‘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.’
‘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.’
‘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, theseatrocities 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 ofkindness 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, theNew York Tribuneis 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 moreconspicuously 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]
‘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 moreconspicuously 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 theDaily Mailfor 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 attractedto 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 ourside, 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, weshould 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 whenwe 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’ whosepunishment 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,ourshells 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 blinkersdeprives 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-occupationshouldoccupy the whole of life, but that itwillif 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 maintainthe 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) revealsomething 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 upontheir 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 themercy 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 andopportunities 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 iftheyremain 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 sociallyconscious 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 willproscribe, 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.Thatwould 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,isthe 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 thisand 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.
ITwill 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 againstThe 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 isnotthat 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 wasevidently 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 ofa 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:—