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THE HEALING OF NATIONS AND THE HIDDEN SOURCES OF THEIR STRIFE


By Edward Carpenter


1915



"_The Tree of Life ... whose leaves are for the Healing of the Nations_"




CONTENTS

    I.  INTRODUCTORY

   II.  WAR-MADNESS

  III.  THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR

   IV.  THE CASE AGAINST GERMANY

    V.  THE CASE FOR GERMANY

   VI.  THE HEALING OF NATIONS

  VII.  PATRIOTISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

 VIII.  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR AND RECRUITING

   IX.  CONSCRIPTION

    X.  HOW SHALL THE PLAGUE BE STAYED?

   XI.  COMMERCIAL PROSPERITY THE PROSPERITY OF A CLASS

  XII.  COLONIES AND SEAPORTS

 XIII.  WAR AND THE SEX IMPULSE

  XIV.  THE OVER-POPULATION SCARE

   XV.  THE FRIENDLY AND THE FIGHTING INSTINCTS

  XVI.  NEVER AGAIN!

 XVII.  THE TREE OF LIFE

 APPENDIX--

        A New and Better Peace

        The Change from the Old Germany to the New

        Classes in Germany for and against the War

        Political Ignorance

        Purpose of the War: Max Harden

        England's Perfidy: Professors Haeckel and Eucken

        Manifesto of Professor Eucken

        Nietzsche on Disarmament

        The Effect of Disarmament

        The Principle of Nationality: Winston Churchill

        Conscription

        Neutralization of the Sea: H.G. Wells

        The War and Democracy: Arnold Bennett

        The Future Settlement: G. Lowes Dickinson

        Brutality of Warfare: H.M. Tomlinson

        Patriotism: Romain Rolland

        No Patriotism in Business!

        Manifesto, Independent Labour Party

        Responsibility of the whole Capitalist Class

        Text of Karl Liebknecht's Protest in Reichstag

        The Russian Danger

        Letter on Russia by P. Kropotkin

        On the Future of Europe, by the same

        Servia: R.W. Seton-Watson

        The Battlefield: Walt Whitman

        Chinese Christians on the War: Dr. A. Salter

        Essential Friendliness of Peoples

        Reconciliation in Death

        Christmas at the Front, 1914

        Letter from the Trenches by Baron Marschall von Bieberstein




I


INTRODUCTORY

The following Studies and Notes, made during the earlier period of the
present war and now collected together for publication, do not--as will
be evident to the reader--pretend to any sort of completeness in their
embrace of the subject, or finality in its presentation. Rather they are
scattered thoughts suggested by the large and tangled drama which we are
witnessing; and I am sufficiently conscious that their expression
involves contradictions as well as repetitions.

The truth is that affairs of this kind--like all the _great_ issues of
human life, Love, Politics, Religion, and so forth, do not, at their
best, admit of final dispatch in definite views and phrases. They are
too vast and complex for that. It is, indeed, quite probable that such
things cannot be adequately represented or put before the human mind
_without_ logical inconsistencies and contradictions. But (perhaps for
that very reason) they are the subjects of the most violent and dogmatic
differences of opinion. Nothing people quarrel about more bitterly than
Politics--unless it be Religion: both being subjects of which all that
one can really say for certain is--that nobody understands them.

When, as in the present war, a dozen or more nations enter into conflict
and hurl at each other accusations of the angriest sort (often quite
genuinely made and yet absolutely irreconcilable one with another), and
when on the top of that scores and hundreds of writers profess to
explain the resulting situation in a few brief phrases (but
unfortunately their explanations are all different), and calmly affix
the blame on "Russia" or "Germany" or "France" or "England"--just as if
these names represented certain responsible individuals, supposed for
the purposes of the argument to be of very wily and far-scheming
disposition--whereas it is perfectly well known that they really
represent most complex whirlpools of political forces, in which the
merest accidents (as whether two members of a Cabinet have quarrelled,
or an Ambassador's dinner has disagreed with him) may result in a long
and fatal train of consequences--it becomes obvious that all so-called
"explanations" (though it may be right that they should be attempted)
fall infinitely short, of the reality.[1]

Feeling thus the impossibility of dealing at all adequately with the
present situation, I have preferred to take here and there just an
aspect of it for consideration, with a view especially to the
differences between Germany and England. I have thought that instead of
spending time over recriminations one might be on safer ground by
trying to get at the root-causes of this war (and other wars), thus
making one's conclusions to some degree independent of a multitude of
details and accidents, most of which must for ever remain unknown to us.

There are in general four rather well-marked species of wars--Religious
wars, Race wars, wars of Ambition and Conquest, and wars of Acquisition
and Profit--though in any particular case the four species may be more
or less mingled. The religious and the race motives often go together;
but in modern times on the whole (and happily) the religious motive is
not so very dominant. Wars of race, of ambition, and of acquisition are,
however, still common enough. Yet it is noticeable, as I frequently have
occasion to remark in the following papers, that it only very rarely
happens that any of these wars are started or set in motion by the
mass-peoples themselves. The mass-peoples, at any rate of the more
modern nations, are quiescent, peaceable, and disinclined for strife.
Why, then, do wars occur? It is because the urge to war comes, not from
the masses of a nation but from certain classes within it. In every
nation, since the dawn of history, there have been found, beside the
toiling masses, three great main cliques or classes, the Religious, the
Military, and the Commercial. It was so in far-back ancient India; it is
so now. Each of these classes endeavours in its turn--as one might
expect--to become the ruling class and to run the government of the
nation. The governments of the nations thus become class-governments.
And it is one or another of these classes that for reasons of its own,
alone or in combination with another class, foments war and sets it
going.

In saying this I do not by any means wish to say anything against the
mere existence of Class, in itself. In a sense that is a perfectly
natural thing. There _are_ different divisions of human activity, and it
is quite natural that those individuals whose temperament calls them to
a certain activity--literary or religious or mercantile or military or
what not--should range themselves together in a caste or class; just as
the different functions of the human body range themselves in definite
organs. And such grouping in classes may be perfectly healthy _provided
the class so created subordinates itself to the welfare of the Nation_.
But if the class does _not_ subordinate itself to the general welfare,
if it pursues its own ends, usurps governmental power, and dominates the
nation for its own uses--if it becomes parasitical, in fact--then it and
the nation inevitably become diseased; as inevitably as the human body
becomes diseased when its organs, instead of supplying the body's needs,
become the tyrants and parasites of the whole system.

It is this Class-disease which in the main drags the nations into the
horrors and follies of war. And the horrors and follies of war are the
working out and expulsion on the surface of evils which have long been
festering within. How many times in the history of "civilization" has a
bigoted religious clique, or a swollen-headed military clique, or a
greedy commercial gang--caring not one jot for the welfare of the people
committed to its charge--dragged them into a senseless and ruinous war
for the satisfaction of its own supposed interests! It is here and in
this direction (which searches deeper than the mere weighing and
balancing of Foreign policies and Diplomacies) that we must look for the
"explanation" of the wars of to-day.

And even race wars--which at first sight seem to have little to do with
the Class trouble--illustrate the truth of my contention. For they
almost always arise from the hatred generated in a nation by an alien
class establishing itself in the midst of that nation--establishing
itself, maybe, as a governmental or dominant class (generally a military
or landlord clique) or maybe as a parasitical or competing class (as in
the case of the Jews in Europe and the Japanese in America and so
forth). They arise, like all other wars, from the existence of a class
within the nation which is not really in accord with the people of that
nation, but is pursuing its own interests apart from theirs. In the
second of the following papers, "The Roots of the Great War," I have
drawn attention to the influence of the military and commercial classes,
especially in Germany, and the way in which their policy, coming into
conflict with a similar policy in the other Western nations, has
inevitably led to the present embroilment. In Eastern Europe similar
causes are at work, but there the race elements--and even the
religious--constitute a more important factor in the problem.

By a curious fatality Germany has become the centre of this great war
and world-movement, which is undoubtedly destined--as the Germans
themselves think, though in a way quite other than they think--to be of
vast importance, and the beginning of a new era in human evolution. And
the more one considers Germany's part in the affair, the more one sees,
I think, that from the combined influence of her historical antecedents
and her national psychology this fatality was to be expected. In roughly
putting together these antecedent elements and influences, I have
entitled the chapter "The Case _for_ Germany," because on the principle
of _tout comprendre_ the fact of the evolution being inevitable
constitutes her justification. The nations cannot fairly complain of her
having moved along a line which for a century or more has been slowly
and irresistibly prepared for her. On the other hand, the nations do
complain of the manner and the methods with which at the last she has
precipitated and conducted the war--as indeed they have shown by so
widely combining against her. However right, from the point of view of
destiny and necessity, Germany may be, she has apparently from the point
of view of the moment put herself in the wrong. And the chapter dealing
with this phase of the question I have called "The Case _against_
Germany."

Whatever further complications and postponements may arise, there will
certainly come a time of recovery and reconstruction on a wide and
extended scale over Europe and a large part of the world. To even
outline this period would be impossible at present; but in the sixth
chapter and the last, as well as in the intermediate pieces, I have
given some suggestions towards this future Healing of the Nations.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Evil--huge and monstrous as it is--is not senseless, one may feel
sure. Even now here in England one perceives an extraordinary pulling
together and bracing up of the people, a development of solidarity and
mutual helpfulness, a greater seriousness, and a disregarding of
artificialities, which are all to the good. These things are gains, even
though the way of their manifestation be through much of enmity and
ignorance. And one may fairly suppose that similar results are traceable
in the other nations concerned. Wounds and death may seem senseless and
needless, but those who suffer them do not suffer in vain. All these
shattering experiences, whether in a nation's career or in the career of
an individual, cause one--they force one--to look into the bases of life
and to get nearer its realities. If, in this case, the experiences of
the war, and the fire which the nations are passing through, serve to
destroy and burn up much of falsity in their respective habits and
institutions, we shall have to admit that the attendant disasters have
not been all loss--even though at the same time we admit that if we had
had a grain of sense we might have mended our falsities in far more
economical and sensible fashion.

If in the following pages--chiefly concerned as they are with Germany
and England--I have seemed to find fault with either party or to affix
blame on one or the other, it is not necessary to suppose that one
harbours ill-feeling towards either, or that one fails to recognize the
splendid devotion of both the combatants. Two nations so closely related
as the Germans and the English cannot really be so hopelessly different
in temperament and character; and a great deal of the supposed
difference is obviously artificial and class-made for the occasion.
Still, there _are_ differences; and as we both think we are right, and
as we are unable to argue the matter out in a rational way, there seems
to be nothing for it but to fight.

War has often been spoken of as a great Game; and Mr. Jerome K. Jerome
has lately written eloquently on that subject. It is a game in which the
two parties agree, so to speak, to differ. They take sides, and in
default of any more rational method, resort to the arbitrament of force.
The stakes are high, and if on the one hand the game calls forth an
immense amount of resource, skill, alertness, self-control, endurance,
courage, and even tenderness, helpfulness, and fidelity; on the other
hand, it is liable to let loose pretty bad passions of vindictiveness
and cruelty, as well as to lead to an awful accumulation of mental and
physical suffering and of actual material loss. To call war "The Great
Game" may have been all very well in the more rudimentary wars of the
past; but to-day, when every horrible invention of science is conjured
up and utilized for the express purpose of blowing human bodies to bits
and strewing battlefields with human remains, and the human spirit
itself can hardly hold up against such a process of mechanical
slaughter, the term has ceased to be applicable. The affections and the
conscience of mankind are too violently outraged by the spectacle; and a
great mass of feeling is forming which one may fairly hope will ere long
make this form of strife impossible among the more modern peoples.

Still, even now, as Mr. Jerome himself contends, the term is partly
justified by a certain fine feeling of which it is descriptive and which
is indeed very noticeable in all ranks. Whether in the Army or Navy,
among bluejackets or private soldiers or officers, the feeling is
certainly very much that of a big game--with its own rules of honour and
decency which must be adhered to, and carried on with extraordinary
fortitude, patience, and good-humour. Whether it arises from the
mechanical nature of the slaughter, or from any other cause, the fact
remains that among our fighting people to-day--at any rate in the
West--there is very little feeling of _hatred_ towards the "enemy." It
is difficult, indeed, to hate a foe whom you do not even see. Chivalry
is not dead, and at the least cessation of the stress of conflict the
tendency to honour opponents, to fraternize with them, to succour the
wounded, and so forth, asserts itself again. And chivalry demands that
what feelings of this kind we credit to ourselves we should also credit
to the other parties in the game. We do cordially credit them to our
French and Belgian allies, and if we do not credit them quite so
cordially to the Germans, that is _partly_ at least because every lapse
from chivalrous conduct on the part of our opponents is immediately
fastened upon and made the most of by our Press. Chivalry is by no means
dead in the Teutonic breast, though the sentiment has certainly been
obscured by some modern German teachings.

While these present war-producing conditions last, we have to face them
candidly and with as much good sense as we can command (which is for the
most part only little!). We have to face them and make the best of
them--though by no means to encourage them. Perhaps after all even a war
like the present one--monstrous as it is--does not denote so great a
deviation of the old Earth from its appointed orbit as we are at first
inclined to think. Under normal conditions the deaths on our planet (and
many of them exceedingly lingering and painful) continue at the rate of
rather more than one every second--say 90,000 a day. The worst battles
cannot touch such a wholesale slaughter as this. Life at its normal best
is full of agonizings and endless toil and sufferings; what matters,
what _it is really there for_, is that we should learn to conduct it
with Dignity, Courage, Goodwill--to transmute its dross into gold. If
war _has_ to continue yet for a time, there is still plenty of evidence
to show that we can wrest--even from its horrors and insanities--some
things that are "worth while," and among others the priceless jewel of
human love and helpfulness.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Some people take great pleasure in analysing White Books and Grey
Books and Orange Books and Yellow Books without end, and proving this or
that from them--as of course out of such a mass of material they can
easily do, according to their fancy. But when one remembers that almost
all the documents in these books have been written with a _view_ to
their later publication; and when one remembers also that, however
incompetent diplomatists as a class may be, no one supposes them to be
such fools as to entrust their _most_ important _ententes_ and
understandings with each other to printed records--why, one comes to the
conclusion that the analysis of all these State papers is not a very
profitable occupation.




II


WAR-MADNESS

_September_, 1914.

How mad, how hopelessly mad, it all seems I With fifteen to twenty
million soldiers already mobilized, and more than half that number in
the fighting lines; with engines of appalling destruction by land and
sea, and over the land and under the sea; with Northern France, Belgium,
and parts of Germany, Poland, Russia, Servia, and Austria drenched in
blood; the nations exhausting their human and material resources in
savage conflict--this war, marking the climax, and (let us hope) the
_finale_ of our commercial civilization, is the most monstrous the old
Earth has ever seen. And yet, as in a hundred earlier and lesser wars,
we hardly know the why and wherefore of it. It is like the sorriest
squabbles of children and schoolboys--utterly senseless and unreasoning.
But broken bodies and limbs and broken hearts and an endless river of
blood and suffering are the outcome.




III


THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR[2]

_October_, 1914.

In the present chapter I wish especially to dwell on (1) the danger to
society, mentioned in the Introduction, of class-ascendancy and
class-rule; and (2) the hope for the future in the international
solidarity of the workers.

Through all the mist of lies and slander created on such an occasion--by
which each nation after a time succeeds in proving that its own cause is
holy while that of its opponent is wicked and devilish; through the
appeals to God and Justice, common to both sides; through the shufflings
and windings of diplomats, and the calculated attitudes of politicians,
adopted for public approval; through the very real rage and curses of
soldiers, the desperate tears and agony of women, the murder of babes,
and the smoke of burning towns and villages: it is difficult, indeed, to
arrive at clear and just conclusions.

When the war first broke out no one could give an adequate reason for
it. It all seemed absurd, monstrous, impossible. Then arose a Babel of
explanations. It was that Germany desired to crush France finally; it
was that she was determined to break Great Britain's naval and
commercial supremacy; it was that she must have an outlet on the sea
through Belgium and Holland; that she must force a way to the
Mediterranean through Servia; that she must carry out her financial
schemes in Asia Minor and the Baghdad region. It was her hatred of the
Slav and her growing dread of Russia; it was her desire for a Colonial
Empire; it was fear of a revolution at home; it was the outcome of long
years of Pan-Germanist philosophy; it was the result of pure military
ambition and the class-domination of the Junkers. Each and all of these
reasons (and many others) were in turn cited, and magnified into the
mainspring of the war; and yet even to-day we cannot say which _was_ the
main reason, or if we admit them all we cannot say in what exact
proportions their influences were combined.

Moreover, they all assume that Germany was the aggressor; and we have to
remember that this would not be admitted for a moment by a vast number
of the Germans themselves--who cease not to say that the war was simply
forced upon them by the hostile preparations of Russia, by the
vengefulness of France, by the jealous foreign policy of England, and by
the obvious threat embodied in the _Entente_ between those three
nations; and that if they (the Germans) made preparations for, or even
precipitated it, that was only out of the sheer necessity of
self-preservation.[3]

Thus we are still left without any generally accepted conclusion in the
matter. Moreover, we are struck, in considering the list of reasons
cited, by a feeling that they are all in their way rather partial and
superficial--that they do not go to the real root of the subject.

Out of them all--and after the first period of confusion and doubt has
passed--our own people at home have settled down into the conviction
that German militarism in general, and Prussian Junkerdom in particular,
are to blame, and that for the good of the world as well as for our own
good we are out to fight these powers of evil. Prussian
class-militarism, it is said, under which for so long the good people of
Germany have groaned, has become a thing intolerable. The arrogance, the
insolence, of the Junker officer, his aristocratic pretension, his
bearish manners, have made him a byword, not only in his own country but
all over Europe; and his belief in sheer militarism and Jingo
imperialism has made him a menace. The Kaiser has only made things
worse. Vain and flighty to a degree, and, like most vain people, rather
shallow, Wilhelm II has supposed himself to be a second and greater
Bismarck, destined by Providence to create the said Teutonic
world-empire. It is simply to fight these powers of evil that we are
out.

Of course, there is a certain amount of truth in this view; at the same
time, it is lamentably insufficient. The fact is that in the vast flux
of destiny which is involved in such a war as the present, and which no
argument can really adequately represent, we are fain to snatch at
_some_ neat phrase, however superficial, by way of explanation. And we
are compelled, moreover, to find a phrase which will put our own efforts
in an ideal light--otherwise we cannot go on fighting. No nation can
fight confessedly for a mean or base object. Every nation inscribes on
its banner _Freedom, Justice, Religion, Culture_ versus _Barbarism_, or
something of the kind, and in a sense redeems itself in so fighting. It
saves its soul even though bodily it may be conquered. And this is not
hypocrisy, but a psychological necessity, though each nation, of course,
accuses the other of hypocrisy.

We are fighting "to put down militarism and the dominance of a military
class," says the great B.P., and one can only hope that when the war is
over we shall remember and rivet into shape this great and good
purpose--not only with regard to foreign militarism, but also with
regard to our own. Certainly, whatever other or side views we may take
of the war, we are bound to see in it an illustration of the danger of
military class-rule. You cannot keep a 60-h.p. Daimler motor-car in your
shed for years and years and still deny yourself the pleasure of going
out on the public road with it--even though you know you are not a very
competent driver; and you cannot continue for half a century perfecting
your military and naval organization without in the end making the
temptation to become a political road-hog almost irresistible.

Still, accepting for the moment the popular explanation given above of
Germany's action as to some degree justified, we cannot help seeing how
superficial and unsatisfactory it is, because it at once raises the
question, which, indeed, is being asked in all directions, and not
satisfactorily answered: "How does it happen that so peace-loving,
sociable, and friendly a people as the great German mass-folk, as we
have hitherto known them, with their long scientific and literary
tradition, their love of music and philosophy, their lager beer and
tobacco, and their generally democratic habits, should have been led
into a situation like the present, whether by a clique of Junkers or by
a clique of militarist philosophers and politicians?" And the answer to
this is both interesting and important.

It resolves itself into two main causes: (1) the rise of the great
German commercial class; and (2) the political ignorance of the German
people.

It is obvious, I think, that a military aristocracy alone, or even with
the combined support of empire-building philosophers and a jack-boot
Kaiser, could not have hurried the solid German nation into so strange a
situation. In old days, and under an avowedly feudal order of society,
such a thing might well have happened. But to-day the source and seat of
power has passed from crowned heads and barons into another social
stratum. It is the financial and commercial classes in the modern States
who have the sway; and unless these classes desire it the military
cliques may plot for war in vain. Since 1870, and the unification of
Germany, the growth of her manufactures and her trade has been enormous;
her commercial prosperity has gone up by leaps and bounds; and this
extension of trade, especially of international trade, has led--as it
had already so conspicuously done in England--to the development of
corresponding ideals and habits of life among the population. The
modest, simple-living, middle-class households of fifty years ago have
largely disappeared, and in their place have sprung up, at any rate in
the larger towns, the very same commercial and parasitical classes, with
their Philistine luxury and fatuous ideals, which have been so
depressing and distressing a feature of _our_ social life during the
same period. Naturally, the desire of these classes has been for the
glorification of Germany, the establishment of an absolutely world-wide
commercial supremacy, and the ousting of England from her markets.

"Germany," said Peter Kropotkin[4] a year or two ago, "on entering a
striking period of juvenile activity, quickly succeeded in doubling and
trebling her industrial productivity, and soon increasing it tenfold;
and now the German middle classes covet new sources of enrichment in
the plains of Poland, in the prairies of Hungary, on the plateaux of
Africa, and especially around the railway line to Baghdad--in the rich
valleys of Asia Minor, which can provide German capitalists with a
labouring population ready to be exploited under one of the most
beautiful skies in the world. It may be so with Egypt some day.
Therefore it is ports for exports, and especially military ports, in the
Adriatic, the Persian Gulf, on the African coast in Beira, and also in
the Pacific, that these schemers of German colonial trade wish to
conquer. Their faithful servant, the German Empire, with its armies and
ironclads, is at their service for this purpose."

It is this class, then, which by backing both financially and morally
the military class has been chiefly responsible for bringing about the
war. Not that I mean, in saying so, that the commercial folk of Germany
have directly instigated its outbreak at the present moment and in the
present circumstances--for many, or most of them, must have seen how
dangerous it was likely to prove to their trade. But in respect of the
general policy which they have so long pursued they are responsible. One
cannot go on for years (and let England, too, remember this) preaching
militarism as a means of securing commercial advantage, and then refuse
to be answerable for the results to which such a policy may lead. The
Junker classes of Prussia and their Kaiser might be suffering from a bad
attack of swelled head; vanity and arrogance might be filling them with
dreams of world-empire; but there would have been no immediate European
war had not the vast trade-interests of Germany come into conflict, or
seemed to come into conflict, with the trade-interests of the
surrounding nations--had not the financial greed of the nation been
stirred, as well as its military vanity.

And talking of general trade and finance, one must not forget to include
the enormous powers exercised in the present day by individual
corporations and individual financiers who intrude their operations into
the sphere of politics. We saw _that_ in our own Boer War; and behind
the scenes in Germany to-day similar influences are at work. The
Deutsche Bank, with immense properties all over the world, and some
£85,000,000 sterling in its hands in deposits alone, initiated
financially the Baghdad Railway scheme. Its head, Herr Arthur von
Gwinner, the great financier, is a close adviser of the Kaiser. "The
railway is already nearly half built, and it represents a German
investment of between £16,000,000 and £18,000,000. Let this be thought
of when people imagine that Germany and Austria went to war with the
idea of avenging the murder of an Archduke.... All German trade would
suffer if the Baghdad Railway scheme were to fail."[5] Then there is
Herr August Thyssen--"King Thyssen"--who owns coalmines, rolling mills,
harbours, and docks throughout Germany, iron-ore mines in France,
warehouses in Russia, and _entrepôts_ in nearly every country from
Brazil and Argentina to India.[6] He has declared that German interests
in Asia Minor must be safeguarded at all costs. But Russia also has
large prospective commercial interests in Asia Minor. The moral is clear
and needs no enforcing. Such men as these--and many others, the
Rathenaus, Siemens, Krupps, Ballins, and Heinekens--exercise in Germany
an immense political influence, just as do our financial magnates at
home. They represent the peaks and summits of wide-spreading commercial
activities whose bases are rooted among the general public. Yet through
it all it must not be forgotten that they represent in each case (as I
shall explain more clearly presently) the interests of a _class_--the
commercial class--but not of the whole nation.

One must, then, modify the first conclusion, that the blame of the war
rests with the military class, by adding a second factor, namely, the
rise and influence of the commercial class. These two classes, acting
and reacting on each other, and pushing--though for different
reasons--in the same direction, are answerable, as far as Germany is
concerned, for dragging Europe into this trouble; and they must share
the blame.

If it is true, as already suggested, that Germany's action has only been
that of the spark that fires the magazine, still her part in the affair
affords such an extraordinarily illuminating text and illustration that
one may be excused for dwelling on it.

Here, in her case, we have the divisions of a nation's life set out in
well-marked fashion. We have a military clique headed by a personal and
sadly irresponsible ruler; we have a vulgar and much swollen commercial
class; and then, besides these two, we have a huge ant's nest of
professors and students, a large population of intelligent and
well-trained factory workers, and a vast residuum of peasants. Thus we
have at least five distinct classes, but of these the last three
have--till thirty or forty years ago--paid little or no attention to
political matters. The professors and students have had their noses
buried in their departmental science and _fach_ studies; the artisans
have been engrossed with their technical work, and have been only
gradually drifting away from their capitalist employers and into the
Socialist camp; and the peasants--as elsewhere over the world, absorbed
in their laborious and ever-necessary labours--have accepted their fate
and paid but little attention to what was going on over their heads.
Yet these three last-mentioned classes, forming the great bulk of the
nation, have been swept away, and suddenly at the last, into a huge
embroilment in which to begin with they had no interest or profit.

This may seem strange, but the process after all is quite simple, and to
study it in the case of Germany may throw helpful light on our own
affairs. However the blame may be apportioned between the Junker and
commercial classes, it is clear that, fired by the Bismarckian
programme, and greatly overstretching it, they played into each other's
hands. The former relied for the financing of its schemes on the support
of the commercials. The latter saw in the militarists a power which
might increase Germany's trade-supremacy. Vanity and greed are met
together, patriotism and profits have kissed each other. A Navy League
and an Army League and an Air League arose. Professors and teachers were
subsidized in the universities; the children were taught Pan-Germanism
in the schools; a new map of Europe was put before them. An enormous
literature grew up on the lines of Treitschke, Houston Chamberlain, and
Bernhardi, with novels and romances to illustrate side-issues, and the
Press playing martial music. The students and intellectuals began to be
infected; the small traders and shopkeepers were moved; and the
war-fever gradually spread through the nation. As to the artisans, they
may, as I have said, have largely belonged to the Socialist party--with
its poll of four million votes in the last election--and in the words of
Herr Haase in the Reichstag just before the war, they may have wished to
hold themselves apart from "this cursed Imperialist policy"; but when
the war actually arrived, and the fever, and the threat of Russia, and
the fury of conscription, they perforce had to give way and join in. How
on earth could they do otherwise? And the peasants--even if they escaped
the fever--could not escape the compulsion of authority nor the old
blind tradition of obedience. They do not know, even to-day, why they
are fighting; and they hardly know whom they are fighting, but in their
ancient resignation they accept the inevitable and shout "Deutschland
über Alles" with the rest. And so a whole nation is swept off its feet
by a small section of it, and the insolence of a class becomes, as in
Louvain and Rheim's, the scandal of the world.[7]

And the people bleed; yes, it is always the people who bleed. The trains
arrive at the hospital bases, hundreds, positively hundreds of them,
full of wounded. Shattered human forms lie in thousands on straw inside
the trucks and wagons, or sit painfully reclined in the passenger
compartments, their faces grimed, their clothes ragged, their toes
protruding from their boots. Some have been stretched on the battlefield
for forty-eight hours, or even more, tormented by frost at night,
covered with flies by day, without so much as a drink of water. And
those that have not already become a mere lifeless heap of rags have
been jolted in country carts to some railway-station, and there, or at
successive junctions, have been shunted on sidings for endless hours.
And now, with their wounds still slowly bleeding or oozing, they are
picked out by tender hands, and the most crying cases are roughly,
dressed before consigning to a hospital. And some faces are shattered,
hardly recognizable, and some have limbs torn away; and there are
internal wounds unspeakable, and countenances deadly pallid, and
moanings which cannot be stifled, and silences worse than moans.

Yes, the agony and bloody sweat of battlefields endured for the
domination or the ambition of a class is appalling. But in many cases,
though more dramatic and appealing to the imagination, one may doubt if
it is worse than the year-long and age-long agony of daily life endured
for the same reason.

Maeterlinck, in his eloquent and fiery letter to the _Daily Mail_ of
September 14th, maintained that the whole German nation is equally to
blame in this affair--that all classes are equally involved in it, with
no _degrees_ of guilt. We may excuse the warmth of personal feeling
which makes him say this, but we cannot accept the view. We are bound to
point out that it is only by some such analysis as the above, and
estimation of the method by which the delusions of one class may be
communicated to the others, that we can guard ourselves, too, from
falling into similar delusions.

I mentioned that besides the growth of the commercial class, a second
great cause of the war was the political ignorance of the German people.
And this is important. Fifty years ago, and before that, when Germany
was divided up into scores of small States and Duchies, the mass of its
people had no practical interest in politics. Such politics as existed,
as between one Duchy and another, were mere teacup politics. Read
Eckermann's _Conversations_, and see how small a part they played in
Goethe's mind. That may have been an advantage in one way. The brains of
the nation went into science, literature, music. And when, after 1870,
the unification of Germany came, and the political leadership passed
over to Prussia, the same state of affairs for a long time continued;
the professors continued their investigations in the matters of the
thyroid gland or the rock inscriptions in the Isle of Thera, but they
left the internal regulation of the State and its foreign policy
confidently in the hands of the Kaiser and the nominees of the great
and rising _bourgeoisie_, and themselves remained unobservant and
uninstructed in such matters. It was only when these latter powers
declared--as in the Emperor's pan-German proclamation of 1896--that a
Teutonic world-empire was about to be formed, and that the study of
_Welt-politik_ was the duty of every serious German, that the thinking
and reading portion of the population suddenly turned its attention to
this subject. An immense mass of political writings--pamphlets,
prophecies, military and economic treatises, romances of German
conquest, and the like--naturally many of them of the crudest sort, was
poured forth and eagerly accepted by the public, and a veritable Fool's
Paradise of German suprernacy arose. It is only in this way, by noting
the long-preceding ignorance of the German citizen in the matter of
politics, his absolute former non-interference in public affairs, and
the dazed state of his mind when he suddenly found himself on the
supposed pinnacle of world-power--that we can explain his easy
acceptance of such cheap and _ad hoc_ publications as those of
Bernhardi and Houston Chamberlain, and the fact that he was so easily
rushed into the false situation of the present war.[8] The absurd
_canards_ which at an early date gained currency, in Berlin--as that the
United States had swallowed Canada, that the Afghans in mass were
invading; India, that Ireland was plunged in civil war--point in the
same direction; and so do the barbarities of the Teutonic troops in the
matters of humanity and art. For though in all war and in the heat of
battle there are barbarities perpetrated, it argues a strange state of
the German national psychology that in this case a heartless severity
and destruction of the enemy's life and property should have been
preached beforehand, and quite deliberately, by professors and
militarists, and accepted, apparently, by the general public. It argues,
to say the least, a strange want of perception of the very unfavourable
impression which such a programme must inevitably excite in the mind of
the world at large.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is, no doubt, pleasant in its way for us British to draw this picture
of Germany, and to trace the causes which led the ruling powers there,
years ago, to make up their minds for war, because, of course, the
process in some degree exonerates us. But, as I have already said, I
have dwelt on Germany, not only because she affords such a good
illustration of what to avoid, but also because she affords so clear an
example of what is going on elsewhere in Europe--in England and France
and Italy, and among all the modern nations. We cannot blame Germany
without implicitly also blaming these.

What, indeed, shall we say of England? Germany has for years maintained
that with her own growing population and her growing trade she needs a
more extended seaboard in Europe, and coaling stations and colonies in
other regions of the globe, but that England, jealous of commercial
supremacy, has been determined to deny her these, and, if possible, to
crush her; that she (Germany) has lived in perpetual fear and panic;
and that if in this case she has been the first to strike, it has only
been because to wait England's opportunity would have been to court
defeat. Allowing for the exaggerations inseparable from opposed points
of view, is there not some justification for this plea? England, who
plunged into the Crimean War in order to _prevent_ Russia from obtaining
a seaboard and her natural commercial expansion, and who afterwards
joined with Russia in order to plunder Persia and to prevent Germany
from getting her railways along the Persian Gulf; who calmly
appropriated Egypt, with its valuable cottonlands and market; who, at
the behest of a group of capitalists and financiers, turned her great
military machine on a little nation of Boer farmers in South Africa;
who, it is said,[9] sold 300,000 tons of coal to Russia to aid her fleet
against Japan, and at the same time furnished Japan with gold at a high
rate of interest for use against Russia--what trust can be placed in
her? "England," says Bernhardi, "in spite of all her pretences of a
liberal and philanthropic policy, has never sought any other object
than personal advantage and the unscrupulous suppression of her rivals."
Let us hope that this "never" is _too_ harsh; let us at least say
"hardly ever"; but still, are we not compelled to admit that if the rise
of commercial ambition in Germany has figured as a danger to _us_, our
far greater commercial ambitions have not only figured as a danger to
Germany, but, in conjunction with our alliance with France and Russia,
her ancient foes, may well have led to a state of positive panic among
her people? And if, as the Allies would doubtless say, there was really
no need for any such panic, the situation was obviously sufficiently
grave to be easily made use of by a military class for its own ends, or
by an armaments ring or a clique of financiers for theirs. Indeed, it
would be interesting to know what enormous profits Kruppism (to use H.G.
Wells' expressive term) _has_ already made out of this world-madness.
Nor can it be denied that the commercial interest in England, if not
deliberately intending to provoke war with Germany, has not been at all
sorry to seize this opportunity of laying a rival Power low--if only in
order to snatch the said rival's trade. That, indeed, the daily Press
reveals only too clearly.

From all this the danger of class-domination emerges more and more into
relief. In Prussia the old Feudal caste remains--in a decadent state,
certainly, but perhaps for that very reason more arrogant, more vulgar,
and less conscious of any _noblesse oblige_ than even before. By itself,
however, and if unsupported by the commercial class, it would probably
have done little harm. In Britain the Feudal caste has ceased to be
exclusively military, and has become blended with the commercial class.
The British aristocracy now consists largely or chiefly of retired
grocers and brewers. Commercialism here has become more confessedly
dominant than in Germany, and whereas there the commercial class may
_support_ the military in its ambitions, here the commercial class
_uses_ the military as a matter of course and for its own ends. We have
become a Nation of Shopkeepers having our own revolvers and machine-guns
behind the counter.

And yet not really a Nation of Shopkeepers, but rather a nation ruled
by a shopkeeping _class_.

[This is the point in the text referred to by Footnote 25 below]

People sometimes talk as if commercial prosperity and the interests of
the commercial folk represented the life of the whole nation. That is a
way of speaking, and it illustrates certainly a common modern delusion.
But it is far from the truth. The trading and capitalist folk are only a
class, and they do _not_, properly speaking, represent the nation. They
do not represent the landowning and the farming interests, both of which
detest them; they do not represent the artisans and industrial workers,
who have expressly formed themselves into unions in order to fight them,
and who have only been able to maintain their rights by so doing; they
do not represent the labourers and peasants, who are ground under their
heel. It would take too long to go into the economics of this subject,
interesting though they are.[10] But a very brief survey of facts shows
us that wherever the capitalist and trading classes have triumphed--as
in England early last century, and until Socialistic legislation was
called in to check them--the condition of the mass of the people has by
no means improved, rather the contrary. Japan has developed a world
trade, and is on the look out for more, yet never before has there been
such distress among her mass-populations. Russia has been lately moving
in the same direction; her commercial interests are rapidly progressing,
but her peasantry is at a standstill, France and Italy have already
grown a fat _bourgeoisie_, but their workers remain in a limbo of
poverty and strikes. And in all these countries, including Germany,
Socialism has arisen as a protest against the commercial order--which
fact certainly does not look as if commercialism were a generally
acknowledged benefit.

No, commercial prosperity means only the prosperity of a class. Yet such
is the curious glamour that surrounds this, subject and makes a fetish
of statistics about "imports and exports," that nothing is more common
than for such prosperity to be taken to mean the prosperity of the
nation as a whole. The commercial people, having command of the Press,
and of the avenues and highways of public influence, do not find it at
all difficult to persuade the nation that _they_ are its
representatives, and that _their_ advantage is the advantage of all.
This illusion is only a part, I suppose, of a historical necessity,
which as the Feudal regime passes brings into prominence the Commercial
regime; but do not let us be deluded by it, nor forget that in
submitting to the latter we are being nose-led by a class just as much
as the Germans have been in submitting to the Prussian Junkers. Do not
let us, at the behest of either class, be so foolish as to set out in
vain pursuit of world-empire; and, above all, do not let us, in freeing
ourselves from military class-rule, fall under the domination of
financiers and commercial diplomats. Let us remember that wars for
world-markets are made for the benefit of the merchant _class_ and not
for the benefit of the mass-people, and that in this respect England has
been as much to blame as Germany or any other nation--nay, pretty
obviously more so.

What is clearly wanted--and indeed is the next stage of human evolution
in England and in all Western lands--is that the people should
emancipate themselves from class-domination, class-glamour, and learn
to act freely from their own initiative. I know it is difficult. It
means a spirit of independence, courage, willingness to make sacrifice.
It means education, alertness to guard against the insidious schemes of
wire-pullers and pressmen, as well as of militarists and commercials. It
means the perception that only through eternal vigilance can freedom be
maintained. Yet it is the only true Democracy; and the logic of its
arrival is assured to us by the historical necessity that progress in
all countries must pass through the preliminary stages of feudalism and
commercialism on its way to realize the true life of the mass-peoples.

To-day the uprising of Socialist ideals, of the power of Trade Unions,
and especially the formation of International Unions, show us that we
are on the verge of this third stage. We are shaping our way towards the
real Democracy, with the attainment of which wars--though they will not
cease from the world--will certainly become much rarer. The
international _entente_ already establishing itself among the manual
workers of all the European countries--and which has now become an
accepted principle of the Labour movement--is a guarantee and a promise
of a more peaceful era; and those who know the artisans and peasants of
this and other countries know well how little enmity they harbour in
their breasts against each other. Racial and religious wars will no
doubt for long continue; but wars to satisfy the ambitions of a military
clique or a personal ruler, or the ambitions of a commercial group, or
the schemes of financiers, or the engineering of the Press--wars from
these all too fruitful causes will, under a sensible Democracy, cease.
If Britain, during the last twenty years, had really favoured the cause
of the People and their international understanding, there would have
been no war now, for her espousal of the mass-peoples' cause would have
made her so strong that it would have been too risky for any Government
to attack her. But of course that could not have happened, for the
simple reason that Conservatism and Liberalism are not Democracy.
Conservatism is Feudalism, Liberalism is Commercialism, and Socialism
only is in its essence Democracy. It is no good scolding at Sir Edward
Grey for making friends with the Russian Government; for his only
alternative would have been to join the "International"--which he
certainly could not do, being essentially a creature of the commercial
regime. The "Balance of Power" and the _ententes_ and alliances of
Figure-head Governments _had_ to go on, till the day--which we hope is
at hand--when Figure-heads will be no more needed.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Reprinted by kind permission from the _English Review_ for December,
1914.

[3] As an example of this belief, read the manifesto of Professor
Eucken, who represents such a large section of German opinion, and note
the absolute sincerity of its tone--as well as its simplicity.

[4] _Wars and Capitalism_, by P. Kropotkin. (Freedom Press.)

[5] See _Nash's Magazine_ for October, 1914, article by "Diplomatist."

[6] Ibid.

[7] In order to realize how easy such a process is, we have only to
remember the steps by which the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 was
engineered.

[8] Of course we must remember that there has been all along and is now
in Germany a very large party, Socialist and other, which has _not_ been
thus carried away; but for the moment its mouth is closed and it cannot
make itself heard.

[9] See Kropotkin's _War and Capitalism_, p. 12.

[10] See note _infra_ on "Commercial Prosperity," p. 167.
(Chapter XI below)




IV


THE CASE AGAINST GERMANY;

_November_, 1914.

With every wish to do justice to Germany, to whose literature I feel I
owe such a debt, and among whose people I have so many personal friends;
allowing also the utmost for the general causes in Europe which have
been for years leading up towards war--and some of which I have
indicated already in the pages above--I still feel it is impossible not
to throw on her the _immediate_ blame for the present catastrophe.

However we distribute the indictment and the charges among the various
parties concerned, whether we accuse mainly the sway of Prussian
Militarism or the rise of German Commercialism, or the long tradition
and growth of a _Welt-politik_ philosophy, or the general political
ignorance which gave to these influences such rash and uncritical
acceptance; or whether we accuse the somewhat difficult and variable
personal equation of the Kaiser himself--the fact still remains that for
years and years this war has been by the German Government most
deliberately and systematically prepared for. The fact remains that
Britain--though for a long period she had foreseen danger and had on the
naval side slowly braced herself to meet it--was on the military side
caught at the last moment unprepared; that France was so little
intending war that a large portion of the nation was actually still
protesting against an increase in the size of the standing army; and
that Russia--whatever plans she may have had, or not had, in mind--was
confessedly at the same period two years or so behind in the
organization and completion of her military establishment.

Whether right or wrong, it can hardly be denied that the moment of the
precipitation of war was chosen and insisted on by Germany. After
Austria's monstrous and insulting dictation to Servia (23rd July), and
Servia's incredibly humble apology (25th), Austria was still not
allowed to accept the latter, and the conference proposed (26th July) by
Sir E. Grey--though accepted by France, Russia, and Italy--was refused
by Germany (27th). On the 28th Austria declared war on Servia. It was
perfectly clear to every one that Russia--after what had happened before
in 1908-9, with regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina--could not possibly
allow this insult to Servia to pass. Germany, therefore, by this move
forced Russia's hand; and at a moment when Russia was known or supposed
to be comparatively unprepared.[11] France had been involved in some
military scandals and was still debating as to the two years' instead of
three years' period for her normal military service. The German
Ambassador at Vienna had openly said that France was not in a condition
for facing a war. England was currently supposed in Germany to be
seriously hampered by domestic troubles at home--chiefly of course
among the Irish, but also amongst the Suffragettes(!) _and_ by
widespread disaffection in India. It was thought, therefore, that
England would certainly remain neutral--and I think we may fairly say
that the extent to which Germany counted on this expected neutrality is
evidenced by her disappointment and public rage when she found that she
was mistaken.

Germany's initiative in the matter is further evidenced by her _instant
readiness_ to attack. She was in Luxemburg within a few hours of the
declaration of war with Russia; and it was clearly her intention to
"rush" Paris and then turn back upon Russia.

It may be said that from her own point of view Germany was quite right
to take the initiative. If she sincerely believed that the _Entente_ was
plotting her downfall, she was justified in attacking instead of waiting
to be attacked. That may be so. It is the line to which General
Bernhardi again returns in his latest book (_Britain as Germany's
Vassal_, translated by J. Ellis Barker). But it does not alter the fact
that this was an immense responsibility to take, and that the immediate
onus of the war rests with Germany. If she under all the above
circumstances precipitated war, she can hardly be surprised if the
judgment of Europe (one may also say the world) is against her. If she
has played her cards so badly as to put herself entirely in the wrong,
she must naturally "dree her weird."

There remains the case of her treatment of Belgium. Britain
certainly--who has only lately assisted at the dismemberment of Persia,
and who is even now allowing Russia (in the face of Persian protests) to
cross neutral territory in the neighbourhood of Tabriz on her way to
attack Turkey, who has uttered, moreover, no word of protest against the
late Ukase (of mid-November) by which the independent rights of Finland
have been finally crushed--Britain, I say, need talk no cant about
Belgian neutrality. Britain, for her own absolute safety, has always
required and still requires Belgian neutrality to be respected. And that
by itself is a sufficient, and the most honest, reason. But in the eyes
of the world at large Germany's deliberate and determined sacrifice of
Belgium, simply because the latter stood in the way of the rapid
accomplishment of her warlike designs against France (and England), can
never be condoned--little Belgium who had never harmed or offended
Germany in any way. Add to this her harsh and brutish ill-treatment of
the Belgian civilian people, her ravage of their ancient buildings and
works of art, and her clearly expressed intention both in word and deed
to annex their territory by force should the fortunes of war favour
her--all these facts, which we may say are proven beyond the shadow of a
doubt, form a most serious indictment. They substantiate the charge that
Germany by acting throughout in this high-handed way has deeply violated
the natural laws of the Comity of Nations, which are the safeguards of
Civilization, and they confirm the rightful claim of Europe to sit in
judgment on her.

I say nothing at the moment about the charges of atrocities committed by
German troops, partly because such charges are always in warfare made by
each side against the other, and partly because their verification
should be the subject of a world-inquiry later on. It may be said,
however, that the Belgian and French Commissions of inquiry have
certainly presented material and evidence which _ought_ to be
investigated later--material which would hardly be credible of so humane
and cultured a people as the Germans, were it not for the fact, alluded
to already, of such severities having been deliberately recommended
beforehand by the philosophical writers, military and political, who
have during the last half-century moulded German public opinion.

England, as I say, is in no position herself to sit in judgment on
Germany and lecture her--much as she undoubtedly enjoys doing so.
England's long-standing policy of commercial greed, leading to political
grab in every part of the world; her infidelity in late years towards
small peoples, like the Boers and the Persians; her neglect of treaty
obligations and silence about them when they do not suit her; her most
dubious alliance with a military despotism like Russia: all render it
impossible for her to accuse Germany. The extraordinary thing is that in
the face of such prevarications as these, which are patent to the whole
world, Britain at any moment of serious crisis always comes forward
with the air of utmost sincerity and in an almost saintly pose as the
champion of political morality! How is it? The world laughs and talks of
_heuchlerei_ and _cant Britannique_. But I almost think (perhaps I
stretch a point in order to save the credit of my country) that the real
cause is not so much British hypocrisy as British _stupidity_--stupidity
which keeps our minds in watertight compartments and prevents us
perceiving how confused and inconsistent our own judgments are and how
insincere they appear to our neighbours. At any rate, whether the cause
is pure hypocrisy or pure stupidity, or whether a Scotch mixture of
these, it cannot be denied that its result is most irritating to
decent-minded people.

It is curious how a certain strain or vein of temperament, like that
just mentioned, will run through a nation's whole life, and colour its
actions in all departments, recognized and commented on by the whole
outside world, and yet remain unobserved by the nation itself.

Every one who has known the Germans at home--even years back--has been
conscious of a certain strain in the Teutonic character which has had a
like bearing in the German national life. How shall I describe it? It is
a certain want of tact, unperceptiveness--a kind of overbearing
simplicity of mind. Whether it be in the train or the hotel or the
private house, the German does not always seem to see the personal
situation. Whether you prefer to talk or remain silent, whether you wish
the window open or shut, whether you desire to partake of such and such
a dish or whether you don't--of such little matters he (or she) seems
unaware. Perhaps it is that the Teutonic mind is so vigorous that it
overrides you without being conscious of doing so, or that it is so
convinced of its own Tightness; or perhaps it is that the scientific
type of mind, depending always on formulae and statistics, necessarily
loses a certain finer quality. Anyhow, the fact remains that sociable,
kindly, _gemüthlich_ and so forth as the Germans are, there is a lack of
delicate touch and perception about them, of gentle manners, and a
certain insensitiveness to the opinion of those with whom they have to
deal. The strain may not be without its useful bearings in the
direction of strength and veracity, but it runs curiously through the
national life, and colours deeply, not only the domestic and social
relations of the people but their foreign politics also, and even their
war tactics and strategy.

I have spoken before of the political ignorance of the German
mass-people, which, dating from years back, caused them to be easily led
by their empire-building philosophers to a certain very dangerous
pinnacle of ambition, and there tempted. The same want of perception of
how their actions would be viewed by the world in general caused the
Government to act in the most egregiously high-handed manner in the
matter of the precipitation and declaration of the war itself, and
subsequently likewise in the ruthless invasion of Belgium and treatment
of her people and her cities. The want of discernment of what was going
on outside the sphere of her own psychology led her into fatal delusions
as to the attitude of England, of Ireland, of Belgium, Italy, India, and
so forth. It caused her generals to miscalculate and seriously
under-estimate the strategic forces opposed to them, both in France and
Russia; and in actual battles it has caused them to adopt, with
disastrous results, tactics which were foolishly inspired by contempt of
the enemy. Without insisting too much on the stories of
atrocities--which are still to a certain extent _sub judice_--it does
rather appear that even those excesses which the Commissions of inquiry
have reported (and which occurred, be it said, chiefly in the early days
of the campaign) were due to an intoxication, not merely of champagne
but of excited self-glorification and blindness to the human rights of
peoples at least as brave as themselves.[12]

However that last point may be, it is certainly curious to think
how--whether it be in the case of the German or the English or any other
people--a vein of temperament or character may decide a nation's fate or
colour its history quite as much as or even more than matters of wealth
and armament.

Personally one feels sorry for the great and admirable German
people--though I do not suppose it will matter to them whether one feels
sorry or not! And I look forward to the day when there will come a
better understanding between them and ourselves--better perhaps than has
ever been before--when we shall forgive them their sins against us, and
they will forgive us our sins against them, one of which certainly is
our meanness and shopkeeperiness in rejoicing in the war as a means of
"collaring their trade." I feel sure that the German mass-people will
wake up one day to the knowledge that they have been grossly betrayed at
home, not only by Prussian militarism but by pan-German commercial
philosophy and bunkum, as well as by their own inattention to, and
consequent ignorance of, political affairs. And I hope they will wake up
to the conviction that Destiny and the gods in this matter are after all
bringing them to a conclusion and a consummation far finer than anything
they have perhaps imagined for themselves. If, indeed, when the war is
over, they are fortunate enough to be compelled by the terms of
settlement to abandon their Army and Navy--or _all_ but the merest
residue of these--the consequences undoubtedly will be that, freed from
the frightful burdens which the upkeep of these entails, they will romp
away over the world through an era of unexampled prosperity and
influence. Their science, liberated, will give them the lead in many
arts and industries; their philosophy and literature, no longer crippled
by national vanities, will rise to the splendid world-level of former
days; their colonizing enterprise, unhindered by conscriptionist vetoes,
will carry them far and wide over the globe; and even their trade will
find that without fortified seaports and tariff walls it will, in these
days of universal movement and intercommunication, do fully as well as,
if not much better than, ever it did before. In that day, however, let
us hope that--the more communal conception of public life having
prevailed and come to its own--the success of Trade, among any nation or
people, will no longer mean the successful manufacture of a dominant and
vulgar class, but the real prosperity and welfare of the whole nation,
including all classes.

And in that day, possibly, the other nations, witnessing the
extraordinary prosperity and success of that one which has abandoned
armaments and Kruppisms, will--if they have a grain of sense left in
them--follow suit and, voluntarily divesting themselves too of their
ancient armour, give up the foolishness of national enmities and
jealousies, and adopt the attitude of humanity and peace, which alone
can be the worthy and sensible attitude for us little mortals, when we
shall have arrived at years of discretion upon the earth.

[Just after writing the above I received the following remarks in a
letter of a friend from South America, which may be worth reprinting. He
says: "In spite of the events of 1815 and 1870, French 'culture' is
supreme to-day over all South America. South America is a suburb of
Paris, and French culture has won its triumphs wholly irrespective of
the defeat of French arms. Therefore I incline to think that true German
culture in science and music will gain rather than lose by the
destruction of German arms. Not only will that nation cease to spend its
time writing dull military books, but other nations will be more likely
to appreciate what there is in German thought and culture when this is
no longer offered us at the point of the bayonet! German commerce in
South America has suffered rather than gained by talk of 'shining
armour.' And the poet, scientist and business man will gain rather than
lose if no longer connected with Potsdam."]

FOOTNOTES:

[11] It is said that Russia took some steps towards mobilization as
early as the 25th. If she did, that would seem quite natural under the
circumstances.

[12] There may possibly be found another explanation of these
excesses--namely, in the galling strictness of the Prussian military
regime. After years and years of monotonously regulated and official
lives, it may be that to both officers and men, in their different ways,
orgies of one kind or another came as an almost inevitable reaction.




V.


THE CASE FOR GERMANY

Having put in the last chapter some of the points which seem to throw
the immediate blame of the war on Germany, it would be only fair in the
present chapter to show how in the long run and looking to the general
European situation to-day as well as to the history of Germany in the
past, the war had become inevitable, and in a sense necessary, as a
stage in the evolution of European politics.

After the frightful devastation of Germany by the religious dissensions
of the early part of the seventeenth century and the Thirty Years War,
it fell to Frederick the Great, not only to lay a firm foundation for
the Prussian State but to elevate it definitely as a rival to Austria in
the leadership of Germany. Thenceforth Prussia grew in power and
influence, and became the nucleus of a new Germany. It would almost seem
that things could not well have been otherwise. Germany was seeking for
a new root from which to grow. Clerical and ultra-Catholic Austria was
of no use for this purpose. Bavaria was under the influence of France.
Lutheran Prussia attracted the best elements of the Teutonic mind. It
seems strange, perhaps, that the sandy wastes of the North-East, and its
rather arid, dour population, _should_ have become the centre of growth
for the new German nation, considering the latter's possession of its
own rich and vital characteristics, and its own fertile and beautiful
lands; but so it was. Perhaps the general German folk, with their
speculative, easygoing, almost sentimental tendencies, _needed_ this
hard nucleus of Prussianism--and its matter-of-fact, organizing type of
ability--to crystallize round.

The Napoleonic wars shattered the old order of society, and spread over
Europe the seeds of all sorts of new ideas, in the direction of
nationality, republicanism, and so forth. Fichte, stirred by Napoleon's
victory at Jena (Fichte's birthplace) and the consequent disaster to
his own people, wrote his _Addresses to the German Nation_, pleading
eloquently for a "national regeneration." He, like Vom Stein,
Treitschke, and many others in their time, came to Berlin and
established himself there as in the centre of a new national activity.
Vom Stein, about the same time, carried out the magnificent and
democratic work by which he established on Napoleonic lines (and much to
Napoleon's own chagrin) the outlines of a great and free and federated
Germany. Carl von Clausewitz did in the military world much what Stein
did in the civil world. He formulated the strategical methods and
teachings of Napoleon, and in his book _Vom Krieg_ (published 1832) not
only outlined a greater military Germany, but laid the basis, it has
been said, of all serious study in the art of war. Vom Stein and
Clausewitz died in the same year, 1831. In 1834 Heinrich von Treitschke
was born.

The three Hohenzollern kings, all named Frederick William, who reigned
from the death of Frederick the Great (1786) to the accession of William
I (1861) did not count much personally. The first and third of those
mentioned were decidedly weakminded, and the third towards the close of
his reign became insane. But the ideas already initiated in Germany
continued to expand. The Zollverein was established, the Teutonic
Federation became closer, and the lead of Prussia more decided. With the
joint efforts of William I and Bismarck the policy became more
governmental, more positive, and more deliberate--the policy of
consolidation and of aggrandisement; and with this definite programme in
view, Bismarck engineered the three wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870,
against Denmark, Austria, and France. They all three had the effect of
confirming the military power of Prussia. The first war gave her a much
desired increase of access to the North Sea; the second led to the
treaty with Austria, and ultimately to the formation of the Triple
Alliance; the third ended in the definite establishment of the Prussian
hegemony, the crowning of William I as Emperor, and the union and
consolidation of all the German States under him; but alas! it left a
seed of evil in the wresting of Alsace-Lorraine from France. For
France never forgave this. Bismarck and Moltke knew she would not
forgive, and were sorely tempted to engineer a _second_ war which should
utterly disable her; but this war never came off. The seed of Revenge,
however, remained with France, and the seed of Fear with Germany; and
these two things were destined to lead to a harvest of disaster.

In 1866 Treitschke came to Berlin. Though Saxon by birth, he became
ultra-Prussian in sympathy and temperament. Somewhat deaf, and by no
means yielding or facile in temper, he was not cut out for a political
career. But politics were his interest; his lectures on history were
successful at Leipzig and had still more scope at Berlin. He became the
strongest of German Unionists, and with a keen but somewhat narrow mind
took an absolute pleasure in attacking every movement or body of people
that seemed to him in any way to stand in the path of Germany's
advancement, or not to assist in her consolidation. Thus he poured out
his wrath in turn on Saxony (his own land) and on Hanover, on the Poles,
the Socialists, and the Catholics, and ultimately in his later years on
Britain.[13]

He conceived, following the lines of the Prussian tradition, that
Germany had a great military mission to fulfil. Her immense energy and
power, which had bulked so large in the early history of Europe, and
which had been so sadly scattered during the religious wars, was now to
come to its own again. She was to make for herself a great place in
Europe, and to expand in colonies over the world. It was a pleasing and
natural ambition, and the expression of it gave a great vogue and
popularity to Treitschke's lectures. The idea was enormously reinforced
by the cause which I have already mentioned and dwelt upon--the growth
of the commercial interest in Germany. From 1870 onwards this growth was
huge and phenomenal. In a comparatively short time a whole new social
class sprang up in the land, and a whole new public opinion. If
expansion from the point of view of Junker ambition had been desirable
before, the same from the point of view of the financial and trading
classes was doubly so now. If a military irruption into the politics of
the world was favoured before, it was clamoured for now when a powerful
class had arisen which not only, called the tune but could pay the
piper.

Thus by the combination of military and commercial interests and
entanglements the web of Destiny was woven and Germany was hurried along
a path which--though no definite war was yet in sight--was certain to
lead to war. The general military, programme of Treitschke, the
conviction that force and force alone could give his country her
rightful place in the world, was more and more cordially adopted. In a
sense this was a perfectly natural and logical programme, and amid the
surrounding European conditions excusable--as I shall point out
presently. But before long it became a weird enthusiasm, almost an
obsession. It was taken up over the land, and repeated in a thousand
books and on as many platforms. One of these propagandists was General
von Bernhardi, who entered in more detail into the technical and
strategical aspects of the programme. The rude and almost brutal
frankness of both writers may be admired; but the want of real depth and
breadth of view cannot be concealed and must be deplored. The arguments
in favour of force, of unscrupulousness, of terrorism are--especially in
Bernhardi[14]--casuistical to a degree. They are those of a man who is
determined to press his country into war at all costs, and who will use
any kind of logic as long as it will lead in his direction. The whole
movement--largely made possible by the political ignorance of the
mass-people, of which I have spoken in a former chapter--culminated in
an extraordinary national fever of ambition; and in the announcement of
schemes for the Germanization of the world, almost juvenile in the want
of experience and the sense of proportion which they display. It would
not be fair to take one writer as conclusive; but as a _specimen_ of the
kind of thing we may quote the following extract (given by Mr. H.A.L.
Fisher, the Oxford historian, in his able brochure _The War: Its Causes
and Issues_) from the writings of Bronsart von Schellendorf: "Do not let
us forget the civilizing task which the decrees of Providence have
assigned to us. Just as Prussia was destined to be the nucleus of
Germany, so the regenerated Germany shall be the nucleus of a future
Empire of the West. And in order that no one shall be left in doubt, we
proclaim from henceforth that our continental nation has a right to the
sea, not only to the North Sea, but to the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
Hence we intend to absorb one after another all the provinces which
neighbour on Prussia. We will successively annex Denmark, Holland,
Belgium, Northern Switzerland, then Trieste and Venice, finally Northern
France from the Sambre to the Loire. This programme we fearlessly
pronounce. It is not the work of a madman. The Empire we intend to found
will be no Utopia. We have ready to our hands the means of founding it,
and no coalition in the world can stop us."

Bronsart von Schellendorf (1832-91) was one of the Prussian Generals who
negotiated the surrender of the French at Sedan. He became Chief of the
Staff, and War Minister (1883-9), and wrote on Tactics, etc. His above
utterance, therefore, cannot be neglected as that of an irresponsible
person.

There is, as I have already had occasion to say, a certain easygoing
absurdity in the habit we commonly have of talking of nations
--"Germany," "France," "England," and so forth--as if they were
simple and plainly responsible persons or individuals, when all the time
we know perfectly well that they are more like huge whirlpools of
humanity caused by the impact and collision of countless and often
opposing currents flowing together from various directions. Yet there is
this point of incontestable similarity between nations and individual
persons, that both occasionally go mad! If Germany was afflicted by a
kind of madness or divine _dementia_ previous to the present war,
Britain can by no means throw that in her teeth, for Britain certainly
went mad over Mafeking; and it was sheer madness that in 1870 threw the
people of France and Napoleon III--utterly unready for war as they
were, and over a most trifling quarrel--into the arms of Bismarck for
the fulfilment of his schemes.

But that some sort of madness did, in consequence of the above-mentioned
circumstances, seize the German people shortly before the outbreak of
the present war we can hardly doubt, though (remembering the proverb) we
must not put the blame for that on her, but on the gods. It was a heady
intoxication, caused largely, I believe, by that era of unexampled
commercial prosperity following upon a period of great political and
military expansion, and confirmed by the direct incitement of the
military and political teachers I have mentioned. All these things,
acting on a people unskilled in politics--of whom Bernhardi himself says
"We are a non-political people"[15]--had their natural effect. But it
seems part of the irony of fate that at this very juncture Germany
should have fallen under the influence of a man who of all the world was
perhaps least fitted to guide her steadily through a difficult crisis.
"We all know the Kaiser," says Mr. Fisher, "the most amazing and amusing
figure on the great stage of politics. The outlines of his character are
familiar to everybody, for his whole life is spent in the full glare of
publicity. We know his impulsiveness, his naïveté, his heady fits of
wild passion, his spacious curiosity and quick grasp of detail, his
portentous lack of humour and delicacy, his childish vanity and
domineering will. A character so romantic, spontaneous, and robust must
always be a favourite with the British people, who, were his lunacies
less formidable, would regard him as the most delectable burlesque of
the age."

However the British generally may regard him, it is certain that the
German nation accepted him as their acclaimed leader. Clever,
good-looking, versatile, imperious, fond of the romantic pose, Wilhelm
was exactly the hero in shining armour that would capture the enthusiasm
of this innocent people. They idolized him. And it is possible that
their quick response confirmed him in his rather generous estimate of
his own capabilities. He dismissed Bismarck and became his own Foreign
Secretary, and entered upon a perilous career as Imperial politician,
under the aegis of God and the great tradition of the Hohenzollerns, a
career made all the more perilous by his constant change of rôle and his
real uncertainty as to his own mind. His "seven thousand speeches and
three hundred uniforms" were only the numerous and really emblematic
disguises of a character unable to concentrate persistently and
effectively on any one settled object. With a kind of theatrical
sincerity he made successive public appearances as War Lord or William
the Peaceful, as Artist, Poet, Architect, Biblical Critic, Preacher,
Commercial Magnate, Generalissimo of land forces and Creator of a World
Navy; and with Whitman he might well have said, "I can resist anything
better than my own diversity."

If Wilhelm II was popular (as he was) among his own mass-people, it may
well be guessed that he was a perfect terror to his own political
advisers and generals. Undoubtedly a large share of responsibility for
the failure of German diplomacy before the war, and of German strategy
during the war, must be laid to the account of his ever-changing plans
and ill-judged interferences. It is difficult, indeed, to imagine a
character more dangerous as a great nation's leader. But out of dangers
great things do often arise. A kind of fatality, as I have said, has
enveloped the whole situation, and still leads on to new and pregnant
evolutions for the German people and for the whole world. Germany will
in the end be justified, but in a way far different from what she
imagined.

Up to the period of Germany's rising commercial prosperity Germany and
England had been on fairly friendly terms. There was no particular cause
of difference between them. But when Commercial and Colonial expansion
became a definite and avowed object of the former's policy, she found,
whereso she might look, that Britain was there, in the way--"everywhere
British colonies, British coaling stations, and floating over a fifth of
the globe the British flag." Could anything be more exasperating? And
these "absent-minded beggars" the English, without any forethought or
science or design, without Prussian organization or Prussian bureaucracy
and statecraft, had simply walked into this huge inheritance without
knowing what they were doing! It certainly was most provoking. But what
England had done why should not Germany do--and do it indeed much
better, with due science and method? Britain had shown no scruple in
appropriating a fifth part of the globe, and dealing summarily with her
opponents, whether savage or civilized; why should Germany show scruple?

And it must be confessed that here Germany had a very good case.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And if Germany, approving
Britain's example, could only show herself strong enough to imitate it
in actual fact, Britain at least could not blame her. Besides, in her
internal industrial development Germany was already showing her equality
with England. In her iron and steel manufactures, her agricultural
machines, her cutlery, her armament works, her glass works, her aniline
dyes, her toys, and her production of a thousand and one articles (like
lamps) of household use, she was showing a splendid record--better in
some ways than England. For while England was losing ground, Germany was
gaining all the time. England was becoming degenerate and lacking in
enterprise. The Zeiss glassworks at Jena have now become the centre of
the optical-glass industry of the world. Carl Zeiss, the founder, tried
hard at one time to get the English glass-makers to turn out a special
glass for his purpose, with very high refractive index. They would not
trouble about it. Zeiss consequently was forced to take the matter up
himself, succeeded at last in getting such glass made in Germany, and
"collared" the trade. The same happened in other departments.

A certain amount of friction arose. The Germans at one time, knowing the
English reputation for cutlery, marked their knives and razors as "made
in Scheffield." The English retaliated in what seemed an insulting way,
by marking the Fatherland's goods as "made in Germany." With Germany's
success, commercial jealousy between the two nations (founded on the
utterly mistaken but popular notion that the financial prosperity of
the country you trade with is inimical to your own prosperity) began to
increase. On the German side it was somewhat bitter. On the English
side, though not so bitter, it was aggravated by the really shameful
ignorance prevailing in this country with regard to things German, and
the almost entire neglect of the German tongue in our schools and
universities and among our literary folk. As an expression (though one
hopes exceptional) of commercial jealousy on our side I may quote a
passage from a letter from a business friend of mine in Lancashire. He
says: "I remember about a _fortnight before_ the war broke out with
Germany having a conversation with a business man in Manchester, and he
said to me that we most certainly ought to join in with the other
nations and sweep the Germans off the face of the earth; I asked him
_why_, and his only answer was, '_Look at the figures of Germany's
exports; they are almost as high as ours_!' All he had against them was
their enterprise--commercial jealousy."

On the other hand, the head of a large warehouse told me only a few days
later that when travelling in Germany for his firm some fifteen years
ago he had a conversation with a German, in the course of which he (the
Englishman) said: "I find your people so obliging and friendly that I
think surely whatever little differences there are between us as nations
will be dispelled by closer intercourse, and so all danger of war will
pass away." "No," replied the German, "you are quite mistaken. You and I
are friendly; but that is only as individuals. As nations we shall never
rest till we have war. The English nation may well be contented because
they have already _got_ all the good things of the Earth--their trade,
their ports, their colonies; but Germany will not allow this to go on
for ever. She will fight for her rightful position in the world; she
will challenge England's mercantile supremacy. She will have to do so,
and she will not fail."[16]

Thus the plot thickened; the entanglement increased. The Boer War roused
ill-feeling between England and Germany. The German Navy Bill followed
in 1900, and the Kaiser announced his intention of creating a sea-power
the equal of any in the world. Britain of course replied with her Navy
Bills; and the two countries were committed to a mad race of armaments.
The whole of Europe stood by anxious. Fear and Greed, the two meanest of
human passions, ruled everywhere. Fear of a militarist Germany began to
loom large upon the more pacific States of Europe. On the other hand,
the fatality of Alsace-Lorraine loomed in Germany, full of forebodings
of revenge. France had found a friend in Russia--a sinister alliance.
Britain, convinced that trouble was at hand, came to an understanding
with France in 1904 and with Russia in 1907. The Triple Entente was born
as a set-off against the Triple Alliance. The Agadir incident in 1911
betrayed the purely commercial nature of the designs of the four Powers
concerned--France, Spain, England, and Germany--and a war over the
corpse of Morocco was only narrowly avoided. Germany felt quite
naturally that she was the victim of a plot, and thenceforth was
alternately convulsed by mad Ambition and haunted by a lurking Terror.

And now we come to the last act of the great drama. So far the
relations of Germany with Russia had not been strained. If there was any
fear of Russia, it was quite in the background. The Junkers--themselves
half Slavs--had supplied a large number of the Russian officials, men
like Plehve and Klingenberg; the Russian bureaucracy was founded on and
followed the methods of the German. The Japanese War called Russia's
attention away to another part of the world, and at the same time
exposed her weakness. But if Germany was not troubled about Russia, a
different sentiment was growing up in Russia itself. The people there
were beginning to hate the official German influence and its hard
atmosphere of militarism, so foreign to the Russian mind. They were
looking more and more to France. Bismarck had made a great mistake in
the Treaty of Berlin--mistake which he afterwards fully recognized and
regretted. He had used the treaty to damage and weaken Russia, and had
so thrown Russia into the arms of France.

A strange Nemesis was preparing. The programme of German
expansion--natural enough in itself, but engineered by Prussia during
all this long period with that kind of blind haughtiness and overbearing
assurance which indeed is a "tempting of Providence"--had so far not
concerned itself much about Muscovite policy; but now there arose a
sudden fear of danger in that quarter. Hitherto the main German
"objective" had undoubtedly been England and France, Belgium and
Holland--the westward movement towards the Atlantic and the great world.
But now all unexpectedly, or at any rate with dramatic swiftness, Russia
appeared on the scenes, and there was a _volte face_ towards the East.
The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 broke out. Whatever simmerings of
hostility there may have been between Germany and Russia before, the
relations of the two now became seriously strained. The Balkan League,
formed under Russian influence, was nominally directed against Turkey;
but it was also a threat to Austria. It provided a powerful backing to
the Servian agitation, it was a step towards the dissolution of Austria,
and it decisively closed the door on Germany's ambition to reach
Salonika and to obtain a direct connection with the Baghdad Railway.
Germany and Austria all at once found themselves isolated in the midst
of Europe, with Russia, Servia, France, and England hostile on every
side. It was indeed a tragic situation, and all the more so when viewed
as the sorry outcome and culmination of a hundred years of Prussian
diplomacy and statecraft.

Why under these circumstances Austria (with Germany of course behind
her) should have dictated most insulting terms to Servia, and then
refused to accept Servia's most humble apology, is difficult to
understand. The only natural explanation is that the Germanic Powers on
the whole thought it best, even as matters stood, to precipitate war;
that notwithstanding all the complications, they thought that the
long-prepared-for hour had come. The German White Book puts the matter
as a mere _necessity_ of self-defence. "Had the Servians been allowed,
with the help of Russia and France, to endanger the integrity of the
neighbouring Monarchy much longer, the consequence must have been the
gradual disruption of Austria and the subjection of the whole Slav
world to the Russian sceptre, with the result that the position of the
German race in Central Europe would have become untenable"; but it is
obvious that this plea is itself untenable, since it makes a quite
distant and problematic danger the excuse for a sudden and insulting
blow--for a blow, in fact, almost certain to precipitate the danger! How
the matter was decided in Berlin we cannot at present tell, or what the
motives exactly were. It seems rather probable that the Kaiser threw his
weight on the side of peace. The German Executive at any rate saw that
the great war they had so long contemplated and so long prepared for was
close upon them--only in an unexpected form, hugely complicated and
threatening. They must have realized the great danger of the situation,
but they very likely may have thought that by another piece of bluff
similar to that of 1908-9 they might intimidate Russia a second time;
and they believed that Russia was behindhand in her military
preparations. They also, it appears, thought that England would not
fight, being too much preoccupied with Ireland, India, and other
troubles. And so it may have seemed that Now was the psychological
moment.

Austria opened with war on Servia (28th of July), and the next day
Russia declared a considerable though not complete mobilization. From
that moment a general conflagration was practically inevitable. The news
of Russia's warlike movement caused a perfect panic in Berlin. The
tension of feeling swung round completely for the time being from enmity
against England and France to fear of Russia. The final mobilization of
the Russian troops (31st of July) was followed by the telegrams between
the Kaiser and the Tsar, and by the formal mobilization (really already
complete) of the German Army and Navy on the 1st of August. War was
declared at Berlin on the 1st of August, and the same or next day the
German forces entered Luxemburg. On August 4th they entered Belgium, and
war was declared by England against Germany.

       *       *       *       *       *

Looking back at the history of the whole affair, one seems to see, as I
have said, a kind of fatality about it. The great power and vigour of
the German peoples, shown by their early history in Europe, had been
broken up by the religious and other dissensions of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. It fell to Prussia to become the centre of
organization for a new Germany. The rich human and social material of
the German States--their literary, artistic, and scientific culture,
their philosophy, their learning--clustered curiously enough round the
hard and military nucleus of the North. It was perhaps their instinct
and, for the time, their salvation to do so. The new Germany, hemmed in
on all sides by foreign Powers, could only see her way to reasonable
expansion and recognition, and a field for her latent activities, by the
use of force, military force. A long succession of political
philosophers drilled this into her. She embarked in small wars and
always with success. She became a political unity and a Great Power in
Europe. And then came her commercial triumph. Riches beyond all
expectation flowed in; and a mercantile class arose in her midst whose
ideals of life were of a corresponding character--the ideals of the
wealthy shopkeeper. What wonder that, feeling her power, feeling herself
more than ever baulked of her rights, she cast her eyes abroad, and
coveted the imperial and commercial supremacy of the world?

In this she had the example of Britain before her. Britain had laid land
to land and market to market over the globe, and showed no particular
scruple in the matter. Why should not Germany do the same? It was true
that Britain always carried the Bible with her--but this was mere
British cant. Britain carried the Bible in her left hand, but in her
right a sword; and when she used the latter she always let the former
drop. Germany could do likewise--but without that odious pretence of
morality, and those crocodile tears over the unfortunates whom she
devoured. It was only a question of Might and Organization and Armament.

So far Germany seems to have had a perfectly good case; and though we in
England might not like her ambitions, we could not reasonably find fault
with motives so perfectly similar to our own. We might, indeed, make a
grievance of the frank brutality displayed in her methods and the
defence of them; but then, she might with equal right object to our
everlasting pretence of "morality," and our concealment of mercenary
and imperial aims under the cloak of virtue and innocence. One really
must confess that it is difficult to say which is the worse.

But if the crystallization of Germany round the Prussian nucleus was for
the time the source of Germany's success, it is a question whether it is
not even now becoming something quite different, and the likely cause of
a serious downfall. It would seem hardly probable that the amalgamation
between elements so utterly dissimilar can permanently endure. The
kindly, studious, sociable, rather naïvely innocent German mass-people
dragged by the scruff of the neck into the arena of militarism and
world-politics, may for a time have had their heads turned by the
exalted position in which they found themselves; but it is not likely
that they will continue for long to enjoy the situation. With no great
instinct for politics, nor any marked gift of tact and discernment,
unsuccessful as a rule as colonists,[17] and with no understanding of
how to govern--except on the Prussian lines, which are every day
becoming more obsolete and less adapted to the modern world--the rôle
which their empire-building philosophers set out for them is one which
they are eminently unfitted to fulfil. It is sad, but we cannot blame
them for the defect. They blame the world in general for siding against
them in this affair, but do not see that in most cases it has been their
own want of perception which has left them on the wrong side of the
hedge.

Bismarck, with his "Blood and Iron" policy, made a huge blunder in not
perceiving that in the modern world spiritual forces are arising which
must for ever discredit the same. He emphasized the blunder by wresting
Alsace-Lorraine from France, and again by crippling Russia in the treaty
of 1878--thus making enemies where generosity might have brought him
friends. The German Executive in July of last year (1914) showed
extraordinary want of tact in not seeing that Russia, rebuffed in 1908
over Bosnia and Herzegovina, would never put up with a _second_ insult
of the same kind over Servia. The same Government was strangely unable
to perceive that whatever it might tactically gain by the invasion and
devastation of Belgium would be more than lost by the moral effect of
such action on the whole world; and notwithstanding its army of spies,
it had not the sense to see that England, whether morally bound to or
not, was certain, at all costs, to fight in defence of Belgium's
neutrality. So true it is that without the understanding which comes
from the heart, all the paraphernalia of science and learning and the
material results of organization and discipline are of little good.

But however we choose to apportion the blame or at least the
responsibility for the situation among the various Governments
concerned, the main point and the main lesson of it all is to see that
any such apportionment does not much matter! As long as our Governments
are constructed as they are--that is, on the principle of representing,
not the real masses of their respective peoples, but the interests of
certain classes, especially the commercial, financial, and military
classes--so long will such wars be inevitable. The real blame rests,
not with the particular Foreign policy of this or that country but with
the fact that Europe, already rising through her mass-peoples into a far
finer and more human and spiritual life than of old, still lies bound in
the chains of an almost Feudal social order.

When the great German mass-peoples find this out, when they discover the
little rift in the lute which now separates their real quality from the
false standards of their own dominant military and commercial folk, then
their true rôle in the world will begin, and a glorious rôle it will be.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] "A German," he said, "could not live long in the atmosphere of
England--an atmosphere of sham, prudery, conventionality, and
hollowness"! See article on "Treitschke," by W.H. Dawson, in the
_Nineteenth Century_ for January 1915.

[14] The influence, however, of Bernhardi in his own country has been
somewhat exaggerated in England.

[15] It seems that the same remark is made about the Germans in the
U.S.A., that they take little interest in politics there.

[16] This attitude is exactly corroborated by Herr Maximilian Harden's
manifesto, originally published in _Die Zukunft,_ and lately reprinted
in the _New York Times_.

[17] Though this is only, perhaps, true of their State colonies. In
their individual and missionary colonizing groups, and as pioneer
settlers, they seem to have succeeded well.




VI


THE HEALING OF, NATIONS[18]

It is quite possible that the little rift within the lute, alluded to in
the concluding paragraph of last chapter, may widen so far as to cause
before long great internal changes and reconstructions in Germany
herself; but short of that happening, it would seem that there is no
alternative for the Allies but to continue the war until her Militarism
can be put out of court, and that for long years to come. There is no
alternative, because she has revealed her hand too clearly as a
menace--if she should prevail--of barbarous force to the whole world. It
is this menace which has roused practically the whole world against her.
And there is this amount of good in the situation, namely, that while
with the victory of Germany a German "terror" might be established
through the world, with the victory of the Allies neither England, nor
France, nor Russia, nor little Belgium, nor any other country, could
claim a final credit and supremacy. With the latter victory we shall be
freed from the nightmare claim of any one nation's world-empire.

But in order to substantiate this result England must also abdicate her
claim. She must abdicate her mere crass insistence on commercial
supremacy. The "Nation of Shopkeepers" theory, which has in the past
made her the hated of other nations, which has created within her
borders a vulgar and unpleasant class--the repository of much arrogant
wealth--must cease to be the standard of her life. I have before me at
this moment a manifesto of "The British Empire League," patronized by
royalty and the dukes, and of which Lord Rothschild is treasurer. The
constitution of the League was framed in 1895; and I note with regret
that positively the five "principal objects of the League" mentioned
therein have solely to do with the extension and facilitation of
Britain's trade, and the "co-operation of the military and naval forces
of the Empire with a special view to the due protection of the trade
routes." Not a word is said _in the whole manifesto_ about the human and
social responsibilities of this vast Empire; not a word about the
guardianship and nurture of native races, their guidance and assistance
among the pitfalls of civilization; not a word about the principles of
honour and just dealing with regard to our civilized neighbour-nations
in Europe and elsewhere; not a word about the political freedom and
welfare of all classes at home. One rubs one's eyes, and looks at the
document again; but it is so. Its one inspiration is--Trade. Seeing
that, I confess to a sinking of the heart. Can we blame Germany for
struggling at all costs to enlarge her borders, when _that_ is what the
British Empire means?

Until we rise, as a nation, to a conception of what we mean by our
national life, finer and grander than a mere counting of trade-returns,
what can we expect save failure and ill-success?

Possibly in the conviction that she is fighting for a worthy object (the
ending of militarism), and in the determination (if sincerely carried
out) of once more playing her part in the world as the protector of
small nations, Britain may find her salvation, and a cause which will
save her soul. It is certainly encouraging to find that there is a
growing feeling in favour of the recognition and rehabilitation of the
small peoples of the world. If it is true that Britain by her grasping
Imperial Commercialism in the past (and let us hope that period _is_
past) has roused jealousy and hatred among the other nations, equally is
it true that Germany to-day, by her dreams of world-conquest, has been
rousing hatred and fear. But the day has gone by of world-empires
founded on the lust of conquest, whether that conquest be military or
commercial. The modern peoples surely are growing out of dreams so
childish as that. The world-empire of Goethe and Beethoven is even now
far more extensive, far more powerful, than that which Wilhelm II and
his Junkers are seeking to encompass. There is something common,
unworthy, in the effort of domination; and while the Great Powers have
thus vulgarized themselves, it is the little countries who have gone
forward in the path of progress. "In modern Europe what do we not owe to
little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom six hundred years ago,
and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic monarchies
held the rest of the European Continent? And what to free Holland, with
her great men of learning and her painters surpassing those of all other
countries save Italy? So the small Scandinavian nations have given to
the world famous men of science, from Linnaeus downwards, poets like
Tegner and Björnson, scholars like Madvig, dauntless explorers like
Fridthiof Nansen. England had, in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and
Milton, a population little larger than that of Bulgaria to-day. The
United States, in the days of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and
Hamilton and Marshall, counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or
Greece."[19]

In all their internal politics and social advancement, Switzerland,
Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Finland (until the paw of the Bear
was on her) and Belgium (till the claw of the Spread-Eagle) have been
well to the fore. It is they who have carried on the banner of idealism
which Germany herself uplifted when she was a small people or a group of
small peoples. It is they who have really had prosperous, healthy,
independent, and alert populations. How much more interesting, we may
say, would Europe be under the variety of such a regime than under the
monotonous bureaucracy and officialism of any Great Power! And to some
such scheme we must adhere. It would mean, of course, the alliance of
all the States of Western Europe, large and small (and including both a
remodelled Germany and a largely remodelled Austria) in one great
Federation--whose purpose would be partly to unite and preserve Europe
against any common foe, from the East or elsewhere, and partly to
regulate any overweening ambition of a member of the Federation, such as
might easily become a menace to the other members. A secondary but most
important result of the formation of such a United States of Europe
would be that while each State would probably preserve a small military
establishment of its own, the enormous and fatal incubus of the present
armaments system would be rendered unnecessary, and so at last the
threat of national bankruptcy and ruin, which has of late pursued the
nations Like an evil dream, might pass away. But in that matter of
finance it cannot be disguised that a terrible period still awaits the
European peoples. Already the moneylenders sitting on their chests form
a veritable nightmare; but with fresh debts by the thousand million
sterling being contracted, there is great danger that the mass-peoples
beneath will be worse paralysed and broken even than they are
now--unless, indeed, with a great effort they rouse themselves and throw
off the evil burden.

That the world is waking up to a recognition of _racial_ rights--that
is, the right of each race to have as far as possible its own
Government, instead of being lorded over by an alien race--is a good
sign; and a European settlement along that line must be pressed for. At
last, after centuries of discomfort, we at home are finding our solution
of the Irish question in this very obvious way; and it may be that
Europe, tired of war, may finally have the sense to adopt the same
principle. Of course, there are cases where populations are so mixed,
as, for instance, the Czechs and Slovaks and Germans in Bohemia and
Moravia, or where small colonies of one race are so embedded in the
midst of another race, as are the Germans among the Roumanians of
Transylvania, that this solution may be difficult. That is no reason,
however, why the general principle should not be applied. It _must_,
indeed, be applied if Europe is not to return to barbarism.

And it interests us--having regard to what I have said about _class_
rule being so fruitful a cause of war--to remember that the rule of one
race by another always does mean class rule. The alien conquerors who
descend upon a country become the military and landlord caste there.
Thus the Norman barons in England, the English squires in Ireland, the
Magyars in Hungary, the German barons in East Prussia and the Baltic
provinces, and so forth. They make their profit and maintain themselves
out of the labour and the taxation of the subject peoples.

In the earlier forms of social life, when men lived in tribes, a rude
equality and democracy prevailed; there was nothing that could well be
called class-government; there was simply custom and the leadership of
the elders of the tribe. Then with the oncoming of what we call
civilization, and the growth of the sense of property, differences
arose--accumulations of wealth and power by individuals, enslavements of
tribes by other tribes; and classes sprang up, and class-government, and
so the material of endless suffering and oppression and hatred and
warfare. I have already explained (in the Introduction) that Class in
itself as the mere formation within a nation of groups of similar
occupation and activity--working harmoniously with each other and with
the nation--is a perfectly natural and healthy phenomenon; it is only
when it means groups pursuing their own interests counter to each other
and to the nation that it becomes diseased. There will come a time when
the class-element in this latter sense will be ejected from society, and
society will return again to its democratic form and structure. There
will be no want, in that time, of variety of occupation and talent, or
of differentiation in the social organism; quite the contrary; but
simply there will be no predatory or parasitical groups within such
organism, whose, interests will run counter to the whole, and which will
act (as such classes act now) as foci and seedbeds of disease and strife
within the whole. With a return to the recognition of racial rights and
autonomies over the world, it is clear that one great cause of strife
will be removed, and we shall be one step nearer to the ending of the
preposterous absurdity of war.

And talking about the difficulty of sorting out mixed populations, or of
dealing with small colonies of one race embedded in the midst of another
race, it is evident that once you get rid of autocratic or military or
class-government of any kind, and return to democratic forms, this
difficulty will be much reduced or disappear. Small democratic communes
are perfectly simple to form in groups of any magnitude or minuteness
which may be desirable; and such groups would easily federate or ally
themselves with surrounding democracies of alien race, whereas if
lorded over by alien conquerors they would be in a state of chronic
rebellion. Of such democratic alliance and federation of peoples of
totally different race, Switzerland supplies a well-recognized and
far-acclaimed example.

       *       *       *       *       *

That in the future there will be an outcry in favour of Conscription
made by certain parties in Britain goes without saying; but that must be
persistently opposed. The nation says it is fighting to put down
Militarism. Why, then, make compulsory militarism foundational in our
national life? To abolish militarism _by_ militarism is like "putting
down Drink" by swallowing it! The whole lesson of this war is against
conscription. Germany could never have "imposed herself" on Europe
without it. And yet her soldiers, brave as they naturally are, and
skilfully as they have fought, have not done themselves justice. How
could they under such conditions--forced into battle by their officers,
flung in heaps on the enemy's guns? The voluntary response in Britain to
the call to arms has been inspiriting; and if voluntaryism means
momentary delay in a crisis, still it means success in the end. No
troops have fought more finely than the British. Said Surgeon-General
Evatt, speaking in London in October--and General Evatt's word in such a
matter ought to carry weight: "After long experience in studying
Russian, German, Bavarian, Saxon, French, Spanish, and American fighting
units, my verdict is unhesitatingly in favour of the British.... What
has occurred lately has been a splendid triumph of citizenship, because
people were allowed their proper liberty and the consciousness of
freely, sharing in a great Empire."

Besides it must always be remembered that conscription gives a
Government power to initiate an iniquitous war, whereas voluntaryism
keeps the national life clean and healthy. A free people will not fight
for the trumped-up schemes and selfish machinations of a class--not,
indeed, unless they are grossly deceived by, Press and Class plots.
Anyhow, to force men to fight in causes which they do not approve, to
compel them to adopt a military career when their temperaments are
utterly unsuited to such a thing, or when their consciences or their
religion forbid them--these things are both foolish and wicked.

If the nation wants soldiers it must pay for them. England, for example,
is rolling in wealth; and it is simply a scandal that the wealthy
classes should sit at home in comfort and security and pay to the man in
the trenches--who is risking his life at every moment, and often living
in such exhaustion and misery as actually to wish for the bullet which
will _end_ his life--no more than the minimum wage of an ordinary
day-labourer; and that they should begrudge every penny paid to his
dependents--whether he be living or dead--or to himself when he returns,
a lifelong cripple, to his home. To starve and stint your own soldiers,
to discourage recruiting, and then to make the consequent failure of men
to come forward into an excuse for conscription is the meanest of
policies. As a matter of fact, the circumstances of the present war show
that with anything like decent reward for their services there is an
abundant, an almost over-abundant, supply of men ready to flock to the
standard of their country in a time of necessity. Nor must it be
forgotten, in this matter of pay, that the general type and average of
our forces to-day, whether naval or military, is far higher than it was
fifty, years ago. The men are just as plucky, and more educated, more
alert, more competent in every way. To keep them up to this high
standard of efficiency they need a high standard of care and
consideration.

It may, however, be said--in view of our present industrial conditions,
and the low standard of physical health and vitality prevailing among
the young folk of our large towns--that physical drill and scout
training, including ambulance and other work, and qualification in
_some_ useful trade, might very well be made a part of our general
educational system, for rich and poor alike, say, between the ages of
sixteen and eighteen. Such a training would to each individual boy be
immensely valuable, and by providing some rudimentary understanding of
military, affairs and the duties of public service and citizenship,
would enable him to choose _how_ he could be helpful to the
nation--provided always he were not forced to make his choice in a
direction distasteful or repugnant to him. In any good cause, as in a
war of _defence_ against a foreign enemy, it is obvious enough, as I
have said, that there would be plenty of native enthusiasm forthcoming
without legal or official pressure. However, I have enlarged a little on
the subject of Conscription in a later chapter, and will say no more
here.

But the burning and pressing question is: Why should we--we, the
"enlightened and civilized" nations of Europe--get involved in these
senseless wars at all? And surely _this_ war will, of all wars, force an
answer to the question. Here, for the last twenty years, have these
so-called Great Powers been standing round, all professing that their
one desire is peace, and all meanwhile arming to the teeth; each
accusing the others of militant intentions, and all lamenting that "war
is inevitable." Here they have been forming their _Ententes_ and
Alliances, carrying on their diplomatic cabals and intrigues, studying
the map and adjusting the Balance of Power--all, of course, with the
best intentions--and lo! with the present result! What nonsense! What
humbug! What an utter bankruptcy of so-called diplomacy! When will the
peoples themselves arise and put a stop to this fooling--the people who
give their lives and pay the cost of it all? If the present-day,
diplomats and Foreign Ministers have sincerely striven for peace, then
their utter incapacity and futility have been proved to the hilt, and
they must be swept away. If they have not sincerely striven for peace,
but only pretended to so strive, then also they must be swept away, for
deceit in such a matter is unpardonable.

And no doubt the latter alternative is the true one. There has been a
pretence of the Governments all round--a pretence of deep concern for
humanity and the welfare of the mass-peoples committed to their charge;
but the real moving power beneath has been _class_-interest--the
interest of the great commercial class in each nation, with its acolyte
and attendant, the military or aristocratic. It is this class, with its
greeds and vanities and suspicions and jealousies, which is the cause of
strife; the working-masses of the various nations have no desire to
quarrel with each other. Nay, they are animated by a very different
spirit.

In an interesting article published by the German Socialist paper
_Vorwärts_, on September 27, 1914, and reproduced in our Press, occurred
the following passage, in which the war is traced to its commercial
sources: "Germany has enjoyed an economical prosperity such as no other
country has experienced during the last decade. That meant with the
capitalist class a revival of strong Imperialist tendencies, which have
been evident enough. This, again, gave rise to mistrust abroad, at
least in capitalist circles, who did their best to communicate their
feelings to the great masses, ... and so the German people as a whole
has been made responsible for what has been the work of a small
class.... The comrades abroad can be assured that though German workmen
are ready to defend their country they will, above all, not forget that
their interests are the same as those of the proletariat in other
countries, who also against their will were forced into the war and now
do their duty. They can rest assured that the German people are not less
humane than others--a result to which education through workmen's
organizations has greatly contributed. If German soldiers in the
excitement of war should commit atrocities, it can be said that among
us--and also in other circles--there will not be a single person to
approve of them."

Reading this statement--so infinitely more sensible and human than
anything to be found in the ordinary Capitalist Press of England and
Germany--one cannot help feeling that there is practically little hope
for the future _until_ the international working masses throughout
Europe come forward and, joining hands with each other, take charge of
the foolish old Governments (who represent the remains of the decadent
feudal and commercial systems), and shape the Western world at last to
the heart's desire of the peoples that inhabit it.

"The peoples of the world desire peace," said Bourtzeff, the Russian
exile[20]--and he, who has been in many lands, ought to know. But they
also--if they would obtain peace--must exercise an eternal vigilance
lest they fall into the hands of class-schemers and be betrayed into
that which they do _not_ desire. The example of Germany--which we have
considered above--shows how easily a good and friendly and pacific
people may, by mere political inattention and ignorance, and by a
quasi-scientific philosophy, which imposes on its political ignorance,
be led into a disastrous situation. It shows how preposterous it is that
Governments generally--as at present constituted--should set themselves
up as the representatives of the mass-peoples' wishes, and as the
arbiters of national destinies. And it shows how vitally necessary it is
that the people, even the working masses and the peasants, should have
some sort of political education and understanding.

In that matter, of the political education of the masses, America, in
her United States and Canada, yields a fine example. Though not
certainly perfect, her general standard of education and alertness is
infinitely superior to that of the peoples of the Old World. And some
writers contend that it is just in that--in her general level and not in
her freaks of genius--that America's claim lies to distinction among the
nations of the earth. If you consider the peoples of the Old World,
whether in England, Scotland, or Ireland, in France, Spain, Italy,
Germany, Austria, Russia, or farther East and farther South over the
earth, you will find the great masses, on the land or in the workshops,
still sunk in vast ignorance, apathy, and irresponsibility. Only here
and there among those I have mentioned, and notably among the smaller
peoples of Western Europe, like Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, and
Sweden, are the masses beginning to stir, as it were, towards the
daylight. It can only be with the final opening of their eyes and
awakening from slumber that the rule of the classes will be at an end.
But that awakening--with the enormous spread of literature and
locomotion and intercommunication of all kinds over the modern world,
cannot now, one would say, be long delayed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, and until that era arrives, we can only insist (at any rate
in our own country) on a different kind of foreign policy from what we
have had--a policy open and strong, not founded on Spread-Eagleism, and
decidedly not founded on commercialism and the interests of the trading
classes (as the Empire League seem to desire), but directed towards the
real welfare of the masses in our own and other lands. If our rulers and
representatives really seek peace, here is the obvious way to ensue and
secure it--namely, by making political friends of those in all countries
who _desire peace_ and are already stretching hands of amity to each
other. What simpler and more obvious way can there be? "We hail our
working-class comrades of every land," says the Manifesto of the
Independent Labour Party. "Across the roar of guns we send greeting to
the German Socialists. They have laboured unceasingly to promote good
relations with Britain, as we with Germany. They are no enemies of ours,
but faithful friends. In forcing this appalling crime upon the nations,
it is the rulers, the diplomats, the militarists, who have sealed their
doom. In tears and blood and bitterness the greater Democracy will be
born. With steadfast faith we greet the future; our cause is holy and
imperishable, and the labour of our hands has not been in vain."

Yes, we must have a foreign policy strong and sincere--and not only so,
but open and avowed. The present Diplomatic system is impossible of
continuance. It has grown up in an automatic way out of antiquated
conditions, and no one in particular can be blamed for it. But that
young men, profoundly ignorant of the world, and having the very _borné_
outlook on life which belongs to our gilded youth (67 per cent. of the
candidates for the Diplomatic Corps being drawn from Eton alone), having
also in high degree that curious want of cosmopolitan sympathy and
adaptability which is characteristic of the English wealthy classes
(every candidate for the Corps must have at least £400 a year of his
own)--that such a type should be charged with the representation of the
United Kingdom in foreign affairs is to-day a hopeless anomaly, and
indeed a very great danger. The recommendations just published of the
Royal Commission are in the right direction, but they need urgent
reinforcement and extension by the pressure of public opinion. And if in
the present-day situation of affairs we cannot refer every question
which arises directly to the nation, we must at least do away with the
one-man-Secretary system, and have in his place a large and responsible
committee, representative, not of any one party or class but as far as
possible of the whole people. [At this moment, for instance, as far as
we know, the terms of settlement of the present war may actually be
being arranged over our heads, and yet that may be taking place quite
apart from the approval and the wishes of the most weighty portion of
the nation.]

Another thing that we must look to with some hope for the future is the
influence of Women. Profoundly shocked as they are by the senseless
folly and monstrous bloodshed of the present conflict, it is certain
that when this phase is over they will insist on having a voice in the
politics of the future. The time has gone by when the mothers and wives
and daughters of the race will consent to sit by meek and silent while
the men in their madness are blowing each other's brains out and making
mountains out of corpses. It is hardly to be expected that war will
cease from the earth this side of the millennium; but women will surely
only, condone it when urged by some tremendous need or enthusiasm; they
will not rejoice--as men sometimes do--in the mere lust of domination
and violence. With their keen perception of the little things of life,
and the way in which the big things are related to these, they will see
too clearly the cost of war in broken hearts and ruined homes to allow
their men to embark in it short of the direst necessity.

And through the women I come back to the elementary causes and roots of
the present war--the little fibres in our social life which have fed,
and are still feeding, the fatal tree whose fruits are, not the healing
but the strife of nations. In the present day--though there may be other
influences--it is evident enough that rampant and unmeasured commercial
greed, concentrating itself in a special class, is the main cause, the
tap-root, of the whole business. And this, equally evidently, springs
out of the innumerable greed of _individuals_--the countless fibres that
combine to one result--the desire of private persons to get rich quick
at all costs, to make their gains out of others' losses, to take
advantage of each other, to triumph in success regardless of others'
failures. And these unworthy motives and inhuman characteristics again
spring obviously out of the mean and materialistic ideals of life which
still have sway among us--the ideals of wealth and luxury and
display--of which the horrors of war are the sure and certain obverse.
As long as we foster these things in our private life, so long will they
lead in our public life to the embitterment of nation against nation.
What is the ruling principle of the interior and domestic conduct of
each nation to-day--even within its own borders--but an indecent
scramble of class against class, of individual against individual? To
rise to noisy power and influence, and to ill-bred wealth and riches, by
trampling others down and profiting by their poverty is--as Ruskin long
ago told us--the real and prevailing motive of our peoples, whatever
their professions of Christianity may be. Small wonder, then, if out of
such interior conditions there rise to dominance in the great world
those very classes who exhibit the same vulgarities in their most
perfect form, and that _their_ conflict with each other, as between
nation and nation, exhibit to us, in the magnified and hideous form of
war, the same sore which is all the time corrupting our internal
economy. The brutality, and atrocity of modern war is but the reflection
of the brutality and inhumanity of our commercial regime and ideals. The
slaughter of the battlefields may be more obvious, but it is less
deliberate, and it is doubtful whether it be really worse, than the
daily and yearly slaughter of the railways, the mines, and the
workshops. That being so, it is no good protesting against, and being
shocked at, an evil which is our very own creation; and to cry out
against war-lords is useless, when it is _our_ desires and ambitions
which set the war-lords in motion. Let all those who indulge and
luxuriate in ill-gotten wealth to-day (and, indeed, their name is
Legion), as well as all those who meanly and idly groan because their
wealth is taken from them, think long and deeply on these things. Truth
and simplicity of life are not mere fads; they are something more than
abstractions and private affairs, something more than social ornaments.
They are vital matters which lie at the root of national well-being.
They are things which in their adoption or in their denial search right
through the tissue of public life. To live straightforwardly by your
own labour is to be at peace with the world. To live on the labour of
others is not only to render your life false at home, but it is to
encroach on those around you, to invite resistance and hostility; and
when such a principle of life is favoured by a whole people, that people
will not only be in a state of internal strife, but will assuredly raise
up external enemies on its borders who will seek its destruction.

The working masses and the peasants, whose lives are in the great whole
honest--who support themselves (and a good many others besides) by their
own labour--_have no quarrel_; and they are the folk who to-day
--notwithstanding lies and slanders galore, and much of race-prejudice
and ignorance--stretch hands of amity and peace to each other wellnigh
all over the world. It is of the modern moneyed classes that we may say
that their life-principle (that of taking advantage of others and living
on their labour) is essentially false[21]; and these are the classes
which are distinctively the cause of enmities in the modern world, and
which, as I have explained above, are able to make use of the military
class in order to carry out their designs. It can only be with the
ending of the commercial and military classes, as classes, that peace
can come to the world. China, founded on the anti-commercial principles
of Confucius, disbanded her armies a thousand years ago, and only quite
lately--under the frantic menace of Western civilization--felt compelled
to reorganize them. She was a thousand years before her time. It can
only be with the emergence of a new structure of society, based on the
principle of solidarity and mutual aid among the individuals of a
nation, and so extending to solidarity and mutual aid among nations,
that peace can come to the Western world. It is the best hope of the
present war that, like some frightful illness, it marks the working out
of deep-seated evils and their expulsion from the social organism; and
that with its ending the old false civilization, built on private gain,
will perish, crushed by its own destructive forces; and in its place the
new, the real culture, will arise, founded on the essential unity of
mankind.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] Reprinted by permission from the _English Review_ for January,
1915.

[19] Lord Bryce in the _Daily Chronicle_, October, 1914.

[20] In a letter to the _Times_, September 18, 1914.

[21] There is no reason in itself why Commercialism should be false.
Commerce and interchange of goods is of course a perfectly natural and
healthy function of social life. Indeed, it is a function which should
have a most beneficent influence in binding nations together. It is when
that function is perverted to private gain that it becomes false. But of
course without this perversion there would be no distinctively
commercial _class_ with interests opposed to those of the community.




VII


PATRIOTISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

Many Socialists and sympathizers with the Labour movement over the world
belittle Patriotism, and seem to think that by decrying and discouraging
the love of one's country one will bring nearer the day of
Internationalism.

I do not agree. Of course we all know there is a lot of sham and false
Patriotism--such as, for instance, Pressmongers magnify and make use of
in order to sell their papers, or such as comfortable, well-to-do folk
with big dividends do so heartily encourage among the poorer classes,
who can thus be persuaded to fight for them; we know, indeed, that there
is a good deal of very mean and unworthy Patriotism--the flag-waving
variety, for instance, which we saw in the Boer war--exultant over a
small nation of farmers defending their homes, and whipped up
deliberately by a commercial gang for their own purposes; or the
narrow-minded, lying, canting variety which blinds a people to its own
faults, and credits itself with all the moral virtues, while at the same
time it gloats over every defamation of the enemy. There is a good deal
of that variety in the present war. And it is easy to understand that
many people, sick of that sort of Patriotism, would go straight for a
ready-made denial of all frontiers and boundaries.

Still, allowing to the full all that can be said in the above direction,
one must admit also that there is such a thing as a true Patriotism, and
I do not see why--however socialist or cosmopolitan we may be--we should
not recognize what is an obvious fact. There is a love of one's own
country--a genuine attachment to and preference for it--"in spite of all
temptations to belong to other nations"--which after all is very
natural, and on the whole a sound and healthy thing. There may be some
people whose minds are so lofty that to them all peoples and races are
alike and without preference; but one knows that the vast multitudes of
our mortal earth are not made like that. "If a man love not his brother
whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?" It is
certainly easier and more natural to make an effort and a sacrifice for
the sake of your own countrymen whom you know so well and with whom you
are linked by a thousand ties than for the sake of foreigners who are
little more than a name--however worthy you may honestly believe the
latter to be. It is more obvious and instinctive for a man to work for
his own family than to give his services to his municipality or his
county council. Charity begins at home, and the wider spirit of human
love and helpfulness which passes beyond the narrow bounds of the family
hearth has perhaps to find an intermediate sphere before it can unfold
itself and expand in the great field of Humanity among all colours and
races.

Personally, I am probably more International by temperament than
Patriotic. I feel a strange kinship and intimacy with all sorts of queer
and outlandish races--Chinese, Egyptian, Mexican, or Polynesian--and
always a slight but persistent sense of estrangement and
misapprehension among my own people. Flag-waving certainly, does not
stir me. Still, I feel that, whatever one's country may be, the love of
it has value and is not to be scoffed at. The Nation is bigger than the
Parish; and to a man of limited outlook it is a means of getting him out
of his own very narrow and local circle of life; to rob him of that in
order to jump him into a cosmopolitan attitude (which to him may be
quite empty and arid) is a mistake. It is easy enough to break the shell
for the growing chick, but if you break it too soon your chick, when
hatched, will be dead.

If you look at the great majority of those who are enthusing just now
about our country and patriotically detesting the Germans, you will see
that notwithstanding lies and slanders and cant galore, and much of
conceit and vanity, their patriotism _is_ pulling them together from one
end of Britain to another, causing them to help each other in a thousand
ways, urging them to make sacrifices for the common good, helping them
to grow the sinews and limbs of the body politic, and even the wings
which will one day transport that body into a bigger world. Really, I
think we ought to be very grateful to the Germans for doing all this for
us; and the Germans ought to be grateful to us for an exactly similar
reason. You will see plainly enough that the great majority of those who
are at this moment giving their thoughts and lives for their countrymen
and neighbours either in Germany or in England could not by any manner
of possibility be expected to act with similar self-surrender and
enthusiasm in an International cause. They are not grown to that point
of development yet, and it is better that they should learn helpfulness
and brotherhood within somewhat narrow bounds than perhaps not learn
these things at all in the open and indiscriminate field of universal
equality. After all, to stimulate love and friendship there is nothing
like a common enemy!

It is an old story and an old difficulty. There comes a time when every
institution of social life becomes rotten and diseased and has to be
removed to make way for the new life which is expanding behind it.
Broadly speaking, we may say that the institution of Patriotism is
_approaching_ this period--at any rate over Western Europe. The outlines
of an International life are becoming clearly visible behind it.

What we have to do is to help on that international life and spirit to
our best, and certainly clear out a lot of sham patriotism that stands
in its way; but this has to be done with discrimination and a certain
tact. People must be made to see that "my country, right or wrong," is
not the genuine article. They must be made to understand how easily this
sort of slapdash sentiment throws them into the hands of scheming
politicians and wire-pullers for sinister purposes--how readily it can
be made use of directly it has become a mere unreasoning instinct and
habit. If a war is wanted, or conscription, or a customs tariff--it may
be merely to suit the coward fears of autocratic rulers, or the selfish
interests of some group of contractors or concession-hunters--all that
the parties concerned have to do is to play the patriotic stop, and they
stand a good chance of getting what they want. Just now there is a good
bit of fleecing going on in this fashion--both of the public and the
wage-workers. Even in its more healthy forms, when delayed in too long,
patriotism easily becomes morbid and delays also the birth of the larger
spirit which is waiting behind it. The Continental Socialists complain
that their cause has hitherto made little progress in Alsace-Lorraine
and Poland for the simple reason that political circumstances have
over-accentuated the patriotic devotion in both these regions.

Thus we have to push on with discrimination. Always we have to remember
that the wide, free sense of equality and kinship which lies at the root
of Internationalism is the real goal, and that the other thing is but a
step on the way, albeit a necessary step. Always we have to press on
towards that great and final liberation--the realization of our common
humanity, the recognition of the same great soul of man slumbering under
all forms in the heart of all races--the one guarantee and assurance of
the advent of World-peace.

That we are verging rapidly towards some altered perspective I quite
believe; and the day is coming when in the social and political spheres
International activity will make excessive patriotism seem somewhat
ridiculous--as, in fact, it has already done in the spheres of Science
and Industry and Art. Still, I also do not see any reason why the two
tendencies should not work side by side. The health of local organs and
members in the human body is by no means incompatible with the health of
the whole organism, and we may understand the great map of Humanity all
the better for its being differently coloured in different parts.




VIII


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF, WAR AND RECRUITING

_November_, 1914.

I sometimes think the country-folk round about where I live the most
sensible people I know. They say with regard to the War--or said at its
outset: "What are they fighting about? _I_ can't make out, and nobody
seems to know. What I've seen o' the Germans they're a decent enough
folk--much like ourselves. If there's got to be fightin', why don't them
as makes the quarrel go and fight wi' each other? But killing all them
folk that's got no quarrel, and burnin' their houses and farms, and
tramplin' down all that good corn--and all them brave men dead what can
never live again--its scandalous, I say."

This at the outset. But afterwards, when the papers had duly explained
that the Germans were mere barbarians and savages, bent on reducing the
whole world to military slavery, they began to take sides and feel there
was good cause for fighting. Meanwhile almost exactly the same thing was
happening in Germany, where England was being represented as a greedy
and deceitful Power, trying to boss and crush all the other nations.
Thus each nation did what was perhaps, from its own point of view, the
most sensible thing to do--persuaded itself that it was fighting in a
just and heroic cause, that it was a St. George against the Dragon, a
David out to slay Goliath.

The attitude of the peasant, however, or agriculturist, all over the
world, is the same. He does not deal in romantic talk about St. George
and the Dragon. He sees too clearly the downright facts of life. He has
no interest in fighting, and he does not want to fight. Being the one
honest man in the community--the one man who creates, not only his own
food but the food of others besides, and who knows the value of his
work, he perceives without illusion the foolery of War, the hideous
waste of it, the shocking toll of agony and loss which it inflicts--and
if left to himself would as a rule have no hand in it. It is only
occasionally--when ground down beyond endurance by the rent-racking
classes above him, or threatened beyond endurance by an enemy from
abroad, that he turns his reaping-hook into a sword and his muck-fork
into a three-pronged bayonet, exchanges his fowling-piece for a rifle,
and fights savagely for his home and his bit of a field.

England, curiously enough, is almost the only country in the world where
the peasant or ordinary field-worker _has_ no field of his own[22]; and
I find that in the villages and among the general agricultural
population there is even now but little enthusiasm for the present
war--though the raid on our coasts at Scarborough and other places
certainly did something to stimulate it. Partly this is, as I have said,
because the agricultural worker knows that his work is foundational, and
that nothing else is of importance compared with it. [At this moment,
for instance, there are peasants in Belgium and Northern France
ploughing and sowing, and so forth, actually close to the trenches and
between the fighting lines.] Partly it is because in England, alas! the
countryman _has_ so little right or direct interest in the soil. One
wonders sometimes why he _should_ feel any enthusiasm. Why should men
want to fight for their land when they have no land to fight for--when
the most they can do is to die at the foot of a trespass-board, singing,
"Britons never, never shall be slaves!"

If the War is ever finished, surely one of the first things to be
insisted on afterwards, with regard to England, must be the settlement
of the actual people (not the parasites) on the land. Else how, after
all that they have gone through, can it be expected that they will ever
again "fight for their country"? But that this vast landless population
in the villages and country districts--hungering as it is for some sure
tenure and interest in the soil--should actually, as now, be berated and
scolded by superior persons of the "upper" classes, and threatened with
conscription if it does not "come forward" more readily, is a spectacle
sufficient to gratify the most hardened cynic.

Certainly it is remarkable that such numbers of the great working masses
of this country (including villagers) should come forward in connexion
with the war, and join the standard and the ranks of fighting men--as
they do--and it is a thing for which one must honour them. But in that
matter there are not a few considerations to be kept in mind.

In the first place a large number are not really very enthusiastic, but
simply join because pressure to do so is put upon them by their
"masters." The press-gangs of old exist no longer, but substitutes for
them revive in subtler form. Many large landlords, for instance, have
given notice to a percentage of their gamekeepers, gardeners, park
employees, and the like, to the effect that their services are no
longer required, but that if they enlist in the ranks now they will be
reinstated in their masters' service again when the war is over ("if
still alive" is, we presume, understood). Large numbers of manufacturing
and other firms have notified their workmen and clerks in similar terms.
This means pretty serious economic pressure. A man in the prime of life,
suddenly ousted from his job, and with no prospect either of finding a
similar job elsewhere or of learning any new one, is in a pretty fix.
His only certain refuge lies in the fact that he can be taught to use a
rifle in a few weeks; and in a few weeks perhaps it becomes clear to him
that to accept that offer and the pay that goes with it--poor as it
is--is his only chance.

There are others, again--perhaps a very large number--who do not care
much about the war in itself, and probably have only the vaguest notion
of what it is all about, but for them to join the ranks means adventure,
comradeship, the open air--all fascinating things; and they hail the
prospect with joy as an escape from intolerable dullness--from the
monotony of the desk and the stuffy office, from the dreary round and
mechanical routine of the factory bench, from the depressing environment
of "home" and domestic squalor.

I must confess--though I have no general prejudice in favour of
war--that I have been much struck, since the outbreak of the present
one, by the altered look of crowds of young men whom I personally
know--who are now drilling or otherwise preparing for it. The gay look
on their faces, the blood in their cheeks, the upright carriage and
quick, elate step--when compared with the hang-dog, sallow, dull
creatures I knew before--all testify to the working of some magic
influence.

As I say, I do not think that this influence in most cases has much to
do with enthusiasm for the "cause" or any mere lust of "battle" (happily
indeed for the most part they do not for a moment realize what modern
battle means). It is simply escape from the hateful conditions of
present-day commercialism and its hideous wage-slavery into something
like the normal life of young manhood--a life in the open under the wide
sky, blood-stirring enterprise, risk if you will, co-operation and
_camaraderie_. These are the inviting, beckoning things, the things
which swing the balance down--even though hardships, low pay, and high
chances of injury and death are thrown in the opposite scale.

Nevertheless, and despite these other considerations, there does
certainly remain, in this as in other wars, a fair number of men among
those who enlist who are _bonâ fide_ inspired by some Ideal which they
feel to be worth fighting for. It may be Patriotism or love of their
country; it may be "to put down militarism"; it may be Religion or
Honour or what not. And it is fine that it should be so. They may in
cases be deluded, or mistaken about facts; the ideal they fight for may
be childish (as in the mediaeval Crusades); still, even so it is fine
that people should be willing to give their lives for an idea--that they
should be capable of being inspired by a vision. Humanity has at least
advanced as far as that.

I suppose patriotism, or love of country--when it comes to its full
realization, as in the case of invasion by an enemy, is the most
powerful and tremendous of such ideals, sweeping everything before it.
It represents something ingrained in the blood. In that case all the
other motives for fighting--economic or what not--disappear and are
swallowed up. Material life and social conditions under a German
government might externally be as comfortable and prosperous as under
our own, but for most of us something in the soul would wither and
sicken at the thought.

Anyhow, whatever the motives may be which urge _individuals_ into
war--whether sheer necessity or patriotism, or the prospect of wages or
distinction, or the love of adventure--a nation or a people in order to
fight _must_ have a "cause" to fight for, something which its public
opinion, its leaders, and its Press can appropriate--some phrase which
it can inscribe on its shield: be it "Country" or "God" or "Freedom from
Tyranny," or "Culture _versus_ Barbarism." It must have some such cry,
else obviously it could not fight with any whole-heartedness or any
force.

The thing is a psychological necessity. Every one, when he gets into a
quarrel, justifies himself and accuses the other party. He puts his own
conduct in an ideal light, and the conduct of his opponent in the
reverse! Doubtless if we were all angels and could impartially enter
into all the origins of the quarrel, we should not fight, because to
"understand" would be to "forgive"; but as we have not reached that
stage, and as we cannot even explain why we are quarrelling--the matter
being so complex--we are fain to adopt a phrase and fight on the
strength of that. It is useless to call this hypocrisy. It is a
psychological necessity. It is the same necessity which makes a mistress
dismiss her maid on the score of a broken teapot, though really she has
no end of secret grievances against her; or which makes the man of
science condense the endless complexity of certain physical phenomena
into a neat but lying formula which he calls a _Law of Nature_. He could
not possibly give all the real facts, and so he uses a phrase.

In war, therefore, each nation adopts a motto as its reason for
fighting. Sometimes the two opposing nations both adopt the same motto I
England and Germany both inscribe on their banners: "Culture _versus_
Barbarism." Each believes in its own good faith, and each accuses the
other of hypocrisy.

In a sense this is all right, and could not be better. It does not so
much matter which is really the most cultured nation, England or
Germany, as that each should really _believe_ that it is fighting in the
cause of Culture. Then, so fighting for what it knows to be a good
cause, the wounds and death endured and the national losses and
depletion are not such sad and dreadful things as they at first appear.
They liberate the soul of the individual; they liberate the soul of the
nation. They are sacrifices made for an ideal; and (provided they are
truly such) the God within is well-pleased and comes one step nearer to
his incarnation. Whatever inner thing you make sacrifices for, the same
will in time appear visibly in your life--blessing or cursing you.
Therefore, beware I and take good care as to what that inner thing
really is.

Such is the meaning of the use of a phrase or "battle-cry"; but we have,
indeed, to be on our guard against _how_ we use it. It can so easily
become a piece of cant or hypocrisy. It can so easily be engineered by
ruling cliques and classes for their own purposes--to persuade and
compel the people to fight _their_ battles. The politicians get us (for
reasons which they do not explain) into a nice little entanglement
--perhaps with some tribe of savages, perhaps with a great
European Power; and before the nation knows where it is it finds itself
committed to a campaign which may develop and become a serious war. Then
there is no alternative but for Ministers to repair to a certain Cabinet
where the well-dried formulae they need are kept hanging, and select one
for their use. It may be "Women and Children," or it may be "Immoral
Savages," or it may be "Empire," or it may be "Our Word of Honour."
Having selected the right one, and duly displayed and advertised it,
they have little difficulty in making the nation rise to the bait, and
fight whatever battles they desire.

Since the early beginnings of the human race we can perceive the same
processes in operation. We can almost guess the grade of advancement
reached among primitive tribes by simply taking note of their _totems_.
These were emblems of the things which held the mind of the tribe, as
admirable or terrible, with which it was proud to identify itself--the
fox, for instance, or the bear, the kangaroo, or the eagle. To be worthy
of _such ideals_ men fought. Later, every little people, every knightly,
family, every group of adventurers, adopted a device for its shield, a
motto for its flag, a figure of some kind, human, or more often animal.
Even the modern nations have not got much farther; and we can judge of
_their_ stage of advancement by the beasts of prey they, flaunt on their
banners or the deep-throat curses which resound in their national
anthems.

But surely the time has now come--even with this world-war--when the
great heart of the peoples will wake up to the savagery and the folly
perpetrated in their names. The people, who, although they enjoy a
"scrap" now and then, are essentially peaceful, essentially friendly,
all the world over; who in the intervals of slaughter offer cigarettes
to their foes, and tenderly dress their enemies' wounds; whose worst and
age-long sin it is that they allow themselves so easily to be dominated
and led by, ambitious and greedy schemers--surely it is time that they
should wake up and throw off these sham governments--these governments
that are three-quarters class-scheming and fraud and only one-quarter
genuine expressions of public spirit--and declare the heart of
solidarity that is within them.

The leaders and high priests of the world have used the name of
Christianity to bless their own nefarious works with, till the soul is
sick at the very sound of the word; but surely the time has come when
the peoples themselves out of their own heart will proclaim the advent
of the Son of Man--conscious of it, indeed, as a great light of
brotherhood shining within them, even amid the clouds of race-enmity and
ignorance, and will deny once for all the gospel of world-empire and
conquest which has so long been foisted on them for insidiously selfish
ends.

An empire based on brotherhood--a holy _human_ empire of the World,
including all races and colours in a common unity and equality--yes! But
these shoddy empires based on militarism and commercialism, and built up
in order to secure the unclean ascendancy of two outworn and effete
classes over the rest of mankind--a thousand times no! That
dispensation, thank Heaven! is past. "These fatuous empires with their
parade of power and their absolute lack of any real policy--this British
Lion, this Russian Bear, these German, French, and American
Eagles--these birds and beasts of prey--with their barbaric notions of
Greed and War, their impossible armaments, and their swift financial
ruin impending--will fall and be rent asunder. The hollow masks of them
will perish. And the sooner the better. But underneath surely there will
be rejoicing, for it will be found that so after all the real peoples of
the earth have come one degree nearer together--yes, one degree nearer
together."

FOOTNOTES:

[22] In Servia, for instance, which many folk doubtless regard as a
benighted country, more than four-fifths of the people are peasant
farmers and cultivate lands belonging to their own families. "These
holdings cannot be sold or mortgaged entire; the law forbids the
alienation for debt of a peasant's cottage, his garden or courtyard, his
plough, the last few acres of his land, and the cattle necessary for
working his farm." [Encycl. Brit.] In 1910 there were altogether _five
hundred_ agricultural co-operative societies in Servia.




IX


CONSCRIPTION

_December_, 1914.

While protesting, as I have already done, against forced military
service, it must still be admitted that the argument in favour of it
retains a certain validity: to the extent, namely, that every one owes a
duty of some kind to his own people, that it is mean to accept all the
advantages of citizenship--security, protection, settled conditions of
life, and so forth--and still to refuse to make sacrifice for one's
country in a time of distress or danger. It is difficult of course for
any one to trace all the threads and fibres which have worked themselves
into his life from his own homeland--as it is difficult for a child to
trace all the qualities of blood that it owes to its mother; but there
they are, and though some of these native inheritances and conditions
may not really be to a man's liking, yet he can hardly refuse to
acknowledge them, or to confess the debt of gratitude that he owes to
the land of his birth.

Granting all this, however, most fully, there still remains a long
stretch from this admission to that of forced military service. The
drawbacks to this latter are many. In the first place compulsion anyhow
is bad. A voluntary citizen army may be all right; but to _compel_ a man
to fight, whether he will or not--in violation, perhaps, of his
conscience, of his instinct, of his temperament--is an inexcusable
outrage on his rights as a human being. In the second place it is gross
folly; for a man who fights devoid of freewill and against his
conscience, against his temperament, cannot possibly make a good
fighter. An army of such recusants, however large, would be useless; and
even a few mixed with the others do, as a matter of fact, greatly lower
the efficiency of the whole force associated with them. In the third
place compulsion means compulsion by a Government, and Government, at
any rate to-day, means class-rule. Forced military service means service
under and subjection to a Class. That means Wars carried on abroad to
serve the interests, often iniquitous enough, of the Few; and military
operations entered into at home to suppress popular discontent or to
confirm class-power. To none of these things could any high-minded man
of democratic temper consent. There are other drawbacks, but these will
do to begin with.

On the other hand, if we reject enforced militarism are we to throw
overboard the idea of "national service" altogether?

I think not. The way out is fairly clear and obvious. Let it be
understood that there _is_ such a thing as national or public service,
to which (within the limits of individual conscience and capacity) every
one is bound to respond. Let it be understood that at a certain age, say
from sixteen to eighteen (but the period would no doubt be a movable
one) every one, boy or girl, rich or poor, shall go through a course of
training fitting him or her for healthy and effective citizenship. This
would include _first of all_ bodily exercises and drill (needed by
almost all, but especially in the present day by town workers), all
sorts of scouting-work, familiarity with Nature, camp and outdoor life;
then all kinds of elementary and necessary trades, like agriculture in
some form or other, metal-work, wood-work, cloth-work, tailoring,
bootmaking; then such things as rifle-shooting, ambulance-work, nursing,
cookery, and so on. Let it be understood that _every one_, male or
female, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, is expected to qualify--not
in the whole programme, but first of all and as far as humanly possible
in the primary condition of physical health and development, and then
after that in some one, at any rate, of the above-mentioned or similar
trades--so that in case of general need or distress he can do
_something_ of use. That would at least be an approach to a valuable and
reasonable institution.

As things are it is appalling to think of the abject futility and
_uselessness_ of vast classes in all the modern nations of to-day,--but
perhaps especially in our own nation. Think of the populations of our
drawing-rooms, of our well-to-do clubs, of our universities, of our
commercial and professional offices, whose occupations, whatever they
are, are entirely remote from the direct needs and meanings of life; or
again of the vast masses who inhabit the mean streets of our great
towns, ignorant, ill-grown, unskilled, and in a chronic state of most
precarious and uncertain employment. What would these populations do in
any case of national crisis--say in a case of serious war or famine or
huge bankruptcy of trade or multitudinous invasion by Chinese or
Japanese, or of total collapse of credit and industry? With a few
brilliant exceptions they would collapse too. They could not feed
themselves, clothe themselves, or defend themselves; they could not
build shelters from the storm, or make tools or weapons of any kind for
their own use; they would be unable to nurse each other in illness or
cook for each other in health. A tribe of Arabs or a commando of Boer
farmers would be far more competent than they.

But the said deficiency, which would be painfully illustrated by a
serious crisis, is there equally in ordinary humdrum times of peace. The
crippled and idiotic life which would bring disaster _then_ is
undermining our very existence _now_. Is it not time that a sensible
nation should look to it that every one of its members, when adult,
should at least be healthy, well-fed, and well-grown, and that each
should not only be decently developed in himself or herself, but should
be capable of bearing a useful part of some kind in the life of the
nation? Is it not time that the nation should place _first of all_ on
its programme the creation of capable and healthy citizens? Can a nation
be really effective, really strong, really secure, without this? I do
not seem to doubt a large _willingness_ among our people to-day for
mutual service and helpfulness--I believe a vast number of our young
women of the well-to-do type are at this moment deeply regretting their
inability to do anything except knit superfluous mufflers--but was there
ever in the history of the world such huge, such wide-flooding
_incompetence_? The willingness of the well-to-do classes may be judged
from their readiness to come forward with subscriptions, their
incompetence from the fact that they have _nothing else to offer_: that
is, that all they can offer is to set _some one else_ (by means of their
money) to do useful work in their place. They cannot themselves nurse
wounded soldiers, or make boots for them, or build huts or weave
blankets; they cannot help in housing or building schemes, or in schemes
for the reclaiming and cultivation of waste lands; they cannot grow corn
or bake bread or cook simple meals for the assistance of the indigent or
the aged or the feeble, because they understand none of these things;
but they can _pay some one else_ to do them--that is, they can divert
some of the money, which they have already taken from the workers, to
setting the latter toiling again! But what use would that be on the day
when our monetary system broke down--as it nearly did at the
commencement of this war? What use would it be on some critical day when
a hostile invasion called every competent man and woman to do the work
of defence absolutely necessary at the moment? What use would it be in
the hour when complete commercial dislocation caused downright famine?
Who would look at offers of money then? Could the nation Carry this vast
mass of incompetents and idlers on its back then; and can it reasonably
be expected to do so now?

A terrible and serious crisis, as I have already said, awaits us--even
when the War is over--a crisis probably worse than that which we are
passing through now. We have to remember the debts that are being piled
up. If the nations are staggering along now under the enormous load of
idlers and parasites living on interest, how will it be then? Unless we
can reorganize our Western societies on a real foundation of actual
life, of practical capacity, of honest and square living, and of mutual
help instead of mutual robbery, they will infallibly collapse, or pass
into strange and alien hands. Now is the critical moment when with the
enormous powers of production which we wield it may be possible to make
a new start, and base the social life of the future on a generous
recognition of the fellowship of all. How many times have the
civilizations of the past, ignoring this salvation, gone down into the
gulf! Can we find a better hope for our civilization to-day?

It is clear, I think, that any nation that wants to stand the shock of
events in the future, and to hold its own in the vast flux of racial and
political changes which is coming on the world, will have to found its
life, not on theories and views, or on the shifting sands of literature
and fashion, but on the solid rock of the real _material_ capability of
its citizens, and on their willingness, their readiness to help each
other--their ingrained instinct of mutual service. A conscript army,
forced upon us by a government and becoming inevitably a tool for the
use of a governing class, we do not want and we will not have; but a
nation of capable men and women, who know what life is and are prepared
to meet it at all points--who will in many cases make a free gift of
their capital and land for such purposes as I have just outlined--we
_must_ have. Personally I would not even here--though the need is a
crying one--advocate downright compulsion; but I would make these things
a part of the recognized system of education, with appropriate
regulations and the strongest recommendations and inducements to every
individual to fall in and co-operate with them. Thus in time an urgent
public opinion might be formed which would brand as disgraceful the
conduct of any person who refused to qualify himself for useful
service, or who, when qualified, deliberately refused to respond to the
call for such service, if needed. Under such conditions the question of
military defence would solve itself. Thousands and thousands of men
would of their own free choice at an early age and during a certain
period qualify themselves in military matters; other thousands, men and
women, would qualify in nursing or ambulance work; other millions,
again, would be prepared to aid in transport work, or in the production
of food, clothing, shelter, and the thousand and one necessaries of
life. No one would be called upon to do work which he had not chosen, no
one would be forced to take up an activity which was hateful to him, yet
all would feel that what they could do and did do would be helpful to
the other ranks and ranges, and would be _solidaire_ with the rest of
the nation. Such a nation would be sane and prosperous in time of peace,
and absolutely safe and impregnable in the hour of danger.




X


HOW SHALL THE PLAGUE BE STAYED?

_Christmas_, 1914.

People ask what new arrangements of diplomacy or revivals of
Christianity--what alliances, _ententes_, leagues of peace, Hague
tribunals, regulation of armaments, weeks of prayer, or tons of
Christmas puddings sent into the enemies' camps--will finally scotch
this pestilence of war. And there is no answer, because the answer is
too close at hand for us to see it.

Nothing but the general abandonment of the system of living on the
labour of others will avail. _There is no other way_. This, whether as
between individuals or as between nations, is--and has been since the
beginning of the world--the root-cause of war. Early and primitive wars
were for this--to raid crops and cattle, to carry off slaves on whose
toil the conquerors could subsist; and the latest wars are the same. To
acquire rubber concessions, gold-mines, diamond-mines, where coloured
labour may be exploited to its bitterest extreme; to secure colonies and
outlying lands, where giant capitalist enterprises (with either white or
coloured labour) may make huge dividends out of the raising of minerals
and other industrial products; to crush any other Power which stands in
the way of these greedy and inhuman ambitions--such are the objects of
wars to-day. And we do not see the cause of the sore because it is so
near to us, because it is in our blood. The whole private life of the
commercial and capitalist classes (who stand as the representatives of
the nations to-day) is founded on the same principle. As individuals our
one object is to find some worker or group of workers whose labour value
we can appropriate. Look at the endless columns of stock and share
quotations in the daily papers, and consider the armies of those who
scan these lists over their breakfast-tables with the one view of
finding some-where an industrial concern whose slave-driven toilers
will yield the shareholder 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 per cent, on his capital.
Undisguised and shameless parasitism is the order, or disorder, of our
days. The rapacity of beasts of prey is in our social life but thinly
veiled--thinly veiled indeed by a wash of "Christian" sentiment and by a
network of philanthropic institutions for the supposed benefit of the
very victims whom we have robbed.

Is it any wonder that this principle of internecine warfare and rapacity
which rules in our midst, this vulgar greed, which loads people's bodies
with jewels and furs and their tables with costly food, regardless of
those from whom these comforts are snatched, should eventuate ultimately
in rapacity and violence on the vast stage of the drama of nations, and
in red letters of war and conflict written across the continents? It is
no good, with a pious snuffle, to say we are out to put down warfare and
militarism, and all the time to encourage in our own lives, and in our
Church and Empire Leagues and other institutions, the most sordid and
selfish commercialism--which itself is in essence a warfare, only a
warfare of a far meaner and more cowardly kind than that which is
signalized by the shock of troops or the rage of rifles and cannon.

No, there is no other way; and only by the general abandonment of our
present commercial and capitalist system will the plague of war be
stayed.[23]

FOOTNOTES:

[23] When these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men return home
after the war is over, do we expect them to go meekly back to the
idiotic slavery of dingy offices and dirty workshops? If we do I trust
that we shall be disappointed. These men who have fought so nobly for
their land, and who have tasted, even under the most trying conditions,
something of the largeness and gladness of a free open-air life, will, I
hope, refuse to knuckle down again to the old commercialism. Now at last
arises the opportunity for our outworn Civilization to make a fresh
start. Now comes the chance to establish great self-supporting Colonies
in our own countrysides and co-operative concerns where real Goods may
be manufactured and Agriculture carried on in free and glad and healthy
industry.




XI


COMMERCIAL PROSPERITY THE PROSPERITY OF A CLASS

The economics of the statement that "commercial prosperity means little
more than the prosperity of a _class_"[24] may be roughly indicated by
the following considerations: International trade means division of
labour among the nations. There is certainly a gain in such division, a
margin of advantage in production; and that gain, that margin, is
secured by the trading class. That is all.

Let us take an example, and to simplify the problem let us leave out of
account those exotic products--like tea or rubber or raw cotton--which
_can_ only be produced in one of the exchanging countries. Let us take
the case of Germany and England, both producing cutlery and both
producing cloth. There is no reason why each country should not produce
_both_ articles exclusively for its own use; and as a matter of fact for
a long time they did so. But presently it was found that the cost of
production of certain kinds of cutlery was less in Germany, and the cost
of production of certain kinds of cloth less in England. Merchants and
dealers came in and effected the exchange, and so an intertrade has
sprung up. The effect of this on the workers in England is simply to
transfer a certain amount of employment from the cutlery trade to the
cloth trade, and on the workers in Germany to transfer an equal amount
from the cloth trade to the cutlery trade. This may mean dislocation of
industry; but the actual number of persons employed or of wages received
in both countries may in such a case remain just the same as before.
There is nothing in the mere fact of exchange to alter those figures.
There is, however, a gain, there is a marginal advantage, in the
exchange; and that is collared by the merchants and dealers. It is, in
fact, _in order to secure this margin_ that the merchant class arises.
This is, of course, a very simple and elementary statement of the
problem, and the exceptions to it or modifications of it may be supplied
by the reader. But in the main it embodies the very obvious truth that
trade is created for the advantage of the trader (who often also in
modern times is the manufacturer himself). What advantages may here and
there leak through to the public or to the employee are small and, so to
speak, accidental. The mere fact of exchange in itself forms no index of
general prosperity. Yet it is often assumed that it does. If, for
instance, it should happen that the whole production of cutlery, as
between Germany and England, were secured by Germany, and the whole
production of cloth were secured by England, so that the _whole_ of
these products on each side had to be exchanged, then doubtless there
would be great jubilation--talk of the immense growth of oversea trade
in both countries, the wonderful increase of exports and imports, the
great prosperity, and so forth; but really and obviously it would only
mean the jubilation and the prosperity of the merchants, the brokers,
the railway and shipping companies of both lands. There would be an
increase in _their_ riches (and an increase in the number of their
employees). It would mean more merchant palaces in Park Lane, bigger
dividends on the shares of transport companies; but after that the
general position of the manual workers in both trades, the numbers
employed, and their rates of wages would be much as before. Prices also,
as regards the general Public, would be but little altered. It is only
because this great trading, manufacturing, and commercial class has
amassed such enormous wealth and influence, and is able to command the
Press, and social position, and votes and representation on public
bodies and in both Houses of Parliament, that it succeeds in impressing
the nation generally with the idea that _its_ welfare is the welfare of
the whole people, and its prosperity the advantage of every citizen. And
it is in this very fact that its great moral and social danger to the
community lies.

It must not be thought (but I believe I have said this before) that in
making out that the commercial classes are largely to blame for modern
wars I mean to say that the present war, and many previous ones, have
been _directly_ instigated by commercial folk. It is rather that the
atmosphere of commercial competition and rivalry automatically leads up
to military rivalries and collisions, which often at the last moment
(though not always) turn out contrary to the wishes of the commercial
people themselves. Also I would repeat that it is not _Commerce_ but the
_class_ interest that is to blame. Commerce and exchange, as we know in
a thousand ways, have the effect of drawing peoples together, giving
them common interests, acquaintance, and understanding of each other,
and so making for peace. The great jubilation during the latter half of
the nineteenth century--from 1851 onwards--over world-wide trade and
Industrial Exhibitions, as the heralds of the world's peace and amity--a
jubilation voiced in Tennyson's earlier _Locksley Hall_--was to a
certain extent justified. There is no doubt that the nations have been
drawn together by intertrading and learned to know each other. Bonds,
commercial and personal, have grown up between them, and are growing
up, which must inevitably make wars more difficult in the future and
less desirable. And if it had been possible to carry on this intertrade
in a spirit of real friendliness and without grasping or greed the
result to-day would be incalculably great. But, unfortunately, this
latter element came in to an extent quite unforeseen and blighted the
prophetic hopes. The second _Locksley Hall_ was a wail of
disillusionment. The growth of large mercantile classes, intoxicated
with wealth and pursuing their own interests _apart from, and indeed
largely in opposition to_, those of the mass-peoples, derailed the
forward movement, and led in some of the ways which I have indicated
above to more of conflict between the nations and less of peace.

Doubtless the growth of these mercantile classes has to a certain extent
been inevitable; and we must do them the justice to acknowledge that
their enterprise and ingenuity (even set in action for their own private
advantage) have been of considerable benefit to the world, and that
their growth may represent a necessary stage in affairs. Still, we
cannot help looking forward to a time when, this stage having been
completed, and commerce between nation and nation having ceased to be
handled for mere private profit and advantage, the parasitical power in
our midst which preys upon the Commonweal will disappear, the mercantile
classes will become organic with the Community, and one great and
sinister source of wars will also cease.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] See p. 50 above.




XII


COLONIES AND SEAPORTS

There is another point of economics on which there seems to be some
confusion of mind. If mere extension of Trade is the thing sought for,
it really does not matter much, in these days of swift and international
transport, whether the outlying lands with which the Trader deals or the
ports _through_ which he deals are the property of his own nation or of
some other nation. The trade goes on all the same. England certainly has
colonies all over the world; but with her free trade and open ports it
often happens that one of her colonies takes more German or French goods
of a certain class than English goods of the same class; or that it
exports more to Germany and France than it does to England. The bulk,
for instance, of the produce of our West African colonies goes, in
normal times, to Germany. German or French trade does not suffer in
dealing with English colonies, though English trade may sometimes suffer
in dealing with French, German or other foreign colonies on account of
the preferential duties they put on in favour of their own goods. Except
for these tariff-walls and bounty systems (which after all, on account
of their disturbing and crippling effect, seem to be gradually going out
of fashion) trade flows over the world, regardless of national barriers,
and will continue so to flow. It is all a question of relative
efficiency and price. German goods, owing to their cheapness and their
accuracy of construction, have of late years been penetrating
everywhere; and to the German trader, as a pure matter of trade, it
makes no difference whether he sells to a foreign nation or a German
colony.

It is the same with seaports. Holland is delighted to provide passage
for Germany's exports and imports, and probably does so at a minimum
cost. The Berlin manufacturer or merchant would be no better off, as far
as trade conditions are concerned, if Germany instead of Holland held
the mouths of the Rhine. The same with a harbour like Salonika. Germany
or Austria may covet dreadfully its possession; and for strategic or
political reasons they may be right, but for pure trade purposes
Salonika in the hands of the Greeks would probably (except for certain
initial expenses in the enlargement of dock accommodation) serve them as
well as in their own hands.

Of course there _are_ other reasons which make nations desire colonies
and ports. Such things may be useful for offensive or defensive purposes
against other nations; they feed a jealous sense of importance and
Imperialism; they provide outlets for population and access to lands
where the institutions and customs of the Homeland prevail; they supply
financiers with a field for the investment of capital under the
protection of their own Governments; they favour the development of a
national _carrying_ trade; and, above all, they supply plentiful
official and other posts and situations for the young men of the middle
and commercial classes; but for the mere extension and development of
the nation's general trade and commerce it is doubtful whether they have
anything like the importance commonly credited to them.




XIII


WAR AND THE SEX IMPULSE

_January_, 1915.

It seems that War, like all greatest things--like Passion, Politics,
Religion, and so forth--is impossible to reckon up. It belongs to
another plane of existence than our ordinary workaday life, and breaks
into the latter as violently and unreasonably, as a volcano into the
cool pastures where cows and sheep are grazing. No arguments, protests,
proofs, or explanations are of any avail; and those that are advanced
are confused, contradictory, and unconvincing. Just as people quarrel
most violently over Politics and Religion, because, in fact, those are
the two subjects which no one really understands, so they quarrel in
Warfare, not really knowing _why_, but impelled by deep, inscrutable
forces. Spectators even and neutrals, for the same reason, take sides
and range themselves bitterly, if only in argument, against each other.

But Logic and Morals are of no use on these occasions. They are too
thin. They are only threads in a vast fabric. You extract a single
thread from the weaving of a carpet, and note its colour and its
concatenations, but that gives you no faintest idea of the pattern of
the carpet; and then you extract another, and another, but you are no
nearer the design. Logic and morals are similar threads in the great web
of life. You may follow them in various directions, but without
effective result. Life is so much greater than either; and War is a
volcanic manifestation of Life which gives them little or no heed.

There is a madness of nations, as well as of individual people. Every
one who has paid attention to the fluctuations of popular sentiment
knows how strange, how unaccountable, these are. They seem to suggest
the coming to the surface, from time to time, of hidden
waves--groundswells of some deep ocean. The temper, the temperament, the
character, the policy of a whole nation will change, and it is
difficult to see why. Sometimes a passion, a fury, a veritable mania,
quite unlike its ordinary self, will seize it. There is a madness of
peoples, which causes them for a while to hate each other with bitter
hatred, to fight furiously and wound and injure each other; and then lo!
a little while more and they are shaking hands and embracing and
swearing eternal friendship! What does it all mean?

It is all as mad and unreasonable as Love is--and that is saying a good
deal! In love, too, people desire to _hurt_ each other; they do not
hesitate to wound one another--wounding hearts, wounding bodies even,
and hating themselves even while they act so. What does it all mean? Are
they trying the one to reach the other _at all costs_--if not by
embraces, at least by injuries--each longing to make his or her
personality felt, to _impress_ himself or herself upon the other in such
wise as never again to be forgotten. Sometimes a man will stab the girl
he loves, if he cannot get at her any other way. Sex itself is a
positive battle. Lust connects itself only too frequently with violence
and the spilling of blood.

Is it possible that something the same happens with whole nations and
peoples--an actual lust and passion of conflict, a mad intercourse and
ravishment, a kind of generation in each other, and exchange of
life-essences, leaving the two peoples thereafter never more the same,
but each strangely fertilized towards the future? Is it this that
explains the extraordinary ecstasy which men experience on the
battlefield, even amid all the horrors--an ecstasy so great that it
calls them again and again to return? "Have you noticed," says one of
our War correspondents,[25] "how many of our colonels fall? Do you know
why? It is for five minutes of _life_. It is for the joy of riding, when
the charge sounds, at the crest of a wave of men."

Is it this that explains the curious fact that Wars--notwithstanding all
their bitterness and brutishness--do not infrequently lead to strange
amalgamations and generations? The spreading of the seeds of Greek
culture over the then known world by Alexander's conquests, or the
fertilizing of Europe with the germs of republican and revolutionary
ideas by the armies of Napoleon, or the immense reaction on the
mediaeval Christian nations caused by the Crusades, are commonplaces of
history; and who--to come to quite modern times--could have foreseen
that the Boer War would end in the present positive alliance between the
Dutch and English in South Africa, or that the Russo-Japanese conflict
would so profoundly modify the ideas and outlook of the two peoples
concerned?

In making these remarks I do not for a moment say that the gains
resulting from War are worth the suffering caused by it, or that the
gains are _not_ worth the suffering. The whole subject is too vast and
obscure for one to venture to dogmatize on it. I only say that if we are
to find any order and law (as we must inevitably _try_ to do) in these
convulsions of peoples, these tempests of human history, it is probably
in the direction that I have indicated.

Of course we need not leave out of sight the ordinary theory and
explanation, that wars are simply a part of the general struggle for
existence--culminating explosions of hatred and mutual destruction
between peoples who are competing with each other for the means of
subsistence. That there is something in this view one can hardly deny;
and it is one which I have already touched upon. Still, I cannot help
thinking that there is something even deeper--something that connects
War with the amatory instinct; and that this probably is to be found in
the direction of a physiological impact and fusion between the two (or
more) peoples concerned, which fertilizes and regenerates them, and is
perhaps as necessary in the life of Nations as the fusion of cells is in
the life of Protozoa, or the phenomena of sex in the evolution of Man.

And while the Nations fight, the little mortals who represent them have
only the faintest idea of what is really going on, of what the warfare
means. They _feel_ the sweep of immense passions; ecstasies and horrors
convulse and dislocate their minds; but they do not, cannot, understand.
And the dear creatures in the trenches and the firing-lines give their
lives--equally beautiful, equally justified, on both sides: fascinated,
rapt, beyond and beside themselves, as foes hating each other with a
deadly hatred; seized with hideous, furious, nerve-racking passions;
performing heroic, magnificent deeds, suffering untold, indescribable
wounds and pains, and lying finally side by side (as not unfrequently
happens) on the deserted battlefield, reconciled and redeemed and
clasping hands of amity even in death.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] H.M. Tomlinson, in the _Daily News_.




XIV


THE OVER-POPULATION SCARE

Some cheerful and rather innocent people insist that because of the
over-population difficulty wars must go on for ever. The population of
the world, they say--or at any rate of the civilized countries--is
constantly increasing, and if war did not from time to time reduce the
numbers there would soon be a deadlock. They seem to think that the only
way to solve the problem is for the men to murder each other. This says
nothing about the women, who, after all, are the chief instruments of
multiplication. It may also be pointed out that even the barbaric method
of slaughter is not practicable. Although wars of extermination may have
now and then occurred in the past among tribes and small peoples, such
wars are not considered decent nowadays; and the numbers killed in
modern campaigns--horribly "scientific" and "efficient" as the methods
are--is such a small fraction of the population concerned as to have no
appreciable result. The population of Germany is about seventy millions,
and I suppose the wildest anti-Teuton could hardly hope that _more_ than
a million Germans will be actually killed in the present conflict--less
than 1-1/2 per cent.--a fraction which would probably soon be
compensated by the increased uxoriousness of the returning troops.

No, War is no solution for the over-population question. If that
question is a difficulty, other means must be employed. We ask
therefore: (1) Is it a serious difficulty? (2) If so, what is the
remedy?

That over-population is in certain localities a serious difficulty few
would deny. China, with her four hundred millions, is probably
over-populated; that is, with her present resources in production the
population presses against the margin of subsistence and can only just
maintain itself. There is evidence to show that in the past the natives
of some of the Pacific islands, isolated in the great ocean and unable
to migrate to other lands, have suffered from the same trouble. Britain
is often said to be over-populated; but here quite other considerations
come in. Though it might be pleasant for many reasons to have more land
at our immediate command, we cannot fairly say that our population
presses against the margin of subsistence, for the simple reason that
with our immense powers of industrial production and the enormous wealth
here yearly obtained the total, if evenly distributed (anything like as
well, for instance, as in China), would yield to every man, woman, and
child in the United Kingdom an ample affluence.[26] The _appearance_
here of over-population arises from the fact that while the wage-earners
actually produce this mass of wealth, two-thirds of it are taken by the
employers and employing classes. Great portions, therefore, of the
actual producers or producing classes _are_ on the margin of
subsistence, while the rest of the wealth of the country is absorbed by
those trading and dividend-consuming classes of whom I have spoken more
than once in previous pages. There is over-population certainly, but it
is an over-population (as any one may see who walks through the West End
of London or the corresponding quarters of any of our large towns) of
idlers and futile people, who are a burden to the nation. With our
extraordinary industrial system--or want of system--it commonly happens
that the abundance of ill-paid or unemployed workers at one end of the
social scale, by reducing the rates of wages and so increasing the rates
of dividends, actually creates a greater abundance of unemployed rich at
the other end; but neither excess points in itself to over-population
--only to a diseased state of distribution. What we really
ought to aim at creating is a nation in which every one was
capable of doing useful or beautiful work of some kind or other and was
gladly occupied in doing it. Such a nation would be truly healthy. It
would be powerful and productive beyond all our present dreams. But the
Western nations of to-day, with their huge burdens of unskilled,
ill-grown poor and their huge burden of incompetent, feeble rich--it is
a wonder that they survive. They would not survive a decade or two if
the Chinese or the Japanese in their numbers were to come into personal
and direct competition with them.

If Britain is not really at present over-populated, the same is probably
even more true of Germany. For Germany, with a larger and more fertile
area in proportion to her population, is safer than we are in the matter
of self-support. But again in Germany the outcry of over-population has
arisen, and has arisen from the same cause as here--namely, the rise of
the commercial system, the division of the nation into extremes of
poverty and riches, and the consequent _appearance_ of excess population
in both directions. And this diseased state of the nation has led to a
fever of "expansion" and has been (as already said) one of the chief
causes of the present war. As long as the modern nations are such fools
as to conduct their industrial affairs in the existing way they will not
only be full of strife, disease, and discord in themselves, but they
will inevitably quarrel with their neighbours.

All this, however, does not prove that a genuine over-population
difficulty may not occur even now in localities, and possibly in some
far future time over the whole earth. And it may be just as well to
consider these possibilities.

Dismissing War and Disease as solutions--as belonging to barbarous and
ignorant ages of human evolution--there remain, perhaps, three rational
methods of dealing with the question: (1) the organization and
improvement of industrial production on existing lands so far as to
allow the support of a larger population; (2) the transport of excess
populations to new and undeveloped lands (colonization); (3) the
limitation of families.

The first method hardly needs discussion here. Its importance is too
obvious. It needs, however, more public discussion in England than it
has hitherto received. The second method--operating at present only in a
very casual and unsystematic way--ought, one would say, to be very
systematically considered and dealt with by the modern States. For a
nation to plant out large bodies of colonists on comparatively
unoccupied lands, as in Africa or Australia or Canada, in a deliberate
and organized fashion, with every facility towards co-operation and
success, and yet on the principle of leaving, each colonial unit plenty
of freedom and autonomy, would not be a very difficult task, nor a very
expensive one, considering the end in view. And in such a case there
would really be no adequate reason for jealousy between States having
colonies in the neighbourhood of each other. If Germany (or any other
country) wishes to have a colony in East Africa or West Africa, it is
really ridiculous to go to war about such a matter. Any peaceful
arrangement would be less expensive; and, as a matter of fact, a
flourishing German (or other) colony in the neighbourhood of a British
settlement would help to bring prosperity to the latter. The two
colonies would benefit each other. It is only _unreasoning jealousy_
which prevents people understanding this.

Finally, there is the third method, of the intentional limitation of
families. Surely the time has come when blind and unlimited propagation
among civilized and self-respecting peoples must come to an end. The
old text "Blessed is he that hath his quiver full of them" has ceased to
have any use or application. Eugenic and healthy conditions of
child-rearing and nurture demand small families. The well-to-do and
educated do already limit their families; and for the poorer classes to
breed and propagate indefinitely is only to play into the hands of the
dividend-hunting rich by increasing the supply of cheap labour, while at
the same time the general standard of the population becomes more and
more degraded. It is indeed a curious question why, in the Press and
among the official classes, every effort to spread abroad the knowledge
of how in a healthy, humane, and eugenic way to limit the size of the
family is discountenanced. Sometimes one thinks that this is done partly
in order to encourage that said pullulation of workers which is so
favourable to, the keeping down of wages; but, of course, ancient
reasons of ignorance and religious bias weigh also. In the United States
the persecutions of Comstockery are worse than here.

The aborigines of Australia are so ignorant that they do not even know
that conception arises from the meeting of the male and female elements.
They think that certain bushes and trees are haunted by the spirits of
babies, which leap unawares into the bodies of passing women. It can be
imagined what evils and delusions spring from such a theory. We do not
want to return to such a period; and yet it would seem that many folk do
not want to go forward from our present condition, with all _its_ evils
and delusions, to something better and more intelligent.

If the nations haven't the sense to be able (if they wish) to limit
their families--short of resorting to such methods as War, Cannibalism,
the spread of Disease, the exposure of Infants, and the like--one can
only conclude that they must go on fighting and preying upon each other
(industrially and militarily) till they gain the sense. Mere unbridled
and irrational lust may have led to wars of extermination in the past.
Love and the sacrament of a true and intimate union may come some day
with the era of peace.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] Militating also against the idea of over-population is the fact
that so much of our agricultural land is obviously uncared for and
neglected.




XV


THE FRIENDLY AND THE FIGHTING INSTINCTS

_January_, 1915.

Fighting is certainly a deeply ingrained instinct in the human race--the
masculine portion. In the long history of human development it has
undoubtedly played an important part. It has even (such is the
cussedness and contrariety of Nature) helped greatly in the evolution of
love and social solidarity. There is no greater bond in early stages
between the members of a group or tribe than the consciousness that they
have a common enemy.[27] It is also obviously still a great _pleasure_
to a very large proportion of our male populations--as, indeed, the fact
of its being the fulfilment of a deep instinct would lead us to expect.
It does not follow, however, from these remarks that we expect war in
its crudest form to continue for ever. There will come a term to this
phase of evolution. Probably the impact and collision between
nations--if required for their impregnation and fecundity--will come
about in some other way.

If fighting is an ingrained instinct, the sociable or friendly instinct
is equally ingrained. We may, indeed, suppose it roots deeper. In the
midst of warfare maddest foes will turn and embrace each other. In the
tale of _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_[28] he (Cuchulain) and Ferdiad fought
for three days on end, yet at the close of each day kissed each other
affectionately; and in the present war there are hundreds of stories
already in circulation of acts of grace and tenderness between enemies,
as well as the quaintest quips and jokes and demonstrations of
sociability between men in opposing trenches who "ought" to have been
slaying each other. In the Russo-Japanese War during the winter, when
military movement was not easy, and the enemy lines in some cases were
very near each other, the men, Russians and Japanese, played games
together as a convenient and pleasant way of passing the time, and not
unfrequently took to snowballing each other.

A friend of mine, who was in that war, told me the following story. The
Japanese troops were attacking one of the forts near Port Arthur with
their usual desperate valour. They cut _zig-zag_ trenches up the
hillside, and finally stormed and took a Russian trench close under the
guns of the fort. The Russians fled, leaving their dead and wounded
behind. After the _mêlée_, when night fell, five Japanese found
themselves in that particular trench with seven Russians--all pretty
badly wounded--with many others of course dead. The riflemen in the fort
were in such a nervous state, that at the slightest movement in the
trench they fired, regardless of whom they might hit. The whole party
remained quiet during the night and most of the next day. They were
suffering from wounds, and without food or water, but they dared not
move; they managed, however, to converse with each other a
little--especially through the Japanese lieutenant, who knew a little
Russian. On the second night the fever for water became severe. One of
the less wounded Russians volunteered to go and fetch some. He raised
himself from the ground, stood up in the darkness, but was discerned
from the fort, and shot. A second Russian did the same and was shot. A
Japanese did likewise. Then the rest lay, quiet again. Finally, the
darkness having increased and the thirst and the wounds being
intolerable, the Japanese lieutenant, who had been wounded in the legs
and could not move about, said that if one of the remaining Russians
would take him on his back he would guide the whole party into a place
of safety in the Japanese lines. So they did. The Russian soldier
crawled on his belly with the Japanese officer lying on his back, and
the others followed, keeping close to the ground. They reached the
Japanese quarters, and were immediately, looked after and cared for. A
few days afterwards the five Russians came on board the transport on
which my friend was engineer. They were being taken as prisoners to
Japan; but the Japanese crew could not do enough for them in the way of
tea and cigarettes and dressing their wounds, and they made quite a
jolly party all together on deck. The Japanese officer was also on
board, and he told my friend the story.

Gallantry towards the enemy has figured largely in the history of
War--sometimes as an individual impulse, sometimes as a recognized
instruction. European records afford us plenty of examples. The Chinese,
always great sticklers for politeness, used to insist in early times
that a warrior should not take advantage of his enemy when the latter
had emptied his quiver, but wait for him to pick up his arrows before
going on with the fight. And in one tale of old Japan, when one Daimio
was besieging another, the besieged party, having run short of
ammunition, requested a truce in order to fetch some more--which the
besiegers courteously granted!

The British officer who the other day picked up a wounded German soldier
and carried him across into the German lines, acted in quite the same
spirit. He saw that the man had been left accidentally when the Germans
were clearing away their wounded; and quite simply he walked forward
with the object of restoring him. But it cost him his life; for the
Germans, not at first perceiving his intention, fired and hit him in two
or three places. Nevertheless he lifted the man and succeeded in bearing
him to the German trench. The firing of course ceased, and the German
colonel saluted and thanked the officer, and pinned a ribbon to his
coat. He returned to the British lines, but died shortly after of the
wounds received.

"Ils sont superbes, ces braves!" said a French soldier in hospital to
Mrs. Haden Guest, indicating the German wounded also there. And a dying
German whispered to her: "I would never have fought against the French
and English had I known how kind they were. I was told that I was only
going on manoeuvres!"[29]

The French are generous in the recognition of bravery. A small company
rushed a Prussian battery in the neighbourhood of the Aisne and put all
the gunners out of action, except one who fought gamely to the last and
would not give in till he was fairly surrounded and made prisoner. "_Tu
est chic, tu--tu est bien chic_" shouted the _pioupious_ with one
accord, and shook him cordially by the hand as they led him away. How
preposterous do such stories as these make warfare appear!--and others,
such as the two opposing forces tacitly agreeing to fetch water at the
evening hour from an intervening stream without molestation on either
side; or the two parties using an old mill as a post-office, by means of
which letters could pass between France and Germany in defiance of all
decent war-regulations! How they illustrate the absolutely instinctive
and necessary tendency of the natural man (notwithstanding occasional
bouts of fury) to aid his fellow and fall into some sort of
understanding with him! Finally the fraternizations last Christmas
between the opposing lines in Northern France almost threatened at one
time to dissolve all the proprieties of official warfare. If they had
spread a little farther and lasted a little longer, who knows what might
have happened? High politics might have been utterly confounded, and
the elaborate schemes of statesmen on both sides entirely frustrated.
Headquarters had, through the officers, to interfere and all such
demonstrations of amity to be for the future forbidden. Could anything
more clearly show the beating of the great heart of Man beneath the
thickly overlying husks of class and class-government? When, oh! when
indeed, will the real human creature emerge from its age-long chrysalis?

FOOTNOTES:

[27] And even the hundred and one humane Associations of to-day derive a
great part of their enthusiasm and vitality from fighting each other!

[28] Put into English by Lady Gregory. (John Murray, 6s. net.)

[29] From _T.P.'s Weekly_, November 7, 1914.




XVI


NEVER AGAIN!

Like a great cry these words to-day rise from the lips of the
nations--"Never Again!" Never before certainly have such enormous masses
of human beings been locked in deadly grip with each other over the
earth, and never before, equally certainly, has their warfare been so
horrible in its deliberate preparation, so hideous, so ghastly in its
after-effects, as to-day. The nations stand round paralysed with disgust
and despair, almost unable to articulate; and when they do find voice it
is with the words above written.

How are we to give effect to the cry? Must we not call upon the Workers
of all countries--those who are the least responsible for the inception
of wars, and yet who suffer most by them, who bear the brunt of the
wounds, the slaughter, the disease, and the misery which are a necessary
part of them--to rise up and forbid them for ever from the earth? Let us
do so! For though few may follow and join with us to-day, yet to-morrow
and every day in the future, and every year, as the mass-peoples come
into their own, and to the knowledge of what they are and what they
desire to be, those numbers will increase, till the cry itself is no
longer a mere cry but an accomplished fact.

It is a hopeful sign that not only among bewildered onlookers and
outsiders but among the soldiers themselves (of the more civilized
countries) this cry is being taken up. Who, indeed, should know better
than they what they are talking about? The same words are on the lips at
this moment of thousands and thousands of French and English and German
soldiers,[30] and in no faint-hearted or evasive sense, but with the
conviction and indignation of experience. We may hope they will not be
forgotten this time when the war is over.

The truth is that not only was this particular war "bound to come," but
(among the civilized peoples) the refusal of war is also bound to come.
Two great developments are leading to this result. On the one hand, the
soldiers themselves, the fighters, are as a class becoming infinitely
more sensitive, more intelligent, more capable of humane feeling, less
stupidly "patriotic" and prejudiced against their enemies than were the
soldiers of a century ago--say, of the time of Wellington; on the other
hand, the horrors, the hideousness, the folly, and the waste of war are
infinitely greater. It is inevitable that these two contradictory
movements, mounting up on opposite sides, must at last clash. The rising
conscience of Humanity must in the end say to the War-fiend, "Get thee
behind me, Satan!" Never before have there passed over the fields of
Europe armies so intelligent, so trained, so observant, so sensitive as
those to-day of Belgium, France, England, and Germany. Some day or other
they will return to their homes; but when they do it will be with a
tale that will give to the Western world an understanding of what war
means, such as it never had before.

All the same, if the word _is_ to be "Never Again!" it must come through
the masses themselves (from whom the fighters are mainly drawn); it must
be through them that this consummation must be realized. It must be
through the banding together and determined and combined effort of the
Unions, local, national, and international, and through the weight of
the workers' influence in all their associations and in all countries.
To put much reliance in this matter upon the "classes" is rash; for
though just now the latter are sentimentalizing freely over the
subject--having got into nearer touch with it than ever before--yet when
all is settled down, and the day arrives once more that _their_
interests point to war, it is only too likely that they (or the majority
of them) will not hesitate to sacrifice the masses--unless, indeed, the
power to do so has already departed from them.

And it is no good for _us_ to sentimentalize on the subject. We must not
blink facts. And the fact is that "it's a long way" to _Never Again_.
The _causes_ of War must be destroyed first; and, as I have more than
once tried to make clear, the causes ramify through our midst; they are
like the roots, pervading the body politic, of some fell disease whose
outbreak on the surface shocks and affrights us. To dislodge and
extirpate these roots is a long business. But there is this consolation
about it--that it is a business which we can all of us begin at once, in
our own lives!

Probably wars will still for many a century continue, though less
frequent we hope. And if the people themselves _want_ to fight, and must
fight, who is to say them Nay? In such case we need not be overmuch
troubled. There are many things worse than fighting; and there are many
wounds and injuries which people inflict on each other worse than bodily
wounds and injuries--only they are not so plain to see. But I certainly
would say--as indeed the peasant says in every land--"Let those who
begin the quarrel do the fighting"; and let those who have to do the
fighting and bear the brunt of it (including the women) decide whether
there _shall_ be fighting or not. To leave the dread arbitrament of War
in the hands of private groups and cliques who, for their own ends and
interests, are willing to see the widespread slaughter of their
fellow-countrymen and the ruin of innumerable homes is hateful beyond
words.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] See "A War-Note for Democrats," by H.M. Tomlinson _(English
Review_, December, 1914). "This war was bound to come, and we've got to
finish it proper. No more of this bloody rot for the kids, an' chance
it."




XVII


THE TREE OF LIFE

_February_, 1915.

Finally, and looking back on all we have said, and especially on the
Christmas scenes and celebrations between the trenches in this war and
the many similar fraternizations of the rank and file of opposing armies
in former wars, one realizes the monstrosity and absurdity of the
present conflict--its anachronism and out-of-dateness in the existing
age of human thought and feeling. The whole European situation resembles
a game of marbles played by schoolboys. It is not much more dignified
than that. Each boy tries on the quiet to appropriate some of the
marbles out of another boy's bag. From time to time, in consequence,
furious scrimmages arise--generally between two boys--the others
looking' on and laughing, knowing well that they themselves are guilty
of the same tricks. Presently, in the fortunes of the game, one boy--a
little more blundering or a little less disguised than the others--lays
himself open to the accusations of the whole crew. They all fall upon
him, and give him a good drubbing; and even some of them say they are
punishing him _for his good_! When shall we make an end, once for all,
of this murderous nonsense?

However our Tommy Atkinses have been worked up to fighting point by
fears for the safety of old England, or by indignation at atrocities
actually observed or distantly reported; however the German soldiers
have been affected by similar fears and indignations, or the French the
same; however the political coil has been engineered (as engineered in
such cases it always is), and whatever inducements of pay or patriotism
have been put in operation and sentiments circulated by the Press--one
thing remains perfectly certain: that left to themselves these men would
never have quarrelled, never have attacked each other. One thing is
perfectly certain: that such a war as the present is the result of the
activity of governing cliques and classes in the various nations,
acting through what are called "Diplomatic" channels, for the most part
in secret and unbeknown to their respective mass-peoples, and for
motives best known to themselves.

One would not venture to say that _all_ wars are so engineered, for
there certainly are occasionally wars which are the spontaneous
expression of two nations' natural hostility and hatred; but these are
rare, very rare, and the war in which we are concerned at present is
certainly not one of them. Also one would not venture to say that though
in the present affair the actuating motives have been of class origin,
and have been worked through secret channels, the motives so put in
action have all been base and mean. That would be going too far. Some of
the motives may have been high-minded and generous, some may have been
mean, and others may have been mean and yet _unconsciously_ so. But
certainly when one looks at the conditions of public and political life,
and the arrangements and concatenations by which influence there is
exerted and secured, and sees (as one must) the pretty bad corruption
which pervades the various parties in all the modern States--the
commercial briberies, the lies of the Press, the poses and
prevarications of Diplomats and Ministers--one cannot but realize the
great probability that the private advantage of individuals or classes
has been (in the present case) a prevailing instigation. The fact that
in Britain two influential and honourable Cabinet Ministers resigned at
once on the declaration of war (a fact upon which the Press has been
curiously silent) cannot but "give one to think." One cannot but realize
that the fighting men in all these nations are the pawns and counters of
a game which is being played for the benefit--or supposed benefit--of
certain classes; that public opinion is a huge millstream which has to
be engineered; that the Press is a channel for its direction, and Money
the secret power which commands the situation.

The fact is sad, but it must be faced. And the facing of it leads
inevitably to the question, "How, then, can Healing ever come?" If (it
will be said) the origin of wars is in the diseased condition of the
nations, what prospect is there of their ever ceasing? And one sees at
once that the prospect is not immediate. One sees at once that Peace
Societies and Nobel Prizes and Hague Tribunals and reforms of the
Diplomatic Service and democratic control of Foreign Secretaries and
Quaker and Tolstoyan preachments--though all these things may be good in
their way--will never bring us swiftly to the realization of peace. The
roots of the Tree of Life lie deeper.

We have seen it a dozen times in the foregoing pages. Only when the
nations cease to be diseased in themselves will they cease fighting with
each other. And the disease of the modern nations is the disease of
disunity--not, as I have already said, the mere existence of variety of
occupation and habit, for that is perfectly natural and healthy, but the
disease by which one class preys upon another and upon the nation--the
disease of parasitism and selfish domination. The health of a people
consists in that people's real _unity_, the organic life by which each
section contributes freely and generously to the welfare of the whole,
identifies itself with that welfare, and holds it a dishonour to snatch
for itself the life which should belong to all. A nation which realized
_that_ kind of life would be powerful and healthy beyond words; it would
not only be splendidly glad and prosperous and unassailable in itself,
but it would inevitably infect all other nations with whom it had
dealings with the same principle. Having the Tree of Life well rooted
within its own garden, its leaves and fruit and all its acts and
expressions would be for the healing of the peoples around. But a nation
divided against itself by parasitic and self-exalting cliques and
sections could never stand. It could never be healthy. No armaments nor
ingenuity of science and organization could save it, and even though the
form of its institutions were democratic, if the reality of Democracy
were not there, its peace crusades and prizes and sentimental
Conferences and Christianities would be of little avail.

At this juncture, then, all over Europe, when the classes are failing us
and by their underhand machinations continually embroiling one nation
with another, it is above all necessary that the mass-peoples should
move and insist upon the representation of their great unitary and
communal life and interests. It is high time that they should open
their eyes and see with clear vision what is going on over their heads,
and more than high time that they should refuse to take part in the
Quarrels of those who (professionally) live upon their labour. It is
indeed astonishing that the awakening has been so long in coming; but
surely it cannot be greatly delayed now. Underneath all the ambitions of
certain individuals and groups; underneath all the greed and chicanery
of others; underneath the widespread ignorance, mother of prejudice,
which sunders folk of different race or colour-deep down the human heart
beats practically the same in all lands, drawing us little mortals
together.

Strangely enough--and yet not strangely--it beats strongest and clearest
often in the simplest, the least sophisticated. Those who live nearest
the truth of their own hearts are nearest to the hearts of others. Those
who have known the realities of the world, and what Life is close to the
earth--they are the same in all lands--they have at least the key to the
understanding of each other. The old needs of life, its destinies and
fatalities, its sorrows and joys, its exaltations and depressions
--these are the same everywhere; and to the manual workers
--the peasant, the labourer, the sailor, the mechanic--the
world-old trades, pursuits, crafts, and callings with which they are so
familiar supply a kind of freemasonry which ensures them even among
strangers a kindly welcome and an easy admittance. If you want to travel
in foreign lands, you will find that to be skilled in one or two manual
trades is better than a high official passport.

Among such people there is no natural hatred of each other. Despite all
the foam and fury of the Press over the present war, I doubt whether
there is any really violent feeling of the working masses on either side
between England and Germany. There certainly is no great amount in
England, either among the country-folk or the town artisans and
mechanics; and if there be much in Germany (which is quite doubtful) it
is fairly obviously due to the _animus_ which has been aroused and the
_virus_ which has been propagated by political and social schemers.

We have had enough of Hatred and Jealousy. For a century now commercial
rivalry and competition, the perfectionment of the engines of war, and
the science of destruction have sufficiently occupied the nations--with
results only of disaster and distress and ruin to all concerned. To-day
surely another epoch opens before us--an epoch of intelligent
helpfulness and fraternity, an epoch even of the simplest common sense.
We have rejoiced to tread and trample the other peoples underfoot, to
malign and traduce them, to single out and magnify their defects, to
boast ourselves over them. And acting thus we have but made the more
enemies. Now surely comes an era of recognition and understanding, and
with it the glad assurance that we have friends in all the ends of the
earth.

We--and I speak of the European nations generally--have talked loudly of
our own glory; but have we welcomed and acclaimed the glory and beauty
of the other peoples and races around us--among whom it is our privilege
to dwell? We have boasted to love each our own country, but have we
cared at all for the other countries too? Verily I suspect that it is
because we have _not_ truly loved our own countries, but have betrayed
them for private profit, that we have thought fit to hate our neighbours
and ill-use them for our profit too.

What a wonderful old globe this is, with its jewelled constellations of
humanity! Alfred Russel Wallace, in his _Travels on the Amazon_ (1853,
ch. xvii), says: "I do not remember a single circumstance in my travels
so striking and so new, or that so well fulfilled all previous
expectation, as my first view of the real uncivilized inhabitants of the
river Uaupés.... I felt that I was as much in the midst of something new
and startling, as if I had been instantaneously transported to a distant
and unknown country." He then speaks of the "quiet, good-natured,
inoffensive" character of these copper-coloured natives, and of their
quickness of hand and skill, and continues: "Their figures are generally
superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest
statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human
form." Elsewhere he says[31]: "Their whole aspect and manner were
different [from the semi-civilized Indians]; they walked with the free
step of the independent forest-dweller ... original and self-sustaining
as the wild animals of the forest ... living their own lives in their
own way, as they had done for countless generations before America was
discovered. The true denizen of the Amazonian forests, like the forest
itself, is unique and not to be forgotten."

Not long ago I was talking to a shrewd, vigorous old English lady who
had spent some forty years of her life among the Kafirs in South Africa
and knew them intimately. She said (not knowing anything about _my_
feelings): "Ah! you British think a great deal about yourselves. You
think you are the finest race on earth; but I tell you the Kafirs are
finer. They are splendid. Whether for their physical attributes, or
their mental, or for their qualities of soul, I sometimes think _they_
are the finest people in the world." Whether the old lady was right (and
one has heard others say much the same), or whether she was carried away
by her enthusiasm, the fact remains that here is a people _capable_ of
exciting such enthusiasm, and certainly capable of exciting much
admiration among all who know them well.

Read the accounts of the Polynesian peoples at an early period--before
commerce and the missionaries had come among them--as given in the pages
of Captain Cook, of Herman Melville, or even as adumbrated in their past
life in the writings of R.L. Stevenson--what a picture of health and
gaiety and beauty! Surely never was there a more charming and happy
folk--even if long-pig did occasionally in their feasts alternate with
wild-pig.

And yet how strange that the white man, with all his science and all his
so-called Christianity, has only come among these three peoples
mentioned (and how many more?) to destroy and defile them--to flog the
mild and innocent native of the Amazons to death for greed of his
rubber; to rob the Kafir of his free wild lands and blast his life with
drink and slavery in the diamond mines; to degrade and exterminate the
Pacific islanders with all the vices and diseases of "civilization"!

Think of the Chinese--that extraordinary people coming down from the
remotest ages of history, with their habits and institutions apparently
but little changed--so kindly, so "all there," so bent on making the
best of this world. "At the first sight of these ugly, cheery, vigorous
people I loved them. Their gaiety, as of children, their friendliness,
their profound humanity, struck me from the first and remained with me
to the last."[32] And the verdict of all who know the people well--in
the interior of the country of course--is the same. Think of the
Japanese with their slight and simple, but exceedingly artistic and
exceedingly heroic type of civilization.

Or, again, of the East Indian peoples, so unfitted as a rule for making
the best of this world, so passive, dreamy, subtle, unpractical, and yet
with their marvellous spiritual gift, their intuition (also since the
dawn of history) and conviction of another plane of being than that in
which we mostly move, and their occasional power of distinctly sensing
that plane and acting on its indications. Think of their ancient
religious philosophy--their doctrine of world-unity--absolutely
foundational and inexpugnable, the corner-stone of all metaphysics,
science, and politics, and of the latest most modern democracy; and
still realized and believed in in India as nowhere else in the world.

Think of the gentle Buddhistic Burmese, the active, social Malays, the
hard-featured, hard-lived Thibetans and Mongolians. Think of the Arabian
and Moorish and Berber races, who, once the masters of the science and
comforts of civilization, of their own accord (but in accordance also
with their religion) abandoned the worship of all these idols and
returned to the Biblical simplicity of four thousand years ago--having
realized that they already possessed something better, namely, the glory
of the sky and the earth, the sun and the desert sands, and the freedom
of love and adventure. How strange, and yet how natural, that sundered
only by a narrow strip of sea they even now should look back upon all
the laborious, feverish, and overcrowded wealth of Europe and _seeing
the cost thereof_ should feel for it only contempt! For that, indeed,
is actually for the most part the case--though not of course without
exceptions among certain sections of the population.

Or again, the millions and millions of Great and Little Russian
peasants. Big-framed, big-hearted, patient, friendly, with a great
natural gift for association and co-operation, peacefully minded and
profoundly religious; yet superstitious, and capable of rising at any
moment _en masse_ to the call of a great crusade or "holy war"; it might
seem that they hold all Western Europe in the hollow of their hands.
Indeed they constitute not only a hope and promise of deliverance to our
modern world, but also a considerable danger. All depends on how we
dispose ourselves towards them. Should the nations of Western Europe
rouse their hatred by chicanery and mean treatment the result might be
fatal. If their flood once began to move, no battle array of armaments
would be of any use--any more than a revolver against a rising tide--the
flood would flow round and over us. But if on the other hand we could
really reach the heart of this great people, if we could treat them
really generously and with understanding, we should create a response
there, and a recognition, which would remove all risk to ourselves, and
possibly help to free Russia from the great burden of political
servitude and ignorance which has so long oppressed her peasantry.

Or think of the Servians--that hospitable people, good lovers and good
haters, with their ancient, almost prehistoric, system of family
communities surviving down to modern days, and blossoming out in a
perfect genius for co-operative agriculture and Raffeisen banks!

Or the Finns, the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the Danes (if I may class
these together); what a clear, clean-minded, healthy people are these,
so direct in their touch on Nature and the human instincts, so
democratic, bold, and progressive in their social organizations--what a
privilege to have them as our near neighbours and relatives! Or the
Germans, in many ways resembling the last mentioned group, only richer
and more varied in their culture and racial characteristics! Or the
Dutch, so well-based and broad-seated both in body and mind, with their
ample bowels of compassion and their well-equipped brains, so full of
tenderness and of sturdy commonsense, what a gift has been theirs to
Europe, what a legacy of artistic treasure and of heroic record! Or the
Spanish with their beautiful and dignified women, or the French with
their fine logical and artistic sense, or the Hungarians, Greeks, and
Italians!

Have we nothing to do but to prepare engines of death and of slaughter
against all these peoples? Is our main idea of relation to them one of
domination and profit? Have we no use for them but to gain their riches,
and in exchange to lose our own souls? Or shall we, like the Prussians,
seek to "impose" our own standards of so-called culture on them, and
trim their infinite variety and grace to one sorry pattern? These are
all in their diverse glory and beauty as leaves of the one great Tree
whose branches spread over the earth. Whoever understands this, and
penetrating to the great heart beneath, recognizes the same original
life in them all, will possess the secret of salvation; whatever nation
first casts aside the filthy rags of its own self-righteousness and the
defiling and sordid garment of mercenary gain, and accepts the others
frankly as its brother and sister nations, all of one family--that
nation will become the Healer and Redeemer of the World.

It is interesting to find that, according to the Book of Revelation, the
tree of which we have been speaking grows with its roots "in the pure
river of the water of Life, which proceeds from the throne of God and
the Lamb." What exactly the author of the book meant by this passage has
been much debated. It is clear that there is here a veiled allusion to
the Zodiac--that mysterious belt of constellations which runs like a
river round the whole starry heavens, and rises in the constellation of
the Ram or He-lamb--but to debate _that_ question now would be
unprofitable, even were one fully competent to do so. More to the point
is it to see that this remarkable simile has an inner sense applicable
to mankind, and so far independent of any allusion to the Zodiac. This
Tree that is for the healing of the nations has its roots in the pure
water of Life which flows from the great Throne. We have seen in an
early chapter where the roots of Strife between the nations are to be
sought for, and whence they draw their nourishment. They are to be found
in the very muddy waters of domination and selfishness and greed. But
the roots of the Tree of Healing are in the pure waters of Life. Right
down below all the folly and meanness which clouds men's souls flows the
universal Life pure from its original source. The longer you live, the
more clearly and certainly you will perceive it. In the eyes of the men
and women around you you will perceive it, and in the eyes of the
children--aye, and even of the animals. Unclean, no doubt, will the
surface be--muddied with meannesses and self-motives; and among those
classes and currents of people who chiefly delight to dwell in the midst
of such things (who dwell in the floating mire of malice and envy and
self-assertion and avarice and conceit and deceit and domination and
other such refuse), the waters will be foul indeed; but below these
classes, among the simple, comparatively unselfconscious types of
humanity who everywhere represent the universal life (without, in a
sense, being aware of it), and again, above them, among those whose
spirits have passed "in compassion and determination around the whole
earth and found only equals and lovers," the water flows pure and free.
These two groups--between them forming far the largest and most
important mass of human kind--are those whose influence and tendency is
toward peace and amity. It is only the scurrying, avaricious,
fever-stricken, and, for all their wealth, poverty-stricken classes and
cliques of the civilization-period who are the sources of discord and
strife--and they only for a time. In the end it will be found that by
every river and stream and tiny brook over the whole earth grows the
invincible Tree of Life, whose roots are deep in the human heart, and
whose leaves are for the healing of the Nations.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] _My Life_, vol ii, p. 288.

[32] G. Lowes Dickinson, _Civilizations of India, China, and Japan_,
p.43. See also Eugene Simon, _La Cité Chinoise,_ passim.




       *       *       *       *       *




APPENDIX


[The following extracts, mostly from contemporaneous sources, are
gathered together in an Appendix with the object of throwing
side-lights, _often from opposing points of view_, on the questions
raised in the text.]




       *       *       *       *       *




APPENDIX



A NEW AND BETTER PEACE.


"If we now destroy the German national idol, it must not be to set up an
idol of our own in its place. There will be ruin enough after the war to
repair, and a heavy task for all the nations in repairing it; but if
they have learned then that peace is not a disguised war but a state of
being in which men and nations alike pursue their own ideas of
excellence without rivalry, then we shall know that the irrevocable dead
have not died in vain."--_"Times" Literary Supplement_, _September_ 17,
1914.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE CHANGE FROM THE GERMANY OF KANT AND GOETHE AND SCHUBERT TO THE
GERMANY OF TO-DAY--AND THE DELUSION OF IMPERIALISM.


"What, then, has wrought this wonderful change in a people so closely
allied to ourselves, whose race is so similar that their children in the
hotels of France and Italy are mistaken for British children? The human
raw material is the same, and until half a century ago gave results
which won our respect and admiration. What is this change of the last
half-century which from the same material gives results so different?
There can be only one answer. The old Germany was a Germany of small,
self-governing States, of small political power; the new Germany is a
'great' Germany, with a new ideal and spirit which comes of victory and
military and political power, of the reshaping of political and social
institutions which the retention of conquered territory demands, its
militarization, regimentation, centralization, and unchallenged
authority; the cultivation of the spirit of domination, the desire to
justify and to frame a philosophy to buttress it. Some one has spoken of
the war which made 'Germany great and Germans small.'..."

"...So in our day, it is not the German national faith, the
_Deutschtum_, the belief that the German national ideal is best for the
German--it is not that belief that is a danger to Europe. It is a belief
that that German national ideal is the best for all other people, and
that the Germans have a right to impose it by the force of their armies.
It is that belief alone which can be destroyed by armies. We must show
that we do not intend to be brought under German rule, or have German
ideals imposed upon us, and having demonstrated that, the Allies must
show that they in their turn have no intention of imposing their ideals
or their rule or their dominance upon German peoples. The Allies must
show after this war that they do not desire to be the masters of the
German peoples or States, but their partners and associates in a Europe
which none shall dominate, but which all shall share."--_From "Shall
this War End German Militarism?" by Norman Angell_.

       *       *       *       *       *

GERMAN PUBLIC OPINION IN 1913 WITH REGARD TO THE IMPENDING WAR.


The Report on this subject given in the French Yellow Book (Section 5)
throws much light on the attitude of the various classes in Germany. In
favour of peace (it says) are "the large mass of workmen, artisans, and
peasants, who are peaceful by instinct"; a considerable number of
non-military nobility, and of "manufacturers, merchants, and financiers
of minor importance, to whom even a victorious war would bring
bankruptcy"; also a vast number of those who are continually in a state
of "suppressed revolt against Prussian policy," like the "Government and
ruling classes of the great southern States, Saxony, Bavaria,
Wurtemburg," and so forth.

On the other hand, in favour of war are the great, mainly Prussian, war
party, consisting of the military aristocracy and nobility "who see with
terror the democratization of Germany and the growing force of the
Socialist party"; "others who consider war as necessary for economic
reasons found in over-population and over-production, the need of
markets and outlets"; the great _bourgeoisie_, "which also has its
reasons of a social nature--the upper middle class being no less
affected than the nobility by the democratization of Germany ... and,
finally, the gun and armour-plate manufacturers, the great merchants who
clamour for greater markets, and the bankers who speculate on the Golden
Age and the indemnity of war. These, too, think that war would be good
business."

The whole paper is too long for extensive citation here, but is well
worth reading.

       *       *       *       *       *

POLITICAL IGNORANCE IN GERMANY.


"On Tuesday last at the Union Society Mr. Dudley Ward, late Berlin
correspondent of the _Daily Chronicle_ and other English papers, and
Fellow of St. John's College, dealt with 'The War from the German Point
of View.' Mr. Ward's profound knowledge of Germany, especially since
1911, and his obvious attempt to review recent events with impartiality,
was a revelation to Cambridge, and a very large audience showed its
enthusiastic appreciation of his ability and his frankness.

"Mr. Ward emphasized particularly the _astonishing political ignorance_
of the German people as a whole, an ignorance quite unintelligible to
any one unacquainted with their Press and their political institutions.
Public opinion, as he said, counts for little in Germany, and the
Government can generally guide it into any direction it may please, and
this fact is essential to the understanding of the events--diplomatic
events--which led to the declaration of war."--_From the "Cambridge
Magazine," December 5, 1914._

       *       *       *       *       *

"One of the political phenomena of America has always been the
indifference of the German to active participation in politics. Efforts
to persuade him to organize with any political party have never
succeeded except in isolated cases. The German-American has been
regarded as an independent politically. Until Europe's conflict raised
concealed characteristics to the surface the German-American's
indifference to politics had not been looked upon as a serious
matter."--_From article by Alt. John Herbert in the London "Daily News,"
December,_ 1914.

       *       *       *       *       *

GERMANY'S PURPOSE.


_According to Herr Maximilien Harden's article in "Die Zukunft," as
reproduced in the "New York Times," December, 1914_.

"Not as weak-willed blunderers have we under-taken the fearful risk of
this war. We wanted it. Because we had to wish it and could wish it. May
the Teuton devil throttle those whiners whose pleas for excuses make us
ludicrous in these hours of lofty experience. We do not stand, and shall
not place ourselves, before the Court of Europe. Our power shall create
new law in Europe. Germany strikes. If it conquers new realms for its
genius, the priesthood of all the gods will sing songs of praise to the
good war.

"We are at the beginning of a war the development and duration of which
are incalculable, and in which up to date no foe has been brought to his
knees. We wage the war in order to free enslaved peoples, and thereafter
to comfort ourselves with the unselfish and useless consciousness of our
own righteousness. We wage it from the lofty point of view and with the
conviction that Germany, as a result of her achievements and in
proportion to them, is justified in asking, and must obtain, wider room
on earth for development and for working out the possibilities that are
in her."

       *       *       *       *       *

ENGLAND'S PERFIDY.


_From the Manifesto of Professors Haeckel and Eucken, September, 1914._

"What is happening to-day surpasses every instance from the past; this
last example will be permanently characterized in the annals of the
world as the _indelible shame of England_. Great Britain is fighting for
a Slavic, semi-Asiatic Power _against Teutonism_; she is fighting, not
only in the ranks of barbarism but also on the side of _wrong and
injustice_, for let it not be forgotten that Russia began the war,
because she refused to permit adequate expiation for a miserable
assassination; but the blame for extending the limits of the present
conflict to the proportions of a world-war, through which the sum of
human culture is threatened, rests upon England.

"And the reason for all this? Because England was _envious_ of Germany's
greatness, because she was bound to hinder further expansion of the
German sphere at any cost! There cannot be the least doubt that England
was determined from the start to break in upon Germany's great conflict
for _national existence_, to cast as many stones as possible in
Germany's path, and to block her every effort toward adequate expansion.
England lay in wait until the favourable opportunity for inflicting a
lasting injury upon Germany should come, and promptly seized upon _the
unavoidable German invasion of Belgian territory_ as a pretext for
draping her own brutal national egotism in a mantle of decency.

"_Or is there in the whole world a person so simple as to believe that
England would have declared war upon France, had the latter Power
invaded Belgium?_ In that event, England would have shed hypocritical
tears over the necessary violation of international law, while
concealing a laughing face behind the mask. The most repulsive thing in
the whole business is this hypocritical Pharisaism; it merits only
contempt.

"History shows that such sentiments as these, far from guiding nations
upward, lead them along the downward path. But we of this present time
have fixed our faith firm as a rock upon our righteous cause, and upon
the superior power and the inflexible will for victory that abide in the
German nation. Nevertheless the deplorable fact remains, that the
boundless egotism already mentioned has for that span of the future
discernible to us destroyed the collaboration of the two nations which
was so full of promise for the intellectual uplift of humanity. But the
other party has willed it so. Upon England alone rests the monstrous
guilt and the responsibility in the eye of world-history."

"ERNST HAECKEL.

"RUDOLF EUCKEN."

       *       *       *       *       *

FROM THE MANIFESTO OF PROFESSOR EUCKEN.


"Let us hope that our German weapons will show the Englishmen that they
were entirely wrong in their reckoning; but first let us point out the
wide discrepancy between their motives and ours.

"With them it is self-seeking, envy, calculation; with us the conviction
that we are fighting for the holiest possessions of our people, for
right and justice."

       *       *       *       *       *

NIETZSCHE ON DISARMAMENT.


The following extract from _Nietzsche_ may be worth quoting as
presenting one aspect of his many-sided thought:--

"Perhaps a memorable day will come when a nation renowned in wars and
victories, distinguished by the highest development of military order
and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for
these objects, will voluntarily exclaim, 'We will break our swords,' and
will destroy its whole military system, lock, stock, and barrel. To make
ourselves defenceless (after having been most strongly defended), from
loftiness of sentiment, is the means towards genuine peace.... The
so-called armed peace that prevails at present in all countries is a
sign of a bellicose disposition, that trusts neither itself nor its
neighbour, and, partly from hate partly from fear, refuses to lay down
its weapons. Better to perish than to hate and fear; and twice better to
perish than to make oneself hated and feared."--_From "Human all too
Human," vol. ii. (translated by P.V. Colm, 1911)_.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE EFFECT OF DISARMAMENT.


"Just as the growth of armaments increases the common danger, so a
policy of reduction would have the opposite effect, and were one
European country boldly to adopt disarmament it would strengthen
incalculably the forces making for peace in all countries. The armaments
of European nations are interdependent, and were such a policy pursued
by one nation it would be followed, if not by immediate disarmament in
other nations, at any rate, by very considerable reductions. It is very
easy to underrate the feeling which for some time past has been growing
throughout Europe against the colossal waste of armaments. Even in
Germany, whose geographical position from a military point of view is
weak, the Socialist vote, which is cast strenuously against armaments,
has grown at each election until it now represents some 35 per cent, of
the total electorate. The great weapon with which reaction has attempted
to combat Socialist growth has been an appeal against the 'unpatriotic'
opposition to armaments. What effect would this appeal have in face of
disarmament abroad? The Socialist party, with its anti-militarist
programme, would sweep Germany and compel the Government rapidly to
follow suit. Sooner or later the internal pressure of public opinion
would force the adoption of a similar policy upon the Government of
every civilized country in Europe."--_From "Why Britain Should Disarm"
by George Benson (National Labour Press, 1d.)_.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE PRINCIPLE OF NATIONALITY.


"Now the war has come, and when it is over let us be careful not to make
the same mistake or the same sort of mistake as Germany made when she
had France prostrate at her feet in 1870. (Cheers.) Let us, whatever we
do, fight for and work towards great and sound principles for the
European system. And the first of those principles which we should keep
before us is the principle of nationality--that is to say, not the
conquest or subjugation of any great community or of any strong race of
men, but the setting free of those races which have been subjugated and
conquered; and if doubt arises about disputed areas of country we should
try to settle their ultimate destination in the reconstruction of Europe
which must follow from this war with a fair regard to the wishes and
feelings of the people who live in them."--_From the speech of Mr.
Churchill, September_ 11, 1914, at the London Opera House.

       *       *       *       *       *


CONSCRIPTION.

"If we, in a moment of unthinking panic, adopt the advice of our
militarists and develop an Army based on universal service, we shall
prepare for ourselves the very situation in which Germany finds itself
at this moment. However much we may protest that our aims are pacific,
and that our Army is intended only for defensive purposes, foreign
nations will view it with alarm, and will reflect that, by the help of
our Navy, we can land an armed force in any country that has a sea
coast. We shall thus incur the risk of a coalition against us. It is
said that if we had had a conscript Army, the present war would not have
taken place. But it is not realized that a different and far more
dangerous war would have been probable, a war in which we should have
had no continental Allies, but should have been resisted, as Germany is
being resisted, in order to relieve Europe of an intolerable terror....

"In a word, of all the measures open to us to adopt, none is so likely
to bring us to disaster as universal military service."--_By Hon.
Bertrand Russell (in "The Labour Leader," October 15, 1914)._

       *       *       *       *       *

H.G. WELLS ON THE REGULATION OF ARMAMENTS AND NEUTRALIZATION OF THE SEA.


"If there is courage and honesty enough in men, I believe it will be
possible to establish a world Council for the regulation of armaments as
the natural outcome of this war. First, the trade in armaments must be
absolutely killed. And then the next supremely important measure to
secure the peace of the world is the neutralization of the sea.

"It will lie in the power of England, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, and
the United States, if Germany and Austria are shattered in this war, to
forbid the further building of any more ships of war at all."--_From the
"Daily Chronicle," August 21, 1914._

       *       *       *       *       *

THE WAR AND DEMOCRACY.


"It will be necessary soon to consider the relations of democracy to the
war. The war is a war of nationalities, but it was not made by peoples.
Its begetter was a comparatively small band of unscrupulous, blind, and
conceited persons, who were clever and persistent enough to demoralize a
whole people. In so far as they permitted themselves to be demoralized
the people were to blame, but the chief blame lies on the small band.
Europe is laid waste, hundreds of thousands of men murdered, and
practically every human being in the occidental hemisphere made to
suffer, not for the amelioration of a race, but in order to satisfy the
idiotic ambitions of a handful. Let not this fact be forgotten.
Democracy will not forget it. And foreign policy in the future will not
be left in the hands of any autocracy, by whatever specious name the
autocracy may call itself. Ruling classes have always said that masses
were incapable of understanding foreign policy. The masses understand it
now. They understand that in spite of very earnest efforts in various
Cabinets, the ruling classes have failed to avert the most terrible
disaster in history. The masses will say to themselves, 'At any rate we
couldn't have done worse than that.' The masses know that if the war
decision had been openly submitted to a representative German chamber,
instead of being taken in concealment and amid disgusting chicane, no
war would have occurred. It is absolutely certain that the triumph of
democracy, and nothing else, will end war as an institution. War will be
ended when the Foreign Offices are subjected to popular control. That
popular control is coming."--_Arnold Bennett in the "Daily News," October
15, 1914._

       *       *       *       *       *

THE FUTURE SETTLEMENT.


Let us turn, then, from the past to the future and ask, first, what the
governmental mind, left to itself, is likely to make of Europe when the
war is finished; secondly, what we, on our part, want and mean to make
of it. What the diplomatists will make of it is written large on every
page of history. Again and again they have "settled" Europe, and always
in such a way as to leave roots for the growth of new wars. For always
they have settled it from the point of view of States, instead of from
the point of view of human life. How one "Power" may be aggrandized and
another curtailed, how the spoils may be divided among the victors, how
the "balance" may be arranged--these kinds of considerations and these
alone have influenced their minds. The desires of peoples, the
interests of peoples, that sense of nationality which is as real a thing
as the State is fictitious--to all that they have been indifferent....

What can be foreseen with certainty is, that if the peace is to be made
by the same men who made the war it will be so made that in another
quarter of a century there will be another war on as gigantic a
scale....

When this war is over Europe might be settled, then and there, if the
peoples so willed it and made their will effective, in such a way that
there would never again be a European War....

First, the whole idea of aggrandizing one nation and humiliating another
must be set aside.... Secondly, in rearranging the boundaries of States,
one point, and one only, must be kept in mind: to give to all peoples
suffering and protesting under alien rule the right to decide whether
they will become an autonomous unit, or will join the political system
of some other nation.... Let no community be coerced under British rule
that wants to be self-governing. We have had the courage, though late,
to apply this principle to South Africa and Ireland. There remains our
greatest act of courage and wisdom--to apply it to India.--_G. Lowes
Dickinson, "The War and the Way Out," pp. 34 et seq._

       *       *       *       *       *

A WAR NOTE FOR DEMOCRATS.


"The truth about the present fighting--well, it cannot be rendered in
words significant enough to shock into understanding the people who are
looking in the newspapers now for stories of heroism, 'brilliant bayonet
charges,' and the rest of the inducements which sell stories of warfare,
but tell us nothing about it. Perhaps, indeed, there are no words for
it. I doubt whether the sincerest artist, finely sensitive, and with the
choicest army of words at his ready and accurate command, could assemble
the case. The mind of a witness in France is not stirred; it is stunned.
One is speechless before the spectacle of men, not fighting in the way
two angry men would fight, but coolly blasting great masses of their
opponents to pieces at long range, and out of sight of each other, till
a region with its wrecked towns and homesteads is littered with human
bowels and fragments. It is possible to value human life too highly,
maybe. But what profit, physical, moral, or economic, can be got from
draining several nations' best male generative force into the clay, I
leave it to worshippers of tribal war-gods of whatever church, and to
the military minds, to explain. But unless the democracies of Europe,
after settling this business, see to securing such a settlement
--whatever the governing classes desire--that this Continental
waste can never occur again, then one would have to admit human nature
is too stupid and base to be troubled over any longer."--_H.M.
Tomlinson, "English Review," December, 1914, p. 75_.

       *       *       *       *       *

PATRIOTISM!


"It would seem, then, that love of our country can flourish only through
the hatred of other countries, and the massacre of those who sacrifice
themselves in defence of them. There is in this theory a ferocious
absurdity, a Neronian dilettantism which repels me in the very depths of
my being. No! Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and
slay those noble and faithful souls who also love their country, but
rather that I should honour them, and seek to unite myself with them for
our common good....

"You Socialists on both sides claim to be defending liberty against
tyranny--French liberty against the Kaiser, Germany liberty against the
Tsar. Would you defend one despotism against another? _Unite and make
war on both_. There was no reason for war between the Western nations;
French, English, and German, we are all brothers, and do not hate one
another. The war-preaching Press is envenomed by a minority, a minority
vitally interested in maintaining these hatreds; but our peoples, I
know, ask for peace and liberty, and that alone."--_From Romain
Rolland's pamphlet "Above the Battlefield," Cambridge, 1914_.

       *       *       *       *       *

NO PATRIOTISM IN BUSINESS!


The following leaderette is from the _Glasgow Evening Citizen_ for the
15th of January:--

"In business patriotism does not enter. Insistently the pocket comes
first. And if the British consumer of aniline dyes can obtain his raw
material more advantageously from the German than from the British
producer, he will probably be ready to do so for the greater gain of
more economic production in his own business."

       *       *       *       *       *

MANIFESTO OF THE INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY.


"We desire neither the aggrandizement of German militarism nor Russian
militarism, but the danger is that this war will promote one or the
other. Britain has placed herself behind Russia, the most reactionary,
corrupt, and oppressive Power in Europe. If Russia is permitted to
gratify her territorial ambitions and extend her Cossack rule,
civilization and democracy will be gravely imperilled. Is it for this
that Britain has drawn the sword?

"To us who are Socialists the workers of Germany and Austria, no less
than the workers of France and Russia, are comrades and brothers; in
this hour of carnage and eclipse we have friendship and compassion to
all victims of militarism. Our nationality and independence, which are
dear to us, we are ready to defend, but we cannot rejoice in the
organized murder of tens of thousands of workers of other lands who go
to kill and be killed at the command of rulers to whom the people are as
pawns.

"The People must everywhere resist such territorial aggression and
national abasement as will pave the way for fresh wars; and, throughout
Europe, the workers must press for frank and honest diplomatic policies,
controlled by themselves, for the suppression of militarism and the
establishment of the United States of Europe, thereby advancing towards
the world's peace. Unless these steps are taken Europe, after the
present calamity, will be still more subject to the increasing
domination of militarism, and liable to be drenched with blood."

       *       *       *       *       *

RESPONSIBILITY RESTS ON THE WHOLE CAPITALIST CLASS.


"Prussian militarism, as we have shown in previous issues, exists, as
all militarism does, to further and protect trade. The furtherance of
that trade meant territorial expansion, which in its turn was a menace
to Britain and her allies. Thus it is that this war, carefully
manoeuvred by the diplomats, is being fought to conserve to one set of
capitalists their right to exploit the peoples, and to check another set
from encroaching upon that right.

"Germany--or rather, the capitalists of Germany, for whom the Kaiser has
always been the "Publicity Agent"--has consistently worked toward the
objective of challenging the right of Britain to a world-wide Empire. To
the German capitalists this war is but the realization of their
philosophy, "Might is Right," and, reckless of human life and suffering,
a European war is to them the way to vaster fields of exploitation and
greater wealth. Their militarism was the machine, and the workers the
cogs of the wheels. British capitalists, on the other hand, determined
to maintain what they hold, forgetful of how it had been obtained, were
thus compelled to take up the cudgels for their own sakes; and here, as
in Germany, the workers are the tools used to save their fortunes and
conserve their rights."--"_The Voice of Labour," October_, 1914.

"And it is not unlikely that the present bloody catastrophe will at last
awaken the people from their indifference. The bitter pain and fearful
suffering will perhaps make a deeper impression than the words of the
revolutionaries. It is possible that the Social Revolution will be the
last act in the present tragedy; possible that murderous militarism will
be drowned in the blood of its numberless victims; that the people of
the different countries will unite against the bloody regime of modern
Capitalism and its institutions, and finally produce a new social
culture upon the basis of free Socialism."--"_Freedom," September 14._

In an American contemporary a quotation is given from an issue of
_Vorwärts_ which was suppressed by the German Government. It reads:--

"The comrades abroad can be assured that the German working class
disapproves to-day of every piratical policy of State just as it has
always disapproved and that it is determined to resist the predatory
subjugation of foreign peoples as strongly as the circumstances permit.
The comrades in foreign lands can be assured that, though the German
workmen are also protecting their Fatherland, they will nevertheless not
forget that their interests are the same as those of the proletariat in
other countries, who, like themselves, have been compelled to go to war
against their will, indeed, even against their often repeated
pronouncements in favour of peace."

       *       *       *       *       *

TEXT OF LIEBKNECHT'S PROTEST.


The _Berner Tagwacht_ publishes the full text of Karl Liebknecht's
protest against the vote of credit by the Reichstag on December 2nd. The
protest was not read, the President having vetoed it under pretext that
it would entail a call to order. The protest was communicated to the
German Press. Not one paper published it. It runs:--

"This war, desired by none of the peoples concerned, has not broken out
in behalf of the welfare of the German people or any other. It is an
Imperialist war, a war for the capitalist domination of the world's
markets and for the political domination of important regions for the
placing of industrial and banking capital. From the point of view of
rivalry in armaments, it is a preventive war provoked by the German and
Austrian war parties together in the obscurity of semi-absolutism and of
secret diplomacy."

After declaring that this is not a defensive war for Germany, the
protest continues:--

"A rapid peace, one which does not humiliate anybody, a peace without
conquests, this is what we must demand. Every effort in this direction
must be favourably received. The continuous and simultaneous affirmation
of this desire, in all the belligerent countries, can alone put a stop
to the bloody massacre before the complete exhaustion of all the peoples
concerned. A peace based upon the international solidarity of the
working class and on the liberty of all the peoples can alone be a
lasting peace. It is in this sense that the proletariats of all
countries must furnish, even in the course of this war, a Socialist
effort for peace.

"But my protest is against the war, against those who are responsible
for it, against those who direct it; it is against the capitalist policy
which gave it birth; it is directed against the capitalist objects
pursued by it, against the plans of annexation, against the violation of
the neutrality of Belgium and Luxemburg, against military dictatorship,
against the total oblivion of social and political duties of which the
Government and ruling classes are still to-day guilty. For this reason,
I reject the military credits asked for."--_From the "Daily News,"
December 14, 1914._

"KARL LIEBKNECHT.

"BERLIN, _December 2_."

       *       *       *       *       *

DANGER OF RUSSIA.


The following is the text of the resolution passed by the Central
Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party in reply to M.
Vandervelde's appeal on behalf of the Allied cause:--

"We recognize the anti-democratic character of the Prussian hegemony,
but as Russian Social Democrats we cannot forget another enemy of the
workers, and no less dangerous--Russian absolutism. In home affairs this
enemy remains what it always has been, a merciless oppressor and an
unceasing exploiter. Even at the present moment, when we should have
thought this despotism would be more cautious, it remains the same and
continues the political persecution of the democracy, and of all subject
nationalities. To-day all Socialist journals are stopped, all working
class organizations are disbanded, many hundreds of members are
arrested, and our brave comrades are sent to exile just as before.
Should this war end in victory for our present Government, it will
become the centre and mainstay of international reaction.... Our
immediate objective should be the convocation of a Constitutional
Assembly. We demand this in the interests of the same European democracy
on whose behalf you appeal. Our party is a very important section of the
world's democracies, and by fighting for our interests we are at the
same time fighting for the interests of all democracies, enlarging and
strengthening them. We hope that our interests are not considered as
opposed to those of other European democracies which we esteem as highly
as our own. We are persuaded that Russian absolutism is the chief
support of reactionary militarism in Europe, and that it has bred in the
German hegemony the dangerous enmity towards European democracy."

       *       *       *       *       *

LETTER ON RUSSIA FROM P. KROPOTKIN.


"'But what about the danger of Russia?' my readers will probably ask.

"To this question, every serious person will probably answer, that when
you are menaced by a great, very great danger, the first thing to do is
to combat this danger, and then see to the next. Belgium and a good deal
of France _are_ conquered by Germany, and the whole civilization of
Europe is menaced by its iron fist. Let us cope first with this danger.

"As to the next, Is there anybody who has not thought himself that the
present war, in which all parties in Russia have risen unanimously
against the common enemy, will render a return to the autocracy of old
materially impossible? And then, those who have seriously followed the
revolutionary movement of Russia in 1905 surely know what were the ideas
which dominated in the First and Second, approximately freely elected
Dumas. They surely know that complete Home Rule for all the component
parts of the Empire was a fundamental point of all the Liberal and
Radical parties. More than that: Finland then actually _accomplished_
her revolution in the form of a democratic autonomy, and the Duma
approved it.

"And finally, those who know Russia and her last movement certainly feel
that _autocracy will never more be re-established in the forms it had
before_ 1905, _and that a Russian Constitution could never take the
Imperialist forms and spirit which Parliamentary rule has taken in
Germany_. As to us, who know Russia from the inside, we are sure that
the Russians never will be capable of becoming the aggressive, warlike
nation Germany is. Not only the whole history of the Russians shows it,
but with the Federation which Russia is _bound to_ become in
the very near future, such a warlike spirit would be absolutely
incompatible."--_Quoted in "Freedom," also in the "Manchester Guardian,"
October, 1914_.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE FUTURE OF EUROPE.

_Portion of a letter written by P. Kropotkin to Mr. R.J. Kelly, K.C., of
Dublin, December 15, 1915._

"The same for the South Slavs and for all nationalities oppressed in
Europe. When the last Balkan War had shown the inner power of the South
Slavs, I greeted in it the disintegration of the Turkish Empire, which
would be followed by the disintegration of the three other
Empires--Austria, Russia, and Germany--so as to open the way for two,
three, or more federations. A South Slavonic federation--the Balkan
United State was the dream of Bakunin--would be followed by a free
Poland, free Finland, Free Caucasia, free Siberia, federated for peace
purposes. Yes, dear Mr. Kelly, you are right, we are on the eve of great
events in Europe. Warmest wishes that this should become a reality, or
receive a sound beginning of realization, during the coming new year,
and my very best wishes to you of health and vigour.--Sincerely yours,

"P. KROPOTKIN."

       *       *       *       *       *


SERVIA.


"We are therefore justified in declining to accept such evidence. We are
witnessing the birththroes of a new nation, the triumph of the idea of
national unity among the disunited Southern Slavs, and it is the duty of
Britain and France, whose Fleets are now operating on the Adriatic, to
insist upon a just and permanent solution, based upon the principle of
nationality and the wishes of the Southern Slav race. Only by treating
the problem as an organic whole and avoiding patchwork we can hope to
remove one of the chief danger centres in Europe."--_Lecture at Essex
Hall, November 13, 1914, by R.W. Seton Watson_.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE BATTLEFIELD.


"Then the camps of the wounded--O heavens what scene is this?--is this
indeed _humanity_--these butchers' shambles? There are several of them.
There they lie, in the largest, in an open space in the woods, from two
hundred to three hundred poor fellows--the groans and screams--the odour
of blood, mixed with the fresh scent of the night, the grass, the
trees--that slaughter-house! Oh, well is it their mothers, their sisters
cannot see them--cannot conceive and never conceived these things.

"One man is shot by a shell, both in the arm and leg--both are
amputated--there lie the rejected members. Some have their legs blown
off--some bullets through the breast--some indescribably horrid wounds
in the face or head, all mutilated, sickening, torn, gouged out--some in
the abdomen--some mere boys--many rebels, badly hurt--they take their
regular turns with the rest, just the same as any--the surgeons use them
just the same. Such is the camp of the wounded--such a fragment, a
reflection afar off of the bloody scene--while all over the clear, large
moon comes out at times softly, quietly shining.

"Amid the woods, the scene of flitting souls--amid the crack and crash
and yelling sounds--the impalpable perfume of the woods--and yet the
pungent, stifling smoke--the radiance of the moon, looking from heaven
at intervals so placid--the sky so heavenly--the clear-obscure up there,
those buoyant upper oceans--a few large, placid stars beyond, coming
silently and languidly out, and then disappearing--the melancholy,
draperied night above, around. And never one more desperate in any age
or land--both parties now in force--masses--no fancy battle, no
semi-play, but fierce and savage demons fighting there--courage and
scorn of death is the rule, exceptions almost none."--_From Walt
Whitman_.

       *       *       *       *       *

CHINESE CHRISTIANS ON THE WAR.


"The most remarkable attitude yet taken in regard to the war by any body
of people in the world is that of the native Christian Churches in
China. I was told a fortnight ago by a missionary just returned from
China that the Chinese Christians are holding daily prayer meetings to
pray for peace. They are also praying earnestly that the Christians in
Europe may be forgiven for killing each other, and, in particular, that
the British and German churches and ministers may be forgiven for the
blasphemy of praying to the Common Father for victory over one another,
_i.e._ for Divine assistance in smashing and maiming and murdering more
of their fellow Christians. I am also told that these Chinese Christians
appreciate perfectly that for the most part the people to be killed are
helpless, innocent workmen, who have had nothing to do with the cause of
all the trouble.

"That action of the Chinamen is of the essence of real Christianity. It
is the real spirit. It has been expressed in Europe only by the Pope, on
the one hand, and, on the other, by the Socialists of the neutral
countries and by the I.L.P. in England. It is the echo of the angel song
of the first Christmas two thousand years ago. It is the true note, the
eternal note. It is the note which will bring mankind back to its senses
when the hideous passions, the false idealisms, and the sordid greeds
behind this world tragedy are shown up for what they are."--_By Dr.
Alfred Salter in "The Labour Leader," December_ 31, 1914.

       *       *       *       *       *

ESSENTIAL FRIENDLINESS OF PEOPLES.


"This essential friendliness, not between nations, but between people of
different nations, is one of the biggest facts of civilization. And yet
it has counted for so little that half the nations in Europe are
fighting one another. Are the causes, then, that have set us fighting
stronger still? Yes, when it is a question of national conscience. And
one must regretfully say yes, as long as it is possible for those who
rule nations and desire war to carry out their will.

"Is that wicked, mediaeval power--in the hands of the few, but still
strong enough to overrule the natural tendencies of peoples towards
peace and friendship and to turn their likings into hatreds--is it going
to continue when this war is over? Who can doubt, if it were possible to
take a plebiscite of all the nations who are fighting now as to whether
international disputes should be settled by war or arbitration, what the
result would be? Is the desire of the many to have its chance when this
war shall be ended, or shall we submit ourselves again to be dominated
by the desire of the few?"--_From "The Daily News," October_ 5, 1914.

"At one spot where there had been a fierce hand-to-hand fight there
were indications that the combatants when wounded had shared their
water-bottles. Near them were a Briton and a Frenchman whose cold hands
were clasped in death, a touching symbol of the unity of the two nations
in this terrible conflict."--_From "The Sheffield Telegraph," November
14, 1914._

       *       *       *       *       *

RECONCILIATION IN DEATH.


_Letter written by a French cavalry officer as he lay wounded and dying
in Flanders._

"There are two other men lying near me, and I do not think there is much
hope for them either. One is an officer of a Scottish regiment, and the
other a private in the Uhlans. They were struck down after me, and when
I came to myself I found them bending over me rendering first aid.

"The Britisher was pouring water down my throat from his flask, while
the German was endeavouring to staunch my wound with an antiseptic
preparation served out to them by their medical corps. The Highlander
had one of his legs shattered, and the German had several pieces of
shrapnel buried in his side.

"In spite of their own sufferings they were trying to help me, and when
I was fully conscious again the German gave us a morphia injection and
took one himself. His medical corps had also provided him with the
injection and the needle, together with printed instructions for its
use.

"After the injection, feeling wonderfully at ease, we spoke of the lives
we had lived before the war. We all spoke English, and we talked of the
women we had left at home. Both the German and the Britisher had only
been married a year.

"I wondered, and I suppose the others did, why we had fought each other
at all. I looked at the Highlander, who was falling to sleep exhausted,
and in spite of his drawn face and mud-stained uniform he looked the
embodiment of freedom. Then I thought of the tricolor of France, and all
that France had done for liberty. Then I watched the German, who had
ceased to speak. He had taken a prayer-book from his knapsack, and was
trying to read a service for soldiers wounded in battle."

The letter ends with a reference to the failing light and the roar of
the guns. It was found at the dead officer's side by a Red Cross file,
and was forwarded to his fiancée.--_From "The Daily Citizen," December
21, 1914._

       *       *       *       *       *

CHRISTMAS, 1914.


_Letters from the Front (from the Daily Press)._

"Last night (Christmas Eve) was the weirdest stunt I have ever seen. All
day the Germans had been sniping industriously, with some success, but
after sunset they started singing, and we replied with carols. Then they
shouted, 'Happy Christmas!' to us, and some of us replied in German. It
was a topping moonlight night, and we carried on long conversations, and
kept singing to each other and cheering. Later they asked us to send one
man out to the middle, between the trenches, with a cake, and they would
give us a bottle of wine.

"Hunt went out, and five of them came out and gave him the wine,
cigarettes, and cigars. After that you could hear them for a long time
calling from half-way, 'Engleeshman, kom hier.' So one or two more of
our chaps went out and exchanged cigarettes, etc., and they all seemed
decent fellows."

       *       *       *       *       *

"We had quite a sing-song last night (Christmas Eve)," says one writer.
"The Germans gave a song, and then our chaps gave them one in return. A
German that could speak English, and some others, came right up to our
trenches, and we gave them cigarettes and papers to read, as they never
get any news, and then we let them walk back to their own trenches. Then
our chaps went over to their trenches, and they let them come back all
right. About five o'clock on Christmas Eve one of them shouted across
and told us that if we did not fire on them they would not open fire on
us, and so the officers agreed. About twenty of them came up all at
once and started chatting away to our chaps like old chums, and neither
side attempted to shoot."

       *       *       *       *       *

"I suppose I have experienced about the most extraordinary Christmas one
could conceive. About seven o'clock on Christmas Eve the Saxons, who are
entrenched about seventy yards from our trenches, began singing. They
had a band playing, and our chaps cheered and shouted to them. After
some time they stood on the top of their trenches, and we did likewise.
We mutually agreed to cease fire, and all night we sang and shouted to
each other. To cap everything, their band played 'God save the King.'

"When daylight came two of our fellows, at the invitation of the enemy,
left the trenches, met half-way, and drank together. That completed it.
They said they would not fire if we did not; so after that we strolled
about talking to each other."

       *       *       *       *       *

"On Christmas morning it was very foggy, so we had a short run on the
top of the trenches to get warm. When the fog lifted we, as well as the
Germans, were exposed. No firing occurred, and the Germans began to wave
umbrellas and rifles, and we answered. They sang and we sang. When we
met we found they were fairly old fellows. They gave us sausages,
cigars, sweets, and perkin. We mixed together, played mouth-organs, and
took part in dances. My word! the Germans can't half sing part-songs. We
exchanged addresses and souvenirs, and when the time came we shook hands
and saluted each other, returning to our trenches."

       *       *       *       *       *

"On Christmas morning one of the Germans came out of a trench and held
up his hands. Then lots of us did the same, and we met half-way, and for
the rest of the day we fraternized, exchanging cigars, cigarettes, and
souvenirs. The Germans also gave us sausages, and we gave them some of
our food. The Scotsmen then started the bagpipes, and we had a rare old
jollification, which included football, in which the Germans took part.
The Germans said they were tired of the war, and wished it was over.
Next day we got an order that all communication and friendly intercourse
must cease."

       *       *       *       *       *

"I went up into the trenches on Christmas night. One wouldn't have
thought there was a war going on. All day our soldiers and the Germans
were talking and singing half-way between the opposing trenches. The
space was filled with English and Germans handing one another cigars. At
night we sang carols."

       *       *       *       *       *

EXTRACT FROM A LETTER PUBLISHED BY THE "_Berliner Tageblatt_" OF
DECEMBER 24, 1914.

The author of the letter is Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, a captain
of the reserves and Prussian "Landrat," obviously a kinsman of the late
diplomatist and Ambassador in London. He wrote on October 18 from the
trenches. He said:--

"Whoever fights in this war in the front ranks, whoever realizes all the
misery and unspeakable wretchedness caused by a modern war ... will
unavoidably arrive at the conviction, if he had not acquired it earlier,
that mankind must find a way of overcoming war. It is untrue that
eternal peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one. A time will and
must arrive which will no longer know war, and this time will mark a
gigantic progress in comparison with our own. Just as human morality has
overcome the war of all against all; just as the individual had to
accustom himself to seek redress of his grievances at the hands of the
State after blood feuds and duels had been banished by civil peace, so
in their development will the nations discover ways and means to settle
budding conflicts not by means of wars, but in some other regulated
fashion, irrespective of what each of us individually may think."

Unfortunately, the writer of this thoughtful letter fell on the
battlefield.


THE END