Successful War No Advantage To Victor, Says Angell.

New York Times 100 years ago today, June 15, 1913:
The Man Who in Three Years Has Revolutionized the Campaign for Peace in Europe by Demonstrating Not the Wickedness But the Futility of Warfare Explains Why One Nation Cannot Enrich Itself by Conquering Another.
    The man who has revolutionized and transformed the campaign for peace in Europe is in this country; and America doesn't even know that the revolution and the transformation have occurred. When Norman Angell wrote "The Great Illusion" he turned the English agitation for disarmament upside down. He stood it on its head, and in that new position it saw things in a new light.
    Instead of arguing that war is cruel, he demonstrated that it was futile. Instead of calling it a crime, he showed that it was no use. Instead of rhapsodizing about its horrors, he analyzed it and proved that there was nothing in it. Instead of viewing it with alarm, he looked for the results it was to bring about and found that they never materialized.
    He went at the subject scientifically, and showed that there is no such thing as a successful war. He showed that victory brings no benefit and defeat no injury — to the nation. He showed that the theory of war rests upon false premises. The "great illusion" is that victory brings any advantage to the victor.
    It was three years ago that the first of the book's many editions came out, and in that time the face of the controversy has been changed by it, so far as England is concerned. Norman Angell societies sprang up everywhere; the Norman Angell movement spread over the country, and the controversy now is not so much between militarists and pacifists as between militarists and Norman Angellists. In France and Germany similar societies are in existence; in America only is there entire ignorance of the fact that there is such a thing as Norman Angellism.
    Mr. Angell is in the United States now for the purpose of looking over the ground — which he finds rather barren — and intends to return next year to begin an active propaganda. He talked to a reporter of The New York Times about his ideas. Here is his position in a nutshell:
    "Practically all the authorities on war and international politics have heretofore taken this ground: Victory in war brings a nation immense benefits; defeat places it at a terrible disadvantage; a conqueror enriches himself by annexing territory; a defeated nation is impoverished by losing that territory; a nation's prosperity depends, other things being equal, upon its military and naval power; a weak and small nation must necessarily suffer in that respect at the hands of the strong or be at the mercy of the strong; if the Germans could crush the English Navy and had England at their mercy they could take England's colonies, transfer England's trade to themselves; they could make themselves rich by their victory and England poor.
    "Well, this doctrine is all wrong. None of these things is true, and belief that they are is 'The Great Illusion' of the civilized world to-day.
    "Speaking broadly and generally, victory brings no material advantage; the idea that conquered territory enriches the conqueror is a pure illusion; that small and weak nations are at a hopeless disadvantage as compared with the large and the great is evidently false, since we know as a simple fact that the small nations are just as prosperous as the great ones; in the modern world it is a sheer impossibility for one nation to seize the wealth of another by military force."

A New Force.
    This, and not any appeal to sentiment, is the basis of the Norman Angell doctrine. It is this study of war from the economic side that has revolutionized the thought of England and is affecting the thought of the European Continent on this question. Militarists themselves unwillingly recognize a new force not to be ridiculed away. Since the publication of "The Great Illusion" a new school of thought, based on it, has arisen in Europe.
    "Conquest — successful war," he said to The Times reporter, "can never be of advantage to the conquering people. The most successful form of war would be the complete incorporation of the conquered people's territory into that of the conquering people, wouldn't it? But that would not mean an addition of wealth to the conquering people, any more than New York, if it took in Long Island, would be able to divide its property among New Yorkers. All that New York would do would be to extend the area of administration; there would not be any transfer of wealth.
    "If it were true that every time you conquer a province the conquering people profited, we should find, largely and generally, that the people of the big States were the wealthy populations and the people of small States were poor. But when we take Europe, it is precisely the populations of the small States that are the richest — Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway — and it is precisely the populations of the great military States, like Russia, that are the poorest.
    "Conquest is not a transfer of wealth, it is only the extension of the area of administration. Let your war be the most successful you can imagine, so successful that you have incorporated the conquered people, and still you have done yourself no good."
    Mr. Angell's position is that the commerce and industry of a people no longer depends upon the expansion of its political frontiers; that a nation's political and economic frontiers do not now necessarily coincide; that military power is socially and economically futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity of the people exercising it; that it is impossible for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of another — to enrich itself by subjugating or imposing its will by force on another; that war can no longer achieve those aims for which people strive.
    He holds that wealth in the economically-civilized world Is founded upon credit and commercial contract. If they are tampered with, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self-injurious it must respect the enemy's property, in which case it becomes economically futile. Thus the wealth of conquered territory remains in the hands of the population of such territory.
    He also shows that international finance has become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that the intangibility of an enemy's property extends to his trade. Political and military power, therefore, can in reality do nothing for trade; the individual merchants, and manufacturers of small nations, exercising no such power, compete successfully with those of the great.
    Finally, the forces which have brought about the economic futility of military power have also rendered it futile as a means of enforcing a nation's moral ideals or imposing its social institutions upon a conquered people. Its language, law, literature, traditions, &c., could not be stamped out. The necessary security in their material possessions enjoyed by the inhabitants of such conquered provinces, quick intercommunication by a cheap press, widely read literature, enable even small communities to become articulate and effectively defend their special social or moral possessions, even when military conquest has been complete. The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers. There is no modern State which is completely Catholic or Protestant, or liberal or autocratic, or aristocratic or democratic, or Socialist or individualist.

War Not Beneficial.
    Mr. Angell's critics have usually assumed that by "The Great Illusion" he means the danger of war. He does not; the illusion is not that war is possible, but that it is beneficial.
    "Just as it has become impossible," said he, "to seize wealth by military force, so has it become impossible to seize the trade of another nation or to enrich ourselves by the annexation of territory.
    "An invader might not care a rap about how much damage he did to us, but he would care a great deal how much damage he did to himself; and he could not upset our credit without damaging himself.
    "But if the invader is not to upset our credit it means practically that he has to leave things as he finds them, and not to interfere with anything which greatly affects the life and trade of the country. But in that case, what is the use of invasion?
    "It was not, of course, always thus; the old Viking who landed on our coast carried off the gold and silver and cattle and slaves, and did not have to worry in the least about such intricate matters as bank rates and stock exchanges.
    "But the Government of a great industrial nation invading us to-day *would* have to worry about such matters; and it is ridiculous to pretend that the condition of things has not changed, and changed materially, since the days of the Vikings. And yet the terms that we employ in international politics — the 'domination' of this or that territory, the 'subjugation' of this or that people, the 'ownership' of countries — comes to us from a time when things were fundamentally different to what they are to-day, and in the rush and hurry of life — members of Parliament and Foreign Ministers and even newspaper editors are very busy people — we do not see that these terms are no longer true and no longer represent the real facts of the world.
    "When Olaf, the Viking king, descended on the coast of Northumbria he hammered his way into a Saxon stronghold, seized all the gold and silver and hides and corn and cattle and women and slaves that he could lay hand on, sailed back home, and was the richer by just the amount of loot which he could safely land on his own shores. As against the profit of such an expedition he had to set on the debit side of the account practically nothing at all.
    "But imagine a modern Olaf landed in London at the head of a victorious army making straight for the cellars of the Bank of England and looting them; would the position be the same? The position would be absolutely different, for the day that he looted the Bank of England the Bank of Germany would suspend payment, and his own balance therein disappear.
    "For every sovereign that he took from English merchants in this way, German merchants would probably pay a hundred. Every time that he brought an English bank, or insurance company, or commercial house to ruin, he would know with absolute and mathematical certainty that he would by the same blow bring a German bank, and a German insurance company, and a German house to ruin also.
    "Can we pretend, therefore, that conditions have not altered? Of course, they have altered.
    "Confiscation in this rude form, therefore, has become impossible, for the simple reason that the confiscator would, unlike the Viking of old, lose more than he could possibly gain. The relative importance of the two factors has changed; the factor of necessary co-operation has gained in weight, the factor of conflict has lost in weight. And yet accepted diplomacy talks as though factors were everlastingly the same!
    "So much for the simple fact of confiscation, but what about the other objects for the attainment of which military force can advantageously be used? Annexation of territory, for instance? Well, what really happens in annexation? When you annex a territory you annex also the real and only owners of the wealth of such territory — you multiply by x, but immediately have to divide by x, so the resultant is exactly what it was before. We remember the multiplication all right and feel quite sure we have added to our wealth, quietly forgetting the division — the other half of the fact.
    "Germany conquered France and annexed Alsace-Lorraine. The Germans consequently 'own' it, and enriched themselves with this newly acquired wealth — indeed the wiseacres have calculated for us its 'cash value.' That is the view of European statesmen; and it is false.
    "Alsace-Lorraine is owned by its inhabitants, and nobody else; and Germany, with all her ruthlessness, has not been able to dispossess them, as is proved by the fact that the matricular contribution (matrikular-beitrag) of the newly acquired State to the Imperial Treasury is fixed on exactly the same scale as that of the other States of the Empire. Prussia, the conqueror, pays per capita just as much and no less than Alsace, the conquered, who, if she were not paying the tax to Germany, would be paying it to France; and if Germany did not 'own' Alsace-Lorraine she would be relieved of charges that certainly amount to as much as she draws from the territory.

 An Optical Illusion.
    "In every civilized State revenues which are drawn from a territory are expended on that territory, and there is no process known to modern government by which wealth may first be drawn from a territory into the treasury, and then be redistributed with a profit to the individuals who have contributed it, or to others. It would be just as reasonable to say that the citizens of London are richer than the citizens of Birmingham because London has a richer treasury; or that Londoners would become richer if the London County Council were to annex the county of Hertford, or to say that peoples' wealth varies according to the size of the administrative area which they inhabit. The whole thing is, as I have called it, an optical illusion, due to the hypnotism of an obsolete terminology.
    "But what about destroying a rival's trade to the advantage of our own? Again we are faced by the increasing factor. Can England check the competition and growing commercial power of Germany by defeating her in a military sense? The general impression is that she could — though, of course, she would never be drawn into an attack on Germany for such a reason.
    "But suppose we could destroy the German fleet to-morrow and completely annihilate Germany's political power? Would German commercial competition cease?
    "The sixty-five millions of efficient and educated people would still be there, as determined as ever to gain their livelihoods by manufacturing as cheaply and pushing their wares as energetically as ever. Indeed, the fact of military defeat would, in all probability, push them to greater industrial efforts, would reconcile many to working on small profits, to working under harder conditions generally. The German competition would, in all probability, be keener, not less keen, after the German defeat.
    "And if Germany could crush us, could wipe out navy from the seas, the converse proposition would be just as true. Moreover, suppose that by some magic the German Empire could simply wipe us from the face of the earth, annihilate every man, woman, and child in Great Britain, what would happen? Germany for a long time would be faced by sheer ruin, and the very best market which she possesses in the world would disappear.

What History Shows.
    "A victorious nation, it is said, could dominate territory, and occupy it for her own merchants, shutting out those of rivals. Well, fortunately, here we can talk on the solid basis of experience. History furnishes numberless instances where the thing has been attempted. And in every instance, without any single exception known to the historian, they have all failed.
    "Spain tried it with half the world for an experimenting ground, and the more she applied this principle of exclusivity the poorer she got; and even in her most 'glorious' period her population was perhaps the poorest in Europe. She refused to read the simple facts of the case, persisted, and has dropped, in so far as the general condition of her people is concerned, almost into the last rank. England tried the same thing during two centuries in the New World and, wiser than Spain, and profiting by the evident facts, abandoned it, with the result that the British Empire in which this principle of exclusivity is unknown is, with all its defects, the best and the most prosperous and the most successful that the world has ever seen.
    "The notion that military power can be exercised for the 'control' of markets, in Admiral Mahan's phrase, is due to ignoring one-half of the facts, as indeed the whole illusion with which I am dealing is due to such reason. It is assumed that if Germany could cut off a million pounds worth of trade a year with, shall we say, Illyria, Illyria could be compelled to spend that million pounds with German, merchants. Whereas, as a matter of fact, for Illyria to buy a million pounds' worth of goods she must sell a million's worth of goods. The proportion which the gold of the world plays to the trade of the world is a mere fraction, so inconsiderable as hardly to be worth considering when it comes to trade as a part from currency questions. And if Illyria sells goods — foodstuffs, coal, iron — to Germany she is merely a competitor to German agricultural, coal, and iron interests.
    "Illyria might sell to other countries. But only if she can do so cheaply — compete advantageously — which she cannot if Germany hampers her with disadvantageous fiscal arrangements which Germany would be doing by imposing exclusively in the old colonial style. But even in selling to other countries she would be competing with Germany: Germans might get such trade.
    "The defenders of the old political doctrines assume a market to be a place where goods are bought. That is only half the truth. It is a place where goods are bought and sold, and unless a territory can sell things it cannot buy them. And the notion that a territory could go on forever buying things and never selling them is simply the idea of perpetual motion applied to economics.
    "In other words, every customer must be to some extent a competitor, and military power cannot possibly alter the fact. Assume that Germany — or any other power, for that matter — is so successful in her schemes of military greatness that she were able to dominate absolutely the whole of Europe, and to convert Europe merely into an extended German Empire. How would she treat such a European empire? By impoverishing its component parts? But that would be suicidal.
    "Where would her big industrial population find their markets? If she set out to develop and enrich the component parts, these would become merely efficient competitors, and she need not have undertaken the costliest war of history to arrive at that result.
    "She might demand that English ports, for instance, be kept open to German goods; but that is precisely what English ports have been for sixty years, and Germany has not been obliged to wage war to effect it. She would close her own markets to our goods, to the goods of foreigners. But that again is precisely what she has done, again without war and by a right which we never dream of challenging."

Colonies and Emigration.
    The reporter inquired concerning the doctrine that the crowded nations of Europe need new territory for an outlet for their populations.
    "The Canadians," said Mr. Angell, "have spent quite a lot of money in the past trying to persuade Germany to go there. The Germans can go to Canada now just as much as if they possessed it."
    "But is it not true that people will emigrate to a colony when they will not to a foreign country?"
    "The facts are the other way. Nothing can persuade the Germans to go to a German colony. They prefer to go to the United States. You see, Germany could not turn Canada into a German-speaking colony by virtue of conquest. England has conquered Quebec, but French is still the language and the law of Quebec, and English would still be the law and language of the German colony of Canada. So that the Germans would have just about the same sort of country to go to that they have now. The fact of conquest has no bearing upon the fact of expansion of population."
    The reporter asked him how his theories applied to the American annexation of the Philippines.
    "America isn't any the wealthier for that," he said; "she can't be, unless you are robbing the Filipinos, which I presume you are not; unless you are taking taxes out of them which you don't spend on them, which I presume you are not.
    "But this may happen: Military force may be used as an army or as a police force. The difference between an army and a police force is this: If the police force of New York were to set out to attack the police of Jersey City it would be acting as an army. So long as it is merely keeping order here it isn't acting as an army at all. But we will suppose that there arose such a condition of disorder in New Jersey that New York could not put its trains through. Then it might be to New York's advantage to send a police force into Jersey and tell them how to run their business. That would not be conquest. If you go into the Philippines and show them how to keep order, you are not conquering them."
    "Then you are not opposed to all wars, but only to wars of conquest?" asked the reporter.
    "But most wars are wars of conquest," answered Mr. Angell. "Look at the problem in Europe. We are threatened with war between England and Germany. England doesn't need to maintain order in Germany, nor Germany in England. Both can do it infinitely better for themselves than either can do it for the other.

Reform Must Come.
    "People say to me, 'But armaments are for defense,' which means that they are to prevent some one else from attacking us. If we say that we are in danger of an invasion, and that our arms are for the purpose of defense, that means that they are for the purpose of rendering some one's attack impossible, and they are necessitated, consequently, by a belief in the advantages of attack. It is a belief in the advantage of conquest that is at the bottom of the whole trouble.
    "When that opinion is reformed, the motive and impulse to conquest will have been taken away, and the necessity for defense will disappear. And general opinion can only be reformed by discussion.
    "What became of the religious wars which devastated the world for so many years? The wars of Catholic and Protestant ended all of a sudden, not because one party had conquered the other, but because each realized the futility of trying to. In the same way the commercial nations of the world will come to realize the futility of attempting conquest, and give it up."
    Once, in a debate between Mr. Angell and the President of the Navy League, the latter laid it down as an axiom that in order to insure peace England must be too strong to be attacked. Mr. Angell's reply was, "Would you give that advice to Germany? If you would, then your position is that when two men are likely to engage in a fight, each must be stronger than the other in order to keep the peace."
    "One of my critics," said Mr. Angell, "says that Germany has got to fight England because Germany needs the wheat of Canada to feed her population. She can have the wheat of Canada now by paying for it, and she couldn't have it in any other way even if she owned Canada. England is said to 'own' Canada, but we can't get a single bushel of Canadian wheat unless we pay for it, like any miserable foreigner. What are the functions of ownership that Great Britain possesses in Canada? She doesn't own a foot of land. She hasn't the title deeds to six penny worth of property. The whole thing is a misuse of terms. "Fiscally, the relation between England and Canada is what it is between England and the United States. Canada imposes tariffs against England when and how she pleases. If she gives England a preference it is by her own choice; England doesn't exact it by right of her position."
    There are between fifteen and twenty Norman Angell societies in England. Mr. Angell pointed to the list of officers and the General Committee of the Manchester Norman Angell League, and said: "All that commercial Manchester means is on that committee, from the Lord Mayor down. It is a saying, you know, that where Lancashire is to-day, England will be to-morrow. Manchester, as you know, is not exactly a sentimental town." Such societies exist in practically every English university. A course of lectures is given on Norman Angellism in Sheffield, and Viscount Esher, though a prominent member of the Imperial Defense League and a man whose interests heretofore have been entirely military, has lectured on the subject at Cambridge University. In this lecture Viscount Esher declared his belief that "Germany will prove just now as receptive as Great Britain to the doctrine of Norman Angell." In the universities Norman Angellism is used as a subject for debate. "It is making headway in France and Germany, too," sa    id Mr. Angell. " Only America doesn't seem to know anything about it. I am confronted over here with the words, 'But it doesn't affect us; we are not likely to have war.' But that isn't the point. America is paying her part of every dollar that Europe spends on armaments.
    "To develop this country you need mainly three things. First, cheap money, which means stable credit; secondly, markets for your products; thirdly, freedom from industrial troubles. And you won't get any of the three if this situation in Europe gets worse.
    "Credit will be disturbed, which will make money dear and even Jeopardize enterprises here. The whole point of my thesis is that the modern world has become an industrial organism. If the bank rate goes up in London to 8 per cent, money is dear in New York; you can't separate the two. You can't depend upon a plentiful supply of necessary capital if we are going to have these disturbances in Europe.
    "Secondly, this unproductive expenditure tends to depress living. If Europe is spending all this money on armies and battleships she hasn't got the money to spend on better food, which would mean a market for America if she had.
    "Thirdly, you will never solve the social problems and give the workers what they are determined to have if you are spending an immense proportion of the wealth of the world not upon making their condition better but upon making it worse.
    "Now, America can't possibly escape the reaction of these factors, and it is just as much her problem as ours. Yet the scientific study of these things hasn't been begun here. You don't seem to realize that it is a science at all."
    Mr. Angell was asked what he thought of the Japanese-American war talk.
    "If the Yellow Peril is a fact," he replied, "then it is high time that the European peoples composed their differences. All talk of the Japanese invasion of America is monstrous rubbish. I take it that Americans consider themselves at least as good as backwoods peasants in the Transvaal, and it took England three years, 400,000 men, and two billions of money to overcome a little community of 100,000 occupying a territory which could not support them the year round, unable to manufacture a pound of gunpowder or so much as a fowling piece.
    "Do a sum in rule of three. How long, how many men, and what amount of money would it take to overcome a community of 100,000,000 inhabiting a territory perfectly supporting them the year round and able' to manufacture the best arms and ammunition in the world? Just work it out. There are no ifs and buts in the whole thing. The conquest of America by Japan is a physical impossibility, and the Japanese, who are not altogether imbeciles, are not going to try it."
    Mr. Angell was asked how he came to take up the study of the subject.
    "As a young man," he answered, "I spent ten years in America. I was here when Anglophobia was the correct thing in politics, and in the agitation over Venezuela I have seen Americans clamoring for the annihilation of Great Britain. I used to go to political meetings in those days and hear these orators bastinado Great Britain and demand her destruction. "It dawned on me that here were sixty or seventy million honest, well intentioned, kindly people who were all wrong. For a Western country to demand the annihilation of England was to demand the annihilation of their own market, their own livelihood. That suggested strongly to me that there was something wrong at the very basis of the thing, that the axioms were all wrong.

Premises at Fault.
    "It is the premises of our political thinking which are at fault, and until we can correct these premises it doesn't matter how learned we are, we are still wrong. The Judges who condemned people to death for witchcraft were very able men, trained to sift evidence, and they devoted many years to the study of the science of witchcraft. All their science was just learned nonsense, because cause their premises were wrong."
    "The Great Illusion" came out first in 1909. It has passed through countless editions, and has been translated into twenty-two languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Persian. Within a year after its publication Sir Edward Grey declared at a banquet of the National Liberal Club that the idea of the economic futility of conquest was first brought to his vision by Mr. Angell's book. The speech of Count von Metternich in November; 1910, a speech which marked the beginning of a new era in Anglo-German relations, was quite frankly a paraphrase of "The Great Illusion." Shortly afterward M. Jaurés quoted the book at length in the French Chamber of Deputies, and called attention to the effect it was having on European politics. The Kaiser in private conversation expressed his interest and indorsed to a large extent Mr. Angell's novel theory.
    He has started a movement which is evidently going to have most important results; for he is taking the peace agitation out of the hands of the dreamers and the sentimentalists and putting it on a basis where it makes converts among men who have hitherto found the practical side of the question their stumbling block.
    "We are trying," he said to The Times reporter, at the conclusion of the interview, "to make of this thing a scientific presentation of the case for international order as against international anarchy."