THE WORLD IN 
 CONFLICT 
 
 BY 
 
 L. T. HOBHOUSE, D.Litt. 
 
 Martin -White Professor of Sociology in the University of London 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD. 
 ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON
 
 A.*\IVOV, OlXlVOV 17T, TO <S' eS VIKCLTU). ^SCHYLUS 
 
 First published in 1913 
 
 (All rights reserved)
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE COMING OF FEAR 5 
 
 II. THE CHANGE OF OUTLOOK - 13 
 
 III. DECADENCE OR REBARBARISATION ? 20 
 
 IV. THE IDEA OF LAW 28 
 V. THE REVOLT - 38 
 
 VI. THE TEMPER OF AGGRESSION - 52 
 
 VII. THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONALISM - 63 
 
 VIII. THE ELEMENTS OF HOPE - 72 
 
 IX. NATIONALITY - 80 
 
 X. THROUGH ALLIANCE TO FEDERATION 88 
 
 XL THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 96
 
 NOTE 
 
 THE following pages consist of a series of 
 articles contributed to the Manchester Guardian 
 during March, April, and May, 1915, reprinted, 
 with some additions, by kind permission of the 
 proprietors.
 
 THE COMING OF FEAR 
 
 THERE come in every man's life events which 
 make a break between present and past, such 
 a break as for a time to make all the world look 
 unreal. Here is the familiar house, the chairs 
 and tables just where they were yesterday ; the 
 same clock is ticking in the chimney-piece, 
 and the familiar books look out from their 
 shelves offering us the same wisdom as before. 
 But since yesterday some one has died, mother 
 or wife or child, and the world is changed. 
 Nothing will ever be the same again, and it is 
 for a while difficult to believe that the room 
 and the house and the world about can really 
 be what they were before. The people passing 
 in the street perplex us with their indifference. 
 They ought to be changed as we are, and we 
 have no patience with their callous stupidity 
 
 s
 
 6 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 which fails to grasp the great change in the 
 world. Some such experience has been lived 
 through by most of us before we have come 
 to man's estate. But, ordinarily, it is a purely 
 private and personal event which so shakes our 
 world. Those of us who feel public matters 
 most keenly are rarely moved by any national 
 misfortune after this fashion. Here as in all 
 things the great war is an exception. To so 
 many the world not only seemed different 
 but became different on August 4th, and in this 
 case the impression was not moderated, but 
 rather deepened by its reflection on the faces 
 and in the manner of their neighbours. It 
 turned out to be in sober truth a different 
 world from that which we knew, a world in 
 which force had a greater part to play than 
 we had allowed, a world in which the ultimate 
 social securities were gone, in which we seemed 
 to see of a sudden through a thin crust of 
 civilisation the seething forces of barbaric lust 
 for power and indifference to life. 
 
 The middle-aged and the old are said to take 
 great changes tranquilly. They have seen and 
 suffered much. They have tasted the grief of 
 life, and nothing comes to them, as to the 
 young, with the shock of total surprise. But in
 
 THE COMING OF FEAR 7 
 
 this instance it may be that the older generation 
 felt more keenly than the young the unsettle- 
 ment of ideas. Those whose memories go back 
 to the sixties and seventies were bred in an 
 England of confident security and an untroubled 
 peace. We looked on battles, sieges, and above 
 all on massacres and cruelties as matter of 
 history. Such things belonged to the past. 
 Certainly they would never trouble us in sea- 
 girt England. The heart of the world was set 
 on peace, and the energies of man were to be 
 given more and more to the pursuit of industry 
 and the gradual improvement and ennobling 
 of human life. The Crimean War and the 
 Indian Mutiny lay in the not remote past, but 
 the former was, after all, a very small affair 
 never touching the life of the nation, and the 
 latter was a regrettable incident never to recur. 
 We were proud of our navy and resolved to 
 maintain its predominance, but we did not 
 seriously think that anyone could touch it, and 
 little panics were only worked up now and 
 then to get some more money spent upon it. 
 All that was military in England seemed a 
 tradition of the past, destined gradually to die 
 out, or to remain a picturesque survival for use 
 on ceremonial occasions, like the Beefeaters'
 
 8 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 uniform or the state coach and' its cream- 
 coloured ponies. Illimitable security was the 
 background of English life. 
 
 It is true that in 1870 war came near our 
 doors. It is the first public event that comes 
 vividly within the recollection of the present 
 writer. We were all " Prooshians " in our 
 village, as indeed were most English people, 
 for a lurking fear of France still remained 
 from the Palmerstonian times ; we heard of 
 the shout " a Berlin," and naturally we knew 
 nothing of forged telegrams. I well remember 
 running out every morning as a small child to 
 waylay the village postman as he tramped 
 over the hills from the nearest post-town, that 
 I might get from him the cream of the news 
 Worth, Sedan, Gravelotte, Metz and be the 
 proud dispenser of the last tales of victory to 
 my elders. But to us it was an excitement ; 
 to our elders a matter of pity and sorrow rather 
 than anxiety. Few, I believe, grasped from 
 the first that 1870 made an epoch in history, 
 that it put a check to the march of peace and 
 humanitarianism, and marked a decisive stage 
 in the rise of a reactionary ethic and a lower 
 civilisation. The old security remained in Eng- 
 land, not seriously shaken even by the scare
 
 THE COMING OF FEAR 9 
 
 of 1877-8, for what, after all, would a war 
 with Russia have meant but a remote naval 
 encounter in which the mass of the population 
 on both sides would have been passive specta- 
 tors ? In any case, the scare died down, and 
 through the eighties and early nineties peace 
 was still in the ascendant. On the Continent 
 itself, though the weight of armaments was 
 pressing harder year by year, the counsels of 
 statesmen were moderate. Bismarck clearly 
 had no further military ambitions, and the 
 anxieties roused by the accession of William II 
 died away, as it began to be thought that he 
 was a man of words rather than of deeds. The 
 first jubilee, in 1887, seemed the apotheosis of 
 Imperial tranquillity assured greatness without 
 ambition, reflecting gratefully on the progress 
 of fifty years, innocent of aggressive intentions, 
 and fearing no assault from without. 
 
 Yet all this time great changes, political 
 and intellectual, were at work preparing for a 
 catastrophe. The deeper causes we will discuss 
 in another section, but I would first set down 
 certain grave events which from the middle of 
 the nineties began to alter the outlook of 
 thoughtful observers of civilisation. The first 
 of these was the series of Armenian massacres
 
 io THE AVORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 from 1894-6. It was not so much the actual 
 cruelty and outrage, bringing the worst horrors 
 of the seventeenth century into the midst of a 
 supposedly humane and ordered civilisation. 
 It was the indifference of Europe in face of such 
 deeds that affected every one with the least 
 touch of imagination. Say what one might 
 of the Armenians, it was never questioned 
 that any one of them could have saved himself 
 by accepting the Koran. They were slain as 
 Christians, and they died as truly for their 
 religion as any of those martyrs whom we 
 were taught in childhood to reverence. But 
 they were allowed to die by six great Christian 
 Powers, possessed in the aggregate of over- 
 whelming force, able by concerted action to 
 stop the horror by a single remonstrance, and 
 refusing to speak the word because not one of 
 them would for one moment postpone selfish 
 interests and fears to the clearest call of honour 
 and humanity. The " year when all Europe 
 became cynical," I remember reading in a 
 newspaper comment on the final refusal of the 
 Powers after the culminating massacre of 1896. 
 It was certainly the year in which the moral 
 bankruptcy of European statesmanship stood 
 revealed. With every^precaution against ideal-
 
 THE COMING OF FEAR n 
 
 ising the past, I find it difficult to think of any 
 earlier occasion on which the claims of honour 
 and humanity were so unblushingly and so 
 consistently set aside. Europe in that great 
 refusal stepped downwards, and from that time 
 forward found it impossible to believe in herself. 
 There was clearly no common conscience which 
 any barbarity, however flagrant, could touch 
 into life. Statesmen were prepared to set in 
 motion the vast forces at their disposal for 
 national aims however trumpery, to avenge 
 national injuries however slight ; but faith, 
 honour, humanity, and the claims of co- 
 religionists were for them words without effect. 
 I firmly believe that if on the political side the 
 Armenian massacres began the train of events 
 which led through many windings to the 
 break-up of Turkey and thereby to the con- 
 flagration of 1914, far more surely on the ethical 
 side the failure of the European Concert gave 
 evidence of a breakdown of principle which 
 initiated a reign of mutual fear whereof a 
 general catastrophe was the inevitable outcome. 
 The moral authority of the Concert was gone. 
 It lingered on in name, leaving Greece in the 
 following year to encounter Turkey alone, 
 mismanaging the affairs of Crete, and exhibiting
 
 12 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 its futility in a succession of paper schemes for 
 Macedonia, till it finally gave way before the 
 resolute but wholly selfish action of Italy in 
 1911. Year by year Europe was more clearly 
 divided between the two great alliances, steadily 
 arming themselves for the coming struggle. 
 Year by year men turned more and more away 
 from ideals of peace, and familiarised themselves 
 with thoughts of war.
 
 II 
 
 THOSE whose memories go back to the seventies 
 and who have formed the habit of watching 
 public events with close attention will be aware, 
 I think, of a general contrast between the 
 earlier and later portion of their lives. The 
 earlier part is a time of tranquil and hopeful 
 outlook, the latter one of increasing apprehen- 
 sion, rapidity of change, and general unsettle- 
 ment. I took the Armenian massacres just 
 now as an indication of the dividing line, and 
 it is certain that after this period there began a 
 succession of events which in the internal 
 development and the external relations of States 
 provide a strong contrast with the relative 
 calm of the earlier years. Close on the Arme- 
 nian troubles followed the Turco-Greek War. 
 Next year came the war concerning Cuba, 
 and next year again began the three years' 
 tragedy in South Africa. The year 1898 had 
 also seen us on the brink of war with France 
 
 13
 
 14 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 over the Fashoda affair, and the last three 
 years of the century witnessed something of 
 the nature of a general onslaught upon the 
 defenceless bulk of China, culminating in the 
 occupation of Pekin in 1900. The Far East 
 had definitely entered into European politics 
 and to the problems of the partition of Africa 
 and the decay of Turkey, long the source of 
 European unrest, was added the far greater 
 question of the future of China and the relations 
 of Europe to an Asiatic Power armed on the 
 European model. The next act in the develop- 
 ment of the problem followed within little 
 more than two years of the Peace of Vereeniging. 
 Vast forces were engaged in Manchuria, and the 
 world saw the first examples of the great siege- 
 battles with which it has now become familiar. 
 After the Japanese War came the Russian 
 revolution, followed for some years by political 
 upheavals in many countries that seemed to 
 give promise of better things. Revolutions 
 occurred in Turkey, Persia, and Portugal, and 
 for a moment it seemed as though the secular 
 decay of the Near Eastern peoples were to be 
 arrested by an internal movement of recupera- 
 tion. But the humanitarianism of the Young 
 Turk movement was a veneer, taken seriously
 
 THE CHANGE OF OUTLOOK 15 
 
 only by a small minority of good but ineffectve 
 men. At bottom it was Chauvinist and despotic, 
 and the methods of the new regime, fostered 
 by the jealousies and selfishness of the European 
 Powers, led straight to the Balkan Wars. 
 Meanwhile the whole European situation grew 
 yearly darker, and on the question of Morocco, 
 which had been the storm centre for seven years, 
 the clouds came almost to bursting in 1911. 
 In our domestic life at the same time the pace 
 year by year became faster and more furious. 
 Constitutional crises wer solved, only to be 
 followed by labour troubles of a magnitude 
 quite unknown to earlier times, and these in 
 turn yielded in excitement to threats of civil 
 war. Whatever else may be said of the last 
 decade in British politics, it certainly has not 
 lacked drama or variety. Rather in the cres- 
 cendo of urgency each new problem has drowned 
 the clamour of the old and made it within a few 
 months sound dim and distant as a voice from 
 the dead past, 
 
 Thus the catastrophe of 1914 was not for 
 the observer of currents of public life in any 
 way a bolt from the blue. It was the climax 
 of a time of stress and strain, the final eruption 
 of forces that had been shaking the world for
 
 16 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 two decades. For the last four years, in fact 
 since the Italians fired the first shot on the 
 Tripolitan coast, there has been almost con- 
 tinuous warfare within the European system. 
 It is not in reality one event that has changed 
 the world. It is a world-change that has 
 culminated in a great event of which no man 
 yet knows the issue. So viewed, the misfortune 
 does not become less grave. If the desolation 
 of Europe could be attributed solely to the 
 fault of a handful of statesmen, if it were all, 
 as in the popular fancy, the wickedness of the 
 Kaiser, even if it were entirely the work of 
 secret diplomacy, as some more instructed 
 critics hold, we might fairly hope that once peace 
 is restored the world would resume its normal 
 course. But if that normal course itself has 
 become one of violence and recklessness, if none 
 of the great problems have been solved, and if 
 the temper of men no longer lends itself to 
 peaceful solutions, the future is so much the 
 more doubtful. One thing at least is now 
 established, and it is for the future of England 
 a serious fact. This country can no longer 
 pursue her own course in internal security 
 regardless of the fate of Europe. I do not 
 know that such isolation was ever a sound
 
 ideal, though in practice it gave better results 
 than the Palmers tonian system of intervention. 
 I for one deeply regretted the departure from 
 the oli system involved in the formation of 
 the Triple Entente, and I still think that our 
 adhesion to one side in the European alliances 
 increased the tension and weighted the chances 
 in favour of war. But be that as it may, the 
 development of the war itself and the revelation 
 of the changes made by mechanical invention 
 have shown that our insular position is no longer 
 what it was. We must guard against rhetorical 
 exaggeration which is a little too frequently 
 heard on this point. In physical fact we are 
 still an island, and because we are an island 
 we have escaped invasion hitherto, and have 
 had eight months in which to organise our 
 defences at leisure. But the submarine has 
 already made our island position a different 
 thing from that which we supposed it to be, 
 and the progress of the submarine within eight 
 months gives us some hint of what invention 
 may have in store in the future. It is indeed 
 curious to reflect on the difference which a little 
 alteration in dates might have made in this war. 
 Had it come in 1911, as so nearly happened, 
 
 the submarine would in all probability have 
 
 B
 
 i8 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 played a very small part and airmanship a very 
 minor part. Had it been delayed another five 
 years it is possible that the submarine would 
 have been the decisive factor at sea, and quite 
 conceivable that the airship would have become 
 a determining element in the entire campaign. 
 But these are inventions still in their infancy 
 which intimately affect our position far more 
 intimately than that of any land power. They 
 have linked our interests far more closely than 
 of old to the Continent, thus illustrating that 
 general tightening up of State relations which 
 has made the world physically one before it had 
 become morally one, and which is therefore one 
 of the deeper causes of international unrest. 
 At any rate, we can no longer secure to our- 
 selves the certainty of uninterrupted peaceful 
 progress by merely standing out of the European 
 arena. For good or for evil we are now in 
 the arena, and must work out our salvation in 
 common with the peoples of the Continent. 
 
 What hope of salvation, then, do we find ? 
 When we look back across the troubled years 
 to the happier and more hopeful days of the 
 nineteenth century, what judgment are we to 
 pass, what inference to draw from the trend 
 of events ? Are we to think that the humani-
 
 THE CHANGE OF OUTLOOK 19 
 
 tarianism of those days was a delusion, a dream 
 based on a transitory rest after the turmoil 
 of the revolutionary wars ? Are we to agree 
 with the protesters of that period that struggle 
 is really the law of life and that peaceful co- 
 operation exists only to prepare societies the 
 better for internecine warfare ? Or did humani- 
 tarianism represent a living movement which, 
 though thwarted and arrested by new forces 
 that it has failed to control, has in it the un- 
 dying spirit which will in the longer run prevail ? 
 If the reader dislikes the term humanitarianism 
 let him substitute whatever name of religious or 
 ethic import formulates for him the spirit 
 making for social and international harmony, 
 and let him ask himself how it stands with 
 this spirit to-day. Is it under eclipse ? If so, 
 what has eclipsed it ? Or perchance its sun is 
 set, as it set once before on the civilised world. 
 Which are we to think the true account, and 
 what view of the future are we to hold ?
 
 Ill 
 
 DECADENCE OR REBARBARISATION ? 
 
 WHEN Ajax hurled a stone upon the Trojan 
 ranks it was of such weight as " not ten strong 
 men of these degenerate days " could lift, but 
 he just played with it single-handed. Thus 
 in Homer's time degeneracy had set in. In the 
 golden age of Roman literature and in the 
 beginning of that work of reconstruction which 
 swept away a corrupt and brutal oligarchy and 
 founded the Empire which gave the principles 
 of law and government to Europe, Horace 
 declares that " the age of our fathers, itself 
 inferior to our grandfathers, produced us more 
 worthless than they, and about to yield a still 
 more faulty progeny." If we trusted the liter- 
 ary men we should picture history as a con- 
 tinuous process of decay. The world is always 
 losing its lofty ideals, its valour, its vigour. Its 
 romance for ever dies. Mr. Kipling is beyond 
 doubt right in throwing back the complaint 
 to the Palaeolithic Age : 
 
 20
 
 DECADENCE OR REBARBARISATION ? 21 
 
 " Farewell, Romance ! " the cave man said : 
 
 " With bone well-carved he went away, 
 Flint arms the ignoble arrow-head, 
 And jasper tips the spear to-day. 
 Changed are the gods of Hunt and Dance. 
 And he with these. Farewell, Romance ! " 
 
 Men had taken to building huts for them- 
 selves, and the dim obscurities of the cave 
 were no longer a delight and a terror to children. 
 Cowards who would not face the enemy with 
 bone-tipped spear were shooting at a distance 
 with bow and arrow. Valour no longer had its 
 rights. Victory fell to the weakling. The race 
 was degenerating and must soon fall a prey to 
 the mammoth or the grizzly bear. 
 
 But, after all, it was the mammoth that 
 perished, and Neolithic man, no longer trusting 
 purely to the keen eye and the swift foot in 
 the hunt, but clearing the ground for seed, 
 and afterwards tilling it and reaping the fruits 
 of industry, laid the foundations of a life which 
 was not only a little more secure but also a 
 little larger and more free. He and his suc- 
 cessors have never yet exhausted the wells of 
 romance nor touched the barriers of the expan- 
 sion of mind. But at every stage in the exten- 
 sion of peaceful arts, with every year in which 
 men have lived for a while more happily and
 
 22 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 harmoniously, there has risen a wail from 
 out of the sullenly retreating waters of bar- 
 barism : " You stay our flood with pitiful 
 dams, behind which you lurk in fancied secur- 
 ity. But the doom of rottenness is upon you. 
 You shall wax fat and die. Peace shall be your 
 ruin, for in its softness you shall rot/' A more 
 profound observer spoke of the most warlike 
 state of his race in just the contrary sense. 
 Sparta fell, said Aristotle, because the Spartans 
 did not know how to live in peace. It was 
 the one-sided cultivation of the arts of war 
 that brought to its decline that city whose 
 name has become the recognised epithet for 
 endurance, fortitude, self-command, and disci- 
 pline. 
 
 In our day the creed of decadence, like 
 everything else, has swathed itself in the garb 
 of science. The physical decadence of England 
 was the subject of statistical demonstration. 
 It was not merely assumed by Treitschke, who 
 offered the abolition of the duel as one of its 
 evidences, but it was accepted as demonstrated 
 fact by our conscriptionists, our Eugenists, our 
 reactionaries. Revelling in their own fore- 
 bodings these prophets of evil wallowed in 
 descriptions of the national decay that was to
 
 DECADENCE OR REBARBARISATION ? 23 
 
 come from our objections to universal drill, 
 our weakness in giving freedom and equality 
 to dependencies, our humanitarian madness 
 that kept the unfit alive, our insanely demo- 
 cratic jealousies that taxed the millionaire 
 whose fitness was written large in the gigantic 
 fortune which he had extracted by his financial 
 skill from our less capable selves. We could 
 not recruit our little army. We could not 
 fill the complement of the Territorial Forces. 
 England's day was over. Romance, farewell. 
 Well, the Germans are said for many years 
 to have drunk to " the Day " the day that 
 was to open the short, sharp, and decisive 
 conflict between their youthful vigour and that 
 Empire of ours which was, in Treitschke's words, 
 " wholly a sham." The day dawned, and every 
 German success was answered by an upward 
 bound of the British recruitment roll. In spite 
 of every War Office blunder, the young men 
 came pouring in. The generation which even 
 their fathers thought too much set upon amuse- 
 ment, showed that the moment they were con- 
 vinced of necessity they could give it up and 
 go to drill. The " soft " young man from 
 behind the counter took his place beside the 
 miner, the spinner, and the schoolmaster under
 
 24 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 canvas in the drenching autumn rains. The 
 Oxford undergraduate left his football and his 
 clubs to drill and be drilled. The city man 
 abandoned golf and motor-car and money- 
 making to get him ready for the front. We 
 elders see them day by day in the streets, men 
 strengthened by drill, fresh-faced and ruddy 
 with the open-air, clear-eyed, vigorous, and 
 happy as though no tragedy of parting lay 
 straight before them. Nor is theirs the courage 
 of ignorance. Every man of them has read 
 newspaper accounts by the score that tell them 
 that in the warfare of the trenches there is little 
 glory and much of frostbite, rheumatism, filth, 
 and fatigue all that is most repugnant to the 
 habits of civilisation. They know well what 
 they are about, and they make no tall talk about 
 it. When they get there they put off tragedy 
 with a joke, and salt the grimness of war with 
 the native wit of the London street. This is 
 not the temper of a few picked men, but of the 
 youth of England the last product of a hun- 
 dred years of general peace, the fourth generation 
 born in the lap of security, the sons and grand- 
 sons of men nine out of ten of whom never saw 
 a man killed in anger. * War may destroy the 
 virtues of peace, but peace cultivates the virtues
 
 DECADENCE OR REBARBARISATION ? 25 
 
 that are required in war. I As to the feats of 
 individuals, can any soldier deed of earlier days 
 match the flight over hostile territory to 
 Friederichshafen, or was ever a demand on 
 constancy and endurance of nerve to match 
 the unceasing watchfulness against torpedo or 
 mine that may at any moment send a whole 
 ship's company to the bottom without the 
 chance of a blow in self-defence ? These tests 
 of courage are higher and more exacting than 
 those of the older warfare. Not but that the 
 feats of those days are emulated. Did not a 
 handful of Frenchmen the other day hold a 
 dug-out close upon the enemy's lines for all 
 the world like D'Artagnan and the immortal 
 three at their breakfast in the Bastion St. 
 Gervais ? 
 
 Whatever else this war has done, let us 
 hope that for a time it has stopped the cant 
 of decadence. There are good things in civilisa- 
 tion which are often threatened with decay, 
 but physical vigour, courage, and enterprise 
 are the last qualities to be seriously endangered. 
 Before the war any cool-headed observer could 
 see that, whatever else might be threatened in 
 our time, it was not manhood, vigour, originality, 
 enterprise. Consider the art of flying alone,
 
 26 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 beyond reasonable question the most daring 
 experiment ever made by men, leaping from a 
 dream to a reality in five years, and yet re- 
 quiring the most consummate union of nerve, 
 skill and mechanical ingenuity. It is the gentle 
 and humaner elements of civilisation that are 
 more often in danger, and the cant of physical 
 decadence is at bottom a part of the campaign 
 waged against all progress in the peaceful arts 
 by the active and plausible advocates of rebar- 
 barisation. The triumph of this party is its 
 logical undoing. The test . of war has justi- 
 fied peace. Yet the victory is but for a day. 
 In the next generation it is likely that men will 
 be wondering if their sons can fight as they 
 did, if their boy who is so keen on golf (or 
 whatever be the substitute for golf in 1950) 
 and who smokes rather too many cigarettes, 
 could stand as they did in the trenches and joke 
 about Jack Johnsons as the huge shells dig their 
 craters near at hand. In 1950 as in 1914 there 
 will be those who lament that the old breed has 
 died out, that the hardy virtues of the fathers 
 have perished, that the poor are coddled, and 
 the sick cured, and the feeble kept alive, while 
 the strong have to bear the burden. Lamenting 
 over these signs of perishing manhood they
 
 DECADENCE OR REBARBARISATION ? 27 
 
 will look forward with apprehension to the day 
 when the rising military Power of the time 
 will challenge England's greatness and reveal 
 it for an image with feet of clay, and with 
 a sorrowful shake of the head the old men 
 will turn from the outward signs of a deca- 
 dent generation to the inward vision of those 
 glorious days of national youth and vigour when 
 George V was King.
 
 IV 
 THE IDEA OF LAW 
 
 IT is not physical decadence that threatens 
 civilisation ; it is not the loss of manliness and 
 vigour which has changed the face of the world, 
 and threatened us with debarbarisation. It is 
 always the more delicate elements of the 
 civilised fabric which are weakest, and yield 
 most easily to assault. It is the painfully won 
 tradition of fear and self-restraint that man 
 learns to impose on himself with so much 
 effort which, being in a sense an artificial fabric, 
 is ever liable to yield to the crude instincts of 
 naked self-assertion which it scarcely covers, 
 and with difficulty holds in. On this side there 
 has been a real weakening, of which we now 
 see the result. For, as has been said, the 
 European war was not a bolt from the blue. 
 It was rather the bursting of a long-gathered 
 storm. What was it, then, that had so charged 
 the world-atmosphere with electricity ? In 
 
 every nation there were elements of peaceful 
 
 28
 
 THE IDEA OF LAW 29 
 
 progress. There was a constant advance in 
 the conquest of material nature. There were 
 the germs slowly maturing of a better social 
 order. There was a humaner spirit in the 
 making and administration of law. There was 
 a reasonable prospect of achieving for a great 
 mass of mankind a better life and a fuller 
 opportunity. What turned men away from 
 these paths of peace and impelled them to 
 mutual destruction ? What causes produced 
 the unrest which, alongside this peaceful de- 
 velopment, we have seen growing year by year 
 till it culminated in the crash of 1914. Such 
 causes will be better analysed by the historian 
 fifty years hence, who will see the change from 
 a distance in truer perspective, but our ideas, 
 in turn, will be of value to him, and I shall try 
 here to give for what they are worth the im- 
 pressions of one observer. In the first place, 
 then, I think that during my own time there 
 has been a profound change of intellectual, or 
 possibly, one should say, of moral outlook. 
 The Victorian age believed in law and reason. 
 Its sons have come in large measure to believe 
 in violence, and in impulse, emotion, or instinct. 
 I do not mean, of course, that all Victorians 
 were rationalists, or that everybody at the
 
 30 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 present day is a follower of Nietzsche or a 
 disciple of M. Bergson. I mean simply that 
 during the last thirty or forty years new in- 
 fluences have arisen which, in almost every 
 field of thought, of ethics, of religion, of politics, 
 of literature, and even of art, have tended to 
 subvert an ideal which was gaining ground 
 during the Victorian era, and have replaced it 
 in the minds of many by its exact opposite. 
 Of course this has only been one of the influences 
 at work, but it has been a potent one, and it has 
 had much to do, as I think, with the unrest 
 that can be seen in so many parts of the world 
 and in so many different directions within the 
 life of every community. We are inclined to 
 laugh a little at Victorian respectability, with its 
 silk hats, its frock coats, and its church-going on 
 Sunday that produced such very slender results 
 between Monday morning and Saturday night. 
 These little externals are always a legitimate 
 theme of satire. But in its cult of outward 
 respectability, pharisaical as it may sometimes 
 have seemed, the Victorian age was essentially 
 true to itself. It was expressing outwardly 
 what it really felt the supreme value of an 
 idea. What was this idea, and how was it 
 expressed ? How was it lost, and what has
 
 THE IDEA OF LAW 31 
 
 replaced it ? are the questions which we must 
 ask if we would discover the difference between 
 the last age and our own. 
 
 Now, when we look back on the work of the 
 middle and later nineteenth century, we see one 
 principle, among others, making its way from 
 philosophic into popular thought, and reflected 
 in most diverse ways, and sometimes in un- 
 expected quarters. It is a little dangerous to 
 compress a pervasive idea into a single word, 
 but in a broad and general sense the idea 
 which I have in mind may be called the idea 
 of Law, or perhaps of Order. The idea of 
 Law in its Victorian incarnation, was the child 
 of science. Science had discovered uniform 
 relations in the physical world. It had followed 
 out the many wonderful ways in which this 
 uniformity runs through all manner of varia- 
 tions, and had given to its generalisations the 
 name of laws. There lay in the term a sugges- 
 tion that a refractory material could somehow 
 be tamed and rendered obedient to a scientific 
 prescription a false suggestion, out of which 
 intellectual trouble was bound to arise. But 
 for the time it, perhaps, heightened the sense 
 of scientific success. It was, in fact, a period 
 of great constructive achievement. The middle
 
 32 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 of the century saw the consolidation of the 
 laws of physical nature in the conception of 
 the Conservation of Energy, and a few more 
 years brought the first luminous hypothesis, 
 not, indeed, upon the origin but on the de- 
 velopment of life, and therewith of mind, of 
 consciousness, and of human society. It was 
 characteristic of the constructive spirit of the 
 times that this hypothesis rapidly became in 
 the minds of scientific men itself a " law " of 
 evolution. A guarded footnote here and there 
 might refer to its unproven character, but, in 
 reality, it very speedily became a dogma of 
 scientific orthodoxy, and the amplitude of its 
 range was illustrated in every nook and cranny 
 of investigation into all that belongs to the living 
 world. Thus the world of the dead and of the 
 living alike seemed to be reduced, or in process 
 of being reduced, to the realm of law. 
 
 It is most instructive for our purpose to 
 notice the bearing of this conception on religion 
 and ethics. The nineteenth century was a 
 period of great religious revival, partly within 
 the orthodox fold or folds, partly in more 
 original experiments. Now the idea of law 
 came into collision with orthodoxy on the 
 question of the miraculous, and it so far carried
 
 THE IDEA OF LAW 33 
 
 the field that the miraculous element from being 
 a support of belief rapidly became a serious 
 difficulty. It may be pretty confidently laid 
 down that no modern apologist who knows the 
 elements of his business would any longer 
 adduce a miraculous event as evidence of a 
 supernatural intervention. But the implica- 
 tions of the scientific criticism went further. 
 Evolutionary ideas were unsympathetic to any 
 sort of special revelation. They treated religion 
 as the product of anterior mundane causes, 
 intellectual, social, or whatever they might be. 
 More than this, the doctrine of natural selection 
 undercut the principal argument of natural 
 theology the argument from design for it 
 suggested a method whereby the apparently 
 purposive structure of the eye or the ear (or 
 for that matter, of the brain and the living 
 consciousness of mankind) might grow up 
 through a series of physical causes in which 
 there was nowhere a spark of intelligent 
 foresight. 
 
 Yet, in spite of all this conflict, the most 
 instructive thing to my mind in the attitude 
 of philosophic science towards orthodox religion 
 in the latter half of the nineteenth century, is 
 not its antagonism, but its secret sympathy.
 
 34 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 If science stood for law in one sense, it half 
 consciously recognised that Christianity stood 
 for law in another for law in the positive order 
 of life that men had built up for themselves. 
 What would happen if this fabric should dis- 
 appear was not certain, and there was, in 
 consequence, an anxiety to preserve the ethical 
 edifice while destroying the theological sub- 
 structure. The permanence of the Christian 
 virtues was upheld as against the transitory 
 and external nature of supernatural beliefs. 
 The doctrine of personal salvation had been 
 the merely provisional support of a spirit of 
 altruism, of gentleness, of self-surrender, that 
 was permanently necessary to humanity. No 
 writer of the time brought out this view more 
 strongly than George Eliot, and the discredit 
 and oblivion into which her work has fallen is 
 an interesting evidence of the change that has 
 come about in the outlook of our generation. 
 George Eliot, in reality, has one theme through- 
 out her stories. Her method is wholly scientific 
 in spirit. It is a repeated attempt to show in 
 the concrete case, how the wheels of life turn, 
 and, in particular, how the characteristics of 
 men and women work out to the salvation or 
 damnation of their own lives and those of
 
 THE IDEA OF LAW 35 
 
 others. In her greatest effort in this direction, 
 " Middlemarch," the attempt is made to show 
 the interweaving of these moral forces through- 
 out the life of an entire neighbourhood. The 
 result is a justification of all that it was then 
 usual to sum up in the word altruism, which 
 for this generation it is necessary to translate 
 as meaning living for others, and for this 
 justification George Eliot has been damned by 
 those that have come after her. I am not con- 
 cerned to uphold George Eliot, who will ulti- 
 mately regain her place without the help of 
 critics, but to illustrate the change in the 
 temper of a generation. We have here a 
 writer who is in the middle of the stream of 
 Victorian philosophy and science, the friend of 
 Herbert Spencer, wife of G. H. Lewes, translator 
 of Strauss. Yet her purpose is constructive, 
 and in the deepest sense conservative. She 
 upholds the traditional virtues, she insists on 
 order and obedience. She is permeated by the 
 sense of a law of life and the conviction that 
 those who hold by it resolutely will win through, 
 will save their own souls, and bring in others 
 with them. Man will master his fate provided 
 he seeks mastery in the way appointed by 
 science, of obedience to immutable law. It is
 
 36 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 interesting to contrast her view with that of 
 Thomas Hardy a generation later. Hardy is 
 also concerned with cause andeffect in human 
 life. His tragedies are also the unfolding of 
 germs, the inexorable development of conse- 
 quences from actions. But in Hardy there is 
 an element of fatality that intervenes, just at 
 the point where human will and reason might 
 set things right, a god from the machine who 
 comes upon the stage in trivial guise, not to 
 cut the knot but to arrest the hand that was 
 about to untie it. Life is with him an ever 
 renewed, ever frustrated purpose. Now this 
 pessimism marked the beginning of a change. 
 It expressed the growing sense of that cleavage 
 between " natural law," as formulated in the 
 evolution theory, and moral or spiritual law as 
 upheld by the old tradition the cleavage 
 incisively formulated by Huxley in his well- 
 known lecture on Evolution and Ethics, the 
 cleavage which, never appreciated by Herbert 
 Spencer, destroyed the elaborate reconstruction 
 of ethics which he essayed. For more and 
 more as the formulae of evolution became 
 popular, and gathered about them all the loose 
 and unscientific accretions that belong to 
 the language of a half-educated society, they
 
 THE IDEA OF LAW 37 
 
 spread the belief that for " science " progress 
 was the child of strife, and, therefore, of self- 
 assertion, hardness, and moral anarchy. Science 
 was deemed to have slain not merely the 
 Christian God, but the Christian ethics, the 
 essentials of which the Victorians had upheld 
 on rational grounds, and in the name of 
 Humanity. So at this stage, the two kinds of 
 law, which we saw above working together in 
 harmony, have fallen asunder. There is law 
 in the natural world, but it seems to involve 
 a denial of the deepest laws of the spiritual 
 world. Love and hate, said an ancient thinker, 
 are the forces that move the universe. The 
 modern found love, except as a reproductive 
 instinct, a mere encumbrance. It was by 
 fighting for its own hand that the living being 
 at every stage maintained itself, and moved 
 on to higher types.
 
 THE REVOLT 
 
 THE biological theory which was the crowning 
 glory of nineteenth-century science could be 
 interpreted as a justification of force and self- 
 assertion. It then became a theory of revolt 
 against law and morals, and more particularly 
 against the morals of Christianity. The man 
 who first grasped its full possibilities in this 
 direction was Nietzsche. What is most signifi- 
 cant for our purpose is that the revolt which 
 Nietzsche initiated was directed not merely 
 against Christianity, nor merely against morals 
 or all that side of morals which enforces gentle- 
 ness, restraint, and peace but against law in 
 general, law in both its senses. His superman 
 will no more admit of intellectual than of moral 
 restraint. Far from being in the Baconian 
 phrase which any Victorian would have taken 
 as his motto, " the minister and interpreter" of 
 nature, it was his business to be minister and 
 interpreter of himself. He formulated scientific 
 laws for his own satisfaction. 
 
 38
 
 THE REVOLT 39 
 
 Nietzsche was, in fact, a Pragmatist in every- 
 thing but name. His superman could not 
 endure the idea of gods, because they would be 
 beings above him. Then there are no gods, he 
 concludes. In the same way the notion of 
 waiting on Nature and learning from her is 
 repugnant. Scientific laws for Nietzsche are by 
 no means the result of humble, patient inquiry. 
 They are simply the output of the will to know, 
 the will to render things intelligible. We are 
 almost prepared to hear that they are imposed 
 on Nature by the fiat of the scientific man. As 
 Pragmatism developed under criticism its ex- 
 ponents had sorrowfully to admit that there 
 was a core of reality which they could neither 
 make nor unmake, but subject to that limiting 
 condition they insist always on the element of 
 choice, of interest, of emotion, in the making of 
 that world of knowledge which the vain Victorian 
 had supposed to be objective. Men were no 
 longer to be led to conclusions by force of 
 argument, but to choose their arguments, find 
 the conclusions they desired, and " validate " 
 them, that is make them good under the test of 
 experience if they could possibly do so. Belief 
 in anything from the truth of religion to the 
 admission that I have a headache was at bottom
 
 40 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 a matter of will, and just as by resolution I may 
 perhaps avert the headache, so by a larger and 
 more comprehensive act of will I might become 
 seized of more important truths. Unfortunately 
 for this argument it was necessary not only that 
 my belief should depend on my choice, but that 
 the reality itself should somehow be constituted 
 as I chose to think it, and this was a paradox 
 which even the Pragmatist recognised to be too 
 strong for him. 
 
 Pragmatism, though it had its disciples in 
 Germany, England and America, was a fleeting 
 moment in modern thought, but the same 
 impulse that gave it birth secured in later years 
 the popularity of Mons. Bergson's philosophy, 
 Here again the essential point is the feebleness 
 of reason, the arbitrary and unreal character of 
 scientific law, the primariness of impulse, the 
 superiority of instinct to rational purpose, the 
 glorification of movement without vision. It 
 was not without reason that M. Bergson was 
 claimed by the Syndicalists as their philosopher, 
 though in point of fact his philosophy would serve 
 equally well for anyone who was very much bent 
 upon asserting himself, expressing his emotions, 
 and doing something big without precisely know- 
 iiig what was to come of it. The point of interest
 
 THE REVOLT 41 
 
 for the moment is that alike in Bergsonism and 
 in Pragmatism, that is in both the schools of 
 philosophy that have been popular in all 
 the nations of late years, we have had the 
 completest possible reaction against the ideas 
 of the nineteenth century. We have an extra- 
 ordinary exaltation of the human will, and in 
 particular of those elements underlying the 
 will which man shares with the animal world, 
 emotion, impulse, instinct. Instead of sub- 
 duing them to reason, conscience and law, we 
 are bidden rather to confide ourselves to them 
 and let them carry us whithersoever they will. 
 
 Philosophy, though it does not like to think 
 so, is in fact always influenced profoundly by the 
 position of contemporary science, its achieve- 
 ments and its failures. Now, in the sciences the 
 last twenty years have provided us with a series 
 of revolutions more startling than any the world 
 has witnessed since the days of Copernicus and 
 Galileo. The most stable elements in the 
 physical world have been shaken under our feet. 
 The conception of matter itself has been called 
 in question, no longer by a dreamy, philosophic 
 mysticism but in the investigations of the 
 laboratory. In place of the seventy or more 
 fixed elements with which the Victorian chemist
 
 42 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 set out, in place of the eternal and indestructible 
 atom which underlay those elements, we have 
 had a conception of the whirl of energies, a 
 shifting scene of interfused forces whose play 
 makes up the appearance of solidity and sub- 
 stantiality. Matter, the hardest and firmest of 
 all the concepts of common-sense, seems to the 
 plain man to have evaporated into abstractions. 
 No longer does it provide a firm starting-point 
 for a mechanical view of the world. Its evolu- 
 tions and transformations appear to make every- 
 thing possible. The boundaries of the miracu- 
 lous have receded. What wonder if the notion 
 of the fixity of law is shaken and people are 
 ready to believe that anything may happen. 
 Even mathematics has not escaped the spirit 
 of the time. Euclid, whom, as boys, we were 
 set to study, in spite of his appalling dryness, 
 as the model of rigid reasoning and the pattern 
 of precise thinking, is now accused of redundant 
 and defective proofs in some of his simplest 
 propositions ; his definitions are shown to 
 assume the point at issue ; his axioms are called 
 in question ; it is shown to be possible to con- 
 struct consistent geometries which negate his 
 postulates and contradict the assumptions which 
 we were told in old days were primary principles
 
 THE REVOLT 43 
 
 based on the constitution of the human mind, 
 revealed as self-evident to intuition. Lastly, 
 in the science of life, the generalisations which 
 were the crowning glory of the Victorian epoch 
 have broken down. The attempt to explain 
 life by a continuous evolution based on accidental 
 variation has been discarded. Darwinism, at 
 least in the specific form which it took towards 
 the close of the century, is held to be dead, and 
 in its latest incarnations the entire evolutionary 
 theory seems to have come into a position in 
 which it will have to choose between some form 
 of teleological principle and admitted bank- 
 ruptcy. Thus on all sides in physical science 
 there has been a tremendous disruption of old 
 ideas, an expansion of outlook from which, in the 
 end, an infinitely wider and deeper philosophy 
 of science must arise, but which in the mean- 
 while has served to shake the foundations, to 
 diminish confidence in the positions which 
 science conceives itself to have attained, and 
 therewith to give an opening to those who 
 attack ratiocination in general as an instrument 
 of truth. 
 
 The revolution in science and philosophy has 
 its parallel in every region of thought and 
 action. In literature, we have noted the moral
 
 44 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 conservatism of the Victorian age, with its exalta- 
 tion of self-sacrifice and all the traditional virtues 
 as means not to salvation in another life but to 
 social harmony in this life. The contemporary 
 hero wants to live his own life and the contem- 
 porary heroine to live hers. Instead of marry- 
 ing in the last chapter and living happily ever 
 after they marry in the first chapter and make 
 a mess of it. Instead of being devoted to each 
 other they are devoted to themselves. All this 
 may or may not be more true to life. The 
 Victorian romance may have been senti- 
 mentalism, its standards of honour may have 
 been conventional, its notions of duty hollow. 
 The robust criminals who are now held up to 
 admiration may or may not have more manhood 
 in them than the Colonel Newcomes whom the 
 older generation admired. I merely note the 
 change of thought which has placed the human 
 ego in the front of the stage, stripped off all 
 idealism as mere paint and flummery, and 
 taught us how to honour in unscrupulous 
 selfishness the sincere expression of human 
 nature as it really is. Fear, weakness, indecision 
 here is the one vice. Be strong, have courage 
 to be what you are, do what you have in you 
 to do, these are variants of the one law, It is
 
 THE REVOLT 45 
 
 not a law which allows for compunction, 
 mutual forbearance, or the nice complexities of 
 the social structure. 
 
 The revolution in art and art criticism follows 
 the same curve. The most vital school of the 
 Victorian age made the artist Nature's faithful 
 servant and follower. Fidelity to truth, carried 
 often enough to a prosaic exposition of detail, 
 was the watchward of pre-Raphaelitism. Sin- 
 cerity, fidelity, truthfulness are the foundations 
 of Ruskin's teaching, and make for him the 
 link between art, morals and science. The 
 artist certainly was to paint what he saw, but 
 his first duty was to learn to see. He was to 
 find out, to accept in a spirit of submission, what 
 was really in the object, and try in all conscien- 
 tiousness to render it. As to expressing himself, 
 to say nothing of his temporary and fleeting 
 emotions, that was to court excommunication. 
 Notwithstanding Morris and Medievalism, not- 
 withstanding all protests against machinery and 
 the modern spirit,we can easily realise, on looking 
 back in the art world of the Victorian age, the 
 same ideas as in its science and its philosophy 
 the idea of " man the minister and interpreter of 
 nature," the idea of his necessary submission to 
 inexorable law, the idea of a final conquest, an
 
 46 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 ordered peace, and repose ensuing through sub- 
 mission. 
 
 Now all this has been revolutionised. First 
 we had the doctrine that a man should not paint 
 what is there, but what he sees, and not what 
 he sees if he looks long enough, but rather what 
 he can see at a glance. But even this was too 
 objective for the new age, and gave way to the 
 theory that the only thing worthy of a man is 
 to paint what he feels. Landscape or human 
 face, tree, valley, mountain and river exist only 
 to excite in him emotions, often apparently of 
 indescribably painful character and tangled 
 meaning, which he proceeds to transfer to 
 canvas. The picture need be no more like the 
 original than a tree is like the painful internal 
 sensation to which it apparently gives rise in 
 some painters. The artist's business is ever the 
 same to express himself in his moving and 
 changeful moods, and despise alike nature and 
 the critic. If he aims at anything, it should be 
 violence. If he despises anything on principle 
 it should be beauty. If he persistently abhors 
 anything it is repose. Noise is to be the note of 
 music ; glaring contrast and flaunting incon- 
 gruity of painting. 
 
 In practical and political life again we see
 
 THE REVOLT 47 
 
 the same contrast. The law in which the 
 Victorians believed was the law of nations as 
 well as the law of nature. In Great Britain, 
 above all, settled confidence in the established 
 order was common ground to all parties at least 
 after the middle of the century. The days of 
 storm and stress were over. Freedom was 
 broadening slowly down, but always by the 
 enlargement of the sphere of law. It moved 
 strictly, and by no merely poetical metaphor, 
 from precedent to precedent. Democracy was 
 accepted by the governing classes, and demo- 
 cracy on its side had accepted the Constitution. 
 There might be great, even fundamental changes 
 in the future, but they would all be changes 
 made in due process of law. The governing 
 classes had thoroughly taught the people the 
 lessons of constitutionalism, and would abide 
 by their own teaching without a murmur if it 
 should so happen that it were turned to uses 
 which they might dislike. The most respected 
 of constitutional text-books showed how the 
 supremacy of law was the very inner citadel 
 of British political life. They showed how, by a 
 wise preservation of forms, continuity had been 
 maintained, orderly development secured, the 
 necessity for change reconciled with regard for
 
 48 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 the past, the prerogatives of the Crown converted 
 into rights of the people. 
 
 Now, before the present war had broken out, 
 all this had come to seem very remote. A com- 
 plete change of temper had occurred in our 
 political life. The pace had become too quick 
 for the slow movement of the Governmental 
 machine. Year in and year out people insisted 
 more and more that men must trust to them- 
 selves and rely on strength to gain what they 
 would never win by persuasion. It was useless, 
 they maintained, to appeal to justice. Legality 
 and constitutionalism were outworn ideas that 
 served merely to stave off decisions. Men must 
 fight for their rights, and equally women for 
 theirs. They should never expect to convince 
 an opponent or a neutral, but let them make 
 themselves sufficiently unpleasant and opposi- 
 tion would finally collapse. It did not matter 
 whether the cause were conservative or revo- 
 lutionary, aristocratic or democratic. The 
 method was to be the same. It might be the 
 red terror or the white terror, but terror was the 
 only weapon that sensible men would use. Not 
 that physical violence was in all cases necessary. 
 That lay in the background. In the interval, 
 every method of annoyance was good provided
 
 THE REVOLT 49 
 
 it was unrelenting and inventive in its malice. 
 These were rapidly becoming the maxims of all 
 parties, who agreed in nothing but the repudia- 
 tion of that constitutionalism which a generation 
 before all had united to uphold. But perhaps 
 the most instructive illustration may be drawn 
 from the world of labour. The Victorian age 
 knew a revolutionary as well as a " tame " 
 socialism. But even the revolutionary socialism, 
 whether in Germany or England or France, was 
 to make use of the State. One bold act of 
 violence might be required, or it might be that 
 by the extension of the suffrage even this single 
 departure from legality might be rendered super- 
 fluous. At any rate, the object of Socialism 
 was to capture the machinery of law and govern- 
 ment and use it for its own purposes. It did 
 not disbelieve in government. It believed in it 
 perhaps too much. All the more extraordinary 
 was the change of temper revealed in the rapid 
 upgrowth of Syndicalism, which was essentially 
 an appeal to each industrial interest to act for 
 itself, which rested on a deep distrust not only 
 of governmental machinery, but of political 
 leaders, and not only of political leaders, but of 
 labour leaders as well. For as these newer 
 ideas spread, workmen began to revolt against
 
 50 
 
 their own chiefs, and strikes were directed 
 not merely against employers, but against 
 union officials, while the idea of scoring a party 
 victory by making the public suffer became 
 increasingly popular with every symptom of 
 success. 
 
 The idea of violence was in the air, then, in 
 the years before the war ; and it was not merely 
 the violence that comes naturally from despair 
 of all legal remedy. There was a deliberate 
 theory of force. Men were being taught not to 
 look too far ahead, not to wait till they could 
 see where they were going, not to follow de- 
 liberately a reasoned policy, but rather to throw 
 themselves on instinct, to strike a blow which 
 should smash something and make an echo in 
 the world even if they did not quite know what 
 they were breaking or what would follow. 
 They were above all things to be strong, and not 
 let the native hue of resolution be sicklied o'er 
 by the pale cast of thought. This was to be 
 guided by the vital impulse, which was above 
 rationality and superior to any deliberate pur- 
 pose. To feel this impulse in one was to be at 
 the centre of things ; to follow it to play the 
 part of a man. To stop and think was to check 
 the well-springs of energy. Rationality, science,
 
 THE REVOLT 51 
 
 philosophy as an intellectual interpretation of 
 the world, were relatively superficial and illusory. 
 If the pragmatists took us back from reason to 
 will, this philosophy carried us a step further 
 on the line of retrogression from will to the in- 
 stincts, emotions, and impulses which man 
 shares with the brute creation. It was not, 
 indeed, like Nietzsche's teaching, egoistic and 
 therefore anti-social, but it was irrationalist. 
 The old order of values was reversed. Reason, 
 that we were taught for ages to place at the 
 summit of human faculty, was degraded, and 
 instinct, which men spent painful generations 
 in seeking to subdue, was set upon the throne. 
 I do not know how much such philosophising 
 has actually formed the character of our genera- 
 tion, but we can easily see that it was a philo- 
 sophy most appropriate to a generation which 
 was rushing headlong upon disaster.
 
 VI 
 THE TEMPER OF AGGRESSION 
 
 IT is a mistake to suppose that ideas of world 
 domination based on racial superiority backed 
 by military force are the peculiar product of 
 the German mind. That any such suggestion 
 is possible in England only shows how short 
 are the political memories of men. It is less 
 than twenty years since very similar notions 
 enjoyed a brief but disastrous ascendancy in 
 this country, under the name of Imperialism. 
 We, too, were swayed by prophets who told us 
 that the Anglo-Saxon was the greatest of all 
 races, that it was endowed with a superlative 
 faculty for governing, that it was pre-eminent 
 in the love of liberty, and should prove it by 
 imposing its ideas of liberty on other peoples. 
 We, too, were assured that it was our manifest 
 destiny to enter into the heritage of the " dying 
 nations," that it was our stern duty to take 
 up the white man's burden of imbuing the 
 savage with a sense of the dignity of labour.
 
 THE TEMPER OF AGGRESSION 53 
 
 We, too, were intoxicated with the progress 
 of a hundred years, with successful commerce, 
 growing wealth, and the pride of a history which 
 since 1783 had known no lasting defeat. Fortun- 
 ately for us and for Europe we took the disease 
 in a mild form. It took us into the South 
 African War, and the war provided the cure. 
 We obtained a military victory through the 
 employment of overwhelming force, but we 
 became perfectly aware that we had come up 
 against a race man for man as good as ourselves. 
 We learned that liberty and national right 
 were not unmeaning names. We saw into the 
 baser uses to which an " Imperial mission" 
 might be put, and the better tradition of the 
 people reasserted itself. We fell back into 
 the British habit of mind which dislikes self- 
 exaltation and desires to live and let live. 
 We turned again to the domestic problems 
 which the epoch of Imperialism had left in 
 suspension. 
 
 Meanwhile in Germany very similar forces 
 had been gathering strength. There was the 
 same racial pride swollen by nearer and greater 
 victories. The same confidence in the virtues 
 of German culture, the same enthusiasm for 
 the idea of spreading it by force if necessary
 
 54 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 among the lesser breeds, the same disbelief in 
 any restraining law. Aggressive militarism is 
 a disease incidental to a period of disbelief 
 in law. But Germany took it worse than we 
 did for reasons partly historical, partly geo- 
 graphical. Indeed, with Germany, it should 
 not be called a disease. Belief in the militant 
 state is rather the natural expression of the 
 normal life of Germany. Among Liberal nations 
 the antinomian doctrines that we have described 
 were annoying and ridiculous rather than a 
 source of vital danger. They stood in the way 
 of progress. They impeded the orderly develop- 
 ment of democracy, but they did not provide 
 a new and positive focus for the energies of the 
 people. In Germany they stand in organic 
 connection with the whole history of her national 
 development. The dominant State philosophies 
 in that country have been consciously framed 
 in reaction against the Liberal theories of 
 democracy and humanity. They associated 
 themselves with the rise of the nation under 
 Prussia, for German nationhood was won not 
 by democratic ardour but by acquiescence in 
 the conception of a military power. The 
 Hegelian philosophy deified the State, and by 
 making it the embodiment of the rational will,
 
 THE TEMPER OF AGGRESSION 55 
 
 gave it an authority over the individual which 
 relegated the free exercise of thought, the 
 rights of conscience, and the claims of personal- 
 ity to a subordinate position. It set up the 
 State as the highest form of human association, 
 admitted war as a permanent and necessary 
 feature of its life and turned resolutely away 
 from the gospel of peace and humanity which 
 had been preached by Kant. In Hegel the 
 State is still the incarnation of a spiritual ideal, 
 but in Treitschke, apparently the most influen- 
 tial figure in the world of academic politics 
 after 1870, the State is identified with force, 
 and though it is still to have a moral aim, yet 
 no aim for a conquering State can be so high 
 as the extension of its own power. It is indeed 
 a strange and gloomy religion that is preached 
 in Treitschke's " Politik." There is a Puritanic 
 rejection of all the elements of joy, happiness, 
 repose in life. Man's business is to strive, but 
 he is to strive neither in the service of God, nor 
 of mankind, nor of his own soul. He is to strive 
 in the service of power, that is, as the citizen 
 of an organised, controlled and armed State, 
 which is the highest human incarnation of 
 power. It is drill that has made the Germans 
 what they are, the hard service of hard masters
 
 56 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 from the Great Elector onwards. It is war that 
 is to be for ever the dreadful medicine of 
 humanity. The anarchism of Nietzsche might 
 have seemed destined to destroy this State 
 religion indeed Nietzsche himself would fain 
 have done so, for his invectives against the 
 Prussian State are as poignant as his arraign- 
 ment of Christianity or of humility but in 
 reality Nietzsche put the finishing touch to 
 German psychology, for he destroyed the moral 
 restraints against which power chafed. No 
 doubt he acted in the interest of the individual 
 but the result accrued to the State philosophy. 
 Thus, while elsewhere the disruption of moral 
 bonds produced political, literary or artistic 
 eccentricities, which in the end were bound 
 to correct themselves, in Germany it removed the 
 feeble barriers which stood between an avalanche 
 and a peaceful world. Hegel's divine State, 
 Treitschke's power, Nietzsche's contempt 
 of restraint are fused together in the faith 
 which animates the governing classes of Ger- 
 many, political, military and academic fused 
 in the medium of some misty conception of the 
 progress of mankind through competition and 
 the fated superiority of the German race. This 
 faith has been fostered in Germany by her
 
 THE TEMPER OF AGGRESSION 57 
 
 political and economic position. She had no 
 colonial empire worthy of the name. A late 
 comer among the nations, she found all the 
 places " in the sun " already occupied. Boxed 
 up in Central Europe, with a defective coastline 
 on the Baltic and a bare egress to the ocean, 
 she saw the natural outlets of her growing 
 energies closed by two small peoples and an 
 island Power behind them. France, whom she 
 had defeated, was building up a great African 
 Empire. England, whom she despised as un- 
 military, possessed a quarter of the world's 
 population. She looked to the ocean and saw 
 the British Fleet guarding the way. She looked 
 eastwards and saw Russia regaining strength 
 after the disasters in Manchuria. She looked 
 south-east and discovered possibilities of ex- 
 pansion in the decay of Turkey only to see 
 them blocked by the rise of military Powers 
 in the Balkan States. A sense of immense 
 energy held in magic bonds possessed her. 
 With an effort she could surely break them, 
 for they were magical, not real. In part 
 they were fetters of law and honour, like the 
 independence of Belgium. But the divine State 
 knew no superior. It was bound by no law. 
 Of its honour it was the judge, Treaties only
 
 58 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 held as long as circumstances remained the same, 
 and the fact that there was a strong desire to 
 break them showed that circumstances had 
 changed. England's military force was negli- 
 gible. France had been beaten once, and might 
 be beaten again. Russia could be held back 
 till she was isolated, and then would make 
 peace. Germany would dominate Europe and 
 become a world-Power, if not indeed the world- 
 Power. Then the state of the world would 
 reflect the true relation of forces which at 
 present it utterly distorted. As long as the 
 strongest of all the Powers was boxed up vir- 
 tually within its own territory there must be 
 all the unrest that belongs to a radically false 
 position. 
 
 It was open to a moderately minded Ger- 
 man to argue forcibly enough against these 
 contentions, and no doubt many did so argue. 
 " We have, after all, done pretty well," they 
 might say. " We have secured a commercial 
 expansion far more rapid than that of any 
 contemporary nation. We have grown rich, 
 and that quickly. It is true that our own 
 markets are limited, but by business efficiency 
 we secure plenty of trade in the markets of 
 other countries, and England, the special object
 
 THE TEMPER OF AGGRESSION 59 
 
 of jealousy, is after all a Free Trade country 
 where we can compete on equal terms with the 
 domestic producer." But all argument of this 
 kind was written down as materialistic. Ger- 
 mans in other countries ceased to be Germans. 
 They no longer swelled the might and majesty 
 of the Fatherland. If this did not appeal there 
 was always another argument for the benefit 
 of the least bellicose, and in particular of the 
 Social Democrat. Germany had an enemy on 
 her eastern front, less civilised, less indus- 
 trial, above all given over to ideals of absolute 
 autocracy. The fear of Tsarism silenced those 
 who were least disposed to be excited by 
 dreams of nationalist ambition. There are 
 those who maintain that fear was the real 
 cause of the war. There are those who ascribe 
 it to ambition. The truth is that these are but 
 two sides of one and the same strain in national 
 psychology. The very same mood of nervous 
 excitability which on the crest of the wave is 
 all boastfulness and aggression drops in its 
 trough to a shivering apprehensiveness ; and 
 the outcome in both cases is the same arm 
 and get in your blow first. 
 
 How far this mood might have been modi- 
 fied by a different attitude on the part of the
 
 60 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 European Powers, and in particular of this 
 country, it is now impossible to say. It is 
 a study in the science of hypothetics moving 
 in the dim region of the might have been. 
 So far as it was a league of peace, the Triple 
 Entente failed. Would any other policy have 
 succeeded ? We can easily understand that 
 the formation and the strengthening of the 
 Entente was a potent argument in the mouth 
 of the German militarist. If he could keep the 
 Pacifist and the Social Democrat under by 
 appealing to the fear of Russia, so he could 
 check the doubts and hesitations of the ordinary 
 moderate man by a reference to " hemming in." 
 The formation of the Triple Entente merely 
 emphasised those natural disabilities of geo- 
 graphy which we find at the root of German 
 unrest. They translated the physical possibil- 
 ities of the position into positive political fact. 
 At least, they could be so represented by the 
 German militant. A moderate might, indeed, 
 have asked whether, after all, England was so 
 averse to German expansion. Was she not, 
 for example, ready to make easy arrangements 
 with regard to the Bagdad Railway, and did 
 she not on the Albanian question show a readi- 
 ness to work with Germany herself in the interest
 
 THE TEMPER OF AGGRESSION 61 
 
 of European peace ? These, however, were 
 secondary points, and would only appeal to 
 men sincerely anxious for a peaceful solution 
 and ready to give credit to antagonists. To 
 the average German the alliance of England 
 with Russia and France wore an appearance of 
 hostility, and barely concealed a menace. It 
 disposed him to believe when the militarist 
 assured him that he must be prepared to meet 
 the world in arms and that the choice lay 
 between world empire and national humiliation. 
 Probably the circumstances attending our par- 
 ticipation in the war have only strengthened 
 this disposition. For it was the vice of the 
 Triple Entente that it reposed on no specific 
 terms. No one knew, not even our own Foreign 
 Office, to what precisely we stood morally com- 
 mitted. It was not known on what terms we 
 should fight, and Sir E. Grey found it apparently 
 impossible to say on what terms we should 
 remain neutral. German statesmen rapidly 
 made up their minds that we should fight 
 whatever they did, so that it was not worth 
 while to forfeit any immediate advantage in 
 the hope of securing our neutrality. Our habit 
 of leaving things undefined has its drawbacks. 
 In sum, we can see that the policy of the Allies
 
 62 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 played on German political psychology in such a 
 way as to reinforce the elements the mingled 
 ambitions and anxieties that were making 
 for war. Whether if it had been guided by 
 archangels it could have radically modified 
 that psychology and so averted war it is im- 
 possible to say. Germany was in the mood 
 to take concession as an evidence of timidity, 
 and when that spirit has once arisen the hour 
 of the statesman is already passing. Germany 
 was in the position of an unrecognised man of 
 capacity, conscious of power, resentful of pov- 
 erty. Such a man is ready to throw off scruples 
 and listen to those who bid the strong take 
 what they can get. Germany had many men 
 of mark to preach this gospel to her, and she 
 listened with willing ears.
 
 VII 
 THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONALISM 
 
 NATIONALITY, Mr. Lowes Dickinson has lately 
 said, is a Janus. It looks both ways towards 
 freedom and towards aggression. The struggles 
 of subject nationalities with oppressors and 
 conquerors have filled a great chapter in the 
 history of freedom. Yet nationalities that have 
 become free have often gone on to enslave 
 others. A nationality feels itself to be one. 
 It also feels itself or fancies itself to be unique, 
 and as it can tolerate no superior, so when it 
 has sufficient strength it is not very ready to 
 tolerate an equal. It requires a very perfect 
 drilling in principles of liberty to impose 
 voluntary restraint on a nationality conscious 
 of power. Hence the rise of nationality, essential 
 in its first stages to political liberty for, think 
 what we may of it, national sentiment is a hard 
 fact, and will not be kept under except by coer- 
 cion is also a permanent menace to peace and 
 order. It is in particular the rise of nationality 
 
 63
 
 64 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 in Europe that has caused the succession 
 of wars since 1815. Indeed we ought to go 
 back to 1793 and say that it was the assertion 
 of French nationality, rinding itself for the 
 first time in the Revolution and seeking to 
 impose its type on Europe, that gradually called 
 forth by reaction the national sentiment of one 
 European people after another. The nineteenth 
 century witnessed the successful emergence of 
 two great nationalities, the German and the 
 Italian, into consolidated political States, the 
 successful claim of Magyar nationality to equality 
 and internal independence, the liberation of 
 Greece, the failure of Poland, and the partial 
 success of Ireland. The later years of the 
 nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth 
 century have seen the rise of the Slav nation- 
 alities into political prominence, and the problems 
 arising out of this last movement have provided 
 the occasion and in part the cause of the present 
 war. 
 
 Few if any European States correspond 
 accurately to national boundaries. But partly 
 through grants of autonomy or through Federal 
 or quasi-Federal arrangements, partly by trans- 
 fers of territory, partly through a greater 
 liberality in internal government, which tends
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONALISM 65 
 
 to conciliate and so to overcome differences, 
 there has been on the whole a tendency for the 
 State and the nationality to coincide. Thus 
 the typical State of the modern world is coming 
 to be more and more a national State. Great 
 Britain, though comprising many racial strains, 
 though including three peoples that nourish a 
 strong and distinctive sentiment of patriotism, 
 has yet been for many generations a true 
 national unity. Scots, Welsh and English are 
 all clearly one in sentiment as against the rest 
 of the world. It is the general belief and hope 
 that liberal measures have similarly incorpor- 
 ated Irish sentiment in a true national unity 
 common to the United Kingdom. France has 
 long been such a unity, though lacerated at 
 one point by the forcible tearing away of 
 two provinces. Germany includes Poles, some 
 Danes, and Alsace-Lorraine, but for the rest is 
 preponderantly German and permeated with 
 an intense feeling for national unity. Italy is 
 all Italian, though she does not include all 
 Italians. All such States have elements of 
 strength which Austria-Hungary, for example, 
 wholly lacks. It is this fusion of living senti- 
 ment permeating the whole or the great majority 
 
 of the population which gives to the State 
 
 E
 
 66 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 a new power and a new unity. Patriotism has 
 become a more general a more spontaneous 
 and a deeper feeling. The State has penetrated 
 further and more sympathetically into private 
 life than of old. Government no longer means 
 in the concrete a king, a nobility, and a mer- 
 cenary army that takes taxes, administers 
 justice, and levies dynastic wars. It is much 
 more truly an organisation of the common life, 
 and this is no less true in semi-autocratic Ger- 
 many than in semi-democratic England. Thus 
 the national consciousness and the State con- 
 sciousness have come to be one and the same 
 thing. Each people has felt itself more at one, 
 and at the same time has drawn the line more 
 definitely between itself and others. 
 
 It is this heightening of national unity 
 which has wrecked the peace programme of 
 the old Manchester School. Cobden and Bright, 
 whom it is the fashion to disparage as material- 
 ists, were in reality men of a broad spiritual 
 vision. They saw a world becoming more inti- 
 mately connected in all its parts by the growth 
 of communication. They saw a peaceful com- 
 merce not only as an end in itself but as a means 
 to the development of a real sense of human 
 unity. They taught and Mr. Norman Angell,
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONALISM 67 
 
 whose work has been most unjustly decried 
 in the same terms, sought to revive their teach- 
 ing that separate national self-interest was not 
 only wrong but illusory. They showed that in 
 exchange advantage was mutual, that in the 
 end Germany was not to lose by England's 
 wealth, nor England to become poorer through 
 German's expansion. They showed that Pro- 
 tectionism, avowedly an expression of national 
 selfishness, was also a policy of class and even 
 of individual selfishness. Their appeal was 
 always to the truest interest of the widest com- 
 munity. In every tariff controversy the Pro- 
 tectionist always has the best of it as long as 
 the argument is conducted on the lines of appeal 
 to particular interests. The Free Trader has 
 always to bring the argument back to the 
 interest of trade as a whole, and even of the 
 world as a whole. Now Cobden and Bright 
 were sanguine men who trusted much to human 
 rationality. They believed that as Lancashire 
 had followed them and as England had followed 
 Lancashire, so by degrees the world would follow 
 England, and they looked forward accordingly 
 to a reign of Free Trade and peace. In this 
 they were mistaken, but in the principle under- 
 lying their argument they were right. The
 
 68 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 interconnection of Free Trade and peace, of 
 Protection and armaments, stands fast. He 
 who would think out a political map of Europe 
 to-day which should give satisfaction to national 
 claims is constantly pulled up by the contention 
 that this or that outlet through foreign soil is 
 necessary to the economic independence of a 
 State. On principles of Free Trade there would 
 be no such necessity. It could be a matter of 
 no moment to Austria-Hungary to have a port 
 on the Adriatic or to Bulgaria to have access 
 to the ^Egean or to Poland to have Dantzig 
 as a harbour but for the constant fear of the 
 interposition of hostile tariff walls. But more 
 than this, the colonial ambitions of the European 
 States as distinct from our own have been 
 motived mainly by Protectionist principles, and 
 questions of commercial rights or privileges 
 have been among those which have made con- 
 troversies as to aggression most acute. Pro- 
 tectionism and national sentiment have played 
 into one another's hands, and between them 
 have defeated reason and humanity. 
 
 Thus we have had a group of States, each 
 consolidating itself more and more within, 
 marking itself off from others by sentiments 
 of national pride, and seeking economic aggran-
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONALISM 69 
 
 disement at the expense of its neighbours by 
 means of a tariff boundary. Meanwhile to these 
 States there has fallen the prize of a derelict 
 world as an apple of contention. Africa has 
 been opened out. The Far East has been half 
 opened. The Near East has been ever tempting 
 with large unrealised possibilities. On all hands 
 there has been the belief, three-parts illusory, 
 that the extension of territory in these defence- 
 less or semi-defenceless regions redounds to 
 national glory and economic advantage. Of 
 this belief Protectionism has been the most 
 solid support. But Protectionism, as we have 
 seen, is itself at bottom an expression of national 
 egoism, and so in the general impulse to 
 plunder a new world we have an illustration on 
 the grand scale of the side of nationalism that 
 faces towards aggression and conquest. Per- 
 haps the historian who reviews the last fifty 
 years will marvel not that the crash came, but 
 that it was averted so long. He will give their 
 meed of credit to two statesmen who retained 
 some of the traditions of older days, to Bis- 
 marck, who combined with all his unscrupulous- 
 ness a certain moderation which disinclined 
 him to adventure for its own sake, and to Lord 
 Salisbury who learned his lesson late in life
 
 70 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 from his chief opponent, Gladstone, and applied 
 it so well as to carry through a peaceful partition 
 of the greater part of Africa and to avert the 
 imminent danger to China at the end of the 
 century by insisting on the policy of the open 
 door. But the equilibrium became more and 
 more unstable. The new arrivals in the com- 
 pany of Great Powers were dissatisfied with their 
 share, Germany most of all. They quickened 
 the pace in the race of armaments. They drank 
 in eagerly the new doctrines of lawlessness. 
 They believed that the world was for the strong 
 and that they were the strong. They had 
 just arrived and were swollen with the con- 
 sciousness of new maturity. Nor were they the 
 first to overestimate themselves or undervalue 
 their neighbours. It is not twenty years since 
 it was fashionable in England to dismiss all the 
 Latin peoples as dying nations, and to bepraise 
 the Teuton as racially one with ourselves. If 
 political memories are short, how much shorter 
 is political foresight. The friends of France 
 in those days would hardly themselves have 
 ventured to attribute to her such rallying 
 power as she showed in the dark days of last 
 August and September, nor would they have 
 found listeners if they had predicted a time not
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF NATIONALISM 71 
 
 far off when we in England should be thankful 
 for so staunch and virile an ally. Every nation 
 in the days of its vigour and prosperity allows 
 itself expressions of self-esteem and depreciation 
 of others which would not be tolerated in an 
 individual, and comes through repetition to 
 believe thoroughly in what it says. 
 
 So it was that in Europe at any time in the 
 last dozen years there came together all the 
 elements of disaster a group of States inflamed 
 with national self-consciousness, grasping at 
 great prizes, discontented with each distribution, 
 emancipated by their new spiritual guides from 
 all sense of law, indoctrinated with all the ethics 
 of violence, ready to accept discipline and 
 hardship only for the sake of overwhelming 
 others, and sustained in their course, if ever 
 aggressive confidence flagged, by fear of the 
 very rivals whom they despised and yet per- 
 petually provoked. Such was the prolonged 
 condition of moral warfare which we now see 
 embodied in physical fact.
 
 VIII 
 THE ELEMENTS OF HOPE 
 
 IN previous articles we have traced the European 
 calamity to the co-operation of two main causes. 
 The first lay in the region of ideas ; the second 
 in that of political and economic development. 
 In the region of ideas we noted the loss of faith 
 in the rational betterment of humanity, the 
 erection of lawlessness into an ideal ; the 
 depreciation of reason and the rational virtue, 
 justice ; the exaltation of self, of power, of 
 impulse, and of instinct. We saw that this 
 trend of thought was common to the civilised 
 world, and it would be easy to show that its 
 influence has been peculiarly marked in Ger- 
 many, where it has chimed in with the historical 
 development of the nation and appeals to the 
 sentiment of a military caste. This seed of 
 ideas, we saw, found a fertile soil in the facts 
 of national development, in the deepening senti- 
 ment of patriotism, which unfortunately has 
 fostered antagonism to other countries together 
 
 7*
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF HOPE 73 
 
 with love for one's own, in the growth of industry 
 under Protection, in the consequent lust for 
 colonial expansion and the rivalries of nations 
 that ensued. We have now to ask how far 
 these causes are temporary and removable, or 
 permanent and ineradicable. On the answer 
 to this question our hope for the future of 
 European civilisation must depend. 
 
 In the region of ideas we must believe that 
 if man remains in spite of the current phil- 
 osophies a rational animal the war itself must 
 work a change. A great calamity should, and 
 normally does, have an effect on a nation com- 
 parable to that of a crash of misfortune upon the 
 individual. If it does not overwhelm it braces. 
 To a shock of a certain magnitude a man will 
 either succumb or he will respond by pulling 
 himself together, asking where he was wrong 
 and how he is to retrieve himself. It shakes the 
 nonsense out of him, and if he has the requisite 
 fibre he may be twice the man that he was 
 before. Now a nation is greater than an in- 
 dividual, and a whole civilisation which is 
 here at stake is greater than a single nation. 
 The ideal of unreason and immoralism is non- 
 sense, and we may fairly hope, without relying 
 on an optimistic faith which is itself irrational,
 
 74 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 that the chastening of adversity will shake 
 this nonsense out of the world. We may 
 believe that loose talk of the survival of the 
 fittest will no longer be allowed to pass, that 
 men will have had enough of violence to prefer 
 the ways of orderly justice, that they will be 
 sated with sensationalism and turn with a fresh 
 appreciation to the real springs of human 
 happiness. The superman has been allowed to 
 fill the stage and act out his part. We have 
 seen him as he really is, and we have seen 
 enough. I do not think that anarchy in any 
 shape will be admired or even tolerated when 
 the war is over. We shall find that tranquillity 
 and repose have their part to fill in a desirable 
 life. We shall be more ready to see the true 
 romance that lies buried in all the prosaic 
 detail of that social reconstruction which seeks 
 the assuagement of misery and the suppression 
 of injustice. 
 
 Far more difficult and doubtful are the 
 problems centring upon the hard fact of national- 
 ity. Here we are dealing, be it remembered, 
 with the actual organisation of Europe. Euro- 
 pean history owes its character, its progress as 
 well as its epochs of stagnation and retrogression, 
 to the fact that it is what some philosophers call
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF HOPE 75 
 
 a unity in or permeating differences. It is one 
 continent ; it is, on the whole, one civilisation. 
 It has behind it a common religious basis, a 
 community of cultivated thought, a long tradi- 
 tion of close political interaction. Yet this com- 
 munity is split up into different centres, speaking 
 different languages, putting a different colour 
 and interpretation even on that which they 
 hold in common, often divided in the past by 
 bitter antagonisms, inclined to mutual rivalry 
 even in peaceful times, and easily inflamed to 
 mutual suspicion. These different centres are 
 organised, the common centre is not. At 
 bottom it is the fact that the State undertakes 
 the protection of life and property that rallies 
 the individual to it unfailingly when the mo- 
 ment of decision comes. Somehow, by hook 
 or by crook, Europe has survived hitherto with- 
 out a common organisation. Yet she has 
 never since the break-up of the Roman Empire 
 been long without feeling the need and form- 
 ing the ideal of re-creating some concrete 
 expression of her unity. In general it has 
 required the stimulus of some sharp experience 
 to call forth any serious effort in this direction. 
 In particular, every attempt on the part of a 
 single Power to establish its supremacy has
 
 76 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 led in the end to a combination against it in 
 defence of threatened liberties. Even after the 
 defeat of Napoleon, the statesmen of the day, 
 reactionary as were many of their aims, were 
 none the less clearly possessed of the idea of 
 Europe as a community with problems that 
 had to be solved in common, demanding of 
 each component part a certain loyalty to the 
 whole. At a later date the imminent dangers 
 arising from the dissolution of Turkey engen- 
 dered the European Concert an ineffective 
 and somewhat soulless instrument, but yet a 
 testimony to the community of European life. 
 It was the final dissolution of the Concert into 
 the system of alliances that set Europe into 
 the path leading to war. Yet in our time the 
 need for a common and, indeed, a more definite 
 organisation has become greater, for two reasons. 
 The first of these is that the channels of inter- 
 national life are broader, deeper, and more 
 numerous than of old. The community of 
 interest has actually been growing greater, 
 while the sentiments of jealousy and antagon- 
 ism have been hardening. Inter-communica- 
 tion is so easy as to have become an incident 
 of daily life. Every educated man travels. 
 Science and philosophy, industrial and com-
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF HOPE 77 
 
 mercial organisation are more and more inter- 
 national in character. What happens in any 
 corner of Europe may affect the whole continent, 
 economically or politically. Secondly, the cal- 
 amity of war is greater in proportion as the 
 populations affected are more densely packed, 
 as social organisation has made it possible to 
 bring the whole people under arms, and as 
 science has perfected the destructive power of 
 weapons. Europe cannot afford to amuse 
 itself with two such wars in a century, or 
 it will, without rhetorical exaggeration, revert 
 to barbarism. It will have to face the 
 problem of such organisation as may guarantee 
 peace, if not because it will, then because it 
 must. 
 
 Yet with the best will in the world it will 
 be faced with difficulties which may at first 
 blush seem insuperable. Consider, for ex- 
 ample, the atmosphere of hatred and suspicion 
 which the war will leave behind it. Such an 
 atmosphere, it is true, clears off more quickly 
 than one would easily imagine. Yet with the 
 best will in the world I find it difficult to con- 
 ceive of a hearty and unsuspicious co-operation 
 with Germany during the next generation. 
 If, indeed, Germany should put her own house
 
 78 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 in order, which means in effect if she should 
 undertake a political revolution which would 
 drive the military caste from power, the out- 
 look would be different. But we cannot count 
 on such an event. Still less can we bring it 
 about by any action of our own. We must put 
 out of our minds any scheme of interference in 
 the domestic affairs of Germany if we would 
 avoid repetition of the mistake made by our 
 great-grandfathers when they brought the Bour- 
 bons back to Paris. Germany must heal her- 
 self. Nor can any proposals of dismemberment 
 be seriously entertained, even if the Allies 
 should ever be in a position to enforce them. 
 If we divide States that are of true German 
 nationality, we shall merely initiate a period 
 of unrest which will last until by force or 
 by consent they are reunited. Those whom 
 national sentiment has joined together no 
 far-seeing statesman will put asunder. We 
 must, therefore, in our counsels reckon with 
 Germany as she is & great Power of sixty 
 or seventy millions in the centre of Europe, 
 capable of such gigantic efforts as the last 
 nine months have witnessed, unchanged for 
 all we can tell in temper and in her attitude 
 to European solidarity and the laws of nations.
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF HOPE 79 
 
 That is our first great difficulty. We must not 
 allow it to paralyse our efforts ; but it must, 
 I think, govern the method of approach to 
 European organisation.
 
 IX 
 NATIONALITY 
 
 THE Allies are fighting on behalf of the rights 
 of nations and the public law of Europe. How 
 far are these two subjects in the end compatible ? 
 The sentiment of nationality over-stimulated is 
 one great source of all the trouble. The same 
 emotions, the same loyalties that animate 
 oppressed nationalities to self-defence and draw 
 scattered nationalities together into political 
 union are apt, as soon as they have gathered 
 strength, to launch them into a career of 
 ambition. Of this tendency Germany herself 
 is a leading example, but not the only example. 
 True, if we could define the rights of nations 
 adequately and be sure that national sentiment 
 would keep within its rights and respect its own 
 fellow when manifested by another people, we 
 should have no trouble. But can we believe 
 that a sentiment of this sort will ever observe 
 the just mean ? Will it not, if fostered, be 
 
 betrayed into excess ? In short, must not 
 
 so
 
 NATIONALITY 81 
 
 nationality be regarded as the separator, the 
 source of discord and permanent danger to 
 peace ? If we protect the smaller nationalities, 
 must we not thereby divide up Europe so much 
 the further, create two or three rival camps 
 where we now have one, and render the ideal of 
 an organised European unity so much the more 
 remote ? 
 
 There is here a genuine and, it may turn 
 out, insuperable difficulty. Yet the argument 
 based on it is fallacious, as may be seen if we 
 press it to its conclusion. If peace is to be 
 secured by the suppression of independent 
 centres of national life, the rule would have 
 to be applied to great Powers as well as small, 
 to the greater Powers even before the smaller. 
 Such a result might conceivably be achieved 
 by conquest, and the attempt has, in fact, 
 been made more than once in the course of 
 history. But it has always called forth the 
 most lively opposition, and it is such an opposi- 
 tion which is ranging the sympathies of the 
 majority of neutrals on the side of the Triple 
 Entente to-day. The feeling for independence 
 in Europe is stronger than any perception of 
 the advantages to be derived by submission 
 to a common head, and the feeling is only being
 
 82 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 accentuated by the present course of events. 
 We may assume that no Great Power would 
 either submit to foreign domination without 
 fighting to the end or voluntarily enter into 
 any union which should impair its right to 
 defend its existing territory. Whatever sort of 
 European organisation that we contemplate as 
 practicable must therefore take full account of 
 national independence. It must be based on 
 the distinct individuality of the component 
 peoples and not on the extinction of their 
 separate life. But if this is a fixed condition of 
 the problem it matters comparatively little to 
 the solution whether the independent peoples 
 to be reckoned with are few or many. To 
 bring the six Great Powers together would be 
 in principle as difficult as to organise sixty 
 States of all sizes. Details of adjustment would 
 be easier, but the kernel of the problem how 
 to get separate States retaining power of self- 
 defence to subject their ambition to a common 
 will would remain the same. 
 
 The suppression of nationality can be of 
 no use to the cause of peace because it could 
 not be carried through. We need not, there- 
 fore, stay to ask whether if it could be carried 
 through the world might not lose more than
 
 NATIONALITY 83 
 
 it would gain. But if this road is blocked 
 may we not try the opposite direction ? May 
 not the rights of nationality be carried through 
 and unity be established on the basis of a more 
 thorough liberty ? Here, too, we shall come 
 up against immense practical difficulties. But 
 let us first consider the question in general 
 terms. Every nationality which is held under 
 by force, or which is divided by violence, is a 
 source of unrest. The whole history of the 
 Continent since Waterloo teems with proofs. 
 There was no rest in Italy till she had expelled 
 the Austrians and achieved unity. The union 
 of Germany caused three wars. The subjection 
 of the Balkan States cost several wars, and 
 the relations of the Serb populations in 
 Serbia and in the Austrian Empire were an 
 originating cause of the present war. In the 
 Balkans the League was dissolved by the 
 refusal to recognise mutual rights, and it is 
 the maintenance of a Bulgarian population 
 in subjection to Serbia to this hour which is 
 the principal obstacle to its renewal a renewal 
 which would at once change the face of the 
 war and lay for the Balkan people the only 
 possible foundation of assured independence. 
 As long as a subject people, capable by numbers
 
 84 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 and geographical position of independent life, 
 is forcibly held under an alien Government 
 there is a principle of wrong within the State 
 which will conflict with any attempt to estab- 
 lish a rule of right in its external relations. 
 Conversely, if every political unit in Europe 
 were content with its status, had no internal 
 enemy with whom foreign Powers might intrigue, 
 and were debarred by general agreement from 
 the forcible acquisition of any unwilling popula- 
 tion, the grounds of quarrel so far as they are 
 internal to Europe would disappear. I con- 
 clude that in proportion as we can approach 
 a general recognition of national rights, in 
 proportion as we can advance the tendency of 
 the political State to coincide with spontaneous 
 national sentiment, we shall facilitate the 
 political union of Europe. It is only by work- 
 ing down to the natural units that we can 
 work up to the organisation within which they 
 might co-operate without friction. 
 
 But, it may be said, the principle of nation- 
 ality cannot be pushed through. Just as its 
 suppression cannot be carried out to the end, 
 so its recognition cannot be consistently main- 
 tained. Take Alsace-Lorraine. Probably on a 
 free vote a substantial part of the population
 
 NATIONALITY 85 
 
 would elect to rejoin France, another part 
 would be for autonomy within the German 
 Empire, and yet another for independence. 
 If you take a vote of Alsace-Lorraine as a 
 whole you get one result, if you take the 
 provinces separately you may get another. 
 If you subdivide the provinces you would get a 
 third. On what principle will you proceed, 
 and how, if you took a vote, would you prevent 
 the officials in charge from " making " it to their 
 satisfaction ? A portion of Transylvania voting 
 as a whole would go to Roumania, but it 
 would contain a colony of Magyars and a 
 smaller colony of Germans, who would then 
 become small but discontented nationalities. 
 You will always have a minority, and the 
 minority will always be a rallying point of 
 dissatisfaction. Without pretending to the 
 possession of any sovereign remedy for these 
 difficulties, we may remark, first of all, that the 
 principle of nationality does not lay down that 
 any group of persons, however small, enjoy 
 an unqualified right to choose their own form 
 of government. Number, geographical and 
 economic self-sufficiency must be taken into 
 account. Anyone in earnest with the desire 
 to solve political controversies by local freedom
 
 86 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 would carry division as low as should be com- 
 patible with these conditions. Thus he would 
 not insist on retaining in Lorraine a population 
 of German speech and sympathies living along 
 the German border. On the other hand, he 
 would recognise the physical impossibility of a 
 union of a Magyar island in a sea of Roumanian 
 population with the continent of Magyar 
 territory. In those cases he would seek to 
 apply measures of local autonomy which will 
 often reconcile a minority to a government 
 which in itself they would not have chosen. 
 But I shall not here attempt to examine all 
 the possibilities open to a constructive states- 
 manship. I shall content myself with two 
 propositions which I believe to have a bearing, 
 the first on the permanent order of Europe, 
 the second on the prospect of terminating the 
 war. The first is that in proportion as political 
 unity can be brought into accord with national 
 sentiment the chances of international union 
 are improved. The second is that as a practical 
 policy the principle of national choice should 
 at least be a limiting condition. I mean that 
 no portion of European territory should be 
 transferred from one government to another 
 without the concurrence of its population, and
 
 NATIONALITY 87 
 
 that concurrence should be expressed by a vote 
 taken under the presidency of a neutral Power. 
 This is a principle which even now might be 
 accepted and proclaimed by the Allies as a 
 condition governing their policy, without the 
 smallest prejudice to their vigour in the conduct 
 of the war. To hope for it may be Utopian, 
 yet it is but the translation into literal terms of 
 that combination of the ideas of nationality 
 and of public law which has been inscribed on 
 our banner by official sanction. It is to make 
 the right of nationality an integral part of the 
 public law of Europe.
 
 X 
 
 THROUGH ALLIANCE TO FEDERATION 
 
 LET us for a moment suppose the ideal of 
 national liberty secured in Europe. Let us 
 imagine that to the nearest approximation 
 allowed by geography each nationality has 
 obtained the government that it desires. It 
 is clear that even so we should not have done 
 away with the possibility of future wars. 
 Nationality we must again recall Mr. Lowes 
 Dickinson's description is a Janus looking 
 towards aggression as well as towards liberty. 
 If peace in Europe is ever to be set on a firm 
 foundation some bond must be established 
 among the independent units. What is the 
 nature of that bond to be ? Is it to be an 
 alliance ? But alliances are rarely made except 
 as against a common enemy, and we are hoping 
 to supersede enmities. Is it to be a federation ? 
 But a federation involves a considerable sacrifice 
 of internal sovereignty, and is not effective 
 unless the armed force is in the hands of the 
 
 88
 
 THROUGH ALLIANCE TO FEDERATION 89 
 
 federal Government. Is it conceivable that the 
 European States would confide to any common 
 centre the control of their military organisation ? 
 The dilemma is serious, and I do not think that 
 sincere lovers of peace can cope with it except 
 by abandoning in the first instance some of 
 their cherished traditions. 
 
 It has, for example, been a cherished belief 
 of peace people that without prejudice to 
 national independence wars might be averted 
 and perhaps finally suppressed by the creation 
 of rational means of avoiding disputes. It is 
 natural that even now many who are looking 
 to the problem that lies beyond this struggle 
 should be planning improved methods of arbitra- 
 tion, conciliation, and so forth. These schemes 
 have in the past foundered on the fact that they 
 presumed a general will for peace. They sup- 
 posed a ring of nations and Governments de- 
 sirous of living a tranquil life, and in danger of 
 being hurried into war only by some sudden 
 passion or some awkward incident which would 
 be disposed of if the proper machinery for that 
 purpose were at hand. This supposition did 
 not, unfortunately, conform to the facts. It is 
 clear that some Governments had no desire for 
 peace in itself, but were bent on aggrandise-
 
 go THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 ment at all costs, and as long as the lust of 
 aggrandisement remains a living political motive, 
 as long as ideals of violence or national domin- 
 ance play their part in the life of peoples, so long 
 this danger will remain. No doubt for a short 
 time after the present war there will be a sense 
 of exhaustion in which people will be glad to 
 make use of any machinery for the avoidance of 
 disputes. But it will be with the passing of 
 this period that the danger will be renewed, and 
 I must record my belief that then no schemes of 
 arbitration unsupported by force will be worth 
 the paper they are writ upon. There was plenty 
 of machinery available for the settlement of the 
 dispute of last July, but there was not the will 
 to use it. How can we create such a will ? 
 
 Another belief cherished by peace people in 
 England, and not least by this present writer, 
 is that Continental alliances are dangerous to 
 our country and a source of possible war. So 
 far as relates to the past this belief has been 
 justified by the event of last year. But that 
 event itself has produced a new situation, and, 
 to speak for one peace man alone, has radically 
 changed my view. The alliance of Great 
 Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, and Serbia 
 has now been cemented with blood. It is going
 
 THROUGH ALLIANCE TO FEDERATION 91 
 
 to be a part of the most moving historical tra- 
 ditions of these peoples. So far as the three 
 Western States are concerned it is reinforced 
 by similarity of political development and by 
 geographical conditions, and all these forces 
 together have engendered a sense of true 
 solidarity which must not be allowed to perish. 
 Scoffers ask whether we are really fighting for 
 Belgium, France, or ourselves. The true answer 
 is that we have been forced by hard facts to 
 regard the cause of all three as one. We are 
 fighting neither selfishly nor unselfishly, but for 
 the whole of which we are members, just as the 
 man who works for his family is working neither 
 selfishly nor unselfishly, but for the whole of 
 which he is a member. I cannot think that this 
 sense of solidarity once gained will, or ought to, 
 die away. On the contrary, I think that here 
 we may have the beginning of that true founda- 
 tion in feeling which may be the basis of an 
 international State. I would look to the union 
 of States in Europe through the existing alliance 
 and not as requiring its dissolution. 
 
 But it will be said, " This is a flat contra- 
 diction with what you have said above of the 
 nature of alliances. An alliance contemplates an 
 enemy. You may preserve the Triple Entente,
 
 92 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 but in doing so you will simply maintain the 
 existing division of Europe into two camps. 
 You will prolong the situation of 1914, only 
 embittered and rendered more dangerous by the 
 memory of the Great War." To this I would 
 reply, first, that we may contemplate two 
 changes in the character of the alliance. The 
 first would be its conversion into something of 
 the nature of a permanent League or Federation. 
 For this purpose it would need a standing 
 council for dealing with all matters affecting 
 the League as a whole, and in particular for 
 adjusting any questions arising between any 
 two of its members. I do not think such ques- 
 tions need necessarily be settled by arbitration. 
 I fancy rather that what needs cultivating as 
 between nations is the Parliamentary habit, and 
 the recognition that many problems, problems of 
 territorial acquisition, for example, should be 
 settled neither by force nor by rigid juridical 
 rules, which, after all, are very difficult to apply, 
 but rather by discussion among all parties in- 
 terested and in accordance ultimately with the 
 decision of a majority as to what seems best for 
 the common good. I think there would be a 
 sufficiently strong sentiment of common suffer- 
 ing and common interest to persuade the nations
 
 THROUGH ALLIANCE TO FEDERATION 93 
 
 of the alliance to agree upon such a collective 
 regulation of their affairs to agree not merely 
 in that verbal fashion in which the nations of 
 Europe and America have signed Hague Con- 
 ventions, but with the real intention of estab- 
 lishing a permanent working union of the States 
 concerned. How far it would be possible to 
 equip the League with a common force con- 
 trolled by its council would be the crucial ques- 
 tion. It is impossible to predict and fruitless at 
 this stage to consider detailed possibilities of 
 adjustment, but I would point out that the 
 feelings of antagonism and distrust which would 
 obstruct any working Federation of Europe 
 would not be there to hinder the development 
 of a common authority in a League of Allies 
 tested by a hard experience. There is nothing 
 in the existing state of feeling to prevent the 
 assumption by the League of a certain super- 
 vision and partial control of the military forces, 
 and in particular of the manufacture of arma- 
 ments. The private manufacture of armaments 
 every lover of peace will desire to abolish. 
 
 I would look forward, then, to the conversion 
 of the existing Alliance into a permanent League 
 or Federation, with a regular constitution and 
 definite functions, which should include some
 
 94 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 measure of control over the production of 
 munitions of war. But from the outset I would 
 contemplate the extension of the League by the 
 free entry of new members. There would be no 
 obstacle to the immediate inclusion of every 
 neutral State in Europe, and in America, pro- 
 vided that each newcomer should frankly accept 
 the conditions of membership. This would at 
 once transform it from an ordinary alliance into 
 something approaching a world-federation. But 
 it might still wear the guise of a confederation 
 arrayed in great strength with a front against 
 Germany. At the outset I confess I cannot see 
 how this can be avoided. If Germany were a 
 member of any such League the entire constitu- 
 tion would have to be framed on different prin- 
 ciples. The assumption of mutual trust and 
 goodwill would not be admissible. At every 
 point precautions and guarantees would have 
 to be inserted, which would tend to impede the 
 working of the machine, and any question of a 
 control of armaments would have to be dis- 
 missed. Peacemakers will err seriously if they 
 set to work after the war as though the revela- 
 tion of the mind of German statesmanship were 
 to count for nothing in the future councils of 
 the world. Every association that works is
 
 THROUGH ALLIANCE TO FEDERATION 95 
 
 founded on a bedrock of trust and mutual good- 
 will. All attempts at internationalism in the 
 past have failed because they have sought to 
 unite those who trusted one another along with 
 those who did not trust one another. To avoid 
 this mistake we must give up something. We 
 must abandon the ideal of any world-embracing 
 union as our immediate object, and seek to work 
 towards it through a union which will be inter- 
 national but not at first all-inclusive. I say 
 not at first, but it need not be said that the 
 ultimate ideal of statesmanship would be to 
 include the Germanic peoples with the rest. 
 The time for that inclusion would arrive as soon 
 as it could be effected without wrecking the 
 scheme.
 
 XI 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 
 
 HISTORY forbids the cheap optimism which 
 assumes that everything will always go forward. 
 More than one great effort of mankind has failed, 
 and if modern civilisation is more broadly based 
 than that of an older day, the catastrophe which 
 has overtaken it is proportionately wider in its 
 sweep. If we are to regain a rational confidence 
 in the future we must look below the surface. We 
 must ask what has been lost, and whether any- 
 thing has been gained to set against it. In the 
 broadest sense what has been lost, in addition to 
 the material havoc and the probable destruction 
 of a sensible proportion of the best men of an 
 entire generation in Europe, is the sense of confi- 
 dence in certain fundamentals of civilised life. 
 First of all, underlying all the anxieties which 
 have been felt by students of international 
 politics for many years, there has been a certain 
 belief in the ultimate wisdom of statesmen, or 
 
 perhaps in a certain saving instinct among peoples 
 
 96
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 97 
 
 as a force which at the last moment would pre- 
 vent a general war. That confidence disappeared 
 in August of last year. But there was worse to 
 come. There was a much more deeply rooted 
 confidence in certain fundamental decencies as 
 the common property of civilised people. It was 
 thought that, cynical as international states- 
 manship had been, there were some primary 
 points of civilised behaviour common to all the 
 nations which shared in Western culture. By a 
 series of ruthless blows Germany has destroyed 
 this illusion, and has shown that, from poisoning 
 the wells to sinking a great passenger ship, there 
 is nothing at which a nation armed with all the 
 resources cf modern science will draw the line. 
 The position is, then, that science has im- 
 measurably increased the efficacy of weapons 
 of destruction and placed them in the hands 
 of men with no more scruples than a horde of 
 conquering barbarians in times past. Unless 
 the world can react against disruptive forces so 
 terrible as these, it is clear that science, which 
 has in a manner been the foundation of what 
 is most distinctive in modern civilisation, must 
 end by destroying it. The different races of 
 mankind have somehow to live together in this 
 world, and if they are to advance in civilisation
 
 98 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 they must somehow co-operate ; but, far from 
 co-operating, they cannot even live unless they 
 can cope with this source of danger. The future 
 of the world, therefore, must depend on the 
 degree of energy and whole-heartedness with 
 which all nations, those that have hitherto been 
 neutral as well as belligerents, will combine to 
 suppress the common peril. 
 
 But it may be said, if scientific civilisation 
 has produced such a portent as German mili- 
 tarism as we now know it to be, is it not stricken 
 at heart ? Civilisations perish not by external 
 calamity, but when the soul is dead within them. 
 The Roman civilisation went under not because 
 the barbarian invaders were strong, but because 
 Rome, at the core, was weak. The structure 
 of the Empire, even in the palmy days of the 
 Antonines, was that of a great machine which 
 is running of its own inertia, but which has lost 
 the force that originally set the mass in motion. 
 At an earlier date the genius of Hellenism 
 perished in the long internecine contest which 
 paralysed the free cities and took the heart out 
 of that civic life which was the source of inspira- 
 tion alike to the poet, the artist, and the philo- 
 sopher. Has the modern world lost its heart in 
 the same way ? To determine this question we
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 99 
 
 must ask ourselves how far Germany was in heart 
 at one with the modern world. We have per- 
 haps been in the habit of attributing too great a 
 community of ideals to the nations of Europe. 
 In reality Germany took but little share in that 
 new democratic, humanising impulse which 
 arose in England in the seventeenth and more 
 vividly in France in the eighteenth century, 
 which animated the American Revolution, which 
 directed the liberalising movement throughout 
 the British Empire giving us the circle of free 
 colonies around the mother country, and which 
 inspired the union and liberation of Italy. To 
 this spirit of freedom, democracy, and humanity 
 the nations of Western Europe and the new 
 peoples sprung from them have contributed at 
 different times and on different sides, from 
 Holland in the sixteenth century to Belgium in 
 1914. Small peoples and great have played 
 their part. Thinkers, poets, statesmen, and 
 philanthropists have done their share. But this 
 spirit is the creation of the West. Elements of 
 its teaching have leavened the political and social 
 structure of Central and Eastern Europe in 
 greater or less degree. They have inspired the 
 revolutionary movements and the occasional 
 bursts of reforming policy in Russia. They
 
 ioo THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 have stimulated the revival of the Balkan 
 nationalities, and they have no doubt affected 
 the structure of German society as well. But 
 it has not been sufficiently recognised that the 
 main body of German thought has stood outside 
 this movement since the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century. In earlier days this was not so. 
 Kant, the greatest of German thinkers, stood in 
 full sympathy with the humanitarianism of the 
 eighteenth century. Fichte was an idealist 
 whose teachings were a force that counted on 
 the side of liberty in the struggle with Napoleon. 
 But with the rise of the Hegelian philosophy 
 academic thought in Germany associated itself 
 more and more with the powers that were. 
 The Hegelian system was the first completely 
 reasoned answer to the democratic and humani- 
 tarian ideal, and though the sceptre passed from 
 the Hegelians it was taken up by very inferior 
 thinkers of the type of Treitschke, who were far 
 more extreme in their claims for the bureaucratic 
 State and the militarist ideal. There have, of 
 course, been advanced thinkers in Germany, but 
 in the main stream of all German thought that 
 is not avowedly militarist and, from the Western 
 point of view, reactionary, we notice two things. 
 The first is that the main body of such thought,
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 101 
 
 Social Democracy, is avowedly revolutionary. 
 It can make no terms with the existing order, 
 but neither can it effect any political resistance 
 to that order. Its impotence was confessed at 
 Zabern and manifested to all the world at the 
 outbreak of the war. Secondly, we notice that 
 it is Socialistic and not Liberal in the true sense, 
 for the claim of personality, and its correlative 
 the rule of right, has never focussed itself 
 in a political party with the Germans. Such 
 Liberalism as existed in Germany died in 1848. 
 Germany, therefore, has built up a culture of 
 her own, self-centred, based on a notion of the 
 State, its claims upon the individual and its 
 rights against the rest of the world, which 
 Western civilisation repudiated. The whole 
 meaning of the democratic movement lay in this 
 repudiation. The whole movement of the re- 
 action as we see it expressed as early as Hegel 
 is to the reassertion of the old ideal. The State 
 is master of the man, and it knows no laws of 
 God or humanity to bind it in its dealings with 
 others. 
 
 Thus when we ask questions as to the soul of 
 modern civilisation we are not to take Germany 
 into account. On the contrary, in a far deeper 
 sense than any of us supposed a year ago, we are
 
 102 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 to conceive her as standing in determined opposi- 
 tion to the ideals which, however imperfectly, the 
 civilised nations of the modern world have been 
 endeavouring to hammer out into practical 
 shape. So regarded, then, the war resolves itself 
 into a contest for the fundamentals of the 
 modern civilised order, not merely for national 
 freedom but for something deeper even than 
 national freedom for the belief in primary rules 
 of right binding all nations and all men in every 
 relation and under every circumstance. Now, 
 looking through the nations of the world other 
 than Germany, we see no sign of any loss of faith 
 in these principles. On the contrary, we see 
 that the nations one by one are waking to the fact 
 that it is these principles that are at stake. If 
 that is so, we have not here to deal with a 
 civilisation which is sick unto death through loss 
 of belief in its own principles, through lack of 
 confidence in itself, through the deadly sin of 
 self-betrayal. Properly regarded, there is less 
 danger to civilisation in such a catastrophe as 
 this than in some of those smaller wars in which 
 the Western nations have in time past betrayed 
 their principles and sinned against the light 
 within them. They have seemed of less account 
 because the material issues involved were
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 103 
 
 smaller, yet were they more threatening because 
 they indicated a moral weakness. Here we see 
 no moral weakness. We see the primary belli- 
 gerents more and more conscious day by day 
 of the vastness of the stake, and more and more 
 resolute accordingly to throw the last ounce of 
 their energy into the contest. In such a struggle 
 civilisation has never yet gone down. As long 
 as it has believed in itself it has always defeated 
 the enemy at the gate. If this is so the outcome 
 of the present war may yet be a union of the 
 nations based upon a far clearer consciousness 
 of those fundamentals which are necessary to 
 co-operation in peaceful order and advance in 
 the true art of living. Victory should mean, not 
 a return to the old state of things dominated 
 by mutual suspicion, but the emergence of a 
 new and more real feeling for the unity of 
 human interests ; and it will be the task of the 
 political thinker and statesman to devise the 
 form which will give to this bond definite and 
 permanent expression. In effect Germany has 
 challenged the world as Napoleon challenged 
 Europe. By slow degrees Napoleon united 
 Europe against him, but it was a Europe 
 dominated by reactionary Governments, and 
 the union was for the time fatal to liberty. By
 
 104 THE WORLD IN CONFLICT 
 
 degrees Germany is uniting the world against 
 her, but it is a world of far more democratic 
 States. The war which will be waged will be 
 more truly a people's war and inspired by ideas 
 of nationality, freedom, and of right. The sacri- 
 fice imposed upon our generation is immense, 
 and the loss of young lives must for many years 
 to come tell upon the output of the best work, 
 yet the price will be worth paying if out of it 
 there arises, for the first time, the conception of 
 a common humanity, not as the dream of a 
 philosopher, but as a popular emotion which 
 has tested and proved itself in the hardest of 
 schools. 
 
 Wytnan 6- Sons Ltd., Printers, London and Reading.
 
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