G. E. Partridge

“ There are many ways of justifying these ambitions—Germany justifies hers by reason, and the researches of her great historians—the Treitschkes and the Mommsens; Russia bases her claims upon her religion and her ethos; Japan brings her divinity and her traditions, her vitality and her intelligence; England offers her justice and above all her proved genius for government as a justification of empire. But after all, these desires for empire lie deeper than proof and reason can go. Poetic, dramatic and religious elements enter into them. There are geniuses among nations. ”

“ Nations crave, as collective or group consciousness, the feeling of power. Just as we say the child in his plays wants to be a man, and the individual in his art feels himself a god, so nations in their wars and in their thoughts of wars, feel themselves more real, realize themselves as world powers, and as supreme and divine. To be first and all is indeed the purpose that runs in these moods, and this we believe is true, in its way, of the most insignificant and hopelessly decrepit of peoples. ”

“ This democratic spirit is the real power behind internationalism. It is as the mood of the city, the whole spirit of the modern urban life, that it is most significant. The mood of the city contains on one side the possibility of an internationalism which is nothing more than a surrender of all patriotism, and is at heart only a mass interest in rights and needs. On the other hand all the interests and impulses that make internationalism necessary and possible seem to have their origin in the city. ”

“ To secure unity in our own national life we must work for it incessantly, and we ought to be willing to, for unity means so much to us. It is not cohesion at any price that we want, but voluntary and natural union, and to secure that we should not hesitate to make our educational institutions broad enough to include the education of the most fundamental relations of the individual to society. We want neither a "healthy egoism" nor a morbid self-denying spirit that is only a step removed from slavery—neither instinctive independence nor an artificial and enforced social organization. ”

“ The creative force in a nation is its life force, its essence and its reality. In some sense the desire to be an empire is the whole meaning of a nation, for without the ambition to be supreme, peoples, some of them, would be nothing. It is the vision of empire, however forlorn and hopeless, that keeps many nations alive, perhaps all. ”

“ They think of freedom as a means of accomplishing good, not as merely being a good. They believe that the good of the individual is not necessarily represented by the satisfaction of his desires, and so perhaps think of the law and order of the democratic community, the control and regulation of the individual in his daily life by the will of all, as the essential feature of a democracy.
Here in America, taking our history and our life as a whole, it seems certain that the dominating mood has been the love of individual freedom. Our democracy is founded upon the idea of the rights of the man. ”

“ The war has taught us that militarism and military capacity in high degree may spring up from very peaceful soil, and also that military training, however perfect, is no substitute for the generic virtues out of which courage and patriotism grow. In the long run will it not be the country that can do without military training that will have the advantage? Or the country in which military preparedness is so merged in everything else as to be indistinguishable from the rest of life? Is there not, in a word, a preparedness that will make a country superior and safe both in war and in peace? ”

“ It is plain to be seen that this devotion to leader and imaginative treatment of him is in part a defensive reaction. The individual hides behind this colossal figure, and thus feels himself safe. But this protective impulse that creates the invincible leader is not the only motive; at least it is probably not the only one. The leader represents the ideals and the ambitions of the people, and his prestige and the forms that surround him, especially everything that is aesthetic or suggests the heroic, symbolize the craving for power in a people. ”

“ But if the elimination of war should mean that we have no longer anything for which men are willing to die, if merely to escape from war we voluntarily sacrifice good that more than counterbalances the evil we overcome, we should say that peace had been bought at too high a price. Terrible as war is, it cannot be judged by itself alone. We have a right to look forward to a time when there shall be no more war, just as everywhere it seems to be instinctive for us to try to gain good without its attendant trouble and evil. ”

“ What each nation stands for, its ethos, its personality, must be made clear. Powers says that all governments and all nations are sincere. It is the soul of nations, then, their own realization of themselves that must be made the real object of history. We must go back of the individual and the event at least, to the desires that have made history what it is; we must see why events have taken place, and while sacrificing nothing of our own principles and standards, understand and feel what the principles and the nature of these widely differing nations really are. ”

“ War, precisely like art, is at first more and then less practical, and sought for practical purposes. More and more there is a craving for glory, for prestige, for subjective satisfaction and symbols of power. Nations take lands that they cannot use for any good purpose, inflict indemnities that may ruin themselves rather than their enemies, exploit economic relations that are dangerous to the nations' very existence. It is power that they seek, and it is power they thus create, but it is often different in form and in value from what the conscious purpose holds. ”

“ Democracy is a spirit, an idea, a social quality, first of all. A monarchial government, though it might be otherwise out of date, might be entirely democratic in spirit; and republics, we know, may be anything but democratic. Where control is in the hands of the people and not of a class, but of the people subject to the best leadership—a leadership that is based upon influence rather than upon any excess of authority or show of force, there is democracy, and of this, of course, the ballot itself is by no means the only test. ”

“ Shall we yield to the fascination of the old romance and go back to our hero worship; or shall we be inspired now by this vision of a new and greater social order, create out of our own powers of imagination the forms this world must assume if it is to appeal to the deepest feelings of all peoples, and make this new world real by our own intelligence and determination? ”

“ We would utilize them to give more power to life at every point, and to make all activities of the practical life more free and creative. And was there ever a time when power was more greatly needed—in industry, in political life and in every phase of life both of the individual and of society?
But it is not only in creating and doing that the world needs art to-day, in the sense in which we mean to define it. An aroused world is called upon to feel to the depths of reality, and to draw from these depths new and more profound valuations. ”

“ Fear runs like a dark thread through all the life of nations, and gives to it a quality of mysticism, and a touch of sadness which is so characteristic of much of the deepest patriotism of the world.
Fear is one of the most powerful motives of all aggressive warfare in the world. We find it in every nation, even those which are naturally most aggressive, and in them perhaps most of all. In the history and in the war moods of Germany the fear motive is unmistakable. America is not without it. Nations conceal their fears, presenting a bold front to the foreigner ”

“ Patrick thinks of war as precisely a plunge into the primeval. War is a reaction, a regression, but still it is something more than a mere slipping of the machinery of life. It is craved; and it is craved because it offers relief from the tension of modern life. It is not quite clear whether it is because we are tired and want rest for our over-worked functions, or are merely dull and need renewed life, but in any case, when the desire has accumulated enough, back we fall into the primeval. ”

“ The principle of a nation is that which the national consciousness fixates itself upon as the title of the nation to continued existence. Nations do not go to war over their causes, or about their distinctive virtues and missions in the world. Rather it is their likenesses that precipitate wars,—their resemblances and identities in being the same in ambition, and having the same conceptions of national honor and the same motives for war and desiring the same objects. Nations in general do not go to war over principles because they are not motivated by principles in their historical course. ”

“ At any rate, the question is now whether as a people we shall be able to take a more advanced view of the individual, a more functional view, so to speak, a new and enlarged conception of the meaning and place of the individual man in society. Democracy, in a word, must henceforth, certainly if it is to be a world state or order and not a condition of world-wide anarchy, go beyond the negative idea of freedom, justice and equality, to a more positive idea of service, in which we think of individuals as having more complex, more free and more internal relations among themselves. ”

“ It still clings to its luxuries of feeling, to its provincial life, it is still fascinated by its beautiful romance of empire. On the other hand we see the stirring of a new idea. A new world arises, less dramatic in its appeal than the old world, but a world appealing by its practical problems both to the will and to the intellect. ”

“ Therefore all, not merely those who just now are included among voters, but all women and children, must have a part in the general education for democracy and also have a part in some way in the institutions of government. From first to last government must be thought of and understood in terms of what it does, as a phase of the total social life of the nation, not as something outside the social order. Government is a collective activity. It is as an aspect of the day's work of the nation, that government must be impressed upon all—both legal citizens and citizens in the making. ”

“ Plainly there are difficult problems ahead of the teachers of American history. They must not inculcate suspicion and fear, but they must not present our security in a false light. They must not inspire the war-like spirit and imperialistic ambitions, but they must do nothing to lessen our seriousness of purpose and enthusiasm for the future. They must not teach national vanity, but they must not on the other hand encourage a spirit which is in any way over-critical and cynical or supercilious. There must be political wisdom on the part of the people but not a sophisticated state of mind. ”

“ Nicolai (79) , who believes strongly that war is wholly useless, compares it to the play we turn to when the actions performed in the play are no longer in themselves practical. War is a great debauch, perhaps now the last the race will experience. War is like wine: in it nations renew their youth. It is not the war itself, but the mood it produces that we crave, and this mood is longed for because in it old and sacred feelings of patriotism are aroused, and these feelings are themselves survivals, something romantic, archaic, no longer needed in the present stage of social life. ”

“ The desire for war is to some extent a desire for death, a longing for a form of euthanasia in which the individual dies but in a sense lives—lives as glorified in death, and also in the continuance of the life of the group and of the country into which he has been absorbed. It is of course its relation to death that more than anything else has made it necessary that war should appeal to art, and take an aesthetic form, and without the aid of the aesthetic, war could not maintain itself in the world. As a sheer fulfillment of duty war could not survive. ”

“ The need first of all is for a continuation of the interest inspired by the war—an interest showing itself in the form of an universal interest in all history, and an intensive investigation of history. We need now, indeed, the most comprehensive study of the world that has ever been conceived or dreamed of by man. This is the duty of the historians. This new history must show us what nations are at heart, what they desire, what they can do. Such an understanding of nations is, we say, the real beginning of internationalism. ”

“ That ideal in education, often expressed by the educator, which holds that the purpose of all teaching is to convey the meaning of the world to the child, to make the world live in epitome, so to speak, in the soul of every child, is religious and nothing else, and quite satisfies the demands of our present day.
If such a standpoint be the right one, certainly the ambition of any nation (or indeed of any group) to have a religion peculiar to itself and an outgrowth of its own culture is unfortunate, and indeed comes from the very essence of morbid nationalism. ”

“ When material objects alone were desired, the motive of work was relatively simple; but as we pass from the desire for goods to the desire for wealth, and to the desire for wealth as a means of gaining power and prestige, the industrial movement becomes more complex. We go on and on, producing ever greater wealth and generating more and more power, and we do this we say with no deep purpose and with no philosophy of life. For the justification of it all, if it be under our control at all, we can only say that through industry we realize an abundant and enriched life. ”

“ We are always catching sight of a movement in the development of nations and of the world—of certain fundamental motives, the most basic of all, the most general, being the motive of power. These causes of war do not appear, however, to be of the nature of a chain, giving us the impression that in order to break the habit of war, all we need do is to discover the weakest link in the chain of causes, break the chain there, and so interrupt the whole mechanism of war-making in the world. ”

“ America, we should say, must become more and more a product of an internal phenomenon—education. That is, the forces that will continue to shape our country must be in the form of leadership growing out of the best [180] impulses and the true meaning of our civilization. No forces will make of us something we are not by nature; our strength must continue to come from within, but it is the aristocratic spirit, the aristocracy of genius in the fields of intellect, morality and art that must of course have the fullest opportunity to influence all our institutions, even the school room. ”