If there is to rise out of all this red ruin something like a republic
of justice, it is essential that our views should be real views; that
is, glimpses of lives and landscapes outside ourselves. It is essential
that they should not be mere opium visions that begin and end in
smoke--and so often in cannon smoke. I make no apology, therefore, for
returning to the purely practical and realistic point I urged last week:
the fact that we shall lose everything we might have gained if we lose
the idea that the responsible person is responsible.
For instance, it is almost specially so with the one or two things in
which the British Government, or the British public, really are behaving
badly. The first, and worst of them, is the non-extension of the
Moratorium, or truce of debtor and creditor, to the very world where
there are the poorest debtors and the cruellest creditors. This is
infamous: and should be, if possible, more infamous to those who think
the war right than to those who think it wrong. Everyone knows that
the people who can least pay their debts are the people who are always
trying to. Among the poor a payment may be as rash as a speculation.
Among the rich a bankruptcy may be as safe as a bank. Considering the
class from which private soldiers are taken, there is an atrocious
meanness in the idea of buying their blood abroad, while we sell their
sticks at home. The English language, by the way, is full of delicate
paradoxes. We talk of the private soldiers because they are really
public soldiers; and we talk of the public schools because they are
really private schools. Anyhow, the wrong is of the sort that ought to
be resisted, as much in war as in peace.