Peace! The thought of it has become almost strange. Yet we must face
that thought, or we shall be as unprepared for it as we were for war.
Practical men are fighting this war, practical men will make the peace
that comes some day. And this unpractical pen ventures no speculation on
how it will be brought about; it jots down merely some of the wider
thoughts that throng, when for a moment the vision of Peace starts up
before the mind!
Statesmen have said that the sequel of this war must be a League for
Peace—a League for the enforcement by international action of
international right. Whether that can be brought about at a Round Table
Conference of the belligerents, or whether the League must be formed by
the victorious Allies with the adherence of the neutral countries, and
the Central Empires invited to fall in with their conclusions, on pain
of ostracism, I hazard here no opinion. But, by whichever means the
League for Peace is formed, it will be valueless unless three elements
of security are present. Due machinery to secure time for the
arbitration of dispute; due force to secure submission to such
arbitration; due intention on the part of individual nations to serve
the League loyally for the good of all. And the greatest of these three
is the last.
The strength of a League for Peace will depend before all on the conduct
of each separate nation. We in this country cannot control the faith,
conduct, or stability of the other members of the League; we _can_
control our own.
However it ends, this war must leave the bitterest feelings. League for
Peace or none, there will remain for this country a menace from without.
If Germany were what is called “crushed”—a queer notion in connection
with sixty-five millions of people—she would smoulder with such a fire
of vengeance that a victorious British nation, slumbering in dreams of
security, waxing fat and swollen-headed, would in a few years time be in
as great danger as ever. If Germany be merely shorn of her pretensions
and forced back within her former boundaries, then, unless good fortune
bring her a social revolution and the comparative blessings of
Democracy, Germany may be much the same as she has been, a
soldier-ridden State, quickly or slowly gathering force, to reforge the
iron machinery of the Prussian soul, and lead the armoured dance again.
Stung to the quick by memory of mistake, knowing that she misjudged our
nature and our power, she will not make mistake a second time. However
ardently the successful may desire to forget—it takes two to bury the
hatchet. Let no one think that Germany will forget. Should we, if we
were beaten, or even badly thwarted?
The writer is as great a lover of Peace as any who will resent his
suggestion that enmity will not readily be changed. But it is well to
remember that the menace from without is only increased by forgetting
that human nature is fundamentally the same all the world over; and
still more increased by not remembering that what we dream and desire is
not as a rule what we can obtain. Granted, that all must hope and strive
for the constitution of a League for Peace, and aim at making its
conditions permanent, it will still be folly to blink the contingency of
further war for years to come.
The validity of such a League will hang on the first years. Keep it
intact, enforce respect for its decisions, _get men’s minds used to it_,
and after a short span nothing is more unlikely than that they will
forego its blessings. But militarism will automatically and
proportionately decrease only as men gain confidence in the League’s
authority, recognizing at last that an impartial justice may apply to
nations every bit as well as to individuals, when there is the force of
general consent behind it. Given a generation of its rule, and the
nations will no longer carry daggers to stab each other in the back, or
swords to avenge their “honour.” There is no need for premature
disarmament. Recognition of the menace from without will not harm a
League for Peace during its first years, so long as we shy at all spirit
of aggression, and are loyal to its first principle of “All for one, and
One for all.”
But Peace will also bring to us in this country the menace from within
which was with us before the war began, as it is with every nation at
whatever time of life—the menace of its individual failings, of its
rankness and its uncompleted justice, its riot after riches at the
expense of national health, its exaggerated party strife, its penny
wisdom and pound folly, its lack of an ideal, and perpetual drifting it
knows not whither. If when the war ends we remain a nation, masters of
our own lives—and there is no Briton who is not convinced that we
shall—the menace from within must again be faced; faced with a stouter
heart and a quicker brain; faced at last with some sort of corporate
will to that victory over ourselves, so much more difficult to win than
over hostile fleets and fortresses. To win the war, and thereafter lose
to our own weakness, would cap the event with irony indeed!
It is the fashion with some to talk glibly of this war as if it were a
purge that will drain from our State innumerable ills. The war’s
honourable necessity none of us dispute, but for us it has in truth only
the one advantage—of having revealed to ourselves our quality,
re-established our faith. That quality, that faith, to be of any lasting
use, will have to stand not only the dreadful spasm of war, but the long
exhaustion, the manifold increase of economic stress and social trouble
that will infallibly begin when the war ends. Unless we are resolved to
carry on our effort of sacrifice, good-will, and courage long into the
future, the last state of this land will be worse than the first. The
purge that we like to speak of will be proven nothing but a debauch,
paid for, like all debauches, by lassitude and spleen.
All national energy at the moment is inevitably bent to the ending of a
state of things dreadful to every man and woman living; but, while doing
this with all our might, we need to keep alive in our minds the feeling
that the fight is not for mere gratification of the passion to down our
foes, not just a spurt of military heroism, to be drowned in the drink
and applause of victory; but a fight for something abiding in ourselves
and in the world—for spiritual, not material, ends.
If, even while we are at war, we cannot keep the feeling that what we
are fighting for is a permanent and steady advance in the just and
reasonable life of nations, _beginning with ourselves_, we had better
never have fought, for at the end we shall but have added to our vanity,
and taken from the stock of our patience, our humanity, and our sense of
justice. And so the feelings of the present are linked with the feelings
and necessities that will arrive with peace. If the fine phrases we have
used, and are still using, about Liberty, Humanity, Democracy, and Peace
are not genuinely felt, they will come home to us and roost most vilely.
By the outside world we shall be judged according to the measure of
actuality we give hereafter to the claim we now make of being champion
of Freedom and Humanity; and only according to our inward habit of
thought during the war shall we be able to act when it is over. We can
_do_ nothing now perhaps, save prosecute the fight to its appointed end;
but, if we are not to turn out fraudulent after the event, it is already
time to feel ahead—to accustom our minds to the thought of the future
efforts, Imperial and social, needful to meet future dangers, and to
fulfil the trusts we shall have taken up.
From facile imaginings and Utopian dreams of a purged social life and a
fortified _morale_ to the real conditions that this war will leave is
likely to be the farthest cry any of us will ever hear. We cannot have
it both ways. If war, as most of us believe, is a terrible calamity, it
will not leave an improved world. A sloppy optimism is not the slightest
good, no more than a deliberate pessimism. “It will be all right after
the war!” is, no doubt, the attitude of many minds just now. It will
only be all right after the war if, with all the might of a sustained
national will, we take care that it is. A great and solemn opportunity,
the greatest our country has ever known, will be there, to be made or
marred. The records of history are not too cheering, and experience of
human nature in the past brings no very happy augury—for after too
great effort comes reaction. But this age has higher aspirations, more
self-consciousness than any that has gone before. To turn the possible
calamity of this war to blessing we shall have to set our foot on
Fatalism. There is no real antagonism between the doctrines of
Determinism and Free Will. When things have happened, we see that they
must have happened as they did; but how does this affect the freedom of
our will _before_ they happen—before we know which way they will turn
out? Men and nations are what they make themselves.
What are we going to make ourselves—after?