Almost everything which is most precious in our civilization has come from small states, the Old Testament, the Homeric poems, the Attic and the Elizabethan drama, the art of the Italian Renaissance, the common law of England. Nobody needs to be told what humanity owes to Athens, Florence, Geneva or Weimar. The world’s debt to these small states far exceeds all that has issued from the militant monarchies of Louis XIV, of Napoleon, of the present emperor of Germany.
It may, perhaps be objected that the apparition of artistic, literary or scientific genius is an incalculable matter of hazard unaffected by the size of the political community in which the great man happens to be born, and that we are only entitled to infer from these examples that a small state may provide an atmosphere in which genius may thrive. It is, however, a relevant answer to much of the criticism now levelled in Germany against small states, to remind ourselves that in the particular points of heroic and martial patriotism, civic pride and political prudence, they have often reached the highest levels to which it possible for humanity to attain, and that from Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as from the illustrious school of the Florentine historians and publicists, the world has learnt nine-tenths of its best political wisdom.
America has particular reasons for gratefully recognizing one of the smallest and most illustrious of the city states of Europe. The seed of modern democratic theory was sown in Geneva, and being scattered on the hither shore of the North American continent by small communities, organized on the model of Calvin, burgeoned into the great Republic of the West.
Nor is it fanciful, in estimating the causes which contributed to the peculiar brilliance of the Greek and then of the Italian city state, to attribute some weight to the question of size. Indeed, if we do this, we shall only be echoing the voice of antiquity itself. In the famous passage in which he depicts the lineaments of the ideal state, Aristotle gives the opinion that a city so large that its citizens are unable to hear the voice of a single town crier has passed the limits of wholesome growth. This conclusion was based on the view that every citizen must take a direct part in the deliberations of the state to which he belongs.
Indeed, had the states of antiquity exceeded the limits compatible with direct government, the world would have lost a good part of its political education. As it was, the contracted span of these communities carried with it three conspicuous benefits. The city state served as a school of patriotic virtue, not in the main of the blustering and thrasonical type, but refined and sublimated by every grace of instinct or reason. It further enabled the experiment of a free direct democratic government to be made, with incalculable consequences for the political thinking of the world. Finally, it threw into a forced and fruitful communion minds of the most different temper, giving to them an elasticity and many-sidedness which might otherwise have been wanting or less conspicuous, and stimulating, through the close mutual competition which it engendered, an intensity of intellectual and artistic passion which has been the wonder of all succeeding generations and such as can never be reached in great states organized for the vulgarity of aggressive war.
So much at least will be generally conceded. The question for us is, however, not to assess our debt to the city states of the past, but to consider what arguments may be found for safeguarding the existence of the smaller nation states of the modern world. And first of all it is relevant to ask whether there may not be some advantage to humanity at large arising from the fact that certain communities are withdrawn by the reason of the scale from the competition of armaments. To certain military minds in Germany it seems to be a lamentable thing that any community of human beings should be organized on the basis of peace, or that the policy of any Government should be steadily directed towards the preservation of its subjects from the horrors of war.
Let us assume for the moment that this extravagant proposition is true, and that the Swiss, the Danes, the Dutch, and the Belgians would be greatly improved in their general morality if they were thrown into some big military empire with an aggressive world-policy and a Providential destiny to impose its culture on the world, and all the other familiar paraphernalia of the Potsdam philosophy. We have still to ask ourselves the question whether, even from the selfish point of view of the Great Powers who are blessed with the moral luxury of a conscript army, there may not be some convenience of attaching to the continued existence of small oases of peace in a world nervously equipping itself for Armageddon? Has Italy no cause to be grateful for the Swiss Confederation? Would the Scandinavian kingdoms preserve their unruffled neutrality if the Danish peninsula were swallowed up by Germany? And has the disappearance of Poland really benefited the two greatest partitioning Powers whose past appetites have brought them the heritage of restless anxiety which belongs to the vigil of coterminous states?
Indeed it is not easy to mention the injurious consequences which have grown from the disappearance of that middle kingdom of Lotharingia which once served as a buffer between France and Germany, or from the extinction of the Polish nation at the close of the eighteenth century.
By common confession European diplomacy suffers from nerves; and the nervous tension is necessarily increased with every addition to the ranks of the rivals. The entanglements likely to give rise to conflict are proportionate to the number and weight of the Powers which stand inside the ring. Every ally who joins one or the other of the coalitions brings with him a whole cluster of new interests which the coalition is bound to defend, and thereby increases the chance of war. Every Power which stands aside lessens the general strain and contracts the area of inflammable controversy.
But the advantages to be derived from the existence of small buffer states are subject to the clear condition that their independence and neutrality are respected.
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Indeed, one of the advantages flowing from the existence of small states consists in the fact that they serve as convenient laboratories for social experiment – a point likely to be appreciated in America, in view of the great mass of material for the comparative study of social and industrial expedients which is provided by the enterprise of the American State legislatures. Such experiments as women’s suffrage, or as State prohibition of the public sale of alcoholic drink, or as a thoroughgoing application of the Reformatory theory of punishment, would never be seriously discussed in large, old, and settled communities, were it not for the fact that they have been tried upon a smaller scale by the more adventurous legislatures of the New World.
Man is an imitative animal, and a study of such an organ as the Journal of Comparative Legislation exhibits the increasing uniformity of the problems which confront the legislator, and the increasing monotony of the solutions which he finds to meet them. All over the world industrial, educational, penal legislation tends to conform to type. And within limits the tendency is the necessary and wholesome consequence of the unifying influence of modern industrial conditions. But our enlarged facilities for imitation present obvious dangers, and among them the fatal temptation to borrow a ready-made uniform which does not fit. Small states may fall into this pitfall as well as big ones, but at least their continued existence presents some guarantee for diversity of life and intellectual adventure in a world steadily becoming more monotonously drab in its outer garment of economic circumstance.
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Even if the improbable came to pass, and a conquered Serbia were to become an obedient and contented fraction of the Austrian Empire, forgetful of heroic ballads and of a long tradition of hardiness and valour, would there be no loss of moral power in the process? To those who measure all virtues by the standard of civic virtue, by intensity of emotional and practical patriotism, the loss would be beyond dispute. A great incentive to the performance of unselfish action would be destroyed, a source of heroic and congenial activity would disappear never to be replaced.
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As soon as the words State and Army become coterminous, a philosophy of violent unification is set up within the body politic, which sooner or later carries everything before it, save the spiritual forces which cannot be broken by any machinery, however despotic and powerful.
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There is no virtue, public or private, which cannot be practiced as fully in a small and weak state as under the scepter of the most formidable tyrant who ever drove fifty armies of conscripts to the slaughter. There is no grace of soul, no disinterested endeavour of mind, no pitch of unobtrusive self-sacrifice of which the members of small and pacific communities have not repeatedly shown themselves to be capable. These virtues indeed may be imperiled by lethargy, but they are threatened even more gravely by that absorbing preoccupation with the facts of material power in which the citizens of great empires are inevitably involved.
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But whatever may be their several shortcomings, the smaller states of Europe are not among the despots. Here at least men may think what they please, and write what they think. Whenever the small states may come up for judgement the advocate of human freedom will plead on their behalf.