THE PERILS OF PARTY POLITICS
No bold, broad, stable policy, therefore, was ever conceived by those
party politicians. The vast organization which was destined to destroy
the old order of things in Europe, and whose manifestations were an
open book to all observers who brought acuteness and patience to the
study, was not merely ignored by them--its very existence was denied,
and those who refused to join the ranks of the deniers were
brand-marked as mischief-makers. The nation's responsible trustees, by
way of justifying this singular attitude, accepted implicitly our
enemy's account of his unfriendly acts and enterprises. Thus it was
the chief of His Majesty's Government who, from his place in the House
of Commons, emphatically asserted that it behoved the British nation
to welcome the Baghdad railway enterprise as a precious cultural
undertaking devoid of political objects and, therefore, well worthy of
our support. In vain the writer of these lines laid bare the real
designs of the German Government, and adduced cogent proofs that the
seemingly cultural scheme was but an integral part of a vast campaign,
of which one object was the ousting of Britons from the Near and
Middle East and the substitution of German overlordship there. They
shut their eyes and stopped their ears, and bade us rejoice that
Britain is not as other countries and can afford to welcome and even
further Germany's "cultural" projects.
It was our party politicians who, when the ground-swell of
international anger and the premonitory rumble of volcanic forces
became audible, diverted public attention from the symptoms and
solemnly assured their countrymen that Germany had no intention of
going to war. To the author of these pages, who was at the pains of
unfolding in private his information and conclusions on this subject
to one of those leaders, the answer given ran thus: "Your intentions
are patriotic and your accuracy of observation is probably scientific.
But your conclusions are wholly erroneous. You must admit that you are
a pessimist. Nor can you deny that we members of the Cabinet dispose
of fuller and more decisive data for a judgment than you, with all
your opportunities, can muster. After all, we do know something of the
temper of the German Government. And we have cogent grounds for
holding that neither the Kaiser nor his Ministers want war. Bethmann
Hollweg is the most pacific chancellor Germany has ever had. And the
German people, bellicose though you think them, are to the full as
peace-loving as our own. Their one desire is to be allowed to vie with
us in commercial and industrial pursuits. So true is this, that if we
suppose the improbable, that the Kaiser's Government should feel
disposed to bring about a European war, that design would be thwarted
by the Reichstag backed by the bulk of the population."
Thus the men who presided over the destinies of the British Empire
either had no eye for the triumphant progress of the German campaign
that had been going forward for years unchecked, or, if they discerned
any of its episodes, saw them only through the softening and
distorting medium of deceptive assurances and explanations emanating
from Berlin. And on the strength of these illusive phrases they kept
the country in a state of unpreparedness for the military form of the
struggle for which our enemy was making ready, and if they had had
their way our navy--which was our anchor of salvation--would also
perhaps have been shorn of its strength.
When at last the war broke out, it was our party politicians, the men
to whom we still look up for light and guidance, who misinterpreted
its nature and underestimated the urgent needs of the Empire. It was
they who conceived the campaign as though it were one of our
occasional colonial expeditions, and would fain base the strength of
our land army abroad on the small number of troops which the
Government had conditionally undertaken to provide. And throughout the
first sixteen months of the war, it was they who went on doling out
contingents with Troy weights and measures like Mrs. Partington
beating back the tidal waves with a mop. It was they, too, who were at
extraordinary pains and risked their prestige, to throw away the
splendid privileged position which, at the outset of the struggle, we
chanced to occupy in South-Eastern Europe. Every blunder into which
petty municipal minds could fall when confronted with a wild
revolutionary welter, marked the hesitant policy of the British
Government. This aimless chaos of soul was the main cause of the
woeful waste of our political advantages and enormous resources in
the accomplishment of secondary ends which generally led nowhere. It
was thus that they forfeited the active support of Turkey, Bulgaria
and Greece, foolishly stood by applauding every step those nations
took towards the camp of our enemies, and then felt constrained to
turn to their own people whom they had unwittingly misled and call
upon it for the sacrifice of the flower of its manhood.
It was they who sacrificed, through sheer administrative incapacity,
the decided superiority over the Teutons which we enjoyed in the air
at the outset of the war. It is now admitted that our mastery in that
region was then complete. All that the country demanded of them was
that they should hold it. But what with divided control, restricted
views, and the policy of insufficient means--_petits paquets_--as the
French term it, they allowed our enemies to outstrip us. And to-day in
the air as on land it is the Germans who have the initiative and the
Allies who are condemned to the defensive. Yet experts had pointed out
over and over again what should be done and what avoided. Their advice
was obviously sound and their criticism obviously irrefutable. But the
men in power fumbled and floundered on until we had forfeited our
mastery in the air to our enemies. And ever since then the nation has
been paying the penalty. Yet it is to the men responsible for these
costly blunders that the nation still looks for salvation!
It was the same men who conceived or sanctioned the plan of an
expedition to Mesopotamia. Whether this was a wise or a foolish
project, when once decided upon it should have been carried out with
might and main. All the means requisite to success should have been
taken; all the resources possessed by the Empire should have been
drawn upon and nothing needlessly left to chance. Above all things
else, the views of the man charged with the execution of the plan
should have been elicited and carefully weighed. As a matter of fact,
General Townshend's judgment was decidedly adverse to the expedition
under the conditions in which it was planned. For the forces assigned
to him, amounting to far less than a division, were absurdly
inadequate, and their inadequacy was easily demonstrable. He ought to
have had at least two divisions more. But once again the game of
divided control and diluted responsibility was played, with
consequences which would in any other country suffice to wreck the
Government chargeable with the blunder.
Yet it is to the men who committed that and all the other blunders
that the nation still looks confidently for salvation!
If the British people finally obtain it under those leaders they may
fairly claim to have abrogated the law of cause and effect.
These same men are still the mentors and the spokesmen of a free
nation which can choose its leaders. It is they to whom the people has
entrusted the conduct of the most critical phase of the whole campaign
in which the recurrence of similar errors may foredoom the Empire to
disruption. And it is, humanly speaking, inconceivable that
miscalculations of that kind should be eliminated, in view of the
crucial fact that the Ministers at present in power, if we may judge
by their utterances and their acts, entertain a fundamentally false
conception of the relations between the Teutons and the allied
nations. Among the elements of that conception there would seem to be
no room for the historic past. The present stands by itself with a
history that goes no further back than the month of July 1914, and
will convulsively come to an end with the truce that ushers in the
future treaty of peace. For that diplomatic instrument will put an end
to the struggle and inaugurate an era of international tranquillity.
Such is the theory on which their entire policy is based.
We must fight on now to a _finish_, but the upshot is sure to be a
finish. Their anticipations of an unclouded dawn, when the present
night has worn itself into the streaky greyness of morning, are
certain to come to pass. The ordeal which we are undergoing is
tremendous, but at any rate the nation and its allies will emerge from
it rejuvenated under the spell of the present magicians, as the old
ram emerged lamb-like and frisky from Medea's cauldron. That, in
brief, would seem to be the picture in the mind's eye of the British
Government, and to that conception all their plans are being
accommodated.
As a matter of ascertainable fact, neither we nor our Allies have
anything of the kind to hope for. In the near future the present
campaign will have come to a close, but not the struggle between
ourselves and our Teuton aggressors. For this war, far from ending the
tragic duel between the two types of community life in Europe, is but
one of its transient episodes. The trial of strength began many years
ago and will not be decided for many years to come, how satisfactory
so ever the terms of the future peace may be to ourselves and our
Allies. This is a fundamental truth which has not yet penetrated the
consciousness of either rulers or people. And for that reason the
problem awaiting them is mis-stated, belittled. According to the
received version it is to beat back German aggression and render it
impossible in the future. Now, however successfully the first part of
the task may be discharged--and it is still very uphill work--the
second is a sheer impossibility, and to lay our plans as though it
were feasible and soon to be realized, is to embark on the body of a
sleeping whale in the belief that it is an island in the sea. And to
negotiate peace abroad and give an impulse to politics at home, with
that comforting prospect in mind, is to lead the nation into a
Serbonian bog whence no escape is possible. The leaders of Great
Britain are so permeated with the duties, the rights, the hopes and
the strivings of parliamentary parties, that they involuntarily think
in terms of home politics and have no chord in their being responsive
to the emotions that sway the German soul and nerve the German arm.
To the average mind it is clear that the terms on which peace might be
negotiated, if the end of the war were also to be the end of the
struggle, might differ considerably from those on which a statesman
would properly insist, were he convinced that the sheathing of the
sword marked but the opening of a new phase of the duel. And it is
this alternative which it behoves us to lay at the foundation of our
peace treaty, if it should rest with the Allies to impose their terms.
The problem, therefore, which a Government that governs has to tackle,
is twofold: the conclusion of such a peace as will confer on the
Entente States, individually and collectively, all possible
advantages, not for contemplating such a tranquil state of things as
the ministerial conception postulates, but for the prosecution of the
struggle with the greatest chances of success, and for the
reconstruction of the social fabric at home with a view to harmonizing
it with the new requirements, and, in particular, with the needs
created by the constant state of economic, financial, diplomatic and
journalistic warfare in which we shall be engaged. The social ordering
of Great Britain must be not merely modified but remodelled and
rebuilt from the groundwork to the coping-stone. One of the first
needs of the nation is the education, physical and spiritual, of the
new generation. Patriotic sentiment must be engrafted on the receptive
soul of the child, and its range of sympathy widened and deepened. The
duty of self-abnegation for the welfare of the community must be
inculcated, together with new conceptions of personal dignity and
worth. To the domestic sentiment in those cramped and distorted forms
in which it still survives in Britain, where we cling tenaciously to
so many institutions devoid of life and utility, a less commanding
part must be assigned in the future than heretofore. Above all, it
behoves us to encourage the scientific spirit with its correlates,
patient thought and study, as opposed to the arrogant amateurism
which, without rudimentary qualifications, claims to have a voice in
the solution of every problem under the sun. It is largely to this
dilettante temperament of the nation and its rulers that we owe the
disasters we have sustained and the dangers with which we are
threatened.
Looking back, then, dispassionately upon the movement, deliberately
organized over thirty years ago by the restless German mind and pushed
steadily forward ever since over diplomatic barriers, financial
hindrances, economic obstacles and international laws, one is struck
less by the unparalleled magnitude of the enterprise than by the
blindness and sluggishness of its destined victims. And it is largely
in these and kindred negative qualities that we have to seek for the
clue to the astonishing sequence of successes scored by our enemies in
their military and naval, as well as their politico-economic,
campaigns. Moreover, these same defects, deep-rooted and widespread
among the allied peoples, constitute their main source of weakness
during the economic and decisive tug-of-war which will be ushered in
by the treaty of peace. For the temperament, traditions and strivings
of each of these nations are so many obstacles to the gathering of
their scattered moral energies and wasted spiritual forces in one
fertilizing stream. They are bent on joining incompatible elements in
a political synthesis. In the name of national independence and by way
of a telling protest against the vassalage which binds Austria to
Germany, the Entente nations spurn the notion of any common accord
which requires the practice of self-surrender as a base, and are
resolved under the strain of circumstance to present such a
loosely-joined front to the enemy as will not involve their foregoing
one iota of their freedom or one tittle of their national claims. How,
in these conditions, they expect ever to rise to that height of moral
fervour without which the quasi-ascetic effort demanded of them is
inconceivable, has not yet been explained. As usual, they count upon
effects without causes, upon an ingathering of the harvest with no
preceding seedtime. Now, interdependence and compromise are the
indispensable conditions of that cohesion which alone can engender the
force required. A condition approaching organic coherency must be
attained before a smooth working system can be created among the
Allies. But as each of them is still rooted to the past, permeated by
its own interests and aspirations, and jealous not only of the
substance of its liberty but also of the shadow, the distance yet to
be traversed before the goal can be reached is enormous, and the road
rugged and beset with pitfalls.
A glance at the past and present may enable us to gauge aright the
nature of some of the difficulties that have to be surmounted in the
future.