CURRENT HISTORY

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE

THE EUROPEAN WAR

VOLUME I.

From the Beginning to March, 1915

With Index

NEW YORK
THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
1915

Copyright 1914, 1915,
By The New York Times Company

CONTENTS

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

ARNOLD BENNETT. See Page 60.

“Common Sense About the War”

By George Bernard Shaw.

I.

The time has now come to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly
about the war. At first the mere horror of it stunned the more thoughtful of us; and
even now only those who are not in actual contact with or bereaved relation to its
heartbreaking wreckage can think sanely about it, or endure to hear others discuss it
coolly. As to the thoughtless, well, not for a moment dare I suggest that for the
first few weeks they were all scared out of their wits; for I know too well that the
British civilian does not allow his perfect courage to be questioned; only
experienced soldiers and foreigners are allowed the infirmity of fear. But they
certainly were—shall I say a little upset? They felt in that solemn hour that
England was lost if only one single traitor in their midst let slip the truth about
anything in the universe. It was a perilous time for me. I do not hold my tongue
easily; and my inborn dramatic faculty and professional habit as a playwright prevent
me from taking a one-sided view even when the most probable result of taking a
many-sided one is prompt lynching. Besides, until Home Rule emerges from its present
suspended animation, I shall retain my Irish capacity for criticising England with
something of the detachment of a foreigner, and perhaps with a certain slightly
malicious taste for taking the conceit out of her. Lord Kitchener made a mistake the
other day in rebuking the Irish volunteers for not rallying faster to the defense of
“their country.” They do not regard it as their country yet. He should have asked
them to come forward as usual and help poor old England through a stiff fight. Then
it would have been all right.

Having thus frankly confessed my bias, which you can allow for as a rifleman
allows for the wind, I give my views for what they are worth. They will be of some
use; because, however blinded I may be by prejudice or perversity, my prejudices in
this matter are not those which blind the British patriot, and therefore I am fairly
sure to see some things that have not yet struck him.

And first, I do not see this war as one which has welded Governments and peoples
into complete and sympathetic solidarity as against the common enemy. I see the
people of England united in a fierce detestation and defiance of the views and acts
of Prussian Junkerism. And I see the German people stirred to the depths by a similar
antipathy to English Junkerism, and anger at the apparent treachery and duplicity of
the attack made on them by us in their extremest peril from France and Russia. I see
both nations duped, but alas! not quite unwillingly duped, by their Junkers and
Militarists into wreaking on one another the wrath they should have {12}spent in destroying
Junkerism and Militarism in their own country. And I see the Junkers and Militarists
of England and Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many
years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as the dominant
military power in the world. No doubt the heroic remedy for this tragic
misunderstanding is that both armies should shoot their officers and go home to
gather in their harvests in the villages and make a revolution in the towns; and
though this is not at present a practicable solution, it must be frankly mentioned,
because it or something like it is always a possibility in a defeated conscript army
if its commanders push it beyond human endurance when its eyes are opening to the
fact that in murdering its neighbours it is biting off its nose to vex its face,
besides riveting the intolerable yoke of Militarism and Junkerism more tightly than
ever on its own neck. But there is no chance—or, as our Junkers would put it,
no danger—of our soldiers yielding to such an ecstasy of common sense. They
have enlisted voluntarily; they are not defeated nor likely to be; their
communications are intact and their meals reasonably punctual; they are as pugnacious
as their officers; and in fighting Prussia they are fighting a more deliberate,
conscious, tyrannical, personally insolent, and dangerous Militarism than their own.
Still, even for a voluntary professional army, that possibility exists, just as for
the civilian there is a limit beyond which taxation, bankruptcy, privation, terror,
and inconvenience cannot be pushed without revolution or a social dissolution more
ruinous than submission to conquest. I mention all this, not to make myself wantonly
disagreeable, but because military persons, thinking naturally that there is nothing
like leather, are now talking of this war as likely to become a permanent institution
like the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s, forgetting, I think, that the rate
of consumption maintained by modern military operations is much greater relatively to
the highest possible rate of production maintainable under the restrictions of war
time than it has ever been before.

The Day of Judgment.

The European settlement at the end of the war will be effected, let us hope, not
by a regimental mess of fire-eaters sitting around an up-ended drum in a vanquished
Berlin or Vienna, but by some sort of Congress in which all the Powers (including,
very importantly, the United States of America) will be represented. Now I foresee a
certain danger of our being taken by surprise at that Congress, and making ourselves
unnecessarily difficult and unreasonable, by presenting ourselves to it in the
character of Injured Innocence. We shall not be accepted in that character. Such a
Congress will most certainly regard us as being, next to the Prussians (if it makes
even that exception), the most quarrelsome people in the universe. I am quite
conscious of the surprise and scandal this anticipation may cause among my more
highminded (hochnaesig, the Germans call it) readers. Let me therefore break
it gently by expatiating for a while on the subject of Junkerism and Militarism
generally, and on the history of the literary propaganda of war between England and
Potsdam which has been going on openly for the last forty years on both sides. I beg
the patience of my readers during this painful operation. If it becomes unbearable,
they can always put the paper down and relieve themselves by calling the Kaiser
Attila and Mr. Keir Hardie a traitor twenty times or so. Then they will feel, I hope,
refreshed enough to resume. For, after all, abusing the Kaiser or Keir Hardie or me
will not hurt the Germans, whereas a clearer view of the political situation will
certainly help us. Besides, I do not believe that the trueborn Englishman in his
secret soul relishes the pose of Injured Innocence any more than I do myself. He puts
it on only because he is told that it is respectable.

Junkers All.

What is a Junker? Is it a German {13}officer of twenty-three, with offensive manners, and a
habit of cutting down innocent civilians with his sabre? Sometimes; but not at all
exclusively that or anything like that. Let us resort to the dictionary. I turn to
the Encyclopaedisches Woerterbuch of Muret Sanders. Excuse its quaint
German-English.

Junker = Young nobleman, younker, lording, country squire, country
gentleman, squirearch. Junkerberrschaft = squirearchy, landocracy.
Junkerleben = life of a country gentleman, (figuratively) a jolly life.
Junkerpartei = country party. Junkerwirtschaft = doings of the country
party.

Thus we see that the Junker is by no means peculiar to Prussia. We may claim to
produce the article in a perfection that may well make Germany despair of ever
surpassing us in that line. Sir Edward Grey is a Junker from his topmost hair to the
tips of his toes; and Sir Edward is a charming man, incapable of cutting down even an
Opposition front bencher, or of telling a German he intends to have him shot. Lord
Cromer is a Junker. Mr. Winston Churchill is an odd and not disagreeable compound of
Junker and Yankee: his frank anti-German pugnacity is enormously more popular than
the moral babble (Milton’s phrase) of his sanctimonious colleagues. He is a bumptious
and jolly Junker, just as Lord Curzon is an uppish Junker. I need not string out the
list. In these islands the Junker is literally all over the shop.

It is very difficult for anyone who is not either a Junker or a successful
barrister to get into an English Cabinet, no matter which party is in power, or to
avoid resigning when we strike up the drum. The Foreign Office is a Junker Club. Our
governing classes are overwhelmingly Junker: all who are not Junkers are riff-raff
whose only claim to their position is the possession of ability of some sort: mostly
ability to make money. And, of course, the Kaiser is a Junker, though less true-blue
than the Crown Prince, and much less autocratic than Sir Edward Grey, who, without
consulting us, sends us to war by a word to an ambassador and pledges all our wealth
to his foreign allies by a stroke of his pen.

What Is a Militarist?

Now that we know what a Junker is, let us have a look at the Militarists. A
Militarist is a person who believes that all real power is the power to kill, and
that Providence is on the side of the big battalions. The most famous Militarist at
present, thanks to the zeal with which we have bought and quoted his book, is General
Friedrich von Bernhardi. But we cannot allow the General to take precedence of our
own writers as a Militarist propagandist. I am old enough to remember the beginning
of the anti-German phase of that very ancient propaganda in England. The
Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 left Europe very much taken aback. Up to that date
nobody was afraid of Prussia, though everybody was a little afraid of France; and we
were keeping “buffer States” between ourselves and Russia in the east. Germany had
indeed beaten Denmark; but then Denmark was a little State, and was abandoned in her
hour of need by those who should have helped her, to the great indignation of Ibsen.
Germany had also beaten Austria; but somehow everybody seems able to beat Austria,
though nobody seems able to draw the moral that defeats do not matter as much as the
Militarists think, Austria being as important as ever. Suddenly Germany beat France
right down into the dust, by the exercise of an organized efficiency in war of which
nobody up to then had any conception. There was not a State in Europe that did not
say to itself: “Good Heavens! what would happen if she attacked us?” We in
England thought of our old-fashioned army and our old-fashioned commander George
Ranger (of Cambridge), and our War Office with its Crimean tradition of imbecility;
and we shook in our shoes. But we were not such fools as to leave it at that. We soon
produced the first page of the Bernhardian literature: an anonymous booklet entitled
The Battle of Dorking. It was not the first page of English {14}Militarist literature:
you have only to turn back to the burst of glorification of war which heralded the
silly Crimean campaign (Tennyson’s Maud is a surviving sample) to find paeans
to Mars which would have made Treitschke blush (perhaps they did); but it was the
first page in which it was assumed as a matter of course that Germany and not France
or Russia was England’s natural enemy. The Battle of Dorking had an enormous
sale; and the wildest guesses were current as to its authorship. And its moral was
“To arms; or the Germans will besiege London as they besieged Paris.” From that time
until the present, the British propaganda of war with Germany has never ceased. The
lead given by The Battle of Dorking was taken up by articles in the daily
press and the magazines. Later on came the Jingo fever (anti-Russian, by the way; but
let us not mention that just now), Stead’s Truth About the Navy, Mr. Spenser
Wilkinson, the suppression of the Channel Tunnel, Mr. Robert Blatchford, Mr. Garvin,
Admiral Maxse, Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, The National Review, Lord
Roberts, the Navy League, the imposition of an Imperialist Foreign Secretary on the
Liberal Cabinet, Mr. Wells’s War in the Air (well worth re-reading just now),
and the Dreadnoughts. Throughout all these agitations the enemy, the villain of the
piece, the White Peril, was Prussia and her millions of German conscripts. At first,
in The Battle of Dorking phase, the note was mainly defensive. But from the
moment when the Kaiser began to copy our Armada policy by building a big fleet, the
anti-German agitation became openly aggressive; and the cry that the German fleet or
ours must sink, and that a war between England and Germany was bound to come some
day, speedily ceased to be merely a cry with our Militarists and became an axiom with
them. And what our Militarists said our Junkers echoed; and our Junker diplomatists
played for. The story of how they manoeuvred to hem Germany and Austria in with an
Anglo-Franco-Russian combination will be found told with soldierly directness and
with the proud candor of a man who can see things from his own side only in the
article by Lord Roberts in the current number of The Hibbert Journal (October,
1914). There you shall see also, after the usual nonsense about Nietzsche, the vision
of “British administrators bearing the White Man’s Burden,” of “young men, fresh from
the public schools of Britain, coming eagerly forward to carry on the high traditions
of Imperial Britain in each new dependency which comes under our care,” of “our
fitness as an Imperial race,” of “a great task committed to us by Providence,” of
“the will to conquer that has never failed us,” of our task of “assuming control of
one-fifth of the earth’s surface and the care of one in five of all the inhabitants
of the world.” Not a suggestion that the inhabitants of the world are perhaps able to
take care of themselves. Not even a passing recollection when that White Man’s Burden
is in question that the men outside the British Empire, and even inside the German
Empire, are by no means exclusively black. Only the sancta simplicitas that
glories in “the proud position of England,” the “sympathy, tolerance, prudence and
benevolence of our rule” in the east (as shown, the Kaiser is no doubt sarcastically
remarking, in the Delhi sedition trial), the chivalrous feeling that it is our
highest duty to save the world from the horrible misfortune of being governed by
anybody but those young men fresh from the public schools of Britain. Change the
words Britain and British to Germany and German, and the Kaiser will sign the article
with enthusiasm. His opinion, his attitude (subject to that merely
verbal change) word for word.

Six of One: Half-a-Dozen of The Other.

Now, please observe that I do not say that the agitation was unreasonable. I
myself steadily advocated the formation of a formidable armament, and ridiculed the
notion that, we, who are wasting hundreds of millions annually on idlers and wasters,
could not easily afford double, treble, quadruple our military {15}and naval expenditure. I
advocated the compulsion of every man to serve his country, both in war and peace.
The idlers and wasters perceiving dimly that I meant the cost to come out of their
pockets and meant to use the admission that riches should not exempt a man from
military service as an illustration of how absurd it is to allow them to exempt him
from civil service, did not embrace my advocacy with enthusiasm; so I must reaffirm
it now lest it should be supposed that I am condemning those whose proceedings I am
describing. Though often horribly wrong in principle, they were quite right in
practice as far as they went. But they must stand to their guns now that the guns are
going off. They must not pretend that they were harmless Radical lovers of peace, and
that the propaganda of Militarism and of inevitable war between England and Germany
is a Prussian infamy for which the Kaiser must be severely punished. That is not
fair, not true, not gentlemanly. We began it; and if they met us half-way, as they
certainly did, it is not for us to reproach them. When the German fire-eaters drank
to The Day (of Armageddon) they were drinking to the day of which our Navy League
fire-eaters had first said “It’s bound to come.” Therefore, let us have no more
nonsense about the Prussian Wolf and the British Lamb, the Prussian Machiavelli and
the English Evangelist. We cannot shout for years that we are boys of the bulldog
breed, and then suddenly pose as gazelles. No. When Europe and America come to settle
the treaty that will end this business (for America is concerned in it as much as we
are), they will not deal with us as the lovable and innocent victims of a treacherous
tyrant and a savage soldiery. They will have to consider how these two incorrigibly
pugnacious and inveterately snobbish peoples, who have snarled at one another for
forty years with bristling hair and grinning fangs, and are now rolling over with
their teeth in one another’s throats, are to be tamed into trusty watch-dogs of the
peace of the world. I am sorry to spoil the saintly image with a halo which the
British Jingo journalist sees just now when he looks in the glass; but it must be
done if we are to behave reasonably in the imminent day of reckoning.

And now back to Friedrich von Bernhardi.

General Von Bernhardi.

Like many soldier-authors, Friedrich is very readable; and he maintains the good
and formidable part of the Bismarck tradition: that is, he is not a humbug. He looks
facts in the face; he deceives neither himself nor his readers; and if he were to
tell lies—as he would no doubt do as stoutly as any British, French, or Russian
officer if his country’s safety were at stake—he would know that he was telling
them. Which last we think very bad taste on his part, if not downright
wickedness.

It is true that he cites Frederick the Great as an exemplary master of war and of
Weltpolitik. But his chief praise in this department is reserved for England.
It is from our foreign policy, he says, that he has learnt what our journalists
denounce as “the doctrine of the bully, of the materialist, of the man with gross
ideals: a doctrine of diabolical evil.” He frankly accepts that doctrine from us (as
if our poor, honest muddle-heads had ever formulated anything so intellectual as a
doctrine), and blames us for nothing but for allowing the United States to achieve
their solidarity and become formidable to us when we might have divided them by
backing up the South in the Civil War. He shows in the clearest way that if Germany
does not smash England, England will smash Germany by springing at her the moment she
can catch her at a disadvantage. In a word he prophesies that we, his great masters
in Realpolitik, will do precisely what our Junkers have just made us do, It is
we who have carried out the Bernhardi programme: it is Germany who has neglected it.
He warned Germany to make an alliance with Italy, Austria, Turkey, and America,
before undertaking the subjugation, first of France, then of England. But a prophet
is not with{16}out
honour save in his own country; and Germany has allowed herself to be caught with no
ally but Austria between France and Russia, and thereby given the English Junkers
their opportunity. They have seized it with a punctuality that must flatter Von
Bernhardi, even though the compliment be at the expense of his own country. The
Kaiser did not give them credit for being keener Junkers than his own. It was an
unpleasant, indeed an infuriating surprise. All that a Kaiser could do without
unbearable ignominy to induce them to keep their bulldogs off and give him fair play
with his two redoubtable foes, he did. But they laughed Frederick the Great’s laugh
and hurled all our forces at him, as he might have done to us, on Bernhardian
principles, if he had caught us at the same disadvantage. Officially, the war is
Junker-cut-Junker, militarist-cut-Militarist; and we must fight it out, not
Heuchler-cut-Hypocrite, but hammer and tongs.

Militarist Myopia.

Unofficially, it is quite another matter. Democracy, even Social-Democracy, though
as hostile to British Junkers as to German ones, and under no illusion as to the
obsolescence and colossal stupidity of modern war, need not lack enthusiasm for the
combat, which may serve their own ends better than those of their political
opponents. For Bernhardi the Brilliant and our own very dull Militarists are alike
mad: the war will not do any of the things for which they rushed into it. It is much
more likely to do the things they most dread and deprecate: in fact, it has already
swept them into the very kind of organization they founded an Anti-Socialist League
to suppress. To shew how mad they are, let us suppose the war carries out their
western program to the last item. Suppose France rises from the war victorious, happy
and glorious, with Alsace and Lorraine regained, Rheims cathedral repaired in the
best modern trade style, and a prodigious indemnity in her pocket! Suppose we tow the
German fleet into Portsmouth, and leave Hohenzollern metaphorically under the heel of
Romanoff and actually in a comfortable villa in Chislehurst, the hero of all its tea
parties and the judge of all its gymkhanas! Well, cry the Militarists, suppose it by
all means: could we desire anything better? Now I happen to have a somewhat active
imagination; and it flatly refuses to stop at this convenient point. I must go on
supposing. Suppose France, with its military prestige raised once more to the
Napoleonic point, spends its indemnity in building an invincible Armada, stronger and
nearer to us than the German one we are now out to destroy! Suppose Sir Edward Grey
remonstrates, and Monsieur Delcasse replies, “Russia and France have humbled one
Imperial Bully, and are prepared to humble another. I have not forgotten Fashoda.
Stop us if you can; or turn, if you like, for help to the Germany we have smashed and
disarmed!” Of what use will all this bloodshed be then, with the old situation
reproduced in an aggravated form, the enemy closer to our shores, a raid far more
feasible, the tradition of “natural enmity” to steel the foe, and Waterloo to be
wiped out like Sedan? A child in arms should be able to see that this idiotic notion
of relaxing the military pressure on us by smashing this or that particular Power is
like trying to alter the pressure of the ocean by dipping up a bucket of water from
the North Sea and pouring it into the Bay of Biscay.

I purposely omit more easterly supposings as to what victorious Russia might do.
But a noble emancipation of Poland and Finland at her own expense, and of Bosnia and
Harzegovina at Austria’s, might easily suggest to our nervous Militarists that a
passion for the freedom of Egypt and India might seize her, and remind her that we
were Japan’s ally in the day of Russia’s humiliation in Manchuria. So there at once
is your Balance of Power problem in Asia enormously aggravated by throwing Germany
out of the anti-Russian scale and grinding her to powder. Even in North
Africa—but enough is enough. You can durchhauen your way out of the
frying pan, but only into the fire. Better take Nietzsche’s brave advice, and make it
{17}your point of
honour to “live dangerously.” History shews that it is often the way to live
long.

Learning Nothing: Forgetting Everything.

But let me test the Militarist theory, not by a hypothetical future, but by the
accomplished and irrevocable past. Is it true that nations must conquer or go under,
and that military conquest means prosperity and power for the victor and annihilation
for the vanquished? I have already alluded in passing to the fact that Austria has
been beaten repeatedly: by France, by Italy, by Germany, almost by everybody who has
thought it worth while to have a whack at her; and yet she is one of the Great
Powers; and her alliance has been sought by invincible Germany. France was beaten by
Germany in 1870 with a completeness that seemed impossible; yet France has since
enlarged her territory whilst Germany is still pleading in vain for a place in the
sun. Russia was beaten by the Japanese in Manchuria on a scale that made an end
forever of the old notion that the West is the natural military superior of the East;
yet it is the terror of Russia that has driven Germany into her present desperate
onslaught on France; and it is the Russian alliance on which France and England are
depending for their assurance of ultimate success. We ourselves confess that the
military efficiency with which we have so astonished the Germans is the effect, not
of Waterloo and Inkerman, but of the drubbing we got from the Boers, who we aid
probably have beaten us if we had been anything like their own size. Greece has
lately distinguished herself in war within a few years by a most disgraceful beating
of the Turks. It would be easy to multiply instances from remoter history: for
example, the effect on England’s position of the repeated defeats of our troops by
the French under Luxembourg in the Balance of Power War at the end of the seventeenth
century differed surprisingly little, if at all, from the effect of our subsequent
victories under Marlborough. And the inference from the Militarist theory that the
States which at present count for nothing as military Powers necessarily count for
nothing at all is absurd on the face of it. Monaco seems to be, on the whole, the
most prosperous and comfortable State in Europe.

In short, Militarism must be classed as one of the most inconsiderately foolish of
the bogus “sciences” which the last half century has produced in such profusion, and
which have the common characteristic of revolting all sane souls, and being stared
out of countenance by the broad facts of human experience. The only rule of thumb
that can be hazarded on the strength of actual practice is that wars to maintain or
upset the Balance of Power between States, called by inaccurate people Balance of
Power wars, and by accurate people Jealousy of Power wars, never establish the
desired peaceful and secure equilibrium. They may exercise pugnacity, gratify spite,
assuage a wound to national pride, or enhance or dim a military reputation; but that
is all. And the reason is, as I shall shew very conclusively later on, that there is
only one way in which one nation can really disable another, and that is a way which
no civilized nation dare even discuss.

Are We Hypocrites?

And now I proceed from general considerations to the diplomatic history of the
present case, as I must in order to make our moral position clear. But first, lest I
should lose all credit by the startling incompatibility between the familiar personal
character of our statesmen and the proceedings for which they are officially
responsible, I must say a word about the peculiar psychology of English
statesmanship, not only for the benefit of my English readers (who do not know that
it is peculiar just as they do not know that water has any taste because it is always
in their mouths), but as a plea for a more charitable construction from the wider
world.

We know by report, however unjust it may seem to us, that there is an opinion
abroad, even in the quarters most friendly to us, that our excellent qualities are
marred by an incorrigible hypocrisy. To {18}France we have always been Perfidious Albion. In Germany,
at this moment, that epithet would be scorned as far too flattering to us. Victor
Hugo explained the relative unpopularity of Measure for Measure among
Shakespeare’s plays on the ground that the character of the hypocrite Angelo was a
too faithful dramatization of our national character. Pecksniff is not considered so
exceptional an English gentleman in America as he is in England.

Now we have not acquired this reputation for nothing. The world has no greater
interest in branding England with this particular vice of hypocrisy than in branding
France with it; yet the world does not cite Tartuffe as a typical Frenchman as it
cites Angelo and Pecksniff as typical Englishmen. We may protest against it as
indignantly as the Prussian soldiers protest against their equally universal
reputation for ferocity in plunder and pillage, sack and rapine; but there is
something in it. If you judge an English statesman, by his conscious intentions, his
professions, and his personal charm, you will often find him an amiable, upright,
humane, anxiously truthful man. If you judge him, as a foreigner must, solely on the
official acts for which he is responsible, and which he has to defend in the House of
Commons for the sake of his party, you will often be driven to conclude that this
estimable gentleman is, in point of being an unscrupulous superprig and fool, worse
than Caesar Borgia and General Von Bernhardi rolled into one, and in foreign affairs
a Bismarck in everything except commanding ability, blunt common sense, and freedom
from illusion as to the nature and object of his own diplomacy. And the permanent
officials in whose hands he is will probably deserve all that and something to spare.
Thus you will get that amazing contrast that confronts us now between the
Machiavellian Sir Edward Grey of the Berlin newspapers and the amiable and popular
Sir Edward Grey we know in England. In England we are all prepared to face any World
Congress and say, “We know that Sir Edward Grey is an honest English gentleman, who
meant well as a true patriot and friend of peace; we are quite sure that what he did
was fair and right; and we will not listen to any nonsense to the contrary.” The
Congress will reply, “We know nothing about Sir Edward Grey except what he did; and
as there is no secret and no question as to what he did, the whole story being
recorded by himself, we must hold England responsible for his conduct, whilst taking
your word for the fact, which has no importance for us, that his conduct has nothing
to do with his character.”

Our Intellectual Laziness.

The general truth of the situation is, as I have spent so much of my life in
trying to make the English understand, that we are cursed with a fatal intellectual
laziness, an evil inheritance from the time when our monopoly of coal and iron made
it possible for us to become rich and powerful without thinking or knowing how; a
laziness which is becoming highly dangerous to us now that our monopoly is gone or
superseded by new sources of mechanical energy. We got rich by pursuing our own
immediate advantage instinctively; that is, with a natural childish selfishness; and
when any question of our justification arose, we found it easy to silence it with any
sort of plausible twaddle (provided it flattered us, and did not imply any trouble or
sacrifice) provided by our curates at £70 a year, or our journalists at a penny
a line, or commercial moralists with axes to grind. In the end we became fatheaded,
and not only lost all intellectual consciousness of what we were doing, and with it
all power of objective self-criticism, but stacked up a lumber of pious praises for
ourselves which not only satisfied our corrupted and half atrophied consciences, but
gave us a sense that there is something extraordinarily ungentlemanly and politically
dangerous in bringing these pious phrases to the test of conduct. We carried Luther’s
doctrine of Justification by Faith to the insane point of believing that as long as a
man says what we have agreed to accept as the right thing it does not {19}matter in the least what
he actually does. In fact, we do not clearly see why a man need introduce the subject
of morals at all, unless there is something questionable to be whitewashed. The
unprejudiced foreigner calls this hypocrisy: that is why we call him prejudiced. But
I, who have been a poor man in a poor country, understand the foreigner better.

Now from the general to the particular. In describing the course of the diplomatic
negotiations by which our Foreign Office achieved its design of at last settling
accounts with Germany at the most favourable moment from the Militarist point of
view, I shall have to exhibit our Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs as behaving
almost exactly as we have accused the Kaiser of behaving. Yet I see him throughout as
an honest gentleman, “perplexed in the extreme,” meaning well, revolted at the last
moment by the horror of war, clinging to the hope that in some vague way he could
persuade everybody to be reasonable if they would only come and talk to him as they
did when the big Powers were kept out of the Balkan war, but hopelessly destitute of
a positive policy of any kind, and therefore unable to resist those who had positive
business in hand. And do not for a moment imagine that I think that the conscious Sir
Edward Grey was Othello, and the subconscious, Iago. I do think that the Foreign
Office, of which Sir Edward is merely the figure head, was as deliberately and
consciously bent on a long deferred Militarist war with Germany as the Admiralty was;
and that is saying a good deal. If Sir Edward Grey did not know what he wanted, Mr.
Winston Churchill was in no such perplexity. He was not an “ist” of any sort, but a
straightforward holder of the popular opinion that if you are threatened you should
hit out, unless you are afraid to. Had he had the conduct of the affair he might
quite possibly have averted the war (and thereby greatly disappointed himself and the
British public) by simply frightening the Kaiser. As it was, he had arranged for the
co-operation of the French and British fleets; was spoiling for the fight; and must
have restrained himself with great difficulty from taking off his coat in public
whilst Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey were giving the country the assurances which
were misunderstood to mean that we were not bound to go to war, and not more likely
to do so than usual. But though Sir Edward did not clear up the misunderstanding, I
think he went to war with the heavy heart of a Junker Liberal (such centaurs exist)
and not with the exultation of a Junker Jingo.

I may now, without more than the irreducible minimum of injustice to Sir Edward
Grey, proceed to tell the story of the diplomatic negotiations as they will appear to
the Congress which, I am assuming, will settle the terms on which Europe is to live
more or less happily ever after.

Diplomatic History of the War.

The evidence of how the Junker diplomatists of our Foreign Office let us in for
the war is in the White Paper, Miscellaneous No. 6 (1914), containing correspondence
respecting the European crisis, and since reissued, with a later White Paper and some
extra matter, as a penny bluebook in miniature. In these much-cited and little-read
documents we see the Junkers of all the nations, the men who have been saying for
years “It’s bound to come,” and clamouring in England for compulsory military service
and expeditionary forces, momentarily staggered and not a little frightened by the
sudden realization that it has come at last. They rush round from foreign office to
embassy, and from embassy to palace, twittering “This is awful. Can’t you stop it?
Won’t you be reasonable? Think of the consequences,” etc., etc. One man among them
keeps his head and looks the facts in the face. That man is Sazonoff, the Russian
Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He keeps steadily trying to make Sir Edward Grey face
the inevitable. He says and reiterates, in effect, “You know very well that you
cannot keep out of a European war. You know you are pledged to fight Germany {20}if Germany attacks
France. You know that your arrangments for the fight are actually made; that already
the British army is commanded by a Franco-British Council of War; that there is no
possible honourable retreat for you. You know that this old man in Austria, who would
have been superannuated years ago if he had been an exciseman, is resolved to make
war on Servia, and sent that silly forty-eight hours ultimatum when we were all out
of town so that he could begin fighting before we could get back to sit on his head.
You know that he has the Jingo mob of Vienna behind him. You know that if he makes
war, Russia must mobilize. You know that France is bound to come in with us as you
are with France. You know that the moment we mobilize, Germany, the old man’s ally,
will have only one desperate chance of victory, and that is to overwhelm our ally,
France, with one superb rush of her millions, and then sweep back and meet us on the
Vistula. You know that nothing can stop this except Germany remonstrating with
Austria, and insisting on the Servian case being dealt with by an international
tribunal and not by war. You know that Germany dares not do this, because her
alliance with Austria is her defence against the Franco-Russian alliance, and that
she does not want to do it in any case, because the Kaiser naturally has a strong
class prejudice against the blowing up of Royal personages by irresponsible
revolutionists, and thinks nothing too bad for Servia after the assassination of the
Archduke. There is just one chance of avoiding Armageddon: a slender one, but worth
trying. You averted war in the Algeciras crisis, and again in the Agadir crisis, by
saying you would fight. Try it again. The Kaiser is stiffnecked because he does not
believe you are going to fight this time. Well, convince him that you are. The odds
against him will then be so terrible that he may not dare to support the Austrian
ultimatum to Servia at such a price. And if Austria is thus forced to proceed
judicially against Servia, we Russians will be satisfied; and there will be no
war.”

Sir Edward could not see it. He is a member of a Liberal Government, in a country
where there is no political career for the man who does not put his party’s tenure of
office before every other consideration. What would The Daily News and The
Manchester Guardian have said had he, Bismarck-like, said bluntly: “If war once
breaks out, the old score between England and Prussia will be settled, not by
ambassadors’ tea parties and Areopaguses, but by blood and iron?” In vain did
Sazonoff repeat, “But if you are going to fight, as you know you are, why not say
so?” Sir Edward, being Sir Edward and not Winston Churchill or Lloyd George, could
not admit that he was going to fight. He might have forestalled the dying Pope and
his noble Christian “I bless peace” by a noble, if heathen, “I fight war.” Instead,
he persuaded us all that he was under no obligation whatever to fight. He persuaded
Germany that he had not the slightest serious intention of fighting. Sir Owen Seaman
wrote in Punch an amusing and witty No-Intervention poem. Sporting Liberals
offered any odds that there would be no war for England. And Germany, confident that
with Austria’s help she could break France with one hand and Russia with the other if
England held aloof, let Austria throw the match into the magazine.

The Battery Unmasked.

Then the Foreign Office, always acting through its amiable and popular but
confused instrument Sir Edward, unmasked the Junker-Militarist battery. He suddenly
announced that England must take a hand in the war, though he did not yet tell the
English people so, it being against the diplomatic tradition to tell them anything
until it is too late for them to object. But he told the German Ambassador, Prince
Lichnowsky, caught in a death trap, pleaded desperately for peace with Great Britain.
Would we promise to spare Germany if Belgium were left untouched? No. Would we say on
what conditions we would spare Germany? No. Not if the Germans promised not to annex
French territory? No. Not even if they prom{21}ised not to touch the French colonies? No. Was there no
way out? Sir Edward Grey was frank. He admitted there was just one chance; that
Liberal opinion might not stand the war if the neutrality of Belgium were not
violated. And he provided against that chance by committing England to the war the
day before he let the cat out of the bag in Parliament.

All this is recorded in the language of diplomacy in the White Paper on or between
the lines. That language is not so straightforward as my language; but at the crucial
points it is clear enough. Sazonoff’s tone is politely diplomatic in No. 6; but in
No. 17 he lets himself go. “I do not believe that Germany really wants war; but her
attitude is decided by yours. If you take your stand firmly with France and Russia
there will be no war. If you fail them now, rivers of blood will flow, and you will
in the end be dragged into war.” He was precisely right; but he did not realize that
war was exactly what our Junkers wanted. They did not dare to tell themselves so; and
naturally they did not dare to tell him so. And perhaps his own interest in war was
too strong to make him regret the rejection of his honest advice. To break up the
Austrian Empire and achieve for Russia the Slav Caliphate of South-East Europe whilst
defeating Prussia with the help of France and of Russia’s old enemy and Prussia’s old
ally England, was a temptation so enormous that Sazonoff, in resisting it so far as
to shew Sir Edward Grey frankly the only chance of preventing it, proved himself the
most genuine humanitarian in the diplomatic world.

Number 123.

The decisive communication between Sir Edward Grey and Prince Lichnowsky is
recorded in the famous No. 123. With the rather childish subsequent attempt to
minimize No. 123 on the ground that the Prince was merely an amiable nincompoop who
did not really represent his fiendish sovereign, neither I nor any other serious
person need be concerned. What is beyond all controversy is that after that
conversation Prince Lichnowsky could do nothing but tell the Kaiser that the
Entente, having at last got his imperial head in chancery, was not going to
let him off on any terms, and that it was now a fight to a finish between the British
and German empires. Then the Kaiser said: “We are Germans. God help us!” When a crowd
of foolish students came cheering for the war under his windows, he bade them go to
the churches and pray. His telegrams to the Tsar (the omission of which from the
penny bluebook is, to say the least, not chivalrous) were dignified and pathetic. And
when the Germans, taking a line from the poet they call “unser Shakespeare,” said:
“Come the four quarters of the world in arms and we shall shock them,” it was, from
the romantic militarist point of view, fine. What Junker-led men could do they have
since done to make that thrasonical brag good. But there is no getting over the fact
that, in Tommy Atkins’s phrase, they had asked for it. Their Junkers, like ours, had
drunk to The Day; and they should not have let us choose it after riling us for so
many years. And that is why Sir Edward had a great surprise when he at last owned up
in Parliament.

How the Nation Took It.

The moment he said that we could not “stand aside with our arms folded” and see
our friend and neighbour France “bombarded and battered,” the whole nation rose to
applaud him. All the Foreign Office distrust of public opinion, the concealment of
the Anglo-French plan of campaign, the disguise of the Entente in a quaker’s
hat, the duping of the British public and the Kaiser with one and the same
prevarication, had been totally unnecessary and unpopular, like most of these
ingenuities which diplomatists think subtle and Machiavellian. The British Public had
all along been behind Mr. Winston Churchill. It had wanted Sir Edward to do just what
Sazonoff wanted him to do, and what I, in the columns of The Daily News
proposed he should do nine months ago (I must really be allowed to claim that I am
not merely wise after the event), which was to arm {22}to the teeth regardless of an expense which
to us would have been a mere fleabite, and tell Germany that if she, laid a finger on
France we would unite with France to defeat her, offering her at the same time as
consolation for that threat, the assurance that we would do as much to France if she
wantonly broke the peace in the like fashion by attacking Germany. No unofficial
Englishman worth his salt wanted to snivel hypocritically about our love of peace and
our respect for treaties and our solemn acceptance of a painful duty, and all the
rest of the nauseous mixture of school-master’s twaddle, parish magazine cant, and
cinematograph melodrama with which we were deluged. We were perfectly ready to knock
the Kaiser’s head off just to teach him that if he thought he was going to ride
roughshod over Europe, including our new friends the French, and the plucky little
Belgians, he was reckoning without old England. And in this pugnacious but perfectly
straightforward and human attitude the nation needed no excuses because the nation
honestly did not know that we were taking the Kaiser at a disadvantage, or that the
Franco-Russian alliance had been just as much a menace to peace as the Austro-German
one. But the Foreign Office knew that very well, and therefore began to manufacture
superfluous, disingenuous, and rather sickening excuses at a great rate. The nation
had a clean conscience, and was really innocent of any aggressive strategy: the
Foreign Office was redhanded, and did not want to be found out. Hence its
sermons.

Mr. H.G. Wells Hoists the Country’s Flag.

It was Mr. H.G. Wells who at the critical moment spoke with the nation’s voice.
When he uttered his electric outburst of wrath against “this drilling, trampling
foolery in the heart of Europe” he gave expression to the pent-up exasperation of
years of smouldering revolt against swank and domineer, guff and bugaboo, calling
itself blood and iron, and mailed fist, and God and conscience and anything else that
sounded superb. Like Nietzsche, we were “fed up” with the Kaiser’s imprisonments of
democratic journalists for Majestaetsbeleidigung (monarch disparagement), with
his ancestors, and his mission, and his gospel of submission and obedience for poor
men, and of authority, tempered by duelling, for rich men. The world had become
sore-headed, and desired intensely that they who clatter the sword shall perish by
the sword. Nobody cared twopence about treaties: indeed, it was not for us, who had
seen the treaty of Berlin torn up by the brazen seizure of Bosnia and Herzegovina by
Austria in 1909, and taken that lying down, as Russia did, to talk about the
sacredness of treaties, even if the wastepaper baskets of the Foreign Offices were
not full of torn up “scraps of paper,” and a very good thing too; for General von
Bernhardi’s assumption that circumstances alter treaties is not a page from
Machiavelli: it is a platitude from the law books. The man in the street understood
little or nothing about Servia or Russia or any of the cards with which the
diplomatists were playing their perpetual game of Beggar my Neighbour. We were rasped
beyond endurance by Prussian Militarism and its contempt for us and for human
happiness and common sense; and we just rose at it and went for it. We have set out
to smash the Kaiser exactly as we set out to smash the Mahdi. Mr. Wells never
mentioned a treaty. He said, in effect: “There stands the monster all freedom-loving
men hate; and at last we are going to fight it.” And the public, bored by the
diplomatists, said: “Now you’re talking!” We did not stop to ask our consciences
whether the Prussian assumption that the dominion of the civilized earth belongs to
German culture is really any more bumptious than the English assumption that the
dominion of the sea belongs to British commerce. And in our island security we were
as little able as ever to realize the terrible military danger of Germany’s
geographical position between France and England on her west flank and Russia on her
east: all three leagued for her de{23}struction; and how unreasonable it was to ask Germany to
lose the fraction of a second (much less Sir Maurice de Runsen’s naïve “a few
days’ delay”) in dashing at her Western foe when she could obtain no pledge as to
Western intentions. “We are now in a state of necessity; and Necessity knows no law,”
said the Imperial Chancellor in the Reichstag. “It is a matter of life and death to
us,” said the German Minister for Foreign Affairs to our Ambassador in Berlin, who
had suddenly developed an extraordinary sense of the sacredness of the Treaty of
London, dated 1839, and still, as it happened, inviolate among the torn fragments of
many subsequent and similar “scraps of paper.” Our Ambassador seems to have been of
Sir Maurice’s opinion that there could be no such tearing hurry. The Germans could
enter France through the line of forts between Verdun and Toul if they were really
too flustered to wait a few days on the chance of Sir Edward Grey’s persuasive
conversation and charming character softening Russia and bringing Austria to
conviction of sin. Thereupon the Imperial Chancellor, not being quite an angel, asked
whether we had counted the cost of crossing the path of an Empire fighting for its
life (for these Militarist statesmen do really believe that nations can be killed by
cannon shot). That was a threat; and as we cared nothing about Germany’s peril, and
wouldn’t stand being threatened any more by a Power of which we now had the inside
grip, the fat remained in the fire, blazing more fiercely than ever. There was only
one end possible to such a clash of high tempers, national egotisms, and reciprocal
ignorances.

Delicate Position of Mr. Asquith.

It seemed a splendid chance for the Government to place itself at the head of the
nation. But no British Government within my recollection has ever understood the
nation. Mr. Asquith, true to the Gladstonian tradition (hardly just to Gladstone, by
the way) that a Liberal Prime Minister should know nothing concerning foreign
politics and care less, and calmly insensible to the real nature of the popular
explosion, fell back on 1839, picking up the obvious barrister’s point about the
violation of the neutrality of Belgium, and tried the equally obvious barrister’s
claptrap about “an infamous proposal” on the jury. He assured us that nobody could
have done more for peace than Sir Edward Grey, though the rush to smash the Kaiser
was the most popular thing Sir Edward had ever done.

Besides, there was another difficulty. Mr. Asquith himself, though serenely
persuaded that he is a Liberal statesman, is, in effect, very much what the Kaiser
would have been if he had been a Yorkshireman and a lawyer, instead of being only
half English and the other half Hohenzollern, and an anointed emperor to boot. As far
as popular liberties are concerned, history will make no distinction between Mr.
Asquith and Metternich. He is forced to keep on the safe academic ground of Belgium
by the very obvious consideration that if he began to talk of the Kaiser’s
imprisonments of editors and democratic agitators and so forth, a Homeric laughter,
punctuated with cries of, “How about Denshawai?” “What price Tom Mann?” “Votes for
women!” “Been in India lately?” “Make McKenna Kaiser,” “Or dear old Herbert
Gladstone,” etc., etc., would promptly spoil that pose. The plain fact is that,
Militarism apart, Germany is in many ways more democratic in practice than England;
indeed the Kaiser has been openly reviled as a coward by his Junkers because he falls
short of Mr. Asquith in calm indifference to Liberal principles and blank ignorance
of working-class sympathies, opinions, and interests.

Mr. Asquith had also to distract public attention from the fact that three
official members of his Government, all men of unquestioned and conspicuous
patriotism and intellectual honesty, walked straight out into private life on the
declaration of war. One of them, Mr. John Burns, did so at an enormous personal
sacrifice, and has since maintained a grim silence far more eloquent than the famous
speech {24}Germany
invented for him. It is not generally believed that these three statesmen were
actuated by a passion for the violation of Belgian neutrality.

On the whole, it was impossible for the Government to seize its grand chance and
put itself at the head of the popular movement that responded to Sir Edward Grey’s
declaration: the very simple reason being that the Government does not represent the
nation, and is in its sympathies just as much a Junker government as the Kaiser’s.
And so, what the Government cannot do has to be done by unofficial persons with clean
and brilliant anti-Junker records like Mr. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Neil Lyons,
and Mr. Jerome K. Jerome. Neither Mr. Asquith nor Sir Edward Grey can grasp, as these
real spokesmen of their time do, the fact that we just simply want to put an end to
Potsdamnation, both at home and abroad. Both of them probably think Potsdam a very
fine and enviable institution, and want England to out-Potsdam Potsdam and to
monopolize the command of the seas; a monstrous aspiration. We, I take it, want to
guarantee that command of the sea which is the common heritage of mankind to the
tiniest State and the humblest fisherman that depends on the sea for a livelihood. We
want the North Sea to be as safe for everybody, English or German, as Portland
Place.

The Need for Recrimination.

And now somebody who would rather I had not said all this (having probably talked
dreadful nonsense about Belgium and so forth for a month past) is sure to ask: “Why
all this recrimination? What is done is done. Is it not now the duty of every
Englishman to sink all differences in the face of the common peril?” etc., etc. To
all such prayers to be shielded from that terrible thing, the truth, I must reply
that history consists mainly of recrimination, and that I am writing history because
an accurate knowledge of what has occurred is not only indispensable to any sort of
reasonable behaviour on our part in the face of Europe when the inevitable day of
settlement comes, but because it has a practical bearing on the most perilously
urgent and immediate business before us: the business of the appeal to the nation for
recruits and for enormous sums of money. It has to decide the question whether that
appeal shall be addressed frankly to our love of freedom, and our tradition (none the
less noble and moving because it is so hard to reconcile with the diplomatic facts)
that England is a guardian of the world’s liberty, and not to bad law about an
obsolete treaty, and cant about the diabolical personal disposition of the Kaiser,
and the wounded propriety of a peace-loving England, and all the rest of the slosh
and tosh that has been making John Bull sick for months past. No doubt at first, when
we were all clasping one another’s hands very hard and begging one another not to be
afraid, almost anything was excusable. Even the war notes of Mr. Garvin, which stood
out as the notes of a gentleman amid a welter of scurrilous rubbish and a rather
blackguardly Punch cartoon mocking the agony of Berlin (Punch having
turned its non-interventionist coat very promptly), had sometimes to run: “We know
absolutely nothing of what is happening at the front, except that the heroism of the
British troops will thrill the ages to the last syllable of recorded time,” or words
to that effect. But now it is time to pull ourselves together; to feel our muscle; to
realize the value of our strength and pluck; and to tell the truth unashamed like men
of courage and character, not to shirk it like the official apologists of a Foreign
Office plot.

What Germany Should Have Done.

And first, as I despise critics who put people in the wrong without being able to
set them right, I shall, before I go any further with my criticism of our official
position, do the Government and the Foreign Office the service of finding a correct
official position for them; for I admit that the popular position, though sound as
far as it goes, is too crude for official use. This correct official position can be
found only by considering what Germany should have done, and might have done had she
not {25}been, like our
own Junkers, so fascinated by the Militarist craze, and obsessed by the chronic
Militarist panic, that she was “in too great hurry to bid the devil good morning.”
The matter is simple enough: she should have entrusted the security of her western
frontier to the public opinion of the west of Europe and to America, and fought
Russia, if attacked, with her rear not otherwise defended. The Militarist theory is
that we, France and England, would have immediately sprung at her from behind; but
that is just how the Militarist theory gets its votaries into trouble by assuming
that Europe is a chess board. Europe is not a chess board; but a populous continent
in which only a very few people are engaged in military chess; and even those few
have many other things to consider besides capturing their adversary’s king. Not only
would it have been impossible for England to have attacked Germany under such
circumstances; but if France had done so England could not have assisted her, and
might even have been compelled by public opinion to intervene by way of a joint
protest from England and America, or even by arms, on her behalf if she were
murderously pressed on both flanks. Even our Militarists and diplomatists would have
had reasons for such an intervention. An aggressive Franco-Russian hegemony, if it
crushed Germany, would be quite as disagreeable to us as a German one. Thus Germany
would at worst have been fighting Russia and France with the sympathy of all the
other Powers, and a chance of active assistance from some of them, especially those
who share her hostility to the Russian Government. Had France not attacked
her—and though I am as ignorant of the terms of the Franco-Russian alliance as
Sir Edward Grey is strangely content to be, I cannot see how the French Government
could have justified to its own people a fearfully dangerous attack on Germany had
Russia been the aggressor—Germany would have secured fair play for her fight
with Russia. But even the fight with Russia was not inevitable. The ultimatum to
Servia was the escapade of a dotard: a worse crime than the assassination that
provoked it. There is no reason to doubt the conclusion in Sir Maurice de Bunsen’s
despatch (No. 161) that it could have been got over, and that Russia and Austria
would have thought better of fighting and come to terms. Peace was really on the
cards; and the sane game was to play for it.

The Achilles Heel of Militarism.

Instead, Germany flew at France’s throat, and by incidentally invading Belgium
gave us the excuse our Militarists wanted to attack her with the full sympathy of the
nation. Why did she do this stupid thing? Not because of the counsels of General von
Bernhardi. On the contrary, he had warned her expressly against allowing herself to
be caught between Russia and a Franco-British combination until she had formed a
counterbalancing alliance with America, Italy, and Turkey. And he had most certainly
not encouraged her to depend on England sparing her: on the contrary, he could not
sufficiently admire the wily ruthlessness with which England watches her opportunity
and springs at her foe when the foe is down. (He little knew, poor man, how much he
was flattering our capacity for Realpolitik!) But he had reckoned without his creed’s
fatal and fundamental weakness, which is, that as Junker-Militarism promotes only
stupid people and snobs, and suppresses genuine realists as if they were snakes, it
always turns out when a crisis arrives that “the silly people don’t know their own
silly business.” The Kaiser and his ministers made an appalling mess of their job.
They were inflamed by Bernhardi; but they did not understand him. They swallowed his
flattery, but did not take in his strategy or his warnings. They knew that when the
moment came to face the Franco-Russian alliance, they were to make a magnificient
dash at France and sweep her pieces off the great chess board before the Russians had
time to mobilize; and then return and crush {26}Russia, leaving the conquest of England for another day.
This was honestly as much as their heads could hold at one time; and they were
helplessly unable to consider whether the other conditions postulated by Bernhardi
were present, or indeed, in the excitement of their schoolboyish imaginations, to
remember whether he had postulated any at all. And so they made their dash and put
themselves in the wrong at every point morally, besides making victory humanly
impossible for themselves militarily. That is the nemesis of Militarism: the
Militarist is thrown into a big game which he is too stupid to be able to play
successfully. Philip of Spain tried it 300 years ago; and the ruin he brought on his
empire has lasted to this day. He was so stupid that though he believed himself to be
the chosen instrument of God (as sure a sign of a hopeless fool in a man who cannot
see that every other man is equally an instrument of that Power as it is a guarantee
of wisdom and goodwill in the man who respects his neighbor as himself) he attempted
to fight Drake on the assumption that a cannon was a weapon that no real gentleman
and good Catholic would condescend to handle. Louis XIV. tried again two centuries
ago, and, being a more frivolous fool, got beaten by Marlborough and sent his
great-grandson from the throne to the guillotine. Napoleon tried it 100 years ago. He
was more dangerous, because he had prodigious personal ability and technical military
skill; and he started with the magnificent credential of the French Revolution. All
that carried him farther than the Spanish bigot or the French fop; but he, too,
accreted fools and knaves, and ended defeated in St. Helena after pandering for
twenty years to the appetite of idiots for glory and bloodshed; waging war as “a
great game”; and finding in a field strewn with corpses “un beau spectacle.” In
short, as strong a magnet to fools as the others, though so much abler.

Our Own True Position.

Now comes the question, in what position did this result of a mad theory and a
hopelessly incompetent application of it on the part of Potsdam place our own
Government? It left us quite clearly in the position of the responsible policeman of
the west. There was nobody else in Europe strong enough to chain “the mad dog.”
Belgium and Holland, Norway and Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland could hardly have
been expected to take that duty on themselves, even if Norway and Sweden had not good
reason to be anti-Russian, and the Dutch capitalists were not half convinced that
their commercial prosperity would be greater under German than under native rule. It
will not be contended that Spain could have done anything; and as to Italy, it was
doubtful whether she did not consider herself still a member of the Triple Alliance.
It was evidently England or nobody. For England to have refrained, from hurling
herself into the fray, horse, foot, and artillery, was impossible from every point of
view. From the democratic point of view it would have meant an acceptance of the
pretension of which Potsdam, by attacking the French Republic, had made itself the
champion: that is, the pretension of the Junker class to dispose of the world on
Militarist lines at the expense of the lives and limbs of the masses. From the
international Socialist point of view, it would have been the acceptance of the
extreme nationalist view that the people of other countries are foreigners, and that
it does not concern us if they choose to cut one another’s throats. Our Militarist
Junkers cried “If we let Germany conquer France it will be our turn next.” Our
romantic Junkers added “and serve us right too: what man will pity us when the hour
strikes for us, if we skulk now?” Even the wise, who loathe war, and regard it as
such a dishonour and disgrace in itself that all its laurels cannot hide its brand of
Cain, had to admit that police duty is necessary and that war must be made on such
war as the Germans had made by attacking France in an avowed attempt to substitute a
hegemony of cannon for the comity of nations. There was no {27}alternative. Had the Foreign Office been the
International Socialist Bureau, had Sir Edward Grey been Jaures, had Mr. Ramsay
MacDonald been Prime Minister, had Russia been Germany’s ally instead of ours, the
result would still have been the same: we must have drawn the sword to save France
and smash Potsdam as we smashed and always must smash Philip, Louis, Napoleon, et
hoc genus omne.

The case for our action is thus as complete as any casus belli is ever
likely to be. In fact its double character as both a democratic and military (if not
Militarist) case makes it too complete; for it enables our Junkers to claim it
entirely for themselves, and to fake it with pseudo-legal justifications which
destroy nine-tenths of our credit, the military and legal cases being hardly a tenth
of the whole: indeed, they would not by themselves justify the slaughter of a single
Pomeranian grenadier. For instance, take the Militarist view that we must fight
Potsdam because if the Kaiser is victorious, it will be our turn next! Well: are we
not prepared to fight always when our turn comes? Why should not we also depend on
our navy, on the extreme improbability of Germany, however triumphant, making two
such terrible calls on her people in the same generation as a war involves, on the
sympathy of the defeated, and on the support of American and European public opinion
when our turn comes, if there is nothing at stake now but the difference between
defeat and victory in an otherwise indifferent military campaign? If the welfare of
the world does not suffer any more by an English than by a German defeat who cares
whether we are defeated or not? As mere competitors in a race of armaments and an
Olympic game conducted with ball cartridge, or as plaintiffs in a technical case of
international law (already decided against us in 1870, by the way, when Gladstone had
to resort to a new treaty made ad hoc and lapsing at the end of the war) we
might as well be beaten as not, for all the harm that will ensue to anyone but
ourselves, or even to ourselves apart from our national vanity. It is as the special
constables of European life that we are important, and can send our men to the
trenches with the assurance that they are fighting in a worthy cause. In short, the
Junker case is not worth twopence: the Democratic case, the Socialist case, the
International case is worth all it threatens to cost.

The German Defence to Our Indictment.

What is the German reply to this case? Or rather, how would the Germans reply to
it if their official Militarist and Kaiserist panjandrums had the wit to find the
effective reply? Undoubtedly they would say that our Social-Democratic professions
are all very fine, but that our conversion to them is suspiciously sudden and recent.
They would remark that it is a little difficult for a nation in deadly peril to trust
its existence to a foreign public opinion which has not only never been expressed by
the people who really control England’s foreign policy, but is flatly opposed to all
their known views and prejudices. They would ask why, instead of making an
Entente with France and Russia and refusing to give Germany any assurance
concerning its object except that we would not pledge ourselves to remain neutral if
the Franco-Russian Entente fell on Germany, we did not say straight out in
1912 (when they put the question flatly to us), and again last July when Sazonoff
urged us so strongly to shew our hand, that if Germany attacked France we should
fight her, Russia or no Russia (a far less irritating and provocative attitude),
although we knew full well that an attack on France through Belgium would be part of
the German program if the Russian peril became acute. They would point out that if
our own Secretary for Foreign Affairs openly disclaimed any knowledge of the terms of
the Franco-Russian alliance, it was hard for a German to believe that they were
wholly fit for publication. In short, they would say “If you were so jolly wise and
well intentioned before the event, why did not your Foreign Minister and your
ambassadors in Berlin and Vienna and St. Petersburg—we beg pardon, Petro{28}grad—invite us to
keep the peace and rely on western public opinion instead of refusing us every pledge
except the hostile one to co-operate with France against us in the North Sea, and
making it only too plain to us that your policy was a Junker policy as much as ours,
and that we had nothing to hope from your goodwill? What evidence had we that you
were playing any other game than this Militarist chess of our own, which you now so
piously renounce, but which none of you except a handful of Socialists whom you
despise and Syndicalists whom you imprison on Militarist pretexts has opposed for
years past, though it has been all over your Militarist anti-German platforms and
papers and magazines? Are your Social-Democratic principles sincere, or are they only
a dagger you keep up your sleeve to stab us in the back when our two most formidable
foes are trying to garotte us? If so, where does your moral superiority come in,
hypocrites that you are? If not, why, we repeat, did you not make them known to all
the world, instead of making an ambush for us by your senseless silence?”

I see no reply to that except a frank confession that we did not know our own
minds; that we came to a knowledge of them only when Germany’s attack on France
forced us to make them up at last; that though doubtless a chronic state of perfect
lucidity and long prevision on our part would have been highly convenient, yet there
is a good deal to be said for the policy of not fording a stream until you come to
it; and that in any case we must entirely decline to admit that we are more likely
than other people to do the wrong thing when circumstances at last oblige us to think
and act. Also that the discussion is idle on the shewing of the German case itself;
for whether the Germans assumed us to be unscrupulous Militarists or conscientious
Democrats they were bound to come to the same conclusion: namely, that we should
attack them if they attacked France; consequently their assumption that we would not
interfere must have been based on the belief that we are simply “contemptible,” which
is the sort of mistake people have to pay for in this wicked world.

On the whole, we can hector our way in the Prussian manner out of that discussion
well enough, provided we hold our own in the field. But the Prussian manner hardly
satisfies the conscience. True, the fact that our diplomatists were not able to
discover the right course for Germany does not excuse Germany for being unable to
find it for herself. Not that it was more her business than ours: it was a European
question, and should have been solved by the united counsels of all the ambassadors
and Foreign Offices and chanceries. Indeed it could not have been stably solved
without certain assurances from them. But it was, to say the least, as much Germany’s
business as anyone else’s, and terribly urgent for her: “a matter of life and death,”
the Imperial Chancellor thought. Still, it is not for us to claim moral superiority
to Germany. It was for us a matter of the life and death of many Englishmen; and
these Englishmen are dead because our diplomatists were as blind as the Prussians.
The war is a failure for secret Junker diplomacy, ours no less than the enemy’s.
Those of us who have still to die must be inspired, not by devotion to the
diplomatists, but, like the Socialist hero of old on the barricade, by the vision of
“human solidarity.” And if he purchases victory for that holy cause with his blood, I
submit that we cannot decently allow the Foreign Office to hang up his martyr’s palm
over the War Office Mantelpiece.

The First Penalty of Disingenuousness.

The Foreign Office, however, can at lease shift its ground, and declare for the
good cause instead of belittling it with quibbling excuses. For see what the first
effect of the nonsense about Belgium has been! It carried with it the inevitable
conclusion that when the last German was cleared off Belgian soil, peace-loving
England, her reluctant work in this shocking war done, would calmly retire from the
conflict, and leave her {29}Allies to finish the deal with Potsdam. Accordingly, after
Mr. Asquith’s oration at the Mansion House, the Allies very properly insisted on our
signing a solemn treaty between the parties that they must all stand together to the
very end. A pitifully thin attempt has been made to represent that the mistrusted
party was France, and that the Kaiser was trying to buy her off. All one can say to
that is that the people who believe that any French Government dare face the French
people now with anything less than Alsace and Lorraine as the price of peace, or that
an undefeated and indeed masterfully advancing German Kaiser (as he seemed then) dare
offer France such a price, would believe anything. Of course we had to sign; but if
the Prime Minister had not been prevented by his own past from taking the popular
line, we should not have been suspected of a possible backing-out when the demands of
our sanctimoniousness were satisfied. He would have known that we are not vindicating
a treaty which by accident remains among the fragments of treaties of Paris, of
Prague, of Berlin, of all sorts of places and dates, as the only European treaty that
has hitherto escaped flat violation: we are supporting the war as a war on war, on
military coercion, on domineering, on bullying, on brute force, on military law, on
caste insolence, on what Mrs. Fawcett called insensable deviltry (only to find the
papers explaining apologetically that she, as a lady, had of course been alluding to
war made by foreigners, not by England). Some of us, remembering the things we have
ourselves said and done, may doubt whether Satan can cast out Satan; but as the job
is not exactly one for an unfallen angel, we may as well let him have a try.

The Blank Cheque.

In the meantime behold us again hopelessly outwitted by Eastern diplomacy as a
direct consequence of this ill-starred outburst of hypocrisy about treaties!
Everybody has said over and over again that this war is the most tremendous war ever
waged. Nobody has said that this new treaty is the most tremendous blank cheque we
have ever been forced to sign by our Parliamentary party trick of striking moral
attitudes. It is true that Mr. J.A. Hobson realised the situation at once, and was
allowed to utter a little croak in a corner; but where was the trumpet note of
warning that should have rung throughout the whole Press? Just consider what the
blank cheque means. France’s draft on it may stop at the cost of recovering Alsace
and Lorraine. We shall have to be content with a few scraps of German colony and the
heavy-weight championship. But Russia? When will she say “Hold! Enough!” Suppose she
wants not only Poland, but Baltic Prussia? Suppose she wants Constantinople as her
port of access to the unfrozen seas, in addition to the dismemberment of Austria?
Suppose she has the brilliant idea of annexing all Prussia, for which there is really
something to be said by ethnographical map-makers, Militarist madmen, and Pan-Slavist
megalomaniacs? It may be a reasonable order; but it is a large one; and the fact that
we should have been committed to it without the knowledge of Parliament, without
discussion, without warning, without any sort of appeal to public opinion or
democratic sanction, by a stroke of Sir Edward Grey’s pen within five weeks of his
having committed us in the same fashion to an appalling European war, shews how
completely the Foreign Office has thrown away all pretence of being any less absolute
than the Kaiser himself. It simply offers carte blanche to the armies of the
Allies without a word to the nation until the cheque is signed. The only limit there
is to the obligation is the certainty that the cheque will be dishonoured the moment
the draft on it becomes too heavy. And that may furnish a virtuous pretext for
another war between the Allies themselves. In any case no treaty can save each Ally
from the brute necessity of surrendering and paying up if beaten, whether the defeat
is shared by the others or not. Did I not say that the sooner we made up our minds to
the terms of the treaty of peace, so that we might know what we were fighting for,
and how far we {30}were
bound to go, the better? Instead of which we sign a ridiculous “scrap of paper” to
save ourselves the intolerable fatigue of thought.

Belgium Crucified Between the European Powers.

And now, before I leave the subject of Belgium, what have we done for Belgium?
Have we saved her soil from invasion? Were we at her side with half a million men
when the avalanche fell on her? Or were we safe in our own country praising her
heroism in paragraphs which all contrived to convey an idea that the Belgian soldier
is about four feet high, but immensely plucky for his size? Alas, when the Belgian
soldier cried: “Where are the English?” the reply was “a mass of concrete as large as
a big room,” blown into the air by a German siege gun, falling back and crushing him
into the earth we had not succeeded in saving from the worst of the horrors of war.
We have not protected Belgium: Belgium has protected us at the cost of being
conquered by Germany. It is now our sacred duty to drive the Germans out of Belgium.
Meanwhile we might at least rescue her refugees by a generous grant of public money
from the caprices of private charity. We need not press our offer to lend her money:
German capitalists will do that for her with the greatest pleasure when the war is
over. I think the Government realizes that now; for I note the after-thought that a
loan from us need not bear interest.

Now that we begin to see where we really are, what practical morals can we
draw?

Unpreparedness the Price of Secrecy.

First, that our autocratic foreign policy, in which the Secretary for Foreign
Affairs is always a Junker, and makes war and concludes war without consulting the
nation, or confiding in it, or even refraining from deceiving it as to his
intentions, leads inevitably to a disastrous combination of war and unpreparedness
for war. Wars are planned which require huge expeditionary armies trained and
equipped for war. But as such preparation could not be concealed from the public, it
is simply deferred until the war is actually declared and begun, at the most
frightful risk of such an annihilation of our little peace army as we escaped by the
skin of our teeth at Mons and Cambrai. The military experts tell us that it takes
four months to make an infantry and six to make a cavalry soldier. And our way of
getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if
we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to
drive us into wholesale enlistment, voluntary or (better still from the Junker point
of view) compulsory. It seems to me that a nation which tolerates such insensate
methods and outrageous risks must shortly perish from sheer lunacy. And it is all
pure superstition: the retaining of the methods of Edward the First in the reign of
George the Fifth. I therefore suggest that the first lesson of the war is that the
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs be reduced to the level of a simple Prime
Minister, or even of a constitutional monarch, powerless to fire a single shot or
sign a treaty without the authority of the House of Commons, all diplomatic business
being conducted in a blaze of publicity, and the present regulation which exacts the
qualification of a private income of at least £400 a year for a position in the
Diplomatic Service replaced by a new regulation that at least half the staff shall
consist of persons who have never dined out at the houses of hosts of higher rank
than unfashionable solicitors or doctors.

In these recommendations I am not forgetting that an effective check on diplomacy
is not easy to devise, and that high personal character and class disinterestedness
(the latter at present unattainable) on the part of our diplomatists will be as vital
as ever. I well know that diplomacy is carried on at present not only by official
correspondence meant for possible publication and subject to an inspection which is
in some degree a responsible inspection, but by private letters which the King
himself has no right {31}to read. I know that even in the United States, where
treaties and declarations of war must be made by Parliament, it is nevertheless
possible for the President to bring about a situation in which Congress, like our
House of Commons in the present instance, has no alternative but to declare war. But
though complete security is impracticable, it does not follow that no precautions
should be taken, or that a democratic tradition is no safer than a feudal tradition.
A far graver doubt is raised by the susceptibility of the masses to war fever, and
the appalling danger of a daily deluge of cheap newspapers written by nameless men
and women whose scandalously low payment is a guarantee of their ignorance and their
servility to the financial department, controlled by a moneyed class which not only
curries favour with the military caste for social reasons, but has large direct
interests in war as a method of raising the price of money, the only commodity the
moneyed class has to sell. But I am quite unable to see that our Junkers are less
susceptible to the influence of the Press than the people educated by public
elementary schools. On the contrary, our Democrats are more fool-proof than our
Plutocrats; and the ravings our Junkers send to the papers for nothing in war time
would be dear at a halfpenny a line. Plutocracy makes for war because it offers
prizes to Plutocrats: Socialism makes for peace because the interests it serves are
international. So, as the Socialist side is the democratic side, we had better
democratize our diplomacy if we desire peace.

II.

RECRUITING.

And now as to the question of recruiting. This is pressing, because it is not
enough for the Allies to win: we and not Russia must be the decisive factor in the
victory, or Germany will not be fairly beaten, and we shall be only rescued
proteges of Russia instead of the saviours of Western Europe. We must have the
best army in Europe; and we shall not get it under existing arrangements. We are
passing out of the first phase of the war fever, in which men flock to the colours by
instinct, by romantic desire for adventure, by the determination not, as Wagner put
it, “to let their lives be governed by fear of the end,” by simple destitution
through unemployment, by rancour and pugnacity excited by the inventions of the
Press, by a sense of duty inculcated in platform orations which would not stand half
an hour’s discussion, by the incitements and taunts of elderly non-combatants and
maidens with a taste for mischief, and by the verses of poets jumping at the cheapest
chance in their underpaid profession. The difficulty begins when all the men
susceptible to these inducements are enlisted, and we have to draw on the solid,
sceptical, sensible residuum who know the value of their lives and services and
liberties, and will not give them except on substantial and honourable conditions.
These Ironsides know that it is one thing to fight for your country, and quite
another to let your wife and children starve to save our rich idlers from a rise in
the supertax. They also know that it is one thing to wipe out the Prussian drill
sergeant and snob officer as the enemies of manhood and honour, and another to let
that sacred mission be made an excuse for subjecting us to exactly the same tyranny
in England. They have not forgotten the “On the knee” episode, nor the floggings in
our military prisons, nor the scandalous imprisonment of Tom Mann, nor the warnings
as to military law and barrack life contained even in Robert Blatchford’s testimony
that the army made a man of him.

What the Labour Party Owes to the Army.

And here is where the Labour Party should come in. The Labour Party’s business is
to abolish the Militarist soldier, who is only a quaint survival of the King’s
footman (himself a still quainter survival of the medieval baron’s retainer), and
substitute for him a trained combatant with full civil rights, receiving the Trade
Union rate of wages proper to a skilled worker at {32}a dangerous trade. It must co-operate with
the Trade Unions in fixing this moral minimum wage for the citizen soldier, and in
obtaining for him a guarantee that the wage shall continue until he obtains civil
employment on standard terms at the conclusion of the war. It must make impossible
the scandal of a monstrously rich peer (his riches, the automatic result of ground
land-landlordism, having “no damned nonsense of merit about them”) proclaiming the
official weekly allowance for the child of the British soldier in the trenches. That
allowance is eighteenpence, being less than one third of the standard allowance for
an illegitimate child under an affiliation order. And the Labour Party must deprive
the German bullet of its present double effect in killing an Englishman in France and
simultaneously reducing his widow’s subsistence from a guinea a week to five
shillings. Until this is done we are simply provoking Providence to destroy us.

I wish I could say that it is hardly necessary to add that Trade Unionism must be
instituted in the Army, so that there shall be accredited secretaries in the field to
act as a competent medium of communication between the men on service and the
political representatives of their class at the War Office (for I shall propose this
representative innovation presently). It will shock our colonels; but I know of no
bodies of men for whom repeated and violent shocking is more needed and more likely
to prove salutary than the regimental masses of the British army. One rather pleasant
shock in store for them is the discovery that an officer and a gentleman, whose sole
professional interest is the honour and welfare of his country, and who is bound to
the mystical equality of life-and-death duty for all alike, will get on much more
easily with a Trade Union secretary than a commercial employer whose aim is simply
private profit and who regards every penny added to the wages of his employees as a
penny taken off his own income. Howbeit, whether the colonels like it or
not—that is, whether they have become accustomed to it or not—it has to
come, and its protection from Junker prejudice is another duty of the Labour Party.
The Party as a purely political body must demand that the defender of his country
shall retain his full civil rights unimpaired; that, the unnecessary, mischievous,
dishonourable and tyrannical slave code called military law, which at its most
savagely stern point produced only Wellington’s complaint that “it is impossible to
get a command obeyed in the British Army,” be carted away to the rubbish heap of
exploded superstitions; and that if Englishmen are not to be allowed to serve their
country in the field as freely as they do in the numerous civil industries in which
neglect and indiscipline are as dangerous as they are in war, their leaders and
Parliamentary representatives will not recommend them to serve at all. In wartime
these things may not matter: discipline either goes by the board or keeps itself
under the pressure of the enemy’s cannon; and bullying sergeants and insolent
officers have something else to do than to provoke men they dislike into striking
them and then reporting them for two years’ hard labour without trial by jury. In
battle such officers are between two fires. But soldiers are not always, or even
often, at war; and the dishonour of abdicating dearly-bought rights and liberties is
a stain both on war and peace. Now is the time to get rid of that stain. If any
officer cannot command men without it, as civilians and police inspectors do, that
officer has mistaken his profession and had better come home.

JOHN GALSWORTHY. (Photo by E.O. Hoppe.) See Page
102.

RUDYARD KIPLING. (Photo by E.O. Hoppe.) See Page
106.

Obsolete Tests in the Army.

Another matter needs to be dealt with at the same time. There are immense numbers
of atheists in this country; and though most of them, like the Kaiser, regard
themselves as devout Christians, the best are intellectually honest enough to object
to profess beliefs they do not hold, especially in the solemn act of dedicating
themselves to death in the service of their country. Army form E 501 A (September,
1912) secured to these the benefit{33} of the Bradlaugh Affirmation Act of 1888, as the
enlisting soldier said simply “I, So and So, do make Oath, &c.” But recruits are
now confronted with another form (E 501, June, 1914) running “I, So and So, swear by
Almighty God, &c.” On September 1st, at Lord Kitchener’s call, a civil servant
obtained leave to enlist and had the oath put to him, in this form by the attesting
officer. He offered to swear in the 1912 form. This was refused; and we accordingly
lost a recruit of just that sturdily conscientious temper which has made the most
formidable soldiers known to history. I am bound to add, however, that the attesting
officer, on being told that the oath would be a blasphemous farce to the conscience
of the recruit, made no difficulty about that, and was quite willing to accept him if
he, on his part, would oblige by professing what he did not believe. Thus a Ghoorka’s
religious conscience is respected: an Englishman’s is insulted and outraged.

But, indeed, all these oaths are obstructive and useless superstitions. No recruit
will hesitate to pledge his word of honour to fight to the death for his country or
for a cause with which he sympathizes; and that is all we require. There is no need
to drag in Almighty God and no need to drag in the King. Many an Irishman, many a
colonial Republican, many an American volunteer who would fight against the Prussian
monarchy shoulder to shoulder with the French Republicans with a will, would rather
not pretend to do it out of devotion to the British throne. To vanquish Prussia in
this war we need the active aid or the sympathy of every Republican in the world.
America, for instance, sympathizes with England, but classes the King with the Kaiser
as an obsolete institution. Besides, even from the courtly point of view the
situation is a delicate one. Why emphasize the fact that, formally speaking, the war
is between two grandsons of Albert the Good, that thoroughbred German whose London
monument is so much grander than Cromwell’s?

The Labour Party should also set its face firmly against the abandonment of Red
Cross work and finance, or the support of soldiers’ families, or the patrolling of
the streets, to amateurs who regard the war as a wholesome patriotic exercise, or as
the latest amusement in the way of charity bazaars, or as a fountain of
self-righteousness. Civil volunteering is needed urgently enough: one of the
difficulties of war is that it creates in certain departments a demand so abnormal
that no peace establishment can cope with it. But the volunteers should be
disciplined and paid: we are not so poor that we need spunge on anyone. And in
hospital and medical service war ought not at present to cost more than peace would
if the victims of our commercial system were properly tended, and our Public Health
service adequately extended and manned. We should therefore treat our Red Cross
department as if it were destined to become a permanent service. No charity and no
amateur anarchy and incompetence should be tolerated. As to allowing that admirable
detective agency for the defence of the West End against begging letter writers, the
Charity Organization Society to touch the soldier’s home, the very suggestion is an
outrage. The C.O.S., the Poor Law, and the charitable amateur, whether of the
patronizing or prying or gushing variety, must be kept as far from the army and its
folk as if they were German spies. The business of our fashionable amateurs is to pay
Income Tax and Supertax. This time they will have to pay through the nose, vigorously
wrung for that purpose by the House of Commons; so they had better set their own
houses in order and leave the business of the war to be officially and responsibly
dealt with and paid for at full standard rates.

Wanted: Labour Representation in the War Office.

But parliamentary activity is not sufficient. There must be a more direct contact
between representative Labour and the Army, because Parliament can only remedy
grievances, and that not be{34}fore years of delay and agitation elapse. Even then the
grievances are not dealt with on their merits; for under our party system, which is
the most abominable engine for the perversion and final destruction of all political
conscience ever devized by man, the House of Commons never votes on any question but
whether the Government shall remain in office or give the Opposition a turn, no
matter what the pretext for the division may be. Only in such emergencies as the
present, when the Government is forced to beg the Labour members to help them to
recruit, is there a chance of making reasonable conditions for the soldier.

The Four Inoculations.

It is therefore necessary that the War Office should have working class
representatives on all committees and councils which issue notices to the public.
There is at present, it would seem, not a single person in authority there who has
the faintest notion of what the immense majority of possible British recruits are
thinking about. The results have been beyond description ludicrous and dangerous.
Every proclamation is urgently worded so as to reassure recruits with £5,000 a
year and repel recruits with a pound a week. On the very day when the popular Lord
Kitchener, dropping even the et rex meus of Wolsey, frankly asked the nation
for 100,000 men for his army, and when it was a matter of life and death that every
encouragement should be held out to working men to enlist, the War Office decided
that this was the psychological moment to remind everybody that soldiers on active
service often die of typhoid fever, and to press inoculation on the recruits pending
the officially longed-for hour when Sir Almroth Wright’s demand for compulsion can be
complied with. I say nothing here about the efficacy of inoculation. Efficacious or
not, Sir Almroth Wright himself bases his demand for compulsion on the ground that it
is hopeless to expect the whole army to submit to it voluntarily. That being so, it
seems to me that when men are hesitating on the threshold of the recruiting station,
only a German spy or our War Office (always worth ten thousand men to our enemies)
would seize that moment to catch the nervous postulant by the sleeve and say, “Have
you thought of the danger of dysentery?” The fact that the working class forced the
Government, very much against its doctor-ridden will, to abolish compulsory
vaccination, shews the extent to which its households loathe and dread these vaccines
(so called, but totally unconnected with cows or Jenner) which, as they are
continually reminded by energetic anti-inoculation propagandists in largely
circulated journals and pamphlets, not to mention ghastly photographs of disfigured
children, sometimes produce worse effects than the diseases they are supposed to
prevent. Indifferent or careless recruits are easily induced to submit to inoculation
by little privileges during the ensuing indisposition or by small money bribes; and
careful ones are proselytized by Sir Almroth’s statistics; but on the whole both
inoculation and amateur medical statistics are regarded with suspicion by the poor;
and the fact that revaccination is compulsory in the regular army, and that the moral
pressure applied to secure both typhoid inoculation and vaccination both in the
regular army and the Territorials is such as only a few stalwarts are able to resist,
is deeply resented. At present the inoculation mania has reached the pitch of
proposing no less than four separate inoculations: revaccination, typhoid, cholera,
and—Sir Almroth’s last staggerer—inoculation against wounds! When the War
Office and its medical advisers have been successfully inoculated against political
lunacy, it will be time enough to discuss such extravagances. Meanwhile, the sooner
the War Office issues a proclamation that no recruit will be either compelled or
importuned to submit to any sort of inoculation whatever against his will, the better
for the recruiting, and the worse for the enemy.

The War Office Bait of Starvation.

But this blunder was a joke compared {35}to the next exploit of the War Office. It suddenly began
to placard the country with frantic assurances to its five-thousand-a-year friends
that they would be “discharged with all possible speed THE MINUTE THE WAR IS OVER.”
Only considerations of space restrained them, I presume, from adding “LAWN TENNIS,
SHOOTING, AND ALL THE DELIGHTS OF FASHIONABLE LIFE CAN BE RESUMED IMMEDIATELY ON THE
FIRING OF THE LAST SHOT.” Now what does this mean to the wage worker? Simply that the
moment he is no longer wanted in the trenches he will be flung back into the labour
market to sink or swim without an hour’s respite. If we had had a Labour
representative or two to help in drawing up these silly placards—I am almost
tempted to say if we had had any human being of any class with half the brains of a
rabbit there—the placards would have contained a solemn promise that no single
man should be discharged at the conclusion of the war, save at his own request, until
a job had been found for him in civil life. I ask the heavens, with a shudder, do
these class-blinded people in authority really intend to take a million men out of
their employment; turn them into soldiers; and then at one blow hurl them back,
utterly unprovided for, into the streets?

But a War Office capable of placarding Lord Roberts’s declaration that the men who
are enlisting are doing “what all able-bodied men in the kingdom should do” is
clearly ignorant enough for anything. I do not blame Lord Roberts for his oratorical
flourish: we have all said things just as absurd on the platform in moments of
enthusiasm. But the officials who reproduced it in cold blood would have us believe
that soldiers live on air; that ammunition drops from heaven like manna; and that an
army could hold the field for twenty-four hours without the support of a still more
numerous body of civilians working hard to support it. Sane men gasp at such placards
and ask angrily, “What sort of fools do you take us for?” I have in my hand a copy of
The Torquay Times containing a hospitable invitation to soldiers’ wives to
call at the War Office, Whitehall, S.W., if they desire “assistance and explanation
of their case.” The return fare from Torquay to London is thirty shillings and
sixpence third class; but the War Office no doubt assumes that all soldiers’ wives
keep motor cars. Still, let us be just even to the War Office. It did not ask
the soldiers’ wives for forms of authorization to pay the separation allowance to
their bankers every six months. It actually offered the money monthly!

Delusive Promises.

The middle and upper classes are nearly as bad as the War Office. They talk of
keeping every man’s place open for him until the end of the war. Obviously this is
flatly impossible. Some places can be kept, and no doubt are being kept. Some
functions are suspended by the war and cannot be resumed until the troops return to
civil life and resume them. Employers are so hardened to the daily commercial
necessity for discharging men without a thought as to what is to become of them that
they are quite ready to undertake to sack the replacers when the troops come back.
Also the return of peace may be followed by a revival of trade in which employment
may not be hard to find, even by discharged soldiers, who are always passed over in
the labour market in favour of civilians, as those well know who have the task of
trying to find places for them. But these considerations do not justify an attempt to
persuade recruits that they can go off soldiering for months—they are told by
Lord Kitchener that it will probably be for years—and then come back and walk
to their benches or into their offices and pick up their work as if they had left
only the night before. The very people who are promising this are raising the cry
“business as usual” in the same breath. How can business be carried on as usual, or
carried on at all, on unoccupied office stools and at counters with no men behind
them? Such rubbish is an insult to the recruit’s intelligence. These promises of
keeping places open were made to the men who enlisted for {36}South Africa, and were of course broken, as
a promise to supply green cheese by quarrying the moon would have been broken. New
employees must be found to do the work of the men who are in the field; and these new
ones will not all be thrown into the street when the war is over to make room for
discharged soldiers, even if a good many of these soldiers are not disqualified by
their new training and habits for their old employment. I repeat, there is only one
assurance that can be given to the recruits without grossly and transparently
deluding them; and that is that they shall not be discharged, except at their own
request, until civil employment is available for them.

Funking Controversy.

This is not the only instance of the way in which, under the first scare of the
war, we shut our eyes and opened our mouths to every folly. For example, there was a
cry for the suspension of all controversy in the face of the national danger. Now the
only way to suspend controversial questions during a period of intense activity in
the very departments in which the controversy has arisen is to allow them all to be
begged. Perhaps I should not object if they were all begged in favour of my own side,
as, for instance, the question of Socialism was begged in favour of Socialism when
the Government took control of the railways; bought up all the raw sugar; regulated
prices; guaranteed the banks; suspended the operation of private contracts; and did
all the things it had been declaring utterly and eternally Utopian and imposible when
Socialists advocated them. But it is now proposed to suspend all popular liberties
and constitutional safeguards; to muzzle the Press, and actually to have no contests
at bye-elections! This is more than a little too much. We have submitted to have our
letters, our telegrams, our newspapers censored, our dividends delayed, our trains
cut off, our horses and even our houses commandeered, our streets darkened, our
restaurants closed, and ourselves shot dead on the public highways if we were slow to
realize that some excited person bawling in the distance was a sentry challenging us.
But that we are to be politically gagged and enslaved as well; that the able-bodied
soldier in the trenches, who depends on the able-minded civilian at home to guard the
liberties of his country and protect him from carelesness or abuse of power by the
authorities whom he must blindly and dumbly obey, is to be betrayed the moment his
back is turned to his fellow-citizens and his face to the foe, is not patriotism: it
is the paralysis of mortal funk: it is the worst kind of cowardice in the face of the
enemy. Let us hear no more of it, but contest our elections like men, and regain the
ancient political prestige of England at home as our expeditionary force has regained
it abroad.

The Labour Party, then, need have no hesitation in raising all the standing
controversies between Democracy and Junkerism in their acutest form, and taking
advantage of the war emergency to press them to a series of parliamentary victories
for Labour, whether in negotiations with the Government whips, in divisions on the
floor of the House, or in strenuously contested bye-elections. No doubt our Junkers
will try to disarm their opponents by representing that it would be in the last
degree unfair, un-English, and ungentlemanly on the part of the Labour members to
seize any tactical advantage in parliamentary warfare, and most treacherous and
unpatriotic to attack their country (meaning the Junker Party) when it is at war.
Some Labour members will be easily enough gulled in this way: it would be laughable,
if the consequences were not so tragic, to see how our parliamentary beginners from
the working class succumb to the charm of the Junker appeal. The Junkers themselves
are not to be coaxed in this manner: it is no use offering tracts to a missionary, as
the poor Kaiser found when he tried it on. The Labour Party will soon learn the value
of these polite demonstrations that it is always its duty not to hamper the governing
classes in their very difficult and delicate and dangerous task of safeguard{37}ing the interests of this
great empire: in short, to let itself be gammoned by elegant phrases and by adroit
practisings on its personal good-nature, its inveterate proletarian sentimentality,
and its secret misgivings as to the correctness of its manners. The Junkers have
already taken the fullest advantage of the war to paralyze democracy. If the Labour
members do not take a vigorous counter-offensive, and fight every parliamentary
trench to the last division, the Labour Movement will be rushed back as precipitately
as General von Kluck rushed the Allies back from Namur to the gates of Paris. In
truth, the importance of the war to the immense majority of Englishmen, Frenchmen,
and Germans lies in the possibility that when Junkers fall out common men may come by
their own.

III.

THE TERMS OF PEACE.

So much for the recruiting. Now for the terms of peace. It is time to take that
subject in hand; for Lord Kitchener’s notion that we are going to settle down to
years of war as we did a century ago is soldierly, but not sensible. It is, of
course, physically possible for us to continue for twenty years digging trenches and
shelling German troops and shoving German armies back when they are not shoving us,
whilst old women pull turnips and tend goats in the fire zones across which soldiers
run to shelter. But we cannot afford to withdraw a million male adults who have
passed a strictish health test from the work of parentage for several years unless we
intend to breed our next generation from parents with short sight, varicose veins,
rotten teeth, and deranged internal organs. Soldiers do not think of these things:
“theirs not to reason why: theirs but to do and die”; but sensible civilians have to.
And even soldiers know that you cannot make ammunition as fast as you can burn it,
nor produce men and horses as instantaneously as you can kill them by machinery. It
would be well, indeed, if our papers, instead of writing of ten-inch shells, would
speak of £1,000 shells, and regimental bands occasionally finish the National
Anthem and the Brabançonne and the Marseillaise with the old strain, “That’s
the way the money goes: Pop goes the Ten Inch.” It is easy to rebuke Mr. Norman
Angell and Herr Bloch for their sordid references to the cost of war; and Mr. H.G.
Wells is profoundly right in pointing out that the fact that war does not pay
commercially is greatly to its credit, as no high human activity ever does pay
commercially. But modern war does not even pay its way. Already our men have “pumped
lead” into retreating Germans who had no lead left to pump back again; and sooner or
later, if we go on indefinitely, we shall have to finish the job with our fists, and
congratulate ourselves that both Georges Carpentier and Bombardier Wells are on our
side. This war will stop when Germany throws up the sponge, which will happen long
before she is utterly exhausted, but not before we ourselves shall be glad enough of
a rest. Nations are like bees: they cannot kill except at the cost of their own
lives.

The question of terms will raise a fierce controversy. At the extremes of our
public opinion we have two temperaments, first, our gentlemen, our sportsmen, our
daredevils, our preux chevaliers. To these the notion of reviling your enemy
when he is up; kicking him when he is knocked down by somebody else; and gouging out
his eyes, cutting out his tongue, hewing off his right arm, and stealing all his
money, is abhorrent and cowardly. These gallants say, “It is not enough that we can
fight Germany to-day. We can fight her any day and every day. Let her come again and
again and yet again. We will fight her one to three; and if she comes on ten to one,
as she did at Mons, we will mill on the retreat, and drive her back again when we
have worn her down to our weight. If her fleet will not come out to fight us because
we have too many ships, we will send all the odds in our favour back to Portsmouth
and fight {38}ship to
ship in the North Sea, and let the bravest and best win.” That is how gallant
fighters talk, and how Drake is popularly (though erroneously) supposed to have
tackled the Armada.

The Ignoble Attitude of Cruel Panic.

But we are not all preux chevaliers. We have at the other extremity the
people who are craving for loot and vengeance, who clamour for the humiliation and
torture of the enemy, who rave against the village burnings and shootings by the
Prussians in one column and exult in the same proceedings by the Russians in another,
who demand that German prisoners of war shall be treated as criminals, who depict our
Indian troops as savage cutthroats because they like to think of their enemies being
mauled in the spirit of the Indian Mutiny, who shriek that the Kaiser must be sent to
Devil’s Island because St. Helena is too good for him, and who declare that Germany
must be so maimed and trodden into the dust that she will not be able to raise her
head again for a century. Let us call these people by their own favourite name, Huns,
even at the risk of being unjust to the real Huns. And let us send as many of them to
the trenches as we can possibly induce to go, in the hope that they may presently
join the lists of the missing. Still, as they rather cling to our soil, they will
have to be reckoned with when the settlement comes. But they will not count for much
then. Most of them will be heartily ashamed of what they said in those first three or
four weeks of blue funk (I am too timid myself not to make allowances for that most
distressing and universal, but fortunately transient effect of war); and most of
those who are not will be ashamed to bear malice publicly.

The Commercial Attitude.

Far more weighty in the matter will be the intermediate sections. First, our
commercial main body, which thinks that chivalry is not business, and that rancour is
childish, but cannot see why we should not make the Germans pay damages and supply us
with some capital to set the City going again, forgetting that when France did that
after 1871 for Berlin, Berlin was set going so effectually that it went headlong to a
colossal financial smash, whilst the French peasant who had provided the capital from
his old stocking throve soberly on the interest at the expense of less vital classes.
Unfortunately Germany has set the example of this kind of looting. Prussian generals,
like Napoleon’s marshals, have always been shameless brigands, keeping up the
seventeenth and eighteenth century tradition of making cities bribe them to refrain
from sack and pillage and even billeting, and being quite incapable of the
magnificence of the great Condé (or was it Turenne?), who refused a payment
offered by a city on the ground that he had not intended to march through it.
Blucher’s fury when Wellington would not allow him to plunder Paris, and his
exclamation when he saw London “What a city to loot!” is still regarded as fair
soldiering; and the blackmail levied recently by the Prussian generals on the Belgian
and French towns they have occupied must, I suppose, be let pass as ransom, not as
ordinary criminal looting. But if the penalty of looting be thus spared, the Germans
can hardly complain if they are themselves held to ransom when the fortunes of war go
against them. Liège and Lille and Antwerp and the rest must be paid their
money back with interest; and there will be a big builder’s bill at Rheims. But we
should ourselves refrain strictly from blackmail. We should sell neither our blood
nor our mercy. If we sell either we are as much brigands as Blucher.

Vindictive Damages.

And we must not let ourselves be tempted to soil our hands under pretext of
vindictive damages. The man who thinks that all the money in Germany could pay for
the life of a single British drummer boy ought to be shot merely as an expression of
the feeling that he is unfit to live. We stake our blood as the Germans stake theirs;
and in that ganz besonderes Saft alone should we {39}[make**] or accept payment. We had better
not say to the Kaiser at the end of the war, “Scoundrel: you can never replace the
Louvain library, nor the sculpture of Rheims; and it follows logically that you shall
empty your pockets into ours.” Much better say: “God forgive us all!” If we cannot
rise to this, and must soil our hands with plunder, at least let us call it plunder,
and not profane our language and our souls by giving it fine names.

Our Annihilationists.

Then we shall have the Militarists, who will want to have Germany “bled to the
white,” dismembered and maimed, so that she may never do it again. Well, that is
quite simple, if you are Militarist enough to do it. Loading Germany with debt will
not do it. Towing her fleet into Portsmouth or sinking it will not do it. Annexing
provinces and colonies will not do it. The effective method is far shorter and more
practical. What has made Germany formidable in this war? Obviously her overwhelmingly
superior numbers. That was how she rushed us back almost to the gates of Paris. The
organization, the readiness, the sixteen-inch howitzer helped; but it was the
multitudinous Kanonenfutter that nearly snowed us under. The British soldier
at Cambrai and Le Cateau killed and killed until his rifle was too hot to hold and
his hand was paralyzed with slayer’s cramp; but still they came and came.

Why Not Kill the German Women?

Well, there is no obscurity about that problem. Those Germans who took but an
instant to kill had taken the travail of a woman for three-quarters of a year to
breed, and eighteen years to ripen for the slaughter. All we have to do is to kill,
say, 75 per cent, of all the women in Germany under 60. Then we may leave Germany her
fleet and her money, and say “Much good may they do you.” Why not, if you are really
going in to be what you, never having read “this Neech they talk of,” call a
Nietzschean Superman? War is not an affair of sentiment. Some of our newspapers
complain that the Germans kill the wounded and fire on field hospitals and Red Cross
Ambulances. These same newspapers fill their columns with exultant accounts of how
our wounded think nothing of modern bullet wounds and hope to be back at the front in
a week, which I take to be the most direct incitement to the Germans to kill the
wounded that could be devized. It is no use being virtuously indignant: “stone dead
hath no fellow” is an English proverb, not a German one. Even the killing of
prisoners is an Agincourt tradition. Now it is not more cowardly to kill a woman than
to kill a wounded man. And there is only one reason why it is a greater crime to kill
a woman than a man, and why women have to be spared and protected when men are
exposed and sacrificed. That reason is that the destruction of the women is the
destruction of the community. Men are comparatively of no account: kill 90 per cent,
of the German men, and the remaining 10 per cent. can repeople her. But kill the
women, and Delenda est Carthago. Now this is exactly what our Militarists want
to happen to Germany. Therefore the objection to killing women becomes in this case
the reason for doing it. Why not? No reply is possible from the Militarist,
disable-your-enemy point of view. If disablement is your will, there is your way, and
the only effectual way. We really must not call the Kaiser and Von Bernhardi
disciples of the mythical Neech when they have either overlooked or shrunk from such
a glaring “biological necessity.” A pair of puling pious sentimentalists if you like.
But Supermen! Nonsense. O, my brother journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call
them sheep led by snobs, call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters,
depict them in the good old English fashion in spectacles and comforter, seedy
overcoat buttoned over paunchy figure, playing the contrabass tuba in a street band;
but do not flatter them with the heroic title of Superman, and hold up as magnificent
villainies worthy of Milton’s Lucifer these common crimes of violence and raid and
lust that any {40}drunken blackguard can commit when the police are away,
and that no mere multiplication can dignify. As to Nietzsche, with his Polish hatred
of Prussia (who heartily reciprocated the sentiment), when did he ever tell the
Germans to allow themselves to be driven like sheep to the slaughter in millions by
mischievous dolts who, being for the most part incapable of reading ten sentences of
a philosophic treatise without falling asleep, allow journalists as illiterate as
themselves to persuade them that he got his great reputation by writing a cheap
gospel for bullies? Strictly between ourselves, we also are an illiterate people; but
we may at least hold our tongues about matters we don’t understand, and not say in
the face of Europe that the English believe that the composer of Parsifal was a
Militarist Prussian (he was an exiled revolutionist); that Nietzsche was a diciple of
Wagner (Nietzsche preferred the music of Bizet, a Frenchman); and that the Kaiser is
a disciple of Nietzsche, who would have laughed his childish pietism to scorn.

The Simple Answer.

Nietzsche would certainly have agreed that we must kill the German women if we
mean business when we talk of destroying Germany. But he would also have answered my
Why not?, which is more than any consistent Militarist can. Indeed, it needs no
philosopher to give the answer. The first ordinary anti-Militarist human person you
meet will tell you that it would be too horrible; that life would be unbearable if
people did such things. And he would be quite right; so please let us hear no more of
kicking your enemy when he is down so that he may be unable to rise for a whole
century. We may be unable to resist the temptation to loot Germany more or less if we
conquer her. We are already actively engaged in piracy against her, stealing her
ships and selling them in our prize courts, instead of honestly detaining them until
the war is over and keeping a strict account of them. When gentlemen rise in the
House of Commons and say that they owe Germans money and do not intend to pay it, one
must face the fact that there will be a strong popular demand for plunder. War, after
all, is simply a letting loose of organized murder, theft, and piracy on a foe; and I
have no doubt the average Englishman will say to me what Falstaff said to Pistol
concerning his share in the price of the stolen fan: “Reason, you rogue, reason: do
you think I’ll endanger my soul gratis?” To which I reply, “If you can’t
resist the booty, take it frankly, and know yourself for half patriot, half brigand;
but don’t talk nonsense about disablement. Cromwell tried it in Ireland. He had
better have tried Home Rule. And what Cromwell could not do to Ireland we cannot do
to Germany.”

The Sensible People.

Finally we come to the only body of opinion in which there is any hope of
civilization: the opinion of the people who are bent, not on gallantry nor revenge
nor plunder nor pride nor panic nor glory nor any of the invidiousnesses of
patriotism, but on the problem of how to so redraw the map of Europe and reform its
political constitutions that this abominable crime and atrocious nuisance, a European
war, shall not easily occur again. The map is very important; for the open sores
which have at last suppurated and burst after having made the world uneasy for years,
were produced by altering the colour of Alsace and Lorraine and of Bosnia and
Herzegovina on the map. And the new map must be settled, not by conquest, but by
consent of the people immediately concerned. One of the broken treaties of Europe
which has been mentioned less frequently of late than the Belgian treaty is the
treaty of Prague, by which a plebiscite was to have been taken on the subject of the
nationality of Schleswig and Holstein. That plebiscite has never been taken. It may
have to be taken, with other plebiscites, before this war is settled.

German Unity Inviolable.

But here let me warn those who are hoping for a disintegrated Germany like that
which Thackeray ridiculed, that their hopes are vain. The southern {41}Germans, the,
friendliest, most easy-going people in the world (as far as I know the world) dislike
the Prussians far more heartily than we do; but they know that they are respected and
strong and big as part of United Germany, and that they were weak and despised and
petty as separate kingdoms. Germany will hold together. No doubt the Germans may
reasonably say to the Prussian drill sergeant and his master Hohenzollern, “A nice
mess you have made of your job after all we have endured from you because we believed
you could make us invincible. We thought that if you were hard masters you were at
any rate good grenadiers; but here are these piffling little Belgians and these
Russians who were beaten by the Japanese, and these English who made such a poor show
against a handful of Boer farmers, fighting and organizing just as well as you. So,
as the French and English are organized as a republic and an extremely limited
monarchy, we will try how that sort of constitution will suit us.” But they will not
break up: on the contrary, they are much more likely to extend the German community
by incorporating German Austria. And as this would raise the question whether
Hohenzollern or Hapsburg should rule the roost, the simplest solution would be to get
rid of them both, and take the sooner or later inevitable step into the democratic
republican form of Government to which Europe is visibly tending, though “this king
business,” as my American correspondents call it, has certain conveniences when it is
limited and combined with an aristocracy also limited by primogeniture and
politically controlled by a commonalty into which all but the eldest brothers in the
aristocratic families fall, thus making the German segregation of the adel
class impossible. Such a monarchy, especially when the monarch is a woman, as in
Holland today, and in England under Victoria, is a fairly acceptable working
substitute for a formal republic in old civilizations with inveterate monarchical
traditions, absurd as it is in new and essentially democratic States. At any rate, it
is conceivable that the western allies might demand the introduction of some such
political constitution in Germany and Austria as a guarantee; for though the demand
would not please Russia, some of Russia’s demands will not please us; and there must
be some give and take in the business.

Limits of Constitutional Interference.

Let us consider this possibility for a moment. First, it must be firmly postulated
that civilized nations cannot have their political constitutions imposed on them from
without if the object of the arrangement is peace and stability. If a victorious
Germany were to attempt to impose the Prussian constitution on France and England,
they would submit to it just as Ireland submitted to Dublin Castle, which, to say the
least, would not be a millennial settlement. Profoundly as we are convinced that our
Government of India is far better than any native Indian government could be (the
assumption that “natives” could govern at all being made for the sake of argument
with due reluctance), it is quite certain that until it becomes as voluntary as the
parliamentary government of Australia, and has been modified accordingly, it will
remain an artificial, precarious, and continually threatening political structure.
Nevertheless, we need not go to the opposite extreme and conclude that a political
constitution must fit a country so accurately that it must be home-made to measure.
Europe has a stock of ready-made constitutions, both Monarchical and Republican,
which will fit any western European nation comfortably enough. We are at present
considerably bothered by the number of Germans who, though their own country and
constitution is less than a day’s journey away, settle here and marry Englishwomen
without feeling that our constitution is unbearable. Englishmen are never tired of
declaring that “they do things better abroad” (as a matter of fact they often do),
and that the ways of Prussia are smarter than the ways of Paddington. It is therefore
quite possible that a reach-me-down constitution proposed, {42}not by the conquerors, but by an
international congress with no interest to serve but the interests of peace, might
prove acceptable enough to a nation thoroughly disgusted with its tyrants.

Physician: Heal Thyself.

Now a congress which undertook the Liberalization of Germany would certainly not
stop there. If we invite a congress to press for a democratization of the German
constitution, we must consent to the democratization of our own. If we send the
Kaiser to St. Helena (or whatever the title of the Chiselhurst villa may be) we must
send Sir Edward Grey there, too. For if on the morrow of the peace we may all begin
to plot and plan one another’s destruction over again in the secrecy of our Foreign
Office, so that in spite of Parliament and free democratic institutions the Foreign
Secretary may at any moment step down from the Foreign Office to the House of Commons
and say, “I arranged yesterday with the ambassador from Cocagne that England is to
join his country in fighting Brobdingnag; so vote me a couple of hundred millions,
and off with you to the trenches,” we shall be just where we were before as far as
any likelihood of putting an end to war is concerned. The congress will certainly ask
us to pledge ourselves that if we shake the mailed fist at all we shall shake it
publicly, and that though we may keep our sword ready (let me interject in passing
that disarmament is all nonsense: nobody is going to disarm after this experience) it
shall be drawn by the representatives of the nation, and not by Junker diplomatists
who despise and distrust the nation, and have planned war behind its back for years.
Indeed they will probably demur to its being drawn even by the representative of the
nation until the occasion has been submitted to the judgment of the representatives
of the world, or such beginnings of a world representative body as may be possible.
That is the true Weltpolitik.

The Hegemony of Peace.

For the main business of the settlement, if it is to have any serious business at
all, must be the establishment of a Hegemony of Peace, as desired by all who are
really capable of high civilization, and formulated by me in the daily Press in a
vain attempt to avert this mischief whilst it was brewing. Nobody took the smallest
public notice of me; so I made a lady in a play say “Not bloody likely,” and
instantly became famous beyond the Kaiser, beyond the Tsar, beyond Sir Edward Grey,
beyond Shakespeare and Homer and President Wilson, the papers occupying themselves
with me for a whole week just as they are now occupying themselves with the war, and
one paper actually devoting a special edition to a single word in my play, which is
more than it has done for the Treaty of London (1839). I concluded then that this was
a country which really could not be taken seriously. But the habits of a lifetime are
not so easily broken; and I am not afraid to produce another dead silence by renewing
my good advice, as I can easily recover my popularity by putting still more shocking
expressions into my next play, especially now that events have shewn that I was right
on the point of foreign policy.

East Is East; and West Is West.

I repeat, then, that there should be a definite understanding that whatever may
happen or not happen further east, England, France, and Germany solemnly pledge
themselves to maintain the internal peace of the west of Europe, and renounce
absolutely all alliances and engagements that bind them to join any Power outside the
combination in military operations, whether offensive or defensive, against one
inside it. We must get rid of the monstrous situation that produced the present war.
France made an alliance with Russia as a defence against Germany. Germany made an
alliance with Austria as a defence against Russia. England joined the Franco-Russian
alliance as a defence against Germany and Austria. The result was that Germany became
involved in a quarrel between Austria and Russia. Having no quarrel with France, and
only a second-hand quarrel with Russia, she was, nevertheless, {43}forced to attack France
in order to disable her before she could strike Germany from behind when Germany was
fighting France’s ally, Russia. And this attack on France forced England to come to
the rescue of England’s ally, France. Not one of the three nations (as distinguished
from their tiny Junker-Militarist cliques) wanted to fight; for England had nothing
to gain and Germany had everything to lose, whilst France had given up hope of her
Alsace-Lorraine revanche, and would certainly not have hazarded a war for it.
Yet because Russia, who has a great deal to gain by victory and nothing except
military prestige to lose by defeat, had a quarrel with Austria over Servia, she has
been able to set all three western friends and neighbours shedding “rivers of blood”
from one another’s throats; an outrageous absurdity. Fifty years ago the notion of
England helping Russia and Japan to destroy Germany would have seemed as suicidal as
Canada helping the Apaches to destroy the United States of America; and though we now
think much better of the Japanese (and also, by the way, of the Apaches), that does
not make us any the more patient with the man who burns down his own street because
he admires the domestic architecture of Yokohama, especially when the fire presently
spreads to the cathedral of Rheims. It is bad enough that we should have betrayed
oriental Persia to oriental Russia as we did (and get nothing for our pains but what
we deserved); but when it comes to sacrificing occidental Germany to her as well, we
are sharpening a knife for our own occidental throat. The Russian Government is the
open enemy of every liberty we boast of. Charles I.’s unsuccessful attempt to arrest
five members of the House of Commons for disagreeing with him is ancient history
here: it occurred 272 years ago; but the Tsar’s successful attempt to arrest thirty
members of the Duma and to punish them as dangerous criminals is a fact of to-day.
Under Russian government people whose worst crime is to find The Daily News a
congenial newspaper are hanged, flogged, or sent to Siberia as a matter of daily
routine; so that before 1906 even the articles in The Times on such events as
the assassinations of Bobrikoff and the Grand Duke were simply polite paraphrases of
“Serve him right.” It may be asked why our newspapers have since ceased to report
examples of Russia’s disregard of the political principles we are supposed to stand
for. The answer is simple. It was in 1906 that we began to lend Russia money, and
Russia began to advertise in The Times. Since then she has been welcome to
flog and hang her H.G. Wellses and Lloyd Georges by the dozen without a word of
remonstrance from our plutocratic Press, provided the interest is paid punctually.
Russia has been embraced in the large charity of cosmopolitan capital, the only
charity that does not begin at home.

The Russian Russians and Their Prussian Tsars.

And here I must save my face with my personal friends who are either Russians or
discoverers of the soul of the Russian people. I hereby declare to Sasha Kropotkin
and Cunninghame Graham that my heart is with their Russia, the Russia of Tolstoy and
Turgenieff and Dostoieffsky, of Gorki and Tchekoff, of the Moscow Art Theatre and the
Drury Lane Ballet, of Peter Kropotkin and all the great humanitarians, great artists,
and charming people whom their very North German Tsars exile and imprison and flog
and generally do what in them lies to suppress and abolish. For the sake of Russian
Russia, I am prepared to strain every point in Prussian Russia’s favour. I grant that
the Nihilists, much as we loved them, were futile romantic people who could have done
nothing if Alexander II. had abdicated and offered them the task of governing Russia
instead of persecuting them and being finally blown to bits by them. I grant that the
manners of the Fins to the Russians are described as insufferable both by the Swedes
and the Russians, and that we never listened to the Russian side of that story. I am
ready to grant Gil{44}bert Murray’s plea that the recent rate of democratic
advance has been greater in Russia than anywhere else in Europe, though it does
remind me a little of the bygone days when the Socialists, scoring 20 votes at one
general election and forty at the next, were able to demonstrate that their gain of
100 per cent. was immensely in excess of the wretched two or three per cent. that was
the best the Unionists or Liberals could shew. I am willing to forget how short a
time it is since Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman said: “The Duma is dead: long live the
Duma!” and since we refused to allow the Tsar to land in England when his ship was
within gangway’s length of our shore, on which occasion I myself held up the
Anglo-Russian agreement for the partition of Persia to the execration of a crowd in
Trafalgar Square, whilst our Metropolitan Police snatched the l’sarbeleidigend
English newspapers from the sellers and tore them up precisely in the Cossack manner.
I have an enormous relish for the art of Russia; I perceive a spirit in Russia which
is the natural antidote to Potsdamnation; and I like most of the Russians I know
quite unaffectedly. I could find it in my heart to reproach the Kaiser for making war
on the Russia of these delightful people, just as I like to think that at this very
moment good Germans may be asking him how he can bring himself to discharge shrapnel
at the England of Bernard Shaw and Cunninghame Graham. History may not forgive him
for it; but the practical point at the moment is that he does it, and no doubt
attributes the perfidy of England to the popularity of our works. And as we have to
take the Kaiser as we find him, and not as the Hohenzollern legend glorifies him, I
have to take the Tsar as I find him. When we fight the Kaiser we are not fighting
Bach and Wagner and Strauss, to whom we have just joyfully surrendered without a blow
at the battle of Queen’s Hall, but all the forces in Germany that made things hard
for Wagner and Strauss. And when we fight for the Tsar we are not fighting for
Tolstoy and Gorki, but for the forces that Tolstoy thundered against all his life and
that would have destroyed him had he not been himself a highly connected Junker as
well as a revolutionary Christian. And if I doubt whether the Tsar would feel
comfortable as a member of a Democratic League of Peace, I am not doubting the good
intent of Kropotkin: I am facing the record of Kropotkin’s imperial jailer, and
standing on the proud fact that England is the only country in Europe, not excepting
even France, in which Kropotkin has been allowed to live a free man, and had his
birthday celebrated by public meetings all over the country, and his articles
welcomed by the leading review. In point of fact, it is largely on Kropotkin’s
account that I regard the Tsar as a gentleman of slightly different views to
President Wilson, and hate the infamous tyranny of which he is the figurehead as I
hate the devil. And I know that practically all our disinterested and thoughtful
supporters of the war feel deeply uneasy about the Russian alliance. At all events, I
should be trifling grossly with the facts of the situation if I pretended that the
most absolute autocracy in Europe, commanding an inexhaustible army in an invincible
country with a dominion stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, may not, if it
achieves a military success against the most dreaded military Power in Europe, be
stirred to ambitions far more formidable to western liberty and human welfare than
those of which Germany is now finding out the vanity after worrying herself and
everyone else with them for forty years. When all is said that can be said for
Russia, the fact remains that a forcibly Russianized German province would be just
such another open sore in Europe as Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, Macedonia or Ireland. It
is useless to dream of guarantees: if Russia undertook to govern democratically she
would not be able to redeem her promise: she would do better with primitive
Communism. Her city populations may be as capable of Democracy as our own (it is,
alas! not saying much); but the overwhelming mass of peasants to whom the Tsar is a
personal God will for a long time to {45}come make his bureaucracy irresistible. As against Russian
civilization German and Austrian civilization is our civilization: there is no
getting over that. A constitutional kingship of Poland and a sort of Caliphate of the
Slavs in remapped southeastern Europe, with that access to warm sea water which is
Russia’s common human right, valid against all Balances of Power and Keys to India
and the like, must be her reward for her share in the war, even if we have to
nationalize Constantinople to secure it to her. But it cannot be too frankly said at
the outset that any attempt to settle Europe on the basis of the present hemming in
of a consolidated Germany and German Austria by a hostile combination of Russia and
the extreme states against it, would go to pieces by its own inherent absurdity, just
as it has already exploded most destructively by its own instability. Until Russia
becomes a federation of several separate democratic States, and the Tsar is either
promoted to the honourable position of hereditary President or else totally
abolished, the eastern boundary of the League of Peace must be the eastern boundary
of Swedish, German, and Italian civilization; and Poland must stand between it and
the quite different and for the moment unassimilable, civilization of Russia, whose
friendship we could not really keep on any other terms, as a closer alliance would
embarrass her as much as it would embarrass us. Meanwhile, we must trust to the march
of Democracy to de-Russianize Berlin and de-Prussianize Petrograd, and to put the
nagaikas of the Cossacks and the riding-whips with which Junker officers slash German
privates, and the forty tolerated homosexual brothels of Berlin, and all the other
psychopathic symptoms of overfeeding and inculcated insolence and sham virility in
their proper place, which I take to be the dustbin.

Driving Capital Out of the Country.

But I must here warn everyone concerned that the most formidable opposition to the
break-up of these unnatural alliances between east and west, between Democracy and
Autocracy, between the twentieth century and the Dark Ages, will not come from the
Balancers of Power. They are not really Balance of Power alliances: in fact, they are
tending to an enormous overbalance of power in favor of the east as against the west
and in favor of Militarist Autocracy as against Democracy. They are at root
absolutely unpatriotic, even absolutely conscienceless products of commercial
finance; and the Balance of Power theories are only the attempts of our diplomats to
put a public spirited face on the operations of private cupidity. This is not the
first time nor the second that I have had to urge that the greatest danger to us in
the sphere of foreign politics is the tendency of capital to run away from
civilization: the one running downhill to hell as naturally as the other struggles
uphill to the Celestial City. The Englishman is allowed to produce the subsistence of
himself and his family only on condition that he produces the subsistence of the
capitalist and his retainers as well; and lo! he finds more and more that these
retainers are not Englishmen, but Russians, South Americans, Kaffirs, Persians, or
yellow or black barbarians armed for his destruction (not to mention Prussians and
Austrians), and that the treaties made by our diplomatists have less and less to do
with the security of the nation or the balance of power or any other public business,
and more and more with capitalist opportunities of making big dividends out of
slavish labour. For instance, the Anglo-Russian agreement is not a national treaty:
it is the memorandum of a commercial agreement settling what parts of Persia are to
be exploited by the Russian and English capitalists respectively; the capitalists,
always against State interference for the benefit of the people, being very strongly
in favor of it for coercing strikers at home and keeping foreign rivals off their
grass abroad. And the absurd part of it is that when the State has thus arranged for
our capitalists to exploit certain parts of Persia, and for their sakes to protect
the parliamentary liber{46}ties of the part left to Russia, they discovered that,
after all, the most profitable game was to lend Russia the money to exploit with, and
to facilitate the operation by allowing her to destroy the Persian parliament in the
face of our own exhortation to it to keep the flag flying, which we accordingly did
without a blush. The French capitalists had dragged France into an alliance with
Russia long before this; but the French Republic had the excuse of the German peril
and the need for an anti-German ally. Her natural ally for that purpose was England;
but as there was no market in England for her money, her plutocrats drove her into
the alliance with Russia as well; and it is that alliance and not the alliance with
England that has terrified Germany into flying at her throat and plunging Europe into
a frightful war. The natural alliance with England twice averted war: in the Moroccan
crises of Algeciras and Agadir, when Sir Edward Grey said boldly that we should
defend France, and took the first steps towards a joint military and naval control of
the French and English forces. Why he shrank from that firm position last July and
thereby led Germany to count so fatally on our neutrality I do not pretend to know;
it suffices for my argument that we were able to hold the balance between France and
Germany, but failed to hold it between Germany and Russia, and that it was the
placing of Russian loans in France and England that brought Russia into our western
affairs. It would have paid us ten times over to have made Russia a present of all we
and France have lent her (indemnifying, of course, the holders of the stock through
an addition to the income tax) rather than pay the price of a European war. But what
is the use of crying for spilt milk? I am merely explaining why, when French money
went to Russia, the French papers discovered that the Russians were a most
interesting people and their Government—properly understood—a
surprisingly Liberal Government; and why, when English money went to Russia, the
English press suddenly developed leanings towards the Greek Church, and deplored the
unofficial execution of Stolypin as deeply as it had rejoiced in the like fate of
Bobrikoff. The upshot of it all is that western civilization is at present busy
committing suicide by machinery, and importing hordes of Asiatics and Africans to
help in the throat cutting, not for the benefit of the silly capitalists, who are
being ruined wholesale, but to break up the Austrian Empire for the benefit of Russia
and the Slavs of eastern Europe, which may be a very desirable thing, but which could
and should be done by the eastern Powers among themselves, without tearing Belgium
and Germany and France and England to pieces in the process.

The Red Flag and the Black.

Will you now at last believe, O stupid British, German, and French patriots, what
the Socialists have been telling you for so many years: that your Union Jacks and
tricolours and Imperial Eagles (“where the carcase is, there will the eagles be
gathered”) are only toys to keep you amused, and that there are only two real flags
in the world henceforth: the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of
Capitalism, the flag of God and the flag of Mammon? What earthly or heavenly good is
done when Tom Fool shoots Hans Narr? The plain fact is that if we leave our capital
to be dealt with according to the selfishness of the private man he will send it
where wages are low and workers enslaved and docile: that is, as many thousand miles
as possible from the Trade Unions and Trade Union rates and parliamentary Labour
Parties of civilization; and Germany, at his sordid behest, will plunge the world
into war for the sake of disgracing herself with a few rubber plantations, poetically
described by her orators and journalists as “a place in the sun.” When you do what
the Socialists tell you by keeping your capital jealously under national control and
reserving your shrapnel for the wasters who not only shirk their share of the
industrial service of their country, but intend that their {47}children and children’s children shall be
idle wasters like themselves, you will find that not a farthing of our capital will
go abroad as long as there is a British slum to be cleared and rebuilt, or a hungry,
ragged, and ignorant British child to be fed, clothed, and educated.

A League of Peace.

But in the west I see no insuperable obstacle to a Treaty of Peace in the largest
sense. This war has smoothed the way to it, if I may use the word smoothing to
describe a process conduced with so little courtesy and so much shrapnel. Germany has
now learned—and the lesson was apparently needed, obvious as it would have been
to a sanely governed nation—that when it comes to shoving and shooting, Germany
instantly loses all the advantages of her high civilization, because France and
England, cultured or uncultured, can shove and shoot as well or beter than she,
whilst as to slashing and stabbing, their half barbarous Turco and Ghoorka slaves can
cut the Prussian Guard to bits, in spite of the unquestionable superiority of
Wagner’s music to theirs. Then take France. She does not dream that she could fight
Germany and England single-handed. And England could not fight France and Germany
without a sacrifice as ruinous as it would be senseless. We therefore have the
necessary primary conditions for a League of Peace between the three countries; for
if one of them break it, the other two can make her sorry, under which circumstances
she will probably not break it. The present war, if it end in the reconquest of
Alsace and Lorraine by the French, will make such a League much more stable; not that
France can acquire by mere conquest any right to hold either province against its
will (which could be ascertained by plebiscite), but because the honors of war as
between France and Germany would then be easy, France having regained her laurels and
taught Germany to respect her, without obliterating the record of Germany’s triumph
in 1870. And if the war should further result in the political reconstruction of the
German Empire as a democratic Commonwealth, and the conquest by the English people of
democratic control of English foreign policy, the combination would be immensely
eased and strengthened, besides being brought into harmony with American public
feeling, which is important to the security and prestige of the League.

The Case of the Smaller States.

Already the war has greatly added to the value of one of the factors upon which
the League of Peace will depend. The smaller States: Holland, Belgium, Switzerland,
and the Scandinavian Powers, would have joined it any time these 40 years, had it
existed, for the sake of its protection, and thereby made the Protestant north of Mr.
Houston Chamberlain’s dream as much a reality as any such dream is ever likely to be.
But after the fight put up by Belgium the other day, the small States will be able to
come in with the certainty of being treated with considerable respect as military
factors; for Belgium can now claim to have saved Europe single-handed. Germany has
been very unpleasantly reminded of the fact that though a big man may be able to beat
a little one, yet if the little one fights for all he is worth he may leave the
victor very sorry he broke the peace. Even as between the big Powers, victory has
not, as far as the fighting has yet gone, been always with the biggest battalions.
With a couple of millions less men, the Kaiser might have taken more care of them and
made a better job of it.

At the same time I hold no brief for small States as such, and most vehemently
deny that we are in any way bound to knight errantry on their behalf as against big
ones. They are mostly either incorrigibly bellicose themselves, like Montenegro, or
standing temptations to the big Powers, like Bosnia and Herzegovina. They multiply
frontiers, which are nuisances, and languages, which have made confusion since the
building of Babel. The striking contrast between the United States of North America
and the disunited States of {48}South America in this respect is, from the Pacifist point
of view, very much in favor of the northern unity. The only objection to large
political units is that they make extremely dangerous autocracies. But as groups of
federated democracies they are the best neighbours in the world. A federal democratic
Russia would be as safe a colleague as America: a federal democratic Germany would be
as pleasant company as Switzerland. Let us, I beg, hear no more of little States as
British Dulcineas.

The Claims of Belgium.

As to the special case of Belgium, its claims in the settlement are simple and
indeed single. If we conclude a peace without clearing the Germans completely out of
Belgium, we shall be either beaten or dishonoured. And such indemnity as a money
payment can effect for Belgium is due not only by Germany, but by Britain, France,
and Russia as well. Belgium has been crushed between the Alliance and the Entente: it
was these two menaces to the peace of Europe that produced Armageddon; and as
Belgium’s heroic resistance served the Entente against the Alliance, the obligation
to make good the remediable damage is even more binding on the Entente.

But there is another and more pressing matter arising out of the conquest of
Belgium.

The Belgian Refugees and the Problem of Unemployment.

As I write these lines the descent on our shores of an army of refugees from
captured Antwerp and threatened Ostend has forced the President of the Local
Government Board to make a desperate appeal to all and sundry to form representative
committees to deal with the prevention and relief of distress: in other words to save
the refugees from starving to death. Now the Board of Trade has already drawn
attention to a memorandum of the Local Government Board as to the propriety of
providing employment for refugees. And instantly and inevitably the condition had to
be laid down that if the Committees find employment for anyone, they shall refer the
case to the local Labour Exchange in order that “any steps taken to assist refugees
to find employment shall not be such as to endanger the employment of British
workpeople.” In other words, the starving Belgians have fled from the Germans only to
compete for crust with starving Englishmen. As long as there is an unemployed
Englishman in the country—and there are a good many, especially in the cotton
industry—how is it possible to give a job to a Belgian without depriving an
Englishman of it? Why, instead of making impossible conditions, and helplessly asking
private citizens to do something for pity’s sake, will not the Government face the
fact that the refugee question is simply an intensification of the normal unemployed
question, the only difference being that we are accustomed to leave our own people to
starve when they are common persons with whom the governing classes do not associate,
whereas the Belgians have rendered us such a tremendous service in the war, and our
statesmen have so loudly protested that the integrity of Belgium is dearer to England
than her own heart’s blood, that we cannot with any decency treat the destitute
Belgians as if they were mere British riffraff. Yet when we attempt to provide for
the Belgians by finding work for them the Board of Trade has to point out that by
doing so we are taking the bread out of the mouths of our own people. Hence we arrive
at the remarkable situation of starving Britons and Belgians looking hungrily through
barbed wire fences at flourishing communities of jolly and well fed German prisoners
of war (whose friendly hat wavings to me and my fellow passengers as I rush through
Newbury Racecourse Station in the Great Western Express I hereby acknowledge publicly
with all possible good feeling). I therefore for the present strongly recommend all
Belgians who have made up their minds to flee to England, to pick up German uniforms
on the battle fields and surrender to the British in the character of Uhlans. Their
subsistence will then be secure until the war is over, as {49}we dare not illtreat our prisoners lest the
Germans should retaliate upon the British soldiers in their hands, even if we were
all spiteful enough to desire to do it, as some of our baser sort have not been
ashamed to propose.

But the women and children, and the too young and the too old, cannot resort to
this expedient. And though theoretically our own unemployed could be dressed in
British uniforms and sent abroad with instructions to take refuge in neutral
territory and be “interned” or to surrender to the first Uhlan patrol they met, yet
it would be difficult to reduce this theory to practice, though the possibility is
worth mentioning as a reduction to absurdity of the situation. As a matter of common
sense “we should at once place all destitute Belgian refugees on the footing of
prisoners of war, except that we need not post sentries to shoot them if they try to
escape, nor surround them with barbed wire. Indeed these precautions are necessary in
the case of the Germans rather to save their sense of honour whilst remaining here
than to defeat any very strong longing on their part to return to the trenches.

In a reasonable state of society there would be another difference. The Belgians
would offer to work so as not to be a burden to us; whilst the German prisoner would
say—as he actually does, by the way—”No: I am not here by my own will: if
you open the door I shall go home and take myself off your hands; so I am in no way
bound to work for you.” As it is, our Trade Unions are up in arms at the slightest
hint of either Belgian or German labour being employed when there is no shortage of
English labour!

The Minority Report.

All this exasperating anomaly and deadlock and breakdown would disappear if we had
a proper system of provision for our own unemployed civilians (there are no
unemployed soldiers: we do not discharge them between the battles). The Belgians
would have found an organization of unemployment ready for them, and would have been
provided for with our own unemployed, not as refugees, but simply as unemployed. How
to do that need not be explained here. The problem was worked out by one of the
hardest bits of thinking yet done in the Socialist movement, and set forth in the
Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and the Relief of Distress,
1909. Our helplessness in the present emergency shews how very unwise we were to
shelve that report. Unluckily, what with the wounded vanity of the majority of the
Commission, who had been played off the stage by Mrs. Sidney Webb; the folly of the
younger journalists of the advanced guard, who had just then rediscovered Herbert
Spencer’s mare’s nest of “the servile State,” and revolted with all the petulant
anarchism of the literary profession against the ideal Interfering Female as typified
in their heated imaginations by poor Mrs. Sidney Webb, who became the Aunt Sally of
our young artists in stale anti-bureaucratic invective; and, above all, the mulishly
silent refusal of our governing classes to see why the unemployed should not be
simply left to starve, as they had always been (the Poor Law being worse than useless
for so large a purpose), nothing was done; and there is consequently no machinery
ready for dealing with the refugees. That is why we must treat them for the moment
simply as unguarded prisoners of war.

The General Strike Against War.

But if the problem of unemployment among our own people becomes acute, we shall
have to fall back on the Minority Report proposals or else run the risk of a revolt
against the war. We have already counted on the chances of that revolt hampering
Germany, just as Germany counted on the chances of its hampering Russia, The notion
that the working classes can stop a war by a general international strike is never
mentioned during the first rally to the national flag at the outbreak of a war; but
it is there all the time, ready to break out again if the supplies of food and glory
run short. Its gravity lies in its impracticability. If it were practicable, every
sane man {50}would
advocate it. As it is, it might easily mean that British troops would be coercing
British strikers at home when they should be fighting Potsdam abroad, thus producing
a disastrous and detestable division of popular feeling in the face of the enemy.

The Disarmament Delusion.

Objections to the Western Pacifist settlement will come from several quarters,
including the Pacifist quarters. Some of the best disposed parties will stumble over
the old delusion of disarmament. They think it is the gun that matters. They are
wrong: the gun matters very much when war breaks out; but what makes both war and the
gun is the man behind them. And if that man really means the peace of the world to be
kept, he will take care to have a gun to keep it with. The League of Peace must have
a first-rate armament, or the League of War will very soon make mincemeat of it. The
notion that the men of evil intent are to have all the weapons will not work.
Theoretically, all our armaments should be pooled. But as we, the British Empire,
will most certainly not pool our defenses with anyone, and as we have not the very
smallest intention of disarming, and will go on building gun for gun and ship for
ship in step with even our dearest friends if we see the least risk of our being left
in a position of inferiority, we cannot with any countenance demand that other Powers
shall do what we will not do ourselves. Our business is not to disable ourselves or
anyone else, but to organize a balance of military power against war, whether made by
ourselves or any other Power; and this can be done only by a combination of armed and
fanatical Pacifists of all nations, not by a crowd of non-combatants wielding
deprecations, remonstrances, and Christmas cards.

America’s Example: War at a Year’s Notice.

How far it will be possible to take these national armaments out of national
control remains to be seen. Already America, who is as deeply demoralized by
Capitalism as we are, though much less tainted with Militarism now that Colonel
Roosevelt has lost his front seat, has pledged herself to several European States not
to go to war with them until the matter under dispute has been in the hands of an
international tribunal for a year. Now there is no military force on earth, nor
likely to be, strong enough to prevent America from treating these agreements as
Germany has just treated the 1839 Treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium.
Therefore the Militarists declare that the agreements are not worth the scraps of
paper they are written on. They always will footle in this way. They might as well
say that because there are crimes which men can commit with legal impunity in spite
of our haphazard criminal codes, men always do commit them. No doubt nations will do
what it is to their interest to do. But because there is in every nation a set of
noisy moral imbeciles who cannot see that nations have an overwhelming interest in
creating and maintaining a tradition of international good faith, and honouring their
promissory notes as scrupulously as the moral imbeciles pay their silly gambling
debts and fight their foolish duels, we are not, I presume, going to discard every
international guarantee except the howitzer. Why, the very Prussian Militarists
themselves are reviling us for doing what their own Militarist preachers assumed as a
matter of course that we should do: that is, attack Prussia without regard to the
interests of European civilization when we caught her at a disadvantage between
France and Russia. But we should have been ashamed to do that if she had not, by
assuming that there was no such thing as shame (alias conscience), terrified
herself into attacking France and Belgium, when, of course, we were immediately
ashamed not to defend them. This idiotic ignoring of the highest energies of the
human soul, without the strenuous pressure of which the fabric of
civilization—German civilization perhaps most of all—could not hold
together for a single day, should really be treated in the asylums of Europe, not on
battlefields.

{51}I conclude that
we might all very well make a beginning by pledging ourselves as America has done to
The Hague tribunal not to take up arms in any cause that has been less than a year
under arbitration, and to treat any western Power refusing this pledge as an
unpopular and suspicious member of the European club. To break such a pledge would be
an act of brigandage; and the need for suppressing brigandage cannot be regarded as
an open question.

The Security Will o’ the Wisp.

It will be observed that I propose no guarantee of absolute security. Not being a
sufferer from delirium tremens I can live without it. Security is no doubt the
Militarists’ most seductive bait to catch the coward’s vote. But their method makes
security impossible, They undertook to secure the English in Egypt from an imaginary
Islam rising by the Denshawai Horror, as a result of which nobody has ventured to
suggest that we should trust the Egyptian army in this conflict, though India, having
learnt from Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald that there are really
anti-Militarists in England who regard Indians as fellow creatures, is actually
rallying to us against the Prussian Junkers, who are, in Indian eyes,
indistinguishable from the Anglo-Indians who call Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay
Macdonald traitors, and whose panicstricken denial of even a decent pretence of
justice in the sedition trials is particularly unfortunate just now. We must always
take risks; and we should never trade on the terror of death, nor forget that this
wretchedest of all the trades is none the less craven because it can so easily be
gilt with romance and heroism and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by
persons whose superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of
Godforsaken folly.

The Only Real World Danger.

The one danger before us that nothing can avert but a general raising of human
character through the deliberate cultivation and endowment of democratic virtue
without consideration of property and class, is the danger created by inventing
weapons capable of destroying civilization faster than we produce men who can be
trusted to use them wisely. At present we are handling them like children. Now
children are very pretty, very lovable, very affectionate creatures (sometimes); and
a child can make nitroglycerine or chloride of nitrogen as well as a man if it is
taught to do so. We have sense enough not to teach it; but we do teach the grown-up
children. We actually accompany that dangerous technical training with solemn moral
lessons in which the most destructive use of these forces at the command of kings and
capitalists is inculcated as heroism, patriotism, glory and all the rest of it. It is
all very well to fire cannons at the Kaiser for doing this; but we do it ourselves.
It is therefore undeniably possible that a diabolical rhythm may be set up in which
civilization will rise periodically to the point at which explosives powerful enough
to destroy it are discovered, and will then be shattered and thrown back to a fresh
start with a few starving and ruined survivors. H.G. Wells and Anatole France have
pre-figured that result in fiction; and I cannot deny the strength of its
probability; for if England and Germany can find no better way of celebrating their
arrival at the highest point of civilization yet attained than setting out to blow
one another to fragments with fulminates, it would seem that the peace of the neutral
States is the result, not of their being more civilized, but less heavily armed. And
when we see that the effect of the enterprise is not to redouble civil vigilance and
stimulate the most alert and jealous political criticism, but on the contrary to
produce an assumption that every constitutional safeguard must be suspended until the
war is over, and that every silly tyrannical expedient such as censorship of the
press, martial law, and the like, will begin to work good instead of evil the moment
men take to murdering one another, it must be admitted that the prospect is not too
hopeful. Our only consolation is that civilization has survived very destructive wars
before, mostly because they have produced ef{52}fects not only unintended but violently objected to by the
people who made them. In 1870, for instance, Napoleon III. can hardly have intended
his own overthrow and return to exile in England; nor did Bismarck aim at the
restoration of French Republicanism and the formation of an Anglo-Franco-Russian
alliance against Prussia. Several good things may come out of the present war if it
leaves anybody alive to enjoy them.

The Church and the War.

And now, where in our society is the organ whose function it should be to keep us
constantly in mind that, as Lassalle said, “the sword is never right,” and to shudder
with him at the fact that “the Lie is a European Power”? In no previous war have we
struck that top note of keen irony, the closing of the Stock Exchange and not of the
Church. The pagans were more logical: they closed the Temple of Peace when they drew
the sword. We turn our Temples of Peace promptly into temples of war, and exhibit our
parsons as the most pugnacious characters in the community. I venture to affirm that
the sense of scandal given by this is far deeper and more general than the Church
thinks, especially among the working classes, who are apt either to take religion
seriously or else to repudiate it and criticize it closely. When a bishop at the
first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock around the altar of
Mars, he may be acting patriotically, necessarily, manfully, rightly; but that does
not justify him in pretending that there has been no change, and that Christ is, in
effect, Mars. The straightforward course, and the one that would serve the Church
best in the long run, would be to close our professedly Christian Churches the moment
war is declared by us, and reopen them only on the signing of the treaty of peace. No
doubt to many of us the privation thus imposed would be far worse than the privation
of small change, of horses and motor cars, of express trains, and all the other
prosaic inconveniences of war. But would it be worse than the privation of faith, and
the horror of the soul, wrought by the spectacle of nations praying to their common
Father to assist them in sabring and bayonetting and blowing one another to pieces
with explosives that are also corrosives, and of the Church organizing this monstrous
paradox instead of protesting against it? Would it make less atheists or more?
Atheism is not a simple homogeneous phenomenon. There is the youthful atheism with
which every able modern mind begins: an atheism that clears the soul of superstitions
and terrors and servilities and base compliances and hypocrisies, and lets in the
light of heaven. And there is the atheism of despair and pessimism: the sullen cry
with which so many of us at this moment, looking on blinded deafened maimed wrecks
that were once able-bodied admirable lovable men, and on priests blessing war, and
newspapers and statesmen and exempt old men hounding young men on to it, are saying
“I know now there is no God.” What has the Church in its present attitude to set
against this crushed acceptance of darkness except the quaint but awful fact that
there are cruder people on whom horrifying calamities have just the opposite effect,
because they seem the work of some power so overwhelming in its malignity that it
must be worshipped because it is mighty? Let the Church beware how it plays to that
gallery. If all the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased
rolling they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war is a
famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.

But as I know quite well that the Churches are not going to do anything of the
kind, I must not close on a note which might to some readers imply that I hope, as
some highly respected friends of mine do, to build a pacific civilization on the
ruins of the vast ecclesiastical organizations which have never yet been able to
utter the truth, because they have had to speak to the poor according to their
ignorance and credulity, and to the rich according to their power. When I read {53}that the icon of the
Russian peasant is a religious force that will prevail over the materialism of
Helmholtz and Haeckel, I have to contain myself as best I can in the face of an
assumption by a modern educated European which implies that the Irish peasants who
tied scraps of rag to the trees over their holy wells and paid for masses to shorten
the stay of their dead relatives in purgatory, were more enlightened than their
countryman Tyndall, the Lucretian materialist, and to ask whether the Russian peasant
may not find his religious opinions somewhat neutralized by his alliance with the
countries of Paul Bert and Combes, of Darwin and Almroth Wright. If we are to keep up
any decent show of talking sense on this point we must begin by recognizing that the
lines of battle in this war cut right across all the political and sectarian lines in
Europe, except the line between our Socialist future and our Commercialist past.
Materialist France, metaphysical Germany, muddle-headed English, Byzantine Russia may
form what military combinations they please: the one thing they cannot form is a
Crusade; and all attempts to represent this war as anything higher or more
significant philosophically or politically or religiously for our Junkers and our
Tommies than a quite simple primitive contest of the pugnacity that bullies and the
pugnacity that will not be bullied are foredoomed to the derision of history. However
far-reaching the consequences of the war may be, we in England are fighting to shew
the Prussians that they shall not trample on us nor on our neighbors if we can help
it, and that if they are fools enough to make their fighting efficiency the test of
civilization, we can play that game as destructively as they. That is simple, and the
truth, and by far the jolliest and most inspiring ground to recruit on. It stirs the
blood and stiffens the back as effectively and quickly as hypocrisy and cant and
humbug sour and trouble and discourage. But it will not carry us farther than the end
of the fight. We cannot go on fighting forever, or even for very long, whatever Lord
Kitchener may think; and win, lose, or tie, the parties, when the fight is over, must
fall back on their civil wisdom and political foresight for a settlement of the terms
on which we are to live happily together ever after. The practicable conditions of a
stable comity of nations cannot be established by the bayonet, which settles nothing
but the hash of those who rely on it. They are to found, as I have already explained,
in the substitution for our present Militarist kingdoms of a system of democratic
units delimited by community of language, religion, and habit; grouped in federations
of united States when their extent makes them politically unwieldy; and held against
war by the bond of international Socialism, the only ground upon which the identity
of interest between all workers never becomes obscured.

The Death of Jaures.

By far the greatest calamity wrought by the war has been the death of
Jaurès, who was worth more to France and to Europe than ten army corps and a
hundred Archdukes. I once proposed a press law that might have saved him. It was that
every article printed in a newspaper should bear not only the name and address of the
writer, but the sum paid him for the contribution. If the wretched dupe who
assassinated Jaurès had known that the trashy articles on the Three Years Law
he had been reading were not the voice of France in peril, but the ignorant
scribbling of some poor devil at his wits’ end to earn three francs, he would hardly
have thrown away his own life to take that of the greatest statesman his country has
produced since Mirabeau. It is hardly too much to say that this ghastly murder and
the appalling war that almost eclipsed its horror, is the revenge of the sweated
journalist on a society so silly that though it will not allow a man to stuff its
teeth without ascertained qualifications for the task, it allows anyone, no matter
how poor, how ignorant, how untrained, how imbecile, to stuff its brains without even
taking the trouble {54}to ask his name. When we interfere with him and his
sweaters at all, we interfere by way of appointing a censorship to prevent him from
telling, not lies, however mischievous and dangerous to our own people abroad, but
the truth. To be a liar and a brewer of bad blood is to be a privileged person under
our censorship, which, so far, has proceeded by no discoverable rule except that of
concealing from us everything that the Germans must know lest the Germans should find
it out.

Socialism Alone Keeps Its Head.

Socialism has lost its leader on the Continent; but it is solid and representative
on the main point; it loathes war; and it sees clearly that war is always waged by
working men who have no quarrel, but on the contrary a supreme common interest. It
steadily resists the dangerous export of capital by pressing the need for
uncommercial employment of capital at home: the only practicable alternative. It
knows that war, on its romantic side, is “the sport of kings”: and it concludes that
we had better get rid of kings unless they can kill their tedium with more democratic
amusements. It notes the fact that though the newspapers shout at us that these
battles on fronts a hundred miles long, where the slain outnumber the total forces
engaged in older campaigns, are the greatest battles known to history, such
machine-carnages bore us so horribly that we are ashamed of our ingratitude to our
soldiers in not being able to feel about them as about comparatively trumpery scraps
like Waterloo or even Inkerman and Balaclava. It never forgets that as long as higher
education, culture, foreign travel, knowledge of the world: in short, the
qualification for comprehension of foreign affairs and intelligent voting, is
confined to one small class, leaving the masses in poverty, narrowness, and
ignorance, and being itself artificially cut off at their expense from the salutary
pressure of the common burden which alone keeps men unspoilt and sane, so long will
that small class be forced to obtain the support of the masses for its wars by
flattering proclamations of the national virtues and indignant denunciations of the
villanies of the enemy, with, if necessary, a stiffening of deliberate falsehood and
a strenuous persecution of any attempt at inconvenient truthtelling. Here there is no
question of the Junker being a monster. You must rule ignoramuses according to their
ignorance. The priest must work bogus miracles for them; the man of science must
offer them magical cures and prophylactics; the barrister must win their verdict by
sophistries, false pathos, and appeals to their prejudices; the army and navy must
dazzle them with pageants and bands and thundering salvos and romantic tales; the
king must cut himself off from humanity and become an idol. There is no escape whilst
such classes exist. Mahomet, the boldest prophet that ever threw down the gage of the
singleness and supremacy of God to a fierce tribe of warriors who worshipped stones
as devotedly as we worship dukes and millionaires, could not govern them by religious
truth, and was forced to fall back on revolting descriptions of hell and the day of
judgment, invented by him for the purpose. What else could he do if his people were
not to be abandoned to their own destruction? If it is an axiom of diplomacy that the
people must not be told the truth, that is not in the least because, for example, Sir
Edward Grey has a personal taste for mendacity; it is a necessity imposed by the fact
that the people are incapable of the truth. In the end, lying becomes a reflex action
with diplomatists; and we cannot even issue a penny bluebook without beginning it
with the quite unprovoked statement that “no crime has ever aroused deeper or more
general horror throughout Europe” than the assassination of the Archduke. The real
tragedy was that the violent death of a fellow creature should have aroused so
little.

Divided Against Ourselves.

This state of things would be bad enough if the governing classes really sought
the welfare of the governed, and were deceiving them for their own good. {55}But they are doing
nothing of the sort. They are using their power secondarily, no doubt, to uphold the
country in which they have so powerful and comfortable a position; but primarily
their object is to maintain that position by the organized legal robbery of the poor;
and to that end they would join hands with the German Junkers as against the working
class in Germany and England as readily as Bismarck joined hands with Thiers to
suppress the Commune of Paris. And even if this were not so, nothing would persuade
the working classes that those who sweat them ruthlessly in commercial enterprise are
any more considerate in public affairs, especially when there is any question of war,
by which much money can be made for rich people who deal in the things most wanted
and most highly paid for in war time: to wit, armaments and money. The direct
interest of our military caste in war accounts for a good deal; but at least it
involves personal risk and hardship and bereavement to the members of that caste. But
the capitalist who has shares in explosives and cannons and soldiers’ boots runs no
risk and suffers no hardship; whilst as to the investor pure and simple, all that
happens to him is that he finds the unearned income obtainable on Government security
larger than ever. Victory to the capitalists of Europe means that they can not only
impose on the enemy a huge indemnity, but lend him the money to pay it with whilst
the working classes produce and pay both principal and interest.

As long as we have that state of things, we shall have wars and secret and
mendacious diplomacy. And this is one of many overwhelming reasons for building the
State on equality of income, because without it equality of status and general
culture is impossible. Democracy without equality is a delusion more dangerous than
frank oligarchy and autocracy. And without Democracy there is no hope of peace, no
chance of persuading ourselves that the sacredness of civilization will protect it
any more than the sacredness of the cathedral of Rheims has protected it, not against
Huns and Vandals, but against educated German gentlemen.

Rheims.

Commercial wage-slaves can never reproduce that wonderful company of sculptured
figures that made Rheims unlike any other place in the world; and if they are now
destroyed, or shortly about to be, it does not console me that we still
have—perhaps for a few days longer only—the magical stained glass of
Chartres and the choir of Beauvais. We tell ourselves that the poor French people
must feel as we should feel if we had lost Westminster Abbey. Rheims was worth ten
Westminster Abbeys; and where it has gone the others may just as easily go too. Let
us not sneer at the German pretension to culture: let us face the fact that the
Germans are just as cultured as we are (to say the least) and that war has
nevertheless driven them to do these things as irresistibly as it will drive us to do
similar things tomorrow if we find ourselves attacking a town in which the highest
point from which our positions can be spotted by an observer with a field glass in
one hand and a telephone in the other is the towering roof of the cathedral. Also let
us be careful how we boast of our love of medieval art to people who well know, from
the protests of Ruskin and Morris, that in times of peace we have done things no less
mischievous and irreparable for no better reason than that the Mayor’s brother or the
Dean’s uncle-in-law was a builder in search of a “restoration” job. If Rheims
cathedral were taken from the Church to-morrow and given to an English or French
joint stock company, everything transportable in it would presently be sold to
American collectors, and the site cleared and let out in building sites. That is the
way to make it “pay” commercially.

The Fate of The Glory Drunkard.

But our problem is how to make Commercialism itself bankrupt. We must beat
Germany, not because the Militarist hallucination and our irresolution forced Germany
to make this war, so desperate for her, at a moment so unfavourable to herself, but
because she has made her{56}self the exponent and champion in the modern world of the
doctrine that military force is the basis and foundation of national greatness, and
military conquest the method by which the nation of the highest culture can impose
that culture on its neighbors. Now the reason I have permitted myself to call General
Von Bernhardi a madman is that he lays down quite accurately the conditions of this
military supremacy without perceiving that what he is achieving is a reductio ad
absurdum. For he declares as a theorist what Napoleon found in practice, that you
can maintain the Militarist hold over the imaginations of the people only by feeding
them with continual glory. You must go from success to success; the moment you fail
you are lost; for you have staked everything on your power to conquer, for the sake
of which the people have submitted to your tyranny and endured the sufferings and
paid the cost your military operations entailed. Napoleon conquered and conquered and
conquered; and yet, when he had won more battles than the maddest Prussian can ever
hope for, he had to go on fighting just as if he had never won anything at all. After
exhausting the possible he had to attempt the impossible and go to Moscow. He failed;
and from that moment he had better have been a Philadelphia Quaker than a victor of
Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena and Wagrarn. Within a short breathing time after that
morning when he stood outside Leipsic, whistling Malbrook s’en va-t-en guerre
whilst his flying army gasped its last in the river or fled under a hail of bullets
from enemies commanded by generals without a tenth of his ability or prestige, we
find him disguised as a postillion, cowering abjectly behind the door of a carriage
whilst the French people whom he had crammed with glory for a quarter of a century
were seeking to tear him limb from limb. His success had made him the enemy of every
country except France: his failure made him the enemy of the human race. And that was
why Europe rose up finally and smashed him, although the English Government which
profited by that operation oppressed the English people for thirty years afterwards
more sordidly than Napoleon would have oppressed them, and its Allies replaced him on
the throne of France by an effete tyrant not worthy to unlace his shoe latchet.
Nothing can finally redeem Militarism. When even genius itself takes that path its
end is still destruction. When mere uppishness takes it the end is not changed,
though it may be reached more precipitately and disastrously.

The Kaiser.

Prussia has talked of that path for many years as the one down which its destiny
leads it. Its ruler, with the kid gloves he called mailed fists and the high class
tailoring he called shining armour, did much of the talking, though he is in practice
a most peaceful teetotaller, as many men with their imaginations full of the romance
of war are. He had a hereditary craze for playing at soldiers; and he was and is a
naïve suburban snob, as the son of The Englishwoman would naturally be, talking
about “the Hohenzollerns” exactly as my father’s people in Dublin used to talk about
“the Shaws.” His stage walk, familiar through the cinematograph, is the delight of
romantic boys, and betrays his own boyish love of the Paradeschritt. It is
frightful to think of the powers which Europe, in its own snobbery, left in the hands
of this Peter Pan; and appalling as the results of that criminal levity have been,
yet, being by no means free from his romantic follies myself, I do not feel harshly
toward Peter, who, after all, kept the peace for over twenty-six years. In the end
his talk and his games of soldiers in preparation for a toy conquest of the world
frightened his neighbours into a league against him; and that league has now caught
him in just such a trap as his strategists were laying for his neighbours. We please
ourselves by pretending that he did not try to extricate himself, and forced the war
on us; but that is not true. When he realized his peril he tried hard enough; but
when he saw that it was no use he accepted the situation and dashed at his enemies
with {57}an infatuate
courage not unworthy of the Hohenzollern tradition. Blinded as he was by the false
ideals of his class, it was the best he could do; for there is always a chance for a
brave and resolute warrior, even when his back is not to the wall but to the
Russians.

That means that we have to conquer him and not to revile him and strike moral
attitudes. His victory over British and French Democracy would be a victory of
Militarism over civilization; it would literally shut the gates of mercy on mankind.
Leave it to our official fools and governesses to lecture the Kaiser, and to let
loose Turcos and Ghoorkas on him: a dangerous precedent. Let Thomas Atkins, Patrick
Murphy, Sandy McAlister, and Pitou Dupont fight him under what leadership they can
get, until honour is satisfied, simply because if St. George does not slay the dragon
the world will be, as a friend of mine said of Europe the other day, “no place for a
gentleman.”

Recapitulation.

1. The war should be pushed vigorously, not with a view to a final crushing of the
German army between the Anglo-French combination and the Russian millions, but to the
establishment of a decisive military superiority by the Anglo-French combination
alone. A victory unattainable without Russian aid would be a defeat for Western
European Liberalism; Germany would be beaten not by us, but by a Militarist autocracy
worse than her own. By sacrificing Prussian Poland and the Slav portions of the
Austrian Empire Germany and Austria could satisfy Russia, and merge Austria and
Germany into a single German State, which would then dominate France and England,
having ascertained that they could not conquer her without Russia’s aid. We may
fairly allow Russia to conquer Austria if she can; that is her natural part of the
job. But if we two cannot without Russian help beat Potsdam, or at least hold her up
in such a stalemate as will make it clear that it is impossible for her to subjugate
us, then we shall simply have to “give Germany best” and depend on an alliance with
America for our place in the sun.

2. We cannot smash or disable Germany, however completely we may defeat her,
because we can do that only by killing her women; and it is trifling to pretend that
we are capable of any such villainy. Even to embarrass her financially by looting her
would recoil on ourselves, as she is one of our commercial customers and one of our
most frequently visited neighbors. We must, if we can, drive her from Belgium without
compromise. France may drive her from Alsace and Lorraine. Russia may drive her from
Poland. She knew when she opened fire that these were the stakes in the game; and we
are bound to support France and Russia until they are won or lost, unless a stalemate
reduces the whole method of warfare to absurdity. Austria, too, knew that the Slav
part of her empire was at stake. By winning these stakes the Allies will wake the
Kaiser from his dream of a Holy Teuton Empire with Prussia as the Head of its Church,
and teach him to respect us; but that once done, we must not allow our camp followers
to undo it all again by spiteful humiliations and exactions which could not seriously
cripple Germany, and would make bad blood between us for a whole generation, to our
own great inconvenience, unhappiness, disgrace, and loss. We and France have to live
with Germany after the war; and the sooner we make up our mind to do it generously,
the better. The word after the fight must be sans rancune; for without peace
between France, Germany, and England, there can be no peace in the world.

3. War, as a school of character and a nurse of virtue, must be formally shut up
and discharged by all the belligerents when this war is over. It is quite true that
ill-bred and swinish nations can be roused to a serious consideration of their
position and their destiny only by earthquakes, pestilences, famines, comets’ tails,
Titanic shipwrecks, and devastating wars, just as it is true that African chiefs
cannot make themselves respected unless they bury virgins alive beneath {58}the doorposts of their
hut-palaces, and Tartar Khans find that the exhibition of a pyramid of chopped-off
heads is a short way to impress their subjects with a convenient conception of their
divine right to rule. Ivan the Terrible did undoubtedly make his subjects feel very
serious indeed; and stupid people are apt to believe that this sort of
terror-stiffened seriousness is virtue. It is not. Any person who should set-to
deliberately to contrive artificial earthquakes, scuttle liners, and start epidemics
with a view to the moral elevation of his countrymen, would very soon find himself in
the dock. Those who plan wars with the same object should be removed with equal
firmness to Hanwell or Bethlehem Hospital. A nation so degraded as to be capable of
responding to no higher stimulus than that of horror had better be exterminated, by
Prussian war lords or anyone else foolish enough to waste powder on them instead of
leaving them to perish of their own worthlessness.

4. Neither England nor Germany must claim any moral superiority in the
negotiations. Both were engaged for years in a race for armaments. Both indulged and
still indulge in literary and oratorical provocation. Both claimed to be “an Imperial
race” ruling other races by divine right. Both shewed high social and political
consideration to parties and individuals who openly said that the war had to come.
Both formed alliances to reinforce them for that war. The case against Germany for
violating the neutrality of Belgium is of no moral value to England because
(a) England has allowed the violation of the Treaty of Paris by Russia
(violation of the neutrality of the Black Sea and closing of the free port of
Batoum), and the high-handed and scandalous violation of the Treaty of Berlin by
Austria (seizure of Bosnia and Herzegovina), without resorting to arms or remedying
the aggression in any other way; (b) because we have fully admitted that we
should have gone to war in defence of France in any case, whether the Germans came
through Belgium or not, and refused to give the German Ambassador any assurance that
we should remain neutral if the Germans sacrificed the military advantage of
attacking through Belgium for the sake of avoiding a war with us; (c) that the
apparent moral superiority of the pledge given by France and England to respect
Belgian neutrality is illusory in face of the facts that France and England stood to
gain enormously, and the Germans to lose correspondingly, by confining the attack on
France to the heavily fortified Franco-German frontier, and that as France and
England knew they would be invited by the Belgians to enter Belgium if the Germans
invaded it, the neutrality of Belgium had, as far as they were concerned, no real
existence; (d) that as all treaties are valid only rebus sic stantibus,
and the state of things which existed at the date of the Treaty of London (1839) had
changed so much since then (Belgium is no longer menaced by France, at whom the
treaty was aimed, and has acquired important colonies, for instance) that in 1870
Gladstone could not depend on it, and resorted to a special temporary treaty not now
in force, the technical validity of the 1839 treaty is extremely doubtful; (e)
that even if it be valid its breach is not a casus belli unless the parties
for reasons of their own choose to make it so; and (f) that the German
national peril pleaded by the Imperial Chancellor in his Peer Gynt speech (the
durchhauen one), when he rashly but frankly threw away the strong technical
case just stated and admitted a breach of international law, was so great according
to received Militarist ideas in view of the Russian mobilization, that it is
impossible for us or any other Militarist-ridden Power to feel sure ourselves, much
less to convince others, that we should have been any more scrupulous in the like
extremity. It must be added that nothing can extenuate the enormity of the broad fact
that an innocent country has been horribly devastated because her guilty neighbors
formed two huge explosive combinations against one another instead of establishing
the peace of Eu{59}rope, but that is an offence against a higher law than any
recorded on diplomatic scraps of paper, and when it comes to judgment the outraged
conscience of humanity will not have much patience with the naughty child’s plea of
“he began it.”

5. Militarism must not be treated as a disease peculiar to Prussia. It is rampant
in England; and in France it has led to the assassination of her greatest statesman.
If the upshot of the war is to be regarded and acted upon simply as a defeat of
German Militarism by Anglo-French Militarism, then the war will not only have wrought
its own immediate evils of destruction and demoralization, but will extinguish the
last hope that we have risen above the “dragons of the prime that tare each other in
their slime.” We have all been equally guilty in the past. It has been steadily
assumed for years that the Militarist party is the gentlemanly party. Its opponents
have been ridiculed and prosecuted in England; hanged, flogged or exiled in Russia;
and imprisoned in France: they have been called traitors, cads, cranks, and so forth:
they have been imprisoned for “bad taste” and for sedition whilst the most virulent
sedition against Democracy and the most mutinous military escapades in the
commissioned ranks have been tolerated obsequiously, until finally the practical
shelving of Liberal Constitutionalism has provoked both in France and England a
popular agitation of serious volume for the supersession of parliament by some sort
of direct action by the people, called Syndicalism. In short Militarism, which is
nothing but State Anarchism, has been carried to such a pitch that it has been
imitated and countered by a movement of popular Anarchism, and has exploded in a
European war because the Commercialist Governments of Europe had no faith in the
effective guidance of any modern State by higher considerations than Lord Roberts’s
“will to conquer,” the weight of the Kaiser’s mailed fist, and the interest of the
Bourses and Stock Exchanges. Unless we are all prepared to fight Militarism at home
as well as abroad, the cessation of hostilities will last only until the belligerents
have recovered from their exhaustion.

6. It had better be admitted on our side that as to the conduct of the war there
is no trustworthy evidence that the Germans have committed any worse or other
atrocities than those which are admitted to be inevitable in war or accepted as part
of military usage by the Allies. By “making examples” of towns, and seizing
irresponsible citizens as hostages and shooting them for the acts of armed civilians
over whom they could exert no possible control, the Germans have certainly pushed
these usages to a point of Terrorism which is hardly distinguishable from the
deliberate murder of non-combatants; but as the Allies have not renounced such
usages, nor ceased to employ them ruthlessly in their dealings with the hill tribes
and fellaheen and Arabs with whom they themselves have to deal (to say nothing of the
notorious domestic Terrorism of the Russian Government), they cannot claim superior
humanity. It is therefore waste of time for the pot to call the kettle black. Our
outcry against the Germans for sowing the North Sea with mines was followed too
closely by the laying of a mine field there by ourselves to be revived without
flagrant Pharisaism. The case of Rheims cathedral also fell to the ground as
completely as a good deal of the building itself when it was stated that the French
had placed a post of observation on the roof. Whether they did or not, all military
experts were aware that an officer neglecting to avail himself of the cathedral roof
in this way, or an opposing officer hestitating to fire on the cathedral so used,
would have been court-martialed in any of the armies engaged. The injury to the
cathedral must therefore be suffered as a strong hint from Providence that though we
can have glorious wars or glorious cathedrals we cannot have both.

7. To sum up, we must remember that if this war does not make an end of war in the
west, our allies of to-day may be our enemies of to-morrow, as they are of yesterday,
and our enemies of to-day our allies of to-morrow as they are of {60}yesterday; so that if we
aim merely at a fresh balance of military power, we are as likely as not to negotiate
our own destruction. We must use the war to give the coup de grace to medieval
diplomacy, medieval autocracy, and anarchic export of capital, and make its
conclusion convince the world that Democracy is invincible, and Militarism a rusty
sword that breaks in the hand. We must free our soldiers, and give them homes worth
fighting for. And we must, as the old phrase goes, discard the filthy rags of our
righteousness, and fight like men with everything, even a good name, to win,
inspiring and encouraging ourselves with definite noble purposes (abstract nobility
butters no parsnips) to face whatever may be the price of proving that war cannot
conquer us, and that he who dares not appeal to our conscience has nothing to hope
from our terrors.

“Shaw’s Nonsense About Belgium”

By Arnold Bennett.

Written for THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Mr. Bernard Shaw’s “Common Sense About the War” is the talk of the town, and it
deserves to be. One of its greatest values is its courage, for in it Shaw says many
things no one else would have dared to say. It therefore, by breaking the unearthly
silence on certain aspects of the situation, perhaps inaugurates a new and healthier
period of discussion and criticism on such subjects as recruiting, treatment of
soldiers and sailors’ dependents, secret diplomacy, militarism, Junkerism, churches,
Russia, peace terms, and disarmament. It contains the most magnificent, brilliant,
and convincing common sense that could possibly be uttered. No citizen, I think,
could rise from the perusal of this tract with a mind unilluminated or opinions
unmodified. Hence everybody ought to read it, though everybody will not be capable of
appreciating the profoundest parts of it.

Mixed up with the tremendous common sense, however, is a considerable and unusual
percentage of that perverseness, waywardness, and arlequinading which are apparently
an essential element of Mr. Shaw’s best work. This is a disastrous pity, having
regard to the immense influence and vogue of Shaw, not only in Germany, but in
America, and the pity is more tragic as Shaw has been most absurd about the very
matter which most Englishmen regard as most important, namely, Great Britain’s actual
justification for going to war.

Shaw’s Admitted Prejudice.

Mr. Shaw begins by conceiving the possibility of his being blinded by prejudice or
perversity, and admits his capacity for criticising England with a certain slight
malicious taste for taking the conceit out of her. Seemingly he belongs to that
numerous class who think that to admit a fault is to excuse it. As a highwayman might
say before taking your purse, “Now, I admit, I have a certain slight taste for
thieving,” and expect you to smile forgiveness of his depredation, Shaw’s bias is
evident wherever he discusses the action and qualities of Great Britain. Thus he
contrasts Bernhardi’s brilliant with our own very dull militarists’ facts, the result
being that the intense mediocrity of Bernhardi leaps to the eye on every page, and
that events have thoroughly discredited all his political and many of his military
ideas, whereas we possess militarists of first-class quality.

Naturally, Shaw calls England muddle-headed. Yet of late nothing has been less
apparent than muddle-headednes. Of British policy, Shaw says that since {61}the Continent generally
regards us as hypocritical, we must be hypocritical. He omits to say that the
Continent generally, and Germany in particular, regards our policy and our diplomacy
as extremely able and clear-sighted. The unscrupulous cleverness of Britain is one of
Germany’s main themes.

These are minor samples of Mr. Shaw’s caprices. In discussing the origin of the
war Mr. Shaw’s aim is to prove that all the great powers are equally to blame. He
goes far back and accuses Great Britain of producing the first page of Bernhardian
literature in the anonymous pamphlet “The Battle of Dorking.” He admits in another
passage that the note of this pamphlet was mainly defensive. He is constantly thus
making intrenchments for himself in case of forced retirement, and there is in his
article almost nothing unjust against Great Britain that is not ingeniously
contradicted or mitigated elsewhere.

Great Britain’s War Literature.

Beginning with “The Battle of Dorking” and ending with H.G. Well’s “War in the
Air,” one of the most disturbing and effective warnings against militarism ever
written, he sees simply that Great Britain has produced threatening and provocative
militarist literature comparable to Germany’s. No grounds exist for such a
contention. There are militarists in all countries, but there are infinitely more in
Germany than in any other country. The fact is notorious. The fact is also notorious
that the most powerful, not the most numerous, party in Germany wanted the war. It
would be as futile to try to prove that Ireland did not want home rule as that
Germany did not want war. As for a war literature, bibliographical statistics show, I
believe, that in the last ten years Germany has published seven thousand books or
pamphlets about war. No one but a German or a Shaw, in a particularly mischievous
mood, would seek to show that Great Britain is responsible for the war fever. It
simply is not so.

Mr. Shaw urges that we all armed together. Of course we did. When one nation
publicly turns bellicose the rest must copy her preparations. If Great Britain could
live this century over again she would do over again what she actually did, because
common sense would not permit her to do otherwise. The admitted fact that some
Britons are militarists does not in the slightest degree impair the rightness or
sagacity of our policy. If one member of a family happens to go to the bad and turn
burglar, therein is no reason why the family mansion should not be insured against
burglary.

Mr. Shaw proceeds to what he calls the diplomatic history of the war. His notion
of historical veracity may be judged from his description of the Austrian ultimatum
to Servia as an escapade of a dotard. He puts the whole blame of it on Franz Josef,
and yet he must know quite well that Germany has admitted even to her own subjects
that Austria asked Germany’s opinion about her policy and obtained Germany’s approval
before delivering the ultimatum. [Official German pamphlet “Reasons for the War with
Russia,” August, 1914.] There is no word in Mr. Shaw’s diplomatic history of the
repeated efforts toward peace made by Great Britain and scotched by Germany. On the
contrary, with astounding audacity and disingenuousness, he tries to make it appear
that suggestions for peace were offered by Germany and rejected by Great Britain.
Once more it simply was not so.

Defense of Sir Edward Grey.

Mr. Shaw’s paraphrase of Document 17 in the British diplomatic dispatches is a
staggering travesty. So far as I can see it bears no relation to the original.
Further, he not only deplores that a liberal government should have an imperialist
Foreign Secretary, but he accuses Sir Edward Grey of sacrificing his country’s
welfare to the interests of his party and committing a political crime in order not
to incur the wrath of The Daily News and The Manchester Guardian. This is totally
inexcusable. Let me not be misunderstood. I am not a liberal. I am an out-and-out
radical. I foresee a cleavage in the Liberal Party, and when that cleavage comes I
shall be on the extreme left wing. I entirely {62}agree with Mr. Shaw’s denunciation of secret diplomacy and
undemocratic control of foreign policy. By every social tradition I should be in
opposition to Sir Edward Grey, but I think Grey was the best Foreign Secretary that
the Liberal Party could have chosen and that he worked well on the only possible
plane, the plane of practicality. I am quite sure he is an honest man, and I strongly
resent, as Englishmen of all opinions will resent, any imputation to the
contrary.

As for the undemocratic control of foreign policy, a strong point about our policy
on the eve of the war is that it was dictated by public opinion. [See Grey’s dispatch
to the British Ambassador at Berlin, No. 123.] Germany could have preserved peace by
a single gesture addressed to Franz Josef. She did not want peace. Mr. Shaw said Sir
Edward Grey ought to have shouted out at the start that if Germany fought we should
fight. Sir Edward Grey had no authority to do so, and it would have been foolish to
do so. Mr. Shaw also says Germany ought to have turned her whole army against Russia
and left the western frontier to the care of the world’s public opinion in spite of
the military alliance by which France was bound to Russia. We have here an example of
his aptitude for practical politics.

Was Belgium a Mere Excuse?

Let us now come to Belgium. Mr. Shaw protests needlessly that he holds no brief
for small States as such, and he most vehemently denies that we are bound to knight
errantry on their behalf. His objection to small States is that they are either
incorrigibly bellicose or standing temptations to big powers. Outside the Balkans no
small State is bellicose. All are eminently pacific. That they are a standing
temptation to thieves is surely no reason for their destruction. If it is a reason
Mr. Shaw ought to throw his watch down the drain.

Mr. Shaw states that Belgium was a mere excuse for our going to war. That there
was a vast deal more in the pre-war diplomacy than appears in the printed dispatches,
or in any dispatches, I am as convinced as Mr. Shaw is, but I am equally convinced
that so far as we are concerned there was nothing in diplomacy, however secret, to
contradict our public attitude. The chief item not superficially apparent is that the
diplomats knew all along that Germany wanted war and was doing all she could to
obtain war on terms most favorable to herself. That our own interest coincided with
our duty to Belgium did not by any means render our duty a mere excuse for action. If
a burglar is making his way upward in the house where Mr. Shaw lives and Mr. Shaw
comes down and collars him in the flat of a defenseless invalid below and hands him
over to the police Mr. Shaw would not expect the police to say, “You are a hypocrite;
you only seized the burglar because you feared he would come to you next.” I stick to
the burglar simile, because a burglar is just what Germany is.

The “Infamous Proposal” Phrase.

Mr. Shaw characterizes Mr. Asquith’s phrase, “Germany’s infamous proposal,” as the
“obvious barrister’s claptrap.” Once more this is totally inexcusable. I do not
always see eye to eye with Mr. Asquith, I agree with Mr. Shaw that he has more than
once sinned against democratic principles, but what has that to do with the point? My
general impression of Mr. Asquith and general impression of this country is that Mr.
Asquith, in addition to being a pretty good Liberal, is an honest man. His memorable
speech containing the “infamous proposal” phrase was most positively a genuine
emotional expression of his conviction and of the conviction of the whole country,
and Mr. Shaw, a finished master of barrister’s claptrap when he likes, has been
merely scurrilous about it. Germany’s proposal was infamous. Supposing that we had
taken the Belgium point at Mr. Shaw’s valuation of it, the “nonsense about Belgium,”
as he calls it, and refrained from war, what would have been the result? The result
would have been that today we could not have looked one another in the face as we
passed down the street.

But Mr. Shaw is not content with ar{63}guing that the Belgium point was a mere excuse for us. He
goes further and continually implies that there was no Belgium point. Every time he
mentions the original treaty that established Belgian neutrality he puts after it in
brackets, [date 1839,] an obvious barrister’s device, sarcastically to discredit the
treaty because of its age. He omits to say that the chief clause in the treaty
contains the word “perpetually.” What is worse, he infers that by the mere process of
years, as Belgium gradually made herself, civilized herself, enriched herself, and
increased her stake in the world, her moral right to independence and freedom instead
of being strengthened was somehow mysteriously weakened. The theory is monstrous, but
if he does not mean that he means nothing.

Further, he says that in 1870 Gladstone could not depend on the treaty of 1839 and
resorted to a special temporary treaty not now in force, and that, therefore,
technically the validity of the 1839 treaty is extremely doubtful. This twisting of
facts throws a really sinister light upon the later developments of Mr. Shaw as a
controversialist. The treaty of 1870 was, indeed, temporary, except in so far as it
confirmed the treaty of 1839. Article 3 of the treaty of 1870 says it shall be
binding on the contracting parties during the continuance of the war and for twelve
months after, and then proceeds “and on the expiration of that time the independence
and neutrality of Belgium will, so far as the high contracting parties are
respectively concerned, continue to rest as heretofore on the quintuple treaty of
1839,” (textual.)

Mr. Shaw’s manifesto is lengthy and it will no doubt be reprinted in book form. I
repeat what I said in my first paragraph as to the major part of it, but I assert
that the objectionable part of the manifesto is so objectionable in its flippancy, in
its perversity, in its injustice, and in its downright inexactitude as to amount to a
scandal. Mr. Shaw has failed to realize either his own importance or the importance
and very grave solemnity of the occasion. The present is no hour for that
disingenuous, dialectical bravura which might excusably relieve a domestic
altercation. Before reprinting Mr. Shaw should, I suggest; seriously reconsider his
position and rewrite.

“Bennett States the German Case”

By George Bernard Shaw.

Letter to The Daily News of London.

To The Daily News, Sir:

In justice to the enemy I am bound to admit that Mr. Bennett’s case, which is the
German case, is a very strong one and that his ironic comment on the case against
Germany, “We have here an example of Mr. Shaw’s aptitude for practical politics,” is
a comment that the Kaiser will probably make and that the average “practical man”
will make, too.

Mr. Bennett, in saying that I am a simpleton to doubt that, if Germany had not
attacked France, France would have attacked her, shows a much greater courage than he
credits me with. That is Germany’s contention, and if valid is her justification for
dashing at any enemy who, as Mr. Bennett believes, was lying in wait to spring on her
back when Russia had her by the throat. If Mr. Bennett is right, and I am a
simpleton, there is nothing more to be said. The Imperial Chancellor’s plea of “a
state of necessity” is proved up to the hilt.

I did not omit to say that Germany regards our policy and our diplomacy as
extremely able and clear-sighted. I expressly and elaborately pointed that out. {64}Mr. Bennett, being an
Englishman, is so flattered by the apparent compliment from those clever Germans that
he insists it is deserved. I, being an Irishman and, therefore, untouched by
flattery, see clearly that what the Germans mean by able and clear-sighted is crafty,
ruthless, unscrupulous, and directed to the deliberate and intentional destruction of
Germany by a masterly diplomatic combination of Russia, France and Great Britain
against her, and I defend the English and Sir Edward Grey in particular on the
ground, first, that the British nation at large was wholly innocent of the
combination, and, second, that even among diplomatists, guilty as most of them
unquestionably were and openly as our Junkers—like the German
ones—clamored for war with Germany, there was more muddle than Machiavelli
about them, and that Sir Edward never completely grasped the situation or found out
what he really was doing and even had a democratic horror of war.

Shaw’s Excuses Scorned.

But Mr. Bennett will not have any of my excuses for his unhappy country. He will
have it that the Germans are right in admiring Sir Edward as a modern Caesar Bogia,
and that our militarist writers are “of first class quality,” as contrasted with the
“intense mediocrity” of poor Gen. Bernhardi.

If Mr. Bennett had stopped there the Kaiser would send him the Iron Cross, but of
course, like a true born Englishman, he goes on to deny indignantly that England has
produced a militarist literature comparable to Germany and to affirm hotly that Mr.
Asquith is an honest man whose bad arguments are “a genuine emotional expression of
his convictions and that of the whole country,” and that Sir Edward Grey is an honest
man, and that he (Mr. Bennett) “strongly resents as Englishmen of all opinions will
resent any imputation to the contrary”—just what I said he would say and that
he entirely agrees with my denunciation of secret diplomacy and undemocratic control
of foreign policy and that I am a perverse and wayward harlequin, mischievous,
unveracious, scurrilous, monstrous, disingenuous, flippant, unjust, inexact,
scandalous, and objectionable, and that on all points to which he takes exception and
a good many more I am so magnificent, brilliant, and convincing that no citizen could
rise from perusing me without being illuminated.

That is just a little what I meant by saying that Englishmen are muddle-headed,
because they never have been forced by political adversity to mistrust their tempers
and depend on a carefully stated case as Irishmen have been.

Showed Germany the Way.

I did with great pains what nobody else had done. I showed what Germany should
have done, knowing that I had no right to reproach her for doing what she did until I
was prepared to show that a better way had been open to her.

Bennett says, in effect, that nobody but a fool could suppose that my way was
practicable and proceeds to call Germany a burglar. That does not get us much
further. In fact, to me it seems a step backward. At all events it is now up to Mr.
Bennett to show us what practical alternative Germany had except the one I described.
If he cannot do that, can he not, at least, fight for his side? We, who are
mouthpieces of many inarticulate citizens, who are fighting at home against the
general tumult of scare and rancor and silly cinematograph heroics for a sane facing
of facts and a stable settlement, are very few. We have to bring the whole continent
of war-struck lunatics to reason if we can.

What chance is there of our succeeding if we begin by attacking one another
because we do not like one another’s style or confine ourselves to one another’s pet
points? I invite Mr. Bennett to pay me some more nice compliments and to reserve his
fine old Staffordshire loathing for my intellectual nimbleness until the war is
over.—G. BERNARD SHAW.

G.K. CHESTERTON. See Page 108

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE. (Photo by Arnold Genthe) See Page
132

{65}Flaws in Shaw’s
Logic

By Cunninghame Graham.

Letter to The Daily News of London.

To the Editor of The Daily News:

The controversy between men of peace as to the merits, demerits, causes, and
possible results of the great war is becoming almost as dangerous and little less
noisy than the real conflict now being waged in and around Ypres. The only difference
between the two conflicts is that the combatants in Flanders only strive to kill the
body. Those who fire paper bullets aim at the annihilation of the soul.

Literature is a nice thing in its way. It both passes and gives us many weary
hours. It has its place. But I submit that at present it is mere dancing on a tight
rope. Whether the war could have been avoided or not is without interest today. In
fact, there is no controversy possible after Maximilian Harden’s pronouncement. In it
he throws away the scabbard and says boldly that Germany from the first was set on
war. Hence it becomes a work of supererogation to find excuses for her, and hence, my
old friend, Bernard Shaw, penned his long indictment of his hereditary enemy,
England, all in vain.

We are a dull-witted race. Although the Continent has dubbed us “Perfidious
Albion,” it is hard for us to take in general ideas, and no man clearly sees the
possibilities of the development of the original sin that lies dormant in him. Thus
it becomes hard for us to understand the reason why, if Germany tore up a treaty
three months ago we are certain to tear up another in three years’ time.

All crystal gazing appeals but little to the average man on this side of the St.
George’s channel. It may be that we shall tear up many treaties, but the broad fact
remains that hitherto we have torn up none.

The particular treaty that Germany tore up was signed by five powers in 1839,
ratified again in 1870 by a special clause respected by King Frederick William in his
war against the French, was often referred to in Parliament by Gladstone and by other
Ministers, and was considered binding on its signatories. Germany tore it up for her
own ends, thus showing that she was a stupid though learned people, for she at once
at the same time prejudiced her case to the whole world and made a military
mistake.

No human motives are without alloy, but at the same time honesty in our case has
proved the better policy. Germany, no doubt, would have granted us almost anything
for our assent to her march through Belgium. We refused her offers, no doubt from
mixed motives, for every Englishman is not an orphan archangel, stupid, or dull or
muddle-headed, or what not. The balance of the world is with us, not, perhaps,
because they love us greatly, but because they see that we, perhaps by accident, have
been forced into the right course and that all smaller nationalities such as
Montenegro, Ireland, Poland, and the rest would disappear on our defeat.

CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.

{66}Editorial
Comment on Shaw

From THE NEW YORK TIMES, Nov. 5, 1914.

Mr. G. Bernard Shaw thinks that “the time has now come to pluck up courage and
begin to talk and write soberly about the war.” Our readers will find in THE TIMES
Sunday Magazine this morning some of the fruits of this auto-suggestion. They are
very remarkable. While Mr. Shaw can hardly be called a representative of any
considerable class, the fact that one prominent writer, always much read, can assume
Mr. Shaw’s attitude and make public Mr. Shaw’s comments throws a strong light on the
spirit of British society. It is true that he intimates that he ran the risk of
“prompt lynching” at one time, but that was probably the suggestion of a certain
timidity and vanity to which he pleads guilty. His safe and prosperous existence is
really a striking evidence, on the one hand, of British good nature, and, on the
other, of the indifferent estimate the British put on his influence.

Like Iago, Mr. Shaw is nothing if not critical, and in this crisis his criticism
is for the most part bitter, extreme, and in purpose destructive. He particularly
dislikes Sir Edward Grey and the Government of which he is a leading spirit, and the
class which the Government represents. He singles out Sir Edward as the chief
“Junker” and among the chief “militarists” who brought about this war. Mr. Shaw’s
attacks on the Foreign Secretary are savage, and, as often happens with savage
attacks—they are far from consistent. For example, Mr. Shaw paraphrases at some
length the interview between Sir Edward and the German Ambassador, in which the
latter made four different propositions to secure the neutrality of Great Britain if
Germany waged war on France, all of which Sir Edward refused. Mr. Shaw sees in this
only evidence of determination to take arms against Germany in any case, carrying out
a long-cherished plan formed by the Government of which Sir Edward Grey was, for this
matter, the responsible member. He does not see—- though it is so plain that a
wayfaring man though a professional satirist should not err therein—that what
the Secretary intended to do—what, in fact, he did do—was to refuse to
put a price on British perfidy, to accept any “bargain” offered to that end.

On the other hand, Mr. Shaw paraphrases at still greater length the report of the
interview in which the Russian Foreign Minister and the French Ambassador at St.
Petersburg tried to induce the British Government to commit itself in advance to war
against Germany. Mr. Shaw thinks that thus the German “bluff” would have been called
and war would have been prevented, and he is confident that Mr. Winston Churchill
would have taken the Bismarck tone and dictated the result. He cannot see—what
is really the essential fact in both cases—that Sir Edward Grey was striving in
every honorable way to preserve peace, that his Government refused to stand idle and
see France crushed in the same spirit that it refused to menace Germany until a
definite and undeniable cause of war arose.

That cause came with Germany’s violation of its pledge to observe the neutrality
of Belgium, and England’s response excites Mr. Shaw’s most furious contempt. He
adopts with zest the judgment of the German Chancellor. The pledge for all who signed
it was but a scrap of paper, of no more binding force than others that had gone their
way to dusty death in the diplomatic waste baskets. To observe the obligation it
imposed was hypocrisy. To fight in order to compel Germany to observe it was crass
militarism. Plainly, Mr. Shaw is a little difficult. {67}The Government under which he lives is
either too bellicose or not bellicose enough; too ready to help France if France is
attacked or not ready enough to bully Germany, and especially it is all wrong about
Belgium and its treaty, since treaties have several times been broken, and so on
through a bewildering circle of contradictory statements and notions.

Mr. Shaw finds little to choose between the groups of combatants. He distinctly
prides himself on his impartiality, not to say indifference. On account of his Irish
birth he claims something of the detachment of a foreigner, but admits a touch of
Irish malice in taking the conceit out of the English. Add to this his professed
many-sidedness as a dramatist and playwright and we get as good an explanation as can
be given of this noted writer’s attitude toward the tremendous struggle now waging.
But Mr. Shaw’s assumption of even-handed scorn for every one concerned, of “six of
one and a half dozen of the other,” does not hold out. He feels profoundly that such
fighting as Germany does, for such a purpose as inspires Germany, must be met by
force, and that England could not in the long run, no matter by whom guided or
governed, have shirked the task laid upon her. That being the case, one wonders a
little why it was worth while to cover every one with ridicule and to present a
picture of Great Britain so essentially grotesque and distorted.

Bernard Shaw on the End of the War.

From The New York Sun, Nov. 15, 1914.

In the midst of a good deal of untimely gibing, George Bernard Shaw, as reported
in a London dispatch to The Sun of yesterday, says one or two very wise and
appropriate things about the end of the war and the times to come after it. His
warnings are a useful check to the current loose talk of the fire-eaters and
preachers of the gospel of vengeance.

“We and France have to live with Germany after the war,” Mr. Shaw points out. Even
to embarrass her financially would be a blow to England herself, Germany being one of
England’s best customers and one of her most frequently visited neighbors. The truth
of this is unanswerable. The great object must be to effect a peace with as little
rancor as possible.

Mr. Shaw does not say it, but there are going to be overwhelming political reasons
why the pride of Germany and Austria and still more why their military power shall
not be too much impaired in case of their defeat.

Perhaps in the final settlement the Western Allies may be found to have more in
common with Berlin than with St. Petersburg. Germany has pointed this out with much
force.

Mr. Shaw’s position is not admirable when he chooses their days of tribulation for
sticking pins into his own people, even though some of the things he says may be
unpleasantly true. But it cannot be denied that he has some sane views on the
situation. The pity is that he must always impair the force of the useful things he
has to say by flippancies, impertinences, and out-of-place girdings at those whose
courage he should help to maintain. He reminds one of a man who insists on wrangling
over the mistaken construction of a chimney while the house is burning down.

Bernard Shaw as a Patriot.

From The New York World, Nov. 17, 1914.

Bernard Shaw has written for our neighbor THE TIMES an elaborate three-page thesis
to maintain:

1. That Great Britain was abundantly justified in making war with Germany.

2. That the explanation given by the British Government for making war against
Germany was stupid, hypocritical, mendacious, and disgraceful.

3. That he alone is capable of interpreting the moral purpose of the British
people in undertaking this necessary work of civilization.

4. That the reason the British Government’s justification of the war is so
inadequate is because no British Government is ever so clever as Bernard Shaw.

{68}5. That even in
the midst of the most horrible calamity known to human history it pays to
advertise.

Various patriots have various ways of serving their country. Some go to the firing
line to be shot and others stay at home to be a source of innocent merriment to the
survivors.

“Shaw Empty of Good Sense”

By Christabel Pankhurst.

Written for THE NEW YORK TIMES.

His reputation for perversity and contrariety is fully maintained by George
Bernard Shaw in the ineptly-named article, “Common Sense About the War.” At home in
Britain we all know that it is Mr. Shaw’s habit to oppose where he might be expected
to support, and vice versa. For example, should he speak at a prohibition meeting he
would most likely extol strong drink, or if asked to defend the sale of liquor
declare dramatically for prohibition.

He sees himself as the critic of everything and everybody—the one and only
man who knows what to do and how to do it.

Mr. Shaw charges his compatriots with intellectual laziness, but they are not so
lazy as to leave him to do their thinking for them. That he sometimes—and
oftener in the past than now—says illuminating things is true, but firm
reliance cannot be placed upon his freakish mental processes, exemplified in his
writings about the war. He has played with effect the part of jester to the British
public, but when, as now, his jests are empty of the kernel of good sense, the matter
gets beyond a joke.

The truth is that in face of this great and tragic reality of war the men of mere
words, the literary theorists, are in danger of missing their way. Certainly women of
deeds are more likely to see things aright than are men of words, and it is as a
woman of deeds that I, a suffragette, make answer to my irresponsible compatriot, Mr.
Bernard Shaw. And yet not a compatriot, for Mr. Shaw disclaims those feelings of
loyalty and enthusiasm for the national cause that fill the mass of us who live under
the British flag!

“Until Home Rule emerges from its present suspended animation,” says Mr. Shaw, “I
shall retain my Irish capacity for criticising England with something of the
detachment of a foreigner.” Now, these words are not a little surprising, because Mr.
Shaw’s interest in the Home Rule cause has hitherto been of a most restrained and
well-nigh secret character, and any one who imagines that Mr. Shaw is a strenuous
campaigner for Home Rule is greatly mistaken. If in the years preceding the war the
Horne Rule cause had depended upon Mr. Shaw’s activities, it would have been in a bad
way. It is now, when a foreign enemy menaces our nation as a whole, that Mr. Shaw
manifests this enhanced interest in Home Rule.

The suffragettes, who have fought and suffered for their cause as no living man
reformer in the British Isles has fought and suffered for his, have during the
present crisis subordinated their claim to the urgent claims of national honor and
safety. So Mr. Shaw, whose campaigning is done generally in the armchair, and never
in any place more dangerous than the rostrum, ought surely to refrain from his
frivolous, inconsistent, destructive, and unprofitable criticism of our country.

As for the question of lynching, Mr. Shaw is, the American public may be assured,
in no danger whatever of being lynched. He is in far more danger of having the Iron
Cross conferred upon {69}him by the Kaiser in recognition of his attempt to
supplement the activities of the official German Press Bureau. But if he were a
German subject, writing on certain points of German policy as he does upon certain
points of British policy, his fate can well be imagined. The only retribution that
will come upon this man, who exploits the freedom of speech and pen that England
gives him, is that his words lose now and henceforth the weight they used to have.
Oh, the conceit of the man, who in this dark hour, when the English are dying on the
battlefield, writes of “taking the conceit out of England” by a stroke of his
inconsequent pen!

Admits England’s Cause Is Just.

But with all his will to “take the conceit” out of this England, so fiercely
menaced, her sons killed, her daughters widowed—yet needing, so he thinks, his
castigation into the bargain—the critic is constrained to admit that our
country is playing the part of “the responsible policeman of the West” and that “for
England to have refrained from hurling herself into the fray, horse, foot, and
artillery, was impossible from every point of view.” Then why preface these
statements by a series of attacks upon the country which is admitted to be justly
fighting in a just cause?

The sole importance of Mr. Shaw’s criticism comes from this. He unwarrantably
indorses statements made by Germany in her attempt to put the Allies in the wrong.
Because he is known to the German people by his dramatic work, extracts from his
article will be circulated among them as an expression of the views of a
representative British citizen. And how are the Germans to know that this is false,
deprived as they are of news of what is happening in the outside world and ignorant
as they must be of Mr. Shaw’s real lack of influence at this serious time?

That their traffic in mere words disables some literary men from comprehending
facts is shown by Mr. Shaw’s play upon the word “Junkerism.” He points to the
dictionary definition of the word instead of to the fact it represents, and by this
verbal juggling tries to convince his readers that the military autocracy that
dominates and misdirects Germany has its counterpart and equal in Great Britain.
Whereas, the conditions in the two countries are wholly different, and it is this
very difference that Germany has regarded as one of the signs of British
inferiority.

Mr. Shaw’s suggestion that the British are posing as “Injured Innocence” and as
“Mild Gazelles” is neither funny nor true. We are simply a people defending
ourselves, resisting conquest and military despotism, and fighting for the ideal of
freedom and self-government. When our country is no longer in danger we suffragettes,
if it be still necessary, are prepared to fight on and wage our civil war that we may
win freedom and self-government for women as well as men. But, in the meantime, we
support the men—yes, and even the Government do we in a sense support—in
fighting the common enemy who menaces the freedom of men and women alike. Although
the Government in the past have erred gravely in their dealing with the woman
question, they are for the purpose of this war the instrument of the nation.

Facts Belie Him.

Mr. Shaw would seem to hold Britain responsible for German militarism, but the
facts he cites are against him there. “I am old enough,” says he, “to remember the
beginnings of the anti-German phase of military propaganda in England. The
Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 left England very much taken aback. Up to that date
nobody was much afraid that Prussia—suddenly Prussia beat France right down in
the dust.” Precisely! It was this war on France, deliberately engineered by Bismarck,
and it was the defeat and despoilment of France that fed Germany’s militarism and
encouraged Germany to make those plans of military aggression which, after long and
deliberate preparation, are being carried into effect in the present war. Germany’s
plans of military aggression have compelled other countries to prepare, {70}however inadequately, to
defend themselves.

Mr. Shaw gives support to the Germans’ contention that they are not the aggressors
but are menaced by Russia. Yet he does not explain why, if that is so, Germany took
French gold and territory in 1870 and has since continued to alienate France; nor why
Germany has chosen Britain as her enemy of enemies to be supplanted and surpassed in
power.

If Germany is simply on the defensive against Russia and has no desire to attack
and cripple France and Britain, then why has she antagonized these countries and
driven one after the other into a Russian alliance?

When he affects to criticise Germany for not having “entrusted the security of her
western frontier to the public opinion of Western Europe and to America and fought
Russia, if attacked, with her rear not otherwise defended,” Mr. Shaw burkes the fact
that Germany’s object is to seize Belgium and to make it part of the German Empire,
also to seize at least the northern coast of France and to make this seizure the
means of dominating Britain.

Indeed, the point at which German ambition for conquest ceases would be hard to
fix. And yet Mr. Shaw pictures for us an injured-innocent, mild-gazelle Germany on
the defensive! Quite in this picture is his assertion that “the ultimatum to Servia
was the escapade of a dotard,” whereas, everybody knows that the ultimatum was
dictated at Berlin. It is plain as a pikestaff that in order to bring on the Great
War of conquest for which her rulers thought The Day had arrived. Germany dictated
the issue and terms of the ultimatum to Servia and then urged Austria to refuse any
compromise and arbitration which might have averted war.

Mr. Shaw has assumed the impossible task of trying to blind the American public to
these and other facts that prove Germany to be the aggressor in this war, but he will
fail in his attempt at white-washing German policy because it is one of the
characteristics of the American people that they have a strong feeling for reality
and that no twisting and combining of words can prevent them from getting at the
facts beneath.

Bernhardi’s writings are generally believed to be an inspiration, and in part a
statement of German policy. But Mr. Shaw differs. In trying to prove that Bernhardism
has nothing to do with the case, he maintains that Germany has neglected the
Bernhardi programme, and says:

“He warned Germany to make an alliance with Italy, Austria, Turkey, and America
before undertaking the subjugation of France, then of England.”

Mr. Shaw then asserts that Germany disregarded this advice and allowed herself to
be caught between Russia and a Franco-British combination with no ally save Austria.
But here again facts are against him. For Germany has followed with marvelous
precision the line drawn by Bernhardi.

She is actually fighting in partnership with Austria. She allied herself with
Italy—though Italy has refused to fight with her in this present war of
aggression. Germany has also bent Turkey to her purpose, and has dragged the Turks
into the war. An alliance with America! Well, to have gained the help of America in
crushing France and crippling England, and ravaging and conquering Belgium was quite
beyond the power of German diplomacy and intrigue! Still Germany’s attempts to win at
least America’s moral support in this war are vigorous, if unsuccessful.

And with what quotable matter Mr. Shaw provides the German rulers for the further
deluding of their subjects when he writes of the German people being “stirred to
their depths by the apparent treachery and duplicity of the attack made upon them in
their extrernest peril from France and Russia,” when he writes of the Kaiser doing
“all a Kaiser could do without unbearable ignominy to induce the British not to fight
him and give him fair play with Russia,” and when he writes of “taking the Kaiser at
a disadvantage.” As though we ought meekly to have agreed to the Kaiser’s plan of
defeating France {71}and using her defeat as a bridge to England and a means of
conquering England! Uncommon nonsense about the war—so we must rename Mr.
Shaw’s production!

And what is all this that flows from the pen of Mr. Shaw about Belgium and
“obsolete treaties,” “rights of way,” “necessities that know no international law,”
“circumstances that alter treaties”? Made in Germany such statements are, and yet
even the Imperial German Chancellor is not so contemptuous as Bernard Shaw is of
Belgium’s charter of existence, the treaty now violated by Germany.

That is a treaty that cannot become obsolete until the powers who made it release
Belgium from the restrictions and obligations which the treaty imposes. Germany
pleads guilty in this matter of the violation of Belgian neutrality, though Mr. Shaw
attempts to show her innocent, for the German Chancellor has said: “This is an
infraction of international law—we are compelled to overrule the legitimate
protests of the Luxemburg and Belgian Governments. We shall repair the wrong we are
doing as soon as our military aims have been achieved.” And again the Chancellor said
the invasion of Belgium “is contrary to the law of nature.” To Mr. Bernard Shaw’s
peculiar sense of international morality such dealing is not, however, repugnant.

No “Right of Way” in Belgium.

In his letter to President Wilson Mr. Shaw, either willfully or ignorantly, seeks
to confuse the neutrality of a neutralized State such as Belgium and the neutrality
of an ordinary State such as Italy, and he pretends that violation of the first sort
of neutrality creates a situation in no way different from that created by the
violation of the second and normal sort of neutrality. I would refer Mr. Shaw to “The
Case for Belgium” issued by the Belgian delegates to the United States wherein they
point out that “the peculiarity about Belgian neutrality is that it has been imposed
upon her by the powers as the one condition upon which they recognized her national
existence.”

The consequence of this is that whereas Italy and the United States and other
powers having a similar status can, subject to the risk of attack from an affronted
belligerent, please themselves whether or not they condone a violation of their
neutrality, Belgium and the other neutralized States cannot condone such violation,
but must either resist all breaches of their neutrality or surrender their right to
existence. And further a neutralized State, putting faith in the treaty that
guarantees its existence and its neutrality, refrains naturally from that preparation
for war which would be deemed necessary in the absence of such a treaty.

There is no such thing as the “right of way” through neutralized Belgium which Mr.
Shaw claims on behalf of belligerent Germany. Far from exercising a right of way
Germany has violently committed a trespass, offering a German promise, a mere “scrap
of paper,” as reparation. “A right of way,” argues Bernard Shaw, “is not a right of
conquest”; but the truth is that in passing through Belgium Germany assumed dominion
over Belgium, which dominion she has since formally asserted and is seeking forcibly
to maintain.

A New Shavian Theory.

No comprehension does Mr. Shaw display of the hurt to the Belgians’ sense of honor
involved in Germany’s use of their territory for purposes hostile to their friendly
neighbor, France. To be forced into injuring a friend is an outrage, indeed, and Mr.
Shaw surely knows too much of matters military to be unaware that to permit a right
of way to one combatant amounts to making an attack upon the other, and that Germany,
by the very fact of crossing Belgium soil, was forcing Belgium to be the enemy of
France. Only by their great heroism were the Belgians able to escape this infamy that
had been planned for them.

To be conquered does not really matter! There we have another Shavian {72}theory. How grateful
would the would-be world-ruling Kaiser feel to Mr. Shaw were he to succeed in
inoculating the peoples of Europe and of America with that theory! So would the task
of putting the peoples under the German yoke (otherwise known as German culture) be
made easier—and cheaper. But the spirit of national freedom, which is as
precious to humanity as is the spirit of individual freedom, cannot be driven out by
words any more than it can be driven out by blows. The most unlettered Belgian
soldier, fighting for a truth that is at the very heart and depth of all things true,
puts the mere wordmonger to shame.

That Great Britain does not fight only for Belgium is certainly a fact, though
Belgium’s plight alone would have been enough to bring us into the conflict. We fight
also for France, because she is wrongfully attacked, and because she is by her
civilization and culture one of the world’s treasures. We fight for the
all-sufficient reason of self-defense.

There is the case for Britain, and despite his special pleading for Germany, Mr.
Shaw can show no flaw in it. He does say, however, that the British Government,
instead of first seeking a mild way of preserving peace, ought to have said point
blank to Germany: “If you attack France we shall attack you.” I also think that such
a declaration would have been the right one. To me and to many others the thought
that our country might stand by and watch inactively an attack upon France was
intolerable. Great was our relief when this apprehension was removed by the British
Government’s declaration of war. Why did not the British Government say to Germany
before the war cloud burst that Britain would fight to defend France, and why did the
Government delay so long in declaring war? Mr. Shaw does not give the reason, but I
will give it.

It was that the Government feared opposition to our entering into the war would
come from a Radico-Socialist literary clique in London, from a section of the Liberal
press, and from certain Liberal and Labor politicians who had been deceived by German
professors and other missionaries of the Kaiser into thinking the German peril did
not exist. When Belgium was invaded most of these misguided ones were unable to cling
any longer to their “keep out of it” policy, and then the Government felt free to
act. Yet the Government need not have waited, because with the facts before them the
people as a whole would perfectly have understood the necessity of fighting even had
Belgium not been invaded.

Henceforward the general public must be kept informed of what is happening in the
international world. Foreign politics must be conducted with greater publicity.
There, at least, Bernard Shaw is right, but this is a reform which he and his
fellow-men have failed to effect, whereas women, had they been voters, would have
demanded and secured it long ago.

Now, although undue diplomatic secrecy, always wrong, will be especially wrong
when the terms of peace come to be made, sentimentality will certainly be more
mischievous still. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Bernard Shaw’s
writings on the war are intended as an appeal to sentimentality—an appeal that
Germany at the close of the war shall have treatment which, by being more than just
to her, would be less than just to the countries whom she has attacked, and would
mean a recurrence of this appalling war in after years.

Before the war specious words were used to cloak the German policy of aggression
which has plunged the world in horror and is martyrizing peoples. In view of the
coming victory of the Allies, the same tactics will be adopted by the German
militarists, and it behooves Bernard Shaw to beware lest even without intent he serve
as their tool. Men such as he who believe that while they can never be in the wrong,
their country can never be in the right, are just the men who are in danger of
stumbling at this time.

CHRISTABEL PANKHURST. Photo (C) by Underwood & Underwood. See Page 68.

JAMES M. BARRIE. See Page 100.

{73}Comment by
Readers of Shaw

Shaw Has Made Minister von Jagow’s Remark on a “Scrap of Paper”
Understandable.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

Most hearty thanks for that masterly “common-sense” article of Bernard Shaw. How
clearly he expresses the much that many of us have felt way down inside and have not
been able to formulate even to ourselves!

He has made at least one woman—and one of German parentage at
that—understand what reams of public and private communications from all over
the Fatherland could not make clear: just why the blunt, impetuous, shocked, and
astounded Kaiser dared give utterance to that disgraceful “scrap of paper”
remark—inexcusable but also very understandable in the light of his knowledge
of and confidence in a more astute miscreant; why France and Germany have always
considered England more or less of a Tartuffe and a “Scheinheilige” (one who seems
holy); and why every German—man, woman and child—so execrates Sir Edward
Grey and colleagues.

Nothing in all the sickening present conditions, the future long-lasting woe and
misery, the barbarous neutrality violations has so made me blush for my mother’s
country as the “scrap of paper” incident; and it has been most bitter to listen to
the extravagant, fantastic eulogies on England, with which we’ve been so favored
without feeling honestly able to make any excuses whatever for Germany.

But now—thanks to that article—I can understand what I may not
condone, and, though abhorring the Kaiser and my mother’s compatriots for their share
in that horror going on abroad, I can also pity the hot-headed, imperfect mere man
going to war under a carefully incited and fostered misapprehension, and need no
longer glorify the cool-headed, sapient policy which so cleverly duped ruler and
people.

Not since the war began have I felt so undepressed, so free to sympathize where I
so love, so free from having to commend those for whom I feel no love whatever. For
all of which accept the warmest thanks of

KATE HUDSON.

New York, Nov. 17.

Shaw Article Work of “Farceur.”

To the Editor of The New York Times:

“Common sense and Shaw!” Shaw begins his article by saying, “I am giving my views
for what they are worth, with a malicious bias.” Later on he says: “I am writing
history.” Toward the end, after having obscured with words many things which had
hitherto been clear to most people, he says: “Now that we begin to see where we
really are, &c.” How Shavian!

There are at least two sides to all questions, and so long as they are reasonably
presented one is glad to hear them even if they fail to convince, but when a farceur
is allowed to occupy three whole pages usually filled by serious and interesting
writers it seems time to protest. The subject itself is not one for easy paradox or
false and flippant epigram.

Mr. Shaw says he does not hold his tongue easily. He certainly does not, and when
it wags it wags foolishly, and, as he admits, maliciously, albeit sometimes
amusingly, and with superficial brilliance. He says the Irish do not consider England
their country yet. Of course they do not. Why should the Irish consider themselves
English? Neither do the Scots, nor the Welsh, nor the Canadians, nor will they ever
so think. But they are all British, and so, despite all Mr. Shaw says to the
contrary, Kitchener was right.

{74}Mr. Shaw falls
into a common and regrettable error when he continually writes England when he really
means the British Empire. It is the British Empire that is at war, for which, though
a citizen, Mr. Shaw has no authority to speak or to be considered a representative,
for, as he unnecessarily admits, he is not a “British patriot”; neither is he a
“Junker,” for I have looked through all his definitions of the word, and none applies
to him.

In what way is the “Battle of Dorking” like Bernhardi? The one he says had as a
moral: “To arms! or the Germans will besiege London!” The other said: “To arms! so
that the Germans may besiege London, or any other country that does not want
compulsory culture!” The one was defensive, the other offensive.

He says of the war: “We” began it. Since he says he is not English, and that it is
an English war, whom does he mean by “We”? If he means the British, then, should a
policeman see a small boy being ill-treated by a large man and go to the help of that
boy, he, the policeman, must be said to have begun the fight which would probably
ensue between him and said man, notwithstanding that the policeman is only fulfilling
what he has sworn to do.

Monaco, he says, “seems to be, on the whole, the most prosperous and comfortable
State in Europe.” If this is buffoonery it is singularly out of place. But even
Monaco has an “army,” has had recently a small revolution, and the Monegasques do not
consider themselves ideally comfortable, and they have many “injustices.” Does he
hold the principality up as a model administration and the source of its prosperity
as above reproach?

Mr. Shaw represents no one but himself, and, like all small men, he reviles others
greater than he, such as Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith, but it does not become him,
looking at his own life’s history, to cast cheap sneers at anonymous journalists in
cheap newspapers, who, though they may lack his literary style, possess, at least,
one virtue which he boasts that he has not—patriotism! Yours very truly,

LAWRENCE GRANT.

New York, Nov. 18.

Antidote to “Long Infliction of Dreary Stuff.”

To the Editor of The New York Times:

Hail to Bernard Shaw! Could anything be more refreshing? After the long infliction
upon us of the flood of dreary stuff from London and Paris, and all the talk of
German militarism, and what is to become of it at the hands of such immaculately
unmilitary apostles of peace and international righteousness and treaty observances
as Russia, France, and England, and all the maudlin denunciations of the German
Nietzsche and Bernhardi, and the terrible Kaiser, could anything be more refreshing
than Shaw’s advent in the field of current war history?

Though an Anglo-Saxon of American birth and long descent, and no believer in
militarism of any sort of itself, yet I see in that no reason to distort ancient
history by an attempt to make it appear that German militarism is at all the chief
sinner, or, for that matter, not a very necessary and desirable thing in order that
Germany may have her rightful place in the world, or any place at all.

V.A.W. Warwick, N.Y., Nov. 16.

False Assumptions Basis of Shaw’s Attack.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

The article on the European war by Mr. G.B. Shaw in THE TIMES of Sunday appeals to
me as a noteworthy specimen of what an artful literary genius can do in the way of
argumentative cantankerousness. His chief grievance is British diplomacy as
represented by Sir Edward Grey, upon whose devoted head he empties the vials of his
splenetic humor.

Underlying his argument are two glaringly false assumptions, and on these the
whole fabric rests. The first is that a certain undefined but presumably mul{75}titudinous body, which he
designates as “Socialist,” “Democratic,” and “Social Democratic,” is better qualified
to determine the policy and conduct the correspondence of the Foreign Office than
trained and experienced statesmen.

The second is that Sir Edward Grey should have followed the suggestion of Sazonof
and threatened Germany with war at a certain stage of the correspondence. This can
now be only a matter of opinion, but it may be confidently affirmed that of all
nations the Germany of this day would be the last to back down in face of a threat.
It may be also said generally that an open threat is about the surest way to bring on
a war. Austria threatened Servia and war ensued. Germany threatened Russia and war
ensued. Germany threatened Belgium—in the form of a notification that she
intended to invade her territory—and war ensued.

Mr. Shaw’s contentions are grotesque.

Flushing, Nov. 16. SAM TEST.

“Junkers” Controlled Old World Ages Before Shaw.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

With regard to the article by Mr. Bernard Shaw, the gist of the matter can be
compressed in fewer words. The ideas expressed are not the exclusive property of Mr.
Shaw. The Old World for indefinite ages has been controlled and directed by what he
calls the “Junker” class, the rich and idle aristocrats who want for nothing, and,
being born to rule, do not find it worth while to exert themselves mentally, and for
whom there is no suitable profession but the army and diplomacy.

The mass of the people are to them the great unwashed, and those a little higher
in the scale “cads and bounders,” or the German equivalent, in fact the canaille of
the French who at the time of the Revolution took things into their own hands to the
great surprise of everybody. This substratum is not considered in the scheme of the
“Junker’s” existence, though the lower orders alone are the workers and producers and
make ease and luxury possible.

Mr. Shaw. I believe, intends to intimate that there might be a use for the
intellectual class, the thinkers and writers with the imagination that can put them
mentally in the place of the individuals who make up the masses, think the thoughts
and live the lives vicariously of the people who are the nation, and if the “Junker”
class of England and Germany and kindred nations who govern and dictate its policies
were leavened with the brains and broad-mindedness of the thinkers there might be
found a better use for men than killing each other and a brighter outlook for the
world which is now filled with widows and orphans.

Mrs. F.B. WILLIAMSON.

Elizabeth, N.J., Nov, 16.

{76}Open Letter
to President Wilson^[1]

By George Bernard Shaw.

Sir: I petition you to invite the neutral powers to confer with the United States
of America for the purpose of requesting Britain, France, and Germany to withdraw
from the soil of Belgium and fight out their quarrel on their own territories.
However the sympathies of the neutral States may be divided, and whatever points now
at issue between the belligerent powers may be doubtful, there is one point on which
there can be neither division nor doubt, and that is that the belligerent armies have
no right to be in Belgium, much less to fight in Belgium, and involve the innocent
inhabitants of that country in their reciprocal slaughter. You will not question my
right to address this petition to you. You are the official head of the nation that
is beyond all question or comparison the chief of the neutral powers, marked out from
all the rest by commanding magnitude, by modern democratic constitution, and by
freedom from the complication of monarchy and its traditions, which have led Europe
into the quaint absurdity of a war waged formally between the German Kaiser, the
German Czar, the German King of the Belgians, the German King of England, the German
Emperor of Austria, and a gentleman who shares with you the distinction of not being
related to any of them, and is therefore describable monarchically as one
Poincaré, a Frenchman.

I make this petition on its merits, without claiming any representative character
except such as attaches to me as a human being. Nobody here has asked me to do it.
Except among the large class of constitutional beggars, the normal English feeling is
that it is no use asking for a thing if you feel certain that it will be refused, and
are not in a position to enforce compliance. Also, that the party whose request is
refused{77} and not
enforced looks ridiculous. Many Englishmen will say that a request to the
belligerents to evacuate Belgium forthwith would be refused; could not be enforced;
and would make the asker ridiculous. We are, in short, not a prayerful nation. But to
you it will be clear that even the strongest power, or even allied group of powers,
can have its position completely changed by an expression of the public opinion of
the rest of the world. In your clear western atmosphere and in your peculiarly
responsible position as the head centre of western democracy, you, when the European
situation became threatening three months ago, must have been acutely aware of the
fact to which Europe was so fatally blinded—namely, that the simple solution of
the difficulty in which the menace of the Franco-Russo-British Entente placed Germany
was for the German Emperor to leave his western frontier under the safeguard of the
neighborliness and good faith of American, British, and French democracy, and then
await quite calmly any action that Russia might take against his country on the east.
Had he done so, we could not have attacked him from behind; and had France made such
an attack—and it is in the extremest degree improbable that French public
opinion would have permitted such a hazardous and unjustifiable adventure—he
would at worst have confronted it with the fullest sympathy of Britain and the United
States, and at best with their active assistance. Unhappily, German Kings do not
allow democracy to interfere in their foreign policy; do not believe in
neighborliness; and do believe in cannon and cannon fodder. The Kaiser never dreamed
of confiding his frontier to you and to the humanity of his neighbors. And the
diplomatists of Europe never thought of that easy and right policy, and could not
suggest any substitute for it, with the hideous result which is before you.

The State of Belgium.

Now that this mischief has been done, and the two European thunderclouds have met
and are discharging their lightnings, it is not for me to meddle with the question
whether the United States should take a side in their warfare as far as it concerns
themselves alone. But I may plead for a perfectly innocent neutral State, the State
of Belgium, which is being ravaged in a horrible manner by the belligerents. Her
surviving population is flying into all the neighboring countries to escape from the
incessant hail of shrapnel and howitzer shells from British cannon, French cannon,
German cannon, and, most tragic of all, Belgian cannon; for the Belgian Army is being
forced to devastate its own country in its own defense.

For this there can be no excuse; and at such a horror the rest of the world cannot
look on in silence without incurring the guilt of the bystander who witnesses a crime
without even giving the alarm. I grant that Belgium, in her extreme peril, made one
mistake. She called to her aid the powers of the Entente alone instead of calling on
the whole world of kindly men. She should have called on America, too; and it is hard
to see how you could in honor have disregarded that call. But if Belgium says
nothing, but only turns her eyes dumbly toward you while you look at the red ruin in
which her villages, her heaps of slain, her monuments and treasures are being hurled
by her friends and enemies alike, are you any the less bound to speak out than if
Belgium had asked you to send her a million soldiers?

Not for a moment do I suggest that your intervention should be an intervention on
behalf of either the Allies or the Entente. If you consider both sides equally
guilty, we know that you can find reasons for that verdict. But Belgium is innocent;
and it is on behalf of Belgium that so much of the world as is still at peace is
waiting for a lead from you. No other question need be prejudged. If Germany
maintains her claim to a right of way through Belgium on a matter which she believed
(however erroneously) to be one of life and death to her as a nation, nobody, not
even China, now pretends that such rights of way have not their place among those
common human rights which are su{78}perior to the more artificial rights of nationality. I
think, for example, that if Russia made a descent on your continent under
circumstances which made it essential to the maintenance of your national freedom
that you should move an army through Canada, you would ask our leave to do so, and
take it by force if we did not grant it. You may reasonably suspect, even if all our
statesmen raise a shriek of denial, that we should take a similar liberty under
similar circumstances in the teeth of all the scraps of paper in our Foreign Office
dustbin. You see, I am frank with you, and fair, I hope, to Germany. But a right of
way is not a right of conquest; and even the right of way was not, as the Imperial
Chancellor imagined, a matter of life and death at all, but a militarist
hallucination, and one that has turned out, so far, a military mistake. In short,
there was no such case of overwhelming necessity as would have made the denial of a
right of way to the German Army equivalent to a refusal to save German independence
from destruction, and therefore to an act of war against her, justifying a German
conquest of Belgium. You can therefore leave the abstract question of international
rights of way quite unprejudiced by your action. You can leave every question between
the belligerents fully open, and yet, in the common interest of the world, ask
Germany to clear out of Belgium, into France or across the Channel, if she can, back
home if she can force no other passage, but at all events out of Belgium. A like
request would, of course, be addressed to Britain and to France at the same time. The
technical correctness of our diplomatic position as to Belgium may be unimpeachable;
but as the effect of our shells on Belgium is precisely the same as that of the
German shells, and as by fighting on Belgian soil we are doing her exactly the same
injury that we should have done her if the violation of her neutrality had been
initiated by us instead of by Germany, we could not decently refuse to fall in with a
general evacuation.

A Certain Result of Intervention.

At all events, your intervention could not fail to produce at least the result
that even if the belligerents refused to comply, your request would leave them in an
entirely new and very unpleasant relation to public opinion. No matter how powerful a
State is, it is not above feeling the vast difference between doing something that
nobody condemns and something that everybody condemns except the interested
parties.

That difference alone would be well worth your pains. But it is by no means a
foregone conclusion that a blank refusal would be persisted in. Germany must be aware
that the honor of England is now so bound up with the complete redemption of Belgium
from the German occupation that to keep Antwerp and Brussels she must take Portsmouth
and London. France is no less deeply engaged. You can judge better than I what chance
Germany now has, or can persuade herself she has, of exhausting or overwhelming her
western enemies without ruining herself in the attempt. Whatever else the war and its
horrors may have done or not done, you will agree with me that it has made an end of
the dreams of military and naval steam-rollering in which the whole wretched business
began. At a cost which the conquest of a whole continent would hardly justify, these
terrible armaments and the heroic hosts which wield them push one another a few miles
back and forward in a month, and take and retake some miserable village three times
over in less than a week. Can you doubt that though we have lost all fear of being
beaten, (our darkened towns, and the panics of our papers, with their endless scares
and silly inventions, are mere metropolitan hysteria,) we are getting very tired of a
war in which, having now re-established our old military reputation, and taught the
Germans that there is no future for their empire without our friendship and that of
France, we have nothing more to gain? In London and Paris and Berlin nobody at
present dares say “Sirs, ye are brethren; why do ye wrong one to an{79}other?”; for the
slightest disposition toward a Christian view of things is regarded as a shooting
matter in these capitals; but Washington is still privileged to talk common humanity
to the nations.

An Advantage of Aloofness.

Finally, I may remind you of another advantage which your aloofness from the
conflict gives you. Here, in England and in France, men are going to the front every
day; their women and children are all within earshot; and no man is hard-hearted
enough to say the worst that might be said of what is going on in Belgium now. We
talk to you of Louvain and Rheims in the hope of enlisting you on our side or
prejudicing you against the Germans, forgetting how sorely you must be tempted to say
as you look on at what we are doing, “Well, if European literature, as represented by
the library of Louvain, and European religion, as represented by the Cathedral of
Rheims, have not got us beyond this, in God’s name let them perish.” I am thinking of
other things—of the honest Belgians, whom I have seen nursing their wounds, and
whom I recognize at a glance as plain men, innocent of all warlike intentions,
trusting to the wisdom and honesty of the rulers and diplomatists who have betrayed
them, taken from their farms and their businesses to destroy and be destroyed for no
good purpose that might not have been achieved better and sooner by neighborly means.
I am thinking of the authentic news that no papers dare publish, not of the lies that
they all publish to divert attention from the truth. In America these things can be
said without driving American mothers and wives mad; here, we have to set our teeth
and go forward. We cannot be just; we cannot see beyond the range of our guns. The
roar of the shrapnel deafens us; the black smoke of the howitzer blinds us; and what
these do to our bodily senses our passions do to our imaginations. For justice, we
must do as the mediaeval cities did—call in a stranger. You are not altogether
that to us; but you can look at all of us impartially. And you are the spokesman of
Western democracy. That is why I appeal to you.

G. BERNARD SHAW.

Note:

{80}A German
Letter to G. Bernard Shaw

By Herbert Eulenberg.

Bernard Shaw: You have addressed us Germans several times of late without
receiving a reply from us. The reason for this was probably the momentary bitterness
against your country of our people’s intellectual representatives. Indeed, our best
scholars and artists, Ernst Haeckel at 81 years, leading the rest, stripped
themselves during these past weeks of all the honors which England had apportioned
them. Permit me as one who had the opportunity to do much for the propagation of your
dramatic works, especially of your finest drama, “Candida,” in Western Germany and in
Holland, to present as quiet and as moderate a retort as is possible.

Your appeal to intellectual Germany we reciprocate with a question to intellectual
England. It is as follows: How is it possible for you to witness your country’s
present unheard of policy (so opposed to culture) without rising as one man against
it? Do you believe that we thinking Germans would ever, without saying or doing
anything, observe an alliance of our Government, whose goal was the strengthening of
imperialism and the subjugation and destruction of a cultured power, such as France
or England? Never! Among your people only a very small number of brave scholars
protested against this criminal alliance of your Government at the beginning of the
war. You others, you poets, painters, and musicians of present-day England were
silent and permitted Sir Edward Grey to continue to sin against a people related to
you by blood and intellect. You raised your voice a little, Bernard Shaw! But what
did you propose to us: “Refrain from your militarism, my dear Germans, and become
again the congenial, complacent poets and thinkers, the people of Goethe and
Beethoven, whom no one hated! Then we will surely help you against the bad
Russians!”

Is not this proposal a bit too naïve for you, Bernard Shaw? We are situated
in the midst of Russians and Frenchmen, who have formed an open alliance against us
for more than twenty years. Our neighbors in the East denounce nothing more than us,
and our neighbors in the West denounce us and plan against us, who have for nearly
half a century evinced nothing but friendliness toward them. When such enemies
surround us, does not your friendly counsel, Bernard Shaw, seem as if you said to us:
“Just let yourself be massacred, Germans! Afterward your British cousins will
vouchsafe you their protection.”

Germany Not Isolated.

Do you think that we would carry on our militarism and our expensive drilling if
we lived on an island as you do? We would not think of it. We would speedily dispatch
a blood-thirsty butcher, like your Lord Kitchener, from our island to our most
unhealthy colony. We could not even reconcile our worthy Dr. Karl Peters, who had
dealt a little unscrupulously with a few negro women, with our conceptions of
culture, and had to pass him over to you! But the thought shall not come to me or to
us, as it does to your Prime Ministers, to pose as angels of light, a fact about
which you have yourself told your compatriots the bitter truth to our great joy. We
admit having injured Belgium’s neutrality, but we have only done it because of dire
necessity, because we could not otherwise reach France and take up the fight against
two sides forced upon us. Belgium’s independence and freedom, which is suddenly of
the utmost importance to your King and your Ministers, we have not touched. Even
after the expeditious capture of Liége we asked Belgium for the second time:
“Let us pass quickly through your country. We will make good every damage, and will
not take away a square foot of your country! Do destroyers of liberty and Huns and
vandals, or whatever other defamatory names your English papers now heap upon us, who
at the time of Beethoven and Schopenhauer formed the Areopagus of culture, conduct
themselves in such a way? Does not one of your living spirits in England cry aloud at
the reprehensible alliance which your Government has made over your heads with Russia
and Japan? On the most shameful day in English history, on the day when Mongolian
Japan gave the German people her ultimatum at the instigation of your politicians, on
this, I repeat it, most shameful day in the entire English history, I believed that
the great dead in Westminster Abbey would rise from their graves horrified at the
shameful deed which their grandsons and great-grandsons imposed upon old England.

The Land of Shakespeare.

We Germans venerated the old England almost as a fatherland. We have recognized,
understood, and studied Shakespeare, whom you, Bernard Shaw, so dislike, more than
any other people, even more than the English nation itself. Lord Byron received more
benefits from Goethe alone than from all of England put together. Newton, Darwin, and
Adam Smith found in Germany their best supporters and interpreters. The dramatic
writers of latter-day England, most worthy of mention, from Oscar Wilde to you,
Galsworthy and Knoblauch, are recognized by us and their plays performed numberless
times. We have always endeavored to understand the English character. “Nowhere did we
feel so much at home as in Germany,” all your compatriots will tell you who have been
guests here.

In “gratitude” for this our merchants were persecuted for years by your merchants,
because of a wild hatred for Germans, which, by the way, had a most disagreeable
effect upon the races of other colors. In “gratitude,” with but few exceptions which
we will not forget, we are now abused and belittled by your press before all of
Europe and America as if we were assassins, vagabonds, enemies of culture and
murderers, far worse than the Russians. As thanks for that you have entered upon a
war against us, for which even Sir Edward Grey could not at first give a good reason
until the injury of Belgium neutrality luckily came to his assistance.

Our people are, therefore, now rightly embittered against England because through
your groundless participation you have made more difficult the war against Russia and
France, for which one alone, the Czar of Russia, bears the blame. But despite this
great bitterness they would never approve the demolition of your country and your
nation, because of their respect for your great past and your share in the
development of culture in Europe. You, however, joined an alliance as a third great
power, whose only purpose is our dissolution and destruction. Merely for reasons of
justice and of moral courage a Pitt, a Burke, a Disraeli would have withdrawn their
participation in such an alliance, which—Oh, heroic deed—falls upon the
Germans by threes, no, by fours or fives. Your present-day statesmen, wholly unworthy
of representing a people with your past and your inheritance, incite the Mongolians
and blacks against us, your brother nation. They steal and permit our small and
insufficiently protected colonies to be stolen and no not care a jot for all
considerations of Europeans’ culture and morals.

An Unnatural Russian Alliance.

England, once the home and the refuge for all free spirits from the days of the
Inquisition, from Rousseau until Freiligrath and Karl Marx, England has allied
herself with Russia—the prison and the horror of all friends of liberty! Hear
ye, hear ye illustrious dead, who lived and struggled for the freedom and the
greatest possible joy of mankind, and {82}shake in your tombs with disgust and with horror! But you
living ones, and you, Bernard Shaw, the foremost of all English artists, do
everything in your power to break this terrible alliance and make it powerless for
England. Much more lies in the balance for her than is understood by your present
nearsighted politicians, who have in mind only the momentary advantages. The
destruction of the German power is not the only thing in question here; no, it
concerns a great part of civilized Europe in regard to the suspension of their
hard-won political liberty; and England, the people of the Magna Charta, the first
free Constitution, can never be a party to that. That is why we call to you, Bernard
Shaw, in the name of Europe, and ask you for your voice in the struggle.

It is a splendid thing that this serious time has also aroused the poets, the
thinkers and artists as political and diplomatic advisers, and we should not let
ourselves be crowded out of this profession, for which, thanks to our minds, we are
not less fitted than the high-brow Lords and Counts. Men of our guild from Thucydides
and Herodotus to Petrarch and Rubens, and our Humboldt and your Beaconsfield have
ever shown themselves to be good intermediaries and peace advocates. And that,
believe me, Bernard Shaw, is of more importance to our people, as well as to our
Kaiser, who for over twenty-five years has avoided war like a poison, than all other
bloody laurels. Here’s to a decent, honorable and “eternal” peace.

HERBERT EULENBERG.

British Authors Defend England’s War

The undersigned writers, comprising among them men of the most divergent political
and social views, some of them having been for years ardent champions of good-will
toward Germany, and many of them extreme advocates of peace, are nevertheless agreed
that Great Britain could not without dishonor have refused to take part in the
present war. No one can read the full diplomatic correspondence published in the
“White Paper” without seeing that the British representatives were throughout
laboring whole-heartedly to preserve the peace of Europe, and that their conciliatory
efforts were cordially received by both France and Russia.

When these efforts failed Great Britain had still no direct quarrel with any
power. She was eventually compelled to take up arms because, together with France,
Germany, and Austria, she had solemnly pledged herself to maintain the neutrality of
Belgium. As soon as danger to that neutrality arose she questioned both France and
Germany as to their intentions. France immediately renewed her pledge not to violate
Belgian neutrality; Germany refused to answer, and soon made all answer needless by
her actions. Without even the pretense of a grievance against Belgium she made war on
the weak and unoffending country she had undertaken to protect, and has since carried
out her invasion with a calculated and ingenious ferocity which has raised questions
other and no less grave than that of the willful disregard of treaties.

When Belgium in her dire need appealed to Great Britain to carry out her pledge,
that country’s course was clear. She had either to break faith, letting the {83}sanctity of treaties and
the rights of small nations count for nothing before the threat of naked force, or
she had to fight. She did not hesitate, and we trust she will not lay down arms till
Belgium’s integrity is restored and her wrongs redressed.

The treaty with Belgium made our duty clear, but many of us feel that, even if
Belgium had not been involved, it would have been impossible for Great Britain to
stand aside while France was dragged into war and destroyed. To permit the ruin of
France would be a crime against liberty and civilization. Even those of us who
question the wisdom of a policy of Continental ententes or alliances refuse to see
France struck down by a foul blow dealt in violation of a treaty.

We observe that various German apologists, official and semi-official, admit that
their country had been false to its pledged word, and dwell almost with pride on the
“frightfulness” of the examples by which it has sought to spread terror in Belgium,
but they excuse all these proceedings by a strange and novel plea. German culture and
civilization are so superior to those of other nations that all steps taken to assert
them are more than justified, and the destiny of Germany to be the dominating force
in Europe and the world is so manifest that ordinary rules of morality do not hold in
her case, but actions are good or bad simply as they help or hinder the
accomplishment of that destiny.

These views, inculcated upon the present generation of Germans by many celebrated
historians and teachers, seem to us both dangerous and insane. Many of us have dear
friends in Germany, many of us regard German culture with the highest respect and
gratitude; but we cannot admit that any nation has the right by brute force to impose
its culture upon other nations, nor that the iron military bureaucracy of Prussia
represents a higher form of human society than the free Constitutions of Western
Europe.

Whatever the world destiny of Germany may be, we in Great Britain are ourselves
conscious of a destiny and a duty. That destiny and duty, alike for us and for all
the English-speaking race, call upon us to uphold the rule of common justice between
civilized peoples, to defend the rights of small nations, and to maintain the free
and law-abiding ideals of Western Europe against the rule of “Blood and Iron” and the
domination of the whole Continent by a military caste.

For these reasons and others the undersigned feel bound to support the cause of
the Allies with all their strength, with a full conviction of its righteousness, and
with a deep sense of its vital import to the future of the world.

{84}

{85}WHO’S WHO
AMONG THE SIGNERS.

WILLIAM ARCHER, dramatic critic and editor of Ibsen’s works, author of “Life of
Macready,” “Real Conversations,” “The Great Analysis,” and (with Granville Barker) “A
National Theatre.”

H. GRANVILLE BARKER, actor, dramatist, and manager, shares with his wife
management of the Kingsway Theatre, London; author of “The Voysey Inheritance,” and
(with Laurence Housman) “Prunella.”

SIR JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE, creator of “Sentimental Tommy” and “Peter Pan,” famous
for his sympathetic studies of Scotch life and his fantastic comedies.

HILAIRE BELLOC, best known as a writer on history, politics, and economics; a
recognized authority on the French Revolution.

ARNOLD BENNETT, author of many popular realistic studies of English provincial
life, including “Clayhanger” and “Hilda Lessways.”

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON, chiefly known for “From a College Window,” “Beside
Still Waters,” and other volumes of essays.

EDWARD FREDERIC BENSON, brother of the preceding, author of many novels of modern
life, including “Dodo.”

VERY REV. MONSIGNOR ROBERT HUGH BENSON, the youngest of the three famous Benson
brothers. Besides numerous devotional and theological works, Monsignor Benson has
written several widely appreciated historical novels.

LAWRENCE BINYON, author of many lyrics and poetic dramas, Assistant Keeper in the
British Museum, in charge of Oriental Prints and Drawings.

ANDREW CECIL BRADLEY, critic, sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford University,
author of a standard work on Shakespeare.

ROBERT BRIDGES, Poet-Laureate. Prominent as a physician before his poetry brought
him the high honor he now enjoys.

HALL CAINE, one of the most popular of contemporary novelists.

R.C. CARTON, dramatist, author of “Lord and Lady Algy” and “A White Elephant.”

CHARLES HADDON CHAMBERS, dramatist, author of “John a Dreams,” part author of “The
Fatal Card.”

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON, essayist, novelist, poet; defender of orthodox thought by
unorthodox methods.

HUBERT HENRY DAVIES, dramatist, author of “The Mollusc” and “A Single Man.”

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, creator of “Sherlock Holmes.”

HERBERT ALBERT LAURENS FISHER, Vice Chancellor of Sheffield University, author of
“The Mediaeval Empire,” “Napoleon Bonaparte,” and other historical works.

JOHN GALSWORTHY, a novelist and dramatist who has come into great prominence
during the last five years, his plays, “Strife” and “Justice,” and his novel, “The
Dark Flower,” being widely known.

ANSTEY GUTHRIE, (F. ANSTEY,) author of “The Brass Bottle,” “The Talking Horse,”
and other fantastic and humorous tales.

SIR HENRY RIDER HAGGARD, author of many widely read romances, among them being
“She.”

THOMAS HARDY, generally considered to be the greatest living English novelist.

JANE ELLEN HARRISON, sometime Fellow and Lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge
University; writer of many standard works on classical religion, literature, and
life.

ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS, (ANTHONY HOPE,) author of popular historical romance and
sketches of modern society, including “The Prisoner of Zenda.”

MAURICE HEWLETT, poet and romantic novelist, author of “Earthworks Out of Tuscany”
and other mediaeval tales.

ROBERT HICHENS, novelist, author of “The Garden of Allah,” “Bella Donna,” and
other stories.

JEROME K. JEROME, humorist, famous for “Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow” and the
“Three Men” series, and for his play “The Passing of the Third Floor Back.”

HENRY ARTHUR JONES, dramatist, author of “The Silver King,” “The Hypocrites,” and
other plays.

RUDYARD KIPLING needs no introduction to people who read the English language.

WILLIAM J. LOCKE, author of “The Morals of Marcus,” “Septimus,” and “The Beloved
Vagabond,” which have been made into successful plays.

EDWARD VERRAL LUCAS, associate editor of Punch and editor of several popular
anthologies, author of “A Wanderer in Holland.”

JOHN WILLIAM MACKAIL, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, author and editor
of many volumes dealing with ancient Greek and Roman literature.

JOHN MASEFIELD, known chiefly for his long poems of life among the British
poor.

ALFRED EDWARD WOODLEY MASON, writer of romantic novels, of which “The Four
Feathers” and “The Turnstile” are perhaps the best known, and of several popular
dramas.

GILBERT MURRAY, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University since 1908, editor
and translator of Greek classics, perhaps the greatest Greek scholar now living.

HENRY NEWBOLT, “laureate of the British Navy,” author of “Drake’s Drum” and many
other songs.

BARRY PAIN, author of “Eliza” and other novels and short stories of adventure, of
many well-known parodies and poems.

SIR GILBERT PARKER, of Canadian birth, poet and author of romantic novels,
including “The Judgment House,” and “The Right of Way.”

EDEN PHILLPOTTS, realistic novelist, noted for his exact portraits of the English
rustic, author of “Down Dartmoor Way.”

SIR ARTHUR WING PINERO, one of the most popular of living dramatists. His plays
include “Sweet Lavender” and “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.”

{86}SIR ARTHUR
QUILLER-COUCH, Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University, poet,
novelist, and writer of short stories.

SIR OWEN SEAMAN, since 1906 editor of Punch, writer of parodies and light
verse.

GEORGE R. SIMS, journalist, poet, and author of many popular dramas, including
“The Lights of London,” “Two Little Vagabonds,” and “Harbour Lights.”

MAY SINCLAIR, writer of novels dealing with modern moral problems, “The Divine
Fire” and “The Combined Maze” being best known.

FLORA ANNIE STEEL, author of “Tales from the Punjab,” “On the Face of the Waters,”
“A Prince of Dreamers,” and other novels and short stories, most of which deal with
life in India.

ALFRED SUTRO, dramatist, author of “The Walls of Jericho,” “The Barrier,” and
other plays of modern society.”

GEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYAN, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; author of
“England Under the Stuarts,” and other historical and biographical works.

RT. HON. GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, historian, biographer of Macaulay, and author of a
four-volume work on the American Revolution.

HUMPHRY WARD, journalist and author, sometime Fellow of Brasenose College, editor
of several biographical and historical works.

MARY A. WARD, (Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD,) best known of contemporary women novelists; her
first success was “Robert Elsmere.”

H.G. WELLS, novelist, author of “Tono Bungay” and “Ann Veronica.”

MARGARET L. WOODS, poet; her “Wild Justice” and “The Invader” have placed her in
the front rank.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL, novelist, poet, dramatist, interpreter of the modern Jewish
spirit.

{87}The Fourth
of August—Europe at War

By H.G. Wells.

Copyright, 1914, by The New York Times Company.

Europe is at war!

The monstrous vanity that was begotten by the easy victories of ’70 and ’71 has
challenged the world, and Germany prepares to reap the harvest Bismarck sowed. That
trampling, drilling foolery in the heart of Europe, that has arrested civilization
and darkened the hopes of mankind for forty years. German imperialism, German
militarism, has struck its inevitable blow. The victory of Germany will mean the
permanent enthronement of the War God over all human affairs. The defeat of Germany
may open the way to disarmament and peace throughout the earth.

To those who love peace there can be no other hope in the present conflict than
the defeat, the utter discrediting of the German legend, the ending for good and all
of the blood and iron superstition, of Krupp, flag-wagging Teutonic Kiplingism, and
all that criminal, sham efficiency that centres in Berlin. Never was war so righteous
as war against Germany now. Never has any State in the world so clamored for
punishment.

But be it remembered that Europe’s quarrel is with the German State, not with the
German people; with a system, and not with a race. The older tradition of Germany is
a pacific and civilizing tradition. The temperament of the mass of German people is
kindly, sane, and amiable. Disaster to the German Army, if it is unaccompanied by any
such memorable wrong as dismemberment or intolerable indignity, will mean the
restoration of the greatest people in Europe to the fellowship of Western nations.
The role of England in this huge struggle is plain as daylight. We have to fight. If
only on account of the Luxemburg outrage, we have to fight. If we do not fight,
England will cease to be a country to be proud of; it will be a dirt-bath to escape
from. But it is inconceivable that we should not fight. And having fought, then in
the hour of victory it will be for us to save the liberated Germans from vindictive
treatment, to secure for this great people their right, as one united German-speaking
State, to a place in the sun.

First we have to save ourselves and Europe, and then we have to stand between
German on the one hand and the Cossack and revenge on the other.

For my own part, I do not doubt that Germany and Austria are doomed to defeat in
this war. It may not be catastrophic defeat, though even that is possible, but it is
defeat. There is no destiny in the stars and every sign is false if this is not
so.

They have provoked an overwhelming combination of enemies. They have underrated
France. They are hampered by a bad social and military tradition. The German is not
naturally a good soldier; he is orderly and obedient, but he is not nimble nor
quick-witted; since his sole considerable military achievement, his not very lengthy
march to Paris in ’70 and ’71, the conditions of modern warfare have been almost
completely revolutionized and in a direction that subordinates the massed fighting of
unintelligent men to the rapid initiative of individualized soldiers. And, on the
other hand, since those years of disaster, the Frenchman has learned the lesson of
humility; he is prepared now sombrely for a sombre struggle; his is the gravity that
precedes astonishing victories. In the air, in the open field, with guns and
machines, it is doubtful if any one fully realizes the superiority of his {88}quality to the German.
This sudden attack may take him aback for a week or so, though I doubt even that, but
in the end I think he will hold his own; even without us he will hold his own, and
with us then I venture to prophesy that within three months from now his tricolor
will be over the Rhine. And even suppose his line gets broken by the first rush. Even
then I do not see how the Germans are to get to Paris or anywhere near Paris. I do
not see how against the strength of the modern defensive and the stinging power of an
intelligent enemy in retreat, of which we had a little foretaste in South Africa, the
exploit of Sedan can be repeated. A retiring German army, on the other hand, will be
far less formidable than a retiring French army, because it has less “devil” in it,
because it is made up of men taught to obey in masses, because its intelligence is
concentrated in its aristocratic officers, because it is dismayed when it breaks
ranks. The German Army is everything the conscriptionists dreamed of making our
people; it is, in fact, an army about twenty years behind the requirements of
contemporary conditions.

On the eastern frontier the issue is more doubtful because of the uncertainty of
Russian things. The peculiar military strength of Russia, a strength it was not able
to display in Manchuria, lies in its vast resources of mounted men. A set invasion of
Prussia may be a matter of many weeks, but the raiding possibilities in Eastern
Germany are enormous. It is difficult to guess how far the Russian attack will be
guided by intelligence, and how far Russia will blunder, but Russia will have to
blunder very disastrously indeed before she can be put upon the defensive. A Russian
raid is far more likely to threaten Berlin than a German to reach Paris.

Meanwhile there is the struggle on the sea. In that I am prepared for some rude
shocks. The Germans have devoted an amount of energy to the creation of an aggressive
navy that would have been spent more wisely in consolidating their European position.
It is probably a thoroughly good navy and ship for ship the equal of our own. But the
same lack of invention, the same relative uncreativeness that has kept the German
behind the Frenchman in things aerial has made him, regardless of his shallow seas,
follow our lead in naval matters, and if we have erred, and I believe we have erred,
in overrating the importance of the big battleship, the German has at least very
obligingly fallen in with our error. The safest, most effective place for the German
fleet at the present time is the Baltic Sea. On this side of the Kiel Canal, unless I
overrate the powers of the waterplane, there is no safe harbor for it. If it goes
into port anywhere that port can be ruined, and the bottled-up ships can be destroyed
at leisure by aerial bombs. So that if they are on this side of the Kiel Canal they
must keep the sea and fight, if we let them, before their coal runs short. Battle in
the open sea in this case is their only chance. They will fight against odds, and
with every prospect of a smashing, albeit we shall certainly have to pay for that
victory in ships and men. In the Baltic we shall not be able to get at them without
the participation of Denmark, and they may have a considerable use against Russia.
But in the end even there mine and aeroplane and destroyer should do their work.

So I reckon that Germany will be held east and west, and that she will get her
fleet practically destroyed. We ought also to be able to sweep her shipping off the
seas, and lower her flag forever in Africa and Asia and the Pacific. All the
probabilities, it seems to me, point to that. There is no reason why Italy should not
stick to her present neutrality, and there is considerable inducement close at hand
for both Denmark and Japan to join in, directly they are convinced of the failure of
the first big rush on the part of Germany. All these issues will be more or less
definitely decided within the next two or three months. By that time I believe German
imperialism will be shattered, and it may be possible to anticipate the {89}end of the armaments
phase of European history. France, Italy, England, and all the smaller powers of
Europe are now pacific countries; Russia, after this huge war, will be too exhausted
for further adventure; a shattered Germany will be a revolutionary Germany, as sick
of uniforms and the imperialist idea as France was in 1871, as disillusioned about
predominance as Bulgaria is today. The way will be open at last for all these western
powers to organize peace. That is why I, with my declared horror of war, have not
signed any of these “stop-the-war” appeals and declarations that have appeared in the
last few days. Every sword that is drawn against Germany now is a sword drawn for
peace.

If the Germans Raid England

By H.G. Wells.

From The Times of London, Oct. 31, 1914.

To the Editor of The [London] Times:

Sir: At the outset of the war I made a suggestion in your columns for the
enrollment of all that surplus of manhood and patriotic feeling which remains after
every man available for systematic military operations has been taken. My idea was
that comparatively undrilled boys and older men, not sound enough for campaigning,
armed with rifles, able to shoot straight with them, and using local means of
transport, bicycles, cars, and so forth, would be a quite effective check upon an
enemy’s scouting, a danger to his supplies, and even a force capable of holding up a
raiding advance—more particularly if that advance was poor in horses and
artillery, as an overseas raid was likely to be. I suggested, too, that the mere
enrollment and arming of the population would have a powerful educational effect in
steadying and unifying the spirit of our people. My proposals were received with what
seemed even a forced amusement by the “experts.” I was told that I knew nothing about
warfare, and that the Germans would not permit us to do anything of the sort. The
Germans, it seems, are the authorities in these matters, a point I had overlooked.
They would refuse to recognize men with only improvised uniforms, they would shoot
their prisoners—not that I had proposed that my irregulars should become
prisoners—and burn the adjacent villages. This seemed to be an entirely
adequate reply from the point of view of the expert mind, and I gathered that the
proper rôle for such an able-bodied civilian as myself was to keep indoors
while the invader was about and supply him as haughtily as possible with light
refreshments and anything else he chose to requisition. I was also reminded that if
only men like myself had obeyed their expert advice and worked in the past for
national service and the general submission of everything to expert military
direction, these troubles would not have arisen. There would have been no surplus of
manhood and everything would have gone as smoothly and as well for England
as—the Press Censorship.

An Improbable Invasion.

For a time I was silenced. Under war conditions it is always a difficult question
to determine how far it is better to obey poor, or even bad, directions or to
criticise them in the hope of getting better. But the course of the war since {90}that correspondence and
the revival of the idea of a raid by your military correspondent provoke me to return
to this discussion. Frankly, I do not believe in that raid, and I think we play the
German game in letting our minds dwell upon it. I am supposed to be a person of
feverish imagination, but even by lashing my imagination to its ruddiest I cannot, in
these days of wireless telegraphy, see a properly equipped German force, not even so
trivial a handful as 20,000 of them, getting itself with guns, motors, ammunition,
and provisions upon British soil. I cannot even see a mere landing of infantrymen. I
believe in that raid even less than I do in the suggested raid of navigables that has
darkened London. I admit the risk of a few aeroplane bombs in London, but I do not
see why people should be subjected to danger, darkness, and inconvenience on account
of that one-in-a-million risk. Still, as the trained mind does insist upon treating
all unenlisted civilians as panicstricken imbeciles and upon frightening old ladies
and influential people with these remote possibilities, and as it is likely that
these alarms may even lead to the retention of troops in England when their point of
maximum effectiveness is manifestly in France, it becomes necessary to insist upon
the ability of our civilian population, if only the authorities will permit the small
amount of organization and preparation needed, to deal quite successfully with any
raid that in an extremity of German “boldness” may be attempted.

And, in the first place, let the expert have no illusions as to what we ordinary
people are going to do if we find German soldiers in England one morning. We are
going to fight. If we cannot fight with rifles, we shall fight with shotguns, and if
we cannot fight according to rules of war apparently made by Germans for the
restraint of British military experts, we will fight according to our inner light.
Many men, and not a few women, will turn out to shoot Germans. There will be no
preventing them after the Belgian stories. If the experts attempt any pedantic
interference, we will shoot the experts. I know that in this matter I speak for so
sufficient a number of people that it will be quite useless and hopelessly dangerous
and foolish for any expert-instructed minority to remain “tame.” They will get shot,
and their houses will be burned according to the established German rules and methods
on our account, so they may just as well turn out in the first place, and get some
shooting as a consolation in advance for their inevitable troubles. And if the
raiders, cut off by the sea from their supports, ill-equipped as they will certainly
be, and against odds, are so badly advised as to try terror-striking reprisals on the
Belgian pattern, we irregulars will, of course, massacre every German straggler we
can put a gun to. Naturally. Such a procedure may be sanguinary, but it is just the
common sense of the situation. We shall hang the officers and shoot the men. A German
raid to England will in fact not be fought—it will be lynched. War is war, and
reprisals and striking terror are games that two can play at. This is the latent
temper of the British countryside, and the sooner the authorities take it in hand and
regularize it the better will be the outlook in the remote event of that hypothetical
raid getting home to us. Levity is a national characteristic, but submissiveness is
not. Under sufficient provocation the English are capable of very dangerous bad
temper, and the expert is dreaming who thinks of a German expedition moving through
an apathetic Essex, for example, resisted only by the official forces trained and in
training.

And whatever one may think of the possibility of raids, I venture to suggest that
the time has come when the present exclusive specialization of our combatant energy
upon the production of regulation armies should cease. The gathering of these will go
on anyhow; there are unlimited men ready for intelligent direction. Now that the
shortage of supplies and accommodation has been remedied the enlistment sluices need
only be opened again. The rank and file of this country is its strength; there is no
need, {91}and there
never has been any need, for press hysterics about recruiting. But there is wanted a
far more vigorous stimulation of the manufacture of material—if only experts
and rich people would turn their minds to that. It is the trading and manufacturing
class that needs goading at the present time. It is very satisfactory to send troops
to France, but in France there are still great numbers of able-bodied, trained
Frenchmen not fully equipped. It is our national duty and privilege to be the
storehouse and arsenal of the Allies. Our factories for clothing and material of all
sorts should be working day and night. There is the point to which enthusiasm should
be turned. It is just as heroic and just as useful to the country to kill yourself
making belts and boots as it is to die in a trench. But our organization for the
enrollment and utilization of people not in the firing line is still amazingly
unsatisfactory. The one convenient alternative to enlistment as a combatant at
present is hospital work. But it is really far more urgent to direct enthusiasm and
energy now to the production of war material. If this war does not end, as all the
civilized world hopes it will end, in the complete victory of the Allies, our failure
will not be through any shortage of men, but through a shortage of gear and
organizing ability. It will not be through a default of the people, but through the
slackness of the governing class.

Arms and Equipment Needed.

Now so far as the enrollment of us goes, of the surplus people who are willing to
be armed and to be used for quasi-military work at home, but who are not of an age or
not of a physique or who are already in shop or office serving some quite useful
purpose at home, we want certain very simple things from the authorities. We want the
military status that is conferred by a specific enrollment and some sort of uniform.
We want accessible arms. They need not be modern service weapons; the rifles of ten
years ago are quite good enough for the possible need we shall have for them. And we
want to be sure that in the possible event of an invasion the Government will have
the decision to give every man in the country a military status by at once resorting
to the levée en masse. Given a recognized local organization and some
advice—it would not take a week of Gen. Baden-Powell’s time, for example, to
produce a special training book for us—we could set to work upon our own local
drill, rifle practice, and exercises, in such hours and ways as best suited our
locality. We could also organize the local transport, list local supplies, and
arrange for their removal or destruction if threatened. Finally, we could set to work
to convert a number of ordinary cars into fighting cars by reconstructing and
armoring them and exercising crews. And having developed a discipline and
self-respect as a fighting force, we should be available not only for fighting work
at home, in the extremely improbable event of a raid, but also for all kinds of
supplementary purposes, as a reserve of motor drivers, as a supply of physically
exercised and half-trained recruits in the events of an extended standard, and as a
guarantee of national discipline under any unexpected stress. Above all, we should be
relieving the real fighting forces of the country for the decisive area, which is in
France and Belgium now and will, I hope, be in Westphalia before the Spring.

At present we non-army people are doing only a fraction of what we would like to
do for our country. We are not being used. We are made to feel out of it, and we
watch the not always very able proceedings of the military authorities and the
international mischief-making of the Censorship with a bitter resentment that is
restrained only by the supreme gravity of the crisis. For my own part I entertain
three Belgians and make a young officer possible by supplementing his expenses, and
my wife knits things. A neighbor, an able-bodied man of 42 and an excellent shot, is
occasionally permitted to carry a recruit to Chelmsford. If I try to use my pen on
behalf of my country abroad, where I have a few friends and readers, what I {92}write is exposed to the
clumsy editing and delays of anonymous and apparently irresponsible officials. So
practically I am doing nothing, and a great number of people are doing very little
more. The authorities are concentrated upon the creation of an army numerically vast,
and for the rest they seem to think that the chief function of government is
inhibition. Their available energy and ability is taxed to the utmost in maintaining
the fighting line, and it is sheer greed for direction that has led to their
systematic thwarting of civilian co-operation. Let me warn them of the boredom and
irritation they are causing. This is a people’s war, a war against militarism; it is
not a war for the greater glory of British diplomatists, officials, and people in
uniforms. It is our war, not their war, and the last thing we intend to result from
it is a permanently increased importance for the military caste.

Yours very sincerely,

H.G. WELLS.

Sir Oliver Lodge’s Comment

To the Editor of The [London] Times:

Sir: In a strikingly vigorous letter Mr. H.G. Wells claims that a nation of which
every individual prefers death to submission is unconquerable and cannot be
successfully invaded. Ways of hampering an army are too numerous, if people are
willing to run every risk, not only for themselves but for those dependent on
them.

This may be admitted. And we may also agree that the British race would be likely
to risk everything if the consequences of carefully engendered hate were loosed upon
us. But here comes a point worthy of consideration. An invasion of England is, to say
the least, unlikely; an invasion of Germany may soon have to be undertaken. May it
not add to the difficulties of our troops if a policy of “arming every woman, child,
and cat and dog” is favorably regarded by us? Is not such a policy a sort of
left-handed outcome of the Prussian contention that even their own unarmed civilian
populace is contemptible and may be slaughtered without mercy if military procedure
is resisted, or even if supplies are not forthcoming?

It will be difficult, and I hope impossible, for the Allies to act in accordance
with this latter view; though the German peasantry may have been so fed with lies
that it will be unable to believe that our soldiers can be trusted to behave like
civilized beings when the time has come for a forward march. It is clear that riotous
license is subversive of discipline, and conduces to defeat—as it probably has
in recent Continental experience. For, although ancient warriors used to ravage a
country, and although women have occasionally intervened in order to stop a battle,
surely never before in the history of the world have women and children been forced
forward in defense of a fighting line! Yet undoubtedly war can be so conducted that
foes mutually respect each other; indeed, save for the cowardly abomination of
floating mines, this present war has been so conducted at sea. I suggest that the
fair procedure in case of invasion is for each civilian to choose whether to be a
combatant or not, and to incur the danger of an affirmative choice in a sufficiently
conspicuous and permanent manner. I am, Sir, faithfully yours,

OLIVER LODGE, The University, Birmingham, Oct. 31.

{93}What the
German Conscript Thinks

By Arnold Bennett.

Copyright, 1914, by The New York Times Company.

Some hold that this is a war of Prussian militarism, and not a war of the German
people. This view has the merits of kindliness and convenience. Others warn us not to
be misled by such sentimentalists, and assert that the heart of the German people is
in the war. The point is of importance to us, because the work of the conscript in
the field must be influenced by his private feelings. Notwithstanding all drill and
sergeantry, the German Army remains a collection of human beings—and human
beings more learned, if not better educated, than our own race! It is not a mere
fighting machine, despite the efforts of its leaders to make it into one.

Among those who assert that the heart of the German people is in the war are
impartial and experienced observers who have carefully studied Germany for many
years. For myself, I give little value to their evidence. To come at the truth by
observation about a foreign country is immensely, overpoweringly difficult. I am a
professional observer: I have lived in Paris and in the French provinces for nine
years; I am fairly familiar with French literature and very familiar with the French
language—and I honestly would not trust myself to write even a shilling
handbook about French character and life. Nearly all newspapers are conservative;
nearly all foreign correspondents adopt the official or conventional point of view;
and the pictures of foreign life which get into the press are, as a rule—shall
I say incomplete?

Even when the honest observer says, “These things I saw with my own eyes and will
vouch for,” I am not convinced that he saw enough. An intelligent foreigner with
first-class introductions might go through England and see with his own eyes that
England was longing for protection, the death of home rule, and the repeal of the
Insurance act. The unfortunate Prince Lichnowsky, after an exhaustive inquiry and
access to the most secret sources of exclusive information telegraphed to the Kaiser
less than a month ago that civil war was an immediate certainty throughout Ireland.
Astounding fatuity? Not at all. English observers of England have made, and
constantly do make, mistakes equally prodigious. See Hansard every month. So that
when I read demonstrations of the thesis that the heart of the German people is in
the war, I am not greatly affected by them.

German Heart Is In the War.

Still, I do myself believe that the heart of the German people is in the war, and
that that heart is governed by two motives—the motive of self-defense against
Russia and the motive of overbearing self-aggrandizement. I do not base my opinion on
phenomena which I have observed. Beyond an automobile journey through
Schleswig-Holstein, which was formidably tedious, and a yacht journey through the
Kiel Canal and Kiel Bay, which was somewhat impressive, I have never traveled in
Germany at all. I base my opinion on general principles. In a highly educated and
civilized country such as Germany (the word “civilized” must soon take on a new
significance!) it is impossible that an autocracy, even a military autocracy, could
exist unrooted in the people. “Prussian militarism” may annoy many Germans, but it
pleases more than it annoys, and there can be few Germans who are not flattered by
it. That the lower classes have an even more tremendous grievance against the upper
classes in Germany than in England or France is a certitude. But the existence and
power of the army are their reward, their sole reward, for all that they have
suffered in hardship and humiliation at the hands of the autocracy. It is the
autocracy’s bribe and sweetmeat to them.

The Germans are a great nation; they have admirable qualities, but they have also
defects, and among their defects is a clumsy arrogance, which may be noticed in any
international hotel frequented by Germans. It is a racial defect, and to try to limit
it to the military autocracy is absurd. An educated and civilized nation has roughly
the Government that it wants and deserves. And it has in the end ways of imposing
itself on its apparent rulers that are more effective than the ballot box or the
barricade, and just as sure. No election was needed to prove to the Italian
Government that Italy did not want to fight for the Triple Alliance, and would not
fight for it. The fact was known; it was immanent in the air, beyond all arguments
and persuasions. Italy breathed a negative, and war was not. So in Germany the mass
of Germans have for years breathed war, and war is. The war may be autocratic,
dynastic, what you will; but it is also national, and it symbolizes the national
defect.

How About the Leaders?

Does the German conscript believe in the efficacy of his leaders? I mean when he
is lying awake and fatigued at night, not when he is shouting “Hoch!” or watching the
demeanor of women in front of him. Does no doubt ever lancinate him? Again I would
answer the question from general principles and not from observation. The German
conscript must know what everybody knows—that in almost every bully there is a
coward. And he must know that he is led by bullies. He learned that in the barrack
yard. An enormous number of conscripts must also know that there is something
seriously wrong with a system that for the sake of its own existence has killed
freedom of the press. And the million little things that are wrong in the system he
also knows out of his own daily life as a conscript. Further, he must be aware {94}that there is a dearth of
really great men in his system. In the past there were in Germany men great enough to
mesmerize Europe—Bismarck and von Moltke. There is none today that appeals to
the popular imagination as Kitchener does in England or Joffre in France. Alone, in
Germany, the Kaiser has been able to achieve a Continental renown. The Kaiser has
good qualities. But twenty-four years ago he committed an act of folly and (one may
say) “bad form” which nothing but results could justify, and which results have not
justified. Whatever his good qualities may be it is an absolute certainty that common
sense, foresight, and mental balance are not among them. The conscript feels that, if
he does not state it clearly to himself. And as for the military organization of
which the Kaiser is the figurehead, it has shown for many years past precisely those
signs which history teaches us are signs of decay. It has not withstood the fearful
ordeal of success. Just lately, if not earlier, the conscript must have felt that,
too.

What is the conclusion? Take the average conscript, the member of the lower middle
class. He is accustomed to think politically, because at least fifty out of every
hundred of him are professed Socialists with a definite and bitter political
programme against certain manifestations of the autocracy. (It is calculated that
two-fifths of the entire army is Socialist.) He may not argue very closely while in
the act of war; indeed, he could not. But enormous experience is accumulated in his
subconsciousness—experience of bullying and cowardice, of humiliation, of
injustice, of lying, and of his own most secret shortcomings—for he, too, is
somewhat of the bully, out for self-aggrandisement as well as for self-defense, and
his conscience privately tells him so. The organization is still colossal,
magnificent, terrific. In the general fever of activity he persuades himself that
nothing can withstand the organization; but at the height of some hand-to-hand
crisis, when one-hundredth of a dogged grain of obstinacy will turn the scale, he may
re{95}member an insult
from an incompetent officer, or the protectionism at home which puts meat beyond his
purse in order to enrich the landowner, or even the quite penal legislation of the
autocracy against the co-operative societies of the poor, and the memory (in spite of
him) may decide a battle. Men think of odd matters in a battle, and it is a
scientific certainty that, at the supreme pinch, the subconscious must react.

Felix Adler’s Comment

From The Standard, Oct. 14, 1914.

Apropos of a recent article by Mr. Arnold Bennett, wherein he speaks of the
resentment which the German soldiers—two-fifths of them Socialists—must
feel against the bullying discipline to which they have been subjected, the following
reflections are jotted down. The reader who is interested in pursuing the subject
further may profitably consult a book entitled “Imperial Germany,” by Prince von
Bülow, which contains some penetrating observations on the workings of the
German mind, as well as the chapter on Germany in Alfred Fouillée’s notable
work, “Esquisse Psychologique des Peuples Européens.”

The precision which characterizes the operations of the German military machine is
due to the German notion of discipline. Discipline in Germany is based on the
peculiar place assigned to the expert. Military experts exercise in their branch an
authority different in degree but not in kind from that belonging to experts in other
departments—strategy, tactics, improvements of armament, methods of
mobilization. The inexpert soldier submits to the military expert as a person about
to undergo a necessary operation would submit to a surgeon. It is a mistake to
suppose that the Germans, a highly intelligent and educated people, are being cowed
into submission by brutal non-commissioned officers. Brutality, when it occurs, is
looked upon as exceptional and incidental to a system on the whole approved. The
Germans would never tolerate the severe discipline to which they are subjected did
they not willingly submit to it. They regard a highly efficient army as necessary to
the safety of the Fatherland, and they are willing to leave the responsibility for
the means of securing efficiency to the experts. During the Franco-German war, when a
student in the University of Berlin, I talked with some of the brightest of the
younger men about their military obligations, and I found that they took precisely
the view just stated. The Pomeranian peasant may submit to military dictation in a
dull, half-instinctive fashion. The flower and élite of German intelligence
submit to it no less—from conviction.

How shall we account for the unique predominance of the expert in German life? The
explanation would seem to lie in the phrase invented by a brilliant writer of the
last century, “Deutschland ist Hamlet” (Germany is Hamlet). The Germans are a
resolute people—not at all, as has been erroneously supposed, a nation of
dreamers—just as Hamlet, according to recent criticism, was essentially of a
resolute character. In the days of the Hansa and of the Hohenstaufen the Germans cut
a great figure in oversea commerce and in war. They were great doers of deeds. The
Germans are intensely volitional, but also intensely intellectual. Hence the native
hue of resolution has sometimes been sicklied o’er by too much thinking. The
intellect of the German refuses to sanction action until the successive steps to be
taken have been worked out with logical accuracy, and a scientific groove, so to
speak, has been hollowed out along which action can proceed. As soon as {96}this is accomplished, the
flood of volitional impulse enters gladly into the channel prepared for it and moves
on in it with irresistible force. Bismarck represents the active side, as the eminent
philosophers of the German people represent the side of logical construction. The two
sides must be taken together to understand German history and the tendencies
prevailing in Germany today.

Underneath it all, of course, is German sentiment, but of this we need take no
account in discussing German discipline, except in so far as love for the Fatherland
enters in to sustain the patience of the people under the burden of their military
establishment.

Discipline, or the subordination of the inexpert to the expert, likewise accounts
for certain peculiarities of the German political parties. Prince von Bülow
mentions three examples of supremely efficient organization—the Prussian Army,
the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the German Social Democracy. There are some 4,200
Socialist associations, subject to the orders of forty-two district associations,
these in turn being ruled by the Central Committee. The working of the Social
Democratic machine is almost flawless. The discipline, it is said, is iron.

Again, the conception of Government in Germany, unlike that which prevails in
England, France, or America, is determined by the idea of expertness. The Government
is the political expert par excellence. Its business is to study the interests of the
State as a whole. In all matters of economic theory, of finance, of administration,
of social reform, it invokes the advice of specialists. But it is itself the supreme
political specialist. It stands high above all the political parties. It does not
depend for its existence on majorities in Parliament. It seeks the co-operation of
Parliament, but reserves to itself the right of initiative and leadership.

The object of the above remarks is to explain, not to justify, and in the face of
much uninstructed criticism to point out the deep sources in the nature of the German
people from which spring the influences that have molded their life. The chief
objections to their system may be summarized in the statements, that it takes too
little account of the value of the inexpert; that it tends to suppress latent
spontaneity; and, especially in the sphere of government, that it ascribes to the
expert a knowledge of the needs of the people such as no ruling class can ever
possess. And it overlooks the highest aim of political life and activity, which is
the education of the inexpert to such a point that they may become more or less
expert in understanding and promoting the public weal.

FELIX ADLER.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK. See Page 144.

EMILE BOUTROUX. (Photo from Bain News Service.) See Page 160.

{97}When Peace
Is Seriously Desired

By Arnold Bennett.

From The Daily News of London.

When peace is seriously desired in any quarter, the questions to be discussed by
the plenipotentaries will fall into three groups:

1. Those which affect all Europe.

2. Those which chiefly affect Western Europe.

3. Those which chiefly affect Eastern Europe.

The first group is, of course, the most important, both practically and
sentimentally. And the main question in it is the question of Belgium. The original
cause of the war was Germany’s deliberate and advertised bellicosity, and it might be
thought that the first aim of peace would be by some means to extinguish that
bellicosity. But relative values may change during the progress of a war, and the
question of Belgium—which means the question of the sanction of international
pledges—now stands higher in the general view than the question of disarmament.
Germany has outraged the public law of Europe, and she has followed up her outrage
with a series of the most cowardly and wanton crimes. She ought to pay, and she ought
to apologize. Only by German payment and German apology can international law be
vindicated. Germany should pay a sum large enough to do everything that money can do
toward the re-establishment of Belgium’s well-being. I have no competence to suggest
the amount of the indemnity. A hundred million pounds does not appear to me too
large.

Then the apology. It may be asked: Why an apology? Would not an apology be implied
in the payment of an indemnity?

It is undeniable that Germany is now directed by hysteric stupidity wielding a
bludgeon. Granted, if you will, that half the nation is at heart against the
stupidity and the bludgeon. So much the worse for the half. Citizens who have not had
the wit to get rid of the Prussian franchise law must accept all the consequences of
their political ineffectiveness. The peacemakers will not be able to divide Germany
into two halves.

For Potsdam a first-rate spectacular effect is needed, and that effect would best
be produced by a German national apology carried by a diplomatic mission with
ceremony to Brussels and published in all German official papers, and emphasized by a
procession of Belgian troops down Unter den Linden. This visible abasement of German
arms in front of the Socialists of Berlin would be an invaluable aid to the breaking
of military tyranny in Prussia.

So much for the Belgium question and the sanction of international pledges. The
other question affecting the whole of Europe is the hope of a universal limitation of
armaments. But there is a particular question, touching France, which in practice
would come before that. I mean Alsace-Lorraine. Unless Germany conquers Europe,
Alsace-Lorraine should be restored to France. A profound national sentiment, to which
all conceivable considerations of expediency or ultimate advantage are unimportant,
demands imperatively the return of the plunder. And in the councils of the Allies,
either alone or with German representatives, the attitude of French diplomacy would
be: “Is it clear about Alsace-Lorraine? If so, we may proceed. If not, it’s no use
going any further.”

Question of Armaments.

We now come to armaments. I have seen it suggested that the destruction of Essen,
Wilhelmshaven, and Heligoland ought to be a condition of peace with Germany.
Certainly the disappearance of these phenomena would be a gain {98}to the world. So would
the disappearance of Rosyth and Toulon. It seems to me, however, very improbable that
their destruction or dismantling by international command would occur after
hostilities have ceased, or could usefully so occur. If the French Army on its way to
Berlin can treat the Krupp factory as the German Army on its way to Paris treated
Rheims Cathedral, well and good! In fact, most excellent! And if the British Navy can
somehow emasculate Wilhelmshaven and Heligoland I shall not complain that its
behavior has been purely doctrinaire. But otherwise I see nothing practical in the
Essen-Wilhelmshaven-Heligoland suggestion. Nor in the project for dethroning the
Kaiser and sending him and his eldest son to settle their differences in St. Helena!
The Kaiser—happily—is not a Napoleon, nor has he yet himself accomplished
anything big enough or base enough to merit Napoleon’s fate. Any dethroning that may
enliven the gray monotony of the post-bellum era at Potsdam should and will be done
by the German soldiers themselves. Even in international politics it is futile to try
to meddle in other people’s private affairs.

Disarmament in Germany can be achieved by the exercise of one principle, and one
principle only. That principle is the principle of mutuality. A scheme in which every
nation will proportionately share should be presented to Germany, and she should be
respectfully but quite firmly asked to participate in it. There would be no sense in
saying to Germany: “You must disarm.” The magic words would be: “We are going to
disarm, and so are you, whether you want to or not.” As to the procedure of
disarmament—whether it shall be slow or fast, whether it shall include
destruction or be content with mere omission to renew, how the proportions shall be
decided, who shall give the signal to begin—here are matters which I am without
skill or desire to discuss. All I know about them is that they are horribly
complicated, unprecedentedly difficult, and bursting with danger; and that they will
strain the wisdom, patience, and ingenuity of the negotiators to the very utmost.

Three Vital Points.

Compared to disarmament, all remaining questions whatsoever affecting peace are
simple and secondary. Indemnities for France or Russia, or both, a Polish Kingdom, a
Balkan United States, the precise number of nations into which Austria-Hungary is to
be shattered, the ownership of the east coast of the Adriatic, even the reparation of
the infamy by which Denmark was robbed of Schleswig-Holstein—what are these but
favorable ground for the art of compromise? The vital points, at any rate for us
Westerners, are only three: Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and disarmament. * * * Stay,
there is another. It is vital to Great Britain’s reputation that she should accept
nothing—neither indemnity, nor colonies; not a single pound, not a single
square mile.

Many persons, I gather, find it hard to believe that Prussia will ever admit that
she is beaten or consent to her own humiliation. Naturally her conduct will depend
upon the degree to which she is beaten. She has admitted defeat and swallowed the
leek before, though it is a long time ago. Meanwhile she has forgotten, and her
opponents seem to have forgotten also, that though her name is Prussia she is subject
to the limitations of the human race. Out of her prodigious score off little Denmark,
her thrashing of Austria—a country which never wins a war—and her victory
over France, there grew a legend that Prussia, and therefore Germany, was not as
other nations. This legend is contrary to fact. Every nation must yield to
force—here, indeed, is Germany’s contribution to our common knowledge.

If in July, 1870, it had been prophesied that France would give up Alsace-Lorraine
and pay two hundred millions to get rid of a foreign army of occupation, France would
have protested that she would fight to the last man and to the last franc first. But
nations don’t do these things. If Germany won {99}the present war and fulfilled her dream of establishing an
army in this island, we should yield, and we should submit to her terms, we who have
never been beaten save by our own colonies—that is a scientific certainty. And
Germany’s terms would not be amusing; in their terribleness they would outrun our
poor Anglo-Saxon imagination. Similarly, if Germany is beaten, she will bow the head,
and to precisely the extent to which she is walloped. We need not worry about that.
Were she recalcitrant we need not even murmur in her ear: “What would you have
extorted if you’d won?” A gesture of the still uplifted sword would suffice to
convince her that facts are facts.

Assuming that the tide turns not again, the chances of a thorough, workmanlike
common sense peace can only be imperiled by one thing—the deep desire of France
and of Belgium for repose and recuperation. We in England do not know what war is. We
have not lived in hell. Our plains have not been devastated, nor our women and
children shot, nor our ears deafened by the boom of cannon, nor our cathedrals
shelled, nor our land turned into a vast and bloody hospital; and we have not
experienced the appalling terror and shame of the foe’s absolute dominion in our
streets and lanes. We have suffered; we shall suffer; but our suffering is nought and
less than nought weighed against the suffering on the Continent. Why, in the midst of
a war of unparalleled horror, we grumble if a train is late! We can talk calmly of
fighting Germany to a stand-still, even if the job takes two years, and it behooves
us to talk so, and to prepare for the task; and for myself I am convinced that we
could make good the word. But France and Belgium will not use that tone, if Russia
does. Once the German armies are across the frontiers, the instinctive pressure in
favor of peace would be enormous, and considerations of the distant future, of the
welfare of our descendants and the progress of mankind, would count little in the
scale. In that moment, if it happily comes, our part and Russia’s would be to sustain
and encourage and salve the supreme victims of fate. A tremendous factor in our favor
would be the exhaustion of Germany; and the measure of our power and of the fear we
inspire is the furious intensity of Germany’s anger against our inconvenient selves.
Without us the war could not last beyond the end of this year, and the peace would be
unsatisfactory.

And even with us, insisting on our own terms of reconciliation, I do not see how
it can last over six months more on anything like the present scale, for the Kaiser,
despite his kinship with Deity, can neither create men nor extract gold coins out of
an empty hat. Military arguments, in Germany as elsewhere, hold good only for a
certain period.

{100}Barrie at
Bay: Which Was Brown?

An Interview on the War.

From The New York Times, Oct. 1, 1914.

As our reporter entered Sir James Barrie’s hotel room by one door, the next door
softly closed. “I was alone,” writes our reporter. “I sprang into the corridor and
had just time to see him fling himself down the elevator. Then I understood what he
had meant when he said on the telephone that he would be ready for me at 10:30.

I returned thoughtfully to the room, where I found myself no longer alone. Sir
James Barrie’s “man” was there; a stolid Londoner, name of Brown, who told me he was
visiting America for the first time.

“Sir James is very sorry, but has been called away,” he assured me without moving
a muscle. Then he added: “But this is the pipe,” and he placed a pipe of the largest
size on the table.

“The pipe he smokes?” I asked.

Brown is evidently a very truthful man, for he hesitated. “That is the interview
pipe,” he explained. “When we decided to come to America, Sir James said he would
have to be interviewed, and that it would be wise to bring something with us for the
interviewers to take notice of. So he told me to buy the biggest pipe I could find,
and he practiced holding it in his mouth in his cabin on the way across. He is very
pleased with the way the gentlemen of the press have taken notice of it.”

“So that is not the pipe he really smokes?” I said, perceiving I was on the verge
of a grand discovery. “I suppose he actually smokes an ordinary small pipe.”

Again Brown hesitated, but again truth prevailed.

“He does not smoke any pipe,” he said, “nor cigars, nor cigarettes; he never
smokes at all; he just puts that one in his mouth to help the interviewers.”

“It has the appearance of having been smoked,” I pointed out.

“I blackened it for him,” the faithful fellow replied.

“But he has written a book in praise of My Lady Nicotine.”

“So I have heard,” Brown said guardedly. “I think that was when he was hard up and
had to write what people wanted; but he never could abide smoking himself. Years
after he wrote the book he read it; he had quite forgotten it, and he was so
attracted by what it said about the delights of tobacco that he tried a cigarette.
But it was no good; the mere smell disgusted him.”

Strange Forgetfulness.

“Odd that he should forget his own book,” I said.

“He forgets them all,” said Brown. “There is this Peter Pan foolishness, for
instance. I have heard people talking to him about that play and mentioning parts in
it they liked, and he tried to edge them off the subject; they think it is his
shyness, but I know it is because he has forgotten the bits they are speaking about.
Before strangers call on him I have seen him reading one of his own books hurriedly,
so as to be able to talk about it if that is their wish. But he gets mixed up, and
thinks that the little minister was married to Wendy.”

“Almost looks as if he hadn’t written his own works,” I said.

“Almost,” Brown admitted uncomfortably.

I asked a leading question. “You don’t suppose,” I said, “that any one writes them
for him? Such things have been. You don’t write them for him by any chance, just as
you blackened the pipe, you know?”

Brown assured me stolidly that he did not. Suddenly, whether to get away {101}from a troublesome
subject I cannot say, he vouchsafed me a startling piece of information. “The German
Kaiser was on our boat coming across,” he said.

“Sure?” I asked, wetting my pencil.

He told me he had Sir James’s word for it. There was on board, it seems, a very
small, shrunken gentleman with a pronounced waist and tiny, turned-up mustache, who
strutted along the deck trying to look fierce and got in the other passengers’ way to
their annoyance until Sir James discovered that he was the Kaiser Reduced to Life
Size. After that Sir James liked to sit with him and talk to him.

Sir James is a great admirer of the Kaiser, though he has not, like Mr. Carnegie,
had the pleasure of meeting him in society. When he read in the papers on arriving
here that the Kaiser had wept over the destruction of Louvain, he told Brown a story.
It was of a friend who had gone to an oculist to be cured of some disease in one eye.
Years afterward he heard that the oculist’s son had been killed in some Indian war,
and he called on the oculist to commiserate with him.

“You cured my eye,” he said to him, “and when I read of your loss I wept for you,
Sir; I wept for you with that eye.”

“Sir James,” Brown explained, “is of a very sympathetic nature, and he wondered
which eye it was that the Kaiser wept with.”

I asked Brown what his own views were about the war, and before replying he pulled
a paper from his pocket and scanned it. “We are strictly neutral,” he then
replied.

“Is that what is written on the paper?” I asked. He admitted that Sir James had
written out for him the correct replies to possible questions. “Why was he neutral?”
I asked, and he again found the reply on the piece of paper: “Because it is the
President’s wish.”

Brown Must Be Neutral.

So anxious, I discovered, is Sir James to follow the President’s bidding that he
has enjoined Brown to be neutral on all other subjects besides the war; to express no
preference on matters of food, for instance, and always to eat oysters and clams
alternately, so that there can be no ill-feeling. Also to walk in the middle of the
streets lest he should seem to be favoring either sidewalk, and to be very cautious
about admitting that one building in New York is higher than another. I assured him
that the Woolworth Building was the highest, but he replied politely, “that he was
sure the President would prefer him to remain neutral.” I naturally asked if Sir
James had given him any further instructions as to proper behavior in America, and it
seems that he had done so. They amount, I gather, to this, that Americans have a
sense of humor which they employ, when they can, to the visitor’s undoing.

“When we reach New York,” Sir James seems to have told Brown in effect, “we shall
be met by reporters who will pretend that America is eager to be instructed by us as
to the causes and progress of the war; then, if we are fools enough to think that
America cannot make up its mind for itself, we shall fall into the trap and preach to
them, and all the time they are taking down our observations they will be saying to
themselves, ‘Pompous asses.’

“It is a sort of game between us and the reporters. Our aim is to make them think
we are bigger than we are, and theirs is to make us smaller than we are; and any
chance we have of succeeding is to hold our tongues, while they will probably succeed
if they make us jabber. Above all, oh, Brown, if you write to the papers giving your
views of why we are at war—and if you don’t you will be the only person who
hasn’t—don’t be lured into slinging vulgar abuse at our opponents, lest America
takes you for another university professor.”

There is, I learned, only one person in America about whom it is impossible, even
in Sir James’s opinion, to preserve a neutral attitude. This is the German
Ambassador, whose splendid work for England day by day and in every paper and to all
reporters cannot, Sir James thinks, be too cordially recognized. Brown has been told
to look upon the German Ambasador as England’s great{102}est asset in America just now, and to
hope heartily that he will be long spared to carry on his admirable work.

Lastly, it was pleasant to find that Brown has not a spark of sympathy with those
who say that, because Germany has destroyed art treasures in Belgium and France, the
Allies should retaliate with similar rudeness if they reach Berlin. He holds that if
for any reason best known to themselves (such as the wish for a sunnier location) the
Hohenzollerns should by and by vacate their present residence, a nice villa should be
provided for them, and that all the ancestral statues in the Sieges-Allee should be
conveyed to it intact, and perhaps put up in the back garden. There the Junkers could
drop in of an evening, on their way home from their offices, and chat pleasantly of
old times. Brown thinks they should be allowed to retain all their iron crosses, and
even given some more, with which, after smart use of their pocket combs, they would
cut no end of a dash among the nursemaids.

As for the pipe, I was informed that it had now done its work, and I could take it
away as a keepsake. I took it, but wondered afterward at Brown’s thinking he had the
right to give it me.

A disquieting feeling has since come over me that perhaps it was Sir James I had
been interviewing all the time, and Brown who had escaped down the elevator.

A “Credo” for Keeping Faith

By John Galsworthy.

I believe in peace with all my heart. I believe that war is outrage—a black
stain on the humanity and the fame of man. I hate militarism and the god of force. I
would go any length to avoid war for material interests, war that involved no
principles, distrusting profoundly the common meaning of the phrase “national
honor.”

But I believe there is a national honor charged with the future happiness of man,
that loyalty is due from those living to those that will come after; that
civilization can only wax and flourish in a world where faith is kept; that for
nations, as for individuals, there are laws of duty, whose violation harms the whole
human race; in sum, that stars of conduct shine for peoples, as for private men.

And so I hold that without tarnishing true honor, endangering civilization present
and to come, and ruining all hope of future tranquillity, my country could not have
refused to take up arms for the defense of Belgium’s outraged neutrality, solemnly
guaranteed by herself and France.

I believe, and claim in proof, the trend of events and of national character
during the last century, that in democracy alone lies any coherent hope of
progressive civilization or any chance of lasting peace in Europe, or the world.

I believe that this democratic principle, however imperfectly developed, has so
worked in France, in England, in the United States, that these countries are already
nearly safe from inclination to aggress, or to subdue other nationalities.

And I believe that while there remain autocratic Governments basing themselves on
militarism, bitterly hostile to the democratic principle, Europe will never be free
of the surcharge of swollen armaments, the nightmare menace of wars like
this—the paralysis that creeps on civilizations which adore the god of
force.

And so I hold that, without betrayal of trusteeship, without shirking the
elementary defense of beliefs coiled within its {103}fibre, or beliefs vital to the future
welfare of all men, my country could not stand by and see the triumph of autocratic
militarism over France, that very cradle of democracy.

I believe that democratic culture spreads from west to east, that only by
maintenance of consolidate democracy in Western Europe can democracy ever hope to
push on and prevail till the Eastern powers have also that ideal under which alone
humanity can flourish.

And so I hold that my country is justified at this juncture in its alliance with
the autocratic power of Russia, whose people will never know freedom till her borders
are joined to the borders of democracy.

I do not believe that jealous, frightened jingoism has ever been more than the
dirty fringe of England’s peace-loving temper, and I profess my sacred faith that my
country has gone to war at last, not from fear, not from hope of aggrandizement, but
because she must—for honor, for democracy, and for the future of mankind.

Hard Blows, Not Hard Words

By Jerome K. Jerome.

From The London Daily News.

In one of Shaw’s plays—I think it is “Superman”—one of the characters
hints, toward the end of the last act, that the hero is a gentleman somewhat prone to
talking. The hero admits it, but excuses himself on the ground that it is the only
way he knows of explaining his opinions.

Times of stress and struggle, whether individual or national, afford men and women
other methods of expressing their views, and a large number of our citizens are, very
creditably, taking the present opportunity to act instead of shout. There are the
young fellows who in their thousands are pressing around the door of the recruiting
offices. They are throwing up, many of them, good jobs for the privilege of drilling
for the next six months for eight hours a day. Their reward will be certain hardship,
their share of sickness and wounds, the probability of lying ten deep in a forgotten
grave, their chance of glory a name printed in small type among a thousand others on
a War Office report.

There are the mothers and wives and children who are encouraging them to go; to
whom their going means semi-starvation. The old, bent crones whose feeble hands will
have to grasp again the hoe and the scrubbing brush. The young women who know only
too well what is before them—the selling of the home just got together; first
the easy chair and the mirror, and then the bed and the mattress; the weary tramping
of the streets, looking for work. The children awestruck and wondering.

There are the men who are quietly going on with their work, doing their best with
straitened means to keep their business going; giving employment; getting ready to
meet the income tax collector, who next year one is inclined to expect will be
demanding anything from half a crown to five shillings in the pound. There are
others. But there is a certain noisy and, to me, particularly offensive man (and with
him, I am sorry to say, one or two women) very much to the fore just now with whose
services the country could very well dispense. He is the man who does his fighting
with his mouth. Unable for reasons of his own to get at the foe in the field, he
thirsts for the blood of the unfortunate unarmed and helpless Germans that the
fortunes of war have left stranded in England. He writes to the paper thoughtfully
suggesting plans that have occurred to him {104}for making their existence more miserable than it must
be. He generally concludes his letter with a short homily directed against the
Prussian Military Staff for their lack of the higher Christian principles.

He has spies on the brain. Two quite harmless English citizens have already been
shot in consequence of the funk this spy mania has created among us. The vast
majority of Germans in England have come to live in England because they dislike
Germany. That a certain number of spies are among us I take to be highly probable. I
take it that if the Allies know their business a certain number of English spies are
doing what they can for us at great personal risk to themselves in Germany. Until the
German Army has landed on our shores German spies can do little or no harm to us. The
police can be trusted to know something about them, and if any are caught red-handed
the rules of war are not likely to be strained for their benefit.

A Story from the South.

From a small town in the South of England comes a story I can vouch for. A couple
of Boy Scouts had been set to guard the local reservoir. About noon one sunny day
they remarked the approach, somewhat ostentatious, of a desperate-looking character.
Undoubtedly a German spy! What can he be up to! The boys approached him and he fled,
leaving behind him the damning evidence—a tin suggestive of sardines and
labeled “Poison!” That the gentleman should have chosen broad daylight for his
nefarious design, should have been careful to label his tin, seemed to the good
townsfolk under present scare conditions proof that they had at last discovered the
real German spy, full of his devilish cunning. The tin was taken possession of by the
police. And then the Sergeant’s little daughter, who happened to have had a few
lessons in French, suggested that the word on the tin was “Poisson,” and the town now
breathes again.

So long as the war continues the spy will be among us. I suggest that we face the
problem of his activities without blue funk and hysteria. The men and women who are
shrieking for vicarious vengeance upon all the Germans remaining in our midst must
remember that there are thousands of English families at the present moment residing
in Germany and Austria. The majority of them, comparatively poor people, with all
their belongings around them, were unable to get away. I shall, until I receive
convincing proof to the contrary, continue to believe that they are living among
their German neighbors unmolested. Even were it not so, I would suggest our setting
the example of humanity rather than our slavishly following an example of
barbarity.

We are fighting for an idea—an idea of some importance to the generations
that will come after us. We are fighting to teach the Prussian Military Staff that
other laws have come to stay—laws superseding those of Attila the Hun. We are
fighting to teach the German people that, free men with brains to think with, they
have no right to hand themselves over body and soul to their rulers to be used as
mere devil’s instruments; that if they do so they shall pay the penalty, and the
punishment shall go hard. We are fighting to teach the German Nation respect for God!
Our weapons have got to be hard blows, not hard words. We are tearing at each other’s
throats; it has got to be done. It is not a time for yelping.

Jack Johnson as a boxer I respect. The thing I do not like about him is his habit
of gibing and jeering at his opponent while he is fighting him. It isn’t gentlemanly,
and it isn’t sporting. The soldiers are fighting in grim silence. When one of them
does talk, it is generally to express admiration of German bravery. It is our valiant
stay-at-homes, our valiant clamorers for everybody else to enlist but themselves, who
would have us fight like some drunken fish hag, shrieking and spitting while she
claws.

Incredible Reports of Atrocities.

Half of these stories of atrocities I do not believe. I remember when I was living
in Germany at the time of the {105}Boer war the German papers were full of accounts of
Tommy Atkins’s brutality. He spent his leisure time in tossing babies on bayonets.
There were photographs of him doing it. Detailed accounts certified by most
creditable witnesses. Such lies are the stock in trade of every tenth-rate
journalist, who, careful not to expose himself to danger, slinks about the byways
collecting hearsay. In every war each side, according to the other, is supposed to
take a fiendish pleasure in firing upon hospitals—containing always a
proportion of their own wounded. An account comes to us from a correspondent with the
Belgian Army. He tells us that toward the end of the day a regrettable incident
occurred. The Germans were taking off their wounded in motor cars. The Belgian
sharpshooters, not noticing the red flag in the dusk, kept up a running fire, and a
large number of the wounded were killed. Had the incident been the other way about it
would have been cited as a deliberate piece of villainy on the part of the Germans.
According to other accounts, the Germans always go into action with screens of women
and children before them. The explanation, of course, is that a few poor terrified
creatures are rushing along the road. They get between the approaching forces, and I
expect the bullets that put them out of their misery come pretty even from both
sides.

The men are mad. Mad with fear, mad with hate, blinded by excitement. Take a mere
dog fight. If you interfere you have got to be prepared for your own dog turning upon
you. In war half the time the men do not know what they are doing. They are little
else than wild beasts. There was great indignation at the dropping of bombs into
Antwerp. One now hears that a French dirigible has been dropping bombs into
Luxembourg—a much more dignified retort. War is a grim game. Able editors and
club-chair politicians have been clamoring for it for years past. They thought it was
all goose-step and bands.

The truth is bad enough, God knows. There is no sense in making things out worse
than they are. When this war is over we have got to forget it. To build up barriers
of hatred that shall stand between our children and our foemen’s children is a crime
against the future.

These stories of German naval officers firing on their wounded sailors in the
water! They are an insult to our intelligence. At Louvain fifty of the inhabitants
were taken out and shot. On Monday the fifty had grown to five hundred; both numbers
vouched for by eye-witnesses, “Dutchmen who would have had no interest,” &c. That
the beautiful old town has been laid in ashes is undoubted. Some criminal lunatic
strutting in pipeclay and mustachios was given his hour of authority and took the
chance of his life. If I know anything of the German people it will go hard with him
when the war is over, if he has not had the sense to get killed. But that won’t rear
again the grand old stones or wipe from Germany’s honor the stain of that long line
of murdered men and women—whatever its actual length may have been. War puts a
premium on brutality and senselessness. Men with the intelligence and instincts of an
ape suddenly find themselves possessed of the powers of a god. And we are astonished
that they do not display the wisdom of a god!

There are other stories that have filtered through to us. There was a dying Uhlan
who caught a child to his arms and kissed him. One would like to be able to kiss
one’s own child before one dies, but failing that—well, after all, there is a
sort of family likeness between them. The same deep wondering eyes, the
same—and then the mist grows deeper. Perhaps after all it was Baby Fritz that
he kissed.

And of a Belgian woman. She had seen her two sons killed before her eyes. She
tells of that and of other horrors. Among such, of the German lads she had stepped
over, their blue eyes quiet in death. The passion and the fear and the hate cleansed
out of them. Just boys with their clothes torn—so like boys.

“They, too, have got mothers, poor lads!” is all she says, thinking of them lying
side by side with her own.

{106}When the
madness and the folly are over, when the tender green is creeping in and out among
the blackened ruins, it will be well for us to think of that dying Uhlan who had to
put up with a French baby instead of his own; of that Belgian mother to whom the
German youngsters were just “poor lads”—with their clothes torn.

And the savagery and the cruelty and the guiltiness that go to the making of war
we will seek to forget.

“As They Tested Our Fathers”

By Rudyard Kipling.

Through no fault nor wish of ours we are at war with Germany, the power which owes
its existence to three well-thought-out wars; the power which for the last twenty
years has devoted itself to organizing and preparing for this war; the power which is
now fighting to conquer the civilized world.

For the last two generations the Germans in their books, teachers, speeches, and
schools have been carefully taught that nothing less than this world conquest was the
object of their preparations and their sacrifices. They have prepared carefully and
sacrificed greatly.

We must have men, and men, and men, if we with our allies are to check the onrush
of organized barbarism.

Have no illusions. We are dealing with a strong and magnificently equipped enemy,
whose avowed aim is our complete destruction.

The violation of Belgium, the attack on France, and the defense against Russia are
only steps by the way. The Germans’ real objective, as she has always told us, is
England and England’s wealth, trade, and worldwide possessions.

If you assume for an instant that that attack will be successful, England will not
be reduced, as some people say, to the rank of a second-rate power, but we shall
cease to exist as a nation. We shall become an outlying province of Germany, to be
administered with what severity German safety and interest require.

We arm against such a fate. We enter into a new life in which all the facts of war
that we had put behind or forgotten for the past hundred years have returned to the
front and test us as they tested our fathers. It will be a long and a hard road,
beset with difficulties and discouragements, but we tread it together and we will
tread it together to the end.

Our petty social divisions and barriers have been swept away at the outset of our
mighty struggle. All the interests of our life of six weeks ago are dead. We have but
one interest now, and that touches the naked heart of every man in this island and in
the empire.

If we are to win the right for ourselves and for freedom to exist on earth, every
man must offer himself for that service and that sacrifice.

{107}Kipling
and “The Truce of the Bear”

Bateman’s Burwash, Sussex.

Dear Sir: I am much obliged for your verses of Sept. 4. “The Truce of the Bear,”
to which they refer, was written sixteen years ago, in 1898. It dealt with a
situation and a menace which have long since passed away, and with issues that are
now quite dead.

The present situation, as far as England is concerned, is Germany’s deliberate
disregard of the neutrality of Belgium, whose integrity Germany as well as England
guaranteed. She has filled Belgium with every sort of horror and atrocity, not in the
heat of passion, but as a part of settled policy of terrorism. Her avowed object is
the conquest of Europe on these lines.

As you may prove for yourself if you will consult her literature of the last
generation, Germany is the present menace, not to Europe alone, but to the whole
civilized world. If Germany, by any means, is victorious you may rest assured that it
will be a very short time before she turns her attention to the United States. If you
could meet the refugees from Belgium flocking into England and have the opportunity
of checking their statements of unimaginable atrocities and barbarities studiously
committed, you would, I am sure, think as seriously on these matters as we do, and in
your unpreparedness for modern war you would do well to think very seriously indeed.
Yours truly,

RUDYARD KIPLING.

On the Impending Crisis

By Norman Angell.

To the Editor of The London Times:

Sir: A nation’s first duty is to its own people. We are asked to intervene in the
Continental war because unless we do so we shall be “isolated.” The isolation which
will result for us if we keep out of this war is that, while other nations are torn
and weakened by war, we shall not be, and by that fact might conceivably for a long
time be the strongest power in Europe, and, by virtue of our strength and isolation,
its arbiter, perhaps, to useful ends.

We are told that if we allow Germany to become victorious she would be so powerful
as to threaten our existence by the occupation of Belgium, Holland, and possibly the
North of France. But, as your article of today’s date so well points out, it was the
difficulty which Germany found in Alsace-Lorraine which prevented her from acting
against us during the South African War. If one province, so largely German in its
origin and history, could create this embarrassment, what trouble will not Germany
pile up for herself if she should attempt the absorption of a Belgium, a Holland, and
a Normandy? She would have created for herself embarrassments compared with which
Alsace and Poland would be a trifle; and Russia, with her 160,000,000, would in a
year or two be as great a menace to her as ever.

The object and effect of our entering into this war would be to insure the
vic{108}tory of
Russia and her Slavonic allies. Will a dominant Slavonic federation of, say,
200,000,000 autocratically governed people, with a very rudimentary civilization, but
heavily equipped for military aggression, be a less dangerous factor in Europe than a
dominant Germany of 65,000,000 highly civilized and mainly given to the arts of trade
and commerce?

The last war we fought on the Continent was for the purpose of preventing the
growth of Russia. We are now asked to fight one for the purpose of promoting it. It
is now universally admitted that our last Continental war—the Crimean
war—was a monstrous error and miscalculation. Would this intervention be any
wiser or likely to be better in its results?

On several occasions Sir Edward Grey has solemnly declared that we are not bound
by any agreement to support France, and there is certainly no moral obligation on the
part of the English people so to do. We can best serve civilization,
Europe—including France—and ourselves by remaining the one power in
Europe that has not yielded to the war madness.

This, I believe, will be found to be the firm conviction of the overwhelming
majority of the English people.

Yours faithfully,

NORMAN ANGELL.

4 Kings Bench Walk, Temple, E.C., July 31.

Why England Came To Be In It

By Gilbert K. Chesterton.

I.

Unless we are all mad, there is at the back of the most bewildering business a
story; and if we are all mad, there is no such thing as madness. If I set a house on
fire, it is quite true that I may illuminate many other people’s weaknesses as well
as my own. It may be that the master of the house was burned because he was drunk; it
may be that the mistress of the house was burned because she was stingy, and perished
arguing about the expense of the fire-escape. It is, nevertheless, broadly true that
they both were burned because I set fire to their house. That is the story of the
thing. The mere facts of the story about the present European conflagration are quite
as easy to tell.

Before we go on to the deeper things which make this war the most sincere war of
human history, it is easy to answer the question of why England came to be in it at
all; as one asks how a man fell down a coal hole, or failed to keep an appointment.
Facts are not the whole truth. But facts are facts, and in this case the facts are
few and simple.

Prussia, France, and England had all promised not to invade Belgium, because it
was the safest way of invading France. But Prussia promised that if she might break
in through her own broken promise and ours she would break in and not steal. In other
words, we were offered at the same instant a promise of faith in the future and a
proposal of perjury in the present.

Those interested in human origins may refer to an old Victorian writer of English,
who in the last and most restrained of his historical essays wrote of Frederick the
Great, the founder of this unchanging Prussian policy. After describing how Frederick
broke the guarantee he had signed on behalf of Maria Theresa he then describes how
Frederick sought to put things straight by a promise that was an insult. “If she
would but let him have Silesia, he would, he said, stand by her against any power
which should {109}try
to deprive her of her other dominions; as if he was not already bound to stand by
her, or as if his new promise could be of more value than the old one.” That passage
was written by Macaulay; but so far as the mere contemporary facts are concerned, it
might have been written by me.

Diplomacy That Might Have Been.

Upon the immediate logical and legal origin of the English interest there can be
no rational debate. There are some things so simple that one can almost prove them
with plans and diagrams, as in Euclid. One could make a kind of comic calendar of
what would have happened to the English diplomatist if he had been silenced every
time by Prussian diplomacy. Suppose we arrange it in the form of a kind of diary:

How long is anybody expected to go on with that sort of game, or keep peace at
that illimitable price? How long must we pursue a road in which promises are all
fetiches in front of us and all fragments behind us? No; upon the cold facts of the
final negotiations, as told by any of the diplomatists in any of the documents, there
is no doubt about the story. And no doubt about the villain of the story.

These are the last facts, the facts which involved England. It is equally easy to
state the first facts—the facts which involved Europe. The Prince who
practically ruled Austria was shot by certain persons whom the Austrian Government
believed to be conspirators from Servia. The. Austrian Government piled up arms and
armies, but said not a word either to Servia, their suspect, or Italy, their ally.
From the documents it would seem that Austria kept everybody in the dark, except
Prussia. It is probably nearer the truth to say that Prussia kept everybody in the
dark, including Austria.

The Demands on Servia.

But all that is what is called opinion, belief, conviction, or common sense, and
we are not dealing with it here. The objective fact is that Austria told Servia to
permit Servian officers to be suspended by the authority of Austrian officers, and
told Servia to submit to this within forty-eight hours. In other words, the Sovereign
of Servia was practically told to take off not only the laurels of two great
campaigns, but his own lawful and national crown, and to do it in a time in which no
respectable citizen is expected to discharge a hotel bill. Servia asked for time for
arbitration—in short, for peace. But Russia had already begun to mobilize, and
Prussia, presuming that Servia might thus be rescued, declared war.

Between these two ends of fact, the ultimatum to Servia, the ultimatum to Belgium,
any one so inclined can, of course, talk as if everything were relative. If any one
asks why the Czar should rush to the support of Servia, it is easy to ask why the
Kaiser should rush to the support of Austria. If any one say that that the French
would attack the Germans, it is sufficient to answer that the Germans did attack the
French.

There remain, however, two attitudes to consider, even perhaps two arguments to
counter, which can best be considered and countered under this general head of facts.
First of all, there is a curious, cloudy sort of argument, much affected by the
professional rhetoricans of Prussia, who are sent out to instruct and correct the
minds of Americans or Scandinavians. It consists of going into convulsions of
incredulity and scorn at the mention of Russia’s responsibility for Servia or
England’s responsibility for Belgium; and suggesting that, treaty or {110}no treaty, frontier or
no frontier, Russia would be out to slay Teutons or England to steal colonies.

England Kept Her Contracts.

Here, as elsewhere, I think the professors dotted all over the Baltic plain fail
in lucidity and in the power of distinguishing ideas. Of course, it is quite true
that England has material interests to defend, and will probably use the opportunity
to defend them; or, in other words, of course England, like everybody else, would be
more comfortable if Prussia were less predominant. The fact remains that we did not
do what the Germans did. We did not invade Holland to seize a naval and commercial
advantage; and whether they say that we wished to do it in our greed or feared to do
it in our cowardice, the fact remains that we did not do it. Unless this common sense
principle be kept in view, I cannot conceive how any quarrel can possibly be judged.
A contract may be made between two persons solely for material advantages on each
side; but the moral advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the person who
keeps the contract. Surely, it cannot be dishonest to be honest—even if honesty
is the best policy. Imagine the most complex maze of indirect motives, and still the
man who keeps faith for money cannot possibly be worse than the man who breaks faith
for money.

It will be noted that this ultimate test applies in the same way to Servia as to
Belgium and Britain. The Servians may not be a very peaceful people; but on the
occasion under discussion it was certainly they who wanted peace. You may choose to
think the Serb a sort of a born robber; but on this occasion it was certainly the
Austrian who was trying to rob. Similarly, you may call England perfidious as a sort
of historical summary, and declare your private belief that Mr. Asquith was vowed
from infancy to the ruin of the German Empire —a Hannibal and hater of the
eagles. But when all is said, it is nonsense to call a man perfidious because he
keeps his promise. It is absurd to complain of the sudden treachery of a business man
in turning up punctually to his appointment, or the unfair shock given to a creditor
by the debtor paying his debts. Lastly, there is an attitude not unknown in the
crisis against which I should particularly like to protest. I should address my
protest especially to those lovers and pursuers of peace who, very shortsightedly,
have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which is impatient of these
preliminary details about who did this or that and whether it was right or wrong.
They are satisfied with saying that an enormous calamity called war has been begun by
some or all of us, and should be ended by some or all of us. To these people this
preliminary chapter about the precise happenings must appear not only dry (and it
must of necessity be the dryest part of the task), but essentially needless and
barren. I wish to tell these people that they are wrong; that they are wrong upon all
principles of human justice and historic continuity; but that they are especially and
supremely wrong upon their own principles of arbitration and international peace.

As to Certain Peace Lovers.

These sincere and high-minded peace lovers are always telling us that citizens no
longer settle their quarrels by private violence, and that nations should no longer
settle theirs by public violence. They are always telling us that we no longer fight
duels, and need no longer wage wars. In short, they perpetually base their peace
proposals on the fact that an ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an
axe.

But how is he prevented from avenging himself with an axe? If he hits his neighbor
on the head with the kitchen chopper what do we do? Do we all join hands, like
children playing mulberry bush, and say: “We are all responsible for this, but let us
hope it will not spread. Let us hope for the happy, happy day when he shall leave off
chopping at the man’s head, and when nobody shall ever chop anything forever and
ever.” Do we say: “Let bygones be bygones. Why go back to all the dull details with
which the business began? {111}Who can tell with what sinister motives the man was
standing there within reach of the hatchet?”

We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking for the facts of
provocation and the proper object of punishment. We do not go into the dull details;
we do inquire into the origins; we do emphatically inquire who it was that hit first.
In short, we do what I have done very briefly in this place.

Given this, it is indeed true that behind these facts there are
truths—truths of a terrible, of a spiritual sort. In mere fact the Germanic
power has been wrong about Servia, wrong about Russia, wrong about Belgium, wrong
about England, wrong about Italy. But there was a reason for its being wrong
everywhere, and of that root reason, which has moved half the world against it, I
shall speak later in this series. For that is something too omnipresent to be proved,
too indisputable to be helped by detail. It is nothing less than the locating, after
more than a hundred years of recriminations and wrong explanations, of the modern
European evil—the finding of the fountain from which poison has flowed upon all
the nations of the earth.

II.

Russian or Prussian Barbarism?

It will hardly be denied that there is one lingering doubt in many who recognize
unavoidable self-defense in the instant parry of the English sword and who have no
great love for the sweeping sabre of Sadowa and Sedan. That doubt is the doubt of
whether Russia, as compared with Prussia, is sufficiently decent and democratic to be
the ally of liberal and civilized powers. I take first, therefore, this matter of
civilization.

It is vital in a discussion like this that we should make sure we are going by
meanings and not by mere words. It is not necessary in any argument to settle what a
word means or ought to mean. But it is necessary in every argument to settle what we
propose to mean by the word. So long as our opponent understands what is the thing of
which we are talking, it does not matter to the argument whether the word is or is
not the one he would have chosen. A soldier does not say, “We were ordered to go to
Mechlin, but I would rather go to Malines.” He may discuss the etymology and
archaeology of the difference on the march, but the point is that he knows where to
go. So long as we know what a given word is to mean in a given discussion, it does
not even matter if it means something else in some other and quite distinct
discussion. We have a perfect right to say that the width of a window comes to four
feet, even if we instantly and cheerfully change the subject to the larger mammals
and say that an elephant has four feet. The identity of the words does not matter,
because there is no doubt at all about the meanings, because nobody is likely to
think of an elephant as four feet long, or of a window as having tusks and a curly
trunk.

Two Meanings of “Barbarian.”

It is essential to emphasize this consciousness of the thing under discussion in
connection with two or three words that are, as it were, the keywords of this war.
One of them is the word “barbarian.” The Prussians apply it to the Russians, the
Russians apply it to the Prussians. Both, I think, really mean something that really
exists, name or no name. Both mean different things. And if we ask what these
different things are we shall understand why England and France prefer Russia, and
consider Prussia the really dangerous barbarian of the two.

To begin with, it goes so much deeper even than atrocities; of which, in the past,
at least, all the three empires of Central Europe have partaken pretty {112}equally; as they
partook of Poland. An English writer, seeking to avert the war by warnings against
Russian influence, said that the flogged backs of Polish women stood between us and
the Alliance. But not long before the flogging of women by an Austrian General led to
that officer being thrashed in the streets of London by Barclay and Perkins draymen.
And as for the third power, the Prussians, it seems clear that they have treated
Belgian women in a style compared with which flogging might be called an official
formality.

But, as I say, something much deeper than any such recrimination lies behind the
use of the word on either side. When the German Emperor complains of our allying
ourselves with a barbaric and half Oriental power, he is not (I assure you) shedding
tears over the grave of Kosciusko. And when I say (as I do most heartily) that the
German Emperor is a barbarian, I am not merely expressing any prejudices I may have
against the profanation of churches or of children. My countrymen and I mean a
certain and intelligible thing when we call the Prussians barbarians. It is quite
different from the thing attributed to Russians; and it could not possibly be
attributed to Russians. It is very important that the neutral world should understand
what this thing is.

If the German calls the Russian barbarous, he presumably means imperfectly
civilized. There is a certain path along which Western nations have proceeded in
recent times; and it is tenable that Russia has not proceeded so far as the others;
that she has less of the special modern system in science, commerce, machinery,
travel, or political constitution. The Russ plows with an old plow; he wears a wild
beard; he adores relics; his life is as rude and hard as that of a subject of Alfred
the Great. Therefore, he is, in the German sense, a barbarian. Poor fellows, like
Gorky and Dostoieffsky, have to form their own reflections on the scenery, without
the assistance of large quotations from Schiller on garden seats; or inscriptions
directing them to pause and thank the All-Father for the finest view in
Hesse-Pumpernickel. The Russians, having nothing but their faith, their fields, their
great courage, and their self-governing communes, are quite cut off from what is
called (in the fashionable street in Frankfort) the true, the beautiful, and the
good. There is a real sense in which one can call such backwardness barbaric, by
comparison with the Kaiserstrasse; and in that sense it is true of Russia.

Now we, the French and English, do not mean this when we call the Prussians
barbarians. If their cities soared higher than their flying ships, if their trains
traveled faster than their bullets, we should still call them barbarians. We should
know exactly what we meant by it; and we should know that it is true. For we do not
mean anything that is an imperfect civilization by accident. We mean something that
is the enemy of civilization by design. We mean something that is willfully at war
with the principles by which human society has been made possible hitherto. Of
course, it must be partly civilized even to destroy civilization. Such ruin could not
be wrought by the savages that are merely undeveloped or inert. You could not have
even Huns without horses or horses without horsemanship. You could not have even
Danish pirates without ships, or ships without seamanship.

The “Positive Barbarian.”

This person, whom I may call the positive barbarian, must be rather more
superficially up to date than what I may call the negative barbarian. Alaric was an
officer in the Roman legions, but for all that he destroyed Rome. Nobody supposes
that Eskimos could have done it at all neatly. But (in our meaning) barbarism is not
a matter of methods but of aims. We say that these veneered vandals have the
perfectly serious aim of destroying certain ideas which, as they think, the world has
outgrown; without which, as we think, the world will die.

It is essential that this perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or positive
barbarian, should be seized. He has what he fancies is a new idea, and he is going to
{113}apply it to
everybody. As a fact, it is simply a false generalization, but he is really trying to
make it general. This does not apply to the negative barbarian; it does not apply to
the Russian or the Servian, even if they are barbarians. If a Russian peasant does
beat his wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him; he is likely to beat
less rather than more as the past fades away. He does not think, as the Prussian
would, that he has made a new discovery in physiology in finding that a woman is
weaker than a man. If a Servian does knife his rival without a word, he does it
because other Servians have done it. He may regard it even as piety—but
certainly not as progress. He does not think, as the Prussian does, that he founds a
new school of horology by starting before the word “Go.” He does not think he is in
advance of the world in militarism—merely because he is behind it in
morals.

No; the danger of the Pruss is that he is prepared to fight for old errors as if
they were new truths. He has somehow heard of certain shallow simplifications, and
imagines that we have never heard of them. And, as I have said, his limited but very
sincere lunacy concentrates chiefly in a desire to destroy two ideas, the twin root
ideas, of national society. The first is the idea of record and promise; the second
is the idea of reciprocity.

It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through time, is what
chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages, but from brutes and reptiles.
This was noted by the shrewdness of the Old Testament when it summed up the dark,
irresponsible enormity of Leviathan in the words, “Will he make a pact with thee?”
The promise, like the wind, is unknown in nature and is the first mark of man.
Referring only to human civilization, it may be said with seriousness that in the
beginning was the Word. The vow is to the man what the song is to the bird or the
bark to the dog; his voice, whereby he is known. Just as a man who cannot keep an
appointment is not fit to fight a duel, so the man who cannot keep an appointment
with himself is not sane enough even for suicide. It is not easy to mention anything
on which the enormous apparatus of human life can be said to depend. But if it
depends on anything it is on this frail cord, flung from the forgotten hills of
yesterday to the invisible mountains of tomorrow. On that solitary string hangs
everything from Armageddon to an almanac, from a successful revolution to a return
ticket. On that solitary string the barbarian is hacking heavily with a sabre which
is fortunately blunt.

Prussia’s Great Discovery.

Any one can see this well enough merely by reading the last negotiations between
London and Berlin. The Prussians had made a new discovery in international
politics—that it may often be convenient to make a promise, and yet curiously
inconvenient to keep it. They were charmed, in their simple way, with this scientific
discovery and desired to communicate it to the world. They therefore promised England
a promise on condition that she broke a promise, and on the implied condition that
the new promise might be broken as easily as the old one. To the profound
astonishment of Prussia, this reasonable offer was refused. I believe that the
astonishment of Prussia was quite sincere. That is what I mean when I say that the
barbarian is trying to cut away that cord of honesty and clear record on which hangs
all that men have made.

The friends of the German cause have complained that Asiatics and Africans upon
the very verge of savagery have been brought against them from India and Algiers. And
in ordinary circumstances I should sympathize with such a complaint made by a
European people. But the circumstances are not ordinary. Here again the quite unique
barbarism of Prussia goes deeper than what we call barbarities. About mere
barbarities, it is true, the Turco and the Sikh would have very good reply to the
superior Teuton. The general and just reason for not using non-European tribes
against {114}Europeans is that given by Chatham against the use of
the red Indian—that such allies might do very diabolical things. But the poor
Turco might not unreasonably ask, after a week-end in Belgium, what more diabolical
things he could do than the highly cultured Germans were doing themselves.

Nevertheless, as I say, the justification of any extra-European aid goes deeper
than by any such details. It rests upon the fact that even other civilizations, even
much lower civilizations, even remote and repulsive civilizations, depend as much as
our own on this primary principle on which the supermorality of Potsdam declares open
war. Even savages promise things, and respect those who keep their promises. Even
Orientals write things down; and though they write them from right to left, they know
the importance of a scrap of paper. Many merchants will tell you that the word of the
sinister and almost unhuman Chinaman is often as good as his bond; and it was amid
palm trees and Syrian pavilions that the great utterance opened the tabernacle to him
that sweareth to his hurt and changeth not. There is doubtless a dense labyrinth of
duplicity in the East; and perhaps more guile in the individual Asiatic than in the
individual German. But we are not talking of the violations of human morality in
various parts of the world.

A Fight Against Anarchy.

We are talking about a new inhuman morality which denies altogether the day of
obligation. The Prussians have been told by their literary men that everything
depends upon “mood,” and by their politicians that all arrangements dissolve before
“necessity.” That is the importance of the German Chancellor’s phrase. He did not
allege some special excuse in the case of Belgium, which might make it seem an
exception that proved the rule. He distinctly argued, as on a principle applicable to
other cases, that victory was a necessity and honor was a scrap of paper. And it is
evident that the half-educated Prussian imagination really cannot get any further
than this. It cannot see that if everybody’s action were entirely incalculable from
hour to hour, it would not only be the end of all promises but the end of all
projects.

In not being able to see that, the Berlin philosopher is really on a lower mental
level than the Arab who respects the salt, or the Brahmin who preserves the caste.
And in this quarrel we have a right to come with scimitars as well as sabres, with
bows as well as rifles, with assegai and tomahawk and boomerang, because there is in
all these at least a seed of civilization that these intellectual anarchists would
kill. And if they should find us in our last stand girt with such strange swords and
following unfamiliar ensigns and ask us for what we fight in so singular a company,
we shall know what to reply: “We fight for the trust and for the tryst; for fixed
memories and the possible meeting of men; for all that makes life anything but an
uncontrollable nightmare. We fight for the long arm of honor and remembrance; for all
that can lift a man above the quicksands of his needs and give him the mastery of
time.”

{115}III.

Disposing of Germany’s Civilizing Mission

In the last summary I suggested that barbarism, as we mean it, is not mere
ignorance or even mere cruelty. It has a more precise sense, and means militant
hostility to certain necessary human ideas. I took the case of the vow or the
contract which Prussian intellectualism would destroy. I urged that the Prussian is a
spiritual barbarian, because he is not bound by his own past, any more than a man in
a dream. He avows that when he promised to respect a frontier on Monday he did not
foresee what he calls “the necessity” of not respecting it on Tuesday. In short, he
is like a child who at the end of all reasonable explanations and reminders of
admitted arrangements has no answer except “But I want to.”

There is another idea in human arrangements so fundamental as to be forgotten, but
now for the first time denied. It may be called the idea of reciprocity; or, in
better English, of give and take. The Prussian appears to be quite intellectually
incapable of this thought. He cannot, I think, conceive the idea that is the
foundation of all comedy—that in the eyes of the other man he is only the other
man. And if we carry this clue through the institutions of Prussianized Germany we
shall find how curiously his mind has been limited in the matter. The German differs
from other patriots in the inability to understand patriotism. Other European peoples
pity the Poles or the Welsh for their violated borders, but Germans only pity
themselves. They might take forcible possession of the Severn or the Danube, of the
Thames or the Tiber, of the Garry or the Garonne—and they would still be
singing sadly about how fast and true stands the watch on the Rhine and what a shame
it would be if any one took their own little river away from them. That is what I
mean by not being reciprocal; and you will find it in all that they do, as in all
that is done by savages.

“Laughs When He Hurts You.”

Here again it is very necessary to avoid confusing this soul of the savage with
mere savagery in the sense of brutality or butchery, in which the Greeks, the French,
and all the most civilized nations have indulged in hours of abnormal panic or
revenge. Accusations of cruelty are generally mutual. But it is the point about the
Prussian that with him nothing is mutual. The definition of the true savage does not
concern itself even with how much more he hurts strangers or captives than do the
other tribes of men. The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he
hurts you and howls when you hurt him. This extraordinary inequality in the mind is
in every act and word that comes from Berlin.

For instance, no man of the world believes all he sees in the newspapers, and no
journalist believes a quarter of it. We should therefore be quite ready in the
ordinary way to take a great deal off the tales of German atrocities; to doubt this
story or deny that. But there is one thing that we cannot doubt or deny—the
seal and authority of the Emperor. In the imperial proclamation the fact that certain
“frightful” things have been done is admitted and justified on the ground of their
frightfulness. It was a military necessity to terrify the peaceful populations with
something that was not civilized, something that was hardly human.

“Howls When You Hurt Him.”

Very well. That is an intelligible policy; and in that sense an intelligible
argument. An army endangered by foreigners may do the most frightful things. But then
we turn the next page of the Kaiser’s public diary, and we find him writing to the
President of the {116}United States to complain that the English are using
dumdum bullets and violating various regulations of The Hague Conference. I pass for
the present the question of whether there is a word of truth in these charges. I am
content to gaze rapturously at the blinking eyes of the true, or positive, barbarian.
I suppose he would be quite puzzled if we said that violating The Hague Conference
was “a military necessity” to us; or that the rules of the conference were only a
scrap of paper. He would be quite pained if we said that dumdum bullets “by their
very frightfulness” would be very useful to keep conquered Germans in order. Do what
he will, he cannot get outside the idea that he, because he is he and not you, is
free to break the law and also to appeal to the law. It is said that the Prussian
officers play at a game called Kriegspiel, or the war game. But in truth they could
not play at any game, for the essence of every game is that the rules are the same on
both sides.

But, taking every German institution in turn, the case is the same; and it is not
a case of mere bloodshed or military bravado. The duel, for example, can legitimately
be called a barbaric thing, but the word is here used in another sense. There are
duels in Germany; but so there are in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain; indeed, there
are duels wherever there are dentists, newspapers, Turkish baths, time tables, and
all the curses of civilization—except in England and a corner of America. You
may happen to regard the duel as a historic relic of the more barbaric States on
which these modern States were built. It might equally well be maintained that the
duel is everywhere the sign of high civilization, being the sign of its more delicate
sense of honor, its more vulnerable vanity, or its greater dread of social disrepute.
But whichever of the two views you take, you must concede that the essence of the
duel is an armed equality. I should not, therefore, apply the word barbaric, as I am
using it, to the duels of German officers, or even the broadsword combats that are
conventional among the German students. I do not see why a young Prussian should not
have scars all over his face if he likes them; nay, they are often the redeeming
points of interest on an otherwise somewhat unenlightening countenance. The duel may
be defended; the sham duel may be defended.

The One-Sided Prussian Duel.

What cannot be defended is something really peculiar to Prussia, of which we hear
numberless stories, some of them certainly true. It might be called the one-sided
duel. I mean the idea that there is some sort of dignity in drawing the sword upon a
man who has not got a sword—a waiter, or a shop assistant, or even a schoolboy.
One of the officers of the Kaiser in the affair at Zabern was found industriously
hacking at a cripple. In all these matters I would avoid sentiment. We must not lose
our tempers at the mere cruelty of the thing, but pursue the strict psychological
distinction. Others besides German soldiers have slain the defenseless, for loot or
lust or private malice, like any other murderer. The point is that nowhere else but
in Prussian Germany is any theory of honor mixed up with such things, any more than
with poisoning or picking pockets. No French, English, Italian, or American gentleman
would think he had in some way cleared his own character by sticking his sabre
through some ridiculous greengrocer who had nothing in his hand but a cucumber. It
would seem as if the word which is translated from the German as “honor” must really
mean something quite different in German. It seems to mean something more like what
we should call “prestige.”

Absence of the Reciprocal Idea.

The fundamental fact, however, is the absence of the reciprocal idea. The Prussian
is not sufficiently civilized for the duel. Even when he crosses swords with us his
thoughts are not as our thoughts; when we both glorify war we are glorifying
different things. Our medals are wrought like his, but they do not mean the same
thing; our regiments are cheered as his are, but the thought in the heart is not the
same; the Iron {117}Cross is on the bosom of his King, but it is not the
sign of our God. For we, alas! follow our God with many relapses and
self-contradictions, but he follows his very consistently. Through all the things
that we have examined, the view of national boundaries, the view of military methods,
the view of personal honor and self-defense, there runs in their case something of an
atrocious simplicity; something too simple for us to understand; the idea that glory
consists in holding the steel, and not in facing it.

If further examples were necessary it would be easy to give hundreds of them. Let
us leave, for the moment, the relations between man and man in the thing called the
duel. Let us take the relation between man and woman, in that immortal duel which we
call a marriage. Here again we shall find that other Christian civilizations aim at
some kind of equality, even if the balance be irrational or dangerous. Thus, the two
extremes of the treatment of women might be represented by what are called the
respectable classes in America and in France. In America they choose the risk of
comradeship, in France the compensation of courtesy. In America it is practically
possible for any young gentleman to take any young lady for what he calls (I deeply
regret to say) a joy ride; but at least the man goes with the woman as much as the
woman with the man. In France the young woman is protected like a nun while she is
unmarried; but when she is a mother she is really a holy woman; and when she is a
grandmother she is a holy terror.

By both extremes the woman gets something back out of life. There is only one
place where she gets little or nothing back, and that is the north of Germany. France
and America aim alike at equality; America by similarity, France by dissimilarity.
But North Germany does definitely aim at inequality. The woman stands up with no more
irritation than a butler; the man sits down with no more embarrassment than a guest.
This is the cool affirmation of inferiority, as in the case of the sabre and the
tradesmen. “Thou goest with women; forget not thy whip,” said Nietzsche. It will be
observed that he does not say “poker,” which might come more naturally to the mind of
a more common or Christian wife-beater. But, then, a poker is a part of domesticity,
and might be used by the wife as well as the husband. In fact, it often is. The sword
and the whip are the weapons of a privileged caste.

Pass from the closest of all differences, that between husband and wife, to the
most distant of all differences, that of the remote and unrelated races who have
seldom seen each other’s faces, and never been tinged with each other’s blood. Here
we still find the same unvarying Prussian principle. Any European might feel a
genuine fear of the Yellow Peril, and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have
felt and expressed it. Many might say, and have said, that the heathen Chinee is very
heathen indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture and
utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people do not. Nor do I
doubt the German Emperor’s sincerity when he sought to point out to us how abnormal
and abominable such a nightmare campaign would be, supposing that it could come.

But now comes the comic irony, which never fails to follow on the attempt of the
Prussian to be philosophic. For the Kaiser, after explaining to his troops how
important it was to avoid Eastern barbarism, instantly commanded them to become
Eastern barbarians. He told them, in so many words, to be Huns, and leave nothing
living or standing behind them. In fact, he frankly offered a new army corps of
aboriginal Tartars to the Far East, within such time as it may take a bewildered
Hanoverian to turn into a Tartar. Any one who has the painful habit of personal
thought will perceive here at once the non-reciprocal principle again. Boiled down to
its bones of logic, it means simply this: “I am a German and you are a Chinaman.
Therefore, I {118}being a German, have a right to be a Chinaman. But you
have no right to be a Chinaman, because you are only a Chinaman.” This is probably
the highest point to which the German culture has risen.

“The Principle of Being Unprincipled.”

The principle here neglected, which may be called mutuality by those who
misunderstand and dislike the word equality, does not offer so clear a distinction
between the Prussian and the other peoples as did the first Prussian principle of an
infinite and destructive opportunism; or, in other words, the principle of being
unprincipled. Nor upon this second can one take up so obvious a position touching the
other civilizations or semi-civilizations of the world. Some idea of oath and bond
there is in the rudest tribes, in the darkest continents. But it might be maintained,
of the more delicate and imaginative element of reciprocity, that a cannibal in
Borneo understands it almost as little as a professor in Berlin. A narrow and
one-sided seriousness is the fault of barbarians all over the world. This may have
been the meaning, for aught I know, of the one eye of the Cyclops; that the barbarian
cannot see around things or look at them from two points of view, and thus becomes a
blind beast and an eater of men. Certainly there can be no better summary of the
savage than this, which, as we have seen, unfits him for the duel. He is the man who
cannot love—no, nor even hate—his neighbor as himself.

But this quality in Prussia does have one effect which has reference to the same
question of the lower civilizations. It disposes once and for all at least of the
civilizing mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans are the last people in the world
to be trusted with the task. They are as short-sighted morally as physically. What is
their sophism of “necessity” but an inability to imagine tomorrow morning? What is
their non-reciprocity but an inability to imagine, not a god or devil, but merely
another man? Are these to judge mankind? Men of two tribes in Africa not only know
that they are all men but can understand that they are all black men. In this they
are quite seriously in advance of the intellectual Prussian, who cannot be got to see
that we are all white men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the Northeast
Teuton anything that marks him out especially from the more colorless classes of the
rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the gray or the
drab. Yet he will explain in serious official documents that the difference between
him and us is a difference between “the master race and the inferior race.”

How to Know “The Master Race.”

The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the
end of an argument, and the difficulty here is that there is no way of testing which
is a master race except by asking which is your own race. If you cannot find out, (as
is usually the case,) you fall back on the absurd occupation of writing history about
prehistoric times. But I suggest quite seriously that if the Germans can give their
philosophy to the Hottentots there is no reason why they should not give their sense
of superiority to the Hottentots. If they can see such fine shades between the Goth
and the Gaul, there is no reason why similar shades should not lift the savage above
other savages; why any Ojibway should not discover that he is one tint redder than
the Dakotas, or any nigger in the Kameruns say he is not so black as he is painted.
For this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and worst of the
refusals of reciprocity. The Prussian calls all men to admire the beauty of his large
blue eyes. If they do, it is because they have inferior eyes; if they don’t, it is
because they have no eyes.

Wherever the most miserable remnant of our race, astray and dried up in deserts or
buried forever under the fall of bad civilization, has some feeble memory that men
are men, that bargains are bargains, that there are two sides to a question, or even
that it takes two to make a quarrel—that remnant has the {119}right to assist the
New Culture, to the knife and club and the splintered stone. For the Prussian begins
all his culture by that act which is the destruction of all creative thought and
constructive action. He breaks that mirror in the mind in which a man can see the
face of his friend or foe.

IV.

Russia Less Despotic Than Prussia

The German Emperor has reproached this country (England) with allying itself with
“barbaric and semi-Oriental power.” We have already considered in what sense we use
the word barbaric; it is in the sense of one who is hostile to civilization, not one
who is insufficient in it. But when we pass from the idea of the barbaric to the idea
of the Oriental, the case is even more curious. There is nothing particularly Tartar
in Russian affairs, except the fact that Russia expelled the Tartars. The Eastern
invader occupied and crushed the country for many years; but that is equally true of
Greece, of Spain, and even of Austria. If Russia has suffered from the East, she has
suffered in order to resist it; and it is rather hard that the very miracle of her
escape should make a mystery about her origin. Jonah may or may not have been three
days inside a fish; but that does not make him a merman. And in all the other cases
of European nations who escaped the monstrous captivity, we do admit the purity and
continuity of the European type. We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not
as a stain. Copper-colored men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and
patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that “Don Quixote” was an African
fable on the lines of “Uncle Remus.” I have never heard that the heavy black in the
pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro ancestry. In the case of Spain, which is
close to us, we can recognize the resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation
after its age of bondage. But Russia is rather remote; and those to whom nations are
but names in newspapers can really fancy, like Mr. Baring’s friend, that all Russian
churches are “mosques.” Yet the land of Turgenev is not a wilderness of fakirs; and
even the fanatical Russian is as proud of being different from the Mongol as the
fanatical Spaniard was proud of being different from the Moor.

“Scratch a Russian.”

The town of Reading, as it exists, offers few opportunities for piracy on the high
seas; yet it was the camp of the pirates in Alfred’s days. I should think it hard to
call the people of Berkshire half Danish merely because they drove out the Danes. In
short, some temporary submergence under the savage flood was the fate of many of the
most civilized States of Christendom, and it is quite ridiculous to argue that
Russia, which wrestled hardest, must have recovered least. Everywhere, doubtless, the
East spread a sort of enamel over the conquered countries; but everywhere the enamel
cracked. Actual history, in fact, is exactly opposite to the cheap proverb invented
against the Muscovite. It is not true to say, “Scratch a Russian and you find a
Tartar.” In the darkest hour of the barbaric dominion it was truer to say, “Scratch a
Tartar and you find a Russian.” It was the civilization that survived under all the
barbarism. This vital romance of Russia, this revolution against Asia, can be proved
in pure fact; not only from the almost superhuman activity of Russia during the
struggle, but also (which is much rarer as human history goes) by her quite
consistent conduct since. She is the only great nation which has really expelled the
Mongol from her country and continued to protest against presence of the Mongol in
her continent. Knowing what he had been in Russia, she knew what {120}he would be in Europe.
In this she pursued a logical line of thought, which was, if anything, too
unsympathetic with the energies and religions of the East. Every other country, one
may say, has been an ally of the Turk—that is, of the Mongol and the Moslem.
The French played them as pieces against Austria; the English warmly supported them
under the Palmerston régime; even the young Italians sent troops to the
Crimea; and of Russia and her Austrian vassal it is nowadays needless to speak. For
good or evil, it is the fact of history that Russia is the only power in Europe that
has never supported the Crescent against the Cross.

That doubtless will appear an unimportant matter, but it may become important
under certain peculiar conditions. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there were
a powerful Prince in Europe who had gone ostentatiously out of his way to pay
reverence to the remains of the Tartar, Mongol, and Moslem left as an outpost in
Europe. Suppose there were a Christian Emperor who could not even go to the tomb of
the crucified without pausing to congratulate the last and living crucifier. If there
were an Emperor who gave guns and guides and maps and drill instructors to defend the
remains of the Mongol in Christendom, what would we say to him? I think at least we
might ask him what he meant by his impudence when he talked about supporting a
semi-Oriental power. That we support a semi-Oriental power we deny. That he has
supported an entirely Oriental power cannot be denied, no, not even by the man who
did it.

Whom Has Prussia Emancipated?

But here is to be noted the essential difference between Russia and Prussia;
especially by those who use the ordinary liberal arguments against the latter Russia
has a policy, which she pursues, if you will, through evil and good; but at least so
as to produce good as well as evil. Let it be granted that the policy has made her
oppressive to the Finns, the Poles—though the Russian Poles feel far less
oppressed than do the Prussian Poles. But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia
has been a despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to others. She did,
so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians or the Montenegrins. But whom did
Prussia ever emancipate—even by accident? It is, indeed, somewhat extraordinary
that in the perpetual permutations of international politics the Hohenzollerns have
never gone astray into the path of enlightenment. They have been in alliance with
almost everybody off and on; with France, with England, with Austria, with Russia.
Can any one candidly say that they have left on any one of these people the faintest
impress of progress or liberation? Prussia was the enemy of the French monarchy, but
a worse enemy of the French Revolution. Prussia had been an enemy of the Czar, but
she was a worse enemy of the Duma. Prussia totally disregarded Austrian rights; but
she is today quite ready to inflict Austrian wrongs. This is the strong particular
difference between the one empire and the other. Russia is pursuing certain
intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals, and for which,
therefore, she will make sacrifices and will protect the weak. But the North German
soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant; everywhere and always on the side of
materialistic tyranny. This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places;
shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in
Africa and raping girls in Wicklow, but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a
hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one solitary flag.
Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is the Prussian; unconsciously
consistent, instinctively restrictive, innocently evil; “following darkness like a
dream.”

Disinterested Despotism.

Suppose we heard of a person (gifted with some longevity) who had helped Alva to
persecute Dutch Protestants, then helped Cromwell to persecute Irish Catholics, and
then helped Claverhouse to persecute Scotch Puritans—we should find it rather
easier to call him a persecutor than to call him a Protestant or a {121}Catholic. Curiously
enough, this is actually the position in which the Prussian stands in Europe. No
arguments can alter the fact that in three converging and conclusive cases he has
been on the side of three distinct rulers of different religions, who had nothing
whatever in common except that they were ruling oppressively. In these three
Governments, taken separately, one can see something excusable, or at least human.
When the Kaiser encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the revolution, the Russian
rulers undoubtedly believed they were wrestling with an inferno of atheism and
anarchy. A Socialist of the ordinary English kind cried out upon me when I spoke of
Stolypin and said he was chiefly known by the halter called “Stolypin’s Necktie.” As
a fact, there were many other things interesting about Stolypin besides his
necktie—his policy of peasant proprietorship, his extraordinary personal
courage, and certainly none more interesting than that movement in his death agony,
when he made the sign of the cross toward the Czar, as the crown and captain of his
Christianity. But the Kaiser does not regard the Czar as the captain of Christianity.
Far from it. What he supported in Stolypin was the necktie, and nothing but the
necktie; the gallows, and not the cross. The Russian ruler did believe that the
Orthodox Church was orthodox. The Austrian Archduke did really desire to make the
Catholic Church catholic. He did really believe that he was being pro-Catholic in
being pro-Austrian. But the Kaiser cannot be pro-Catholic, and, therefore, cannot
have been really pro-Austrian; he was simply and solely anti-Servian; nay, even in
the cruel and sterile strength of Turkey, any one with imagination can see something
of the tragedy, and, therefore, of the tenderness of true belief. The worst that can
be said of the Moslems is, as the poet put it, they offered to man the choice of the
Koran or the sword. The best that can be said for the German is that he does not care
about the Koran, but is satisfied if he can have the sword. And for me, I confess,
even the sins of these three other striving empires take on, in comparison, something
that is sorrowful and dignified; and I feel they do not deserve that this little
Lutheran lounger should patronize all that is evil in them, while ignoring all that
is good. He is not Catholic; he is not Orthodox; he is not Mohammedan. He is merely
an old gentleman who wishes to share the crime, though he cannot share the creed. He
desires to be a persecutor by the pang without the palm. So strongly do all the
instincts of the Prussian drive against liberty that he would rather oppress other
peoples’ subjects than think of anybody going without the benefits of oppression. He
is a sort of disinterested despot. He is as disinterested as the devil, who is ready
to do any one’s dirty work.

The Paradox of Prussia.

This would seem obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts which
cannot be explained otherwise. Indeed it would be inconceivable if we were thinking
of a whole people, consisting of free and varied individuals. But in Prussia the
governing class is really a governing class, and a very few people are needed to
think along these lines to make all the other people act along them. And the paradox
of Prussia is this: That while its princes and nobles have no other aim on this earth
but to destroy democracy wherever it shows itself, they have contrived to get
themselves trusted, not as wardens of the past, but as forerunners of the future.
Even they cannot believe that their theory is popular, but they do believe that it is
progressive. Here again we find the spiritual chasm between the two monarchies in
question. The Russian institutions are, in many cases, really left in the rear of the
Russian people, and many of the Russian people know it. But the Prussian institutions
are supposed to be in advance of the Prussian people, and most of the Prussian people
believe it. It is thus much easier for the war lords to go everywhere and impose a
hopeless slavery upon every one, for they have al{122}ready imposed a sort of hopeful slavery
on their own simple race.

A Factory of Thumbscrews.

And when men shall speak to us of the hoary iniquities of Russia and of how
antiquated is the Russian system we shall answer, “Yes; that is the superiority of
Russia.” Their institutions are part of their history, whether as relics or fossils.
Their abuses have really been uses; that is to say, they have been used up. If they
have old engines of terror or torment, they may fall to pieces from mere rust, like
an old coat of armor. But in the case of the Prussian tyranny, if it be tyranny at
all, it is the whole point of its claim that it is not antiquated, but just going to
begin, like the showman. Prussia has a whole thriving factory of thumbscrews, a whole
humming workshop of wheels and racks, of the newest and neatest pattern, with which
to win Europe back to reaction * * * infandum renovare dolorem. And if we wish to
test the truth of this, it can be done by the same method which showed us that
Russia, if her race or religion could sometimes make her an invader and an oppressor,
could also be made an emancipator and a knight errant. In the same way, if the
Russian institutions are old-fashioned, they honestly exhibit the good as well as the
bad that can be found in old-fashioned things. In their police system they have an
inequality which is against our ideas of law. But in their commune system they have
an equality that is older than law itself. Even when they flogged each other like
barbarians, they called each other by their Christian names like children. At their
worst, they retained all the best of a rude society. At their best, they are simply
good, like good children or good nuns. But in Prussia, all that is best in the
civilized machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind.
Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none
of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is
sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose; and that purpose, if words and acts
have any meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty throughout the world.

V.

The “Bond of Teutonism”

In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what seems to
be mainly a mental limitation—a kind of knot in the brain. Toward the problem
of Slav population, of English colonization, of French armies, and of reinforcements
it shows the same strange philosophic sulks. So far as I can follow it, it seems to
amount to saying, “It is very wrong that you should be superior to me, because I am
superior to you.” The spokesman of this system seems to have a curious capacity for
concentrating this entanglement or contradiction sometimes into a single paragraph,
or even a single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor’s celebrated
suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all become Huns.
A much stronger instance is his more recent order to his troops touching the war in
Northern France. As most people know, his words ran: “It is my royal and imperial
command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present, upon one
single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valor of my
soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over Gen. French’s
contemptible little army.” The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can afford to
pass over. What I am interested in is the mentality, the train of thought that can
manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space. If French’s little army is
contemptible it would seem clear that {123}all the skill and valor of the German Army had better
not be concentrated on it, but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the
skill and valor of the German Army are concentrated on it it is not being treated as
contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments in his
mind, and he insisted on saying them both at once. He wanted to think of an English
Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of an English defeat as a big
thing. He wanted to exult, at the same moment, in the utter weakness of the British
Nation in their attack and the supreme skill and valor of the Germans in repelling
such an attack. Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England and
yet a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these
contradictory conceptions simultaneously he got rather mixed. Therefore he bade
Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of this almost
invisible earwig, and let the impure blood of this cockroach redden the Rhine down to
the sea.

Prof. Harnack’s Reproach.

But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any accidental
and hereditary Prince; and it is quite equally clear in the case of the philosophers
who have been held up to us, even in England, as the very prophets of progress. And
in nothing is it shown more sharply than in the curious, confused talk about race,
and especially about the Teutonic race. Prof. Harnack and similar people are
reproaching us, I understand, for having broken “the bond of Teutonism”—a bond
which the Prussians have strictly observed, both in breach and observance. We note it
in the open annexation of lands wholly inhabited by negroes, such as Denmark. We note
it equally in their instant and joyful recognition of the flaxen hair and light blue
eyes of the Turks. But it is still the abstract principle of Prof. Harnack which
interests me most, and in following it I have the same complexity of inquiry, but the
same simplicity of result. Comparing the professor’s concern about “Teutonism” with
his unconcern about Belgium, I can only reach the following result: “A man need not
keep a promise he has made. But a man must keep a promise he has not made.” There
certainly was a treaty binding Britain to Belgium, if it was only a scrap of paper.
If there was any treaty binding Britain with Teutonism it is, to say the least of it,
a lost scrap of paper—almost what one might call a scrap of waste paper. Here
again the pedants under consideration exhibit the illogical perversity that makes the
brain reel. There is obligation and there is no obligation; sometimes it appears that
Germany and England must keep faith with each other; sometimes that Germany need not
keep faith with anybody and anything; sometimes that we, alone among European
peoples, are almost entitled to be Germans; sometimes that besides us Russians and
Frenchmen almost rise to a Germanic loveliness of character. But through all there
is, hazy but not hypocritical, this sense of some common Teutonism.

Prof. Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained to some
celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance between two
different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same thing. Prof. Haeckel’s
contribution to biology, in this case, was exactly like Prof. Harnack’s contribution
to ethnology. Prof. Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine
what an Englishman is like he simply photographs the same German over again. In both
cases there is probably sincerity, as well as simplicity. Haeckel was so certain that
the species illustrated in embryo really are closely related and linked up that it
seemed to him a small thing to simplify it by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain
that the German and Englishman are almost alike that he really risks the
generalization that they are exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same
fair and foolish face twice over, and calls it a remarkable resemblance between
cousins. Thus he can prove the {124}existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as
Haeckel has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of God.

Germans and English.

Now, the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike—except in the
sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything good and evil, more
unlike than any other two men we can take at random from the great European family.
They are opposite from the roots of their history—nay, of their geography. It
is an understatement to call Britain insular. Britain is not only an island, but an
island slashed by the sea till it nearly splits into three islands, and even the
midlands can almost smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful, and fertile
inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and narrow paths,
as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy is really national because
it is natural. It has cohered out of hundreds of accidental adventures of ships and
shipmen before Chaucer’s time and after it. But the German Navy is an artificial
thing, as artificial as a constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply
copied the British Navy, as Frederick II. copied the French Army, and this Japanese
or antlike assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which the Germans
have and the English markedly have not. There are other German superiorities which
are very much superior. The one or two really jolly things that the Germans have got
are precisely the things which the English haven’t got, notably a real habit of
popular music and of the ancient songs of the people; not merely spreading from the
towns or caught from the professionals. In this the Germans rather resemble the
Welsh, though heaven knows what becomes of Teutonism if they do. But the difference
between the Germans and the English goes deeper than all these signs of it. They
differ more than any other two Europeans in the normal posture of the mind.

Above all, they differ in what is the most English of all English
traits—that shame which the French may be right in calling “the bad shame,” for
it is certainly mixed up with pride and suspicion, the upshot of which we call
shyness. Even an Englishman’s rudeness is often rooted in his being embarrassed. But
a German’s rudeness is rooted in his never being embarrassed. He eats and makes love
noisily. He never feels a speech or a song or a sermon or a large meal to be what the
English call “out of place” in particular circumstances. When Germans are patriotic
and religious they have no reactions against patriotism and religion, as have the
English and the French. Nay, the mistake of Germany in the modern disaster largely
arose from the facts that she thought England was simple, when England is very
subtle. She thought that because our politics have become largely financial they had
become wholly financial; that because our aristocrats had become pretty cynical they
had become entirely corrupt. They could not seize the subtlety by which a rather
used-up English gentleman might sell a coronet when he could not sell a fortress;
might lower the public standards and yet refuse to lower the flag. In short, the
Germans are quite sure that they understand us entirely because they do not
understand us at all. Possibly, if they began to understand us they might hate us
even more, but I would rather be hated for some small but real reason than pursued
with love on account of all kinds of qualities which I do not possess and which I do
not desire. And when the Germans get their first genuine glimpses of what modern
England is like they will discover that England has a very broken, belated, and
inadequate sense of having an obligation to Europe; but no sort of sense whatever of
having any obligation to Teutonism.

Slippery Strength of Stupidity.

This is the last and strongest of the Prussian qualities we have here considered.
There is in stupidity of this sort a strange, slippery strength, because it can be
not only outside rules, but outside reason. The man who really cannot see that he is
contradicting him{125}self has a great advantage in controversy, though the
advantage breaks down when he tries to reduce it to simple addition, to
chess—or to the game called war. It is the same about the stupidity of the
one-sided kinship. The drunkard who is quite certain that a total stranger is his
long-lost brother has a great advantage until it comes to matters of detail. “We must
have chaos within,” said Nietzsche, “that we may give birth to a dancing star.”

In these slight notes I have suggested the principal strong points of the Prussian
character—a failure in honor which almost amounts to a failure in memory; an
egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that the other party is an ego, and,
above all, an actual itch for tyranny and interference, the devil which everywhere
torments the idle and the proud. To these must be added a certain mental
shapelessness, which can expand or contract without reference to reason or
record—a potential infinity of excuses. If the English had been on the German
side the German professors would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved
the Teutons. As the English are on the other side, the German professors will say
that these Teutons were not sufficiently evolved; or they will say they were just
sufficiently evolved to show that they were not Teutons. Probably they will say both.
But the truth is that all that they call evolution should rather be called evasion.
They tell us they are opening windows of enlightenment and doors of progress. The
truth is that they are breaking up the whole house of the human intellect that they
may abscond in any direction. There is an ominous and almost monstrous parallel
between the position of their overrated philosophers and of their comparatively
underrated soldiers. For what their professors call roads of progress are really
routes of escape.

South Africa’s Boers and Britons

By H. Rider Haggard.

The heart of South Africa, Boer and Briton, is with England in this war. Here and
there you will find an individual who cherishes bitter and hostile memories, of which
there has been an example in Mr. Beyers letter the other day, so effectually answered
by Gen. Botha. But such instances, I believe, are so rare that really they are the
exceptions which seem to prove the rule. Of course, it goes without saying that every
person of English descent is heartily with the mother country, and I do not suppose
it would be an overestimate to add that quite 80 per cent, of the Dutch are of the
same way of thinking.

Still, there is a party among the South African Dutch that sees no necessity for
the invasion of German Southwest Africa. This party overlooks the fact that the
Germans have for long been preparing to invade them; also that if by any chance
Germany should conquer in this war South Africa would be one of the first countries
that they would seize.

In speaking of this I talk of what I understand, since for the last two and a half
years it has been my duty to travel around the British Empire upon the service of his
Majesty. In addition to South Africa, I have visited India, Australia, New Zealand,
Newfoundland, and Canada. I have recently traveled throughout South Africa as a
member of the Dominion’s Royal Commission. It was my first visit there after the
lapse of a whole generation, and I can only say that everywhere I have found the most
intense loyalty and devotion to the old mother land. The empire is one and
indivisible; together it will stand or together it will fall.

{126}South Africa
is united; it has forgotten its recent labor troubles. I answer “absolutely” all such
things are past history, blown away and destroyed by this great wind of war. South
Africa, down to its lowest Hottentot, has, I believe, but one object, to help England
to win in this vast battle of the nations. Why, even the natives, as you may have
noticed, are sending subscriptions from their scanty hoards and praying to be allowed
“to throw a few stones for the King.” Did not Poutsma say as much the other day?

In the old days, of course, there were very strained relations between the English
and Boers, which had their roots in foolish and inconsistent acts carried out by the
Home Government, generally to forward party ends. I need not go into them because
they are too long.

Then came the Boer war, which, as you know, proved a much bigger enterprise than
the Home Government had anticipated. It cost Britain 20,000 lives and
£300,000,000 of English money before the Boers were finally subdued. Only about
half a score of years have gone by since peace was declared. Within two or three
years of that peace the British Government made up its mind to a very bold step and
one which was viewed with grave doubts by many people—namely, to give full
self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange River Colonies.

Astonished at Results.

When I traveled through South Africa the other day this new Constitution had been
working for a few years, and I can only say that I was astonished at the results.
Here and there in the remoter districts, it is true, some racial feeling still
prevailed, but taken as a whole this seems absolutely to have died away. Briton and
Boer have come together in a manner for which I believe I am right in saying there is
no precedent in the history of the world, so shortly, at any rate, after a prolonged
and bitter struggle to the death. I might give many instances, but I will only take
one. At Pretoria I was asked to inspect a company of Boy Scouts, and there I found
English and Dutch lads serving side by side with the utmost brotherhood. Again I met
most of the men who had been leaders of the Boers in the war. One and all professed
the greatest loyalty to England. Moreover, I am certain that this was not lip
loyalty; it was from the heart. Especially was I impressed by that great man, Gen.
Botha, with whom I had several conversations. I am convinced that at this moment the
King has no truer or more faithful servant than Gen. Botha. Again and again did I
hear from prominent South Africans of Dutch or Huguenot extraction that never more
was there any chance of trouble between Boer and Briton.