1
About the end of the war there are two chief ways of thinking, there is
a simpler sort of mind which desires merely a date, and a more complex
kind which wants particulars. To the former class belong most of the men
out at the front. They are so bored by this war that they would
welcome any peace that did not definitely admit defeat--and examine
the particulars later. The “tone” of the German army, to judge by its
captured letters, is even lower. It would welcome peace in any form.
Never in the whole history of the world has a war been so universally
unpopular as this war.
The mind of the soldier is obsessed by a vision of home-coming for
good, so vivid and alluring that it blots out nearly every other
consideration. The visions of people at home are of plenty instead
of privation, lights up, and the cessation of a hundred tiresome
restrictions. And it is natural therefore that a writer rather given to
guesses and forecasts should be asked very frequently to guess how long
the war has still to run.
All such forecasting is the very wildest of shooting. There are the
chances of war to put one out, and of a war that changes far faster than
the military intelligence. I have made various forecasts. At the outset
I thought that military Germany would fight at about the 1899 level,
would be lavish with cavalry and great attacks, that it would be
reluctant to entrench, and that the French and British had learnt
the lesson of the Boer war better than the Germans. I trusted to
the melodramatic instinct of the Kaiser. I trusted to the quickened
intelligence of the British military caste. The first rush seemed to
bear me out, and I opened my paper day by day expecting to read of the
British and French entrenched and the Germans beating themselves to
death against wire and trenches. In those days I wrote of the French
being over the Rhine before 1915. But it was the Germans who entrenched
first.
Since then I have made some other attempts. I did not prophesy at all in
1915, so far as I can remember. If I had I should certainly have backed
the Gallipoli attempt to win. It was the right thing to do, and it was
done abominably. It should have given us Constantinople and brought
Bulgaria to our side; it gave us a tragic history of administrative
indolence and negligence, and wasted bravery and devotion. I was very
hopeful of the western offensive in 1915; and in 1916 I counted still on
our continuing push. I believe we were very near something like decision
this last September, but some archaic dream of doing it with cavalry
dashed these hopes. The “Tanks” arrived to late to do their proper work,
and their method of use is being worked out very slowly.... I still
believe in the western push, if only we push it for all we are worth.
If only we push it with our brains, with our available and still
unorganised brains; if only we realise that the art of modern war is to
invent and invent and invent. Hitherto I have always hoped and looked
for decision, a complete victory that would enable the Allies to dictate
peace. But such an expectation is largely conditioned by these delicate
questions of adaptability that my tour of the front has made very urgent
in my mind. A spiteful German American writer has said that the British
would rather kill twenty thousand of their men than break one general.
Even a grain of truth in such a remark is a very valid reasoning for
lengthening one's estimate of the duration of the war.
There can be no doubt that the Western allies are playing a winning game
upon the western front, and that this is the front of decision now. It
is not in doubt that they are beating the Germans and shoving them back.
The uncertain factor is the rate at which they are shoving them back.
If they can presently get to so rapid an advance as to bring the average
rate since July 1st up to two or three miles a day, then we shall still
see the Allies dictating terms. But if the shove drags on at its present
pace of less than a mile and four thousand prisoners a week over the
limited Somme front only, if nothing is attempted elsewhere to increase
the area of pressure, [*This was written originally before the French
offensive at Verdun.] then the intolerable stress and boredom of the war
will bring about a peace long before the Germans are decisively crushed.
But the war, universally detested, may go on into 1918 or 1919. Food
riots, famine, and general disorganisation will come before 1920, if it
does. The Allies have a winning game before them, but they seem unable
to discover and promote the military genius needed to harvest an
unquestionable victory. In the long run this may not be an unmixed evil.
Victory, complete and dramatic, may be bought too dearly. We need not
triumphs out of this war but the peace of the world.
This war is altogether unlike any previous war, and its ending, like its
development, will follow a course of its own. For a time people's minds
ran into the old grooves, the Germans were going _nach Paris_ and _nach
London_; Lord Curzon filled our minds with a pleasant image of the
Bombay Lancers riding down _Unter den Linden._ But the Versailles
precedent of a council of victors dictating terms to the vanquished is
not now so evidently in men's minds. The utmost the Allies talk upon
now is to say, “We must end the war on German soil.” The Germans talk
frankly of “holding out.” I have guessed that the western offensive will
be chiefly on German soil by next June; it is a mere guess, and I admit
it is quite conceivable that the “push” may still be grinding out its
daily tale of wounded and prisoners in 1918 far from that goal.
None of the combatants expected such a war as this, and the consequence
is that the world at large has no idea how to get out of it. The war may
stay with us like a schoolboy caller, because it does not know how to
go. The Italians said as much to me. “Suppose we get to Innsbruck and
Laibach and Trieste,” they said, “it isn't an end!” Lord Northcliffe,
I am told, came away from Italy with the conviction that the war would
last six years.
There is the clearest evidence that nearly everyone is anxious to get
out of the war now. Nobody at all, except perhaps a few people who may
be called to account, and a handful of greedy profit-seekers, wants to
keep it going. Quietly perhaps and unobtrusively, everyone I know is now
trying to find the way out of the war, and I am convinced that the
same is the case in Germany. That is what makes the Peace-at-any-price
campaign so exasperating. It is like being chased by clamorous geese
across a common in the direction in which you want to go. But how are
we to get out--with any credit--in such a way as to prevent a subsequent
collapse into another war as frightful?
At present three programmes are before the world of the way in which the
war can be ended. The first of these assumes a complete predominance
of our Allies. It has been stated in general terms by Mr. Asquith.
Evacuation, reparation, due punishment of those responsible for the war,
and guarantees that nothing of the sort shall happen again. There is as
yet no mention of the nature of these guarantees. Just exactly what is
to happen to Poland, Austria, and the Turkish Empire does not appear in
this prospectus. The German Chancellor is equally elusive. The Kaiser
has stampeded the peace-at-any-price people of Great Britain by
proclaiming that Germany wants peace. We knew that. But what sort
of peace? It would seem that we are promised vaguely evacuation and
reparation on the western frontier, and in addition there are to be
guarantees--but it is quite evident that they are altogether different
guarantees from Mr. Asquith's--that nothing of the sort is ever to
happen again. The programme of the British and their Allies seems
to contemplate something like a forcible disarmament and military
occupation of Belgium, the desertion of Serbia and Russia, and the
surrender to Germany of every facility for a later and more successful
German offensive in the west. But it is clear that on these terms as
stated the war must go on to the definite defeat of one side or the
other, or a European chaos. They are irreconcilable sets of terms.
Yet it is hard to say how they can be modified on either side, if the
war is to be decided only between the belligerents and by standards of
national interest only, without reference to any other considerations.
Our Allies would be insane to leave the Hohenzollern at the end of
the war with a knife in his hand, after the display he has made of
his quality. To surrender his knife means for the Hohenzollern the
abandonment of his dreams, the repudiation of the entire education and
training of Germany for half a century. When we realise the fatality of
this antagonism, we realise how it is that, in this present anticipation
of hell, the weary, wasted and tormented nations must still sustain
their monstrous dreary struggle. And that is why this thought that
possible there may be a side way out, a sort of turning over of the
present endlessly hopeless game into a new and different and manageable
game through the introduction of some external factor, creeps and
spreads as I find it creeping and spreading.
That is what the finer intelligences of America are beginning to
realise, and why men in Europe continually turn their eyes to America,
with a surmise, with a doubt.
A point of departure for very much thinking in this matter is the recent
speech of President Wilson that heralded the present discussion. All
Europe was impressed by the truth, and by President Wilson's recognition
of the truth, that from any other great war after this America will
be unable to abstain. Can America come into this dispute at the end to
insist upon something better than a new diplomatic patchwork, and so
obviate the later completer Armageddon? Is there, above the claims
and passions of Germany, France, Britain, and the rest of them, a
conceivable right thing to do for all mankind, that it might also be in
the interest of America to support? Is there a Third Party solution, so
to speak, which may possibly be the way out from this war?
And further I would go on to ask, is not this present exchange of Notes,
appealing to the common sense of the world, really the beginning, and
the proper beginning, of the unprecedented Peace Negotiations to end
this unprecedented war? And, I submit, the longer this open discussion
goes on before the doors close upon the secret peace congress the better
for mankind.
2
Let me sketch out here what I conceive to be the essentials of a world
settlement. Some of the items are the mere commonplaces of everyone who
discusses this question; some are less frequently insisted upon. I have
been joining up one thing to another, suggestions I have heard from
this man and that, and I believe that it is really possible to state a
solution that will be acceptable to the bulk of reasonable men all about
the world. Directly we put the panic-massacres of Dinant and Louvain,
the crime of the _Lusitania_ and so on into the category of symptoms
rather than essentials, outrages that call for special punishments and
reparations, but that do not enter further into the ultimate settlement,
we can begin to conceive a possible world treaty. Let me state the broad
outlines of this pacification. The outlines depend one upon the other;
each is a condition of the other. It is upon these lines that the
thoughtful, as distinguished from the merely the combative people, seem
to be drifting everywhere.
In the first place, it is agreed that there would have to be an
identical treaty between all the great powers of the world binding them
to certain things. It would have to provide:--
That the few great industrial states capable of producing modern war
equipment should take over and control completely the manufacture of all
munitions of war in the world. And that they should absolutely close the
supply of such material to all the other states in the world. This is a
far easier task than many people suppose. War has now been so developed
on its mechanical side that the question of its continuance or abolition
rests now entirely upon four or five great powers.
Next comes the League of Peace idea; that there should be an
International Tribunal for the discussion and settlement of
international disputes. That the dominating powers should maintain land
and sea forces only up to a limit agreed upon and for internal police
use only or for the purpose of enforcing the decisions of the Tribunal.
That they should all be bound to attack and suppress any power amongst
them which increases its war equipment beyond its defined limits.
That much has already been broached in several quarters. But so far is
not enough. It ignores the chief processes of that economic war that
aids and abets and is inseparably a part of modern international
conflicts. If we are to go as far as we have already stated in the
matter of international controls, then we must go further and provide
that the International Tribunal should have power to consider and set
aside all tariffs and localised privileges that seem grossly unfair or
seriously irritating between the various states of the world. It
should have power to pass or revise all new tariff, quarantine, alien
exclusion, or the like legislation affecting international relations.
Moreover, it should take over and extend the work of the International
Bureau of Agriculture at Rome with a view to the control of all staple
products. It should administer the sea law of the world, and control and
standardise freights in the common interests of mankind. Without these
provisions it would be merely preventing the use of certain weapons; it
would be doing nothing to prevent countries strangling or suffocating
each other by commercial warfare. It would not abolish war.
Now upon this issue people do not seem to me to be yet thinking very
clearly. It is the exception to find anyone among the peace talkers who
really grasps how inseparably the necessity for free access for everyone
to natural products, to coal and tropical products, e.g. free shipping
at non-discriminating tariffs, and the recognition by a Tribunal of the
principle of common welfare in trade matters, is bound up with the ideal
of a permanent world peace. But any peace that does not provide for
these things will be merely laying down of the sword in order to take up
the cudgel. And a “peace” that did not rehabilitate industrial Belgium,
Poland, and the north of France would call imperatively for the
imposition upon the Allies of a system of tariffs in the interests of
these countries, and for a bitter economic “war after the war” against
Germany. That restoration is, of course, an implicit condition to any
attempt to set up an economic peace in the world.
These things being arranged for the future, it would be further
necessary to set up an International Boundary Commission, subject to
certain defining conditions agreed upon by the belligerents, to re-draw
the map of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This war does afford an occasion
such as the world may never have again of tracing out the “natural map”
of mankind, the map that will secure the maximum of homogeneity and the
minimum of racial and economic freedom. All idealistic people hope for
a restored Poland. But it is a childish thing to dream of a contented
Poland with Posen still under the Prussian heel, with Cracow cut off,
and without a Baltic port. These claims of Poland to completeness have a
higher sanction than the mere give and take of belligerents in congress.
Moreover this International Tribunal, if it was indeed to prevent war,
would need also to have power to intervene in the affairs of any country
or region in a state of open and manifest disorder, for the protection
of foreign travellers and of persons and interests localised in that
country but foreign to it.
Such an agreement as I have here sketched out would at once lift
international politics out of the bloody and hopeless squalor of
the present conflict. It is, I venture to assert, the peace of the
reasonable man in any country whatever. But it needs the attention
of such a disengaged people as the American people to work it out and
supply it with--weight. It needs putting before the world with some sort
of authority greater than its mere entire reasonableness. Otherwise
it will not come before the minds of ordinary men with the effect of a
practicable proposition. I do not see any such plant springing from the
European battlefields. It is America's supreme opportunity. And yet it
is the common sense of the situation, and the solution that must satisfy
a rational German as completely as a rational Frenchman or Englishman.
It has nothing against it but the prejudice against new and entirely
novel things.
3
In throwing out the suggestion that America should ultimately undertake
the responsibility of proposing a world peace settlement, I admit that
I run counter to a great deal of European feeling. Nowhere in Europe now
do people seem to be in love with the United States. But feeling is
a colour that passes. And the question is above matters of feeling.
Whether the belligerents dislike Americans or the Americans dislike the
belligerents is an incidental matter. The main question is of the duty
of a great and fortunate nation towards the rest of the world and the
future of mankind.
I do not know how far Americans are aware of the trend of feeling in
Europe at the present time. Both France and Great Britain have a sense
of righteousness in this war such as no nation, no people, has ever felt
in war before. We know we are fighting to save all the world from the
rule of force and the unquestioned supremacy of the military idea. Few
Frenchmen or Englishmen can imagine the war presenting itself to an
American intelligence under any other guise. At the invasion of Belgium
we were astonished that America did nothing. At the sinking of the
_Lusitania_ all Europe looked to America. The British mind contemplates
the spectacle of American destroyers acting as bottleholders to German
submarines with a dazzled astonishment. “Manila,” we gasp. In England we
find excuses for America in our own past. In '64 we betrayed Denmark; in
'70 we deserted France. The French have not these memories. They do
not understand the damning temptations of those who feel they are
“_au-dessus de la melee._” They believe they had some share in the
independence of America, that there is a sacred cause in republicanism,
that there are grounds for a peculiar sympathy between France and the
United States in republican institutions. They do not realise that
Germany and America have a common experience in recent industrial
development, and a common belief in the “degeneracy” of all nations with
a lower rate of trade expansion. They do not realise how a political
campaign with the slogan of “Peace and a Full Dinner-Pail” looks in the
middle west, what an honest, simple, rational appeal it makes there.
Atmospheres alter values. In Europe, strung up to tragic and majestic
issues, to Europe gripping a gigantic evil in a death struggle, that
would seem an inscription worthy of a pigsty. A child in Europe would
know now that the context is, “until the bacon-buyer calls,” and it is
difficult to realise that adult citizens in America may be incapable of
realising that obvious context.
I set these things down plainly. There is a very strong disposition in
all the European countries to believe America fundamentally indifferent
to the rights and wrongs of the European struggle; sentimentally
interested perhaps, but fundamentally indifferent. President Wilson
is regarded as a mere academic sentimentalist by a great number of
Europeans. There is a very widespread disposition to treat America
lightly and contemptuously, to believe that America, as one man put it
to me recently, “hasn't the heart to do anything great or the guts to do
anything wicked.” There is a strong undercurrent of hostility therefore
to the idea of America having any voice whatever in the final settlement
after the war. It is not for a British writer to analyse the appearance
that have thus affected American world prestige. I am telling what I
have observed.
Let me relate two trivial anecdotes.
X came to my hotel in Paris one day to take me to see a certain
munitions organisation. He took from his pocket a picture postcard that
had been sent him by a well-meaning American acquaintance from America.
It bore a portrait of General Lafayette, and under it was printed the
words, “General Lafayette, _Colonel in the United States army._”
“Oh! These Americans!” said X with a gesture.
And as I returned to Paris from the French front, our train stopped at
some intermediate station alongside of another train of wounded
men. Exactly opposite our compartment was a car. It arrested our
conversation. It was, as it were, an ambulance _de grand luxe_; it was a
thing of very light, bright wood and very golden decorations; at one end
of it was painted very large and fair the Stars and Stripes, and at the
other fair-sized letters of gold proclaimed--I am sure the lady will
not resent this added gleam of publicity--“Presented by Mrs. William
Vanderbilt.”
My companions were French writers and French military men, and they were
discussing with very keen interest that persistent question, “the ideal
battery.” But that ambulance sent a shaft of light into our carriage,
and we stared together.
Then Colonel Z pointed with two fingers and remarked to us, without any
excess of admiration:
“_America!_”
Then he shrugged his shoulders and pulled down the corners of his mouth.
We felt there was nothing more to add to that, and after a little pause
the previous question was resumed.
I state these things in order to make it clear that America will start
at a disadvantage when she starts upon the mission of salvage and
reconciliation which is, I believe, her proper role in this world
conflict. One would have to be blind and deaf on this side to be
ignorant of European persuasion of America's triviality. I would not
like to be an American travelling in Europe now, and those I meet here
and there have some of the air of men who at any moment may be
dunned for a debt. They explode without provocation into excuses and
expostulations.
And I will further confess that when Viscount Grey answered the
intimations of President Wilson and ex-President Taft of an American
initiative to found a World League for Peace, by asking if America
was prepared to back that idea with force, he spoke the doubts of all
thoughtful European men. No one but an American deeply versed in the
idiosyncrasies of the American population can answer that question, or
tell us how far the delusion of world isolation which has prevailed in
America for several generations has been dispelled. But if the answer
to Lord Grey is “Yes,” then I think history will emerge with a complete
justification of the obstinate maintenance of neutrality by America. It
is the end that reveals a motive. It is our ultimate act that sometimes
teaches us our original intention. No one can judge the United States
yet. Were you neutral because you are too mean and cowardly, or too
stupidly selfish, or because you had in view an end too great to be
sacrificed to a moment of indignant pride and a force in reserve too
precious to dispel? That is the still open question for America.
Every country is a mixture of many strands. There is a Base America,
there is a Dull America, there is an Ideal and Heroic America. And I
am convinced that at present Europe underrates and misjudges the
possibilities of the latter.
All about the world to-day goes a certain freemasonry of thought. It is
an impalpable and hardly conscious union of intention. It thinks not
in terms of national but human experience; it falls into directions and
channels of thinking that lead inevitably to the idea of a world-state
under the rule of one righteousness. In no part of the world is this
modern type of mind so abundantly developed, less impeded by antiquated
and perverse political and religious forms, and nearer the sources of
political and administrative power, than in America. It does not seem to
matter what thousand other things America may happen to be, seeing that
it is also that. And so, just as I cling to the belief, in spite of
hundreds of adverse phenomena, that the religious and social stir of
these times must ultimately go far to unify mankind under the kingship
of God, so do I cling also to the persuasion that there are intellectual
forces among the rational elements in the belligerent centres, among
the other neutrals and in America, that will co-operate in enabling the
United States to play that role of the Unimpassioned Third Party, which
becomes more and more necessary to a generally satisfactory ending of
the war.
4
The idea that the settlement of this war must be what one might call an
unimpassioned settlement or, if you will, a scientific settlement or a
judicial and not a treaty settlement, a settlement, that is, based upon
some conception of what is right and necessary rather than upon the
relative success or failure of either set of belligerents to make its
Will the standard of decision, is one that, in a great variety of forms
and partial developments, I find gaining ground in the most different
circles. The war was an adventure, it was the German adventure under the
Hohenzollern tradition, to dominate the world. It was to be the last of
the Conquests. It has failed. Without calling upon the reserve strength
of America the civilised world has defeated it, and the war continues
now partly upon the issue whether it shall be made for ever impossible,
and partly because Germany has no organ but its Hohenzollern
organisation through which it can admit its failure and develop its
latent readiness for a new understanding on lines of mutual toleration.
For that purpose nothing more reluctant could be devised than
Hohenzollern imperialism. But the attention of every new combatant--it
is not only Germany now--has been concentrated upon military
necessities; every nation is a clenched nation, with its powers of
action centred in its own administration, bound by many strategic
threats and declarations, and dominated by the idea of getting and
securing advantages. It is inevitable that a settlement made in a
conference of belligerents alone will be shortsighted, harsh, limited by
merely incidental necessities, and obsessed by the idea of hostilities
and rivalries continuing perennially; it will be a trading of advantages
for subsequent attacks. It will be a settlement altogether different in
effect as well as in spirit from a world settlement made primarily to
establish a new phase in the history of mankind.
Let me take three instances of the impossibility of complete victory
_on either side_ giving a solution satisfactory to the conscience and
intelligence of reasonable men.
The first--on which I will not expatiate, for everyone knows of its
peculiar difficulty--is Poland.
The second is a little one, but one that has taken hold of my
imagination. In the settlement of boundaries preceding this war the
boundary between Serbia and north-eastern Albania was drawn with an
extraordinary disregard of the elementary needs of the Albanians of that
region. It ran along the foot of the mountains which form their summer
pastures and their refuge from attack, and it cut their mountains off
from their winter pastures and market towns. Their whole economic life
was cut to pieces and existence rendered intolerable for them. Now an
intelligent Third Party settling Europe would certainly restore these
market towns, Ipek, Jakova, and Prisrend, to Albania. But the Albanians
have no standing in this war; theirs is the happy lot that might have
fallen to Belgium had she not resisted; the war goes to and fro through
Albania; and when the settlement comes, it is highly improbable that
the slightest notice will be taken of Albania's plight in the region. In
which case these particular Albanians will either be driven into exile
to America or they will be goaded to revolt, which will be followed no
doubt by the punitive procedure usual in the Balkan peninsula.
For my third instance I would step from a matter as small as three
market towns and the grazing of a few thousand head of sheep to a matter
as big as the world. What is going to happen to the shipping of the
world after this war? The Germans, with that combination of cunning
and stupidity which baffles the rest of mankind, have set themselves to
destroy the mercantile marine not merely of Britain and France but of
Norway and Sweden, Holland, and all the neutral countries. The German
papers openly boast that they are building up a big mercantile marine
that will start out to take up the world's overseas trade directly peace
is declared. Every such boast receives careful attention in the British
press. We have heard a very great deal about the German will-to-power
in this war, but there is something very much older and tougher and less
blatant and conspicuous, the British will. In the British papers there
has appeared and gained a permanent footing this phrase, “ton for ton.”
This means that Britain will go on fighting until she has exacted and
taken over from Germany the exact equivalent of all the British shipping
Germany has submarined. People do not realise that a time may come when
Germany will be glad and eager to give Russia, France and Italy all that
they require of her, when Great Britain may be quite content to let
her allies make an advantageous peace and herself still go on fighting
Germany. She does not intend to let that furtively created German
mercantile marine ship or coal or exist upon the high seas--so long as
it can be used as an economic weapon against her. Neither Britain nor
France nor Italy can tolerate anything of the sort.
It has been the peculiar boast of Great Britain that her shipping has
been unpatriotic. She has been the impartial carrier of the whole world.
Her shippers may have served their own profit; they have never served
hers. The fluctuations of freight charges may have been a universal
nuisance, but they have certainly not been an aggressive national
conspiracy. It is Britain's case against any German ascendancy at sea,
an entirely convincing case, that such an ascendancy would be used
ruthlessly for the advancement of German world power. The long-standing
freedom of the seas vanishes at the German touch. So beyond the present
war there opens the agreeable prospect of a mercantile struggle, a
bitter freight war and a war of Navigation Acts for the ultimate control
in the interests of Germany or of the Anti-German allies, of the world's
trade.
Now how in any of these three cases can the bargaining and trickery of
diplomatists and the advantage-hunting of the belligerents produce any
stable and generally beneficial solution? What all the neutrals want,
what every rational and far-sighted man in the belligerent countries
wants, what the common sense of the whole world demands, is neither the
“ascendancy” of Germany nor the “ascendancy” of Great Britain nor the
“ascendancy” of any state or people or interest in the shipping of the
world. The plain right thing is a world shipping control, as impartial
as the Postal Union. What right and reason and the welfare of coming
generations demand in Poland is a unified and autonomous Poland,
with Cracow, Danzig, and Posen brought into the same Polish-speaking
ring-fence with Warsaw. What everyone who has looked into the Albanian
question desires is that the Albanians shall pasture their flocks and
market their sheepskins in peace, free of Serbian control. In every
country at present at war, the desire of the majority of people is for
a non-contentious solution that will neither crystallise a triumph nor
propitiate an enemy, but which will embody the economic and ethnological
and geographical common sense of the matter. But while the formulae
of national belligerence are easy, familiar, blatant, and instantly
present, the gentler, greater formulae of that wider and newer world
pacifism has still to be generally understood. It is so much easier to
hate and suspect than negotiate generously and patiently; it is so
much harder to think than to let go in a shrill storm of hostility. The
rational pacifist is hampered not only by belligerency, but by a sort
of malignant extreme pacifism as impatient and silly as the extremest
patriotism.
5
I sketch out these ideas of a world pacification from a third-party
standpoint, because I find them crystallising out in men's minds. I note
how men discuss the suggestion that America may play a large part in
such a permanent world pacification. There I end my account rendered.
These things are as much a part of my impression of the war as a
shell-burst on the Carso or the yellow trenches at Martinpuich. But I
do not know how opinion is going in America, and I am quite unable to
estimate the power of these new ideas I set down, relative to the blind
forces of instinct and tradition that move the mass of mankind. On the
whole I believe more in the reason-guided will-power of men than I did
in the early half of 1914. If I am doubtful whether after all this war
will “end war,” I think on the other hand it has had such an effect of
demonstration that it may start a process of thought and conviction,
it may sow the world with organisations and educational movements
considerable enough to grapple with an either arrest or prevent the next
great war catastrophe. I am by no means sure even now that this is not
the last great war in the experience of men. I still believe it may be.
The most dangerous thing in the business so far is concerned is the wide
disregard of the fact that national economic fighting is bound to cause
war, and the almost universal ignorance of the necessity of subjecting
shipping and overseas and international trade to some kind of
international control. These two things, restraint of trade and
advantage of shipping, are the chief material causes of anger between
modern states. But they would not be in themselves dangerous things if
it were not for the exaggerated delusions of kind and difference, and
the crack-brained “loyalties” arising out of these, that seem still to
rule men's minds. Years ago I came to the conviction that much of the
evil in human life was due to the inherent vicious disposition of the
human mind to intensify classification.[*See my “First and Last Things,”
Book I. and my “Modern Utopia,” Chapter X.] I do not know how it will
strike the reader, but to me this war, this slaughter of eight or nine
million people, is due almost entirely to this little, almost universal
lack of clear-headedness; I believe that the share of wickedness in
making war is quite secondary to the share of this universal shallow
silliness of outlook. These effigies of emperors and kings and statesmen
that lead men into war, these legends of nationality and glory, would
collapse before our universal derision, if they were not stuffed tight
and full with the unthinking folly of the common man.
There is in all of us an indolent capacity for suffering evil and
dangerous things, that I contemplate each year of my life with a
deepening incredulity. I perceive we suffer them; I record the futile
protests of the intelligence. It seems to me incredible that men should
not rise up out of this muddy, bloody, wasteful mess of a world war,
with a resolution to end for ever the shams, the prejudices, the
pretences and habits that have impoverished their lives, slaughtered our
sons, and wasted the world, a resolution so powerful and sustained that
nothing could withstand it.
But it is not apparent that any such will arises. Does it appear at all?
I find it hard to answer that question because my own answer varies with
my mood. There are moods when it seems to me that nothing of the sort
is happening. This war has written its warning in letters of blood and
flame and anguish in the skies of mankind for two years and a half. When
I look for the collective response to that warning, I see a multitude
of little chaps crawling about their private ends like mites in an old
cheese. The kings are still in their places, not a royal prince has been
killed in this otherwise universal slaughter; when the fatuous portraits
of the monarchs flash upon the screen the widows and orphans still break
into loyal song. The ten thousand religions of mankind are still ten
thousand religions, all busy at keeping men apart and hostile. I see
scarcely a measurable step made anywhere towards that world kingdom of
God, which is, I assert, the manifest solution, the only formula that
can bring peace to all mankind. Mankind as a whole seems to have learnt
nothing and forgotten nothing in thirty months of war.
And then on the other hand I am aware of much quiet talking. This
book tells of how I set out to see the war, and it is largely
conversation.... Perhaps men have always expected miracles to happen;
if one had always lived in the night and only heard tell of the day, I
suppose one would have expected dawn to come as a vivid flash of light.
I suppose one would still think it was night long after the things about
one had crept out of the darkness into visibility. In comparison with
all previous wars there has been much more thinking and much more
discussion. If most of the talk seems to be futile, if it seems as if
everyone were talking and nobody doing, it does not follow that things
are not quietly slipping and sliding out of their old adjustments
amidst the babble and because of the babble. Multitudes of men must be
struggling with new ideas. It is reasonable to argue that there must
be reconsideration, there must be time, before these millions of mental
efforts can develop into a new collective purpose and really _show_--in
consequences.
But that they will do so is my hope always and, on the whole, except in
moods of depression and impatience, my belief. When one has travelled
to a conviction so great as mine it is difficult to doubt that other men
faced by the same universal facts will not come to the same conclusion.
I believe that only through a complete simplification o religion to its
fundamental idea, to a world-wide realisation of God as the king of the
heart and of all mankind, setting aside monarchy and national egotism
altogether, can mankind come to any certain happiness and security. The
precedent of Islam helps my faith in the creative inspiration of such
a renascence of religion. The Sikh, the Moslem, the Puritan have shown
that men can fight better for a Divine Idea than for any flag or monarch
in the world. It seems to me that illusions fade and effigies lose
credit everywhere. It is a very wonderful thing to me that China is now
a republic.... I take myself to be very nearly an average man, abnormal
only by reason of a certain mental rapidity. I conceive myself to be
thinking as the world thinks, and if I find no great facts, I find a
hundred little indications to reassure me that God comes. Even those who
have neither the imagination nor the faith to apprehend God as a
reality will, I think, realise presently that the Kingdom of God over
a world-wide system of republican states, is the only possible formula
under which we may hope to unify and save mankind.