‘That unity is impossible on the basis of the old policies, the European statecraft of the past. For that assumes a condition of the world in which each State must look for its national security to its own isolated strength; and such assumption compels each member, as a measure of national self-preservation, and so justifiably, to take precaution against drifting into a position of inferior power, compels it, that is, to enter into a competition for the sources of strength—territory and strategic position. Such a condition will inevitably, in the case of any considerable alliance, produce a situation in which some of its members will be brought into conflict by claims for the same territory. In the end, that will inevitably disrupt the Alliance.

‘The price of the preservation of nationality is a workable internationalism. If this latter is not possible then the smaller nationalities are doomed. Thus, though internationalism may not be in the case of every member of the Alliance the object of war, it is the condition of its success.’

CHAPTER V

PATRIOTISM AND POWER IN WAR AND PEACE

IN the preceding chapter attention has been called to a phenomenon which is nothing short of a ‘moral miracle’ if our ordinary reading of war psychology is correct. The phenomenon in question is the very definite and sudden worsening of Anglo-American relations, following upon common suffering on the same battle-fields, our soldiers fighting side by side; an experience which we commonly assume should weld friendship as nothing else could.[58]

This miracle has its replica within the nation itself: intense industrial strife, class warfare, revolution, embittered rivalries, following upon a war which in its early days our moralists almost to a man declared at least to have this great consolation, that it achieved the moral unity of the nation. Pastor and poet, statesman and professor alike rejoiced in this spiritual consolidation which dangers faced in common had brought about. Never again was the nation to be riven by the old differences. None was now for party and all were for the State. We had achieved the ‘union sacrée’ ... ‘duke’s son, cook’s son.’ On this ground alone many a bishop has found (in war time) the moral justification of war.[59]

Now no one can pretend that this sacred union has really survived the War. The extraordinary contrast between the disunity with which we finish war and the unity with which we begin it, is a disturbing thought when we recollect that the country cannot always be at war, if only because peace is necessary as a preparation for war, for the creation of things for war to destroy. It becomes still more disturbing when we add to this post-war change another even more remarkable, which will be dealt with presently: the objects for which at the beginning of a war we are ready to die—ideals like democracy, freedom from military regimentation and the suppression of military terrorism, the rights of small nations—are things about which at the end of the War we are utterly indifferent. It would seem either that these are not the things that really stirred us—that our feelings had some other unsuspected origin—or that war has destroyed our feeling for them.

Note this juxtaposition of events. We have had in Europe millions of men in every belligerent country showing unfathomable capacity for disinterested service. Millions of youngsters—just ordinary folk—gave the final and greatest sacrifice without hesitation and without question. They faced agony, hardship, death, with no hope or promise of reward save that of duty discharged. And, very rightly, we acclaim them as heroes. They have shown without any sort of doubt that they are ready to die for their country’s cause or for some even greater cause—human freedom, the rights of a small nation, democracy, or the principle of nationality, or to resist a barbarous morality which can tolerate the making of unprovoked war for a monarchy’s ambition or the greed of an autocratic clique.

And, indeed, whatever our final conclusion, the spectacle of vast sacrifices so readily made is, in its ultimate meaning one of infinite inspiration and hope. But the War’s immediate sequel puts certain questions to us that we cannot shirk. For note what follows.

After some years the men who could thus sacrifice themselves, return home—to Italy, or France, or Britain—and exchange khaki for the miner’s overall or the railway worker’s uniform. And it would then seem that at that moment their attitude to their country and their country’s attitude to them undergo a wonderful change. They are ready—so at least we are told by a Press which for five years had spoken of them daily as heroes, saints, and gentlemen—through their miners’ or railway Unions to make war upon, instead of for, that community which yesterday they served so devotedly. Within a few months of the close of this War which was to unify the nation as it had never been unified before (the story is the same whichever belligerent you may choose) there appear divisions and fissures, disruptions and revolutions, more disturbing than have been revealed for generations.

Our extreme nervousness about the danger of Bolshevist propaganda shows that we believe that these men, yesterday ready to die for their country, are now capable of exposing it to every sort of horror.

Or take another aspect of it. During the War fashionable ladies by thousands willingly got up at six in the morning to scrub canteen floors or serve coffee, in order to add to the comfort of their working-class countrymen—in khaki. They did this, one assumes, from the love of countrymen who risked their lives and suffered hardship in the execution of duty. It sounds satisfactory until the same countryman ceases fighting and turns to extremely hard and hazardous duties like mining, or fishing in winter-time in the North Sea. The ladies will no longer scrub floors or knit socks for him. They lose all real interest in him. But if it was done originally from ‘love of fellow-countrymen,’ why this cessation of interest? He is the same man. Into the psychology of that we shall inquire a little more fully later. The phenomenon is explained here in the conviction that its cause throws light upon the other phenomenon equally remarkable, namely, that victory reveals a most astonishing post-war indifference to those moral and ideal ends for which we believed we were fighting. Is it that they never were our real aims at all, or that war has wrought a change in our nature with reference to them?

The importance of knowing what really moves us is obvious enough. If our potential power is to stand for the protection of any principle—nationality or democracy—that object must represent a real purpose, not a convenient clothing for a quite different purpose. The determination to defend nationality can only be permanent if our feeling for it is sufficiently deep and sincere to survive in the competition of other moral ‘wishes.’ Where has the War, and the complex of desires it developed, left our moral values? And, if there has been a re-valuation, why?

The Allied world saw clearly that the German doctrine—the right of a powerful State to deny national independence to a smaller State, merely because its own self-preservation demanded it—was something which menaced nationality and right. The whole system by which, as in Prussia, the right of the people to challenge the political doctrines of the Government was denied (as by a rigorous control of press and education), was seen to be incompatible with the principles upon which free government in the West has been established. All this had to be destroyed in order that the world might be made ‘safe for democracy.’ The trenches in Flanders became ‘the frontiers of freedom.’ To uphold the rights of small nations, freedom of speech and press, to punish military terror, to establish an international order based on right as against might—these were things for which free men everywhere should gladly die. They did die, in millions. Nowhere so much, perhaps, as in America were these ideals the inspiration which brought that country into the War. She had nothing to gain territorially or materially. If ever the motive to war was an ideal motive, America’s was.

Then comes the Peace. And the America which had discarded her tradition of isolation to send two million soldiers on the European continent, ‘at the call of the small nation,’ was asked to co-operate with others in assuring the future security of Belgium, in protecting the small States by the creation of some international order (the only way in which they ever can be effectively protected); to do it in another form for a small nation that has suffered even more tragically than Belgium, Armenia; definitely to organise in peace that cause for which she went to war. And then a curious discovery is made. A cause which can excite immense passion when it is associated with war, is simply a subject for boredom when it becomes a problem of peace-time organisation. America will give lavishly of the blood of her sons to fight for the small nations; she will not be bothered with mandates or treaties in order to make it unnecessary to fight for them. It is not a question whether the particular League of Nations established at Paris was a good one. The post-war temper of America is that she does not want to be bothered with Europe at all: talk about its security makes the American public of 1920 irritable and angry. Yet millions were ready to die for freedom in Europe two years ago! A thing to die for in 1918 is a thing to yawn over, or to be irritable about, when the war is done.

Is America alone in this change of feeling about the small State? Recall all that we wrote and talked about the sacredness of the rights of small nations—and still in certain cases talk and write. There is Poland. It is one of the nations whose rights are sacred—to-day. But in 1915 we acquiesced in an arrangement by which Poland was to be delivered, bound hand and foot, at the end of the war, to its worst and bitterest enemy, Czarist Russia. The Alliance (through France, to-day the ‘protector of Poland’) undertook not to raise any objection to any policy that the Czar’s Government might inaugurate in Poland. It was to have a free hand. A secret treaty, it will be urged, about which the public knew nothing? We were fighting to liberate the world from diplomatic autocracies using their peoples for unknown and unavowed purposes. But the fact that we were delivering over Poland to the mercies of a Czarist Government was not secret. Every educated man knew what Russian policy under the Czarist Government would be, must be, in Poland. Was the Russian record with reference to Poland such that the unhampered discretion of the Czarist Government was deemed sufficient guarantee of Polish independence? Did we honestly think that Russia had proved herself more liberal in the treatment of the Poles than Austria, whose Government we were destroying? The implication, of course, flew in the face of known facts: Austrian rule over the Poles, which we proposed to destroy, had proved itself immeasurably more tolerant than the Russian rule which we proposed to re-enforce and render more secure.

And there were Finland and the Border States. If Russia had remained in the War, ‘loyal to the cause of democracy and the rights of small nations,’ there would have been no independent Poland, or Finland, or Esthonia, or Georgia; and the refusal of our Ally to recognise their independence would not have disturbed us in the least.

Again, there was Serbia, on behalf of whose ‘redemption’ in a sense, the War began. An integral part of that ‘redemption’ was the inclusion of the Dalmatian coast in Serbia—the means of access of the new Southern Slav State to the sea. Italy, for naval reasons, desired possession of that coast, and, without informing Serbia, we undertook to see that Italy should get it. (Italy, by the way, also entered the War on behalf of the principle of Nationality.)[60]

It is not to be supposed, however, that the small State itself, however it may declaim about ‘liberty or death,’ has, when the opportunity to assert power presents itself, any greater regard for the rights of nationality—in other people. Take Poland. For a hundred and fifty years Poland has called upon Heaven to witness the monstrous wickedness of denying to a people its right to self-determination; of forcing a people under alien rule. After a hundred and fifty years of the martyrdom of alien rule, Poland acquires its freedom. That freedom is not a year old before Poland itself becomes in temper as imperialistic as any State in Europe. It may be bankrupt, racked with typhus and famine, split by bitter factional quarrels, but the one thing upon which all Poles will unite is in the demand for dominion over some fifteen millions of people, not merely non-Polish, but bitterly anti-Polish. Although Poland is perhaps the worst case, all the new small States show a similar disposition: Czecho-Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Finland, Greece, have all now their own imperialism, limited only, apparently, by the extent of their power. All these people have fought for the right to national independence; there is not one that is not denying the right to national independence. If every Britain has its Ireland, every Ireland has its Ulster.

But is this belief in Nationality at all? What should we have thought of a Southerner of the old Slave States fulminating against the crime of slavery? Should we have thought his position any more logical if he had explained that he was opposed to slavery because he did not want to become a slave? The test of his sincerity would have been, not the conduct he exacted of others, but the conduct he proposed to follow towards others. ‘One is a Nationalist,’ says Professor Corradini, one of the prophets of Italian sacro egoismo, ‘while waiting to be able to become an Imperialist.’ He prophesies that in twenty years ‘all Italy will be Imperialist.’[61]

The last thing intended here is any excuse of German violence by a futile tu quoque. But what it is important to know, if we are to understand the real motives of our conduct—and unless we do, we cannot really know where our conduct is leading us, where we are going—is whether we really cared about the ‘moral aims of war,’ the things for which we thought we were willing to die. Were we not as a matter of fact fighting—and dying—for something else?

Test the nature of our feelings by what was after all perhaps the most dramatised situation in the whole drama: the fact that in the Western world a single man, or a little junta of military chiefs, could by a word send nations into war, millions to their death; and—worse still in a sense—that those millions would accept the fact of thus being made helpless pawns, and with appalling docility, without question, kill and be killed for reasons they did not even know. It must be made impossible ever again for half a dozen Generals or Cabinet Ministers thus to play with nations and men and women as with pawns.

The War is at last over. And in Eastern Europe, the most corrupt, as it was one of the potentially most powerful of all the military autocracies—that of the Czar—has either gone to pieces from its own rottenness, or been destroyed by the spontaneous uprising of the people. Bold experiments, in entirely new social and economic methods, are attempted in this great community which may have so much to teach the Western world, experiments which challenge not only old political institutions, but old economic ones as well. But the men who were the Czar’s Ministers are still in Paris and London, in close but secret confabulation with Allied Governments.

And one morning we find that we are at war with the first Workers’ Republic of the world, the first really to try a great social experiment. There had been no declaration, no explanation. President Wilson had, indeed, said that nothing would induce the Allies to intervene. Their behaviour on that point would be the ‘acid test’ of sincerity. But in Archangel, Murmansk, Vladivostock, the Crimea, on the Polish border, on the shores of the Caspian, our soldiers were killing Russians, or organising their killing; our ships sank Russian ships and bombarded Russian cities. We found that we were supporting the Royalist parties—military leaders who did not hide in the least their intention to restore the monarchy. But again, there is no explanation. But somewhere, for some purpose undefined, killing has been proclaimed. And we kill—and blockade and starve.

The killing and blockading are not the important facts. Whatever may be behind the Russian business, the most disturbing portent is the fact which no one challenges and which indeed is most generally offered as a sort of defence. It is this: Nobody knows what the policy of the Government in Russia is, or was. It is commonly said they had no policy. Certainly it was changeable. That means that the Government does not need to give an explanation in order to start upon a war which may affect the whole future form of Western society. They did not have to explain because nobody particularly cared. Commands for youths to die in wars of unknown purpose do not strike us as monstrous when the commands are given by our own Governments—Governments which notoriously we do not trouble to control. Public opinion as a whole did not have any intense feeling about the Russian war, and not the slightest as to whether we used poison gas, or bombarded Russian cathedrals, or killed Russian civilians. We did not want it to be expensive, and Mr Churchill promised that if it cost too much he would drop it. He admitted finally that it was unnecessary by dropping it. But it was not important enough for him to resign over. And as for bringing anybody to trial for it, or upsetting the monarchy....[62]

There is another aspect of our feeling about the Prussian tendencies and temper, to rid the world of which we waged the War.

All America (or Britain, for that matter: America is only a striking and so a convenient example) knew that the Bismarckian persecution of the Socialists, the imprisonment of Bebel, of Liebknecht, the prosecution of newspapers for anti-militarist doctrines, the rigid control of education, by the Government, were just the natural prelude to what ended in Louvain and Aerschot, to the shooting down of the civilians of an invaded country. Again, that was why Prussia had to be destroyed in the interest of human freedom and the safety of democracy. The newspapers, the professors, the churches, were telling us all this endlessly for five years. Within a year of the end of the War, America is engaged in an anti-Socialist campaign more sweeping, more ruthless, by any test which you care to apply—the numbers arrested, the severity of the sentences imposed, the nature of the offences alleged—than anything ever attempted by Bismarck or the Kaiser. Old men of seventy (one selected by the Socialist party as Presidential Candidate), young girls, college students, are sent to prison with sentences of ten, fifteen, or twenty years. The elected members of State Legislatures are not allowed to sit, on the ground of their Socialist opinions. There are deportations in whole shiploads. If one takes the Espionage Act and compares it with any equivalent German legislation (the tests applied to school teachers or the refusal of mailing privileges to Socialist papers), one finds that the general principle of control of political opinion by the Government, and the limitations imposed upon freedom of discussion, and the Press, are certainly pushed further by the post-war America than they were by the pre-war Germany—the Germany that had to be destroyed for the precise reason that the principle of government by free discussion was more valuable than life itself.

And as to military terrorism. Americans can see—scores of American papers are saying it every day—that the things defended by the British Government in Ireland are indistinguishable from what brought upon Germany the wrath of Allied mankind. But they do not even know and certainly would not care if they did know, that American marines in Hayti—a little independent State that might one day become the hope and symbol of a subject nationality, an unredeemed race that has suffered and does suffer more at American hands than Pole or Alsatian ever suffered at German hands—have killed ten times as many Haytians as the Black and Tans have killed Irish. Nor for that matter do Americans know that every week there takes place in their own country—as there has taken place week after week in the years of peace for half a century—atrocities more ferocious than any which are alleged against even the British or the German. Neither of the latter burn alive, weekly, untried fellow-countrymen with a regularity that makes the thing an institution.

If indeed it was the militarism, the terrorism, the crude assertion of power, the repressions of freedom, which made us hate the German, why are we relatively indifferent when all those evils raise their heads, not far away, among a people for whom after all we are not responsible, but at home, near to us, where we have some measure of responsibility?

For indifferent in some measure to those near-by evils we all are.

The hundred million people who make up America include as many kindly, humane, and decent folk as any other hundred million anywhere in the world. They have a habit of carrying through extraordinary and unusual measures—like Prohibition. Yet nothing effective has been done about lynching, for which the world holds them responsible, any more than we have done anything effective about Ireland, for which the world holds us responsible. Their evil may one day land them in a desperate ‘subject nationality’ problem, just as our Irish problem lands us in political difficulty the world over. Yet neither they nor we can manage to achieve one-tenth of the emotional interest in our own atrocity or oppression, which we managed in a few weeks to achieve in war-time over the German barbarities in Belgium. If we could—if every schoolboy and maid-servant felt as strongly over Balbriggan or Amritsar as they felt over the Lusitania and Louvain—our problem would be solved; whereas the action and policy which arose out of our feeling about Louvain did not solve the evil of military terrorism. It merely made it nearly universal.

It brings us back to the original question. Is it mainly, or at all, the cruelty or the danger of oppression which moves us, which is at the bottom of our flaming indignation over the crimes of the enemy?

We believed that we were fighting because of a passionate feeling for self-rule; for freedom of discussion, of respect for the rights of others, particularly the weak; the hatred of the mere pride of power out of which oppression grows; of the regimentation of minds which is its instrument. But after the War we find that in truth we have no particular feeling about the things we fought to make impossible. We rather welcome them, if they are a means of harassing people that we do not happen to like. We get the monstrous paradox that the very tendencies which it was the object of the War to check, are the very tendencies that have acquired an elusive power in our own country—possibly as the direct result of the War!

Perhaps if we examine in some detail the process of the break-up after war, within the nation, of the unity which marked it during war, we may get some explanation of the other change just indicated.

The unity on which we congratulated ourselves was for a time a fact. But just as certainly the patriotism which prompted the duchess to scrub floors was not simply love of her countrymen, or it would not suddenly cease when the war came to an end. The self-same man who in khaki was a hero to be taken for drives in the duchess’s motor-car, became as workman—a member of some striking union, say—an object of hostility and dislike. The psychology revealed here has a still more curious manifestation.

When in war-time we read of the duke’s son and the cook’s son peeling potatoes into the same tub, we regard this aspect of the working of conscription as something in itself fine and admirable, a real national comradeship in common tasks at last. Colonel Roosevelt orates; our picture papers give us photographs; the country thrills to this note of democracy. But when we learn that for the constructive purposes of peace—for street-cleaning—the Soviet Government has introduced precisely this method and compelled the sons of Grand Dukes to shovel snow beside common workmen, the same papers give the picture as an example of the intolerable tyranny of socialism, as a warning of what may happen in England if the revolutionists are listened to. That for years that very thing had been happening in England for the purposes of war, that we were extremely proud of it, and had lauded it as wholesome discipline and a thing which made conscription fine and democratic, is something that we are unable even to perceive, so strong and yet so subtle are the unconscious factors of opinion. This peculiar psychological twist explains, of course, several things: why we are all socialists for the purposes of war, and why socialism can then give results which nothing else could give; why we cannot apply the same methods successfully to peace; and why the economic miracles possible in war are not possible in peace. And the outcome is that forces, originally social and unifying, are at present factors only of disruption and destruction, not merely internationally, but, as we shall see presently, nationally as well.

When the accomplishment of certain things—the production of shells, the assembling of certain forces, the carriage of cargoes—became a matter of life and death, we did not argue about nationalisation or socialism; we put it into effect, and it worked. There existed for war a will which found a way round all the difficulties of credit adjustment, distribution, adequate wages, unemployment, incapacitation. We could take over the country’s railways and mines, control its trade, ration its bread, and decide without much discussion that those things were indispensable for its purposes. But we can do none of these things for the upbuilding of the country in peace time. The measures to which we turn when we feel that the country must produce or perish, are precisely the measures which, when the war is over, we declare are the least likely to get anything done at all. We could make munitions; we cannot make houses. We could clothe and feed our soldiers and satisfy all their material wants; we cannot do that for the workers. Unemployment in war-time was practically unknown; the problem of unemployment in peace time seems beyond us. Millions go unclothed; thousands of workers who could make clothes are without employment. One speaks of the sufferings of the army of poverty as though they were dispensations of heaven. We did not speak thus of the needs of soldiers in war-time. If soldiers wanted uniforms and wool was obtainable, weavers did not go unemployed. Then there existed a will and common purpose. That will and common purpose the patriotism of peace-time cannot give us.

Yet, again, we cannot always be at war. Women must have time and opportunity to bear and to bring up children, and men to build up a country-side, if only in order to have men for war to slay and things for war to destroy. Patriotism fails as a social cement within the nation at peace, it fails as a stimulus to its constructive tasks; and as between nations, we know it acts as a violent irritant and disruptive force.

We need not question the genuineness of the emotion which moves our duchess when she knits socks for the dear boys in the trenches—or when she fulminates against the same dear boys as working men when they come home. As soldiers she loved them because her hatred of Germans—that atrocious, hostile ‘herd’—was deep and genuine. She felt like killing Germans herself. Consequently, to those who risked their lives to fulfil this wish of hers, her affections went out readily enough. But why should she feel any particular affection for men who mine coal, or couple railway trucks, or catch fish in the North Sea? Dangerous as are those tasks, they are not visibly and intimately related to her own fierce emotions. The men performing them are just workpeople, the relation of whose labour to her own life is not, perhaps, always very clear. The suggestion that she should scrub floors or knit socks for them would appear to her as merely silly or offensive.

But unfortunately the story does not end there. During these years of war her very genuine emotions of hate were fed and nourished by war propaganda; her emotional hunger was satisfied in some measure by the daily tale of victories over the enemy. She had, as it were, ten thousand Germans for breakfast every morning. And when the War stopped, certainly something went out of her life. No one would pretend that these flaming passions of five years went for so little in her emotional experience that they could just be dropped from one day to another without something going unsatisfied.

And then she cannot get coal; her projected journey to the Riviera is delayed by a railway strike; she has troubles with servants; faces a preposterous super-tax and death duties; an historical country seat can no longer be maintained and old associations must be broken up; Labour threatens revolution—or her morning paper says it does; Labour leaders say grossly unfair things about dukes. Here, indeed, is a new hostility, a new enemy tribe, on which the emotions cultivated so assiduously during five years, but hungry and unfed since the War, can once more feed and find some satisfaction. The Bolshevist, or the Labour agitator, takes the place of the Hun; the elements of enmity and disruption are already present.

And something similar takes place with the miner, or labour man, in reference to the duchess and what she stands for. For him also the main problem of life had resolved itself during the War into something simple and emotional; an enemy to be fought and overcome. Not a puzzling intellectual difficulty, with all the hesitations and uncertainties of intellectual decision dependent upon sustained mental effort. The rights and wrongs were settled for him; right was our side, wrong the enemy’s. What we had to do was to crush him. That done, it would be a better world, his country ‘a land fit for heroes to live in.’

On return from the War he does not find quite that. He can, for instance, get no house fit to live in at all. High prices, precarious employment. What is wrong? There are fifty theories, all puzzling. As to housing, he is sometimes told it is his own fault; the building unions won’t permit dilution. When the ‘high-brows’ are all at sixes and sevens, what is a man to think? But it is suggested to him that behind all this is one enemy: the Capitalist. His papers have a picture of him: very like the Hun. Now here is something emotionally familiar. For years he has learned to hate and fight, to embody all problems in the one problem of fighting some definite—preferably personified—enemy. Smash him; get him by the throat, and then all these brain-racking puzzles will clear themselves up. Our side, our class, our tribe, will then be on top, and there will be no real solution until it is. To this respond all the emotions, the whole state of feeling which years of war have cultivated. Once more the problem of life is simple; one of power, domination, the fight for mastery; loyalty to our side, our lot, ‘right or wrong.’ Workers to be masters, workers who have been shoved and ordered about, to do the shoving and the ordering. Dictatorship of the proletariat. The headaches disappear and one can live emotionally free once more.

There are ‘high-brows’ who will even philosophise the thing for him, and explain that only the psychology of war and violence will give the emotional drive to get anything done; that only by the myths which mark patriotism can real social change be made. Just as for the hate which keeps war going, the enemy State must be a single ‘person,’ a collectivity in which any one German can be killed as vengeance or reprisal for any other,[63] so ‘the capitalist class’ must be a personality, if class hatred is to be kept alive in such a way as to bring the class war to victory.

But that theory overlooks the fact that just as the nationalism which makes war also destroys the Alliances by which victory can be made effective, so the transfer of the psychology of Nationalism to the industrial field has the same effect of Balkanisation. We get in both areas, not the definite triumph of a cohesive group putting into operation a clear-cut and understandable programme or policy, but the chaotic conflict of an infinite number of groups unable to co-operate effectively for any programme.

If the hostilities which react to the Syndicalistic appeal were confined to the Capitalist, there might be something to be said for it from the point of view of the Labour movement. But forces so purely instinctive, by their very nature repelling the restraint of self-imposed discipline by intelligent foresight of consequences, cannot be the servant of an intelligent purpose, they become its master. The hostility becomes more important than the purpose. To the industrial Jingo, as to the nationalist Jingo, all foreigners are potential enemies. The hostile tribe or herd may be constituted by very small differences; slight variations of occupation, interest, race, speech, and—most potently of all perhaps—dogma or belief. Heresy-hunting is, of course, one manifestation of tribal animosity; and a heretic is the person who has the insufferable impudence to disagree with us.

So the Sorelian philosophy of violence and instinctive pugnacity gives us, not the effective drive of a whole movement against the present social order (for that would require order, discipline, self-control, tolerance, and toleration); it gives us the tendency to an infinite splitting of the Labour movement. No sooner does the Left of some party break off and found a new party than it is immediately confronted by its own ‘Leftism.’ And your dogmatist hates the dissenting member of his own sect more fiercely than the rival sect; your Communist some rival Communism more bitterly than the Capitalist. Already the Labour movement is crossed by the hostilities of Communist against Socialist, the Second International against the Third, the Third against the Fourth; Trades Unionism by the hostility of skilled against unskilled, and in much of Europe there is also the conflict of town against country.

This tendency has happily not yet gone far in England; but here, as elsewhere, it represents the one great danger, the tendency to be watched. And it is a tendency that has its moral and psychological roots in the same forces which have given us the chaos in the international field: The deep human lust for coercion, domination; the irksomeness of toleration, thought, self-discipline.

The final difficulty in social and political discussion is, of course, the fact that the ultimate values—what is the highest good, what is the worst evil—cannot usually be argued about at all; you accept them, you see that they are good or bad as the case may be, or you don’t.

Yet we cannot organise a society save on the basis of some sort of agreement concerning these least common denominators; the final argument for the view that Western Europe had to destroy German Prussianism was that the system challenged certain ultimate moral values common to Western society. On the morrow of the sinking of the Lusitania an American writer pointed out that if the cold-blooded slaughter of innocent women and children were accepted as a normal incident of war, like any other, the whole moral standards of the West would then definitely be placed on another plane. That elusive but immeasurably important moral sense, which gives a society sufficient community of aim to make common action possible, would have been radically altered. The ancient world—highly civilised and cultured as much of it was—had a Sittlichkeit which made the chattel-slavery of the greater part of the human race an entirely normal—and, as they thought, inevitable—condition of things. It was accepted by the slaves themselves, and it was this acquiescence in the arrangement by both parties to it which mainly accounted for its continuance through a very long period of a very high civilisation. The position of women illustrates the same thing. There are to-day highly developed civilisations in which a man of education buys a wife, or several, as in the West he would buy a racehorse. And the wife, or wives, accept that situation; there can be no change in that particular matter until certain quite ‘unarguable’ moral values have altered in the minds of those concerned.

The American writer raised, therefore, an extremely important question in relation to the War. Has its total outcome affected certain values of the fundamental kind just indicated? What has been its effect upon social impulses? Has it any direct relation to certain moral tendencies that have succeeded it?

Perhaps the War is now old enough to enable us to face a few quite undeniable facts with some measure of detachment.

When the Germans bombarded Scarborough early in the War, there was such a hurricane of moralisation that one rejoiced that this War would not be marked on our side, at least, by the bombardment of open cities. But when our Press began to print reports of French bombs falling on circus tents full of children, scores being killed, there was simply no protest at all. And one of the humours of the situation was that after more than a year, in which scores of such reports had appeared in the Press, some journalistic genius began an agitation on behalf of ‘reprisals’ for air raids.[64]

At a time when it seemed doubtful whether the Germans would sign the Treaty or not, and just what would be the form of the Hungarian Government, the Evening News printed the following editorial:—

Now the prevailing thesis of the British, and particularly the Northcliffe Press, in reference to Bolshevism, was that it is a form of tyranny imposed by a cruel minority upon a helpless people. The proposal amounts, therefore, either to killing civilians for a form of Government which they cannot possibly help, or to an admission that Bolshevism has the support of the populace, and that as the outcome of our war for democracy we should refuse them the right to choose the government they prefer.

When the Germans bombarded Scarborough and dropped bombs on London, the Northcliffe Press called Heaven to witness (a) that only fiends in human form could make war on helpless civilian populations, women, and children; (b) that not only were the Huns dastardly baby-killers for making war in that fashion, but were bad psychologists as well, because our anger at such unheard-of devilries would only render our resistance more unconquerable than ever; and (c) that no consideration whatever would induce English soldiers to blow women and children to pulp—unless it were as a reprisal. Well, Lord Northcliffe proposed to commence a war against Hungarians (as it had already been commenced against the Russians) by such a wholesale massacre of the civil population that a Government, which he tells us is imposed upon them against their will, may ‘lose its attractions.’ This would be, of course, the second edition of the war waged to destroy militarist modes of thought, to establish the reign of righteousness and the protection of the defenceless and the weak.

The Evening News is the paper, by the way, whose wrath became violent when it learned that some Quakers and others were attempting to make some provision for the children of interned Austrians and Germans. Those guilty of such ‘un-English’ conduct as a little mercy and pity extended to helpless children, were hounded in headlines day after day as ‘Hun-coddlers,’ traitors ‘attempting to placate the Hun tiger by bits of cake to its cubs’; and when the War is all over—a year after all the fighting is stopped—a vicar of the English Church opposes, with indignation, the suggestion that his parish should be contaminated by ‘enemy’ children brought from the famine area to save them from death.[66]

On March 3, 1919, Mr Winston Churchill stated in the House of Commons, speaking of the blockade:—

One might take this as a prelude to a change of policy. Not at all: he added that we were ‘enforcing the blockade with rigour’ and would continue to do so.

Mr Churchill’s indication as to how the blockade acts is important. We spoke of it as ‘punishment’ for Germany’s crimes, or Bolshevist infamies, as the case may be. But it did not punish ‘Germany’ or the Bolshevists.[67] Its penalties are in a peculiar degree unevenly distributed. The country districts escape almost entirely, the peasants can feed themselves. It falls on the cities. But even in the cities the very wealthy and the official classes can as a rule escape. Virtually its whole weight—as Mr Churchill implies—falls upon the urban poor, and particularly the urban child population, the old, the invalids, the sick. Whoever may be the parties responsible for the War, these are guiltless. But it is these we punish.

Very soon after the Armistice there was ample evidence available as to the effect of the blockade, both in Russia and in Central Europe. Officers of our Army of Occupation reported that their men ‘could not stand’ the spectacle of the suffering around them. Organisations like the ‘Save the Children Fund’ devoted huge advertisements to familiarising the public with the facts. Considerable sums for relief were raised—but the blockade was maintained. There was no connection between the two things—our foreign policy and the famine in Europe—in the public mind. It developed a sort of moral shock absorber. Facts did not reach it or disturb its serenity.

This was revealed in a curious way at the time of the signature of the Treaty. At the gathering of the representatives, the German delegate spoke sitting down. It turned out afterwards that he was so ill and distraught, that he dared not trust himself to stand up. Every paper was full of the incident, as also of the fact that the paper-cutter in front of him on the table was found afterwards to be broken; that he placed his gloves upon his copy of the Treaty; and that he had thrown away his cigarette on entering the room. These were the offences which prompted the Daily Mail to say: ‘After this no one will treat the Huns as civilised or repentant.’ Almost the entire Press rang with the story of ‘Rantzau’s insult.’ But not one paper, so far as I could discover, paid any attention to what Rantzau had said. He said:—