does not follow because this aspiration for world-peace is almost
universal that it will be realized. There may be faults in ourselves,
unsuspected influences within us and without, that may be working to
defeat our superficial sentiments. There must be not only a desire for
peace, but a will for peace, if peace is to be established forever. If
out of a hundred men ninety-nine desire peace and trouble no further,
the one man over will arm himself and set up oppression and war again.
Peace must be organized and maintained. This present monstrous
catastrophe is the outcome of forty-three years of skillful,
industrious, systematic world armament. Only by a disarmament as
systematic, as skillful, and as devoted may we hope to achieve centuries
of peace.
No apology is needed, therefore, for a discussion of the way in which
peace may be organized and established out of the settlement of this
war. I am going to set out and estimate as carefully as I can the forces
that make for a peace organization and the forces that make for war. I
am going to do my best to diagnose the war disorder. I want to find out
first for my own guidance, and then with a view to my co-operation with
other people, what has to be done to prevent the continuation and
recrudescence of warfare.
Such an inquiry is manifestly the necessary first stage in any world
pacification. So manifestly that, of course, countless others are also
setting to work upon it. It is a research. It is a research exactly like
a scientific exploration. Each of us will probably get out a lot of
truth and a considerable amount of error; the truth will be the same and
the errors will confute and disperse each other. But it is clear that
there is no simple panacea in this matter, and that only by intentness
and persistence shall we disentangle a general conception of the road
the peace-desiring multitude must follow.
Now, first be it noted that there is in every one a certain discord with
regard to war. Every man is divided against himself. On the whole, most
of us want peace. But hardly any one is without a lurking belligerence,
a lurking admiration for the vivid impacts, the imaginative appeals of
war. I am sitting down to write for the peace of the world, but
immediately before I sat down to write I was reading the morning's
paper, and particularly of the fight between the Sydney and the Emden
at Cocos Island.
I confess to the utmost satisfaction in the account of the smashing
blows delivered by the guns of the Australian. There is a sensation of
greatness, a beautiful tremendousness, in many of the crude facts of
war; they excite in one a kind of vigorous exaltation; we have that
destructive streak in us, and it is no good pretending that we have not;
the first thing we must do for the peace of the world is to control
that. And to control it one can do nothing more effective than to keep
in mind the other side of the realities of war.
As my own corrective I have at hand certain letters from a very able
woman doctor who returned last week from Calais. Lockjaw, gangrene, men
tied with filthy rags and lying bitterly cold in coaly sheds; men
unwounded, but so broken by the chill horrors of the Yser trenches as to
be near demented--such things make the substance of her picture. One
young officer talked to her rather dryly of the operations, of the
ruined towns and villages, of the stench of dead men and horses, of the
losses and wounds and mutilations among his men, of the list of pals he
had lost. "Suddenly he began to cry. He broke down just like an
overtaxed child. And he could not stop crying. He cried and cried, and I
could do nothing to help him." He was a strong man and a brave man, and
to that three months of war had brought him.
And then this again:
There were a fair number of Belgian doctors, but no nurses
except the usual untrained French girls, almost no equipment,
and no place for clean surgery. We heard of a house containing
sixty-one men with no doctor or nurses--several died without
having received any medical aid at all. Mrs. ---- and I even
on the following Wednesday found four men lying on straw in a
shop with leg and foot wounds who had not been dressed since
Friday and had never been seen by a doctor. In addition there
were hundreds and hundreds of wounded who could walk trying to
find shelter in some corner, besides the many unwounded French
and Belgian soldiers quartered in the town.
As if this inferno of misery were not enough, there were added
the refugees! These were not Belgians, as I had imagined, but
French. It appears that both English and French armies have
to clear the civil population out of the whole fighting
area--partly to prevent spying and treachery, (which has been
a curse to both armies,) and partly because they would starve.
They are sent to Calais, and then by boat to Havre.
That first Sunday evening an endless procession flowed from
the station to the quays in the drenching rain. Each family
had a perambulator, (a surprisingly handsome one, too,) piled
with sticks of bread, a few bundles of goods, and, when we
peered inside, a couple of crying babies. There were few young
people; mostly it was whimpering, frightened-looking children
and wretched, bent old men and women. It seemed too bad to be
true; even when they brushed past us in the rain we could not
believe that their sodden figures were real. They were
dematerialized by misery in some odd way.
Some of them slept in skating rinks, trucks, some in the
Amiral Ganteaume. (One's senses could not realize that to the
horrors of exile these people had added those of shipwreck
next day.) Some certainly stood in the Booking Hall outside
our hotel all night through. This sort of thing went on all
the week, and was going on when we left.
Nevertheless, I was stirred agreeably by the imagination of the shells
smashing the Emden and the men inside the Emden, and when I read the
other day that the naval guns had destroyed over 4,000 men in the German
trenches about Middlekirche I remarked that we were "doing well." It is
only on the whole that we who want to end war hate and condemn war; we
are constantly lapsing into fierceness, and if we forget this lurking
bellicosity and admiration for hard blows in our own nature then we
shall set about the task of making an end to it under hopelessly
disabling misconceptions. We shall underrate and misunderstand
altogether the very powerful forces that are against pacifist effort.
Let us consider first, then, the forces that are directly opposed to the
pacification of the world, the forces that will work openly and
definitely for the preservation of war as a human condition. And it has
to be remembered that the forces that are for a thing are almost always
more unified, more concentrated and effective than the forces that are
against it. We who are against war and want to stop it are against it
for a great multitude of reasons. There are other things in life that
we prefer, and war stops these other things. Some of us want to pursue
art, some want to live industrious lives in town or country, some would
pursue scientific developments, some want pleasures of this sort or
that, some would live lives of religion and kindliness, or religion and
austerity.
But we all agree in fixing our minds upon something else than war. And
since we fix our minds on other things, war becomes possible and
probable through our general inattention. We do not observe it, and
meanwhile the people who really care for war and soldiering fix their
minds upon it. They scheme how it shall be done, they scheme to bring it
about. Then we discover suddenly--as the art and social development, the
industry and pleasant living, the cultivation of the civil enterprise of
England, France, Germany, and Russia have discovered--that everything
must be pushed aside when the war thinkers have decided upon their game.
And until we of the pacific majority contrive some satisfactory
organization to watch the war-makers we shall never end war, any more
than a country can end crime and robbery without a police. Specialist
must watch specialist in either case. Mere expressions of a virtuous
abhorrence of war will never end war until the crack of doom.
The people who actually want war are perhaps never at any time very
numerous. Most people sometimes want war, and a few people always want
war. It is these last who are, so to speak, the living nucleus of the
war creature that we want to destroy. That liking for an effective smash
which gleamed out in me for a moment when I heard of the naval guns is
with them a dominating motive. It is not outweighed and overcome in them
as it is in me by the sense of waste, and by pity and horror and by love
for men who can do brave deeds and yet weep bitterly for misery and the
deaths of good friends. These war-lovers are creatures of a simpler
constitution. And they seem capable of an ampler hate.
You will discover, if you talk to them skillfully, that they hold that
war "ennobles," and that when they say ennobles they mean that it is
destructive to the ten thousand things in life that they do not enjoy or
understand or tolerate, things that fill them, therefore, with envy and
perplexity--such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the
cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude
and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest
writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets,
for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is
hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful and
happier living.
The military peoples of the world have almost always been harsh and
rather stupid peoples, full of a virtuous indignation of all they did
not understand. The modern Prussian goes to war today with as supreme a
sense of moral superiority as the Arabs when they swept down upon Egypt
and North Africa. The burning of the library of Alexandria remains
forever the symbol of the triumph of a militarist "culture" over
civilization. This easy belief of the dull and violent that war "braces"
comes out of a real instinct of self-preservation against the subtler
tests of peace. This type of person will keep on with war if it can. It
is to politics what the criminal type is to social order; it will be
resentful and hostile to every attempt to fix up a pacific order in the
world.
This heavy envy which is the dominant characteristic of the pro-military
type is by no means confined to it. More or less it is in all of us. In
England one finds it far less frequently in professional soldiers than
among sedentary learned men. In Germany, too, the more uncompromising
and ferocious pro-militarism is to be found in the frock coats of the
professors. Just at present England is full of virtuous reprehension of
German military professors, but there is really no monopoly of such in
Germany, and before Germany England produced some of the most perfect
specimens of aggressive militarist conceivable. To read Froude upon
Ireland or Carlyle upon the Franco-German War is to savor this
hate-dripping temperament in its perfection.
Much of this literary bellicosity is pathological. Men overmuch in
studies and universities get ill in their livers and sluggish in their
circulations; they suffer from shyness, from a persuasion of excessive
and neglected merit, old maid's melancholy, and a detestation of all the
levities of life. And their suffering finds its vent in ferocious
thoughts. A vigorous daily bath, a complete stoppage of wine, beer,
spirits, and tobacco, and two hours of hockey in the afternoon would
probably make decently tolerant men of all these fermenting professional
militarists. Such a regimen would certainly have been the salvation of
both Froude and Carlyle. It would probably have saved the world from the
vituperation of the Hebrew prophets--those models for infinite mischief.
The extremist cases pass to the average case through insensible degrees.
We are all probably, as a species, a little too prone to intolerance,
and if we do in all sincerity mean to end war in the world we must
prepare ourselves for considerable exercises in restraint when strange
people look, behave, believe, and live in a manner different from our
own. The minority of permanently bitter souls who want to see
objectionable cities burning and men fleeing and dying form the real
strength in our occasional complicities.
The world has had its latest object lesson in the German abuse of
English and French as "degenerates," of the Russians as "Mongol hordes,"
of the Japanese as "yellow savages," but it is not only Germans who let
themselves slip into national vanity and these ugly hostilities to
unfamiliar life. The first line of attack against war must be an attack
upon self-righteousness and intolerance. These things are the germ of
uncompromising and incurable militarism everywhere.
Now, the attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance and the stern,
self-satisfied militarism that arises naturally out of these things is
to be made in a number of ways. The first is a sedulous propaganda of
the truth about war, a steadfast resolve to keep the pain of warfare
alive in the nerves of the careless, to keep the stench of war under the
else indifferent nose. It is only in the study of the gloomily
megalomaniac historian that aggressive war becomes a large and glorious
thing. In reality it is a filthy outrage upon life, an idiot's smashing
of the furniture of homes, a mangling, a malignant mischief, a scalding
of stokers, a disemboweling of gunners, a raping of caught women by
drunken soldiers. By book and pamphlet, by picture and cinematograph
film, the pacifist must organize wisdom in these matters.
And not only indignation and distress must come to this task. The stern,
uncompromising militarist will not be moved from his determinations by
our horror and hostility. These things will but "brace" him. He has a
more vulnerable side. The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of
stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist
it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that
will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to
trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension
and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of
his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it
is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the
essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter
of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other than
theatrical and silly.
The greater part of the world is in an agony, a fever, but that does not
make the cause of that fever noble or great. A man may die of yellow
fever through the bite of a mosquito; that does not make a mosquito
anything more than a dirty little insect or an aggressive imperialist
better than a pothouse fool.
Henceforth we must recognize no heroic war but defensive war, and as the
only honorable warriors such men as those peasants of Visé who went out
with shotguns against the multitudinous overwhelming nuisance of
invasion that trampled down their fields.
Or war to aid such defensive war.
II.
But the people who positively admire and advocate and want war for its
own sake are only a small, feverish minority of mankind. The greater
obstacle to the pacification of the world is not the war-seeker, but the
vast masses of people who for the most various motives support and
maintain all kinds of institutions and separations that make for war.
They do not want war, they do not like war, but they will not make
sacrifices, they will not exert themselves in any way to make war
difficult or impossible.
It is they who give the war maniac his opportunity. They will not lock
the gun away from him, they will not put a reasonable limit to the
disputes into which he can ultimately thrust his violent substitute for
a solution. They are like the people who dread and detest yellow fever,
but oppose that putting of petrol on the ponds which is necessary to
prevent it because of the injury to the water flowers.
Now, it is necessary, if we are to have an intelligently directed
anti-war campaign, that we should make a clear, sound classification of
these half-hearted people, these people who do not want war, but who
permit it. Their indecisions, their vagueness, these are the really
effective barriers to our desire to end war forever.
And first, there is one thing very obvious, and that is the necessity
for some controlling world authority if treaties are to be respected and
war abolished. While there are numerous sovereign States in the world
each absolutely free to do what it chooses, to arm its people or
repudiate engagements, there can be no sure peace. But great multitudes
of those who sincerely desire peace forever cannot realize this. There
are, for example, many old-fashioned English liberals who denounce
militarism and "treaty entanglements" with equal ardor; they want
Britain to stand alone, unaggressive, but free; not realizing that such
an isolation is the surest encouragement to any war-enamored power.
Exactly the same type is to be found in the United States, and is
probably even more influential there. But only by so spinning a web of
treaties that all countries are linked by general obligations to mutual
protection can a real world-pacification be achieved.
The present alliance against the insufferable militarism of Germany may
very probably be the precursor of a much wider alliance against any
aggression whatever in the future. Only through some such arrangement is
there any reasonable hope of a control and cessation of that constant
international bickering and pressure, that rivalry in finance, that
competition for influence in weak neutral countries, which has initiated
all the struggles of the last century, and which is bound to accumulate
tensions for fresh wars so long as it goes on.
Already several States, and particularly the Government of the United
States of America, have signed treaties of arbitration, and The Hague
Tribunal spins a first web of obligations, exemplary if gossamer,
between the countries of the world. But these are but the faint initial
suggestions of much greater possibilities, and it is these greater
possibilities that have now to be realized if all the talk we have had
about a war to end war is to bear any fruit. What is now with each week
of the present struggle becoming more practicable is the setting up of a
new assembly that will take the place of the various embassies and
diplomatic organizations, of a mediaeval pattern and tradition, which
have hitherto conducted international affairs.
This war must end in a public settlement, to which all of the
belligerents will set their hands; it will not be a bundle of treaties,
but one treaty binding eight or nine or more powers. This settlement
will almost certainly be attained at a conference of representatives of
the various Foreign Offices involved. Quite possibly interested neutral
powers will also send representatives. There is no reason whatever why
this conference should dissolve, why it should not become a permanent
conference upon the inter-relations of the participating powers and the
maintenance of the peace of the world. It could have a seat and
officials, a staff, and a revenue of its own; it could sit and debate
openly, publish the generally binding treaties between its constituent
powers, and claim for the support of its decisions their military and
naval resources.
The predominance of the greater powers could be secured either by the
representatives having multiple votes, according to the population
represented, or by some sort of proportional representation. Each power
could appoint its representatives through its Foreign Office or by
whatever other means it thought fit. They could as conveniently be
elected by a legislature or a nation. And such a body would not only be
of enormous authority in the statement, interpretation, and enforcement
of treaties, but it could also discharge a hundred useful functions in
relation to world hygiene, international trade and travel, the control
of the ocean, the exploration and conservation of the world's supplies
of raw material and food supply. It would be, in fact, a World Council.
Today this is an entirely practicable and hopeful proposal if only we
can overcome the opposition of those who cling to the belief that it is
possible for a country to be at the same time entirely pacific and
entirely unresponsible to and detached from the rest of mankind.
Given such a body, such a great alliance of world powers, much else in
the direction of world pacification becomes possible. Without it we may
perhaps expect a certain benefit from the improved good feeling of
mankind and the salutary overthrow of the German military culture, but
we cannot hope for any real organized establishment of peace.
I believe that a powerful support for the assembly and continuance of
such a world congress as this could be easily and rapidly developed in
North and South America, in Britain and the British Empire generally, in
France and Italy, in all the smaller States of northern, central, and
western Europe. It would probably have the personal support of the Czar,
unless he has profoundly changed the opinions with which he opened his
reign, the warm accordance of educated China and Japan, and the good
will of a renascent Germany. It would open a new era for mankind.
III.
Now, this idea of a congress of the belligerents to arrange the peace
settlements after this war, expanding by the accession of neutral powers
into a permanent world congress for the enforcement of international law
and the maintenance of the peace of mankind, is so reasonable and
attractive and desirable that if it were properly explained it would
probably receive the support of nineteen out of every twenty intelligent
persons.
Nevertheless, its realization is, on the whole, improbable. A mere
universal disgust with war is no more likely to end war than the
universal dislike for dying has ended death. And though war, unlike
dying, seems to be an avoidable fate, it does not follow that its
present extreme unpopularity will end it unless people not only desire
but see to the accomplishment of their desire.
And here again one is likely to meet an active and influential
opposition. Though the general will and welfare may point to the future
management of international relations through a world congress, the
whole mass of those whose business has been the direction of
international relations is likely to be either skeptical or actively
hostile to such an experiment. All the foreign offices and foreign
ministers, the diplomatists universally, the politicians who have
specialized in national assertion, and the courts that have symbolized
and embodied it, all the people, in fact, who will be in control of the
settlement, are likely to be against so revolutionary a change.
For it would be an entirely revolutionary change. It would put an end to
secrecy. It would end all that is usually understood by diplomacy. It
would clear the world altogether of those private understandings and
provisional secret agreements, those intrigues, wire-pullings, and
quasi-financial operations that have been the very substance of
international relations hitherto. To these able and interested people,
for the most part highly seasoned by the present conditions, finished
and elaborated players at the old game, this is to propose a new, crude,
difficult, and unsympathetic game. They may all of them, or most of
them, hate war, but they will cling to the belief that their method of
operating may now, after a new settlement, be able to prevent or
palliate war.