Now the short eastern French frontier was very strongly defended. There

was little prospect of Germany repeating the successes of 1870-71

against that barrier. But the Belgian frontier of France was longer and

less strongly defended. An attack in overwhelming force on France

through Belgium might repeat 1870 on a larger scale. The French left

might be swung back south-eastwardly on Verdun, as a pivot, and crowded

back upon its right, as one shuts an open razor. This scheme the German

strategists had worked out with great care and elaboration. Its

execution involved an outrage upon the law of nations, because Prussia

had undertaken to guarantee the neutrality of Belgium and had no quarrel

with her, and it involved the risk of bringing in Great Britain (which

power was also pledged to protect Belgium) against Germany. Yet the

Germans believed that their fleet had grown strong enough to make Great

Britain hesitate to interfere, and with a view to possibilities they had

constructed a great system of strategic railways to the Belgian

frontier, and made every preparation for the execution of this scheme.

So they might hope to strike down France at one blow, and deal at their

leisure with Russia.

In 1914 all things seemed moving together in favour of the two Central

Powers. Russia, it is true, had been recovering since 1906, but only

very slowly; France was distracted by financial scandals. The astounding

murder of M. Calmette, the editor of the _Figaro_, by the wife of M.

Caillaux, the minister of finance, brought these to a climax in March;

Britain, all Germany was assured, was on the verge of a civil war in

Ireland. Repeated efforts were made both by foreign and English people

to get some definite statement of what Britain would do if Germany and

Austria assailed France and Russia; but the British Foreign Secretary

maintained a front of heavy ambiguity up to the very day of the British

entry into the war.[499] As a consequence, there was a feeling on the

continent that Britain would either not fight or delay fighting, and

this may have encouraged Germany to go on threatening France. Events

were precipitated on June 28th by the assassination of the Archduke

Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian Empire, when on a state

visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Here was a timely excuse to

set the armies marching. “It is now or never,” said the German

Emperor.[500] Serbia was accused of instigating the murderers, and

notwithstanding the fact that Austrian commissioners reported that there

was no evidence to implicate the Serbian government, the

Austro-Hungarian government contrived to press this grievance towards

war. On July 23rd Austria discharged an ultimatum at Serbia, and, in

spite of a practical submission on the part of Serbia, and of the

efforts of Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, to call a

conference of the powers, declared war against Serbia on July 28th.

Russia mobilized her army on July 30th, and on August 1st Germany

declared war upon her. German troops crossed into French territory next

day, and, simultaneously with the delivery of an ultimatum to the

unfortunate Belgians, the big flanking movement through Luxembourg and

Belgium began. Westward rode the scouts and advanced guards. Westward

rushed a multitude of automobiles packed with soldiers. Enormous columns

of grey-clad infantry followed; round-eyed, fair young Germans they were

for the most part--law-abiding, educated youngsters who had never yet

seen a shot fired in anger. “This was war,” they were told. They had to

be bold and ruthless. Some of them did their best to carry out these

militarist instructions at the expense of the ill-fated Belgians.

A disproportionate fuss has been made over the detailed atrocities in

Belgium, disproportionate, that is, in relation to the fundamental

atrocity of August, 1914, which was the invasion of Belgium. Given that,

the casual shootings and lootings, the wanton destruction of property,

the plundering of inns and of food and drink shops by hungry and weary

men, and the consequent rapes and incendiarism, follow naturally enough.

Only very simple people believe that an army in the field can maintain

as high a level of honesty, decency, and justice as a settled community

at home. And the tradition of the Thirty Years War still influenced the

Prussian army. It has been customary in the countries allied against

Germany to treat all this vileness and bloodshed of the Belgian months

as though nothing of the sort had ever happened before, and as if it

were due to some distinctively evil strain in the German character. They

were nicknamed “Huns.” But nothing could be less like the systematic

destructions of the nomads (who once proposed to exterminate the entire

Chinese population in order to restore China to pasture) than the German

crimes in Belgium. Much of that crime was the drunken brutality of men

who for the first time in their lives were free to use lethal weapons,

much of it was the hysterical violence of men shocked at their own

proceedings and in deadly fear of the revenge of the people whose

country they had outraged, and much of it was done under duress because

of the theory that men should be terrible in warfare and that

populations are best subdued by fear. The German common people were

bundled from an orderly obedience into this war in such a manner that

atrocities were bound to ensue. They certainly did horrible and

disgusting things. But any people who had been worked up for war and led

into war as the Germans were, would have behaved in a similar manner.

On the night of August 2nd, while most of Europe, still under the

tranquil inertias of half a century of peace, still in the habitual

enjoyment of such a widely diffused plenty and cheapness and freedom as

no man living will ever see again, was thinking about its summer

holidays, the little Belgian village of Visé was ablaze, and stupefied

rustics were being led out and shot because it was alleged someone had

fired on the invaders. The officers who ordered these acts, the men who

obeyed, must surely have felt scared at the strangeness of the things

they did. Most of them had never yet seen a violent death. And they had

set light not to a village, but a world. It was the beginning of the end

of an age of comfort, confidence, and gentle and seemly behaviour in

Europe.

So soon as it was clear that Belgium was to be invaded, Great Britain

ceased to hesitate, and (at eleven at night on August 4th) declared war

upon Germany. The following day a German mine-laying vessel was caught

off the Thames mouth by the cruiser _Amphion_ and sunk,--the first time

that the British and Germans had ever met in conflict under their own

national flags upon land or water....

All Europe still remembers the strange atmosphere of those eventful

sunny August days, the end of the Armed Peace. For nearly half a century

the Western world had been tranquil and had seemed safe. Only a few

middle-aged and ageing people in France had had any practical experience

of warfare. The newspapers spoke of a world catastrophe, but that

conveyed very little meaning to those for whom the world had always

seemed secure, who were indeed almost incapable of thinking of it as

otherwise than secure. In Britain particularly for some weeks the

peace-time routine continued in a slightly dazed fashion. It was like a

man still walking about the world unaware that he has contracted a fatal

disease which will alter every routine and habit in his life. People

went on with their summer holidays; shops reassured their customers with

the announcement, “business as usual.” There was much talk and

excitement when the newspapers came, but it was the talk and excitement

of spectators who have no vivid sense of participation in the

catastrophe that was presently to involve them all.

§ 8[501]

[Illustration: Map to illustrate the Original GERMAN Plan, 1914]

We will now review very briefly the main phases of the world struggle

which had thus commenced. Planned by Germany, it began with a swift

attack designed to “knock out” France while Russia was still getting her

forces together in the East. For a time all went well. Military science

is never up to date under modern conditions, because military men are as

a class unimaginative, there are always at any date undeveloped

inventions capable of disturbing current tactical and strategic practice

which the military intelligence has declined. The German plan had been

made for some years; it was a stale plan; it could probably have been

foiled at the outset by a proper use of entrenchments and barbed wire

and machine guns, but the French were by no means as advanced in their

military science as the Germans, and they trusted to methods of open

warfare that were at least fourteen years behind the times. They had a

proper equipment neither of barbed wire nor machine guns, and there was

a ridiculous tradition that the Frenchman did not fight well behind

earthworks. The Belgian frontier was defended by the fortress of Liège,

ten or twelve years out of date, with forts whose armament had been

furnished and fitted in many cases by German contractors; and the

French north-eastern frontier was very badly equipped. Naturally the

German armament firm of Krupp had provided nutcrackers for these nuts in

the form of exceptionally heavy guns firing high explosive shells. These

defences proved therefore to be mere traps for their garrisons. The

French attacked and failed in the southern Ardennes. The German hosts

swung round the French left with an effect of being irresistible; Liège

fell on August 9th, Brussels was reached on August 20th, and the small

British army of about 70,000, which had arrived in Belgium, was struck

at Mons (August 22nd) in overwhelming force, and driven backward in

spite of the very deadly rifle tactics it had learnt during the South

African War. (The German troops could not believe that the British were

using rifles and not machine guns against them.) The little British

force was pushed aside westward, and the German right swept down so as

to leave Paris to the west and crumple the entire French army back upon

itself.

So confident was the German higher command at this stage of having won

the war, that by the end of August German troops were already being

withdrawn for the Eastern front, where the Russians were playing havoc

in East and West Prussia. And then came the French counter-attack,

strategically a very swift and brilliant counter-attack. The French

struck back on their centre, they produced an unexpected army on their

left, and the small British army, shaken but reinforced, was still fit

to play a worthy part in the counter-stroke. The German right overran

itself, lost its cohesion, and was driven back from the Marne to the

Aisne (Battle of the Marne, September 6th to 10th). It would have been

driven back farther had it not had the art of entrenchment in reserve.

Upon the Aisne it stood and dug itself in. The heavy guns, the high

explosive shell, the tanks, needed by the allies to smash up these

entrenchments, did not yet exist.

The Battle of the Marne shattered the original German plan. For a time

France was saved. But the German was not defeated; he had still a great

offensive superiority in men and equipment. His fear of the Russian in

the east had been relieved by a tremendous victory at Tannenberg. His

next phase was a headlong, less elaborately planned campaign to outflank

the left of the allied armies and to seize the Channel ports and cut off

supplies coming from Britain to France. Both armies extended to the west

in a sort of race to the coast. Then the Germans, with a great

superiority of guns and equipment, struck at the British round and about

Ypres. They came very near to a break through, but the British held

them.

The war on the Western front settled down to trench warfare. Neither

side had the science and equipment needed to solve the problem of

breaking through modern entrenchments and entanglements, and both sides

were now compelled to resort to scientific men, inventors, and such-like

unmilitary persons for counsel and help in their difficulty. At that

time the essential problem of trench warfare had already been solved;

there existed in England, for instance, the model of a tank, which would

have given the allies a swift and easy victory before 1916; but the

professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative

mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his

gifts in such a calling; nearly all supremely great soldiers have been

either inexperienced fresh-minded young men like Alexander, Napoleon,

and Hoche, politicians turned soldiers like Julius Cæsar, nomads like

the Hun and Mongol captains, or amateurs like Cromwell and Washington;

whereas this war after fifty years of militarism was a hopelessly

professional war; from first to last it was impossible to get it out of

the hands of the regular generals, and neither the German nor allied

headquarters was disposed to regard an invention with toleration that

would destroy their traditional methods.[502] The tank was not only

disagreeably strange to these military gentlemen, but it gave an

unprofessional protection to the common soldiers within it. The Germans,

however, did make some innovations. In February (28th) they produced a

rather futile novelty, the flame projector, the user of which was in

constant danger of being burnt alive, and in April, in the midst of a

second grave offensive upon the British (second Battle of Ypres, April

17th to May 17th), they employed a cloud of poison gas. This horrible

device was used against Algerian and Canadian troops; it shook them by

the physical torture it inflicted, and by the anguish of those who died,

but it failed to break through them. For some weeks chemists were of

more importance than soldiers on the allied front, and within six weeks

the defensive troops were already in possession of protective methods

and devices.

[Illustration: The WESTERN FRONT 1915-18]

For a year and a half, until July, 1916, the Western front remained in a

state of indecisive tension. There were heavy attacks on either side

that ended in bloody repulses. The French made costly but glorious

thrusts at Arras and in Champagne in 1915, the British at Loos. From

Switzerland to the North Sea there ran two continuous lines of

entrenchment, sometimes at a distance of a mile or more, sometimes at a

distance of a few feet (at Arras, _e.g._), and in and behind these lines

of trenches millions of men toiled, raided their enemies, and prepared

for sanguinary and foredoomed offensives. In any preceding age these

stagnant masses of men would have engendered a pestilence inevitably,

but here again modern science had altered the conditions of warfare.

Certain novel diseases appeared, trench feet for instance, caused by

prolonged standing in cold water, new forms of dysentery, and the like,

but none developed to an extent to disable either combatant force.

Behind this front the whole life of the belligerent nations was being

turned more and more to the task of maintaining supplies of food,

munitions, and, above all, men to supply the places of those who day by

day were killed or mangled.[503] The Germans had had the luck to possess

a considerable number of big siege guns intended for the frontier

fortresses; these were now available for trench smashing with high

explosive, a use no one had foreseen for them. The Allies throughout the

first years were markedly inferior in their supply of big guns and

ammunition, and their losses were steadily greater than the German. Mr.

Asquith, the British Prime Minister, though a very fine practitioner in

all the arts of Parliament, was wanting in creative ability; and it is

probably due to the push and hustle of Mr. Lloyd George (who presently

ousted him in December, 1916) and the clamour of the British press that

this inferiority of supplies was eventually rectified.[504]

There was a tremendous German onslaught upon the French throughout the

first half of 1916 round and about Verdun. The Germans suffered enormous

losses and were held, after pushing in the French lines for some miles.

The French losses were as great or greater. “_Ils ne passeront pas_,”

said and sang the French infantry--and kept their word.

The Eastern German front was more extended and less systematically

entrenched than the Western. For a time the Russian armies continued to

press westward in spite of the Tannenberg disaster. They conquered

nearly the whole of Galicia from the Austrians, took Lemberg on

September 2nd, 1914, and the great fortress of Przemysl on March 22nd,

1915. But after the Germans had failed to break the Western front of the

Allies, and after an ineffective allied offensive made without proper

material,[505] they turned to Russia, and a series of heavy blows, with

a novel use of massed artillery, were struck first in the south and then

at the north of the Russian front. On June 22nd, Przemysl was retaken,

and the whole Russian line was driven back until Vilna (September 2nd)

was in German hands.

In May, 1915 (23rd), Italy joined the allies, and declared war upon

Austria. (Not until a year later did she declare war on Germany.) She

pushed over her eastern boundary towards Goritzia (which fell in the

summer of 1916), but her intervention was of little use at that time to

either Russia or the two Western powers. She merely established another

line of trench warfare among the high mountains of her picturesque

north-eastern frontier.

While the main fronts of the chief combatants were in this state of

exhaustive deadlock, both sides were attempting to strike round behind

the front of their adversaries. The Germans made a series of Zeppelin,

and later of aeroplane, raids upon Paris and the east of England.

Ostensibly these aimed at depôts, munition works, and the like targets

of military importance, but practically they bombed promiscuously at

inhabited places. At first these raiders dropped not very effective

bombs, but later the size and quality of these missiles increased,

considerable numbers of people were killed and injured, and very much

damage was done. The English people were roused to a pitch of extreme

indignation by these outrages.[506] Although the Germans had possessed

Zeppelins for some years, no one in authority in Great Britain had

thought out the proper methods of dealing with them, and it was not

until late in 1916 that an adequate supply of anti-aircraft guns was

brought into play and that these raiders were systematically attacked by

aeroplanes. Then came a series of Zeppelin disasters, and after the

spring of 1917 they ceased to be used for any purpose but sea scouting,

and their place as raiders was taken by large aeroplanes (the Gothas).

The visits of these latter machines to London and the east of England

became systematic after the summer of 1917. All through the winter of

1917-18, London on every moonlight night became familiar with the

banging of warning maroons, the shrill whistles of the police alarm, the

hasty clearance of the streets, the distant rumbling of scores and

hundreds of anti-aircraft guns growing steadily to a wild uproar of

thuds and crashes, the swish of flying shrapnel, and at last, if any of

the raiders got through the barrage, with the dull heavy bang of the

bursting bombs. Then presently, amidst the diminuendo of the gun fire,

would come the inimitable rushing sound of the fire brigade engines and

the hurry of the ambulances.... War was brought home to every Londoner

by these experiences.

While the Germans were thus assailing the nerve of their enemy home

population through the air, they were also attacking the overseas trade

of the British by every means in their power. At the outset of the war

they had various trade destroyers scattered over the world, and a

squadron of powerful modern cruisers in the Pacific, namely, the

_Scharnhorst_, the _Gneisenau_, the _Leipzig_, the _Nürnberg_, and the

_Dresden_. Some of the detached cruisers, and particularly the _Emden_,

did a considerable amount of commerce destroying before they were hunted

down, and the main squadron caught an inferior British force off the

coast of Chile and sank the _Good Hope_ and the _Monmouth_ on November

1st, 1914. A month later these German ships were themselves pounced upon

by a British force, and all (except the _Dresden_) sunk by Admiral

Sturdee in the Battle of the Falkland Isles. After this conflict the

allies remained in undisputed possession of the surface of the sea, a

supremacy which the great naval Battle of Jutland (May 1st, 1916) did

nothing to shake. The Germans concentrated their attention more and more

upon submarine warfare. From the beginning of the war they had had

considerable submarine successes. On one day, September 22nd, 1914, they

sank three powerful cruisers, the _Aboukir_, the _Hogue_, and the

_Cressy_, with 1473 men. They continued to levy a toll upon British

shipping throughout the war; at first they hailed and examined passenger

and mercantile shipping, but this practice they discontinued for fear of

traps, and in the spring of 1915 they began to sink ships without

notice. In May, 1915, they sank the great passenger liner, the

_Lusitania_, without any warning, drowning a number of American

citizens. This embittered American feeling against them, but the

possibility of injuring and perhaps reducing Britain by a submarine

blockade was so great, that they persisted in a more and more

intensified submarine campaign, regardless of the danger of dragging the

United States into the circle of their enemies.

Meanwhile, Turkish forces, very ill equipped, were making threatening

gestures at Egypt across the desert of Sinai.

And while the Germans were thus striking at Britain, their least

accessible and most formidable antagonist, through the air and under the

sea, the French and British were also embarking upon a disastrous flank

attack in the east upon the Central Powers through Turkey. The Gallipoli

campaign was finely imagined, but disgracefully executed. Had it

succeeded, the Allies would have captured Constantinople in 1915. But

the Turks were given two months’ notice of the project by a premature

bombardment of the Dardanelles in February, the scheme was also probably

betrayed through the Greek Court, and when at last British and French

forces were landed upon the Gallipoli peninsula in April, they found the

Turks well entrenched and better equipped for trench warfare[507] than

themselves. The Allies trusted for heavy artillery to the great guns of

the ships, which were comparatively useless for battering down

entrenchments, and among every other sort of thing that they had failed

to foresee, they had not foreseen hostile submarines. Several great

battleships were lost; they went down in the same clear waters over

which the ships of Xerxes had once sailed to their fate at Salamis. The

story of the Gallipoli campaign from the side of the Allies is at once

heroic and pitiful, a story of courage and incompetence, and of life,

material, and prestige wasted, culminating in a withdrawal in January,

1916.[508]

This failure was due in part to the refusal of the Greeks to co-operate

in the adventure. For a year and a half the Greek king, the

brother-in-law of the Kaiser, being protected by friends in high

quarters on the Allied side, tricked and misled the Allies, and wasted

the lives of great numbers of common British and French soldiers. In

June, 1917, he was forced to abdicate, but instead of permitting the

Greeks, under their proper leader Venizelos, to follow their natural and

traditional republican disposition, his son, Alexander, the Kaiser’s

nephew, was made king in his place--_by the Allies!_ This Greek chapter

in the story of the great war still awaits the investigations of the

historian. It is at present a quite inexplicable story, and we give

these preposterous facts with no attempt to rationalize them.

Linked up closely with this Greek vacillation was the entry of Bulgaria

into the war (October 12th, 1915). The king of Bulgaria had hesitated

for more than a year to make any decision between the two sides. Now the

manifest failure of the British at Gallipoli, coupled with a strong

Austro-German attack in Serbia, swung him over to the Central Powers.

While the Serbs were hotly engaged with the Austro-German invaders upon

the Danube he attacked Serbia in the rear, and in a few weeks the

country had been completely overrun. The Serbian army made a terrible

retreat through the mountains of Albania to the coast, where its remains

were rescued by an Allied fleet.

An Allied force landed at Salonika in Greece, and pushed inland towards

Monastir, but was unable to render any effectual assistance to the

Serbians. It was the Salonika plan which sealed the fate of the

Gallipoli expedition.

To the east, in Mesopotamia, the British, using Indian troops chiefly,

made a still remoter flank attack upon the Central Powers. An army, very

ill provided for the campaign, was landed at Basra in the November of

1914, and pushed up towards Bagdad in the following year. It gained a

victory at Ctesiphon, the ancient Arsacid and Sassanid capital within

twenty-five miles of Bagdad, but the Turks were heavily reinforced,

there was a retreat to Kut, and there the British army, under General

Townshend, was surrounded and starved into surrender on April 29th,

1916.

All these campaigns in the air, under the seas, in Russia, Turkey, and

Asia, were subsidiary to the main front, the front of decision, between

Switzerland and the sea; and there the main millions lay entrenched,

slowly learning the necessary methods of modern scientific warfare.

There was a rapid progress in the use of the aeroplane. At the outset of

the war this had been used chiefly for scouting, and by the Germans for

the dropping of marks for the artillery. Such a thing as aerial fighting

was unheard of. In 1916 the aeroplanes carried machine guns and fought

in the air; their bombing work was increasingly important, they had

developed a wonderful art of aerial photography, and all the aerial side

of artillery work, both with aeroplanes and observation balloons, had

been enormously developed. But the military mind was still resisting the

use of the tank, the obvious weapon for decision in trench warfare.

Many intelligent people outside military circles understood this quite

clearly. The use of the tank against trenches was an altogether obvious

expedient. Leonardo da Vinci invented an early tank, but what military

“expert” has ever had the wits to study Leonardo? Soon after the South

African War, in 1903, there were stories in magazines describing

imaginary battles in which tanks figured, and a complete working model

of a tank was shown to the British military authorities--who of course

rejected it--in 1912. Tanks had been invented and re-invented before the

war began. But had the matter rested entirely in the hands of the

military, there would never have been any use of tanks. It was Mr.

Winston Churchill, at that time at the British Admiralty, who insisted

upon the manufacture of the first tanks, and it was in the teeth of the

grimmest opposition that they were sent to France.[509] To the British

navy, and not to the army, military science owes the use of these

devices. The German military authorities were equally set against them.

In July, 1916, Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, began a

great offensive which failed to break through the German line. In some

places he advanced a few miles; in others he was completely repulsed.

There was a huge slaughter of the new British armies. And he did not use

tanks.

In September, when the season was growing too late for a sustained

offensive, tanks first appeared in warfare. A few were put into action

by the British in a not very intelligent fashion. Their effect upon the

German was profound, they produced something like a panic, and there can

be little doubt that had they been used in July in sufficient numbers

and handled by a general of imagination and energy, they would have

ended the war there and then. At that time the Allies were in greater

strength than the Germans upon the Western front. Russia, though fast

approaching exhaustion, was still fighting, Italy was pressing the

Austrians hard, and Roumania was just entering the war on the side of

the allies. But the waste of men in this disastrous July offensive,

coupled with the obstinate neglect of the possibilities of the tanks by

the military authorities, brought the Allied cause to the very brink of

disaster.

Directly the British failure of July had reassured the Germans, they

turned on the Roumanians, and the winter of 1916 saw the same fate

overtake Roumania that had fallen upon Serbia in 1915. The year that had

begun with the retreat from Gallipoli and the surrender of Kut, ended

with the crushing of Roumania and with volleys fired at a landing party

of French and British marines by a royalist crowd in the port of Athens.

It looked as though King Constantine of Greece, that protégé of the

Allied foreign offices, meant to lead his people in the footsteps of

King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. But the coast line of Greece is one much

exposed to naval action. Greece was blockaded, and a French force from

Salonika joined hands with an Italian force from Valona to cut the king

of Greece off from his Central European friends.

On the whole, things looked much less dangerous for the Hohenzollern

imperialism at the end of 1916 than they had done after the failure of

the first great rush at the Marne. The Allies had wasted two years of

opportunity. Belgium, Serbia, and Roumania, and large areas of France

and Russia, were occupied by Austro-German troops. Counterstroke after

counterstroke had failed, and Russia was now tottering towards a

collapse. Had Germany been ruled with any wisdom, she might have made a

reasonable peace at this time. But the touch of success had intoxicated

her imperialists. They wanted not safety, but triumph, not world

welfare, but world empire. “World power or downfall” was their formula;

it gave their antagonists no alternative but a fight to a conclusive

end.

§ 9

Early in 1917 Russia collapsed.

By this time the enormous strain of the war was telling hardly upon all

the European populations. There had been a great disorganization of

transport everywhere, a discontinuance of the normal repairs and

replacements of shipping, railways, and the like, a using-up of material

of all sorts, a dwindling of food production, a withdrawal of greater

and greater masses of men from industry, a cessation of educational

work, and a steady diminution of the ordinary securities and honesties

of life. Nowhere was the available directive ability capable of keeping

a grip upon affairs in the face of the rupture of habitual bonds and the

replacement of the subtle disciplines of peace by the clumsy brutalities

of military “order.” More and more of the European population was being

transferred from surroundings and conditions to which it was accustomed,

to novel circumstances which distressed, stimulated, and demoralized it.

But Russia suffered first and most from this universal pulling up of

civilization from its roots. The Russian autocracy was dishonest and

incompetent. The Tsar, like several of his ancestors, had now given way

to a crazy pietism, and the court was dominated by a religious impostor,

Rasputin, whose cult was one of unspeakable foulness, a reeking scandal

in the face of the world. Beneath the rule of this dirty mysticism,

indolence and scoundrelism mismanaged the war. The Russian common

soldiers were sent into battle without guns to support them, without

even rifle ammunition; they were wasted by their officers and generals

in a delirium of militarist enthusiasm. For a time they seemed to be

suffering mutely as the beasts suffer; but there is a limit to the

endurance even of the most ignorant. A profound disgust for the Tsardom

was creeping through these armies of betrayed and wasted men. From the

close of 1915 onwards Russia was a source of deepening anxiety to her

Western allies. Throughout 1916 she remained largely on the defensive,

and there were rumours of a separate peace with Germany. She gave little

help to Roumania.

On December 29th, 1916, the monk Rasputin was murdered at a dinner-party

in Petrograd, and a belated attempt was made to put the Tsardom in

order. By March things were moving rapidly; food riots in Petrograd

developed into a revolutionary insurrection; there was an attempted

suppression of the Duma, the representative body, attempted arrests of

liberal leaders, the formation of a provisional government under Prince

Lvoff, and an abdication (March 15th) by the Tsar. For a time it seemed

that a moderate and controlled revolution might be possible--perhaps

under a new Tsar. Then it became evident that the destruction of

confidence in Russia had gone too far for any such adjustments. The

Russian people were sick to death of the old order of things in Europe,

of Tsars and of wars and great powers; it wanted relief, and that

speedily, from unendurable miseries. The Allies had no understanding of

Russian realities; their diplomatists were ignorant of Russian; genteel

persons, with their attention directed to the Russian Court rather than

Russia, they blundered steadily with the new situation. There was little

goodwill among the diplomatists for republicanism, and a manifest

disposition to embarrass the new government as much as possible. At the

head of the Russian republican government was an eloquent and

picturesque leader, Kerensky, who found himself assailed by the deep

forces of a profounder revolutionary movement, the “social revolution,”

at home and cold-shouldered by the Allied governments abroad. His allies

would neither let him give the Russian people land nor peace beyond

their frontiers. The French and the British press pestered their

exhausted ally for a fresh offensive, but when presently the Germans

made a strong attack by sea and land upon Riga, the British Admiralty

quailed before the prospect of a Baltic expedition in relief. The new

Russian republic had to fight unsupported. In spite of their great naval

predominance and the bitter protests of the great English admiral, Lord

Fisher (1841-1920), it is to be noted that the Allies, except for some

submarine attacks, left the Germans the complete mastery of the Baltic

throughout the war.

The Russian masses were resolute to end the war. There had come into

existence in Petrograd a body representing the workers and common

soldiers, the Soviet, and this body clamoured for an international

conference of socialists at Stockholm. Food riots were occurring in

Berlin at this time, war weariness in Austria and Germany was profound,

and there can be little doubt, in the light of subsequent events, that

such a conference would have precipitated a reasonable peace on

democratic lines in 1917 and a German revolution. Kerensky implored his

Western allies to allow this conference to take place, but, fearful of a

worldwide outbreak of socialism and republicanism, they refused, in

spite of the favourable response of a small majority of the British

Labour Party. Without either moral or physical help from the Allies, the

“moderate” Russian republic still fought on and made a last desperate

offensive effort in July. It failed after some preliminary successes and

another great slaughtering of Russians.

The limit of Russian endurance was reached. Mutinies broke out in the

Russian armies, and particularly upon the northern front, and upon

November 7th, 1917, Kerensky’s government was overthrown and power was

seized by the Soviet Government, dominated by the Bolshevik socialists

under Lenin, and pledged to make peace regardless of the Western powers.

Russia passed definitely “out of the war.”

In the spring of 1917 there had been a costly and ineffective French

attack upon the Champagne front which had failed to break through and

sustained enormous losses. Here, then, by the end of 1917, was a phase

of events altogether favourable to Germany, had her government been

fighting for security and well-being rather than for pride and victory.

But to the very end, to the pitch of final exhaustion, the people of the

Central Powers were held to the effort to realize an impossible world

imperialism.

To that end it was necessary that Britain should be not merely resisted,

but subjugated, and in order to do that Germany had already dragged

America into the circle of her enemies. Throughout 1916 the submarine

campaign had been growing in intensity, but hitherto it had respected

neutral shipping. In January, 1917, a complete “blockade” of Great

Britain and France was proclaimed, and all neutral powers were warned to

withdraw their shipping from the British seas. An indiscriminate sinking

of the world’s shipping began which compelled the United States to enter

the war in April (6th), 1917. Throughout 1917, while Russia was breaking

up and becoming impotent, the American people were changing swiftly and

steadily into a great military nation. And the unrestricted submarine

campaign, for which the German imperialists had accepted the risk of

this fresh antagonist, was far less successful than had been hoped. The

British navy proved itself much more inventive and resourceful than the

British army; there was a rapid development of anti-submarine devices

under water, upon the surface, and in the air; and after a month or so

of serious destruction, the tale of submarine sinkings declined. The

British found it necessary to put themselves upon food rations; but the

regulations were well framed and ably administered, the public showed an

excellent spirit and intelligence, and the danger of famine and social

disorder was kept at arm’s length.

[Illustration: Time Chart of the Great War, 1914-18 (Western Front)]

[Illustration: Time Chart of the Great War, 1914-18 (Eastern Front)]

Yet the German imperial government persisted in its course. If the

submarine was not doing all that had been expected, and if the armies

of America gathered like a thunder-cloud, yet Russia was definitely

down; and in October the same sort of Autumn offensive that had

overthrown Serbia in 1915 and Roumania in 1916 was now turned with

crushing effect against Italy. The Italian front collapsed after the

Battle of Caporetto, and the Austro-German armies poured down into

Venetia and came almost within gunfire of Venice. Germany felt

justified, therefore, in taking a high line with the Russian peace

proposals, and the peace of Brest Litovsk (March 2nd, 1918) gave the

Western allies some intimation of what a German victory would mean to

them. It was a crushing and exorbitant peace, dictated with the utmost

arrogance of confident victors.

All through the winter German troops had been shifting from the Eastern

to the Western front, and now, in the spring of 1918, the jaded

enthusiasm of hungry, weary, and bleeding Germany was lashed up for the

one supreme effort that was really and truly to end the war. For some

months American troops had been in France, but the bulk of the American

army was still across the Atlantic. It was high time for the final

conclusive blow upon the Western front, if such a blow was ever to be

delivered. The first attack was upon the British in the Somme region.

The not very brilliant cavalry generals who were still in command of a

front upon which cavalry was a useless encumbrance, were caught napping;

and on March 21st, in “Gough’s Disaster,” a British army was driven back

in such disorder as no British army had ever known before. Thousands of

guns were lost, and scores of thousands of prisoners. Many of these

losses were due to the utter incompetence of the higher command. No less

than a hundred tanks were abandoned _because they ran out of petrol_!

The British were driven back almost to Amiens.[510] Throughout April and

May the Germans rained offensives on the Allied front. They came near to

a break through in the north, and they made a great drive back to the

Marne, which they reached again on May 30th, 1918.

This was the climax of the German effort. Behind it was nothing but an

exhausted homeland. Fresh troops were hurrying from Britain across the

Channel, and America was now pouring men into France by the hundred

thousand. In June the weary Austrians made a last effort in Italy, and

collapsed before an Italian counter-attack. Early in June the French

began to develop a counter-attack in the Marne angle. By July the tide

was turning and the Germans were reeling back. The Battle of Château

Thierry (July 18th) proved the quality of the new American armies. In

August the British opened a great and successful thrust into Belgium,

and the bulge of the German lines towards Amiens wilted and collapsed.

Germany had finished. The fighting spirit passed out of her army, and

October was a story of defeat and retreat along the entire Western

front. Early in November British troops were in Valenciennes and

Americans in Sedan. In Italy also the Austrian armies were in a state of

disorderly retreat. But everywhere now the Hohenzollern and Habsburg

forces were collapsing. The smash at the end was amazingly swift.

Frenchmen and Englishmen could not believe their newspapers as day after

day they announced the capture of more hundreds of guns and more

thousands of prisoners.

In September a great allied offensive against Bulgaria had produced a

revolution in that country and peace proposals. Turkey had followed with

a capitulation at the end of October, and Austro-Hungary on November

4th. There was an attempt to bring out the German Fleet for a last

fight, but the sailors mutinied (November 7th).

The Kaiser and the Crown Prince bolted hastily, and without a scrap of

dignity, into Holland. It was like welshers bolting from a racecourse to

escape a ducking. On November 11th an armistice was signed, and the war

was at an end....

For four years and a quarter the war had lasted, and gradually it had

drawn nearly everyone, in the Western world at least, into its vortex.

Upwards of ten millions of people had been actually killed through the

fighting, another twenty or twenty-five million had died through the

hardships and disorders entailed. Scores of millions were suffering and

enfeebled by under-nourishment and misery. A vast proportion of the

living were now engaged in war work, in drilling and armament, in making

munitions, in hospitals, in working as substitutes for men who had gone

into the armies and the like. Business men had been adapting themselves

to the more hectic methods necessary for profit in a world in a state of

crisis. The war had become, indeed, an atmosphere, a habit of life, a

new social order. Then suddenly it ended.

In London the armistice was proclaimed about midday on November 11th. It

produced a strange cessation of every ordinary routine. Clerks poured

out of their offices and would not return, assistants deserted their

shops, omnibus drivers and the drivers of military lorries set out upon

journeys of their own devising with picked-up loads of astounded and

cheering passengers going nowhere in particular and careless whither

they went. Vast vacant crowds presently choked the streets, and every

house and shop that possessed such adornments hung out flags. When night

came, many of the main streets, which had been kept in darkness for many

months because of the air raids, were brightly lit. It was very strange

to see thronging multitudes assembled in an artificial light again.

Everyone felt aimless, with a kind of strained and aching relief. It was

over at last. There would be no more killing in France, no more air

raids--and things would get better. People wanted to laugh, and

weep--and could do neither. Youths of spirit and young soldiers on leave

formed thin noisy processions that shoved their way through the general

drift, and did their best to make a jollification. A captured German gun

was hauled from the Mall, where a vast array of such trophies had been

set out, into Trafalgar Square, and its carriage burnt. Squibs and

crackers were thrown about. But there was little concerted rejoicing.

Nearly everyone had lost too much and suffered too much to rejoice with

any fervour.[511]

§ 10

The world in the year after the great war was like a man who has had

some vital surgical operation very roughly performed, and who is not yet

sure whether he can now go on living or whether he has not been so

profoundly shocked and injured that he will presently fall down and die.

It was a world dazed and stunned. German militarist imperialism had been

defeated, but at an overwhelming cost. It had come very near to victory.

Everything went on, now that the strain of the conflict had ceased,

rather laxly, rather weakly, and with a gusty and uncertain temper.

There was a universal hunger for peace, a universal desire for the lost

safety and liberty and prosperity of pre-war times, without any power of

will to achieve and secure these things.

Just as with the Roman Republic under the long strain of the Punic War,

so now there had been a great release of violence and cruelty, and a

profound deterioration in financial and economic morality. Generous

spirits had sacrificed themselves freely to the urgent demands of the

war, but the sly and base of the worlds of business and money had

watched the convulsive opportunities of the time and secured a firm grip

upon the resources and political power of their countries. Everywhere

men who would have been regarded as shady adventurers before 1914 had

acquired power and influence while better men toiled unprofitably. Such

men as Lord Rhondda, the British food controller, killed themselves with

hard work, while the war profiteer waxed rich and secured his grip upon

press and party organization.

In the course of the war there had been extraordinary experiments in

collective management in nearly all the belligerent countries. It was

realized that the common expedients of peacetime commerce, the higgling

of the market, the holding out for a favourable bargain, were

incompatible with the swift needs of warfare. Transport, fuel, food

supply, and the distribution of the raw materials not only of clothing,

housing, and the like, but of everything needed for war munitions, had

been brought under public control. No longer had farmers been allowed to

under-farm; cattle had been put upon deer-parks and grass-lands ploughed

up, with or without the owner’s approval. Luxury building and

speculative company promotion had been restrained. In effect, a sort of

emergency socialist state had been established throughout belligerent

Europe. It was rough-and-ready and wasteful, but it was more effective

than the tangled incessant profit-seeking, the cornering and

forestalling and incoherent productiveness of “private enterprise.”

In the earlier years of the war there was a very widespread feeling of

brotherhood and the common interest in all the belligerent states. The

common men were everywhere sacrificing life and health for what they

believed to be the common good of the state. In return, it was promised,

there would be less social injustice after the war, a more universal

devotion to the common welfare. In Great Britain, for instance, Mr.

Lloyd George was particularly insistent upon his intention to make the

after-war Britain “a land fit for heroes.” He foreshadowed the

continuation of this new war communism into the peace period in

discourses of great fire and beauty. In Great Britain there was created

a Ministry of Reconstruction, which was understood to be planning a new

and more generous social order, better labour conditions, better

housing, extended education, a complete and scientific revision of the

economic system. Similar hopes of a better world sustained the common

soldiers of France and Germany and Italy. It was premature

disillusionment that caused the Russian collapse. So that two mutually

dangerous streams of anticipation were running through the minds of men

in Western Europe towards the end of the war. The rich and adventurous

men, and particularly the new war profiteers, were making their plans to

prevent such developments as that air transport should become a state

property, and to snatch back manufactures, shipping, land transport, the

public services generally, and the trade in staples from the hands of

the commonweal into the grip of private profit; they were securing

possession of newspapers and busying themselves with party caucuses and

the like to that end; while the masses of common men were looking

forward naïvely to a new state of society planned almost entirely in

their interest and according to generous general ideas. The history of

1919 is largely the clash of these two streams of anticipation. There

was a hasty selling off, by the “business” government in control, of

every remunerative public enterprise to private speculators.... By the

middle of 1919 the labour masses throughout the world were manifestly

disappointed and in a thoroughly bad temper. The British “Ministry of

Reconstruction” and its foreign equivalents were exposed as a soothing

sham. The common man felt he had been cheated. There was to be no

reconstruction, but only a restoration of the old order--in the harsher

form necessitated by the poverty of the new time.

For four years the drama of the war had obscured the social question

which had been developing in the Western civilizations throughout the

nineteenth century. Now that the war was over, this question reappeared

gaunt and bare, as it had never been seen before.

And the irritations and hardships and the general insecurity of the new

time were exacerbated by a profound disturbance of currency and credit.

Money, a complicated growth of conventions rather than a system of

values, had been deprived within the belligerent countries of the

support of a gold standard. Gold had been retained only for

international trade, and every government had produced excessive

quantities of paper money for domestic use. With the breaking down of

the war-time barriers the international exchange became a wildly

fluctuating confusion, a source of distress to everyone except a few

gamblers and wily speculators. Prices rose and rose--with an infuriating

effect upon the wage-earner. On the one hand was the employer resisting

his demands for more pay; on the other hand, food, house-room, and

clothing were being steadily cornered against him. And, which was the

essential danger of the situation, _he had lost any confidence he had

ever possessed that any patience or industrial willingness he displayed

would really alleviate the shortages and inconveniences by which he

suffered_.

In the speeches of politicians towards the close of 1919 and the spring

of 1920, there was manifest an increasing recognition of the fact that

what is called the capitalist system--the private ownership system that

is, in which private profit is the working incentive--was on its trial.

It had to produce general prosperity, they admitted, or it had to be

revised. It is interesting to note such a speech as that of Mr. Lloyd

George, the British premier, delivered on Saturday, December 6th, 1919.

Mr. Lloyd George had had the education and training of a Welsh

solicitor; he entered politics early, and in the course of a brilliant

parliamentary career he had had few later opportunities for reading and

thought. But being a man of great natural shrewdness, he was expressing

here very accurately the ideas of the more intelligent of the business

men and wealthy men and ordinary citizens who supported him.

“There is a new challenge to civilization,” he said. “What is it? It is

fundamental. It affects the whole fabric of society as we know it; its

commerce, its trade, its industry, its finance, its social order--all

are involved in it. There are those who maintain that the prosperity and

strength of the country have been built up by the stimulating and

invigorating appeal to individual impulse, to individual action. That is

one view. The State must educate; the State must assist where necessary;

the State must control where necessary; the State must shield the weak

against the arrogance of the strong; but the life springs from

individual impulse and energy. (Cheers.) That is one view. What is the

other? That private enterprise is a failure, tried, and found wanting--a

complete failure, a cruel failure. It must be rooted out, and the

community must take charge as a community, to produce, to distribute, as

well as to control.

“Those are great challenges for us to decide. _We_ say that the ills of

private enterprise can be averted. _They_ say, ‘No, they cannot. No

ameliorative, no palliative, no restrictive, no remedial measure will

avail. These evils are inherent in the system. They are the fruit of the

tree, and you must cut it down.’ That is the challenge we hear ringing

through the civilized world to-day, from ocean to ocean, through valley

and plain. You hear it in the whining and maniacal shrieking of the

Bolshevists. You hear it in the loud, clear, but more restrained tones

of Congresses and Conferences. The Bolshevists would blow up the fabric

with high explosive, with horror. Others would pull down with the

crowbars and with cranks--especially cranks. (Laughter.)

“Unemployment, with its injustice for the man who seeks and thirsts for

employment, who begs for labour and cannot get it, and who is punished

for failure he is not responsible for by the starvation of his

children--that torture is _something that private enterprise ought to

remedy for its own sake_. (Cheers.) Sweating, slums, the sense of

semi-slavery in labour, must go. We must cultivate a sense of manhood by

treating men as men. If I--and I say this deliberately--if I had to

choose between this fabric I believe in, and allowing millions of men

and women and children to rot in its cellars, I would not hesitate one

hour. That is not the choice. Thank God it is not the choice. Private

enterprise can produce more, so that all men get a fair share of

it....”[512]

Here, put into quasi-eloquent phrasing, and with a jest adapted to the

mental habits of the audience, we have the common-sense view of the

ordinary prosperous man not only of Great Britain, but of America or

France or Italy or Germany. In quality and tone it is a fair sample of

British political thought in 1919. The prevailing economic system has

made us what we are, is the underlying idea; and we do not want any

process of social destruction to precede a renascence of society, we do

not want to experiment with the fundamentals of our social order. Let us

accept that. Adaptation, Mr. Lloyd George admitted, there had to be. Now

this occasion of his speaking was a year and a month after the

Armistice, and for all that period private enterprise had been failing

to do all that Mr. Lloyd George was so cheerfully promising it would do.

The community was in urgent need of houses. Throughout the war there had

been a cessation not only of building, but of repairs. The shortage of

houses in the last months of 1919 amounted to scores of thousands in

Britain alone.[513] Multitudes of people were living in a state of

exasperating congestion, and the most shameless profiteering in

apartments and houses was going on. It was a difficult, but not an

impossible situation. Given the same enthusiasm and energy and

self-sacrifice that had tided over the monstrous crisis of 1916, the far

easier task of providing a million houses could have been performed in a

year or so. But there had been corners in building materials, transport

was in a disordered state, and it did not _pay_ private enterprise to

build houses at any rents within the means of the people who needed

them. Private enterprise, therefore, so far from bothering about the

public need of housing, did nothing but corner and speculate in rents

and sub-letting. It now demanded grants in aid from the State--in order

to build at a profit. And there was a great crowding and dislocation of

goods at the dépôts because there was insufficient road transport. There

was an urgent want of cheap automobiles to move about goods and workers.

But private enterprise in the automobile industry found it far more

profitable to produce splendid and costly cars for those whom the war

had made rich. The munition factories built with public money could have

been converted very readily into factories for the mass production of

cheap automobiles, but private enterprise had insisted upon these

factories being sold by the State, and would neither meet the public

need itself nor let the State do so. So, too, with the world, in the

direst discomfort for need of shipping, private enterprise insisted upon

the shutting down of the newly constructed State shipyards. Currency was

dislocated everywhere, but private enterprise was busy buying and

selling francs or marks and intensifying the trouble. While Mr. George

was making the very characteristic speech we have quoted, the discontent

of the common man was gathering everywhere, and little or nothing was

being done to satisfy his needs. It was becoming very evident that

unless there was to be some profound change in the spirit of business,

under an unrestrained private enterprise system there was little or no

hope, in Europe at any rate, of decent housing, clothing, or education

for the workers for two or three generations.

These are facts that the historian of mankind is obliged to note with as

little comment as possible. Private enterprise in Europe in 1919

displayed neither will nor capacity for meeting the crying needs of the

time. So soon as it was released from control, it ran naturally into

speculation, cornering, and luxury production. It followed the line of

maximum profit. It displayed no sense of its own dangers; and it

resisted any attempt to restrain and moderate its profits and make

itself serviceable, even in its own interest. And this went on in the

face of the most striking manifestations of the extreme recalcitrance on

the part of the European masses to the prolonged continuance of the

privations and inconveniences they suffered. In 1913 these masses were

living as they had lived since birth; they were habituated to the life

they led. The masses of 1919, on the other hand, had been uprooted

everywhere, to go into the armies, to go into munition factories, and so

on. They had lost their habits of acquiescence, and they were hardier

and more capable of desperate action. Great multitudes of men had gone

through such brutalizing training as, for instance, bayonet drill; they

had learnt to be ferocious, and to think less either of killing or being

killed. Social unrest had become, therefore, much more dangerous.

Everything seemed to point to a refusal to tolerate the current state of

affairs for many years. Unless the educated and prosperous and

comfortable people of Europe could speedily get their private enterprise

under sufficient restraint to make it work well and rapidly for the

common good, unless they could develop the idea of business as primarily

a form of public service and not primarily a method of profit-making,

unless they could in their own interest achieve a security of peace that

would admit of a cessation not only of war preparation, but of

international commercial warfare, strike and insurrection promised to

follow strike and insurrection up to a complete social and political

collapse. It was not that the masses had or imagined that they had the

plan of a new social, political, and economic system. They had not, and

they did not believe they had. The defects we have pointed out in the

socialist scheme (chapter xxxix, § 5) were no secret from them. It was a

much more dangerous state of affairs than that. It was that they were

becoming so disgusted with the current system, with its silly luxury,

its universal waste, and its general misery, that they did not care what

happened afterwards so long as they could destroy it. It was a return to

a state of mind comparable to that which had rendered possible the

debacle of the Roman Empire.

Already in 1919 the world had seen one great community go that way, the

Russian people. The Russians overturned the old order and submitted to

the autocratic rule of a small group of doctrinaire Bolshevik

socialists, because these men seemed to have something new to try. They

wrecked the old system, and at any cost they would not have it back. The

information available from Russia at the time of writing this summary is

still too conflicting and too obviously tainted by propagandist aims for

us to form any judgment upon the proceedings and methods of the Soviet

Government, but it is very plain that from November, 1917, Russia has

not only endured that government and its mainly socialistic methods, but

has fought for it successfully against anything that seemed to threaten

a return to the old régime.

We have already (§ 5) pointed out the very broad differences between the

Russian and the Western communities, and the strong reasons there are

for doubting that they will move upon parallel lines and act in similar

ways. The Russian masses were cut off by want of education and sympathy

from the small civilized community of prosperous and educated people

which lived upon them. These latter were a little separate nation. The

masses below have thrown that separate nation off and destroyed it and

begun again, so to speak, upon a new sort of society which, whether it

succeed or collapse, cannot fail to be of intense interest to all

mankind. But there is much more unity of thought and feeling between

class and class in the West than in Russia, and particularly in the

Atlantic communities. Even if they wrangle, classes can talk together

and understand each other. There is no unbroken stratum of illiterates.

The groups of rich and speculative men, the “bad men” in business and

affairs, whose freedoms are making the very name of “private enterprise”

stink in the nostrils of the ordinary man, are only the more active

section of very much larger classes, guilty perhaps of indolence and

self-indulgence, but capable of being roused to a sense not merely of

the wickedness but of the danger of systematic self-seeking in a

strained, impoverished, and sorely tried world. Many of these more

reasonable and moral people have shown themselves clearly aware of the

nature of the present situation, and some of them have made speeches and

delivered sermons and written books--often addressed to the working

classes--expressing very generous and unselfish views. Speeches and

sermons and books will in themselves do little to allay the gathering

wrath of classes ill housed, ill fed, and unhealthy, and angry because

they believe things are so through the reckless greed of others; but

such utterances are valuable as admissions, and if these good

intentions, encouraged perhaps and aided by a certain pressure from

below, presently develop into a resolute combining and direction of the

energies of private enterprise--for a time at least--towards socially

necessary work and a restriction of speculation and luxury, and if there

begin a rapid provision, even at some cost to the hoards and

satisfactions of the successful classes, of the decent homes and

gardens, of the pleasant public surroundings, the health services and

the education and leisure needed to tranquillize the fiercer

discontents, it is still possible that readjustment rather than

revolution will be the method of the Atlantic communities. But that

readjustment cannot be indefinitely delayed; it must come soon.

In one way or another it seems inevitable now that the new standard of

well-being which the mechanical revolution of the last century has

rendered possible, should become the general standard of life.

Revolution is conditional upon public discomfort. Social peace is

impossible without a rapid amelioration of the needless discomforts of

the present time. A rapid resort to willing service and social

reconstruction on the part of those who own and rule, or else a

worldwide social revolution leading towards an equalization of

conditions and an attempt to secure comfort on new and untried lines,

seem now to be the only alternatives before mankind. The choice which

route shall be taken lies, we believe, in western Europe, and still more

so in America, with the educated, possessing, and influential classes.

The former route demands much sacrifice, for prosperous people in

particular, a voluntary assumption of public duties and a voluntary

acceptance of class discipline and self-denial; the latter may take an

indefinite time to traverse, it will certainly be a very destructive and

bloody process, and whether it will lead to a new and better state of

affairs at last is questionable. A social revolution, if ultimately the

western European States blunder into it, may prove to be a process

extending over centuries; it may involve a social breakdown as complete

as that of the Roman Empire, and it may necessitate as slow a

recuperation.

Let us add to what has been written above a short passage from an abler

and far more authoritative pen.[514] It approaches this question of

economic disorganization from a different angle, but the drift of its

implications is the same. It says as plainly to the private capitalist

system: “Mend, show more understanding, and a better and a stronger will

for the common welfare, or go.”

“In the latter stages of the war all the belligerent governments

practised, from necessity or incompetence, what a Bolshevist might have

done from design.[515] Even now, when the war is over, most of them

continue out of weakness the same malpractices. But further, the

Governments of Europe, being many of them at this moment reckless in

their methods as well as weak, seek to direct on to a class known as

‘profiteers’ the popular indignation against the more obvious

consequences of their vicious methods. These profiteers are, broadly

speaking, the entrepreneur class of capitalists, that is to say, the

active and constructive element in the whole capitalist society, who in

a period of rapidly rising prices cannot but get rich quick whether they

wish it or desire it or not.[516] If prices are continually rising,

every trader who has purchased for stock or owns property and plant

inevitably makes profits. By directing hatred against this class,

therefore, the European Governments are carrying a step further the

fatal process which the subtle mind of Lenin had consciously conceived.

The profiteers are a consequence and not a cause of rising prices. By

combining a popular hatred of the class of _entrepreneurs_ with the blow

already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary

disturbance of contract and of the established equilibrium of wealth

which is the inevitable result of inflation, these governments are fast

rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of

the nineteenth century. But they have no plan for replacing it.

“We are thus faced in Europe with the spectacle of an extraordinary

weakness, on the part of the great capitalist class, which has emerged

from the industrial triumphs of the nineteenth century and seemed a very

few years ago our all-powerful master. The terror and personal timidity

of the individuals of this class is now so great, their confidence in

their place in society and in their necessity to the social organism so

diminished, that they are the easy victims of intimidation. This was not

so in England twenty-five years ago, any more than it is now in the

United States. Then the capitalists believed in themselves, in their

value to society, in the propriety of their continued existence in the

full enjoyment of their riches and the unlimited exercise of their

power. Now they tremble before every insult. Call them pro-Germans,

international financiers, or profiteers, and they will give you any

ransom you choose to ask not to speak of them so harshly. They allow

themselves to be ruined and altogether undone by their own instruments,

governments of their own making, and a press of which they are the

proprietors. Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society

ever perished save by its own hand.”

§ 11[517]

We have dealt with the social and economic disorder of the European

communities, and the rapid return of the “class-war” to the foreground

of attention, before giving any account of the work of world settlement

that centred on the Peace Conference at Paris, because the worried and

preoccupied state of everyone concerned with private problems of income,

prices, employment, and the like goes far to explain the jaded

atmosphere in which that Conference addressed itself to the vast task

before it.

The story of the Conference turns very largely upon the adventure of one

particular man, one of those men whom accident or personal quality picks

out as a type to lighten the task of the historian. We have in the

course of this history found it very helpful at times to focus our

attention upon some individual, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Yuan

Chwang, the Emperor Frederick II and Charles V and Napoleon I for

example, and to let him by reflection illuminate the period in which he

lived. The conclusion of the Great War can be seen most easily as the

rise of the American President, President Wilson, to predominant

importance in the world’s hopes and attention, and his failure to

justify that predominance.

President Wilson (born 1856) had previously been a prominent student and

teacher of history, constitutional law, and the political sciences

generally. He had held various professorial chairs, and had been

President of Princeton University (New Jersey). There is a long list of

books to his credit, and they show a mind rather exclusively directed to

American history and American politics. There is no evidence that he had

at any time in his life made a general study of the world problem

outside the very peculiar and exceptional American case. He was mentally

the new thing in history, negligent of and rather ignorant of the older

things out of which his new world had arisen. He retired from academic

life, and was elected Democratic Governor of New Jersey in 1910. In 1913

he became the Democratic presidential candidate, and as a consequence of

a violent quarrel between ex-President Roosevelt and President Taft,

which split the dominant Republican party, he became President of the

United States.

The events of August 1914 seem to have taken President Wilson, like the

rest of his fellow-countrymen, by surprise. We find him cabling an offer

of his services as a mediator on August 3rd. Then, for a time, he and

America watched the conflict. At first neither the American people nor

their President seem to have had a very clear or profound understanding

of that long-gathered catastrophe. Their tradition for a century had

been to disregard the problems of the Old World, and it was not to be

lightly changed. The imperialistic arrogance of the German Court and the

stupid inclination of the German military authorities towards

melodramatic “frightfulness,” their invasion of Belgium, their cruelties

there, their use of poison gas, and the nuisance of their submarine

campaign created a deepening hostility to Germany in the States as the

war proceeded; but the tradition of political abstinence and the

deep-rooted persuasion that America possessed a political morality

altogether superior to European conflicts restrained the President from

active intervention. He adopted a lofty tone. He professed to be unable

to judge the causes and justice of the Great War. It was largely his

high pacific attitude that secured his re-election as President for a

second term. But the world is not to be mended by merely regarding

evil-doers with an expression of rather undiscriminating disapproval. By

the end of 1916 the Germans had been encouraged to believe that under no

circumstances whatever would the United States fight, and in 1917 they

began their unrestricted submarine warfare and the sinking of American

ships without notice. President Wilson and the American people were

dragged into the war by this supreme folly. And also they were dragged

into a reluctant attempt to define their relations to Old-World politics

in some other terms than those of mere aloofness. Their thoughts and

temper changed very rapidly. They came into the war side by side with

the Allies, but not in any pact with the Allies. They came into the

war, in the name of their own modern civilization, to punish and end an

intolerable political and military situation.

Slow and belated judgments are sometimes the best judgments. In a series

of “notes,” too long and various for detailed treatment in this

_Outline_, thinking aloud, as it were, in the hearing of all mankind,

President Wilson sought to state the essential differences of the

American State from the Great Powers of the Old World. We have been at

some pains in this history to make plain the development of these

differences. He unfolded a conception of international relationships

that came like a gospel, like the hope of a better world, to the whole

eastern hemisphere. Secret agreements were to cease, “nations” were to

determine their own destinies, militarist aggression was to cease, the

sea-ways were to be free to all mankind. These commonplaces of American

thought, these secret desires of every sane man, came like a great light

upon the darkness of anger and conflict in Europe. At last, men felt,

the ranks of diplomacy were broken, the veils of Great Power “policy”

were rent in twain. Here with authority, with the strength of a powerful

new nation behind it, was the desire of the common man throughout the

world, plainly said.

Manifestly there was needed some over-riding instrument of government to

establish world law and maintain these broad and liberal generalizations

upon human intercourse. A number of schemes had floated in men’s minds

for the attainment of that end. In particular there was a movement for

some sort of world league, a “League of Nations.” The American President

adopted this phrase and sought to realize it. An essential condition of

the peace he sought through the overthrow of German imperialism was, he

declared, to be this federal organ. This League of Nations was to be the

final court of appeal in international affairs. It was to be the

substantial realization of the peace. Here again he awakened a

tremendous echo.

President Wilson was the spokesman of a new age. Throughout the war, and

for some little time after it had ended, he held, so far as the Old

World was concerned, that exalted position. But in America, where they

knew him better, there were doubts. And writing as we do now with the

wisdom of subsequent events, we can understand these doubts. America,

throughout a century and more of detachment and security, had developed

new ideals and formulæ of political thought, without realizing with any

intensity that, under conditions of stress and danger, these ideals and

formulæ might have to be passionately sustained. To her community many

things were platitudes that had to the Old World communities, entangled

still in ancient political complications, the quality of a saving

gospel. President Wilson was responding to the thought and conditions of

his own people and his own country, based on a liberal tradition that

had first found its full expression in English speech; but to Europe and

Asia he seemed to be thinking and saying, for the first time in history,

things hitherto undeveloped and altogether secret. And that

misconception he may have shared.

We are dealing here with an able and successful professor of political

science, who did not fully realize what he owed to his contemporaries

and the literary and political atmosphere he had breathed throughout his

life; and who passed very rapidly, after his re-election as President,

from the mental attitudes of a political leader to those of a Messiah.

His “notes” are a series of explorations of the elements of the world

situation. When at last, in his address to Congress of January 8th,

1918, he produced his Fourteen Points as a definite statement of the

American peace intentions, they were, as a statement, far better in

their spirit than in their arrangement and matter.

Yet, since the Fourteen Points certainly mark a new epoch in human

affairs, and since it was in the belief that they would determine and

limit the pains and penalties of the peace treaty that Germany

capitulated,[518] it may be well to summarize them here, with a word or

so of explanation.

(I) The First Point was the most vital of all. It summarizes and

dismisses the essential evils of the Great Power system. It demands:

“Open covenants of peace openly arrived at, after which there shall be

no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall

proceed always frankly and in the public view.”

(II) “Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas outside territorial

waters alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in

whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of

international covenants.”

(III) “The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the

establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations

consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.”

(IV) “Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will

be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.”

There are four points of universal importance, admirably stated. But II

is insufficient. Why should the sea-ways alone be free? What of the

air-ways above three thousand feet? What of the great international land

routes? Why, if Switzerland is at war with Germany and Italy, should

those powers be able to stop air and land transit and the passage of

peaceful people between France and Constantinople?

After IV, the Fourteen Points embark upon the consideration of

particular cases, for which one general statement should have sufficed.

(V) provides for “A free, open-minded and absolutely impartial

adjustment of all colonial claims based upon a strict observance of the

principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the

interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the

equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.”...

This is hopelessly vague. What, for instance, is this about claims and

title? There is no definition, no standard here.

The drop towards particular current issues continues in the next eight

points, which betray clearly how limited and accidental was the

President’s vision of European affairs.

(VI) is a vague demand for the evacuation of Russian territory (then

occupied by Germany), and the “assistance” (undefined) of the Russian

people.

(VII) Evacuation and restoration of Belgium.

(VIII) Evacuation and restoration of all French territory, and the

“righting” of the wrong done to France by Prussia in the matter of

Alsace-Lorraine.

(IX) The readjustment of the Italian frontier “on the lines of

nationality.”

(X) “Autonomy” of the Austrian “subject nations.”

(XI) The Balkans to be evacuated, Serbia to be granted an outlet to the

sea, and the independence of the Balkan States to be guaranteed.

(XII) Turkish subject nations to be assured of “undoubted security of

life and unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” The

Dardanelles to be internationalized, and Ottoman sovereignty to be

recognized only in Turkish districts.

(XIII) Poland to be independent.

Finally the Fourteenth Point arises again to the Great Charter level out

of this peddling with special cases.

(XIV) “A general association of nations must be formed under specific

covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political

and territorial independence for great and small States alike.”

So far the Fourteen Points. But some of the utterances of President

Wilson after this epoch-making address went much further and much higher

than this first statement. On September 27th, 1918, at New York, he said

some very important things:

“As I see it, the constitution of that League of Nations and the clear

definition of its objects must be a part, in a sense the most essential

part, of the peace settlement itself. It cannot be formed now. If formed

now, it would be merely a new alliance confined to the nations

associated against a common enemy....

“But these general terms do not disclose the whole matter. Some details

are needed to make them sound less like a thesis and more like a

practical programme. These, then, are some of the particulars, and I

state them with the greater confidence because I can state them

authoritatively as representing this Government’s interpretation of its

own duty with regard to peace.

“First, the impartial justice meted out must involve no discrimination

between those to whom we wish to be just and those to whom we do not

wish to be just. It must be a justice that has no favourites and knows

no standards but the equal rights of the several peoples concerned.

“Second, no special or separate interest of any single nation or any

group of nations can be made the basis of any part of the settlement

which is not consistent with the common interest of all.

“Third, there can be no leagues or alliances or special covenants and

understandings within the general and common family of the League of

Nations.

“Fourth, and more specifically, there can be no special selfish economic

combinations within the League, and no employment of any form of

economic boycott or exclusion, except as the power of economic penalty,

by exclusion from the markets of the world, may be vested in the League

of Nations itself as a means of discipline and control.

“Fifth, all international agreements and treaties of every kind must be

made known in their entirety to the rest of the world....

“In the same sentence in which I say that the United States will enter

into no special arrangements or understandings with particular nations,

let me say also that the United States is prepared to assume its full

share of responsibility for the maintenance of the common covenants and

understandings upon which peace must henceforth rest.

“We still read Washington’s immortal warning against entangling

alliances with full comprehension and an answering purpose. But only

special and limited alliances entangle; and we recognize and accept the

duty of a new day in which we are permitted to hope for a general

alliance, which will avoid entanglements and clear the air of the world

for common understandings and the maintenance of common rights.”

These Fourteen Points and their significant later addenda had an immense

reception throughout the world. Here at last seemed a peace for

reasonable men everywhere, as good and acceptable to honest and decent

Germans and Russians, as to honest and decent Frenchmen and Englishmen

and Belgians; and for some months the whole world was lit by faith in

Wilson. Could they have been made the basis of a world settlement in

1919, they would forthwith have opened a new and more hopeful era in

human affairs.

But, as we must tell, they did not do that. There was about President

Wilson a certain narrowness of mind, a certain suspicion of egotism;

there was in the generation of people in the United States to whom this

great occasion came, a generation born in security, reared in plenty

and, so far as history goes, in ignorance, a generation remote from the

tragic issues that had made Europe grave, a certain superficiality and

lightness of mind. It was not that the American people were superficial

by nature and necessity, but that they had never been deeply stirred by

the idea of a human community larger than their own. It was an

intellectual but not a moral conviction, with them. One had on the one

hand these new people of the new world, with their new ideas, their

finer and better ideas, of peace and world righteousness, and on the

other the old, bitter, deeply entangled peoples of the Great Power

system and the former were crude and rather childish in their immense

inexperience, and the latter were seasoned and bitter and intricate. The

theme of this clash of the raw idealist youthfulness of a new age with

the experienced ripeness of the old, was treated years ago by that great

novelist, Henry James, in a very typical story called _Daisy Miller_. It

is the pathetic story of a frank, trustful, high-minded, but rather

simple-minded American girl, with a real disposition towards

righteousness and a great desire for a “good time” and how she came to

Europe and was swiftly entangled and put in the wrong, and at last

driven to welcome death by the complex tortuousness and obstinate

limitations of the older world. There have been a thousand variants of

that theme in real life, a thousand such trans-Atlantic tragedies, and

the story of President Wilson is one of them. But it is not to be

supposed, because the new thing succumbs to the old infections, that is

the final condemnation of the new thing.

Probably no fallible human being manifestly trying to do his best amidst

overwhelming circumstances has been subjected to such minute, searching,

and pitiless criticism as President Wilson. He is blamed, and it would

seem that he is rightly blamed, for conducting the war and the ensuing

peace negotiations on strictly party lines. He remained the President

representing the American Democratic Party, when circumstances conspired

to make him the representative of the general interests of mankind. He

made no attempt to forget party issues for a time, and to incorporate

with himself such great American leaders as ex-President Roosevelt,

ex-President Taft, and the like. He did not draw fully upon the moral

and intellectual resources of the States; he made the whole issue too

personal, and he surrounded himself with merely personal adherents. And

a still graver error was his decision to come to the Peace Conference

himself. Nearly every experienced critic seems to be of opinion that he

should have remained in America, in the rôle of America, speaking

occasionally as if a nation spoke. Throughout the concluding years of

the war he had achieved an unexampled position in the world.

[Illustration: President Wilson]

Says Doctor Dillon:[519] “Europe, when the President touched its shores,

was as clay ready for the creative potter. Never before were the nations

so eager to follow a Moses who would take them to the long-promised land

where wars are prohibited and blockades unknown. And to their thinking

he was that great leader. In France men bowed down before him with awe

and affection. Labour leaders in Paris told me that they shed tears of

joy in his presence, and that their comrades would go through fire and

water to help him to realize his noble schemes. To the working classes

in Italy his name was a heavenly clarion at the sound of which the earth

would be renewed. The Germans regarded him and his humane doctrine as

their sheet-anchor of safety. The fearless Herr Muehlon said: ‘If

President Wilson were to address the Germans, and pronounce a severe

sentence upon them, they would accept it with resignation and without a

murmur and set to work at once.’ In German-Austria his fame was that of

a saviour, and the mere mention of his name brought balm to the

suffering and surcease of sorrow to the afflicted....”

Such was the overpowering expectation of the audience to which

President Wilson prepared to show himself. He reached France on board

the _George Washington_ in December, 1918.

He brought his wife with him. That seemed no doubt a perfectly natural

and proper thing to an American mind. Quite a number of the American

representatives brought their wives. Unhappily a social quality, nay,

almost a tourist quality, was introduced into the world settlement by

these ladies. Transport facilities were limited, and most of them

arrived in Europe with a radiant air of privilege. They came as if they

came to a treat. They were, it was intimated, seeing Europe under

exceptionally interesting circumstances. They would visit Chester, or

Warwick, or Windsor _en route_--for they might not have a chance of

seeing these celebrated places again. Important interviews would be

broken off to get in a visit to some “old historical mansion.” This may

seem a trivial matter to note in a History of Mankind, but it was such

small human things as this that threw a miasma of futility over the

Peace Conference of 1919. In a little while one discovered that Wilson,

the Hope of Mankind, had vanished, and that all the illustrated fashion

papers contained pictures of a delighted tourist and his wife, grouped

smilingly with crowned heads and such-like enviable company.... It is so

easy to be wise after the event, and to perceive that he should not have

come over.

[Illustration: M. Clemenceau]

The men he had chiefly to deal with, for example M. Clemenceau (France),

Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour (Britain), Baron Sonnino and Signor

Orlando (Italy), were men of widely dissimilar historical traditions.

But in one respect they resembled him and appealed to his sympathies.

They, too, were party politicians, who had led their country through the

war. Like himself they had failed to grasp the necessity of entrusting

the work of settlement to more specially qualified men. “They were the

merest novices in international affairs. Geography, ethnology,

psychology, and political history were sealed books to them. Like the

Rector of Louvain University, who told Oliver Goldsmith that, as he had

become the head of that institution without knowing Greek, he failed to

see why it should be taught there, the chiefs of State, having obtained

the highest position in their respective countries without more than an

inkling of international affairs, were unable to realize the importance

of mastering them or the impossibility of repairing the omission as they

went along....”[520]

“What they lacked, however, might in some perceptible degree have been

supplied by enlisting as their helpers men more happily endowed than

themselves. But they deliberately chose mediocrities. It is a mark of

genial spirits that they are well served, but the plenipotentiaries of

the Conference were not characterized by it. Away in the background some

of them had familiars or casual prompters to whose counsels they were

wont to listen, but many of the adjoints who moved in the limelight of

the world-stage were gritless and pithless.

[Illustration: Mr. Lloyd George]

“As the heads of the principal Governments implicitly claimed to be the

authorized spokesmen of the human race, and endowed with unlimited

powers, it is worth noting that this claim was boldly challenged by the

people’s organs in the Press. Nearly all the journals read by the masses

objected from the first to the dictatorship of the group of Premiers,

Mr. Wilson being excepted....”[521]

The restriction upon our space in this _Outline_ will not allow us to

tell here how the Peace Conference shrank from a Council of Ten to a

Council of Four (Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando), and how

it became a conference less and less like a frank and open discussion of

the future of mankind, and more and more like some old-fashioned

diplomatic conspiracy. Great and wonderful had been the hopes that had

gathered to Paris. “The Paris of the Conference,” says Dr. Dillon,

“ceased to be the capital of France. It became a vast cosmopolitan

caravanserai teeming with unwonted aspects of life and turmoil, filled

with curious samples of the races, tribes, and tongues of four

continents who came to watch and wait for the mysterious to-morrow.

“An Arabian Nights’ touch was imparted to the dissolving panorama by

strange visitants from Tartary and Kurdistan, Corea and Aderbeijan,

Armenia, Persia, and the Hedjaz--men with patriarchal beards and

scimitar-shaped noses, and others from desert and oasis, from Samarkand

and Bokhara. Turbans and fezzes, sugar-loaf hats and head-gear

resembling episcopal mitres, old military uniforms devised for the

embryonic armies of new states on the eve of perpetual peace,

snowy-white burnouses, flowing mantles, and graceful garments like the

Roman toga, contributed to create an atmosphere of dreamy unreality in

the city where the grimmest of realities were being faced and coped

with.

“Then came the men of wealth, of intellect, of industrial enterprise,

and the seed-bearers of the ethical new ordering, members of economic

committees from the United States, Britain, Italy, Poland, Russia,

India, and Japan, representatives of naphtha industries and far-off coal

mines, pilgrims, fanatics and charlatans from all climes, priests of all

religions, preachers of every doctrine, who mingled with princes,

field-marshals, statesmen, anarchists, builders-up and pullers-down. All

of them burned with desire to be near to the crucible in which the

political and social systems of the world were to be melted and recast.

Every day, in my walks in my apartment, or at restaurants, I met

emissaries from lands and peoples whose very names had seldom been heard

of before in the West. A delegation from the Pont-Euxine Greeks called

on me, and discoursed of their ancient cities of Trebizond, Samsoun,

Tripoli, Kerassund, in which I resided many years ago, and informed me

that they, too, desired to become welded into an independent Greek

Republic, and had come to have their claims allowed. The Albanians were

represented by my old friend Turkhan Pasha, on the one hand, and by my

friend Essad Pasha on the other--the former desirous of Italy’s

protection, the latter demanding complete independence. Chinamen,

Japanese, Coreans, Hindus, Kirghizes, Lesghiens, Circassians,

Mingrelians, Buryats, Malays, and Negroes and Negroids from Africa and

America were among the tribes and tongues foregathered in Paris to watch

the rebuilding of the political world system and to see where they ‘came

in.’ ...”

To this thronging, amazing Paris, agape for a new world, came President

Wilson, and found its gathering forces dominated by a personality

narrower, in every way more limited and beyond comparison more forcible

than himself: the French Premier, M. Clemenceau. At the instance of

President Wilson, M. Clemenceau was elected President of the Conference.

“It was,” said President Wilson, “a special tribute to the sufferings

and sacrifices of France.” And that, unhappily, sounded the keynote of

the Conference, whose sole business should have been with the future of

mankind.

Georges Benjamin Clemenceau[522] was an old journalist politician, a

great denouncer of abuses, a great upsetter of governments, a doctor who

had, while a municipal councillor, kept a free clinic, and a fierce,

experienced duellist. None of his duels ended fatally, but he faced them

with great intrepidity. He had passed from the medical school to

republican journalism in the days of the Empire. In those days he was an

extremist of the left. He was for a time a teacher in America, and he

married and divorced an American wife. He was thirty in the eventful

year 1871. He returned to France after Sedan, and flung himself into the

stormy politics of the defeated nation with great fire and vigour.

Thereafter France was his world, the France of vigorous journalism,

high-spirited personal quarrels, challenges, confrontations, scenes,

dramatic effects, and witticisms at any cost. He was what people call

“fierce stuff,” he was nicknamed the “Tiger,” and he seems to have been

rather proud of his nickname. Professional patriot rather than statesman

and thinker, this was the man whom the war had flung up to misrepresent

the fine mind and the generous spirit of France.[523] His limitations

had a profound effect upon the conference, which was further coloured

by the dramatic resort for the purpose of signature to the very Hall of

Mirrors at Versailles in which Germany had triumphed and proclaimed her

unity. There the Germans were to sign. To M. Clemenceau and to France,

in that atmosphere, the war ceased to seem a world war; it was merely

the sequel of the previous conflict of the Terrible Year, the downfall

and punishment of offending Germany. “The world had to be made safe for

democracy,” said President Wilson. That from M. Clemenceau’s expressed

point of view was “talking like Jesus Christ.” The world had to be made

safe for Paris. “Talking like Jesus Christ” seemed a very ridiculous

thing to many of those brilliant rather than sound diplomatists and

politicians who made the year 1919 supreme in the history of human

insufficiency.

(Another flash of the “Tiger’s” wit, it may be noted, was that President

Wilson with his fourteen points was “worse” than God Almighty. “Le bon

Dieu” only had ten....)

M. Clemenceau sat with Signor Orlando in the more central chairs of a

semicircle of four in front of the fire, says Keynes. He wore a black

frock-coat and grey suede gloves, which he never removed during these

sessions. He was, it is to be noted, the only one of these four

reconstructors of the world who could understand and speak both French

and English.

The aims of M. Clemenceau were simple and in a manner attainable. He

wanted all the settlement of 1871 undone. He wanted Germany punished as

though she was a uniquely sinful nation and France a sinless martyr

land. He wanted Germany so crippled and devastated as never more to be

able to stand up to France. He wanted to hurt and humiliate Germany more

than France had been hurt and humiliated in 1871. He did not care if in

breaking Germany Europe was broken; his mind did not go far enough

beyond the Rhine to understand that possibility. He accepted President

Wilson’s League of Nations as an excellent proposal if it would

guarantee the security of France whatever she did, but he preferred a

binding alliance of the United States and England to maintain, uphold,

and glorify France under practically any circumstances. He wanted wider

opportunities for the exploitation of Syria, north Africa, and so forth

by Parisian financial groups. He wanted indemnities to recuperate

France, loans, gifts, and tributes to France, glory and homage to

France. France had suffered, and France had to be rewarded. Belgium,

Russia, Serbia, Poland, Armenia, Britain, Germany, and Austria had all

suffered too, all mankind had suffered, but what would you? that was not

his affair. These were the supers of a drama in which France was for him

the star.... In much the same spirit Signor Orlando seems to have sought

the welfare of Italy.

Mr. Lloyd George brought to the Council of Four the subtlety of a

Welshman, the intricacy of a European, and an urgent necessity for

respecting the nationalist egotism of the British imperialists and

capitalists who had returned him to power. Into the secrecy of that

council went President Wilson (leaving Point I at the door) with the

very noblest aims for his newly discovered American world policy, his

rather hastily compiled Fourteen (now reduced to Thirteen) Points, and a

project rather than a scheme for a League of Nations.

The Second Point was presently observed to be missing. It may have

fallen into the Atlantic on the way over. It may have been thrown into

the sea as an offering to the British Admiralty.

“There can seldom have been a statesman of the first rank more

incompetent than the President in the agilities of the Council

Chamber.”[524] From the whispering darknesses and fireside disputes of

that council, and after various comings and goings we cannot here

describe, he emerged at last with his Fourteen Points pitifully torn and

dishevelled, but with a little puling infant of a League of Nations,

which might die or which might live and grow--no one could tell. This

history cannot tell. We are at the end of our term. But that much, at

least, he had saved....

Let us now consider briefly this Covenant of the League of Nations, and

recapitulate the terms of the quasi-settlement of the world’s affairs of

1919-20; and let us indicate here and there where the latter departs

from the promised standard of the Fourteen Points, and where it is most

dangerous to the future peace and most manifestly contrary to the

welfare of mankind. Because just as the history of Europe in the

nineteenth century was largely the undoing of the Treaty of Vienna, and

as the Great War was the necessary outcome of the Treaty of Frankfort

and the Treaty of Berlin, so the general history of the twentieth

century henceforth will be largely the amendment or reversal of the more

ungenerous and unscientific arrangements of the Treaty of 1919, and a

struggle to establish those necessary impartial world controls of which

the League of Nations is the first insufficient and unsatisfactory

sketch.

§ 12

This homunculus in a bottle which it was hoped might become at last Man

ruling the Earth, this League of Nations as it was embodied in the

Covenant of April 28th, 1919, was not a league of peoples at all; it was

a league of “states, dominions, or colonies.” It was stipulated that

these should be “fully self-governing,” but there was no definition

whatever of this phrase. There was no bar to a limited franchise and no

provision for any direct control by the people of any state. India

figured--presumably as a “fully self-governing state!” An autocracy

would no doubt have been admissible as a “fully self-governing”

democracy with a franchise limited to one person. The League of the

Covenant of 1919 was, in fact, a league of “representatives” of foreign

offices, and it did not even abolish the nonsense of embassies at every

capital. The British Empire appeared once as a whole, and then India (!)

and the four dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New

Zealand appeared as separate sovereign states. The Indian representative

was, of course, sure to be merely a British nominee; the other four

would be colonial politicians. But if the British Empire was to be thus

dissected, a representative of Great Britain should have been

substituted for the Imperial representative, and Ireland and Egypt

should also have been given representation. Moreover, either New York

State or Virginia was historically and legally almost as much a

sovereign state as New Zealand or Canada. The inclusion of India raised

logical claims for French Africa and French Asia. One French

representative did propose a separate vote for the little principality

of Monaco.

There was to be an assembly of the League in which every member state

was to be represented and to have an equal voice, but the working

directorate of the league was to vest in a Council, which was to

consist of the representatives of the United States, Britain, France,

Italy, and Japan, with four other members elected by the Assembly. The

Council was to meet once a year; the gatherings of the Assembly were to

be at “stated intervals,” not stated.

Except in certain specified instances the league of this Covenant could

make only unanimous decisions. One dissentient on the council could bar

any proposal--on the lines of the old Polish _liberum veto_ (chapter

xxxvi, § 7). This was a quite disastrous provision. To many minds it

made the Covenant League rather less desirable than no league at all. It

was a complete recognition of the unalienable sovereignty of states, and

a repudiation of the idea of an over-riding commonweal of mankind. This

provision practically barred the way to all amendments to the league

constitution in future except by the clumsy expedient of a simultaneous

withdrawal of the majority of member states desiring a change, to form

the league again on new lines. The covenant made inevitable such a final

winding-up of the league it created, and that was perhaps the best thing

about it.

The following powers, it was proposed, should be excluded from the

original league: Germany, Austria, Russia, and whatever remains there

were of the Turkish Empire. But any of these might subsequently be

included with the assent of two thirds of the Assembly. The original

membership of the league as specified in the projected Covenant was: the

United States of America, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, the British Empire

(Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India), China, Cuba,

Ecuador, France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, the Hedjas, Honduras, Italy,

Japan, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, the

Serb-Croat-Slovene State, Siam, Czecho-Slovakia, and Uruguay. To which

were to be added by invitation the following powers which had been

neutral in the war: the Argentine Republic, Chile, Colombia, Denmark,

Holland, Norway, Paraguay, Persia, Salvador, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,

and Venezuela.

Such being the constitution of the league, it is scarcely to be wondered

at that its powers were special and limited. It was given a seat at

Geneva and a secretariat. It had no powers even to inspect the military

preparations of its constituent states, or to instruct a military and

naval staff to plan out the armed co-operation needed to keep the peace

of the world. The French representative in the League of Nations

Commission, M. Leon Bourgeois, insisted lucidly and repeatedly on the

logical necessity of such powers. As a speaker he was rather copious and

lacking in “spice” of the Clemenceau quality. The final scene in the

plenary session of April 28th, before the adoption of the Covenant, is

described compactly by Mr. Wilson Harris, the crowded Banqueting Hall at

the Quai d’Orsay, with its “E” of tables for the delegates, with

secretaries and officials lining the walls and a solid mass of

journalists at the lower end of the room. “At the head of the room the

‘Big Three’ _diverted themselves in undertones_ at the expense of the

worthy M. Bourgeois, now launched, with the help of what must have been

an entirely superfluous sheaf of notes, on the fifth rendering of his

speech in support of his famous amendments.”

They were so often “diverting themselves in undertones,” those three men

whom God had mocked with the most tremendous opportunity in history.

Keynes (_op. cit._) gives other instances of the levities, vulgarities,

disregards, inattentions, and inadequacies of these meetings.

This poor Covenant arrived at in this fashion returned with President

Wilson to America, and there it was subjected to an amount of

opposition, criticism, and revision which showed, among other things,

how relatively unimpaired was the mental energy of the United States. It

was manifest that the people of America had no mind to a compact that

was virtually little more than a league of allied imperialisms for

mutual insurance. The Senate refused to ratify the covenant, and the

first meeting of the League Council was held therefore without American

representatives. The close of 1919 and the opening months of 1920 saw a

very curious change come over American feeling after the pro-French and

pro-British enthusiasms of the war period. The peace negotiations

reminded the Americans, in a confused and very irritating way, of their

profound differences in international outlook from any European power

that the war had for a time helped them to forget. They felt they had

been “rushed” into many things without due consideration. They

experienced a violent revulsion towards that policy of isolation that

had broken down in 1917. The close of 1919 saw a phase, a very

understandable phase, of passionate and even violent “Americanism,” in

which European imperialism and European socialism were equally anathema.

There may have been a sordid element in the American disposition to

“cut” the moral responsibilities the United States had incurred in the

affairs of the Old World, and to realize the enormous financial and

political advantages the war had given the new world; but the broad

instinct of the American people seems to have been sound in its distrust

of the proposed settlement.

[Illustration: GERMANY after the PEACE TREATY of 1919]

§ 13

The main terms of the Treaties of 1919-20 with which the Conference of

Paris concluded its labours can be stated much more vividly by a few

maps than by a written abstract. We need scarcely point out how much

those treaties left unsettled, but we may perhaps enumerate some of the

more salient breaches of the Twelve that survived out of the Fourteen

Points at the opening of the Conference.

One initial cause of nearly all those breaches lay, we believe, in the

complete unpreparedness and unwillingness of that pre-existing league of

nations, subjected states and exploited areas, the British Empire, to

submit to any dissection and adaptation of its system or to any control

of its naval and aerial armament. A kindred contributory cause was the

equal unpreparedness of the American mind for any interference with the

ascendancy of the United States in the New World (compare Secretary

Olney’s declaration in this chapter, § 6). Neither of those Great

Powers, who were necessarily dominant and leading Powers at Paris, had

properly thought out the implications of a League of Nations in relation

to these older arrangements, and so their support of that project had to

most European observers a curiously hypocritical air; it was as if they

wished to retain and ensure their own vast predominance and security

while at the same time restraining any other power from such expansions,

annexations, and alliances as might create a rival and competitive

imperialism. Their failure to set an example of international confidence

destroyed all possibility of international confidence in the other

nations represented at Paris.

[Illustration: Map to illustrate the TURKISH TREATY, 1920]

Even more unfortunate was the refusal of the Americans to assent to the

Japanese demand for a recognition of racial equality.

Moreover, the foreign offices of the British, the French, and the

Italians were haunted by traditional schemes of aggression entirely

incompatible with the new ideas. A League of Nations that is to be of

any appreciable value to mankind must supersede imperialisms; it is

either a super-imperialism, a liberal world-empire of united states,

participant or in tutelage, or it is nothing; but few of the people at

the Paris Conference had the mental vigour even to assert this obvious

consequence of the League proposal. They wanted to be at the same time

bound and free, to ensure peace for ever, but to keep their weapons in

their hands. Accordingly the old annexation projects of the Great Power

period were hastily and thinly camouflaged as proposed acts of this poor

little birth of April 28th. The newly born and barely animate League was

represented to be distributing, with all the reckless munificence of a

captive pope, “mandates” to the old imperialisms that, had it been the

young Hercules we desired, it would certainly have strangled in its

cradle. Britain was to have extensive “mandates” in Mesopotamia and East

Africa; France was to have the same in Syria; Italy was to have all her

holdings to the west and southeast of Egypt consolidated as mandatory

territory. Clearly, if the weak thing that was being nursed by its

Secretary in its cradle at Geneva into some semblance of life, did

presently succumb to the infantile weakness of all institutions born

without passion, all these “mandates” would become frank annexations.

Moreover, all the powers fought tooth and nail at the Conference for

“strategic” frontiers--the ugliest symptom of all. Why should a state

want a strategic frontier unless it contemplates war? If on that plea

Italy insisted upon a subject population of Germans in the southern

Tyrol and a subject population of Yugo-Slavs in Dalmatia, and if little

Greece began landing troops in Asia Minor, neither France nor Britain

was in a position to rebuke these outbreaks of pre-millennial method.

[Illustration: The BREAK-UP of AUSTRIA-HUNGARY]

We will not enter here into any detailed account of how President Wilson

gave way to the Japanese and consented to their replacing the Germans at

Kiau Chau, which is Chinese property, how the almost purely German city

of Dantzig was practically, if not legally, annexed to Poland, and how

the powers disputed over the claims of the Italian imperialists, a claim

strengthened by these instances, to seize the Yugo-Slav part of Fiume

and deprive the Yugo-Slavs of a good Adriatic outlet. Nor will we do

more than note the complex arrangements and justifications that put the

French in possession of the Saar valley, which is German territory, or

the entirely iniquitous breach of the right of “self-determination”

which practically forbade German Austria to unite--as it is natural and

proper that she should unite--with the rest of Germany. These burning

questions of 1919-20, which occupied the newspapers and the minds of

statesmen and politicians, and filled all our waste paper baskets with

propaganda literature, may seem presently very incidental things in the

larger movement of these times. All these disputes, like the suspicions

and tetchy injustices of a weary and irritated man, may lose their

importance as the tone of the world improves, and the still inadequately

apprehended lessons of the Great War and the Petty Peace that followed

it begin to be digested by the general intelligence of mankind.

It is worth while for the reader to compare the treaty maps we give with

what we have called the natural political map of Europe. The new

arrangements do approach this latter more closely than any previous

system of boundaries. It may be a necessary preliminary to any

satisfactory league of peoples, that each people should first be in

something like complete possession of its own household.

It is absurd to despair of mankind because of these treaties, or to

regard them as anything more than feeble first sketches of a world

settlement. To do so would be to suppose that there is nothing in

France--that land of fine imaginations--better than M. Clemenceau,

nothing in America stronger and wiser than President Wilson, and nothing

in Britain to steady the Keltic traits of Mr. Lloyd George. The

attention we have given to these three personalities in this _Outline_

is intended less to enhance their importance than to emphasize their

unimportance, and to make it clear to the reader how provisional and

incidental all that they did must be in the world’s affairs. On no

statesmen, on no particular men or groups of men, on no state or

organization indeed, and on no Covenant or Treaty, does the future of

our race now depend. The year 1919 was not a year of creation and

decision, it was just the first cheerless dawn of a long day of

creative effort. The conferences of the Ten, of the Four, of the Big

Three, had no trace of creative power; there was no light in the men of

Versailles; the dawn was manifest rather as a grey light of critical

disapproval that broke through the shutters and staled the guttering

candles of the old diplomacy as the conference yawned and drawled to its

end. Creation was not there. But a great process of thought spreads

throughout the world; many thousands of men and women, in every country,

for the most part undistinguished and unknown people, are awakening to

their responsibility, are studying, thinking, writing, and teaching,

getting together, correcting false impressions, challenging foolish

ideas, trying to find out and tell the truth; and upon them it is that

we must rest our hope, such hope as we can entertain, of a saner plan to

take the place of this first flimsy League and this patched and

discomforting garment of treaties that has been flung for a while over

the naked distresses of our world.

§ 14

The failure to produce a more satisfactory world settlement in 1919-20

was, we have suggested, a symptom of an almost universal intellectual

and moral lassitude, resulting from the overstrain of the Great War. A

lack of fresh initiative is characteristic of a fatigue phase; everyone,

from sheer inability to change, drifts on for a time along the lines of

mental habit and precedent.

Nothing could be more illustrative of this fatigue inertia than the

expressed ideas of military men at this time. It will round off this

chapter in an entirely significant way, and complete our picture of the

immense world interrogation on which our history must end, if we give

here the briefest summary of a lecture that was delivered to a gathering

of field-marshals, generals, major-generals, and the like by

Major-General Sir Louis Jackson, at the Royal United Service Institution

in London one day in December, 1919. Lord Peel, the British

Under-Secretary for War, presided, and the reader must picture to

himself the not too large and quite dignified room of assembly in that

building, and all these fine, grave, soldierly figures quietly intent

upon the lecturer’s words. He is describing, with a certain subdued

enthusiasm, the probable technical developments of military method in

the “next war.”

Outside, through the evening twilight of Whitehall, flows the London

traffic, not quite so abundant as in 1914, but still fairly abundant;

the omnibuses all overcrowded because there are now not nearly enough of

them, and the clothing of people generally shabbier. Some little way

down Whitehall is a temporary erection, the Cenotaph, with its base

smothered with a vast, pathetic heap of decaying wreaths, bunches of

flowers, and the like, a cenotaph to commemorate the eight hundred

thousand young men of the Empire who have been killed in the recent

struggle. A few people are putting fresh flowers and wreaths there. One

or two are crying.

The prospect stretches out beyond this gathering into the grey vastness

of London, where people are now crowded as they have never been crowded

before, whose food is dear and employment more uncertain than it has

ever been. But let not the spectacle be one of unrelieved gloom; Regent

Street, Oxford Street, and Bond Street are bright with shoppers and

congested with new automobiles, because we must remember that everybody

does not lose by a war. Beyond London the country sinks into night, and

across the narrow sea are North France and Belgium devastated, Germany

with scores of thousands of her infants dwindling and dying for want of

milk, all Austria starving. Half the population of Vienna, it is

believed, unless American relief comes quickly, is doomed to die of

hardship before the spring. Beyond that bleak twilight stretches the

darkness of Russia. There, at least, no rich people are buying anything,

and no military men are reading essays on the next war. But in icy

Petrograd is little food, little wood, and no coal. All the towns of

Russia southward as far as the snow reaches are in a similar plight, and

in the Ukraine and to the south a ragged and dingy war drags to its end.

Europe is bankrupt, and people’s pockets rustle with paper money whose

purchasing power dwindles as they walk about with it.

But now we will return to Sir Louis in the well-lit room at the United

Service Institution.

He was of opinion--we follow the report in next morning’s

_Times_[525]--that we were merely on the eve of the most extensive

modifications of the art of war known to history. It behoved us,

therefore--us being, of course, the British and not the whole of

mankind--to get on with our armaments and to keep ahead; a fine opening

generalization. “It was necessary to develop new arms.... The nation

which best did so would have a great advantage in the next war. There

were people who were crying aloud for a reduction of armaments----”

(But there the Director of Trench Warfare and Supplies was wrong. They

were just crying at the cenotaph, poor, soft, and stupid souls, because

a son or a brother or a father was dead.)

Sir Louis believed that one of the greatest developments in the art of

warfare would be brought about in mechanical transport. The tank he

treated with ingratitude. These military gentlemen are ungrateful to an

invention which shoved and butted them into victory almost in spite of

themselves. The tank, said Sir Louis, was “a freak.... The outstanding

feature” of the tank, he said, was that it made mechanical transport

independent of the roads. Hitherto armies on the march had only been

able to spoil the roads; now their transport on caterpillar wheels would

advance in open order on a broad front carrying guns, munitions,

supplies, bridging equipment, rafts, and men--and incidentally ploughing

up and destroying hedges, ditches, fields, and cultivation generally.

Armies would wallow across the country, leaving nothing behind but dust

and mud.

So our imaginations are led up to the actual hostilities.

Sir Louis was in favour of gas. For punitive expeditions particularly,

gas was to be recommended. And here he startled and disconcerted his

hearers by a gleam of something approaching sentimentality. “It might be

possible,” he said, “to come to some agreement that no gas should be

used which caused unnecessary suffering.” But there his heart spoke

rather than his head; it should have been clear to him that if law can

so far override warfare as to prohibit any sort of evil device whatever,

it can override warfare to the extent of prohibiting it altogether. And

where would Sir Louis Jackson and his audience be then? War is war; its

only law is the law that the maximum destruction of the forces of the

enemy is necessary. To that law in warfare all considerations of

humanity and justice are subordinate.

From gas Sir Louis passed to the air. Here he predicted “most important

advances.... We need not trouble ourselves yet with flying destroyers or

flying concrete forts, but in twenty years’ time the Air Force Estimates

might be the most important part of our preparations for war.” He

discussed the conversion of commercial flying machines to bombing and

reconnaissance uses, and the need for special types of fighting machine

in considerable numbers and always ready. He gave reasons for supposing

that the bombers in the next war would not have the same targets near

the front of the armies, and would secure better results by going

further afield and bombing the centres “where stores are being

manufactured and troops trained.” As everyone who stayed in London or

the east of England in 1917-18 knows, this means the promiscuous bombing

of any and every centre of population. But, of course, the bombing of

those ‘prentice days would be child’s play to the bombing of the “next

war.” There would be countless more aeroplanes, bigger and much nastier

bombs....

Sir Louis, proceeding with his sketch, mentioned the “destruction of the

greater part of London” as a possible incident in the coming struggle.

And so on to the culminating moral, that the highest pay, the utmost

importance, the freest expenditure, must be allowed to military

gentlemen. “The expense entailed is in the nature of an absolutely

necessary insurance.” With which his particular audience warmly agreed.

And a certain Major-General Stone, a little forgetful of the source of

his phrases,[526] said he hoped that this lecture “may be the beginning

not of trusting in the League of Nations, but in _our own_ right hand

and _our_ stretched-out arm!”

But we will not go on with the details of this dream. For indeed no

Utopia was ever so impossible as this forecast of a world in which

scarcely anything but very carefully sandbagged and camouflaged G. H. Q.

would be reasonably safe, in which countless bombers would bomb the

belligerent lands incessantly and great armies with lines of caterpillar

transport roll to and fro, churning the fields of the earth into

blood-streaked mud. There is not energy enough and no will whatever left

in the world for such things. Generals who cannot foresee tanks cannot

be expected to foresee or understand world bankruptcy; still less are

they likely to understand the limits imposed upon military operations by

the fluctuating temper of the common man. Apparently these military

authorities of the United Service Institution did not even know that

warfare aims at the production of states of mind in the enemy, and is

sustained by states of mind. The chief neglected factor in the

calculations of Sir Louis is the fact that no people whatever will stand

such warfare as he contemplates, not even the people on the winning

side. For as northern France, south-eastern Britain, and north Italy now

understand, the victor in the “next war” may be bombed and starved

almost as badly as the loser. A phase is possible in which a

war-tormented population may cease to discriminate between military

gentlemen on this side or that, and may be moved to destroy them as the

common enemies of the race. The Great War of 1914-18 was the culmination

of the military energy of the western populations, and they fought and

fought well because they believed they were fighting “the war to end

war.” They were. German imperialism, with its organized grip upon

education and its close alliance with an aggressive commercialism, was

beaten and finished. The militarism and imperialism of Britain and

France and Italy are by comparison feeble, disorganized, and

disorganizing survivals. They are things “left over” by the great war.

They have no persuasive power. They go on--for sheer want of wits to

leave off. No European Government will ever get the same proportion of

its people into the ranks and into its munition works again as the

governments of 1914-18 did. Our world is very weak and feeble still

(1920), but its war fever is over. Its temperature is, if anything,

sub-normal. It is doubtful if it will take the fever again for a long

time. The alterations in the conditions of warfare are already much

profounder than such authorities as Sir Louis Jackson suspect.[527]

§ 15

This _Outline_ of our history would not be complete without at least a

few words by way of a stock-taking of the state of mind in which we

leave mankind to-day. For the history of our race for the last few

thousand years is no more than a history of the development and

succession of states of mind and of acts arising out of them. Human

history is in essence a history of ideas, and these tremendous

experiences of the war constitute a crowning epoch. In the past six

years there must have been a destruction of fixed ideas, prejudices, and

mental limitations unparalleled in all history. Never before can there

have been so great and so universal an awakening from assumed and

accepted things. Never before have men stood so barely face to face with

the community of their interests and their common destiny. We do not

begin to realize yet how much of the pre-war world is done with for good

and all, and how much that is new is beginning. Few of us have attempted

to measure yet the change in our own minds.

And on the whole and in spite of much eddying and backwash of motives

and thought, there does seem to have been a step forward towards the

consciousness of a collective need and of the possibility of a

collective effort embracing all mankind. Death, waste, hunger, and

disease are very rife to-day; the world is full of physical evils, but

there is this mental awakening to set against them.

In all material things the year 1913 seems now, to a European at least,

a year of amazing and unattainable plenty. But it was a year of great

social discontent and of waste, of vice and an extravagant search for

personal indulgence on the part of the free and wealthy classes. The

Great War was visibly approaching; yet there was neither will nor

understanding to prevent the catastrophe; smart and fashionable life

capered to nigger dance tunes, and that hectic generation was disposed

to welcome even a universal war as a fresh and crowning excitement. War

did not seem real to the moods of that time; nothing seemed real to the

moods of that time. It was a world of lost or faded beliefs. It did not

believe even in the florid nationalisms and imperialisms which waved

their flags and filled half the world with the stir and glitter of great

armies. But it set itself in the form of these things because they

trampled and glittered very entertainingly and because they promised

sensational adventures. The catastrophe of the war was not an

unnecessary disaster; it was a necessary fulfilment of such an age of

drift. Only through a catastrophe, it may be, could a new phase of human

thought and will have become possible.

This graver world of 1920 does seem to be awakening to the truth that

there are realities worth seeking and evils not to be tolerated. The

mental and moral backgrounds of hundreds of millions of minds have been

altered and are being altered by the stern lessons of this age.

Brotherhood through sorrow, sorrow for common sufferings and for

irreparable mutual injuries, is spreading and increasing throughout the

world. There are no doubt great countervailing evils, a wild scramble

for the diminishing surplus of wealth, a propaganda, but a failing

propaganda, of division and hatred. The dominating fact, nevertheless,

is a new sanity....

What a wonderful and moving spectacle is this of our kind to-day! Would

that we could compress into one head and for the use of one right hand

the power of ten thousand novelists and playwrights and biographers and

the quintessence of a thousand histories, to render the endless variety,

the incessant multitudinous adventure, and at the same time the

increasing unity of this display. Everywhere, with a mysterious

individual difference, we see youth growing to adolescence and the

interplay of love, desire, curiosities, passionate impulses, rivalries.

As the earth spins from darkness into the light, the millions wake again

to a new day in their life of toil, anxiety, little satisfactions,

little chagrins, rivalries, spites, generosities. From tropic to the

bleakest north, the cocks crow before the advancing margin of dawn. The

early toiler hurries to his work, the fox and the thief slink home, the

tramp stretches his stiff limbs under the haystack, and springs up alert

before the farmer’s man discovers him, the ploughman is already in the

field with his horses, the fires are lit in the cottage and the kettle

sings. The hours warm as the day advances; the crowded trains converge

upon the city centres, the traffic thickens in the streets, the

breakfast-table of the prosperous home is spread, the professor begins

his lecture, the shop assistants greet their first customers....

Outwardly it is very like the world before the war. And yet it is

profoundly different. The sense of inevitable routines that held all the

world in thrall six years ago has gone. And the habitual assurance of

security has gone too. The world has been roused--for a time at

least--to great dangers and great desires. These minds, this innumerable

multitude of minds, are open to fresh ideas of association and duty and

relationship as they were never open before. The old confused and

divided world is condemned; it is going on provisionally under a

sentence of great and as yet incalculable change.

Every one of these hundred of millions of human beings is in some form

seeking happiness, is driven by complex and conflicting motives, is

guided by habits, is swayed by base cravings, by endless suggestions, by

passions and affections, by vague exalted ideas. Every one of them is

capable of cruelties and fine emotions, of despairs and devotions and

self-forgetful effort. All of them forget; all of them become slack with

fatigue and fearful or mean or incapable under a sufficient strain. The

follies of vanity entrap them all into absurdities. Not one is

altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent;

and not one is altogether vile. Every one of them can be unhappy, every

one can feel disappointment and remorse. Not a single one but has at

some time wept. And in every one of them is a streak of divinity. Each

one for all the obsessions of self is yet dimly aware of something in

common, of something that could make a unity out of our infinite

diversity. And they are everyone more aware of this than in 1913.

Through all the world grows the realization that there can be no

securely happy individual life without a righteous general life. Through

all the world spreads the suspicion that this scheme of things might be

remade, and remade better, and that our present evils need not be. Our

lives, we see with a growing certitude, are fretted and shadowed and

spoilt because there is as yet no worldwide law, no certain justice. Yet

there is nothing absolutely unattainable in world law and world justice.

More men are capable of realizing this than was ever possible at any

previous time. And to be aware of a need is to be half-way towards its

satisfaction. We call this stir towards a new order, this refusal to

drift on in the old directions, unrest, but rather is it hope which

disturbs the world.

What real driving force is there in all this aspiration towards a new

and wider order? What directive forces are these stirring millions

likely to encounter? What accidents and subtle suggestions may not

waylay them and cheat them? An age is closing and an age begins. This

chapter of history which tells of the Great Powers into which

Christendom broke up and of the unbridled national and individual

self-seeking which ensued, has culminated in a world catastrophe and is

at its end. What will be the next stage in history?

BOOK IX

THE NEXT STAGE IN HISTORY

XLI

THE POSSIBLE UNIFICATION OF THE WORLD INTO ONE COMMUNITY OF KNOWLEDGE

AND WILL

§1. _The Possible Unification of Men’s Wills in Political Matters._

§2. _How a Federal World Government may come about._ §3. _Some

Fundamental Characteristics of a Modern World State._ §4. _What

this World might be were it under one Law and Justice._ §5. _The

Stages Beyond._

§ 1

We have brought this _Outline of History_ up to our own times, but we

have brought it to no conclusion. It breaks off at a dramatic phase of

expectation. The story of life which began inestimable millions of years

ago, the adventure of mankind which was already afoot half a million

years ago, rises to a crisis in the immense interrogation of to-day. The

drama becomes ourselves. It is you, it is I, it is all that is happening

to us and all that we are doing which will supply the next chapter of

this continually expanding adventure.

Our history has traced a steady growth of the social and political units

into which men have combined. In the brief period of ten thousand years

these units have grown from the small family tribe of the early

neolithic culture to the vast united realms--vast yet still too small

and partial--of the present time. And this change in size of the

state--a change manifestly incomplete--has been accompanied by profound

changes in its nature. Compulsion and servitude have given way to ideas

of associated freedom, and the sovereignty that was once concentrated in

an autocratic king and god has been widely diffused throughout the

community. Until the Roman republic extended itself to all Italy, there

had been no free community larger than a city state; all great

communities were communities of obedience under a monarch. The great

united republic of the United States would have been impossible before

the printing press and the railway. The telegraph and telephone, the

aeroplane, the continual progress of land and sea transit, are now

insisting upon a still larger political organization.

If our _Outline_ has been faithfully drawn, and if these brief

conclusions are sound, it follows that we are engaged upon an immense

task of adjustment to these great lines upon which our affairs are

moving. Our wars, our social conflict, our enormous economic stresses,

are all aspects of that adjustment. The loyalties and allegiances to-day

are at best provisional loyalties and allegiances. Our true State, this

state that is already beginning, this state to which every man owes his

utmost political effort, must be now this nascent Federal World State to

which human necessities point. Our true God now is the God of all men.

Nationalism as a God must follow the tribal gods to limbo. Our true

nationality is mankind.

How far will modern men lay hold upon and identify themselves with this

necessity and set themselves to revise their ideas, remake their

institutions, and educate the coming generations to this final extension

of citizenship? How far will they remain dark, obdurate, habitual, and

traditional, resisting the convergent forces that offer them either

unity or misery? Sooner or later that unity must come or else plainly

men must perish by their own inventions. We, because we believe in the

power of reason and in the increasing good-will in men, find ourselves

compelled to reject the latter possibility. But the way to the former

may be very long and tedious, very tragic and wearisome, a martyrdom of

many generations, or it may be travelled over almost swiftly in the

course of a generation or so. That depends upon forces whose nature we

understand to some extent now, but not their power. There has to be a

great process of education, by precept and by information and by

experience, but there are as yet no quantitative measures of education

to tell us _how much_ has to be learnt or _how soon_ that learning can

be done. Our estimates vary with our moods; the time may be much longer

than our hopes and much shorter than our fears.

The terrible experiences of the Great War have made very many men who

once took political things lightly take them now very gravely. To a

certain small number of men and women the attainment of a world peace

has become the supreme work in life, has become a religious

self-devotion. To a much greater number it has become at least a ruling

motive. Many such people now are seeking ways of working for this great

end, or they are already working for this great end, by pen and

persuasion, in schools and colleges and books, and in the highways and

byways of public life. Perhaps now most human beings in the world are

well-disposed towards such efforts, but rather confusedly disposed; they

are without any clear sense of what must be done and what ought to be

prevented, that human solidarity may be advanced. The world-wide

outbreak of faith and hope in President Wilson, before he began to wilt

and fail us, was a very significant thing indeed for the future of

mankind. Set against these motives of unity indeed are other motives

entirely antagonistic, the fear and hatred of strange things and

peoples, love of and trust in the old traditional thing, patriotisms,

race prejudices, suspicions, distrusts--and the elements of spite,

scoundrelism, and utter selfishness that are so strong still in every

human soul.

The overriding powers that hitherto in the individual soul and in the

community have struggled and prevailed against the ferocious, base, and

individual impulses that divide us from one another, have been the

powers of religion and education. Religion and education, those closely

interwoven influences, have made possible the greater human societies

whose growth we have traced in this _Outline_; they have been the chief

synthetic forces throughout this great story of enlarging human

coöperations that we have traced from its beginnings. We have found in

the intellectual and theological conflicts of the nineteenth century the

explanation of that curious exceptional disentanglement of religious

teaching from formal education which is a distinctive feature of our

age, and we have traced the consequences of this phase of religious

disputation and confusion in the reversion of international politics

towards a brutal nationalism and in the backward drift of industrial

and business life towards harsh, selfish, and uncreative profit-seeking.

There has been a slipping off of ancient restraints; a real

_de-civilization_ of men’s minds. We would lay stress here on the

suggestion that this divorce of religious teaching from organized

education is necessarily a temporary one, a transitory dislocation, and

that presently education must become again in intention and spirit

religious, and that the impulse to devotion, to universal service and to

a complete escape from self, which has been the common underlying force

in all the great religions of the last five and twenty centuries, an

impulse which ebbed so perceptibly during the prosperity, laxity,

disillusionment, and scepticism of the past seventy or eighty years,

will reappear again, stripped and plain, as the recognized fundamental

structural impulse in human society.

Education is the preparation of the individual for the community, and

his religious training is the core of that preparation. With the great

intellectual restatements and expansions of the nineteenth century, and

educational break-up, a confusion and loss of aim in education was

inevitable. We can no longer prepare the individual for a community when

our ideas of a community are shattered and undergoing reconstruction.

The old loyalties, the old too limited and narrow political and social

assumptions, the old too elaborate religious formulæ, have lost their

power of conviction, and the greater ideas of a world state and of an

economic commonweal have been winning their way only very slowly to

recognition. So far they have swayed only a minority of exceptional

people. But out of the trouble and tragedy of this present time there

may emerge a moral and intellectual revival, a religious revival, of a

simplicity and scope to draw together men of alien races and now

discrete traditions into one common and sustained way of living for the

world’s service. We cannot foretell the scope and power of such a

revival; we cannot even produce evidence of its onset. The beginnings of

such things are never conspicuous. Great movements of the racial soul

come at first “like a thief in the night,” and then suddenly are

discovered to be powerful and world-wide. Religious emotion--stripped of

corruptions and freed from its last priestly entanglements--may

presently blow through life again like a great wind, bursting the doors

and flinging open the shutters of the individual life, and making many

things possible and easy that in these present days of exhaustion seem

almost too difficult to desire.[528]

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