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Title: The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife

Author: Edward Carpenter

Release Date: November 16, 2003 [EBook #10097]

Language: English

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THE HEALING OF NATIONS AND THE HIDDEN SOURCES OF THEIR STRIFE


By Edward Carpenter


1915



"_The Tree of Life ... whose leaves are for the Healing of the Nations_"




CONTENTS

    I.  INTRODUCTORY

   II.  WAR-MADNESS

  III.  THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR

   IV.  THE CASE AGAINST GERMANY

    V.  THE CASE FOR GERMANY

   VI.  THE HEALING OF NATIONS

  VII.  PATRIOTISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

 VIII.  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR AND RECRUITING

   IX.  CONSCRIPTION

    X.  HOW SHALL THE PLAGUE BE STAYED?

   XI.  COMMERCIAL PROSPERITY THE PROSPERITY OF A CLASS

  XII.  COLONIES AND SEAPORTS

 XIII.  WAR AND THE SEX IMPULSE

  XIV.  THE OVER-POPULATION SCARE

   XV.  THE FRIENDLY AND THE FIGHTING INSTINCTS

  XVI.  NEVER AGAIN!

 XVII.  THE TREE OF LIFE

 APPENDIX--

        A New and Better Peace

        The Change from the Old Germany to the New

        Classes in Germany for and against the War

        Political Ignorance

        Purpose of the War: Max Harden

        England's Perfidy: Professors Haeckel and Eucken

        Manifesto of Professor Eucken

        Nietzsche on Disarmament

        The Effect of Disarmament

        The Principle of Nationality: Winston Churchill

        Conscription

        Neutralization of the Sea: H.G. Wells

        The War and Democracy: Arnold Bennett

        The Future Settlement: G. Lowes Dickinson

        Brutality of Warfare: H.M. Tomlinson

        Patriotism: Romain Rolland

        No Patriotism in Business!

        Manifesto, Independent Labour Party

        Responsibility of the whole Capitalist Class

        Text of Karl Liebknecht's Protest in Reichstag

        The Russian Danger

        Letter on Russia by P. Kropotkin

        On the Future of Europe, by the same

        Servia: R.W. Seton-Watson

        The Battlefield: Walt Whitman

        Chinese Christians on the War: Dr. A. Salter

        Essential Friendliness of Peoples

        Reconciliation in Death

        Christmas at the Front, 1914

        Letter from the Trenches by Baron Marschall von Bieberstein




I


INTRODUCTORY

The following Studies and Notes, made during the earlier period of the
present war and now collected together for publication, do not--as will
be evident to the reader--pretend to any sort of completeness in their
embrace of the subject, or finality in its presentation. Rather they are
scattered thoughts suggested by the large and tangled drama which we are
witnessing; and I am sufficiently conscious that their expression
involves contradictions as well as repetitions.

The truth is that affairs of this kind--like all the _great_ issues of
human life, Love, Politics, Religion, and so forth, do not, at their
best, admit of final dispatch in definite views and phrases. They are
too vast and complex for that. It is, indeed, quite probable that such
things cannot be adequately represented or put before the human mind
_without_ logical inconsistencies and contradictions. But (perhaps for
that very reason) they are the subjects of the most violent and dogmatic
differences of opinion. Nothing people quarrel about more bitterly than
Politics--unless it be Religion: both being subjects of which all that
one can really say for certain is--that nobody understands them.

When, as in the present war, a dozen or more nations enter into conflict
and hurl at each other accusations of the angriest sort (often quite
genuinely made and yet absolutely irreconcilable one with another), and
when on the top of that scores and hundreds of writers profess to
explain the resulting situation in a few brief phrases (but
unfortunately their explanations are all different), and calmly affix
the blame on "Russia" or "Germany" or "France" or "England"--just as if
these names represented certain responsible individuals, supposed for
the purposes of the argument to be of very wily and far-scheming
disposition--whereas it is perfectly well known that they really
represent most complex whirlpools of political forces, in which the
merest accidents (as whether two members of a Cabinet have quarrelled,
or an Ambassador's dinner has disagreed with him) may result in a long
and fatal train of consequences--it becomes obvious that all so-called
"explanations" (though it may be right that they should be attempted)
fall infinitely short, of the reality.[1]

Feeling thus the impossibility of dealing at all adequately with the
present situation, I have preferred to take here and there just an
aspect of it for consideration, with a view especially to the
differences between Germany and England. I have thought that instead of
spending time over recriminations one might be on safer ground by
trying to get at the root-causes of this war (and other wars), thus
making one's conclusions to some degree independent of a multitude of
details and accidents, most of which must for ever remain unknown to us.

There are in general four rather well-marked species of wars--Religious
wars, Race wars, wars of Ambition and Conquest, and wars of Acquisition
and Profit--though in any particular case the four species may be more
or less mingled. The religious and the race motives often go together;
but in modern times on the whole (and happily) the religious motive is
not so very dominant. Wars of race, of ambition, and of acquisition are,
however, still common enough. Yet it is noticeable, as I frequently have
occasion to remark in the following papers, that it only very rarely
happens that any of these wars are started or set in motion by the
mass-peoples themselves. The mass-peoples, at any rate of the more
modern nations, are quiescent, peaceable, and disinclined for strife.
Why, then, do wars occur? It is because the urge to war comes, not from
the masses of a nation but from certain classes within it. In every
nation, since the dawn of history, there have been found, beside the
toiling masses, three great main cliques or classes, the Religious, the
Military, and the Commercial. It was so in far-back ancient India; it is
so now. Each of these classes endeavours in its turn--as one might
expect--to become the ruling class and to run the government of the
nation. The governments of the nations thus become class-governments.
And it is one or another of these classes that for reasons of its own,
alone or in combination with another class, foments war and sets it
going.

In saying this I do not by any means wish to say anything against the
mere existence of Class, in itself. In a sense that is a perfectly
natural thing. There _are_ different divisions of human activity, and it
is quite natural that those individuals whose temperament calls them to
a certain activity--literary or religious or mercantile or military or
what not--should range themselves together in a caste or class; just as
the different functions of the human body range themselves in definite
organs. And such grouping in classes may be perfectly healthy _provided
the class so created subordinates itself to the welfare of the Nation_.
But if the class does _not_ subordinate itself to the general welfare,
if it pursues its own ends, usurps governmental power, and dominates the
nation for its own uses--if it becomes parasitical, in fact--then it and
the nation inevitably become diseased; as inevitably as the human body
becomes diseased when its organs, instead of supplying the body's needs,
become the tyrants and parasites of the whole system.

It is this Class-disease which in the main drags the nations into the
horrors and follies of war. And the horrors and follies of war are the
working out and expulsion on the surface of evils which have long been
festering within. How many times in the history of "civilization" has a
bigoted religious clique, or a swollen-headed military clique, or a
greedy commercial gang--caring not one jot for the welfare of the people
committed to its charge--dragged them into a senseless and ruinous war
for the satisfaction of its own supposed interests! It is here and in
this direction (which searches deeper than the mere weighing and
balancing of Foreign policies and Diplomacies) that we must look for the
"explanation" of the wars of to-day.

And even race wars--which at first sight seem to have little to do with
the Class trouble--illustrate the truth of my contention. For they
almost always arise from the hatred generated in a nation by an alien
class establishing itself in the midst of that nation--establishing
itself, maybe, as a governmental or dominant class (generally a military
or landlord clique) or maybe as a parasitical or competing class (as in
the case of the Jews in Europe and the Japanese in America and so
forth). They arise, like all other wars, from the existence of a class
within the nation which is not really in accord with the people of that
nation, but is pursuing its own interests apart from theirs. In the
second of the following papers, "The Roots of the Great War," I have
drawn attention to the influence of the military and commercial classes,
especially in Germany, and the way in which their policy, coming into
conflict with a similar policy in the other Western nations, has
inevitably led to the present embroilment. In Eastern Europe similar
causes are at work, but there the race elements--and even the
religious--constitute a more important factor in the problem.

By a curious fatality Germany has become the centre of this great war
and world-movement, which is undoubtedly destined--as the Germans
themselves think, though in a way quite other than they think--to be of
vast importance, and the beginning of a new era in human evolution. And
the more one considers Germany's part in the affair, the more one sees,
I think, that from the combined influence of her historical antecedents
and her national psychology this fatality was to be expected. In roughly
putting together these antecedent elements and influences, I have
entitled the chapter "The Case _for_ Germany," because on the principle
of _tout comprendre_ the fact of the evolution being inevitable
constitutes her justification. The nations cannot fairly complain of her
having moved along a line which for a century or more has been slowly
and irresistibly prepared for her. On the other hand, the nations do
complain of the manner and the methods with which at the last she has
precipitated and conducted the war--as indeed they have shown by so
widely combining against her. However right, from the point of view of
destiny and necessity, Germany may be, she has apparently from the point
of view of the moment put herself in the wrong. And the chapter dealing
with this phase of the question I have called "The Case _against_
Germany."

Whatever further complications and postponements may arise, there will
certainly come a time of recovery and reconstruction on a wide and
extended scale over Europe and a large part of the world. To even
outline this period would be impossible at present; but in the sixth
chapter and the last, as well as in the intermediate pieces, I have
given some suggestions towards this future Healing of the Nations.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Evil--huge and monstrous as it is--is not senseless, one may feel
sure. Even now here in England one perceives an extraordinary pulling
together and bracing up of the people, a development of solidarity and
mutual helpfulness, a greater seriousness, and a disregarding of
artificialities, which are all to the good. These things are gains, even
though the way of their manifestation be through much of enmity and
ignorance. And one may fairly suppose that similar results are traceable
in the other nations concerned. Wounds and death may seem senseless and
needless, but those who suffer them do not suffer in vain. All these
shattering experiences, whether in a nation's career or in the career of
an individual, cause one--they force one--to look into the bases of life
and to get nearer its realities. If, in this case, the experiences of
the war, and the fire which the nations are passing through, serve to
destroy and burn up much of falsity in their respective habits and
institutions, we shall have to admit that the attendant disasters have
not been all loss--even though at the same time we admit that if we had
had a grain of sense we might have mended our falsities in far more
economical and sensible fashion.

If in the following pages--chiefly concerned as they are with Germany
and England--I have seemed to find fault with either party or to affix
blame on one or the other, it is not necessary to suppose that one
harbours ill-feeling towards either, or that one fails to recognize the
splendid devotion of both the combatants. Two nations so closely related
as the Germans and the English cannot really be so hopelessly different
in temperament and character; and a great deal of the supposed
difference is obviously artificial and class-made for the occasion.
Still, there _are_ differences; and as we both think we are right, and
as we are unable to argue the matter out in a rational way, there seems
to be nothing for it but to fight.

War has often been spoken of as a great Game; and Mr. Jerome K. Jerome
has lately written eloquently on that subject. It is a game in which the
two parties agree, so to speak, to differ. They take sides, and in
default of any more rational method, resort to the arbitrament of force.
The stakes are high, and if on the one hand the game calls forth an
immense amount of resource, skill, alertness, self-control, endurance,
courage, and even tenderness, helpfulness, and fidelity; on the other
hand, it is liable to let loose pretty bad passions of vindictiveness
and cruelty, as well as to lead to an awful accumulation of mental and
physical suffering and of actual material loss. To call war "The Great
Game" may have been all very well in the more rudimentary wars of the
past; but to-day, when every horrible invention of science is conjured
up and utilized for the express purpose of blowing human bodies to bits
and strewing battlefields with human remains, and the human spirit
itself can hardly hold up against such a process of mechanical
slaughter, the term has ceased to be applicable. The affections and the
conscience of mankind are too violently outraged by the spectacle; and a
great mass of feeling is forming which one may fairly hope will ere long
make this form of strife impossible among the more modern peoples.

Still, even now, as Mr. Jerome himself contends, the term is partly
justified by a certain fine feeling of which it is descriptive and which
is indeed very noticeable in all ranks. Whether in the Army or Navy,
among bluejackets or private soldiers or officers, the feeling is
certainly very much that of a big game--with its own rules of honour and
decency which must be adhered to, and carried on with extraordinary
fortitude, patience, and good-humour. Whether it arises from the
mechanical nature of the slaughter, or from any other cause, the fact
remains that among our fighting people to-day--at any rate in the
West--there is very little feeling of _hatred_ towards the "enemy." It
is difficult, indeed, to hate a foe whom you do not even see. Chivalry
is not dead, and at the least cessation of the stress of conflict the
tendency to honour opponents, to fraternize with them, to succour the
wounded, and so forth, asserts itself again. And chivalry demands that
what feelings of this kind we credit to ourselves we should also credit
to the other parties in the game. We do cordially credit them to our
French and Belgian allies, and if we do not credit them quite so
cordially to the Germans, that is _partly_ at least because every lapse
from chivalrous conduct on the part of our opponents is immediately
fastened upon and made the most of by our Press. Chivalry is by no means
dead in the Teutonic breast, though the sentiment has certainly been
obscured by some modern German teachings.

While these present war-producing conditions last, we have to face them
candidly and with as much good sense as we can command (which is for the
most part only little!). We have to face them and make the best of
them--though by no means to encourage them. Perhaps after all even a war
like the present one--monstrous as it is--does not denote so great a
deviation of the old Earth from its appointed orbit as we are at first
inclined to think. Under normal conditions the deaths on our planet (and
many of them exceedingly lingering and painful) continue at the rate of
rather more than one every second--say 90,000 a day. The worst battles
cannot touch such a wholesale slaughter as this. Life at its normal best
is full of agonizings and endless toil and sufferings; what matters,
what _it is really there for_, is that we should learn to conduct it
with Dignity, Courage, Goodwill--to transmute its dross into gold. If
war _has_ to continue yet for a time, there is still plenty of evidence
to show that we can wrest--even from its horrors and insanities--some
things that are "worth while," and among others the priceless jewel of
human love and helpfulness.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Some people take great pleasure in analysing White Books and Grey
Books and Orange Books and Yellow Books without end, and proving this or
that from them--as of course out of such a mass of material they can
easily do, according to their fancy. But when one remembers that almost
all the documents in these books have been written with a _view_ to
their later publication; and when one remembers also that, however
incompetent diplomatists as a class may be, no one supposes them to be
such fools as to entrust their _most_ important _ententes_ and
understandings with each other to printed records--why, one comes to the
conclusion that the analysis of all these State papers is not a very
profitable occupation.




II


WAR-MADNESS

_September_, 1914.

How mad, how hopelessly mad, it all seems I With fifteen to twenty
million soldiers already mobilized, and more than half that number in
the fighting lines; with engines of appalling destruction by land and
sea, and over the land and under the sea; with Northern France, Belgium,
and parts of Germany, Poland, Russia, Servia, and Austria drenched in
blood; the nations exhausting their human and material resources in
savage conflict--this war, marking the climax, and (let us hope) the
_finale_ of our commercial civilization, is the most monstrous the old
Earth has ever seen. And yet, as in a hundred earlier and lesser wars,
we hardly know the why and wherefore of it. It is like the sorriest
squabbles of children and schoolboys--utterly senseless and unreasoning.
But broken bodies and limbs and broken hearts and an endless river of
blood and suffering are the outcome.




III


THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR[2]

_October_, 1914.

In the present chapter I wish especially to dwell on (1) the danger to
society, mentioned in the Introduction, of class-ascendancy and
class-rule; and (2) the hope for the future in the international
solidarity of the workers.

Through all the mist of lies and slander created on such an occasion--by
which each nation after a time succeeds in proving that its own cause is
holy while that of its opponent is wicked and devilish; through the
appeals to God and Justice, common to both sides; through the shufflings
and windings of diplomats, and the calculated attitudes of politicians,
adopted for public approval; through the very real rage and curses of
soldiers, the desperate tears and agony of women, the murder of babes,
and the smoke of burning towns and villages: it is difficult, indeed, to
arrive at clear and just conclusions.

When the war first broke out no one could give an adequate reason for
it. It all seemed absurd, monstrous, impossible. Then arose a Babel of
explanations. It was that Germany desired to crush France finally; it
was that she was determined to break Great Britain's naval and
commercial supremacy; it was that she must have an outlet on the sea
through Belgium and Holland; that she must force a way to the
Mediterranean through Servia; that she must carry out her financial
schemes in Asia Minor and the Baghdad region. It was her hatred of the
Slav and her growing dread of Russia; it was her desire for a Colonial
Empire; it was fear of a revolution at home; it was the outcome of long
years of Pan-Germanist philosophy; it was the result of pure military
ambition and the class-domination of the Junkers. Each and all of these
reasons (and many others) were in turn cited, and magnified into the
mainspring of the war; and yet even to-day we cannot say which _was_ the
main reason, or if we admit them all we cannot say in what exact
proportions their influences were combined.

Moreover, they all assume that Germany was the aggressor; and we have to
remember that this would not be admitted for a moment by a vast number
of the Germans themselves--who cease not to say that the war was simply
forced upon them by the hostile preparations of Russia, by the
vengefulness of France, by the jealous foreign policy of England, and by
the obvious threat embodied in the _Entente_ between those three
nations; and that if they (the Germans) made preparations for, or even
precipitated it, that was only out of the sheer necessity of
self-preservation.[3]

Thus we are still left without any generally accepted conclusion in the
matter. Moreover, we are struck, in considering the list of reasons
cited, by a feeling that they are all in their way rather partial and
superficial--that they do not go to the real root of the subject.

Out of them all--and after the first period of confusion and doubt has
passed--our own people at home have settled down into the conviction
that German militarism in general, and Prussian Junkerdom in particular,
are to blame, and that for the good of the world as well as for our own
good we are out to fight these powers of evil. Prussian
class-militarism, it is said, under which for so long the good people of
Germany have groaned, has become a thing intolerable. The arrogance, the
insolence, of the Junker officer, his aristocratic pretension, his
bearish manners, have made him a byword, not only in his own country but
all over Europe; and his belief in sheer militarism and Jingo
imperialism has made him a menace. The Kaiser has only made things
worse. Vain and flighty to a degree, and, like most vain people, rather
shallow, Wilhelm II has supposed himself to be a second and greater
Bismarck, destined by Providence to create the said Teutonic
world-empire. It is simply to fight these powers of evil that we are
out.

Of course, there is a certain amount of truth in this view; at the same
time, it is lamentably insufficient. The fact is that in the vast flux
of destiny which is involved in such a war as the present, and which no
argument can really adequately represent, we are fain to snatch at
_some_ neat phrase, however superficial, by way of explanation. And we
are compelled, moreover, to find a phrase which will put our own efforts
in an ideal light--otherwise we cannot go on fighting. No nation can
fight confessedly for a mean or base object. Every nation inscribes on
its banner _Freedom, Justice, Religion, Culture_ versus _Barbarism_, or
something of the kind, and in a sense redeems itself in so fighting. It
saves its soul even though bodily it may be conquered. And this is not
hypocrisy, but a psychological necessity, though each nation, of course,
accuses the other of hypocrisy.

We are fighting "to put down militarism and the dominance of a military
class," says the great B.P., and one can only hope that when the war is
over we shall remember and rivet into shape this great and good
purpose--not only with regard to foreign militarism, but also with
regard to our own. Certainly, whatever other or side views we may take
of the war, we are bound to see in it an illustration of the danger of
military class-rule. You cannot keep a 60-h.p. Daimler motor-car in your
shed for years and years and still deny yourself the pleasure of going
out on the public road with it--even though you know you are not a very
competent driver; and you cannot continue for half a century perfecting
your military and naval organization without in the end making the
temptation to become a political road-hog almost irresistible.

Still, accepting for the moment the popular explanation given above of
Germany's action as to some degree justified, we cannot help seeing how
superficial and unsatisfactory it is, because it at once raises the
question, which, indeed, is being asked in all directions, and not
satisfactorily answered: "How does it happen that so peace-loving,
sociable, and friendly a people as the great German mass-folk, as we
have hitherto known them, with their long scientific and literary
tradition, their love of music and philosophy, their lager beer and
tobacco, and their generally democratic habits, should have been led
into a situation like the present, whether by a clique of Junkers or by
a clique of militarist philosophers and politicians?" And the answer to
this is both interesting and important.

It resolves itself into two main causes: (1) the rise of the great
German commercial class; and (2) the political ignorance of the German
people.

It is obvious, I think, that a military aristocracy alone, or even with
the combined support of empire-building philosophers and a jack-boot
Kaiser, could not have hurried the solid German nation into so strange a
situation. In old days, and under an avowedly feudal order of society,
such a thing might well have happened. But to-day the source and seat of
power has passed from crowned heads and barons into another social
stratum. It is the financial and commercial classes in the modern States
who have the sway; and unless these classes desire it the military
cliques may plot for war in vain. Since 1870, and the unification of
Germany, the growth of her manufactures and her trade has been enormous;
her commercial prosperity has gone up by leaps and bounds; and this
extension of trade, especially of international trade, has led--as it
had already so conspicuously done in England--to the development of
corresponding ideals and habits of life among the population. The
modest, simple-living, middle-class households of fifty years ago have
largely disappeared, and in their place have sprung up, at any rate in
the larger towns, the very same commercial and parasitical classes, with
their Philistine luxury and fatuous ideals, which have been so
depressing and distressing a feature of _our_ social life during the
same period. Naturally, the desire of these classes has been for the
glorification of Germany, the establishment of an absolutely world-wide
commercial supremacy, and the ousting of England from her markets.

"Germany," said Peter Kropotkin[4] a year or two ago, "on entering a
striking period of juvenile activity, quickly succeeded in doubling and
trebling her industrial productivity, and soon increasing it tenfold;
and now the German middle classes covet new sources of enrichment in
the plains of Poland, in the prairies of Hungary, on the plateaux of
Africa, and especially around the railway line to Baghdad--in the rich
valleys of Asia Minor, which can provide German capitalists with a
labouring population ready to be exploited under one of the most
beautiful skies in the world. It may be so with Egypt some day.
Therefore it is ports for exports, and especially military ports, in the
Adriatic, the Persian Gulf, on the African coast in Beira, and also in
the Pacific, that these schemers of German colonial trade wish to
conquer. Their faithful servant, the German Empire, with its armies and
ironclads, is at their service for this purpose."

It is this class, then, which by backing both financially and morally
the military class has been chiefly responsible for bringing about the
war. Not that I mean, in saying so, that the commercial folk of Germany
have directly instigated its outbreak at the present moment and in the
present circumstances--for many, or most of them, must have seen how
dangerous it was likely to prove to their trade. But in respect of the
general policy which they have so long pursued they are responsible. One
cannot go on for years (and let England, too, remember this) preaching
militarism as a means of securing commercial advantage, and then refuse
to be answerable for the results to which such a policy may lead. The
Junker classes of Prussia and their Kaiser might be suffering from a bad
attack of swelled head; vanity and arrogance might be filling them with
dreams of world-empire; but there would have been no immediate European
war had not the vast trade-interests of Germany come into conflict, or
seemed to come into conflict, with the trade-interests of the
surrounding nations--had not the financial greed of the nation been
stirred, as well as its military vanity.

And talking of general trade and finance, one must not forget to include
the enormous powers exercised in the present day by individual
corporations and individual financiers who intrude their operations into
the sphere of politics. We saw _that_ in our own Boer War; and behind
the scenes in Germany to-day similar influences are at work. The
Deutsche Bank, with immense properties all over the world, and some
L85,000,000 sterling in its hands in deposits alone, initiated
financially the Baghdad Railway scheme. Its head, Herr Arthur von
Gwinner, the great financier, is a close adviser of the Kaiser. "The
railway is already nearly half built, and it represents a German
investment of between L16,000,000 and L18,000,000. Let this be thought
of when people imagine that Germany and Austria went to war with the
idea of avenging the murder of an Archduke.... All German trade would
suffer if the Baghdad Railway scheme were to fail."[5] Then there is
Herr August Thyssen--"King Thyssen"--who owns coalmines, rolling mills,
harbours, and docks throughout Germany, iron-ore mines in France,
warehouses in Russia, and _entrepots_ in nearly every country from
Brazil and Argentina to India.[6] He has declared that German interests
in Asia Minor must be safeguarded at all costs. But Russia also has
large prospective commercial interests in Asia Minor. The moral is clear
and needs no enforcing. Such men as these--and many others, the
Rathenaus, Siemens, Krupps, Ballins, and Heinekens--exercise in Germany
an immense political influence, just as do our financial magnates at
home. They represent the peaks and summits of wide-spreading commercial
activities whose bases are rooted among the general public. Yet through
it all it must not be forgotten that they represent in each case (as I
shall explain more clearly presently) the interests of a _class_--the
commercial class--but not of the whole nation.

One must, then, modify the first conclusion, that the blame of the war
rests with the military class, by adding a second factor, namely, the
rise and influence of the commercial class. These two classes, acting
and reacting on each other, and pushing--though for different
reasons--in the same direction, are answerable, as far as Germany is
concerned, for dragging Europe into this trouble; and they must share
the blame.

If it is true, as already suggested, that Germany's action has only been
that of the spark that fires the magazine, still her part in the affair
affords such an extraordinarily illuminating text and illustration that
one may be excused for dwelling on it.

Here, in her case, we have the divisions of a nation's life set out in
well-marked fashion. We have a military clique headed by a personal and
sadly irresponsible ruler; we have a vulgar and much swollen commercial
class; and then, besides these two, we have a huge ant's nest of
professors and students, a large population of intelligent and
well-trained factory workers, and a vast residuum of peasants. Thus we
have at least five distinct classes, but of these the last three
have--till thirty or forty years ago--paid little or no attention to
political matters. The professors and students have had their noses
buried in their departmental science and _fach_ studies; the artisans
have been engrossed with their technical work, and have been only
gradually drifting away from their capitalist employers and into the
Socialist camp; and the peasants--as elsewhere over the world, absorbed
in their laborious and ever-necessary labours--have accepted their fate
and paid but little attention to what was going on over their heads.
Yet these three last-mentioned classes, forming the great bulk of the
nation, have been swept away, and suddenly at the last, into a huge
embroilment in which to begin with they had no interest or profit.

This may seem strange, but the process after all is quite simple, and to
study it in the case of Germany may throw helpful light on our own
affairs. However the blame may be apportioned between the Junker and
commercial classes, it is clear that, fired by the Bismarckian
programme, and greatly overstretching it, they played into each other's
hands. The former relied for the financing of its schemes on the support
of the commercials. The latter saw in the militarists a power which
might increase Germany's trade-supremacy. Vanity and greed are met
together, patriotism and profits have kissed each other. A Navy League
and an Army League and an Air League arose. Professors and teachers were
subsidized in the universities; the children were taught Pan-Germanism
in the schools; a new map of Europe was put before them. An enormous
literature grew up on the lines of Treitschke, Houston Chamberlain, and
Bernhardi, with novels and romances to illustrate side-issues, and the
Press playing martial music. The students and intellectuals began to be
infected; the small traders and shopkeepers were moved; and the
war-fever gradually spread through the nation. As to the artisans, they
may, as I have said, have largely belonged to the Socialist party--with
its poll of four million votes in the last election--and in the words of
Herr Haase in the Reichstag just before the war, they may have wished to
hold themselves apart from "this cursed Imperialist policy"; but when
the war actually arrived, and the fever, and the threat of Russia, and
the fury of conscription, they perforce had to give way and join in. How
on earth could they do otherwise? And the peasants--even if they escaped
the fever--could not escape the compulsion of authority nor the old
blind tradition of obedience. They do not know, even to-day, why they
are fighting; and they hardly know whom they are fighting, but in their
ancient resignation they accept the inevitable and shout "Deutschland
ueber Alles" with the rest. And so a whole nation is swept off its feet
by a small section of it, and the insolence of a class becomes, as in
Louvain and Rheim's, the scandal of the world.[7]

And the people bleed; yes, it is always the people who bleed. The trains
arrive at the hospital bases, hundreds, positively hundreds of them,
full of wounded. Shattered human forms lie in thousands on straw inside
the trucks and wagons, or sit painfully reclined in the passenger
compartments, their faces grimed, their clothes ragged, their toes
protruding from their boots. Some have been stretched on the battlefield
for forty-eight hours, or even more, tormented by frost at night,
covered with flies by day, without so much as a drink of water. And
those that have not already become a mere lifeless heap of rags have
been jolted in country carts to some railway-station, and there, or at
successive junctions, have been shunted on sidings for endless hours.
And now, with their wounds still slowly bleeding or oozing, they are
picked out by tender hands, and the most crying cases are roughly,
dressed before consigning to a hospital. And some faces are shattered,
hardly recognizable, and some have limbs torn away; and there are
internal wounds unspeakable, and countenances deadly pallid, and
moanings which cannot be stifled, and silences worse than moans.

Yes, the agony and bloody sweat of battlefields endured for the
domination or the ambition of a class is appalling. But in many cases,
though more dramatic and appealing to the imagination, one may doubt if
it is worse than the year-long and age-long agony of daily life endured
for the same reason.

Maeterlinck, in his eloquent and fiery letter to the _Daily Mail_ of
September 14th, maintained that the whole German nation is equally to
blame in this affair--that all classes are equally involved in it, with
no _degrees_ of guilt. We may excuse the warmth of personal feeling
which makes him say this, but we cannot accept the view. We are bound to
point out that it is only by some such analysis as the above, and
estimation of the method by which the delusions of one class may be
communicated to the others, that we can guard ourselves, too, from
falling into similar delusions.

I mentioned that besides the growth of the commercial class, a second
great cause of the war was the political ignorance of the German people.
And this is important. Fifty years ago, and before that, when Germany
was divided up into scores of small States and Duchies, the mass of its
people had no practical interest in politics. Such politics as existed,
as between one Duchy and another, were mere teacup politics. Read
Eckermann's _Conversations_, and see how small a part they played in
Goethe's mind. That may have been an advantage in one way. The brains of
the nation went into science, literature, music. And when, after 1870,
the unification of Germany came, and the political leadership passed
over to Prussia, the same state of affairs for a long time continued;
the professors continued their investigations in the matters of the
thyroid gland or the rock inscriptions in the Isle of Thera, but they
left the internal regulation of the State and its foreign policy
confidently in the hands of the Kaiser and the nominees of the great
and rising _bourgeoisie_, and themselves remained unobservant and
uninstructed in such matters. It was only when these latter powers
declared--as in the Emperor's pan-German proclamation of 1896--that a
Teutonic world-empire was about to be formed, and that the study of
_Welt-politik_ was the duty of every serious German, that the thinking
and reading portion of the population suddenly turned its attention to
this subject. An immense mass of political writings--pamphlets,
prophecies, military and economic treatises, romances of German
conquest, and the like--naturally many of them of the crudest sort, was
poured forth and eagerly accepted by the public, and a veritable Fool's
Paradise of German suprernacy arose. It is only in this way, by noting
the long-preceding ignorance of the German citizen in the matter of
politics, his absolute former non-interference in public affairs, and
the dazed state of his mind when he suddenly found himself on the
supposed pinnacle of world-power--that we can explain his easy
acceptance of such cheap and _ad hoc_ publications as those of
Bernhardi and Houston Chamberlain, and the fact that he was so easily
rushed into the false situation of the present war.[8] The absurd
_canards_ which at an early date gained currency, in Berlin--as that the
United States had swallowed Canada, that the Afghans in mass were
invading; India, that Ireland was plunged in civil war--point in the
same direction; and so do the barbarities of the Teutonic troops in the
matters of humanity and art. For though in all war and in the heat of
battle there are barbarities perpetrated, it argues a strange state of
the German national psychology that in this case a heartless severity
and destruction of the enemy's life and property should have been
preached beforehand, and quite deliberately, by professors and
militarists, and accepted, apparently, by the general public. It argues,
to say the least, a strange want of perception of the very unfavourable
impression which such a programme must inevitably excite in the mind of
the world at large.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is, no doubt, pleasant in its way for us British to draw this picture
of Germany, and to trace the causes which led the ruling powers there,
years ago, to make up their minds for war, because, of course, the
process in some degree exonerates us. But, as I have already said, I
have dwelt on Germany, not only because she affords such a good
illustration of what to avoid, but also because she affords so clear an
example of what is going on elsewhere in Europe--in England and France
and Italy, and among all the modern nations. We cannot blame Germany
without implicitly also blaming these.

What, indeed, shall we say of England? Germany has for years maintained
that with her own growing population and her growing trade she needs a
more extended seaboard in Europe, and coaling stations and colonies in
other regions of the globe, but that England, jealous of commercial
supremacy, has been determined to deny her these, and, if possible, to
crush her; that she (Germany) has lived in perpetual fear and panic;
and that if in this case she has been the first to strike, it has only
been because to wait England's opportunity would have been to court
defeat. Allowing for the exaggerations inseparable from opposed points
of view, is there not some justification for this plea? England, who
plunged into the Crimean War in order to _prevent_ Russia from obtaining
a seaboard and her natural commercial expansion, and who afterwards
joined with Russia in order to plunder Persia and to prevent Germany
from getting her railways along the Persian Gulf; who calmly
appropriated Egypt, with its valuable cottonlands and market; who, at
the behest of a group of capitalists and financiers, turned her great
military machine on a little nation of Boer farmers in South Africa;
who, it is said,[9] sold 300,000 tons of coal to Russia to aid her fleet
against Japan, and at the same time furnished Japan with gold at a high
rate of interest for use against Russia--what trust can be placed in
her? "England," says Bernhardi, "in spite of all her pretences of a
liberal and philanthropic policy, has never sought any other object
than personal advantage and the unscrupulous suppression of her rivals."
Let us hope that this "never" is _too_ harsh; let us at least say
"hardly ever"; but still, are we not compelled to admit that if the rise
of commercial ambition in Germany has figured as a danger to _us_, our
far greater commercial ambitions have not only figured as a danger to
Germany, but, in conjunction with our alliance with France and Russia,
her ancient foes, may well have led to a state of positive panic among
her people? And if, as the Allies would doubtless say, there was really
no need for any such panic, the situation was obviously sufficiently
grave to be easily made use of by a military class for its own ends, or
by an armaments ring or a clique of financiers for theirs. Indeed, it
would be interesting to know what enormous profits Kruppism (to use H.G.
Wells' expressive term) _has_ already made out of this world-madness.
Nor can it be denied that the commercial interest in England, if not
deliberately intending to provoke war with Germany, has not been at all
sorry to seize this opportunity of laying a rival Power low--if only in
order to snatch the said rival's trade. That, indeed, the daily Press
reveals only too clearly.

From all this the danger of class-domination emerges more and more into
relief. In Prussia the old Feudal caste remains--in a decadent state,
certainly, but perhaps for that very reason more arrogant, more vulgar,
and less conscious of any _noblesse oblige_ than even before. By itself,
however, and if unsupported by the commercial class, it would probably
have done little harm. In Britain the Feudal caste has ceased to be
exclusively military, and has become blended with the commercial class.
The British aristocracy now consists largely or chiefly of retired
grocers and brewers. Commercialism here has become more confessedly
dominant than in Germany, and whereas there the commercial class may
_support_ the military in its ambitions, here the commercial class
_uses_ the military as a matter of course and for its own ends. We have
become a Nation of Shopkeepers having our own revolvers and machine-guns
behind the counter.

And yet not really a Nation of Shopkeepers, but rather a nation ruled
by a shopkeeping _class_.

[This is the point in the text referred to by Footnote 25 below]

People sometimes talk as if commercial prosperity and the interests of
the commercial folk represented the life of the whole nation. That is a
way of speaking, and it illustrates certainly a common modern delusion.
But it is far from the truth. The trading and capitalist folk are only a
class, and they do _not_, properly speaking, represent the nation. They
do not represent the landowning and the farming interests, both of which
detest them; they do not represent the artisans and industrial workers,
who have expressly formed themselves into unions in order to fight them,
and who have only been able to maintain their rights by so doing; they
do not represent the labourers and peasants, who are ground under their
heel. It would take too long to go into the economics of this subject,
interesting though they are.[10] But a very brief survey of facts shows
us that wherever the capitalist and trading classes have triumphed--as
in England early last century, and until Socialistic legislation was
called in to check them--the condition of the mass of the people has by
no means improved, rather the contrary. Japan has developed a world
trade, and is on the look out for more, yet never before has there been
such distress among her mass-populations. Russia has been lately moving
in the same direction; her commercial interests are rapidly progressing,
but her peasantry is at a standstill, France and Italy have already
grown a fat _bourgeoisie_, but their workers remain in a limbo of
poverty and strikes. And in all these countries, including Germany,
Socialism has arisen as a protest against the commercial order--which
fact certainly does not look as if commercialism were a generally
acknowledged benefit.

No, commercial prosperity means only the prosperity of a class. Yet such
is the curious glamour that surrounds this, subject and makes a fetish
of statistics about "imports and exports," that nothing is more common
than for such prosperity to be taken to mean the prosperity of the
nation as a whole. The commercial people, having command of the Press,
and of the avenues and highways of public influence, do not find it at
all difficult to persuade the nation that _they_ are its
representatives, and that _their_ advantage is the advantage of all.
This illusion is only a part, I suppose, of a historical necessity,
which as the Feudal regime passes brings into prominence the Commercial
regime; but do not let us be deluded by it, nor forget that in
submitting to the latter we are being nose-led by a class just as much
as the Germans have been in submitting to the Prussian Junkers. Do not
let us, at the behest of either class, be so foolish as to set out in
vain pursuit of world-empire; and, above all, do not let us, in freeing
ourselves from military class-rule, fall under the domination of
financiers and commercial diplomats. Let us remember that wars for
world-markets are made for the benefit of the merchant _class_ and not
for the benefit of the mass-people, and that in this respect England has
been as much to blame as Germany or any other nation--nay, pretty
obviously more so.

What is clearly wanted--and indeed is the next stage of human evolution
in England and in all Western lands--is that the people should
emancipate themselves from class-domination, class-glamour, and learn
to act freely from their own initiative. I know it is difficult. It
means a spirit of independence, courage, willingness to make sacrifice.
It means education, alertness to guard against the insidious schemes of
wire-pullers and pressmen, as well as of militarists and commercials. It
means the perception that only through eternal vigilance can freedom be
maintained. Yet it is the only true Democracy; and the logic of its
arrival is assured to us by the historical necessity that progress in
all countries must pass through the preliminary stages of feudalism and
commercialism on its way to realize the true life of the mass-peoples.

To-day the uprising of Socialist ideals, of the power of Trade Unions,
and especially the formation of International Unions, show us that we
are on the verge of this third stage. We are shaping our way towards the
real Democracy, with the attainment of which wars--though they will not
cease from the world--will certainly become much rarer. The
international _entente_ already establishing itself among the manual
workers of all the European countries--and which has now become an
accepted principle of the Labour movement--is a guarantee and a promise
of a more peaceful era; and those who know the artisans and peasants of
this and other countries know well how little enmity they harbour in
their breasts against each other. Racial and religious wars will no
doubt for long continue; but wars to satisfy the ambitions of a military
clique or a personal ruler, or the ambitions of a commercial group, or
the schemes of financiers, or the engineering of the Press--wars from
these all too fruitful causes will, under a sensible Democracy, cease.
If Britain, during the last twenty years, had really favoured the cause
of the People and their international understanding, there would have
been no war now, for her espousal of the mass-peoples' cause would have
made her so strong that it would have been too risky for any Government
to attack her. But of course that could not have happened, for the
simple reason that Conservatism and Liberalism are not Democracy.
Conservatism is Feudalism, Liberalism is Commercialism, and Socialism
only is in its essence Democracy. It is no good scolding at Sir Edward
Grey for making friends with the Russian Government; for his only
alternative would have been to join the "International"--which he
certainly could not do, being essentially a creature of the commercial
regime. The "Balance of Power" and the _ententes_ and alliances of
Figure-head Governments _had_ to go on, till the day--which we hope is
at hand--when Figure-heads will be no more needed.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Reprinted by kind permission from the _English Review_ for December,
1914.

[3] As an example of this belief, read the manifesto of Professor
Eucken, who represents such a large section of German opinion, and note
the absolute sincerity of its tone--as well as its simplicity.

[4] _Wars and Capitalism_, by P. Kropotkin. (Freedom Press.)

[5] See _Nash's Magazine_ for October, 1914, article by "Diplomatist."

[6] Ibid.

[7] In order to realize how easy such a process is, we have only to
remember the steps by which the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 was
engineered.

[8] Of course we must remember that there has been all along and is now
in Germany a very large party, Socialist and other, which has _not_ been
thus carried away; but for the moment its mouth is closed and it cannot
make itself heard.

[9] See Kropotkin's _War and Capitalism_, p. 12.

[10] See note _infra_ on "Commercial Prosperity," p. 167.
(Chapter XI below)




IV


THE CASE AGAINST GERMANY;

_November_, 1914.

With every wish to do justice to Germany, to whose literature I feel I
owe such a debt, and among whose people I have so many personal friends;
allowing also the utmost for the general causes in Europe which have
been for years leading up towards war--and some of which I have
indicated already in the pages above--I still feel it is impossible not
to throw on her the _immediate_ blame for the present catastrophe.

However we distribute the indictment and the charges among the various
parties concerned, whether we accuse mainly the sway of Prussian
Militarism or the rise of German Commercialism, or the long tradition
and growth of a _Welt-politik_ philosophy, or the general political
ignorance which gave to these influences such rash and uncritical
acceptance; or whether we accuse the somewhat difficult and variable
personal equation of the Kaiser himself--the fact still remains that for
years and years this war has been by the German Government most
deliberately and systematically prepared for. The fact remains that
Britain--though for a long period she had foreseen danger and had on the
naval side slowly braced herself to meet it--was on the military side
caught at the last moment unprepared; that France was so little
intending war that a large portion of the nation was actually still
protesting against an increase in the size of the standing army; and
that Russia--whatever plans she may have had, or not had, in mind--was
confessedly at the same period two years or so behind in the
organization and completion of her military establishment.

Whether right or wrong, it can hardly be denied that the moment of the
precipitation of war was chosen and insisted on by Germany. After
Austria's monstrous and insulting dictation to Servia (23rd July), and
Servia's incredibly humble apology (25th), Austria was still not
allowed to accept the latter, and the conference proposed (26th July) by
Sir E. Grey--though accepted by France, Russia, and Italy--was refused
by Germany (27th). On the 28th Austria declared war on Servia. It was
perfectly clear to every one that Russia--after what had happened before
in 1908-9, with regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina--could not possibly
allow this insult to Servia to pass. Germany, therefore, by this move
forced Russia's hand; and at a moment when Russia was known or supposed
to be comparatively unprepared.[11] France had been involved in some
military scandals and was still debating as to the two years' instead of
three years' period for her normal military service. The German
Ambassador at Vienna had openly said that France was not in a condition
for facing a war. England was currently supposed in Germany to be
seriously hampered by domestic troubles at home--chiefly of course
among the Irish, but also amongst the Suffragettes(!) _and_ by
widespread disaffection in India. It was thought, therefore, that
England would certainly remain neutral--and I think we may fairly say
that the extent to which Germany counted on this expected neutrality is
evidenced by her disappointment and public rage when she found that she
was mistaken.

Germany's initiative in the matter is further evidenced by her _instant
readiness_ to attack. She was in Luxemburg within a few hours of the
declaration of war with Russia; and it was clearly her intention to
"rush" Paris and then turn back upon Russia.

It may be said that from her own point of view Germany was quite right
to take the initiative. If she sincerely believed that the _Entente_ was
plotting her downfall, she was justified in attacking instead of waiting
to be attacked. That may be so. It is the line to which General
Bernhardi again returns in his latest book (_Britain as Germany's
Vassal_, translated by J. Ellis Barker). But it does not alter the fact
that this was an immense responsibility to take, and that the immediate
onus of the war rests with Germany. If she under all the above
circumstances precipitated war, she can hardly be surprised if the
judgment of Europe (one may also say the world) is against her. If she
has played her cards so badly as to put herself entirely in the wrong,
she must naturally "dree her weird."

There remains the case of her treatment of Belgium. Britain
certainly--who has only lately assisted at the dismemberment of Persia,
and who is even now allowing Russia (in the face of Persian protests) to
cross neutral territory in the neighbourhood of Tabriz on her way to
attack Turkey, who has uttered, moreover, no word of protest against the
late Ukase (of mid-November) by which the independent rights of Finland
have been finally crushed--Britain, I say, need talk no cant about
Belgian neutrality. Britain, for her own absolute safety, has always
required and still requires Belgian neutrality to be respected. And that
by itself is a sufficient, and the most honest, reason. But in the eyes
of the world at large Germany's deliberate and determined sacrifice of
Belgium, simply because the latter stood in the way of the rapid
accomplishment of her warlike designs against France (and England), can
never be condoned--little Belgium who had never harmed or offended
Germany in any way. Add to this her harsh and brutish ill-treatment of
the Belgian civilian people, her ravage of their ancient buildings and
works of art, and her clearly expressed intention both in word and deed
to annex their territory by force should the fortunes of war favour
her--all these facts, which we may say are proven beyond the shadow of a
doubt, form a most serious indictment. They substantiate the charge that
Germany by acting throughout in this high-handed way has deeply violated
the natural laws of the Comity of Nations, which are the safeguards of
Civilization, and they confirm the rightful claim of Europe to sit in
judgment on her.

I say nothing at the moment about the charges of atrocities committed by
German troops, partly because such charges are always in warfare made by
each side against the other, and partly because their verification
should be the subject of a world-inquiry later on. It may be said,
however, that the Belgian and French Commissions of inquiry have
certainly presented material and evidence which _ought_ to be
investigated later--material which would hardly be credible of so humane
and cultured a people as the Germans, were it not for the fact, alluded
to already, of such severities having been deliberately recommended
beforehand by the philosophical writers, military and political, who
have during the last half-century moulded German public opinion.

England, as I say, is in no position herself to sit in judgment on
Germany and lecture her--much as she undoubtedly enjoys doing so.
England's long-standing policy of commercial greed, leading to political
grab in every part of the world; her infidelity in late years towards
small peoples, like the Boers and the Persians; her neglect of treaty
obligations and silence about them when they do not suit her; her most
dubious alliance with a military despotism like Russia: all render it
impossible for her to accuse Germany. The extraordinary thing is that in
the face of such prevarications as these, which are patent to the whole
world, Britain at any moment of serious crisis always comes forward
with the air of utmost sincerity and in an almost saintly pose as the
champion of political morality! How is it? The world laughs and talks of
_heuchlerei_ and _cant Britannique_. But I almost think (perhaps I
stretch a point in order to save the credit of my country) that the real
cause is not so much British hypocrisy as British _stupidity_--stupidity
which keeps our minds in watertight compartments and prevents us
perceiving how confused and inconsistent our own judgments are and how
insincere they appear to our neighbours. At any rate, whether the cause
is pure hypocrisy or pure stupidity, or whether a Scotch mixture of
these, it cannot be denied that its result is most irritating to
decent-minded people.

It is curious how a certain strain or vein of temperament, like that
just mentioned, will run through a nation's whole life, and colour its
actions in all departments, recognized and commented on by the whole
outside world, and yet remain unobserved by the nation itself.

Every one who has known the Germans at home--even years back--has been
conscious of a certain strain in the Teutonic character which has had a
like bearing in the German national life. How shall I describe it? It is
a certain want of tact, unperceptiveness--a kind of overbearing
simplicity of mind. Whether it be in the train or the hotel or the
private house, the German does not always seem to see the personal
situation. Whether you prefer to talk or remain silent, whether you wish
the window open or shut, whether you desire to partake of such and such
a dish or whether you don't--of such little matters he (or she) seems
unaware. Perhaps it is that the Teutonic mind is so vigorous that it
overrides you without being conscious of doing so, or that it is so
convinced of its own Tightness; or perhaps it is that the scientific
type of mind, depending always on formulae and statistics, necessarily
loses a certain finer quality. Anyhow, the fact remains that sociable,
kindly, _gemuethlich_ and so forth as the Germans are, there is a lack of
delicate touch and perception about them, of gentle manners, and a
certain insensitiveness to the opinion of those with whom they have to
deal. The strain may not be without its useful bearings in the
direction of strength and veracity, but it runs curiously through the
national life, and colours deeply, not only the domestic and social
relations of the people but their foreign politics also, and even their
war tactics and strategy.

I have spoken before of the political ignorance of the German
mass-people, which, dating from years back, caused them to be easily led
by their empire-building philosophers to a certain very dangerous
pinnacle of ambition, and there tempted. The same want of perception of
how their actions would be viewed by the world in general caused the
Government to act in the most egregiously high-handed manner in the
matter of the precipitation and declaration of the war itself, and
subsequently likewise in the ruthless invasion of Belgium and treatment
of her people and her cities. The want of discernment of what was going
on outside the sphere of her own psychology led her into fatal delusions
as to the attitude of England, of Ireland, of Belgium, Italy, India, and
so forth. It caused her generals to miscalculate and seriously
under-estimate the strategic forces opposed to them, both in France and
Russia; and in actual battles it has caused them to adopt, with
disastrous results, tactics which were foolishly inspired by contempt of
the enemy. Without insisting too much on the stories of
atrocities--which are still to a certain extent _sub judice_--it does
rather appear that even those excesses which the Commissions of inquiry
have reported (and which occurred, be it said, chiefly in the early days
of the campaign) were due to an intoxication, not merely of champagne
but of excited self-glorification and blindness to the human rights of
peoples at least as brave as themselves.[12]

However that last point may be, it is certainly curious to think
how--whether it be in the case of the German or the English or any other
people--a vein of temperament or character may decide a nation's fate or
colour its history quite as much as or even more than matters of wealth
and armament.

Personally one feels sorry for the great and admirable German
people--though I do not suppose it will matter to them whether one feels
sorry or not! And I look forward to the day when there will come a
better understanding between them and ourselves--better perhaps than has
ever been before--when we shall forgive them their sins against us, and
they will forgive us our sins against them, one of which certainly is
our meanness and shopkeeperiness in rejoicing in the war as a means of
"collaring their trade." I feel sure that the German mass-people will
wake up one day to the knowledge that they have been grossly betrayed at
home, not only by Prussian militarism but by pan-German commercial
philosophy and bunkum, as well as by their own inattention to, and
consequent ignorance of, political affairs. And I hope they will wake up
to the conviction that Destiny and the gods in this matter are after all
bringing them to a conclusion and a consummation far finer than anything
they have perhaps imagined for themselves. If, indeed, when the war is
over, they are fortunate enough to be compelled by the terms of
settlement to abandon their Army and Navy--or _all_ but the merest
residue of these--the consequences undoubtedly will be that, freed from
the frightful burdens which the upkeep of these entails, they will romp
away over the world through an era of unexampled prosperity and
influence. Their science, liberated, will give them the lead in many
arts and industries; their philosophy and literature, no longer crippled
by national vanities, will rise to the splendid world-level of former
days; their colonizing enterprise, unhindered by conscriptionist vetoes,
will carry them far and wide over the globe; and even their trade will
find that without fortified seaports and tariff walls it will, in these
days of universal movement and intercommunication, do fully as well as,
if not much better than, ever it did before. In that day, however, let
us hope that--the more communal conception of public life having
prevailed and come to its own--the success of Trade, among any nation or
people, will no longer mean the successful manufacture of a dominant and
vulgar class, but the real prosperity and welfare of the whole nation,
including all classes.

And in that day, possibly, the other nations, witnessing the
extraordinary prosperity and success of that one which has abandoned
armaments and Kruppisms, will--if they have a grain of sense left in
them--follow suit and, voluntarily divesting themselves too of their
ancient armour, give up the foolishness of national enmities and
jealousies, and adopt the attitude of humanity and peace, which alone
can be the worthy and sensible attitude for us little mortals, when we
shall have arrived at years of discretion upon the earth.

[Just after writing the above I received the following remarks in a
letter of a friend from South America, which may be worth reprinting. He
says: "In spite of the events of 1815 and 1870, French 'culture' is
supreme to-day over all South America. South America is a suburb of
Paris, and French culture has won its triumphs wholly irrespective of
the defeat of French arms. Therefore I incline to think that true German
culture in science and music will gain rather than lose by the
destruction of German arms. Not only will that nation cease to spend its
time writing dull military books, but other nations will be more likely
to appreciate what there is in German thought and culture when this is
no longer offered us at the point of the bayonet! German commerce in
South America has suffered rather than gained by talk of 'shining
armour.' And the poet, scientist and business man will gain rather than
lose if no longer connected with Potsdam."]

FOOTNOTES:

[11] It is said that Russia took some steps towards mobilization as
early as the 25th. If she did, that would seem quite natural under the
circumstances.

[12] There may possibly be found another explanation of these
excesses--namely, in the galling strictness of the Prussian military
regime. After years and years of monotonously regulated and official
lives, it may be that to both officers and men, in their different ways,
orgies of one kind or another came as an almost inevitable reaction.




V.


THE CASE FOR GERMANY

Having put in the last chapter some of the points which seem to throw
the immediate blame of the war on Germany, it would be only fair in the
present chapter to show how in the long run and looking to the general
European situation to-day as well as to the history of Germany in the
past, the war had become inevitable, and in a sense necessary, as a
stage in the evolution of European politics.

After the frightful devastation of Germany by the religious dissensions
of the early part of the seventeenth century and the Thirty Years War,
it fell to Frederick the Great, not only to lay a firm foundation for
the Prussian State but to elevate it definitely as a rival to Austria in
the leadership of Germany. Thenceforth Prussia grew in power and
influence, and became the nucleus of a new Germany. It would almost seem
that things could not well have been otherwise. Germany was seeking for
a new root from which to grow. Clerical and ultra-Catholic Austria was
of no use for this purpose. Bavaria was under the influence of France.
Lutheran Prussia attracted the best elements of the Teutonic mind. It
seems strange, perhaps, that the sandy wastes of the North-East, and its
rather arid, dour population, _should_ have become the centre of growth
for the new German nation, considering the latter's possession of its
own rich and vital characteristics, and its own fertile and beautiful
lands; but so it was. Perhaps the general German folk, with their
speculative, easygoing, almost sentimental tendencies, _needed_ this
hard nucleus of Prussianism--and its matter-of-fact, organizing type of
ability--to crystallize round.

The Napoleonic wars shattered the old order of society, and spread over
Europe the seeds of all sorts of new ideas, in the direction of
nationality, republicanism, and so forth. Fichte, stirred by Napoleon's
victory at Jena (Fichte's birthplace) and the consequent disaster to
his own people, wrote his _Addresses to the German Nation_, pleading
eloquently for a "national regeneration." He, like Vom Stein,
Treitschke, and many others in their time, came to Berlin and
established himself there as in the centre of a new national activity.
Vom Stein, about the same time, carried out the magnificent and
democratic work by which he established on Napoleonic lines (and much to
Napoleon's own chagrin) the outlines of a great and free and federated
Germany. Carl von Clausewitz did in the military world much what Stein
did in the civil world. He formulated the strategical methods and
teachings of Napoleon, and in his book _Vom Krieg_ (published 1832) not
only outlined a greater military Germany, but laid the basis, it has
been said, of all serious study in the art of war. Vom Stein and
Clausewitz died in the same year, 1831. In 1834 Heinrich von Treitschke
was born.

The three Hohenzollern kings, all named Frederick William, who reigned
from the death of Frederick the Great (1786) to the accession of William
I (1861) did not count much personally. The first and third of those
mentioned were decidedly weakminded, and the third towards the close of
his reign became insane. But the ideas already initiated in Germany
continued to expand. The Zollverein was established, the Teutonic
Federation became closer, and the lead of Prussia more decided. With the
joint efforts of William I and Bismarck the policy became more
governmental, more positive, and more deliberate--the policy of
consolidation and of aggrandisement; and with this definite programme in
view, Bismarck engineered the three wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870,
against Denmark, Austria, and France. They all three had the effect of
confirming the military power of Prussia. The first war gave her a much
desired increase of access to the North Sea; the second led to the
treaty with Austria, and ultimately to the formation of the Triple
Alliance; the third ended in the definite establishment of the Prussian
hegemony, the crowning of William I as Emperor, and the union and
consolidation of all the German States under him; but alas! it left a
seed of evil in the wresting of Alsace-Lorraine from France. For
France never forgave this. Bismarck and Moltke knew she would not
forgive, and were sorely tempted to engineer a _second_ war which should
utterly disable her; but this war never came off. The seed of Revenge,
however, remained with France, and the seed of Fear with Germany; and
these two things were destined to lead to a harvest of disaster.

In 1866 Treitschke came to Berlin. Though Saxon by birth, he became
ultra-Prussian in sympathy and temperament. Somewhat deaf, and by no
means yielding or facile in temper, he was not cut out for a political
career. But politics were his interest; his lectures on history were
successful at Leipzig and had still more scope at Berlin. He became the
strongest of German Unionists, and with a keen but somewhat narrow mind
took an absolute pleasure in attacking every movement or body of people
that seemed to him in any way to stand in the path of Germany's
advancement, or not to assist in her consolidation. Thus he poured out
his wrath in turn on Saxony (his own land) and on Hanover, on the Poles,
the Socialists, and the Catholics, and ultimately in his later years on
Britain.[13]

He conceived, following the lines of the Prussian tradition, that
Germany had a great military mission to fulfil. Her immense energy and
power, which had bulked so large in the early history of Europe, and
which had been so sadly scattered during the religious wars, was now to
come to its own again. She was to make for herself a great place in
Europe, and to expand in colonies over the world. It was a pleasing and
natural ambition, and the expression of it gave a great vogue and
popularity to Treitschke's lectures. The idea was enormously reinforced
by the cause which I have already mentioned and dwelt upon--the growth
of the commercial interest in Germany. From 1870 onwards this growth was
huge and phenomenal. In a comparatively short time a whole new social
class sprang up in the land, and a whole new public opinion. If
expansion from the point of view of Junker ambition had been desirable
before, the same from the point of view of the financial and trading
classes was doubly so now. If a military irruption into the politics of
the world was favoured before, it was clamoured for now when a powerful
class had arisen which not only, called the tune but could pay the
piper.

Thus by the combination of military and commercial interests and
entanglements the web of Destiny was woven and Germany was hurried along
a path which--though no definite war was yet in sight--was certain to
lead to war. The general military, programme of Treitschke, the
conviction that force and force alone could give his country her
rightful place in the world, was more and more cordially adopted. In a
sense this was a perfectly natural and logical programme, and amid the
surrounding European conditions excusable--as I shall point out
presently. But before long it became a weird enthusiasm, almost an
obsession. It was taken up over the land, and repeated in a thousand
books and on as many platforms. One of these propagandists was General
von Bernhardi, who entered in more detail into the technical and
strategical aspects of the programme. The rude and almost brutal
frankness of both writers may be admired; but the want of real depth and
breadth of view cannot be concealed and must be deplored. The arguments
in favour of force, of unscrupulousness, of terrorism are--especially in
Bernhardi[14]--casuistical to a degree. They are those of a man who is
determined to press his country into war at all costs, and who will use
any kind of logic as long as it will lead in his direction. The whole
movement--largely made possible by the political ignorance of the
mass-people, of which I have spoken in a former chapter--culminated in
an extraordinary national fever of ambition; and in the announcement of
schemes for the Germanization of the world, almost juvenile in the want
of experience and the sense of proportion which they display. It would
not be fair to take one writer as conclusive; but as a _specimen_ of the
kind of thing we may quote the following extract (given by Mr. H.A.L.
Fisher, the Oxford historian, in his able brochure _The War: Its Causes
and Issues_) from the writings of Bronsart von Schellendorf: "Do not let
us forget the civilizing task which the decrees of Providence have
assigned to us. Just as Prussia was destined to be the nucleus of
Germany, so the regenerated Germany shall be the nucleus of a future
Empire of the West. And in order that no one shall be left in doubt, we
proclaim from henceforth that our continental nation has a right to the
sea, not only to the North Sea, but to the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
Hence we intend to absorb one after another all the provinces which
neighbour on Prussia. We will successively annex Denmark, Holland,
Belgium, Northern Switzerland, then Trieste and Venice, finally Northern
France from the Sambre to the Loire. This programme we fearlessly
pronounce. It is not the work of a madman. The Empire we intend to found
will be no Utopia. We have ready to our hands the means of founding it,
and no coalition in the world can stop us."

Bronsart von Schellendorf (1832-91) was one of the Prussian Generals who
negotiated the surrender of the French at Sedan. He became Chief of the
Staff, and War Minister (1883-9), and wrote on Tactics, etc. His above
utterance, therefore, cannot be neglected as that of an irresponsible
person.

There is, as I have already had occasion to say, a certain easygoing
absurdity in the habit we commonly have of talking of nations
--"Germany," "France," "England," and so forth--as if they were
simple and plainly responsible persons or individuals, when all the time
we know perfectly well that they are more like huge whirlpools of
humanity caused by the impact and collision of countless and often
opposing currents flowing together from various directions. Yet there is
this point of incontestable similarity between nations and individual
persons, that both occasionally go mad! If Germany was afflicted by a
kind of madness or divine _dementia_ previous to the present war,
Britain can by no means throw that in her teeth, for Britain certainly
went mad over Mafeking; and it was sheer madness that in 1870 threw the
people of France and Napoleon III--utterly unready for war as they
were, and over a most trifling quarrel--into the arms of Bismarck for
the fulfilment of his schemes.

But that some sort of madness did, in consequence of the above-mentioned
circumstances, seize the German people shortly before the outbreak of
the present war we can hardly doubt, though (remembering the proverb) we
must not put the blame for that on her, but on the gods. It was a heady
intoxication, caused largely, I believe, by that era of unexampled
commercial prosperity following upon a period of great political and
military expansion, and confirmed by the direct incitement of the
military and political teachers I have mentioned. All these things,
acting on a people unskilled in politics--of whom Bernhardi himself says
"We are a non-political people"[15]--had their natural effect. But it
seems part of the irony of fate that at this very juncture Germany
should have fallen under the influence of a man who of all the world was
perhaps least fitted to guide her steadily through a difficult crisis.
"We all know the Kaiser," says Mr. Fisher, "the most amazing and amusing
figure on the great stage of politics. The outlines of his character are
familiar to everybody, for his whole life is spent in the full glare of
publicity. We know his impulsiveness, his naivete, his heady fits of
wild passion, his spacious curiosity and quick grasp of detail, his
portentous lack of humour and delicacy, his childish vanity and
domineering will. A character so romantic, spontaneous, and robust must
always be a favourite with the British people, who, were his lunacies
less formidable, would regard him as the most delectable burlesque of
the age."

However the British generally may regard him, it is certain that the
German nation accepted him as their acclaimed leader. Clever,
good-looking, versatile, imperious, fond of the romantic pose, Wilhelm
was exactly the hero in shining armour that would capture the enthusiasm
of this innocent people. They idolized him. And it is possible that
their quick response confirmed him in his rather generous estimate of
his own capabilities. He dismissed Bismarck and became his own Foreign
Secretary, and entered upon a perilous career as Imperial politician,
under the aegis of God and the great tradition of the Hohenzollerns, a
career made all the more perilous by his constant change of role and his
real uncertainty as to his own mind. His "seven thousand speeches and
three hundred uniforms" were only the numerous and really emblematic
disguises of a character unable to concentrate persistently and
effectively on any one settled object. With a kind of theatrical
sincerity he made successive public appearances as War Lord or William
the Peaceful, as Artist, Poet, Architect, Biblical Critic, Preacher,
Commercial Magnate, Generalissimo of land forces and Creator of a World
Navy; and with Whitman he might well have said, "I can resist anything
better than my own diversity."

If Wilhelm II was popular (as he was) among his own mass-people, it may
well be guessed that he was a perfect terror to his own political
advisers and generals. Undoubtedly a large share of responsibility for
the failure of German diplomacy before the war, and of German strategy
during the war, must be laid to the account of his ever-changing plans
and ill-judged interferences. It is difficult, indeed, to imagine a
character more dangerous as a great nation's leader. But out of dangers
great things do often arise. A kind of fatality, as I have said, has
enveloped the whole situation, and still leads on to new and pregnant
evolutions for the German people and for the whole world. Germany will
in the end be justified, but in a way far different from what she
imagined.

Up to the period of Germany's rising commercial prosperity Germany and
England had been on fairly friendly terms. There was no particular cause
of difference between them. But when Commercial and Colonial expansion
became a definite and avowed object of the former's policy, she found,
whereso she might look, that Britain was there, in the way--"everywhere
British colonies, British coaling stations, and floating over a fifth of
the globe the British flag." Could anything be more exasperating? And
these "absent-minded beggars" the English, without any forethought or
science or design, without Prussian organization or Prussian bureaucracy
and statecraft, had simply walked into this huge inheritance without
knowing what they were doing! It certainly was most provoking. But what
England had done why should not Germany do--and do it indeed much
better, with due science and method? Britain had shown no scruple in
appropriating a fifth part of the globe, and dealing summarily with her
opponents, whether savage or civilized; why should Germany show scruple?

And it must be confessed that here Germany had a very good case.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And if Germany, approving
Britain's example, could only show herself strong enough to imitate it
in actual fact, Britain at least could not blame her. Besides, in her
internal industrial development Germany was already showing her equality
with England. In her iron and steel manufactures, her agricultural
machines, her cutlery, her armament works, her glass works, her aniline
dyes, her toys, and her production of a thousand and one articles (like
lamps) of household use, she was showing a splendid record--better in
some ways than England. For while England was losing ground, Germany was
gaining all the time. England was becoming degenerate and lacking in
enterprise. The Zeiss glassworks at Jena have now become the centre of
the optical-glass industry of the world. Carl Zeiss, the founder, tried
hard at one time to get the English glass-makers to turn out a special
glass for his purpose, with very high refractive index. They would not
trouble about it. Zeiss consequently was forced to take the matter up
himself, succeeded at last in getting such glass made in Germany, and
"collared" the trade. The same happened in other departments.

A certain amount of friction arose. The Germans at one time, knowing the
English reputation for cutlery, marked their knives and razors as "made
in Scheffield." The English retaliated in what seemed an insulting way,
by marking the Fatherland's goods as "made in Germany." With Germany's
success, commercial jealousy between the two nations (founded on the
utterly mistaken but popular notion that the financial prosperity of
the country you trade with is inimical to your own prosperity) began to
increase. On the German side it was somewhat bitter. On the English
side, though not so bitter, it was aggravated by the really shameful
ignorance prevailing in this country with regard to things German, and
the almost entire neglect of the German tongue in our schools and
universities and among our literary folk. As an expression (though one
hopes exceptional) of commercial jealousy on our side I may quote a
passage from a letter from a business friend of mine in Lancashire. He
says: "I remember about a _fortnight before_ the war broke out with
Germany having a conversation with a business man in Manchester, and he
said to me that we most certainly ought to join in with the other
nations and sweep the Germans off the face of the earth; I asked him
_why_, and his only answer was, '_Look at the figures of Germany's
exports; they are almost as high as ours_!' All he had against them was
their enterprise--commercial jealousy."

On the other hand, the head of a large warehouse told me only a few days
later that when travelling in Germany for his firm some fifteen years
ago he had a conversation with a German, in the course of which he (the
Englishman) said: "I find your people so obliging and friendly that I
think surely whatever little differences there are between us as nations
will be dispelled by closer intercourse, and so all danger of war will
pass away." "No," replied the German, "you are quite mistaken. You and I
are friendly; but that is only as individuals. As nations we shall never
rest till we have war. The English nation may well be contented because
they have already _got_ all the good things of the Earth--their trade,
their ports, their colonies; but Germany will not allow this to go on
for ever. She will fight for her rightful position in the world; she
will challenge England's mercantile supremacy. She will have to do so,
and she will not fail."[16]

Thus the plot thickened; the entanglement increased. The Boer War roused
ill-feeling between England and Germany. The German Navy Bill followed
in 1900, and the Kaiser announced his intention of creating a sea-power
the equal of any in the world. Britain of course replied with her Navy
Bills; and the two countries were committed to a mad race of armaments.
The whole of Europe stood by anxious. Fear and Greed, the two meanest of
human passions, ruled everywhere. Fear of a militarist Germany began to
loom large upon the more pacific States of Europe. On the other hand,
the fatality of Alsace-Lorraine loomed in Germany, full of forebodings
of revenge. France had found a friend in Russia--a sinister alliance.
Britain, convinced that trouble was at hand, came to an understanding
with France in 1904 and with Russia in 1907. The Triple Entente was born
as a set-off against the Triple Alliance. The Agadir incident in 1911
betrayed the purely commercial nature of the designs of the four Powers
concerned--France, Spain, England, and Germany--and a war over the
corpse of Morocco was only narrowly avoided. Germany felt quite
naturally that she was the victim of a plot, and thenceforth was
alternately convulsed by mad Ambition and haunted by a lurking Terror.

And now we come to the last act of the great drama. So far the
relations of Germany with Russia had not been strained. If there was any
fear of Russia, it was quite in the background. The Junkers--themselves
half Slavs--had supplied a large number of the Russian officials, men
like Plehve and Klingenberg; the Russian bureaucracy was founded on and
followed the methods of the German. The Japanese War called Russia's
attention away to another part of the world, and at the same time
exposed her weakness. But if Germany was not troubled about Russia, a
different sentiment was growing up in Russia itself. The people there
were beginning to hate the official German influence and its hard
atmosphere of militarism, so foreign to the Russian mind. They were
looking more and more to France. Bismarck had made a great mistake in
the Treaty of Berlin--mistake which he afterwards fully recognized and
regretted. He had used the treaty to damage and weaken Russia, and had
so thrown Russia into the arms of France.

A strange Nemesis was preparing. The programme of German
expansion--natural enough in itself, but engineered by Prussia during
all this long period with that kind of blind haughtiness and overbearing
assurance which indeed is a "tempting of Providence"--had so far not
concerned itself much about Muscovite policy; but now there arose a
sudden fear of danger in that quarter. Hitherto the main German
"objective" had undoubtedly been England and France, Belgium and
Holland--the westward movement towards the Atlantic and the great world.
But now all unexpectedly, or at any rate with dramatic swiftness, Russia
appeared on the scenes, and there was a _volte face_ towards the East.
The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 broke out. Whatever simmerings of
hostility there may have been between Germany and Russia before, the
relations of the two now became seriously strained. The Balkan League,
formed under Russian influence, was nominally directed against Turkey;
but it was also a threat to Austria. It provided a powerful backing to
the Servian agitation, it was a step towards the dissolution of Austria,
and it decisively closed the door on Germany's ambition to reach
Salonika and to obtain a direct connection with the Baghdad Railway.
Germany and Austria all at once found themselves isolated in the midst
of Europe, with Russia, Servia, France, and England hostile on every
side. It was indeed a tragic situation, and all the more so when viewed
as the sorry outcome and culmination of a hundred years of Prussian
diplomacy and statecraft.

Why under these circumstances Austria (with Germany of course behind
her) should have dictated most insulting terms to Servia, and then
refused to accept Servia's most humble apology, is difficult to
understand. The only natural explanation is that the Germanic Powers on
the whole thought it best, even as matters stood, to precipitate war;
that notwithstanding all the complications, they thought that the
long-prepared-for hour had come. The German White Book puts the matter
as a mere _necessity_ of self-defence. "Had the Servians been allowed,
with the help of Russia and France, to endanger the integrity of the
neighbouring Monarchy much longer, the consequence must have been the
gradual disruption of Austria and the subjection of the whole Slav
world to the Russian sceptre, with the result that the position of the
German race in Central Europe would have become untenable"; but it is
obvious that this plea is itself untenable, since it makes a quite
distant and problematic danger the excuse for a sudden and insulting
blow--for a blow, in fact, almost certain to precipitate the danger! How
the matter was decided in Berlin we cannot at present tell, or what the
motives exactly were. It seems rather probable that the Kaiser threw his
weight on the side of peace. The German Executive at any rate saw that
the great war they had so long contemplated and so long prepared for was
close upon them--only in an unexpected form, hugely complicated and
threatening. They must have realized the great danger of the situation,
but they very likely may have thought that by another piece of bluff
similar to that of 1908-9 they might intimidate Russia a second time;
and they believed that Russia was behindhand in her military
preparations. They also, it appears, thought that England would not
fight, being too much preoccupied with Ireland, India, and other
troubles. And so it may have seemed that Now was the psychological
moment.

Austria opened with war on Servia (28th of July), and the next day
Russia declared a considerable though not complete mobilization. From
that moment a general conflagration was practically inevitable. The news
of Russia's warlike movement caused a perfect panic in Berlin. The
tension of feeling swung round completely for the time being from enmity
against England and France to fear of Russia. The final mobilization of
the Russian troops (31st of July) was followed by the telegrams between
the Kaiser and the Tsar, and by the formal mobilization (really already
complete) of the German Army and Navy on the 1st of August. War was
declared at Berlin on the 1st of August, and the same or next day the
German forces entered Luxemburg. On August 4th they entered Belgium, and
war was declared by England against Germany.

       *       *       *       *       *

Looking back at the history of the whole affair, one seems to see, as I
have said, a kind of fatality about it. The great power and vigour of
the German peoples, shown by their early history in Europe, had been
broken up by the religious and other dissensions of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. It fell to Prussia to become the centre of
organization for a new Germany. The rich human and social material of
the German States--their literary, artistic, and scientific culture,
their philosophy, their learning--clustered curiously enough round the
hard and military nucleus of the North. It was perhaps their instinct
and, for the time, their salvation to do so. The new Germany, hemmed in
on all sides by foreign Powers, could only see her way to reasonable
expansion and recognition, and a field for her latent activities, by the
use of force, military force. A long succession of political
philosophers drilled this into her. She embarked in small wars and
always with success. She became a political unity and a Great Power in
Europe. And then came her commercial triumph. Riches beyond all
expectation flowed in; and a mercantile class arose in her midst whose
ideals of life were of a corresponding character--the ideals of the
wealthy shopkeeper. What wonder that, feeling her power, feeling herself
more than ever baulked of her rights, she cast her eyes abroad, and
coveted the imperial and commercial supremacy of the world?

In this she had the example of Britain before her. Britain had laid land
to land and market to market over the globe, and showed no particular
scruple in the matter. Why should not Germany do the same? It was true
that Britain always carried the Bible with her--but this was mere
British cant. Britain carried the Bible in her left hand, but in her
right a sword; and when she used the latter she always let the former
drop. Germany could do likewise--but without that odious pretence of
morality, and those crocodile tears over the unfortunates whom she
devoured. It was only a question of Might and Organization and Armament.

So far Germany seems to have had a perfectly good case; and though we in
England might not like her ambitions, we could not reasonably find fault
with motives so perfectly similar to our own. We might, indeed, make a
grievance of the frank brutality displayed in her methods and the
defence of them; but then, she might with equal right object to our
everlasting pretence of "morality," and our concealment of mercenary
and imperial aims under the cloak of virtue and innocence. One really
must confess that it is difficult to say which is the worse.

But if the crystallization of Germany round the Prussian nucleus was for
the time the source of Germany's success, it is a question whether it is
not even now becoming something quite different, and the likely cause of
a serious downfall. It would seem hardly probable that the amalgamation
between elements so utterly dissimilar can permanently endure. The
kindly, studious, sociable, rather naively innocent German mass-people
dragged by the scruff of the neck into the arena of militarism and
world-politics, may for a time have had their heads turned by the
exalted position in which they found themselves; but it is not likely
that they will continue for long to enjoy the situation. With no great
instinct for politics, nor any marked gift of tact and discernment,
unsuccessful as a rule as colonists,[17] and with no understanding of
how to govern--except on the Prussian lines, which are every day
becoming more obsolete and less adapted to the modern world--the role
which their empire-building philosophers set out for them is one which
they are eminently unfitted to fulfil. It is sad, but we cannot blame
them for the defect. They blame the world in general for siding against
them in this affair, but do not see that in most cases it has been their
own want of perception which has left them on the wrong side of the
hedge.

Bismarck, with his "Blood and Iron" policy, made a huge blunder in not
perceiving that in the modern world spiritual forces are arising which
must for ever discredit the same. He emphasized the blunder by wresting
Alsace-Lorraine from France, and again by crippling Russia in the treaty
of 1878--thus making enemies where generosity might have brought him
friends. The German Executive in July of last year (1914) showed
extraordinary want of tact in not seeing that Russia, rebuffed in 1908
over Bosnia and Herzegovina, would never put up with a _second_ insult
of the same kind over Servia. The same Government was strangely unable
to perceive that whatever it might tactically gain by the invasion and
devastation of Belgium would be more than lost by the moral effect of
such action on the whole world; and notwithstanding its army of spies,
it had not the sense to see that England, whether morally bound to or
not, was certain, at all costs, to fight in defence of Belgium's
neutrality. So true it is that without the understanding which comes
from the heart, all the paraphernalia of science and learning and the
material results of organization and discipline are of little good.

But however we choose to apportion the blame or at least the
responsibility for the situation among the various Governments
concerned, the main point and the main lesson of it all is to see that
any such apportionment does not much matter! As long as our Governments
are constructed as they are--that is, on the principle of representing,
not the real masses of their respective peoples, but the interests of
certain classes, especially the commercial, financial, and military
classes--so long will such wars be inevitable. The real blame rests,
not with the particular Foreign policy of this or that country but with
the fact that Europe, already rising through her mass-peoples into a far
finer and more human and spiritual life than of old, still lies bound in
the chains of an almost Feudal social order.

When the great German mass-peoples find this out, when they discover the
little rift in the lute which now separates their real quality from the
false standards of their own dominant military and commercial folk, then
their true role in the world will begin, and a glorious role it will be.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] "A German," he said, "could not live long in the atmosphere of
England--an atmosphere of sham, prudery, conventionality, and
hollowness"! See article on "Treitschke," by W.H. Dawson, in the
_Nineteenth Century_ for January 1915.

[14] The influence, however, of Bernhardi in his own country has been
somewhat exaggerated in England.

[15] It seems that the same remark is made about the Germans in the
U.S.A., that they take little interest in politics there.

[16] This attitude is exactly corroborated by Herr Maximilian Harden's
manifesto, originally published in _Die Zukunft,_ and lately reprinted
in the _New York Times_.

[17] Though this is only, perhaps, true of their State colonies. In
their individual and missionary colonizing groups, and as pioneer
settlers, they seem to have succeeded well.




VI


THE HEALING OF, NATIONS[18]

It is quite possible that the little rift within the lute, alluded to in
the concluding paragraph of last chapter, may widen so far as to cause
before long great internal changes and reconstructions in Germany
herself; but short of that happening, it would seem that there is no
alternative for the Allies but to continue the war until her Militarism
can be put out of court, and that for long years to come. There is no
alternative, because she has revealed her hand too clearly as a
menace--if she should prevail--of barbarous force to the whole world. It
is this menace which has roused practically the whole world against her.
And there is this amount of good in the situation, namely, that while
with the victory of Germany a German "terror" might be established
through the world, with the victory of the Allies neither England, nor
France, nor Russia, nor little Belgium, nor any other country, could
claim a final credit and supremacy. With the latter victory we shall be
freed from the nightmare claim of any one nation's world-empire.

But in order to substantiate this result England must also abdicate her
claim. She must abdicate her mere crass insistence on commercial
supremacy. The "Nation of Shopkeepers" theory, which has in the past
made her the hated of other nations, which has created within her
borders a vulgar and unpleasant class--the repository of much arrogant
wealth--must cease to be the standard of her life. I have before me at
this moment a manifesto of "The British Empire League," patronized by
royalty and the dukes, and of which Lord Rothschild is treasurer. The
constitution of the League was framed in 1895; and I note with regret
that positively the five "principal objects of the League" mentioned
therein have solely to do with the extension and facilitation of
Britain's trade, and the "co-operation of the military and naval forces
of the Empire with a special view to the due protection of the trade
routes." Not a word is said _in the whole manifesto_ about the human and
social responsibilities of this vast Empire; not a word about the
guardianship and nurture of native races, their guidance and assistance
among the pitfalls of civilization; not a word about the principles of
honour and just dealing with regard to our civilized neighbour-nations
in Europe and elsewhere; not a word about the political freedom and
welfare of all classes at home. One rubs one's eyes, and looks at the
document again; but it is so. Its one inspiration is--Trade. Seeing
that, I confess to a sinking of the heart. Can we blame Germany for
struggling at all costs to enlarge her borders, when _that_ is what the
British Empire means?

Until we rise, as a nation, to a conception of what we mean by our
national life, finer and grander than a mere counting of trade-returns,
what can we expect save failure and ill-success?

Possibly in the conviction that she is fighting for a worthy object (the
ending of militarism), and in the determination (if sincerely carried
out) of once more playing her part in the world as the protector of
small nations, Britain may find her salvation, and a cause which will
save her soul. It is certainly encouraging to find that there is a
growing feeling in favour of the recognition and rehabilitation of the
small peoples of the world. If it is true that Britain by her grasping
Imperial Commercialism in the past (and let us hope that period _is_
past) has roused jealousy and hatred among the other nations, equally is
it true that Germany to-day, by her dreams of world-conquest, has been
rousing hatred and fear. But the day has gone by of world-empires
founded on the lust of conquest, whether that conquest be military or
commercial. The modern peoples surely are growing out of dreams so
childish as that. The world-empire of Goethe and Beethoven is even now
far more extensive, far more powerful, than that which Wilhelm II and
his Junkers are seeking to encompass. There is something common,
unworthy, in the effort of domination; and while the Great Powers have
thus vulgarized themselves, it is the little countries who have gone
forward in the path of progress. "In modern Europe what do we not owe to
little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom six hundred years ago,
and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic monarchies
held the rest of the European Continent? And what to free Holland, with
her great men of learning and her painters surpassing those of all other
countries save Italy? So the small Scandinavian nations have given to
the world famous men of science, from Linnaeus downwards, poets like
Tegner and Bjoernson, scholars like Madvig, dauntless explorers like
Fridthiof Nansen. England had, in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and
Milton, a population little larger than that of Bulgaria to-day. The
United States, in the days of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and
Hamilton and Marshall, counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or
Greece."[19]

In all their internal politics and social advancement, Switzerland,
Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Finland (until the paw of the Bear
was on her) and Belgium (till the claw of the Spread-Eagle) have been
well to the fore. It is they who have carried on the banner of idealism
which Germany herself uplifted when she was a small people or a group of
small peoples. It is they who have really had prosperous, healthy,
independent, and alert populations. How much more interesting, we may
say, would Europe be under the variety of such a regime than under the
monotonous bureaucracy and officialism of any Great Power! And to some
such scheme we must adhere. It would mean, of course, the alliance of
all the States of Western Europe, large and small (and including both a
remodelled Germany and a largely remodelled Austria) in one great
Federation--whose purpose would be partly to unite and preserve Europe
against any common foe, from the East or elsewhere, and partly to
regulate any overweening ambition of a member of the Federation, such as
might easily become a menace to the other members. A secondary but most
important result of the formation of such a United States of Europe
would be that while each State would probably preserve a small military
establishment of its own, the enormous and fatal incubus of the present
armaments system would be rendered unnecessary, and so at last the
threat of national bankruptcy and ruin, which has of late pursued the
nations Like an evil dream, might pass away. But in that matter of
finance it cannot be disguised that a terrible period still awaits the
European peoples. Already the moneylenders sitting on their chests form
a veritable nightmare; but with fresh debts by the thousand million
sterling being contracted, there is great danger that the mass-peoples
beneath will be worse paralysed and broken even than they are
now--unless, indeed, with a great effort they rouse themselves and throw
off the evil burden.

That the world is waking up to a recognition of _racial_ rights--that
is, the right of each race to have as far as possible its own
Government, instead of being lorded over by an alien race--is a good
sign; and a European settlement along that line must be pressed for. At
last, after centuries of discomfort, we at home are finding our solution
of the Irish question in this very obvious way; and it may be that
Europe, tired of war, may finally have the sense to adopt the same
principle. Of course, there are cases where populations are so mixed,
as, for instance, the Czechs and Slovaks and Germans in Bohemia and
Moravia, or where small colonies of one race are so embedded in the
midst of another race, as are the Germans among the Roumanians of
Transylvania, that this solution may be difficult. That is no reason,
however, why the general principle should not be applied. It _must_,
indeed, be applied if Europe is not to return to barbarism.

And it interests us--having regard to what I have said about _class_
rule being so fruitful a cause of war--to remember that the rule of one
race by another always does mean class rule. The alien conquerors who
descend upon a country become the military and landlord caste there.
Thus the Norman barons in England, the English squires in Ireland, the
Magyars in Hungary, the German barons in East Prussia and the Baltic
provinces, and so forth. They make their profit and maintain themselves
out of the labour and the taxation of the subject peoples.

In the earlier forms of social life, when men lived in tribes, a rude
equality and democracy prevailed; there was nothing that could well be
called class-government; there was simply custom and the leadership of
the elders of the tribe. Then with the oncoming of what we call
civilization, and the growth of the sense of property, differences
arose--accumulations of wealth and power by individuals, enslavements of
tribes by other tribes; and classes sprang up, and class-government, and
so the material of endless suffering and oppression and hatred and
warfare. I have already explained (in the Introduction) that Class in
itself as the mere formation within a nation of groups of similar
occupation and activity--working harmoniously with each other and with
the nation--is a perfectly natural and healthy phenomenon; it is only
when it means groups pursuing their own interests counter to each other
and to the nation that it becomes diseased. There will come a time when
the class-element in this latter sense will be ejected from society, and
society will return again to its democratic form and structure. There
will be no want, in that time, of variety of occupation and talent, or
of differentiation in the social organism; quite the contrary; but
simply there will be no predatory or parasitical groups within such
organism, whose, interests will run counter to the whole, and which will
act (as such classes act now) as foci and seedbeds of disease and strife
within the whole. With a return to the recognition of racial rights and
autonomies over the world, it is clear that one great cause of strife
will be removed, and we shall be one step nearer to the ending of the
preposterous absurdity of war.

And talking about the difficulty of sorting out mixed populations, or of
dealing with small colonies of one race embedded in the midst of another
race, it is evident that once you get rid of autocratic or military or
class-government of any kind, and return to democratic forms, this
difficulty will be much reduced or disappear. Small democratic communes
are perfectly simple to form in groups of any magnitude or minuteness
which may be desirable; and such groups would easily federate or ally
themselves with surrounding democracies of alien race, whereas if
lorded over by alien conquerors they would be in a state of chronic
rebellion. Of such democratic alliance and federation of peoples of
totally different race, Switzerland supplies a well-recognized and
far-acclaimed example.

       *       *       *       *       *

That in the future there will be an outcry in favour of Conscription
made by certain parties in Britain goes without saying; but that must be
persistently opposed. The nation says it is fighting to put down
Militarism. Why, then, make compulsory militarism foundational in our
national life? To abolish militarism _by_ militarism is like "putting
down Drink" by swallowing it! The whole lesson of this war is against
conscription. Germany could never have "imposed herself" on Europe
without it. And yet her soldiers, brave as they naturally are, and
skilfully as they have fought, have not done themselves justice. How
could they under such conditions--forced into battle by their officers,
flung in heaps on the enemy's guns? The voluntary response in Britain to
the call to arms has been inspiriting; and if voluntaryism means
momentary delay in a crisis, still it means success in the end. No
troops have fought more finely than the British. Said Surgeon-General
Evatt, speaking in London in October--and General Evatt's word in such a
matter ought to carry weight: "After long experience in studying
Russian, German, Bavarian, Saxon, French, Spanish, and American fighting
units, my verdict is unhesitatingly in favour of the British.... What
has occurred lately has been a splendid triumph of citizenship, because
people were allowed their proper liberty and the consciousness of
freely, sharing in a great Empire."

Besides it must always be remembered that conscription gives a
Government power to initiate an iniquitous war, whereas voluntaryism
keeps the national life clean and healthy. A free people will not fight
for the trumped-up schemes and selfish machinations of a class--not,
indeed, unless they are grossly deceived by, Press and Class plots.
Anyhow, to force men to fight in causes which they do not approve, to
compel them to adopt a military career when their temperaments are
utterly unsuited to such a thing, or when their consciences or their
religion forbid them--these things are both foolish and wicked.

If the nation wants soldiers it must pay for them. England, for example,
is rolling in wealth; and it is simply a scandal that the wealthy
classes should sit at home in comfort and security and pay to the man in
the trenches--who is risking his life at every moment, and often living
in such exhaustion and misery as actually to wish for the bullet which
will _end_ his life--no more than the minimum wage of an ordinary
day-labourer; and that they should begrudge every penny paid to his
dependents--whether he be living or dead--or to himself when he returns,
a lifelong cripple, to his home. To starve and stint your own soldiers,
to discourage recruiting, and then to make the consequent failure of men
to come forward into an excuse for conscription is the meanest of
policies. As a matter of fact, the circumstances of the present war show
that with anything like decent reward for their services there is an
abundant, an almost over-abundant, supply of men ready to flock to the
standard of their country in a time of necessity. Nor must it be
forgotten, in this matter of pay, that the general type and average of
our forces to-day, whether naval or military, is far higher than it was
fifty, years ago. The men are just as plucky, and more educated, more
alert, more competent in every way. To keep them up to this high
standard of efficiency they need a high standard of care and
consideration.

It may, however, be said--in view of our present industrial conditions,
and the low standard of physical health and vitality prevailing among
the young folk of our large towns--that physical drill and scout
training, including ambulance and other work, and qualification in
_some_ useful trade, might very well be made a part of our general
educational system, for rich and poor alike, say, between the ages of
sixteen and eighteen. Such a training would to each individual boy be
immensely valuable, and by providing some rudimentary understanding of
military, affairs and the duties of public service and citizenship,
would enable him to choose _how_ he could be helpful to the
nation--provided always he were not forced to make his choice in a
direction distasteful or repugnant to him. In any good cause, as in a
war of _defence_ against a foreign enemy, it is obvious enough, as I
have said, that there would be plenty of native enthusiasm forthcoming
without legal or official pressure. However, I have enlarged a little on
the subject of Conscription in a later chapter, and will say no more
here.

But the burning and pressing question is: Why should we--we, the
"enlightened and civilized" nations of Europe--get involved in these
senseless wars at all? And surely _this_ war will, of all wars, force an
answer to the question. 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 others of militant intentions, and all lamenting that "war
is inevitable." Here they have been forming their _Ententes_ and
Alliances, carrying on their diplomatic cabals and intrigues, studying
the map and adjusting the Balance of Power--all, of course, with the
best intentions--and lo! with the present result! What nonsense! What
humbug! What an utter bankruptcy of so-called diplomacy! When will the
peoples themselves arise and put a stop to this fooling--the people 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 incapacity and futility 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.

And no doubt the latter alternative is the true one. There has been a
pretence of the Governments all round--a pretence of deep concern for
humanity and the welfare of the mass-peoples committed to their charge;
but the real moving power beneath has been _class_-interest--the
interest of the great commercial class in each nation, with its acolyte
and attendant, the military or aristocratic. It is this class, with its
greeds and vanities and suspicions and jealousies, which is the cause of
strife; the working-masses of the various nations have no desire to
quarrel with each other. Nay, they are animated by a very different
spirit.

In an interesting article published by the German Socialist paper
_Vorwaerts_, on September 27, 1914, and reproduced in our Press, occurred
the following passage, in which the war is traced to its commercial
sources: "Germany has enjoyed an economical prosperity such as no other
country has experienced during the last decade. That meant with the
capitalist class a revival of strong Imperialist tendencies, which have
been evident enough. This, again, gave rise to mistrust abroad, at
least in capitalist circles, who did their best to communicate their
feelings to the great masses, ... and so the German people as a whole
has been made responsible for what has been the work of a small
class.... The comrades abroad can be assured that though German workmen
are ready to defend their country they will, above all, not forget that
their interests are the same as those of the proletariat in other
countries, who also against their will were forced into the war and now
do their duty. They can rest assured that the German people are not less
humane than others--a result to which education through workmen's
organizations has greatly contributed. If German soldiers in the
excitement of war should commit atrocities, it can be said that among
us--and also in other circles--there will not be a single person to
approve of them."

Reading this statement--so infinitely more sensible and human than
anything to be found in the ordinary Capitalist Press of England and
Germany--one cannot help feeling that there is practically little hope
for the future _until_ the international working masses throughout
Europe come forward and, joining hands with each other, take charge of
the foolish old Governments (who represent the remains of the decadent
feudal and commercial systems), and shape the Western world at last to
the heart's desire of the peoples that inhabit it.

"The peoples of the world desire peace," said Bourtzeff, the Russian
exile[20]--and he, who has been in many lands, ought to know. But they
also--if they would obtain peace--must exercise an eternal vigilance
lest they fall into the hands of class-schemers and be betrayed into
that which they do _not_ desire. The example of Germany--which we have
considered above--shows how easily a good and friendly and pacific
people may, by mere political inattention and ignorance, and by a
quasi-scientific philosophy, which imposes on its political ignorance,
be led into a disastrous situation. It shows how preposterous it is that
Governments generally--as at present constituted--should set themselves
up as the representatives of the mass-peoples' wishes, and as the
arbiters of national destinies. And it shows how vitally necessary it is
that the people, even the working masses and the peasants, should have
some sort of political education and understanding.

In that matter, of the political education of the masses, America, in
her United States and Canada, yields a fine example. Though not
certainly perfect, her general standard of education and alertness is
infinitely superior to that of the peoples of the Old World. And some
writers contend that it is just in that--in her general level and not in
her freaks of genius--that America's claim lies to distinction among the
nations of the earth. If you consider the peoples of the Old World,
whether in England, Scotland, or Ireland, in France, Spain, Italy,
Germany, Austria, Russia, or farther East and farther South over the
earth, you will find the great masses, on the land or in the workshops,
still sunk in vast ignorance, apathy, and irresponsibility. Only here
and there among those I have mentioned, and notably among the smaller
peoples of Western Europe, like Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, and
Sweden, are the masses beginning to stir, as it were, towards the
daylight. It can only be with the final opening of their eyes and
awakening from slumber that the rule of the classes will be at an end.
But that awakening--with the enormous spread of literature and
locomotion and intercommunication of all kinds over the modern world,
cannot now, one would say, be long delayed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, and until that era arrives, we can only insist (at any rate
in our own country) on a different kind of foreign policy from what we
have had--a policy open and strong, not founded on Spread-Eagleism, and
decidedly not founded on commercialism and the interests of the trading
classes (as the Empire League seem to desire), but directed towards the
real welfare of the masses in our own and other lands. If our rulers and
representatives really seek peace, here is the obvious way to ensue and
secure it--namely, by making political friends of those in all countries
who _desire peace_ and are already stretching hands of amity to each
other. What simpler and more obvious way can there be? "We hail our
working-class comrades of every land," says the Manifesto of the
Independent Labour Party. "Across the roar of guns we send greeting to
the German Socialists. They have laboured unceasingly to promote good
relations with Britain, as we with Germany. They are no enemies of ours,
but faithful friends. In forcing this appalling crime upon the nations,
it is the rulers, the diplomats, the militarists, who have sealed their
doom. In tears and blood and bitterness the greater Democracy will be
born. With steadfast faith we greet the future; our cause is holy and
imperishable, and the labour of our hands has not been in vain."

Yes, we must have a foreign policy strong and sincere--and not only so,
but open and avowed. The present Diplomatic system is impossible of
continuance. It has grown up in an automatic way out of antiquated
conditions, and no one in particular can be blamed for it. But that
young men, profoundly ignorant of the world, and having the very _borne_
outlook on life which belongs to our gilded youth (67 per cent. of the
candidates for the Diplomatic Corps being drawn from Eton alone), having
also in high degree that curious want of cosmopolitan sympathy and
adaptability which is characteristic of the English wealthy classes
(every candidate for the Corps must have at least L400 a year of his
own)--that such a type should be charged with the representation of the
United Kingdom in foreign affairs is to-day a hopeless anomaly, and
indeed a very great danger. The recommendations just published of the
Royal Commission are in the right direction, but they need urgent
reinforcement and extension by the pressure of public opinion. And if in
the present-day situation of affairs we cannot refer every question
which arises directly to the nation, we must at least do away with the
one-man-Secretary system, and have in his place a large and responsible
committee, representative, not of any one party or class but as far as
possible of the whole people. [At this moment, for instance, as far as
we know, the terms of settlement of the present war may actually be
being arranged over our heads, and yet that may be taking place quite
apart from the approval and the wishes of the most weighty portion of
the nation.]

Another thing that we must look to with some hope for the future is the
influence of Women. Profoundly shocked as they are by the senseless
folly and monstrous bloodshed of the present conflict, it is certain
that when this phase is over they will insist on having a voice in the
politics of the future. The time has gone by when the mothers and wives
and daughters of the race will consent to sit by meek and silent while
the men in their madness are blowing each other's brains out and making
mountains out of corpses. It is hardly to be expected that war will
cease from the earth this side of the millennium; but women will surely
only, condone it when urged by some tremendous need or enthusiasm; they
will not rejoice--as men sometimes do--in the mere lust of domination
and violence. With their keen perception of the little things of life,
and the way in which the big things are related to these, they will see
too clearly the cost of war in broken hearts and ruined homes to allow
their men to embark in it short of the direst necessity.

And through the women I come back to the elementary causes and roots of
the present war--the little fibres in our social life which have fed,
and are still feeding, the fatal tree whose fruits are, not the healing
but the strife of nations. In the present day--though there may be other
influences--it is evident enough that rampant and unmeasured commercial
greed, concentrating itself in a special class, is the main cause, the
tap-root, of the whole business. And this, equally evidently, springs
out of the innumerable greed of _individuals_--the countless fibres that
combine to one result--the desire of private persons to get rich quick
at all costs, to make their gains out of others' losses, to take
advantage of each other, to triumph in success regardless of others'
failures. And these unworthy motives and inhuman characteristics again
spring obviously out of the mean and materialistic ideals of life which
still have sway among us--the ideals of wealth and luxury and
display--of which the horrors of war are the sure and certain obverse.
As long as we foster these things in our private life, so long will they
lead in our public life to the embitterment of nation against nation.
What is the ruling principle of the interior and domestic conduct of
each nation to-day--even within its own borders--but an indecent
scramble of class against class, of individual against individual? To
rise to noisy power and influence, and to ill-bred wealth and riches, by
trampling others down and profiting by their poverty is--as Ruskin long
ago told us--the real and prevailing motive of our peoples, whatever
their professions of Christianity may be. Small wonder, then, if out of
such interior conditions there rise to dominance in the great world
those very classes who exhibit the same vulgarities in their most
perfect form, and that _their_ conflict with each other, as between
nation and nation, exhibit to us, in the magnified and hideous form of
war, the same sore which is all the time corrupting our internal
economy. The brutality, and atrocity of modern war is but the reflection
of the brutality and inhumanity of our commercial regime and id