from captured Antwerp and threatened Ostend has forced the President of
the Local Government Board to make a desperate appeal to all and sundry
to form representative committees to deal with the prevention and relief
of distress: in other words to save the refugees from starving to death.
Now the Board of Trade has already drawn attention to a memorandum of
the Local Government Board as to the propriety of providing employment
for refugees. And instantly and inevitably the condition had to be laid
down that if the Committees find employment for anyone, they shall refer
the case to the local Labour Exchange in order that "any steps taken to
assist refugees to find employment shall not be such as to endanger the
employment of British workpeople." In other words, the starving Belgians
have fled from the Germans only to compete for crust with starving
Englishmen. As long as there is an unemployed Englishman in the
country--and there are a good many, especially in the cotton
industry--how is it possible to give a job to a Belgian without
depriving an Englishman of it? Why, instead of making impossible
conditions, and helplessly asking private citizens to do something for
pity's sake, will not the Government face the fact that the refugee
question is simply an intensification of the normal unemployed question,
the only difference being that we are accustomed to leave our own people
to starve when they are common persons with whom the governing classes
do not associate, whereas the Belgians have rendered us such a
tremendous service in the war, and our statesmen have so loudly
protested that the integrity of Belgium is dearer to England than her
own heart's blood, that we cannot with any decency treat the destitute
Belgians as if they were mere British riffraff. Yet when we attempt to
provide for the Belgians by finding work for them the Board of Trade has
to point out that by doing so we are taking the bread out of the mouths
of our own people. Hence we arrive at the remarkable situation of
starving Britons and Belgians looking hungrily through barbed wire
fences at flourishing communities of jolly and well fed German prisoners
of war (whose friendly hat wavings to me and my fellow passengers as I
rush through Newbury Racecourse Station in the Great Western Express I
hereby acknowledge publicly with all possible good feeling). I therefore
for the present strongly recommend all Belgians who have made up their
minds to flee to England, to pick up German uniforms on the battle
fields and surrender to the British in the character of Uhlans. Their
subsistence will then be secure until the war is over, as we dare not
illtreat our prisoners lest the Germans should retaliate upon the
British soldiers in their hands, even if we were all spiteful enough to
desire to do it, as some of our baser sort have not been ashamed to
propose.
But the women and children, and the too young and the too old, cannot
resort to this expedient. And though theoretically our own unemployed
could be dressed in British uniforms and sent abroad with instructions
to take refuge in neutral territory and be "interned" or to surrender to
the first Uhlan patrol they met, yet it would be difficult to reduce
this theory to practice, though the possibility is worth mentioning as a
reduction to absurdity of the situation. As a matter of common sense "we
should at once place all destitute Belgian refugees on the footing of
prisoners of war, except that we need not post sentries to shoot them if
they try to escape, nor surround them with barbed wire. Indeed these
precautions are necessary in the case of the Germans rather to save
their sense of honour whilst remaining here than to defeat any very
strong longing on their part to return to the trenches.
In a reasonable state of society there would be another difference. The
Belgians would offer to work so as not to be a burden to us; whilst the
German prisoner would say--as he actually does, by the way--"No: I am
not here by my own will: if you open the door I shall go home and take
myself off your hands; so I am in no way bound to work for you." As it
is, our Trade Unions are up in arms at the slightest hint of either
Belgian or German labour being employed when there is no shortage of
English labour!"
*The Minority Report*.
All this exasperating anomaly and deadlock and breakdown would disappear
if we had a proper system of provision for our own unemployed civilians
(there are no unemployed soldiers: we do not discharge them between the
battles). The Belgians would have found an organization of unemployment
ready for them, and would have been provided for with our own
unemployed, not as refugees, but simply as unemployed. How to do that
need not be explained here. The problem was worked out by one of the
hardest bits of thinking yet done in the Socialist movement, and set
forth in the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws
and the Relief of Distress, 1909. Our helplessness in the present
emergency shews how very unwise we were to shelve that report.
Unluckily, what with the wounded vanity of the majority of the
Commission, who had been played off the stage by Mrs. Sidney Webb; the
folly of the younger journalists of the advanced guard, who had just
then rediscovered Herbert Spencer's mare's nest of "the servile State,"
and revolted with all the petulant anarchism of the literary profession
against the ideal Interfering Female as typified in their heated
imaginations by poor Mrs. Sidney Webb, who became the Aunt Sally of our
young artists in stale anti-bureaucratic invective; and, above all, the
mulishly silent refusal of our governing classes to see why the
unemployed should not be simply left to starve, as they had always been
(the Poor Law being worse than useless for so large a purpose), nothing
was done; and there is consequently no machinery ready for dealing with
the refugees. That is why we must treat them for the moment simply as
unguarded prisoners of war.
*The General Strike Against War.*
But if the problem of unemployment among our own people becomes acute,
we shall have to fall back on the Minority Report proposals or else run
the risk of a revolt against the war. We have already counted on the
chances of that revolt hampering Germany, just as Germany counted on the
chances of its hampering Russia, The notion that the working classes can
stop a war by a general international strike is never mentioned during
the first rally to the national flag at the outbreak of a war; but it is
there all the time, ready to break out again if the supplies of food and
glory run short. Its gravity lies in its impracticability. If it were
practicable, every sane man would advocate it. As it is, it might easily
mean that British troops would be coercing British strikers at home when
they should be fighting Potsdam abroad, thus producing a disastrous and
detestable division of popular feeling in the face of the enemy.
*The Disarmament Delusion.*
Objections to the Western Pacifist settlement will come from several
quarters, including the Pacifist quarters. Some of the best disposed
parties will stumble over the old delusion of disarmament. They think it
is the gun that matters. They are wrong: the gun matters very much when
war breaks out; but what makes both war and the gun is the man behind
them. And if that man really means the peace of the world to be kept, he
will take care to have a gun to keep it with. The League of Peace must
have a first-rate armament, or the League of War will very soon make
mincemeat of it. The notion that the men of evil intent are to have all
the weapons will not work. Theoretically, all our armaments should be
pooled. But as we, the British Empire, will most certainly not pool our
defenses with anyone, and as we have not the very smallest intention of
disarming, and will go on building gun for gun and ship for ship in step
with even our dearest friends if we see the least risk of our being left
in a position of inferiority, we cannot with any countenance demand that
other Powers shall do what we will not do ourselves. Our business is not
to disable ourselves or anyone else, but to organize a balance of
military power against war, whether made by ourselves or any other
Power; and this can be done only by a combination of armed and fanatical
Pacifists of all nations, not by a crowd of non-combatants wielding
deprecations, remonstrances, and Christmas cards.
*America's Example: War at a Year's Notice.*
How far it will be possible to take these national armaments out of
national control remains to be seen. Already America, who is as deeply
demoralized by Capitalism as we are, though much less tainted with
Militarism now that Colonel Roosevelt has lost his front seat, has
pledged herself to several European States not to go to war with them
until the matter under dispute has been in the hands of an international
tribunal for a year. Now there is no military force on earth, nor likely
to be, strong enough to prevent America from treating these agreements
as Germany has just treated the 1839 Treaty guaranteeing the neutrality
of Belgium. Therefore the Militarists declare that the agreements are
not worth the scraps of paper they are written on. They always will
footle in this way. They might as well say that because there are crimes
which men can commit with legal impunity in spite of our haphazard
criminal codes, men always do commit them. No doubt nations will do what
it is to their interest to do. But because there is in every nation a
set of noisy moral imbeciles who cannot see that nations have an
overwhelming interest in creating and maintaining a tradition of
international good faith, and honouring their promissory notes as
scrupulously as the moral imbeciles pay their silly gambling debts and
fight their foolish duels, we are not, I presume, going to discard every
international guarantee except the howitzer. Why, the very Prussian
Militarists themselves are reviling us for doing what their own
Militarist preachers assumed as a matter of course that we should do:
that is, attack Prussia without regard to the interests of European
civilization when we caught her at a disadvantage between France and
Russia. But we should have been ashamed to do that if she had not, by
assuming that there was no such thing as shame (_alias_ conscience),
terrified herself into attacking France and Belgium, when, of course, we
were immediately ashamed not to defend them. This idiotic ignoring of
the highest energies of the human soul, without the strenuous pressure
of which the fabric of civilization--German civilization perhaps most of
all--could not hold together for a single day, should really be treated
in the asylums of Europe, not on battlefields.
I conclude that we might all very well make a beginning by pledging
ourselves as America has done to The Hague tribunal not to take up arms
in any cause that has been less than a year under arbitration, and to
treat any western Power refusing this pledge as an unpopular and
suspicious member of the European club. To break such a pledge would be
an act of brigandage; and the need for suppressing brigandage cannot be
regarded as an open question.
*The Security Will o' the Wisp.*
It will be observed that I propose no guarantee of absolute security.
Not being a sufferer from _delirium tremens_ I can live without it.
Security is no doubt the Militarists' most seductive bait to catch the
coward's vote. But their method makes security impossible, They
undertook to secure the English in Egypt from an imaginary Islam rising
by the Denshawai Horror, as a result of which nobody has ventured to
suggest that we should trust the Egyptian army in this conflict, though
India, having learnt from Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald that
there are really anti-Militarists in England who regard Indians as
fellow creatures, is actually rallying to us against the Prussian
Junkers, who are, in Indian eyes, indistinguishable from the
Anglo-Indians who call Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald
traitors, and whose panicstricken denial of even a decent pretence of
justice in the sedition trials is particularly unfortunate just now. We
must always take risks; and we should never trade on the terror of
death, nor forget that this wretchedest of all the trades is none the
less craven because it can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism
and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by persons whose
superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of
Godforsaken folly.
*The Only Real World Danger.*
The one danger before us that nothing can avert but a general raising of
human character through the deliberate cultivation and endowment of
democratic virtue without consideration of property and class, is the
danger created by inventing weapons capable of destroying civilization
faster than we produce men who can be trusted to use them wisely. At
present we are handling them like children. Now children are very
pretty, very lovable, very affectionate creatures (sometimes); and a
child can make nitroglycerine or chloride of nitrogen as well as a man
if it is taught to do so. We have sense enough not to teach it; but we
do teach the grown-up children. We actually accompany that dangerous
technical training with solemn moral lessons in which the most
destructive use of these forces at the command of kings and capitalists
is inculcated as heroism, patriotism, glory and all the rest of it. It
is all very well to fire cannons at the Kaiser for doing this; but we do
it ourselves. It is therefore undeniably possible that a diabolical
rhythm may be set up in which civilization will rise periodically to the
point at which explosives powerful enough to destroy it are discovered,
and will then be shattered and thrown back to a fresh start with a few
starving and ruined survivors. H.G. Wells and Anatole France have
pre-figured that result in fiction; and I cannot deny the strength of
its probability; for if England and Germany can find no better way of
celebrating their arrival at the highest point of civilization yet
attained than setting out to blow one another to fragments with
fulminates, it would seem that the peace of the neutral States is the
result, not of their being more civilized, but less heavily armed. And
when we see that the effect of the enterprise is not to redouble civil
vigilance and stimulate the most alert and jealous political criticism,
but on the contrary to produce an assumption that every constitutional
safeguard must be suspended until the war is over, and that every silly
tyrannical expedient such as censorship of the press, martial law, and
the like, will begin to work good instead of evil the moment men take to
murdering one another, it must be admitted that the prospect is not too
hopeful. Our only consolation is that civilization has survived very
destructive wars before, mostly because they have produced effects not
only unintended but violently objected to by the people who made them.
In 1870, for instance, Napoleon III. can hardly have intended his own
overthrow and return to exile in England; nor did Bismarck aim at the
restoration of French Republicanism and the formation of an
Anglo-Franco-Russian alliance against Prussia. Several good things may
come out of the present war if it leaves anybody alive to enjoy them.
*The Church and the War.*
And now, where in our society is the organ whose function it should be
to keep us constantly in mind that, as Lassalle said, "the sword is
never right," and to shudder with him at the fact that "the Lie is a
European Power"? In no previous war have we struck that top note of keen
irony, the closing of the Stock Exchange and not of the Church. The
pagans were more logical: they closed the Temple of Peace when they drew
the sword. We turn our Temples of Peace promptly into temples of war,
and exhibit our parsons as the most pugnacious characters in the
community. I venture to affirm that the sense of scandal given by this
is far deeper and more general than the Church thinks, especially among
the working classes, who are apt either to take religion seriously or
else to repudiate it and criticize it closely. When a bishop at the
first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock around
the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically, necessarily,
manfully, rightly; but that does not justify him in pretending that
there has been no change, and that Christ is, in effect, Mars. The
straightforward course, and the one that would serve the Church best in
the long run, would be to close our professedly Christian Churches the
moment war is declared by us, and reopen them only on the signing of the
treaty of peace. No doubt to many of us the privation thus imposed would
be far worse than the privation of small change, of horses and motor
cars, of express trains, and all the other prosaic inconveniences of
war. But would it be worse than the privation of faith, and the horror
of the soul, wrought by the spectacle of nations praying to their common
Father to assist them in sabring and bayonetting and blowing one another
to pieces with explosives that are also corrosives, and of the Church
organizing this monstrous paradox instead of protesting against it?
Would it make less atheists or more? Atheism is not a simple homogeneous
phenomenon. There is the youthful atheism with which every able modern
mind begins: an atheism that clears the soul of superstitions and
terrors and servilities and base compliances and hypocrisies, and lets
in the light of heaven. And there is the atheism of despair and
pessimism: the sullen cry with which so many of us at this moment,
looking on blinded deafened maimed wrecks that were once able-bodied
admirable lovable men, and on priests blessing war, and newspapers and
statesmen and exempt old men hounding young men on to it, are saying "I
know now there is no God." What has the Church in its present attitude
to set against this crushed acceptance of darkness except the quaint but
awful fact that there are cruder people on whom horrifying calamities
have just the opposite effect, because they seem the work of some power
so overwhelming in its malignity that it must be worshipped because it
is mighty? Let the Church beware how it plays to that gallery. If all
the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling
they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war
is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.
But as I know quite well that the Churches are not going to do anything
of the kind, I must not close on a note which might to some readers
imply that I hope, as some highly respected friends of mine do, to build
a pacific civilization on the ruins of the vast ecclesiastical
organizations which have never yet been able to utter the truth, because
they have had to speak to the poor according to their ignorance and
credulity, and to the rich according to their power. When I read that
the icon of the Russian peasant is a religious force that will prevail
over the materialism of Helmholtz and Haeckel, I have to contain myself
as best I can in the face of an assumption by a modern educated European
which implies that the Irish peasants who tied scraps of rag to the
trees over their holy wells and paid for masses to shorten the stay of
their dead relatives in purgatory, were more enlightened than their
countryman Tyndall, the Lucretian materialist, and to ask whether the
Russian peasant may not find his religious opinions somewhat neutralized
by his alliance with the countries of Paul Bert and Combes, of Darwin
and Almroth Wright. If we are to keep up any decent show of talking
sense on this point we must begin by recognizing that the lines of
battle in this war cut right across all the political and sectarian
lines in Europe, except the line between our Socialist future and our
Commercialist past. Materialist France, metaphysical Germany,
muddle-headed English, Byzantine Russia may form what military
combinations they please: the one thing they cannot form is a Crusade;
and all attempts to represent this war as anything higher or more
significant philosophically or politically or religiously for our
Junkers and our Tommies than a quite simple primitive contest of the
pugnacity that bullies and the pugnacity that will not be bullied are
foredoomed to the derision of history. However far-reaching the
consequences of the war may be, we in England are fighting to shew the
Prussians that they shall not trample on us nor on our neighbors if we
can help it, and that if they are fools enough to make their fighting
efficiency the test of civilization, we can play that game as
destructively as they. That is simple, and the truth, and by far the
jolliest and most inspiring ground to recruit on. It stirs the blood and
stiffens the back as effectively and quickly as hypocrisy and cant and
humbug sour and trouble and discourage. But it will not carry us farther
than the end of the fight. We cannot go on fighting forever, or even for
very long, whatever Lord Kitchener may think; and win, lose, or tie, the
parties, when the fight is over, must fall back on their civil wisdom
and political foresight for a settlement of the terms on which we are to
live happily together ever after. The practicable conditions of a stable
comity of nations cannot be established by the bayonet, which settles
nothing but the hash of those who rely on it. They are to found, as I
have already explained, in the substitution for our present Militarist
kingdoms of a system of democratic units delimited by community of
language, religion, and habit; grouped in federations of united States
when their extent makes them politically unwieldy; and held against war
by the bond of international Socialism, the only ground upon which the
identity of interest between all workers never becomes obscured.
*The Death of Jaures.*
By far the greatest calamity wrought by the war has been the death of
Jaurès, who was worth more to France and to Europe than ten army corps
and a hundred Archdukes. I once proposed a press law that might have
saved him. It was that every article printed in a newspaper should bear
not only the name and address of the writer, but the sum paid him for
the contribution. If the wretched dupe who assassinated Jaurès had known
that the trashy articles on the Three Years Law he had been reading were
not the voice of France in peril, but the ignorant scribbling of some
poor devil at his wits' end to earn three francs, he would hardly have
thrown away his own life to take that of the greatest statesman his
country has produced since Mirabeau. It is hardly too much to say that
this ghastly murder and the appalling war that almost eclipsed its
horror, is the revenge of the sweated journalist on a society so silly
that though it will not allow a man to stuff its teeth without
ascertained qualifications for the task, it allows anyone, no matter how
poor, how ignorant, how untrained, how imbecile, to stuff its brains
without even taking the trouble to ask his name. When we interfere with
him and his sweaters at all, we interfere by way of appointing a
censorship to prevent him from telling, not lies, however mischievous
and dangerous to our own people abroad, but the truth. To be a liar and
a brewer of bad blood is to be a privileged person under our censorship,
which, so far, has proceeded by no discoverable rule except that of
concealing from us everything that the Germans must know lest the
Germans should find it out.
*Socialism Alone Keeps Its Head.*