Let us dispose of one or two of the more devastating confusions in the foregoing.

First there is the everlasting muddle as to the internationalist attitude towards the likelihood of war. To Colonel Roosevelt one is an internationalist or ‘pacifist’ because one thinks war will not take place. Whereas probably the strongest motive of internationalism is the conviction that without it war is inevitable, that in a world of rival nationalisms war cannot be avoided. If those who hate war believe that the present order will without effort give them peace, why in the name of all the abuse which their advocacy brings on their heads should they bother further about the matter?

Secondly, internationalism is assumed to be the alternative to the employment of force or power of arms, whereas it is the organisation of force, of power (latent or positive) to a common—an international—end.

Our incurable habit of giving to homely but perfectly healthy and justifiable reasons of conduct a high faluting romanticism sometimes does morality a very ill service. When in political situations—as in the making of a Peace Treaty—a nation is confronted by the general alternative we are now discussing, the grounds of opposition to a co-operative or ‘Liberal’ or ‘generous’ settlement are almost always these: ‘Generosity’ is lost upon a people as crafty and treacherous as the enemy; he mistakes generosity for weakness; he will take advantage of it; his nature won’t be softened by mild treatment; he understands nothing but force.

The assumption is that the liberal policy is based upon an appeal to the better side of the enemy; upon arousing his nobler nature. And such an assumption concerning the Hun or the Bolshevik, for instance (or at an earlier date, the Boer or the Frenchman), causes the very gorge of the Roosevelt-Bottomley patriot to rise in protest. He simply does not believe in the effective operation of so remote a motive.

But the real ground of defence for the liberal policy is not the existence of an abnormal if heretofore successfully disguised nobility on the part of the enemy, but of his very human if not very noble fears which, from our point of view, it is extremely important not to arouse or justify. If our ‘punishment’ of him creates in his mind the conviction that we are certain to use our power for commercial advantage, or that in any case our power is a positive danger to him, he will use his recovered economic strength for the purpose of resisting it; and we should face a fact so dangerous and costly to us.

To take cognisance of this fact, and to shape our policy accordingly is not to attribute to the enemy any particular nobility of motive. But almost always when that policy is attacked, it is attacked on the ground of its ‘Sunday School’ assumption of the accessibility of the enemy to gratitude or ‘softening’ in Colonel Roosevelt’s phrase.

We reach in the final analysis of the interplay of motive a very clear political pragmatism. Either policy will justify itself, and by the way it works out in practice, prove that it is right.

Here is a statesman—Italian, say—who takes the ‘realist’ view, and comes to a Peace Conference which may settle for centuries the position of his country in the world—its strength, its capacity for defending itself, the extent of its resources. In the world as he knows it, a country has one thing, and one thing only, upon which it can depend for its national security and the defence of its due rights; and that thing is its own strength. Italy’s adequate defence must include the naval command of the Adriatic and a strategic position in the Tyrol. This means deep harbours on the Dalmatian coast and the inclusion in the Tyrol of a very considerable non-Italian population. To take them may, it is true, not only violate the principle of nationality but shut off the new Yugo-Slav nation from access to the sea and exchange one irredentism for another. But what can the ‘realist’ Italian statesman, whose first duty is to his own country do? He is sorry, but his own nationality and its due protection are concerned; and the Italian nation will be insecure without those frontiers and those harbours. Self-preservation is the law of life for nations as for other living things. You have, unfortunately, a condition in which the security of one means the insecurity of another, and if a statesman in these circumstances has to choose which of the two is to be secure, he must choose his own country.

Some day, of course, there may come into being a League of Nations so effective that nations can really look to it for their safety. Meantime they must look to themselves. But, unfortunately, for each nation to take these steps about strategic frontiers means not only killing the possibility of an effective League: it means, sooner or later, killing the military alliance which is the alternative. If one Alsace-Lorraine could poison European politics in the way it did, what is going to be the effect ultimately of the round dozen that we have created under the treaty? The history of Britain in reference to Arab and Egyptian Nationality; of France in relation to Poland and other Russian border States; of all the Allies in reference to Japanese ambitions in China and Siberia, reveals what is, fundamentally, a precisely similar dilemma.

When the statesmen—Italian or other—insist upon strategic frontiers and territories containing raw materials, on the ground that a nation must look to itself because we live in a world in which international arrangements cannot be depended on, they can be quite certain that the reason they give is a sound one: because their own action will make it so: their action creates the very conditions to which they appeal as the reason for it. Their decision, with the popular impulse of sacred egoism which supports it, does something more than repudiate Mr Wilson’s principles; it is the beginning of the disruption of the Alliance upon which their countries have depended. The case is put in a manifesto issued a year or two ago by a number of eminent Americans from which we have already quoted in Chapter III.

It says:—

That is why, when in the past the realist statesman has sometimes objected that he does not believe in internationalism because it is not practical, I have replied that it is not practical because he does not believe in it.

The prerequisite to the creation of a society is the Social Will. And herein lies the difficulty of making any comparative estimate of the respective risks of the alternative courses. We admit that if the nations would sink their sacred egoisms and pledge their power to mutual and common protection, the risk of such a course would disappear. We get the paradox that there is no risk if we all take the risk. But each refuses to begin. William James has illustrated the position:—

CHAPTER VII

THE SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT

At least that is the alternative as many of us see it. And if the only alternative to an impulse spending itself in hostilities and hatreds destructive of social cohesion, were the sheer restraint of impulse by calculation and reason; if our choice were truly between chaos, anarchy, and the perpetual repression of all spontaneous and vigorous impulse—then the choice of a fatalistic refusal to reason would be justifiable.

But happily that is not the alternative. The function of reason and discipline is not to repress instinct and impulse, but to turn those forces into directions in which they may have free play without disaster. The function of the compass is not to check the power of the ship’s engines; it is to indicate a direction in which the power can be given full play, because the danger of running on to the rocks has been obviated.

Let us first get the mere facts straight—facts as they have worked out in the War and the Peace.

It is not true that the directions taken by our instincts cannot in any way be determined by our intelligence. ‘A man’s impulses are not fixed from the beginning by his native disposition: within certain limits they are profoundly modified by his circumstances and way of life.’[70] What we regard as the ‘instinctive’ part of our character is, again, within large limits very malleable: by beliefs, by social circumstances, by institutions, and above all by the suggestibility of tradition, the work is often of individual minds.

It is not so much the character of our impulsive and instinctive life that is changed by these influences, as the direction. The elements of human nature may remain unchangeable, but the manifestations resulting from the changing combinations may be infinitely various as are the forms of matter which result from changing combinations of the same primary elements.

It is not a choice between a life of impulse and emotion on the one side, and wearisome repressions on the other. The perception that certain needs are vital will cause us to use our emotional energy for one purpose instead of another. And just because the traditions that have grouped around nationalism turn our combativeness into the direction of war, the energy brought into play by that impulse is not available for the creativeness of peace. Having become habituated to a certain reagent—the stimulus of some personal or visible enemy—energy fails to react to a stimulus which, with a different way of life, would have sufficed. Because we must have gin to summon up our energy, that is no proof that energy is impossible without it. It is hardly for an inebriate to laud the life of instinct and impulse. For the time being that is not the attitude and tendency that most needs encouragement.

As to the fact that the instinctive and impulsive part of our behaviour is dirigible and malleable by tradition and discussion, that is not only admitted, but it is apt to be over-emphasised—by those who insist upon the ‘unchangeability of human nature.’ The importance which we attached to the repression of pacifist and defeatist propaganda during the War, and of Bolshevist agitation after the War, proves that we believe these feelings, that we allege to be unchangeable, can be changed too easily and readily by the influence of ideas, even wrong ones.

The type of feeling which gave us the Treaty was in a large degree a manufactured feeling, in the sense that it was the result of opinion, formed day by day by a selection only of the facts. For this manufacture of opinion, we consciously created a very elaborate machinery, both of propaganda and of control of news. But that organisation of public opinion, justifiable in itself perhaps as a war measure, was not guided (as the result shows) by an understanding of what the political ends, which, in the early days of the War, we declared to be ours, would need in the way of psychology. Our machinery developed a psychology which made our higher political aims quite impossible of realisation.

Public opinion, ‘human nature,’ would have been more manageable, its ‘instincts’ would have been sounder, and we should have had a Europe less in disintegration, if we had told as far as possible that part of the truth which our public bodies (State, Church, Press, the School) were largely occupied in hiding. But the opinion which dictated the policy of repression is itself the result of refusing to face the truth. To tell the truth is the remedy here suggested.

The Paradox of the Peace

The supreme paradox of the Peace is this:—

We went into the War with certain very definitely proclaimed principles, which we declared to be more valuable than the lives of the men that were sacrificed in their defence. We were completely victorious, and went into the Conference with full power, so far as enemy resistance was concerned, to put those principles into effect.[71] We did not use the victory which our young men had given us to that end, but for enforcing a policy which was in flat contradiction to the principles we had originally proclaimed.

In some respects the spectacle is the most astounding of all history. It is literally true to say that millions of young soldiers gladly gave their lives for ideals to which the survivors, when they had the power to realise them (again so far as physical force can give us power,) showed complete indifference, sometimes a contemptuous hostility.

It was not merely an act of the statesmen. The worst features of the Treaty were imposed by popular feeling—put into the Treaty by statesmen who did not believe in them, and only included them in order to satisfy public opinion. The policy of President Wilson failed in part because of the humane and internationalist opinion of the America of 1916 had become the fiercely chauvinist and coercive opinion of 1919, repudiating the President’s efforts.

Part of the story of these transformations has been told in the preceding pages. Let us summarise the story as a whole.

We saw at the beginning of the War a real feeling for the right of peoples to choose their own form of government, for the principle of nationality. At the end of the War we deny that right in half a score of cases,[72] where it suits our momentary political or military interest. The very justification of ‘necessity,’ which shocks our conscience when put forward by the enemy, is the one we invoke callously at the peace—or before it, as when we agree to allow Czarist Russia to do what she will with Poland, and Italy with Serbia. Having sacrificed the small State to Russia in 1916, we are prepared to sacrifice Russia to the small State in 1919, by encouraging the formation of border independencies, which, if complete independencies, must throttle Russia, and which no ‘White’ Russian would accept. While encouraging the lesser States to make war on Russia, we subsidise White Russian military leaders who will certainly destroy the small States if successful. We entered the War for the destruction of militarism, and to make disarmament possible, declaring that German arms were the cause of our arms; and having destroyed German arms, we make ours greater than they were before the War, and introduce such new elements as the systematic arming of African savages for European warfare. We fought to make the secret bringing about of war by military or diplomatic cliques impossible, and after the Armistice the decision to wage war on the Russian Republic is made without even public knowledge, in opposition to sections in the Cabinets concerned, by cliques of whose composition the public is completely ignorant.[73] The invasion of Russia from the north, south, east, and west, by European, Asiatic, and negro troops, is made without a declaration of war, after a solemn statement by the chief spokesman of the Allies that there should be no invasion. Having declared, during the War, on a score of occasions, that we were not fighting against any right or interest of the German people[74]—or the German people at all—because we realised that only by ensuring that right and interest ourselves could we turn Germany from the ways of the past, at the peace we impose conditions which make it impossible for the German people even adequately to feed their population, and leave them no recourse but the recreation of their power. Having promised at the Armistice not to use our power for the purpose of preventing the due feeding of Germany, we continue for months a blockade which, even by the testimony of our own officials, creates famine conditions and literally kills very many of the children.

At the beginning of the War, our statesmen, if not our public, had some rudimentary sense of the economic unity of mankind, of our need of one another’s work, and the idea of blockading half a world in time of dire scarcity would have appalled them. Yet at the Armistice it was done so light-heartedly that, having at last abandoned it, they have never even explained what they proposed to accomplish by it, for, says Mr Maynard Keynes. ‘It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problem of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four.’[75] At the beginning of the War we invoked high heaven to witness the danger and anomaly of autocratic government in our day. We were fighting for Parliamentary institutions, ‘open Covenants openly arrived at.’ After victory, we leave the real settlement of Europe to be made by two or three Prime Ministers, rendering no account of their secret deliberations and discussions to any Parliament until, in practice, it is too late to alter them. At the beginning of the War we were profoundly moved by the wickedness of military terrorism; at its close we employ it—whether by means of starvation, blockade, armed negro savages in German cities, reprisals in Ireland, or the ruthless slaughter of unarmed civilians in India—without creating any strong revulsion of feeling at home. At the beginning of the War we realised that the governmental organisation of hatred with the prostitution of art to ‘hymns of hate’ was vile and despicable. We copied that governmental organisation of hatred, and famous English authors duly produce our hymns of hate.[76] We felt at the beginning that all human freedom was menaced by the German theory of the State as the master of man and not as his instrument, with all that means of political inquisition and repression. When some of its worst features are applied at home, we are so indifferent to the fact that we do not even recognise that the thing against which we fought has been imposed upon ourselves.[77]

Many will dissent from this indictment. Yet its most important item—our indifference to the very evils against which we fought—is something upon which practically all witnesses testifying to the state of public opinion to-day agree. It is a commonplace of current discussion of present-day feeling. Take one or two at random, Sir Philip Gibbs and Mr. Sisley Huddleston, both English journalists. (I choose journalists because it is their business to know the nature of the public mind and spirit.) Speaking of the wholesale starvation, unimaginable misery, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Mr. Huddleston writes:—

Mr. Huddleston was present throughout most of the Conference. This is his verdict:—

As to the future:—

And as to the outcome on the mind of the people:—

Sir Philip Gibbs renders on the whole a similar verdict. He says:—

And perhaps most important of all (though the clergy here just stand for the complacent mob mind; they were no worse than the laity), this:—

From Passion to Indifference: the Result of Drift

A common attitude just now is something like this:—

‘With the bitter memory of all that the Allies had suffered strong upon them, it is not astonishing that at the moment of victory an attitude of judicial impartiality proved too much to ask of human nature. The real terms will depend upon the fashion in which the formal terms are enforced. Much of the letter of the Treaty—trial of the Kaiser, etc.—has already disappeared. It is an intolerable priggishness to rake up this very excusable debauch just as we are returning to sobriety.’

And that would be true, if, indeed, we had learned the lesson, and were adopting a new policy. But we are not. We have merely in some measure exchanged passion for lassitude and indifference. Later on we shall plead that the lassitude was as ‘inevitable’ as the passion. On such a line of reasoning, it is no good reacting by a perception of consequences against a mood of the moment. That is bad psychology and disastrous politics. To realise what ‘temperamental politics’ have already involved us in, is the first step towards turning our present drift into a more consciously directed progress.

Note where the drift has already carried us with reference to the problem of the new Germany which it was our declared object to create. There were weeks following the Armistice in Germany, when a faithful adherence to the spirit of the declarations made by the Allies during the War would have brought about the utter moral collapse of the Prussianism we had fought to destroy. The Prussian had said to the people: ‘Only Germany’s military power has stood between her and humiliating ruin. The Allies victorious will use their victory to deprive Germany of her vital rights.’ Again and again had the Allies denied this, and Germany, especially young Germany, watched to see which should prove right. A blockade, falling mainly, as Mr Churchill complacently pointed out (months after an armistice whose terms had included a promise to take into consideration the food needs of Germany) upon the feeble, the helpless, the children, answered that question for millions in Germany. Her schools and universities teem with hundreds of thousands stricken in their health, to whom the words ‘never again’ mean that never more will they put their trust in the ‘naïve innocence’ of an internationalism that could so betray them.

The militarism which morally was at so low an ebb at the Armistice, has been rehabilitated by such things as the blockade and its effects, the terms of the Treaty, and by minor but dramatic features like the retention of German prisoners long after Allied prisoners had returned home, and the occupation of German university town by African negroes. So that to-day a League of Nations offered by the Allies would probably be regarded with a contemptuous scepticism—somewhat similar to that with which America now regards the political beatitudes which it applauded in 1916-17.

We are in fact modifying the Treaty. But those modifications will not meet the present situation, though they might well have met the situation in 1918. If we had done then what we are prepared to do now, Europe would have been set on the right road.

Suppose the Allies had said in December, 1918 (as they are in effect being brought to say in 1920): ‘We are not going to play into the hands of your militarists by demanding the surrender of the Kaiser or the punishment of the war criminals, vile as we believe their offences to be. We are not going to stimulate your waning nationalism by demanding an acknowledgment of your sole guilt. Nor are we going to ruin your industry or shatter your credit. On the contrary, we will start by making you a loan, facilitating your purchases of food and raw materials, and we will admit you into the League of Nations.’

We are coming to that. If it could have been our policy early instead of late, how different this story would have been.

And the tragedy is this: To do it late is to cause it to lose its effectiveness, for the situation changes. The measures which would have been adequate in 1918 are inadequate in 1920. It is the story of Home Rule. In the eighties Ireland would have accepted Gladstonian Home Rule as a basis at least of co-operation. English and Ulster opinion was not ready even for Home Rule. Forty years later it had reconciled itself to Home Rule. But by the time Britain was ready for the remedy, the situation had got quite beyond it. It now demanded something for which slow-moving opinion was unprepared. So with a League of Nations. The plan now supported by Conservatives would, as Lord Grey has avowed, have assuredly prevented this War if adopted in place of the mere Arbitration plans of the Hague Conference. At that date the present League of Nations Covenant would have been adequate to the situation. But some of the self-same Conservatives who now talk the language of internationalism—even in economic terms—poured contumely and scorn upon those of us who used it a decade or two since. And now, it is to be feared, the Government for which they are ready will certainly be inadequate to the situation which we face.

‘An evil idealism and self-sacrificing hates.’

‘The cause of this insanity,’ says Sir Philip Gibbs, ‘is the failure of idealism.’ Others write in much the same strain that selfishness and materialism have reconquered the world. But this does not get us very far. By what moral alchemy was this vast outpouring of unselfishness, which sent millions to their death as to a feast (for men cannot die for selfish motives, unless more certain of their heavenly reward than we in the Western world are in the habit of being) turned into selfishness; their high ideals into low desires—if that is what has happened? Can it be a selfishness which ruins and starves us all? Is it selfishness on the part of the French which causes them to adopt towards Germany a policy of vengeance that prevents them receiving the Reparations that they so sorely need? Is it not indeed what one of their writers had called a ‘holy hate,’ instinctive, intuitive, purged of all calculation of advantage or disadvantage? Would not selfishness—enlightened selfishness—have given us not only a sounder Europe in the material sense, but a more humane Europe, with its hostilities softened by the very fact of contact and co-operation, and the very obviousness of our need for one another? The last thing desired here is to raise the old never-ending question of egoism versus altruism. All that is desired is to point out that a mere appeal to feeling, to a ‘sense of righteousness’ and idealism, is not enough. We have an illimitable capacity for sublimating our own motives, and of convincing ourselves completely, passionately, that our evil is good. And the greater our fear that intellectual inquiry, some sceptical rationalism, might shake the certitude of our righteousness, the greater the passion with which we shall stand by the guide of ‘instinct and intuition.’ Can there not be a destructive idealism as well as a social one? What of the Holy Wars? What of the Prussian who, after all, had his ideal, as the Bolshevist has his? What of all fanatics ready to die for their idealism?

It is never the things that are obviously and patently evil that constitute the real menace to mankind. If Prussian nationalism had been nothing but gross lust and cruelty and oppression, as we managed to persuade ourselves during the War that it was, it would never have menaced the world. It did that because it could rally to its end great enthusiasms; because men were ready to die for it. Then it threatened us. Only those things which have some element of good are dangerous.

A Treaty of the character of that Versailles would never have been possible if men had not been able to justify it to themselves on the ground of its punitive justice. The greeds expressed in the annexation of alien territory, and the violation of the principle of nationality, would never have been possible but for the plea of the sacred egoism of patriotism; our country before the enemy’s, our country right or wrong. The assertion of sheer immoralism embodied in this last slogan can be made into the garments of righteousness if only our idealism is instinctive enough.

Some of the worst crimes against justice have been due to the very fierceness of our passion for righteousness—a passion so fierce that it becomes undiscriminating and unseeing. It was the passion for what men believed to be religious truth which gave us the Inquisition and the religious wars; it was the passion for patriotism which made France for so many years, to the astonishment of the world, refuse justice to Dreyfus; it is a righteous loathing for negro crime which has made lynching possible for half a century in the United States, and which prevents the development of an opinion which will insist on its suppression. It is ‘the just anger that makes men unjust.’ The righteous passion that insists on a criminal’s dying for some foul crime, is the very thing which prevents our seeing that the crime was not committed by him at all.

It was something akin to this that made the Treaty of Versailles possible. That is why merely to appeal to idealism and feeling will fail, unless the defect of vision which makes evil appear good is corrected. It is not the feeling which is at fault; it is the defective vision causing feeling to be misused, as in the case of our feeling against the man accused on what seem to us good grounds, of a detestable offence. He is loathsome to our sight, because the crime is loathsome. But when some one else confesses to the crime, our feeling against the innocent man disappears. The direction it took, the object upon which it settled, was due to a misconception.

Obviously that error may occur in politics. Equally certainly something worse may happen. With some real doubt in our mind whether this man is the criminal, we may yet, in the absence of any other culprit, stifle that doubt because of our anger, and our vague desire to have some victim suffer for so vile a crime. Feeling will be at fault, in such a case, as well as vision. And this thing happens, as many a lynching testifies. (‘The innocence of Dreyfus would be a crime,’ said a famous anti-Dreyfusard.) Both defects may have played their part in the tragedy of Versailles. In making our appeal to idealism, we assume that it is there, somewhere, to be aroused on behalf of justice; we must assume, consequently, that if it has not been aroused, or has attached itself to wrong purposes, it is because it has not seen where justice lay.

Our only protection against these miscarriages, by which our passion is borne into the wrong channel, against the innocent while the guilty escape, is to keep our minds open to all the facts, all the truth. But this principle, which we have proclaimed as the very foundation stone of our democratic faith, was the first to go when we began the War. The idea that in war time, most particularly, a democracy needs to know the enemy’s, or the Pacifist, or even the internationalist and liberal case, would have been regarded as a bad joke. Yet the failure to do just that thing inevitably created a conviction that all the wrong was on one side and all the right on the other, and that the problem of the settlement was mainly a problem of ruthless punishment. One of that temper may have come the errors of the Treaty and the miseries that have flowed from them. It was the virtual suppression of free debate on the purposes and aims of the War and their realisation that delivered public opinion into the keeping of the extremest Jingoes when we came to make the peace.

We create the temper that destroys us

Behind the war-time attitude of the belligerents, when they suppressed whatever news might tell in favour of the enemy, was the conviction that if we could really understand the enemy’s position we should not want to fight him. That is probably true. Let us assume that, and assume consequently the need for control of news and discussion. If we are to come to the control by governments of political belief, as we once attempted control by ecclesiastical authority of religious belief, let us face the fact, and drop pretence about freedom of discussion, and see that the organisation of opinion is honest and efficient. There is a great deal to be said for the suppression of freedom of discussion. Some of the greatest minds in the world have refused to accept it as a working principle of society. Theirs is a perfectly arguable, extremely strong and thoroughly honest case.[80] But virtually to subpress the free dissemination of facts, as we have done not only during, but after the War, and at the same time to go on with our talk about free speech, free Press, free discussion, free democracy is merely to add to the insincerities and falsehoods, which can only end by making society unworkable. We not only disbelieve in free discussion in the really vital crises; we disbelieve in truth. That is one fact. There is another related to it. If we frankly admitted that public opinion has to be ‘managed,’ organised, shaped, we should demand that it be done efficiently with a view to the achievement of conscious ends, which we should place before ourselves. What happened during the War was that everybody, including the governments who ought to have been free from the domination of the myths they were engaged in creating, lost sight of the ultimate purposes of the War, and of the fact that they were creating forces which would make the attainment of those ends impossible; rob victory, that is, of its effectiveness.

Note how the process works. We say when war is declared: ‘A truce to discussion. The time is for action, not words.’ But the truce is a fiction. It means, not that talk and propaganda shall cease, only that all liberal contribution to it must cease. The Daily News suspends its internationalism, but the Daily Mail is more fiercely Chauvinist than ever. We must not debate terms. But Mr Bottomley debates them every week, on the text that Germans are to be exterminated like vermin. What results? The natural defenders of a policy even as liberal as that of an Edward Grey are silenced. The function of the liberal Press is suspended. The only really articulate voices on policy are the voices of Lord Northcliffe and Mr Bottomley. On such subjects as foreign policy those gentlemen do not ordinarily embrace all wisdom; there is something to be said in criticism of their views. But in the matter of the future settlement of Europe, to have criticised those views during the War would have exposed the critic to the charge of pro-Germanism. So Chauvinism had it all its own way. For months and years the country heard one view of policy only. The early policy of silence did really impose a certain silence upon the Daily News or the Manchester Guardian; none whatever upon the Times or the Daily Mail. None of us can, day after day, be under the influence of such a process without being affected by it.[81] The British public were affected by it. Sir Edward Grey’s policy began to appear weak, anæmic, pro-German. And in the end he and his colleagues disappeared, partly, at least, as the result of the very policy of ‘leaving it to the Government’ upon which they had insisted at the beginning of the War. And the very group which, in 1914, was most insistent that there should be no criticism of Asquith, or McKenna, or Grey, were the very group whose criticisms turned those leaders out of office! While in 1914 it was accepted as proof of treason to say a word in criticism of (say) Grey, by 1916 it had almost become evidence of treason to say a word for him ... and that while he was still in office!

The history of America’s attitude towards the War displays a similar line of development. We are apt to forget that the League of Nations idea entered the realm of practical politics as the result of a great spontaneous popular movement in America in 1916, as powerful and striking as any since the movement against chattel-slavery. A year of war morale resulted, as has already been noted, in a complete reversal of attitude. America became the opponent and Britain the protagonist of the League of Nations.

In passing, one of the astonishing things is that statesmen, compelled by the conditions of their profession to work with the raw material of public opinion, seem blind to the fact that the total effect of the forces which they set in motion will be to transform opinion and render it intractable. American advisers of President Wilson scouted the idea, when it was suggested to them early in the War, that the growth of the War temper would make it difficult for the President to carry out his policy.[82] A score of times the present writer has heard it said by Americans who ought to have known better, that the public did not care what the foreign policy of the country was, and that the President could carry out any policy that he liked. At that particular moment it was true, but quite obviously there was growing up at the time, as the direct result of war propaganda, a fierce Chauvinism, which should have made it plain to any one who observed its momentum, that the notion of President Wilson’s policy being put into execution after victory was simply preposterous.

Mr Asquith’s Government was thus largely responsible for creating a balance of force in public opinion (as we shall see presently) which was responsible for its collapse. Mr Lloyd George has himself sanctioned a jingoism which, if useful temporarily, becomes later an insuperable obstacle to the putting into force of workable policies. For while Versailles could do what it liked in matters that did not touch the popular passion of the moment, in the matters that did, the statesmen were the victims of the temper they had done so much to create. There was a story current in Paris at the time of the Conference: ‘You can’t really expect to get an indemnity of ten thousand millions, so what is the good of putting it in the Treaty,’ an expert is said to have remarked. ‘My dear fellow,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘if the election had gone on another fortnight, it would have been fifty thousand millions.’ But the insertion of these mythical millions into the Treaty has not been a joke; it has been an enormous obstacle to the reconstruction of Europe. It was just because public opinion was not ready to face facts in time, that the right thing had to be done at the wrong time, when perhaps it was too late. The effect on French policy has been still more important. It is the illusions concerning illimitable indemnities—directly fostered by the Governments in the early days of the Armistice—still dominating French public opinion, which more than anything else, perhaps, explains an attitude on the part of the French Government that has come near to smashing Europe.

Even minds extraordinarily brilliant, as a rule, miscalculated the weight of this factor of public passion stimulated by the hates of war, and the deliberate exploitation of it for purposes of ‘war morale’ and propaganda. Thus Mr Wells,[83] writing even after two years of war, predicted that if the Germans were to make a revolution and overthrow the Kaiser, the Allies would ‘tumble over each other’ to offer Germany generous terms. What is worse is that British propaganda in enemy countries seems to have been based very largely on this assumption.[84] It constituted an elaboration of the offers implicit in Mr Wilson’s speeches, that once Germany was democratised there should be, in Mr Wilson’s words, ‘no reprisal upon the German people, who have themselves suffered all things in this War which they did not choose.’ The statement made by the German rulers that Germany was fighting against a harsh and destructive fate at the hands of the victors, was, President Wilson said, ‘wantonly false.’ ‘No one is threatening the peaceful enterprise of the German Empire.’ Our propaganda in Germany seems to have been an expansion of this text, while the negotiations which preceded the Armistice morally bound us to a ‘Fourteen Points peace’ (less the British reservation touching the Freedom of the Seas). The economic terms of the Peace Treaty, the meaning of which has been so illuminatingly explained by the representative of the British Treasury at the Conference, give the measure of our respect for that obligation of honour, once we had the Germans at our mercy.[85]

Fundamental Falsehoods and their Outcome

We witnessed both in England and America very great changes in the dynamics of opinion. Not only was one type of public man being brought forward and another thrust into the background, but one group of emotions and of motives of public policy were being developed and another group atrophied. The use of the word ‘opinion,’ with its implication of a rationalised process of intellectual decision, may be misleading. ‘Public opinion’ is here used as the sum of the forces which become articulate in a country, and which a government is compelled not necessarily to obey, but to take into account. (A government may bamboozle it or dodge it, but it cannot openly oppose it.)

And when reference is made to the force of ideas—Nationalist or Socialist or Revolutionary—a power which we all admit by our panic fears of defeatist or Red Propaganda, it is necessary to keep in mind the kind of force that is meant. One speaks of Communist or Socialist, Pacifist or Patriotic ideas gaining influence, or creating a ferment. The idea of Communism, for instance, has obviously played some part in the vast upheavals that have followed the War.[86] But in a world where the great majority are still condemned to intense physical labour in order to live at all, where peoples as a whole are overworked, harassed, pre-occupied, it is impossible that ideas like those of Karl Marx should be subjected to elaborate intellectual analysis. Rather is it an idea—of the common ownership of wealth or its equal distribution, of poverty being the fault of a definite class of the corporate body—an idea which fits into a mood produced largely by the prevailing conditions of life, which thus becomes the predominating factor of the new public opinion. Now foreign policy is certainly influenced, and in some great crises determined, by public opinion. But that opinion is not the resultant of a series of intellectual analyses of problems of Balkan nationalities or of Eastern frontiers; that is an obvious impossibility for a busy headline-reading public, hard at work all day and thirsty for relaxation and entertainment at night. The public opinion which makes itself felt in Foreign Policy—which, when war is in the balance after a longish period of peace, gives the preponderance of power to the most Chauvinistic elements; which, at the end of a war and on the eve of Treaty-making, as in the December 1918 election, insists upon a rigorously punitive peace—this opinion is the result of a few predominant ‘sovereign ideas’ or conceptions giving a direction to certain feelings.

Take one such sovereign idea, that of the enemy nation as a person: the conception of it as a completely responsible corporate body. Some offence is committed by a German: ‘Germany’ did it, Germany including all Germans. To punish any German is to inflict satisfactory punishment for the offence, to avenge it. The idea, when we examine it, is found to be extremely abstract, with but the faintest relation to human realities. ‘They drowned my brother,’ said an Allied airman, when asked his feelings on a reprisal bombing raid over German cities. Thus, because a sailor from Hamburg drowns an Englishman in the North Sea, an old woman in a garret in Freiburg, or some children, who have but dimly heard of the war, and could not even remotely be held responsible for it, or have prevented it, are killed with a clear conscience because they are German. We cannot understand the Chinese, who punish one member of a family for another’s fault, yet that is very much more rational than the conception which we accept as the most natural thing in the world. It is never questioned, indeed, until it is applied to ourselves. When the acts of British troops in Ireland or India, having an extraordinary resemblance to German acts in Belgium, are taken by certain American newspapers as showing that ‘Britain,’ (i.e. British people) is a bloodthirsty monster who delights in the killing of unarmed priests or peasants, we know that somehow the foreign critic has got it all wrong. We should realise that for some Irishman or Indian to dismember a charwoman or decapitate a little girl in Somersetshire, because of the crime of some Black and Tan in Cork, or English General at Amritsar, would be unadulterated savagery, a sort of dementia. In any case the poor folk in Somerset were not responsible; millions of English folk are not. They are only dimly aware of what goes on in India or Ireland, and are not really able in all matters, by any means, to control their government—any more than the Americans are able to control theirs.

Yet the idea of responsibility attaching to a whole group, as justification for retaliation, is a very ancient idea, savage, almost animal in its origin. And anything can make a collectivity. To one small religious sect in a village it is a rival sect who are the enemies of the human race; in the mind of the tortured negro in the Congo any man, woman, or child of the white world could fairly be punished for the pains that he has suffered.[87] The conception has doubtless arisen out of something protective, some instinct useful, indispensable to the race; as have so many of the instincts which, applied unadapted to altered conditions, become socially destructive.

Here then is evidence of a great danger, which can, in some measure, be avoided on one condition: that the truth about the enemy collectively is told in such a way as to be a reminder to us not to slip into injustices that, barbarous in themselves, drag us back into barbarism.

But note how all the machinery of Press control and war-time colleges of propaganda prepared the public mind for the extremely difficult task of the settlement and Treaty-making that lay before it. (It was a task in which everything indicated that, unless great care were taken, public judgment would be so swamped in passion that a workable peace would be impossible.) The more tribal and barbaric aspect of the conception of collective responsibility was fortified by the intensive and deliberate exploitation of atrocities during the years of the War. The atrocities were not just an incident of war-time news: the principal emotions of the struggle came to centre around them. Millions whom the obscure political debate behind the conflict left entirely cold, were profoundly moved by these stories of cruelty and barbarity. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was among those who urged their systematic exploitation on that ground, in a Christmas communication to the Times.[88] With reference to stories of German cruelty, he said:—