CHAPTER VII

THE SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT

_'Human Nature is always what it is'_

'You may argue as much as you like. All the logic chopping will never

get over the fact that human nature is always what it is. Nations will

always fight.... always retaliate at victory.'

If that be true, and our pugnacities, and hates, and instincts

generally, are uncontrollable, and they dictate conduct, no more is to

be said. We are the helpless victims of outside forces, and may as well

surrender, without further discussion, or political agitation, or

propaganda. For if those appeals to our minds can neither determine the

direction nor modify the manifestation of our innate instincts, nor

influence conduct, one rather wonders at our persistence in them.

Why so many of us find an obvious satisfaction in this fatalism, so

patently want it to be true, and resort to it in such convenient

disregard of the facts, has been in some measure indicated in the

preceding chapter. At bottom it comes to this: that it relieves us of so

much trouble and responsibility; the life of instinct and emotion is so

easily flowing a thing, and that of social restraints and rationalised

decisions so cold and dry and barren.

At least that is the alternative as many of us see it. And if the only

alternative to an impulse spending itself in hostilities and hatreds

destructive of social cohesion, were the sheer restraint of impulse by

calculation and reason; if our choice were truly between chaos,

anarchy, and the perpetual repression of all spontaneous and vigorous

impulse--then the choice of a fatalistic refusal to reason would be

justifiable.

But happily that is not the alternative. The function of reason and

discipline is not to repress instinct and impulse, but to turn those

forces into directions in which they may have free play without

disaster. The function of the compass is not to check the power of the

ship's engines; it is to indicate a direction in which the power can be

given full play, because the danger of running on to the rocks has been

obviated.

Let us first get the mere facts straight--facts as they have worked out

in the War and the Peace.

It is not true that the directions taken by our instincts cannot in any

way be determined by our intelligence. 'A man's impulses are not fixed

from the beginning by his native disposition: within certain limits they

are profoundly modified by his circumstances and way of life.'[70] What

we regard as the 'instinctive' part of our character is, again, within

large limits very malleable: by beliefs, by social circumstances, by

institutions, and above all by the suggestibility of tradition, the work

is often of individual minds.

It is not so much the _character_ of our impulsive and instinctive life

that is changed by these influences, as the direction. The elements of

human nature may remain unchangeable, but the manifestations resulting

from the changing combinations may be infinitely various as are the

forms of matter which result from changing combinations of the same

primary elements.

It is not a choice between a life of impulse and emotion on the one

side, and wearisome repressions on the other. The perception that

certain needs are vital will cause us to use our emotional energy for

one purpose instead of another. And just because the traditions that

have grouped around nationalism turn our combativeness into the

direction of war, the energy brought into play by that impulse is not

available for the creativeness of peace. Having become habituated to a

certain reagent--the stimulus of some personal or visible enemy--energy

fails to react to a stimulus which, with a different way of life, would

have sufficed. Because we must have gin to summon up our energy, that is

no proof that energy is impossible without it. It is hardly for an

inebriate to laud the life of instinct and impulse. For the time being

that is not the attitude and tendency that most needs encouragement.

As to the fact that the instinctive and impulsive part of our behaviour

is dirigible and malleable by tradition and discussion, that is not only

admitted, but it is apt to be over-emphasised--by those who insist upon

the 'unchangeability of human nature.' The importance which we attached

to the repression of pacifist and defeatist propaganda during the War,

and of Bolshevist agitation after the War, proves that we believe these

feelings, that we allege to be unchangeable, can be changed too easily

and readily by the influence of ideas, even wrong ones.

The type of feeling which gave us the Treaty was in a large degree a

manufactured feeling, in the sense that it was the result of opinion,

formed day by day by a selection only of the facts. For this manufacture

of opinion, we consciously created a very elaborate machinery, both of

propaganda and of control of news. But that organisation of public

opinion, justifiable in itself perhaps as a war measure, was not guided

(as the result shows) by an understanding of what the political ends,

which, in the early days of the War, we declared to be ours, would need

in the way of psychology. Our machinery developed a psychology which

made our higher political aims quite impossible of realisation.

Public opinion, 'human nature,' would have been more manageable, its

'instincts' would have been sounder, and we should have had a Europe

less in disintegration, if we had told as far as possible that part of

the truth which our public bodies (State, Church, Press, the School)

were largely occupied in hiding. But the opinion which dictated the

policy of repression is itself the result of refusing to face the truth.

To tell the truth is the remedy here suggested.

_The Paradox of the Peace_

The supreme paradox of the Peace is this:--

We went into the War with certain very definitely proclaimed principles,

which we declared to be more valuable than the lives of the men that were

sacrificed in their defence. We were completely victorious, and went into

the Conference with full power, so far as enemy resistance was concerned,

to put those principles into effect.[71] We did not use the victory which

our young men had given us to that end, but for enforcing a policy which

was in flat contradiction to the principles we had originally proclaimed.

In some respects the spectacle is the most astounding of all history. It

is literally true to say that millions of young soldiers gladly gave

their lives for ideals to which the survivors, when they had the power

to realise them (again so far as physical force can give us power,)

showed complete indifference, sometimes a contemptuous hostility.

It was not merely an act of the statesmen. The worst features of the

Treaty were imposed by popular feeling--put into the Treaty by statesmen

who did not believe in them, and only included them in order to satisfy

public opinion. The policy of President Wilson failed in part because of

the humane and internationalist opinion of the America of 1916 had

become the fiercely chauvinist and coercive opinion of 1919, repudiating

the President's efforts.

Part of the story of these transformations has been told in the

preceding pages. Let us summarise the story as a whole.

We saw at the beginning of the War a real feeling for the right of

peoples to choose their own form of government, for the principle of

nationality. At the end of the War we deny that right in half a score of

cases,[72] where it suits our momentary political or military interest.

The very justification of 'necessity,' which shocks our conscience when

put forward by the enemy, is the one we invoke callously at the

peace--or before it, as when we agree to allow Czarist Russia to do what

she will with Poland, and Italy with Serbia. Having sacrificed the small

State to Russia in 1916, we are prepared to sacrifice Russia to the

small State in 1919, by encouraging the formation of border

independencies, which, if complete independencies, must throttle Russia,

and which no 'White' Russian would accept. While encouraging the lesser

States to make war on Russia, we subsidise White Russian military

leaders who will certainly destroy the small States if successful. We

entered the War for the destruction of militarism, and to make

disarmament possible, declaring that German arms were the cause of our

arms; and having destroyed German arms, we make ours greater than they

were before the War, and introduce such new elements as the systematic

arming of African savages for European warfare. We fought to make the

secret bringing about of war by military or diplomatic cliques

impossible, and after the Armistice the decision to wage war on the

Russian Republic is made without even public knowledge, in opposition to

sections in the Cabinets concerned, by cliques of whose composition the

public is completely ignorant.[73] The invasion of Russia from the

north, south, east, and west, by European, Asiatic, and negro troops, is

made without a declaration of war, after a solemn statement by the chief

spokesman of the Allies that there should be no invasion. Having

declared, during the War, on a score of occasions, that we were not

fighting against any right or interest of the German people[74]--or the

German people at all--because we realised that only by ensuring that

right and interest ourselves could we turn Germany from the ways of the

past, at the peace we impose conditions which make it impossible for the

German people even adequately to feed their population, and leave them

no recourse but the recreation of their power. Having promised at the

Armistice not to use our power for the purpose of preventing the due

feeding of Germany, we continue for months a blockade which, even by the

testimony of our own officials, creates famine conditions and literally

kills very many of the children.

At the beginning of the War, our statesmen, if not our public, had some

rudimentary sense of the economic unity of mankind, of our need of one

another's work, and the idea of blockading half a world in time of dire

scarcity would have appalled them. Yet at the Armistice it was done so

light-heartedly that, having at last abandoned it, they have never even

explained what they proposed to accomplish by it, for, says Mr Maynard

Keynes. 'It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic

problem of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was

the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of

the Four.'[75] At the beginning of the War we invoked high heaven to

witness the danger and anomaly of autocratic government in our day. We

were fighting for Parliamentary institutions, 'open Covenants openly

arrived at.' After victory, we leave the real settlement of Europe to be

made by two or three Prime Ministers, rendering no account of their

secret deliberations and discussions to any Parliament until, in

practice, it is too late to alter them. At the beginning of the War we

were profoundly moved by the wickedness of military terrorism; at its

close we employ it--whether by means of starvation, blockade, armed

negro savages in German cities, reprisals in Ireland, or the ruthless

slaughter of unarmed civilians in India--without creating any strong

revulsion of feeling at home. At the beginning of the War we realised

that the governmental organisation of hatred with the prostitution of

art to 'hymns of hate' was vile and despicable. We copied that

governmental organisation of hatred, and famous English authors duly

produce _our_ hymns of hate.[76] We felt at the beginning that all human

freedom was menaced by the German theory of the State as the master of

man and not as his instrument, with all that means of political

inquisition and repression. When some of its worst features are applied

at home, we are so indifferent to the fact that we do not even recognise

that the thing against which we fought has been imposed upon

ourselves.[77]

Many will dissent from this indictment. Yet its most important item--our

indifference to the very evils against which we fought--is something

upon which practically all witnesses testifying to the state of public

opinion to-day agree. It is a commonplace of current discussion of

present-day feeling. Take one or two at random, Sir Philip Gibbs and Mr.

Sisley Huddleston, both English journalists. (I choose journalists

because it is their business to know the nature of the public mind and

spirit.) Speaking of the wholesale starvation, unimaginable misery, from

the Baltic to the Black Sea, Mr. Huddleston writes:--

'We read these things. They make not the smallest impression on us.

Why? How is it that we are not horrified and do not resolve that

not for a single day shall any preventable evil exist? How is it,

that, on the contrary, for two years we have been cheerfully

engaged in intensifying the sum of human suffering? Why are we so

heedless? Why are we so callous? Why do we allow to be committed,

in our name, a thousand atrocities, and to be written, in our name

and for our delectation, a million vile words which reveal the most

amazing lack either of feeling or of common sense?

'There have been crimes perpetrated by the politicians--by all the

politicians--which no condemnation could fitly characterise. But

the peoples must be blamed. The peoples support the war-making

politicians. It is my business to follow the course of events day

by day, and it is sometimes difficult to stand back and take a

general view. Whenever I do so, I am appalled at the blundering or

the wickedness of the leaders of the world. Without party

prejudices or personal predilections, an impartial observer, I

cannot conceive how it is possible to be always blind to the truth,

the glaring truth, that since the Armistice we have never sought to

make peace, but have sought only some pretext and method for

prolonging the War.

'Hate exudes from every journal in speaking of certain peoples--a

weary hate, a conventional hate, a hate which is always whipping

itself into a passion. It is, perhaps, more strictly, apathy

masquerading as hate--which is worst of all. The people are

_blasé_: they seek only bread and circuses for themselves. They

regard no bread for others as a rather boring circus for

themselves.'

Mr. Huddleston was present throughout most of the Conference. This is

his verdict:--

' ... Cynicism soon became naked. In the East all pretence of

righteousness was abandoned. Every successive Treaty was more

frankly the expression of shameful appetites. There was no pretence

of conscience in politics. Force rules without disguise. What was

still more amazing was the way in which strife was stirred up

gratuitously. What advantage was it, even for a moment, to any one

to foment civil war in Russia, to send against the unhappy,

famine-stricken country army after army? The result was so

obviously to consolidate the Bolshevist Government around which

were obliged to rally all Russians who had the spirit of

nationality. It seemed as if everywhere we were plotting our own

ruin and hastening our own end. A strange dementia seized our

rulers, who thought peace, replenishment of empty larders, the

fraternisation of sorely tired nations, ignoble and delusive

objects. It appeared that war was for evermore to be humanity's

fate.

'Time after time I saw excellent opportunities of universal peace

deliberately rejected. There was somebody to wreck every Prinkipo,

every Spa. It was almost with dismay that all Europeans who had

kept their intelligence unclouded saw the frustration of peace, and

heard the peoples applaud the men who frustrated peace. I care not

whether they still enjoy esteem: history will judge them harshly

and will judge harshly the turbulence which men plumed themselves

on creating two years after the War.'

As to the future:--

'If it is certain that France must force another fight with Germany

in a short span of years, if she pursues her present policy of

implacable antagonism; if it is certain that England is already

carefully seeking the European equilibrium, and that a responsible

minister has already written of the possibility of a military

accord with Germany; if there has been seen, owing to the foolish

belief of the Allies in force--a belief which increases in inverse

ratio to the Allied possession of effective force--the re-birth of

Russian militarism, as there will assuredly be seen the re-birth of

German militarism; if there are quarrels between Greece and Italy,

between Italy and the Jugo-Slavs, between Hungary and Austria,

between every tiny nation and its neighbour, even between England

and France, it is because, when war has once been invoked, it

cannot easily be exorcised. It will linger long in Europe: the

straw will smoulder and at any moment may break into flame....

'This is not lurid imagining: it is as logical as a piece of

Euclidean reasoning. Only by a violent effort to change our fashion

of seeing things can it be averted. War-making is now a habit.'

And as to the outcome on the mind of the people:--

'The war has killed elasticity of mind, independence of judgment,

and liberty of expression. We think not so much of the truth as of

conforming to the tacitly accepted fiction of the hour.[78]

Sir Philip Gibbs renders on the whole a similar verdict. He says:--

'The people of all countries were deeply involved in the general

blood-guiltiness of Europe. They made no passionate appeal in the

name of Christ or in the name of humanity for the cessation of the

slaughter of boys and the suicide of nations, and for a

reconciliation of peoples upon terms of some more reasonable

argument than that of high explosives. Peace proposals from the

Pope, from Germany, from Austria, were rejected with fierce

denunciation, most passionate scorn, as "peace plots" and "peace

traps," not without the terrible logic of the vicious circle,

because indeed, there was no sincerity of renunciation in some of

those offers of peace, and the Powers opposite to us were simply

trying our strength and our weakness in order to make their own

kind of peace, which should be that of conquest. The gamblers,

playing the game of "poker," with crowns and armies as their

stakes, were upheld generally by the peoples, who would not abate

one point of pride, one fraction of hate, one claim of vengeance,

though all Europe should fall in ruin, and the last legions of boys

be massacred. There was no call from people to people across the

frontiers of hostility. "Let us end this homicidal mania. Let us

get back to sanity and save our younger sons. Let us hand over to

justice those who will continue the slaughter of our youth!" There

was no forgiveness, no generous instinct, no large-hearted common

sense in any combatant nation of Europe. Like wolves they had their

teeth in one another's throats, and would not let go, though all

bloody and exhausted, until one should fall at the last gasp, to be

mangled by the others. Yet in each nation, even in Germany, there

were men and women who saw the folly of the war and the crime of

it, and desired to end it by some act of renunciation and

repentance, and by some uplifting of the people's spirit to vault

the frontiers of hatred and the barbed wire which hedged in

patriotism. Some of them were put in prison. Most of them saw the

impossibility of counteracting the forces of insanity which had

made the world mad, and kept silent, hiding their thoughts and

brooding over them. The leaders of the nations continued to use

mob-passion as their argument and justification, excited it anew

when its fires burned low, focussed it upon definite objectives,

and gave it a sense of righteousness by the high-sounding

watchwords of liberty, justice, honour, and retribution. Each side

proclaimed Christ as its captain, and invoked the blessing and aid

of the God of Christendom, though Germans were allied with Turks,

and France was full of black and yellow men. The German people did

not try to avert their ruin by denouncing the criminal acts of

their War Lords nor by deploring the cruelties they had committed.

The Allies did not help them to do so, because of their lust for

bloody vengeance and their desire for the spoils of victory. The

peoples shared the blame of their rulers because they were not

nobler than their rulers. They cannot now plead ignorance or

betrayal by false ideals which duped them, because character does

not depend on knowledge, and it was the character of European

peoples which failed in the crisis of the world's fate, so that

they followed the call-back of the beast in the jungle rather than

the voice of the Crucified One whom they pretended to adore.'

And perhaps most important of all (though the clergy here just stand for

the complacent mob mind; they were no worse than the laity), this:--

'I think the clergy of all nations, apart from a heroic and saintly

few, subordinated their faith, which is a gospel of charity, to

national limitations. They were patriots before they were priests,

and their patriotism was sometimes as limited, as narrow, as

fierce, and as blood-thirsty as that of the people who looked to

them for truth and light. They were often fiercer, narrower, and

more desirous of vengeance than the soldiers who fought, because it

is now a known truth that the soldiers, German and Austrian, French

and Italian and British, were sick of the unending slaughter long

before the ending of the war, and would have made a peace more fair

than that which now prevails if it had been put to the common vote

in the trenches; whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury, the

Archbishop of Cologne, and the clergy who spoke from many pulpits

in many nations under the Cross of Christ, still stoked up the

fires of hate and urged the armies to go on fighting "in the cause

of Justice," "for the defence of the Fatherland," "for Christian

righteousness," to the bitter end. Those words are painful to

write, but as I am writing this book for truth's sake, at all cost,

I let them stand.'[79]

_From Passion to Indifference: the Result of Drift_

A common attitude just now is something like this:--

'With the bitter memory of all that the Allies had suffered strong upon

them, it is not astonishing that at the moment of victory an attitude of

judicial impartiality proved too much to ask of human nature. The real

terms will depend upon the fashion in which the formal terms are

enforced. Much of the letter of the Treaty--trial of the Kaiser,

etc.--has already disappeared. It is an intolerable priggishness to rake

up this very excusable debauch just as we are returning to sobriety.'

And that would be true, if, indeed, we had learned the lesson, and were

adopting a new policy. But we are not. We have merely in some measure

exchanged passion for lassitude and indifference. Later on we shall

plead that the lassitude was as 'inevitable' as the passion. On such a

line of reasoning, it is no good reacting by a perception of

consequences against a mood of the moment. That is bad psychology and

disastrous politics. To realise what 'temperamental politics' have

already involved us in, is the first step towards turning our present

drift into a more consciously directed progress.

Note where the drift has already carried us with reference to the

problem of the new Germany which it was our declared object to create.

There were weeks following the Armistice in Germany, when a faithful

adherence to the spirit of the declarations made by the Allies during

the War would have brought about the utter moral collapse of the

Prussianism we had fought to destroy. The Prussian had said to the

people: 'Only Germany's military power has stood between her and

humiliating ruin. The Allies victorious will use their victory to

deprive Germany of her vital rights.' Again and again had the Allies

denied this, and Germany, especially young Germany, watched to see which

should prove right. A blockade, falling mainly, as Mr Churchill

complacently pointed out (months after an armistice whose terms had

included a promise to take into consideration the food needs of Germany)

upon the feeble, the helpless, the children, answered that question for

millions in Germany. Her schools and universities teem with hundreds of

thousands stricken in their health, to whom the words 'never again' mean

that never more will they put their trust in the 'naïve innocence' of

an internationalism that could so betray them.

The militarism which morally was at so low an ebb at the Armistice, has

been rehabilitated by such things as the blockade and its effects, the

terms of the Treaty, and by minor but dramatic features like the

retention of German prisoners long after Allied prisoners had returned

home, and the occupation of German university town by African negroes.

So that to-day a League of Nations offered by the Allies would probably

be regarded with a contemptuous scepticism--somewhat similar to that

with which America now regards the political beatitudes which it

applauded in 1916-17.

We are in fact modifying the Treaty. But those modifications will not

meet the present situation, though they might well have met the

situation in 1918. If we had done then what we are prepared to do _now_,

Europe would have been set on the right road.

Suppose the Allies had said in December, 1918 (as they are in effect

being brought to say in 1920): 'We are not going to play into the hands

of your militarists by demanding the surrender of the Kaiser or the

punishment of the war criminals, vile as we believe their offences to

be. We are not going to stimulate your waning nationalism by demanding

an acknowledgment of your sole guilt. Nor are we going to ruin your

industry or shatter your credit. On the contrary, we will start by

making you a loan, facilitating your purchases of food and raw

materials, and we will admit you into the League of Nations.'

We are coming to that. If it could have been our policy early instead of

late, how different this story would have been.

And the tragedy is this: To do it late is to cause it to lose its

effectiveness, for the situation changes. The measures which would have

been adequate in 1918 are inadequate in 1920. It is the story of Home

Rule. In the eighties Ireland would have accepted Gladstonian Home Rule

as a basis at least of co-operation. English and Ulster opinion was not

ready even for Home Rule. Forty years later it had reconciled itself to

Home Rule. But by the time Britain was ready for the remedy, the

situation had got quite beyond it. It now demanded something for which

slow-moving opinion was unprepared. So with a League of Nations. The

plan now supported by Conservatives would, as Lord Grey has avowed, have

assuredly prevented this War if adopted in place of the mere Arbitration

plans of the Hague Conference. At that date the present League of

Nations Covenant would have been adequate to the situation. But some of

the self-same Conservatives who now talk the language of

internationalism--even in economic terms--poured contumely and scorn

upon those of us who used it a decade or two since. And now, it is to be

feared, the Government for which they are ready will certainly be

inadequate to the situation which we face.

_'An evil idealism and self-sacrificing hates.'_

'The cause of this insanity,' says Sir Philip Gibbs, 'is the failure of

idealism.' Others write in much the same strain that selfishness and

materialism have reconquered the world. But this does not get us very

far. By what moral alchemy was this vast outpouring of unselfishness,

which sent millions to their death as to a feast (for men cannot die for

selfish motives, unless more certain of their heavenly reward than we in

the Western world are in the habit of being) turned into selfishness;

their high ideals into low desires--if that is what has happened? Can it

be a selfishness which ruins and starves us all? Is it selfishness on

the part of the French which causes them to adopt towards Germany a

policy of vengeance that prevents them receiving the Reparations that

they so sorely need? Is it not indeed what one of their writers had

called a 'holy hate,' instinctive, intuitive, purged of all calculation

of advantage or disadvantage? Would not selfishness--enlightened

selfishness--have given us not only a sounder Europe in the material

sense, but a more humane Europe, with its hostilities softened by the

very fact of contact and co-operation, and the very obviousness of our

need for one another? The last thing desired here is to raise the old

never-ending question of egoism versus altruism. All that is desired is

to point out that a mere appeal to feeling, to a 'sense of

righteousness' and idealism, is not enough. We have an illimitable

capacity for sublimating our own motives, and of convincing ourselves

completely, passionately, that our evil is good. And the greater our

fear that intellectual inquiry, some sceptical rationalism, might shake

the certitude of our righteousness, the greater the passion with which

we shall stand by the guide of 'instinct and intuition.' Can there not

be a destructive idealism as well as a social one? What of the Holy

Wars? What of the Prussian who, after all, had his ideal, as the

Bolshevist has his? What of all fanatics ready to die for their

idealism?

It is never the things that are obviously and patently evil that

constitute the real menace to mankind. If Prussian nationalism had been

nothing but gross lust and cruelty and oppression, as we managed to

persuade ourselves during the War that it was, it would never have

menaced the world. It did that because it could rally to its end great

enthusiasms; because men were ready to die for it. Then it threatened

us. Only those things which have some element of good are dangerous.

A Treaty of the character of that Versailles would never have been

possible if men had not been able to justify it to themselves on the

ground of its punitive justice. The greeds expressed in the annexation

of alien territory, and the violation of the principle of nationality,

would never have been possible but for the plea of the sacred egoism of

patriotism; our country before the enemy's, our country right or wrong.

The assertion of sheer immoralism embodied in this last slogan can be

made into the garments of righteousness if only our idealism is

instinctive enough.

Some of the worst crimes against justice have been due to the very

fierceness of our passion for righteousness--a passion so fierce that it

becomes undiscriminating and unseeing. It was the passion for what men

believed to be religious truth which gave us the Inquisition and the

religious wars; it was the passion for patriotism which made France for

so many years, to the astonishment of the world, refuse justice to

Dreyfus; it is a righteous loathing for negro crime which has made

lynching possible for half a century in the United States, and which

prevents the development of an opinion which will insist on its

suppression. It is 'the just anger that makes men unjust.' The righteous

passion that insists on a criminal's dying for some foul crime, is the

very thing which prevents our seeing that the crime was not committed by

him at all.

It was something akin to this that made the Treaty of Versailles

possible. That is why merely to appeal to idealism and feeling will

fail, unless the defect of vision which makes evil appear good is

corrected. It is not the feeling which is at fault; it is the defective

vision causing feeling to be misused, as in the case of our feeling

against the man accused on what seem to us good grounds, of a detestable

offence. He is loathsome to our sight, because the crime is loathsome.

But when some one else confesses to the crime, our feeling against the

innocent man disappears. The direction it took, the object upon which it

settled, was due to a misconception.

Obviously that error may occur in politics. Equally certainly something

worse may happen. With some real doubt in our mind whether this man is

the criminal, we may yet, in the absence of any other culprit, stifle

that doubt because of our anger, and our vague desire to have some

victim suffer for so vile a crime. Feeling will be at fault, in such a

case, as well as vision. And this thing happens, as many a lynching

testifies. ('The innocence of Dreyfus would be a crime,' said a famous

anti-Dreyfusard.) Both defects may have played their part in the tragedy

of Versailles. In making our appeal to idealism, we assume that it is

there, somewhere, to be aroused on behalf of justice; we must assume,

consequently, that if it has not been aroused, or has attached itself to

wrong purposes, it is because it has not seen where justice lay.

Our only protection against these miscarriages, by which our passion is

borne into the wrong channel, against the innocent while the guilty

escape, is to keep our minds open to all the facts, all the truth. But

this principle, which we have proclaimed as the very foundation stone of

our democratic faith, was the first to go when we began the War. The

idea that in war time, most particularly, a democracy needs to know the

enemy's, or the Pacifist, or even the internationalist and liberal case,

would have been regarded as a bad joke. Yet the failure to do just that

thing inevitably created a conviction that all the wrong was on one side

and all the right on the other, and that the problem of the settlement

was mainly a problem of ruthless punishment. One of that temper may have

come the errors of the Treaty and the miseries that have flowed from

them. It was the virtual suppression of free debate on the purposes and

aims of the War and their realisation that delivered public opinion into

the keeping of the extremest Jingoes when we came to make the peace.

_We create the temper that destroys us_

Behind the war-time attitude of the belligerents, when they suppressed

whatever news might tell in favour of the enemy, was the conviction that

if we could really understand the enemy's position we should not want to

fight him. That is probably true. Let us assume that, and assume

consequently the need for control of news and discussion. If we are to

come to the control by governments of political belief, as we once

attempted control by ecclesiastical authority of religious belief, let

us face the fact, and drop pretence about freedom of discussion, and see

that the organisation of opinion is honest and efficient. There is a

great deal to be said for the suppression of freedom of discussion. Some

of the greatest minds in the world have refused to accept it as a

working principle of society. Theirs is a perfectly arguable, extremely

strong and thoroughly honest case.[80] But virtually to subpress the

free dissemination of facts, as we have done not only during, but after

the War, and at the same time to go on with our talk about free speech,

free Press, free discussion, free democracy is merely to add to the

insincerities and falsehoods, which can only end by making society

unworkable. We not only disbelieve in free discussion in the really

vital crises; we disbelieve in truth. That is one fact. There is another

related to it. If we frankly admitted that public opinion has to be

'managed,' organised, shaped, we should demand that it be done

efficiently with a view to the achievement of conscious ends, which we

should place before ourselves. What happened during the War was that

everybody, including the governments who ought to have been free from

the domination of the myths they were engaged in creating, lost sight of

the ultimate purposes of the War, and of the fact that they were

creating forces which would make the attainment of those ends

impossible; rob victory, that is, of its effectiveness.

Note how the process works. We say when war is declared: 'A truce to

discussion. The time is for action, not words.' But the truce is a

fiction. It means, not that talk and propaganda shall cease, only that

all liberal contribution to it must cease. The _Daily News_ suspends its

internationalism, but the _Daily Mail_ is more fiercely Chauvinist than

ever. We must not debate terms. But Mr Bottomley debates them every

week, on the text that Germans are to be exterminated like vermin. What

results? The natural defenders of a policy even as liberal as that of an

Edward Grey are silenced. The function of the liberal Press is

suspended. The only really articulate voices on policy are the voices of

Lord Northcliffe and Mr Bottomley. On such subjects as foreign policy

those gentlemen do not ordinarily embrace all wisdom; there is something

to be said in criticism of their views. But in the matter of the future

settlement of Europe, to have criticised those views during the War

would have exposed the critic to the charge of pro-Germanism. So

Chauvinism had it all its own way. For months and years the country

heard one view of policy only. The early policy of silence did really

impose a certain silence upon the _Daily News_ or the _Manchester

Guardian_; none whatever upon the _Times_ or the _Daily Mail_. None of

us can, day after day, be under the influence of such a process without

being affected by it.[81] The British public were affected by it. Sir

Edward Grey's policy began to appear weak, anæmic, pro-German. And in

the end he and his colleagues disappeared, partly, at least, as the

result of the very policy of 'leaving it to the Government' upon which

they had insisted at the beginning of the War. And the very group which,

in 1914, was most insistent that there should be no criticism of

Asquith, or McKenna, or Grey, were the very group whose criticisms

turned those leaders out of office! While in 1914 it was accepted as

proof of treason to say a word in criticism of (say) Grey, by 1916 it

had almost become evidence of treason to say a word for him ... and that

while he was still in office!

The history of America's attitude towards the War displays a similar

line of development. We are apt to forget that the League of Nations

idea entered the realm of practical politics as the result of a great

spontaneous popular movement in America in 1916, as powerful and

striking as any since the movement against chattel-slavery. A year of

war morale resulted, as has already been noted, in a complete reversal

of attitude. America became the opponent and Britain the protagonist of

the League of Nations.

In passing, one of the astonishing things is that statesmen, compelled

by the conditions of their profession to work with the raw material of

public opinion, seem blind to the fact that the total effect of the

forces which they set in motion will be to transform opinion and render

it intractable. American advisers of President Wilson scouted the idea,

when it was suggested to them early in the War, that the growth of the

War temper would make it difficult for the President to carry out his

policy.[82] A score of times the present writer has heard it said by

Americans who ought to have known better, that the public did not care

what the foreign policy of the country was, and that the President could

carry out any policy that he liked. At that particular moment it was

true, but quite obviously there was growing up at the time, as the

direct result of war propaganda, a fierce Chauvinism, which should have

made it plain to any one who observed its momentum, that the notion of

President Wilson's policy being put into execution after victory was

simply preposterous.

Mr Asquith's Government was thus largely responsible for creating a

balance of force in public opinion (as we shall see presently) which was

responsible for its collapse. Mr Lloyd George has himself sanctioned a

jingoism which, if useful temporarily, becomes later an insuperable

obstacle to the putting into force of workable policies. For while

Versailles could do what it liked in matters that did not touch the

popular passion of the moment, in the matters that did, the statesmen

were the victims of the temper they had done so much to create. There

was a story current in Paris at the time of the Conference: 'You can't

really expect to get an indemnity of ten thousand millions, so what is

the good of putting it in the Treaty,' an expert is said to have

remarked. 'My dear fellow,' said the Prime Minister, 'if the election

had gone on another fortnight, it would have been fifty thousand

millions.' But the insertion of these mythical millions into the Treaty

has not been a joke; it has been an enormous obstacle to the

reconstruction of Europe. It was just because public opinion was not

ready to face facts in time, that the right thing had to be done at the

wrong time, when perhaps it was too late. The effect on French policy

has been still more important. It is the illusions concerning

illimitable indemnities--directly fostered by the Governments in the

early days of the Armistice--still dominating French public opinion,

which more than anything else, perhaps, explains an attitude on the part

of the French Government that has come near to smashing Europe.

Even minds extraordinarily brilliant, as a rule, miscalculated the

weight of this factor of public passion stimulated by the hates of war,

and the deliberate exploitation of it for purposes of 'war morale' and

propaganda. Thus Mr Wells,[83] writing even after two years of war,

predicted that if the Germans were to make a revolution and overthrow

the Kaiser, the Allies would 'tumble over each other' to offer Germany

generous terms. What is worse is that British propaganda in enemy

countries seems to have been based very largely on this assumption.[84]

It constituted an elaboration of the offers implicit in Mr Wilson's

speeches, that once Germany was democratised there should be, in Mr

Wilson's words, 'no reprisal upon the German people, who have themselves

suffered all things in this War which they did not choose.' The

statement made by the German rulers that Germany was fighting against a

harsh and destructive fate at the hands of the victors, was, President

Wilson said, 'wantonly false.' 'No one is threatening the peaceful

enterprise of the German Empire.' Our propaganda in Germany seems to

have been an expansion of this text, while the negotiations which

preceded the Armistice morally bound us to a 'Fourteen Points peace'

(less the British reservation touching the Freedom of the Seas). The

economic terms of the Peace Treaty, the meaning of which has been so

illuminatingly explained by the representative of the British Treasury

at the Conference, give the measure of our respect for that obligation

of honour, once we had the Germans at our mercy.[85]

_Fundamental Falsehoods and their Outcome_

We witnessed both in England and America very great changes in the

dynamics of opinion. Not only was one type of public man being brought

forward and another thrust into the background, but one group of

emotions and of motives of public policy were being developed and

another group atrophied. The use of the word 'opinion,' with its

implication of a rationalised process of intellectual decision, may be

misleading. 'Public opinion' is here used as the sum of the forces which

become articulate in a country, and which a government is compelled not

necessarily to obey, but to take into account. (A government may

bamboozle it or dodge it, but it cannot openly oppose it.)

And when reference is made to the force of ideas--Nationalist or

Socialist or Revolutionary--a power which we all admit by our panic

fears of defeatist or Red Propaganda, it is necessary to keep in mind

the kind of force that is meant. One speaks of Communist or Socialist,

Pacifist or Patriotic ideas gaining influence, or creating a ferment.

The idea of Communism, for instance, has obviously played some part in

the vast upheavals that have followed the War.[86] But in a world where

the great majority are still condemned to intense physical labour in

order to live at all, where peoples as a whole are overworked, harassed,

pre-occupied, it is impossible that ideas like those of Karl Marx

should be subjected to elaborate intellectual analysis. Rather is it

_an_ idea--of the common ownership of wealth or its equal distribution,

of poverty being the fault of a definite class of the corporate body--an

idea which fits into a mood produced largely by the prevailing

conditions of life, which thus becomes the predominating factor of the

new public opinion. Now foreign policy is certainly influenced, and in

some great crises determined, by public opinion. But that opinion is not

the resultant of a series of intellectual analyses of problems of Balkan

nationalities or of Eastern frontiers; that is an obvious impossibility

for a busy headline-reading public, hard at work all day and thirsty for

relaxation and entertainment at night. The public opinion which makes

itself felt in Foreign Policy--which, when war is in the balance after a

longish period of peace, gives the preponderance of power to the most

Chauvinistic elements; which, at the end of a war and on the eve of

Treaty-making, as in the December 1918 election, insists upon a

rigorously punitive peace--this opinion is the result of a few

predominant 'sovereign ideas' or conceptions giving a direction to

certain feelings.

Take one such sovereign idea, that of the enemy nation as a person: the

conception of it as a completely responsible corporate body. Some

offence is committed by a German: 'Germany' did it, Germany including

all Germans. To punish any German is to inflict satisfactory punishment

for the offence, to avenge it. The idea, when we examine it, is found to

be extremely abstract, with but the faintest relation to human

realities. 'They drowned my brother,' said an Allied airman, when asked

his feelings on a reprisal bombing raid over German cities. Thus,

because a sailor from Hamburg drowns an Englishman in the North Sea, an

old woman in a garret in Freiburg, or some children, who have but dimly

heard of the war, and could not even remotely be held responsible for

it, or have prevented it, are killed with a clear conscience because

they are German. We cannot understand the Chinese, who punish one member

of a family for another's fault, yet that is very much more rational

than the conception which we accept as the most natural thing in the

world. It is never questioned, indeed, until it is applied to ourselves.

When the acts of British troops in Ireland or India, having an

extraordinary resemblance to German acts in Belgium, are taken by

certain American newspapers as showing that 'Britain,' (_i.e._ British

people) is a bloodthirsty monster who delights in the killing of unarmed

priests or peasants, we know that somehow the foreign critic has got it

all wrong. We should realise that for some Irishman or Indian to

dismember a charwoman or decapitate a little girl in Somersetshire,

because of the crime of some Black and Tan in Cork, or English General

at Amritsar, would be unadulterated savagery, a sort of dementia. In any

case the poor folk in Somerset were not responsible; millions of English

folk are not. They are only dimly aware of what goes on in India or

Ireland, and are not really able in all matters, by any means, to

control their government--any more than the Americans are able to

control theirs.

Yet the idea of responsibility attaching to a whole group, as

justification for retaliation, is a very ancient idea, savage, almost

animal in its origin. And anything can make a collectivity. To one small

religious sect in a village it is a rival sect who are the enemies of

the human race; in the mind of the tortured negro in the Congo any man,

woman, or child of the white world could fairly be punished for the

pains that he has suffered.[87] The conception has doubtless arisen out

of something protective, some instinct useful, indispensable to the

race; as have so many of the instincts which, applied unadapted to

altered conditions, become socially destructive.

Here then is evidence of a great danger, which can, in some measure, be

avoided on one condition: that the truth about the enemy collectively is

told in such a way as to be a reminder to us not to slip into injustices

that, barbarous in themselves, drag us back into barbarism.

But note how all the machinery of Press control and war-time colleges of

propaganda prepared the public mind for the extremely difficult task of

the settlement and Treaty-making that lay before it. (It was a task in

which everything indicated that, unless great care were taken, public

judgment would be so swamped in passion that a workable peace would be

impossible.) The more tribal and barbaric aspect of the conception of

collective responsibility was fortified by the intensive and deliberate

exploitation of atrocities during the years of the War. The atrocities

were not just an incident of war-time news: the principal emotions of

the struggle came to centre around them. Millions whom the obscure

political debate behind the conflict left entirely cold, were profoundly

moved by these stories of cruelty and barbarity. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

was among those who urged their systematic exploitation on that ground,

in a Christmas communication to the _Times_.[88] With reference to

stories of German cruelty, he said:--

'Hate has its uses in war, as the Germans have long discovered. It

steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do.

So much do they feel this that Germans are constrained to invent

all sorts of reasons for hatred against us, who have, in truth,

never injured them in any way save that history and geography both

place us before them and their ambitions. To nourish hatred they

invent every lie against us, and so they attain a certain national

solidity....

'The bestiality of the German nation has given us a driving power

which we are not using, and which would be very valuable in this

stage of the war. Scatter the facts. Put them in red-hot fashion.

Do not preach to the solid south, who need no conversion, but

spread the propaganda wherever there are signs of any intrigue--on

the Tyne, the Clyde, in the Midlands, above all in Ireland, and

French Canada. Let us pay no attention to platitudinous Bishops or

gloomy Deans or any other superior people, who preach against

retaliation or whole-hearted warfare. We have to win, and we can

only win by keeping up the spirit of resolution of our own people.'

Particularly does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle urge that the munition

workers--who were, it will be remembered, largely woman--be stimulated

by accounts of atrocities:

'The munition workers have many small vexations to endure, and

their nerves get sadly frayed. They need strong elemental emotions

to carry them on. Let pictures be made of this and other incidents.

Let them be hung in every shop. Let them be distributed thickly in

the Sinn Fein districts of Ireland, and in the hot-beds of

Socialism and Pacifism in England and Scotland. The Irishman has

always been of a most chivalrous nature.'

It is possible that Sinn Fein has now taken to heart this counsel as to

the use that may be made of cruelties committed by the enemy in war.

Now there is no reason to doubt the truth of atrocities, whether they

concern the horrible ill-treatment of prisoners in war-time of which Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle writes, or the burning alive of negro women in peace

time in Texas and Alabama, or the flogging of women in India, or

reprisals by British soldiers in Ireland, or by Red Russians against

White and White against Red. Every story may be true. And if each side

told the whole truth, instead of a part of it, these atrocities would

help us towards an understanding of this complex nature of ours. But we

never do tell the whole truth. Always in war-time does each side leave

out two things essential to the truth: the good done by the enemy and

the evil done by ourselves. If that elementary condition of truth were

fulfilled, these pictures of cruelty, bestiality, obscenity, rape,

sadism, sheer ferocity, might possibly tell us this: 'There is the

primeval tiger in us; man's history--and especially the history of his

wars--is full of these warnings of the depths to which he can descend.

Those ten thousand men and women of pure English stock gloating over the

helpless prisoners whom they are slowly roasting alive, are not normally

savages.[89] Most of them are kindly and decent folk. These stories of

the September massacres of the Terror no more prove French nature to be

depraved than the history of the Inquisition, or of Ireland or India,

proves Spanish or British nature to be depraved.'

But the truth is never so told. It was not so told during the War. Day

after day, month after month, we got these selected stories. In the

Press, in the cinemas, in Church services, they were related to us. The

message the atrocity carried was not: here is a picture of what human

nature is capable of; let us be on our guard that nothing similar marks

our history. That was neither the intention nor the result of

propaganda. It said in effect and was intended to say:--

'This lecherous brute abusing a woman is a picture of Germany. All

Germans are like that; and no people but Germans are like that. That

sort of thing never happens in other armies; cruelty, vengeance, and

blood-lust are unknown in the Allied forces. That is why we are at war.

Remember this at the peace table.'

That falsehood was conveyed by what the Press and the cinema

systematically left out. While they told us of every vile thing done by

the enemy, they told us of not one act of kindness or mercy among all

those hundred million during the years of war.

The suppression of everything good of the enemy was paralleled by the

suppression of everything evil done by our side. You may search Press

and cinemas in vain for one single story of brutality committed by

Serbian, Rumanian, Greek, Italian, French, or Russian--until the last in

time became an enemy. Then suddenly our papers were full of Russian

atrocities. At first these were Bolshevik atrocities only, and of the

'White' troops we heard no evil. Then when later the self-same Russian

troops that had fought on our side during the War fought Poland, our

papers were full of the atrocities inflicted on Poles.

By the daily presentation during years of a picture which makes the

enemy so entirely bad as not to be human at all, and ourselves entirely

good, the whole nature of the problem is changed. Admit these premises,

and policies like those proposed by Mr Wells become sheer rubbish. They

are based on the assumption that Germans are accessible to ordinary

human influences like other human beings. But every day for years we

have been denying that premise. If the daily presentation of the facts

is a true presentation, the _New York Tribune_ is right:--

'We shall not get permanent peace by treating the Hun as if he were

not a Hun. One might just as well attempt to cure a man-eating

tiger of his hankering for human flesh by soft words as to break

the German of his historic habits by equally futile kind words. The

way to treat a German, while Germans follow their present methods,

is as a common peril to all civilised mankind. Since the German

employs the method of the wild beast he must be treated as beyond

the appeal of generous or kind methods. When one is generous to a

German, he plans to take advantage of that generosity to rob or

murder; this is his international history, never more

conspicuously illustrated than here in America. Kindness he

interprets as fear, regard for international law as proof of

decadence; agitation for disarmament has been for him the final

evidence of the degeneracy of his neighbours.'[90]

That conclusion is inevitable if the facts are really as presented by

the _Daily Mail_ for four years. The problem of peace in that case is

not one of finding a means of dealing, by the discipline of a common

code or tradition, with common shortcomings--violences, hates,

cupidities, blindnesses. The problem is not of that nature at all. We

don't have these defects; they are German defects. For five years we

have indoctrinated the people with a case, which if true, renders only

one policy in Europe admissible; either the ruthless extermination of

these monsters, who are not human beings at all; or their permanent

subjugation, the conversion of Germany into a sort of world lunatic

asylum.

When therefore the big public, whether in America or France or Britain,

simply will not hear (in 1919) of any League of Nations that shall ever

include Germany they are right--if we have been telling them the truth.

Was it necessary thus to 'organise' hate for the purposes of war?

Violent partisanship would assuredly assert itself in war-time without

such stimulus. And if we saw more clearly the relationship of these

instincts and emotions to the formation of policy, we should organise,

not their development, but their restraint and discipline, or, that

being impossible in sufficient degree (which it may be), organise their

re-direction to less anti-social ends.

As it was, it ended by making the war entered upon sincerely, so far as

public feeling was concerned, for a principle or policy, simply a war

for no purpose beyond victory--and finally for domination at the price

of its original purpose. For one who is attracted to the purpose, a

thousand are attracted to the war--the simple success of 'our side.'

Partisanship as a motive is animal in its deep, remote innateness.

Little boys and girls at the time of the University boat race will

choose the Oxford or the Cambridge colours, and from that moment

passionately desire the victory of 'their' side. They may not know what

Oxford is, or what a University is, or what a boat race is: it does not

in the least detract from the violence of their partisanship. You get

therefore a very simple mathematical explanation of the increasing

subservience of the War's purpose to the simple purpose of victory and

domination for itself. Every child can understand and feel for the

latter, very few adults for the former.

This competitive feeling, looking to victory, domination, is feeding the

whole time the appetite for power. These instincts, and the clamant

appetite for domination and coercion are whetted to the utmost and then

re-inforced by a moral indignation, which justifies the impulse to

retaliation on the ground of punitive justice for inhuman horrors. We

propose to establish with this outlaw a relationship of contract! To

bargain with him about our respective rights! In the most favourable

circumstances it demands a very definite effort of discipline to impose

upon ourselves hampering restrictions in the shape of undertakings to

another Power, when we believe that we are in a position to impose our

will. But to suggest imposing upon ourselves the restrictions of such a

relationship with an enemy of the human race.... The astonishing thing

is that those who acquiesced in this deliberate cultivation of the

emotions and instincts inseparable from violent partisanship, should

ever have expected a policy of impartial justice to come out of that

state of mind. They were asking for psychological miracles.

That the propaganda was in large part conscious and directed was proved

by the ease with which the flood of atrocity stories could suddenly be

switched over from Germans to Russians. During the time that the Russian

armies were fighting on our side, there was not a single story in our

Press of Russian barbarity. But when the same armies, under the same

officers, are fighting against the Poles, atrocities even more ingenious

and villainous than those of the Germans in Belgium suddenly

characterise the conduct of the Russian troops. The atrocities are

transposed with an ease equal to that with which we transfer our

loyalties.[91] When Pilsudski's troops fought against Russia, all the

atrocities were committed by them, and of the Russian troops we heard

nothing but heroism. When Brusiloff fights under Bolshevik command our

papers print long Polish accounts of the Russian barbarities.

We have seen that behind the conception of the enemy as a single person

is a falsehood: it is obvious that seventy millions of men, women, and

children, of infinitely varying degrees of responsibility, are not a

single person. The falsehood may be, in some degree, an unwitting one, a

primitive myth that we have inherited from tribal forbears. But if that

is so, we should control our news with a view to minimizing the dangers

of mythical fallacies, bequeathed to us by a barbaric past. If it is

necessary to use them for the purposes of war morale, we should drop

them when the war is over, and pass round the word, to the Churches for

instance, that on the signing of an armistice the moratorium of the

Sermon on the Mount comes to an end. As it is, two years after the

Armistice, an English Vicar tells his congregation that to bring

Austrian children to English, to save them from death by famine, is an

unpatriotic and seditious act.

Note where the fundamental dishonesties of our propaganda lead us in the

matter of policy, in what we declared to be one of the main objects of

the War: the erection of Europe upon a basis of nationality. Our whole

campaign implied that the problem resolved itself into the destruction

of one great Power, who denied that principle, as against the Allies,

who were ready to grant it. How near that came to the truth, the round

score of 'unredeemed' nationalities deliberately created by the Allies

in the Treaties sufficiently testifies. If we had avowed the facts, that

a Europe of completely independent nationalities is not possible, that

great populations will not be shut off from the sea, or recognise

independent nationalities to the extent of risking economic or political

strangulation, we should then necessarily have gone on to devise the

limitations and obligations which all must accept and the rights which

all must accord. We should have been fighting for a body of principles

as the basis of a real association of States. The truth, or some measure

of it, would have prepared us all for that limitation of independence

without which no nationality can be secure. The falsehood that Germany

alone stood in the way of the recognition of nationality, made a treaty

really based on that principle (namely, upon all of us consenting to

limit our independence) impossible of acceptance by our own opinion. And

one falsehood leads to another. Because we refused to be sincere about

the inducements which we held out in turn to Italy, Bulgaria, Rumania,

Greece, we staggered blindly into the alternative betrayal first of one

party, then of another. Just as we were faithless to the principle of

nationality when we acquiesced in the Russian attitude towards Finland

and Poland, and the Italian towards Serbia, so later we were to prove

faithless to the principle of the Great State when we supported the

Border Nationalities in their secession from Russia. We have encouraged

and helped States like Ukrainia, Azerbaidjan. But we have been just as

ready to stand for 'Great Russia,' if Koltchak appeared to be winning,

knowing perfectly well that we cannot be loyal to both causes.

Our defence is apparent enough. It is fairly illustrated in the case of

Italy. If Italy had not come into the war, Serbia's prospect of any

redemption at all would have been hopeless; we were doing the best we

could for Serbia.[92]

Assuredly--but we happened to be doing it by false pretences, sham

heroics, immeasurable hypocrisy. And the final effect was to be the

defeat of the aims for which we were fighting. If our primary aims had

been those we proclaimed, we could no more have violated the principle

of nationality to gain an ally, than we could have ceded the Isle of

Wight to Germany, and the intellectual rectitude which would have

enabled us to see that, would also have enabled us to see the necessity

of the conditions on which alone a society of nations is possible.

The indispensable step to rendering controllable those passions now

'uncontrollable' and disrupting Europe, is to tell the truth about the

things by which we excuse them. Again, our fundamental nature may not

change, any more than it would if we honestly investigated the evidence

proving the innocence of the man, whose execution we demand, of the

crime which is the cause of our hatred. That investigation would be an

effort of the mind; the result of it would be a change in the direction

of our feelings. The facts which it is necessary to face are not

abstruse or difficult. They are self-evident to the simplest mind. The

fact that the 'person' whose punishment we demand in the case of the

enemy is not a person at all, either bad or good, but millions of

different persons of varying degrees of badness and goodness, many of

them--millions--without any responsibility at all for the crime that

angers us, this fact, if faced, would alter the nature of our feelings.

We should see that we were confronted by a case of mistaken identity.

Perhaps we do not face this evidence because we treasure our hate. If

there were not a 'person' our hate could have no meaning; we could not

hate an 'administrative area,' nor is there much satisfaction in

humiliating it and dominating it. We can desire to dominate and

humiliate a person, and are often ready to pay a high price for the

pleasure. If we ceased to think of national States as persons, we might

cease to think of them as conflicting interests, in competition with one

another, and begin to think of them instead as associations within a

great association.

Take another very simple truth that we will not face: that our arms do,

and must do, the things that raise our passions when done by the enemy.

Our blockades and bombardments also kill old women and children. Our

soldiers, too, the gallant lads who mount our aeroplanes, the sailors

who man our blockades, are baby-killers. They must be; they cannot help

it if they are to bomb or blockade at all. Yet we never do admit this

obvious fact. We erect a sheer falsehood, and then protect ourselves

against admitting it by being so 'noble' about it that we refuse to

discuss it. We simply declare that in no circumstances could England, or

English soldiers, ever make war upon women and children, or even be

unchivalrous to them. That is a moral premise beyond or behind which

patriotism will not permit our minds to go. If the 'nobility' of

attitude had any relation to our real conduct, one would rejoice. When,

during the armistice negotiations, the Germans exacted that they should

be permitted means, after the surrender of their fleet, of feeding their

people, a New York paper declared the condition an insult to the Allies.

'The Germans are prisoners,' it said, 'and the Allies do not starve

prisoners.' But one discovers a few weeks later that these noble

gestures are quite compatible with the maintenance of the blockade, on

the ground that Germans for their sins ought to be starved. We then

become the agents of Providence in punitive justice.

When the late Lord Fisher[93] came out squarely and publicly in defence

of the killing of women and children (in the submarine sinking) as a

necessary part of war, there seemed a chance for intellectual honesty in

the matter; for a real examination of the principles of our conduct. If

we faced the facts in this honest sailor-like fashion there was some

hope either that we should refuse to descend to reprisals by

disembowelling little girls; or, if it should appear that such things

are inseparable from war, that it would help to get a new feeling about

war. But Lord Fisher complains that the Editor of the paper to which he

sent his letter suppressed it from the later editions of his paper for

fear it should shock the public. Shock!

You see, _our_ shells falling on schools and circuses don't disembowel

little girls; our blockades don't starve them. Everybody knows that

British shells and British blockades would not do such things. When

Britain blockades, pestilence and hunger and torture are not suffering;

a dying child is not a dying child. Patriotism draws a shutter over our

eyes and ears.

When this degree of self-deception is possible, there is no infamy of

which a kindly, humane, and emotionally moral people may not prove

themselves capable; no moral contradiction or absurdity which mankind

may not approve. Anything may become right, anything may become wrong.

The evil is not only in its resultant inhumanities. It lies much more in

the fact that this development of moral blinkers deprives us of the

capacity to see where we are going, and what we are crushing underfoot;

and that may well end by our walking over the precipice.

During the War, we formed judgments of the German character which

literally make it sub-human. For our praise of the French (during the

same period) language failed us. Yet less than twenty years ago the

rôles were reversed.[94] The French were the mad dogs, and the Germans

of our community of blood.

The refusal to face the plain facts of life, a refusal made on grounds

which we persuade ourselves are extremely noble, but which in fact

result too often in simple falsehood and distortion, is revealed by the

common pre-war attitude to the economic situation dealt with in this

book. The present writer took the ground before the War that much of the

dense population of modern Europe could not support itself save by

virtue of an economic internationalism which political ideas (ideas

which war would intensify) were tending to make impossible. Now it is

obvious that before there can be a spiritual life, there must be a

fairly adequate physical one. If life is a savage and greedy scramble

over the means of sheer physical sustenance, there cannot be much in it

that is noble and inspiring. The point of the argument was, as already

mentioned, not that the economic pre-occupation _should_ occupy the

whole of life, but that it _will_ if it is simply disregarded; the way

to reduce the economic pre-occupation is to solve the economic problem.

Yet these plain and undeniable truths were somehow twisted into the

proposition that men went to war because they believed it 'paid,' in the

stockbroking sense, and that if they saw it did not 'pay' they would not

go to war. The task of attempting to find the conditions in which it

will be possible for men to live at all with decent regard for their

fellows, without drifting into cannibalistic struggles for sustenance

one against another, is made to appear something sordid, a 'usurer's

gospel.' And on that ground, very largely, the 'economics' of

international policy were neglected. We are still facing the facts. Self

deception has become habitual.

President Wilson failed to carry through the policy he had proclaimed,

as greater men have failed in similar moral circumstances. The failure

need not have been disastrous to the cause which he had espoused. It

might have marked merely a step towards ultimate success, if he had

admitted the failure. Had he said in effect: 'Reaction has won this

battle; we have been guilty of errors and shortcomings, but we shall

maintain the fight, and avoid such errors in future,' he would have

created for the generation which followed a clear-cut issue. Whatever

there was of courage and sincerity of purpose in the idealism he had

created earlier in the War, would have rallied to his support. Just

because such a declaration would have created an issue dividing men

sharply and even bitterly, it would have united each side strongly; men

would have had the two paths clearly and distinctly before their eyes,

and though forced for the time along that of reaction, they would have

known the direction in which they were travelling. Again and again

victory has come out of defeat; again and again defeat has nerved men to

greater effort.

But when defeat is represented as victory by the trusted leader, there

follows the subtlest and most paralysing form of confusion and doubt.

Men no longer know who are the friends and who the enemies of the things

they care for. When callous cruelty is called righteous, and cynical

deception justice, men begin to lose their capacity to distinguish the

one from the other, and to change sides without consciousness of their

treason.

In the field of social relationship, the better management by men of

their society, a sincere facing of the simple truths of life, right

conclusions from facts that are of universal knowledge, are of

immeasurably greater importance than erudition. Indeed we see that again

and again learning obscures in this field the simpler truths. The

Germany that had grown up before the War is a case in point. Vast

learning, meticulous care over infinite detail, had become the mark of

German scholarship. But all the learning of the professors did not

prevent a gross misreading of what, to the rest of the world, seemed all

but self-evident--simple truths which perhaps would have been clearer if

the learning had been less, used as it was to buttress the lusts of

domination and power.

The main errors of the Treaty (which, remember, was the work of the

greatest diplomatic experts in Europe) reveal something similar. If the

punitive element--which is still applauded--defeats finally the aims

alike of justice, our own security, appeasement, disarmament, and sets

up moral forces that will render our New World even more ferociously

cruel and hopeless than the Old, it will not be because we were ignorant

of the fact that 'Germany'--or 'Austria' or 'Russia'--is not a person

that can be held responsible and punished in this simple fashion. It did

not require an expert knowledge of economics to realise that a ruined

Germany could not pay vast indemnities. Yet sometimes very learned men

were possessed by these fallacies. It is not learning that is needed to

penetrate them. A wisdom founded simply on the sincere facing of

self-evident facts would have saved European opinion from its most

mischievous excesses. This ignorance of the learned may perhaps be

related to another phenomenon; a great increase in our understanding of

inert matter, unaccompanied by any corresponding increase in our

understanding of human conduct. This latter understanding demands a

temperamental self-control and detachment, which mere technical

knowledge does not ask. Although in technical science we have made such

advances as would cause the Athenians, say, to look on us as gods, we

show no corresponding advance upon them, or upon the Hebrew prophets for

that matter, in the understanding of conduct and its motives. And the

spectacle of Germany--of the modern world, indeed--so efficient in the

management of matter, so clumsy in the understanding of the essentials

of human relationship, reminds us once more of the futility of mere

technical knowledge, unless accompanied by a better moral understanding.

For without the latter we are unable to use the improvement in technique

(as Europe is unable to use it to-day) for indispensable human ends. Or

worse still, technical knowledge, in the absence of wisdom and

discipline, merely gives us more efficient weapons of collective

suicide. Butler's fantasy of the machines which men have made acquiring

a mind of their own, and then rounding upon their masters and

destroying them, has very nearly come true. If some new force, like the

release of atomic energy, had been discovered during this war, and

applied (as Mr Wells has imagined it being applied) to bombs that would

go on exploding without cessation for a week or two, we know that

passions ran so high that both sides would have used them, as both sides

in the next war will use super-poison gas and disease germs. Not only

the destruction, therefore, but the passion and the ruthlessness, the

fears and hates, the universal pre-emption of wealth for 'defence'

perpetually translating itself into preventive offence, would have

grown. Man's society would assuredly have been destroyed by the

instruments that he himself had made, and Butler's fantasy would have

come true.

It is coming true to-day. What starves Europe is not lack of technical

knowledge; there is more technical knowledge than when Europe could feed

itself. If we could combine our forces to effective co-operation, the

Malthusian dragon could be kept at bay. It is the group of ideas which

underlie the process of Balkanisation that stand in the way of turning

our combined forces against Nature instead of against one another.

We have gone wrong mainly in certain of the simpler and broader issues

of human relationship, and this book has attempted to disentangle from

the complex mass of facts in the international situation, those

'sovereign ideas' which constitute in crises the basic factors of public

action and opinion. In so doing there may have been some

over-simplification. That will not greatly matter, if the result is some

re-examination and clarification of the predominant beliefs that have

been analysed. 'Truth comes out of error more easily than out of

confusion,' as Bacon warned us. It is easier to correct a working

hypothesis of society, which is wrong in some detail, than to achieve

wise conduct in society without any social principle. If social or

political phenomena are for us first an unexplained tangle of forces,

and we live morally from hand to mouth, by opinions which have no

guiding principle, our emotions will be at the mercy first of one

isolated fact or incident, and then of another.

A certain parallel has more than once been suggested in these pages.

European society is to-day threatened with disintegration as the result

of ideas and emotions that have collected round Patriotism. A century or

two since it was threatened by ideas and passions which gathered round

religious dogma. By what process did we arrive at religious toleration

as a social principle? That question has been suggested because to

answer it may throw some light on our present problem of rendering

Patriotism a social instead of an anti-social force.

If to-day, for the most part, in Europe and America one sect can live

beside another in peace, where a century or two ago there would have

been fierce hatreds, wars, massacres, and burnings, it is not because

the modern population is more learned in theology (it is probably less

so), but rather conversely, because theological theory gave place to lay

judgment in the ordinary facts of life.

If we have a vast change in the general ideas of Europe in the religious

sphere, in the attitude of men to dogma, in the importance which they

attach to it, in their feeling about it; a change which for good or evil

is a vast one in its consequences, a moral and intellectual revulsion

which has swept away one great difficulty of human relationship and

transformed society; it is because the laity have brought the discussion

back to principles so broad and fundamental that the data became the

facts of human life and experience--data with which the common man is as

familiar as the scholar. Of the present-day millions for whom certain

beliefs of the older theologians would be morally monstrous, how many

have been influenced by elaborate study concerning the validity of this

or that text? The texts simply do not weigh with them, though for

centuries they were the only things that counted. What do weigh with

them are profounder and simpler things--a sense of justice,

compassion--things which would equally have led the man of the sixteenth

century to question the texts and the premises of the Church, if

discussion had been free. It is because it was not free that the social

instinct of the mass, the general capacity to order their relations so

as to make it possible for them to live together, became distorted and

vitiated. And the wars of religion resulted. To correct this vitiation,

to abolish these disastrous hates and misconceptions, elaborate learning

was not needed. Indeed, it was largely elaborate learning which had

occasioned them. The judges who burned women alive for witchcraft, or

inquisitors who sanctioned that punishment for heresy, had vast and

terrible stores of learning. _What was needed was that these learned

folk should question their premises in the light of facts of common

knowledge._ It is by so doing that their errors are patent to the quite

unlearned of our time. No layman was equipped to pass judgment on the

historical reasons which might support the credibility of this or that

miracle, or the intricate arguments which might justify this or that

point of dogma. But the layman was as well equipped, indeed, he was

better equipped than the schoolman, to question whether God would ever

torture men everlastingly for the expression of honest belief; the

observer of daily occurrences, to say nothing of the physicist, was as

able as the theologian to question whether a readiness to believe

without evidence is a virtue at all. Questions of the damnation of

infants, eternal torment, were settled not by the men equipped with

historical and ecclesiastical scholarship, but by the average man, going

back to the broad truths, to first principles, asking very simple

questions, the answer to which depended not upon the validity of texts,

but upon correct reasoning concerning facts which are accessible to all;

upon our general sense of life as a whole, and our more elementary

institutions of justice and mercy; reasoning and intuitions which the

learning of the expert often distorts.

Exactly the service which extricated us from the intellectual and moral

confusion that resulted in such catastrophes in the field of religion,

is needed in the field of politics. From certain learned folk--writers,

poets, professors (German and other), journalists, historians, and

rulers--the public have taken a group of ideas concerning Patriotism,

Nationalism, Imperialism, the nature of our obligation to the State, and

so on, ideas which may be right or wrong, but which we are all agreed,

will have to be very much changed if men are ever to live together in

peace and freedom; just as certain notions concerning the institution of

private property will have to be changed if the mass of men are to live

in plenty.

It is a commonplace of militarist argument that so long as men feel as

they do about their Fatherland, about patriotism and nationalism,

internationalism will be an impossibility. If that is true--and I think

it is--peace and freedom and welfare will wait until those large issues

have been raised in men's minds with sufficient vividness to bring about

a change of idea and so a change of feeling with reference to them.

It is unlikely, to say the least, that the mass of Englishmen or

Frenchmen will ever be in possession of detailed knowledge sufficient to

equip them to pass judgment on the various rival solutions of the

complex problems that face us, say, in the Balkans. And yet it was

immediately out of a problem of Balkan politics that the War arose, and

future wars may well arise out of those same problems if they are

settled as badly in the future as in the past.

The situation would indeed be hopeless if the nature of human

relationship depended upon the possession by the people as a whole of

expert knowledge in complex questions of that kind. But happily the

Sarajevo murders would never have developed into a war involving twenty

nations but for the fact that there had been cultivated in Europe

suspicions, hatreds, insane passions, and cupidities, due largely to

false conceptions (though in part also themselves prompting the false

conceptions) of a few simple facts in political relationship;

conceptions concerning the necessary rivalry of nations, the idea that

what one nation gains another loses, that States are doomed by a fate

over which they have no control to struggle together for the space and

opportunities of a limited world. But for the atmosphere that these

ideas create (as false theological notions once created a similar

atmosphere between rival religious groups) most of these at present

difficult and insoluble problems of nationality and frontiers and

government, would have solved themselves.

The ideas which feed and inflame these passions of rivalry, hostility,

fear, hate, will be modified, if at all, by raising in the mind of the

European some such simple elementary questions as were raised when he

began to modify his feeling about the man of rival religious belief. The

Political Reformation in Europe will come by questioning, for instance,

the whole philosophy of patriotism, the morality or the validity, in

terms of human well-being, of a principle like that of 'my country,

right or wrong';[95] by questioning whether a people really benefit by

enlarging the frontiers of their State; whether 'greatness' in a nation

particularly matters; whether the man of the small State is not in all

the great human values the equal of the man of the great Empire; whether

the real problems of life are greatly affected by the colour of the

flag; whether we have not loyalties to other things as well as to our

State; whether we do not in our demand for national sovereignty ignore

international obligation without which the nations can have neither

security nor freedom; whether we should not refuse to kill or horribly

mutilate a man merely because we differ from him in politics. And with

those, if the emergence from chattel-slavery is to be complemented by

the emergence from wage slavery, must be put similarly fundamental

questions touching problems like that of private property and the

relation of social freedom thereto; we must ask why, if it is rightly

demanded of the citizen that his life shall be forfeit to the safety of

the State, his surplus money, property, shall not be forfeit to its

welfare.

To very many, these questions will seem a kind of blasphemy, and they

will regard those who utter them as the subjects of a loathsome

perversion. In just that way the orthodox of old regarded the heretic

and his blasphemies. And yet the solution of the difficulties of our

time, this problem of learning to live together without mutual homicide

and military slavery, depends upon those blasphemies being uttered.

Because it is only in some such way that the premises of the differences

which divide us, the realities which underlie them, will receive

attention. It is not that the implied answer is necessarily the truth--I

am not concerned now for a moment to urge that it is--but that until the

problem is pushed back in our minds to these great yet simple issues,

the will, temper, general ideas of Europe on this subject will remain

unchanged. And if _they_ remain unchanged so will its conduct and

condition.

The tradition of nationalism and patriotism, around which have gathered

our chief political loyalties and instincts, has become in the actual

conditions of the world an anti-social and disruptive force. Although we

realize perhaps that a society of nations of some kind there must be,

each unit proclaims proudly its anti-social slogan of sacred egoisms and

defiant immoralism; its espousal of country as against right.[96]

The danger--and the difficulty--resides largely in the fact that the

instincts of gregariousness and group solidarity, which prompt the

attitude of 'my country right or wrong,' are not in themselves evil:

both gregariousness and pugnacity are indispensable to society.

Nationality is a very precious manifestation of the instincts by which

alone men can become socially conscious and act in some corporate

capacity. The identification of 'self' with society, which patriotism

accomplishes within certain limits, the sacrifice of self for the

community which it inspires--even though only when fighting other

patriotisms--are moral achievements of infinite hope.

The Catharian heresy that Jehovah of the Old Testament is in reality

Satan masquerading as God has this pregnant suggestion; if the Father of

Evil ever does destroy us, we may be sure that he will come, not

proclaiming himself evil, but proclaiming himself good, the very Voice

of God. And that is the danger with patriotism and the instincts that

gather round it. If the instincts of nationalism were simply evil, they

would constitute no real danger. It is the good in them that has made

them the instrument of the immeasurable devastation which they

accomplish.

That Patriotism does indeed transcend all morality, all religious

sanctions as we have heretofore known them, can be put to a very simple

test. Let an Englishman, recalling, if he can, his temper during the

War, ask himself this question: Is there anything, anything whatsoever,

that he would have refused to do, if the refusal had meant the triumph

of Germany and the defeat of England? In his heart he knows that he

would have justified any act if the safety of his country had hung upon

it.

Other patriotisms have like justifications. Yet would defeat,

submission, even to Germany, involve worse acts than those we have felt

compelled to commit during the War and since--in the work of making our

power secure? Did the German ask of the Alsatian or the Pole worse than

we have been compelled to ask of our own soldiers in Russia, India, or

Ireland?

The old struggle for power goes on. For the purpose of that struggle we

are prepared to transform our society in any way that it may demand. For

the purposes of the war for power we will accept anything that the

strength of the enemy imposes: we will be socialist, autocratic,

democratic, or communist; we will conscribe the bodies, souls, wealth of

our people; we will proscribe, as we do, the Christian doctrine, and

all mercy and humanity; we will organise falsehood and deceit, and call

it statecraft and strategy; lie for the purpose of inflaming hate, and

rejoice at the effectiveness of our propaganda; we will torture helpless

millions by pestilence and famine--as we have done--and look on unmoved;

our priests, in the name of Christ, will reprove misplaced pity, and

call for the further punishment of the wicked, still greater efforts in

the Fight for Right. We shall not care what transformations take place

in our society or our natures; or what happens to the human spirit.

Obediently, at the behest of the enemy--because, that is, his power

demands that conduct of us--shall we do all those things, or anything,

save only one: we will not negotiate or make a contract with him. _That_

would limit our 'independence'; by which we mean that his submission to

our mastery would be less complete.

We can do acts of infinite cruelty; disregard all accepted morality; but

we cannot allow the enemy to escape the admission of defeat.

If we are to correct the evils of the older tradition, and build up one

which will restore to men the art of living together, we must honestly

face the fact that the older tradition has failed. So long as the old

loyalties and patriotisms, tempting us with power and dominion, calling

to the deep hunger excited by those things, and using the banners of

righteousness and justice, seem to offer security, and a society which,

if not ideal, is at least workable, we certainly shall not pay the price

which all profound change of habit demands. We have seen that as a fact

of his history man only abandons power and force over others when it

fails. At present, almost everywhere, we refuse to face the failure of

the old forms of political power. We don't believe that we need the

co-operation of the foreigner, or we believe that we can coerce him.

Little attention has been given here to the machinery of

internationalism--League of Nations, Courts of Arbitration, Disarmament.

This is not because machinery is unimportant. But if we possessed the

Will, if we were ready each to pay his contribution in some sacrifice of

his independence, of his opportunity of domination, the difficulties of

machinery would largely disappear. The story of America's essay in

internationalism has warned us of the real difficulty. Courts of

Arbitration, Leagues of Nations, were devices to which American opinion

readily enough agreed; too readily. For the event showed that the old

conceptions were not changed. They had only been disregarded. No

machinery of internationalism can work so long as the impulses and

prepossessions of irresponsible nationalism retain their power. The test

we must apply to our sincerity is our answer to the question:--What

price, in terms of national independence, are we prepared to pay for a

world law? What, in fact, _is_ the price that is asked of us? To this

last question, the pages that precede, and to some extent those that

follow, have attempted to supply an answer. We should gain many times in

freedom and independence the contribution in those things that we made.

Perhaps we may be driven by hunger--the actual need of our children for

bread--to forsake a method which cannot give them bread or freedom, in

favour of one that can. But, for the failure of power to act as a

deterrent upon our desire for it, we must perceive the failure. Our

angers and hatreds obscure that failure, or render us indifferent to it.

Hunger does not necessarily help the understanding; it may bemuse it by

passion and resentment. We may in our passion wreck civilisation as a

passionate man in his anger will injure those he loves. Yet, well fed,

we may refuse to concern ourselves with problems of the morrow. The

mechanical motive will no longer suffice. In the simpler, more animal

forms of society, the instinct of each moment, with no thought of

ultimate consequence, may be enough. But the Society which man has built

up can only go forward or be preserved as it began: by virtue of

something which is more than instinct. On man is cast the obligation to

be intelligent; the responsibility of will; the burden of thought.

If some of us have felt that, beyond all other evils which translate

themselves into public policy, those with which these pages deal

constitute the greatest, it is not because war means the loss of life,

the killing of men. Many of our noblest activities do that. There are so

many of us that it is no great disaster that a few should die. It is not

because war means suffering. Suffering endured for a conscious and

clearly conceived human purpose is redeemed by hope of real achievement;

it may be a glad sacrifice for some worthy end. But if we have

floundered hopelessly into a bog because we have forgotten our end and

purpose in the heat of futile passion, the consolation which we may

gather from the willingness with which men die in the bog should not

stand in the way of our determination to rediscover our destination and

create afresh our purpose. These pages have been concerned very little

with the loss of life, the suffering of the last seven years. What they

have dealt with mainly is the fact that the War has left us a less

workable society, has been marked by an increase in the forces of chaos

and disintegration. That is the ultimate indictment of this War as of

all wars: the attitude towards life, the ideas and motive forces out of

which it grows, and which it fosters, makes men less able to live

together, their society less workable, and must end by making free

society impossible. War not only arises out of the failure of human

wisdom, from the defect of that intelligence by which alone we can

successfully fight the forces of nature; it perpetuates that failure and

worsens it. For only by a passion which keeps thought at bay can the

'morale' of war be maintained. The very justification which we advance

for our war-time censorships and propaganda, our suspension of free

speech and discussion, is that if we gave full value to the enemy's

case, saw him as he really is, blundering, foolish, largely helpless

like ourselves; saw the defects of our own and our Allies' policy, saw

what our own acts in war really involved and how nearly they resembled

those which aroused our anger when done by the enemy, if we saw all

this and kept our heads, we should abandon war. A thousand times it has

been explained that in an impartial mood we cannot carry on war; that

unless the people come to feel that all the right is on our side and all

the wrong on the enemy's, morale will fail. The most righteous war can

only be kept going by falsehood. The end of that falsehood is that our

mind collapses. And although the mind, thought, judgment, are not

all-sufficient for man's salvation, it is impossible without them.

Behind all other explanations of Europe's creeping paralysis is the

blindness of the millions, their inability to see the effects of their

demands and policy, to see where they are going.

Only a keener feeling for truth will enable them to see. About

indifferent things--about the dead matter that we handle in our

science--we can be honest, impartial, true. That is why we succeed in

dealing with matter. But about the things we care for--which are

ourselves--our desires and lusts, our patriotisms and hates, we find a

harder test of thinking straight and truly. Yet there is the greater

need; only by that rectitude shall we be saved. There is no refuge but

in truth.

ADDENDUM

THE ARGUMENT OF _THE GREAT ILLUSION_

CHAPTER I

THE 'IMPOSSIBILITY OF WAR' MYTH

It will illustrate certain difficulties which have marked--and mark--the

presentation of the argument of this book, if the reader will consider

for a few minutes the justice of certain charges which have been brought

against _The Great Illusion_. Perhaps the commonest is that it argued

that 'war had become impossible.' The truth of that charge at least can

very easily be tested. The first page of that book, the preface,

referring to the thesis it proposed to set out, has these words: 'the

argument is _not_ that war is impossible, but that it is futile.' The

next page but one describes what the author believes to be the main

forces at work in international politics: a fierce struggle for

preponderant power 'based on the universal assumption that a nation, in

order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry,

or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is

necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of

political force against others ... that nations being competing units,

advantage, in the last resort, goes to the possessor of preponderant

military force, the weaker going to the wall, as in the other forms of

the struggle for life.' A whole chapter is devoted to the evidence which

goes to show that this aggressive and warlike philosophy was indeed the

great actuating force in European politics. The first two paragraphs of

the first chapter forecast the likelihood of an Anglo-German explosion;

that chapter goes on to declare that the pacifist effort then current

was evidently making no headway at all against the tendencies towards

rivalry and conflict. In the third chapter the ideas underlying those

tendencies are described as 'so profoundly mischievous,' and so

'desperately dangerous,' as to threaten civilisation itself. A chapter

is devoted to showing that the fallacy and folly of those all but

universal ideas was no guarantee at all that the nations would not act

upon them. (Particularly is the author insistent on the fact that the

futility of war will never in itself suffice to stop war. The folly of a

given course of action will only be a deterrent to the degree to which

men realise its folly. That was why the book was written.) A warning is

uttered against any reliance upon the Hague Conferences, which, it is

explained at length, are likely to be quite ineffective against the

momentum of the motives of aggression. A warning is uttered towards the

close of the book against any reduction of British armaments,

accompanied, however, by the warning that mere increase of armaments

unaccompanied by change of policy, a Political Reformation in the

direction of internationalism, will provoke the very catastrophe it is

their object to avoid; only by that change of policy could we take a

real step towards peace 'instead of _a step towards war, to which the

mere piling up of armaments, unchecked by any other factor, must in the

end inevitably lead_.'[97]

The last paragraph of the book asks the reader which of two courses we

are to follow: a determined effort towards placing European policy on a

new basis, or a drift along the current of old instincts and ideas, a

course which would condemn us to the waste of mountains of treasure and

the spilling of oceans of blood.

Yet, it is probably true to say that, of the casual newspaper references

(as distinct from reviews) made during the last ten years to the book

just described, four out of five are to the effect that its author said

'war was impossible because it did not pay.'

The following are some passages referred to in the above summary:--

'Not the facts, but men's opinions about the facts is what matters.

This is because men's conduct is determined, not necessarily by the

right conclusion from facts, but the conclusion they believe to be

right.... As long as Europe is dominated by the old beliefs, those

beliefs will have virtually the same effect in politics as though

they were intrinsically sound.'--(p. 327.)

'It is evident that so long as the misconception we are dealing

with is all but universal in Europe, so long as the nations believe

that in some way the military and political subjugation of others

will bring with it a tangible material advantage to the conqueror,

we all do, in fact, stand in danger from such aggression. Not his

interest, but what he deems to be his interest, will furnish the

real motive of our prospective enemy's action. And as the illusion

with which we are dealing does, indeed, dominate all those minds

most active in European politics, we must, while this remains the

case, regard an aggression, even such as that which Mr Harrison

foresees, as within the bounds of practical politics.... On this

ground alone I deem that we or any other nation are justified in

taking means of self-defence to prevent such aggression. This is

not, therefore, a plea for disarmament irrespective of the action

of other nations. So long as current political philosophy in Europe

remains what it is, I would not urge the reduction of our war

budget by a single sovereign.'--(p. 329.)

'The need for defence arises from the existence of a motive for

attack.... That motive is, consequently, part of the problem of

defence.... Since as between the European peoples we are dealing

with in this matter, one party is as able in the long run to pile

up armaments as the other, we cannot get nearer to solution by

armaments alone; we must get at the original provoking cause--the

motive making for aggression.... If that motive results from a

true judgment of the facts; if the determining factor in a nation's

well-being and progress is really its power to obtain by force

advantage over others, the present situation of armament rivalry

tempered by war is a natural and inevitable one.... If, however,

the view is a false one, our progress towards solution will be

marked by the extent to which the error becomes generally

recognised in European public opinion.'--(p. 337.)

'In this matter it seems fatally easy to secure either one of two

kinds of action: that of the "practical man" who limits his

energies to securing a policy which will perfect the machinery of

war and disregard anything else; or that of the Pacifist, who,

persuaded of the brutality or immorality of war, is apt to

deprecate effort directed at self-defence. What is needed is the

type of activity which will include both halves of the problem:

provision for education, for a Political Reformation in this

matter, _as well as_ such means of defence as will meantime

counterbalance the existing impulse to aggression. To concentrate

on either half to the exclusion of the other half is to render the

whole problem insoluble.'--(p. 330.)

'Never has the contest of armament been so keen as when Europe

began to indulge in Peace Conferences. Speaking roughly and

generally, the era of great armament expansion dates from the first

Hague Conference. The reader who has appreciated the emphasis laid

in the preceding pages on working through the reform of ideas will

not feel much astonishment at the failure of efforts such as these.

The Hague Conferences represented an attempt, not to work through

the reform of ideas, but to modify by mechanical means the

political machinery of Europe, without reference to the ideas which

had brought it into existence.

'Arbitration treaties, Hague Conferences, International Federation,

involve a new conception of relationship between nations. But the

ideals--political, economical, and social--on which the old

conceptions are based, our terminology, our political literature,

our old habits of thought, diplomatic inertia, which all combine to

perpetuate the old notions, have been left serenely undisturbed.

And surprise is expressed that such schemes do not succeed.'--(p.

350.)

Very soon after the appearance of the book, I find I am shouting myself

hoarse in the Press against this monstrous 'impossibility of war'

foolishness. An article in the _Daily Mail_ of September 15th, 1911,

begins thus:--

' ... One learns, with some surprise, that the very simple facts to

which I have now for some years been trying to draw the attention

they deserve, teach that:--

1. War is now impossible.

2. War would ruin both the victor and the vanquished.

3. War would leave the victor worse off than the vanquished.

'May I say with every possible emphasis that nothing I have ever

written justifies any one of these conclusions.

'I have always, on the contrary, urged that:--

(1) War is, unhappily, quite possible, and, in the prevailing

condition of ignorance concerning certain elementary

politico-economic facts, even likely.

(2) There is nothing to justify the conclusion that war would

"ruin" both victor and vanquished. Indeed, I do not quite know what

the "ruin" of a nation means.

(3) While in the past the vanquished has often profited more by

defeat than he could possibly have done by victory, it is no

necessary result, and we are safest in assuming that the vanquished

will suffer most.'

Nearly two years later I find myself still engaged in the same task.

Here is a letter to the _Saturday Review_ (March 8th, 1913):--

'You are good enough to say that I am "one of the very few

advocates of peace at any price who is not altogether an ass." And

yet you also state that I have been on a mission "to persuade the

German people that war in the twentieth century is impossible." If

I had ever tried to teach anybody such sorry rubbish I should be

altogether an unmitigated ass. I have never, of course, nor so far

as I am aware, has any one ever said that war was impossible.

Personally, not only do I regard war as possible, but extremely

likely. What I have been preaching in Germany is that it is

impossible for Germany to benefit by war, especially a war against

us; and that, of course, is quite a different matter.'

It is true that if the argument of the book as a whole pointed to the

conclusion that war was 'impossible,' it would be beside the point to

quote passages repudiating that conclusion. They might merely prove the

inconsequence of the author's thought. But the book, and the whole

effort of which it was a part, would have had no _raison d'être_ if the

author had believed war unlikely or impossible. It was a systematic

attack on certain political ideas which the author declared were

dominant in international politics. If he had supposed those powerful

ideas were making _not_ for war, but for peace, why as a pacifist should

he be at such pains to change them? And if he thought those

war-provoking ideas which he attacked were not likely to be put into

effect, why, in that case either, should he bother at all? Why, for that

matter, should a man who thought war impossible engage in not too

popular propaganda against war--against something which could not occur?

A moment's real reflection on the part of those responsible for this

description of _The Great Illusion_, should have convinced them that it

could not be a true one.

I have taken the trouble to go through some of the more serious

criticisms of the book to see whether this extraordinary confusion was

created in the mind of those who actually read the book instead of

reading about it. So far as I know, not a single serious critic has come

to a conclusion that agrees with the 'popular' verdict. Several going to

the book after the War, seem to express surprise at the absence of any

such conclusion. Professor Lindsay writes:--

'Let us begin by disposing of one obvious criticism of the

doctrines of _The Great Illusion_ which the out-break of war has

suggested. Mr Angell never contended that war was impossible,

though he did contend that it must always be futile. He insisted

that the futility of war would not make war impossible or armament

unnecessary until all nations recognised its futility. So long as

men held that nations could advance their interests by war, so long

war would last. His moral was that we should fight militarism,

whether in Germany or in our own country, as one ought to fight an

idea with better ideas. He further pointed out that though it is

pleasanter to attack the wrong ideals held by foreigners, it is

more effective to attack the wrong ideals held in our own

country.... The pacifist hope was that the outbreak of a European

war, which was recognised as quite possible, might be delayed

until, with the progress of pacifist doctrine, war became

impossible. That hope has been tragically frustrated, but if the

doctrines of pacifism are convincing and irrefutable, it was not in

itself a vain hope. Time was the only thing it asked of fortune,

and time was denied it.'

Another post-war critic--on the other side of the Atlantic--writes:--

'Mr. Angell has received too much solace from the unwisdom of his

critics. Those who have denounced him most vehemently are those who

patently have not read his books. For example, he cannot properly

be classed, as frequently asserted in recent months, as one of

those Utopian pacifists who went about proclaiming war impossible.

A number of passages in _The Great Illusion_ show him fully alive

to the danger of the present collapse; indeed, from the narrower

view of politics his book was one of the several fruitless attempts

to check that growing estrangement between England and Germany

whose sinister menace far-sighted men discerned. Even less

justifiable are the flippant sneers which discard his argument as

mercenary or sordid. Mr Angell has never taken an "account book" or

"breeches pocket" view of war. He inveighs against what he terms

its political and moral futilities as earnestly as against its

economic futility.'

It may be said that there must be some cause for so persistent a

misrepresentation. There is. Its cause is that obstinate and deep-seated

fatalism which is so large a part of the prevailing attitude to war and

against which the book under consideration was a protest. Take it as an

axiom that war comes upon us as an outside force, like the rain or the

earthquake, and not as something that we can influence, and a man who

'does not believe in war,' must be a person who believes that war is not

coming;[98] that men are naturally peaceable. To be a Pacifist because

one believes that the danger of war is very great indeed, or because one

believes men to be naturally extremely prone to war, is a position

incomprehensible until we have rid our minds of the fatalism which

regards war as an 'inevitable' result of uncontrollable forces.