Class Isz Book Oop)TigIit]f COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. THE WAR FOR THE WORLD THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO THE WAR FOR THE WORLD BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL AUTHOR OF " ITALIAN FANTASIES," " CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO," ETC. CHANCELLOR OF GOTHA: Once Alba's vanquished, Europe's at our feet. And have we Europe then the world is ours." COUNT FRITHIOF: "What shall it profit a race to gain the world and lose its soul ? " " THE WAR GOD " (ACT I.) THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916 All rights reserved Copyright, 1915 By ISRAEL ZANGWILL Copyright, 1915 THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE COMPANY Copyright, 1916 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1916. JUL 27I9I6 ©CI.A433866 TO THE ENGLISHMAN Too modest to be named Too unassuming to question his government's wisdom or righteousness who abandoning all worldly and with no other-worldly hopes went to the front as simply as in the daily war for the world and returned crippled and uncomplaining save of his uselessness to his country this book — of which he might not wholly approve — is — without permission but with admiring affection — DEDICATED. CONTENTS PAGE Some Prognostications and a Preface, with an Apologia for not Being Pro-German i The War Devil 79 Lament 88 Paradise Lost 91 The Shadows of Society 96 The Next War 97 Arms and the Man 104 The Ruined Romantics in On the Coast 124 The Gods of Germany 125 Militarism, British and Prussian 135 Arms and the Band 141 The Model Monster 147 Some Apologists for Germany 154 The Kaiser at the Judgment Bar 170 The War and the Drama 175 The Two Empires 195 The Levity of War-Politics 196 The Place of Peace 211 The Military Pacifists 213 The Absurd Side of Alliances 221 The War for the Words 228 Novelists and the War 233 Walking in War-Time '. 240 Appendix 248 On Catching Up a Lie 250 Patriotism and Percentage 255 The War and the Churches 265 Written by a Jew this Christmas Eve 277 vii Ylll CONTEXTS PAGE Mr. Morel and the Congo 278 The Awkward Age of the Women's Movement 287 The Militant Suffragists 298 Prologue for a Women's Theatre 319 The War and the Women 321 (1) Woman as Woreer 321 (2) Woman as Fighter 330 (3) Woman as Peacemaker 337 Wake Up. Parliament ! 344 For Small Mercies 357 Rosy Russia 358 At the Congress 369 The Story of the Steam-Roller 371 Bezalel 373 The War and the Jews 374 "russla and the jews " 4°5 (Two Letters to the Nation.) On the Death of Herzl 414 The Jewish Factor ln the War and the Settlement 415 Two Letters to "The Times " 449 Envoi: Oliver Singing 455 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO- GERMAN "This war is in reality a life and death struggle between two forms of State, one retrograde and no longer capable, the other far advanced and capable of the most powerful activities. Either Germany with its organization and ideas will be destroyed in this war, or England, if it is to live at all, must rebuild its institutions and introduce that Continental form of State of which Germany is the most shining example." — Professor Eduard Meyer. "Because these (German aims and methods) have a loathy side, and because these endanger our commerce, our institutions, our very existence, we must not in our perfectly legitimate anger ignore the fact that they could not have given Germany her present strength without much good being mixed with the evil." — Morning Post, 8th February, 1916. "Fight the Germans like the Germans." — Mr. Austin Harrison. In these dark and unbalanced days, when mass-psychol- ogy can ill support any contradiction of the prevailing temper, it is necessary, I am aware, for an obdurate Anti- German like myself to walk somewhat gingerly. But if I am unable to surrender myself to the current idolatry of German State-institutions, and the contagion of Prussian militarism; if the enthusiasm for German organization leaves me cold, and the scrapping of Magna Charta hot; if I have shown in so much of my work— as that popular Labor-organ, the Herald, complains — too great a bias 2 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE against Germany, and ignored the cultural and socialistic sides of her State-concept, something must be allowed in extenuation to the force of early impressions. For it so happened that my very first experience of Germany was one calculated to quicken my instinctive loathing for the Bismarckized State, and to crystallize my vague intuitions of the coming clash between British and German State- concepts in a war for the world. II I was returning to England from Italy with a through ticket via the Netherlands when suddenly from the corridor of the train appeared a new conductor, demanding my Fakrkarte. With a weary sigh — for I had shown it so often and would have to show it so often again before reaching London — I produced the be-clipped and mutilated pass that had begun life as a beautiful Biglietto. Alas! its con- ductor-crushing career seemed over. For my official was still aggressive. Ensued a duologue in German. "But where is your seat-ticket?" "This is it." "No! You have no right to be sitting here without a seat- ticket ! " "I have been sitting here since Rome." "You are not in Italy now, you are in Germany." (I began to feel it was indeed so.) "You must pay two marks for your place." "But my ticket shows I have paid all the way to London." "Nevertheless in Germany you must pay for your seat." "But I must sit somewhere." "And every seat must be paid for." I believed his claim now, but I resented his manner. WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 3 "Very well then— I will stand." "Es ist verboten — the seats must be sat on." "Then I will stand in the corridor." And I walked haughtily without. He was unimpressed. "You cannot stand in the corridor. Es ist verboten. Either you pay for your seat or you leave the train." "That is nonsense — on arriving at Munich I will pay, if I am assured the charge is correct." "You will not get to Munich — I shall put you out at the next station." "You cannot do that. Es ist verboten." He glowered. "I will put you out at the next station." "But my luggage is in the van." "That is your look-out." And deliberately placing in his wallet my elaborate and expensive ticket, which he had been holding in his hand, he closed the bag with the snap of a steel trap. I felt caught in it! To be put down at a wayside German station, without ticket, luggage, or adequate funds, with no remedy but an action for recovery against the railway company, which would at the best detain me weeks in Germany — it was not an alluring prospect. Suddenly over the window of the carriage I perceived the painted words — sinister as the inscription over the gate of Dante's Hell: "For Eight Officers." So the Railway Company was then either the German Government, or already part of its war-organization! I paid the two marks. Ill Even Switzerland, I thought during a melodramatic episode at Basle station in the small hours, was beginning to be infected with Berlin Bumbledom. It was an August night, unbearably sultry, and a crowd of passengers chang- 4 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE ing their train were stuffed into a little waiting room, there to pass an hour or so. I left it and strolled into the spacious station, drawing a breath of relief. "Where are you going?" A dread being in uniform blocked my way. "To wait on the platform for my train," I replied in my best Swiss-German. "You cannot wait on the platform. Es ist verboten." "Why?" "Because if you did, others would go there." "And why should they not?" "Because then those who were there would get into the train first." "And why not? First come, first served." "Es ist verboten! There would be a crowd on the plat- form." "Better than a crowd in that stifling room. I cannot stay there." "You must." "I will not. The railway company is my servant. I am not its servant." Sensation. He went away and returned with a still more ornamented official, who however equally failed to move me — at least by his words. The plot thickened. A file of soldiers arrived with fixed bayonets, and clock- work attitudes. But other passengers gathered round and endorsed my view of the Black Hole of Basle. Before my free-born defiance officialdom was paralyzed — the protest was apparently unprecedented in the history of the station. But it seemed to me intolerable that Switzerland should go the way of Prussia. There was a deadlock, as in the trenches of Flanders. At this moment a third official came up — in a somewhat different style of decoration and also of a more gentlemanly cast. 4 He enquired into the cause WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 5 of the disturbance and having heard both sides, he turned to me and said politely: "I should strongly advise you, mein Herr, not to resist, or there will be very considerable trouble." I was disappointed and outraged: "What!" I cried in wilfully dramatic accents. "In Switzerland, which we in England have always looked upon as the land par excellence of Freedom!" "This is not my land," explained the gentlemanly Swiss. "This is the German part of the station." I understood. But this was not the end, for as I refused to return to the room even though it was Prussian, porters appeared with a long rope, with which a space was roped off in the station immediately outside the asphyxiating little room, and here, penned like cattle at market, we stood in the dead of night till our Prussian train, punctual to the second, rolled obediently into its appointed platform. IV Our treatment enabled me to appreciate more vividly the callous handling of the thousands of poor Jews whom for many years it was a function of an organization over which I presided, to emigrate via Germany. Constant and perennial were the complaints of cruelty both at the German frontier stations and on board the German steam- ers. Once the brutality was so palpable that I actually succeeded in getting a couple of naval officers dismissed. But as a rule it was less acts of tyranny than a pervasive atmosphere of harshness and contempt, difficult to cope with, but embittering the lot of the steerage passengers, already suffering sufficiently from exile, poverty and sea- sickness. To dispense with the German lines in favor for 6 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE example of Dutch, was impossible, because Germany simply forbade emigrants to pass through her territory unless provided with sailing-tickets for her vessels. And this is the Germany that prates of the freedom of the seas! The outbreak of hostilities between our respective coun- tries served to suspend them between my organization and a great German Shipping Company which was vainly demanding an apology from our Russian representative for his outspoken statements concerning the treatment of emigrants. The Chairman with whom I had been in con- troversial correspondence blossomed out into a Colonel of the famous Prussian Guard. That seemed to throw a back- light on the whole business. Even as an author I have suffered from the Germans, for one of the greatest tortures of my lif e was reading the proofs of my novels in German. When I reflect that my translator was a popular novelist who has since become famous by his vigorous verse against England, I cannot help suspecting that his translation was a premature act of war. His rendering of a nursery reference to "Baby Bunting " I have never forgotten. It was turned into "Babys Flagge." Such is the insidious effect of Militarismus. Socially too my Teutonic experiences have not been cap- tivating. The beer-regurgitating face-slashed student of the Kneipe and the duelling ground has always seemed to me a barbarian type of young man : my esurient and lip-smacking neighbors at Teutonic tables d'hote have never impressed me as the latest models of refinement; nor have I been over- come by the Kultur of the tourists who, with opera-glasses slung across their portly bosoms, ejaculate their monotonous "Wunderschon!" before every mountain or miniature. WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 7 I have loved the old towns and the life at Munich and Dres- den but I have never been at ease in the Zion of the German salon, with its heavy spirit-constricting furniture. And one of the greatest shocks I ever received in a drawing-room was when Wagner's stepdaughter (the Countess Gravina) imparted to me that Jesus was not born into my race but was a pure Aryan. I was not then aware of the copious literature on the subject with its humorless demonstra- tion that the founder of Christianity was a German. Of course the Countess was merely echoing her relative, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who remarks urbanely: "Whoever maintains that Christ was a Jew is either ig- norant or a liar." She may even have agreed with Herr Max Bewer that Jesus was of Rhenish- Westphalian origin. 1 So if the readers of the Morning Post find me in as im- perfect affinity with the Germans as Charles Lamb was with the Jews, they will know it is not from mere eccentricity or conservatism, but from a reasonable antipathy to spiritual swagger and mediaeval militarism, accompanied by bump- tiousness and cruelty. Repugnance to Prussianism is too inracinated in my breast to be uprooted merely because the German machine has ground out a few victories. Rather do I feel like Herbert Spencer at the Athenaeum Club, when having inadvertently challenged a young billiard- champion, he remarked solemnly after his astonishing lick- ing: "Young man! To play billiards as I do shows a sensible care for recreation, but to play billiards as you do argues a great deal of wasted time." The German machine, ac- cording to Dr. Sadler, who seems not far from admiring it, cannot be imitated in parts: it works only as a whole. 1 A new book, Die Erde und unsere Ahnen, proves that Moses was born in the Harz mountains, Jerusalem was the North German town of Goslar and Solomon's Temple stood on the Brocken Mountain. 8 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE And I must firmly refuse to have Prussia at any price, even at the risk of being considered an early Edwardian. VI Early in the nineties, even before Edward VII had con- tracted his apprehension of Germany and while Nietzsche lay hidden in the decent obscurity of the German language unknown and unmentioned in England — halcyon fabular period ! — I was couching the lance of levity at this inspired misleader of modern thought, and throwing off irreverent impressions of the Kaiser who had come in a cocked hat to Venice to visit Umberto I— even at that delirious mo- ment of music and pageantry I see that I wondered how long the Italian Alliance would last — and had inconsider- ately moored his great white yacht, the Hohenzollern, exactly opposite my window. "This young man," I wrote, 1 "from all I have observed since he became my neighbor, lives a highly colored dramatic existence, in which there are sixty minutes to every hour, and sixty seconds to every minute, the sort of life that should have pleased Walter Pater. He must be a disciple of Nietzsche, a lover of the strong and splendid, this German gentleman who is just off to Vienna to prance at the head of fifteen hundred horsemen. While he lived opposite me it was all excursions and alarums. As a neighbor an Emperor is distinctly noisy." I proceed to point out — while admitting his exceptional virtues for a King — the danger which a monarch, with such a nursery passion for playing at soldiers, was to a semi- constitutional country like Germany, "a country over- civilized in thought and under-civilized in action," and a propos of Nietzsche's teaching I wrote: 1 See my book, Without Prejudice (originally published in the Pall Mall Magazine). WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 9 "Human nature is like Venice or Holland — a province slowly wrested from the sea, and secured by dams or dykes. Woe to him who makes a breach in the sea-walls!" For here is the true War for the World — this perpetual struggle of land and sea, this tenacious beating of the waves of barbarism against the dykes of civilization, to regain the ground won from the waste of waters; this tireless labor of the forces of Good to conserve their gains and reclaim marshes yet undrained. VII It is not only the Dutch who have "With mad labor fished the land to shore." Marvell's lines apply to many another territory netted from the ocean. "How did they rivet with gigantic piles, Thorough the centre their new-catched miles, And to the stake a struggling country bound Where barking waves still beat the forced ground." Those who are familiar with our oozy Eastern coast are aware how much soil there is which is halfway or at every other stage between land and water. We have for example saltings which may be grazed over at certain times but not, say, during the high spring tides, or which, reclaimed by a sea-wall, rise to the status of marshes; we have sands now impassable, now high and dry; we have pasture-land which gradually improves into arable land, and responds regularly to the plough. What is "fleet " or creek at noon is causeway at sunset, and where the cowman strode at sunrise, eels may gambol at twilight. The battle between sea and land, with man as ally or negligent neutral, goes on pauselessly IO SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE all along the line, with here a retreat and there an advance, and with on the whole a measurable shrinkage of land or a definite repulse of sea. This is precisely the battle of Ormuzd and Ahriman in the spiritual war-zone. But, carried on obscurely and con- tinuously at points innumerable in periods of superficial peace, it is not often that it ranges itself so visibly and pic- turesquely as in the rival battalions of Great Britain and Germany, nor that a war for the world between two Great Powers coincides so closely with the elemental clash of Good and Evil. Were the contest limited to those Powers, with no complications of Allies, black, white or yellow, and could we be sure that the victory of England would mean the defeat of Germany and not its spiritual domination, then, despite England's iniquities and shortcomings in other di- rections, we might almost say that the coincidence is ab- solute. For what is Prussian Militarism but a re-swamping of the territory dyked and cultivated by the painful labor of generations? VIII Unfortunately the effort to "fight the Germans like the Germans" only begets more Germanism. I am reminded of the police official who tried to arrest some Dukhobors for going about stark naked. In the heat of the chase — for they fled before him — he threw off his coat, and then his waistcoat, and then his trousers, and by the time he had come up with them, you could not tell him from Adam or a Dukhobor. Even so the method of military resistance to militarism, which is like the defensive opening of the sluices in the Low Countries, merely co-operates with the oncoming ocean in ruining the territory defended. A deluge — Waters- nood, as they say in Holland, — is now upon us, racing and foaming towards our islet of civilization from every quarter WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN II of the compass. Let me give one little example — the book, The Way of the Red Cross, with a touching Preface by Queen Alexandra though as marvellous a record of human kindness as the Times' Fund is of journalistic achievement, yet blurs over the fact that the Red Cross is not a mere medical branch of the British Army — if it were, the War Office should pay for it — nor even a voluntary addition to the British Army, but a Christ-like body working "above the battle," and bound to devote equal care to the wounded enemy. It is only as it were through a slip of the pen that we learn from one passage of this book that there are German wounded under the care of our Red Cross corps. It seems to be feared that subscriptions would fall off, if Britons remembered too clearly that this work of mercy was international work. Here then is a distinct loss of spiritual territory once reclaimed from barbarism — the sea is back again amid the ruins of our groins and embankments. Mr. Bertrand Russell even asserts: — "On the Western front, at least, both sides have long ceased to take prisoners, except in large batches. I have heard an innocent-faced young Scotsman boasting to a fellow-soldier, amid roars of laughter, that he had bayonetted a disarmed German who knelt before him imploring mercy." What the Germans on their side have done we know from Lord Bryce's Report. But if there is any truth in the Ap- peal of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, our officials during a riot in Ceylon have behaved like the Germans in Belgium, if happily only on a small scale. As for their doings in Ireland — ! IX The Dutch — when a flood is impending — appoint in all threatened areas a local dijk graaf or Dyke-Reeve with 12 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE full military rights over the polder-land, to take whatever measures are necessary for its salvation. Where are our Dyke-Reeves before the Watersnood now fast reducing Europe to a spiritual swamp? They are not to be found in the Cabinets, for the statesman — Lord Haldane has told us frankly, though I cannot find it in Hegel — must follow, not lead, public opinion. The politician and the public can in fact only advance, like two drunken men, by leaning on each other. Nor does the Press — that reflex of the ad- vertiser and the reader — afford an escape from this vicious circle. The Stage is even more swiftly at the mercy of the mob, drawing still more costly breath. The Church — well, after all, vox populi vox dei — is a theological propo- sition. There indeed remain a few personalities — in the Lords, the Commons, the Press, even the Church, that have not bowed the knee to Baal. But even journalists who do not pander to the public and its idols have been so disequili- brated by the war that I have, on entering Fleet Street by what remains of Temple Bar, sometimes looked up expect- ing to see the inscription: "Abandon sense all ye who enter here; " followed perhaps by "For three years or the dura- tion of the war." In this general neglect of the dykes at a time when the danger from their neglect is at a maximum, I am impelled to present myself at the post of national duty as a dyke- custodian, a trustee of civilization — self-appointed. X But even a self-appointed functionary may tender his credentials and I respectfully beg to offer, in proof of my qualifications for the place, a record of many years of vigi- lance as a coastguard on the shore of the German Ocean. WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 13 It is this record indeed which makes it so difficult for me to pose suddenly as a pro-German. My parlor-maid said to her mistress the day Armageddon broke out: "The Germans are on our side, aren't they, mum?" On being corrected, she duly proceeded to hate them. But I un- fortunately have a miso-Gothic past. That would not matter if I were a politician, for a politician has only a future. But liter a scripta manet — if only in the British Museum — and my uncomfortable prevision of the menace to modern civilization implicit in a race of Huns, not com- ing from without like the shatterers of the Roman Empire, but begotten at the very centre of that civilization, com- mitted me a la Cassandra to a series of fulminations and predictions that cannot well be explained away. XI At the end of 1907 for example, when the waves of Gothic barbarism threatened to submerge Prussian Poland, whose four million Poles the Reichstag — at the instigation of the "Hakatists" with their policy of Ausrotten — pro- posed to expropriate and replace by Prussians proper, the illustrious Polish novelist, Sinkiewicz, made an appeal to "the conscience of the world." In the polyglot volume he published at Paris, entitled Prusse et Pologne, I find myself protesting as follows, under date January the first, 1 1908: 1 It is odd that Sinkiewicz, though he appealed to 250 persons throughout the world, did not apparently regard any ecclesiastic as incarnating its con- science. But then I remember at the beginning of the Twentieth Century diagnosing the dangers that threatened it, side by side with the then Arch- bishop of Canterbury, who replied like the Mad Hatter that he "had no idea." Mr. Wells, it is interesting to find, replied with similar^ modesty to Sinkiewicz, disclaiming knowledge of Polish politics. He had not then spent his famous fortnight in Russia. 14 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE "I feel honored that my opinion should be sought by so illustrious a writer as yourself, but I fear it will give you scanty comfort. As a Jew, I cannot agree with you that the proposed outrage upon German Poles is ' the greatest iniquity and infamy in the history of the Twentieth Century;' that abominable title has already been earned by the massacres of the Jews in Russia, carried out with official connivance and under circumstances of atrocity which have no parallel even in mediaeval times. I cannot believe that the twentieth century reserves for us a deeper horror. But this is almost the only hope I can permit myself of a century that has seen this occur with no effective protest. Might is recognized as the rule of life, Christianity has been deposed even from the lips of Governments. It rarely was anywhere else; but our century has grown too self-conscious to be able to leave it even this last resting-place. "In this degeneration of the human conscience Germany has played perhaps the leading role. After the brutal Germani- fication of the French provinces, I cannot see why you should be so astonished at the same treatment being extended to the Polish districts. Europe offered no protest against the iron hand re-moulding Alsace and Lorraine as a sculptor remodels his wax faces, why should you expect Europe to interfere on behalf of the Poles? Whence, cher maitre, come your optimism, your generous belief in the power of 'the pillars of civilization and intellectual culture!' You and I should know that a people that has lost its power of military resistance is the doomed prey of the nations with teeth and claws; though by another law of nature teeth and claws never suffice to destroy it utterly. It develops cunning to match the claws, and finds ways of lying low. The only force that can utterly dissolve a people is love. The wax face which, however moulded, will retain some trace of its original lineaments, can be entirely melted by the heat of love — by liberty, equality and fraternity. 1 But this recipe for assimilating races is rarely tried, and even when it is begun, mankind is rarely patient enough to carry it through. This 1 A captain in the Austrian Polish Legion said he was fighting for the Austrians because of Austria's good treatment of the Poles. WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 1 5 new persecution of the Poles will therefore only serve to accen- tuate the Polish nationality. "Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under the inspiration of the generous policy of the Sigismunds, Poland was the chief land of refuge for the Jews, and it is a thousand pities that hosts and guests should now alike be swamped by the forces of barbarism. The Germany of Goethe and Schiller, of Kant and Beethoven, to which humanity turned in reverence, has been replaced by a Germany of blood and iron, a Germany, which as the Hague Conference proved, burdens all Europe with an ever increasing tax for armaments and is ready to sow the waters of the world with submarine mines: a Germany from which we turn shuddering. It only needs the dispossession of the Poles for Germany to lose her last lingering hold upon those whose respect is not for might but for civilization. Let her true patriots look to it, let them learn from the case of Hungary that even from a material point of view it does not pay to defy humanity's slowly evolved ideals of right and justice. Each of us can see the mote in his brother's eye and justice has thus still a certain almost universal support among those uncon- cerned in the particular issue — naturally always the majority of mankind. "Writing on the first of the year, I can but wish for you and your brother Poles, that the new year will witness the collapse of this lamentable and impolitic policy." XII At the May Meeting of a Peace Society, some six months before Sinkiewicz issued his appeal I find myself rebuking the shallow optimism of the late Mr. Stead, with whom I had already crossed olive-branches at a prior Peace Meet- ing, when after a tour of all the crowned heads of Europe he reported enthusiastically that the Millennium was al- most upon us: "I take the opportunity," I wrote, "of reminding Mr. Stead 1 6 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE that more good will be done by facing the brutal facts of life and the European situation than by allowing the wish that war shall cease to be father to the thought that it is ceasing. When Mr. Stead and I were last together on a peace platform, he maintained that I was unduly pessimistic in the face of a most glorious prospect of universal peace and disarmament. I said it was very doubtful if disarmament would be brought at all nearer by this conference, and that Germany was the enemy. Mr. Stead insisted that the Kaiser was the greatest peace lover in Europe, and apparently only wore so many uniforms for amusement. I venture to repeat that those who preach against war must never under-rate its glamour, and par- ticularly the great vested interests which depend upon its con- tinuance. It is only by education, by creating the glamour of peace, to offset the glamour of war, that any real amelioration can be effected. I need not say I am in the greatest sympathy with the objects of your meeting; but your peace crusade will need an enormously greater organization to make any dints upon the mailed battalions of war." To add to the difficulty of my turning pro- German now, I actually placed the responsibility for the coming war on Germany's shoulders years before she had written Austria's ultimatum to Serbia, and like Mrs. Partington trying to keep back the Atlantic with her broom, I tried to keep back the German Ocean with my pen. Through my blank- verse Tragedy, "The War God," produced at His Maj- esty's Theatre by Sir Herbert Tree in 191 1 (and written several years earlier) , humanity was invited to consider the rival issues raised for it by Bismarck and Tolstoy, the two giant protagonists of the century, the War for the World beside which the material struggle between Alba and Gotha for the mastery of the planet was a triviality. The mysterious assassination of this play in the heart of London in broad daylight may perhaps be counted, like the in- finitely more deplorable murder of Jaures, among the WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 1 7 earliest casualties in the cosmic combat. It was followed — soon after the outburst of war — by the Foreign Office prohibition of my play " The Melting Pot " at the request of Russia. A third play of mine, " The New Religion," had already been prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain. But these evidences of England's growing passion for Prus- sianism were hardly calculated to increase my liking for it. XIII Not that censorship of the Stage is new — it was in fact the one piece of Prussianism left like a fly in amber in the British Constitution. An historian remarks that in Tudor days the dramatist was practically outside Magna Charta, "liable to instant imprisonment without bail, trial or ap- peal at the hands of the stage censor." It may even be admitted that the institution was primarily designed not to protect morals but politicians and princes, and that it was the politico-satirical plays of Fielding that called forth the more constitutional Licensing Act of 1737. A dram- atist might be well content to be quashed in company with the author of Rule, Britannia, whose historic tragedy " Edward and Eleonara " was prohibited, not to mention Shakespeare (a whole act of whose Richard III was cut out by the Master of the Revels), Middleton, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, Steele, Dryden, Gay and the blameless Miss Mitford. What is new in the business, however, is the re-inforcement of the Lord Chamberlain by the Foreign Office; an innovation which seems to have begun when " The Mikado " was so ridiculously interdicted to please Japan, and another comic opera, " Morocco Bound " was modified to appease the susceptibilities of the Sultan of Turkey. That because Russia is in alliance with us, it is the duty 1 8 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE of the Foreign Office to keep her uncriticized may seem a plausible contention. But on examination it amounts not only to interference in the internal affairs of England and with our British notions of liberty — and that he can- not interfere in the internal affairs of Russia is Sir Edward Grey's pet shibboleth — but it also identifies the State with any and every theatre. Now there is no State Theatre — I wish there was, even at the risk of its having to represent the views of the Foreign Office. But to suffer from the drawbacks of a State Theatre, and enjoy none of the ad- vantages of its existence, is an intolerable situation for the dramatist. It would be so simple for the Foreign Office to say to the Russian Ambassador: "England, you may not have noticed, is a land of liberty and the theatres are private enterprises, for which the State has no responsi- bility." An astute Foreign Office would even see the ad- vantage of a medium for conveying hints or suggestions to foreign countries through non-committal channels. So far, however, from recognizing and exploiting this demo- cratic instrument, the Government has even extended the censorship to newspapers, thus staking England's entire fortunes on the wisdom of the official view. Newspapers, like theatres, have a certain public charac- ter, but when, as I understand from high quarters, the De- fence of the Realm Act carries over even into the purely individual realm of books, our liberties are indeed in a parlous condition, and the pages I have been compelled to suppress in this very book are an ominous reminder of the distance we have travelled from the doctrine of Milton's Areopagiticus. 1 They are moreover an interesting illustra- 1 The censorship of the press is one of the worst losses of the war. The notion that the German Staff would spend its days and nights in piecing together d la Sherlock Holmes stray items in odd newspapers, is childish: not to mention the possibility that would then arise of fooling it fatally. The editorial censorship, whether commercial or conscientious, is surely bad WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 1 9 tion of the central thesis of this book that there is neither truce nor standstill in the war for the world, that no liberty is so old-established as to be safe, and that what our an- cestors won for us we shall not necessarily bequeath to our children. "Now we can only wait for the day, wait and apportion our shame, These are the dykes our fathers left, but we would not look to the same. Time and again were we warned of the dykes, time and again we delayed; Now, it may fall, we have slain our sons as our fathers we have be- trayed." XIV Inter arma silent leges. Rome in war-time surrendered herself to a dictator. It is disconcerting — but it may be a grim necessity — that our war for the freedom of the world shall mean — if only pro tern — the enslavement of England, the sweeping away by the old waste of waters of all her secular landmarks. Burke thought that the politician was a wary beast, and that knowing that most people see — and see only — what happened before they were born, he would not — when attempting a new arbitrary imposition — stamp upon its forehead such a name as Ship-Money. But ship- money could be imposed to-day — nay, is imposed — as easily as anything else. "The Defence of the Realm Act, which ran through a Radical House of Commons in a few hours," says the Westminster Gazette, "made an end of Magna Charta, and scrapped whole centuries of our history. We have neither liberty of the person, nor liberty of the Press, 1 enough without the Governmental gag. Even our ministers are astonished when told things known for months to everybody outside the ambit of our Press Bureau, a state of things that might produce fatal surprises. 1 The fining of the Bystander £200 for a comic cartoon will be an historical index of war-mentality. 20 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE nor liberty of trade." A coil of passports, regulations, ordinances and measures impedes life and ties labor. Our privacy is slit open by the postal censor. Under the plea Salus reipublicce suprema lex, even Habeas Corpus is gone — for a British-born subject may be im- prisoned without reason given or without trial. We have lived to see military and industrial conscription, accom- panied by a "petty Prussianism" which has disgusted even conscriptionist organs, secret trials before illegally minded officials, executions of unnamed persons for unknown of- fences, some of them soldier lads under twenty, intern- ment of thousands of able-bodied aliens (some of them even seized with a high hand upon the high seas when they were deserting their fatherlands) , winding up of enemy companies, and ruthless sentences for purely technical offences pro- nounced by panic-stricken magistrates, whose obiter dicta occasionally reveal a childishness beyond words. Thus a commercial traveller, a British subject, was not allowed to return to his American home on the ground that the goods he represented ought to have been made in Eng- land. A German-speaking witness was told to learn a language worth speaking. This Prussianism pro tern has only been made possible by the device of a Coalition Government, for this is not, as it pretends, a union of all the talents — that, as Herbert Spencer pointed out half a century ago, could be better secured by utilizing the best business men — but a shield against criticism and a cover for blunders. As Lord Lore- burn said so excellently in the House of Lords, a parlia- mentary danger relieved, is not a national danger relieved. The Defence of the Realm Act is in fact a Defence of the Cabinet Act. The rapidity with which war reverses gener- ations of history is only another proof of its degenerative character — war is perhaps really the test of a people, not WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 21 of their brute strength but of whether their constitution is a reality alive in their spirit or a mere dead heritage. Of course all the other belligerents have slid back as swiftly as Britain, but corruptio optimi pessima. It does not seem to occur to anybody that a great nation must take a little risk for a great principle. XV Nor can the Government be accused of not representing the people, for the mob has bettered the Government oblawas (or alien drives) by pogroms (attacks on property though happily free from murder) and it clamors for still more internments (regardless of the expense, and of the waste of labor-force), still more high-handed hampering of neutrals, and for non-recognition of naturalization scraps of paper. Lloyds and the Baltic Exchange suspend members, Shipping Companies refuse to embark emigrants. Town-Councillors remove the name of the German maker from the dial of the parish clock and — with a still more comical desire to put back the clock of civilization — a Mr. Herbert Stephen writes to the Times that it would be " exceedingly disagreeable to have the same time here as in Germany!" How truly observes Romain Rolland, " Un grand peuple assailli par la guerre n'a pas seulement ses frontieres a defendre il a aussi sa raison." Even scholars rush to run down the German Science they have always profited by, and learned bodies hasten to remove their German members. Anti-German Leagues break up Quaker meetings, disturbing the immemorial Elian quiet. Even in Parliament a military member back from the trenches was allowed to declare without rebuke from the Speaker that if he had had another honorable member in his battalion at the front, that gentleman would have been strung up by the 22 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE thumbs before he had been there half an hour! There could not be a more salutary illustration of Burke's axiom that "the civil power, like every other that calls in the aid of an ally stronger than itelf, perishes by the assistance it receives." Such things at home do not tend to put an allegation like the Baralong episode at sea beyond the need of formal disproof by the Admiralty. Undoubtedly the pitilessness of Prussianism is responsible for much of this debacle of Britishism, — that is how evil engenders evil. But unless these phenomena prove — as we must hope they will prove — the mere mania of war-fever, to be dispelled by the first cool touch of Peace, Germany — even if we pulverize her — will have destroyed the Britain we knew "A land of settled Government, A land of old and just renown Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent." One wonders indeed whether Tennyson would have carried out his threat to leave such an England "Should banded unions persecute Opinion, and induce a time When single thought is civil crime And individual freedom mute." How odd that it is from a member of Mr. Asquith's con- stricted House of Lords that comes the stately reminder of Britain's real greatness as the pioneer of freedom. 1 And how pathetically reads the letter 2 of the veteran Liberal, Sir Edward Fry, on the murder of Magna Charta! "The shock that I have received from the judgment of Sir Ed- 1 Lord Parmoor's Letter to the Times, March i, 1916. 2 The Times, February 25, 1916. WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 23 ward Halliday has made some words of the ancient docu- ment resound continually in my ears." The late Emil Reich, whose clairvoyance of the coming war was so marvellous, seems yet to have been mistaken in thinking that in the hour of crisis, free England would re- veal great personalities as opposed to the mechanical medi- ocrities of "the model monster." We have had as yet only the mediocrities without even the mechanical perfec- tion. The cry "Nothing matters, unless we win the war" reveals rather the temper of a lady throwing her bonnet over the mills than of a great historic nation with its thou- sand years of heroic vicissitude. The pity is all the more because of the greatness Britain at war has shown in so many directions — in the boundless- ness of her effort and her sacrifice, the nobility of her young men, her generosity towards Belgium, and the spiritual gravitation she has exercised upon her remotest Colonies and Dependencies. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has written a characteristic book, called more suo The Crimes of Eng- land, the point of which is, I gather, that this is the first war in which England has been in the right. That is further than even Coleridge (who once cursed his country) or Cowper (who bade her cease to " grind India ") or Words- worth (on whom the freight of her offences lay heavy) has ever gone. But if Mr. Chesterton is correct — and the crimes of Chesterton are many — it is certainly odd that the first war in which England has been in the right should be the one war in which she has temporarily ceased to exist. "Who lives if England dies?" asked Kipling finely. But England does not live if her mere geographical semblance survives. One is reminded of the words Tacitus put into the mouth of Otho. "Quid? 1 vos pulcherrimam hanc ur- 1 Historic, Book I, Cap. 84. 24 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE bem domibus et tectis et congestu lapidum stare creditis? Muta ista et inanima intercidere ac reparari promiscua sunt: aeternitas rerum et pax gentium et mea cum vestra salus incolumitate senatus firmatur. Hunc auspicato a parente et conditore urbis nostras institutum, et a regibus usque ad principes continuum et immortalem, sicut a ma- joribus accepimus, sic posteris tradamus. Nam ut vobis senatores, ita ex senatoribus principes nascuntur." "No more speeches!" cried Lord Glenconner, and spoke England's mood of the moment. That the first duty of Parliament is to parler, and not to fight in the trenches, that action cannot supersede counsel, and that a brusque soldierly "let us get on with the war" does not help us to win it, and that the dignity of a great nation requires it to go its way with imperturbable majesty, was an opinion I was at first alone in expressing. My speech "Wake up, Parlia- ment," republished in this volume, was regarded by some as scandalous, if not indeed treasonable. But I soon lived to see its point of view adopted by the Times, which had welcomed the dumbness of Westminster as a symptom of national unity, but which speedily perceived that Parlia- ment is never more necessary than in a great war whose duration is uncertain, nay, which found itself compelled to be the missing voice of the nation — a service I recognize as beyond price, much as I may disagree with particular things said by the voice. Parliament itself has never re- covered its potency. Paralyzed by the device of a non- party Ministry, devoid constitutionally of the power over foreign affairs possessed by many other Parliaments, which form Committees entitled to call for papers and cross- examine Ministers, hectored over by the Zabernian rhet- oric of M. P.'s from the front, menaced by the hysteria of the constituencies as well as hypnotized by its own, flinging away money by the thousand millions without WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 25 question or criticism, 1 abandoning the control of the purse for which it was recently waging war with the House of Lords, the House of Commons has presented a pitiable spectacle, ironically enhanced by the armlets sported by some of the members. The degradation reached its climax in the conscription comedy, preluded by the farcical fraud of the National Register. A hireling army is no ideal of mine. "Despicable" I wrote years ago "is the nation which sends mercenaries to do its fighting." 2 A citizen army is the only militarism the future can tolerate, and the rough-and-ready methods of voluntary enlistment, in a nation without the tradition of national service, indubitably worked injustice, as by the patriotic rush of "only sons" whom conscription would have passed by. But for a great nation to swop its national system in the middle of a war, to introduce conscription on the basis of a wager whether a certain number of single men would vol- unteer or not — and then not even to take the number of the single men as they enlisted, but to proceed entirely upon guesswork, — an ethic that would have scandalized Crock- ford's gaming club — and subsequently to try to justify the guess by hustling into the army "everything on two legs" (even on cork legs) and "unstarring" the "starred" young men already supposed to be allowed for in the "statistics" — all this is more like Mexico or a lunatic ward than Tenny- son's stately old island. The notion that it is quantity, quantity, quantity that matters has long amazed all of us who play chess and are accustomed to see Kings beaten in the very thick of their men. No wonder the Southwark 1 In the debate on Mr. McKenna's last Budget, the greatest in our history, one speaker "complained there had hardly been a quorum present through- out." (Times, April 6, 1916.) 2 Kalian Fantasies. Risorgimento. 26 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE Tribunal exempted pro km the one man in all England able to nt padded rooms in asylums. My sympathy with Sir John Simon is. however, dimin- ished by the fact that he let pass without a word — such is the slackness of even the best of Parliamentarians now- adays — the real introduction of conscription. That oc- curred when the time-expired soldiers and marines had their term of service compulsorily extended. But that the London Clubs should have considered Sir John Simon's noble sacrifice of his political position a symptom of dubi- ous sanity- throws a significant light upon the spirit of our fight for Liberty. Beholding thus how "• Freedom namms swiftly 1 down From precedent to precedent." I ask myself whether the vaunted resolution of Britons never to be slaves is only an old song. If so over the British Empire may be written Ichubod. For its greatness is in- separably bound up with its freedom. The attempt to run the British Empire without Britishism is suicidal. An Australian M. F. W. Eggleston of Melbourne) put the truth strongly in a recent number of the Xatioti when he wrote: "But above all material ties, above all ties based upon com- mon danger or co mm on interest, the factor which plays the greatest part in holding the Empire together is the spiritual leadership of the world by Great Britain. It is Britain — the cradle of freedom and modern democracy, the mother of Parlia- ments, the most successful exponent of the principles of re- — litly not slowly. Facilis descensus. As Rornain Rolland says: "Dans la lutte eternelle entre le mal et le bien. la partie if est pas egale: il tant un siecle pour constnrire, cequ'un jour sufat a detruire."' WITH AX APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAX 2J sponsible representative Government — who attracts the imagi- nation and secures the passionate devotion of a young democracy like Australia. If weak and trembling hands let fall this sceptre, then the days of the Empire as a powerful, united, positive force in the world are numbered." Sharing his advantage of seeing the Empire at a non- parochial angle, I have often striven to bring home the same truth to my fellow-citizens. Speaking when Edward VII. succeeded to it — exactlv a thousand years after Edward I. — I said: 1 "H you were as much in contact with foreign opinion as I am, if you knew how the thought of England lives and glows in the hearts of the oppressed — as the sun of liberty, the ark of refuge — then you would be more careful than you are to keep this great vision, this splendid ideal, untarnished, even by for- eign misconceptions and alien misunderstandings. Caesar's Empire — as well as Caesar's wife — must be above suspicion." But why cite Mr. Eggleston and myself, when there is Plato? "Now there is a voice from each form of polity, as it were from certain animals: one from a democracy, another from an oligarchy, and another from a monarchy. . . . Whichever then of these polities speaks with its own voice, both to gods and men, and produces actions, correspondent to its voice, it nourishes ever, and is preserved; but when it imitates another voice, it is destroyed." For which reason, if for no other. I trust that after the war. despite our pro-German press, the British Constitu- tion will be thoroughly repaired and re-painted. 1 The occasion was a dinner to Mr. Linley Simbourne of Punch over which I was presiding. 28 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE XVI Much of this obscurantist activity on the part of our Press Bureau and our Press has been devoted to maintaining the mirage of "Rosy Russia," and our men of letters with whom I had co-operated in signing a manifesto against Germany declaring that we in Great Britain were "conscious of a destiny and a duty ... to maintain the free and law- abiding ideals of Western Europe" signed behind my back another manifesto — to Russia — calculated to give fresh rosiness to the myth. I was glad to note that the author of The Truce of the Bear was not among the signatories. Russia, across whose vast steppes the war for the world now rages both spiritually and physically, and which is fighting with equal heroism and nobility in both zones, is unquestionably a splendid potentiality in which lie latent one of the great countries and peoples of the future, des- tined to enrich humanity in every department. But at present it is only a giant embryo, whose very calendar lags symbolically behind. According to its best friends it is at present a Continent of an alphabetic 1 if lovable moujiks — 140 to 150 million spread over three Europes — who al- though piously Christian are practically pagan in their superstitions and primeval earth-rites. 2 They are environed by a torpid and degraded Church 3 which has not yet reached the stage of relating religion to life but is a Church of Prayer and Praise. So ignorant are the remoter members of this vast peasantry that according to an Englishwoman well acquainted with Russia 4 some of our allies in the pres- 1 Seventy-five per cent cannot read or write, according to a letter in the Times (January 3, 19 16). 2 See Times' Russian Supplement (February 24, 1916). 3 See Dr. Sarolea, also a Russian Countess in the Daily Chronicle, inter- viewed by Harold Begbie. 4 Mrs. Rosa Newmarch in the Times, January 4, 1916. WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 20. ent war had never heard of the English at all, or at best con- fused them with the French. Nay, they did not even know all their own forty-eight races, for another recent writer on Russia tells us that a group from far Siberia arriving at Warsaw, after days in the train, and seeing people of other traits and vestures, asked of their officers, "can we begin killing now?" x This backbone of Russia is supplemented (according to these same friendly authorities) by a miseducated, loose- living and misleading minority of doctrinaire revolution- aries out of touch with the real Russian people, which its shallowness wishes to endow with Western representative institutions, and by a growing industrial element which, to believe Stephen Graham, is the worst type of humanity that has ever afflicted the planet, "crass, heavy, ugly, un- faithful, unclean, impure," 2 and which is the only element in which political unrest really exists. There is also in the Baltic provinces a considerable Ger- man-speaking population that combines with the bureau- cratic ruling elements, which are in sympathy with Prussian rigidity, to constitute a large pro-German factor. Nor are Germans the only exotic stock. Of the forty-eight races in Russia only two-thirds, roughly speaking, are Russians proper, or Orthodox Christians. No less than thirty per cent, including nearly twenty million Mohammedans, are of other sects or faiths. England, faced in India, with a similar problem, has boldly solved it by a policy of equal justice for all faiths and races, and the loyalty of the Indian troops is her reward. Russia — and the ideal of Pobiedon- ostseff is applauded by Mr. Stephen Graham — seeks rather the unity of the strait waistcoat and the Procrustean bed. These motley races and creeds are to be adjusted to a Slavo- 1 Russia, Die Balkans, and the Dardanelles. (Granville Fortescue.) 2 Changing Russia, by Stephen Graham. 30 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE phil system of which the three principles are : Samoderjavie (Autocracy), Pravoslavie (Orthodoxy), Narodnost (nation- ality). 1 And the reactionary organs inspired by the Ste- phen Graham propaganda tell us that for the Russian Jews to demand rights from "a system created by a Chris- tian State for its own protection" 2 is "to treat with con- tempt the realities of an Empire whose political institu- tions and intelligence are still in embryo." 3 To which I can imagine the shade of a Russian Jew replying: " Perhaps it was right to make life such a hell, But why did you murder me too? " XVII An alliance with an Empire of such rudimentary "in- stitutions and intelligence" — in which France had the dis- honor of leading the way — could not fail — however neces- sary to safety — to radiate maleficent influences even when it was an entente. M. Kulmazin, President of the Council of the Empire, calls it "a humanitarian alliance," a de- scription on which more than one page of this book is a sufficient commentary, not to mention the many docu- ments in my possession which must remain unpub- lished till the censorship is relaxed. It is only fair to say, however, that some of these documents themselves dem- onstrate how powerless is even the civil bureaucracy be- fore the military, so that, by analogy and comparatively, Russia may not be so much more under the mailed fist than ourselves. Indeed, I have arrived at a most com- fortable conclusion. In the first place now that we are on a level with Russia, knowing exactly what it means not to 1 See that often excellent book, Europe's Debt to Russia, by Dr. Sarolea, a writer, however, who does not halt between two opinions but expresses both on different pages; doubtless through the necessity of living up to his title. 2 Morning Post. 3 Pall Mall Gazette, February 27, 1915. WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 3 1 enter or leave our own country without a coil of passports and delays, and police inquisitions, 1 and to be hampered day and night by military regulations — for of course our war regime is Russia's peace regime— the union seems much less unnatural. And in the second place my former fear that like a matrimonial misalliance it would drag us down, that the British bureaucratic tiger having tasted blood would have no relish to return to his pre-war menu, has been dispelled. For if we are old and tired, disappointed of democracy and blase in freedom, Russia comes to the eternal quest of liberty with a young hope, an unjaded enthusiasm, a burning thirst and an idyllic inexperience. Thus it is Russia 1 A Russian friend domiciled in England tells me, however, that our police are too gentlemanly to be efficient. Certainly the notorious Fatherland of New York, hurled at me every week from New York in an envelope, is almost the only American letter to me that is never censored. In the Dallas scandal at the Home Office we had, however, a foretaste of what happens in a bu- reaucratic country, and if we really settle down to Russianism, no doubt a double language will be invented by journalists and the public generally to baffle the censorship. Thus a Russian lady wishing to make me acquainted with what was happening to the Jews of Russia behind the official veil wrote me a long allegorical letter about the misfortunes of my "poor relatives," while another informed me she was studying certain Bible texts on which she desired my views viz., Jer. XIV, 17, Gen. IV, 14, Jer. XIII, 19, 20, Isa. LII, 3, Jer. XIII, 15-17, Esth. IV, 14, Lev. XLX, 17, Amos I, 9. I give here the first four put together as she designed. For confirmation see article herein on The Jewish Factor in the War. Jer. XIV, 17. — And thou shalt say this word unto them; let mine eyes run down with tears night and day, and let them not cease : for the virgin daugh- ter of my people is broken with a great breach, with a very grievous wound. Gen. IV, 14. — Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. Jer. XIII, 19-20. — The cities of the south are shut up, and there is none to open them : Judah is carried away captive all of it, it is wholly carried away captive. Lift up your eyes and behold them that come from the north: where is the flock that was given thee, thy beautiful flock? Isa. LII, 3. — For thus saith the Lord: Ye were sold for nought; and not by money shall ye be redeemed. 32 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE that will drag us up and in the ardor of the ever-developing Duma our faded Parliament will renew its youth. 1 XVIII In so far as it deals with Russia, "The Melting Pot" is on historic ground. The pogrom at Kishineff in 1904 has already a whole literature devoted to it, and the notion that foreign history can be hushed up in any particular country when the political conditions demand, opens up a geograph- ical conception of history which transcends even Pascal's famous " Verite au degd des Pyrenees, erreiir au deld." But the moral of the play is not anti-Russian at all as was ex- cellently pointed out by my brother novelist (and novelist brother), Mr. Louis Zangwill, in a letter to the Daily Chronicle, whose interviewer had misrepresented his views. "Although the dramatic action of the play was based on a Russian pogrom against the Jews, it yet raises the question: 'Could Jew and Russian, though separated by the -widest gap conceivable, nevertheless come together spiritually through the healing power of a higher ideal of humanity?' And the play answers distinctly, emphatically, 'Yes!' "As I pointed out to your representative, the play is thus symbolic, and foreshadows the future rapprochement between the Russian and the Jewish peoples. The contrast between the narrow fanaticism of the bureaucratic old Russia and the idealistic aspirations of the new young Russia is clearly and sharply drawn, but it is obviously impossible to draw such a contrast without dwelling equally on the two factors to it, though one of these, never meant to be viewed alone, may have displeased the Foreign Office. It is therefore open to question whether the Foreign Office has really exercised a wise judgment 1 1 had hardly written these words when I read of an interview with M. Rodzianko, the President of the Duma, in which he — a Conservative — is reported as saying: "After this war you could no more stop free speech than a dam could hold the winter floods when Spring comes. Yes, after this war it will be in Russia like the Spring." (Daily Chronicle, February 29, 19 16.) WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 3$ in the matter. Personally, if I may express an opinion of my own, I am certain that the whole Jewish people, especially in view of the Russian alliance with England, would gladly wipe the past out of their minds in the appreciation of the significance of a new, free, and regenerated Russia." Nor, though incidentally offensive to the "Black Hun- dreds" is the play concerned with Russia except as a place to escape from. Its theme is America, with its fusion of races under a new human ideal, an ideal whose illumination was never more necessary than at this Cimmerian moment, and this makes the subservience of the Foreign Office to the Russian Bureaucracy a double treason against human- ity. For what had prompted me to write the play was the consciousness that the War for the World had shifted to a new battle-zone, and that in America — to use the great words of Abraham Lincoln — "we shall nobly save or meanly lose the last great hope of earth." Mr. G. K. Chesterton, for whom "the last great hope of earth" lies in the rear, in criticising the "Melting Pot's" ideal of looking forward and of accentuating "The God of our Children" rather than "The God of our Fathers," remarked that this is "Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense" — an iteration that lacks only the damnable — because the past is unchangeably fixed and known, and the future un- known and unknowable. (I regret I cannot remember his exact words, always excepting his triple "nonsense.") But the past is not really known, 1 nor is the past unchange- 1 As Faust puts it, " Mein Freund, die Zeiten der Vergangenheit Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln Was ihr den geist der Zeiten heisst Das ist im grund der Herren eigner geist In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln." In the simpler language of Voltaire, ancient history is only " des fables convenues." See his tale "Jeannot et Colin." 34 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE able. This paradox I am sure will commend me to Mr. Chesterton's heart but it rests on the simple fact that you can alter your relation to the past and therefore alter the proportion the past bears in the totality of your history. For instance, 1914 will be either the blackest year in human history, or the beginning of a new and happier era, accord- ing to what we make of it. The past in fact remains as a series of half-dead seeds, any of which may be revived by a changed relation to it. Nor does the unknowability of the future — which is at worst merely partial — prevent our trying to mould it to an ideal pattern conceived in our conscious- ness. This is in fact what every reformer is doing all the time. XIX Lest the superior person, lifting an eye-brow at my ad- miration for America, dismiss me as a belated doctrinaire democrat, let me remark that I have always defined my- self as " a democrat with a profound mistrust of the people." The tyranny of majorities is worse than the majority of tyrannies. Democracy, like so many human arrangements, is simply the least bad of all the alternatives, and it con- tains within itself — as no other form of Government does — its own antidote. 1 Sully has observed — and Burke has endorsed the observation — that the people never rise from any instinct of rebellion but from mere impatience of its sufferings. And democracy, tempered by Tammany, is better than autocracy tempered by assassination. Even so great a thinker as Kant, groping for a Philosophy of 1 An Italian book, by a Professor of Political Economy at Basle has been published pretending to expose democracy, on the ground the leaders always become autocrats and bureaucrats. But I have long ago said that it is "disguised aristocracy" — only it is an elected and removable chosen aristoc- racy — and this makes all the difference. WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 35 History, looked upon the American Constitution as a for- ward step in human history, and John Bright said in one of his eloquent perorations: — "It may be a vision but I will cherish it. I see one vast con- federation stretching from the frozen North in unbroken line to the glowing South, and from the wild billows of the Atlantic Westward to the calmer waters of the Pacific main — and I see one people, and one language and one law, and one faith, and over all that wide continent, the home of freedom, and a refuge for the oppressed of every race and of every clime." The vision, like so many poetic visions, failed to take ac- count of all the facts — notably of the black problem that literally darkens the picture, and of the financial magnates living like mediaeval robber-barons, each in his turreted Trust. But even Bryce, the sober student of The Ameri- can Commonwealth writes of it in the closing chapter of his classical work as "the latest experiment which mankind have tried and the last which they can ever hope to try under equally favorable conditions." In fact the "War for the World" — that eternal duel of Ormuzd and Ahriman, of Good and Evil — stands in America at one of its most critical moments, since our planet was launched upon its mystic adventure. Here is the forefront of the battle, the first line of trenches, always in danger of being re- taken. XX Long before the "Melting Pot" tried to bring home to America by a vivid image of her manifest mission that she carried humanity and its fortunes, I had published in the closing days of the nineteenth century — at the invitation 36 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE of a great American organ — a forecast of the forces of reaction against which she would have to struggle in the new century. "The twentieth century," I wrote, "will be America's critical century. Will she develop on the clear lines laid down by her great founders, or will she survive, like most human institutions, as a caricature and contradiction of the ideals of her creators? Will she fall back into outworn feudalisms, accepting second- hand ideals from the Europe she has outgrown? Small as is the significance of aristocracy in the modern world of Europe, it is at least the petrifaction of what was once living and signif- icant. The original adoration of nobility was not snobbery but respect for real superiority. But the modern American love of a lord is the worship of a withered leaf. That all men are created free and equal is a nobler proposition, if "free" be in- terpreted as having a right to one's own body and soul, and "equal" as having a right to develop one's own body and soul to their highest. America became the exponent of these ideals; every other conception has been tried and found wanting. And for America to hash up again hereditary aristocracy and mili- tarism would be a ridiculous anti-climax. If America breaks away from her ideals, humanity's last chance will be gone — at least for the white races: for perhaps — who knows? — destiny would seek its next instrument among the despised colored races. O if America were less conscious of her own greatness, and more conscious of the greatness of her opportunity! "The Eighteenth Century saw the dawn of generous ideals of the Brotherhood of Man. What the Jewish prophets had dreamed twenty-five centuries before, became the dream of the noblest spirits of Europe. The Nineteenth Century, which, by its electric links, has brought the nations nearer to one an- other physically than ever before, yet closes on the tableau of their spiritual separation — each armed to the teeth and fear- fully watching the others, anxious to outstrip them not in great- ness but in bigness. The Nineteenth Century has set aside the ideals of the eighteenth, but I dare to hope it has not destroyed WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN T>7 them. They will return — but purified of whatever dross of false idealism was in them, and more equated to the facts of life. But let it be remembered that Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, do not belong to the world of facts but to the world of ideals. They are the way man's aspiration shapes the facts, as man's will cuts tunnels through the dumb mountains and lays cables beneath the blind seas. "The Nineteenth Century's own idols have not proved so worshipful as it imagined. If the Press diffuses light, it can also — as Bismarck discovered — diffuse darkness. If Science as a maid-of-all-work is a success, Science as an interpreter of the mystery of the Universe is a dismal failure. Even her im- mense practical boons only serve to amplify our senses and increase our speed : they cannot increase our happiness. Giants suffer as well as dwarfs, and the soul may sit lonely and sad, surrounded by mechanical miracles. "As ever, the soul is the true centre of things, and if America remembers this, she may steer safely through the immense spiritual perils of the coming century towards her old goal of a noble democracy, and may yet point the true path of civiliza- tion to the feudal nations and exhibit the divine element in the long procession of the centuries." XXI Of these ideas "The Melting Pot" was but a dramatic expansion. " A fig for your feuds and vendettas ! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Rus- sians — into the Crucible with you all. God is making the American!" 1 And David Quixano, the young musician, 1 The play, so fatuously suppressed by the Foreign Office, has become al- most a text-book in many American schools and colleges and is constantly performed by their dramatic societies. As I write, I receive a letter from a school-mistress in Connecticut who says: "My pupils love the story and quotations, and we often recite the last glorious outburst 'What a seething and a bubbling! Celt and Latin, etc' Oh, it is splendid to see the little Citizens — Latins, Celts, Jews and Gentiles, all repeat it understandingly." 38 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE whose family had been swallowed up in the Kishineff po- grom, told the comfortable cultured Europe-apers : "You look back on Europe as a pleasure-ground, a palace of art. But I know it is sodden with blood, red with bestial massacres!" ("Romantic claptrap this," according to Mr. Walkley, the dramatic critic; there are signs he knows better now.) But it was in vain that my young idealist, raising hands of benediction towards the Western sky, and his yet more glamorous vision, prayed: "Peace, Peace to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant Continent — the God of our children give you Peace!" Under the slogan of "Preparedness" America is now seething with incipient Prussianism, and announcing with the first fine careless rapture of discovery that "to ensure peace you must prepare for war!" Para helium, forsooth. Para cerebellum! Poor simple souls ! So this fallacy, like the con- fidence trick, is perennial, needing only a constant renewal of fools. "I know that maxim — it was made in hell, This wealth of ships and guns inflames the vulgar And makes the very war it guards against. How often, as the Master said, the sight Of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done." l And so the most peace-loving country in the world is to have the second largest navy, and in time no doubt "the largest on earth." I agree with Lord Rosebery in lamenting this victory of Ahriman in America. 1 "The War God," Act I. WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 39 XXII En passant I may remark on the shallowness of the con- tention that the emergence of the "hyphenated" American during the war has destroyed the " Melting Pot" thesis. It is true Americans from the Fatherland have suddenly resumed the German, even to the point of abetting criminal plots against the Allies. But this is no more a disproof of the fusing process than — if I may use a vulgar image — sea- sickness is a disproof of digestion. An abnormal condition has simply counteracted the process. Sympathy with their country in its hour of trial has given these American Ger- mans a violent centrifugal pull which counteracts the cen- tripetal pull of America. But their re-assertion of race has only made the majority of Americans more conscious than ever of their Americanism, more determined than ever to be a non-European and politically homogeneous people. I say politically homogeneous because the actual physical fusion is a long process and is not even necessary, any more than it is necessary in Britain for Welshmen to marry Highland women or countesses to wed costermongers. That Americans have forgotten " that their chief and only allegiance was to the great Government under which they live" is, said President Wilson, "the only thing within our borders that has given us grave concern in recent months." The attempts — as yet happily defeated — to bring back America to the wretched divisions of the world it has left behind; to call in the Old World to upset the balance of the New, is only another of the proofs of the unrelaxing per- sistence of the sea of evil to dash itself against the dykes of good in that ceaseless war for the world, which consti- tutes the great cosmic drama. 1 1 Canada, it should not be forgotten, is only second as a "Melting Pot" to the United States, and the effect of the war upon Teutonic blood there is 40 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE XXIII The "War Devil" which opens this volume and which unlike all the other war-pieces was written before the war (having appeared indeed in such Continental organs as the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna simultaneously with its ap- pearance in the Daily Chronicle in April, 1913), does not, unfortunately, need the faintest modification now that its outlook has been so wretchedly vindicated. That neither Hague Palaces of Peace nor ever-mounting Armaments would suffice to keep the world's peace unless Reason and Love set to work to untie the world's knots, was a conclusion that sentimentalists did not like to face, believing as they do in short cuts to the Millennium. I differ further from Mr. Carnegie in holding that a mechanical millennium is not only not possible but also not desirable. There are worse devils than even the War Devil, and I said so plainly both in this article and in the lyric "Lament" which was published in the first number of the Daily News and Leader, and had the enthusiastic endorsement of the late Watts- Dunton. Your modern thinker — he goes so fast nowadays he is a futurist rather than a contemporary — has always failed to allow for the element of truth or necessity in ancient institutions — from Capitalism to Christianity, from war to sex-segregation. The attack insufficiently prepared by a superficial analysis naturally fails: is indeed justly bafned by the immortal residuum. In "the Next shown by the fact that the inhabitants of Berlin (Ontario), who are mostly of German descent, petitioned to change the name of their town! The Ukrainians, a more recent immigration, yet numerous enough to support ten newspapers in Ukrainian, enlisted more freely than they were accepted, since it was feared their hatred to Russia might not yet be sufficiently melted. See their national organ Svoboda for February 29, 1916, published in Jersey City, in an idiom of which an old Russian order characteristically remarked: "There never was, is not, and cannot be any Ukrainian language." WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 4 1 War" — provoked by the shower of premature prophecies that this would be the last, that it was "a war to end war"— an attempt is made at a more exhaustive analysis of the causes of war than Pacifists 1 (who, according to Dr. Me- lamed's learned Theorie, Ur sprung, und Geschichte der Friedensidee, have declaimed against it for 2500 years) have ever troubled to make. As wind and fire and water have shaped the lands so war has shaped their distribution among the peoples. As the rain-gauge records rain so history records blood. Yet Canon Gore finds the cause of the present war in Europe's materialism and selfishness (as if the Kaiser's inspiration was not theological), for Dr. R. A. Cram it is due to our inability to build Gothic Cathedrals (as if the Cathedral Ages were bloodless) and Professor Hobhouse traces it to the modern cult of lawlessness in art and life, even in Berg- son's rehabilitation of instinct against reason; as if Prussian militarism was not precisely the glorification of law and order, of reason made mechanical. The analysis of war and politics is continued in the articles on "The Levity of War Politics," "The Absurd Side of Alliances," "The Military Pacifists," "The Ruined Romantics," "Some Apologists for Germany," and "The War for the Words," all of which articles grew out of the attempt to write this Preface to a much smaller book, and had finally to be given their own way as separate entities. "Paradise Lost" on the other hand was my first thought when the war broke out — it has been already published in several places — notably in King Albert's Book. Patriotism and Percentage is in a lighter vein, an old satire of mine, dating from 1904, and more 1 1 must head off at once the critic who would ignore the contents of this book, by a digression proving the right word is " Pacificist." But " Pazifist" is used in Germany and "Pacifiste" in French, and we must accept this short form only as a war-economy. 42 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE than once republished. Its object was to show the absurd tangle that had resulted from the separate evolutions of internationalism and nationalism, and since we are now again talking tariffs, I have reprinted its companion satire of Protectionism in the States. In pursuance of the same line of satiric suggestion I wrote to the Times in 1909 sug- gesting that as the new German Dreadnoughts, which were supposed to be aimed against us, could not be built without the new German loan of forty millions, it was treasonable for any British subject, banker or stockbroker to take part in it. This was of course a hit at our British policy of muddling along intellectually, but in Germany it was received as a piece of disgusting Chauvinism; a reception recalling in a humble way the fury in France over Gilbert's lines in which a certain gallant British skipper explains why he sailed away before a French frigate : " For to fight a French fal-lal Is like hitting of a gal And a lubberly thing for to do." XXIV Reviewing my "War Devil" with handsome compli- ments, Mr. William Archer in an article called "Love, Reason and War" nevertheless boggled at my formula of "Reason and Love," and confessed himself "disappointed at the inert pessimism of the conclusion." For, he urged, if "Love," or a "passionate sense of brotherhood must possess us before we can exorcise the War Devil, there is no ray of hope on the horizon ... for the present state of tension must certainly snap long before 'a passionate sense of brotherhood' can ripen to relax it; and a world- war would effectually crush and ruin whatever tender shoots of world-fraternity may now be germinating here WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 43 and there." He thought therefore that the war could and should be staved off by some more rational means than Love. It will be seen that the "inert pessimism" must now be- long to Mr. Archer, for despite the world-war I do not believe "the passionate sense of brotherhood" so remote, indeed it not seldom reaches across the opposing trenches. I am not thinking merely of the Christmas truce. One hears on all sides of the friendly relations set up between English and Turks, between English and Prussians even. At Souchez, so an officer back from the trenches told a friend of mine, the Prussians actually utter a warning shout to our men when their Minenwerfer menaces. The artillery being of course remote and impersonal shares the apathy or hatred of the civilian, but the men who are brought into living touch (strange words) with one another have the comradeship easily passing into affection that comes to all those who go through common danger. Were the animosity between the French and German real — as real as between, say, Balkan neighbors — how could we possibly explain that astonishing episode recorded by Lord Northcliffe in his vivid narrative of Verdun — when through a rapid thaw "the parapets melted and subsided and two long lines of men stood up naked as it were before each other," and "the French and German officers turned their backs" while "the men on each side rebuilt their parapets without firing a single shot." Supposing to fire would have meant "wholesale murder" what else were they out for? Who has ever heard of two rival dogs that when their chains broke waited to be fastened up again? * Mr. Archer thinks that Reason is enough. But Reason 1 1 asked a young relative of mine back from Gallipoli how he could find it in his heart to kill Turks — a people he had never seen before. " I felt I was killing Germans," he replied simply. 44 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE may tell us what should be done, it supplies no motive- power for doing it. If Love without Reason is fruitful in folly, Reason without Love is altogether sterile. Only by Reason and Love united can we untie our knots. What comes of trying to run the world by Unreason and Hate my lines on "The Place of Peace" sufficiently indicate. I was startled to find that Tolstoy in his secret Diary published in Russia this January uses the same formula as was laid down in my article of 19 13. In Reason and Love he too finds the only practicable alternative to the present governance of Society. 1 The coincidence is the more pe- culiar since Tolstoy unfortunately preferred to base his teaching upon Biblical texts. "Reason and Love" is a better basis. Not only can the Devil quote Scripture for his own purposes, but large sections of people are repelled by quotations professing a supernatural authoritativeness. Moreover, elasticity is lost. Tolstoy, for example, finding the text "Thou shalt not kill," leapt to annex it as an im- movable basis for Pacifism. "Reason and Love" however might very well say sometimes: "Thou shalt kill." Not to mention that a score of Biblical texts say so likewise. Mr. Archer in shying at the word "Love" was only a child of the age before the war. The dry distrust of emotion was perhaps due to the supposed Shavian philosophy, though a quarter of a century ago I remember Shaw telling a Fabian audience how he cried, when he first came up to London, to think of all the misery and was persuaded he would es- tablish Socialism in a fortnight. But I remain unregener- 1 Our world is governed by violence — that is, by hatred. Therefore the majority of those who constitute society, its dependent, weakly members — women, children, and the unintelligent — are reared by malignity and join the ranks of hatred. But if the world were governed by Reason and Love, then this majority would be reared in Love and would join its ranks. To this end Reason and Love must persistently assert their existence. — Tolstoy's Diary. WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 45 ate; I am quite aware that the word "Love" is fly-blown, and like the grand old name of gentleman, " soiled with all ignoble use." Nevertheless "Love is and was my Lord and King," and I abide by my formula. Cecil Rhodes thought that if there was a God — which was doubtful — he would want the world to be all English — that was certain. This is always how the overflowing energy of a great people manifests itself. Bulwer Lytton said every man was a patriot for the best of all reasons — ■ his country had produced him. The true patriot cannot imagine the world-spirit desiring to produce any other types. The late Max O'Rell told me that to a Parisian it seemed comic that anybody should not be a Frenchman. Pan-Germanism is therefore no abnormal dream. Austria's old motto ran: "Austria? est imperare orbi universe 1 " But it is not more magniloquent than our own Rule, Britannia, "All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles, thine." And this "elan vital" for Empire is sophisticated by the poets and orators as Virgil moralized the Roman clutch for the world: " T11 regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; Hae tibi erunt artis, pacisque imponere morem, Par cere subjectis et debcllare superbos." But the God of Reason and Love desires the world to be neither British nor German. XXV The Reform Club of New York has presented to President Wilson a memorandum as to the needs of the various coun- 46 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE tries for ports or markets, which needs constitute the main driving-forces towards war. Not one but could be equitably supplied by mutual arrangement to the advantage of the world at large. Across these commercial needs cut however the racial yearnings and national ideals, but even these could be adjusted by Reason and Love, which could at least remove all inequalities and oppressions everywhere; in which case much fanatical and purposeless patriotism would be peacefully absorbed by superior Kulturen, and the nerve of nationality would be dulled. Those who suppose an acute sense of nationality would continue to co-exist with "World-Peace" want to have their cake and eat it too. There would be just such differences as subsist between Italian towns to-day, no two alike, yet the civic conscious- ness purged (or despoiled) of the wild flavor of the days when Pisa fought Genoa, Siena Florence, or Pavia Ravenna. XXVI Although in "Militarism, British and Prussian," I defend the British sub-conscious and defensive variety of militarism against Mr. Bernard Shaw's identification of it with the true or Prussian variety, I had already suggested in "The War Devil" that there is still too much Khaki in our cosmos. Our civilization, though pacific and industrial and free from military swagger, still revolves round a Court conceived on the old military models, and atavistic in its pageantry and its sympathies. Hence the disrespect for science and letters, and education, which revenges itself ironically when in a war of chemists the chemist is displaced or ruled by the Colonel. The Kaiser was made an Admiral of the Fleet, just as the Tsar has now been made a Field Marshal. Science will not come to its own till a foreign monarch is made F. R. S., which when you come to think WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 47 of it is the only appropriate title for him. A Pension List like ours for Literature and Science — "To Mrs. T. K. Cheyne in consideration of the services of her husband, the late Professor Cheyne, to Biblical criticism, and of her straitened circumstances, £30 — " suggests rather the Re- public of Andorra or San Marino than the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. There is neither a Minister of Fine Arts as there is even in Belgium, nor is there a National Theatre to exalt the national temper or to rescue the drama from under the unclean thumb of the Syndicate. Even in the Lord Chamberlain's office one stumbles on colonels, and when "The Next Religion" was prohibited I had to discuss theology with colonels, of the verbally uninspired kind that corrected Gilbert's "chambers fit for a lord" into "chambers fit for a heaven," it being an office instruction that "Lord" was a theological term. As the horizon ac- cording to Sydney Smith was — when a certain lady ap- peared — clouded with majors, so is the horizon of the British Government darkened with colonels, gentle and honest as Colonel Newcome, but also as inefficient. They are Colonels even in the War Office. XXVII And it is perhaps because they are there — instead of plain business men — that it is so difficult to help one's country. At the very outbreak of the war I indicated to a Cabinet Minister of my acquaintance a serious defect in one of our munitions — of which I had been specially in- formed — and my letter was neatly docketed. When the War Office was clamoring for men, I asked it to sanction the raising of a Jewish Foreign Legion, similar to the Zion Mule Corps which was doing so brilliantly at the Dar- danelles and the commander of which was cabling me in 48 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE the spirit of Oliver Twist, and again the request was ac- knowledged. Finally I drew attention in the most authori- tative quarter to a most important new invention, which might not impossibly make the whole difference between defeat and victory and which was patriotically offered to the Government without a farthing of royalty. This time — so dire was the need — it looked as if something would be done and the thing was pushed in many directions and by many influences. Yet six months passed without result! Outraged, I made a supreme effort. A Cabinet Minister assured me everything would be done to help me. I re- plied indignantly that it was I who was trying to help the country. I was now invited to the War Office, courteously received by colonels. Things happened — and then again silence! The inventor's nerves broke down at last and at the sick bed we both abandoned the hope of helping such a country. Four months later and with practically no further effort from outside the invention was to some extent taken up! Now of course either it is a useless invention and should not have been taken up even now, or it is supremely important, and the delay was criminal. The inventor, instead of being prostrated and almost killed off should have been imprisoned by our anx- ious country in a palace, with black slaves to gratify every wish, and attendant mechanicians waiting with motor-cars to bear off the perfected pattern as soon as it was finally tested. Imagine the Germans having the chance of such an invention! "Almost," I say to the War Office, "almost thou persuadest me to be pro- German." The Government offices have now abandoned red tape for white, which is more economical. Let us hope, it is also symbolical. 1 But it would be unfair not to admit that with a War Office 1 Compare the amusing chapter on "Olympus" in The First Hundred Thousand, by Ian Hay WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 49 adapted for a "Contemptible Little Army" called on sud- denly to cater for millions, it has done better than could have been expected. Not to mention that in this instance professional scientific jealousies may have sub-consciously impeded, for as Hazlitt says: The unavoidable aim of all corporate books of learning is not to grow wise, and to teach, but to prevent anyone here from being or seeming wiser than themselves. XXVIII If we are to get away from the colonels it must not be merely by calling in science to help organize war as Professor Armstrong demands — indirectly as intellect would thus profit in the scale of recognition once it was mobilized for war. There must be a complete " trans- valuation of values." Sir William Tilden demands more honors for science and that the Presidents of Scientific bodies should be ex officio members of the Privy Council. Even this suggestion, excellent as it is, does not go far enough. What we have to do is to recognize the emergence of a modern pacific, industrial civilization from the outworn militarist State by a new set of social symbols and a transference of honors to the leaders of the new organism. Otherwise Prussians remain potential in the germ everywhere. This is a reform I have often advocated. Here for example is a speech made by me in the last century to a Business Club — the date is not noted, but admirers of Lord Rosebery may trace it from the allusion to him, which shows him more in-seeing than most politicians. "When'I find Lord Rosebery pointing out to his nation that the silent campaigns of commerce are at least as decisive of the fate of nations as the noisy operations of the battlefield, I feel 5