The World War was a terrible calamity. But it did not mean the end of
things. On the contrary it brought about the coming of a new day.
It is easy to write a history of Greece and Rome or the Middle Ages.
The actors who played their parts upon that long-forgotten stage are
all dead. We can criticize them with a cool head. The audience that
applauded their efforts has dispersed. Our remarks cannot possibly hurt
their feelings.
But it is very difficult to give a true account of contemporary events.
The problems that fill the minds of the people with whom we pass through
life, are our own problems, and they hurt us too much or they please us
too well to be described with that fairness which is necessary when we
are writing history and not blowing the trumpet of propaganda. All the
same I shall endeavour to tell you why I agree with poor Condorcet when
he expressed his firm faith in a better future.
Often before have I warned you against the false impression which is
created by the use of our so-called historical epochs which divide the
story of man into four parts, the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance and the Reformation, and Modern Time. The last of these
terms is the most dangerous. The word "modern" implies that we, the
people of the twentieth century, are at the top of human achievement.
Fifty years ago the liberals of England who followed the leadership of
Gladstone felt that the problem of a truly representative and democratic
form of government had been solved forever by the second great Reform
Bill, which gave workmen an equal share in the government with their
employers. When Disraeli and his conservative friends talked of a
dangerous "leap in the dark" they answered "No." They felt certain of
their cause and trusted that henceforth all classes of society would
co-operate to make the government of their common country a success.
Since then many things have happened, and the few liberals who are still
alive begin to understand that they were mistaken.
There is no definite answer to any historical problem.
Every generation must fight the good fight anew or perish as those
sluggish animals of the prehistoric world have perished.
If you once get hold of this great truth you will get a new and much
broader view of life. Then, go one step further and try to imagine
yourself in the position of your own great-great-grandchildren who will
take your place in the year 10,000. They too will learn history. But
what will they think of those short four thousand years during which we
have kept a written record of our actions and of our thoughts? They will
think of Napoleon as a contemporary of Tiglath Pileser, the Assyrian
conqueror. Perhaps they will confuse him with Jenghiz Khan or Alexander
the Macedonian. The great war which has just come to an end will
appear in the light of that long commercial conflict which settled the
supremacy of the Mediterranean when Rome and Carthage fought during one
hundred and twenty-eight years for the mastery of the sea. The Balkan
troubles of the 19th century (the struggle for freedom of Serbia and
Greece and Bulgaria and Montenegro) to them will seem a continuation of
the disordered conditions caused by the Great Migrations. They will look
at pictures of the Rheims cathedral which only yesterday was destroyed
by German guns as we look upon a photograph of the Acropolis ruined
two hundred and fifty years ago during a war between the Turks and the
Venetians. They will regard the fear of death, which is still common
among many people, as a childish superstition which was perhaps natural
in a race of men who had burned witches as late as the year 1692. Even
our hospitals and our laboratories and our operating rooms of which we
are so proud will look like slightly improved workshops of alchemists
and mediaeval surgeons.
And the reason for all this is simple. We modern men and women are not
"modern" at all. On the contrary we still belong to the last generations
of the cave-dwellers. The foundation for a new era was laid but
yesterday. The human race was given its first chance to become
truly civilised when it took courage to question all things and made
"knowledge and understanding" the foundation upon which to create a more
reasonable and sensible society of human beings. The Great War was the
"growing-pain" of this new world.
For a long time to come people will write mighty books to prove that
this or that or the other person brought about the war. The Socialists
will publish volumes in which they will accuse the "capitalists" of
having brought about the war for "commercial gain." The capitalists
will answer that they lost infinitely more through the war than they
made--that their children were among the first to go and fight and be
killed--and they will show how in every country the bankers tried their
very best to avert the outbreak of hostilities. French historians will
go through the register of German sins from the days of Charlemagne
until the days of William of Hohenzollern and German historians will
return the compliment and will go through the list of French horrors
from the days of Charlemagne until the days of President Poincare. And
then they will establish to their own satisfaction that the other fellow
was guilty of "causing the war." Statesmen, dead and not yet dead, in
all countries will take to their typewriters and they will explain how
they tried to avert hostilities and how their wicked opponents forced
them into it.
The historian, a hundred years hence, will not bother about these
apologies and vindications. He will understand the real nature of the
underlying causes and he will know that personal ambitions and personal
wickedness and personal greed had very little to do with the final
outburst. The original mistake, which was responsible for all this
misery, was committed when our scientists began to create a new world of
steel and iron and chemistry and electricity and forgot that the human
mind is slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the well-known
sloth, and marches from one hundred to three hundred years behind the
small group of courageous leaders.
A Zulu in a frock coat is still a Zulu. A dog trained to ride a bicycle
and smoke a pipe is still a dog. And a human being with the mind of a
sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 Rolls-Royce is still a human
being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman.
If you do not understand this at first, read it again. It will become
clearer to you in a moment and it will explain many things that have
happened these last six years.
Perhaps I may give you another, more familiar, example, to show you what
I mean. In the movie theatres, jokes and funny remarks are often thrown
upon the screen. Watch the audience the next time you have a chance. A
few people seem almost to inhale the words. It takes them but a second
to read the lines. Others are a bit slower. Still others take from
twenty to thirty seconds. Finally those men and women who do not read
any more than they can help, get the point when the brighter ones among
the audience have already begun to decipher the next cut-in. It is not
different in human life, as I shall now show you.
In a former chapter I have told you how the idea of the Roman Empire
continued to live for a thousand years after the death of the last Roman
Emperor. It caused the establishment of a large number of "imitation
empires." It gave the Bishops of Rome a chance to make themselves the
head of the entire church, because they represented the idea of Roman
world-supremacy. It drove a number of perfectly harmless barbarian
chieftains into a career of crime and endless warfare because they were
for ever under the spell of this magic word "Rome." All these people,
Popes, Emperors and plain fighting men were not very different from you
or me. But they lived in a world where the Roman tradition was a vital
issue something living--something which was remembered clearly both
by the father and the son and the grandson. And so they struggled and
sacrificed themselves for a cause which to-day would not find a dozen
recruits.
In still another chapter I have told you how the great religious
wars took place more than a century after the first open act of the
Reformation and if you will compare the chapter on the Thirty Years War
with that on Inventions, you will see that this ghastly butchery took
place at a time when the first clumsy steam engines were already
puffing in the laboratories of a number of French and German and English
scientists. But the world at large took no interest in these strange
contraptions, and went on with a grand theological discussion which
to-day causes yawns, but no anger.
And so it goes. A thousand years from now, the historian will use the
same words about Europe of the out-going nineteenth century, and he
will see how men were engaged upon terrific nationalistic struggles
while the laboratories all around them were filled with serious folk who
cared not one whit for politics as long as they could force nature to
surrender a few more of her million secrets.
You will gradually begin to understand what I am driving at. The
engineer and the scientist and the chemist, within a single generation,
filled Europe and America and Asia with their vast machines, with their
telegraphs, their flying machines, their coal-tar products. They
created a new world in which time and space were reduced to complete
insignificance. They invented new products and they made these so cheap
that almost every one could buy them. I have told you all this before
but it certainly will bear repeating.
To keep the ever increasing number of factories going, the owners, who
had also become the rulers of the land, needed raw materials and coal.
Especially coal. Meanwhile the mass of the people were still thinking in
terms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and clinging to the
old notions of the state as a dynastic or political organisation. This
clumsy mediaeval institution was then suddenly called upon to handle the
highly modern problems of a mechanical and industrial world. It did
its best, according to the rules of the game which had been laid down
centuries before. The different states created enormous armies and
gigantic navies which were used for the purpose of acquiring new
possessions in distant lands. Whereever{sic} there was a tiny bit of
land left, there arose an English or a French or a German or a Russian
colony. If the natives objected, they were killed. In most cases they
did not object, and were allowed to live peacefully, provided they did
not interfere with the diamond mines or the coal mines or the oil mines
or the gold mines or the rubber plantations, and they derived many
benefits from the foreign occupation.
Sometimes it happened that two states in search of raw materials wanted
the same piece of land at the same time. Then there was a war. This
occurred fifteen years ago when Russia and Japan fought for the
possession of certain terri-tories which belonged to the Chinese people.
Such conflicts, however, were the exception. No one really desired to
fight. Indeed, the idea of fighting with armies and battleships and
submarines began to seem absurd to the men of the early 20th century.
They associated the idea of violence with the long-ago age of unlimited
monarchies and intriguing dynasties. Every day they read in their papers
of still further inventions, of groups of English and American and
German scientists who were working together in perfect friendship for
the purpose of an advance in medicine or in astronomy. They lived in
a busy world of trade and of commerce and factories. But only a few
noticed that the development of the state, (of the gigantic community of
people who recognise certain common ideals,) was lagging several
hundred years behind. They tried to warn the others. But the others were
occupied with their own affairs.
I have used so many similes that I must apologise for bringing in one
more. The Ship of State (that old and trusted expression which is ever
new and always picturesque,) of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the
Romans and the Venetians and the merchant adventurers of the seventeenth
century had been a sturdy craft, constructed of well-seasoned wood, and
commanded by officers who knew both their crew and their vessel and
who understood the limitations of the art of navigating which had been
handed down to them by their ancestors.
Then came the new age of iron and steel and machinery. First one part,
then another of the old ship of state was changed. Her dimensions were
increased. The sails were discarded for steam. Better living quarters
were established, but more people were forced to go down into the
stoke-hole, and while the work was safe and fairly remunerative, they
did not like it as well as their old and more dangerous job in the
rigging. Finally, and almost imperceptibly, the old wooden square-rigger
had been transformed into a modern ocean liner. But the captain and the
mates remained the same. They were appointed or elected in the same
way as a hundred years before. They were taught the same system of
navigation which had served the mariners of the fifteenth century.
In their cabins hung the same charts and signal flags which had done
service in the days of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. In short, they
were (through no fault of their own) completely incompetent.
The sea of international politics is not very broad. When those Imperial
and Colonial liners began to try and outrun each other, accidents were
bound to happen. They did happen. You can still see the wreckage if you
venture to pass through that part of the ocean.
And the moral of the story is a simple one. The world is in dreadful
need of men who will assume the new leadership--who will have the
courage of their own visions and who will recognise clearly that we are
only at the beginning of the voyage, and have to learn an entirely new
system of seamanship.
They will have to serve for years as mere apprentices. They will have
to fight their way to the top against every possible form of opposition.
When they reach the bridge, mutiny of an envious crew may cause their
death. But some day, a man will arise who will bring the vessel safely
to port, and he shall be the hero of the ages.