equally easy to state the first facts--the facts which involved Europe.
The Prince who practically ruled Austria was shot by certain persons
whom the Austrian Government believed to be conspirators from Servia.
The. Austrian Government piled up arms and armies, but said not a word
either to Servia, their suspect, or Italy, their ally. From the
documents it would seem that Austria kept everybody in the dark, except
Prussia. It is probably nearer the truth to say that Prussia kept
everybody in the dark, including Austria.
*The Demands on Servia.*
But all that is what is called opinion, belief, conviction, or common
sense, and we are not dealing with it here. The objective fact is that
Austria told Servia to permit Servian officers to be suspended by the
authority of Austrian officers, and told Servia to submit to this within
forty-eight hours. In other words, the Sovereign of Servia was
practically told to take off not only the laurels of two great
campaigns, but his own lawful and national crown, and to do it in a time
in which no respectable citizen is expected to discharge a hotel bill.
Servia asked for time for arbitration--in short, for peace. But Russia
had already begun to mobilize, and Prussia, presuming that Servia might
thus be rescued, declared war.
Between these two ends of fact, the ultimatum to Servia, the ultimatum
to Belgium, any one so inclined can, of course, talk as if everything
were relative. If any one asks why the Czar should rush to the support
of Servia, it is easy to ask why the Kaiser should rush to the support
of Austria. If any one say that that the French would attack the
Germans, it is sufficient to answer that the Germans did attack the
French.
There remain, however, two attitudes to consider, even perhaps two
arguments to counter, which can best be considered and countered under
this general head of facts. First of all, there is a curious, cloudy
sort of argument, much affected by the professional rhetoricans of
Prussia, who are sent out to instruct and correct the minds of Americans
or Scandinavians. It consists of going into convulsions of incredulity
and scorn at the mention of Russia's responsibility for Servia or
England's responsibility for Belgium; and suggesting that, treaty or no
treaty, frontier or no frontier, Russia would be out to slay Teutons or
England to steal colonies.
*England Kept Her Contracts.*
Here, as elsewhere, I think the professors dotted all over the Baltic
plain fail in lucidity and in the power of distinguishing ideas. Of
course, it is quite true that England has material interests to defend,
and will probably use the opportunity to defend them; or, in other
words, of course England, like everybody else, would be more comfortable
if Prussia were less predominant. The fact remains that we did not do
what the Germans did. We did not invade Holland to seize a naval and
commercial advantage; and whether they say that we wished to do it in
our greed or feared to do it in our cowardice, the fact remains that we
did not do it. Unless this common sense principle be kept in view, I
cannot conceive how any quarrel can possibly be judged. A contract may
be made between two persons solely for material advantages on each side;
but the moral advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the
person who keeps the contract. Surely, it cannot be dishonest to be
honest--even if honesty is the best policy. Imagine the most complex
maze of indirect motives, and still the man who keeps faith for money
cannot possibly be worse than the man who breaks faith for money.
It will be noted that this ultimate test applies in the same way to
Servia as to Belgium and Britain. The Servians may not be a very
peaceful people; but on the occasion under discussion it was certainly
they who wanted peace. You may choose to think the Serb a sort of a born
robber; but on this occasion it was certainly the Austrian who was
trying to rob. Similarly, you may call England perfidious as a sort of
historical summary, and declare your private belief that Mr. Asquith was
vowed from infancy to the ruin of the German Empire--a Hannibal and
hater of the eagles. But when all is said, it is nonsense to call a man
perfidious because he keeps his promise. It is absurd to complain of the
sudden treachery of a business man in turning up punctually to his
appointment, or the unfair shock given to a creditor by the debtor
paying his debts. Lastly, there is an attitude not unknown in the crisis
against which I should particularly like to protest. I should address my
protest especially to those lovers and pursuers of peace who, very
shortsightedly, have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which
is impatient of these preliminary details about who did this or that and
whether it was right or wrong. They are satisfied with saying that an
enormous calamity called war has been begun by some or all of us, and
should be ended by some or all of us. To these people this preliminary
chapter about the precise happenings must appear not only dry (and it
must of necessity be the dryest part of the task), but essentially
needless and barren. I wish to tell these people that they are wrong;
that they are wrong upon all principles of human justice and historic
continuity; but that they are especially and supremely wrong upon their
own principles of arbitration and international peace.
*As to Certain Peace Lovers.*
These sincere and high-minded peace lovers are always telling us that
citizens no longer settle their quarrels by private violence, and that
nations should no longer settle theirs by public violence. They are
always telling us that we no longer fight duels, and need no longer wage
wars. In short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on the fact
that an ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an axe.
But how is he prevented from avenging himself with an axe? If he hits
his neighbor on the head with the kitchen chopper what do we do? Do we
all join hands, like children playing mulberry bush, and say: "We are
all responsible for this, but let us hope it will not spread. Let us
hope for the happy, happy day when he shall leave off chopping at the
man's head, and when nobody shall ever chop anything forever and ever."
Do we say: "Let bygones be bygones. Why go back to all the dull details
with which the business began? Who can tell with what sinister motives
the man was standing there within reach of the hatchet?"
We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking for the facts of
provocation and the proper object of punishment. We do not go into the
dull details; we do inquire into the origins; we do emphatically inquire
who it was that hit first. In short, we do what I have done very briefly
in this place.
Given this, it is indeed true that behind these facts there are
truths--truths of a terrible, of a spiritual sort. In mere fact the
Germanic power has been wrong about Servia, wrong about Russia, wrong
about Belgium, wrong about England, wrong about Italy. But there was a
reason for its being wrong everywhere, and of that root reason, which
has moved half the world against it, I shall speak later in this series.
For that is something too omnipresent to be proved, too indisputable to
be helped by detail. It is nothing less than the locating, after more
than a hundred years of recriminations and wrong explanations, of the
modern European evil--the finding of the fountain from which poison has
flowed upon all the nations of the earth.
*II.*
*Russian or Prussian Barbarism?*
It will hardly be denied that there is one lingering doubt in many who
recognize unavoidable self-defense in the instant parry of the English
sword and who have no great love for the sweeping sabre of Sadowa and
Sedan. That doubt is the doubt of whether Russia, as compared with
Prussia, is sufficiently decent and democratic to be the ally of liberal
and civilized powers. I take first, therefore, this matter of
civilization.
It is vital in a discussion like this that we should make sure we are
going by meanings and not by mere words. It is not necessary in any
argument to settle what a word means or ought to mean. But it is
necessary in every argument to settle what we propose to mean by the
word. So long as our opponent understands what is the thing of which we
are talking, it does not matter to the argument whether the word is or
is not the one he would have chosen. A soldier does not say, "We were
ordered to go to Mechlin, but I would rather go to Malines." He may
discuss the etymology and archaeology of the difference on the march,
but the point is that he knows where to go. So long as we know what a
given word is to mean in a given discussion, it does not even matter if
it means something else in some other and quite distinct discussion. We
have a perfect right to say that the width of a window comes to four
feet, even if we instantly and cheerfully change the subject to the
larger mammals and say that an elephant has four feet. The identity of
the words does not matter, because there is no doubt at all about the
meanings, because nobody is likely to think of an elephant as four feet
long, or of a window as having tusks and a curly trunk.
*Two Meanings of "Barbarian."*
It is essential to emphasize this consciousness of the thing under
discussion in connection with two or three words that are, as it were,
the keywords of this war. One of them is the word "barbarian." The
Prussians apply it to the Russians, the Russians apply it to the
Prussians. Both, I think, really mean something that really exists, name
or no name. Both mean different things. And if we ask what these
different things are we shall understand why England and France prefer
Russia, and consider Prussia the really dangerous barbarian of the two.
To begin with, it goes so much deeper even than atrocities; of which, in
the past, at least, all the three empires of Central Europe have
partaken pretty equally; as they partook of Poland. An English writer,
seeking to avert the war by warnings against Russian influence, said
that the flogged backs of Polish women stood between us and the
Alliance. But not long before the flogging of women by an Austrian
General led to that officer being thrashed in the streets of London by
Barclay and Perkins draymen. And as for the third power, the Prussians,
it seems clear that they have treated Belgian women in a style compared
with which flogging might be called an official formality.
But, as I say, something much deeper than any such recrimination lies
behind the use of the word on either side. When the German Emperor
complains of our allying ourselves with a barbaric and half Oriental
power, he is not (I assure you) shedding tears over the grave of
Kosciusko. And when I say (as I do most heartily) that the German
Emperor is a barbarian, I am not merely expressing any prejudices I may
have against the profanation of churches or of children. My countrymen
and I mean a certain and intelligible thing when we call the Prussians
barbarians. It is quite different from the thing attributed to Russians;
and it could not possibly be attributed to Russians. It is very
important that the neutral world should understand what this thing is.
If the German calls the Russian barbarous, he presumably means
imperfectly civilized. There is a certain path along which Western
nations have proceeded in recent times; and it is tenable that Russia
has not proceeded so far as the others; that she has less of the special
modern system in science, commerce, machinery, travel, or political
constitution. The Russ plows with an old plow; he wears a wild beard; he
adores relics; his life is as rude and hard as that of a subject of
Alfred the Great. Therefore, he is, in the German sense, a barbarian.
Poor fellows, like Gorky and Dostoieffsky, have to form their own
reflections on the scenery, without the assistance of large quotations
from Schiller on garden seats; or inscriptions directing them to pause
and thank the All-Father for the finest view in Hesse-Pumpernickel. The
Russians, having nothing but their faith, their fields, their great
courage, and their self-governing communes, are quite cut off from what
is called (in the fashionable street in Frankfort) the true, the
beautiful, and the good. There is a real sense in which one can call
such backwardness barbaric, by comparison with the Kaiserstrasse; and in
that sense it is true of Russia.
Now we, the French and English, do not mean this when we call the
Prussians barbarians. If their cities soared higher than their flying
ships, if their trains traveled faster than their bullets, we should
still call them barbarians. We should know exactly what we meant by it;
and we should know that it is true. For we do not mean anything that is
an imperfect civilization by accident. We mean something that is the
enemy of civilization by design. We mean something that is willfully at
war with the principles by which human society has been made possible
hitherto. Of course, it must be partly civilized even to destroy
civilization. Such ruin could not be wrought by the savages that are
merely undeveloped or inert. You could not have even Huns without horses
or horses without horsemanship. You could not have even Danish pirates
without ships, or ships without seamanship.
*The "Positive Barbarian."*
This person, whom I may call the positive barbarian, must be rather more
superficially up to date than what I may call the negative barbarian.
Alaric was an officer in the Roman legions, but for all that he
destroyed Rome. Nobody supposes that Eskimos could have done it at all
neatly. But (in our meaning) barbarism is not a matter of methods but of
aims. We say that these veneered vandals have the perfectly serious aim
of destroying certain ideas which, as they think, the world has
outgrown; without which, as we think, the world will die.
It is essential that this perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or positive
barbarian, should be seized. He has what he fancies is a new idea, and
he is going to apply it to everybody. As a fact, it is simply a false
generalization, but he is really trying to make it general. This does
not apply to the negative barbarian; it does not apply to the Russian or
the Servian, even if they are barbarians. If a Russian peasant does beat
his wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him; he is likely
to beat less rather than more as the past fades away. He does not think,
as the Prussian would, that he has made a new discovery in physiology in
finding that a woman is weaker than a man. If a Servian does knife his
rival without a word, he does it because other Servians have done it. He
may regard it even as piety--but certainly not as progress. He does not
think, as the Prussian does, that he founds a new school of horology by
starting before the word "Go." He does not think he is in advance of the
world in militarism--merely because he is behind it in morals.
No; the danger of the Pruss is that he is prepared to fight for old
errors as if they were new truths. He has somehow heard of certain
shallow simplifications, and imagines that we have never heard of them.
And, as I have said, his limited but very sincere lunacy concentrates
chiefly in a desire to destroy two ideas, the twin root ideas, of
national society. The first is the idea of record and promise; the
second is the idea of reciprocity.
It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through
time, is what chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages, but
from brutes and reptiles. This was noted by the shrewdness of the Old
Testament when it summed up the dark, irresponsible enormity of
Leviathan in the words, "Will he make a pact with thee?" The promise,
like the wind, is unknown in nature and is the first mark of man.
Referring only to human civilization, it may be said with seriousness
that in the beginning was the Word. The vow is to the man what the song
is to the bird or the bark to the dog; his voice, whereby he is known.
Just as a man who cannot keep an appointment is not fit to fight a duel,
so the man who cannot keep an appointment with himself is not sane
enough even for suicide. It is not easy to mention anything on which the
enormous apparatus of human life can be said to depend. But if it
depends on anything it is on this frail cord, flung from the forgotten
hills of yesterday to the invisible mountains of tomorrow. On that
solitary string hangs everything from Armageddon to an almanac, from a
successful revolution to a return ticket. On that solitary string the
barbarian is hacking heavily with a sabre which is fortunately blunt.
*Prussia's Great Discovery.*
Any one can see this well enough merely by reading the last negotiations
between London and Berlin. The Prussians had made a new discovery in
international politics--that it may often be convenient to make a
promise, and yet curiously inconvenient to keep it. They were charmed,
in their simple way, with this scientific discovery and desired to
communicate it to the world. They therefore promised England a promise
on condition that she broke a promise, and on the implied condition that
the new promise might be broken as easily as the old one. To the
profound astonishment of Prussia, this reasonable offer was refused. I
believe that the astonishment of Prussia was quite sincere. That is what
I mean when I say that the barbarian is trying to cut away that cord of
honesty and clear record on which hangs all that men have made.
The friends of the German cause have complained that Asiatics and
Africans upon the very verge of savagery have been brought against them
from India and Algiers. And in ordinary circumstances I should
sympathize with such a complaint made by a European people. But the
circumstances are not ordinary. Here again the quite unique barbarism of
Prussia goes deeper than what we call barbarities. About mere
barbarities, it is true, the Turco and the Sikh would have very good
reply to the superior Teuton. The general and just reason for not using
non-European tribes against Europeans is that given by Chatham against
the use of the red Indian--that such allies might do very diabolical
things. But the poor Turco might not unreasonably ask, after a week-end
in Belgium, what more diabolical things he could do than the highly
cultured Germans were doing themselves.
Nevertheless, as I say, the justification of any extra-European aid goes
deeper than by any such details. It rests upon the fact that even other
civilizations, even much lower civilizations, even remote and repulsive
civilizations, depend as much as our own on this primary principle on
which the supermorality of Potsdam declares open war. Even savages
promise things, and respect those who keep their promises. Even
Orientals write things down; and though they write them from right to
left, they know the importance of a scrap of paper. Many merchants will
tell you that the word of the sinister and almost unhuman Chinaman is
often as good as his bond; and it was amid palm trees and Syrian
pavilions that the great utterance opened the tabernacle to him that
sweareth to his hurt and changeth not. There is doubtless a dense
labyrinth of duplicity in the East; and perhaps more guile in the
individual Asiatic than in the individual German. But we are not talking
of the violations of human morality in various parts of the world.
*A Fight Against Anarchy.*
We are talking about a new inhuman morality which denies altogether the
day of obligation. The Prussians have been told by their literary men
that everything depends upon "mood," and by their politicians that all
arrangements dissolve before "necessity." That is the importance of the
German Chancellor's phrase. He did not allege some special excuse in the
case of Belgium, which might make it seem an exception that proved the
rule. He distinctly argued, as on a principle applicable to other cases,
that victory was a necessity and honor was a scrap of paper. And it is
evident that the half-educated Prussian imagination really cannot get
any further than this. It cannot see that if everybody's action were
entirely incalculable from hour to hour, it would not only be the end of
all promises but the end of all projects.
In not being able to see that, the Berlin philosopher is really on a
lower mental level than the Arab who respects the salt, or the Brahmin
who preserves the caste. And in this quarrel we have a right to come
with scimitars as well as sabres, with bows as well as rifles, with
assegai and tomahawk and boomerang, because there is in all these at
least a seed of civilization that these intellectual anarchists would
kill. And if they should find us in our last stand girt with such
strange swords and following unfamiliar ensigns and ask us for what we
fight in so singular a company, we shall know what to reply: "We fight
for the trust and for the tryst; for fixed memories and the possible
meeting of men; for all that makes life anything but an uncontrollable
nightmare. We fight for the long arm of honor and remembrance; for all
that can lift a man above the quicksands of his needs and give him the
mastery of time."
*III.*
*Disposing of Germany's Civilizing Mission*
In the last summary I suggested that barbarism, as we mean it, is not
mere ignorance or even mere cruelty. It has a more precise sense, and
means militant hostility to certain necessary human ideas. I took the
case of the vow or the contract which Prussian intellectualism would
destroy. I urged that the Prussian is a spiritual barbarian, because he
is not bound by his own past, any more than a man in a dream. He avows
that when he promised to respect a frontier on Monday he did not foresee
what he calls "the necessity" of not respecting it on Tuesday. In short,
he is like a child who at the end of all reasonable explanations and
reminders of admitted arrangements has no answer except "But I want to."
There is another idea in human arrangements so fundamental as to be
forgotten, but now for the first time denied. It may be called the idea
of reciprocity; or, in better English, of give and take. The Prussian
appears to be quite intellectually incapable of this thought. He cannot,
I think, conceive the idea that is the foundation of all comedy--that in
the eyes of the other man he is only the other man. And if we carry this
clue through the institutions of Prussianized Germany we shall find how
curiously his mind has been limited in the matter. The German differs
from other patriots in the inability to understand patriotism. Other
European peoples pity the Poles or the Welsh for their violated borders,
but Germans only pity themselves. They might take forcible possession of
the Severn or the Danube, of the Thames or the Tiber, of the Garry or
the Garonne--and they would still be singing sadly about how fast and
true stands the watch on the Rhine and what a shame it would be if any
one took their own little river away from them. That is what I mean by
not being reciprocal; and you will find it in all that they do, as in
all that is done by savages.
*"Laughs When He Hurts You."*
Here again it is very necessary to avoid confusing this soul of the
savage with mere savagery in the sense of brutality or butchery, in
which the Greeks, the French, and all the most civilized nations have
indulged in hours of abnormal panic or revenge. Accusations of cruelty
are generally mutual. But it is the point about the Prussian that with
him nothing is mutual. The definition of the true savage does not
concern itself even with how much more he hurts strangers or captives
than do the other tribes of men. The definition of the true savage is
that he laughs when he hurts you and howls when you hurt him. This
extraordinary inequality in the mind is in every act and word that comes
from Berlin.
For instance, no man of the world believes all he sees in the
newspapers, and no journalist believes a quarter of it. We should
therefore be quite ready in the ordinary way to take a great deal off
the tales of German atrocities; to doubt this story or deny that. But
there is one thing that we cannot doubt or deny--the seal and authority
of the Emperor. In the imperial proclamation the fact that certain
"frightful" things have been done is admitted and justified on the
ground of their frightfulness. It was a military necessity to terrify
the peaceful populations with something that was not civilized,
something that was hardly human.
*"Howls When You Hurt Him."*