AUTOCRACY AND WAR--1905
From the firing of the first shot on the banks of the Sha-ho, the fate of
the great battle of the Russo-Japanese war hung in the balance for more
than a fortnight. The famous three-day battles, for which history has
reserved the recognition of special pages, sink into insignificance
before the struggles in Manchuria engaging half a million men on fronts
of sixty miles, struggles lasting for weeks, flaming up fiercely and
dying away from sheer exhaustion, to flame up again in desperate
persistence, and end--as we have seen them end more than once--not from
the victor obtaining a crushing advantage, but through the mortal
weariness of the combatants.
We have seen these things, though we have seen them only in the cold,
silent, colourless print of books and newspapers. In stigmatising the
printed word as cold, silent and colourless, I have no intention of
putting a slight upon the fidelity and the talents of men who have
provided us with words to read about the battles in Manchuria. I only
wished to suggest that in the nature of things, the war in the Far East
has been made known to us, so far, in a grey reflection of its terrible
and monotonous phases of pain, death, sickness; a reflection seen in the
perspective of thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official
reticence, through the veil of inadequate words. Inadequate, I say,
because what had to be reproduced is beyond the common experience of war,
and our imagination, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a
slumbering faculty, notwithstanding the din of humanitarian talk and the
real progress of humanitarian ideas. Direct vision of the fact, or the
stimulus of a great art, can alone make it turn and open its eyes heavy
with blessed sleep; and even there, as against the testimony of the
senses and the stirring up of emotion, that saving callousness which
reconciles us to the conditions of our existence, will assert itself
under the guise of assent to fatal necessity, or in the enthusiasm of a
purely aesthetic admiration of the rendering. In this age of knowledge
our sympathetic imagination, to which alone we can look for the ultimate
triumph of concord and justice, remains strangely impervious to
information, however correctly and even picturesquely conveyed. As to
the vaunted eloquence of a serried array of figures, it has all the
futility of precision without force. It is the exploded superstition of
enthusiastic statisticians. An over-worked horse falling in front of our
windows, a man writhing under a cart-wheel in the streets awaken more
genuine emotion, more horror, pity, and indignation than the stream of
reports, appalling in their monotony, of tens of thousands of decaying
bodies tainting the air of the Manchurian plains, of other tens of
thousands of maimed bodies groaning in ditches, crawling on the frozen
ground, filling the field hospitals; of the hundreds of thousands of
survivors no less pathetic and even more tragic in being left alive by
fate to the wretched exhaustion of their pitiful toil.
An early Victorian, or perhaps a pre-Victorian, sentimentalist, looking
out of an upstairs window, I believe, at a street--perhaps Fleet Street
itself--full of people, is reported, by an admiring friend, to have wept
for joy at seeing so much life. These arcadian tears, this facile
emotion worthy of the golden age, comes to us from the past, with solemn
approval, after the close of the Napoleonic wars and before the series of
sanguinary surprises held in reserve by the nineteenth century for our
hopeful grandfathers. We may well envy them their optimism of which this
anecdote of an amiable wit and sentimentalist presents an extreme
instance, but still, a true instance, and worthy of regard in the
spontaneous testimony to that trust in the life of the earth, triumphant
at last in the felicity of her children. Moreover, the psychology of
individuals, even in the most extreme instances, reflects the general
effect of the fears and hopes of its time. Wept for joy! I should think
that now, after eighty years, the emotion would be of a sterner sort. One
could not imagine anybody shedding tears of joy at the sight of much life
in a street, unless, perhaps, he were an enthusiastic officer of a
general staff or a popular politician, with a career yet to make. And
hardly even that. In the case of the first tears would be
unprofessional, and a stern repression of all signs of joy at the
provision of so much food for powder more in accord with the rules of
prudence; the joy of the second would be checked before it found issue in
weeping by anxious doubts as to the soundness of these electors' views
upon the question of the hour, and the fear of missing the consensus of
their votes.
No! It seems that such a tender joy would be misplaced now as much as
ever during the last hundred years, to go no further back. The end of
the eighteenth century was, too, a time of optimism and of dismal
mediocrity in which the French Revolution exploded like a bombshell. In
its lurid blaze the insufficiency of Europe, the inferiority of minds, of
military and administrative systems, stood exposed with pitiless
vividness. And there is but little courage in saying at this time of the
day that the glorified French Revolution itself, except for its
destructive force, was in essentials a mediocre phenomenon. The
parentage of that great social and political upheaval was intellectual,
the idea was elevated; but it is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its
royal form and power, to lose its "virtue" the moment it descends from
its solitary throne to work its will among the people. It is a king
whose destiny is never to know the obedience of his subjects except at
the cost of degradation. The degradation of the ideas of freedom and
justice at the root of the French Revolution is made manifest in the
person of its heir; a personality without law or faith, whom it has been
the fashion to represent as an eagle, but who was, in truth, more like a
sort of vulture preying upon the body of a Europe which did, indeed, for
some dozen of years, very much resemble a corpse. The subtle and
manifold influence for evil of the Napoleonic episode as a school of
violence, as a sower of national hatreds, as the direct provocator of
obscurantism and reaction, of political tyranny and injustice, cannot
well be exaggerated.
The nineteenth century began with wars which were the issue of a
corrupted revolution. It may be said that the twentieth begins with a
war which is like the explosive ferment of a moral grave, whence may yet
emerge a new political organism to take the place of a gigantic and
dreaded phantom. For a hundred years the ghost of Russian might,
overshadowing with its fantastic bulk the councils of Central and Western
Europe, sat upon the gravestone of autocracy, cutting off from air, from
light, from all knowledge of themselves and of the world, the buried
millions of Russian people. Not the most determined cockney
sentimentalist could have had the heart to weep for joy at the thought of
its teeming numbers! And yet they were living, they are alive yet,
since, through the mist of print, we have seen their blood freezing
crimson upon the snow of the squares and streets of St. Petersburg; since
their generations born in the grave are yet alive enough to fill the
ditches and cover the fields of Manchuria with their torn limbs; to send
up from the frozen ground of battlefields a chorus of groans calling for
vengeance from Heaven; to kill and retreat, or kill and advance, without
intermission or rest for twenty hours, for fifty hours, for whole weeks
of fatigue, hunger, cold, and murder--till their ghastly labour, worthy
of a place amongst the punishments of Dante's Inferno, passing through
the stages of courage, of fury, of hopelessness, sinks into the night of
crazy despair.
It seems that in both armies many men are driven beyond the bounds of
sanity by the stress of moral and physical misery. Great numbers of
soldiers and regimental officers go mad as if by way of protest against
the peculiar sanity of a state of war: mostly among the Russians, of
course. The Japanese have in their favour the tonic effect of success;
and the innate gentleness of their character stands them in good stead.
But the Japanese grand army has yet another advantage in this
nerve-destroying contest, which for endless, arduous toil of killing
surpasses all the wars of history. It has a base for its operations; a
base of a nature beyond the concern of the many books written upon the so-
called art of war, which, considered by itself, purely as an exercise of
human ingenuity, is at best only a thing of well-worn, simple artifices.
The Japanese army has for its base a reasoned conviction; it has behind
it the profound belief in the right of a logical necessity to be appeased
at the cost of so much blood and treasure. And in that belief, whether
well or ill founded, that army stands on the high ground of conscious
assent, shouldering deliberately the burden of a long-tried faithfulness.
The other people (since each people is an army nowadays), torn out from a
miserable quietude resembling death itself, hurled across space, amazed,
without starting-point of its own or knowledge of the aim, can feel
nothing but a horror-stricken consciousness of having mysteriously become
the plaything of a black and merciless fate.
The profound, the instructive nature of this war is resumed by the
memorable difference in the spiritual state of the two armies; the one
forlorn and dazed on being driven out from an abyss of mental darkness
into the red light of a conflagration, the other with a full knowledge of
its past and its future, "finding itself" as it were at every step of the
trying war before the eyes of an astonished world. The greatness of the
lesson has been dwarfed for most of us by an often half-conscious
prejudice of race-difference. The West having managed to lodge its hasty
foot on the neck of the East, is prone to forget that it is from the East
that the wonders of patience and wisdom have come to a world of men who
set the value of life in the power to act rather than in the faculty of
meditation. It has been dwarfed by this, and it has been obscured by a
cloud of considerations with whose shaping wisdom and meditation had
little or nothing to do; by the weary platitudes on the military
situation which (apart from geographical conditions) is the same
everlasting situation that has prevailed since the times of Hannibal and
Scipio, and further back yet, since the beginning of historical
record--since prehistoric times, for that matter; by the conventional
expressions of horror at the tale of maiming and killing; by the rumours
of peace with guesses more or less plausible as to its conditions. All
this is made legitimate by the consecrated custom of writers in such time
as this--the time of a great war. More legitimate in view of the
situation created in Europe are the speculations as to the course of
events after the war. More legitimate, but hardly more wise than the
irresponsible talk of strategy that never changes, and of terms of peace
that do not matter.
And above it all--unaccountably persistent--the decrepit, old, hundred
years old, spectre of Russia's might still faces Europe from across the
teeming graves of Russian people. This dreaded and strange apparition,
bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images;
that something not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a
blind Djinn grown up from a cloud, and of the Old Man of the Sea, still
faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance,
stamping its shadowy feet upon the gravestone of autocracy already
cracked beyond repair by the torpedoes of Togo and the guns of Oyama,
already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings of a
resurrection.
Never before had the Western world the opportunity to look so deep into
the black abyss which separates a soulless autocracy posing as, and even
believing itself to be, the arbiter of Europe, from the benighted,
starved souls of its people. This is the real object-lesson of this war,
its unforgettable information. And this war's true mission, disengaged
from the economic origins of that contest, from doors open or shut, from
the fields of Korea for Russian wheat or Japanese rice, from the
ownership of ice-free ports and the command of the waters of the East--its
true mission was to lay a ghost. It has accomplished it. Whether
Kuropatkin was incapable or unlucky, whether or not Russia issuing next
year, or the year after next, from behind a rampart of piled-up corpses
will win or lose a fresh campaign, are minor considerations. The task of
Japan is done, the mission accomplished; the ghost of Russia's might is
laid. Only Europe, accustomed so long to the presence of that portent,
seems unable to comprehend that, as in the fables of our childhood, the
twelve strokes of the hour have rung, the cock has crowed, the apparition
has vanished--never to haunt again this world which has been used to gaze
at it with vague dread and many misgivings.
It was a fascination. And the hallucination still lasts as inexplicable
in its persistence as in its duration. It seems so unaccountable, that
the doubt arises as to the sincerity of all that talk as to what Russia
will or will not do, whether it will raise or not another army, whether
it will bury the Japanese in Manchuria under seventy millions of
sacrificed peasants' caps (as her Press boasted a little more than a year
ago) or give up to Japan that jewel of her crown, Saghalien, together
with some other things; whether, perchance, as an interesting
alternative, it will make peace on the Amur in order to make war beyond
the Oxus.
All these speculations (with many others) have appeared gravely in print;
and if they have been gravely considered by only one reader out of each
hundred, there must be something subtly noxious to the human brain in the
composition of newspaper ink; or else it is that the large page, the
columns of words, the leaded headings, exalt the mind into a state of
feverish credulity. The printed page of the Press makes a sort of still
uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of
genuine feeling; leaving them only the artificially created need of
having something exciting to talk about.
The truth is that the Russia of our fathers, of our childhood, of our
middle-age; the testamentary Russia of Peter the Great--who imagined that
all the nations were delivered into the hand of Tsardom--can do nothing.
It can do nothing because it does not exist. It has vanished for ever at
last, and as yet there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill-
omened creation, which, being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in
reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a
monument of fear and oppression.
The true greatness of a State does not spring from such a contemptible
source. It is a matter of logical growth, of faith and courage. Its
inspiration springs from the constructive instinct of the people,
governed by the strong hand of a collective conscience and voiced in the
wisdom and counsel of men who seldom reap the reward of gratitude. Many
States have been powerful, but, perhaps, none have been truly great--as
yet. That the position of a State in reference to the moral methods of
its development can be seen only historically, is true. Perhaps mankind
has not lived long enough for a comprehensive view of any particular
case. Perhaps no one will ever live long enough; and perhaps this earth
shared out amongst our clashing ambitions by the anxious arrangements of
statesmen will come to an end before we attain the felicity of greeting
with unanimous applause the perfect fruition of a great State. It is
even possible that we are destined for another sort of bliss altogether:
that sort which consists in being perpetually duped by false appearances.
But whatever political illusion the future may hold out to our fear or
our admiration, there will be none, it is safe to say, which in the
magnitude of anti-humanitarian effect will equal that phantom now driven
out of the world by the thunder of thousands of guns; none that in its
retreat will cling with an equally shameless sincerity to more unworthy
supports: to the moral corruption and mental darkness of slavery, to the
mere brute force of numbers.
This very ignominy of infatuation should make clear to men's feelings and
reason that the downfall of Russia's might is unavoidable. Spectral it
lived and spectral it disappears without leaving a memory of a single
generous deed, of a single service rendered--even involuntarily--to the
polity of nations. Other despotisms there have been, but none whose
origin was so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of
whose end was so gruesomely ignoble. What is amazing is the myth of its
irresistible strength which is dying so hard.
* * * * *
Considered historically, Russia's influence in Europe seems the most
baseless thing in the world; a sort of convention invented by
diplomatists for some dark purpose of their own, one would suspect, if
the lack of grasp upon the realities of any given situation were not the
main characteristic of the management of international relations. A
glance back at the last hundred years shows the invariable, one may say
the logical, powerlessness of Russia. As a military power it has never
achieved by itself a single great thing. It has been indeed able to
repel an ill-considered invasion, but only by having recourse to the
extreme methods of desperation. In its attacks upon its specially
selected victim this giant always struck as if with a withered right
hand. All the campaigns against Turkey prove this, from Potemkin's time
to the last Eastern war in 1878, entered upon with every advantage of a
well-nursed prestige and a carefully fostered fanaticism. Even the half-
armed were always too much for the might of Russia, or, rather, of the
Tsardom. It was victorious only against the practically disarmed, as, in
regard to its ideal of territorial expansion, a glance at a map will
prove sufficiently. As an ally, Russia has been always unprofitable,
taking her share in the defeats rather than in the victories of her
friends, but always pushing her own claims with the arrogance of an
arbiter of military success. She has been unable to help to any purpose
a single principle to hold its own, not even the principle of authority
and legitimism which Nicholas the First had declared so haughtily to rest
under his special protection; just as Nicholas the Second has tried to
make the maintenance of peace on earth his own exclusive affair. And the
first Nicholas was a good Russian; he held the belief in the sacredness
of his realm with such an intensity of faith that he could not survive
the first shock of doubt. Rightly envisaged, the Crimean war was the end
of what remained of absolutism and legitimism in Europe. It threw the
way open for the liberation of Italy. The war in Manchuria makes an end
of absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish from the shock behind
a rampart of dead ukases, manifestoes, and rescripts. In the space of
fifty years the self-appointed Apostle of Absolutism and the
self-appointed Apostle of Peace, the Augustus and the Augustulus of the
_regime_ that was wont to speak contemptuously to European Foreign
Offices in the beautiful French phrases of Prince Gorchakov, have fallen
victims, each after his kind, to their shadowy and dreadful familiar, to
the phantom, part ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, with beak
and claws and a double head, looking greedily both east and west on the
confines of two continents.
That nobody through all that time penetrated the true nature of the
monster it is impossible to believe. But of the many who must have seen,
all were either too modest, too cautious, perhaps too discreet, to speak;
or else were too insignificant to be heard or believed. Yet not all.
In the very early sixties, Prince Bismarck, then about to leave his post
of Prussian Minister in St. Petersburg, called--so the story goes--upon
another distinguished diplomatist. After some talk upon the general
situation, the future Chancellor of the German Empire remarked that it
was his practice to resume the impressions he had carried out of every
country where he had made a long stay, in a short sentence, which he
caused to be engraved upon some trinket. "I am leaving this country now,
and this is what I bring away from it," he continued, taking off his
finger a new ring to show to his colleague the inscription inside: "La
Russie, c'est le neant."
Prince Bismarck had the truth of the matter and was neither too modest
nor too discreet to speak out. Certainly he was not afraid of not being
believed. Yet he did not shout his knowledge from the house-tops. He
meant to have the phantom as his accomplice in an enterprise which has
set the clock of peace back for many a year.
He had his way. The German Empire has been an accomplished fact for more
than a third of a century--a great and dreadful legacy left to the world
by the ill-omened phantom of Russia's might.
It is that phantom which is disappearing now--unexpectedly,
astonishingly, as if by a touch of that wonderful magic for which the
East has always been famous. The pretence of belief in its existence
will no longer answer anybody's purposes (now Prince Bismarck is dead)
unless the purposes of the writers of sensational paragraphs as to this
_Neant_ making an armed descent upon the plains of India. That sort of
folly would be beneath notice if it did not distract attention from the
real problem created for Europe by a war in the Far East.
For good or evil in the working out of her destiny, Russia is bound to
remain a _Neant_ for many long years, in a more even than a Bismarckian
sense. The very fear of this spectre being gone, it behoves us to
consider its legacy--the fact (no phantom that) accomplished in Central
Europe by its help and connivance.
The German Empire may feel at bottom the loss of an old accomplice always
amenable to the confidential whispers of a bargain; but in the first
instance it cannot but rejoice at the fundamental weakening of a possible
obstacle to its instincts of territorial expansion. There is a removal
of that latent feeling of restraint which the presence of a powerful
neighbour, however implicated with you in a sense of common guilt, is
bound to inspire. The common guilt of the two Empires is defined
precisely by their frontier line running through the Polish provinces.
Without indulging in excessive feelings of indignation at that country's
partition, or going so far as to believe--with a late French
politician--in the "immanente justice des choses," it is clear that a
material situation, based upon an essentially immoral transaction,
contains the germ of fatal differences in the temperament of the two
partners in iniquity--whatever the iniquity is. Germany has been the
evil counsellor of Russia on all the questions of her Polish problem.
Always urging the adoption of the most repressive measures with a
perfectly logical duplicity, Prince Bismarck's Empire has taken care to
couple the neighbourly offers of military assistance with merciless
advice. The thought of the Polish provinces accepting a frank
reconciliation with a humanised Russia and bringing the weight of
homogeneous loyalty within a few miles of Berlin, has been always
intensely distasteful to the arrogant Germanising tendencies of the other
partner in iniquity. And, besides, the way to the Baltic provinces leads
over the Niemen and over the Vistula.
And now, when there is a possibility of serious internal disturbances
destroying the sort of order autocracy has kept in Russia, the road over
these rivers is seen wearing a more inviting aspect. At any moment the
pretext of armed intervention may be found in a revolutionary outbreak
provoked by Socialists, perhaps--but at any rate by the political
immaturity of the enlightened classes and by the political barbarism of
the Russian people. The throes of Russian resurrection will be long and
painful. This is not the place to speculate upon the nature of these
convulsions, but there must be some violent break-up of the lamentable
tradition, a shattering of the social, of the administrative--certainly
of the territorial--unity.
Voices have been heard saying that the time for reforms in Russia is
already past. This is the superficial view of the more profound truth
that for Russia there has never been such a time within the memory of
mankind. It is impossible to initiate a rational scheme of reform upon a
phase of blind absolutism; and in Russia there has never been anything
else to which the faintest tradition could, after ages of error, go back
as to a parting of ways.
In Europe the old monarchical principle stands justified in its
historical struggle with the growth of political liberty by the evolution
of the idea of nationality as we see it concreted at the present time; by
the inception of that wider solidarity grouping together around the
standard of monarchical power these larger, agglomerations of mankind.
This service of unification, creating close-knit communities possessing
the ability, the will, and the power to pursue a common ideal, has
prepared the ground for the advent of a still larger understanding: for
the solidarity of Europeanism, which must be the next step towards the
advent of Concord and Justice; an advent that, however delayed by the
fatal worship of force and the errors of national selfishness, has been,
and remains, the only possible goal of our progress.
The conceptions of legality, of larger patriotism, of national duties and
aspirations have grown under the shadow of the old monarchies of Europe,
which were the creations of historical necessity. There were seeds of
wisdom in their very mistakes and abuses. They had a past and a future;
they were human. But under the shadow of Russian autocracy nothing could
grow. Russian autocracy succeeded to nothing; it had no historical past,
and it cannot hope for a historical future. It can only end. By no
industry of investigation, by no fantastic stretch of benevolence, can it
be presented as a phase of development through which a Society, a State,
must pass on the way to the full consciousness of its destiny. It lies
outside the stream of progress. This despotism has been utterly
un-European. Neither has it been Asiatic in its nature. Oriental
despotisms belong to the history of mankind; they have left their trace
on our minds and our imagination by their splendour, by their culture, by
their art, by the exploits of great conquerors. The record of their rise
and decay has an intellectual value; they are in their origins and their
course the manifestations of human needs, the instruments of racial
temperament, of catastrophic force, of faith and fanaticism. The Russian
autocracy as we see it now is a thing apart. It is impossible to assign
to it any rational origin in the vices, the misfortunes, the necessities,
or the aspirations of mankind. That despotism has neither an European
nor an Oriental parentage; more, it seems to have no root either in the
institutions or the follies of this earth. What strikes one with a sort
of awe is just this something inhuman in its character. It is like a
visitation, like a curse from Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon
the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of
two continents: a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East or
of the West.
This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering from an
awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be traced either to
her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a nation so difficult to
understand by Europe. From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence
as a State she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism; she found
nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning
and end of her organisation. Hence arises her impenetrability to
whatever is true in Western thought. Western thought, when it crosses
her frontier, falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a
noxious parody of itself. Hence the contradictions, the riddles of her
national life, which are looked upon with such curiosity by the rest of
the world. The curse had entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing
else in the world, has moulded her institutions, and with the poison of
slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy of a hopeless
fatalism. It seems to have gone into the blood, tainting every mental
activity in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinating
assertion of purity and holiness. The Government of Holy Russia,
arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the
bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to
those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation. The
worst crime against humanity of that system we behold now crouching at
bay behind vast heaps of mangled corpses is the ruthless destruction of
innumerable minds. The greatest horror of the world--madness--walked
faithfully in its train. Some of the best intellects of Russia, after
struggling in vain against the spell, ended by throwing themselves at the
feet of that hopeless despotism as a giddy man leaps into an abyss. An
attentive survey of Russia's literature, of her Church, of her
administration and the cross-currents of her thought, must end in the
verdict that the Russia of to-day has not the right to give her voice on
a single question touching the future of humanity, because from the very
inception of her being the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of
rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been made the
imperative condition of her existence. The great governmental secret of
that imperium which Prince Bismarck had the insight and the courage to
call _Le Neant_, has been the extirpation of every intellectual hope. To
pronounce in the face of such a past the word Evolution, which is
precisely the expression of the highest intellectual hope, is a gruesome
pleasantry. There can be no evolution out of a grave. Another word of
less scientific sound has been very much pronounced of late in connection
with Russia's future, a word of more vague import, a word of dread as
much as of hope--Revolution.
In the face of the events of the last four months, this word has sprung
instinctively, as it were, on grave lips, and has been heard with solemn
forebodings. More or less consciously, Europe is preparing herself for a
spectacle of much violence and perhaps of an inspiring nobility of
greatness. And there will be nothing of what she expects. She will see
neither the anticipated character of the violence, nor yet any signs of
generous greatness. Her expectations, more or less vaguely expressed,
give the measure of her ignorance of that _Neant_ which for so many years
had remained hidden behind this phantom of invincible armies.
_Neant_! In a way, yes! And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has let himself
be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the use of an inexact
form. The form of his judgment had to be pithy, striking, engraved
within a ring. If he erred, then, no doubt, he erred deliberately. The
saying was near enough the truth to serve, and perhaps he did not want to
destroy utterly by a more severe definition the prestige of the sham that
could not deceive his genius. Prince Bismarck has been really
complimentary to the useful phantom of the autocratic might. There is an
awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word _Neant_--and in
Russia there is no idea. She is not a _Neant_, she is and has been
simply the negation of everything worth living for. She is not an empty
void, she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless
abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards
personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every ennobling
desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of conscience. Those that
have peered into that abyss, where the dreams of Panslavism, of universal
conquest, mingled with the hate and contempt for Western ideas, drift
impotently like shapes of mist, know well that it is bottomless; that
there is in it no ground for anything that could in the remotest degree
serve even the lowest interests of mankind--and certainly no ground ready
for a revolution. The sin of the old European monarchies was not the
absolutism inherent in every form of government; it was the inability to
alter the forms of their legality, grown narrow and oppressive with the
march of time. Every form of legality is bound to degenerate into
oppression, and the legality in the forms of monarchical institutions
sooner, perhaps, than any other. It has not been the business of
monarchies to be adaptive from within. With the mission of uniting and
consolidating the particular ambitions and interests of feudalism in
favour of a larger conception of a State, of giving self-consciousness,
force and nationality to the scattered energies of thought and action,
they were fated to lag behind the march of ideas they had themselves set
in motion in a direction they could neither understand nor approve. Yet,
for all that, the thrones still remain, and what is more significant,
perhaps, some of the dynasties, too, have survived. The revolutions of
European States have never been in the nature of absolute protests _en
masse_ against the monarchical principle; they were the uprising of the
people against the oppressive degeneration of legality. But there never
has been any legality in Russia; she is a negation of that as of
everything else that has its root in reason or conscience. The ground of
every revolution had to be intellectually prepared. A revolution is a
short cut in the rational development of national needs in response to
the growth of world-wide ideals. It is conceivably possible for a
monarch of genius to put himself at the head of a revolution without
ceasing to be the king of his people. For the autocracy of Holy Russia
the only conceivable self-reform is--suicide.
The same relentless fate holds in its grip the all-powerful ruler and his
helpless people. Wielders of a power purchased by an unspeakable
baseness of subjection to the Khans of the Tartar horde, the Princes of
Russia who, in their heart of hearts had come in time to regard
themselves as superior to every monarch of Europe, have never risen to be
the chiefs of a nation. Their authority has never been sanctioned by
popular tradition, by ideas of intelligent loyalty, of devotion, of
political necessity, of simple expediency, or even by the power of the
sword. In whatever form of upheaval autocratic Russia is to find her
end, it can never be a revolution fruitful of moral consequences to
mankind. It cannot be anything else but a rising of slaves. It is a
tragic circumstance that the only thing one can wish to that people who
had never seen face to face either law, order, justice, right, truth
about itself or the rest of the world; who had known nothing outside the
capricious will of its irresponsible masters, is that it should find in
the approaching hour of need, not an organiser or a law-giver, with the
wisdom of a Lycurgus or a Solon for their service, but at least the force
of energy and desperation in some as yet unknown Spartacus.
A brand of hopeless mental and moral inferiority is set upon Russian
achievements; and the coming events of her internal changes, however
appalling they may be in their magnitude, will be nothing more impressive
than the convulsions of a colossal body. As her boasted military force
that, corrupt in its origin, has ever struck no other but faltering
blows, so her soul, kept benumbed by her temporal and spiritual master
with the poison of tyranny and superstition, will find itself on
awakening possessed of no language, a monstrous full-grown child having
first to learn the ways of living thought and articulate speech. It is
safe to say tyranny, assuming a thousand protean shapes, will remain
clinging to her struggles for a long time before her blind multitudes
succeed at last in trampling her out of existence under their millions of
bare feet.
That would be the beginning. What is to come after? The conquest of
freedom to call your soul your own is only the first step on the road to
excellence. We, in Europe, have gone a step or two further, have had the
time to forget how little that freedom means. To Russia it must seem
everything. A prisoner shut up in a noisome dungeon concentrates all his
hope and desire on the moment of stepping out beyond the gates. It
appears to him pregnant with an immense and final importance; whereas
what is important is the spirit in which he will draw the first breath of
freedom, the counsels he will hear, the hands he may find extended, the
endless days of toil that must follow, wherein he will have to build his
future with no other material but what he can find within himself.
It would be vain for Russia to hope for the support and counsel of
collective wisdom. Since 1870 (as a distinguished statesman of the old
tradition disconsolately exclaimed) "il n'y a plus d'Europe!" There is,
indeed, no Europe. The idea of a Europe united in the solidarity of her
dynasties, which for a moment seemed to dawn on the horizon of the Vienna
Congress through the subsiding dust of Napoleonic alarums and excursions,
has been extinguished by the larger glamour of less restraining ideals.
Instead of the doctrines of solidarity it was the doctrine of
nationalities much more favourable to spoliations that came to the front,
and since its greatest triumphs at Sadowa and Sedan there is no Europe.
Meanwhile till the time comes when there will be no frontiers, there are
alliances so shamelessly based upon the exigencies of suspicion and
mistrust that their cohesive force waxes and wanes with every year,
almost with the event of every passing month. This is the atmosphere
Russia will find when the last rampart of tyranny has been beaten down.
But what hands, what voices will she find on coming out into the light of
day? An ally she has yet who more than any other of Russia's allies has
found that it had parted with lots of solid substance in exchange for a
shadow. It is true that the shadow was indeed the mightiest, the darkest
that the modern world had ever known--and the most overbearing. But it
is fading now, and the tone of truest anxiety as to what is to take its
place will come, no doubt, from that and no other direction, and no
doubt, also, it will have that note of generosity which even in the
moments of greatest aberration is seldom wanting in the voice of the
French people.
Two neighbours Russia will find at her door. Austria, traditionally
unaggressive whenever her hand is not forced, ruled by a dynasty of
uncertain future, weakened by her duality, can only speak to her in an
uncertain, bilingual phrase. Prussia, grown in something like forty
years from an almost pitiful dependant into a bullying friend and evil
counsellor of Russia's masters, may, indeed, hasten to extend a strong
hand to the weakness of her exhausted body, but if so it will be only
with the intention of tearing away the long-coveted part of her
substance.
Pan-Germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and Germany is anything
but a _Neant_ where thought and effort are likely to lose themselves
without sound or trace. It is a powerful and voracious organisation,
full of unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite for aggrandisement
will only be limited by the power of helping itself to the severed
members of its friends and neighbours. The era of wars so eloquently
denounced by the old Republicans as the peculiar blood guilt of dynastic
ambitions is by no means over yet. They will be fought out differently,
with lesser frequency, with an increased bitterness and the savage tooth-
and-claw obstinacy of a struggle for existence. They will make us regret
the time of dynastic ambitions, with their human absurdity moderated by
prudence and even by shame, by the fear of personal responsibility and
the regard paid to certain forms of conventional decency. For, if the
monarchs of Europe have been derided for addressing each other as
"brother" in autograph communications, that relationship was at least as
effective as any form of brotherhood likely to be established between the
rival nations of this continent, which, we are assured on all hands, is
the heritage of democracy. In the ceremonial brotherhood of monarchs the
reality of blood-ties, for what little it is worth, acted often as a drag
on unscrupulous desires of glory or greed. Besides, there was always the
common danger of exasperated peoples, and some respect for each other's
divine right. No leader of a democracy, without other ancestry but the
sudden shout of a multitude, and debarred by the very condition of his
power from even thinking of a direct heir, will have any interest in
calling brother the leader of another democracy--a chief as fatherless
and heirless as himself.
The war of 1870, brought about by the third Napoleon's half-generous,
half-selfish adoption of the principle of nationalities, was the first
war characterised by a special intensity of hate, by a new note in the
tune of an old song for which we may thank the Teutonic thoroughness. Was
it not that excellent bourgeoise, Princess Bismarck (to keep only to
great examples), who was so righteously anxious to see men, women and
children--emphatically the children, too--of the abominable French nation
massacred off the face of the earth? This illustration of the new war-
temper is artlessly revealed in the prattle of the amiable Busch, the
Chancellor's pet "reptile" of the Press. And this was supposed to be a
war for an idea! Too much, however, should not be made of that good
wife's and mother's sentiments any more than of the good First Emperor
William's tears, shed so abundantly after every battle, by letter,
telegram, and otherwise, during the course of the same war, before a dumb
and shamefaced continent. These were merely the expressions of the
simplicity of a nation which more than any other has a tendency to run
into the grotesque. There is worse to come.
To-day, in the fierce grapple of two nations of different race, the short
era of national wars seems about to close. No war will be waged for an
idea. The "noxious idle aristocracies" of yesterday fought without
malice for an occupation, for the honour, for the fun of the thing. The
virtuous, industrious democratic States of to-morrow may yet be reduced
to fighting for a crust of dry bread, with all the hate, ferocity, and
fury that must attach to the vital importance of such an issue. The
dreams sanguine humanitarians raised almost to ecstasy about the year
fifty of the last century by the moving sight of the Crystal
Palace--crammed full with that variegated rubbish which it seems to be
the bizarre fate of humanity to produce for the benefit of a few
employers of labour--have vanished as quickly as they had arisen. The
golden hopes of peace have in a single night turned to dead leaves in
every drawer of every benevolent theorist's writing table. A swift
disenchantment overtook the incredible infatuation which could put its
trust in the peaceful nature of industrial and commercial competition.
Industrialism and commercialism--wearing high-sounding names in many
languages (_Welt-politik_ may serve for one instance) picking up coins
behind the severe and disdainful figure of science whose giant strides
have widened for us the horizon of the universe by some few inches--stand
ready, almost eager, to appeal to the sword as soon as the globe of the
earth has shrunk beneath our growing numbers by another ell or so. And
democracy, which has elected to pin its faith to the supremacy of
material interests, will have to fight their battles to the bitter end,
on a mere pittance--unless, indeed, some statesman of exceptional ability
and overwhelming prestige succeeds in carrying through an international
understanding for the delimitation of spheres of trade all over the
earth, on the model of the territorial spheres of influence marked in
Africa to keep the competitors for the privilege of improving the nigger
(as a buying machine) from flying prematurely at each other's throats.
This seems the only expedient at hand for the temporary maintenance of
European peace, with its alliances based on mutual distrust, preparedness
for war as its ideal, and the fear of wounds, luckily stronger, so far,
than the pinch of hunger, its only guarantee. The true peace of the
world will be a place of refuge much less like a beleaguered fortress and
more, let us hope, in the nature of an Inviolable Temple. It will be
built on less perishable foundations than those of material interests.
But it must be confessed that the architectural aspect of the universal
city remains as yet inconceivable--that the very ground for its erection
has not been cleared of the jungle.
Never before in history has the right of war been more fully admitted in
the rounded periods of public speeches, in books, in public prints, in
all the public works of peace, culminating in the establishment of the
Hague Tribunal--that solemnly official recognition of the Earth as a
House of Strife. To him whose indignation is qualified by a measure of
hope and affection, the efforts of mankind to work its own salvation
present a sight of alarming comicality. After clinging for ages to the
steps of the heavenly throne, they are now, without much modifying their
attitude, trying with touching ingenuity to steal one by one the
thunderbolts of their Jupiter. They have removed war from the list of
Heaven-sent visitations that could only be prayed against; they have
erased its name from the supplication against the wrath of war,
pestilence, and famine, as it is found in the litanies of the Roman
Catholic Church; they have dragged the scourge down from the skies and
have made it into a calm and regulated institution. At first sight the
change does not seem for the better. Jove's thunderbolt looks a most
dangerous plaything in the hands of the people. But a solemnly
established institution begins to grow old at once in the discussion,
abuse, worship, and execration of men. It grows obsolete, odious, and
intolerable; it stands fatally condemned to an unhonoured old age.
Therein lies the best hope of advanced thought, and the best way to help
its prospects is to provide in the fullest, frankest way for the
conditions of the present day. War is one of its conditions; it is its
principal condition. It lies at the heart of every question agitating
the fears and hopes of a humanity divided against itself. The succeeding
ages have changed nothing except the watchwords of the armies. The
intellectual stage of mankind being as yet in its infancy, and States,
like most individuals, having but a feeble and imperfect consciousness of
the worth and force of the inner life, the need of making their existence
manifest to themselves is determined in the direction of physical
activity. The idea of ceasing to grow in territory, in strength, in
wealth, in influence--in anything but wisdom and self-knowledge--is
odious to them as the omen of the end. Action, in which is to be found
the illusion of a mastered destiny, can alone satisfy our uneasy vanity
and lay to rest the haunting fear of the future--a sentiment concealed,
indeed, but proving its existence by the force it has, when invoked, to
stir the passions of a nation. It will be long before we have learned
that in the great darkness before us there is nothing that we need fear.
Let us act lest we perish--is the cry. And the only form of action open
to a State can be of no other than aggressive nature.
There are many kinds of aggressions, though the sanction of them is one
and the same--the magazine rifle of the latest pattern. In preparation
for or against that form of action the States of Europe are spending now
such moments of uneasy leisure as they can snatch from the labours of
factory and counting-house.
Never before has war received so much homage at the lips of men, and
reigned with less disputed sway in their minds. It has harnessed science
to its gun-carriages, it has enriched a few respectable manufacturers,
scattered doles of food and raiment amongst a few thousand skilled
workmen, devoured the first youth of whole generations, and reaped its
harvest of countless corpses. It has perverted the intelligence of men,
women, and children, and has made the speeches of Emperors, Kings,
Presidents, and Ministers monotonous with ardent protestations of
fidelity to peace. Indeed, war has made peace altogether its own, it has
modelled it on its own image: a martial, overbearing, war-lord sort of
peace, with a mailed fist, and turned-up moustaches, ringing with the din
of grand manoeuvres, eloquent with allusions to glorious feats of arms;
it has made peace so magnificent as to be almost as expensive to keep up
as itself. It has sent out apostles of its own, who at one time went
about (mostly in newspapers) preaching the gospel of the mystic sanctity
of its sacrifices, and the regenerating power of spilt blood, to the poor
in mind--whose name is legion.
It has been observed that in the course of earthly greatness a day of
culminating triumph is often paid for by a morrow of sudden extinction.
Let us hope it is so. Yet the dawn of that day of retribution may be a
long time breaking above a dark horizon. War is with us now; and,
whether this one ends soon or late, war will be with us again. And it is
the way of true wisdom for men and States to take account of things as
they are.
Civilisation has done its little best by our sensibilities for whose
growth it is responsible. It has managed to remove the sights and sounds
of battlefields away from our doorsteps. But it cannot be expected to
achieve the feat always and under every variety of circumstance. Some
day it must fail, and we shall have then a wealth of appallingly
unpleasant sensations brought home to us with painful intimacy. It is
not absurd to suppose that whatever war comes to us next it will _not_ be
a distant war waged by Russia either beyond the Amur or beyond the Oxus.
The Japanese armies have laid that ghost for ever, because the Russia of
the future will not, for the reasons explained above, be the Russia of to-
day. It will not have the same thoughts, resentments and aims. It is
even a question whether it will preserve its gigantic frame unaltered and
unbroken. All speculation loses itself in the magnitude of the events
made possible by the defeat of an autocracy whose only shadow of a title
to existence was the invincible power of military conquest. That
autocratic Russia will have a miserable end in harmony with its base
origin and inglorious life does not seem open to doubt. The problem of
the immediate future is posed not by the eventual manner but by the
approaching fact of its disappearance.
The Japanese armies, in laying the oppressive ghost, have not only
accomplished what will be recognised historically as an important mission
in the world's struggle against all forms of evil, but have also created
a situation. They have created a situation in the East which they are
competent to manage by themselves; and in doing this they have brought
about a change in the condition of the West with which Europe is not well
prepared to deal. The common ground of concord, good faith and justice
is not sufficient to establish an action upon; since the conscience of
but very few men amongst us, and of no single Western nation as yet, will
brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the fascination of a
material advantage. And eagle-eyed wisdom alone cannot take the lead of
human action, which in its nature must for ever remain short-sighted. The
trouble of the civilised world is the want of a common conservative
principle abstract enough to give the impulse, practical enough to form
the rallying point of international action tending towards the restraint
of particular ambitions. Peace tribunals instituted for the greater
glory of war will not replace it. Whether such a principle exists--who
can say? If it does not, then it ought to be invented. A sage with a
sense of humour and a heart of compassion should set about it without
loss of time, and a solemn prophet full of words and fire ought to be
given the task of preparing the minds. So far there is no trace of such
a principle anywhere in sight; even its plausible imitations (never very
effective) have disappeared long ago before the doctrine of national
aspirations. _Il n'y a plus d'Europe_--there is only an armed and
trading continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for
life and death and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions. There are
also other ambitions not so loud, but deeply rooted in the envious
acquisitive temperament of the last corner amongst the great Powers of
the Continent, whose feet are not exactly in the ocean--not yet--and
whose head is very high up--in Pomerania, the breeding place of such
precious Grenadiers that Prince Bismarck (whom it is a pleasure to quote)
would not have given the bones of one of them for the settlement of the
old Eastern Question. But times have changed, since, by way of keeping
up, I suppose, some old barbaric German rite, the faithful servant of the
Hohenzollerns was buried alive to celebrate the accession of a new
Emperor.
Already the voice of surmises has been heard hinting tentatively at a
possible re-grouping of European Powers. The alliance of the three
Empires is supposed possible. And it may be possible. The myth of
Russia's power is dying very hard--hard enough for that combination to
take place--such is the fascination that a discredited show of numbers
will still exercise upon the imagination of a people trained to the
worship of force. Germany may be willing to lend its support to a
tottering autocracy for the sake of an undisputed first place, and of a
preponderating voice in the settlement of every question in that south-
east of Europe which merges into Asia. No principle being involved in
such an alliance of mere expediency, it would never be allowed to stand
in the way of Germany's other ambitions. The fall of autocracy would
bring its restraint automatically to an end. Thus it may be believed
that the support Russian despotism may get from its once humble friend
and client will not be stamped by that thoroughness which is supposed to
be the mark of German superiority. Russia weakened down to the second
place, or Russia eclipsed altogether during the throes of her
regeneration, will answer equally well the plans of German policy--which
are many and various and often incredible, though the aim of them all is
the same: aggrandisement of territory and influence, with no regard to
right and justice, either in the East or in the West. For that and no
other is the true note of your _Welt-politik_ which desires to live.
The German eagle with a Prussian head looks all round the horizon, not so
much for something to do that would count for good in the records of the
earth, as simply for something good to get. He gazes upon the land and
upon the sea with the same covetous steadiness, for he has become of late
a maritime eagle, and has learned to box the compass. He gazes north and
south, and east and west, and is inclined to look intemperately upon the
waters of the Mediterranean when they are blue. The disappearance of the
Russian phantom has given a foreboding of unwonted freedom to the _Welt-
politik_. According to the national tendency this assumption of Imperial
impulses would run into the grotesque were it not for the spikes of the
_pickelhaubes_ peeping out grimly from behind. Germany's attitude proves
that no peace for the earth can be found in the expansion of material
interests which she seems to have adopted exclusively as her only aim,
ideal, and watchword. For the use of those who gaze half-unbelieving at
the passing away of the Russian phantom, part Ghoul, part Djinn, part Old
Man of the Sea, and wait half-doubting for the birth of a nation's soul
in this age which knows no miracles, the once-famous saying of poor
Gambetta, tribune of the people (who was simple and believed in the
"immanent justice of things"), may be adapted in the shape of a warning
that, so far as a future of liberty, concord, and justice is concerned:
"Le Prussianisme--voila l'ennemi!"
THE CRIME OF PARTITION--1919
At the end of the eighteenth century, when the partition of Poland had
become an accomplished fact, the world qualified it at once as a crime.
This strong condemnation proceeded, of course, from the West of Europe;
the Powers of the Centre, Prussia and Austria, were not likely to admit
that this spoliation fell into the category of acts morally reprehensible
and carrying the taint of anti-social guilt. As to Russia, the third
party to the crime, and the originator of the scheme, she had no national
conscience at the time. The will of its rulers was always accepted by
the people as the expression of an omnipotence derived directly from God.
As an act of mere conquest the best excuse for the partition lay simply
in the fact that it happened to be possible; there was the plunder and
there was the opportunity to get hold of it. Catherine the Great looked
upon this extension of her dominions with a cynical satisfaction. Her
political argument that the destruction of Poland meant the repression of
revolutionary ideas and the checking of the spread of Jacobinism in
Europe was a characteristically impudent pretence. There may have been
minds here and there amongst the Russians that perceived, or perhaps only
felt, that by the annexation of the greater part of the Polish Republic,
Russia approached nearer to the comity of civilised nations and ceased,
at least territorially, to be an Asiatic Power.
It was only after the partition of Poland that Russia began to play a
great part in Europe. To such statesmen as she had then that act of
brigandage must have appeared inspired by great political wisdom. The
King of Prussia, faithful to the ruling principle of his life, wished
simply to aggrandise his dominions at a much smaller cost and at much
less risk than he could have done in any other direction; for at that
time Poland was perfectly defenceless from a material point of view, and
more than ever, perhaps, inclined to put its faith in humanitarian
illusions. Morally, the Republic was in a state of ferment and
consequent weakness, which so often accompanies the period of social
reform. The strength arrayed against her was just then overwhelming; I
mean the comparatively honest (because open) strength of armed forces.
But, probably from innate inclination towards treachery, Frederick of
Prussia selected for himself the part of falsehood and deception.
Appearing on the scene in the character of a friend he entered
deliberately into a treaty of alliance with the Republic, and then,
before the ink was dry, tore it up in brazen defiance of the commonest
decency, which must have been extremely gratifying to his natural tastes.
As to Austria, it shed diplomatic tears over the transaction. They
cannot be called crocodile tears, insomuch that they were in a measure
sincere. They arose from a vivid perception that Austria's allotted
share of the spoil could never compensate her for the accession of
strength and territory to the other two Powers. Austria did not really
want an extension of territory at the cost of Poland. She could not hope
to improve her frontier in that way, and economically she had no need of
Galicia, a province whose natural resources were undeveloped and whose
salt mines did not arouse her cupidity because she had salt mines of her
own. No doubt the democratic complexion of Polish institutions was very
distasteful to the conservative monarchy; Austrian statesmen did see at
the time that the real danger to the principle of autocracy was in the
West, in France, and that all the forces of Central Europe would be
needed for its suppression. But the movement towards a _partage_ on the
part of Russia and Prussia was too definite to be resisted, and Austria
had to follow their lead in the destruction of a State which she would
have preferred to preserve as a possible ally against Prussian and
Russian ambitions. It may be truly said that the destruction of Poland
secured the safety of the French Revolution. For when in 1795 the crime
was consummated, the Revolution had turned the corner and was in a state
to defend itself against the forces of reaction.
In the second half of the eighteenth century there were two centres of
liberal ideas on the continent of Europe: France and Poland. On an
impartial survey one may say without exaggeration that then France was
relatively every bit as weak as Poland; even, perhaps, more so. But
France's geographical position made her much less vulnerable. She had no
powerful neighbours on her frontier; a decayed Spain in the south and a
conglomeration of small German Principalities on the east were her happy
lot. The only States which dreaded the contamination of the new
principles and had enough power to combat it were Prussia, Austria, and
Russia, and they had another centre of forbidden ideas to deal with in
defenceless Poland, unprotected by nature, and offering an immediate
satisfaction to their cupidity. They made their choice, and the untold
sufferings of a nation which would not die was the price exacted by fate
for the triumph of revolutionary ideals.
Thus even a crime may become a moral agent by the lapse of time and the
course of history. Progress leaves its dead by the way, for progress is
only a great adventure as its leaders and chiefs know very well in their
hearts. It is a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an
enterprise the victims do not count. As an emotional outlet for the
oratory of freedom it was convenient enough to remember the Crime now and
then: the Crime being the murder of a State and the carving of its body
into three pieces. There was really nothing to do but to drop a few
tears and a few flowers of rhetoric upon the grave. But the spirit of
the nation refused to rest therein. It haunted the territories of the
Old Republic in the manner of a ghost haunting its ancestral mansion
where strangers are making themselves at home; a calumniated, ridiculed,
and pooh-pooh'd ghost, and yet never ceasing to inspire a sort of awe, a
strange uneasiness, in the hearts of the unlawful possessors. Poland
deprived of its independence, of its historical continuity, with its
religion and language persecuted and repressed, became a mere
geographical expression. And even that, itself, seemed strangely vague,
had lost its definite character, was rendered doubtful by the theories
and the claims of the spoliators who, by a strange effect of uneasy
conscience, while strenuously denying the moral guilt of the transaction,
were always trying to throw a veil of high rectitude over the Crime. What
was most annoying to their righteousness was the fact that the nation,
stabbed to the heart, refused to grow insensible and cold. That
persistent and almost uncanny vitality was sometimes very inconvenient to
the rest of Europe also. It would intrude its irresistible claim into
every problem of European politics, into the theory of European
equilibrium, into the question of the Near East, the Italian question,
the question of Schleswig-Holstein, and into the doctrine of
nationalities. That ghost, not content with making its ancestral halls
uncomfortable for the thieves, haunted also the Cabinets of Europe, waved
indecently its bloodstained robes in the solemn atmosphere of Council-
rooms, where congresses and conferences sit with closed windows. It
would not be exorcised by the brutal jeers of Bismarck and the fine
railleries of Gorchakov.
As a Polish friend observed to me some years ago: "Till the year '48 the
Polish problem has been to a certain extent a convenient rallying-point
for all manifestations of liberalism. Since that time we have come to be
regarded simply as a nuisance. It's very disagreeable."
I agreed that it was, and he continued: "What are we to do? We did not
create the situation by any outside action of ours. Through all the
centuries of its existence Poland has never been a menace to anybody, not
even to the Turks, to whom it has been merely an obstacle."
Nothing could be more true. The spirit of aggressiveness was absolutely
foreign to the Polish temperament, to which the preservation of its
institutions and its liberties was much more precious than any ideas of
conquest. Polish wars were defensive, and they were mostly fought within
Poland's own borders. And that those territories were often invaded was
but a misfortune arising from its geographical position. Territorial
expansion was never the master-thought of Polish statesmen. The
consolidation of the territories of the _serenissime_ Republic, which
made of it a Power of the first rank for a time, was not accomplished by
force. It was not the consequence of successful aggression, but of a
long and successful defence against the raiding neighbours from the East.
The lands of Lithuanian and Ruthenian speech were never conquered by
Poland. These peoples were not compelled by a series of exhausting wars
to seek safety in annexation. It was not the will of a prince or a
political intrigue that brought about the union. Neither was it fear.
The slowly-matured view of the economical and social necessities and,
before all, the ripening moral sense of the masses were the motives that
induced the forty three representatives of Lithuanian and Ruthenian
provinces, led by their paramount prince, to enter into a political
combination unique in the history of the world, a spontaneous and
complete union of sovereign States choosing deliberately the way of
peace. Never was strict truth better expressed in a political instrument
than in the preamble of the first Union Treaty (1413). It begins with
the words: "This Union, being the outcome not of hatred, but of
love"--words that Poles have not heard addressed to them politically by
any nation for the last hundred and fifty years.
This union being an organic, living thing capable of growth and
development was, later, modified and confirmed by two other treaties,
which guaranteed to all the parties in a just and eternal union all their
rights, liberties, and respective institutions. The Polish State offers
a singular instance of an extremely liberal administrative federalism
which, in its Parliamentary life as well as its international politics,
presented a complete unity of feeling and purpose. As an eminent French
diplomatist remarked many years ago: "It is a very remarkable fact in the
history of the Polish State, this invariable and unanimous consent of the
populations; the more so that, the King being looked upon simply as the
chief of the Republic, there was no monarchical bond, no dynastic
fidelity to control and guide the sentiment of the nations, and their
union remained as a pure affirmation of the national will." The Grand
Duchy of Lithuania and its Ruthenian Provinces retained their statutes,
their own administration, and their own political institutions. That
those institutions in the course of time tended to assimilation with the
Polish form was not the result of any pressure, but simply of the
superior character of Polish civilisation.
Even after Poland lost its independence this alliance and this union
remained firm in spirit and fidelity. All the national movements towards
liberation were initiated in the name of the whole mass of people
inhabiting the limits of the old Republic, and all the Provinces took
part in them with complete devotion. It is only in the last generation
that efforts have been made to create a tendency towards separation,
which would indeed serve no one but Poland's common enemies. And,
strangely enough, it is the internationalists, men who professedly care
nothing for race or country, who have set themselves this task of
disruption, one can easily see for what sinister purpose. The ways of
the internationalists may be dark, but they are not inscrutable.
From the same source no doubt there will flow in the future a poisoned
stream of hints of a reconstituted Poland being a danger to the races
once so closely associated within the territories of the Old Republic.
The old partners in "the Crime" are not likely to forgive their victim
its inconvenient and almost shocking obstinacy in keeping alive. They
had tried moral assassination before and with some small measure of
success, for, indeed, the Polish question, like all living reproaches,
had become a nuisance. Given the wrong, and the apparent impossibility
of righting it without running risks of a serious nature, some moral
alleviation may be found in the belief that the victim had brought its
misfortunes on its own head by its own sins. That theory, too, had been
advanced about Poland (as if other nations had known nothing of sin and
folly), and it made some way in the world at different times, simply
because good care was taken by the interested parties to stop the mouth
of the accused. But it has never carried much conviction to honest
minds. Somehow, in defiance of the cynical point of view as to the Force
of Lies and against all the power of falsified evidence, truth often
turns out to be stronger than calumny. With the course of years,
however, another danger sprang up, a danger arising naturally from the
new political alliances dividing Europe into two armed camps. It was the
danger of silence. Almost without exception the Press of Western Europe
in the twentieth century refused to touch the Polish question in any
shape or form whatever. Never was the fact of Polish vitality more
embarrassing to European diplomacy than on the eve of Poland's
resurrection.
When the war broke out there was something gruesomely comic in the
proclamations of emperors and archdukes appealing to that invincible soul
of a nation whose existence or moral worth they had been so arrogantly
denying for more than a century. Perhaps in the whole record of human
transactions there have never been performances so brazen and so vile as
the manifestoes of the German Emperor and the Grand Duke Nicholas of
Russia; and, I imagine, no more bitter insult has been offered to human
heart and intelligence than the way in which those proclamations were
flung into the face of historical truth. It was like a scene in a
cynical and sinister farce, the absurdity of which became in some sort
unfathomable by the reflection that nobody in the world could possibly be
so abjectly stupid as to be deceived for a single moment. At that time,
and for the first two months of the war, I happened to be in Poland, and
I remember perfectly well that, when those precious documents came out,
the confidence in the moral turpitude of mankind they implied did not
even raise a scornful smile on the lips of men whose most sacred feelings
and dignity they outraged. They did not deign to waste their contempt on
them. In fact, the situation was too poignant and too involved for
either hot scorn or a coldly rational discussion. For the Poles it was
like being in a burning house of which all the issues were locked. There
was nothing but sheer anguish under the strange, as if stony, calmness
which in the utter absence of all hope falls on minds that are not
constitutionally prone to despair. Yet in this time of dismay the
irrepressible vitality of the nation would not accept a neutral attitude.
I was told that even if there were no issue it was absolutely necessary
for the Poles to affirm their national existence. Passivity, which could
be regarded as a craven acceptance of all the material and moral horrors
ready to fall upon the nation, was not to be thought of for a moment.
Therefore, it was explained to me, the Poles _must_ act. Whether this
was a counsel of wisdom or not it is very difficult to say, but there are
crises of the soul which are beyond the reach of wisdom. When there is
apparently no issue visible to the eyes of reason, sentiment may yet find
a way out, either towards salvation or to utter perdition, no one can
tell--and the sentiment does not even ask the question. Being there as a
stranger in that tense atmosphere, which was yet not unfamiliar to me, I
was not very anxious to parade my wisdom, especially after it had been
pointed out in answer to my cautious arguments that, if life has its
values worth fighting for, death, too, has that in it which can make it
worthy or unworthy.
Out of the mental and moral trouble into which the grouping of the Powers
at the beginning of war had thrown the counsels of Poland there emerged
at last the decision that the Polish Legions, a peace organisation in
Galicia directed by Pilsudski (afterwards given the rank of General, and
now apparently the Chief of the Government in Warsaw), should take the
field against the Russians. In reality it did not matter against which
partner in the "Crime" Polish resentment should be directed. There was
little to choose between the methods of Russian barbarism, which were
both crude and rotten, and the cultivated brutality tinged with contempt
of Germany's superficial, grinding civilisation. There was nothing to
choose between them. Both were hateful, and the direction of the Polish
effort was naturally governed by Austria's tolerant attitude, which had
connived for years at the semi-secret organisation of the Polish Legions.
Besides, the material possibility pointed out the way. That Poland
should have turned at first against the ally of Western Powers, to whose
moral support she had been looking for so many years, is not a greater
monstrosity than that alliance with Russia which had been entered into by
England and France with rather less excuse and with a view to
eventualities which could perhaps have been avoided by a firmer policy
and by a greater resolution in the face of what plainly appeared
unavoidable.
For let the truth be spoken. The action of Germany, however cruel,
sanguinary, and faithless, was nothing in the nature of a stab in the
dark. The Germanic Tribes had told the whole world in all possible tones
carrying conviction, the gently persuasive, the coldly logical; in tones
Hegelian, Nietzschean, warlike, pious, cynical, inspired, what they were
going to do to the inferior races of the earth, so full of sin and all
unworthiness. But with a strange similarity to the prophets of old (who
were also great moralists and invokers of might) they seemed to be crying
in a desert. Whatever might have been the secret searching of hearts,
the Worthless Ones would not take heed. It must also be admitted that
the conduct of the menaced Governments carried with it no suggestion of
resistance. It was no doubt, the effect of neither courage nor fear, but
of that prudence which causes the average man to stand very still in the
presence of a savage dog. It was not a very politic attitude, and the
more reprehensible in so far that it seemed to arise from the mistrust of
their own people's fortitude. On simple matters of life and death a
people is always better than its leaders, because a people cannot argue
itself as a whole into a sophisticated state of mind out of deference for
a mere doctrine or from an exaggerated sense of its own cleverness. I am
speaking now of democracies whose chiefs resemble the tyrant of Syracuse
in this, that their power is unlimited (for who can limit the will of a
voting people?) and who always see the domestic sword hanging by a hair
above their heads.
Perhaps a different attitude would have checked German self-confidence,
and her overgrown militarism would have died from the excess of its own
strength. What would have been then the moral state of Europe it is
difficult to say. Some other excess would probably have taken its place,
excess of theory, or excess of sentiment, or an excess of the sense of
security leading to some other form of catastrophe; but it is certain
that in that case the Polish question would not have taken a concrete
form for ages. Perhaps it would never have taken form! In this world,
where everything is transient, even the most reproachful ghosts end by
vanishing out of old mansions, out of men's consciences. Progress of
enlightenment, or decay of faith? In the years before the war the Polish
ghost was becoming so thin that it was impossible to get for it the
slightest mention in the papers. A young Pole coming to me from Paris
was extremely indignant, but I, indulging in that detachment which is the
product of greater age, longer experience, and a habit of meditation,
refused to share that sentiment. He had gone begging for a word on
Poland to many influential people, and they had one and all told him that
they were going to do no such thing. They were all men of ideas and
therefore might have been called idealists, but the notion most strongly
anchored in their minds was the folly of touching a question which
certainly had no merit of actuality and would have had the appalling
effect of provoking the wrath of their old enemies and at the same time
offending the sensibilities of their new friends. It was an unanswerable
argument. I couldn't share my young friend's surprise and indignation.
My practice of reflection had also convinced me that there is nothing on
earth that turns quicker on its pivot than political idealism when
touched by the breath of practical politics.
It would be good to remember that Polish independence as embodied in a
Polish State is not the gift of any kind of journalism, neither is it the
outcome even of some particularly benevolent idea or of any clearly
apprehended sense of guilt. I am speaking of what I know when I say that
the original and only formative idea in Europe was the idea of delivering
the fate of Poland into the hands of Russian Tsarism. And, let us
remember, it was assumed then to be a victorious Tsarism at that. It was
an idea talked of openly, entertained seriously, presented as a
benevolence, with a curious blindness to its grotesque and ghastly
character. It was the idea of delivering the victim with a kindly smile
and the confident assurance that "it would be all right" to a perfectly
unrepentant assassin, who, after sawing furiously at its throat for a
hundred years or so, was expected to make friends suddenly and kiss it on
both cheeks in the mystic Russian fashion. It was a singularly
nightmarish combination of international polity, and no whisper of any
other would have been officially tolerated. Indeed, I do not think in
the whole extent of Western Europe there was anybody who had the
slightest mind to whisper on that subject. Those were the days of the
dark future, when Benckendorf put down his name on the Committee for the
Relief of Polish Populations driven by the Russian armies into the heart
of Russia, when the Grand Duke Nicholas (the gentleman who advocated a
St. Bartholomew's Night for the suppression of Russian liberalism) was
displaying his "divine" (I have read the very word in an English
newspaper of standing) strategy in the great retreat, where Mr. Iswolsky
carried himself haughtily on the banks of the Seine; and it was beginning
to dawn upon certain people there that he was a greater nuisance even
than the Polish question.
But there is no use in talking about all that. Some clever person has
said that it is always the unexpected that happens, and on a calm and
dispassionate survey the world does appear mainly to one as a scene of
miracles. Out of Germany's strength, in whose purpose so many people
refused to believe, came Poland's opportunity, in which nobody could have
been expected to believe. Out of Russia's collapse emerged that
forbidden thing, the Polish independence, not as a vengeful figure, the
retributive shadow of the crime, but as something much more solid and
more difficult to get rid of--a political necessity and a moral solution.
Directly it appeared its practical usefulness became undeniable, and also
the fact that, for better or worse, it was impossible to get rid of it
again except by the unthinkable way of another carving, of another
partition, of another crime.
Therein lie the strength and the future of the thing so strictly
forbidden no farther back than two years or so, of the Polish
independence expressed in a Polish State. It comes into the world
morally free, not in virtue of its sufferings, but in virtue of its
miraculous rebirth and of its ancient claim for services rendered to
Europe. Not a single one of the combatants of all the fronts of the
world has died consciously for Poland's freedom. That supreme
opportunity was denied even to Poland's own children. And it is just as
well! Providence in its inscrutable way had been merciful, for had it
been otherwise the load of gratitude would have been too great, the sense
of obligation too crushing, the joy of deliverance too fearful for
mortals, common sinners with the rest of mankind before the eye of the
Most High. Those who died East and West, leaving so much anguish and so
much pride behind them, died neither for the creation of States, nor for
empty words, nor yet for the salvation of general ideas. They died
neither for democracy, nor leagues, nor systems, nor yet for abstract
justice, which is an unfathomable mystery. They died for something too
deep for words, too mighty for the common standards by which reason
measures the advantages of life and death, too sacred for the vain
discourses that come and go on the lips of dreamers, fanatics,
humanitarians, and statesmen. They died . . . .
Poland's independence springs up from that great immolation, but Poland's
loyalty to Europe will not be rooted in anything so trenchant and
burdensome as the sense of an immeasurable indebtedness, of that
gratitude which in a worldly sense is sometimes called eternal, but which
lies always at the mercy of weariness and is fatally condemned by the
instability of human sentiments to end in negation. Polish loyalty will
be rooted in something much more solid and enduring, in something that
could never be called eternal, but which is, in fact, life-enduring. It
will be rooted in the national temperament, which is about the only thing
on earth that can be trusted. Men may deteriorate, they may improve too,
but they don't change. Misfortune is a hard school which may either
mature or spoil a national character, but it may be reasonably advanced
that the long course of adversity of the most cruel kind has not injured
the fundamental characteristics of the Polish nation which has proved its
vitality against the most demoralising odds. The various phases of the
Polish sense of self-preservation struggling amongst the menacing forces
and the no less threatening chaos of the neighbouring Powers should be
judged impartially. I suggest impartiality and not indulgence simply
because, when appraising the Polish question, it is not necessary to
invoke the softer emotions. A little calm reflection on the past and the
present is all that is necessary on the part of the Western world to
judge the movements of a community whose ideals are the same, but whose
situation is unique. This situation was brought vividly home to me in
the course of an argument more than eighteen months ago. "Don't forget,"
I was told, "that Poland has got to live in contact with Germany and
Russia to the end of time. Do you understand the force of that
expression: 'To the end of time'? Facts must be taken into account, and
especially appalling facts, such as this, to which there is no possible
remedy on earth. For reasons which are, properly speaking,
physiological, a prospect of friendship with Germans or Russians even in
the most distant future is unthinkable. Any alliance of heart and mind
would be a monstrous thing, and monsters, as we all know, cannot live.
You can't base your conduct on a monstrous conception. We are either
worth or not worth preserving, but the horrible psychology of the
situation is enough to drive the national mind to distraction. Yet under
a destructive pressure, of which Western Europe can have no notion,
applied by forces that were not only crushing but corrupting, we have
preserved our sanity. Therefore there can be no fear of our losing our
minds simply because the pressure is removed. We have neither lost our
heads nor yet our moral sense. Oppression, not merely political, but
affecting social relations, family life, the deepest affections of human
nature, and the very fount of natural emotions, has never made us
vengeful. It is worthy of notice that with every incentive present in
our emotional reactions we had no recourse to political assassination.
Arms in hand, hopeless or hopefully, and always against immeasurable
odds, we did affirm ourselves and the justice of our cause; but wild
justice has never been a part of our conception of national manliness. In
all the history of Polish oppression there was only one shot fired which
was not in battle. Only one! And the man who fired it in Paris at the
Emperor Alexander II. was but an individual connected with no
organisation, representing no shade of Polish opinion. The only effect
in Poland was that of profound regret, not at the failure, but at the
mere fact of the attempt. The history of our captivity is free from that
stain; and whatever follies in the eyes of the world we may have
perpetrated, we have neither murdered our enemies nor acted treacherously
against them, nor yet have been reduced to the point of cursing each
other."
I could not gainsay the truth of that discourse, I saw as clearly as my
interlocutor the impossibility of the faintest sympathetic bond between
Poland and her neighbours ever being formed in the future. The only
course that remains to a reconstituted Poland is the elaboration,
establishment, and preservation of the most correct method of political
relations with neighbours to whom Poland's existence is bound to be a
humiliation and an offence. Calmly considered it is an appalling task,
yet one may put one's trust in that national temperament which is so
completely free from aggressiveness and revenge. Therein lie the
foundations of all hope. The success of renewed life for that nation
whose fate is to remain in exile, ever isolated from the West, amongst
hostile surroundings, depends on the sympathetic understanding of its
problems by its distant friends, the Western Powers, which in their
democratic development must recognise the moral and intellectual kinship
of that distant outpost of their own type of civilisation, which was the
only basis of Polish culture.
Whatever may be the future of Russia and the final organisation of
Germany, the old hostility must remain unappeased, the fundamental
antagonism must endure for years to come. The Crime of the Partition was
committed by autocratic Governments which were the Governments of their
time; but those Governments were characterised in the past, as they will
be in the future, by their people's national traits, which remain utterly
incompatible with the Polish mentality and Polish sentiment. Both the
German submissiveness (idealistic as it may be) and the Russian
lawlessness (fed on the corruption of all the virtues) are utterly
foreign to the Polish nation, whose qualities and defects are altogether
of another kind, tending to a certain exaggeration of individualism and,
perhaps, to an extreme belief in the Governing Power of Free Assent: the
one invariably vital principle in the internal government of the Old
Republic. There was never a history more free from political bloodshed
than the history of the Polish State, which never knew either feudal
institutions or feudal quarrels. At the time when heads were falling on
the scaffolds all over Europe there was only one political execution in
Poland--only one; and as to that there still exists a tradition that the
great Chancellor who democratised Polish institutions, and had to order
it in pursuance of his political purpose, could not settle that matter
with his conscience till the day of his death. Poland, too, had her
civil wars, but this can hardly be made a matter of reproach to her by
the rest of the world. Conducted with humanity, they left behind them no
animosities and no sense of repression, and certainly no legacy of
hatred. They were but a recognised argument in political discussion and
tended always towards conciliation.
I cannot imagine, whatever form of democratic government Poland
elaborates for itself, that either the nation or its leaders would do
anything but welcome the closest scrutiny of their renewed political
existence. The difficulty of the problem of that existence will be so
great that some errors will be unavoidable, and one may be sure that they
will be taken advantage of by its neighbours to discredit that living
witness to a great historical crime. If not the actual frontiers, then
the moral integrity of the new State is sure to be assailed before the
eyes of Europe. Economical enmity will also come into play when the
world's work is resumed again and competition asserts its power. Charges
of aggression are certain to be made, especially as related to the small
States formed of the territories of the Old Republic. And everybody
knows the power of lies which go about clothed in coats of many colours,
whereas, as is well known, Truth has no such advantage, and for that
reason is often suppressed as not altogether proper for everyday
purposes. It is not often recognised, because it is not always fit to be
seen.
Already there are innuendoes, threats, hints thrown out, and even awful
instances fabricated out of inadequate materials, but it is historically
unthinkable that the Poland of the future, with its sacred tradition of
freedom and its hereditary sense of respect for the rights of individuals
and States, should seek its prosperity in aggressive action or in moral
violence against that part of its once fellow-citizens who are Ruthenians
or Lithuanians. The only influence that cannot be restrained is simply
the influence of time, which disengages truth from all facts with a
merciless logic and prevails over the passing opinions, the changing
impulses of men. There can be no doubt that the moral impulses and the
material interests of the new nationalities, which seem to play now the
game of disintegration for the benefit of the world's enemies, will in
the end bring them nearer to the Poland of this war's creation, will
unite them sooner or later by a spontaneous movement towards the State
which had adopted and brought them up in the development of its own
humane culture--the offspring of the West.
A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM--1916
We must start from the assumption that promises made by proclamation at
the beginning of this war may be binding on the individuals who made them
under the stress of coming events, but cannot be regarded as binding the
Governments after the end of the war.
Poland has been presented with three proclamations. Two of them were in
such contrast with the avowed principles and the historic action for the
last hundred years (since the Congress of Vienna) of the Powers
concerned, that they were more like cynical insults to the nation's
deepest feelings, its memory and its intelligence, than state papers of a
conciliatory nature.
The German promises awoke nothing but indignant contempt; the Russian a
bitter incredulity of the most complete kind. The Austrian proclamation,
which made no promises and contented itself with pointing out the Austro-
Polish relations for the last forty-five years, was received in silence.
For it is a fact that in Austrian Poland alone Polish nationality was
recognised as an element of the Empire, and individuals could breathe the
air of freedom, of civil life, if not of political independence.
But for Poles to be Germanophile is unthinkable. To be Russophile or
Austrophile is at best a counsel of despair in view of a European
situation which, because of the grouping of the powers, seems to shut
from them every hope, expressed or unexpressed, of a national future
nursed through more than a hundred years of suffering and oppression.
Through most of these years, and especially since 1830, Poland (I use
this expression since Poland exists as a spiritual entity to-day as
definitely as it ever existed in her past) has put her faith in the
Western Powers. Politically it may have been nothing more than a
consoling illusion, and the nation had a half-consciousness of this. But
what Poland was looking for from the Western Powers without
discouragement and with unbroken confidence was moral support.
This is a fact of the sentimental order. But such facts have their
positive value, for their idealism derives from perhaps the highest kind
of reality. A sentiment asserts its claim by its force, persistence and
universality. In Poland that sentimental attitude towards the Western
Powers is universal. It extends to all classes. The very children are
affected by it as soon as they begin to think.
The political value of such a sentiment consists in this, that it is
based on profound resemblances. Therefore one can build on it as if it
were a material fact. For the same reason it would be unsafe to
disregard it if one proposed to build solidly. The Poles, whom
superficial or ill-informed theorists are trying to force into the social
and psychological formula of Slavonism, are in truth not Slavonic at all.
In temperament, in feeling, in mind, and even in unreason, they are
Western, with an absolute comprehension of all Western modes of thought,
even of those which are remote from their historical experience.
That element of racial unity which may be called Polonism, remained
compressed between Prussian Germanism on one side and the Russian
Slavonism on the other. For Germanism it feels nothing but hatred. But
between Polonism and Slavonism there is not so much hatred as a complete
and ineradicable incompatibility.
No political work of reconstructing Poland either as a matter of justice
or expediency could be sound which would leave the new creation in
dependence to Germanism or to Slavonism.
The first need not be considered. The second must be--unless the Powers
elect to drop the Polish question either under the cover of vague
assurances or without any disguise whatever.
But if it is considered it will be seen at once that the Slavonic
solution of the Polish Question can offer no guarantees of duration or
hold the promise of security for the peace of Europe.
The only basis for it would be the Grand Duke's Manifesto. But that
Manifesto, signed by a personage now removed from Europe to Asia, and by
a man, moreover, who if true to himself, to his conception of patriotism
and to his family tradition could not have put his hand to it with any
sincerity of purpose, is now divested of all authority. The forcible
vagueness of its promises, its startling inconsistency with the hundred
years of ruthlessly denationalising oppression permit one to doubt
whether it was ever meant to have any authority.
But in any case it could have had no effect. The very nature of things
would have brought to nought its professed intentions.
It is impossible to suppose that a State of Russia's power and
antecedents would tolerate a privileged community (of, to Russia,
unnational complexion) within the body of the Empire. All history shows
that such an arrangement, however hedged in by the most solemn treaties
and declarations, cannot last. In this case it would lead to a tragic
issue. The absorption of Polonism is unthinkable. The last hundred
years of European History proves it undeniably. There remains then
extirpation, a process of blood and iron; and the last act of the Polish
drama would be played then before a Europe too weary to interfere, and to
the applause of Germany.
It would not be just to say that the disappearance of Polonism would add
any strength to the Slavonic power of expansion. It would add no
strength, but it would remove a possibly effective barrier against the
surprises the future of Europe may hold in store for the Western Powers.
Thus the question whether Polonism is worth saving presents itself as a
problem of politics with a practical bearing on the stability of European
peace--as a barrier or perhaps better (in view of its detached position)
as an outpost of the Western Powers placed between the great might of
Slavonism which has not yet made up its mind to anything, and the
organised Germanism which has spoken its mind with no uncertain voice,
before the world.
Looked at in that light alone Polonism seems worth saving. That it has
lived so long on its trust in the moral support of the Western Powers may
give it another and even stronger claim, based on a truth of a more
profound kind. Polonism had resisted the utmost efforts of Germanism and
Slavonism for more than a hundred years. Why? Because of the strength
of its ideals conscious of their kinship with the West. Such a power of
resistance creates a moral obligation which it would be unsafe to
neglect. There is always a risk in throwing away a tool of proved
temper.
In this profound conviction of the practical and ideal worth of Polonism
one approaches the problem of its preservation with a very vivid sense of
the practical difficulties derived from the grouping of the Powers. The
uncertainty of the extent and of the actual form of victory for the
Allies will increase the difficulty of formulating a plan of Polish
regeneration at the present moment.
Poland, to strike its roots again into the soil of political Europe, will
require a guarantee of security for the healthy development and for the
untrammelled play of such institutions as she may be enabled to give to
herself.
Those institutions will be animated by the spirit of Polonism, which,
having been a factor in the history of Europe and having proved its
vitality under oppression, has established its right to live. That
spirit, despised and hated by Germany and incompatible with Slavonism
because of moral differences, cannot avoid being (in its renewed
assertion) an object of dislike and mistrust.
As an unavoidable consequence of the past Poland will have to begin its
existence in an atmosphere of enmities and suspicions. That advanced
outpost of Western civilisation will have to hold its ground in the midst
of hostile camps: always its historical fate.
Against the menace of such a specially dangerous situation the paper and
ink of public Treaties cannot be an effective defence. Nothing but the
actual, living, active participation of the two Western Powers in the
establishment of the new Polish commonwealth, and in the first twenty
years of its existence, will give the Poles a sufficient guarantee of
security in the work of restoring their national life.
An Anglo-French protectorate would be the ideal form of moral and
material support. But Russia, as an ally, must take her place in it on
such a footing as will allay to the fullest extent her possible
apprehensions and satisfy her national sentiment. That necessity will
have to be formally recognised.
In reality Russia has ceased to care much for her Polish possessions.
Public recognition of a mistake in political morality and a voluntary
surrender of territory in the cause of European concord, cannot damage
the prestige of a powerful State. The new spheres of expansion in
regions more easily assimilable, will more than compensate Russia for the
loss of territory on the Western frontier of the Empire.
The experience of Dual Controls and similar combinations has been so
unfortunate in the past that the suggestion of a Triple Protectorate may
well appear at first sight monstrous even to unprejudiced minds. But it
must be remembered that this is a unique case and a problem altogether
exceptional, justifying the employment of exceptional means for its
solution. To those who would doubt the possibility of even bringing such
a scheme into existence the answer may be made that there are
psychological moments when any measure tending towards the ends of
concord and justice may be brought into being. And it seems that the end
of the war would be the moment for bringing into being the political
scheme advocated in this note.
Its success must depend on the singleness of purpose in the contracting
Powers, and on the wisdom, the tact, the abilities, the good-will of men
entrusted with its initiation and its further control. Finally it may be
pointed out that this plan is the only one offering serious guarantees to
all the parties occupying their respective positions within the scheme.
If her existence as a state is admitted as just, expedient and necessary,
Poland has the moral right to receive her constitution not from the hand
of an old enemy, but from the Western Powers alone, though of course with
the fullest concurrence of Russia.
This constitution, elaborated by a committee of Poles nominated by the
three Governments, will (after due discussion and amendment by the High
Commissioners of the Protecting Powers) be presented to Poland as the
initial document, the charter of her new life, freely offered and
unreservedly accepted.
It should be as simple and short as a written constitution can
be--establishing the Polish Commonwealth, settling the lines of
representative institutions, the form of judicature, and leaving the
greatest measure possible of self-government to the provinces forming
part of the re-created Poland.
This constitution will be promulgated immediately after the three Powers
had settled the frontiers of the new State, including the town of Danzic
(free port) and a proportion of seaboard. The legislature will then be
called together and a general treaty will regulate Poland's international
portion as a protected state, the status of the High Commissioners and
such-like matters. The legislature will ratify, thus making Poland, as
it were, a party in the establishment of the protectorate. A point of
importance.
Other general treaties will define Poland's position in the Anglo-Franco-
Russian alliance, fix the numbers of the army, and settle the
participation of the Powers in its organisation and training.
POLAND REVISITED--1915
I.
I have never believed in political assassination as a means to an end,
and least of all in assassination of the dynastic order. I don't know
how far murder can ever approach the perfection of a fine art, but looked
upon with the cold eye of reason it seems but a crude expedient of
impatient hope or hurried despair. There are few men whose premature
death could influence human affairs more than on the surface. The deeper
stream of causes depends not on individuals who, like the mass of
mankind, are carried on by a destiny which no murder has ever been able
to placate, divert, or arrest.
In July of last year I was a stranger in a strange city in the Midlands
and particularly out of touch with the world's politics. Never a very
diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a
private order which caused me to be even less informed than usual on
public affairs as presented from day to day in that necessarily
atmosphereless, perspectiveless manner of the daily papers, which
somehow, for a man possessed of some historic sense, robs them of all
real interest. I don't think I had looked at a daily for a month past.
But though a stranger in a strange city I was not lonely, thanks to a
friend who had travelled there out of pure kindness to bear me company in
a conjuncture which, in a most private sense, was somewhat trying.
It was this friend who, one morning at breakfast, informed me of the
murder of the Archduke Ferdinand.
The impression was mediocre. I was barely aware that such a man existed.
I remembered only that not long before he had visited London. The
recollection was rather of a cloud of insignificant printed words his
presence in this country provoked.
Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance was
Archducal, dynastic, purely accidental. Can there be in the world of
real men anything more shadowy than an Archduke? And now he was no more;
removed with an atrocity of circumstances which made one more sensible of
his humanity than when he was in life. I connected that crime with
Balkanic plots and aspirations so little that I had actually to ask where
it had happened. My friend told me it was in Serajevo, and wondered what
would be the consequences of that grave event. He asked me what I
thought would happen next.