Halford John Mackinder

“ In the present time of War, when freedom even in a democracy must yield to efficiency, there are those who would have us say that the experts whom we have for the time being installed in some of the high offices should be succeeded henceforth by experts, and that our prejudice is antiquated. None the less even in war time Britain has returned to a Civilian Minister for War! The fact is, of course, that the inefficiencies of the normally working British Constitution are merely the obverse of the truth that democracy is incompatible with the organisation necessary for war against autocracies. ”

“ Society is a 'going concern,' and no small part of our well-being may be compared with the intangible 'goodwill' of a business. The owner of a business depends on the habits of his customers no less than on the regular running of the machinery in his factory; both must be kept in repair, and when in repair they have the value of the 'going concern'; but should the business stop, they have merely a break-up value—the machinery becomes so much scrap metal, and the goodwill is reduced to the book debts.
Society reposes on the fact that man is a creature of habit. ”

“ In our anxiety to repudiate the ideas historically associated with the Balance of Power, is there not perhaps some danger that we should allow merely juridical conceptions to rule our thoughts in regard to the League of Nations? It is our ideal that justice should be done between nations, whether they be great or small, precisely as it is our ideal that there should be justice between men, whatever the difference of their positions in society. ”

“ What we need, in my belief, to guide our Reconstruction is a presumption of statesmanship in favour of the balanced nation, and the balanced province, sinning neither with the Free Trader nor the Protectionist. If we persist for a generation or two, with such an ideal before us, we may gradually change the Going Concern, so that we shall have fraternal nations and fraternal provinces, instead of warring, organised interests ever striving to extend their limits to the international field in order to outflank opposing interests which still lag on the merely national scale. ”

“ But if drifting in the grip of the Going Concern leads to disease in a nation, and if we must not fall into panic because that results in crime, nor yet suffer revolt because that ends in suicide, what course remains open to us? Surely that of control, which in a democracy means self-control. If this War has proved anything, it has proved that these gigantic forces of modern production are capable of control. ”

“ But it has been long, and social structures have wasted in part, and in part have been diverted to new uses, so that habits and vested interests have dissolved, and all society is as clay in our hands, if only we have the cunning to mould it while it is still yielding. But the art of the clay-moulder, as of the worker in hot metal, lies not merely in knowing what he would make, but also in allowing for the properties of the material in which he is working. He must not only have artistic aims, but also technical knowledge; his human initiative must reckon with reality ”

“ Let any one try to realise what would happen to himself if all those on whom he depends—the postmen, railwaymen, butchers, bakers, printers, and very many others—were suddenly to vary their settled routines; he will then begin to appreciate in how great a degree the power of modern man over nature is due to the fact that society is a 'going concern,' or, in the language of the engineer, has momentum. Stop the running long enough to throw men's habits out of gear with one another, and society would quickly run down to the simple reality of control by nature. ”

“ The Sahara is not everywhere an utter desert; there are many oases—trenched valleys with wells to the water percolating underground in their bottoms, or hilly tracts against which at times the clouds gather—but these are minute and scattered exceptions upon a barren and riverless area nearly as large as all Europe. The Sahara is the most unbroken natural boundary in the world; throughout History it has been a barrier between the White and the Black men.
Between the Sahara and the Heartland there is a broad gap which is occupied by Arabia. ”

“ Do you realise that we have now made the circuit of the world, and that every system is now a closed system, and that you can now alter nothing without altering the balance of everything, and that there are no more desert shores on which the jetsam of incomplete thought can rest undisturbed? Let us attempt logical, symmetrical thought, but practical, cautious action, because we have to do with a mighty Going Concern. If you stop it, or even slow down its running, it will punish you relentlessly. ”

“ At last men become fatalist, and, abandoning ideals, seek some organiser who shall restore efficiency. The necessity is reinforced by the fact that foreign enemies are invading the national territory, and that less production and relaxed discipline have reduced the defensive power of the State. But the organiser needed for the task of reconstruction is no mere administrator; he must be able to design and make, and not merely to repair and lubricate social machinery. So Carnot, who 'organises victory,' and Napoleon with his Code Civil, win eternal fame by creative effort. ”

“ A nation does not die when so smitten, but the whole mechanism of its society must be reconstituted, and that quickly, if the men and women who survive its impoverishment are not to forget the habits and lose the aptitudes on which their civilisation depends. History shows no remedy but force upon which to found a fresh nucleus of discipline in such circumstances; but the organiser who rests upon force tends inevitably to treat the recovery of mere efficiency as his end. Idealism does not flourish under his rule. ”

“ Because the conquerors of old time did their work ruthlessly, countries like France and England are to-day homogeneous and free from that mixture of races which has made the Near East a plague to humanity. Why should we not use our modern powers of transport and organisation to achieve the same happy condition of affairs—justly and generously. The reasons for doing so in this particular instance are far reaching; a Polish Posen would bite a very threatening bay into the Eastern frontier of Germany, and a German East Prussia would be a stepping-stone for German penetration into Russia. ”

“ But it is equally important that we should bear in mind the new face of Reality. We have been fighting lately, in the close of the War, a straight duel between land-power and sea-power, and sea-power has been laying siege to land-power. We have conquered, but had Germany conquered she would have established her sea-power on a wider base than any in history, and in fact on the widest possible base. The joint continent of Europe, Asia, and Africa, is now effectively, and not merely theoretically, an island. ”

“ Fortunately the younger Britains refused to accept the Free Trade of Manchester; they used the fiscal independence granted to them by the Motherland to pursue that economic ideal which was foreshadowed by the great American statesman, Alexander Hamilton— the ideal of the truly independent nation, balanced in all its development. This does not in the least imply that a great international trade should not be done, but it should be a trade so controlled that the effect of it is always tending towards the balance aimed at, and is not accumulating, beyond hope of recovery, economic one-sidedness. ”

“ Is it not productive power which now counts rather than dead wealth? Shall we cot all of us—and now in some degree even the Americans also—have spent our dead capital, and shall we not all of us, the Germans included, be starting again in the productive race practically from scratch? The world was astonished at the rapidity with which France recovered from her disaster of 1870, but the power of industrial production was as nothing then to what it is now. ”

“ For the time being, at any rate, the Russian Revolution has gone the common revolutionary way, but we still put our hope in Universal Democracy. To the eighteenth-century ideal of Liberty, and the nineteenth-century ideal of Nationality, we have added our twentieth-century ideal of the League of Nations. If a third tragedy were to ensue, it would be on a vast scale, for democratic ideals are to-day the working creed of the greater part of humanity. ”

“ If we are to realise our ideal of a League of Nations which shall prevent war in the future, we must recognise these geographical realities and take steps to counter their influence. Last century, under the spell of the Darwinian theory, men came to think that those forms of organisation should survive which adapted themselves best to their natural environment. To-day we realise, as we emerge from our fiery trial, that human victory consists in our rising superior to such mere fatalism. ”

“ We, the Western nations, have incurred such tremendous sacrifices in this conflict that we cannot afford to trust to anything that may happen at Berlin; we must be secure in any case. In other words, we must settle this question between the Germans and Slavs, and we must see to it that East Europe, like West Europe, is divided into self-contained nations. If we do that, we shall not only reduce the German people to its proper position in the world, a great enough position for any single people, but we shall also have created the conditions precedent to a League of Nations. ”

“ Who can say that a single mighty sea-power, wholly Latinised as far as the Black and Baltic Seas, would not have commanded the world from its peninsular base? But Classical Rome was primarily a Mediterranean and not a peninsular power, and the Rhine-Danube frontier must be regarded as demarking a penetration from the Mediterranean coast rather than as the incomplete achievement of a peninsular policy. ”

“ When we look back on the course of events during the hundred years after the French Revolution, and consider East Europe as the basis of what was on the whole a single force in the world's affairs, do we not realise that separate as people of the Victorian Age often thought the politics of Europe from those of the Not-Europe outside, there was, in fact, no such separation. East Europe was in command of the Heartland, and was opposed by the sea-power of Britain round more than three quarters of the margin of the Heartland, from China through India to Constantinople. ”

“ You cannot guide it by setting up mere fences, and by mending those fences if it breaks them down, because this Going Concern consists of hundreds of millions of human beings who are 'pursuing' happiness, and they will swarm over all your fences like an army of ants. You can only guide Humanity by the attraction of ideals. ”

“ The true parallel is to be drawn not between Napoleon and Bismarck, but between Napoleon and the entire Prussian ruling caste. The end of that caste, which we are now witnessing, is like the end of Napoleon; the blindly organising man goes to his Moscow, and the blindly organising State to its Armageddon. Kultur is the name given to that philosophy and education which imbued a whole race with the 'ways and means' mind. The French are an artistic, and therefore an idealistic people; Napoleon prostituted their idealism with the glory of his genius. ”

“ Above all, he values the habit of discipline; his machine must answer promptly to the lever.
The organiser inevitably comes to look upon men as his tools. His is the inverse of the mind of the idealist, for he would move men in brigades and must therefore have regard to material limitations, whereas the idealist appeals to the soul in each of us, and souls are winged and can soar. It does not follow that the organiser is careless of the well-being of the society beneath him; on the contrary, he regards that society as so much man-power to be maintained in efficient condition. ”

“ The surrender of the German fleet in the Firth of Forth is a dazzling event, but in all soberness, if we would take the long view, must we not still reckon with the possibility that a large part of the Great Continent might some day be united under a single sway, and that an invincible sea-power might be based upon it? ”

“ In ordinary society it is notoriously difficult for people of very unequal fortune to be friends in the true sense; that beautiful relationship is not compatible with patronage and dependence. Civilisation, no doubt, consists in the exchange of services, but it should be an equal exchange. Our economics of money have assessed as equal services of very unequal value from the point of view of the quality of the industrial employment which they give. For the contentment of nations we must contrive to secure some equality of opportunity for national development. ”

“ I have no doubt that I shall be told by practical men that the ideal of complete and balanced economic growth in each locality is contrary to the whole tendency of the age, and is, in fact, archaic. I shall be told that you can only get a great and cheap production by the method of world-organisation and local specialisation. ”

“ But man-power does not imply a counting only of heads, though, other things being equal, numbers are decisive. Nor does it depend merely on the number of efficient human beings, though health and skill are of the first importance. Man-power—the power of men—is also, and in these modern days very greatly, dependent on organisation, or, in other words, on the 'Going Concern,' the social organism. German Kultur, the 'ways and means' philosophy, has been dangerous to the outer world because it recognises both Realities, Geographical and Economic, and thinks only in terms of them. ”

“ There are two roads to such a tyranny, the one the conquest of all other nations by one nation, the other the perversion of the very international power itself which may be set up to coerce the lawless nation. In our great replanning of human society we must recognise that the skill and opportunity of the robber are prior facts to the Law of Robbery. In other words, we must envisage our vast problem as business men dealing with realities of growth and opportunity, and not merely as lawyers defining rights and remedies. ”

“ But North America is no longer even a continent; in this twentieth century it is shrinking to be an island. Americans used to think of their three millions of square miles as the equivalent of all Europe; some day, they said, there would be a United States of Europe as sister to the United States of America. Now, though they may not all have realised it, they must no longer think of, Europe apart from Asia and Africa. The Old World has become insular, or in other words a unit, incomparably the largest geographical unit on our Globe. ”

“ We have seen that the question of base, not only secure but also productive, is vital to sea-power; the productive base is needed for the support of men not only for the manning of ships, but for all the land services in connection with shipping, a fact to-day more clearly realised in Britain than ever before. In regard to land-power we have seen that the camel-men and horsemen of past history failed to maintain lasting empires from lack of adequate man-power, and that Russia was the first tenant of the Heartland with a really menacing man-power. ”

“ Only in the fifteenth century did Time ripen for the great adventure on the ocean which was to make the world European. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider further the unique environment in which the Western strain of our human breed developed the enterprise and tenacity which have given it the lead in the modern world. Europe is but a small corner of the great island which also contains Asia and Africa, but the cradle land of the Europeans was only a half of Europe—the Latin Peninsula and the subsidiary peninsulas and islands clustered around it. ”