whatever may happen or not happen further east, England, France, and
Germany solemnly pledge themselves to maintain the internal peace of the
west of Europe, and renounce absolutely all alliances and engagements
that bind them to join any Power outside the combination in military
operations, whether offensive or defensive, against one inside it. We
must get rid of the monstrous situation that produced the present war.
France made an alliance with Russia as a defence against Germany.
Germany made an alliance with Austria as a defence against Russia.
England joined the Franco-Russian alliance as a defence against Germany
and Austria. The result was that Germany became involved in a quarrel
between Austria and Russia. Having no quarrel with France, and only a
second-hand quarrel with Russia, she was, nevertheless, forced to attack
France in order to disable her before she could strike Germany from
behind when Germany was fighting France's ally, Russia. And this attack
on France forced England to come to the rescue of England's ally,
France. Not one of the three nations (as distinguished from their tiny
Junker-Militarist cliques) wanted to fight; for England had nothing to
gain and Germany had everything to lose, whilst France had given up hope
of her Alsace-Lorraine _revanche_, and would certainly not have hazarded
a war for it. Yet because Russia, who has a great deal to gain by
victory and nothing except military prestige to lose by defeat, had a
quarrel with Austria over Servia, she has been able to set all three
western friends and neighbours shedding "rivers of blood" from one
another's throats; an outrageous absurdity. Fifty years ago the notion
of England helping Russia and Japan to destroy Germany would have seemed
as suicidal as Canada helping the Apaches to destroy the United States
of America; and though we now think much better of the Japanese (and
also, by the way, of the Apaches), that does not make us any the more
patient with the man who burns down his own street because he admires
the domestic architecture of Yokohama, especially when the fire
presently spreads to the cathedral of Rheims. It is bad enough that we
should have betrayed oriental Persia to oriental Russia as we did (and
get nothing for our pains but what we deserved); but when it comes to
sacrificing occidental Germany to her as well, we are sharpening a knife
for our own occidental throat. The Russian Government is the open enemy
of every liberty we boast of. Charles I.'s unsuccessful attempt to
arrest five members of the House of Commons for disagreeing with him is
ancient history here: it occurred 272 years ago; but the Tsar's
successful attempt to arrest thirty members of the Duma and to punish
them as dangerous criminals is a fact of to-day. Under Russian
government people whose worst crime is to find _The Daily News_ a
congenial newspaper are hanged, flogged, or sent to Siberia as a matter
of daily routine; so that before 1906 even the articles in _The Times_
on such events as the assassinations of Bobrikoff and the Grand Duke
were simply polite paraphrases of "Serve him right." It may be asked why
our newspapers have since ceased to report examples of Russia's
disregard of the political principles we are supposed to stand for. The
answer is simple. It was in 1906 that we began to lend Russia money, and
Russia began to advertise in _The Times_. Since then she has been
welcome to flog and hang her H.G. Wellses and Lloyd Georges by the dozen
without a word of remonstrance from our plutocratic Press, provided the
interest is paid punctually. Russia has been embraced in the large
charity of cosmopolitan capital, the only charity that does not begin at
home.
*The Russian Russians and Their Prussian Tsars.*
And here I must save my face with my personal friends who are either
Russians or discoverers of the soul of the Russian people. I hereby
declare to Sasha Kropotkin and Cunninghame Graham that my heart is with
their Russia, the Russia of Tolstoy and Turgenieff and Dostoieffsky, of
Gorki and Tchekoff, of the Moscow Art Theatre and the Drury Lane Ballet,
of Peter Kropotkin and all the great humanitarians, great artists, and
charming people whom their very North German Tsars exile and imprison
and flog and generally do what in them lies to suppress and abolish. For
the sake of Russian Russia, I am prepared to strain every point in
Prussian Russia's favour. I grant that the Nihilists, much as we loved
them, were futile romantic people who could have done nothing if
Alexander II. had abdicated and offered them the task of governing
Russia instead of persecuting them and being finally blown to bits by
them. I grant that the manners of the Fins to the Russians are described
as insufferable both by the Swedes and the Russians, and that we never
listened to the Russian side of that story. I am ready to grant Gilbert
Murray's plea that the recent rate of democratic advance has been
greater in Russia than anywhere else in Europe, though it does remind me
a little of the bygone days when the Socialists, scoring 20 votes at one
general election and forty at the next, were able to demonstrate that
their gain of 100 per cent. was immensely in excess of the wretched two
or three per cent. that was the best the Unionists or Liberals could
shew. I am willing to forget how short a time it is since Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman said: "The Duma is dead: long live the Duma!" and
since we refused to allow the Tsar to land in England when his ship was
within gangway's length of our shore, on which occasion I myself held up
the Anglo-Russian agreement for the partition of Persia to the
execration of a crowd in Trafalgar Square, whilst our Metropolitan
Police snatched the _l'sarbeleidigend_ English newspapers from the
sellers and tore them up precisely in the Cossack manner. I have an
enormous relish for the art of Russia; I perceive a spirit in Russia
which is the natural antidote to Potsdamnation; and I like most of the
Russians I know quite unaffectedly. I could find it in my heart to
reproach the Kaiser for making war on the Russia of these delightful
people, just as I like to think that at this very moment good Germans
may be asking him how he can bring himself to discharge shrapnel at the
England of Bernard Shaw and Cunninghame Graham. History may not forgive
him for it; but the practical point at the moment is that he does it,
and no doubt attributes the perfidy of England to the popularity of our
works. And as we have to take the Kaiser as we find him, and not as the
Hohenzollern legend glorifies him, I have to take the Tsar as I find
him. When we fight the Kaiser we are not fighting Bach and Wagner and
Strauss, to whom we have just joyfully surrendered without a blow at the
battle of Queen's Hall, but all the forces in Germany that made things
hard for Wagner and Strauss. And when we fight for the Tsar we are not
fighting for Tolstoy and Gorki, but for the forces that Tolstoy
thundered against all his life and that would have destroyed him had he
not been himself a highly connected Junker as well as a revolutionary
Christian. And if I doubt whether the Tsar would feel comfortable as a
member of a Democratic League of Peace, I am not doubting the good
intent of Kropotkin: I am facing the record of Kropotkin's imperial
jailer, and standing on the proud fact that England is the only country
in Europe, not excepting even France, in which Kropotkin has been
allowed to live a free man, and had his birthday celebrated by public
meetings all over the country, and his articles welcomed by the leading
review. In point of fact, it is largely on Kropotkin's account that I
regard the Tsar as a gentleman of slightly different views to President
Wilson, and hate the infamous tyranny of which he is the figurehead as I
hate the devil. And I know that practically all our disinterested and
thoughtful supporters of the war feel deeply uneasy about the Russian
alliance. At all events, I should be trifling grossly with the facts of
the situation if I pretended that the most absolute autocracy in Europe,
commanding an inexhaustible army in an invincible country with a
dominion stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, may not, if it
achieves a military success against the most dreaded military Power in
Europe, be stirred to ambitions far more formidable to western liberty
and human welfare than those of which Germany is now finding out the
vanity after worrying herself and everyone else with them for forty
years. When all is said that can be said for Russia, the fact remains
that a forcibly Russianized German province would be just such another
open sore in Europe as Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, Macedonia or Ireland. It
is useless to dream of guarantees: if Russia undertook to govern
democratically she would not be able to redeem her promise: she would do
better with primitive Communism. Her city populations may be as capable
of Democracy as our own (it is, alas! not saying much); but the
overwhelming mass of peasants to whom the Tsar is a personal God will
for a long time to come make his bureaucracy irresistible. As against
Russian civilization German and Austrian civilization is our
civilization: there is no getting over that. A constitutional kingship
of Poland and a sort of Caliphate of the Slavs in remapped southeastern
Europe, with that access to warm sea water which is Russia's common
human right, valid against all Balances of Power and Keys to India and
the like, must be her reward for her share in the war, even if we have
to nationalize Constantinople to secure it to her. But it cannot be too
frankly said at the outset that any attempt to settle Europe on the
basis of the present hemming in of a consolidated Germany and German
Austria by a hostile combination of Russia and the extreme states
against it, would go to pieces by its own inherent absurdity, just as it
has already exploded most destructively by its own instability. Until
Russia becomes a federation of several separate democratic States, and
the Tsar is either promoted to the honourable position of hereditary
President or else totally abolished, the eastern boundary of the League
of Peace must be the eastern boundary of Swedish, German, and Italian
civilization; and Poland must stand between it and the quite different
and for the moment unassimilable, civilization of Russia, whose
friendship we could not really keep on any other terms, as a closer
alliance would embarrass her as much as it would embarrass us.
Meanwhile, we must trust to the march of Democracy to de-Russianize
Berlin and de-Prussianize Petrograd, and to put the nagaikas of the
Cossacks and the riding-whips with which Junker officers slash German
privates, and the forty tolerated homosexual brothels of Berlin, and all
the other psychopathic symptoms of overfeeding and inculcated insolence
and sham virility in their proper place, which I take to be the dustbin.
*Driving Capital Out of the Country*.
But I must here warn everyone concerned that the most formidable
opposition to the break-up of these unnatural alliances between east and
west, between Democracy and Autocracy, between the twentieth century and
the Dark Ages, will not come from the Balancers of Power. They are not
really Balance of Power alliances: in fact, they are tending to an
enormous overbalance of power in favor of the east as against the west
and in favor of Militarist Autocracy as against Democracy. They are at
root absolutely unpatriotic, even absolutely conscienceless products of
commercial finance; and the Balance of Power theories are only the
attempts of our diplomats to put a public spirited face on the
operations of private cupidity. This is not the first time nor the
second that I have had to urge that the greatest danger to us in the
sphere of foreign politics is the tendency of capital to run away from
civilization: the one running downhill to hell as naturally as the other
struggles uphill to the Celestial City. The Englishman is allowed to
produce the subsistence of himself and his family only on condition that
he produces the subsistence of the capitalist and his retainers as well;
and lo! he finds more and more that these retainers are not Englishmen,
but Russians, South Americans, Kaffirs, Persians, or yellow or black
barbarians armed for his destruction (not to mention Prussians and
Austrians), and that the treaties made by our diplomatists have less and
less to do with the security of the nation or the balance of power or
any other public business, and more and more with capitalist
opportunities of making big dividends out of slavish labour. For
instance, the Anglo-Russian agreement is not a national treaty: it is
the memorandum of a commercial agreement settling what parts of Persia
are to be exploited by the Russian and English capitalists respectively;
the capitalists, always against State interference for the benefit of
the people, being very strongly in favor of it for coercing strikers at
home and keeping foreign rivals off their grass abroad. And the absurd
part of it is that when the State has thus arranged for our capitalists
to exploit certain parts of Persia, and for their sakes to protect the
parliamentary liberties of the part left to Russia, they discovered
that, after all, the most profitable game was to lend Russia the money
to exploit with, and to facilitate the operation by allowing her to
destroy the Persian parliament in the face of our own exhortation to it
to keep the flag flying, which we accordingly did without a blush. The
French capitalists had dragged France into an alliance with Russia long
before this; but the French Republic had the excuse of the German peril
and the need for an anti-German ally. Her natural ally for that purpose
was England; but as there was no market in England for her money, her
plutocrats drove her into the alliance with Russia as well; and it is
that alliance and not the alliance with England that has terrified
Germany into flying at her throat and plunging Europe into a frightful
war. The natural alliance with England twice averted war: in the
Moroccan crises of Algeciras and Agadir, when Sir Edward Grey said
boldly that we should defend France, and took the first steps towards a
joint military and naval control of the French and English forces. Why
he shrank from that firm position last July and thereby led Germany to
count so fatally on our neutrality I do not pretend to know; it suffices
for my argument that we were able to hold the balance between France and
Germany, but failed to hold it between Germany and Russia, and that it
was the placing of Russian loans in France and England that brought
Russia into our western affairs. It would have paid us ten times over to
have made Russia a present of all we and France have lent her
(indemnifying, of course, the holders of the stock through an addition
to the income tax) rather than pay the price of a European war. But what
is the use of crying for spilt milk? I am merely explaining why, when
French money went to Russia, the French papers discovered that the
Russians were a most interesting people and their Government--properly
understood--a surprisingly Liberal Government; and why, when English
money went to Russia, the English press suddenly developed leanings
towards the Greek Church, and deplored the unofficial execution of
Stolypin as deeply as it had rejoiced in the like fate of Bobrikoff. The
upshot of it all is that western civilization is at present busy
committing suicide by machinery, and importing hordes of Asiatics and
Africans to help in the throat cutting, not for the benefit of the silly
capitalists, who are being ruined wholesale, but to break up the
Austrian Empire for the benefit of Russia and the Slavs of eastern
Europe, which may be a very desirable thing, but which could and should
be done by the eastern Powers among themselves, without tearing Belgium
and Germany and France and England to pieces in the process.
*The Red Flag and the Black.*
Will you now at last believe, O stupid British, German, and French
patriots, what the Socialists have been telling you for so many years:
that your Union Jacks and tricolours and Imperial Eagles ("where the
carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered") are only toys to keep
you amused, and that there are only two real flags in the world
henceforth: the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of
Capitalism, the flag of God and the flag of Mammon? What earthly or
heavenly good is done when Tom Fool shoots Hans Narr? The plain fact is
that if we leave our capital to be dealt with according to the
selfishness of the private man he will send it where wages are low and
workers enslaved and docile: that is, as many thousand miles as possible
from the Trade Unions and Trade Union rates and parliamentary Labour
Parties of civilization; and Germany, at his sordid behest, will plunge
the world into war for the sake of disgracing herself with a few rubber
plantations, poetically described by her orators and journalists as "a
place in the sun." When you do what the Socialists tell you by keeping
your capital jealously under national control and reserving your
shrapnel for the wasters who not only shirk their share of the
industrial service of their country, but intend that their children and
children's children shall be idle wasters like themselves, you will find
that not a farthing of our capital will go abroad as long as there is a
British slum to be cleared and rebuilt, or a hungry, ragged, and
ignorant British child to be fed, clothed, and educated.
*A League of Peace*.
But in the west I see no insuperable obstacle to a Treaty of Peace in
the largest sense. This war has smoothed the way to it, if I may use the
word smoothing to describe a process conduced with so little courtesy
and so much shrapnel. Germany has now learned--and the lesson was
apparently needed, obvious as it would have been to a sanely governed
nation--that when it comes to shoving and shooting, Germany instantly
loses all the advantages of her high civilization, because France and
England, cultured or uncultured, can shove and shoot as well or beter
than she, whilst as to slashing and stabbing, their half barbarous Turco
and Ghoorka slaves can cut the Prussian Guard to bits, in spite of the
unquestionable superiority of Wagner's music to theirs. Then take
France. She does not dream that she could fight Germany and England
single-handed. And England could not fight France and Germany without a
sacrifice as ruinous as it would be senseless. We therefore have the
necessary primary conditions for a League of Peace between the three
countries; for if one of them break it, the other two can make her
sorry, under which circumstances she will probably not break it. The
present war, if it end in the reconquest of Alsace and Lorraine by the
French, will make such a League much more stable; not that France can
acquire by mere conquest any right to hold either province against its
will (which could be ascertained by plebiscite), but because the honors
of war as between France and Germany would then be easy, France having
regained her laurels and taught Germany to respect her, without
obliterating the record of Germany's triumph in 1870. And if the war
should further result in the political reconstruction of the German
Empire as a democratic Commonwealth, and the conquest by the English
people of democratic control of English foreign policy, the combination
would be immensely eased and strengthened, besides being brought into
harmony with American public feeling, which is important to the security
and prestige of the League.
*The Case of the Smaller States.*
Already the war has greatly added to the value of one of the factors
upon which the League of Peace will depend. The smaller States: Holland,
Belgium, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian Powers, would have joined it
any time these 40 years, had it existed, for the sake of its protection,
and thereby made the Protestant north of Mr. Houston Chamberlain's dream
as much a reality as any such dream is ever likely to be. But after the
fight put up by Belgium the other day, the small States will be able to
come in with the certainty of being treated with considerable respect as
military factors; for Belgium can now claim to have saved Europe
single-handed. Germany has been very unpleasantly reminded of the fact
that though a big man may be able to beat a little one, yet if the
little one fights for all he is worth he may leave the victor very sorry
he broke the peace. Even as between the big Powers, victory has not, as
far as the fighting has yet gone, been always with the biggest
battalions. With a couple of millions less men, the Kaiser might have
taken more care of them and made a better job of it.
At the same time I hold no brief for small States as such, and most
vehemently deny that we are in any way bound to knight errantry on their
behalf as against big ones. They are mostly either incorrigibly
bellicose themselves, like Montenegro, or standing temptations to the
big Powers, like Bosnia and Herzegovina. They multiply frontiers, which
are nuisances, and languages, which have made confusion since the
building of Babel. The striking contrast between the United States of
North America and the disunited States of South America in this respect
is, from the Pacifist point of view, very much in favor of the northern
unity. The only objection to large political units is that they make
extremely dangerous autocracies. But as groups of federated democracies
they are the best neighbours in the world. A federal democratic Russia
would be as safe a colleague as America: a federal democratic Germany
would be as pleasant company as Switzerland. Let us, I beg, hear no more
of little States as British Dulcineas.
*The Claims of Belgium.*
As to the special case of Belgium, its claims in the settlement are
simple and indeed single. If we conclude a peace without clearing the
Germans completely out of Belgium, we shall be either beaten or
dishonoured. And such indemnity as a money payment can effect for
Belgium is due not only by Germany, but by Britain, France, and Russia
as well. Belgium has been crushed between the Alliance and the Entente:
it was these two menaces to the peace of Europe that produced
Armageddon; and as Belgium's heroic resistance served the Entente
against the Alliance, the obligation to make good the remediable damage
is even more binding on the Entente.
But there is another and more pressing matter arising out of the
conquest of Belgium.
*The Belgian Refugees and the Problem of Unemployment.*