One more word before these vapourings cease. The national task in this
war is still mighty enough to absorb all action, but not quite all
thought, for it is no spasmodic effort, meaning nothing to the future.
To carry the spirit of to-day into a long to-morrow, making of our
patriotism not a mere torrent soon spent and leaving an arid plain, but
a life-giving, even-flowing river—for that one must not lose the sense
of continuity; one must think ahead. More! One must resolve—resolve
that this new unity shall stand not only the strain of war, but the
greater strain of the coming Peace. After—will come the test. Having
guaranteed our country for the moment from destructive powers without,
shall we at once redeliver it to the destructive powers within—go back
to strife over Ireland, the Suffrage, the Welsh Church, and the Second
Chamber? Or, preserving our new-found unity, settle generously and in a
large spirit those distressful matters, and pass on to the real work—to
a wider and freer view of Empire, to the right training of the nation,
the right feeding of the nation, to securing for each man, woman, and
child a solid foundation of health and hope; to the restoration of the
land and of our food supply; to clearance of mutual suspicions, and the
stablishing of a new trustfulness between Labour and Capital; to the
banishment of inhumanity; the freeing of the eyes of Justice; and
interment of the privileges of class?
Shall we go back to rolling in the troughs of a dirty sea or set new
sail and steer out with a true faith in our destiny as the Ship of
Freedom and Justice?
“When the devil was sick, the devil a saint would be,
But when the devil got well, the devil a saint was he!”
Is that to be our case? Let us not underrate the danger. At this moment
and until the war is over, we are full of patriotism and good-will. We
_have_ to be. There’s the trouble. Once Peace comes, and the unifying
force of our common peril is over, what then? Is the old raw party
spirit to ramp among us again? If a man would discover what danger there
is of a return to every kind of disunity, let him take a definite
national question and see how much of his private interest or conviction
he is prepared to abate for the sake of the public good. Mighty little!
Are we to dissolve again into those “rascally Radicals” and those
“infernal Tories”; into “grinders of the poor” and “discontented
devils”; into “brutal men” and “hysterical females” with all the other
warring tribes of the Armageddon of Peace? Are we to lose utterly the
inspiring vision of our Country, in the squabbles of domestic life? Some
of that intense vision must go, alas! But surely not all. And yet all
_will_ go unless we keep in mind the thought that this war is not an
end, but the means to an end, which none of us will see, but all of us
can further in time of peace as well as in time of war—an end for whose
attainment the blood and treasure now spilled is but as a preliminary.
It will be heart-breaking if from this stupendous cataclysm no lasting
good to the world and to Britain can be brought forth. Its horror, even
now, few realize who are not at the front. One who was many months on
ambulance duty in the French lines wrote these words:
“They talk of the war! Let them come close in! Let them see
lying around emaciated heads with no bodies within a couple of
hundred yards; let them see the bloody confusion of heads and
entrails and limbs which is showered around when a trench is
mined; let them see the heads with ears and noses bitten off as
if by mad dogs; let them see the men driven insane by the sights
and sounds of the battlefield, who turn and rend their comrades
and have to be shot down by them; let them come where hundreds
of wounded men are lying on contested ground screaming the whole
night through (and not one in a million has ever heard a man
scream!) and then talk of the war!”
If from this horror, fought through and endured, as we believe, for the
future of our Land and the future of mankind, there is to come no
blessing, no advance to freedom and health and justice. . . . What then?
Nothing will be easier than to take up again the peace life of Britain
as it was, and worse than it was, because coarsened by the passions of
war, and embittered by the strain of a greater economic stress. Nothing
will be easier than to give rein to the instincts of greed, pugnacity,
and rancour, now hard held in by sentiment and the common peril; to step
back and walk blindly in a country where all is faction; where class
shuns class, and men and women are bitterly opposed; where the youth of
the nation is all the time running to seed; where children go hungry and
millions throughout the land are miserably housed and fed; where the
access to justice is often still beyond the reach of the poor; where
helplessness is not yet a guarantee against ill-usage. Once the war
effort is over, nothing will be easier than—from a resolved and united
nation—to become a crowd pressing this way and that, without view and
without vision, seeking purse and place, or, at the best, fulfilment of
small factious policies.
No one can tell yet what will be the world-sequel of this war—whether
it will bring a long peace or other wars; the enlargement of democracy
or the hardening of autocratic rule; the United States of Europe or a
congery of distrustful Powers working for another “Day.” Only one thing
we know, that in our charge will be our own national life, to make or to
mar; to prepare against whatever fortune the outer world shall brew, to
prepare against the subtle march of inward dissolution. Our future does
not lie on the knees of the gods; it lies in our own hands, and hearts,
and brains, and the use that we shall make of them.
Swift is the descent to hell, and no wings fly so fast thither as the
wings of material success. Shall we go that way? Or shall we, having
fixed our eyes on a goal far beyond the finish of this war, quietly,
resolutely in our conduct to the outer world and in our national life,
begin at once transmuting into deeds those words: Freedom, Health,
Justice for All?
As a man thinks and dreams, so does he act. It is time to think and
dream a little of the future, while the spirit of unity is on us, the
vision of our Country with us; so that, when we see again the face of
Peace, we may continue to act in unity, having in our hearts the good of
our Land, and in our eyes the vision of her, growing ever to truer
greatness and beauty.