Class JU f_ Rook • L 5 7 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from The Library of Congress http://www.archive.org/details/waraftershortcha01odg THE WAR AND AFTER Short Chapters on Subjects of Serious Practical Import for the Average Citizen from A. D. 1915 onwards BY SIR OLIVER LODGE, F.R.S. PRINCIPAL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM AUTHOR OF "RAYMOND OR LIFE AND DEATH," ETC. NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY MAY -4 1918 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ©GLA497160 TO PRESIDENT WILSON AT ONE TIME PRINCIPAL OF THE UNIVERSITY THIS EDITION IS DEDICATED WITH THE ADMIRATION OF THE AUTHOR England! the time is come when thou should'st wean Thy heart from its emasculating food; The truth should now be better understood; Old things have been unsettled; we have seen Fair seed-time, better harvest might have been But for thy trespasses; . . . England! all nations in this charge agree: But worse, more ignorant in love and hate, Far — far more abject, is thine Enemy: Therefore the wise pray for thee, though the freight Of thy offences be a heavy weight. Oh grief that Earth's best hopes rest all with Thee! Wordsworth, Sonnet XXI PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION THIS book was published in 191 5 at a time when events were going hard for us. We had no adequate supply of munitions, and our men had to suffer bombardment with severe economy of retort. Since then things have mended, the Nation has provided what is necessary and set its teeth in a firmer grip, but our feelings, whether for friend or foe, have not appreciably changed, and there is practically nothing in the book that need be altered. Nothing to be changed, but something loud to be added, something that the world is shouting, something vivid in historic significance. One of the great phases of history is being enacted before our eyes — the union of the Dominions and of the New and Old Worlds, a hand-clasp of friendliness across the seas, a beginning of the Federation of the English-speaking race. Welcome, thrice welcome, are our brethren now definitely enrolled in an unselfish Crusade for free- dom and righteousness. Surely this exalteth a na- tion. Never was the star-spangled banner so glo- rious as when it was unfurled in a vigorous and decisive effort to bring to nought all that mean and ugly preparation, to counter all that ruthless effi- ciency, which sought by violence and cruelty to dominate the earth. A Nation never yet defeated, nor likely to be defeated, has after mature consideration and un- exampled patience done even more than was asked viii PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION or expected; it has entered into the struggle as if it, too, had been endangered, has esteemed no sac- rifice too great for the nobility of the cause, and now upholds on the distant Continent of Europe the threatened freedom of mankind. The conse- quences of such an action are not to be estimated by any one generation ; they stretch beyond our narrow purview, and will benefit our descendants a millennium hence. It would surely be well now for every civilised nation to join in, to bear at first hand some of the burden, to feel directly some of the evil, of this atrocious War; and thereafter to meet and decide that civilisation had reached a point at which state- organised brutality and destruction must cease, that underground and undersea miscellaneous slaughter with accompaniments of poison and filth shall never more be regarded as an endurable method of settling international affairs, and that never again shall the discoveries of Science be pro- faned in this diabolical manner. If there are special virtues cultivated by war — as in old time there certainly were— we must learn to acquire them by other means. The world is now a unit as it never was before ; mankind must learn to behave as one family on this small heavenly body that we call the earth; the cultivation of in- ternational friendliness and confidence and honour must be the permanent aim of every statesman worthy of the name; and the present ghastly af- front to the peaceful heavens must be the last. To that end our children must strive, and may God grant them wisdom and insight and courage and faith. Ouver Lodge:. PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION THE Workers' Educational Association, and other organizations, have provided or rec- ommended for their students a large sup- ply of historical literature connected with the war, and it may be hoped that much of it is being read by those whose voting power — surely under some strange providential guidance — helps to control the conduct of this country's affairs. But the mass of material is so great, and the time for reading so short, that an attempt to concentrate attention on special points and to emphasize some of the more pressing and practical features of the pres- ent difficult but hopeful situation, may be useful. It is with this sole but very serious aim that the following chapters have been written. As I have no pretension to be an historian I shall often quote from other writers when dealing with historical facts and national characters. Of all the readily accessible treatises dealing with the crisis, perhaps the most noteworthy anticipation of current events and impartial survey of the na- tional characteristics which have led to the present outburst is contained in a book called The Anglo- German Problem, written well before the outbreak of hostilities and published in 19 12 by that distin- guished Belgian, Dr. Charles Sarolea, Head of the French Department of the University of Edin- burgh. I shall quote a few passages from this book to illustrate the clear knowledge possessed by experts a few years ago. ix x PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION As to the rights and wrongs of the diplomacy preceding this war, our own case is so clear and strong, and so emphasized by our just and honour- able — but as it turns out lamentable — unprepared- ness, that only a few people here and there, mis- led by false statements, can require a legal argu- ment to prove it; I do not touch on this subject, but note that an able summing-up by a Swiss- American jurist exists, in a book called The Evi- dence in the Case, by the Hon. James M. Beck, LL.D., of New York, with a Preface by the ex- American Ambassador to this country, Mr. Choate. The book was published by Putnam's Sons early in 19 1 5, and is fiercely interesting. Only one other tract will I mention here — though from others I may quote — and that is the pamphlet by Professor Gilbert Murray entitled How Can War Ever be Right? which I hope will be read by all premature pacifists. It is highly desirable at the present time to pre- serve our mental balance. We must, it is true, de- nounce in measured terms the inhuman atrocities which have been authoritatively sanctioned and en- forced on helpless victims, and the campaign of lies and slander with which neutral nations have been affronted by diplomatists to whom every trace of the saving sense of humour seems to be denied; and we must sorrowfully admit that the attitude of those politicians and rulers is approved and fol- lowed by droves of misguided patriots. Yet we should earnestly endeavour to distinguish between these recent outgrowths of unholy subservience to a dominating clique, and the more permanent and friendly aspect of the European nations with which we are at war. We should bear continually PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xi in mind — hard though it often be — the services to humanity, and the lovable, friendly, and homely past aspects of the majority of our present foes. What real quarrel have we with Austria, with the peasants of Bavaria, with the Rhine provinces, with Hanover, or with the down-trodden Prussian Poles? To mention no others, we actually have to reckon the Tyrolese among our foes at the present time — they are furnishing sharpshooters to the German army; and in other only less flagrant cases we are being slain at the call of duty by those who are essentially our friends. To assist them in doing their duty, which else must be repulsive, a cam- paign of hate has been artificially fostered. This dementia is not reciprocated, and it would be ludi- crous were its consequences not likely to be so seri- ous to those of our number who happen to fall helpless into the hands of a temporarily insane peo- ple. But, while admitting with sad astonishment the terrible Downfall in moral status which has been the accompaniment of half a century's aim at World Power, let us see to it that we remember our own shortcomings also; and while proclaiming fully and fairly that they are of a kind differing toto ccelo from those with which we are contending, yet admit sorrowfully enough that we might have done far better in the past, and hope that we may have wisdom and resolution enough to do better in the future. O. J. L. May, 1915. CONTENTS PAGE Preface to the American Edition ..... vii Preface to the English Edition ix Part I : The Past CHAPTER I. The Great Age of German Philosophy 3 II. German Characteristics : Their Strength and Weakness 10 III. Revulsion Towards Materialism . . 14 IV. Revolt Against Christianity ... 22 V. Moral Power of Nations .... 28 VI. Modern German Philosophy . . -34 VII. A Conflict of Ideals 45 VIII. Two Fallacies 56 IX. Germany and England: German Atti- tude 62 X. England and Germany: English Atti- tude 75 Part II : The Present XL "S.O.S." What is the War for? . . 85 XII. Material Efficiency and Self-Interest 92 XIII. Evil or Aggressive War 103 XIV. Savagery 109 XV. Non-Resistance and Defensive War . 118 xiii xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XVI. Christianity and Pacifism .... 126 XVII. " Love Your Enemies" 132 Part III: The Future XVIII. The Outcome 143 XIX. On the Dulness of War, and Its Civilian Aspect, and on Effective Neutrality 149 XX. Social Unrest . 156 XXI. Industrial Conditions 166 XXII. Social Reform . ....... 178 XXIII. Education and Science . . . 190 XXIV. Peace and Disarmament .... 203 XXV. National Rearrangement .... 208 XXVI. The Future of Europe 217 XXVII. Other Home Reforms 227 XXVIII. Conclusion 241 Index to Quotations 245 Index . 249 PART I: THE PAST Corruptio optimi pessima In a democratic country of thirty-six millions it may seem infinitely unimportant what one individual does or thinks, as compared with what in an autocracy one man, and that the irresponsible ruler, does or thinks; yet the fate of the democratic country depends clearly enough upon the collective effect of the views and character of each one of her individual citizens; and whilst there is here less danger of a selfish policy, through the obvious difficulty or combination for such an end, and through the necessary conflictfof interests, there is more danger of apathy, through each man thinking that these things are not his concern. — E. de Selincourt. THE WAR AND AFTER PART I: THE PAST CHAPTER I THE GREAT AGE OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY WHY is .the world so horrified at the out- burst of savagery which has now oc- curred? Because it is a blasphemous prostitution of high gifts and a dragging in the mire of a noble Past. The old Germany was full of attraction for thoughtful Englishmen: it had much that was consoling amid the welter of trade and politics and business and sport which seemed to saturate the British atmosphere. The peace- fully social and calmly learned surroundings of Germany were restful, and it could really be re- garded as a spiritual home. Briefly let me try to illustrate, by a very few extracts from German literature, the kind of shock which must have been experienced by those who have been well acquainted with the Germany of the past. The greatest Teutonic names in Philosophy are surely those of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. A few short extracts from these writers will give an idea of the peaceful absorption in which they lived and 3 4 THE WAR AND AFTER worked, and show how far the country was in its greatness from the Prussianized Germany of to-day. Modern Germany is a young nation, and "may be said to have had a sober youth. She has been blamed for culpable absent-mindedness and absorption in mystic speculation, while other nations were stealing a march upon her in ex- ploiting the habitable world. I believe," says J. H. Muirhead, "that never was she truer to her- self/' In remote Konigsberg, in Eastern Prussia, on a monument to the memory of Immanuel Kant, the first sentence of perhaps the greatest passage written by him is inscribed, in which the two immensities of Nature and Spirit are held to- gether as for a moment for men to contem- plate. "Two things, the longer and oftener I contem- plate them, fill my soul with ever new and ever growing awe — the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. "I cannot regard either of them as veiled in darkness, or as belonging to some transcendental realm beyond the range of my perception. I see them before me. I connect them directly with the consciousness of my own being. "The first of them begins from the position I occupy in the world of sense. It extends my con- nexion therewith into an immeasurable space — > with world upon worlds and systems upon systems — with the boundless time of their periodic motions, their beginning and their duration. "The second begins from my invisible self, from my personality. It places me in a world which GREAT GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 5 has true infinitude, whose outlines only the under- standing can trace, and with which my connexion is not merely accidental, as it is with the world of sense: my relation to it is universal and neces- sary. "The vision of the first nullifies my importance. I am but a brute creature, which has borrowed the material of which it is made, and must give it back again to the planet on which it lives — the planet itself hardly more than a speck in the vast universe. But the vision of the second raises my worth be- yond all limitations. It exhibits me as a being which has mind, and is endowed with personality. In me is revealed the moral law, which shows me independent of all animality and of the whole world of sense, accepting neither conditions nor bounds but pointing onwards to infini- tude." And Sir Henry Jones, commenting on this pas- sage and on the philosophy of Kant generally, in his Provincial Assembly Lecture 1912, on "The Immanence of God and the Individuality of Man," writes thus: — "The world of sense is now being re- valuated: the whole scheme, including man, is being interpreted anew. It is maintained, with a confidence which is growing, that sense and the things of sense, and the whole scheme of finitude, do not obscure but reveal the eternal veri- ties. The temporal is not secular any more, nor is there anything in this wide world which is com- mon and unclean; unless, alas! man has made it so." Such philosophy is by no means barren; and, as a practical outcome, a friendly and co-operative 6 THE WAR AND AFTER federation of humanity is looked forward to as an ideal for the future. Professor J. H. Muirhead tells us, in his ad- mirable little book German Philosophy in Relation to the War, that "there dawned upon Kant, not as in the Middle Ages as a theological dogma or as a legal speculation, nor as with some mod- erns as a poetic dream, but as a consequence of a mature philosophical conviction, the possibility of a peaceful federation of States, which should re- place the present transitional phase of armed violence tempered by partial and precarious treaties." It was this idea that he worked out in his old age in the short essay on Eternal Peace. He there sets out in the form of preliminary and definitive articles the conditions, negative and positive, of such a peace. "Mo treaty of peace can be a real one which is made with the secret reservation of material for a future war." No independent State (great and small are here the same) shall be acquired by another, by inherit- ance, exchange, purchase, or gift. Standing armies shall in time cease. No public debt shall be contracted for purposes of external action. No State shall forcibly interfere with the Con- stitution or Government of another State. No State at war with another State shall commit such hostile acts as must make mutual trust im- possible in a future condition of peace. He denounces assassination, poisoning, breaches of capitulation, and attempts to make use of treachery among the enemy; and he adds a warning against "punitive wars" between States, as inconsistent with the idea of political GREAT GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 7 right. All these things are the destruction of trust between nations. If practised and per- sisted in they can only end in a war of exter- mination and "the kind of eternal peace that would be found in the great graveyard of the human race." "The fact," says Kant, "that the sense of com- munity among the peoples of the earth has gone so far that the violation of right in one place is felt everywhere, has made the idea of a citi- zenship of the world no fantastic dream, but a necessary extension of the unwritten code of States and Peoples." To those who regard attempts at permanent international friendship as hopeless and Utopian, Muirhead would reply that "the essential prin- ciple on which we are to go in all politics is that the practicable is to be measured by the right, and not the right by the practicable. We must gradually learn to say in politics as in morals, 'I ought, therefore I can/ " This also is the view taken by one of Ger- many's greatest philosophers: — "The binding cord," writes Hegel, "is not force, but the deep-seated feeling of order that is pos- sessed by us all." He has no words strong enough to denounce von Haller — the von Treitschke of his time, who had written: "It is the eternal unchangeable decree of God that the most powerful must rule, and will for ever rule," and who had poured contempt on the national liberties of Germany and our own Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights as "mere documentary liberties." In all this, Hegel says, Haller has confused the force of right with the right of force. "The 8 THE WAR AND AFTER power he means is not the power of the right, but the power of the vulture to tear in pieces the innocent lamb." "War is not the sequel, it is the failure of politics. The sequel of politics is art, science, religion — all that goes to make what Aristotle called the good life — for the full development of which the State is the essential condition. But the State is far from, supreme. Above and be- yond the State there is the spirit of the World, which is also the spirit of God, before which all things are judged: The history of the world is the judgment of the world" (a saying usually attributed to Schiller). Wherefore, says Hegel again, looking forward to the future, "let us together greet the dawn of a better time, when the spirit that has hitherto been driven out may return to itself again, and win room and space wherein to found a kingdom of its own." And so once more back to the anticipation of Kant :— "We may reasonably hail the Kingdom of Heaven as soon as ever the principle has taken root generally in the public mind that the efforts and creeds of the Churches should all point in one direction — all have one aim — a Divine com- munity upon this earth. For this principle, because it is the motive force of a continual striving towards perfection, is like a seed that grows up and produces other seed like itself; and thus contains implicitly the whole fabric which will one day illuminate and rule the world." Finally let us quote the aspiration of Fichte, GREAT GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 9 whereby he encouraged his Nation to strive to- wards this great end: — "All ages, all the wise and good who have ever breathed on this earth, all their thoughts and aspirations after a Highest, mingle in these voices and surround you, and raise supplicating hands to you. Even Providence, if one may say so, and the Divine plan of the world in the creation of a race of man, which indeed only exists that it may be taken into men's thoughts and brought to reality by them, pleads with you to save its honour and its very being." To us and the Allies these words might be addressed to-day. Alas! only a lunatic would now address them to Germany. CHAPTER II GERMAN CHARACTERISTICS I THEIR STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS HOW are we to understand the strange dif- ferences of aim and outlook between the Germans and ourselves? An enlightening article by Baron von Hiigel in a magazine called The Quest for April 191 5 is of considerable help. He speaks of the German thirst for theory, and of the English contrary habit of shrinking from all systematic thought, as specially char- acteristic :— "Theory, system (Weltanschauung) , is, for the average Englishman, something that instantly puts him ill at ease, or at least something that he dis- believes and avoids; for the German, it is in his very blood. ... It is this innate need of sys- tem that renders the German steady, but also obstinate; virile and brutal; profound and pedan- tic; comprehensive and rich in outlook, and ration- alist and doctrinaire." Germany must be considered a sentimental nation. The feeling of patriotism is allowed a good deal of sentimental expression. They seem to have but little faculty of self-criticism; or perhaps it is the absence of any sense of humour that enables them to say and sing things, at meet- 10 GERMAN CHARACTERISTICS 11 ings and suppers and smoking concerts, which trend perilously near balderdash. An Irish gath- ering of the same kind is less sentimental and more amusing. The Kaiser's speeches are typical of this sort of attitude, and, though rather fine, would be impossible to any one who realized that he was on the verge of making himself ridiculous. The ethnologist Dr. A. H. Keane, in The Living Races of Mankind, writes: "All admit that the German is capable of a deep love of nature, of rare poetical feeling, and devotion to any cause he may have embraced. [But] he is easily led into extremes, genuine sentiment becomes over-sen- sitive, anger rises to fury, resentment to ran- cour and hatred, in the pursuit even of noble ideals." Imperial enthusiasm, however legitimate, always seems liable to lead to exaggeration and to a trampling on the rights of others. So Germanic enthusiasm has been misled, warped, and made harmful by the dominating influence of Prussia in practical politics; advantage has been taken of current sentiment, and it has been applied in practice with untoward and bombastic and es- sentially stupid results. The nation has submitted itself unduly to the Prussian spirit, but we can trust that the general German characteristics will eventually overcome this same evil spirit — "a spirit," says von Hiigel, "not confined to Germany, and which is even more the enemy of the German soul than it can ever be of our own military peace." The difficult thing to understand, he goes on 1% THE WAR AND AFTER to say, is the thorough and "apparently life-and- death allegiance of a people, not only highly edu- cated and, in the professional classes, mostly awake even unto scepticism, but also, surely, in- curably idealistic and mystical, to so thoroughly cold and calculating, mechanical and cynical, a system as is the Prussian Realpolitik, with its con- ception, and largely its practice, of a frankly un- moral statesmanship. "All men, at least here in England, see and know that this frankly Machiavellian policy, originally special to the Prussian militarist school, is now practised, inculcated, systema- tized and assumed by Germany (in so far as Germany now operates as a determining, political, diplomatic, and military power) with a deliberation, preparedness, persistency, and ruthlessness, both towards its own German in- struments and towards its non-German oppo- nents, unmatched, on such a scale and amidst such civilized peoples, throughout the annals of the world." The veneer of civilization quickly peels off an upstart race and shows the barbarian beneath. This is always liable to happen amid the stress of war, but it is usually kept in control by higher authority. In the present case, however, there is no higher authority. The veneer of Prussian civilization was so thin it peeled off before the war began, and the brutalities were contemplated beforehand, and gloated on, and carried out, not in defiance of authority, but at its dictation. In an atmosphere of this kind, Peace Con- ferences and all humanitarian talk must indeed GERMAN CHARACTERISTICS 13 have seemed absurd, and must have been en- couraged from cynical motives. By laying real restrictions on ourselves, and getting the bar- barian occasionally to assent to them in words, we were virtually playing his game. We should not attempt such a thing if we were contemplat- ing a battle with savages; and, most unexpected- ly, it is a battle with savages that we are en- gaged in — though, unfortunately, savages with all the tools and weapons and ingenious devices of civilization. Their will to use them, moreover, for the slaughter and torture of their fellow-man, is sustained and intensified and made utterly un- scrupulous by a heathen religion and a false phil- osophy. The whole civilized world should rise in unison against a foe to humanity of this diabolical character. CHAPTER III REVULSION TOWARDS MATERIALISM THE fact is that Philosophy has a much more effective influence on conduct than is generally in this country supposed. It may not be known by that name; people may imagine that they have no particular philosophy of life; but practically they have, and unless they are mere drifting casuals they cannot avoid having one — though its formulation is a subject for pro- fessors. And any country in which as a body the educated class loses its independence and be- comes subservient to State officialism is in a parlous condition; the blind are then led by those whose eyes are bandaged. It may be thought that to associate recent German conduct with materialistic philosophy or with a philosophical revolt of any kind is far- fetched and absurd. It is not so. But to make the position clear may require a little technical argument. Ideas are not remote and inert things, but are living forces in the minds of men, con- tinually influencing character and expressing themselves in action. So now, as J. H. Muirhead has well said, "What we see confronting each other throughout the world are not so much armed hosts of men as 14 REVULSION TOWARDS MATERIALISM 15 opposing ideals of life that have their root in divergent theories as to the inner make of the universe and as to human destiny in it. . . . These things have come upon us, not because German thought has been faithful to its great philosophical tradition, but because it has broken away from its spirit and falsified its results. It is a story, not of a continuous development, but of a reaction — a great rebellion and apostasy." Matter and Spirit There are two main aspects of the physical universe — matter on the one hand, the ether of space on the other. For all practical purposes they are distinct, though doubtless ultimately re- lated. Though distinct in being, they are inti- mately connected in function; and all activity consists in the transference of energy from one to the other, and back again. Static energy belongs to the ether, kinetic energy belongs to matter; and in every case of activity, when work is done, energy is transmuted from static to ki- netic or from kinetic to static; and at the same time it is transferred from ether to matter or from matter to ether. Alternations sometimes go on rapidly — many times in the hundredth of a second; while in other cases energy is stored in one or other form for millions of years. The ultimate nature of both forms of energy is probably unknown, but if either is higher and more fundamental than the other, it must be the kinetic form; and the static may ultimately be explicable as an aspect of that. Take this apparent digression as a parable. 16 THE WAR AND AFTER There are likewise two aspects of the Universe as a whole. There may be many more, but there are at least two— the material and the spiritual —and all human existence depends on the inter- action of these two. A right appreciation of the universe will attend to both these aspects. Wisdom lies in appreciating them both at their true value and recognizing due proportion be- tween them. If either is dominant, surely it should be the higher — it should be spirit, mind, intelligence, soul; which are not material things, but which utilize material things for their manifestation. Spirit and Matter appear to be distinct, though presumably they are ultimately related; and the activities that we call life and mind depend on their connexion, or interaction, through nerve and brain mechan- ism. The key-note of the material universe is recurrence — operation in cycles — the atoms going through various changes, but ultimately returning to their initial state; — a cycle of transformation which may be simply typified by the evaporation of water from the sea and its condensation again as rain. Or again, as another example, we may adduce the storage of atmospheric ingredients in vegetation under the influence of sunshine, — in the form it may be of timber or of coal, — and their subsequent release during combustion: the same molecules being hereafter again acted upon by solar radiation in the leaves of plants, and stored as vegetable tissue once more. In all such cases we see a cycle of recurrence, the atoms and the REVULSION TOWARDS MATERIALISM IT material universe generally being fixed and un- progressive. Even in the sea, we are now taught that sunshine is effective towards life. The sea harvest is only second in value to the land harvest. Animal life can only feed upon vegetable, it can- not directly assimilate material from the mineral kingdom; and vegetation itself can only do so under the influence and with the aid of the energy of sunlight. Thus, as Professor Herdman points out with reference to marine organisms, they rise through the chain — Inorganic molecules, Diatoms or seaweed, Copepoda, Sprat, Whiting, Cod, Man; — and then fall back to lower organ- isms and unorganized molecules once more, descending through the agency of Bacteria to diatoms and debris; a never-ending cycle of changes. And, even without special knowledge, Recur- rence in the physical world is a commonplace of observation. Day and night succeed one an- other, and summer and winter; while live things go on growing, reaching maturity, and then de- cay. The material parts of these also go through a cycle of changes, like seed time and harvest and seed time again; but running through the organic world there is a soul which ages with the times; the experience of the race is stored in mysterious fashion; and instincts — the growth of ages — excite our wonder. The soul of man grows onward, never in closed curves: it is as old as time itself. In grief and in sor- row, aye and also in love and in joy, the world groweth old. Thus the keynote of the psychical universe 18 THE WAR AND AFTER is progression; — movement in spirals it may be, but not recurrent, not cyclical. What may be called life, or the soul, utilizes matter to ad- vance, to go through a real process of evolution. The material is the instrument by aid of which, or rather through the passive opposition of which, it rises; rising in the very act of over- coming inherent difficulties and inertia-like ob- struction. We ourselves utilize matter — the mat- ter of this planet, "the dust of the earth," — for the purpose of manifesting ourselves, our own personality, our own thoughts, our own identity; which are not material, but which utilize matter and make it subservient to our needs. This is conspicuously done by all artists. An artist is one who is specially skilful in utilizing matter for purposes of thought, of beauty, of something which he cannot other- wise convey to the rest of mankind. He ar- ranges pigments, or he carves stone, or he erects a building, or he makes black marks on paper; and the result is a painting, a statue, a cathedral, a poem, or an oratorio. The music has to be incarnated in order to be ap- preciated; the poem has to be heard. In itself, as recorded, in its material aspect alone, it is nothing but black marks on paper; and in- deed the picture is nothing but cunningly ar- ranged chemical material — pigments; and yet what a soul is there displayed, what emotions are there exhibited! The thought of the artist, the emotion of the artist, is called out, not in the matter, but in the receptive soul which has the potentiality for thoughts and ideas akin REVULSION TOWARDS MATERIALISM 19 to his own; and thus is conveyed to all suc- ceeding generations something which the world will not willingly let die. Thought is creative — genuinely creative — in the sense of bringing into existence things which without it would not have been — things which are new to the universe; — and matter is the vehicle in which the thought is incarnate and made mani- fest. The obstruction which matter offers to the artist enables him to put forth effort, calls for effort on the part of all of us. We live in a world where things are not easy. This utiliza- tion of matter is not easy; matter is obstruc- tive; it has inertia. Difficulties have to be overcome, and this is good exercise and train- ing. The result is evolution — the rising on stepping-stones of matter to higher things. The outcome of all the interaction is Life, more Life, more fullness and completeness and elevation of Life. But there is always a danger lest the material become dominant and overpower the spiritual, whose very existence may be denied. For just as in the physical universe matter is obvious and insistent to our senses: whereas the Ether, no matter how substantial it may really be, is in- tangible and elusive, so that its existence is disbelieved in and denied by the specifically scientific philosophy of modern German physicists ; so it is also in the larger scheme to which these things are an allegory. Our present sense organs, inherited from a long animal ancestry, are framed for the material aspect of things. Anything beyond that is a matter of inference, 20 THE WAR AND AFTER and by untrained or unreceptive persons may readily be disbelieved in. A whole nation may go astray in this direction, and, by over-em- phasizing the material, may lose the spiritual sense altogether; and may prostitute science to the sheer meaningless destruction of works of Art and of everything held sacred by hu- manity. The purely material aspect of the Universe has been preached, not indeed by the great philosophers, — far otherwise in their case, — but by the modern smaller men who have revolted from the German philosophy of the great time. How far the bastard materialistic philosophy of Haeckel has taken root in Germany I do not know; but I know that it has far too much power among the classes struggling for educa- tion in this country, — among whom are some who have been seeking to indoctrinate them- selves and their fellows with the foolish para- doxes of '"determinism," wherein people are sup- posed to be automata — guiltless of all blame what- ever they do. Fortunately the consequences — the fruits — of a merely mechanical philosophy have now become conspicuous. The possibility of such a reversal of the process of evolution has been anticipated by Professor Bergson : — "What would happen," he asks, "if the moral effort of humanity should turn in its tracks at the moment of attaining its goal, and if some diabolical contrivance should cause it to produce the mechanization of spirit instead of the spirit- ualization of matter? There was a people pre- destined to try the experiment." REVULSION TOWARDS MATERIALISM 21 The material progress of such a people has altogether outstripped and overpowered, or negatived and reversed, their spiritual advance. "The idea, peculiar to the nineteenth century, of employing science in the satisfaction of our material wants, has given a wholly unforeseen extension to the mechanical arts, and has equipped man in less than fifty years with more tools than he had made during the thousands of years he had lived on the earth. Each new machine being for man a new organ — an artificial organ which merely prolongs the natural organs — his body has become suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being able at the same time to dilate to the dimensions of his new body." There has always been a sort of nightmare that some day mechanism would get the upper hand and begin to enslave humanity. Well, we must take care that it does not. We must take warning by the German downfall, and must re- turn, as our leaders have returned, to the theory and practice of a more idealistic philosophy. CHAPTER IV R3V0I/T AGAINST CHRISTIANITY BUT not against idealistic philosophy only has there been a revolt; we have seen also a Teutonic revulsion against Christianity. Among the latest of European nations to receive it, they doubtless tried hard to assimilate it, and on the whole must be said to have failed: failed only temporarily no doubt, but seriously. It is felt to be a foreign religion, essentially alien to the German mind. For their doctrine of irresponsible force, and the supreme dominance of the State uncontrolled by any Higher Power, is practical Atheism. They use the term "God," but that term may mean anything; it may be applied, and has been applied, to images and beings indistinguishable from devils. The use of the term depends on the attributes ascribed to the Being so named. There are Gods of cruelty and injustice in the Old Testament; and under priestly influence not only was Agag hewed in pieces before the Lord, but helpless non- combatants were sacrificed, and even the beasts belonging to them maliciously slaugh- tered. We had hoped that the civilized part of the human race had got beyond this state of uncon- 22 REVOLT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY 23 scious blasphemy; but it is by fruits that we must judge the value of the belief of any nation and the nature of the God they worship. The savage attacks of Haeckel on Christianity have borne fruit: — Louvain. We see there materialism rampant. The religion of Thor and Odin seems to be taking root in Germany again: very much as Heine predicted: — "When once that restraining talisman, the Cross, is broken, then the smouldering ferocity of those ancient warriors will again blaze up; then will again be heard the deadly clang of that frantic Berserker wrath, of which the Norse poets say and sing so much. The talisman," he continued, "is rotten with decay, and the day will surely come when it will crumble and fall. Then the ancient stone-gods will arise from out the ashes of dismantled ruins, and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes; and finally, Thor, with his colossal hammer, will leap up, and with it shatter into fragments the Gothic cathedrals." The prophecy is being fulfilled more literally than Heine anticipated. But let it not be supposed that Germany has thrown over all religious influence. Professor Cramb asks and answers eloquently the question : — "But what definitely is to be Germany's part in the future of human thought? Germany answers: 'It is reserved for us to resume in thought that creative role in religion which the whole Teutonic race abandoned fourteen cen- turies ago.' Judaea and Galilee cast their dreary spell over Greece and Rome when Greece and 24 THE WAR AND AFTER Rome were already sinking into decrepitude and the creative power in them was exhausted; . . . but Judaea and Galilee struck Germany in the splendour and heroism of her prime. Ger- many and the whole Teutonic people in the fifth century made the great error. They conquered Rome, but, dazzled by Rome's authority, they adopted the religion and the culture of the van- quished. Germany's own deep religious instinct, her native genius for religion, manifested in her creative success, was arrested, stunted, thwarted. But, having once adopted the new faith, she strove to live that faith, and for more than thirty generations she has struggled and wrestled to see with eyes that were not her eyes, to worship a God that was not her God, to live with a world- vision that was not her vision and to strive for a heaven that was not hers." That is supposed to be, and doubtless truly represents, Germany's ideal; and it constitutes the best basis for her ambition not only to found a world-empire, but also to create a world- religion. "No cultured European nation since the French Revolution has made any experiment in creative religion. The experiment which Eng- land, with her dull imagination, has recoiled from, Germany will make; the fated task which England has declined, she will essay." Unfortunately part of their endowment for the task is a thorough assimilation of the principles of Machiavelli, which were based on a clear recog- nition of the essentially weak and self-interested character of individuals and of all other States. Two of these principles may be thus specified:— first, that the end justifies the means; second, REVOLT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY 25 that Christianity spells political and national ruin. So under Christianity the religious are at a disadvantage in all contests with the irreligious, and the world must fall into the hands of the unscrupulous. "Consequently we find Machiavelli telling us, with care and exactitude, when the prince should break his word, when he should betray his ser- vant, when he should throw over an ally he is pledged to support, and so on; and particular emphasis is laid upon the use of fraud to achieve his ends, for 'it behoves the ruler to be a fox as well as a lion.' . . . Machiavelli was the Treitschke and Bernhardi of the Renaissance." It is a point definitely at issue whether Chris- tianity is a religion which any given nation is able to absorb and practise. The Germans have made the effort and failed. We see the result. They regard it as an alien religion foisted on them from Galilee. They may even regard it as a Jewish religion, because it originated in Judaea; though it is one that the Jews have never accepted. It is by no means the first time that Christianity has had to struggle for existence; and we, the Allies, are now the cham- pions of Christendom — an honour which we can hardly be said to have done enough to deserve. Nevertheless, for better for worse, that is our function at the present time; and whether we are worthy of the position remains to be proved. It is to me largely a question of fact — a ques- tion of what is true. If this life be all, then a religion of Power might serve. Whether even then it would be the best, is a question, but it is a 26 THE WAR AND AFTER hypothetical question hardly worth considering. There is no need to consider different hypoth- esis; our business is to ascertain what is true. And if this life be not all — if we have a con- tinued existence, and if Christianity is really a Divine revelation, — then it is no use hedging— half believing and half not believing — and trying to act in between, so to speak. Strength lies in whole beliefs, after having taken the trouble to ascertain the truth. Professor Cramb gives an admirable and sympathetic account of the German ideal of the religion of Power — a kind of Gothic religion — suited, as they think, to the Northern races; as the Classical religion once seemed suited to the South. The pages of Cramb on Treitschke remind me of the pages of Gibbon on Julian and his conflict with Christianity. Then it was Rome versus Galilee; and at the end the Emperor ad- mitted that the Galilean had conquered. Now it is a sort of Napoleonic idea: it is Corsica versus Galilee; and which shall conquer remains to be seen. Napoleon, a pioneer of this movement, also tried for world power or downfall; and in St Helena he gained downfall. Yet he had an ideal; he did much good to France, and he meant to do more good to the world as soon as he had become supreme. I suppose that Prussia thinks the same. It really does believe in German culture, thought, and character, and wishes to impose them on the world. It thinks the way to do that is by main force. That is part of the religion of power; it is a fighting religion, as Mohammedanism is. REVOLT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY 27 That is where it has its present advantage over Christianity, which is essentially a religion of peace and goodwill. It seems an unequal con- test; and if the whole of the power were ter- restrial, so it might prove. The well-prepared and fighting nation appears to have every advantage. Nearly every advantage it really has. We ought not to assume that we shall always win. The consequences of defeat are too terrible to contemplate, but they might have to be undergone. We should then have to submit to a tyranny such as we have hitherto only read of. We should have to pass under the yoke. Civilians would have to stand and look on while horrors were perpetrated; and after- wards our existence would only be by the per- mission of our masters. Slavery — which we have helped to exterminate from the world — would be enforced upon us. We have run a great risk; the country has not taken it seriously enough. Mons was with- in an ace of being a disaster. The Germans over- ran France, and were close to Paris. What turned them back? I do not know. I doubt if any one fully and completely knows. September 3rd was a critical day. It is a war against Principalities and Powers and spiritual wickedness in high places. I myself believe in assistance from on High. [It may be necessary to explain that I am not referring to inci- dents imagined by writers of fiction.] CHAPTER V MORAL POWER OF NATIONS A REVOLT against Christianity I have called it. For surely one part of the essence of Christianity is that the weak should over- come the strong. That seems to be meaningless nonsense to the Prussian governing mind; for ac- cording to one of their writers, the unpardonable sin — the sin against the Holy Ghost — is weakness. Strength, dominance, power to impose your will on others — force of that kind is their conscious aim and object. That any weak nation should interfere, or delay the accomplishment of that object rouses their fierce indignation; yet they will find their strength succumb to weakness, and the nation which they have overpowered and op- pressed will be their ruin. They fear Russia; they pretend to respect France, though they wish to smash her beyond recovery; they hate and try to despise England; but the nation before which their strength will ultimately go down in deep disaster is the one they have held in derision and over which they have ridden rough- shod — Belgium. All honour to its King and his indomitable spirit, which rose superior to any idea of non-resistance to violence and wrong. 28 MORAL POWER OF NATIONS 29 The world is the richer for the experience of the summer of 19 14, and Belgium has inscribed its name on an eternal roll of honour — the roll of those who have died in holding a pass against overwhelming odds. All Humanity blesses the heroic struggle for freedom of the Belgian nation, for without their aid the face of Europe would have been changed past redemption, and the Earth might have been subject to a brutal and intolerable dominance. We have witnessed in our own generation one of the classical contests of the world; and the tale will go down to remote posterity — a tale of deep infamy and lofty honour — re- lating how at this time the powers of evil were frustrated, and how the holiest cause emerged, stricken but victorious — triumphing, as always, through grievous pain. ". . . notre force est en nous et nous avons souffert Meme notre douleur . . . devient notre orgueil." "Divine must be That triumph, when the very worst, the pain, And even the prospect of our brethren slain, Hath something in it which the heart enjoys : — In glory will they sleep and endless sanctity.' , Let it be clearly realized by posterity that the Prussian plans were well laid, and that from their point of view they ought to have succeeded. Had Belgium not resisted they would have swept over France before the French were ready, and before we could possibly have been there to help to stop them. After that the deluge! Their plans were for a sudden violent irruption, 80 THE WAR AND AFTER for conquest of great tracts of territory and coast line, and afterwards reduction of the re- mainder at leisure. They trusted in wrong and robbery, and even in spite of the delay they very nearly succeeded. Their attack was a triumph of organization and evil foresight. Everything was prepared to the utmost; the only weakness was that they relied on the help of the Devil, and after the traditional manner he failed his worshippers at the last moment. Neutrality of Belgium People may be surprised at the immense im- portance attached in European Diplomacy to the neutrality of Belgium. It has been in the fore- ground of many treaties, and has been reaffirmed and guaranteed again and again. In 1870 the announcement that England would join against either side which infringed it, was effective; both Prussia and France renewed their obligation to respect Belgian neutrality, the Franco-German War was fought on that basis, and if unwit- tingly troops crossed the Belgian frontier they loyally laid down their arms. It is only on such a basis that small nations can live comfortably as neighbours to Great Powers; and it is instructive to realize how deep- seatedly the doctrine of neutrality is ingrained in the Belgians themselves. A Belgian writer in the Hibbert Journal, the Abbe Noel, writes thus : — "On the morrow of 1830 the powers which had roused us to independent life maternally endowed us with 'perpetual neutrality.' To this neutrality, MORAL POWER OF NATIONS 81 guaranteed by solemn signatures, we vowed to be faithful with a loyalty which was, no doubt, excessive. I well recall how from my earliest years I learnt to contemplate this neutrality as the first condition of our national existence; it formed a dogma raised above the level of dis- cussion, an obligation which formed part of our very existence." How came it then, we English must ask, that our protestations in support of Belgian neutrality were on this last occasion discounted and ignored? It was because it was too generally thought that we should not act up to our duty, that our aims were selfish, and that so long as we were not ourselves endangered we should hold aloof. There have been times when a mere state- ment by a British ruler, that unless certain wrongs are terminated we shall intervene, has produced an immediate effect. But that has been when the ruler was one who had shown that he fully meant what he said, and would move without hesitation, trusting in the Lord of Hosts. The message of Oliver Cromwell, sent in the words of Milton; was sufficient by itself to stop the persecution of the Waldenses. The Duke of Savoy instantly succumbed. Under Crom- well, England became the head and protectress of Protestant Europe — and that without striking a foreign blow. By sheer strength of character and force of right. Would to God that the word of Britain to-day were powerful like that! Power so used is worth having. How came it that our sea-power to-day was ignored by a foe who underrated not our ships or our guns but our morale? 3% THE WAR AND AFTER May it not have been because we were passive when, in the past, Bulgaria was overrun and tortured by our foes' present ally, the Turk? We had guaranteed the future of Armenia, and had replaced Macedonia under Turkish rule, but we lifted no hand to stop the slaughter of Armenians in the streets or among the moun- tains; nor did we make effective effort to check Turkish misrule in Macedonia. One other in- stance, even more crucial,— we did not defend Denmark from the disgraceful raid which took from it Schleswig-Holstein. On the other hand we have been accused of coveting a Naboth's vineyard in South Africa, and of carrying on a diplomacy of bluff, till at length a calamitous war became inevitable. The rights and wrongs of all this are part of the commonplaces of party politics, and any one-sided presentation of the case is sure to be unfair; but that is the way our case appeared to continental Powers, and that is why they neither feared nor respected us. For our sins, — or for our virtues if these were virtues, — we are smitten. We have now at length re- gained the respect of the world, though only at a mighty cost. Let us see to it henceforward that we lose it not again. It is an asset worth having. In a pamphlet issued by the Society of Friends I find the following true statement: — "Instructed opinion no longer holds that the true welfare of a people depends on the extent of territory under its government; a clear distinction has become apparent between administering a country and possessing or MORAL POWER OF NATIONS 33 utilizing its wealth. The great empires are filled with poverty-stricken people leading diminished lives. Certain small nations are models of human welfare to the rest of Europe. ,, I should say this of the country called Tyrol; there are none haughtily rich there, and none poor below the level of self-respect. It is a thousand pities that Austria has been dragged into this infamous war, for it seems to treat its provinces remarkably well, and with it England has till now had no quarrel. "The sword, as the sword, can give no rights. . . . The spirit of conquest never can confer true glory and happiness upon a nation that has at- tained power sufficient to defend itself. . . . In- definite progress undoubtedly there ought to be somewhere, but let that be in knowledge, in science, in civilization, in the increase of the num- bers of the people and in the augmentation of their virtue and happiness. . . . by the Soul Only, the Nations shall be great and free." CHAPTER VI MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY EVEN Nietzsche in his saner moments saw that militarism was a dangerous enemy to genuine German culture, and that it is liable to generate a bastard variety: — "Prussian vic- tories/' he says, "are secured by severe mili- tary discipline, and other factors which have nothing to do with culture"; and he gives warning that if these factors be permitted to grow and spread, "they will have the power to extirpate German mind; and when that is done, who knows whether there will still be anything to be made out of the surviving German body?" Mommsen also sounded a note of warning many years ago: — "Have a care lest in this country, which has been at once a power in arms and a power in intelligence, the intelligence should vanish, and nothing but the pure military State should remain." And after the Franco-German War Nietzsche wrote: — "A great victory is a great danger. The greatest error at the present is the belief that this fortunate war has been won by German Culture. 34 MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 85 At present both the public and the private life of Germany shows every sign of the utmost want of culture" {Unseasonable Contemplations: 1873)- And again, in Human, All Too Human, he says : "The greatest disadvantage of the national army, now so much glorified, lies in the squandering of men of the highest civilization; it is only by the favourableness of all cir- cumstances that there are such men at all; how carefully and anxiously should we deal with them, since long periods are required to bring about the chance conditions for the production of such delicately organized brains. But as the Greeks wallowed in the blood of Greeks, so do Europeans now in the blood of Euro- peans; and, indeed, taken relatively, it is the most highly cultivated who are sacrificed, those who promise an abundant and excellent posterity; for such stand in the front of the battle as commanders, and also expose them- selves to most danger, by reason of their higher ambition." He thus clearly recognizes that war is not a eugenic agent, but is destructive of much which it is to our interest to preserve. Unfortunately not all Nietzsche's writings are of this same character — far from it: — some are little better than inconsequential ravings: and his nation seems of late to have neglected the sanity and assimilated the mania. His genius lay in expressing ideas so forcibly as to arrest attention, and it would have been quite possible for a nation with a sense of humour to disinter the buried meaning, to recognize a vivid truth 86 THE WAR AND AFTER and an earnestness of purpose underlying his utterances, and to regard the form as a dramatic setting. The English nation has to some extent been able to discriminate in this way concern- ing its own more brilliant Nietzschian prophet, — who for instance tells us that if we value any truth we must be prepared to right for it, that if we had a proper horror of poverty we should treat it as a crime and exterminate it. The idea that heroism and strenuous exertion are appropriate in other fields than those of bodily battle inspire the following passage, which contains the most famous of all Neitzsche's maxims : — "I rejoice in all signs that a more manly, more warlike age is beginning, which will, before all things, bring bravery once more into repute! For it must prepare the way for a still loftier age, and store up the forces neces- sary to it, — that age which shall carry heroism into the domain of knowledge, and wage wars on behalf of ideas and their consequences. . . . Believe me, the secret of extracting the greatest profit and enjoyment from, existence is this: live dangerously! Build your cities on Vesuvius! Launch your ships on uncharted seas! Live at war with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, ye enlightened ones, so long as ye cannot be rulers and possessors" {The Joyful Wisdom). And again, more paradoxically: — "Ye say a good cause will hallow even war? I say unto you it is the good war that halloweth every cause" (Zarathustra: "Of War and Warriors"). MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 37 Such sentences — fine as they are — obviously lend themselves to misinterpretation. It is not easy to understand that any large body of people could be so stupid, but the Prussians managed it; and to realize their misreading of philosophic writers we have throughout to concentrate attention rather on the way that things are taken than on what was really meant. They seem to have misinterpreted their prophet until he became really mad; but still he carried them with him. To illustrate the violent things which they found possible to assimilate I regret to have to make abominable quotations, but it is necessary to exhibit and gibbet a few specimens. Speaking of the French Aristocracy before the French Revolution, and its overbearing attitude towards the peasants, Nietzsche justifies it thus: — "The essential point in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it shall not regard itself as a function of the commonwealth, but as its mean- ing and highest justification; that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of any number of men and women, who for its sake must be depressed below the stand- ard of humanity and reduced to slaves, to instru- ments. It must fundamentally believe that society ought not to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding on the strength of which a selected race of beings may be able to devote themselves to their higher mission, and rise to a higher existence ,, (Beyond Good and Evil). And again: — 38 THE WAR AND AFTER "At risk of wounding innocent ears, I lay down the principle that egoism is of the essence of the noble soul." So far he might be under- stood as referring to something like the divine egoism of the Gospel; but he goes on to ex- plain — "I mean the firm belief that to a being such as we are, other beings are by nature subject, and are bound to sacrifice them- selves." This is quite a Napoleonic tradition. It is well brought out by Bernard Shaw in his admir- able short play A Man of Destiny. In so far as a true aristocrat is the flower and glory of his race, there is much meaning in it, but its superficial meaning and immediate application are horrible. And all this anti-socialism can be easily twisted into an overbearing national insolence: witness the following effusion by Herr K. F. Wolff, in Pan-Germanische Blatter for Septem- ber 1914. "There are two kinds of races, master races and inferior races. Political rights belong to the master race alone, and can only be won by war. This is a scientific law, a law of biology. ... It is unjust that a rapidly increasing master race should be struggling for room behind its own frontier, while a decadent inferior race can stretch its limbs at ease on the other side of that frontier. The inferior race should not be edu- cated in the schools of the master race, nor should any school be established for it, nor should its language be employed in public. [If it rebel], it is necessary to use the most violent means to crush such insurrection,— and not to encum- MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 39 ber the prisons afterward! Thus the con- querors can best work for the annihilation of the conquered, and break for ever with the prejudice which would claim for a beaten race any right to maintain its nationality or its native tongue." A writer in the North American Review points out that: — "Here we see an easy but very significant transition has been effected. Nietzsche knew nothing of any master nation existing in the world to-day. His doctrine was that within all nations there was a master aristocracy, and a 'herd' living in more or less disguised slavery. But Herr Wolff gaily transfers the 'Master' quality from individuals to a whole nation — the Germans — and the slave quality to a whole nation, manifestly the French, who have no right to 'stretch their limbs at ease on the other side of the frontier.' This is, of course, a misreading of Nietzsche, but it is a misreading to which he lends himself only too readily, and there is every reason to believe that it is a misreading very widely accepted in Germany." But Nietzsche himself launched into the ut- most violence of language before he had done, and in one of the wickedest of his books, Beyond Good and Evil, emphasizes his weird cult of self- ishness thus : — "The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values; he looks for no ap- proval from others, but takes his stand on the judgment — 'What is hurtful to me is hurtful in itself; he knows it to be his prerogative to con- fer honour on things, to be a creator of values. 40 THE WAR AND AFTER . . . Ruling-class morality is, however, particu- larly strange and disagreeable to the prevailing taste of the day, by reason of the sternness of its principle that one has duties only to one's equals: that one may act towards beings of a lower order, and toward everything that is foreign, just as seems good to one . . . and in any case 'beyond good and evil' "... "We hold that hardness, violence, slavery, danger — and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, arts of temptation, and devilry of all kinds, — that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical, wild- beast-like and serpent-like in man, contributes to the elevation of the species 'man,' just as much as its opposite — and in saying this we do not even say enough. ... To refrain from mutual injury, from violence, from exploitation, to reduce one's will to a level with that of others . . . discloses itself as what it is — namely, a Will to the denial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. One must resist all sentimental weakness: life in its essence is appropriation, injury, the overpowering of what- ever is foreign to us and weaker than ourselves, suppression, hardness, the forcing upon others of our own forms, the incorporation of others, or, at the very least and mildest, their exploita- tion." And in another book, called The Genealogy of Morals, we find that infamous passage about the "blond beast" so often referred to in connection with the ravaging of Belgium, which has been used to justify the instructions given to the licensed Prussian soldiery when at length MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 41 they flung off the last traces of superficial civili- zation : — "Those very men who are so strictly kept within bounds by good manners, respect, usage, gratitude, and still more by mutual watchfulness, by jealousy inter pares, who, moreover, in their behaviour to one another show themselves so inventive in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship — those very men are to the outside world, to things foreign and to foreign countries, little better than so many uncaged beasts of prey. Here they enjoy liberty from all social restraint, . . . they revert to the beast of prey's innocence of conscience, and become rejoicing monsters, who perhaps go on their way, after a hideous sequence of murder, conflagration, violation, torture, with as much gaiety and equanimity as if they had merely taken part in some student gambols. . . . Deep in the nature of all these noble races there lurks unmistakably the beast of prey, the blond beast, lustfully roving in search of booty and victory. From time to time the beast demands an outlet, an escape, a return to the wilderness." The reason such conduct is resented is cyni- cally expounded thus : — "That the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey is in no way surprising; but that is no reason why we should blame the great birds of prey for picking up the little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves, These birds of prey are evil; and whoso is as un- like as possible to a bird of prey, and as like as possible to its opposite, a lamb, shall we not call m THE WAR AND AFTER him good? One can have no objection to their setting up such an ideal, except that the birds of prey are likely to regard it rather mockingly, and to say, We bear no grudge against these good lambs; on the contrary, we love them — for nothing is more to our taste than a tender lamb/ " So we sometimes find the Germans now saying that while they hate England they love France and Belgium. Were it not that the fruits of this philosophy, planted in too rank a soil, had actually turned out so unexpectedly hideous, it might be laughed at as extravagant, and likened to the intention of a mother to make* her son a butcher because of his fondness for animals. But enough of this preposterous; madness! The main fault lay with the nation who drew sustenance from these ravings, and accepted them because of their correspondence with its own im- moral desires. In a series of Essays under the title of "The Comments of Bagshot" which were published in the Westminster Gazette during the years 1908 and 1909, their writer realized very clearly how it was that the Germans were wresting philo- sophical teaching to their own ultimate destruction : it was because they found their literal form ex- pressive of the doctrines which their own selfish bigotry demanded. "Why all this pother about Nietzsche? This mad mystic, trying to make a philosophy out of the principles of the German General Staff, is only our own Carlyle carried to the ultimate logic of his Teutonic ideas, and if you will go MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 43 to him yourself and read his books, instead of taking them secondhand in the bowdlerized ver- sions of his imitators, it will do you no more harm than a visit to the Zoological Gardens, where the Nietzschean principle is in full working order/ 7 And in another place he goes on: — "The worst of Nietzsche is that none of the people who ought to read him will, and that for those who do read him he is virulent poison. Rightly construed, this surging anarchism of his is a revolt against the doctrine which the supermen have imposed upon the world, and a call to the lowly and meek to assert their manhood against their oppressors; and it is a singular perversion which makes it the gospel and the justification of the oppressor. But that is the nemesis of all teaching which seeks to cast out fire with fire. To the oppressed Nietzsche says, 'Go and be oppressors too' — which they never will be and never could be even if they wanted to be. It is utterly use- less to invite the pigeon to become a hawk or to tell St. Francis to turn himself into Napoleon." It is too late now, alas! to argue as to what relic of sense may underlie the Nietzschean ravings. Taken as his countrymen have taken them, and applied as their Professors have applied them — translating into intellectual terms and seek- ing to develop latent appetites and vices in the nation — they are manifestly devilish: and this fact it is which dooms them to extinction. So we happily revert to our own statesman- poet, Wordsworth: — "Everything which is desperately immoral, being 44 THE WAR AND AFTER in its constitution monstrous, is of itself perish- able : decay it cannot escape ; and further it is liable to sudden dissolution. For he stands upon a hideous precipice (and it will be the same with all who may succeed to him and his iron sceptre) who has out- lawed himself from society by proclaiming, with word and act, that he acknowledges no mastery but power.'' If Germany were doomed to win this war, she might con- tinue^ — for how long, we cannot tell — to be the victim of a perverse ideal. But any Englishman who reveres and loves that soul of her which speaks in her music, philosophy, and poetry, must desire her total defeat for her own sake as well as for his country's and the world's. It is incredible that that soul is dead, and that anguish would not wake it from its evil dream. — A. C. Bradley. CHAPTER VII A CONFLICT OF IDEALS WE, unworthy, are agents of Higher Powers in this conflict. We are genu- inely and consciously fighting for the right. We have no other object than to keep humanity from falling below the state it has so far attained, and sinking back into the mire of merely animal materialism and brute force. We stand against the powers of evil, one of the cham- pions of Christendom, resisting decadence and up- holding spiritual faith. That is our strength and may yet be our salvation. There is no false pride in this statement, and there need be no false modesty. The day of trial has shown us both our faults and our virtues. Lamentably deficient in wisdom as we are, we do as a nation earnestly long for the triumph of the good. Heroism, virtue, and strength of character, really do appeal to us, and arouse not perfunctory but genuine enthu- siasm. Moreover, in some directions we are able to act up to our convictions: we strenuously desire to act fairly, and to give our foes and competitors an even chance; and on the whole we achieve this. It is not always so in the stress of competitive commerce; but as a 45 46 THE WAR AND AFTER national characteristic it is so: when we win, we wish to win by fair means not by foul. We have a sense of personal honour, and we have a healthy horror of gratuitous cruelty and savage revenge. We honour an upstanding foe, and we heartily desire to succour a defeated enemy. In all this we have often been misunderstood. It has sometimes been suggested that we must be acting from some ulterior base or cowardly motive, and often we have been accused of hypocrisy. But the charge is a false one. Hypocrisy is not a charge easy to controvert, yet as a matter of fact it is not one of our national vices. Instinc- tively shrinking from it, indeed, we often fall into the other extreme and refrain from putting forward our best motive. We do not resent the charge of a little more worldly wisdom than we really possess ; we rather like to be thought subtle, and resent being called simply good. Yet the latter charge is nearer to our national characteristics than the former, in spite of the fact that our conduct so often falls below our aspiration. Virtue vic- torious and vice vanquished is what really appeals to the heart of the people — even amid communities where, by the warpings of society or the weakness of the flesh, bad habits would seem to be theoretically as well as practically su- preme. Is all this true of our race alone and are these simple and childlike characteristics denied to other nations? God forbid. They are, let us hope and fully believe, characteristic of unwarped humanity. But unfortunately a part of humanity has, for the A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 47 time, become warped by evil teachings; and the more docile and obedient it is the more disastrous is the result. A writer in the quarterly journal called Science Progress truly says that: — "We have witnessed the greatest crime ever perpetrated upon humanity. It is due in the first place to the wickedness or incompetence of those by whom the mass of men allow themselves to be ruled — the prince who pretends to possess the mandate of God, or the politicians who pretend to possess the mandate of the people; and secondly to the fact that, however far civilization has progressed, the mass of men still remain in- tellectually in but little better condition than they were in when they smote each other with sticks and hammered each other to death with stones." It is a curious coincidence that at this anniversary of the battle of Waterloo Europe should once again be contending with a Napoleonic idea of world dominion: this time in a more flagrant and even less pardonable form. The influence of the Na- poleonic spirit is by no means extinct, for as Professor Cramb wrote — and he did not live to see the present war, though he felt it was coming : — "The influence which Napoleon exercises upon modern German thought is peculiar and instructive. In Europe as a whole, in the twentieth century, two great spirit-forces con- tend for men's allegiance — Napoleon and Christ. The one, the representative of life- renunciation, places the reconciliation of life's discords and the solution of its problems in 48 THE WAR AND AFTER a tranquil but nebulous region beyond the grave; the other, the asserter of earth and of earth's glories, disregardful of any life beyond the grave, finds life's supreme end in heroism and the doing of great things, and seeks no immortality except the immortality of renown; and even of that he is slightly contemptuous.* To Napoleon the end of life is power, and the imposing of his will upon the wills of other men. Like Achilles or like Ajax, ever to be the first and to outshine all other is his confessed ambition." Two Ideals Reduced to its elements this war is a war of ideals, a conflict between two ideals of govern- ment; — the English ideal of a commonwealth of nations, a group of friendly states, some larger some smaller, some stronger some weaker, but all working together and contributing each her quota for the good of humanity and the progress of the world ; — that is the ideal on the one hand ; — and on the other, the Prussian ideal of a single glorified state, dominating all others, enforcing its will despotically, imposing its customs, its learning and its culture on all the rest of the world. This ideal is that of a strong resolute autocracy, ruling all Europe, not with the consent of the governed, but in spite of their remonstrance and ignoring their dislike; a government so strong as to be able to crush all opposition, and to do away with all freedom except the freedom to do precisely as you are told; the replacement in fact of freedom by coercion. A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 49 The fact is that, as Mr. Austen Chamberlain said in one of his speeches, "This is a struggle between two ideals of civili- zation and progress — whether the world is to be drilled and dragooned on the Prussian model, or whether the measured order and free- dom which has prevailed wherever the British flag flies is to triumph. " Their ideal, — drill, discipline, and docility, the three desiderata of government, — they must be- lieve in very strongly, or they would not sacrifice so much to enforce it. So long as they managed their own affairs in this way no one had a word to say; but when mis- sionary enterprise is attempted, our approval or disapproval becomes important. Mr. Harold Picton, writing with the object of promoting friendly feelings between the countries and stemming the torrent of hate which he feared might be reciprocated from our side, admits this freely, in spite of his partial admiration and whole-hearted good feeling for the German people, their efficiency, and their virtues. He says : — "In the past these matters have belonged to the internal affairs of Germany, and we have paid them but little heed. Now, however, that Germany proposes to extend her system to peoples comparatively free, her general methods of internal administration are a matter of grave concern for us all. Those methods as applied to others are shortly, 'Be German or be damned/ There are those who would rather be damned. This the German statesmen of to-day did not foresee. I have no contempt for SO THE WAR AND AFTER German individuality and character, — on the contrary, it attracts me; but when an individual begins to consider it his sacred duty to impose his individuality on others, he is on the high-road to a very disagreeable form of insanity. Only strong measures will effect a radi- cal cure." He admits also the meanness of the policy of half upholding an agreement and half withdrawing from it: — "What is low is to get the benefit of an agree- ment and also the benefit of breaking it. What was the method of the German statesmen? Up to the 31st of July the German Ambassador gave Bel- gium to understand that her neutrality would be respected. On the 2nd of August the German Government demanded the immediate passage of German troops. Such a standard of honour would make enduring peace for ever impossible, for an enduring peace must depend upon agreements: it would make a brotherhood of nations for ever impossible, for any brotherhood must depend upon trust." But he realizes, as we all ought to realize clearly, the temptations and difficulties under which Germany labours by reason of its hedged-round geographical position. Whether it ought to feel suffocated or not, it does, in spite of our free trade and open door : and whether it has ever really felt alarmed about possible attack on one or other side — for it must know that its past history has not made it beloved — we need not be surprised at an occasional causeless panic, and at the should- ering of arms betimes against imaginary dangers : — A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 51 "Let us, as Englishmen, imagine our land where Germany now is. Imagine the shifting suspicions of diplomacy on our land frontiers— the huge un- defined power of Russia on one hand, an unfriendly France on the other. Compulsory armament would be inevitable, and the cult of force might sink into our souls." This cult of force has planted Prussia astride of the neck of Germany : it has risen, and now it must perish, with the sword. The years 1866 and 1870 were the fatal years of Prussian supremacy and success. Up to that time German art, German science, German history, were admired and envied throughout the world. It had gloried in the era of Goethe, of Beethoven, and of Helmholtz. Since that date the great men of Germany have been few ; the decline then begun has continued. With some exceptions, no doubt, they have lost their public faith in unselfish action ; they officially disbelieve in chivalry; they deny any moral government of the world; they believe in the rule of the strongest. It is a thousand pities, for in physical science they have done wonders. Who does not remember the splendid achievements of Hertz — that brilliant follower of our own Clerk Maxwell — -whose all too early death saved him from the horrors of this disastrous epoch. E. Gold- schmidt has devised an ingenious extension on the practical side of Hertz's work. In mathematical physics Planck is a name of eminence. In Biology it is true Sir Ray Lankester speaks of the present German position with dispraise bordering on contempt. But in Mechanism and Chemicals and Apparatus the nation still ranks high; its scientific instruments and their design 52 THE WAR AND AFTER are beautiful; it has devoted itself to the design and construction of appliances, specially those which can be used in war. Hitherto in peace time we have reaped the benefit of its instrument makers' well-instructed skill. Now we seem to be fighting a nation of machines. In war-material it is un- rivalled; in personnel it is lacking; its army is itself a machine — a devoted, terrible, obedient machine. To it we of the Allied Nations oppose Men, individual resource and character, the domination of personality — handicapped I fear by the rigidity of officials and by insufficient preparation. Determination there is on both sides; for not in biological metaphor, but in dire reality, it is a struggle for existence. The two ideals are in the field against each other; one must emerge trium- phant, the other must be defeated. There can be no halting between two opinions. It is a very ancient alternative; "If the Lord be God, follow Him; but if Baal, then follow him." There can be no peace till the prophets of Baal are extermi- nated, and the falseness of their creed displayed. Up and down, backwards and forwards, the fighting line may surge; but there can be only one end. Of this we should be well assured, while striving with all our might for its accomplishment. Towards this some are giving their lives, or the lives of those dear to them; others are giving of their substance: and this without stint, for if the cause of God is not triumphant, life on this planet will be no longer worth living. Death is preferable to German rule of the kind we should experience if conquered, and if the dormant national hate, fostered by lies and now fanned into a blaze, were set free on the vanquished. What has been done in Belgium A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 53 would be done in England, and more also. The Belgian homes are an object lesson, clearly dis- playing the character and consequences of the Prussian ideal. Yet I must assume that the people themselves are not consciously evil, only diabolically mis- guided. For they too have an ideal, I grant them that: — one which has become deeply engrained, and has spread from Prussia to the rest of Ger- many, deceived as it has been, with the truth sedulously kept from it. There will be an awaken- ing; and already there must be many thousands who have not bowed the knee to Baal; who long for freedom as we do; and who in due time will make their voices heard. Amid the glamour of apparent success they cannot speak; but when dis- asters come, when they can no longer be concealed, and the nation learns how it has been befooled; when it realizes how it has befooled itself; then the wholesome elements in the nation will emerge, and will strike down the dominant party with execration and anathemas. For this conclusion we can bide our time. Inter- nal forces will work the necessary disruption, so long as we make no feeble, no hasty, no inconclusive peace. It is no time to talk of peace yet; nor will it be for long. Humanity cannot afford to forgo the gain to be derived from a struggle such as this ; nor can it run the risk of having such an awful conflict ever repeated. Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation. And fortunately the 'nations are united as never they have been before. So that a preparation is being made for friendly union among the nations of Europe, and ultimately for that federation of 54 THE WAR AND AFTER the world to which prophets have been long looking forward. Many horrors, much aerial fighting, will precede that time. Tennyson foresaw it all. You remember how he Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue ; Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. Yes, the federation of kindred and friendly nations, each with its own independent powers and aptitudes, its separate life and genius. So will our ideal of free institutions and self-respecting com- munities be fulfilled; — that settled policy of free government which has resulted in the loyal colonies and devoted daughter nations of the British Empire. The result of the struggle will be ultimately wholesome for all the nations concerned, including Germany; for what will be defeated will not be Germany, but a miserably wrong-headed philosophy of life. The Germany to which we owe so much science and learning and art will be re-born ; it will throw off the shackles of a cramping and over- powering despotism of evil: and once more, I sin- cerely trust, we shall be friends. As a sign of grace, let us bear in mind the fine testimony borne by the foe to that great and gallant soldier who had done his best, in face of obloquy, to prepare his own nation for the war which he felt was imminent. An obituary notice in a German A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 55 paper contained the following: "Lord Roberts was an honourable, conspicuous, dangerous enemy, and an extraordinarily brave one; before such a man we lower our swords." CHAPTER VIII TWO tfAU,ACl3S THE errors or mistaken theories which are now supreme in Germany are: — first, a glorification of war, bas>ed on a misreading of Darwinism; and, second, an en- thronement of mere powefr, a belief in the unmoral supremacy of the State. They must be genuinely believed — even if to some extent believed to order — but they are desperate mis- takes. Fallacy No. i Consider them for a moment. First, a mis- reading of Darwinism; a misunderstanding of the phrase "struggle for existence" as conducive to evolution, so that slaughter and active con- flict seem the highest good. The Darwinian struggle is not of this order at all. It is a selection of the fittest to survive, among a crowd of organisms which cannot possibly all survive; a selection of those most fitted to the environment. It is akin to the natural competition and effort with which we are all ac- quainted in peace time; it is not like war at all. The expressions "struggle for existence" and 56 TWO FALLACIES 57 "survival of the fittest," containing, as they do, a suggestion of conscious effort and of ethical signifi- cance, have been to some extent responsible for a certain amount of popular misconception. When we remember that the Darwinistic conception applies to the evolution of plants as well as of animals, we realize how absurd it is to think of it as akin to conscious fighting, or as anything more than a reaction against crowdedness, a mutual effort against severe conditions of life, or at most a struggle for food and light and air. Mutual effort I say, for there is much uncon- scious co-operation about the struggle, far more co-operation than is usually admitted. Not to speak of the obvious case of the social animals, who manifestly contribute to each other's welfare, nor of what there is still less need to mention, the sheer nobility of motherhood — which goes without saying as an example of loving help — we can adduce the interlocking of animals and plants in the economy of nature, and the inter-relation among animals so that by the sacrifice of some species others manage to live, as all illustrating a harmoni- ous and co-operating though unconsciously con- ducted scheme — as unconscious and instinctive as the service bees render to plants, and plants to bees. Thus it is that they all live together and prosper fairly, with numbers kept down to a reasonable level. The mutual depend- ence on each other is a sign of unconscious co-operation and mutual aid, rather than of hostility and warfare. The system is a simula- tion in the unconscious world of love as well 58 THE WAR AND AFTER as of hate, and of self-devotion as well as of strife. But, apart from this, the facts on which the Darwinian theory is based are merely these: — (i) Organisms reproduce themselves and tend to increase in number. (2) The rate of reproduction is so great that it is impossible for all to survive. (3) Those survive, or tend to survive, whose special features are best adapted to their environment. (4) The special features or peculiarities of individuals tend to be transmitted to their descendants. (5) Hence the race gradually becomes better adapted to its surroundings, and accommodates itself to the prevailing con- ditions. (6) The environment therefore, in con- junction with the unalterable facts of here- dity, may be said to govern selection. It is round clauses (4) and (5) that most dis- cussion and controversy arise: and it is not likely that these simple statements solve the whole prob- lem of organic evolution, — far from it. But so far as they go they are undeniable, and the im- portant thing for us is the influence of environment, because that is really the only part over which we have any control. A writer in the Eugenics Review, Mr. T. G. Chambers, says: — "What has to be realized to-day — and this seems to me to be the great lesson to be learned TWO FALLACIES 59 from a study of the principles of evolution— is that man has a very considerable power to determine what is to survive. If this be true a colossal responsibility rests upon man. He may by his actions cause to survive that which he knows to be good or that which he knows to be evil. By his influence upon environment he possesses a considerable control. He may create survival values. The beneficial effect of his influence in this direction will depend entirely upon his ethical principles. Just as man might, if he chose, breed hideous gruesome beasts by selection, and thus produce horrors, so he can by his influence over the environment of his own race give survival value to base and evil characteristics, and thus cause the deteriora- tion of the race. He is working within the laws of evolution. He may, on the other hand, so influence environment as to tend to give survival value to the highest and noblest characteristics, and thus, working within the same laws, he is raising the ethical standard of the race." So far as humanity alone is concerned the really helpful struggle for life is not that of the battle- field, but of the City, the workshop, and the home; the struggle for political and religious freedom, for reasonable leisure, for more domestic comfort; and above all the never ending striving towards a higher standard of conduct and greater nobility of soul. Fallacy No. 2 The second error is the absolute enthronement of material power; the blasphemous notion that 60 THE WAR AND AFTER nothing higher than the State exists, and that there is no moral law, human or divine, to which the strongest State is subject; nothing above its own conception of what is beneficial to itself. Expediency thus becomes the supreme guide; all other considerations are signs of weakness and timidity; the sole national virtue is power to execute what it intends; the one fatal sin is de- ficiency of power. If any given State is supremely strong, there exists no power above it; it is free to execute its own behests, and to dominate and coerce the world. This pernicious doctrine, the genesis of which we dealt with in Chapter VI, is what must be over- thrown; and so great is the importance of the final demonstration of its falsity that a heavy price is being paid for it, in suffering and death. In no other way could the conviction of error be so thoroughly burnt into the conscience of humanity. And the conditions for the proof are sound. No one will be able to say that the German nation was weak, that it was caught unprepared, that it had not every advantage which the appliances and discoveries of the nineteenth century could grant it. In all adventitious and material ways it had immensely the advantage. It chose its own time, and it struck with vigour, determination, and enthusiasm. Only on the spiritual, the immaterial side, was it deficient; and so the conscience of humanity has risen up against it, and it will be defeated. The whole strength of every enlightened nation, and of every individual in the nation, must com- bine to resist it. And if England is in the van, TWO FALLACIES 61 as it is in the forefront of the battle; if it draw upon itself, as it is doing, the hatred and fierce antagonism of the powers of evil; so much the more joyful and hopeful for the England of the future. It will come out of the struggle braced and invigorated, and renewed in the spirit of its mind. We needed this effort, and this sacrifice of ease and prosperity; but the sinews of the na- tion are still sound. She has seen dark days before; indeed, as Emerson says, she has "a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day." And those who are young have the joy of taking part in the struggle, and will reap the fruits of the great national experience henceforth through- out their lives. Let them see to it that they make use of their opportunities and have nothing to regret when the trial is over, when victory super- venes and peace reigns once more. Other less obvious opportunities there will always be, when these exceptional ones are gone: that is true: but lost opportunities never return. CHAPTER IX GERMANY AND ENGLAND ; GERMAN ATTITUDE Fas est et ab hoste doceri IT is not waste of time to study the character of an alien civilization if it is sufficiently like our own to enable us to learn something from it — even if we gather from it only caution and warning. From Germany we have much to learn, both in the positive and the negative direction. In the past we have been trying to assimilate the good. In the present we must also take warning by the bad. The British idea that every citizen is entitled to express his opinion on politics has no doubt its ludicrous side, but it is also a safeguard. Instinct may be wiser than knowledge in some cases, and it is to be presumed that the average man is governed by a sort of instinct, since he certainly cannot have much knowledge. Undoubtedly, however, he ought to have more, and that is one reason why W.E.A. and other Labour movements in the direction of self -education are so im- portant. It is also the chief reason why the Country should be kept better informed. Self-sacrificing action cannot be expected merely on a basis of gossip and uncertainty. The information, 62 GERMANY AND ENGLAND 63 both about facts and about policy, which privately spreads among politicians and is thus presumably accessible occasionally to highly placed enemies, should be more widely and definitely disseminated; as it is in France, where the Government — more clearly and logically recognizing the fact of democracy — takes the people into its confidence. Common rumour is fal- lacious and slanderous at times, and too little gratitude is felt for those who are bearing a serious National burden. But, on the whole, one instinct that I hope our race is acquiring is not to believe in lies, however insistently they are told us, but to read between the lines and judge of the facts for ourselves. This instinct seems not to exist in Germany, where the people swallow lies like chil- dren who have never run the gauntlet of a Public School; where it is said that in the first term new boys believe everything that is told them, in the second term disbelieve everything, and in the third term begin to discriminate between truth and falsehood. The Germans seem to be in their first term; and until they have learnt wisdom by bitter experience they are a danger and menace to the world. Their great Army is like a first-class revolver in the hands of a clever but mischevious child. Their old child-like strength and simplicity are now spoiled — let us hope not irretrievably spoiled. At present "the Germans, having made up their minds to be a nation of the world, are overdoing it with a German thoroughness. They have tried," says Mr. Clutton-Brock in his Thoughts on the War, "they have tried to learn wisdom like industrious scholars, but, being a 64 THE WAR AND AFTER people naturally simple, they have chosen the worst possible teachers. They went to the Prussians and said to them, Make us a nation ' of the world; and the Prussians, for their own purposes, did their best, or their worst, with them. "Prussia has gained her power over Germany because she is more utterly worldly than any other nation. We and the French have been worldly enough, but we have always known that there was another world. Prussia has never known that; — or, rather, the other world for her, if it exists at all, is just the same as this one, except that it is more favourable to Prussia. And the Germans, diffident, wavering, and credulous in matters of the world, have been overawed by her narrow certainty. They saw that the Prussians, far more stupid than themselves, had gained power; and they went to Prussia to learn the secret of it. So she taught them that all the German virtues, moral and intellectual, had been wasted hitherto because they had not been used in the service of Germany. Ger- man thought, German virtue, German culture must now be all as proudly and consciously German as the German Army, and, like that, must be or- ganized for victory. The Prussians taught this because they did not understand the German vir- tues ; and the Germans learned it because they were still children and Prussia seemed to them to be grown up." Many Englishmen who have been accustomed to remember with pride their German training, and who still regard the people of that country with affectionate concern, have had to speak in GERMANY AND ENGLAND 65 sad accents lately. Professor Sully, writing in the Hibbert Journal, recently described his ex- periences as a student in Gottingen in and about the year 1867 — i.e. before the Franco-Prussian War — and mentions some of the characteristics which then struck him, thus : — "One feature common to both sexes which struck me particularly was an unwillingness to trespass upon what is a main field of conversation for English people, namely, politics. We soon learned that this reticence was not wholly due to the strong feeling aroused by the recent annexation of Hanover to Prussia. The German habit of leaving the officials to settle what is best for the country seemed to us to be only one illus- tration of the general belief in the expert, in everybody's having his special domain of knowledge his Pach, outside of which he should be chary of offering his opinion. With this respect for the expert there seemed to associate itself a dull uniformity of opinion about men, books, and other things, and an apparent timidity in expressing views of a marked individu- ality. Even in those days one could see the tendency of the Germans to allow their minds to be 'over-drilled.' " And Professor W. J. Ashley also, who received not long ago an Honorary Degree from Berlin, says, on a basis of experience subsequent to 1870:— "In academic circles the legitimate pride in German science seemed sometimes to have become almost an obsession, and to have the effect of shut- ting out of sight what was being done in other lands. It seemed to be hardly realized that what 66 THE WAR AND AFTER Germany had to teach the western world in the way of thoroughness and method had already been pretty well learnt, and that there were intellectual qualities of almost equal value, qualities of lucidity and discrimination and balance, which could per- haps be better learnt elsewhere — even in the despised France. There was a curious national self-satisfaction which failed to perceive that the great new ideas, the waves of intellectual inspiration within and without the realm of scholarship and research, which were affecting the minds of this generation all over the world, were now almost all of them coming from other direc- tions than Germany. Again, it is enough to turn to France, and mention such names as Pasteur and Rodin and Loisy and Bergson. "The word for it all, I am afraid I must say, is simply 'conceit/ But then [he goes on] I have reflected that there have been times when we ourselves were similarly difficult to get on with. I suppose nobody, at this time of day, would say that Palmerston was positively ingratiating in his dealings with other countries; and if we want to see how confined was the outlook of the middle- Victorian Englishman we have but to go back to . . . Thackeray's unconscious ex- emplifications. And as I believed that England had become a little more tolerant, a little less self -pleased, a little less heavy-handed than in Palmerston's time, so I hoped that the German phase of self-glorification and disregard for the feelings of others would also pass away, with- out a great cataclysm. I was mistaken; but I am not ashamed of having ascribed to Ger- GERMANY AND ENGLAND 67 many a reserve of statesmanship and cool sense which it is now apparent it did not possess." Many of us could say the same about our friendly admiration for what we thought was Germany. The revelation has been appalling. The Editor of the Hibbert Journal, in April 191 5, thus summarizes both Germany's strength and weakness: — "Germany is, and has long been, the great head-centre of the critical movement in all its departments. She has turned her critical faculty on the problems of society and has developed an industrial and military organization which for theoretical completeness is without a rival. She has created a social machine which can be set working by the pressure of a button; but, through her constant oversight of the human element, she has left the button at the mercy of the most dangerous element in the State. "While there is no nation which thinks so much as the German, there are many which enjoy more freedom of thought. Her thought is standardized, and the expert controls its direction throughout an immense variety of products. Once the most creative of nations, she has now become the least. Her originality is mainly of one kind: she makes new departures in criticism and invents, or borrows, new ma- chines — social, industrial, military, philosophical, and religious. Nowhere else is psychology so much studied, and human nature so little under- stood." Thus the misunderstandings between England and Germany are not superficial but deep seated. 68 THE WAR AND AFTER They do not merely involve questions of com- mercial interests, but they are rooted in a conflict of principles and ideals. Dr. Sarolea in 1912 predicted that if a war between the two countries did break out, it would not be merely an economic war, like the colonial wars between France and England in the eighteenth century; rather would it partake of the nature of a political and religious crusade, like the French wars of the Revolution and the Empire. The strain between England and Germany, he implies, is part of the old conflict between Liberalism and despotism, between industrialism and militarism, between progress and reaction, between the masses and the classes. One nation believes in political liberty and national autonomy, its Press is free and the rulers are responsible to public opinion; whereas in the other nation public opinion is still muzzled or powerless, and the masses are still under the heel of an absolute government, a reactionary party, a military Junkertum, and a despotic bureaucracy. The root of the evil in Germany lies in the fact that in Germany the war spirit and the war caste still prevail, and that a mili- tary Power like Prussia is the predominant partner in the German Confederation. The fact is that the old policy of Frederick the Great survives in Prussia to this day. It is true that he still governs Prussia. Of Frederick, Bernhardi says: — "The aggrandizement of his territory had become a necesssity, if Prussia wanted to exist on a business footing and bear its royal name with honour. The king saw this political neces- GERMANY AND ENGLAND 69 sity, and took the bold decision to challenge Austria. None of the wars which he waged were forced upon him. None did he postpone to the last extremity. Always he reserved it to himself to initiate the attack, to forestall his adversaries, and to secure the most favourable chances. ,, Compare with this attitude what Bernhardi advised in 191 1 about policy to-day, and about the best method of concealing the nature of what would really be a war of aggression: — "If we did attack either France or Russia, the other would be compelled to come to the rescue, and we should find ourselves in a much worse position than if we had only to combat one adversary. It must therefore be the duty of our diplomacy so to shuffle the cards as to compel Prance to attack us. We might then expect that Russia would remain neutral. "One thing is certain, we shall not get France to attack us by mere passive waiting. Neither France nor Russia nor England need attack us to obtain what they want. As long as we are afraid to be the aggressors, they can gain all they need from us by diplomatic means, as has been proved by the recent Moroccan events. Hence, if we wish to bring about an attack on the part of our enemies we must initiate a political action which, without attacking France, yet will hurt her interests and those of England so severely that both States will feel obliged to attack us. The possibilities for such a procedure present themselves in Africa as well as in Europe." 70 THE WAR AND AFTER Commenting in 19 12 upon this free-spoken utterance, Dr. Sarolea says: — "The General has spoken with the frankness of a soldier, and not with the reticence of a diplomat. The British people will be grateful to the gallant soldier for his candour, however cynical. They will remember some of his admissions and some of his indiscretions, and [warned by these] they will perhaps be less inclined henceforward to political optimism — less inclined to assume that the present differences between Germany and England are to be removed by international courtesies, by Parliamentary visits and banquets, or that difficulties will be solved by a policy of passive acquiescence and blissful repose." Alas! we of the general English public knew too little of what was being hatched behind the scenes, and did not trust the clear-sighted vision of our prophets. For a time ingenious and organized deceit appears to answer, in a world accustomed to fair dealing; but now at length the atrocious false- hoods and lying diplomacy by which Prussian representatives seek to deceive neutral nations have overreached themselves. Their deeds have drowned their words, and the reaction of neutral nations, especially of America, can be expressed in those words of Emerson: "What you are speaks so loudly, we cannot hear what you say." Still we may be puzzled as to why they take all this trouble, and why they detest us so much. For one thing, they are hideously annoyed with our successful colonization, and think that they GERMANY AND ENGLAND 71 could do the same with the same opportunities. If they could, then presumably they would al- ready have done so; but as Governors of Colonies they have been complete failures, and not a population desires to be under their thumb. So they think they can mend matters by whole- sale robbery and by taking colonies, as going concerns, from other people. Dr. Sarolea, with his usual acumen, hits off the position exactly: — "The final responsibility must be traced to the political and moral shortcomings of the German people themselves. After all, success- ful colonization, as distinguished from the old predatory Imperialism, is the fruit of political freedom, of individual initiative, of a spirit of adventure and enterprise; and until recently the German people were lacking in every one of those qualities. "Germany is not really a nation of colonists in the exact sense of the word, for a colonist is a man who settles in a new land, and a man who settles in a new land must be a pioneer and an adventurer. Now the German does not like to settle in a new land; he is so accus- tomed to passive obedience that he does not succeed in those new countries where initiative is the first quality required. He generally prefers to go to old settled countries, like the United States, or Brazil, (or Australia), which have already an organized government." Baron von Hiigel sums up the weakness of Germans, regarded as colonizers, very clearly : — "It is precisely where the Prussianized German 72 THE WAR AND AFTER attains to supreme power, that his defects show and tell. 'Live and let live/ — patience, toler- ance, geniality, comradeship, trust, generosity; the willingness, the desire, to see races, social organizations, religions, subtly different from our own, developing, each at its best, in an atmos- phere of large tolerance; with the benefit of the doubt (where the State appears endangered by such tolerance) always given in favour of the liberty and responsibility of these various in- dividuals and complexes, — all this is funda- mentally necessary for successful colonial rule, and this is not necessarily associated with manufacturing and mercantile (and military) gifts. "It is no accident that England, a great colonial Power, is not a great military Power, and that it holds India with, comparatively, a handful of European troops. You are hardly likely to possess both gifts and tastes to a high degree; and you will, in any case, find that an intense militarism profoundly hinders, and does not help, a wholesome colonial rule. Recent Germany, unfortunately for us all, thinks that not only are these things, at their intensest, thoroughly compatible, but that the one neces- sarily furnishes the might, and hence the right, to the other." Thus the mere fact that we succeed, by ap- parently casual methods, where they fail by highly elaborated officialism, is a cause of much irritation, and has helped to engender an orga- nized feeling of hate. Baron von Hiigel goes on to say, — "The bitterness felt by so many home GERMANY AND ENGLAND 73 Germans against the English successes amongst foreign and native races, is doubtless greatly intensified by the English appearing to the Ger- man to succeed as it were in play, — as cricketers and golfers, as 'good fellows' who, with a school and university education of little con- centration, and with, say, some six hours of office work, comparatively simple administrative machinery, and small bodies of military, succeed where he fails. These Britishers are mostly not theoretical at all, they possess loosely knit minds and moderate passions. The German works intensely, systematically, preparing every- thing; and yet his complex bureaucracy, his militarist self-repression, his huge plans, lead to little or nothing. Thus the 'flannelled fool' utterly out-distances the iron will and fierce labour of highly trained specialists. Hogarth's Idle Apprentice, unjustly yet quite understand- ably, envied the solid successes of the Indus- trious Apprentice. But would not the Industrious Apprentice grow wildly bitter if the Apprentice who seemed to him Idle, at least as com- pared with himself, somehow carried off one great solid success after the other from under his very eyes?" Yes, it must be aggravating; and it would be a great mistake for us to pride ourselves on our foolishness, as if it were that and not some less obtrusive real merit — especially the spirit of recognized and permitted freedom— which has given us success as pioneers. Once beyond the pioneering stage the Germans have much to teach us; and if only they had fought fairly and honourably we could have sympathized with 745 THE WAR AND AFTER them, and should have felt genuinely like friends who possess different aptitudes and powers — each admiring the other. They make excellent colonists under the freedom of British institu- tions. Settlers in Australia, for instance, by no means hanker for a return to Prussian, officialdom. German interests were in no danger, they had a perfectly open door for their com- merce, and the meritorious part of their civiliza- tion was spreading: if only they had not been too hasty and too greedy and too determined on territorial expansion at the expense of thriving neighbours. CHAPTER X ENGLAND AND GERMANY! ENGLISH ATTITUDE WHATEVER German intentions may be or may have been with respect to terri- torial expansion, it is quite certain that no considerations of that kind explain our entry into the war. Fortunately for us the British Interest note has never been sounded in the present case — beyond the vital need for defence — and we are working whole-heartedly and disinterestedly with our Allies. It is most true, as Edward Lyttelton has said, that "from the outset of this grim business Britons have been nerved to do and die because they have set themselves to vindicate principles which are to us and to all men, though some see it not, of infinitely greater value than any power or prestige or Empire." The deeply-engrained and unanimous horror of the English-speaking race at the main inter- national crime which was initially committed by our foes is thus expressed by our good friend of American birth, Henry James: — "Personally," he says, "I feel so strongly on everything that the war has brought into question for the Anglo-Saxon peoples, that humorous 75 76 THE WAR AND AFTER detachment or any other thinness or tepidity of mind on the subject affects me as vulgar impiety, not to say as rank blasphemy; our whole race- tension became for me a sublimely conscious thing from the moment Germany flung at us all her explanation of her pounce upon Belgium for massacre and ravage in the form of the most insolent 'Because I choose to, damn you all!' recorded in history/' So it is that the noblest of our youth have enrolled themselves for the necessary work of war, whether at home or abroad; and many, alas, of the flower of humanity on both sides have succumbed. The death of Mr. Glad- stone's grandson, successor to the Hawarden estate, inheritor of a great name, and himself of brilliant political promise, has struck England with singular poignancy; and the words which the Grand Old Man used, in 1870, about the cause to which this country has now pledged its honour and the lives of its soldiers, may well be recalled: — "We felt called upon to enlist ourselves on the part of the British nation as advocates and as champions of the integrity and independence of Belgium. And if we had gone to war we should have gone to war for freedom, we should have gone to war for public right, we should have gone to war to save human happiness from being invaded by tyrannous and lawless power. That is what I call a good cause, gentlemen. And though I detest war, — and there are no epithets too strong, if you could supply me with them, that I will not endeavour to heap upon its head, — in such a war as that, ENGLAND AND GERMANY 77 while the breath in my body is continued to me, I am ready to engage. I am ready to support it, I am ready to give all the help and aid I can to those who carry this country into it." Forty-five years later the readiness of his and of many another noble family has been tested, and has rung true. So we have stood up for the integrity of the smaller nations against a European bully: knowing that we should suffer much strain and loss, but throwing ourselves into the struggle in accordance with our pledged word, without counting the cost. Happy are all free nations, too strong to be dispossessed, But blessed are they among nations, that dare to be strong for the rest. But that is not how our attitude appears to our foes, nor ever has appeared. Professor Cramb, explaining German views of England long before ever the present war began, speaks of the hostility to England then prevalent, and says that in the great historian Professor von Treitschke, — whose lectures in Berlin were crowded with the elite of that capital, — antago- nism reaches a height and persistence of rancour or contempt which in so great a man is arresting if not unique. For him the greatness of England passed with the seventeenth century, with Crom- well and Milton. People who fail to understand us may regard us as hypocritical. We are weak, and fall below our ideals, but we are not hypocrites. Hypocrisy is not indeed very common; it is not 78 THE WAR AND AFTER an English vice at all. The conduct of some Englishmen has thrown scorn upon the lofty attitude of others; and it is a matter of too common and painful experience that at different times, even in the same individual, religious emo- tion is not inconsistent with debased acts. Humanity is a complex thing, and not only the same nation but the same individual may say one thing and do another; thereby of course bringing some discredit on his religious convictions, and enabling his practice to be thrown up against his preaching. But in spite of weaknesses of that kind, King David was not a hypocrite. The Prussian theory deprecates the subjuga- tion of one's own will to any higher and nobler purpose; it cannot understand the kind of Divine service that is perfect freedom; it would re- pudiate Tennyson's aspiration after the highest kind of self-will: — Our wills are ours, we know not how ; Our wills are ours, to make them thine. Is an attitude like that weakness? Is that hypocrisy? A thousand times, No! Grounds of Disuke But though it is true that we have not been liked, even our good attributes having been, mis- conceived and mistrusted, the Germans have been disliked still more. This fact, steeped as they are in self-admiration, seems to come to them as a surprise. They try to court the approval of neutral nations, to deprecate any rebuke for their conduct; and they regard hostility, or even ENGLAND AND GERMANY 79 lukewarmness of approbation, as undeserved and hurting to their feelings. They go about saying, in the sense if not the words of Gilbert and Sullivan's Opera, Princess Ida — And everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man, And I can't think why ! Well, considering their history, the widespread dislike is not really surprising. Dr. Qarolea estimated the reason clearly enough: — "Wherever German power has made itself felt for the last forty years — in Italy and Austria, in Russia and Turkey — it has countenanced re- action and tyranny. In politics Germany is to-day what Austria and Russia were in the days of the Holy Alliance, the power of darkness. Whilst in the provinces of science and art the German people are generally progressive, in poli- tics the German Government is consistently retrogressive. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized and repeated that, more than any other State — more even than Russia — Prussia stands in the way of political advance. It was Prussia that helped to crush the Polish struggle for freedom in 1863; when, a few years ago, English public opinion was protesting against the Armenian massacres, the Kaiser stood loyally by Abdul Hamid and propped his tottering throne; when the Russian Liberals were engaged in a life- and-death struggle with Czardom, the Kaiser gave his moral support to Russian despotism. It is not too much to say that it is the evil influence of Prusso-Germany alone which keeps despotism alive in the modern world." And, again,- — 80 THE WAR AND AFTER "Prussia owes whatever she is, and whatever territory she has, to a systematic policy of cunning and deceit, of violence and conquest. No doubt she has achieved an admirable work of organization at home, and has fulfilled what was perhaps a necessary historic mission, but in her international relations she has been mainly a predatory Power. She has stolen her Eastern provinces from Poland; she is largely responsible for the murder of a great civilized nation. She has wrested Silesia from Austria. She has taken Hanover from its legitimate rulers. She has taken Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, Alsace-Lorraine from France. And to-day [this was written in 1912] the military caste in Prussia trust and hope that a final conflict with England will consummate what previous wars have so successfully accomplished in the past. "The German of to-day still wants to rise and to soar; no longer in order to sow broad- cast the seeds of ideas from the high altitudes of speculation, but rather to throw down bombs and explosives." Yes, "a season of calm weather" our prophets, Plotinus and Tennyson and Wordsworth, have taught us to associate with spiritual vision and angels' visits: Materialism bids us, at these periods, look out for Zeppelins. And the dove, which by mystical writers and artists had been used as a symbol for the Holy Ghost, has become a Taube! But let us always distinguish between Prussia and the rest of Germany. True, the rest of Germany has subordinated itself to Prussia, which has the ultimate political, financial and ENGLAND AND GERMANY 81 military control, but their doing so has been a fearful mistake and one which will yet cost them dear. An American point of view was indicated by an editorial in the New York Times: — "The world cannot, will not, let Germany win in this war. With her domination over all Europe, peace and security would vanish from trie earth. ... A few months ago, the world only dimly comprehended Germany, now it knows her thoroughly: Germany is doomed to sure defeat. Yet the doom of the German Empire may become the deliverance of the German people if they will betimes but seize and hold their own." "The German people are slandering them- selves when they lay themselves prostrate before the sword and the peaked helmet of the Hohen- zollern monarchy. They are not predestined for all time to come to be the utterly incapable politicians which they profess to be. They are not an essentially 'unpolitical' race doomed to anarchy, and the Prussians are not the imperial race predestined to supremacy. Indeed, in political capacity the Southern Germans are far more gifted than the Prussians. Their traditions of municipal government are as su- perior to the bureaucratic traditions of Prussia as the genius of liberty is superior to the genius of despotism. No country can boast of a more glorious civic history than the free Gdrman cities of the South and of the East." — So says Dr. Sarolea. The following characteristic extract from 82 THE WAR AND AFTER Carlyle serves to describe the typical official Prussian : — "Examine the man who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were, begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under the sun. A great man? A poor, prurient, empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; un- less you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness." Do not let us abuse an individual, but only a type. An individual may be a figure-head, and so attract to himself both glory and dis- honour; but a human personality is a strange mixture, it contains elements of good and bad, — and human judgment, based necessarily on im- perfect knowledge, is very fallible — but we may sympathetically admit that a strong personality set up on a pinnacle is in a difficult and dangerous position, from which if he fall he falls like Lucifer never to rise again. PART II: THE PRESENT "The accepted time" Therefore take heed how you impawn our person, How you awake our sleeping sword of war: We charge you, in the name of God, take heed ; For never two such kingdoms did contend Without much fall of blood ; whose guiltless drops Are every one a woe, a sore complaint, 'Gainst him whose wrongs give edge unto the swords That make such waste in brief mortality. Shakespeare, Henry V. PART II: THE PRESENT CHAPTER XI "S.O.S." WHAT IS THE WAR FOR? HUMANITY has much to contend with; it is set in the midst of tremendous forces ■ — surrounded by many and great dangers — and is itself full of infirmity; contemplation of their evil case has before now driven men to pessimism or to despair. All our mutual help and tolerance are needed for the conduct of life. We have learned to be sensitive to the grief and pain of others, to shrink from sights of bodily suffering and to do our best at any cost to relieve it. When earthquakes or ship- wrecks or railway accidents occur, we stand horrified, and sometimes mistrust Providence. To bring such catastrophes about on purpose is unthinkable. How then can the present state of Europe be credible, or other than a ghastly nightmare? All the resources of civilization and science utilized, and all the manhood of the nations busily engaged, either in preparing machinery for inflicting torture and death, or else in em- ploying them for this hellish purpose! Nor is the suffering limited to the wounded alone. The links of affection which bind one 85 86 THE WAR AND AFTER human being to another afford further oppor- tunity for exquisite torture. The premature breakage of such links, and the agonized fear of friends for those exposed to the danger, give scope and room enough for a cry to the heavens, of magnitude such as cannot have ascended in any previous epoch of the world's history. Collect the utterances of pain and grief and heroism throughout antiquity: they would have to be multiplied manyfold before they reach in volume the agonized supplications rising from the far more numerous and tenderly nurtured humanity of to-day. Bereavement is wide- spread. The voice of weeping is heard through all the lands: soon in every family there must be one dead. It is a terrible time for women, for all mothers and wives on whom the blow has fallen or soon may fall. The pain may take the form of a dazed bewilderment — and no wonder — for there never yet was a more meaningless, a more diabolical, stroke. Here is an expression of it which in simple form may represent the feeling of thousands:— WIDOWED IN SPRING. 1 The lattice of the naked boughs is turning into lace As little buds, like cunning knots, a growing pattern trace. Across a sky of April blue the swallows wheel and chase, But Nature's beauty sickens me when I only want his face again His honest, ugly face. 1 1. M. P. in the Westminster Gazette for the evening be- fore the ist of May, 1915. So Victor Hugo in exile : Le moi de mai, sans la France, II n'est plus le mois de mai. "S.O.S." 87 I draw no comfort from the warmth of springtime in the land, For there is winter in my heart and round my head a band Of burning frost that numbs my brain. ... I do not under- stand Why Death should take my man from me ere I could clasp his hand again — His strong, protecting hand. Yes, the shot crashes into human souls as well as into human bodies; the guns reach far. As Harold Begbie says, — "A battlefield is only the outline of War. Fill it up with agonizing anxiety, with burn- ing prayers, with maddening sleeplessness, with tears and sobs and groans; fill it up with the heart's capacity for utmost grief and sharpest pain; fill it up with suffering, the suffering of women and children, till the outline is as pitted with these things as a map of London is pitted with names, and then you may have some idea, some faint idea, of the range of a heavy gun and the flight of a bullet." Surely there must be some deep cause and reason for all this suffering. It has not been sent by Providence; it has been brought about by man. The execution of the design is wholly carved out by humanity; it is self-torment, a kind of self-flagellation, that we are witness- ing, a determination of mankind to inflict the utmost evil on itself. Surely there must be some good reason? Or is it mania, a homicidal mania that has afflicted some portion of the human race, so that it runs amok amid its fellows and 88 THE WAR AND AFTER endeavours to exterminate them before they can defend themselves? No sane man or set of men could imagine that the) 7 had attained to so great an elevation, so high and mighty a culture, that all the rest of mankind must either immediately rise to that status, or must recognize its superiority so vividly as instantly to succumb and grovel before it. Crazy megalomania is not unknown in asylums, and it has to be kept under restraint. The forms it takes are sometimes humorous, and onlookers have laughed at the antics of those whose sense of proportion, of decency, and of humour, have become totally obliterated. But when the monomania attacks a community of high organization and intelligence, with all the resources of civilization in its hands, designed and discovered by every country under heaven and constructed with the best brains and energy of the race, — then the spectacle becomes not humorous but tragic. Surely, even so, a glimmer of sense remains: they cannot anticipate conquest without a struggle, they must realize that not on prostrate inferiors alone will suffering be inflicted but on themselves also, that their own nation will suffer untold pain and grief whatever be the ultimate result. Will they not ask themselves, is the result — can any possible outcome — be worth the awful sacrifice which must be made in order to attain it? Either they never asked the question in this way, or they were so obsessed by their own superiority as to answer in the affirmative! None but madmen could give such an answer. Xo others could set "S.O.S." 89 themselves against the whole human race, with the desire to exterminate it rather than fail to impose upon it their own ideas of progress and civilization and culture. "We look around upon the larger life of the social world and the political state — that mind- made structure into which the knowledge, the energy, the instructed will, of unnumbered generations of men have built themselves, the greatest by far of all the achievements of the human spirit: what do we see? It is welter- ing chaos thinly crusted over, and hardly held down; its elements ever embattling themselves for war. It is Civilization itself, the hard-won product of man's greatest pains, whose security seems to many to be at stake, striking its moving tent and facing a wilderness which no foot has ever trodden, and no man knowing what awaits it." Will it emerge at last? Or are its forces once more to be rolled backwards? It is certainly interesting that ancient methods of warfare have been to some extent resusci- tated, and that battles are again being fought on or near the plains of Troy, but it is hardly encouraging from the point of view of human progress. The inevitable question has been put — "Shall the epitaph on our human kind be nothing better than a forlorn 'As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be'? What advantageth it any man that war is fought in the old way, in the ancient places, if war and the rumours of war shall never cease from our hearts?" 90 THE WAR AND AFTER And the writer who asks this question, in a paper called The Arbitrator for May 191 5, con- tinues : — "There are times when hope grows faint, and human affairs seem to the tired eye and the aching brain a mere whirling revolution round one fixed desperate centre. Bound to the wheel, man turns full cycle in the course of the ages. 'You know as well as we do/ said the Athenians of old to the people of Melos, 'that, as the world goes, the question of right is only dis- cussed between equals: while, among those who differ in power, the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. "Our forefathers had high and generous aspirations one hundred years ago, when a quarter of a century's fighting had sobbed itself to sleep, and a Holy Alliance seemed to promise halcyon days to Europe. Their aspirations were not fulfilled. Within a few tens of years the winds of war were awake again, and rushed from their caverns, in sweeping gusts and heavy gales, to traverse a continent from end to end. Their fretting clamour arose, as it arises now, to the starry silence of the skies, and the white radiance of eternity was stained, as it is stained to-day, by the drifting smoke of the guns." Nor only of the guns. To their eternal shame they broke their plighted word here also, and are employing as instruments of torture the liquefied gases discovered by our own Faraday in Albemarle Street, during a century of what seemed like progress. Yet in one sense there is progress. We may be thankful that with us "there is a difference, "S.O.S." 91 after all, between tHe tone and temper of this war and the tone and temper of the last war that England waged. Here, at least, there has not been recurrence. Into that war we rushed as if it were a joyous venture; into this we have gone as if it were — what, indeed, it is — a bitterly cruel necessity. We have not flaunted our flags or made merry over our enemies. We have possessed our souls in quietness. . . . If we can but capture these hours, and make them ours for ever — if we can but make the present temper of the nation our eternal possession — it may be that there remains a rest, after all, if not for us, at any rate for our children." CHAPTER XII MATERIAL EFFICIENCY AND SELF-INTEREST THE essence of Christianity is persuasion, and what Matthew Arnold called sweet reasonableness ; while Teutonic Kultur, on the other hand, deifies force and material efficiency. Short of this worship of mere expe- diency, however, and apart altogether from their regarding nothing human or divine as above the exigencies and expediency of the State, the German people have set an example to Europe in the systematic way they have culti- vated the practical arts and the applied sciences. They have not made a good use of the increased powers so conferred upon them, but they have made a very efficient use; and in that they have done wisely. They have shown that in their generation the children of this world are wiser than the children of light. For this they deserve praise, and have received it. Material efficiency is a good thing, German example in that direction was being extensively preached; and although not much practised yet in this country, and apparently hardly understood by our governing classes, yet the preachings in time would have had their due effect. The 92 MATERIAL EFFICIENCY 93 danger is now that the wheat will be thrown away with the tares. We had much to learn from the German nation; we find that we had much to reject also; but material efficiency in the cultivation of science is not one of the things we have to reject. We have to free ourselves from what has now become conspicuous — the evil soul which has cankered and devastated all their progress — the lying and spying and brutality which have poured scorn upon their science as well as upon their politics and philosophy. In praising German efficiency I referred just now, incidentally, to the parable of the Unjust Steward, and the puzzling commendation bestowed upon his evil practices — not because they were evil, but because they were for his special object effective. Their evil character was the self-destructive part of them. So it is with German efficiency. For we must include under that head not only the appli- cations of science, the splendid organization, forethought, and strenuous industry shown in commerce, and in the arts both of war and peace; not only the legitimate discipline of the whole people for intelligent and economical pro- duction; but also the less admirable features, such as the self-seeking dealings with the Press, and lies promulgated in neutral countries, the elaborate spy system organized for years, — which also must have been developed by the same methodical kind of work that has obtained for them a recognized place in scientific and historical studies. We can fully admit that all material measures have been taken to the 94 THE WAR AND AFTER uttermost, but the soul has been omitted. That is why their civilization bears such evil fruit — the fruit of brutality and atrocities which eclipse those of the Turk, in that they are carried out by order and with a terrorizing" object. So self-confident and self-sufficient have they become that they seek to impose their organiza- tion on all mankind. They have imposed on nobody; they have exposed themselves. They stand naked before an astonished Europe. With the telescope of the Lusitania they are visible even from America. As to their Kultur: — translation from one language to another has many traps. Vicaire means curate and cure means vicar. So Kultur does not mean culture but the opposite of culture; it is everything except culture, it is their idea of civilization, it consists chiefly in organization. There is nothing the matter with the organization, in itself it is good, but being devoid of soul it is insufficient: how fearfully insufficient we had not realized till now. Civilization without morality, with no wide outlook, no elevation of purpose, no loftiness of soul, no perception of beauty, no veneration or recognition of anything higher than the State, — it is blank atheism. Organization as an end in itself, devoid of religion and with all the culture of life ignored — it is like the old soulless political economy based on self-interest, with human nature omitted; — it is the old temptation of Genesis, "Ye shall be as gods"; and that of the wilderness, with all the king- doms of the world as the reward of devil-wor- ship. The fruit of the tree of knowledge, of MATERIAL EFFICIENCY 95 knowledge only, is death and damnation. So it was in the beginning and so it is now. Nevertheless the English Nation might not have felt quite sure on this point. We had been taught so long about the merits of the German system of organization — we knew indeed that in certain ways it worked well — that we might have felt doubtful whether after all it was not permissible to try to accept it at their hands; whether in fact it was not nourishing sustenance or at least wholesome medicine that they were offering us, even though the spoon which they employed for the purpose was rather jagged, and though there was but little jam with the powder. Fortunately — if we can say fortunately — their conduct can have left no doubt on this point in the mind of a single reasonable person; for if that is the outcome of their system our own haphazard muddling along is infinitely prefer- able. To every one that is now clear — even to those who detest and despise the policy of muddle; but to people with special knowledge it seems to have been clear before. The young poet Rupert Brooke, who took part in the Ant- werp expedition and lost his life in the Dar- danelles — and who came of a peace-loving family — writing home in 191 1 about his gener- ally favourable experience of friendly German life in Munich, expresses himself thus concern- ing the deeper political nefariousness which he found underlying the pleasant superficial aspect of everyday existence. "I have sampled and sought out German culture. It has changed all my political views. 96 THE WAR AND AFTER I am wildly in favour of nineteen new Dreadnoughts. German culture must never prevail !" Selfishness But it has been said that the policy of all nations is really controlled by selfish considera- tions, and that a claim for higher motives, like the assertion that we accepted the present challenge on behalf of smaller nations, is pious humbug. The kind of motive which drives Britain into war, it is said, was illustrated by our dealings with a small nation in South Africa, and by our abstaining from intervention on behalf of Bulgaria or Armenia or Macedonia. The determining cause seems to depend on whether or not we have anything to gain. Bernard Shaw, for instance, thus criticized our attitude to the present war. And in so doing he did not blame Britain — he did not blame either Britain or Germany. He con- sidered them both actuated simply by the only intelligible motive, namely self-interest. This used indeed to be the doctrine of the old Political Economy, that self-interest was the mainspring of life; but whatever be the case with the trained Capitalist it is not the main motive of the Nation at large. There is a healthier spirit in the Nation as a whole, much nearer to the Christian doctrine that the way to attain life is through willingness to lose it for a high ideal. It is amazing how on the score of self-interest anybody can be got to fight at all. There can be no self-interest in los- ing your life for the sake of your country. SELF-INTEREST 97 Fighting on those lines is illogical — illogical but instinctive. Nevertheless if soldiers do shirk bayonets, or seek to save themselves unduly, or shelter them- selves behind women and children, it can be claimed that it is not cowardice, but a return to logic — a carrying out of the philosophy in which they have been instructed. That is the kind of way in which an evil doctrine defeats itself and contains the seeds of its own down- fall. That is why evil can never really dominate the world for long. The truth is that self-interest is very far from being the dominating motive of mankind. For one thing, there is always great uncertainty in which direction it really lies; and even if the well-known Christian paradox be set aside, there are many considerations which sway more strongly than strict logic. As "Bagshot" says: "Statesmanship would be easy and peace secure, if mankind were only governed by self- interest. It is the incalculable idealism of man — his passions and pride and lust for self-asser- tion and expansion — that destroys his peace and lends the glamour and the glory to his exist- ence. History teaches us to mistrust all policies which assume that nations will act as on a cold calculation of their material advan- tages they ought to act. There is always some- thing not ourselves which defeats the utilitarian within us." This is especially the case among those who have but little leisure or ability to organize their lives, and who live mainly by instinct. 98 THE WAR AND AFTER The services given to society by such people are sometimes beyond praise. A great error has been committed, and wrong has been done, by historians sometimes speaking of our Army as a mercenary army, and all our soldiers as mercenaries: as if they were fight- ing for pay. The contrast intended is between a professional army and a National army. Our soldiers till lately have been professional, but they have never been mercenaries. Let it be understood that a mercenary soldier means the type of professional fighting man who in the Middle Ages wandered about Europe wherever fighting was going on, and offered his services for pay to any nation that was short of soldiers, without regard to the cause or object of the fight — treating himself in fact merely as a weapon to be wielded by whomsoever would. That our men bear constantly in mind the opposing ideals now in conflict, is not to be expected; but they know, clearly enough, that they are fighting for freedom from the yoke of an oppressor. They may well feel that subject to Prussian tyranny they would refuse to live. To put up with petty insults continually, to stand by helpless while those nearest to us were injured, would be intolerable. Far better to die. With that in the background of their thoughts, their main activities, their valour and splendid pertinacious courage, are instinctive. No volun- tary army could be formed in time of war if self-interest were the motive for enlistment. The British response to a call of duty and danger has been magnificent. And yet at one time a good deal was done SELF-INTEREST 99 which might have killed the voluntary system. It is not the fear of death or torture that chokes off recruits, it is, or it was at one time, the im- personal inconsideration of officials. What the enemy can do to them men will suffer, but at unnecessary official maltreatment they rebel. When volunteers are asked for any forlorn hope at colliery explosions or shipwrecks they are always forthcoming; but the volunteers are not capriciously rejected on a variable standard of height, nor are they told to strip and wait an unconscionable time for a medical inspection, nor are they ruled as of no value because short of the tip of a little finger. These flea-bites are often more deterrent than real hardships. If it can be felt that the hardships are inevitable and part of the work, and are not due to mere official disrespect and carelessness, they are as gladly put up with as wounds. Death itself can be faced with very different feelings under different circumstances. We instinctively discriminate between what is inflicted by Providence and what is wreaked on us by man. The Titanic was re- garded very differently from the Lusitania. Mere wholesale death is not so great a calamity. The difference between a war and an earthquake, for instance, is very marked. An earthquake is a calamity to the body, but not necessarily to the soul. No feelings of wrath are aroused, only of misfortune. Whole families may be blotted out by an earthquake, and there need be no repining on the part of humanity. But the feelings induced by the purposeful infliction of death and torture are very different — much more deadly, much more 100 THE WAR AND AFTER harmful. A most calamitous earthquake oc- curred during the present war, and it has been instructive to see the different feelings which it aroused. Nevertheless our foes expected us to be swayed solely by self-interest. We had acquired a repu- tation for selfishness and wealth-acquiring ease; but it was a false reputation and did not truly represent the people of England. Many a time the English people would have been willing to interfere with armed force when they saw flagrant wrong being done in Europe or Asia Minor, but their leaders hesitated and let the opportunity slip by. The accusation of selfishness is easy to make, and not easy to rebut; for in our past history we have not been free from it. Politicians often think they are doing the nation good service by keeping a keen eye on British Interests; and sometimes perhaps they are. But as with individuals so it is with a nation, its true Interest is not always in the direction of acquisition and greed. A nation has a soul too, and there are times when loss may be gain — certainly there are times when it may be wholesome, and when it would be willingly acquiesced in by the people. The action of Italy, whatever its immediate cause, is glorified by noble traditions in the past. The world does not forget Mazzini and Garibaldi and Cavour; they are a splendid heri- tage, and inspire confidence. Would that we had more of such traditions to our credit. Our actions now are handicapped by suspicion due to bad traditions in the past. It is not easy even SELF-INTEREST 101 to make use of our fleet without arousing animosity, — especially on the part of people whose self-interest is endangered, and who imagine some commercial motive. Objection is raised to our stopping goods from Neutral Countries from entering hostile territory, and to our interfering with Neutral commerce by maintaining a kind of Blockade. But in such a matter we have no alternative: we must behave fairly and honourably not only to our own troops but to those of our Allies. They have the bulk of the fighting on land; the frontier which they are facing is immensely longer than our portion, and it is our Allies who will chiefly suffer by the incoming of extra hostile ammu- nition. It is our duty to protect them at sea, and keep war munitions out of Germany — including cotton and all other raw material for feeding either guns or fighters. There is no selfishness in that. There is damned selfishness in not doing it. Yet it is true here, as always, that bare selfishness does not really pay — that it is really safer to respond to the call of duty than to shirk it. That is why it is possible for a cynic to misconceive the motive. People are still to be found who think that England might have stood out, isolated by the sea, and defied the con- queror behind its navy; only taking care that it was always superior to that of any two or three other nations. But how long could this attitude of selfish isolation be maintained? Said Dr. Sarolea, two years before the war, — "With characteristic naivete and insular selfish- ness some jingoes imagine that if only the 102 THE WAR AND AFTER naval armaments of Germany could be stopped, all danger to England would be averted. But surely the greatest danger to England is not the invasion of England: it is the invasion of France and Belgium. . . . In the past the battles of England have been mainly fought on the Continent, and so they will be in the future. A crushing defeat of France in the plains of Flanders or Cham- pagne, with the subsequent annexation of Northern Belgium and of Holland, would be a deadly blow to English supremacy." If we had been mad enough to hold our hand in the autumn of 1914, the deeds that have been done in Belgium would before very long have been done here also, and we should have had to bow our necks to the Prussian yoke. No one need deny that we are fighting for our national existence too. There are two kinds of war, and war for freedom is a holy war. CHAPTER XIII tVlh OR AGGRDSSIV3 WAR THE right translation of Kultur seems to be everything' in organized civilization except culture. For true culture the Prussian has no use — he despises and dislikes it: its opposite, which is aggressive war, he thinks noble and exhilarating; and what Mr. Wells calls "his gloomily megalomaniac his- torians" write of it as a large and glorious thing. In reality it is an outrage upon life, a smashing of homes, a mangling, a malignant mischief. The immediate object of war appears now to be, as Mr. Arnold Bennett expresses it, to tear flesh, to break bones, to suffocate, and to kill; the object of Prussian war is further to inflict such intolerable agony that it can no longer be endured,- — to overcome by any, even the most frightful, torture of body or of mind inflicted on combatants and non-combatants alike. The truth of this must be faced. And yet it would appear that the Prussians love and admire war. Why? Mr. Wells analyses their psychology in a plausible manner: — "These war-lovers are creatures of a simpler constitution. And they seem capable of an 103 104 THE WAR AND AFTER ampler hate. You will discover, if you talk to them skilfully, that they hold that war 'ennobles/ and that when they say ennobles they mean that it is destructive to the ten thousand things in life that they do not enjoy or understand or tolerate — things that fill them therefore with envy and perplexity — such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life 'degenerate.' And going back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful and happier living. The military peoples of the world have almost always been harsh and rather stupid peoples, full of a virtuous indignation against all they did not understand. The modern Prussian goes to war to-day with as supreme a sense of moral superiority as the Arabs when they swept down upon Egypt and North Africa. The burning of the library of Alexandria remains for ever the symbol of the triumph of militarism over civili- zation/' "The State," glories Treitschke, "is no academy of arts; if it neglects its power in favour of the ideal strivings of mankind, it re- nounces its nature and goes to ruin. . . . the renunciation of its own power is for the State in the most real sense — the sin against the Holy Ghost." The easy belief of the dull and violent that EVIL OR AGGRESSIVE WAR 105 war "braces" arises from a real instinct of self- preservation, a fear of the subtler tests of peace. The uncultured type of person will pre- serve war as long as he can. This type is to politics what the criminal type is to social order; it is resentful and hostile to every attempt to organize pacific order in the world. How then have we thought it right — and in the highest degree right — to enter on this war? Ah, there is the completest distinction between aggressive and defensive war: between war waged for the lust of domination and conquest, and war undertaken in defiance of a strong bully, and in defence of our own liberty and the exist- ence of weaker or friendly nations. As Mr. Roosevelt has said: — - "Any movement that fails emphatically to discriminate between the two kinds of peace and the two kinds of war is an evil not a good movement. Any movement that speaks against war in terms that would apply as much to such a war as that waged by Lincoln, as to a war waged to destroy a free people, is a thoroughly base and evil thing. "Above all, it is base and evil to clamour for peace in the abstract when silence is kept about the concrete and hideous wrongs done to humanity at this very moment. " The neutral attitude of America can be criti- cized,— but best by American citizens; and after all American influence is on the right side. "Germany knows that Americans condemn not only their manner of waging war but also her having brought the war about. Moreover, it is 106 THE WAR AND AFTER well for us to remember what the American people have done. ... It is American help that has saved the Belgian people from starvation; and American ambassadors and consuls have done an incalculable service by their efforts to protect subjects of all the allied nations in Ger- many and in territory occupied by the German armies" (C. Pankhurst). And though there is a strong Peace party in America as elsewhere, the venerable Dr. Eliot, so long President of Harvard University, made the following solemn pronouncement to a meet- ing of Baptist ministers in Boston: — "Do not pray for peace now. I cannot conceive a worse catastrophe for the human race than peace in Europe now. If it were declared now, Germany would be in possession of Belgium, and German aggressive militarism would have triumphed. That would be a success for Germany after she had committed the greatest crime a nation can commit — namely, faithlessness to treaty rights, — the sanctity of contracts would pass for nothing, and civilization would be set back for cen- turies." Yet Germany is terribly strong, and its brutal policy of terrorism seems for a time to answer, by assisting the invasion of territory with a minimum of loss; and it does not scruple blasphemously to invoke the Deity on behalf of its abominations. Aye, it has long been known that during the period of success the wicked flourish like a green bay-tree; but wait for the test of adversity: at the breath of failure EVIL OR AGGRESSIVE WAR 107 it is cut down, dried up, and withered. Hear Wordsworth : — "As long as guilty actions thrive, guilt is strong; it has a giddiness and transport of its own, a hardihood not without superstition, as if Providence were a party to its success. But disaster opens the eyes of conscience, and in the minds of men who have been employed in bad actions, defeat and a feeling of punishment are inseparable. "On the other hand, the power of an un- blemished heart and a brave spirit is shown, in the events of war, not only among unpractised citizens and peasants, but among troops in the most perfect discipline. . . . This paramount efficacy of moral causes ... is indisputable. 7 ' But it is possible for a moral sense to become perverted; and prophetic insight is shown in the following extracts from Dr. Sarolea in 1912: — "To an Englishman war is a dwind- ling force, an anachronism. It may still sometimes be a necessity, a dura Lex, an ultima ratio, but it is always a monstrous calamity. In other words, to an Englishman war is evil, war is immoral. On the contrary, to the German war is essentially moral. Indeed, it is the source of the highest morality, of the most valuable virtues, and without war the human race would speedily degenerate. It is the main- spring of national progress. ... If war is a curse, then the wells of public opinion have been poisoned in Germany, perhaps for gene- rations to come. If war is a blessing, if the philosophy of war is indeed the gospel of the super-man, sooner or later the German people 108 THE WAR AND AFTER are bound to put that gospel into practice. . . . The war of to-morrow, therefore, will not be like the war of 1870, a war confined to two belligerent forces: it will be a universal European war. Nor will it be a humane war, subject to the rules of international law, and to the decrees of the Hague Tribunal: it will be an inexorable war; or, to use the expression of von Bernhardi, it will be a 'war to the knife/ Nor will it be decided in a few weeks like the war of 1870: it will involve a long and difficult campaign, or rather a succession of campaigns; it will mean to either side political annihilation or supremacy." The madness of the present aggressive lust for power can only be likened to homicidal mania ending in suicide. Where Force is treated as right it is in- evitable that right and wrong — Should lose their names, and so should justice too. Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, a universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce a universal prey, And last eat up himself. Troilus and Cressidd CHAPTER XIM SAVAGERY O shame to men ; devil with devil damn'd Firm concord holds, men only disagree Of creatures rational, though under hope Of heavenly grace, and God proclaiming peace, Yet live in hatred, enmity and strife Among themselves, and levy cruel wars, Wasting the earth, each other to destroy. As if, which might induce us to accord, Man had not hellish foes enow besides, That day and night for his destruction wait. Paradise Lost THE unprecedented outburst of savagery which has disgraced the present war is as unexpected as it is unwelcome. To the amazement of the rest of the world, Germany has rushed like a highway robber upon her unprepared neighbours, demanded enormous indemnities from them, and seized their goods. And, as a writer in Science Progress says, "The evil has been heightened by the innumerable tricks of the robber. She made treaties which she had no intention of keeping — treaties with other nations and conventions regarding the rules of war. She utilized her own citizens who were living in foreign countries to abuse the 109 110 THE WAR AND AFTER hospitality shown to them by spying on their hosts. . . . There is clear evidence that she had determined on the present outbreak long before it occurred, and that she used the murder of the Austrian Archduke merely as a plausible excuse. Like a bandit she prepared the secret dagger while she avowed friendship. It is a false statement that nations, like individuals, cannot be indicted for evil deeds, but the Germans have been so stupid as not to perceive the stigma which their actions have placed and will place upon their race for a century to come." While I write the German Chancellor is characteristically expressing indignant astonish- ment that Italy would not accept the word of Austria and Germany — the word of Germany! — but actually prefers to fight for its unredeemed provinces, as well as for the integrity of Belgium and Servia. Once more we must ask, for what are the Germans fighting? What is it that they expected to get? No war was necessary for extension of trade. "Everywhere Germans were welcomed in British territory, were allowed to trade under our flag, were shown the secrets of our indus- tries and even of our armaments, were allowed to acquire wealth, titles, and influence in Britain itself. For centuries we had remained the friends of our relatives the Germans. We had not opposed them in their ambitions. We raised no tariff barriers against them. We made no war upon their commerce, but gave to them and to all an open entry and an equal chance. There SAVAGERY 111 was therefore no reason based upon racial ani- mosity or past disfavours to urge Germany to attack us." But even their ideas of trade appear to be warlike. Sir William Ramsey the chemist says : — "It has not been generally known that in commerce, as in war, the methods employed by Germany have been completely organized for many years. Instead of looking on commerce as an arrangement for mutual benefit, the Ger- man nation has regarded it as a war. And just as in the present war all methods of attack are regarded by the military advisers of Germany as legitimate, so we are slowly awaking to the knowledge that German commercial and in- dustrial methods have for years been ag- gressive." Those who started the war must have re- garded themselves as a virile race prepared to sweep away the effete dregs of a decayed past, yet in reality (to quote the writer in Science Progress again), the fight is between "nations which are for the most part equal in civilization and strength — belonging to very similar races, having nearly equal opportunities for agri- culture, manufactures, trades, arts and sciences, and for the most part obeying, or pretending to obey, the same great moral code. Under these circumstances, what could one of these nations expect to gain by flinging itself at the throat of others; what then would compensate for the dreadful tragedies which were sure to ensue; what praise of humanity could, under these circumstances, ever be bestowed upon the 112 THE WAR AND AFTER victor; or what God would be ever likely to bless such a deed? Yet in a moment the tragedy has befallen us." They tell us that they made the war from fear i — fear of foreign attack — and that they in- fringed the neutrality of Belgium in a panic. That is a lie; but it is one that they should be held to. If it were true it w T ould be a comparatively intelligible, though a contemptible, excuse. A coward is always a danger to the community: one never knows when he will break out into senseless violence. It is well known in the west of America that a coward with a revolver is a serious danger. So also horses in a panic are liable to ruin themselves and every one near them. But to undertake all this slaughter for the purpose of spreading Ger- man or any other culture, — there is no expres- sion for that but raving lunacy. They uphold their sanity therefore by saying that they were panic-stricken. Though it is unlikely that they are personally any more cowardly than any one else, it is true that they have an official and authoritative kind of behaviour characterized by extraordinary and diabolically planned bullying, which is just as bad and proverbially has much the same result as cowardice. It is the fear of reprisals which causes them to commit atrocities; and when they enter a village they are willing to massacre the inhabitants rather than run the risk of a stray shot. For a time brutality seems efficient: in the long run it will prove disastrous. Moreover their lack of training in games and sports, and their exclusively military exercises, SAVAGERY US lead them to indulge in unfair practices which would be impossible to any people accustomed to fair play. Not only do they lack chivalry and a sense of humour, which is conspicuously absent from their nation at all times, but they lack the most elementary notions of honourable behaviour. Not all of them — not all those at sea, for in- stance; and of course only some of those on land. But certain unfair practices seem to be insisted on by authority; on the principle that all is fair in war, — which never has been in the least true. That proverb about all being fair in love and war emanates from the devil, and has had, and is having, vicious conse- quences; because, while it sounds plausible and semi-humorous, it lends itself to moments of temptation and undermines resistance. Any man, whatever his creed, must feel that foul and dishonourable deceit is beneath his dignity as a man, and that if he can only succeed by methods of that kind he would prefer to fail; since failure at any rate need not be dishonourable. In the German, absence of humour has become tragic. They are not wholly deficient in the quality; they are able to recognize the humorous side of people in the water trying to clamber up the slippery side of an up-turned boat. But it is not among their strongest qualities. Their indignation at the idea that one of their submarines might be attacked by a merchant vessel which it was intending to sink, is evi- dence of this. It was probably not in the Berlin 114 THE WAR AND AFTER Zoological Gardens, but it might have been, that the following inscription was placed upon a cage : — This animal is vicious. When attacked it defends itself. 1 So they issue a complaint to neutral Powers about the hostile attitude of merchant vessels when threatened by a submarine. So also they were profoundly moved to indignation by the attitude of Belgium, which behaved more like a porcupine than a sheep or a hare, and not only resented but actively opposed the encroach- ment of its territory by an armed force. What incredible impudence! The fact of unexpected opposition seems to arouse extraordinary feelings of animosity in high quarters in Germany — quarters which we must impersonate as the Kaiser, without pre- suming on any personal judgement. The best excuse that can be made for this indignant anger is one made by one of the characters, an old American dame, in Mrs. Sedgwick's novel Tante : — "But I guess we can't judge people like Mercedes, Karen. When you go through life like a mowing-machine and see everyone flatten out before you, you must get kind of exalted ideas about yourself. If anything happens that makes a hitch, or if anybody don't flatten out, why it must seem to you as if they were wrong in some way, doing you an injury." However superior in practice their conduct 1 Cet animal est tres mediant Quand on Fattaque, il se defend. SAVAGERY 115 Effects of Evii, Theory may be in the sense of being nearer to what they regard as their rightful will, the Prussian ideals as set forth by its leading politicians and professors are extraordinarily base. So wrong-headed and preposterous have their theories been that it has been difficult to take them seriously; we could not believe that any nation could act up to the mad doctrines and put in practice the crazy precepts of Nietzsche and his disciples, or regard them in any but a figurative and hyperbolic sense. The world has been inclined to laugh such vagaries to scorn, until the present outburst of intolerable evil has forced upon us the truth of the old theological dogma that perverted beliefs and false doctrines are the most deadly of all forms of evil, because most serious in their conse- quences, — leading in fact to nothing less than damnation. Conduct insufficiently restrained by sound faith, is lamentable enough but human. But for an evil faith to drag conduct down below the bestial level, and to drown the remonstrance of natural instincts in a flood of guile, — that is not human at all but devilish. We can hardly suppose that by a malign miracle the whole German nation has suddenly willed evil, but the practical outcome is like that. Theories become dangerous when they favour and justify the lowest impulses. "Some of their own militarist fanatics have said that they have no political aptitude; and they prove that now in their devotion to a 116 THE WAR AND AFTER theory of self-preservation which is leaving them without a friend in the civilized world. War, they believe, is in all ages a return to barbarism; but how if the world has reached a stage at which it will not allow any nation to return to barbarism, at which the conscious barbarian is treated as the enemy of the human race? Then he has no chance unless he is stronger than the human race. And the Germans now have allowed their theory to ride them almost into that desperate pass. They have done what they hoped to do; they have frightened the world, and it laughs at them no longer.'' To say that war licenses acts of every kind is to make a quite irrational statement. For what is the object of waging war? Not surely to destroy the rest of humanity, but to do something useful either for the whole human race or at least for one's own nation. Hence war, like other things, had become civi- lized, and bounds were set to the permissible amount of destruction and devastation; of which, alas! a sufficiency must always be caused. What object can be gained by a return to savagery, — by letting loose mere passion with- out any intelligent control? Such a procedure must defeat its own ends, whatever they are. But to a reasonable being it can have no ends; it cannot possibly have any claim to culture, nor can it assist in spreading the ideas and man- ners of the conqueror; for if those are the outcome of its civilization it stands self -condemned. So that even if successful in overcoming resistance, SAVAGERY 117 and making a cowed desert of the rest of the world, it would be beneath contempt as a mis- sionary effort. It is the same in war as in games. The object is not the mere winning. To win a game by- unfair practices, or by brutality, is not winning at all. The object of a football team, though apparently to place a ball between two posts, or over a certain bar, is not an object which justifies any and every method of achieving it. There would be no credit in taking the other side at some disadvantage, in handicapping them in some unfair way, or in trying to do it when they were not looking. Victory so achieved is worthless; and if, after all that has been done, the Germans now turned out ulti- mately victorious, their victory could be nothing but dust and ashes. Defeat is now their only hope, — they have left no other loophole; it is the only channel through which they can return to sanity,— and the sooner it comes now, the better for them and for every- body. A war carried on for no other object than the gratuitous infliction of suffering is destruc- tive to those who wage it, and the licence allowed or enforced on a soldiery must be subversive of all discipline and have dire consequences after a return to civil life. They err who count it glorious to subdue By conquest far and wide, to overrun Large countries, and in field great battles win, Great cities by assault ; what do these worthies, But rob, and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave Peaceful nations, neighbouring or remote. . . . Paradise Regained CHAPTER XV NON-RESISTANCE AND DEFENSIVE WAR GOOD people have been puzzled by the doctrine of non-resistance. There are certain cases in which non-resistance may be legitimate, a few in which it is admirable: there are other cases when it would be grossly immoral. There is no real practical difficulty in discriminating between these cases, though the difference is perhaps not easy to formulate. Our instincts or intuitions are often more to be trusted than our theories. Non-resistance may be legitimate enough about some personal injury, or about some weak yielding to temptation such as an understand- able theft; and the defaulter may be forgiven, — sometimes with happy results. It is the kind of thing that must be done every day in a large community, and it is done most readily by those who have themselves experienced the evil effects of harsh treatment. While in Canada I once heard that good man Prince Kropotkin, whom Russia of the past had imprisoned and expatriated for his opinions, catechized about his doctrine of non-resistance. "Do you mean to say that if a man stole your purse you would not have him put in prison?" 118 NON-RESISTANCE 119 His reply was an impressive one — "No; no more would you if you had ever been in one." In cases where the punishment far exceeds the crime it is better to put up with an injury than commit a greater one. That is common- sense and simply human, and in accordance with our instincts if we have sufficient illumination to recognize it. In Mr. Galsworthy's powerful plays, The Silver Box, and Justice, those who put the law in motion over a trifle must have deeply regretted their precipitancy before the end. But all this natural restraint on conduct does not mean that we should refrain from defending the helpless, nor that we should fail to stand up for the right. A passive attitude of defiance, though itself far from impotent, is not suffi- cient; there must be an active and positive attack on certain evils as well. The cleansing of the Temple shows, if any demonstration were needed, that bold and violent activity in face of flagrant and disgraceful wrong can be essen- tially Christian. And if the foe has guns and machinery we must employ guns and machinery too. Actual physical conflict is not out of har- mony with the plan of creation; it represents a stage in evolution — not a very high stage, and one that the world must ultimately outgrow; — but much of the world is not yet completely beyond the tooth and claw period of animal existence. It may be a puzzle, but we must trust our higher intuition; we shall find absolute sup- port there for defensive fighting, though none 120 THE WAR AND AFTER for selfish aggression; nor shall we find any justification for treachery or for insidious and lying statecraft, even though we encounter these evils rampant on the enemy's side — as we do. That verse of the National Anthem which we generally deprecate is truly appropriate just now: — Oh Lord our God arise, Scatter our enemies, And make them fall; Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On Thee our hopes we fix, God save us all. There is such a thing as righteous indignation. The following quotation is not from the Old Testament — an outburst of revolt against heathen persecution — it is in that most Christian and evangelical letter, The Epistle to the Romans. It might be printed in capitals as an inspired expression of deep and righteous indignation : — "Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood; Destruction and misery are in their ways; and the way of peace have they not known: There is no fear of God before their eyes" (Romans m. 13). I would that all neutral nations, or at any rate so great and powerful a people as Americans, could have seen their way to express their feel- ings in similarly forcible language, when inter- national law and the dictates of common NON-RESISTANCE 121 humanity were grossly violated, and could have taken honourable action accordingly. No fight- ing was necessary; the weapon of the boycott would have been amply sufficient as a sequel to denunciation; and they would have done their nation and the flag much honour. A non-fighting declaration of judicial hos- tility in the interests of civilization, and as representing the police of the world, could have been made. As an excuse for non-intervention it has been claimed that many of the citizens of the United States are German. That is only an answer if Americans are no longer to be considered as of our blood. In that case it is a foreign country, and no longer the America of our hopes. The federation of the English-speaking race, so long looked forward to — where is it!* But I doubt not that much will yet be done; the intervention needed from a non-European nation is so simple, so easily applied, so honour- able, and so effective. Apart from financial con- siderations, how the American citizen would rejoice to see the Stars and Stripes once more arrayed on the side of freedom and honour and in defence of truth and justice and right! Seldom indeed in any war is the issue so clear as in the present one. The tearing up of treaties, the contempt of the written word, the treachery, the lying, and above all the unspeak- able cruelties, put our enemy outside the pale of civilization, and he should be boycotted with firmness and decision. The sooner these evils are * The answer is given magnificently in 191 7. See Preface. 122 THE WAR AND AFTER eradicated from the planet the better, and now is the time for attacking them in concentrated form. The policy of abstention, and apparently bland acceptance not only of breaches of inter- national law but of crimes against humanity, until some national affront is offered which cannot be ignored, will be felt hereafter a dis- grace. "He that is not with us is against us," is now being manifestly said by the supreme Power of Goodness, — that power which is being denied and blasphemously assailed. And how much might be done! "For, methinks, I see the great work indeed in hand against the abusers of the world, where- in it is no greater fault to have confidence in man's power, than it is too hastily to despair of God's work." 1 But man's power, in such things, is also great, when exercised by a whole people for the right. As Wordsworth says, in a Sonnet of 1811 :— The power of armies is a visible thing, Formal, and circumscribed in time and space; But who the limits of that power shall trace Which a brave People into light can bring Or hide, at will, — for freedom combating, By just revenge inflamed? War as Suppuration War is not a healthy form of activity, it is a pathological symptom, a sign of disease; though truly it may be beneficent in the long run, as in- 1 The elder Sidney, — treating of the war in the Nether- lands against Philip of Spain. NON-RESISTANCE 123 flammation is beneficent. When things are wrong there must be a struggle to set them right, and the effort must involve pain and sacrifice. If the morbid microbes succumb permanently to the attack of our phagocytes, the result is renewed health. A deep-seated disease calls for desperate remedies, and inflammation may have healthy and curative consequences. The virulence of the inflammation is a sign of the severity of the disease. But we need a Lister to show us a better way than suppuration, an antiseptic or aseptic sur- gery, to deal with the wounds of the body politic. The most obvious evil in humanity at present is the Prussian spirit, its philosophy, its ideals, and its practice. These must be extirpated or humanity will succumb. But these are not the only evils, they are conspicuous, they are recog- nized, they are being attacked ; but there are others more deep-seated, barely suspected, less violent, but hardly less dangerous. While we are cleansing the Temple let us see to it that the work is done thoroughly. War is not always opposed to Christianity: there are worse evils than death. It is Christian to make a stand for the right, though never in a self-seeking spirit. If Germany had only disagreed with our methods and had tried doctrines of its own, had vigorously competed with us in commerce but had otherwise kept itself to itself, we should never have attacked it. If any Statesman had been wicked enough to attempt such a war, the working classes would not have allowed it. Their pronouncements for peace and brother- 1M THE WAR AND AFTER hood were clear — clear enough on the passive side. But they did not go far enough; their willingness to supply actual help was doubtful. England has a reputation for inertia and selfish- ness; and it was this reputation for putting money-bags first, for regarding Turkish bonds more than the wrongs of Bulgaria and Armenia — whether the reputation was deserved or not — which misled people. Sir Edward Grey was not quite certain that the English people would go to war in defence of Belgium; he was careful to say that the Country must decide, but that he thought it would. A few Labour Members — good men in intention— are mistaken still, and adhere to their one-sided passive statement of peace and brotherhood and goodwill. But goodwill on the negative side is not enough ; there comes a time when activity is necessary, and when anything else is unchristian and inhuman. To maintain brotherhood effectively requires some- thing more than passivity: there is no brother- hood nor even neighbourliness in passing by on the other side. Active interference is required when an enemy tries to trample on a friend. At that stage we now are: and thank God we have responded ! To a nation exuberantly proud of its own organization and social structure, and anxious to force them on all the rest of the world and cram them down its throat by force, we say: — ■ Convert us by influence and teachings and reasonableness, if you can, and we will retaliate in kind; and in the course of the discussion we will remain brothers in argument, as we NON-RESISTANCE 125 can be brothers in a football contest or any other fair game. But come to us with weapons, — aye, or go to our friends and Allies with weapons, to hack your way through and to impose your will on them — we will meet you with weapons also; and for the good of the world, and under the banner of Christ, we will resist you to the death. The present war has made this clear. It would have been better if it had been clear before; but nothing can really make things clear except acts. Deeds are the test of faith. By their fruits ye shall know them. By their fruits we can test the doctrine of the Politicians and Pro- fessors of Berlin. Neutrality in face of outrages like these would be a crime. To sit still and allow their doctrines to be forced on the whole civilized world would be false to our trust — • to ignore our mission, to deny our Master. It is in his name we are fighting, and we can plead his example. CHAPTER XVI CHRISTIANITY AND PACIFISM THOSE who emphasize as Christian the doctrine of non-resistance and the power of meekness and long-suffering, should remember that Christ came to show us those aspects of Deity which we might otherwise have missed. He did not emphasize the strong and fierce and dangerous aspects, except very inci- dentally and occasionally. He did not conceal them, but there was little need for calling atten- tion to those aspects, — Nature and History and common experience do that; the Hebrew Scriptures and Mosaic Law are sufficiently explicit; those attributes have always been familiar to all races of mankind. But the gentler aspects have not been so familiar, and those were what needed to be emphasized, — the aspects of Love and Friendliness and Com- passion — the otherwise almost incredible attri- butes of Sympathy and Fellow-feeling. Even the attributes associated with the term "child- like" cannot be alien from the fullness of the Godhead. Attending now to the Christian revelation, we must admit that there are many ingredients in the composition of human life with which 126 CHRISTIANITY AND PACIFISM 127 Christ was not directly concerned; and war is one of them. For his lifetime happened in a period — one of the few periods — of world peace. Consequently we cannot say from direct evi- dence what his attitude to a righteous war would have been; that is, a war undertaken from no selfish motive, but in defence of right, of home, and of the weak. We know how- ever, unless we resolutely blind ourselves to facts, that his attitude would not have been one of inattention or non-resistance; we can judge fairly well from his parable of the wolf and the sheep-fold, — the good shepherd fought the wolf, while the hireling took refuge in igno- minious flight; we know it from his use of violence in the cleansing of the Temple, but we know it still more from his denunciations. He did not mince matters about the wrath to come. It must be remembered, — according to the view of orthodox Christianity, and in accord- ance doubtless with the views of those who claim in excessive detail supernatural sanction for the deeds and words of their Master, — that bodily violence in face of wrong was in his case unnecessary; denunciation was sufficient, since his denunciations, unlike ours, were effec- tive. Witness the case of the barren fig-tree. His Kingdom was not of this world, and there was no need for his servants to fight. Legions of angels were at his disposal; and the most scathing denunciation and summoning of woe was never wanting when wickedness was accom- panied by knowledge and when the wrongdoer erred in the face of light. There was not a trace of pacifist non-resistance on his part, 128 THE WAR AND AFTER save in respect of personal injuries. He was not one to wash his hands and excuse himself from intervention when the innocent was un- justly accused, or when confronted with the powers of Satan. No, the typical pacifist was Pilate ! But, by Christ, the Devil and all his works were resisted to the death. In speaking of assaults on children he said: "Whosoever offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone be hung about his neck and that he be drowned in the depths of the sea" — meaning that any violent death was preferable to the fate that was actually in store for such a monster. So it was also that he denounced the orthodox re- ligious people of his time as religious hypocrites who were devouring widows' houses and for a pretence making long prayers, — "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damna- tion of hell !" With punishments and penalties like these at his command there was little need for bodily violence of any kind. "Fear not them," he said, "which can only kill the body and afterwards have no more power; but fear Him who can cast both body and soul into hell. Yea, I say unto you, fear Him !" There is no leniency, no pacific treat- ment of wrong here, nor is laxness anywhere to be found in the universe. Evil may be allowed to accumulate for a time, but sooner or later Nemesis arrives. It is the divine attributes of Deity that we have to learn, not their merely human aspect only; and some of those Attributes are fierce and inexorable. With all the powers of the Universe at His command He can stand by while CHRISTIANITY AND PACIFISM 129 inhuman tortures are inflicted, and interfere no more than He did at the scourging and the crucifixion. Great pain can evidently be tolerated by One who sees both before and after, with far-reaching vision. Death and bodily pain are not the worst of evils; and slaughter — even wholesale slaughter — is from time to time permitted, if thereby evils can be eradicated from humanity which otherwise would remain dormant. Christ was not the only revelation of the attributes of .Deity vouchsafed to us. Surely people admit that the whole realm of Nature is another channel of intelligence; and we have our instincts also. We can learn by studying the mind of man as well as the starry heavens. The attributes we so learn are not the ones emphasized by Christ, — true, — the danger was that the human race should continue to attend to those other channels too exclusively; but it is folly now to take refuge in the other extreme. One fact that is vividly worth remembering at the present time is that God does not act without agents; it is only through suitable agents that the physical world is affected at all; it is probably through appropriate agents that Divine action is always taken. He acts in accordance with law and order; if evil is to be exterminated it is exterminated by means, and by appropriate and available means. When there was a revolt in heaven, orthodox people are given to understand that it was put down by suitable means, by contest and violence, in other words by war. It was not tolerated nor treated leniently. 130 THE WAR AND AFTER Evil is not treated leniently in this universe. The punishment of sin is awful. Are not our sensitive nerves able to convey to us agonies of pain? Suffering is the badge of all our tribe. These things had been well rubbed into the Jewish nation: they are referred to as well- known, but the immediate era of Christ's presence on earth was "the acceptable year of the Lord." "The day of vengeance of our God" had not then come; but he never concealed the fact that come it would. And the execution of vengeance requires agents. If we are worthy, we may be employed for the purpose: if we are not worthy, doubtless other agents can be used. Not the sword only, but the noisome beast and the pestilence can be brought into service. But there are times when we can be honoured by being enrolled under a Divine Commission, and when the rooting out of evil is entrusted to us; and then, it is upon our character and conduct in the past that our efficacy and even our method will depend. If we are strong enough, and have clean hands and a record for strict justice, and have never over-reached or bullied a weaker neighbour or coveted or grabbed his goods, — then our bare word may suffice to prevent some great evil from befalling mankind, and may bring shame and repentance to the sinner. But if we are less worthy than that, then we too much be punished, even while we are relatively honoured, by being called upon to inflict and to suffer ills of various kinds — the inevitable result of national sin. When a nation behaves as the German nation CHRISTIANITY AND PACIFISM 131 has behaved we are justified in sharing with the Highest a blaze of righteous anger, and we are summoned to the activities which accom- pany such anger. Wherever tyranny and vice are rampant, virtue means protest and strenuous activity. As the sword of the Lord, and in the power of His might, we must slay and extir- pate the evil men who are responsible for the outrages to humanity and who have dragged the nation down till they approve them. "Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord; shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?'' CHAPTER XVII "l,OVE YOUR ^N^MI^S" NOT only the rulers have gone wrong, but the German people also. The people have shown themselves marvellously docile, their emotions being apparently under State control; and, when told to hate, they use every means to stimulate that feeling. One of their weak- nesses, all along, has been excessive mental sub-division, — trusting the specialist, sub-dividing the complexity of life until they have lost all comprehensive grasp; so the reins have now slipped from their fingers, and over everything of importance, even over their own passions, they have lost control. Even their Professors are State officials. The German Professor, as has been said, does not so much profess as officiate; and the whole class has shown itself amenable to political influence. A wonderful and horrible thing has been committed in the land: the Professors, teach falsely, Politicians bear rule by their means, and the people love to have it so. They are miserably deceived, but even so we have no hatred for them. The injunction to love our enemies is sometimes said to be im- 132 "LOVE YOUR ENEMIES'* 133 possibly hard, but essentially and instinctively we are obeying it. No bitterness, but only honour, is felt for foes who do their duty strenuously and die or suffer heroically. How eagerly the nation has seized every opportunity of honouring sailors who in the course of their work have done us legitimate damage. There is a wholesome spirit in fighting a fierce and honourable foe who plays the game. We have shown in South Africa and in the Soudan that we can honour such foes, and feel no bitterness against them. How willingly we would do the same with the Germans if they gave us any opportunity, — as some few of them have, — has already been proved. They misunderstand it, they think it cowardice or hypocrisy, — some- thing which they can better understand. But we know that it is nothing of the kind; in serious matters like that we are not hypocrites, and our practice really comes up to, and often exceeds, our profession. In Mr. Begbie's interesting account of all the multifarious activity he saw behind the English lines in France, he narrates the follow- ing:— "The other day a doctor fell in with a British soldier whose blood was maddened by what he had seen of German treatment of our wounded men. 'Do you know what I mean to do/ he demanded, 'when I come across one of their wounded? I mean to put my boot in his ugly face.' The doctor replied: 'No, you won't; it's not in your nature. I'll tell you what you will do — you'll give him a drink out of your water-bottle.' To which the soldier, after 134 THE WAR AND AFTER a pause in which he searched the doctor's face, made grumbling and regretful answer: 'Well, maybe I shall' " And when we think of the ministers of mercy, the doctors and nurses who brave danger and witness horrors to succour the wounded, who accompany the engines of destruction for the illogical but beautiful reason of lessening as quickly as possible the injuries they do, — "Is it not as if behind a tidal wave of flame risen from the very core of hell's furnaces there followed a squadron of the heavenly host, whose faces shine with the beauty of the grace of God?" It cannot truly be said that the British have been unchivalrous. To refrain from protesting too much good intention is wise, for it is hard to raise conduct to an ideal level; and failure to achieve what we aim at, looks like hypocrisy. There are few vices to which as a nation we are less prone. The Germans are not hypo- crites either, but then they strenuously and loudly profess evil. It cannot be always easy to act up fully even to their profession, though some of them have made far too successful efforts. The injunction translated "Love your enemies/' if pressed unduly and beyond its reasonable mean- ing, may sound like an impossible and futile counsel; it would have been more readily under- stood if it had been worded — Honour and respect your foe, be ready to recognize good in him and to meet him half way. In all this our nation has a clean record. But the translation is right. To love people "LOVE YOUR ENEMIES" 135 as ourselves does not mean to be uncritical towards them, or to refrain from blaming or punishing them. Far from it: the best human nature has always been severe on its own failings and frailties and sins. But it does mean trying to understand, to see their point of view, to rejoice at any spark of good and of honourable conduct which may be detected. In so far as there are none such — • approbation and affection would be utterly misplaced. But think of the barbarous futility of an opposite injunction, and of the extraordinary state of mind which can lead people to regard the injunction "Hate your enemies" as a national or human asset ! 1 The good faith and trustfulness of the German people have been imposed upon, and they have been so misinformed and misled about this war, and about the diplomacy which led to it, that they have made themselves willing tools; but never in a spirit of conscious wrong. A German whose eyes have been opened, writing for his own people, has explained to them the wickedness of the diplomacy of both Germany and Austria, in a book called J' Accuse published in German at Lau- sanne; but the circulation of the book in Germany has been forbidden. From its 1 The absence of reciprocation on our side is illustrated by the following: — At smoking concerts near the front I am told that German prisoners sometimes contribute musical items to the pro- gramme, and that occasionally the chairman's call takes this form : "Mr. Franz Schmidt will now oblige with the Song of 'ate." 136 THE WAR AND AFTER Germany will surely be forbidden. From its epilogue I translate but a brief sentence or two: — "The confidence of the German nation has been shamefully abused by its leaders and rulers; round its eyes, once so clear-sighted, the dark band of ignorance has been tied. Out of peace- loving citizens have been made fighters filled with hate and vengeance; out of representatives of high culture and intelligence, blind and narrow de- votees. . . . "They have ruined and blinded the German nation in order that they might be able to hound it into a war which it had never fore- seen, never intended, and never wished. To make it 'free/ they have brought it into slavery. ... A faithful son of Germania, I see the deluded mother stumbling to the preci- pice, and spring forward to save her from the fatal fall. Is it still permitted in the Germany of to-day to speak the truth? Or have things already gone so far that lies only are fitting? . . . "Hundreds of thousands can be guarded from death, the German nation from ruin, — now, but now only — , if truth can make its way into the hearts of the German people. For truth is a call to halt, while lies are a step forward on the road to ruin. "The truth will but serve our adversaries, — do you think? You great children, closing your eyes to escape danger! Your adversaries have long known it. . . . But you, Germany, in- corrigibly trustful dreamer, you alone are still slumbering, — -are still sleeping peacefully, in "LOVE YOUR ENEMIES" 187 all your unrighteousness, the sleep of the righteous. " Yes, the cause still seems righteous in the eyes of the people, and still they are willing nobly to sacrifice everything for its attainment; that is why we can still respect them. "We have seen our enemies dying fine deaths bravely for a cause which, to our thinking, is neither brave nor fine; and when they have died like that, for a cause like that, we give them all that we can, and all that we may — the respect brave men deserve. We have hated a cause; we have not hated, and we pray that we may never hate, the combatants.' ' Yet the present is no era for untimely generosity. Those who advocate treating the enemy well, and giving him good terms, should be sure first that we have the upper hand, — should be sure indeed that the enemy realizes and admits that fact — otherwise it will seem only like weakness. A farmer catching a culprit in his apple orchard may, if he chooses, refrain from thrashing the boy he has caught, and even give him a few apples and tell him not to come again. But if, instead of a boy, he encounters a man with a bludgeon, — a friendly and charitable treat- ment of the violent culprit may be otherwise interpreted; and the pacifist farmer might soon find that his orchard had to be abandoned alto- gether. Indeed that would be the ultimate result of non-resistance, pressed to extremes, in face of a truculent foe; there would be nothing for it but to get off the earth. There have doubtless been saintly individuals, here and there, whose personal and divine \ IBS THE WAR AND AFTER dominance was such as to disarm even a truculent foe. If you have a personality such as that, developed during a lifetime of saint- hood, nothing further need be said; no instruc- tion is required by such a one; his behaviour would be part of his character, and his influence may be extraordinary. But for ordinary un- trained and ungifted persons to attempt con- duct on this level because they admire it, when the whole foundation on which it is built is non-existent, is certainly unwise and cannot but lead to disaster. The apostolic injunction "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus" is sane and right and strong; and if that is the state of your mind you are above exhortation or rebuke. But if it be not the state of your mind, if you have not led the life which makes that possible, if you are only pretending that your mind is in that condition, — then the pretence will become apparent, and your actions will discredit yourself and disable your friends: besides doing mortal injury to the cause you have at heart. There are good people about to-day whose desire for good is genuine enough, though their power and wisdom are ter- ribly limited. So far as lies in their power they are, without intending it, encouraging the foe. It is the same in industrial war — to which some of those who now advocate premature and easy conditions of peace may be more accustomed. While your enemy is undefeated, an offer of easy terms is a sign of weakness. Ordinary commercial bargaining would obviously be jeop- ardized by premature offer of easy terms. Only "LOVE YOUR ENEMIES" 139 when you are really master, and the foe (whether it be workmen in a strike or masters in a lock-out) is defeated, can leniency and generosity be proposed without their being not only misunderstood but actually detrimental. All such talk at the present time is a danger to the Commonwealth, especially if its impor- tance — as is all too likely — be overrated by the foe. But what a period it is through which we are passing, one of the scourging and purify- ing epochs of the world's history! The good feeling and the generosity are only untimely: presently when peace reigns once more, they will resume their value, and be an asset to mankind. Tribulation is always grievous, and the pain suf- fered by kindly and tender souls must be severe; but it is the method necessary for threshing out the grain, and we are now buying the threshing-floor that in the future may stay the plague. Saddened and serious the nation will hence- forth be, sobered by the loss of so many bright young lives, — brilliant, some of them, with every worldly prospect, heirs of great estates, in- heritors of great names, to human ken lost and gone — Oh Iago, the pity of it; the pity of it, Iago! And those who return, saved as by fire, what scenes they will have witnessed, what memories will cling round them, what horrors have they not been through? For a generation at least frivolity will surely be burned out of the land, a consuming fire will have passed over it; 140 THE WAR AND AFTER and an outpouring of the Spirit, long expected, will meet with keener receptivity than ever be- fore. Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead ! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old But dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold, Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage. We have reaped the fruits of the past, we are struggling through the present; only those now young will enter upon the future — a future clouded with anxiety but brightened with hope. "To you, young men, it has been given by a tragic fate to see with your eyes and hear with your ears what war really is. Old men made it, but you must wage it — with what courage, with what generosity, with what sacrifice of what hopes, they best know who best know you. If you return from this ordeal, remember what it has been. Do not listen to the shouts of victory, do not snuff the incense of applause; but keep your inner vision fixed on the facts you have faced. You have seen battleships, bay- onets, and guns, and you know them for that they are, forms of evil thought. Think other thoughts, love other loves, youth of England and of the world! You have been through hell and purga- tory. Climb now the rocky stair that leads to the sacred mount." PART III: THE FUTURE "Thy kingdom come'' When history records its final verdict upon this great war and decides upon its real causes, it will be influenced not so much by what we are saying now, as by what we do after- wards. Much remains To conquer still, peace hath her victories No less renown'd than wan . . . PART III: THE FUTURE CHAPTER XVIII TH3 OUTCOME THE toil and suffering are not over yet, the need for continued exertion is patent; it is too soon to estimate the consequences, but the pain and danger have been so severe that surely the nation will take warning, surely it will not let itself sink back into old habits, and once more become sluggish and luxurious. Not England only but Europe should be renewed in the spirit of its mind. The earth might be so fine a habitation for an ennobled human race; the physical beauty of its early summer — which to some percipient souls is so intense as to be hardly bearable — is only typical of what might be throughout, if man also became harmonious. If, in some strange indirect way, the present strife contributed towards an effective realization of this truth, the outcome would be worth even the cost. But it must be admitted that the result of the war must be dependent on the progress our civilization has made during the era of peace. We cannot suddenly change our character; what we can do is to use the opportunity to develop and foster those wholesome attributes 143 144 THE WAR AND AFTER which might otherwise have lain dormant — to display the power and the goodwill which only a strong stimulus can bring into the light of day. Humanity rises under stress, it responds to a strenuous call, and the same individuals who have gone on working and grumbling and living ordinarily most of their lives are found to be- have as heroes when danger is imminent or when the call of duty comes. War is by no means the only real stimulus: opportunities for heroism arise in times of peace also; and, whether at a coalpit, or a fire, or a shipwreck, men are able, without self-consciousness or any heroics, to perform prodigies of valour and willingly to risk their lives. Daily routine is often too dull to bring out the best in human nature; only the really strong soul can live heroically amid the ordinary humdrum affairs of life. That seems to be a test beyond ordinary human nature; yet the heroism is there all the time, often unsuspected, — it only needs circumstances to call it out. T. H. Green used to say that "one of the chief trials of life was its slow- ness.^ What modern courage is called on to face is not, as in war, the storm and the whirl- wind with their grandeur and romance, but what William James called "the steady drizzle" of small inconveniences, discomforts, annoyances, depressions, and despondencies. Even in modern warfare itself, in the case of the vast majority of those who are either directly or indirectly engaged, it is doubtful whether it is not this virtue, under exceptionally exciting conditions, that is mainly called for. The merit of Nietzsche's message — and it has THE OUTCOME 145 many; merits when interpreted intelligently — is that he urged his unpromising nation to treat daily affairs as opportunity for heroic effort. This is the meaning of the sometimes misin- terpreted passage quoted in its context before, in Chapter VI :— "Live dangerously. Build your cities on Vesuvius. Launch your ships on uncharted seas. Live at war with your equals and with yourselves !" So also G. B. S. set forth dramatically, in Major Barbara, a proposition which it is not unfair to consider as responsibly intended: — ■ "Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done." And again, in the same play: — "When you vote, you only change the names of the Cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down Governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new." Well, we have been "shooting" now. Surely we may hope that we may have had circum- stances enough, or shall have had by the time the war is finished, to call out our faculties, not momentarily but permanently, and to estab- lish ordinary life on a higher level than before. That is a special feature in the training of the Boy Scout, that he is to seek opportunities of kindly service in the daily round; — so it must be part of the education of the ordinary citizen to recognize an opportunity for service in the life of honourable industry, in the life of creation rather than in the life of destruction, 146 THE WAR AND AFTER in the arts of peace rather than in the arts of war. "There is truer duty to be done in raising harvests than in burning them, more in build- ing houses than in shelling them, more duty in honest and unselfish living than in honest and unselfish dying. To be heroic in danger is little. To be heroic in change and sway of fortune is little. To be patient in the great chasm and pause of loss is little. But to be heroic in happiness; to bear yourself gravely and righteously in the dazzling of the sunshine of morning; not to forget the God in whom you trust when He gives you most; not to fail those who trust you when they seem to need you least — this is the difficult fortitude. ... All the duties of her children to England may be summed up in two words — industry and honour" (Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive). But we must keep our leaders up to the mark: we must make them use all their abili- ties for the good of the Nation; we must call them away from the game of Party Politics, from a consideration of party gains and per- sonal careers; or rather we must show them that their careers will be ruined by persistence in any such trivialties. We have been counted among the champions of Christendom; we have stood up for Christ against Belial. The cause of the Nation is now the cause of Christ, Politics is no longer a game, but a serious matter. We have been face to face with the powers of evil; the powers of good have been on our side. We must be faithful to the highest that we know; the Nation must raise the THE OUTCOME 147 standard of the greatest Revelation in human history. While as to the Christian Churches,— they must admit their essential unity, they must try to regard their differences as they would be regarded from a higher standpoint; religious denominations must cease from squab- bling, on pain of losing their hold on the Com- munity. The cry of the religious teacher, in essence if not in words, must be "Back to Christ." We shall have learnt that death and sacrifice for the good of humanity is not too high a demand, even on the most ordinary of the sons of men; while as to the higher, the mountain peaks of the race, — the atmosphere is tremulous with the wave of sympathy which is passing through it, and death is but the prelude to im- mortal victory. Unto each man his handiwork, unto each his crown, The just fate gives; Whoso takes the world's life on him and his own lays down, He, dying so, lives. Whoso bears the whole heaviness of the wrong'd world's weight , And puts it by, It is well with him suffering, though he face man's fate ; How should he die ? Seeing death has no part in him any more, no power Upon his head ; He has bought his eternity with a little hour, And is not dead. For an hour if ye look for him, he is no more found, For one hour's space ; Then ye lift up your eyes to him and behold him crowned, A deathless face. 148 THE WAR AND AFTER On the mountains of memory, by the world's well-springs, In all men's eyes, Where the light of the life of him is on all past things, Death only dies. CHAPTER XIX ON THE DULNESS OF WAR, AND ITS CIVILIAN ASPECT, AND ON EFFECTIVE NEUTRALITY THE demonstration of the uninteresting and monotonous character of modern civilized warfare is a feature of special value. War is now a dull and dirty business, and the acces- sories of its organization are much more closely related to the discipline associated with convict labour than ever before. The state and panoply of war is a thing of the past. Parade finery has become an ana- chronism. It used to have a meaning when people actually went into war in fine clothes; but now that they are all discarded before business begins, they have become a sham and a pretence, like bad architecture, which pretends to be stone whereas it is really iron, the sham arch being supported by a girder. Real fighting clothes are not conspicuous but workmanlike. Armies do not advance with banners flying and trumpets blowing, but in loose open order, each individual looking after himself, and taking shelter or digging himself into the mud as soon as pos- sible. Tools are therefore quite as important as arms; and miners with safety breathing ap- pliances may prove themselves the fittest to sur- vive. 149 150 THE WAR AND AFTER It is much the same in marine warfare. To conduct sneaking undersea attacks on fishing boats or trading vessels is no occupation for a gentleman; and the deteriorating effect of this kind of work on German sailors has be- come conspicuous. It is dishonouring to a noble profession. Every war has its own lessons, and training based on past experience gets rapidly out of date. Initiation and originality are more neces- sary than mechanical obedience. Changes are very rapid, and excessive practical instruction in extinct methods may be positively harmful. Moreover war has become to a great extent a matter of civil organization: traffic and supplies and railways, engineering and scientific appli- cations and medical resources; all which things can be studied and encouraged and developed in times of peace, only a slight dislocation and extension being needed to make them available in times of war. In medicine and surgery this seems fully recognized. It might be more recognized in engineering and many other subjects. Far less than before is war an exclusive and self-contained subject. A few leaders and officers who make it a profession there must always be; but the bulk of the combatants should be en- gaged in civil occupations, and a moderate amount of parade drill should be sufficient. Open order advance must depend a good deal on individual prowess, and training for it must be more akin to scout work than to parade drill. Older methods have to be partially unlearned in modern war; DULNESS OF WAR 151 it is full of emergency, and occasional breaches of regulation-tightness may be justified by success. The system of keeping soldiers nearly idle during peace, and too superior to do civil work efficiently, must be out of date. Trench work is dirty and muddy, and there is no reason why the men should not engage in similar work in peace time. In the old days at the South Kensington Museum, if a bucket was wanted, two men and a corporal were sent to fetch it; the two men brought the bucket between them, the corporal marching with them. This sort of thing is nonsense, and is akin to the "goose step" — a characteristic though ridiculous Prussian at- titude. It is right that war should disturb industrial organization, and that warriors should freely utilize the skill of civilians, who willingly help if called in and given the opportunity: it is not right that a whole class of the community be kept for war purposes alone. War is only tolerable if made a dire national necessity, so that it will never be entered upon lightly or for the sake of a career; it ought to interrupt careers, and be only undertaken when it is forced upon us from outside, — as in the present instance. We have learnt that against certain foes peace- ful civilians enjoy no immunity in case of in- vasion. Hence they must be able to resist. For that purpose, and that purpose only, they must all be armed and trained, — -at least wherever in- vasion is a possibility. But apart from the actual danger which civilians now run, of overbearing and atrocious 152 THE WAR AND AFTER insult, universal body-training for service should be the rule; not what is now known as military training — or not much of that; — but plenty of something more like naval training — the training of the handy man; training for use- fulness of all sorts, analogous to that of Boy Scouts; together with exercise for maintaining bodily fitness, for power of marching and carrying weights and endurance generally. Such discipline would be good for the nation, and would lessen the number of street loafers and corner-men, whose very aspect is a disgrace, To call upon every nation to maintain so large a body of troops as to be able to intervene effectively by armed force in case of need is too much, but there ought to be an international police to enforce the judgements of international law. Law without force at its back is futile. There must be penalties for crime, and they must be enforced. The armies of the future must be maintained not for national aggrandizement, but as an international police. And the more civic and industrial the normal occupations of the force can be, the better. Many humane duties can be found for them, — even for the few who have to be specifically professional, — just as' they are found for the ordinary civic police of to-day. The army should be more like a police; and the more international the purely military calls upon it can be made, the better; — an international police for enforcing inter- national law, like the civil machinery we have for defence against burglars: the police CIVILIAN ASPECT OF WAR 15S being armed whenever burglars are armed, and provided with all the proper machinery. In mechanism and equipment nothing should be lacking; and every industrial organization should be pressed into the service. But it should be in full swing for ordinary industrial purposes at other times; and the managing and directing powers of those who have acquired long expert- ness by practice should be utilized in times of war. War should perturb the ordinary processes of trade; it should be conducted by their means and at their expense. Business should not go on as usual. All neutral nations should consider it their duty to uphold international law, and must cease to consider themselves free to refrain from action in face of international crime. But only in face of actual crime should the international force be mobilized. The right of revolt and insurrection must be preserved. An army used to suppress freedom would be a curse. Like every weapon, many inventions, and nearly every scientific discovery, military force can be misused: its employment should be jealously guarded and limited to its proper purpose. It must certainly be no engine in the hands of any one class, nor of any one Government. It must not be used to suppress popular criticism and free speech. All this is or should be plati- tude: for if there is a danger in this direction we are better without the force. The right use of force is to sustain, not to repress, freedom, and to uphold the principles of international law. 154 THE WAR AND AFTER Neutrality International law, people say, is confused and uncertain; but unless neutral nations do their duty in suppressing international crime, it is likewise impotent. Irrespective of any deli- cate question of law, there have recently been manifest crimes committed against humanity. These demand punishment. If neutral nations take no notice, the offender glories in his im- munity and continues his diabolical practices. It is troublesome no doubt to pronounce a strong judgement, the lazy way is to sup- pose that there may be something to be said on both sides, and to steer a middle, neutral, smug, and passive course. In case of crime against the innocent, this pro- cedure is utterly unfair. It is stigmatized forcibly by Browning in The Ring and the Book. The balanced judgement of the lawyer — it was not then the Pope — in that poem is blas- phemy against truth and right. The fatal out- come of such inertia could be no worse if judgement were viciously and purposely given in favour of wrong. It may be said truly by some neutral nations that they are not called upon to fight. That may be so, but in that case they are so for- tunately situated that without sacrifice of blood and treasure, merely by supplying help in one direction and withholding it in another — sacri- ficing nothing but an evil opportunity for profit — they can while declining war take effective sides. There should not be a civilized state in the world now that countenances such acts as have been NEUTRALITY 155 ordered by the ruthless policy of Germany. The powerful criminal should be banned and isolated by all the rest of humanity. Apart altogether from armed intervention, or from any participation in current disputes, the weapon of the boycott can be made very effective against a criminal nation; and any ill- treatment of prisoners or helpless people left in the enemy's hands should be most severely dealt with. For this cold-blooded and dis- graceful sin there is no excuse, and there should be no forgiveness: it is an outrage on humanity. Of how great service America has been to us in this one respect — that of obtaining access to and reporting concerning our prisoners — it is unnecessary to speak. It is an honourable service which as a matter of course it performs, but nevertheless we are grateful; and the effort not altogether to lose the approbation of that great people has been a restraining influence on exalted criminals who have very nearly cast off all restraint. The cutting off of supplies and diverting the stream of commerce from a delinquent, is a kind of war, and a very effective kind, but it is war which does not seek to maim and shatter. It cannot be undertaken without pecuniary and commercial sacrifice, entry upon it is therefore highly honourable, and its sole object is to bring erring nations to their senses, to strengthen the principle of right and equity, and to uphold a righteous government of the world. CHAPTER XX SOCIAL UNREST j'accuse ONLY in a country like Germany which has concentrated its soul on war-preparation can a war be really efficiently conducted. The fact that modern war had become a scientific and industrial undertaking is there well understood; and, partly in consequence of that perception, the industrial and scientific resources of that country have been developed to the utmost, and so organ- ized that they can be diverted from peace to war purposes without delay or dislocation. The familiar inscription on railway trucks (6 horses or 40 men) and the personal bearing of railway officials, are outward and visible signs of this easy transition. On the other hand it is manifest that we are almost hopelessly far from such a concen- tration — even in time of dire need. War Office officials, without adequate training in mercantile affairs, continue to manage what should be managed by competent civilians; and though they now conduct certain things, such as trans- port, in an admirable manner, under the orga- nizing genius at their head, other things are being seriously mismanaged. Scandals are arising 156 SOCIAL UNREST 157 about contracts; and even many months after the war broke out competent and specially trained civilians anxious to help were not trusted and not encouraged. Meetings take place for organiz- ing manufacturing firms on a war basis, but hardly anything is done. All this may, I hope, become ancient history at any moment: but, even so, valuable time has elapsed before it is set right. We have depended almost wholly on the strong and resolute character of the men at the front, and we have dawdled over the preparations which would back up their bravery and make it effective. Consider the civilian's position, and his irritating impotence in the face of what he knows is dire need. Great manufacturing firms are given rights and privileges for the good of the community; and when the call comes upon them for special service, they could surely re- spond, not merely to definite red tape orders, but in an organizing capacity; and they would be able to manage their business far better than when hampered by well-meaning but ignorant officialdom. Neither business nor finance can be efficiently worked by amateurs, any more than an inexperienced civilian can conduct a campaign. Civil activities must bend to military need, but the civil organiza- tion itself should be utilized, fully informed, and trusted. Treachery would be rare, and when discovered should be dealt with in prompt military man- ner. The vicious contractor is as dangerous as a full-blown traitor. He may exist but surely 158 THE WAR AND AFTER he is exceptional. Patriotism might easily be made the dominant note. Greed is a temptation which inefficient control only strengthens. Venality is not wholly excluded, or some officials are much slandered. Secret commissions are spoken of in some countries, and there are scandalous rumours even about the supply of arms. But hideous evils like these need no denun- ciation. They skulk in darkness: the light of day would destroy them. There are people com- petent to drag them out; and random accusations are worse than useless. Let us deal here only with those evils which are not universally felt to be evils, — with those remediable errors which are consistent with a feeling of righteousness and honour and duty. Mistaken or ill-informed officialism is one: it has been obstructive in every war we have had, and it is only less obstructive now. Hitherto the patriotism of manufacturing firms has prevented active revolt, but the tradi- tional methods of the War Office, in subjects which they do not understand, have been irritating beyond words. Let us hope that under the present regime the tradition will be broken. Then the workmen must be better instructed about what is expected of them. Posters invite them to enlist, but other information should be given, and their services should be asked for in many other ways also. To have Trade Unions deciding on limitation of output, and artificially restricting the working of machinery because of some conditions to which they had grown half -accustomed in time of peace— an outcome SOCIAL UNREST 159 of social strife and misunderstanding between employer and employed — to have such con- ditions extending into war time, so that men at the front are being slaughtered for want of the munitions which would do half the work for them — is utterly intolerable. It is treachery of the worst description. It cannot be meant as such: it must be due to defective imagination, the result of lack of education. Authoritative exposition and instruction is the remedy ; the poster method might be still more employed for the dissemination of trustworthy information. When the indignation of a people breaks out into rioting, the way to calm them is not by police suppression, but by information. If they are assured that the authorities are actually deal- ing with certain abuses, they will not go to the trouble and danger of violence; but if they are not so assured, they may feel it their righteous duty to show to those in authority that the country is in earnest, and that the population is behind them if they take strong measures. In a Democracy this is no small matter to be assured of. People in a higher class write to the Times, or speak on platforms, when they feel similarly moved; but for the mass of people, to whom a brick is handier than a pen, what outlet for their feelings have they, beyond a protest emphasized by physical force? In its origin the outbreak may be quite serious and conscientious; but of course the danger is that a rough and irresponsible element, always lurk- ing in the community, may utilize the opportunity for frolic, and may bring dis- 160 THE WAR AND AFTER credit on the movement by random destruction and looting. Adequate and prompt information would stop the beginnings of disturbance, provided the Government were able to say and to prove — what unfortunately they are often not able to show — that they are fully awake to the position and are taking prompt and effective measures. It is just because this is not only not known, but sometimes not the fact, that rioting is in a man- ner justified, and occasionally does assist to stimu- late into activity those who might otherwise be asleep. The populace cannot be expected always to respond to stimulus just when desired, and to refrain from all undesired forms of activity, un- less it is more frequently taken into confidence and informed clearly and sufficiently what is being done. There are indeed some measures taken by the enemy to which we in this country would hardly stoop. It is part of their efficiency not only to develop their own industries but to try to injure ours by a system of spies and of agents provocateurs. Bribes of more or less indirect kind can be given to employers, and the natural tendency of hard-worked and ignorant men to drink and idleness and slack- ness can readily be fostered by aliens in our midst; free drinks can be provided at a cost not excessive considering the advantage of obstructing the production of munitions of war; and our unsuspecting workers may fall into the trap. It is a loathsome and dirty kind of war, but that to some minds seems to be an attrac- SOCIAL UNREST 161 tion. And in so far as they are really en- deavouring to make war loathsome and filthy as well as horrible, — and in so far as they incite us to retaliatory measures altogether beneath our dignity, thereby lowering the moral cur- rency below that of savages, who do at least make war with open force — so far they may be stimulating an ultimately beneficent reaction, since the whole atmosphere of so-called war will become too disgusting for civilized nations any longer to be able to endure it. What is past is past — though not beyond in- quiry and punishment, — and we are looking to the future. In the future we want to get down to the root causes of an evil state of things. Something is very wrong with industrial condi- tions when workmen's organizations can delib- erately withhold munitions and threaten strikes, not because of any immediate grievance, but to uphold certain rules and regulations which in past time they have made. But although the call for special and sustained effort is loud, there is no excuse for harassed employers or impatient officials to urge men to continuity of labour, for long periods together, beyond their strength. Such over-pressure de- feats its own end, it makes for inefficiency; length of hours does not mean greater output. Skilled and thoughtful attention is necessary to all these points, and to the physical and mental health of workpeople. Spurts of extra work are pos- sible, but they must be short ; and if men are over- strained, their stamina or their nerves break down, so that when an extra call comes they cannot respond, and in sheer hopeless reaction 162 THE WAR AND AFTER may give way to the temptation of careless oblivion. Overwork on the part of men and animals is to be deprecated, — periods of rest are essen- tial, — but intermittent operation is no benefit to a machine; — that is quite different from animate exertion — a machine is not overworked by continuity of service, rather the contrary. A watch is none the better for being allowed to run down. Mechanism should work continuously, includ- ing time for cleaning and repairs; and the act of artificially keeping a machine idle at the present time, when it might be making munitions, is wickedness and treachery. In war an autocracy or dictatorship has a great advantage over a system of popular government, unless the populace is wise enough and well-informed enough to suspend its ordi- nary methods of restriction and revolt. The throes of war is no time to speak of social reform. In so far as that is attempted now, we are reap- ing the fruits of a bad past; the gleaners are storing trouble for themselves and are hamper- ing their cause in the future. They have a good cause, if only they would not be foolish now. Can they not suspend their rules and throw all their energies into the work, be the conse- quences what they may, when their brothers are being sacrificed by the thousand for want of their aid? They are honoured in finding that their help is so urgently needed, and that they are competent to give it. To abstain is folly which can only be half-excused by ignorance SOCIAL UNREST 163 or stupidity, and verges perilously near to crime. Most working-men feel this strongly, and are moved to indignation at the slur cast upon their class by the action or inaction of what can only be an obstinate few. It is the minority only whom we accuse: but the others are so busy they have not time to put the case strongly enough themselves. It is in their behalf that we must speak. And in speaking we must recognize, in all fairness, the magnificent mass of labour and energy that is being thrown into the national work, not only now but always. The "working class" is an epithet of nobility, a title to dis- tinction. It is to that class, always active on sea and land, that the nation owes its comfort, its luxury, its sustenance, and its safety. Among the workers must be reckoned those who in normal times have a reasonable amount of leisure — as all should have — even though their work is not strictly hand work. And of what are ordinarily called the more leisured classes, many, as is well known, are at the front, sacri- ficing themselves with distinguished honour at the call of duty, and surpassing themselves in acts of heroism; while many others are work- ing hard and doing all they can in various ways — ambulance and other. On the whole all classes, without distinction, have responded nobly, in ac- cordance with the demand of their traditions and privileges. But there is a residuum of all classes — most disgraceful among the well-to-do — who respond not at all to the national need, who regard the 164. THE WAR AND AFTER whole position with selfish detachment, who block the railway line with their special trains, and who frankly think the war a bore because it interferes with their comfort and their sports. These are not worth appealing to: they are useless excrescences on society anyhow; if they abstained from gambling they would be doing no good. Their possible usefulness is not worth considering. Let them alone; they are already damned. But with the industrial classes the case is far otherwise, and it behoves us to ask very care- fully how is it that any reasonably patriotic British working-men do not feel the call of patriotism more intensely? Those who join army or navy in time of war undoubtedly do feel the call; but those who stay and work are just as necessary, and ought to feel that they can just as really and honourably serve their coun- try by work into which they put their utmost energies — not counting the cost, not seeking for extra profit or better conditions, and not allow- ing any kind of class feeling to rise to the sur- face, until the foe has been vanquished and peace restored. Hear Mr. Ruskin on the roots of honour; he is worth a hearing: though he is then chiefly addressing employers. He is explaining that we honour a soldier because he is ready to die for his country; and that every profession is honoured because of the sacrifice for which, under given circumstances, it successfully calls. He specifies the conditions under which a man will undergo suffering and loss — the due occasion on SOCIAL UNREST 165 which he should be ready to die — rather than prove 1 false to the trust reposed in him : — "The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle. The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague. The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood. The Lawyer rather than countenance Injustice. The Merchant — what is his due occasion of death?" May we not say — rather than not provide for his country the materials it grievously needs? Shall Commerce and Trade be the only dis- honourable profession? Nay, rather we shall find that "commerce is an occupation which gentle- men will every day see more need to engage in, rather than in the businesses of talking to men, or slaying them; that, in true commerce, as in true preaching, or true fighting, it is necessary to admit the idea of occasional voluntary loss; — that sixpences have to be lost, as well as lives, under a sense of duty; that the market may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade its heroisms, as well as war." This has begun to penetrate to some employers of labour — it must penetrate to many more. It has hardly begun to penetrate to the workmen. Till it does, their occupation lacks the dignity which is essentially its due. Let us now leave railing accusations, and con- sider calmly what are the roots of the evil, if haply we may discover the source of them, and thus find a way to a remedy. CHAPTER XXI INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS N considering the changes that should be I made after the war, it is essential to remem ber the ghastly conditions of life and death which we have idly acquiesced in; hoping with a kind of grim hope that they were inevit- able, and that so not we were responsible but only the nature of things. The abominable false doctrine that humanity would always mul- tiply to the limits of subsistence has been responsible for much supineness and hopeless- ness in social reform. That doctrine has proved itself conspicuously untrue; and surely the war has taught us that Society may be more effi- ciently organized, so as to attack a multitude of remediable evils. Enthusiasts hope that humanity can see its way to put down war for ever. That is probably beyond our power; we cannot legislate for all eternity. But there are more important things which do lie within our power, and which are really more important than mere cessation of fighting. There are reforms at home waiting to be accomplished; and there are men able and willing to deal with them, if only the sinews for that wholesome kind of warfare were provided. — The expenditure not of a tithe, nor yet of a hundredth, but of a 166 INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 167 thousandth part of the cost of this war could in a few years lead to an extraordinary benefit to Society and might constitute a literal renewal of life. Needless infant mortality is responsible for as many frustrated lives as war. This one sen- tence touches a topic of vital moment! And survival is often mere existence — certainly not fulness of life. Life is just what we do not sufficiently attend to. Mr. Bernard Shaw is constantly preaching the value of life and the strength of the life- force, if we gave it a chance by removing manifest and fatal disabilities, and if we helped it with energy and enthusiasm such as we are ready to bestow without hesitation upon war. This is what he has re- cently said:— "Mr. Sidney Webb offers to put an end to British unemployment and destitution, with their infinite loss and demoralization, for a paltry couple of million pounds. Sir Horace Plunkett offers to quadruple the produce of the Irish soil, and thereby avert the land and labour war that is hanging over Ireland, at a cost of £5,000 a year for technical education in agriculture. They might as well ask for the sun and stars. No mother sends her son to live for England. No father shakes his son's hand and says 'I wish I were young enough to stand beside you in the fight for a decent country to live in.' '' Now that we have learnt the power of or- ganization, and the vast importance of scien- tific education to civilized man, we surely can- not be content to continue the old discredited methods of government by officials and 168 THE WAR AND AFTER amateurs, and stint all really enlightened enter- prises by the prosaic and debilitating handicap of scarcity of funds. The impecuniosity of practically all genuinely educational and scien- tific institutions is a national disgrace as well as folly. As the President of the Leland Stanford Uni- versity in America has lately said : — "We spend now some $290,000,000 a year on 'preparedness for war/ of course without getting it, though coming once or twice dan- gerously near it. Let us in addition spend one per cent, of this amount on prepared- ness for peace. It is an experiment worth trying." The value of human existence, as it might be developed if we rose to the height of our opportunities, is well expressed by Mr. Lowes Dickinson : — "There can be no peace, not even a genuine desire for peace, until men realize that the greatness of a people is to be measured by the quality of life of the individual citizens. A city like Athens or Florence is worth all the Empires that have ever been. The nobility of a people lies not in its capacity for war, but in its capacity for peace. It is, indeed, only because the nations are incapable of the one that they plunge so readily into the other. The task of peace is to create life, as the task of war is to destroy it; to organize labour so that it shall not incapacitate men for leisure; to establish justice as a foundation for personality; to un- fold in men the capacity for noble joy and pro- found sorrow; to liberate them for the passion INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 169 of love, the perception of beauty, the contempla- tion of truth." And again, speaking of humanity generally, "If men had given to the creation of life a tithe of the devotion they have offered again and again to its destruction, they would have made of this world so glorious a place that they would not need to take refuge from it in the shambles. It is our false ideals that make for war. And it is the feebleness of our in- telligence and the pettiness of our passions that permit such ideals to master us. We seek col- lective power because we are incapable of in- dividual greatness. We seek extension of territory because we cannot utilize the territory we have. We seek to be many, because none of us is able to be properly one." But though a democracy is often afflicted with a spirit of unwise and disproportionate economy, neither idealism nor ambition can be reckoned among its weaknesses. It can be drilled for war, but the difficulty of organizing it for the arts of peace is partly due to its not understanding the worthiness of the ob- ject — having naturally small perception of the beauty of life, — and partly to its disinclina- tion to submit to authority even of its own choosing, preferring to be swayed rather by the passion of the moment than by wise and considered judgement. Yet "when a man chooses for himself the part that he will take in the national organization, the more incumbent on him is it to fulfil that part to the utmost; where he has a voice in the selection of those who represent supreme authority, it is all the 170 THE WAR AND AFTER more incumbent on him to obey loyally." That is where our enemy has an advantage. For in a military autocracy, the danger of anarchic individualism is far less real; the people are readier, as it were by instinct, to do what they are told, and are not accustomed to think for themselves. "But Liberty has its price, Jike all else that is worth the having; an4 that price is greater risk to the State and greater responsibility to the individual/' That truth is just why the attitude of some of the intelligent artisans in this country is specially perturbing and disappointing; the supine and apparently selfish attitude of some of them is deserving of scrutiny. To what is it due? The facile slander is to attribute it to drink; and drink is not without its influ- ence. Alcohol is perhaps supplied freely by interested enemies, and the temptation may often be succumbed to. But the attitude of some good workers to the country's needs is susceptible of deeper explanation than that. It is not, and it cannot be, lack of patriotism; the very same sort of men volunteer for deadly service at the front. Whenever they can feel that they are serving the Nation and not the Capitalist they are heroic; the blighting sus- picion which curbs their effort is as to who reaps the benefit of all their labour. And this is not a momentary impulse or trivial ques- tion: it has grown up during all the centuries of factory labour and dividend-earning Com- panies. Labour is a floating commodity, easily accessible, and enterprises are started on the certainty that the necessary labour can be got INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 171 for the asking, and can be discarded and changed at will. The real grievance of labour is the absence of interest in work — the long hours of monotonous soulless toil. The words of Coleridge, in The Friend, ex- press for us this part of the social problem: "Those institutions of society which should condemn me to the necessity of twelve hours' daily toil, would make my soul a slave, and sink the rational being in the mere animal. It is a mockery of our fellow-creatures' wrongs to call them equal in rights, when, by the bitter compulsion of their wants, we make them in- ferior to us in all that can soften the heart or dignify the understanding." And a writer in a recent Hibbert Journal (April 191 5) says: — "In any great industrial city one looks at the people, at their dwindled, indefinite types, their deadening work, their play, which for the most part they perform by proxy; and, after humbly acknowledging certain virtues in them which such a life would certainly kill in oneself, one is still tempted to cry, 'But nothing, nothing, can ever make this a vital, creative, and there- fore whole and happy race again !' ' That is a hard saying, but the conditions must be held responsible for whatever industrial apathy there is. "I am not unpatriotic," said a workman when remonstrated with. "I had two sons at the front, one of them is killed. I am willing to serve the Country; but I will not slave over- time, and seven days a week, to increase the profits of a blasted blood-sucking board of m THE WAR AND AFTER Directors. I will work the hours I choose (he might go on) and for as long as is necessary to get me the pay I need for a week. More I don't need, and I want to live a human life and not the life of a slave. Show me work that has any interest and excitement and a spice of danger, and I'm on; but to tend a machine day after day from my youth up, — I'm about sick of it; and if they want it done for fifteen hours a day they can get another machine to do it — not me." How can the modern craftsman have joy in his work, — work without thought or originality or initiative, or anything but a long familiar mechanical skill? It can be tolerated for a few hours a day, since that is the way in which he draws from the capitalist a living wage, but as for the work itself the workman sometimes feels that it may go to hell and the capitalist with it. "What's all the work for?" he sometimes asks. "I don't know who wants the things. They're not produced because they're wanted, but because there's a profit on each; and if a million are turned out in a year, then the profit is a large one. I'm one of the hands that makes the profit for some one, and I'm tired of it. "Slums tempered by beershops, that's where we live, and we're taken on and shoved off just as may suit the manager. If the country needs my services, let it take them direct, let me have something to live for, something to work for, let me realize what I'm doing and be allowed to put some thought into it. Then I'll put my back into it too." INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 1*73 An anonymous writer in The New Statesman describes the average workman's position thus: we may not approve or relish the description, but we may at least bethink ourselves how far, allowing for some exaggeration, it is true: — "Consider the working-man's position. He has no security in his work beyond the week — frequently not beyond the day. He lives at the whim of the employing classes. He lives as it were at a week's notice. He sees his children growing up about him, and he knows that an accident may happen to him, any day, as the result of which they will be left to the harsh charity of the parish. He sees them growing up with the gutter for their only garden, and he speculates on the future of all that brightness and laughter, and its in- secure tenure even of the gutter. He sees them doomed to live almost for certain in the same flowerless monotony in which he himself has always lived. When they come into the house, he is like a man fighting for air. They are all fighting for air. They are overcrowded; they cannot get away from each other; they get on each other's nerves. Hence the occa- sional furies of mean streets, the outbreaks of violence and drunkenness. He attempts to bring some of the beauty of the world into his home: he has a caged bird, a cat, a pot of geraniums. He has one or two meanly showy glass orna- ments on the mantelpiece; but his house is almost always ugly. He is dumped, as it were, into a brickfield: he has no inheritance in the teeming earth. Wherever he goes it is the same. He is herded into cheap galleries in the theatres: 174 THE WAR AND AFTER he is pushed into separate bars in the public- houses. He is a person cut off, put in his place. He is an outsider, and his children are out- siders, in a world of motor-cars and rich dresses and gardens. . . . And yet, paradoxi- cally enough, he is cheerful rather than bitter, and he faces death for his coun- try in great battles with music-hall jokes on his lips." Yes, they are fine at the front, where their importance is obvious; nor are those of the more privileged class any less fine, there. But at home we have got into a rut of bad condi- tions, and so into an apparent lack of patriotism, for which the blame may have to be evenly distributed. The writer quoted above sees faults in employers, and objects to the workmen being regarded as "the bad boys of the family, whom it is always safe to blame. Whenever any dispute arises between them and their employers, they are almost invariably regarded as the aggressors. The employer who insists that war shall be the occasion of lower real wages and larger profits, is looked on as a sensible business man. The worker who demands that during war-time his children's stomachs shall be filled at least as usual, is browbeaten as a fellow who is disturbing the national unity and interfering with the supply of necessary things to his brothers in the trenches. The employer who strikes against giving his men an honest wage is never painted in half so dark colours. And yet it is his refusal to pay a fair wage which has again and INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 175 again in recent months held up the work of the war." The evil, whatever it is — the root of the so- called conflict between Capital and Labour— is not that of one nation, but of civilized humanity. What then is the remedy? One remedy is militarism. Let the worker be dragooned and disciplined into habitual obedience till he becomes docile, asks no ques- tions, and does not cultivate a soul; then he will be useful to the State. And the Capitalist class — let them be disciplined and docile too. The State will then be supreme; and provided other nations live a slacker kind of existence, it will acquire a world-dominance and be able to impose its will upon them all ; — that is the ideal condition from the German point of view. What an ideal! "It may, however, be said — in view of our present industrial conditions, and the low standard of physical health and vitality pre- vailing among the young folk of our large towns — that physical drill and scout training, including ambulance and other work and quali- fication in some useful trade, might very well be made a part of our general educational system, for rich and poor alike, say between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. Such a training would to each individual boy be immensely valuable, and by providing some rudimen- tary understanding of military affairs and the duties of public service and citizenship would enable him to choose how he could be helpful to the nation, — provided always he were not forced to make his choice in a direction 176 THE WAR AND AFTER distasteful or repugnant to him. In any good cause, as in a war of defence against a foreign enemy, it is obvious enough that there would then be plenty of native enthusiasm forthcoming without legal or official pressure.'' So says Edward Carpenter. Something of this sort has now in emergency been organized at Liverpool by the admirable efforts of Lord Derby, and unloaders of ships have been made to feel the real usefulness of their labour by being put into khaki. "For years attention has been called to the peculiarly unsatisfactory and demoralizing posi- tion of the casual dock labourer. Now at one blow he is to be given the status, the pay, and the security of a public servant. The form of organization is obviously exceptional and tem- porary, devised to meet exceptional and temporary circumstances, but if the experiment is successful it will have proved that organization is possible, and that the great problem of casual labour, the most fertile perhaps of all sources of poverty and social degradation, is quite capable of solu- tion." How far from a happy condition of things we have been, in normal times, the writings of socialists and the songs of our poets make manifest. The mean streets and sordid sur- roundings amid which masses dwell — in spring time and harvest and all the year round, in this age of large cities and mercantile prosperity — these evil conditions, so alien to the merry England and smiling countryside of our less prosperous days, are having their due effect, and leave visible traces on both the body and the INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 177 soul of the modern craftsman. William Morris's lyric which records the "Message of the March Wind" is not the less exquisite a poem because it is a trenchant, even a practical "criticism of life": Hark ! the March wind again of a people is telling Of the life that they live there, so haggard and grim, That if we and our love amidst them had been dwelling My fondness had faltered, thy beauty grown dim. This land we have loved in our love and our leisure For them hangs in heaven, high out of their reach ; The wide hills o'er the sea-plain for them have no pleasure, The grey homes of their fathers no story to teach. The singers have sung and the builders have builded, The painters have fashioned their tales of delight ; For what and for whom hath the world's book been gilded, When all is for these but the blackness of night ? How long, and for what is their patience abiding ? How oft and how oft shall their story be told? While the hope that none seeketh in darkness is hiding, And in grief and in sorrow the world groweth old? CHAPTER XXII SOCIAL REFORM GOD SAVE THE PEOPLE THE following extract shows the way in which enlightened manufacturers regard their relations to their workpeople:— "We must not forget that, fortunately, the wage-earners in this country are steadily be- coming better educated, and acquiring a more intelligent appreciation of the industrial system and of their place in it. They think with truth that in the past they have not had a fair share either in wealth or leisure of the immense gain that has been made through the progress of science and invention. But this is not the only cause of the industrial unrest. They want — and surely this is a very legitimate demand! — ■ more control over their own lives. The problem of the future, which the capitalist classes have to meet, is in the first place a wider and more equitable distribution of wealth and leisure; and in the second, to devise some method by which the workers can have some share in the control of the industry in which they are engaged'' (Ed- ward Cadbury on "Scientific Management in Industry"). The first step towards reform — dissatisfaction 178 SOCIAL REFORM 179 with present conditions — has probably been already taken; the second step, which will be taken as soon as wage-earners get better edu- cated, is to begin to look forward and make provision for the future and acquire a stake in the country and an outlook much wider than any they possess at present. Since they con- stitute the majority of the human race, this is surely a good thing and one worthy of en- couragement from every humane point of view. Consider therefore the causes which on the whole at present tend to keep masses of humanity down at a lower level than they need occupy. One, and I believe rather a potent one, is their hand-to-mouth thriftless style of living: a possible cause, and at the same time a certain consequence, of the floating labour market and the system of the weekly wage. Thrift The precariousness and insecurity of tenure associated with the weekly-wage system, and the habit, so difficult to eradicate, of spending each week's earnings before the next is received, are destructive of foresight, thrift, and responsi- bility, in all except the strongest characters. The system is bound to induce happy-go-lucky irres- ponsible light-heartedness, which, though in itself not without merit in times of health and pros- perity, affords very little foot-hold and is no sort of stand-by in times of sickness, unemploy- ment, or distress. That such a system can retain its hold on workers, when they have had 180 THE WAR AND AFTER experience of the fluctuation of trade and the uncertainties of employment, is very remark- able; and until it can be changed so that the working classes exercise some sort of forethought and prudential care — such as is characteristic of the classes immediately above them — so long they will be liable to periods of acute distress, and will be more or less at the mercy of the exceptional self-seeking Capitalist. It is true that they possess the weapon of the Strike, but it is a weapon very injurious to the Nation and very sharp-edged in the handle to those who use it; in fact it is a weapon without a handle, and cannot be clutched without pain and injury. Moreover readiness for warfare is no substitute for provident arrangements whereby they could set aside sufficient to tide them over difficult periods. Since the ultimate object of all industry can only be a richer and fuller human life — though that is too infrequently remembered, — and since self-respect or personal dignity is a contributory asset to such a life, it follows that whatever the State can do to encourage thrift should be done. There would be no harm in receiving pay- ment week by week, if it were not necessarily spent week by week, and if an amount were always stored so as to secure the necessary independence. The practical difficulty of saving small sums is however not insignificant. To put money into any Benefit or Building Society which becomes insolvent, is not only ruinous to a few individuals, but is discouraging to any nascent spirit of saving in the Nation. Failures SOCIAL REFORM 181 of that kind, which at one time were too fre- quent, must be held responsible for a great deal of evil. And though supervision and better management have put such Societies on a much sounder basis, the benefits they confer, and the freedom of their members, are limited. They do not fully, though they do partially, supply the need of an easily managed banking account. Cash in the pocket involves tempta- tions greatly in excess of cash at the Bank; but what bank is there that will take workmen's savings? There used to be the Provincial Savings Bank, with Government security and three per cent interest; every complete thirty- three shillings deposited earning an interest of a penny a month. In my youth I was one of the Trustees of such a Savings Bank at Hanley. It was open only for a few hours twice a week, Saturday afternoon and Monday evening; and the Trustees used to attend in rotation, along with a paid official, either to receive the sums brought by small depositors on Saturday or to pay them out as well as receive on Monday. I remember the inconvenience and delay to which those who came (mostly women) were subjected. They received tickets from a porter as they entered, giving them their place on a bench, where they sat after the manner of a queue until their turn came for admission into the counting-house, whence, after transacting their business, they went away through another door. It was slow and tedious work, and the patience with which they put up with it im- pressed me, especially when (as sometimes hap- pened) either the paid official or the trustee 182 THE WAR AND AFTER happened to be late. But what impressed me also was the small maximum of deposit allowed; for more than once I heard a man told that he must take the money out, or that no more could be received, as it had reached the maximum. They used sometimes to ask in despair where they were to put it, but on that question it was a responsible matter to offer sound advice. Nowadays the Post Office Savings Bank system no doubt diminishes a great many of the mere inconveniences; but still the total that can thus be saved is strictly limited to £200; with a maximum of fifty pounds deposit in any one year. I suppose that the restriction is insisted on in order to avoid competition with ordinary banks; but surely those have plenty to do in connection with large affairs. The retention of small savings with absolute security is so vital to the interests of the Country that I cannot but feel that the maximum ought to be abolished, and every other encouragement given to easy saving by the people — not for sickness only, as by a scheme of insurance; still less by any compulsory method; but as a part of the education of the Country towards foresight and towards civic and family responsi- bility. 1 It seems to me that a change of habit of that kind would do more to diminish the drink evil, and other kinds of extravagance, 1 The recent opening of an unlimited Fund with perfect security, to small investors, is therefore an event of the ut- most significance ; and if the War Loan be continued, in principle, into peace time, it will have a vast influence on the true prosperity of the country. SOCIAL REFORM 183 than any more direct and prohibitive measure. It is always indirect methods that are the most efficacious; not mere mechanical negative pro- hibition, but real positive strengthening of character and improvement of the outlook on life. And while thus incidentally touching on the drink question, — surely indirect methods are the best mode of dealing with that. Temperance by forcible suppression is worth very little com- pared with temperance in the interests of frugality and self-respect. Once cultivate a sense of human dignity, — and drunkenness becomes impossible. But if this is too long a process — though with national education it need not be so long under a rational social system, — then there are other indirect methods which may be employed. As to their merits I am incompetent to judge; but I quote here the advice of Mr. Robert Blatch- ford, who on such a matter must be well worth listening to: — "The remedy for all these evils is State control of the drink traffic. All distilleries and breweries should be Government concerns. All 'places within the meaning of the Act' should be State owned. The drink quick and drink often, ugly, vulgar, or blatant 'inns/ 'hotels/ 'pubs/ and gin-palaces, should be abolished, and good hotels and cafes should be opened in their place. If that were done there would be no need for prohibition/' We may well agree with Milton when he says : — ' 'And were I the chooser, a dram of well- 184 THE WAR AND AFTER doing should be preferred before many times as much forcible hindrance of evil doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person more than the restraint of ten vicious.' " Oh if only we had wisdom enough to take hold of social evils at their roots, and not be merely trying to lop off their excrescences and prune them into some sort of conformity! It is not militarism alone that we are now engaged in fighting. "We really are fighting all together for a new and better state of existence. And we may surely hope — even those who have but small confidence — that some of its results appear already. In nearly all countries engaged in the war we see a process of regeneration going on. . . . Russia has renounced drink, is ac- quiring initiative, conquering that national apathy which, more than anything else, barred her on the road towards progress and freedom. France is pulling herself together, reintegrating, regaining self-control. Germany is completing her fusion into unity, breaking up from within those demarcations of caste and calling which have handicapped so much her free evolution, and learning in the school of sacrifice to distin- guish between true and false ideals." So says Count Hermann Keyserling, in the Hibbert Journal, and we may at all events hope that he is right. And what is England doing? It must be preparing to do something in the way of na- tional reform. As yet it has not begun. We are a long way from the idea that daily SOCIAL REFORM 185 work may be a joy; like that felt by William Morris, — To-morrow's uprising to deeds shall be sweet. We are not yet up to the standard of past centuries in recognizing and upholding the pleasure and dignity of labour. "Think what this meant to the worker: think what it meant to him when his work exercised and developed, not his manual skill only, but his best faculties — intellectual, imaginative, inventive. I have heard people wonder why England in those days was called Merrie England? It was because the labour of the nation — which after all is the nation's chief concern and most absorbing occupation — was itself a source of pleasure and of pride." 1 There was a time — the time of the Guilds of industry — when the worker took joy in his work, when he had initiative, and could con- struct things of beauty. This was the era of the Gothic cathedrals. Work was done then that was worth living for. It has become a very serious question, whether England possesses a soul now as it did in the past. Industrialism has sadly interfered with Art, and the modern method of putting out a contract to the lowest tender is not likely to result in the building of cathedrals or any other object of beauty. The lack of joy in work is deprecated even by those who rejoice in the Forth Bridge kind 1 Mr. Lisle March-Phillips, in a paper read before the Peasant Art Fellowship. 186 THE WAR AND AFTER of structure that we do make and make well; so it is in no way surprising that persons of taste and culture should lament the deca- dence of works of art, and the fall in the status and conditions of labour, since, let us say, the twelfth century, when individual resource and prowess had more scope, and when handi- craft had a soul. A writer in the Hibbert Journal for April 1915 says — "Wiser generations, yet unborn, will surely look back with wonder upon the ugly experi- ment of mechanical industrialism. From the very first it was patent that the freedom it promised hung chains about the many; and yet it was quickly accepted and riveted upon the world's comparatively free life, with almost universal approval. To dub it 'progress' was sufficient to secure a submission fatal as that we criticize in the Germans to-day: the sub- mission of the romantic, peasant-filled, kindly Germany of the ancient towns and the fairy- haunted Christmas-tree forests, to the prosaic power and plans of Prussia!" Germany has gone farther in this decadence than we have, has gone farther and fared worse. It is not content with being, like ourselves, com- paratively unable to produce, — it rejoices in having the power actively to destroy. But unless these works are renewed, time will destroy them, only more slowly. And that we are powerless to prevent; for under present con- ditions we cannot renew them, we can only deceptively restore. "It is probably true that we should not SOCIAL REFORM 187 bring up big guns against Gothic cathedrals; but we are not wholly clean of such crimes, for all that. As complacent units in modern industrial civilization we are all bearing a hand in the black miracle — the exact antithesis to the Christian making and mending miracle — the black miracle of undoing. Krupp guns may destroy the glory of Rheims Cathedral in a few days: the destructive method for which we are partly responsible is slower but surer. Our modern civilization, built up on mechanical industrialism (or, it were truer to say, imprisoned withira it, ensnared at every turn in its barbed wire entanglements), has been, throughout its whole devastating era, whittling away or corrupting those very powers in the race which made a Rheims Cathedral possible. "There can be no doubt — its very nature and origin prove it — that Gothic art was a source of joy to the population of the country and a potent influence beautifying and ennobling the life of the whole nation." In those days it appears that the organizing Architect was himself a craftsman: — "All members of all handicrafts, of whatever kind, were united in brotherhoods, and these brotherhoods were the depositaries of all know- ledge in regard to that craft, and the only authorities on the right methods of work. There was no outside dictation. Labour, skilled and disciplined and organized, found out the best way of doing things, and did them. . . . "There is something extraordinarily imposing 188 THE WAR AND AFTER in these mediaeval brotherhoods of workmen, in the wisdom and sagacity of their laws, in their firmness and moderation, in the proud independ- ence of their attitude." Let us hope that something of this kind will emerge from the ashes of this shocking contest, and that a brotherhood feeling may once again rise among all the workers and contributors to noble works of Art. It may now, with greater facilities of intercourse, easily become an international feeling, and may include the workers even of the enemy; for among us — save when exasperated by inhuman atrocities — fellow-feeling for them has never really ceased. The party calling itself the Independent Labour Party has made serious mistakes in policy, its heart is stronger than its head, and its atti- tude in some respects has been deplorable; but it is eagerly anxious for the right, and although friendly feeling across the breach is hardly reciprocated at the present time, it is some- thing to feel that on our side at least it is as vivid as ever. Apart from any mere party significance which may be foisted into it, a re- cent manifesto of this party may on this ground be welcomed;— "We hail our working-class comrades of every land. Across the roar of guns we send greeting to the German Socialists. They have laboured unceasingly to promote good relations with Britain, as we with Germany. They are no enemies of ours, but faithful friends. In forcing this appalling crime upon the nations, it is the rulers, the diplomats, the militarists, who SOCIAL REFORM 189 have sealed their doom. In tears and blood and bitterness the greater Democracy will be born. With steadfast faith we greet the future; our cause is holy and imperishable, and the labour of our hands has not been in vain." But who shall so forecast the years And find in loss a gain to match? Or reach a hand thro' time to catch The far-off interest of tears? CHAPTER XXIII EDUCATION AND SCIENCE SOME years ago it seemed to be thought that any one who considered the welfare of other nations as well as his own was no true patriot. Fortunately the present state of things must put an end to that selfish and shortsighted provincialism. Even a nation is not an end in itself; and the wide area of the present calamity, and the number of nations which have been drawn into it, are a sign of the progress that has been already made towards union. Honourable behaviour of a na- tional kind has also received a stimulus, if only from the utter disgust which conspicuous and flagrant dishonour has aroused. The intercourse between man and man, even in the competitive scheme known as business, is governed on the whole by considerations of personal honour; though it is admittedly a little hard sometimes, especially for an inexperienced novice in commerce, to know what will be con- sidered honourable or otherwise. But though there may be a difficulty in drawing the line, and though it is in some places rather perilously elastic, there is no doubt at all that a man who distinctly oversteps it and over-reaches his neighbour by sharp practice is stigmatized as dishonourable; 190 EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 191 and it is further recognized that, on the whole, honourable behaviour pays better than the reverse. Complexity of scheming, or shall we say duplicity, is not appreciated; it is universally condemned as double dealing. A certain kind of strong simplicity is favourably regarded and exerts a beneficent influence. Single-mindedness — simplicity — the opposite of duplicity- — is on the whole what we aim at. But unfortunately the intercourse between nations is sometimes otherwise conducted. The kind of Diplomacy illustrated on page 69 and confessed by our foes is mere Duplicity. Secret treaties, spying information, underhand practices, and over-reaching methods, are among the methods of diplomatic intercourse. So long as this goes on international business is conducted under serious difficulties; and if only single-mindedness and simplicity could be introduced and accepted as the traditional method — to depart from which would be dishonourable — how vast would be the improvement! The change is bound to come in time — we cannot go on always as at present, — and Sir Edward Grey's fine example affords hope for the future. We are all parts of humanity, and if one member suffer, all others suffer with it. Fair dealing is becoming the essence of prosperity in business. Fair dealing between nation and na- tion will conduce to the prosperity as well as to the peace of the world. To see a nation disregard its obligations, tear up its treaties, and spread abroad stupid and malicious lies, is no joy to the rest of the world 192 THE WAR AND AFTER — not even to its enemies. It is a grief and a humiliation, an insult to humanity. There would be a kind of stern joy in meeting an honourable foe — one with whom at the conclusion of strife we could shake hands heartily across the battle- fields and welcome back with brotherly love. But now, alas! where is the honour of our foe? Even in his own eyes the word must have become despicable. "The word 'honour' when applied to a nation is sometimes used in a sense almost opposite to the 'honour' of an individual. An honourable man is one who declines to take any advantage of his neighbour, either by violence, legality, or deceit, and seeks to set right any financial advantage he may have improperly or accidentally gained. A secret treaty with one neighbour against the interests of another would not be made by an honour- able man; while the repudiation of his cove- nant or cynical breaking of his given word is unthinkable. But between nation and nation we had all, more or less, been labouring under the delusion that there is a genuine divergence of interests, and that prosperity of one nation depends on the ruin of others: whereas if any permanent settlement is to be reached we must escape from this delusion and learn to see more clearly a common goal for the human race." "The man who feels no regret for the ruined honour of other nations, must be poor in sympathy for the honour of his own country." Seen with far-sighted vision our country's real interests are not the selfish considerations EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 193 which ordinarily go by that name, any more than they are so for an individual: there are times when it is our duty to lend a helping hand, even at some risk to ourselves. For instance — as Mrs. Browning says, — "non-inter- vention in the affairs of neighbouring States is a high political virtue; but non-inter- ference does not mean passing by on the other side when your neighbour falls among thieves. . . . If patriotism be a virtue indeed, it cannot mean an exclusive devotion to our country's interests, for that is only another form of devotion to personal interests, family interests, or provincial interests, all of which, if not driven past themselves, are vulgar and immoral ob- jects." The more the nations co-operate, the stronger the feeling of nationality. That is indeed an instrument without which our conjoint effort would be much weakened. Let us always stand up for the integrity of the smaller nations. The more the nations co-operate, the stronger and happier will humanity become. Together we have to strive for the mastery over Nature, for the overcoming of disease, for the better education of the race, for the triumph of mind over matter and of soul over body. In this we must give each other all the help and en- couragement we can. The task is hard enough without fratricidal strife. "Nationality is sacred to me," said Mazzini, "because I see in it the instrument of labour for the good and progress of all men." Mazzini based his love of country on the faith that the claims of humanity come first, and that a 194 THE WAR AND AFTER country is false to itself if it does not keep in view the good of all mankind. If it finds its strength in the weakness of another, if it is indifferent to the cause of struggling nations, it has no right to exist as a nation. "National life and international life should be the two mani- festations of the same principle, the love of good." The apostrophe of Fichte, quoted at the end of Chapter I, is the peroration of his famous Address to the German Nation which he issued in 1807 after the humiliation inflicted on Germany by Napoleon at the beginning of last century. It was a summons to the spirit of Nationality. Nation and Country, he claims, extend far beyond the State. For ordinary times the spirit of civic well-being is sufficient, but for dis- turbed and unprecedented occasions the only spirit that can be put at the helm is one generated by the consuming flame of the higher Patriotism, which conceives the nation as the embodiment of the eternal. Among the steps that can be taken to create that spirit he looks to Education as the means that had hitherto been overlooked. He knows that the Press will try to ridicule a spiritual weapon of that kind, but he says: "Perhaps I deceive myself, but I cannot part with it, as it is all I care to live for,— I hope to convince some Germans and bring them to see that nothing but Education can rescue us from the miseries that overwhelm us." This was understood by the German people, EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 195 and on the obelisk erected in his honour at Berlin they have placed this inscription : — "The Teachers shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever." So his nation listened, and did attend to Education: attended to it more thoroughly than any other nation; and it is to this cause that they owe their real progress and access of power. They have spoiled it, but that was due to the defects of their other qualities. They were unable to divest themselves of pedantry, they were earnest and accomplished in many good directions, but their learning took a pon- derous and unattractive form, and they inflicted a mechanical system upon their youth. Upon the fly-leaf of one of their text-books the English writer "Bagshot" is said to have relieved his mind by writing the following diatribe : — "My heart," he writes, "goes out to the un- happy German youth who have fallen under the yoke of this horrible pedant. It enrages me to think of him and a hundred like him let loose on a country to turn its schools and universities into gigantic tool-factories for the making of human implements. To-morrow I will start for Germany and tell this man to his face that education has no purpose but to make men philosophers. He will not understand my mean- ing, and he will laugh in my face, but happily there are some people in Germany who do under- stand, and by and by they will rise up and slay these pedants and save their country." 196 THE WAR AND AFTER Well, they did not rise in time to save their country, though perhaps they will rise now to assist its recuperation. But the worst of their failure to avoid swamping genuine education with Kultur, is that it will tend to discredit education itself — in their own minds and in the minds of other nations. Yet the war ought to show us how intense is the need for better and higher education among the governing classes of this country. I do not specify which" the governing classes really are — that may be differently regarded — but their vast ignorance of everything relating to science is admitted on all hands — admitted without shame and even with a sort of bastard pride by most of those who may be called our* governing oligarchy. Surely we shall not let science continue to grub along like a sort of Cinderella, called in occasionally when housework has to be done, but otherwise left to sit among the ashes and brood. Men of science are usually content to go on with their studies and be attended to only when they expound some fresh discovery, or when some of their inventions come into practical use. But there come periods when the nation's neglect of science, and mistrust of its workers, lead perilously near to disaster. At those times they have to speak; and some scientific men are speaking now, and calling attention to the momentous contrast in this respect between the enemy nation and our own. Never was the parable of the Unjust Steward so illuminated as it is to-day, never was the need to learn from the wisdom of this world more forcibly urged EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 197 by the march of events. Science alone is powerless to save humanity, but science neglected and kept in the background may help to ruin it. Among much evil, the organized pursuit of science and development of its application has been one good; and to it the strength of the German nation, for better for worse, is largely due. I fear that Britain has not learnt that full strength yet. Defect of soul may render it ulti- mately impotent, but in itself the weapon is one of power, and no vice need be inherent in its use. We are not yet awake to the material weak- ness of our position, and perhaps it would be a calamity if the present catastrophe were over before this lesson had been driven into our brains. A pittance doled out by Government depart- ments, and administered with rigid economy, is no way to encourage research. Some lavish- ness is necessary, and much trust. The un- scrupluous scientific man can make money now: it is not difficult, if you are ready to abandon the high ambition of youth and take your part in the world-scramble on its own terms. But what folly it is to throw away the enthusiasm of youth as if it were of no value, and limit the possibility of scientific achievement to the few hours that can be spared from the effort to earn a precarious livelihood by teaching and examining. The only way to bring the weakness of the present position home to people in general is to emphasize the side of the applications of science to industry and manufacture. Every- 198 THE WAR AND AFTER thing really depends on research for its own sake; but the highest genius cannot be organized, it can only be maintained — fundamental dis- coveries are not made to order. But, even for pure research, material means must be forth- coming; and it is only when a Royal Institution provides the laboratories, or when family accident renders an individual what is called "independent" — absurd word, — that a Faraday or a Cavendish becomes possible. Never will more than the few realize the importance of pure science; but its application to industry ought to appeal to all, one would have thought, in this commercial com- munity. But no, the power of indirection has not yet been fully grasped, and still only the direct and obvious means are employed by most of those who are strenuously trying to increase their business. English official neglect of science has been a byword among those who are behind the scenes and who realize what might be done — what in fact has been done in other countries. The difference between German thoroughness and our supineness is felt in many sciences, but it is felt most strongly in the science which owes most to Germany — namqly chemistry. Chemists have inveighed against the dis- couragement offered to them here, compared with opportunities provided for chemical re- search in Germany, and have pointed to the practical and commercial results and conse- quences which flow from this difference — conse- quences which are now being bitterly driven home. A recent Address to the Society of EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 199 Chemical Industry was devoted by its President, Professor Frankland, to this very theme, and I shall quote a few extracts so as to illustrate at first hand the strong feeling which throughout the last half -century has existed among chemists : — "The mischief caused through the neglect of chemistry by practical men in this country has been so subtle that to a large extent it has remained concealed from the average man of intelligence and from the governmental classes. . . . The systematic neglect of chemical science and the failure by manufacturers to utilize the services of highly qualified chemists, could only lead to the result that all the industries which are dependent on a profound knowledge of chemistry must tend to disappear from our midst, and pass into the hands of those who are prepared, not only to apply new chemical discoveries to industry, but even to prosecute the most varied chemical investigations in the hope of sooner or later making discoveries which shall be of advantage to their commercial undertakings. "It is in the possession of such schools of research, both in the universities and in the chemical factories, that Germany has by two generations the lead of all other countries in the world. . . . The facts which I have brought forward speak for themselves and proclaim in the most convincing manner the stupendous pro- gress which has been made by Germany in the chemical industries during the past forty years. . . . If the chemical industries are to be re- habilitated in this country, there must be a 200 THE WAR AND AFTER complete change in the attitude of mind towards science in general, and towards chemical science in particular, amongst the influential classes of the population; and it will certainly not be effected by following the precept 'business as usual/ but by pursuing a policy which is the exact opposite of what is implied by that vulgar and undignified phrase. . . . The study of chemistry in this country now only draws those men who either have or think they have an overpowering zeal and passion for the science, to which they devote themselves against the advice of their friends, and in spite of the warnings of the professors of chemistry by whom they are initiated/' And to show that this represents no indi- vidual opinion, but is representative of those who have special knowledge on the subject, here is part of the text of a Memorial presented by the Chemical Society to the Government on The Position of Chemical Industries. "Though, during the past thirty years, there have been some signs of progress in the appli- cation of science to the chemical manufactures of the country, there can be no doubt that in this respect we are still far behind several foreign countries, especially Germany, where it has been fully recognized for more than half a century that 'scientific research work, carried out in the laboratory, is the soul of in- dustrial prosperity/ "As representatives of chemical science we are of opinion that the main causes of the back- ward condition of chemical industry in this country have been: — EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 201 i. The defects of our educational system and particularly the lack of recog- nition of the importance of research as an essential part of the training of the student of science. 2. The want of scientific knowledge on the part of the community at large, especially of manufacturers, and the non- appreciation of the true value of scientific research. 3. The lack of organization amongst various chemical and allied industries. 4. The almost total want of sympathy and co-operation between manufacturers and workers in pure science." Nevertheless, as Professor Frankland says: — "Notwithstanding the absence of material inducements, I venture to say without fear of contradiction that there is more original investi- gation being prosecuted in this country by chemists than by any other body of British men of science; and this I attribute to the fact that such a large proportion of our number have either been at German Universities or are the pupils of those who have been at these centres of research. Nor are any of us, I am sure, even during this unfortunate crisis, unmindful of the hospitality and the inspiration which we have received in the schools of the enemy." That is quite true; in pure science we have no enemy. Discoveries once made are open to all; and all are co-operators and friends. A wholesome spirit of emulation may exist, but 202 THE WAR AND AFTER that is very different from ruthless competition. The feeling of co-workers in every depart- ment of knowledge is one of camaraderie and friendship, just as it appears to be beginning to be among artisans. The present miserable mania has interrupted this feeling for a time, but it will be renewed hereafter; and though indirect in its effect, there is no feeling more immediately tending towards goodwill and peace. CHAPTER XXIV P£AC£ AND DISARMAMENT DISARMAMENT is not a policy: it will be a consequence, an effect, following upon a changed spirit in humanity. "The true doctrine of peace is not the Tolstoy an gospel of non-resistance; it is, indeed, its very negation. It is no part of the doctrine of the pacifist that he shall place himself at the mercy of the militarist, and that in his very endeavour to secure peace he shall disarm himself whilst the militarist is preparing to attack him. The Utopian says: 'Disarma- ment first, conversion afterwards/ Common- sense and sound reason reply: 'Such a policy would be suicidal. Faith must precede works. Let the world be first converted, and disarma- ment must needs follow.' . . . Towards that political education and conversion the schools will do — must do — a great deal in the future. They are doing very little in the present. At present the intellectual training of the schoolboy is hopelessly antiquated, and is almost entirely based on the study of the military civilizations of the past. The mind of the schoolboy imbibes from his earliest years the poison of militarism and of the old Imperialism. In ordinary times he only learns about the glamour and the 203 204 THE WAR AND AFTER romance of the wars of olden days; he learns nothing about the horrors and realities of war to-day." So said Dr. Sarolea in 1912. He also said that the Universities were doing at present little more than the schools; and that the Churches were doing least of all. If we wish for peace we must prepare for peace; we must seek peace and ensue it — not in a passive non-resisting manner but in a very active and energetic and strenuous way. "And here is a lesson for those eager pacifists who try to make us love peace by talking of the folly and horrors of war. We shall only love peace when we have made it worthy of our love. Until then there will still be a narrow truth in the saying, Si vis pacem, para helium. But that must give way to the greater truth that if you would have peace you must make it finer than war. And there is something to be learned from war, from its discipline and sacrifice and concord, of what peace ought to be/' Hear Milton on this subject: — "If after being released from the toils of war, you neglect the arts of peace, if your peace and your liberty be a state of warfare, if war be your only virtue, the summit of your praise, you will soon find peace most adverse to your interests. Your peace will only be a more distressing war, and that which you imagined liberty wall prove the worst of slavery." That excellent little book called THougHts on the War, by Mr. Clutton-Brock, contains many PEACE AND DISARMAMENT 205 excellent passages, one or two of which I should like here to quote: — "War does us this good at least — that it makes us suddenly aware of the difference between a gentleman at his club and a gentle- man in the trenches. Beautiful things happen between officers and men when the British Army- is at war, and it brings the tears to our eyes to hear of them. But it is not enough to feel these fine emotions and because of them to say that war is not all an evil. That is so only if war teaches us how to make a finer peace, and one that will cure us of all desire for war, — a peace in which gentlemen will prove them- selves, as these officers proved themselves; and if they do not, they will lose the name of gentlemen. In war there is a chance of great adventures for all men, rich and poor, and the poorest can be a hero. But we must make a peace too in which the poorest will have a chance of adventures of the mind and spirit, and in which all men will know that these are worth more than riches or the respect now given to riches. . . . Peace should not be full of aimlessness and stagnation, but of purpose and advance. It should mean an order like that of armies in the field, made by the tie between leaders and led, the tie of a common duty and a common opportunity. Then war would be merely a distraction from that purpose and a check to that advance, and men would be as impatient of it as if it were a noise breaking in upon music. "We speak of the adventures of peace, adventures of the mind and spirit. Most men 206 THE WAR AND AFTER know so little of these that to them the artist, the philosopher, the saint, the man of science, are not adventurers at all. They cannot believe in the exultation of victory where there is no enemy, in the thrill of discovery where there are only material obstacles to overcome. To them, and we cannot wonder at it, work is all part of a struggle for life and of the routine imposed upon men by that struggle; and peace means that routine unbroken and uninspired. They may try to escape from it by gambling, by sport, by debauchery, by all the varieties of what we are pleased to call pleasure, and finally by war. But there is another escape, possible now to our civilization, with its new command of all the forces of Nature, an escape into the freedom of the mind which art and thought and religion offer to us. But what have we done yet with all our power to make that freedom possible to all?'' "To be free," says Milton, "is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be frugal and abstinent, to be temperate and just, and lastly; to be magnanimous and brave; and to be the opposite of these is to be a slave." "How can we have time for war among our- selves when there is infinity before us to be felt and probed in so short a span of life, when we have the power to create another world of art with all the hopes and desires of men shaping it and sounding through it?" But to this end the higher and more real education of the people is essential; especially since the government of the country is now so largely in their hands. PEACE AND DISARMAMENT 207 "The peoples of the world desire peace," said Bourtzeff, the Russian exile — and he, who has been in many lands, ought to know. But they also — if they would obtain peace— must exercise an eternal vigilance lest they fall into the hands of class-schemers and be betrayed into that which they do not desire. The example of Germany shows how easily a good and friendly and pacific people may by mere political inattention and ignorance, and by a quasi-scientific philosophy imposed on its polit- ical ignorance, be led into a disastrous situation. It shows how vitally necessary it is that the people, even the working masses and the peasants, should have some sort of political education and understanding. The power of political thinking, like any other power, only grows by exercise; and as Edward Carpenter says: — "Until we rise, as a nation, to a conception of what we mean by our national life, finer and grander than a mere counting of trade-returns, what can we expect save disaster after disaster to bring us to our senses? "Possibly in the conviction that she is fighting for a worthy object (the end of militarism), and in the determination (if sincerely carried out) of once more playing her part in the world as the protector of small nations, Britain may find her salvation, and a cause which will save her soul." CHAPTER XXV NATIONAL REARRANGEMENT We beseech Thee to give to all nations Unity, Peace, and Concord. FOR the general public to make up its mind concerning details of national rearrange- ment after the war is no doubt unpardonable and futile; and yet we cannot but hope for certain changes, and can hardly refrain from privately thinking over them, well knowing that our meditations carry no authority, and must be modified — perhaps extensively modified- — by cir- cumstances. The task of arrangement will be a severe one, and many proposals must be dis- cussed which cannot in their entirety be carried out. What we may all legitimately hope is that it will be in no vengeful spirit that this country will enter into the negotiations — save for the insisting on just punishment for actual crime. But that accomplished, the right of defeated foes to live — and not only to live but to prosper, subject to heavy indemnities for the losses they have inflicted on their neighbours by their hideously mistaken policy — that right will, let us hope, be fully recognized. For a per- manent settlement must be based upon public right. 208 NATIONAL REARRANGEMENT 209 Here let us quote the eloquent utterance of the Prime Minister, as laying down a general basis of settlement: — "The idea of public right," says Mr. Asquith, "what does it mean when translated into con- crete terms? It means, first and foremost, the clearing of the ground by the definite repudia- tion of militarism as the governing factor in the relation of States, and in the future mould- ing of the European world. It means, next, that room must be found and kept for the in- dependent existence and the free development of the smaller nationalities — each with a corporate consciousness of its own. Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland, and the Scandinavian coun- tries, Greece, and the Balkan States, must be recognized as having exactly as good a title as their more powerful neighbours — more power- ful in strength as in wealth — exactly as good a title to a place in the sun. And it means, finally, or it ought to mean, perhaps by a slow and gradual process, the substitution for force, for the clash of competing ambition, for grouping and alliances and a precarious equi- poise, — the substitution for all these things of a real European partnership, based on the recog- nition of equal right established and enforced by a common will." Let us therefore, who agree with this admir- able statement, cultivate as far as possible the idea of a federation of European nations — the recognition of common interests, without com- mon jealousies and antagonisms — a federation for all purposes, both peace and war. Let us have fewer languages and more mutual under- 210 THE WAR AND AFTER standing, freer mutual interchange of commodi- ties; and if there is any European war hence- forward, let it be recognized as that horrible evil, civil war. Moreover, in order to give strength and solidity to the federation, let every citizen pass through a period of disciplinary training for his better education and bodily development, and let the immense reserve potential army thus constituted be used as an international police to see that henceforward no one misguided nation, under some ambitious ruler or set of rulers, flouts the rest of humanity and tries to set itself up as above everything human or divine. Let it be a police force able to carry out the dictates of international law with a strong and resolute hand; but let it jealously guard free- dom — the freedom even of revolt — and only come into action in suppression of actual crime. And if ever, under unwise or vicious counsellors, the British Fleet be used as a weapon of aggression and domineering insolence — which God forbid — then let Britain be made to suffer by the rest of the civilized world. The reason our command of the seas has been regarded with equanimity is because we only use our Fleet to keep the seas open and trade routes equally free to all nations. Under a policy of artificial limitations, invidious Tariffs, and restricted commerce, our Fleet might possibly become a menace; and its dominance could then be properly resented by any nation whose com- mercial activities it tended unfairly to restrain. Our policy should surely be continually to urge the advantage of Free Trade all round. Let every country produce that which its NATIONAL REARRANGEMENT 211 economical conditions and natural aptitudes best fit it for. Freedom in such matters undoubtedly benefits humanity by enabling each country to develop its resources to the uttermost, whether assisted by foreign enterprise and capital and by imported labour, or otherwise. And let every nation, small or large, develop its own genius and individuality, free from any attempt at coercion to one pattern: let it have full responsibility for its own errors, and credit for its own successes. Small Nations We have stood up for the small nations; we have recognized their rights and their value. The British Empire is already a federation of friendly nations, and the independence which ever since the mistake about America has been granted to its Colonies has been more than justified. We must see to it that a country nearer home is emancipated too, and left free to develop its own genius without mistrust and without coer- cion. Ireland, by its striking loyalty, as well as by its always conspicuous bravery, has earned its modified independence, and henceforth must be one of the friendly nations in the British Empire. Consider what we owe to the small nations — we may almost say that to them is due the progress of the world. In some of the best epochs in history all nations were small; com- munities which produced some of the greatest of mankind were no more than cities. Value 212 THE WAR AND AFTER in spiritual things cannot be numerically esti- mated; nor has numbering the people always been reckoned a judicious act. Of high modern examples of small popula- tions Lord Bryce gives the following historical summary : — "In modern Europe what do we not owe to little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom six hundred years ago, and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic mon- archies held the rest of the European Continent? And what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and her painters surpassing those of all other countries save Italy? So the small Scandinavian nations have given to the world famous men of science, from Linnaeus down- wards, poets like Tegner and Bjornson, scholars like Madvig, dauntless explorers like Fridtjof Nansen. England had, in the age of Shake- speare, Bacon, and Milton, a population little larger than that of Bulgaria to-day. The United States, in the days of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Mar- shall, counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece." And the following is by Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield:- — "Almost everything which is most precious in our civilization has come from small States — the Old Testament, the Homeric poems, the Attic and the Elizabethan drama, the art of the Italian Renaissance, the common law of Eng- land. Nobody needs to be told what humanity owes to Athens, Florence, Geneva, or Weimar. The world's debt to any one of these small NATIONAL REARRANGEMENT 213 States far exceeds all that has issued from the militant monarchies of Louis XIV, of Napoleon, of the present Emperor of Germany. ... In the particular points of heroic and martial patriotism, civic pride and political prudence, they have often reached the highest levels to which it is possible for humanity to attain; and from Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as from the illustrious school of Florentine historians and publicists, the world has learnt nine-tenths of its best political wisdom." But indeed, when considering the possible outcome from small communities, there is no need to go beyond the country now called Syria! And it is interesting to remember that that sufficiently momentous Advent occurred dur- ing a numbering of the people by the Emperor of Rome. One more head to be counted — or perhaps to be ignored by the enume- rators as too insignificant an item in the stable of an inn; true majesty being only dis- cernible by the extra simple and the extra wise! But, returning to more prosaic matters, it is manifest that one of the minor advantages flow- ing from the existence of smaller States consists in the fact that they serve as convenient labora- tories for social experiment on a moderate scale. Much material for the comparative study of social and industrial expedients has been provided by the enterprise of the American State Legislatures. Such experiments as women's suf- frage, or as the State control of the public sale of alcoholic drink, or as a thoroughgoing appli- cation of the Reformatory theory of punishment, 214 THE WAR AND AFTER would hardly be seriously contemplated in large, old, and settled communities, were it not for the fact that they have been tried upon a smaller scale by the more adventurous Legislatures of the New World. Ths East of Europe; If I attempt to touch on the thorny questions bristling round the East of Europe, it must be in a spirit of irresponsibility; not as an his- torian writing for statesmen, but as an ordinary citizen discussing contemporary possibilities with others. To hold aloof altogether and leave every- thing to politicians is the German not the English method: it is permissible to take an interest even in difficult questions, and to welcome one solution rather than another when it is offered. This war, coupled with the warning experi- ence gained in the minor war which preceded it, when the Turk was nearly ousted and when the victors fell into the trap laid for them by Prussian diplomacy, ought to make a vast difference to that physically attractive part of Europe which has perforce remained backward in all arts except the art of fighting. They have had terrible things to put up with, and the older among us well remember the horrible atrocities inflicted upon the Bulgarians by the governing Turk. But the Bulgarian atrocities have now been outdone, and neither the East of Europe nor even Asia can teach us anything in that direction. Surely all that internecine period will be now NATIONAL REARRANGEMENT 215 written off, and the Balkan nations will learn to direct their energies in more peaceful and profitable directions, except when they may have to combine against a common foe. The gallantry shown by Serbia is univer- sally recognized; and its future is clearly going to be an important one. It is strange to recall that the present war immediately arose because that country resented a gratuitous attempt, sus- tained by Prussia and instigated I believe chiefly by Hungary, to destroy it and blot out its in- dependence. Serbia deserves, and doubtless will acquire, large provinces on the seaboard of the Adriatic, chiefly consisting of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Roumania, as one of the Allies, will presumably acquire that part of Hungary which is so clearly required to give it a rational boundary, and which is kin to it in race and language, namely Transylvania. Italy — thrice welcome as an ally — will at length attain its still unredeemed Provinces; and no longer will Trieste be a pistol at the head of Venice. All that is comparatively easy. The difficulty will be to see how the Teutonic nations associated with German-speaking Austria can likewise have an outlet to the Mediterranean. To give them Fiume, which seems the only feasible plan, is to cut into the Slavonic fringe, and will entail serious difficulty; yet a great continental nation ought not to be debarred from the sea, and a settlement which does not provide some kind oi free trade outlet is likely to cause restlessness and future trouble. 216 THE WAR AND AFTER Germany, once liberated from Prussian bully- ing control, may arrange for itself to unite its ancient kingdoms into a real coequal Federa- tion, and to have its headquarters at Vienna or Munich or Dresden; and it may be hoped that then it will have a fine future before it, when the sins of the present generation have been wiped out. To hamper the natural development of any nation or people is folly, even when it is the outcome of a w T ell-meaning policy. If we had not mistakenly taken part in the boxing in of Russia, Constantinople would long ago have been in its hands; we should have been freed from its inevitable efforts to press out in other directions, ever since, its natural exit being closed; and we should not now be seriously hampered by the problem of the Dardanelles. CHAPTER XXVI THE FUTURE OF EUROPE THE Nation as a whole cannot enter into details concerning conditions of peace, but it may strengthen the hands of its respon- sible ministers and assist future negotiations if it makes up its mind to a few essentials. Among these are: — Settlement of boundaries on national and racial lines, in accordance with the wishes of the in- habitants if strongly expressed. Punishment of highly placed criminals who ordered atrocities. Among which the use of non-combatants as a screen for a firing line is perhaps the most infernal, because it is a newly invented outrage on humanity and beneath the standard even of savage warfare. The universally recognized duty of all civi- lized nations to Belgium cannot be better expressed than in the words of Wordsworth — merely substituting that other word for the word "Spain." "The first end to be secured by [Belgium] is riddance of the enemy; the second, per- manent independence. . . . Humanity and honour and justice, and all the sacred feelings connected with atonement, retribution, and satisfaction; 217 218 THE WAR AND AFTER shame that will not sleep, and the sting of unperformed duty; and all the powers of the mind, the memory that broods over the dead and turns to the living, the under- standing, the imagination, and the reason; — demand and enjoin that the wanton oppressor should be driven, with confusion and dismay, from the country which he has so heinously abused.'' International crime is a calamity, but it is one that should be promptly put down. Prus- sianism must cease; the dominion of Prussia over Germany and of the Prussian spirit as it has spread into Austria, Russia, and other countries, must terminate. Too long has the world suffered the arrogance of this upstart nation. But beyond these essential preliminaries, there are a number of problems which soon will have to be faced, and which may be partly enumerated : — First as regards the prestige of Prussia and its supposed services to the rest of Germany. Dr. Sarolea, summing up the situation in 1912, says that he is convinced that German unity would have come sooner without the inter- vention of Prussia, that it would have been closer, more real, more permanent, and attained at far less cost. "German unity is far from being an accom- plished fact. Germany remains a geographical expression. After all, even to the most super- ficial observer, it must be apparent to-day that iron and blood have not welded Germany together. Neither Schleswig-Holstein nor Alsace- THE FUTURE OF EUROPE 219 Lorraine, nor Hanover nor Poland, are integral parts of the Empire. Technically the kingdom of Prussia to-day includes many provinces, like the Rhine Provinces, which have nothing Prus- sian in character. . . . Historic Prussia is comparatively barren and monotonous, whereas Germany has a rich diversity of smiling vine- yards and romantic Scenery, is traversed by magnificent rivers, is the seat of prosperous industries. Germany can boast of a comparatively pure Teutonic stock; Prussians proper are a mixed race, and their composition is more Slavonic than Teutonic." Prussia has been a danger and disaster to Germany as well as to the rest of the world, and German unity has been more formal than real until the present tragic tightening of the bonds which precedes their snapping. The unification of Germany, so far as it has gone, was really accomplished by the will of the people. The States were ready for it in 1864: it was only declined then because Prus- sian arrogance objected to receive an imperial crown at the hands of the people. It was ulti- mately achieved by blood and iron, and achieved badly, with Prussia in an intolerable position; though Germany, being docile, ac- quiesced, and has • suffered accordingly, especi- ally from having imbibed some of the vices of the conquering State. For these it must suffer in the future too; but the result should be that something more like the old German spirit will arise out of the ashes. "Modern Germany has made obvious to all in what sense the traditional ways of the West THE WAR AND AFTER are wrong; the pain she has inflicted, the suffering she endures, will induce, at last, the long-wanted change. . . . None can foretell what the Germans will be like even ten years hence; an enormous amount of what they are com- mitting just now has nothing whatever to do with their soul — it is the result of machinery, automatism, prejudice. If the machine falls to pieces, all may change." As for rearrangement in Europe, the peoples must largely settle it for themselves. It is not our business to arrange their affairs, though we may give help where it is needed. We shall certainly acquire no jot of Europe — not even Heligoland; — it belongs to Holstein, let it share the fate of Holstein. And if with Schleswig that province wishes to return to Denmark, as other provinces will wish to return to France, let it be so. If not, Heligoland may have to be made an International Station, for security to the rest of the world. So also in the near East, let the nations secure their individuality and combine in such way as they think best, on a basis of nationality and sympathetic understanding. The time has passed for alien rule. If German-speaking Austria wishes to unite with the federated Ger- man Southern States, it is only appropriate that it should; and it would help to emancipate all the others from the dominance of Prussia. The present haphazard Austrian Empire will break up; but the historic German Empire may again have its seat in Vienna. It may be that thereby also the re-constituted Germany will gain an outlet to the Mediter- THE FUTURE OF EUROPE 221 ranean, instead of being limited for ocean- going purposes to a small coast-'line on the North Sea. Let us hope that it will develop its peaceful arts and commerce to the benefit of itself and of the world. No restrictions or hampering of the peaceful development of Ger- man industry and commerce should be enforced. But the Prussian Navy — the Navy of the Kiel Canal — has been made a bad use of: whatever fate is in store for that destructive force, it is too dangerous a weapon to leave in the hands of those who wish for world dominance. The object of its creation was not to keep the seas open for international traffic, but to destroy all traffic but its own. That cannot be tolerated. But, except the provinces of Prussian aggran- dizement, Germany itself need not lose terri- tory. The robberies of Prussia must go back to their owners, except in so far as the inhabi- tants wish to unite with Germany. Germany may thus be united on a better basis, and in a more real sense, than before. As for the German colonies, it has no need of any in the Pacific; they may be considered emancipated from its hated rule. For the others let time decide. It has still to learn how to govern them, hitherto it has failed: though Germans can colonize admirably under other flags. Politically they are behind the time, and for the present will have plenty to do to put their house in order and keep themselves to themselves. Ultimately there may be a future for German Colonies in South America; and if that development be attempted, I m THE WAR AND AFTER trust that we shall imitate the example of our friends in the Northern Continent and remain strictly neutral and impartial. Unless indeed — which God avert — international crime be again committed. The Kingdom of Poland must be reconstituted and re-united, presumably under the suzerainty of the Czar; and if possible it should have an outlet to the Baltic Sea for trading purposes. For if in the past the Polish nation made grievous mistakes, "no nation has paid more dearly for them, or has retrieved them more heroically. No nation has been greater in mis- fortune. Surely a nation which has produced great men in all branches of human activity, which has produced a Copernicus, a Sobieski, a Kosciusko, a Mickiewic, and a Chopin, is not a nation of mere barbarians. A nation which for a hundred and fifty years has asserted itself against overwhelming odds has proved its right to live/' The immense Empire of Russia must no longer be land-locked; it must be trusted with the key of its own door, and must undoubtedly possess Constantinople; thereby its legitimate needs will be satisfied, and it need no longer press out to the sea in other directions. Of land it has ample and to spare; and it would have had access to the sea more than half a century ago, had it not been for our grievously mis- taken policy of those days. The result may have turned out well however, for Russia of those days had not had its trials: it was still in many respects barbarous. In the interim, although its government has been THE FUTURE OF EUROPE 223 under Prussian influence to its great detriment and discredit, it has made great progress, and now that it is freed from that malign influence we have hopes of better things. The world may owe a great debt to the Russia of the future. We cannot provide against every con- tingency; our policy is to trust the Slavonic race now that it is, we hope permanently, emancipated from Prussian bedevilment. The heart of the Russian people is more sound and essentially Christian than perhaps that of any other nation. We shall find that it has much to teach us, and a genuine place in the higher spiritual development of the world. When the political sins and shortcomings of Russia in the past — especially its brutal sup- pression of struggling hopes for freedom — are again thrust before our notice, — as they will be, — let us remember our own dealings with Ireland; and let us recollect further that sucli errors, grievous as they are, belong to an early stage of development, and signify that the country responsible for them is legitimately be- hindhand, and has a century or two still to make up. I have some sympathy with the sentiments expressed by Mr. Cloudesley Brereton in an article in the Revue de Paris for 15 March 191 5, which I translate thus: — "Most of our views of Russia come to us through that parti-coloured window, Germany, — whose particular interest it is to show us every colour except white. Personally I prefer to base my ideas of that country on the writings ££4 THE WAR AND AFTER of Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Maxim Gorki, and Stephen Graham, in which the greatness of the Russian soul shines out continually in all its naive simplicity. To me Russia, in spite of all her faults, appears an unlimited reservoir of brotherly love, compassion, and mercy. The great ideas of Russia, if they come into contact with our own, should help us to cast out much that is hard and narrow in our civilization, and thus create a new spirit in the Western peoples. "The other day," he goes on to say, "I asked Stephen Graham the following question: 'What will be our relations with the Russians at the end of the war? 7 He replied: 'Treat them generously and they will surpass you in generosity. But deal with them crookedly and they will undoubtedly turn upon you!' So diplomats, beware!" There remains the problem of the Balkan States: doubtless too technical for amateur treat- ment. A few words therefore only. Serbia will gain extensive territory from Austria, and, in harmony it is to be hoped with Italy, will face the Adriatic and probably ac- quire the Slavonic part of Dalmatia. Greece, we hope, for its own sake, will join the Allies in time, under the guidance of its eminent statesman Venizelos; and will thereby acquire Smyrna and some fine hinterland in Asia Minor, which is deserving of a better fate than its present derelict condition. Bulgaria, if it makes a wise choice and throws its powerful aid into the scale, will probably again enlarge its borders up to the Chataldja lines- — this time in a permanent THE FUTURE OF EUROPE 225 manner, and will get back a large tract of Macedonia. The Gates of the Black Sea will be a diffi- culty to any State, such as Roumania, for whom the Black Sea is the only seaboard. Whether the Dardanelles can by International Treaty be kept open for all peaceful trading, in the in- terests of countries which Border the Black Sea; and whether the Kiel Canal can be similarly Internationalized and employed for commerce only, we must leave to Statesmen to decide. We might hope that henceforth Constanti- nople and Heligoland, like Gibraltar hitherto, may be used as guarantees of opportunity for peaceable development and progress. The imminent defeat of the Turk will eject the Turkish Government from Europe. But there is one small part of Asia that should like- wise be liberated from his blighting rule. The protectorate which has been exercised over Egypt, with admirable results, should be extended to Syria, and that country be once more offered to the Jews. Some people think they do not want it, but they have not yet had the refusal of it, — that responsibility should be offered them; but whether they accept it or not, the Turk should go, and some measure of untaxed prosperity be restored to a tract of country immeasurably sacred to the greater part of man- kind. It is natural for humanity to guard and care for places round which memory clings. There was a time when we might have acquiesced in the ousting of the Turk by Germany: that did not look at all improbable. Now it is a thing 226 THE WAR AND AFTER that cannot be contemplated; it would be merely- replacing one desecration by another. The simplest solution is to restore Palestine to Egypt, to which till comparatively recently it belonged, and thus secure its adequate pro- tection while leaving it free to develop its own resources in accordance with the genius of what- ever inhabitants, Hebrew or other, go to live there. For in the future it may once again be pros- perous, when the devastating blight of greedy Turkish misgovernment is removed. CHAPTER XXVII OTHER HOME REFORMS A PERSONALITY is compounded of moods, — serious sometimes and sometimes frivo- lous, sometimes gay, sometimes depressed; so that an effort is occasionally required to realize that a single individuality is concerned all the time. Greater simplicity and consistency is expected from characters in literature, or they would be confusing. Actions, thoughts, and even tastes are in most real cases variable, and dependent on the prevailing mood; and in each mood, if it last long enough, something definite can be accomplished. Wisdom lies in trying to coerce the less productive moods into harmony with those which really corre- spond to and are most approved by the higher self:— Tasks in hours of insight will'd Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd. And the mind of a nation is, in that sense, moody too. It is strange now to look back over the frivolities and eccentricities, the ex- citements and trivialities, through which we have passed — we who have lived through the latter half of the nineteenth century: — from 227 S28 THE WAR AND AFTER that trivial excrescence of the genuine aesthetic movement, genially satirized in "Patience," down to the inane foolishness of Tango Teas. But the mood of the nation is serious now: and now is the time for something good to be accomplished, and some real progress made. What a splendid spirit is now active! The self-sacrificing labour thrown into the Red Cross and Ambulance movement alone is magnificent. From the Queen Mother down- wards, every class is seeking, by influence, per- sonal support and personal work, to mitigate the hideous suffering and preserve some beauty and kindness on this planet. Our eyes henceforth may be wider open. And with a keener perception of the dignity and beauty of life — yes even of the physical beauty of this island of ours, to which we have grown so accustomed that we fail adequately to appre- ciate it — we shall not so tamely allow it to be defaced and vulgarized in the supposed interests of trade. It is not a good thing to become careless and callous to scenes of beauty, and to acquiesce tamely in the disfigurement of home surround- ings. Beauty is one of the Divine attributes — a fact insufficiently remembered. Providence has given us a land which in its first flush of summer glory almost oppresses sensitive souls with un- speakable feeling; and among the chief cities of the world architects have done much to place our own capital not indeed on an eminence but in a high and worthy place. Let us be careful of these trusts. Now that we have grown accustomed to more OTHER HOME REFORMS 229 moderate darkness in London, we must not have those whisky advertisements flaunted across the Thames, nor the traffic made dangerous and the streets ugly and vulgar by revolving sky- signs; while as for the country — the country which men have died to defend — shall it not at last be cleared of advertisement boards of pills and trash? This may seem a small matter, but it is typical of much. Why should the country be smeared over with the printed cries of street hawkers? Are we never to be able to clear our minds of sordid trifles unless we are rich enough to own large estates or to travel abroad? The country does not belong to the hucksters — let them be satisfied with the towns. And there, let them be kept within reasonable bounds and subject to rational control. Landlords used to govern the country, as many laws testify: they have now largely given place to tradesmen; but in all cases it is the lowest type who take advantage of the oppor- tunities offered, and who make themselves and their wares obnoxious. That is the worst of permitting abuses. A set whom their fellows despise rise into notoriety by the easy process of pressing their immunity to the utmost and becoming a public nuisance. In any company it is the noisy vulgarian who becomes con- spicuous; and when conspicuousness is the thing desired, noise and vulgarity are the easiest steps to its attainment. If the shouting method were stopped all round — as it has been with almost inconvenient completeness in medicine and most of the professions — how much fairer 230 THE WAR AND AFTER it would be to the earnest and silent and digni- fied worker! Party Politics One thing that I hope the war will, if not terminate, at any rate greatly mitigate the folly of, is the domination in this country of the idea and game of party politics. Politics has turned out to be too serious a matter to be treated as an opportunity for a career and personal advancement. Government should be carried on by the best brains of the nation; and differences of opinion should be helpful rather than hampering. The present coalition of parties — the aim at a truly com- prehensive National Government in face of a foe — represents what should be the attitude all the time. For there are plenty of foes to be contended against beside hostile militarism; and to be continually working in the teeth of acrimonious opposition, sustained for the sake of opposition and in the hope of turning the Government out, is unduly wearing and demoralizing: it cannot lead to the best results. It was noticeable not long ago how spokes- men of the late Government, Lord Crewe for in- stance, in accepting the aid of the Opposition, was careful apologetically to say that he quite understood that the assistance was not given for their sake but for the Country's. Well of course it should always be given for the Country. But nevertheless some consideration is due to those who have the heavy burden of directing the policy of the Country; and OTHER HOME REFORMS 231 if some help were afforded for their sake too, it would be only reasonable. Such an idea is alien to the Party system, and those who are receiving help at the present time are anxious to disclaim any idea that they are misappro- priating it in that way. Yet the animosity be- tween the parties, though always proclaimed and maintained and having its injurious effect, must be somewhat artificial, just as the animosity of the foes in the trenches is. And, since war began, the politicians have been publicly fraternizing, on a sort of inverted Christmas Day, in a way which, as private individuals, they either do or would like to do ordinarily. It is extraordinary that the only way effec- tively to disapprove of a Government measure - — and nowadays all measures have to be Government measures — is to attack the pro- posal as a vicious one, to call the Government the worst of modern times, and to turn it out with invective and contumely. All this strong language is part of the game; it is called "an appeal to the constituencies. ,, It is under- stood to be exaggerated, and what educated people consider idiotic, for the benefit of the ignorant constituents. This behaviour is really contempt of Court, and should be resented by voters instead of being enjoyed. Shouts of "Give it them," "Let them have it," repre- sent to the world that the attitude of the British to politics is like their enjoyment of a football scrimmage. Political discussion is treated as a variety of sport. I hope that we have all learnt that it is more serious than that. And, after all, what kind of people is it THE WAR AND AFTER that hustings speeches influence? Only the wobblers. The steady voters go on as usual, time after time. The election is determined "by the small swaying body whose votes can be readily caught, — in the old days by bribery, in these days by fustian; — and so we have "the swing of the pendulum," and the policy of the "Outs" versus the "Ins"; the Country never getting the benefit of more than half its brains, save among its permanent officials, who thereby acquire an undue amount or irresponsible and unintended and unrecog- nized though certainly in some cases beneficent power. It is sometimes thought that democratic government is necessarily of a party kind; but that is surely not true of a healthy democracy. Party politics appears to be a disease to which democracy is liable. Essentially, democracy is government by free discussion; but free dis- cussion is not synonymous with party discussion. On the contrary, party discussion is far from free; and every party speaker, like a one-sided Counsel in a law case, must feel hampered by knowing that his slightest admission will be seized and exaggerated unfairly. The party system in politics is not unconnected with the Advocate system in law. This is not to abuse it — it may be to some extent to justify, or at least to explain it. Forensic appeals are con- stantly being made to a jury: and the judicial summing-up is left to historians of the future. Differences of opinion there are, and ought to be, but these should be brought forward and OTHER HOME REFORMS 23S opposed to each other fairly and squarely, in the hope that something better than either of the opposing opinions will emerge out of the discussion. Discussion, not conflict, — discussion with full persuasion that every one is trying to do the best he can, and has no other motive — represents the right method of managing a great business. Undiscovered Genius A more economical utilization of the best brains of the nation should be another aim. Utilization not in politics alone, but in science and in industry. Have we not all been struck with the ability shown by assistants and foremen and skilled craftsmen such as carpenters? This ability should be given fuller scope for its develop- ment. In a laboratory it usually is, more or less; and the result, in one instance at least, was Faraday. But in the workshop what chance has a man of special ability, to emerge? A little, it is true. James Watt was an artisan who ulti- mately got his chance; but what pertinacious labour and severe trials did he not go through, and what opposition he had to overcome! His environment opposed and nearly frustrated even his great genius: a man of less strength of body and tenacity of purpose would have suc- cumbed. His example shows that a man of genius, combined with strong character, can even now win his way to the front; but the country is unwise to insist upon such a combination, before it gets the benefit of the brains at its 234 THE WAR AND AFTER disposal. As far as possible, things sfiould be so organized that ability, even if not specially conspicuous, should have its chance. Many more laboratories in proportion to the number of workshops, would give such a chance: laboratories free and unhampered by State regulations and control. If State subsidy means management by officials, its benefit is almost sterilized. But worse than that is the jealousy and restrictions imposed by workmen themselves. Their ideal of marching all together, each controlled and limited to a bare average, has been a scheme of self-defence adopted by a com- munity afflicted by past history and in danger of serfdom; but it is not the way to develop individuality and give every genius his chance. It is, like the customary ideal of a public school, planned to suppress originality and maintain an average standard. In this way the humdrum work of the world can be done, but no great production such as future ages will admire is likely: distinguished achievement is indeed only possible because providential arrangements sometimes overrule well-meaning human stu- pidity. The beehive system is splendid at a certain stage of development — something like it may be needed in war-time — but it is beneath the possible standard of humanity: we can aim higher than that. That nation which learns how to discover and utilize its great men, in every walk of life, will forge ahead to a surprising extent, and will advance the general cause of civilization. We cannot create or control OTHER HOME REFORMS 235 genius, it bloweth where it listeth, but we can control environment: that is our human privilege and duty.' The debilitating struggle for bare subsist- ence should certainly cease. It cannot possibly be necessary. Enough for a living is so easily procured. Not so easily if agriculture is neglected: we ought to keep consciously before us the fact that everything has to come from the land. That is what receives the sun- shine; and it is upon the energy of sunshine that the whole activity of our planet necessarily depends. The amount of the energy can be reckoned, and it is enough to feed far more people than ever lived at one time, or are ever likely to live. We have hardly yet learned how best to utilize it. But, if we had, it is not bread alone that man needs; he should have leisure to cultivate his soul; and education should assist him. Bare subsistence is bound to come first, but that should be easy: the really difficult things fol- low after that. Machinery may contribute to subsistence; machinery, from the plough upwards, is neces- sary for that; but wealth of soul is not in- creased by machinery. In so far as machines can perform bare mechanical tasks, and thereby confer more leisure upon human beings, their use is of manifest advantage. Steamships; instead of galleys of oars propelled by wretched slaves, represent an obvious stride in civiliza- tion; while to propel an aeroplane by human muscle is simply impossible. Greater leisure ought to result from the per- 236 THE WAR AND AFTER formance of mechanical tasks and menial offices by machinery. But does it? Increase of out- put is often secured instead. "Speeding up" is a term invented in America; and humanity can thus become more enslaved and desperately driven than before. This is, or ought to be, the real meaning of the limitation of output insisted on by Trade Unions. And when it is doubtful whether things are wanted or not, such limitation may be legitimate: in peace time it may be possible to have over-production. But when the things are vitally necessary, when they are needed to save the life-blood of your fellows, all such artificial limitation of the power of machinery becomes criminal. The whole nation must be aware that munitions and sup- plies of every kind are really needed now; and class legislation, like mere party obstruc- tion and artificially hostile criticism, must be suspended. The less of such obstruction and criticism that need be renewed after a return to normal times, the better for the nation. The entire atmosphere of production needs purifying by a more wholesome breath. At present manu- facturing processes are smothered in the dust of recent strife, bound and hampered by restrictions founded on mistrust, and choked by the noxious gases of greed and selfishness. There is now a chance for better relations between capital and labour — as an outcome of joint sacrifice for a common end; and there is some hope that ideas of universal service for the good of the Community, and especially a keener realization of the fact that human life and OTHER HOME REFORMS 237 welfare are the real objects of all exertion, may permeate and reform and re-invigorate the land. Infant Mortality The monotony of environment and absence of leisure, and consequent succumbing to tempta- tion, may swamp some genius which otherwise would enrich the nation; but the unnecessary slaughter which goes on hourly among infants must destroy the chance of much more. We have learned that young life is itself an asset to the Community, even apart from exceptional pos- sibilities and promise. Given favourable condi- tions for development and education, every other child born into the world seems likely to promise notable service; — else how comes it that the sons of peers so frequently blossom into Diplomatists and Civil Servants and able Governors and holders of important positions under the Crown ? Clearly the present state of infant mortality is a disgrace to the Community; fortunately it is felt to be so, and remedies are bein^ sought. The present state of stress may hasten reform. Motherhood should be better protected than at present, and education in the management of children should be wide- spread. Indeed instruction in elementary physiology, generally, would conduce to greater respect for the body and diminish the ills due to its maltreatment. Compulsory school attend- ance too soon after illness is another danger to infants. THE WAH AND AFTER Position of Womkn One more of the welcome changes which must follow the war is that women will surely not have to revert to their old unrecognized political position. We have had quite enough of a nation which systematically underrates and suppresses its own womenfolk, making them take a merely subservient position, and treating all other women with disrespect and barbarity. The exclusion of women from due recognition, and the mean estimation in which they have been held, is responsible for much evil. It is perhaps a curious outcome of war that women should come more to the front, but so it is, — in every department their help and influence are more and more gratefully recognized, — indeed the one bright spot in the hideous blunder of the Crimea was the emergence of Florence Nightingale. Women have once more shown that they can take their share in war preparation, and in national labour and suffering and achievement, and in service near the front; while they were already engaged usefully in civic and municipal enterprises. War does not spare women vicariously — it does not even spare them per- sonally, as we may have thought and hoped that it did — and they are entitled to a voice in the affairs which lead to or which avoid war. Some of them, in a too recent past, have been terribly irritating, but the wisdom of the best must be trusted to hold in check or at least to counterbalance the impudence and folly of the worst. Besides, they have made some OTHER HOME REFORMS 239 amends by wise and patriotic counsel and activity in face of real danger. Clamour and violence, in past frivolous times, have done their cause much harm; but in spite of the antics of a minority the wise instincts of womanhood can no longer be ignored or treated as a negligible asset in the government of a State. Daughter nations of the Empire, and independent States of America, have tried experiments from which we can well learn; and surely the present time will not be allowed to pass, until artificial and unnatural dis- abilities are removed, and opportunity be given to all properly qualified citizens to take a recognized and official part in work which already they share and often largely influence. It has for some time been noteworthy how far more eagerly women put themselves under educational influences than do men. Of the few who enter professions, or become Scholars, it would be impertinent to speak; I speak only of the average. They form the majority of an audience at any lecture, or at a not immediately, professional or too technical opportunity for receiving education. Their minds are developing and their spirit rising to an unprecedented extent. To them always has humanity looked for train- ing in its youth: to them it will be looking also for training in its age. The faults of emanci- pation and the exuberance of political youth may be upon them just now, but they are striving for light, they are pressing towards the dawn, and their loud and sometimes discordant utter- 240 THE WAR AND AFTER ances are but the birth-pangs of a sane and noble future. "For, when the people speaks loudly, it is from being strongly possessed either by the Godhead or the Demon; and he who cannot discover the true spirit from the false, hath no ear for profitable communion/' Imagine for a moment that, when peace returns to England, we could retain undiminished that sense of unity and that self-devotion which have been evoked by war, and could use them wisely in all their strength, if only for ten years, to make England, morally and so- cially, all that it might be. Why, it might become, for itself, almost what Shakespeare called it, a "second Eden," and, for others, a light to lighten the nations. — A. C. Bradley. CHAPTER XXVIII CONCLUSION WE live in great and invigorating times, when long-do rma;nt energies are set free, and revolutionary changes can be made, — times which may be a turning-point in the history of the world. If so the cost may be justified: though the full cost, direct and indirect, has not yet been, probably cannot be, estimated. Toil and sacrifice, grief and pain, are always necessary and inevitable preparations for a period of special development and spiritual outpouring. The Christian revelation itself was not accomplished with Calvary. Gethsemane pre- ceded Pentecost. Seers and sensitives have known intuitively that great events were being forshadowed, they felt the coming of the present time, and have heralded the advent of a new era. The conflict is not solely material, the whole psychic atmo- sphere is troubled, and the powers of good are arrayed against the forces of evil. To suppose that human powers and forces exhaust the cate- gory, is to take a limited and purblind— a strictly sensory — view of the universe. Mankind is co- operating with higher influences — either con- sciously or unconsciously — co-operating on both 241 9A% THE WAR AND AFTER sides; and from the point of view of the evolution and progress of humanity on this planet there has been real risk of a check and a reverse. Free- dom might have been destroyed, a highly organ- ized material Kultur might have assumed sway, and the advance of humanity in a spiritual direction would have been set back for centuries. The conflict has been more serious, and the un- toward result more possible, than has J^een widely perceived. Those who believe in a Divine government of the world may have felt assured that all would be well, that right must triumph in the end; and so it may, but the victory was far from certain: there were times when the balance terribly oscillated. Divine government differs intensely from simple conceptions of it: it does not act as the natural man expects. It is not overbearing and dominating, but persuasive and auxiliary. It does not keep things right by main force, nor set them right artificially. It calls continually for human co-operation and effort, and it never overpowers or chokes free will. That deadly gift — symbolized in the early chapters of Genesis as the knowledge of good and evil and the power of conscious choice between them — is no pictorial semblance or imaginary equipment: it is real, and salutary, and alarming. At any moment the human race might have decided to go wrong, or by weak- ness of resistance and abstention from taking pains might allow the power of the devil to get the upper hand. There was a real risk, a genuine anxiety. Help was available, but only in response to heartfelt longing, only accessible CONCLUSION 243 to the demand of a good will. It becomes active only in response to what we call prayer. Mental and spiritual supineness would have left us de- pendent on material preparation alone, and we should have been overwhelmed by our enemies. The affairs of this planet are surely being more and more handed over to conscious humanity. More and more are we becoming the guiding and directing principle in this sublunary sphere. We may do all we can, exert ourselves to the utmost, and then, if we realize our lack of sufficient power and need of extra help, we may ask for it. It will not be forced upon us. Our own good will is essential. If we are ready to place it in harmony with the Divine will- not in a spirit of passivity and acquiescence alone, but of work and effort and real sym- pathetic exertion, — if we are ready to enter on that service which never enslaves but leaves us in perfect freedom, — then indeed assistance is forthcoming and we cannot be finally overcome. Freedom is the watchword of humanity, this it is which was conferred upon us by Divine Charter which may not be revoked. With all the pains and penalties attached, we have it; and if we — poor struggling insects — determine madly to inflict death and torture on each other, we may. Not God nor all His angels will stop us, — no, not though we inflict scourging and ut- most horrors on the incarnate Son. People ask despairingly sometimes why man- made evils are permitted, why, if Divine inter- position is a reality, they are not stopped by supernatural force. They do not understand 244 THE WAR AND AFTER the conditions. Free-will, for better for worse, has been granted to the human race; and a Divine Treaty cannot be torn up. The privilege has been granted to us to be not slaves but sons; the long education of history to this end is behind us, the still longer education of the future is before us; and not only for indi- viduals but for the whole human race on this planet, if it chooses, there remains a magni- ficent era. The will of God shall yet be done on earth, some day, when it has become the human will likewise. In no other way can it be done; and this present distress is moving us all nearer to the time — long looked forward to, and alas! still distant, but approaching — when the eyes of all mankind shall be open to spiritual truths, when all shall serve Him from the least to the greatest, and when the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. INDEX TO QUOTATIONS PAGE 7 "The fact that the sense of community" 7 "the essential principle" „ 7 "The binding cord" . 8 "Let us together" 8 "We may reasonably hail" 9 "All ages, all the wise" 12 "All men, at least here in England" 21 "The idea, peculiar to the nineteenth century" 24 "No cultured European nation" 25 "Consequently we find Machiavelli" 29 "notre force" 29 "Divine must be" 33 "The sword, as the sword" 33 "by the soul Only" 34 "Prussian victories are secured" 43 "Everything which is des- perately immoral" 61 "a kind of instinct", 65 "In academic circles" 77 "Happy are all free nations" 78 "Our wills are ours" Kant. E. Caird's Critical Philosophy of Kant, ii. 350 Prof. J. H. Muirhead, German Philosophy in Relation to the War Hegel, Phil. of Right, p. 245 n. Hegel, quoted by E. Caird, P- 78 Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason, Pt. III. Fichte, 14th Address, fin. Von Hiigel, The Quest, April 1915 Bergson, Hibbert Journal, April 1915 Prof. Cramb, Germany and England E. de Selincourt, English Poets and the National Ideal Verhaeren, La Multiple Splendeur Wordsworth, Sonnet xxvi. Wordsworth, Letter to Capt. Pasley, 181 1 Wordsworth, Sonnet xi. Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season Wordsworth, pamphlet on The Convention of Cintra, 1809 Emerson, English Traits. Speech at Manchester Prof. W. J. Ashley's pamphlet The War and its Economic Aspects Mrs. Browning, The Court Lady Tennyson, In Memoriam (Intro- ductory Section) 245 246 PAGE THE WAR AND AFTER 80 Influence of calm weather 89 "We look around upon the larger life" 97 "Statesmanship would be easy" 103 "These war-lovers are creatures" 104 "The State is no academy" 107 "As long as guilty actions thrive" no "Everywhere Germans were welcomed" 115 "Some of their own mili- tarist fanatics" 131 "Shall I not visit" . 137 "We have seen our enemies" 140 "Blow out, you bugles" 140 "To you, young men" 141 "When history records" 141 "much remains to conquer still" 147 "Unto each man his handi- work" 165 "Commerce is an occupa- tion" 169 "When a man chooses for himself" and "Liberty has its price" 176 "For years attention has been called" 178 "God save the people" 185 "Tomorrow's uprising" 189 "But who shall so forecast the years" 192 "The word 'honour' when applied" 'Plotinus, Enn. v. 2-3, quoted by Myers in Human Personality, vol. ii. p. 291 Wordsworth, Immortality Tennyson, In Mem., xcv. Sir Henry Jones, The Im- manence of God and the Individuality of Man "The Comments of Bagshot," Westminster Gazette, 1908 (probably by Mr. Spender) H. G. Wells, The Peace of the World, p. 19 Treitschke, Lectures on Poli- tics Wordsworth, The Convention of Cintra Science Progress, April 1915 A. Clutton-Brock, Thoughts on the War Jer. v. 29 The Arbitrator, May 1915 Rupert Brooke, Fugitive Pieces. See also p. 92 Lowes Dickinson, pamphlet, After the War, p. 18 E. de Selincourt Milton, To Cromwell Swinburne, Songs before Sun- rise, "Super Flumina Babylo- nis." The special reference is to Mazzini Ruskin, Unto This Last E. de Selincourt, English Poets and the National Ideal The New Statesman, April 10, 1915 Ebenezer Elliott, People s Anthem William Morris, Poems by the Way, "The Message of the March Wind" Tennyson, In Memoriam, I. Looking towards Peace, issued by Society of Friends INDEX TO QUOTATIONS 24*7 PAGE 192 "The man who feels no regret" 204 "And here is a lesson" 204 "If after being released" . 206 "How can we have time for war?" 217 "The first end to be se- cured" 219 "Modern Germany has made obvious" 222 "no nation has paid more dearly" 227 "Tasks in hours of insight" 240 "For, when the people speaks" Wordsworth, The Convention of Cintra Dr. Sarolea Milton, Second Defence of the People of England A. Clutton-Brock, Thoughts on the War, p. 85 Wordsworth, The Convention of Cintra Count Hermann Keyserling, Hibbert Journal, April 191 5 Dr. Sarolea, The Anglo-German Problem (1912) Matthew Arnold, Morality Wordsworth, The Convention of Cintra INDEX Abbe Noel, 30 Advent, 213 Advertisements, 229 Agents, 130 American help, 106, 121-123, 155 Armenia, 32, 79, 96, 124 Arnold, Matthew, 92, 227 Artists, 18 Ashley, Professor W. J., 65 Asquith, Rt. Hon. H., 209 Atheism, 22, 59, 94 Austria, vii, 33, 79, 220 Baal, 52. See Devil worship "Bagshot," 42, 97, 195 Barbarism, 116. See Savagery Bargaining, 137 Beck, Hon. J. M., vi Beethoven, 51 Begbie, Harold, 87, 133 Belgian neutrality, 112 Belgium, 29, 30, 50, 52, 76, 102, 114, 217 Bennett, Arnold, 103 Bereavement, 86 Bergson, 20 Bernhardi, 68, 69 Birth of Christ, 213 Blatchford, Robert, 183 Bourtzeff, 207 Boycotting, 121, 155, 156 Boy Scout, 145, 152, 175 Bradley, A. C, 44, 240 Brereton, Cloudesley, 223 British Empire, 54, 75 British Fleet, 210 Brooke, Rupert, 95, 138 Brotherhood, 124, 187 Browning, 155 Browning, E. B., 77, 193 Brutality, 113. See Savagery 249 Bryce, Viscount, 211 Bulgaria, 32, 96, 124, 214, 224 Bureaucracy, 72, 81 Cadbury, Edward, 178 Calm weather, 80 Carlyle, 42 Carpenter, Edward, 176, 207 Cathedrals, 185, 186 Cavendish, 198 Chamberlain, Austen, 49 Chambers, T. G., 58 Christendom, 25, 45, 125, 146 Christianity, 136, 241 Civilian organization, 151-7 Civilization, 88 Clutton-Brock, 63, 64, 205 Coleridge, 171 Colonization, 55, 71-73 Commerce, neutral, 101 Constantinople, 216, 224 Co-operation, 67, 203, 242 Cotton, 101 Cowardice, 113 Cramb, Prof., 23, 26, 77, 78 Creative thought, 18 Cromwell, 31 Cycles of recurrence, 16, 17, 89 Dardanelles, 216 Darwinism, 56-59 Democracy, 159, 234 Denmark, 33, 80 Denunciations, 128 Derby, Lord, 176 Despotism, 79 Determinism, 20 Devil-worship, 30, 52, 94 Dickinson, Lowes, 140, 168 Diplomacy, 69, 191 Disarmament, 203 250 THE WAR AND AFTER Dislike, 78 Dostoevski, 223 Drink, 171, 183 Dulness, 144 149, 172 Earthquakes, 85, 99 Education, 63, 160, 194, 200, 239 Efficiency, 90, 156, 160, 199, 201 Eliot, Dr. s 106 Emerson, 61, 70 Environment, 58, 234 Ether, 19 Fallacies, 56-61 Faraday, go, 198, 233 Federation, 53 Fichte, 8, 194 Fisher, H. A. L., 212 Fiume, 215 Football, 117, 125 Forth Bridge, 185 Frankland, Prof. P., 199* 201 Frederick II, 68, 79 Freedom, 49, 207, 243 Free Trade, 210 Galsworthy, 119 Garibaldi, 100 Genius, undiscovered, 232 German Colonies, 221 German Empire, 216, 220 German Navy, 221 German science, 51, 199, 201 Germany, old, 3, 55 Gilbert, 79 Gladstone, 76 Goethe, 51 Goldschmidt, Dr. E., 51 Goodwill, 124 Graham, Stephen, 223 Greece, 224 Green, T. H., 144 Grey, Sir Edward, 124 Haeckel, 20, 23 Hate, 134 Hegel, 7 Heine, 23 Heligoland, 220, 224 Helmholtz, 51 Heroism, 144 Hertz, 51 Holstein, 33, 218, 220 Homicidal mania, 87 Honour, 51, 69, in, 113, 122, 133, 189, 192 Hiigel, Baron von, 10, 11, 71, 72 Hugo, Victor, 86 Humour, 114 Hypocrisy, 46, 78, 79, 134 Ideals, 49 India, 72 Indignation, 130 Infant mortality, 167, 237 International police, 152, 153 Invasion, 102 Italy, 100, no, 216 J' Accuse, 135, 136 James, Henry, 75 Jones, Prof. Sir H., 5 Jordan, Starr, 168 Joy in work, 185 Kaiser, 10, 79, 82, 115 Kant, 5, 6, 8 Keane, Dr. A. H., 10 Keyserling, Count Hermann, 184 Kiel Canal, 220, 224 King David, 78 Kropotkin, Prince, 118 Kultur, 92 ; 94, 95, 103, 195 Labour, 165, 171, 173, 176, 178, 185, 235 Labour members, 124 Labour Party, 187 Labour troubles, 162 Lankester, Sir E. Ray, 51 Leisure, 234 Liberty, 170 Lincoln, Abraham, 105 Lister, 123 London, 228 Louvain, 23 Lunacy, 87 Lusitania, 94, 99 Lyttelton, Hon. E., 75 Macedonia, 32, 96 3Machiavelli a n, 25 iMachinery, 19, 236 INDEX 251 March- Phillips, Lisle, 185 Mazzini, 101, 147, 193 Megalomania, 87 Mercenaries, 97 Militarism, 175 Milton, 31, 109, 117, 142, 183, 204, 207 Modern war, 150 Mohammedanism, 26 Mommsen, 34 Mons, 27 Morris, William, 177, 185 Motherhood, 237 Muirhead, Prof. J. H., 4, 5, 14 Murray, Prof. Gilbert, x Naboth's vineyard, 33 Nansen, 212 Napoleon, 26, 38, 47 National anthem, 121 Nationality, 193 Neutral commerce, 101 Nietzsche, 34-42, 115, 144 Nightingale, Florence, 238 Non-resistance, 118, 136 Organization. See Efficiency Outcome, 143 Pacifism, 126-30, 136 Palestine, 213, 224, 225 Palmerston, 66 Party politics, 146, 230-33 Peace conference, 11 Picton, Harold, 49 Pilate, 128 Planck, Prof, von, 51 Plotinus, 80 Plunkett, Sir Horace, 167 Poison gases, 90 Poland, 79, 221 Professors, German, 132 Prussia, 79, 219 Ramsay, Sir W., in Recruiting, 98 Red Cross movement, 228 Relativity, principle of, 51 Religion, 25, 26, 47, JJ Revelation, 129, 241 Rheims, 186 Ring and the Book, 154 Roberts, Lord, 55 Roosevelt, 105 Roumania, 214, 224 Royal Institution, 198 Ruskin, 146, 157 Russia, 79, 216, 221 Sarolea, Dr. C., vi, 68, 70, 71, 81, 102, 108, 204, 218 Savagery, 3, 94, 109, 113, 214 Saving, 182 Schleswig. See Holstein Science, neglect of, 196-201 Sedgwick, Mrs., 114 Self-interest, 96, 99 Selincourt, Prof, de, 2, 25, 141, 169 Serbia, 215, 224 Shakespeare, 84, 108 Shaw, Bernard, 38, 96, 145, 167 Sheep-fold parable, 127 Shepherds and Wise Men, 213 Shipwrecks, 85 Sidney, 123 Simplicity, 191 Small nations, 209, 211, 212 Smyrna, 224 Social experiment, 213 Socialists, 187 Speeding up, 236 Struggle for existence, 56 Sullivan, 79 Sully, Prof., 65 Suppuration, 123 Swinburne, 147 Syria, 224 Tante, 114 Taube, 80 Temple cleansing, 120, 124, 127 Temptation, 94 Tennyson, 54, 78, 80 Thackeray, 66 Thrift, 179 Titanic, 99 Tolstoy, 223 Treitschke, 26, 28, 77, 78 Tribulation, 137 Tyrolese, xi, 33, 104 252 THE WAR AND AFTER Unfair practices, 117 Union, 53 Unjust steward, 94, 196 Venizelos, 224 Verhaeren, 29 Volunteers, 98 Waldenses, 31 War Loan, 182 Watt, James, 233 Webb, Sidney, 167 Weekly wage, 180 Wells, H. G., 103 Wise Men and shepherds, 213 Wolff, K. R, 38, 39 Women, position of, 238 Wordsworth, vi, 29, 43, 81, 107, 123, 217, 240 Workers' Educational Associa- tion, ix, 62 Zeppelins, 80 iggARY OF U&?*ESS 563