THE HEALING OF NATIONS AND THE HIDDEN SOURCES OF THEIR STRIFE
By Edward Carpenter
1915
"_The Tree of Life ... whose leaves are for the Healing of the Nations_"
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTORY
II. WAR-MADNESS
III. THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR
IV. THE CASE AGAINST GERMANY
V. THE CASE FOR GERMANY
VI. THE HEALING OF NATIONS
VII. PATRIOTISM AND INTERNATIONALISM
VIII. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR AND RECRUITING
IX. CONSCRIPTION
X. HOW SHALL THE PLAGUE BE STAYED?
XI. COMMERCIAL PROSPERITY THE PROSPERITY OF A CLASS
XII. COLONIES AND SEAPORTS
XIII. WAR AND THE SEX IMPULSE
XIV. THE OVER-POPULATION SCARE
XV. THE FRIENDLY AND THE FIGHTING INSTINCTS
XVI. NEVER AGAIN!
XVII. THE TREE OF LIFE
APPENDIX--
A New and Better Peace
The Change from the Old Germany to the New
Classes in Germany for and against the War
Political Ignorance
Purpose of the War: Max Harden
England's Perfidy: Professors Haeckel and Eucken
Manifesto of Professor Eucken
Nietzsche on Disarmament
The Effect of Disarmament
The Principle of Nationality: Winston Churchill
Conscription
Neutralization of the Sea: H.G. Wells
The War and Democracy: Arnold Bennett
The Future Settlement: G. Lowes Dickinson
Brutality of Warfare: H.M. Tomlinson
Patriotism: Romain Rolland
No Patriotism in Business!
Manifesto, Independent Labour Party
Responsibility of the whole Capitalist Class
Text of Karl Liebknecht's Protest in Reichstag
The Russian Danger
Letter on Russia by P. Kropotkin
On the Future of Europe, by the same
Servia: R.W. Seton-Watson
The Battlefield: Walt Whitman
Chinese Christians on the War: Dr. A. Salter
Essential Friendliness of Peoples
Reconciliation in Death
Christmas at the Front, 1914
Letter from the Trenches by Baron Marschall von Bieberstein
I
INTRODUCTORY
The following Studies and Notes, made during the earlier period of the
present war and now collected together for publication, do not--as will
be evident to the reader--pretend to any sort of completeness in their
embrace of the subject, or finality in its presentation. Rather they are
scattered thoughts suggested by the large and tangled drama which we are
witnessing; and I am sufficiently conscious that their expression
involves contradictions as well as repetitions.
The truth is that affairs of this kind--like all the _great_ issues of
human life, Love, Politics, Religion, and so forth, do not, at their
best, admit of final dispatch in definite views and phrases. They are
too vast and complex for that. It is, indeed, quite probable that such
things cannot be adequately represented or put before the human mind
_without_ logical inconsistencies and contradictions. But (perhaps for
that very reason) they are the subjects of the most violent and dogmatic
differences of opinion. Nothing people quarrel about more bitterly than
Politics--unless it be Religion: both being subjects of which all that
one can really say for certain is--that nobody understands them.
When, as in the present war, a dozen or more nations enter into conflict
and hurl at each other accusations of the angriest sort (often quite
genuinely made and yet absolutely irreconcilable one with another), and
when on the top of that scores and hundreds of writers profess to
explain the resulting situation in a few brief phrases (but
unfortunately their explanations are all different), and calmly affix
the blame on "Russia" or "Germany" or "France" or "England"--just as if
these names represented certain responsible individuals, supposed for
the purposes of the argument to be of very wily and far-scheming
disposition--whereas it is perfectly well known that they really
represent most complex whirlpools of political forces, in which the
merest accidents (as whether two members of a Cabinet have quarrelled,
or an Ambassador's dinner has disagreed with him) may result in a long
and fatal train of consequences--it becomes obvious that all so-called
"explanations" (though it may be right that they should be attempted)
fall infinitely short, of the reality.[1]
Feeling thus the impossibility of dealing at all adequately with the
present situation, I have preferred to take here and there just an
aspect of it for consideration, with a view especially to the
differences between Germany and England. I have thought that instead of
spending time over recriminations one might be on safer ground by
trying to get at the root-causes of this war (and other wars), thus
making one's conclusions to some degree independent of a multitude of
details and accidents, most of which must for ever remain unknown to us.
There are in general four rather well-marked species of wars--Religious
wars, Race wars, wars of Ambition and Conquest, and wars of Acquisition
and Profit--though in any particular case the four species may be more
or less mingled. The religious and the race motives often go together;
but in modern times on the whole (and happily) the religious motive is
not so very dominant. Wars of race, of ambition, and of acquisition are,
however, still common enough. Yet it is noticeable, as I frequently have
occasion to remark in the following papers, that it only very rarely
happens that any of these wars are started or set in motion by the
mass-peoples themselves. The mass-peoples, at any rate of the more
modern nations, are quiescent, peaceable, and disinclined for strife.
Why, then, do wars occur? It is because the urge to war comes, not from
the masses of a nation but from certain classes within it. In every
nation, since the dawn of history, there have been found, beside the
toiling masses, three great main cliques or classes, the Religious, the
Military, and the Commercial. It was so in far-back ancient India; it is
so now. Each of these classes endeavours in its turn--as one might
expect--to become the ruling class and to run the government of the
nation. The governments of the nations thus become class-governments.
And it is one or another of these classes that for reasons of its own,
alone or in combination with another class, foments war and sets it
going.
In saying this I do not by any means wish to say anything against the
mere existence of Class, in itself. In a sense that is a perfectly
natural thing. There _are_ different divisions of human activity, and it
is quite natural that those individuals whose temperament calls them to
a certain activity--literary or religious or mercantile or military or
what not--should range themselves together in a caste or class; just as
the different functions of the human body range themselves in definite
organs. And such grouping in classes may be perfectly healthy _provided
the class so created subordinates itself to the welfare of the Nation_.
But if the class does _not_ subordinate itself to the general welfare,
if it pursues its own ends, usurps governmental power, and dominates the
nation for its own uses--if it becomes parasitical, in fact--then it and
the nation inevitably become diseased; as inevitably as the human body
becomes diseased when its organs, instead of supplying the body's needs,
become the tyrants and parasites of the whole system.
It is this Class-disease which in the main drags the nations into the
horrors and follies of war. And the horrors and follies of war are the
working out and expulsion on the surface of evils which have long been
festering within. How many times in the history of "civilization" has a
bigoted religious clique, or a swollen-headed military clique, or a
greedy commercial gang--caring not one jot for the welfare of the people
committed to its charge--dragged them into a senseless and ruinous war
for the satisfaction of its own supposed interests! It is here and in
this direction (which searches deeper than the mere weighing and
balancing of Foreign policies and Diplomacies) that we must look for the
"explanation" of the wars of to-day.
And even race wars--which at first sight seem to have little to do with
the Class trouble--illustrate the truth of my contention. For they
almost always arise from the hatred generated in a nation by an alien
class establishing itself in the midst of that nation--establishing
itself, maybe, as a governmental or dominant class (generally a military
or landlord clique) or maybe as a parasitical or competing class (as in
the case of the Jews in Europe and the Japanese in America and so
forth). They arise, like all other wars, from the existence of a class
within the nation which is not really in accord with the people of that
nation, but is pursuing its own interests apart from theirs. In the
second of the following papers, "The Roots of the Great War," I have
drawn attention to the influence of the military and commercial classes,
especially in Germany, and the way in which their policy, coming into
conflict with a similar policy in the other Western nations, has
inevitably led to the present embroilment. In Eastern Europe similar
causes are at work, but there the race elements--and even the
religious--constitute a more important factor in the problem.
By a curious fatality Germany has become the centre of this great war
and world-movement, which is undoubtedly destined--as the Germans
themselves think, though in a way quite other than they think--to be of
vast importance, and the beginning of a new era in human evolution. And
the more one considers Germany's part in the affair, the more one sees,
I think, that from the combined influence of her historical antecedents
and her national psychology this fatality was to be expected. In roughly
putting together these antecedent elements and influences, I have
entitled the chapter "The Case _for_ Germany," because on the principle
of _tout comprendre_ the fact of the evolution being inevitable
constitutes her justification. The nations cannot fairly complain of her
having moved along a line which for a century or more has been slowly
and irresistibly prepared for her. On the other hand, the nations do
complain of the manner and the methods with which at the last she has
precipitated and conducted the war--as indeed they have shown by so
widely combining against her. However right, from the point of view of
destiny and necessity, Germany may be, she has apparently from the point
of view of the moment put herself in the wrong. And the chapter dealing
with this phase of the question I have called "The Case _against_
Germany."
Whatever further complications and postponements may arise, there will
certainly come a time of recovery and reconstruction on a wide and
extended scale over Europe and a large part of the world. To even
outline this period would be impossible at present; but in the sixth
chapter and the last, as well as in the intermediate pieces, I have
given some suggestions towards this future Healing of the Nations.
* * * * *
The Evil--huge and monstrous as it is--is not senseless, one may feel
sure. Even now here in England one perceives an extraordinary pulling
together and bracing up of the people, a development of solidarity and
mutual helpfulness, a greater seriousness, and a disregarding of
artificialities, which are all to the good. These things are gains, even
though the way of their manifestation be through much of enmity and
ignorance. And one may fairly suppose that similar results are traceable
in the other nations concerned. Wounds and death may seem senseless and
needless, but those who suffer them do not suffer in vain. All these
shattering experiences, whether in a nation's career or in the career of
an individual, cause one--they force one--to look into the bases of life
and to get nearer its realities. If, in this case, the experiences of
the war, and the fire which the nations are passing through, serve to
destroy and burn up much of falsity in their respective habits and
institutions, we shall have to admit that the attendant disasters have
not been all loss--even though at the same time we admit that if we had
had a grain of sense we might have mended our falsities in far more
economical and sensible fashion.
If in the following pages--chiefly concerned as they are with Germany
and England--I have seemed to find fault with either party or to affix
blame on one or the other, it is not necessary to suppose that one
harbours ill-feeling towards either, or that one fails to recognize the
splendid devotion of both the combatants. Two nations so closely related
as the Germans and the English cannot really be so hopelessly different
in temperament and character; and a great deal of the supposed
difference is obviously artificial and class-made for the occasion.
Still, there _are_ differences; and as we both think we are right, and
as we are unable to argue the matter out in a rational way, there seems
to be nothing for it but to fight.
War has often been spoken of as a great Game; and Mr. Jerome K. Jerome
has lately written eloquently on that subject. It is a game in which the
two parties agree, so to speak, to differ. They take sides, and in
default of any more rational method, resort to the arbitrament of force.
The stakes are high, and if on the one hand the game calls forth an
immense amount of resource, skill, alertness, self-control, endurance,
courage, and even tenderness, helpfulness, and fidelity; on the other
hand, it is liable to let loose pretty bad passions of vindictiveness
and cruelty, as well as to lead to an awful accumulation of mental and
physical suffering and of actual material loss. To call war "The Great
Game" may have been all very well in the more rudimentary wars of the
past; but to-day, when every horrible invention of science is conjured
up and utilized for the express purpose of blowing human bodies to bits
and strewing battlefields with human remains, and the human spirit
itself can hardly hold up against such a process of mechanical
slaughter, the term has ceased to be applicable. The affections and the
conscience of mankind are too violently outraged by the spectacle; and a
great mass of feeling is forming which one may fairly hope will ere long
make this form of strife impossible among the more modern peoples.
Still, even now, as Mr. Jerome himself contends, the term is partly
justified by a certain fine feeling of which it is descriptive and which
is indeed very noticeable in all ranks. Whether in the Army or Navy,
among bluejackets or private soldiers or officers, the feeling is
certainly very much that of a big game--with its own rules of honour and
decency which must be adhered to, and carried on with extraordinary
fortitude, patience, and good-humour. Whether it arises from the
mechanical nature of the slaughter, or from any other cause, the fact
remains that among our fighting people to-day--at any rate in the
West--there is very little feeling of _hatred_ towards the "enemy." It
is difficult, indeed, to hate a foe whom you do not even see. Chivalry
is not dead, and at the least cessation of the stress of conflict the
tendency to honour opponents, to fraternize with them, to succour the
wounded, and so forth, asserts itself again. And chivalry demands that
what feelings of this kind we credit to ourselves we should also credit
to the other parties in the game. We do cordially credit them to our
French and Belgian allies, and if we do not credit them quite so
cordially to the Germans, that is _partly_ at least because every lapse
from chivalrous conduct on the part of our opponents is immediately
fastened upon and made the most of by our Press. Chivalry is by no means
dead in the Teutonic breast, though the sentiment has certainly been
obscured by some modern German teachings.
While these present war-producing conditions last, we have to face them
candidly and with as much good sense as we can command (which is for the
most part only little!). We have to face them and make the best of
them--though by no means to encourage them. Perhaps after all even a war
like the present one--monstrous as it is--does not denote so great a
deviation of the old Earth from its appointed orbit as we are at first
inclined to think. Under normal conditions the deaths on our planet (and
many of them exceedingly lingering and painful) continue at the rate of
rather more than one every second--say 90,000 a day. The worst battles
cannot touch such a wholesale slaughter as this. Life at its normal best
is full of agonizings and endless toil and sufferings; what matters,
what _it is really there for_, is that we should learn to conduct it
with Dignity, Courage, Goodwill--to transmute its dross into gold. If
war _has_ to continue yet for a time, there is still plenty of evidence
to show that we can wrest--even from its horrors and insanities--some
things that are "worth while," and among others the priceless jewel of
human love and helpfulness.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Some people take great pleasure in analysing White Books and Grey
Books and Orange Books and Yellow Books without end, and proving this or
that from them--as of course out of such a mass of material they can
easily do, according to their fancy. But when one remembers that almost
all the documents in these books have been written with a _view_ to
their later publication; and when one remembers also that, however
incompetent diplomatists as a class may be, no one supposes them to be
such fools as to entrust their _most_ important _ententes_ and
understandings with each other to printed records--why, one comes to the
conclusion that the analysis of all these State papers is not a very
profitable occupation.
II
WAR-MADNESS
_September_, 1914.
How mad, how hopelessly mad, it all seems I With fifteen to twenty
million soldiers already mobilized, and more than half that number in
the fighting lines; with engines of appalling destruction by land and
sea, and over the land and under the sea; with Northern France, Belgium,
and parts of Germany, Poland, Russia, Servia, and Austria drenched in
blood; the nations exhausting their human and material resources in
savage conflict--this war, marking the climax, and (let us hope) the
_finale_ of our commercial civilization, is the most monstrous the old
Earth has ever seen. And yet, as in a hundred earlier and lesser wars,
we hardly know the why and wherefore of it. It is like the sorriest
squabbles of children and schoolboys--utterly senseless and unreasoning.
But broken bodies and limbs and broken hearts and an endless river of
blood and suffering are the outcome.
III
THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR[2]
_October_, 1914.
In the present chapter I wish especially to dwell on (1) the danger to
society, mentioned in the Introduction, of class-ascendancy and
class-rule; and (2) the hope for the future in the international
solidarity of the workers.
Through all the mist of lies and slander created on such an occasion--by
which each nation after a time succeeds in proving that its own cause is
holy while that of its opponent is wicked and devilish; through the
appeals to God and Justice, common to both sides; through the shufflings
and windings of diplomats, and the calculated attitudes of politicians,
adopted for public approval; through the very real rage and curses of
soldiers, the desperate tears and agony of women, the murder of babes,
and the smoke of burning towns and villages: it is difficult, indeed, to
arrive at clear and just conclusions.
When the war first broke out no one could give an adequate reason for
it. It all seemed absurd, monstrous, impossible. Then arose a Babel of
explanations. It was that Germany desired to crush France finally; it
was that she was determined to break Great Britain's naval and
commercial supremacy; it was that she must have an outlet on the sea
through Belgium and Holland; that she must force a way to the
Mediterranean through Servia; that she must carry out her financial
schemes in Asia Minor and the Baghdad region. It was her hatred of the
Slav and her growing dread of Russia; it was her desire for a Colonial
Empire; it was fear of a revolution at home; it was the outcome of long
years of Pan-Germanist philosophy; it was the result of pure military
ambition and the class-domination of the Junkers. Each and all of these
reasons (and many others) were in turn cited, and magnified into the
mainspring of the war; and yet even to-day we cannot say which _was_ the
main reason, or if we admit them all we cannot say in what exact
proportions their influences were combined.
Moreover, they all assume that Germany was the aggressor; and we have to
remember that this would not be admitted for a moment by a vast number
of the Germans themselves--who cease not to say that the war was simply
forced upon them by the hostile preparations of Russia, by the
vengefulness of France, by the jealous foreign policy of England, and by
the obvious threat embodied in the _Entente_ between those three
nations; and that if they (the Germans) made preparations for, or even
precipitated it, that was only out of the sheer necessity of
self-preservation.[3]
Thus we are still left without any generally accepted conclusion in the
matter. Moreover, we are struck, in considering the list of reasons
cited, by a feeling that they are all in their way rather partial and
superficial--that they do not go to the real root of the subject.
Out of them all--and after the first period of confusion and doubt has
passed--our own people at home have settled down into the conviction
that German militarism in general, and Prussian Junkerdom in particular,
are to blame, and that for the good of the world as well as for our own
good we are out to fight these powers of evil. Prussian
class-militarism, it is said, under which for so long the good people of
Germany have groaned, has become a thing intolerable. The arrogance, the
insolence, of the Junker officer, his aristocratic pretension, his
bearish manners, have made him a byword, not only in his own country but
all over Europe; and his belief in sheer militarism and Jingo
imperialism has made him a menace. The Kaiser has only made things
worse. Vain and flighty to a degree, and, like most vain people, rather
shallow, Wilhelm II has supposed himself to be a second and greater
Bismarck, destined by Providence to create the said Teutonic
world-empire. It is simply to fight these powers of evil that we are
out.
Of course, there is a certain amount of truth in this view; at the same
time, it is lamentably insufficient. The fact is that in the vast flux
of destiny which is involved in such a war as the present, and which no
argument can really adequately represent, we are fain to snatch at
_some_ neat phrase, however superficial, by way of explanation. And we
are compelled, moreover, to find a phrase which will put our own efforts
in an ideal light--otherwise we cannot go on fighting. No nation can
fight confessedly for a mean or base object. Every nation inscribes on
its banner _Freedom, Justice, Religion, Culture_ versus _Barbarism_, or
something of the kind, and in a sense redeems itself in so fighting. It
saves its soul even though bodily it may be conquered. And this is not
hypocrisy, but a psychological necessity, though each nation, of course,
accuses the other of hypocrisy.
We are fighting "to put down militarism and the dominance of a military
class," says the great B.P., and one can only hope that when the war is
over we shall remember and rivet into shape this great and good
purpose--not only with regard to foreign militarism, but also with
regard to our own. Certainly, whatever other or side views we may take
of the war, we are bound to see in it an illustration of the danger of
military class-rule. You cannot keep a 60-h.p. Daimler motor-car in your
shed for years and years and still deny yourself the pleasure of going
out on the public road with it--even though you know you are not a very
competent driver; and you cannot continue for half a century perfecting
your military and naval organization without in the end making the
temptation to become a political road-hog almost irresistible.
Still, accepting for the moment the popular explanation given above of
Germany's action as to some degree justified, we cannot help seeing how
superficial and unsatisfactory it is, because it at once raises the
question, which, indeed, is being asked in all directions, and not
satisfactorily answered: "How does it happen that so peace-loving,
sociable, and friendly a people as the great German mass-folk, as we
have hitherto known them, with their long scientific and literary
tradition, their love of music and philosophy, their lager beer and
tobacco, and their generally democratic habits, should have been led
into a situation like the present, whether by a clique of Junkers or by
a clique of militarist philosophers and politicians?" And the answer to
this is both interesting and important.
It resolves itself into two main causes: (1) the rise of the great
German commercial class; and (2) the political ignorance of the German
people.
It is obvious, I think, that a military aristocracy alone, or even with
the combined support of empire-building philosophers and a jack-boot
Kaiser, could not have hurried the solid German nation into so strange a
situation. In old days, and under an avowedly feudal order of society,
such a thing might well have happened. But to-day the source and seat of
power has passed from crowned heads and barons into another social
stratum. It is the financial and commercial classes in the modern States
who have the sway; and unless these classes desire it the military
cliques may plot for war in vain. Since 1870, and the unification of
Germany, the growth of her manufactures and her trade has been enormous;
her commercial prosperity has gone up by leaps and bounds; and this
extension of trade, especially of international trade, has led--as it
had already so conspicuously done in England--to the development of
corresponding ideals and habits of life among the population. The
modest, simple-living, middle-class households of fifty years ago have
largely disappeared, and in their place have sprung up, at any rate in
the larger towns, the very same commercial and parasitical classes, with
their Philistine luxury and fatuous ideals, which have been so
depressing and distressing a feature of _our_ social life during the
same period. Naturally, the desire of these classes has been for the
glorification of Germany, the establishment of an absolutely world-wide
commercial supremacy, and the ousting of England from her markets.
"Germany," said Peter Kropotkin[4] a year or two ago, "on entering a
striking period of juvenile activity, quickly succeeded in doubling and
trebling her industrial productivity, and soon increasing it tenfold;
and now the German middle classes covet new sources of enrichment in
the plains of Poland, in the prairies of Hungary, on the plateaux of
Africa, and especially around the railway line to Baghdad--in the rich
valleys of Asia Minor, which can provide German capitalists with a
labouring population ready to be exploited under one of the most
beautiful skies in the world. It may be so with Egypt some day.
Therefore it is ports for exports, and especially military ports, in the
Adriatic, the Persian Gulf, on the African coast in Beira, and also in
the Pacific, that these schemers of German colonial trade wish to
conquer. Their faithful servant, the German Empire, with its armies and
ironclads, is at their service for this purpose."
It is this class, then, which by backing both financially and morally
the military class has been chiefly responsible for bringing about the
war. Not that I mean, in saying so, that the commercial folk of Germany
have directly instigated its outbreak at the present moment and in the
present circumstances--for many, or most of them, must have seen how
dangerous it was likely to prove to their trade. But in respect of the
general policy which they have so long pursued they are responsible. One
cannot go on for years (and let England, too, remember this) preaching
militarism as a means of securing commercial advantage, and then refuse
to be answerable for the results to which such a policy may lead. The
Junker classes of Prussia and their Kaiser might be suffering from a bad
attack of swelled head; vanity and arrogance might be filling them with
dreams of world-empire; but there would have been no immediate European
war had not the vast trade-interests of Germany come into conflict, or
seemed to come into conflict, with the trade-interests of the
surrounding nations--had not the financial greed of the nation been
stirred, as well as its military vanity.
And talking of general trade and finance, one must not forget to include
the enormous powers exercised in the present day by individual
corporations and individual financiers who intrude their operations into
the sphere of politics. We saw _that_ in our own Boer War; and behind
the scenes in Germany to-day similar influences are at work. The
Deutsche Bank, with immense properties all over the world, and some
£85,000,000 sterling in its hands in deposits alone, initiated
financially the Baghdad Railway scheme. Its head, Herr Arthur von
Gwinner, the great financier, is a close adviser of the Kaiser. "The
railway is already nearly half built, and it represents a German
investment of between £16,000,000 and £18,000,000. Let this be thought
of when people imagine that Germany and Austria went to war with the
idea of avenging the murder of an Archduke.... All German trade would
suffer if the Baghdad Railway scheme were to fail."[5] Then there is
Herr August Thyssen--"King Thyssen"--who owns coalmines, rolling mills,
harbours, and docks throughout Germany, iron-ore mines in France,
warehouses in Russia, and _entrepôts_ in nearly every country from
Brazil and Argentina to India.[6] He has declared that German interests
in Asia Minor must be safeguarded at all costs. But Russia also has
large prospective commercial interests in Asia Minor. The moral is clear
and needs no enforcing. Such men as these--and many others, the
Rathenaus, Siemens, Krupps, Ballins, and Heinekens--exercise in Germany
an immense political influence, just as do our financial magnates at
home. They represent the peaks and summits of wide-spreading commercial
activities whose bases are rooted among the general public. Yet through
it all it must not be forgotten that they represent in each case (as I
shall explain more clearly presently) the interests of a _class_--the
commercial class--but not of the whole nation.
One must, then, modify the first conclusion, that the blame of the war
rests with the military class, by adding a second factor, namely, the
rise and influence of the commercial class. These two classes, acting
and reacting on each other, and pushing--though for different
reasons--in the same direction, are answerable, as far as Germany is
concerned, for dragging Europe into this trouble; and they must share
the blame.
If it is true, as already suggested, that Germany's action has only been
that of the spark that fires the magazine, still her part in the affair
affords such an extraordinarily illuminating text and illustration that
one may be excused for dwelling on it.
Here, in her case, we have the divisions of a nation's life set out in
well-marked fashion. We have a military clique headed by a personal and
sadly irresponsible ruler; we have a vulgar and much swollen commercial
class; and then, besides these two, we have a huge ant's nest of
professors and students, a large population of intelligent and
well-trained factory workers, and a vast residuum of peasants. Thus we
have at least five distinct classes, but of these the last three
have--till thirty or forty years ago--paid little or no attention to
political matters. The professors and students have had their noses
buried in their departmental science and _fach_ studies; the artisans
have been engrossed with their technical work, and have been only
gradually drifting away from their capitalist employers and into the
Socialist camp; and the peasants--as elsewhere over the world, absorbed
in their laborious and ever-necessary labours--have accepted their fate
and paid but little attention to what was going on over their heads.
Yet these three last-mentioned classes, forming the great bulk of the
nation, have been swept away, and suddenly at the last, into a huge
embroilment in which to begin with they had no interest or profit.
This may seem strange, but the process after all is quite simple, and to
study it in the case of Germany may throw helpful light on our own
affairs. However the blame may be apportioned between the Junker and
commercial classes, it is clear that, fired by the Bismarckian
programme, and greatly overstretching it, they played into each other's
hands. The former relied for the financing of its schemes on the support
of the commercials. The latter saw in the militarists a power which
might increase Germany's trade-supremacy. Vanity and greed are met
together, patriotism and profits have kissed each other. A Navy League
and an Army League and an Air League arose. Professors and teachers were
subsidized in the universities; the children were taught Pan-Germanism
in the schools; a new map of Europe was put before them. An enormous
literature grew up on the lines of Treitschke, Houston Chamberlain, and
Bernhardi, with novels and romances to illustrate side-issues, and the
Press playing martial music. The students and intellectuals began to be
infected; the small traders and shopkeepers were moved; and the
war-fever gradually spread through the nation. As to the artisans, they
may, as I have said, have largely belonged to the Socialist party--with
its poll of four million votes in the last election--and in the words of
Herr Haase in the Reichstag just before the war, they may have wished to
hold themselves apart from "this cursed Imperialist policy"; but when
the war actually arrived, and the fever, and the threat of Russia, and
the fury of conscription, they perforce had to give way and join in. How
on earth could they do otherwise? And the peasants--even if they escaped
the fever--could not escape the compulsion of authority nor the old
blind tradition of obedience. They do not know, even to-day, why they
are fighting; and they hardly know whom they are fighting, but in their
ancient resignation they accept the inevitable and shout "Deutschland
über Alles" with the rest. And so a whole nation is swept off its feet
by a small section of it, and the insolence of a class becomes, as in
Louvain and Rheim's, the scandal of the world.[7]
And the people bleed; yes, it is always the people who bleed. The trains
arrive at the hospital bases, hundreds, positively hundreds of them,
full of wounded. Shattered human forms lie in thousands on straw inside
the trucks and wagons, or sit painfully reclined in the passenger
compartments, their faces grimed, their clothes ragged, their toes
protruding from their boots. Some have been stretched on the battlefield
for forty-eight hours, or even more, tormented by frost at night,
covered with flies by day, without so much as a drink of water. And
those that have not already become a mere lifeless heap of rags have
been jolted in country carts to some railway-station, and there, or at
successive junctions, have been shunted on sidings for endless hours.
And now, with their wounds still slowly bleeding or oozing, they are
picked out by tender hands, and the most crying cases are roughly,
dressed before consigning to a hospital. And some faces are shattered,
hardly recognizable, and some have limbs torn away; and there are
internal wounds unspeakable, and countenances deadly pallid, and
moanings which cannot be stifled, and silences worse than moans.
Yes, the agony and bloody sweat of battlefields endured for the
domination or the ambition of a class is appalling. But in many cases,
though more dramatic and appealing to the imagination, one may doubt if
it is worse than the year-long and age-long agony of daily life endured
for the same reason.
Maeterlinck, in his eloquent and fiery letter to the _Daily Mail_ of
September 14th, maintained that the whole German nation is equally to
blame in this affair--that all classes are equally involved in it, with
no _degrees_ of guilt. We may excuse the warmth of personal feeling
which makes him say this, but we cannot accept the view. We are bound to
point out that it is only by some such analysis as the above, and
estimation of the method by which the delusions of one class may be
communicated to the others, that we can guard ourselves, too, from
falling into similar delusions.
I mentioned that besides the growth of the commercial class, a second
great cause of the war was the political ignorance of the German people.
And this is important. Fifty years ago, and before that, when Germany
was divided up into scores of small States and Duchies, the mass of its
people had no practical interest in politics. Such politics as existed,
as between one Duchy and another, were mere teacup politics. Read
Eckermann's _Conversations_, and see how small a part they played in
Goethe's mind. That may have been an advantage in one way. The brains of
the nation went into science, literature, music. And when, after 1870,
the unification of Germany came, and the political leadership passed
over to Prussia, the same state of affairs for a long time continued;
the professors continued their investigations in the matters of the
thyroid gland or the rock inscriptions in the Isle of Thera, but they
left the internal regulation of the State and its foreign policy
confidently in the hands of the Kaiser and the nominees of the great
and rising _bourgeoisie_, and themselves remained unobservant and
uninstructed in such matters. It was only when these latter powers
declared--as in the Emperor's pan-German proclamation of 1896--that a
Teutonic world-empire was about to be formed, and that the study of
_Welt-politik_ was the duty of every serious German, that the thinking
and reading portion of the population suddenly turned its attention to
this subject. An immense mass of political writings--pamphlets,
prophecies, military and economic treatises, romances of German
conquest, and the like--naturally many of them of the crudest sort, was
poured forth and eagerly accepted by the public, and a veritable Fool's
Paradise of German suprernacy arose. It is only in this way, by noting
the long-preceding ignorance of the German citizen in the matter of
politics, his absolute former non-interference in public affairs, and
the dazed state of his mind when he suddenly found himself on the
supposed pinnacle of world-power--that we can explain his easy
acceptance of such cheap and _ad hoc_ publications as those of
Bernhardi and Houston Chamberlain, and the fact that he was so easily
rushed into the false situation of the present war.[8] The absurd
_canards_ which at an early date gained currency, in Berlin--as that the
United States had swallowed Canada, that the Afghans in mass were
invading; India, that Ireland was plunged in civil war--point in the
same direction; and so do the barbarities of the Teutonic troops in the
matters of humanity and art. For though in all war and in the heat of
battle there are barbarities perpetrated, it argues a strange state of
the German national psychology that in this case a heartless severity
and destruction of the enemy's life and property should have been
preached beforehand, and quite deliberately, by professors and
militarists, and accepted, apparently, by the general public. It argues,
to say the least, a strange want of perception of the very unfavourable
impression which such a programme must inevitably excite in the mind of
the world at large.
* * * * *
It is, no doubt, pleasant in its way for us British to draw this picture
of Germany, and to trace the causes which led the ruling powers there,
years ago, to make up their minds for war, because, of course, the
process in some degree exonerates us. But, as I have already said, I
have dwelt on Germany, not only because she affords such a good
illustration of what to avoid, but also because she affords so clear an
example of what is going on elsewhere in Europe--in England and France
and Italy, and among all the modern nations. We cannot blame Germany
without implicitly also blaming these.
What, indeed, shall we say of England? Germany has for years maintained
that with her own growing population and her growing trade she needs a
more extended seaboard in Europe, and coaling stations and colonies in
other regions of the globe, but that England, jealous of commercial
supremacy, has been determined to deny her these, and, if possible, to
crush her; that she (Germany) has lived in perpetual fear and panic;
and that if in this case she has been the first to strike, it has only
been because to wait England's opportunity would have been to court
defeat. Allowing for the exaggerations inseparable from opposed points
of view, is there not some justification for this plea? England, who
plunged into the Crimean War in order to _prevent_ Russia from obtaining
a seaboard and her natural commercial expansion, and who afterwards
joined with Russia in order to plunder Persia and to prevent Germany
from getting her railways along the Persian Gulf; who calmly
appropriated Egypt, with its valuable cottonlands and market; who, at
the behest of a group of capitalists and financiers, turned her great
military machine on a little nation of Boer farmers in South Africa;
who, it is said,[9] sold 300,000 tons of coal to Russia to aid her fleet
against Japan, and at the same time furnished Japan with gold at a high
rate of interest for use against Russia--what trust can be placed in
her? "England," says Bernhardi, "in spite of all her pretences of a
liberal and philanthropic policy, has never sought any other object
than personal advantage and the unscrupulous suppression of her rivals."
Let us hope that this "never" is _too_ harsh; let us at least say
"hardly ever"; but still, are we not compelled to admit that if the rise
of commercial ambition in Germany has figured as a danger to _us_, our
far greater commercial ambitions have not only figured as a danger to
Germany, but, in conjunction with our alliance with France and Russia,
her ancient foes, may well have led to a state of positive panic among
her people? And if, as the Allies would doubtless say, there was really
no need for any such panic, the situation was obviously sufficiently
grave to be easily made use of by a military class for its own ends, or
by an armaments ring or a clique of financiers for theirs. Indeed, it
would be interesting to know what enormous profits Kruppism (to use H.G.
Wells' expressive term) _has_ already made out of this world-madness.
Nor can it be denied that the commercial interest in England, if not
deliberately intending to provoke war with Germany, has not been at all
sorry to seize this opportunity of laying a rival Power low--if only in
order to snatch the said rival's trade. That, indeed, the daily Press
reveals only too clearly.
From all this the danger of class-domination emerges more and more into
relief. In Prussia the old Feudal caste remains--in a decadent state,
certainly, but perhaps for that very reason more arrogant, more vulgar,
and less conscious of any _noblesse oblige_ than even before. By itself,
however, and if unsupported by the commercial class, it would probably
have done little harm. In Britain the Feudal caste has ceased to be
exclusively military, and has become blended with the commercial class.
The British aristocracy now consists largely or chiefly of retired
grocers and brewers. Commercialism here has become more confessedly
dominant than in Germany, and whereas there the commercial class may
_support_ the military in its ambitions, here the commercial class
_uses_ the military as a matter of course and for its own ends. We have
become a Nation of Shopkeepers having our own revolvers and machine-guns
behind the counter.
And yet not really a Nation of Shopkeepers, but rather a nation ruled
by a shopkeeping _class_.
[This is the point in the text referred to by Footnote 25 below]
People sometimes talk as if commercial prosperity and the interests of
the commercial folk represented the life of the whole nation. That is a
way of speaking, and it illustrates certainly a common modern delusion.
But it is far from the truth. The trading and capitalist folk are only a
class, and they do _not_, properly speaking, represent the nation. They
do not represent the landowning and the farming interests, both of which
detest them; they do not represent the artisans and industrial workers,
who have expressly formed themselves into unions in order to fight them,
and who have only been able to maintain their rights by so doing; they
do not represent the labourers and peasants, who are ground under their
heel. It would take too long to go into the economics of this subject,
interesting though they are.[10] But a very brief survey of facts shows
us that wherever the capitalist and trading classes have triumphed--as
in England early last century, and until Socialistic legislation was
called in to check them--the condition of the mass of the people has by
no means improved, rather the contrary. Japan has developed a world
trade, and is on the look out for more, yet never before has there been
such distress among her mass-populations. Russia has been lately moving
in the same direction; her commercial interests are rapidly progressing,
but her peasantry is at a standstill, France and Italy have already
grown a fat _bourgeoisie_, but their workers remain in a limbo of
poverty and strikes. And in all these countries, including Germany,
Socialism has arisen as a protest against the commercial order--which
fact certainly does not look as if commercialism were a generally
acknowledged benefit.
No, commercial prosperity means only the prosperity of a class. Yet such
is the curious glamour that surrounds this, subject and makes a fetish
of statistics about "imports and exports," that nothing is more common
than for such prosperity to be taken to mean the prosperity of the
nation as a whole. The commercial people, having command of the Press,
and of the avenues and highways of public influence, do not find it at
all difficult to persuade the nation that _they_ are its
representatives, and that _their_ advantage is the advantage of all.
This illusion is only a part, I suppose, of a historical necessity,
which as the Feudal regime passes brings into prominence the Commercial
regime; but do not let us be deluded by it, nor forget that in
submitting to the latter we are being nose-led by a class just as much
as the Germans have been in submitting to the Prussian Junkers. Do not
let us, at the behest of either class, be so foolish as to set out in
vain pursuit of world-empire; and, above all, do not let us, in freeing
ourselves from military class-rule, fall under the domination of
financiers and commercial diplomats. Let us remember that wars for
world-markets are made for the benefit of the merchant _class_ and not
for the benefit of the mass-people, and that in this respect England has
been as much to blame as Germany or any other nation--nay, pretty
obviously more so.
What is clearly wanted--and indeed is the next stage of human evolution
in England and in all Western lands--is that the people should
emancipate themselves from class-domination, class-glamour, and learn
to act freely from their own initiative. I know it is difficult. It
means a spirit of independence, courage, willingness to make sacrifice.
It means education, alertness to guard against the insidious schemes of
wire-pullers and pressmen, as well as of militarists and commercials. It
means the perception that only through eternal vigilance can freedom be
maintained. Yet it is the only true Democracy; and the logic of its
arrival is assured to us by the historical necessity that progress in
all countries must pass through the preliminary stages of feudalism and
commercialism on its way to realize the true life of the mass-peoples.