The nation, so far, has not found a remedy for the evil that has
overtaken us. Rather in a kind of madness that is not without a strange
splendor, like a ship that goes down with drums beating and banners
flying, we are racing toward the rocks. At this time, when we are
sorely stricken and in dire poverty and debt, we have extended the
responsibilities of empire and of world--power as though we had
illimitable wealth. Our sphere of influence includes Persia, Thibet,
Arabia, Palestine, Egypt--a vast part of the Mohammedan world. Yet if
any part of our possessions were to break into revolt or raise a “holy
war” against us, we should be hard pressed for men to uphold our power
and prestige, and our treasury would be called upon in vain for gold.
After the war which was to crush militarism the air force alone proposed
an annual expenditure of more than twice as much money as the whole cost
of the army before the war. While the armaments of the German people,
whom we defeated in the war against militarism, are restricted to a few
warships and a navy of 100,000 men at a cost reckoned as £10,000,000
a year, we are threatened with a naval and military program costing
£300,000,000 a year. Was it for this our men fought? Was it to establish
a new imperialism upheld by the power of guns that 900,000 boys of ours
died in the war of liberation? I know it was otherwise. There are people
at the street-corners who know; and in the tram-cars and factories
and little houses in mean streets where there are empty chairs and the
portraits of dead boys.
It will go hard with the government of England if it plays a grandiose
drama before hostile spectators who refuse to take part in it. It will
go hard with the nation, for it will be engulfed in anarchy.
At the present time, in this August of 1919, when I write these words,
five years after another August, this England of ours, this England
which I love because its history is in my soul and its blood is in my
body, and I have seen the glory of its spirit, is sick, nigh unto death.
Only great physicians may heal it, and its old vitality struggling
against disease, and its old sanity against insanity. Our Empire is
greater now in spaciousness than ever before, but our strength to hold
it has ebbed low because of much death, and a strain too long endured,
and strangling debts. The workman is tired and has slackened in his
work. In his scheme of life he desires more luxury than our
poverty affords. He wants higher wages, shorter hours, and less
output--reasonable desires in our state before the war, unreasonable now
because the cost of the war has put them beyond human possibility. He
wants low prices with high wages and less work. It is false arithmetic
and its falsity will be proved by a tremendous crash.
Some crash must come, tragic and shocking to our social structure. I
see no escape from that, and only the hope that in that crisis the very
shock of it will restore the mental balance of the nation and that
all classes will combine under leaders of unselfish purpose, and fine
vision, eager for evolution and not revolution, for peace and not for
blood, for Christian charity and not for hatred, for civilization and
not for anarchy, to reshape the conditions of our social life and give
us a new working order, with more equality of labor and reward, duty and
sacrifice, liberty and discipline of the soul, combining the virtue
of patriotism with a generous spirit to other peoples across the old
frontiers of hate. That is the hope but not the certainty.
It is only by that hope that one may look back upon the war with
anything but despair. All the lives of those boys whom I saw go marching
up the roads of France and Flanders to the fields of death, so splendid,
so lovely in their youth, will have been laid down in vain if by their
sacrifice the world is not uplifted to some plane a little higher
than the barbarity which was let loose in Europe. They will have been
betrayed if the agony they suffered is forgotten and “the war to end
war” leads to preparations for new, more monstrous conflict.
Or is war the law of human life? Is there something more powerful than
kaisers and castes which drives masses of men against other masses in
death-struggles which they do not understand? Are we really poor beasts
in the jungle, striving by tooth and claw, high velocity and poison-gas,
for the survival of the fittest in an endless conflict? If that is so,
then God mocks at us. Or, rather, if that is so, there is no God such as
we men may love, with love for men.
The world will not accept that message of despair; and millions of men
to-day who went through the agony of the war are inspired by the humble
belief that humanity may be cured of its cruelty and stupidity, and that
a brotherhood of peoples more powerful than a League of Nations may be
founded in the world after its present sickness and out of the conflict
of its anarchy.
That is the new vision which leads men on, and if we can make one step
that way it will be better than that backward fall which civilization
took when Germany played the devil and led us all into the jungle. The
devil in Germany had to be killed. There was no other way, except by
helping the Germans to kill it before it mastered them. Now let us
exorcise our own devils and get back to kindness toward all men of good
will. That also is the only way to heal the heart of the world and
our own state. Let us seek the beauty of life and God's truth somehow,
remembering the boys who died too soon, and all the falsity and hatred
of these past five years. By blood and passion there will be no healing.
We have seen too much blood. We want to wipe it out of our eyes and
souls. Let us have Peace.