a different conception. He passes from considering the fiction of a Social Contract to a discussion of the power over the individual of the General Will, by virtue of which a people becomes a people. This General Will, the Volonté Générale, he distinguishes from the Volonté de Tous, which is a mere numerical sum of individual wills. These particular wills do not rise above themselves. The General Will, on the other hand, represents what is greater than the individual volition of those who compose the society of which it is the will. On occasions, this higher will is more apparent than at other times. But it may, if there is social slackness, be difficult to distinguish from a mere aggregate of voices, from the will of a mob. What is interesting is that Rousseau, so often associated with doctrine of quite another kind, should finally recognise the bond of a General Will as what really holds the community together. For him, as for those who have had a yet clearer grasp of the principle, in willing the General Will we not only realise our true selves but we may rise above our ordinary habit of mind. We may reach heights which we could not reach, or which at all events most of us could not reach, in isolation. There are few observers who have not been impressed with the wonderful unity and concentration of purpose which an entire nation may display-above all, in a period of crisis. We see it in time of war, when a nation is fighting for its life or for a great cause. We have seen it in Japan, and we have seen it still more recently among the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula. We have marvelled at the illustrations with which history abounds of the General Will rising to heights of which but few of the individual citizens in whom it is embodied have ever before been conscious even in their dreams. In his life of Themistocles Plutarch tells us how even in time of peace the leader of the Athenian people could fashion them into an undivided community and inspire them to rise above themselves. It was before the Persians had actually threatened to invade Attica that Themistocles foresaw what would come. Greece could not raise armies comparable in numbers to those of the Persian kings. But he told his people that the oracle had spoken thus: " When all things else are taken within the boundary of Cecrops and the covert of divine Cithaeron, Zeus grants to Athena that the wall of wood alone shall remain uncaptured, which shall help thee and thy children." The Athenian citizens were accustomed in each year to divide among themselves the revenue of their silver mines at Laurium. Themistocles had the daring, so Plutarch tells us, to come forward and boldly propose that the usual distribution should cease, and that they should let him spend the money for them in building a hundred ships. The citizens rose to his lead, the ships were built, and with them the Greeks were able at later date to win against Xerxes the great sea-fight at Salamis, and to defeat an invasion by the hosts of Persia which, had it succeeded, might have changed the course of modern as well as ancient history. By such leadership it is that a common ideal can be made to penetrate the soul of a people, and to take complete possession of it. The ideal may be very high, or it may be of so ordinary a kind that we are not conscious of it without the effort of reflection. But when it is there it influences and guides daily conduct. Such idealism passes beyond the sphere of law, which provides only what is necessary for mutual protection and liberty of just action. It falls short, on the other hand, in quality of the dictates of what Kant called the Categorical Imperative that rules the private and individual conscience, but that alone, an Imperative which therefore gives insufficient guidance for ordinary and daily social life. Yet the ideal of which I speak is not the less binding; and it is recognised as so binding that the conduct of all good men conforms to it. Thus we find within the single state the evidence of a sanction which is less than legal but more than merely moral, and which is sufficient, in the vast majority of the events of daily life, to secure observance of general standards of conduct without any question of resort to force. If this is so within a nation, can it be so as between nations? That brings me at once to my third point. Can nations form a group or community among themselves within which a habit of looking to common ideals may grow up sufficiently strong to develop a General Will, and to make the binding power of these ideals a reliable sanction for their obligations to each other? There is, I think, nothing in the real nature of nationality that precludes such a possibility. A famous student of history has bequeathed to us a definition of nationality which is worth attention; I refer to Ernest Renan, of whom George Meredith once said. to me, while the great French critic was still living, that there was more in his head than in any other head in Europe. Renan tells us that "Man is enslaved neither by his race, nor by his language, nor by his religion, nor by the course of rivers, nor by the direction of mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation." Another acute critic of life, Matthew Arnold, citing one still greater than himself, draws what is in effect a deduction from the same proposition. "Let us," he says, "conceive of the whole group of civilised nations as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working towards a common result; a confederation whose members have a due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed, and of each other. This was the ideal of Goethe, and it is an ideal which will impose itself upon the thoughts of our modern societies more and more." 1 But while I admire the faith of Renan and Arnold and Goethe in what they all three believed to be the future of humanity, there is a long road yet to be travelled before what they hoped for can be fully accomplished. Grotius concludes his great book on War and Peace with a noble prayer: "May God write," he said, "these lessons-He Who alone can-on the hearts of all those who have the affairs of Christendom in their hands. And may He give to those persons a 'Preface to the Poems of Wadsworth. mind fitted to understand and to respect rights, human and divine, and lead them to recollect always that the ministration committed to them is no less than this, that they are the Governors of Man, a creature most dear to God." The prayer of Grotius has not yet been fulfilled, nor do recent events point to the fulfilment being near. The world is probably a long way off from the abolition of armaments and the peril of war. For habits of mind which can be sufficiently strong with a single people can hardly be as strong between nations. There does not exist the same extent of common interest, of common purpose, and of common tradition. And yet the tendency, even as between nations that stand in no special relation to each other, to develop such a habit of mind is in our time becoming recognisable. There are signs that the best people in the best nations are ceasing to wish to live in a world of mere claims, and to proclaim on every occasion, "Our country, right or wrong." There is growing up a disposition to believe that it is good, not only for all men but for all nations, to consider their neighbours' point of view as well as their own. There is apparent at least a tendency to seek for a higher standard of ideals in international relations. The barbarism which once looked to conquest and the waging of successful war as the main object of statesmanship, seems as though it were passing away. There have been established rules of International Law which already govern the conduct of war itself, and are generally observed as binding by all civilised people, with the result that the cruelties of war have been lessened. If practice falls short of theory, at least there is to-day little effective challenge of the broad principle that a nation has as regards its neighbours' duties as well as rights. It is this spirit that may develop as time goes on into a full international "Sittlichkeit." |