her United States and Canada, yields a fine example. Though not
certainly perfect, her general standard of education and alertness is
infinitely superior to that of the peoples of the Old World. And some
writers contend that it is just in that--in her general level and not in
her freaks of genius--that America's claim lies to distinction among the
nations of the earth. If you consider the peoples of the Old World,
whether in England, Scotland, or Ireland, in France, Spain, Italy,
Germany, Austria, Russia, or farther East and farther South over the
earth, you will find the great masses, on the land or in the workshops,
still sunk in vast ignorance, apathy, and irresponsibility. Only here
and there among those I have mentioned, and notably among the smaller
peoples of Western Europe, like Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, and
Sweden, are the masses beginning to stir, as it were, towards the
daylight. It can only be with the final opening of their eyes and
awakening from slumber that the rule of the classes will be at an end.
But that awakening--with the enormous spread of literature and
locomotion and intercommunication of all kinds over the modern world,
cannot now, one would say, be long delayed.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, and until that era arrives, we can only insist (at any rate
in our own country) on a different kind of foreign policy from what we
have had--a policy open and strong, not founded on Spread-Eagleism, and
decidedly not founded on commercialism and the interests of the trading
classes (as the Empire League seem to desire), but directed towards the
real welfare of the masses in our own and other lands. If our rulers and
representatives really seek peace, here is the obvious way to ensue and
secure it--namely, by making political friends of those in all countries
who _desire peace_ and are already stretching hands of amity to each
other. What simpler and more obvious way can there be? "We hail our
working-class comrades of every land," says the Manifesto of the
Independent Labour Party. "Across the roar of guns we send greeting to
the German Socialists. They have laboured unceasingly to promote good
relations with Britain, as we with Germany. They are no enemies of ours,
but faithful friends. In forcing this appalling crime upon the nations,
it is the rulers, the diplomats, the militarists, who have sealed their
doom. In tears and blood and bitterness the greater Democracy will be
born. With steadfast faith we greet the future; our cause is holy and
imperishable, and the labour of our hands has not been in vain."
Yes, we must have a foreign policy strong and sincere--and not only so,
but open and avowed. The present Diplomatic system is impossible of
continuance. It has grown up in an automatic way out of antiquated
conditions, and no one in particular can be blamed for it. But that
young men, profoundly ignorant of the world, and having the very _borné_
outlook on life which belongs to our gilded youth (67 per cent. of the
candidates for the Diplomatic Corps being drawn from Eton alone), having
also in high degree that curious want of cosmopolitan sympathy and
adaptability which is characteristic of the English wealthy classes
(every candidate for the Corps must have at least £400 a year of his
own)--that such a type should be charged with the representation of the
United Kingdom in foreign affairs is to-day a hopeless anomaly, and
indeed a very great danger. The recommendations just published of the
Royal Commission are in the right direction, but they need urgent
reinforcement and extension by the pressure of public opinion. And if in
the present-day situation of affairs we cannot refer every question
which arises directly to the nation, we must at least do away with the
one-man-Secretary system, and have in his place a large and responsible
committee, representative, not of any one party or class but as far as
possible of the whole people. [At this moment, for instance, as far as
we know, the terms of settlement of the present war may actually be
being arranged over our heads, and yet that may be taking place quite
apart from the approval and the wishes of the most weighty portion of
the nation.]
Another thing that we must look to with some hope for the future is the
influence of Women. Profoundly shocked as they are by the senseless
folly and monstrous bloodshed of the present conflict, it is certain
that when this phase is over they will insist on having a voice in the
politics of the future. The time has gone by when the mothers and wives
and daughters of the race will consent to sit by meek and silent while
the men in their madness are blowing each other's brains out and making
mountains out of corpses. It is hardly to be expected that war will
cease from the earth this side of the millennium; but women will surely
only, condone it when urged by some tremendous need or enthusiasm; they
will not rejoice--as men sometimes do--in the mere lust of domination
and violence. With their keen perception of the little things of life,
and the way in which the big things are related to these, they will see
too clearly the cost of war in broken hearts and ruined homes to allow
their men to embark in it short of the direst necessity.
And through the women I come back to the elementary causes and roots of
the present war--the little fibres in our social life which have fed,
and are still feeding, the fatal tree whose fruits are, not the healing
but the strife of nations. In the present day--though there may be other
influences--it is evident enough that rampant and unmeasured commercial
greed, concentrating itself in a special class, is the main cause, the
tap-root, of the whole business. And this, equally evidently, springs
out of the innumerable greed of _individuals_--the countless fibres that
combine to one result--the desire of private persons to get rich quick
at all costs, to make their gains out of others' losses, to take
advantage of each other, to triumph in success regardless of others'
failures. And these unworthy motives and inhuman characteristics again
spring obviously out of the mean and materialistic ideals of life which
still have sway among us--the ideals of wealth and luxury and
display--of which the horrors of war are the sure and certain obverse.
As long as we foster these things in our private life, so long will they
lead in our public life to the embitterment of nation against nation.
What is the ruling principle of the interior and domestic conduct of
each nation to-day--even within its own borders--but an indecent
scramble of class against class, of individual against individual? To
rise to noisy power and influence, and to ill-bred wealth and riches, by
trampling others down and profiting by their poverty is--as Ruskin long
ago told us--the real and prevailing motive of our peoples, whatever
their professions of Christianity may be. Small wonder, then, if out of
such interior conditions there rise to dominance in the great world
those very classes who exhibit the same vulgarities in their most
perfect form, and that _their_ conflict with each other, as between
nation and nation, exhibit to us, in the magnified and hideous form of
war, the same sore which is all the time corrupting our internal
economy. The brutality, and atrocity of modern war is but the reflection
of the brutality and inhumanity of our commercial regime and ideals. The
slaughter of the battlefields may be more obvious, but it is less
deliberate, and it is doubtful whether it be really worse, than the
daily and yearly slaughter of the railways, the mines, and the
workshops. That being so, it is no good protesting against, and being
shocked at, an evil which is our very own creation; and to cry out
against war-lords is useless, when it is _our_ desires and ambitions
which set the war-lords in motion. Let all those who indulge and
luxuriate in ill-gotten wealth to-day (and, indeed, their name is
Legion), as well as all those who meanly and idly groan because their
wealth is taken from them, think long and deeply on these things. Truth
and simplicity of life are not mere fads; they are something more than
abstractions and private affairs, something more than social ornaments.
They are vital matters which lie at the root of national well-being.
They are things which in their adoption or in their denial search right
through the tissue of public life. To live straightforwardly by your
own labour is to be at peace with the world. To live on the labour of
others is not only to render your life false at home, but it is to
encroach on those around you, to invite resistance and hostility; and
when such a principle of life is favoured by a whole people, that people
will not only be in a state of internal strife, but will assuredly raise
up external enemies on its borders who will seek its destruction.
The working masses and the peasants, whose lives are in the great whole
honest--who support themselves (and a good many others besides) by their
own labour--_have no quarrel_; and they are the folk who to-day
--notwithstanding lies and slanders galore, and much of race-prejudice
and ignorance--stretch hands of amity and peace to each other wellnigh
all over the world. It is of the modern moneyed classes that we may say
that their life-principle (that of taking advantage of others and living
on their labour) is essentially false[21]; and these are the classes
which are distinctively the cause of enmities in the modern world, and
which, as I have explained above, are able to make use of the military
class in order to carry out their designs. It can only be with the
ending of the commercial and military classes, as classes, that peace
can come to the world. China, founded on the anti-commercial principles
of Confucius, disbanded her armies a thousand years ago, and only quite
lately--under the frantic menace of Western civilization--felt compelled
to reorganize them. She was a thousand years before her time. It can
only be with the emergence of a new structure of society, based on the
principle of solidarity and mutual aid among the individuals of a
nation, and so extending to solidarity and mutual aid among nations,
that peace can come to the Western world. It is the best hope of the
present war that, like some frightful illness, it marks the working out
of deep-seated evils and their expulsion from the social organism; and
that with its ending the old false civilization, built on private gain,
will perish, crushed by its own destructive forces; and in its place the
new, the real culture, will arise, founded on the essential unity of
mankind.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Reprinted by permission from the _English Review_ for January,
1915.
[19] Lord Bryce in the _Daily Chronicle_, October, 1914.
[20] In a letter to the _Times_, September 18, 1914.
[21] There is no reason in itself why Commercialism should be false.
Commerce and interchange of goods is of course a perfectly natural and
healthy function of social life. Indeed, it is a function which should
have a most beneficent influence in binding nations together. It is when
that function is perverted to private gain that it becomes false. But of
course without this perversion there would be no distinctively
commercial _class_ with interests opposed to those of the community.
VII
PATRIOTISM AND INTERNATIONALISM
Many Socialists and sympathizers with the Labour movement over the world
belittle Patriotism, and seem to think that by decrying and discouraging
the love of one's country one will bring nearer the day of
Internationalism.
I do not agree. Of course we all know there is a lot of sham and false
Patriotism--such as, for instance, Pressmongers magnify and make use of
in order to sell their papers, or such as comfortable, well-to-do folk
with big dividends do so heartily encourage among the poorer classes,
who can thus be persuaded to fight for them; we know, indeed, that there
is a good deal of very mean and unworthy Patriotism--the flag-waving
variety, for instance, which we saw in the Boer war--exultant over a
small nation of farmers defending their homes, and whipped up
deliberately by a commercial gang for their own purposes; or the
narrow-minded, lying, canting variety which blinds a people to its own
faults, and credits itself with all the moral virtues, while at the same
time it gloats over every defamation of the enemy. There is a good deal
of that variety in the present war. And it is easy to understand that
many people, sick of that sort of Patriotism, would go straight for a
ready-made denial of all frontiers and boundaries.
Still, allowing to the full all that can be said in the above direction,
one must admit also that there is such a thing as a true Patriotism, and
I do not see why--however socialist or cosmopolitan we may be--we should
not recognize what is an obvious fact. There is a love of one's own
country--a genuine attachment to and preference for it--"in spite of all
temptations to belong to other nations"--which after all is very
natural, and on the whole a sound and healthy thing. There may be some
people whose minds are so lofty that to them all peoples and races are
alike and without preference; but one knows that the vast multitudes of
our mortal earth are not made like that. "If a man love not his brother
whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?" It is
certainly easier and more natural to make an effort and a sacrifice for
the sake of your own countrymen whom you know so well and with whom you
are linked by a thousand ties than for the sake of foreigners who are
little more than a name--however worthy you may honestly believe the
latter to be. It is more obvious and instinctive for a man to work for
his own family than to give his services to his municipality or his
county council. Charity begins at home, and the wider spirit of human
love and helpfulness which passes beyond the narrow bounds of the family
hearth has perhaps to find an intermediate sphere before it can unfold
itself and expand in the great field of Humanity among all colours and
races.
Personally, I am probably more International by temperament than
Patriotic. I feel a strange kinship and intimacy with all sorts of queer
and outlandish races--Chinese, Egyptian, Mexican, or Polynesian--and
always a slight but persistent sense of estrangement and
misapprehension among my own people. Flag-waving certainly, does not
stir me. Still, I feel that, whatever one's country may be, the love of
it has value and is not to be scoffed at. The Nation is bigger than the
Parish; and to a man of limited outlook it is a means of getting him out
of his own very narrow and local circle of life; to rob him of that in
order to jump him into a cosmopolitan attitude (which to him may be
quite empty and arid) is a mistake. It is easy enough to break the shell
for the growing chick, but if you break it too soon your chick, when
hatched, will be dead.
If you look at the great majority of those who are enthusing just now
about our country and patriotically detesting the Germans, you will see
that notwithstanding lies and slanders and cant galore, and much of
conceit and vanity, their patriotism _is_ pulling them together from one
end of Britain to another, causing them to help each other in a thousand
ways, urging them to make sacrifices for the common good, helping them
to grow the sinews and limbs of the body politic, and even the wings
which will one day transport that body into a bigger world. Really, I
think we ought to be very grateful to the Germans for doing all this for
us; and the Germans ought to be grateful to us for an exactly similar
reason. You will see plainly enough that the great majority of those who
are at this moment giving their thoughts and lives for their countrymen
and neighbours either in Germany or in England could not by any manner
of possibility be expected to act with similar self-surrender and
enthusiasm in an International cause. They are not grown to that point
of development yet, and it is better that they should learn helpfulness
and brotherhood within somewhat narrow bounds than perhaps not learn
these things at all in the open and indiscriminate field of universal
equality. After all, to stimulate love and friendship there is nothing
like a common enemy!
It is an old story and an old difficulty. There comes a time when every
institution of social life becomes rotten and diseased and has to be
removed to make way for the new life which is expanding behind it.
Broadly speaking, we may say that the institution of Patriotism is
_approaching_ this period--at any rate over Western Europe. The outlines
of an International life are becoming clearly visible behind it.
What we have to do is to help on that international life and spirit to
our best, and certainly clear out a lot of sham patriotism that stands
in its way; but this has to be done with discrimination and a certain
tact. People must be made to see that "my country, right or wrong," is
not the genuine article. They must be made to understand how easily this
sort of slapdash sentiment throws them into the hands of scheming
politicians and wire-pullers for sinister purposes--how readily it can
be made use of directly it has become a mere unreasoning instinct and
habit. If a war is wanted, or conscription, or a customs tariff--it may
be merely to suit the coward fears of autocratic rulers, or the selfish
interests of some group of contractors or concession-hunters--all that
the parties concerned have to do is to play the patriotic stop, and they
stand a good chance of getting what they want. Just now there is a good
bit of fleecing going on in this fashion--both of the public and the
wage-workers. Even in its more healthy forms, when delayed in too long,
patriotism easily becomes morbid and delays also the birth of the larger
spirit which is waiting behind it. The Continental Socialists complain
that their cause has hitherto made little progress in Alsace-Lorraine
and Poland for the simple reason that political circumstances have
over-accentuated the patriotic devotion in both these regions.
Thus we have to push on with discrimination. Always we have to remember
that the wide, free sense of equality and kinship which lies at the root
of Internationalism is the real goal, and that the other thing is but a
step on the way, albeit a necessary step. Always we have to press on
towards that great and final liberation--the realization of our common
humanity, the recognition of the same great soul of man slumbering under
all forms in the heart of all races--the one guarantee and assurance of
the advent of World-peace.
That we are verging rapidly towards some altered perspective I quite
believe; and the day is coming when in the social and political spheres
International activity will make excessive patriotism seem somewhat
ridiculous--as, in fact, it has already done in the spheres of Science
and Industry and Art. Still, I also do not see any reason why the two
tendencies should not work side by side. The health of local organs and
members in the human body is by no means incompatible with the health of
the whole organism, and we may understand the great map of Humanity all
the better for its being differently coloured in different parts.
VIII
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF, WAR AND RECRUITING
_November_, 1914.
I sometimes think the country-folk round about where I live the most
sensible people I know. They say with regard to the War--or said at its
outset: "What are they fighting about? _I_ can't make out, and nobody
seems to know. What I've seen o' the Germans they're a decent enough
folk--much like ourselves. If there's got to be fightin', why don't them
as makes the quarrel go and fight wi' each other? But killing all them
folk that's got no quarrel, and burnin' their houses and farms, and
tramplin' down all that good corn--and all them brave men dead what can
never live again--its scandalous, I say."
This at the outset. But afterwards, when the papers had duly explained
that the Germans were mere barbarians and savages, bent on reducing the
whole world to military slavery, they began to take sides and feel there
was good cause for fighting. Meanwhile almost exactly the same thing was
happening in Germany, where England was being represented as a greedy
and deceitful Power, trying to boss and crush all the other nations.
Thus each nation did what was perhaps, from its own point of view, the
most sensible thing to do--persuaded itself that it was fighting in a
just and heroic cause, that it was a St. George against the Dragon, a
David out to slay Goliath.
The attitude of the peasant, however, or agriculturist, all over the
world, is the same. He does not deal in romantic talk about St. George
and the Dragon. He sees too clearly the downright facts of life. He has
no interest in fighting, and he does not want to fight. Being the one
honest man in the community--the one man who creates, not only his own
food but the food of others besides, and who knows the value of his
work, he perceives without illusion the foolery of War, the hideous
waste of it, the shocking toll of agony and loss which it inflicts--and
if left to himself would as a rule have no hand in it. It is only
occasionally--when ground down beyond endurance by the rent-racking
classes above him, or threatened beyond endurance by an enemy from
abroad, that he turns his reaping-hook into a sword and his muck-fork
into a three-pronged bayonet, exchanges his fowling-piece for a rifle,
and fights savagely for his home and his bit of a field.
England, curiously enough, is almost the only country in the world where
the peasant or ordinary field-worker _has_ no field of his own[22]; and
I find that in the villages and among the general agricultural
population there is even now but little enthusiasm for the present
war--though the raid on our coasts at Scarborough and other places
certainly did something to stimulate it. Partly this is, as I have said,
because the agricultural worker knows that his work is foundational, and
that nothing else is of importance compared with it. [At this moment,
for instance, there are peasants in Belgium and Northern France
ploughing and sowing, and so forth, actually close to the trenches and
between the fighting lines.] Partly it is because in England, alas! the
countryman _has_ so little right or direct interest in the soil. One
wonders sometimes why he _should_ feel any enthusiasm. Why should men
want to fight for their land when they have no land to fight for--when
the most they can do is to die at the foot of a trespass-board, singing,
"Britons never, never shall be slaves!"
If the War is ever finished, surely one of the first things to be
insisted on afterwards, with regard to England, must be the settlement
of the actual people (not the parasites) on the land. Else how, after
all that they have gone through, can it be expected that they will ever
again "fight for their country"? But that this vast landless population
in the villages and country districts--hungering as it is for some sure
tenure and interest in the soil--should actually, as now, be berated and
scolded by superior persons of the "upper" classes, and threatened with
conscription if it does not "come forward" more readily, is a spectacle
sufficient to gratify the most hardened cynic.
Certainly it is remarkable that such numbers of the great working masses
of this country (including villagers) should come forward in connexion
with the war, and join the standard and the ranks of fighting men--as
they do--and it is a thing for which one must honour them. But in that
matter there are not a few considerations to be kept in mind.