stagnation of the western Roman Empire. She gave the world paper,
which made the printed book and newspaper possible, which made general
education and the publication of scientific work possible, which indeed
laid the foundation of the modern world. She taught the Mongols and
Turks the organisation and military methods that ended the dying Greek
impulse of the eastern Roman Empire, nearly conquered Europe, and drove
the reluctant European seamen to discover South Africa and America. She
numbers to-day more than a fifth part of the human race; has four times
as many civilised citizens as the United States, and nearly as many as
all continental Europe put together. When we discuss the struggles of
a world civilisation to exist it is well now and then to give China
a thought. For China must be a pillar of that world civilisation
equivalent to the whole English-speaking world.
Two or three facts of some importance are not perhaps so actively
present in the general consciousness as they might be. There is a
Chinese Republic with a President in Pekin, who rules more or less
in most of China proper, though Canton and several other provinces
get along in a state of provisional independence. But besides the
President there is also a young Emperor in Pekin with a large official
income--in arrears--and a remarkable English tutor. The Emperor, we are
told, is quite Anglicised, he is being taught constitutional history,
and presently, if the British people do not wake up to the dangers of
the position, there may be an attempt, open or furtive, with British
assistance, to restore the Chinese monarchy. Moreover, although I
understood at the Washington Conference that Wei-hai-wei was to be
given up, the British are still there--waiting for something to turn
up. The British never had much right to be in Wei-hai-wei; their excuse
for being there collapsed with the collapse of Russian imperialism;
and probably not one British voter in the hundred is prepared for the
possibly expensive and humiliating consequences of keeping there too
long. The abandonment of the Singapore dock enlargement implied a
policy of general withdrawal from forcible adventures in Eastern Asia.
But in the untidy way of the British, the shreds and patches of some
old dream of a military and political predominance in China are left
to brew misunderstandings and trouble in the future.
It is not that Britain has not a profound interest in the future
development of China. All the English-speaking peoples, all the
other peoples in the world, have a great and increasing interest in
Chinese affairs. As the world is drawn together into a political
unity, the Chinaman becomes the most important neighbour of everyone.
But the method of expressing an interest by grabbing and fortifying
settlements, threatening coasts with warships, levying tribute and
imposing iniquitous trade arrangements, is now manifestly old-fashioned
and barbaric, and a new line of activities has to replace these outworn
puerilities.
The English-speaking communities have to work out, and do seem to
be beginning to work out, a common conception of a world order, and
of their common share in it. Regarded as a point of departure, as a
new turn in international thought, the League of Nations movement
marks an epoch in world history. That sort of thought is still most
extensively carried by the English language; shallow and weak to-day,
it may become deeper and more effective as time goes on. It is in the
character of the English-speaking communities. It is manifestly of
primary importance that so far as possible this thinking-out of the
organised peace of the world by the English-speaking communities should
go on parallel with, and in touch with, the similar thinking-out of
the other great communities of the world. And with no other great
community is it more possible and desirable to develop a joint system
of ideas and a common political and social aim, than with the great
Chinese mass. It is possible, because China is to an extraordinary
extent renascent and blank and ready to consider and accept points of
view and constructive conceptions. China is remaking her education
from the foundation. The four hundred million mass of China is at
present intellectually far more plastic than the forty million mass
of France, and the thirty million mass of Italy. And it is desirable
as well as possible, because a successful effort to bring modern
Chinese and American and British thought about the world’s affairs into
co-operative understanding would add the weight of four hundred million
to the five hundred million of the American and British systems.
In America, China, and Britain alike there is a recognition--weak
and partial though it is--of this great opportunity. The return
of the Boxer indemnity, already partially repaid by America, and
soon to be repaid by Britain, ear-marked for educational purposes,
is an unprecedented and most significant thing in international
relationships. Part of the American money has gone to educate Chinese
students in English and so prepare them to become students in the
American Universities. The rest is to be devoted to the development of
a modern library in Pekin University. The British money is not yet
apportioned, but Dr. Tsai, the Chancellor of the National University
at Pekin, has recently been in London to urge the paramount need of a
museum and a properly equipped system of scientific laboratories in
China.
I saw Dr. Tsai giving an address to the China Society in the London
School of Oriental Studies upon these new developments of Chinese
education. It was one of the most reassuring things I have witnessed
for some time, that little gathering of Chinese students and of a few
interested English friends, in the steep little lecture theatre in
Finsbury Circus, to discuss the making-over of the Chinese mind that is
now in progress. We are still in the day of comparatively small things;
sums like ten million pounds are dwarfed by such figures as four
hundred million people; yet they are not too small to be perceptible
and significant. A growing number of Chinese are making themselves
thoroughly well acquainted with all the West has to teach them; they
are not simply learning and accepting, they are criticising. The
perennial vigour and originality of the Chinese mind is manifested by a
prompt repercussion to British and American ideas.
I have before me as I write, for example, a memorandum on _Chinese
Politics and Professionalism_, by Mr. S. C. Chang, which is one of
the ablest criticisms of the Anglo-American panacea of “democracy”
that I have ever read. It is one of the most remarkable and admirable
things about China that in a time of great political confusion whole
provinces, almost without government, go on in an orderly fashion and
that arts flourish and reading and teaching spread. The nucleus of the
mental organisation of a new China, in close touch and sympathy with
the Atlantic peoples, appears. Before a generation has passed it may
have gathered sufficient power to undertake the general education of
the whole Chinese people. It already inspires a considerable Press.
These new relationships of study and discussion between the
English-speaking and Chinese worlds will, I hope, increase, intensify,
and develop. At present it is a very extraordinary thing that, while
the young Chinese students in Britain and America can be counted by
hundreds, there is still no system of sending English and American
students, by way of scholarships, to study Chinese life and literature
in China.
The Chinese are more conscious than the English-speaking peoples of
deficient knowledge, and of the need of new inspiration. Our phase is,
comparatively, a phase of self-satisfaction. The Chinese will know what
we think, and know long before we have realised how much we have to
learn from them, and what a wholesome thing it is for us to get their
point of view. For Chinese schools multiply and teaching spreads, and
where there are schools and teaching there the future grows.
XXXV
AIR ARMAMENT: THE SUPREMACY OF QUALITY
3.5.24
Bankrupt France and out-of-work England are developing a sort of
armament race in air equipment. It has not quite the vigour of the
old naval armament race; it is not so expensive, and the chances
for financial and industrial loot are less. But it goes on, and at
present, on paper at least, France leads handsomely. On paper France is
ascendant over Britain in the air, capable of inflicting vast injuries,
while sustaining small reprisals, and the matter is one of great
concern to many anxious souls. They have visions of London stark and
stiff and twisted under poison gas and all the British ports and docks
destroyed.
The vagueness of our knowledge does on the whole enhance our terrors.
But it is well to remember that our knowledge _is_ vague. It is
particularly vague about the things that aeroplanes can carry and drop.
Chemists and science students generally find an innocent pleasure
in inventing wonderful rays, explosives, and lethal gases for the
benefit of the ingenuous newspaper man. They invent them rather than
make them. In practice the normal limitations and insufficiencies of
this earthly life apply with peculiar force to explosives and lethal
gases. Only in the world of scientific romance can they be made out
of nothing and instantaneously. In this sordid world of everyday they
demand ingredients that are difficult and expensive to produce and
limited in amount, and they require apparatus and skill and often
considerable courage for their preparation. And in order to produce any
serious effect on an enemy they must be delivered in huge consignments
upon that enemy, and that requires a large number of aeroplanes of
sufficient size to carry bulky material. Mr. Galsworthy was recently
writing to the _Times_ in grave alarm about the exposure of Britain
to French air attack. He saw all her ports destroyed, no wharf for
any food ship, England starved. I doubt if he had ever attempted to
figure out how many tons of high explosive--allowing for the inevitable
misses--would have to be conveyed from France to Southampton, for
example, to smash up that one port alone to any decisive extent.
Before the heavy transport aeroplane can be safely used its mechanics
must be insured against attack from fighting aeroplanes in the hands
of highly skilled men. And this brings us to the essential objection
to any panic creation of air forces. In the air quality is of supreme
importance, and quality is rare. Given equal machines a good man can
almost always put down a mediocre man; a man of exceptional gifts can
keep on putting down ordinary men. The star air fighters in the war
were men who had accounted for scores of enemy machines. Given a few
exceptional men and the best machines, an air force of a few score
units is capable of accounting for hundreds of inferior squadrons.
God, we are told, is on the side of the biggest battalions, but this
arithmetical preference, if it continues at all at the present time,
is certainly restricted only to land fighting. In the air God is now
manifestly on the side of intelligence, quickness, and courage. For
a mastery of the air over and around one’s country there is needed
therefore, before all other things, a War Office capable of finding and
using first-class men, aviators, mechanics and inventors. Inventors and
innovators most of all. After that, it must have money for the best
material. But the money and the bulk of the product is a secondary
matter. It is only after the air war is won that the big omnibuses full
of bombs can come into play for more than incidental raids.
Now it is doubtful if any War Office exists or can exist capable of
carrying on a skilled air warfare. There is something subtly stupid
and unscientific about this war business, and you will never find
first-class imaginations giving themselves freely and continuously
to war organisation. Great men like Cromwell or Mr. Trotsky may do
miracles of war organisation under necessity, but it is only puerile
types like Mr. Amery who can go on planning war in peace time. The
soldier is, has been, and always will be a rather limited and usually
a rather thickheaded person. It follows therefore that if ever there
should be a real, fully-prepared-for war in the world again--a thing
which, as the unrepentant author of the phrase “The War to End War,”
I am naturally disposed to doubt--then probably the air warfare which
will dominate it will be a warfare conducted with machines far below
the quality of the best contemporary knowledge, and by men below
the highest attainable standard. It may be, therefore, a clumsy
war, as needlessly destructive as the great war; and the lumbering
big aeroplane, with its tons of explosive, in search for targets of
military significance, will incidentally smash up all sorts of precious
things. But the less clumsy air-warfare is the less it will do that.
It is a paradoxical-looking but quite valid proposition that the
less we develop special skill and invention in air-warfare the more
prolonged and destructive air-warfare is likely to be. A brilliantly
clever and trained and equipped air force might even be capable of
purely defensive warfare. A clumsy, abundant air force, incapable of
encountering and outflying its antagonists, could only work by the
cruel and de-civilising method of reprisal raids.
For these reasons I think it almost as regrettable that Mr. Ramsay
MacDonald should talk so readily of a sort of Washington Conference
for Europe upon air disarmament as that he should have consented
to the replacement building of the five cruisers. Nothing will ever
restrain nations at war from making a belligerent use of the air;
and the alternative to a specialised scientifically developed air
fighting force will be a mobilisation of civil transport air planes
for offensive use. This will not be a diminution but an aggravation of
the horrors of air attack so far as the ordinary civilised man on the
ground is concerned.
A number of people seem to consider civil air transport as the natural
reserve for war aviators and machines. The British have recently
subsidised the various commercial concerns which run the poor, partial,
under-equipped air services between Britain and the Continent, to the
extent of a million pounds, no doubt with some such fancy about air
reserves in mind. The consolidation of the British air companies was
followed at once by a reduction of the salaries of the pilots, and a
defensive strike on their part. The ideal pilot of the companies seems
to be a higher sort of omnibus driver, hardly better paid. So far
there has been no visible increase in equipment. Nothing could have
brought out more plainly the essential conflict between profit-making
and public service. The need of civilisation in respect to peace and
war ends alike is to work out the possibilities of flying to their
utmost extent and at any cost to attract exceptionally capable men to
every branch of the service. The natural aim of a consolidated group
of companies seeking profit is to stabilise conditions at the nearest
possible profitable level, regardless of the future and the public
welfare. In no branch of human activity is private enterprise for gain
more mischievous than in transport, and in no field of transport has
private enterprise shown itself more wasteful and futile than in air
transport. During the war flying was everywhere a State enterprise, and
enormous progress was made in every development of air science. Since
the war progress has slowed down to negligible proportions under the
magic touch of the modern business man. His method is to standardise;
he is the enemy of distinctive quality wherever it is to be found.
XXXVI
LABOUR POLITICIANS: THE EVAPORATION OF THE INTELLIGENZIA
10.5.24
At the last General Election the British Labour Party was supported
with the most whole-hearted enthusiasm by a great cloud of artistic
and intellectual workers. It had the Intelligenzia solidly for it. It
had all the higher and better theatrical and artistic workers on its
side: such great literary names as Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell,
such men of science as Soddy. They supported it for a variety of very
understandable reasons. They were revolted by the mean and sterile
dullness of the two historical but disintegrating parties. They were
bored to death by Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Baldwin, Lord
Birkenhead, their endless differences, and their essential resemblance.
They were attracted by the brave hopefulness and the constructive
programme of the new party. They were even allowed to dot the i’s
and cross the t’s of its ample promises. No doubt they helped at the
election, though Heaven knows to what extent. They certainly brought
in youth, ever in love with ideas, to canvass and toil for the party;
they brought in clever journalists and able controversialists.
But all that was six months ago. Now Labour has been tarnished by
office I doubt whether it will exercise the same compelling magic upon
intellectually adventurous people. There is all the difference in the
world between encouraging a Labour Party which promises everything
glorious, and bolstering up a Labour Government which does nothing
amusing. I doubt if the Intelligenzia is likely to be very energetic
when the next election comes.
It is not in the nature of an Intelligenzia to support a political
party in office. Its function in the community is to criticise
actuality, and to startle and enlarge people’s æsthetic, scientific,
political, and social perceptions. It is always against the thing that
is, and it is always in advance of the thing that can practically
be. And what it is saying of the Labour Government now is that it
is just as dull and just as shifty and just as futile as a Left
Liberal Government would have been. Mr. C. P. Trevelyan seems to have
some meritorious intentions about education, and there has been a
recognition of Russia--which the Liberals would have given us just as
well. Apart from that, what have the Intelligenzia got for all their
support of Labour?
In Mr. Ramsay MacDonald we have one of the ablest of living public
speakers, a Prime Minister of unparalleled piety and gentility, but
that is insufficient to console the Intelligenzia for their general
disappointment. The more brightly the personality of Mr. Ramsay
MacDonald shines, the less visible are the creative ideas for which
their advanced spirits followed him. Instead of some genuine effort
toward disarmament there has been the most foolish treatment possible
of the business of the five cruisers. There has not even been a gesture
towards the nationalisation of transport, mines, and the production of
staple commodities. At least the Labour Ministers might have availed
themselves of official files and opportunities, to prepare reports,
digest facts and set inquiries afoot that would open a way to future
nationalisation. The Capital Levy has gone behind a screen. There
has been a muddle over housing and a resort to Liberal assistance.
These Labour leaders over whom the Intelligenzia waved its banners of
constructive Socialism and of a world remade, so bravely, turn out to
be for the most part just ordinary politicians abjectly afraid to stop
anything or start anything that may affect votes.
There is the utmost symbolical value in the behaviour of the new Labour
Ministers towards Court affairs. Great Britain is a monarchy and the
Ministers must go to Court, but there was no law and no necessity to
require a Labour representative in a Labour Ministry to dress up in
an expensive and unsuitable livery. The neat blue serge suit in which
such a man would attend a Labour Congress or pay his respects to his
God in church or chapel was surely good enough for a Court visit. A
red tie, perhaps, in suitable cases could have emphasised the note of
Socialism. But no! These men the Intelligenzia worked for and elected
as the representatives of a new age must needs set out at once to beg,
borrow, or steal the uniform of the old. As the newspaper photographs
witness, most of them wear it with little grace or dignity. They have
the self-conscious solemnity of a new local mayor in his robes. As a
rule it matters little what a man wears, but these liveries betrayed
stupendous acquiescences.
It was unfortunate for the good relations of the Intelligenzia with the
Labour Party that two police spies were found under the platform of a
private meeting of the Communist Party the other day. The Intelligenzia
will always have a very tolerant corner in its heart for the Communist
Party in Britain and America. The party gets hold of a lot of the best
of the young people and does them a lot of good. It is extremist, and
you cannot have a healthy mental life in a community in which extremist
opinions and intentions are not fairly stated. Prohibition of opinions
is an insult to adult citizens. In Great Britain at least the Communist
Party is a perfectly legal organisation. It has as much right to hold a
private meeting as the Liberal or Tory Party. It is the business of the
police and Government to respect and protect its privacy. Mr. Henderson
ought to know a lot about the Communists. They supply a healthy
criticism and irritant on the Left wing of his party. He ought to have
known this police annoyance was going on, and he ought to have stopped
it as soon as he came into office. Either he knew this meeting was
going to be spied upon or he did not. If he did he does not understand
freedom, and if he did not his officials are lacking in respect for him.
In a large number of quite symptomatic affairs the Labour Government
either through ignorance or through other preoccupations has failed to
take advantage of its opportunities, and each one of these failures
estranges some new group of intelligent people. For example, everyone
with a vision a little wider than the politician’s realises the
importance of China to the future of mankind. In the long run, even the
question of the mishandling of the five cruisers may prove less serious
than negligence on the part of our Government toward the China Boxer
indemnity money. The Chinese ask for a directive voice in that matter.
Dr. Tsai is the Chancellor of Pekin University; he represents the best
educational influences in China. He comes to London, but he finds most
of the Ministers he wants to see too busy trying on their breeches
and stockings to see him. He is given a nice talk with a permanent
official, and told in the best official style that all his suggestions
will be most carefully considered by the “Committee.” The Committee
which is to be set up may be just the sort of Committee that destroys
the confidence of progressive Chinamen in British good faith. As it
was first planned it represented material interests strongly; it had
only one member who could be called an educationist; and there was no
representative of New China upon it at all. There has been much coming
and going since then, and the situation may be to a large extent saved,
but if so it will be in spite of rather than thanks to any creative
comprehension on the part of the Foreign Secretary or any member of the
Labour Government.