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ahrheitslicbe zeigt sich darin, daß man überall das Gute zu finden und zu schätzen weiß.

GOTHE.

VOL. CLIV.

NEW YORK:

THE LEONARD SCOTT PUBLICATION COMPANY,

7 & 9 WARREN STREET.

MDCCCC.

THE

WESTMINSTER REVIEW.

VOL. CLIV. No. 1. - JULY 1900.

LOYALTY AND WAR.

THE frequent misuse of the word "loyalty" seems to indicate a prevalent misconception of its meaning, which it were well to remove if possible, for nothing more surely leads to error than the use of words long associated with high moral sentiments-what might be called hallowed words to express unsanctioned, and often extremely unhallowed ideas. Liberty," "honour," "justice," are instances of words which are often so misused, but no word is apt to be worse misused than "loyalty."

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Those who use the word most glibly seem to think it means subservience to a monarch; or, at best, that it means a slavish acquiescence in the measures of a government an unthinking acceptance of the prevalent opinion-an unquestioning approval of the general vote-or a blind sympathy with the general aim.

The first of these meanings need not, of course, be considered. The feeling which prompts subservience to a monarch, having no rational basis, is merely a foolish superstition, incompatible with the moral and intellectual freedom of humanity, and thus unworthy of civilised peoples. Neither does the word loyalty possess any of the other meanings given. It simply means legality-that is, justice. To be loyal or leal means to be true, honest, just; and political loyalty is truth, honesty, and justice rendered by the individual to the community. The word contains no shadow of the notion either of subservience to or of sympathy with any person, idea or object. A man may be perfectly loyal to his country, and yet feel it his duty to express the strongest disapproval of the actions of his country, and repudiate the slightest sympathy with its objects in some particular

case.

For the fact of the country being "his country" entitles him to do this. The outcome of true loyalty is not such an expression as "My country, right or wrong," but rather, "May my country VOL. 154. No. 1.

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be always right, and may I always do my share towards realising that end."

In time of war the mistaken sentiment of loyalty rises to fever heat, and any person who expresses disapproval of the war or sympathy with those opposed to his country is at once stigmatised as disloyal; though the chances are that he feels a truer love for his country and a stronger desire for her highest interests than the ignorant music-hall patriot who shouts himself hoarse in the gallery, and is regarded as a paragon of loyalty and a pillar of the Empire. The fact of this so-called sentiment of loyalty being always most rampant in time of war is a very interesting social phenomenon, and seems to indicate its real origin and nature. For there certainly appears to be no reason why the right of the minority to criticise or censure the actions of the majority should be denied in time of war any more than at any other time-why its voice should be freely heard on all matters of internal politics, but be suddenly silenced as "disloyalty" the moment war is declared. For it is easy to imagine measures of internal administration fraught with even more important consequences for good or evil to the State than the result of

a war.

Yet, however strenuously the minority might oppose or advocate such measures, its voice would be freely heard and its views freely discussed. Those views might be regarded as dangerous, revolutionary, or what not, but no one in a democratic State would think of calling them disloyal. For in a democracy free criticism, however revolutionary, must needs always be legal and constitutional, since law and constitution themselves derive their sole authority from the general will, and free criticism is nothing else than the general will in process of formation.

Why, then, this outcry against " disloyalty" only in time of war? The feeling is probably a survival from the days of absolute monarchies, when the whole duty of the citizen was held to be unquestioning obedience to the sovereign's will, and loyalty meant subjection to the monarch. The sovereign's will being rarely, if ever, disputed or resisted in the internal affairs of the kingdom, " loyalty" or " disloyalty" came naturally to be associated with the external relations of the State, in which alone the sovereign's will could ever meet with serious opposition.

And this suggests the interesting question, May not this mistaken notion of loyalty be the very thing that fosters the warlike spirit? May not this mistaken idea of the duty of keeping silence while the clash of arms is sounding be the very thing that hinders the abolition of war? If war had to undergo the same ordeal of free, fearless, and unreproached public criticism among the belligerent nations themselves as inevitably awaits all other political acts, it may well be that wars would be less readily entered upon and more readily closed.

It is to this extension of rational criticism rather than to a broadening of racial sympathies- that is, to the intellectual rather than to the moral factor-that we must look for the eventual extinction of the barbarous practice of war a conclusion which only bears out Buckle's well-known generalisation that reason rather than morality is the mainspring of modern progress. For it cannot be denied that the general attitude of democracies towards war scarcely fulfils the expectations of those earlier preachers of the democratic gospel who fancied that the nations were only waiting to be freed from their respective tyrannies to rush into each other's fraternal arms. On the contrary, it seems to be usually found that "the people are even more eager for the fray than their rulers, and, so far from exhibiting any reluctance to slay their fellow-men, very often actually force their rulers into

"

The national hatreds which the old monarchies of the earth have left behind them are not to be so easily got rid of as the eighteenth-century enthusiast fondly imagined, and the only way by which they can be eliminated is the slow, steady working of the human intellect the mystic movement of the Spirit of Light over the dark waters of Ignorance and Prejudice.

war.

A, E. MADDOCK.

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