The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National AdvantageAngell, Norman
History
The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage
Angell, Norman
Commercial policy; Disarmament; Imperialism; War; War, Cost of
contrary, Germany has known how to keep this fatal hypnotism at bay,
and, far from allowing her military activities to absorb her industrial,
it is precisely the military activities which are in a fair way now to
being absorbed by the industrial and commercial, and her world commerce
has its foundation, not in tribute or bullion exacted at the sword's
point, but in sound and honest exchange. So that to-day the legitimate
commercial tribute which Germany, who never sent a soldier there, exacts
from Spanish America is immensely greater than that which goes to Spain,
who poured out blood and treasure during three centuries on these
territories. In this way, again, do the warlike nations inherit the
earth!
If Germany is never to duplicate Spain's decadence, it is precisely
because (1) she has never had, historically, Spain's temptation to live
by conquest, and (2) because, having to live by honest industry, her
commercial hold, even upon the territories conquered by Spain, is more
firmly set than that of Spain herself.
How may we sum up the whole case, keeping in mind every empire that ever
existed--the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Mede and Persian, the
Macedonian, the Roman, the Frank, the Saxon, the Spanish, the
Portuguese, the Bourbon, the Napoleonic? In all and every one of them
we may see the same process, which is this: If it remains military it
decays; if it prospers and takes its share of the work of the world it
ceases to be military. There is no other reading of history.
That history furnishes no justification for the plea that pugnacity and
antagonism between nations is bound up in any way with the real process
of national survival, shows clearly enough that nations nurtured
normally in peace are more than a match for nations nurtured normally in
war; that communities of non-military tradition and instincts, like the
Anglo-Saxon communities of the New World, show elements of survival
stronger than those possessed by communities animated by the military
tradition, like the Spanish and Portuguese nations of the New World;
that the position of the industrial nations in Europe as compared with
the military gives no justification for the plea that the warlike
qualities make for survival. It is clearly evident that there is no
biological justification in the terms of man's political evolution for
the perpetuation of antagonism between nations, nor any justification
for the plea that the diminution of such antagonism runs counter to the
teachings of the "natural law." There is no such natural law; in
accordance with natural laws, men are being thrust irresistibly towards
co-operation between communities and not towards conflict.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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