D
646
S53
Peace
Conference
Hints
By Bernard Shaw
London: Constable & Co. Ltd.

ARTES
1837
SCIENTIA
LIBRARY
VERITAS
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
PLUNIBUS UNUM
THEBOR
SI QUÆRIS-PENINSULAM AMⱭNAM
CIRCUMSMICE
PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
1
D
646
$53
འ ག རྣ མ བ ནི པར
PEACE CONFERENCE
HINTS
BY
DOL BERNARD SHAW
George
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LIMITED
1919
Copyright
1919.
All rights reserved.
Librarian
} $ $ +
37
CONTENTS
ENTER HISTORY:
CHAPTER I.
EXIT ROMANCE. BRITISH FOREIGN
POLICY. THE DIPLOMACY OF 1906-1914.
CHAPTER II.
CROSS PURPOSES IN HOME POLITICS. THE GREAT CAMOU-
FLAGE. PRINCE LICHNOWSKY
CHAPTER III.
THE FALL OF MR. ASQUITH AND SIR EDWARD GREY. THE
LION'S SPRING. THE BLOCKADE. THE FREEDOM of
THE SEAS
CHAPTER IV.
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM SUCCEEDS ΤΟ THE HOLY
ROMAN EMPIRE. THE COALITION ROYALISTS AND
MR. WILSON. MR. WILSON AS CHARLEMAGNE.
THE IRISH QUESTION
CHAPTER V.
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS. ITS ROMANCE AND ITS REALITY.
ANACHARSIS KLOOTZ VERSUS M. LEON BOURGEOIS
PAGE
7
17
31
45
64
vi
CONTENTS
CHAPTER VI.
INDISPENSABILITY OF GERMANY IN THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS.
CLEMENCEAU'S OBJECTION. THE DEMAND FOR
SECURITY. DISARMAMENT. FUTILITY OF THE
ECONOMIC BOYCOTT. RECAPITULATION
CHAPTER VII.
GOOD MANNERS IN WAR AND PEACE.
THE CREED OF
CHRISTIAN CHIVALRY. OUR FULL MEAL or
VENGEANCE. ATROCITY MONGERING HAD BETTER
END. THE PERIL OF CLASS WAR
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CHAPTER I
ENTER HISTORY: EXIT ROMANCE
BEFORE the Peace Conference can be discussed
with any profit, it must be approached in the
light of the facts, and not of the romance on which
the popular imagination was fed during the war.
It is in the nature of war that it can never be fought
out on the merits of the casus belli. The common
soldier, who has to risk life and limb in the business,
like the common taxpayer and elector who has to
support the soldier and maintain the Government
in power, is never trusted with the truth. He may
not be statesman enough to grasp its scope and
importance. He may not be capable of under-
standing it at all. His narrow personal and
parochial morality might be revolted by it. It is
therefore deemed necessary to present the war to
him as a crude melodrama in which his country
is the hero and the enemy the villain. The present
war is no exception to this rule. The legend of
the crimes of Germany, which has nerved millions
of Britons and Americans, Frenchmen and Italians,
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to devote themselves to the destruction of the
German military power through the wholesale
slaughter of their fellow creatures, is no truer
than the counter legend of the crimes of England
which rallied millions of Germans to defend their
country by the same ruinous method. Now that
the war is over, the legends have served their
purposes and must be discarded. They would
not bear a moment's investigation in an impartial
court. Even at the Peace Conference, which, far
from being an impartial court, ordains simply the
imposition of the will of the victors on the
vanquished, the victors must for their own sakes
be guided by the facts even if they still talk in
terms of the fictions.
The first step in the discussion is, therefore, to
set forth the facts in order.
England, as all the world knows, has, ever since
she ceased to be raided and conquered by one
continental invasion after another, Roman, Saxon,
Danish, and Norman, taken the lesson of these
raids and conquests closely to heart, and held
steadily to certain conditions of self-preservation.
These are, that her fleet must command the seas,
and that no rival fleet or even combination of
fleets must be capable of overcoming that fleet;
that no continental State shall be allowed to
acquire such a military predominance in Europe
as to deprive England of the power of defeating
it by throwing herself into the scale against it
(in other words that England must hold the
balance of power); and, in particular, that no
Power of the first magnitude must be allowed to
ENTER HISTORY: EXIT ROMANCE 9
control the shores of the North Sea and thereby
cut off England's military access to the continent.
This is the English equivalent of the Monroe
Doctrine. It is quite useless to argue about its
morality. It is imposed on England by necessity,
just as the Monroe Doctrine, which is equally
indefensible ethically, is imposed on the United
States by necessity. Whilst war exists as an
institution, and nations compete with one another
for power, prestige, and "places in the sun,
England will have to postulate these conditions
and fight for them whether her Government be
composed of Quakers or Jingos. She will no
more suffer a formidable rival to hold Antwerp
than to hold Portsmouth. If the United States
build a thousand new battleships England will
build fifteen hundred new ones. If the French
Republic rises on the ruins of the Prussian mon-
archy towards a European hegemony, England
will combine with Germany to make that hegemony
impossible. In the matter of foreign alliances
she will allow Belgium just as much freedom of
choice as she allows Ireland, and no more. She
will act in this way because she must. She may
never let her left hand know what her right is
doing. Her non-interventionist Liberals, her
Quakers, her littleminded insular commercialists
may repudiate such designs; her Imperialists
may profess ententes cordiales and unions of hearts
and championships of oppressed little nationalities ;
her prelates may preach peace on earth and good-
will to men; but at the first extra battleship built
abroad, at the first menace to Antwerp, at the
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first possibility of hegemony, all these calculations
will be swept aside by the surge of patriotism or
duped by diplomatic secrecy; and all the pieties
and professions will veer round to the point at
which the whole duty of man in England will be
to maintain the freedom of the seas by the guardian-
ship of the British fleet, to save Antwerp from a
fate worse than death, and to rescue Europe from
being crushed under the heel of a brutal despotism.
Do not dismiss this too lightly as British
hypocrisy. There is always some solid brick
underneath the whitewash. It may very easily
be the interest of the world as well as of England
that there shall not be a hegemony in Europe,
and that access to its shores shall not be controlled
by any Power that can afford to keep the door
locked. The British fleet may in effect be found
useful to the world as a maritime police force.
To take an extreme instance, the defence of the
Straits of Gibraltar by England, though apparently
an outrageous violation of the Spanish form of
the Monroe Doctrine, may save the Spanish tax-
payer a huge annual charge whilst protecting him
more effectually than a Spanish fortress could.
In the affairs of nations as in those of individuals,
it commonly happens that the robust people who
make it their first duty to take care of themselves
are more useful to their neighbors than the
idealists whose eyes are in the ends of the earth,
and in whom the disease of suicidal mania takes
on an air of virtue by calling itself self-sacrifice.
The present destruction of the military power
of Germany is thus only a formal incident of
ENTER HISTORY: EXIT ROMANCE
11
British foreign policy, planned with all England's
accustomed resolution, patience, craft, force, and
triumphant success.
Also with all her amazing
power of concealing from herself what she is doing.
The Englishman never knows what the British
Foreign Office is about, not because the Foreign
Office could effectively conceal its proceedings if they
were resolutely investigated, but because he does
not want to know. Some instinct tells him that
he had better not know. He will not read the
speeches of the Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs even when they are fully reported. He
does not read the White Papers and Blue Books
which deal with foreign policy; and if he did
read them he could not read between the lines of
the official formalities and courtesies, nor would
he in any case learn the whole truth if he did;
for diplomacy is conducted mostly by private
correspondence which even the King has no right
to see.
And whilst he abuses all the Ministers
of the domestic departments to his heart's content
according to his party politics, he invariably
speaks with the deepest respect and awe of his
foreign affairs minister at home and his proconsuls
abroad. Hence you have such ridiculously
exaggerated reputations as those of the late Lord
Cromer and of Lord Grey of Fallodon. The down-
fall of the latter was due, not to his errors, but to
the fact that the necessity for stuffing the British
people with a fairy tale as to the nature and causes
of the war made it impossible for him to claim his
own triumph because it was of the kind which he
himself had been denouncing as Machiavellism.
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When the Northcliffe Press turned and rent him
for not having been Machiavellian enough in the
matter of the Balkans, he could not defend himself
without shaking the war moral of the British people
and the British army by revealing that the generous
indignation which was inspiring them to fight
Germany to the bitter end was founded on a
patriotic fiction.
What would his defence have been if he could
have uttered it? Simply the true history of his
policy as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
And that history would have been as follows.
In 1898-1902 it became apparent that Germany
was violating the first of the conditions of British
self-preservation. She was building a fleet. A year
or two later Lord Lee, then Mr Arthur Lee and
civil lord of the Admiralty, convulsed diplomatic
Europe for a fortnight by mentioning at a public
dinner that there was no need to be alarmed, as
England could, if put to it, sink the German
fleet before her declaration of war had reached
Berlin. This was true, but not calculated to reassure
the Germans as to their security face to face with
England. In 1906 the Liberals won a general
election by a huge majority; but as the Liberals
were distrusted in foreign affairs because they
consisted so largely of commercial non-inter-
ventionists and Quaker Pacifists, they secured this
victory by including among their leaders a number
of gentlemen described as Liberal Imperialists, a
title which left some doubt as to whether they were
genuine Liberals, but no doubt whatever that
they were sound Imperialists: that is, men alive
ENTER HISTORY: EXIT ROMANCE 13
to the growth of the German fleet, and faithful
to the old British tradition in that matter. Three
of them, Mr Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, and Mr
Haldane, were entrusted with the foreign policy
of the Government; and the nation, reassured,
relapsed into its customary instinctive inattention
to this dangerous topic.
Now that the war is over there is no longer any
reason to conceal what followed. Lord Haldane's
letter to The Times of the 18th December, 1918
completes the history begun in his speech from
the chair at a lecture delivered by Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle shortly after the beginning of the war, and
in the nearly simultaneous speech of Mr Winston
Churchill as to the preparation of the navy at the
same period. The rest is in the parliamentary
reports and the published diplomatic correspond-
ence, including the memoranda discovered by
the Germans in Brussels and not disowned by the
British Foreign Office.
Immediately on the accession to power of the
Liberal Imperialists the French Republic raised
the question of the German peril. The Germans
outnumbered the French by twenty millions, and
were therefore in a condition of manifest military
superiority. As the subjugation of the French
Republic would produce a German hegemony, it
was clearly part of the traditional British policy
to prevent such a subjugation. Accordingly it
was quietly agreed that in the event of a German
invasion of France, Britain should not only support
France with the North Sea Fleet, but send a
military expedition to reinforce the French army.
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As it was foreseen that a German invasion must
as a matter of strategical necessity be made through
Belgium, the Belgians were warned that they would
be expected to resist, and promised that England
would see them through. The Belgians, thus
caught "between the pass and fell incensed points
of mighty opposites ", could only demand exact
particulars of the assistance to be given them. The
number of troops and the number of days within
which these troops would be landed at their ports
were specified. The Belgians finally expressed a
hope that troops would not be sent into their
country uninvited. They were told, in effect, that
in the event of a German invasion England would
defend the soil of Belgium, invited or uninvited;
and the Belgians resigned themselves to their fate
accordingly.
The British Imperialists then put their prepara-
tion vigorously in hand. Lord Haldane, as Secre-
tary of State for War, set to work with Sir Douglas
Haig to reorganize the British army. It was
impossible to introduce conscription in the then
lazy and luxurious phase of public opinion; but
the promised expedition was prepared and trained
with a view to the work that awaited it; a terri-
torial force was established to deal with such
raids as might slip through the fence of the navy;
General French was instructed to prepare himself
for the command of the expeditionary force by
studying the ground in Flanders; the provision of
artillery was looked to; and a huge accumulation
of ammunition for the navy was begun.
The result was that when the war broke out,
ENTER HISTORY: EXIT ROMANCE 15
England was, up to the limit of her engagements,
by far the best prepared of all the belligerents.
Her program was carried out with plenty to spare,
and without a hitch. The navy was invincible.
The military expedition, in greater numbers and
in a shorter time than had been promised, was
sent across the sea without the loss of a single man.
After discounting all blunders and all reverses, and
admitting that our engagements, and consequently
our preparation, fell far short of our real commit-
ments and responsibilities, we can still claim that
Germany was not only hopelessly blockaded,
but outwitted, outprepared, outgeneralled, out-
fought, outflown, outgassed, outtanked, out-
raided, outbombed, and finally brought to her
knees at England's feet more abjectly than Philip,
or Louis, or Napoleon, or any of the old rivals of
the British Lion. It has been an amazing and
magnificent achievement, of which the English
themselves will not become conscious until some
eloquent historian, a century hence, tells them what
to think about it.
On the other hand, the Germans, considering
their prodigious military reputation, a reputation
created partly by their cheap military and moral
victory over bankrupt Bonapartism in 1871, and
partly by the romancings of German officers with
a literary turn, were comparatively unprepared and
incompetent. They had not a single torpedo
ready for the expedition as it crossed the sea.
They attacked Liège with field guns, though every
artillerist in Europe knew that they might as well
have attacked it with pop-guns; and before they
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got up some Austrian siege guns, they had lost their
one chance of winning the war. They rushed on
Paris without provisions or munitions, and had to
retreat and scrap their general in the face of a
breathless Europe. They introduced clouds of
poisonous gas under climatic conditions which
made it more deadly to them than to their enemy.
They had grasped the importance of the machine
gun, which soon threatened to make the war
impossible; but the British invented the tank and
checkmated the machine gun. The world-famous
German organization and efficiency proved a
sentimental dream; and its final collapse was so
complete, so sudden, and so ludicrous, that the
astonished victors were for some time more dis-
concerted than triumphant.
In my next chapter I shall explain how this
apparently simple and direct struggle between two
rival Powers, eight years of which were occupied in
manoeuvring for position, and only four in actual
fighting, was
was masked by such a bewildering
camouflage of cross purposes, mystifications, party
moves, and soul conflicts between dreams of martial
glory and Christian pacifist compunction, that not
until the armistice was signed was it possible even
to approach the truth in a public utterance of any
kind, spoken or written. Even now men gape
openmouthed at the story, and ask whether they
or the narrator are mad.
CHAPTER II
CROSS PURPOSES, THE GREAT CAMOUFLAGE, AND
LICHNOWSKY
Ar the end of the preceding chapter, having
traced the direct course of the policy by which
the British Empire broke the power of Germany,
I promised to explain the entanglements which
made it impossible at any moment before the end
of the war to lay that policy bare to the British
public, the British parliament, or the British
historian.
To begin with, the Jingo Imperialists and the
genuinely Liberal Imperialists were at cross pur-
poses. Lord Haldane, a Scot, by far the ablest
member of the Imperialist trio (Asquith-Grey-
Haldane) who conducted the policy, and, as
Secretary of State for War, the acting partner of
the combination, foresaw the war as a horrible.
possibility to be avoided at all costs short of
subjugation; and he did what a man, a Liberal,
and a philosopher could to maintain friendly rela-
tions with the Germans : a course which, when
the war broke out, earned him black ingratitude,
bitter vituperation, and even threats of impeach-
ment as the friend of Germany." His two English
colleagues merely drifted into the combination
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under French pressure, and, being peaceable good-
natured persons, hoped that the Kaiser would
keep quiet. The Jingos,
The Jingos, on the other hand,
were eager for a fight with Germany. Many
of them advocated a surprise attack on the
German fleet. About a year before the war, on
the initiative of a German Count, friendly addresses
were exchanged between the leading men of both
countries, full of platitudes about Shakespear
and Goethe. A sentence was inserted in the first
draft of the British address to the effect that the
possession by Germany of a powerful fleet, far
from being a subject of jealousy, could only be
regarded as an additional guarantee of civilization.
It was found impossible to obtain the necessary
British signatures until that sentence was expunged.
Evidently those who refused to sign it and those
who consented were in very different attitudes. Men
who were making a necessary provision for defence in
the event of an attack by Germany were inextricably
confused in the same party with men who could
hardly be induced to wait for a decent pretext
before springing the mine so carefully dug. To the
latter the avoidance of the war would have been
the worst misfortune that could have happened to
England. Even when Germany capitulated they
were still under such a terror
terror of peace that
they called her collapse "a peace offensive."
There is a good deal to be said for their view from
the Militarist and British Leonine standpoint. I
am not here criticising it adversely I am only
chronicling the contrarieties of opinion and feeling
that existed in the Imperialist camp.
CROSS PURPOSES
19
Now if this had been the only division in the
party and in the country, it would not have
mattered, as the two sides agreed on the practical
part of the policy. Both were equally determined
to place the British Empire in a position to reduce
the German Empire to the degree of a second-rate
Power if she moved towards a hegemony, and to
keep ahead of her in naval shipbuilding. But there
were other sections whose secession would have
wrecked the Liberal Government, and who were
fundamentally opposed to the policy. First there
were the commercial non-interventionists, Cob-
denites, Gladstonians and George Washingtonians,
who objected to meddling in continental quarrels,
and knew that huge profits could be made out of
a war by neutrals supplying the combatants with
war materials. With them on the practical point
were the Quakers, always important in Liberal
party politics, objecting to war as sinful. Also, of
course, the many members who were simply incap-
able of foreign policy.
The attitude of the Labor Party was not so
simple. Though there was and is plenty of British
Bulldog Jingoism in the rank and file of the Labor
Party, and also among its leaders, the dynamic
section, to which the party owed its formation
and which supplies most of its ideas, are mainly
Socialists and Internationalists who well know
that the traditions of the British Lion have no
future, and that the interests of all proletarians
are identical and, as between one country and
another, pacific. They were, it is true, far
more determined to overthrow the Hohenzollernist
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Junkerdom than the Jingos; but they wished to
destroy Junkerdom both at home and abroad by a
combination of Labor at home and abroad, whereas
the capitalist Jingos aimed simply at the supremacy
of British over German Junkerdom.
Further, the Labor Party itself was divided into
idealist Pacifists who wished to stop the war,
and Realists who knew that the war must be fought
to a finish, and who hoped that when Junkers
fell out working men would come to their own.
On one point, however, Labor was unanimous
and irreconcilable. The Liberal Imperialists had
been led by their military advisers, by French
pressure, and, from the Labor point of view,
largely by class instinct, into the stupendous
moral blunder of allowing themselves to be made
accomplices in an open and flagrant crime against
civilization committed by the French Republic.
This was nothing less than an alliance with the
abominable despotism of the Russian Tsardom.
On the surface the military advantages of this
alliance seemed unquestionable. Russia com-
manded the Eastern frontiers of the German and
Austrian Empires, and could thus complete the
famous encirclement (Einkreisung) which was the
masterstroke of the Allied strategy. No better
illustration could be found of the shallowness of
professional military realism. The Tsardom, long
obsolete, and rotten with corruption, cruelty,
ignorance, and the incoherence, contradiction, and
weakness which are necessary conditions of auto-
cracy, conducted as it must be by thousands of
deputy autocrats in no sort of organic relation to
CROSS PURPOSES
21
one another, was tottering on the brink of revolu
tion, as the Labor Party well knew. It was there-
fore perilously untrustworthy as a military ally.
Besides, it was clearly the business of western
Europe to support Germany, in the interest of
civilization, against a barbarous anachronism like
the Tsardom. No western Power could conspire
with Russia to overthrow Germany without putting
itself hopelessly in the wrong morally, unless it
could prove that there was no safe alternative, and
that self-preservation drove it to this desperate
step. But no such proof was possible. It is true
that France and England needed an additional
ally. They were faced by a threefold alliance of
Germany, Austria, and Italy (the Triplice); and
the Kaiser was cultivating a ridiculous but
dangerous entente with Islam, which meant Turkey.
A triple alliance was therefore necessary to England
and France. But there was an alternative to an
alliance with Russia, very obvious to a democrat,
if not to a countryhouse diplomatist. That al-
ternative was an alliance with the United States of
America. Events have proved that this was the
right alternative not only morally but militarily.
Why was it not chosen?
Well, there were diplomatic as well as strategic
reasons against it. The United States were still
in the Washingtonian phase of non-intervention;
and the Imperialism of the late Colonel Roosevelt
could not see very far, though it could see very
red. It could see just far enough to understand
that it was not America's business to maintain
Britain as ruler of the seas and holder of the
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European balance of power. The United States
had no more interest in these British traditions
than the Central Empires themselves. To bring
them into the Alliance it would have been necessary
to appeal to their interest in the peace of the world
and in the substitution of Federal Republicanism
for Empire as the prevalent form of government
in Europe. An alliance of the United States with
Russia was quite out of the question. There was
nothing for it but either to remodel the anti-
German combination so as to substitute America
for Russia, or leave it as it was, and accept the
French alliance with Russia as part of it.
Such a remodelling was beyond Sir Edward
Grey's capacity, and highly uncongenial to his
class traditions and sympathies as a typical British
Junker. He took to the Russian alliance as a duck
takes to water; and the Tsardom, with the French
Republic in one pocket and the British Empire in
the other, abandoned the little self-restraint which
the scruples of the democratic west had hitherto
imposed on it, and let itself go in Persia and
elsewhere with the certainty that everything to
its discredit would now be kept out of the British
and French papers. From this time forth The
Times no longer hailed the assassination of
Grand Dukes and Governors of Finland with
a very thinly paraphrased "Serve him right!";
and Russia's reputation rose as the Tsardom's
conduct grew worse. Yet the attempt at conceal-
ment was only half successful. Nothing could
smother the thundering voice of Tolstoy, nor silence
the thousand minor voices that clamored for
•
CROSS PURPOSES
23
judgment on the vilest surviving tyranny in
Europe. Paris swallowed a visit from the Tsar,
and even made much of him; but when he pro-
posed to visit England the agitation against him
was so furious that Mr Asquith dared not allow
him to land, much less confess to the Labor Party
and to the people that the Liberal Imperialists had
virtually joined hands with the Tsar in a secret
compact against a much more civilized neighboring
State. The Russian connection thus forced Mr
Asquith to a secrecy which did not stop short of flat
denials, made by himself and Sir Edward Grey in
reply to questions in the House of Commons on
more than one occasion, that there was any binding
engagement between Britain and France. The two
Powers actually went to the length of exchanging
letters stating formally that there was no binding
engagement; so that these denials might be tech-
nically true. But none the less they were misleading
and were meant to be misleading. A true reply
to the questions would have run There is no
binding engagement between England and France
in the legal sense; but if Germany attacks France,
whether through Belgium or not, and England does
not send the British fleet and an expeditionary
force to France's aid, England will be dishonored
to the last page of her history." That would have
been the truth: anything short of it had the effect
of a lie; and naturally, when the truth came out
later, those who were deceived refused to make
the fine distinctions with which Mr Asquith and
Sir Edward saved their consciences and their party.
And so the secrecy of the Russian alliance went
te
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on, with all its evil consequences. It was so evident
that Sir Edward Grey was unequal to the situation,
that in desperation I, as a private individual,
suggested a line of action when Prince Lichnowsky
was appointed German ambassador in London.
Under the impression that well known authors and
sociologists enjoy the same consideration in England
as in Germany, he invited me to visit him at the
embassy, and even went so far as to say that a
place should always be ready for me at his
table. As it happened, I had just induced The
Daily Chronicle to place its columns at my
disposal for a proposed solution of the Franco-
German difficulty. I had urged that for the sake
of averting war, England should, as the holder of
the balance of power, reinforce her army, and
declare, officially and unequivocally, that if Ger-
many attacked France, England would throw
in her sword on the side of France, balancing this
threat by a counter assurance that if Germany
were attacked by Russia or France or both, she
would defend Germany. I pointed out that this
would have the effect of producing a combination
of England, France and Germany to keep the
peace of Europe; that the weaker Northern States,
Belgium and Holland, Norway, Sweden and Den-
mark, would immediately join it; that the United
States would have every reason to do the same;
and that the final result would be a combination
of western democracy against war from the
Carpathians to the Rocky Mountains. The dead
silence which followed this proposal in the Press
was inevitable; for as I was not a party politician,
CROSS PURPOSES
25
nor a famous cricketer, jockey, or glovefighter,
neither the political columns nor the stunt columns
of the British Press were concerned with me: I
might as well have been Fielding, Goldsmith,
Blake, Dickens, Hardy, Wells or Bennett for all
the attention my political ideas received from the
newspapers. But the newspapers have very little
to do with diplomacy; and my suggestion was
offered to the diplomatists. Unfortunately, it
demanded certain positive qualities in which Sir
Edward Grey was deficient. He was
He was a busily
agreeable drifter, trusting to amiable conferences to
smooth over difficulties, and compliant with estab-
lished power to such a degree that not even the
Denshawai atrocity in Egypt nor the outrageous
proceedings of the Russians in Persia had moved
him to make himself disagreeable to the Anglo-
Egyptian officials or to the Russian court, even
though the cost of his compliance was the infamy
of his country. To invite him to do anything with
the sword of England except hide it nervously
behind his back and smile, and invite Europe to
tea parties grandiloquently described as conferences,
was to harness a mouse to a steam roller. The
only comment reported to me on my proposal was
that if I were in the Foreign Office, there would be
a European war in a fortnight. As I was not in
the Foreign Office, there was a European war in
eighteen months. The policy of drift proved, even
on its own shewing, no more pacific than the
policy of action.
As to Mr Asquith, I doubt whether Mr Asquith
ever really had any policy at all. His years of
26
PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
office were very prosperous and comfortable years.
for the governing class; and as he shared that
comfort and prosperity, and was blessed with an
easy disposition and a ready talent that could deal
plausibly with a difficulty when it arose, but could
neither anticipate it nor remember it for a single
day, he took things as he found them and would
have been content to leave them as he found them,
if only all the sleeping dogs had been allowed to
lie by less placid spirits. Lord Haldane's case was
different; but he was unfortunately neither Prime
Minister nor Foreign Secretary: he was busy
reorganizing the army and trying to keep the
Kaiser from playing with fire. And, being a Scot
with a trained and exercised intellect, he was not
trusted by his English colleagues, who preferred
not to know what they were doing lest they should
become unable to deny it or perhaps even to do
it without pains in their consciences.
And so my proposal inevitably came to nothing.
But when I had formulated it, I took advantage
of Prince Lichnowsky's hospitality, and mooted
it to him. He put it aside without a moment's
consideration as uncalled-for, on the ground that
Sir Edward Grey was one of the greatest living
statesmen, and the truest friend of Germany. I
could not, especially in the presence of Von Kühl-
mann, lift up my hands and exclaim, with Huss,
"Sancta simplicitas!" Besides, it was Lich-
nowsky, not I, who was going to the stake. If
the war came, my side was the English side;
and, as an Irishman, I was facing it with my eyes
open and with no British patriotic illusions. It
CROSS PURPOSES
27
was not my business to warn the Prince that he
was walking straight into an ambush; for if a
war had to come, I wanted his master to be beaten.
I changed the conversation to neutral topics of
art and literature, and concluded that I could not,
without something like personal treachery, follow
up the acquaintance the ambassador had so
frankly offered me. Nothing further passed between
us on the subject of European politics; and I spoke
with the Prince only once again, at a private
concert, not about foreign policy. I liked him ; and
nobody could help liking his wife. They were not only
charming people, but clever, unaffected, generous
and cultured in the best sense. In fact it was
Lichnowsky's generosity and intelligence that
made him a dupe. If he had been a little more of
a fool and a little less of a gentleman, he might
not have made the mistake of giving our di-
plomatists credit for his own best qualities. His so-
called revelations shew that he took exceptional
powers of observation and a very considerable
literary talent into London society. I hope he
has forgiven me for not being more frank with
him; but besides the purely militarist considera-
tions already stated, I can plead that at this time
my knowledge of the situation was built, not upon
the facts and documents and disclosures which
have since become public, but upon the British
tradition, on current circumstantial evidence, and
on my estimate of the character of the parties. I
could not then have convinced any foreigner,
much less a professional diplomatist like Prince
Lichnowsky, that a person known to him only as
28
PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
وو
a playwright and a man of letters could instruct
him in foreign affairs. I even doubt whether he
would have been allowed to invite me to the
embassy had the political side of my career been
known to him as the literary side was. Socialists
are not privileged in Imperial circles in Germany.
After this failure, there was nothing to be done
but drift along in the hope that as there was
neither a Napoleon nor a Bismarck in the field,
and Sir Edward Grey was only one of a dozen diplo-
matic drifters, Europe might drift into a new
situation without a collision. The hope was
disappointed. England did not "muddle through
this time. The Serbs assassinated the Austrian heir
apparent; Austria sent a furious ultimatum to
Serbia; Russia rallied to the defence of the Slav
and mobilized against Austria; and Germany,
being Austria's ally, and well aware that France
was the ally of Russia, dashed at France in the
hope of smashing her before Russia could bring
her cumbrous forces to bear effectively. Then the
British battery was unmasked at last, and the
ambush let loose on the doomed empires that had
presumed to challenge England's naval supremacy
and to move towards Antwerp. When I called it
the last spring of the British Lion," the Lion
was so pleased that he could not help cheering
my remark even whilst he ground his teeth with
fury at me for tearing off the sheepskin in which
he was still masquerading.
'
Up to the last Sir Edward Grey clung to the
sheepskin. He could perhaps have prevented the
war even at the eleventh hour by declaring, as
CROSS PURPOSES
}
29
Sazonoff and Cambon implored him to declare,
that Britain would fight if Germany attacked
France, and by telling the Kaiser that if Russia
attacked him he might trust to western Democracy
to allow him a fair fight with his barbarous eastern
enemy. Had France repudiated that honorable
understanding-and it is hard to believe that
public opinion in France would have tolerated
such a repudiation-the Kaiser would have had
only France and Russia to fight instead of virtually
the whole world. But Sir Edward would not.
He fussed; he palpitated; he begged for another
little conference; he would answer for nothing,
not even for a defence of Belgium. He did nothing
and said everything except the one thing that
might have kept Germany's hands off France.
Had he said it, he would have baulked the spring
of the British Lion. And the British Lion did
not intend to be baulked. From that moment
until the Lion had his prey helpless in his claws
there was only one really valid word in England
about peace; and that was that those who preached
it were the enemies of their country. Peace pro-
posals were called peace offensives.
I am very far from condemning this attitude.
I could make a fairly strong case for it as having
the root of the actual situation in it. Although
M. Clemenceau has since committed himself to the
opinion of Cambon and Sazonoff, not to mention
my own, that the war would have been staved off
if Germany had been warned of the certainty of
British intervention, I can conceive myself doing
rationally what Lord Grey did instinctively. If the
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war had to come, it was important that it should
come before the German fleet was as powerful
as the British. And England can hardly be
reproached for fighting and conquering, instead
of contriving that Germany should exhaust herself
in a struggle with Russia from which she might
well have emerged more formidable than ever.
But England cannot claim both the laurel and
the olive. If she did everything to postpone the
war except the thing that might conceivably have
postponed it, History will certainly conclude
that she did not postpone it simply because at
bottom she did not want to postpone it. It is
significant that none of us, British Imperialist or
other, put any heart into preventing it.
CHAPTER III
THE BRITISH LION, THE BLOCKADE, AND THE
FREEDOM OF THE SEAS
THE reader will now fully understand the burst.
of feeling against the Government which the out-
break of the war provoked in the British parlia-
ment among those who had not been in the secret.
The old Liberal Non-Interventionists were furious
at having been duped for eight years. The Quakers
were horrified. The Labor leaders raged because
a compact which involved the lives of millions of
men had been made behind the backs of those men ;
and the Russian alliance was loathsome to them.
Lord Morley and Mr Trevelyan, with Mr John
Burns, wiped the dust of the Government from
their feet. Socialist Internationalists like Messrs
Ramsay Macdonald, Snowden, and Anderson made
up their minds that though the German Junkers
must be brought down, they should be brought down
on the heads of the British Junkers who had
planned the war. The Press branded all the
malcontents as pro-Germans, and described them
as hunted fugitives; but the enormous applause
with which they were received in large popular
meetings and congresses shewed that the working
31
(
32
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classes were not hoodwinked as completely as the
middle classes. To avoid a defeat of the Govern-
ment in the face of the enemy, Mr Asquith had to
make another secret compact: this time with the
Opposition leaders, who agreed to support him
against his deserters on condition that he sur-
rendered all points in controversy between them
for the duration of the war. But this did not save
the party for long. The Opposition soon wearied
of allowing the Liberals all the credit of conducting
the war, and the loaves and fishes of office as well.
They betrayed the compact to the country and
forced a coalition on Mr Asquith. This revelation
finished his career. A secret understanding
with France to defeat German ambition was one
thing: a secret plot with Lord Lansdowne and
Mr Bonar Law to throw over the Liberal program
was quite another. The strain was too great.
Mr Lloyd George, who had come into the war
party at the twelfth hour on the popular but
really quite irrelevant issue of the violation of
Belgian neutrality, not only became Prime Minister
and War Lord in place of Mr Asquith, but presently
threw him out of the coalition as a negligible
quantity, Sir Edward Grey being "kicked upstairs"
out of the Foreign Office into the House of Lords.
One would have supposed that the two
discarded statesmen would have waited only
for the signing of the armistice to turn the tables
on their supplanter by claiming and proving that
they and Lord Haldane had, in spite of Mr Lloyd
George, ci-devant "pro-Boer", planned and executed
the magnificently successful stroke which had
THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS 33
rescued the British Empire from the contempt
into which its very poor military record in the
South African war had plunged it, and restored it
to its ancient glory as the most formidable Power
in the world and the arbiter of Europe. But
having drifted into their policy on the French
initiative and carried it out with true English
empiricism, they hardly knew what they had done.
Lord Haldane, who did know, did not let himself
entirely loose until after the election. Yet it was on
a hint from a speech of his that Mr Asquith, three
days before the poll, suddenly made a belated
bid for public support as the man to whom England
owed her perfect preparation for the war. But
as he had allowed the public to be stuffed for four
years with the legend that England had been
utterly unprepared for the war, and had never
harbored a thought of unkindness to Germany,
and as, further, the Northcliffe Press immediately
suppressed his bid as completely as they sup-
pressed the speeches of Mr Ramsay Macdonald,
nobody noticed Mr Asquith's volte-face; and he
was heavily defeated in his contest for the seat
he had held easily for thirty years. The day
after the election, Lord Haldane, in a long letter
to The Times which that paper would have refused
to publish six months earlier even if Lord Haldane
could have been induced to write it at the risk
of shaking the British moral, tore away the last
shreds of the Great Camouflage; and the Lion
of Waterloo at last stood revealed, with the sheep-
skin and the ass's head flung off, and the once
terrible Kaiser helpless in his claws. Nine hundred
D
34
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thousand Britons lay dead around the pedestal;
but Britannia did not grudge the price: she will
never ask Lord Haldane " What hast thou done
with my legions?"
Unfortunately, the empiricism of Britannia,
which enabled her to plan and win bit by bit without
connecting one bit with another and thereby
arriving at a clear consciousness of her policy,
now prevents her from seeing that, having thrown
over the pretence that she was innocently unpre-
pared for the war, she cannot now come to the
Peace Conference in an attitude of virtuous in-
dignation founded on that pretence. She has
not as yet put two and two together: her Press
and her politicians still denounce Germany for
the crime of preparing for war in the very same
issues in which they quote Lord Haldane's descrip-
t'on of how he outprepared the Germans. The
Blackguards of England, a noisy but not, I hope,
numerous undergrowth which has been tolerated
and encouraged during the war to a disgraceful
and dangerous extent, have openly demanded a
judicial murder of the Kaiser, a wanton air-raid
on Berlin, and the subsequent enslavement of
the German people by impossible ransoms for
a century to come. It flatters these people to
hear that we were stronger and cleverer than the
Germans, and that the Press photograph of the
British Lion as half sheep, half donkey, was a
fake. They are much less willing to learn that the
German devil is as absurd a fable as the British
angel. They want to revel in the consciousness of
being victorious, successful and powerful, shocking
THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS 35
humbugs if you will, but mighty, crafty, born rulers
of men; yet they do not want to give the Germans
fair play they want moral excuses for skinning
them alive; and on this point they must be
resolutely tackled and held back and made to
behave themselves. If no British statesman has
courage and character enough to bully them, Mr
Wilson and General Smuts must. If not, they may
provoke a world situation in which anti-British com-
binations will be formed which I dare not describe
in detail; for they might spring into being at the
flourish of a pen if that pen were too explicit.
Suffice it to say that the destruction of Germany's
prestige has left the British Empire in the position
formerly held by her defeated foe: namely, that of
the most dangerous and widely dreaded Imperial
Power left in the world. And as America has
helped to place her there, it is now necessary to go
carefully into America's position in the matter.
It is clear that Mr Wilson cannot in the Peace
Conference take his stand on British grounds. The
ultimatum to Serbia, the violation of the neutrality
of Belgium, the attack on France, are tenable
points in our case because we went to war the
moment Belgium was invaded; but the United
States did not move in the matter, and are there-
fore out of court as far as these particular counts
in the indictment against Germany are concerned.
They not only remained out of the war but
made a great deal of money out of it until the
submarine campaign produced a situation in which
neutrality was no longer possible. In this the
United States behaved very prudently. They were
D 2
36
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able to give invaluable assistance to the Allies as
neutrals. When they drew the sword at last they
were able to come in as the determining factor in
the conflict and thus make themselves the holders
of the balance of power.
In the meantime they
had rid themselves of all their financial indebted-
ness to Europe, and compelled England to admit
them to an increased share of the carrying
trade. Above all, they had strengthened the
moral position of Republicanism by producing
at the right moment a man who, like Washington
or Lincoln, easily dominated a colossal situation
as spokesman of the highest ideals, whilst British
and French demagogues could not rise above the
rhetoric of the prize ring and the slop of the
cinema "sub-title."
Yet even as England, with a very strong case
and a still stronger hand, has discounted both the
strength of her case and the prestige of her strength
by substituting a ridiculous melodrama for the
truth, the United States seem equally incapable
of understanding their own position and equally
determined to pose as the knights errant of the
distressed damsels who have been rescued from
the dungeons of Kaiser Bill, the Demon Enchanter
of Hunland. They will have it that their swords
leaped from their scabbards to avenge Edith Cavell,
and that the tearing up of the Scrap of Paper
(now ignored by the Belgians themselves in the
hour of their triumph) was to them as the
rending of the veil of the temple. All this is very
silly, and would make Mr Wilson very ridiculous
in Paris if he attempted to impose it on his
THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS 37
Allies there, much less on the Germans. The truth
is, the foreign policy of the United States, like that
of Britain, of France, of Germany, of Austria,
of Italy, of Turkey, of Bulgaria, of Rumania
and all the other belligerents, has been not a
romantic policy but a policy of self-preservation ;
and such it will have to remain until the establish-
ment of a supernational legislature, tribunal, and
police makes it possible for nations to reject, as
the principle of their foreign policy, the one prin-
ciple that knows no law.
Meanwhile all diplomatists, however they may
sympathize with Mr Wilson, must prepare for the
next war as a means of avoiding it, knowing well
all the time that such preparation will in the end
get on the nerves of all the Powers, and precipitate
the catastrophe. The United States, for instance,
will have to place herself in a position to face
the combined fleets of Britain and Japan; Japan
will have to place herself in a position to face the
combined fleets of the United States and Britain;
and as fleets in the future will be not only marine,
but submarine and celestial, the inland Powers
will enter into the competition and try to make
themselves proof against such a blockade as has
just forced Germany to capitulate. It is idle to
hope that any moral protest will suspend this
manœuvring for the inside grip in the next war.
If every one of the Powers had in office a Labor
party boiling over with pacific enthusiasm, and
had inscribed on its national arms "Proletarians
of all lands, unite," none the less their diplomatists
and soldiers, in the absence of a League of Nations,
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would have to prepare for the worst as carefully
as if Junkerism were still in command of all the
earth. If I myself were Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs or for War in a Labor or any other
Government in England, I should resume the work
of Lord Haldane and Sir Douglas Haig without a
moment's intermission; and if people talked to
me about the League of Nations I should say that
an army and navy in hand is worth ten Leagues
of Nations in the bush, and that as long as the
League did not exist I should act with reference
to the armaments and Governments which do exist.
It is necessary to enforce this hard fact, because
the earth is full of amiable people who believe that
moral steam, unlike physical steam, is independent
of engines and organization. It is of course nothing
of the sort. The reason that lust for money and
power prevail as they do against the nobler senti-
ments is simply that the people who want more
money and more power have organized arma-
ments to coerce those who desire to establish the
kingdom of heaven on earth, and have also organized
the Press and the public schools to persuade the
masses that the pursuit of more money and more
power is virtuous, heroic, and patriotic. This they
do with the enormous advantage of being single-
minded in the knowledge of what they want and
the determination to get it at all costs (though,
having got it, they become at once the most
charming people imaginable). They are single-
minded not only as to ends, but to means, the
means being always the presentation to their
opponents of the clear and universally intelligible
THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS
39
alternative "Submit or be killed." In the mean-
time the idealists are singleminded neither as to ends
nor means, being a motley crew "with a hundred
religions and only one sauce," carrying individual-
ism to such a degree that each of them confronts
the enemy in a minority, though if they combined
they would be in a majority of at least four to one.
The singleminded "divide and govern," because
they have a common religion and a common philo-
sophy of life. The religion may be the worship of
Manımon, and the philosophy that of a pirate;
but they are all effectively agreed on it, and will
cut throats for its sake; and so they will triumph
until their opponents learn the lesson and find
unity in a common religion and philosophy of their
own.
As the League of Nations will be an attempt to
focus the coercive forces, moral and physical, of
idealism, it must not be conceived as a Tol-
stoyan celebration, but as a very vigorous organ-
ization of resistance to evil, like a municipal police
force. Nor will it make an end of the tyranny
of self-preservation; for what else but that eternal
tyranny is driving all the more thoughtful states-
men, Jingo as well as Internationalist, to insist
on or at least accept the League? The next war,
if permitted to occur, will be no "sport of kings,"
no game of chance played with live soldiers and
won by changing them into dead ones, but a
scientific attempt to destroy cities and kill
civilians. Not the soldiers alone, but all of us, will
have to live miserably in holes in the ground,
afraid to look at the sky lest our white faces should
40
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betray us to a hostile aeroplane; for our houses
will be heaps of charred bricks. The existing
London record is a 600 lb. bomb which destroyed
six houses and rendered twenty uninhabitable;
and this bomb is already a middle-sized one. What
the record may be for those unfortunate Rhine
towns on which, during the last year of the war,
the War Office boasted of having dropped 100
bombs for every one dropped in England by the
Germans, is not yet known. What is known is
that the British aeroplanes did what no German
plane attempted in England. They swooped down.
into the streets of Treves and used their machine
guns there.
Under such conditions towns are
not inhabitable; industry is not practicable; and
life is not bearable. The notion that war is a bene-
ficent gymnastic, moral and spiritual, is reduced to
absurdity: one might as well make the same plea
for hurricanes and earthquakes, or pretend that
because a man is the better for swimming, he will,
a fortiori, be the better for drowning.
And yet the sensational terrors of the high
explosive, hurled from the clouds or shot up from
the depths of the sea, are trifling compared to the
horrors of the blockade. As the fumes of battle
clear away, it becomes more and more apparent
that the war was won by the British navy, at a
stupendous cost to the whole world, both belli-
gerent and neutral. Not bombardment, but starva-
tion and civil ruin, have brought England's
rivals to their knees; and this starvation and ruin
have fallen heavily not only on neutral countries,
but on England's own Allies, who have escaped the
THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS 41
fate of Russia and Germany only by being rationed
from England. Russia was the first victim, even
during her alliance with England. Then came the
revolution, which stopped supplies from Britain.
The stoppage forced Russia to make peace with
the Central Empires to avert starvation; but the
opening of her western frontier to German trade
could not save her, because Germany had already
been driven by the blockade to plunder Belgium
to the last saucepan lid, to build her submarines
out of the vitals of her own fleet, and to leave her-
self without tanks to fight the Allied machine guns.
From the Ural Mountains to the shores of the North
Sea there was starvation everywhere; and from
Warsaw eastward there were whole countries of
which it was affirmed without improbability that
there was no child under seven years of age left
alive. Even in America, no less than in Holland
and the Scandinavian lands, large classes with
small but formerly sufficient fixed incomes had those
incomes deprived of half their purchasing power.
After such a terrible demonstration of the might
of the British navy, its possession and control
by a single State must appear so dangerous to all
the others that no one who grasped the situation
shared the surprise of the innocents when the
rejoicings over the armistice were suddenly jarred
upon by the claim that the United States must
possess an equally formidable fleet, and by the
announcements of Admiral Badger and Mr Daniels
as to the American ship-building program.
Thus we are back again at the point reached
when the intention of Germany to build a rival
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fleet was realized in England, and the preparations
for the great war began. Just as the lieutenants
of the German and British navies, during the race
of naval armaments which culminated at the Battle
of Jutland, looked forward to "der Tag" when
the preparations would be brought to the test of
warfare, the lieutenants of the United States
navy are already looking forward, quite properly
and inevitably, to "The Day" when the British
and American fleets shall fight for that power to
blockade without which no nation can ever again
feel safe whilst war remains tolerated as an
institution. The duty of securing that power is
henceforth the sacred duty of all patriots as long as
the present anarchy between nations leaves them
with no security against ruin and subjugation
except the power of self-preservation.
66
The more frankly this situation is faced the more
intolerable does it become, and the more over-
whelming seems the
the importance of President
Wilson's demand for the freedom of the seas.'
The small change of that freedom no longer pre-
sents any serious difficulty as between England
and America, because America very early in the
war forced England to pay for contraband taken
from American ships; and it is not pretended that
England, as a great carrying nation with a tradition
of Free Trade, abuses her power by attempting to
make private roads of indispensable maritime
highways in peace. The real difficulty is that she
can, and does, ruin half the world to save herself
in time of war, and is, indeed, unable to obtain a
decision by any other means; for it is evident that
THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS 43
had all the ports been open and all the seas free
throughout the war the armies might have fought
for ever without having to surrender to famine.
Indeed this is a vital part of England's case for
the command of the sea; for if she could have
won the war without it she would have no plea
for insisting on retaining it except sheer arrogance.
But its operation has proved also that the com-
mand of the sea means a power of life and death
over Europe; and this constitutes a hegemony
against which the world will rebel as surely as it
rebelled against the mere threat of a Pan-German
hegemony. England is still bound to fight to the
last man and the last penny she can spare to main-
tain her command of the seas. But the United
States and all the other non-British Powers are
thereby driven to an equally stubborn resolution
that no single State in the world shall command
the seas.
There is no possible solution except the League
of Nations solution as long as the problem exists.
It cannot be solved by the American fleet sinking
the British fleet: that would only transfer the
command of the seas to America; and an American
command of the seas would be just as objectionable
as a British one. The problem might be removed
by the two fleets going to the bottom simultaneously,
each in trying to sink the other. But that is not
an event which can become the object of British
or American foreign policy. The effective solution
must be that the British fleet shall be sinkable
by the combined fleets of the other Powers, but not
by any one of them, or any combination of them
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that could easily be formed with a view to
hegemony. And this state of things can be broug
...about only by a League of Nations.
The main question, then, to be considered is the
practicability of an efficient League of Nations.
That it is practicable within certain limits, and
that those limits will not disable it as a bar
to any renewal of Armageddon in Europe and
North America, I hope to demonstrate convin-
cingly. But I must first deal with the Peace Con-
ference as the nucleus of the League, and with the
various interests which confront Mr Wilson as
the advocate of his famous fourteen points.
CHAPTER IV
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM SUCCEEDS TO THE HOLY
ROMAN EMPIRE.
MR. WILSON AS CHARLE-
MAGNE. THE IRISH QUESTION.
THE divisions in the internal affairs of Europe,
reflected as they are in the United States, will tax
Mr Wilson's diplomacy to the limit, and may
possibly drive him to the point at which he may have
to act as master of the situation rather than as
negotiator and conciliator. The coalitions which
the war has produced in all the allied countries
have had to make a common profession of abhor-
rence of militarism and autocracy, and of an ardent
desire to "make the world safe for democracy.
But all the coalitions contain elements well known
to be quite as militarist, quite as monarchical,
quite as hostile to democracy as the most bigoted
Hohenzollern or Hapsburg.
These elements, just because they are ultra-
militarist, become necessarily dominant in a state of
war, which imposes militarism and suspends popular
liberties even in the most democratic States. It
goes without saying that in the monarchical
countries they are strongly anti-republican, and
took their part in the war to get the better of the
45
46
PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
monarchies of Germany and Austria, not to abolish
them. The moment their operations had the
unintended effect of making Russia a republic,
they turned against Russia, and are now actually
making war on her with the object of restoring
order, which to them means nothing else than the
monarchical order. When they overshot their
mark in the same way in the Central Empires, they
began to use the blockade as a means of crushing
the German Republicans. They have, of course, a
hundred plausible excuses for each step they take
or propose in this direction; but not one of these
excuses would be made by them if the boot were
on the other leg, and the effect of the war had been
to upset republics and substitute monarchies for
them. When they deposed the King of Greece for
being a pro-German, they did not impose a Republic
on Greece with Mr Venizelos as President, which
would have been the simplest matter in the world.
Instead, they set Constantine's son on the throne.
When the Kaiser fell, the only question they raised
was whether his son or his grandson should suc-
ceed him. They call all Republicans except French
and American ones Bolsheviks; and they would
talk about President Wilson and President Poin-
caré exactly as their great grandfathers talked
about Washington if they dared.
There is no concealment of all this; and it is not
here alleged to the discredit of the Royalists. They
have a right to their opinions, for which there is a
great deal to be said, as the condition of the common
people in France and America no less than in Russia
and Poland shews. Democracy as it exists to-day
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM
47
has little more to say for itself than that its hopes
and possibilities are infinite, whereas the possi-
bilities of oligarchy and autocracy are limited to
such an extent by their fundamental economic and
psychic unsoundness that they can hardly be said
to hold out any hopes at all. But they are not
fraudulent except when they pretend to be demo-
cratic; and of this particular fraud the republics
are ten times more guilty than the monarchies.
Lincoln's famous formula of government of the
people by the people for the people was always
impossible as to its second count; for the people
can no more govern than they can write plays or
use the infinitesimal calculus. Even government
by consent of the governed is impossible as long
as people are so uneducated politically that they
will not consent to be governed at all, and must
therefore be governed, under one pretence or an-
other, by main force. But government of the
people for the people is possible, and is the goal of
democracy. Now no political system at present
existing on earth attains that goal, or is even visibly
tending towards it. It has proved safer to be a
frank traitor under the Hohenzollerns, like Lieb-
knecht, even in war time, than to be a Con-
servative Non-Interventionist in the United States
of America; and Mr Wilson goes into the Peace
Conference with the knowledge that if recrimina-
tions begin as to the condition of the people, the
reasonableness of the distribution of the national
income, the exploitation of child labor, the preva-
lence of Lynch law, the toleration of heterodox or
anti-governmental opinion (even under Mr Wilson's
48
PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
own rule), the general level of culture, the cruelty
of the criminal codes and the guarantees for justice
in their administration, the honesty of the police,
and the freedom of municipal and national politics
from corruption, American republicanism will come
out of the comparison with constitutional monarchy
so badly that it will be very difficult for him with
any countenance to take the position of a moral
dictator imposing superior American political insti-
tutions on the rest of the world. Feudal barons
are not so much worse than beef barons, or Hohen-
zollern and Hapsburg kings than railway and
kerosine kings, that he can offer a substitution of
one for the other as a contribution to the emancipa-
tion of the human race. The most convincing
democratic asset he has to shew is himself; and
he may feel some delicacy about harping on
that.
Moreover, what has just been said about the
formal win-the-war coalitions of Europe is equally
true about the virtual win-the-war coalition which
stands behind Mr Wilson. Senator Lodge is
hardly more of a democrat in foreign affairs than
Lord Curzon; and the latest American elections
have gone Mr Lodge's way. President Wilson
will need that rare and mystical force of character
that acts "on the evidence of things unseen" in
the face of a very depressing mass of contrary
evidence of things very glaringly visible. He has
made an enormous impression in Europe as a
great man in America he seems to be regarded
merely as the figure-head of his political party.
The prophet is not without honor save in his own
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM
49
country. In Europe the President has become the
banner bearer of the reserves of conscience and
honor which the popular spoutings of M Clemenceau
and Mr Lloyd George only offend; but some-
times a surprised face is seen here when this is
admitted; and it is always the face of an American,
and quite as likely an American Democrat as an
American Republican. Thus we have the curious
spectacle of an American statesman going into a
European conference with a tremendous European
moral backing, and a relatively feeble American
one. When he asked for an expression of American
support it was deliberately denied to him. He
could not ask for an expression of European
support; but it has been volunteered to him by
every available means. Europe has earned the
same right to say "our Wilson " as Germany earned
to say
unser Shakespear." All Europe hails him
as a godsend half America groans under him as
an affliction. It cannot be helped: no man can
be great and popular at the same time before his
death except at a distance; but there are times.
when the neighbors of illustrious men are in danger
of making themselves ridiculous by the familiarity
which expresses itself in the old formula " Woodrow
Wilson a great man! Why, I knew his father.”
Rightly or wrongly, Europe is deeply impressed
by Wilson, and is not impressed at all by the
thousands of American ward bosses who feel superior
to him without having succeeded in making Europe
aware of their existence; and that fact must be
accepted for the moment unless American democracy
wishes to be set down as a political failure which
E
50
PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
has accidentally produced a greater individual
success than it is capable of appreciating.
With all this in view we can see the Peace
Conference as it really must be. It must consist
largely of anti-democrats and anti-republicans
who, by choosing their phrases prudently, can
profess their real views with less risk than their
opponents can contradict them. It will consist
to some extent of democrats and republicans who
have lost the courage of their opinions by living in
a continual minority, and fighting vainly against
a public school system by which every genera-
tion, no matter what phase of enlightenment it
may have been born into through the efforts of
some gifted and lucky band of reformers, is
deliberately replunged into the ideas of the reign
of Henry VIII; so that the stone of Sisyphus
rolls back on the wretched reformers every thirty
years, and re-establishes the ideas of a feudalism
thoroughly corrupted by capitalism. That is to
say, all the members of the Conference will be
Opportunists, though some of them will be seeking
opportunities for reaction and some for progress.
And the Reactionists, though ostensibly the anti-
popular party, will be fortified by the certainty that
their views can always be made to appeal strongly to
popular prejudice, ignorance, and arrogance; whilst
the reformers, ostensibly the party of the people,
will have more cause to dread popular persecution
than to depend on popular support.
In such a miserable situation political ambition,
without scruple or principle, goes far. The greed
and rancor which abuse victory by grasping at
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM
51
plunder and vengeance with both hands open and
both eyes shut, go still further, because mere
ambition will comply with them as the cheapest road
to success. There is only one force that can beat
both; and that force is the entirely mystic force
of evolution applied through the sort of living
engine we call the man of principle. Principle is
the motive power in the engine: its working
qualities are integrity and energy, conviction and
courage, with reason and lucidity to shew them the
way. It is because Europe knows in its heart that
only such a living engine can dominate the faithless,
the conventional, the feeble, the greedy, the
intimidated, the parliamentarily demoralized figure-
heads of the Conference, that Europe is proclaiming
President Wilson as that man; not yet sure that
he will hold out to the end as he has begun, but
quite sure that there is no hope from the others.
If he fails, Europe will either settle down in
despair to drudge along until the next war is
ready to engulf it, or else throw official and demo-
cratic parliaments and conferences to the winds,
and try Syndicalism, Bolshevism, Spartacus dic-
tatorship, and even intentional chaos and anarchy
in order that they may work out their natural
remedy through what bloodshed and destruction
may be necessary sooner than trust any longer to
established institutions that can do nothing but
prepare for holocausts of which each
as it
approaches threatens to be the day of doom for
civilization.
Here, then, is no little diplomatic job which
any one of half a dozen Cabinet fixtures
E 2
52
PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
might do as well as any other, but a labor of
Hercules only to be achieved by a man who is
hors concours: a genuine Worthy, too democratic
to be a demagogue. For a mere demagogue, rallying
the Progressives and bullying the Reactionaries,
will not suffice. Any political platform pugilist
can rally and bully. There must be force of such
a quality that it need do neither the force in
the presence of which evil loses heart and goodwill
takes it.
One may say that, so far, the claim of the
American political system to be superior to the
European system rests mainly on the single fact that
in America it has been possible on three crucial
occasions in history for a man of this force to be
placed at the head of affairs in the United States,
whereas in Europe, though such men exist, they
are hopelessly outside politics: place and power
being divided between the hereditary aristocrat
(that is to say the aristocrat who is not necessarily
an aristocrat at all) and the ambitious demagogue
who has energy and histrionic instinct without ex-
ceptional intellect or exceptional character, and who
is so dependent on electoral applause that when he
gives way to a generous impulse and says some-
thing really splendid, he runs away from it at the
first hoot from the nearest cad. If the man who
came to the top in America by election finds
himself at the top in Europe by simple moral gravi-
tation, then American Republicanism has some-
thing to say for itself in spite of lynchings, Colorado
labor wars, and child slaves in Carolina mills. That
this phenomenon is genuinely Republican and not
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM
53
merely American is suggested by the fact that the
one man whom the British Empire can claim
as in the same class with President Wilson,
and who has proved it by being admitted to the
War Council without the smallest self-assertion as
having an obvious natural right to that eminence,
is General Smuts, a Republican by all his domi-
nant characteristics and political antecedents,
whose utmost modesty and good sense cannot
enable him to help the British Government without
a quaint air of helping a lame dog over a style.
Now Mr Wilson's mission, I take it, is America's
mission that is, to stand for Republicanism in
Europe. The position of Republicanism changed
greatly in Europe in the last years of the war,
and even in its last hours. When the Tsardom
fell, all the thrones rocked. When the Hohen-
zollerns and Hapsburgs fell, Europe changed from
a continent in which, outside little privileged
Switzerland, one important republic and a few
tolerated toy ones. were struggling to maintain
a not highly respected existence amid a host of
contemptuous kingdoms, menaced by legitimist
pretenders within and hostile courts without, to a
continent in which a handful of minor royalties,
mostly the poor relations of the deposed emperors,
hold on timidly to a few outlying minor thrones,
diligently saving money for the inevitable day
when they too must pack up and face the world as
common citizens. The British throne alone stands
steady, not without earnest professions that we
are only "a crowned republic" after all, and being
able to support that plea by pointing to the steady
54
PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
growth of all the worst features of French and
American Republicanism in our political life.
The change is so enormous, and the circumstances
of it so catastrophic, that Europe has not assimi-
lated it yet. The extremely easy operation of
putting the clock back recommends itself to a huge
proportion of the people and of the governing
classes as more feasible as well as more congenial
than the very arduous operation of keeping it up
to time. The Powers which are at present enter-
taining the Kaiser in Holland (for no expert in
London society is taken in by the nonsense in
the Press about his being there of his own accord
as an unwelcome intruder) are much more disposed
to put him back in Berlin than to take chances
with a Social-Democratic Republic. The Labor
agitation has not prevented M Pichon from
advocating war on the Russian Revolution as
openly as Pitt did on the French Revolution. In
short, just as the 1815 Allies, after making war on
Napoleon in the character of the knights of liberty
against tyranny, promptly re-established the Bour-
bons when they had disposed of "the Corsican
usurper" under pretence of ridding the world of
Jacobinism, the Allies of 1919 may easily slip into
a restoration of monarchy in Russia, Poland,
Austria, and Germany under pretence of ridding
the world of Bolshevism.
Mr Wilson can hardly become an accomplice in
such a backsliding. If he did, he would be entering
on a course which would point to nothing short of
the restoration of monarchy in the United States,
and its imposition on the rest of the American
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM
55
continent. That reversion would not pay American
Capitalism any better than it would please the
American people; for Capitalism flourishes more
luxuriantly in republics than in monarchies, and
opens the political career much more widely to
the commercial talent. There is a notion prevalent
among the middle classes in England, especially
the Liberal middle classes, that kings do not matter,
as parliaments have now deprived them of their
power. Those who see the governing classes from
the inside know better. Reform, or change of any
sort, is almost impossible when it touches the
throne that is why reform is always beginning
at the bottom, and never where it mostly should
begin, at the top. We can get a Factory Code in
the teeth of the Manchester School after a long
struggle; but a University and Public School
code, an Army code, a Landed Estates code, are
not even thought of: not because they are not
far more needed than the palliations of the lot
of the poor which are the staple of would-be-
progressive politics, but because the court and the
country house, the public schools and the army,
are practically above the law.
Note, however, that it has been found impossible
to impose this tyranny on the colonies. The attempt
ended in America in the breaking away of New
England, and the formation of a federal republic.
To avoid the same disruption elsewhere, the British
Empire had to grant to Canada, Australia and
South Africa constitutions which assimilate them
to the federated republics, and make it impossible
to impose on them the monarchical conditions which
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PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
still prevail in London, and were supreme until the
recent revolutions in Berlin, Vienna, and Petro-
grad.
Before the war one could say that the
whole of North America and Australia, and a
considerable part of Africa, had reached the federal
republican stage of political development, and were
visibly lost for ever to what all good Americans
call "this king business." In the course of the
war, the king business suddenly crashed in Russia,
Germany, and Austria: that is, in the bulk of
Europe, leaving a problem of political reconstruc-
tion that can be solved only in one of two ways:
a restoration, or a system of federated republics.
The French Republic, One and Indivisible, is
conceivable in Russia, but hardly possible, whereas
it is neither conceivable nor possible in Germany
and Austria. What is both conceivable and possible
is republican federation. We do not want the
Austrian Empire, to which provinces like Bosnia
owe so much of their material civilization, replaced
by half a dozen Mexicos any more than we want
the Hapsburgs back again. Yet even a ramshackle
empire may be an advance on an anarchy of warlike
tribes. Let us not forget the experience of the
United States. Federation is no more compatible
than Empire with Secession. Federal Unions
must keep together. No American can have the
face to urge Bavaria and Prussia to break asunder
instead of maintaining their organization in a
German federated republic; and what is good for
the German goose is good for the Austrian gander.
No doubt present frontiers are unscientific and
should be redrawn. But the only scientific frontiers
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM
57
are ethnographic frontiers; and until the League
of Nations abolishes war the only politically
possible frontiers are strategic frontiers, which
are seldom ethnographic. Meanwhile the rule
should be integration, not disruption.
And here it may be asked what is to happen to
the centralized tyranny of the British Isles. What
about Ireland ? One quarter of Mr Wilson's
constituents are either Irish or German; and,
reasonably or unreasonably, they want him to
settle both the German and Irish questions demo-
cratically. The Irish question is very simple.
Home Rule is nonsense, and always has been
nonsense. Neither Gladstone nor Parnell, Redmond
nor Mr Asquith, could draft a Home Rule Bill that
had any sort of constitutional logic in it; and this
not because they were overrated statesmen, but
because they tried to conduct a surgical operation
on two nations as if it concerned only one. Ireland
must choose between being in the British Empire
and being out of it. If she chooses to be out of it,
it must be as a nominally independent State, like
Greece or Belgium, whose recent experiences of
nominal independence and actual subjugation are
hardly encouraging; yet to attain even this position
the Irish must wait for a miracle which will reduce
the British Empire to impotence. In view of what
has just happened the wait would be a long one.
What is more, Separatist Ireland cannot count
upon the sympathy of the United States, which
in the Civil War of 1861 committed themselves
to the principle of
of Unionism at all costs.
If, however, Ireland decides to remain in the
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PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
British Empire voluntarily she may fairly claim
to be in it on the same terms as England. She
cannot reasonably demand more or honorably
accept less. Now it is impossible to effect this
without making a new constitution for England
as well as for Ireland. Ireland must be represented
in a central parliament; but her representation
in an English parliament is an outrage on England:
that is why there must be distinct central and
national parliaments. England suffers more from
the absence of a national English parliament than
Ireland, which, having no parliament of its own,
has played the cuckoo in the House of Commons
by thrusting the domestic affairs of Ireland upon
it almost to the exclusion of English domestic
affairs. Federation of the British Isles is the
obvious solution. It is hard to see on what other
lines Mr Wilson, as a Republican Federalist, can
press for a settlement of the Irish question. His
only ground for interfering is that the United States
must be compromised and internally distracted by
their alliance with Great Britain as long as the
government of Ireland openly sets at nought every
principle on which the alliance is supposed to be
based. He certainly cannot suggest for Ireland a
Secession which his own Federation denied to
Virginia, Alabama, and the rest at the price of a
most bloody civil war.
No one seems yet to have noticed how imperative
this question of the federation of the British Isles
has become under the strain of the war and the
danger of its recurrence. In imperial affairs there
is no responsible government in Great Britain at
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM
59
all, because there is no imperial parliament.
Parliament was not consulted as to whether we
should go to war or not it was simply informed
by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs that
our forces had been placed at the disposition of
the Franco-Russian Alliance the day before, and
that we were members of the Alliance and already
at war. Later on, when a treaty was made between
the Allies that none of them should make peace
until all the others were satisfied, a treaty obviously
either impracticable or superfluous (it would have
been broken by the Tsar if he had not been swept
away, leaving it to be broken at Brest-Litovsk),
the House of Commons was not asked for its views
about it: the accomplished fact was announced
without by-your-leave. The secret treaties which
followed were not even announced. In short, for
purposes of foreign policy the British Empire is
governed by the Foreign Office and not by Parlia-
ment. Parliament is supposed to be able to refuse
to vote supplies, and thereby have the last word in
the matter. In fact it has no such power; for a re-
fusal to fight during a war actually in progress means
national suicide. The war might conceivably have
been prevented by an imperial parliament in 1906,
when it was strategically begun by the Foreign
Office, though even that is doubtful; for a reference
to so well known a book as Mr H. G. Wells's War
of the Worlds, published in 1898, will shew that
even then an ultimatum to Germany" was a
burning topic. But the actual nondescript parlia-
ment at Westminster was quite incapable of inter-
fering with the Foreign Office. It had neither the
''
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PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
time, the capacity, nor the disposition to deal
with foreign affairs. When the war came it was
newspaper pressure that forced it to shove the
war through by sacrificing its sluggish thoughtless
routine to the supreme need for winning. Its front
bench delegates to the Peace Conference have been
thus roused to an alarmed consciousness of world
politics; but no pressure of blood and iron can
enable men to improvise world policy, which is a
matter, not of rough and ready resourcefulness and
hustling energy, but of experience, training, and a
certain order of mind quite different from that which
finds its natural employment in domestic politics.
Therefore, whatever Mr Wilson, whose mind is of
this comprehensive order, may be able to do, our
own parliamentarians will still be at the mercy of the
old diplomatists, who are at least accustomed to
"think in continents" and not in parliamentary
constituencies.
The remedy is to have domestic parliaments in
the three nations (four, if the Welsh insist) for
domestic affairs, and a federal parliament for their
world politics. We should not then have ministers
hastening to the Conference with a vague idea that
Vladivostock is a suburb of Moscow; that Savoy
overlooks the Thames Embankment; that it is
unpatriotic to doubt that a Crown Prince who is
at war with England varies that activity by picking
pockets; and that war should be conducted in the
spirit in which suburban neighbors, when they
quarrel about a dead cat, throw its body back-
wards and forwards over the garden wall as long
as it lasts under such usage. Division of labor and
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM
61
specialization of interest according to capacity are
just as necessary in representative government as
in executive government, unless indeed it is assumed
that the ignoramus is the only really representative
man. But the result of acting on that assumption
is that the representative is hopelessly at the mercy
of the official in all matters which lie outside the
commonest experience. Foreign policy is clearly such
a matter; and unless the lives of millions of men
are again to be staked without their knowledge
and consent by practically irresponsible diplo-
matists, we must have one set of representatives to
deal with the Aldgate Pump and another to deal
with the Danube. Our present parliament palpitates
between the Aldgate Pump and Ireland, and is
composed mostly of men who, though able to tackle
problems of local and national government with
at least some possibility of eventually learning that
business, not only know rather less about foreign
affairs and history than about quaternions, but are
congenitally disqualified from ever seeing human
concerns on the Mercator projection as well as on
the information of a village policeman as to the
whereabouts of the railway station. Give England
Home Rule by providing these gentlemen with an
English parliament for English affairs, at the same
time providing similar appropriate spheres for
conspicuous municipal ability in Scotland and
Ireland, and a central federal parliament will
emerge as the organ of high politics, and take over
the European command from the Foreign Office
and the War Office. Indeed without such an
organ, and the parliamentary responsibility it
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PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
would establish, we shall be forced to send
irresponsible diplomatists to the League of Nations,
and thereby weaken the democratic character and
authority of that body by making it possible for
the federated republics to complain that the
British delegates are autocrats in disguise.
It is therefore even luckier for England than for
Ireland that Mr Wilson must be, for the purpose of
the Peace Conference, a republican federalist as
against the reactionists to monarchy and centraliza-
tion. If he could secure federal government for
Germany, Austria, Russia, Slavia, and the British
Islands, it would be established as the rule for
Europe instead of, as it was before the war, the
exception; and the United States would imme-
diately succeed to the political seniority of the
world. The American President would be the
doyen among the heads of States, the Charlemagne,
the Holy Roman Emperor, the Apostolic Majesty,
in place of the Hapsburgs abolished. Let no one
think that this change has no value. It seems only
yesterday that the late Lord Salisbury, who gave
Heligoland to the Kaiser, refused to send a British
official representative to a Paris Exhibition on
the ground that a respectable kingdom could have
no avoidable relations with that transitory eruption
of riff-raff called a republic. Even so sound and
recent a republican as Mark Twain thought that
the United States ambassadors in Europe would
look better in court liveries. To-day a United
States President has had his health proposed in
Buckingham Palace by the King of England as
between king and archking.
FEDERAL REPUBLICANISM
63
A century ago Wellington stood where Mr Wilson
now stands, with courtiers and diplomatists twitter-
ing nervously about him, the great man of a great
hour. But Wellington, Irish to the backbone,
stood for the old order, despising the kings, but
hating the mobs. He won Waterloo, but could not
make English Byron feel otherwise than "damned
sorry." Mr Wilson, even more conspicuously the
great man of a greater hour, and so far quite equal
to the occasion, is Grand Master at the completion
of that edifice of federal republicanism of which
his countrymen laid the first stone in 1776.
CHAPTER V
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS : ROMANCE AND REALITY
ANYONE who has fully grasped the situation of
the European Powers, and mastered the history
of the war, a liberty which none of the belligerents
could permit even to themselves in private before
the armistice, but which is now not only open to
us all, but highly desirable, will be staggered by
a second reading of Mr Wilson's speech of the
8th January 1918 (the fourteen points) and his
elucidation of it on the 27th September. When
these speeches were delivered, they passed for an
arraignment of the Central Empires, and a demand
upon them for securities for their good behavior.
To-day they have scarcely any meaning except as
against Mr Wilson's own allies. One can almost
hear Mr Balfour, Lord Grey, and Lord Robert
Cecil, M. Pichon, M. Poincaré, and Baron Sonnino,
saying "I trust you don't mean us," and Mr Wilson
replying, with his jaw set in the halo of his famous
smile, "You are too modest, gentlemen. I do
mean you, and, the Central Empires being now
disposed of, nobody else."
It may prove that at this point the fat is in the
fire. That French diplomatists and English country
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
65
gentlemen of £30,000 a year are to allow themselves
to be schoolmastered by an American professor is
a phenomenon which to them will appear nothing
short of apocalyptic; and some of them have
given anguished expression to this feeling in
private. But the President's extraordinary personal
success in London has put an end to such snobbish
recalcitrance in England. To-day the part of
Charlemagne is to him who can play it: the tiara
to him who can pontificate. After the banquet
at Buckingham Palace and the reception at the
Guildhall, no doubt remained as to who was king,
by divine right of character and personality, in
western Europe. But even whilst Mr Wilson was
speaking at the Guildhall, the votes cast at the
General Election a fortnight before were being
counted; and next day the count revealed an
overwhelming majority in Parliament for the party
against which Mr Wilson will have to fight tooth
and nail in the Peace Conference if he is to carry
his fourteen points. "I find in my welcome,"
said the President at the Guildhall, "the thought
that they [the Allied nations] have fought to do
away with the old order and establish a new one,
and that the key of the old order was that unstable
thing which we used to call the balance of power, a
thing which was determined by the sword which
was thrown in on the one side or the other, a
balance which was maintained by jealous watchful-
ness and an antagonism of interests which, though
it was generally latent, was always deepseated."
Unfortunately, the old order was just then receiving
a five years lease of parliamentary supremacy from
F
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PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
that proportion (about half) of the registered
electors of the United Kingdom which took the
trouble to vote. As far as it can be said to
have voted for anything definite, it voted for
hanging the Kaiser; and the degree of its
political sagacity may be inferred from the fact
that in order to secure that satisfaction it put
into power the party which will certainly do its
best to restore monarchy in Germany, and which
is in sympathy with Mr Wilson's opponents in the
United States to such an extent that the first
practical instalment of the League of Nations
threatens to be a combination of the British
Government and the American Opposition against
the American Government and the British Opposi-
tion. All of which confirms the view that Mr Wilson
will not be helped by party politics.
He must
make his way as the Man of Destiny, depending
for his support on the hopes and fears of man-
kind, and on the urge of evolution which inspires
them, waving the mere votes aside as an old hand
who knows what votes are worth.
66
The crux of the fourteen points is the League of
Nations; and what we have to consider now is
what this League must come to in practice. At the
Guildhall Mr Wilson described it as
not one group
of nations set against another, but a single, over-
whelming, powerful group of nations which shall
be the trustee of the peace of the world." At
which there was immense cheering.
It will be observed that in this definition the
group is only a group. "The parliament of man,
the federation of the world" is still out of the
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
67
question; and Anacharsis Klootz, Orator of the
Human Race, is still a fool and a farceur. This is
quite as it must be. For I am sorry to say that
Anacharsis Klootz, being guillotined, yet speaketh,
and is indeed all over the place, especially in the
United States, which issues from the press, every
week or so, the latest crankbuilt scheme for
assembling all the nations of the earth, black and
white, brown and yellow, pagan and Christian,
savage and civilized, as big as the United States.
or as little as the Republic of San Salvador, not
to mention Monaco or Andorra, at The Hague, to
fall on one another's necks and do something which
is vaguely described as arbitrating, with a view to
the immediate establishment of the millennium.
Now if this sort of folly were confined to the
American crank, it would not matter. I know the
American crank well: he never stops writing to
me under the impression that I am the world's
Supercrank. But the British official League of
Nations diplomatist is Lord Robert Cecil; and he
has solemnly declared that unless all the nations of
the earth are included, there can be no League
of Nations. Whereas the obvious truth is that the
practicability and success of the League of Nations
depend on limitation to a carefully selected group
of politically and psychologically homogeneous
constituents. As I write these lines the report comes
that M. Leon Bourgeois is vehemently of this
opinion from the French point of view.
autocracy is eligible for such a combination,
because autocrats die, go mad, take to drink, can
be bribed, and cannot possibly govern their
No
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countries except by delegating their power to
hundreds of petty autocrats, in no real organic
relation to one another, and all subject to the
vicissitudes that threaten the chief autocrat.
When an American President, who theoretically
has no power to pledge his jealously democratic
country at all, gives an undertaking that the United
States will observe such and such covenants for
the next twenty years, no one hesitates to stake all
his capital on the certainty that the undertaking
will be carried out. When some oriental Tsar,
who has absolute power to pledge his country,
gives a similar undertaking, it is not valid for
five months or five minutes; consequently no one
in his senses will stake ten pounds on its being
carried out. Now the solidity of the League of
Nations depends on the constituent nations being
in a position to give pledges that command practi-
cally absolute confidence: in technical terms,
having a responsible Government. An autocracy
cannot deliver the goods; and that settles the
question of its eligibility for a League of Nations,
and settles it emphatically in the negative. Even
an alliance, as the breakdown of the Russian
alliance has just proved, is not safe with an
autocracy.
But there must be much more than mere pledges
between the constituents of the League of Nations.
They must form a supernational legislature, and
set up a supernational tribunal, exactly as the
United States had to set up a superstate legislature
and a superstate tribunal. To put it in more
intimate terms, they must have, for affairs wider
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
69
than their national affairs, a common legislature
and a common tribunal. Now people cannot have
a common legislature and a common court of
justice unless they have common ideas of right
and wrong, law and justice. They must have a
common language, however its dialects may vary
from English to French, and from German to
Swedish. They may have half a dozen different
words for justice, or for wife, or for God, or for
honor, or for humanity; but unless the different
words mean pretty nearly the same thing, no
common legislature or tribunal is possible. Attempts
at common action between people who believe in
fifty gods and make human sacrifices to them and
people who believe in one god or in no god will not
work. People to whom women are mere breeding
cattle to be bought by the dozen if a man can
afford so many will not get on with people to whom
women are wives and mothers in the western sense.
Nations on whose territory it is an offence punish-
able by torture and death for a laborer to criticize
the Government can have nothing in common
politically with nations in which every man has
a vote, and may vituperate his rulers with tongue
and pen to his heart's content. Nations which
cannot intermarry without a strong sense of
miscegenation will hardly arrive at laws or verdicts
by the same process of reasoning.
The difficulty, then, in forming a League of
Nations is not to get every nation into it, but to
keep the incompatible nations out of it. Twelve
years ago the most zealous claimant for admission
to a League of Nations would have been the Tsar
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of Russia, whose example would immediately have
been followed by the Empress of China and possibly
the Lama of Thibet. Their admission would have
produced either complete paralysis of the League
or else such a reduction to absurdity as occurred
in the southern States of America after the civil
war, when the American crank was allowed to
force heterogeneous white and black legislation
and justice on the emancipated slave States.
The moment it is recognized that the League
must be founded on a basis of common ideas,
common institutions, common level of civilization,
and, generally and roughly, a common philosophy
of life, it becomes apparent, first, that the materials
for a League of which the British Empire and the
United States are to be constituents are to be
found between the Carpathians and the Rocky
Mountains, and not further afield. Its constituents
must be either republics or constitutional monar-
chies in which the monarch has much less
personal power than an American President would
have if he were elected for life. It must have a
well developed Labor movement, Socialist move-
ment, and Science movement. And it would
have to be prepared for the formation of other
Leagues of Nations in the yellow world, the Indian
world, perhaps in the Slav world and the Spanish-
Indian world. Human political society is in
solution; and it will not crystallize into one solid
lump for a long time yet. The possibility of
putting an end to war lies not in waiting for the
one solid lump, but in the first League being so
formidable, and, let us hope, so well intentioned,
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
71
that no foreign leagues would dare attempt such
a monstrous and perilous enterprise as a war on it
would be.
With the ground of speculation thus cleared, we
can see quite plainly where we must begin. Without
a League between the United States, Great Britain,
France, and Germany there can be no peace in
the world, and consequently no League of Nations
in the sense now contemplated. Anything short
of this would be simply the present offensive and
defensive alliance made permanent. By the
acceptance of the fourteen points, and the ac-
ceptance of an armistice (virtually a surrender)
on their basis, these four countries have consented
to the League in principle. And it is clear that
when the League is once formed and believed to
be genuine, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway
and Sweden will join it automatically. Whether
Italy, Spain, and Greece would commit themselves.
at once, or consider the possibility of a separate
League with South America, need not be too
curiously considered; for they would certainly
not hold aloof with any purpose of reviving the
wars of religion against the new crystallization of
the Protestant North. They would be friendly.
Frankly, on the score of an undeniable hetero-
geneity of temperament, the combination might be
more workable without them. The northern
combination would be strong enough to begin with;
and enough is enough. The danger of biting off
more than we can chew is very obvious: superfluous
strength would be dearly purchased at the cost
of a great increase of friction.
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We now see that the difference between Mr Wilson
and M. Clemenceau, declared in the three days
debate in the French Chamber which began on the
27th December, is not so irreconcilable as it seems.
Mr Wilson said "If the future had nothing for us
but a new attempt to keep the world at the right
poise by a balance of power, the United States
would take no interest, because she will join no
combination of power which is not a combination
of all of us." M. Clemenceau said "There is an
old system, the balance of power, to which I remain
faithful. This system seems to be now condemned;
but if such a balance of power had preceded the
war, and if Britain, America, France, and Italy had
agreed to say that whoever attacked one of them
would be attacking the whole world, this atrocious
war would not have taken place. This system of
alliance shall be my guiding thought at the Con-
ference. I shall make all possible sacrifices to this
end." Now as between the alliance thus desiderated
by M. Clemenceau and a Klootzian League of the
Human Race there is, fortunately, a hopeless
incompatibility. But between it and the practical
form which a League of Nations must take there
is no incompatibility, because the League will be
an alliance to maintain the balance of power in
favor of peace as against war, and of democracy
as against autocracy and oligarchy.
I may add that the alliance under the old system
proved unstable, and failed to prevent the war.
M. Clemenceau said truly that " If Britain, America,
France and Italy had agreed to say that whoever
attacked one of them would be attacking the whole
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
73
world, this atrocious war would not have taken
place." But this was just what not one of them
could be persuaded to do at any price. I have
already described how I urged that such a declara-
tion should be made by Britain eighteen months
before the war, and how, even eighteen hours before
the war, with the powder actually catching fire,
Lord Grey still could not be persuaded to declare
that Britain would fight, even to maintain Belgian
neutrality. M. Clemenceau cannot forget the
memorable explosion of relief in the French
Chamber when, after waiting until it was too late
to prevent the war and baulk the British lion, Lord
Grey at last sprang his ambush. Russia, treacher-
ously governed, collapsed in ruins after precipi-
tating the war by her mobilization. Italy prudently
waited until her price went up to fighting point.
America did not move until Northern France and
Belgium were blasted tracts of ruin. This sort of
alliance can hardly be what M. Clemenceau means
when he says
"There is an old system to which I
remain faithful." He might as well say that he
remains faithful to the ruins of Rheims and to
what has been called (in France) the condem-
nation of a million Frenchmen to die that England
may live.
We therefore need consider no further what the
League of Nations will be. It cannot possibly be
more than a League of Nations with common ends
and common interests. What does remain to be
considered is how far they will be able to agree to
surrender their sovereign rights to their common
organization.
CHAPTER VI
GERMANY AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS. CLEMEN-
CEAU'S OBJECTION. THE DEMAND FOR SECURITY.
DISARMAMENT. NEUTRALITY. RECAPITULATION.
I NEED not dwell on the question whether
Germany shall be admitted into the League of
Nations. If she be not, there will be no League,
only an alliance against her in which France
and Italy will be able to use England and America
to annex German and Austrian territory. This is
already so obvious that the Jingos of London and
Washington, implacably anti-German as they
imagine themselves to be, will be the first to
discover that without Germany they will be at
a heavy disadvantage in a League of Nations.
What is more, they are already at the same dis-
advantage in the absence of a League; for the
French and Italian Jingos have been acting as
masters of the situation, and making no secret of
their determination to annex parts of the Rhineland
and the Austrian Tyrol (to say nothing of Jugo-
Slavia) without regard to the irredentist movements
which must follow such annexations. The British
and American Jingos may have no objection to
these annexations as such; but they will object
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SECURITY
75
very strongly to being landed in supporting them
whether they object or not, and receiving no
quid-pro-quo for their submission to the superior
self-assertiveness of the Latin diplomatists. They
will call in Germany sooner or later to counter-
balance the south.
Thus Germany is sure of her admission. But it
may be delayed, not on the ground that she is
permanently ineligible, but on the ground that she
has no settled government. As we have seen, even
the existence of a settled government would not
make her eligible if that government were a restored
Hohenzollernist divine right monarchy, or an
irresponsible Vigilance Committee holding on by
main force. But if a form of government emerges
politically homogeneous with that of the League
(and this is the most probable event) then there
can be no question, if the League be an honest one,
and very little question even if it be dominated
by Jingo jealousies, that Germany must be a
constituent, and, from the Anglo-American point
of view, a very desirable constituent.
Nevertheless the Anglo-American Jingos, and
still more immediately the Anglo-American doc-
trinaires, must reckon gently with the feeling in
France which has already so nearly driven M.
Clemenceau into a declaration of pure reaction
towards the old diplomacy which, with all its draw-
backs, has so signally avenged Sedan. It is easy
to sit down behind the British fleet, or at the other
side of the Atlantic, and ask the inhabitants of
Picardy and Belgium to feel safe in a new moral
world within range of Long Bertha, and within a
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few minutes' flight of aeroplanes that drop earth-
quake bombs on sleeping cities. Even London,
who, safe as she seems comparatively, has for
years past not dared to allow a clock to strike nor
a light to shine from a window at night, nor heard
the report of an anti-aircraft gun without a spasm
of terror, knows better than that.
If the old reliance on superior physical force is
to be given up, the demand for security, which
will be more imperative than ever, will take the
form of a demand for disarmament. Now not one
of the Great Powers will consent to be genuinely
disarmed. M. Clemenceau has said definitely that
France will not consent to the disarmament even
of England: she will insist on the retention of the
British Fleet. But he will find that the question
is not to be disposed of so easily. The inhabitants
of Picardy and Belgium, contemplating their
levelled houses, gutted factories, hewn-down
orchards, and crowded cemeteries, may say
" A
plague on your British fleet! What worse could
have happened to us if there had not been a British
ship on the seas? Did we not starve with the
Germans? Has any town or village in Germany
suffered as ours have suffered? Was it not this
fleet building business that began all the trouble?
Who but ourselves have had to pay for it? And
now you tell us that America is going to build a
rival fleet and begin the mischief all over again ! "
Thus the very spectacle of devastation which urges
M. Clemenceau to obduracy against Mr Wilson
turns out on closer consideration to be an object
lesson in the need for co-operation with him.
SECURITY
77
This argument will cut no ice in England. If
the British statesmen dared be candid they would
say at once that no proposal for the reduction of
the British fleet will be entertained for a moment,
and that it will be useless to claim that Mr Wilson's
fourth point: namely, "that national armaments
will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with
domestic safety" obliges England to reduce her
fleet. Her domestic safety absolutely requires
command of the seas. It is difficult to see how the
United States can take exception to this attitude,
since their patriots have hastened to announce
that they, too, intend to build an Invincible
Armada. Yet from the moment they lay down.
their first keel with that end in view the main
business of every Secretary of State for War in
England must be to do unto that fleet as England
has already done to Germany's, unless the old
order on which M. Clemenceau pins his faith
be superseded by a new one, as Mr Wilson
demands.
Let us see how far the war itself has changed the
problem of the armaments. It has certainly greatly
lessened the value of disarmament as a security
for peace by demonstrating that a land armament,
including a conscript army millions strong, can be
improvised virtually in no time, and that feats of
transportation of soldiers across the sea which
nobody believed possible a year ago are easy. No
nation can be prevented from making and secreting
models of the jigs, dies, and presses on which a rapid
mechanical output of weapons depends. Further,
the most dreaded armament is now the aircraft
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armament; and the commercial aeroplane, of which
there will be hundreds of thousands, is potentially
a bombing aeroplane.
Psychologically, it has been shewn that a
complete preparation for war in time of peace,
though every belligerent accuses the enemy of it,
is impossible. Everyone knows that as in the midst
of life we are in death, we should always be ready
to meet it, with our wills made, our consciences
clear, and our moral accounts balanced. We know
equally well that in the midst of peace we are at
war, and should always be ready for the firing of
the first shot. But in the one case as in the other,
we never are. As we have seen, the British forces
were the best prepared in 1914; but the prepara-
tion did not go very far beyond the normal establish-
ment, and was neither up to date nor adequate
to the share we had to take in the land
warfare. In all the belligerent countries the age
limit for conscription had to be raised during the
conflict; and the armies had to learn their business,
the rule at first being insufficiency and inefficiency
on all sides. The moral is that disarmed nations
can put up quite as disastrous a fight as armed
ones if they are determined to fight. If the will
to fight continues, the means will always be forth-
coming. And the less skilled and the less prepared
the belligerents are, the more horrible will be the
suffering and the carnage.
On the other hand, the use of high explosives,
poison gas, aircraft, and guns ranging up to seventy
miles has made the possibilities of destruction and
death so appalling, that the necessary precautions
DISARMAMENT
79
a war.
against them, even if effective, make life as in-
tolerable for the civil population whom the armies
formerly protected as for the soldiers themselves:
indeed more so; for the soldier has nothing to do
but deal and dodge death, whilst the civilians
have to support the soldiers, support themselves,
and take care of the children into the bargain under
this terrible fire. The expense and demoralization
are enormous. Formerly war was the sport of
kings: an extravagance which they could afford
and even profit by if successful. There were cases
in which the losers themselves were the better for
But now the expense is past a joke. That
the national outputs of the belligerents have never
been better distributed than during the war; that
millions of laborers and their families have been
better fed and clothed than ever in their lives before;
that nevertheless colossal profits have been made
by some employers, does not console the governing
class for the reduction of its permanent incomes
by more than one third through income tax and
supertax, for a fifty per cent. reduction in the
purchasing power of the two thirds that remain,
and for the threat of "a levy on capital" which,
though founded on the absurd delusion that the
figures of the War Loans and Victory Loans and
Liberty Loans are anything now but memoranda of
claims for interest payable out of future produc-
tion, may nevertheless have the effect of confis-
cating that interest, and forcing property holders
to mortgage their estates and their industrial
stocks and shares to the Government for nothing,
as the Government will simply write off the amount
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of the mortgage against the "capital levy" which
has compelled the victim to mortgage. Add nine
million deaths from war pestilence, which is only
faintly alleviated by calling it Spanish Influenza ;
pile on the uncertainty as to whether even the
victors can avert the revolutions which are now
practically de rigueur in the case of defeat; and it
will be seen that Bloch, the Polish banker, whom
the war was at first supposed to have signally
refuted, has in fact been confirmed by it in his
essential thesis that modern war has passed from
the stage of wholesale murder to that of State
suicide.
Therefore a deadlock may be averted by the
fact that the nations, though afraid to disarm,
are still more afraid to face the next war, for which
their armaments are intended. Disarmament will
not prevent war, nor, if it could, would that
sort of preventive have much moral value. The
peace that is produced by disablement is worth no
more than that which is produced by manacles
and fetters. The disarmament of nations will
follow the course of the disarmament of individuals.
On the wild edges of civilization men carry revolvers
and cartridges. When they come to New York or
Paris or London, it is not necessary to disarm
them: they sell their revolvers and buy umbrellas.
Neither the British Empire nor the United States
nor the French Republic nor the German Federation
will beat their swords into ploughshares until they
feel safe without them. When they do feel safe
they will lose no time, because armaments are
frightfully expensive; and compulsory military
DISARMAMENT
81
service is so irksome that it would be intolerable
except under pressure of a mortal peril.
The abolition of conscription, which would be
very popular, may, if skilfully advocated, be
accepted as a compromise. Every government
knows now that in the event of a war it can not
only introduce conscription ad hoc, but can even,
as happened in England, get so many voluntary
recruits as to leave it an unsettled question whether
conscription is ever really necessary. Now Mr Wilson
can hardly ask much more on his fourth point than
that conscription should be abolished? With the
power of conscription up each nation's sleeve;
with a professional army on hand sufficient for
that very elastic consideration "domestic safety ";
with a secret provision for the turning out of
weapons in large quantities as fast as any other
Power could; and with an industrial transport
service in the air and on the roads capable of
military service (conditions of which nothing can
deprive any nation at present), a quite imposing
show of disarmament may be made without any
real sacrifice. In England any political reform,
however revolutionary in appearance, will be
accepted by the governing classes if only it can be
codified in such a way as to leave things virtually
where they were before. Dickens's formula "How
not to do it" remains as valid as ever. But it
does not always work as it is intended to work.
In this particular case it is clear that the pretence
of abandoning warlike intentions would very
considerably weaken them. It is the tragedy of
the hypocrite that he is often held to his professions
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to such an extent that he has to confess to himself
ruefully on his deathbed that he might just as
well have been born an honest man.
Still, all this applies to land forces, and not to
navies and their power of blockade. Here there
will be no yielding. Mr Wilson might as well ask
Britain to cut her right hand off as to forgo either
her present navy or such increase of it as may be
necessary to keep it ahead of any naval combina
tion that could in any reasonable probability be
brought against it. And Mr Daniels, Secretary to
the United States navy, and as little of a fire-eater
as any Quaker, has declared unequivocally, on the
question being raised by the American admirals,
that unless a League of
of Nations in some
way supersedes this British necessity, the United
States must build a bigger navy than the British.
This, curiously enough, is the most satisfactory
position from which the League of Nations could
possibly start, because it practically guarantees
another war, with Britain on one side, the United
States on the other, and Japan heaven knows
where, unless the League of Nations super-
nationalizes the two fleets and prevents them from
attempting to outgrow one another. The prospect
of such a competition is unbearable; for the
resources of the two countries are so huge that
of armaments between them beggars
imagination; and the final inevitable collision
would be cataclysmal. Poor Germany, with
all her goods in the shop window, working
hard and long for scanty pay, could afford no
preparation for the last war comparable for a
a race
DISARMAMENT
83
moment to a British-American preparation for the
next one. What is more, the Americans and
English, being relatives, have a power of hating
one another that no strangers could attain.
Throughout the whole nineteenth century there
was no bad blood between the Germans and the
English: they were allies and friends. During
the same period there was continual bad blood
between the Americans and the English: the
closely related blood feud between England and
Ireland was hardly less cordial; and the recent
celebration of a century of brotherly peace and
Hands Across the Atlantic was, even for a political
farce, an exceptionally impudent one. The first
battleship Mr Daniels builds in the absence of a
League of Nations will begin an anti-American
movement in England compared to which the anti-
German one will seem a lovers' quarrel.
This abominable vision makes some arrange-
ment imperative, League or no League. The two
Powers must agree as to the weights of their
respective naval armaments, solemnly forswearing
all rivalry, and entering into such engagements as
must put them unequivocally in the wrong morally
if they blockade Europe without the sanction of
the League, or if they attack one another. Less
than this can hardly be tolerated in the face of
recent experience; and more cannot be enforced;
for if England and America agreed to throw over
the League at any time, there would be an end to
it. Nothing but conscience and common sense can
keep it together in any case: no material guarantees
could avail against a deliberate resolution of its
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more powerful constituents to revert to the present
evil anarchy. We must make up our minds to
this from the beginning. It is true that the League
must have a police force at its disposal; but just
as no State has or can have a domestic police force
strong enough to restrain the whole mass of the
people from doing anything they are determined to
do, so no League of Nations can have a police
force capable of preventing its constituents from
relapsing into the barbarism of war if they are
bent on it. Something can be done in restraint
of accumulation of huge stocks of high explosives,
shells, and artillery, by a League which will at
least have the right to call attention and demand
explanations. The fitting of commercial submarine
craft with torpedo tubes can be made an offence
against supernational law; and if the League of
Nations insists on responsibility of the Press in
foreign affairs (and to interfere with fleets and
armies and leave newspapers alone would be to
strain at the gnat and swallow the camel), it must
acquire rights of action, if not against the advocacy
of war in the abstract by Darwin, Ruskin, Tennyson,
and their German disciples, at least against Press
campaigns and Bernhardian treatises hounding on
any nation to a specific act of war. These steps will
be difficult at first. But later on, when the wide-
spread feeling that war is a crime against humanity
finds at last an organized executive power behind
it, it will become much easier to deal with war
agitations as incitements to crime.
I purposely omit such widely advocated and
little thought-out "sanctions" as the outlawry
NEUTRALITY
85
and economic boycott of a recalcitrant nation.
They are double edged weapons, or rather spears
pointed at both ends. We do not outlaw the
individual offender: we either leave him to his
conscience or call a policeman. We cannot outlaw
him without outlawing ourselves at the same time
in respect of him. And we cannot refuse a
customer without losing his custom. This holds
good between nations also. The only effective
sanctions are force and conscience.
There is one expedient, dear to the old diploma-
tists, which must be discarded by the League of
Nations, and that is the figment of neutrality.
Calling a country neutral is in effect pretending that
for certain purposes it does not exist. The pretence
does not alter the fact that it does exist. Before
the war Belgium and Greece were diplomatically
assumed to have no existence in relation to the war.
They were called neutral: that is, neither one
thing nor the other, giving no reaction either to
the British litmus or the German turmeric. But
the Germans found out at once in practice what
they had known all along in theory, that their
only chance of winning the war was to get to Paris
with the utmost speed; and the shortest way was
through Belgium, which was therefore by no means
neutral, but either a bridge to victory or a very
solid obstacle to it. They at once demanded a
passage through Belgium, offering to pay their
way and do no damage. The refusal of this offer
became an act of war by Belgium on behalf of the
Allies. But its acceptance would have been equally
an act of war on behalf of Germany against the
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Allies. In such a situation the figment of neutrality
collapsed at once. The dilemma was so obvious
that it had been foreseen and provided for, Belgium
having, as we have seen, had already to arrange that
in such an event she was to resist any attempt on
the part of the German army to pass through her
territory. The arrangement was not discovered
and revealed until the Germans took Brussels;
and in the meantime there was a reckless exploita-
tion of virtuous indignation among the Allies over
the violation of neutrality and the tearing up of
the treaty of 1839 which guaranteed it, and which
the Imperial Chancellor, like Gladstone forty
years before, estimated accurately as a scrap
of paper.
Yet he was himself the dupe of the
figment to such an extent that he very rashly
admitted moral delinquency instead of thinking
out his case. Neutrality had not been " violated":
that which does not exist cannot be violated. A
figment had been reduced to absurdity: that was
all.
I made such attempts as an unofficial individual
writer could to warn the country not to be righteous
overmuch, as it was extremely unlikely that we
should get through the war without having to
violate neutrality ourselves. But in England
nothing can resist the national love of lecturing
other people on their moral behavior. The flimsiest
case for moral superiority is preferred to the
strongest case in which "honors are easy." We
revelled and "wallowed in our superiority to the
tearers up of scraps of paper (our own waste-paper
basket being none the less full) and to the violators
NEUTRALITY
87
of the sacred covenant of neutrality. We then
discovered that it was necessary for the success
of our Eastern strategy to seize certain Greek
islands, and to send troops into Greek territory.
Also (and this raises a point of the first importance
for the League of Nations) we found that our
production of steel depended on a certain natural
product for which we had hitherto depended on
Germany, and must now procure from Eubea. In
dealing with this situation we shewed none of
Bethmann Hollweg's squeamishness. We seized
the islands, including Eubea, straight away, and
then sounded the King of Greece as to whether
he would not like to regularize the proceeding by
coming into the war on the side of the Allies.
His reply, made to an American interviewer, was
that he declined to take the side of a Power which
always sent 35,000 men on expeditions for which
at least 200,000 were needed. This pleasantry
cost him his throne. We republished the interview
with the pleasantry left out; hoofed King Con-
stantine out of his country; set up his son in his
place; and proceeded to make ourselves thoroughly
at home in Hellas. The Greeks, with the object
lesson of Belgium before their eyes, knew better
than to do more than protest on paper. The
Germans had established a reign of terror for all
resisters of invasion; and there were no great
Powers behind Greece as there had been behind
Belgium to compel her to resist.
TIM
These high-handed proceedings were quite in-
evitable. Moral recriminations about it are
empty and idle, Greece might just as well have
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PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
made war on us as refused us what we took: she
had no more power to be neutral in any real sense
than she had to melt into thin air and let the
Mediterranean up to the Bulgarian frontier. But
our action knocked the bottom out of all Mr
Pecksniff's nonsense about scraps of paper and the
sacredness of neutrality. And they force us now
to drop these figments and to face the real question
of the conflict between the rights of nations and
the rights of humanity at large. What rights of
way are the nations to have over one another's
territory? If one nation may force another to
share its supply of magnesite, may it not in turn
be forced to share its own supply of coal ?
Here we begin to see that the League of
Nations is being forced on us not only by our
fear of another Armageddon, but by the march
of civilization, which has bestridden frontiers
and made " sovereign rights" as obsolete as
autocracy or the Roman father. Just as it is idle
for England or Germany to try to stop one another's
army by a notice board inscribed "Trespassers will
be prosecuted: this land is strictly preserved," so
it is equally silly to try to stop pacific penetration
by the same means. A whole new range of questions
must be faced and answered. Has England a right
to refuse to allow a German to land in England, or
Germany a right to refuse to let an Englishman cross
the German frontier? May a handful of people
inhabiting a corner of the huge Australian continent
refuse to let a yellow man set foot on it, however
overcrowded his own country may be? Has a
Chinaman any rights in California or an East Indian
NEUTRALITY
89
in Cape Colony? If individuals have such rights,
have nations and armies got them? Fancy such
problems being solved by people who are still in
the act of crying "Here's a stranger: heave half
a brick at him "!
These questions may not be finally settled, nor
even asked, in Paris; but unless the members of
the Conference are keenly aware that they are
coming up for settlement, and coming up quickly,
their provisions for the future will have very little
value. The immediately important point is that
any attempt to fall back on the old expedient of
setting up buffer States between the great Powers
and declaring them to be neutral must be put out
of countenance by the mere irony of the facts of
the war. If the discussion threatens to degenerate
at any moment into recriminations about violated
neutrality, the Conference will be promptly re-
minded that the Allies were as powerless to respect
that figment as Germany was. And when small
nations (Ireland, for example) demand such inde-
pendence as Belgium or Greece enjoyed before the
war, had they not better be asked bluntly how
much that independence proved worth when war
broke out between their gigantic neighbors, and
whether their chance of liberty does not lie rather
in interdependence than in a spurious independence?
In short, there will be a great breakdown of national
cant at the Conference, because the Conference is
international, and national cant has no currency
beyond the frontier.
Further than this I cannot carry the subject.
The story of the Conference from day to day must
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be taken up by the journalists who will write
within a few hours of the event. I can only give a
statement of certain conditions, some of them
obvious enough, but all of them involving con-
siderations not at all obvious, which, being none
the less real, will either govern the Conference's
decisions, or, if ignored or defied, reduce them later
on to absurdity. In doing this I have done my
best to avoid conciseness, because, as people
seldom digest pemmican successfully, conciseness
in complicated matters is generally the reduction
of a compound truth to a simple falsehood. Early
in the war the German Government, wishing to
stir up a rebellion against the French in Morocco
and Algeria, circulated a document written in
very choice Arabic to the effect that I am a great
prophet, and that I once told an American senator
that the violation of Belgian neutrality was an
incident of the war and not the cause of it. I
am quite unable to follow that operation of the
German mind which led to the conclusion that any
Moorish sheikh could be induced to rush to arms
because some dog of an unbeliever had made a
statement that was neither interesting nor even
intelligible in Morocco to some other dog of an un-
believer; but the Germans formed that conclusion
and spent money on it. Thereupon a distinguished
literary colleague of mine, E. A. W. Mason, who had
plunged into active service in the war, and was busy
circumventing the Germans round the Mediter-
ranean and thereabouts, came to me and asked
me for "a concise and straightforward denial " of
the implication that the great Rabbi Shaw was a
RECAPITULATION
91
pro-German. Having been among the Moors and
spoken to Sheikhs and Marabouts myself, I had no
difficulty in convincing Mason that conciseness is
not a virtue in Barbary. Also, I am not the man
to lose an opportunity of preaching at the utmost
admissible length when I find myself installed as
a great prophet. Mason and I were not men of
letters for nothing. We combined the style of our
Bible with that of Burton's Arabian Nights in a
prophetic message which will, I hope, find a perma-
nent place in Arab literature as an additional
surah of the Koran. It was duly translated and
circulated; and the Moors lay low and did
nothing. It had every quality except that of
conciseness.
But if it is a mistake to be concise in opening a
case, it is just as well to add a concise summing-
up; so as to provide a convenient conspectus of
the conclusions arrived at. Accordingly I re-
capitulate as follows.
1. As far as the planning of the war and the
preparations for it are concerned the parties enter
the Peace Conference on equal terms morally. All
of them obeyed, more or less intelligently, the
instinct of self-preservation, and were under the
necessity of securing it by military force because
there was no supernational law in existence to take
its place.
2. The war was decided by the naval blockade,
which proved that the British Empire has militant
powers of starvation and ruin at present possessed
by no other State.
3. Though France, through M. Clemenceau, has
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expressed confidence in this state of things, the
United States, through their admirals and Mr
Daniels, have declared unequivocally that unless
the situation be changed by the establishment of
a League of Nations, the United States must build
a fleet capable of coping with any existing naval
armament.
4. As a similar resolution on the part of the
German Empire was the first step towards the
present war, this declaration may be taken as the
first step towards the next war unless and until
the League of Nations becomes an established
fact.
a
5. The League of Nations must begin as
combination of States with settled responsible
governments of the modern democratic type, and
will differ from an alliance by having a joint
legislature and tribunal for enacting and adminis-
tering a body of international and supernational
law. The present alliance presents so obvious a
nucleus for such a League, that it must at once
anticipate its attitude and accept most of its moral
responsibilities.
6. As republican federations of the North
American type will be eligible as constituents of
the League of Nations without question, whereas
monarchies will have to satisfy the League that
their governments are really responsible, the
League, without directly imposing any form of
government, or denying to any nation its right of
self-determination, must, by the mere fact of its
existence and the conditions of admission to it,
act as a high premium on federal republicanism
RECAPITULATION
93
and responsible government, and as a veto on
autocracy.
7. Germany cannot be admitted to the League
until she has a settled government of the type
desiderated; but the League cannot seriously
ensure peace in Europe until Germany is admitted.
8. Pending the admission of Germany to the
League, the Alliance will be dominated by the
initiative of France and Italy; and as this situa-
tion will lead to a rapprochement between the
English-speaking allies and Germany, it is important
that the campaign of hatred against Germany,
which has now served its turn, should be dis-
continued in England and America.
9. Disarmament (including nominal abolition of
conscription) is possible as regards land forces,
but delusive. Naval and aerial armaments must
be balanced and morally controlled by the League
of Nations. The production of high explosives
and artillery on a threatening scale, and the equip-
ment of submarine vessels with torpedo tubes,
should be made an offence against supernational
law; but the League cannot make war physically
impossible and should not try to.
10. There is not, and there never can be, any
such thing as neutrality in war or in peace.
Belgium passive may affect the result more than
Brazil active. The extent to which any nation
can be permitted to limit the general human right
of way or to monopolize any natural product is one
of the most difficult and pressing subjects for the
supernational legislation which the League of
Nations will have to set up.
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11. The influence of party politics and Balance
of Power diplomacy on the Peace Conference may
produce a reactionary combination of the present
European war Governments with the American
Republican Opposition against the American Demo-
cratic Government and the European Opposi-
tions; and as, in view of the electoral weakness of
the latter, Mr Wilson, as a Great Man standing for
a Great Idea, must depend on sheer intellectual and
moral superiority without regard to election figures,
it is important that America should wake up to
this situation, and not leave her President in the
position of a prophet with less honor in his own
country than in Europe, on which he has made a
tremendous impression.
CHAPTER VII
GOOD MANNERS IN WAR AND PEACE
We are so unaccustomed to be at war with our
more civilized neighbors that most of us have no
idea of how we should behave ourselves under
such circumstances. Not only our simple citizens,
but our editors and statesmen, and even in a few
instances our very soldiers, have been guilty of
the most shocking solecisms. Instead of putting
on our full dress clothes and standing on our very
best behavior, we have been recklessly abusive and
injurious. We have frantically denied every state-
ment made by the enemy without stopping to
consider whether it was true, and have thereby
not only missed the advantage of many valuable
admissions in our own favor, but put ourselves
gratuitously in the wrong. We have passion-
ately accepted and affirmed and reaffirmed as
authentic news stories which on the face of
them could not possibly have been true. Our
suppressions, being sane and premeditated, have
been worse than our raging affirmations. In
short, we have behaved as naïvely as the children
of a certain little country town in my neighbor-
95
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hood, who assembled at the railway station
when the announcement was made that some
prisoners of war were to be imported for work on
the farms. When they were asked what they had
come for, they replied "To spit at the Germans."
And those who told them that this was naughty,
and sent them home, were immediately accused
by several quite fully grown persons of being " pro-
Germans."
For indeed the worst of it was that we did all
these things, not merely to the few unfortunate
Germans who were within our reach, but to those
of our
own people who behaved punctiliously
according to the creed of Christian chivalry, or
even with common decency. It seems hardly
credible now that the Headmaster of Eton was
X
driven scurrilously from his place for reminding
us that our occupation of Gibraltar raised the
same problem as the German control of the Kiel
canal, or that the Archbishop of York would
have been unfrocked, had such a proceeding been
possible, for speaking of the Kaiser as one gentle-
man speaks of another whose hospitality he has
accepted in happier days. I might strengthen my
demonstration by citing cases in allied or enemy
countries; but it is for them to confess their own
sins, not for me to confess for them.
What, then, is the creed of Christian chivalry,
and the code of manners founded on it?
First and above all, a soldier who kills his enemy
for any personal reason whatever is guilty of
murder. Whether the reason be simple hatred,
or a desire to strip him of a better pair of boots,
CHRISTIAN CHIVALRY
97
or to remove an heir who stands between him and
a property, or a rival who has supplanted him in
love, no excuse can be allowed on the score that
the dead man was an enemy in the military sense.
A soldier slaying an enemy for a personal reason,
a judge summing up against a prisoner for a per-
sonal reason, a clergyman refusing the sacrament
to a parishioner for a personal reason, all incur the
same condemnation. Were it not so, a soldier
who had disabled his enemy or taken him prisoner
would kill him. But his obligation to kill or disable
him in fair fight is not more sacred than his
obligation to bind up his wounds, nurse him, doctor
him, feed him, lodge him and clothe him, when he is
at his conqueror's mercy. That is the difference,
and the whole difference, between the civilized
soldier and the North American Indian brave, or
any lawless brigand or pirate.
The moral law in the matter is the same as the
physical law: the civilian's obligation the same as
the warrior's. War is a very dreadful thing at its
best; but if it suspended every rule and impulse
of human kindness, so that men were not only
authorized but enjoined to become utter devils
for the duration," both at home and in the field,
human society would be incompatible with war
as an institution, and Dr. Johnson's famous
definition of patriotism as the last refuge of a
scoundrel would become generally valid. Too
many of our civilians need to have this lesson rubbed
into them by our soldiers. They know that in
breaches of the peace they must not kick a man
when he is down, or refuse to shake hands with
H
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him when they have fought out a quarrel with
him. But they seem to have no shame in kicking
a German when he is down, or declaring that they
will never shake hands with a German as long as
they live.
Now a good deal of this is due to a quite amiable
failure to realize what war means. In the news-
papers the civilian reads an endless and glorious
list of heroic exploits by plucky, good-natured,
indomitably cheerful British soldiers, whose worst
weaknesses are a little comic coarseness of language
and a tendency to go on the spree occasionally
and sing parodies of popular hymns. And side by
side with these lists are others of mean, filthy,
cruel, cowardly outrages by men of several different
enemy nationalities generalized as Huns. It does
not occur to some of us that the German papers
must have presented the same contrast between
the British Hun and the German hero. Both are
as false to the facts as the elaborate deception by
which Sir Douglas Haig persuaded the German
commanders that he was planning an attack many
miles distant from the spot in which his final
blow was actually delivered. His business of
deceiving the enemy was a trifle compared to the
business of deceiving our own simpleton-civilians,
who know nothing of war and less of Christian
chivalry. Even soldiers have to be deceived,
because they are not all heroes. The percentage
who win (or deserve) Victoria Crosses is balanced
at the other end by a percentage who have to be
restrained from surrendering too easily by per-
suading them that the enemy inflicts un-
CHRISTIAN CHIVALRY
99
bearable tortures and privations on prisoners of
war.
But if these deceptions are necessary as ruses
de guerre there is no sort of sense in keeping them
up when the war is over. Sir Douglas Haig is not
now ostentatiously equipping a yacht for a polar
expedition to persuade the Germans that he will
not be available for the defence of Amiens next
summer. No British infantryman, however "fed
up" with fighting, is now under the smallest temp-
tation to surrender in order to escape from shell
barrages. All the deceptions are now doing un-
mitigated mischief, making unreason and bad blood
where reason and good nature are the most urgent
needs of the situation in Europe. Everyone who is
not a born fool must realize soon what all the
clever people realized long ago, that the moral
cleaning-up after the war is far more important
than the material restorations. The towns that
have been knocked down mostly needed it very
badly, and will be replaced, let us hope, by better
planned, healthier, happier habitations. We shall
be able to build cathedrals quite as handsome
as the best medieval ones, stained glass and all,
as soon as we really like them and want
them. But the poisoning of the human soul
by hatred, the darkening of the human mind by
lies, and the hardening of the human heart by
slaughter and destruction and starvation, are evils
that spread and fester long after the guns have
stopped. Yet the importance that war gives to
fools who are negligible in peace makes them loth
to let the war cease if they can possibly carry it on
H 2
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by mere rancor after the soldiers have come home.
To appease such rancor, I offer the following
figures.
First, as to the satisfaction we have already had of
our desire to be revenged on the Germans for what
they have done to us. Without counting the war
carnage, which has been frightful, we have by our
blockade caused 763,000 persons to die in Ger-
many of "malnutrition," a polite name for starva-
tion. By 1917 we had increased the civilian
mortality by 32 per cent. above the figure for 1913.
Next year we got that appalling figure up to 37 per
cent. This does not include influenza cases. More
than 50,000 children under fifteen died in 1917,
and 15,000 girls and women under thirty. These
are only the deaths: the condition of the survivors
may be imagined. And this is still going on more
or less, and will go on until the blockade is raised.
Does any Englishman want any more revenge ?
Can Mr Havelock Wilson find even a five-times-
torpedoed sailor, or his widow, whose resentment
will not melt into pity and horror at so dreadful a
holocaust? How infinitesimally little and mean
do our petty persecutions by internment and ex-
patriation seem beside this awful blow which we
have struck at the life of the very heart of our
Europe, the common mother of the slayers and the
slain! The submarine campaign was a desperate
attempt to return the blow. It failed; but
what right have we, whose blow got home, to give
ourselves moral airs and demand the further
punishment of the losers in this hideous starvation
match? Even we, the winners, are already heavily
CHRISTIAN CHIVALRY
101
وو
punished for what we have done, not only by our own
losses but by the German losses as well; for every
German we have killed, and every German child
we have lamed for life by rickets, is a loss
to us just as certainly as every Allied soldier or
civilian the Germans have killed is a loss to
Germany. "There is no wealth but life said
Ruskin truly; and we shall all, Germans and Allies
alike, be on short commons for years to come, be-
cause we have killed and disabled so much of the
life of the world. This is why Germany nursed back
to health so many Allied soldiers whom they had
broken with their shells, and why we did the same
with so many German soldiers. This is why, at
Ruhleben, the Germans gave the English prisoners
with scrupulous honesty the parcels of food we
sent out to them, though they were so hungry
themselves that the prisoners at last became
masters of the camp because they had a store of
fats to give away. The poor little cramped minds
that cannot understand this would have robbed the
prisoners and left the fallen soldiers to perish on the
field, or slaughtered them out of hand.
I have also a few figures for the consideration of
those who have had dust thrown in their eyes until
they see red by the atrocity-mongering which was
not a very clean trade even in war time, and
is now mere villainous mischief-making. Of course
there have been atrocities. It is physically im-
possible that half or quarter of the crimes that
must have been perpetrated by the bad characters
engaged in this war should have been recorded.
Accept all the newspaper stories as true, even those
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which bear their falsehood on the face of them:
multiply them by ten; and they will still fall short
of the estimate of military crime which any
statistician can give with absolute certainty without
consulting a provo-marshal or reading a single
sensational column about German Brutalities.
Before the war one in every fifty of our population
was charged every year with a non-indictable
offence. One in every eight hundred was charged
with an indictable offence. One in three thousand
and seventy-seven was tried for a crime. The
first two figures represent a good deal of violent
disorder, including the knocking about of women
in a highly unchivalrous manner. The last includes
acts of cruelty so horrible that they are too sicken-
ing to be reported, some of the victims being the
criminal's own infant children. In the face
of these figures, and of the prisons and police
forces and assizes and gallows that stand before
us to remind us that they correspond to facts,
it is idle to hold up an ideal Englishman who
is incapable of an act of brutality or cowardice
side by side with an ideal German who is
capable of nothing else. The plain fact is that
both the Allies and the Germans must have
conscribed for military service not only millions of
average decent men, but thousands of infernal
scoundrels. What these scoundrels did when they
got such chances as war offered them cannot now
be remedied, and had best be forgotten. Such
memories are not useful even as an argument for
abolishing war; for born villains are even more
villainous in peace, when they are not under stern
CHRISTIAN CHIVALRY
103
military discipline.
could tell of things done by German soldiers that
leave the imagination of our most inventive re-
porters beggared; but does anyone suppose that
the French or British or Italian military police can
present their tribunals with much whiter gloves?
Only the other day it was reported as an ordinary
item of news that the police force of the American
army in France had to be reorganized because the
French complained that in the department of the
Seine alone thirty-four murders had been com-
mitted by the soldiers in addition to an unconscion-
able number of quarrels pushed to bloodshed. If
this is what the less self-controlled members of
respectable and civilized communities do to
their friends and allies, what are they likely to do
to their enemies when their blood is up? We had
better wipe the slate, and say no more about it:
it is not wholesome reading for our children; and
it will certainly not make the work of the Peace
Conference any easier.
The German military police
No more, I hope, need be said to check the
cruder rancors of war. They are to be classed with
rioting and looting as simple misconduct disguised
as patriotism. I will not even press the case here
against that intellectual rioting and looting, largely,
I am sorry to say, conducted by university pro-
fessors and men of letters who ought to know better,
which is so much worse, because so much more
lasting in its infection, than mere physical rioting
and looting. Most of its authors are by this time
ashamed of it; and their friends are no more likely
to hold them to account for their ravings in the
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first access of war fever than for their utterances
in the delirium of any other fever.
It will have been noticed by my readers that in
the first chapters of this book I have made out a
much better case for the German war policy than
any of the Germans have to my knowledge made out
for themselves. In doing so I have acted only as a
British military surgeon acts when he sets the
broken leg of a German prisoner of war better than
the German could set it for himself. The surgeon
does the same for the English soldier; and I have
done the same for the English case. I am of course
aware that much more sentimental and popular
versions of the English case are being offered in all
directions; but the difficulty is that they are not
true, and that if they were put forward at the
Peace Conference, the enemies of England could ride
off under cover of a demonstration that they are
not true. A capable advocate, when he is convinced
of the soundness of his own case, always takes
his opponent's case at its best, even if he has to
state it for him better than he can state it himself;
and he will take special care when going into court
to cry off all claims that cannot be sustained, so as
to avoid refutations that would prejudice those
that can. In our case the claim that Belgium was
in any real sense neutral, or could possibly have
been neutral, cannot be sustained. The claim
that the attack of Germany on France was entirely
wanton and unprovoked cannot be sustained. The
claim that the so-called strategic Encirclement of
the Central Empires by an Anglo-Franco-Russian
combination is a German invention cannot be
CHRISTIAN CHIVALRY
105
sustained. What is more, if they could be sus-
tained, England would cut a contemptible figure as
a thriftless, helpless, blind, silly gull, victorious
only by undeserved and extraordinary luck, and
by the help of America at the last hour. Such a
figure has sufficient points in common with the
British sailor-lieutenant of melodrama to be more
congenial and flattering to simpletons than the
truth; but if England had been governed by its
simpletons the Kaiser would at this moment be
installed in Buckingham Palace, and the Prussian
Guards would be knocking the hats off Englishmen
who did not salute as they passed. Those who
cannot bear the truth, or still hanker after melo-
drama, can find their fill in the papers that cater
specially for them. They must not expect to find it
at the Peace Conference. The Salon de l'Horloge
is not exactly the Palace of Truth; but neither is it
the palace of popular patriotism; for as all the dele-
gations have a different patria, and every patria has
moral pretensions intolerable to and incompatible
with the moral pretensions of all the other patrias,
patriotism has to be dropped before any discussion
is possible except discussion of the sort that is most
effectively conducted with chair legs and revolvers.
It may now be asked whether under these cir-
cumstances I am justified, face to face with so
many simpletons who are incapable of real politics,
in letting the cat out of the bag. Why not leave
the mass of men happy in their belief that the war
was a melodrama of which they were the heroes,
and leave the diplomatists to do the real business
between themselves quietly?
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It is quite a fair question; but there are several
conclusive answers to it without falling back on the
excuse that I am not very largely read by simple-
tons. I will give one or two of them. Even if it
were of no importance that the British voter should
know exactly what his Government has done (and
that view is rank oligarchy), it is of enormous
importance that the Germans, among whom I
have many readers, should know, and know
accurately, what has just happened to them, and
that the rest of the world should know it too. We
are the most powerful single State on earth now;
but we still hold to the resolution we made when
we were only a tight little (and by no means
always a right little) island. We will endure
oppressions and masteries from one another; but
we will suffer no other State on earth to master us,
or to have the means of mastering us.
If any
State begins to build up an armament with that
in view, or even with that as a possible result,
that State will have to fight us; and in such
fights we have not been beaten since 1066. This
success is due neither to luck nor to superhuman
virtues inherent in the English people, but to the
fact that as our interest in preventing a hegemony
is not peculiar to us, we are always able to form
an alliance against the hegemonist. And we are
rich enough to see our allies through with money as
well as with reinforcements. If our turn to be de-
feated ever comes it will be because our Own
position will threaten the world with a British
hegemony, and will make it possible for America
or some other Power to form and finance a com-
CHRISTIAN CHIVALRY
107
bination against us as decisive as those we formed
against Louis XIV, Napoleon, and the Kaiser.
66
The moral is that hegemonies are impossible,
and attempts at them certain to end in armament
races and finally in war. There was a time when this
did not seem an objection. Even now the pro-
fessional soldier, the pseudo-evolutionary biologist,
and the war profiteer, quietly encouraged by those
who are of Great Catherine's opinion that an in-
surgent proletariat can always be diverted by giving
them a little war to amuse them," have still a
good word to say for war. But the rest, having
had enough of it for one generation, are urging
on the Peace Conference as its first and last duty
the replacement of violence by law between
nations. That is why all the masks must come off,
all the hypocrisies be dropped, and all the hidden
cards be shaken from the diplomatic sleeves and
thrown face upwards on the table.
When Imperial hegemony is given up as im-
possible, class hegemony within the nations re-
mains to be dealt with. Civil war, the war for an
idea, the only really respectable sort of war, will
still be a possibility; and, ideas having no respect
for frontiers, such civil war must develop into a
world crusade. The melodramatic pretences of
the Balance of Power wars have trained men and
women to think of liberty and justice as things to
be secured by fighting. That is a dangerous training.
Much of the reasoning that I have heard applied
of late to "the Hun" might be applied rather
more cogently to me as "the Capitalist." Every
second street in Europe now contains men who have
108
PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS
found out how easy it is to get rid of an opponent
by thrusting a bayonet through him or throwing
a bomb at him, and are well practised in both
operations. To glorify such methods when the
practitioners were in the trenches, wholly pre-
occupied with the Germans, was common prudence :
to do so now when they are face-to-face with the
hegemonists of their own country is rash madness.
We had better muzzle the trumpet and raise
the hymn of peace, even though its loveliest and
noblest settings, in The Messiah, in The Magic
Flute, in the Ninth Symphony, in Parsifal, are all
the work of those notorious Huns, Händel, Mozart,
Beethoven, and Wagner. The old lion is triumphant
on the crest of the mountain. But the crest of the
mountain is also the brink of the abyss.
THE END
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