THE MILITARY SHAM
IN the original conception of this work militarism was selected as
the first sham to be assailed because it is at once the most costly
and the least excusable. The way to remove many of the blots on our
civilisation is by no means plain. A dozen conflicting theories
confront you, and each has a sufficiently large body of adherents to
entitle it to consideration. But there are others in regard to which a
large and practical measure of agreement has been reached. Here we do
not need so much the subtle dissection of arguments and proposals as
the kindling of that ardent and imperious sentiment which spurs a man
or a race to action. The evil is recognised: the way to remedy it is
sufficiently clear. What we need is, in the mass of the people, that
fiery resentment of a hated tyranny which will shake the lie from its
throne.
The first, the gravest, the most flagrant and most vivid in our minds
at the moment of these obvious shams is war, with the military system
which it involves. Here there is no sacred legend of a divine origin
to confuse the minds of the ignorant. There are legends of divine
approval, it is true, but the clergy do not press them and they have
little influence. War is a practice or institution which we clearly
trace to the wild impulses and imperfect social forms of early man:
even to the sheer passion of the beast that was still strong in him.
No sophistry can obscure this bestial origin. We men and women of the
twentieth century cling to one feature, at least, of an age on which
we look back with high disdain: an age with which we would bitterly
resent any comparison in point of intelligence and feeling. We may try
to gild it with glittering phrases about a nation's honour, but we
know, all the while, that the honour of a nation no more demands that
it shall dye its hands in the blood of a sister-nation than the honour
of an individual requires so barbaric a consolation.
We maintain this sham in an age when mechanical progress has made such
strides that it has turned the industry of war into our chief and most
oppressive occupation. We cannot, with all our sacrifices, find the
means to carry out most urgent reforms in our social life; we cannot
put flesh on the bones and light in the eyes of poor children, or ease
the lives of worn workers and helpless widows; because we need these,
and even greater resources, to sharpen the sabre for our neighbour's
throat and enlarge the calibre of the tube that will scatter a hail of
death. We have for years stood in such attitude confronting each
other, we civilised nations, that on any day of any year the bugle
might peal, and the soil and seas of Europe be reddened with blood,
and the pain which knows no remedy shoot through millions of homes;
and now the tragedy has opened, grimmer than the dourest prophet had
ever pictured it. Why have we done this? Ultimately, because man, the
primeval savage, knowing nothing of our systems of justice, laid it
down that the knife or the club was the guardian of a man's honour
or property: proximately, because we of this highly cultivated age
enthrone still one of the most ghastly shams which barbarism succeeded
in enforcing on civilisation.
I have described it as a characteristic of our age that we are rising
above the stream of traditions which flows from civilisation to
civilisation, and are discovering that some of its sources are
tainted. Now in the case of warfare this scrutiny of the origin and
course of our traditions is comparatively easy. What we have
discovered is so well known, and so little disputed, that it need
hardly be related. It may be useful to state, at least, that very
early man was probably not a combative and bloodthirsty savage. He
lives to-day in such lowly peoples as the Veddahs and the Yahgans, and
they are generally peaceful and averse from brawling. In this
primitive man, however, there slumbered all the impulsive passion of
earlier ancestors, and it was inevitable that a cultural rise should
awaken it. When men became organised in tribes, when they became
hunters and tillers of the soil, when they increased and wandered far
afield, quarrels arose over women and hunting grounds and other
necessaries, and the institution of warfare was established. Within
the tribe there was already some kind of court, as a rule, before
which a man could bring his neighbour for wrong-doing. For the quarrel
between tribe and tribe there was no judge: the verdict lay with the
heavier weapon and the stouter arm. Hence, the higher the intelligence
of the tribe, the more deadly and widespread became the carnage.
Ferocity became a useful social quality--a virtue, indeed, the supreme
virtue, or _virtus_ (manliness)--and the primitive genius was expended
in making more cruel and lacerating the barbs of the arrow and the
spear. The administration of justice advanced, and a time came when
private vengeance, and even family feuds, were strictly forbidden and
regarded as crimes. But, while ten men might not go to war against ten
men, ten thousand would march out, with the sonorous blessing of their
priests, to the more barbaric butchery of war against ten thousand.
The mind had to grow larger, the heart more human, before the reign of
justice would be acknowledged in the relations of masses of men to
each other as well as in the relations of individuals.
With the dawn of civilisation a terrible paradox occurred. Warfare was
not abolished, but made more destructive. Again we find this a natural
and intelligible development. Each early civilisation found itself
surrounded by barbaric tribes, with which no compact of justice could
be established or trusted. The great Stoic humanitarians of Rome, who
preached the brotherhood of men and denounced violence, dared not, in
the interest of civilisation, plead disarmament. There were, of
course, moral sophisms in support of this plain need. The profit of
aggression, the prestige of conquering, were adorned with phrases akin
to our "white man's burden." Yet it is true that until modern
times warfare could not have been abolished without grave danger to
civilisation. The crime of warfare became a crime only in these later
centuries. Now that fully three-fourths of the race are gathered into
civilised states, a compact of justice, an international tribunal with
an international executive, _is_ possible; and we are guilty, either
of a base hypocrisy or a ghastly insensibility to our gravest
interests, in refusing to set up that compulsory international
tribunal.
No writer will be expected to discuss patiently to-day the pitiful
sophistry with which, until yesterday, a few defended the retention of
the military institution. Germany resounded with, and England and
France and the United States echoed here and there, the pompous and
hollow claims of its Treitschkes and Moltkes. War was a splendid moral
discipline: an institution appointed by Providence for purging the
race of sloth and materialism, for restoring chivalry and brightening
the shield of honour and rebuking selfishness. War has grimly belied
its apologists and we need notice them no longer. It has betrayed one
of the greatest nations of modern times into horrors and outrages
which are a supreme and eternal mockery of their moral claims for it.
Others more justly claimed that war develops the virility, the
endurance, the power of men. The lesson of history, they said, is on
the side of war: the great empires of the world became great by their
heroism and sacrifices on the field of battle. Here we must
distinguish carefully. It is obviously true that these empires became
big, powerful, and wealthy by war; and if any nation candidly
confesses that it relies on war to increase its territory, its power,
and its wealth, its argument is unanswerable. But there is now no
nation in the world that professes to maintain an army and a navy for
the purpose of aggression and expansion. Even Germany, which
undoubtedly did construct its massive armament for that purpose, had
not the audacity to admit it. Defence is the justifying title and, in
so far as it is sincere, it is a just title. If, as long as the
military system lasts, an army and a navy of a certain strength are
required, in the judgment of appointed experts, for the defence of a
country and its institutions, we pay our share willingly for the
maintenance of such an army and navy, and we respect our soldiers and
sailors. I do not for one moment advocate the disarmament of one
nation living amidst armed neighbours; and a partial disarmament, or
an insufficient armament, is the surest provocation of war. My point
is that, since the world has reached such a pitch of moral development
that each nation now professes to arm only against the possible
aggression of a neighbour, the time has come for them to agree upon
the infinitely less costly and more reliable way of settling their
possible quarrels as individuals do. Only one nation, Germany, seems
to be genuinely opposed to this, not so much from native malice of
character as from very serious domestic reasons for aggression: and a
perfect opportunity now arises for effectively impressing on Germany
the fact that she has come too late into the family of Great Powers
for filibustering.
As to the development of physique and endurance and discipline, it is
too obvious that this could be attained by athletic contests which are
at present left to voluntary interest or to the unattractive
manœuvres of professional exploiters. For years I have followed
professional football with keen pleasure, and I was interested when,
at the outbreak of war, men cried that these footballers were the most
superb material for our recruiting agents. It was perfectly true. Any
State which is sincerely eager to develop the physique and endurance
of its citizens can do it by the use of devices which will provide
most enjoyable spectacles and national or international festivals
instead of periodic orgies of blood and tears. The defenders of war
must be hard pressed for argument when they plead this necessity.
There is, moreover, one supreme difference between war and athletics
as instruments of training. War destroys what it creates: athletics
keeps its men among our citizens and breeders.
The truth is that the whole historical argument for war, which has had
an incalculable influence in the education of Germany, is a miserable
fallacy. The real lesson of history is that militarism has been a
malignant cancer, transmitted from one empire to another, and, by
destroying them, it has hundreds of times suspended the advance of
civilisation. It is in a sense a fallacy to claim that any nation
became great by war. The tribe which wins ascendancy over its
neighbours does so because it is already more powerful, more numerous,
or more fortunately situated. Then comes the period of expansion,
when, as we admit, greater power and wealth and territory are
undoubtedly won by the sword. This is the seductive phase of history,
leading astray men like Ruskin as well as men like Mommsen and
Niebuhr. Let us admit all its glories. Moral and humanitarian excesses
are just as mischievous as immoral excesses. As a result of this
successful war and expansion, the older empires were enabled to foster
art, to protect their growing culture, to civilise vast stretches of
the earth that might otherwise have lain uncivilised for ages.
Most assuredly war has, in this sense, been a most valuable influence
in spreading civilisation over the earth. What modern historians
forget is that the conditions have totally changed. Your empire is no
longer surrounded by myriads of barbarians whom you must conquer
before you can civilise. Germany has been forced to colour its
aggression by the stupid pretence that it had a higher _Kultur_ than
its neighbours, and that, in endeavouring to impose it on them, it was
carrying out the "law of history." It is a pity that science and
history ever adopted the word "law." What they mean, of course, is
only a summary of the way in which things uniformly occurred in
certain conditions. Now that the conditions are entirely changed, the
laws have no application. One might suggest that we still need armies
to conquer and civilise the outstanding barbaric peoples. We do not.
We need an international armed force to check their aggressions, but
there are other and better methods of civilising them. In any case,
this plea has no relation to the vast armies and navies and the bloody
wars we actually endure.
But it is the next and final phase of militarism which the historical
apologists for war have so grossly overlooked: the phase when the best
stocks of the old race are extinguished on the battlefield or
enervated by the luxurious idleness which was bought by the spoils of
war. Is it not proverbial how the great families which had led the
invincible legions of Rome dwindled in five centuries into a sickly
cluster of parasites or wholly disappeared? Is it not notorious that
it was, in the first century of the present era, the healthier
provincial stocks which saved Rome from destruction, or postponed its
destruction? And do we not find, as time goes on, men from more and
more distant provinces, in the end men from the barbaric fringes of
the Empire, coming to lead its legions and support its falling eagles?
All through Roman history war presents itself to the mind of the
candid historian as a vampire living on the best blood of the people.
Only a continuous supply of fresh blood and stout frames from the
subject peoples keeps up the illusion of an "eternal Rome." It is
only the shell that lasts. The people of Rome itself and of the
neighbouring plains, from which the old legionaries had come, were
soon exhausted. Italy in turn was exhausted and made desolate. Then
Gaul and Spain and Africa, and Thrace and Dacia and the more distant
provinces, were sucked bloodless and resourceless; and the great shell
of an empire fell with a crash under the blows of Goth and Vandal. It
is a clerical myth that Roman strength was sapped by vice. Its blood
was drunk by war.
These things Niebuhr and Mommsen forgot when they proposed to Germany
the splendid example of Rome; and history will have its revenge on its
great interpreters by recording the close in tragedy of this new
imperialism which they inspired. Other historians boldly quoted
Greece--Alexander of Macedon--and the fallacy is even more piteous.
Athens assuredly did not become great by war. Its most brilliant
period opens after a crushing and devastating reverse, and its
achievements were entirely due to its statesmen, its artists, and its
thinkers. But from the moment when the shadow of the Macedonian empire
fell on it, a blight came swiftly over its culture. Its glory departed
for ever when it became part of a great military power. Greece, as a
whole, was impoverished and ruined by war. Sparta itself, one of the
most strenuous military powers that ever lived, is a classical proof
that war invigorates only to destroy.
To whatever nation we turn, we learn the same lesson of history. Egypt
survived the strain, owing to the constant infusion of foreign blood,
for eight thousand years, but sank at last so exhausted that it seems
almost beyond the hope of reanimation. Assyria and Babylonia were
prepared for destruction by the same steady drain of their healthiest
blood. The Hittites, the Lydians, the Phœnicians, the Medes, the
Persians followed the same course. From the first founding of
civilisation in the valley of the Nile, ten thousand years ago, war
has brooded over its cities and cornfields, and has time after time
blighted its achievements and its hopes. It is as though some god were
jealous of the advance of man, and maintained on the earth this
corroding pest to eat into the life of each successive empire, and, by
destroying it, to interrupt the progress of the race.
In the history of Europe since the fall of Rome we witness the same
human tragedy. I do not overlook the other evil influences, such as
fiscal disorder and industrial parasitism, which have contributed to
the fall of empires, but the share of war in these tragedies was
incalculable. The fate of early England, battling against invaders and
rent by internal quarrels for centuries, is typical. The greater
England of modern times, or the _real_ greatness of modern England,
was built in periods of comparative peace by merchants and
manufacturers and scholars. Over the whole of Europe the vampire still
brooded, fastening on each young nation that advanced beyond its
fellows. The medieval republics of Italy were wrecked by war. Holland
and Portugal, once the most promising powers of Europe, were exhausted
by it. Not vice, not enervation, not a dwindling birth-rate,--which
are rather consequences than causes,--but the incessant exhaustion of
their resources on the seas and the battlefield condemned them to
decay. Italy fell back into the state of impotence which gave Austria
and the Papacy their ignoble opportunity. Once more the advance of
civilisation was checked by the jealous god of war.
It is, of course, true that warfare produced fine types of men; but
for every Bayard there were ten thousand brutal soldiers, whose march
across Europe left a broad track of rape and ruin. It is true that the
naval or military successes of Venice and Genoa and Florence enabled
them to raise marble palaces and to foster the art of painters and the
research of scholars; but it is equally true that prosperity based on
such a foundation was generally doomed. The example of medieval Rome
shows that a military basis was not essential. The peoples from whom
the tribute had been wrung awaited their hour--the hour when the
vampire had sucked the great frame weak and bloodless--and then, by
the same law of might, they smote the oppressor. The historian who
reads the whole chronicle of man is saddened even in contemplating a
nation's prosperity. Amidst the cries of joy and triumph and love he
seems to hear the cynical laughter of the war-god.
I need not follow the devastation of war through the later history of
Europe. The Thirty Years War laid Germany desolate, and postponed its
cultural development for more than a century. Spain, Portugal, and
Holland, which had won empire by the sword, lost it to the sword. The
Ottoman Empire sank into weakness and shame. All this was due, in the
first place, to what Count von Moltke calls "the institution of
God": the institution without which "the world would fall into
decay and lose itself in materialism." Even while he spoke Germany
was prospering by peace as few nations had ever prospered before.
Could there possibly be a more perverse reading of the lesson of
history? Could there be a greater mockery conceived than to imagine
God smiling on this blood-reeking Europe, or to call this a spiritual
triumph over materialism? Is any man, with the present desolation of
Europe before him, tempted to place the soldier above the artist, the
scientist, or the engineer as an instrument of progress? Let us grant
militarism all that it has really achieved. It remains, in the mind of
the historian, the greatest curse that mankind has endured since the
primitive humans were first gathered into tribes and disputed each
other's "spheres of influence."
Blind to this ghastly tragedy of history, we have maintained and
cherished militarism until it has brought on us in turn the greatest
catastrophe that a single year ever embraced. Probably our
grandchildren, probably many a child that gazes now with wide eyes on
our troops and banners, will look back on our civilisation with
amazement. They may smile at a drill-sergeant like Count von Moltke
telling illiterate rustics of the glorious moral qualities which war
develops in--the men who traversed Belgium! But we civilians will
honestly puzzle them. We had the history of the world unfolded before
us, and we saw this institution plainly emerging from barbarism and
leaving its bloody and defacing splashes on every page of the
chronicle. We traced the evolution of justice, and we saw that, as it
was a mighty gain to men when tribunals were set up to adjudicate on
the quarrels of individuals or clans, it would be a far mightier gain
to erect a tribunal for settling the quarrels of nations. Yet we took
this stupid burden from the shoulders of our fathers, and we made it
incalculably heavier for ourselves and our children.
I need not set out the weight of the burden in figures. When I first
wrote this page I dilated on the seventy million sterling per year
which we English were compelled to spend on defence: I imagined it
expended on social betterment and human help--on a magnificent scheme
of education, for children and adults, and so on. Then I observed--two
years ago--with a shudder that at any moment a war might double our
National Debt and compel us to find a further £40,000,000 a year to
pay for our militarism. And here, within less than twelve months, we
have incurred this monstrous burden, yet we linger still on the very
fringe of the mighty battlefield we have to traverse. Think what the
future may be if we retain militarism. In the past one hundred years,
or a little more, war has cost Europe about £4,000,000,000. In one
year a modern war has cost Europe more than that sum, and may cost it
double. Add to this, if you can calculate it, the value of the
millions of the more robust workers who die on the field: the
appalling loss to productive industry: the portentous devastation of
property. I suppose that, soberly, the total cost of this war will be
something between ten and twenty thousand million sterling. What will
be the cost of the next war, which may come within ten years? And what
might we have done in Europe with ten thousand million sterling?
I am not, it will be observed, relying on disputed speculations like
those of Mr. Norman Angell. I do not accept his characteristic theory;
but it need not now be discussed, as our experience rather suggests
that a modern war will prove so exhausting, economically, that there
will be no question of substantial indemnity for the victor. But we
must in any case add to this cost of war, for victor and vanquished
alike, that incalculable damage which is expressed in ruined homes,
ruined fortunes, and the pain of loss. This also is too vividly
present in our minds to need comment. These sacrifices have been borne
heroically. Those of us who have lost nothing can most sincerely
salute both the men who exposed their lives in a just cause and the
women who endured as women do. The soldier's trade is an honourable
trade while the need for it lasts, and at such a time it calls for
respect and gratitude. But how stupid and brutal in the last degree is
the system that imposes these sacrifices, when we reflect that the
honour or the rights of any nation could have been vindicated without
the darkening of a single home or the loss of a single citizen.
There, of course, we have the centre of gravity of the whole
discussion. _If_ we can abolish and dispense with the military system,
our retention of it in the twentieth century is the most appalling
sham and anachronism of which we are guilty. I do not enlarge on the
cost of war. No one to-day can be insensible of it or suggest that any
but the most imperious needs would justify us in retaining it. I
assume also that, after the lamentable behaviour of Germany, none will
question that there will be wars as long as militarism lasts, and that
the cost and carnage will increase prodigiously.
The supreme point for us to realise is the comparative ease with which
this greatest of reforms can be accomplished. We have no rival schools
of economists or moralists or philosophers darkening counsel here. We
do not await a genius to discover the path for us. A plain and
seriously indisputable ideal is put before us: arbitration. A court
for exercising it has already been established: the Hague Tribunal.
Let the majority of people in the more powerful nations of the earth
agree to submit every international difference to that or some other
tribunal, and we have made an end of militarism and war.
If this seem a hasty or superficial view of a grave problem, reflect
on the difficulties which a cautious or conservative thinker might
allege. He would, I fancy, on sincere consideration, admit that the
chief and most serious difficulty is not a reluctance based on
specific reasons, but a general apathy due to want of reflection. I am
not for a moment underrating the magnitude of the effort that will be
required in overcoming this apathy, in creating the general will. In
this respect, indeed, the pacifist reform is peculiarly hampered.
Pessimistic people ask how we came to boast of moral progress in
modern times when this military evil has become greater than ever.
They do not reflect on the special conditions of the problem. In
attacking almost every other evil--industrial injustice, say, or cruel
sport, or a stupid penal code--we have to deal only with our own
nation. We can carry the reform within our own frontiers, whatever
other nations do. In the case of militarism we cannot. All the Great
Powers, at least, must advance simultaneously. We have not to educate
a nation, but a planet. Pacifists have at times given the
impression--generally a wrong impression--that they forgot this; that
they advocated disarmament or relaxation of armament in our own
nation, whether other nations disarmed or no. In this way, and because
many pacifists have weakly opposed or carped at England's action in
this very grave crisis, they have done harm by making humanitarianism
seem unpractical, blindly sentimental, and dangerous. I need not
repeat that I have not the least sympathy with that sort of pacifism.
The reform must be international and thoroughly practical.
But this large task of planting a definite conviction in the minds of
the majority in many nations does not conflict with what I said about
the essential clearness and simplicity of the reform. If you set out
to attack poverty or to reform marriage, you have first to settle very
serious controversies about the way to do it. There is no such
controversy here. There are, it is true, a few who still have in their
veins some of the blood of the medieval swashbuckler. They say that,
while a quarrel about territory might fitly be referred to a judge, an
outrage on our national honour must be expiated by blood. The idea is
purely barbaric. As if this river of human blood were not an
immeasurably greater outrage than the heated words of a nervous
diplomatist, or the jibes of a silly journalist, or the acts of an
excited crowd, or the guilt of a couple of assassins! As if an
international court could not devise some means of appeasing injured
honour as well as of restoring injured rights! It is dreadful
materialism, they say, to put honour in the scale with money. So men
said in the clubs of London a century ago in defence of the duel, and
we recognise in their pleas the lingering, more or less disguised, of
a barbaric sentiment. Most of us recognise that same feature in this
last apology for the duel of nations. If we can trust our individual
honour to a mediocre magistrate or judge, or a still worse jury, we
can certainly entrust our national honour to a group of the ablest and
most impartial lawyers of the world. It is sheer distrust of justice
to refuse it.
Here again history is wholly on the side of reform. Which of the great
wars of the nineteenth century involved a point of honour that could
not, with entire decency, have been submitted to arbitration? Was
there such a point of honour in the Napoleonic wars? The
Prusso-Danish? The Prusso-Austrian? The Italian? The American Civil
War? The Franco-German? The Russo-Turkish? The South African? What
point was involved in any of them that could not have been settled
with far greater honour to the combatants and greater regard for
justice by an impartial tribunal? In most cases they were really wars
of aggression and expansion, like the war in which we are engaged. We
may at least ask the men who hold that medieval idea of war to
have--since they boast much of their courage--the elementary courage
to say so.
There is no conceivable quarrel that cannot with perfect honour be
submitted to arbitration. And the ostensible ground of this colossal
struggle which is now exhausting Europe--the satisfaction due to
Austria for the assassination of the Archduke--was pre-eminently a
matter for a tribunal. The frivolity and insincerity with which these
grave issues are sometimes met are, to put it on the lowest level,
costly. Speaking in a London club some time ago, I urged this
substitution of arbitration for war. My opponent frivolously observed
that he was not sure that a court of great lawyers would be cheaper
than war, and there were some who quite seriously applauded. Yet
Europe had then actually expended about £2,000,000,000 in the
preliminary stages of its great war!
Wherever there is a considerable and deliberate reluctance to
substitute arbitration for war, wherever these unsatisfactory pleas
for war are put forward, we find a hypocritical concealment of real
motives. If we would be practical we must candidly confront these
motives, and we shall find that the most persistent and most dangerous
of them is still the desire to gain territory. The spectacle of the
decay of the Ottoman Empire and the apparent helplessness of the
Balkan peoples had more to do with the militarism of European Powers
than they were willing to admit. That source of temptation is now
renewed, and most of the Powers have, or soon will have, all the
territory they can reasonably desire. The further distribution of
African territory could clearly be best controlled by an international
court. There remains one Power that will still feel the lust of
territory. Germany conspicuously thwarted in Europe the advance of the
pacifist reform because, as the whole world now sees, it had an
aggressive territorial ambition. We may assume that Austria will now
be cured of its lawless and costly designs, and that Germany will
remain the one unsated and discontented nation. But Europe will surely
have the elementary wisdom of refusing to maintain its terrible burden
on that account. It will pay us better to meet the real economic need
of Germany by a generous colonial deal, and then to use the power of
an international polity to destroy and prevent the revival of
militarism in that country.
We should thus remove the last serious obstacle to the reform, and the
work might advance rapidly. The tribunal, as I said, exists, and has
had more experience than is generally realised. The Hague Conference
of 1907 established a Prize Court, with permanent salaried judges, and
an Arbitration Court. A large number of very grave quarrels have since
been adjusted by this tribunal, and, as Professor Schücking observes,
"more than a hundred contracts between States have been concluded in
which, on each occasion, two States made the Arbitration Court
obligatory." But, largely owing to the opposition of Germany and the
general apathy, the Court remained optional, and the Powers maintained
their armies for the settlement of quarrels in the old barbaric
manner. The next and last step is for all the Powers to recognise the
Court as compulsory, and to furnish it with an executive (a small
international army and navy) for the enforcement of its decisions. Our
vast armies and navies then become superfluous and would be disbanded
simultaneously, leaving only a small force in each country for the
suppression of native aggression (with the consent of the Hague Court)
and for use by the Court itself to enforce its verdicts or suppress
illegal attempts to arm.
There is nothing Utopian or academic about this reform. A body of
high-minded lawyers and statesmen have for years discussed the details
of the scheme, and are ready to launch it whenever the various
Governments are compelled by public opinion to adopt it. The immediate
task is to create this pressure of public opinion. We may hope that,
after our ghastly lesson in the price of the military method, we shall
no longer be rebuffed with vapid phrases like: "Do not force the
pace." A business-man who talked nonsense of that kind would soon
find his level. We need to conduct our national and international life
on business-principles, to get rid as speedily as possible of a waste
and disorder which are an outrage on the intelligence of the race. I
look more confidently to business-men than to speech-making
politicians and sentimental moralists for the triumph of the reform.
Certain industries will, of course, be gravely dislocated, even
annihilated, by the change; and vast bodies of additional workers
will, in most countries, be thrown upon a crowded labour-market. From
the abstract economical point of view it is only a question of
transfer. Fifty millions which were spent on military industries will
now be used in enlarging other industries or creating new. In reality
there will be grave confusion; but that is due to the utterly
disorganised nature of our industrial world, which I discuss later. In
any case to allege this industrial difficulty as a serious reason
against disarmament is a very singular piece of folly. The cost and
trouble of adjusting this temporary dislocation would be infinitely
less than the cost and trouble of a war.
We need, therefore, to persuade the public, which has borne its
military yoke and endured the occasional lash of war with the
placidity of a draught-ox--that is, candidly, how we shall appear in
the social history of the future--that it may escape the yoke and the
lash when it wills. Our Churches might make some atonement for a long
and lamentable neglect of their duty by organising a really spirited
collective campaign in this greatest of moral interests. The central
educative body should, however, be quite unsectarian. I take it that
an amalgamation of the various Peace Societies, strengthened by the
adhesion of our commercial and industrial leaders, would form this
central educative body. The present war would furnish it with a superb
text and an unanswerable argument. It ought, in the circumstances, to
capture each country in Europe more speedily than Cobden's famous
league captured England. The press would begin to assist at a certain
stage of progress. Even the politicians would presently lend their
oratory; especially as their prestige, at least in this country, would
hardly survive a second strain such as this war has put on it. Every
agency ought to be enlisted in impressing upon the public that,
whatever other reforms may imply, here we ask no sacrifice; we
indicate a way in which the community may, when it wills, rid itself
of a stupendous burden and set free enormous resources for social
improvement.
Reformers are widely, and with some reason, accused of being dreamy
and unpractical. Here, at least, it will be seen that it is rather the
public and the opponents of reform who are dreamy, romantic, and
unpractical: that the reform itself is a business proposition of the
most attractive and promising character. But let us be even more
practical. To forecast the future is an interesting intellectual
recreation; but to close one's mind entirely against the
possibilities and dangers of the future is positive folly. Let us
glance at the future.
I have not the faintest hope that the Allied Powers will, as they
ought to do, disarm Germany and Austria and then disarm themselves,
when the war is over. Then Germany will concentrate all its marvellous
power of organisation, dissimulation, and intrigue in a dream of
_revanche_. The appalling incompetence displayed by what we may call,
in the broadest sense, our Intelligence Department and our War Office
will return, when the temporary accession of business-ability has been
withdrawn from it. There will be no serious inquiry into our
scandalous indolence in the early period of the war, our complete
failure to forecast the conditions of war, and our heavy somnolence
during Germany's feverish preparations, although the documents
published by the French Government show that, by 1913 at least,
sharp-sighted foreign representatives saw clearly that war was, to put
it moderately, highly probable. In point of fact, our authorities knew
that war was gravely imminent. I happen to know, from a little breach
of confidence, that our War Office secretly warned certain reservists
in June 1914 (even before the Serajevo murder) to be ready. The men
were ready, and have borne _their_ share superbly; but our authorities
had to confess that, even after nine months' experience of the war,
they were immeasurably behind Germany in the production of the two
vital necessaries of a modern war--machine-guns and high-explosive
shells.
Our experts will return to this comfortable somnolence. There will be
no serious inquiry. Politicians and their advisers will escape in a
cloud of thrilling emotions and enthusiastic rhetoric. Persistent
questioners, who are rudely impatient of party-discipline, will be
snubbed and evaded. Any other questioners, not of the political world,
will be ignored. We shall return to British dignity and placidity.
Germany will work and intrigue as it never worked and intrigued
before. There will be grave domestic trouble in Russia and, as in the
case of Turkey, German representatives will think while British
representatives play. The preparations may occupy ten years or twenty
years, but they will proceed. The aim will be a war with Russia
neutral or friendly to Germany. If it occurs ... One has only to
imagine where we should be to-day if Germany had not made the error of
abandoning the Bismarckian tradition.
Behind this is a further possibility. China is just as capable as
Japan of learning the use of thirteen-inch guns and maxims. Sir Hiram
Maxim, in fact, who knows both China and the gun, quite agrees with me
on that. And China has, behind that stoical and almost childlike
expression it presents to Europe, an acute memory that for thirty
years we have treated it with flagrant injustice. It may take decades
to undo the evil of ages of Manchu misgovernment and organise the
resources of the country, but the day will come when an alert and
powerful nation of 500,000,000 Orientals will press against its
frontiers. We may remember that the Mongol banners have before now
fluttered over Moscow and reached the Mediterranean. And the Mongols
are not the only awakening people. We may yet see an anti-European
combination from the Asiatic shore of the Pacific to the African shore
of the Atlantic. These are some of the possibilities we hand on to our
children if we do not in time abandon the military system.
To that pass has it brought us. We writhe and groan under the terrible
burden it lays on us, and we shrink from contemplating the future; yet
we might cast off the burden and rid the future of peril when we will.
We disavow the buccaneering spirit, and protest that we arm only in
defence against each other; and one wonders whether to smile or weep
at the obtuseness which prevents us from adopting a simple and humane
means of defence instead of this exhausting barbarism. We
"humanise" war, yet cling needlessly to the whole inhuman
business. We are teaching the backward nations to arm,--we would
gladly supply them with tutors and arms at any time,--and may be thus
preparing a more colossal conflict than ever. Surely the man or woman
of the twenty-first century will find us an enigma!
Let me close with a repetition of my protest against the
misconstruction to which such a book as this is always exposed. I
advocate no Utopian scheme, but one which some of the ablest lawyers,
statesmen, and business-men in Europe have discussed for years and
warmly endorsed. I have no wish to conceal technical difficulties
under sentimental phrases, but these men, to whom I refer, are
prepared to meet the difficulties. I regard the work of the soldier as
honourable and worthy, as long as we impose the military system on
each other; and at this particular juncture regret only that I am long
past the age of bearing arms. I plead, as long as the system lasts,
for unquestionable efficiency in national defence, whatever it cost.
But I say that, in this military system, we are enthroning the
hollowest and most ghastly sham that ever deluded humanity: that, when
we have the courage or wisdom to strip it of its tinselled robes, we
will shudder at sight of the gaunt frame of death which has ruled
civilisation for so many thousand years: that nothing is wanting but
the general will to dethrone this mockery of a god: and that, when we
have abolished militarism and war, we shall advance along the way of
social improvement with far lighter steps and vastly increased
resources.