Ploughshare and Pruning-hook/Lecture 3
CHRISTIANITY A DANGER TO THE STATE
(1916)
THE State, which accepts the proposition that force is a remedy, has logical ground for employing force to secure its ends, until worsted by the forces opposed to it, or by some other power.
Such a State, naturally and logically, claims the assistance of its subjects in pursuing a course for which, in time of peace, and with their apparent consent, it has made great preparation, entailing a vast expenditure of the nation's wealth and energy.
This claim of the State for the personal service of its citizens is always latent even in peace-time; but in peace-time the great majority of the services it requires are rendered upon a voluntary basis, and generally in exchange for a monetary equivalent.
Only, therefore, when the State is pressed by necessity to make an extreme assertion of its claims for personal service does it find itself actively opposed by citizens who have never in their own lives and consciences accepted the proposition that force is a remedy for evil.
It is true that many of these objectors have paid taxes without resistance for the upkeep of Army and Navy. If they have done so conscientiously and not merely negligently, it has probably been upon the lines of "rendering to Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's," and from a recognition that all the devices of barter and exchange (including a coin-currency) are a material convenience devised by the State, which may legitimately be given to or withdrawn from the control of the individual without affecting his personal integrity. Men so minded may say quite plausibly: "My worldly goods you can take or leave; my pockets you may fill or empty; but my body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, and if I am called upon to give personal service for the infliction of legal penalties, for the suppression of civil commotion, or for the prosecution of war, then I am asked for service in a form which I can only render if my conscience approves."
Faced by this contention, the State has often thought wise to admit, or to make allowance for, a claim which nevertheless it will not recognise by law. People who object to jury-service for the enforcement of a penal code which is against their conscience, are frequently excused without fine or penalty. The same allowance would probably be made to excuse any one opposed to capital punishment from assuming the office of hangman. Yet capital punishment only exists because a majority in the State believes it to be essential to public safety; and if there were a dearth of hands ready to undertake the task, it would then become a test of good citizenship for all to offer themselves; and the conscientious objector, whose argument was tolerated and respectfully listened to the day before, would suddenly become a disreputable object to all law-abiding men, unless the State were weak enough, or wise enough, to provide him with the right of exemption. If it did so he would immediately cease to be disreputable in the eyes of the law, his right to a conscience being granted.
That concession has frequently been made in the past to people who, calling themselves Christians, have held tenets subversive of State-authority. When religious conformity was considered necessary to the spiritual security of the State, Nonconformists resisted, till the State made allowance for them. When the taking of an oath was considered necessary for the security of truth in the witness-box, Quakers resisted, till the State made allowance for them. When the coercion of Ulster was considered necessary for the well-being of Ireland, men who had taken the oath of military obedience threatened a conscientious strike, and the State made allowance for them. Incidentally they became the heroes of that party which is to-day most strenuous in its detestation of those later conscientious objectors who refuse to take the oath of military obedience; but nobody was sent to prison for uttering propaganda in their praise!
Now the reason why the State could tolerate them was not a moral reason; it was simply upon the calculation that, while still pursuing its policy of physical force, it could afford to do without them. It could allow non-conformity based upon Christian teaching, or upon conscientious scruples, to streak the current of its policy, without thereby suffering any deflection of its course.
But it is quite different when the State, driven by its belief in the rightness and the remedial value of physical force, comes to commit the whole of its resources to the prosecution of war. The existence of the conscientious objector then becomes a more inconvenient factor in the situation; it may even, from the State's point of view, become a dangerous one. Then those insidious Christian idiosyncrasies, which have so often been allowed to withstand authority, must have all possible ground cut from under them, lest it should afford standing to a new social ideal. We have it on the authority of the public prosecutor himself that, if all men became conscientious objectors, war would no longer be possible; and from such a catastrophe the State must, of course, be saved by all possible means.
It is at this point, therefore, that the latent claim (which in peace time is often more honoured in the breach than in the observance) becomes insistent and active. The State must have—if it can get it—the personal service of all its able-bodied citizens. And thus, practically for the first time, the rival claims of law and conscience upon a man's allegiance come to be fought out in public on a large scale; and if the Nation is engaged in a popular war, or in one where the vast majority believes that it has righteousness upon its side, then there will inevitably be much prejudice in the public mind against the conscientious objector; whereas there might be much sympathy for him (though not really on the principle for which he contended) if he were refusing to fight in a war which happened to be unpopular, or which a great number of people regarded as unjust.
But if we want to get to the true basis of the principle against which the conscientious objector is contending (a principle which cannot logically be separated from any form of government built up on force) we must not colour our view with the rightness or wrongness (in our own estimation) of the war in which we are engaged, since we obscure thereby that quality of allegiance which is claimed by the State.
The State's claim—latent in peace-time and liable to emerge whenever war or crisis shall arise—is not that its citizens should fight for it when the cause is just and right, but that they should fight for it in any case, if it orders them. That claim, made by every State with more or less urgency, we are now invited to view with horror operating at its full efficiency throughout a Prussianised Germany. Thus exalted and perfected, it has become, we are told, a danger to the world; in such a State the moral conscience of the individual has become atrophied by subordination, and he is not free to choose between right and wrong. But war only brings home to us the logic of a situation which in peace-time we have burked; and now, in order to combat the evil, in its fullest manifestation, men in this country are asked to give their souls into similar keeping—to accept, that is to say, the over-riding of individual conscience by the law of State-necessity. It is a claim which any State, founded on force, is bound eventually to make; it is a claim which anyone who believes force to be evil is bound to repudiate. The follower of the one school draws his ethics from the established rules of the body politic to which he belongs; the follower of the other draws them, it may be, from the personal example and teaching of One whom the body politic of his day regarded as a criminal, and put to death; of One whose followers, it may be said further, were persecuted in the early centuries of the Christian era, not because of their opinions, but because, in practice, they were a danger to the State. The Roman mind was very logical; and only when Christianity had become absorbed in the State system and had accepted the view that physical force and persecution were good social remedies, only then did Christianity cease to be an apparent danger and a fit subject for persecution.
But the primitive Christian standpoint is always liable to emerge; and when it does, then we get the opposing principles of two incompatible schools. And we must keep these principles in mind—the principle of conduct based upon a personal example rejecting force, and the principle of conduct based upon a social edifice relying upon force for its well-being and advancement; otherwise we confuse the issue, and weaken our appreciation of the moral position which each side assumes. It is surely quite evident that the State, while based upon force, cannot (except as an indulgence) countenance the claim of any individual to make the morality of its action the test for personal allegiance and service. And so this State-claim must be unequivocably defined, otherwise we do not really know where we are.
Now many fervent supporters of the doctrine that State-necessity must stand supreme above individual conscience, confuse matters by importing the moral equation, and by arguing for the compelling principle from particular instances where moral considerations seem to favour it: "Our Cause is just; therefore, etc.," is the line on which they contend. But the State's claim stands independent of the justice of its cause; and "My Country right or wrong!" is the real motto which the objector to conscientious liberty is called to fight under.
All that the State-backers say as to the obligation for Englishmen to fight Germany to-day, applies equally to the obligation for Germans to fight England. So while we continue to assert that a man must fight here with us for the cause of liberty, honour, righteousness—in a word, for God—we assert equally that in another country he must subject his conscience to the claims of the State, and fight for oppression, dishonour, unrighteousness—in a word, for the Devil (and that in spite of the baptismal vows which oblige him to "fight manfully under Christ's banner," not merely against sin, as he individually is concerned, but sin spiritually combined in its symbolic representative, and defended by the temporalities of the world). From which we must argue that, if Christ were here on earth to-day, born of German parents, he would be called upon to fight in the ranks of Germany; that if he were born of English parents he would be called to fight for England; while, if again, born of Jewish parents, he might be accorded the alternative privilege of fighting for England which was not his country, or of being deported to Russia to fight for the persecutors of his race.
The conscientious objector, on the other hand, feels bound to take the moral equation of all such particular instances as a guide to his diagnosis of the evils of war; and he comes thus to regard the expedient of war as altogether so bad a remedy for evil that he dares to doubt whether Christ would be seen bearing arms on either side; and he is probably strengthened in that conviction by the fact that modern conditions of war tend more and more to involve the weak, the innocent, and the helpless in the ruin and suffering wrought by industrial and financial exhaustion, invasion and blockade, and that "arms of precision" are so unprecise and blind in action that they are quite as likely, when directed against towns, to destroy the non-fighters as the fighters. And the conscientious objector finds a difficulty in seeing Christ serving a gun for the artillery of either side (however righteous the cause) which may have for immediate result the disembowelling of a mother while in the pains of child-birth, or the dismembering of young children.
He holds further (and it is a tenable argument addressed to any Power which maintains despotic sway over an alien race, declaring such sway to be acceptable to the people concerned, while treating as "seditious" any reluctance to regard it as acceptable), he holds that, if the worst comes to the worst, submission to force, or mere passive resistance thereto, is more life-saving, both morally and physically, than the setting of force against force even for the defence of "liberty." He holds, probably, that Finland, in her policy of passive resistance to Tsarist domination, has better conditions and prospects to-day than Serbia; that the present fate of India, as the result of submission to a stronger Power is preferable to the present fate of Belgium; even though the Government forced upon it be more alien to the genius of its races than is the German to the Flemish. He may believe that in the long run India is more likely to escape from being Britainised by bowing to the subjugating Power, than Britain is likely to escape from being Prussianised by a hurried adoption of a similar system to that which she has set out to destroy. He may even think (for there is no limit to the contrariety of his views) that if England wins handsomely in this war by adopting the Prussian system of militarism, she is more likely to retain it than if she gets beaten. In a word he thinks war the most hazardous of all remedies for the evils it sets out to cure.
The State, on the other side, sees the very gravest danger to that edifice of worldly power which is summed up in the word "imperial," if once it allows the individual conscience to pick and choose the moral terms of its allegiance. And the better the argument the conscientious objector can present from political parallels in other countries, or from the failures and blunders of past history, the more dangerous becomes his propaganda and the more rigorously must it be suppressed.
The State's claim to our duty to-day is precisely the same, neither more nor less, than it would be if it required our services for the prosecution of a second Boer War, a second Opium-trade war against China, or a second war against the Independence of America. The causes of the war might be no more reputable than in these cases, but the State's claim on our allegiance would remain the same. "It is not for you," the State says, in effect, "to judge whether I am right or wrong, if I come to claim your services for war."
Now nobody, I presume, is so convinced of the perennial purity of his country's motives, or that its foreign policy has in the past been so safe-guarded by democratic control, as to claim that it has never waged foolish or unjust wars. Most reasonable people will admit that the State is, in matters of morals, a fallible authority. The claim is, therefore, that of a fallible authority for the unquestioning obedience of its citizens in a course of action which may involve the ruin, torture, and death of an innocent people, or the subjugation of a liberty-loving race. That claim by a State which stands based on the doctrine that Might is a surer remedy and defence than Right, is a perfectly logical one. I have not a word to say against it.
But when that claim is made for the State by followers of Christianity on Christian grounds, then I am anxious to relieve the State of the entanglement they would thrust upon it. I am sure that a State which bases its authority on Might is weakened and not strengthened by any attempt to sanction its claim as being compatible with the Christianity taught by Christ. The less Christianity a State pretends to when it goes to war, the more is it likely to conduct its war effectively, and to find no mental hindrance in its way as it advances to its true end—the destruction of its enemies.
Because our counsels were mixed with a certain modicum of Christianity, we had a reluctance early in the war to use asphyxiating gas, exploding bullets, and certain other improved devices for adding to the frightful effectiveness of war. We still hesitate to smear phosphorus on our shells so as to make wounds incurable, or to starve our prisoners because we hear that our fellow countrymen are being starved in Germany. In some instances with the help of the Daily Mail the doctrine of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" has carried the day for us; but it is not a Christian doctrine, and elsewhere Christianity, or its shadow, still holds us by the leg. The Morning Post, seeing the national danger we were in from these divided counsels, rightly demanded a Government that would "stick at nothing," but has only partially succeeded in securing what it wants.
Now the conscientious objectors have been trying to do us the service, which we have ignored, of pointing out from the very beginning that war is not and cannot be Christian, and so showing us that when a nation goes to war Christianity is the real danger. The bigger the bulk of genuine and practical Christianity in any country, the more impossible is it for that country to adopt effective methods of war. The reluctance which we feel to shell out phosphorus, or to starve civilians, will in the genuinely Christian State make itself felt at a much earlier stage of warlike practice, long before those particular devices have been applied or even thought of; and it will arise (to the discrediting of all power which places Might above Right) from the assertion that "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" is not Christian doctrine, and is, in result, no remedy for the evil it sets itself to avenge.
This is the real parting of the ways; it is fundamental. Christianity, based upon the personal example and teaching of Christ, is too individualist to be in accordance with Society as at present constituted. Institutional Christianity, on the other hand, has obviously transferred its allegiance in certain matters of moral guidance from Christ to Cæsar; and claims that those matters have been left for Cæsar to decide. I heard it argued, for instance, quite recently, by a Roman Catholic, that as Christendom in all ages had tolerated war, all question of conscientious objection thereto by a Catholic falls to the ground. The answer of the Christian individualist, I conceive, would be, that Christendom also tolerated torture for the extraction of truth, and slavery for the extraction of labour; and that, nevertheless, the conscientious objection of resistant minorities succeeded, in spite of the supineness of Christendom, in placing those monstrosities outside the pale of civilized convention. No doubt while those devices flourished under the countenance of Mother Church, Christians opposed to their abolition would have cried then, as they cry now about war, "How are you to do without them? How can you extract truth from an unwilling witness, or labour from a subjugated race, except by compulsion and force?" The answer to that apparently insoluble problem now stands written in history—a history which has not eliminated untruth from the witness-box, or indolence from the labour market; yet torture and slavery alike have ceased to be practical politics, except where the State still answers with regard to war as it used to answer with regard to these: "I cannot do without." There, in their last real stronghold, unaffected by Christian ethics, slavery and torture still stand.
But we have to remember that the State's claim, if we accept it as a binding principle, comes much closer home to us than it would do if it arose only in time of war. Military service, once we are in it, involves us in such things as the firing at Peterloo on defenceless citizens, in the murder under superior orders of Sheehy Skeffington; in the shooting, if we are ordered to shoot them, of conscientious objectors—men who are themselves sworn not to take life. Military service, loyally rendered in Tsarist Russia, involved the riding down, the sabring to death, and the drowning of those meek crowds who stood before the Winter Palace in January, 1905, asking for their "Little Father" to come and speak to them words of comfort.
These are things unfortunately which Christians cannot do with a good conscience, but which the State for its safety may say that it requires. Let those of us who agree with the State's claim to our personal service, irrespective of conscience, do our utmost to separate it from the weakening effects which true and genuine Christianity is bound to have on it.