between the Central Powers and the world can be written easily without
undue cramping in an ordinary handwriting upon a postcard. It is the
second question that needs answering. And the reason why the second
question has to be asked and answered is this, that several of the
Allies, and particularly we British, are not being perfectly plain and
simple-minded in our answer to the first, that there is a division among
us and in our minds, and that our division is making us ambiguous in our
behaviour, that it is weakening and dividing our action and
strengthening and consolidating the enemy, and that unless we can drag
this slurred-over division of aim and spirit into the light of day and
_settle it now_, we are likely to remain double-minded to the end of the
war, to split our strength while the war continues and to come out of
the settlement at the end with nothing nearly worth the strain and
sacrifice it has cost us.
And first, let us deal with that postcard and say what is the essential
aim of the war, the aim to which all other aims are subsidiary. It is,
we have heard repeated again and again by every statesman of importance
in every Allied country, to defeat and destroy military imperialism, to
make the world safe for ever against any such deliberate aggression as
Germany prepared for forty years and brought to a climax when she
crossed the Belgian frontier in 1914. We want to make anything of that
kind on the part of Germany or of any other Power henceforth impossible
in this world. That is our great aim. Whatever other objects may be
sought in this war no responsible statesman dare claim them as anything
but subsidiary to that; one can say, in fact, this is our sole aim, our
other aims being but parts of it. Better that millions should die now,
we declare, than that hundreds of millions still unborn should go on
living, generation after generation, under the black tyranny of this
imperialist threat.
There is our common agreement. So far, at any rate, we are united. The
question I would put to the reader is this: Are we all logically,
sincerely, and fully carrying out the plain implications of this War
Aim? Or are we to any extent muddling about with it in such a way as to
confuse and disorganize our Allies, weaken our internal will, and
strengthen the enemy?
Now the plain meaning of this supreme declared War Aim is that we are
asking Germany to alter her ways. We are asking Germany to become a
different Germany. Either Germany has to be utterly smashed up and
destroyed or else Germany has to cease to be an aggressive military
imperialism. The former alternative is dismissed by most responsible
statesmen. They declare that they do not wish to destroy the German
people or the German nationality or the civilized life of Germany. I
will not enlarge here upon the tedium and difficulties such an
undertaking would present. I will dismiss it as being not only
impossible, but also as an insanely wicked project. The second
alternative, therefore, remains as our War Aim. I do not see how the
sloppiest reasoner can evade that. As we do not want to kill Germany we
must want to change Germany. If we do not want to wipe Germany off the
face of the earth, then we want Germany to become the prospective and
trust-worthy friend of her fellow nations. And if words have any meaning
at all, that is saying that we are fighting to bring about a Revolution
in Germany. We want Germany to become a democratically controlled State,
such as is the United States to-day, with open methods and pacific
intentions, instead of remaining a clenched fist. If we can bring that
about we have achieved our War Aim; if we cannot, then this struggle has
been for us only such loss and failure as humanity has never known
before.
But do we, as a nation, stick closely to this clear and necessary, this
only possible, meaning of our declared War Aim? That great, clear-minded
leader among the Allies, that Englishman who more than any other single
man speaks for the whole English-speaking and Western-thinking
community, President Wilson, has said definitely that this is his
meaning. America, with him as her spokesman, is under no delusion; she
is fighting consciously for a German Revolution as the essential War
Aim. We in Europe do not seem to be so lucid. I think myself we have
been, and are still, fatally and disastrously not lucid. It is high
time, and over, that we cleared our minds and got down to the essentials
of the war. We have muddled about in blood and dirt and secondary issues
long enough.
We in Britain are not clear-minded, I would point out, because we are
double-minded. No good end is served by trying to ignore in the fancied
interests of "unity" a division of spirit and intention that trips us
up at every step. We are, we declare, fighting for a complete change in
international methods, and we are bound to stick to the logical
consequences of that. We have placed ourselves on the side of democratic
revolution against autocratic monarchy, and we cannot afford to go on
shilly-shallying with that choice. We cannot in these days of black or
white play the part of lukewarm friends to freedom. I will not remind
the reader here of the horrible vacillations and inconsistencies of
policy in Greece that have prolonged the war and cost us wealth and
lives beyond measure, but President Wilson himself has reminded us
pungently enough and sufficiently enough of the follies and
disingenuousness of our early treatment of the Russian Revolution. What
I want to point out here is the supreme importance of a clear lead in
this matter _now_ in order that we should state our War Aims
effectively.
In every war there must be two sets of War Aims kept in mind; we ought
to know what we mean to do in the event of victory so complete that we
can dictate what terms we choose, and we ought to know what, in the
event of a not altogether conclusive tussle, are the minimum terms that
we should consider justified us in a discontinuance of the tussle. Now,
unless our leading statesmen are humbugs and unless we are prepared to
quarrel with America in the interests of the monarchist institutions of
Europe, we should, in the event of an overwhelming victory, destroy both
the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg Imperialisms, and that means, if it means
anything at all and is not mere lying rhetoric, that we should insist
upon Germany becoming free and democratic, that is to say, in effect if
not in form republican, and upon a series of national republics, Polish,
Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and the like, in Eastern Europe,
grouped together if possible into congenial groups--crowned republics it
might be in some cases, in the case of the Serb for example, but in no
case too much crowned--that we should join with this renascent Germany
and with these thus liberalized Powers and with our Allies and with the
neutrals in one great League of Free Nations, trading freely with one
another, guaranteeing each other freedom, and maintaining a world-wide
peace and disarmament and a new reign of law for mankind.
If that is not what we are out for, then I do not understand what we are
out for; there is dishonesty and trickery and diplomacy and foolery in
the struggle, and I am no longer whole-hearted for such a half-hearted
war. If after a complete victory we are to bolster up the Hohenzollerns,
Hapsburgs, and their relations, set up a constellation of more cheating
little subordinate kings, and reinstate that system of diplomacies and
secret treaties and secret understandings, that endless drama of
international threatening and plotting, that never-ending arming, that
has led us after a hundred years of waste and muddle to the supreme
tragedy of this war, then the world is not good enough for me and I
shall be glad to close my eyes upon it. I am not alone in these
sentiments. I believe that in writing thus I am writing the opinion of
the great mass of reasonable British, French, Italian, Russian, and
American men. I believe, too, that this is the desire also of great
numbers of Germans, and that they would, if they could believe us,
gladly set aside their present rulers to achieve this plain common good
for mankind.
But, the reader will say, what evidence is there of any republican
feeling in Germany? That is always the objection made to any reasonable
discussion of the war--and as most of us are denied access to German
papers, it is difficult to produce quotations; and even when one does,
there are plenty of fools to suggest and believe that the entire German
Press is an elaborate camouflage. Yet in the German Press there is far
more criticism of militant imperialism than those who have no access to
it can imagine. There is far franker criticism of militarism in Germany
than there is of reactionary Toryism in this country, and it is more
free to speak its mind.
That, however, is a question by the way. It is not the main thing that I
have to say here. What I have to say here is that in Great Britain--I
will not discuss the affairs of any of our Allies--there are groups and
classes of people, not numerous, not representative, but placed in high
and influential positions and capable of free and public utterance, who
are secretly and bitterly hostile to this great War Aim, which inspires
all the Allied peoples. These people are permitted to deny--our peculiar
censorship does not hamper them--loudly and publicly that we are
fighting for democracy and world freedom; "Tosh," they say to our dead
in the trenches, "you died for a mistake"; they jeer at this idea of a
League of Nations making an end to war, an idea that has inspired
countless brave lads to face death and such pains and hardships as outdo
even death itself; they perplex and irritate our Allies by propounding
schemes for some precious economic league of the British Empire--that is
to treat all "foreigners" with a common base selfishness and stupid
hatred--and they intrigue with the most reactionary forces in Russia.
These British reactionaries openly, and with perfect impunity, represent
our war as a thing as mean and shameful as Germany's attack on Belgium,
and they do it because generosity and justice in the world is as
terrible to them as dawn is to the creatures of the night. Our Tories
blundered into this great war, not seeing whither it would take them. In
particular it is manifest now by a hundred signs that they dread the
fall of monarchy in Germany and Austria. Far rather would they make the
most abject surrenders to the Kaiser than deal with a renascent
Republican Germany. The recent letter of Lord Lansdowne, urging a peace
with German imperialism, was but a feeler from the pacifist side of this
most un-English, and unhappily most influential, section of our public
life. Lord Lansdowne's letter was the letter of a Peer who fears
revolution more than national dishonour.
But it is the truculent wing of this same anti-democratic movement that
is far more active. While our sons suffer and die for their comforts and
conceit, these people scheme to prevent any communication between the
Republican and Socialist classes in Germany and the Allied population.
At any cost this class of pampered and privileged traitors intend to
have peace while the Kaiser is still on his throne. If not they face a
new world--in which their part will be small indeed. And with the utmost
ingenuity they maintain a dangerous vagueness about the Allied peace
terms, _with the sole object of preventing a revolutionary movement in
Germany_.
Let me put it to the reader exactly why our failure to say plainly and
exactly and conclusively what we mean to do about a score of points, and
particularly about German economic life after the war, paralyses the
penitents and friends and helpers that we could now find in Germany. Let
me ask the reader to suppose himself a German in Germany at the present
time. Of course if he was, he is sure that he would hate the Kaiser as
the source of this atrocious war, he would be bitterly ashamed of the
Belgian iniquity, of the submarine murders, and a score of such stains
upon his national honour; and he would want to alter his national system
and make peace. Hundreds of thousands of Germans are in that mood now.
But as most of us have had to learn, a man may be bitterly ashamed of
this or that incident in his country's history--what Englishman, for
instance, can be proud of Glencoe?--he may disbelieve in half its
institutions and still love his country far too much to suffer the
thought of its destruction. I prefer to see my country right, but if it
comes to the pinch and my country sins I will fight to save her from the
destruction her sins may have brought upon her. That is the natural way
of a man.
But suppose a German wished to try to start a revolutionary movement in
Germany at the present time, have we given him any reason at all for
supposing that a Germany liberated and democratized, but, of course,
divided and weakened as she would be bound to be in the process, would
get better terms from the Allies than a Germany still facing them,
militant, imperialist, and wicked? He would have no reason for believing
anything of the sort. If we Allies are honest, then if a revolution
started in Germany to-day we should if anything lower the price of peace
to Germany. But these people who pretend to lead us will state nothing
of the sort. For them a revolution in Germany would be the signal for
putting up the price of peace. At any risk they are resolved that that
German revolution shall not happen. Your sane, good German, let me
assert, is up against that as hard as if he was a wicked one. And so,
poor devil, he has to put his revolutionary ideas away, they are
hopeless ideas for him because of the power of the British reactionary,
they are hopeless because of the line we as a nation take in this
matter, and he has to go on fighting for his masters.
A plain statement of our war aims that did no more than set out honestly
and convincingly the terms the Allies would make with a democratic
republican Germany--republican I say, because where a scrap of
Hohenzollern is left to-day there will be a fresh militarism
to-morrow--would absolutely revolutionize the internal psychology of
Germany. We should no longer face a solid people. We should have
replaced the false issue of Germany and Britain fighting for the
hegemony of Europe, the lie upon which the German Government has always
traded, and in which our extreme Tory Press has always supported the
German Government, by the true issue, which is freedom versus
imperialism, the League of Nations versus that net of diplomatic roguery
and of aristocratic, plutocratic, and autocratic greed and conceit which
dragged us all into this vast welter of bloodshed and loss.
VI
THE WAR AIMS OF THE WESTERN ALLIES
Here, quite compactly, is the plain statement of the essential cause and
process of the war to which I would like to see the Allied Foreign
Offices subscribe, and which I would like to have placed plainly before
the German mind. It embodies much that has been learnt and thought out
since this war began, and I think it is much truer and more fundamental
than that mere raging against German "militarism," upon which our
politicians and press still so largely subsist.
The enormous development of war methods and war material within the last
fifty years has made war so horrible and destructive that it is
impossible to contemplate a future for mankind from which it has not
been eliminated; the increased facilities of railway, steamship,
automobile travel and air navigation have brought mankind so close
together that ordinary human life is no longer safe anywhere in the
boundaries of the little states in which it was once secure. In some
fashion it is now necessary to achieve sufficient human unity to
establish a world peace and save the future of mankind.
In one or other of two ways only is that unification possible. Either
men may set up a common league to keep the peace of the earth, or one
state must ultimately become so great and powerful as to repeat for all
the world what Rome did for Europe two thousand years ago. Either we
must have human unity by a league of existing states or by an Imperial
Conquest. The former is now the declared Aim of our country and its
Allies; the latter is manifestly the ambition of the present rulers of
Germany. Whatever the complications may have been in the earlier stages
of the war, due to treaties that are now dead letters and agreements
that are extinct, the essential issue now before every man in the world
is this: Is the unity of mankind to be the unity of a common freedom, in
which every race and nationality may participate with complete
self-respect, playing its part, according to its character, in one great
world community, or is it to be reached--and it can only be so reached
through many generations of bloodshed and struggle still, even if it can
be ever reached in this way at all--through conquest and a German
hegemony?
While the rulers of Germany to-day are more openly aggressive and
imperialist than they were in August, 1914, the Allies arrayed against
them have made great progress in clearing up and realizing the instincts
and ideals which brought them originally into the struggle. The German
government offers the world to-day a warring future in which Germany
alone is to be secure and powerful and proud. _Mankind will not endure
that_. The Allies offer the world more and more definitely the scheme of
an organized League of Free Nations, a rule of law and justice about the
earth. To fight for that and for no other conceivable end, the United
States of America, with the full sympathy and co-operation of every
state in the western hemisphere, has entered the war. The British
Empire, in the midst of the stress of the great war, has set up in
Dublin a Convention of Irishmen of all opinions with the fullest powers
of deciding upon the future of their country. If Ireland were not
divided against herself she could be free and equal with England
to-morrow. It is the open intention of Great Britain to develop
representative government, where it has not hitherto existed, in India
and Egypt, to go on steadfastly increasing the share of the natives of
these countries in the government of their own lands, until they too
become free and equal members of the world league. Neither France nor
Italy nor Britain nor America has ever tampered with the shipping of
other countries except in time of war, and the trade of the British
Empire has been impartially open to all the world. The extra-national
"possessions," the so-called "subject nations" in the Empires of
Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, are, in fact, possessions held in
trust against the day when the League of Free Nations will inherit for
mankind.
Is it to be union by conquest or is it to be union by league? For any
sort of man except the German the question is, Will you be a free
citizen or will you be an underling to the German imperialism? For the
German now the question is a far graver and more tragic one. For him it
is this: "You belong to a people not now increasing very rapidly, a
numerous people, but not so numerous as some of the great peoples of the
world, a people very highly trained, very well drilled and well armed,
perhaps as well trained and drilled and equipped as ever it will be. The
collapse of Russian imperialism has made you safe if now you can get
peace, and you _can_ get a peace now that will neither destroy you nor
humiliate you nor open up the prospect of fresh wars. The Allies offer
you such a peace. To accept it, we must warn you plainly, means refusing
to go on with the manifest intentions of your present rulers, which are
to launch you and your children and your children's children upon a
career of struggle for war predominance, which may no doubt inflict
untold deprivations and miseries upon the rest of mankind, but whose end
in the long run, for Germany and things German, can be only Judgment and
Death."
In such terms as these the Oceanic Allies could now state their war-will
and carry the world straightway into a new phase of human history. They
could but they do not. For alas! not one of them is free from the
entanglements of past things; when we look for the wisdom of statesmen
we find the cunning of politicians; when open speech and plain reason
might save the world, courts, bureaucrats, financiers and profiteers
conspire.
VII
THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY
From the very outset of this war it was manifest to the clear-headed
observer that only the complete victory of German imperialism could save
the dynastic system in Europe from the fate that it had challenged. That
curious system had been the natural and unplanned development of the
political complications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two
systems of monarchies, the Bourbon system and the German, then ruled
Europe between them. With the latter was associated the tradition of the
European unity under the Roman empire; all the Germanic monarchs had an
itch to be called Caesar. The Kaiser of the Austro-Hungarian empire and
the Czar had, so to speak, the prior claim to the title. The Prussian
king set up as a Caesar in 1871; Queen Victoria became the Caesar of
India (Kaisir-i-Hind) under the auspices of Lord Beaconsfield, and last
and least, that most detestable of all Coburgers, Ferdinand of Bulgaria,
gave Kaiserism a touch of quaint absurdity by setting up as Czar of
Bulgaria. The weakening of the Bourbon system by the French revolution
and the Napoleonic adventure cleared the way for the complete ascendancy
of the Germanic monarchies in spite of the breaking away of the United
States from that system.
After 1871, a constellation of quasi-divine Teutonic monarchs, of which
the German Emperor, the German Queen Victoria, the German Czar, were the
greatest stars, formed a caste apart, intermarried only among
themselves, dominated the world and was regarded with a mystical awe by
the ignorant and foolish in most European countries. The marriages, the
funerals, the coronations, the obstetrics of this amazing breed of idols
were matters of almost universal worship. The Czar and Queen Victoria
professed also to be the heads of religion upon earth. The
court-centered diplomacies of the more firmly rooted monarchies steered
all the great liberating movements of the nineteenth century into
monarchical channels. Italy was made a monarchy; Greece, the motherland
of republics, was handed over to a needy scion of the Danish royal
family; the sturdy peasants of Bulgaria suffered from a kindred
imposition. Even Norway was saddled with as much of a king as it would
stand, as a condition of its independence. At the dawn of the twentieth
century republican freedom seemed a remote dream beyond the confines of
Switzerland and France--and it had no very secure air in France.
Reactionary scheming has been an intermittent fever in the French
republic for six and forty years. The French foreign office is still
undemocratic in tradition and temper. But for the restless disloyalty of
the Hohenzollerns this German kingly caste might be dominating the world
to this day.