CHAPTER III

THE STATE, THE INDIVIDUAL, AND WAR

This brings us to consider the function of the State in relation to the practice of war.

1. To begin with, it may be confidently asserted that no Christian man of the type with whom we may be concerned can or will defend an aggressive war. By that we mean a war undertaken by one State against another in order to deprive the latter of territory, commerce, or inhabitants for the exclusive benefit of the former. And in doing so it is good to claim the theoretical support of a man so Christian as Professor W. Herrmann of Marburg in his well-known work on Ethics; although, alas! he has forsaken the position in practice by his support of the German policy in this war. "War is for the Christian morally justified, if it is politically correct, as an act of self-assertion on the part of a people in the carrying out of its culture-task (Kulturaufgabe)," that is, in maintaining and propagating its own type of culture. If Herrmann explicitly limits this statement to the act of self-defence on the part of a people desiring 1 W. Herrmann, “Ethik," 2d Ed., p. 189.

to defend its own form of civilization against invasion by another people, there can be no objection to it, as we shall see later on. He goes on to urge that it is the duty of the Christian to establish the conviction among the peoples that war for any other reason destroys the people that walk into it.

It is, as we have already insisted, an essential view, absolutely necessary to be held, that the rules of Christian morality govern States as States. For, let it be repeated, the State is not a mere addition to the nature of the individual man, it is not a new kind of being in addition to the sum and organization of the individuals composing it. Rather is it the expression of the prevailing moral character and personal ideals of all its citizens. It is the effort of all these wills to act as one will. When we speak of it as if it were a person, we must remember always that it is less than a person, and yet is the attempt of all the persons who belong to it to interpret the meaning of life and to realize it in harmony with one another. Hence the rules of justice and of honor apply to the conduct of citizens through the State, in their unified will, as truly as through the family, and other groups within the State, to which each man belongs.

We have seen that there are limits to what the State may attempt to do with and for its citizens. These limits are fixed on the one hand by its own

limitations of wisdom, insight, and goodness, on the other by the sacred depths of the personal life of its citizens and the necessity for a large and indefinite measure of freedom, without which the individual person cannot fully live his own true life and be in fullest measure the person he is fitted to be. But when these complementary facts are understood, it becomes clear that the State must be made subject to the same fundamental principles of morality as the individual in its dealing with other States. Hence there can be no just reason invented for an aggressive war whose aim is the murder and robbery of one State by another State. The aggrandizement of one nation at the cost of the freedom and rights of another nation, or even the propagation of a higher form of civilization, by war, is immoral. Only an autocracy could deny this and menial philosophers support the denial; only an ignoble democracy can make it the deliberate policy of its government.

2. The essential question, then, for a student of Christian Ethics, and the one at present urgent question, is this: What is the duty of a State, which while maintaining good conduct on its own side is actually attacked and invaded for purposes of conquest and depredation by another State? The whole and fundamental fact is that when an invading army crosses its border it becomes an organized mass of murderers and robbers. They are col

lectively and individually within the scope of its government. Towards them it has the same duties as towards all others who are living at that time upon its territory. The invaded State has the same responsibility, though a heavier task, towards the invading criminals as towards the less numerous, less organized, less equipped criminals among its own citizens. If the State is to fulfil its duty, the invading force must be put down. Whatever force is necessary to do this must be exercised at all costs, and to the limit of the powers of the nation which the State represents and for which it acts. Manifestly the invading criminals cannot be arrested and imprisoned by the ordinary police force. Their numbers, equipment, organization, and methods make that impossible. An army must be gathered, trained, equipped, to meet the situation. But this is what we call war..

To refuse on any ground to meet the situation thus created is to abandon the State. It is to deny and surrender the primary functions for which it came into existence, and without whose fulfilment it simply does not exist. It is here that the honor of a nation becomes involved with its duty. The killing of the invading enemy is a necessary form of the fulfilment of that duty. In the circumstances described, punishment cannot be inflicted, the State cannot carry out its inherent task, without inflicting that penalty. The pacifist who insists

that the State should rather perish than kill is saying rather that it becomes wrong for a State to exist as soon as it is attacked by an enemy. It must consent to die whensoever an organized foreign foe appears within its borders. No argument will ever make this program of conduct appear reasonable to the vast majority of Christian men. They will always feel that somewhere in it there is contained a fallacy, a misinterpretation of the meaning and of the effect of sacrifice, a misrepresentation or miscalculation of the duty of the State, a failure to compare truly the fulfilment of its task in that act of killing which is necessary under these circumstances, with the fulfilment of that task among its own citizens.

The pacifist mode of thought seems to surrender the whole world of moral considerations which are implied in the existence of the State, for the one theory that it can never be right under any circumstances to inflict death upon any man. The duty of the State to safeguard its citizens, the sense of honor involved in the defence of its duty, the noble instinct of the human soul to protect the weak and prevent the wicked from attaining their ends-these are all cast aside in order to avoid the one fact, which is indeed a dreadful, but here an inevitable, fact, the putting of the criminal to death. Frankly, it comes to be a weighing of alternatives in the light of their moral content