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THE CONSCIENCE 
 OF EUROPE 
 
THE CONSCIENCE 
 OF EUROPE 
 
 THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 
 
 BY 
 
 ALEXANDER W. RIMINGTON 
 
 A.R.E., R.B.A., HON. F.S.A. 
 
 LATE PROFESSOR OF FINE ARTS 
 
 queen's college, LONDON 
 
 LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. 
 RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.I 
 
First published in igiy 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Printed in Great Britain 
 by Tumbull A* Spears^ Edinburgh 
 
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
 
 TO THE SILENT SUFFERERS 
 
 AMONGST THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE 
 
PREFACE 
 
 My aim in this book has been to consider certain 
 aspects of the war in their relation to the Con- 
 science of the peoples of Europe. 
 
 To do so it is necessary to regard them from 
 a relatively independent standpoint. This is no 
 easy task in such times as these, for it is difficult 
 to shake off the influence of our prepossessions and 
 assumptions whilst engaged in the heat of conflict 
 for what seems to us a righteous cause, and to see 
 and consider facts and events dispassionately. 
 
 The difficulty is increased by the fact that 
 Humanity is under the stress of an imprecedented 
 disaster, which, though the extent of its desolating 
 misery is largely hidden beneath the mantle of 
 military and political phrases, and by the impossi- 
 biUty of grasping all its endless ramifications, is 
 by its very nature and the passions it arouses 
 almost paralysing to the critical faculties. 
 
 And yet, surely we ought from time to time 
 to endeavour to clear our vision and balance 
 our judgment for the sake of both the present 
 and the future. 
 
 It may seem presumptuous to attempt to deal 
 with some of the questions raised in the follow- 
 ing pages, especially when many able minds are 
 
viii THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 occupied with them, but my excuse for doing so 
 must be twofold. 
 
 Firstly, that I have travelled much in Europe, 
 have frequently lived abroad for many months 
 at a time, have been brought into exceptionally 
 close touch with all ranks and classes of people 
 in most of the nations now at war ; and have 
 had many international and social questions 
 brought home to me. I have thus had somewhat 
 special opportunities for forming opinions upon 
 some of these, and realizing their significance. 
 
 Secondly, that I should feel it criminal to re- 
 main silent and not endeavour to assist in urging 
 some considerations — however inefficiently stated 
 — upon my fellow-countrymen of which I am 
 convinced it is very dangerous for us to lose sight. 
 
 Two misconceptions with regard to some 
 portions of this book are possible. In the 
 desire to avoid the undue influence of national 
 or patriotic prejudice and to be faithful to 
 the truth as I see it, some passages written 
 from a humanitarian, and consequently not a 
 purely nationaUst standpoint, might possibly be 
 twisted into support of an accusation of *' pro- 
 German '* tendencies. Perhaps, therefore, I should 
 say that I regard the German militarist caste, 
 its methods, its evil example, and its conduct 
 of the war as deserving of the severest censure 
 and as one of the greatest dangers to civilization ; 
 though I do not believe that violent and indis- 
 criminate abuse of the whole German nation is 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 either fair or justifiable, and I endorse and share 
 President Wilson's attitude in this respect. 
 
 The second misconception against which I wish 
 to guard is that although I do not hold the opinions 
 of, for example, my late friend and colleague 
 Professor Cramb, as to the inherent nobility of 
 war and the glory of Napoleonic forcefulness, 
 and though I write with indignation of some of 
 the evils of aggressive militarism and of such a 
 war as the present conflict, I am for '' peace at 
 any price." That is not true — but I am for a 
 reasonable peace unstained by the spirit of 
 revenge and founded upon respect for the 
 common rights of humanity. 
 
 In considering the war, and some of the ques- 
 tions it opens up, from the wider standpoint of 
 its European character, it is necessary to look 
 below the surface for facts and influences — apart 
 from the course of diplomacy and the acts of 
 governments — ^which have led up to and been 
 responsible for the present calamity, as well as 
 to subject to impartial criticism those which are 
 seemingly obvious. The refusal to do so because 
 some of them are disconcerting to our precon- 
 ceived ideas, and others are difficult to trace, 
 constitutes I believe another of the great dangers 
 which threaten hopes and plans for securing the 
 future peace of Europe. War is as inimical to the 
 open mind as it is in the abstract to the true 
 Conscience of Humanity. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGX 
 
 I. The Conscience of Europe — ^its Founda- 
 tions AND ITS Relationship to the 
 War I 
 
 II. The War in Conflict with the Ethical 
 Conscience of Humanity. Some 
 Further Considerations . . lo 
 
 III. The Atmosphere that made War possible. 
 
 Some Contributory Causes . . 19 
 
 IV. God and the War. A Set-back in 
 
 Christian Social Evolution . . 36 
 
 V. Militarism and Humanity. A Debit and 
 
 Credit Account .... 40 
 
 VI. " Nothing matters if we Win " . -57 
 
 VII. Christian Ethics and War. Attitude 
 
 OF THE European Churches . . 61 
 
 VIII. Some Further Influences acting upon 
 
 THE Conscience of Europe . . 72 
 
 IX. Patriotism : Two Aspects ... 81 
 
xii THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 PAGS 
 
 X. The War as an Evidence of False 
 
 Ideals throughout Europe . . 89 
 
 XL Women and the Conscience of Europe. 
 The War's two main Currents of 
 
 Influence upon Them ... 93 
 
 XII. The State Conscience and its Divorce 
 
 from the Individual Conscience . 99 
 
 XIII. The Evolution of Conscience— Sub- 
 
 conscious Influences. New Creative 
 
 Impulses . . . . . . 108 
 
 XIV. The Self-righteousness of Nations . 11 1 
 XV. The Silence of the Sufferers . .116 
 
 XVI. Some Beliefs shattered by the War . 121 
 
 XVII. The Re-invigoration of the Conscience 
 
 OF Europe. Preparations for it . 125 
 
 XVIII. Withdrawing the Veil . . .130 
 
 XIX. A NEW Offensive on behalf of Humanity 153 
 
 Appendix 157 
 
 Index . 175 
 
THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 THE WAR 
 
 AND THE FUTURE 
 
 The War, regarded as a sanguinary struggle be- 
 tween two immense groups of the nations of 
 Europe, is in direct contradiction to the better 
 feeUngs of their peoples, and to many the 
 question must constantly present itself : *' How 
 can Europe reconcile this unprecedented war of 
 mutual destruction with its conscience ? '' 
 
 For every nation of Europe professes to have 
 a conscience, if its statesmen and writers are 
 to be taken seriously, even though a distinc- 
 tion must unfortunately be drawn between the 
 consciences of governments and those of the 
 peoples they govern. That conscience, moreover, 
 is nominally founded upon a religious basis — 
 upon a union of Christian ethics with philosophic 
 ideals, upon which union our civilization has been 
 built up. 
 
 Each European government would say in 
 reply to this question as to Conscience : " Ours is 
 a righteous war of self-defence and necessity," 
 or " for high ideals of justice and freedom." 
 
 A 1 
 
2 THE 'conscience OF EUROPE . 
 
 We ourselves ceii:4iiily entered the war with this 
 conviction, and there are many who would look 
 upon that fact as conclusive and resent any 
 further consideration of the question of Conscience. 
 
 But it is true notwithstanding that each nation 
 or group of nations can only base a plea of justifi- 
 cation for its action upon the proximate and 
 final causes which led to war — ^upon the circum- 
 stances and decisions of a few months, weeks, or 
 days. None of the nations dares to look too 
 far back or consider its past conduct and past 
 aims and objects too critically. In its heart of 
 hearts each knows that there has been much that 
 has been wofully amiss, both internally as regards 
 its own Ufe, and externally as regards its 
 neighbours. 
 
 And thus, whatever may have been the 
 immediate causes of the war — ^whatever the guilt 
 of this or that individual nation — ^the broad fact 
 remains that nearly all the Christian peoples 
 of Europe are engaged in a ruthless '' civil " 
 war of mutual annihilation, and there is urgent 
 need to refer that fact to the Conscience of 
 Europe. 
 
 First let us consider the actual position, stripped 
 of any excuses for it. 
 
 After centuries of slow progress, and the devel- 
 opment of innumerable international interests 
 and philanthropic movements that seemed to 
 promise the permanent deepening of the sense 
 of human brotherhood between the nations, this 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 8 
 
 hideous catastrophe has come upon the world 
 with the rush of a tempest, blotting out the sun, 
 devastating the fair face of the earth, and sweep- 
 ing civilization aside as of no account. At the 
 moment of wilting it has caused the death of 
 perhaps seven millions and the injury of perhaps 
 forty or fifty millions of combatants, apart from 
 many milUons of civiUans. 
 
 Most of us realize to some extent what the war 
 means, though some are too busily occupied in 
 helping it forward to do so and others lack the 
 necessary imagination, but few have the courage 
 to look the facts fairly in the face or attempt to 
 realize the horror, folly, cruelty, and waste, or 
 to analyse the latent causes which have led up 
 to this suicidal conflict. Yet it is very needful 
 to do so, if we are to prepare remedies and if 
 there is to be hope for the future. 
 
 We have frankly to recognize what appears to 
 be the bankruptcy and collapse of almost all that 
 gave ground for that hope in the past. We had 
 looked to human intelligence, to religion, to 
 philosophy, to social and natural science as bul- 
 warks and as foundations for future progress, 
 and as protection against the dangers of inter- 
 national rivalry, but though they continue to 
 exist they have all been swept aside by the war 
 madness, and even the desire for truth and 
 reason has vanished. None of these things have 
 been able to withstand the shock of the attack 
 upon the ideals of civilization. " They have all 
 
4 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 crumbled and been submerged in the floods of 
 unreasoning passion/' 
 
 This is admittedly a war more widespread and 
 more horrible than any the world has ever seen. 
 It is a reversion to the type of early barbaric 
 wars in which whole races or peoples took part, 
 and is thus far worse in its effects than the con- 
 flicts of the Middle Ages or those of later periods, 
 which were fought by professional armies, and 
 in which only a small proportion of the men of 
 each nation were engaged. 
 
 In the present case, whole peoples, includ- 
 ing nearly all the best of those occupied in the 
 industrial, commercial, scientific, artistic, and 
 literary professions, on whom rested the hopes of 
 Europe, have been hurried into the trenches or 
 into the storm and fury of massed attacks, to 
 slaughter and be slaughtered by the frightful 
 modern machinery of war. Physical science, 
 which should have been the friend of man, has 
 been perverted to the creation of every conceiv- 
 able instrument of deadly destruction. Tens of 
 thousands of machine guns and rifles pour cease- 
 less streams of bullets into the bodies and brains 
 of the peace-loving citizens of Europe, and they 
 are supplemented by storms of shell splinters, 
 devastating explosives, clouds of shrapnel, gases 
 which destroy eyesight and eat out lung tissues, 
 ghastly knife thrusts, jets of liquid fire and lead, 
 devilish hand bombs, and every diabolical and 
 underhand means of destroying life. There is a 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 5 
 
 terror of blood and noise, so frightful as to paralyse 
 the nerves of thousands and drive others raving 
 mad, there is a condemnation to the existence 
 of animals in trenches, half-filled with filthy mud 
 and stagnant water, and surrounded by unburied 
 corpses, there are widespread disease and destitu- 
 tion amongst millions of innocent peasants, and 
 reckless air raids upon towns and villages, — 
 there is the forced sight of agonized deaths and 
 mutilations of friend and foe, the destruction 
 of a thousand hopes and noble ambitions, the 
 spectacle of the revival of some of the worst 
 passions and bUnd animosities and the paralysis 
 of common progress. Europe is approaching an 
 even worse condition than that to which prolonged 
 wars had reduced her in the eighteenth and early 
 part of the nineteenth centuries, when the misery 
 of the people in many countries reached a climax. 
 
 All the efforts of the politicians and the news- 
 papers to gloss over the facts and invest them with 
 the old glamour of war, or sometimes even to 
 refer to them with a repulsive jocularity, will not 
 alter the truth, namely, that the whole infernal 
 struggle is unworthy of Christian nations. 
 
 The following extract from the manifesto of 
 the Executive Council of the General Committee 
 of Help for the Victims of the War in Lithuania 
 well summarizes the reality : 
 
 " The storm of murder and rapine which by 
 reason of its magnitude and its horror is utterly 
 without parallel or precedent in the history of 
 
6 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 mankind has descended in all its awful fury upon 
 the ancient nations of Europe. It has overthrown 
 and displaced the foundations of a vaunted but 
 meretricious civilization. With torrents of hatred 
 and of shame and outrage unutterable it has 
 quenched in the heart of men the spark of 
 brotherhood and justice, and brought to pass 
 a butchery of the people." 
 
 Listen again to the following description from 
 another source : 
 
 '* Nothing that I have read, nothing, I think, 
 that will ever be written, can really bring home 
 to those who have not seen a part of it the 
 abominable, monstrous, purposeless destructive- 
 ness of it all. . . . 
 
 '* Week after week and year after year the 
 energy of all those millions of fighting men, in- 
 stead of being usefully productive, is devoted to 
 the destruction of their fellow-men, and, as a 
 necessary consequence, of the lifelong happiness 
 of those other milUons of human beings, especially 
 women and children, to whom they are dear.'* 
 
 No one would for a moment wish to deny the 
 existence of the fine feelings of patriotism or 
 heroism which have led so many men here and 
 elsewhere to volunteer for military service in 
 what they have beUeved to be the defence of 
 their country or of the respect for treaties and 
 the rights of small nations, but this does not make 
 the war any the less a disgrace to civiUzation and 
 to the nations of Europe. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 7 
 
 In addition to the atrocious character of the 
 warfare between contending armies there is the 
 fate of the civiUan populations. In the war zones 
 there is the killing, maiming, and destitution, 
 or death from miseiy or starvation, of countless 
 innocent non-combatants hardly even referred 
 to in the newspapers, but whose homes have been 
 wrecked, whose fields have been devastated, 
 whose shops have been burnt, whose means of 
 living have been swept away, whose hopes of 
 happiness have been shrivelled into despair, who 
 have lost all, or nearly all they have loved and 
 cared for, and, in a word, whose lives have been 
 blasted and desolated. It is probable that the 
 numbers of these even exceed those of the actual 
 combatants who are killed, and in addition to 
 them there are countless others not in the war 
 zones who are almost equally sufferers, and who, 
 scattered throughout the length and breadth of 
 every country engaged in this cruel war, are torn 
 with the misery of bereavement and anxiety or 
 are faced by despair or ruin. 
 
 Europe now contains millions of desolate 
 widows, who were once leading happy and pros- 
 perous lives, tens of millions of fatherless children, 
 in the death of whose fathers other millions 
 are inhumanly rejoicing. To multitudes lashed 
 into fury by the newspapers nothing would seem 
 to matter, as long as the sum total of deaths and 
 mutilations of their enemies can be increased, 
 and a still more tragic and significant fact is 
 
8 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 that not only is the womanhood of Europe 
 suffering all this mental agony, but vast numbers 
 of the women and girls and even children of every 
 nation are labouring day and night to provide 
 fresh implements of destruction for piling up the 
 mounds of dead and increasing the miseries of 
 their sisters in other nations. 
 
 Meanwhile international trade is being de- 
 stroyed, agriculture bUghted, scientific progress 
 interrupted, art withered, missionary and philan- 
 thropic work paralysed, and the altruistic teach- 
 ings of Christianity set at nought or perverted 
 by sophistry into approval of what they most 
 clearly and emphatically condemn. Education 
 also is being arrested and neglected, crushing 
 debts piled up which will hang Uke millstones 
 round the necks of future generations and hinder 
 future progress, and lastly, the creed of a war- 
 loving miUtarism is being more and more widely 
 accepted,^ and the false ideals of a narrow and 
 selfish nationalism everywhere preached, regard- 
 less of the wider interests of humanity, while 
 justice, freedom, brotherhood and truth are being 
 trampled under foot. 
 
 Such, at the present moment, is the condi- 
 tion of Europe, such the outcome of its boasted 
 advance in civilization, its social hopes and 
 aspirations, its nominal profession of adherence 
 to Christian ethics. 
 
 The extent of its fall can by no means be de- 
 
 ^ This happily no longer applies to Russia. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 9 
 
 scribed in any such brief summary. No man 
 can follow all the ramifications of the desolation 
 which the present war has brought with it — 
 no words can picture the horrors of its battle- 
 fields where the fighting never ceases, and no 
 eye can probe the cancerous diseases of hatred 
 and false ambition which are eating into the 
 social and mental Ufe of its nations. 
 
II 
 
 We come back, therefore, to our original ques- 
 tion : " How can Europe reconcile this war of 
 mutual destruction with its conscience ? '' 
 
 On the surface there is Uttle evidence of any 
 such question being asked by the majority of 
 people. " Defence of the Realm " acts, martial 
 law, military exigencies, and the tyranny of 
 governments have led to the suppression of almost 
 all frank and open opinion as to the war. The 
 peoples of the belligerent nations have been 
 effectually silenced except when they endorse the 
 actions of their rulers, the Press to a great extent 
 has been gagged and has lent itself to providing 
 morphia for the conscience of its readers, or 
 stimulants for hatred and the spirit of revenge. 
 Men of independent thought have for the most 
 part been refused a hearing, or governments have 
 intentionally allowed them to be overwhelmed 
 by the clamour of hostile mob ignorance and 
 intolerance. 
 
 But notwithstanding all this, beneath the 
 surface, in each country, a thinking minority still 
 exists to whom the old ideals of Christianity and 
 civiUzation are as true and certain as ever — and 
 there is much scattered evidence of a widespread 
 
 10 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 11 
 
 feeling amongst the soldiers of all countries, as 
 well as the peasantry and common people, that 
 the war as a whole is a crime against civiHzation. 
 A few in each nation, whose names some day will 
 be inscribed in letters of gold in the history of 
 Humanity, courageously give expression to the 
 feelings of this minority — but they are usually 
 treated as anti-patriots or friends of the enemy. 
 Nevertheless, they represent the remnant or 
 residue of the conscience of Europe which is for 
 the time being submerged beneath the waves 
 of the flowing tide of miUtarism. 
 
 Charles Darwin said : " The voice of con- 
 science is due to the demand for recognition made 
 by relatively permanent impulses of moderate 
 strength in opposition to the pressure of less 
 permanent impulses which are immoral and of 
 very great strength/' In other words, he asserted 
 that the habitually moral attitude of mind tends 
 to overcome and subject sudden immoral impulses. 
 Rehgious convictions, though not always im- 
 mediate in their action upon conduct, reinforce 
 and are behind this habitual attitude. 
 
 Appl5dng this to the common conscience of 
 European peoples, the permanent or habitual 
 conscience-impulses of Europe which have been 
 developed by religion are those which resist the 
 temporary impulses towards criminal acts whether 
 of individuals or of States. 
 
 Anti-moral impulses, therefore, which are not 
 at once yielded to are less dangerous, because 
 
12 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 there is time for consideration and the develop- 
 ment of self-control. Murder is often com- 
 mitted upon a sudden and violent impulse, when 
 time for reflection would have prevented it. 
 The desire to declare war, or to obtain certain 
 advantages or avoid supposed risks by the threat 
 of war was a momentary impulse of great strength 
 in the minds of some European nations in 1914. 
 Time, however, was not allowed for the voice of the 
 conscience of Europe to make itself heard. Vis- 
 count Grey strove for time to allow the conscience 
 of Europe to come into play, but failed in his 
 endeavour, partly because the previous momen- 
 tum towards sudden and decisive acts had already 
 become too great, but more particularly because 
 the atmosphere was too heavily charged with 
 suspicion and fear and the State consciences had 
 not sufficient moral strength — and lastly, because 
 there was no means by which the peoples of 
 Europe could give rapid expression to their 
 own innate conscientious convictions as to the 
 immoraUty and wickedness of a destructive war 
 amongst the Christian nations of Europe. 
 
 The war once declared, the fear of invasion and 
 of defeat, the fear of loss of prestige, the fear of 
 the destruction of commercial interests were all 
 used by each State and by the newspaper Press 
 to drown the conscience of the peoples and to 
 make it less and less possible for any effective 
 protest to assert itself. The conscience of Europe 
 was paralysed and rendered mute. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 13 
 
 In order to understand the position better, it 
 may be useful to consider some of the first causes 
 and facts of the war which are partly visible and 
 partly latent. The purpose of the present writer 
 is not to examine the relative guilt of the nations 
 in having brought about the war, but to consider 
 firstly the tendencies that may have been pro- 
 vocative in the minds of rulers, diplomatists, and 
 peoples ; secondly, the dangerous influences which 
 the war, once begun, has helped to spread and 
 intensify, and which have made reasonable peace- 
 terms so difficult ; and lastly, some hopes and pro- 
 posals — and their connection with the conscience 
 of Humanity — ^which may make for peace and 
 civiUzation in the future. 
 
 In considering the whole question of the genesis 
 of the war let us endeavour to free ourselves 
 from national prejudices, and to take a broad 
 view of the whole situation. NationaUsm and 
 patriotism have their uses, but they are apt to 
 make us incapable of seeing things except through 
 tinted glasses, and to obscure our outlook upon 
 facts and issues. 
 
 Amongst the former there is a strange and in- 
 disputable one which is universally admitted — 
 namely, that the peoples of Europe, as apart from 
 their governments, up to the moment of the out- 
 break of war, did not desire it. More than that, 
 speaking broadly, they abhorred the very idea 
 of it, and would have avoided being dragged into 
 it if they could. If the vote of every man and 
 
14 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 woman could have been taken in every country, 
 even including Germany and Austria,^ it is 
 quite certain that there would have been an 
 utterly insignificant minority in favour of war, 
 and an absolutely crushing majority against it, 
 of course assuming that war had not first been 
 declared by any individual country. And yet, 
 notwithstanding this, war broke out, and has 
 become more widespread, and more violent, than 
 any war the world has hitherto seen. The peoples 
 of Europe neither wished for war nor demanded 
 it. That is certain. The responsibiUty for war 
 rested entirely in the first instance with their 
 rulers, military councils, and diplomatists. By 
 them and by them alone it was initiated, and 
 it is of vital importance that this fact should 
 not be lost sight of, even though it may not 
 entirely absolve the peoples of Europe from 
 
 ^ Mr F. William Wile, an American for many years resident 
 in Berlin, the special correspondent of the Daily Mail and 
 The New York Times, fully confirms this statement of 
 mine, which is based upon information obtained from many 
 independent sources in neutral countries and elsewhere. He 
 wrote in 191 5 of the German people : "I saw them with my 
 own eyes literally dragged into the fight against their will, 
 fears, and judgment. I know from their own lips that they 
 considered it a cruelly unnecessary war and did not want it. 
 They were joyful and prosperous a year and a half ago — 
 never more so. They craved a continuance of the simple 
 blessings of Peace." — "The Assault," by F. W. Wile, p. x 
 (W. Heinemann). 
 
 And again : " Armageddon was plotted, prepared for and 
 precipitated by the German War-party. It was not the work 
 of the German people" {Ibid., p. 27). 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 15 
 
 their share of the responsibility for it in a 
 lesser degree. 
 
 Leaving aside all theories and patriotic con- 
 victions as to who amongst these rulers was 
 chiefly responsible for the war, let us for a moment 
 consider a few of the bare and indisputable facts. 
 
 The Austrian militarist party and government 
 were the first movers, and issued an ultimatum 
 to Servia after the Serajevo assassination of the 
 heir of the Austrian throne. 
 
 The Tzar and his advisers, acting possibly under 
 the fear of the strikes which had broken out in 
 Petrograd in July and the alarm aroused by 
 incipient revolution, followed by taking the part 
 of Servia, and threatened Austria by mobilizing 
 on her frontiers. The Tzar then appealed to the 
 German Emperor to put pressure upon Austria 
 to settle the dispute with Servia, and also 
 mobihzed large masses of troops near the German 
 frontier. The Germans demanded demobilization 
 of these forces, and, failing to obtain it, declared 
 war. 
 
 Into the vexed question of whether Austria 
 was, in the first instance, instigated by Germany 
 to pick a quarrel with Servia, it is not necessary 
 to enter, for the evidence is conflicting. 
 
 These, then, are the bare facts, stripped of all 
 nationalist or partisan statement about them. 
 What may be argued from them ? Surely two 
 main deductions : 
 
 (i) That, as has been already said, the re- 
 
16 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 sponsibility for war rested entirely with a few 
 crowned heads, half a dozen diplomatists, and 
 some small groups of military advisers. 
 
 (2) That the countries in which the war origin- 
 ated all had more or less autocratic governments, 
 under which the voice and wishes of their peoples 
 could be but very feebly heard. 
 
 After the declaration of war each government 
 made its own statement of the case, and demanded 
 the support of its individual nation. At first 
 there was a thrill of fear, horror, and aversion, 
 and then national and racial instincts and anti- 
 pathies rose to the surface and seemed to take 
 possession of public opinion. 
 
 Hostilities having been once decided upon, 
 the war spirit, contrary to the previous hopes of 
 those who thought that the advance of material 
 and ethical civihzation would hold it in check, 
 developed into frenzy, and has spread like an 
 infectious disease, each nation being, as it were, 
 unconscious of the presence of the virus. 
 
 Returning to the first of our deductions, from 
 the bare facts of the opening of war, it would seem 
 as if the primary responsibiUty and guilt for de- 
 ciding upon war rested with a few men in power 
 in three semi-autocratically governed nations, 
 and that Europe having been dragged into the 
 contest against her will, her conscience might 
 be fairly clear. 
 
 But there are other points to be taken into 
 account. How came it that these twenty-five or 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 17 
 
 thirty men with whom rested the final decisions 
 had no higher sense of responsibility towards the 
 Christian civiUzation of the peoples of Europe ? 
 We may blame them rightly enough if we choose, 
 in various degrees, for reckless ambition, love 
 of power, short-sighted concentration upon the 
 hereditary aims of monarchs, failure to realize 
 to the full the horrors of an European war, failure 
 to consider the higher interests of their own 
 people, absorption in the old-fashioned practices 
 and etiquettes of diplomacy, or for being possessed 
 by a blind desire to use and prove armies upon 
 which so much had been expended. We may 
 blame them for all or any of these, but we must 
 remember that after all they themselves were part 
 of the life of modern Europe, influenced Uke other 
 men by their environment and the tendencies 
 around them, acted upon by the ideals and fears 
 of their time, weakened no doubt in their moral 
 fibre and their sense of responsibility towards their 
 fellow-men by some of these tendencies. 
 
 Everyone places the blame for this war upon 
 someone else, for the universal desire to find a 
 scapegoat is a very strong one. The truth is, 
 it could not have taken place if the standard 
 of moral responsibility had been higher, not merely 
 at the moment of the outbreak of war, but for 
 some time previously. If the moral atmosphere 
 in which the men who made the war Uved and 
 breathed had been purer, their mental outlook 
 would have been different, public opinion itself 
 
18 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 would have been healthier and more able to resist 
 the war impulse, and the probability is that there 
 would have been no war. The war has been 
 therefore largely due to a weakening of the sense 
 of responsibility towards the ideals of Christian 
 civiUzation. 
 
 The causes of this weakening are, of course, 
 to a great extent hidden from us. God alone 
 can know them in their fulness, but some of them 
 certainly have lain in men's misuse of the gift 
 of freewill, and their continued choice of evil 
 rather than good. 
 
 Small and obscure causes often he below the 
 surface of wide-reaching tendencies and are 
 most difficult to trace. There is the story of 
 the king who spared a conquered city from 
 pillage and massacre for no apparent reason, until 
 he admitted afterwards that it was in consequence 
 of the smile of a child who held out its arms to 
 him as he passed through the city at the head 
 of his troops. The feeling of pity was latent, 
 and only called forth by a small provocative 
 cause which no historian could have discovered 
 had it not been avowed by the king. 
 
 Thus with nations. Some of the causes which 
 have led them down the slope towards de- 
 generacy of ideals must for ever remain obscure, 
 but others are more or less in evidence and it is 
 in our highest interests to endeavour to trace 
 and consider these. 
 
Ill 
 
 During the nineteenth century the slow progress 
 which Europe had made in those preceding it 
 was astonishingly quickened. In almost every 
 civiUzed country there was a great social 
 advance. The welfare of the people was more 
 and more considered, abuses were lessened, 
 slavery was aboU hed, there was a rapid widening 
 of intercourse between nations, knowledge in- 
 creased in every direction, natural science was 
 studied as it had never been studied before, new 
 experiments were made in education ; philan- 
 thropic institutions and universities everywhere 
 sprang into being, and there was new activity 
 in art and literature. In addition there was an 
 enormous extension of trade and commercial 
 enterprise ; every part of the world was laid 
 under tribute for new products and natural 
 substances which science turned to account ; 
 inventions crowded upon each other's heels, 
 fresh discoveries in physical science were made 
 almost every day, and unheard-of possibilities 
 in locomotion, transport, telegraphy, and the 
 use of electricity were opened up. Instruments 
 or processes widening man's scope, bringing 
 natural forces more under his control, were 
 
 19 
 
20 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 welcomed by the whole world. Congratulations 
 upon them were international, questions of race 
 seldom stood in the way of their development, 
 scientific men shook each other by the hand, 
 and all over the world they were ready to place 
 their investigations at each other's disposal. 
 They came over in deputations from country to 
 country ; met in congresses in all the capitals 
 of Europe ; confeired together ; set aside 
 national and party jealousies in the joy of the 
 general advance and in the interests of marking 
 out possible routes to be followed in exploring 
 the yet unknown regions of natural science. 
 In medicine and biology all this was especially 
 evident. Everywhere men rejoiced at the con- 
 quest over fell diseases by new methods of inocu- 
 lation ; by fresh experiments in tracking diseases 
 to their origin ; by new drugs and new methods 
 of alleviating pain and making operations more 
 certain. The discoveries of Pasteur the French- 
 man, and Koch and Virchow the Germans, were 
 welcomed everywhere without any thought of 
 the narrowing prejudices of race or language, 
 and there seemed a hope that the dangers 
 arising from these prejudices would gradually 
 disappear. 
 
 So also in art ; everywhere there were inter- 
 national Art Exhibitions in which the impulses 
 of individual nations contributed to the art 
 movements throughout the civilized world. 
 Similarly nation exchanged ideas with nation in 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 21 
 
 literature and music, in dramatic art, and in all 
 intellectual pursuits. 
 
 Even though there was not free exchange of 
 products of the industries of every country, each 
 was benefited more or less by the commercial 
 and industrial advances made in other nations. 
 
 Educational systems acted and reacted upon 
 each other. England borrowed ideas from 
 Germany, and Germany criticized her early 
 educational methods by the light of what she 
 saw that was good elsewhere. Lastly, improved 
 means of travelling were beginning to make 
 nations better acquainted with one another, and 
 there were many districts in Europe in which 
 all nations met for health or pleasure, exchanged 
 ideas and fraternized to a greater or less extent. 
 New schemes of international helpfulness were 
 springing up in all directions. Philanthropy 
 knew no frontiers and reached out a helping hand 
 across them. It seemed at one time as if the 
 prospects for humanity had never been brighter, 
 as though old animosities were wearing down, 
 old prejudices disappearing, old false ideas fading 
 away. 
 
 Perhaps, taken all in all, the nineteenth century 
 was more splendid and more full of promise than 
 any that the world has ever seen ; and its achieve- 
 ments, its wealth, its intellectual progress were 
 well calculated to make men think that much 
 greater things were still assuredly in store for 
 them. 
 
22 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 But perhaps it carried also with it a certain 
 intoxication of success which made men demand 
 more than they had any right to expect and which 
 in time began to slacken self-restraint and stimu- 
 late almost insatiable desires. It is small wonder 
 that a great wave of self-satisfaction spread over 
 the world towards the close of that great century 
 and that a self-satisfied if not self-righteous spirit 
 in the minds of men made its appearance. That 
 in itself tended to weaken the sense of moral 
 responsibility. 
 
 But a still more important fact has to be taken 
 into account. During the latter half of the 
 nineteenth century the remarkable progress of 
 physical research had turned the scientific mind 
 towards the quest of a physical solution of the 
 problems of the universe. Science had done so 
 much that it might be the key to much more, 
 and thus it came about that purely mechanical 
 theories professing to explain the problems of 
 life and thought became more and more popular. 
 The spiritual side of life was neglected or ex- 
 plained away by the philosophers, and material- 
 istic theories of the universe were exalted into 
 definite laws which, though plausible, were purely 
 hypothetical. A new dogmatism propounded by 
 men of science sprang up and was supported by 
 a large class who disUked the moral restraints 
 of religion and of an ethical code based upon a 
 belief in free-will and personal responsibility, 
 and this scientific materialism became more 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 23 
 
 intolerant than any theological dogmatism.^ 
 Scientific materiaUsm has been generally aban- 
 doned in recent years, but its moral effects upon 
 the conscience of Europe have remained. 
 
 Two influences have thus helped to create the 
 atmosphere in which a widespread European 
 war became possible. 
 
 The first was an exaggerated self-satisfaction, 
 tending to make men over sanguine and less 
 upon their guard against the growth of social 
 diseases, moral or mental. 
 
 The second a materialistic and mechanical 
 view of the Universe tending to lessen the 
 sense of personal responsibiUty, the importance of 
 
 ^ It is interesting to contrast the present position as 
 regards materialism with that referred to in the latter part 
 of the nineteenth century. The following are significant 
 expressions of opinion : 
 
 " It may be doubted whether materialism as a philosophy 
 exists any longer, in the sense of being sustained by serious 
 philosophers ; but a few physiological writers, of skill and 
 industry, continue to advocate what they are pleased to call 
 Scientific Materialism. Properly regarded this is a Policy, 
 not a Philosophy . . . but they make the mistake of regard- 
 ing it as a philosophy comprehensive enough to give them 
 the right of negation as well as of affirmation. . . ." — Sir 
 Oliver Lodge. 
 
 Materialistic Agnosticism is also now largely discredited. 
 " We still hear often of ' Back to Kant.* Who says ' Back 
 to Spencer ? ' His very fluency and confidence, his dogmatic 
 Agnosticism, which once were an attraction to many of his 
 readers, are now deterrents. His omniscience, for a time 
 rarely questioned, does not bear close scrutiny." — The Times, 
 Literary Supplement. Review of Mr Hugh Elliot's book on 
 Herbert Spencer. 
 
24 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 social morals founded upon the belief in free-will 
 and religion, and the need for ethical aims and 
 ideals in literature and art. 
 
 Philosophic materiaUsm and Christianity are 
 incompatible and contradictory, and all attempts 
 to reconcile them are futile. In the early days 
 of the renaissance of materialism there was re- 
 luctance to recognize this, and on both sides 
 there was a desire for compromise, but as time 
 went on materialism became more self-assertive 
 and positive, and the upholders of reHgion took 
 refuge in the unsatisf5dng statement that science 
 and philosophy were one thing and reUgion 
 another, and that it did not matter if their 
 conclusions were diverse, while a school of 
 theologians endeavoured to explain away or 
 water down fundamental Christian beliefs. 
 
 Thus slowly and surely the influence of Christi- 
 anity amongst the educated of most countries 
 was steadily weakened. 
 
 Previously, and especially in the earlier part 
 of the nineteenth century, the Christian con- 
 science as a guiding influence had developed 
 itself anew amongst the nations of Europe, after 
 the upheaval of the French Revolution. It 
 had many a set-back, but it had existed, as it 
 were, as a sub-conscious source of vitality and 
 progress, permeating and augumenting all the 
 nobler impulses of the time. But during the last 
 thirty or forty years of the century, partly, as has 
 been pointed out, from the increase of philosophic 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 25 
 
 materialism and partly from other causes, it was 
 steadily undermined, and its decay has accounted 
 for the reappearance of many of the evils to which 
 it was in direct opposition.^ 
 
 The tap-root of Christian ethics, . from which 
 the great branching tree of European civilization 
 has grown up, is Christian altruism, or in other 
 words, the unselfish effort of the individual to 
 help others and to put restraint upon his passions 
 and desires for the sake of his fellow-men and in 
 order to follow the example of the Founder of 
 Christianity. We should expect, therefore, that 
 the first symptom of downward tendency from 
 the standards of Christian morality would be 
 the revival and development of personal selfish- 
 ness, which, of course, would also mean collective 
 or national selfishness, and that is exactly what 
 is generally admitted to have been the case, and 
 to have been one of the great moral dangers for 
 many years previous to the outbreak of war. 
 
 It showed itself in the ever-increasing and 
 
 ^ Lord Beaconsfield's forecast as to the effect of the decay 
 of Christianity is interesting. 
 
 " You have in this country accumulated wealth that never 
 has beei? equalled, and probably it will still increase. You 
 have a luxury that will some day peradventure rival even 
 your wealth. And the union of such circumstances with a 
 church without a distinctive creed will lead, I believe, to a 
 dissoluteness of manners and morals rarely equalled in the 
 history of man, but which prepares the tomb of empires." 
 From his Address in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, 
 Nov. 25th 1864. Cf. Buckle's " Life of Disraeli," vol. iv 
 P- 372 (John Murray). 
 
26 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 insatiable desire for wealth and luxury, a restless 
 dissatisfaction with the wholesome occupations 
 and pleasures of Ufe, an apologetic attitude 
 towards vice, attacks upon the Christian virtues 
 and ordinances, a widespread tolerance of self- 
 indulgence, a disregard by each class of the needs 
 and interests of other classes, a tendency to 
 tyrannize over minorities and to neglect urgent 
 social reforms. In some countries the conditions 
 of life of many of the people in great cities was 
 a disgrace to civiHzation, and at the same time 
 amusement and sport became the principle 
 occupation of large numbers to the exclusion 
 of a sense of duty towards serious work and 
 social responsibiUty, while the extravagance and 
 ostentation of a certain proportion of the 
 wealthy throughout Europe suggested com- 
 parison with the decadent periods of the 
 Roman Empire. 
 
 As the admiration for Christian ideals decayed 
 and the desire to put them into practice and 
 live the Christian life weakened, so a belief in 
 the power of money as a superior good gained- 
 ground. 
 
 The haste to become rich at the cost of others 
 rapidly increased the rivalry between classes 
 and the animosity between capital and labour. 
 At the same time commercial corruption ex- 
 tended in all directions, and men holding the 
 highest positions were found ready to lend 
 their names, or their influence, for fraudulent 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 27 
 
 purposes, scandals of this kind even involv- 
 ing prominent public men in most European 
 countries. 
 
 With the lessening desire for the good of others 
 as a powerful motive in men's lives, suspicion of 
 them had rapidly grown, and an attitude of critical 
 uncharitableness had become general, and it is 
 not unreasonable to suppose that this affected 
 rulers and diplomatists as well as journaUsts 
 and poUticians. It is probably this attitude of 
 suspicion and unbeUef as to the good intentions 
 of others which more than an5rthing else has 
 created fear and has helped to make the present 
 war possible. 
 
 Again, for many years past, the demand for 
 new markets, the desire to obtain predominant 
 influence, the reckless destruction of the rights 
 of smaller and less civilized nations all over the 
 world, the unscrupulous pressure put upon govern- 
 ments by the autocrats of high finance; have all 
 contributed to make nationalism more narrow 
 and selfish, and international relationships more 
 difficult — in other words, less Christian and 
 humanitarian. Within the last twenty or thirty 
 years annexation by great nations and ex- 
 tension of their *' spheres of influence '* has 
 proceeded apace, often excused by the flimsiest 
 pretexts, and sometimes coupled with terrible 
 abuses in the treatment of the native popula- 
 tions. Cases in point of such annexations are 
 those, amongst others, of Madagascar, the Congo, 
 
28 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 Tripoli, Tunis, Tonquin, Morocco, other large 
 tracts of Africa, Finland, and some of the 
 Balkan States. France alone during this period 
 annexed altogether about 4,250,000 and Great 
 Britain 3,000,000 square miles. 
 
 Not only was this the tendency of the foreign 
 policy of the nations, coupled with many un- 
 principled acts, but the weakening of the ab- 
 stract principles of honour and justice, and of the 
 regard for the welfare of others, also showed itself 
 increasingly in the parUamentary government of 
 many countries. In Great Britain, as everyone 
 knows, home politics became more and more a 
 question of bargaining for votes, and with the 
 introduction of measures for party purposes some 
 of the worst vices of party government made 
 their appearance. In France poUtical corrup- 
 tion and insincerity took another form owing to 
 the number and complexity of parties and the 
 multitude of conflicting interests. But for a long 
 time past politics and poUticians were regarded 
 by the French nation as synonymous with 
 dishonesty and intrigue ; and immediately before 
 the war there was striking evidence of this in 
 the gross scandals of the Caillaux assassination 
 and trial. 
 
 Politics have also been a money-making 
 profession amongst many politicians in almost 
 every country. In Austria for years such repre- 
 sentative government as the country possessed 
 has been discredited, as well as its administrative 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 29 
 
 bureaucracy. In Italy, as elsewhere, politics had 
 been a trade, and the misappropriation of public 
 funds, more especially the proceeds of taxation, 
 ceased to excite much surprise or scandal. 
 
 Lastly, in Russia, although Uttle was known 
 as to the secrets which lay behind party 
 representation in the Duma, administrative 
 corruption was a bye-word. 
 
 And with the degeneration of party poUtics 
 everywhere a corrupt newspaper Press grew up, 
 always ready to support party measures, just or 
 unjust, by false pleading, suppression of truth, 
 and the stimulation of party animosity or party 
 ambitions. 
 
 With the decline of Christian standards of 
 social conduct came also the weakening of sexual 
 moraUty, which has always had a strangely close 
 connection with the vitiation of principles in 
 general. Towards the end of the nineteenth 
 century both in France and in Italy a propaganda, 
 set on foot by some of the subversive parties 
 in both countries, had for its definite object the 
 abolition of marriage and destruction of family 
 life, as a means to an end in lessening moral 
 restraint in poUtics. The movement even found 
 its echo amongst a small party in England and 
 Germany. This would have been impossible 
 a few years earlier, and was an index to the 
 tendencies of the time. 
 
 The downward trend in morals showed itself 
 
30 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 of course in literature, which again reacted upon 
 and stimulated it.^ This decadent movement 
 in morals, as reflected in Uterature, began chiefly 
 in France with the abandonment of an ideaUstic 
 outlook and the growth of the reaUstic school 
 of Zola and his followers. At first this aroused 
 great opposition and was a shock to the Uterary 
 conscience of most European countries, and both 
 in England and in Germany was severely 
 criticized. 
 
 Tennyson focussed this attitude in his memor- 
 able lines in '* Sixty Years After.'* 
 
 * The following extracts from a review in the Observer by- 
 Mr John Bailey of the " Cambridge History of English 
 Literature" are significant in this connection. 
 
 They refer to the literary life of but one nation, but its 
 tendencies may fairly be taken as typical of the recent trend 
 of European literature in general. In fact, in many countries 
 the downward movement towards the abandonment of all 
 expression in literature of the sense of right and wrong has 
 been much more marked. 
 
 Mr Bailey says : " Perhaps the most striking of the con- 
 trasts between the Victorian age and the present was its pre- 
 occupation with ethics. Cowper said of one of his poems 
 that he had written it ' as well as I could in hopes to do good.* 
 Everyone of the great Victorian writers might have said the 
 same, Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Dickens, 
 Thackeray, George Eliot. They are all alike in that ; they are 
 undisguisedly anxious 'to do good.' They are all preachers 
 of works if not of faith. Even Meredith, the last of them, made 
 most of his long poems sermons in verse. All, with scarcely 
 an exception, whatever they thought of the Christian creed, 
 were upholders of Christian morality. The general reaction 
 against Victorian sobriety is nowhere more felt than in this 
 field." 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 31 
 
 " Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage 
 
 of your sewer ; 
 Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream 
 
 should issue pure. 
 Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of 
 
 Zolaism, — 
 Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too 
 
 into the abysm." 
 
 But the reaction against Zola was short-lived, 
 and in England many of the critics of the news- 
 paper press vigorously supported him, got up 
 a banquet for him in London, and did all they 
 could to provide him with fresh readers and 
 admirers. 
 
 Gradually a naturalistic and then an anti- 
 moral school of literature developed itself in 
 Germany, England, France, Italy, Scandinavia, 
 and Russia. Some efforts were made to stem its 
 progress and some of the older writers united 
 against it, but the movement grew and continued 
 to be supported by the press, so that ultimately 
 a whole crowd of authors, and not a few women 
 amongst them, made literary immorality popular 
 and accentuated the downward movement. The 
 serious outlook, from the standpoint of religion 
 and morals, was dealt with in England at the great 
 Pan- Anglican Conference in several able papers, 
 and in France a powerful society was founded 
 by one or two leading statesmen to endeavour 
 to stem the advancing tide of sensual literature, 
 showing that the dangers arising from it were 
 realized. 
 
32 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 Degeneracy in literature found, of course, its 
 counterpart in the drama, and a number of 
 irresponsible playwrights pandered to the lower 
 passions throughout Europe, while contempt and 
 abuse was poured by a section of the press upon 
 those who raised a protest. 
 
 It has always been recognized that art, and more 
 especially painting, has generally been an index 
 to the character of the nation which produced it, 
 and in the present instance art did not fail also 
 to show signs of disease. So typical have been 
 some of these signs that it may be worth while 
 to follow them a little more in detail. 
 
 As in literature, a reaction took place during 
 the latter part of the nineteenth century from 
 romantic classisism towards realism. The first 
 steps away from classic precedent were towards 
 closer truth to nature, and some artistic sacrifices 
 had to be made in consequence, but the rebound 
 from convention was sane and vigorous, and it 
 was reasonable to sympathize with the impulses 
 which took artists whole-heartedly back to nature 
 and opened their minds to hitherto unrecorded 
 forms of beauty. At first this return to nature 
 remained an artistic one. The painter still 
 looked at her with the eyes of an artist, still 
 carried with him traditions of the past and did 
 not wilfully fling away all the artistic knowledge 
 that had been strained out from nature's com- 
 plexities by his predecessors. He was still a 
 man of artistic culture and realized that all great 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 33 
 
 art had developed from that which preceded it. 
 The movement culminated in our own pre- 
 RaphaeUte School and a similar one in Germany 
 of which Overbeck was the representative. 
 The first appearance of the ultra-realistic school 
 in art was in France and ultimately led to the 
 development of the early Impressionists, with 
 whom the rejection of artistic precedent asserted 
 itself still more. About the same time the first 
 seeds were sown of an art which was destined later 
 on to abandon the quest of beauty in order to 
 express the spirit of revolt against artistic prin- 
 ciples and even to devote itself to a cult of the 
 repulsive and the deformed. 
 
 The earlier impressionist movement found 
 its exponents in England in Whistler and his 
 followers, in whose work there reappeared 
 colour of a refined and beautiful kind. This 
 proved, however, to be but a temporary reaction, 
 and the more advanced — or retrograde — school 
 in France and other countries pursued its course, 
 abandoning most of the emotional capabilities 
 of art and professedly devoting itself to technical 
 problems such as the expression of a sense 
 of Ught, sacrificing all else, until Post-Im- 
 pressionism, Futurism, Cubism, and other forms 
 of artistic charlatanry appeared and became 
 representative of the decadent tendencies in 
 painting. Not content with abandoning most 
 of the true objects of art, these schools 
 endeavoured to appeal to the curiosity and 
 
34 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 ignorance of the multitude who had ceased to 
 appreciate good art, by making their work both 
 unintelligible and to some extent sensual and 
 anti-moral.^ 
 
 The discovery and expression of beauty, which 
 has been one of the true and noble objects of art 
 throughout the centuries, as well as its appeal 
 to the intellect and the higher emotions, was 
 replaced by this modern parody of art, with its 
 frantic attempt to be original and startling. A 
 crowd of pretentious and insincere art critics 
 sprang up ready to support it, and in order to 
 disarm attack veiled their advocacy in obscurity 
 of expression and extravagant language. 
 
 Thus in the years before the war painting 
 
 * " Art has her dangers — dangers coming to her from men's 
 frivolity, their absorption in sumptuousness and luxury, their 
 over attention to trivialities and mere curiosities, their morbid 
 excitement after titillating novelties, their resultant shallow- 
 ness of judgment and sane appreciation. Dangers from these 
 things and the like of them assail Art and are fatal to her 
 fineness." 
 
 " There has been overmuch excitement and frivolity, over- 
 much running hither and thither after fools and their folly, 
 overmuch licence and even applause accorded to fallacious 
 theories and practices, as destructive as they were ridiculous. 
 To remind ourselves of but one example. How persistently 
 has it been dinned into our ears, in certain ' anti-philistine ' 
 quarters — sometimes one must confess with brilliant and 
 seductive paradox — that art need have no thought of moral 
 and spiritual purpose. . . . There is little doubt we needed 
 a cleansing purge and sharp awakening, a recalling to sanity, 
 to a readjustment of our estimate of things." — ^Prof. Selwyn 
 Image, " Art, Morals, and the War " (H. Milford, Oxford). 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 35 
 
 followed the general trend towards degeneracy 
 in social life and in literature, and reflected the 
 waning of higher ideals and the principles of self- 
 restraint or self-control which rest upon the 
 ethics of Christianity. 
 
 There were those who pointed this out, but they 
 were regarded for the most part as old-fashioned 
 and behind the times. There were, of course, a 
 great many artists who remained true to their 
 art, but the development of such a school as 
 that just described was yet another indication 
 of that atmosphere of lowered moral responsibilty 
 which helped to make a widespread European 
 war possible. 
 
IV 
 
 And yet, despite this darkened moral atmo- 
 sphere, there are many who, with serious con- 
 victions as to God's government of the world, 
 have asked in perplexity how such a frightful 
 war as the present one could have been permitted 
 to arise and is allowed to continue. 
 
 Surely the reply is to be found in recognizing 
 the existence of the mysterious gift of free-will, 
 under which men have ignorantly chosen the evil 
 instead of the good, have allowed themselves to 
 drift, and have disregarded those ethics of the 
 brotherhood of man upon which the Christian 
 civiUzation of the world has been founded. 
 Without free-will we should have been compelled 
 to regard ourselves as the mere machines of the 
 now discredited materialist ; with the possession 
 of it, we must accept the results of our own 
 actions and the outcome of our own choice. 
 Free-will could not continue to exist if the results 
 of its exercise were always swept aside when they 
 produced evil. It is beginning to be realized 
 that God has set limits to His interference in 
 human affairs. If men were automata they 
 would be slaves, and no more deadly injury to 
 the hopes of humanity and the strivings towards 
 
 36 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 87 
 
 progress and civilization can be inflicted than to 
 persuade them that they are the slaves of irre- 
 sistible forces. 
 
 It is asserted by many that this war proves 
 the failure of Christianity. All that it really 
 proves is the failure of the modern world to have 
 been Chiistian ; or rather the failure of its rulers 
 or of a sufficient proportion of its peoples to be so. 
 It proves that the barbarous instincts of pagan 
 times have again risen to the surface in despite 
 of Christianity. 
 
 It may be asked, " Why rake up the past, and 
 criticize it so severely ? Why show that there 
 was a decadent tendency in Europe ? ' ' The answer 
 is, because the facts must be looked fairly in the 
 face, and the need for reform recognized, if there 
 is to be improvement in the future condition of 
 Europe. Men must see the need for alteration 
 of heart and mind, and as the machinery of 
 civilization and especially its powers of self 
 protection have failed, the causes of this failure 
 ought to be impartially examined into. 
 
 There are those who think that it is better to 
 ignore the defects of the past and to assume 
 that all is well in the present. They point to 
 many facts for self-congratulation, to many 
 advances which cannot be denied, and which no 
 one wishes to deny ; they speak of the heroism 
 called forth by the war — ^the self-sacrifice, the 
 practical pity for the wounded ; but they are 
 apt to close their eyes to the symptoms of social 
 
38 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 diseases which have been only too evident for a 
 long time past, and think it unpatriotic to see 
 faults in their own nation even though it is a 
 part of the European comity and consequently 
 responsible to Europe. 
 
 But the truth is that there has been a set back 
 in social evolution which must be fairly studied 
 by those who believe in the existence of a 
 progressive purpose in the universe, and in the 
 existence of free-will capable of co-operating with 
 that purpose. 
 
 There are certain assertions of latent material- 
 istic fatalism which are continually made, such, 
 for instance, as " That war is necessary from time 
 to time," that '* This war must in any case have 
 come,*' that " There have always been wars and 
 there always will be,'' '' The desire for fighting 
 is an ineradicable part of human nature,'' '' War 
 is a necessary part of evolution." " The evil of 
 war is a disguised good." " You cannot alter 
 human nature." 
 
 All these statements, some of which are half- 
 truths, are used to support sophisms with regard 
 to war, and some might as well be applied to other 
 disasters which afflict the human race — ^for in- 
 stance, to many forms of disease, poUtical cor- 
 ruptions, ruin brought about by commercial 
 dishonesty, and so forth. A part of human 
 progress is the struggle against all these things, 
 the non-acceptance of them as necessary, the 
 recognition of them as great evils, the diagnosis 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 39 
 
 of the causes that produced them, and the dis- 
 covery and provision of remedies for them. 
 Human nature has as a matter of fact been largely 
 altered and moraUzed by both reUgion and 
 philosophy. 
 
 This materialistic belief in the necessity for 
 war and the excellent side of war, lies at the root 
 of Prussianism abroad and at home, and the 
 statements of such authors as Bernhardi, Cramb, 
 Treitschke, and others. ^ It is a practical denial 
 of the possibiUty of man controlUng his destiny ; 
 it overlooks the fact of his having done so to a 
 considerable extent in the past, it is the antith- 
 esis of everything for which Christianity stands, 
 and a condition of mind which tends to dry up 
 the springs of initiative in religious and philo- 
 sophic social reform. 
 
 ^ See Appendix, p. 162, *' Evolution and War." 
 
The past hopes and assertions of the rulers and 
 philosophers of Europe as to the guarantees 
 which had been built up for the peaceful develop- 
 ment of European civilization have to a large 
 extent failed. The war which is devastating 
 Europe is the evidence of their failure.^ It was 
 said that the advance of civilization, the widening 
 of the sense of brotherhood and the development 
 of international interests, made war on a big 
 scale impossible : it was said that universal 
 military service, and the immense size of standing 
 armies, also tended to make it impossible, and 
 was a guarantee for peace ; it was asserted that 
 the balance of power as a substitute for a universal 
 league of nations was also a guarantee. All 
 these assertions have now been proved to have 
 been illusions or sophistries ; and we must be 
 upon our guard against those whose interests 
 or whose prejudices impel them to endeavour to 
 make us believe that they can again be accepted 
 with safety. 
 
 Especially must we be cautious with regard 
 to the supposed security arising from the assumed 
 advance of civilization. If humanity is to be 
 
 ^ See Appendix, p. i66, "Rulers and Diplomatists." 
 40 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 41 
 
 saved from future catastrophes such as the 
 present one, men must retrace their steps, to a 
 large extent remodel their outlook upon the 
 universe, and get back to the firmer moral founda- 
 tions of social Ufe which have been abandoned, 
 and build others to consoUdate them. 
 
 But not only must past degenerate tendencies 
 be looked at with the open eyes of the surgeon 
 who does not shrink from a painful diagnosis, 
 but also those symptoms, some of them even 
 more dangerous, which the war has brought 
 into being. 
 
 The purifying action of war has often been in- 
 sisted upon ; and, by those interested in the 
 continuance of war or carried away by its fascina- 
 tion and spirit of sacrifice, has been unduly ex- 
 aggerated. The undeniable facts of self-sacrifice, 
 courage, heroism, love of country, improved 
 physique, return to a simple Ufe, and develop- 
 ment of national spirit, excellent in themselves, 
 are all put forward as if they were more than 
 sufficient to counterbalance the hideous tide of 
 unspeakable misery and destruction which is 
 the outcome of a modern war such as this, which 
 has swept over the life of Europe, destroyed the 
 flower of its manhood, and buried a thousand 
 hopes for the future under the festering mounds 
 of its dead. 
 
 It is probably true that no disaster, however 
 great, fails in the end to carry some benefits with 
 it, however small in comparison to the magnitude 
 
42 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 of its evil. A devastating earthquake often 
 serves to quicken the sympathies of all nations 
 with their fellow-men, and to reawaken impulses 
 of self-sacrifice on their behalf. It may also 
 necessitate the rebuilding of towns and villages 
 which were in an unsanitary condition, and other 
 resultant benefits might be traced out. The 
 same argument would apply to an epidemic of 
 cholera, or typhus, but it would of course be un- 
 reasonable to argue that therefore earthquakes, 
 cholera, or typhus are desirable things. 
 
 It is clear that in every country some good 
 may result from the present conflict, or is being 
 evolved at the present time, and this perhaps 
 is most evident in the case of Great Britain. If 
 we except the desires of a few fanatical journalists 
 and miUtary men, who always see advantages in 
 wars, this conflict was undoubtedly entered upon 
 by this country with the high motives put forward 
 by the Cabinet, and once decided upon, the wide- 
 spread conviction of the justice of these motives 
 led to great and noble personal self-sacrifice on 
 all sides. In England alone, as we know, it was 
 possible to raise a large and effective army of 
 many milHons solely by means of the voluntary 
 principle, and the great majority of the men who 
 enUsted did so no doubt from patriotic motives 
 of one kind or another, to defend their country 
 or to help to prosecute the war on behalf of what 
 they believed to be a justifiable and righteous 
 cause. In most of the other countries engaged 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 43 
 
 in the war, this spirit of self-sacrifice, even under 
 the conditions of conscription, was no doubt also 
 called forth by the war to a considerable extent, 
 and this must be fairly recognized. 
 
 Self-sacrifice, moreover, has not been confined 
 to the mihtary class, but civilians have shown it, 
 if not in so striking and dramatic a way, in hardly 
 less degree. 
 
 The war has also served to bring the peoples of 
 Europe face to face with the great facts of life, 
 with its duties and its dangers, with the heart- 
 rending sorrows of others, as perhaps nothing else 
 could have done, and it has torn down many of 
 the veils and silken curtains of artificiaUty. It 
 has also promoted the virtues of fortitude, courage, 
 and resource, and shown men that many of the 
 luxuries they thought so necessary to the pleasure 
 of life were merely useless hindrances. 
 
 Another benefit, and one of no small kind, has 
 been to cause men to sink many of their differences 
 in poUtics and social Ufe, and to join together 
 for common national purposes. Lastly — ^though 
 it is impossible to follow the subject into all its 
 details — ^the care of the wounded and the spectacle 
 of their hideous sufferings has undoubtedly 
 touched many sympathetic chords in minds which 
 would not otherwise have been awakened to an 
 altruistic attitude, and may in time perhaps 
 serve to rescue humanity from the ruthless horrors 
 of war under modern conditions and the frightful 
 and needless sacrifice of the Hfe and health of 
 
44 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 millions. All these and some other benefits, 
 directly or indirectly traceable to the war, should 
 undoubtedly be entered up on the credit side of 
 the ledger of humanity, however overwhelming 
 may be the debit balance on the opposite page. 
 
 It is a pleasanter task to summarize them than 
 to look fairly and squarely at the latter. In the 
 interests of humanity, however, the items of the 
 long columns on that debit side must be carefully 
 scrutinized if the mistakes and failures of the past 
 are to be avoided and the civiUzation of Europe 
 saved from ruin in the future. 
 
 Let us now turn to this debit balance and 
 again ask the question, How can Europe reconcile 
 this war with its conscience ? Part of the 
 answer is, that its conscience appears to lie dormant 
 and, as it were, to be hypnotized by those who 
 as rulers and diplomatists led the nations into 
 war by their evil ambitions, unreasoning fears, and 
 false ideals. Almost from that hour the thinking 
 men of sensitive conscience in every nation 
 engaged in war were silenced by the loud and 
 insistent demand for a blind patriotism which 
 should admit no fault except on the part of the 
 enemy and which should express itself only in 
 violent denunciation and recrimination. Not 
 only were their voices silenced, but they were 
 scarcely allowed to hear those of their contem- 
 poraries in neutral nations. Some few essayed 
 to speak, some to protest in the name of humanity 
 at the way in which Europe was being rushed 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 45 
 
 into war, but ultimately in every country they 
 were treated as traitors and more or less silenced 
 either by the censorship or by the chauvinist 
 mob. 
 
 Almost all freedom of speech was crushed and 
 not only were the peoples of most of the nations 
 of Europe prevented from making any effectual 
 protest against being dragged into the horrors 
 of this internecine strife, without really under- 
 standing the why and wherefore of it, or having 
 been allowed previously any discussion of the 
 ambitions and treaties which led up to it, but 
 governments themselves retired into relative 
 silence and secrecy behind the exigencies of the 
 military situation. Throughout Europe, the 
 miUtarist party commanded the position ; every- 
 thing had to give way to them, and humanity 
 was at their mercy. Many of the liberties and 
 rights for which Europe had slowly struggled 
 during the centuries disappeared as in a flash, 
 and some of them perhaps may never return. 
 Not only freedom of speech and freedom of action 
 had to be given up, but with them, as we shall 
 see, also many articles of the moral code of 
 Christian civilization. That is a point which 
 we must not lose sight of even though there have 
 been desperate attempts to bUnd us to it by a 
 crowd of sophists, some of the clergy of almost 
 all denominations having, alas ! been amongst 
 them. 
 
 Leaving it aside for a moment and returning to 
 
46 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 the debit and credit side of the war ledger and 
 of the items of good which must be entered up 
 in the credit column — ^if we examine these we 
 shall find that unfortunately even they must 
 be generally quaUfied and cannot be set down 
 without reservation. Take, for instance, the de- 
 velopment of courage. Physical courage, though 
 a great quality, is one lying far below the level 
 of moral courage, and the first is sometimes 
 developed at the expense of the second. Even 
 love of country, which war accentuates and which 
 may be so noble and fair, not infrequently leads, 
 under the pressure of war, to a narrow and selfish 
 form of nationahsm, unable to think of humanity 
 and human brotherhood in the wide sense. 
 Improved physique, due to mihtary training, 
 may apply to the individual, but as was clearly 
 shown after the Napoleonic wars, it does not 
 always apply to nations, who are slow to recover 
 the drain upon their youthful virility, — and thus 
 with many other benefits credited to war. 
 
 But turning from these minor flaws in the 
 arguments of the apologists for miUtarism we 
 should do wisely to bear in mind some of the 
 indisputably evil effects of war upon national 
 and individual character. They are so many 
 and so complicated that they are like a plague 
 of insidious diseases, germinating in every 
 direction and flinging their spores broadcast into 
 the human Ufe of the world. 
 
 War is inimical to most of the better feelings 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 47 
 
 of humanity. It converts neighbours and friends 
 into enemies and opens the floodgates to a vast 
 volume of corrupting influences. From the 
 moment of the commencement of war a thousand 
 war-interests leap into being and feed upon 
 civilization like parasites, spreading out their 
 roots and tentacles and sucking the Hfe out of 
 the wholesome progressive occupations of man- 
 kind. Militarist industries of all kinds develop, 
 all devoted directly or indirectly to the main 
 purpose of inflicting death, destruction, and ruin 
 upon some other nation or nations ; labour is 
 taken from pursuits beneficial to civilization 
 and forced into these wasteful industries either 
 by the bribe of high wages or by compulsion. 
 Corruption and bribery invariably flourish in con- 
 nection with many of these ; the sense of honour 
 is weakened in the scramble for contracts, and one 
 portion of a nation enriches itself at the expense 
 of the remainder through the spending of vast 
 national loans of which the interest has to be paid 
 by present and prospective over-taxation.^ 
 
 War is made the excuse for the suspension 
 of justice, of freedom, of education, of pro- 
 
 1 In reference to the after effects in England of the 
 Napoleonic wars Green points out that " the war enriched 
 the landowner, the capitalist, the manufacturer, the farmer ; 
 but it impoverished the poor. It is indeed from the fatal 
 years which lie behind the Peace of Amiens and Waterloo that 
 we must date that war of classes, that social severance be- 
 tween rich and poor, between employers and employed which 
 still forms the great difficulty of English politics." — Green's 
 *' History of the English People," p. 805. 
 
48 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 gress in every direction. *' Nothing matters/* 
 Humanity must deliver itself bound hand and 
 foot to militarist exigencies and it must even 
 deliver its conscience — ^the most precious of all 
 its possessions — ^into the keeping of a few men 
 calling themselves *' the State/' That conscience 
 has to be drugged, moreover, by being persuaded 
 in every country that a state of war exists only 
 and solely with the object of ending war. That 
 is the grand conjuring-trick of rulers and 
 militarists, supported by the press, and which 
 never fails to deceive the multitude. The mili- 
 tarist is disguised as an ambassador of peace, 
 though this does not prevent his methods from 
 stimulating the evil passions of war of almost 
 every kind. Take, for example, those of hatred 
 and the spirit of revenge. There are many in 
 each country who will assert that their own 
 particular nation is free from such passions. The 
 '* Hymn of Hate '' in Germany, the anti-German 
 League, and numerous popular publications of 
 the most violent tone in England and other 
 countries are sufficient evidence to the contrary. 
 Hardly any accusations or insinuations on both 
 sides have been too wild or too unmeasured to 
 be put forward and to be believed. A large part 
 of the press especially, in each country, set 
 itself to stimulate every evil passion, to fan 
 hatred into fury and to pour contempt upon any 
 moderating considerations. Every fact that could 
 be twisted into a taunt was seized upon, every 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 49 
 
 incident that could be used to create prejudice or 
 foster unreasoning passion was brought into pro- 
 minence. With regard to the press in this con- 
 nection, here is the opinion of an eminent author, 
 M. Platyhoff-Lejeune (editor of the Coenobium). 
 He maintains that the greatest evil in the war has 
 been produced " neither by cannon, asphxjdating 
 gas, political parties, nor heads of States, but by 
 the press/' He says : 
 
 *' We all obey this formidable tyrant, we let 
 it drag us where it will. It benumbs our con- 
 sciences, excites our lowest passions, foments 
 hatred of brother against brother, deceives us 
 by concealing and altering the truth, flatters our 
 worst instincts, and throws dust in our eyes. 
 It drags in the mud the ideal for peace and 
 harmony between men . . . it is dragging 
 humanity towards an abyss which will be its 
 ruin. Drunk by its incontestable successes, it 
 grows continually more savage and intolerant. 
 Free men obey it servilely, without being aware 
 of the weight of their chains. . . ." 
 
 Mr Harold Begbie, himself a journalist, who 
 is also eloquent upon this subject, in his '* Vindi- 
 cation of Great Britain " speaks of " the immense 
 danger and the inexpressible shame of government 
 by newspaper clamour " ; and he adds : '* It is 
 to me one of the greatest tragedies of this most 
 tragic calamity, that the men of middle age who 
 make this war by their reckless journalism are 
 safe out of the firing line, while a purer, kinder 
 
50 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 and more honourable generation, which would 
 certainly have worked for a better and nobler 
 world and which would have been superior to 
 the influence of the baser newspapers, is being 
 slain by tens and hundreds of thousands/' 
 
 The alternative attitude which might have 
 been taken up by the press and public men — ^that 
 of moderation instead of violence of statement, 
 a regard for truth and a sense of responsibility 
 towards the higher ideals and rights of humanity ^ 
 — ^would have added greatly to the prestige of 
 every nation, and have tended to lessen many 
 of the horrors of war, even though it might well 
 have been coupled with the calm and cool de- 
 termination in each country to pursue its aims. 
 Instead of this the dominant idea which has 
 seized the majority, whatever may be averred 
 to the contrary, would seem to be that of furious 
 hatred and the desire for revenge ; and whatever 
 Christianity may have to say as to the justifiable- 
 ness of war under some conditions and for some 
 purposes (though its sanction is a very debatable 
 question), there can be no doubt that the spirit 
 of revenge is distinctly anti-Christian. This is 
 not to deny that there are no better motives and 
 nobler ideals now in existence side by side with 
 the insensate craving for revenge and too often 
 also for nothing less than the crushing of the 
 enemy's people in their national life, but this 
 
 ^ Since exemplified in President Wilson's speeches, and 
 those of Russian statesmen. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 51 
 
 attitude is one of the dark shadows upon the 
 character of the struggle for ideals. 
 
 The spirit of revenge, masked under a demand 
 for punishment, has thus been one of the evil 
 emanations of the present war, and this re- 
 naissance of one of the worst passions of barbaric 
 times will make co-operation for the advance of 
 civilization amongst the nations of Europe after 
 the war extremely difficult. It will have done 
 much to destroy the common fellowship of 
 humanity. 
 
 In addition, deliberate lying has been supported 
 for miUtary and poUtical purposes, misrepresen- 
 tation of the enemy on both sides has become a 
 fine art, and there is everywhere a tendency to 
 accept a cold-hearted and brutal ferocity without 
 any sense of shame. It is impossible to shut 
 our eyes to these things, and they are all directly 
 contrary to Christian ethics, and subversive of 
 the Conscience of Europe. 
 
 Side by side with them has grown up a callous- 
 ness to human suffering and a lack of sympathy 
 with the sorrows of humanity at large. At first 
 the tragedies of the battle-fields and the horrors 
 and struggles against ruin and starvation into 
 which the civilian populations were drawn 
 aroused a thrill of compassion in most hearts. 
 But as these things spread and multipUed the 
 mind failed to follow them in all their complexities 
 and men's hearts became more and more in- 
 sensitive. The longer the war lasts the more they 
 
52 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 are being taken for granted as inevitable and 
 passed over with coolness of sympathy. It is 
 impossible, as has been said, for the imagination 
 to be sufficiently stretched to take in the extent 
 of the hideous disasters which have occurred 
 and are occurring, and the attempt to realise even 
 a small portion of them is at last given up in 
 despair. 
 
 It is, however, dangerous to lose sight of them, 
 for a renewed impulse towards better things will 
 largely depend upon how deeply they sink into 
 our minds. We should not shrink from looking 
 upon them, even though they may wring our 
 hearts, and almost make us despair of the future 
 of humanity. As a great thinker once said : 
 '* Despair or semi-despair is often a prelude to 
 renewed exertion or perhaps even the source of 
 it." 
 
 In one of the final chapters of this book some 
 attempt is made to carry out and to give effect 
 to this conviction of the need to face facts by 
 a statement of some few of the characteristic 
 horrors of the war. 
 
 But to return to our present subject, the evil 
 effect of the war upon the Conscience of Europe. 
 War is in a certain sense an assertion that might 
 is right, and that arms ajone can show who has 
 righteousness on his side. The old savage belief 
 in force being better than reason and justice has 
 been revived and a new religion of the beneficent 
 influence of war has been preached. The apostle 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 58 
 
 of force says : " Your ideas are false/' " Your 
 ambitions are injurious and interfere with mine," 
 or " your social creed is a dangerous one/' '' I 
 will prove to you by bullet and bayonet that they 
 are absolutely wrong and that mine are absolutely 
 right/' It is a reversion to the old chimera that 
 the virtues of man or woman can be proved in the 
 joust and the tournament. It is a revival of the 
 superstitious beUef in ordeal by duel or by battle, 
 or by the exercise of brute force in some form or 
 other, made worse in the present instance by the 
 fact that modern weapons and methods of war 
 tend increasingly to mere mechanism and the 
 destruction of life on both sides by machinery, 
 and that individual character tells less and less. 
 But it is everywhere a convenient assumption 
 for those who support the militarist ideals re- 
 gardless of the suffering to humanity which they 
 entail. '' The machinery of explosives shall de- 
 cide what is right," says the modern miUtarist." 
 *' All other tests are useless." Meanwhile the 
 noble ideals of mutual helpfulness and inter- 
 national friendship and the sense of brotherhood 
 amongst men have been set aside and held up to 
 ridicule,and a war after the war is widely preached. 
 
 On the declaration of war militarism every- 
 where raised its head once more, and flaunted 
 forth its old banners inscribed with the false and 
 outworn devices of barbaric times. 
 
 Once more there were the old unreasoning 
 shouts of defiance to the enemy, of his utter 
 
54 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 vileness, of the supreme beauty of military glory, 
 of the necessity of victory at all costs. Once again 
 the hideous goddess of war has risen out of the 
 earth and multitudes bow down to her in abject 
 adoration. The priesthood of her cult is more 
 intolerant than that of any pagan theocracy. 
 No word of dissent is allowed under its rule ; 
 persecution follows any renunciation of her 
 deviUsh rites. Any expression of Christian ab- 
 horrence of her reeking altars, piled with mangled 
 and dpng human beings and streaming with 
 blood, is denounced as unpatriotic by her devotees. 
 No protest can be allowed ; worship her or you 
 are anathema. 
 
 The military system, developed and perfected 
 in accordance with modern ideas, is like a gigantic 
 machine of which every detail has been tested, 
 improved and perfected until there is little or no 
 danger of any individual bolt or rivet giving 
 way, and in which no part has any power of 
 resistance or can escape being compelled to do 
 the work allotted to it. The starting levers of 
 this huge engine once having been moved by the 
 controlling powers it must roll forward, crushing 
 whom it may and utilizing the whole force of the 
 nation. This being so, it is evident that in war 
 individual will disappears except amongst a very 
 few, that the tendency is to turn men into 
 mechanical units, performing certain tasks like 
 slaves, whether they are by nature fitted for them 
 or not, or whether they are or are not contrary 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 55 
 
 to their consciences. Under modern conditions 
 almost the whole manhood of the nation has to 
 abandon its ordinary occupations, sever its family- 
 ties, become mere miUtary numbers, use rifle 
 and bayonet, fling bombs, drop them upon de- 
 fenceless women and children, burn, trample 
 down and destroy, bury its dead comrades, be 
 shot, torn, mangled, tortured, frozen, do all 
 the dirty and degrading work of war for its 
 quarrelsome rulers and often finally be left to 
 lie wounded and rotting in the field of battle. 
 War, in fact, whatever may be said to the contrary, 
 means in some lesser degree and for whatever 
 period it continues, the return of the majority 
 of mankind to the old conditions of slavery. 
 Some slaves may be willing slaves, as at times 
 under the Roman Empire, and in the Southern 
 States of America, but they are nevertheless 
 slaves, and many of the arguments of the miU- 
 tarists are exactly those which were favoured 
 by the apologists of slavery before its abolition. 
 
 The weakening of individual volition and initia- 
 tive amongst a large part of its manhood may well 
 be the outcome of a war under modern conditions 
 for any nation, as also the increase of toleration 
 for some of the evils of the condition of semi- 
 slavery and the abandonment of the ideal of 
 personal freedom.^ 
 
 With this weakening it would seem inevitable 
 
 ^ " Any lessening of personal liberty is a step towards slavery. 
 It is a question of degree of the deprivation of man's rights 
 
56 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 that a lowering of the sense of the rights of 
 humanity, such as were proclaimed by Christianity 
 and put forward to some extent by the French 
 Revolution and endorsed by the conscience of 
 Europe, must take place. If this is so, then, 
 as has been shown to be the case, there will also 
 be a lessening of the recognition of the rights 
 of minor and semi-civiUzed nations, and success 
 in the use of force will tend to stimulate the desire 
 for annexation, and to perpetuate injustice to- 
 wards small states. 
 
 and individuality. The establishment of militarist systems 
 upon a conscription basis to support governments is there- 
 fore a distinct descent towards slavery and the enrolment of 
 the whole manhood of a nation is therefore an evil of 
 tremendous magnitude in its destruction of freedom. It is a 
 political development of the last two centuries which has 
 been contemporary with the decline of Christian ideals. The 
 history of the Middle Ages is the history of the gradual emanci- 
 pation of men from every species of servitude in proportion 
 as the influence of religion became more penetrating and more 
 universal. The history of the last three centuries exhibits 
 the gradual revival of declining slavery which appears under 
 new forms of oppression as the authority of religion has 
 decreased." — Lord Acton. 
 
VI 
 
 The sacrifices involved by war (though they are 
 part of its fascination for some minds) , the demands 
 upon every citizen to assist in it, the over-stimu- 
 lation of his patriotism, the frequent assertion of 
 the narrower nationaUst ideas, and, above all, the 
 desire of the governing classes responsible for 
 the war, to prove themselves in the right and to 
 bring it to an obviously successful issue, all tend 
 to evolve an article of the miUtarist creed which 
 carries with it the greatest danger to civilization 
 and the conscience. In each country it will be 
 proclaimed that '' Nothing matters if we win." 
 Surely one of the most immoral and wicked 
 assertions ever made. If that is true, then '* the 
 end justifies the means '' in the most literal and 
 absolute sense. If a nation really accepts the 
 dogma that *' Nothing matters if we win,'' it is 
 quite conceivable that the war might be won by 
 means so dishonest, and so disastrous to the 
 higher interests of humanity, that when won 
 the disgrace of the gain would be infinitely greater 
 than that of a possible failure to win. That 
 this is not an entirely imaginary danger has been 
 clearly shown by the attitude of the extremist 
 portion of the press and by various statements 
 
 67 
 
58 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 by public speakers and writers on both sides in 
 the present war. It has been shown especially 
 in Prussia, but also in other countries nearer 
 home, that there are men, with powerful parties 
 behind them, who are prepared to demand the 
 sacrifice of the foundation-principles of civiliza- 
 tion and to trample under foot not only Uberty, 
 and respect for conscience, but also many of the 
 fundamental principles of those Christian ethics 
 upon which, as every fair-minded man knows, 
 European civilization has been mainly developed.^ 
 Liberty is, of course, the first asset of civiliza- 
 tion which has been attacked, and once having 
 
 1 " Nothing Matters if We Win." 
 
 The following suggestion is significant of the influence of 
 militarism upon some minds. Not even in Prussia could a 
 more iniquitous proposal be made. 
 
 The writer of a letter to the Press arguing that were it not 
 for sentiment we could make a large annual saving, pleads 
 for the extermination of the inmates of lunatic asylums in 
 the following words : 
 
 " They are guarded by hundreds of warders and nursed 
 by hundreds of nurses. They are housed in palatial build- 
 ings surrounded by parks. They do no productive work, 
 and their appetites are excellent. They are housed, clothed, 
 and fed at the expense of the State or their relatives. They 
 know nothing of war. ... If it were not for sentiment there 
 would be a government lethal chamber for these unfortunate 
 beings. The buildings could house munition workers or 
 government officials ; the parks and pleasure gcirdens might 
 be used for growing potatoes or wheat. The nurses might 
 serve in some of our understaffed hospitals. While the 
 warders — ^many of them old soldiers — ^might be used to 
 guard German prisoners." — In Reynolds^ Newspaper, Dec. 
 17, 1916. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 59 
 
 been partially sacrificed on military grounds, 
 its opponents would seem in many countries 
 to be insatiable in their demands for its complete 
 destruction. 
 
 A well-known writer in a leading newspaper 
 has recently said : '' Principle ... is relative 
 and not absolute " ; and has added : *' Perish 
 principle ! — and save us by any change . . . 
 which is necessary for victory/' Those who 
 support the over-riding of conscience and of the 
 prerogatives of manhood, the destruction of re- 
 presentative government and its replacement 
 by despotic rule are representative of a large 
 class of people who are autocrats at heart. 
 
 The nationaUst or Chauvinist who desires to 
 win at all costs — ^that is to say, to obtain what 
 he considers a decisive and crushing victory at 
 all costs — ^would sacrifice everything to asserted 
 military necessities. The interests of civilization 
 count for very little with him, and one of Ger- 
 many's crimes is that she has been brutally 
 logical as to this. Small wonder then that the 
 ideals for which nations bled only a century ago 
 are regarded by the rabid imperialist as of little 
 worth, and that any real independence of speech 
 and thought as to the origin, objects, and methods 
 of the war is described as traitorous. The full- 
 blown miUtarist goes further and declares that 
 the war is a noble and magnificent thing in itself, 
 and there are not a few who would like it to be 
 continued as long as there is any possible excuse 
 
60 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 to be made for its continuance. Nothing should 
 be said on the other side — ^the horrors of war 
 should be hushed up and the widespread miseries 
 of other countries, and of Europe in general, 
 should seldom be referred to. The nobility of 
 war must not be lessened in the eyes of the people 
 by a too close inspection. The Major Carters 
 of Mesopotamia and of other countries are 
 '' meddlesome interfering faddists '' ^ and must 
 be silenced at all costs. There must be no in- 
 dividual conscience, and each man shall act as if 
 the political and military heads of each nation 
 were his only guides and had lawful authority 
 to bend his every action to their will without 
 protest. All these things tend to vitiate and 
 deaden the Conscience of Europe. 
 
 ^ Vide Report of the Mesopotamia Commission. 
 
VII 
 
 The primitive and pagan forms of society were 
 predominantly military. The interests and 
 happiness of the individual were sacrificed to 
 the aims and ambitions of the Chief of the tribe 
 or nation, or to the " national idea." The State 
 or its Chief claimed the entire manhood and dis- 
 allowed all domestic ties, over-riding domestic 
 virtues as antagonistic to militarist aims and 
 necessities. 
 
 Christianity slowly reversed this, and again and 
 again by leagues and alUances has endeavoured 
 to banish war altogether, although from time 
 to time there have been relapses into Christian 
 co-operation with pohtico-mihtary statecraft. 
 
 In the very early centuries of Christianity it 
 was against the conscience of Christians to engage 
 in war, and it was only later that Christian 
 Churches allowed themselves to a greater or less 
 extent to become the tools of governments and 
 to set aside the Christian doctrine of brotherly 
 love and good-will for state purposes. Sophis- 
 tical arguments on the side of war for all sorts 
 of purposes were developed as the Church found 
 it inconvenient to dissociate itself from the 
 action of the State. 
 
 61 
 
62 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 The fact nevertheless remains that Christianity 
 from the first proclaimed itself as a Gospel of 
 love and charity, breathing a new life into the 
 body of human virtues and giving a new sanction 
 to the highest theories of human brotherhood 
 in Greek and other philosophies, and that the 
 whole spirit of its ethics is opposed to war. 
 
 With reference to thi^, we find Justin Martyr 
 in A.D. 140 sa5dng : *' We who were once slaj^ers 
 of one another do not now fight against our 
 enemies/' 
 
 Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (a.d. 167), proves 
 that the followers of Jesus had disused the 
 weapons of war and no longer knew how to fight. 
 
 Tertullian (a.d. 200) alludes to Christians who 
 were engaged in military pursuits, but informs 
 us also that many soldiers quitted those pursuits 
 in consequence of their conversion to Christianity, 
 and expresses his own opinion that Christ has 
 forbidden the use of the sword and the revenge 
 of injuries. 
 
 This attitude continued to develop ; for, thirty 
 years later, Origen writes : '' We no longer take 
 the sword against any nation. We have become, 
 for the sake of Jesus, the children of peace. By 
 our prayers we fight for the King abundantly, 
 but take no part in his wars even though he urges 
 us." 1 
 
 It has been attempted to confuse the question 
 by the assumption that the preservation of law 
 
 ^ See also Appendix, p. 173, ** Erasmus on War." 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 63 
 
 and order by force is exactly analogous to war, 
 but there are many fundamental differences, 
 more especially in the fact that force, and punish- 
 ment by force, reach, or are intended to reach, 
 only the actual offenders, in the civil adminis- 
 tration of law and order, and in war it is chiefly 
 the innocent who perish and suffer. Moreover, 
 with the development of Christian society the 
 brutal use of force and the frequent use of the 
 death penalty in suppressing crime has rightly 
 been more and more discontinued. 
 
 With the local decay of true Christian ethics 
 in certain European countries the old pagan views 
 of the military state, associated with, and sup- 
 ported by, a subservient priesthood revived, and 
 the Christian virtues of humility, gentleness, 
 patience, and brotherly love were all disliked and 
 discredited by the militarists as being inimical 
 to the war spirit, and wars became more frequent 
 or the danger of them more imminent. 
 
 This tendency was greatly in the ascendant 
 prior to the outbreak of the present war, not 
 only in Germany — where the writer has heard 
 scorn poured upon the Christian ethics of human 
 brotherhood by Prussian Officers — but also in 
 other countries, and since its outbreak it has 
 been much strengthened. 
 
 The violent currents of passion and hatred, 
 suspicion and covetousness which the war has 
 aroused are the direct antithesis to the Christian 
 virtues ; and they seem, strange to say, to have 
 
64 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 taken possession of part of the civilian popu- 
 lations far more than of the soldiers actually 
 engaged in warfare. As has been truly said : 
 '* The great difficulty will be to pacify the 
 civilians/' 
 
 The failure of professing Christians, and the 
 representative leaders of the various Churches 
 and denominations to protest against and do 
 their utmost to prevent this devastating war 
 amongst the Christian nations of Europe is a 
 deplorable fact and one that has helped to 
 brutalize it, by weakening faith and the evidence 
 of the influence of Christ's teachings as to the 
 claims of human brotherhood. The represen- 
 tatives of Christianity have greatly discredited 
 it in the eyes of the masses by their insensate 
 nationalism and apparent indifference to the 
 sufferings of the people throughout Europe, 
 provided only that a crushing military victory be 
 obtained for their own side, in preference to a 
 reasonable and unrevengeful peace, free from 
 the spoils of war and with guarantees for the 
 future security of Europe upon the basis of the 
 Christian principles of justice and toleration. 
 The Churches of the nations have, for the most 
 part, fallen into line with the emasculated 
 and state-worshipping Christianity of Northern 
 Germany — and when the peoples of Europe reckon 
 with their rulers for having prepared the con- 
 ditions which made the present war possible, the 
 Churches and their leaders will, with few ex- 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 65 
 
 ceptions, stand in evil plight before the judgment- 
 seat of Humanity. 
 
 What might not have been done had the 
 priesthood of every Christian Church risen to 
 this supreme occasion and used their power in the 
 defence of Christian civiUzation. The example 
 of Argentina and Chile is a case in point. As 
 lately as in 1903 and 1904, after many years 
 of heated nationalist disputes as to frontiers, 
 war became imminent between these two 
 countries. It was mainly avoided at the last 
 moment by the heroic exertions of two bishops, 
 Monseigneur Benavento in Argentina and Mon- 
 seigneur Jarva in Chile, who made a passionate 
 appeal together with their clergy throughout 
 the length and breadth of both countries on 
 behalf of peace and arbitration instead of war. 
 The Government of each yielded, war was avoided, 
 and arbitration finally agreed to, with the result 
 of an enduring peace. 
 
 Had the leading clergy of European countries 
 been united on the broad basis of the Christian 
 faith, and taken similar action, it might well have 
 been possible to have avoided war in Europe, 
 for even the attitude of the German and Austrian 
 Governments might have been altered had they 
 been instantly confronted with a determined 
 and widespread opposition to war on the part 
 of the eminently reUgious populations of Bavaria 
 and the Southern States, led by their priesthood 
 and the forces which lie behind the Centre Party 
 
66 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 in the Reichstag. But instead of this, the clergy 
 of every State, with few exceptions (amongst them 
 the very noble and unpopular one of the Pope ^), 
 became violent nationalist partisans, blindly echo- 
 ing the political statements of their respective 
 governments, urging forward the war, and, in too 
 many cases, even helping to accentuate its fury. 
 The addresses of many of the clergy in Germany ^ 
 at the beginning of the war were, for instance, 
 violent beyond belief, and there were numberless 
 cases of a similar ecclesiastical attitude in 
 England. One of the most prominent of our 
 English clergy stated from the pulpit that ** the 
 
 ^ It is not generally known that Pope Pius X. did, as a 
 matter of fact, endeavour to use his utmost influence with the 
 Austrian Emperor on behalf of the avoidance of war. During 
 the Servian crisis he dispatched his nuncio to Vienna with 
 instructions to seek an immediate interview with the Em- 
 peror, but the author has it on good authority that the mili- 
 tarist party found means to prevent the interview taking 
 place. 
 
 The present Pope's condemnation of the war from first to 
 last and his constant appeal to the nations to reconcile their 
 differences and renounce their wrongful ambitions on the 
 ground of their common Christianity has been very pathetic 
 and remarkable. He has, of course, suffered the fate of all 
 those who stand for principle regardless of the consequences ; 
 and his strict neutrality in the conflict — ^the only possible 
 attitude for the head of a Church with adherents in every one 
 of the warring nations, all of whom have in greater or less 
 degree repudiated the humanitarian teachings of Christ — 
 has been made a cause of unjust and bitter complaint against 
 him. The present writer is not a Roman Catholic, but feels 
 it right to make this acknowledgment. See also Appendix, 
 p. 171, " The Pope's Prayer." 
 
 * Appendix, p. 168. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 67 
 
 killing of Germans is a divine service '* ; another 
 said, *' the duty of the moment, the Christian duty 
 of the moment, is to kill Germans, and again to 
 kill Germans '* ; and phrases in sermons de- 
 scribing them collectively as the " enemies of 
 God " are frequent, without any reservation or 
 modifying clauses as to separation of the few 
 guilty from the many innocent,^ or any qualifying 
 reference to Christ's command expressed in the 
 prayer enjoined upon all Christians. ^ 
 
 Well may the agnostic and the materialist, well 
 may all those who are opposed to Christianity, 
 proclaim its failure at the present world-crisis ; 
 for the consciences of true Christians themselves 
 are staggered by the present catastrophe, and in 
 their souls they know that most of their spiritual 
 leaders' war-apologetics have no satisfactory 
 foundation. 
 
 There was a somewhat parallel attitude to the 
 present one of the Church towards the war in 
 that of the Church towards slavery. 
 
 During the great agitation for the abolition 
 of slavery both in England and America there 
 
 ^ Mr Frederic Wile, the late Berlin correspondent of the 
 Daily Mail, with many years' experience of the country, 
 estimates the militarist party in Germany at less than one 
 thirtieth of the nation. — " The Assault," by F. W. W^ile 
 (W. Heinemann). 
 
 2 For a striking exception, amongst many others, to this 
 general statement, see Appendix, p. 164. 
 
 The protest by the Archbishop of Canterbury against re- 
 prisals upon the civilian population of the enemy should also 
 not be forgotten. 
 
68 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 were great numbers of the Christian clergy, in- 
 cluding many Bishops, who denounced those who 
 protested against slavery as if they were the very 
 worst of criminals. 
 
 The same kind of apologetics for the war 
 and all its horrors and the same abuse of those 
 who think Christianity is incompatible with the 
 methods of modern warfare and with militarism, 
 are now indulged in. 
 
 When the reaction comes and the peoples 
 of Europe can look back upon the war and its 
 suicidal iniquities with minds less inflamed by 
 racial passion, and clouded by ignorance of the 
 conditions existing before the war, they may well 
 be incUned to turn upon the Christian Churches 
 and say, *' The worldly institutions of govern- 
 ments, diplomacy, and treaties all broke down ; 
 philosophy, science, material progress were power- 
 less to arrest the advance of the catastrophe. 
 We had looked to religion with hope and trust 
 as the spiritual force which might protect 
 humanity '* — but the Churches had no courage. 
 Almost with one accord they denied their Master 
 and failed to protest in His Name. The States 
 crushed the conscience of humanity and drove 
 the peoples into mutual slaughter. The Churches 
 sided with their States with blind Erastianism. 
 
 The reply to the hostile critic who attacks 
 Christianity in the abstract is again, of course, 
 that it is not Christianity that has failed but 
 that Christians have not been truly Christian. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 69 
 
 Its apparent failure has, however, it must be 
 admitted, been largely contributed to by the want 
 of moral courage and consistency in its leaders 
 and priests. 
 
 It has been truly said that, '* The military 
 castes have been supported in Europe by putting 
 the spell of old conditions upon simple peoples. 
 The Christian Churches have bolstered them up 
 and failed utterly to preach the words of peace, 
 because in the heart of the priest there is the 
 patriot, so that every Christian nation claims 
 God as a national asset. . . . There will be no 
 hope of peace until the peoples of the world re- 
 cognise their brotherhood and refuse to be led 
 to the shambles for mutual massacre.*' ^ 
 
 The priest would not have failed had his 
 Christianity been more real and his moral courage 
 greater, and had he not followed with the crowd 
 instead of keeping the principles of his Master 
 before his eyes. 
 
 One of the great writers of our time says : 
 " The precepts of Jesus have been misconstrued 
 because we do not wish to understand them.'' 
 It might be added that unless we put a gloss upon 
 them our inconsistency would be too apparent. 
 
 The endeavour to reconcile Christian ethics 
 with the unspeakable horrors of modern war has 
 developed the use of casuistry amongst theologians 
 to a degree which cannot fail to react injuriously 
 upon future theology, and to alienate from the 
 
 ^ " The Soul of the War," Philip Gibbs (Heinemann). 
 
70 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 Churches large numbers of people to whom this 
 casuistry seems closely alhed to sophistry. 
 Amongst the latter are not a few who, while 
 perfectly wilhng to accept and make use of the 
 twisted apologetics of the theologians on behalf 
 of war, nevertheless despise such inconsistency 
 in their innermost hearts. For the time being 
 these theological leaders are a useful prop to 
 militarism which can be discarded later on, but 
 meanwhile the attitude of apology for war as the 
 only remedy, taken up by priests and ministers 
 in every country, has made it infinitely more 
 difficult for the Churches and their clergy to help 
 the bereaved and the suffering with any convinc- 
 ing expression of sympathy. They too often 
 preach war, submission to destruction of freedom 
 of conscience and of liberty, hatred of enemies 
 and *' punitive '' revenge with one breath, and 
 express a conventional sympathy for the suffering 
 with another. Too often they seem to say, *' We 
 are right nationally, and nothing else matters 
 much.'* The Churches would seem to be un- 
 aware of the bitter feeling which has been en- 
 gendered against them amongst large numbers 
 of the working classes on account of this double 
 failure to echo the words and teaching of Christ 
 and to enter sufficiently into the unparalleled 
 sufferings from bereavement, separation, anxiety 
 and ruin amongst the people, and the effect of 
 this will be felt long after the conclusion of the 
 conflict. Too many of the clergy have taken 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 71 
 
 upon themselves the role of the recruiting sergeant, 
 and of the politician who declaims upon the 
 glory and righteousness of war, instead of con- 
 sistently deploring it — even if it should seem un- 
 avoidable — and condemning the degeneration of 
 moral outlook which has made it possible, and 
 has led to the abandonment of Christ's principles 
 of Human Brotherhood and to the mutual 
 slaughter of milUons of His followers. There 
 are noble and heroic exceptions to this in every 
 country, but they seem few and far between. 
 
 These strictures may seem to some unduly 
 severe, but the claims of the Churches to re- 
 present the mind and the doctrines of Christ and to 
 stand for all that is best in the ideals of Christian 
 civilization, place them in a position which makes 
 criticism inevitable, at the present crisis and in 
 connection with such a subject as that of the 
 conscience of humanity. 
 
VIII 
 
 One of the causes that assisted to make an 
 European war possible was, as most people would 
 admit, the growth of commercial greed, the in- 
 ordinate desire for larger profits, new markets, 
 and less rivalry. That tendency has not been 
 lessened by the war, but rather increased. 
 
 The desire for larger profits and new markets 
 is reasonable and beneficial when there is a moral 
 conscience behind the means adopted for ob- 
 taining them, but when that moral conscience 
 has been partly atrophied by a materialistic 
 philosophy of life and by other demoraUzing 
 influences, then that desire becomes a dangerous 
 one for the world. 
 
 "It is the pursuit of markets and concessions 
 and outlets for capital that lies behind the colonial 
 policy that leads to war. States compete for 
 the right to exploit the weak, and in this com- 
 petition governments are prompted or controlled 
 by financial interests. ... In the Near East and 
 the Far it is commerce, concessions, loans that 
 have led to the rivalry of the Powers — ^to war 
 after war, to ' punitive expeditions,' and, irony 
 of ironies, to * indemnities ' exacted as a new 
 and special form of robbery from peoples who rose 
 
 72 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 78 
 
 in the endeavour to defend themselves against 
 robbery. The Powers combine for a moment to 
 suppress the common victim, the next they are 
 at one another's throats over the spoil." ^ 
 
 Commercial greed not only tends towards wars 
 but makes for their indefinite continuance. In 
 many manufactures and trades, the advent of 
 war has meant the cessation of competition, and 
 with increased profits due to its absence, the 
 desire for the continuance of such conditions 
 grows rapidly, and a war lasting for many years 
 does not seem so terrible as it did before. Trade 
 jealousy and greed take small account of the 
 wider interests and sorrows of humanity. The 
 fire which is consuming the world seems to many 
 an excellent one in which to heat their own irons. 
 It is only necessary to read a few of the half- 
 yearly reports of munition firms, ship-building 
 companies and steel manufacturers, et hoc genere, 
 to reaUze their vast earnings in war-time. 
 
 Commercial greed in its unrestrained form is 
 due to a variety of tendencies, all traceable to 
 the slackening of the public conscience. 
 
 The insatiable desire for pleasure and luxury 
 amongst the middle classes throughout Europe 
 for many years prior to the war was evident to 
 everyone. A sense of duty and of reUgious 
 responsibiUty towards others had lessened. 
 Crowds of people spent their whole lives in the 
 
 ^ " The European Anarchy," by G. Lowes Dickinson 
 (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.). 
 
74 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 pursuit of pleasure, sport, adventure, anything 
 rather than work for their fellows. The noble 
 exceptions to them became fewer. All this 
 meant the need for more and more money and 
 larger profits — and as to how these were obtained 
 did not seem much to matter. The Congo, the 
 Rubber Estate Companies of South America, 
 the reckless exploitation of underpaid labour, 
 unscrupulous Trusts, and a hundred other 
 evidences of this were indisputable. The de- 
 gradation of the national and international 
 conscience throughout Europe was, in fact, led 
 up to and assisted by the personal greed for 
 money at all costs of every individual man who 
 indulged the irresponsible desire for it. 
 
 Soon after the war broke out, the fierce avarice 
 of trade interests in almost every country became 
 still more evident, for the war seemed a possible 
 means of promoting trade monopolies in the future. 
 
 Another of the effects of the war reacting upon 
 the European Conscience has been the weakening 
 of the sense of justice. In almost every belli- 
 gerent country the rights of the individual citizen 
 are suspended and he has been placed in many 
 respects at the mercy of a bureaucracy against 
 whose arbitrary acts he has small chance of 
 effective appeal. Russia, it is true, has broken 
 her chains, but in the main, during war, freedom 
 and the sense of justice are trampled under foot. 
 
 In all, or nearly all, the nations engaged 
 (Austria is said to be to a great extent an honour- 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 75 
 
 able exception) every individual belonging to 
 a hostile country has been treated more or less 
 as though he were personally responsible for the 
 actions of his Government. The majority of 
 aliens in any country are perfectly innocent 
 civilians who were living upon honest, friendly, 
 or perhaps intimate terms with their neighbours, 
 pursuing their business or profession, contribut- 
 ing, probably, to the sum total of human advance- 
 ment in commerce, medicine, science, literature, 
 or art. They have, nevertheless, been treated as 
 suspected criminals, have been imprisoned and 
 exposed to great hardships, and too often have had 
 their health injured and their businesses or pro- 
 fessions destroyed or appropriated. This may 
 partly have been dictated by real conviction of 
 necessity ; it may even have been necessary in 
 the national interests to imprison some aliens, 
 and watch others, but wholesale internment was 
 not considered justifiable in the eighteenth 
 and nineteenth centuries, and whatever may be 
 the arguments put forward to excuse such action 
 we cannot get rid of the fact that in the majority 
 of cases it is not just, and that its tendency is to 
 undermine the sense of justice. It is a reversion 
 to the practice of more barbarous times. ^ 
 
 A still worse injustice, and a still greater 
 injury to the conscience of nations, is the im- 
 prisonment upon suspicion — perhaps upon the 
 mere assertion of informers — ^without trial, of 
 
 ^ See Appendix, p. 172. 
 
76 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 their own subjects, by governments in time of 
 war. Even in Great Britain an evil example 
 has been set in this respect in the present war. 
 Lord Shaw, in his recent judgment in a House 
 of Lords AppeaP says of the power thus exer- 
 cised in England at the expense of the rights 
 of British subjects : 
 
 '' This is dangerous country ; it has its dark 
 reminders. It is the proscription, the arrest 
 of suspects at the will of men in power, vested 
 with a plenary discretion.'* He adds : *' The 
 method is not unknown to English history, but 
 history in darker times — ^the method of despotism. ' ' 
 
 War, and especially long-continued war, also 
 tends to diminish the sense of justice in many 
 other ways. It prevents any arguments put 
 forward by the enemy as justification for his 
 actions being fairly considered. Every nation is 
 dehberately unjust to its enemies of set purpose, 
 and of set policy, and this appUes to individuals 
 as well as to nations, and tends to warp the mind 
 and the conscience. 
 
 Closely connected with this growth of an 
 attitude hostile to abstract justice is that of an 
 attitude also hostile to truth. During war, 
 truth of every kind as to facts is recklessly 
 sacrificed on all hands. Secrecy as to these is 
 obviously necessary now and then, but the 
 suppression and misrepresentation of fact often 
 amounts to deUberate lying. Deception of every 
 
 ^ The King versus Halliday. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 77 
 
 kind is a recognized part of warfare, and gradually 
 becomes accepted in civilian as well as military life. 
 In the present instance a large part of the 
 newspaper press, war being declared, devoted 
 itself mainly to systematic misrepresentation. 
 Almost every fact in connection with the war that 
 could be distorted with advantage for some special 
 purpose was, and is, deliberately distorted. As 
 has been said, one of the chief occupations of 
 a portion of the newspaper press during war-time 
 is to find means for intensifying hatred and 
 fanning it into yet fiercer flames. The mili- 
 tarist and the men who engineer war require a 
 plentiful supply of hatred, and the newspaper 
 press does its best to assist them to obtain it, 
 largely by falsifying or twisting facts and suppress- 
 ing mitigating circumstances. This effort, how- 
 ever, is not confined to newspaper editors, but 
 one of the melancholy features of the present war 
 is that men who might have been expected 
 to take a higher standpoint have thrown them- 
 selves enthusiastically into this work of mis- 
 representation and stimulation of international 
 hatreds. In every country a certain proportion 
 of its literary men, its scientists, and its theo- 
 logians have spoken and written with an un- 
 reasoning violence of which few could have 
 believed them capable, and have done their 
 utmost to vituperate and misrepresent. One of 
 the most fatal diseases which attack character 
 and conscience is the refusal to face the truth, 
 
78 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 the desire to cover it up — ^to suppress it in order 
 to believe evil of others rather than good, or to 
 live in a false condition of self-satisfaction. Even 
 as science cannot develop without the keen desire 
 for truth and the determination to face it, so 
 humanity must drift blindly without it, for it is 
 the compass of human life, to read which falsely 
 is to prepare for disaster. 
 
 To turn to another of the evil effects of the war. 
 Upon the common mind the liberty to kill must 
 always have a bad influence, and upon many it 
 has a very brutalizing one. In the present war 
 it is not merely a question of killing but of doing 
 so in a great variety of new and demoralizing 
 ways. The individual soldier may be, and 
 generally is chivalrous by instinct, but armies never 
 are. It is the function of the Generals to make 
 the conditions for the enemy unequal and un- 
 sportsmanUke, and to take every possible ad- 
 vantage which can be secured by any means, 
 however deceptive or treacherous. There is 
 therefore an element of underhand cowardice in 
 all war. What is said by a recent writer is true. 
 
 '* Any man who did in the public street what 
 armies do in the battlefield would most assuredly 
 be lynched by an infuriated and indignant 
 population." ^ 
 
 This cannot fail to have an evil influence upon 
 uneducated, or, for the matter of that, upon 
 educated minds. That the methods of modern 
 
 1 " Slings and Arrows," by Edwin Pugh (Chapman & Hall). 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 79 
 
 warfare are brutalizing cannot be denied. Tens 
 of thousands of men are living more or less like 
 animals in holes in the ground, surrounded with 
 filth and many other revolting conditions of 
 existence. They have daily the spectacle before 
 them of horrible wounds, agony and despair, 
 shattered nerves, raving madness ; they hear 
 screams of excruciating pain and witness the 
 sufferings and death of their friends. No man 
 can be in contact with all this, day after day, 
 and month after month, as in present-day warfare, 
 without being to some extent hardened.^ It is 
 impossible for him to retain the same faculty 
 for sympathy with the evils endured by his 
 fellow -men, or keep unblunted the susceptibilities 
 upon which rest so many of the Christian virtues. 
 Europe has in some degree recognized this and 
 the inhuman brutality of war, and she has tried 
 to salve her conscience with such palUatives to 
 war as the Red Cross Society, but this means, in 
 practice, that whilst driving her sons into the 
 trenches to slaughter and be slaughtered she 
 rescues those who are not killed, but only 
 mangled or wounded, partly from noble motives 
 of humanity and partly that they may fight again. 
 Some have even argued — ^though it is indefensible 
 to do so from the Christian standpoint — ^that it 
 would be better if these palliatives did not exist, 
 
 1 Mr Zangwill informs us that the Chief Constable of a great 
 city said to him in speaking of returned soldiers : " They tell 
 me that they can never regard human life as sacred again." 
 
80 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 because they tend to prevent the true character 
 of war from being reahzed, and cover up its 
 frightful barbarity with a ragged sheet of philan- 
 thropy. No one would wish to belittle the 
 splendid work of the Red Cross Society and its 
 close connection with the remains of the Christian 
 conscience of Europe, or the nobility of the lives 
 devoted to its work, but it should not blind us 
 to the true character of war. 
 
 Yet another of the evils which the war has 
 brought with it, is the weakening or destruction 
 of the behef in humanity, or in other words, the 
 lessening of the self-respect of the peoples of 
 Europe. That such a war as the present should 
 be possible seems to show clearly that Europe has 
 overrated its civilization, its progress, and its 
 moral standards. 
 
 One of the greatest incentives to improvement 
 in races is a belief that a high or higher standard 
 of morality and progress exists in others, and any 
 shrivelling of that belief usually brings with it 
 a corresponding tendency towards degeneration. 
 Everyone tries consciously or unconsciously to 
 live up to or surpass his conception of the 
 level of conduct of his neighbours, and an un- 
 propitious moral environment is injurious in 
 social life just as an unpropitious physical one 
 is to animals or plants in nature. A lessened 
 self-respect means an enfeebled power of respond- 
 ing to conscience and of maintaining the struggle 
 against a downward tendency. 
 
IX 
 
 This world-wide and suicidal war has made it 
 clearer than ever that there are two kinds of 
 patriotism ; firstly, a true and noble love of 
 country, combined with love of humanity, or in 
 other words Christian and religious patriotism ; 
 and secondly, a spurious patriotism or a fierce 
 desire for the aggrandizement or dominance of a 
 particular country, more or less regardless of 
 the wider interests of humanity in general. This 
 latter kind, be it noted, often deceives itself into 
 believing that it is humanitarian, because it 
 believes that the methods of government and 
 the ideals of culture of its own nation are the 
 only right ones for humanity. 
 
 These two forms of patriotism are not 
 always distinct and separate, but so merge 
 into each other as often to make their dis- 
 entanglement difficult. War, however, lessens 
 this difficulty, because it brings false patriotism 
 more into evidence and shows it in its true 
 colours. 
 
 It is without doubt the direct descendant 
 of the tribal and family loyalty demanding 
 combative support which still exists amongst 
 savage peoples and still shows itself amongst the 
 
 XT 81 
 
82 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 relatively civilized ones in such survivals as the 
 blood-feuds of Corsica or Sardinia. 
 
 Narrow or pseudo-patriotism deifies the nation 
 as a type of the family or clan, or else deifies that 
 indefinite and fluctuating entity called the State, 
 which it holds to be representative of the nation, 
 but which may in reality be merely an autocratic 
 ruler and his satellites or a non-representative 
 group of politicians and diplomatists. It finds 
 its chief and present-day expression in the vulgar 
 and aggressive sentiments of a large number 
 of the newspapers, in the verbiage of the Chau- 
 vinist-politicians, or in the clap-trap of the stump 
 orators who in time of war make money out of 
 the war-fever. It is professed also by an im- 
 mense army of civil servants and place-holders 
 to whom the State seems everything, by those 
 who have an axe to grind on the national grind- 
 stone, and by vast numbers of those who do not 
 think much for themselves and like the sound 
 of the word *' patriotic.'' 
 
 It is essentially short of vision, because it can 
 only see the temporary and local advantages and 
 not those which are more important though a 
 little further removed, for it fails to recognize 
 that any attempt of one country to hinder the 
 progress or improved producing power of others, 
 lowers the sum-total of the progress and pro- 
 duction of the whole human race in which sooner 
 or later it shares. 
 
 False patriotism has two main roots — ^jealousy 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 83 
 
 and ignorance. Not wide-minded enough to 
 include other nations in its hopes for the future, 
 and often too ignorant of them and of their 
 capabihties and aspirations, its jealousy takes 
 delight in abuse and misrepresentation. How 
 often has one been struck by this in conversation 
 and in speeches. The narrow patriot is nearly 
 always an untravelled person, frequently knows 
 no language but his own, and dislikes everything 
 but the ways of bis own country. If he does 
 travel he is usually wrapped up in his ov/n pre- 
 judices, which he carries with him like a rug taken 
 to protect him from the chills to self-love which 
 might occur from seeing too clearly the achieve- 
 ments of other nations. 
 
 Above all, he is instantly up in arms at any 
 criticism of the national faiUngs of his own 
 country or any statement of its Government's 
 sins towards other nations, even though he may 
 not have any personal responsibility for them, and 
 is compelled to recognize them. 
 
 False patriotism inspired those nationalities 
 who, in the past, always desired to exterminate 
 their neighbours. Apart from the recitals of 
 the Old Testament, history gives us endless 
 examples of them. It was looked upon as a just 
 and righteous thing to conquer and destroy. It 
 was the quality which made the Jews sneer 
 at all Gentiles and the Romans consider them- 
 selves justified in enslaving a large part of the 
 population of the countries they absorbed. 
 
84 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 False patriotism shows especially a bitter 
 antagonism towards that nation which exhibits 
 a marked superiority in material progress and 
 in expansion of trade. Rapid advance in science 
 and art does not excite so much hostility because 
 they are of necessity more international in char- 
 acter, and money is less concerned. As amongst 
 families, so amongst nations, increase of wealth 
 however well-earned, breeds jealousies. 
 
 False patriotism is always intolerant, ready 
 to take offence, to stand on its dignity, to imagine 
 evil, to refuse to give credit for good inten- 
 tions. In attributing various evil qualities to its 
 neighbours, it also develops the jealous and fear- 
 ful temperament which tends to cause internal 
 divisions and provide excuses for tyranny over 
 minorities. This surely affords another proof 
 that national unity and progress cannot be satis- 
 factorily built up upon purely selfish foundations. 
 Selfishness and jealousy are as dangerous qualities 
 in a nation as in an individual. 
 
 False patriotism usually exaggerates the worth 
 of material advantages, those of wealth and wide 
 empire, and underates the value of spiritual and 
 intellectual ones. It overlooks the fact that small 
 and less wealthy States have produced some of 
 the greatest men in the true sense, that of being 
 the real benefactors of humanity — and that there 
 are other and far more precious things than 
 money, luxury, and power. The small States 
 of Germany before they were consoHdated into 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 85 
 
 an aggressive and militarist empire, and when 
 they did so much for science, philosophy, music, 
 and literature in Europe, are an illustration. 
 So also States like the Italian Repubhcs, in some 
 respects. 
 
 Lastly, false patriotism is unable to understand 
 the wider and nobler kind of love of country. 
 No one, in its view, is worthy of being called a 
 patriot unless he is vociferous and aggressive, 
 ready to trample on the rights of other nations 
 if they are an obstruction, and to put forward 
 purely selfish national motives without a blush. 
 
 It is refreshing to turn from this noxious parody 
 of patriotism to the true kind, which would rather 
 see its country spiritually and morally great than 
 merely powerful — ^honourable and honoured in 
 the eyes of the world, rather than feared and 
 envied. 
 
 True patriotism knows that the greatness of a 
 country can only be founded upon its moral 
 standards and that if these are corrupt and 
 selfish its future is in jeopardy. England has 
 been recognized as a great country because in 
 many periods of her history her moral standards 
 have been acknowledged to be high. English 
 manufactured goods were known to be what they 
 professed to be — English justice was above sus- 
 picion — English officials, especially in her Colonies, 
 were universally looked up to and trusted. Her 
 greatness was not that of mere size and power. 
 
 True patriotism based upon high moral ideals. 
 
86 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 is in striking evidence in such a country 
 as Switzerland, where without any aggressive 
 ambitions, without any unscrupulous desire for 
 wide empire, even without a single colony, the 
 advancement, prosperity, and happiness of its 
 people have been the guiding motives in the minds 
 of its Government for centuries, and where that 
 Government itself has been freed from the evils 
 of the party system and is truly representative of 
 the wishes of the people through the influence of 
 the " Referendum " and the " Initiative/' In 
 Switzerland wealth has a fairly equal distribution. 
 There is practically no great poverty. Edu- 
 cation stands extremely high. Philanthropy 
 has shown itself in wise and humane legislation 
 and private effort of every kind. The country 
 has model hospitals, model reformatories, model 
 local and political systems of self-government, 
 and prosperity and happiness are widely diffused. 
 It is representative in every sense of a noble 
 patriotism. 
 
 True patriotism desires, above all, the moral 
 welfare of the people of its country — ^the proper 
 distribution of wealth so that no classes shall be 
 living in poverty and conditions provocative 
 of disease ; it desires advancement in education ; 
 the utmost possible personal freedom for every 
 individual ; prevention of the evils of bureaucracy ; 
 unadulterated justice ; absence of political 
 corruption ; mutual toleration and kindliness 
 between employers and employed ; a just balance 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 87 
 
 between the claims of Capital and Labour ; a 
 high-minded and open foreign policy ; the peace- 
 ful opportunity for progress — above all, freedom 
 of conscience, of expression of opinion, and religion. 
 In its external policy it does not desire the injury 
 of its neighbours, but to give and take help in all 
 that tends to raise humanity. In a word, true 
 patriotism is indistinguishable in its aims from 
 true Christianity. 
 
 It is not always declaiming the greatness of 
 its own intentions or denouncing the greed and 
 grasping characteristics of its neighbours. It is 
 not always on the look-out for those whom it 
 can brand as unpatriotic because they criticize 
 national faults and are not blind optimists. True 
 and noble patriotism takes the broad welfare of 
 humanity as its basis, and, regarding nationality 
 as a means to an end in furthering it, tends to- 
 wards ridding the world of international jealousies 
 and retaining only the kind of wholesome rivalry 
 between nations that exists between public schools 
 or universities. 
 
 This is the kind of patriotism that it was 
 hoped had been growing up in Europe and was 
 becoming more and more acknowledged and 
 professed by its peoples before this wicked and 
 unnecessary war broke loose upon it. But the 
 peoples of Europe were deceived by their rulers 
 and journalists, and perhaps, too, they deceived 
 themselves ; and they did not realize the danger 
 of the overwhelmingly strong currents of false 
 
88 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 patriotism impregnated with greed, jealousy, 
 misunderstanding, corruption, fear, ignorance, 
 want of imagination, and blindness to the welfare 
 of humanity, which were at work in the minds 
 of many, and especially in those of their governing 
 bodies. 
 
 Even now the persistent attempt of the rulers 
 of too many countries is still to bind the shackles 
 of a narrow, short-sighted and aggress ve *' patriot- 
 ism '' upon them, making a just and reasonable 
 peace and a future league of nations more and 
 more difficult, and postponing them further and 
 further into the dark future of a ruined civilization. 
 
X 
 
 If we free ourselves in idea from the limitations 
 of the narrow nationalism which we have been 
 considering and from the purely selfish interests 
 of this or that country to which we may happen 
 to belong, and even from the too absorbing 
 conviction of the necessity and rightness of our 
 share in the war, and consider the world as a 
 place which God has given mankind to dwell in — 
 a place full of almost unlimited possibiHties 
 of happiness and advancement, beautiful and 
 varied beyond imagination, containing every- 
 thing that man needs and with almost infinite 
 opportunities for wholesome work, for discovery 
 and invention, for the satisfaction and the joy of 
 overcoming such difficulties and evils as may exist, 
 and for advancing along the paths of creative 
 evolution, if he would but use his energies and 
 his mind in conformity with God's moral laws — 
 we shall realize the hideous ingratitude towards 
 Him which is evidenced by this war. 
 
 As I travelled across France after the outbreak 
 of hostilities and passed well-remembered towns 
 and villages, peaceful homesteads, and fruitful 
 fields and vineyards Ijdng in the gleaming valleys 
 and fertile plains, all of them drained of their 
 
90 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 manhood and activity in order to swell the tide 
 of destruction and misery for the peoples of 
 Europe, this came home to me with insistent 
 force. 
 
 If we — the people of Europe — ^had more nearly 
 followed the ethical precepts of mutual helpful- 
 ness and unselfishness, in which the Founder of 
 Christianity has told us with convincing authority 
 that all the duties to our fellow -men are summed 
 up, there would have been no war, and none of 
 the destruction, slaughter, and waste which it 
 has meant. We — ^that is the nations of Europe — 
 should have been ready to give as well as to take, 
 to welcome each other's advances in civilization 
 instead of being envious of them, and to avoid 
 the unscrupulous ambitions and plottings which 
 have again and again kept international fears 
 alive and tended towards war. 
 
 But led by our rulers and diplomatists, our 
 false philosophers and covetous financiers, we 
 have grasped at more than we had any right to, 
 have undervalued the natural, simple, and legiti- 
 mate pleasures of life, have given ourselves up 
 largely to false ideals and often to degrading 
 pursuits, and, to crown our follies, have at last 
 divided ourselves into packs of ravening wolves 
 bent upon tearing each other to pieces by tens 
 of millions. 
 
 It may be said that these ideals and these 
 ethics of Christian brotherhood, altruism, and 
 mutual helpfulness are Utopian. Undoubtedly 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 91 
 
 they cannot be fully realized everywhere and at 
 all times. Nevertheless, they have again and 
 again been put to the test of practical experience 
 in the lives of nations as well as of individuals 
 with magnificent results, are the basis of what- 
 ever is great in the constitution of many countries, 
 and have been the real mainspring of many 
 movements which have led to genuine and 
 important national reforms. 
 
 To congratulate ourselves unreservedly upon 
 the possible future benefits and qualities de- 
 veloped by such a hideous and ferocious con- 
 flict as this, in view of the collective crime 
 which it constitutes towards God seems indeed 
 hypocritical and perverse ; and the false pride, 
 blind optimism, and self-satisfaction which are 
 too evident in all the nations, show how diseased 
 has become the conscience of Europe. Each 
 country asserts that it is and has been right — 
 from the beginning and before the beginning of 
 the war. What need then for change in the future 
 in its attitude towards its neighbours ? What 
 need for self-criticism or for reform of its govern- 
 ment and its false ideals, its national corruptions 
 and its grasping and underhand methods of 
 diplomacy ? What need for repentance and 
 change of spirit ? 
 
 Ingratitude has been well said to be one of 
 the basest of all vices, and sometimes it amounts 
 to a crime — a crime which poisons the whole 
 character, leading, as we know, to morbid dis- 
 
92 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 content, which again arouses avarice and selfish- 
 ness ; they in their turn generating oppression 
 of others, hatred of opponents and competitors, 
 maUce and all manner of uncharitableness. 
 Ingratitude has infected the conscience of Europe 
 in the past and makes its convalescence the more 
 difficult in the future. Let us recognize this 
 frankly. 
 
XI 
 
 To turn to another important aspect of the 
 subject — ^the effect of this war upon women in 
 relation to the Conscience of Europe. 
 
 It has exercised two main currents of influence 
 upon them — one in the direction of developing 
 and bringing into prominence their finer qualities 
 and the other acting in the opposite sense. 
 
 With regard to the first, the war has shown 
 women in the best possible light in their active 
 sympathy for the miseries of the wounded, and 
 there has been noble concentration of effort 
 amongst vast numbers of them in every country to 
 assist in relieving suffering with infinite devotion 
 and self-denial. The splendid example of Florence 
 Nightingale has been followed by tens of thousands 
 of women, in a hundred new directions. 
 
 The war has made it self-evident that women 
 have many hitherto unrecognized capabiUties. 
 Their powers of organizing and of undertaking 
 work requiring great skill and discretion, and 
 their unselfish enthusiasm and endurance of 
 fatigue and hardship, have been very remarkable. 
 All this and much more has been demonstrated. 
 
 And apart from their practical energies, the 
 war has also revealed many exceptionally fine 
 moral qualities in women to which we may look 
 
 93 
 
94 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 with increased confidence for strengthening the 
 conscience of Europe and helping to defend 
 humanity against those who would prey upon 
 and destroy it, under the specious pretexts put 
 forward by narrow and selfish nationalist interests 
 and the creed of brute force as a means of govern- 
 ment. We may still agree with James Russell 
 Lowell in his exclamation *' Earth's noblest thing 
 — a woman perfected ! '' 
 
 This must not, however, blind us to the effect 
 of the second set of influences which have been 
 acting upon women since the outbreak of war, 
 and the weaker side of the character of a certain 
 proportion of women which it has brought to the 
 surface. 
 
 War still retains its romantic prestige in the 
 eyes of too many women, despite the ruthless 
 atrocity of modern warfare. They cannot free 
 themselves from the outworn mediaeval concep- 
 tion of war, as something essentially noble instead 
 of essentially cruel, insane and evil. In this re- 
 spect the war has shown many of them to be a 
 danger to the conscience of Europe because, they 
 too often fail to see the logical contradiction 
 between war and the spirit of Christianity, have 
 been too ready to accept war as a virtuous instead 
 of a horrible and degrading method of destroying 
 evil and of settling disputes and rivalries between 
 governments, and are eager to manufacture and 
 maintain a romance of war. 
 
 It might have been supposed that women with 
 their higher morahty and greater unselfishness 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 95 
 
 would have exercised a moderating influence upon 
 men in time of war. It is disappointing to find 
 that in the main this is not so. Unfortunately 
 it is women who, as a rule, have shown the war- 
 spirit in its most unbalanced form, who have 
 called most vehemently in many instances for 
 retaliation and reprisals upon civilians, who have 
 shown the most cruel animosity towards innocent 
 aliens and who have chiefly supported the most 
 violent and sensational newspapers. 
 
 Not only, alas ! have they supported war by 
 ideaUzing militarism, but have actually helped 
 it forward in practice, perhaps, in most cases, 
 scarcely realizing what they are doing. In every 
 country we have the spectacle of immense numbers 
 of women working in the manufacture of deadly 
 implements for augmenting the tempest of 
 slaughter. In consequence of their work the 
 fury and extent of that tempest is increased a 
 hundredfold. And although they are plausibly 
 assured that their labours are only for the pro- 
 tection of the men and women of their own 
 country, the practical effect of their work in 
 every nation is to prepare bereavement and 
 misery for millions of their sisters in Europe. 
 
 Women are in fact, despite their other noble 
 work in lessening suffering, actively assisting in 
 making the war more widespread and more 
 horrible. Had the women of every country in 
 Europe adhered to their higher instincts and 
 unanimously refused to take any part in assisting 
 the war, except in trying to lessen its evils, 
 
96 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 how different would have been the position. An 
 international agreement might well be proposed 
 to make this unworthy use of women's labour 
 impossible in the future. Motives of patriotism 
 have made their assistance in such work seem an 
 obvious duty, but looked at from the wider point 
 of view of the interests of humanity and Christian 
 civilization, the results have nevertheless been 
 disastrous. Women seem to have been unable 
 to take this larger view, though perhaps it is too 
 much to expect that they should have done so, 
 under the pressure of the demands of governments 
 and militarists. They have failed, alas ! to realize 
 the extent of their collective help in the slaughter 
 of the youthful manhood of Europe and their 
 share of the responsibihty for the widespread 
 horrors of the war. 
 
 Another fact in connection with the misuse of 
 women's work for the purposes of militarism which 
 should not be lost sight of, is the evil effect 
 upon the health of the nation through so many 
 of the mothers of its children. Hundreds of 
 thousands of women have been taken from their 
 ordinary occupations (and from all the newer 
 opportunities for work which were opening out 
 for them) and crowded into munition factories 
 under long hours, unsatisfactory health conditions, 
 and deteriorating intercourse.^ 
 
 The holiest instincts and functions of women's 
 nature are bound up with the perpetuation and 
 preservation of human life. Militarism and war 
 
 ^ See Appendix, p. 170, " Side Issues of the War." 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 97 
 
 are therefore in direct opposition to these funda- 
 mental instincts, and it might have been argued 
 that, coupled with her finer moral nature and 
 capacity for sympathy and pity, her voice would 
 have been urgently raised in every country on 
 the side of peace, or at any rate on that of the 
 limitation of the evils of war. 
 
 But though this has not been so, there have 
 been many exceptions to the tolerant attitude of 
 women towards war. A minority amongst them 
 throughout Europe has remained firm for the 
 common brotherhood and interests of humanity 
 and has not been imposed upon by the glamour 
 of war, or the insidious appeals of a purely selfish 
 patriotism. It is also more than probable that 
 this minority may be far larger than it appears 
 at present. 
 
 There are associations of women in perhaps 
 each one of the combatant countries, with high- 
 minded aims for moderating the fury and un- 
 reasonableness of the politicians, lessening the 
 effect of the systematic misrepresentations of 
 the newspapers and the efforts of those who would 
 stimulate international hatreds and jealousies 
 to a white heat. There are others which hold 
 meetings for discussion of the problems of the 
 war, and for counteracting some of its evils in 
 the light of religion. 
 
 Lastly, there are individual women who have 
 had the courage and abiUty to plead with the 
 greatest eloquence for the nobler ideals of 
 
98 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 Christian civilization — ^women of various political 
 opinions and of diverse nationalities. 
 
 The effects of the war upon the character of 
 women, and the influence of women upon public 
 opinion, must be taken seriously into account 
 by those who see the urgent need for moral re- 
 construction. The majority of men are far more 
 influenced by the character and the ideals of 
 the women with whom they are in contact than 
 they either realize or are ready to admit. One 
 of the great reconstructive forces after the 
 European convulsions of the past has been the 
 influence of the surviving women. It is difficult 
 to overrate what France owed to them after the 
 Napoleonic wars and the Franco-German con- 
 flict of 1870. It is to women above all that 
 the world ought to be able to look with hope 
 for keeping alive the traditions of civiUzation and 
 the ideals of Christianity and for revitalizing the 
 conscience of Europe ; and it would be disastrous 
 for the future if the fine moral characteristics 
 and religious instincts of women have been or 
 are being seriously stunted and withered by the 
 poisonous atmosphere of a prolonged war such 
 as the present one, so different from and so far 
 more demoralizing than any other of modem 
 times. 
 
XII 
 
 The genesis of the war has shown that it is 
 dangerous to regard the social or state conscience 
 as entirely different to the individual conscience, 
 and as being founded upon a separate code of 
 morals. The tendency to do so and to emanci- 
 pate it from the restraints of the moral principles 
 of Christianity and to put in their place national 
 selfishness supported by specious excuses, has 
 been one of the principal causes of the present 
 catastrophy. 
 
 During the latter half of the ninteenth century 
 there seemed to have been some improvement 
 in this respect and grounds for hope that the 
 sovereigns or governments of Europe were be- 
 ginning to take a better view of their respon- 
 sibilities towards civilization ; but towards its 
 close the moral atmosphere, as we have seen, 
 again became darkened by the intellectual fog 
 of materialism and the dimming of the light of 
 Christian ethics. Fallacious arguments again 
 became popular with politicians, tending to show 
 that what is wrong for individuals is perfectly right 
 for States, and that in effect foreign poUcy must 
 be based upon a cynical and selfish opportunism. 
 
 This degenerate policy was in fresh evidence, 
 
100 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 more especially throughout Europe, about the 
 beginning of the twentieth century and culmin- 
 ated in various crises between 1900 and 1911. 
 It was shown more particularly in the desire for 
 annexation upon the flimsiest pretexts. Smaller 
 and less civilized countries began to be more and 
 more at the mercy of the Great Powers. Wars 
 were warded off with more and more difficulty, 
 though Europe in its ignorance and its belief in 
 the potency of the common interests of mankind 
 to preserve peace, lived under a false sense of 
 security. It reckoned without sufficient know- 
 ledge of the forces at work beneath the surface 
 of things — the dangerous dogmas of antiquated 
 diplomacy, guided only by the *' State Con- 
 science " — of the fierce ambitions of rulers and 
 militarists, of politicians and financial speculators, 
 and above all without recognition of the incon- 
 ceivably evil influences of an unscrupulous section 
 of the newspaper press in all countries. It awoke 
 to find that, blinded by a false confidence in 
 the steady progress of humanity towards better 
 things, it had neglected to provide itself with 
 constitutional means of defence against those 
 who for their own interests and under their 
 own infatuated obsessions were prepared to 
 risk plunging the world into universal war. 
 
 The sense of responsibility towards humanity 
 — the better form of State conscience amongst 
 governments — ^has had periods of ebb and flow 
 throughout the centuries. At times States agreed 
 
THE WAR ANT) THE ilrt^t^^^ TOl 
 
 to sink or make compromises as to their own 
 individual interests for the common welfare of 
 Europe. At others narrow nationaUsm or aggres- 
 sive imperialism again embittered their relation- 
 ships and led to war. More than once the noble 
 idea of a confraternity of nations, a brotherhood 
 in the true sense, seemed to be on the point of 
 taking permanent shape, but lasted for only too 
 short a period. 
 
 Mr Lowes Dickinson has lately reminded us 
 that— 
 
 " In the great and tragic history of Europe 
 there is a turning-point that marks the defeat of 
 the ideal of a world-order and the definite accept- 
 ance of international anarchy. That turning- 
 point is the emergence of the sovereign State at 
 the end of the fifteenth century. And it is sym- 
 bolical of all that was to follow that at that point 
 stands, looking down the vista of the centuries, 
 the brilhant and sinister figure of Machiavelli. 
 From that date onwards international policy has 
 meant Machiavellianism. Sometimes the masters 
 of the craft, like Catherine de Medici or Napoleon, 
 have avowed it ; sometimes, like Frederick the 
 Great, they have disclaimed it. But always they 
 have practised it." ^ 
 
 Machiavellianism may be defined as the asser- 
 tion that the ordinary moral code has no binding 
 power for States, and Germany especially has 
 
 ^ " The European Anarchy," by G. Lowes Dickinson 
 (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.). 
 
10*2 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 carried this view to its logical outcome. To be 
 fair, however, we must admit that Machiavel- 
 lianism has not been confined to Germany. 
 
 Novikov has shown with convincing logic in 
 his philosophical works that the social and state 
 conscience can only safely be based upon the same 
 foundations as that of the individual man, and 
 that otherwise the fabric of sound and true state 
 policy may well sink into the quicksands of a 
 purely selfish, narrow and dangerous nationalism. 
 He shows that there can be little hope for 
 humanity in the future if social morality (and 
 state morality as its representative) is to be de- 
 rived from no leading moral principles. '* If,'' 
 he says, " expediency is to be the governing rule, 
 unprincipled expediency will be the determining 
 impulse in almost every question of state policy 
 both internal and external, and principles will be 
 less and less referred to." 
 
 We have already witnessed this tendency. 
 There were those who again and again pointed 
 out its dangers, but in the political scramble for 
 place and power, in the corruption of politics, 
 in the ambition of rulers, the warning passed 
 unheeded, until at last the conscience of the 
 governing powers of European countries had again 
 become so corrupted that no one nation could 
 trust any other. Distrust and fear became almost 
 universal, Germany and Pan-Slavism agitated this 
 crystallizing and explosive solution of suspicion 
 and animosity, and the final result was the war. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 103 
 
 Nevertheless it cannot be too often insisted 
 upon, that the conscience of Europe has not been 
 fairly represented by its rulers and that the con- 
 science of the people of every State was far 
 purer and healthier than that of its representatives. 
 
 This statement may, of course, be disputed, but 
 in my experience and opinion there are a multi- 
 tude of facts that tend to show that it is certainly 
 true. I have been struck by it constantly in 
 my intercourse with the people of most of the 
 European nations. The common man of the 
 people knows what justice means — ^the justice 
 which has been defined and consolidated by 
 Christianity — he knows what liberty means, 
 liberty of will, liberty of action, liberty of con- 
 science — ^but these words have lost almost all 
 their meaning in the mouths of many statesmen. 
 This or that act is labelled as being one of 
 ** justice,'' though too often it is one of mere 
 tyranny over minorities, or the infraction of some 
 perfectly clear principle of justice. Tyranny poses 
 again and again as a champion of liberty, with the 
 help of the log-rolling systems of parliamentary 
 government or the self-seeking ones of autocracy. 
 Those who talk most loudly about freedom of con- 
 science are sometimes the first to suppress and 
 deride it when it becomes inconvenient. Mili- 
 tarism is the negation of the rights of conscience.^ 
 
 ^ Conscience and the State. 
 
 " We owe allegiance to the State ; but deeper, truer, more, 
 To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit's core ; 
 
104 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 Militarism, moreover, is impossible without a 
 highly centralized government and its influence 
 tends towards centralization, towards the destruc- 
 tion of local self-government and of individual 
 freedom. In order to reach its ends it propagates 
 a false philosophy of life in which the liberty of 
 the individual is once more asserted to be entirely 
 subservient to the interests of that indefinite 
 entity ''the State/' This assertion, though it 
 sounds plausible, means if carried to a logical 
 conclusion, a return, as we have seen, to some- 
 thing very like slavery of the whole nation, ex- 
 cepting its bureaucracy, and is one of the outcomes 
 of the gradual abandonment of those teachings 
 of personal liberty and responsibility, charity 
 and mutual toleration between men, upon which 
 Christian civilization has been built up. 
 
 Christianity demands freedom, freedom for 
 the will, freedom for the conscience, coupled with 
 the development of self-control in the individual, 
 and all that is inimical to freedom in this true 
 sense, is inimical to Christianity. Hence the 
 development of the anti-Christian school of apolo- 
 gists for the miUtarist system in Germany, and 
 the falsification of the German conscience by such 
 
 Our country claims our fealty, we grant it so — but then 
 Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men." 
 
 James Russell Lowell. 
 *' Nous ne savons pas en quoi consiste le bien generale, 
 mais nous savons surement que la realisation de ce bien est 
 possible seulement lors qu'on accomplit la loi de bonte revelee 
 k chaque homme." — " La loi de I'amour," Tolstoi, p. 201. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 105 
 
 militant materialists as Haeckel and others^ It 
 has been shown again and again in the history of 
 the worid that, with the diminution of individual 
 freedom, injustice, tyranny over minorities, abject 
 subserviency to those in power, bribery, corrup- 
 tion and cruelty, have steadily increased. With 
 regard to the last of these, under a government 
 opposed to individual freedom, the respect for 
 truth also disappears. It is necessary for constant 
 excuses to be devised for the practice of cruelty 
 and for over-riding the rights of the individual ; 
 and this means abundant misrepresentation and 
 the habit of official lying. In the present war 
 we have seen some confirmation of this. The 
 conscience of rulers, and to some extent that of 
 Europe in general, has accepted the injustice of 
 the imprisonment of innocent civilians upon an 
 immense scale, the killing, intentional or acci- 
 dental, of non-combatants, the ruin of unoffending 
 traders, the denial of the rights of free speech 
 and of conscience ; and the habit of misrepre- 
 sentation and deliberate lying has grown apace 
 in the practice of these cruelties. 
 
 All these things have assisted in the destruc- 
 tion or atrophy of the sense of human brotherhood. 
 The slumbering animosities between race and race 
 have been rearoused, the old differences of aim 
 in life and outlook have been exaggerated, com- 
 mercial jealousies intensified, the reputation and 
 
 ^ A somewhat parallel writer in France is M. Louis Bertrand, 
 author of " Le Sens de TEnemie." 
 
106 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 character of each individual nation blackened 
 and misrepresented ; distrust, misconception, 
 blind hatred fostered in every possible way. And 
 although these feelings of hatred and defiance 
 exist at present mainly between the nations of 
 the two AUiances which are fighting against each 
 other, a general and still more dangerous atmo- 
 sphere of international distrust is being perpetu- 
 ated which will continue to exert an evil influence 
 long after the end of the war and may well 
 create difficulties between nations who are now 
 friends. 
 
 Christianity, broadly speaking, has had most 
 effect upon the great masses of the working 
 classes, the peasants, the artisans, the smaller 
 traders, the lower middle class, whose consciences 
 and instincts have become in the main Christian. 
 The mind of the peasant in most countries has 
 been more truly Christian than that of the 
 wealthier classes. This shows itself clearly to 
 anyone who, like the author, has an intimate 
 knowledge of both the peasantry or working 
 people of Europe, and those who are generally 
 called their superiors. It is evidenced in their 
 generous impulses, in their desire to help each 
 other, in their hospitality, in their sympathy, in 
 their courtesy, often in their good manners, in 
 their keen sense of justice, frequently in their 
 detestation of vice, and in many other ways. 
 Of course there are exceptions here and there to 
 this general statement — ^though I am not sure 
 
THE WAR -AND THE FUTURE 107 
 
 that it does not even hold good where many 
 would suppose it failed, namely, in most of the 
 larger cities. 
 
 A few years ago — ^misled by the vociferations 
 of a few violent speakers and ftnti-Christian 
 journalists — ^many would have said that the 
 EngUsh working-classes were an exception. But 
 the war has proved this not to be the case. No- 
 where have Christian ideals been more nobly 
 and courageously preached than by many English 
 labour leaders and writers, and there are other 
 facts in evidence. To many people this has been 
 a revelation. To a large extent no doubt the 
 definite doctrines and dogmas of Christianity 
 have disappeared from amongst the English 
 working classes, but its moral code has not yet 
 been neutralized by the spread of secularism, 
 and even the secularist in many instances adopts 
 it. It is becoming clear that if the world is to be 
 delivered from the fear of perpetual wars and to 
 have any prospect of permanent peace before it, 
 it will be chiefly due to the voice and influence of 
 the people of Europe, or of the world, and not to 
 that of their governing classes, who have led them 
 into the present catastrophe. 
 
XIII 
 
 Fear and jealousy are most potent in overpower- 
 ing and silencing conscience. Fear more especi- 
 ally in its extreme forms tends to make men reck- 
 less, unscrupulous, desperate, savage and inhuman. 
 When fear predominates in a nation or amongst 
 its rulers, war is apt to seem a lesser evil than the 
 terrors conjured up by fear. 
 
 The war-mongers, the aggressive rulers and 
 politicians, the armament makers and other war- 
 projftteers know this and have often used the 
 Press in peace time to create fear. This was quite 
 clearly shown by the facts which emerged from 
 the scandals revealed in the German Reichstag 
 and elsewhere before the war, in connection 
 with the bribery of the Press and State officials 
 by armament firms, both in Germany and 
 France. 
 
 Commercial rivalry and an annexationist policy 
 amongst the nations tend, of course, to create 
 jealousy; and that also has been fostered by 
 the press. Both fear and jealousy are pecu- 
 liarly dangerous to conscience because they are 
 pecuUarly insidious. They act as it were upon 
 the subconscious mind. They are when thus 
 divorced from reason a form of disease which 
 
 X08 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 109 
 
 hinders the healthy development of conscience, 
 or undermines it. 
 
 Herbert Spencer and Huxley endeavoured to 
 trace the evolution of moral conscience from a 
 materialistic standpoint and both practically ad- 
 mitted their failure to do so. The conscience of 
 modem Europe is vitalized by the spirit of Christi- 
 anity, but the renaissance of materialism tended 
 to vitiate its attitude towards war and revive 
 earlier traditions of conduct based upon the use 
 of force as the supreme arbiter. In savage times 
 war was simply an organized system of tribal 
 robbery. Later on in the history of the race it 
 began to be regarded as contrary to conscience 
 unless it seemed necessary for expansion of racial 
 territory. Still later, wars of annexation or ex- 
 pansion amongst nations of approximately equal 
 civilization were regarded as unjustifiable, but 
 were not to be reprobated if waged against nations 
 of a lower degree of culture or for the purpose of 
 forcing a particular form of religion upon a con- 
 quered country.^ 
 
 Lastly, amongst men of high moral standards 
 war became only reconcilable with conscience if 
 waged in self-defence. This has probably been 
 the attitude towards war of the great bulk of the 
 peoples of Europe prior to the present struggle, 
 but it was unfortunately not that of their rulers. 
 
 The whole spirit of Christianity is one of absolute 
 
 ^ See '* Slings and Arrows," by E. Pugh (Chapman & 
 Hall). 
 
110 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 reprobation of war as a means of deciding disputes 
 between nations, and this attitude should be the 
 final stage of the evolution of the conscience of 
 Europe as far as war is concerned. 
 
 The gradual advance towards the ideals of 
 peaceful development (even though retarded by 
 bloody wars) has been steady if slow. The pre- 
 sent catastrophe is a terrible setback, but the 
 evolutionary impulse, with God behind it — as the 
 Christian believes — remains, and gives hope for 
 the future. In other words, that impulse is carry- 
 ing us forward towards the peaceful settlement of 
 disputes in national as well as in civil life, and the 
 abandonment of wars of aggression and annexa- 
 tion ; and there is a general movement towards 
 peace and justice which is still continuing, though 
 obscured. Even now the general acceptance by 
 reasonable men of the noble ideals put forward 
 by President Wilson and the new Russian states- 
 men, and the hope of a League of Nations for 
 preserving peace, shows that there is no reason 
 for despair. At the same time, if we recognize 
 the existence of free-will, it is clear that the con- 
 tinuance and strength of this impulse will greatly 
 depend upon how we use that gift of free-will 
 and whether we strive to put into practice the 
 moral code and the spirit of Christianity in our 
 international politics. 
 
XIV 
 
 One of the effects of the war has been to stimulate 
 in most of the nations an overweening sense of 
 self-righteousness. It has been the policy of 
 governments to encourage this feeling for military 
 and political purposes. The newspaper writers 
 have also traded upon it as a means for increasing 
 their popularity and the circulation of their 
 papers. Many politicians foster it for various 
 reasons and because they think it will appeal to 
 the electorate. 
 
 Too many preachers deliver sermons upon the 
 war in which they dwell (truly enough) upon the 
 noble spirit of self-sacrij&ce shown by the nation 
 and the devotion of its men and women ; upon 
 its great achievements, the unselfishness of its 
 aims and its determination to go on to " the 
 bitter end " — ^without any counterbalancing state- 
 ment of its sins, private and public, of the evils 
 of greed, envy, luxury, dishonesty, grasping 
 diplomacy and national selfishness which helped 
 to make the war possible. They too often infuse 
 a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction into the minds 
 of their congregations and fail to awaken that 
 sense of responsibility towards humanity at large 
 and towards God which comes before a narrow 
 
 111 
 
112 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 nationalism ^ and which is of the essence of Christ's 
 teaching. 
 
 Not seldom they go on to point out the utter 
 iniquity of the enemy nations, to endorse all 
 the worst newspaper accounts of atrocities com- 
 mitted by them, and to sum up by describing them 
 collectively as the enemies of God and the children 
 of the devil, to be, by implication, destroyed or 
 exterminated in Old Testament fashion.^ Thus 
 each nation is persuaded to consider itself, what- 
 ever its past conduct may have been, as a moral 
 exponent of religious civilization at the point of 
 the sword. 
 
 I do not refer only to English preachers — ^the 
 same type of sermon is to be found in every 
 country — ^in Germany as well as in England, in 
 Italy and in France — and in all of them there is 
 a pathetic resemblance to the prayer of the 
 Pharisee who went into the Temple and thanked 
 God that he was not as other men are, unjust, 
 extortioners, and so forth ; but if God is the same 
 
 1 A remarkable statement of this view has since been made 
 in the speech by Lord Hugh Cecil at the recent meeting of the 
 League of Nations Society : " We shall do no good unless we 
 get people to feel that there is something higher than their 
 loyalty to their country — ^that there are obligations to all 
 mankind. And I need not say — because it is a truism indeed 
 — that this doctrine of there being something higher is one 
 of the most elementary commonplaces of the tenets of 
 Christianity." 
 
 * A significant letter by the Dean of Canterbury eulogizing 
 the imprecations of Psalm 58 has appeared since this was 
 %vritten. See The Times of July 11, 1917. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 113 
 
 God as He revealed Himself at the time the 
 parable was uttered, such unqualified self-con- 
 gratulations must be equally offensive in His sight. 
 
 Strangely enough, however, many theologians 
 would seem to be of opinion that He has changed 
 His character or that we have misread it, or that 
 His teachings through the words of Christ were 
 entirely misunderstood, and that what Christ in- 
 tended to say was that we should hate our enemies, 
 on account of their wickedness, with the utmost 
 ferocity, until by overcoming and killing sufficient 
 numbers of them we should bring them to recog- 
 nize our good qualities, our noble stand for right 
 and justice and their own evil dispositions. 
 
 The dialectics of these bellicose theologians may 
 seem somewhat strange but they are very human ; 
 the inherited war-passions of our and their an- 
 cestors are scarcely hidden by the clerical garb ; 
 they are carried away by that narrower national 
 patriotism which, as Edith Cavell said, '* is not 
 enough.*' But the falsity of their arguments is 
 accepted and the weakness of their ethics over- 
 looked because it is convenient and because it 
 squares in with present desires and supposed 
 present necessities. There must be no holes in 
 the beautiful garment of self-righteousness in 
 which we kneel in the Church or the Chapel. We 
 must not admit faults, we must adopt pharisaical 
 tactics in order to continue to fight efficiently. 
 
 If, in consequence of the whole attitude of nations 
 towards each other having been wrong, unchristian 
 
114 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 and selfish as expressed in their foreign poUcy and 
 their enormous armaments, this war came about 
 and the peoples of each nation have been driven 
 into it by their rulers and by force of circum- 
 stances, there should at least have remained more 
 generosity and chivalry between enemies, some 
 understanding of illusions, difficulties, compul- 
 sions on both sides, some pity for the combatants 
 though they may be in the ranks of the enemy. 
 This chivalrous attitude towards enemies, this 
 understanding of the fact that the civilian man- 
 hood of the enemy countries has had no option as 
 to fighting, has been driven into the trenches by 
 compulsion and forced to do horrible deeds at the 
 muzzle of the revolver, belongs much more to the 
 soldier than the priest or the press-ridden civiUan. 
 
 The self-righteous frame of mind tends to para- 
 lyse conscience and increase the evil influences of 
 war, and it has alas been as much fostered by the 
 Churches as by the Press. 
 
 Let me not be misunderstood. I have no feel- 
 ings of hostility towards the clergy of any de- 
 nomination — far from it — I should be the last to 
 deny the deep debt we owe them for spiritual 
 benefits too many to summarize — and upon them 
 rest many of our hopes for the awakening of 
 national conscience in the future — ^nevertheless, 
 the failure of what seems to be the majority of 
 them to rise to the needs of the present spiritual 
 crisis has been pathetic and disheartening. All 
 honour to the minority who have been the excep- 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 115 
 
 tion, and have had the courage and strength to 
 accept temporary unpopularity by opposing the 
 vitiated currents of pubHc opinion. They will 
 have their reward. 
 
 Self-satisfaction and self-righteousness have as 
 we know an injurious effect upon individuals. 
 They have a similar effect upon States, and are 
 amongst the contributing causes which tend to 
 produce a State policy of the kind in evidence in 
 Prussia, as well as elsewhere — unscrupulous, ruth- 
 less as to the freedom of its own citizens, reckless 
 as to the rights of other nations. Thus this self- 
 righteous outlook which is specially fostered by 
 war and those who support war, is not only con- 
 trary to the spirit of Christianity but is an evil of 
 no small magnitude, and one which helps to block 
 the paths of future progress and reconstruction. 
 
XV 
 
 Almost all accounts of hospitals at the front 
 describe the strange silence of the patients. 
 Though men are brought in shattered and 
 smashed, with torn muscles, fractured bones, 
 perforated vital organs and every hideous form 
 of wound, there is an absence of cries and almost 
 of groans. 
 
 So with other sufferers in the war, — the vast 
 multitude of the bereaved, those with broken 
 hopes, the homeless, the ruined, the starving, — 
 those who once had pleasure in life and wholesome 
 work, in the skill of their hands and brains, in the 
 joy of helping their fellow-creatures through that 
 work, and in the beauty of the world as God made 
 it, and to whom it is now but a desolate and 
 blasted desert, — all these and many others are 
 relatively silent. They are allowed or allow them- 
 selves no voice ; few newspapers speak of their 
 condition or are their advocates ; they are incon- 
 venient evidences of the infamous barbarity and 
 horror of war, witnesses to its iniquity, so they 
 are passed over. They are one huge multitudin- 
 ous sacrifice to the desires and necessities of mili- 
 tarism in every country. The great military 
 machines pursue their irresistible course Uke 
 
 116 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 117 
 
 Juggernaut cars, crushing and maiming their 
 helpless victims — whether willing or protesting 
 victims, makes no difference. A destructive 
 obsession, an insane desire for victory '' at all 
 costs,'* has seized every nation, and the din of 
 mutual slaughter amongst the combatants, con- 
 tinuing night and day, overpowers the faint 
 moans of the suffering multitude. 
 
 Meanwhile the loud-mouthed patriots, the 
 elderly men of the clubs, the thoughtless women 
 full of bustling activity, the stump orators, the 
 hack journaUsts, the armament manufacturers, 
 and all the crowd of believers in war, shout for 
 more and more carnage, declaim against all those 
 who deplore the strife as neutrals or who en- 
 deavour to bring the nations back to reason, and 
 denounce the very mention of the accursed word 
 Peace. 
 
 The following extract from a French news- 
 paper expresses the feeUngs of many whose hearts 
 bleed for those voiceless sufferers : 
 
 " I declare that I am exasperated by the old 
 gentlemen — those who, sitting comfortably on 
 the terrace of a cafe . . . shout, * To the death, 
 to the last soldier ' ! Was it because he was 
 sitting opposite the station whence the trains 
 start for the East, or was it because he was sur- 
 roimded by the men home on leave, that one of 
 these old gentlemen seemed so bloodthirsty the 
 other evening ? With unparalleled ferocity he 
 wished to send everyone to the fray — ^neutrals, 
 
118 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 children of seventeen, old men. Unable to listen 
 to him any longer, I addressed this bellicose 
 old man. . . . ' But, monsieur. What are you 
 waiting for ? Why not hurry to those battles 
 yourself ? ' 
 
 /'The good man replied that he was ill, and 
 they would not have him. Strange that these old 
 men who are not wanted are so madly anxious 
 that others should go ! One would gladly let 
 them chatter and heap conquest upon conquest. 
 One would let them surround the enemy and 
 lead triumphant armies to Berlin. But when 
 one sees the soldiers sadly unclasping from their 
 necks the arms of those so dear to them, one 
 feels a certain anger with these old chatterers. 
 While they chatter one thinks of the eyes red 
 with weeping that one has met. One's heart 
 aches with past anguish and is heavy with the 
 trouble that is still to come.'' 
 
 It has been truly said that those who began 
 this war had not suiificient imagination to realize 
 in the least what it would mean. No imagina- 
 tion could grasp the full extent of its destructive 
 horrors ; but the militarist and diplomatic mind 
 has been steeled and trained to look at things 
 in the lump and become hardened to possibilities 
 of acute human suffering entailed by diplomatic 
 and military action, and has thus destroyed part 
 of its imaginative faculty. Nowhere could this 
 be better exemphfied than by the past history 
 of Prussia, by the Napoleonic wars, and by the 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 119 
 
 disclosures with regard to the Mesopotamian 
 campaign. 
 
 But lack of imagination is not confined to those 
 who began the war. It is as much the disease 
 of most of those who sit at home in each country 
 and urge it forward. Everything is done by the 
 belligerent governments to prevent the iniquities 
 of war coming home to the minds of the pubhc. 
 The imagination of the ordinary man is seldom 
 helped to penetrate below the surface of things, 
 to hear the sobbing agony of the bereaved or to 
 see the misery of the peasantries of Europe (who 
 have little concern with the quarrels of govern- 
 ments), torn from their homes, killed, wounded, 
 starved, and ruined. He thinks mainly in terms 
 of military success or failure. 
 
 Most of the poor boys of the belligerent nations 
 who have been forced into the ranks of the fighters 
 have scarcely begun to know or enjoy life before 
 it has been blackened for them by long-drawn 
 out months or years of experience of bloodshed 
 and slaughter — but the imagination of the middle- 
 aged and elderly who shout with the journalists 
 and politicians does not include any sufficient 
 estimate of their sufferings in its outlook. Want 
 of imagination makes real sympathy with suffer- 
 ing impossible. Many people can never sym- 
 pathise unless they themselves have endured. 
 They cannot hear " the still, sad music of 
 humanity " of which Wordsworth spoke. 
 
 Above all, the unthinking and unimaginative 
 
120 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 masses of each nation never even begin to con- 
 sider or feel compassion for the sufferings of the 
 people of an enemy nation. All pity for them 
 is swallowed up in hatred of their ruling classes 
 *' who began the war." And so it proceeds, with 
 the great pubhc of each nation becoming less and 
 less humane because more aiid more blind to each 
 other's miseries. 
 
 The silence of the sufferers is one of the most 
 significant facts of the war. It is an e\ddence of 
 how, in almost all coimtries, the huge majorities 
 who hate war can be held do\Mi and silenced by 
 t\Tannous minorities, how their sufferings can be 
 hidden or calmly accepted just as in the old daj-s 
 of slavery and of absolutism when the people 
 were the chattels of the lords. It has also become 
 clear that most of the supposed constitutional 
 guarantees for their freedom and personal safety, 
 for their right to foUow their conscience, are as 
 easily torn up as any treaties ; that whole nations 
 can still be gagged while they are tortured, that 
 the horrors of the Inquisition were in extent 
 as nothing to the horrors of modem pohtical 
 mihtarism, and that the groans of the sufferers 
 can be stifled as effectually as ever. 
 
XVI 
 
 There were many beliefs which were common 
 before the beginning of this terrible war which 
 seemed well founded but which have been shown 
 -to have been illusions. To some of them I have 
 already referred, but it may be well to restate and 
 consider them a Uttle more fully, because there 
 is great danger that after the conclusion of the 
 war they will be revived and reasserted. There 
 are large interests which sheltered themselves 
 behind some of them and there are many people 
 who will desire their rehabihtation. 
 Amongst them are the following. 
 
 1. The belief that vast armies, containing 
 nearly the whole manhood of the nation, are 
 guarantees for peace because they make wars too 
 dangerous and too disastrous. This idea over- 
 looks the fact that decision for or against war 
 rests practically with a few, and that war once 
 declared those few have its entire control, and to 
 a large extent that of the press, in their hands, 
 and can prevent any pubUc expression of opinion 
 against it. 
 
 2. The beUef that centralized forms of govern- 
 ment, well organized and apparently in the hands 
 of responsible persons, are also guarantees for 
 
 121 
 
122 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 peace. On the contrary it has been shown that 
 war would be much more difficult were govern- 
 ments less centralized and less able to act rapidly 
 and on their own initiative. 
 
 3. The belief that democratic forms of govern- 
 ment, entailing as they do some inherent evils 
 and some serious temptations to electoral abuses, 
 are a worse danger than more oligarchical ones. 
 
 No imagination can even faintly realize the col- 
 lective evils of the present war, which are tending 
 to sweep the whole civilization of Europe into the 
 abyss — which have brought greater suffering and 
 misery with them than at any previous period of 
 European history — and compared with which the 
 worst corruptions of modern forms of democratic 
 governments weigh as nothing in the scale. 
 
 4. The belief that any great part of the news- 
 paper press of any country could be relied upon 
 to defend the interests of humanity when war 
 threatened, or — after the declaration of war — to 
 take any views wider than those of a narrow 
 nationalism or to make any stand for unpopular 
 principles which might prejudice its commercial 
 interests. With some honourable exceptions the 
 war has shown this to be the wildest illusion of 
 all. The major part of the newspaper press of 
 Europe has in the main shown itself the bitterest 
 enemy of humanity and of civilization, deter- 
 mined to foster every evil passion, to intensify 
 the chauvinistic spirit of every nation, and to 
 suppress or pervert truth in every possible way 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 123 
 
 so as to make the formation of a true public 
 opinion impossible. It has done its best '' to 
 call evil good and good evil, to put darkness for 
 light and light for darkness/' and too often to 
 falsify and crush the Christian conscience of the 
 nations. 
 
 5. The belief that the people of any nation 
 would be allowed sufficient knowledge of the 
 true facts of the European position either in time 
 of peace or during war, to enable them to in- 
 fluence or control the diplomatic acts and general 
 foreign policy of their governments. 
 
 6. The belief that the balance of power is a 
 sufficient safeguard against war ; whereas it has 
 been shown to be its provocative and has dragged 
 in combatants on both sides. AUiances intended 
 to preserve the balance of power have proved 
 fatal to Europe. 
 
 7. The belief that secret diplomacy may safely 
 be left in the hands of a trained set of diplomatists 
 without any sufficient check being exercised 
 upon it by the parliaments of the nations. All 
 the supposed checks upon secret diplomacy have 
 been proved to be futile. It has been impossible 
 for most nations to control their foreign policy 
 through their representative governments because 
 they have been allowed no real information as 
 to the details of that poHcy, and when asking for 
 them have been put off with half-truths, refusals, 
 or deliberate lies. 
 
 All these beliefs having been shattered by the 
 
124 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 experiences of the war, a vast variety of recon- 
 structive questions are opened up. Numerous 
 reforms, national and international, have become 
 imperative if civilization is not to perish and the 
 world to drift into a long series of destructive 
 wars, but there is a primary condition for the 
 success of any of these reforms which cannot be 
 left out of consideration, and which is dealt with 
 in the next section. 
 
XVII 
 
 If we admit the anti-moral causes which have 
 tended to produce this war, and have been 
 common to European nations but focussed in 
 the aims and actions of an autocratic Germany — 
 one conclusion stands out clearly. It is this — 
 that no international rearrangements, no League 
 of Nations, no treaties, no readjustments of 
 frontiers, not even the extension of truly repre- 
 sentative government, the power of nations to 
 control their own foreign policy, and the abolition 
 of secret diplomacy, will suffice to prevent the 
 recurrence of war on perhaps a yet more stupend- 
 ous scale, unless the Christian conscience and 
 the moral standards of Europe be rebuilt and 
 reinvigorated. 
 
 Just as in business, success largely depends 
 upon the probity and credit of a firm — not only 
 upon its reputation for honest dealing and fidelity 
 to bargains, but also upon its actual possession 
 of these quahties — so also in the relationships 
 between nations, the existence and recognition of 
 a moral conscience is essential to the successful 
 working of any international scheme for the pre- 
 vention of future wars, and the development 
 of civilization. 
 
 126 
 
126 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 Lord Beaconsj&eld recognized this, and although 
 a Jew by race gave his eloquent support to 
 Christianity as the foundation stone of European 
 progress. In his Sheldonian address he said in 
 reference to Christian truth : '' That truth is the 
 only security for civilization and the only guaran- 
 tee of real progress/' ^ 
 
 This was also the conviction of Gladstone and 
 Wilberforce, to mention only two other great 
 names, and is becoming generally admitted even 
 by those who do not accept the full dogmatic 
 creed of Christianity. 
 
 Sound international law cannot continue to 
 exist or be remodelled without a religious and 
 moral conscience behind it, and a sense of human 
 brotherhood. It has grown up out of the recog- 
 nition of both, however much it may have been 
 emasculated during recent years and cynically 
 set aside in the present war. It requires to be 
 supported by the reinvigoration of the conscience 
 of Europe. 
 
 The task of moral regeneration is a gigantic 
 one, but the world's history has shown again and 
 again that great and effective reconstructions of 
 human outlook and aim have been achieved and 
 are also not infrequently due to the initiative of 
 a few individual men. It might well be feasible, 
 after a world-experience of such terrific import 
 as this war, for a few groups of men to arouse 
 a great regenerative impulse in every country. 
 
 1 " Life of Disraeli," G. Buckle, vol. iv. p. 374 (John 
 Murray). 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 127 
 
 So long as the war continues it may be difficult 
 to take action, because the peoples of each nation 
 fear, or are not permitted to make, any open 
 avowal of moral responsibility for the atmosphere 
 in which war generated ; but when once it is 
 over, the opportunity will be immense and preg- 
 nant with hope, and we need not therefore take 
 too pessimistic a view of the present or the future 
 position. 
 
 For the time being, most of the great minds, 
 those who love their fellow-creatures, those who 
 stand for the highest in religion, philosophy, 
 literature, science, and art, are in part silenced ; 
 but the hope for the future lies in what they may 
 say and do when the pressure of militarism and 
 the tyranny of the unthinking crowd and of rulers 
 is once more relaxed. 
 
 Now above all is the time for preparation. The 
 humanitarians and the true disciples of Christ in 
 every Church, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Non- 
 conformist, Greek — the Unitarians, the Quakers, 
 who have so nobly begun this very work, the high- 
 minded Jews, who have done so much for civiUza- 
 tion, the sincere Christian and non-Christian moral- 
 ists, should be summoning their energies, clearing 
 their thoughts, making their plans. 
 
 The war has, alas ! shown that little collective 
 action is to be hoped for from any one of the 
 Churches and we must therefore look in the main 
 to the vigorous convictions and actions of their 
 individual members, lay or clerical. There may 
 
128 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 be a Savonarola, a Wilberforce, or a George Fox 
 in this or that country, who, called forth by 
 the overwhelming needs of the time, may come 
 forward as the spokesman of groups of men whose 
 minds are aflame with the desire for the renewal of 
 Christian standards. 
 
 '' The success of any moral enterprise does not 
 depend upon numbers,''^ but I would make the 
 suggestion that an international association of 
 such groups should be formed either before or 
 immediately after the conclusion of the war.^ 
 There are already various groups of this descrip- 
 tion — mostly little known, seldom referred to in 
 the press — ^which have come into existence since 
 the beginning of the war in several countries, and 
 are already exerting a considerable influence. 
 With them, and with men of Uke mind, may 
 well rest many of the hopes for the future, as 
 much as with the statesmen and peace negotiators, 
 and their moral heroism is often not inferior to 
 
 1 W. L. Garrison — ^the Slave Liberator. 
 
 2 Since this was written my attention has been called to 
 an important association entitled the " World Alliance for 
 Promoting International Friendship through the Churches," 
 which now possesses affiliated councils and a large membership 
 in most European countries and in America. 
 
 The council for each nation includes various distinguished 
 and influential names. Amongst those of the British Council 
 are several bishops and leading representatives of the Church 
 of England and of most other religious denominations. The 
 chairman is Mr J. Allen Baker, M.P., and the hon. secretary 
 the Right Hon. W. H. Dickinson, M.P. Fuller particulars 
 are given of its aims and objects in the Appendix, p. 157. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 129 
 
 the courage of the soldier. They may be, in 
 fact, the neuclei of a possible network of organiza- 
 tions which might spread over Europe as other 
 great associations of men, united by common 
 religious or humanitarian objects, have already 
 done — as, for instance, the Red Cross Society. 
 
 Such associations have again and again in- 
 fluenced the history of the world and dammed 
 back or drained away tyrannous and de- 
 structive forces. The early Christian Church 
 itself with its scattered groups of followers and its 
 triumph over the power of Roman miUtary 
 barbarism is a case in point. 
 
 The following chapter may assist to convince 
 some minds how imperative and urgent is the 
 present need for revitalizing the Conscience of 
 Europe. 
 
XVIII (see footnote 1) 
 
 I BELIEVE that it is an imperative duty to en- 
 deavour to bring home the horrors of modern war 
 to those who do not reaUze them sufficiently — 
 who do not stop to think much about their details 
 or who are permitted to know Httle of them. 
 The tragedy of the present conflict is too Httle 
 realized, especially amongst those who are not 
 near the fighting zones. The sufferings of those 
 millions who have been dragged into the war, 
 under the tjnranny of the militarist system of 
 settling disputes between nations, are evidence of 
 its abstract iniquity. 
 
 One of the most able and eloquent writers upon 
 the war — and who has seen it face to face — Mr 
 Philip Gibbs, sums up his experiences and im- 
 pressions by saying : ''A man with a pen in his 
 hand, however feeble it may be, must use it to 
 tell the truth about the monstrous horror, to etch 
 its images of cruelty into the brains of his readers, 
 and to tear down the veil by which the leaders 
 of the peoples try to conceal its obscenities. The 
 
 ^ Those whose eyes are already opened to the full horror of 
 modern war, and who would avoid realistic descriptions, may 
 be advised to omit this chapter and proceed to Chapter XIX. 
 containing the conclusion of my argument. 
 ISO 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 181 
 
 conscience of Europe must not be lulled to sleep 
 again by the narcotic of old phrases about * the 
 ennobling influence of war ' and its ' purging 
 fires.' It must be shocked by the stark reality 
 of this crime in which all humanity is involved, 
 so that from all the peoples of the civiHzed world 
 there will be a great cry of rage and horror if 
 the spirit of militarism raises its head again 
 and demands new sacrifices of blood and life's 
 beauty." ^ 
 
 I endorse every word of this passage. This 
 present war has shown the true character of 
 modem warfare, the direct and logical outcome 
 of the wicked and unscrupulous passions and 
 methods which are inherent in all wars, which 
 cause them, and are further developed by them. 
 Modern war means the wholesale murder and 
 mutilation of the youth of nations and the retro- 
 gression of civiKzation. Prussian miUtarism in 
 its very worst form is the rigid application of the 
 true principles of war-making, legalized slaughter 
 both of citizen-soldiers and of civilians, accom- 
 panied by every species of soul-revolting atrocity 
 towards both that the debased mind of man can 
 invent. The horrors of modern war must be ex- 
 posed in all their fulness, just as it was necessary 
 to expose the infamies of the slave-trade and of 
 the Belgian Congo administration. To hide them 
 up or minimize them seems to me nothing less 
 than criminal. 
 
 * "The Soul of the VV^ar," concluding chapter (Heinemann). 
 
132 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 The following accounts are from statements 
 and letters of officers and soldiers, from the de- 
 scriptions of eye-witnesses and from other experi- 
 ences collected by the author (from various 
 published sources) who would urge the reader not 
 to shrink from their perusal, fragmentary of 
 necessity as they are. 
 
 After the Battle 
 
 " To help the wounded was impossible . . . 
 and night came. It was freezing, and snow began 
 to fall and cover those heaps of thousands of dis- 
 torted human bodies. Whether it was the dark- 
 ness and the snow that caused it, or whether the 
 thousands of wounded realized that help was 
 impossible, and that they must lie all night in 
 the cold and bleed to death, nobody knows. . . . 
 The phenomenon cannot be explained ... or 
 perhaps it is only remarkable that it does not 
 happen oftener ! . . . But suddenly it was as if 
 madness had seized all those out there who still 
 lived, who were lying wounded and helpless. It 
 was as if they had all simultaneously been pierced 
 with frenzy at their own terrible impotence. 
 
 " It began like a kind of deep murmuring, 
 gurgUng and wailing, which spread over the whole 
 battlefield . . . and a moment after it changed 
 into screaming. Screams so wild and piercing 
 that they spread as a contagion, quick as lightning. 
 At last it became like^'one single scream from thou- 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 138 
 
 sands of despairing throats ... a bellowing, a 
 sobbing, a wail of the soul's agony and fear of 
 death . . . 
 
 *' And we who listened to it were nearly going 
 mad, our hair stood on end ... we screamed 
 too, we cried that we could not endure it any 
 longer ; we wanted to run out from our position, 
 to go out there and help ... or to kill, to stop 
 those screams ... to murder or to die ! It will 
 hardly be believed possible, but the screams 
 almost drowned the roar of the shells . . . 
 
 '* The officers felt that there was danger afoot. 
 Everyone who ran out of cover was certain to 
 fall. The demoralization of the men had to be 
 avoided. And so orders were given that the music 
 should play ! Forward all the regimental bands ! 
 Music, more music . . . Patriotic songs and 
 merry melodies ... all through the night . . . 
 to drown the appalling screams out there . . . 
 Not before 2 p.m. on the following day did the 
 firing slacken a little, so that the stretcher-bearers 
 could steal out and pick up such individuals as 
 had survived the cold night and the loss of blood." 
 (Quoted by Karen Bramsen in Politiken, Copen- 
 hagen, from an account given by a French corporal 
 after Verdun.) 
 
 An Estimate of War 
 
 " On July I, 1914, I loved war and all that 
 pertained to war ; now (ten months later) I loathe 
 
134 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 it with an ineradicable hate and disgust, and 
 hope never again to see ground crimsoned with 
 blood/' Here are a few further quotations 
 which sufficiently explain this change of sentiment. 
 " The ground (after a battle) was covered with 
 dark patches — ^blood blotches. Fragments of 
 flesh, arms, legs, limbs of horses, and scattered 
 intestines lay everywhere about that horrible 
 first position. On the ground lay a human eye, 
 and within an inch or two of it a cluster of teeth. 
 . . . The man was close by, a mere mass of 
 smashed flesh and bones, with thousands of beastly 
 flies battening on his gore, as they were on that 
 of all the corpses. The sight was unbearable.'' 
 Again, '* One bayoneted gunner was not quite 
 dead. At long intervals ... he made desperate 
 efforts to breathe ; and every time he did so 
 bubbles of blood welled from the wound in his 
 breast, and a horrible gurgling sound came from 
 both throat and breast. . . . Nothing could be 
 done for him except to place him in a more com- 
 fortable position. War is hellish." ''We dis- 
 covered one dead man who had died in the act of 
 holding his bowels in, the outside of the stomach 
 having been shot away." Or again, ''At the 
 battle of Darkehmen a man, quite naked, foaming 
 and gesticulating wildly, rushed towards us . . . 
 He made straight for our ranks, where he was 
 knocked down by a soldier and secured ... I 
 do not know what became of him ; but hundreds 
 of our prisoners are raving mad when captured." 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 135 
 
 C An Englishman in the Russian Ranks/' by 
 John Morse. Duckworth & Co.) 
 
 The " Romance " of Modern War 
 
 *' It is a veritable shambles. An overpowering, 
 indescribable, sickening odour of hundreds of 
 sons, brothers and fathers of England and Germany 
 decomposing there in the sun, arises from it. The 
 air in that vicinity is laden with mist until one 
 wonders how the men in the trenches can stand the 
 terrible conditions. It is a pestilential spot. Here 
 terrible hand-to-hand encounters take place where 
 quarter is not asked and mercy is not shown . . . '* 
 
 ** There was a roar as if several Vesuviuses were 
 in eruption and a number of Niagaras adding to 
 the din. The earth trembled and shook under 
 mighty blows ; the very air vibrated intensely. 
 . . , It was the famous ' Trommelfeuer,' or 
 ' drumfire,' of hundreds of big guns. The British 
 were * drumming ' the German trenches in the 
 adjoining sector. . . . Probably close to looo 
 shells a minute were raining and exploding on the 
 German trenches. 
 
 " We stood awe-stricken. Mankind, like 
 Frankenstein, was being devoured by the monster 
 it had created. 
 
 " ' The poor devils in those trenches — God help 
 them ! ' said the staff officer feelingly. 
 
 " ' And human flesh and blood can stand 
 that ? ' I asked. 
 
136 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 *' ' Yes, but words can give but a faint idea of 
 what it means/ he answered. ' Men sometimes 
 go insane, sometimes their eardrums burst ; their 
 eyes are burned out by the withering blasts of 
 explosions ; they are suffocated and their lungs 
 burned out by gaseous fumes. God ! it's awful. 
 If war was hell at the time your Sherman spoke, 
 what would he call it to-day ? ' 
 
 "... The Geneva Red Cross symbol of mercy 
 is helpless ; the once sacred protection against 
 which none could raise a hand when its mantle 
 was spread over soldiers who had bravely fought, 
 perhaps, their last battle, commands little respect 
 in this war, which knows not chivalry or mercy, 
 even to the fallen. 
 
 " This is due partly to the new conditions of 
 warfare ; partly to the bitterness of the struggle. 
 The Red Cross on a white field is not a magic 
 mantle that can ward off shells fired by an 
 artillerist at a target which he cannot see, nor 
 against flyers dropping bombs from thousands 
 of feet in the air." (The Special Staff Corre- 
 spondent, New York World.) 
 
 The Ruin of Ideals 
 
 " All the elements have been mastered by 
 human genius and now master us. Youth, 
 strength, intellect, civiHzation, humanity, re- 
 ligion, science, even goodness itself are all in the 
 jumble sale of the war. All the grand ideals, all 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 137 
 
 the soaring aspirations, all the immaculate im- 
 aginings lie littered among the dust and the 
 desolation of the war. 
 
 '' Any ruined village in the wake of the armies is 
 a symbol and a synthesis of the utter collapse 
 and disappearance of the frail fabrics erected by 
 human hands ; and as we look round at these 
 terrible spectacles we wonder that man, created 
 in the linage of God, should have sunk so low. 
 We are witnessing not only the ruin of ideals, but 
 the prostitution of all the grandest triumphs of 
 the human mind/' (The Military Correspondent 
 of the Times in the London Magazine.) 
 
 An Extract from a Letter received by 
 Mr D. Starr-Jordan 
 
 [The Survey y New York.) 
 
 '* Next I went into a locked car, full of poor 
 crazy creatures, with a Red Cross nurse and a 
 Swedish prince who was distributing bags of 
 chocolate. The prince could speak but little 
 English. He wished to say that the men were 
 insane but could not think of the right word, so 
 he said haltingly, '' The men are — fools ! '' No 
 country has any right to demand what these men 
 have given. No cause is righteous that demands 
 such sacrifices. 
 
 " One man looked like an artist ; he was finely 
 built and extremely refined, but his mind was an 
 absolute blank, as if paralysed by what he had 
 
138 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 seen and heard. The saddest of all was one poor 
 creature who had brought back from the battle- 
 field only his fear. He lay there on his bed 
 trembling like a leaf, the perspiration pouring 
 down his face in an agony of terror. Nowhere 
 did I see signs of glory — no ! 
 
 '' When I spoke kindly to the men they would 
 weep and kiss my hands. There was no hope of 
 life in them except when I spoke of a new peace. 
 They got out as well as they could, most of them 
 with only one leg, some without arms, many 
 with distorted faces, all of them crippled and 
 ruined for life . . . They were only husks of 
 men. ... To say that war is hell gives too much 
 grace to war." 
 
 Modern Weapons 
 
 ''A ' Pilsener * shell kills everyone within 
 150 yards and kills many who are further off. 
 The mere pressure of gas breaks in the partitions 
 and roofs of bombproof shelters. Scores of men 
 who escape metal fragments, stones, and showers 
 of earth, are killed, lacerated, or blinded by the 
 pressure of the gas. Men who are only a short 
 distance away are torn asunder. The gas gets 
 into the body cavities and expands, tearing the 
 flesh asunder. Sometimes only the clothes are 
 stripped off, leaving intact the boots. Of men 
 close by, not a fragment remains ; the clothes 
 disappear and only small metal articles are found. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 139 
 
 If the shell is very near the explosion melts rifle 
 barrels as if they were struck by lightning. 
 Men who disappear in such explosions are often 
 reported missing as there is no proof of their 
 death/' (Surgeon-Major Lesghintoeff, Warsaw.) 
 
 Civilized Warfare ! 
 (From a letter to the Times.) 
 
 *' Everything points to the advisability of a 
 short knife or dirk being at instant command when 
 the jump into the trench is made. And this not 
 for thrusting forward as in striking a blow, but 
 for back-handed action, the arm being swung 
 with the blade projecting — a dagger action, in 
 fact, which is much the quickest and most effective 
 way of dealing with an enemy who is close up to 
 you. I notice that in a weapon devised for use 
 by the French the idea of a thrust-blow instead 
 of a swing-blow has been adopted, there being a 
 loop-handle, and the point projecting from the 
 back of the knuckles. This is not a good arrange- 
 ment. I suggest that the soldier should have a 
 short knife, ready to be whipped out in an instant 
 by putting it in a small leather case sewed high up 
 on the left breast, close to the armpit. The mode 
 of use would be to have it out just before jumping 
 into the trench, and to swing it into the face of the 
 nearest man, and as rapidly as possible into the 
 faces of as many men as can be reached — no stab- 
 bing at the body. The purpose should be to 
 
140 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 ' flabbergast ' your man more than merely to 
 wound. A ' job ' in the face is the most effective 
 way of getting first, which is everything in a hand- 
 to-hand struggle and the most disconcerting 
 injury." 
 
 Civilized Warfare! 
 
 " They had come towards us with their liquid 
 fire . . . but we took cover and got it stopped 
 and beaten down. Only four of us were caught 
 by the fire . . . four good comrades from 
 Bretagne . . . and we saw them being burnt 
 aUve. Their screams were awful ! . . . When 
 the fire gets one, there is nothing to be done. It 
 eats into the skin. We could not help. 
 
 *' But we became wild and furious at the sight 
 of these four who were burning like torches, and 
 when listening to their fearful screams ... we 
 could not stand it . . . nobody could restrain 
 us ... we rushed out of the trench and over to 
 the enemy. Some of us fell on the way, but the 
 remainder got across, and we bounded over the 
 trench and right down on to them. We fought 
 with our fists ... we throttled them with our 
 hands ... we stuck them with our bayonets. . . . 
 
 " I got hold of a fellow and was about to bayonet 
 him . . . when I happened to look into his face. 
 . . . An oldish German with eyeglasses and full 
 beard ... he looked like a professor, I thought. 
 ' Mercy ! ' he moaned, ' do not kiU me for my 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 141 
 
 wife's and children's sake.' " (Quoted by Karen 
 Bramsen, in Politiken, Copenhagen.) 
 
 Scenes from the Hospital in the Palais des 
 Beaux Arts, Paris 
 
 " But most pitiable of all were the long rows 
 of the paralysed and blind, who lay in the hospital 
 wards motionless and sightless, with smashed 
 faces. In the Palace of Fine Arts this statuary 
 might make the stones weep. 
 
 '* That human beings should wilfully inflict 
 these horrors upon each other in this year of the 
 Christian era is one of those facts of life which 
 breed despair." [The Daily Chronicle.) 
 
 Standing Orders of Modern Warfare 
 
 *' Henceforth commanders who surrender these 
 trenches, from whatever side the attack may come, 
 before the last man is killed will be punished in the 
 same way as if he had run away. . . . 
 
 '' Henceforth I shall hold responsible all 
 officers who do not shoot with their revolvers 
 all the privates who try to escape from the 
 trenches on any pretext." [Signed y Commander 
 of the nth Div., Colonel Rifaat, of the Turkish 
 Army.) 
 
 Similar orders are frequently issued in other 
 armies. 
 
142 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 The Fate of Civilians 
 
 " L'impression qu'on eprouve devant cette 
 immense plaine de Meskene est sinistre. A perte 
 de vue, on apergoit des monticules a la file, sous 
 chacun desquels sont enterres, p61e-m^le, deux ou 
 trois cents cadavres de femmes, de vieillards et 
 d'enfants. 
 
 '' Actuellement, quatre ou cinq mille Ar- 
 meniens campent entre le bourg de Meskene et 
 TEuphrate : ce ne sont que des fantomes. 
 
 '* Sous une grande hutte, pres de six cents 
 orphelins subsistent entasses dans Tordure, ronges 
 de vermin ! Ces enfant s ne re9oivent que 150 
 grammes de pain par jour. Sou vent ils restent 
 deux jours sans rien recevoir. La mortalite fait 
 de tels ravages que, apres huit jours, lorsque je suis 
 repasse pres de cette hutte, dix-sept de ces 
 orphelins etaient morts de maladies intestinales 
 depuis mon premier passage. 
 
 "... Trente mille Armeniens campaient, voici 
 quelques mois, autour de Deir-el-Zor, centre du 
 mutessarifat du mtoe nom, ou ils jouissaient de la 
 protection du governeur Ali-Souad bey. Je dois 
 mentionner le nom de cet homme de coeur, car il 
 s'effor9ait de soulager les souffrances des exiles. 
 Quelques-uns d'entre eux avaient commence a 
 faire un peu de commerce. 
 
 "... Des que le pouvoir central eut 6t6 
 informe de la fa9on dont les Armeniens etaient 
 traites a Deir-el-Zor, Ali-Souad bey a ete transf ere 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 148 
 
 a Bagdad et remplace par Zeki bey. L'arriv6e de 
 ce nouveau mutessarif , renomme pour sa cruaut^, 
 fut, pour les deportes, le signal d'effroyables 
 tortures. 
 
 " La prison, la bastonnade et les pendaisons ont 
 remplac^ maintenant les distributions quoti- 
 diennes de pain. Les jeunes fiUes ont subi les 
 pires violences et ont 616 livrees aux Arabes du 
 voisinage. Des enfants ont ete noyes dans le 
 fleuve." {Le Journal, Paris. i6tli Feb. 1917.) 
 
 Want of Knowledge and Imagination 
 
 The following is an extract from a letter from 
 a young officer, published in The Nation of 23rd 
 June 1917 : 
 
 "... It is hideously exasperating to hear 
 people talking the glib commonplaces about the 
 war and distributing cheap sympathy to its 
 victims. 
 
 '* Perhaps you are tempted to give them a 
 picture of a leprous earth, scattered with the 
 swollen and blackening corpses of hundreds of 
 young men. The appalling stench of rotting 
 carrion mingled with the sickening smell of ex- 
 ploded lyddite and ammonal. Mud like porridge, 
 trenches like shallow and sloping cracks in the 
 porridge — porridge that stinks in the sun. 
 Swarms of flies and bluebottles clustering on pits 
 of offal. Wounded men lying in the shell holes 
 among the decaying corpses, helpless under the 
 
144 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 scorching sun and bitter nights, under repeated 
 shelling. Men with bowels dropping out, lungs 
 shot away, with blinded, smashed faces, or limbs 
 blown into space. Men screaming and gibbering. 
 Wounded men hanging in agony on the barbed 
 wire, until a friendly spout of liquid fire shrivels 
 them up like a fly in a candle. But these are only 
 words, and probably only convey a fraction of 
 their meaning to their hearers. They shudder, 
 and it is forgotten. . . .'' 
 
 War's Glory 
 
 " All this garrison had been killed and cut to 
 pieces before or after death. Their bodies or 
 their fragments lay in every shape and shapeless- 
 ness of death, in puddles of broken trenches, or on 
 the edge of deep ponds in shell craters. The water 
 was vivid green about them or red as blood, with 
 the colour of high-explosive gases. Mask-like 
 faces, with holes for eyes, seemed to stare back at 
 me as I stared at them, not with any curiosity in this 
 sight of death — for it is not new to me — and I am 
 quite untouched with emotion ; for the horror of all 
 this war is now so great that a scene like this leaves 
 one cold as ice, and only just a little sick, but 
 counting their numbers, and reckoning the sum of 
 all these things who a little time ago were living 
 men. 
 
 *' It is one great obscenity, killing for all time 
 the legend of war's glory and romance." (Philip 
 Gibbs. In the Daily Telegraph.) 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 145 
 
 The Sufferings of Civilians 
 
 " Yes, Monsieur, I have seen terrible things. 
 
 My Httle town of , was entered by the Germans 
 
 early in the war and then taken by our troops and 
 retaken by the enemy. At first the Bosches treated 
 us well. But our miseries soon began. Our own 
 batteries had sometimes to shell the town and yet 
 we were so short of food that my peasants had to 
 work out in the fields under gun fire. It is the 
 same in hundreds of villages all along the front. 
 Most of the people cannot desert their farms or 
 their houses. They do not know where to go. 
 They did not reahze at first what this war would 
 mean or that they would be killed and starved in 
 thousands. Most of the sympathy is for the 
 soldiers, and they need it, God knows. But the 
 multitudes of the poor people on both sides of the 
 fighting line, hundreds of miles long, are nearly 
 forgotten. Your * Quakers ' and our officials have 
 done much for them here and there, but immense 
 numbers have been helpless victims — old men, 
 women, children. Everyone has been too busy 
 with the great business of killing. It is terrible. 
 
 I shall never forget one night at . Some 
 
 houses had been destroyed, but not many. It 
 was fairly quiet, and my old church had been 
 crowded for vespers. Ah, Monsieur, what prayers, 
 what tears amongst that kneeling crowd ! How 
 different to the old days of persecution under the 
 
146 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 Government, when many people were afraid to go 
 to Mass. Suddenly, as we left the church, a shell 
 burst in the square, and enveloped us in smoke and 
 flame, then another and another. The people ran 
 for their houses. A few were killed and several 
 others lay groaning on the stones. I gave some 
 absolution ; my soutane was all dabbled with blood 
 as I knelt by them. Some few had taken refuge 
 in the little crypt below the Church. They called 
 to me up the stairs by the tower to come down, 
 and I went to them. The gun-fire increased so 
 much that we thought it safer to remain there. 
 Presently the church began to be hit and we heard 
 masses of masonry falling. There were several 
 children below, separated from their parents. 
 Everyone implored me to remain with them, and 
 we stayed there many hours in the cold and damp 
 and without food. Once I ventured up the stairs 
 and across the Church, over the piles of stones and 
 mortar and brought the Host into safety below. 
 There was one little girl and her brother, and both 
 were terrified and trembling. I had been trying 
 to comfort them, and had just moved to the other 
 side of the crypt when a terrific crash took place, 
 and there was a blinding glare of flame as a shell 
 struck the jamb of one of the windows just above 
 ground. There were screams of terror amongst 
 my poor people. Several were wounded and some 
 fainted, but most horrible of all the brains of the 
 little girl had been dashed out and covered her 
 brother who had not been killed, but whose hand 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 147 
 
 had been blown off. I cannot describe to you, 
 Monsieur, the horror of that night. Much of the 
 village was destroyed, many houses burnt, many 
 of my poor people killed and mutilated, and awful 
 was the work of rescue. Two days afterwards a 
 high-explosive shell burst near me and shattered 
 my nerves, but, by the mercy of God, here 
 T am.'* 
 
 Civilians and Conscripts 
 
 " Only a thousand deaths a day — ^besides cases 
 of the dreadful post-typhus gangrene ! In 
 February it must have been ghastly — ^hundreds 
 dying delirious in the mud of the streets for want 
 of hospitals. 
 
 '* The foreign medical missions had suffered 
 heavily. Half a hundred priests succumbed after 
 giving absolution to the dying. . . . And the 
 typhus was not all. Smallpox, scarlet fever, 
 scarlatina, diptheria raged along the great roads 
 and in the far villages, and already there were 
 cases of cholera which were sure to spread with 
 the coming of the summer in that devastated 
 land ; where battle-fields, villages, and roads stank 
 with the lightly-buried dead, and the streams were 
 polluted with the bodies of men and horses." 
 (*' The War in Eastern Europe.'' John Reed, 
 p. 30. Eveleigh Nash & Co.) 
 
148 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 The Military Machine at Work 
 
 *' Our men's feet were in terrible condition. 
 They had had practically no sleep for three nights 
 and hardly any food at all for two days. . . . Half 
 an hour after we had thrown ourselves down ex- 
 hausted in the rain, the General came out with his 
 chief of Staff. 
 
 '' ' How many men have I here ? ' he asked 
 surlily. 
 
 ** * Eight thousand.' 
 
 '* ' Good. Send them to relieve the trenches.' 
 
 '* Our Colonel protested. ' They must have 
 rest and food. For five days ' 
 
 '' ' Never mind ! ' snapped the General. ' I 
 don't want your opinion. March ! ' 
 
 " The General went back to bed. 
 
 '* We coaxed, pleaded, threatened, flogged. It 
 was terrible to hear them beg for food and sleep, 
 and the column staggered off to the front trenches. 
 . . . There was nothing to eat. The Germans 
 attacked twice in the night so there was no sleep. 
 . . . Finally on the fifth morning, they relieved 
 us. Out of eight thousand men two thousand 
 came back, and twelve hundred of those went to 
 the Hospital."! 
 
 It is unnecessary to recall the revelations of the 
 Mesopotamian Report which are hardly fit for 
 republication here. 
 
 1 "The War in Eastern Europe," p. 30, by John Reed 
 (Eveleigh Nash & Co.). 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 149 
 
 These brief descriptions, terrible as they are 
 in their vivid reaUsm, can, of course, but very 
 faintly suggest the actual horrors of this war. 
 They bear the same relation to it as a few 
 handfuls of sand do to an African desert. 
 
 The evils of such a conflict, its cruelties and its 
 iniquities, extend far beyond and outside the 
 actual battle-fields, and their ramifications are 
 endless. They are eating into the very life and 
 soul of Europe ; and yet amongst the makers and 
 promoters of war they are little alluded to. They 
 are calmly accepted as part of the whole ghastly 
 business and are hidden up as much as possible 
 beneath the technical descriptions of *' brilliant 
 advances '* and " masterly retirements " and the 
 officially asserted objects of campaigns. 
 
 So it has always been in the past, — but never 
 before have the lives and happiness of the whole 
 population of nations been thus dragged into the 
 torture chambers of war. Never before to the 
 same extent have whole generations of innocent 
 peasants and harmless citizens been regarded 
 as mere masses of bone and muscle to be used 
 and destroyed in the propulsion of the miUtary 
 machine of their political rulers. The States of 
 to-day, represented by a few autocratic individuals 
 whose power is derived from mere birthright, or 
 who, in some cases, have perhaps climbed into 
 office by all the intrigues of the modem politician, 
 and for the most part seem to have no faith in 
 anything but brute force, have driven a whole 
 
150 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 generation of men and women to their ruin in this 
 atrocious holocaust, committing them to treaties 
 and miUtary engagements without their know- 
 ledge, refusing them the right of protest, silencing 
 them under the plea of State necessity, sweeping 
 them by millions into premature graves and 
 premature disease and disablement. 
 
 No man with a spark of the true impulses of 
 Christianity or love of that spirit of freedom which 
 has been and is being vilified and recklessly 
 trampled under foot by most of the militarists 
 and many of the politicians, despite their asser- 
 tions to the contrary, can justify the horrors of 
 modern war or the conditions of government which 
 led to them. They are a disgrace to Europe, to 
 humanity, and to professing Christians, a crime of 
 the blackest kind, and the worst ingratitude before 
 God. Germany has been the worst criminal, but 
 she has not stood alone ; all the nations have been, 
 to some extent, responsible for the position in 
 which the world now finds itself.^ 
 
 She has at least shown Europe, as has been said, 
 what modern war, carried to its logical conclusion, 
 really means, and that its true character is that 
 of shameless murder, pitiless destruction of most 
 of what humanity has striven for in the light of 
 higher ideals, utter disregard of the prompt- 
 ings of the Christian conscience. It is almost as 
 
 ^ From whence come wars and fightings among you — 
 come they not hence even of your lusts. . . Ye lust and have 
 not ; Ye kill and desire to have, and cannot obtain. — St 
 James iv. i. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 151 
 
 though Germany in this respect has unwittingly 
 done the world a service ; the service of the felon 
 whose crime acts as a warning to society. But 
 if this is so, and if, as many believe, the unspeak- 
 able horrors of war are amongst the strongest 
 evidences of its iniquity and folly, then it is of the 
 first importance that these horrors should not be 
 hidden by a false and hypocritical reticence, but 
 should be shown to the world in their true char- 
 acter. This is my justification for the present 
 chapter of this book, and, painful as it has been to 
 compile it, I could wish it to have been yet more 
 outspoken and fuller of detail. 
 
 I would go further and suggest that for the sake 
 of humanity and the future of civilization it would 
 be a praiseworthy and helpful work, for those 
 competent to it — for such a writer, for instance, 
 as Mr Philip Gibbs — to collect and publish the 
 fullest details available of the agonies and 
 abominations of the present war, gathered from 
 every front and every country, and illustrated, 
 where possible, with photographs, which should 
 spare no revolting details. 
 
 I am fully at one with Verestchagin and Tolstoi 
 in their belief that the eyes of the world should be 
 opened to the true nature of war. In the end it 
 might then share the fate of slavery and ordeal 
 by torture. A war of self-defence (though '* self- 
 defence " is often a mask for other aims) or a war 
 for the protection of an oppressed race may at 
 times be necessary, after all other means have 
 
152 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 failed, and there may be noble ideals in the minds 
 of those who wage such wars, but no ideal, no 
 object, however apparently just can alter the 
 fact that war is a degrading and infamous method 
 of settUng disputes between nations, and in itself 
 a negation of the Christian conscience. 
 
XIX 
 
 If peace is to be secured for any length of time by 
 a League of Nations or by any other international 
 organization, one of the first works to be taken in 
 hand, as soon as the war is over and men are free 
 to speak, should be a relentless attack throughout 
 Europe upon the shibboleths and fallacies of 
 militarism — an attack infinitely more widespread, 
 more logical, and more effective, than any that 
 has yet been made. There should then be no 
 delay in extending and reorganizing it. 
 
 It is difficult to realize to what extent these 
 fallacies of militarism, which we in England have 
 proclaimed to the world our desire to destroy, 
 have obtained a new vitality like a fresh growth of 
 poisonous fungi. As with moral standards for 
 humanity, so with the evils of miUtarism, the 
 opportunity for appealing to the conscience of 
 Europe will never have been greater than it wiE 
 be after the war and when the reaction comes. 
 The peoples and ruUng classes of Europe must 
 be shown how to free themselves from their in- 
 tellectual tyrants, the bloody, merciless, anti- 
 Christian dogmas of miUtarism, and how to use 
 their freedom in building up new ethical and 
 constitutional defences against them. 
 
 163 
 
154 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 To recapitulate, — if future possibilities of peace, 
 progress, and prosperity are to be restored amongst 
 the nations of Europe and the World, the first 
 essential condition would seem to be that change 
 of spirit, that strengthening of the conscience of 
 Humanity to which I have so often referred ; and 
 the abandonment of the latent belief — far more 
 widespread than is generally recognized, and 
 certainly not confined to Germany — that Might 
 constitutes Right, and that force and national 
 interests rise superior to moral obligations.^ 
 
 There are, as we know, certain practical pro- 
 posals for preventing the recurrence of such wars 
 of self-annihilation as the present one, which 
 are being put forward and discussed. Some of 
 these have been suggested again and again in 
 the past in one shape or another, but have now 
 been endorsed in their new form by some of the 
 best intellects and the most responsible statesmen 
 of the day, and are full of hope for the future ; 
 while others again are more distant possibilities. 
 
 Amongst them are the following : 
 
 1. A League of Nations to preserve and enforce 
 peace, as restated by President Wilson in its main 
 proposals, and widely accepted. 
 
 2. The ultimate Federation of Nations growing 
 out of such a League. 
 
 3. The extension and reform of Representative 
 Government, so as to give peoples a real control 
 over their own lives and fortunes which, to be 
 
 ^ See Appendix, " Rulers and Diplomatists,'* p. 166. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 155 
 
 effective, should, I believe, be supported by the 
 introduction of the Referendum and Initiative, 
 where it does not already exist,^ and should in- 
 clude practical and not merely nominal control 
 by all Parliaments of the Foreign Policy of their 
 Nations, and the abolition or restriction of secret 
 diplomacy. 
 
 4. The Organization of International Associa- 
 tions of various kinds for deepening the sense 
 of brotherhood between peoples, by promoting 
 international intercourse and extending the recog- 
 nition of the common interests of humanity. 
 
 If we consider each of these proposals, it is 
 self-evident that they are all as much dependent 
 for their success upon the character of the impulse 
 which lies behind them as any piece of machinery 
 is upon the controlling intelligence which directs 
 its action. Love of our fellow-men, sympathy for 
 them in their sufferings, to whatever nation they 
 may belong, a desire to understand their nobler 
 ambitions and aspirations, their racial traditions 
 and influences, as well as to make reasonable 
 allowance for their false ideals, their disabilities, 
 and their mistakes — ^in short, the abandonment 
 of the super-critical and uncharitable attitude so 
 often adopted by one nation towards another — 
 is essential if this controlling and directing 
 impulse is to be of the right character. 
 
 Without an altruistic humanism — which re- 
 ligion and the love of God can best provide — ^there 
 
 ^ See Appendix, p. i6o. 
 
156 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 will be no real security for the future, and the 
 world may well relapse into that condition of 
 semi-barbarism and denial of personal liberty and 
 public freedom from which Christianity had been 
 gradually rescuing it. 
 
 As far as rulers and men of influence are con- 
 cerned, the words of Grotius are here strikingly 
 appropriate : 
 
 " May God write these lessons — He who alone 
 can — on the hearts of all those who have the 
 affairs of Christendom in their hands. And may 
 He give to those persons a mind fitted to under- 
 stand and respect rights, human and divine, and 
 lead them to recollect always that the ministra- 
 tion committed to them is no less than this, that 
 they are the Governors of Man, a creature most 
 dear to God." 
 
 But hopes for the future do not rest only with 
 rulers and men of influence. They rest also with 
 the peoples and with the maintenance and de- 
 velopment in their hearts of right aims and ideals 
 — ^in other words, with the Conscience of Europe. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 (A) The following is a Brief Summary of the Aims 
 AND Objects of the Society referred to on 
 
 p. 128, ENTITLED ^^ The WoRLD ALLIANCE FOR 
 
 Promoting International Friendship through 
 the Churches." 
 
 The nucleus of this society existed before the war, but 
 it has been largely remodelled, reorganized and ex- 
 tended. It has associated councils containing many 
 influential names in most of the leading European 
 countries and in America. Amongst the members of 
 the Executive Committee of the British Council are the 
 Bishop of Northern Europe, the Right Rev. Bishop 
 Boyd-Carpenter, the Bishop of Kensington, Dr John 
 Clifford, Mr J. Allen Baker, M.P., Mrs Creighton, the 
 Bishop of Lichfield, the Dean of Worcester, the Right 
 Hon. W. H. Dickinson, M.P., the Rev. W. Temple, 
 Professor J. Y. Simpson and other distinguished persons. 
 Amongst its Vice-Presidents are the Bishop of Winchester 
 Canon Simpson, Canon Masterman, Professor Cairns, 
 Dr Selbie, Rev. F. B. Meyer, the Bishop of Edinburgh, 
 Rev. G. Campbell Morgan, the Rev. Dr Sanday, and 
 many others. 
 
 The attitude of the World AlHance is summarized in 
 the following statement from one of its publications : 
 
 " One of the functions of the Christian Church is to 
 witness to the potential brotherhood of man. It is 
 pledged to a behef in love as the true basis of human 
 
 167 
 
158 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 intercourse. . . . It is International. Its members are 
 drawn from every race ; its claim transcends all national 
 claims. In every country the opportunity lies before it 
 of influencing public opinion and moulding national 
 thought, while remaining outside party strife, and 
 poHtical and diplomatic intrigue. The peace of the 
 world has been shivered into fragments, mainly because 
 there existed at the moment no large body of men which 
 possessed at once the will and the power to maintain it.'' 
 
 One of the fundamental resolutions passed at a general 
 meeting of the AlHance is the following : 
 
 " That inasmuch as the work of conciliation and the 
 promotion of amity is essentially a Christian task, it is 
 expedient that the Churches in all lands should use their 
 influence with the peoples, parliaments, and governments 
 of the world, to bring about good and friendly relations 
 between the nations, so that, along the path of peaceful 
 civilization they may reach that universal goodwill 
 which Christianity has taught mankind to aspire 
 after." 
 
 The following is a general statement issued by the 
 British Council of the World Alliance, and which coincides 
 with the attitude of its other Councils in Europe and 
 America : 
 
 " At the conclusion of the war there will rest upon the 
 nations of the world a graver responsibility than has 
 ever fallen upon mankind collectively. The war has 
 been world-wide. Few, if any, nations have been un- 
 affected by it. Its horrors have made themselves felt 
 in every clime, and its lessons have come home to almost 
 eve:y race. 
 
 " The problem that will face humanity will be to dis- 
 cover by what method a recurrence of these experiences 
 may be rendered impossible. 
 
 " Amongst the leaders of thought in this matter none 
 are more urgently called upon to express their view 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 159 
 
 than the Christian Churches. The war itself has shown 
 how inadequate has been their influence to restrain the 
 forces that make for international strife. 
 
 '^ In formulating the principles on which to base new 
 international relationships, the first which must be 
 insisted upon is that Christ's principles should control 
 the actions of States not less than those of individuals. 
 Not a few writers have held that considerations for the 
 welfare of the State will justify an action on the part 
 of a ruler which in his personal capacity would not be 
 permissible. Such a view is inconsistent with the 
 Christian conception of moral duty. That which is 
 wrong in a man is not less wrong merely because as a 
 ruler he deems it to be to the advantage of his State. 
 The contrary doctrine has already brought untold 
 cruelty and injustice to thousands of innocent men and 
 women. Its maintenance makes it impossible for any 
 community to rely upon anything else than armed 
 force. . . . 
 
 "It is clearly a Christian function to urge that, in 
 the settlement after the war, a spirit both of justice and 
 of fellowship shall prevail. . . ." 
 
 " Justice and conciHation are the two leading notes of 
 the Anglo-American Treaties, and Christian thought and 
 endeavour cannot do better than build upon this basis 
 its scheme for an international system expressive of 
 universal goodwill. 
 
 '* The objects of the British Council have been defined 
 as follows : 
 
 " I. To induce the Churches in the British Empire to 
 use their influence with the people, and the Parliaments 
 and Governments in the Empire to bring about and 
 maintain good and friendly relationships with all nations. 
 
 "2. To bring together ministers and laymen of all 
 religious denominations in the Empire, and to enlist 
 the Churches in their corporate capacity in a joint 
 
160 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 endeavour to achieve the promotion of International 
 Friendship and the avoidance of war. 
 
 " 3. To form a constituent part of the World Alliance 
 for Promoting International Friendship through the 
 Churches^ and as such to co-operate with similar groups 
 In other countries. 
 
 " 4. To take all such steps as may be necessary to bring 
 before those who guide religious Hfe in the Empire the 
 paramount duty of teaching that the moral standard 
 which governs the consciences of Christian men should 
 regulate the actions of nations, and that international 
 relations and disputes should be adjusted by peaceful 
 methods and in accordance with the dictates of justice 
 and equity. 
 
 "5. To aid in the development of the national Christian 
 conscience and to promote all measures that will lead 
 the nations to realize that the progress of humanity 
 demands that the reign of law and the principles of love 
 shall prevail in international affairs." 
 
 {B) The Referendum and Initiative 
 
 The Referendum, or Vote of the People, as a check to 
 the Acts of the Legislature, is not a new institution, but 
 it is so little understood that the following brief account 
 may be of interest. It first took shape in the sixteenth 
 century in connection with the spread of the Reforma- 
 tion. Switzerland began to adopt it ih various Cantons 
 in its modern and pohtical form about 1848, and it has 
 now worked with great success as part of the Federal 
 constitution for a good many years. It has also recently 
 been introduced with success in some of the United 
 States of America, in Australia, and in British Columbia. 
 In another form — that of the Plebiscite — it has occa- 
 sionally been used in some of the monarchical countries 
 of Europe, and there are powerful and eloquent advo- 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 161 
 
 cates for its adoption in almost every progressive 
 nation. 
 
 There is much misconception with regard to it. Its 
 opponents — the most bitter of whom are some of the party- 
 politicians — often assert that it means the destruction of 
 parliamentary government, and there exists a strange 
 ignorance and confusion about it in the public mind. 
 
 So far from weakening parliamentary and representa- 
 tive government it strengthens it, because it brings it 
 more directly into touch with and under the control of 
 the will of the nation. 
 
 The Referendum operates briefly as follows : 
 
 Suppose an Act is passed by the Legislature. If there 
 is a strong minority of the electors opposed to it, or 
 which thinks that it should be amended, that minority 
 can, if sufficiently numerous, demand that it shall not 
 become law until it has been submitted to a vote of the 
 people, under which it is accepted or rejected by a simple 
 Yes or No. The machinery for taking this vote is 
 extremely simple and rapid, and not necessarily costly. 
 The Referendum acts as a support to sound legislation, 
 because, although seldom employed, the fact that it can 
 be demanded at any moment brings legislation into 
 accord with the real needs of the nation. That the people 
 have the power to demand a Referendum exercises a 
 wholesome check upon party-government, destroys its 
 worst evils, and gives stability and dignity to parlia- 
 mentary institutions. 
 
 Switzerland provides us with a most important object- 
 lesson as to its value, for in the main it has been of 
 immense benefit to that country. It has shown that 
 there is no general desire for hasty legislation, has been 
 the means of obtaining important amendments to faulty 
 acts/ and yet has also shown that when a beneficial 
 
 * A case in point is that of the Swiss National Insurance 
 Acts. The first act was passed by the Legislature, and upon 
 
 L 
 
162 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 proposal has been properly explained to the people they 
 are ready to endorse it. 
 
 Had the Referendum been in operation in the countries 
 engaged in the present war it is practically certain that 
 that war would never have taken place, because the 
 peoples of Europe would have been able to insist upon 
 sufficient control of their own destinies and foreign 
 poHcies. 
 
 The Initiative is the natural complement of the 
 Referendum. The latter either approves or vetoes a 
 proposed parliamentary act. The Initiative enables the 
 people to have some voice in proposing Legislation. A 
 proposal can be sent up to Parliament, provided its 
 promoters can obtain the signatures of a certain number 
 of the Electors, and such proposals are then bound to 
 be considered by Parliament. 
 
 Much more might be said as to the advantages of 
 the Referendum and Initiative as an antidote to the 
 failures and corruptions of so-called representative 
 governments, and still more so to the abuses of semi- 
 autocratic rule ; but they are being more and more 
 recognized by thinking men of goodwill who have the 
 interests of humanity at heart. The present war may 
 perhaps have the effect of bringing them further into 
 public consideration. 
 
 (C) Evolution and War 
 
 " The scientific world is agreed about evolution ; it 
 is not agreed about natural selection. . . . 
 
 a Referendum being demanded was rejected by an enormous 
 majority of the Electorate. Inquiries were then made by the 
 Government as to the reasons for this. They were ascer- 
 tained and many of the objections raised found to be just. 
 A new measure was prepared and accepted by the country 
 and has since worked extremely well. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 163 
 
 " The German claim that * the natural law to which 
 all the laws of nature can be reduced is the law of struggle * 
 fails, first, because even if it were a scientific law it does 
 not follow that a law derived from a consideration of 
 animals and plants applies to human beings, and second, 
 because it does not happen to be a law but a hypothesis 
 much in debate. . . ." 
 
 ** The struggle for existence does not mean in the 
 least that those who are best armed for the active 
 extermination of their fellows should survive. . . ." 
 
 " Let me sum up my argument. It is asserted that 
 war is just, necessary, and admirable, and that this pro- 
 position is a deduction from biology. In the words of 
 von Bernhardi : * Wherever we look in nature we find 
 that war is a fundamental law of development. This 
 great verity which has been recognized in past ages has 
 been convincingly demonstrated in modern times by 
 Charles Darwin.' I hope to have succeeded in showing : 
 
 " I. That if the struggle for existence were a scientific 
 law it does not necessarily apply to human affairs. 
 
 "2. That modern nations are not units of the same 
 order as the units of the animal and vegetable kingdom, 
 from which the law of struggle for existence is a supposed 
 inference. 
 
 "3. That the struggle for existence as propounded by 
 Charles Darwin, and as it can be followed in nature, has 
 no resemblance with human warfare. 
 
 ** 4. That man is not subject to the laws of the un- 
 conscious, and that his conduct is to be judged not by 
 them, but by its harmony with a real and external not- 
 self, that man has built up through the ages.'' (" Evolu- 
 tion and the War," p. 20, by P. Chalmers Mitchell.) 
 
 To the Christian it is clear that **The real and 
 external not-self " is the moral code of Christianity, 
 partly developed in man and partly revealed to him by 
 
164 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 God. Thus regarded, it has a surer foundation than 
 when it is extracted from philosophical systems of 
 ethics. 
 
 (D) The National Conscience and National Ideals 
 
 IS The following are extracts from a remarkable address 
 by the Rev. F. Homes Dudden, D.D._, Rector of Holy 
 Trinity, Sloane Street. As will be seen, their tone is in 
 strong contrast to that of the majority of war sermons. 
 
 " It seems to me that the primary and outstanding 
 duty of the non-combatant in war-time is of a spiritual 
 nature. It is to do his best in every possible way to 
 keep the mind, the will, the feeling of the people sound 
 and true. It is to fight against every tendency to 
 national deterioration, and to foster every influence 
 which may contribute to the uplifting of the national 
 thought and the national character. It is to safeguard 
 the conscience of the nation. . . . 
 ^" The peril which threatened Rome, and finally 
 brought about her overthrow, is the peril which threatens 
 the safety of every kingdom and empire. * A great 
 nation assailed by war,' as a French writer reminds us, 
 * has not only its frontiers to protect. It must also 
 protect its good sense from the hallucinations, injustices, 
 and follies that the plague lets loose. . . .' " 
 
 ** And it is this last sacred duty that is laid on most 
 of you. Some men to-day — only too many ! are called 
 upon to die for England. But you, or most of you, are 
 called upon to live for England — ^live so that it may live 
 its inner life : live so as to promote all that is highest 
 and healthiest and holiest in that Hfe — to safeguard the 
 soul of the nation.'' 
 
 '* The special task of the non-combatant is to nulHfy 
 and destroy the false ideas and the false ideals that 
 mislead nations into war ; and he has to cherish and 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 165 
 
 develop the true ideas and true ideals that make for 
 peace, for righteousness, for a stable international order. 
 For war — let Prussian militarists belaud it as they will 
 — war with its red ruin, war with its inevitable cruelties 
 and barbarities, war with its hideous sufferings, over- 
 whelming as a general rule not the guilty but the inno- 
 cent — war tends necessarily to demorahze the human 
 spirit and to render the higher life impracticable ! . . . 
 
 " Yes, despite some mitigating features, war is a deadly 
 enemy of the higher life of the race. And therefore, 
 whoever sets himself with thoroughgoing earnestness 
 to counteract the malignant influences that are con- 
 ducive to war, and to cultivate the wholesome influences 
 that are unfavourable thereto, is faithfully doing his part 
 to keep alive the soul, not only of his own nation but of 
 all nations and all humanity. 
 
 " Consider, I say, that the first task of the English 
 non-combatant to-day is to defend himself and others 
 against those detestable ideas which have blasted the 
 soul of Germany and made this Armageddon possible. 
 You know, of course, what they are. There is the false 
 conception of patriotism, for instance, which finds ex- 
 pression in the maxim, * My country right or wrong, 
 and right or wrong my country.' There is the false 
 conception of the State, which is embodied in the 
 doctrine that ^ there is no power above the State,' and 
 that moral considerations need be no restraint on govern- 
 ments. There is the false conception of discipline, 
 which sanctions the perpetration of unnamable atrocities, 
 provided that they be ordered by superior authority. 
 Or again, there is the false conception of a country's 
 highest good as consisting, not in spiritual things, but 
 in the wealth, the strength, the success, the material 
 resources of the people. All these are examples of the 
 kind of pernicious ideas that the English patriot has to 
 guard against. For, beHeve me, there is indeed a very 
 
166 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 real danger — and we had better frankly recognize it — 
 of our nation being infected, at any rate in some measure, 
 with these or similar ideas. Why, I have myself read 
 articles and letters in the newspapers, I have myself 
 listened to conversations, in which some of these ideas — 
 toned down, it is true, and modified yet essentially the 
 same ideas — have been openly and unblushingly ex- 
 pressed and advocated. And herein lies our peril. 
 For what would it profit us to conquer the Germans if 
 we ourselves were to be conquered by the vile principles 
 of the German Kultur ? What sort of triumph would 
 it be if we were to emerge from this ghastly struggle, 
 victorious indeed in our arms, but embittered, intolerant, 
 arrogant, revengeful, more inclined to believe in the 
 effectiveness of bluster and brute force, and less regard- 
 ful of moral and religious considerations — if, in a word, 
 we were to exchange the soul of England for the soul 
 of Germany ? . . . 
 
 " * What can we do ? ' asked Bishop Westcott years 
 ago. And the answer that he gave then is the answer 
 that must be given now. ' We can check in ourselves 
 and in others every temper that makes for war, all un- 
 generous judgments, all presumptuous claims, all prompt- 
 ings of self-assertion, the noxious growths of isolation, 
 arrogance, and passion.' 
 
 " So much for the negative task of the non-combatant. 
 But there is also, remember, a positive task. Not only 
 must the patriot seek to guard against and eradicate 
 the ideas that lead to war ; he must also seek to cultivate 
 and disseminate the ideas that lead to peace.'' (From 
 a report published in The Church Times, See also 
 p. 67.) 
 
 {E) Rulers and Diplomatists 
 
 " But the burning and pressing question is why should 
 we — we, the ' enlightened and civilized ' nations of Europe 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 167 
 
 — get involved in these senseless wars at all ? . . . 
 Here for the last twenty years have these so-called great 
 Powers been standing round, all professing that their 
 one desire is peace, and all meanwhile arming to the 
 teeth ; each accusing the other of militant intentions 
 and all lamenting that ' war is inevitable.' Here they 
 have been forming their Ententes and Alliances, study- 
 ing the map and adjusting the balance of power. All, 
 of course, with the best intentions, and lo ! with the 
 present result ! What nonsense ! . . . When will the 
 peoples themselves arise and put a stop to this fooling, 
 the peoples who give their lives and pay the cost of it 
 all ? If the present-day diplomats and foreign ministers 
 have sincerely striven for peace, then their utter in- 
 capacity and futihty have been proved to the hilt, and 
 they must be swept away. If they have not sincerely 
 striven for peace, but only pretended to so strive, then 
 also they must be swept away, for deceit in such a matter 
 is unpardonable." (Ed. Carpenter, " The Healing of 
 the Nations.") 
 
 The author goes on to point out that in his opinion 
 the real moving power beneath the pretence of rulers 
 and diplomatists has been the class interests of trade 
 and militarism, with its greeds and vanities, suspicions 
 and jealousies, and he considers that the working masses 
 of the various nations have had no desire to quarrel 
 with each other and are animated by an entirely 
 different spirit. My personal knowledge of them in 
 most of the beUigerent countries certainly confirms 
 this view, and the irony of the whole position is that 
 it is just these very classes who are being forced under 
 pain of death to kill each other by millions under the 
 pressure of the Government machines. It has been 
 truly said, *' There was no reason for war between the 
 Western nations. We are all brothers and do not hate 
 one another. The war-preaching press is envenomed 
 
168 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 by a minority, a minority vitally interested in maintain- 
 ing these hatreds, but our peoples, I know, ask for peace 
 and Hberty and that alone." 
 
 (F) " Bloodthirsty Sermons " 
 
 In the report of the meeting of the Prussian diet one 
 of the members, Herr Hoffmann, condemned the " blood- 
 thirsty sermons " of various ministers of rehgion. Herr 
 Hoffmann said : 
 
 "It is difficult to speak without indignation of the 
 devilish work accomplished during this war by the 
 pastors of the Protestant State Church of Prussia. 
 Look, for instance, at the agitation carried on by 
 Chaplain Schettler, who has been circulating among 
 our soldiers at the front books in which butchery is 
 advocated as a Christian duty. 
 
 Chaplain Schettler says : " The death-cries of the 
 Russian troops caught in the Masurian swamps were 
 terrible, but we must rejoice over them, for in slaughter- 
 ing thousands upon thousands of Russian barbarians 
 we were achieving a noble work. A truly religious 
 work, a service for Christ." ^ 
 
 In one book written by Chaplain Schettler, entitled, 
 " In the Name of God — Forward," this is a characteristic 
 extract : * It is not our fault if in this bloody war we 
 must also carry out the duties of an executioner. Cold 
 steel is put into the hand of the German soldier, and he 
 must use it without hesitation and without mercy. He 
 must thrust the bayonet between the ribs of the enemy ; 
 he must shatter the butt end of his rifle on the enemies* 
 skulls — that is his holy duty. Thereby he is serving 
 God. Use your weapons with effect against the Russians, 
 the French, the Belgians, and, above all, against the 
 English canaille." Herr Hoffmann commented — 
 
 " Is that the language of religion ? Is that the 
 ^ Compare the expressions of English clergy quoted on p. 66. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 169 
 
 doctrine of the Christian faith ? These disgraceful 
 publications bring shame and discredit on the name of 
 Germany. '^ 
 
 Would that they were confined to Germany. Parallels 
 for them can, alas ! be found in most countries. 
 
 (G) True Religion as a Preventive of War 
 
 " What happens when there is no religion ? Then 
 troubles and wars like the present come in. It must 
 be so. Simply and logically it cannot be anything else. 
 For if we give up God, then only man is left. Then one 
 man is as good as another. Then when conflicting 
 interests come in, as sooner or later they must — many 
 men, many minds — then A says to B and C and all the 
 rest, * Why should it not be my way as much as your 
 ways ? ' And B says the same to A and C, and C says 
 the same to A and B. Then there is a row. Then there 
 is upset, confusion, trouble, and chaos. And so it must 
 be to the end. Even if they manage to get settled 
 again, even if there is some fresh arrangement made, 
 still, fresh Hves are born and come on to the scene, and 
 sooner or later there will be further conflicts of wills, 
 and the same trouble will come over again. Even the 
 most despotic power for order cannot of itself prevent 
 rebellion and murder somewhere. It is so with indi- 
 viduals, and it is so with nations, for what are these 
 great separate and organized centres of self-interest but 
 individuals * writ large ' ? 
 
 "It is only, then, when we bring something into life 
 which is higher than ourselves, something to which we 
 can all bow aHke, it is only when we bring God into it, 
 that human life can continue peaceable, nay, can be 
 even tolerably and respectable. It is only when A can 
 say to B and C, * ... let it be neither your ways, neither 
 let it be my way, but let it be God's way, that we can 
 
170 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 then all get on together. We must have God. Human 
 life cannot get on without Him. The world cannot be 
 run without God — it cannot be done. Why should it ? 
 He made it. How can it do without Him ? " (Fr. C. 
 Sharp.) 
 
 " La cause de toutes nos mis^res est . . . dans cette 
 incroyance insouci^nte des masses, et dans la negation 
 consciente de la necessite de la religion par les soi-disant 
 classes cultivees." (Tolstoi.) 
 
 {H) Side Issues of the War — Immorality 
 
 Apart from the evils of munition work the following 
 statement is significant of other militarist influences 
 upon women. 
 
 Some disquieting revelations of the side issues of the 
 war in the matter of social purity were made by Miss 
 Dame Dawson (Commandant of the Women's Police 
 Service) at the annual meeting of the London Diocesan 
 Council for Preventive, Rescue, and Penitentiary Work, 
 at which the Bishop of London presided in the Church 
 House. 
 
 The Women's Police service, she said, had been formed 
 at the outbreak of the war. At that time, in one of the 
 most ordinary little towns, where the girls were typical 
 of other English girls in 19 14, there was a great deal of 
 seething unrest. The girls craved for excitement and 
 for opportunities of possessing money of their own. 
 Their small weekly wages were expected to swell the 
 family exchequer, and they rebelled against the sordid- 
 ness of the home conditions. . . . When the war broke 
 out, and some 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers came into that 
 town, and the ugliest little girl could have male atten- 
 tions which in time of peace would never have come into 
 her Hfe, was it any wonder that many of the younger 
 women lost their heads ? It was an avalanche with 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 171 
 
 which the first Women Police had to deal, and in six 
 months hundreds of those girls were common prostitutes. 
 Much of the trouble might have been avoided, she 
 thought, if the military authorities had called in large 
 numbers of experienced rescue workers of both sexes 
 before the difficulties actually arose. 
 
 Then there was the girl who made a trade of it. In 
 great numbers such women had httle children at home 
 whom they supported by their immoral earnings. They 
 made large sums of money in that way, and said, " We 
 are not afraid of disease ; the doctors will see to us, 
 and, besides, we are saving the others." {The Church 
 Times, 29th June 191 7.) 
 
 (/) Prayer for Peace by Pope Benedict XV. 
 
 " Dismayed by the horrors of a war which is bringing 
 ruin to peoples and nations, we turn, Jesus, to Thy 
 most loving Heart as to our last hope. God of Mercy, 
 with tears we invoke Thee to end this fearful scourge ; 
 O King of Peace, we humbly implore the peace for which 
 we long. From Thy sacred Heart Thou didst shed forth 
 over the world divine Charity, so that discord might end 
 and love alone might reign among men. During Thy 
 life on earth Thy Heart beat with tender compassion for 
 the sorrows of men ; in this hour made terrible with 
 burning hate, with bloodshed and with slaughter, once 
 more may thy divine Heart be moved to pity. Pity 
 the countless mothers in anguish for the fate of their 
 sons ; pity the numberless famiUes now bereaved of 
 their fathers ; pity Europe ^ over which broods such 
 havoc and disaster. Do Thou inspire rulers and peoples 
 with counsels of meekness, do Thou heal the discords 
 that tear the nations asunder ; Thou Who didst shed 
 Thy precious blood that they might live as brothers, 
 bring men together once more in loving harmony. And 
 
172 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 as once before, to the cry of the Apostle Peter : Save us 
 Lord, we perish. Thou didst answer with words of mercy 
 and didst still the raging waves, so now deign to hear 
 our trustful prayer, and give back to the world peace 
 and tranquillity." 
 
 (/) Treatment of Civilian Aliens in the Eighteenth 
 AND Nineteenth Centuries 
 
 The following treaty -provisions appear in the Prussian- 
 American Treaty of July ii, 1799 : 
 
 " In the event of war breaking out between the 
 signatories to the Treaty, merchants trading in the one 
 State, but belonging to the other State, shall be permitted 
 to remain nine months in their abode, in order that they 
 may fulfil their outstanding engagements and liquidate 
 their businesses ; they may then depart without hind- 
 rance and take their entire goods with them, without 
 being molested or prevented. Women and children, 
 professors of all faculties, peasants, artists, artizans 
 and fishermen, who are unarmed and who inhabit un- 
 fortified towns, villages or other places as well as all 
 those whose professions serve for the amusement and 
 general well-being of the community may continue in 
 their various professions ; they shall not be subjected 
 to molestation of their person, neither shall their houses 
 or property be set fire to, or otherwise destroyed ; 
 neither shall their fields be devastated by the armies 
 of the enemy ; and should it be necessary to take any 
 of their property for the use of the invading army an 
 adequate price shall be paid for the same.'' 
 
 This treaty was originally concluded between Frederick 
 the Great and Benjamin Franklin in the year 1785, and 
 again renewed in 1799 and 1828. During this present 
 war both Governments have repeatedly referred to 
 some of the stipulations of the Treaty. 
 
THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 173 
 
 (K) Erasmus on War 
 
 '^ If there is anything in the affairs of mortals which 
 it becomes us dehberately to attack ... to avert and 
 to abolish, it is certainly war, than which there is nothing 
 more wicked, more mischievous or more widely destruc- 
 tive in its effects, nothing harder to be rid of, or more 
 horrible, in a word, more unworthy of a man, not to say 
 of a Christian.'' (Erasmus. Opera IL, Prov. 951 C.) 
 
INDEX 
 
 Acton, Lord, 56 
 
 " After the Battle," 132 
 
 Agnosticism, 67 
 
 Aliens, 75 
 
 Aliens in eighteenth century, 
 
 172 
 Altruism and Christian ethics, 
 
 25 
 Anglican Church, 127 
 Annexation and spheres of 
 
 influence, 27 
 Anti-Christian attitude of 
 
 revenge, 50 
 Anti-moral causes of war, 
 
 125 
 
 Anti-war impulses, develop- 
 ment of, no 
 
 Apostles of force, the, 52 
 
 Argentina, 65 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 30 
 
 Austria, 74 
 
 Austrian bureaucracy, 28 
 
 Austrian militarist party, 
 15 
 
 Bailey, John, 30 
 Baker, J. Allen, M.P., 128 
 Balance of power, 123 
 Banners of militarism, the, 
 
 53 
 Bavaria, 65 
 
 Beaconsfield, Lord, 25, 125 
 Beauty, expression of, 34 
 Begbie, Harold, 49 
 Benavento, Monseigneur, 65 
 Benedict XV., Pope, 66, 171 
 Bernhardi, von, 39, 163 
 Bloodthirsty sermons, 66, 168 
 Boyd-Carpenter, Bishop, 157 
 
 Bramson, Karen, 133, 141 
 Bribery of the Press, 108 
 British annexations, 28 
 Browning, Robert, 30 
 
 Cairns, Prof., 157 
 Cambridge History of English 
 
 Literature, 30 
 Carlyle, 30 
 
 Carpenter, Edward, 169 
 Castes, the military, 69 
 Chauvinism, 59 
 Chile, 65 
 
 Christian associations, 128 
 Christian conscience as a 
 
 guiding influence, the, 24 
 Christian ethics, 69 
 Christianity, asserted failure 
 
 of, 37 
 Christian virtues disliked by 
 
 militarists, 63 
 Churches of the nations, 64 
 Civilian aliens in the eighteenth 
 
 and nineteenth centuries, 
 
 172 
 Civilians and conscripts, 147 
 Civilians, sufferings of, 145 
 Classicism and Realism, 32 
 Clifford, Dr John, 157 
 Cold sympathy, 51 
 Commercial competition, 108 
 Commercial greed, 72 
 Conclusions, final, 154 
 Congo, 27 
 
 Conscience impulses, 1 1 
 Conscience, salves to, 79 
 Conscription as guarantee for 
 
 peace, 121 
 Contradiction between war 
 175 
 
176 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 and spirit of Christianity, 
 
 Courage, 46 
 Cowper, 30 
 Cramb, Prof., ix, 39 
 Creighton, Mrs, 157 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 163 
 Darwin's definitions of con- 
 science, II 
 Decadent Literature, 30 
 Degeneracy, 26 
 Degeneracy in Art, 32, 33 
 Degenerate Drama, 32 
 Democratic governments, 122 
 Despair, 52 
 Dickens, 30 
 Dickinson, the Right Hon. 
 
 W. H., M.P., 128, 157 
 Diplomacy, bankruptcy of, 68 
 Disraeli, Life of, 25, 126 
 Disraeli and Christianity, 25 
 Dudden, Rev. Dr Homes, 166 
 
 Early Christian attitude to 
 
 war, 61 
 Ecclesiastical sophistry, 69 
 Edinburgh, Bishop of, 157 
 Eliot, George, 30 
 "Englishman in the Russian 
 
 Ranks, An," 134 
 Estimate of war, an, 133 
 " European Anarchy, The," 
 ^ 73, loi 
 Evil passions, 48 
 Evolution and War, 162 
 Explosives shall decide, 53 
 
 Fallacious safeguards for 
 European civilization, 3 
 
 False conceptions of National 
 good, 165 
 
 Fate of civilian populations, 7 
 
 Fate of civilians, the, 142 
 
 Fear, 108 
 
 Finland, 28 
 
 Foundations of the Con- 
 science of Europe, i 
 
 Fox, George, 128 
 
 Freedom of conscience, 70 
 
 Freedom, loss of, 45 
 
 Free-will, 22, 36 
 
 Free-will, struggle against 
 evil based on, 38 
 
 French annexations, 28 
 
 Germany and the war, 151 
 Gibbs, Mr Philip, 69, 130 
 Gladstone, 126 
 Goddess of war, the, 54 
 Government machines, 169 
 Governm_ents centralized, 121 
 Green's *' History of the 
 
 English People," 47 
 Grey, Viscount, and the con- 
 science of Europe, 12 
 Grotius, 156 
 
 Guarantees against war, 
 failure of, 40 
 
 Haste to become rich, 26 
 Hatred, 48 
 Hoffmann, Herr, 170 
 Horrors of the war, 1 30 
 Huxley, 109 
 
 Ignorance of nations, en- 
 forced, 123 
 
 Image, Prof. Selwyn, 34 
 
 Imagination, lack of, 119 
 
 Imprisonment upon sus- 
 picion, 75 
 
 Initiative, the, 86, 162 
 
 Innocent aliens, 75 
 
 Insanity in war, 137 
 
 Insatiable enemies of liberty, 
 59 
 
 International Association, 128 
 
 International conscience, de- 
 cadence of, 74 
 
 International law, 126 
 
 Irenaeus, 62 
 
 Italian politics, 29 
 
INDEX 
 
 177 
 
 Jarva, Monseigneur, 65 
 Jealousy, 108 
 
 Jealousy of material pro- 
 gress, 84 
 Jews, high-niinded, 127 
 Justice, suppression of, 47 
 Justice, weakening of, sense 
 
 oi. 74 
 Justin Martyr, 62 
 
 Kensington, the Bishop of, 
 
 157 
 King versus Halliday, the, 
 
 76 
 Knowledge and Imagination, 
 
 want of, 143 
 
 Liberty and slavery, 55 
 Liberty to kill, the, 78 
 Lichfield, the Bishop of, 157 
 Lithuania, 5 
 Lodge, Sir O., 23 
 Loud-mouthed patriots, 117 
 Lunatic asylums and the 
 
 war, 58 
 Lying, 51 
 
 Madagascar, 27 
 Masterman, Canon, 157 
 Materialistic optimism, fal- 
 lacies of, 40 
 Meredith, 30 
 
 Meyer, the Rev. F. B., 157 
 Militarism, 59 
 Militarist arguments, flaws 
 
 in, 46 
 Militarist industries, 47 
 Military machine at work, 
 
 the, 148 
 Military machines, the, 117 
 Mitchell, P. Chalmers, 165 
 Modern militarism, demands 
 
 of, 55 
 Modern political militarism, 
 
 120 
 Moral degeneracy in war, 47 
 Morality, subversion of, 29 
 
 Morgan, the Rev. G. Camp- 
 bell, 157 
 Morse, Mr John, 135 
 
 Napoleonic wars, 46, 47 
 National conscience and 
 
 National ideals, 164 
 National jealousy, 73, 83 
 National selfishness, 84 
 Nations, physique of, 46 
 Need to realize character of 
 
 modern war, 130 
 Newspaper Ptess, the, 29, 
 
 49, 77 
 New York World, 136 
 Nineteenth century, 19 
 Nonconformists, 127 
 Nothing matters if 
 
 57, 58 
 Not-self systems, 165 
 
 we wm, 
 
 Optimism, unreasoning, 37 
 Ordeal by battle, 53 
 Origen, 62 
 
 Palais des Beaux Arts, in 
 
 the, 141 
 Pan- Anglican Conference, 31 
 Paralysis of civilization, 8 
 Patriotism, aggressive, its 
 
 shackles, 88 
 Patriotism, false, 83, 84 
 Patriotism, narrow, 82 
 Patriotism, true, 85, 86 
 Patriotism, two forms of, 81 
 Patriotism's aims, 85 
 Philosophy, bankruptcy of, 68 
 Platyhoff-Lejeune, M., 49 
 Political corruption, 28 
 Pope Benedict s prayer, 1 73 
 Pope Pius X., 66 
 Preservation of order, and 
 
 war, 62 
 Pre-war convictions, 68, 121 
 Pre-war moral atmosphere, 17 
 Principle and militarism, 58 
 Profiteering, 73 
 Prussian militarism, 131 
 
178 THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE 
 
 Prussian officers, 63 
 Pugh, Edwin, 78 
 Punitive expeditions, 72 
 Purifying action of war, 41 
 
 Quakers, 127 
 
 Re-action against Victorian 
 
 morals, 30 
 Red Cross Society, 79, 129 
 Referendum, the, 86, 160 
 Regeneration, moral, 126 
 Re-invigoration of Christian 
 
 conscience, 125 
 Relative responsibility of 
 
 governments and peoples, 
 
 14 
 
 Religion as a preventive of 
 war, 169 
 
 Representatives of Christian- 
 ity, 64 
 
 Responsibility for war, 14 
 
 Revenge, spirit of, 48 
 
 Rights of humanity, weaken- 
 ing of sense of, 56 
 
 Roman Catholics, 127 
 
 Romance of modern war, the, 
 
 135 
 Roman slave system, the, 83 
 Ruin of ideals, the, 136 
 Ruskin, 30 
 
 Russia, corruption in, 29 
 Russian statesmen, 50 
 
 Sand AY, the Rev. Dr. 157 
 Savonarola, 128 
 Schettler, Chaplain, 168 
 Scientific materialism, 23 
 Secret diplomacy, 123-155 
 Secret treaties, 150 
 Selbie, Dr, 157 
 Self-sacrifice, 41 
 Self-satisfaction versus moral 
 
 responsibility, 22 
 Sense of responsibility, 50 
 Sharpe, Father C, 170 
 Shaw's, Lord, judgment, 76 
 Side issues of the war, 170 
 
 Silence of the sufferers, the, 
 
 116-120 
 Simpson, Canon, 157 
 Simpson, Prof. J. Y., 157 
 Small nations, 84 
 Social evolution, the set back 
 
 in. 38 
 Spencer, Herbert, 23, 109 
 Standing orders of modern 
 
 warfare, 141 
 Submergence of conscience, 1 1 
 Swiss National Insurance 
 
 Acts, 161 
 Switzerland, 86, 161 
 Sympathy, conventional, 70 
 
 Temple, the Rev. W., 157 
 
 Tennyson, 30, 31 
 
 Tertullian, 62 
 
 Thackeray, 30 
 
 " The end justifies the 
 
 means," 57 
 Tolstoi, 170 
 Tonquin, 28 
 Torture chambers of war, 
 
 the, 149 
 Trade jealousies, 73 
 Treitschke, 39 
 Tribal war, 81 
 Tripoli, 28 
 Tunis, 28 
 
 Unitarians, 127 
 Unpropitious moral environ- 
 ments, 80 
 
 " Vindication of Great 
 Britain," 49 
 
 War and demoralization, 164 
 
 War, debit balance of, 44 
 
 Warfare, civilized, 139, 140 
 
 War fever, 16 
 
 War's glory, 144 
 
 War inimical to higher life, 
 
 165 
 
 War mongers, 108 
 
INDEX 
 
 179 
 
 War not desired by any 
 European peoples, 13 
 
 Weapons, modern, 138 
 
 Westcott, Bishop, 166 
 
 Wilberforce, 126, 128 
 
 Wile's, William F., views, 14 
 
 Wilson, President, 50 
 
 Winchester, Bishop of, 157 
 
 Women after Franco-Ger- 
 man war, 98 
 
 Women after Napoleonic 
 wars, 98 
 
 Women and the conscience 
 of Europe, 93 
 
 Women and the war, 93 
 
 Women as munition workers, 
 
 95 ... 
 
 Women, associations of, 97 
 
 Women, devotion and self- 
 denial of, 93 
 Women's false ideals, 94 
 Women, highest instincts of, 
 
 96 
 Women's moral qualities, 93 
 Women's religious instincts, 
 
 98 
 Women's unrecognised capa- 
 bilities, 93 
 Worcester, the Dean of, 157 
 World alliance for promoting 
 international friendship 
 through the Churches, 128 
 World alliance, the, 157 
 
 Zangwill, 79 
 Zola, 30, 31 
 
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