_An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, February 13, 1918_
Our losses in this War continue to be enormous, and we are not yet near
to the end. So it may seem absurd to speak of our gains, of gains that
we have already achieved. But if you will look at the thing in a large
light, I think you will see that it is not absurd.
I do not speak of gains of territory, and prisoners, and booty. It is
true that we have taken from the Germans about a million square miles of
land in Africa, where land is cheap. We have taken more prisoners from
them than they have taken from us, and we have whole parks of German
artillery to set over against the battered and broken remnants of
British field-guns which were exhibited in Berlin--a monument to the
immortal valour of the little old Army. I am speaking rather of gains
which cannot be counted as guns are counted, or measured as land is
measured, but which are none the less real and important.
The Germans have achieved certain great material gains in this War, and
they are fighting now to hold them. If they fail to hold them, the
Germany of the war-lords is ruined. She will have to give up all her
bloated ambitions, to purge and live cleanly, and painfully to
reconstruct her prosperity on a quieter and sounder basis. She will not
do this until she is forced to it by defeat. No doubt there are moderate
and sensible men in Germany, as in other countries; but in Germany they
are without influence, and can do nothing. War is the national industry
of Prussia; Prussia has knit together the several states of the larger
Germany by means of war, and has promised them prosperity and power in
the future, to be achieved by war. You know the Prussian doctrine of
war. Every one now knows it. According to that doctrine it is a foolish
thing for a nation to wait till it is attacked. It should carefully
calculate its own strength and the strength of its neighbours, and, when
it is ready, it should attack them, on any pretext, suddenly, without
warning, and should take from them money and land. When it has gained
territory in this fashion, it should subject the population of the
conquered territory to the strictest laws of military service, and so
supply itself with an instrument for new and bolder aggression. This is
not only the German doctrine; it is the German practice. In this way and
no other modern Germany has been built up. It is a huge new State,
founded on force, cemented by fear, and financed on speculative gains to
be derived from the great gamble of war. You may have noticed that the
German people have not been called on, as yet, to pay any considerable
sum in taxation towards the expenses of this war. Those expenses (that,
at least, was the original idea) were to be borne wholly by the
conquered enemy. There are hundreds of thousands of Germans to-day who
firmly believe that their war-lords will return in triumph from the
stricken field, bringing with them the spoils of war, and scattering a
largess of peace and plenty.
To us it seems a marvel that any people should accept such a doctrine,
and should willingly give their lives and their fortunes to the work of
carrying it out in practice; but it is not so marvellous as it seems.
The German peoples are brave and obedient, and so make good soldiers;
they are easily lured by the hope of profit; they are naturally
attracted by the spectacular and sentimental side of war; above all,
they are so curiously stupid that many of them do actually believe that
they are a divinely chosen race, superior to the other races of the
world. They are very carefully educated, and their education, which is
ordered by the State, is part of the military machine. Their thinking is
done for them by officials. It would require an extraordinary degree of
courage and independence for a German youth to cut himself loose and
begin thinking and judging for himself. It must always be remembered,
moreover, that their recent history seems to justify their creed. I will
not go back to Frederick the Great, though the history of his wars is
the Prussian handbook, which teaches all the characteristic Prussian
methods of treachery and deceit. But consider only the last two German
wars. How, in the face of these, can it be proved to any German that war
is not the most profitable of adventures? In 1866 Prussia had war with
Austria. The war lasted forty days, and Prussia had from five to six
thousand soldiers killed in action. As a consequence of the war Prussia
gained much territory, and established her control over the states of
greater Germany. In 1870 she had war with France. Her total casualties
in that war were approximately a hundred thousand, just about the same
as our casualties in Gallipoli. From the war she gained, besides a great
increase of strength at home, the rich provinces of Alsace and Lorraine,
with all their mineral wealth, and an indemnity of two hundred million
pounds, that is to say, four times the actual cost of the war in money.
How then can it be maintained that war is not good business? If you say
so to any Prussian, he thinks you are talking like a child.
Not only were these two wars rich in profit for the Germans, but they
did not lose them much esteem. There was sympathy in this country for
the union of the German peoples, just as there was sympathy, a few years
earlier, for the union of the various states of Italy. There was not a
little admiration for German efficiency and strength. So that Bismarck,
who was an expert in all the uses of bullying, blackmail, and fraud, was
accepted as a great European statesman. I have always believed, and I
still believe, that Germany will have to pay a heavy price for
Bismarck--all the heavier because the payment has been so long deferred.
The present War, then, is in the direct line of succession to these
former wars; it was planned by Germany, elaborately and deliberately
planned, on a calculation of the profits to be derived from operations
on a large scale.
Well, as I said, we, as a people, do not believe in gambling in human
misery to attain uncertain speculative gains. We hold that war can be
justified only by a good cause, not by a lucky event. The German
doctrine seems to us impious and wicked. Though we have defined our war
aims in detail, and the Germans have not dared publicly to define
theirs, our real and sufficient war aim is to break the monstrous and
inhuman doctrine and practice of the enemy--to make their calculations
miscarry. And observe, if their calculations miscarry, they have fought
and suffered for nothing. They entered into this War for profit, and in
the conduct of the War, though they have made many mistakes, they have
made none of those generous and magnanimous mistakes which redeem and
beautify a losing cause.
The essence of our cause, and its greatest strength, is that we are not
fighting for profit. We are fighting for no privilege except the
privilege of possessing our souls, of being ourselves--a privilege which
we claim also for other weaker nations. The inestimable strength of that
position is that if the odds are against us it does not matter. If you
see a ruffian torturing a child, and interfere to prevent him, do you
feel that your attempt was a wrong one because he knocks you down? And
if you succeed, what material profit is there in saving a child from
torture? We have sometimes fought in the past for doubtful causes and
for wrong causes, but this time there is no mistake. Our cause is better
than we deserve; we embraced it by an act of faith, and it is only by
continuing in that faith that we shall see it through. The little old
Army, when they went to France in August 1914, did not ask what profits
were likely to come their way. They knew that there were none, but they
were willing to sacrifice themselves to save decency and humanity from
being trampled in the mud. This was the Army that the Germans called a
mercenary Army, and its epitaph has been written by a good poet:
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.
Their shoulders held the heavens suspended,
They stood, and earth's foundations stay,
What God abandoned these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
We must follow their example, for we shall never get a better. We must
not make too much of calculation, especially when it deals with
incalculable things. Nervous public critics, like Mr. H.G. Wells, are
always calling out for more cleverness in our methods, for new and
effective tricks, so that we may win the War. I would never disparage
cleverness; the more you can get of it, the better; but it is useless
unless it is in the service of something stronger and greater than
itself, and that is character. Cleverness can grasp; it is only
character that can hold. The Duke of Wellington was not a clever man; he
was a man of simple and honourable mind, with an infinite capacity for
patience, persistence, and endurance, so that neither unexpected
reverses abroad nor a flood of idle criticism at home could shake him or
change him. So he bore a chief part in laying low the last great tyranny
that desolated Europe.
None of our great wars was won by cleverness; they were all won by
resolution and perseverance. In all of them we were near to despair and
did not despair. In all of them we won through to victory in the end.
But in none of them did victory come in the expected shape. The worst of
making elaborate plans of victory, and programmes of all that is to
follow victory, is that the mixed event is sure to defeat those plans.
Not every war finds its decision in a single great battle. Think of our
war with Spain in the sixteenth century. Spain was then the greatest of
European Powers. She had larger armies than we could raise; she had
more than our wealth, and more than our shipping. The newly discovered
continent of America was an appanage of Spain, and her great galleons
were wafted lazily to and fro, bringing her all the treasures of the
western hemisphere. We defeated her by standing out and holding on. We
fought her in the Low Countries, which she enslaved and oppressed. We
refused to recognize her exclusive rights in America, and our merchant
seamen kept the sea undaunted, as they have kept it for the last three
years. When at last we became an intolerable vexation to Spain, she
collected a great Armada, or war-fleet, to invade and destroy us; and it
was shattered, by the winds of heaven and the sailors of England, in
1588. The defeat of the Armada was the turning-point of the war, but it
was not the end. It lifted a great shadow of fear from the hearts of the
people, as a great shadow of fear has already been lifted from their
hearts in the present War, but during the years that followed we
suffered many and serious reverses at the hand of Spain, before peace
and security were reached. So late as 1601, thirteen years after the
defeat of the Armada, the King of Denmark offered to mediate between
England and Spain, so that the long and disastrous war might be ended.
Queen Elizabeth was then old and frail, but this was what she said--and
if you want to understand why she was almost adored by her people,
listen to her words: 'I would have the King of Denmark, and all Princes
Christian and Heathen to know, that England hath no need to crave peace;
nor myself endured one hour's fear since I attained the crown thereof,
being guarded with so valiant and faithful subjects.' In the end the
power and menace of Spain faded away, and when peace was made, in 1604,
this nation never again, from that day to this, feared the worst that
Spain could do.
What were our gains from the war with Spain? Freedom to live our lives
in our own way, unthreatened; freedom to colonize America. The gains of
a great war are never visible immediately; they are deferred, and
extended over many years. What did we gain by our war with Napoleon,
which ended in the victory of Waterloo? For long years after Waterloo
this country was full of riots and discontents; there were
rick-burnings, agitations, popular risings, and something very near to
famine in the land. But all these things, from a distance, are now seen
to have been the broken water that follows the passage of a great storm.
The real gains of Waterloo, and still more of Trafalgar, are evident in
the enormous commercial and industrial development of England during the
nineteenth century, and in the peaceful foundation of the great
dominions of Canada, Australia, and South Africa, which was made
possible only by our unchallenged use of the seas. The men who won those
two great battles did not live to gather the fruits of their victory;
but their children did. If we defeat Germany as completely as we hope,
we shall not be able to point at once to our gains. But it is not a rash
forecast to say that our children and children's children will live in
greater security and freedom than we have ever tasted.
A man must have a good and wide imagination if he is to be willing to
face wounds and death for the sake of his unborn descendants and
kinsfolk. We cannot count on the popular imagination being equal to the
task. Fortunately, there is a substitute for imagination which does the
work as well or better, and that is character. Our people are sound in
instinct; they understand a fight. They know that a wrestler who
considers, while he is in the grip of his adversary, whether he would
not do well to give over, and so put an end to the weariness and the
strain, is no sort of a wrestler. They have never failed under a strain
of this kind, and they will not fail now. The people who do the
half-hearted and timid talking are either young egotists, who are angry
at being deprived of their personal ease and independence; or elderly
pensive gentlemen, in public offices and clubs, who are no longer fit
for action, and, being denied action, fall into melancholy; or feverish
journalists, who live on the proceeds of excitement, who feel the pulse
and take the temperature of the War every morning, and then rush into
the street to announce their fluttering hopes and fears; or cosmopolitan
philosophers, to whom the change from London to Berlin means nothing but
a change in diet and a pleasant addition to their opportunities of
hearing good music; or aliens in heart, to whom the historic fame of
England, 'dear for her reputation through the world,' is less than
nothing; or practical jokers, who are calm and confident enough
themselves, but delight in startling and depressing others. These are
not the people of England; they are the parasites of the people of
England. The people of England understand a fight.
That brings me to the first great gain of the War. We have found
ourselves. Which of us, in the early months of 1914, would have dared
to predict the splendours of the youth of this Empire--splendours which
are now a part of our history? We are adepts at self-criticism and
self-depreciation. We hate the language of emotion. Some of us, if we
were taken to heaven and asked what we thought of it, would say that it
is decent, or not so bad. I suppose we are jealous to keep our standard
high, and to have something to say if a better place should be found.
But in spite of all this, we do now know, and it is worth knowing, that
we are not weaker than our fathers. We know that the people who inhabit
these islands and this commonwealth of nations cannot be pushed on one
side, or driven under, or denied a great share in the future ordering of
the world. We know this, and our knowledge of it is the debt that we owe
to our dead. It is not vanity to admit that we know it; on the contrary,
it would be vanity to pretend that we do not know it. It is visible to
other eyes than ours. Some time ago I heard an address given by a friend
of mine, an Indian Mohammedan of warrior descent, to University students
of his own faith. He was urging on them the futility of dreams and the
necessity of self-discipline and self-devotion. 'Why do the people of
this country', he said, 'count for so much all the world over? It is not
because of their dreams; it is because thousands of them are lying at
the bottom of the sea.'
Further, we have not only found ourselves; we have found one another. A
new kindliness has grown up, during the War, between people divided by
the barriers of class, or wealth, or circumstance. A statesman of the
seventeenth century remarks that _It is a Misfortune for a Man not to
have a Friend in the World, but for that reason he shall have no Enemy_.
I might invert his maxim and say, _It is a Misfortune for a Man to have
many Enemies, but for that reason he shall know who are his Friends_. No
Radical member of Parliament will again, while any of us live, cast
contempt on 'the carpet Captains of Mayfair'. No idle Tory talker will
again dare to say that the working men of England care nothing for their
country. Even the manners of railway travel have improved. I was
travelling in a third-class compartment of a crowded train the other
day; we were twenty in the compartment, but it seemed a pity to leave
any one behind, and we made room for number twenty-one. Nothing but a
very kindly human feeling could have packed us tight enough for this.
Yet now is the time that has been chosen by some of these pensive
gentlemen that I spoke of, and by some of these excitable journalists,
to threaten us with class-war, and to try to make our flesh creep by
conjuring up the horrors of revolution. I advise them to take their
opinions to the third-class compartment and discuss them there. It is a
good tribunal, for, sooner or later, you will find every one there--even
officers, when they are travelling in mufti at their own expense. I have
visited this tribunal very often, and I have always come away from it
with the same impression, that this people means to win the War. But I
do not travel much in the North of England, so I asked a friend of mine,
whose dealings are with the industrial North, what the workpeople of
Lancashire and Yorkshire think of the War. He said, 'Their view is very
simple: they mean to win it; and they mean to make as much money out of
it as ever they can.' Certainly, that is very simple; but before you
judge them, put yourselves in their place. There are great outcries
against profiteers, for making exorbitant profits out of the War, and
against munition workers, for delaying work in order to get higher
wages. I do not defend either of them; they are unimaginative and
selfish, and I do not care how severely they are dealt with; but I do
say that the majority of them are not wicked in intention. A good many
of the more innocent profiteers are men whose sin is that they take an
offer of two shillings rather than an offer of eighteenpence for what
cost them one and a penny. Some of us, in our weaker moments, might be
betrayed into doing the same. As for the munition workers, I remember
what Goldsmith, who had known the bitterest poverty, wrote to his
brother. 'Avarice', he said, 'in the lower orders of mankind is true
ambition; avarice is the only ladder the poor can use to preferment.
Preach then, my dear Sir, to your son, not the excellence of human
nature nor the disrespect of riches, but endeavour to teach him thrift
and economy. Let his poor wandering uncle's example be placed in his
eyes. I had learned from books to love virtue before I was taught from
experience the necessity of being selfish.'
The profiteers and the munition workers are endeavouring, incidentally,
to better their own position. But make no mistake; the bulk of these
people would rather die than allow one spire of English grass to be
trodden under the foot of a foreign trespasser. Their chief sin is that
they do not fear. They think that there is plenty of time to do a little
business for themselves on the way to defeat the enemy. I cannot help
remembering the mutiny at the Nore, which broke out in our fleet during
the Napoleonic wars. The mutineers struck for more pay and better
treatment, but they agreed together that if the French fleet should put
in an appearance during the mutiny, all their claims should be postponed
for a time, and the French fleet should have their first attention.
Employers and employed do, no doubt, find in some trades to-day that
their relations are strained and irksome. They would do well to take a
lesson from the Army, where, with very few exceptions, there is harmony
and understanding between those who take orders and those who give them.
It is only in the Army that you can see realized the ideal of ancient
Rome.
Then none was for a party,
Then all were for the State;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great.
Why is the Army so far superior to most commercial and industrial
businesses? The secret does not lie in State employment. There is plenty
of discontent and unrest among the State-employed railway men and
munition workers. It lies rather in the habit of mutual help and mutual
trust. If any civilian employer of labour wants to have willing
workpeople, let him take a hint from the Army. Let him live with his
workpeople, and share all their dangers and discomforts. Let him take
thought for their welfare before his own, and teach self-sacrifice by
example. Let him put the good of the nation before all private
interests; and those whom he commands will do for him anything that he
asks.
I cannot believe that the benefits which have come to us from the Army
will pass away with the passing of the War. Those who have been comrades
in danger will surely take with them something of the old spirit into
civil life. And those who have kept clear of the Army in order to carry
on their own trades and businesses will surely realize that they have
missed the great opportunity of their lives.
In a wider sense the War has brought us to an understanding of one
another. This great Commonwealth of independent nations which is called
the British Empire is scattered over the surface of the habitable globe.
It embraces people who live ten thousand miles apart, and whose ways of
life are so different that they might seem to have nothing in common.
But the War has brought them together, and has done more than half a
century of peace could do to promote a common understanding. Hundreds of
thousands of men of our blood who, before the War, had never seen this
little island, have now made acquaintance with it. Hundreds of thousands
of the inhabitants of this island to whom the Dominions were strange,
far places, if, after the War, they should be called on to settle there,
will not feel that they are leaving home. I can only hope that the
Canadians and Anzacs think as well of us as we do of them. We do not
like to praise our friends in their hearing, so I will say no more than
this: I am told that a new kind of peerage, very haughty and very
self-important, has arisen in South London. Its members are those
house-holders who have been privileged to have Anzac soldiers billeted
on them. It is private ties of this kind, invisible to the
constitutional lawyer and the political historian, which make the fine
meshes of the web of Empire.
Because he knew that the strength of the whole texture depends on the
strength of the fine meshes, Earl Grey, who died last year, will always
be remembered in our history. Not many men have his opportunity to make
acquaintance with the domain that is their birthright, for he had
administered a province of South Africa, and had been Governor-General
of Canada, He rediscovered the glory of the Empire, as poets rediscover
the glory of common speech. 'He had breathed its air,' a friend of his
says, 'fished its rivers, walked in its valleys, stood on its mountains,
met its people face to face. He had seen it in all the zones of the
world. He knew what it meant to mankind. Under the British flag,
wherever he journeyed, he found men of English speech living in an
atmosphere of liberty and carrying on the dear domestic traditions of
the British Isles. He saw justice firmly planted there, industry and
invention hard at work unfettered by tyrants of any kind, domestic life
prospering in natural conditions, and our old English kindness and
cheerfulness and broad-minded tolerance keeping things together. But he
also saw room under that same flag, ample room, for millions and
millions more of the human race. The Empire wasn't a word to him. It was
a vast, an almost boundless, home for honest men.'
The War did not dishearten him. When he died, in August, 1917, he said,
'Here I lie on my death-bed, looking clear into the Promised Land. I'm
not allowed to enter it, but there it is before my eyes. After the War
the people of this country will enter it, and those who laughed at me
for a dreamer will see that I wasn't so wrong after all. But there's
still work to do for those who didn't laugh, hard work, and with much
opposition in the way; all the same, it is work right up against the
goal. My dreams have come true.'
One of the clear gains of the War is to be found in the increased
activity and alertness of our own people. The motto of to-day is, 'Let
those now work who never worked before, And those who always worked now
work the more.' Before the War we had a great national reputation for
idleness--in this island, at least. I remember a friendly critic from
Canada who, some five or six years ago, expressed to me, with much
disquiet, his opinion that there was something very far wrong with the
old country; that we had gone soft. As for our German critics, they
expressed the same view in gross and unmistakable fashion. Wit is not a
native product in Germany, it all has to be imported, so they could not
satirize us; but their caricatures of the typical Englishman showed us
what they thought. He was a young weakling with a foolish face, and was
dressed in cricketing flannels. It would have been worth their while to
notice what they did not notice, that his muscles and nerves are not
soft. They learned that later, when the bank-clerks of Manchester broke
the Prussian Guard into fragments at Contalmaison. This must have been a
sad surprise, for the Germans had always taught, in their delightful
authoritative fashion, that the chief industries of the young Englishman
are lawn-tennis and afternoon tea. They are a fussy people, and they
find it difficult to understand the calm of the man who, having nothing
to do, does it. Perhaps they were right, and we were too idle. The
disease was never so serious as they thought it, and now, thanks to
them, we are in a fair way to recovery. The idle classes have turned
their hand to the lathe and the plough. Women are doing a hundred things
that they never did before, and are doing them well. The elasticity and
resourcefulness that the War has developed will not be lost or destroyed
by the coming of peace. Least of all will those qualities be lost if we
should prove unable, in this War, to impose our own terms on Germany.
Then the peace that follows will be a long struggle, and in that
struggle we shall prevail. In the last long peace we were not
suspicious; we felt friendly enough to the Germans, and we gave them
every advantage. They despised us for our friendliness and used the
peace to prepare our downfall. That will never happen again. If we
cannot tame the cunning animal that has assaulted humanity, at least we
can and will tether him. Laws will not be necessary; there are millions
of others besides the seamen of England who will have no dealings with
an unsubdued and unrepentant Germany. What the Germans are not taught by
the War they will have to learn in the more tedious and no less costly
school of peace.
In any case, whether we win through to real peace and real security, or
whether we are thrown back on an armed peace and the duty of unbroken
vigilance, we shall be dependent for our future on the children who are
now learning in the schools or playing in the streets. It is a good
dependence. The children of to-day are better than the children whom I
knew when I was a child. I think they have more intelligence and
sympathy; they certainly have more public spirit. We cannot do too much
for them. The most that we can do is nothing to what they are going to
do for us, for their own nation and people. I am not concerned to
discuss the education problem. Formal education, carried on chiefly by
means of books, is a very small part of the making of a man or a woman.
But I am interested to know what the children are thinking. You cannot
fathom a child's thoughts, but we know who are their best teachers, and
what lessons have been stamped indelibly on their minds. Their teachers,
whom they never saw, and whose lessons they will never forget, lie in
graves in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and Syria and Mesopotamia,
or unburied at the bottom of the sea. The runner falls, but the torch is
carried forward. This is what Julian Grenfell, who gave his mind and his
life to the War, has said in his splendid poem called _Into Battle_:
And life is colour and warmth and light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting hath increase.
Those who died fighting will have such increase that a whole new
generation, better even than the old, will be ready, no long time hence,
to uphold and extend and decorate the Commonwealth of nations which
their fathers and brothers saved from ruin.
One thing I have never heard discussed, but it is the clearest gain of
all, and already it may be called a certain gain. After the War the
English language will have such a position as it has never had before.
It will be established in world-wide security. Even before the War, it
may be truly said, our language was in no danger from the competition of
the German language. The Germans have never had much success in the
attempt to get their language adopted by other peoples. Not all the
military laws of Prussia can drive out French from the hearts and homes
of the people of Alsace. In the ports of the near and far East you will
hear English spoken--pidgin English, as it is called, that is to say, a
selection of English words suited for the business of daily life. But
you may roam the world over, and you will hear no pidgin German. Before
the War many Germans learned English, while very few English-speaking
people learned German. In other matters we disagreed, but we both knew
which way the wind was blowing. It may be said, and said truly, that our
well-known laziness was one cause of our failing or neglecting to learn
German. But it was not the only cause; and we are not lazy in tasks
which we believe to be worth our while. Rather we had an instinctive
belief that the future does not belong to the German tongue. That belief
is not likely to be impaired by the War. Armed ruffians can do some
things, but one thing they cannot do; they cannot endear their language
to those who have suffered from their violence. The Germans poisoned the
wells in South-West Africa; in Europe they did all they could to poison
the wells of mutual trust and mutual understanding among civilized men.
Do they think that these things will make a good advertisement for the
explosive guttural sounds and the huddled deformed syntax of the speech
in which they express their arrogance and their hate? Which of the
chief European languages will come first, after the War, with the little
nations? Will Serbia be content to speak German? Will Norway and Denmark
feel a new affection for the speech of the men who have degraded the old
humanity of the seas? Neighbourhood, kinship, and the necessities of
commerce may retain for the German language a certain measure of custom
in Sweden and Switzerland, and in Holland. But for the most part Germans
will have to be content to be addressed in their own tongue only by
those who fear them, or by those who hope to cheat them.
This gain, which I make bold to predict for the English language, is a
real gain, apart from all patriotic bias. The English language is
incomparably richer, more fluid, and more vital than the German
language. Where the German has but one way of saying a thing, we have
two or three, each with its distinctions and its subtleties of usage.
Our capital wealth is greater, and so are our powers of borrowing.
English sprang from the old Teutonic stock, and we can still coin new
words, such as 'food-hoard' and 'joy-ride', in the German fashion. But
long centuries ago we added thousands of Romance words, words which came
into English through the French or Norman-French, and brought with them
the ideas of Latin civilization and of mediaeval Christianity. Later on,
when the renewed study of Latin and Greek quickened the intellectual
life of Europe, we imported thousands of Greek and Latin words direct
from the ancient world, learned words, many of them, suitable for
philosophers, or for writers who pride themselves on shooting a little
above the vulgar apprehension. Yet many of these, too, have found their
way into daily speech, so that we can say most things in three ways,
according as we draw on one or another of the three main sources of our
speech. Thus, you can Begin, or Commence, or Initiate an undertaking,
with Boldness, or Courage, or Resolution. If you are a Workman, or
Labourer, or Operative, you can Ask, or Bequest, or Solicit your
employer to Yield, or Grant, or Concede, an increase in the Earnings, or
Wages, or Remuneration which fall to the lot of your Fellow, or
Companion, or Associate. Your employer is perhaps Old, or Veteran, or
Superannuated, which may Hinder, or Delay, or Retard the success of your
application. But if you Foretell, or Prophesy, or Predict that the War
will have an End, or Close, or Termination that shall not only be
Speedy, or Rapid, or Accelerated, but also Great, or Grand, or
Magnificent, you may perhaps Stir, or Move, or Actuate him to have Ruth,
or Pity, or Compassion on your Mate, or Colleague, or Collaborator. The
English language, then, is a language of great wealth--much greater
wealth than can be illustrated by any brief example. But wealth is
nothing unless you can use it. The real strength of English lies in the
inspired freedom and variety of its syntax. There is no grammar of the
English speech which is not comic in its stiffness and inadequacy. An
English grammar does not explain all that we can do with our speech; it
merely explains what shackles and restraints we must put upon our speech
if we would bring it within the comprehension of a school-bred
grammarian. But the speech itself is like the sea, and soon breaks down
the dykes built by the inland engineer. It was the fashion, in the
eighteenth century, to speak of the divine Shakespeare. The reach and
catholicity of his imagination was what earned him that extravagant
praise; but his syntax has no less title to be called divine. It is not
cast or wrought, like metal; it leaps like fire, and moves like air. So
is every one that is born of the spirit. Our speech is our great
charter. Far better than in the long constitutional process whereby we
subjected our kings to law, and gave dignity and strength to our
Commons, the meaning of English freedom is to be seen in the illimitable
freedom of our English speech.
Our literature is almost as rich as our language. Modern German
literature begins in the eighteenth century. Modern English literature
began with Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, and has been full of
great names and great books ever since. Nothing has been done in German
literature for which we have not a counterpart, done as well or
better--except the work of Heine, and Heine was a Jew. His opinion of
the Prussians was that they are a compost of beer, deceit, and sand.
French literature and English literature can be compared, throughout
their long course, sometimes to the great advantage of the French.
German literature cannot seriously be compared with either.
It may be objected that literature and art are ornamental affairs, which
count for little in the deadly strife of nations. But that is not so.
Our language cannot go anywhere without taking our ideas and our creed
with it, not to mention our institutions and our games. If the Germans
could understand what Chaucer means when he says of his Knight that
he lovèd chivalry,
Truth and honoùr, freedom and courtesy,
then indeed we might be near to an understanding. I asked a good German
scholar the other day what is the German word for 'fair play'. He
replied, as they do in Parliament, that he must ask for notice of that
question. I fear there is no German word for 'fair play'.
The little countries, the pawns and victims of German policy, understand
our ideas better. The peoples who have suffered from tyranny and
oppression look to England for help, and it is a generous weakness in us
that we sometimes deceive them by our sympathy, for our power is
limited, and we cannot help them all. But it will not count against us
at the final reckoning that in most places where humanity has suffered
cruelty and indignity the name of England has been invoked: not always
in vain.
And now, for I have kept to the last what I believe to be the greatest
gain of all, the entry of America into the War assures the triumph of
our common language. America is peopled by many races; only a minority
of the inhabitants--an influential and governing minority--are of the
English stock. But here, again, the language carries it; and the ideas
that inspire America are ideas which had their origin in the long
English struggle for freedom. Our sufferings in this War are great, but
they are not so great that we cannot recognize virtue in a new recruit
to the cause. No nation, in the whole course of human history, has ever
made a more splendid decision, or performed a more magnanimous act, than
America, when she decided to enter this War. She had nothing to gain,
for, to say the bare truth, she had little to lose. If Germany were to
dominate the world, America, no doubt, would be ruined; but in all human
likelihood, Germany's impious attempt would have spent itself and been
broken long before it reached the coasts of America. America might have
stood out of the War in the assurance that her own interests were safe,
and that, when the tempest had passed, the centre of civilization would
be transferred from a broken and exhausted Europe to a peaceful and
prosperous America. Some few Americans talked in this strain, and
favoured a decision in this sense. But it was not for nothing that
America was founded upon religion. When she saw humanity in anguish, she
did not pass by on the other side. Her entry into the War has put an
end, I hope for ever, to the family quarrel, not very profound or
significant, which for a century and a half has been a jarring note in
the relations of mother and daughter. And it has put an end to another
danger. It seemed at one time not unlikely that the English language as
it is spoken overseas would set up a life of its own, and become
separated from the language of the old country. A development of this
kind would be natural enough. The Boers of South Africa speak Dutch, but
not the Dutch spoken in Holland. The French Canadians speak French, but
not the French of Molière. Half a century ago, when America was
exploring and settling her own country, in wild and lone places, her
pioneers enriched the English speech with all kinds of new and vivid
phrases. The tendency was then for America to go her own way, and to
cultivate what is new in language at the expense of what is old. She
prided herself even on having a spelling of her own, and seemed almost
willing to break loose from tradition and to coin a new American
English.
This has not happened; and now, I think, it will not happen. For one
thing, the American colonists left us when already we had a great
literature. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Spenser belong to America no less
than to us, and America has never forgotten them. The education which
has been fostered in American schools and colleges keeps the whole
nation in touch with the past. Some of their best authors write in a
style that Milton and Burke would understand and approve. There is no
more beautiful English prose than Nathaniel Hawthorne's. The best
speeches of Abraham Lincoln, and, we may truly add, of President Wilson,
are merely classic English. During my own lifetime I am sure I have seen
the speech usages of the two peoples draw closer together. For one
thing, we on this side now borrow, and borrow very freely, the more
picturesque colloquialisms of America. On informal occasions I sometimes
brighten my own speech with phrases which I think I owe to one of the
best of living American authors, Mr. George Ade, of Chicago, the author
of _Fables in Slang_. The press, the telegraph, the telephone, and the
growing habit of travel bind us closer together every year; and the
English that we speak, however rich and various it may be, is going to
remain one and the same English, our common inheritance.
One question, the most important and difficult of all, remains to be
asked. Will this War, in its course and in its effects, tend to prevent
or discourage later wars? If the gains that it brings prove to be merely
partial and national gains, if it exalts one nation by unjustly
depressing another, and conquers cruelty by equal cruelty, then nothing
can be more certain than that the peace of the world is farther off than
ever. When she was near her death, Edith Cavell, patriot and martyr,
said that patriotism is not enough. Every one who thinks on
international affairs knows this; almost every one forgets it in time of
war. What can be done to prevent nations from appealing to the wild
justice of revenge?
A League of Nations may do good, but I am surprised that any one who has
imagination and a knowledge of the facts should entertain high hopes of
it as a full solution. There is a League of Nations to-day which has
given a verdict against the Central Powers, and that verdict is being
enforced by the most terrible War in all human history. If the verdict
had been given before the War began, it may be said, then Germany might
have accepted it, and refrained. So she might, but what then? She would
have felt herself wronged; she would have deferred the War, and, in ways
that she knows so well, would have set about making a party for herself
among the nations of the League. Who can be confident that she would
have failed either to divide her judges, or to accumulate such elements
of strength that she might dare to defy them? A League of Nations would
work well only if its verdicts were loyally accepted by all the nations
composing it. To make majority-rule possible you must have a community
made up of members who are reasonably well informed upon one another's
affairs, and who are bound together by a tie of loyalty stronger and
more enduring than their causes of difference. It would be a happy thing
if the nations of the world made such a community; and the sufferings of
this War have brought them nearer to desiring it. But those who believe
that such a community can be formed to-day or to-morrow are too
sanguine. It must not be forgotten that the very principle of the
League, if its judgements are to take effect, involves a world-war in
cases where a strong minority resists those judgements. Every war would
become a world-war. Perhaps this very fact would prevent wars, but it
cannot be said that experience favours such a conclusion.
There is no escape for us by way of the Gospels. The Gospel precept to
turn the other cheek to the aggressor was not addressed to a meeting of
trustees. Christianity has never shirked war, or even much disliked it.
Where the whole soul is set on things unseen, wounds and death become of
less account. And if the Christians have not helped us to avoid war, how
should the pacifists be of use? Those of them whom I happen to know, or
to have met, have shown themselves, in the relations of civil life, to
be irritable, self-willed, combative creatures, where the average
soldier is calm, unselfish, and placable. There is something incongruous
and absurd in the pacifist of British descent. He has fighting in his
blood, and when his creed, or his nervous sensibility to physical
horrors, denies him the use of fighting, his blood turns sour. He can
argue, and object, and criticize, but he cannot lead. All that he can
offer us in effect is eternal quarrels in place of occasional fights.
No one can do anything to prevent war who does not recognize its
splendour, for it is by its splendour that it keeps its hold on
humanity, and persists. The wickedest and most selfish war in the world
is not fought by wicked and selfish soldiers. The spirit of man is
immense, and for an old memory, a pledged word, a sense of fellowship,
offers this frail and complicated tissue of flesh and blood, which a pin
or a grain of sand will disorder, to be the victim of all the atrocities
that the wit of man can compound out of fire and steel and poison. If
that spirit is to be changed, or directed into new courses, it must be
by one who understands it, and approaches it reverently, with bared
head.
The best hope seems to me to lie in paying chief attention to the
improvement of war rather than to its abolition; to the decencies of the
craft; to the style rather than the matter. Style is often more
important than matter, and this War would not have been so fierce or so
prolonged if it had not become largely a war on a point of style, a war,
that is to say, to determine the question how war should be waged. If
the Germans had behaved humanely and considerately to the civil
population of Belgium, if they had kept their solemn promise not to use
poison-gas, if they had refrained from murder at sea, if their valour
had been accompanied by chivalry, the War might now have been ended,
perhaps not in their disfavour, for it would not have been felt, as it
now is felt, that they must be defeated at no matter how great a cost,
or civilization will perish.
Even as things are, there have been some gains in the manner of
conducting war, which, when future generations look back on them, will
be seen to be considerable. It is true that modern science has devised
new and appalling weapons. The invention of a new weapon in war always
arouses protest, but it does not usually, in the long run, make war more
inhuman. There was a great outcry in Europe when the broadsword was
superseded by the rapier, and a tall man of his hands could be spitted
like a cat or a rabbit by any dexterous little fellow with a trained
wrist. There was a wave of indignation, which was a hundred years in
passing, when musketry first came into use, and a man-at-arms of great
prowess could be killed from behind a wall by one who would not have
dared to meet him in open combat. But these changes did not, in effect,
make war crueller or more deadly. They gave more play to intelligence,
and abolished the tyranny of the bully, who took the wall of every man
he met, and made himself a public nuisance. The introduction of
poison-gas, which is a small thing compared with the invention of
fire-arms, has given the chemist a place in the ranks of fighting-men.
And if science has lent its aid to the destruction of life, it has spent
greater zeal and more prolonged effort on the saving of life. No
previous war will compare with this in care for the wounded and maimed.
In all countries, and on all fronts, an army of skilled workers devote
themselves to this single end. I believe that this quickening of the
human conscience, for that is what it is, will prove to be the greatest
gain of the War, and the greatest advance made in restraint of war. If
the nations come to recognize that their first duty, and their first
responsibility, is to those who give so much in their service, that
recognition will of itself do more than can be done by any conclave of
statesmen to discourage war. It was the monk Telemachus, according to
the old story, who stopped the gladiatorial games at Rome, and was
stoned by the people. If war, in process of time, shall be abolished,
or, failing that, shall be governed by the codes of humanity and
chivalry, like a decent tournament; then the one sacrificial figure
which will everywhere be honoured for the change will be the figure not
of a priest or a politician, but of a hospital nurse.