and when it wags it wags foolishly, and, as he admits, maliciously,
albeit sometimes amusingly, and with superficial brilliance. He says the
Irish do not consider England their country yet. Of course they do not.
Why should the Irish consider themselves English? Neither do the Scots,
nor the Welsh, nor the Canadians, nor will they ever so think. But they
are all British, and so, despite all Mr. Shaw says to the contrary,
Kitchener was right.
Mr. Shaw falls into a common and regrettable error when he continually
writes England when he really means the British Empire. It is the
British Empire that is at war, for which, though a citizen, Mr. Shaw has
no authority to speak or to be considered a representative, for, as he
unnecessarily admits, he is not a "British patriot"; neither is he a
"Junker," for I have looked through all his definitions of the word, and
none applies to him.
In what way is the "Battle of Dorking" like Bernhardi? The one he says
had as a moral: "To arms! or the Germans will besiege London!" The other
said: "To arms! so that the Germans may besiege London, or any other
country that does not want compulsory culture!" The one was defensive,
the other offensive.
He says of the war: "We" began it. Since he says he is not English, and
that it is an English war, whom does he mean by "We"? If he means the
British, then, should a policeman see a small boy being ill-treated by a
large man and go to the help of that boy, he, the policeman, must be
said to have begun the fight which would probably ensue between him and
said man, notwithstanding that the policeman is only fulfilling what he
has sworn to do.
Monaco, he says, "seems to be, on the whole, the most prosperous and
comfortable State in Europe." If this is buffoonery it is singularly out
of place. But even Monaco has an "army," has had recently a small
revolution, and the Monegasques do not consider themselves ideally
comfortable, and they have many "injustices." Does he hold the
principality up as a model administration and the source of its
prosperity as above reproach?
Mr. Shaw represents no one but himself, and, like all small men, he
reviles others greater than he, such as Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith,
but it does not become him, looking at his own life's history, to cast
cheap sneers at anonymous journalists in cheap newspapers, who, though
they may lack his literary style, possess, at least, one virtue which he
boasts that he has not--patriotism! Yours very truly,
LAWRENCE GRANT.
New York, Nov. 18.
* * * * *
*Antidote to "Long Infliction of Dreary Stuff."*
_To the Editor of The New York Times_:
Hail to Bernard Shaw! Could anything be more refreshing? After the long
infliction upon us of the flood of dreary stuff from London and Paris,
and all the talk of German militarism, and what is to become of it at
the hands of such immaculately unmilitary apostles of peace and
international righteousness and treaty observances as Russia, France,
and England, and all the maudlin denunciations of the German Nietzsche
and Bernhardi, and the terrible Kaiser, could anything be more
refreshing than Shaw's advent in the field of current war history?
Though an Anglo-Saxon of American birth and long descent, and no
believer in militarism of any sort of itself, yet I see in that no
reason to distort ancient history by an attempt to make it appear that
German militarism is at all the chief sinner, or, for that matter, not a
very necessary and desirable thing in order that Germany may have her
rightful place in the world, or any place at all.
V.A.W. Warwick, N.Y., Nov. 16.
* * * * *
*False Assumptions Basis of Shaw's Attack.*
_To the Editor of The New York Times_:
The article on the European war by Mr. G.B. Shaw in THE TIMES of Sunday
appeals to me as a noteworthy specimen of what an artful literary genius
can do in the way of argumentative cantankerousness. His chief grievance
is British diplomacy as represented by Sir Edward Grey, upon whose
devoted head he empties the vials of his splenetic humor.
Underlying his argument are two glaringly false assumptions, and on
these the whole fabric rests. The first is that a certain undefined but
presumably multitudinous body, which he designates as "Socialist,"
"Democratic," and "Social Democratic," is better qualified to determine
the policy and conduct the correspondence of the Foreign Office than
trained and experienced statesmen.
The second is that Sir Edward Grey should have followed the suggestion
of Sazonof and threatened Germany with war at a certain stage of the
correspondence. This can now be only a matter of opinion, but it may be
confidently affirmed that of all nations the Germany of this day would
be the last to back down in face of a threat. It may be also said
generally that an open threat is about the surest way to bring on a war.
Austria threatened Servia and war ensued. Germany threatened Russia and
war ensued. Germany threatened Belgium--in the form of a notification
that she intended to invade her territory--and war ensued.
Mr. Shaw's contentions are grotesque.
Flushing, Nov. 16. SAM TEST.
* * * * *
*"Junkers" Controlled Old World Ages Before Shaw.*
_To the Editor of The New York Times:_
With regard to the article by Mr. Bernard Shaw, the gist of the matter
can be compressed in fewer words. The ideas expressed are not the
exclusive property of Mr. Shaw. The Old World for indefinite ages has
been controlled and directed by what he calls the "Junker" class, the
rich and idle aristocrats who want for nothing, and, being born to rule,
do not find it worth while to exert themselves mentally, and for whom
there is no suitable profession but the army and diplomacy.
The mass of the people are to them the great unwashed, and those a
little higher in the scale "cads and bounders," or the German
equivalent, in fact the canaille of the French who at the time of the
Revolution took things into their own hands to the great surprise of
everybody. This substratum is not considered in the scheme of the
"Junker's" existence, though the lower orders alone are the workers and
producers and make ease and luxury possible.
Mr. Shaw. I believe, intends to intimate that there might be a use for
the intellectual class, the thinkers and writers with the imagination
that can put them mentally in the place of the individuals who make up
the masses, think the thoughts and live the lives vicariously of the
people who are the nation, and if the "Junker" class of England and
Germany and kindred nations who govern and dictate its policies were
leavened with the brains and broad-mindedness of the thinkers there
might be found a better use for men than killing each other and a
brighter outlook for the world which is now filled with widows and
orphans.
Mrs. F.B. WILLIAMSON.
Elizabeth, N.J., Nov, 16.
*Open Letter to President Wilson*[A]
*By George Bernard Shaw.*
Sir: I petition you to invite the neutral powers to confer with the
United States of America for the purpose of requesting Britain, France,
and Germany to withdraw from the soil of Belgium and fight out their
quarrel on their own territories. However the sympathies of the neutral
States may be divided, and whatever points now at issue between the
belligerent powers may be doubtful, there is one point on which there
can be neither division nor doubt, and that is that the belligerent
armies have no right to be in Belgium, much less to fight in Belgium,
and involve the innocent inhabitants of that country in their reciprocal
slaughter. You will not question my right to address this petition to
you. You are the official head of the nation that is beyond all question
or comparison the chief of the neutral powers, marked out from all the
rest by commanding magnitude, by modern democratic constitution, and by
freedom from the complication of monarchy and its traditions, which have
led Europe into the quaint absurdity of a war waged formally between the
German Kaiser, the German Czar, the German King of the Belgians, the
German King of England, the German Emperor of Austria, and a gentleman
who shares with you the distinction of not being related to any of them,
and is therefore describable monarchically as one Poincaré, a Frenchman.
I make this petition on its merits, without claiming any representative
character except such as attaches to me as a human being. Nobody here
has asked me to do it. Except among the large class of constitutional
beggars, the normal English feeling is that it is no use asking for a
thing if you feel certain that it will be refused, and are not in a
position to enforce compliance. Also, that the party whose request is
refused and not enforced looks ridiculous. Many Englishmen will say that
a request to the belligerents to evacuate Belgium forthwith would be
refused; could not be enforced; and would make the asker ridiculous. We
are, in short, not a prayerful nation. But to you it will be clear that
even the strongest power, or even allied group of powers, can have its
position completely changed by an expression of the public opinion of
the rest of the world. In your clear western atmosphere and in your
peculiarly responsible position as the head centre of western democracy,
you, when the European situation became threatening three months ago,
must have been acutely aware of the fact to which Europe was so fatally
blinded--namely, that the simple solution of the difficulty in which the
menace of the Franco-Russo-British Entente placed Germany was for the
German Emperor to leave his western frontier under the safeguard of the
neighborliness and good faith of American, British, and French
democracy, and then await quite calmly any action that Russia might take
against his country on the east. Had he done so, we could not have
attacked him from behind; and had France made such an attack--and it is
in the extremest degree improbable that French public opinion would have
permitted such a hazardous and unjustifiable adventure--he would at
worst have confronted it with the fullest sympathy of Britain and the
United States, and at best with their active assistance. Unhappily,
German Kings do not allow democracy to interfere in their foreign
policy; do not believe in neighborliness; and do believe in cannon and
cannon fodder. The Kaiser never dreamed of confiding his frontier to you
and to the humanity of his neighbors. And the diplomatists of Europe
never thought of that easy and right policy, and could not suggest any
substitute for it, with the hideous result which is before you.
*The State of Belgium.*
Now that this mischief has been done, and the two European thunderclouds
have met and are discharging their lightnings, it is not for me to
meddle with the question whether the United States should take a side in
their warfare as far as it concerns themselves alone. But I may plead
for a perfectly innocent neutral State, the State of Belgium, which is
being ravaged in a horrible manner by the belligerents. Her surviving
population is flying into all the neighboring countries to escape from
the incessant hail of shrapnel and howitzer shells from British cannon,
French cannon, German cannon, and, most tragic of all, Belgian cannon;
for the Belgian Army is being forced to devastate its own country in its
own defense.
For this there can be no excuse; and at such a horror the rest of the
world cannot look on in silence without incurring the guilt of the
bystander who witnesses a crime without even giving the alarm. I grant
that Belgium, in her extreme peril, made one mistake. She called to her
aid the powers of the Entente alone instead of calling on the whole
world of kindly men. She should have called on America, too; and it is
hard to see how you could in honor have disregarded that call. But if
Belgium says nothing, but only turns her eyes dumbly toward you while
you look at the red ruin in which her villages, her heaps of slain, her
monuments and treasures are being hurled by her friends and enemies
alike, are you any the less bound to speak out than if Belgium had asked
you to send her a million soldiers?
Not for a moment do I suggest that your intervention should be an
intervention on behalf of either the Allies or the Entente. If you
consider both sides equally guilty, we know that you can find reasons
for that verdict. But Belgium is innocent; and it is on behalf of
Belgium that so much of the world as is still at peace is waiting for a
lead from you. No other question need be prejudged. If Germany maintains
her claim to a right of way through Belgium on a matter which she
believed (however erroneously) to be one of life and death to her as a
nation, nobody, not even China, now pretends that such rights of way
have not their place among those common human rights which are superior
to the more artificial rights of nationality. I think, for example, that
if Russia made a descent on your continent under circumstances which
made it essential to the maintenance of your national freedom that you
should move an army through Canada, you would ask our leave to do so,
and take it by force if we did not grant it. You may reasonably suspect,
even if all our statesmen raise a shriek of denial, that we should take
a similar liberty under similar circumstances in the teeth of all the
scraps of paper in our Foreign Office dustbin. You see, I am frank with
you, and fair, I hope, to Germany. But a right of way is not a right of
conquest; and even the right of way was not, as the Imperial Chancellor
imagined, a matter of life and death at all, but a militarist
hallucination, and one that has turned out, so far, a military mistake.
In short, there was no such case of overwhelming necessity as would have
made the denial of a right of way to the German Army equivalent to a
refusal to save German independence from destruction, and therefore to
an act of war against her, justifying a German conquest of Belgium. You
can therefore leave the abstract question of international rights of way
quite unprejudiced by your action. You can leave every question between
the belligerents fully open, and yet, in the common interest of the
world, ask Germany to clear out of Belgium, into France or across the
Channel, if she can, back home if she can force no other passage, but at
all events out of Belgium. A like request would, of course, be addressed
to Britain and to France at the same time. The technical correctness of
our diplomatic position as to Belgium may be unimpeachable; but as the
effect of our shells on Belgium is precisely the same as that of the
German shells, and as by fighting on Belgian soil we are doing her
exactly the same injury that we should have done her if the violation of
her neutrality had been initiated by us instead of by Germany, we could
not decently refuse to fall in with a general evacuation.
*A Certain Result of Intervention.*
At all events, your intervention could not fail to produce at least the
result that even if the belligerents refused to comply, your request
would leave them in an entirely new and very unpleasant relation to
public opinion. No matter how powerful a State is, it is not above
feeling the vast difference between doing something that nobody condemns
and something that everybody condemns except the interested parties.
That difference alone would be well worth your pains. But it is by no
means a foregone conclusion that a blank refusal would be persisted in.
Germany must be aware that the honor of England is now so bound up with
the complete redemption of Belgium from the German occupation that to
keep Antwerp and Brussels she must take Portsmouth and London. France is
no less deeply engaged. You can judge better than I what chance Germany
now has, or can persuade herself she has, of exhausting or overwhelming
her western enemies without ruining herself in the attempt. Whatever
else the war and its horrors may have done or not done, you will agree
with me that it has made an end of the dreams of military and naval
steam-rollering in which the whole wretched business began. At a cost
which the conquest of a whole continent would hardly justify, these
terrible armaments and the heroic hosts which wield them push one
another a few miles back and forward in a month, and take and retake
some miserable village three times over in less than a week. Can you
doubt that though we have lost all fear of being beaten, (our darkened
towns, and the panics of our papers, with their endless scares and silly
inventions, are mere metropolitan hysteria,) we are getting very tired
of a war in which, having now re-established our old military
reputation, and taught the Germans that there is no future for their
empire without our friendship and that of France, we have nothing more
to gain? In London and Paris and Berlin nobody at present dares say
"Sirs, ye are brethren; why do ye wrong one to another?"; for the
slightest disposition toward a Christian view of things is regarded as a
shooting matter in these capitals; but Washington is still privileged to
talk common humanity to the nations.
*An Advantage of Aloofness.*
Finally, I may remind you of another advantage which your aloofness from
the conflict gives you. Here, in England and in France, men are going to
the front every day; their women and children are all within earshot;
and no man is hard-hearted enough to say the worst that might be said of
what is going on in Belgium now. We talk to you of Louvain and Rheims in
the hope of enlisting you on our side or prejudicing you against the
Germans, forgetting how sorely you must be tempted to say as you look on
at what we are doing, "Well, if European literature, as represented by
the library of Louvain, and European religion, as represented by the
Cathedral of Rheims, have not got us beyond this, in God's name let them
perish." I am thinking of other things--of the honest Belgians, whom I
have seen nursing their wounds, and whom I recognize at a glance as
plain men, innocent of all warlike intentions, trusting to the wisdom
and honesty of the rulers and diplomatists who have betrayed them, taken
from their farms and their businesses to destroy and be destroyed for no
good purpose that might not have been achieved better and sooner by
neighborly means. I am thinking of the authentic news that no papers
dare publish, not of the lies that they all publish to divert attention
from the truth. In America these things can be said without driving
American mothers and wives mad; here, we have to set our teeth and go
forward. We cannot be just; we cannot see beyond the range of our guns.
The roar of the shrapnel deafens us; the black smoke of the howitzer
blinds us; and what these do to our bodily senses our passions do to our
imaginations. For justice, we must do as the mediaeval cities did--call
in a stranger. You are not altogether that to us; but you can look at
all of us impartially. And you are the spokesman of Western democracy.
That is why I appeal to you.
G. BERNARD SHAW.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] The English newspaper, The Nation, in which Mr. Shaw's letter to the
President of the United States appeared on Nov. 7, made the following
comment thereon:
We are glad to publish Mr. Shaw's brilliant appeal to the President of
the United States, because we believe that when the time for settlement
arrives, the influence of America will be a powerful, perhaps a
decisive, factor in obtaining it. We agree, too, with him that while she
is not likely to respond to an appeal to intervene on the side of the
Entente or the Alliance, the case of Belgium, the innocent victim of the
war, is bound to find her in a very different mood. The States are
already Belgium's almoner; it is only a step further for them to come in
as her savior. But on a vital point we disagree with Mr. Shaw. His Irish
mind puts the case with an indifference to which we cannot pretend. We
have got to save Western Europe from a victory of Prussian militarism,
as well as to avenge Belgium and set her on her feet again. We regard
the temper and policy revealed in Germany's violation of Belgium soil
and her brutalization of the Belgian people as essential to our judgment
of this war and its end. And we dare not concede an inch to Mr. Shaw's
"right of way" theory. His distinction between "right of way" and a
"right of conquest" has no practical effect other than to extinguish the
rights of small nationalities as against great ones, who alone have the
power to take a "right of way" when it is refused, and afterward to turn
it into a right of conquest. Germany's action was not only a breach of
her own treaty (only revealed within a few hours of its execution), but
of Article I. of The Hague Convention on the rights of neutral powers:
"THE TERRITORY OF NEUTRAL POWERS IS INVIOLABLE."
It is not therefore a small thing that Germany has ripped clean through
the whole fabric of The Hague Conventions of 1907. Could the American
Government, aware of that fact, address herself to intervention on the
Belgian question without regard to the breaches of international law
which were perpetrated, first, through the orignal German invasion of
Belgium, and then in the conduct of the campaign in that country?
*A German Letter to G. Bernard Shaw*
By Herbert Eulenberg.
_The following letter from the noted German playwright Eulenberg,
whose plays of a decided modern tendency have been presented
extensively in Germany and in Vienna, was made public by the German
Press Bureau of New York in October_, 1914.
Bernard Shaw: You have addressed us Germans several times of late
without receiving a reply from us. The reason for this was probably the
momentary bitterness against your country of our people's intellectual
representatives. Indeed, our best scholars and artists, Ernst Haeckel at
81 years, leading the rest, stripped themselves during these past weeks
of all the honors which England had apportioned them. Permit me as one
who had the opportunity to do much for the propagation of your dramatic
works, especially of your finest drama, "Candida," in Western Germany
and in Holland, to present as quiet and as moderate a retort as is
possible.
Your appeal to intellectual Germany we reciprocate with a question to
intellectual England. It is as follows: How is it possible for you to
witness your country's present unheard of policy (so opposed to culture)
without rising as one man against it? Do you believe that we thinking
Germans would ever, without saying or doing anything, observe an
alliance of our Government, whose goal was the strengthening of
imperialism and the subjugation and destruction of a cultured power,
such as France or England? Never! Among your people only a very small
number of brave scholars protested against this criminal alliance of
your Government at the beginning of the war. You others, you poets,
painters, and musicians of present-day England were silent and permitted
Sir Edward Grey to continue to sin against a people related to you by
blood and intellect. You raised your voice a little, Bernard Shaw! But
what did you propose to us: "Refrain from your militarism, my dear
Germans, and become again the congenial, complacent poets and thinkers,
the people of Goethe and Beethoven, whom no one hated! Then we will
surely help you against the bad Russians!"
Is not this proposal a bit too naïve for you, Bernard Shaw? We are
situated in the midst of Russians and Frenchmen, who have formed an open
alliance against us for more than twenty years. Our neighbors in the
East denounce nothing more than us, and our neighbors in the West
denounce us and plan against us, who have for nearly half a century
evinced nothing but friendliness toward them. When such enemies surround
us, does not your friendly counsel, Bernard Shaw, seem as if you said to
us: "Just let yourself be massacred, Germans! Afterward your British
cousins will vouchsafe you their protection."
*Germany Not Isolated.*