was to Amsterdam. I started on a perfect day for flying. But as we
approached the Channel it became evident that we were not going to
cross the water, but that we were swerving round to Lympne. Something
had gone wrong. We landed at Lympne. The aviator apologised; he had an
oil leakage. Matters were patched up, and we got up again and flew to
Amsterdam. There the oil leakage was worse than ever, and we could not
have gone much farther. A head-wind or a sudden storm might have got us
into serious trouble. We had been flying in a machine that had not been
sedulously overhauled, an overworked machine.
Next day I should have flown on to Berlin. When I went to the Amsterdam
office to start, I learned that no aeroplane had come from Berlin
for two days--though it was admirable flying weather--and the office
could not tell me when a machine would be available. Apparently there
had been some financial dislocation of the German service. I had to
get round to various European towns I wanted to visit by means of the
shabby, disheartened railway services of Central Europe. Returning,
I did secure tickets for Paris from Prague by the Franco-Rumanian
Air Company, which professes to run a swift and regular service from
Bucharest to Paris. At the Prague aerodrome there is a vainglorious
monument, an obelisk, to commemorate the foundation of this company.
That and the office in Prague, where I got my money back, was as much
as I saw of the Franco-Rumanian Company. Thanks to certain fortunate
chances, which made me independent of private enterprise aeroplane
companies, I had had some beautiful flying in Czecho-Slovakia. I made
three delightful flights on three separate days, and on two of these
days the French machines were not going to Strassburg “on account of
the weather.”
The real trouble of that particular company, however, was not the
weather, but a shortage of machines. The company has no understanding
with the German Government, and its route lies over German territory
from Czecho-Slovakia to Strassburg. Badly overhauled machines are
never safe to get to their destination, and, I was told, eleven
Franco-Rumanian aeroplanes, forced to descend on German territory, had
been seized by the Germans.
’Planes were coming to Prague from Warsaw and Vienna and depositing
passengers there to get through to their destinations as well as
they could, but there was nothing going on to Strassburg. I got to
Paris from Prague by train via Amsterdam! That is the present route
between these two places, and I suppose it will remain so until our
great-grandchildren, if any, see what is left of the French removed
from what is left of the Ruhr Valley.
From Paris I started by an English service for London. We started
with an air of tremendous punctuality and efficiency from the Hôtel
Crillon at three in the afternoon. I reckoned we should be up by 3.30,
and that I should dine in London at half-past seven or eight. But
we muddled about at the aerodrome of Le Bourget until nearly five,
booking luggage, fooling with passports, packing the all too big and
clumsy omnibus machine. I sat in a seat with a lot of valises and hat
boxes, tied precariously with string, swaying in front of my nose.
The saloon had a worn and weary look; it was not nearly so pretty as
it is in the advertisement pictures. We made a fairly good flight to
the coast except that now and then the engine popped a little. We rose
over the water, as usual, to about five thousand feet. Then as we came
within distant sight of Dungeness, one engine began to miss badly. I
noticed that we were dropping rapidly. However, we escaped a ducking.
We crossed the coast-line while still at nearly two thousand feet and
landed at Lympne. Apologies. The defective engine, we were told, was
in a hopeless condition, and the company must send us passengers on
in cars to a rural railway station and so by slow train to London,
to arrive at heaven knows what hour. There was no attempt whatever
to bring up a reserve aeroplane from Croydon; I presume because the
company has no reserve aeroplanes available. I had the good luck to
find a friend at Lympne who took me to his house for the night and
turned my misfortune into pleasure, but my fellow-passengers were not
so fortunate.
Luckily I was not a passenger in the French Goliath which crashed
at West Malling in August last. I have flown successfully on one
occasion from Paris to London in a French Goliath, and on another have
started from London to Paris and had a forced landing at Lympne. These
Goliaths are quite good machines, but they seem to be unlucky ones.
That West Malling disaster was only another such story of “private
enterprise” flying as I have told, but carried to the pitch of tragedy.
The unfortunate machine must have been in a shocking condition of
maladjustment. It had already been down at Lympne for patching, and was
going on to Croydon. The radiator of the port engine had been leaking.
Then as it went on to Croydon the starboard engine failed completely.
But we have always been told, perhaps untruthfully, that even if
one engine of these double engine machines fails the other suffices
to carry on to a safe landing. The port engine was still going. The
aviator declared at first that there was a panic among the passengers,
and that is why he crashed in a nut plantation. I doubt about the
panic. But at any rate, here again was a machine in use in a condition
quite unfit for passenger traffic, so that it needed only a momentary
nervous failure to destroy it.
The moral I draw here to-day is to repeat exactly what I maintained
upon the British Civil Air Transport Commission in 1918. “Private
enterprise” cannot run successful European air services. Moreover, it
is impossible to control the air services of Europe on nationalist
lines. You cannot have nearly forty sovereign countries each trying to
wreck the air service of the other thirty-nine. Europe must be one
area for air transport under one control, or there can be nothing but a
few ferry services in operation. One comprehensive European air trust,
with hundreds and presently thousands of aeroplanes in daily flight
and two or three in reserve and under over-haul for every one in the
air, would have in the end an enormously profitable organisation. But
Europe to-day is as morally incapable of producing such an organisation
as Central Africa. These risky trips in dud machines and these flowery
prospectuses of defective services are as much organised public flying
as this generation is likely to see in Europe.
VII
WILL GERMANY BREAK INTO PIECES?
3.11.23
Will Germany break into pieces and become a group of divergent and
mutually hostile States?
To some readers this will seem to be an entirely useless question.
They will declare that the thing is happening. Germany is breaking up
visibly, they will say. Germany has attempted a democratic republic and
failed. The daily news is kaleidoscopic. It varies with the day and the
political bias of one’s paper. Sometimes Germany is breaking in this
way and sometimes in that. But few people seem to have much faith in
the final emergence of a united Germany from this sea of disaster and
misery in Central Europe.
Perhaps I believe too much in the things of the mind and imagination,
in language and writing and literature as a link and a sustaining power
in human affairs, but I do not share this belief in the break-up of
Germany. I believe she will keep together as Russian-speaking Russia
has kept together, and become again a great nation and a great people
playing a leading part in the world’s destinies.
It is true that her new democratic institutions have worked feebly and
disastrously. But just at present what we call democratic institutions,
our old clumsy system of voting and representative government that
is, are not working particularly well in any European country. One
cannot congratulate either Great Britain or France or Italy upon
its triumphant democracy just at the present time. The duly elected
British Government is unable to carry out its obvious foreign policy
effectively because it is shouted down by a millionaire newspaper-owner
suffering from Napoleonic mania, and in France the expression of
public opinion is not so much shouted down as battened down under
a centralised and all-powerful Press combine. France behaves with
the concentrated vigour of monomania, and Great Britain with the
self-regardful evasiveness of the feeble-minded, and the common citizen
of neither country is really justified in an attitude of superiority
towards the distraught and leaderless German.
Distraught and leaderless the Germans are, and--which is perhaps the
greatest misfortune that can happen to a people in the face of a
steadfast enemy--without a leading idea to hold them together. We have
to remember that this great people, the Germans, lost their way in
1848, and have still to recover it. At that time there was a reasonable
prospect of a Republican United States of Germany. It was wrecked by
the habitual particularism of Germany, and by the self-seeking treason
of the Hohenzollerns. Germany was unified later, but from above and
not from below, by a crown and dynasty and not by education and an
educated popular will, and Germany is still reaping the consequences of
that misfortune.
It is not the least among the endless inconveniences of monarchy that
it substitutes an unreal symbol for real ideas of unity. Instead of a
cult of brotherhood, instead of a pride in the achievements of one’s
own people in science and art and social progress and the service
of mankind, there is substituted, more or less completely, an idiot
adulation of the crowned head and his womankind and their offspring.
The school children of a monarchist country are trained up to a worship
of these glorified individuals; the flag becomes a carpet beneath the
feet of their deities, and their attention is diverted from their own
pride and honour as future members of a great community. Many people
never grow up out of the obsessions of a royalist training, and so it
is that the collapse of the Hohenzollern system has left great masses
of the German people imaginatively bankrupt and utterly confused. Any
people who had had the same training and the same experience would be
equally at a loss and helpless. The idea of a great German republic,
one and indivisible, has to be built up now in an atmosphere of
unparalleled storm, confusion, and disaster.
It cannot be built up all at once, and meanwhile anything superficial
in the way of separations may happen to Germany. I will not attempt to
discuss the bubblings of separatism and monarchist extremism that are
going on. But one probability is very present in my mind. It is one of
the paradoxes of the Russian situation that the Communist Government of
Moscow survives there very largely because under the stress of foreign
invasions and the foreign-subsidised devastations of White adventurers
it became a patriotic Government. In Germany now, neither the big
industrials, the old Junkers, nor the ruling classes generally seem to
have the wit and generosity to think of their civilisation as a whole.
The Communists do--after their fashion. At present the Communists are
showing no overwhelming strength in German affairs, but a time may come
when great numbers of the German people, trained in hardship, ruined
and desperate, may turn to this one party which tells the same story in
the Rhineland and Bavaria and Saxony and Prussia.
We have, I think, to count it among the possibilities of the present
situation that a Communist Government may presently be fighting for
German integrity against foreign domination in Berlin, and that great
masses of the German people, like the Russians, may prefer even
Communism to the certain shames and indignities of separatism. In which
case Monsieur Poincaré will, I suppose, beat up his armies of blacks
and whites and march on Berlin. With an “extension” trip to Moscow to
follow.
Yet even after that Germany will survive. Twice before in her history
Germany has arisen out of desolation and defeat. I believe she will
rise again out of her present darkness and end at last the central and
leading Power, the very keystone, it may be, of a reconstructed Europe.
I believe in the German schoolmaster, the German student, in German
persistency, and the patient strength of the German brain. I hated and
hate that bastard imitative Byzantine-German Imperialism and German
Junkerism, and I believe that our war to shatter these things was a
necessary war. But I have never faltered in my belief in the greatness
and soundness of the German people, and in my appreciation of all that
we owe in intellectual, social, and industrial stimulus to Germany.
Her present situation is unparalleled. Every attempt she makes to
get to her feet is thwarted by her pitiless, senseless foe. Our
English-speaking peoples, in our slow, oafish way, are looking on,
are assisting, at an attempt to waste and torment to death a great
community as civilised as our own. We never came into the war for any
such objective, and I do not believe that we shall stand by to the end
in the face of this iniquity.
But anyhow, I believe that Germany will come back. Her common language
and now her common miseries will keep her one. She has many enemies,
but on her side now is the long reach and the long memory of the
printed word. Bohemia, Czecho-Slovakia as we call it now, rose again
after an almost complete extinction of three hundred years. Dark years
are before Germany and a terrible winter, but in two years or ten years
Germany will have found her Masaryk and her Benes and be on her way to
recovery.
I would not like to be a German separatist in the days to come.
VIII
THE FUTURE OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
_Empire Review. October 1923_
The _Empire Review_ has, I perceive, been born again and displays a
constellation of gifted contributors writing about subjects of which
their knowledge approaches saturation point. Commander Locker Lampson
is alive to the need of variety, and for an incidental change he asks
me to write upon a topic that he must feel is by no means my specialty.
He wants my views about the British Empire. I more than suspect he
counts upon my taking a Radical view of that great system. He selects
me, an obscure supporter of the Labour Party, as a sample of what men
are thinking on that side of the political arena. But I can write only
as a man in that street. The official attitude of the party is to
be found plainly and simply stated in the publications of the party
headquarters.
Yielding to the Editor’s persuasiveness, I will set down a few notes
and a few generalities that occur to me. They may offend some of those
peculiar people who are all out for the British Empire, any old British
Empire whatever it is and whatever it does, but I think that they may
be of interest to many--what shall I call them?--Imperialists, and
I take it most of the readers of the _Empire Review_ are such, who
are prepared for the idea that support of the British Empire may be a
conditional support and not a fanaticism.
Let me begin with something that is more than a mere verbal quibble.
I wish that this political system could have some other name than
Empire, because it is not properly an Empire at all. It is a complex
association of at least three different types of territory, and the
word “Empire” is endlessly misleading and mischievous in connection
with it.
In the last few years, for purposes that need not now concern us,
I have had to study a certain amount of history and a number of
historians. Many men of commanding intelligence have been historians,
and I offer no comparison between the intellectual quality of
historians and that of scientific men as such. But trained as I was in
the clear, subtle and beautiful disciplines of comparative anatomy, I
found myself amazed at the easy carelessness of the average historian’s
habitual terminology, his slovenly parallelisms and reckless
assumptions. A large part of his work is the study of human communities
and political associations. Yet I found him without any intelligible
classification of political combinations, any real sense of grades and
structural differences between one community and another. He slops the
word “Empire” over the whole face of history; Athenian Empire and Aztec
Empire, Shang Empire and Sung Empire, Empire of Alexander and Roman
Empire, Mongol Empire and Hittite Empire, British Empire and Brazilian
Empire; it’s all the same to him. “Cats is dogs,” as the porter said,
“rabbits is poultry, but a parrot is a passenger.” As a consequence,
the historian argues from the most atrocious analogies. And, though
there is a considerable and pretentious literature of political
science, there does not yet exist in all political and historical
literature any attempt at a clear analysis of the differences and
affinities of all these various human complexes. Yet to make such an
analysis would be a most attractive and fruitful task. Historical and
political science has still to find its Linnæus. History, until that
happens, remains a slough of terminological confusion, and the ideas of
the ordinary educated man drown in that mud.
The word “Empire” came into the world with the expansion of the Roman
Republic. The Roman Empire was a thing different in many fundamentals
from the so-called “Empires” that preceded it, the “Shah-doms,” if I
may create a sort of temporary word, of Asia and the “Pharaoh-doms” of
Egypt, for example. It differed from them at least as widely in its
possibilities, structure and range as a species of Tertiary mammals
differs from a species of Mesozoic reptiles. It was unprecedented
in arising out of an aristocratic republic instead of a conquering
monarchy, and in having a legal tradition of a strength and prestige
unknown to any previous community. It was unprecedented in its
disposition to extend its citizenship beyond its initial boundaries.
Its expansion was concurrent with an increasing use of coined money
and of credit based upon coined money; its economic and financial
system had a quite novel facility and instability. The Empire was held
together by a road-system that made the road-system of the Persians
seem a mere preliminary experiment. Its extent was far greater than
that of any preceding form of political administration. Reading and
writing, already raised to new levels of simplicity and convenience
by the Greeks and Hebrews, brought what we should think nowadays a
small proportion, but which was in those days a quite unprecedented
proportion, of the population into an intelligent participation in
public affairs. Iron had become widespread for tools and implements as
well as weapons, and the horse was now no longer a war-beast but, with
its bastard child the mule, a universally available means of transport.
All these things made the Roman Imperial System as new a thing in human
experience as the United States of America or the present British
“Empire,” both of which, I hold, are new species, fresh beginnings
without any true affinities in the past.
There is in all history only one rough parallel to the Roman Empire,
and that is its contemporary Chinese Empire. But I will restrain my
encyclopædic impulse and leave that out of our present discussion.
Now as Gibbon’s great history shows, the history of all Europe and
Western Asia since that time is really the story of this unique thing,
the Empire, the Roman Empire, and its struggle to exist, to remain
one, and to restore itself, when broken, to complete existence. It was
broken naturally by the Adriatic crack, running in towards that fatal
wedge out of the great plains of the nomads, Hungary; it was broken by
the general incapacity of the Italians for navigation, due perhaps to
characteristics of the Italian coast; it was broken by the intellectual
inadequacies of a plutocracy. But the Empires that sprang from it,
West and East, were only the results of a fission that left the idea
of reunion perpetually alive; the Holy Roman Empire, the Tzardom, the
Imperialism of Napoleon, even the Austrian Empire and the Hohenzollern
Empire, were all logically and legitimately the products of the
original Empire, legitimately Empires in origin and intention, attempts
to recover a universal sway; parts in a great dreary, futile European
drama on which at last in these days the curtain falls.
There has indeed only been one real Empire in the world, this that
centred upon Rome and the Mediterranean. Britain played a certain part
in this Empire; Henry VIII, for example, was Imperial candidate against
Charles V and the King of France; but the rôle of Britain therein has
generally been a marginal one. The importance of England to mankind
began only when it turned its face from the Empire and from thoughts of
the Empire to the ocean. What we call to-day the British Empire is a
new thing and a different thing from the Roman Empire, created by new
and greater forces, and deserving an entirely distinctive name.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the opening phases of a great
process of change in human conditions that has been going on until the
present time. From the point of view of one who discusses political
or economic agglomerations, the most important thing in that great
revolution has been the development of new means of communication
between man and man. That revolution began with the appearance of
the ocean-going sailing ship and of printed paper; it reaches its
climax nowadays in wireless telegraphy and the aeroplane. It is now
a commonplace, though for many historians and scholars it is quite
a recent discovery, that any change in communications involves new
economic, strategic and political adjustments. For a score of centuries
the horse, the horse-drawn vehicle, the hand-made high-road, the
parchment document, the public speaker and vocal teacher and a feeble
coastal shipping had been the limiting conditions of all statecraft.
Under these conditions the idea of the Empire had been the highest
political idea in men’s minds. Now, however, in that age of Renascence,
the ocean which had been an ultimate barrier became almost suddenly
a highway; and the printed book, and, presently, the newspaper
quickened masses in the community, hitherto politically ineffective,
into informed activity. The politics and statecraft of Europe,
obsessed--still to this day obsessed--by the doomed Imperial tradition,
began nevertheless a clumsy slow adaptation to this process of material
change, unable to ignore its pressures and compulsions, but evidently
indisposed to recognise its nature.
I use this word “indisposed” deliberately. The political mind, like the
legal mind to which it is so closely akin, looks backward habitually,
prefers precedents to Utopias, clings to the old and is pushed along by
the new. Europe clings still to the Imperial tradition four centuries
after it became impracticable; its kindred peoples are divided and they
destroy one another in the feuds of a dead issue. Frenchman and German
waste Europe, as Asia Minor was wasted by Byzantine and Persian, in a
futile search for a kind of supremacy that can never return to this
world. They are like rivals who fight for a woman already dead and
decayed.
Continental Europe is being desolated and destroyed by imaginative
incapacity, by the failure to recognise the obsolescence of its
political ideas and traditions. But Europe is not the world, nor will
its decline and fall be the end of the human story. In the United
States of America, in this so-called British Empire, and now in the
United States of Russia, we must recognise a breaking away from
tradition as complete as when the Roman Empire broke away from the
forms and traditions of any previous political synthesis. These new
systems arise not to inherit, but to supersede.