1 Among the minor topics that people are talking about behind the
western fronts is the psychology of the Yielding Pacifist and the
Conscientious Objector. Of course, we are all pacifists nowadays; I know
of no one who does not want not only to end this war but to put an end
to war altogether, except those blood-red terrors Count Reventlow, Mr.
Leo Maxse--how he does it on a vegetarian dietary I cannot imagine!--and
our wild-eyed desperados of _The Morning Post._ But most of the people
I meet, and most of the people I met on my journey, are pacifists like
myself who want to _make_ peace by beating the armed man until he gives
in and admits the error of his ways, disarming him and reorganising the
world for the forcible suppression of military adventures in the future.
They want belligerency put into the same category as burglary, as a
matter of forcible suppression. The Yielding Pacifist who will accept
any sort of peace, and the Conscientious Objector who will not fight at
all, are not of that opinion.
Both Italy and France produce parallel types to those latter, but it
would seem that in each case England displays the finer developments.
The Latin mind is directer than the English, and its standards--shall
I say?--more primitive; it gets more directly to the fact that here are
men who will not fight. And it is less charitable. I was asked quite a
number of times for the English equivalent of an _embusque._ “We don't
generalise,” I said, “we treat each case on its merits!”
One interlocutor near Udine was exercised by our Italian Red Cross work.
“Here,” he said, “are sixty or seventy young Englishmen, all fit for
military service.... Of course they go under fire, but it is not like
being junior officers in the trenches. Not one of them has been killed
or wounded.”
He reflected. “One, I think, has been decorated,” he said....
My French and Italian are only for very rough common jobs; when it came
to explaining the Conscientious Objector sympathetically they broke
down badly. I had to construct long parenthetical explanations of
our antiquated legislative methods to show how it was that the
“conscientious objector” had been so badly defined. The foreigner does
not understand the importance of vague definition in British life.
“Practically, of course, we offered to exempt anyone who conscientiously
objected to fight or serve. Then the Pacifist and German people started
a campaign to enrol objectors. Of course every shirker, every coward and
slacker in the country decided at once to be a conscientious objector.
Anyone but a British legislator could have foreseen that. Then we
started Tribunals to wrangle with the objectors about their _bona
fides._ Then the Pacifists and the Pro-Germans issued little leaflets
and started correspondence courses to teach people exactly how to lie to
the Tribunals. Trouble about freedom of the pamphleteer followed. I had
to admit--it has been rather a sloppy business. The people who made the
law knew their own minds, but we English are not an expressive people.”
These are not easy things to say in Elementary (and slightly Decayed)
French or in Elementary and Corrupt Italian.
“But why do people support the sham conscientious objector and issue
leaflets to help him--when there is so much big work clamouring to be
done?”
“That,” I said, “is the Whig tradition.”
When they pressed me further, I said: “I am really the questioner. I
am visiting _your_ country, and you have to tell _me_ things. It is
not right that I should do all the telling. Tell me all about Romain
Rolland.”
And so I pressed them about the official socialists in Italy and the
Socialist minority in France until I got the question out of the net
of national comparisons and upon a broader footing. In several
conversations we began to work out in general terms the psychology of
those people who were against the war. But usually we could not get to
that; my interlocutors would insist upon telling me just what they would
like to do or just what they would like to see done to stop-the-war
pacifists and conscientious objectors; pleasant rather than fruitful
imaginative exercises from which I could effect no more than
platitudinous uplifts.
But the general drift of such talks as did seem to penetrate the
question was this, that among these stop-the-war people there are really
three types. First there is a type of person who hates violence and
the infliction of pain under any circumstances, and who have a mystical
belief in the rightness (and usually the efficacy) of non-resistance.
These are generally Christians, and then their cardinal text is the
instruction to “turn the other cheek.” Often they are Quakers. If they
are consistent they are vegetarians and wear _Lederlos_ boots. They do
not desire police protection for their goods. They stand aloof from all
the force and conflict of life. They have always done so. This is an
understandable and respectable type. It has numerous Hindu equivalents.
It is a type that finds little difficulty about exemptions--provided the
individual has not been too recently converted to his present habits.
But it is not the prevalent type in stop-the-war circles. Such genuine
ascetics do not number more than a thousand or so, all three of our
western allied countries. The mass of the stop-the-war people is made up
quite other elements.
2
In the complex structure of the modern community there are two groups
or strata or pockets in which the impulse of social obligation, the
gregarious sense of a common welfare, is at its lowest; one of these is
the class of the Resentful Employee, the class of people who, without
explanation, adequate preparation or any chance, have been shoved at an
early age into uncongenial work and never given a chance to escape, and
the other is the class of people with small fixed incomes or with small
salaries earnt by routine work, or half independent people practising
some minor artistic or literary craft, who have led uneventful,
irresponsible lives from their youth up, and never came at any point
into relations of service to the state. This latter class was more
difficult to define than the former--because it is more various within
itself. My French friends wanted to talk of the “Psychology of the
Rentier.” I was for such untranslatable phrases as the “Genteel Whig,”
or the “Donnish Liberal.” But I lit up an Italian--he is a Milanese
manufacturer--with “these Florentine English who would keep Italy in a
glass case.” “I know,” he said. Before I go on to expand this congenial
theme, let me deal first with the Resentful Employee, who is a much
more considerable, and to me a much more sympathetic, figure in European
affairs. I began life myself as a Resentful Employee. By the extremest
good luck I have got my mind and spirit out of the distortions of that
cramping beginning, but I can still recall even the anger of those old
days.
He becomes an employee between thirteen and fifteen; he is made to do
work he does not like for no other purpose that he can see except the
profit and glory of a fortunate person called his employer, behind whom
stand church and state blessing and upholding the relationship. He is
not allowed to feel that he has any share whatever in the employer's
business, or that any end is served but the employer's profit. He cannot
see that the employer acknowledges any duty to the state. Neither church
nor state seems to insist that the employer has any public function.
At no point does the employee come into a clear relationship of mutual
obligation with the state. There does not seem to be any way out for the
employee from a life spent in this subordinate, toilsome relationship.
He feels put upon and cheated out of life. He is without honour. If
he is a person of ability or stubborn temper he struggles out of his
position; if he is a kindly and generous person he blames his “luck” and
does his work and lives his life as cheerfully as possible--and so live
the bulk of our amazing European workers; if he is a being of great
magnanimity he is content to serve for the ultimate good of the race; if
he has imagination, he says, “Things will not always be like this,”
and becomes a socialist or a guild socialist, and tries to educate the
employer to a sense of reciprocal duty; but if he is too human for any
of these things, then he begins to despise and hate the employer and the
system that made him. He wants to hurt them. Upon that hate it is easy
to trade.
A certain section of what is called the Socialist press and the
Socialist literature in Europe is no doubt great-minded; it seeks to
carve a better world out of the present. But much of it is socialist
only in name. Its spirit is Anarchistic. Its real burthen is not
construction but grievance; it tells the bitter tale of the employee, it
feeds and organises his malice, it schemes annoyance and injury for the
hated employer. The state and the order of the world is confounded with
the capitalist. Before the war the popular so-called socialist press
reeked with the cant of rebellion, the cant of any sort of rebellion.
“I'm a rebel,” was the silly boast of the young disciple. “Spoil
something, set fire to something,” was held to be the proper text for
any girl or lad of spirit. And this blind discontent carried on into
the war. While on the one hand a great rush of men poured into the army
saying, “Thank God! we can serve our country at last instead of some
beastly profiteer,” a sourer remnant, blind to the greater issues of
the war, clung to the reasonless proposition, “the state is only for
the Capitalist. This war is got up by Capitalists. Whatever has to be
done--_we are rebels._”
Such a typical paper as the British _Labour Leader_, for example, may
be read in vain, number after number, for any sound and sincere
constructive proposal. It is a prolonged scream of extreme
individualism, a monotonous repetition of incoherent discontent with
authority, with direction, with union, with the European effort. It
wants to do nothing. It just wants effort to stop--even at the price of
German victory. If the whole fabric of society in western Europe were to
be handed over to those pseudo-socialists to-morrow, to be administered
for the common good, they would fly the task in terror. They would make
excuses and refuse the undertaking. They do not want the world to go
right. The very idea of the world going right does not exist in their
minds. They are embodied discontent and hatred, making trouble, and that
is all they are. They want to be “rebels”--to be admired as “rebels”.
That is the true psychology of the Resentful Employee. He is a
de-socialised man. His sense of the State has been destroyed.
The Resentful Employees are the outcome of our social injustices. They
are the failures of our social ad educational systems. We may regret
their pitiful degradation, we may exonerate them from blame; none the
less they are a pitiful crew. I have seen the hardship of the trenches,
the gay and gallant wounded. I do a little understand what our soldiers,
officers and men alike, have endured and done. And though I know I ought
to allow for all that I have stated, I cannot regard these conscientious
objectors with anything but contempt. Into my house there pours a dismal
literature rehearsing the hardships of these men who set themselves
up to be martyrs for liberty; So and So, brave hero, has been sworn
at--positively sworn at by a corporal; a nasty rough man came into
the cell of So and So and dropped several h's; So and So, refusing to
undress and wash, has been undressed and washed, and soap was rubbed
into his eyes--perhaps purposely; the food and accommodation are not of
the best class; the doctors in attendance seem hasty; So and So was put
into a damp bed and has got a nasty cold. Then I recall a jolly vanload
of wounded men I saw out there....
But after all, we must be just. A church and state that permitted
these people to be thrust into dreary employment in their early 'teens,
without hope or pride, deserves such citizens as these. The marvel
is that there are so few. There are a poor thousand or so of these
hopeless, resentment-poisoned creatures in Great Britain. Against five
willing millions. The Allied countries, I submit, have not got nearly
all the conscientious objectors they deserve.
3
If the Resentful Employee provides the emotional impulse of the
resisting pacifist, whose horizon is bounded by his one passionate
desire that the particular social system that has treated him so ill
should collapse and give in, and its leaders and rulers be humiliated
and destroyed, the intellectual direction of a mischievous pacifism
comes from an entirely different class.
The Genteel Whig, though he differs very widely in almost every other
respect from the Resentful Employee, has this much in common, that he
has never been drawn into the whirl of collective life in any real and
assimilative fashion. This is what is the matter with both of them.
He is a little loose, shy, independent person. Except for eating and
drinking--in moderation, he has never done anything real from the day
he was born. He has frequently not even faced the common challenge of
matrimony. Still more frequently is he childless, or the daring parent
of one particular child. He has never traded nor manufactured. He has
drawn his dividends or his salary with an entire unconsciousness of any
obligations to policemen or navy for these punctual payments. Probably
he has never ventured even to reinvest his little legacy. He is acutely
aware of possessing an exceptionally fine intelligence, but he is
entirely unconscious of a fundamental unreality. Nothing has ever
occurred to him to make him ask why the mass of men were either not
possessed of his security or discontented with it. The impulses that
took his school friends out upon all sorts of odd feats and adventures
struck him as needless. As he grew up he turned with an equal distrust
from passion or ambition. His friends went out after love, after
adventure, after power, after knowledge, after this or that desire, and
became men. But he noted merely that they became fleshly, that effort
strained them, that they were sometimes angry or violent or heated. He
could not but feel that theirs were vulgar experiences, and he sought
some finer exercise for his exceptional quality. He pursued art or
philosophy or literature upon their more esoteric levels, and realised
more and more the general vulgarity and coarseness of the world about
him, and his own detachment. The vulgarity and crudity of the things
nearest him impressed him most; the dreadful insincerity of the Press,
the meretriciousness of success, the loudness of the rich, the baseness
of common people in his own land. The world overseas had by comparison
a certain glamour. Except that when you said “United States” to him he
would draw the air sharply between his teeth and beg you not to...
Nobody took him by the collar and shook him.
If our world had considered the advice of William James and insisted
upon national service from everyone, national service in the drains or
the nationalised mines or the nationalised deep-sea fisheries if not
in the army or navy, we should not have had any such men. If it had
insisted that wealth and property are no more than a trust for the
public benefit, we should have had no genteel indispensables. These
discords in our national unanimity are the direct consequence of our bad
social organisation. We permit the profiteer and the usurer; they evoke
the response of the Reluctant Employee, and the inheritor of their
wealth becomes the Genteel Whig.
But that is by the way. It was of course natural and inevitable that the
German onslaught upon Belgium and civilisation generally should strike
these recluse minds not as a monstrous ugly wickedness to be resisted
and overcome at any cost, but merely as a nerve-racking experience. Guns
were going off on both sides. The Genteel Whig was chiefly conscious
of a repulsive vast excitement all about him, in which many people did
inelegant and irrational things. They waved flags--nasty little flags.
This child of the ages, this last fruit of the gigantic and tragic tree
of life, could no more than stick its fingers in its ears as say,
“Oh, please, do _all_ stop!” and then as the strain grew intenser and
intenser set itself with feeble pawings now to clamber “Au-dessus de la
Melee,” and now to--in some weak way--stop the conflict. (“Au-dessus
de la Melee”--as the man said when they asked him where he was when the
bull gored his sister.) The efforts to stop the conflict at any price,
even at the price of entire submission to the German Will, grew more
urgent as the necessity that everyone should help against the German
Thing grew more manifest.
Of all the strange freaks of distressed thinking that this war has
produced, the freaks of the Genteel Whig have been among the most
remarkable. With an air of profound wisdom he returns perpetually to
his proposition that there are faults on both sides. To say that is his
conception of impartiality. I suppose that if a bull gored his sister he
would say that there were faults on both sides; his sister ought not
to have strayed into the field, she was wearing a red hat of a highly
provocative type; she ought to have been a cow and then everything would
have been different. In the face of the history of the last forty years,
the Genteel Whig struggles persistently to minimise the German outrage
upon civilisation and to find excuses for Germany. He does this, not
because he has any real passion for falsehood, but because by training,
circumstance, and disposition he is passionately averse from action
with the vulgar majority and from self-sacrifice in a common cause, and
because he finds in the justification of Germany and, failing that, in
the blackening of the Allies to an equal blackness, one line of defence
against the wave of impulse that threatens to submerge his private
self. But when at last that line is forced he is driven back upon others
equally extraordinary. You can often find simultaneously in the same
Pacifist paper, and sometimes even in the utterances of the same writer,
two entirely incompatible statements. The first is that Germany is so
invincible that it is useless to prolong the war since no effort of the
Allies is likely to produce any material improvement in their position,
and the second is that Germany is so thoroughly beaten that she is now
ready to abandon militarism and make terms and compensations entirely
acceptable to the countries she has forced into war. And when finally
facts are produced to establish the truth that Germany, though still
largely wicked and impenitent, is being slowly and conclusively beaten
by the sanity, courage and persistence of the Allied common men, then
the Genteel Whig retorts with his last defensive absurdity. He invents a
national psychology for Germany. Germany, he invents, loves us and wants
to be our dearest friend. Germany has always loved us. The Germans are
a loving, unenvious people. They have been a little mislead--but nice
people do not insist upon that fact. But beware of beating Germany,
beware of humiliating Germany; then indeed trouble will come. Germany
will begin to dislike us. She will plan a revenge. Turning aside from
her erstwhile innocent career, she may even think of hate. What are our
obligations to France, Italy, Serbia and Russia, what is the happiness
of a few thousands of the Herero, a few millions of the Belgians--whose
numbers moreover are constantly diminishing--when we might weigh them
against the danger, the most terrible danger, of incurring _permanent
German hostility?..._
A Frenchman I talked to knew better than that. “What will happen to
Germany,” I asked, “if we are able to do so to her and so; would she
take to dreams of a _Revanche?_”
“She will take to Anglomania,” he said, and added after a flash of
reflection, “In the long run it will be the worse for you.”