Section 1

What is Coming?

A Forecast of Things after the War

By H.G. WELLS

1916

CONTENTS

1. FORECASTING THE FUTURE

2. THE END OF THE WAR

3. NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION

4. BRAINTREE, BOCKING, AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD

5. How FAR WILL EUROPE GO TOWARD SOCIALISM?

6. LAWYER AND PRESS

7. THE NEW EDUCATION

8. WHAT THE WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN

9. THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE

10. THE UNITED STATES, FRANCE, BRITAIN, AND RUSSIA

11. THE "WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN"

12. THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS

I. FORECASTING THE FUTURE

Prophecy may vary between being an intellectual amusement and a serious

occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences.

For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned.

But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of

science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind.

Science is very largely analysis aimed at forecasting. The test of any

scientific law is our verification of its anticipations. The scientific

training develops the idea that whatever is going to happen is really

here now--if only one could see it. And when one is taken by surprise

the tendency is not to say with the untrained man, "Now, who'd ha'

thought it?" but "Now, what was it we overlooked?"

Everything that has ever existed or that will ever exist is here--for

anyone who has eyes to see. But some of it demands eyes of superhuman

penetration. Some of it is patent; we are almost as certain of next

Christmas and the tides of the year 1960 and the death before 3000 A.D.

of everybody now alive as if these things had already happened. Below

that level of certainty, but still at a very high level of certainty,

there are such things as that men will probably be making aeroplanes of

an improved pattern in 1950, or that there will be a through railway

connection between Constantinople and Bombay and between Baku and Bombay

in the next half-century. From such grades of certainty as this, one may

come down the scale until the most obscure mystery of all is reached:

the mystery of the individual. Will England presently produce a military

genius? or what will Mr. Belloc say the day after to-morrow? The most

accessible field for the prophet is the heavens; the least is the secret

of the jumping cat within the human skull. How will so-and-so behave,

and how will the nation take it? For such questions as that we need the

subtlest guesses of all.

Yet, even to such questions as these the sharp, observant man may risk

an answer with something rather better than an even chance of being

right.

The present writer is a prophet by use and wont. He is more interested

in to-morrow than he is in to-day, and the past is just material for

future guessing. "Think of the men who have walked here!" said a tourist

in the Roman Coliseum. It was a Futurist mind that answered: "Think of

the men who will." It is surely as interesting that presently some

founder of the World Republic, some obstinate opponent of militarism or

legalism, or the man who will first release atomic energy for human use,

will walk along the Via Sacra as that Cicero or Giordano Bruno or

Shelley have walked there in the past. To the prophetic mind all history

is and will continue to be a prelude. The prophetic type will

steadfastly refuse to see the world as a museum; it will insist that

here is a stage set for a drama that perpetually begins.

Now this forecasting disposition has led the writer not only to publish

a book of deliberate prophesying, called "Anticipations," but almost

without premeditation to scatter a number of more or less obvious

prophecies through his other books. From first to last he has been

writing for twenty years, so that it is possible to check a certain

proportion of these anticipations by the things that have happened, Some

of these shots have hit remarkably close to the bull's-eye of reality;

there are a number of inners and outers, and some clean misses. Much

that he wrote about in anticipation is now established commonplace. In

1894 there were still plenty of sceptics of the possibility either of

automobiles or aeroplanes; it was not until 1898 that Mr. S.P. Langley

(of the Smithsonian Institute) could send the writer a photograph of a

heavier-than-air flying machine actually in the air. There were articles

in the monthly magazines of those days _proving_ that flying was

impossible.

One of the writer's luckiest shots was a description (in "Anticipations"

in 1900) of trench warfare, and of a deadlock almost exactly upon the

lines of the situation after the battle of the Marne. And he was

fortunate (in the same work) in his estimate of the limitations of

submarines. He anticipated Sir Percy Scott by a year in his doubts of

the decisive value of great battleships (_see_ "An Englishman Looks at

the World"); and he was sound in denying the decadence of France; in

doubting (before the Russo-Japanese struggle) the greatness of the power

of Russia, which was still in those days a British bogey; in making

Belgium the battle-ground in a coming struggle between the mid-European

Powers and the rest of Europe; and (he believes) in foretelling a

renascent Poland. Long before Europe was familiar with the engaging

personality of the German Crown Prince, he represented great airships

sailing over England (which country had been too unenterprising to make

any) under the command of a singularly anticipatory Prince Karl, and in

"The World Set Free" the last disturber of the peace is a certain

"Balkan Fox."

In saying, however, here and there that "before such a year so-and-so

will happen," or that "so-and-so will not occur for the next twenty

years," he was generally pretty widely wrong; most of his time estimates

are too short; he foretold, for example, a special motor track apart

from the high road between London and Brighton before 1910, which is

still a dream, but he doubted if effective military aviation or aerial

fighting would be possible before 1950, which is a miss on the other

side. He will draw a modest veil over certain still wider misses that

the idle may find for themselves in his books; he prefers to count the

hits and leave the reckoning of the misses to those who will find a

pleasure in it.

Of course, these prophecies of the writer's were made upon a basis of

very generalised knowledge. What can be done by a really sustained

research into a particular question--especially if it is a question

essentially mechanical--is shown by the work of a Frenchman all too

neglected by the trumpet of fame--Clement Ader. M. Ader was probably the

first man to get a mechanism up into the air for something more than a

leap. His _Eole_, as General Mensier testifies, prolonged a jump as far

as fifty metres as early as 1890. In 1897 his _Avion_ fairly flew. (This

is a year ahead of the date of my earliest photograph of S.P. Langley's

aeropile in mid-air.) This, however, is beside our present mark. The

fact of interest here is that in 1908, when flying was still almost

incredible, M. Ader published his "Aviation Militaire." Well, that was

eight years ago, and men have been fighting in the air now for a year,

and there is still nothing being done that M. Ader did not see, and

which we, if we had had the wisdom to attend to him, might not have been

prepared for. There is much that he foretells which is still awaiting

its inevitable fulfilment. So clearly can men of adequate knowledge and

sound reasoning power see into the years ahead in all such matters of

material development.

But it is not with the development of mechanical inventions that the

writer now proposes to treat. In this book he intends to hazard certain

forecasts about the trend of events in the next decade or so. Mechanical

novelties will probably play a very small part in that coming history.

This world-wide war means a general arrest of invention and enterprise,

except in the direction of the war business. Ability is concentrated

upon that; the types of ability that are not applicable to warfare are

neglected; there is a vast destruction of capital and a waste of the

savings that are needed to finance new experiments. Moreover, we are

killing off many of our brightest young men.

It is fairly safe to assume that there will be very little new furniture

on the stage of the world for some considerable time; that if there is

much difference in the roads and railways and shipping it will be for

the worse; that architecture, domestic equipment, and so on, will be

fortunate if in 1924 they stand where they did in the spring of 1914. In

the trenches of France and Flanders, and on the battlefields of Russia,

the Germans have been spending and making the world spend the comfort,

the luxury and the progress of the next quarter-century. There is no

accounting for tastes. But the result is that, while it was possible

for the writer in 1900 to write "Anticipations of the Reaction of

Mechanical Progress upon Human Life and Thought," in 1916 his

anticipations must belong to quite another system of consequences.

The broad material facts before us are plain enough. It is the mental

facts that have to be unravelled. It isn't now a question of "What

thing--what faculty--what added power will come to hand, and how will it

affect our ways of living?" It is a question of "How are people going to

take these obvious things--waste of the world's resources, arrest of

material progress, the killing of a large moiety of the males in nearly

every European country, and universal loss and unhappiness?" We are

going to deal with realities here, at once more intimate and less

accessible than the effects of mechanism.

As a preliminary reconnaissance, as it were, over the region of problems

we have to attack, let us consider the difficulties of a single

question, which is also a vital and central question in this forecast.

We shall not attempt a full answer here, because too many of the factors

must remain unexamined; later, perhaps, we may be in a better position

to do so. This question is the probability of the establishment of a

long world peace.

At the outset of the war there was a very widely felt hope among the

intellectuals of the world that this war might clear up most of the

outstanding international problems, and prove the last war. The writer,

looking across the gulf of experience that separates us from 1914,

recalls two pamphlets whose very titles are eloquent of this

feeling--"The War that will End War," and "The Peace of the World." Was

the hope expressed in those phrases a dream? Is it already proven a

dream? Or can we read between the lines of the war news, diplomatic

disputations, threats and accusations, political wranglings and stories

of hardship and cruelty that now fill our papers, anything that still

justifies a hope that these bitter years of world sorrow are the

darkness before the dawn of a better day for mankind? Let us handle this

problem for a preliminary examination.

What is really being examined here is the power of human reason to

prevail over passion--and certain other restraining and qualifying

forces. There can be little doubt that, if one could canvass all mankind

and ask them whether they would rather have no war any more, the

overwhelming mass of them would elect for universal peace. If it were

war of the modern mechanical type that was in question, with air raids,

high explosives, poison gas and submarines, there could be no doubt at

all about the response. "Give peace in our time, O Lord," is more than

ever the common prayer of Christendom, and the very war makers claim to

be peace makers; the German Emperor has never faltered in his assertion

that he encouraged Austria to send an impossible ultimatum to Serbia,

and invaded Belgium because Germany was being attacked. The Krupp-Kaiser

Empire, he assures us, is no eagle, but a double-headed lamb, resisting

the shearers and butchers. The apologists for war are in a hopeless

minority; a certain number of German Prussians who think war good for

the soul, and the dear ladies of the London _Morning Post_ who think war

so good for the manners of the working classes, are rare, discordant

voices in the general chorus against war. If a mere unsupported and

uncoordinated will for peace could realise itself, there would be peace,

and an enduring peace, to-morrow. But, as a matter of fact, there is no

peace coming to-morrow, and no clear prospect yet of an enduring

universal peace at the end of this war.

Now what are the obstructions, and what are the antagonisms to the

exploitation of this world-wide disgust with war and the world-wide

desire for peace, so as to establish a world peace?

Let us take them in order, and it will speedily become apparent that we

are dealing here with a subtle quantitative problem in psychology, a

constant weighing of whether this force or that force is the stronger.

We are dealing with influences so subtle that the accidents of some

striking dramatic occurrence, for example, may turn them this way or

that. We are dealing with the human will--and thereby comes a snare for

the feet of the would-be impartial prophet. To foretell the future is to

modify the future. It is hard for any prophet not to break into

exhortation after the fashion of the prophets of Israel.

The first difficulty in the way of establishing a world peace is that it

is nobody's business in particular. Nearly all of us want a world

peace--in an amateurish sort of way. But there is no specific person or

persons to whom one can look for the initiatives. The world is a

supersaturated solution of the will-for-peace, and there is nothing for

it to crystallise upon. There is no one in all the world who is

responsible for the understanding and overcoming of the difficulties

involved. There are many more people, and there is much more

intelligence concentrated upon the manufacture of cigarettes or

hairpins than upon the establishment of a permanent world peace. There

are a few special secretaries employed by philanthropic Americans, and

that is about all. There has been no provision made even for the

emoluments of these gentlemen when universal peace is attained;

presumably they would lose their jobs.

Nearly everybody wants peace; nearly everybody would be glad to wave a

white flag with a dove on it now--provided no unfair use was made of

such a demonstration by the enemy--but there is practically nobody

thinking out the arrangements needed, and nobody making nearly as much

propaganda for the instruction of the world in the things needful as is

made in selling any popular make of automobile. We have all our

particular businesses to attend to. And things are not got by just

wanting them; things are got by getting them, and rejecting whatever

precludes our getting them.

That is the first great difficulty: the formal Peace Movement is quite

amateurish.

It is so amateurish that the bulk of people do not even realise the very

first implication of the peace of the world. It has not succeeded in

bringing this home to them.

If there is to be a permanent peace of the world, it is clear that

there must be some permanent means of settling disputes between Powers

and nations that would otherwise be at war. That means that there must

be some head power, some point of reference, a supreme court of some

kind, a universally recognised executive over and above the separate

Governments of the world that exist to-day. That does not mean that

those Governments Have to disappear, that "nationality" has to be given

up, or anything so drastic as that. But it does mean that all those

Governments have to surrender almost as much of their sovereignty as the

constituent sovereign States which make up the United States of America

have surrendered to the Federal Government; if their unification is to

be anything more than a formality, they will have to delegate a control

of their inter-State relations to an extent for which few minds are

prepared at present.

It is really quite idle to dream of a warless world in which States are

still absolutely free to annoy one another with tariffs, with the

blocking and squeezing of trade routes, with the ill-treatment of

immigrants and travelling strangers, and between which there is no means

of settling boundary disputes. Moreover, as between the united States of

the world and the United States of America there is this further

complication of the world position: that almost all the great States of

Europe are in possession, firstly, of highly developed territories of

alien language and race, such as Egypt; and, secondly, of barbaric and

less-developed territories, such as Nigeria or Madagascar. There will be

nothing stable about a world settlement that does not destroy in these

"possessions" the national preference of the countries that own them and

that does not prepare for the immediate or eventual accession of these

subject peoples to State rank. Most certainly, however, thousands of

intelligent people in those great European countries who believe

themselves ardent for a world peace will be staggered at any proposal to

place any part of "our Empire" under a world administration on the

footing of a United States territory. Until they cease to be staggered

by anything of the sort, their aspirations for a permanent peace will

remain disconnected from the main current of their lives. And that

current will flow, sluggishly or rapidly, towards war. For essentially

these "possessions" are like tariffs, like the strategic occupation of

neutral countries or secret treaties; they are forms of the conflict

between nations to oust and prevail over other nations.

Going on with such things and yet deprecating war is really not an

attempt to abolish conflict; it is an attempt to retain conflict and

limit its intensity; it is like trying to play hockey on the

understanding that the ball shall never travel faster than eight miles

an hour.

Now it not only stands in our way to a permanent peace of the world that

the great mass of men are not prepared for even the most obvious

implications of such an idea, but there is also a second invincible

difficulty--that there is nowhere in the world anybody, any type of men,

any organisation, any idea, any nucleus or germ, that could possibly

develop into the necessary over-Government. We are asking for something

out of the air, out of nothingness, that will necessarily array against

itself the resistance of all those who are in control, or interested in

the control, of the affairs of sovereign States of the world as they are

at present; the resistance of a gigantic network of Government

organisations, interests, privileges, assumptions.

Against this a headless, vague aspiration, however universal, is likely

to prove quite ineffective. Of course, it is possible to suggest that

the Hague Tribunal is conceivably the germ of such an overriding

direction and supreme court as the peace of the world demands, but in

reality the Hague Tribunal is a mere legal automatic machine. It does

nothing unless you set it in motion. It has no initiative. It does not

even protest against the most obvious outrages upon that phantom of a

world-conscience--international law.

Pacificists in their search for some definite starting-point, about

which the immense predisposition for peace may crystallise, have

suggested the Pope and various religious organisations as a possible

basis for the organisation of peace. But there would be no appeal from

such a beginning to the non-Christian majority of mankind, and the

suggestion in itself indicates a profound ignorance of the nature of the

Christian churches. With the exception of the Quakers and a few Russian

sects, no Christian sect or church has ever repudiated war; most have

gone out of the way to sanction it and bless it.

It is altogether too rashly assumed by people whose sentimentality

outruns their knowledge that Christianity is essentially an attempt to

carry out the personal teachings of Christ. It is nothing of the sort,

and no church authority will support that idea. Christianity--more

particularly after the ascendancy of the Trinitarian doctrine was

established--was and is a theological religion; it is the religion that

triumphed over Arianism, Manichseism, Gnosticism, and the like; it is

based not on Christ, but on its creeds. Christ, indeed, is not even its

symbol; on the contrary, the chosen symbol of Christianity is the cross

to which Christ was nailed and on which He died. It was very largely a

religion of the legions. It was the warrior Theodosius who, more than

any single other man, imposed it upon Europe.

There is no reason, therefore, either in precedent or profession, for

expecting any plain lead from the churches in this tremendous task of

organising and making effective the widespread desire of the world for

peace. And even were this the case, it is doubtful if we should find in

the divines and dignitaries of the Vatican, of the Russian and British

official churches, or of any other of the multitudinous Christian sects,

the power and energy, the knowledge and ability, or even the goodwill

needed to negotiate so vast a thing as the creation of a world

authority.

One other possible starting-point has been suggested. It is no great

feat for a naive imagination to suppose the President of the Swiss

Confederation or the President of the United States--for each of these

two systems is an exemplary and encouraging instance of the possibility

of the pacific synthesis of independent States--taking a propagandist

course and proposing extensions of their own systems to the suffering

belligerents.

But nothing of the sort occurs. And when you come to look into the

circumstances of these two Presidents you will discover that neither of

them is any more free than anybody else to embark upon the task of

creating a State-overriding, war-preventing organisation of the world.

He has been created by a system, and he is bound to a system; his

concern is with the interests of the people of Switzerland or of the

United States of America. President Wilson, for example, is quite

sufficiently occupied by the affairs of the White House, by the clash of

political parties, by interferences with American overseas trade and the

security of American citizens. He has no more time to give to projects

for the fundamental reconstruction of international relationships than

has any recruit drilling in England, or any captain on an ocean liner,

or any engineer in charge of a going engine.

We are all, indeed, busy with the things that come to hand every day. We

are all anxious for a permanent world peace, but we are all up to the

neck in things that leave us no time to attend to this world peace that

nearly every sane man desires.

Meanwhile, a small minority of people who trade upon

contention--militarists, ambitious kings and statesmen, war contractors,

loan mongers, sensational journalists--follow up their interests and

start and sustain war.

There lies the paradoxical reality of this question. Our first inquiry

lands us into the elucidation of this deadlock. Nearly everybody desires

a world peace, and yet there is not apparent anywhere any man free and

able and willing to establish it, while, on the other hand, there are a

considerable number of men in positions of especial influence and power

who will certainly resist the arrangements that are essential to its

establishment.

But does this exhaust the question, and must we conclude that mankind is

doomed to a perpetual, futile struggling of States and nations and

peoples--breaking ever and again into war? The answer to that would

probably, be "Yes" if it were not for the progress of war. War is

continually becoming more scientific, more destructive, more coldly

logical, more intolerant of non-combatants, and more exhausting of any

kind of property. There is every reason to believe that it will continue

to intensify these characteristics. By doing so it may presently bring

about a state of affairs that will supply just the lacking elements that

are needed for the development of a world peace.

I would venture to suggest that the present war is doing so now: that it

is producing changes in men's minds that may presently give us both the

needed energy and the needed organisation from which a world direction

may develop.

The first, most distinctive thing about this conflict is the

exceptionally searching way in which it attacks human happiness. No war

has ever destroyed happiness so widely. It has not only killed and

wounded an unprecedented proportion of the male population of all the

combatant nations, but it has also destroyed wealth beyond precedent. It

has also destroyed freedom--of movement, of speech, of economic

enterprise. Hardly anyone alive has escaped the worry of it and the

threat of it. It has left scarcely a life untouched, and made scarcely a

life happier. There is a limit to the principle that "everybody's

business is nobody's business." The establishment of a world State,

which was interesting only to a few cranks and visionaries before the

war, is now the lively interest of a very great number of people. They

inquire about it; they have become accessible to ideas about it.

Peace organisation seems, indeed, to be following the lines of public

sanitation. Everybody in England, for example, was bored by the

discussion of sanitation--until the great cholera epidemic. Everybody

thought public health a very desirable thing, but nobody thought it

intensely and overridingly desirable. Then the interest in sanitation

grew lively, and people exerted themselves to create responsible

organisations. Crimes of violence, again, were neglected in the great

cities of Europe until the danger grew to dimensions that evolved the

police. There come occasions when the normal concentration of an

individual upon his own immediate concerns becomes impossible; as, for

instance, when a man who is stocktaking in his business premises

discovers that the house next door is on fire. A great many people who

have never troubled their heads about anything but their own purely

personal and selfish interests are now realising that quite a multitude

of houses about them are ablaze, and that the fire is spreading.

That is one change the war will bring about that will make for world

peace: a quickened general interest in its possibility. Another is the

certainty that the war will increase the number of devoted and fanatic

characters available for disinterested effort. Whatever other outcome

this war may have, it means that there lies ahead a period of extreme

economic and political dislocation. The credit system has been strained,

and will be strained, and will need unprecedented readjustments. In the

past such phases of uncertainty, sudden impoverishment and disorder as

certainly lie ahead of us, have meant for a considerable number of minds

a release--or, if you prefer it, a flight--from the habitual and

selfish. Types of intense religiosity, of devotion and of endeavour are

let loose, and there will be much more likelihood that we may presently

find, what it is impossible to find now, a number of devoted men and

women ready to give their whole lives, with a quasi-religious

enthusiasm, to this great task of peace establishment, finding in such

impersonal work a refuge from the disappointments, limitations, losses

and sorrows of their personal life--a refuge we need but little in more

settled and more prosperous periods. They will be but the outstanding

individuals in a very universal quickening. And simultaneously with this

quickening of the general imagination by experience there are certain

other developments in progress that point very clearly to a change under

the pressure of this war of just those institutions of nationality,

kingship, diplomacy and inter-State competition that have hitherto stood

most effectually in the way of a world pacification. The considerations

that seem to point to this third change are very convincing, to my mind.

The real operating cause that is, I believe, going to break down the

deadlock that has hitherto made a supreme court and a federal government

for the world at large a dream, lies in just that possibility of an

"inconclusive peace" which so many people seem to dread. Germany, I

believe, is going to be beaten, but not completely crushed, by this war;

she is going to be left militarist and united with Austria and Hungary,

and unchanged in her essential nature; and out of that state of affairs

comes, I believe, the hope for an ultimate confederation of the nations

of the earth.

Because, in the face of a league of the Central European Powers

attempting recuperation, cherishing revenge, dreaming of a renewal of

the struggle, it becomes impossible for the British, the French, the

Belgians, Russians, Italians or Japanese to think any longer of settling

their differences by war among themselves. To do so will mean the

creation of opportunity for the complete reinstatement of German

militarism. It will open the door for a conclusive German hegemony.

Now, however clumsy and confused the diplomacy of these present Allies

may be (challenged constantly, as it is, by democracy and hampered by a

free, venal and irresponsible Press in at least three of their

countries), the necessity they will be under will be so urgent and so

evident, that it is impossible to imagine that they will not set up some

permanent organ for the direction and co-ordination of their joint

international relationships. It may be a queerly constituted body at

first; it may be of a merely diplomatic pretension; it may be called a

Congress, or any old name of that sort, but essentially its business

will be to conduct a joint fiscal, military and naval policy, to keep

the peace in the Balkans and Asia, to establish a relationship with

China, and organise joint and several arbitration arrangements with

America. And it must develop something more sure and swift than our

present diplomacy. One of its chief concerns will be the right of way

through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and the watching of the

forces that stir up conflict in the Balkans and the Levant. It must have

unity enough for that; it must be much more than a mere leisurely,

unauthoritative conference of representatives.

For precisely similar reasons it seems to me incredible that the two

great Central European Powers should ever fall into sustained conflict

again with one another. They, too, will be forced to create some

overriding body to prevent so suicidal a possibility. America too, it

may be, will develop some Pan-American equivalent. Probably the hundred

millions of Latin America may achieve a method of unity, and then deal

on equal terms with the present United States. The thing has been ably

advocated already in South America. Whatever appearances of separate

sovereignties are kept up after the war, the practical outcome of the

struggle is quite likely to be this: that there will be only three great

World Powers left--the anti-German allies, the allied Central Europeans,

the Pan-Americans. And it is to be noted that, whatever the constituents

of these three Powers may be, none of them is likely to be a monarchy.

They may include monarchies, as England includes dukedoms. But they will

be overriding alliances, not overriding rulers. I leave it to the

mathematician to work out exactly how much the chances of conflict are

diminished when there are practically only three Powers in the world

instead of some scores. And these new Powers will be in certain respects

unlike any existing European "States." None of the three Powers will be

small or homogeneous enough to serve dynastic ambitions, embody a

national or racial Kultur, or fall into the grip of any group of

financial enterprises. They will be more comprehensive, less romantic,

and more businesslike altogether. They will be, to use a phrase

suggested a year or so ago, Great States.... And the war threat between

the three will be so plain and definite, the issues will be so lifted

out of the spheres of merely personal ambition and national feeling,

that I do not see why the negotiating means, the standing conference of

the three, should not ultimately become the needed nucleus of the World

State for which at present we search the world in vain.

There are more ways than one to the World State, and this second

possibility of a post-war conference and a conference of the Allies,

growing almost unawares into a pacific organisation of the world, since

it goes on directly from existing institutions, since it has none of the

quality of a clean break with the past which the idea of an immediate

World State and Pax Mundi involves, and more particularly since it

neither abolishes nor has in it anything to shock fundamentally the

princes, the diplomatists, the lawyers, the statesmen and politicians,

the nationalists and suspicious people, since it gives them years in

which to change and die out and reappear in new forms, and since at the

same time it will command the support of every intelligent human being

who gets his mind clear enough from his circumstances to understand its

import, is a far more credible hope than the hope of anything coming _de

novo_ out of Hague Foundations or the manifest logic of the war.

But, of course, there weighs against these hopes the possibility that

the Allied Powers are too various in their nature, too biased, too

feeble intellectually and imaginatively, to hold together and maintain

any institution for co-operation. The British Press may be too silly not

to foster irritation and suspicion; we may get Carsonism on a larger

scale trading on the resuscitation of dying hatreds; the British and

Russian diplomatists may play annoying tricks upon one another by sheer

force of habit. There may be many troubles of that sort. Even then I do

not see that the hope of an ultimate world peace vanishes. But it will

be a Roman world peace, made in Germany, and there will have to be

several more great wars before it is established. Germany is too

homogeneous yet to have begun the lesson of compromise and the

renunciation of the dream of national conquest. The Germans are a

national, not an imperial people. France has learnt that through

suffering, and Britain and Russia because for two centuries they have

been imperial and not national systems. The German conception of world

peace is as yet a conception of German ascendancy. The Allied conception

becomes perforce one of mutual toleration.

But I will not press this inquiry farther now. It is, as I said at the

beginning, a preliminary exploration of one of the great questions with

which I propose to play in these articles. The possibility I have

sketched is the one that most commends itself to me as probable. After a

more detailed examination of the big operating forces at present working

in the world, we may be in a position to revise these suggestions with a

greater confidence and draw our net of probabilities a little tighter.

II. THE END OF THE WAR[1]

The prophet who emerges with the most honour from this war is Bloch. It

must be fifteen or sixteen years ago since this gifted Pole made his

forecast of the future. Perhaps it is more, for the French translation

of his book was certainly in existence before the Boer War. His case was

that war between antagonists of fairly equal equipment must end in a

deadlock because of the continually increasing defensive efficiency of

entrenched infantry. This would give the defensive an advantage over the

most brilliant strategy and over considerably superior numbers that

would completely discourage all aggression. He concluded that war was

played out.

[Footnote 1: This chapter was originally a newspaper article. It was

written in December, 1915, and published about the middle of January.

Some of it has passed from the quality of anticipation to achievement,

but I do not see that it needs any material revision on that account.]

His book was very carefully studied in Germany. As a humble disciple of

Bloch I should have realised this, but I did not, and that failure led

me into some unfortunate prophesying at the outbreak of the war. I

judged Germany by the Kaiser, and by the Kaiser-worship which I saw in

Berlin. I thought that he was a theatrical person who would dream of

vast massed attacks and tremendous cavalry charges, and that he would

lead Germany to be smashed against the Allied defensive in the West, and

to be smashed so thoroughly that the war would be over. I did not

properly appreciate the more studious and more thorough Germany that was

to fight behind the Kaiser and thrust him aside, the Germany we British

fight now, the Ostwald-Krupp Germany of 1915. That Germany, one may now

perceive, had read and thought over and thought out the Bloch problem.

There was also a translation of Bloch into French. In English a portion

of his book was translated for the general reader and published with a

preface by the late Mr. W.T. Stead. It does not seem to have reached the

British military authorities, nor was it published in England with an

instructive intention. As an imaginative work it would have been

considered worthless and impracticable.

But it is manifest now that if the Belgian and French frontiers had been

properly prepared--as they should have been prepared when the Germans

built their strategic railways--with trenches and gun emplacements and

secondary and tertiary lines, the Germans would never have got fifty

miles into either France or Belgium. They would have been held at Liége

and in the Ardennes. Five hundred thousand men would have held them

indefinitely. But the Allies had never worked trench warfare; they were

unready for it, Germans knew of their unreadiness, and their unreadiness

it is quite clear they calculated. They did not reckon, it is now clear

that they were right in not reckoning, the Allies as contemporary

soldiers. They were going to fight a 1900 army with a 1914 army, and

their whole opening scheme was based on the conviction that the Allies

would not entrench.

Somebody in those marvellous maxims from the dark ages that seem to form

the chief reading of our military experts, said that the army that

entrenches is a defeated army. The silly dictum was repeated and

repeated in the English papers after the battle of the Marne. It shows

just where our military science had reached in 1914, namely, to a level

a year before Bloch wrote. So the Allies retreated.

For long weeks the Allies retreated out of the west of Belgium, out of

the north of France, and for rather over a month there was a loose

mobile war--as if Bloch had never existed. The Germans were not fighting

the 1914 pattern of war, they were fighting the 1899 pattern of war, in

which direct attack, outflanking and so on were still supposed to be

possible; they were fighting confident in their overwhelming numbers, in

their prepared surprise, in the unthought-out methods of their

opponents. In the "Victorian" war that ended in the middle of September,

1914, they delivered their blow, they over-reached, they were

successfully counter-attacked on the Marne, and then abruptly--almost

unfairly it seemed to the British sportsmanlike conceptions--they

shifted to the game played according to the very latest rules of 1914.

The war did not come up to date until the battle of the Aisne. With that

the second act of the great drama began.

I do not believe that the Germans ever thought it would come up to date

so soon. I believe they thought that they would hustle the French out of

Paris, come right up to the Channel at Calais before the end of 1914,

and then entrench, produce the submarine attack and the Zeppelins

against England, working from Calais as a base, and that they would end

the war before the spring of 1915--with the Allies still a good fifteen

years behindhand.

I believe the battle of the Marne was the decisive battle of the war, in

that it shattered this plan, and that the rest of the 1914 fighting was

Germany's attempt to reconstruct their broken scheme in the face of an

enemy who was continually getting more and more nearly up to date with

the fighting. By December, Bloch, who had seemed utterly discredited in

August, was justified up to the hilt. The world was entrenched at his

feet. By May the lagging military science of the British had so far

overtaken events as to realise that shrapnel was no longer so important

as high explosive, and within a year the significance of machine guns, a

significance thoroughly ventilated by imaginative writers fifteen years

before, was being grasped by the conservative but by no means

inadaptable leaders of Britain.

The war since that first attempt--admirably planned and altogether

justifiable (from a military point of view, I mean)--of Germany to

"rush" a victory, has consisted almost entirely of failures on both

sides either to get round or through or over the situation foretold by

Bloch. There has been only one marked success, the German success in

Poland due to the failure of the Russian munitions. Then for a time the

war in the East was mobile and precarious while the Russians retreated

to their present positions, and the Germans pursued and tried to

surround them. That was a lapse into the pre-Bloch style. Now the

Russians are again entrenched, their supplies are restored, the Germans

have a lengthened line of supplies, and Bloch is back upon his pedestal

so far as the Eastern theatre goes.

Bloch has been equally justified in the Anglo-French attempt to get

round through Gallipoli. The forces of the India Office have pushed

their way through unprepared country towards Bagdad, and are now

entrenching in Mesopotamia, but from the point of view of the main war

that is too remote to be considered either getting through or getting

round; and so too the losses of the German colonies and the East African

War are scarcely to be reckoned with in the main war. They have no

determining value. There remains the Balkan struggle. But the Balkan

struggle is something else; it is something new. It must be treated

separately. It is a war of treacheries and brags and appearances. It is

not a part of, it is a sequence to, the deadlock war of 1915.

But before dealing with this new development of the latter half of 1915

it is necessary to consider certain general aspects of the deadlock

war. It is manifest that the Germans hoped to secure an effective

victory in this war before they ran up against Bloch. But reckoning with

Bloch, as they certainly did, they hoped that even in the event of the

war getting to earth, it would still be possible to produce novelties

that would sufficiently neutralise Bloch to secure a victorious peace.

With unexpectedly powerful artillery suddenly concentrated, with high

explosives, with asphyxiating gas, with a well-organised system of

grenade throwing and mining, with attacks of flaming gas, and above all

with a vast munition-making plant to keep them going, they had a very

reasonable chance of hacking their way through.

Against these prepared novelties the Allies have had to improvise, and

on the whole the improvisation has kept pace with the demands made upon

it. They have brought their military science up to date, and to-day the

disparity in science and equipment between the antagonists has greatly

diminished. There has been no escaping Bloch after all, and the

deadlock, if no sudden peace occurs, can end now in only one thing, the

exhaustion in various degrees of all the combatants and the succumbing

of the most exhausted. The idea of a conclusive end of the traditional

pattern to this war, of a triumphal entry into London, Paris, Berlin or

Moscow, is to be dismissed altogether from our calculations. The end of

this war will be a matter of negotiation between practically immobilised

and extremely shattered antagonists.

There is, of course, one aspect of the Bloch deadlock that the Germans

at least have contemplated. If it is not possible to get through or

round, it may still be possible to get over. There is the air path.

This idea has certainly taken hold of the French mind, but France has

been too busy and is temperamentally too economical to risk large

expenditures upon what is necessarily an experiment. The British are too

conservative and sceptical to be the pioneers in any such enterprise.

The Russians have been too poor in the necessary resources of mechanics

and material.

The Germans alone have made any sustained attempt to strike through the

air at their enemies beyond the war zone. Their Zeppelin raids upon

England have shown a steadily increasing efficiency, and it is highly

probable that they will be repeated on a much larger scale before the

war is over. Quite possibly, too, the Germans are developing an

accessory force of large aeroplanes to co-operate in such an attack.

The long coasts of Britain, the impossibility of their being fully

equipped throughout their extent, except at a prohibitive cost of men

and material, to resist air invaders, exposes the whole length of the

island to considerable risk and annoyance from such an expedition.

It is doubtful, though, if the utmost damage an air raid is likely to

inflict upon England would count materially in the exhaustion process,

and the moral effect of these raids has been, and will be, to stiffen

the British resolution to fight this war through to the conclusive

ending of any such possibilities.

The net result of these air raids is an inflexible determination of the

British people rather to die in death grips with German militarism than

to live and let it survive. The best chance for the aircraft was at the

beginning of the war, when a surprise development might have had

astounding results. That chance has gone by. The Germans are racially

inferior to both French and English in the air, and the probability of

effective blows over the deadlock is on the whole a probability in

favour of the Allies. Nor is there anything on or under the sea that

seems likely now to produce decisive results. We return from these

considerations to a strengthened acceptance of Bloch.

The essential question for the prophet remains therefore the question of

which group of Powers will exhaust itself most rapidly. And following on

from that comes the question of how the successive stages of exhaustion

will manifest themselves in the combatant nations. The problems of this

war, as of all war, end as they begin in national psychology.

But it will be urged that this is reckoning without the Balkans. I

submit that the German thrust through the wooded wilderness of Serbia is

really no part of the war that has ended in the deadlock of 1915. It is

dramatic, tragic, spectacular, but it is quite inconclusive. Here there

is no way round or through to any vital centre of Germany's antagonists.

It turns nothing; it opens no path to Paris, London, or Petrograd. It is

a long, long way from the Danube to either Egypt or Mesopotamia, and

there--and there--Bloch is waiting. I do not think the Germans have any

intention of so generous an extension of their responsibilities. The

Balkan complication is no solution of the deadlock problem. It is the

opening of the sequel.

A whole series of new problems are opened up directly we turn to this

most troubled region of the Balkans--problems of the value of kingship,

of nationality, of the destiny of such cities as Constantinople, which

from their very beginning have never had any sort of nationality at all,

of the destiny of countries such as Albania, where a tangle of intense

tribal nationalities is distributed in spots and patches, or Dalmatia,

where one extremely self-conscious nation and language is present in the

towns and another in the surrounding country, or Asia Minor, where no

definite national boundaries, no religious, linguistic, or social

homogeneities have ever established themselves since the Roman legions

beat them down.

But all these questions can really be deferred or set aside in our

present discussion, which is a discussion of the main war. Whatever

surprises or changes this last phase of the Eastern Empire, that

blood-clotted melodrama, may involve, they will but assist and hasten on

the essential conclusion of the great war, that the Central Powers and

their pledged antagonists are in a deadlock, unable to reach a decision,

and steadily, day by day, hour by hour, losing men, destroying material,

spending credit, approaching something unprecedented, unknown, that we

try to express to ourselves by the word exhaustion.

Just how the people who use the word "exhaustion" so freely are

prepared to define it, is a matter for speculation. The idea seems to be

a phase in which the production of equipped forces ceases through the

using up of men or material or both. If the exhaustion is fairly mutual,

it need not be decisive for a long time. It may mean simply an ebb of

vigour on both sides, unusual hardship, a general social and economic

disorganisation and grading down. The fact that a great killing off of

men is implicit in the process, and that the survivors will be largely

under discipline, militates against the idea that the end may come

suddenly through a vigorous revolutionary outbreak. Exhaustion is likely

to be a very long and very thorough process, extending over years. A

"war of attrition" may last into 1918 or 1919, and may bring us to

conditions of strain and deprivation still only very vaguely imagined.

What happens in the Turkish Empire or India or America or elsewhere may

extend the areas of waste and accelerate or retard the process, but is

quite unlikely to end it.

Let us ask now which of the combatants is likely to undergo exhaustion

most rapidly, and what is of equal or greater importance, which is

likely to feel it first and most? No doubt there is a bias in my mind,

but it seems to me that the odds are on the whole heavily against the

Central Powers. Their peculiar German virtue, their tremendously

complete organisation, which enabled them to put so large a proportion

of their total resources into their first onslaught and to make so great

and rapid a recovery in the spring of 1915, leaves them with less to

draw upon now. Out of a smaller fortune they have spent a larger sum.

They are blockaded to a very considerable extent, and against them fight

not merely the resources of the Allies, but, thanks to the complete

British victory in the sea struggle, the purchasable resources of all

the world.

Conceivably the Central Powers will draw upon the resources of their

Balkan and Asiatic allies, but the extent to which they can do that may

very easily be over-estimated. There is a limit to the power for treason

of these supposititious German monarchs that Western folly has permitted

to possess these Balkan thrones--thrones which need never have been

thrones at all--and none of the Balkan peoples is likely to witness with

enthusiasm the complete looting of its country in the German interest by

a German court. Germany will have to pay on the nail for most of her

Balkan help. She will have to put more into the Balkans than she takes

out.

Compared with the world behind the Allies the Turkish Empire is a

country of mountains, desert and undeveloped lands. To develop these

regions into a source of supplies under the strains and shortages of

war-time, will be an immense and dangerous undertaking for Germany. She

may open mines she may never work, build railways that others will

enjoy, sow harvests for alien reaping. The people the Bulgarians want in

Bulgaria are not Germans but Bulgarians; the people the Turks want in

Anatolia are not Germans but Turks. And for all these tasks Germany must

send men. Men?

At present, so far as any judgment is possible, Germany is feeling the

pinch of the war much more even than France, which is habitually

parsimonious, and instinctively cleverly economical, and Russia, which

is hardy and insensitive. Great Britain has really only begun to feel

the stress. She has probably suffered economically no more than have

Holland or Switzerland, and Italy and Japan have certainly suffered

less. All these three great countries are still full of men, of gear, of

saleable futures. In every part of the globe Great Britain has colossal

investments. She has still to apply the great principle of conscription

not only to her sons but to the property of her overseas investors and

of her landed proprietors. She has not even looked yet at the German

financial expedients of a year ago. She moves reluctantly, but surely,

towards such a thoroughness of mobilisation. There need be no doubt that

she will completely socialise herself, completely reorganise her whole

social and economic structure sooner than lose this war. She will do it

clumsily and ungracefully, with much internal bickering, with much

trickery on the part of her lawyers, and much baseness on the part of

her landlords; but she will do it not so slowly as a logical mind might

anticipate. She will get there a little late, expensively, but still in

time....

The German group, I reckon, therefore, will become exhausted first. I

think, too, that Germany will, as a nation, feel and be aware of what is

happening to her sooner than any other of the nations that are sharing

in this process of depletion. In 1914 the Germans were reaping the

harvest of forty years of economic development and business enterprise.

Property and plenty were new experiences, and a generation had grown up

in whose world a sense of expansion and progress was normal. There

existed amongst it no tradition of the great hardship of war, such as

the French possessed, to steel its mind. It had none of the irrational

mute toughness of the Russians and British. It was a sentimental people,

making a habit of success; it rushed chanting to war against the most

grimly heroic and the most stolidly enduring of races. Germany came into

this war more buoyantly and confidently than any other combatant. It

expected another 1871; at the utmost it anticipated a year of war.

Never were a people so disillusioned as the Germans must already be,

never has a nation been called upon for so complete a mental

readjustment. Neither conclusive victories nor defeats have been theirs,

but only a slow, vast transition from joyful effort and an illusion of

rapid triumph to hardship, loss and loss and loss of substance, the

dwindling of great hopes, the realisation of ebb in the tide of national

welfare. Now they must fight on against implacable, indomitable Allies.

They are under stresses now as harsh at least as the stresses of France.

And, compared with the French, the Germans are untempered steel.

We know little of the psychology of this new Germany that has come into

being since 1871, but it is doubtful if it will accept defeat, and still

more doubtful how it can evade some ending to the war that will admit

the failure of all its great hopes of Paris subjugated, London humbled,

Russia suppliant, Belgium conquered, the Near East a prey. Such an

admission will be a day of reckoning that German Imperialism will

postpone until the last hope of some breach among the Allies, some

saving miracle in the old Eastern Empire, some dramatically-snatched

victory at the eleventh hour, is gone.

Nor can the Pledged Allies consent to a peace that does not involve the

evacuation and compensation of Belgium and Serbia, and at least the

autonomy of the lost Rhine provinces of France. That is their very

minimum. That, and the making of Germany so sick and weary of military

adventure that the danger of German ambition will cease to overshadow

European life. Those are the ends of the main war. Europe will go down

through stage after stage of impoverishment and exhaustion until these

ends are attained, or made for ever impossible.

But these things form only the main outline of a story with a vast

amount of collateral interest. It is to these collateral issues that the

amateur in prophecy must give his attention. It is here that the German

will be induced by his Government to see his compensations. He will be

consoled for the restoration of Serbia by the prospect of future

conflicts between Italian and Jugoslav that will let him in again to the

Adriatic. His attention will be directed to his newer, closer

association with Bulgaria and Turkey. In those countries he will be told

he may yet repeat the miracle of Hungary. And there may be also another

Hungary in Poland. It will be whispered to him that he has really

conquered those countries when indeed it is highly probable he has only

spent his substance in setting up new assertive alien allies. The

Kaiser, if he is not too afraid of the precedent of Sarajevo, may make a

great entry into Constantinople, with an effect of conquering what is

after all only a temporarily allied capital. The German will hope also

to retain his fleet, and no peace, he will be reminded, can rob him of

his hard-earned technical superiority in the air. The German air fleet

of 1930 may yet be something as predominant as the British Navy of 1915,

and capable of delivering a much more intimate blow. Had he not better

wait for that? When such consolations as these become popular in the

German Press we of the Pledged Allies may begin to talk of peace, for

these will be its necessary heralds.

The concluding phase of a process of general exhaustion must almost

inevitably be a game of bluff. Neither side will admit its extremity.

Neither side, therefore, will make any direct proposals to its

antagonists nor any open advances to a neutral. But there will be much

inspired peace talk through neutral media, and the consultations of the

anti-German allies will become more intimate and detailed. Suggestions

will "leak out" remarkably from both sides, to journalists and neutral

go-betweens. The Eastern and Western Allies will probably begin quite

soon to discuss an anti-German Zollverein and the co-ordination of their

military and naval organisations in the days that are to follow the war.

A discussion of a Central European Zollverein is already afoot. A

general idea of the possible rearrangement of the European States after

the war will grow up in the common European and American mind; public

men on either side will indicate concordance with this general idea, and

some neutral power, Denmark or Spain or the United States or Holland,

will invite representatives to an informal discussion of these

possibilities.

Probably, therefore, the peace negotiations will take the extraordinary

form of two simultaneous conferences--one of the Pledged Allies, sitting

probably in Paris or London, and the other of representatives of all the

combatants meeting in some neutral country--Holland would be the most

convenient--while the war will still be going on. The Dutch conference

would be in immediate contact by telephone and telegraph with the Allied

conference and with Berlin....

The broad conditions of a possible peace will begin to get stated

towards the end of 1916, and a certain lassitude will creep over the

operations in the field.... The process of exhaustion will probably have

reached such a point by that time that it will be a primary fact in the

consciousness of common citizens of every belligerent country. The

common life of all Europe will have become--miserable. Conclusive blows

will have receded out of the imagination of the contending Powers. The

war will have reached its fourth and last stage as a war. The war of the

great attack will have given place to the war of the military deadlock;

the war of the deadlock will have gone on, and as the great combatants

have become enfeebled relatively to the smaller States, there will have

been a gradual shifting of the interest to the war of treasons and

diplomacies in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Quickly thereafter the last phase will be developing into predominance,

in which each group of nations will be most concerned, no longer about

victories or conquests, but about securing for itself the best chances

of rapid economic recuperation and social reconstruction. The commercial

treaties, the arrangements for future associated action, made by the

great Allies among themselves will appear more and more important to

them, and the mere question of boundaries less and less. It will dawn

upon Europe that she has already dissipated the resources that have

enabled her to levy the tribute paid for her investments in every

quarter of the earth, and that neither the Germans nor their antagonists

will be able for many years to go on with those projects for world

exploitation which lay at the root of the great war. Very jaded and

anaemic nations will sit about the table on which the new map of Europe

will be drawn.... Each of the diplomatists will come to that business

with a certain pre-occupation. Each will be thinking of his country as

one thinks of a patient of doubtful patience and temper who is coming-to

out of the drugged stupor of a crucial, ill-conceived, and unnecessary

operation ... Each will be thinking of Labour, wounded and perplexed,

returning to the disorganised or nationalised factories from which

Capital has gone a-fighting, and to which it may never return.

III. NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION

The war has become a war of exhaustion. One hears a great deal of the

idea that "financial collapse" may bring it to an end. A number of

people seem to be convinced that a war cannot be waged without money,

that soldiers must be paid, munitions must be bought; that for this

money is necessary and the consent of bank depositors; so that if all

the wealth of the world were nominally possessed by some one man in a

little office he could stop the war by saying simply, "I will lend you

no more money."

Now, as a matter of fact, money is a power only in so far as people

believe in it and Governments sustain it. If a State is sufficiently

strong and well organised, its control over the money power is

unlimited. If it can rule its people, and if it has the necessary

resources of men and material within its borders, it can go on in a

state of war so long as these things last, with almost any flimsy sort

of substitute for money that it chooses to print. It can enrol and use

the men, and seize and work the material. It can take over the land and

cultivate it and distribute its products. The little man in the office

is only a power because the State chooses to recognise his claim. So

long as he is convenient he seems to be a power. So soon as the State is

intelligent enough and strong enough it can do without him. It can take

what it wants, and tell him to go and hang himself. That is the

melancholy ultimate of the usurer. That is the quintessence of

"finance." All credit is State-made, and what the State has made the

State can alter or destroy.

The owner and the creditor have never had any other power to give or

withhold credit than the credit that was given to them. They exist by

sufferance or superstition and not of necessity.

It is the habit of overlooking this little flaw in the imperatives of

ownership that enables people to say that this war cannot go on beyond

such and such a date--the end of 1916 is much in favour just

now--because we cannot pay for it. It would be about as reasonable to

expect a battle to end because a landlord had ordered the soldiers off

his estate. So long as there are men to fight and stuff to fight with

the war can go on. There is bankruptcy, but the bankruptcy of States is

not like the bankruptcy of individuals. There is no such thing among

States as an undischarged bankrupt who is forbidden to carry on. A State

may keep on going bankrupt indefinitely and still carry on. It will be

the next step in our prophetic exercise to examine the differences

between State bankruptcy and the bankruptcy of a subject of the State.

The belligerent Powers are approaching a phase when they will no longer

be paying anything like twenty shillings in the pound. In a very

definite sense they are not paying twenty shillings in the pound now.

That is not going to stop the war, but it involves a string of

consequences and possibilities of the utmost importance to our problem

of what is coming when the war is over.

The exhaustion that will bring this war to its end at last is a process

of destruction of men and material. The process of bankruptcy that is

also going on is nothing of the sort. Bankruptcy destroys no concrete

thing; it merely writes off a debt; it destroys a financial but not an

economic reality. It is, in itself, a mental, not a physical fact. "A"

owes "B" a debt; he goes bankrupt and pays a dividend, a fraction of his

debt, and gets his discharge. "B's" feelings, as we novelists used to

say, are "better imagined than described"; he does his best to satisfy

himself that "A" can pay no more, and then "A" and "B" both go about

their business again.

In England, if "A" is a sufficiently poor man not to be formidable, and

has gone bankrupt on a small scale, he gets squeezed ferociously to

extract the last farthing from him; he may find himself in jail and his

home utterly smashed up. If he is a richer man, and has failed on a

larger scale, our law is more sympathetic, and he gets off much more

easily. Often his creditors find it advisable to arrange with him so

that he will still carry on with his bankrupt concern. They find it is

better to allow him to carry on than to smash him up.

There are countless men in the world living very comfortably indeed, and

running businesses that were once their own property for their

creditors. There are still more who have written off princely debts and

do not seem to be a "ha'p'orth the worse." And their creditors have

found a balm in time and philosophy. Bankruptcy is only painful and

destructive to small people and helpless people; but then for them

everything is painful and destructive; it can be a very light matter to

big people; it may be almost painless to a State.

If England went bankrupt in the completest way to-morrow, and repudiated

all its debts both as a nation and as a community of individuals, if it

declared, if I may use a self-contradictory phrase, a permanent

moratorium, there would be not an acre of ploughed land in the country,

not a yard of cloth or a loaf of bread the less for that. There would be

nothing material destroyed within the State. There would be no immediate

convulsion. Use and wont would carry most people on some days before

they even began to doubt whether So-and-so could pay his way, and

whether there would be wages at the end of the week.

But people who lived upon rent or investments or pensions would

presently be very busy thinking how they were going to get food when the

butcher and baker insisted upon cash. It would be only with comparative

slowness that the bulk of men would realise that a fabric of confidence

and confident assumptions had vanished; that cheques and bank notes and

token money and every sort of bond and scrip were worthless, that

employers had nothing to pay with, shopkeepers no means of procuring

stock, that metallic money was disappearing, and that a paralysis had

come upon the community.

Such an establishment as a workhouse or an old-fashioned monastery,

living upon the produce of its own farming and supplying all its own

labour, would be least embarrassed amidst the general perplexity. For it

would not be upon a credit basis, but a socialistic basis, a basis of

direct reality, and its need for payments would be incidental. And

land-owning peasants growing their own food would carry on, and small

cultivating occupiers, who could easily fall back on barter for anything

needed.

The mass of the population in such a country as England would, however,

soon be standing about in hopeless perplexity and on the verge of

frantic panic--although there was just as much food to be eaten, just as

many houses to live in, and just as much work needing to be done.

Suddenly the pots would be empty, and famine would be in the land,

although the farms and butchers' shops were still well stocked. The

general community would be like an automobile when the magneto fails.

Everything would be there and in order, except for the spark of credit

which keeps the engine working.

That is how quite a lot of people seem to imagine national bankruptcy:

as a catastrophic jolt. It is a quite impossible nightmare of cessation.

The reality is the completest contrast. All the belligerent countries of

the world are at the present moment quietly, steadily and progressively

going bankrupt, and the mass of people are not even aware of this

process of insolvency.

An individual when he goes bankrupt is measured by the monetary standard

of the country he is in; he pays five or ten or fifteen or so many

shillings in the pound. A community in debt does something which is in

effect the same, but in appearance rather different. It still pays a

pound, but the purchasing power of the pound has diminished. This is

what is happening all over the world to-day; there is a rise in prices.

This is automatic national bankruptcy; unplanned, though perhaps not

unforeseen. It is not a deliberate State act, but a consequence of the

interruption of communications, the diversion of productive energy, the

increased demand for many necessities by the Government and the general

waste under war conditions.

At the beginning of this war England had a certain national debt; it has

paid off none of that original debt; it has added to it tremendously; so

far as money and bankers' records go it still owes and intends to pay

that original debt; but if you translate the language of £.s.d. into

realities, you will find that in loaves or iron or copper or hours of

toil, or indeed in any reality except gold, it owes now, so far as that

original debt goes, far less than it did at the outset. As the war goes

on and the rise in prices continues, the subsequent borrowings and

contracts are undergoing a similar bankrupt reduction. The attempt of

the landlord of small weekly and annual properties to adjust himself to

the new conditions by raising rents is being checked by legislation in

Great Britain, and has been completely checked in France. The attempts

of labour to readjust wages have been partially successful in spite of

the eloquent protests of those great exponents of plain living, economy,

abstinence, and honest, modest, underpaid toil, Messrs. Asquith,

McKenna, and Runciman. It is doubtful if the rise in wages is keeping

pace with the rise in prices. So far as it fails to do so the load is on

the usual pack animal, the poor man.

The rest of the loss falls chiefly upon the creditor class, the people

with fixed incomes and fixed salaries, the landlords, who have let at

long leases, the people with pensions, endowed institutions, the Church,

insurance companies, and the like. They are all being scaled down. They

are all more able to stand scaling down than the proletarians.

Assuming that it is possible to bring up wages to the level of the

higher prices, and that the rise in rents can be checked by legislation

or captured by taxation, the rise in prices is, on the whole, a thing to

the advantage of the propertyless man as against accumulated property.

It writes off the past and clears the way for a fresh start in the

future.

An age of cheapness is an old usurers' age. England before the war was a

paradise of ancient usuries; everywhere were great houses and enclosed

parks; the multitude of gentlemen's servants and golf clubs and such

like excrescences of the comfort of prosperous people was perpetually

increasing; it did not "pay" to build labourers' cottages, and the more

expensive sort of automobile had driven the bicycle as a pleasure

vehicle off the roads. Western Europe was running to fat and not to

muscle, as America is to-day.

But if that old usurer's age is over, the young usurer's age may be

coming. To meet such enormous demands as this war is making there are

three chief courses open to the modern State.

The first is to _take_--to get men by conscription and material by

requisition. The British Government _takes_ more modestly than any other

in the world; its tradition from Magna Charta onward, the legal training

of most of its members, all make towards a reverence for private

ownership and private claims, as opposed to the claims of State and

commonweal, unequalled in the world's history.

The next course of a nation in need is to _tax_ and pay for what it

wants, which is a fractional and more evenly distributed method of

taking. Both of these methods raise prices, the second most so, and so

facilitate the automatic release of the future from the boarding of the

past. So far all the belligerent Governments have taxed on the timid

side.

Finally there is the _loan_. This mortgages the future to the present

necessity, and it has so far been the predominant source of war credits.

It is the method that produces least immediate friction in the State; it

employs all the savings of surplus income that the unrest of civil

enterprise leaves idle; it has an effect of creating property by a

process that destroys the substance of the community. In Germany an

enormous bulk of property has been mortgaged to supply the subscriptions

to the war loans, and those holdings have again been hypothecated to

subscribe to subsequent loans. The Pledged Allies with longer stockings

have not yet got to this pitch of overlapping. But everywhere in Europe

what is happening is a great transformation of the property owner into a

_rentier_, and the passing of realty into the hands of the State.

At the end of the war Great Britain will probably find herself with a

national debt so great that she will be committed to the payment of an

annual interest greater in figures than the entire national expenditure

before the war. As an optimistic lady put it the other day: "All the

people who aren't killed will be living quite comfortably on War Loan

for the rest of their lives."

But part, at least, of the bulk of this wealth will be imaginary rather

than real because of the rise in prices, in wages, in rent, and in

taxation. Most of us who are buying the British and French War Loans

have no illusions on that score; we know we are buying an income of

diminishing purchasing power. Yet it would be a poor creature in these

days when there is scarcely a possible young man in one's circle who has

not quite freely and cheerfully staked his life, who was not prepared to

consider his investments as being also to an undefined extent a national

subscription.

A rise in prices is not, however, the only process that will check the

appearance of a new rich usurer class after the war. There is something

else ahead that has happened already in Germany, that is quietly coming

about among the Allies, and that is the cessation of gold payments. In

Great Britain, of course, the pound note is still convertible into a

golden sovereign; but Great Britain will not get through the war on

those terms. There comes a point in the stress upon a Government when it

must depart from the austerer line of financial rectitude--and tamper in

some way with currency.

Sooner or later, and probably in all cases before 1917, all the

belligerents will be forced to adopt inconvertible paper money for their

internal uses. There will be British assignats or greenbacks. It will

seem to many financial sentimentalists almost as though Great Britain

were hauling down a flag when the sovereign, which has already

disappeared into bank and Treasury coffers, is locked up there and

reserved for international trade. But Great Britain has other sentiments

to consider than the finer feelings of bankers and the delicacies of

usury. The pound British will come out of this war like a company out of

a well-shelled trench--attenuated.

Depreciation of the currency means, of course, a continuing rise in

prices, a continuing writing off of debt. If labour has any real grasp

of its true interests it will not resent this. It will merely insist

steadfastly on a proper adjustment of its wages to the new standard. On

that point, however, it will be better to write later....

Let us see how far we have got in this guessing. We have considered

reasons that seem to point to the destruction of a great amount of old

property and old debt, and the creation of a great volume of new debt

before the end of the war, and we have adopted the ideas that currency

will probably have depreciated more and more and prices risen right up

to the very end.

There will be by that time a general habit of saving throughout the

community, a habit more firmly established perhaps in the propertied

than in the wages-earning class. People will be growing accustomed to a

dear and insecure world. They will adopt a habit of caution; become

desirous of saving and security.

Directly the phase of enormous war loans ends, the new class of

_rentiers_ holding the various great new national loans will find

themselves drawing this collectively vast income and anxious to invest

it. They will for a time be receiving the bulk of the unearned income of

the world. Here, in the high prices representing demand and the need for

some reinvestment of interest representing supply, we have two of the

chief factors that are supposed to be necessary to a phase of business

enterprise. Will the economic history of the next few decades be the

story of a restoration of the capitalistic system upon a new basis?

Shall we all become investors, speculators, or workers toiling our way

to a new period of security, cheapness and low interest, a restoration

of the park, the enclosure, the gold standard and the big automobile,

with only this difference--that the minimum wage will be somewhere about

two pounds, and that a five-pound note will purchase about as much as a

couple of guineas would do in 1913?

That is practically parallel with what happened in the opening half of

the nineteenth century after the Napoleonic wars, and it is not an

agreeable outlook for those who love the common man or the nobility of

life. But if there is any one principle sounder than another of all

those that guide the amateur in prophecy, it is that _history never

repeats itself_. The human material in which those monetary changes and

those developments of credit will occur will be entirely different from

the social medium of a hundred years ago.

The nature of the State has altered profoundly in the last century. The

later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries constituted a period

of extreme individualism. What were called "economic forces" had

unrestricted play. In the minds of such people as Harriet Martineau and

Herbert Spencer they superseded God. People were no longer reproached

for "flying in the face of Providence," but for "flying in the face of

Political Economy."

In that state of freedom you got whatever you could in any way you

could; you were not your neighbour's keeper, and except that it

interfered with the enterprise of pickpockets, burglars and forgers, and

kept the dice loaded in favour of landlords and lawyers, the State stood

aside from the great drama of human getting. For industrialism and

speculation the State's guiding maxim was _laissez faire_.

The State is now far less aloof and far more constructive. It is far

more aware of itself and a common interest. Germany has led the way from

a system of individuals and voluntary associations in competition

towards a new order of things, a completer synthesis. This most modern

State is far less a swarming conflict of businesses than a great

national business. It will emerge from this war much more so than it

went in, and the thing is and will remain so plain and obvious that only

the greediest and dullest people among the Pledged Allies will venture

to disregard it. The Allied nations, too, will have to rescue their

economic future from individual grab and grip and chance.

The second consideration that forbids us to anticipate any parallelism

of the history of 1915-45 with 1815-45 is the greater lucidity of the

general mind, the fact that all Western Europe, down to the agricultural

labourers, can read and write and does read newspapers and "get ideas."

The explanation of economic and social processes that were mysterious to

the elect a hundred years ago are now the commonplaces of the tap-room.

What happened then darkly, and often unconsciously, must happen in

1916-26 openly and controllably. The current bankruptcy and liquidation

and the coming reconstruction of the economic system of Europe will go

on in a quite unprecedented amount of light. We shall see and know what

is happening much more clearly than anything of the kind has ever been

seen before.

It is not only that people will have behind them, as a light upon what

is happening, the experiences and discussions of a hundred years, but

that the international situation will be far plainer than it has ever

been. This war has made Germany the central fact in all national affairs

about the earth. It is not going to destroy Germany, and it seems

improbable that either defeat or victory, or any mixture of these, will

immediately alter the cardinal fact of Germany's organised

aggressiveness.

The war will not end the conflict of anti-Germany and Germany, That will

only end when the results of fifty years of aggressive education in

Germany have worn away. This will be so plain that the great bulk of

people everywhere will not only see their changing economic

relationships far more distinctly than such things have been seen

hitherto, but that they will see them as they have never been seen

before, definitely orientated to the threat of German world

predominance. The landlord who squeezes, the workman who strikes and

shirks, the lawyer who fogs and obstructs, will know, and will know that

most people know, that what he does is done, not under an empty,

regardless heaven, but in the face of an unsleeping enemy and in

disregard of a continuous urgent necessity for unity.

So far we have followed this speculation upon fairly firm ground, but

now our inquiry must plunge into a jungle of far more difficult and

uncertain possibilities. Our next stage brings us to the question of how

people and peoples and classes of people are going to react to the new

conditions of need and knowledge this war will have brought about, and

to the new demands that will be made upon them.

This is really a question of how far they will prove able to get out of

the habits and traditions of their former social state, how far they

will be able to take generous views and make sacrifices and unselfish

efforts, and how far they will go in self-seeking or class selfishness

regardless of the common welfare. This is a question we have to ask

separately of each great nation, and of the Central Powers as a whole,

and of the Allies as a whole, before we can begin to estimate the

posture of the peoples of the world in, say, 1946.

Now let me here make a sort of parenthesis on human nature. It will be

rather platitudinous, but it is a necessary reminder for what follows.

So far as I have been able to observe, nobody lives steadily at one

moral level. If we are wise we shall treat no man and no class--and for

the matter of that no nation--as either steadfastly malignant or

steadfastly disinterested. There are phases in my life when I could die

quite cheerfully for an idea; there are phases when I would not stir six

yards to save a human life. Most people fluctuate between such extremes.

Most people are self-seeking, but most people will desist from a

self-seeking cause if they see plainly and clearly that it is not in the

general interest, and much more readily if they also perceive that other

people are of the same mind and know that they know their course is

unsound.

The fundamental error of orthodox political economy and of Marxian

socialism is to assume the inveterate selfishness of everyone. But most

people are a little more disposed to believe what it is to their

interest to believe than the contrary. Most people abandon with

reluctance ways of living and doing that have served them well. Most

people can see the neglect of duty in other classes more plainly than

they do in their own.

This war has brought back into the everyday human life of Europe the

great and overriding conception of devotion to a great purpose. But that

does not imply clear-headedness in correlating the ways of one's

ordinary life with this great purpose. It is no good treating as cynical

villainy things that merely exhibit the incapacity of our minds to live

consistently.

One Labour paper a month or so ago was contrasting Mr. Asquith's

eloquent appeals to the working man to economise and forgo any rise in

wages with the photographs that were appearing simultaneously in the

smart papers of the very smart marriage of Mr. Asquith's daughter. I

submit that by that sort of standard none of us will be blameless. But

without any condemnation, it is easy to understand that the initiative

to tax almost to extinction large automobiles, wedding dresses,

champagne, pâté de foie gras and enclosed parks, instead of gin and

water, bank holiday outings and Virginia shag, is less likely to come

from the Prime Minister class than from the class of dock labourers.

There is an unconscious class war due to habit and insufficient thinking

and insufficient sympathy that will play a large part in the

distribution of the burthen of the State bankruptcy that is in progress,

and in the subsequent readjustment of national life.

And having made this parenthesis, I may perhaps go on to point out the

peculiar limitations under which various classes will be approaching the

phase of reorganisation, without being accused of making this or that

class the villain of an anticipatory drama.

Now, three great classes will certainly resist the valiant

reconstruction of economic life with a vigour in exact proportion to

their baseness, stupidity and narrowness of outlook. They will, as

classes, come up for a moral judgment, on whose verdict the whole future

of Western civilisation depends. If they cannot achieve a considerable,

an unprecedented display of self-sacrifice, unselfish wisdom, and

constructive vigour, if the community as a whole can produce no forces

sufficient to restrain their lower tendencies, then the intelligent

father had better turn his children's faces towards the New World. For

Europe will be busy with social disorder for a century.

The first great class is the class that owns and holds land and

land-like claims upon the community, from the Throne downward. This

Court and land-holding class cannot go on being rich and living rich

during the strains of the coming years. The reconstructing world cannot

bear it. Whatever rises in rent may occur through the rise in prices,

must go to meet the tremendous needs of the State.

This class, which has so much legislative and administrative power in at

least three of the great belligerents--in Great Britain and Germany

perhaps most so--must be prepared to see itself taxed, and must be

willing to assist in its own taxation to the very limit of its

statistical increment. The almost vindictive greed of the landowners

that blackened the history of England after Waterloo, and brought Great

Britain within sight of revolution, must not be repeated. The British

Empire cannot afford a revolution in the face of the Central European

Powers. But in the past century there has been an enormous change in

men's opinions and consciences about property; whereas we were

Individualists, now we are Socialists. The British lord, the German

junker, has none of the sense of unqualified rights that his

great-grandfather had, and he is aware of a vigour of public criticism

that did not exist in the former time....

How far will these men get out of the tradition of their birth and

upbringing?

Next comes the great class of lawyers who, through the idiotic method of

voting in use in modern democracies, are able practically to rule Great

Britain, and who are powerful and influential in all democratic

countries.

In order to secure a certain independence and integrity in its courts,

Great Britain long ago established the principle of enormously

overpaying its judges and lawyers. The natural result has been to give

our law courts and the legal profession generally a bias in favour of

private wealth against both the public interest and the proletariat. It

has also given our higher national education an overwhelming direction

towards the training of advocates and against science and constructive

statecraft. An ordinary lawyer has no idea of making anything; that

tendency has been destroyed in his mind; he waits and sees and takes

advantage of opportunity. Everything that can possibly be done in

England is done to make our rulers Micawbers and Artful Dodgers.

One of the most anxious questions that a Briton can ask himself to-day

is just how far the gigantic sufferings and still more monstrous

warnings of this war have shocked the good gentlemen who must steer the

ship of State through the strong rapids of the New Peace out of this

forensic levity their training has imposed upon them....

There, again, there are elements of hope. The lawyer has heard much

about himself in the past few years. His conscience may check his

tradition. And we have a Press--it has many faults, but it is no longer

a lawyer's Press....

And the third class which has immediate interests antagonistic to bold

reconstructions of our national methods is that vaguer body, the body of

investing capitalists, the savers, the usurers, who live on dividends.

It is a vast class, but a feeble class in comparison with the other

two; it is a body rather than a class, a weight rather than a power. It

consists of all sorts of people with nothing in common except the

receipt of unearned income....

All these classes, by instinct and the baser kinds of reason also, will

be doing their best to check the rise in prices, stop and reverse the

advance in wages, prevent the debasement of the circulation, and

facilitate the return to a gold standard and a repressive social

stability. They will be resisting any comprehensive national

reconstruction, any increase in public officials, any "conscription" of

land or railways or what not for the urgent civil needs of the State.

They will have fighting against these tendencies something in their own

consciences, something in public opinion, the tradition of public

devotion their own dead sons have revived--and certain other forces.

They will have over against them the obvious urgent necessities of the

time.

The most urgent necessity will be to get back the vast moiety of the

population that has been engaged either in military service or the

making of munitions to productive work, to the production of food and

necessary things, and to the restoration of that export trade which, in

the case of Great Britain at least, now that her overseas investments

have been set off by overseas war debts, is essential to the food

supply. There will be coming back into civil life, not merely thousands,

but millions of men who have been withdrawn from it. They will feel that

they have deserved well of their country. They will have had their

imaginations greatly quickened by being taken away from the homes and

habits to which they were accustomed. They will have been well fed and

inured to arms, to danger, and the chances of death. They will have no

illusions about the conduct of the war by the governing classes, or the

worshipful heroism of peers and princes. They will know just how easy is

courage, and how hard is hardship, and the utter impossibility of doing

well in war or peace under the orders of detected fools.

This vast body will constitute a very stimulating congregation of

spectators in any attempt on the part of landlord, lawyer and investor

to resume the old political mystery dance, in which rents are to be sent

up and wages down, while the old feuds of Wales and Ireland, ancient

theological and sectarian jealousies and babyish loyalties, and so forth

are to be waved in the eyes of the no longer fascinated realist.

"Meanwhile," they will say, with a stiff impatience unusual in their

class, "about _us_?" ...

Here are the makings of internal conflict in every European country. In

Russia the landlord and lawyer, in France the landlord, are perhaps of

less account, and in France the investor is more universal and jealous.

In Germany, where Junker and Court are most influential and brutal,

there is a larger and sounder and broader tradition of practical

efficiency, a modernised legal profession, and a more widely diffused

scientific imagination.

How far in each country will imagination triumph over tradition and

individualism? How far does the practical bankruptcy of Western

civilisation mean a revolutionary smash-up, and a phase that may last

for centuries, of disorder and more and more futile conflict? And how

far does it mean a reconstruction of human society, within a few score

of years, upon sounder and happier lines? Must that reconstruction be

preceded by a revolution in all or any of the countries?

To what extent can the world produce the imagination it needs? That, so

far, is the most fundamental question to which our prophetic

explorations have brought us.

IV. BRAINTREE, BOCKING, AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD

Will the war be followed by a period of great distress, social disorder

and a revolution in Europe, or shall we pull through the crisis without

violent disaster? May we even hope that Great Britain will step straight

out of the war into a phase of restored and increasing welfare?

Like most people, I have been trying to form some sort of answer to this

question. My state of mind in the last few months has varied from a

considerable optimism to profound depression. I have met and talked to

quite a number of young men in khaki--ex-engineers, ex-lawyers,

ex-schoolmasters, ex-business men of all sorts--and the net result of

these interviews has been a buoyant belief that there is in Great

Britain the pluck, the will, the intelligence to do anything, however

arduous and difficult, in the way of national reconstruction. And on the

other hand there is a certain stretch of road between Dunmow and

Coggeshall....

That stretch of road is continually jarring with my optimistic

thoughts. It is a strongly pro-German piece of road. It supports

allegations against Great Britain, as, for instance, that the British

are quite unfit to control their own affairs, let alone those of an

empire; that they are an incompetent people, a pig-headedly stupid

people, a wasteful people, a people incapable of realising that a man

who tills his field badly is a traitor and a weakness to his country....

Let me place the case of this high road through Braintree (Bocking

intervening) before the reader. It is, you will say perhaps, very small

beer. But a straw shows the way the wind blows. It is a trivial matter

of road metal, mud, and water-pipes, but it is also diagnostic of the

essential difficulties in the way of the smooth and rapid reconstruction

of Great Britain--and very probably of the reconstruction of all

Europe--after the war. The Braintree high road, I will confess, becomes

at times an image of the world for me. It is a poor, spiritless-looking

bit of road, with raw stones on one side of it. It is also, I perceive,

the high destiny of man in conflict with mankind. It is the way to

Harwich, Holland, Russia, China, and the whole wide world.

Even at the first glance it impresses one as not being the road that

would satisfy an energetic and capable people. It is narrow for a high

road, and in the middle of it one is checked by an awkward bend, by

cross-roads that are not exactly cross-roads, so that one has to turn

two blind corners to get on eastward, and a policeman, I don't know at

what annual cost, has to be posted to nurse the traffic across. Beyond

that point one is struck by the fact that the south side is considerably

higher than the north, that storm water must run from the south side to

the north and lie there. It does, and the north side has recently met

the trouble by putting down raw flints, and so converting what would be

a lake into a sort of flint pudding. Consequently one drives one's car

as much as possible on the south side of this road. There is a

suggestion of hostility and repartee between north and south side in

this arrangement, which the explorer's inquiries will confirm. It may be

only an accidental parallelism with profounder fact; I do not know. But

the middle of this high road is a frontier. The south side belongs to

the urban district of Braintree; the north to the rural district of

Bocking.

If the curious inquirer will take pick and shovel he will find at any

rate one corresponding dualism below the surface. He will find a

Bocking water main supplying the houses on the north side and a

Braintree water main supplying the south. I rather suspect that the

drains are also in duplicate. The total population of Bocking and

Braintree is probably little more than thirteen thousand souls

altogether, but for that there are two water supplies, two sets of

schools, two administrations.

To the passing observer the rurality of the Bocking side is

indistinguishable from the urbanity of the Braintree side; it is just a

little muddier. But there are dietetic differences. If you will present

a Bocking rustic with a tin of the canned fruit that is popular with the

Braintree townsfolk, you discover one of these differences. A dustman

perambulates the road on the Braintree side, and canned food becomes

possible and convenient therefore. But the Braintree grocers sell canned

food with difficulty into Bocking. Bocking, less fortunate than its

neighbour, has no dustman apparently, and is left with the tin on its

hands. It can either bury it in its garden--if it has a garden--take it

out for a walk wrapped in paper and drop it quietly in a ditch, if

possible in the Braintree area, or build a cairn with it and its

predecessors and successors in honour of the Local Government Board

(President £5,000, Parliamentary Secretary £1,500, Permanent Secretary

£2,000, Legal Adviser £1,000 upward, a total administrative expenditure

of over £300,000 ...). In death Bocking and Braintree are still divided.

They have their separate cemeteries....

Now to any disinterested observer there lies about the Braintree-Bocking

railway station one community. It has common industries and common

interests. There is no _octroi_ or anything of that sort across the

street. The shops and inns on the Bocking side of the main street are

indistinguishable from those on the Braintree side. The inhabitants of

the two communities intermarry freely. If this absurd separation did not

exist, no one would have the impudence to establish it now. It is

wasteful, unfair (because the Bocking piece is rather better off than

Braintree and with fewer people, so that there is a difference in the

rates), and for nine-tenths of the community it is more or less of a

nuisance.

It is also a nuisance to the passing public because of such

inconvenience as the asymmetrical main road. It hinders local

development and the development of a local spirit. It may, of course,

appeal perhaps to the humorous outlook of the followers of Mr. G.K.

Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, who believe that this war is really a war in

the interests of the Athanasian Creed, fatness, and unrestricted drink

against science, discipline, and priggishly keeping fit enough to join

the army, as very good fun indeed, good matter for some jolly reeling

ballad about Roundabout and Roundabout, the jolly town of Roundabout;

but to anyone else the question of how it is that this wasteful

Bocking-Braintree muddle, with its two boards, its two clerks, its two

series of jobs and contracts, manages to keep on, was even before the

war a sufficiently discouraging one.

It becomes now a quite crucial problem. Because the muddle between the

sides of the main road through Bocking and Braintree is not an isolated

instance; it is a fair sample of the way things are done in Great

Britain; it is an intimation of the way in which the great task of

industrial resettlement that the nation must face may be attempted.

It is--or shall I write, "it may be"?

That is just the question I do not settle in my mind. I would like to

think that I have hit upon a particularly bad case of entangled local

government. But it happens that whenever I have looked into local

affairs I have found the same sort of waste and--insobriety of

arrangement. When I started, a little while back, to go to Braintree to

verify these particulars, I was held up by a flood across the road

between Little Easton and Dunmow. Every year that road is flooded and

impassable for some days, because a bit of the affected stretch is under

the County Council and a bit under the Little Easton Parish Council, and

they cannot agree about the contribution of the latter. These things

bump against the most unworldly. And when one goes up the scale from the

urban district and rural district boundaries, one finds equally crazy

county arrangements, the same tangle of obstacle in the way of quick,

effective co-ordinations, the same needless multiplicity of clerks, the

same rich possibilities of litigation, misunderstanding, and deadlocks

of opinion between areas whose only difference is that a mischievous

boundary has been left in existence between them. And so on up to

Westminster. And to still greater things....

I know perfectly well how unpleasant all this is to read, this outbreak

at two localities that have never done me any personal harm except a

little mud-splashing. But this is a thing that has to be said now,

because we are approaching a crisis when dilatory ways, muddle, and

waste may utterly ruin us. This is the way things have been done in

England, this is our habit of procedure, and if they are done in this

way after the war this Empire is going to smash.

Let me add at once that it is quite possible that things are done almost

as badly or quite as badly in Russia or France or Germany or America; I

am drawing no comparisons. All of us human beings were made, I believe,

of very similar clay, and very similar causes have been at work

everywhere. Only that excuse, so popular in England, will not prevent a

smash if we stick to the old methods under the stresses ahead. I do not

see that it is any consolation to share in a general disaster.

And I am sure that there must be the most delightful and picturesque

reasons why we have all this overlapping and waste and muddle in our

local affairs; why, to take another example, the boundary of the Essex

parishes of Newton and Widdington looks as though it had been sketched

out by a drunken man in a runaway cab with a broken spring.

This Bocking-Braintree main road is, it happens, an old Stane Street,

along which Roman legions marched to clean up the councils and clerks of

the British tribal system two thousand years ago, and no doubt an

historian could spin delightful consequences; this does not alter the

fact that these quaint complications in English affairs mean in the

aggregate enormous obstruction and waste of human energy. It does not

alter the much graver fact, the fact that darkens all my outlook upon

the future, that we have never yet produced evidence of any general

disposition at any time to straighten out or even suspend these fumbling

intricacies and ineptitudes. Never so far has there appeared in British

affairs that divine passion to do things in the clearest, cleanest,

least wasteful, most thorough manner that is needed to straighten out,

for example, these universal local tangles. Always we have been content

with the old intricate, expensive way, and to this day we follow it....

And what I want to know, what I would like to feel much surer about than

I do is, is this in our blood? Or is it only the deep-seated habit of

long ages of security, long years of margins so ample, that no waste

seemed altogether wicked. Is it, in fact, a hopeless and ineradicable

trait that we stick to extravagance and confusion?

What I would like to think possible at the present time, up and down the

scale from parish to province, is something of this sort. Suppose the

clerk of Braintree went to the clerk of Bocking and said: "Look here,

one of us could do the work of both of us, as well or better. The easy

times are over, and offices as well as men should be prepared to die for

their country. Shall we toss to see who shall do it, and let the other

man go off to find something useful to do?" Then I could believe. Such

acts of virtue happen in the United States. Here is a quotation from the

New York _World_ of February 15th, 1916:

"For two unusual acts Henry Bruère may be remembered by New York longer

than nine days. Early in his incumbency he declared that his office was

superfluous and should be abolished, the Comptroller assuming its

duties. He now abolishes by resignation his own connection with it, in

spite of its $12,000 salary."

Suppose the people of Braintree and Bocking, not waiting for that lead,

said: "But this is absurd! Let us have an identical council and one

clerk, and get ahead, instead of keeping up this silly pretence that one

town is two." Suppose someone of that 300,000 pounds' worth of gentlemen

at the Local Government Board set to work to replan our local government

areas generally on less comic lines. Suppose his official superiors

helped, instead of snubbing him....

I see nothing of the sort happening. I see everywhere wary, watchful

little men, thinking of themselves, thinking of their parish, thinking

close, holding tight....

I know that there is a whole web of excuses for all these complicated,

wasteful, and obstructive arrangements of our local government, these

arrangements that I have taken merely as a sample of the general human

way of getting affairs done. For it is affairs at large I am writing

about, as I warned the reader at the beginning. Directly one inquires

closely into any human muddle, one finds all sorts of reasonable rights

and objections and claims barring the way to any sweeping proposals. I

can quite imagine that Bocking has admirable reasons for refusing

coalescence with Braintree, except upon terms that Braintree could not

possibly consider. I can quite understand that there are many

inconveniences and arguable injustices that would be caused by a merger

of the two areas. I have no doubt it would mean serious loss to

So-and-so, and quite novel and unfair advantage to So-and-so. It would

take years to work the thing and get down to the footing of one water

supply and an ambidextrous dustman on the lines of perfect justice and

satisfactoriness all round.

But what I want to maintain is that these little immediate claims and

rights and vested interests and bits of justice and fairness are no

excuse at all for preventing things being done in the clear, clean,

large, quick way. They never constituted a decent excuse, and now they

excuse waste and delay and inconvenience less than ever. Let us first do

things in the sound way, and then, if we can, let us pet and compensate

any disappointed person who used to profit by their being done

roundabout instead of earning an honest living. We are beginning to

agree that reasonably any man may be asked to die for his country; what

we have to recognise is that any man's proprietorship, interest, claims

or rights may just as properly be called upon to die. Bocking and

Braintree and Mr. John Smith--Mr. John Smith, the ordinary comfortable

man with a stake in the country--have been thinking altogether too much

of the claims and rights and expectations and economies of Bocking and

Braintree and Mr. John Smith. They have to think now in a different

way....

Just consider the work of reconstruction that Great Britain alone will

have to face in the next year or so. (And her task is, if anything, less

than that of any of her antagonists or Allies, except Japan and Italy.)

She has now probably from six to ten million people in the British

Isles, men and women, either engaged directly in warfare or in the

manufacture of munitions or in employments such as transit, nursing, and

so forth, directly subserving these main ends. At least five-sixths of

these millions must be got back to employment of a different character

within a year of the coming of peace. Everywhere manufacture, trade and

transit has been disorganised, disturbed or destroyed. A new economic

system has to be put together within a brief score or so of weeks; great

dislocated masses of population have to be fed, kept busy and

distributed in a world financially strained and abounding in wounded,

cripples, widows, orphans and helpless people.

In the next year or so the lives of half the population will have to be

fundamentally readjusted. Here is work for administrative giants, work

for which no powers can be excessive. It will be a task quite difficult

enough to do even without the opposition of legal rights, haggling

owners, and dexterous profiteers. It would be a giant's task if all the

necessary administrative machinery existed now in the most perfect

condition. How is this tremendous job going to be done if every Bocking

in the country is holding out for impossible terms from Braintree, and

every Braintree holding out for impossible terms from Bocking, while

the road out remains choked and confused between them; and if every John

Smith with a claim is insisting upon his reasonable expectation of

profits or dividends, his reasonable solatium and compensation for

getting out of the way?

I would like to record my conviction that if the business of this great

crisis is to be done in the same spirit, the jealous, higgling, legal

spirit that I have seen prevailing in British life throughout my

half-century of existence, it will not in any satisfactory sense of the

phrase get done at all. This war has greatly demoralised and discredited

the governing class in Great Britain, and if big masses of unemployed

and unfed people, no longer strung up by the actuality of war, masses

now trained to arms and with many quite sympathetic officers available,

are released clumsily and planlessly into a world of risen prices and

rising rents, of legal obstacles and forensic complications, of greedy

speculators and hampered enterprises, there will be insurrection and

revolution. There will be bloodshed in the streets and the chasing of

rulers.

There _will_ be, if we do seriously attempt to put the new wine of

humanity, the new crude fermentations at once so hopeful and so

threatening, that the war has released, into the old administrative

bottles that served our purposes before the war.

I believe that for old lawyers and old politicians and "private

ownership" to handle the great problem of reconstruction after the war

in the spirit in which our affairs were conducted before the war is

about as hopeful an enterprise as if an elderly jobbing brick-layer,

working on strict trade-union rules, set out to stop the biggest

avalanche that ever came down a mountain-side. And since I am by no

means altogether pessimistic, in spite of my qualmy phases, it follows

that I do not believe that the old spirit will necessarily prevail. I do

not, because I believe that in the past few decades a new spirit has

come into human affairs; that our ostensible rulers and leaders have

been falling behind the times, and that in the young and the untried,

in, for example, the young European of thirty and under who is now in

such multitudes thinking over life and his seniors in the trenches,

there are still unsuspected resources of will and capacity, new mental

possibilities and new mental habits, that entirely disturb the

argument--based on the typical case of Bocking and Braintree--for a

social catastrophe after the war.

How best can this new spirit be defined?

It is the creative spirit as distinguished from the legal spirit; it is

the spirit of courage to make and not the spirit that waits and sees and

claims; it is the spirit that looks to the future and not to the past.

It is the spirit that makes Bocking forget that it is not Braintree and

John Smith forget that he is John Smith, and both remember that they are

England.

For everyone there are two diametrically different ways of thinking

about life; there is individualism, the way that comes as naturally as

the grunt from a pig, of thinking outwardly from oneself as the centre

of the universe, and there is the way that every religion is trying in

some form to teach, of thinking back to oneself from greater standards

and realities. There is the Braintree that is Braintree against England

and the world, giving as little as possible and getting the best of the

bargain, and there is the Braintree that identifies itself with England

and asks how can we do best for the world with this little place of

ours, how can we educate best, produce most, and make our roads straight

and good for the world to go through.

Every American knows the district that sends its congressman to

Washington for the good of his district, and the district, the rarer

district, that sends a man to work for the United States. There is the

John Smith who feels toward England and the world as a mite feels toward

its cheese, and the John Smith who feels toward his country as a

sheep-dog feels toward the flock. The former is the spirit of

individualism, "business," and our law, the latter the spirit of

socialism and science and--khaki.... They are both in all of us, they

fluctuate from day to day; first one is ascendant and then the other.

War does not so much tilt the balance as accentuate the difference. One

rich British landowner sneaks off to New York State to set up a home

there and evade taxation; another turns his mansion into a hospital and

goes off to help Serbian refugees. Acts of baseness or generosity are

contagious; this man will give himself altogether because of a story of

devotion, this man declares he will do nothing until Sir F.E. Smith goes

to the front. And the would-be prophet of what is going to happen must

guess the relative force of these most impalpable and uncertain things.

This Braintree-Bocking boundary which runs down the middle of the road

is to be found all over the world. You will find it in Ireland and the

gentlemen who trade on the jealousies of the north side and the

gentlemen who trade on the jealousies of the south. You will find it in

England among the good people who would rather wreck the Empire than

work honestly and fairly with Labour. There are not only parish

boundaries, but park boundaries and class and sect boundaries. You will

find the Bocking-Braintree line too at a dozen points on a small scale

map of Europe.... These Braintree-Bocking lines are the barbed-wire

entanglements between us and the peace of the world. Against these

entanglements in every country the new spirit struggles in many

thousands of minds. Where will it be strongest? Which country will get

clear first, get most rapidly to work again, have least of the confusion

and wrangling that must in some degree occur everywhere? Will any

country go altogether to pieces in hopeless incurable discord?

Now I believe that the answer to that last question is "No." And my

reason for that answer is the same as my reason for believing that the

association of the Pledged Allies will not break up after the war; it is

that I believe that this war is going to end not in the complete

smashing up and subjugation of either side, but in a general exhaustion

that will make the recrudescence of the war still possible but very

terrifying.

Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs for the next two

decades, and the speech of Mars is blunt and plain. He will say to us

all: "Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste

time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will

certainly come down upon you again. I have taken all your men between

eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed such as I pleased; millions of

them. I have wasted your substance--contemptuously. Now, mark you, you

have multitudes of male children between the ages of nine and nineteen

running about among you. Delightful and beloved boys. And behind them

come millions of delightful babies. Of these I have scarcely smashed and

starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps by the way. But go on

muddling, each for himself and his parish and his family and none for

all the world, go on in the old way, stick to-your 'rights,' stick to

your 'claims' each one of you, make no concessions and no sacrifices,

obstruct, waste, squabble, and presently I will come back again and take

all that fresh harvest of life I have spared, all those millions that

are now sweet children and dear little boys and youths, and I will

squeeze it into red pulp between my hands, I will mix it with the mud of

trenches and feast on it before your eyes, even more damnably than I

have done with your grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken most

of your superfluities already; next time I will take your barest

necessities."

So the red god, Mars; and in these days of universal education the great

mass of people will understand plainly now that that is his message and

intention. Men who cannot be swayed by the love of order and creation

may be swayed by the thought of death and destruction.... There, I

think, is the overriding argument that will burst the proprietorships

and divisions and boundaries, the web of ineffectiveness that has held

the world so long. Labour returning from the trenches to its country and

demanding promptness, planning, generous and devoted leaderships and

organisation, demanding that the usurer and financier, the landlord and

lawyer shall, if need be, get themselves altogether out of the way, will

have behind its arguments the thought of the enemy still unsubdued,

still formidable, recovering. Both sides will feel that. This world is a

more illuminated world than 1816; a thousand questions between law and

duty have been discussed since then; beyond all comparison we know

better what we are doing. I think the broad side of John Smith (and Sir

John Smith and John Smith, K.C.) will get the better of his narrow

ends--and that so it will be with Jean Dupont and Hans Meyer and the

rest of them. There may be riots here and there; there may be some

pretty considerable rows; but I do not think there is going to be a

chaotic and merely destructive phase in Great Britain or any Western

European country. I cast my guess for reconstruction and not for revolt.

V. HOW FAR WILL EUROPE GO TOWARD SOCIALISM?

A number of people are saying that this war is to be the end of

Individualism. "Go as you please" has had its death-blow. Out of this

war, whatever else emerges, there will emerge a more highly organised

State than existed before--that is to say, a less individualistic and

more socialistic State. And there seems a heavy weight of probability on

the side of this view. But there are also a number of less obvious

countervailing considerations that may quite possibly modify or reverse

this tendency.

In this chapter an attempt is to be made to strike a balance between the

two systems of forces, and guess how much will be private and how much

public in Europe in 1930, or thereabouts.

The prophets who foretell the coming of Socialism base their case on

three sets of arguments. They point out, first, the failure of

individual enterprise to produce a national efficiency comparable to

the partial State Socialism of Germany, and the extraordinary, special

dangers inherent in private property that the war has brought to light;

secondly, to the scores of approaches to practical Socialism that have

been forced upon Great Britain--for example, by the needs of the war;

and, thirdly, to the obvious necessities that will confront the British

Empire and the Allies generally after the war--necessities that no

unorganised private effort can hope to meet effectively.

All these arguments involve the assumption that the general

understanding of the common interest will be sufficient to override

individual and class motives; an exceedingly doubtful assumption, to say

the least of it. But the general understanding of the common interest is

most likely to be kept alive by the sense of a common danger, and we

have already arrived at the conclusion that Germany is going to be

defeated but not destroyed in this war, and that she will be left with

sufficient vitality and sufficient resentment and sufficient of her

rancid cultivated nationalism to make not only the continuance of the

Alliance after the war obviously advisable and highly probable, but also

to preserve in the general mind for a generation or so that sense of a

common danger which most effectually conduces to the sweeping aside of

merely personal and wasteful claims. Into the consequences of this we

have now to look a little more closely.

It was the weaknesses of Germany that made this war, and not her

strength. The weaknesses of Germany are her Imperialism, her Junkerism,

and her intense, sentimental Nationalism; for the former would have no

German ascendancy that was not achieved by force, and, with the latter,

made the idea of German ascendancy intolerable to all mankind. Better

death, we said. And had Germany been no more than her Court, her

Junkerism, her Nationalism, the whole system would have smashed beneath

the contempt and indignation of the world within a year.

But the strength of Germany has saved her from that destruction. She was

at once the most archaic and modern of states. She was Hohenzollern,

claiming to be Caesar, and flaunting a flat black eagle borrowed from

Imperial Rome; and also she was the most scientific and socialist of

states. It is her science and her Socialism that have held and forced

back the avengers of Belgium for more than a year and a half. If she has

failed as a conqueror, she has succeeded as an organisation. Her

ambition has been thwarted, and her method has been vindicated. She

will, I think, be so far defeated in the contest of endurance which is

now in progress that she will have to give up every scrap of territorial

advantage she has gained; she may lose most of her Colonial Empire; she

may be obliged to complete her modernisation by abandoning her militant

Imperialism; but she will have at least the satisfaction of producing

far profounder changes in the chief of her antagonists than those she

herself will undergo.

The Germany of the Hohenzollerns had its mortal wound at the Marne; the

Germany we fight to-day is the Germany of Krupp and Ostwald. It is

merely as if she had put aside a mask that had blinded her. She was

methodical and civilised except for her head and aim; she will become

entirely methodical. But the Britain and Russia and France she fights

are lands full of the spirit of undefined novelty. They are being made

over far more completely. They are being made over, not in spite of the

war, but because of the war. Only by being made over can they win the

war. And if they do not win the war, then they are bound to be made

over. They are not merely putting aside old things, but they are forming

and organising within themselves new structures, new and more efficient

relationships, that will last far beyond the still remote peace

settlement.

What this war has brought home to the consciousness of every intelligent

man outside the German system, with such thoroughness as whole

generations of discussion and peace experience could never have

achieved, is a double lesson: that Germany had already gone far to

master when she blundered into the war; firstly, the waste and dangers

of individualism, and, secondly, the imperative necessity of scientific

method in public affairs. The waste and dangers of individualism have

had a whole series of striking exemplifications both in Europe and

America since the war began. Were there such a thing as a Socialist

propaganda in existence, were the so-called socialistic organisations

anything better than a shabby little back-door into contemporary

politics, those demonstrations would be hammering at the mind of

everyone. It may be interesting to recapitulate some of the most salient

instances.

The best illustration, perhaps, of the waste that arises out of

individualism is to be found in the extreme dislocation of the privately

owned transit services of Great Britain at the present time. There is no

essential reason whatever why food and fuel in Great Britain should be

considerably dearer than they are under peace conditions. Just the same

home areas are under cultivation, just the same foreign resources are

available; indeed, more foreign supplies are available because we have

intercepted those that under normal conditions would have gone to

Germany. The submarine blockade of Britain is now a negligible factor in

this question.

Despite these patent conditions there has been, and is, a steady

increase in the cost of provisions, coal, and every sort of necessity.

This increase means an increase in the cost of production of many

commodities, and so contributes again to the general scarcity. This is

the domestic aspect of a difficulty that has also its military side. It

is not sufficient merely to make munitions; they must also be delivered,

Great Britain is suffering very seriously from congestion of the

railways. She suffers both in social and military efficiency, and she is

so suffering because her railways, instead of being planned as one great

and simple national distributing system, have grown up under conditions

of clumsy, dividend-seeking competition.

Each great railway company and combination has worked its own areas, and

made difficulties and aggressions at the boundaries of its sphere of

influence; here are inconvenient junctions and here unnecessary

duplications; nearly all the companies come into London, each taking up

its own area of expensive land for goods yards, sidings, shunting

grounds, and each regardless of any proper correlation with the other;

great areas of the County of London are covered with their idle trucks

and their separate coal stores; in many provincial towns you will find

two or even three railway stations at opposite ends of the town; the

streets are blocked by the vans and trolleys of the several companies

tediously handing about goods that could be dealt with at a tenth of the

cost in time and labour at a central clearing-house, did such a thing

exist; and each system has its vast separate staff, unaccustomed to work

with any other staff.

Since the war began the Government has taken over the general direction

of this disarticulated machinery, but no one with eyes who travels about

England now can fail to remark, in the miles and miles of waiting loaded

trucks on every siding, the evidences of mischievous and now almost

insuperable congestion. The trucks of each system that have travelled on

to another still go back, for the most part, _empty_ to their own; and

thousands of privately owned trucks, which carry cargo only one way,

block our sidings. Great Britain wastes men and time to a disastrous

extent in these needless shuntings and handlings.

Here, touching every life in the community, is one instance of the

muddle that arises naturally out of the individualistic method of

letting public services grow up anyhow without a plan, or without any

direction at all except the research for private profit.

A second series of deficiencies that the war has brought to light in the

too individualistic British State is the entire want of connection

between private profit and public welfare. So far as the interests of

the capitalist go it does not matter whether he invests his money at

home or abroad; it does not matter whether his goods are manufactured in

London or Timbuctoo.

But what of the result? At the outbreak of the war Great Britain found

that a score of necessary industries had drifted out of the country,

because it did not "pay" any private person to keep them here. The

shortage of dyes has been amply discussed as a typical case. A much

graver one that we may now write about was the shortage of zinc. Within

a month or so of the outbreak of the war the British Government had to

take urgent and energetic steps to secure this essential ingredient of

cartridge cases. Individualism had let zinc refining drift to Belgium

and Germany; it was the luck rather than the merit of Great Britain that

one or two refineries still existed.

Still more extraordinary things came to light in the matter of the metal

supply. Under an individualistic system you may sell to the highest

bidder, and anyone with money from anywhere may come in and buy. Great

supplies of colonial ores were found to be cornered by semi-national

German syndicates. Supplies were held up by these contracts against the

necessities of the Empire. And this was but one instance of many which

have shown that, while industrial development in the Allied countries is

still largely a squabbling confusion of little short-sighted,

unscientific, private profit-seeking owners, in Germany it has been for

some years increasingly run on far-seeing collectivist lines. Against

the comparatively little and mutually jealous British or American

capitalists and millionaires Germany pits itself as a single great

capitalist and competitor. She has worked everywhere upon a

comprehensive plan. Against her great national electric combination, for

example, only another national combination could stand. As it was,

Germany--in the way of business--wired and lit (and examined) the forts

at Liége. She bought and prepared a hundred strategic centres in

individualistic Belgium and France.

So we pass from the fact that individualism is hopeless muddle to the

fact that the individualist idea is one of limitless venality, Who can

buy, may control. And Germany, in her long scheming against her

individualist rivals, has not simply set herself to buy and hold the

keys and axles of their economic machinery. She has set herself, it must

be admitted, with a certain crudity and little success, but with

unexampled vigour, to buy the minds of her adversaries. The Western

nations have taken a peculiar pride in having a free Press; that is to

say, a Press that may be bought by anyone. Our Press is constantly

bought and sold, in gross and detail, by financiers, advertisers,

political parties, and the like. Germany came into the market rather

noisily, and great papers do to a large extent live in glass houses; but

her efforts have been sufficient to exercise the minds of great numbers

of men with the problem of what might have happened in the way of

national confusion if the German attack had been more subtly

conceived....

It is only a partial answer to this difficulty to say that a country

that is so nationalist and aggressive as Germany is incapable of subtle

conceptions. The fact remains that in Great Britain at the present time

there are newspaper proprietors who would be good bargains for Germany

at two million pounds a head, and that there was no effectual guarantee

in the individualistic system, but only our good luck and the natural

patriotism of the individuals concerned that she did not pick up these

bargains before trading with the enemy became illegal. It happened, for

example, that Lord Northcliffe was public-spirited, That was the good

luck of Great Britain rather than her merit. There was nothing in the

individualistic system to prevent Germany from buying up the entire

Harmsworth Press--_The Times, Daily Mail_, and all--five years before

the war, and using it to confuse the national mind, destroy the national

unity, sacrifice the national interests, and frustrate the national

will.

Not only the newspapers, but the news-agents and booksellers of both

Great Britain and America are entirely at the disposal of any hostile

power which chooses to buy them up quietly and systematically. It is

merely a question of wealth and cleverness. And if the failure of the

Germans to grip the Press of the French and English speaking countries

has been conspicuous, she has been by no means so unsuccessful in--for

example--Spain. At the present time the thought and feeling of the

Spanish speaking world is being _educated_ against the Allies. The

Spanish mind has been sold by its custodians into German control.

Muddle and venality do not, however, exhaust the demonstrated vices of

individualism. Individualism encourages desertion and treason.

Individualism permits base private people to abscond with the national

resources and squeeze a profit out of national suffering. In the early

stages of the war some bright minds conceived the idea of a corner in

drugs. It is not illegal; it is quite the sort of thing that appeals to

the individualistic frame of mind as entirely meritorious. As the _New

Statesman_ put it recently: "The happy owners of the world's available

stock of a few indispensable drugs did not refrain from making, not only

the various Governments, but also all the sick people of the world pay

double, and even tenfold, prices for what was essential to relieve pain

and save life. What fortunes were thus made we shall probably never

know, any more than we shall know the tale of the men and women and

children who suffered and died because of their inability to pay, not

the cost of production of what would have saved them, but the

unnecessarily enhanced price that the chances of the market enabled the

owners to exact."

And another bright instance of the value of individualism is the selling

of British shipping to neutral buyers just when the country is in the

most urgent need of every ship it can get, and the deliberate transfer

to America of a number of British businesses to evade paying a proper

share of the national bill in taxation. The English who have gone to

America at different times have been of very different qualities; at the

head of the list are the English who went over in the _Mayflower_; at

the bottom will be the rich accessions of this war....

And perhaps a still more impressive testimony to the rottenness of these

"business men," upon whom certain eccentric voices call so amazingly to

come and govern us, is the incurable distrust they have sown in the

minds of labour. Never was an atmosphere of discipline more lamentable

than that which has grown up in the factories, workshops, and great

privately owned public services of America and Western Europe. The men,

it is evident, _expect_ to be robbed and cheated at every turn. I can

only explain their state of mind by supposing that they have been robbed

and cheated. Their scorn and contempt for their employees' good faith

is limitless. Their _morale_ is undermined by an invincible distrust.

It is no good for Mr. Lloyd George to attempt to cure the gathered ill

of a century with half an hour or so of eloquence. When Great Britain,

in her supreme need, turns to the workmen she has trained in the ways of

individualism for a century, she reaps the harvest individualism has

sown. She has to fight with that handicap. Every regulation for the

rapid mobilisation of labour is scrutinised to find the trick in it.

And they find the trick in it as often as not. Smart individualistic

"business experience" has been at the draughtsman's elbow. A man in an

individualistic system does not escape from class ideas and prejudices

by becoming an official. There is profound and bitter wisdom in the deep

distrust felt by British labour for both military and industrial

conscription.

The breakdown of individualism has been so complete in Great Britain

that we are confronted with the spectacle of this great and ancient

kingdom reconstructing itself perforce, while it wages the greatest war

in history. A temporary nationalisation of land transit has been

improvised, and only the vast, deep-rooted, political influence of the

shipowners and coalowners have staved off the manifestly necessary step

of nationalising shipping and coal. I doubt if they will be able to

stave it off to the end of the long struggle which is still before us if

the militarism of Germany is really to be arrested and discredited.

Expropriation and not conscription will be the supreme test of Britain's

loyalty to her Allies.

The British shipowners, in particular, are reaping enormous but

precarious profits from the war. The blockade of Britain, by the British

shipowners is scarcely less effective than the blockade of Germany by

Britain. With an urgent need of every ship for the national supplies,

British ships, at the present moment of writing this, are still carrying

cheap American automobiles to Australia. They would carry munitions to

Germany if their owners thought they had a sporting chance of not

getting caught at it. These British shipowners are a pampered class with

great political and social influence, and no doubt as soon as the

accumulating strain of the struggle tells to the extent of any serious

restriction of their advantage and prospects, we shall see them shifting

to the side of the at present negligible group of British pacifists. I

do not think one can count on any limit to their selfishness and

treason.

I believe that the calculations of some of these extreme and apparently

quite unreasonable "pacifists" are right. Before the war is over there

will be a lot of money in the pacifist business. The rich curs of the

West End will join hands with the labour curs of the Clyde. The base are

to be found in all classes, but I doubt if they dominate any. I do not

believe that any interest or group of interests in Great Britain can

stand in the way of the will of the whole people to bring this struggle

to a triumphant finish at any cost. I do not believe that the most

sacred ties of personal friendship and blood relationship with

influential people can save either shipowners or coalowners or army

contractors to the end.

There will be no end until these profit-makings are arrested. The

necessary "conscriptions of property" must come about in Great Britain

because there is no alternative but failure in the war, and the British

people will not stand failure. I believe that the end of the war will

see, not only transit, but shipping, collieries, and large portions of

the machinery of food and drink production and distribution no longer

under the administration of private ownership, but under a sort of

provisional public administration. And very many British factories will

be in the same case.

Two years ago no one would have dared to prophesy the tremendous

rearrangement of manufacturing machinery which is in progress in Britain

to-day. Thousands of firms of engineers and manufacturers of all sorts,

which were flourishing in 1914, exist to-day only as names, as shapes,

as empty shells. Their staffs have been shattered, scattered,

reconstructed; their buildings enlarged and modified; their machinery

exchanged, reconstituted, or taken. The reality is a vast interdependent

national factory that would have seemed incredible to Fourier.

It will be as impossible to put back British industrialism into the

factories and forms of the pre-war era as it would be to restore the

Carthaginian Empire. There is a new economic Great Britain to-day,

emergency made, jerry-built no doubt, a gawky, weedy giant, but a giant

who may fill out to such dimensions as the German national system has

never attained. Behind it is an _idea_, a new idea, the idea of the

nation as one great economic system working together, an idea which

could not possibly have got into the sluggish and conservative British

intelligence in half a century by any other means than the stark

necessities of this war.... Great Britain cannot retrace those steps

even if she would, and so she will be forced to carry this process of

reconstruction through. And what is happening to Great Britain must,

with its national differences, be happening to France and Russia. Not

only for war ends, but for peace ends, behind the front and sustaining

the front, individualities are being hammered together into common and

concerted activities.

At the end of this war Great Britain will find herself with this great

national factory, this great national organisation of labour, planned,

indeed, primarily to make war material, but convertible with the utmost

ease to the purposes of automobile manufacture, to transit

reconstruction, to electrical engineering, and endless such uses.

France and Russia will be in a parallel case. All the world will be

exhausted, and none of the Allies will have much money to import

automobiles, railway material, electrical gear, and so on, from abroad.

Moreover, it will be a matter of imperative necessity for them to get

ahead of the Central Powers with their productive activities. We shall

all be too poor to import from America, and we shall be insane to import

from Germany. America will be the continent with the long purse,

prepared to buy rather than sell. Each country will have great masses of

soldiers waiting to return to industrial life, and will therefore be

extremely indisposed to break up any existing productive organisation.

In the face of these facts, will any of the Allied Powers be so foolish

as to disband this great system of national factories and nationally

worked communications? Moreover, we have already risked the prophecy

that this war will not end with such conclusiveness as to justify an

immediate beating out of our swords into ploughshares. There will be a

military as well as a social reason for keeping the national factories

in a going state.

What more obvious course, then, than to keep them going by turning them

on to manufacture goods of urgent public necessity? There are a number

of modern commodities now practically standardised: the bicycle, the

cheap watch, the ordinary tradesman's delivery automobile, the farmer's

runabout, the country doctor's car, much electric-lighting material,

dynamos, and so forth. And also, in a parallel case, there is

shipbuilding. The chemical side of munition work can turn itself with no

extreme difficulty to the making of such products as dyes.

We face the fact, then, that either the State must go on with this

production, as it can do, straight off from the signing of peace,

converting with a minimum of friction, taking on its soldiers as they

are discharged from the army as employees with a minimum waste of time

and a minimum of social disorder, and a maximum advantage in the

resumption of foreign trade, or there will be a dangerous break-up of

the national factory system, a time of extreme chaos and bitter

unemployment until capital accumulates for new developments. The risks

of social convulsion will be enormous. And there is small hope that the

Central Powers, and particularly industrial Germany, will have the

politeness to wait through the ten or twelve years of economic

embarrassment that a refusal to take this bold but obviously

advantageous step into scientific Socialism will entail.

But the prophet must be on his guard against supposing that, because a

thing is highly desirable, it must necessarily happen; or that, because

it is highly dangerous, it will be avoided. This bold and successful

economic reconstruction upon national lines is not inevitable merely

because every sound reason points us in that direction. A man may be

very ill, a certain drug may be clearly indicated as the only possible

remedy, but it does not follow that the drug is available, that the

doctor will have the sense to prescribe it, or the patient the means to

procure it or the intelligence to swallow it.

The experience of history is that nations do not take the obviously

right course, but the obviously wrong one. The present prophet knows

only his England, but, so far as England is concerned, he can cover a

sheet of paper with scarcely a pause, jotting down memoranda of

numberless forces that make against any such rational reconstruction.

Most of these forces, in greater or less proportion, must be present in

the case of every other country under consideration.

The darkest shadow upon the outlook of European civilisation at the

present time is not the war; it is the failure of any co-operative

spirit between labour and the directing classes. The educated and

leisured classes have been rotten with individualism for a century; they

have destroyed the confidence of the worker in any leadership whatever.

Labour stands apart, intractable. If there is to be any such rapid

conversion of the economic machinery as the opportunities and

necessities of this great time demand, then labour must be taken into

the confidence of those who would carry it through. It must be reassured

and enlightened. Labour must know clearly what is being done; it must be

an assenting co-operator. The stride to economic national service and

Socialism is a stride that labour should be more eager to take than any

other section of the community.

The first step in reassuring labour must be to bring the greedy private

owner and the speculator under a far more drastic discipline than at

present. The property-owning class is continually accusing labour of

being ignorant, suspicious, and difficult; it is blind to the fact that

it is itself profit-seeking by habit, greedy, conceited, and half

educated.

Every step in the mobilisation of Great Britain's vast resources for the

purposes of the war has been hampered by the tricks, the failures to

understand, and the almost instinctive disloyalties of private owners.

The raising of rents in Glasgow drove the infuriated workmen of the

Clyde district into an unwilling strike. It was an exasperating piece of

private selfishness, quite typical of the individualistic state of mind,

and the failure to anticipate or arrest it on the part of the Government

was a worse failure than Suvla Bay. And everywhere the officials of the

Ministry of Munitions find private employers holding back workers and

machinery from munition works, intriguing--more particularly through the

Board of Trade--to have all sorts of manufactures for private profit

recognised as munition work, or if that contention is too utterly

absurd, then as work vitally necessary to the maintenance of British

export trade and the financial position of the country. It is an

undeniable fact that employers and men alike have been found far readier

to risk their lives for their country than to lay aside any scale of

profits to which they have grown accustomed.

This conflict of individualistic enterprise and class suspicion against

the synthesis of the public welfare is not peculiar to Great Britain; it

is probably going on with local variations in Germany, Russia, Italy,

France, and, indeed, in every combatant country. Because of the

individualistic forces and feelings, none of us, either friends or

enemies, are really getting anything like our full possible result out

of our national efforts. But in Germany there is a greater tradition of

subordination; in France there is a greater clarity of mind than in any

other country.

Great Britain and Russia in this, as in so many other matters, are at

once close kindred and sharp antithesis. Each is mentally crippled by

the corruption of its educational system by an official religious

orthodoxy, and hampered by a Court which disowns any function of

intellectual stimulus. Neither possesses a scientifically educated

_class_ to which it can look for the powerful handling of this great

occasion; and each has acquired under these disadvantages the same

strange faculty for producing sane resultants out of illogical

confusions. It is the way of these unmethodical Powers to produce

unexpected, vaguely formulated, and yet effective cerebral

action--apparently from their backbones.

As I sit playing at prophecy, and turn over the multitudinous

impressions of the last year in my mind, weighing the great necessities

of the time against obstacles and petty-mindedness, I become more and

more conscious of a third factor that is neither need nor obstruction,

and that is the will to get things right that has been liberated by the

war.

The new spirit is still but poorly expressed, but it will find

expression. The war goes on, and we discuss this question of economic

reconstruction as though it was an issue that lay between the labour

that has stayed behind and the business men, for the most part old men

with old habits of mind, who have stayed behind.

The real life of Europe's future lies on neither side of that

opposition. The real life is mutely busy at present, saying little

because of the uproar of the guns, and not so much learning as casting

habits and shedding delusions. In the trenches there are workers who

have broken with the old slacking and sabotage, and there are

prospective leaders who have forgotten profit. The men between eighteen

and forty are far too busy in the blood and mud to make much showing

now, but to-morrow these men will be the nation.

When that third factor of the problem is brought in the outlook of the

horoscope improves. The spirit of the war may be counted upon to balance

and prevail against this spirit of individualism, this spirit of

suspicion and disloyalty, which I fear more than anything else in the

world.

I believe in the young France, young England, and young Russia this war

is making, and so I believe that every European country will struggle

along the path that this war has opened to a far more completely

organised State than has existed ever before. The Allies will become

State firms, as Germany was, indeed, already becoming before the war;

setting private profit aside in the common interest, handling

agriculture, transport, shipping, coal, the supply of metals, the

manufacture of a thousand staple articles, as national concerns.

In the face of the manifest determination of the Central Powers to do as

much, the Allies will be forced also to link their various State firms

together into a great allied trust, trading with a common interest and a

common plan with Germany and America and the rest of the world.... Youth

and necessity will carry this against selfishness, against the

unimaginative, against the unteachable, the suspicious, the "_old

fool_."

But I do not venture to prophesy that this will come about as if it were

a slick and easy deduction from present circumstances. Even in France I

do not think things will move as lucidly and generously as that. There

will be a conflict everywhere between wisdom and cunning, between the

eyes of youth and the purblind, between energy and obstinacy.

The reorganisation of the European States will come about clumsily and

ungraciously. At every point the sticker will be found sticking tight,

holding out to be bought off, holding out for a rent or a dividend or a

share, holding out by mere instinct. At every turn, too, the bawler will

be loud and active, bawling suspicions, bawling accusations, bawling

panic, or just simply bawling. Tricks, peculation, obstinacies,

vanities--after this war men will still be men. But I do believe that

through all the dust and din, the great reasons in the case, the steady

constructive forces of the situation, will carry us.

I believe that out of the ruins of the nineteenth century system of

private capitalism that this war has smashed for ever, there will arise,

there does even now arise, in this strange scaffolding of national

munition factories and hastily nationalised public services, the

framework of a new economic and social order based upon national

ownership and service.

Let us now recapitulate a little and see how far we have got in

constructing a picture of the European community as it will be in

fifteen or twenty years' time. Nominally it will be little more of a

Socialist State than it is to-day, but, as a matter of fact, the ships,

the railways, the coal and metal supply, the great metal industries,

much engineering, and most agriculture, will be more or less completely

under collective ownership, and certainly very completely under

collective control. This does not mean that there will have been any

disappearance of private property, but only that there will have been a

very considerable change in its character; the owner will be less of

controller but more of a creditor; he will be a _rentier_ or an

annuitant.

The burthen of this class upon the community will not be relatively

quite so heavy as it would otherwise have been, because of a very

considerable rise in wages and prices.

In a community in which all the great initiatives have been assumed by

the State, the importance of financiers and promoters will have

diminished relatively to the importance of administrative officials; the

opportunities of private exploitation, indeed, will have so diminished

that there will probably be far less evidence of great concentrations of

private wealth in the European social landscape than there was before

the war.

On the other hand, there will be an enormously increased _rentier_ class

drawing the interest of the war loans from the community, and

maintaining a generally high standard of comfort. There will have been a

great demand for administrative and technical abilities and a great

stimulation of scientific and technical education. By 1926 we shall be

going about a world that will have recovered very largely from the

impoverishment of the struggle; we shall tour in State-manufactured

automobiles upon excellent roads, and we shall live in houses equipped

with a national factory electric light installation, and at every turn

we shall be using and consuming the products of nationalised

industry--and paying off the National Debt simultaneously, and reducing

our burden of _rentiers_.

At the same time our boys will be studying science in their schools

more thoroughly than they do now, and they will in many cases be

learning Russian instead of Greek or German. More of our boys will be

going into the public service, and fewer thinking of private business,

and they will be going into the public service, not as clerks, but as

engineers, technical chemists, manufacturers, State agriculturists, and

the like. The public service will be less a service of clerks and more a

service of practical men. The ties that bind France and Great Britain at

the present moment will have been drawn very much closer. France,

Belgium and England will be drifting towards a French-English

bi-lingualism....

So much of our picture we may splash in now. Much that is quite

essential remains to be discussed. So far we have said scarcely a word

about the prospects of party politics and the problems of government

that arise as the State ceases to be a mere impartial adjudicator

between private individuals, and takes upon itself more and more of the

direction of the general life of the community.

VI. LAWYER AND PRESS

The riddle of administration is the most subtle of all those that the

would-be prophet of the things that are coming must attempt. We see the

great modern States confronted now by vast and urgent necessities, by

opportunities that may never recur. Individualism has achieved its

inevitable failure; "go as you please" in a world that also contained

aggressive militarism, has broken down. We live in a world of improvised

State factories, commandeered railways, substituted labour and emergency

arrangements. Our vague-minded, lax, modern democracy has to pull itself

together, has to take over and administer and succeed with a great

system of collective functions, has to express its collective will in

some better terms than "go as you please," or fail.

And we find the affairs of nearly every great democratic State in the

hands of a class of men not specially adapted to any such constructive

or administrative work.

I am writing here now chiefly of the Western Allies. Russia is peculiar

in having her administrative machine much more highly developed in

relation to her general national life than the free democratic

countries. She has to make a bureaucracy that has not hitherto been an

example for efficiency into a bureaucracy that will be constructive,

responsive, liberal, scientific, and efficient; the Western countries

have to do the same with that oligarchy of politicians which, as

Professor Michels has recently pointed out in his striking book on

"Political Parties," is the necessary reality of democratic government.

By different methods the Eastern and Western Powers have to attain a

common end. Both bureaucracy and pseudo-democratic oligarchy have to

accomplish an identical task, to cement the pacific alliance of the

Pledged Allies and to socialise their common industrial and economic

life, so as to make it invulnerable to foreign attack.

Now in Great Britain, which is the democracy that has been most under

the close observation of the present prophet, there is at present a

great outcry against the "politician," and more particularly against the

"lawyer-politician." He is our embarrassment. In him we personify all

our difficulties. Let us consider the charges against this individual.

Let us ask, can we do without him? And let us further see what chances

there may be of so altering, qualifying, or balancing him as to minimise

the evil of his influence. To begin with, let us run over the essentials

of the charge against him.

It is with a modest blush that the present prophet recapitulates these

charges. So early as the year 1902 he was lifting up his voice, not

exactly in the wilderness but at least in the Royal Institution, against

the legal as compared with the creative or futurist type of mind. The

legal mind, he insisted, looks necessarily to the past. It is dilatory

because it has no sense of coming things, it is uninventive and

wasteful, it does not create, it takes advantage. It is the type of mind

least able, under any circumstances, to organise great businesses, to

plan campaigns, to adventure or achieve. "Wait and see" crystallises its

spirit. Its resistance is admirable, and it has no "go." Nevertheless

there is a tendency for power to gravitate in all democratic countries

to the lawyer.

In the British system the normal faults of the lawyer are enhanced, and

his predominance intensified, by certain peculiarities of our system. In

the first place, he belongs to a guild of exceptional power. In Britain

it happens that the unfortunate course was taken ages ago of bribing the

whole legal profession to be honest. The British judges and law officers

are stupendously overpaid in order to make them incorruptible; it is a

poor but perhaps a well-merited compliment to their professional code.

We have squared the whole profession to be individually unbribable.

The judges, moreover, in the Anglo-Saxon communities are appointed from

among the leading barristers, an arrangement that a child can see is

demoralising and inadvisable. And in Great Britain all the greatest

salaries in the government service are reserved for the legal

profession. The greatest prizes, therefore, before an energetic young

man who has to make his way in Great Britain are the legal prizes, and

his line of advancement to these lies, for all the best years of his

life, not through the public service, but through the private practice

of advocacy. The higher education, such as it is, in Great Britain,

produces under the stimulus of these conditions an advocate as its

finest flower. To go from the posing and chatter of the Union Debating

Society to a university laboratory is, in Britain, to renounce ambition.

Few men of exceptional energy will do that.

The national consequences of this state of affairs have been only too

manifest throughout the conduct of the war. The British Government has

developed all the strength and all the weakness of the great profession

it represents. It has been uninventive, dilatory, and without

initiative; it has been wasteful and evasive; but it has not been

wanting in a certain eloquence and dignity, it has been wary and shrewd,

and it has held on to office with the concentrated skill and

determination of a sucker-fish. And the British mind, with a

concentration and intensity unprecedented before the war, is speculating

how it can contrive to get a different sort of ruler and administrator

at work upon its affairs.

There is a disposition in the Press, and much of the private talk one

hears, to get rid of lawyers from the control of national affairs

altogether, to substitute "business men" or scientific men or "experts."

That way lies dictatorship and Caesarism. And even Great Britain is not

so heedless of the experiences of other nations as to attempt again what

has already been so abundantly worked out in national disaster across

the Channel. The essential business of government is to deal between man

and man; it is not to manage the national affairs in detail, but to

secure the proper managers, investigators, administrators, generals,

and so forth, to maintain their efficiency, and keep the balance between

them. We cannot do without a special class of men for these

interventions and controls. In other words, we cannot do without a

special class of politicians. They may be elected by a public or

appointed by an autocrat; at some point they have to come in. And this

business of intervening between men and classes and departments in

public life, and getting them to work together, is so closely akin to

the proper work of a lawyer in dealing between men and men, that, unless

the latter are absolutely barred from becoming the former, it is almost

unavoidable that politicians should be drawn more abundantly from the

lawyer class than from any other class in the community.

This is so much the case, that when the London _Times_ turns in despair

from a government of lawyers and looks about for an alternative, the

first figure that presents itself is that distinguished advocate Sir

Edward Carson!

But there is a difference between recognising that some sort of

lawyer-politician is unavoidable and agreeing that the existing type of

lawyer who is so largely accountable for the massive slowness, the

confused action, the slovenliness rather than the weakness of purpose,

shown by Great Britain in this war, is the only possible type, The

British system of education and legal organisation is not the last word

of human wisdom in these matters.

The real case we British have against our lawyers, if I may adopt an

expressive colloquialism, is not that they are lawyers, but that they

are such infernal lawyers. They trail into modern life most of the

faults of a mediaeval guild. They seem to have no sense of the State

they could develop, no sense of the future they might control. Their law

and procedure has never been remodelled upon the framework of modern

ideas; their minds are still set to the tune of mediaeval bickerings,

traditionalism, and State blindness. They are mystery dealers, almost

unanimously they have resisted giving the common man the protection of a

code.

In the United Kingdom we have had no Napoleon to override the

profession. It is extraordinary how complete has been their preservation

of barbaric conceptions. Even the doctor is now largely emancipated from

his archaic limitations as a skilled retainer. He thinks more and more

of the public health, and less and less of his patron. The more recent a

profession the less there is of the individualistic personal reference;

scientific research, for example, disavows and forbids every personal

reference.

But while everyone would be shocked at some great doctor, or some great

research institution, in these days of urgent necessity spending two or

three weeks on the minor ailments of some rich person's lapdog, nobody

is scandalised at the spectacle of Sir Edward Carson and a costly law

court spending long days upon the sordid disputes that centre upon young

Master Slingsby's ear--whether it is the Slingsby family ear or the ear

of a supposititious child--a question that any three old women might be

trusted to settle. After that he rests for a fortnight and recuperates,

and returns--to take up a will case turning upon the toy rabbits and

suchlike trifles which entertained the declining years of a

nonagenarian. This, when we are assured that the country awaits Sir

Edward as its Deliverer. It is as if Lord Kitchener took a month off to

act at specially high rates for the "movies." Our standard for the

lawyer is older and lower than it is for other men.

There is no more reason nowadays why a lawyer should look to advocacy as

a proper use of his knowledge than that a doctor should make private

poisoning the lucrative side of his profession. There is no reason why

a court of law should ignore the plain right of the commonweal to

intervene in every case between man and man. There is every reason why

trivial disputes about wills and legitimacy should not be wasting our

national resources at the present time, when nearly every other form of

waste is being restrained. The sound case against the legal profession

in Anglo-Saxon countries is not that it is unnecessary, but that it is

almost incredibly antiquated, almost incredibly careless of the public

well-being, and that it corrupts or dwarfs all the men who enter it.

Our urgent need is not so much to get rid of the lawyer from our affairs

as to get rid of the wig and gown spirit and of the special pleader, and

to find and develop the new lawyer, the lawyer who is not an advocate,

who is not afraid of a code, who has had some scientific education, and

whose imagination has been quickened by the realisation of life as

creative opportunity. We want to emancipate this profession from its

ancient guild restrictions--the most anti-social and disastrous of all

such restrictions--to destroy its disgraceful traditions of over-payment

and fee-snatching, to insist upon a scientific philosophical training

for its practitioners, to make the practice of advocacy a fall from

grace, and to bar professional advocates from the bench.

In the British trenches now there must be many hundreds of fine young

lawyers, still but little corrupted, who would be only too glad to

exchange the sordid vulgarities and essential dishonour of a successful

lawyer's career under the old conditions for lives of service and

statecraft....

No observer of the general trend of events in Europe will get any real

grasp of what is happening until he realises the cardinal importance of

the reactions that centre upon this question. The current development of

political institutions and the possible development of a new spirit and

method in the legal profession are so intimately interwoven as to be

practically one and the same question. The international question is,

can we get a new Germany? The national question everywhere is, can we

get a better politician?

The widely prevalent discontent with the part played by the lawyer in

the affairs of all the Western Allies is certain to develop into a

vigorous agitation for legal reconstruction. In the case of every other

great trade union the war has exacted profound and vital concessions.

The British working men, for example, have abandoned scores of

protective restrictions upon women's labour, upon unskilled labour, for

which they have fought for generations; they have submitted to a virtual

serfdom that the nation's needs might be supplied; the medical

profession has sent almost too large a proportion of its members to the

front; the scientific men, the writers, have been begging to be used in

any capacity at any price or none; the Ministry of Munitions is full of

unpaid workers, and so on.

The British legal profession and trade union alone has made no sign of

any disposition to relax its elaborate restrictions upon the labour of

amateurs and women, or to abate one jot or one tittle of its habitual

rewards. There has been no attempt to reduce the costly law officers of

the Government, for example, or to call in the help of older men or

women to release law officers who are of military experience or age.

And I must admit that there are small signs of the advent of the "new

lawyer," at whose possibility I have just flung a hopeful glance, to

replace the existing mass of mediaeval unsoundness. Barristers seem to

age prematurely--at least in Great Britain--unless they are born old. In

the legal profession one hears nothing of "the young"; one hears only of

"smart juniors." Reform and progressive criticism in the legal

profession, unlike all other professions, seem to be the monopoly of the

retired.

Nevertheless, Great Britain is as yet only beginning to feel the real

stresses of the war; she is coming into the full strain a year behind

France, Germany, and Russia; and after the war there lies the

possibility of still more violent stresses; so that what is as yet a

mere cloud of criticism and resentment at our lawyer-politicians and

privileged legal profession may gather to a great storm before 1918 or

1919.

I am inclined to foretell as one most highly probable development of the

present vague but very considerable revolt against the lawyer in British

public life, first, some clumsy proposals or even attempts to leave him

out, and use "business men," soldiers, admirals, dictators, or men of

science, in his place--which is rather like throwing away a blottesque

fountain-pen and trying to write with a walking-stick or a revolver or a

flash-light--and then when that is found to be impossible, a resolute

attempt to clean and reconstitute the legal profession on modern and

more honourable lines; a movement into which, quite possibly, a number

of the younger British lawyers, so soon as they realise that the

movement is good enough to risk careers upon, may throw themselves. A

large share in such a reform movement, if it occurs, will be brought

about by the Press; by which I mean not simply the periodical Press, but

all books and contemporary discussion. It is only by the natural playing

off of Press against lawyer-politician that democratic States can ever

come to their own.

And that brings me to the second part of this question, which is

whether, quite apart from the possible reform and spiritual rebirth of

the legal profession, there is not also the possibility of balancing and

correcting its influence. In ancient Hebrew history--it may be a warning

rather than a precedent--there were two great forces, one formal,

conservative and corrupting, the other undisciplined, creative, and

destructive; the first was the priest, the second the prophet. Their

interaction is being extraordinarily paralleled in the Anglo-Saxon

democracies by the interaction of lawyer-politician and Press to-day.

If the lawyer-politician is unavoidable, the Press is indispensable. It

is not in the clash and manoeuvres and mutual correction of party, but

in the essential conflict of political authority on the one hand and

Press on the other that the future of democratic government apparently

lies. In the clearer, simpler case of France, a less wealthy and finer

type of lawyer interacts with a less impersonal Press. It is in the

great contrasts and the essential parallelism of the French and the

Anglo-Saxon democratic systems that one finds the best practical reason

for anticipating very profound changes in these two inevitables of

democracy, the Press and the lawyer-politician, and for assuming that

the method of democracy has still a vast range of experimental

adjustment between them still untried. Such experimental adjustment will

be the chief necessity and business of political life in every country

of the world for the next few decades.

The lawyer-politician and the Press are as it were the right and left

hands of a modern democracy. The war has brought this out clearly. It

has ruptured the long-weakened bonds that once linked this and that

newspaper with this and that party. For years the Press of all the

Western democracies has been drifting slowly away from the tradition--it

lasted longest and was developed most completely in Great

Britain--that-newspapers were party organs.

In the novels of Disraeli the Press appears as an ambiguously helpful

person who is asked out to dinner, who is even admitted to week-end

conferences, by the political great. He takes his orders from the Whig

peers or the Tory peers. At his greatest he advises them respectfully.

But that was in the closing days of the British oligarchy; that was

before modern democracy had begun to produce its characteristic

political forms. It is not so very much more than a century ago that

Great Britain had her first lawyer Prime Minister. Through all the

Napoleonic wars she was still a country ruled by great feudal landlords,

and gentlemen adventurers associated with them. The lawyers only came to

their own at the close of the great Victorian duet of Disraeli and

Gladstone, the last of the political gentlemen adventurers. It is only

now, in the jolts and dissatisfactions of this war, that Great Britain

rubs her eyes and looks at her government as it is.

The old oligarchy established the tradition of her diplomacy. Illiberal

at home, it was liberal abroad; Great Britain was the defender of

nationality, of constitutionalism, and of the balance of power against

the holy alliance. In the figure of such a gentleman as Sir Edward Grey

the old order mingles with the new. But most of his colleagues are of

the new order. They would have been incredible in the days of Lord

Melbourne. In its essential quality the present British Government is

far more closely akin to the French than it is to its predecessor of a

hundred years ago. Essentially it is a Government of lawyer-politicians

with no close family ties or intimate political traditions and

prejudices. And its natural and proper corrective is the Press, over

which it fails to exercise now even a shadow of the political and social

influence that once kept that power in subjection.

It is the way with all human institutions; they remain in appearance

long after they have passed away in reality. It is on record that the

Roman senate still thought Rome was a republic in the third century of

the Christian era. It is nothing wonderful, therefore, that people

suppose that the King, the Lords, and the Commons, debating through a

Ministry and an Opposition, still govern the British Empire. As a matter

of fact it is the lawyer-politicians, split by factions that simulate

the ancient government and opposition, who rule, under a steadily

growing pressure and checking by the Press. Since this war began the

Press has released itself almost inadvertently from its last association

with the dying conflicts of party politics, and has taken its place as a

distinct power in the realm, claiming to be more representative of the

people than their elected representatives, and more expressive of the

national mind and will.

Now there is considerable validity in this claim. It is easy to say

that a paper may be bought by any proprietor and set to put what he

chooses into the public mind. As a matter of fact, buying a newspaper is

far more costly and public a proceeding than buying a politician. And if

on the one hand the public has no control over what is printed in a

paper, it has on the other the very completest control over what is

read. A politician is checked by votes cast once in several years, a

newspaper is checked by sales that vary significantly from day to day. A

newspaper with no circulation is a newspaper that does not matter; a few

weeks will suffice to show if it has carried its public with it or gone

out of influence. It is absurd to speak of a newspaper as being less

responsible than a politician.

Nevertheless, the influence of a great newspaper is so much greater than

that of any politician, and its power more particularly for

mischief--for the creation of panic conditions, for example--so much

swifter, that it is open to question whether the Press is at present

sufficiently held to its enormous responsibilities.

Let us consider its weaknesses at the present time, let us ask what

changes in its circumstances are desirable in the public interest, and

what are likely to come about. We have already reckoned upon the Press

as a chief factor in the adequate criticism, cleansing, and

modernisation of the British lawyer-politician; is there any power to

which we may look for the security of the Press? And I submit the answer

is the Press. For while the legal profession is naturally homogeneous,

the Press is by nature heterogeneous. Dog does not eat dog, nor lawyer,

lawyer; but the newspapers are sharks and cannibals, they are in

perpetual conflict, the Press is a profession as open as the law is

closed; it has no anti-social guild feeling; it washes its dirty linen

in public by choice and necessity, and disdains all professional

etiquette. Few people know what criticisms of the Lord Chief Justice may

have ripened in the minds of Lord Halsbury or Sir Edward Carson, but we

all know, to a very considerable degree of accuracy, the worst of what

this great journalist or group of newspaper proprietors thinks of that.

We have, therefore, considerable reason for regarding the Press as

being, in contrast with the legal profession, a self-reforming body. In

the last decade there has been an enormous mass of criticism of the

Press by the Press. There has been a tendency to exaggerate its

irresponsibility. A better case is to be made against it for what I will

call, using the word in its least offensive sense, its venality. By

venality I mean the fact, a legacy from the now happily vanishing age of

individualism, that in theory and law at least anyone may own a

newspaper and sell it publicly or secretly to anyone, that its

circulation and advertisement receipts may be kept secret or not as the

proprietors choose, and that the proprietor is accountable to no one for

any exceptional incomings or any sudden fluctuations in policy.

A few years ago we were all discussing who should buy _The Times_; I do

not know what chances an agent of the Kaiser might not have had if he

had been sufficiently discreet. This venality will be far more dangerous

to the Allied countries after the war than during its continuance. So

long as the state of war lasts there are prompt methods available for

any direct newspaper treason, and it is in the neutral countries only

that the buying and selling of papers against the national interest has

occurred to any marked extent.

Directly peace is signed, unless we provide for the event beforehand,

our Press will pass under neutral conditions. There will be nothing to

prevent, for example, any foreseeing foreign power coming into Great

Britain, offering to buy up not only this paper or that, but also, what

is far more important, to buy up the great book and newspaper

distributing firms. These vitally important public services, so far as

law and theory go, will be as entirely in the market as railway tickets

at a station unless we make some intelligent preventive provision.

Unless we do, and if, as is highly probable, peace puts no immediate

stop to international malignity, the Germans will be bigger fools than I

think them if they do not try to get hold of these public services. It

is a matter of primary importance in the outlook of every country in

Europe, therefore, that it should insist upon and secure responsible

native ownership of every newspaper and news and book distributing

agency, and the most drastic punishment for newspaper corruption. Given

that guarantee against foreign bribery, we may, I think, let free speech

rage. This is so much a matter of common sense that I cannot imagine

even British "wait and see" waiting for the inevitable assault upon our

national journalistic virtue that will follow the peace.

So I spread out the considerations that I think justify our forecasting,

in a very changed Great Britain and a changed Europe, firstly, a legal

profession with a quickened conscience, a sense of public function and a

reformed organisation, and, secondly, a Press, which is recognised and

held accountable in law and in men's minds, as an estate of the realm,

as something implicitly under oath to serve the State. I do not agree

with Professor Michel's pessimistic conclusion that peace will bring

back exacerbated party politics and a new era of futility to the

democratic countries. I believe that the tremendous demonstration of

this war (a demonstration that gains weight with every week of our

lengthening effort), of the waste and inefficiency of the system of

1913-14, will break down at last even the conservatism of the most

rigidly organised and powerful and out-of-date of all professions.

It is not only that I look to the indignation and energy of intelligent

men who are outside our legal and political system to reform it, but to

those who are in it now. A man may be quietly parasitic upon his mother,

and yet incapable of matricide. So much of our national energy and

ability has been attracted to the law in Great Britain that our nation,

with our lawyers in modern clothing instead of wigs and gowns, lawyers

who have studied science and social theory instead of the spoutings of

Cicero and the loquacious artfulness of W.E. Gladstone, lawyers who look

forward at the destiny of their country instead of backward and at the

markings on their briefs, may yet astonish the world. The British lawyer

really holds the future of the British Empire and, indeed, I could

almost say, of the whole world in his hands at the present time, as much

as any single sort of man can be said to hold it. Inside his skull

imagination and a heavy devil of evil precedent fight for his soul and

the welfare of the world. And generosity fights against tradition and

individualism. Only the men of the Press have anything like the same

great possibilities of betrayal.

To these two sorts of men the dim spirit of the nation looks for such

leading as a democracy can follow. To them the men with every sort of

special ability, the men of science, the men of this or that sort of

administrative ability and experience, the men of creative gifts and

habits, every sort of man who wants the world to get on, look for the

removal (or the ingenious contrivance) of obstructions and

entanglements, for the allaying (or the fomentation) of suspicion,

misapprehension, and ignorant opposition, for administration (or class

blackmail).

Yet while I sit as a prophetic amateur weighing these impalpable forces

of will and imagination and habit and interest in lawyer, pressman,

maker and administrator, and feeling by no means over-confident of the

issue, it dawns upon me suddenly that there is another figure present,

who has never been present before in the reckoning up of British

affairs. It is a silent figure. This figure stands among the pressmen

and among the lawyers and among the workers; for a couple of decades at

least he will be everywhere in the British system; he is young and he is

uniformed in khaki, and he brings with him a new spirit into British

life, the spirit of the new soldier, the spirit of subordination to a

common purpose....

France, which has lived so much farther and deeper and more bitterly

than Britain, knows....[2]

[Footnote 2: In "An Englishman Looks at the World," a companion volume

to the present one, which was first published by Messrs. Cassell early

in 1914, and is now obtainable in a shilling edition, the reader will

find a full discussion of the probable benefit of proportional

representation in eliminating the party hack from political life.

Proportional representation would probably break up party organisations

altogether, and it would considerably enhance the importance and

responsibility of the Press. It would do much to accelerate the

development of the state of affairs here foreshadowed, in which the rôle

of government and opposition under the party system will be played by

elected representatives and Press respectively.]

VII. THE NEW EDUCATION

Some few months ago Mr. Harold Spender, in the _Daily News_, was calling

attention to a very significant fact indeed. The higher education in

England, and more particularly the educational process of Oxford and

Cambridge, which has been going on continuously since the Middle Ages,

is practically in a state of suspense. Oxford and Cambridge have

stopped. They have stopped so completely that Mr. Spender can speculate

whether they can ever pick up again and resume upon the old lines.

For my own part, as the father of two sons who are at present in

mid-school, I hope with all my heart that they will not. I hope that the

Oxford and Cambridge of unphilosophical classics and Little-go Greek for

everybody, don's mathematics, bad French, ignorance of all Europe except

Switzerland, forensic exercises in the Union Debating Society, and cant

about the Gothic, the Oxford and Cambridge that turned boys full of life

and hope and infinite possibility into barristers, politicians,

mono-lingual diplomatists, bishops, schoolmasters, company directors,

and remittance men, are even now dead.

Quite recently I passed through Cambridge, and, with the suggestions of

Mr. Spender in my mind, I paused to savour the atmosphere of the place.

He had very greatly understated the facts of the case. He laid stress

upon the fact that instead of the normal four thousand undergraduates or

so, there are now scarcely four hundred. But before I was fairly in

Cambridge I realised that that gives no idea of the real cessation of

English education. Of the first seven undergraduates I saw upon the

Trumpington road, one was black, three were coloured, and one of the

remaining three was certainly not British, but, I should guess,

Spanish-American. And it isn't only the undergraduates who have gone.

All the dons of military age and quality have gone too, or are staying

up not in caps and gowns, but in khaki; all the vigorous teachers are

soldiering; there are no dons left except those who are unfit for

service--and the clergy. Buildings, libraries, empty laboratories, empty

lecture theatres, vestiges, refugees, neutrals, khaki; that is Cambridge

to-day.

There never was before, there never may be again, so wonderful an

opportunity for a cleaning-up and sweeping-out of those two places, and

for a profitable new start in British education.

The cessation of Oxford and Cambridge does not give the full measure of

the present occasion. All the other British universities are in a like

case. And the schools which feed them have been practically swept clean

of their senior boys. And not a tithe of any of this war class of

schoolboys will ever go to the universities now, not a tithe of the war

class of undergraduates will ever return. Between the new education and

the old there will be a break of two school generations. For the next

thirty or forty years an exceptional class of men will play a leading

part in British affairs, men who will have learnt more from reality and

less from lectures than either the generations that preceded or the

generations that will follow them. The subalterns of the great war will

form a distinct generation and mark an epoch. Their experiences of need,

their sense of deficiencies, will certainly play a large part in the

reconstitution of British education. _The stamp of the old system will

not be on them_.

Now is the time to ask what sort of training should a university give to

produce the ruling, directing, and leading men which it exists to

produce? Upon that Great Britain will need to make up its mind

speedily. It is not a matter for to-morrow or the day after; it is

necessary to decide now what it is the Britain that is coming will need

and want, and to set to work revising the admission and degree

requirements, and reconstructing all those systems of public

examinations for the public services that necessarily dominate school

and university teaching, before the universities and schools reassemble.

If the rotten old things once get together again, the rotten old things

will have a new lease of life. This and no other is the hour for

educational reconstruction. And it is in the decisions and readjustments

of schools and lectures and courses, far more than anywhere else, that

the real future of Great Britain will be decided. Equally true is this

of all the belligerent countries. Much of the future has a kind of

mechanical inevitableness, but here far more than anywhere else, can a

few resolute and capable men mould the spirit and determine the quality

of the Europe to come.

Now surely the chief things that are needed in the education of a ruling

class are these--first, the selection and development of Character,

then the selection and development of Capacity, and, thirdly, the

imparting of Knowledge upon broad and comprehensive lines, and the

power of rapidly taking up and using such detailed knowledge as may be

needed for special occasions. It is upon the first count that the

British schools and universities have been most open to criticism. We

have found the British university-trained class under the fiery tests of

this war an evasive, temporising class of people, individualistic,

ungenerous, and unable either to produce or obey vigorous leadership. On

the whole, it is a matter for congratulation, it says wonderful things

for the inherent natural qualities of the English-speaking peoples, that

things have proved no worse than they are, considering the nature of the

higher education under which they have suffered.

Consider in what that educational process has consisted. Its backbone

has been the teaching of Latin by men who can read, write, and speak it

rather worse than a third-rate Babu speaks English, and of Ancient Greek

by teachers who at best half know this fine lost language. They do not

expect any real mastery of either tongue by their students, and

naturally, therefore, no real mastery is ever attained. The boys and

young men just muff about at it for three times as long as would be

needed to master completely both those tongues if they had "live"

teachers, and so they acquire habits of busy futility and petty

pedantry in all intellectual processes that haunt them throughout life.

There are also sterile mathematical studies that never get from

"exercises" to practice. There is a pretence of studying philosophy

based on Greek texts that few of the teachers and none of the taught can

read comfortably, and a certain amount of history. The Modern History

School at Oxford, for example, is the queerest collection of chunks of

reading. English history from the beginning, with occasional glances at

Continental affairs, European history for about a century, bits of

economics, and--the _Politics_ of Aristotle! It is not education; it is

a jack-daw collection....This sort of jumble has been the essentials of

the more pretentious type of "higher education" available in Great

Britain up to the present.

In this manner, through all the most sensitive and receptive years of

life, our boys have been trained in "how not to get there," in a variety

of disconnected subjects, by men who have never "got there," and it

would be difficult to imagine any curriculum more calculated to produce

a miscellaneous incompetence. They have also, it happens, received a

certain training in _savoir faire_ through the collective necessities of

school life, and a certain sharpening in the arts of advocacy through

the debating society. Except for these latter helps, they have had to

face the world with minds neither more braced, nor more trained, nor

more informed than any "uneducated" man's.

Surely the first condition that should be laid down for the new

education in Europe is that whatever is undertaken must be undertaken in

grim earnest and done. It is ridiculous to talk about the

"character-forming" value of any study that does not go through to an

end. Manifestly Greek must be dropped as a part of the general

curriculum for a highly educated man, for the simple reason that now

there are scarcely any competent teachers, and because the sham of

teaching it partially and pretentiously demoralises student and school

alike. The claim of the clergy and so forth to "know" Greek is one of

the many corrupting lies in British intellectual life. English comic

writers never weary of sneering at the Hindu who claimed to be a "failed

B.A.," but what is the ordinary classical degree man of an English

university but a "failed" Greek scholar? Latin, too, must be either

reduced to the position of a study supplementary to the native tongue,

or brought up to an honest level of efficiency.

French and German in the case of the English, and English in the case

of the French and Russians, are essentially governess languages; any

intelligent boy or girl from a reasonably prosperous home ought to be

able to read, write, and speak either before fifteen; they are to be

taken by the way rather than regarded as a fundamental part of

education. The French, German, or English literature and literary

development up to and including contemporary work is, of course, an

entirely different matter. But there can be no doubt of the great

educational value of some highly inflected and well-developed language

_taught by men to whom it is a genuine means of expression_. Educational

needs and public necessity point alike to such languages as Russian or,

in the case of Great Britain, Hindustani to supply this sound training.

If Great Britain means business after this war, if she is to do her duty

by the Eastern world she controls, she will not stick at the petty

expense of getting a few hundreds of good Russian and Hindu teachers

into the country, and she will place Russian and Hindustani upon at

least an equal footing with Greek in all her university and competitive

examinations. Moreover, it is necessary to set a definite aim of

application before university mathematical teaching. As the first

condition of character-building in all these things, the student should

do what he ostensibly sets out to do. No degree and no position should

be attainable by half accomplishment.

Of course, languages and mathematics do not by any means round off the

education of a man of the leading classes. There is no doubt much

exercise in their attainment, much value in their possession. But the

essence of the higher education is now, as it always has been,

philosophy; not the antiquated pretence of "reading" Plato and

Aristotle, but the thorough and subtle examination of those great

questions of life that most exercise and strengthen the mind. Surely

that is the essential difference of the "educated" and the "common" man.

The former has thought, and thought out thoroughly and clearly, the

relations of his mind to the universe as a whole, and of himself to the

State and life. A mind untrained in swift and adequate criticism is

essentially an uneducated mind, though it has as many languages as a

courier and as much computation as a bookie.

And what is our fundamental purpose in all this reform of our higher

education? It is neither knowledge nor technical skill, but to make our

young men talk less and think more, and to think more swiftly, surely,

and exactly. For that we want less debating society and more philosophy,

fewer prizes for forensic ability and more for strength and vigour of

analysis. The central seat of character is the mind. A man of weak

character thinks vaguely, a man of clear intellectual decisions acts

with precision and is free from vacillation. A country of educated men

acts coherently, smites swiftly, plans ahead; a country of confused

education is a country of essential muddle.

It is as the third factor in education that the handling and experience

of knowledge comes, and of all knowledge that which is most accessible,

most capable of being handled with the greatest variety of educational

benefit, so as to include the criticism of evidence, the massing of

facts, the extraction and testing of generalisations, lies in the two

groups of the biological sciences and the exact sciences. No doubt a

well-planned system of education will permit of much varied

specialisation, will, indeed, specialise those who have special gifts

from a very early age, will have corners for Greek, Hebrew, Sanscrit,

philology, archaeology, Christian theology, and so on, and so on;

nevertheless, for that great mass of sound men of indeterminate

all-round ability who are the intellectual and moral backbone of a

nation, it is in scientific studies that their best training lies,

studies most convenient to undertake and most readily applied in life.

From either of the two groups of the sciences one may pass on to

research or to technical applications leading directly to the public

service. The biological sciences broaden out through psychology and

sociology to the theory and practice of law, and to political life. They

lead also to medical and agricultural administration. The exact sciences

lead to the administrative work of industrialism, and to general

economics.

These are the broad, clear lines of the educational necessities of a

modern community, plain enough to see, so that every man who is not

blinded by prejudice and self-interest can see them to-day. We have now

before us a phase of opportunity in educational organisation that will

never recur again. Now that the apostolic succession of the old pedagogy

is broken, and the entire system discredited, it seems incredible that

it can ever again be reconstituted in its old seats upon the old lines.

In these raw, harsh days of boundless opportunity, the opportunity of

the new education, because it is the most fundamental, is assuredly the

greatest of all.

VIII. WHAT THE WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN

Section 1

To discuss the effect of this war upon the relations of men and women to

each other is to enter upon the analysis of a secular process compared

with which even the vast convulsions and destructions of this world

catastrophe appear only as jolts and incidents and temporary

interruptions. There are certain matters that sustain a perennial

development, that are on a scale beyond the dramatic happenings of

history; wars, the movements of peoples and races, economic changes,

such things may accelerate or stimulate or confuse or delay, but they

cannot arrest the endless thinking out, the growth and perfecting of

ideas, upon the fundamental relationships of human Beings. First among

such eternally progressive issues is religion, the relationship of man

to God; next in importance and still more immediate is the matter of

men's relations to women. In such matters each phase is a new phase;

whatever happens, there is no going back and beginning over again. The

social life, like the religious life, must grow and change until the

human story is at an end.

So that this war involves, in this as in so many matters, no fundamental

set-back, no reversals nor restorations. At the most it will but realise

things already imagined, release things latent. The nineteenth century

was a period of unprecedented modification of social relationships; but

great as these changes were, they were trivial in comparison with the

changes in religious thought and the criticism of moral ideals. Hell was

the basis of religious thinking in A.D. 1800, and the hangman was at the

back of the law; in 1900 both Hell and the hangman seemed on the verge

of extinction. The creative impulse was everywhere replacing fear and

compulsion in human motives. The opening decade of the twentieth century

was a period of unprecedented abundance in everything necessary to human

life, of vast accumulated resources, of leisure and release. It was

also, because of that and because of the changed social and religious

spirit, a period of great social disorganisation and confused impulses.

We British can already look back to the opening half of 1914 as to an

age gone for ever. Except that we were all alive then and can remember,

it has become now almost as remote, almost as "historical," as the days

before the French Revolution. Our days, our methods and reactions, are

already so different. The greater part of the freedom of movement, the

travel and going to and fro, the leisure, the plenty and carelessness,

that distinguished early twentieth century life from early nineteenth

century life, has disappeared. Most men are under military discipline,

and every household economises. The whole British people has been

brought up against such elementary realities of need, danger, and

restraint as it never realised before. We discover that we had been

living like Olympians in regard to worldly affairs, we had been

irresponsibles, amateurs. Much of that fatness of life, the wrappings

and trimmings of our life, has been stripped off altogether. That has

not altered the bones of life; it has only made them plainer; but it has

astonished us as much as if looking into a looking-glass one suddenly

found oneself a skeleton. Or a diagram.

What was going on before this war in the relations of men and women is

going on still, with more rapidity perhaps, and certainly with more

thoroughness. The war is accentuating, developing, defining. Previously

our discussions and poses and movements had merely the air of seeking

to accentuate and define. What was apparently being brought about by

discursive efforts, and in a mighty controversy and confusion, is coming

about now as a matter of course.

Before the war, in the British community as in most civilised

communities, profound changes were already in progress, changes in the

conditions of women's employment, in the legal relations of husband and

wife, in the political status of women, in the status of illegitimate

children, in manners and customs affecting the sexes. Every civilised

community was exhibiting a falling birth-rate and a falling death-rate,

was changing the quality of its housing, and diminishing domestic labour

by organising supplies and developing, appliances. That is to say, that

primary human unit, the home, was altering in shape and size and

frequency and colour and effect. A steadily increasing proportion of

people were living outside the old family home, the home based on

maternity and offspring, altogether. A number of us were doing our best

to apprehend the summation of all this flood of change. We had a vague

idea that women were somehow being "emancipated," but just what this

word meant and what it implied were matters still under exploration.

Then came the war. For a time it seemed as if all this discussion was at

an end, as if the problem itself had vanished.

But that was only a temporary distraction of attention. The process of

change swirled into new forms that did not fit very easily into the

accepted formulae, swirled into new forms and continued on its way. If

the discussion ceased for a time, the process of change ceased not at

all. Matters have travelled all the farther in the last two years for

travelling mutely. The questions between men and women are far more

important and far more incessant than the questions between Germans and

the rest of mankind. They are coming back now into the foreground of

human thought, but amended and altered. Our object is to state the

general nature of that alteration. It has still been "emancipation," but

very different in quality from the "emancipation" that was demanded so

loudly and incoherently in that ancient world--of 1913!

Never had the relations of men and women been so uneasy as they were in

the opening days of 1914. The woman's movement battered and banged

through all our minds. It broke out into that tumult in Great Britain

perhaps ten years ago. When Queen Victoria died it was inaudible; search

_Punch_, search the newspapers of that tranquil age. In 1914 it kicked

up so great a dust that the Germans counted on the Suffragettes as one

of the great forces that were to paralyse England in the war.

The extraordinary thing was that the feminist movement was never clearly

defined during all the time of its maximum violence. We begin to

perceive in the retrospect that the movement was multiple, made up of a

number of very different movements interwoven. It seemed to concentrate

upon the Vote; but it was never possible to find even why women wanted

the vote. Some, for example, alleged that it was because they were like

men, and some because they were entirely different. The broad facts that

one could not mistake were a vast feminine discontent and a vast display

of feminine energy. What had brought that about?

Two statistical factors are to be considered here. One of these was the

steady decline in the marriage rate, and the increasing proportion of

unmarried women of all classes, but particularly of the more educated

classes, requiring employment. The second was the fall in the

birth-rate, the diminution in size of the average family, the increase

of sterile unions, and the consequent release of a considerable

proportion of the energy of married women. Co-operating with these

factors of release were the economic elaborations that were improving

the appliances of domestic life, replacing the needle by the sewing

machine, the coal fire and lamp by gas and electricity, the dustpan and

brush by the pneumatic carpet cleaner, and taking out of the house into

the shop and factory the baking, much of the cooking, the making of

clothes, the laundry work, and so forth, that had hitherto kept so many

women at home and too busy to think. The care of even such children as

there were was also less arduous; crêche and school held out hands for

them, ready to do even that duty better.

Side by side with these releases from duty was a rise in the standard of

education that was stimulating the minds and imaginations of woman

beyond a point where the needle--even if there had been any use for the

needle--can be an opiate. Moreover, the world was growing richer, and

growing richer in such a way that not only were leisure and desire

increasing, but, because of increasingly scientific methods of

production, the need in many branches of employment for any but very

keen and able workers was diminishing. So that simultaneously the world,

that vanished world before 1914, was releasing and disengaging enormous

volumes of untrained and unassigned feminine energy and also diminishing

the usefulness of unskilful effort in every department of life. There

was no demand to meet the supply. These were the underlying processes

that produced the feminist outbreak of the decade before the war.

Now the debate between the sexes is a perennial. It began while we were

still in the trees. It has its stereotyped accusations; its stereotyped

repartees. The Canterbury Pilgrims had little to learn from Christabel

Pankhurst. Man and woman in that duet struggle perpetually for the upper

hand, and the man restrains the woman and the woman resents the man. In

every age some voice has been heard asserting, like Plato, that the

woman is a human being; and the prompt answer has been, "but such a

different human being." Wherever there is a human difference fair play

is difficult, the universal clash of races witnesses to that, and sex is

the greatest of human differences.

But the general trend of mankind towards intelligence and reason has

been also a trend away from a superstitious treatment of sexual

questions and a recognition, so to speak, that a woman's "a man for a'

that," that she is indeed as entitled to an independent soul and a

separate voice in collective affairs. As brain has counted for more and

more in the human effort and brute strength and the advantage of not

bearing children for less and less, as man has felt a greater need for a

companion and a lesser need for a slave, and as the increase of food and

the protection of the girl from premature child-bearing has approximated

the stature and strength and enterprise of the woman more and more to

that of the man, this secular emancipation of the human female from the

old herd subordination and servitude to the patriarchal male has gone

on. Essentially the secular process has been an equalising process. It

was merely the exaggeration of its sustaining causes during the plenty

and social and intellectual expansion of the last half-century that had

stimulated this secular process to the pitch of crisis.

There have always been two extreme aspects of the sexual debate. There

have always been the oversexed women who wanted to be treated primarily

as women, and the women who were irritated and bored by being treated

primarily as women. There have always been those women who wanted to

get, like Joan of Arc, into masculine attire, and the school of the

"mystical darlings." There have always been the women who wanted to

share men's work and the women who wanted to "inspire" it--the mates and

the mistresses. Of course, the mass of women lies between these

extremes. But it is possible, nevertheless, to discuss this question as

though it were a conflict of two sharply opposed ideals. It is

convenient to write as if there were just these two sorts of women

because so one can get a sharp definition in the picture. The ordinary

woman fluctuates between the two, turns now to the Western ideal of

citizenship and now to the Eastern of submission. These ideals fight not

only in human society, but in every woman's career.

Chitra in Rabindranath Tagore's play, for example, tried both aspects of

the woman's life, and Tagore is at one with Plato in preferring the

Rosalind type to the houri. And with him I venture to think is the clear

reason of mankind. The real "emancipation" to which reason and the trend

of things makes is from the yielding to the energetic side of a woman's

disposition, from beauty enthroned for love towards the tall,

weather-hardened woman with a spear, loving her mate as her mate loves

her, and as sexless as a man in all her busy hours.

But it was not simply the energies that tended towards this particular

type that were set free during the latter half of the nineteenth

century. Every sort of feminine energy was set free. And it was not

merely the self-reliant, independence-seeking women who were

discontented. The ladies who specialised in feminine arts and graces and

mysteries were also dissatisfied. They found they were not important

enough. The former type found itself insufficiently respected, and the

latter type found itself insufficiently adored. The two mingled their

voices in the most confusing way in the literature of the suffrage

movement before the war. The two tendencies mingle confusingly in the

minds of the women that this movement was stirring up to think. The Vote

became the symbol for absolutely contradictory things; there is scarcely

a single argument for it in suffragist literature that cannot be

completely negatived out of suffragist literature.

For example, compare the writings of Miss Cicely Hamilton, the

distinguished actress, with the publications of the Pankhurst family.

The former expresses a claim that, except for prejudice, a woman is as

capable a citizen as a man and differing only in her sex; the latter

consist of a long rhapsody upon the mystical superiorities of women and

the marvellous benefits mankind will derive from handing things over to

these sacred powers. The former would get rid of sex from most human

affairs; the latter would make what our Georgian grandfathers called

"The Sex" rule the world.

Or compare, say, the dark coquettings of Miss Elizabeth Robins' "Woman's

Secret" with the virile common sense of that most brilliant young

writer, Miss Rebecca West, in her bitter onslaught on feminine

limitations in the opening chapters of "The World's Worst Failure." The

former is an extravagance of sexual mysticism. Man can never understand

women. Women always hide deep and wonderful things away beyond masculine

discovery. Men do not even suspect. Some day, perhaps--It is someone

peeping from behind a curtain, and inviting men in provocative tones to

come and play catch in a darkened harem. The latter is like some gallant

soldier cursing his silly accoutrements. It is a hearty outbreak against

that apparent necessity for elegance and sexual specialisation that

undercuts so much feminine achievement, that reduces so much feminine

art and writing to vapidity, and holds back women from the face of

danger and brave and horrible deaths. It is West to Miss Robins' East.

And yet I believe I am right in saying that all these four women

writers have jostled one another upon suffrage platforms, and that they

all suffered blows and injuries in the same cause, during the various

riots and conflicts that occurred in London in the course of the great

agitation. It was only when the agitation of the Pankhurst family, aided

by Miss Robins' remarkable book "Where are you going to ...?" took a

form that threatened to impose the most extraordinary restrictions on

the free movements of women, and to establish a sort of universal purdah

of hostility and suspicion against those degraded creatures, those

stealers and destroyers of women, "the men," that the British feminist

movement displayed any tendency to dissociate into its opposed and

divergent strands.

It is a little detail, but a very significant one in this connection,

that the committee that organised the various great suffrage processions

in London were torn by dispute about the dresses of the processionists.

It was urged that a "masculine style of costume" discredited the

movement, and women were urged to dress with a maximum of feminine

charm. Many women obtained finery they could ill afford, to take part in

these demonstrations, and minced their steps as womanly as possible to

freedom....

It would be easy to overstate the efflorescence of distinctively

feminine emotion, dressiness, mysticism, and vanity upon the suffrage

movement. Those things showed for anyone to see. This was the froth of

the whirlpool. What did not show was the tremendous development of the

sense of solidarity among women. Everybody knew that women had been

hitting policemen at Westminster; it was not nearly so showy a fact that

women of title, working women, domestic servants, tradesmen's wives,

professional workers, had all been meeting together and working together

in a common cause, working with an unprecedented capacity and an

unprecedented disregard of social barriers. One noted the nonsensical

by-play of the movement; the way in which women were accustoming

themselves to higher standards of achievement was not so immediately

noticeable. That a small number of women were apparently bent on

rendering the Vote impossible by a campaign of violence and malicious

mischief very completely masked the fact that a very great number of

girls and young women no longer considered it seemly to hang about at

home trying by a few crude inducements to tempt men to marry them, but

were setting out very seriously and capably to master the young man's

way of finding a place for oneself in the world. Beneath the dust and

noise realities were coming about that the dust and noise entirely

failed to represent. We know that some women were shrieking for the

Vote; we did not realise that a generation of women was qualifying for

it.

The war came, the jolt of an earthquake, to throw things into their

proper relationships.

The immediate result was the disappearance of the militant suffragists

from public view for a time, into which the noisier section hastened to

emerge in full scream upon the congenial topic of War Babies. "Men,"

those dreadful creatures, were being camped and quartered all over the

country. It followed, from all the social principles known to Mrs. and

Miss Pankhurst, that it was necessary to provide for an enormous number

of War Babies. Subscriptions were invited. Statisticians are still

looking rather perplexedly for those War Babies; the illegitimate

birth-rate has fallen, and what has become of the subscriptions I do not

know. _The Suffragette_ rechristened itself _Britannia_, dropped the War

Baby agitation, and, after an interlude of self-control, broke out into

denunciations, first of this public servant and then of that, as

traitors and German spies. Finally, it discovered a mare's nest in the

case of Sir Edward Grey that led to its suppression, and the last I

have from this misleading and unrepresentative feminist faction is the

periodic appearance of a little ill-printed sheet of abuse about the

chief Foreign Office people, resembling in manner and appearance the

sort of denunciatory letter, at once suggestive and evasive, that might

be written by the curate's discharged cook. And with that the aggressive

section of the suffragist movement seems to have petered out, leaving

the broad reality of feminine emancipation to go on in a beneficent

silence.

There can be no question that the behaviour of the great mass of women

in Great Britain has not simply exceeded expectation but hope. And there

can be as little doubt that the suffrage question, in spite of the

self-advertising violence of its extravagant section, did contribute

very materially to build up the confidence, the willingness to undertake

responsibility and face hardship, that has been so abundantly displayed

by every class of woman. It is not simply that there has been enough

women and to spare for hospital work and every sort of relief and

charitable service; that sort of thing has been done before, that was in

the tradition of womanhood. It is that at every sort of occupation,

clerking, shop-keeping, railway work, automobile driving, agricultural

work, police work, they have been found efficient beyond precedent and

intelligent beyond precedent. And in the munition factories, in the

handling of heavy and often difficult machinery, and in adaptability and

inventiveness and enthusiasm and steadfastness their achievement has

been astonishing. More particularly in relation to intricate mechanical

work is their record remarkable and unexpected.

There is scarcely a point where women, having been given a chance, have

not more than made good. They have revolutionised the estimate of their

economic importance, and it is scarcely too much to say that when, in

the long run, the military strength of the Allies bears down the

strength of Germany, it will be this superiority of our women which

enables us to pit a woman at--the censorship will object to exact

geography upon this point--against a man at Essen which has tipped the

balance of this war.

Those women have won the vote. Not the most frantic outbursts of

militancy after this war can prevent them getting it. The girls who have

faced death and wounds so gallantly in our cordite factories--there is a

not inconsiderable list of dead and wounded from those places--have

killed for ever the poor argument that women should not vote because

they had no military value. Indeed, they have killed every argument

against their subjection. And while they do these things, that paragon

of the virtues of the old type, that miracle of domestic obedience, the

German _haus-frau_, the faithful Gretchen, riots for butter.

And as I have before remarked, the Germans counted on the suffragettes

as one of the great forces that were to paralyse England in this war.

It is not simply that the British women have so bountifully produced

intelligence and industry; that does not begin their record. They have

been willing to go dowdy. The mass of women in Great Britain are wearing

the clothes of 1914. In 1913 every girl and woman one saw in the streets

of London had an air of doing her best to keep in the fashion. Now they

are for the most part as carelessly dressed as a busy business man or a

clever young student might have been. They are none the less pretty for

that, and far more beautiful. But the fashions have floated away to

absurdity. Every now and then through the austere bustle of London in

war time drifts a last practitioner of the "eternal feminine"--with the

air of a foreign visitor, with the air of devotion to some peculiar

cult. She has very high-heeled boots; she shows a leg, she has a short

skirt with a peculiar hang, due no doubt to mysteries about the waist;

she wears a comic little hat over one brow; there is something of

Columbine about her, something of the Watteau shepherdess, something of

a vivandiere, something of every age but the present age. Her face,

subject to the strange dictates of the mode, is smooth like the back of

a spoon, with small features and little whisker-like curls before the

ears such as butcher-boys used to wear half a century ago. Even so, she

dare not do this thing alone. Something in khaki is with her, to justify

her. You are to understand that this strange rig is for seeing him off

or giving him a good time during his leave. Sometimes she is quite

elderly, sometimes nothing khaki is to be got, and the pretence that

this is desired of her wears thin. Still, the type will out.

She does not pass with impunity, the last exponent of true feminine

charm. The vulgar, the street boy, have evolved one of those strange

sayings that have the air of being fragments from some lost and

forgotten chant:

"She's the Army Contractor's Only Daughter,

Spending it now."

Or simply, "Spending it now."

She does not pass with impunity, but she passes. She makes her stilted

passage across the arena upon which the new womanhood of Western Europe

shows its worth. It is an exit. There is likely to be something like a

truce in the fashions throughout Europe for some years. It is in America

if anywhere that the holy fires of smartness and the fashion will be

kept alive....

And so we come to prophecy.

I do not believe that this invasion by women of a hundred employments

hitherto closed to them is a temporary arrangement that will be reversed

after the war. It is a thing that was going on, very slowly, it is true,

and against much prejudice and opposition, before the war, but it was

going on; it is in the nature of things. These women no doubt enter

these employments as substitutes, but not usually as inferior

substitutes; in quite a number of cases they are as good as men, and in

many they are not underselling, they are drawing men's pay. What reason

is there to suppose that they will relapse into a state of superfluous

energy after the war? The war has merely brought about, with the

rapidity of a landslide, a state of affairs for which the world was

ripe. The world after the war will have to adjust itself to this

extension of women's employment, and to this increase in the proportion

of self-respecting, self-supporting women.

Contributing very largely to the establishment of this greatly enlarged

class of independent women will be the great shortage for the next

decade of marriageable men, due to the killing and disablement of the

war. The women of the next decades will not only be able to get along

economically without marriage, but they will find it much more difficult

to marry. It will also probably be a period in which a rise in prices

may, as it usually does, precede the compensating rise in wages. It may

be that for some years it will be more difficult to maintain a family.

This will be a third factor in the fixation of this class of bachelor

women.

Various writers, brooding over the coming shortage of men, have jumped

to the conclusion that polygamy is among the probabilities of the near

future. They write in terms of real or affected alarm for which there is

no justification; they wallow in visions of Germany "legalising"

polygamy, and see Berlin seeking recuperation, in man power by

converting herself into another Salt Lake City. But I do not think that

Germany, in the face of the economic ring that the Allies will certainly

draw about her, is likely to desire a very great increase in population

for the next few years; I do not see any great possibility of a

specially rich class capable of maintaining numerous wives being

sustained by the impoverished and indebted world of Europe, nor the

sources from which a supply of women preferring to become constituents

in a polygamous constellation rather than self-supporting freewomen is

to be derived.

The temperamental dislike of intelligent women to polygamy is at least

as strong as a man's objection to polyandry. Polygamy, open or hidden,

flourishes widely only where there are women to be bought. Moreover,

there are considerable obstacles in religion and custom to be overcome

by the innovating polygamist--even in Germany. It might mean a breach of

the present good relations between Germany and the Vatican. The relative

inferiority of the tradition of the German to that of most other

European women, its relative disposition towards feminine servitude, is

no doubt a consideration on the other scale of this discussion, but I do

not think it is one heavy enough to tilt back the beam.

So far from a great number of men becoming polygamists, I think it would

be possible to show cause for supposing that an increasing proportion

will cease even to be monogamists. The romantic excitements of the war

have produced a temporary rise in the British marriage rate; but before

the war it had been falling slowly and the average age at marriage had

been rising, and it is quite possible that this process will be

presently resumed and, as a new generation grows up to restore the

balance of the sexes, accelerated.

We conclude, therefore, that this increase in the class of economically

independent bachelor women that is now taking place is a permanent

increase. It is probably being reinforced by a considerable number of

war widows who will not remarry. We have to consider in what directions

this mass of capable, intelligent, energetic, undomesticated freewomen

is likely to develop, what its effect will be on social usage, and

particularly how it will react upon the lives of the married women about

them. Because, as we have already pointed out in this chapter, the

release of feminine energy upon which the feminist problem depends is

twofold, being due not only to the increased unmarriedness of women

through the disproportion of the sexes and the rise in the age of

marriage, but also to the decreased absorption of married women in

domestic duties. A woman, from the point of view of this discussion, is

not "married and done for," as she used to be. She is not so

extensively and completely married. Her large and increasing leisure

remains in the problem.

The influence of this coming body of freewomen upon the general social

atmosphere will be, I venture to think, liberalising and relaxing in

certain directions and very bracing in others. This new type of women

will want to go about freely without an escort, to be free to travel

alone, take rooms in hotels, sit in restaurants, and so forth. Now, as

the women of the past decade showed, there are for a woman two quite

antagonistic ways of going about alone. Nothing showed the duplicate

nature of the suffragist movement more than the great variety of

deportment of women in the London streets during that time. There were

types that dressed neatly and quietly and went upon their business with

intent and preoccupied faces. Their intention was to mingle as

unobtrusively as possible into the stream of business, to be as far as

possible for the ordinary purposes of traffic "men in a world of men." A

man could speak to such women as he spoke to another man, without

suspicion, could, for example, ask his way and be directed without being

charged with annoying or accosting a delicate female.

At the other extreme there was a type of young woman who came into the

streets like something precious that has got loose. It dressed itself

as feminine loveliness; it carried sex like a banner and like a

challenge. Its mind was fully prepared by the Pankhurst literature for

insult. It swept past distressed manhood imputing motives. It was pure

hareem, and the perplexed masculine intelligence could never determine

whether it was out for a demonstration or whether it was out for a

spree. Its motives in thus marching across the path of feminine

emancipation were probably more complicated and confused than that

alternative suggests, and sheer vanity abounded in the mixture. But

undoubtedly that extremity is the vanishing extremity of these things.

The new freewoman is going to be a grave and capable being, soberly

dressed, and imposing her own decency and neutrality of behaviour upon

the men she meets. And along the line of sober costume and simple and

restrained behaviour that the freewoman is marking out, the married

woman will also escape to new measures of freedom.

I do not believe that among women of the same social origins and the

same educational quality there can exist side by side entirely distinct

schools of costume, deportment, and behaviour based on entirely

divergent views of life. I do not think that men can be trained to

differentiate between different sorts of women, sorts of women they will

often be meeting simultaneously, and to treat this one with frankness

and fellowship and that one with awe passion and romantic old-world

gallantry. All sorts of intermediate types--the majority of women will

be intermediate types--will complicate the problem. This conflict of the

citizen-woman ideal with the loveliness-woman ideal, which was breaking

out very plainly in the British suffrage movement before the war, will

certainly return after the war, and I have little doubt which way the

issue will fall. The human being is going to carry it against the sexual

being. The struggle is going to be extensive and various and prolonged,

but in the serious years ahead the serious type must, I feel, win. The

plain, well-made dress will oust the ribbon and the decolletage.

In every way the war is accelerating the emancipation of women from

sexual specialisation. It is facilitating their economic emancipation.

It is liberating types that will inevitably destroy both the "atmosphere

of gallantry" which is such a bar to friendliness between people of

opposite sexes and that atmosphere of hostile distrust which is its

counterpart in the minds of the over-sexual suffragettes. It is

arresting the change of fashions and simplifying manners.

In another way also it is working to the same end. That fall in the

birth-rate which has been so marked a feature in the social development

of all modern states has become much more perceptible since the war

began to tell upon domestic comfort. There is a full-cradle agitation

going on in Germany to check this decline; German mothers are being

urged not to leave the Crown Prince of 1930 or 1940 without the

necessary material for glory at some fresh Battle of Verdun. I doubt the

zeal of their response. But everywhere the war signifies economic stress

which must necessarily continue long after the war is over, and in the

present state of knowledge that stress means fewer children. The family,

already light, will grow lighter. This means that marriage, although it

may be by no means less emotionally sacred, will become a lighter thing.

Once, to be married was a woman's whole career. Household cares, a dozen

children, and she was consumed. All her romances ended in marriage. All

a decent man's romance ended there, too. She proliferated and he toiled,

and when the married couple had brought up some of their children and

buried the others, and blessed their first grandchildren, life was

over.

Now, to be married is an incident in a woman's career, as in a man's.

There is not the same necessity of that household, not the same close

tie; the married woman remains partially a freewoman and assimilates

herself to the freewoman. There is an increasing disposition to group

solitary children and to delegate their care to specially qualified

people, and this is likely to increase, because the high earning power

of young women will incline them to entrust their children to others,

and because a shortage of men and an excess of widows will supply other

women willing to undertake that care. The more foolish women will take

these releases as a release into levity, but the common sense of the

newer types of women will come to the help of men in recognising the

intolerable nuisance of this prolongation of flirting and charming on

the part of people who have had what should be a satisfying love.

Nor will there be much wealth or superfluity to make levity possible and

desirable. Winsome and weak womanhood will be told bluntly by men and

women alike that it is a bore. The frou-frou of skirts, the delicate

mysteries of the toilette, will cease to thrill any but the very young

men. Marriage, deprived of its bonds of material necessity, will demand

a closer and closer companionship as its justification and excuse. A

marriage that does not ripen into a close personal friendship between

two equals will be regarded with increasing definiteness as an

unsatisfactory marriage.

These things are not stated here as being desirable or undesirable. This

is merely an attempt to estimate the drift and tendency of the time as

it has been accentuated by the war. It works out to the realisation that

marriage is likely to count for less and less as a state and for more

and more as a personal relationship. It is likely to be an affair of

diminishing public and increasing private importance. People who marry

are likely to remain, so far as practical ends go, more detached and

separable. The essential link will be the love and affection and not the

home.

With that go certain logical consequences. The first is that the

circumstances of the unmarried mother will resemble more than they have

hitherto done those of many married mothers; the harsh lines once drawn

between them will dissolve. This will fall in with the long manifest

tendency in modern society to lighten the disadvantages (in the case of

legacy duties, for example) and stigma laid upon illegitimate children.

And a type of marriage where personal compatibility has come to be

esteemed the fundamental thing will be altogether more amenable to

divorce than the old union which was based upon the kitchen and the

nursery, and the absence of any care, education, or security for

children beyond the range of the parental household. Marriage will not

only be lighter, but more dissoluble.

To summarise all that has gone before, this war is accelerating rather

than deflecting the stream of tendency, and is bringing us rapidly to a

state of affairs in which women will be much more definitely independent

of their sexual status, much less hampered in their self-development,

and much more nearly equal to men than has ever been known before in the

whole history of mankind....

IX. THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE