People who have a clear and simple case do not talk in this fashion.
Picking now at random among the utterances of politicians and
propagandists, we find an assorted job-lot of aims assigned and causes
alleged, and in all of them there is that curious, incomprehensible and
callous disregard of the power of conviction that a straight story
always exercises, if you have one to tell. In November, 1917, when the
Foreign Office was being pestered by demands for a statement of the
Allied war-aims, Lord Robert Cecil said in the House of Commons, that
the restitution of Alsace and Lorraine to France was a "well-understood
war-aim from the moment we entered the war." As things have turned out,
it is an odd coincidence how so many of these places that have iron or
coal or oil in them seem to represent a well-understood war-aim. Less
than a month before, in October, 1917, General Smuts said that to his
mind the one great dominating war-aim was "the end of militarism, the
end of standing armies." Well, the Allies won the war, but judging by
results, this dominating war-aim seems rather to have been lost sight
of. Mr. Lloyd George again on another occasion, said in the House of
Commons that "self-determination was one of the principles for which we
entered the war ... a principle from which we have never departed since
the beginning of the war." This, too, seems an aim that for some reason
the victorious nations have not quite realized; indeed in some cases, as
in Ireland, for example, there has been no great alacrity shown about
trying to realize it. Viscount Bryce said that the war sprang from the
strife of races and religions in the Balkan countries, and from the
violence done to the sentiment of nationality in Alsace-Lorraine which
made France the ally of Russia. But the fact is that France became the
ally of Russia on the basis of hard cash, and since the Russian
Revolution, she has been a bit out of luck by way of getting her money
back. Mr. Asquith in the House of Commons, 3 August, 1914 said:
If I am asked what we are fighting for, I reply in two sentences.
In the first place, to fulfil a solemn international obligation....
Secondly we are fighting ... to vindicate the principle that small
nationalities are not to be crushed in defiance of international
good faith.
Just so: and in the House of Commons, 20 December, 1917, he said:
The League of Nations ... was the avowed purpose, the very purpose
... for which we entered the war and for which we are continuing
the war.
You pays your money, you see, and takes your choice. The point to be
made, however, is that one who has a strong case, a real case, never
trifles with it in this way. Would the reader do it?