people have no voice in the supreme decision of war. Their privilege
is to fight those with whom they have no quarrel. Theirs, too, to
sacrifice in appalling numbers their fathers, husbands, brothers,
and sons, to give up their homes and savings, to acquiesce blindly
in every evil that marches in the wake of strife. Just as the men
ordered from the trenches to be mown down by shot and shell are given
or offered some form of raw spirit to stimulate and even intoxicate
them, so before war is declared, Governments, through the medium of a
docile Press, circulate the lies best calculated to make the imminent
enormity appear inevitable and just. As soon as the declaration of
war is made, the common patriotism of nations obscures every other
issue. Men must fight for hearth and home, for fatherland and all
that it implies. Primal necessity is speaking, and on every banner of
every nation the ominous words "Væ victis" are inscribed. The people
who make war and, somewhere out of Death's ample range direct it,
understand the psychology of nations; their skill in all the arts of
deception is unrivalled. Yet of all the lessons enforced by the war
there is none that has come with greater force to all whose minds are
not hermetically sealed than the lesson that Individualism has failed
completely in the hour of the world's extremist need. The price we have
paid for it within the compass of two brief years is the total loss
of millions of lives, the future ineffectiveness of still more, the
sheer, brutal waste of wealth more than sufficient to have solved all
the economic troubles of Europe. Countless thinkers in all belligerent
countries have been forced to the conclusion that Socialism is the only
force capable of rendering what is left of Europe capable and adequate
to the demands upon it. Great Britain, insular by act of God and the
general tendency of the population, is fully prepared to accept
Socialism as long as it is not called by that name, for such is the
state of our mental development that we judge all political goods by
their labels. In other countries, where social, political, and economic
conditions are not merely discussed, but understood, where the people's
representatives are required to have some minimum of knowledge in
addition to birth, money, and influence, these concessions to popular
ignorance and prejudice have been swept aside. The recognition of the
necessity for sweeping changes is made without fear. Even in Germany,
when Dr. Frank, the eminent Socialist, was reported killed, a statement
was published to the effect that the Kaiser had expressed his regrets
at the death of a man whose gifts would have helped the country in the
days when schemes of reconstruction are under consideration.
This may have been no more than a sop to the social Democrats, of whom
upwards of two millions have been called to the colours, but even if
this be so, the sop is a significant one, and could not have been
lightly given.
In stricken Belgium, the man who comes next to King Albert in sheer
patriotic endeavour and in the gift of inspiring the nation to hold up
its head under conditions hard for any of us to realise, is the famous
Socialist leader, Emile Vandervelde. He is not only at the head of the
Belgian Ministry of War, but is King Albert's most trusted adviser; his
gifts overshadow those of his equally devoted and patriotic colleagues.
The thrill of horror and shame that ran through France when Jean Jaurés
fell to the assassin's bullet in the opening days of war, was felt far
beyond the French borders. Even in the tense excitement of that unhappy
season, the French Government, after voting the murdered patriot a
public funeral, posted in every Commune throughout the country its
expression of horror and regret. To-day, a Socialist Prime Minister
directs with rare skill and courage the fortunes of the Republic;
the French National Council has not hesitated to summon to its ranks
such an uncompromising foe of Individualism in whatever form as Jules
Guesde. None, having eyes to see, ears to hear with, and even a modest
gift of comprehension, can fail to gather from this the tendency of
the great Power with which we are now so closely allied. Of all the
European nations there is none in which the gift of political sagacity
is so strongly marked as it is in France, none to which the gifts of
political foresight and courage have been granted in equal measure.
What Paris thinks to-day, London must be at least prepared to discuss
in the very near future.
There is no secret about the cause of the action that France and
Belgium have taken of set purpose. The whole essence of a successful
struggle is unity--unity of purpose, of feeling and of thought. The
working classes, now as ever, are bearing in every country the bulk of
the burden of war. Sane Governments must needs endeavour to secure for
labour an adequate representation in their midst. Knowing that their
proper interests are being subordinated, if at all, to the national
cause, and not for private profit or exploitation, labour feels that
it is secure, and will give all it has to give with a generosity
that may be rivalled, but can never be excelled. The white flame of
patriotism is only kept glowing if it is fed by the efforts of a whole
community. This result will never be quite realised here in England
until all interests are united in a Cabinet that stands just now for
very little more than the propertied classes. I admit, Mr. Henderson,
Mr. Brace, and Mr. Wardle, have all been given some office to placate
the great Trade Unions from which so much is demanded to-day. But this
is not enough. Our Cabinet of aged ostriches still hides its head
in the bushes of precedent and prejudice, content to believe that
what it does not wish to see can have no existence, and fortified
in this strange method, that would be comic if it were not tragic,
by all sections of the capitalistic Press. International Socialism
is gathering its forces throughout Europe, and in the United States
as well, to impose permanent peace on kings and other anachronisms.
Thinking people in all the centres of civilisation agree that this war
is sounding the knell of privilege. But England remains content to be
ruled by lawyers, professional politicians, mid-Victorian relics, and
doctrinaires. Socialism, the master force of the immediate future, is
deliberately ignored. Well might Father Adderley (Canon the Honourable
James Adderley, so beloved in the slums of Plaistow and Birmingham)
deplore in his recently published memoirs, the absence from Parliament
or from the Government itself, of H. M. Hyndman, the Nestor of English
Socialism. The astonishing part of our national attitude towards this
crisis is that the men who really guide and influence our public
opinion, the live men of letters, are for the most part Socialists,
and make no secret of their principles, nor have they ever hesitated
to voice their suspicion of what Matthew Arnold called "the unelastic
pedantry of theorising Liberalism." Does this Government think that all
this teaching has fallen or is falling on deaf ears? Does it forget
that it was the French Encyclopædists who made the French Revolution?
They taught a discontented and unhappy people to think and the people
did the rest. Our rulers have always moved respectfully behind the
times, but, to do them what justice we may, be it remembered that they
never expected to live through seasons that impel the times to move
with giant and sudden strides.
Now, even in the latter days, all these things have come upon them.
Will they, can they, rise to the height of the occasion?
XXII
HOW SHALL WE MINISTER TO WORLD DISEASED?
It is not without a certain significance that, while French and German
soldiery were sacrificing themselves by their thousands to the Gods of
War in and around the blood-stained village street of Douaumont, while
our soldiers were holding on to the line of the Tigris, near whose
source Russian forces were marching southward to the rescue, the Royal
Commission appointed to investigate what is euphemistically called
"Social Disease," issued its report. The coincidence from certain
view-points is startling.
The report, definitely limited as to its scope, sober in its statement,
and appalling in its revelation, is a solemn reminder to the world of
civilised men that there are enemies equally deadly and more insidious
than those with whom any belligerent is concerned. The victims of the
diseases discussed probably outnumber, in Great Britain alone, all her
defenders on sea and land. Four millions of our population, with power
to add to their number, are at grips with a deadly enemy in various
stages of its virulence; an enemy who will "visit the sins of the
fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation." Nay
more, the Commissioners whose trained minds lend solid value to their
every utterance, assure us that after a war an excessive incidence
of disease is certain to occur, even in districts previously free.
There are other significant comments. "Our evidence," they tell us,
"tends to show that the communication of disease is frequently due
to intoxicants, and there is no doubt that the growth of temperance
among the population would help to bring about an amelioration. We are
also conscious of the fact that overcrowded and insanitary dwellings
contribute to the spread of disease, and from improvements in this
direction we should expect some diminution of its prevalence."
Let us consider the full meaning of these vivid comments. When war is
over, we shall celebrate the coming of peace throughout the length and
breadth of these islands. Countless offerings will be laid before the
altar of the brewer and the distiller; it will be almost dangerous to
be an abstainer. For a time, at least, the barriers of restraint will
be torn down. Something known as "good fellowship" will at once dictate
and excuse an orgie. The discipline that weak minds require will be
honoured in the breach rather than the observance, and "an excessive
incidence of disease is certain to occur, even in districts previously
free."
When a town is successfully invaded, and a soldiery, grown reckless
after lying cheek by jowl with death flings his self-discipline,
mercy, and restraint to the winds, the world that has not lost its
reason is sick at heart. When peace is proclaimed, and the return to
civil life is associated with a licence that outrages the living and
damns the unborn, there is apparently no authority that can intervene,
no public opinion capable of making itself felt. The living, and
those upon whom the heaviest burden of life is to be imposed, are
alike unprotected. Not only is this so, but the conditions that must
make for their undoing are cultivated in the interests of those who
flood the land with spirits and malt liquors. What if our slums help
infection to spread? Are not slum-owners often men of repute, some
of whom sit in the high seats of judgment and help to administer a
world they are willing to degrade still further in the sacred name
of rent? Do we not make a man a Peer if he can brew sufficient beer?
The Commissioners know better than to plead for an England sober
or an England adequately housed. Theirs not to presume to attack
vested interests. They have dared greatly in pointing out what the
slum and the gin palaces contribute to the spread of most loathsome
diseases under heaven. There they must stop. They know their public.
"Improvement in the social conditions and in the moral standard may be
slow." They have realised what our modern political conditions stand
for throughout Great Britain. They even admit that there may be no
money for improvement; European civilisation, however inadequate to
human needs, however imperfect and incomplete, can only be destroyed
at heavy expense. The destruction demands the best life-blood of every
belligerent nation and all available financial resources. What can be
left to combat "social disease," cancer, consumption, drink, slums,
and the other evils that destroy even more than war, but have nothing
arresting or spectacular in their methods? The Commissioners plead, it
would seem, with more of earnestness than hope.
Perhaps the most appalling side of "social disease" is due to its
utter absence of respect for persons. We could wish in the interests
of humanity as at present constituted that the germs could themselves
be inoculated with genuine English snobbery, so that they would
refrain from attacking "high personages." Apparently, germs are
untutored things. They ignore class distinctions. They attack with
equal impartiality the drunken soldier of a garrison town, the sailor
set free, after a long voyage, in an evil seaport with money burning
holes in his pocket, and the crowned head who, in the days of his
indiscretion, lived as lewdly as the soldier or sailor without the
excuse of either. The wages of sin is death. "Social disease" affects
the ordered function of the brain, and when that brain is in the skull
of one who controls the destinies of Empire, the dread death-wages
must be paid by the rank and file of his subjects. Nobody has dared
yet to write fully and freely of the influence of social disease upon
the decrees of European rulers. Though the hideous facts are known
well enough in certain circles, they are hardly discussed. Perhaps the
scandal is one from which the sharpest pen shrinks appalled. Consider
the _cercle privé_ from which Europe's dynasts spring, the tendencies
of upbringing, the intermarriage, the temptation, the effect upon
narrow minds and exhausted stocks. The light is beginning to shine
upon thrones. The world is beginning to ask why so much of madness is
manifest in the ranks of rulers, and whether in the wide interests of
humanity the breed is not of more importance than the blood. At present
the question is asked _sotto voce_, the time is surely coming when it
will ring through Europe. But for the moment there is a still larger
question at stake.
The publication of the Royal Commission's Report is a warning and a
challenge to the democracy, not only of Great Britain, but of the
world. It tells them that the real, the enduring enemy, is not the
German, the Briton, the Frenchman, or the Russian. The enemy is not
on the battlefield, but in the homeland, in the street, perhaps in
the house. He has invaded every country in Europe without exception.
Battleships, heavy ordnance, elaborate trenches, are of no avail.
Treaties of peace cannot be made effective until they are signed
between a vigilant and victorious democracy on the one hand and a
defeated, privileged class on the other.
The national resources required to meet a foul disease are taken from
us to-day in measure beyond precedent to meet an expenditure for which
the demand was created by kings and statesmen. There was no reference
to the will of the people; until such time as that will could be
neither logical nor effective. The world's working men, decimated
to satisfy the ambitions of their misrulers, must return in greatly
diminished numbers and with lives crippled and wasted by the million,
to find the old enemies at their gate and the worst and ugliest of
these enemies prepared to take advantage of peace by waging more deadly
war. And those who will administer their shattered dynasties will
include members of families that are notoriously tainted by "social
disease." Surely viler prospect were hard to find.
Yet there is not under heaven an evil for which there is no remedy.
If the people sacrificed to armament makers, diplomats, and dynasts
will join hands across the world they can overcome the enemies without
and within. Their strength, if they will but put it forward, is
irresistible, far greater than they know. They should have no more
illusions. They are many; those who exploit them are few. Before
the war the great international movement was growing. A series of
ultimatums, of frenzied calls to patriotism, racial prejudice and fear,
frosted the ripening blossoms, but could not reach the root that lies
deep down in the heart of suffering humanity. Internationalism will
rise again. Those who have a finger upon the pulse of the workers the
world over, know that the life forces, depressed for a time, are giving
a growing vigour to the beat. Already they see the rulers of the world
deploring the catastrophe that they brought about, becoming conscious
that their hands drip blood. Already they see that normal evils are
not merely remaining unabated but are actually growing, that a world
returned to sanity and humility will find more vileness to combat and
fewer means to its aid. It will look for a lead.
That is why there is so much reason to hope that the United States
will not be drawn into war. There, the workers of Europe are already
beginning to look for guidance, direction, help, and actual
co-operation in the ultimate struggle for freedom, that when war is
over they may combat the yet worse evils around them. Our thoughts turn
to the New World, redeemed from kings and popes and the tragic remains
of feudalism, and, largely on that account, at peace. Consider the
vile, naked truth that we in England may lack the means adequately to
conquer the "social disease," the white scourge, the slum problem, and
other shames of man's own making because our national resources are
being sacrificed to such destruction as sun, moon, and stars have never
looked upon since first they lit the earth.
Our rulers, our statesmen, our parliaments, our laws alike, have
failed us. Judge them by their fruits, as hereafter surely they
must be judged. There is nothing left between Europe and the abyss
but the solidarity of the working classes, the spread of democracy,
the overthrow of every effete institution that exists for no better
reason than that it has been allowed to exist so long. We, the
Internationalists, look to the United States, that island of sanity
set in a raging sea of madness. We look to it for light and leading,
for encouragement and support. It is the only great power left to read
the lessons of world-war without prejudice. I would like the terrible
indictment penned against our modern civilisation by the Royal
Commission to be read by every thinking American of whose political
faith democracy is the vital essence.[1]
"This is that Blossom on our human tree
Which opens once in many myriad years
But opened, fills the world with Wisdom's scent
And Love's dropped honey."
FOOTNOTE:
[1] I would like it studied in the red light of war, that our cousins
oversea with their generous instincts, quick judgment and resourceful
minds may be stimulated to assist the workers of all nations when once
this terrible chapter of our life is closed. United action will make
impossible in the future all wars save that which is waged against
disease, privilege, and ineffectiveness.
XXIII
HOW I WOULD WORK FOR PEACE
For a long time past, ever since it was realised that the countless
campaigns to which we are committed would be long in following their
appointed course, costly in progress and revolting in detail, all
manner of people have come forward to explain that they have mastered
the causes and the cure of war. Belligerent and neutral countries
alike have put forward their panaceas, and Great Britain has held some
particularly active groups, perhaps because, while strife fills her
horizon, only Zeppelins have succeeded in bringing the actualities home
to those who are not serving. Then, too, we have always had in the
country a number of men and women who believe honestly that war is a
madness and crime, that their contention can be proved by argument, and
that because they imagine war does not really benefit anybody, nobody
really wants war.
There are others who do not go quite so far as this, being content
to saddle policies or individuals with the responsibility. Secret
diplomacy is, we are assured, a fruitful source of wars, and we are
invited to place our cards on the table, and instruct our diplomats
to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Out
of these theories are born societies like the Union of Democratic
Control, and many unnecessary speeches by people who are apt to confuse
martyrdom and unpopularity.
War gives rise to optimists, like Mr. Henry Ford, who, quite oblivious
to gibes and sneers, charters a steamer and proceeds to Europe, that he
may call upon belligerents to cease their quarrels, because even from
the distant city of Detroit, he can see how foolishly they are behaving.
It may be easy to laugh or to sneer at these manifestations. I find it
impossible to do either. In every one of these efforts, great or small,
notable or ludicrous, something of the spirit that is helping the
world to progress is made manifest. If men and women who have little
in life except the respect of their circle, deliberately sacrifice
that precious asset for the sake of saying what they believe to be the
truth, they are worthy of regard, and let us remember that most of us
are amongst those who would rather be stoned than laughed at.
If I have criticism for panaceas that are to rid the nation of war as
patent medicine-vendors offer to rid the individual of disease, if I
look a little askance at all schemes of international betterment by
will of the people, it is because all equality of reasoning power, all
movement towards higher things, is conditioned by education.
We are very much like our fruit-trees. If you plant one hundred trees
of equally good appearance and quality on a good soil, and you attend
to fifty, and leave the other fifty to look after themselves, what is
going to happen? The trees that have clean soil round the roots, that
are pruned and washed and shaped in the way they should go will yield
abundantly, look well, and live long; the others will be uncertain in
their growth, unattractive in aspect, and liable to fail or become
diseased.
In England we pay scant heed to the prosperity of the race, we are
far more concerned with the prosperity of the race-course. We have
been taught to care less for the well-being of the public than of the
publican.
I do not write in any bitterness of spirit, but I remember how long,
and successfully the race-course struggled against the war, how
definitely Mr. Lloyd George's attempt to end the drink traffic was
defeated by the "trade," and how, on the other hand, certain alleged
economies in our schools, designed to save a few pounds at the cost of
efficiency, have been accepted with hardly a protest.
If we wish to raise another generation that may benefit by the lessons
we have learned and paid so dearly for, we must educate it, and
education must be recognised as a necessity, something as necessary
to us as the bread we eat, and more important than professional
politicians, public-houses, race-courses, theatres, and motor-cars;
more vital to our welfare than all the amusements of the rich and the
poor put together.
Without education, the best ideas, the highest ideals must be lost
and, as things are here, so they are elsewhere. In Europe the only
belligerent countries that have developed education all over their
territory are France and Germany. In some of the other countries,
the schoolmaster does not cover a tithe of the domain, and rulers do
not wish to see the area of activity enlarged, partly because they
understand it is easier to deceive, divide, and rule the ignorant, and
partly because they know that the rank and file will not be able to
keep pace with the enlightened intelligences to which the most restless
elements in the State will be attracted. Autocratic rule cannot endure
indefinitely in countries where the proletariat has been to school,
even military domination might in time be questioned.
But what bearing has this upon world war? you may ask, and I reply that
it has a considerable bearing upon the whole question, because the
great majority of those who ensue peace are preaching just now to the
converted.
Those who make the next war may be despotic or unconstitutional rulers,
if Europe is of a mind to endure such people after this, but they will
depend largely upon the uneducated classes, or upon an iron discipline
that makes every man a slave of him who represents the State. Education
is the one reliable antidote to absolute monarchy, and despite its
complete failure in July and August, 1914, I am still inclined to
have faith in the International. It failed then, for each belligerent
country called out that it was in danger, and in that hour when the
social democracy might have saved Europe from the loss of millions of
promising lives, the savings of one generation and the progress of two,
it failed. But nobody will recognise more completely than the social
democrat the price of failure; he will see that democracy must be in
future as independent of boundaries as is art or science.
I believe that scores of men and women have the right peace methods,
that there are many plans by which peace might be assured to the world,
but no one of these can possibly become effective unless it can appeal
to the men who constitute the rank and file of the world's armies, and
to their wives and sweethearts.
The only other way out of the tangle is for victory to fall upon the
side of those who are really concerned to keep the peace, and there
is more than a little danger in this, for those who are concerned only
with peace are apt to forget war altogether--to neglect necessary
precautions, cut down reasonable expenditure, and in short, to give the
war-loving, but weaker races, a chance of challenging peace afresh. A
union of the world's democracies is the cure for war, and this union is
not possible until a certain standard of education has been reached by
one and all. Only then will the man to whom fighting is the breath of
life understand that he must control his murderous instincts or perish
by them.