JFrartk
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 FRANK J. KLINGBERG
 
 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY
 
 "THE GREAT ILLUSION' 
 CONTROVERSY 
 
 ' Mr. Angell's pamphlet was a work as unimposing in form as it was daring in expres- 
 sion. For a time nothing was heard of it in public, but many of us will remember the 
 curious way in which ... " Norman Angellism " suddenly became one of the principal 
 topics of discussion amongst politicians and journalists all over Europe. Naturally at 
 first it was the apparently extravagant and paradoxical elements that were fastened upon 
 most that the whole theory of the commercial basis of war was wrong, that no 
 modern war could make a profit for the victors, and that-^-most astonishing thing of all 
 a successful war might leave the conquerors who received the indemnity relatively 
 worse off than the conquered who raid it. People who had been brought up in the 
 acceptance of the idea that a war between nations was analogous to the struggle of two 
 errand boys for an apple, and that victory inevitably meant economic gain, were amazed 
 into curiosity. Men who had never examined a Pacifist argument before read Mr. 
 Angell's book. Perhaps they thought that his doctrines sounded so extraordinarily 
 like nonsense that there really must be some sense in them or nobody would have 
 dared to propound them.' The New Stateman, October 1 1, 1913. 
 
 'The fundamental proposition of the book is a mistake. . . . And the proposition 
 that the extension of national territory that is the bringing of a large amount of prop- 
 erty under a single administration is not to the financial advantage of a nation appears 
 to me as illusory as to maintain that business on a small capital is as profitable as on a 
 large. ... The armaments of European States now are not so much for protection 
 against conquest as to secure to themselves the utmost possible share of the unexploited 
 or imperfectly exploited regions of the world.' The late ADMIRAL MAHAN. 
 
 'I have long ago described the policy of The Great Illusion . . . not only as a childish 
 absurdity but a mischievous and immoral sophism.' MR. FREDERIC HARRISON. 
 
 ' Among the mass of printed books there are a few that may be counted as acts, 
 not books. The Control Social was indisputably one; and I venture to suggest to you 
 that The Great Illusion is another. The thesis of Galileo was not more diametrically 
 opposed to current ideas than those of Norman Angell. Yet it had in the end a certain 
 measure of success.' VISCOUNT ESHER. 
 
 'When all criticisms are spent, it remains to express a debt of gratitude to Mr. Angell. 
 He belongs to the cause of internationalism the greatest of all the causes to which a man 
 can set his hands in these days. The cause will not triumph by economics. But it 
 cannot reject any ally. And if the economic appeal is not final, it has its weight. " We 
 shall perish of hunger," it has been said, "in order to have success in murder." To those 
 who have ears for that saying, it cannot be said too often.' Political Thought in England, 
 from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day, by ERNEST BARKER. 
 
 'A wealth of closely reasoned argument which makes the book one of the most damag- 
 ing indictments that have yet appeared of the principles governing the relation of 
 civilized nations to one another,' The Quarterly Review. 
 
 'Ranks its author with Cobden amongst the greatest of our pamphleteers, perhaps 
 the greatest since Swift.' The Nation. 
 
 'No book has attracted wider attention or has done more to stimulate thought in the 
 present century than The Great Illusion.' The Daily Mail. 
 
 'One of the most brilliant contributions to the literature of international relations 
 which has appeared for a very long time.' Journal of the Institute of Bankers. 
 
 'After five and a half years in the wilderness, Mr. Norman Angell has come back. . . . 
 His book provoked one of the great controversies of this generation. . . . To-day, Mr. 
 Angell, whether he likes it or not. is a prophet whose prophesies have come true. . . . 
 It is hardly possible to open a current newspaper without the eye lighting on some fresh 
 vindication of the once despised and rejected doctrine of Norman Angellism.' The Daily 
 News, February 25, 1920.
 
 THE 
 FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 A SEQUEL TO 
 
 "THE GREAT ILLUSION" 
 BY 
 
 NORMAN ANGELL 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE CENTURY CO. 
 
 1921
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 PATRIOTISM UNDER THREE FLAGS 
 
 THE GREAT ILLUSION 
 
 THE FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL POLITY 
 
 WHY FREEDOM MATTERS 
 
 WAR AND THE WORKER 
 
 AMERICA AND THE WORLD STATE (AMERICA) 
 
 PRUSSIANISM AND ITS DESTRUCTION 
 
 THE WORLD'S HIGHWAY (AMERICA) 
 
 WAR AIMS 
 
 DANGERS OF HALF-PREPAREDNESS (AMERICA) 
 
 POLITICAL CONDITIONS OF ALLIED SUCCESS (AMERICA) 
 
 THE BRITISH REVOLUTION AND THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (AMERICA) 
 
 THE PEACE TREATY AND THE ECONOMIC CHAOS 
 
 Copyright, 1921, by 
 THE CENTURY Co. 
 
 Printed in the U. S. A.
 
 Colieg* 
 Library 
 
 HC 
 
 To H. S. 
 
 1567C76
 
 INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 
 
 THE case which is argued in these pages includes the exami- 
 nation of certain concrete matters which very obviously and 
 directly touch important American interests American for- 
 eign trade and investments, the exchanges, immigration, ar- 
 maments, taxation, industrial unrest and the effect of these on 
 social and political organisation. Yet the greatest American 
 interest here discussed is not any one of those particular 
 issues, or even the sum of them, but certain underlying forces 
 which more than anything else, perhaps, influence all of them. 
 The American reader will have missed the main bearing of 
 the argument elaborated in these pages unless that point can 
 be made clear. 
 
 Let us take a few of the concrete issues just mentioned. 
 The opening chapter deals with the motives which may push 
 Great Britain still to struggle for the retention of predomi- 
 nant power at sea. The force of those motives is obviously 
 destined to be an important factor in American politics, in 
 determining, for instance, the amount of American taxa- 
 tion. It bears upon the decisions which American voters and 
 American statesmen will be called upon to make in American 
 elections within the next few years. Or take another aspect 
 of the same question: the peculiar position of Great Britain 
 in the matter of her dependence upon foreign food. This is 
 shown to be typical of a condition common to very much of 
 the population of Europe, and brings us to the problem of the 
 pressure of population in the older civilisations upon the 
 
 vii
 
 viii INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION 
 
 means of subsistence. That "biological pressure" is certain, 
 in some circumstances, to raise for America questions of 
 immigration, of relations generally with foreign countries, of 
 defence, which American statesmanship will have to take into 
 account in the form of definite legislation that will go on to 
 American Statute books. Or, take the general problem of 
 the economic reconstruction of Europe, with which the book 
 is so largely occupied. That happens to bear, not merely on 
 the expansion of American trade, the creation of new markets, 
 that is, and on the recovery of American debts, but upon the 
 preservation of markets for cotton, wheat, meat and other 
 products, to which large American communities have in the 
 past looked, and do still look, for their prosperity and even 
 for their solvency. Again, dealing with the manner in which 
 the War has affected the economic organisation of the Euro- 
 pean society, the writer has been led to describe the 
 process by which preparation for modern war has come 
 to mean, to an increasing degree, control by the govern- 
 ment of the national resources as a whole, thus setting 
 up strong tendencies towards a form of State Socialism. To 
 America, herself facing a more far-reaching organisation of 
 the national resources for military purposes than she has 
 known in the past, the analysis of such a process is certainly 
 of very direct concern. Not less so is the story of the relation of 
 revolutionary forces in the industrial struggle "Bolshevism" 
 to the tendencies so initiated or stimulated. 
 
 One could go on expanding this theme indefinitely, and write 
 a whole book about America's concern in these things. But 
 surely in these days it would be a book of platitudes, elabo- 
 rately pointing out the obvious. Yet an American critic of 
 these pages in their European form warns me that I must be 
 careful to show their interest for American readers. 
 
 Their main interest for the American is not in the kind of 
 relationship just indicated, very considerable and immediate 
 as that happens to be. Their chief interest is in this: they
 
 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION ix 
 
 attempt an analysis of the ultimate forces of policies in West- 
 ern society; of the interrelation of fundamental economic 
 needs and of predominant political ideas public opinion, with 
 its constituent elements of "human nature," social or anti- 
 social instinct, the tradition of Patriotism and Nationalism, 
 the mechanism of the modern Press. It is suggested in these 
 pages that some of the main factors of political action, the 
 dominant motives of political conduct, are still grossly neg- 
 lected by "practical statesmen"; and that the statesmen still 
 treat as remote and irrelevant certain moral forces which 
 recent events have shown to have very great and immediate 
 practical importance. (A number of cases are discussed in 
 which practical and realist European statesmen have seen 
 their plans touching the stability of alliances, the creation of 
 international credit, the issuing of international loans, in- 
 demnities, a "new world" generally, all this frustrated because 
 in drawing them up they ignored the invisible but final factor 
 of public feeling and temper, which the whole time they were 
 modifying or creating, thus unconsciously undermining the 
 edifices they were so painfully creating. Time and again in 
 the last few years practical men of affairs in Europe have 
 found themselves the helpless victims of a state of feeling or 
 opinion which they so little understood that they had often 
 themselves unknowingly created it.) 
 
 In such hard realities as the exaction of an indemnity, we see 
 governments forced to policies which can only make their task 
 more difficult, but which they are compelled to adopt in order 
 to placate electoral opinion, or to repel an opposition which 
 would exploit some prevailing prejudice or emotion. 
 
 To understand the nature of forces which must determine 
 America's main domestic and foreign policies as they have 
 determined those of Western Society in Europe during the 
 last generation is surely an "American interest"; though 
 indeed, in neglecting the significance of those "hidden currents 
 flowing continually beneath the surface of political history."
 
 x INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION 
 
 American students of politics would be following much 
 European precedent. Although public opinion and feeling are 
 the raw material with which statesmen deal, it is still considered 
 irrelevant and academic to study the constituent elements 
 of that raw material. 
 
 Americans are sufficiently detached from Europe to see that 
 in the way of a better unification of that Continent for the 
 purposes of its own economic and moral restoration stand 
 disruptive forces of "Balkanisation," a development of the 
 spirit of Nationalism which the statesmen for years have 
 encouraged and exploited. The American of to-day speaks 
 of the Balkanisation of Europe just as the Englishman of 
 two or three years ago spoke of the Balkanisation of the 
 Continent, of the wrangles of Poles, Czecho-Slovaks, Hun- 
 garians, Rumanians, Italians, Jugo-Slavs. And the attitude 
 of both Englishman and American are alike in this: to the 
 Englishman, watching the squabbles of all the little new States 
 and the breaking out of all the little new wars, there seemed 
 at work in that spectacle forces so suicidal that they could 
 never in any degree touch his own political problems; the 
 American to-day, watching British policy in Ireland or French 
 policy towards Germany, feels that in such conflict are moral 
 forces that could never produce similar paralysis in American 
 policy. "Why," asks the confident American, "does England 
 bring such unnecessary trouble upon herself by her military 
 conduct in Ireland? Why does France keep three- fourths of 
 a Continent still in ferment, making reparations more and 
 more remote"? Americans have a very strong feeling that 
 they could not be guilty of the Irish mess, or of prolonging 
 the confusion which threatens to bring Europe's civilisation 
 to utter collapse. How comes it that the English people, so 
 genuinely and so sincerely horrified at the thought of what a 
 Bissing could do in Belgium, unable to understand how the 
 German people could tolerate a government guilty of such 
 things, somehow find that their own British Government is
 
 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION xi 
 
 doing very similar things in Cork and Balbriggan ; and finding 
 it, simply acquiesce? To the American the indefensibility of 
 British conduct is plain. "America could never be guilty of 
 it." To the Englishman just now, the indefensibility of French 
 conduct is plain. The policy which France is following is 
 seen to be suicidal from the point of view of French inter- 
 ests. The Englishman is sure that "English political sense" 
 would never tolerate it in an English government. 
 
 The situation suggests this question : would Americans deny 
 that England in the past has shown very great political genius, 
 or that the French people are alert, open-minded, "realist," 
 intelligent? Recalling what England has done in the way of 
 the establishment of great free communities, the flexibility 
 and "practicalness" of her imperial policy, what France has 
 contributed to democracy and European organisation, can we 
 explain the present difficulties of Europe by the absence, on the 
 part of Englishmen or Frenchmen, or other Europeans, of a 
 political intelligence granted only so far in the world's history 
 to Americans? In other words, do Americans seriously 
 argue that the moral forces which have wrought such havoc 
 in the foreign policy of European States could never threaten 
 the foreign policy of America? Does the American plead that 
 the circumstances which warp an Englishman's or French- 
 man's judgment could never warp an American's? Or that he 
 could never find himself in similar circumstances? As a matter 
 of fact, of course, that is precisely what the American like 
 the Englishman or Frenchman or Italian in an analogous case 
 does plead. To have suggested five years ago to an English- 
 man that his own generals in India or Ireland would copy 
 Bissing, would have been deemed too preposterous even for 
 anger: but then equally, to Americans, supporting in their 
 millions in 1916 the League to Enforce Peace, would the idea 
 have seemed preposterous that a few years later America, hav- 
 ing the power to take the lead in a Peace League, would re- 
 fuse to do so, and would herself be demanding, as the result
 
 xii INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION 
 
 of participation in a war to end war, greater armament than 
 ever as protection against Great Britain. 
 
 I suggest that if an English government can be led to sanction 
 and defend in Ireland the identical things which shocked the 
 world when committed in Belgium by Germans, if France to- 
 day threatens Europe with a military hegemony not less mis- 
 chievous than that which America determined to destroy, the 
 causes of those things must be sought, not in the special 
 .wickedness of this or that nation, but in forces which may 
 operate among any people. 
 
 One peculiarity of the prevailing political mind stands out. 
 It is evident that a sensible, humane and intelligent people, 
 even with historical political sense, can quite often fail to 
 realise how one step of policy, taken willingly, must lead to the 
 taking of other steps which they detest. If Mr. Lloyd George 
 is supporting France, if the French Government is proclaiming 
 policies which it knows to be disastrous, but which any French 
 Government must offer to its people or perish, it is because 
 somewhere in the past there have been set in motion forces 
 the outcome of which was not realised. And if the outcome 
 was not realised, although, looking back, or looking at the 
 situation from the distance of America from Europe, the in- 
 evitability of the result seems plain enough, I suggest that it 
 is because judgment becomes warped as the result of certain 
 feelings or predominant ideas; and that it will be impossible 
 wisely to guide political conduct without some understanding 
 of the nature of those feelings and ideas, and unless we realise 
 with some humility and honesty that all nations alike are sub- 
 ject to these weaknesses. 
 
 We all of us clamantly and absolutely deny this plain fact 
 when it is suggested that it also applies to our own people. 
 What would have happened to the publicist who, during the 
 War, should have urged: "Complete and overwhelming vic- 
 tory will be bad, because we shall misuse it?" Yet all the 
 victories of history would have been ground for such a warning.
 
 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION xiii 
 
 Universal experience was not merely flouted by the uninstruc- 
 ted. One of the curiosities of war literature is the fashion 
 in which the most brilliant minds, not alone in politics, but in 
 literature and social science, simply disregard this obvious truth. 
 We each knew "our" people British, French, Italian, Ameri- 
 can to be good people : kindly, idealistic, just. Give them 
 the power to do the Right to do justice, to respect the rights 
 of others, to keep the peace and it will be done. That is 
 why we wanted "unconditional surrender" of the Germans, 
 and indignantly rejected a negotiated peace. It was admitted, 
 of course, that injustice at the settlement would fail to give 
 us the world we fought for. It was preposterous to suppose 
 that we, the defenders of freedom and democracy, arbitration, 
 self-determination, America, Britain, France, Japan, Russia, 
 Italy, Rumania should not do exact and complete justice. So 
 convinced, indeed, were we of this that we may search in 
 vain the works of all the Allied writers to whom any 
 attention was paid, for any warning whatsoever of the one 
 danger which, in fact, wrecked the settlement, threw the 
 world back into its oldest difficulties, left it fundamentally 
 just where it was, reduced the War to futility. The one con- 
 dition of justice that the aggrieved party should not be in 
 the position of imposing his unrestrained will ,the one truth 
 which, for the world's welfare, it was most important to pro- 
 claim, was the one which it was black heresy and blasphemy 
 to utter, and which, to do them justice, the moral and intel- 
 lectual guides of the nations never did utter. 
 
 It is precisely the truth which Americans to-day are refusing 
 to face. We all admit that, "human nature being what it is," 
 preponderance of power, irresponsible power, is something 
 which no nation (but our own) can be trusted to use wisely 
 or with justice. The backbone of American policy shall there- 
 fore be an effort to retain preponderance of power. If this be 
 secured, little else matters. True, the American advocate of 
 isolation to-day says: "We are not concerned with Europe.
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION 
 
 We ask only to be let alone. Our preponderance of power, 
 naval or other, threatens no-one. It is purely defensive." Yet 
 the truth is that the demand for preponderance of armaments 
 itself involves a denial of right. Let us see why. 
 
 No one denies that the desire to possess a definitely prepon- 
 derant navy is related, at least in some degree, to such things 
 as, shall we say, the dispute over the Panama tolls. A growing 
 number feel and claim that that is a purely American dispute. 
 To subject it to arbitral decision, in which necessarily Euro- 
 peans would have a preponderance, would be to give away the 
 American case beforehand. With unquestioned naval prepon 
 derance over any probable combination of rivals, America is in 
 a position to enforce compliance with what she believes to be 
 her just rights. At this moment a preponderant navy is being 
 urged on precisely those grounds. In other words, the demand 
 is that in a dispute to which she is a party she shall be judge, 
 and able to impose her own judgement. That is to say, she 
 demands from others the acceptance of a position which she 
 would not herself accept. There is nothing at all unusual in 
 the demand. It is the feeling which colours the whole attitude 
 of combative nationalism. But it none the less means that 
 "adequate defence" on this basis inevitably implies a moral 
 aggression a demand upon others which, if made by others 
 upon ourselves, we should resist to the death. 
 
 It is not here merely or mainly the question of a right: 
 American foreign policy has before it much the same alter- 
 natives with reference to the world as a whole, as were pre- 
 sented to Great Britain with reference to the Continent in the 
 generation which preceded the War. Her "splendid isolation" 
 was defended on grounds which very closely resemble those 
 now put forward by America as the basis of the same policy. 
 Isolation meant, of course, preponderance of power, and when 
 she declared her intention to use that power only on behalf of 
 even-handed justice, she not only meant it, but carried out 
 the intention, at least to an extent that no other nation has
 
 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION xv 
 
 done. She accorded a degree of equality in economic treat- 
 ment which is without parallel. One thing only led her to 
 depart from justice: that was the need of maintaining the 
 supremacy. For this she allowed herself to become involved 
 in certain exceedingly entangling Alliances. Indeed, Great 
 Britain found that at no period of her history were her domestic 
 politics so much dominated by the foreign situation as when 
 she was proclaiming to the world her splendid isolation from 
 foreign entanglements. It is as certain, of course, that Ameri- 
 can "isolation" would mean that the taxation of Gopher 
 Prairie would be settled in Tokio; and that tens of thousands 
 of American youth would be sentenced to death by unknown 
 elderly gentlemen in a European Cabinet meeting. If the 
 American retorts that his country is in a fundamentally differ- 
 ent position, because Great Britain possesses an Empire and 
 America does not, that only proves how very much current 
 ideas in politics fail to take cognizance of the facts. The 
 United States to-day has in the problem of the Philippines, 
 their protection and their trade, and the bearing of those things 
 upon Japanese policy ; in Hayti and the West Indies, and their 
 bearing upon America's subject nationality problem of the 
 negro; in Mexico, which is likely to provide America with its 
 Irish problem; in the Panama Canal tolls question and its 
 relation to the development of a mercantile marine and naval 
 competition with Great Britain, in these things alone, to men- 
 tion no others, subjects of conflict, involving defence of 
 American interests, out of which will arise entanglements not 
 differing greatly in kind from the foreign questions which 
 dominated British domestic policy during the period of British 
 isolation. 
 
 Now, what America will do about these things will not de- 
 pend upon highly rationalised decisions, reached by a hundred 
 million independent thinkers investigating the facts concerning 
 the Panama Treaty, the respective merits of alternative alli- 
 ance combinations, or the real nature of negro grievances.
 
 xvi INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION 
 
 American policy will be determined by the same character of 
 force as has determined British policy in Ireland or India, 
 in Morocco or Egypt, French policy in Germany or in Poland, 
 or Italian policy in the Adriatic. The "way of thinking" which 
 is applied to the decisions of the American democracy has 
 behind it the same kind of moral and intellectual force that 
 we find in the society of Western Europe as a whole. Behind 
 the American public mind lie practically the same economic 
 system based on private property, the same kind of political 
 democracy, the same character of scholastic training, the same 
 conceptions of nationalism, roughly the same social and moral 
 values. If we find certain sovereign ideas determining the 
 course of British or French or Italian policy, giving us certain 
 results, we may be sure that the same ideas will, in the case 
 of America, give us very much the same results. 
 
 When Britain spoke of "splendid isolation," she meant what 
 America means by the term to-day, namely, a position by virtue 
 of which, when it came to a conflict of policy between herself 
 and others, she should possess preponderant power, so that 
 she could impose her own view of her own rights, be judge 
 and executioner in her own case. To have suggested to an 
 Englishman twenty years ago that the real danger to the secu- 
 rity of his country lay in the attitude of mind dominant among 
 Englishmen themselves, that the fundamental defect of Eng- 
 lish policy was that it asked of others something which English- 
 men would never accord if asked by others of them, and that 
 such a policy was particularly inimical in the long run to Great 
 Britain, in that her population lived by processes which dom- 
 inant power could not, in the last resort, exact such a line 
 of argument would have been, and indeed was, regarded as 
 too remote from practical affairs to be worth the attention of 
 practical politicians. A discussion of the Japanese Alliance, 
 the relations with Russia, the size of foreign fleets, the Bagdad 
 railway, would have been regarded as entirely practical and 
 relevant. These things were the "facts" of politics. It was
 
 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION xvii 
 
 not regarded as relevant to the practical issues to examine 
 the role of certain general ideas and traditions which had 
 grown up in England in determining the form of British 
 policy. The growth of a crude philosophy of militarism, 
 based on a social pseudo-Darwinism, the popularity of Kipling 
 and Roberts, the jingoism of the Northcliffe Press these 
 things might be regarded as items in the study of social psy- 
 chology; they were not regarded as matters for the practical 
 statesman. "What would you have us do about them, any- 
 
 way 
 
 It has happened to the present writer, in addressing Ameri- 
 can students, to lay stress upon the role of certain dominant 
 ideas in determining policy (upon the idea, say, of the State 
 as a person, upon the conception of States as necessarily rival 
 entities), and afterwards to get questions in this wise: "Your 
 lecture seems to imply an internationalist policy. What is your 
 plan? What ought we to do? Should we make a naval alli- 
 ance wth Great Britain, or form a new League of Nations, 
 or denounce Article X, or ..'.?" I have replied: "The first 
 thing to do is to change your ideas and moral values; or to 
 get to know them better. That is the most practical and im- 
 mediate platform, because all others depend on it. We all pro- 
 fess great love of peace and justice. What will you pay for 
 it, in terms of national sovereignty? What degree of sover- 
 eignty will you surrender as your contribution to a new 
 order? If your real feeling is for domination, then the only 
 effect of writing constitutions of the League of Nations will 
 be to render international organisation more remote than ever, 
 by showing how utterly incompatible it is with prevailing moral 
 values." 
 
 But such a reply is usually regarded as hopelessly "unprac- 
 tical." There is no indication of something to be "done" a 
 platform to be defended or a law to be passed. To change 
 fundamental opinions and redirect desires is not apparently to 
 "do" anything at all. Yet until that invisible thing is done
 
 xviii INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION 
 
 our Covenants and Leagues will be as futile as have been the 
 numberless similar plans of the past, "concerning which," as 
 one seventeenth century critic wrote, "I know no single im- 
 perfection save this : That by no possibility would any Prince 
 or people be brought to abide by them." It was, I believe, 
 regarded as a triumph of practical organisation to have obtained 
 nation-wide support for the 'League to Enforce Peace' pro- 
 posal, "without raising controversial matters at all" leaving 
 untouched, that is, the underlying ideas of patriotism, of 
 national right and international obligation, the prevailing moral 
 and political values, in fact. The subsequent history of Ameri- 
 ca's relation to the world's effort to create a League of Nations 
 is sufficient commentary as to whether it is "practical" to de- 
 vise plans and constitutions without reference to a prevailing 
 attitude of mind. 
 
 America has before her certain definite problems of foreign 
 policy Japanese immigration into the United States and the 
 Philippines; concessions granted to foreigners in Mexico; the 
 question of disorder in that country; the relations with Hayti 
 (which will bear on the question of America's subject nation- 
 ality, the negro) ; the exemption of American ships from tolls 
 in the Panama Canal ; the exclusion of foreign shipping from 
 "coastwise" trade with the Philippines. It would be possible 
 to draw up plans of settlement with regard to each item 
 which would be equitable. But the development of foreign 
 policy (which, more than any other department of politics, will 
 fix the quality of American society in the future) will not 
 depend upon the more or less equitable settlement of those 
 specific questions. The specific differences between England 
 and Germany before the War were less serious than those 
 between England and America and were nearly all settled 
 when war broke out. Whether an issue like Japanese immi- 
 gration or the Panama tolls leads to war will not depend upon 
 its intrinsic importance, or whether Britain or Japan or Amer- 
 ica make acceptable proposals on the subject. Mr ex- Secretary
 
 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION xix 
 
 Daniels has just told us that the assertion of the right to estab- 
 lish a cable station on the Island of Yap is good ground for 
 risking war.) The specific issues about which nations fight 
 are so little the real cause of the fight that they are generally 
 completely forgotten when it comes to making the peace. The 
 future of submarine warfare was not mentioned at Versailles. 
 Given a certain state of mind, a difference about cables on the 
 Island of Yap is quite sufficient to make war inevitable. We 
 should probably regard it as a matter of national honour, con- 
 cerning which there must be no argument. Another mood, 
 and it would be impossible to get the faintest ripple of interest 
 in the subject. 
 
 It was not British passion for Serbian nationality which 
 brought Britain to the side of Russia in 1914. It was the 
 fear of German power and what might be done with it, a fear 
 wrought to frenzy pitch by a long indoctrination concerning 
 German wickedness and aggression. Passion for the sub- 
 jugation of Germany persisted long after there was any ground 
 of fear of what German power might accomplish. If America 
 fights Japan, it will not be over cables on Yap ; it will be from 
 fear of Japanese power, the previous stimulation of latent 
 hatreds for the strange and foreign. And if the United States 
 goes to war over Panama Canal tolls, it will not be because 
 the millions who will get excited over that question have ex- 
 amined the matter, or possess ships or shares in ships that will 
 profit by the exemption; it will be because all America has 
 read of Irish atrocities which recall school-day histories of 
 British atrocities in the American Colonies; because the 
 "person," Britain, has become a hateful and hostile person, 
 and must be punished and coerced. 
 
 War either with Japan or Britain or both is, of course, quite 
 within the region of possibility. It is merely an evasion of 
 the trouble which facing reality always involves, to say that 
 war between Britain and America is "unthinkable." If any 
 war, as we have known it these last ten years, is thinkable,
 
 xx INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION 
 
 war between nations that have already fought two wars is obvi- 
 ously not unthinkable. And those who can recall at all vividly 
 the forces which marked the growth of the conflict between 
 Britain and Germany will see just those forces beginning to 
 colour the relations of Britain and America. Among those 
 forces none is more notable than this: a disturbing tendency 
 to stop short at the ultimate questions, a failure to face the 
 basic causes of divergence. Among people of good will there 
 is a tendency to say: "Don't let's talk about it. Be discreet. 
 Let us assume we are good friends and we shall be. Let us 
 exchange visits." In just such a way, even within a few weeks 
 of war, did people of good will in England and Germany 
 decide not to talk of their differences, to be discreet, to exchange 
 visits. But the men of ill will talked talked of the wrong 
 things and sowed their deadly poison. 
 
 These pages suggest why neither side in the Anglo-German 
 conflict came down to realities before the War. To have come 
 to fundamentals would have revealed the fact to both parties 
 that any real settlement would have asked things which neither 
 would grant. Really to have secured Germany's future eco- ' 
 nomic security would have meant putting her access to the 
 resources of India and Africa upon a basis of Treaty, of con- 
 tract. That was for Britain the end of Empire, as Imperialists 
 understood it. To have secured in exchange the end of 
 "marching and drilling" would have been the end of military 
 glory for Prussia. For both it would have meant the surrender 
 of certain dominations, a recasting of patriotic ideals, a revo- 
 lution of ideas. 
 
 Whether Britain and America are to fight may very well 
 depend upon this: whether the blinder and more unconscious 
 motives rooted in traditional patriotisms, and the impulse to 
 the assertion of power, will work their evil before the develop- 
 ment of ideas has brought home to us a clearer vision of the 
 abyss into which we fall; before we have modified, in other 
 words, our tradition of patriotism, our political moralities, our
 
 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION xxi 
 
 standard of values. Without that more fundamental change 
 no scheme of settlement of specific differences, no platforms, 
 Covenants, Constitution can avail, or have any chance of 
 acceptance or success. 
 
 As a contribution to that change of ideas and of values 
 these pages are offered.
 
 SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT 
 
 THE central conclusion suggested by the following analysis 
 of the events of the past few years is that, underlying the dis- 
 ruptive processes so evidently at work especially in the inter- 
 national field is the deep-rooted instinct to the assertion of 
 domination, preponderant power. This impulse sanctioned and 
 strengthened by prevailing traditions of 'mystic' patriotism, 
 has been unguided and unchecked by any adequate realisation 
 either of its anti-social quality, the destructiveness inseparable 
 from its operation, or its ineffectiveness to ends indispensable 
 to civilisation. 
 
 The psychological roots of the impulse are so deep that we 
 shall continue to yield to it until we realise more fully its dan- 
 ger and inadequacy to certain vital ends like sustenance for our 
 people, and come to see that if civilisation is to be carried on we 
 must turn to other motives. We may then develop a new 
 political tradition, which will 'discipline' instinct, as the tradi- 
 tion of toleration disciplined religious fanaticism when that 
 passion threatened to shatter European society. 
 
 Herein lies the importance of demonstrating the economic 
 futility of military power. While it may be true that conscious 
 economic motives enter very little into the struggle of nations, 
 and are a very small part of the passions of patriotism and 
 nationalism, it is by a realisation of the economic truth regard- 
 ing the indispensable condition of adequate life, that those pas- 
 sions will be checked, or redirected and civilised. 
 
 This does not mean that economic considerations should
 
 xxiv SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT 
 
 dominate life, but rather the contrary that those considera- 
 tions will dominate it if the economic truth is neglected. A 
 people that starves is a people thinking only of material things 
 food. The way to dispose of economic pre-occupations is 
 to solve the economic problem. 
 
 The bearing of this argument is that developed by the 
 present writer in a previous book, The Great Illusion, and the 
 extent to which it has been vindicated by events, is shown in 
 the Addendum.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I OUR DAILY BREAD '.. '. . . . 3 
 
 II THE OLD ECONOMY AND THE POST-WAR STATE . 61 
 
 III NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND THE ASSERTION OF 
 
 RIGHT . * , . . . . . 81 
 
 IV MILITARY PREDOMINANCE AND INSECURITY . .112 
 
 V PATRIOTISM AND POWER IN WAR AND PEACE: THE 
 
 SOCIAL OUTCOME . . . . . 142 
 
 VI THE ALTERNATIVE RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 169 
 
 VII THE SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT . . 199 
 
 ADDENDUM : SOME NOTES ON 'THE GREAT ILLU- 
 SION* AND ITS PRESENT RELEVANCE . . 253 
 
 I. The 'Impossibility of War' Myth. II. 'Economic' 
 and 'Moral' Motives in International Affairs. III. The 
 'Great Illusion' Argument. IV. Arguments now out of 
 date. V. The Argument as an attack on the State. 
 VI. Vindication by Events. VII. Could the War have 
 been prevented? 
 
 XXV
 
 SYNOPSIS 
 CHAPTER I (pp. 3-60) 
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 AN examination of the present conditions in Europe shows 
 that much of its dense population (particularly that of these 
 islands) cannot live at a standard necessary for civilisation 
 (leisure, social peace, individual freedom) except by certain 
 co-operative processes which must be carried on largely across 
 frontiers. (The prosperity of Britain depends on the pro- 
 duction by foreigners of a surplus of food and raw material 
 above their own needs.) The present distress is not mainly 
 the result of the physical destruction of war (famine or short- 
 age is worst, as in the Austrian and German and Russian areas, 
 where there has been no destruction). The Continent as a 
 whole has the same soil and natural resources and technical 
 knowledge as when it fed its populations. The causes of its 
 present failure at self-support are moral: economic paralysis 
 following political disintegration, 'Balkanisation' ; that, in its 
 turn, due to certain passions and prepossessions. 
 
 A corresponding phenomenon is revealed within each national 
 society: a decline of production due to certain moral dis- 
 orders, mainly in the political field; to 'unrest,' a greater 
 cleavage between groups, rendering the indispensable co- 
 operation less effective. 
 
 xxvi
 
 SYNOPSIS xxvii 
 
 The necessary co-operation, whether as between nations or 
 groups within each nation, cannot be compelled by physical 
 coercion, though disruptive forces inseparable from the use of 
 coercion can paralyse co-operation. Allied preponderance of 
 power over Germany does not suffice to obtain indemnities, or 
 even coal in the quantities demanded by the Treaty. The out- 
 put of the workers in Great Britain would not necessarily be 
 improved by adding to the army or police force. As inter- 
 dependence increases, the limits of coercion are narrowed. 
 Enemies that are to pay large indemnities must be permitted 
 actively to develop their economic life and power; they are 
 then so potentially strong that enforcement of the demands 
 becomes correspondingly expensive and uncertain. Knowledge 
 and organisation acquired by workers for the purposes of 
 their labour can be used to resist oppression. Railwaymen or 
 miners driven to work by force would still find means of re- 
 sistance. A proletarian dictatorship cannot coerce the produc- 
 tion of food by an unwilling peasantry. The processes 
 by which wealth is produced have, by increasing complexity, 
 become of a kind which can only be maintained if there be 
 present a large measure of voluntary acquiescence, which 
 means, in its turn, confidence. The need for that is only made 
 the more imperative by the conditions which have followed the 
 virtual suspension of the gold standard in all the belligerent 
 States of Europe, the collapse of the exchanges and other mani- 
 festations of instability of the currencies. 
 
 European statesmanship, as revealed in the Treaty of Ver- 
 sailles, and in the conduct of international affairs since the 
 Armistice, has recognised neither the fact of interdependence 
 the need for the economic unity of Europe nor the futility 
 of attempted coercion. Certain political ideas and passions 
 give us an unworkable Europe. What is their nature? How 
 have they arisen? How can they be corrected? These ques- 
 tions are part of the problem of sustenance; which is the first 
 indispensable of civilisation,.
 
 xxviii SYNOPSIS 
 
 CHAPTER II (pp. 61-80) 
 
 THE OLD ECONOMY AND THE POST-WAR STATE 
 
 The trans-national processes which enabled Europe to sup- 
 port itself before the War were based mainly on private ex- 
 changes prompted by the expectation of individual advantage. 
 They were not dependent upon political power. (The fifteen 
 millions for whom German soil could not provide lived by trade 
 with countries over which Germany had no political control, as 
 a similar number of British live by similar non-political means.) 
 
 The old individualist economy has been largely destroyed by 
 the State Socialism introduced for war purposes: the nation, 
 taking over individual enterprise, became trader and manu- 
 facturer in increasing degree. The economic clauses of the 
 Treaty, if enforced, must prolong this tendency, rendering a 
 large measure of such Socialism permanent. 
 
 The change may be desirable. But if co-operation must in 
 future be less as between individuals for private advantage, 
 and much more as between nations, governments acting in an 
 economic capacity, the political emotions of nationalisation will 
 play a much larger role in the economic processes of Europe. 
 If to Nationalist hostilities as we have known them in the past 
 is to be added the commercial rivalry of nations now converted 
 into traders and capitalists, we are likely to have not a less but 
 a more quarrelsome world, unless the fact of interdependence 
 is much more vividly realised than in the past. 
 
 CHAPTER III (pp. 81-111) 
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND THE ASSERTION OF RIGHT 
 
 The change noted in the preceding chapter raises a profound 
 question of Right Have we the right to use our power to deny 
 to others the means of life? By our political power we can 
 create a Europe which, while not assuring advantage to the
 
 SYNOPSIS xxix 
 
 victor, deprives the vanquished of means of existence. The 
 loss of both ore and coal by the Central Powers might well 
 make it impossible for their future populations to find food. 
 What are they to do? Starve? To disclaim responsibility is 
 to claim that we are entitled to use our power to deny them 
 life. 
 
 This 'right' to starve foreigners can only be invoked by in- 
 voking the conception of nationalism 'Our nation first.' But 
 the policy of placing life itself upon a foundation of prepon- 
 derant force, instead of mutually advantageous co-operation, 
 compels statesmen perpetually to betray the principle of 
 nationality; not only directly, (as in the case of the annexa- 
 tion of territory, economically necessary, but containing peoples 
 of alien nationality,) but indirectly; for the resistance which 
 our policy (of denying means of subsistence to others) pro- 
 vokes, makes preponderance of power the condition of survival. 
 All else must give way to that need. 
 
 Might cannot be pledged to Right in these conditions. If 
 our power is pledged to Allies for the purpose of the Balance 
 (which means, in fact, preponderance), it cannot be used 
 against them to enforce respect for (say) nationality. To 
 turn against Allies would break the Balance. To maintain 
 the Balance of Power we are compelled to disregard the moral 
 merits of an Ally's policy (as in the case of the promise to\ 
 the Czar's government not to demand the independence ofr 
 Poland). The maintenance of a Balance (i.e. preponderance) 
 is incompatible with the maintenance of Right. There is a 
 conflict of obligation. 
 
 CHAPTER IV (pp. 112-141) 
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE AND INSECURITY 
 
 The moral questions raised in the preceding chapter have 
 a direct bearing on the effectiveness of military power based
 
 xxx SYNOPSIS 
 
 on the National unit, or a group of National units, such as an 
 Alliance. Military preponderance of the smaller Western Na- 
 tional units over large and potentially powerful groups, like 
 the German or the Russian, must necessitate stable and pro- 
 longed co-operation. But, as the present condition of the 
 Alliance which fought the War shows, the rivalries inseparable 
 from the fears and resentments of 'instinctive' nationalism, 
 make that prolonged co-operation impossible. The qualities of 
 Nationalism which stand in the way of Internationalism stand 
 also in the way of stable alliances (which are a form of Inter- 
 nationalism) and make them extremely unstable foundations 
 of power. 
 
 The difficulties encountered by the Allies in taking com- 
 bined action in Russia show that to this fundamental insta- 
 bility due to the moral nature of Nationalism, must be added, 
 as causes of military paralysis, the economic disruption which 
 reduces the available material resources, and the social unrest 
 (largely the result of the economic difficulties) which under- 
 mines the cohesion even of the national unit. 
 
 These forces render military predominance based on the 
 temporary co-operation of units still preserving the Nationalist 
 outlook extremely precarious and unreliable. 
 
 CHAPTER V (pp. 142-168) 
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER IN WAR AND PEACE: THE 
 SOCIAL OUTCOME 
 
 The greatest and most obvious present need of Europe, for 
 the salvation of its civilisation, is unity and co-operation. 
 Yet the predominant forces of its politics push to conflict 
 and disunity. If it is the calculating selfishness of 'realist' states- 
 men that thus produces impoverishment and bankruptcy, the 
 calculation would seem to be defective. The Balkanisation 
 of Europe obviously springs, however, from sources belong- 
 ing to our patriotisms, which are mainly uncalculating and
 
 SYNOPSIS xxxi 
 
 instinctive, 'mystic* impulses and passions. Can we safely 
 give these instinctive pugnacities full play? 
 
 One side of patriotism gregariousness, 'herd instinct' has 
 a socially protective origin, and is probably in some form in- 
 dispensable. But coupled with uncontrolled pugnacity, tribal 
 gregariousness grows into violent partisanship as against other 
 groups, and greatly strengthens the instinct to coercion, the 
 desire to impose our power. 
 
 In war-time, pugnacity, partisanship, coerciveness can find 
 full satisfaction in the fight against the enemy. But when 
 the war is over, these instincts, which have become so highly 
 developed, still seek satisfaction. They may find it in two 
 ways : in conflict between Allies, or in strife between groups 
 within the nation. 
 
 We may here find an explanation of what seems otherwise 
 a moral enigma: that just after a war, universally lauded as 
 a means of national unity, 'bringing all classes together,' the 
 country is distraught by bitter social chaos, amounting to 
 revolutionary menace; and that after the war which was to 
 wipe out at last all the old differences which divided the Allies, 
 their relations are worse than before the War (as in the case of 
 Britain and America and Britain and France). 
 
 Why should the fashionable lady, capable of sincere self- 
 sacrifice (scrubbing hospital floors and tending canteens) for 
 her countrymen when they are soldiers, become completely 
 indifferent to the same countrymen when they have returned 
 to civil life (often dangerous and hard, as in mining and fish- 
 ing) ? In the latter case there is no common enmity uniting 
 duchess and miner. 
 
 Another enigma may be solved in the same way: why mili- 
 tary terrorism, unprovoked war, secret diplomacy, autocratic 
 tyranny, violation of nationality, which genuinely appal us 
 when committed by the enemy, leave us unmoved when 'politi- 
 cal necessity' provokes very similar conduct on our part; why 
 the ideals for which we went to war become matters of in-
 
 xxxii SYNOPSIS 
 
 difference to us when we have achieved victory. Gregarious- 
 ness, which has become intense partisanship, makes right that 
 which our side does or desires; wrong that which the other 
 side does. 
 
 This is fatal, not merely to justice, but to sincerity, to in- 
 tellectual rectitude, to the capacity to see the truth objectively. 
 It explains why we can, at the end of a war, excuse or espouse 
 the very policies which the war was waged to make impossible. 
 
 CHAPTER VI (pp. 169-198) 
 
 THE ALTERNATIVE RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 
 
 Instinct, being cp-terminous with all animal life, is a mo- 
 tive of conduct immeasurably older and more deeply rooted 
 than reasoning based on experience. So long as the instinctive, 
 'natural* action succeeds, or appears to succeed in its object, 
 we do not trouble to examine the results of instinct or to 
 reason. Only failure causes us to do that. 
 
 We have seen that the pugnacities, gregariousness, group 
 partisanship embodied in patriotism, give a strong emotional 
 push to domination, the assertion of our power over others 
 as a means of settling our relations with them. Physical coer- 
 cion marks all the early methods in politics (as in autocracy 
 and feudalism), in economics (as in slavery), and even in the 
 relations of the sexes. 
 
 But we try other methods (and manage to restrain our im- 
 pulse sufficiently) when we really discover that force won't 
 work. When we find we cannot coerce a man but still need 
 his service, we offer him inducements, bargain with him, enter 
 a contract. This is the result of realising that we really need 
 him, and cannot compel him. That is the history of the de- 
 velopment from status to contract. 
 
 Stable international co-operation cannot come in any other 
 way. Not until we realise the failure of national coercive 
 power for indispensable ends (like the food of our people)
 
 SYNOPSIS xxxiii 
 
 shall we cease to idealise power and to put our intensest politi- 
 cal emotions, like those of patriotism, behind it. 
 
 The alternative to preponderance is partnership of power. 
 Both may imply the employment of force (as in policing), but 
 the latter makes force the instrument of a conscious social 
 purpose, offering to the rival that challenges the force (as in 
 the case of the individual criminal within the nation) the 
 same rights as those claimed by the users of force. Force as 
 employed by competitive nationalism does not do this. It 
 says 'You or me,' not 'You and me.' The method of social 
 co-operation may fail temporarily; but it has the perpetual 
 opportunity of success. It succeeds the moment that the two 
 parties both accept it. But the other method is bound to fail ; 
 the two parties cannot both accept it. Both cannot be masters. 
 Both can be partners. 
 
 The failure of preponderant power on a nationalist basis 
 for indispensable ends would be self-evident but for the push 
 of the instincts which warp our judgment. 
 
 Yet faith in the social method is the condition of its suc- 
 cess. It is a choice of risks. We distrust and arm. Others, 
 then, are entitled also to distrust ; their arming is our justifica- 
 tion for distrusting them. The policy of suspicion justifies 
 itself. To allay suspicion we must accept the risk of trust. 
 That, too, will justify itself. 
 
 Man's future depends on making the better choice, for 
 either the distrust or the faith will justify itself. His judg- 
 ment will not be fit to make that choice if it is warped by the 
 passions of pugnacity and hate that we have cultivated as 
 part of the apparatus of war. 
 
 CHAPTER VII (pp. 199-251) 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 
 
 If our instinctive pugnacities and hates are uncontrollable, 
 and they dictate conduct, no more is to be said. We are the
 
 xxxiv SYNOPSIS 
 
 helpless victims of outside forces, and may as well surrender. 
 But many who urge this most insistently in the case of our 
 patriotic pugnacities obviously do not believe it : their demands 
 for the suppression of 'defeatist' propaganda during the War, 
 their support of war-time propaganda for the maintenance 
 of morale, their present fears of the 'deadly infection' of 
 Bolshevist ideas, indicate, on the contrary, a very real belief 
 that feelings can be subject to an extremely rapid modification 
 or redirection. In human society mere instinct has always 
 been modified or directed in some measure by taboos, tradi- 
 tions, conventions, constituting a social discipline. The charac- 
 ter of that discipline is largely determined by some sense of 
 social need, developed as the result of the suggestion of trans- 
 mitted ideas, discussions, intellectual ferment. 
 
 The feeling which made the Treaty inevitable was the re^ 
 suit of a partly unconscious but also partly conscious propa- 
 ganda of war half-truths, built up on a sub-structure of 
 deeply rooted nationalist conceptions. The systematic exploita- 
 tion of German atrocities, and the systematic suppression of 
 similar Allie3 "offences, the systematic suppression of every 
 good deed-done" by-our enemy, constituted a monstrous half' 
 truth. It had the effect of fortifying the conception of the 
 enemy people as a single person; its complete collective re- 
 sponsibility. Any one of them child, woman, invalid couldx 
 properly be punished (by famine, say) for any other's guilt.J 
 Peace became a problem of repressing or destroying this en- 
 tirely bad person by a combination of nations entirely good. 
 
 This falsified the nature of the problem, gave free rein to 
 natural and instinctive retaliations, obscured the simplest hu- 
 man realities, and rendered possible ferpcious. cruelty on the 
 .part of the Allies. There would have been in any case a strong 
 tendency to ignore even the facts which in Allied interest 
 should have been considered. In the best circumstances it 
 would have been extremely difficult to put through a Wilsonian 
 (type 1918) policy, involving restraint of the sacred egoisms,
 
 SYNOPSIS xxxv 
 
 the impulsive retaliations, the desire for dominion inherent in 
 'intense' nationalisms. The efficiency of the machinery by 
 which the Governments for the purpose of war formed the 
 mind of the nation, made it out of the question. 
 
 If ever the passions which gather around the patriotisms 
 disrupting and Balkanising Europe are to be disciplined or 
 directed by a better social tradition, we must face without 
 pretence or self-deception the results which show the real 
 nature of the older political moralities. We must tell truths 
 that disturb strong prejudices.
 
 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY
 
 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 The relation of certain economic facts to Britain's 
 independence and Social Peace 
 
 POLITICAL instinct in England, particularly in the shaping of 
 naval policy, has always recognised the intimate relation which 
 must exist between an uninterrupted flow of food to these 
 shores and the preservation of national independence. An 
 enemy in a position to stop that flow would enjoy not merely 
 an economic but a political power over us the power to starve 
 us into ignominious submission to his will. 
 
 The fact has, of course, for generations been the main argu- 
 ment for Britain's right to maintain unquestioned command 
 of the sea. In the discussions before the War concerning 
 the German challenge to our naval power, it was again and 
 again pointed out that Britain's position was very special: 
 what is a matter of life and death for her had no equivalent 
 importance for other powers. And it was when the Kaiser 
 announced that Germany's future was upon the sea that 
 British fear became acute! The instinct of self-preservation 
 became aroused by the thought of the possible possession in 
 hostile hands of an instrument that could sever vital arteries. 
 
 The fact shows how impossible it is to divide off into water- 
 
 3
 
 4 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 tight compartments the 'economic* from the political or moral. 
 To preserve the capacity to feed our people, to see that our 
 children shall have milk, is certainly an economic affair a 
 commercial one even. But it is an indispensable condition 
 also of the defence of our country, of the preservation of our 
 national freedom. The ultimate end behind the determination 
 to preserve a preponderant navy may be purely nationalist or 
 moral; the means is the maintenance of a certain economic 
 situation. 
 
 Indeed the task of ensuring the daily bread of the people 
 touches moral and social issues nearer and more intimate even 
 than the preservation of our national independence. The in- 
 exorable rise in the cost of living, the unemployment and loss 
 and insecurity which accompany a rapid fall in prices, are 
 probably the predominating factors in a social unrest which 
 may end in transforming the whole texture of Western society. 
 The worker finds his increased wage continually nullified by 
 increase of price. Out of this situation arises an exasperation 
 which, naturally enough, with peoples habituated by five years 
 of war to violence and emotional mass-judgments, finds ex- 
 pression, not necessarily in organised revolution that implies, 
 after all, a plan of programme, a hope of a new order but 
 rather in sullen resentment; declining production, the menace 
 of general chaos. However restricted the resources of a 
 country may have become, there will always be some people 
 under a regime of private capital and individual enterprise 
 who will have more than a mere sufficiency, whose means will 
 reach to luxury and even ostentation. They may be few in 
 number; the amount of waste their luxury represents may in 
 comparison with the total resources be unimportant. But 
 their existence will suffice to give colour to the charge of 
 profiteering and exploitation and to render still more acute the 
 sullen discontent, and finally perhaps the tendency to violence. 
 
 It is in such a situation that the price of a few prime neces- 
 saries bread, coal, milk, sugar, clothing becomes a social,
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 5 
 
 political, and moral fact of the first importance. A two- 
 shilling loaf may well be a social and political portent. 
 
 In the week preceding the writing of these lines five cabinets 
 have fallen in Europe. The least common denominator in the 
 cause is the grinding poverty which is common to the peoples 
 they ruled. In two cases the governments fell avowedly over 
 the question of bread, maintained by subsidy at a fraction of 
 its commercial cost. Everywhere the social atmosphere, the 
 temper of the workers, responds to stimulus of that kind. 
 
 When we reach the stage at which mothers are forced to see 
 their children slowly die for lack of milk and bread, or the 
 decencies of life are lost in a sordid scramble for sheer physical 
 existence, then the economic problem becomes the gravest 
 moral problem. The two are merged. 
 
 The obvious truth that, if economic preoccupations are not 
 to dominate the minds and absorb the energies of men to the 
 exclusion of less material things, then the fundamental eco- 
 nomic needs must be satisfied ; the fact, that though the founda- 
 tions are certainly not the whole building, civilisation does rest 
 upon foundations of food, shelter, fuel, and that if it is to be 
 stable they must be sound these things have been rendered 
 commonplace by events since the Armistice. But before the 
 War they were not commonplaces. The suggestion that the 
 economic results of war were worth considering was quite com- 
 monly rejected as 'offensive/ implying that men went to war 
 for 'profit.' Nations in going to war, we were told, were lifted 
 beyond the region of 'economics.' The conception that the 
 neglect of the economics of war might mean as it has meant 
 the slow torture of tens of millions of children and the disin- 
 tegration of whole civilisations, and that if those who professed 
 to be the trustees of their fellows were not considering these 
 things they ought to be this was, very curiously as it now 
 seems to us at this date, regarded as sordid and material. We 
 now see that the things of the spirit depend upon the solution 
 of these material problems.
 
 6 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 The one fact which stood out clear above all others after the 
 Armistice was the actual shortage of goods at a time when mil- 
 lions were literally dying of hunger. The decline of productivity 
 was obvious. It was due in part to diversion of energies to 
 the task of war, to the destruction of materials, failure in many 
 cases to maintain plant (factories, railways, roads, housing) ; 
 to a varying degree of industrial and commercial demoralisation 
 arising out of the War and, later, out of the struggle for poli- 
 tical rearrangements both within States and as between States ; 
 to the shortening of the hours of labour ; to the dislocation, first 
 of mobilisation, and then of demobilisation; to relaxation of 
 effort as reaction from the special strain of war; to the de- 
 moralisation of credit owing to war-time financial shifts. We 
 had all these factors of reduced productivity on the one side, 
 and on the other a generally increased habit and standard of 
 expenditure, due in part to a stimulation of spending power 
 owing to the inflation of the currency and in part to the reck- 
 lessness which usually follows war ; and above all an increasingly 
 insistent demand on the part of the worker everywhere in 
 Europe for a higher general standard of living, that is to say, 
 not only a larger share of the diminished product of his labour, 
 but a larger absolute amount drawn from a diminished total. 
 
 This created an economic impasse the familiar 'vicious 
 circle.' The decline in the purchasing power of money and the 
 rise in the rate of interest set up demands for compensating 
 increases both of wages and of profits, which increases in turn 
 added to the cost of production, to prices. And so on da capo. 
 As the first and last remedy for this condition one thing was 
 urged, to the exclusion of almost all else increased production. 
 The King, the Cabinet, economists, Trades Union leaders, the 
 newspapers, the Churches, all agreed upon that one solution. 
 Until well into the autumn of 1920 all were enjoining upon the 
 workers their duty of an ever-increasing output. 
 
 By the end of that year, workers, who had on numberless 
 occasions been told that their one salvation was to increase
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 7 
 
 their output, and who had been upbraided in no mild terms 
 because of their tendency to diminish output, were being dis- 
 charged in their hundreds of thousands because there was a 
 paralysing over-production and glut! Half a world was fam- 
 ished and unclothed, but vast stores of British goods were 
 rotting and multitudes of workers unemployed. America re- 
 vealed the same phenomena. After stories of the fabulous 
 wealth which had come to her as the result of the War and the 
 destruction of her commercial competitors, we find, in the win- 
 ter of 1920-21 that over great areas in the South and West her 
 farmers are near to bankruptcy because their cotton and wheat 
 are unsaleable at prices that are remunerative, and her indus- 
 trial unemployment problem as acute as it has been in a genera- 
 tion. So bad is it, indeed, that the Labour Unions are unable 
 to resist the Open Shop campaign forced upon them by the 
 employers, a campaign menacing the gains in labour organisa- 
 tion that it has taken more than a generation to make. Ameri- 
 ca's commercial competitors being now satisfactorily disposed 
 of by the War, and 'the economic conquest of the world' being 
 now open to that country, we find the agricultural interests 
 (particularly cotton and wheat) demanding government aid 
 for the purpose of putting these aforesaid competitors once 
 more on their feet (by loan) in order that they may buy 
 American products. But the loans can only be repaid and the 
 products paid for in goods. This, of course, constitutes, in 
 terms of nationalist economics, a 'menace.' So the same Con- 
 gress which receives demands for government credits to Euro- 
 pean countries, also receives demands for the enactment of 
 Protectionist legislation, which will effectually prevent the Eu- 
 ropean creditors from repaying the loans or paying for the 
 purchases. The spectacle is a measure of the chaos in our 
 thinking on international economics. 1 
 
 1 But British policy can hardly be called less contradictory. A year 
 after the enactment of a Treaty which quite avowedly was framed for 
 the purpose of checking the development of German trade, we find
 
 8 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 But the fact we are for the moment mainly concerned with 
 is this: on the one side millions perishing for lack of corn or 
 cotton ; on the other corn and cotton in such abundance that they 
 are burned, and their producers face bankruptcy. 
 
 Obviously therefore it is not merely a question of production, 
 but of production adjusted to consumption, and vice versa ; of 
 proper distribution of purchasing power, and a network of 
 processes which must be in increasing degree consciously con- 
 trolled. We should never have supposed that mere production 
 would suffice, if there did not perpetually slip from our minds 
 the very elementary truth that in a world where division of 
 labour exists wealth is not a material but a material plus a 
 
 the unemployment crisis producing on the part of the New Statesman 
 the following comment: 
 
 'It must be admitted, however, that the present wave of depression 
 and unemployment is far more an international than a national problem. 
 The abolition of "casual labour" and the adoption of a system of "in- 
 dustrial maintenance" would appreciably affect it. The international 
 aspect of the question has always been important, but never so over- 
 whelmingly important as it is to-day. 
 
 'The present great depression, however, is not normal. It is due 
 in the main to the breakdown of credit and the demoralisation of the 
 "exchanges" throughout Europe. France cannot buy locomotives in 
 England if she has to pay 60 francs to the pound sterling. Germany, 
 with an exchange of 260 (instead of the pre-war 20) marks to the 
 pound, can buy scarcely anything. Russia, for other reasons cannot 
 buy at all. And even neutral countries like Sweden and Denmark, 
 which made much money out of the war and whose "exchanges" are 
 fairly normal, are financially almost hors de combat, owing presumably 
 to the ruin of Germany. There appears to be no remedy for this 
 position save the economic rehabilitation of Central Europe. 
 
 'As long as German workmen are unable to exercise their full pro- 
 ductive capacity, English workmen will be unemployed. That, at 
 present, is the root of the problem. For the last two years we, as an 
 industrial nation, have been cutting off pur nose to spite our face. In 
 so far as we ruin Germany we are ruining ourselves ; and in so far as 
 we refuse to trade with revolutionary Russia we are increasing the likeli- 
 hood of violent upheavals in Great Britain. Sooner or later we shall 
 have to scrap every Treaty that has been signed and begin again the 
 creation of the New Europe on the basis of universal co-operation and 
 mutual aid. Where we have demanded indemnities we must offer loans. 
 
 'A system of international credit founded necessarily on British 
 credit is as great a necessity for ourselves as it is for Central Eu- 
 rope. We must finance our customers or lose them and share their 
 ruin, sinking deeper every month into the morass of doles and relief 
 works. That is the main lesson of the present crisis.' (Jan. 1st, 1921.)
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 9 
 
 process a process of exchange. Our minds are still dominated 
 by the mediaeval aspect of wealth as a 'possession' of static 
 material such as land, not as part of a flow. It is that over- 
 sight which probably produced the War; it certainly produced 
 certain clauses of the Treaty. The wealth of England is not 
 coal, because if we could not exchange it (or the manufactures 
 and services based on it) for other things mainly food it 
 certainly would not even feed our population. And the process 
 by which coal becomes bread is only possible by virtue of certain 
 adjustments, which can only be made if there be present such 
 things as a measure of political security, stability of conditions 
 enabling us to know that crops can be gathered, transported and 
 sold for money of stable value ; if there be in other words the 
 indispensable element of contract, confidence, rendering possible 
 the indispensable device of credit. And as the self-sufficing 
 economic unit quite obviously in the case of England, less 
 obviously but hardly less certainly in other notable cases 
 cannot be the national unit, the field of the contract the 
 necessary stability of credit, that is must be, if not inter- 
 national, then trans-national. All of which is extremely 
 elementary; and almost entirely overlooked by our statesman- 
 ship, as reflected in the Settlement and in the conduct of policy 
 since the Armistice. 
 
 Britain's dependence on the production by foreigners of a 
 surplus of food and raw materials beyond their own 
 needs 
 
 The matter may be clarified if we summarise what precedes, 
 and much of what follows, in this proposition : 
 
 The present conditions in Europe show that much of its 
 dense population (notably the population of these islands) can
 
 10 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 only live at a standard necessary for civilisation (leisure, social 
 peace, individual freedom) by means of certain co-operative 
 processes, which must be carried on largely across frontiers. 
 The mere physical existence of much of the population of 
 Britain is dependent upon the production by foreigners of a 
 surplus of food and raw materials beyond their own needs. 
 
 The processes of production have become of the complex 
 kind which cannot be compelled by preponderant power, exacted 
 by physical coercion. 
 
 But the attempt at such coercion, the inevitable results of 
 a policy aimed at securing predominant power, provoking resis- 
 tance and friction, can and does paralyse the necessary 
 processes, and by so doing is undermining the economic 
 foundations of British life. 
 
 What are the facts supporting the foregoing proposition? 
 
 Many whose instincts of national protection would become 
 immediately alert at the possibility of a naval blockade of these 
 islands, remain indifferent to the possibility of a blockade 
 arising in another but every bit as effective a fashion. 
 
 That is through the failure of the food and raw material, 
 upon which our populations and our industries depend, to be 
 produced at all owing to the progressive social disintegration 
 which seems to be going on over the greater part of the world. 
 To the degree to which it is true to say that Britain's life is 
 dependent upon her fleet, it is true to say that it is dependent 
 upon the production by foreigners of a surplus above their own 
 needs of food and raw material. This is the most fundamental 
 fact in the economic situation of Britain : a large portion of her 
 population are fed by the exchange of coal, or services and 
 manufactures based on coal, for the surplus production, mainly 
 food and raw material, of peoples living overseas. 1 Whether 
 
 'Out of a population of 45,000,000 our home-grown wheat suffices 
 for only about 12,500,000, on the basis of the 1919-20 crop. Sir Henry 
 Rew, Food Supplies in Peace and War, says: 'On the basis of our
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 11 
 
 the failure of food to reach us were due to the sinking of our 
 ships at sea or the failure of those ships to obtain cargoes at 
 the port of embarkation the result in the end would be the same. 
 Indeed, the latter method, if complete, would be the more 
 serious as an armistice or surrender would not bring relief. 
 
 The hypothesis has been put in an extreme form in order to 
 depict the situation as vividly as possible. But such a condition 
 as the complete failure of the foreigner's surplus does not seem 
 to-day so preposterous as it might have done five years ago. 
 For that surplus has shrunk enormously and great areas that 
 once contributed to feeding us can do so no longer. Those 
 areas already include Russia, Siberia, the Balkans, and a large 
 part of the Near and Far East. What we are practically con- 
 cerned with, of course, is not the immediate disappearance of 
 that surplus on which our industries depend, but the degree 
 to which its reduction increases for us the cost of food, and so 
 intensifies all the social problems that arise out of an increasing 
 cost of living. Let the standard alike of consumption and 
 production of our overseas white customers decline to the 
 standard of India and China, and our foreign trade would 
 correspondingly decrease ; the decline in the world's production 
 of food would mean that much less for us; it would reduce the 
 volume of our trade, or in terms of our own products, cost 
 that much more; this in turn would increase the cost of our 
 manufactures, create an economic situation which one could 
 describe with infinite technical complexity, but which, howerer 
 technical and complex that description were made, would finally 
 come to this that our own toil would become less productive. 
 
 That is a relatively new situation. In the youth of men 
 now living, these islands with their twenty-five or thirty million 
 
 present population ... we should still need to import 78 per cent. 
 of our requirements.' (p. 165). Before the War, according to the same 
 authority, home produce supplied 48 per cent, in food value of the 
 total consumption, but the table on which this figure is based does not 
 include sugar, tea, coffee, or cocoa.
 
 12 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 population were, so far as vital needs are concerned, self- 
 sufficing. What will be the situation when the children now 
 growing up in our homes become members of a British popu- 
 lation which may number fifty, sixty, or seventy millions? 
 (Germany's population, which, at the outbreak of war, was 
 nearly seventy millions, was in 1870 a good deal less than the 
 present population of Great Britain.) 
 
 Moreover, the problem is affected by what is perhaps the most 
 important economic change in the world since the industrial 
 revolution, namely the alteration in the ratio of the exchange 
 value of manufactures and food the shift over of advantage 
 in exchange from the side of the industrialist and manufacturer 
 to the side of the producer of food. 
 
 Until the last years of the nineteenth century the world was 
 a place in which it was relatively easy to produce food, and 
 nearly the whole of its population was doing it. In North and 
 South America, in Russia, Siberia, China, India, the universal 
 occupation was agriculture, carried on largely (save in the case 
 of China and India) upon new soil, its first fertility as yet 
 unexhausted. A tiny minority of the world's population only 
 was engaged in industry in the modern sense: in producing 
 things in factories by machinery, in making iron and steel. 
 Only in Great Britain, in Northern Germany, in a few districts 
 in the United States, had large-scale industry been system- 
 atically developed. It is easy to see, therefore, what immense 
 advantage in exchange the industrialist had. What he had for 
 sale was relatively scarce; what the agriculturist had for sale 
 was produced the world over and was, in terms of manufac- 
 tures, extremely cheap. It was the economic paradox of the 
 time that in countries like America, South and North, the 
 farmer the producer of food was naturally visualised as a 
 poverty-stricken individual a 'hayseed' dressed in cotton jeans, 
 without the conveniences and amenities of civilisation, while it 
 was in the few industrial centres that the vast wealth was 
 being piled up. But as the new land in North America and
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 13 
 
 Argentina and Siberia became occupied and its first fertility 
 exhausted, as the migration from the land to the towns set in, 
 it became possible with the spread of technical training through- 
 out the world, with the wider distribution of mechanical power 
 and the development of transport, for every country in some 
 measure to engage in manufacture, and the older industrial 
 centres lost some of their monopoly advantage in dealing with 
 the food producer. In Cobden's day it was almost true to say 
 that England spun cotton for the world. To-day cotton is 
 spun where cotton is grown; in India, in the Southern States 
 of America, in China. 
 
 This is a condition which (as the pages which follow reveal 
 in greater detail) the intensification of nationalism and its 
 hostility to international arrangement will render very much 
 more acute. The patriotism of the future China or Argentina 
 or India and Australia, for that matter may demand the 
 home production of goods now bought in (say) England. It 
 may not in economic terms benefit the populations who thus 
 insist upon a complete national economy. But 'defence is 
 more than opulence.' The very insecurity which the absence 
 of a definitely organised international order involves will be 
 invoked as justifying the attempt at economic self-sufficiency. 
 Nationalism creates the situation to which it points as justi- 
 fication for its policy: it makes the very real dangers that it 
 fears. And as Nationalism thus breaks up the efficient trans- 
 national division of labour and diminishes total productivity, 
 the resultant pressure of population or diminished means of 
 subsistence will push to keener rivalry for the conquest of 
 territory. The circle can become exceedingly vicious so 
 vicious, indeed, that we may finally go back to the self-sufficing 
 village community; a Europe sparsely populated if the resul- 
 tant clerical influence is unable to check prudence in the matter 
 of the birth-rate, densely populated to a Chinese or Indian 
 degree if the birth-rate is uncontrolled. 
 
 The economic chaos and social disintegration which have
 
 14 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 stricken so much of the world have brought a sharp reminder 
 of the primary, the elemental place of food in the catalogue of 
 man's needs, and the relative ease and rapidity with which most 
 else can be jettisoned in our complex civilisation, provided only 
 that the stomach can be filled. 
 
 Before the War the towns of Europe were the luxurious 
 and opulent centres; the rural districts were comparatively 
 poor. To-day it is the cities of the Continent that are half- 
 starved or famine-stricken, while the farms are well-fed and 
 relatively opulent. In Russia, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Aus- 
 tria, the cities perish, but the peasants for the most part have 
 a sufficiency. The cities are finding that with the breakdown 
 of the old stability of the transport and credit systems par- 
 ticularly they cannot obtain food from the farmers. This 
 process which we now see at work on the Continent is in fact 
 the reversal of our historical development. 
 
 As money acquired a stable value and transport and com- 
 munication became easy and cheap, the manor ceased to be self- 
 contained, to weave its own clothes and make its own imple- 
 ments. But the Russian peasants are proving to-day that if the 
 railroads break down, and the paper money loses its value, the 
 farm can become once more self-sufficing. Better to thresh 
 the wheat with a flail, to weave clothes from the wool, than to 
 exchange wheat and wool for a money that will buy neither 
 cloth nor threshing machinery. But a country-side that weaves 
 its own cloth and threshes its grain by hand is one that has 
 little surplus of food for great cities as Vienna, Buda-Pest, 
 Moscow, and Petrograd have already discovered. 
 
 If England is destined in truth to remain the workshop 
 of that world which produces the food and raw material, then 
 she has indeed a very direct interest in the maintenance of all 
 those processes upon which the pre-war exchange between 
 farm and factory, city and country, depended. * 
 
 1 The growing power of the food-producing area and its determina- 
 tion to be independent as far as possible of the industrial centre, is a
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 15 
 
 The 'farm' upon which the 'factory' of Great Britain de- 
 pends is the food-producing world as a whole. It does not 
 suffice that the overseas world should merely support itself as 
 it did, say, in the tenth century, but it must be induced by hope 
 of advantage to exchange a surplus for those things which we 
 can deliver to it more economically than it can make them for 
 itself. Because the necessary social and political stability, with 
 its material super-structure of transport and credit, operating 
 trans-nationally, has broken down, much of Europe is returning 
 to its earlier simple life of unco-ordinated production, and its 
 total fertility is being very greatly reduced. The consequent 
 reaction of a diminished food supply for ourselves is already 
 being felt. 
 
 The 'Prosperity' of Paper Money 
 
 It will be said : Does not the unquestioned rise in the stand- 
 ard of wages, despite all the talk of debt, expenditure, un- 
 balanced budgets, public bankruptcy, disprove any theory of a 
 vital connection between a stable Europe and our own pros- 
 perity? Indeed, has not the experience of the War discredited 
 much of the theory of the interdependence of nations? 
 
 The first few years of the War did, indeed, seem to discredit 
 it, to show that this interdependence was not so vital as had 
 been supposed. Germany seemed for a long time really to be 
 self-supporting, to manage without contact with other peoples. 
 It seemed possible to re-direct the channels of trade with rela- 
 tive ease. It really appeared for a time that the powers of the 
 
 fact too often neglected in considering the revolutionary movements of 
 Europe. The war of the classes almost everywhere is crossed by an- 
 other war, that between cities and country. The land-owning country- 
 man, whether peasant or noble, tends to become conservative, clerical, 
 anti-socialist (and anti-social) in his politics and outlook.
 
 16 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Governments could modify fundamentally the normal process 
 of credit almost at will, which would have been about equivalent 
 to the discovery of perpetual motion! Not only was private 
 credit maintained by governmental assistance, but exchanges 
 were successfully 'pegged'; collapse could be prevented ap- 
 parently with ease. Industry itself showed a similar elasticity. 
 In this country it seemed possible to withdraw five or six 
 million men from actual production, and so organise the re- 
 mainder as to enable them to produce enough not only to 
 maintain themselves, but the country at large and the army, 
 in food, clothing and other necessaries. And this was accom- 
 plished at a standard of living above rather than below that 
 which obtained when the country was at peace, and when the 
 six or seven or eight millions engaged in war or its maintenance 
 were engaged in the production of consumable wealth. It 
 seemed an economic miracle that with these millions withdrawn 
 from production, though remaining consumers, the total in- 
 dustrial output should be very little less than it was before the 
 War. 
 
 But we are beginning to see how this miracle was performed, 
 and also what is the truth as to the self-sufficiency of the great 
 nations. As late as the early summer of 1918, when, even 
 after four years of the exhausting drain of war, well-fed 
 German armies were still advancing and gaining victories, and 
 German guns were bombarding Paris (for the first time in the 
 War), the edifice of German self-sufficiency seemed to be sound. 
 But this apparently stalwart economic structure crumbled in 
 a few months into utter ruins and the German population was 
 starving and freezing, without adequate food, fuel, clothing. 
 England has in large measure escaped this result just because 
 her contacts with the rest oC_the world have been maintained 
 while Germany's have not. These latter "were not even re-es- 
 tablished at"~The" Armistice; in many respects her economic \ 
 isolation was more complete after the War than during it. 
 Moreover, because our contacts with the rest of the world are
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 17 
 
 maintained by shipping, a very great flexibility is given to our 
 extra-national economic relationships. Our lines of communi- 
 cation can be switched from one side of the world to the other 
 instantly, whereas a country whose approaches are by railroads 
 may find its communications embarrassed for a generation if 
 new frontiers render the old lines inapplicable to the new poli- 
 tical conditions. 
 
 In the first year or so following the Armistice there was a 
 curious contradiction in the prevailing attitude towards the 
 economic situation at home. The newspapers were full of head- 
 lines about the Road to Ruin and National Bankruptcy; the 
 Government plainly was unable to make both ends meet; the 
 financial world was immensely relieved when America postponed 
 the payments of debts to her; we were pathetically appealing 
 to her to come and save us; the British sovereign, which for 
 generations has been a standard of value for the world and 
 the symbol of security, dropped to a discount of 20 per cent, 
 in terms of the dollar; our Continental creditors were even 
 worse off ; the French could only pay us in a depreciated paper 
 currency, the value of which in terms of the dollar varied be- 
 tween a third and a fourth of what it was before the War; 
 the lira was cheaper still. Yet side by side with this we had 
 stories of a trade boom (especially in textiles and cotton), so 
 great that merchants and manufacturers refused to go to their 
 offices, in order to dodge the flood of orders so vastly in ex- 
 cess of what they could fulfil. Side by side with depreciated i 
 paper currency, with public debts so crippling that the Govern- 
 ment could only balance its budget by loans which were not 
 successful when floated, the amusement trades flourished as 
 never before. Theatre, music hall, and cinematograph receipts 
 beat all records. There was a greater demand for motor-cars 
 than the trade could supply. The Riviera was fuller than it 
 had ever been before. The working class itself was competing 
 with others for the purchase of luxuries which in the past 
 that class never knew. And while the financial situation made 
 *
 
 18 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 it impossible, apparently, to find capital for building houses to 
 live in, ample capital was forthcoming wherewith to build 
 cinema -palaces. We heard and read of famine almost at our 
 floors, and saw great prosperity around us; read daily of im- 
 pending bankruptcy and of high profits and lavish spending; 
 of world-wide unrest and revolution and higher wages than 
 the workers had ever known. 
 
 Complex and contradictory as the facts seemed, the difficulty 
 of a true estimate was rendered greater by the position in which 
 European Governments found themselves placed. These Gov- 
 ernments were faced by the necessity of maintaining credit and 
 confidence at almost any cost. They must not, therefore, throw 
 too great an emphasis upon the dark features. Yet the need 
 for economy and production was declared to be as great as it 
 was during the war. To create a mood of seriousness and 
 sober resolution adequate to the situation would involve stressing 
 facts which, in their efforts to obtain loans, internal or external, 
 and to maintain credit, governments were compelled to mini- 
 mise. 
 
 Then, of course, the facts were obscured mainly by the pur- 
 chasing power created by the manufacture of credit and paper 
 money. Some light is thrown upon this ambiguous situation 
 by a fact which is now so manifest that this juxtaposition of 
 growing indebtedness and lavish spending, high wages, high 
 profits, active trade, and a rising standard of living, were all 
 things that marked the condition of Germany in the first few 
 years of the War. Industrial concerns showed profits such 
 as they had never shown before; wages steadily rose; and 
 money was plentiful. But the profits were made and the wages 
 were paid in a money that continually declined in value as ours 
 is declining. The higher consumption drew upon sources that 
 were steadily being depleted as ours are being depleted. The 
 production was in certain cases maintained by very uneco- 
 nomic methods : as by working only the best seams in the coal 
 mines, by devoting no effort to the proper upkeep of plant
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 19 
 
 (locomotives on the railway which ordinarily would go into 
 the repair shop every six weeks were kept running somehow 
 during the whole course of the War). In this sense the people 
 were 'living upon capital' devoting, that is, to the needs ot 
 current consumption energy which should have been devoted 
 to ensuring future production. In another way, they were 
 converting into income what is normally a source of capital. 
 An increase in profits or wages, which ordinarily would have 
 provided a margin, over and above current expenditure, out 
 of which capital for new plant, etc., could have been drawn, 
 was rapidly nullified by a corresponding increase in prices. 
 Loans for the purpose even of capital expenditure involved an 
 inflation of currency which still further increased prices, thus 
 diminishing the value of the capital so provided, necessitating 
 the issue of further loans which had the same effect. And so 
 the vicious circle was narrowed. Even after four years of this 
 kind of thing the edifice had in many respects the outward ap- 
 pearances of prosperity. As late as April, 1918, the German 
 organisation, as we have noted, was still capable of maintaining 
 a military machine which could not only hold its own but com- 
 pel the retirement of the combined forces of France, Britain, 
 America, and minor Allies. But once the underlying process 
 of disintegration became apparent, the whole structure went 
 to pieces^ 
 
 It is that unnoticed process of disintegration, preceding the 
 final collapse, which should interest us. For the general 
 method employed by Germany for meeting the consumption of 
 war and disguising the growing scarcity is in many respects the 
 method her neighbours adopted for meeting the consumption 
 of a new standard of life on the basis of less total wealth 
 a standard which, on the part of the workers, means both 
 shorter hours and a larger share of their produce, and on the 
 part of other classes a larger share of the more expensive 
 luxuries. Like the Germans of 1914-18, we are drawing 
 for current consumption upon the fund which, in a more
 
 20 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 healthy situation, would go to provide for renewal of plant 
 and provision of new capital. To 'eat the seed corn' may give 
 an appearance of present plenty at the cost of ^starvation later. 
 It is extremely unlikely that there will ever be in England 
 the sudden catastrophic economic collapse which we have wit- 
 nessed in Russia, Germany, Austria, and Central Europe gener- 
 ally. But we shall none the less be concerned. As the increased 
 wages gained by strikes lose with increasing rapidity their value 
 in purchasing power, thus wiping out the effect of the industrial 
 'victory,' irritation among the workers will grow. On minds 
 so prepared the Continental experiments in social reconstruc- 
 tion prompted by conditions immeasurably more acute will 
 act with the force of hypnotic suggestion. Our Government 
 may attempt to cope with these movements by repression or 
 political devices. Tempers will be too bad and patience too 
 short to give the sound solutions a real chance. And an eco- 
 nomic situation, not in itself inherently desperate, may get 
 steadily worse because of the loss of social discipline and of 
 political insight, the failure to realise past expectations, the 
 continuance of military burdens created by external political 
 chaos. 
 
 The European disintegration: Britain's concern. 
 
 What has actually happened in so much of Europe around 
 us ought certainly to prevent any too complacent sense of 
 security. In the midst of this old civilisation are (in Mr. 
 Hoover's calculation) some hundred million folk, who before 
 the War managed to support themselves in fair comfort but 
 are now unable to be truly self-supporting. Yet they live upon ', 
 the same soil and in the presence of the same natural resources 
 as before the War. Their inability to use that soil and those 
 materials is not due to the mere physical destruction of war, 
 for the famine is worst where there has been no physical de-
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 21 
 
 struction at all. It is not a lack of labour, for millions are 
 unemployed, seeking work. Nor is it lack of technical or 
 scientific knowledge, upon which (very erroneously) we are 
 apt to look as the one sufficient factor of civilisation; for our 
 technical knowledge in the management of matter is greater 
 even than before the War. 
 
 What then is the reason why these millions starve in the 
 midst of potential plenty? It is that they have lost, from 
 certain moral causes examined later in these pages, the capacity 
 to co-ordinate their labour sufficiently to carry on the processes 
 by which alone labour and knowledge can be applied to an 
 exploitation of nature sufficiently complete to support our 
 dense modern populations. 
 
 The fact that wealth is not to-day a material which can be 
 taken, but a process which can only be maintained by virtue 
 of certain moral factors, marks a change in human relationship, 
 the significance of which still seems to escape us. 
 
 The manor, or even the eighteenth century village, was 
 roughly a self-sufficing unit. It mattered little to that unit what 
 became of the outside world. The manor or village was inde- 
 pendent; its people could be cut off from the outside world, 
 could ravage the near parts of it and remain unaffected. But 
 when the development of communication and the discovery of 
 steam turns the agricultural community into coal miners, these 
 are no longer indifferent to the condition of the outside workl. 
 Cut them off from the agriculturalists who take their coal or 
 manufactures, or let these latter be unable to carry on their 
 calling, and the miner starves. He cannot eat his coal. He is 
 no longest independent. His life hangs upon certain activities 
 of others. Where his forebears could have raided and ravaged 
 with no particular hurt to themselves, the miner cannot. He 
 is dependent upon those others and has given them hostages. 
 He is no longer 'independent,' however clamorously in his 
 Nationalist oratory he may use that word. He has been forced 
 into a relation of partnership. And how very small is the effect-
 
 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 iveness of any physical coercion he can apply, in order to exact 
 the services by which he lives, we shall see presently. 
 
 This situation of interdependence is of course felt much more 
 acutely by some countries than others much more by England, 
 for instance, than by France. France in the matter of essential 
 foodstuffs can be nearly self-supporting, England cannot. For 
 England, an outside world of fairly high production is a matter 
 of life and death ; the economic consideration must in this sense 
 take precedence of others. In the case of France considerations 
 of political security are apt to take precedence of economic con- 
 siderations. France can weaken her neighbours vitally without 
 being brought to starvation. She can purchase security at the 
 cost of mere loss of profits on foreign trade by the economic 
 destruction of, say, Central Europe. The same policy would 
 for Britain in the long run spell starvation. And it is this 
 fundamental difference of economic situation which is at the 
 bottom of much of the divergence of policy between Britain 
 and France which has recently become so acute. 
 
 This is the more evident when we examine recent changes 
 of detail in this general situation special to England. Before 
 the War a very large proportion of our food and raw material 
 was supplied by the United States. But our economic relation- 
 ship with that country has been changed as the result of the 
 War. Previous to 1914 we were the creditor and America 
 the debtor nation. She was obliged to transmit to us large 
 sums in interest on investments of British capital. These 
 annual payments were in fact made in the form of food and 
 raw materials, for which, in a national sense, we did not have 
 to give goods or services in return. We are now less in the 
 position of creditor, more in that of debtor. America does 
 not have to transmit to us. Whereas, originally, we did an 
 immense proportion of America's carrying trade, because she 
 had no ocean-going mercantile marine, she has begun to do 
 her own carrying. Further, the pressure of her population upon 
 her food resources is rapidly growing. The law diminishing
 
 OUR DAILY BREAQ 23 
 
 returns is in some instances beginning to apply to the production 
 of food, which in the past has been plentiful without fertilisers 
 and under a very wasteful and simple system. And in America, 
 as elsewhere, the standard of consumption, owing to a great 
 increase of the wage standard, has grown, while the standard 
 of production has not always correspondingly increased. 
 
 The practical effect of this is to throw England into greater 
 dependence upon certain new sources of food or trade, which 
 in the end is the same thing. The position becomes clearer if 
 we reflect that our dependence becomes more acute with every 
 increase of our population. Our children now at school may 
 be faced by the problem of finding food for a population of 
 sixty or seventy millions on these islands. A high agricultural 
 productivity on the part of countries like Russia and Siberia 
 and the Balkans might well be then a life and death matter. 
 
 Now the European famine has taught us a good deal about 
 the necessary conditions of high agricultural productivity. 
 The co-operation of manufactures of railways for taking 
 crops out and fertilisers in, of machinery, tools, wagons, clothing 
 is one of them. That manufacturing itself must be done by 
 division of labour is another : the country or area that is fitted 
 to supply textiles or cream separators is not necessarily fitted 
 to supply steel rails : yet until the latter are supplied the former 
 cannot be obtained. Often productivity is paralysed simply 
 because transport has broken down owing to lack of rolling 
 stock, or coal, or lubricants, or spare parts for locomotives ; or 
 because a debased currency makes it impossible to secure food 
 from peasants, who will not surrender it in return for paper 
 that has no value the manufactures which might ultimately 
 give it value being paralysed. The lack of confidence in the 
 maintenance of the value of paper money, for instance, is 
 rapidly diminishing the food productivity of the soil; peasants 
 will not toil to produce food which they cannot exchange, 
 through the medium of money, for the things which they need 
 clothing, implements, and so on. This diminishing produc-
 
 24 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 tivity is further aggravated by the impossibility of obtaining 
 fertilisers (some of which are industrial products, and all of 
 which require transport), machines, tools, etc. The food pro- 
 ducing capacity of Europe cannot be maintained without the 
 full co-operation of the non-agricultural industries transport, 
 manufactures, coal mining, sound banking and the mainte- 
 nance of political order. Nothing but the restoration of all the 
 economic processes of Europe as a whole can prevent a declining 
 productivity that must intensify social and political disorder, 
 of which we may merely have seen the beginning. 
 
 But if this interdependence of factory and farm in the pro- 
 duction of food is indisputable, though generally ignored, it 
 involves a further fact just as indisputable, and even more 
 completely ignored. And the further fact is that the manufac- 
 turing and the farming, neither of which can go on without the 
 other, may well be situated in different States. Vienna starves 
 largely because the coal needed for its factories is now situ- 
 ated in a foreign State Czecho-Slovakia which, partly from 
 political motives perhaps, fails to deliver it. Great food pro- 
 ducing areas in the Balkans and Russia are dependent for 
 their tools and machinery, for the stability of the money with- 
 out which the food will not be produced, upon the industries 
 of Germany. Those industries are destroyed, the markets 
 have disappeared, and with them the incentive to production. 
 The railroads of what ought to be food producing States 
 are disorganized from lack of rolling stock, due to the same 
 paralysis of German industry; and so the food production is 
 diminished. Tens of millions of acres outside Germany, whose 
 food the world sorely needs, have been rendered barren by 
 the industrial paralysis of the Central Empires which the 
 economic terms of the Treaty render inevitable. 
 
 Speaking of the need of Russian agriculture for German 
 industry, Mr. Maynard Keynes, who has worked out the 
 statistics revealing the relative position of Germany to the 
 rest of Europe, writes:
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 25 
 
 'It is impossible geographically and for many other rea- 
 sons for Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Americans to under- 
 take it we have neither the incentive nor the means for 
 doing the work on a sufficient scale. Germany, on the other 
 hand, has the experience, the incentive, and to a large extent, 
 the materials for furnishing the Russian peasant with the 
 goods of which he has been starved for the past five years, 
 for reorganising the business of transport and collection, and 
 so for bringing into the world's pool, for the common advan- 
 tage, the supplies from which we are now disastrously cut 
 off. ... If we oppose in detail every means by which Ger- 
 many or Russia can recover their material well-being, because 
 we feel a national, racial, or political hatred for their popula- 
 tions or their governments, we must be prepared to face the 
 consequences of such feelings. Even if there is no moral 
 solidarity between the newly-related races of Europe, there 
 is an economic solidarity which we cannot disregard. Even 
 now, the world markets are one. If we do not allow Ger- 
 many to exchange products with Russia and so feed herself, 
 she must inevitably compete with us for the produce of the 
 New World. The more successful we are in snapping eco- 
 nomic relations between Germany and Russia, the more we shall 
 depress the level of our own economic standards and increase 
 the gravity of our own domestic problems.' 1 
 
 It is not merely the productivity of Russia which is involved. 
 Round Germany as a central support the rest of the European 
 economic system grouped itself, and upon the prosperity and 
 enterprise of Germany the prosperity of the rest of the Con- 
 tinent mainly depended. Germany was the best customer 
 of Russia, Norway, Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and 
 Austria-Hungary; she was the second best customer of Great 
 Britain, Sweden, and Denmark; and the third best customer 
 of France. She was the largest source of supply to Russia, 
 Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, 
 
 * 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace/ pp. 275-277.
 
 26 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Austria-Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria; and the second 
 largest source of supply to Great Britain, Belgium, and France. 
 Britain sent more experts to Germany than to any other coun- 
 try in the world except India, and bought more from her 
 than any other country in the world except the United States. 
 There was no European country except those west of Ger- 
 many which did not do more than a quarter of their total 
 trade with her; and in the case of Russia, Austria-Hungary, 
 and Poland, the proportion was far greater. To retard or 
 prevent the economic restoration of Germany means retarding 
 the economic reconstruction of Europe. 
 
 This gives us a hint of the deep causes underlying the 
 present divergence of French and British policy with refer- 
 ence to the economic reconstruction of Russia and Central 
 Europe. A Britain of sixty or seventy millions faced by the 
 situation with reference to America that has just been touched 
 upon, might well find that the development of the resources 
 of Russia, Siberia, and the Near East even at the cost of 
 dividing the profits thereof in terms of industrial development 
 with Germany, each supplying that for which it was best 
 suited was the essential condition of food and social peace. 
 France has no such pre-occupation. Her concern is political: 
 the maintenance of a military predominance on which she be- 
 lieves her political security to depend, an object that might well 
 be facilitated by the political disintegration of Europe even 
 though it involved its economic disintegration. 
 
 That brings us to the political factor in the decline in produc- 
 tivity. From it 'we may learn something of the moral factor, 
 which is the ultimate condition of any co-operation whatso- 
 ever. 
 
 The relationship of the political to the economic situation 
 is illustrated most vividly, perhaps, in the case of Austria. 
 Mr. Hoover, in testimony given to a United States Senate 
 Committee, has declared bluntly that it is no use talking of 
 loans to Austria which imply future security, if the present
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 27 
 
 political status is to be maintained, because that status has 
 rendered the old economic activities impossible. Speaking 
 before the Committee, he said: 
 
 'The political situation in Austria I hesitate to discuss, but 
 it is the cause of the trouble. Austria has now no hope of 
 being anything more than a perpetual poorhouse, because all 
 her lands that produce food have been taken from her. This, 
 I will say, was done without American inspiration. If this 
 political situation continues, and Austria is made a perpetual 
 mendicant, the United States should not provide the charity. 
 We should make the loan suggested with full notice that those 
 who undertake to continue Austria's present status must pay 
 the bill. Present Austria faces three alternatives death, mi- 
 gration, or a complete industrial diversion and re-organization. 
 Her economic rehabilitation seems impossible after the way 
 she was broken up at the Peace Conference. Her present 
 territory will produce only enough food for three months, and 
 she has now no factories which might produce products to be 
 exchanged for food/ * 
 
 To realise what can really be accomplished by statesman- 
 ship that has a soul above such trifles as food and fuel, when 
 it sets its hand to map-drawing, one should attempt to visualise 
 the state of Vienna to-day. Mr A. G. Gardiner, the English 
 journalist, has sketched it thus : 
 
 'To conceive its situation one must imagine London suddenly 
 cut off from all the sources of its life, no access to the sea, 
 frontiers of hostile Powers all round it, every coalfield of 
 Yorkshire or South Wales or Scotland in foreign hands, no 
 citizen able to travel to Birmingham or Manchester without a 
 passport, the mills it had financed in Lancashire taken from 
 it, no coal to burn, no food to eat, and with its shilling down 
 
 1 Manchester Guardian, Weekly Edition, February 6th., 1920.
 
 28 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 in value to a farthing no money to buy raw materials for its 
 labour, industry at a standstill, hundreds of thousands living 
 (or dying) on charity, nothing prospering except ,the vile ex- 
 ploiters of misery, the traffickers in food, the traffickers in vice. 
 That is the Vienna which the peace criminals have made. 
 
 'Vienna was the financial and administrative centre of fifty 
 million of people. It financed textile factories, paper manu- 
 facturing, machine works, beet growing, and scores of other 
 industries in German Bohemia. It owned coal mines at 
 Teschen. It drew its food from Hungary. From every quar- 
 ter of the Empire there came to Vienna the half-manufac- 
 tured products of the provinces for the finishing processes, 
 tailoring, dyeing, glass-working, in which a vast population 
 found employment. 
 
 'Suddenly all this elaborate structure of economic life was 
 swept away. Vienna, instead of being the vital centre of fifty 
 millions of people, finds itself a derelict city with a province 
 of six millions. It is cut off from its coal supplies, from its 
 food supplies, from its factories, from everything that means 
 existence. It is enveloped by tariff walls.' 
 
 The writer goes on to explain that the evils are not limited 
 to Austria. In this unhappy Balkanised Society that the peace 
 has created at the heart of Europe, every State is at issue with 
 its neighbours : the Czechs with the Poles, the Hungarians with 
 the Czechs, the Rumanians with the Hungarians, and all with 
 Austria. The whole Empire is parcelled out into quarrelling 
 factions, with their rival tariffs, their passports and their ani- 
 mosities. All free intercourse has stopped, all free interchange 
 of commodities has ceased. Each starves the other and is 
 starved by the other. 'I met a banker travelling from Buda- 
 Pest to Berlin by Vienna and Bavaria. I asked him why he 
 went so far out of his way to get to his goal, and he replied 
 that it was easier to do that than to get through the barbed- 
 wire entanglements of Czecho-Slovakia. There is great hunger
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 29 
 
 in Bohemia, and it is due largely to the same all-embracing 
 cause. Formerly the Czech peasants used to go to Hungary 
 to gather the harvest and returned with corn as part payment. 
 Now intercourse has stopped, the Hungarian cornfields are 
 without the necessary labour, and the Czech peasant starves 
 at home, or is fed by the American Relief Fund. "One year 
 of peace," said Herr Renner, the Chancellor, to me, "has 
 wrought more ruin than five years of war." ' 
 
 Mr Gardiner's final verdict * does not in essence differ from 
 that of Mr Hoover: 
 
 'It is the levity of mind which has plunged this great city 
 into ruin that is inexplicable. The political dismemberment of 
 Austria might be forgiven. That was repeatedly declared by 
 the Allies not to be an object of the War; but the policy of the 
 French, backed by the industrious propaganda of a mischievous 
 newspaper group in this country, triumphed and the promise 
 'was dishonoured. Austria-Hungary was broken into political 
 fragments. That might be defended as a political necessity. 
 But the economic dismemberment was as gratuitous as it was 
 deadly. It could have been provided against if ordinary fore- 
 sight had been employed. Austria-Hungary was an economic 
 unit, a single texture of the commercial, industrial, and financial 
 interests.' 2 
 
 1 Daily News, June 28th., 1920. 
 
 'Sir William Goode, British Director of Relief, has said, (Times 
 Dec. 6th., 1919) : 
 
 'I have myself recently returned from Vienna. I feel as if I had 
 spent ten days in the cell of a condemned murderer who has given 
 up all hope of reprieve. I stayed at the best hotel, but I saw no milk 
 and no eggs the whole time I was there. In the bitter, cold hall of 
 the hotel, once the gayest rendezvous in Europe, the visitors huddled 
 together in the gloom of one light where there used to be forty. They 
 were more like shadows of the Embankment than representatives of 
 the rich. Vienna's world-famous Opera House is packed every after- 
 noon. Why? Women and men go there in order to keep themselves 
 warm, and because they have no work to do.' 
 
 He went on : 
 
 'First aid was to hasten peace. Political difficulties combined with
 
 30 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 We have talked readily enough in the past of this or that 
 being a 'menace to civilisation.' The phrase has been applied 
 indifferently to a host of things from Prussian Militarism to 
 the tango. No particular meaning was attached to the phrase, 
 and we did not believe that the material security of our civilisa- 
 tion the delivery of the letters and the milk in the morning, 
 and the regular running of the 'Tubes' would ever be endan- 
 gered in our times. 
 
 But this is what has happened in a few months. We have 
 seen one of the greatest and most brilliant capitals of Europe, 
 a city completely untouched by the physical devastation of war, 
 endowed beyond most with the equipment of modern technical 
 learning and industry, with some of the greatest factories, 
 medical schools and hospitals of our times, unable to save its 
 children from death by simple starvation unable, with all that 
 equipment, to provide them each with a little milk and a few 
 ounces of flour every day. 
 
 The Limits of Political Control 
 
 It is sometimes suggested that as political factors (partic- 
 ularly the drawing of frontiers) entered to some extent at least 
 into the present distribution of population, political forces can 
 re-distribute that population. But re-distribution would mean 
 in fact killing. 
 
 So to re-direct the vast currents of European industry as to 
 involve a great re-distribution of the population would demand 
 
 decreased production, demoralisation of railway traffic, to say nothing 
 of actual shortages of coal, food, and finance, had practically paralysed 
 industrial and commercial activity. The bold liberation or creation of 
 areas, without simultaneous steps to reorganise economic life, had so far 
 proved to be a dangerous experiment. Professor Masaryk, the able 
 President of Czecho-Slovakia, put the case in a nutshell when he said: 
 "It is a question of the export of merchandise or of population." '
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 31 
 
 a period of time so great that during the necessary stoppage of 
 the economic process most of the population concerned would 
 be dead even if we could imagine sufficient stability to permit 
 of these vast changes taking place according to the naive and 
 what we now know to be fantastic, programme of our Treaties. 
 And since the political forces as we shall see are extremely 
 unstable, the new distribution would presumably again one day 
 undergo a similarly murderous modification. 
 
 That brings us to the question suggested in the proposition 
 set out some pages back, how far preponderant political power 
 can ensure or compel those processes by which a population in 
 the position of that of these islands lives. 
 
 For, as against much of the foregoing, it is sometimes urged 
 that Britain's concern in the Continental chaos is not really 
 vital, because while the British Isles cannot be self-sufficing, the 
 British Empire can be. 
 
 During the War a very bold attempt was made to devise a 
 scheme by which political power should be used to force the 
 economic development of the world into certain national chan- 
 nels, a scheme whereby the military power of the dominant 
 group should be so used as to ensure it a permanent preponder- 
 ance of economic resources. The plan is supposed to have 
 emanated from Mr Hughes, the Prime Minister of Australia, 
 and the Allies (during Mr Asquith's Premiership incidentally) 
 met in Paris for its consideration. Mr Hughes's idea seems 
 to have been to organise the world into economic categories: 
 the British Empire first in order of mutual preference, the Allies 
 next, the neutrals next, and the enemy States last of all. Russia 
 was, of course, included among the Allies, America among the 
 neutrals, the States then Austria- Hungary among the enemies. 
 
 One has only to imagine some such scheme having been 
 voted and put into operation, and the modifications which 
 political changes would to-day compel, to get an idea of merely 
 the first of the difficulties of using political and military power, 
 with a basis of separate and competing nationalisms, for
 
 32 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 economic purposes. The very nature of military nationalism 
 makes surrender of competition in favour of long continued 
 co-operation for common purposes, a moral impossibility. The 
 foundations of the power are unstable, the wills which determine 
 its use contradictory. 
 
 Yet military power must rest upon Alliance. Even the 
 British Empire found that its defence needed Allies. And if the 
 British Empire is to be self-sufficing, its trade canalised into 
 channels drawn along certain political lines, the preferences and 
 prohibitions will create many animosities. Are we to sacrifice 
 our self-sufficiency for the sake of American and French 
 friendship, or risk losing the friendship by preferences designed 
 to ensure self-sufficiency? Yet to the extent that our trade 
 is with countries like North and South America we cannot 
 exercise on its behalf even the shadow of military coercion. 
 
 But that is only the beginning of the difficulty. 
 
 A suggestive fact is that ever since the population of these 
 islands became dependent upon overseas trade, that trade has 
 been not mainly with the Empire but with foreigners. It is 
 to-day. 1 And if one reflects for a moment upon the present 
 political relationship of the Imperial Government to Ireland, 
 Egypt, India, South Africa, and the tariff and immigration 
 legislation that has marked the economic history of Australia 
 and Canada during the last twenty years, one will get some 
 idea of the difficulty which surrounds the employment of 
 political power for the shaping of an economic policy to sub- 
 serve any large and long-continued political end. 
 
 The difficulties of an imperial policy in this respect do not 
 differ much in character from the difficulties encountered in 
 Paris. The British Empire, too, has its problems of 'Balkanis- 
 
 *The figures for 1913 are: 
 
 Imports. From British Possessions 192,000,000. 
 
 From Foreign Countries 577,000,000. 
 
 Exports. To British Possessions 195,000,000. 
 
 To Foreign Countries 330,000,000. 
 
 Re-exports. To British Possessions 14,000,000. 
 
 To Foreign Countries 96,000,000.
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 33 
 
 ation,' problems that have arisen also from the anti-social 
 element of 'absolute' nationalism. The present Nationalist 
 fermentation within the Empire reveals very practical limits to 
 the use of political power. We cannot compel the purchase of 
 British goods by Egyptian, Indian, or Irish Nationalists. 
 Moreover, an Indian or Egyptian boycott or Irish agitation, 
 may well deprive political domination of any possibility of 
 economic advantage. The readiness with which British opinion 
 has accepted very large steps towards the independence and 
 evacuation of Egypt after having fiercely resisted such a policy 
 for a generation, would seem to suggest that some part of the 
 truth in this matter is receiving general recognition. It is hardly 
 less noteworthy that popular newspapers that one could not 
 have imagined taking such a view at the time, say, of the Boer 
 war now strenuously oppose further commitments in Mesopo- 
 tamia and Persia and do so on financial grounds. And even 
 where the relations of the Imperial Government with States 
 like Canada or Australia are of the most cordial kind, the 
 impotence of political power for exacting economic advantage 
 has become an axiom of imperial statecraft. The day that 
 the Government in London proposed to set in motion its army 
 or navy for the purpose of compelling Canada or Australia 
 to cease the manufacture of cotton or steel in order to give 
 England a market, would be the day, as we are all aware, of 
 another Declaration of Independence. Any preference would 
 be the result of consent, agreement, debate, contract: not of 
 coercion. 
 
 But the most striking demonstration yet afforded in history 
 of the limits placed by modern industrial conditions upon the 
 economic effectiveness of political power is afforded by the 
 story of the attempt to secure reparations, indemnity, and even 
 coal from Germany, and the attempt of the victors, like France, 
 to repair the disastrous financial situation which has followed 
 war by the military seizure of the wealth of a beaten enemy. 
 That story is instructive both by reason of the light which it 
 
 8
 
 34 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 throws upon the facts as to the economic value of military 
 power, and upon the attitude of public and statesmen towards 
 these facts. 
 
 When, some hfteen years ago, it was suggested that, given 
 the conditions of modern trade and industry, a victor would 
 not in practice be able to turn his military preponderance to 
 economic account even in such a relatively simple matter as 
 the payment of an indemnity, the suggestion was met with all 
 but universal derision. European economists of international 
 reputation implied that an author who could make a suggestion 
 of that kind was just playing with paradox for the purpose 
 of notoriety. And as for newspaper criticism it revealed the 
 fact that in the minds of the critics it was as simple a matter 
 for an army to 'take' a nation's wealth once military victory 
 had been achieved, as it would be for a big schoolboy to take 
 an apple from a little one. 
 
 Incidentally, the history of the indemnity negotiations illum- 
 inates extraordinarily the truth upon which the present writer 
 happens so often to have insisted, namely, that in dealing with 
 the economics of nationalism, one cannot dissociate from the 
 problem the moral facts which make the nationalism without 
 which there would be no nationalisms, and therefore no 'inter- 
 national' economics. 
 
 A book by the present author published some fifteen years 
 ago has a chapter entitled 'The Indemnity Futility.' In the 
 first edition the main emphasis of the chapter was thrown on 
 this suggestion : on the morrow of a great war the victor would 
 be in no temper to see the foreign trade of his beaten enemy 
 expand by leaps and bounds, yet by no other means than by an 
 immense foreign trade could a nation pay an indemnity commen- 
 surate with the vast expenditure of modern war. The idea 
 that it would be paid in 'money,' which by some economic 
 witchcraft should not involve the export of goods, was declared 
 to be a gross and ignorant fallacy. The traders of the victorious 
 nation would have to face a greatly sharpened competition
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 35 
 
 from the beaten nation ; or the victor would have to go without 
 any very considerable indemnity. The chapter takes the ground 
 that an indemnity is not in terms of theoretical economics an 
 impossibility : it merely indicates the indispensable condition of 
 securing it the revival of the enemy's economic strength 
 and suggests that this would present for the victorious nation, 
 not only a practical difficulty of internal politics (the pressure 
 of Protectionist groups) but a grave political difficulty arising 
 out of the theory upon which defence by preponderant isolated 
 national power is based. A country possessing the economic 
 strength to pay a vast indemnity is of potential military strength. 
 And this is a risk your nationalists will not accept. 
 
 Even friendly Free Trade critics shook their heads at this 
 and implied that the argument was a reversion to Protectionist 
 illusions for the purpose of making a case. That misunder- 
 standing (for the argument does not involve acceptance of 
 Protectionist premises) seemed so general that in subsequent 
 editions of the book this particular passage was deleted. 1 
 
 *The question is dealt with more fully in the last chapter of the 
 'Addendum' to this book. The chapter of 'The Great Illusion' dealing 
 with the indemnity says : 'The difficulty in the case of a large in- 
 demnity is not so much the payment by the vanquished as the receiving 
 by the victor.' (p. 76, 1910 Edition.) Mr Lloyd George (Jan. 28th., 
 1921) says: 'The real difficulty is in securing payment outside the 
 limits of Germany. . . .The only way Germany can pay is by exports 
 the difference between German imports and exports ... If she ex- 
 ports too much for the Allies it means the ruin of their industry.' 
 
 Thus the main problem of an indemnity is to secure wealth in ex- 
 portable iorm which will not disorganise the victor's trade. Yet so 
 obscured does the plainest fact become in the murky atmosphere of 
 war time that in many of the elaborate studies emanating from West- 
 minster and Paris, as to 'What Germany can pay' this phase of the 
 problem is not even touched upon. We get calculations as to Ger- 
 many's total wealth in railroads, public buildings, houses, as though 
 these things could be picked up and transported to France or Belgium. 
 We are told that the Allies should collect the revenues of the railroads ; 
 the Daily Mail wants us to 'take' the income of Herr Stinnes, all with- 
 out a word as to the form in which this wealth is to leave Germany. 
 Are we prepared to take the things made in the factories of Herr 
 Stinnes or other Germans? If not, what do we propose that Germany 
 shall give? Paper marks increased in quantity until they reach just the
 
 36 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 It is not necessary now to labour the point, in view of all 
 that has happened in Paris. The dilemma suggested fifteen 
 years ago is precisely the dilemma which confronted the 
 makers of the Peace Treaty; it is, indeed, precisely the dilemma 
 which confronts us to-day. 
 
 It applies not only to the Indemnity, Reparations, but to 
 our entire policy, to larger aspects of our relations with the 
 enemy. Hence the paralysis which results from the two mutu- 
 ally exclusive aims of the Treaty of Versailles: the desire 
 on the one hand to reduce the enemy's strength by checking 
 his economic vitality and on the other to restore the general 
 productivity of Europe, to which the economic life of the 
 enemy is indispensable. 
 
 France found herself, at the end of the War, in a desperate 
 financial position and in dire need of all the help which could 
 come from the enemy towards the restoration of her devas- 
 tated districts. She presented demands for reparation run- 
 ning to vast, unprecedented sums. So be it. Germany then 
 was to be permitted to return to active and productive work, 
 to be permitted to have the iron and the other raw materials 
 necessary for the production of the agricultural machinery, 
 the building material and other sorts of goods France needed. 
 Not the least in the world! Germany was to produce this 
 
 value of the paper they are printed on? Even to secure coal, we must, 
 as we have seen, give in return food. 
 
 If the crux of the situation were really understood by the memorialists 
 who want Germany's pockets searched, their studies would be devoted 
 not to showing what Germany might produce under favourable cir- 
 cumstances, which her past has shown to be very great indeed, but 
 what degree of competitive German production Allied industrialists 
 will themselves be ready to face. 
 
 "Big business" in England is already strongly averse to the pay- 
 ment of an indemnity, as any conversation in the City or with indus- 
 trialists readily reveals. Yet it was the suggestion of what has actually 
 taken place which excited the derision of critics a few years ago. 
 Obviously the feasibility of an indemnity is much more a matter of our 
 will than of Germany's, for it depends on what shall be the size of 
 Germany's foreign trade. Gearly we can expand that if we want to. 
 We might give her a preference 1
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 37 
 
 great mass of wealth, but her factories were to remain closed, 
 her rolling stock was to be taken from her, she was to have 
 neither food nor raw materials. This is not some malicious 
 travesty of the attitude which prevailed at the time that the 
 Treaty was made. It was, and to a large extent still is, the 
 position taken by many French publicists as well as by some 
 in England. Mr. Vanderlip, the American banker, describes 
 in his book 1 the attitude which he found in Paris during the 
 Conference in these words : 'The French burn to milk the cow 
 but insist first that its throat must be cut.' 
 
 Despite the lessons of the year which followed the signing 
 of the Treaty, one may doubt whether even now the nature 
 of wealth and 'money' has come home to the Chauvinists of 
 the Entente countries. The demand that we should at one 
 and the same time forbid Germany to sell so much as a pen- 
 knife in the markets of the world and yet compel her to pay 
 us a tribute which could only be paid by virtue of a foreign 
 trade greater than any which she has been able to maintain 
 in the past these mutually exclusive demands are still made 
 in our own Parliament and Press. 
 
 How powerfully the Nationalist fears operate to obscure 
 the plain alternatives is revealed in a letter of M. Andre 
 Tardieu, written more than eighteen months after the Armis- 
 tice. 
 
 M. Tardieu, who was M. Clemenceau's political lieutenant 
 in the framing of the Treaty, and one of the principal inspirers 
 of the French policy, writing in July, 1920, long after the 
 condition of Europe and the Continent's economic dependence 
 on Germany had become visible, 'warns' us of the 'danger' that 
 Germany may recover unless the Treaty is applied in all its 
 rigour ! He says : 
 
 'Remember your own history and remember what the rat 
 de terre de cousin which Great Britain regarded with such 
 1( What Happened to Europe.'
 
 38 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 disdain after the Treaty of Frankfurt became in less than 
 forty years. We shall see Germany recover economically, 
 profiting by the ruins she has made in other countries, with a 
 rapidity which will astonish the world. When that day arrives, 
 if we have given way at Spa to the madness of letting her 
 off part of the debt that was born of her crime, no courses 
 will be too strong for the Governments which allowed them- 
 selves to be duped. M. Clemenceau always said to British and 
 American statesmen: "We of France understand Germany 
 better than you." M. Clemenceau was right, and in bringing 
 his colleages round to his point of view he did good work for 
 the welfare of humanity. If the work of last year is to be 
 undone, the world will be delivered up to the economic hege- 
 mony of Germany before twenty-five years have passed. There 
 could be no better proof than the recent despatches of The 
 Times correspondent in Germany, which bear witness to the 
 fever of production which consumes Herr Stinnes and his 
 like. Such evidence is stronger than the biased statistics of 
 Mr Keynes. Those who refuse to take it into account will 
 be the criminals in the eyes of their respective countries/ l 
 
 Note M. Tardieu's argument. He fears the restoration of 
 Germany industry, unless we make her pay the whole indem- 
 nity. That is to say, in other words, if we compel Germany 
 to produce during the next twenty-five years something like 
 ten thousand millions worth of wealth over and above her own 
 needs, involving as it must a far greater output from her fac- 
 tories, mines, shipyards, laboratories, a far greater develop- 
 ment of her railways, ports, canals, a far greater efficiency 
 and capacity in her workers than has ever been known in the 
 past, if that takes place as it must if we are to get an indem- 
 nity on the French scale, why, in that case, there will be no 
 risk of Germany's making too great an economic recovery! 
 
 The English Press is not much better. It was in Decem- 
 
 1 Times, July 3rd., 1920.
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 39 
 
 her, 1918, that Professor Starling presented to the British 
 Government his report showing that unless Germany had more 
 food she would be utterly unable to pay any large indemnity 
 to aid in reparations to France. Fully eighteen months later we 
 find the Daily Mail (June 18, 1920) rampaging and shouting 
 itself hoarse at the monstrous discovery that the Government 
 have permitted Germans to purchase wheat! Yet the Mail 
 has been foremost in insisting upon France's dire need for a 
 German indemnity in order to retore devastated districts. If 
 the Mail is really representative of John Bull, then that per- 
 son is at present in the position of a farmer who at seed-time 
 is made violently angry at the suggestion that grain should 
 be taken for the purpose of sowing the land, and shouts that it 
 is a wicked proposal to take food from the mouths of his 
 children. Although the Northcliffe Press has itself published 
 page advertisements (from the Save the Children Fund) de- 
 scribing the incredible and appalling conditions in Europe, 
 the Daily Mail shouts in its leading article: 'Is British Food 
 to go to the Boches?' The thing is in the best war style. 'Is 
 there any reason why the Briton should be starved to feed the 
 German?' asks the Mail. And there follows, of course, the 
 usual invective about the submarines, war criminals, the sink- 
 ing of hospital ships, and the approval by the whole German 
 people of all these crimes. 
 
 We get here, as at every turn and twist of our policy, not 
 any recognition of interdependence, but a complete repudiation 
 of that idea, and an assumption, instead, of a conflict of inter- 
 est. If the children of Vienna or Berlin are to be fed, then it 
 is assumed that it must be at the expense of the children of 
 Paris and London. The wealth of the world is conceived as 
 a fixed quantity, unaffected by any process of co-operation 
 between the peoples sharing the world. The idea is, of course, 
 an utter fallacy. French or Belgian children will have more, 
 not less, if we take measures to avoid European conditions 
 in which the children of Vienna are left to die. If, during
 
 40 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 the winter of 1919-1920, French children died from sickness 
 due to lack of fuel, it was because the German coal was not 
 delivered, and the German coal was not delivered because, 
 among other things, of general disorganization of transport, of 
 lack of rolling stock, of underfeeding of the miners, of collapse 
 of the currency, political unrest, uncertainty of the future. 
 
 It is one of the contradictions of the whole situation that 
 France herself gives intermittent recognition to the fact of 
 this interdependence. When, at Spa, it became evident that 
 coal simply could not be delivered in the quantities demanded 
 unless Germany had some means of buying imported food, 
 France consented to what was in fact a loan to Germany (to 
 the immense mystification of certain journalistic critics in 
 Paris). One is prompted to ask what those who, before the 
 War so scornfully treated the present writer for throwing 
 doubts upon the feasibility of a post-war indemnity, would 
 have said had he predicted that on the morrow of victory, the 
 victor, instead of collecting a vast indemnity would from the 
 simplest motives of self -protection, out of his own direly 
 depleted store of capital, be advancing money to the van-' 
 quished. 1 
 
 The same inconsistency runs through much of our post-war 
 behaviour. The famine in Central Europe has become so ap- 
 palling that very great sums are collected in Britain and Amer- 
 ica for its relief. Yet the reduced productivity out of which 
 the famine has arisen was quite obviously deliberately de- 
 signed, and most elaborately planned by the economic provi- 
 sions of the Treaty and by the blockades prolonged after the 
 Armistice, for months in the case of Germany and years in the 
 case of Russia. And at the very time that advertisements were 
 appearing in the Daily Mail for 'Help to Starving Europe,' 
 and only a few weeks before France consented to advance 
 money for the purpose of feeding Germany, that paper was 
 
 "The proposal respecting Austria was a loan of SO millions in 
 instalments of five years.
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 41 
 
 working up 'anti-Hun stunts' for the purpose of using our 
 power to prevent any food whatsoever going to Boches. It is 
 also a duplication of the American phenomenon already touched 
 upon : One Bill before Congress for the loaning of American 
 money to Europe in order that cotton and wheat may find a 
 market: another Bill before the same Congress designed, by 
 a stiffly increased tariff, to keep out European goods so that 
 the loans can never be repaid. 1 
 
 The experience of France in the attempt to exact coal by 
 the use of military pressure throws a good deal of light upon 
 what is really annexed when a victor takes over territory con- 
 taining, say, coal; as also upon the question of getting the 
 coal when it has been annexed. 'If we need coal,' wrote a 
 Paris journalist plaintively during the Spa Conference, 'why 
 in heaven's name don't we go and take it.' The implication 
 being that it could be 'taken' without payment, for nothing. 
 But even if France were to occupy the Ruhr and to administer 
 the mines, the plant would have to be put in order, rolling 
 stock provided, railroads restored, and, as France has already 
 
 1 Mr Hoover seems to suggest that their repayment should never take 
 place. To a meeting of Bankers he says : 
 
 'Even if we extend these credits and if upon Europe's recovery we 
 then attempt to exact the payment of these sums by import of com- 
 modities, we shall have introduced a competition with our own indus- 
 tries that cannot be turned back by any tariff wall ... I believe that 
 we have to-day an equipment and a skill in production that yield us 
 a surplus of commodities for export beyond any compensation we can 
 usefully take by way of imported commodities . . . Gold and remit- 
 tances and services cannot cover this gulf in our trade balance . . . 
 To me there is only one remedy, and that is by the systematic permanent 
 investment of our surplus production in reproductive works abroad. 
 We thus reduce the return we must receive to a return of interest 
 and profit.' 
 
 A writer in the New Republic (Dec. 29th., 1920.) who quotes this 
 says pertinently enough : 
 
 'Mr Hoover disposes of the principal of our foreign loans. The 
 debtors cannot return it and we cannot afford to receive it back. But 
 the interest and profit which he says we may receive that will have to 
 be paid in commodities, as the principal would be if it were paid at all. 
 What shall we do when the volume of foreign commodities received in 
 payment of interest and profit becomes very large and our industries 
 cry for protection ? '
 
 42 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 learned, miners fed and clothed and housed. But that costs 
 money to be paid as part of the cost of the coal. If Germany 
 is compelled to provide those things mining machinery, roll- 
 ing stock, rails, miners' houses and clothing and food we are 
 confronted with pretty much the same dilemma as we encounter 
 in compelling the payment of an indemnity. A Germany that 
 can buy foreign food is a Germany of restored credit; a Ger- 
 many that can furnish rolling stock, rails, mining machinery, 
 clothing and housing for miners, is a Germany restored to ' 
 general economic health and potentially powerful. That Ger- 
 many France fears to create. And even though we resort to a 
 military occupation, using forced labour militarily controlled, we 
 are faced by the need of all the things that must still enter 
 in the getting of the coal, from miners' food and houses to 
 plant and steel rails. Their cost must be charged against the 
 coal obtained. And the amount of coal obtained in return 
 for a given outlay will depend very largely, as we know in 
 England to our cost, upon the willingness of the miner him- 
 self. Even the measure of resistance provoked in British 
 miners by disputes about workers' control and Nationalisation, 
 has meant a great falling off in output. But at least they are 
 working for their own countrymen. What would be their out- 
 put if they felt they were working for an enemy, and that 
 every ton they mined might merely result in increasing the 
 ultimate demands which that enemy would make upon their 
 country? Should we get even eighty per cent, of the pre-war 
 output or anything like it ? * Yet that diminished output 
 
 1 The present writer declines to join in the condemnation of British 
 miners for reduced output. In an ultimate sense (which is no part of 
 the present discussion) the decline in effort of the miner is perhaps 
 justified. But the facts are none the less striking as showing how great 
 the difference of output can be. Figures given by Sir John Cadman, 
 President of the Institute of Mining Engineers a short time ago (and 
 quoted in the Fortnightly Review for Oct. 1920.), show that in 1916 
 the coal production per person employed in the United Kingdom was 
 263 tons, as against 731 tons in the United States. In 1918 the former 
 amounted to 236 tons, and during 1919 it sank to 197j^ tons. In 1913 
 the coal produced per man per day in this country was 0.98 tons, and
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 43 
 
 would have to stand the cost of all the permanent charges 
 aforesaid. Would the cost of the coal to France, under some 
 scheme of forced labour, be in the end less than if she 
 were to buy it in the ordinary commercial way from German 
 mines, as she did before the War? This latter method would 
 almost certainly be in economic terms more advantageous. 
 Where is the economic advantage of the military method? 
 This, of course, is only the re-discovery of the old truth that 
 forced or slave labour is more costly than paid labour. 
 
 The ultimate explanation of the higher cost of slave labour 
 is the ultimate explanation of the difficulty of using political 
 power for economic ends, of basing our economic security 
 upon military predominance. Here is France, with her old 
 enemy helpless and prostrate. She needs his work for repara- 
 tions, for indemnities, for coal. To perform that work the 
 prostrate enemy must get upon his feet. If he does, France 
 fears that he will knock her down. From that fear arise con> 
 tradictory policies, self -stultifying courses. If she overcomes 
 her fear sufficiently to allow the enemy to produce a certain 
 amount of wealth for her, it is extremely likely that more 
 than the amount of that wealth will have to be spent in pro- 
 tecting herself against the danger of the enemy's recovered 
 vitality. Even when wars were less expensive than they are, 
 
 in America it was 3.91 tons for bituminous coal and 2.19 tons for 
 anthracite. In 1918 the British output figure was 0.80 tons, and the 
 American 3.77 tons for bituminous coal and 227 for anthracite. Meas- 
 ured by their daily output, a single American miner does just as much 
 work as do five Englishmen. 
 
 The inferiority in production is, of course, 'to some considerable ex- 
 tent' due to the fact that the most easily workable deposits in England 
 are becoming exhausted, while the United States can most easily draw 
 on their most prolific and most easily workable sites. . . . 
 
 It is the fact that in our new and favourable coalfields, such as the 
 South Yorkshire area, the men working under the most favourable 
 modern conditions and in new mines where the face is near the shaft, 
 do not obtain as much coal per man employed, as that got by the 
 miners in the country generally under the conditions appertaining forty 
 and fifty years ago.
 
 44 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 indemnities were soon absorbed in the increase of armament 
 necessitated by the Treaties which exacted the indemnities. 
 
 Again, this is a very ancient story. The victor on the 
 Egyptian vase has his captured enemy on the end of a rope. 
 We say that one is free, the other bond. But as Spencer has 
 shown us, both are bond. The victor is tied to the vanquished : 
 if he should let go the prisoner would escape. The victor spends 
 his time seeing that the prisoner does not escape; the prisoner 
 his time and energy trying to escape. The combined efforts 
 in consequence are not turned to the production of wealth; they 
 are 'cancelled out' by being turned one against another. Both 
 may come near to starvation in that condition if much labour 
 is needed to produce food. Only if they strike a bargain and 
 co-operate will they be in the position each to turn his energy 
 to the best economic account. 
 
 But though the story is ancient, men have not yet read it. 
 These pages are an attempt to show why it has not been read. 
 
 Let us summarise the conclusions so far reached, namely : 
 
 That predominant political and military power is important 
 to exact wealth is shown by the inability of the Allies to turn 
 their power to really profitable account; notably by the failure 
 of France to alleviate her financial distress by adequate repa- 
 rations even adequate quantities of coal from Germany; 
 and by the failure of the Allied statesmen as a whole, wielding 
 a concentration of power greater perhaps than any known in 
 history to arrest an economic disintegration, which is not only 
 the cause of famine and vast suffering, but is a menace to 
 Allied interest, particularly to the economic security of Britain. 
 
 The causes of this impotence are both mechanical and moral. 
 If another is to render active service in the production of wealth 
 for us particularly services of any technical complexity in 
 industry, finance, commerce he must have strength for that 
 activity, knowledge, and the instruments. But all those things 
 can be turned against us as means of resistance to our coercion.
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 45 
 
 To the degree to which we make him strong for our service 
 we make him strong for resistance to our will. As resistance 
 increases we are compelled to use an increasing proportion of 
 what we obtain from him in protecting ourselves against him. 
 Energies cancel each other, indemnities must be used in prepa- 
 ration for the next war. Only voluntary co-operation can save 
 this waste and create an effective combination for the produc- 
 tion of wealth that can be utilised for the preservation of life. 
 
 The Ultimate Moral Factor 
 
 The problem is not merely one of foreign politics or inter- 
 national relationship. The passions which obscure the real 
 nature of the process by which men live are present in the 
 industrial struggle also, and especially in the case of com- 
 munities situated as is the British make of the national and 
 international order one problem. 
 
 It is here suggested that : 
 
 Into the processes which maintain life within the nation 
 an increasing measure of consent and aquiescence by all parties 
 must enter: physical coercion becomes increasingly impotent 
 to ensure them. The problem of declining production by (inter 
 alias) miners, cannot be solved by increasing the army or 
 police. The dictatorship of the proletariat fails before the prob- 
 lem of exacting big crops by the coercion of the peasant or 
 countryman. It would fail still more disastrously before the 
 problem of obtaining food or raw materials from foreigners 
 (without which the British could not live) in the absence of a 
 money of stable value. 
 
 One of the most suggestive facts of the post-war situation 
 is that European civilization almost breaks down before one 
 of the simplest of its mechanical problems: that of 'moving
 
 46 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 some stones from where they are not needed to the places 
 where they are needed,' in other words before the problem of 
 mining and distributing coal. Millions of children have died 
 in agony in France during this last year or two because there 
 was no coal to transport the food, to warm the buildings. Coal 
 is the first need of our massed populations. Its absence means 
 collapse of everything of transport, of the getting of food 
 to the towns, of furnishing the machinery and fertilisers by 
 which food can be produced in sufficient quantity. It is warmth, 
 it is clothing, it is light, it is the daily newspaper, it is water, 
 it is communication. All our elaboration of knowledge and 
 science fails in the presence of this problem of 'taking some 
 stones from one heap and putting them on another.' The coal 
 famine is a microcosm of the world's present failure. 
 
 But if all those things and spiritual things also are in- 
 volved because the absence of material well-being means wide- 
 spread moral evils depend upon coal, the getting of the coal 
 itself is dependent upon them. We have touched upon the 
 importance of the one element of sheer goodwill on the part 
 of the miners as a factor in the production of coal; upon the 
 hopelessness of making good its absence by physical coercion. 
 But we have also seen that just as the attempted use of coer- 
 cion in the international field, though ineffective to exact 
 necessary service or exchange, can and does produce paralysis 
 of the indispensible processes, so the 'power' which the posi- 
 tion of the miner gives him is a power of paralysis only. 
 
 A later chapter shows that the instinct of industrial groups 
 to solve their difficulties by simple coercion, the sheer asser- 
 tion of power, is very closely related to the psychology of 
 nationalism, so disruptive in the international field. Bolshe- 
 vism, in the sense of belief in the effectiveness of coercion, 
 represents the transfer of jingoism to the industrial struggle. 
 It involves the same fallacies. A mining strike can bring the 
 industrial machine to a full stop; to set that machine to work 
 for the feeding of the population which involves the co-
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 47 
 
 ordination of a vast number of industries, the purchase of 
 food and raw material from foreigners, who will only sur- 
 render it in return for promises to pay which they believe will 
 be fulfilled means not only technical knowledge, it means also 
 the presence of a certain predisposition to co-operation. This 
 Balkanised Europe which cannot feed itself has all the techni- 
 cal knowledge that it ever had. But its natural units are domin- 
 ated by a certain temper which make impossible the co-opera- 
 tions by which alone the knowledge can be applied to the avail- 
 able natural resources. 
 
 It is also suggestive that the virtual abandonment of the 
 gold standard is playing much the same role (rendering visible 
 the inefficiency of coercion) in the struggle between the indus- 
 trial that it is between the national groups. A union strikes 
 for higher wages and is successful. The increase is granted 
 and is paid in paper money. 
 
 When wages were paid in gold an advance in wages, gained 
 as the result of strike or agitation, represented, temporarily 
 at least, a real victory for the workers. Prices might ultimately 
 rise and wipe out the advantage, but with a gold currency 
 price movements have nothing like the rapidity and range 
 which is the case when unlimited paper money can be printed. 
 An advance in wages paid in paper may mean nothing more 
 than a mere readjustment of symbols. The advance, in other 
 words, can be cancelled by 'a morning's work of the inflation- 
 ist' as a currency expert has put it. The workers in these con- 
 ditions can never know whether that which they are granted 
 with the right hand of increased wages will not be taken away 
 by the left hand of inflation. 
 
 In order to be certain that they are not simply tricked, the 
 workers must be in a position to control the conditions which 
 determine the value of currency. But again, that means the 
 co-ordination of the most complex economic processes, 
 processes which can only be ensured by bargaining with other 
 groups and with foreign countries.
 
 48 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 This problem would still present itself as acutely on the 
 morrow of the establishment of a British Soviet Republic as 
 it presents itself to-day. If the British Soviets could not buy 
 food and raw materials in twenty different centres through- 
 out the world they could not feed the people. We should be 
 blockaded, not by ships, but by the worthlessness of our money. 
 Russia, which needs only an infinitesimal proportion relatively 
 of foreign imports has gold and the thing of absolutely uni- 
 versal need, food. We have no gold only things which a 
 world fast disintegrating into isolated peasantries is learning 
 somehow to do without. 
 
 Before blaming the lack of 'social sense' on the part of 
 striking miners or railwaymen let us recall the fact that the 
 temper and attitude to life and the social difficulties which lie 
 at the bottom of the Syndicalist philosophy have been deliber- 
 ately cultivated by Government, Press, and Church, during five 
 years for the purposes of war; and that the selected ruling 
 order have shown the same limitation of vision in not one 
 whit less degree. 
 
 Think what Versailles actually did and what it might have 
 done. 
 
 .Here when the Conference met, was a Europe on the edge 
 of famine some of it over the edge. Every country in the 
 world, including the wealthiest and most powerful, like Amer- 
 ica, was faced with social maladjustment in one form or 
 another. In America it was an inconvenience, but in the cities 
 of a whole continent in Russia, Poland, Germany, Austria 
 it was shortly to mean ill-health, hunger, misery, and agony 
 to millions of children and their mothers. Terms of the study 
 like 'the interruption of economic processes' were to be trans- 
 lated into such human terms as infantile cholera, tuberculosis, 
 typhus, hunger-cedema. These, as events proved, were to 
 undermine the social sanity of half a world. 
 
 The acutest statesmen that Europe can produce, endowed 
 with the most autocratic power, proceed to grapple with the
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 49 
 
 situation. In what way do they apply that power to the 
 problem of production and distribution, of adding to the 
 world's total stock of goods, which nearly every government 
 in the world was in a few weeks to be proclaiming as human- 
 ity's first need, the first condition of reconstruction and re- 
 generation ? 
 
 The Treaty and the policy pursued since the Armistice to- 
 wards Russia tell us plainly enough. Not only do the politi- 
 cal arrangements of the Treaty, as we have seen, ignore the 
 needs of maintaining the machinery of production in Europe 1 
 but they positively discourage and in many cases are obviously 
 framed to prevent, production over very large areas. 
 
 The Treaty, as some one has said, deprived Germany of 
 both the means and the motive of production. No adequate 
 provision was made for enabling the import of food and raw 
 materials, without which Germany could not get to work on the 
 scale demanded by the indemnity claims; and the motive for 
 industry was undermined by leaving the indemnity claims in- 
 determinate. 
 
 The victor's passion, as we have seen, blinded him to the 
 indispensable condition of the very demands which he was 
 making. Europe was unable temperamentally to reconcile it- 
 self to the conditions of that increased productivity, by which 
 alone it was to be saved. It is this element in the situation 
 its domination, that is, by an uncalculating popular passion 
 poured out lavishly in support of self -destructive policies 
 which prompts one to doubt whether these disruptive forces 
 find their roots merely in the capitalist organization of society : 
 still less whether they are due to the conscious machinations 
 of a small group of capitalists. No considerable section of 
 capitalism any where has any interest in the degree of paralysis 
 
 1 Mr J. M. Keynes, 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace,' 
 p. 211, says: '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.' 
 
 4
 
 50 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 that has been produced. Capitalism may have overreached 
 itself by stimulating nationalist hostilities until they have got 
 beyond control. Even so, it is the unseeing popular passion 
 that furnishes the capitalist with his arm, and is the factor of 
 greatest danger. 
 
 Examine for a moment the economic manifestation of inter- 
 national hostilities. There has just begun in the United 
 States a clamorous campaign for the denunciation of the 
 Panama Treaty which places British ships on an equality 
 with American. American ships must be exempt from the tolls. 
 'Don't we own the Canal?' ask the leaders of this campaign. 
 There is widespread response to it. But of the millions of 
 Americans who will become perhaps passionately angry over 
 that matter and extremely anti-British, how many have any 
 shares in any ships that can possibly benefit by the denuncia- 
 tion of the Treaty? Not one in a thousand. It is not an 
 economic motive operating at all. 
 
 Capitalism the management of modern industry by a small 
 economic autocracy of owners of private capital has certainly a 
 part in the conflicts that produce war. But that part does not 
 arise from the direct interest that the capitalists of one nation 
 as a whole have in the destruction of the trade or industry 
 of another. Such a conclusion ignores the most elementary 
 facts in the modern organisation of industry. And it is cer- 
 tainly not true to say that British capitalists, as a distinct 
 group, were more disposed than the public as a whole to insist 
 upon the Carthaginian features of the Treaty. Everything 
 points rather to the exact contrary. Public opinion as reflected, 
 for instance, by the December, 1918, election, was more fero- 
 ciously anti-German than capitalists are likely to have been. 
 It is certainly not too much to say that if the Treaty had been 
 made by a group of British or French bankers, merchants, 
 shipowners, insurance men, and industrialists, liberated from 
 all fear of popular resentment, the economic life of Central 
 Europe would not have been crushed as it has been.
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 51 
 
 Assuredly, such a gathering of capitalists would have in- 
 cluded groups having direct interest in the destruction of 
 German competition. But it would also have included others 
 having an interest in the restoration of the German market 
 and German credit, and one influence would in some measure 
 have cancelled the other. 
 
 As a simple fact we know that not all British capitalists, 
 still less British financiers, are interested in the destruction of 
 German prosperity. Central Europe was one of the very 
 greatest markets available for British industry, and the recov- 
 ery of that market may constitute for a very large number 
 of manufacturers, merchants, shippers, insurance companies, 
 and bankers, a source of immense potential profit. It is a 
 perfectly arguable proposition, to put it at the very lowest, that 
 British 'capitalism' has, as a whole, more to gain from a pro- 
 ductive and stable Europe than from a starving and unstable 
 one. There is no reason whatever to doubt the genuineness 
 of the internationalism that we associate with the Manches- 
 ter School of Capitalist Economics. 
 
 But in political nationalism as a force there are no such cross 
 currents cancelling out the hostility of one nation to another. 
 Economically, Britain is not one entity and Germany another. 
 But as a sentimental concept, each may perfectly well be an 
 entity ; and in the imagination of John Citizen, in his political 
 capacity, voting on the eve of the Peace Conference, Britain 
 is a triumphant and heroic 'person/ while Germany is an evil 
 and cruel 'person,' who must be punished, and whose pockets 
 must be searched. John has neither the time nor has he 
 felt the need, for a scientific attitude in politics. But when 
 it is no longer a question of giving his vote, but of earn- 
 ing his income, of succeeding as a merchant or shipowner 
 in an uncertain future, he will be thoroughly scientific. 
 When it comes to carrying cargoes or selling cotton goods, 
 he can face facts. And, in the past at least, he knows that 
 he has not sold those materials to a wicked person called
 
 52 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 'Germany/ but to a quite decent and human trader called 
 Schmidt. 
 
 What I am suggesting here is that for an explanation of 
 the passions which have given us the Treaty of Versailles we 
 must look much more to rival nationalisms than to rival capi- 
 talisms ; not to hatreds that are the outgrowth of a real conflict 
 of interests, but to certain nationalist conceptions, 'myths,' as 
 Sorel has it. To these conceptions economic hostilities may 
 assuredly attach themselves. At the height of the war-hatred 
 of things German, a shopkeeper who had the temerity to ex- 
 pose German post cards or prints for sale would have risked 
 the sacking of his shop. The sackers would not have been 
 persons engaged in the post card producing trade. Their 
 motive would have been patriotic. If their feelings lasted over 
 the war, they would vote against the admission of German 
 post cards. They would not be moved by economic, still less 
 by capitalistic motives. These motives do enter, as we shall 
 see presently, into the problems raised by the present condi- 
 tion of Europe. But it is important to see at what point and 
 in what way. The point for the moment and it has im- 
 mense practical importance is that the Treaty of Versailles 
 and its economic consequences should be attributed less to 
 capitalism (bad as that has come to be in its total results) than 
 to the pressure of a public opinion that had crystallised round 
 nationalist conceptions. 1 
 
 1 Incidentally we see nations not yet brought under capitalist organi- 
 sation (e.g. the peasant nations of the Balkans) equally subject to the 
 hostilities we are discussing. 
 
 Bertrand Russell writes (New Republic, September 15th., 1920) : 
 'No doubt commercial rivalry between England and Germany had a 
 great deal to do with causing the war, but rivalry is a different thing 
 from profit-seeking. Probably by combination, English and German 
 capitalists could have made more than they did out of rivalry, but the 
 rivalry was instinctive, and its economic form was accidental. The 
 capitalists were in the grip of nationalist instinct as much as their 
 proletarian 'dupes.' In both classes some have gained by the war, but 
 the universal will to war was not produced by the hope of gain. It 
 was produced by a different set of instincts, one which Marxian 
 psychology fails to recognise adequately. . . .
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 53 
 
 Here, at the end of 1920, is the British Press still clamour- 
 ing for the exclusion of German toys. Such an agitation 
 presumably pleases the millions of readers. They are certainly 
 not toymakers or sellers; they have no commercial interest 
 in the matter save that 'their toys will cost them more' if the 
 agitation succeeds. They are actuated by nationalist hostility. 
 
 If Germany is not to be allowed to sell even toys, there will be 
 very few things indeed that she can sell. We are to go on with 
 the policy of throttling Europe in order that a nation whose in- 
 dustrial activity is indispensable to Europe shall not become 
 strong. We do not see, it is true, the relation between the 
 economic revival of Europe and the industrial recuperation 
 of Germany ; we do not see it because we can be made to feel 
 anger at the idea of German toys for British children so much, 
 more readily than we can be made to see the causes which 
 deprive French children of warmth in their schoolrooms. 
 European society seems to be in the position of an ill-disci- 
 plined child that cannot bring itself to swallow the medicine 
 that would relieve it of its pain. The passions which have 
 been cultivated in five years of war must be indulged, what- 
 ever the ultimate cost to ourselves. The judgment of such 
 a society is swamped in those passions. 
 
 The restoration of much of Europe will involve many vast 
 
 Men desire power, they desire satisfaction for their pride and their 
 self-respect. They desire victory over their rivals so profoundly that 
 they will invent a rivalry for the unconscious purpose of making a 
 victory possible. All these motives cut across the pure economic motive 
 in ways that are practically important. 
 
 There is need of a treatment of political motives by the methods of 
 psycho-analysis. In politics, as in private life, men invent myths to 
 rationalise their conduct. If a man thinks that the only reasonable 
 motive in politics is economic self -advancement, he will persuade him- 
 self that the things he wishes to do will make him rich. When he 
 wants to fight the Germans, he tells himself that their competition is 
 ruining his trade. If, on the other hand, he is an 'idealist,' who holds 
 that his politics should aim at the advancement of the human race, he 
 will tell himself that the crimes of the Germans demand their humilia- 
 tion. The Marxian sees through this latter camouflage, but not through 
 the former.
 
 54 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 and complex problems of reconstruction. But here, in the 
 alternatives presented by the payment of a German indemnity, 
 for instance, is a very simple issue : if Germany is to pay, she 
 must produce goods, that is, she must be economically restored ; 
 if we fear her economic restoration, then we cannot obtain 
 the execution of the reparation clauses of the Treaty. But that 
 simple issue one of the greatest figures of the Conference can- 
 not face. He has not, eighteen months after the Treaty, 
 emerged from the most elementary confusion concerning it. 
 If the psychology of Nationalism renders so simple a problem 
 insoluble, what will be its effect upon the problem of Europe 
 as a whole? 
 
 Again, it may be that shipowners are behind the American 
 agitation and toy manufacturers behind the British. A Coffin 
 Trust might intrigue against measures to prevent a repetition 
 of the influenza epidemic. But what should we say of the 
 fitness for self-government of a people that should lend itself 
 by millions to such an intrigue of Coffin-makers, showing as 
 the result of its propaganda a fierce hostility to sanitation? 
 We should conclude that it deserved to die. If Europe went 
 to war as the result of the intrigues of a dozen capitalists, its 
 civilisation is not worth saving; it cannot be saved, for as 
 soon as the capitalists were removed, its inherent helplessness 
 would place it at the mercy of some other form of exploita- 
 tion. 
 
 Its only hope lies in a capacity for self -management, self- 
 rule, which means self-control. But a few financial intriguers, 
 we are told, have only to pronounce certain words, 'fatherland 
 above all,' 'national honour,' put about a few stories of atroci- 
 ties, clamour for revenge, for the millions to lose all self-con- 
 trol, to become completely blind as to where they are going, 
 what they are doing, to lose all sense of the ultimate conse- 
 quences of their acts. 
 
 The gravest fact in the history of the last ten years is not 
 the fact of war; it is the temper of mind, the blindness of con-
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 55 
 
 duct on the part of the millions, which alone, ultimately, 
 explains our policies. The suffering and cost of war may well 
 be the best choice of evils, like the suffering and cost of surgery, 
 or the burdens we assume for a clearly conceived moral end. 
 But what we have seen in recent history is not a deliberate 
 choice of ends with a consciousness of moral and material 
 cost. We see a whole nation demanding fiercely in one breath 
 certain things, and in the next just as angrily demanding 
 other things which make compliance with the first impossible; 
 a whole nation or a whole continent given over to an orgy 
 of hate, retaliation, the indulgence of self -destructive pas- 
 sions. And this collapse of the human mind does but become 
 the more appalling if we accept the. explanation that 'wars 
 are caused by capitalism' or 'Junkerthum' ; if we believe that 
 six Jew financiers sitting in a room can thus turn millions 
 into something resembling madmen. No indictment of human 
 reason could be more severe. 
 
 To assume that millions will, without any real knowledge 
 of why they do it or of the purpose behind the behests they 
 obey, not only take the lives of others and give their own, 
 but turn first in one direction and then in another the flood 
 of their deepest passions of hate and vengeance, just as a little 
 group of mean little men, manipulating mean little interests, 
 may direct, is to argue a moral helplessness and shameful 
 docility on the part of those millions which would deprive the 
 future of all hope of self-government. And to assume that 
 they are not unknowing as to the alleged cause that would 
 bring us to moral phantasmagoria. 
 
 We shall get nearer to the heart of our problem if, instead 
 of asking perpetually 'Who caused the War?' and indicting 
 'Capitalists' or 'Junkers,' we ask the question: 'What is the 
 cause of that state of mind and temper in the millions which 
 made them on the one side welcome war (as we allege of the 
 German millions), or on the other side makes them acclaim, 
 or impose, blockades, famines,' 'punitive' 'Treaties of Peace ?'
 
 56 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Obviously 'selfishness' is not operating so far as the mas? 
 is concerned, except of course in the sense that a yielding to 
 the passion of hate is self-indulgence. Selfishness, in the 
 sense of care for social security and well-being, might save 
 the structure of European society. It would bring the famine 
 to an end. But we have what a French writer has called a 
 'holy and unselfish hate.' Balkan peasants prefer to burn 
 their wheat rather than send it to the famished city across 
 the river. Popular English newspapers agitate against a Ger- 
 man trade which is the only hope of necessitous Allies ob- 
 taining any considerable reparation from Germany. A society 
 in which each member is more desirous of hurting his neigh- 
 bour than of promoting his own welfare, is one in which the 
 aggregate will to destruction is more powerful than the will 
 to preservation. 
 
 The history of these last years shows with painful clarity 
 that as between groups of men hostilities and hates are aroused 
 very much more easily than any emotion of comradeship. And 
 the hate is a hungrier and more persistent emotion than the 
 comradeship. The much proclaimed fellowship of the Allies, 
 'cemented by the blood shed on the field/ vanished rapidly. 
 But hate remained and found expression in the social struggle, 
 in fierce repressions, in bickerings, fears, and rancours be- 
 tween those who yesterday fought side by side. Yet the 
 price of survival is, as we have seen, an ever closer cohesion 
 and social co-operation. 
 
 And while it is undoubtedly true that the 'hunger of hate' 
 the actual desire to have something to hate may so warp 
 our judgment as to make us see a conflict of interest where 
 none exists, it is also true that a sense of conflict of vital inter- 
 est is a great feeder of hate. And that sense of conflict may 
 well become keener as the problem of man's struggle for 
 sustenance on the earth becomes more acute, as his numbers 
 increase and the pressure upon that sustenance becomes greater. 
 
 Once more, as millions of children are born at our very
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 57 
 
 doors into a world that cannot feed them, condemned, if they 
 live at all, to form a race that will be defective, stunted, un- 
 healthy, abnormal, this question which Malthus very rightly 
 taught our grandfathers to regard as the final and ultimate 
 question of their Political Economy, comes dramatically into 
 the foreground. How can the earth, which is limited, find 
 food for an increase of population which is unlimited? 
 
 The haunting anxieties which lie behind the failure to find 
 a conclusive answer to that question, probably affect political 
 decisions and deepen hostilities and animosities even where 
 the reason is ill-formulated or unconscious. Some of us, per- 
 haps, fear to face the question lest we be confronted with 
 morally terrifying alternatives. Let posterity decide its own 
 problems. But such fears, and the motives prompted by them, 
 do not disappear by our refusal to face them. Though hidden, 
 they still live, and under various moral disguises influence 
 our conduct. 
 
 Certainly the fears inspired by the Malthusian theory and 
 the facts upon which it is based, have affected our attitude to 
 war; affected the feeling of very many for whom war is not 
 avowedly, as it is openly and avowedly to some of its students, 
 'the Struggle for Bread.' 1 
 
 The Great Illusion was an attempt frankly to face this ulti- 
 mate question of the bearing of war upon man's struggle for 
 survival. It took the ground that the victory of one nation 
 
 *'If the Englishman sells goods in Turkey or Argentina, he is taking 
 trade from the German, and if the German sells goods in either of 
 these countries or any other country, come to that he is taking trade 
 from the Englishman; and the well-being of every inhabitant of the 
 great manufacturing towns, such as London, Paris, or Berlin, is bound 
 up in the power of the capitalist to sell his wares ; and the production 
 of manufactured articles has outstripped the natural increase of de- 
 mand by 67 per cent., therefore new markets must be fotmd for these 
 wares or the existing ones be "forced"; hence the rush for colonies 
 and feverish trade competition between the great manufacturing coun- 
 tries. And the production of manufactured goods is still increasing, 
 and the great cities must sell their wares or starve. Now we under- 
 stand what trade rivalry really is. It resolves itself, in fact, into the 
 struggle for bread.' (A Rifleman: 'Struggle for Bread.' p. 54.)
 
 58 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 over another, however complete, does not solve the problem; 
 it makes it worse in that the conditions and instincts which war 
 accentuates express themselves in nationalist and racial rivalries, 
 create divisions that embarrass and sometimes make impossible 
 the widespread co-operation by which alone man can effectively 
 exploit nature. 
 
 That demonstration as a whole belongs to the pages that 
 follow. But bearing upon the narrower question of war in 
 relation to the world's good, this much is certain : 
 
 If the object of the combatants in the War was to make 
 sure of their food, then indeed is the result in striking contrast 
 with that intention, for food is assuredly more insecure than 
 ever alike for victor and vanquished. They differ only in the 
 degree of insecurity. The War, the passions which it has 
 nurtured, the political arrangements which those passions have 
 dictated, have given us a Europe immeasurably less able to 
 meet its sustenance problem than it was before. So much less 
 able that millions, who before the War could well support them- 
 selves by their own labour, are now unable so to do and have 
 to be fed by drawing upon the slender stocks of their con- 
 querors stocks very much less than when some at least of those 
 conquerors were in the position of defeated peoples. 
 
 This is not the effect of the material destruction of war, of 
 the mere battering down of houses and bridges and factories 
 by the soldier. 
 
 The physical devastation, heart-breaking as the spectacle of 
 it is, is not the difficult part of the problem, nor quantitatively 
 the most important. 1 It is not the devastated districts that are 
 
 1 Mr J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, says : 
 'I do not put the money value of the actual physical loss to Belgian 
 property by destruction and loot above 150,000,000 as a maximum, and 
 while I hesitate to put yet lower an estimate which differs so widely 
 from those generally current, I shall be surprised if it proves possible 
 to substantiate claims even to this amount. . . . While the French 
 claims are immensely greater, here too, there has been excessive exag- 
 geration, as responsible French statisticians have themselves pointed out. 
 Not above 10 per cent, of the area of France was effectively occupied 
 by the enemy, and not above 4 per cent, lay within the area of sub-
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD 59 
 
 suffering from famine, nor their losses which appreciably dimin- 
 ish the world supply of food. It is in cities in which not a house 
 has been destroyed, in which, indeed, every wheel in every 
 factory is still intact, that the population dies of hunger, and 
 the children have to be fed by our charity. It is the fields over 
 which not a single soldier has tramped that are condemned to 
 sterility because those factories are idle, while the factories 
 are condemned to idleness because the fields are sterile. 
 
 The real 'economic argument' against war does not consist 
 in the presentation of a balance sheet showing so much cost and 
 destruction and so much gain. The real argument consists iq 
 the fact that war, and still more the ideas out of which it arises, 
 produce ultimately an unworkable society. The physical des 
 truction and perhaps the cost are greatly exaggerated. It is 
 perhaps true that in the material foundations of wealth Britain 
 is as well off to-day as before the War. It is not from lack 
 of technical knowledge that the economic machine works with 
 such friction : that has been considerably increased by the War, 
 It is not from lack of idealism and unselfishness. There has 
 been during the last five years such an outpouring of devote<J 
 unselfishness the very hates have been unselfish as history 
 cannot equal. Millions have given their lives for the contrary 
 ideals in which they believed. It is sometimes the ideals foi 
 which men die that make impossible their life and work 
 together. 
 
 The real 'economic argument,' supported by the experience 
 of our victory, is that the ideas which produce war the fears 
 out of which it grows and the passions which it feeds produce 
 a state of mind that ultimately renders impossible the co-opera- 
 tion by which alone wealth can be produced and life maintained. 
 The use of our power or our knowledge for the purpose of 
 subduing Nature to our service depends upon the prevalence 
 
 stantial devastation. ... In short, it will be difficult to establish a bill 
 exceeding 500,000,000 for physical and material damage in the occu- 
 pied and devastated areas of Northern France.' (pp. 114-117.)
 
 60 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 of certain ideas, ideas which underlie the 'art of living together.' 
 They are something apart from mere technical knowledge 
 which war, as in Germany, may increase, but which can never 
 be a substitute for this 'art of living together.' (The arms, 
 indeed, may be the instruments of anarchy, as in so much of 
 Europe to-day). 
 
 The War has left us a defective or perverted social sense, 
 with a group of instincts and moralities that are disintegrating 
 Western society, and will, unless checked, destroy it. 
 
 These forces, like the 'ultimate art' which they have so nearly 
 destroyed, are part of the problem of economics. For they 
 render a production of wealth adequate to welfare impossible. 
 How have they arisen? How can they be corrected? These 
 questions will form an integral part of the problems here dealt 
 with.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE OLD ECONOMY AND THE POST-WAR STATE 
 
 THIS chapter suggests the following: 
 
 The trans-national processes which enabled Europe to sup- 
 port itself before the War, were based mainly on private 
 exchanges prompted by the expectation of individual advantage. 
 They were not dependent upon political power. (The fifteen 
 millions for whom German soil could not provide, lived by trade 
 with countries over which Germany had no political control, as 
 a similar number of British live by similar non-political means.) 
 
 The old individualist economy has been largely destroyed by 
 the State Socialism introduced for war purposes; the Nation, 
 taking over individual enterprise, became trader and manufac- 
 turer in increasing degree. The economic clauses of the 
 Treaty, if enforced, must prolong this tendency, rendering a 
 large measure of such Socialism permanent. 
 
 The change may be desirable. But if co-operation must in 
 future be less as between individuals for private advantage, 
 and much more as between nations, Governments acting in an 
 economic capacity, the political emotions of nationalism will 
 play a much larger role in the economic processes of Europe. 
 If to Nationalist hostilities as we have known them in the past, 
 is to be added the commercial rivalry of nations now converted 
 into traders and capitalists, we are likely to have not a less but 
 more quarrelsome world, unless the fact of interdependence is 
 much more vividly realised than in the past. 
 
 61
 
 62 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 The facts of the preceding chapter touching the economic 
 chaos in Europe, the famine, the debauchery of the currencies, 
 the collapse of credit, the failure to secure indemnities, and 
 particularly the remedies of an international kind to which we 
 are now being forced, all confirm what had indeed become 
 pretty evident before the War, namely, that much of Europe 
 lives by virtue of an international, or, more correctly, a trans- 
 national economy. That is to say, there are large populations 
 that cannot live at much above a coolie standard unless there 
 is a considerable measure of economic co-operation across fron- 
 tiers. The industrial countries, like Britain and Germany, can 
 support their populations only by exchanging their special prod- 
 ucts and services particularly coal, iron, manufactures, ocean 
 carriage for food and raw materials ; while more agricultural 
 countries like Italy and even Russia, can maintain their full 
 food-producing capacity only by an apparatus of railways, 
 agricultural machinery, imported coal and fertilisers, to which 
 the industry of the manufacturing area is indispensable. 
 
 That necessary international co-operation had, as a matter 
 of fact, been largely developed before the War. The cheapen- 
 ing of transport, the improvement of communication, had 
 pushed the international division of labour very far indeed. 
 The material in a single bale of clothes would travel half round 
 the world several times, and receive the labour of half a dozen 
 nationalities, before finally reaching its consumer. But there 
 was this very significant fact about the whole process; 
 Governments had very little to do with it, and the process did 
 not rest upon any clearly defined body of commercial right, 
 defined in a regular code or law. One of the greatest of all 
 British industries, cotton spinning, depended upon access to raw 
 material under the complete control of a foreign State, America. 
 (The blockade of the South in the War of Secession proved 
 how absolute was the dependence of a main British industry 
 upon the political decisions of a foreign Government). The 
 mass of contradictory uncertainties relating to rights of neutral
 
 OLD ECONOMY AND POST-WAR STATE 63 
 
 trade in war-time, known as International Law, furnished no 
 basis of security at all. It did not even pretend to touch the 
 source the right of access to the material itself. 
 
 That right, and the international economy that had become 
 so indispensable to the maintenance of so much of the popu- 
 lation of Western Europe, rested upon the expectation that the 
 private owner of raw materials the grower of wheat or cotton, 
 or the owner of iron ore or coal-mines would continue to 
 desire to sell those things, would always, indeed, be compelled 
 so to do, in order to turn them to account. The main aim of 
 the Industrial Era was markets to sell things. One heard of 
 'economic invasions' before the War. This did not mean that 
 the invader took things, but that he brought them for sale. 
 The modern industrial nation did not fear the loss of commodi- 
 ties. What it feared was their receipt. And the aid of Govern- 
 ments was mainly invoked, not for the purpose of preventing 
 things leaving the country, but for the purpose of putting 
 obstacles in the way of foreigners bringing commodities into 
 the country. Nearly every country had 'Protection' against 
 foreign goods. Very rarely did we find countries fearing to 
 lose their goods and putting on export duties. Incidentally 
 such duties are forbidden by the American Constitution. 
 
 Before the War it would have seemed a work of supereroga- 
 tion to frame international regulations to protect the right to 
 buy: all were searching for buyers. In an economic world 
 which revolved on the expectation of individual profit, the 
 competition for profit kept open the resources of the world. 
 
 Under that system it did not matter much, economically, 
 what political administration provided always that it was an 
 orderly one covered the area in which raw materials were 
 found, or even controlled ports and access to the sea. It was 
 in no way indispensable to British industry that its most 
 necessary raw material cotton, say should be under its own 
 control. That industry had developed while the sources of the 
 material were in a foreign State. Lancashire did not need to
 
 64 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 'own' Louisiana. If England had 'owned' Louisiana, British 
 cotton-spinners would still have had to pay for the cotton as 
 before. When a writer declared before the War that Germany 
 dreamed of the conquest of Canada because she needed its 
 wheat wherewith to feed her people, he certainly overlooked 
 the fact that Germany could have had the wheat of Canada 
 on the same conditions as the British who 'owned' the country 
 and who certainly could not get it without paying for it. 
 It was true before the War to write : 
 
 'Co-operation between nations has become essential for the 
 very life of their peoples. But that co-operation does not take 
 place as between States at all. A trading corporation called 
 "Britain" does not buy cotton from another corporation called 
 "America." A manufacturer in Manchester strikes a bargain 
 with a merchant in Louisiana in order to keep a bargain with 
 a dyer in Germany, and three, or a much larger number of 
 parties, enter into virtual, or perhaps actual, contract, and form 
 a mutually dependent economic community (numbering, it may 
 be, with the work-people in the group of industries involved, 
 some millions of individuals) an economic entity so far as 
 one can exist which does not include all organised society. 
 The special interests of such a community may become hostile 
 to those of another community, but it will almost certainly not 
 be a "national" one, but one of a like nature, say a shipping 
 ring or groups of international bankers or Stock Exchange 
 speculators. The frontiers of such communities do not coincide 
 with the areas in which operate the functions of the State. 
 How could a State, say Britain, act on behalf of an economic 
 entity such as that just indicated ? By pressure against America 
 or Germany? But the community against which the British 
 manufacturer in this case wants pressure exercised is not 
 "America" or "Germany" both want it exercised against the 
 shipping ring or the speculators or the bankers who in part 
 are British. If Britain injures America or Germany as a whole,
 
 OLD ECONOMY AND POST-WAR STATE 65 
 
 she injures necessarily the economic entity which it was her 
 object to protect.' 1 
 
 This line of reasoning is no longer valid, for it was based 
 upon a system of economic individualism, upon a distinction 
 between the functions proper to the State and those proper to 
 the citizen. This individualist system has been profoundly 
 transformed in the direction of national control by the measures 
 adopted everywhere for the purposes of war; a transformation 
 that the confiscatory clauses of the Treaty and the arrange- 
 ments for the payment of the indemnity help to render per- 
 manent. While the old understanding or convention has been 
 destroyed or its disappearance very greatly accelerated by 
 the Allies, no new one has so far been established to take its 
 place. To that fact we must ascribe much of the economic 
 paralysis that has come upon the world. 
 
 I am aware, of course, that the passage I have quoted did not 
 tell the whole story; that already before the War the power 
 of the political State was being more and more used by 'big 
 business'; that in China, Mexico, Central America, the Near 
 East, Morocco, Persia, Mesopotamia, wherever there was un- 
 developed and disorderly territory, private enterprise was exer- 
 cising pressure upon the State to use its power to ensure sources 
 of raw material or areas for the investment of capital. That 
 phase of the question is dealt with at greater length elsewhere. 2 
 But the actual (whatever the potential) economic importance 
 of the territory about which the nations quarrelled was as yet, 
 in 1914, small; the part taken by Governments in the control 
 and direction of international trade was negligible. Europe 
 
 1 The Foundations of International Policy pp. xxiii-xxiv. 
 
 It is true, of course, that Governments were for their armies and 
 navies and public departments considerable purchasers in the inter- 
 national market. But the general truth of the distinction here made 
 is unaffected. The difference in degree, in this respect, between the 
 pre-war and post-war state in so great as to make a difference of kind. 
 The dominant motive for State action has been changed. 
 
 3 See Addendum and also the authors' War and the Workers. 
 (National Labour Press), pp. 29-50. 
 I
 
 66 
 
 lived by processes that went on without serious obstacle across 
 frontiers. Little States, for instance, without Colonies (Scandi- 
 navia, Switzerland) not only maintained a standard of living 
 for their people quite as high as that in the great States, but 
 maintained it moreover by virtue of a foreign trade relatively 
 as considerable. And the forces which preserved the inter- 
 national understanding by which that trade was carried on were 
 obviously great. 
 
 It was not true, before the War, to say that Germany had to 
 expand her frontiers to feed her population. It is true that 
 with her, as with us, her soil did not produce the food needed 
 for the populations living on it; as with us, about fifteen 
 millions were being fed by means of trade with territories which 
 politically she did not 'own/ and did not need to 'own' with 
 Russia, with South America, with Asia, with our own Colonies. 
 Like us Germany was turning her coal and iron into bread. 
 The process could have gone on almost indefinitely, so long as 
 the coal and iron lasted, as the tendency to territorial division 
 of labour was being intensified by the development of transport 
 and invention. (The pressure of the population on the food 
 resources of these islands was possibly greater under the 
 Heptarchy than at present, when they support forty-five mil- 
 lions.) Under the old economic order conquest meant, not a 
 transfer of wealth from one set of persons to another for 
 the soil of Alsace, for instance, remained in the hands of those 
 who had owned it under France but a change of administra- 
 tion. The change may have been as unwarrantable and oppress- 
 ive as you will, but it did not involve economic strangulation 
 of the conquered peoples or any very fundamental economic 
 change at all. French economic life did not wither as the 
 result of the changes of frontier in 1872, and French factories 
 were not shut off from raw material, French cities were not 
 stricken with starvation as the result of France's defeat. Her 
 economic and financial recovery was extraordinarily rapid ; her 
 financial position a year or two after the War was sounder
 
 OLD ECONOMY AND POST-WAR STATE 67 
 
 than that of Germany. It seemed, therefore, that if Germany, 
 of all nations, and Bismarck, of all statesmen, could thus respect 
 the convention which after war secured the immunity of private 
 trade and property, it must indeed be deeply rooted in inter- 
 national comity. 
 
 Indeed, the 'trans-national' economic activities of individuals, 
 which had ensued so widespread an international economy, and 
 the principle of the immunity of private property from seizure 
 after conquest, had become so firmly rooted in international 
 relationship as to survive all the changes of war and conquest. 
 They were based on a principle that had received recognition 
 in English Treaties dating back to the time of Magna Carta, 
 and that had gradually become a convention of international 
 relationship. 
 
 At Versailles the Germans pointed out that their country 
 was certainly not left with resources to feed its population. 
 The Allies replied to that, not by denying the fact to which 
 their own advisers, like Mr Hoover, have indeed pointedly 
 called attention but as follows: 
 
 'It would appear to be a fundamental fallacy that the political 
 control of a country is essential in order to procure a reasonable 
 share of its products. Such a proposal finds no foundation in 
 economic law or history.' 1 
 
 In making their reply the Allies seemed momentarily to have 
 overlooked one fact their own handiwork in the Treaty. 
 
 Before the War it would have been a true reply. But the 
 Allies have transformed what were, before the War, dangerous 
 fallacies into monstrous truths. 
 
 President Wilson has described the position of Germany 
 under the Treaty in these terms : 
 
 'The Treaty of Peace sets up a great Commission, known as 
 the Reparations Commission. . . . That Reparation Commission 
 
 * Note of May 22, 1919.
 
 68 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 can determine the currents of trade, the conditions of credit, 
 of international credit; it can determine how much Germany 
 is going to buy, where it is going to buy, and how it is going 
 to pay for it' 1 
 
 In other words, it is no longer open to Germany, as the 
 result of guarantees of free movement accorded to individual 
 traders, to carry on that process by which before the War she 
 supported herself. Individual Germans cannot now, as hereto- 
 fore, get raw materials by dealing with foreign individuals, 
 without reference to their nationality. Germans are now, in 
 fact, placed in the position of having to deal through their 
 State, which in turn deals with other States. To buy wheat or 
 iron, they cannot as heretofore go to individuals, to the grower 
 or mine-owner, and offer a price; the thing has to be done 
 through Governments. We have come much nearer to a con- 
 dition in which the States do indeed 'own' (they certainly con- 
 trol) their raw material. 
 
 The most striking instance is that of access to the Lorraine 
 iron, which before the War furnished three-fourths of the raw 
 material of Germany's basic industry. Under the individualist 
 system, in which 'the buyer is king' in which efforts were mainly 
 directed to finding markets, no obstacle was placed on the export 
 of iron (except, indeed, the obstacle to the acquisition by French 
 citizens of Lorraine iron set up by the French Government in 
 the imposition of tariffs). But under the new order, with the 
 French State assuming such enormously increased economic 
 functions, the destination of the iron will be determined by 
 political considerations. And 'political considerations,' in an 
 order of international society in which the security of the nation 
 depends, not upon the collective strength of the whole society, 
 but upon its relative strength as against rival units, mean the 
 deliberate weakening of rivals. Thus, no longer will the desire 
 
 1 Speech of September 5, 1919. From report in Philadelphia Public 
 Ledger, Sept 6.
 
 OLD ECONOMY AND POST-WAR STATE 69 
 
 of private owners to find a market for their wares be a guaran- 
 tee of the free access of citizens in other States to those mate- 
 rials. In place of a play of factors which did, however clumsily, 
 ensure in practice general access to raw materials, we have a 
 new order of motives; the deliberate desire of States, com- 
 peting in power, owning great sources of raw material, to 
 deprive rival States of the use of them. 
 
 That the refusal of access will not add to the welfare of the 
 people of the State that so owns these materials, that, indeed, 
 it will inevitably lower the standard of living in all States alike, 
 is certainly true. But so long as there is no real international 
 society organised on the basis of collective strength and co- 
 operation, the motive of security will override considerations 
 of welfare. The condition of international anarchy makes true 
 what otherwise need not be true, that the vital interests of 
 nations are conflicting. 
 
 Parenthetically, it is necessary to say this : the time may have 
 come for the destruction of the older order. If the individ- 
 ualist order was that which gave us Armageddon, and still 
 more, the type of mind which Armageddon and the succeeding 
 'peace' revealed, then the present writer, for one, sheds no tears 
 over its destruction. In any case, a discussion of the intrinsic 
 merits, social and moral, of socialism and individualism re- 
 spectively, would to-day be quite academic. For those who pro- 
 fess to stand for individualism are the most active agents of 
 its destruction. The Conservative Nationalists, who oppose 
 the socialisation of wealth and yet advocate the conscription 
 of life ; oppose Nationalisation, yet demand the utmost military 
 preparedness in an age when effective preparation for war 
 means the mobilisation particularly of the nation's industrial 
 resources ; resent the growing authority of the State, yet insist 
 that the power of the National State shall be such as to give 
 it everywhere domination ; do, indeed, demand omelets without 
 eggs, and bricks not only without straw but without clay. 
 
 A Europe of competing military nationalisms means a
 
 70 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Europe in which the individual and all his activities must more 
 and more be merged in his State for the purpose of that com- 
 petition. The process is necessarily one of progressively intense 
 socialisation; and the war measures carried it to very great 
 lengths indeed. Moreover, the point to which our attention 
 just now should be directed, is the difference which distin- 
 guishes the process of change within the State from that which 
 marks the change in the international field. Within the State 
 the old method is automatically replaced by the new (indeed 
 nationalisation is mostly the means by which the old individual- 
 ism is brought to an end) ; between nations, on the other hand, 
 no organised socialistic internationalism replaces the old method 
 which is destroyed. The world is left without any settled inter- 
 national economy. 
 
 Let us note the process of destruction of the old economy. 
 
 In July, 1914, the advocacy of economic nationalisation or 
 Socialism would have been met with elaborate arguments from 
 perhaps nine average Englishmen out of ten, to the effect that 
 control or management of industries and services by the Govern- 
 ment was impossible, by reason of the sheer inefficiency which 
 marks Governmental work. Then comes the War, and an 
 efficient railway service and the co-ordination of industry and 
 finance to national ends becomes a matter of life and death. In 
 this grave emergency, what policy does this same average 
 Englishman, who has argued so elaborately against State con- 
 trol, and the possibility of governments ever administering 
 public services, pursue? Almost as a matter of course, as the 
 one thing to be done, he clamours for the railways and other 
 public services to be taken over by the Government, and for the 
 State to control the industry, trade, and finance of the country. 
 
 Now it may well be that the Socialist would deny that the 
 system which obtained during the War was Socialism, and 
 would say that it came nearer to being State Capitalism than 
 State Socialism; the individualist may argue that the methods 
 would never be tolerated as a normal method of national life.
 
 OLD ECONOMY AND POST-WAR STATE 71 
 
 But when all allowances are made the fact remains that when 
 our need was greatest we resorted to the very system which 
 we had always declared to be the worst from the point of view 
 of efficiency. As Sir Leo Chiozza Money, in sketching the 
 history of this change, which he has called 'The Triumph of 
 Nationalisation/ says: 'The nation won through the unprece- 
 dented economic difficulties of the greatest War in history by 
 methods which it had despised. National organisation tri- 
 umphed in a land where it had been denied/ In this sense the 
 England of 1914-1920 was a Socialist England; and it was a 
 Socialist England by common consent. 
 
 This fact has an effect on the moral outlook not generally 
 realised. 
 
 For very many, as the War went on and increasing sacri- 
 fices of life and youth were demanded, new light was thrown 
 upon the relations of the individual to the State. A whole 
 generation of young Englishmen were suddenly confronted 
 with the fact that their lives did not belong to themselves, that 
 each owed his life to the State. But if each must give, or at 
 least risk, everything that he possessed, even life itself, were 
 others giving or risking what they possessed? Here was 
 new light on the institution of private property. If the life 
 of each belongs to the community, then assuredly does his prop- 
 erty. The Communist State which says to the citizen, 'You 
 must work and surrender your private property or you will 
 have no vote,' asks, after all, somewhat less than the bourgeois 
 Military State which says to the conscript, Tight and give 
 your person to the State or we will kill you.' For great masses 
 of the British working-classes conscription has answered the 
 ethical problem involved in the confiscation of capital. The 
 Eighth Commandment no longer stands in the way, as it stood 
 so long in the case of a people still religiously minded and 
 still feeling the weight of Puritan tradition. 
 
 Moreover, the War showed that the communal organisation 
 of industry could be made to work. It could 'deliver the goods'
 
 72 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 if those goods were, say, munitions. And if it could work 
 for the purposes of war, why not for those of peace? The 
 War showed that by co-ordinated and centralised action the 
 whole economic structure can without disaster be altered to 
 a degree that before the War no economist would have sup- 
 posed possible. We witnessed the economic miracle men- 
 tioned in the last chapter, but worth recalling here. Suppose 
 before the War you had collected into one room all the great 
 capitalist economists in England, and had said to them : 'Dur- 
 ing the next few years you will withdraw from normal pro- 
 duction five or six millions of the best workers. The mere 
 residue of the workers will be able to feed, clothe, and generally 
 maintain those five or six millions, themselves, and the country 
 at large, at a standard of living on the whole as high, if not 
 higher, than that to which the people were accustomed before 
 those five or six million workers were withdrawn.' If you 
 had said that to those capitalist economists, there would not 
 have been one who would have admitted the possibility of 
 the thing, or regarded the forecast as anything but rubbish. 
 
 Yet that economic miracle has been performed, and it has 
 been performed thanks to Nationalisation and Socialism, and 
 could not have been performed otherwise. 
 
 However, one may qualify in certain points this summary 
 of the outstanding economic facts of the War, it is impossible 
 to exaggerate the extent to which the revelation of economic 
 possibilities has influenced working-class opinion. 
 
 To the effect of this on the minds of the more intelligent 
 workers, we have to add another psychological effect, a certain 
 recklessness, inseparable from the conditions of war, reflected 
 in the workers' attitude towards social reform. 
 
 Perhaps a further factor in the tendency towards Com- 
 munism is the habituation to confiscation which currency in- 
 flation involves. Under the influence of war contrivances 
 States have learned to pay their debts in paper not equivalent 
 in value to the gold in which the loan was made : whole classes
 
 OLD ECONOMY AND POST-WAR STATE 73 
 
 of bondholders have thus been deprived of anything from 
 one-half to two-thirds of the value of their property. It is 
 confiscation in its most indiscriminate and sometimes most 
 cruel form. Bourgeois society has accepted it. A socialistic 
 society of to-morrow may be tempted to find funds for its 
 social experiments in somewhat the same way. 
 
 Whatever weight we may attach to some of these factors, 
 this much is certain: not only war, but preparation for war, 
 means, to a much greater degree than it has ever meant before, 
 mobilisation of the whole resources of the country men, 
 women, industry. This form of 'nationalisation' cannot go 
 on for years and not affect the permanent form of the society 
 subjected to it. It has affected it very deeply. It has involved 
 a change in the position of private property and individual 
 enterprise that since the War has created a new cleavage in 
 the West. The future of private property which was before 
 the War a theoretical speculation, has become within a year or 
 two, and especially, perhaps, since the Bolshevist Revolution in 
 Russia, a dominating issue in European social and political 
 development. It has subjected European society to a new strain. 
 The wearing down of the distinction between the citizen and 
 the State, and the inroads upon the sacro-sanctity of private 
 property and individual enterprise, make each citizen much 
 more dependent upon his State, much more a part of it. Con- 
 trol of foreign trade so largely by the State has made inter- 
 national trade less a matter of processes maintained by indi- 
 viduals who disregarded their nationality, and more a matter of 
 arrangement between States, in which the non-political indi- 
 vidual activity tends to disappear. We have here a group 
 of forces which has achieved a revolution, a revolution in the 
 relationship of the individual European to the European State, 
 and of the States to one another. 
 
 The socialising and communist tendencies set up by measures 
 of industrial mobilisation for the purposes of the War, have 
 been carried forward in another sphere by the economic
 
 74 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 terms of the Treaty of Versailles. These latter, if even partly 
 carried into effect, will mean in very large degree the com- 
 pulsory socialisation, even communisation, of the enemy 
 States. Not only the country's foreign trade, but much of its 
 internal industry must be taken out of the hands of private 
 traders or manufacturers. The provisions of the Treaty as- 
 suredly help to destroy the process upon which the old eco- 
 nomic order in Europe rested. 
 
 Let the reader ask himself what is likely to be the influence 
 upon the institution of private property and private commerce 
 of a Treaty world- wide in its operation, which will take a 
 generation to carry out, which may well be used as a precedent 
 for future settlements between States (settlements which may 
 include very great politico-economic changes in the position 
 of Egypt, Ireland, and India), and of which the chief eco- 
 nomic provisions are as follows: 
 
 'It deprives Germany of nearly the whole of her overseas 
 marine. It banishes German sovereignty and economic in- 
 fluence from all her overseas possessions, and sequestrates the 
 private property of Germans in those places, in Alsace-Lor- 
 raine, and in all countries within Allied jurisdiction. It puts at 
 the disposal of the Allies all German financial rights and in- 
 terests, both in the countries of her former Allies and in the 
 States and territories which have been formed out of them. 
 It gives the Reparations Commission power to put its finger 
 on any great business or property in Germany and to demand 
 its surrender. Outside her own frontiers Germany can be 
 stripped of everything she possesses, and inside them, until an 
 impossible indemnity has been paid to the last farthing, she 
 can truly call nothing her own. 
 
 'The Treaty inflicts on an Empire built up on coal and iron 
 the loss of about one-third cf her coal supplies, with such a 
 heavy drain on the scanty remainder as to leave her with an 
 annual supply of only 60 million tons, as against the pre-war
 
 OLD ECONOMY AND POST-WAR STATE 75 
 
 production of over 190 million tons, and the loss of over three- 
 quarters of her iron ore. It deprives her of all effective control 
 over her own system of transport; it takes the river system 
 of Germany out of German hands, so that on every Inter- 
 national Committee dealing with German waters, Germans 
 are placed in a clear minority. It is as though the Powers of 
 Central Europe were placed in a majority on the Thames 
 Conservancy or the Port of London Authority. Finally, it 
 forces Germany for a period of years to concede "most 
 favoured nation" treatment to the Allies, while she receives no 
 such reciprocal favour in return.' 
 
 This wholesale confiscation of private property 1 is to take 
 place without the Allies affording any compensation to the 
 individuals expropriated, and the proceeds will be employed, 
 first, to meet private debts due to Allied nationals from any 
 German nationals, and, second, to meet claims due from Aus- 
 trian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, or Turkish nationals. Any bal- 
 ance may either be returned by the liquidating power direct to 
 Germany, or retained by them. If retained, the proceeds must 
 be 'transfer red to the Reparations Commission for Germany's 
 
 1 In German East Africa we have a case in which practically the 
 whole of the property in land was confiscated. The whole European 
 population were evicted from the farms and plantations many, of course, 
 representing the labour of a lifetime and deported. A visitor to the 
 colony describes it as an empty shell, its productivity enormously re- 
 duced. In contradistinction, however, one welcomes General Smuts's 
 statement in the Union House of Assembly in regard to the Govern- 
 ment's intentions as to German property. He declared that the balance 
 of nine millions in the hands of the Custodian after claims for damages 
 had been recovered, would not be paid to the Reparations Commission, 
 as this would practically mean confiscation. The Government would 
 take the nine millions, plus interest, as a loan to South Africa for thirty 
 years at four per cent. While under the Peace Treaty they had the right 
 to confiscate all private property in S9Uth-West Africa, they did not in- 
 tend to avail themselves of those rights. They would leave private 
 property alone. As to the concessions, if the titles to these were proved, 
 they would also be left untouched. The statement of the South 
 African Government's intentions, which are the most generous of any 
 country in the world, was received with repeated cheers from all sec- 
 tions of the House.
 
 76 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 credit in the Reparations account. Note, moreover, how the 
 identification of a citizen with his State is carried forward 
 by the discrimination made against Germans in overseas trade. 
 Heretofore there were whole spheres of international trade 
 and industrial activity in which the individual's nationality 
 mattered very little. It was a point in favour of individual 
 effort, and, incidentally, of international peace. Under the 
 Treaty, whereas the property of Allied nationals within Ger- 
 man jurisdiction reverts to Allied ownership on the conclusion 
 of peace, the property of Germans within Allied jurisdiction is 
 to be retained and liquidated as described above, with the 
 result that the whole of German property over a large part of 
 the world can be expropriated, and the large properties now 
 within the custody of Public Trustees and similar officials 
 in the Allied countries may be retained permanently. In the 
 second place, such German assets are chargeable, not only 
 with the liabilities of Germans, but also, if they run to it, with 
 'payment of the amounts due in respect of claims by the 
 nationals of such Allied or Associated Power with regard 
 to their property, rights, and interests in the territory of other 
 Enemy Powers/ as, for example, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Aus- 
 tria. This is a remarkable provision, which is naturally non- 
 reciprocal. In the third place, any final balance due to Ger- 
 many on private account need not be paid over, but can be 
 held against the various liabilities of the German Govern- 
 ment. 1 The effective operation of these articles is guaranteed 
 by the delivery of deeds, titles, and information. 
 
 1 Since the above lines were written the following important an- 
 nouncement has appeared (according to The Times of October 26th., 
 1920.) in the Board of Trade Journal of October 21st. : 
 
 ' H. M. Government have informed the German Government that they 
 do not intend to exercise their rights under paragraph 18 of Annex 
 II to Part VIII of the Treaty of Versailles, to seize the property of 
 German nationals in this country in case of voluntary default by 
 Germany. This applies to German property in the United Kingdom 
 or under United Kingdom control, whether in the form of bank bal- 
 ances, or in that of goods in British bottoms, or of goods sent to this 
 country for sate-
 
 OLD ECONOMY AND POST-WAR STATE 77 
 
 It will be noted how completely the Treaty returns to the 
 Tribal conception of a collective responsibility, and how it 
 wipes away the distinction heretofore made in International 
 Law, between the civilian citizen and the belligerent Govern- 
 ment. An Austrian who has lived and worked in England or 
 China or Egypt all his life, and is married to an English woman 
 and has children who do not speak a word of German, who is 
 no more responsible for the invasion of Belgium than an Ice- 
 lander or a Chinaman, finds that the savings of his lifetime 
 left here in the faith of British security, are confiscated under 
 the Treaty in order to satisfy the claims of France or Japan. 
 And, be it noted, whenever attention is directed to what the 
 defenders of the Treaty like to call its 'sternness' (as when 
 it deprives Englishborn women and their children of their 
 property) we are invited to repress our misgiving on that score 
 in order to contemplate the beauty of its 'justice,' and to ad- 
 mire the inexorable accuracy with which reward and punish- 
 ment are distributed. It is the standing retort to critics of 
 the Treaty : they forget its 'justice.' 1 
 
 ' It has already been announced that German property, rights, and 
 interests acquired since the publication of the General Licence permit- 
 ting the resumption of trade with Germany (i.e, since July 12th., 1919), 
 are not liable to retention under Art. 297 of the Peace Treaty, which 
 gives the Allied and Associated Powers the right to liquidate all Ger- 
 man property, rights, and interests within their territories at the date 
 of the coming into force of the Treaty.' 
 
 This announcement has called forth strong protests from France 
 and from some quarters in this C9untry, to which the British Govern- 
 ment has rejoined by a semi-official statement that the concession has 
 been made solely on account of British commercial interests. The in- 
 cident illustrates the difficulty of waiving even permissive powers under 
 the Treaty, although the exercise of those powers would obviously in- 
 jure British traders. Moreover, the Reparations (Recovery) Act, 
 passed in March 1921, appears to be inconsistent with the above an- 
 nouncement. 
 
 1 A point that seems to have been overlooked is the effect of this 
 Treaty on the arrangements which may follow changes in the political 
 status of, say, Egypt or India or Ireland. If some George Washington 
 of the future were to apply the principles of the Treaty to British 
 property, the effects might be far-reaching. 
 
 A Quarterly Review critic (April 1920) says of these clauses of the 
 Treaty (particularly Article 297b.) :
 
 78 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 How far this new tendency is likely to go towards a reasser- 
 tion of the false doctrine of the complete submergence of the 
 individual in the State, the erection of the 'God-State' which at 
 the beginning we declared to be the main moral cause of the 
 War and set out to destroy, will be discussed later. The point 
 for the moment is that the enforcement of this part of the 
 Treaty, like other parts, will go to swell communistic tendencies. 
 It will be the business of the German State to maintain the 
 miners who are to deliver the coal under the Treaty, the work- 
 ers in the shipyards who are to deliver the yearly toll of 
 ships. The intricate and elaborate arrangements for 'search- 
 ing Germany's pockets' for the purpose of the indemnity 
 mean the very strictest Governmental control of private trade 
 in Germany, in many spheres its virtual abolition. All must 
 be done through the Government in order that the conditions 
 of the Treaty may be fulfilled. Foreign trade will be no 
 longer the individual enterprise of private citizens. It will, 
 by the order of the Allies, be a rigidly controlled Govern- 
 mental function, as President Wilson reminded us in the pas- 
 sage quoted above. 
 
 To a lesser degree the same will be true of the countries 
 receiving the indemnity. Mr. Lloyd George promises that 
 it will not be paid in cheap goods, or in such a way as to 
 damage home industries. But it must be paid in some goods : 
 ships, dyes, or (as some suggest) raw materials. Their dis- 
 tribution to private industry, the price that these industries 
 
 'We are justified in regarding this policy with the utmost appre- 
 hension, not only because of its injustice, but also because it is likely 
 to form precedents of a most mischievous character in the future. If, it 
 will be said, the Allied Governments ended their great war for justice 
 and right by confiscating private property and ruining those unfortunate 
 individuals who happened to have investments outside their own 
 country, how can private wealth at home complain if a Labour Govern- 
 ment proposes to confiscate private property in any business which it 
 thinks suitable for "nationalisation"? Under another provision the 
 Reparations Commission is actually allowed to demand the surrender 
 of German properties and German enterprises in neutral countries. 
 This will be found in Article 235, which "introduces a quite novel prin- 
 ciple in the collection of indemnities." '
 
 OLD ECONOMY AND POST-WAR STATE 79 
 
 shall pay, must be arranged by the receiving Government. 
 This inevitably means a prolongation of the State's interven- 
 tion in the processes of private trade and industry. Nor is it 
 merely the disposal of the indemnity in kind which will com- 
 pel each Allied Government to continue to intervene in the 
 trade and industry of its citizens. The fact that the Repara- 
 tions Commission is, in effect, to allocate the amount of ore, 
 cotton, shipping, Germany is to get, to distribute the ships 
 and coal which she may deliver, means the establishment of 
 something resembling international rationing. The Govern- 
 ments will, in increasing degree, determine the amount and 
 direction of trade. 
 
 The more thoroughly we 'make Germany pay,' the more 
 State-controlled do we compel her (and only to a lesser ex- 
 tent ourselves) to become. We should probably regard a 
 standard of life in Germany very definitely below that of the 
 rest of Western Europe, as poetic justice. But it would in- 
 evitably set up forces, both psychological and economic, that 
 make not only for State-control either State Socialism or 
 State Capitalism but for Communism. 
 
 Suppose we did our work so thoroughly that we took abso- 
 lutely all Germany could produce over and above what was 
 necessary for the maintenance of the physical efficiency of her 
 population. That would compel her to organise herself in- 
 creasingly on the basis of equality of income : no one, that is, 
 going above the line of physical efficiency and no one falling 
 below it. 
 
 Thus, while British, French, and American anti-socialists are 
 declaring that the principle enunciated by the Russian Govern- 
 ment, that all trade must be through the Soviet, is one which 
 will prove most mischievous in its example, it is precisely 
 that principle which increasingly, if the Treaty is enforced, 
 they will in fact impose upon a great country, highly organ- 
 ised, of great bureaucratic efficiency, far more likely by its 
 training and character to make the principle a success.
 
 80 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 This tendency may be in the right direction or the wrong 
 one. The point is that no provision has been made to meet 
 the condition which the change creates. The old system per- 
 mitted the world to work under well-defined principles. The 
 new regimen, because it has not provided for the consequences 
 of the changes it has provoked, condemns a great part of 
 Europe to economic paralysis which must end in bitter anarchic 
 struggles unless the crisis is anticipated by constructive states- 
 manship. 
 
 Meantime the continued coercion of Germany will demand 
 on the part of the Western democracies a permanent mainte- 
 nance of the machine of war, and so a perpetuation of the 
 tendency, in the way already described, towards a militarised 
 Nationalisation. 
 
 The resultant 'Socialism' will assuredly not be of the type 
 that most Socialists (among whom, incidentally, the present 
 writer counts himself) would welcome. But it will not neces- 
 sarily be for that reason any less fatal to the workable trans- 
 national individualism. 
 
 Moreover, military nationalisation presupposes international 
 conflict, if not perpetually recurrent war; presupposes, that 
 is, first, an inability to organise a stable international economy 
 indispensable to a full life for Europe's population; and, 
 secondly, an increasing destructiveness in warfare self-de- 
 struction in terms of European Society as a whole. 'Efficiency" 
 in such a society would be efficiency in suicide.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND THE ASSERTION OF RIGHT 
 
 THE change noted in the preceding chapter raises certain pro- 
 found questions of Right. These may be indicated as fol- 
 lows : 
 
 By our political power we can create a Europe which, while 
 not assuring advantage to the victor, deprives the vanquished 
 of means of existence. The loss of both ore and coal by the 
 Central Powers might well make it impossible for their future 
 populations to find food. What are they to do ? Starve ? To 
 disclaim responsibility is to claim that we are entitled to use 
 our power to deny them life. 
 
 This 'right' to starve foreigners can only be invoked by 
 invoking the concept of nationalism. 'Our nation first.' But 
 the policy of placing life itself upon a foundation of pre- 
 ponderant force instead of mutually advantageous co-opera- 
 tion, compels statesmen perpetually to betray the principle of 
 nationality; not only directly (as in the case of the annexation 
 of territory, economically necessary, but containing peoples 
 of alien nationality), but indirectly; for the resistance which 
 our policy (of denying means of subsistence to others) pro- 
 vokes, makes preponderance of power the condition of sur- 
 vival. All else must give way to that need. 
 
 Might cannot be pledged to Right in these conditions. If 
 our power is pledged to Allies for the purposes of the Balance 
 (which means, in fact, preponderance), it cannot be used 
 81
 
 82 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 against them to enforce respect for (say) nationality. To turn 
 against Allies would break the Balance. To maintain the 
 Balance of Power we are compelled to disregard the moral 
 merits of an Ally's policy (as in the case of the promise to 
 the Czar's Government not to demand the independence of 
 Poland). The maintenance of a Balance (i.e. preponderance) 
 is incompatible with the maintenance of Right. There is a 
 conflict of obligation. 
 
 Before the War, a writer in the National Review, desiring 
 to show the impossibility of obviating war by any international 
 agreement, took the example of the conflict with Germany 
 and put the case as follows : 
 
 'Germany must go to war. Every year an extra million 
 babies are crying out for more room, and as the expansion 
 of Germany by peaceful means seems impossible, Germany 
 can only provide for those babies at the cost of potential foes. 
 
 'This ... it cannot be too often repeated, is not mere 
 envious greed, but stern necessity. The same struggle for life 
 and space which more than a thousand years ago drove one 
 Teutonic wave after another across the Rhine and the Alps, 
 is now once more a great compelling force. . . . This aspect 
 of the case may be all very sad and very wicked, but it is 
 true. . . . Herein lies the ceaseless and ruinous struggle for 
 armaments, and herein for France lies the dire necessity of 
 linking her foreign policy with that of powerful allies.' 
 
 'And so,' adds the writer, 'it is impossible and absurd to 
 accept the theory of Mr. Norman Angell.' 
 
 Now that theory was, not that Germany and others would 
 not fight I was very insistent indeed that x unless there was 
 a change in European policy they would but that war, how- 
 ever it might end, would not solve the question. And that con- 
 
 1 See quotations in Addendum.
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 83 
 
 elusion at least, whatever may be the case with others, is 
 proved true. 
 
 For we have had war; we have beaten Germany; and those 
 million babies still confront us. The German population and 
 its tendency to increase is still there. What are we going to 
 do about it? The War has killed two million out of about 
 seventy million Germans; it killed very few of the women. 
 The subsequent privations of the blockade certainly disposed 
 of some of the weaker among both women and children. The 
 rate of increase may in the immediate future be less. It was 
 declining before the War as the country became more pros- 
 perous, following in this what seems to be a well-established 
 rule : the higher the standard of civilisation the more does the 
 birth-rate decline. But if the country is to become extremely 
 frugal and more agricultural, this tendency to decline is likely 
 to be checked. In any case the number of mouths to be fed 
 will not have been decreased by war to the same extent that 
 the resources by which they might have been fed have been 
 decreased. 
 
 What do we propose to Germany, now that we have beaten 
 her, as the means of dealing with those million babies? Pro- 
 fessor Starling, in a report to the British Government, 1 sug- 
 gests emigration: 
 
 'Before the War Germany produced 85 per cent, of the 
 total food consumed by her inhabitants. This large produc- 
 tion was only possible by high cultivation, and by the plentiful 
 use of manure and imported feeding stuffs, means for the 
 purchase of these being furnished by the profits of industry. 
 . . . The loss to Germany of 40 per cent, of its former coal 
 output must diminish the number of workers who can be 
 maintained. The great increase in German population during 
 the last twenty-five years was rendered possible only by ex- 
 ploiting the agricultural possibilities of the soil to the greatest 
 
 'Cmd. 280 (1919), p. IS.
 
 S4 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 possible extent, and this in its turn depended on the industrial 
 development of the country. The reduction by 20 per cent, 
 in the productive area of the country, and the 40 per cent, 
 diminution in the chief raw material for the creation of wealth, 
 renders the country at present over-populated, and it seems 
 probable that within the next few years many million (ac- 
 cording to some estimates as many as fifteen million) workers 
 and their families will be obliged to emigrate, since there 
 will be neither work nor food for them to be obtained from the 
 reduced industries of the country/ 
 
 But emigration where? Into Russia? The influence of 
 Germans in Russia was very great even before the War. Cer- 
 tain French writers warn us frantically against the vast dan- 
 ger of Russia's becoming a German colony unless a cordon 
 of border States, militarily strong, is created for the purpose 
 of keeping the two countries apart. But we should certainly 
 get a Germanisation of Russia from the inside if five or ten 
 or fifteen million Germans were dispersed therein and the 
 country became a permanent reservoir for those annual million 
 babies. 
 
 And if not Russia, where? Imagine a migration of ten 
 or fifteen million Huns throughout the world a dispersion 
 before which that of the Jews and of the Irish would pale. 
 We know how the migration from an Ireland of eight millions 
 that could not feed itself has reacted upon our politics and 
 our relations with America. What sort of foreign problems 
 are we going to bequeath to our children if our policy forces 
 a great German migration into Russia, or the Balkans, or 
 Turkey ? 
 
 This insistent fact of a million more or less of little Huns 
 being born into the world every year remains. Shall we sug- 
 gest to Germany that she must deal with this problem as the 
 thrifty householder deals with the too frequent progeny of 
 the family cat?
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 85 
 
 Or shall we do just nothing, and say that it is not our 
 affair; that as we have the power over the iron of Lorraine 
 and Morocco, over the resources of Africa and Asia, over 
 the ocean highways of the world, we are going to see that that 
 power, naval and military, is used to ensure abundance for 
 ourselves and our friends; that as for others, since they have 
 not the power, they may starve ? Vae metis indeed ! * 
 
 Just note what is involved. This war was fought to destroy 
 the doctrine that might is right. Our power, we say, gives us 
 access to the wealth of the world; others shall be excluded. 
 Then we are using our power to deny to some millions the 
 most elemental of all rights, the right to existence. By the 
 economic use of our military power (assuming that military 
 power is as effective as we claim) we compel some millions to 
 choose between war and penury or starvation; we give to 
 war, in their case, the justification that it is on behalf of the 
 bread of their children, their livelihood. 
 
 Let us compare France's position. Unlike the German, the 
 French population has hardly increased at all in recent genera- 
 tions. In the years immediately preceding the War, indeed, 
 it showed a definite decline, a tendency naturally more marked 
 since the War. This low birth-rate has greatly concerned 
 French statesmen, and remedies have been endlessly discussed, 
 with no result. The causes are evidently very deep-rooted in- 
 deed. The soil which has been inherited by this declining 
 population is among the richest and most varied in the world, 
 
 1 The dilemma is not, of course, as absolute, as this query would 
 suggest. What I am trying to make perfectly clear here is the kind 
 of problem that faces us rather than the precise degree of its difficulty. 
 My own view is that after much suffering especially to the children, 
 and the reduction during a generation or two, perhaps, of the physical 
 standard of the race, the German population will find a way round the 
 sustenance difficulty. For one thing, France needs German coke quite as 
 badly as Germany needs French ore, and this common need may be 
 made the basis of a bargain. But though Germany may be able to 
 surmount the difficulties created for her by her victors, it is those difficul- 
 ties which will constitute her grievance, and will present precisely the 
 kind, if not the degree, of injustice here indicated.
 
 86 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 producing in the form of wines, brandies, and certain other 
 luxuries, results which can be duplicated nowhere else. It 
 stretches almost into the sub-tropics. In addition, the nation 
 possesses a vast colonial empire in Algeria, Tunis, Morocco 
 (which include some of the greatest food-growing areas in 
 the world), Madagascar, Equatorial Africa, Cochin-China ; 
 an empire managed, by the way, on strongly protectionist 
 principles. 
 
 We have thus on the one side a people of forty millions 
 with no tendency to increase, mainly not industrial (because 
 not needing to be), possessing undeveloped areas capable, in 
 their food and mineral resources (home and colonial), of sup- 
 porting a population very many times its size. On the other 
 hand is a neighbouring group, very much larger, and rapidly 
 increasing, occupying a poorer and smaller territory. It is 
 unable to subsist at modern standards on that territory without 
 a highly-developed industry. The essential raw materials have 
 passed into the hands of the smaller group. The latter on 
 grounds of self-defence, fearing to be outnumbered, may with- 
 hold those materials from the larger group ; and its right so to 
 do is to be unquestioned. 
 
 Does any one really believe that Western Society could 
 remain stable, resting on moral foundations of this kind? Can 
 one disregard primary economic need in considering the problem 
 of preserving the Europe of 'free and independent national 
 states' of Mr. Asquith's phrase? 1 
 
 1 One very commonly sees the statement that France had no adequate 
 resources in iron ore before the War. This is an entire mistake, as 
 the Report of the Commission appointed by the Minister of Munitions 
 to visit Lorraine (issued July, 1919), points out (p. 11.) : 'Before the 
 War the resources of Germany of iron ore were 0,600,000,000 tons and 
 those of France 3,300,000,000.' What gave Germany the advantage was 
 the possession not of greater ore resources than France, but of coal 
 suitable for furnace coke, and this superiority in coal will still remain 
 even after the Treaty, although the paralysis of transport and other in- 
 dispensable factors may render the superiority valueless. The report 
 just quoted says: 'It is true that Germany will want iron ore from 
 Lorraine (in 1913 she took 14,000,000 tons from Briey and 18,500,000 
 tons from Lorraine), but she will not be so entirely dependent upon
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 87 
 
 If things are left where this Treaty leaves them, then the 
 militarist theories which before were fallacies will have be- 
 come true. We can no longer say that peoples as distinct from 
 imperialist parties have no interest in conquest. In this new 
 world of to-morrow this 'better and more stable world' 
 the interests of peoples themselves will be in deadly conflict. 
 For an expanding people it will be a choice between robbery 
 of neighbours' territory and starvation. Re-conquest of Lor- 
 raine will become for the Germans not a matter of hurt 
 pride or sentiment, but a matter of actual food need, a need 
 which will not, like hurt pride, diminish with the lapse of 
 time, but increase with the growth of the population. On 
 the side of war, then, truly we shall find 'the human stomach 
 and the human womb.' 
 
 The change is a deeper reversion than we seem to realise. 
 Even under feudalism the means of subsistence of the people, 
 the land they cultivated, remained as before. Only the lords 
 were changed and one lord was very like another. But 
 where, under modern industrial economy, titles to property in 
 indispensable raw materials can be cancelled by a conqueror and 
 become the State property of the conquering nation, which 
 enforces the right to distribute them as it pleases, whole popu- 
 lations may find themselves deprived of the actual means of 
 supporting themselves on the territory that they occupy. 
 
 this one source of supply as the Lorrarine works will be upon Ger- 
 many for coke, unless some means are provided to enable Lorraine to 
 obtain coke from elsewhere, or to produce her own needs from Saar 
 coal and imported coking coal.' The whole report seems to indicate 
 that the mise en valeur of France's new 'property' depends upon sup- 
 plies of German coal to say nothing of the needs of a German market 
 and the markets depending on that market. As it is, the Lorraine steel 
 works are producing nothing like their full output because of the ina- 
 bility of Germany to supply furnace coke, owing largely to the West- 
 phalian labour troubles and transport disorganisation. Whether poli- 
 tical passion will so far subside as to enable the two countries to come 
 to a bargain in the matter of exchange of ore or basic pig-iron for 
 furnace coke, remains to be seen. In any case one may say that the 
 ore-fields of Lorraine will only be of value to France provided that 
 much of their product is returned to Germany and used for the pur- 
 pose of giving value to German coal.
 
 88 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 We shall have set up a disruptive ferment working with all 
 the force of the economic needs of 50 or 100 million virile folk 
 to bring about once more some vast explosion. Europe will 
 once more be living on a volcano, knowing no remedy save 
 futile efforts to 'sit on the lid.' 
 
 The beginnings of the attempt are already visible. Colonel 
 Repington points out that owing to the break up of Russia 
 and Austria, and the substitution for these two powerful States 
 of a large number of small, independent ones likely to quarrel 
 among themselves, Germany will be the largest and most 
 cohesive of all the European Continental nations, relatively 
 stronger than she was before the War. He demands in conse- 
 quence, that not only France, but Holland and Belgium, be 
 extended to the Rhine, which must become the strategic frontier 
 of civilisation against barbarism. He says there can be no 
 sort of security otherwise. He even reminds us that it was 
 Rome's plan. (He does not remind us that if it had notably 
 succeeded then we should hardly be trying it again two thou- 
 sand years later.) The plan gives us, in fact, this prospect: 
 the largest and most unified racial block in Europe will find 
 itself surrounded by a number of lesser States, containing 
 German minorities, and possessing materials indispensable to 
 Germany's economic life, to which she is refused peaceful 
 access in order that she may not become strong enough to 
 obtain access by force; an attempt which she will be com- 
 pelled to make because peaceful access is denied to her. Our 
 measures create resistance; that resistance calls forth more 
 extreme measures; those measures further resistance, and so 
 on. We are in the thick once more of Balance of Power, 
 strategic frontiers, every element of the old stultifying state- 
 craft against which all the Allies before the Armistice 
 made flaming protest. 
 
 And when this conflict of rights each fighting as he be- 
 lieves for the right to life has blazed up into passions that 
 transcend all thought of gain or advantage, we shall be asked
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 89 
 
 somewhat contemptuously what purpose it serves to discuss 
 so cold a thing as 'economies' in the midst of this welter. 
 
 It won't serve any purpose. But the discussion of economics 
 before it had become a matter for passion might have pre- 
 vented the conflict. 
 
 The situation has this complication and irony: Increas- 
 ing prosperity, a higher standard of living, sets up a tendency 
 prudentially to check increase of population. France, and 
 in hardly less degree even new and sparsely populated coun- 
 tries like Australia, have for long shown a tendency to a de- 
 cline of the rate of increase. In France, indeed, as has al- 
 ready been mentioned, an absolute decrease had set in before 
 the War. But as soon as this tendency becomes apparent, 
 the same nationalist who invokes the menace of over-popula- 
 tion as the justification for war, also invokes nationalism to 
 reverse the tendency which would solve the over-population 
 problem. This is part of the mystic nature of the nationalist 
 impulse. Colonel Roosevelt is not the only warlike nationalist 
 who has exhausted the resources of invective to condemn 'race 
 suicide' and to enjoin the patriotic duty of large families. 
 
 We may gather some idea of the morasses into which the 
 conception of nationalism and its 'mystic impulses' may lead 
 us when applied to the population problem by examining some 
 current discussions of it. Dr Raymond Pearl, of John Hop- 
 kins University, summarises certain of his conclusions thus : 
 
 'There are two ways which have been thought of and prac- 
 tised, by which a nation may attempt to solve its problem of 
 population after it has become very pressing and after the 
 effects of internal industrial development and its creation of 
 wealth have been exhausted. These are respectively the methods 
 of France and Germany. By consciously controlled methods, 
 France endeavoured, and on the whole succeeded, in keeping her 
 birth-rate at just such a delicate balance with the death-rate as 
 to make the population nearly stationary. Then any industrial
 
 90 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 developments simply operated to raise the standard of living 
 of those fortunate enough to be born. France's condition, 
 social economy, and political, in 1914 represented, I think, the 
 results of about the maximum efficiency of what may be called 
 the birth-control method of meeting the problem of population. 
 'Germany deliberately chose the other plan of meeting the 
 problem of population. In fewest words the scheme was, 
 when your population pressed too hard upon subsistence, and 
 you had fully liquidated the industrial development asset, to go 
 out and conquer some one, preferably a people operating under 
 the birth-control population plan, and forcibly take his land 
 for your people. To facilitate this operation a high birth- 
 rate is made a matter of sustained propaganda, and in every 
 other possible way encouraged. An abundance of cannon 
 fodder is essential to the success of the scheme.' x 
 
 A word or two as to the facts alleged in the foregoing. We 
 are told that the two nations not only followed respectively 
 two different methods, but that it was in each case a deliberate 
 national choice, supported by organised propaganda. 'By con- 
 sciously controlled methods, France,' we are told, 'en- 
 deavoured' to keep her birth-rate down. The fact is, of course, 
 that all the conscious endeavours of 'France,' if by France is 
 meant the Government, the Church, the learned bodies, were 
 in the exactly contrary direction. Not only organised propa- 
 ganda, but most elaborate legislation, aiming through taxation 
 at giving a preference to large families, has for a generation 
 been industriously urging an increase in the French popula- 
 tion. It has notoriously been a standing dish in the menu 
 of the reformers and uplifters of nearly every political party. 
 What we obviously have in the case of France is not a deci- 
 sion made by the nation as a corporate body and the Govern- 
 ment representing it, but a tendency which their deliberate 
 
 1 From the summary of a series of lectures on the Biology of Death, 
 as reported in the Boston Herald of December 19th., 1920.
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 91 
 
 decision, as represented by propaganda and legislation, has 
 been unable to check. 1 
 
 In discussing the merits of the two plans, Dr Pearl goes on : 
 
 'Now the morals of the two plans are not at issue here. 
 Both are regarded, on different grounds to be sure, as highly 
 immoral by many people. Here we are concerned only with 
 actualities. There can be no doubt that in general and in the 
 long run the German plan is bound to win over the birth- 
 control plan, if the issue is joined between the two and only 
 the two, and its resolution is military in character. ... So 
 long as there are on the earth aggressively-minded peoples who 
 from choice deliberately maintain a high birth-rate, no people 
 can afford to put the French solution of the population prob- 
 lem into operation unless they are prepared to give up, prac- 
 tically at the asking, both their national integrity and their land.' 
 
 Let us assume, therefore, that France adopts the high birth- 
 rate plan. She, too, will then be compelled, if the plan has 
 worked out successfully, 'to get out and conquer some one.' But 
 that some one will also, for the same reasons, have been fol- 
 lowing the plan of high birth-rate. What is then to happen? 
 A competition in fecundity as a solution of the excess popu- 
 lation problem seems inadequate. Yet it is inevitably prompted 
 by the nationalist impulse. 
 
 Happily the general rise in the standard of life itself fur- 
 nishes a solution. As we have seen, the birth-rate is, within 
 certain limits, in inverse ratio to a people's prosperity. But 
 
 1 A recent book on the subject, summing up the various recommenda- 
 tions made in France up to 1918 for increasing the birth-rate is La 
 Natalite: ses Lois Economiques et Psychologiques, by Gaston Rageot. 
 
 The present writer remembers being present ten years before the War 
 at a Conference at the Sorbonne on this subject. One of the lecturers 
 summarised all the various plans that had been tried to increase the 
 birth-rate. 'They have all failed,' he concluded, and I doubt if any- 
 thing remains to be done.' And one of the savants present added : 'Ex- 
 cept to applaud.'
 
 92 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 again, nationalism, by preventing the economic unification of 
 Europe, may well stand in the way of that solution also. It 
 checks the tendencies which would solve the problem. 
 
 A fall in the birth-rate, as a concomitant of a rising stand- 
 ard of living, was beginning to be revealed in Germany also 
 before the War. 1 If now, under the new order, German in- 
 dustrialism is checked and we get an agricultural population 
 compelled by circumstances to a standard of life not higher 
 than that of the Russian moujik, we may perhaps also be 
 faced by a revival of high fertility in mystic disregard of 
 the material means available for the support of the popula- 
 tion. 
 
 There is a further point. 
 
 Those who have dealt with the world's food resources point 
 out that there are great sources of food still undeveloped. But 
 the difficulties do not arise from a total shortage. They arise 
 from a mal-distribution of population, coupled with the fact that 
 as between nations the Ten Commandments particularly the 
 eighth do not run. By the code of nationalism we have no obli- 
 gation towards starving foreigners. A nation may seize terri- 
 tory which it does not need, and exclude from it those who 
 direly need its resources. While we insist that internationalism 
 is political atheism, and that the only doctrine fit for red-blood- 
 ed people is what Colonel Roosevelt called 'intense Nationalism,' 
 intense nationalism means, in economic practice, the attempt, 
 
 *Mr William Harbutt Dawson gives the figures as follows: 
 ' The decline in the birth-rate was found to have become a settled 
 factor in the population question. . . . The birth-rate for the whole 
 Empire reached the maximum figure in 1876, when it stood at 41.0 per 
 1000 of the population. . . . Since 1876 the movement has been 
 steadily downward, with the slightest possible break at the beginning 
 of the 'nineties Since 1900 the rate has decreased as fol- 
 lows : 
 
 1900 .... 35.6 per 1000, 1904 .... 34.1 per 1000. 
 
 1901 . 35.7 per " 1905 .... 33.0 per " 
 
 1902 ... 35.1 per " 1906 .... 33.1 per " 
 
 1903 .... 33.9 per " 
 
 (The Evolution of Modern Germany, p. 309)
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS AND RIGHT 93 
 
 even at some cost, to render the political unit also the economic 
 unit, and as far as possible self-sufficing. 
 
 It serves little purpose, therefore, to point out that one or 
 two States in South America can produce food for half the 
 world, if we also create a political tradition which leads the 
 patriotic South American to insist upon having his own manu- 
 factures, even at cost to himself, so that he will not need ours. 
 He will achieve that result at the cost of diminishing his pro- 
 duction of food. Both he and the Englishman will be poorer, 
 but according to the standard of the intense nationalist, the 
 result should be a good one, though it may confront many 
 of us with starvation, just as the intense nationalism of the 
 various nations of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe actu- 
 ally results in famine on soil fully capable, before the War, of 
 supporting the population, and capable of supporting still 
 greater populations if natural resources are used to the best 
 advantage. It is political passions, anti-social doctrines, and the 
 muddle, confusion, and hostility that go therewith which are 
 the real cause of the scarcity. 
 
 And that may forecast the position of Europe as a whole 
 to-morrow: we may suffer starvation for the patriotic joy 
 of seeing foreigners Boche or Bolshevist suffer in still 
 greater degree. 
 
 Given the nationalist conception of a world divided into 
 completely distinct groups of separate corporate bodies, enti- 
 ties so different that the binding social ties between them 
 (laws, in fact) are impossible of maintenance, there must 
 inevitably grow up pugnacities and rivalries, creating a general 
 sense of conflict that will render immeasurably difficult the 
 necessary co-operation between the peoples, the kind of co- 
 operation which the Treaty of Versailles has, in so large de- 
 gree, deliberately destroyed. Whether the hostility comes, it] 
 the first instance, from the 'herd/ or tribal, instinct, and 
 develops into a sense of economic hostility, or whether the 
 hostility arises from the conviction that there exists a conflict
 
 94 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 of interest, the result is pretty much the same. I happen to have 
 put the case elsewhere in these terms : 
 
 If it be true that since the world is of limited space, we must 
 fight one another for it, that if our children are to be fed others 
 must starve, then agreement between peoples will be for ever 
 impossible. Nations will certainly not commit suicide for 
 the sake of peace. If this is really the relationship of two 
 great nations, they are, of course, in the position of two 
 cannibals, one of whom says to the other: 'Either I have got 
 to eat you, or you have got to eat me. Let's come to a friendly 
 agreement about it.' They won't come to a friendly agreement 
 about it. They will fight. And my point is that not only 
 would they fight if it really were true that the one had to kill 
 and eat the other, but they would fight as long as they be- 
 lieved it to be true. It might be that there was ample food 
 within their reach out of their reach, say, so long as each 
 acted alone, but within their reach if one would stand on the 
 shoulders of the other ('this is an allegory'), and so get the 
 fat cocoa-nuts on the higher branches. But they would, never- 
 theless, be cannibals so long as each believed that the flesh of 
 the other was the only source of food. It would be that mis- 
 take, not the necessary fact, which would provoke them to 
 fight. 
 
 When we learn that one Balkan State refuses to another a 
 necessary raw material, or access over a railroad, because it 
 prefers the suffering of that neighbour to its own welfare, we 
 are shocked and talk about primitive and barbarous passions. 
 But are we ourselves Britain or France in better state? 
 The whole story of the negotiations about the indemnity and 
 the restoration of Europe shows that we are not. Quite soon 
 after the Armistice the expert advisers of the British Govern- 
 ment urged the necessity, for the economic safety of the Allies 
 themselves, of helping in the restoration of Germany. But 
 they also admitted that it was quite hopeless to go to Parlia- 
 ment with any proposal to help Germany. And even when one
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 95 
 
 gets a stage further and there is general admission 'in the 
 abstract* that if France is to secure reparations, Germany 
 must be fed and permitted to work, the sentiment of hostility 
 stands in the way of any specific measure. 
 
 We are faced with certain traditions and moralities, involving 
 a psychology which, gathering round words like 'patriotism,' 
 deprives us of the emotional restraint and moral disci- 
 pline necessary to carry through the measures which intellec- 
 tually we recognise to be indispensable to our country's 
 welfare. 
 
 We thus see why it is impossible to speak of international 
 economics without predicating the nation as a concept. In the 
 economic problems of nations or States, one is necessarily deal- 
 ing not only with economic facts, but with political facts : a 
 political entity in its economic relations (before the War in- 
 considerable, but since the War very great) ; group conscious- 
 ness; the interests, or what is sometimes as important, the 
 supposed interests of this group or area as distinct from that; 
 the moral phenomena of nationalism group preferences or 
 prejudices, herd instinct, tribal hostility. All this is part of 
 the economic problem in international politics. Protection, for 
 instance, is only in part a problem of economics; it is also a 
 problem of political preferences : the manufacturer who is con- 
 tent to face the competition of his own countrymen, objects to 
 facing that of foreigners. Political conceptions are part of the 
 economic problem when dealing with nations, just as primary 
 economic need must be taken into account as part of the cause of 
 the conflict of nationalisms. 
 
 One very commonly hears the argument : 'What is the good 
 of discussing economic forces in relation to the conflict of 
 Europe when our participation, for instance, in the War, was 
 in no way prompted by economic considerations ?' 
 
 Our motive may not have been economic, yet the cause of the 
 War may very well have been mainly economic. The sentiment 
 of nationality may be a stronger motive in European politics
 
 96 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 than any other. The chief menace to nationality may none the 
 less be economic need. 
 
 While it may be perfectly true that Belgians, Serbs, Poles, 
 Bohemians, fought from motives of nationality, it may also 
 be true that the wars which they were compelled to fight had 
 an economic cause. 
 
 If the desire of Germany or Austria for undeveloped ter- 
 ritory had anything to do with that thrust towards the Near 
 East in the way of which stood Serbian nationality, then eco- 
 nomic causes had something to do with compelling Serbia and 
 Belgium to fight for their nationality. Owing to the pressure 
 of the economic need or greed of others, we are still concerned 
 with economic forces, though we may be actuated only by the 
 purest nationalism : the economic pressure of others is obviously 
 part of the problem of our national defence. And if one ex- 
 amines in turn the chief problems of nationality, one finds in 
 almost every case that any aggression by which it may be 
 menaced is prompted by the need, or assumed need, of other 
 nations for mines, ports, access to the sea (warm water or 
 other) , or for strategic frontiers to defend those things. 
 
 Why should the desire of one people to rule itself, to be 
 free, be thwarted by another making exactly the same demands ? 
 In the case of the Germans we ascribe it to some special and 
 evil lust peculiar to their race and training. But the Peace 
 has revealed to us that it exists in every people, every one. 
 
 A glance at the map enables us to realise readily enough why 
 a given State may resist the 'complete independence' of a 
 neighbouring territory. 
 
 Here, on the borders of Russia, for instance, are a number 
 of small States in a position to block the access of the popula- 
 tion of Russia to the sea ; in a position, indeed, by their control 
 of certain essential raw materials, to hold up the development 
 of a hundred million people, very much as the robber barons 
 of the Rhine held up the commerce of that waterway. No 
 powerful Russia, Bolshevik or Czarist, will permanently recog-
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 97 
 
 nise the absolute right of a little State, at will (at the bidding, 
 perhaps, of some military dictator, who in South American 
 fashion may have seized its Government), to block her access 
 to the 'highways of the world.' 'Sovereignty and independence* 
 absolute sovereignty over its own territory, that is may well 
 include the 'right' to make the existence of others intolerable. 
 Ought any nation to have such a right? Like questions are 
 raised in the case of the States that once were Austria. They 
 have achieved their complete freedom and independence. Some 
 of the results are dealt with in the first chapter. In some cases 
 the new States are using their 'freedom, sovereignty, and inde- 
 pendence' for the purpose of worsening a condition of famine 
 and economic paralysis that spells indescribable suffering for 
 millions of completely innocent folk. 1 
 
 So far, the new Europe is economically less competent than 
 the old. The old Austrian grouping, for instance, made pos- 
 sible a stable and orderly life for fifty million people. A 
 Mittel Europa, with its Berlin-Bagdad designs, would, what- 
 ever its dangers otherwise, have given us a vastly greater area 
 of co-ordinated production, an area approaching that of the 
 United States ; it would have ensured the effective co-operation 
 of populations greatly in excess of those of the United States. 
 Whatever else might have happened, there would have been no 
 destruction by famine of the populations concerned if some 
 such plan of organised production had materialised. The old 
 Austria at least ensured for the children physical health and 
 education, for the peasants work in their fields, in security ; and 
 
 1 Conversely it may be said that the economic position of the border 
 States becomes impossible unless the greater States are orderly. In re- 
 gard to Poland, Mr Keynes remarks: 'Unless her great neighbours are 
 prosperous and orderly, Poland is an economic impossibility, with no 
 industry but Jew-baiting.' 
 
 Sir William Goode (the British Director of Relief) states that he 
 found 'everywhere never-ending vicious circles of political paradox 
 and economic complication, with consequent paralysis of national life 
 and industry. The new States of repartitioned Europe seem not only 
 incapable of maintaining their own economic life, but also either unable 
 or unwilling to help their neighbours.' (Cmd. 521 (1920), p. 6.) 
 i
 
 98 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 although denial of full national rights was doubtless an evil 
 thing, it still left free a vast field of human activities those 
 of the family, of productive labour, of religion, music, art, 
 love, laughter. 
 
 A Europe of small 'absolute' nationalisms threatens to make 
 these things impossible. We have no standard, unhappily, by 
 which we can appraise the moral loss and gain in the exchange 
 of the European life of July, 1914, for that which Europe now 
 faces and is likely to face in the coming years. But if we can- 
 not measure or weigh the moral value of absolute nationalism, 
 the present situation does enable us to judge in some measure 
 the degree of security achieved for the principle of nationality, 
 and to what extent it may be menaced by the economic needs 
 of the millions of Europe. And one is impelled to ask whether 
 nationality is not threatened by a danger far greater than any 
 it had to meet in the old Europe, in the anarchy and chaos that 
 nationalism itself is at present producing. 
 
 The greater States, like Germany, may conceivably manage 
 somehow to find a modus vivendi. A self-sufficing State may 
 perhaps be developed (a fact which will enable Germany at one 
 and the same time to escape the payment of reparations and to 
 defy future blockades). But that will mean embittered nation- 
 alism. The sense of exclusion and resentment will remain. 
 
 The need of Germany for outside raw materials and food 
 may, as the result of this effort to become self-sufficing, prove 
 less than the above considerations might suggest. But unhap- 
 pily, assumed need can be as patent a motive in international 
 politics as real need. Our recent acquiescence in the independ- 
 ence of Egypt would imply that our need for persistent occupa- 
 tion was not as great as we supposed. Yet the desire to re- 
 main in Egypt helped to shape our foreign policy during a 
 whole generation, and played no small part in the bargaining 
 with France over Morocco which widened the gulf between our- 
 selves and Germany. 
 
 The preservation of the principle of nationality depends upon
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 99 
 
 making it subject at least to some form of internationalism. If 
 'self-determination' means the right to condemn other peoples 
 to death by starvation, then that principle cannot survive. The 
 Balkanisation of Europe, turning it into a cauldron of rival 
 'absolute' nationalisms, does not mean safety for the principle 
 of nationality, it means its ultimate destruction either by 
 anarchy or by the autocratic domination of the great Powers. 
 The problem is to reconcile national right and international 
 obligation. That will mean a discipline of the national impulse, 
 and of the instincts of domination which so readily attach 
 themselves to it. The recognition of economic needs will cer- 
 tainly help towards such discipline. However 'materialistic* 
 it may be to recognise the right of others to life, that recogni- 
 tion makes a sounder foundation for human society than do 
 the instinctive impulses of mystic nationalism. 
 
 Until we have managed somehow to create an economic code or 
 comity which makes the sovereignty of each nationality subject 
 to the general need of the whole body of organised society, this 
 struggle, in which nationality is for ever threatened, will go on. 
 
 The alternatives were very clearly stated on the other side 
 of the Atlantic : 
 
 'The underlying assumption heretofore has been that a na- 
 tion's security and prosperity rest chiefly upon its own strength 
 and resources. Such an assumption has been used to justify 
 statesmen in attempting, on the ground of the supreme need 
 for national security, to increase their own nation's power and 
 resources by insistence upon strategic frontiers, territory with 
 raw material, outlets to the sea, even though that course does 
 violence to the security and prosperity of others. Under any 
 system in which adequate defence rests upon individual pre- 
 ponderance of power, the security of one must involve the in- 
 security of another, and must inevitably give rise to covert or 
 overt competitions for power and territory, dangerous to peace 
 and destructive to justice. 
 
 'Under such a system of competitive as opposed to co
 
 100 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 operative nationalism, the smaller nationalities can never be 
 really secure. International commitments of some kind there 
 must be. The price of secure nationality is some degree of 
 internationalism. 
 
 'The problem is to modify the conditions that lead to war. 
 It will be quite inadequate to establish courts of arbitration or 
 of law if they have to arbitrate or judge on the basis of the old 
 laws and practices. These have proved insufficient. 
 
 'It is obvious that any plan ensuring national security and 
 equality of opportunity will involve a limitation of national 
 sovereignty. States possessing ports that are the natural out- 
 let of a hinterland occupied by another people, will perhaps 
 regard it as an intolerable invasion of their independence if 
 their sovereignty over those ports is not absolute but limited 
 by the obligation to permit of their use by a foreign and pos- 
 sibly rival people on equal terms. States possessing territories 
 in Africa or Asia inhabited by populations in a backward state 
 of development, have generally heretofore looked for privileged 
 and preferential treatment of their own industry and commerce 
 in those territories. Great interests will be challenged, some 
 sacrifice of national pride demanded, and the hostility of poli- 
 tical factions in some countries will be aroused. 
 
 'Yet if, after the War, States are to be shut out from the 
 sea ; if rapidly expanding populations find themselves excluded 
 from raw materials indispensable to their prosperity; if the 
 privileges and preferences enjoyed by States with overseas 
 territories place the less powerful States at a disadvantage, we 
 shall have re-established potent motives for that competition for 
 political power which, in the past, has been so large an element 
 in the causation of war and the subjugation of weaker peoples. 
 The ideal of the security of all nations and "equality of oppor- 
 tunity" will have failed of realisation.' * 
 
 1 From a manifesto signed by a large number of American intellectuals, 
 business men, and Labour Leaders ('League of Free Nations Associa- 
 tion* on the eve of President Wilson's departure for Paris. .
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 101 
 
 The Balance of Power and Defence of Law and Nationality. 
 
 'Why were you so whole-soully for this war?' asked the in- 
 terviewer of Mr Lloyd George. 
 'Belgium/ was the reply. 
 The Prime Minister of the morrow continued : 
 
 'The Saturday after war had actually been declared on the 
 Continent (Saturday, 1st August), a poll of the electors of 
 Great Britain would have shown ninety-five per cent, against 
 embroiling this country in hostilities. Powerful city financiers 
 whom it was my duty to interview this Saturday on the finan- 
 cial situation, ended the conference with an earnest hope that 
 Britain would keep out of it. A poll on the following Tuesday 
 would have resulted in a vote of ninety-nine per cent, in favour 
 of war. 
 
 'What had happened in the meantime? The revolution in 
 public sentiment was attributable entirely to an attack made by 
 Germany on a small and unprotected country, which had done 
 her no wrong, and what Britain was not prepared to do for 
 interests political and commercial, she readily risked to help 
 the weak and helpless. Our honour as a nation is involved in 
 this war, because we are bound in an honourable obligation to 
 defend the independence, the liberty, the integrity of a small 
 neighbour that has lived peaceably; but she could not have 
 compelled us, being weak. The man who declined to discharge 
 his debt because his creditor is too poor to enforce it, is a 
 blackguard.' 
 
 A little later, in the same interview, Mr Lloyd George, after 
 allusion to German misrepresentations, said: 
 
 'But this I know is true after the guarantee given that the 
 German fleet would not attack the coast of France or annex any 
 French territory, / would not have been party to a declaration 
 of war, had Belgium not been invaded, and I think I can say
 
 102 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 the same thing for most, if not all, of my colleagues. If Ger- 
 many had been wise, she would not have set foot on Belgian 
 soil. The Liberal Government then would not have intervened. 
 Germany made a grave mistake/ * 
 
 This interview compels several very important conclusions. 
 One, perhaps the most important and the most hopeful is 
 profoundly creditable to English popular instinct and not so 
 creditable to Mr Lloyd George. 
 
 If Mr Lloyd George is speaking the truth (it is difficult to 
 find just the phrase which shall express one's meaning and be 
 Parliamentary), if he believes it would have been entirely safe 
 for Great Britain to have kept out of the War provided only 
 that the invasion of Belgium could have been prevented, then 
 indeed is the account against the Cabinet, of which he was 
 then a member and (after modifications in it) was shortly to 
 become the head, a heavy one. I shall not pursue here the 
 inquiry whether in point of simple political fact, Belgium was 
 the sole cause of our entrance into the War, because I don't 
 suppose anybody believes it. But and here Mr Lloyd George 
 almost certainly does speak the truth the English people gave 
 their whole-souled support to the war because they believed 
 it to be for a cause of which Belgium was the shining example 
 and symbol : the right of the small nation to the same considera- 
 tion as the great. That objective may not have been the main 
 inspiration of the Governments : it was the main moral inspira- 
 tion of the British people, the sentiment which the Government 
 exploited, and to which it mainly appealed. 
 
 'The purpose of the Allies in this War,' said Mr Asquith, 
 'is to pave the way for an international system which will secure 
 the principle of equal rights for all civilised States ... to 
 render secure the principle that international problems must be 
 handled by free people and that their settlement shall no longer 
 be hampered and swayed by the overmastering dictation of 
 
 1 Interview published by Pearson's Magazine, March, 1915.
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 103 
 
 a Government controlled by a military caste.' We should not 
 sheathe the sword 'until the rights of the smaller nationalities 
 of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation. Pro- 
 fessor Headlam (an ardent upholder of the Balance of Power, 
 by the way), in a book that is characteristic of the early war 
 literature, says the cardinal principles for which the War was 
 fought were two: first, that Europe is, and should remain, 
 divided between independent national States, and, second, that 
 subject to the condition that it did not threaten or interfere 
 with the security of other States, each country should have 
 full and complete control over its own affairs. 
 
 How far has our victory achieved that object? Is the 
 policy which our power supported before the War and still 
 supports compatible with it? Does it help to strengthen the 
 national security of Belgium, and other weak States like 
 Yugo-Slavia, Poland, Albania, Finland, the Russian Border 
 States, China? 
 
 It is here suggested, first, that our commitments under the 
 Balance of Power policy which we had espoused x deprived 
 our national force of any preventive effectiveness whatever 
 in so far as the invasion of Belgium was concerned, and 
 secondly, that our post-war policy, which is also in fact a 
 Balance of Power policy is betraying in like fashion the cause 
 of the small State. 
 
 It is further suggested that the very nature of the operation 
 
 1 Times, March 8, 1915. 'Our honour and interest must have com- 
 pelled us to join France and Russia even if Germany had scrupulously 
 respected the rights of her small neighbours and had sought to hack 
 her way through the Eastern fortresses. The German Chancellor has 
 insisted more than once upon this truth. He has fancied apparently 
 that he was making an argumentative point against us by establishing it. 
 That, like so much more, only shows his complete misunderstanding of 
 our attitude and our character. . . . We reverted to our historical policy 
 of the Balance of Power.' 
 
 The Times maintains the same position five years later (July 31st, 
 1920) : 'It needed more than two years of actual warfare to render the 
 British people wholly conscious that they were fighting not a quixotic 
 fight for Belgium and France, but a desperate battle for their own 
 existence.'
 
 104 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 of the Balance of Power policy sets up in practice a conflict 
 of obligation: if our power is pledged to the support of one 
 particular group, like the Franco-Russian group of 1914, it 
 cannot also be pledged to the support, honestly and impartially, 
 of a general principle of European law. 
 
 We were drawn into the War, Mr Lloyd George tells us, 
 to vindicate the integrity of Belgium. Very good. We know 
 what happened in the negotiations. Germany wanted very 
 much to know what would induce us to keep out of the War. 
 Would we keep out of the War if Germany refrained from 
 crossing the Belgian frontier? Such an assurance, giving 
 Germany the strongest material reasons for not invading Bel- 
 gium, converting a military reason (the only reason, we are 
 told, that Germany would listen to) for that offence into an 
 immensely powerful military reason against it, could not be 
 given. In order to be able to maintain the Balance of Power 
 against Germany we must 'keep our hands free/ 
 
 It is not a question here of Germany's trustworthiness, but 
 of using her sense of self-interest to secure our object of the 
 protection of Belgium. The party in the German councils 
 opposed to the invasion would say: 'If you invade Belgium 
 you will have to meet the hostility of Great Britain. If you 
 don't, you will escape that hostility.' To which the general 
 staff was able to reply: 'Britain's Balance of Power policy 
 means that you will have to meet the enmity of Britain in any 
 case. In terms of expediency, it does not matter whether you 
 go through Belgium or not.' 
 
 The fact that the principle of the 'Balance' compelled us to 
 support France, whether Germany respected the Treaty of 
 1839 or not, deprived our power of any value as a restraint 
 upon German military designs against Belgium. There was, 
 in fact, a conflict of obligations: the obligations to the 
 Balance of Power rendered that to the support of the Treaty 
 of no avail in terms of protection. If the object of force is 
 to compel observance of law on the part of those who will not
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 105 
 
 observe it otherwise, that object is defeated by the entangle- 
 ments of the Balance of Power. 
 
 Sir Edward Grey's account of that stage of the negotiations 
 at which the question of Belgium was raised, is quite clear 
 and simple. The German Ambassador asked him 'whether, 
 if Germany gave a promise not to violate Belgian neutrality, 
 we would engage to remain neutral.' 'I replied,' writes Sir 
 Edward, 'that I could not say that; our hands were still free, 
 and we were considering what our attitude should be. I did 
 not think that we could give a promise of neutrality on that 
 condition alone. The Ambassador pressed me as to whether 
 I could not formulate conditions on which we would remain 
 neutral. He even suggested that the integrity of France and 
 her Colonies might be guaranteed. I said that I felt obliged 
 to refuse definitely any promise to remain neutral on similar 
 terms, and I could only say that we must keep our hands 
 free.' 
 
 'If language means anything,' comments Lord Loreburn, 1 
 'this means that whereas Mr Gladstone bound this country 
 to war in order to safeguard Belgian neutrality, Sir Edward 
 would not even bind this country to neutrality to save Bel- 
 gium. He may have been right, but it was not for the sake 
 of Belgian interests that he refused.' 
 
 Compare our experience, and the attitude of Sir Edward 
 Grey in 1914, when we were concerned to maintain the 
 Balance of Power, with our experience and Mr Gladstone's 
 behaviour when precisely the same problem of protecting 
 Belgium was raised in 1870. In these circumstances Mr 
 Gladstone proposed both to France and to Prussia a treaty 
 by which Great Britain undertook that, if either of the bellig- 
 erents should in the course of that war violate the neutrality 
 of Belgium, Great Britain would co-operate with the other 
 belligerent in defence of the same, 'employing for that purpose 
 her naval and military forces to ensure its observance.' In 
 
 1 How the War Came, p. 238.
 
 106 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 this way both France and Germany knew and the whole world 
 knew, that invasion of Belgium meant war with Great Britain. 
 Whichever belligerent violated the neutrality must reckon with 
 the consequences. Both France and Prussia signed that 
 Treaty. Belgium was saved. 
 
 Lord Loreborn (How the War Came) says of the 
 incident : 
 
 'This policy, which proved a complete success in 1870, indi- 
 cated the way in which British power could effectively protect 
 Belgium against an unscrupulous neighbour. But then it is a 
 policy which cannot be adopted unless this country is itself 
 prepared to make war against either of the belligerents which 
 shall molest Belgium. For the inducement to each of such 
 belligerents is the knowledge that he will have Great Britain 
 as an enemy if he invades Belgium, and as an Ally if his 
 enemy attacks him through Belgian territory. And that can- 
 not be a security unless Great Britain keeps herself free to give 
 armed assistance to either should the other violate the Treaty. 
 The whole leverage would obviously disappear if we took sides 
 in the war on other grounds.' 1 
 
 This, then, is an illustration of the truth above insisted upon : 
 to employ our force for the maintenance of the Balance of 
 Power is to deprive it of the necessary impartiality for the 
 maintenance of Right. 
 
 Much more clear even than in the case of Belgium was the 
 conflict in certain other cases between the claims of the Bal- 
 
 1 Lord Loreburn adds : 
 
 'But Sir Edward Grey in 1914 did not and could not offer similar 
 Treaties to France and Germany because our relations with France 
 and the conduct of Germany were such, that for us to join Germany in 
 any event was unthinkable. And he did not proclaim our neutrality be- 
 cause our relations with France, as described in his own speech, were 
 such that he could not in honour refuse to join France in the war. 
 Therefore the example of 1870 could not be followed in 1914, and Bel- 
 gium was not saved but destroyed.'
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 107 
 
 ance of Power and our obligation to place 'the rights of the 
 smaller nationalities of Europe upon an unassailable founda- 
 tion' which Mr Asquith proclaimed as the object of the War. 
 The archetype of suppressed nationality was Poland; a 
 nation with an ancient culture, a passionate and romantic 
 attachment to its ancient traditions, which had simply been 
 wiped off the map. If ever there was a case of nation-murder 
 it was this. And one of the culprits perhaps the chief 
 culprit was Russia. To-day the Allies, notably France, stand 
 as the champions of Polish nationality. But as late as 1917, 
 as part of that kind of bargain which inevitably marks the 
 old type of diplomatic Alliance, France was agreeing to hand 
 over Poland, helpless, to her old jailer, the Czarist Govern- 
 ment. In March, 1916, the Russian Ambassador in Paris was 
 instructed that, at the then impending diplomatic conference 1 
 
 'It is above all necessary to demand that the Polish question 
 should be excluded from the subjects of international nego- 
 tiation, and that all attempts to place Poland's future under 
 the guarantee and control of the Powers should be prevented.' 
 
 On February 12th, 1917, the Russian Foreign Minister 
 informed the Russian Ambassador that M. Doumergue 
 (French Ambassador in Petrograd) had told the Czar of 
 France's wish to get Alsace-Lorraine at the end of the War, 
 and also 'a special position in the Saar Valley, and to bring 
 about the detachment from Germany of the territories west 
 of the Rhine and their reorganisation in such a way that in 
 future the Rhine may form a permanent strategic obstacle to 
 any German advance.' The Czar was pleased to express his 
 approval in principle of this proposal. Accordingly the 
 Russian Foreign Minister expressed his wish that an Agree- 
 ment by exchange of Notes should take place on this subject, 
 
 1 See the Documents published by the Russian Government in No- 
 vember, 1917.
 
 108 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 and desired that if Russia agreed to the unrestricted right of 
 France and Britain to fix Germany's western frontiers, so 
 Russia was to have an assurance of freedom of action in fixing 
 Germany's future frontier on the east. (This means the 
 Russian western frontier.) * 
 
 Or take the case of Serbia, the oppressed nationality whose 
 struggle for freedom against Austria was the immediate 
 cause of the War. It was because Russia would not permit 
 Austria to do with reference to Serbia, what Russia claimed 
 the right to do with reference to Poland, that the latter made 
 of the Austrian policy a casus belli. 
 
 Very well. We stood at least for the vindication of Serbian 
 nationality. But the 'Balance' demanded that we should win 
 Italy to our side of the scale. She had to be paid. So on 
 April 20th, 1915, without informing Serbia, Sir Edward Grey 
 signed a Treaty (the last article of which stipulated that it 
 should be kept secret) giving to Italy the whole of Dalmatia, 
 in its present extent, together with the islands north and west 
 of the Dalmatian coast and I stria as far as the Quarnero and 
 the Istrian Islands. That Treaty placed under Italian rule 
 whole populations of Southern Slavs, creating inevitably a 
 Southern Slav irredentism, and put the Yugo-Slavia, that we 
 professed to be creating, under the same kind of economic 
 disability which it had suffered from the Austrian Empire. 
 One is not astonished to find Signor Salandra describing the 
 principles which should guide his policy as 'a freedom from 
 all preoccupations and prejudices, and from every sentiment 
 except that of "Sacred egoism" (sacro egoismo) for Italy.' 
 
 To-day, it need hardly be said, there is bitter hatred between 
 our Serbian Ally and our Italian Ally, and most patriotic 
 
 1 It is not clear whether the undertaking to Russia was actually given. 
 Lord R. Cecil in the House of Commons on July 24th, 1917, said: 'It 
 will be for this country to back up the French in what they desire. I 
 will not go through all the others of our Allies there are a good 
 many of them but the principle (to stand by our Allies) will be 
 equally there in the case of all and particularly in the case of Serbia.
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 109 
 
 Vugo-Slavs regard war with Italy one day as inevitable. 1 
 Yet, assuredly, Sir Edward Grey is not to be blamed. If 
 allegiance to the Balance of Power was to come first, allegiance 
 to any principle, of nationality or of anything else, must come 
 second. 
 
 The moral implications of this political method received 
 another illustration in the case of the Rumanian Treaty. Its 
 nature is indicated in the Report of General Polivanov, amongst 
 the papers published at Petrograd and dated 7th-20th Novem- 
 ber, 1916. It explains how Rumania was at first a neutral, 
 but shifting between different inclinations a wish not to come 
 in too late for the partition of Austria-Hungary, and a wish to 
 earn as much as possible at the expense of the belligerents. 
 At first, according to this Report, she favoured our enemies 
 and had obtained very favourable commercial agreements with 
 Germany and Austria-Hungary. Then in 1916, on the Russ- 
 ian successes under Brusilov, she inclined to the Entente 
 Powers. The Russian Chief of the Staff thought Rumanian 
 neutrality preferable to her intervention, but later on General 
 Alexeiev adopted the view of the Allies, 'who looked upon 
 Rumania's entry as a decisive blow for Austria-Hungary and 
 as the nearing of the War's end.' So in August, 1916, an 
 agreement was signed with Rumania (by whom it was signed 
 is not stated, assigning to her Bukovina and all Transylvania. 
 'The events which followed/ says the report, 'showed how 
 greatly our Allies were mistaken and how they overvalued 
 Rumania's entry.' In fact, Rumania was in a brief time 
 utterly overthrown. And then Polivanov points out that the 
 collapse of Rumania's plans as a Great Power 'is not particu- 
 larly opposed to Russia's interests.' 
 
 One might follow up this record and see how far the method 
 of the Balance has protected the small and weak nation in the 
 
 1 Since these lines were written, there has been a change of govern- 
 ment and of policy in Italy. An agreement has been reached with 
 Yugo-Slavia, which appears to satisfy the moderate elements in both 
 countries.
 
 110 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 case of Albania, whose partition was arranged for in April, 
 1915, under the Treaty of London; in the case of Macedonia 
 and the Bulgarian Macedonians; in the case of Western 
 Thrace, of the Serbian Banat, of the Bulgar Dobrudja, of the 
 Southern Tyrol, of German Bohemia, of Shantung of still 
 further cases in which we were compelled to change or modify 
 or betray the cause for which we entered the War in order 
 to maintain the preponderance of power by which we could 
 achieve military success. 
 
 The moral paralysis exemplified in this story is already in- 
 fecting our nascent efforts at creating a society of nations 
 witness the relation of the League with Poland. No one in 
 1920 justified the Polish claims made against Russia. Our own 
 communications to Russia described them as 'imperialistic.' The 
 Prime Minister condemned them in unmeasured terms. Poland 
 was a member of the League. Her supplies of arms and 
 ammunition, military stores, credit, were obtained by the grace 
 of the chief members of the League. The only port by which 
 arms could enter Poland was a city under the special control 
 of the League. An appeal was made to the League to take 
 steps to prevent the. Polish adventure. Lord Robert Cecil 
 advocated the course with particular urgency. The Soviet 
 Government itself, while Poland was preparing, appealed to 
 the chief constitutional governments of the League for some 
 preventive action. Why was none taken? Because the Bal- 
 ance of Power demanded that we should 'stand by France,' 
 and Polish Imperialism was part of the policy quite overtly 
 and deliberately laid down by M. Clemenceau, who, with a 
 candour entirely admirable, expressed his preference for the 
 old system of alliances as against the newfangled Society of 
 Nations. We could not restrain Poland and at the same time 
 fulfil our Alliance obligations to France, who was supporting 
 the Polish policy. 1 
 
 'Lord Curzon (May 17th, 1920) wrote that he did not see how we 
 could invoke the League to restrain Poland. The Poles, he added,
 
 NATIONALITY, ECONOMICS, AND RIGHT 1 1 1 
 
 By reason of the grip of this system we supported (while 
 proclaiming the sacredness of the cause of oppressed nationali- 
 ties) or acquiesced in the policy of Czarist Russia against 
 Poland, and incidentally Finland ; we supported Poland against 
 republican Russia; we encouraged the creation of small border 
 States as means of fighting Soviet Russia, while we aided Kolt- 
 chak and Denikin, who would undoubtedly if successful have 
 suppressed the border States. We supported the Southern 
 Slavs against Austria when we desired to destroy the latter; 
 we supported Italy (in secret treaties) against the Southern 
 Slavs when we des-ired the help of the former. Violations and 
 repressions of nationality which, when committed by the enemy 
 States, we declared should excite the deathless resistance of 
 all free men and call down the punishment of Heaven, we 
 acquiesce in and are silent about when committed by our Allies. 
 
 This was the Fight for Right, the war to vindicate the moral 
 law in the relations of States. 
 
 The political necessities of the Balance of Power have pre- 
 vented the country from pledging its power, untrammelled, to 
 the maintenance of Right. The two objects are in theory and 
 practice incompatible. The Balance of Power is in fact an 
 assertion of the principle of Macht-Politik, of the principle that 
 Might makes Right. 
 
 must choose war or peace on their own responsibility. Mr Lloyd 
 George (June 19th, 1920) declared that 'the League of Nations could not 
 intervene in Poland.'
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE AND INSECURITY 
 
 THE War revealed this : However great the military power of 
 a State, as in the case of France ; however great its territorial 
 extent, as in the case of the British Empire; or its economic 
 resources and geographical isolation as in the case of the 
 United States, the conditions of the present international order 
 compel that State to resort to Alliance as an indispensable part 
 of its military defence. And the peace reveals this: that no 
 Alliance can long resist the disruptive forces of nationalist 
 psychology. So rapid indeed has been the disintegration of the 
 Alliance that fought this War, that, from this one cause, the 
 power indispensable for carrying out the Treaty imposed upon 
 the enemy has on the morrow of victory already disappeared. 
 
 So much became patent in the year that followed the signing 
 of the Treaty. The fact bears of course fundamentally upon 
 the question of the use of political power for those economic 
 ends discussed in the preceding pages. If the economic policy 
 of the Treaty of Versailles is to be carried out, it will in any 
 case demand a preponderance of power so immense and secure 
 that the complete political solidarity of the Alliance which 
 fought the War must be assumed. It cannot be assumed. 
 That Alliance has in fact already gone to pieces; and with it 
 the unquestioned preponderance of power. 
 
 The fact bears not only upon the use of power for the pur- 
 pose of carrying an economic policy or some moral end, 
 like the defence of Nationality into effect. The disruptive 
 
 112
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 113 
 
 influence of the Nationalisms of which alliances are composed 
 raises the question of how far a military preponderance resting 
 on a National foundation can even give us political security. 
 
 If the moral factors of nationality are, as we have seen, an 
 indispensable part of the study of international economics, 
 so must those same factors be considered as an indispensable 
 part of the problem of the power to be exercised by an al- 
 liance. 
 
 During the War there was an extraordinary neglect of this 
 simple truth. It seemed to occur to no one that the intensifica- 
 tion of the psychology of nationalism not only among the 
 lesser States but in France and America and England ran the 
 risk of rendering the Alliance powerless after its victory. Yet 
 that is what has happened. 
 
 The power of an Alliance (again we are dealing with things 
 that are obvious but neglected) does not depend upon the sum 
 of its material forces navies, armies, artillery. It depends 
 upon being able to assemble those things to a common purpose ; 
 in other words, upon policy fit to direct the instrument. If the 
 policy, or certain moral elements within it, are such that one 
 member of the Alliance is likely to turn his arms against the 
 others, the extent of Ms armament does not add to the strength 
 of the Alliance. It was with ammunition furnished by Britain 
 and France that Russia in 1919 and 1920 destroyed British 
 and French troops. The present building of an enormous navy 
 by America is not accepted in Britain as necessarily adding to 
 the security of the British Empire. 
 
 It is worth while to note how utterly fallacious are certain 
 almost universal assumptions concerning the relation of war psy- 
 chology to the problem of alliance solidarity. An English visi- 
 tor to the United States (or an American visitor to England) 
 during the years 1917-1918 was apt to be deluged by a flood 
 of rhetoric to this effect : The blood shed on the same battle- 
 fields, the suffering shared in common in the same common 
 cause, would unite and cement as nothing had ever yet united
 
 114 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 the two great branches of the English-speaking race, destined 
 by Providence. . . . 
 
 But the same visitor moving in the same circle less than two 
 years later found that this eternal cement of friendship had 
 already lost its potency. Never, perhaps, for generations were 
 Anglo-American relations so bad as they had become within 
 a score or so of months of the time that Englishmen and Ameri- 
 cans were dying side by side on the battle-field. At the begin- 
 ning of 1921, in the United States, it was easier, on a public 
 platform, to defend Germany than to present a defence of 
 English policy in Ireland or in India. And at that period one 
 might hear commonly enough in England, in trams and rail- 
 way carriages, a repetition of the catch phrase, 'America next.' 
 If certain popular assumptions as to war psychology were 
 right, these things would be impossible. 
 
 Yet, as a matter of fact, the psychological phenomenon is 
 true to type. It was not an accident that the internationalist 
 America of 1915, of 'Peace without Victory,' should by 1918 
 have become more fiercely insistent upon absolute victory and 
 unconditional surrender than any other of the belligerents, 
 whose emotions had found some outlet during three years of 
 war before America had begun. The complete reversal of the 
 'Peace without Victory' attitude was demanded cultivated, de- 
 liberately produced as a necessary part of war morale. But 
 these emotions of coercion and domination cannot be intensively 
 cultivated and then turned off as by a tap. They made America 
 fiercely nationalist, with necessarily a temperamental distaste 
 for the internationalism of Mr Wilson. And when a mere 
 year of war left the emotional hungers unsatisfied, they turned 
 unconsciously to other satisfactions. Twenty million Ameri- 
 cans of Irish descent or association, among others, utilised the 
 opportunity. 
 
 One feature perhaps the very largest feature of all of 
 war morale, had been the exploitation of the German atrocities. 
 The burning of Louvain, and other reprisals upon the Belgian
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 115 
 
 civilian population, meant necessarily a special wickedness on 
 the part of a definite entity, known as 'Germany,' that had to be 
 crushed, punished, beaten, wiped out. There were no distinc- 
 tions. The plea that all were not equally guilty excited the fierce 
 anger reserved for all such 'pacifist' and pro-German pleas. A 
 German woman had laughed at a wounded American: all Ger- 
 man women were monsters. 'No good German but a dead Ger- 
 man.' It was in the German blood and grey matter. The elab- 
 orate stories illustrated of Germans sticking bayonets into 
 Belgian children produced a thesis which was beyond and above 
 reason or explanation: for that atrocity, 'Germany' seventy 
 million people, ignorant peasants, driven workmen, the babies, 
 the invalids, the old women gathering sticks in the forest, the 
 children trooping to school all were guilty. To state the 
 thing in black and white sounds like a monstrous travesty. 
 But it is not a travesty. It is the thesis we, too, maintained ; 
 but in America it had, in the American way, an over simplifi- 
 cation and an extra emphasis. 
 
 And then after the War an historical enemy of America's 
 does precisely the same thing. In the story of Amritsar and 
 the Irish reprisals it is the Indian and Sinn Fein version only 
 which is told ; just as during the War we got nothing but the 
 anti-German version of the burning of Louvain, or reprisals 
 upon civilians. Why should we expect that the result should 
 be greatly different upon American opinion? Four hundred 
 unarmed and hopeless people, women and children as well as 
 men, are mown down by machine-guns. Or, in the Irish re- 
 prisals, a -farmer is shot in the presence of his wife and children. 
 The Government defends the soldiers. 'Britain' has done this 
 thing: forty-five millions of people, of infinitely varying de- 
 grees of responsibility, many opposing it, many ignorant of it, 
 almost all entirely helpless. To represent them as inhuman 
 monsters because of these atrocities is an infinitely mischievous 
 falsehood. But it is made possible by a theory, which in the 
 case of Germany we maintained for years as essentially true.
 
 116 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 And now it is doing as between Britain and America what a 
 similar falsehood did as between Germany and England, and 
 will go on doing so long as Nationalism includes conceptions of 
 collective responsibility which fly in the face of common sense 
 and truth. If the resultant hostilities can operate as between 
 two national groups like the British and the American, what 
 groups can be free of them? 
 
 It is a little difficult now, two years after the end of the 
 War, with the world in its present turmoil, to realise that we 
 really did expect the defeat of Germany to inaugurate an era 
 of peace and security, of reduction of armaments, the virtual 
 end of war; and believed that it was German militarism, 'that 
 trampling, drilling foolery in the heart of Europe, that has 
 arrested civilisation and darkened the hopes of mankind for 
 forty years,' * as Mr Wells wrote in The War that will End 
 War, which accounted for nearly all the other militarisms, and 
 that after its destruction we could anticipate 'the end of the 
 armament phase of European history.' For, explained Mr 
 Wells, 'France, Italy, England, and all the smaller Powers of 
 Europe are now pacific countries ; Russia, after this huge War, 
 will be too exhausted for further adventure.' 2 
 
 'When will peace come?' asked Professor Headlam, and 
 answered that 
 
 'It will come when Germany has learnt the lesson of the War, 
 when it has learnt, as every other nation has had to learn, that 
 the voice of Europe cannot be defied with impunity. . . . 
 Men talk about the terms of peace. They matter little. With 
 a Germany victorious no terms could secure the future of Eu- 
 rope, with a Germany defeated, no artificial securities will be 
 wanted, for there will be a stronger security in the conscious- 
 ness of defeat.' 8 
 
 1 The War that will End War, p. 14. 
 
 'Ibid. p. 19. * The Issue, p. 37-39.
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 117 
 
 There were to be no limits to the political or economic re- 
 arrangements which victory would enable us to effect. Very au- 
 thoritative military critics like Mr Hilaire Belloc became quite 
 angry and contemptuous at the suggestion that the defeat of the 
 enemy would not enable us to rearrange Europe at our will. 
 The doctrine that unlimited power was inherent in victory was 
 thus stated by Mr Belloc : 
 
 'It has been well said that the most straightforward and 
 obvious conclusions on the largest lines of military policy are 
 those of which it is most difficult to convince a general audience ; 
 and we find in this matter a singular miscalculation running 
 through the attitude of many Western publicists. They speak 
 as though, whatever might happen in the West, the Alliance, 
 which is fighting for European civilisation, the Western Allies 
 and the United States, could not now affect the destinies of 
 Eastern Europe. . . . 
 
 Such an attitude is, upon the simplest principles of military 
 science, a grotesque error. ... If we are victorious . . . the 
 destruction of the enemy's military power gives us as full an 
 opportunity for deciding the fate of Eastern Europe as it 
 does for deciding the fate of Western Europe. Victory gained 
 by the Allies will decide the fate of all Europe, and, for that 
 matter, of the whole world. It will open the Baltic and the 
 Black Sea. It will leave us masters with the power to dictate 
 in what fashion the new boundaries shall be arranged, how the 
 entries to the Eastern markets shall be kept open, garrisoned 
 and guaranteed. . . . 
 
 Wherever they are defeated, whether upon the line they 
 now hold or upon other lines, their defeat and our victory 
 will leave us with complete power. If that task be beyond our 
 strength, then civilisation has suffered defeat, and there is the 
 end of it/ 
 
 German power was to be destroyed as the condition of saving 
 civilisation. Mr Belloc wrote:
 
 118 
 
 'If by some negotiation (involving of course the evacuation 
 of the occupied districts in the West) the enemy remains un- 
 defeated, civilised Europe has lost the war and Prussia has 
 won it.' 1 
 
 Such was the simple and popular thesis. Germany, criminal 
 and barbarian, challenged Europe, civilised and law-abiding. 
 Civilisation can only assert itself by the punishment of Germany 
 and save itself by the destruction of German power. Once the 
 German military power is destroyed, Europe can do with 
 Germany what it will. 
 
 I suggest that the experience of the last two years, and our 
 own present policy, constitute an admission or demonstration, 
 first, that the moral assumption of this thesis that the menace 
 of German power was due to some special wickedness on the 
 part of the German nation not shared by other peoples in any 
 degree is false; and, secondly, that the destruction of Ger- 
 many's military force gives to Europe no such power to control 
 Germany. 
 
 Our power over Germany becomes every day less : 
 
 First, by the break-up of the Alliance. The 'sacred egoisms' 
 which produced the War are now disrupting the Allies. The 
 most potentially powerful European member of the Alliance 
 or Association Russia has become an enemy; the most 
 powerful member of all, America, has withdrawn from 
 co-operation; Italy is in conflict with one Ally, Japan with 
 another. 
 
 Secondly, by the more extended Balkanisation of Europe. 
 The States utilised by (for instance) France as the instruments 
 of Allied policy (Poland, Hungary, Ukrainia, Rumania, 
 Czecho-Slovakia) are liable to quarrel among themselves. 
 The groups rendered hostile to Allied policy Germany, 
 Russia, China are much larger, and might well once more 
 become cohesive units. The Nationalism which is a factor of 
 
 *Land and Water, February 21st, 1918.
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 119 
 
 Allied disintegration may nevertheless work for the consoli- 
 dation of the groups opposed to us. 
 
 Thirdly, by the economic disorganisation of Europe (result- 
 ing mainly from the desire to weaken the enemy), which de- 
 prives the Alliance of economic resources sufficient for a 
 military task like that of the conquest of Russia or the occu- 
 pation of Germany. 
 
 Fourthly, by the social unrest within each country (itself 
 due in part to the economic disorganisation, in part to the 
 introduction of the psychology of jingoism into the domain 
 of industrial strife) : Bolshevism. A long war of intervention 
 in Russia by the Alliance would have broken down under the 
 strain of internal unrest in Allied countries. 
 
 The Alliance thus succumbs to the clash of Nationalisms 
 and the clash of classes. 
 
 These moral factors render the purpose which will be given 
 to accumulated military force 'the direction in which the guns 
 will shoot' so uncertain that the amount of material power 
 available is no indication of the degree of security attained. 
 
 If it were true, as we argued so universally before and 
 during the War, that German power was the final cause of 
 the armament rivalry in Europe, then the disappearance of 
 that power should mark, as so many prophesied it would 
 mark, the end of the 'armament era.' 1 Has it done so ? Or 
 
 1 Even as late as January 13th, 1920, Mr H. W. Wilson of the Daily 
 Mail writes that if the disarmament of Germany is carried out 'the real 
 cause of swollen armaments in Europe will vanish.' 
 
 On May 18th, 1920, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson (Morning Post, 
 May 19th) declares himself thus : 
 
 'We were told that after this last war we were to have peace. We 
 have not; there are something between twenty and thirty bloody wars 
 going on at the present moment. We were told that the great war 
 was to end war. It did not; it could not. We have a very difficult 
 time ahead, whether on the sea, in the air, or on the land.' He wanted 
 them to take away the warning from a fellow soldier that their country 
 and their Empire both wanted them to-day as much as ever they had, 
 and if they were as proud of belonging to the British Empire as he was 
 they would do their best, in whatever capacity they served, to qualify 
 themselves for the times that were coming.
 
 120 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 does any one to-day seriously argue that the increase of arma- 
 ment expenditure over the pre-war period is in some mystic 
 way due to Prussian militarism? 
 
 Let us turn to a Times leader in the summer of 1920 : 
 
 'To-day the condition of Europe and of a large portion of 
 the world is scarcely less critical than it was six years ago. 
 Within a few days, or at most a few weeks, we may know 
 whether the Peace Treaty signed at Versailles will possess 
 effective validity. The independent existence of Poland, which 
 is a keystone of the reorganisation of Europe contemplated by 
 the Treaty, is in grave peril; and with it, though perhaps not 
 in the manner currently imagined in Germany, is jeopardised 
 the present situation of Germany herself. 
 
 . . There is undoubtedly a widespread plot against West- 
 ern civilisation as we know it, and probably against British 
 liberal institutions as a principal mainstay of that civilisation. 
 Yet if our institutions, and Western civilisation with them, 
 are to withstand the present onslaught, they must be defended. 
 .... We never doubted the staunchness and vigour of Eng- 
 land six years ago, and we doubt them as little to-day.' * 
 
 And so we must have even larger armaments than ever. 
 Field-Marshal Earl Haig and Field-Marshal Sir Henry 
 Wilson in England, Marshal Foch in France, General Leonard 
 Wood in America, all urge that it will be indispensable to 
 maintain our armaments at more than the pre-war scale. The 
 ink of the Armistice was barely dry before the Daily Mail 
 published a long interview with Marshal Foch 2 in the course 
 of which the Generalissimo enlarged on the 'inevitability' of 
 war in the future and the need of being 'prepared for it.' 
 Lord Haig, in his Rectorial Address at St Andrews (May 
 14th, 1919) followed with the plea that as 'the seeds of future 
 conflict are to be found in every quarter, only waiting the right 
 condition, moral, economic, political, to burst once more into 
 
 'July 31st, 1920. 'April 19th, 1919.
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 121 
 
 activity/ every man in the country must immediately be trained 
 for war. The Mail, supporting his plea, said:- 
 
 'We all desire peace, but we cannot, even in the hour of com- 
 plete victory, disregard the injunction uttered by our first 
 soldier, that "only by adequate preparation for war can peace 
 in every way be guaranteed." 
 
 ' "A strong citizen army on strong territorial lines," is the 
 advice Sir Douglas Haig urges on the country. A system 
 providing twelve months' military training for every man in 
 the country should be seriously thought of ... Morally and 
 physically the War has shown us that the effect of discipline 
 upon the youths of the country is an asset beyond calculation.' 
 
 So that the victory which was to end the 'trampling and drill- 
 ing foolery* is made a plea for the institution of permanent con- 
 scription in England, where, before the victory, it did not exist. 
 
 The admission involved in this recommendation, the admis- 
 sion that destruction of German power has failed to give us 
 security, is as complete as it well could be. 
 
 If this was merely the exuberant zeal of professional soldiers, 
 we might perhaps disregard these declarations. But the con- 
 viction of the soldiers is reflected in the policy of the Govern- 
 ment. At a time when the financial difficulties of all the Allied 
 countries are admittedly enormous, when the bankruptcy of 
 some is a contingency freely discussed, and when the need of 
 economy is the refrain everywhere, there is not an Allied State 
 which is not to-day spending more upon military and naval 
 preparations than it was spending before the destruction of the 
 German power began. America is preparing to build a bigger 
 fleet than she has ever had in her history 1 a larger fleet than 
 
 a A Reuter Despatch dated August 31st, 1920, says: 
 'Speaking to-day at Charleston (West Virginia) Mr Daniels, U. S. 
 Naval Secretary, said : "We are building enormous docks and are con- 
 structing 18 dreadnoughts and battle cruisers, with a dozen other power- 
 ful ships which in effective fighting power will give our navy world 
 primacy." '
 
 122 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 the German armada, which was for most Englishmen perhaps 
 the decisive demonstration of Germany's hostile intent. Britain 
 on her side has at present a larger naval budget than that of 
 the year which preceded the War ; while for the new war instru- 
 ment of aviation she has a building programme more costly 
 than the shipbuilding programmes of pre-war time. France 
 is to-day spending more on her army than before the War; 
 spending, indeed, upon it now a sum larger than that which 
 she spent upon the whole of her Government when German 
 militarism was undestroyed. 
 
 Despite all this power possessed by the members of the 
 Alliance, the predominant note in current political criticism is 
 that Germany is evading the execution of the Treaty of Ver- 
 sailles, that in the payment of the indemnity, the punishment 
 of military criminals, and disarmament, the Treaty is a dead 
 letter, and the Allies are powerless. As the Times reminds us, 
 the very keystone of the Treaty, in the independence of Poland, 
 trembles. 
 
 It is not difficult to recall the fashion in which we thought 
 and wrote of the German menace before and during the War. 
 The following from The New Europe (which had taken as 
 its device 'La Victoire Integrate') will be recognised as 
 typical : 
 
 'It is of vital importance to us to understand, not only Ger- 
 many's aims, but the process by which she hopes to carry 
 them through. If Germany wins, she will not rest content 
 with this victory. Her next object will be to prepare for 
 further victories both in Asia and in Central and Western 
 Europe. 
 
 'Those who still cherish the belief that Prussia is pacifist 
 show a profound misunderstanding of her psychology. . . . 
 On this point the Junkers have been frank: those who have 
 not been frank are the wiseacres who try to persuade us that 
 we can moderate their attitude by making peace with them.
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 123 
 
 If they would only pay a little more attention to the Junkers' 
 avowed objects, and a little less attention to their own theories 
 about those objects, they would be more useful guides to 
 public opinion in this country, which finds itself hopelessly 
 at sea on the subject of Prussianism.. 
 
 'What then are Germany's objects? What is likely to be 
 her view of the general situation in Europe at the present 
 moment? . . . Whatever modifications she may have intro- 
 duced into her immediate programme, she still clings to her 
 desire to overthrow our present civilisation in Europe, and to 
 introduce her own on the ruins of the old order. . . . 
 
 'Buoyed up by recent successes . . . her offers of peace will 
 become more insistent and more difficult to refuse. Influ- 
 ences will clamour for the resumption of peace on economic 
 and financial grounds. . . . We venture to say that it will be 
 very difficult for any Government to resist this pressure, and, 
 unless the danger of coming to terms with Germany is very 
 clearly and strongly put before the public, we may find our- 
 selves caught in the snares that Germany has for a long time 
 past been laying for us. 
 
 . . . 'We shall be told that once peace is concluded the 
 Junkers will become moderate, and all those who wish to be- 
 lieve this will readily accept it without further question. 
 
 'But, while we in our innocence may be priding ourselves 
 on the conclusion of peace to Germany it will not be a peace, 
 but a "respite." . . . This "respite" will be exceedingly 
 useful to Germany not only for propaganda purposes, but in 
 order to replenish her exhausted resources necessary for 
 future aggression. Meanwhile German activities in Asia and 
 Ireland are likely to continue unabated until the maximum 
 inconvenience to England has been produced/ 
 
 If the reader will carry his mind back a couple of years, he 
 will recall having read numberless articles similar to the above, 
 concerning the duty of annihilating the power of Germany.
 
 124 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Well, will the reader note that the above does not refer to 
 Germany at all, but to Russia? I have perpetrated a little 
 forgery for his enlightenment. In order to bring home the 
 rapidity with which a change of roles can be accomplished, 
 an article warning us against any peace with Russia, appearing 
 in the New Europe of January 8th, 1920, has been reproduced 
 word for word, except that 'Russia' or 'Lenin' has been changed 
 to 'Germany' or 'the Junkers,' as the case may be. 
 
 Now let us see what this writer has to say as to the German 
 power to-day? 
 
 Well, he says that the security of civilisation now depends 
 upon the restoration, in part at least, of that German power, 
 for the destruction of which the world gave twenty million 
 lives. The danger to civilisation now is mainly 'the breach 
 between Germany and the West, and the rivalries of national- 
 ism.' Lenin, plotting our destruction, relies mainly on that : 
 
 'Above all we may be sure that his attention is concentrated 
 on England and Germany. So long as Germany remains aloof 
 and feelings of bitterness against the Allies are allowed to 
 grow still more acute, Lenin can rub his hands with glee ; what 
 he fears more than anything is the first sign that the sores 
 caused by five years of war are being healed, and that Eng- 
 land, France, and Germany are preparing to treat one another 
 as neighbours, who have each their several parts to play in 
 the restoration of normal economic conditions in Europe.' 
 
 As to the policy of preventing Germany's economic restora- 
 tion for fear that she should once more possess the raw material 
 of military power, this writer declares that it is precisely that 
 Carthaginian policy (embodied in the Treaty of Versailles) 
 which Lenin would most of all desire: 
 
 'As a trained economist we may be sure that he looks first 
 and foremost at the widespread economic chaos. We can
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 125 
 
 imagine his chuckle of satisfaction when he sees the European 
 exchanges getting steadily worse and national antagonisms 
 growing more acute. Disputes about territorial questions are 
 to him so much grist to the Bolshevik mill, as they all tend to 
 obscure the fundamental question of the economic reconstruc- 
 tion of Europe, without which no country in Europe can con- 
 sider itself safe from Bolshevism. 
 
 'He must realise to the full the lamentable condition of the 
 finances of the new States in Central and South-east Europe.' 
 
 In putting forward these views, The New Europe is by no 
 means alone. Already in January, 1920, Mr J. L. Garvin had 
 declared what indeed was obvious, that it was out of the 
 question to expect to build a new Europe on the simultaneous 
 hostility of Germany and Russia. 
 
 'Let us face the main fact. If there is to be no peace with 
 the Bolshevists there must be an altogether different under- 
 standing with Germany. . . . For any sure and solid barrier 
 against the external consequences of Bolshevism Germany is 
 essential.' 
 
 Barely six months later Mr Winston Churchill, Secretary 
 of State for War in the British Cabinet, chooses the Evening 
 News, probably the arch-Hun-Hater of all the English Press, 
 to open out the new policy of Alliance with Germany against 
 Russia. He says : 
 
 'It will be open to the Germans ... by a supreme effort 
 of sobriety, of firmness, of self-restraint, and of courage 
 undertaken, as most great exploits have to be, under conditions 
 of peculiar difficulty and discouragement to build a dyke of 
 peaceful, lawful, patient strength and virtue against the flood 
 of red barbarism flowing from the East, and thus safeguard 
 their own interests and the interests of their principle antag- 
 onists in the West.
 
 126 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 'If the Germans were able to render such a service, not by 
 vainglorious military adventure or with ulterior motives, they 
 would unquestionably have taken a giant step upon that path 
 of self -redemption which would lead them surely and swiftly 
 as the years pass by to their own great place in the councils 
 of Christendom, and would have rendered easier the sincere 
 co-operation between Britain, France, and Germany, on which 
 the very salvation of Europe depends.' 
 
 So the salvation of Europe depends upon our co-operation 
 with Germany, upon a German dyke of 'patient strength.' x 
 
 One wonders why we devoted quite so many lives and so 
 much agony to knocking Germany out; and why we furnished 
 quite so much treasure to the military equipment of the very 
 Muscovite 'barbarians' who now threaten to overflow it. 
 
 One wonders also, why, if 'the very salvation of Europe' in 
 July, 1920. depends upon sincere co-operation of the Entente 
 with Germany, those Allies were a year earlier exacting by force 
 her signature to a Treaty which not even its authors pretended 
 was compatible with German reconciliation. 
 
 If the Germans are to fulfil the role Mr Churchill assigns 
 to them, then obviously the Treaty of Versailles must be torn 
 up. If they are to be the 'dyke' protecting Western civilisation 
 against the Red military flood, it must, according to the 
 Churchillian philosophy, be a military dyke: the disarmament 
 clauses must be abolished, as must the other clauses particu- 
 larly the economic ones which would make of any people 
 suffering from them the bitter enemy of the people that imposed 
 them. Our Press is just now full of stories of secret Treaties 
 between Germany and Russia against France and England. 
 Whether the stories are true or not, it is certain that the effect 
 of the Treaty of Versailles and the Allied policy to Russia will 
 be to create a Russo-German understanding. And Mr 
 
 *We are once more back to the Carlylean 'deep, patient . . . vir- 
 tuous . . . Germany.'
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 127 
 
 Churchill (phase 1920) has undoubtedly indicated the alter- 
 natives. If you are going to light Russia to the death, then you 
 must make friends with Germany; if you are going to main- 
 tain the Treaty of Versailles, then you must make friends with 
 Russia. You must 'trust' either the Boche or the Bolshevist. 
 
 Popular feeling at this moment (or rather the type of feeling 
 envisaged by the Northcliffe Press) won't do either. Boche 
 and Bolshevist alike are 'vermin' to be utterly crushed, and any 
 policy implying co-operation with either is ruled out. 'Force 
 . . . force to the uttermost' against both is demanded by the 
 Times, the Daily Mail, and the various evening, weekly, or 
 monthly editions thereof. 
 
 Very well. Let us examine the proposal to 'hold down' by 
 force both Russia and Germany. Beyond Russia there is Asia, 
 particularly India. The New Europe writer reminds us : 
 
 ' ... If England cannot be subdued by a direct attack, she 
 is, at any rate, vulnerable in Asia, and it is here that Lenin is 
 preparing to deliver his real propaganda offensive. During 
 the last few months more and more attention has been paid to 
 Asiatic propaganda, and this will not be abandoned, no matter 
 what temporary arrangements the Soviet Government may at- 
 tempt to make with Western Europe. It is here, and here only, 
 that England can be wounded, so that she may be counted out 
 of the forth-coming revolutionary struggle in Europe that Lenin 
 is preparing to engage in at a later date. . . . 
 
 'We should find ourselves so much occupied in maintaining 
 order in Asia that we should have little time or energy left for 
 interfering in Europe.' 
 
 As a matter of fact, we know how great are the forces that 
 can be absorbed 1 when the territory for subjection stretches 
 
 1 Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in a memo- 
 randum dated December 1st, 1919, which appears in a Blue Book on 'the 
 Evacuation of North Russia, 1919,' says: 'There is one great lesson to 
 be learned from the history of the campaign. . . . It is that once a 
 military force is involved in operations on land it is almost impossible 
 to limit the magnitude of its commitments.'
 
 128 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 from Archangel to the Deccan through Syria, Arabia, 
 Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Afghanistan. Our experience 
 in Archangel, Murmansk, Vladivostock, and with Koltchak, 
 Denikin, and Wrangel shows that the military method must 
 be thorough or it will fail. It is no good hoping that a supply 
 of surplus ammunition to a counter-revolutionary general will 
 subdue a country like Russia. The only safe and thorough- 
 going plan is complete occupation or a very extended occu- 
 pation of both countries. M. Clemenceau definitely favoured 
 this course, as did nearly all the military-minded groups in 
 England and America, when the Russian policy was dis- 
 cussed at the end of 1918 and early in 1919. 
 
 Why was that policy not carried out? 
 
 The history of the thing is clear enough. That policy 
 would have called upon the resources in men and material 
 of the whole of the Alliance, not merely those of the Big 
 Four, but of Poland, Czecho- Slovakia, Yugo-Slavia, Italy, 
 Greece, and Japan as well. The 'March to Berlin and Mos- 
 cow' which so many, even in England and America, were 
 demanding at the time of the Armistice would not have been the 
 march of British Grenadiers ; nor the succeeding occupation one 
 like that of Egypt or India. Operations on that scale would 
 have brought in sooner or later (indeed, much smaller opera- 
 tions have already brought in) the forces of nations in bitter 
 conflict the one with the other. We know what the occupa- 
 tion of Ireland by British troops has meant. Imagine an 
 Ireland multiplied many times, occupied not only by British 
 but by 'Allied' troops British side by side with Senegalese 
 negroes, Italians with Yugo- Slavs, Poles with Czecho- Slovaks 
 and White Russians, Americans with Japanese. Remember, 
 moreover, how far the disintegration of the Alliance had al- 
 ready advanced. The European member of the Alliance great- 
 est in its potential resources, human and material, was of course 
 the very country against which it was now proposed to act; 
 the 'steamroller' had now to be destroyed ... by the Allies.
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 129 
 
 America, the member of the Alliance, which, at the time of 
 the Armistice, represented the greatest unit of actual material 
 force, had withdrawn into a nationalist isolation from, and 
 even hostility to, the European Allies. Japan was pursuing 
 a line of policy which rendered increasingly difficult the active 
 co-operation of certain of the Western democracies with her; 
 her policy had already involved her in declared and open hos- 
 tility to the other Asiatic element of the Alliance, China. Italy 
 was in a state of bitter hostility to the nationality Greater 
 Serbia whose defence was the immediate occasion of the War, 
 and was soon to mark her feeling towards the peace by re- 
 turning to power the Minister who had opposed Italy's en- 
 trance into the War; a situation which we shall best under- 
 stand if we imagine a 'pro-German* (say, for instance, Lord 
 Morley, or Mr Ramsay MacDonald, or Mr Philip Snowden) 
 being made Prime Minister of England. What may be termed 
 the minor Allies, Yugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, Rumania, 
 Greece, Poland, the lesser Border States, the Arab kingdom 
 that we erected, were drifting towards the entangling conflicts 
 which have since broken out. Already, at a time when the Quai 
 d'Orsay and Carmelite House were both clamouring for what 
 must have meant in practice the occupation of both Germany 
 and Russia, the Alliance had in fact disintegrated, and some 
 of its main elements were in bitter conflict. The picture of 
 a solid alliance of pacific and liberal democracies standing for 
 the maintenance of an orderly European freedom against 
 German attacks had completely faded away. Of the Grand 
 Alliance of twenty-four States as a combination of power 
 pledged to a common purpose, there remained just France and 
 England and their relations, too, were becoming daily worse ; 
 in fundamental disagreement over Poland, Turkey, Syria, the 
 Balkan States, Austria, and Germany itself, its indemnities, 
 and its economic treatment generally. Was this the instru- 
 ment for the conquest of half a world? 
 
 But the political disintegration of the Alliance was not the
 
 130 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 only obstacle to a thorough-going application of military 
 force to the problem of Germany and Russia. 
 
 By the very terms of the theory of security by prepon- 
 derant power, Germany had to be weakened economically, for 
 her subjugation could never be secure if she were permitted 
 to maintain an elaborate, nationally organised economic ma- 
 chinery, which not only gives immense powers of production, 
 capable without great difficulty of being transformed to the 
 production of military material, but which, through the or- 
 ganisation of foreign trade, gives influence in countries like 
 Russia, the Balkans, the Near and Far East. 
 
 So part of the policy of Versailles, reflected in the clauses 
 of the Treaty already dealt with, was to check the economic 
 recovery of Germany and more particularly to prevent econo- 
 mic co-operation between that country and Russia. That 
 Russia should become a 'German Colony' was a nightmare 
 that haunted the minds of the French peace-makers. 1 
 
 But, as we have already seen, to prevent the economic co- 
 operation of Germany and Russia meant the perpetuation of 
 the economic paralysis of Europe. Combined with the main- 
 
 *And Russo-German co-operation is of course precisely what French 
 policy must create. Says an American critic : 
 
 'France certainly carries a big stick, but she does not speak softly; 
 she takes her own part, but she seems to fear neither God nor the revul- 
 sion of man. Yet she has reason to fear. Suppose she succeeds for 
 a while in reducing Germany to servitude and Russia to a dictatorship 
 of the Right, in securing her own dominion on the Continent as over- 
 lord by the petty States of Europe. What then? What can be the 
 consequence of a common hostility of the Teutonic and Slavonic peo- 
 ples, except in the end common action on their part to throw off an 
 intolerable yoke? The nightmare of a militant Russo-German alliance 
 becomes daily a more sinister prophecy, as France teaches the people of 
 Europe that force alone is the solvent France has only to convince 
 all of Germany that the Treaty of Versailles will be enforced in all its 
 rigour, which means occupation of the Ruhr and the loss of Silesia, to 
 destroy the final resistance of those Germans who look to the West 
 rather than to the East for salvation. Let it be known that the barrier 
 of the Rhine is all bayonet and threat, and western-minded Germany 
 must go down before the easterners, Communist or Junker. It will not 
 matter greatly which.' (New Republic, Sept. 15th, 1920).
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 131 
 
 tenance of the blockade it would certainly have meant utter 
 and perhaps irretrievable collapse. 
 
 Perhaps the Allies at the beginning of 1919 were in no mood 
 to be greatly disturbed by the prospect. But they soon learned 
 that it had a very close bearing both on the aims which they 
 had set before themselves in the Treaty and, indeed, on the 
 very problem of maintaining military predominance. 
 
 In theory, of course, an army of occupation should live on 
 the occupied country. But it soon became evident that it was 
 quite out of the question to collect even the cost of the armies 
 for the limited occupation of the Rhine territories from a 
 country whose industrial life was paralysed by blockade. 
 Moreover, the costs of the German occupation were very sen- 
 sibly increased by the fact of the Russian blockade. Deprived 
 of Russian wheat and other products, the cost of living in 
 Western Europe was steadily rising, the social unrest was in 
 consequence increasing, and it was vitally necessary, if some- 
 thing like the old European life was to be restored, that pro- 
 duction should be restarted as rapidly as possible. We found 
 that a blockade of Russia which cut off Russian foodstuffs 
 from Western Europe, was also a blockade of ourselves. But 
 the blockade, as we have seen, was not the only economic 
 device used as a part of military pressure: the old economic 
 nerves between Germany and her neighbours had been cut 
 out and the creeping paralysis of Europe was spreading in 
 every direction. There was not a belligerent State on the 
 Continent of Europe that was solvent in the strict sense of the 
 term able, that is, to discharge its obligations in the gold 
 money in which it had contracted them. All had resorted to 
 the shifts of paper fictitious money, and the debacle of the 
 exchanges was already setting in. Whence were to come the 
 costs of the forces and armies of occupation necessitated by 
 the policy of complete conquest of Russia and Germany at the 
 same time? 
 
 When, therefore (according to a story current at the time),
 
 132 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 President Wilson, following the announcement that France 
 stood for the military coercion of Russia, asked each Ally in 
 turn how many troops and how much of the cost it would 
 provide, each replied : 'None.' It was patent, indeed, that the 
 resources of an economically paralysed Western Europe were 
 not adequate to this enterprise. A half-way course was 
 adopted. Britain supplied certain counter-revolutionary gen- 
 erals with a very considerable quantity of surplus stores, and 
 a few military missions; France adopted the policy of using 
 satellite States Poland, Rumania, and even Hungary as her 
 tools. The result we know. 
 
 Meantime, the economic and financial situation at home (in 
 France and Italy) was becoming desperate. France needed 
 coal, building material, money. None of these things could 
 be obtained from a blockaded, starving, and restless Germany. 
 One day, doubtless, Germany will be able to pay for the armies 
 of occupation; but it will be a Germany whose workers are 
 fed and clothed and warmed, whose railways have adequate 
 rolling stock, whose fields are not destitute of machines, and 
 factories of coal and the raw materials of production. In 
 other words, it will be a strong and organised Germany, and, 
 if occupied by alien troops, most certainly a nationalist and 
 hostile Germany, dangerous and difficult to watch, however 
 much disarmed. 
 
 But there was a further force which the Allied Govern- 
 ments found themselves compelled to take into consideration 
 in settling their military policy at the time of the Armistice. 
 In addition to the economic and financial difficulties which 
 compelled them to refrain from large scale operations in 
 Russia and perhaps in Germany; in addition to the clash of 
 rival nationalisms among the Allies, which was already intro- 
 ducing such serious rifts into the Alliance, there was a further 
 element of weakness revolutionary unrest, the 'Bolshevik' 
 fever. 
 
 In December, 1918, the British Government was confronted
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 133 
 
 by the refusal of soldiers at Dover, who believed that they were 
 being sent to Russia, to embark. A month or two later the 
 French Government was faced by a naval mutiny at Odessa. 
 American soldiers in Siberia refused to go into action against 
 the Russians. Still later, in Italy, the workers enforced their 
 decision not to handle munitions for Russia, by widespread 
 strikes. Whether the attempt to obtain troops in very large 
 quantities for a Russian war, involving casualties and sacri- 
 fices on a considerable scale, would have meant at the begin- 
 ning of 1919 military revolts, or Communist, Spartacist, or 
 Bolshevik revolutionary movements, or not, the Governments 
 were evidently not prepared to face the issue. 
 
 We have seen, therefore, that the blockade and the econo- 
 mic weakening of our enemy are two-edged weapons, only 
 of effective use within very definite limits; that these limits 
 in turn condition in some degree the employment of more 
 purely military instruments like the occupation of hostile ter- 
 ritory; and indeed condition the provision of the instruments. 
 
 The power basis of the Alliance, such as it is, has been, since 
 the Armistice, the naval power of England, exercised through 
 the blockades, and the military force of France exercised 
 mainly through the management of satellite armies. The 
 British method has involved the greater immediate cruelty (per- 
 haps a greater extent and degree of suffering imposed upon 
 the weak and helpless than any coercive device yet discovered 
 by man) though the French has involved a more direct nega- 
 tion of the aims for which the War was fought. French policy 
 aims quite frankly at the re-imposition of France's military 
 hegemony of the Continent. That aim will not be readily 
 surrendered. 
 
 Owing to the division in Socialist and Labour ranks, to 
 the growing fear and dislike of 'confiscatory' legislation, by 
 a peasant population and a large petit rentier class, conserva- 
 tive elements are bound to be predominant in France for a 
 long time. Those elements are frankly sceptical of any League
 
 134 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 of Nations device. A League of Nations would rob them 
 of what in the Chamber of Deputies a Nationalist called 'the 
 Right of Victory.' But the alternative to a League as a 
 means of security is military predominance, and France has 
 bent her energies since the Armistice to securing it. To-day, 
 the military predominance of France on the Continent is 
 vastly greater than that of Germany ever was. Her chief 
 antagonist is not only disarmed forbidden to manufacture 
 heavy artillery, tanks or fighting aircraft but as we have 
 seen, is crippled in economic life by the loss of nearly all his 
 iron and much of his coal. France not only retains her arma- 
 ment, but is to-day spending more upon it than before the 
 War. The expenditure for the army in 1920 amounted to 
 5000 millions of francs, whereas in 1914 it was only 1200 
 millions. Translate this expenditure even with due regard to 
 the changed price level into terms of policy, and it means, 
 inter alia, that the Russo-Polish war and Feisal's deposition 
 in Syria are burdens beyond her capacity. And this is only the 
 beginning. Within a few months France has revived the full 
 flower of the Napoleonic tradition so far as the use of satellite 
 military States is concerned. Poland is only one of many in- 
 struments now being industriously fashioned by the artisans 
 of the French military renaissance. In the Ukraine, in Hun- 
 gary, in Czecho-Slovakia, in Rumania, in Yugo-Slavia; in 
 Syria, Greece, Turkey, and Africa, French military and finan- 
 cial organisers are at work. 
 
 M. Clemenceau, in one of his statements to the Chamber l on 
 France's future policy, outlined the method : 
 
 'We have said that we would create a system of barbed 
 wire. There are places where it will have to be guarded to pre- 
 vent Germany from passing. There i^re peoples like the Poles, 
 of whom I spoke just now, who are fighting against the 
 Soviets, who are resisting, who are in the van of civilisation. 
 1 December 23rd, 1919.
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 135 
 
 Well, we have decided ... to be the Allies of any people 
 attacked by the Bolsheviks. I have spoken of the Poles, of the 
 help that we shall certainly get from them in case of necessity. 
 Well, they are fighting at this moment against the Bolsheviks, 
 and if they are not equal to the task but they will be equal to 
 it the help which we shall be able to give them in different 
 ways, and which we are actually giving them, particularly 
 in the form of military supplies and uniforms that help will 
 be continued. There is a Polish army, of which the greater 
 part has been organised and instructed by French officers. 
 . . . The Polish army must now be composed of from 450,000 
 to 500,000 men. If you look on the map at the geographical 
 situation of this military force, you will think that it is inter- 
 esting from every point of view. There is a Czecho-Slovak 
 army, which already numbers nearly 150,000 men, well 
 equipped, well armed, and capable of sustaining all the tasks of 
 war. Here is another factor on which we can count. But 
 I count on many other elements. I count on Rumania.' 
 
 Since then Hungary has been added, part of the Hungarian 
 plan being the domination of Austria by Hungary, and, later, 
 possibly the restoration of an Austrian Monarchy, which might 
 help to detach monarchical and clerical Bavaria from Republi- 
 can Germany. 1 This is the revival of the old French policy 
 
 1 The Times of September 4th, 1920 reproduces an article from the 
 Matin, on M. Millerand's policy with regard to small States. M. 
 Millerand's aim was that economic aid should go hand in hand with 
 French military protection. With this policy in view, a number of large 
 businesses rcently passed under French control, including the Skoda 
 factory in Czecho-Slovakia, big works at Kattowitz in Upper Silesia, 
 the firm of Huta-Bankowa in Poland, railway factories in Rumania, 
 and certain river systems and ports in Yugo-Slavia. In return for 
 assistance to Admiral Horthy, an agreement was signed whereby 
 France obtained control of the Hungarian State Railways, of the 
 Credit Bank, the Hungarian river system and the port of Buda-pest. 
 Other reports state that France has secured 85 per cent, of the oil-fields 
 of Poland, in return for her help at the time of the threat to Warsaw. 
 As the majority of shares in the Polish Oil Company 'Galicia,' which 
 have been in British hands until recently, have been bought up by a 
 French Company, the 'Franco-Polonaise,' France now holds an im- 
 portant weapon of international policy.
 
 136 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 of preventing the unification of the German people. 1 It is that 
 aspiration which largely explains recent French sympathy for 
 Clericalism and Monarchism and the reversal of the policy 
 heretofore pursued by the Third Republic towards the Vati- 
 can. 
 
 The systematic arming of African negroes reveals some- 
 thing of Napoleon's leaning towards the military exploitation of 
 servile races. We are probably only at the beginning of the 
 arming of Africa's black millions. They are, of course, an 
 extremely convenient military material. French or British 
 soldiers might have scruples against service in a war upon a 
 Workers' Republic. Cannibals from the African forest 'con- 
 scribed' for service in Europe are not likely to have political 
 or social scruples of that kind. To bring some hundreds of 
 thousands of these Africans to Europe, to train them systemati- 
 cally to the use of European arms; to teach them that the 
 European is conquerable ; to put them in the position of victors 
 over a vanquished European people here indeed are possibili- 
 ties. With Senegalese negroes having their quarters in Goethe's 
 house, and placed, if not in authority, at least as the instru- 
 ments of authority over the population of a European university 
 city; and with the Japanese imposing their rule upon great 
 stretches of what was yesterday a European Empire (and our 
 Ally) a new page may well have opened for Europe. 
 
 But just consider the chances of stability for power based on 
 
 1 The present writer would like to enter a warning here that nothing 
 in this chapter implies that we should disregard France's very legiti- 
 mate fears of a revived militarist Germany. The implication is that 
 she is going the right way about to create the very dangers that terrify 
 her. If this were the place to discuss alternative policies, I should cer- 
 tainly go on to urge that England and America should make it plain 
 to France that they are prepared to pledge their power to her defence. 
 More than that, both countries should offer to forgo the debts owing 
 to them by France on condition of French adhesion to more workable 
 European arrangements. The last thing to be desired is a rupture, 
 or a mere change of roles : France to become once more the 'enemy' 
 and Germany once more the 'Ally.' That outcome would merely 
 duplicate the weary story of the past
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 137 
 
 the assumption of continued co-operation of a number of 
 'intense' nationalisms, each animated by its sacred egoisms. 
 France has turned to this policy as a substitute for the alliance 
 of two or three great States, which national feeling and con- 
 flicting interests have driven apart. Is this collection of mush- 
 room republics to possess a stability to which the Entente 
 could not attain? 
 
 One looks over the list. We have, it is true, after a century, 
 the re-birth of Poland, a great and impressive case of the vin- 
 dication of national right. But Poland, yesterday the victim 
 of the imperialist oppressor, has, herself, almost in a few 
 hours, as it were, acquired an imperialism of her own. The 
 Pole assures us that his nationality can only be secure if he 
 is given dominion over territories with largely non-Polish 
 populations; if, that is, some fifteen millions of Ruthenes. 
 Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, are deprived of a separate 
 national existence. Italy, it is true, is now fully redeemed; 
 but that redemption involves the 'irredentism' of large numbers 
 of German Tyrolese, Yugo-Slavs, and Greeks. The new Aus- 
 tria is forbidden to federate with the main branch of the race 
 to which her people belong though federation alone can save 
 them from physical extinction. The Czecho-Slovak nation 
 is now achieved, but only at the expense of a German unre- 
 deemed population larger numerically than that of Alsace- 
 Lorraine. And Slovaks and Czechs already quarrel many 
 foresee the day when the freed State will face its own rebels. 
 The Slovenes and Croats and the Serbs do not yet make a 
 'nationality,' and threaten to fight one another as readily as 
 they would fight the Bulgarians they have annexed in Bul- 
 garian Macedonia. Rumania has marked her redemption by 
 the inclusion of considerable Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Ser- 
 bian 'irredentisms' within her new borders. Finland, which 
 with Poland typified for so long the undying struggle for 
 national right, is to-day determined to coerce the Swedes on 
 the Aaland Islands and the Russians on the Carelian Territory.
 
 138 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Greek rule of Turks has already involved retaliatory, puni- 
 tive, or defensive measures which have needed Blue Book 
 explanation. Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaidjan have not yet 
 acquired their subject nationalities. 
 
 The prospect of peace and security for these nationalities 
 may be gathered in some measure by an enumeration of the 
 wars which have actually broken out since the Peace Confer- 
 ence met in Paris, for the appeasement of Europe. The Poles 
 have fought in turn, the Czecho-Slovaks, the Ukrainians, the 
 Lithuanians, and the Russians. The Ukrainians have fought 
 the Russians and the Hungarians. The Finns have fought the 
 Russians, as have also the Esthonians and the Letts. The 
 Esthonians and Letts have also fought the Baltic Germans. 
 The Rumanians have fought Hungary. The Greeks have 
 fought the Bulgarians and are at present in 'full dress' war with 
 the Turks. The Italians have fought the Albanians, and the 
 Turks in Asia Minor. The French have been fighting the 
 Arabs in Syria and the Turks in Cilicia. The various British 
 expeditions or missions, naval or military, in Archangel, Mur- 
 mansk, the Baltic, the Crimea, Persia, Siberia, Turkestan, 
 Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, the Soudan, or in aid of Koltchak, 
 Denikin, Yudenitch, or Wrangel, are not included in this list 
 as not arising in a strict sense perhaps out of nationality 
 problems. 
 
 Let us face what all this means in the alignment of power 
 in the world. The Europe of the Grand Alliance is a Europe 
 of many nationalities: British, French, Italian, Rumanian, 
 Polish, Czecho-Slovak, Yugo-Slav, Greek, Belgian, Magyar, 
 to say nothing of the others. None of these States exceeds 
 greatly forty millions of people, and the populations of most 
 are very much less. But the rival group of Germany and 
 Russia, making between them over two hundred millions, 
 comprises just two great States. And contiguous to them, 
 united by the ties of common hatreds, lie the Mahomedan 
 world and China. Prusso- Slavdom (combining racial ele-
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 139 
 
 merits having common qualities of amenity to autocratic disci- 
 pline) might conceivably give a lead to Chinese and other 
 Asiatic millions, brought to hate the West. The opposing 
 group is a Balkanised Europe of irreconcilable national 
 rivalries, incapable, because of those rivalries, of any prolonged 
 common action, and taking a religious pride in the fact of this 
 incapacity to agree. Its moral leaders, or many of them, 
 certainly its powerful and popular instrument of education, 
 the Press, encourage this pugnacity, regarding any effort 
 towards its restraint or discipline as political atheism; deepen- 
 ing the tradition which would make 'intense' nationalism a 
 noble, virile, and inspiring attitude, and internationalism 
 something emasculate and despicable. 
 
 We talk of the need of 'protecting European civilisation' 
 from hostile domination, German or Russian. It is a danger. 
 Other great civilisations have found themselves dominated 
 by alien power. Seeley has sketched for us the process by 
 which a vast country with two or three hundred million souls, 
 not savage or uncivilised but with a civilisation, though de- 
 scending along a different stream of tradition, as real arid 
 ancient as our own, came to be utterly conquered and subdued 
 by a people, numbering less than twelve millions, living on 
 the other side of the world. It reversed the teaching of his- 
 tory which had shown again and again that it was impossible 
 really to conquer an intelligent people alien in tradition from 
 its invaders. The whole power of Spain could not in eighty 
 years conquer the Dutch provinces with their petty popula- 
 tion. The Swiss could not be conquered. At the very time 
 when the conquest of India's hundreds of millions was under 
 way, the English showed themselves wholly unable to reduce 
 to obedience three millions of their own race in America. 
 What was the explanation? The Inherent Superiority of the 
 Anglo-Saxon Stock? 
 
 For long we were content to draw such a flattering conclu- 
 sion and leave it at that, until Seeley pointed out the uncom-
 
 140 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 fortable fact that the great bulk of the forces used in the 
 conquest of India were not British at all. They were Indian. 
 India was conquered for Great Britain by the natives of 
 India. 
 
 The nations of India (says Seeley) have been conquered 
 by an army of which, on the average, about a fifth part was 
 English. India can hardly be said to have been conquered at 
 all by foreigners; she was rather conquered by herself. If 
 we were justified, which we are not, in personifying India 
 as we personify France or England, we could not describe her 
 as overwhelmed by a foreign enemy; we should rather have 
 to say that she elected to put an end to anarchy by submitting 
 to a single government, even though that government were in 
 the hands of foreigners.' 1 
 
 In other words, India is an English possession because the 
 peoples of India were incapable of cohesion, the nations of 
 India incapable of internationalism. 
 
 The peoples of India include some of the best fighting stock 
 in the world. But they fought one another: the pugnacity 
 and material power they personified was the force used by 
 their conquerors for their subjection. 
 
 I will venture to quote what I wrote some years ago touch- 
 ing Seeley 's moral: 
 
 'Our successful defeat of tyranny depends upon such a 
 development of the sense of patriotism among the democratic 
 nations that it will attach itself rather to the conception of the 
 unity of all free co-operative societies, than to the mere geo- 
 graphical and racial divisions; a development that will enable 
 it to organise itself as a cohesive power for the defence of 
 that ideal, by the use of all the forces, moral and material, 
 which it wields. 
 1 The Expansion of England, p. 202.
 
 MILITARY PREDOMINANCE 141 
 
 '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 as- 
 sumption compels each member, as a measure of national self- 
 preservation, and so justifiably, to take precaution against drift- 
 ing 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 phe- 
 nomenon which is nothing short of a 'moral miracle' if our 
 ordinary reading of war psychology is correct. The phenome- 
 non 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 friend- 
 ship as nothing else could. 1 
 
 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 sacree' . . . 'duke's son, 
 
 1 The assumption marks even post-war rhetoric. M. Millerand's mes- 
 sage to the Senate and Chamber upon his election as President of the 
 Republic says : True to the Alliances for ever cemented by blood shed 
 in common,' France will strictly enforce the Treaty of Versailles, 'a 
 new charter of Europe and the World.' (Times, Sept. 27th, 1920). 
 The passage is typical of the moral fact dealt with in this chapter. M. 
 Millerand knows, his hearers know, that the war Alliance 'for ever 
 cemented by blood shed in common,' has already ceased to exist. But 
 the admission of this patent fact would be fatal to the 'blood' heroics. 
 
 142
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 143 
 
 cook's son.' On this ground alone many a bishop has found 
 (in war time) the moral justification of war. 1 
 
 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 de- 
 mocracy, freedom from military regimentation and the sup- 
 pression of military terrorism, the rights of small nations are 
 things about which at the end of the War we are utterly in- 
 different. It would seem either that these are not the things 
 that really stirred us that our feelings had some other unsus- 
 pected 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 un- 
 fathomable 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 
 
 1 Dr L. P. Jacks, Editor of Tke Hibbert Journal, tells us that before 
 the War the English nation, regarded from the moral point of view, 
 was a scene of 'indescribable confusion ; a moral chaos.' But there 
 has come to it 'the peace of mind that comes to every man who, after 
 tossing about among uncertainties, finds at last a mission, a cause to 
 which he can devote himself.' For this reason, he says, the War has 
 actually made the English people happier than they were before: 
 'brighter, more cheerful. The Englishman worries less about himself. 
 . . . The tone and substance of conversation are better. . . . There 
 is more health in our souls and perhaps in our bodies.' And he tells 
 how the War cured a friend of insomnia. (The Peace fulness of Being 
 at War, New Republic, September 11, 1915).
 
 144 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 that they are ready to die for their country's cause or for some 
 even greater cause human freedom, the rights of a small na- 
 tion, democracy, or the principle of nationality, or to resist 
 a barbarous morality which can tolerate the making of un- 
 provoked 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 them- 
 selves, return home to Italy, or France, or Britain and ex- 
 change 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
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 145 
 
 their lives and suffered hardship in the execution of duty. 
 It sounds satisfactory until the same countryman ceases fight- 
 ing 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 obvi- 
 ous enough. If our potential power is to stand for the pro- 
 tection 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 nation- 
 ality 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 Govern- 
 ment was denied (as by a rigorous control of press and educa- 
 tion), 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 
 
 10
 
 146 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 dis- 
 carded 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
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 147 
 
 State? Recall all that we wrote and talked about the sacred- 
 ness 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 au- 
 tocracies using their peoples for unknown and unavowed pur- 
 poses. 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 dis- 
 cretion of the Czarist Government was deemed sufficient guaran- 
 tee 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 destroy- 
 ing? 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 'redemp-
 
 14S THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 tion' 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.) l 
 
 It is not to be supposed, however, that the small State it- 
 self, 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 martyr- 
 dom of alien rule, Poland acquires its freedom. That free- 
 dom is not a year old before Poland itself becomes in temper 
 as imperialistic as any State in Europe. It may be bank- 
 rupt, 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. Al- 
 though Poland is perhaps the worst case, all the new small 
 States show a similar disposition: Czecho-Slovakia, Yugo- 
 slavia, 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 na- 
 tional independence; there is not one that is not denying the 
 right to national independence. If every Britain has its Ire- 
 land, 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 ful- 
 minating against the crime of slavery? Should we have 
 thought his position any more logical if he had explained that 
 
 *The facts of both the Russian and the Italian bargains are dealt 
 with in more detail in Chap. III.
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 149 
 
 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 Pro- 
 fessor 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.' 1 
 
 The last thing intended here is any excuse of German vio- 
 lence 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 fight- 
 ing and dying for something else? 
 
 Test the nature of our feelings by what was after all per- 
 haps the most dramatised situation in the whole drama: the 
 
 1 Quoted by Mr T. L. Stoddard in an article on Italian Nationalism, in 
 the Forum, Sept. 1915. One may hope that the outcome of the War has 
 modified the tendencies in Italy of which he treats. But the quotations 
 he makes from Italian Nationalist writers put Treitschke and Bern- 
 hardi in the shade. Here are some. Corradini says : 'Italy must be- 
 come once more the first nation in the world.' Rocco : 'It is said 
 that all the other territories are occupied. But strong nations, or nations 
 on the path of progress, conquer. . . . territories occupied by nations 
 in decadence.' Luigi Villari rejoices that the cobwebs of mean- 
 spirited Pacifism have been swept away. Italians are beginning to feel, 
 in whatever part of the world they may happen to be, something of 
 the pride of Roman citizens.' Scipione Sighele writes: 'War must be 
 loved for itself. . . To say "War is the most horrible of evils," to talk 
 of war as "an unhappy necessity," to declare that we should "never 
 attack but always know how to defend ourselves," to say these things 
 is as dangerous as to make out-and-out Pacifist and anti-militarist 
 speeches. It is creating for the future a conflict of duties : duties 
 towards humanity, duties towards the Fatherland.' Corradini explains 
 the programme of the Nationalists : 'All our efforts will tend towards 
 making the Italians a warlike race. We will give it a new will ; we 
 will instil into it the appetite for power, the need of mighty hopes. 
 We will create a religion the religion of the Fatherland victorious 
 over the other nations.' 
 
 I am indebted to Mr Stoddard for the translations; but they read 
 quite 'true to type.'
 
 150 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 Lon- 
 don, 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 ex- 
 planation. 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 Arch- 
 angel, Murmansk, Vladivostock, the Crimea, on the Polish 
 border, on the shores of the Caspian, our soldiers were kill- 
 ing Russians, or organising their killing; our ships sank Rus- 
 sian 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.
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 151 
 
 The killing and blockading are not the important facts. 
 Whatever may be behind the Russian business, the most dis- 
 turbing 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 cathe- 
 drals, or killed Russian civilians. We did not want it to be ex- 
 pensive, 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 . . .* 
 
 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 Bis- 
 marckian 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 
 
 1 It is true that the Labour Party, alone of all the parties, did take 
 action, happily effective, against the Russian adventure after it had 
 gone on in intermittent form for two years. But the above paragraphs 
 refer particularly to the period which immediately succeeded the War, 
 and to a general temper which was unfortunately a fact despite Labour 
 action.
 
 152 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 cam- 
 paign 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 So- 
 cialist opinions. There are deportations in whole shiploads. 
 I f one takes the Espionage Act and compares it with any equiv- 
 alent 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 dis- 
 cussion, and the Press, are certainly pushed further by the post- 
 war America than they were by the pre-war Germany the Ger- 
 many 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 de- 
 fended by the British Government in Ireland are indistinguish- 
 able 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 sym- 
 bol of a subject nationality, an unredeemed race that has suf- 
 fered and does suffer more at American hands than Pole or
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 153 
 
 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 responsi- 
 bility? 
 
 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 des- 
 perate '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 bar- 
 barities 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
 
 154 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 feeling about Louvain did not solve the evil of military terror- 
 ism. 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 country- 
 men, 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
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 155 
 
 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 revo- 
 lutionists 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 whole- 
 some 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 suc- 
 cessfully 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, ade- 
 quate 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.
 
 156 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 un- 
 known; 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
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 157 
 
 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 pre- 
 tend that these flaming passions of five years went for so 
 little in her emotional experience that they could just be 
 dropped from ORC 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 de-
 
 158 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 cision 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 pro- 
 letariat. 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
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 159 
 
 for any other, 1 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 effect- 
 ively 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 pur- 
 
 1 Mr Hartley Manners, the playwright, who produced during the 
 War a book entitled Hate with a Will to Victory, writes thus : 
 
 'And in voicing our doctrine of Hate let us not forget that the Ger- 
 man people were, and are still, solidly behind him (the Kaiser) in 
 everything he does.' . . . 
 
 'The German people are actively and passively with their Govern- 
 ment to the last man and the last mark. No people receive their faith 
 and their rules of conduct more fatuously from their rulers than do 
 the German people. Fronting the world they stand as one with their 
 beloved Kaiser. He who builds on a revolution in Germany as a pos- 
 sible ending of the war, knows not what he says. They will follow 
 through any degradation of the body, through any torture of spirit, 
 the tyrants they have been taught from infancy to regard as their 
 Supreme Masters of body and soul.' . . . 
 
 And here is his picture of 'the German'; 
 
 ... 'a slave frpm birth, with no rights as a free man, owing alleg- 
 iance to a militaristic Government to whom he looks for his very life; 
 crushed by taxation to keep up the military machine; ill-nourished, 
 ignorant, prone to crime in greater measure than the peasants of any 
 other country as the German statistics of crime show a degraded 
 peasant, a wretched future, and a loathesome past these are the inherit- 
 ances to which the German peasant is born. What type of nature can 
 develop in such conditions? But one the brute. And the four years' 
 commerce of this War has shown the German from prince to peasant 
 as offspring of the one family the brute family.' . . .
 
 160 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 pose, 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 differ- 
 ences; 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 move- 
 ment 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 Inter- 
 national 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
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 161 
 
 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 parr 
 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 race- 
 horse. 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 im- 
 portant question in relation to the War. Has its total out- 
 come 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? 
 11
 
 162 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 re- 
 ports had appeared in the Press, some journalistic genius 
 began an agitation on behalf of 'reprisals' for air raids. 1 
 
 At a time when it seemed doubtful whether the Germans 
 would sign the Treaty or not, and just what would be the form 
 cf the Hungarian Government, the Evening News printed the 
 following editorial: 
 
 'It might take weeks or months to bring the Hungarian 
 Bolshevists and recalcitrant Germans to book by ^extensive 
 
 "The following which appeared in The Times of April 17, 1915 
 is merely a type of at least thirty or forty similar reports published by 
 the German Army Headquarters : 'In yesterday's clear weather the 
 airmen were very active. Enemy airmen bombarded places behind our 
 positions. Freiburg was again visited, and several civilians, the ma- 
 jority being children, were killed and wounded.' A few days later the 
 Paris Temps (April 22, 1915) reproduced the German accounts of 
 French air-raids where bombs were dropped on Kandern, Loerrach, 
 Mulheim, Habsheim, Wiesenthal, Tiiblingen, Mannheim. These raids 
 were carried out by squads of airmen, and the bombs were thrown 
 particularly at railway stations and factories. Previous to this, British 
 and French airmen had been particularly active in Belgium, dropping 
 bombs on Zeebrugge, Bruges, Middlekirke, and other towns. One Ger- 
 man official report tells how a bomb fell on to a loaded street car, 
 killing many women and children. Another (dated September 7, 1915) 
 contains the following: 'In the course of an enemy aeroplane attack 
 on Lichtervelde, north of Roulers in Flanders, seven Belgian inhabi- 
 tants were killed and two injured.' A despatch from Zurich, dated 
 Sept. 24, 1915, says: 'At yesterday's meeting of the Stuttgart City 
 Council, the Mayor and Councillors protested vigorously against the 
 recent French raid upon an undefended city. Burgomaster Lauten- 
 schlager asserted that an enemy that attacked harmless civilians was 
 fighting a lost cause.'
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 163 
 
 operations with large forces. It might take but a few days 
 to bring them to reason by adequate use of aircraft. 
 
 'Allied airmen could reach Buda-pest in a few hours, and 
 teach its inhabitants such a lesson that Bolshevism would lose 
 its attractions for them. 
 
 'Strong Allied aerodomes on the Rhine and in Poland, 
 well equipped with the best machines <tnd pilots, could quickly 
 persuade the inhabitants of the large German cities of the 
 folly of having refused to sign the peace. 
 
 'Those considerations are elementary. For that reason they 
 may be overlooked. They are "milk for babes." ' * 
 
 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 help- 
 less 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 democ- 
 racy 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; (&) 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 
 
 1 March 27th, 1919.
 
 164 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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. 1 
 
 On March 3, 1919, Mr Winston Churchill stated in the 
 House of Commons, speaking of the blockade : 
 
 '. . . This weapon of starvation falls mainly upon the women 
 and children, upon the old and the weak and the poor, after 
 all the fighting has stopped.' 
 
 'In Drinkwater's play, Abraham Lincoln, the fire-eating wife of the 
 war-profiteer, who had been violently abusing an old Quaker lady, is 
 thus addressed by Lincoln : 
 
 'I don't agree with her, but I honour her. She's wrong, but she is 
 noble. You've told me what you think. I don't agree with you, and 
 I'm ashamed of you and your like. You, who have sacrificed nothing 
 babble about destroying the South while other people conquer it. I 
 accepted this war with a sick heart, and I've a heart that's near to break- 
 ing every day. I accepted it in the name of humanity, and just and 
 merciful dealing, and the hope of love and charity on earth. And you 
 come to me, talking of revenge and destruction, and malice, and endur- 
 ing hate. These gentle people are mistaken, but they are mistaken 
 cleanly, and in a great name. It is you that dishonour the cause for 
 which we stand it is you who would make it a mean and little 
 thing. . . .'
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 165 
 
 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. 1 Its penalties 
 are in a peculiar degree unevenly distributed. The country 
 districts escape almost entirely, the peasants can feed them- 
 selves. It falls on the cities. But even in the cities the very 
 wealthy and the official classes can as a rule escape. Virtu- 
 ally 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 signa- 
 ture of the Treaty. At the gathering of the representatives, 
 
 1 The official record of the Meeting of the Council of Ten on Janu- 
 ary 16, 1919, as furnished to the Foreign Relations Committee of the 
 American Senate, reports Mr Lloyd George as saying : 
 
 'The mere idea of crushing Bolshevism by military force is pure 
 madness. . . . 
 
 'The Russian blockade would be a "death cordon," condemning 
 women and children to starvation, a policy which, as humane people, 
 those present could not consider.'
 
 166 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 the German delegate spoke sitting down. It turned out after- 
 wards that he was so ill and distraught, that he dared not 
 trust himself to stand up. Every paper was full of the in- 
 cident, 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: 
 
 'I do not want to answer by reproaches to reproaches. . . . 
 Crimes in war may not be excusable, but they are committed 
 in the struggle for victory and in the defence of national 
 existence, and passions are aroused which make the conscience 
 of peoples blunt. The hundreds of thousands of non-com- 
 batants who have perished since November 11 by reason of the 
 blockade, were killed with cold deliberation, after our adver- 
 saries had conquered and victory had been assured them. 
 Think of that when you speak of guilt and punishment/ 
 
 No one seems to have noticed this trifle in presence of the 
 heinousness of the cigarette, the gloves, and the other crimes. 
 Yet this was an insult indeed. If true, it shamefully disgraces 
 England if England is responsible. The public presumably 
 simply did not care whether it was true or not. 
 
 A few months after the Armistice I wrote as follows : 
 
 'When the Germans sank the Lusitania and slew several 
 hundred women and children, we knew at least we thought 
 we knew that that was the kind of thing which Englishmen 
 could not do. In all the hates and stupidities, the dirt and 
 heartbreaks of the war, there was just this light on the hor-
 
 PATRIOTISM AND POWER 167 
 
 izon : that there were certain things to which we at least could 
 never fall, in the name of victory or patriotism, or any other 
 of the deadly masked words that are "the unjust stewards of 
 men's ideas.'* 
 
 'And then we did it. We, too, sank Lusitanias. We, too, 
 for some cold political end, plunged the unarmed, the weak, 
 the helpless, the children, the suffering women, to agonising 
 death and torture. Without a tremor. Not alone in the 
 bombing of cities, which we did so much better than the enemy. 
 For this we had the usual excuse. It was war. 
 
 'But after the War, when the fighting was finished, the 
 enemy was disarmed, his submarines surrendered, his aero- 
 planes destroyed, his soldiers dispersed; months afterwards, 
 we kept a weapon which was for use first and mainly against 
 the children, the weak, the sick, the old, the women, the mothers, 
 the decrepit: starvation and disease. Our papers told us 
 our patriotic papers how well it was succeeding. Corres- 
 pondents wrote complacently, sometimes exultingly, of how 
 thin and pinched were all the children, even those well into 
 teens; how stunted, how defective, the next generation would 
 be; and how the younger children, those of seven and eight, 
 looked like children of three and four ; and how those beneath 
 this age simply did not live. Either they were born dead, or 
 if they were born alive what was there to give them? Milk? 
 An unheard-of luxury. And nothing to wrap them in; even 
 in hospitals the new-born children were wrapped in news- 
 papers, the lucky ones in bits of sacking. The mothers were 
 most fortunate when the children were born dead. In an 
 insane asylum a mother wails: "If only I did not hear the 
 cry of the children for food all day long, all day long!" To 
 "bring Germany to reason" we had, you see, to drive mothers 
 out of their reason. 
 
 ' "It would have been more merciful," said Bob Smillie, 
 "to turn the machine-guns on those children." Put this question 
 to yourself, patriot Englishmen: "Was the sinking of the
 
 168 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Lusitania as cruel, as prolonged, as mean, as merciless a death 
 as this?" And we you and I do it every day, every night. 
 
 'Here is the Times of May 21, half a year after the cessation 
 of war, telling the Germans that they do not know how much 
 more severe we can still make the "domestic results" of star- 
 vation, if we really put our mind to it. To the blockade we 
 shall add the "horrors of invasion." The invasion of a country 
 already disarmed is to be marked when we do it by horror. 
 
 'But the purpose! That justifies it! What purpose? To 
 obtain the signature to the Treaty of Peace. Many English- 
 men not Pacifists, not sentimentalists, not conscientious ob- 
 jectors, or other vermin of that kind, but Bishops, Judges, 
 Members of the House of Lords, great public educators. Tory 
 editors have declared that this Treaty is a monstrous in- 
 justice. Some Englishmen at least think so. But if the 
 Germans say so, that becomes a crime which we shall know 
 how to punish. "The enemy have been reminded already" 
 says the Times, proud organ of British respectability, of Con- 
 servatism, of distinguished editors and ennobled proprietors, 
 "that the machinery of the blockade can again be put into 
 force at a few hours' notice . . . the intention of the Allies 
 to take military action if necessary. . . . Rejection of the 
 Peace terms now offered them, will assuredly lead to fresh 
 chastisement." 
 
 'But will not Mr Lloyd George be able to bring back 
 signatures f Will he not have made Peace permanent Peace? 
 Shall we not have destroyed this Prussian philosophy of 
 frightfulness, force, and hate? Shall we not have proved to 
 the world that a State without military power can trust to the 
 good faith and humanity of its neighbours ? Can we not, then, 
 celebrate victory with light hearts, honour our dead and glorify 
 our arms ? Have we not served faithfully those ideals of right 
 and justice, mercy and chivalry, for which a whole generation 
 of youth went through hell and gave their lives?'
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE ALTERNATIVE RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 
 
 | 
 
 THE facts of the present situation in Europe, so far sketched, 
 reveal broadly this spectacle : everywhere the failure of national 
 power to indispensable ends, sustenance, political security, 
 nationality, right; everywhere a fierce struggle for national 
 power. 
 
 Germany, which successfully fed her expanding population 
 by a system which did not rest upon national power, wrecked 
 that system in order to attempt one which all experience showed 
 could not succeed. The Allied world pilloried both the folly 
 and the wickedness of such a statecraft; and at the peace 
 proceeded to imitate it in every particular. The faith in the 
 complete efficacy of preponderant power which the economic 
 and other demands of the Treaty of Versailles and the policy 
 towards Russia reveal, is already seen to be groundless (for 
 the demands, in fact, are being abandoned). There is in that 
 document an element of naivete, and in the subsequent policy 
 a cruelty which will be the amazement of history if our race 
 remains capable of history. 
 
 Yet the men who made the Treaty, and accelerated the 
 famine and break-up of half a world, including those, like 
 M. Tardieu, who still demand a ruined Germany and an indem- 
 nity-paying one, were the ablest statesmen of Europe, experi- 
 enced, realist, and certainly not morally monsters. They were 
 probably no worse morally, and certainly more practical, than 
 the passionate democracies, American and European, who en- 
 
 169
 
 170 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 couraged all the destructive elements of policy and were hostile 
 to all that was recuperative and healing. 
 
 It is perfectly true and this truth is essential to the thesis 
 here discussed that the statesmen at Versailles were neither 
 fools or villains. Neither were the Cardinals and the Princes 
 of the Church, who for five hundred years, more or less, 
 attempted to use physical coercion for the purpose of suppress- 
 ing religious error. There is, of course an immeasurably 
 stronger case for the Inquisition as an instrument of social 
 order than there is for the use of competing national military 
 power as the basis of modern European society. And the 
 stronger case for the Inquisition as an instrument of social 
 by a modern statesman when he goes to war. It was less. 
 The inquisitor, in burning and torturing the heretic, passion- 
 ately believed that he obeyed the voice of God, as the modern 
 statesman believes that he is justified by the highest dictates 
 of patriotism. We are now able to see that the Inquisitor 
 was wrong, his judgment twisted by some overpowering pre- 
 possession : Is some similar prepossession distorting vision and 
 political wisdom in modern statecraft? And if so, what is the 
 nature of this prepossession? 
 
 As an essay towards the understanding of its nature, the 
 following suggestions are put forward: 
 
 The assertion of national power, domination, is always in 
 line with popular feeling. And in crises like that of the 
 settlement with Germany popular feeling dictates policy. 
 
 The feelings associated with coercive domination evidently 
 lie near the surface of our natures and are easily excited. To 
 attain our end by mere coercion instead of bargain or agree- 
 ment, is the method in conduct which, in the order of experi- 
 ments, our race generally tries first, not only in economics (as 
 by slavery) but in sex, in securing acquiescence to our religious 
 beliefs, and in most other relationships. Coercion is not only 
 the response to an instinct; it relieves us of the trouble and
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 171 
 
 uncertainties of intellectual decision as to what is equitable 
 in a bargain. 
 
 To restrain the combative instinct sufficiently to realise the 
 need of co-operation, demands a social discipline which the 
 prevailing political traditions and moralities of Nationalism and 
 Patriotism not only do not furnish, but directly discourage. 
 
 But when some vital need becomes obvious and we find 
 that force simply cannot fulfil it, we then try other methods, 
 and manage to restrain our impulse sufficiently to do so. If 
 we simply must have a man's help, and we find we cannot 
 force him to give it, we then offer him inducements, bargain, 
 enter a contract, even though it limits our independence. 
 
 Stable international co-operation cannot come in any other 
 way. Not until we realise the failure of national coercive 
 power for indispensable ends (like the food of our people) 
 shall we cease to idealise power and to put our most intense 
 political emotions (like those of patriotism) behind it. Our 
 traditions will buttress and 'rationalise' the instinct to power 
 until we see that it is mischievous. We shall then begin to 
 discredit it and create new traditions. 
 
 An American sociologist (Professor Giddings of Columbia 
 University) has written thus: 
 
 'So long as we can confidently act, we do not argue; but 
 when we face conditions abounding in uncertainty, or when 
 we are confronted by alternative possibilities, we first hesitate, 
 then feel our way, then guess, and at length venture to reason. 
 Reasoning, accordingly, is that action of the mind to which 
 we resort when the possibilities before us and about us are 
 distributed substantially according to the law of chance occur- 
 rence, or, as the mathematician would say, in accordance with 
 "the normal curve" of random frequency. The moment the 
 curve is obviously skewed, we decide ; if it is obviously skewed 
 from the beginning, by authority, or coercion, our reasoning
 
 172 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 is futile or imperfect. So, in the State, if any interest or 
 coalition of interests is dominant, and can act promptly, it rules 
 by absolutist methods. Whether it is benevolent or cruel, it 
 wastes neither time nor resources upon government by dis- 
 cussion; but if interests are innumerable, and so distributed as 
 to offset one another, and if no great bias or overweighting 
 anywhere appears, government by discussion inevitably arises. 
 The interests can get together only if they talk. If power 
 shall be able to dictate, it will also rule, and the appeal to rea- 
 son will be vain.' 
 
 This means that a realisation of interdependence even 
 though it be subconscious is the basis of the social sense, the 
 feeling and tradition which make possible a democratic 
 society, in which freedom is voluntarily limited for the purpose 
 of preserving any freedom at all. 
 
 It indicates also the relation of certain economic truths to 
 the impulses and instincts that underlie international conflict. 
 We shall excuse or justify or fail to restrain those instincts, 
 unless and until we see that their indulgence stands in the way 
 of the things which we need and must have if society is to 
 live. We shall then discredit them as anti-social, as we have 
 discredited religious fanaticism, and build up a controlling 
 Sittlichkeit. 
 
 The statement of Professor Giddings, quoted above, leaves 
 out certain psychological facts which the present writer in an 
 earlier work has attempted to indicate. He, therefore, makes 
 no apology for reproducing a somewhat long passage bearing 
 on the case before us : 
 
 'The element in man which makes him capable, however 
 feebly, of choice in the matter of conduct, the one fact distin- 
 guishing him from that vast multitude of living things which 
 act unreflectingly, instinctively (in the proper and scientific 
 sense of the word), as the mere physical reaction to external 
 prompting, is something not deeply rooted, since it is the latest
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 175 
 
 addition of all to our nature. The really deeply rooted motives 
 of conduct, those having by far the greatest biological mo- 
 mentum, are naturally the "motives" of the plant and the 
 animal, the kind that marks in the main the acts of all 
 living things save man, the unreflecting motives, those contain- 
 ing no element of ratiocination and free volition, that almost 
 mechanical reaction to external forces which draw the leaves 
 towards the sun-rays and makes the tiger tear its living food 
 limb from limb. 
 
 'To make plain what that really means in human conduct, we 
 must recall the character of that process by which man turns 
 the forces of nature to his service instead of allowing them to 
 overwhelm him. Its essence is a union of individual forces 
 against the common enemy, the forces of nature. Where men 
 in isolated action would have been powerless, and would have 
 been destroyed, union, association, co-operation, enabled them 
 to survive. Survival was contingent upon the cessation of 
 struggle between them, and the substitution therefor of common 
 action. Now, the process both in the beginning and in the sub- 
 sequent development of this device of co-operation is important. 
 It was born of a failure of force. If the isolated force had 
 sufficed, the union of force would not have been resorted to. 
 But such union is not a mere mechanical multiplication of blind 
 energies; it is a combination involving will, intelligence. If 
 mere multiplication of physical energy had determined the re- 
 sult of man's struggles, he would have been destroyed or be 
 the helpless slave of the animals of which he makes his food. 
 He has overcome them as he has overcome the flood and the 
 storm by quite another order of action. Intelligence only 
 emerges where physical force is ineffective. 
 
 'There is an almost mechanical process by which, as the 
 complexity of co-operation grows, the element of physical com- 
 pulsion declines in effectiveness, and is replaced by agreement 
 based on mutual recognition of advantage. There is through 
 every step of this development the same phenomenon: intel-
 
 174 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 ligence and agreement only emerge as force becomes ineffective. 
 The early (and purely illustrative) slave-owner who spent his 
 days seeing that his slave did not run away, and compelling 
 him to work, realised the economic defect of the arrangement : 
 most of the effort, physical and intellectual, of the slave was 
 devoted to trying to escape; that of the owner, trying to pre- 
 vent him. The force of the one, intellectual or physical, 
 cancelled the force of the other, and the energies of both were 
 lost so far as productive value was concerned, and the needed 
 task, the building of the shelter or the catching of the fish, was 
 not done, or badly done, and both went short of food and 
 shelter. But from the moment that they struck a bargain as 
 to the division of labour and of spoils, and adhered to it, the full 
 energies of both were liberated for direct production, and the 
 economic effectiveness of the arrangement was not merely 
 doubled, but probably multiplied many times. But this sub- 
 stitution of free agreement for coercion, with all that it implied 
 of contract, of "what is fair," and all that followed of mutual 
 reliance in the fulfilment of the agreement, was based upon 
 mutual recognition of advantage. Now, that recognition, with- 
 out which the arrangement could not exist at all, required, 
 relatively, a considerable mental effort, due in the first instance 
 to the failure of force. If the slave-owner had had more 
 effective means of physical coercion, and had been able to 
 subdue his slave, he would not have bothered about agreement, 
 and this embryo of human society and justice would not have 
 been brought into being. And in history its development has 
 never been constant, but marked by the same rise and fall of 
 the two orders of motive; as soon as one party or the other 
 obtained such preponderance of strength as promised to be 
 effective, he showed a tendency to drop free agreement and use 
 force; this, of course, immediately provoked the resistance of 
 the other, with a lesser or greater reversion to the earlier profit- 
 less condition. 
 
 'This perpetual tendency to abandon the social arrangement
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 175 
 
 and resort to physical coercion is, of course, easily explainable 
 by the biological fact just touched on. To realise at each turn 
 and permutation of the division of labour that the social ar- 
 rangement was, after all, the best demanded on the part of the 
 two characters in our sketch, not merely control of instinctive 
 actions, but a relatively large ratiocinative effort for which the 
 biological history of early man had not fitted him. The physi- 
 cal act of compulsion only required a stone axe and a quickness 
 of purely physical movement for which his biological history 
 had afforded infinitely long training. The more mentally-mo- 
 tived action, that of social conduct, demanding reflection as to 
 its effect on others, and the effect of that reaction upon our 
 own position and a conscious control of physical acts, is of 
 modern growth; it is but skin-deep; its biological momentum 
 is feeble. Yet on that feeble structure has been built all 
 civilisation. 
 
 'When we remember this how frail are the ultimate foun- 
 dations of our fortress, how much those spiritual elements 
 which alone can give us human society are outnumbered by the 
 pre-human elements is it surprising that those pre-social 
 promptings of which civilisation represents the conquest, 
 occasionally overwhelm man, break up the solidarity of his 
 army, and push him back a stage or two nearer to the brute 
 condition from which he came? That even at this moment he 
 is groping blindly as to the method of distributing in the order 
 of his most vital needs the wealth he is able to wring from the 
 earth; that some of his most fundamental social and political 
 conceptions those, among others, with which we are now deal- 
 ing have little relation to real facts; that his animosities and 
 hatreds are as purposeless and meaningless as his enthusiasms 
 and his sacrifices ; that emotion and effort which quantitatively 
 would suffice amply for the greater tasks before him, for the 
 firmer establishment of justice and well-being, for the cleaning 
 up of all the festering areas of moral savagery that remain, 
 are as a simple matter of fact turned to those purposes hardly
 
 176 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 at all, but to objects which, to the degree to which they succeed, 
 merely stultify each other? 
 
 'Now, this fact, the fact that civilisation is but skin-deep and 
 that man is so largely the unreflecting brute, is not denied by 
 pro-military critics. On the contrary they appeal to it as the 
 first and last justification of their policy. "All your talk will 
 never get over human nature; men are not guided by logic; 
 passion is bound to get the upper hand," and such phrases, are 
 a sort of Greek chorus supplied by the military party to the 
 whole of this discussion. 
 
 'Nor do the militarist advocates deny that these unreflecting 
 elements are anti-social; again, it is part of their case that, 
 unless they are held in check by the "iron hand," they will 
 submerge society in a welter of savagery. Nor do they deny 
 it is hardly possible to do so that the most important securities 
 which we enjoy, the possibility of living in mutual respect of 
 right because we have achieved some understanding of right; 
 all that distinguishes modern Europe from the Europe of 
 (among other things) religious wars and St. Bartholomew mas- 
 sacres, and distinguishes British political methods from those 
 Turkey or Venezuela, are due to the development of moral 
 forces (since physical force is most resorted to in the less 
 desirable age and area), and particularly to the general recog- 
 nition that you cannot solve religious and political problems by 
 submitting them to the irrelevant hazard of physical force. 
 
 'We have got thus far, then: both parties to the discussion 
 are agreed as to the fundamental fact that civilisation is based 
 upon moral and intellectual elements in constant danger of be- 
 ing overwhelmed by more deeply-rooted anti-social elements. 
 The plaiji facts of history past and present are there to show 
 that where those moral elements are absent the mere fact of 
 the possession of arms only adds to the destructiveness of the 
 resulting welter. 
 
 'Yet all attempts to secure our safety by other than military 
 means are not merely regarded with indifference ; they are more
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 177 
 
 generally treated either with a truly ferocious contempt or with 
 definite condemnation. 
 
 'This apparently on two grounds : first, that nothing that we 
 can do will affect the conduct of other nations ; secondly, that, 
 in the development of those moral forces which do undoubtedly 
 give us security, government action which political effort has 
 in view can play no part. 
 
 'Both assumptions are, of course, groundless. The first im- 
 plies not only that our own conduct and our own ideas need 
 no examination, but that ideas current in one country have 
 no reaction on those of another, and that the political action 
 of one State does not affect that of others. "The way to be 
 sure of peace is to be so much stronger than your enemy that 
 he will not dare to attack you," is the type of accepted and 
 much-applauded "axioms" the unfortunate corollary of which 
 is (since both parties can adopt the rule) that peace will only 
 be finally achieved when each is stronger than the other. 
 
 'So thought and acted the man with the stone axe in our 
 illustration, and in both cases the psychological motive is the 
 same : the long-inherited impulse to isolated action, to the so- 
 lution of a difficulty by some simple form of physical movement ; 
 the tendency to break through the more lately acquired habit 
 of action based on social compact and on the mental realisation 
 of its advantage. It is the reaction against intellectual effort 
 and responsible control of instinct, a form of natural protest 
 very common in children and in adults not brought under the 
 influence of social discipline. 
 
 'The same general characteristics are as recognisable in mili- 
 tarist politics within the nation as in the international field. 
 It is not by accident that Prussian and Bismarckian conceptions 
 in foreign policy are invariably accompanied by autocratic 
 conceptions in internal affairs. Both are founded upon a belief 
 in force as the ultimate determinant in human conduct ; a dis- 
 belief in the things of the mind as factors of social control, 
 a disbelief in moral forces that cannot be expressed in "blood 
 
 12
 
 178 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 and iron." The impatience shown by the militarist the world 
 over at government by discussion, his desire to "shut up the 
 talking shops" and to govern autocratically, are but expressions 
 of the same temper and attitude. 
 
 'The forms which Governments have taken and the general 
 method of social management, are in large part the result of 
 its influence. Most Governments are to-day framed far more 
 as instruments for the exercise of physical force than as in- 
 struments of social management. 
 
 'The militarist does not allow that man has free will in the 
 matter of his conduct at all ; he insists that mechanical forces 
 on the one side or the other alone determine which of two 
 given courses shall be taken; the ideas which either hold, the 
 role of intelligent volition, apart from their influence in the 
 manipulation of physical force, play no real part in human 
 society. "Prussianism," Bismarckian "blood and iron," are 
 merely political expressions of this belief in the social field 
 the belief that force alone can decide things; that it is not 
 man's business to question authority in politics or authority in 
 the form of inevitability in nature. It is not a question of who 
 is right, but of who is stronger. "Fight it out, and right will 
 be on the side of the victor" on the side, that is, of the heaviest 
 metal or the heaviest muscle, or, perhaps, on that of the one 
 who has the sun at his back, or some other advantage of external 
 nature. The blind material things not the seeing mind and 
 the soul of man are the ultimate sanction of human society. 
 
 'Such a doctrine, of course, is not only profoundly anti-social, 
 it is anti-human fatal not merely to better international re- 
 lations, but, in the end, to the degree to which it influences 
 human conduct at all, to all those large freedoms which man 
 has so painfully won. 
 
 'This philosophy makes of man's acts, not something into 
 which there enters the element of moral responsibility and free 
 volition, something apart from and above the mere mechanical 
 force of external nature, but it makes man himself a helpless
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 179 
 
 slave; it implies that his moral efforts and the efforts of his 
 mind and understanding are of no worth that he is no more 
 the master of his conduct than the tiger of his, or the grass 
 and the trees of theirs, and no more responsible. 
 
 'To this philosophy the "civilist" may oppose another: that 
 in man there is that which sets him apart from the plants and 
 the animals, which gives him control of and responsibility for 
 his social acts, which makes him the master of his social destiny 
 if he but will it; that by virtue of the forces of his mind he 
 may go forward to the completer conquest, not merely of nature, 
 but of himself, and thereby, and by that alone, redeem human 
 association from the evils that now burden it.' 
 
 From Balance to Community of Power 
 
 Does the foregoing imply that force or compulsion has no 
 place in human society? Not the least in the world. The 
 conclusions so far drawn might be summarised, and certain 
 remaining ones suggested, thus : 
 
 Coercion has its place in human society, and the considera- 
 tions here urged do not imply any sweeping theory of 
 non-resistance. They are limited to the attempt to show that 
 the effectiveness of political power depends upon certain moral 
 elements usually utterly neglected in international politics, 
 and particularly that instincts inseparable from Nationalism as 
 now cultivated and buttressed by prevailing political morality, 
 must condemn political power to futility. Two broad principles 
 of policy are available: that looking towards isolated national 
 power, or that looking towards common power behind a com- 
 mon purpose. The second may fail; it has risks. But the 
 first is bound to fail. The fact would be self-evident but for 
 the push of certain instincts warping our judgment in favour 
 of the first. If mankind decides that it can do better than the 
 first policy, it will do better. If it decides that it cannot, that
 
 180 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 decision will itself make failure inevitable. Our whole social 
 salvation depends upon making the right choice. 
 
 In an earlier chapter certain stultifications of the Balance of 
 Power as applied to the international situation were dealt with. 
 It was there pointed out that if you could get such a thing as 
 a real Balance, that would certainly be a situation tempting 
 the hot-heads of both sides to a trial of strength. An obvious 
 preponderance of power on one side might check the temper 
 of the other. A 'balance' would assuredly act as no check. 
 But preponderance has an even worse result. 
 
 How in practical politics are we to say when a group has 
 become preponderantly powerful? We know to our cost that 
 military power is extremely difficult of precise estimate. It 
 cannot be weighed and balanced exactly. In political practice, 
 therefore, the Balance of Power means a rivalry of power, 
 because each to be on the safe side wants to be just a bit 
 stronger than the other. The competition creates of itself the 
 very condition it sets out to prevent. 
 
 The defect of principle here is not the employment of force. 
 It is the refusal to put force behind a law which may demand 
 our allegiance. The defect lies in the attempt to make our- 
 selves and our own interests by virtue of preponderant power 
 superior to law. 
 
 The feature which stood condemned in the old order was 
 not the possession by States of coercive power. Coercion is 
 an element in every good society that we have heretofore 
 known. The evil of the old order was that in case of States 
 the Power was anti-social ; that it was not pledged to the ser- 
 vice of some code or rule designed for mutual protection, but 
 was the irresponsible possession of each individual, maintained 
 for the express purpose of enabling him to enforce his own 
 views of his own rights, to be judge and executioner in his own 
 case, when his view came into collision with that of others. 
 The old effort meant in reality the attempt on the part of a
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 181 
 
 group of States to maintain in their own favour a preponderance 
 of force of undefined and unlimited purpose. Any opposing 
 group that found itself in a position of manifest inferiority 
 had in fact to submit in international affairs to the decision of 
 the possessor of preponderant power for the time being. It 
 might be used benevolently; in that case the weaker obtained 
 his rights as a gift from the stronger. But so long as the 
 possession of power was unaccompanied by any defined obliga- 
 tion, there could be no democracy of States, no Society of 
 Nations. To destroy the power of the preponderant group 
 meant merely to transpose the situation. The security of one 
 meant always the insecurity of the other. 
 
 The Balance of Power in fact adopts the fundamental premise 
 of the 'might makes right' principle, because it regards power 
 as the ultimate fact in politics; whereas the ultimate fact is 
 the purpose for which the power will be used. Obviously you 
 don't want a Balance of Power between justice and injustice, 
 law and crime ; between anarchy and order. You want a pre- 
 ponderance of power on the side of justice, of law and of 
 order. 
 
 We approach here one of the commonest and most disastrous 
 confusions touching the employment of force in human society, 
 particularly in the Society of Nations. 
 
 It is easy enough to make play with the absurdities and con- 
 tradictions of the si vis pacem para bellum of our militarists. 
 And the hoary falsehood does indeed involve a flouting of all 
 experience, an intellectual astigmatism that almost makes one 
 despair. But what is the practical alternative? 
 
 The anti-militarist who disparages our reliance upon 'force' 
 is almost as remote from reality, for all society as we know it 
 in practice, or have ever known it, does rely a great deal upon 
 the instrument of 'force,' upon restraint and coercion. 
 
 We have seen where the competition in arming among 
 European nations has led us. But it may be argued : suppose 
 you were greatly to reduce all round, cut in half, say, the
 
 182 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 military equipment of Europe, would the power for mutual 
 destruction be sensibly reduced, the security of Europe sensibly 
 greater? 'Adequacy' and 'destructiveness' of armament are 
 strictly relative terms. A country with a couple of battleships 
 has overwhelming naval armament if its opponent has none. 
 A dozen machine-guns or a score of rifles against thousands 
 of unarmed people may be more destructive of life than a hun- 
 dred times that quantity of material facing forces similarly 
 armed. (Fifty rifles at Amritsar accounted for two thousand 
 killed and wounded, without a single casualty on the side of the 
 troops.) Wars once started, instruments of destruction can 
 be rapidly improvised, as we know. And this will be truer 
 still when we have progressed from poison gas to disease germs, 
 as we almost certainly shall. 
 
 The first confusion is this : 
 
 The issue is made to appear as between the 'spiritual' and the 
 'material'; as between material force, battleships, guns, armies 
 on the one side as one method, and 'spiritual' factors, persuasion, 
 moral goodness on the other side, as the contrary method. 
 'Force v. Faith,' as some evangelical writer has put it. The 
 debate between the Nationalist and the Internationalist is usually 
 vitiated at the outset by an assumption which, though generally 
 common to the two parties, is not only unproven, but flatly 
 contrary to the weight of evidence. The assumption is that the 
 military Nationalist, basing his policy upon material force a 
 preponderant navy, a great army, superior artillery can dis- 
 pense with the element of trust, contract, treaty. 
 
 Now to state the issue in that way creates a gross confusion, 
 and the assumption just indicated is quite unjustifiable. The 
 militarist quite as much as the anti-militarist, the nationalist 
 quite as much as the internationalist, has to depend upon a 
 moral factor, 'a contract,' the force of tradition, and of moral- 
 ity. Force cannot operate at all in human affairs without a 
 decision of the human mind and will. Guns do not get pointed 
 and go off without a mind behind them, and as already insisted,
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 183 
 
 the direction in which the gun shoots is determined by the mind 
 which must be reached by a form of moral suasion, discipline, 
 or tradition; the mind behind the gun will be influenced by 
 patriotism in one case, or by a will to rebellion and mutiny, 
 prompted by another tradition or persuasion, in another. And 
 obviously the moral decision, in the circumstances with which 
 we are dealing, goes much deeper and further back. The 
 building of battleships, or the forming of armies, the long 
 preparation which is really behind the material factor, implies 
 a great deal of 'faith.' These armies and navies could never 
 have been brought into existence and be manoeuvred without 
 vast stores of faith and tradition. Whether the army serves 
 the nation, as in Britain or France, or dominates it as in a 
 Spanish-American Republic (or in a somewhat different 
 sense in Prussia), depends on a moral factor: the nature of 
 the tradition which inspires the people from whom the army 
 is drawn. Whether the army obeys its officers or shoots them 
 is determined by moral not material factors, for the officers 
 have not a preponderance of physical force over the men. You 
 cannot form a pirate crew without a moral factor : the agree- 
 ment not to use force against one another, but to act in consort 
 and combine it against the prey. Whether the military material 
 we and France supplied Russia, and the armies France helped 
 to train, are employed against us or the Germans, depends upon 
 certain moral and political factors inside Russia, certain ideas 
 formed in the minds of certain men. It is not a situation of 
 Ideas against Guns, but of ideas using guns. The confusion 
 involves a curious distortion in our reading of the history of the 
 struggle against privilege and tyranny. 
 
 Usually when we speak of the past struggles of the people 
 against tyranny, we have in our minds a picture of the great 
 mass held down by the superior physical force of the tyrant. 
 But such a picture is, of course, quite absurd. For the physical 
 force which held down the people was that which they them- 
 selves supplied. The tyrant had no physical force save that
 
 184 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 with which his victims furnished him. In this struggle of 
 'People v. Tyrant,' obviously the weight of physical force was 
 on the side of the people. This was as true of the slave States 
 of antiquity as it is of the modern autocracies. Obviously the 
 free minority the five or ten or fifteen per cent. of Rome or 
 Egypt, or the governing orders of Prussia or Russia, did not 
 impose their will upon the remainder by virtue of superior 
 physical force, the sheer weight of numbers, of sinew and 
 muscle. If the tyranny of the minority had depended upon its 
 own physical power, it could not have lasted a day. The physi- 
 cal force which the minority used was the physical force of 
 the majority. The people were oppressed by an instrument 
 which they themselves furnished. 
 
 In that picture, therefore, which we make of the mass of 
 mankind struggling against the 'force' of tyranny, we must 
 remember that the force against which they struggled was not 
 in the last analysis physical force at all ; it was their own weight 
 from which they desired to be liberated. 
 
 Do we realise all that this means? It means that tyranny 
 has been imposed, as freedom has been won : through the Mind. 
 
 The small minority imposes itself and can only impose itself 
 by getting first at the mind of the majority the people in one 
 form or another : by controlling it through keeping knowledge 
 from it, as in so much of antiquity, or by controlling the know- 
 ledge itself, as in Germany. It is because the minds of the 
 masses have failed them that they have been enslaved. With- 
 out that intellectual failure of the masses, tyranny could have 
 found no force wherewith to impose its burdens. 
 
 This confusion as to the relation of 'force' to the moral 
 factor is of all confusions most worth while clearing up: and 
 for that purpose we may descend to homely illustrations. 
 
 You have a disorderly society, a frontier mining camp, every 
 man armed, every man threatened by the arms of his neighbour 
 and every man in danger. What is the first need in restoring 
 order? More force more revolvers and bowie knives? No;
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 185 
 
 every man is fully armed already. If there exists in this dis- 
 order the germ of order some attempt will be made to move 
 towards the creation of a police. But what is the indispensable 
 prerequisite for the success of such an effort ? It is the capacity 
 for a nucleus of the community to act in common, to agree 
 together to make the beginnings of a community. And unless 
 that nucleus can achieve agreement a moral and intellectual 
 problem there can be no police force. But be it noted well, 
 this first prerequisite the agreement among a few members 
 necessary to create the first Vigilance Committee is not force ; 
 it is a decision of certain minds determining how force shall be 
 used, how combined. Even when you have got as far as the 
 police, this device of social protection will entirely break down 
 unless the police itself can be trusted to obey the constituted 
 authority, and the constituted authority itself to abide by the 
 law. If the police represents a mere preponderance of power, 
 using that power to create a privileged position for itself or for 
 its employers setting itself, that is, against the community 
 you will sooner or later get resistance which will ultimately 
 neutralise that power and produce a mere paralysis so far as 
 any social purpose is concerned. The existence of the police 
 depends upon general agreement not to use force except as the 
 instrument of the social will, the law to which all are party. 
 This social will may not exist; the members of the vigilance 
 committee or town council or other body may themselves use 
 their revolvers and knives each against the other. Very well, 
 in that case you will get no police. 'Force' will not remedy it. 
 Who is to use the force if no one man can agree with the other ? 
 All along the line here we find ourselves, whatever our pre- 
 disposition to trust only 'force,' thrown back upon a moral 
 factor, compelled to rely upon contract, an agreement, before 
 we can use force at all. 
 
 It will be noted incidentally that effective social force does 
 not rest upon a Balance of Power: society does not need a 
 Balance of Power as between the law and crime; it wants a
 
 186 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 preponderance of power on the side of the law. One does not 
 want a Balance of Power between rival parties in the State. 
 One wants a preponderance of power on behalf of a certain 
 fundamental code upon which all parties, or an immense major- 
 ity of parties, will be agreed. As against the Balance of Power 
 we need a Community of Power to use Mr. Wilson's phrase 
 on the side of a purpose or code of which the contributors to 
 the power are aware. 
 
 One may read in learned and pretentious political works that 
 the ultimate basis of a State is force the army which is the 
 means by which the State's authority is maintained. But who 
 compels the army to carry out the State's orders rather than 
 its own will or the personal will of its commander ? Quis custo- 
 diet ipsos oust odes? The following passage from an address 
 delivered by the present writer in America may perhaps help 
 to make the point clear : 
 
 'When, after the counting of the votes, you ask Mr Wilson 
 to step down from the President's chair, how do you know he 
 will get down ? I repeat, How do you know he will get down ? 
 You think that a foolish and fantastic question ? But, in a great 
 many interesting American republics, Mexico, Venezuela, or 
 Hayti, he would not get down ! You say, "Oh, the army would 
 turn him out." I beg your pardon. It is Mr Wilson who com- 
 mands the army ; it is not the army that commands Mr Wilson. 
 Again, in many American republics a President who can depend 
 on his army, when asked to get out of the Presidency, would 
 reply almost as a matter of course, "Why should I get down 
 when I have an army that stands by me?" 
 
 'How do we know that Mr Wilson, able, we will assume, 
 to count on his army, or, if you prefer, some President par- 
 ticularly popular with the army, will not do that ? Is it physical 
 force which prevents it? If so, whose? You may say: "If he 
 did that, he knows that the country would raise an army of 
 rebellion to turn him out." Well, suppose it did? You raise
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 187 
 
 this army, as they would in Mexico, or Venezuela, and the army 
 turns him out. And your man gets into the Presidential chair, 
 and then, when you think he has stolen enough, you vote him 
 down. He would do precisely the same thing. He would say : 
 "My dear people, as very great philosophers tell you, the State 
 is Force, and as a great French monarch once said. 'I am the 
 State.' J'y suis, j'y reste". And then you would have to get 
 another army of rebellion to turn him out just as they do in 
 Mexico, Venezuela, Hayti, or Honduras.' 
 
 There, then, is the crux of the matter. Every constitution 
 at times breaks down. But if that fact were a conclusive argu- 
 ment for the anarchical arming of each man against the other 
 as preferable to a police enforcing law, there could be no human 
 society. The object of constitutional machinery for change is 
 to make civil war unnecessary. 
 
 There will be no advance save through an improved tradition. 
 Perhaps it will be impossible to improve the tradition. Very 
 well, then the old order, whether among the nations of Europe 
 or the political parties of Venezuela, will remain unchanged. 
 More 'force,' more soldiers, will not do it. The disturbed areas 
 of Spanish-America each show a greater number of soldiers 
 to population than States like Massachusetts or Ohio. So in 
 the international solution. What would it have availed if 
 Britain had quadrupled the quantity of rifles to Koltchak's peas- 
 ant soldiers so long as his land policy caused them to turn their 
 rifles against his Government? Or for France to have 
 multiplied many times the loans made to the Ukraine, if at the 
 same time the loans made to Poland so fed Polish nationalism 
 that the Ukrainians preferred making common cause with 
 the Bolsheviks to becoming satellites of an Imperialist Poland? 
 Do we add to the 'force' of the Alliance by increasing the 
 military power of Serbia, if that fact provokes her to challenge 
 Italy? Do we strengthen it by increasing at one and the 
 same time the military forces of two States say Poland
 
 188 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 * 
 
 and Czecho- Slovakia if the nationalism which we nurse leads 
 finally to those two States turning their forces one against the 
 other? Unless we know the policy (again a thing of the mind, 
 of opinion) which will determine the use to which guns will be 
 put, it does not increase our security it may diminish it to 
 add more guns. 
 
 The Alternative Risks 
 
 We see, therefore, that the alternatives are not in fact a 
 choice between 'material' and 'spiritual' means. The material 
 can only operate, whether for our defence or against us, by 
 virtue of a spiritual thing, the will. 'The direction in which 
 the gun will shoot' a rather important point in its effectiveness 
 as a defensive weapon depends not on the gun but on the 
 mind of the man using it, the moral factor. The two cannot 
 be separated. 
 
 It is untrue to say that the knife is a magic instrument, sav- 
 ing the cancer patient's life: it is the mind of the surgeon using 
 the material thing in a certain way which saves the patient's 
 life. A child or savage who, failing to realise the part played 
 by the invisible element of the surgeon's mind, should deem 
 that a knife of a particular pattern used 'boldly' could be de- 
 pended upon to cure cancer, would merely, of course commit 
 manslaughter. 
 
 It is foolish to talk of an absolute guarantee of security by 
 force, as of guarantee of success in surgical operations by 
 perfection of knives. In both cases we are dealing with instru- 
 ments, indispensable, but not of themselves enough. The mind 
 behind the instrument, technical in one case, social in the other, 
 may in both cases fail ; then we must improve it. Merely to go 
 on sharpening the knife, to go on applying, for instance, to the 
 international problem more 'force,' in the way it has been ap- 
 plied in the past, can only give us in intenser degree the present 
 results.
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 189 
 
 Yet the truth here indicated is perpetually being disregarded, 
 particularly by those who pique themselves on being 'practical.' 
 In the choice of risks by men of the world and realist statesmen 
 the choice which inevitably leads to destruction is for ever being 
 made on grounds of safety; the choice which leads at least in 
 the direction of security is for ever being rejected on the 
 grounds of its danger. 
 
 Why is this ? The choice is instinctive assuredly ; it is not the 
 result of 'hard-headed calculation' though it often professes to 
 be. We speak of it as the 'protective' instinct. But it is a 
 protective instinct which obviously destroys us. 
 
 I am suggesting here that, at the bottom of the choice in 
 favour of the Balance of Power or preponderance as a political 
 method, is neither the desire for safety nor the desire to place 
 'might behind right,' but the desire for domination, the instinct 
 of self-assertion, the anti-social wish to be judge in our own 
 case; and further, that the way out of the difficulty is to dis- 
 cipline this instinct by a better social tradition. To do that we 
 must discredit the old tradition create a different feeling 
 about it; to which end it is indispensable to face frankly 
 the nature of its moral origins; to look its motives in the 
 face. 1 
 
 It is extremely suggestive in this connection that the 'realist' 
 politician, the 'hard-headed practical man,' disdainful of 'Sun- 
 day School standards,' in his defence of national necessity, is 
 quite ready to be contemptuous of national safety and interest 
 
 1 While attempting in this chapter to reveal the essential difference 
 of the two methods open to us, it is hardly necessary to say that in the 
 complexities and cross-currents of human society practical policy can 
 rarely be guided by a single absolute principle. Reference has been 
 made to the putting of the pooled force of the nations behind a prin- 
 ciple or law as the alternative of each attempting to use his own for 
 enforcing his own view. The writer does not suppose for an instant 
 that it is possible immediately to draw up a complete Federal Code of 
 Law for Europe, to create a well-defined European constitution and 
 then raise a European army to defend it, or body of police to enforce 
 it. He is probably the last person in the world likely to believe the 
 political ideas of the European capable of such an agile adaptation.
 
 190 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 when these latter point plainly to a policy of international 
 agreement as against domination. Agreement is then rejected 
 as pusillanimous, and consideration for national interest as 
 placing 'pocket before patriotism/ We are then reminded, even 
 by the most realist of nationalists, that nations live for higher 
 things than 'profit' or even safety. 'Internationalism,' says 
 Colonel Roosevelt, 'inevitably emasculates its sincere votaries/ 
 and 'every civilisation worth calling such' must be based 'on 
 a spirit of intense nationalism/ For Colonel Roosevelt or Gen- 
 eral Wood in America as for Mr Kipling, or Mr Chesterton, 
 or Mr Churchill, or Lord Northciffe, or Mr Bottomley, and a 
 vast host of poets, professors, editors, historians, bishops, 
 publicists of all sorts in England and France, 'Internationalist' 
 and 'Pacifist' are akin to political atheist. A moral consideration 
 now replaces the 'realist.' The metamorphosis is only intelli- 
 gible on the assumption here suggested that both explanations 
 or justifications are a rationalisation of the impulse to power 
 and domination. 
 
 Our political, quite as much as our social, conduct is in the 
 main the result of motives that are mainly unconscious instinct, 
 habit, unquestioned tradition. So long as we find the result 
 satisfactory, well and good. But when the result of fol- 
 lowing instinct is disaster, we realise that the time has 
 come to 'get outside ourselves/ to test our instincts by their 
 social result. We have then to see whether the 'reasons' we 
 have given for our conduct are really its motives. That exam- 
 ination is the first step to rendering the unconscious motive 
 conscious. In considering, for instance, the two methods indi- 
 cated in this chapter, we say, in 'rationalising' our decision, 
 that we chose the lesser of two risks. I am suggesting that in 
 the choice of the method of the Balance of Power our real 
 motive was not desire to achieve security, but domination. It 
 is just because our motives are not mainly intellectual but 
 'instinctive' that the desire for domination is so likely to have 
 played the determining role: for few instincts and innate
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 191 
 
 desires are stronger than that which pushes to 'self-affirmation' 
 the assertion of preponderant force. 
 
 We have indeed seen that the Balance of Power means in 
 practice the determination to secure a preponderance of power. 
 What is a 'Balance?' The two sides will not agree on that, 
 and each to be sure will want it tilted in its favour. We decline 
 to place ourselves within the power of another who may differ 
 from us as to our right. We demand to be stronger, in order 
 that we may be judge in our own case. This means that we 
 shall resist the claim of others to exactly the same thing. 
 
 The alternative is partnership. It means trust. But we have 
 seen that the exercise of any form of force, other than that 
 which one single individual can wield, must involve an element 
 of 'trust.' The soldiers must be trusted to obey the officers, 
 since the former have by far the preponderance of force; the 
 officers must be trusted to obey the constitution instead of 
 challenging it; the police must be trusted to obey the author- 
 ities ; the Cabinet must be trusted to obey the electoral decision ; 
 the members of an alliance to work together instead of against 
 one another, and so on. Yet the assumption of the 'Power 
 Politician' is that the method which has succeeded (notably 
 within the State) is the 'idealistic* but essentially unpractical 
 method in which security and advantage are sacrificed to 
 Utopian experiment; while the method of competitive arma- 
 ment, however distressing it may be to the Sunday Schools, 
 is the one that gives us real security. 'The way to be sure 
 of preserving peace/ says Mr Churchill, 'is to be so much 
 stronger than your enemy that he won't dare to attack you.' 
 In other words it is obvious that the way for two people to 
 keep the peace is for each to be stronger than the other. 
 
 'You may have made your front door secure' says Marshal 
 Foch, arguing for the Rhine frontier, 'but you may as well make 
 sure by having a good high garden wall as well.' 
 
 'Make sure,' that is the note si vis pacem. . . . And he 
 can be sure that 'the average practical man,' who prides himself
 
 192 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 on 'knowing human nature' and 'distrusting theories' will 
 respond to the appeal. Every club smoking room will decide 
 that 'the simple soldier' knows his business and has judged 
 human forces aright. 
 
 Yet of course the simple truth is that the 'hard-headed 
 soldier' has chosen the one ground upon which all experience, 
 all the facts, are against him. Then how is he able to 'get 
 away with it' to ride off leaving at least the impression of 
 being a sternly practical unsentimental man of the world by 
 virtue of having propounded an aphorism which all practical 
 experience condemns? Here is Mr Churchill. He is talking 
 to hard-headed Lancashire manufacturers. He desires to show 
 that he too is no theorist, that he also can be hard-headed and 
 practical. And he who really does know the mind of the 
 'hard-headed business man' is perfectly aware that the best 
 road to those hard heads is to propound an arrant absurdity, to 
 base a proposed line of policy on the assumption of a physical 
 impossibility, to follow a will-o'-the-wisp which in all recorded 
 history has led men into a bog. 
 
 They applaud Mr Churchill, not because he has put before 
 them a cold calculation of relative risk in the matter of main- 
 taining peace, an indication, where, on the whole, the balance 
 of safety lies; Mr Churchill, of course, knows perfectly well 
 that, while professing to do that, he has been doing nothing 
 of the sort. He has, in reality, been appealing to a sentiment, 
 the emotion which is strongest and steadiest in the 'hard-faced 
 men' who have elbowed their way to the top in a competitive 
 society. He has 'rationalised' that competitive sentiment of 
 domination by putting forward a 'reason' which can be avowed 
 to them and to others. 
 
 Colonel Roosevelt managed to inject into his reasons for 
 predominance a moral strenuousness which Mr Churchill does 
 not achieve. 
 
 The following is a passage from one of the last important 
 speeches made by Colonel Roosevelt twice President of the
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 193 
 
 United States and one of the out-standing figures in the world 
 in his generation : 
 
 'Friends, be on your guard against the apostles of weakness 
 and folly when peace comes. They will tell you that this is 
 the last great war. They will tell you that they can make 
 paper treaties and agreements and guarantees by which brutal 
 and unscrupulous men will have their souls so softened that 
 weak and timid men won't have anything to fear and that brave 
 and honest men won't have to prepare to defend themselves. 
 
 'Well, we have seen that all such treaties are worth less than 
 scraps of paper when it becomes to the interests of powerful 
 and ruthless militarist nations to disregard them. . . . After 
 this War is over, these foolish pacifist creatures will again 
 raise their piping voices against preparedness and in favour 
 of patent devices for maintaining peace without effort. Let 
 us enter into every reasonable agreement which bids fair to 
 minimise the chances of war and to circumscribe its area. 
 . . . But let us remember it is a hundred times more important 
 for us to prepare our strength for our own defence than to 
 enter any of these peace treaties, and that if we thus prepare 
 our strength for our own defence we shall minimise the 
 chances of war as no paper treaties can possibly minimise 
 them; and we shall thus make our views effective for peace 
 and justice in the world at large as in no other way can they 
 be made effective.' * 
 
 Let us dispose of one or two of the more devastating confu- 
 sions 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 
 
 'Delivered at Portland, Maine, on March 28th, 1918; reported in 
 New York Times, March 29th. 
 
 18
 
 194 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 of internationalism is the conviction that without it war is in- 
 evitable, 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 com- 
 mon 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 'gen- 
 erous' 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 under- 
 stands 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-Bottom- 
 ley 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 ex- 
 tremely 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
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 195 
 
 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 ac- 
 cordingly 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 com- 
 mand 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 se- 
 curity 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.
 
 196 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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, unfor- 
 tunately, 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, fun- 
 damentally, 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 cre- 
 ates 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 : 
 
 'If, as in the past, nations must look for their future security 
 chiefly to their own strength and resources, then inevitably, in 
 the name of the needs of national defence, there will be claims 
 for strategic frontiers and territories with raw material which 
 do violence to the principle of nationality. Afterwards those
 
 RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT 197 
 
 who suffer from such violations would be opposed to the League 
 of Nations, because it would consecrate the injustice of which 
 they would be the victims. A refusal to trust to the League of 
 Nations, and a demand for "material" guarantees for future 
 safety, will set up that very distrust which will afterwards be 
 appealed to as justification for regarding the League as imprac- 
 ticable because it inspires no general confidence. A bold "Act 
 of Political Faith" in the League will justify itself by making 
 the League a success; but, equally, lack of faith will justify 
 itself by ruining the League/ 
 
 That is why, when in the past the realist statesman has some- 
 times 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: 
 
 'I am climbing the Alps, and have had the ill luck to work 
 myself into a position from which the only escape is by a ter- 
 rible leap. Being without similar experience, I have no evidence 
 of my ability to perform it successfully ; but hope and confidence 
 in myself make me sure that I shall not miss my aim, and nerve 
 my feet to execute what, without those subjective emotions, 
 would have been impossible. 
 
 'But suppose that, on the contrary, the emotions ... of mis- 
 trust predominate Why, then, I shall hesitate so long that at 
 
 last, exhausted and trembling, and launching myself in a mo- 
 ment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the abyss. In
 
 198 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 this case, and it is one of an immense class, the part of wisdom 
 is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of the in- 
 dispensable, preliminary conditions of the realisation of its 
 object. There are cases where faith creates its own justification. 
 Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; 
 doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish.'
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 
 
 ' Human Nature is always what it is' 
 
 'You may argue as much as you like. All the logic chopping 
 will never get over the fact that human nature is always what 
 it is. Nations will always fight. . . . always retaliate at victory.' 
 
 If that be true, and our pugnacities, and hates, and instincts 
 generally, are uncontrollable, and they dictate conduct, no more 
 is to be said. We are the helpless victims of outside forces, and 
 may as well surrender, without further discussion, or political 
 agitation, or propaganda. For if those appeals to our minds 
 can neither determine the direction nor modify the manifesta- 
 tion of our innate instincts, nor influence conduct, one rather 
 wonders at our persistence in them. 
 
 Why so many of us find an obvious satisfaction in this fatal- 
 ism, so patently want it to be true, and resort to it in such 
 convenient disregard of the facts, has been in some measure 
 indicated in the preceding chapter. At bottom it comes to this : 
 that it relieves us of so much trouble and responsibility ; the life 
 of instinct and emotion is so easily flowing a thing, and that of 
 social restraints and rationalised decisions so cold and dry 
 and barren. 
 
 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 re- 
 straint of impulse by calculation and reason ; if our choice were 
 
 199
 
 200 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 can- 
 not in any way be determined by our intelligence. 'A man's 
 impulses are not fixed from the beginning by his native dis- 
 position: within certain limits they are profoundly modified 
 by his circumstances and way of life.' * 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 instinc- 
 
 1 Bertrand Russell : Principles of Social Reconstruction. 
 
 Mr. Trotter in Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, says : 
 
 'We see one instinct producing manifestations directly hostile to each 
 other prompting to ever-advancing developments of altruism while it 
 necessarily leads to any new product of advance being attacked. It 
 shows, moreover . . . that a gregarious species rapidly developing a 
 complex society can be saved from inextricable confusion only by the 
 appearance of reason and the application of it to life. (p. 46.) 
 
 . . . 'The conscious direction of man's destiny is plainly indicated 
 by Nature as the only mechanism by which the social life of so complex 
 an animal can be guaranteed against disaster and brought to yield its 
 full possibilities, (p. 162.) 
 
 . . . 'Such a directing intelligence or group of intelligences would 
 take into account before all things the biological character of man. . . . 
 It would discover when natural inclinations in man must be indulged, 
 and would make them respectable, what inclinations in him must be 
 controlled for the advantage of the species, and make them insignificant.' 
 (p. 162-3.)
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 201 
 
 tive 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 im- 
 possible 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,
 
 202 . THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 man- 
 ageable, 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 pv.rt 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 repres- 
 sion 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. 1 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 origin- 
 ally 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, 
 
 1 The opening sentence of a five volume History of the Peace Confer- 
 ence of Paris, edited by H. W. V. Temperley, and published under the 
 auspices of the Institute of International Affairs, is as follows : 
 
 The war was a conflict between the principles of freedom and of 
 lutocracy, between the principles of moral influence and of material 
 force, of government by consent and of government by compulsion.'
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 203 
 
 when they had the power to realise them (again so far as 
 physical force can give us power,) showed complete indiffer- 
 ence, 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 be- 
 come 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, 1 where it suits our momentary 
 political or military interest. The very justification of 'necess- 
 ity,' 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 Jn_19Jt9, 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 
 
 1 Foremost as examples stand out the claims of German Austria to. 
 federate with Germany; the German population of the Southern Tyrol \ 
 with Austria; the Bohemian Germans with Austria; the Transyl- 
 vanian Magyars with Hungary; the Bulgarians of Macedonia, the Bul- 
 garians of the Dobrudja, and the Bulgarians of Western Thrace with 
 Bulgaria; the Serbs of the Serbian Banat with Yugo-Slavia ; the 
 Lithuanians and Ukrainians for freedom from Polish dominion.
 
 204 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 the War for the destruction of militarism, and to make dis- 
 armament 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 elementTag^the systematic arming of African savages 
 
 " ^" - i r*^ 
 
 for European warfare. We fought to make the secret bring- 
 ing 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. 1 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 2 
 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 
 
 'We know now (see the interview with M. Paderewski in the New 
 York W or Id) that we compelled Poland to remain at war when she 
 wanted to make peace. It has never been fully explained why the 
 Prinkipo peace policy urged by Mr Lloyd George as early as December 
 1918 was defeated, and why instead we furnished munitions, tanks, 
 aeroplanes, poison gas, military missions and subsidies in turn to 
 Koltchak, Denikin, Yudenitch, Wrangel, and Poland. We prolonged 
 the blockade which in the early phases forbade Germany that was 
 starving to catch fish in the Baltic, and stopped medicine and hospital 
 supplies to the Russians for fear, apparently, of the very thing which 
 might have helped to save Europe, the economic co-operation of Russia 
 and Central Europe. 
 
 1 'We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling 
 towards them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon 
 their impulse that their government acted in entering this war.' 
 'We are glad ... to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world, 
 and for the liberation of its peoples, the German people 
 for the rights of nations great and small ... to choose 
 life.' (President Wilson, Address to Congress, April 2nd, 
 
 of the world, . 
 
 )les included : \ 
 
 their way of \^ 
 i, 1917).
 
 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 be- 
 fore their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible 
 to arouse the interest of the Four.' * At the beginning of the 
 War we invoked high heaven to witness the danger and anom- 
 aly 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^fooTate 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 prosti- 
 tution of art to 'hymjjs_O-Lhate' was vile and despicable. We 
 copied that governmental organisation of hatred, and famous 
 
 1 The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 211.
 
 206 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 English authors duly produce our hymns of hate. 1 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. 2 
 
 Many will dissent from this indictment. Yet its most im- 
 portant 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, un- 
 imaginable misery, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Mr. 
 Huddleston writes: 
 
 'We read these things. They make not the smallest im- 
 pression on us. Why? How is it that we are not horrified 
 and do not resolve that not for a single day shall any pre- 
 ventable evil exist? How is it, that, on the contrary, for 
 two years we have been cheerfully engaged in intensifying 
 the sum of human suffering ? Why are we so heedless? Why 
 are we so callous? Why do we allow to be committed, in 
 our name, a thousand atrocities, and to be written, in our 
 name and for our delectation, a million vile words which re- 
 veal the most amazing lack cither of feeling or of common 
 sense ? 
 
 'There have been crimes perpetrated by the politicians 
 
 1 See quotations from Sir A. Conan Doyle, later in this Chapter. 
 'See, e.g., the facts as to the repression of Socialism in America, 
 Chapter V.
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 207 
 
 by all the politicians which no condemnation could fitly charac- 
 terise. But the peoples must be blamed. The peoples sup- 
 port the war-making politicians. It is my business to follow 
 the course of events day by day, and it is sometimes difficult 
 to stand back and take a general view. \Vhenever I do so, I 
 am appalled at the blundering or the wickedness of the leaders 
 of the world. Without party prejudices or personal predilec- 
 tions, an impartial observer, I cannot conceive how it is possible 
 to be always blind to the truth, the glaring truth, that since 
 the Armistice we .have .never sought to make peace, but have 
 sought only some pretext and method for prolonging the 
 War. 
 
 'Hate exudes from every journal in speaking of certain 
 peoples a weary hate, a conventional hate, a hate which is 
 always whipping itself into a passion. It is, perhaps, more 
 strictly, apathy masquerading as hate which is worst of all. 
 The people are blase: they seek only bread and-xircuses- for 
 themselves. They regard no bread for others as a rather bor- 
 ing circus for themselves.' 
 
 Mr. Huddleston was present throughout most of the Con- 
 ference. This is his verdict: 
 
 '. . . Cynicism soon became naked. In the East all pre- 
 tence of righteousness was abandoned. Every successive 
 Treaty was more frankly the expression of shameful appe- 
 tites. There was no pretence of conscience in politics. Force 
 rules without disguise. What was still more amazing was 
 the way in which strife was stirred up gratuitously. What 
 advantage was it, even for a moment, to any one to foment 
 civil war in Russia, to send against the unhappy, famine- 
 stricken country army after army? The result was so obvi- 
 ously to consolidate the Bolshevist Government around which 
 were obliged to rally all Russians who had the spirit of na- 
 tionality. It seemed as if everywhere we were plotting our
 
 208 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 own ruin and hastening our own end. A strange dementia 
 seized our rulers, who thought peace, replenishment of empty 
 larders, the fraternisation of sorely tired nations, ignoble 
 and delusive objects. It appeared that war was for evermore 
 to be humanity's fate. 
 
 'Time after time I saw excellent opportunities of universal 
 peace deliberately rejected. There was somebody to wreck 
 every Prinkipo, every Spa. It was almost with dismay that 
 all Europeans who had kept their intelligence unclouded saw 
 the frustration of peace, and heard the peoples applaud the 
 men who frustrated peace. I care not whether they still enjoy 
 esteem : history will judge them harshly and will judge harshly 
 the turbulence which men plumed themselves on creating two 
 years after the War/ 
 
 As to the future: 
 
 'If it is certain that France must force another fight with 
 Germany in a short span of years, if she pursues her present 
 policy of implacable antagonism; if it is certain that England 
 is already carefully seeking the European equilibrium, and 
 that a responsible minister has already written of the possi- 
 bility of a military accord with Germany; if there has been 
 seen, owing to the foolish belief of the Allies in force a 
 belief which increases in inverse ratio to the Allied possession 
 of effective force the re-birth of Russian militarism, as there 
 will assuredly be seen the re-birth of German militarism; if 
 there are quarrels between Greece and Italy, between Italy and 
 the Jugo-Slavs, between Hungary and Austria, between every 
 tiny nation and its neighbour, even between England and 
 France, it is because, when war has once been invoked, it 
 cannot easily b,_xorciecl. It will linger long in Europe: 
 the straw will smoulder and at any moment may break into 
 flame. . . . 
 
 'This is not lurid imagining: it is as logical as a piece of
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 209 
 
 Euclidean reasoning. Only by a violent effort to change our 
 fashion of seeing things can it be averted. War-making is now 1 
 a habit.' 
 
 And as to the outcome on the mind of the people : 
 
 'The war has killed elasticity of mind, independence of 
 judgment, and liberty of expression. We think not so much 
 of the truth as of conforming to the tacitly accepted fiction 
 of the hour. 1 
 
 Sir Philip Gibbs renders on the whole a similar verdict. He 
 says : 
 
 The people of all countries were deeply involved in the 
 general blood-guiltiness of Europe. They made no passion- 
 ate appeal in the name of Christ or in the name of humanity 
 for the cessation of the slaughter of boys and the suicide of 
 nations, and for a reconciliation of peoples upon terms of 
 some more reasonable argument than that of high explosives. 
 Peace proposals from the Pope, from Germany, from Aus- 
 tria, were rejected with fierce denunciation, most passionate 
 scorn, as "peace plots" and "peace traps," not without the 
 terrible logic of the vicious circle, because indeed, there was 
 no sincerity of renunciation in some of those offers of peace, 
 and the Powers opposite to us were simply trying our strength 
 and our weakness in order to make their own kind of peace, 
 which should be that of conquest. The gamblers, playing 
 the game of "poker," with crowns and armies as their stakes, 
 were upheld generally by the peoples, who would not abate 
 one point of pride, one fraction of hate, one claim of ven- 
 geance, though all Europe should fall in ruin, and the last 
 legions of boys be massacred. There was no call from people 
 to people across the frontiers of hostility. "Let us end this 
 
 1 The Atlantic Monthly, November 1920. 
 M
 
 210 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 homicidal mania. Let us get back to sanity and save our 
 younger sons. Let us hand over to justice those who will 
 continue the slaughter of our youth!" There was no for- 
 giveness, no generous instinct, no large-hearted common sense 
 in any combatant nation of Europe. Like wolves they had 
 their teeth in one another's throats, and would not let go, 
 though all bloody and exhausted, until one should fall at the 
 last gasp, to be mangled by the others. Yet in each nation, 
 even in Germany, there were men and women who saw the 
 folly of the war and the crime of it, and desired to end it by 
 some act of renunciation and repentance, and by some uplift- 
 ing of the people's spirit to vault the frontiers of hatred and 
 the barbed wire which hedged in patriotism. Some of them 
 were put in prison. Most of them saw the impossibility of 
 counteracting the forces of insanity which had made the world 
 mad, and kept silent, hiding their thoughts and brooding over 
 them. The leaders of the nations continued to use mob-passion 
 as their argument and justification, excited it anew when its 
 fires burned low, focussed it upon definite objectives, and gave 
 it a sense of righteousness by the high-sounding watchwords 
 of liberty, justice, honour, and retribution. Each side pro- 
 claimed Christ as its captain, and invoked the blessing and 
 aid of the God of Christendom, though Germans were allied 
 with Turks, and France was full of black and yellow men. 
 The German people did not try to avert their ruin by de- 
 nouncing the criminal acts of their War Lords nor by de- 
 ploring the cruelties they had committed. The Allies did not 
 help them to do so, because of their lust for bloody vengeance 
 and their desire for the spoils of victory. The peoples shared 
 the blame of their rulers because they were not nobler than 
 their rulers. They cannot now plead ignorance or betrayal 
 by false ideals which duped them, because character does 
 not depend on knowledge, and it was the character of European 
 peoples which failed in the crisis of the world's fate, so 
 that they followed the call-back of the beast in the jungle
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 211 
 
 rather than the voice of the Crucified One whom they pre- 
 tended to adore.' 
 
 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: 
 
 'I think the clergy of all nations, apart from a heroic and 
 saintly few, subordinated their faith, which is a gospel of 
 charity, to national limitations. They were patriots before 
 they were priests, and their patriotism was sometimes as 
 limited, as narrow, as fierce, and as blood-thirsty as that of 
 the people who looked to them for truth and light. They 
 were often fiercer, narrower, and more desirous of vengeance 
 than the soldiers who fought, because it is now a known truth 
 that the soldiers, German and Austrian, French and Italian 
 and British, were sick of the unending slaughter long before -v 
 the ending of the war, and would have made a peace more \ 
 fair than that which now prevails if it had been put to the 
 common vote in the trenches; whereas the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, the Archbishop of Cologne, and the clergy who 
 spoke from many pulpits in many nations under the Cross 
 of Christ, still stoked up the fires of hate and urged the 
 armies to go on fighting "in the cause of Justice," "for the de- 
 fence of the Fatherland," "for Christian righteousness," to the 
 bitter end. Those words are painful to write, but as I am 
 writing this book for truth's sake, at all cost, I let them stand.' * 
 
 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 
 
 1 Realities of War, pp. 426-7, 441.
 
 212 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 so- 
 briety.' 
 
 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 reason- 
 ing, 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 polities' 
 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
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 213 
 
 trust in the 'naive 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 occupa- 
 tion 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 modifi- 
 cations 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 crimi- 
 nals, vile as we believe their offences to be. We are not go- 
 ing 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
 
 214 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 un- 
 prepared. So with a League of Nations. The plan now sup- 
 ported 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 Con- 
 servatives 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 selfish-
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 215 
 
 ness 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 de- 
 sired 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 na- 
 tionalism 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 viola- 
 tion 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
 
 216 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 crimi- 
 nal's dying for some foul crime, is the very thing which pre- 
 vents 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 mis- 
 used, 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 cer- 
 tainly 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 suf- 
 fer 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
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 217 
 
 lynching testifies. ('The innocence of Dreyfus would be a 
 crime,' said a famous anti-Drey fusard.) 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, conse- 
 quently, that if it has not been aroused, or has attached it- 
 self 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 inno- 
 cent 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 de- 
 bate on the purposes and aims of the War and their realisa- 
 tion that delivered public opinion into the keeping of the ex- 
 tremest 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
 
 218 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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. 1 But virtually to sub- 
 press 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 discus- 
 sion, 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 an- 
 other 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, includ- 
 ing 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 de- 
 clared: '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 internation- 
 alism, 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 extermi- 
 
 1 Is it necessary to say that the present writer does not accept it ?
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 219 
 
 nated 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 some- 
 thing to be said in criticism of their views. But in the mat- 
 ter 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. 1 The British public 
 were affected by it. Sir Edward Grey's policy began to 
 appear weak, anaemic, 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 be- 
 come 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 dis- 
 plays 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 
 
 1 The argument is not invalidated in the least by sporadic instances of 
 liberal activity here an isolated article or two. For iteration is the 
 essence of propaganda as an opinion forming factor.
 
 220 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 movement in America irt 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. Ameri- 
 can 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. 1 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 
 
 1 In an article in the North American Review, just before America's 
 entrance into the War, I attempted to indicate the danger by making 
 one character in an imaginary symposium say : 'One talks of "Wilson's 
 programme," "Wilson's policy." There will be only one programme 
 and one policy possible as soon as the first American soldier sets foot 
 on European soil : Victory. Bottomley and Maxse will be milk and 
 water to what we shall see America producing. We shall have a 
 settlement so monstrous that Germany will offer any price to Russia 
 and Japan for their future help . . . America's part in the War will 
 absorb about all the attention and interest that busy people can give 
 to public affairs. They will forget about these international arrange- 
 ments concerning the sea, the League of Peace the things for whicfi 
 the country entered the War. In fact if Wilson so much as tries to 
 remind them of the objects of the War he will be accused of pro- 
 Germanism, and you will have their ginger Press demanding that the 
 "old gang" be "combed out" '
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 221 
 
 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 put- 
 ting into force of workable policies. For while Versailles 
 could do what it liked in matters that did not touch the popu- 
 lar passion of the moment, in the matters that did, the states- 
 men 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 thouand 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 Armis- 
 tice 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, miscalcu- 
 lated 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, 1 
 
 1 'If we take the extremist possibility, and suppose a revolution in 
 Germany or in South Germany, and the replacement of the Hohen- 
 zollerns in all or part of Germany by a Republic, then I am convinced 
 that for republican Germany there would be not simply forgiveness, but 
 a warm welcome back to the comity of nations. The French, British, 
 Belgians, and Italians, and every civilised force in Russia would tumble 
 over one another in their eager greeting of this return to sanity.' 
 (What is coming? p. 198).
 
 222 
 
 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. 1 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 re- 
 prisal upon the German people, who have themselves suffered 
 all things in this War which they did not choose.' The state- 
 ment made by the German rulers that Germany was fighting 
 against a harsh and destructive fate at the hands of the vic- 
 tors, 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 Armis- 
 tice 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 Ger- 
 mans at our mercy. 2 
 
 1 See the memoranda published in The Secrets of Crewe House. 
 
 1 Mr Keynes is not alone in declaring that the Treaty makes of our 
 armistice engagements a 'scrap of paper.' The Round Table, in an 
 article which aims at justifying the Treaty as a whole, says: 'Opin- 
 ions may differ as to the actual letter of the engagements which we 
 made at the Armistice, but the spirit of them is undoubtedly strained in 
 some of the detailed provisions of the peace. There is some honest 
 ground for the feeling manifested in Germany that the terms on which 
 she laid down her arms have not been observed in all respects.' 
 
 A very unwilling witness to our obligations is Mr Leo Maxse, who 
 writes (National Review, February, 1921) : 
 
 'Thanks to the American revelations we are in a better position to 
 appreciate the trickery and treachery of the pre-Armistice negotiations, 
 as well as the hideous imposture of the Paris Peace Conference, which, 
 we now learn for the first time, was governed by the self-denying 
 ordinance of the previous November, when, unbeknown to the coun- 
 tries betrayed, the Fourteen Points had been inextricably woven into
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 223 
 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 atro- 
 phied. The use of the word 'opinion,' with its implication 
 of a rationalised process of intellectual decision, may be mis- 
 leading. 'Public opinion' is here used as the sum of the forces 
 which become articulate in a country, and which a govern- 
 ment is compelled not necessarily to obey, but to take into ac- 
 count. (A government may bamboozle it or dodge it, but it 
 cannot openly oppose it.) 
 
 And when reference is made to the force of ideas Na- 
 tionalist 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. 1 But in a 
 world where the great majority are still condemned to in- 
 tense physical labour in order to live at all, where peoples as 
 a whole are overworked, harassed, pre-occupied, it is im- 
 
 the Armistice. Thus was John Bull effectively 'dished' of every farthing 
 of his war costs.' 
 
 As a fact, of course, the self-denying ordinance was not 'unbeknown 
 to the countries betrayed.' The Fourteen Points commitment was quite 
 open; the European Allies could have repudiated them, as, on one 
 point, Britain did. 
 
 1 A quite considerable school, who presumably intend to be taken 
 seriously, would have us believe that the French Revolution, the Russian 
 Revolution, the English Trade Union Movement are all the work of a 
 small secret Jewish Club or Junta their work, that is, in the sense that 
 but for them the Revolutions or Revolutionary movements would not 
 have taken place. These arguments are usually brought by 'intense 
 nationalists' who also believe that sentiments like nationalism are so 
 deeply rooted that mere ideas or theories can never alter them.
 
 224 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 possible that ideas like those of Karl Marx should be sub- 
 jected 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 predomi- 
 nating 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 direc- 
 tion 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 of- 
 fence, 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 respon- 
 sible for it, or have prevented it, are killed with a clear con-
 
 science 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 concep- 
 tion 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 'Bri- 
 tain,' (i.e. British people) is a bloodthirsty monster who de- 
 lights 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 char- 
 woman 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 de- 
 mentia. 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 govern- 
 ment 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 col- 
 lectivity. 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. 1 The conception has doubtless arisen out of 
 something protective, some instinct useful, indispensable to 
 
 *An American playwright has indicated amusingly with what in- 
 genuity we can create a 'collectivity.' One of the characters in the 
 play applies for a chauffeur's job. A few questions reveal the fact 
 that he does not know anything about it. 'Why does he want to be a 
 chauffeur?' 'Well, I'll tell you, boss. Last year I got knocked down 
 by an automobile and badly hurt. And I made up my mind that 
 when I came out of the hospital I'd get a bit of my own back. Get 
 even by knocking over a few guys, see ?' A policy of 'rq^risals,' in fact.
 
 226 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 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 re- 
 minder 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 indi- 
 cated 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 in- 
 tensive 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. 1 With reference to stories of German cruelty, 
 he said:- 
 
 'Hate has its uses in war, as the Germans have long dis- 
 covered. It steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other 
 emotion can do. So much do they feel this that Germans are 
 constrained to invent all sorts of reasons for hatred against 
 us, who have, in truth, never injured them in any way save 
 that history and geography both place us before them and 
 their ambitions. To nourish hatred they invent every lie 
 against us, and so they attain a certain national solidity. . . . 
 
 1 December 26th, 1917.
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 227 
 
 'The bestiality of the German nation has given us a driving 
 power which we are not using, and which would be very 
 valuable in this stage of the war. Scatter the facts. Put them 
 in red-hot fashion. Do not preach to the solid south, who need 
 no conversion, but spread the propaganda wherever there are 
 signs of any intrigue on the Tyne, the Clyde, in the Mid- 
 lands, above all in Ireland, and French Canada. Let us pay 
 no attention to platitudinous Bishops or gloomy Deans or 
 any other superior people, who preach against retaliation or 
 whole-hearted warfare. We have to win, and we can only win 
 by keeping up the spirit of resolution of our own people.' 
 
 Particularly does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle urge that the 
 munition workers who were, it will be remembered, largely 
 woman be stimulated by accounts of atrocities: 
 
 'The munition workers have many small vexations to en- 
 dure, and their nerves get sadly frayed. They need strong 
 elemental emotions to carry them on. Let pictures be made of 
 this and other incidents. Let them be hung in every shop. 
 Let them be distributed thickly in the Sinn Fein districts of 
 Ireland, and in the hot-beds of Socialism and Pacifism in 
 England and Scotland. The Irishman has always been of a 
 most chivalrous nature.' 
 
 It is possible that Sinn Fein has now taken to heart this 
 counsel as to the use that may be made of cruelties committed 
 by the enemy in war. 
 
 Now there is no reason to doubt the truth of atrocities, 
 whether they concern the horrible ill-treatment of prisoners 
 in war-time of which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes, or 
 the burning alive of negro women in peace time in Texas and 
 Alabama, or the flogging of women in India, or reprisals by 
 British soldiers in Ireland, or by Red Russians against White 
 and White against Red. Every story may be true. And if 
 each side told the whole truth, instead of a part of it, these
 
 228 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 atrocities would help us towards an understanding of this 
 complex nature of ours. But we never do tell the whole truth. 
 Always in war-time does each side leave out two things essen- 
 tial to the truth: the good done by the enemy and the evii 
 done by ourselves. If that elementary condition of truth were 
 fulfilled, these pictures of cruelty, bestiality, obscenity, rape, 
 sadism, sheer ferocity, might possibly tell us this: 'There is 
 the primeval tiger in us; man's history and especially the 
 history of his wars is full of these warnings of the depths 
 to which he can descend. Those ten thousand men and 
 women of pure English stock gloating over the helpless 
 prisoners whom they are slowly roasting alive, are not normally 
 savages. 1 Most of them are kindly and decent folk. These 
 stories of the September massacres of the Terror no more prove 
 French nature to be depraved than the history of the Inquisi- 
 tion, or of Ireland or India, proves Spanish or British nature 
 to be depraved.' 
 
 But the truth is never so told. It was not so told during 
 the War. Day after day, month after month, we got these 
 selected stories. In the Press, in the cinemas, in Church serv- 
 ices, they were related to us. The message the atrocity car- 
 ried was not : here is a picture of what human nature is capable 
 of; let us be on our guard that nothing similar marks our 
 history. That was neither the intention nor the result of 
 propaganda. It said in effect and was intended to say: 
 
 'This lecherous brute abusing a woman is a picture of Ger- 
 many. All Germans are like that ; and no people but Germans 
 are like that. That sort of thing never happens in other 
 armies; cruelty, vengeance, and blood-lust are unknown in the 
 Allied forces. That is why we are at war. Remember this 
 at the peace table.' 
 
 That falsehood was conveyed by what the Press and the 
 cinema systematically left out. While they told us of every 
 vile thing done by the enemy, they told us of not one act of 
 
 1 A thing which happens about once a week in the United States.
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 229 
 
 kindness or mercy among all those hundred million during 
 the years of war. 
 
 The suppression of everything good of the enemy was 
 paralleled by the suppression of everything evil done by our 
 side. You may search Press and cinemas in vain for one 
 single story of brutality committed by Serbian, Rumanian, 
 Greek, Italian, French, or Russian until the last in time be- 
 came an enemy. Then suddenly our papers were full of 
 Russian atrocities. At first these were Bolshevik atrocities 
 only, and of the 'White' troops we heard no evil. Then 
 when later the self -same Russian troops that had fought on our 
 side during the War fought Poland, our papers were full of 
 the atrocities inflicted on Poles. 
 
 By the daily presentation during years of a picture which 
 makes the enemy so entirely bad as not to be human at all, 
 and ourselves entirely good, the whole nature of the problem 
 is changed. Admit these premises, and policies like those 
 proposed by Mr Wells become sheer rubbish. They are 
 based on the assumption that Germans are accessible to ordin- 
 ary human influences like other human beings. But every day 
 for years we have been denying that premise. If the daily 
 presentation of the facts is a true presentation, the New York 
 Tribune is right: 
 
 'We shall not get permanent peace by treating the Hun 
 as if he were not a Hun. One might just as well attempt to 
 cure a man-eating tiger of his hankering for human flesh 
 by soft words as to break the German of his historic habits 
 by equally futile kind words. The way to treat a German, 
 while Germans follow their present methods, is as a common 
 peril to all civilised mankind. Since the German employs 
 the method of the wild beast he must be treated as beyond 
 the appeal of generous or kind methods. When one is gener- 
 ous to a German, he plans to take advantage of that generosity 
 to rob or murder; this is his international history, never more
 
 230 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 conspicuously illustrated than here in America. Kindness he 
 interprets as fear, regard for international law as proof of 
 decadence; agitation for disarmament has been for him the 
 final evidence of the degeneracy of his neighbours.' 1 
 
 That conclusion is inevitable if the facts are really as pre- 
 sented by the Daily Mail for four years. The problem of 
 peace in that case is not one of finding a means of dealing, by 
 the discipline of a common code or tradition, with common 
 shortcomings violences, hates, cupidities, blindnesses. The 
 problem is not of that nature at all. We don't have these 
 defects; they are German defects. For five years we have 
 indoctrinated the people with a case, which if true, renders 
 only one policy in Europe admissible; either the ruthless 
 extermination of these monsters, who are not human beings 
 at all; or their permanent subjugation, the conversion of 
 Germany into a sort of world lunatic asylum. 
 
 When therefore the big public, whether in America or 
 France or Britain, simply will not hear (in 1919) of any 
 League of Nations that shall ever include Germany they are 
 right if we have been telling them the truth. 
 
 Was it necessary thus to 'organise' hate for the purposes of 
 war? Violent partisanship would assuredly assert itself in 
 war-time without such stimulus. And if we saw more clearly 
 the relationship of these instincts and emotions to the forma- 
 tion of policy, we should organise, not their development, but 
 their restraint and discipline, or, that being impossible in suffi- 
 cient degree (which it may be), organise their re-direction to 
 less anti-social ends. 
 
 As it was, it ended by making the war entered upon 
 sincerely, so far as public feeling was concerned, for a princi- 
 ple or policy, simply a war for no purpose beyond victory 
 and finally for domination at the price of its original purpose. 
 For one who is attracted to the purpose, a thousand are at- 
 
 1 October 16th, 1917.
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 231 
 
 tracted to the war the simple success of 'our side.' Partisan- 
 ship as a motive is animal in its deep, remote innateness. Little 
 boys and girls at the time of the University boat race will 
 choose the Oxford or the Cambridge colours, and from that 
 moment passionately desire the victory of 'their' side. They 
 may not know what Oxford is, or what a University is, or what 
 a boat race is : it does not in the least detract from the violence 
 of their partisanship. You get therefore a very simple mathe- 
 matical explanation of the increasing subservience of the War's 
 purpose to the simple purpose of victory and domination for 
 itself. Every child can understand and feel for the latter, 
 very few adults for the former. 
 
 This competitive feeling, looking to victory, domination, is 
 feeding the whole time the appetite for power. These instincts, 
 and the clamant appetite for domination and coercion are 
 whetted to the utmost and then re-inforced by a moral indig- 
 nation, which justifies the impulse to retaliation on the ground 
 of punitive justice for inhuman horrors. We propose to 
 establish with this outlaw a relationship of contract ! To bar- 
 gain with him about our respective rights ! In the most favour- 
 able circumstances it demands a very definite effort of disci- 
 pline to impose upon ourselves hampering restrictions in the 
 shape of undertakings to another Power, when we believe that 
 we are in a position to impose our will. But to suggest im- 
 posing upon ourselves the restrictions of such a relationship 
 with an enemy of the human race . . . The astonishing thing 
 is that those who acquiesced in this deliberate cultivation of 
 the emotions and instincts inseparable from violent partisan- 
 ship, should ever have expected a policy of impartial justice 
 to come out of that state of mind. They were asking for psy- 
 chological miracles. 
 
 That the propaganda was in large part conscious and directed 
 was proved by the ease with which the flood of atrocity stories 
 could suddenly be switched over from Germans to Russians. 
 During the time that the Russian armies were fighting on our
 
 232 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 side, there was not a single story in our Press of Russian 
 barbarity. But when the same armies, under the same officers, 
 are fighting against the Poles, atrocities even more ingenious 
 and villainous than those of the Germans in Belgium suddenly 
 characterise the conduct of the Russian troops. The atrocities 
 are transposed with an ease equal to that with which we trans- 
 fer our loyalties. 1 When Pilsudski's troops fought against 
 Russia, all the atrocities were committed by them, and of the 
 Russian troops we heard nothing but heroism. When Brusiloff 
 fights under Bolshevik command our papers print long Polish 
 accounts of the Russian barbarities. 
 
 We have seen that behind the conception of the enemy as a 
 single person is a falsehood : it is obvious that seventy millions 
 of men, women, and children, of infinitely varying degrees of 
 responsibility, are not a single person. The falsehood may be, 
 in some degree, an unwitting one, a primitive myth that we have 
 inherited from tribal forbears. But if that is so, we should 
 control our news with a view to minimizing the dangers of 
 mythical fallacies, bequeathed to us by a barbaric past. If it is 
 necessary to use them for the purposes of war morale, we 
 
 1 The amazing rapidity with which we can change sides and causes, 
 and the enemy become the Ally, and the Ally the enemy, in the course 
 of a few weeks, approaches the burlesque. 
 
 At the head of the Polish armies is Marshal Pilsudski, who fought 
 under Austro-German command, against Russia. His ally is the 
 Ukrainian adventurer, General Petlura, who first made a separate peace 
 at Brest-Litovsk, and contracted there to let the German armies into 
 the Ukraine, and to deliver up to them its stores of grain. These in 
 May 1920 were the friends of the Allies. The Polish Finance Minister 
 at the time we were aiding Poland was Baron Bilinski, a gentleman 
 who filled the same post in the Austrian Cabinet which let loose the 
 world war, insisted hotly on the ultimatum to Serbia, helped to ruin 
 the finances of the Hapsburg dominions by war, and then after the 
 collapse repeated the same operation in Poland. On the other side 
 the command has passed, it is said, to the dashing General Brusiloff, 
 who again and again saved the Eastern front from Austrian and Ger- 
 man offensives. He is now the 'enemy' and his opponents our 'Allies.' 
 They are fighting to tear the Ukraine, which means all South Russia, 
 away from the Russian State. The preceding year we spent millions 
 to achieve the opposite result. The French sent their troops to Odessa, 
 and we gave our tanks to Denikin, in order to enable him to recover 
 this region for Imperial Russia,
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 233 
 
 should drop them when the war is over, and pass round the 
 word, to the Churches for instance, that on the signing of an 
 armistice the moratorium of the Sermon on the Mount comes 
 to an end. As it is, two years after the Armistice, an English 
 Vicar tells his congregation that to bring Austrian children to 
 English, to save them from death by famine, is an unpatriotic 
 and seditious act. 
 
 Note where the fundamental dishonesties of our propaganda 
 lead us in the matter of policy, in what we declared to be one 
 of the main objects of the War : the erection of Europe upon a 
 basis of nationality. Our whole campaign implied that the 
 problem resolved itself into the destruction of one great Power, 
 who denied that principle, as against the Allies, who were 
 ready to grant it. How near that came to the truth, the round 
 score of 'unredeemed' nationalities deliberately created by the 
 Allies in the Treaties sufficiently testifies. If we had avowed 
 the facts, that a Europe of completely independent nationalities 
 is not possible, that great populations will not be shut off from 
 the sea, or recognise independent nationalities to the extent of 
 risking economic or political strangulation, we should then 
 necessarily have gone on to devise the limitations and obliga- 
 tions which all must accept and the rights which all must accord. 
 We should have been fighting for a body of principles as the 
 basis of a real association of States. The truth, or some 
 measure of it, would have prepared us all for that limitation of 
 independence without which no nationality can be secure. The 
 falsehood that Germany alone stood in the way of the recog- 
 nition of nationality, made, a treaty really based on that princi- 
 ple (namely, upon all of us consenting to limit our indepen- 
 dence) impossible of acceptance by our own opinion. And 
 one falsehood leads to another. Because we refused to be 
 sincere about the inducements which we held out in turn to 
 Italy, Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece, we staggered blindly into 
 the alternative betrayal first of one party, then of another. 
 Just as we were faithless to the principle of nationality when
 
 234 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 we acquiesced in the Russian attitude towards Finland and 
 Poland, and the Italian towards Serbia, so later we were to 
 prove faithless to the principle of the Great State when we 
 supported the Border Nationalities in their secession from 
 Russia. We have encouraged and helped States like Ukrainia, 
 Azerbaidjan. But we have been just as ready to stand for 
 'Great Russia,' if Koltchak appeared to be winning, knowing 
 perfectly well that we cannot be loyal to both causes. 
 
 Our defence is apparent enough. It is fairly illustrated in 
 the case of Italy. If Italy had not come into the war, Serbia's 
 prospect of any redemption at all would have been hopeless; 
 we were doing the best we could for Serbia. 1 
 
 Assuredly but we happened to be doing it by false pre- 
 tences, sham heroics, immeasurable hypocrisy. And the final 
 effect was to be the defeat of the aims for which we were 
 fighting. If our primary aims had been those we proclaimed, 
 we could no more have violated the principle of nationality to 
 gain an ally, than we could have ceded the Isle of Wight to 
 Germany, and the intellectual rectitude which would have 
 enabled us to see that, would also have enabled us to see the 
 necessity of the conditions on which alone a society of nations 
 is possible. 
 
 The indispensable step to rendering controllable those pas- 
 sions now 'uncontrollable' and disrupting Europe, is to tell 
 the truth about the things by which we excuse them. Again, 
 our fundamental nature may not change, any more than it 
 would if we honestly investigated the evidence proving the 
 innocence of the man, whose execution we demand, of the 
 crime which is the cause of our hatred. That investigation 
 would be an effort of the mind; the result of it would be a 
 change in the direction of our feelings. The facts which it 
 is necessary to face are not abstruse or difficult. They are self- 
 evident to the simplest mind. The fact that the 'person' whose 
 
 "The Russian case is less evident. But only the moral inertia fol- 
 lowing on a long war could have made our Russian record possible.
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 235 
 
 punishment we demand in the case of the enemy is not a person 
 at all, either bad or good, but millions of different persons of 
 varying degrees of badness and goodness, many of them 
 millions without any responsibility at all for the crime that 
 angers us, this fact, if faced, would alter the nature of our 
 feelings. We should see that we were confronted by a case 
 of mistaken identity. Perhaps we do not face this evidence 
 because we treasure our hate. If there were not a 'person' 
 our hate could have no meaning ; we could not hate an 'admin- 
 istrative area,' nor is there much satisfaction in humiliating 
 it and dominating it. We can desire to dominate and humiliate 
 a person, and are often ready to pay a high price for the 
 pleasure. If we ceased to think of national States as persons, 
 we might cease to think of them as conflicting interests, in 
 competition with one another, and begin to think of them 
 instead as associations within a great association. 
 
 Take another very simple truth that we will not face: that 
 our arms do, and must do, the things that raise our passions 
 when done by the enemy. Our blockades and bombardments 
 also kill old women and children. Our soldiers, too, the gal- 
 lant lads who mount our aeroplanes, the sailors who man our 
 blockades, are baby-killers. They must be; they cannot help 
 it if they are to bomb or blockade at all. Yet we never do 
 admit this obvious fact. We erect a sheer falsehood, and then 
 protect ourselves against admitting it by being so 'noble' about 
 it that we refuse to discuss it. We simply declare that in no 
 circumstances could England, or English soldiers, ever make 
 war upon women and children, or even be unchivalrous to them. 
 That is a moral premise beyond or behind which patriotism 
 will not permit our minds to go. If the 'nobility' of attitude 
 had any relation to our real conduct, one would rejoice. When, 
 during the armistice negotiations, the Germans exacted that they 
 should be permitted means, after the surrender of their fleet, 
 of feeding their people, a New York paper declared the con- 
 dition an insult to the Allies. The Germans are prisoners/
 
 236 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 it said, 'and the Allies do not starve prisoners.' But one dis- 
 covers a few weeks later that these noble gestures are quite 
 compatible with the maintenance of the blockade, on the ground 
 that Germans for their sins ought to be starved. We then 
 become the agents of Providence in punitive justice. 
 
 When the late Lord Fisher x came out squarely and publicly 
 in defence of the killing of women and children (in the sub- 
 marine sinking) as a necessary part of war, there seemed a 
 chance for intellectual honesty in the matter; for a real 
 examination of the principles of our conduct. If we faced the 
 facts in this honest sailor-like fashion there was some hope 
 either that we should refuse to descend to reprisals by disem- 
 bowelling little girls; or, if it should appear that such things 
 are inseparable from war, that it would help to get a new 
 feeling about war. But Lord Fisher complains that the Editor 
 of the paper to which he sent his letter suppressed it from the 
 later editions of his paper for fear it should shock the public. 
 Shock! 
 
 You see, our shells falling on schools and circuses don't 
 disembowel little girls; our blockades don't starve them. 
 Everybody knows that British shells and British blockades 
 would not do such things. When Britain blockades, pestilence 
 and hunger and torture are not suffering; a dying child is not 
 a dying child. Patriotism draws a shutter over our eyes and 
 ears. 
 
 When this degree of self-deception is possible, there is no 
 infamy of which a kindly, humane, and emotionally moral 
 people may not prove themselves capable ; no moral contradiction 
 or absurdity which mankind may not approve. Anything may 
 become right, anything may become wrong. 
 
 The evil is not only in its resultant inhumanities. It lies 
 much more in the fact that this development of moral blinkers 
 
 *He complained that I had 'publicly reproved him' for supporting 
 severity in warfare. He was mistaken. As he really did believe in 
 the effectiveness of terrorism, he did a very real service by standing 
 publicly for his conviction.
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 237 
 
 deprives us of the capacity to see where we are going, and 
 what we are crushing underfoot; and that may well end by 
 our walking over the precipice. 
 
 During the War, we formed judgments of the German 
 character which literally make it sub-human. For our praise 
 of the French (during the same period) language failed us. 
 Yet less than twenty years ago the roles were reversed. 1 The 
 French were the mad dogs, and the Germans of our community 
 of blood. 
 
 1 Here is what the Times of December 10th, 1870, has to say about 
 France and Germany respectively, and on the Alsace-Lorraine ques- 
 tion : 
 
 'We must say with all frankness that France has never shown her- 
 self so senseless, so pitiful, so worthy of contempt and reprobation, as 
 at the present moment, when she obstinately declines to look facts in 
 the face, and refuses to accept the misfortune her own conduct has 
 brought upon her. A France broken up in utter anarchy, Ministers 
 who have no recognised chief, who rise from the dust in their air 
 balloons, and who carry with them for ballast shameful and manifest 
 lies and proclamations of victories that exist only in their imagination, 
 a Government which is sustained by lies and imposture, and chooses 
 rather to continue and increase the waste of lives than to resign its 
 own dictatorship and its wonderful Utopia of a republic; that is the 
 spectacle which France presents to-day. It is hard to say whether any 
 nation ever before burdened itself with such a load of shame. The 
 quantity of lies which France officially and unofficially has been manu- 
 facturing for us in the full knowledge that they are lies, is something 
 frightful and absolutely unprecedented. Perhaps it is not much after 
 all in comparison with the immeasurable heaps of delusions and uncon- 
 scious lies which have so long been in circulation among the French. 
 Their men of genius who are recognised as such in all departments 
 of literature are apparently of opinion that France outshines other 
 nations in a superhuman wisdom, that she is the new Zion of the whole 
 world, and that the literary productions of the French, for the last 
 fifty years, however insipid, unhealthy, and often indeed devilish, con- 
 tain a real gospel, rich in blessing for all the children of men. 
 
 We believe that Bismarck will take as much of Alsace-Lorraine, 
 too, as he chooses, and that it will be the better for him, the better for 
 us, the better for all the world but France, and the better in the long 
 run for France herself. Through large and quiet measures, Count von 
 Bismarck is aiming with eminent ability at a single object; the well- 
 being of Germany and of the world, of the large-hearted, peace-loving, 
 enlightened, and honest people of Germany growing into one nation; 
 and if Germany becomes mistress of the Continent in place of France, 
 which is light-hearted, ambitious, quarrelsome, and over-excitable, it 
 will be the most momentous event of the present day, and all the world 
 must hope that it will soon come about.'
 
 238 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 The refusal to face the plain facts of life, a refusal made 
 on grounds which we persuade ourselves are extremely noble, 
 but which in fact result too often in simple falsehood and 
 distortion, is revealed by the common pre-war attitude to the 
 economic situation dealt with in this book. The present writer 
 took the ground before the War that much of the dense popu- 
 lation of modern Europe could not support itself save by virtue 
 of an economic internationalism which political ideas (ideas 
 which war would intensify) were tending to make impossible. 
 Now it is obvious that before there can be a spiritual life, there 
 must be a fairly adequate physical one. If life is a savage 
 and greedy scramble over the means of sheer physical suste- 
 nance, there cannot be much in it that is noble and inspiring. 
 The point of the argument was, as already mentioned, not 
 that the economic pre-occupation should occupy the whole of 
 life, but that it will if it is simply disregarded; the way to 
 reduce the economic pre-occupation is to solve the economic 
 problem. Yet these plain and undeniable truths were somehow 
 twisted into the proposition that men went to war because 
 they believed it 'paid,' in the stockbroking sense, and that if 
 they saw it did not 'pay' they would not go to war. The task 
 of attempting to find the conditions in which it will be possible 
 for men to live at all with decent regard for their fellows, 
 without drifting into cannibalistic struggles for sustenance one 
 against another, is made to appear something sordid, a 'usurer's 
 gospel.' And on that ground, very largely, the 'economies' of 
 international policy were neglected. We are still facing the 
 facts. Self deception has become habitual. 
 
 President Wilson failed to carry through the policy he had 
 proclaimed, as greater men have failed in similar moral circum- 
 stances, The failure need not have been disastrous to the 
 cause which he had espoused. It might have marked merely 
 a step towards ultimate success, if he had admitted the failure. 
 Had he said in effect : 'Reaction has won this battle ; we have 
 been guilty of errors and shortcomings, but we shall maintain
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 239 
 
 the fight, and avoid such errors in future/ he would have 
 created for the generation which followed a clear-cut issue. 
 Whatever there was of courage and sincerity of purpose in 
 the idealism he had created earlier in the War, would have 
 rallied to his support. Just because such a declaration would 
 have created an issue dividing men sharply and even bitterly, 
 it would have united each side strongly; men would have had 
 the two paths clearly and distinctly before their eyes, and 
 though forced for the time along that of reaction, they would 
 have known the direction in which they were travelling. Again 
 and again victory has come out of defeat; again and again 
 defeat has nerved men to greater effort. 
 
 But when defeat is represented as victory by the trusted 
 leader, there follows the sublest and most paralysing form of 
 confusion and doubt. Men no longer know who are the friends 
 and who the enemies of the things they care for. When 
 callous cruelty is called righteous, and cynical deception justice, 
 men begin to lose their capacity to distinguish the one from 
 the other, and to change sides without consciousness of their 
 treason. 
 
 In the field of social relationship, the better management 
 by men of their society, a sincere facing of the simple truths 
 of life, right conclusions from facts that are of universal 
 knowledge, are of immeasurably greater importance than 
 erudition. Indeed we see that again and again learning 
 obscures in this field the simpler truths. The Germany that 
 had grown up before the War is a case in point. Vast learn- 
 ing, meticulous care over infinite detail, had become the mark 
 of German scholarship. But all the learning of the professors 
 did not prevent a gross misreading of what, to the rest of the 
 world, seemed all but self-evident simple truths which perhaps 
 would have been clearer if the learning had been less, used 
 as it was to buttress the lusts of domination and power. 
 
 The main errors of the Treaty (which, remember, was the 
 work of the greatest diplomatic experts in Europe) reveal
 
 240 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 something similar. If the punitive element which is still 
 applauded defeats finally the aims alike of justice, our own 
 security, appeasement, disarmament, and sets up moral forces 
 that will render our New World even more ferociously cruel 
 and hopeless than the Old, it will not be because we were 
 ignorant of the fact that 'Germany' or 'Austria' or 'Russia' 
 is not a person that can be held responsible and punished 
 in this simple fashion. It did not require an expert knowledge 
 of economics to realise that a ruined Germany could not pay 
 vast indemnities. Yet sometimes very learned men were 
 possessed by these fallacies. It is not learning that is needed 
 to penetrate them. A wisdom founded simply on the sincere 
 facing of self-evident facts would have saved European opinion 
 from its most mischievous excesses. This ignorance of the 
 learned may perhaps be related to another phenomenon ; a great 
 increase in our understanding of inert matter, unaccompanied 
 by any corresponding increase in our understanding of human 
 conduct. This latter understanding demands a temperamental 
 self-control and detachment, which mere technical knowledge 
 does not ask. Although in technical science we have made 
 such advances as would cause the Athenians, say, to look on 
 us as gods, we show no corresponding advance upon them, or 
 upon the Hebrew prophets for that matter, in the understanding 
 of conduct and its motives. And the spectacle of Germany 
 of the modern world, indeed so efficient in the management 
 of matter, so clumsy in the understanding of the essentials of 
 human relationship, reminds us once more of the futility of 
 mere technical knowledge, unless accompanied by a better 
 moral understanding. For without the latter we are unable 
 to use the improvement in technique (as Europe is unable 
 to use it to-day) for indispensable human ends. Or worse 
 still, technical knowledge, in the absence of wisdom and disci- 
 pline, merely gives us more efficient weapons of collective 
 suicide. Butler's fantasy of the machines which men have 
 made acquiring a mind of their own, and then rounding upon
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 241 
 
 their masters and destroying them, has very nearly come true. 
 If some new force, like the release of atomic energy, had been 
 discovered during this war, and applied (as Mr Wells has 
 imagined it being applied) to bombs that would go on exploding 
 without cessation for a week or two, we know that passions 
 ran so high that both sides would have used them, as both 
 sides in the next war will use super-poison gas and disease 
 germs. Not only the destruction, therefore, but the passion 
 and the ruthlessness, the fears and hates, the universal pre- 
 emption of wealth for 'defence' perpetually translating itself 
 into preventive offence, would have grown. Man's society would 
 assuredly have been destroyed by the instruments that he him- 
 self had made, and Butler's fantasy would have come true. 
 
 It is coming true to-day. What starves Europe is not lack 
 of technical knowledge ; there is more technical knowledge than 
 when Europe could feed itself. If we could combine our 
 forces to effective co-operation, the Malthusian dragon could be 
 kept at bay. It is the group of ideas which underlie the process 
 of Balkanisation that stand in the way of turning our combined 
 forces against Nature instead of against one another. 
 
 We have gone wrong mainly in certain of the simpler and 
 broader issues of human relationship, and this book has at- 
 tempted to disentangle from the complex mass of facts in the 
 international situation, those 'sovereign ideas' which constitute 
 in crises the basic factors of public action and opinion. In so 
 doing there may have been some over-simplification. That will 
 not greatly matter, if the result is some re-examination and 
 clarification of the predominant beliefs that have been analysed. 
 'Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion,' as 
 Bacon warned us. It is easier to correct a working hypothesis 
 of society, which is wrong in some detail, than to achieve wise 
 conduct in society without any social principle. If social or 
 political phenomena are for us first an unexplained tangle of 
 forces, and we live morally from hand to mouth, by opinions 
 which have no guiding principle, our emotions will be at the 
 
 M
 
 242 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 mercy first of one isolated fact or incident, and then of another. 
 
 A certain parallel has more than once been suggested in these 
 pages. European society is to-day threatened with disintegra- 
 tion as the result of ideas and emotions that have collected round 
 Patriotism. A century or two since it was threatened by ideas 
 and passions which gathered round religious dogma. By what 
 process did we arrive at religious toleration as a social principle ? 
 That question has been suggested because to answer it may 
 throw some light on our present problem of rendering Patrio- 
 tism a social instead of an anti-social force. 
 
 If to-day, for the most part, in Europe and America one 
 sect can live beside another in peace, where a century or two 
 ago there would have been fierce hatreds, wars, massacres, and 
 burnings, it is not because the modern population is more learned 
 in theology (it is probably less so), but rather conversely, be- 
 cause theological theory gave place to lay judgment in the 
 ordinary facts of life. 
 
 If we have a vast change in the general ideas of Europe in 
 the religious sphere, in the attitude of men to dogma, in the 
 importance which they attach to it, in their feeling about it; a 
 change which for good or evil is a vast one in its consequences, 
 a moral and intellectual revulsion which has swept away one 
 great difficulty of human relationship and transformed society; 
 it is because the laity have brought the discussion back to prin- 
 ciples so broad and fundamental that the data became the facts 
 of human life and experience data with which the common 
 man is as familiar as the scholar. Of the present-day millions 
 for whom certain beliefs of the older theologians would be 
 morally monstrous, how many have been influenced by elaborate 
 study concerning the validity of this or that text? The texts 
 simply do not weigh with them, though for centuries they were 
 the only things that counted. What do weigh with them are pro- 
 founder and simpler things a sense of justice, compassion 
 things which would equally have led the man of the sixteenth 
 century to question the texts and the premises of the Church,
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 243 
 
 if discussion had been free. It is because it was not free that 
 the social instinct of the mass, the general capacity to order their 
 relations so as to make it possible for them to live together, 
 became distorted and vitiated. And the wars of religion re- 
 sulted. To correct this vitiation, to abolish these disastrous 
 hates and misconceptions, elaborate learning was not needed. 
 Indeed, it was largely elaborate learning which had occasioned 
 them. The judges who burned women alive for witchcraft, or 
 inquisitors who sanctioned that punishment for heresy, had vast 
 and terrible stores of learning. What was needed was that 
 these learned folk should question their premises in the light 
 of facts of common knowledge. It is by so doing that their 
 errors are patent to the quite unlearned of our time. No layman 
 was equipped to pass judgment on the historical reasons which 
 might support the credibility of this or that miracle, or the 
 intricate arguments which might justify this or that point of 
 dogma. But the layman was as well equipped, indeed, he was 
 better equipped than the schoolman, to question whether God 
 would ever torture men everlastingly for the expression of 
 honest belief ; the observer of daily occurrences, to say nothing 
 of the physicist, was as able as the theologian to question 
 whether a readiness to believe without evidence is a virtue at 
 all. Questions of the damnation of infants, eternal torment, 
 were settled not by the men equipped with historical and ec- 
 clesiastical scholarship, but by the average man, going back to 
 the broad truths, to first principles, asking very simple questions, 
 the answer to which depended not upon the validity of texts, 
 but upon correct reasoning concerning facts which are accessible 
 to all ; upon our general sense of life as a whole, and our more 
 elementary institutions of justice and mercy ; reasoning and in- 
 tuitions which the learning of the expert often distorts. 
 
 Exactly the service which extricated us from the intellectual 
 and moral confusion that resulted in such catastrophes in the 
 field of religion, is needed in the field of politics. From certain 
 learned folk writers, poets, professors (German and other),
 
 244 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 journalists, historians, and rulers the public have taken a 
 group of ideas concerning Patriotism, Nationalism, Imperialism, 
 the nature or our obligation to the State, and so on, ideas which 
 may be right or wrong, but which we are all agreed, will have 
 to be very much changed if men are ever to live together in 
 peace and freedom; just as certain notions concerning the in- 
 stitution of private property will have to be changed if the 
 mass of men are to live in plenty. 
 
 It is a commonplace of militarist argument that so long as men 
 feel as they do about their Fatherland, about patriotism and 
 nationalism, internationalism will be an impossibility. If that is 
 true and I think it is peace and freedom and welfare will 
 wait until those large issues have been raised in men's minds 
 with sufficient vividness to bring about a change of idea and so 
 a change of feeling with reference to them. 
 
 It is unlikely, to say the least, that the mass of Englishmen 
 or Frenchmen will ever be in possession of detailed knowledge 
 sufficient to equip them to pass judgment on the various rival 
 solutions of the complex problems that face us, say, in the 
 Balkans. And yet it was immediately out of a problem of Bal- 
 kan politics that the War arose, and future wars may well arise 
 out of those same problems if they are settled as badly in the 
 future as in the past. 
 
 The situation would indeed be hopeless if the nature of human 
 relationship depended upon the possession by the people as a 
 whole of expert knowledge in complex questions of that kind. 
 But happily the Sarajevo murders would never have developed 
 into a war involving twenty nations but for the fact that there 
 had been cultivated in Europe suspicions, hatreds, insane pas- 
 sions, and cupidities, due largely to false conceptions ( though 
 in part also themselves prompting the false conceptions) of a 
 few simple facts in political relationship ; conceptions concerning 
 the necessary rivalry of nations, the idea that what one nation 
 gains another loses, that States are doomed by a fate over which 
 they have no control to struggle together for the space and
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 245 
 
 opportunities of a limited world. But for the atmosphere that 
 these ideas create (as false theological notions once created a 
 similar atmosphere between rival religious groups) most of these 
 at present difficult and insoluble problems of nationality and 
 frontiers and government, would have solved themselves. 
 
 The ideas which feed and inflame these passions of rivalry, 
 hostility, fear, hate, will be modified, if at all, by raising in the 
 mind of the European some such simple elementary questions 
 as were raised when he began to modify his feeling about the 
 man of rival religious belief. The Political Reformation in 
 Europe will come by questioning, for instance, the whole phi- 
 losophy of patriotism, the morality or the validity, in terms of 
 human well-being, of a principle like that of 'my country, right 
 or wrong'; 1 by questioning whether a people really benefit by 
 enlarging the frontiers of their State; whether 'greatness' in a 
 nation particularly matters ; whether the man of the small State 
 is not in all the great human values the equal of the man of the 
 great Empire; whether the real problems of life are greatly 
 affected by the colour of the flag ; whether we have not loyalties 
 to other things as well as to our State; whether we do not in 
 our demand for national sovereignty ignore international obli- 
 gation without which the nations can have neither security nor 
 freedom; whether we should not refuse to kill or horribly 
 mutilate a man merely because we differ from him in politics. 
 And with those, if the emergence from chattel-slavery is to be 
 complemented by the emergence from wage slavery, must be put 
 similarly fundamental questions touching problems like that of 
 private property and the relation of social freedom thereto ; we 
 must ask why, if it is rightly demanded of the citizen that his 
 life shall be forfeit to the safety of the State, his surplus money, 
 property, shall not be forfeit to its welfare. 
 
 1 We realise without difficulty that no society could be formed by 
 individuals each of whom had been taught to base his conduct on 
 adages such as these: 'Myself alone'; 'myself before anybody else'; 
 'my ego is sacred'; 'myself over all'; 'myself right or wrong.' Yet 
 those are the slogans of Patriotism the world over and are regarded 
 as noble and inspiring, shouted with a moral and approving thrill.
 
 246 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 To very many, these questions will seem a kind of blasphemy, 
 and they will regard those who utter them as the subjects of a 
 loathsome perversion. In just that way the orthodox of old 
 regarded the heretic and his blasphemies. And yet the solution 
 of the difficulties of our time, this problem of learning to live 
 together without mutual homicide and military slavery, depends 
 upon those blasphemies being uttered. Because it is only in 
 some such way that the premises of the differences which divide 
 us, the realities which underlie them, will receive attention. It 
 is not that the implied answer is necessarily the truth I am not 
 concerned now for a moment to urge that it is but that until 
 the problem is pushed back in our minds to these great yet 
 simple issues, the will, temper, general ideas of Europe on this 
 subject will remain unchanged. And if they remain unchanged 
 so will its conduct and condition. 
 
 The tradition of nationalism and patriotism, around which 
 have gathered our chief political loyalties and instincts, has be- 
 come in the actual conditions of the world an anti-social and 
 disruptive force. Although we realize perhaps that a society of 
 nations of some kind there must be, each unit proclaims proudly 
 its anti-social slogan of sacred egoisms and defiant immoralism ; 
 its espousal of country as against right. 1 
 
 The danger and the difficulty resides largely in the fact 
 that the instincts of gregariousness and group solidarity, which 
 prompt the attitude of 'my country right or wrong,' are not in 
 themselves evil : both gregariousness and pugnacity are indispen- 
 sable to society. Nationality is a very precious manifestation 
 of the instincts by which alone men can become socially 
 
 1 However mischievous some of the manifestations of Nationalism 
 may prove, the worst possible method of dealing with it is by the 
 forcible repression of any of its claims which can be granted with 
 due regard to the general interest. To give Nationalism full play, as 
 far as possible, is the best means of attenuating its worst features and 
 preventing its worst developments. This, after all, is the line of con- 
 duct which we adopt to certain religious beliefs which we may regard 
 as dangerous superstitions. Although the belief may have dangers, the 
 social dangers involved in forcible repression would be greater still.
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 247 
 
 conscious and act in some corporate capacity. The identifica- 
 tion of 'self with society, which patriotism accomplishes within 
 certain limits, the sacrifice of self for the community which it 
 inspires even though only when fighting other patriotisms 
 are moral achievements of infinite hope. 
 
 The Catharian heresy that Jehovah of the Old Testament is 
 in reality Satan masquerading as God has this pregnant sug- 
 gestion : if the Father of Evil ever does destroy us, we may be 
 sure that he will come, not proclaiming himself evil, but pro- 
 claiming himself good, the very Voice of God. And that is the 
 danger with patriotism and the instincts that gather round it. 
 If the instincts of nationalism were simply evil, they would 
 constitute no real danger. It is the good in them that has made 
 them the instrument of the immeasurable devastation which 
 they accomplish. 
 
 That Patriotism does indeed transcend all morality, all re- 
 ligious sanctions as we have heretofore known them, can be 
 put to a very simple test. Let an Englishman, recalling, if he 
 can, his temper during the War, ask himself this question: Is 
 there anything, anything whatsoever, that he would have refused 
 to do, if the refusal had meant the triumph of Germany and the 
 defeat of England? In his heart he knows that he would have 
 justified any act if the safety of his country had hung upon it. 
 
 Other patriotisms have like justifications. Yet would defeat, 
 submission, even to Germany, involve worse acts than those we 
 have felt compelled to commit during the War and since in the 
 work of making our power secure ? Did the German ask of the 
 Alsatian or the Pole worse than we have been compelled to ask 
 of our own soldiers in Russia, India, or Ireland ? 
 
 The old struggle for power goes on. For the purpose of that 
 struggle we are prepared to transform our society in any way 
 that it may demand. For the purposes of the war for power 
 we will accept anything that the strength of the enemy imposes : 
 we will be socialist, autocratic, democratic, or communist; we 
 will conscribe the bodies, souls, wealth of our people; we will
 
 248 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 proscribe, as we do, the Christian doctrine, and all mercy and 
 humanity; we will organise falsehood and deceit, and call it 
 statecraft and strategy; lie for the purpose of inflaming hate, 
 and rejoice at the effectiveness of our propaganda; we will tor- 
 ture helpless millions by pestilence and famine as we have done 
 and look on unmoved ; our priests, in the name of Christ, will 
 reprove misplaced pity, and call for the further punishment of 
 the wicked, still greater efforts in the Fight for Right. We shall 
 not care what transformations take place in our society or our 
 natures ; or what happens to the human spirit. Obediently, at 
 the behest of the enemy because, that is, his power demands 
 that conduct of us shall we do all those things, or anything, 
 save only one: we will not negotiate or make a contract with 
 him. That would limit our 'independence' ; by which we mean 
 that his submission to our mastery would be less complete. 
 
 We can do acts of infinite cruelty; disregard all accepted 
 morality ; but we cannot allow the enemy to escape the admission 
 of defeat. 
 
 If we are to correct the evils of the older tradition, and build 
 up one which will restore to men the art of living together, we 
 must honestly face the fact that the older tradition has failed. 
 So long as the old loyalties and patriotisms, tempting us with 
 power and dominion, calling to the deep hunger excited by those 
 things, and using the banners of righteousness and justice, seem 
 to offer security, and a society which, if not ideal, is at least 
 workable, we certainly shall not pay the price which all pro- 
 found change of habit demands. We have seen that as a fact 
 of his history man only abandons power and force over others 
 when it fails. At present, almost everywhere, we refuse to 
 face the failure of the old forms of political power. We don't 
 believe that we need the co-operation of the foreigner, or we 
 believe that we can coerce him. 
 
 Little attention has been given here to the machinery of in- 
 ternationalism League of Nations, Courts of Arbitration, 
 Disarmament. This is not because machinery is unimportant.
 
 But if we possessed the Will, if we were ready each to pay his 
 contribution in some sacrifice of his independence, of his oppor- 
 tunity of domination, the difficulties of machinery would largely 
 disappear. The story of America's essay in internationalism has 
 warned us of the real difficulty. Courts of Arbitration, Leagues 
 of Nations, were devices to which American opinion readily 
 enough agreed; too readily. For the event showed that the 
 old conceptions were not changed. They had only been disre- 
 garded. No machinery of internationalism can work so long 
 as the impulses and prepossessions of irresponsible nationalism 
 retain their power. The test we must apply to our sincerity is 
 our answer to the question : What price, in terms of national 
 independence, are we prepared to pay for a world law ? What, 
 in fact, is the price that is asked of us? To this last question, 
 the pages that precede, and to some extent those that follow, 
 have attempted to supply an answer. We should gain many 
 times in freedom and independence the contribution in those 
 things that we made. 
 
 Perhaps we may be driven by hunger the actual need of our 
 children for bread to forsake a method which cannot give 
 them bread or freedom, in favour of one that can. But, for the 
 failure of power to act as a deterrent upon our desire for it, 
 we must perceive the failure. Our angers and hatreds obscure 
 that failure, or render us indifferent to it. Hunger does not 
 necessarily help the understanding ; it may bemuse it by passion 
 and resentment. We may in our passion wreck civilisation as a 
 passionate man in his anger will injure those he loves. Yet, 
 well fed, we may refuse to concern ourselves with problems of 
 the morrow. The mechanical motive will no longer suffice. In 
 the simpler, more animal forms of society, the instinct of each 
 moment, with no thought of ultimate consequence, may be 
 enough. But the Society which man has built up can only go 
 forward or be preserved as it began: by virtue of something 
 which is more than instinct. On man is cast the obligation to be 
 intelligent ; the responsibility of will ; the burden of thought.
 
 250 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 If some of us have felt that, beyond all other evils which 
 translate themselves into public policy, those with which these 
 pages deal constitute the greatest, it is not because war means 
 the loss of life, the killing of men. Many of our noblest activi- 
 ties do that. There are so many of us that it is no great disaster 
 that a few should die. It is not because war means suffering. 
 Suffering endured for a conscious and clearly conceived human 
 purpose is redeemed by hope of real achievement; it may be 
 a glad sacrifice for some worthy end. But if we have floundered 
 hopelessly into a bog because we have forgotten our end and 
 purpose in the heat of futile passion, the consolation which we 
 may gather from the willingness with which men die in the bog 
 should not stand in the way of our determination to rediscover 
 our destination and create afresh our purpose. These pages 
 have been concerned very little with the loss of life, the suf- 
 fering of the last seven years. What they have dealt with mainly 
 is the fact that the War has left us a less workable society, has 
 been marked by an increase in the forces of chaos and disin- 
 tegration. That is the ultimate indictment of this War as of 
 all wars : the attitude towards life, the ideas and motive forces 
 out of which it grows, and which it fosters, makes men less 
 able to live together, their society less workable, and must end 
 by making free society impossible. War not only arises out of 
 the failure of human wisdom, from the defect of that 
 intelligence by which alone we can successfully fight the 
 forces of nature; it perpetuates that failure and worsens it. 
 For only by a passion which keeps thought at bay can the 
 'morale' of war be maintained. The very justification which 
 we advance for our war-time censorships and propaganda, our 
 suspension of free speech and discussion, is that if we gave 
 full value to the enemy's case, saw him as he really is, blunder- 
 ing, foolish, largely helpless like ourselves; saw the defects of 
 our own and our Allies' policy, saw what our own acts in war 
 really involved and how nearly they resembled those which 
 aroused our anger when done by the enemy, if we saw all this
 
 SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT 251 
 
 and kept our heads, we should abandon war. A thousand times 
 it has been explained that in an impartial mood we cannot 
 carry on war; that unless the people come to feel that all the 
 right is on our side and all the wrong on the enemy's, morale 
 will fail. The most righteous war can only be kept going by 
 falsehood. The end of that falsehood is that our mind col- 
 lapses. And although the mind, thought, judgment, are not 
 all-sufficient for man's salvation, it is impossible without them. 
 Behind all other explanations of Europe's creeping paralysis 
 is the blindness of the millions, their inability to see the effects 
 of their demands and policy, to see where they are going. 
 
 Only a keener feeling for truth will enable them to see. About 
 indifferent things about the dead matter that we handle in 
 our science we can be honest, impartial, true. That is why 
 we succeed in dealing with matter. But about the things we 
 care for which are ourselves our desires and lusts, our 
 patriotisms and hates, we find a harder test of thinking straight 
 and truly. Yet there is the greater need ; only by that rectitude 
 shall we be saved. There is no refuge but in truth.
 
 ADDENDUM 
 THE ARGUMENT OF THE GREAT ILLUSION 
 
 253
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE 'IMPOSSIBILITY OF WAR' MYTH 
 
 IT will illustrate certain difficulties which have marked and 
 mark the presentation of the argument of this book, if the 
 reader will consider for a few minutes the justice of certain 
 charges which have been brought against The Great Illusion. 
 Perhaps the commonest is that it argued that 'war had become 
 impossible/ The truth of that charge at least can very easily 
 be tested. The first page of that book, the preface, referring 
 to the thesis it proposed to set out, has these words: 'the 
 argument is not that war is impossible, but that it is futile.' 
 The next page but one describes what the author believes to 
 be the main forces at work in international politics: a fierce 
 struggle for preponderant power 'based on the universal 
 assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding 
 population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the 
 best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to 
 territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against 
 others . . . that nations being competing units, advantage, in 
 the last resort, goes to the possessor of preponderant military 
 force, the weaker going to the wall, as in the other forms of 
 the struggle for life.' A whole chapter is devoted to the 
 evidence which goes to show that this aggressive and warlike 
 philosophy was indeed the great actuating force in European 
 politics. The first two paragraphs of the first chapter fore- 
 cast the likelihood of an Anglo-German explosion ; that chapter 
 goes on to declare that the pacifist effort then current was 
 
 255
 
 256 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 evidently making no headway at all against the tendencies 
 towards rivalry and conflict. In the third chapter the ideas 
 underlying those tendencies are described as 'so profoundly 
 mischievous,' and so 'desperately dangerous,' as to threaten 
 civilisation itself. A chapter is devoted to showing that the 
 fallacy and folly of those all but universal ideas was no 
 guarantee at all that the nations would not act upon them. 
 (Particularly is the author insistent on the fact that the futility 
 of war will never in itself suffice to stop war. The folly of a 
 given course of action will only be a deterrent to the degree to 
 which men realise its folly. That was why the book was 
 written.) A warning is uttered against any reliance upon the 
 Hague Conferences, which, it is explained at length, are likely 
 to be quite ineffective against the momentum of the motives 
 of aggression. A warning is uttered towards the close of the 
 book against any reduction of British armaments, accompanied, 
 however, by the warning that mere increase of armaments 
 unaccompanied by change of policy, a Political Reformation in 
 the direction of internationalism, will provoke the very catas- 
 trophe it is their object to avoid ; only by that change of policy 
 could we take a real step towards peace 'instead of a step 
 towards war, to which the mere piling up of armaments, un- 
 checked by any other factor, must in the end inevitably lead.' x 
 
 The last paragraph of the book asks the reader which of 
 two courses we are to follow: a determined effort towards 
 placing European policy on a new basis, or a drift along the 
 current of old instincts and ideas, a course which would con- 
 demn us to the waste of mountains of treasure and the spilling 
 of oceans of blood. 
 
 Yet, it is probably true to say that, of the casual newspaper 
 references (as distinct from reviews) made during the last ten 
 years to the book just described, four out of five are to the 
 effect that its author said 'war was impossible because it did 
 not pay.' 
 
 1 The Great Illusion, p. 326
 
 THE 'IMPOSSIBILITY OF WAR' MYTH 257 
 
 The following are some passages referred to in the above 
 summary : 
 
 'Not the facts, but men's opinions about the facts is what 
 matters. This is because men's conduct is determined, not 
 necessarily by the right conclusion from facts, but the con- 
 clusion they believe to be right. ... As long as Europe is 
 dominated by the old beliefs, those beliefs will have virtually 
 the same effect in politics as though they were intrinsically 
 sound.' (p. 327.) 
 
 'It is evident that so long as the misconception we are dealing 
 with is all but universal in Europe, so long as the nations 
 believe that in some way the military and political subjugation 
 of others will bring with it a tangible material advantage to 
 the conqueror, we all do, in fact, stand in danger from such 
 aggression. Not his interest, but what he deems to be his inter- 
 est, will furnish the real motive of our prospective enemy's 
 action. And as the illusion with which we are dealing does, 
 indeed, dominate all those minds most active in European 
 politics, we must, while this remains the case, regard an aggres- 
 sion, even such as that which Mr Harrison foresees, as within 
 the bounds of practical politics. . . . On this ground alone I 
 deem that we or any other nation are justified in taking means 
 of self-defence to prevent such aggression. This is not, there- 
 fore, a plea for disarmament irrespective of the action of other 
 nations. So long as current political philosophy in Europe 
 remains what it is, I would not urge the reduction of our war 
 budget by a single sovereign.' (p. 329.) 
 
 'The need for defence arises from the existence of a motive 
 for attack. . . . That motive is, consequently, part of the 
 problem of defence. . . . Since as between the European 
 peoples we are dealing with in this matter, one party is as able 
 in the long run to pile up armaments as the other, we cannot 
 get nearer to solution by armaments alone ; we must get at the 
 original provoking cause the motive making for aggression.
 
 258 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 ... If that motive results from a true judgment of the facts; if 
 the determining factor in a nation's well-being and progress is 
 really its power to obtain by force advantage over others, the 
 present situation of armament rivalry tempered by war is a 
 natural and inevitable one. ... If, however, the view is a 
 false one, our progress towards solution will be marked by the 
 extent to which the error becomes generally recognised in 
 European public opinion.' (p. 337.) 
 
 'In this matter it seems fatally easy to secure either one of 
 two kind.; of action: that of the "practical man" who limits 
 his energies to securing a policy which will perfect the machin- 
 ery of war and disregard anything else ; or that of the Pacifist, 
 who, persuaded of the brutality or immorality of war, is apt 
 to deprecate effort directed at self-defence. What is needed 
 is the type of activity which will include both halves of the 
 problem: provision for education, for a Political Reformation 
 in this matter, as well as such means of defence as will mean- 
 time counterbalance the existing impulse to aggression. To 
 concentrate on either half to the exclusion of the other half 
 is to render the whole problem insoluble.' (p. 330.) 
 
 'Never has the contest of armament been so keen as when 
 Europe began to indulge in Peace Conferences. Speaking 
 roughly and generally, the era of great armament expansion 
 dates from the first Hague Conference. The reader who has 
 appreciated the emphasis laid in the preceding pages on work- 
 ing through the reform of ideas will not feel much astonishment 
 at the failure of efforts such as these. The Hague Conferences 
 represented an attempt, not to work through the reform of 
 ideas, but to modify by mechanical means the political 
 machinery of Europe, without reference to the ideas which 
 had brought it into existence. 
 
 'Arbitration treaties, Hague Conferences, International 
 Federation, involve a new conception of relationship between 
 nations. But the ideals political, economical, and social 
 on which the old conceptions are based, our terminology, our
 
 THE 'IMPOSSIBILITY OF WAR' MYTH 259 
 
 political literature, our old habits of thought, diplomatic inertia, 
 which all combine to perpetuate the old notions, have been left 
 serenely undisturbed. And surprise is expressed that such 
 schemes do not succeed.' (p. 350.) 
 
 Very soon after the appearance of the book, I find I am 
 shouting myself hoarse in the Press against this monstrous 
 'impossibility of war' foolishness. An article in the Daily Mall 
 of September 15th, 1911, begins thus: 
 
 ' . . . One learns, with some surprise, that the very simple 
 facts to which I have now for some years been trying to draw 
 the attention they deserve, teach that: 
 
 1. War is now impossible. 
 
 2. War would ruin both the victor and the vanquished. 
 
 3. War would leave the victor worse off than the van- 
 
 quished. 
 
 'May I say with every possible emphasis that nothing I have 
 ever written justifies any one of these conclusions. 
 'I have always, on the contrary, urged that : 
 
 ( 1 ) War is, unhappily, quite possible, and, in the prevailing 
 condition of ignorance concerning certain elementary politico- 
 economic facts, even likely. 
 
 (2) There is nothing to justify the conclusion that war 
 would "ruin" both victor and vanquished. Indeed, I do not 
 quite know what the "ruin" of a nation means. 
 
 (3) While in the past the vanquished has often profited 
 more by defeat than he could possibly have done by victory, it 
 is no necessary result, and we are safest in assuming that the 
 vanquished will suffer most.' 
 
 Nearly two years later I find myself still engaged in the same 
 task. Here is a letter to the Saturday Review (March 8th, 
 1913) :
 
 260 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 'You are good enough to say that I am "one of the very few 
 advocates of peace at any price who is not altogether an ass." 
 And yet you also state that I have been on a mission "to per- 
 suade the German people that war in the twentieth century is 
 impossible." If I had ever tried to teach anybody such sorry 
 rubbish I should be altogether an unmitigated ass. I have 
 never, of course, nor so far as I am aware, has any one ever 
 said that war was impossible. Personally, not only do I regard 
 war as possible, but extremely likely. What I have been 
 preaching in Germany is that it is impossible for Germany to 
 benefit by war, especially a war against us ; and that, of course, 
 is quite a different matter.' 
 
 It is true that if the argument of the book as a whole pointed 
 to the conclusion that war was 'impossible,' it would be beside 
 the point to quote passages repudiating that conclusion. They 
 might merely prove the inconsequence of the author's thought. 
 But the book, and the whole effort of which it was a part, 
 would have had no raison d'etre if the author had believed 
 war unlikely or impossible. It was a systematic attack on 
 certain political ideas which the author declared were dominant 
 in international politics. If he had supposed those powerful 
 ideas were making not for war, but for peace, why as a pacifist 
 should he be at such pains to change them? And if he thought 
 those war-provoking ideas which he attacked were not likely 
 to be put into effect, why, in that case either, should he bother 
 at all? Why, for that matter, should a man who thought war 
 impossible engage in not too popular propaganda against war 
 against something which could not occur? 
 
 A moment's real reflection on the part of those responsible 
 for this description of The Great Illusion, should have con- 
 vinced them that it could not be a true one. 
 
 I have taken the trouble to go through some of the more 
 serious criticisms of the book to see whether this extraordinary 
 confusion was created in the mind of those who actually read
 
 THE 'IMPOSSIBILITY OF WAR' MYTH 261 
 
 the book instead of reading about it. So far as I know, not 
 a single serious critic has come to a conclusion that agrees with 
 the 'popular' verdict. Several going to the book after the War, 
 seem to express surprise at the absence of any such conclusion. 
 Professor Lindsay writes: 
 
 'Let us begin by disposing of one obvious criticism of the 
 doctrines of The Great Illusion which the out-break of war 
 has suggested. Mr Angell never contended that war was im- 
 possible, though he did contend that it must always be futile. 
 He insisted that the futility of war would not make war im- 
 possible or armament unnecessary until all nations recognised 
 its futility. So long as men held that nations could advance 
 their interests by war, so long war would last. His moral 
 was that we should fight militarism, whether in Germany or 
 in our own country, as one ought to fight an idea with better 
 ideas. He further pointed out that though it is pleasanter to 
 attack the wrong ideals held by foreigners, it is more effective 
 to attack the wrong ideals held in our own country. . . . The 
 pacifist hope was that the outbreak of a European war, which 
 was recognised as quite possible, might be delayed until, with 
 the progress of pacifist doctrine, war became impossible. That 
 hope has been tragically frustrated, but if the doctrines of 
 pacifism are convincing and irrefutable, it was not in itself a 
 vain hope. Time was the only thing it asked of fortune, and 
 time was denied it.' 
 
 Another post-war critic on the other side of the Atlantic 
 writes : 
 
 'Mr. Angell has received too much solace from the unwisdom 
 of his critics. Those who have denounced him most vehemently 
 are those who patently have not read his books. For example, 
 he cannot properly be classed, as frequently asserted in recent 
 months, as one of those Utopian pacifists who went about
 
 262 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 proclaiming war impossible. A number of passages in The 
 Great Illusion show him fully alive to the danger of the present 
 collapse; indeed, from the narrower view of politics his book 
 was one of the several fruitless attempts to check that grow- 
 ing estrangement between England and Germany whose sinister 
 menace far-sighted men discerned. Even less justifiable are 
 the flippant sneers which discard his argument as mercenary 
 or sordid. Mr Angell has never taken an "account book" or 
 "breeches pocket" view of war. He inveighs against what 
 he terms its political and moral futilities as earnestly as against 
 its economic futility.' 
 
 It may be said that there must be some cause for so persis- 
 tent a misrepresentation. There is. Its cause is that obstinate 
 and deep-seated fatalism which is so large a part of the pre- 
 vailing attitude to war and against which the book under 
 consideration was a protest. Take it as an axiom that war 
 comes upon us as an outside force, like the rain or the earth- 
 quake, and not as something that we can influence, and a man 
 who 'does not believe in war,' must be a person who believes 
 that war is not coming ; x that men are naturally peaceable. 
 To be a Pacifist because one believes that the danger of war 
 is very great indeed, or because one believes men to be naturally 
 extremely prone to war, is a position incomprehensible until 
 we have rid our minds of the fatalism which regards war as 
 an 'inevitable' result of uncontrollable forces. 
 
 What is a writer to do, however, in the face of persistent 
 misrepresentation such as this? If he were a manufacturer 
 of soap and some one said his soap was underweight, or he 
 were a grocer and some one said his sugar was half sand, he 
 could of course obtain enormous damages. But a mere writer, 
 having given some years of his life to the study of the most 
 important problem of his time, is quite helpless when a tired 
 
 1 The Pacifists lie when they tell us that the danger of war is over.' 
 General Leonard Wood.
 
 THE 'IMPOSSIBILITY OF WAR' MYTH 263 
 
 headline writer, or a journalist indulging his resentment, or 
 what he thinks is likely to be the resentment of his readers, 
 describes a book as proclaiming one thing when as a matter 
 of simple fact it proclaims the exact contrary. 
 
 So much for myth or misrepresentation No. 1. We come 
 to a second, namely, that The Great Illusion is an appeal to 
 avarice; that it urges men not to defend their country 'because 
 to do so does not pay;' that it would have us place 'pocket 
 before patriotism,' a view reflected in Benjamin Kidd's last 
 book, pages of which are devoted to the condemnation of the 
 'degeneracy and futility' of resting the cause of peace on no 
 higher ground than that it is 'a great illusion to believe that a 
 national policy founded on war can be a profitable policy for any 
 people in the long run.' x He quotes approvingly Sir William 
 Robertson Nicoll for denouncing those who condemn war 
 because 'it would postpone the blessed hour of tranquil money 
 getting/ 2 As a means of obscuring truths which it is import- 
 ant to realise, of creating by misrepresentation a moral repuls- 
 ion to a thesis, and thus depriving it of consideration, this 
 second line of attack is even more important than the first. 
 
 To say of a book that it prophesied 'the impossibility of 
 war,' is to imply that it is mere silly rubbish, and its author 
 a fool. Sir William Robertson Nicoll's phrase would of 
 course imply that its doctrine was morally contemptible. 
 
 The reader must judge, after considering dispassionately 
 what follows, whether this second description is any truer than 
 the first. 
 
 *The Science of Power, p. 14. * Ibid, p. 144.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 'ECONOMIC' AND 'MORAL' MOTIVES IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 
 
 The Great Illusion dealt among other factors of international 
 conflict with the means by which the population of the world 
 is driven to support itself ; and studied the effect of those efforts 
 to find sustenance upon the relations of States. It therefore 
 dealt with economics. 
 
 On the strength of this, certain critics (like some of those 
 quoted in the last chapter) who cannot possibly have read the 
 book thoroughly, seem to have argued: If this book about 
 war deals with 'economics,' it must deal with money and 
 profits. To bring money and profits into a discussion of war 
 is to imply that men fight for money, and won't fight if they 
 don't get money from it; that war does not 'pay.' This is 
 wicked and horrible. Let us denounce the writer for a shallow 
 Hedonist and money-grubber. . . . 
 
 As a matter of simple fact, as we shall see presently, the 
 book was largely an attempt to show that the economic argu- 
 ment usually adduced for a particularly ruthless form of 
 national selfishness was not a sound argument; that the com- 
 monly invoked justification for a selfish immoralism in 
 Foreign Policy was a fallacy, an illusion. Yet the critics 
 somehow managed to turn what was in fact an argument against 
 national egoism into an argument for selfishness. 
 
 What was the political belief and the attitude towards life 
 which The Great Illusion challenged? And what was the 
 counter principle which it advocated as a substitute therefore? 
 
 264
 
 'ECONOMIC' AND 'MORAL' MOTIVES 265 
 
 It challenged the theory that the vital interests of nations 
 are conflicting, and that war is part of the inevitable struggle 
 for life among them; the view that, in order to feed itself, 
 a nation with an expanding population must conquer territory 
 and so deprive others of the means of subsistence; the view 
 that war is the 'struggle for bread.' 1 In other words, it 
 challenged the economic excuse or justification for the 'sacred 
 egoism' which is so largely the basis of the nationalist political 
 philosophy, an excuse, which, as we shall see, the nationalist 
 invokes if not to deny the moral law in the international field, 
 at least to put the morality governing the relations of States 
 on a very different plane from that which governs the relations 
 of individuals. As against this doctrine The Great Illusion 
 advanced the proposition, among others, that the economic or 
 biological assumption on which it is based is false; that the 
 policy of political power which results from this assumption 
 is economically unworkable, its benefits an illusion; that the 
 amount of sustenance provided by the earth is not a fixed 
 quantity so that what one nation can seize another loses, but 
 is an expanding quantity, its amount depending mainly upon 
 the efficiency with which men co-operate in their exploitation 
 of Nature. As already pointed out, a hundred thousand Red 
 Indians starved in a country where a hundred million modern 
 Americans have abundance. The need for co-operation, and 
 the faith on which alone it can be maintained, being indispen- 
 sable to our common welfare, the violation of the social com- 
 pact, international obligation, will be visited with penalties just 
 as surely as are violations of the moral law in relations between 
 individuals. The economic factor is not the sole or the largest 
 element in human relations, but it is the one which occupies 
 the largest place in public law and policy. (Of twp contest- 
 ants, each can retain his religion or literary preferences with- 
 out depriving the other of like possessions; they cannot both 
 retain the same piece of material property.) The economic 
 
 1 See quotations, Part I, Chapters I and III.
 
 266 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 problem is vital in the sense of dealing with the means by which 
 we maintain life; and it is invoked as justification for the 
 political immoralism of States. Until the confusions concern- 
 ing it are cleared up, it will serve little purpose to analyse the 
 other elements of conflict. 
 
 What justifies the assumption that the predatory egotism, 
 sacred or profane, here implied, was an indispensable part of 
 the pre-war political philosophy, explaining the great part of 
 policy in the international field? 1 
 
 First the facts: the whole history of international conflict 
 in the decade or two which preceded the War ; and the terms 
 of the Treaty of Versailles. If you would find out the nature 
 of a people's (or a statesman's) political morality, note their 
 conduct when they have complete power to carry their desires 
 into effect. The terms of peace, and the relations of the Allies 
 with Russia, show a deliberate and avowed pre-occupation with 
 sources of oil, iron, coal; with indemnities, investments, old 
 debts; with Colonies, markets; the elimination of commercial 
 rivals with all these things to a degree very much greater 
 and in a fashion much more direct than was assumed in The 
 Great Illusion. 
 
 But the tendency had been evident in the conflicts which 
 preceded the War. These conflicts, in so far as the Great 
 Powers were concerned, had been in practically every case 
 over territory, or roads to territory; over Madagascar, Egypt, 
 Morocco, Korea, Mongolia; 'warm water' ports, the division 
 
 1 The validity of this assumption still holds even though we take the 
 view that the defence of war as an inevitable struggle for bread is 
 merely a rationalisation (using that word in the technical sense of the 
 psychologists) of impulse or instinct, merely, that is, an attempt to find 
 a 'reason' for conduct the real explanation of which is the subcon- 
 scious promptings of pugnacities or hostilities, the craving of our 
 nature for certain kinds of action. If we could not justify our behaviour 
 in terms of self-preservation, it would stand so plainly condemned 
 ethically and socially that discipline of instinct as in the case of sex 
 instinct would obviously be called for and enforced. In either case, 
 the road to better behaviour is by a clearer revelation of the social 
 mischief of the predominant policy.
 
 'ECONOMIC' AND 'MORAL' MOTIVES 267 
 
 of Africa, the partitioning of China, loans thereto and con- 
 cessions therein; the Persian Gulf, the Bagdad Railway, the 
 Panama Canal. Where the principle of nationality was denied 
 by any Great Power it was generally because to recognise it 
 might block access to the sea or raw materials, throw a barrier 
 across the road to undeveloped territory. 
 
 There was no denial of this by those who treated of public 
 affairs. Mr Lloyd George declared that England would be 
 quite ready to go to war rather than have the Morocco question 
 settled without reference to her. Famous writers like Mahan 
 did not balk at conclusions like this : 
 
 'It is the great amount of unexploited raw material in terri- 
 tories politically backward, and now imperfectly possessed 
 by the nominal owners, which at the present moment consti- 
 tutes the temptation and the impulse to war of European 
 States.' x 
 
 Nor to justify them thus : 
 
 'More and more Germany needs the assured importation 
 of raw materials, and, where possible, control of regions 
 productive of such materials. More and more she requires 
 assured markets, and security as to the importation of food, 
 since less and less comparatively is produced within her own 
 borders for her rapidly increasing population. This all means 
 security at sea. . . . Yet the supremacy of Great Britain in 
 European seas means a perpetually latent control of German 
 commerce. . . . The world has long been accustomed to the 
 idea of a predominant naval power, coupling it accurately 
 with the name of Great Britain: and it has been noted that 
 such power, when achieved, is commonly found associated 
 with commercial and industrial pre-eminence, the struggle for 
 which is now in progress between Great Britain and Germany. 
 
 1 Rear-Admiral A. T. Mahan : Force in International Relations.
 
 268 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Such pre-eminence forces a nation to seek markets, and, where 
 possible, to control them to its own advantage by preponderant 
 force, the ultimate expression of which is possession. . . . 
 From this flow two results: the attempt to possess, and the 
 organisation of force by which to maintain possession already 
 achieved. . . . This statement is simply a specific formulation of 
 the general necessity stated; itself an inevitable link in a chain 
 
 of logical sequence: industry, markets, control, navy, bases. 
 
 i 
 
 Mr Spenser Wilkinson, of a corresponding English school, 
 is just as definite: 
 
 The effect of growth is an expansion and an increase of 
 power. It necessarily affects the environment of the growing 
 organisms; it interferes with the status quo. Existing rights 
 and interests are disturbed by the fact of growth, which is 
 itself a change. The growing community finds itself hedged 
 in by previously existing and surviving conditions, and fet- 
 tered by prescriptive rights. There is, therefore, an exertion 
 of force to overcome resistance. No process of law or of 
 arbitration can deal with this phenomenon, because any tribunal 
 administering a system of right or law must base its decision 
 upon the tradition of the past which has become unsuited to 
 the new conditions that have arisen. The growing State is 
 necessarily expansive or aggressive.' 2 
 
 Even more decisive as a definite philosophy are the proposi- 
 tions of Mr Petre, who, writing on 'The Mandate of Human- 
 ity,' says: 
 
 'The conscience of a State cannot, therefore, be as delicate, 
 as disinterested, as altruistic, as that of the noblest individ- 
 uals. The State exists primarily for its own people and only 
 
 1 The Interest of America in International Conditions, by Rear- 
 Admiral A. T. Mahan, pp. 47-87. 
 1 Government and the War, p. 62.
 
 'ECONOMIC' AND 'MORAL' MOTIVES 269 
 
 secondarily for the rest of the world. Hence, given a dispute 
 in which it feels its rights and welfare to be at stake, it may, 
 however erroneously, set aside its moral obligations to inter- 
 national society in favour of its obligations to the people for 
 whom it exists. 
 
 'But no righteous conscience, it may be said, could give its 
 verdict against a solemn pledge taken and reciprocated; no 
 righteous conscience could, in a society of nations, declare 
 against the ends of that society. Indeed I think it could, and 
 sometimes would, if its sense of justice were outraged, if 
 its duty to those who were bone of its bone and flesh of its 
 flesh came into conflict with its duty to those who were not 
 directly belonging to it. ... 
 
 'The mechanism of a State exists mainly for its own preser- 
 vation, and cannot be turned against this, its legitimate end. 
 The conscience of a State will not traverse this main condition, 
 and to weaken its conscience is to weaken its life. . . . 
 
 'The strong will not give way to the weak; the one who 
 thinks himself in the right will not yield to those whom he 
 believes to be in the wrong; the living generations will not 
 be restrained by the promises to a dead one; nature will not 
 be controlled by conventions.' 1 
 
 It is the last note that gives the key to popular feeling 
 about the scramble for territory. In The Great Illusion whole 
 pages of popular writing are quoted to show that the concep- 
 tion of the struggle as in truth the struggle for survival had 
 firmly planted itself in the popular consciousness. One of 
 the critics who is so severe upon the present writer for trying 
 to undermine the economic foundation of that popular creed, 
 Benjamin Kidd, himself testifies to the depth and sweep of this 
 pseudo-Darwinism (he seems to think indeed that it is true 
 Darwinism, which it is not, as Darwin himself pointed out). 
 He declares that 'there is no precedent in the history of the 
 
 1 State Morality and a League of Nations, pp 83-85.
 
 270 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 human mind to compare with the saturnalia of the Western 
 intellect* which followed the popularisation of what he regards 
 as Darwin's case and I would regard as a distortion of it. 
 Kidd says it 'touched the profoundest depth of the psychology 
 of the West.' 'Everywhere throughout civilisation an al- 
 most inconceivable influence was given to the doctrine of 
 the law of biological necessity in books of statecraft and war- 
 craft, of expanding military empires.' 'Struggle for life,' 
 'a biological necessity/ 'survival of the fit,' had passed into 
 popular use and had come to buttress popular feeling about the 
 inevitability of war and its ultimate justification and the use- 
 lessness of organising the natives save on a basis of conflict. 
 
 We are now in a position to see the respective moral posi- 
 tions of the two protagonists. 
 
 The advocate of Political Theory No. 1, which an over- 
 whelming preponderance of evidence shows to be the pre- 
 vailing theory, says: You Pacifists are asking us to commit 
 national suicide; to sacrifice future generations to your politi- 
 cal ideals. Now, as voters or statesmen we are trustees, we 
 act for others. Sacrifice, suicide even, on behalf of an ideal, 
 may be justified when we are sacrificing ourselves. But we 
 cannot sacrifice others, our wards. Our first duty is to our own 
 nation, our own children; to their national security and future 
 welfare. It is regrettable if, by the conquests, wars, block- 
 ades, rendered necessary by those objects other people starve, 
 and lose their national freedom and see their children die ; but 
 that is the hard necessity of life in a hard world. 
 
 Advocate of Political Theory No. 2 says: I deny that the 
 excuse of justification which you give for your cruelty to 
 others is a valid excuse or justification. Pacifism does not 
 ask you to sacrifice your people, to betray the interest of your 
 wards. You will serve their interests best by the policy we 
 advocate. Your children will not be more assured of their 
 sustenance by these conquests that attempt to render the feed- 
 ing of foreign children more difficult ; yours will be less secure.
 
 'ECONOMIC AND 'MORAL' MOTIVES 271 
 
 By co-operating with those others instead of using your ener- 
 gies against them, the resultant wealth. . . . 
 
 Advocate No. 1 : Wealth ! Interest ! You introduce your 
 wretched economic calculations of interest into a question of 
 Patriotism. You have the soul of a bagman concerned only 
 to restore 'the blessed hour of tranquil money-getting,' and 
 Sir William Robertson Nicoll shall denounce you in the Brit- 
 ish Weekly! 
 
 And the discussion usually ends with this moral flourish 
 and gestures of melodramatic indignation. 
 
 But are they honest gestures? Here are the upholders of 
 a certain position who say : 'In certain circumstances as when 
 you are in a position of trustee, the only moral course, the 
 only right course, is to be guided by the interests of your 
 ward. Your duty then demands a calculation of advantage. 
 You may not be generous at your ward's expense. This is 
 the justification of the "sacred egoism" of the poet.' 
 
 If in that case a critic says: 'Very well. Let us consider 
 what will be the best interests of your ward,' is it really open 
 to the first party to explain in a paroxysm of moral indigna- 
 tion: 'You are making a shameful and disgraceful appeal to 
 selfishness and avarice?' 
 
 This is not an attempt to answer one set of critics by quoting 
 another set. The self -same people take those two attitudes. 
 I have quoted above a passage of Admiral Mahan's in which 
 he declares that nations can never be expected to act from any 
 other motive than that of interest (a generalisation, by the 
 way, from which I should most emphatically dissent). He 
 goes on to declare that Governments 'must put first the rival 
 interests of their own wards . . . their own people,' and are 
 thus pushed to the acquisition of markets by means of military 
 predominance. 
 
 Very well. The Great Illusion argued some of Admiral 
 Mahan's propositions in terms of interest and advantage. And 
 then, when he desired to demolish that argument, he did not
 
 272 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 hesitate in a long article in the North American Review to 
 write as follows : 
 
 'The purpose of armaments, in the minds of those main- 
 taining them, is not primarily an economical advantage, in 
 the sense of depriving a neighbour State of its own, or fear 
 of such consequences to itself through the deliberate aggres- 
 sion of a rival having that particular end in view. . . . The 
 fundamental proposition of the book is a mistake. Nations 
 are under no illusion as to the unprofitableness of war in 
 itself. . . . The entire conception of the work is itself an 
 illusion, based upon a profound misreading of human action. 
 To regard the world as governed by self-interest only is to 
 live in a non-existent world, an ideal world, a world possessed 
 by an idea much less worthy than those which mankind, to do 
 it bare justice, persistently entertains.' 1 
 
 Admiral Mahan was a writer of very great and deserved 
 reputation, in the very first rank of those dealing with the 
 relations of power to national politics, certainly incapable of 
 any conscious dishonesty of opinion. Yet, as we have seen, 
 his opinion on the most important fact of all about war 
 its ultimate purpose, and the reasons which justify it or provoke 
 it swings violently in absolute self-contradiction. And the 
 flat contradiction here revealed shows and this surely is the 
 moral of such an incident that he could never have put to 
 himself detachedly, coldly, impartially the question: 'What do 
 I really believe about the motives of nations in War? To 
 what do the facts as a whole really point?' Had he done so, 
 it might have been revealed to him that what really de- 
 termined his opinion about the causes of war was a desire to 
 justify the great profession of arms, to one side of which he 
 had devoted his life and given years of earnest labour and 
 study; to defend from some imputation of futility one of the 
 
 1 North American Review, March 1912.
 
 'ECONOMIC' AND 'MORAL' MOTIVES 273 
 
 most ancient of man's activities that calls for some at least 
 of the sublimest of human qualities. If a widened idealism 
 clearly discredited that ancient institution, he was prepared 
 to show that an ineradicable conflict of national interests ren- 
 dered it inevitable. If it was shown that war was irrelevant 
 to those conflicts, or ineffective as a means of protecting the 
 interests concerned, he was prepared to show that the mo- 
 tives pushing to war were not those of interest at all. 
 
 It may be said that none the less the thesis under discus- 
 sion substitutes one selfish argument for another; tries bv 
 appealing to self-interest (the self-interest of a group or 
 nation) to turn selfishness from a destructive result to a 
 more social result. Its basis is self. Even that is not really 
 true. For, first, that argument ignores the question of trus- 
 teeship; and, secondly, it involves a confusion between the 
 motive of a given policy and the criterion by which its good- 
 ness or badness shall be tested. 
 
 How is one to deal with the claim of the 'mystic nation- 
 alist' (he exists abundantly even outside the Balkans) that 
 the subjugation of some neighbouring nationalism is demanded 
 by honour; that only the great State can be the really good 
 State; that power 'majesty,' as the Oriental would say 
 is a thing good in itself ? x There are ultimate questions as to 
 what is good and what is bad that no argument can answer; 
 ultimate values which cannot be discussed. But one can re- 
 duce those unarguable values to a minimum by appealing to cer- 
 tain social needs. A State which has plenty of food may not be 
 a good State; but a State which cannot feed its population 
 
 1 Admiral Mahan himself makes precisely this appeal : 
 'That extension of national authority over alien communities, which 
 is the dominant note in the world politics of to-day, dignifies and en- 
 larges each State and each citizen that enters its fold . . . Sentiment, 
 imagination, aspiration, the satisfaction of the rational and moral 
 faculties in some object better than bread alone, all must find a part 
 in a worthy motive. Like individuals, nations and empires have souls 
 as well as bodies. Great and beneficent achievement ministers to 
 worthier contentment than the filling of the pocket.' 
 
 18
 
 274 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 cannot be a good State, for in that case the citizens will be 
 hungry, greedy, and violent. 
 
 In other words, certain social needs and certain social utili- 
 ties which we can all recognise as indispensables furnish 
 a ground of agreement for the common action without which 
 no society can be established. And the need for such a 
 criterion becomes more manifest as we learn more of the 
 wonderful fashion in which we sublimate our motives. A 
 country refuses to submit its dispute to arbitration, because 
 its 'honour' is involved. Many books have been written to try 
 and find out precisely what honour of this kind is. One of 
 the best of them has decided that it is anything which a coun- 
 try cares to make it. It is never the presence of coal, or iron, 
 or oil, which makes it imperative to retain a given territory: 
 it is honour (as Italy's Foreign Minister explained when Italy 
 went to war for the conquest of Tripoli). Unfortunately, 
 rival States have also impulses of honour which compel them 
 to claim the same undeveloped territory. Nothing can prove 
 or disprove that honour, in such circumstances, is invoked 
 by each or either of the parties concerned to make a piece of 
 acquisitiveness or megalomania appear as fine to himself as 
 possible: that, just because he has a lurking suspicion that all 
 is not well with the operation, he seeks to justify it to him- 
 self with fine words that have a very vague content. But 
 on this basis there can be no agreement. If, however, one 
 shifts the discussion to the question of what is best for the 
 social welfare of both, one can get a modus vivendi. For each 
 to admit that he has no right so to use his power as to deprive 
 the other of means of life, would be the beginning of a code 
 which could be tested. Each might conceivably have that 
 right to deprive the other of means of livelihood, if it were 
 a choice between the lives of his own people or others. 
 
 The economic fact is the test of the ethical claim : if it really 
 be true that we must withhold sources of food from others 
 because otherwise our own would starve, there is some ethical
 
 275 
 
 justification for such use of our power. If such is not the 
 fact, the whole moral issue is changed, and with it, to the 
 degree to which it is mutually realised, the social outlook and 
 attitude. The knowledge of interdependence is part, at least, 
 of an attitude which makes the 'social sense' the sense that 
 one kind of arrangement is fair and workable, and another 
 is not. To bring home the fact of this interdependence is 
 not simply an appeal to selfishness : it is to reveal a method by 
 which an apparently irreconcilable conflict of vital needs can 
 be reconciled. The sense of interdependence, of the need of 
 one for another, is part of the foundation of the very diffi- 
 cult art of living together. 
 
 Much mischief arises from the misunderstanding of the 
 term 'economic motive.' Let us examine some further exam- 
 ples of this. One is a common confusion of terms: an eco- 
 nomic motive may be the reverse of selfish. The long sustained 
 efforts of parents to provide fittingly for their children 
 efforts continued, it may be, through half a lifetime are 
 certainly economic. Just as certainly they are not selfish in 
 any exact sense of the term. Yet something like this confu- 
 sion seems to overlie the discussion of economics in connec- 
 tion with war. 
 
 Speaking broadly, I do not believe that men ever go to war 
 from a cold calculation of advantage or profit. I never have 
 believed it. It seems to me an obvious and childish misread- 
 ing of human psychology. I cannot see how it is possible to 
 imagine a man laying down his life on the battle-field for 
 personal gain. Nations do not fight for their money or inter- 
 ests, they fight for their rights, or what they believe to be 
 their rights. The very gallant men who triumphed at Bull 
 Run or Chancellorsville were not fighting for the profits on 
 slave-labour: they were fighting for what they believed to 
 be their independence: the rights, as they would have said, 
 to self-government or, as we should now say, of self-deter- 
 mination. Yet it was a conflict which arose out of slave
 
 276 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 labour: an economic question. Now the most elementary of 
 all rights, in the sense of the first right which a people will 
 claim, is the right to existence the right of a population to 
 bread and a decent livelihood. 1 For that nations certainly will 
 fight. Yet, as we see, it is a right which arises out of an 
 economic need or conflict. We have seen how it works as a 
 factor in our own foreign policy: as a compelling motive for 
 the command of the sea. We believe that the feeding of these 
 islands depends upon it: that if we lost it our children might 
 die in the streets and the lack of food compel us to an igno- 
 minious surrender. It is this relation of vital food supply to 
 preponderant sea power which has caused us to tolerate no 
 challenge to the latter. We know the part which the growth 
 of the German Navy played in shaping Anglo-Continental re- 
 lations before the War; the part which any challenge to our 
 naval preponderance has always played in determining our 
 foreign policy. The command of the sea, with all that that 
 means in the way of having built up a tradition, a battle-cry in 
 politics, has certainly bound up with it this life and death 
 fact of feeding our population. That is to say it is an economic 
 need. Yet the determination of some millions of Englishmen 
 to fight for this right to life, to die rather than see the daily 
 bread of their people in jeopardy, would be adequately de- 
 scribed by some phrase about Englishmen going to war be- 
 cause it 'paid.' It would be a silly or dishonest gibe. Yet 
 that is precisely the kind of gibe that I have had to face these 
 fifteen years in attempting to disentangle the forces and mo- 
 tives underlying international conflict. 
 
 What picture is summoned to our minds by the word 'eco- 
 nomies' in relation to war? To the critics whose indignation 
 is so excited at the introduction of the subject at all into the 
 discussion of war and they include, unhappily, some of the 
 
 1 It is not necessary to enter exhaustively into the difficult problem 
 of 'natural right.' It suffices for the purpose of this argument that the 
 claim of others to life will certainly be made and that we can only re- 
 fuse it at a cost which diminishes our own chances of survival.
 
 'ECONOMIC AND 'MORAL' MOTIVES 277 
 
 great names of English literature 'economic' seems to carry 
 no picture but that of an obese Semitic stockbroker, in quak- 
 ing fear for his profits. This view cannot be said to imply 
 either much imagination or much sense of reality. For among 
 the stockbrokers, the usurers, those closest to financial manip- 
 ulation and in touch with financial changes, are to be found 
 some groups numerically small, who are more likely to gain 
 than to lose by war; and the present writer has never sug- 
 gested the contrary. 
 
 But the 'economic futility* of war expresses itself other- 
 wise : in half a Continent unable to feed or clothe or warm 
 itself; millions rendered neurotic, abnormal, hysterical by 
 malnutrition, disease, and anxiety; millions rendered greedy, 
 selfish, and violent by the constant strain of hunger; resulting 
 in 'social unrest' that threatens more and more to become 
 sheer chaos and confusion: the dissolution and disintegra- 
 tion of society. Everywhere, in the cities, are the children 
 who cry and who are not fed, who raise shrunken arms to 
 our statesmen who talk with pride z of their stern measures 
 of 'rigorous' blockade. Rickety and dying children, and un- 
 dying hate for us, their murderers, in the hearts of their 
 mothers these are the human realities of the 'economics of 
 war.' 
 
 The desire to prevent these things, to bring about an order 
 that would render possible both patriotism and mercy, would 
 save us from the dreadful dilemma of feeding our own children 
 only by the torture and death of others equally innocent the 
 effort to this end is represented as a mere appeal to selfishness 
 and avarice, something mean and ignoble, a degradation of 
 human motive. 
 
 'These theoretical dilemmas do not state accurately the real 
 conditions of politics,' the reader may object. 'No one pro- 
 poses to inflict famine as a means of enforcing our policy' 
 . . . 'England does not make war on women and children.' 
 
 * See Mr Churchill's declaration, quoted Part I Chapter V.
 
 278 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Not one man or woman in a million, English or other, would 
 wittingly inflict the suffering of starvation upon a single child, 
 if the child were visible to his eyes, present in his mind, and if 
 the simple human fact were not obscured by the much more 
 complex and aitificial facts that have gathered round our con- 
 ceptions of patriotism. The heaviest indictment of the military- 
 nationalist philosophy we are discussing is that it manages 
 successfully to cover up human realities by dehumanising 
 abstractions. From the moment that the child becomes a part 
 of that abstraction 'Russia,' 'Austria,' 'Germany' it loses its 
 human identity, and becomes merely an impersonal part of the 
 political problem of the struggle of our nation with others. 
 The inverted moral alchemy, by which the golden instinct that 
 we associate with so much of direct human contact is trans- 
 formed into the leaden cruelty of nationalist hate and high 
 statecraft, has been dealt with at the close of Part I. When 
 in tones of moral indignation it is declared that Englishmen 
 'do not make war on women and children,' we must face the 
 truth and say that Englishmen, like all peoples, do make such 
 war. 
 
 An action in public policy the proclamation of the blockade, 
 or the confiscation of so much tonnage, or the cession of terri- 
 tory, or the refusal of a loan these things are remote and 
 vague; not only is the relation between results and causes re- 
 mote and sometimes difficult to establish, but the results them- 
 selves are invisible and far away. And when the results of a 
 policy are remote, and can be slurred over in our minds, we 
 are perfectly ready to apply, logically and ruthlessly, the most 
 ferocious of political theories. It is of supreme importance 
 then what those theories happen to be. When the issue of war 
 and peace hangs in the balance, the beam may well be kicked 
 one way or the other by our general political philosophy, these 
 somewhat vague and hazy notions about life being a struggle, 
 and nature red of tooth and claw, about wars being part of 
 the cosmic process, sanctioned by professors and bishops and
 
 'ECONOMIC' AND 'MORAL' MOTIVES 279 
 
 writers. It may well be these vague notions that lead us to 
 acquiesce in the blockade or the newest war. The typhus or 
 the rickets do not kill or maim any the less because we do not 
 in our minds connect those results with the political abstractions 
 that we bandy about so lightly. And we touch there the great- 
 est service which a more 'economic' treatment of European 
 problems may perform. If the Treaty of Versailles had been 
 more economic it would also have been a more humane and 
 human document. If there had been more of Mr Keynes and 
 less of M. Clemenceau, there would have been not only more 
 food in the world, but more kindliness ; not only less famine, 
 but less hate; not only more life, but a better way of life; 
 those living would have been nearer to understanding and dis- 
 carding the way of death. 
 
 Let us summarise the points so far made with reference to 
 the 'economic' motive. 
 
 We need not accept any hard and fast (and in the view of 
 the present writer, unsound) doctrine of economic determinism, 
 in order to admit the truth of the following : 
 
 1. Until economic difficulties are so far solved as to give the 
 mass of the people the means of secure and tolerable physical 
 existence, economic considerations and motives will tend to 
 exclude all others. The way to give the spiritual a fair chance 
 with ordinary men and women is not to be magnificently 
 superior to their economic difficulties, but to find a solution for 
 them. Until the economic dilemma is solved, no solution of 
 moral difficulties will be adequate. If you want to get rid of 
 the economic preoccupation, you must solve the worst of the 
 economic problem. 
 
 2. In the same way the solution of the economic conflict be- 
 tween nations will not of itself suffice to establish peace; but 
 no peace is possible until that conflict is solved. That makes 
 it of sufficient importance. 
 
 3. The 'economic' problem involved in international politics 
 the use of political power for economic ends is also one of
 
 280 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Right, including the most elemental of all rights, that to exist. 
 
 4. The answer which we give to that question of Right will 
 depend upon our answer to the actual query of The Great 
 Illusion : must a country of expanding population expand its 
 territory or trade by means of its political power, in order to 
 live? Is the political struggle for territory a struggle for 
 bread ? 
 
 5. If we take the view that the truth is contained in neither 
 an unqualified affirmative nor an unqualified negative, then all 
 the more is it necessary that the interdependence of peoples, 
 the necessity for a truly international economy, should become 
 a commonplace. A wider realisation of those facts would help 
 to create that pre-disposition necessary for a belief in the 
 workability of voluntary co-operation, a belief which must 
 precede any successful attempt to make such co-operation the 
 basis of an international order. 
 
 6. The economic argument of The Great Illusion, if valid, 
 destroys the pseudo-scientific justification for political immoral- 
 ism, the doctrine of State necessity, which has marked so much 
 of classical statecraft. 
 
 7. The main defects of the Treaty of Versailles are due to 
 the pressure of a public opinion obsessed by just those ideas of 
 nations as persons, of conflicting interests, which The Great 
 Illusion attempted to destroy. If the Treaty had been inspired 
 by the ideas of interdependence of interest, it would have been 
 not only more in the interests of the Allies, but morally sounder, 
 providing a better ethical basis for future peace. 
 
 8. To go on ignoring the economic unity and interdependence 
 of Europe, to refuse to subject nationalist pugnacities to that 
 needed unity because 'economies' are sordid, is to refuse to face 
 the needs of human life, and the forces that shape it. Such an 
 attitude, while professing moral elevation, involves a denial of 
 the right of others to live. Its worst defect, perhaps, is that its 
 heroics are fatal to intellectual rectitude, to truth. No society 
 built upon such foundations can stand.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE GREAT ILLUSION ARGUMENT 
 
 THE preceding chapters have dealt rather with misconceptions 
 concerning The Great Illusion than with its positive proposi- 
 tions. What, outlined as briefly as possible, was its central 
 argument ? 
 
 That argument was an elaboration of these propositions: 
 Military preponderance, conquest, as a means to man's most 
 elemental needs bread, sustenance is futile, because the 
 processes (exchange, division of labour) to which the dense 
 populations of modern Western society are compelled to resort, 
 cannot be exacted by military coercion ; they can only operate 
 as the result of a large measure of voluntary acquiescence by 
 the parties concerned. A realisation of this truth is indispen- 
 sable for the restraint of the instinctive pugnacities that hamper 
 human relationship, particularly where nationalism enters. 1 
 The competition for power so stimulates those pugnacities and 
 fears, that isolated national power cannot ensure a nation's 
 political security or independence. Political security and eco- 
 nomic well-being can only be ensured by international co- 
 
 1 Mr J. L. Garvin, who was among those who bitterly criticised this 
 thesis on account of its 'sordidness,' now writes : 'Armageddon might 
 become almost as frequent as General Elections if belligerency were 
 not restrained by sheer dread of the consequences in an age of economic 
 interdependence when even victory has ceased to pay." 
 
 (Quoted in Westminster Gazette, Jan, 24, 1921.) 
 281
 
 282 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 operation. This must be economic as well as political, be 
 directed, that is, not only at pooling military forces for the 
 purpose of restraining aggression, but at the maintenance of 
 some economic code which will ensure for all nations, whether 
 militarily powerful or not, fair economic opportunity and 
 means of subsistence. 
 
 It was, in other words, an attempt to clear the road to a more 
 workable international policy by undermining the main concep- 
 tions and prepossessions inimical to an international order. 1 It 
 did not elaborate machinery, but the facts it dealt with point 
 clearly to certain conclusions on that head. 
 
 While arguing that prevailing beliefs (false beliefs for the 
 most part) and feelings (largely directed by the false beliefs) 
 were the determining factors in international politics, the author 
 challenged the prevailing assumption of the unchangeability of 
 those ideas and feelings, particularly the proposition that war 
 between human groups arises out of instincts and emotions 
 incapable of modification or control or re-direction by con- 
 scious effort. The author placed equal emphasis on both parts 
 of the proposition that dealing with the alleged immutability 
 of human pugnacity and ideas, and that which challenged the 
 representation of war as an inevitable struggle for physical 
 
 1 The introductory synopsis reads : 
 
 What are the fundamental motives that explain the present rivalry 
 of armaments in Europe, notably the Anglo-German? Each nation 
 pleads the need for defence; but this implies that some one is likely to 
 attack, and has therefore a presumed interest in so doing. What are 
 the motives which each State thus fears its neighbours may obey? 
 
 They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order 
 to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or 
 simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily 
 pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against 
 others (German naval competition is assumed to be. the expression of 
 the growing need of an expanding population for a larger place in the 
 world, a need which will find a realisation in the conquest of English 
 Colonies or trade, unless these were defended) ; it is assumed, there- 
 fore, that a nation's relative prosperity is broadly determined by its 
 political power; that nations being competing units, advantage, in the 
 last resort, goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the 
 weaker going to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life. 
 
 The author challenges this whole doctrine.
 
 THE GREAT ILLUSION ARGUMENT 283 
 
 sustenance if only because no exposure of the biological 
 fallacy would be other than futile if the former proposition 
 were true. 1 
 
 If conduct in these matters is the automatic reaction to un- 
 controllable instinct and is not affected by ideas, or if ideas 
 themselves are the mere reflection of that instinct, obviously it 
 is no use attempting demonstrations of futility, economic or 
 other. The more we demonstrate the intensity of our inherent 
 pugnacity and irrationalism, the more do we in fact demonstrate 
 the need for the conscious control of those instincts. The 
 alternative conclusion is fatalism: an admission not only that 
 our ship is not under control, but that we have given up the 
 task of getting it under control. We have surrendered our 
 freedom. 
 
 Moreover, our record shows that the direction taken by our 
 pugnacities their objective is in fact largely determined by 
 traditions and ideas which are in part at least the sum of con- 
 scious intellectual effort. The history of religious persecution 
 its wars, inquisitions, repressions shows a great change 
 (which we must admit as a fact, whether we regard it as good 
 or bad) not only of idea but of feeling. 2 The book rejected 
 
 1 See chapters The Psychological Case for Peace, Unchanging Human 
 Nature, and Is the Political Reformation Possible? 
 
 'Not the facts, but men's opinions about the facts, is what matters. 
 Men's conduct is determined, not necessarily by the right conclusion 
 from facts, but the conclusion they believe to be right.' 
 
 In another pre-war book of the present writer (The Foundations of 
 International Polity) the same view is developed, particularly in the 
 passage which has been reproduced in Chapter VI of this book, 'The 
 Alternative Risks of Status and Contract.' 
 
 ' 'The cessation of religious war indicates the greatest outstanding fact 
 in the history of civilised mankind during the last thousand years, which 
 is this : that all civilised Governments have abandoned their claim to 
 dictate the belief of their subjects. For very long that was a right 
 tenaciously held, and it was held on grounds for which there is an 
 immense deal to be said. It was held that as belief is an integral part 
 of conduct, that as conduct springs from belief, and the purpose of the 
 State is to ensure such conduct as will enable us to go about our business 
 in safety, it was obviously the duty of the State to protect those beliefs, 
 the abandonment of which seemed to undermine the foundations of con-
 
 284 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 instinct as sufficient guide and urged the need of discipline by 
 intelligent foresight of consequence. 
 
 To examine our subconscious or unconscious motives of 
 conduct is the first step to making them conscious and modify- 
 ing them. 
 
 This does not imply that instincts whether of pugnacity or 
 other can readily be repressed by a mere effort of will. But 
 their direction, the object upon which they expend themselves, 
 will depend upon our interpretation of facts. If we interpret 
 the hailstorm or the curdled milk in one way, our fear and 
 hatred of the witch is intense; the same facts interpreted 
 another way make the witch an object of another emotion, pity. 
 
 Reason may be a very small part of the apparatus of human 
 conduct compared with the part played by the unconscious and 
 subconscious, the instinctive and the emotional. The power 
 of a ship's compass is very small indeed compared with the 
 
 duct. I do not believe that this case has ever been completely answered . . . 
 Men of profound thought and profound learning to-day defend it, and 
 personally I have found it very difficult to make a clear and simple 
 case for the defence of the principle on which every civilised Govern- 
 ment in the world is to-day founded. How do you account for this 
 tiiat a principle which I do not believe one man in a million could defend 
 from all objections has become the dominating rule of civilised govern- 
 ment throughout the world? 
 
 'Well, that once universal policy has been abandoned, not because every 
 argument, or even perhaps most of the arguments, which led to it, have 
 been answered, but because the fundamental one has. The conception 
 on which it rested has been shown to be, not in every detail, but in the 
 essentials at least, an illusion, a Misconception. 
 
 'The world of religious wars and of the Inquisition was a world which 
 had a quite definite conception of the relation of authority to religious 
 belief and to truth as that authority was the source of truth; that 
 truth could be, and should be, protected by force ; that Catholics who did 
 not resent an insult offered to their faith (like the failure of a Huguenot 
 to salute a passing religious procession) were renegade. 
 
 'Now. what broke down this conception was a growing realisation that 
 authority, force, was irrelevant to the issues of truth (a party of heretics 
 triumphed by virtue of some physical accident, as that they occupied a 
 mountain region) ; that it was ineffective, and that the essence of truth 
 was something outside the scope of physical conflict. As the realisation 
 of this grew, the conflicts declined.' Foundations of International 
 Polity, p. 214.
 
 THE GREAT ILLUSION ARGUMENT 285 
 
 power developed by the engines. But the greater the power 
 of the engines, the greater will be the disaster if the relatively 
 tiny compass is deflected and causes the ship to be driven on 
 to the rocks. The illustration indicates, not exactly but with 
 sufficient truth, the relationship of 'reason' to 'instinct.' 
 
 The instincts that push to self-assertion, to the acquisition of 
 preponderant power, are so strong that we shall only abandon 
 that method as the result of perceiving its futility. Co-opera- 
 tion, which means a relationship of partnership and give and 
 take, will not succeed till force has failed. 
 
 The futility of power as a means to our most fundamental 
 and social ends is due mainly to two facts, one mechanical, and 
 the other moral. The mechanical fact is that if we really need 
 another, our power over him has very definite limits. Our 
 dependence on him gives him a weapon against us. The moral 
 fact is that in demanding a position of domination, we ask 
 something to which we should not accede if it were asked of 
 us: the claim does not stand the test of the categorical im- 
 perative. If we need another's labour, we cannot kill him; if 
 his custom, we cannot forbid him to, earn money. If his labour 
 is to be effective, we must give him tools, knowledge; and 
 these things can be used to resist our exactions. To the degree 
 to which he is powerful for service he is powerful for resist- 
 ance. A nation wealthy as a customer will also be ubiquitous 
 as a competitor. 
 
 The factors which have operated to make physical compul- 
 sion (slavery) as a means of obtaining service less economical 
 than service for reward, operate just as effectively between 
 nations. The employment of military force for economic ends 
 is an attempt to apply indirectly the principle of chattel-slavery 
 to groups; and involves the same disadvantages. 1 
 
 1 An attempt is made, in The Great Illusion, to sketch the process 
 which lies behind the progressive substitution of bargain for coercion 
 (The Economic Interpretation of the History of Development 'From 
 Status to Contract') on pages 187-192, and further developed in a chap- 
 ter 'the Diminishing Factor of Physical Force' (p. 257).
 
 286 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 In so far as coercion represents a means of securing a wider 
 and more effective social co-operation as against a narrower 
 social co-operation, or more anarchic condition, it is likely to 
 be successful and to justify itself socially. The imposition of 
 Western government upon backward peoples approximates to 
 the role of police; the struggles between the armed forces of 
 rival Western Powers do not. The function of a police force 
 is the exact contrary to that of armies competing with one 
 another. 1 
 
 The demonstration of the futility of conquest rested mainly 
 on these facts. After conquest the conquered people cannot be 
 
 1 'When we learn that London, instead of using its police for the run- 
 ning in of burglars and "drunks/ is using them to lead an attack on 
 Birmingham for the purpose of capturing that city as part of a policy 
 of "municipal expansion," or "Civic Imperialism," or "Pan-Londonism," 
 or what not ; or is using its force to repel an attack by the Birmingham 
 police acting as the result of a similar policy on the part of the Birming- 
 ham patriots when that happens you can safely approximate a police 
 force to a European army. But until it does, it is quite evident that the 
 two the army and the police force have in reality diametrically op- 
 posed roles. The police exist as an instrument of social co-operation ; 
 the armies as the natural outcome of the quaint illusion that though one 
 city could never enrich itself by "capturing" or "subjugating" another, 
 in some wonderful (and unexplained) way one country can enrich itself 
 by capturing or subjugating another 
 
 'France has benefited by the conquest of Algeria, England by that 
 of India, because in each case the arms were employed not, properly 
 speaking, for conquest, but for police purposes, for the establishment 
 and maintenance of order; and, so far as they filled that role, their 
 role was a useful one 
 
 'Germany has no need to maintain order in England, nor England in 
 Germany, and the latent struggle, therefore, between these two countries 
 is futile 
 
 'It is one of the humours of the whole Anglo-German conflict that 
 so much has the British public been concerned with the myths and 
 bogeys of the matter, that it seems calmly to have ignored the realities. 
 While even the wildest Pan-German does not cast his eyes in the direction 
 of Canada, he does cast them in the direction of Asia Minor; and the 
 political activities of Germany may centre on that area for precisely 
 the reasons which result from the distinction between policing and con- 
 quest which I have drawn. German industry is coming to have a 
 dominating situation in the Near East, and as those interests her 
 markets and investments increase, the necessity for better order in, and 
 the better organisation of, such territories, increases in corresponding 
 degree. Germany may need to police Asia Minor.' (The Great Illusion, 
 pp. 131-2-3.)
 
 THE GREAT ILLUSION ARGUMENT 287 
 
 i 
 
 killed. They cannot be allowed to starve. Pressure of popula- 
 tion on means of subsistence has not been reduced, but probably 
 increased, since the number of mouths to fill eliminated by the 
 casualty lists is not equivalent to the reduced production occa- 
 sioned by war. To impose by force (e.g. exclusion from raw 
 materials) a lower standard of living, creates (a) resistance 
 which involves costs of coercion (generally in military estab- 
 lishments, but also in the political difficulties in which the coer- 
 cion of hostile peoples as in Alsace-Lorraine and Ireland 
 generally involves their conqueror), costs which must be 
 deducted from the economic advantage of the conquest; and 
 (b) loss of markets which may be indispensable to countries 
 (like Britain) whose prosperity depends upon an international 
 division of labour. A population that lives by exchanging its 
 coal and iron for (say) food, does not profit by reducing the 
 productivity of subject peoples engaged in food production. 
 In The Great Illusion the case was put as follows : 
 
 'When we conquer a nation in these days, we do not exter- 
 minate it: we leave it where it was. When we "overcome" 
 the servile races, far from eliminating them, we give them 
 added chances of life by introducing order, etc., so that the 
 lower human quality tends to be perpetuated by conquest by 
 the higher. If ever it happens that the Asiatic races challenge 
 the white in the industrial or military field, it will be in large 
 part thanks to the work of race conservation, which has been 
 the result of England's conquest in India, Egypt, and Asia 
 generally/ (pp. 191-192.) 
 
 'When the division of labour was so little developed that 
 every homestead produced all that it needed, it mattered nothing 
 if part of the community was cut off from the world for weeks 
 and months at a time. All the neighbours of a village or home- 
 stead might be slain or harassed, and no inconvenience resulted. 
 But if to-day an English county is by a general railroad strike 
 cut off for so much as forty-eight hours from the rest of the
 
 288 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 economic organism, we know that whole sections of its popu- 
 lation are threatened with famine. If in the time of the Danes 
 England could by some magic have killed all foreigners, she 
 would presumably have been the better off. If she could do 
 the same thing to-day half her population would starve to 
 death. If on one side of the frontier a community is, say, 
 wheat-producing, and on the other coal-producing, each is de- 
 pendent for its very existence on the fact of the other being 
 able to carry on its labour. The miner cannot in a week set to 
 and grow a crop of wheat ; the farmer must wait for his wheat 
 to grow, and must meantime feed his family and dependents. 
 The exchange involved here must go on, and each party have 
 fair expectation that he will in due course be able to reap the 
 fruits of his labour, or both starve; and that exchange, that 
 expectation, is merely the expression in its simplest form of 
 commerce and credit; and the interdependence here indicated 
 has, by the countless developments of rapid communication, 
 reached such a condition of complexity that the interference 
 with any given operation affects not merely the parties directly 
 involved, but numberless others having at first sight no connec- 
 tion therewith. 
 
 The vital interdependence here indicated, cutting athwart 
 frontiers, is largely the work of the last forty years; and it 
 has, during that time, so developed as to have set up a financial 
 interdependence of the capitals of the world, so complex that 
 disturbance in New York involves financial and commercial 
 disturbance in London, and, if sufficiently grave, compels 
 financiers of London to co-operate with those of New York 
 to put an end to the crisis, not as a matter of altruism, but 
 as a matter of commercial self -protection. The complexity 
 of modern finance makes New York dependent on London, 
 London upon Paris, Paris upon Berlin, to a greater degree 
 than has ever yet been the case in history. This interdepen- 
 dence is the result of the daily use of those contrivances of 
 civilisation which date from yesterday the rapid post, the
 
 THE GREAT ILLUSION ARGUMENT 289 
 
 instantaneous dissemination of financial and commercial in- 
 formation by means of telegraphy, and generally the incredi- 
 ble progress of rapidity in communication which has put the 
 half-dozen chief capitals of Christendom in closer contact 
 financially, and has rendered them more dependent the one upon 
 the other than were the chief cities of Great Britain less than 
 a hundred years ago. (pp. 49-50.) 
 
 'Credit is merely an extension of the use of money, and 
 we can no more shake off the domination of the one than 
 we can of the other. We have seen that the bloodiest despot 
 is himself the slave of money, in the sense that he is com- 
 pelled to employ it. In the same way no physical force can 
 in the modern world set at naught the force of credit. It is 
 no more possible for a great people of the modern world to 
 live without credit than without money, of which it is a 
 part. . . . The wealth of the world is not represented by a 
 fixed amount of gold or money now in the possession of one 
 Power, and now in the possession of another, but depends on 
 all the unchecked multiple activities of a community for the time 
 being. Check that activity, whether by imposing tribute, or 
 disadvantageous commercial conditions, or an unwelcome ad- 
 ministration which sets up sterile political agitation, and you 
 get less wealth less wealth for the conqueror, as well as less 
 for the conquered. The broadest statement of the case is 
 that all experience especially the experience indicated in the 
 last chapter shows that in trade by free consent carrying 
 mutual benefit we get larger results for effort expended than 
 in the exercise of physical force which attempts to exact 
 advantage for one party at the expense of the other.' (pp. 
 270-272.) 
 
 In elaboration of this general thesis it is pointed out that 
 the processes of exchange have become too complex for direct 
 barter, and can only take place by virtue of credit; and it is 
 by the credit system, the 'sensory nerve' of the economic organ- 
 
 19
 
 290 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 ism, that the self-injurious results of economic war are first 
 shown. If, after a victorious war, we allow enemy industry 
 and international trade to go on much as before, then obvi- 
 ously our victory will have had very little effect on the funda- 
 mental economic situation. If, on the other hand, we attempt 
 for political or other reasons to destroy our enemy's industry 
 and trade, to keep him from the necessary materials of it, we 
 should undermine our own credit by diminishing the exchange 
 value of much of our own real wealth. For this reason it 
 is 'a great illusion' to suppose that by the political annexation 
 of colonies, territories with iron-mines, coal-mines, we enrich 
 ourselves by the amount of wealth their exploitation repre- 
 sents. 1 
 
 The large place which such devices as an international credit 
 system must take in our international economy, adds enormously 
 to the difficulty of securing any 'spoils of victory' in the 
 shape of indemnity. A large indemnity is not impossible, but 
 the only condition on which it can be made possible a large 
 foreign trade by the defeated people is not one that will be 
 readily accepted by the victorious nation. Yet the dilemma 
 is absolute : the enemy must do a big foreign trade (or deliver 
 in lieu of money large quantities of goods) which will compete 
 with home production, or he can pay no big indemnity 
 nothing commensurate with the cost of modern war. 
 
 Since we are physically dependent on co-operation with 
 
 1 'If a great country benefits every time it annexes a province, and 
 her people are the richer for the widened territory, the small nations 
 ought to be immeasurably poorer than the great; instead of which, by 
 every test which you like to apply public credit, amounts in savings 
 banks, standard of living, social progress, general well-being citizens 
 of small States are, other things being equal, as well off as, or better 
 off than, the citizens of great. The citizens of countries like Holland, 
 Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, are, by every possible test, just 
 as well off as the citizens of countries like Germany, Austria, or Russia. 
 These are the facts which are so much more potent than any theory. 
 If it were true that a country benefited by the acquisition of territory, 
 and widened territory meant general well-being, why do the facts so 
 eternally deny it? There is something wrong with the theory.' (The 
 Great Illusion, p. 44).
 
 THE GREAT ILLUSION ARGUMENT 291 
 
 foreigners, it is obvious that the frontiers of the national State 
 are not co-terminous with the frontiers of our society. Human 
 association cuts athwart frontiers. The recognition of the fact 
 would help to break down that conception of nations as per- 
 sonalities which plays so large a part in international hatred. 
 The desire to punish this or that 'nation' could not long sur- 
 vive if we had in mind, not the abstraction, but the babies, the 
 little girls, old men, in no way responsible for the offences 
 that excited our passions, whom we treated in our minds as a 
 single individual. 1 
 
 As a means of vindicating a moral, social, religious, or 
 cultural ideal as of freedom or democracy war between 
 States, and still more between Alliances, must be largely 
 ineffective for two main reasons. First, because the 
 State and the moral unit do not coincide. France or the 
 British Empire could not stand as a unit for Protestanism as 
 opposed to Catholicism, Christianity as opposed to Moham- 
 medanism, or Individualism as opposed to Socialism, or Par- 
 liamentary Government as opposed to Bureaucratic Autoc- 
 racy, or even for European ascendancy as against Coloured 
 Races. For both Empires include large coloured elements; 
 the British Empire is more Mohammedan than Christian, has 
 larger areas under autocratic than under Parliamentary govern- 
 ment ; has powerful parties increasingly Socialistic. The State 
 power in both cases is being used, not to suppress, but to give 
 actual vitality to the non-Christian or non-European or coloured 
 elements that it has conquered. The second great reason why 
 it is futile to attempt to use the military power of States for 
 ends such as freedom and democracy, is that the instincts to 
 which it is compelled to appeal, the spirit it must cultivate and 
 the methods it is compelled increasingly to employ, are them- 
 selves inimical to the sentiment upon which freedom must rest. 
 Nations that have won their freedom as the result of military 
 
 1 See Chapters of The Great Illusion, The State as a Person, and A 
 False Analogy and its Consequences.
 
 292 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 victory, usually employ that victory to suppress the freedom 
 of others. To rest our freedom upon a permanent basis of 
 nationalist military power, is equivalent to seeking security 
 from the moral dangers of Prussianism by organising our 
 States on the Prussian model. 
 
 Our real struggle is with nature: internecine struggles 
 between men lessen the effectiveness of the human army. A 
 Continent which supported precariously, with recurrent famine, 
 a few hundred thousand savages fighting endlessly between 
 themselves, can support, abundantly a hundred million whites 
 who can manage to maintain peace among themselves and fight 
 nature. 
 
 Nature here includes human nature. Just as we turn the 
 destructive forces of external nature from our hurt to our 
 service, not by their unintelligent defiance, but by utilising 
 them through a knowledge of their qualities, so can the irre- 
 pressible but not 'undirectable' forces of instinct, emotion, 
 sentiment, be turned by intelligence to the service of our greatest 
 and most permanent needs.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 ARGUMENTS NOW OUT OF DATE 
 
 FOR the purposes of simplicity and brevity the main argument 
 of The Great Illusion assumed the relative permanence of the 
 institution of private property in Western society, and the 
 persistence of the tendency of victorious belligerents to respect 
 it, a tendency which had steadily grown in strength for five 
 hundred years. The book assumed that the conqueror would 
 do in the future what he has done to a steadily increasing 
 degree in the past, especially as the reasons for such policy, 
 in terms of self-interest, have so greatly grown in force during 
 the last generation or two. To have argued its case in terms 
 of non-existent and hypothetical conditions which might not 
 exist for generations or centuries, would have involved hope- 
 lessly bewildering complications. And the decisive reason for not 
 adding this complication was the fact that though it would vary 
 the form of the argument, it would not effect the final conclusion. 
 As already explained in the first part of this book (Chapter 
 II) this war has marked a revolution in the position of private 
 property and the relation of the citizen to the State. The 
 Treaty of Versailles departs radically from the general princi- 
 ples adhered to, for instance, in the Treaty of Frankfurt; the 
 position of German traders and that of the property of German 
 citizens does not at all to-day resemble the position in which 
 the Treaty of Frankfurt left the French trader and French 
 private property. 
 
 293
 
 294 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 The fact of the difference has already been entered into at 
 some length. It remains to see how the change affects the 
 general argument adopted in The Great Illusion. 
 
 It does not affect its final conclusions. The argument ran: 
 A conqueror cannot profit by 'loot' in the shape of confiscations, 
 tributes, indemnities, which paralyse the economic life of the 
 defeated enemy. They are economically futile. They are 
 unlikely to be attempted, but if they are attempted they will 
 still be futile. x 
 
 Events have confirmed that conclusion, though not the expec- 
 tation that the enemy's economic life would be left undisturbed. 
 We have started a policy which does injure the economic life of 
 the enemy. The more it injures him, the less it pays us. And 
 we are abandoning it as rapidly as nationalist hostilities will 
 permit us. In so far as pre-war conditions pointed to the 
 need of a definitely organised international economic code, the 
 situation created by the Treaty has only made the need more 
 visible and imperative. For, as already explained in the first 
 Part, the old understandings enabled industry to be built up 
 on an international basis; the Treaty of Versailles and its 
 confiscations, prohibitions, controls, have destroyed those 
 foundations. Had that instrument treated German trade and 
 industry as the Germans treated French in 1871 we might 
 have seen a recovery of German economic life relatively as 
 rapid as that which took place in France during the ten years 
 which followed her defeat. We should not to-day be faced 
 by thirty or forty millions in Central and Eastern Europe 
 without secure means of livelihood. 
 
 The present writer confesses most frankly and the critics 
 of The Great Illusion are hereby presented with all that they 
 
 1 In the synopsis of the book the point is put thus : 'If credit and com- 
 mercial contract are tampered with an attempt at confiscation, the 
 credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of 
 the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self -injurious it must 
 respect the enemy's propetry, in which case it becomes economically 
 futile.'
 
 ARGUMENTS NOW OUT OF DATE 295 
 
 can make of the admission that he did not expect a Euro- 
 pean conqueror, least of all Allied conquerors, to use their 
 victory for enforcing a policy having these results. He believed 
 that elementary considerations of self-interest, the duty of 
 statesmen to consider the needs of their own countries just 
 emerging from war, would stand in the way of a policy of this 
 kind. On the other hand, he was under no illusions as to 
 what would result if they did attempt to enforce that policy. 
 Dealing with the damage that a conqueror might inflict, the 
 book says that such things as the utter destruction of the 
 enemy's trade 
 
 could only be inflicted by an invader as a means of punish- 
 ment costly to himself, or as the result of an unselfish and 
 expensive desire to inflict misery for the mere joy of inflicting 
 it. In this self-seeking world it is not practical to assume the 
 existence of an inverted altruism of this kind. (p. 29.) 
 
 Because of the 'interdependence of our credit-built finance 
 and industry' 
 
 the confiscation by an invader of private property, whether 
 stocks, shv.res, ships, mines, or anything more valuable than 
 jewellery or furniture anything, in short, which is bound up 
 with the economic life of the people would so react upon the 
 finance of the invader's country as to make the damage to the 
 invader resulting from the confiscation exceed in value the 
 property confiscated (p. 29). 
 
 Speaking broadly and generally, the conqueror in our day 
 has before him two alternatives: to leave things alone, and 
 in order to do that he need not have left his shores; or to 
 interfere by confiscation in some form, in which case he dries 
 up the source of the profit which tempted him (p. 59). 
 
 All the suggestions made as to the economic futility of such
 
 296 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 a course including the failure to secure an indemnity have 
 been justified. 1 
 
 In dealing with the indemnity problem the book did fore- 
 cast the likelihood of special trading and manufacturing 
 interests within the conquering nation opposing the only con- 
 dition upon which a very large indemnity would be possible 
 that condition being either the creation of a large foreign 
 trade by the enemy or the receipt of payment in kind, in goods 
 which would compete with home production. But the author 
 certainly did not think it likely that England and France would 
 impose conditions so rapidly destructive of the enemy's 
 economic life that they the conquerors would, for their own 
 economic preservation, be compelled to make loans to the 
 defeated enemy. 
 
 Let us note the phase of the argument that the procedure 
 adopted renders out of date. A good deal of The Great Illusion 
 was devoted to showing that Germany had no need to expand 
 territorially; that her desire for overseas colonies was senti- 
 mental, and had little relation to the problem of providing for 
 her population. At the beginning of 1914 that was certainly 
 true. It is not true to-day. The process by which she sup- 
 ported her excess population before the War will, to put it 
 at its lowest, be rendered extremely difficult of maintenance 
 as the result of allied action. The point, however, is that we 
 
 1 'We need markets. What is a market? "A place where things are 
 sold." That is only half the truth. It is a place where things are 
 bought and sold, and one operation is impossible without the other, and 
 the notion that one nation can sell for ever and never buy is simply the 
 theory of perpetual motion applied to economics ; and international 
 trade can no more be based upon perpetual motion than can engineering. 
 As between economically highly-organised nations a customer must also 
 be a competitor, a fact which bayonets cannot alter. To the extent to 
 which they destroy him as a competitor, they destroy him, speaking 
 
 generally and largely, as a customer This is the paradox, the 
 
 futility of conquest the great illusion which the history of our own 
 empire so well illustrates. We "own" our empire by allowing its com- 
 ponent parts to develop themselves in their own way, and in view of 
 their own ends, and all the empires which have pursued any other 
 policy have only ended by impoverishing their own populations and 
 falling to pieces.' (p. 75).
 
 ARGUMENTS NOW OUT OF DATE 297 
 
 are not benefiting by this paralysis of German industry. We 
 are suffering very greatly from it: suffering so much that we 
 can be neither politically nor economically secure until this 
 condition is brought to an end. There can be no peace in 
 Europe, and consequently no safety for us or France, so long 
 as we attempt by power to maintain a policy which denies to 
 millions in the midst of our civilisation the possibility of 
 earning their living. In so far as the new conditions create 
 difficulties which did not originally exist, our victory does but 
 the more glaringly demonstrate the economic futility of our 
 policy towards the vanquished. 
 
 An argument much used in The Great Illusion as disproving 
 the claims made for conquest was the position of the popula- 
 tion of small States. 'Very well,' may say the critic, 'Germany 
 is now in the position of a small State. But you talk about 
 her being ruined!' 
 
 In the conditions of 1914, the small State argument was 
 entirely valid (incidentally the Allied Governments argue that 
 it still holds). 1 It does not hold to-day. In the conditions 
 of 1920 at any rate, the small State is, like Germany, econom- 
 ically at the mercy of British sea power or the favoritism 
 of the French Foreign Office, to a degree that was unknown 
 before the War. How is the situation to develop? Is the 
 Dutch or Swedish or Austrian industrial city permanently to 
 be dependent upon the good graces of some foreign official 
 sitting in Whitehall or the Quai d'Orsay? At present, if an 
 industrialist in such a city wishes to import coal or to ship 
 a cargo to one of the new Baltic States, he may be prevented 
 owing to political arrangements between France and England. 
 If that is to be the permanent situation of the non-Entente 
 world, then peace will become less and less secure, and all our 
 talk of having fought for the rights of the small and weak 
 will be a farce. The friction, the irritation, and sense of 
 grievance will prolong the unrest and uncertainty, and the 
 
 1 See Part I, Chapter II.
 
 298 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 resultant decline in the productivity of Europe will render 
 our own economic problems the more acute. The power by 
 which we thus arrogate to ourselves the economic dictatorship 
 of Europe will ultimately be challenged. 
 
 Can we revert to the condition of things which, by virtue 
 of certain economic freedoms that were respected, placed the 
 trader or industrialist of a small State pretty much on an 
 equality, in most things, with the trader of the Great State? 
 Or shall we go forward to a recognised international economic 
 system, in which the small States will have their rights secured 
 by a definite code? 
 
 Reversion to the old individualist 'trans-nationalism' or an 
 internationalism without considerable administrative machinery 
 seems now impossible. The old system is destroyed at its 
 sources within each State. The only available course now is, 
 recognising the fact of an immense growth in the govern- 
 mental control or regulation of foreign trade, to devise definite 
 codes or agreements to meet the case. If the obtaining of 
 necessary raw materials by all the States other than France and 
 England is to be the subject of wrangles between officials, each 
 case to be treated on its merits, we shall have a much worse 
 anarchy than before the War. A condition in which two or 
 three powers can lay down the law for the world will indeed 
 be an anti-climax. 
 
 We may never learn the lesson ; the old futile struggles may 
 go on indefinitely. But if we do put our intelligences to the 
 situation it will call for a method of treatment somewhat 
 different from that which pre-war conditions required. 
 
 For the purposes of the War, in the various Inter-Allied 
 bodies for the apportionment of shipping and raw material, 
 we had the beginnings of an economic League of Nations, 
 an economic World Government. Those bodies might have 
 been made democratic, and enlarged to include neutral interests, 
 and maintained for the period of Reconstruction (which might 
 in any case have been regarded as a phase properly subject
 
 ARGUMENTS NOW OUT OF DATE 299 
 
 to war treatment in these matters). But these international 
 organisations were allowed to fall to pieces on the removal of 
 the common enmity which held the European Allies and 
 America together. 
 
 The disappearance of these bodies does not mean the dis- 
 appearance of 'controls/ but the controls will now be exercised 
 in considerable part through vast private Capitalist Trusts 
 dealing with oil, meat, and shipping. Nor will the interference 
 of government be abolished. If it is considered desirable to 
 ensure to some group a monoply of phosphates, or palm 
 nuts, the aid of governments will be invoked for the purpose. 
 But in this case the government will exercise its powers not 
 as the result of a publicly avowed and agreed principle, but 
 illicitly, hypocritically. 
 
 While professing to exercise a 'mandate' for mankind, a 
 government will in fact be using its authority to protect special 
 interests. In other words we shall get a form of international- 
 ism in which the international capitalist Trust will control the 
 Government instead of the Government's controlling the 
 Trust. 
 
 The fact that this was happening more and more before the 
 War was one reason why the old individualist order has broken 
 down. More and more the professed position and function 
 of the State was not its real position and function. The 
 amount of industry and trade dependent upon governmental 
 intervention (enterprises of the Chinese Loan and Bagdad 
 Railway type) before the War was small compared with the 
 quantity that owed nothing to governmental protection. But 
 the illicit pressure exercised upon goverments by those inter- 
 ested in the exploitation of backward countries was out of pro- 
 portion to the public importance of their interests. 
 
 It was this failure of democratic control of 'big business' 
 by the pre-war democracies which helped to break down the 
 old individualism. While private capital was apparently 
 gaining control over the democratic forces, moulding the policy
 
 300 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 of democratic governments, it was in fact digging its own 
 grave. If political democracy in this respect had been equal 
 to its task, or if the captains of industry had shown a greater 
 scruple or discernment in their use of political power, the 
 individualist order might have given us a workable civilisation ; 
 or its end might have been less painful. 
 
 The Great Illusion did not assume its impending demise. 
 Democracy had not yet organised socialistic controls within 
 the nation. To have assumed that the world of nationalisms 
 would face socialistic regulation and control as between States, 
 would have implied an agility on the part of the public im- 
 agination which it does not in fact possess. An international 
 policy on these lines would have been unintelligible and pre- 
 posterous. It is only because the situation which has followed 
 victory is so desperate, so much worse than anything The Great 
 Illusion forecast, that we have been brought to face these 
 remedies to-day. 
 
 Before the War, the line of advance, internationally, was 
 not by elaborate regulation. We had seen a congeries of States 
 like those of the British Empire maintain not only peace but 
 a sort of informal Federation, without limitation in any formal 
 way of the national freedom of any one of them. Each could 
 impose tariffs against the mother country, exclude citizens of 
 the Empire, recognise no common defined law. The British 
 Empire seemed to forecast a type of international Association 
 which could secure peace without the restraints or restrictions 
 of a central authority in anything but the most shadowy form. 
 If the merely moral understanding which held it together and 
 enabled co-operation in a crisis could have been extended to 
 the United States; if the principle of 'self-determination' that 
 had been applied to the white portion of the Empire were 
 gradually extended to the Asiatic ; if a bargain had been made 
 with Germany and France as to the open door, and equality 
 of access to undeveloped territory made a matter of defined 
 agreement, we should have possessed the nucleus of a world
 
 ARGUMENTS NOW OUT OF DATE 301 
 
 organisation giving the widest possible scope for independent 
 national development. But world federation on such lines 
 depended above all, of course, upon the development of a 
 certain 'spirit,' a guiding temper, to do for nations of different 
 origin what had already been done for nations of a largely 
 common origin (though Britain has many different stocks 
 English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and, overseas, Dutch and 
 French as well). But the spirit was not there. The whole 
 tradition in the international field was one of domination, com- 
 petition, rivalry, conflicting interest, 'Struggle for life.' 
 
 The possibility of such a free international life has disap- 
 peared with the disappearance of the laisser-fatre ideal in 
 national organisation. We shall perforce be much more con- 
 cerned now with the machinery of control in both spheres as 
 the only alternative to an anarchy more devastating than that 
 which existed before the War. For all the reasons which 
 point to that conclusion the reader is referred once more to the 
 second chapter of the first part of this book.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE ARGUMENT AS AN ATTACK ON THE STATE 
 
 THERE was not before the War, and there has not been since, 
 any serious challenge to the economic argument of The Great 
 Illusion. Criticism (which curiously enough does not seem 
 to have included the point dealt with in the preceding Chapter) 
 seems to have centred rather upon the irrelevance of economic 
 considerations to the problem of war the problem, that is, of 
 creating an international society. The answer to that is, of 
 course, both explicit and implicit in much of what precedes. 
 
 The most serious criticism has been directed to one specific 
 point. It is made notably both by Professor Spenser Wilkin- 
 son L and Professor Lindsay, 2 and as it is relevant to the 
 existing situation and to much of the argument of the present 
 book, it is worth dealing with. 
 
 The criticism is based on the alleged disparagement of the 
 State -implied in the general attitude of the book. Professor 
 Lindsay (whose article, by the way, although hostile and mis- 
 apprehending the spirit of the book, is a model of fair, sincere, 
 and useful criticism) describes the work under criticism 
 largely as an attack on the conception of 'the State as a person.' 
 He says in effect that the present author argues thus : 
 
 1 Government and the War, pp. 52-59. 
 
 'The Political Theory of Mr Norman Angell, by Professor A. D. 
 Lindsay, The Political Quarterly, December 1914. 
 
 302
 
 ARGUMENT AS AN ATTACK ON THE STATE 303 
 
 'The only proper thing co consider is the interest or the 
 happiness of individuals. If a political action conduces to the 
 interests of individuals, it must be right; if it conflicts with 
 these interests it must be wrong.' 
 
 Professor Lindsay continues: 
 
 'Now if pacifism really implied such a view of the relation 
 of the State and the individual, and of the part played by self- 
 interest in life, its appeal has little moral force behind it. ... 
 
 'Mr. Angell seems to held that not only is the national State 
 being superseded, but that the supersession is to be welcomed. 
 The economic forces which are destroying the State will do all 
 the State has done to bind men together, and more.' 
 
 As a matter of fact Professor Lindsay has himself answered 
 his own criticism. For he goes on : 
 
 'The argument of The Great Illusion is largely based on the 
 public part played by the organisation of credit. Mr Angell 
 has been the first to notice the great significance of its activ- 
 ity. It has misled him, however, into thinking that it presaged 
 a supersession of political by econmic control. . . . The facts 
 are, not that political forces are being superseded by economic, 
 but that the new industrial situation has called into being 
 new political organisations .... To co-ordinate their activities 
 . . .will be impossible if the spirit of exclusive nationalism and 
 distrust of foreigners wins the day; it will be equally impos- 
 sible if the strength of our existing centres of patriotism and 
 public spirit are destroyed.' 
 
 Very well. We had here in the pre-war period two dangers, 
 either of which in Professor Lindsay's view would '"make the 
 preservation of civilisation impossible: one danger was that 
 men would over-emphasise their narrower patriotism and
 
 304 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 surrender themselves to the pugnacities of exclusive national- 
 ism and distrust of foreigners, forgetting that the spiritual 
 life of densely packed societies can only be rendered possible 
 by certain widespread economic co-operations, contracts; the 
 other danger was that we should under-emphasise each our 
 own nationalism and give too much importance to the wider 
 international organisation of mankind. 
 
 Into which danger have we run as a matter of simple fact? 
 Which tendency is it that is acting as the present disruptive 
 force in Europe? Has opinion and statesmanship as ex- 
 pressed in the Treaty, for instance given too much or too 
 little attention to the interdependence of the world, and the 
 internationally economic foundations of our civilisation? 
 
 We have seen Europe smashed by neglecting the truths which 
 The Great Illusion stressed, perhaps over-stressed, and by sur- 
 rendering to the exclusive nationalism which that book attacked. 
 The book was based on the anticipation that Europe would be 
 very much more likely to come to grief through over-stressing 
 exclusive nationalism and neglecting its economic interdepen- 
 dence, than through the decay of the narrower patriotism. 
 
 If the book had been written in vacua, without reference to 
 impending events, the emphasis might have been different. * 
 
 1 In order that the reader may grasp more clearly Mr Lindsay's point, 
 here are some longer passages in which he elaborates it : 
 
 'If all nations really recognised the truth of Mr Angell's arguments, 
 that they all had common interests which war destroyed, and that there- 
 fore war was an evil for victors as well as for vanquished, the 
 European situation would be less dangerous, but were every one in the 
 world as wisely concerned with their own interests as Mr Angell would 
 have men to be, if they were nevertheless bound by no political ties, 
 the situation would be infinitely more dangerous than it is. For un- 
 checked competition, as Hobbes showed long ago, leads straight to war 
 however rational men are. The only escape from its dangers is by 
 submitting it to some political control. And for that reason the growth 
 of economic relations at the expense of political, which Mr Angell 
 heralds with such enthusiasm, is the greatest peril of modern times. 
 
 'If men are to avoid the danger that, in competing with one another 
 in the small but immediate matters where their interests diverge, they 
 may overreach themselves and bring about their mutual ruin, two things 
 are essential, one moral or emotional, the other practical. It is not
 
 ARGUMENT AS AN ATTACK ON THE STATE 305 
 
 But in criticising the emphasis that is thrown upon the 
 welfare of the individual, Professor Lindsay would seem to 
 be guilty of confusing the test of good political conduct with 
 the motive. Certainly The Great Illusion did not disparage the 
 need of loyalty to the social group to the other members of the 
 partnership. That need is the burden of most that has been 
 written in the preceding pages when dealing with the facts 
 of interdependence. An individual who can see only his 
 own interest does not see even that; for such interest is 
 dependent on others. (These arguments of egoism versus 
 altruism are always circular.) But it insisted upon two 
 facts which modern Europe seemed in very great danger 
 of forgetting. The first was that the Nation-State was not 
 the social group, not co-terminous with the whole of Society, 
 
 enough that men should recognise that what they do affects other men, 
 and vice versa. They must care for how their actions affect other men, 
 not only for how they may react on themselves. They must, that is, 
 love their neighbours. They must further agree with one another in 
 caring for certain ways of action quite irrespective of how such ways of 
 action affect their personal interests. They must, that is, be not only 
 economic but moral men. Secondly, recognising that the range of their 
 personal sympathies with other men is more restricted than their inter- 
 dependence, and that in the excitement of competition all else is apt to 
 be neglected, they must depute certain persons to stand out of the com- 
 petitive struggle and look after just those vital common interests and 
 greater issues which the contending parties are apt to neglect. These 
 men will represent the common interests of all, their common ideals 
 and their mutual sympathies; they will give to men's concern for these 
 common ends a focus which will enable them to resist the pull of diver- 
 gent interests and round their actions will gather the authority which 
 these common ends inspire. . . . 
 
 "... Such propositions are of course elementary. It is, however, im- 
 portant to observe that economic relations are in this most distinguished 
 from political relations, that men can enter into economic relations with- 
 out having any real purpose in common. For the money which they 
 gain by their co-operation may represent power to carry out the most 
 diverse and conflicting purposes 
 
 '... Politics implies mutual confidence and respect and a certain 
 measure of agreement in ideals. The consequence is that co-operation 
 for economic is infinitely easier than for political purposes and spreads 
 much more rapidly. Hence it easily overruns any political boundaries, 
 and by doing so has produced the modern situation which Mr Angell 
 has described.'
 
 306 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 only a very arbitrarily chosen part of it; and the second was 
 that the test of the 'good State' was the welfare of the citizens 
 who composed it. How otherwise shall we settle the adjust- 
 ment between national right and international obligation, 
 answer the old and inevitable question, 'What is the Good 
 State ?' . The only intelligible answer is : the State which pro- 
 duces good men, subserves their welfare. A State which did 
 not subserve the welfare of its citizens, that produced men 
 morally, intellectually, physically poor and feeble, co-uld not 
 be a good State. A State is tested by the degree to which it 
 serves individuals. 
 
 Now the fact of forgetting the first truth, that the Nation- 
 State is not the whole of Society but only a part, and that we 
 have obligations to the other part, led to a distortion of the 
 second. The Hegelianism which denied any obligation above, 
 or beyond that of the Nation- State sets up a conflict of sov- 
 ereignties, a competition of power, stimulating the instinct of 
 domination, making indeed the power and position of the 
 State with reference to rival States the main end of politics. 
 The welfare of men is forgotten. The fact that the State is 
 made for man, not man for the State, is obscured. It was 
 certainly forgotten or distorted by the later political philos- 
 ophers of Prussia. The oversight gave us Prussianism and 
 Imperialism, the ideal of political power as an end in itself, 
 against which The Great Illusion was a protest. The Imper- 
 ialism, not alone in Prussia, takes small account of the quality 
 of individual life, under the flag. The one thing to be sought 
 is that the flag should be triumphant, be flown over vast terri- 
 tories, inspire fear in foreigners, and be an emblem of 'glory.' 
 There is a discernible distinction of aim and purpose between 
 the Patriot, Jingo, Chauvinist, and the citizen of the type 
 interested in such things as social reform. The military Patriot 
 the world over does not attempt to hide his contempt for 
 efforts at the social betterment of his countryman. That is 
 'parish pump.' Mr Maxse or Mr Kipling is keenly interested
 
 ARGUMENT AS AN ATTACK ON THE STATE 307 
 
 in England, but not in the betterment of Englishmen; indeed, 
 both are in the habit of abusing Englishmen very heartily, 
 unless they happen to be soldiers. In other words, the real end 
 of politics is forgotten. It is not only that the means have 
 become the end, but that one element of the means, power, 
 has become the end. 
 
 The point I desired to emphasise was that unless we keep 
 before ourselves the welfare of the individual as the test of 
 politics (not necessarily the motive of each individual for him- 
 self) we constantly forget the purpose and aim of politics, 
 and patriotism becomes not the love of one's fellow countrymen 
 and their welfare, but the love of power expressed by that 
 larger 'ego' which is one's group. 'Mystic Nationalism' comes 
 to mean something entirely divorced from any attribute of 
 individual life. The 'Nation' becomes an abstraction apart 
 from the life of the individual. 
 
 There is a further consideration. The fact that the Nation- 
 State is not co-terminous with Society is shown by its vital 
 need of others ; it cannot live by itself ; it must co-operate with 
 others; consequently it has obligations to those others. The 
 demonstration of that fact involves an appeal to 'interest,' to 
 welfare. The most visible and vital co-operation outside the 
 limits of the Nation-State is the economic; it gives rise to the 
 most definite, as to the most fundamental obligation the obli- 
 gation to accord to others the right to existence. It is out of the 
 common economic need that the actual structure of some mutual 
 arrangement, some social code, will arise, has indeed arisen. 
 This makes the beginning of the first visible structure of a 
 world society. And from these homely beginnings will come, 
 if at all, a more vivid sense of the wider society. And the 
 'economic' interest, as distinct from the temperamental interest 
 of domination, has at least this social advantage. Welfare is 
 a thing that in society may well grow the more it is divided: 
 the better my countrymen the richer is my life likely to become. 
 Domination has not this quality : it is mutually exclusive. We
 
 308 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 cannot all be masters. If any country is to dominate, some- 
 body or some one else's country must be dominated; if the 
 one is to be the Superior Race, some other must be inferior. 
 And the inferior sooner or later objects, and from that resis- 
 tance comes the disintegration that now menaces us. 
 
 It is perfectly true that we cannot create the kind of State 
 which will best subserve the interests of its citizens unless 
 each is ready to give allegiance to it, irrespective of his immedi- 
 ate personal 'interest.' (The word is put in inverted commas 
 because in most men not compelled by bad economic circum- 
 stances to fight fiercely for daily bread, sheer physical suste- 
 nance, the satisfaction of a social and creative instinct is a very 
 real 'interest,' and would, in a well-organised society, be as 
 spontaneous as interest in sport or social ostentation.) The 
 State must be an idea, an abstraction, capable of inspiring 
 loyalty, embodying the sense of interdependence. But the 
 circumstances of the independent modern national State, in 
 frequent and unavoidable contact with other similar States, 
 are such as to stimulate not mainly the motives of social co- 
 hesion, but those instincts of domination which become anti- 
 social and disruptive. The nationalist stands condemned not 
 because he asks allegiance or loyalty to the social group, but 
 first, because he asks absolute allegiance to something which 
 is not the social group but only part of it, and secondly, 
 because that exclusive loyalty gives rise to disruptive pugnac- 
 ities, injurious to all. 
 
 In pointing out the inadequacy of the unitary political 
 Nation- State as the embodiment of final sovereignty, an in- 
 adequacy due to precisely the development of such organisations 
 as Labour, the present writer merely anticipated the drift of 
 much political writing of the last ten years on the problem 
 of State sovereignty; as also the main drift of events. 1 
 
 1 1 have in mind, of course, the writings of Cole, Laski, Figgis, and 
 Webb. In A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great 
 Britain, Mr Webb writes: 
 
 'Whilst metaphysical philosophers had been debating what was the
 
 ARGUMENT AS AN ATTACK ON THE STATE 309 
 
 If Mr Lindsay finds the very mild suggestions in The Great 
 Illusion touching the necessary qualification of the sovereignty 
 of the Nation-State subversive, one wonders what his feelings 
 are on reading, say, Mr Cole, who in a recent book (Social 
 Theory) leaves the Political State so attenuated that one 
 questions whether what is left is not just ghost. At the best 
 the State is just one collateral association among others. 
 
 The sheer mechanical necessities of administration of an in- 
 dustrial society, so immeasurably more complex than the simple 
 agricultural society which gave us the unitary political State, 
 seem to be pushing us towards a divided or manifold sover- 
 eignty. If we are to carry over from the National State into 
 the new form of the State as we seem now in danger of 
 doing the attitude of mind which demands domination for 
 'our* group, the pugnacities, suspicions, and hostilities character- 
 istic of nationalist temper, we may find the more complex 
 society beyond our social capacity. I agree that we want a 
 common political loyalty, that mere obedience to the momentary 
 interest of our group will not give it; but neither will the 
 temper of patriotism as we have seen it manifested in the 
 European national State. The loyalty to some common 
 code will probably only come through a sense of its social 
 
 nature of the State by which they always meant the sovereign Political 
 State the sovereignty, and even the moral authority of the State itself, 
 in the sense of the political government, were being silently and almost 
 unwittingly undermined by the growth of new forms of Democracy.' 
 (p. xv.) 
 
 In Social Theory, Mr Cole, speaking of the necessary co-ordination 
 of the new forms of association, writes : 
 
 'To entrust the State with the function of co-ordination would be to 
 entrust it in many cases with the task of arbitrating between itself and 
 some other functional association, say a church or a trade union.' There 
 must be a co-ordinating body, but it 'must be not any single association, 
 but a combination of associations, a federal body in which some or all 
 of the various functional associations are linked together.' (pp. 101 and 
 134.) A reviewer summarises Mr Cole as saying: 'I do not want any 
 single supreme authority. It is the sovereignty of the State that I object 
 to, as fatal to liberty. For single sovereignty I substitute a federal 
 union of functions, and I see the guarantee of personal freedom in the 
 severally which prevents any one of them from undue encroachments.'
 
 310 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 need. (It is on the ground of its social need that Mr 
 Lindsay defends the political State.) At present we have 
 little sense of that need, because we have (as Versailles proved) 
 a belief in the effectiveness of our own power to exact the 
 services we may require. The rival social or industrial groups 
 have a like belief. Only a real sense of interdependence can 
 undermine that belief ; and it must be a visible, economic inter- 
 dependence. 
 
 A social sense may be described as an instinctive feeling for 
 'what will work.' We are only yet at the beginning of the 
 study of human motive. So much is subconscious that we 
 are certainly apt to ascribe to one motive conduct which in 
 fact is due to another. And among the neglected motives of 
 conduct is perhaps a certain sense of art a sense, in this 
 connection, of the difficult 'art of living together.' It is prob- 
 ably true that what some, at least, find so revolting in some 
 of the manifestations of nationalism, chauvinism, is that they 
 violently challenge the whole sense of what will work, to say 
 nothing of the rights of others. 'If every one took that line, 
 nobody could live.' In a social sense this is gross and offensive. 
 It has an effect on one like the manners of a cad. It is that 
 sort of motive, perhaps, more than any calculation of 'interest,' 
 which may one day cause a revulsion against Balkanisation. 
 But to that motive some informed sense of interdependence 
 is indispensable.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 VINDICATION BY EVENTS 
 
 IF the question merely concerned the past, if it were only a 
 matter of proving that this or that 'School of thought' was 
 right, this re-examination of arguments put forward before 
 the War would be a sterile business enough. But it concerns 
 the present and the future; bears directly and pertinently upon 
 the reasons which have led us into the existing chaos ; and the 
 means by which we might hope to emerge. As much to-day 
 as before the War (and far more obviously) is it true that 
 upon the reply to the questions raised in this discussion de- 
 pends the continuance of our civilisation. Our society is still 
 racked by a fierce struggle for political power, our populations 
 still demand the method of coercion, still refuse to face the 
 facts of interdependence, still insist clamorously upon a policy 
 which denies those facts. 
 
 The propositions we are here discussing were not, it is well 
 to recall, merely to the effect that 'war does not pay,' but that 
 the ideas and impulses out of which it grows, and which 
 underlay and still underlie European politics, give us 
 an unworkable society; and that unless they can be cor- 
 rected they will increasingly involve social collapse and dis- 
 integration. 
 
 That conclusion was opposed, as we have seen, on two main 
 grounds. One was that the desire for conquest and extension 
 of territory did not enter appreciably into the causes of war, 
 
 311
 
 312 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 'since no one really believed that victory could advantage them/ 
 The other ground of objection, in contradistinction, was that 
 the economic advantages of conquest or military predomi- 
 nance were so great and so obvious that to deny them was 
 mere paradox -mongering. 
 
 The validity of both criticisms has been very thoroughly 
 tested in the period that has followed the Armistice. Whether 
 it be true or not that the competition for territory, the belief 
 that predominant power could be turned to economic account, 
 entered into the causes of the War, that competition and belief 
 have certainly entered into the settlement and must be reckoned 
 among the causes of the next war. The proposition that the 
 economic advantages of conquest and coercion are illusory is 
 hardly to-day a paradox, however much policy may still ignore 
 the facts. 
 
 The outstanding facts of the present situation most worth 
 our attention in this connection are these: Military predom- 
 inance, successful war, evidently offer no solution either of 
 specifically international or of our common social and economic 
 problems. The political disintegration going on over wide 
 areas in Europe is undoubtedly related very intimately to eco- 
 nomic conditions: actual lack of food, the struggle for ever- 
 increasing wages and better conditions. Our attempted rem- 
 edies our conferences for dealing with international credit, 
 the suggestion of an international loan, the loans actually made 
 to the enemy are a confession of the international character 
 of that problem. All this shows that the economic question, 
 alike nationally and internationally, is not, it is true, something 
 that ought to occupy all the energies of men, but something 
 that will, unless dealt with adequately ; is a question that simply 
 cannot be swept aside with magnificent gestures. Finally, the 
 nature of the settlement actually made by the victor, its charac- 
 teristic defects, the failure to realise adequately the victor's 
 dependence on the economic life of the vanquished, show clearly 
 enough that, even in the free democracies, orthodox statecraft
 
 VINDICATION BY EVENTS 313 
 
 did indeed suffer from the misconception which The Great 
 Illusion attributed to it. 
 
 What do we see to-day in Europe? Our preponderant 
 military power overwhelming, irresistible, unquestioned is 
 impotent to secure the most elementary forms of wealth needed 
 by our people: fuel, food, shelter. France, who in the fort/ 
 years of her 'defeat* had the soundest finances in Europe, is, 
 as a victor over the greatest industrial nation in Europe, all 
 but bankrupt. (The franc has fallen to a discount of over 
 seventy per cent.) All the recurrent threats of extended mili- 
 tary occupation fail to secure reparations and indemnities, the 
 restoration of credit, exchange, of general confidence and 
 security. 
 
 And just as we are finding that the things necessary for the 
 life of our peoples cannot be secured by military force exercised 
 against foreign nations or a beaten enemy, so are we finding 
 that the same method of force within the limits of the nation 
 used by one group as against another, fails equally. The 
 temper or attitude towards life which leads us to attempt to 
 achieve our end by the forcible imposition of our will upon 
 others, by dictatorship, and to reject agreement, has produced 
 in some degree everywhere revolt and rebellion on the one side, 
 and repression on the other; or a general disruption and the 
 breakdown of the co-operative processes by which mankind 
 lives. All the raw materials of wealth are here on the earth 
 as they were ten years ago. Yet Europe either starves or 
 slips into social chaos, because of the economic difficulty. 
 
 In the way of the necessary co-operation stands the Balkan- 
 isation of Europe. Why are we Balkanised rather than 
 Federalised? Why do Balkan and other border States fight 
 fiercely over this coalfield or that harbour? Why does France 
 still oppose trade with Russia, and plot for the control of an 
 enlarged Poland or a reactionary Hungary ? Why does Ameri- 
 ca now wash her hands of the whole muddle in Europe? 
 
 Because everywhere the statesmen and the public believe that
 
 314 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 if only the power of their State were great enough, they could 
 be independent of rival States, achieve political and economic 
 security and dispense with agreements and obligations. 
 
 If they had any vivid sense of the vast dangers to which 
 reliance upon isolated power exposed any State, however great ; 
 if they had realised how the prosperity and social peace of their 
 own States depended upon the reconciliation and well-being of 
 the vanquished, the Treaty would have been a very different 
 document, peace would long since have been established with 
 Russia, and the moral foundations of co-operation would be 
 present. 
 
 By every road that presented itself, The Great Illusion at- 
 tempted to reveal the vital interdependence of peoples within 
 and without the State and, as a corollary to that interdepen- 
 dence, the very strict limits of the force that can be exercised 
 against any one whose life, and daily and willing labour is 
 necessary to us. It was not merely the absence of these ideas 
 but the very active presence of the directly contrary ideas of 
 rival and conflicting interest, which explained the drift that the 
 present writer thought and said so often would, unless 
 checked, lead Western civilisation to a vast orgy of physical 
 self-destruction and moral violence and chaos. 
 
 The economic conditions which constitute one part of the 
 vindication of The Great Illusion are of course those de- 
 scribed in the first part of this book, particularly in the first 
 chapter. All that need be added here are a few suggestions as 
 to the relationship between those conditions and the propositions 
 we are concerned to verify. 
 
 As bearing upon the truth of those propositions, we cannot 
 neglect the condition of Germany. 
 
 If ever national military power, the sheer efficiency of the 
 military instrument, could ensure a nation's political and eco- 
 nomic security, Germany should have been secure. It was not 
 any lack of the 'impulse to defence,' of the 'manly and virile 
 qualities' so beloved of the militarist, no tendency to 'softness,'
 
 VINDICATION BY EVENTS 315 
 
 no 'emasculating internationalism' which betrayed her. She fell 
 because she failed to realise that she too, for all her power, 
 had need of a co-operation throughout the world, which her 
 force could not compel ; and that she must secure a certain moral 
 co-operation in her purposes or be defeated. She failed, not 
 for lack of 'intense nationalism,' but by reason of it, because 
 the policy which guided the employment of her military instru- 
 ment had in it too small a regard for the moral factors in the 
 world at large, which might set in motion material forces against 
 her. 
 
 It is hardly possible to doubt that the easy victories of 1871 
 marked the point at which the German spirit took the wrong 
 turning, and rendered her statesmen incapable of seeing the 
 forces which were massing for her destruction. The presence 
 in 1919 of German delegates at Versailles in the capacity of 
 vanquished can only be adequately explained by recalling the 
 presence there of German statesmen as victors in 1871. It took 
 forty years for some of the moral fruits of victory to manifest 
 themselves in the German spirit. 
 
 But the very severity of the present German lot is one that 
 lends itself to sophistry. It will be argued : 'You say that pre- 
 ponderant military power, victory, is ineffective to economic 
 ends. Well, look at the difference between ourselves and 
 Germany. The victors, though they may not flourish, are at 
 least better off than the vanquished. If we are lean, they 
 starve. Our military power is not economically futile.' 
 
 If to bring about hardship to ourselves in order that some 
 one else may suffer still greater hardship is an economic gain, 
 then it is untrue to say that conquest is economically futile. 
 But I had assumed that advantage or utility was to be measured 
 by the good to us, not by the harm done to others at our cost. 
 We are arguing for the moment the economic, and not the ethical 
 aspect of the thing. Keep for a moment to those terms. If 
 you were told that an enterprise was going to be extremely 
 profitable and you lost half your fortune in it, you would cer-
 
 316 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 tainly regard as curious the logic of the reply, that after all 
 you had gained, because others in the same enterprise had lost 
 everything. 
 
 We are considering in effect whether the facts show that 
 nations must, in order to provide bread for their people, defeat 
 in war competing nations who otherwise would secure it. But 
 that economic case for the 'biological inevitability' of war is 
 destroyed if it is true that, after having beaten the rival nation, 
 we find that we have less bread than before; that the future 
 security of our food is less ; and that out of our own diminished 
 store we have to feed a defeated enemy who, before his defeat, 
 managed to feed himself, and helped to feed us as well. 
 
 And that is precisely what the present facts reveal. 
 
 Reference has already been made to the position of France. 
 In the forty years of her defeat France was the banker of 
 Europe. She exacted tribute in the form of dividends and 
 interest upon investments from Russia, the Near East, Germany 
 herself; exacted it in a form which suited the peculiar genius 
 of her people and added to the security of her social life. She 
 was Germany's creditor, and managed to secure from her 
 conqueror of 1871 the prompt payment of the debts owing to 
 her. When France was not in a position to compel anything 
 whatsoever from Germany by military force, the financial claims 
 of Frenchmen upon Germany were readily discountable in any 
 market of the world. To-day, the financial claims on Germany, 
 made by a France which is militarily all-powerful, simply can- 
 not be discounted anywhere. The indemnity vouchers, whatever 
 may be the military predominance behind them, are simply not 
 negotiable instruments so long as they depend upon present 
 policy. They are a form of paper which no banker would 
 dream of discounting on their commercial merits. 
 
 To-day France stands as the conquerer of the richest ore- 
 fields in the world, of territory which is geographically the 
 industrial centre of Europe; of a vast Empire in Africa and 
 Asia; in a position of predominance in Poland, Hungary,
 
 VINDICATION BY EVENTS 317 
 
 and Rumania. She has acquired through the Reparations Com- 
 mission such power over the enemy countries as to reduce them 
 almost to the economic position of an Asiatic or African colony. 
 If ever wealth could be conquered, France has conquered it. 
 If political power could really be turned to economic account, 
 France ought to-day to be rich beyond any nation in history. 
 Never was there such an opportunity of turning military power 
 into wealth. 
 
 Then why is she bankrupt? Why is France faced by eco- 
 nomic and financial difficulties so acute that the situation seems 
 inextricable save by social revolution, a social reconstruction, 
 that is, involving new principles of taxation, directly aiming at 
 the re-distribution of wealth, a re-distribution resisted by the 
 property-owning classes. These, like other classes, have since 
 the Armistice been so persistently fed upon the fable of making 
 the Boche pay, that the government is unable to induce them to 
 face reality. 1 
 
 1 The British Treasury has issued statements showing that the French 
 people at the end of last year were paying 2. 7s., and the British people 
 15. 3s. per head in direct taxation. The French tax is calculated at 
 3.5. per cent, on large incomes, whereas similar incomes in Great Britain 
 would pay at least 25 per cent. This does not mean that the burden of 
 taxes on the poor in France is small. Both the working and middle 
 classes have been very hard hit by indirect taxes and by the rise in 
 prices, which is greater in France than in England. 
 
 The point is that in France the taxation is mainly indirect, this falling 
 most heavily upon the poor; while in England it is much more largely 
 direct. 
 
 The French consumers are much more heavily taxed than the British, 
 but the protective taxes of France bring in comparatively little revenue, 
 while they raise the price of living and force the French Government 
 and the French local authorities to spend larger and larger amounts 
 on salaries and wages. 
 
 The Budget for the year 1920 is made the occasion for an illuminating 
 review of France's financial position by the reporter of the Finance 
 Commission, M. Paul Doumar. 
 
 The expenditure due to the War until the present date amounts 
 roughly to 233,000 million francs (equivalent, at the normal rate of 
 exchange, to 9,320,000,000) wheVeof the sum of 43,000 million francs 
 has been met out of revenue, leaving a deficit of 190 billions. 
 
 This huge sum has been borrowed in various ways 26 billions from 
 the Bank of France, 35 billions from abroad, 46 billions in Treasury 
 notes, and 72 billions in regular loans. The total public debt on July 1
 
 318 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 With a public debt of 233,729 million of francs (about 
 9,300,000,000, at the pre-war rate of exchange) ; with the 
 permanent problem of a declining population accentuated by 
 the loss of millions of men killed and wounded in the war, and 
 complicated by the importation of coloured labour; with the 
 exchange value of the franc reduced to sixty in terms of 
 the British pound, and to fifteen in terms of the American 
 dollar, * the position of victorious France in the hour of her 
 complete military predominance over Europe seems wellnigh 
 desperate. 
 
 She could of course secure very considerable alleviation of 
 her present difficulties if she would consent to the only condition 
 upon which Germany could make a considerable contribution 
 to Reparations; the restoration of German industry. But to 
 that one indispensable condition of indemnity or reparation 
 France will not consent, because the French feel that a flourish- 
 ing Germany would be a Germany dangerous to the security of 
 France. 
 
 In this condition one may recall a part of The Great Illusion 
 case which, more than any other of the 'preposterous propo- 
 sitions,' excited derision and scepticism before the War. That 
 was the part dealing with the difficulties of securing an indem- 
 nity. In a chapter (of the early 1910 Edition) entitled The 
 Indemnity Futility, occurred these passages: 
 
 'The difficulty in the case of a large indemnity is not so much 
 the payment by the vanquished as the receiving by the victor . . . 
 
 'When a nation receives an indemnity of a large amount of 
 gold, one or two things happens : either the money is exchanged 
 for real wealth with other nations, in which case the greatly 
 
 is put at 233,729 millions, reckoning foreign loans on the basis of ex- 
 change at car. 
 
 M. Doumer declares that so long as this debt weighs on the State, 
 the financial situation must remain precarious and its credit mediocre. 
 
 1 January, 1921.
 
 VINDICATION BY EVENTS 319 
 
 increased imports compete directly with the home producers, 
 or the money is kept within the frontiers and is not exchanged 
 for real wealth from abroad, and prices inevitably rise .... The 
 rise in price of home commodities hampers the nation receiving 
 the indemnity in selling those commodities in the neutral markets 
 of the world, especially as the loss of so large a sum by the 
 vanquished nation has just the reverse effect of cheapening 
 prices and therefore, enabling that nation to compete on better 
 terms with the conqueror in neutral markets.' (p. 76.) 
 
 The effect of the payment of the French indemnity of 1872 
 upon German industry was analysed at length. 
 
 This chapter was criticised by economists in Britain, France, 
 and America. I do not think that a single economist of note 
 admitted the slightest validity in this argument. Several accused 
 the author of adopting protectionist fallacies in an attempt to 
 'make out a case.' It happens that he is a convinced Free 
 Trader. But he is also aware that it is quite impracticable to 
 dissociate national psychology from international commercial 
 problems. Remembering what popular feeling about the ex- 
 pansion of enemy trade must be on the morrow of war, he 
 asked the reader to imagine vast imports of enemy goods as 
 the means of paying an indemnity, and went on : 
 
 'Do we not know that there would be such a howl about the 
 ruin of home industry that no Government could stand the 
 clamour for a week?. . . That this influx of goods for nothing 
 would be represented as a deep-laid plot on the part of foreign 
 nations to ruin the home trade, and that the citizens would 
 rise in their wrath to prevent the accomplishment of such a plot? 
 Is not this very operation by which foreign nations tax them- 
 selves to send abroad goods, not for nothing (that would be a 
 crime at present unthinkable), but at below cost, the offence 
 to which we have given the name of "dumping" ? When it is 
 carried very far, as in the case of sugar, even Free Trade
 
 320 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 nations like Great Britain join International Conferences to pre- 
 vent these gifts being made!. . . .' 
 
 The fact that not one single economist, so far as I know, 
 would at the time admit the validity of these arguments, is 
 worth consideration. Very learned men may sometimes be led 
 astray by keeping their learning in watertight compartments, 
 'economies' in one compartment and 'polities' or political psy- 
 chology in another. The politicians seemed to misread the 
 economies and the economists the politics. 
 
 What are the post-war facts in this connection? We may 
 get them summarised on the one hand by the Prime Minister of 
 Great Britain and on the other by the expert adviser of the 
 British Delegation to the Peace Conference. 
 
 Mr Lloyd George, speaking two years after the Armistice, 
 and after prolonged and exhaustive debates on this problem, 
 says: 
 
 'What I have put forward is an expression of the views of 
 all the experts .... Every one wants gold, which Germany has 
 not got, and they will not take German goods. Nations can 
 only pay debts by gold, goods, services, or bills of exchange on 
 nations which are its debtors. x 
 
 'The real difficulty ... is due to the difficulty of securing 
 payment outside the limits of Germany. Germany could pay 
 pay easily inside her own boundary, but she could not export 
 
 1 An authorised interview published by the daily papers of January 
 28th, 1921. 
 
 M. Briand, the French Premier, in explaining what he and Mr Lloyd 
 George arranged at Paris to the Chamber and Senate on February 3rd, 
 remarked : 
 
 'We must not lose sight of the fact that in order to pay us Germany 
 must every year create wealth abroad for herself by developing her 
 exports and reducing her imports to strictly necessary things. She can 
 only do that to the detriment of the commerce and industry of the 
 Allies. That is a strange and regrettable consequence of facts. The 
 placing of an annuity on her exports, payable in foreign values, will, 
 however, correct as much as possible this paradoxical situation.'
 
 VINDICATION BY EVENTS 321 
 
 her forests, railways, or land across her own frontiers and 
 make them over to the Allies. Take the railways, for example. 
 Suppose the Allies took possession of them and doubled the 
 charges; they would be paid in paper marks which would be 
 valueless directly they crossed the frontier. 
 
 'The only way Germany could pay was by way of exports 
 that is by difference between German imports and exports. If, 
 however, German imports were too much restricted, the Ger- 
 mans would be unable to obtain food and raw materials 
 necessary for their manufactures. Some of Germany's principal 
 markets Russia and Central Europe were no longer pur- 
 chasers, and if she exported too much to the Allies, it meant 
 the ruin of their industry and lack of employment for their 
 people. Even in the case of neutrals it was only possible 
 generally to increase German exports by depriving our traders 
 of their markets.' 1 
 
 There is not a line here that is not a paraphrase of the chapter 
 in the early edition of The Great Illusion. 
 
 The following is the comment of Mr Maynard Keynes, ex- 
 Advisor to the British Treasury, on the claims put forward 
 after the Paris Conference of January 1921 : 
 
 'It would be easy to point out how, if Germany could com- 
 pass the vast export trade which the Paris proposals contemplate, 
 it could only be by ousting some of the staple trades of Great 
 Britain from the markets of the world. Exports of what 
 commodities, we may ask, in addition to her present exports, is 
 Germany going to find a market for in 1922 to look no farther 
 ahead which will enable her to make the payment of between 
 150,000,000 and 200,000,000 including the export proportion 
 which will be due from her in that year ? Germany's five prin- 
 cipal exports before the War were iron, steel, and machinery, 
 
 "Version appearing in the Times of January 28th, 1921. 
 21
 
 
 322 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 coal and coke, woollen goods and cotton goods. Which of these 
 trades does Paris think she is going to develop on a hitherto 
 unprecedented scale? Or if not these, what others? And how 
 is she going to finance the import of raw materials which, except 
 in the case of coal and coke, are a prior necessity to manufac- 
 ture, if the proceeds of the goods when made will not be 
 available to repay the credits ? I ask these questions in respect 
 of the year 1922 because many people may erroneously believe 
 that while the proposed settlement is necessarily of a problematic 
 character for the later years only time can show it makes 
 some sort of a start possible. These questions are serious and 
 practical, and they deserve to be answered. If the Paris pro- 
 posals are more than wind, they mean a vast re-organisation of 
 the channels of international trade. If anything remotely like 
 them is really intended to happen, the reactions on the trade and 
 industry of this country are incalculable. It is an outrage that 
 they should be dealt with by the methods of the poker party of 
 which news comes from Paris.' * 
 
 If the expert economists failed to admit the validity of The 
 Great Illusion argument fifteen years ago, the general public 
 has barely a glimmering of it to-day. It is true that our miners 
 realise that vast deliveries of coal for nothing by Germany dis- 
 organise our coal export trade. British shipbuilding has been 
 disastrously affected by the Treaty clauses touching the sur- 
 render of German tonnage so much so that the Government 
 have now recommended the abandonment of these clauses, 
 which were among the most stringent and popular in the whole 
 Treaty. The French Government has flatly refused to accept 
 German machinery to replace that destroyed by the German 
 armies, while French labour refuses to allow German labour, 
 in any quantity, to operate in the devastated regions. Thus 
 coal, ships, machinery, manufactures, labour, as means of pay- 
 ment, have either already created great economic havoc or have 
 
 1 The Manchester Guardian, Jan 31st, 1921.
 
 VINDICATION BY EVENTS 323 
 
 been rejected because they might. Yet our papers continue to 
 shout that 'Germany can pay,' implying that failure to do so 
 is merely a matter of her will. Of course she can pay if we 
 let her. Payment means increasing German foreign trade. 
 Suppose, then, we put the question 'Can German Foreign Trade 
 be increased ?' Obviously it can. It depends mainly on us. To 
 put the question in its truer form shows that the problem is 
 much more a matter of our will than of Germany's. Inci- 
 dentally, of course, German diplomacy has been as stupid as 
 our own. If the German representatives had said, in effect: 
 'It is common ground that we can pay only in commodities. 
 If you will indicate the kind and quantity of goods we shall 
 deliver, and will facilitate the import into Germany of, and 
 the payment for, the necessary food and raw material, we will 
 accept on that condition even your figures of reparation.' 
 The Allies, of course, could not have given the necessary un- 
 dertaking, and the real nature of the problem would have stood 
 revealed. x 
 
 The review of the situation of France given in the preceding 
 pages will certainly be criticised on the ground that it gives alto- 
 gether too great weight to the temporary embarrassment, and 
 leaves out the advantages which future generations of French- 
 men will reap. 
 
 Now, whatever the future may have in store, it will certainly 
 have for France the task of defending her conquests if she 
 either withholds their product (particularly iron) from the 
 peoples of Central Europe who need them, or if she makes of 
 their possession a means of exacting a tribute which they feel 
 to be burdensome and unjust. Again we are faced by the same 
 dilemma; if Germany gets the iron, her population goes on 
 
 1 Mr John Foster Dulles, who was a member of the American delega- 
 tion at the Peace Conference, has, in an article in The New Republic 
 for March 30th, 1921, outlined the facts concerning the problem of 
 payment more completely than I have yet seen it done. The facts he 
 reveals constitute a complete and overwhelming vindication of the case 
 as stated in the first edition of The Great Illusion.
 
 324 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 expanding and her potential power of resistance goes on increas- 
 ing. Thus France's burden of defence would grow steadily 
 greater, while her population remained constant or declined. 
 This difficulty of French deficiency in human raw material is 
 not a remote contingency; it is an actual difficulty of to-day, 
 which France is trying to meet in part by the arming of the 
 negro population of her African colonies, and in part by the 
 device of satellite militarisms, as in Poland. But the precarious- 
 ness of such methods is already apparent. 
 
 The arming of the African negro carries its appalling 
 possibilities on its face. Its development cannot possibly avoid 
 the gravest complication of the industrial problem. It is the 
 Servile State in its most sinister form; and unless Europe is 
 itself ready for slavery it will stop this reintroduction of slavery 
 for the purposes of militarism. 
 
 The other device has also its self-defeating element. To sup- 
 port an imperialist Poland means a hostile Russia ; yet Poland, 
 wedged in between a hostile Slav mass on the one side and a 
 hostile Teutonic one on the other,, herself compounded of 
 Russian, German, Austrian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Jewish 
 elements, ruled largely by a landowning aristocracy when the 
 countries on both sides have managed to transfer the great 
 estates to the peasants, is as likely, in these days, to be a military 
 liability as a military asset. 
 
 These things are not irrelevant to the problem of turning 
 military power to economic account: they are of the very es- 
 sence of the problem. 
 
 Not less so is this consideration: If France should for 
 political reasons persist in a policy which means a progressive 
 reduction in the productivity of Europe, that policy would be 
 at its very roots directly contrary to the vital interests of 
 England. The foregoing pages have explained why the increas- 
 ing population of these islands, that live by selling coal or its 
 products, are dependent upon the high productivity of the out- 
 side world. France is self-supporting and has no such
 
 VINDICATION BY EVENTS 325 
 
 pre-occupation. Already the divergence is seen in the case of 
 the Russian policy. Britain direly needs the wheat of Russia 
 to reduce the cost of living or improve the value of what she 
 has to sell, which is very nearly the same thing. France does 
 not need Russian foodstuffs, and in terms of narrow self-interest 
 (cutting her losses in Czarist bonds) can afford to be indifferent 
 to the devastation of Russia. As soon as this divergence reaches 
 a certain degree, rupture becomes inevitable. 
 
 The mainspring of French policy during the last two years 
 has been fear fear of the economic revival of Germany which 
 might be the beginning of a military revival. The measures 
 necessary to check German economic revival inevitably increase 
 German resentment, which is taken as proof of the need for 
 increasingly severe measures of repression. Those measures 
 are tending already to deprive France of her most powerful 
 military Allies. That fact still further increases the burden 
 that will be thrown upon her. Such burdens must inevitably 
 make very large deductions from the 'profits' of her new con- 
 quests. 
 
 Note in view of these circumstances some further difficulties 
 of turning those conquests to account. Take the iron mines of 
 Lorraine. * France has now within her borders what is, as 
 already noted, the geographical centre of Continental industry. 
 How shall she turn that fact to account ? 
 
 For the iron to become wealth at all, for France to become 
 the actual centre of European industry, there must be a Euro- 
 pean industry: the railroads and factories and steamship lines 
 as consumers of the iron must once more operate. To do that 
 they in their turn must have their market in the shape of active 
 consumption on the part of the millions of Europe. In other 
 words the Continent must be economically restored. But that 
 
 1 As the Lorraine ores are of a kind that demand much less than their 
 own weight of coal for smelting, it is more economic to bring the coal 
 to the ore than vice versa. It was for political and military reasons 
 that the German State encouraged the placing of some of the great 
 furnaces on the right instead of the left bank of the Rhine.
 
 326 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 it cannot be while Germany is economically paralysed. Ger- 
 many's industry is the very keystone of the European industry 
 and agriculture whether in Russia, Poland, the Balkans; or 
 the Near East which is the indispensable market of the French 
 iron. * Even if we could imagine such a thing as a reconstruc- 
 tion of Europe on lines that would in some wonderful way put 
 seventy or eighty million Germans into a secondary place 
 involving as it would vast redistributions of population the 
 process obviously would take years or generations. Meantime 
 Europe goes to pieces. 'Men will not always die quietly' as 
 Mr Keynes puts it. What is to become of French credit while 
 France is suppressing Bolshevik upheavals in Poland or Hun- 
 gary caused by the starvation of cities through the new economic 
 readjustments? Europe famishes now for want of credit. But 
 credit implies a certain dependence upon the steady course of 
 future events, some assurance, for instance, that this particular 
 railway line to which advances are made will not find itself, in 
 a year or two's time, deprived of its traffic in the interest of 
 economic rearrangements resulting from an attempt to re-draw 
 the economic map of Europe. Nor can such re-drawing disre- 
 gard the present. It is no good telling peasants who have 
 not ploughs or reapers or who cannot get fertilisers because 
 their railroad has no locomotives, that a new line running on 
 their side of the new frontier will be built ten or fifteen years 
 hence. You cannot stop the patients breathing 'for just a few 
 hours' while experiments are made with vital organs. The 
 operation must adapt itself to the fact that all the time he must 
 breathe. And to the degree to which we attempt violently to 
 re-direct the economic currents, does the security upon which 
 our credit depends decline. * 
 
 1 It is worth while to recall here a passage from The Economic Con- 
 sequences of the Peace, by Mr J. M. Keynes, quoted in Chapter I. of 
 this book. 
 
 "There is one aspect of the possible success of France which is cer- 
 tainly worth consideration. France has now in her possession the 
 greatest iron ore fields in Europe. Assume that she is so far successful
 
 VINDICATION BY EVENTS 327 
 
 There are other considerations. A French journalist asks 
 plaintively: 'If we want the coal why don't we go in and take 
 it' by the occupation of the Ruhr. The implication is that 
 France could get the coal for nothing. Well, France has 
 taken over the Saar Valley. By no means does she get the 
 coal for nothing. The miners have to be paid. France tried 
 paying them at an especially low rate. The production fell off ; 
 the miners were discontented and underfed. They had to be 
 paid more. Even so the Saar has been 'very restless' under 
 French control, and the last word, as we know, will rest with 
 the men. Miners who feel they are working for the enemy of 
 their fatherland are not going to give a high production. It is 
 a long exploded illusion that slave labour labour under physical 
 compulsion is a productive form of labour. Its output in- 
 variably is small. So assuredly France does not get this coal 
 for nothing. And from the difference between the price which 
 it costs her as owner of the mines and administrator of their 
 workers, and that which she would pay if she had to buy the 
 coal from the original owners and administrators (if there is 
 a difference on the credit side at all) has to be deducted the 
 ultimate cost of defence and of the political complications that 
 that has involved. Precise figures are obviously not available ; 
 but it is equally obvious that the profit of seizure is microscopic. 
 
 Always does the fundamental dilemma remain. France will 
 need above all, if she is to profit by these raw materials of 
 
 in her policy of military coercion that she succeeds in securing vast 
 quantities of coal and coke for nothing. French industry then secures 
 a very marked advantage and an artificial and 'uneconomic' one 
 over British industry, in the conversion of raw materials into finished 
 products. The present export by France of coal which she gets for 
 nothing to Dutch and other markets heretofore supplied by Britain 
 might be followed by the 'dumping* of steel and iron products on 
 terms which British industry could not meet. This, of course, is on 
 the hypothesis of success in obtaining 'coal for nothing,' which the 
 present writer regards as extremely unlikely for the reasons here given. 
 But it should be noted that the failure of French effort in this matter 
 will be from causes just as disastrous for British prosperity as French 
 success would be.
 
 328 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 European industry, markets, and again markets. But markets 
 mean that the iron which has been captured must be returned 
 to the nation from which it was taken, on conditions economi- 
 cally advantageous to that nation. A central Europe that is 
 consuming large quantities of metallurgical products is a Central 
 Europe growing in wealth and power and potentially dangerous 
 unless reconciled. And reconciliation will include economic 
 justice, access to the very 'property' that has been seized. 
 
 The foregoing is not now, as it was when the present author 
 wrote in similar terms a decade since, mere speculation or 
 hypothesis. Our present difficulties with reference to the in- 
 demnity or reparations, the fall in the exchanges, or the supply 
 of coal, are precisely of the order just indicated. The con- 
 queror is caught in the grip of just those difficulties in turning 
 conquest to economic account upon which The Great Illusion so 
 repeatedly insisted. 
 
 The part played by credit as the sensory nerve of the eco- 
 nomic organism has, despite the appearances to the contrary 
 in the early part of the War, confirmed those propositions that 
 dealt with it. Credit as the extension of the use of money 
 is society's bookkeeping. The debauchery of the currencies 
 means of course juggling with the promises to pay. The general 
 relation of credit to a certain dependability upon the future 
 has already been dealt with. x The object here is to call attention 
 to the present admissions that the maintenance or re-creation 
 of credit is in very truth an indispensable element in the re- 
 covery of Europe. Those admissions consist in the steps that 
 are being taken internationally, the emphasis which the govern- 
 ments themselves are laying upon this factor. Yet ten years 
 ago the 'diplomatic expert* positively resented the introduction 
 of such a subject into the discussion of foreign affairs at all. 
 Serious consideration of the subject was generally dismissed by 
 the orthodox authority on international politics with some 
 contemptuous reference to 'cosmopolitan usury.' 
 
 1 See Part I, Chapter I.
 
 VINDICATION BY EVENTS 329 
 
 Even now we seize every opportunity of disguising the truth 
 to ourselves. In the midst of the chaos we may sometimes 
 see flamboyant statements that England at any rate is greater 
 and richer than before. (It is a statement, indeed, very apt to 
 come from our European co-belligerents, worse off than our- 
 selves.) It is true, of course, that we have extended our 
 Empire ; that we have to-day the same materials of wealth as 
 or more than we had before the War ; that we have improved 
 technical knowledge. But we are learning that to turn all this 
 to account there must be not only at home, but abroad, a wide- 
 spread capacity for orderly co-operation ; the diffusion through- 
 out the world of a certain moral quality. And the war, for the 
 time being, at least, has very greatly diminished that quality. 
 Because Welsh miners have absorbed certain ideas and developed 
 a certain temperament, the wealth of many millions who are 
 not miners declines. The idea of a self-sufficing Empire that 
 can disregard the chaos of the outside world recedes steadily 
 into the background when we see the infection of certain ideas 
 beginning the work of disintegration within the Empire. Our 
 control over Egypt has almost vanished ; that over India is en- 
 dangered ; our relations with Ireland affect those with America 
 and even with some of our white colonies. Our Empire, too, 
 depends upon the prevalence of certain ideas.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 COULD THE WAR HAVE BEEN PREVENTED? 
 
 'BuT the real irrelevance of all this discussion,' it will be said, 
 'is that however complete our recognition of these truths might 
 have been, that recognition would not have affected Germany's 
 action. We did not want territory, or colonies, or mines, or 
 oil-wells, or phosphate islands, or railway concessions. We 
 fought simply to resist aggression. The alternatives for us were 
 sheer submission to aggression, or war, a war of self-defence.' 
 
 Let us see. Our danger came from Germany's aggressive- 
 ness. What made her more aggressive than other nations, than 
 those who later became our Allies Russia, Rumania, Italy, 
 Japan, France? Sheer original sin, apart from political or 
 economic circumstance? 
 
 Now it was an extraordinary thing that those who were most 
 clamant about the danger were for the most part quite ready 
 to admit even to urge and emphasise as part of their case 
 that Germany's aggression was not due to inherent wickedness, 
 but that any nation placed in her position would behave in just 
 about the same way. That, indeed, was the view of very many 
 pre-eminent before the War in their warnings of the German 
 peril, of among others, Lord Roberts, Admiral Mahan, Mr 
 Frederic Harrison, Mr Blatchford, Professor Wilkinson. 
 
 Let us recall, for instance, Mr Harrison's case for German 
 aggression Germany's 'poor access to the sea and its expand- 
 ing population' : 
 
 330
 
 COULD THE WAR HAVE BEEN PREVENTED ? 331 
 
 'A mighty nation of 65,000,000, with such superb resources 
 both for peace and war, and such overweening pride in its own 
 superiority and might, finds itself closed up in a ring-fence too 
 narrow for its fecundity as for its pretensions, constructed more 
 by history, geography, and circumstances than by design a 
 fence maintained by the fears rather than the hostility of its 
 weaker neighbours. That is the rumbling subterranean volcano 
 on which the European State system rests. 
 
 'It is inevitable but that a nation with the magnificent re- 
 sources of the German, hemmed in a territory so inadequate 
 to their needs and pretensions, and dominated by a soldier, 
 bureaucratic, and literary caste, all deeply imbued with the 
 Bismarckian doctrine, should thirst to extend their dominions, 
 and their power at any sacrifice of life, of wealth, and of 
 justice. One must take facts as they are, and it is idle to be 
 blind to facts, or to rail against them. It is as silly to gloss over 
 
 manifest perils as it is to preach moralities about them 
 
 England, Europe, civilisation, is in imminent peril from German 
 expansion.' * 
 
 Very well. We are to drop preaching moralities and look 
 at the facts. Would successful war by us remove the economic 
 and political causes which were part at least of the explanation 
 
 1 English Review, January 1913. 
 
 Lord Roberts, in his 'Message to the Nation,' declared that Germany's 
 refusal to accept the world's status quo was 'as statesmanlike as it is 
 unanswerable.' He said further: 
 
 'How was this Empire of Britain founded? War founded this Em- 
 pire war and conquest! When we, therefore, masters by war of 
 one-third of the habitable globe, when we propose to Germany to 
 disarm, to curtail her navy or diminish her army, Germany naturally 
 refuses; and pointing, not without justice, to the road by which England, 
 sword in hand, has climbed to her unmatched eminence, declares openly, 
 or in the veiled language of diplomacy, that by the same path, if by 
 no other, Germany is determined also to ascend ! Who amongst us, 
 knowing the past of this nation, and the past of all nations and cities 
 that have ever added the lustre of their name to human annals, can accuse 
 Germany or regard the utterance of one of her greatest a year and a 
 half ago, (or of General Bernhardi three months ago) with any feelings 
 except those of respect?' (pp. 8-9.)
 
 332 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 of German aggression ? Would her need for expansion become 
 less? The preceding pages answer that question. Successful 
 war by us would not dispose of the pressure of German popu- 
 lation. 
 
 If the German menace was due in part at least to such 
 causes as 'poor access to the sea,' the absence of any assurance 
 as to future provision for an expanding population, what 
 measures were proposed for the removal of those causes? 
 
 None whatever. Not only so, but any effort towards a 
 frank facing of the economic difficulty was resisted by the very 
 people who had previously urged the economic factors of the 
 conflict, as a 'sordid' interpretation of that conflict. We have 
 seen what happened, for instance, in the case of Admiral Mahan. 
 He urged that the competition for undeveloped territory and 
 raw materials lay behind the political struggle. So be it ; replies 
 some one; let us see whether we cannot remove that economic 
 cause of conflict, whether indeed there is any real economic con- 
 flict at all. And the Admiral then retorts that economics have 
 nothing to do with it. To Mr Frederic Harrison 'The Great 
 Illusion policy is childish and mischievous rubbish.' What was 
 that policy? To deny the existence of the German or other 
 aggressiveness? The whole policy was prompted by the very 
 fact of that danger. Did the policy suggest that we should 
 simply yield to German political pretensions? Again, as we 
 have seen, such a course was rejected with every possible em- 
 phasis. The one outstanding implication of the policy was that 
 while arming we must find a basis of co-operation by which 
 both peoples could live. 
 
 In any serious effort to that end, one overpowering question 
 had to be answered by Englishmen who felt some responsibility 
 for the welfare of their people. Would that co-operation, giv- 
 ing security to others, demand the sacrifice of the interest or 
 welfare of their own people? The Great Illusion replied, No, 
 and set forth the reasons for that reply. And the setting- forth 
 of those reasons made the book an 'appeal to avarice against
 
 COULD THE WAR HAVE BEEN PREVENTED? 333 
 
 patriotism,' an attempt 'to restore the blessed hour of money 
 getting.' Eminent Nonconformist divines and patriotic stock- 
 brokers joined hands in condemning the appalling sordidness 
 of the demonstration which might have led to a removal of the 
 economic causes of international quarrel. 
 
 It is not true to say that in the decade preceding Armageddon 
 the alternatives to fighting Germany were exhausted, and that 
 nothing was left but war or submission. We simply had not 
 tried the remedy of removing the economic excuse for aggres- 
 sion. The fact that Germany did face these difficulties and 
 much future uncertainty was indeed urged by those of the 
 school of Mr Harrison and Lord Roberts as a conclusive argu- 
 ment against the possibility of peace or any form of agreement 
 with her. The idea that agreement should reach to such 
 fundamental things as the means of subsistence seemed to in- 
 volve such an invasion of sovereignty as not even to be 
 imaginable. 
 
 To show that such an agreement would not ask a sacrifice 
 of vital national interest, that indeed the economic advantages 
 which could be exacted by military preponderance were exceed- 
 ingly small or non-existent, seemed the first indispensable step 
 towards bringing some international code of economic right 
 within the area of practical politics, of giving it any chance of 
 acceptance by public opinion. Yet the effort towards that was 
 disparaged and derided as 'materialistic.' 
 
 One hoped at least that this disparagement of material in- 
 terest as a motive in international politics might give us a peace 
 settlement which would be free from it. But economic interest 
 which is 'sordid' when appealed to as a means of preserving the 
 peace, becomes a sacred egoism when invoked on behalf of a 
 policy which makes war almost inevitable. 
 
 Why did it create such bitter resentment before the War to 
 suggest that we should discuss the economic grounds of inter- 
 national conflict why before the War were many writers who 
 now demand that discussion so angry at it being suggested?
 
 334 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 Among the very hostile critics of The Great Illusion hostile 
 mainly on the ground that it misread the motive forces in inter- 
 national politics was Mr J. L. Garvin. Yet his own first 
 post-war book is entitled : The Economic Foundations of Peace, 
 and its first Chapter Summary begins thus : 
 
 'A primary war, largely about food and raw materials: in- 
 separable connection of the politics and economics of the 
 peace.' 
 
 And his first paragraph contains the following : 
 
 'The war with many names was in one main aspect a war 
 about food supply and raw materials. To this extent it was 
 Germany's fight to escape from the economic position of in- 
 terdependence without security into which she had insensibly 
 fallen to obtain for herself independent control of an ample 
 share in the world's supplies of primary resources. The war 
 meant much else, but it meant this as well and this was a vital 
 factor in its causes.' 
 
 His second chapter is thus summarised: 
 
 'Former international conditions transformed by the revolu- 
 tion in transport and telegraphic intelligence ; great nations lose 
 their former self -sufficient basis: growth of interdependence 
 
 between peoples and continents Germany without sea power 
 
 follows Britain's economic example; interdependence without 
 security : national necessities and cosmopolitan speculation : an 
 Armageddon unavoidable.' 
 
 Lord Grey has said that if there had existed in 1914 a 
 League of Nations as tentative even as that embodied in the 
 Covenant, Armageddon could in any case have been delayed, 
 and delay might well have meant prevention. We know now 
 that if war had been delayed the mere march of events would
 
 COULD THE WAR HAVE BEEN PREVENTED? 335 
 
 have altered the situation. It is unlikely that a Russian revolu- 
 tion of one kind or another could have been prevented even if 
 there had been no war; and a change in the character of the 
 Russian government might well have terminated on the one 
 side the Serbian agitation against Austria, and on the other 
 the genuine fear of German democrats concerning Russia's im- 
 perialist ambitions. The death of the old Austrian emperor 
 was another factor that might have made for peace. * 
 
 Assume, in addition to such factors, that Britain had been 
 prepared to recognise Germany's economic needs and difficul- 
 ties, as Mr Garvin now urges we should recognise them. 
 Whether even this would have prevented war, no man can say. 
 But we can say and it is implicit in the economic case now so 
 commonly urged as to the need of Germany for economic se- 
 curity that since we did not give her that security we did not 
 do all that we might have done to remove the causes of war. 
 'Here in the struggle for primary raw materials' says Mr Garvin 
 in effect over the six hundred pages more or less of his book, 
 'are causes of war that must be dealt with if we are to have 
 peace.' If then, in the years that preceded Armageddon, the 
 world had wanted to avoid that orgy, and had had the necessary 
 wisdom, these are things with which it would have occupied 
 itself. 
 
 Yet when the attempt was made to draw the attention of the 
 world to just those factors, publicists even as sincere and able 
 as Mr Garvin disparaged it ; and very many misrepresented it 
 by silly distortion. It is easy now to see where that pre-war 
 attempt to work towards some solution was most defective : if 
 greater emphasis had been given to some definite scheme for 
 
 1 Lord Loreburn says : The whole train of causes which brought about 
 the tragedy of August 1914 would have been dissolved by a Russian 
 revolution . . . We could have come to terms with Germany as regards 
 Asia Minor : Nor could the Alsace-Lorraine difficulty have produced 
 trouble. No one will pretend that France would have been aggressive 
 when deprived of Russian support considering that she was devoted 
 to peace even when she had that support. Had the Russian revolution 
 come, war would not have come. 1 (How the War Came, p. 278.)
 
 336 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 assuring Germany's necessary access to resources, the real issue 
 might have been made plainer. A fair implication of The Great 
 Illusion was that as Britain had no real interest in thwarting 
 German expansion, the best hope for the future lay in an in- 
 creasingly clear demonstration of the fact of community of 
 interest. The more valid conclusion would have been that the 
 absence of conflict in vital interests should have been seized 
 upon as affording an opportunity for concluding definite conven- 
 tions and obligations which would assuage fears on both sides. 
 But criticism, instead of bringing out this defect, directed itself, 
 for the most part, to an attempt to show that the economic 
 fears or facts had nothing to do with the conflict. Had criticism 
 consisted in taking up the problem where The Great Illusion 
 left it, much more might have been done perhaps sufficient 
 to make Armageddon unnecessary. * 
 
 The importance of the phenomenon we have just touched 
 upon the disparagement before war of truths we are 
 compelled to face after war lies in its revelation of subcon- 
 scious or unconscious motive. There grows up after some years 
 of peace in every nation possessing military and naval traditions 
 and a habit of dominion, a real desire for domination, perhaps 
 even for war itself; the opportunity that it affords for the as- 
 sertion of collective power ; the mysterious dramatic impulse to 
 'stop the cackle with a blow ; strike, and strike home.' 
 
 For the moment we are at the ebb of that feeling and another 
 is beginning perhaps to flow. The results are showing in our 
 policy. We find in what would have been ten years ago very 
 strange places for such things, attacks upon the government for 
 its policy of 'reckless militarism' in Mesopotamia or Persia. Al- 
 
 *Mr Walter Lippmann did tackle the problem in much the way I 
 have in mind in The Stakes of Diplomacy. That book is critical of my 
 own point of view. But if books like that had been directed at The 
 Great Illusion, we might have made headway. As it is, of course, Mr 
 Lippmann's book has been useful in suggesting most that is good in the 
 mandate system of the League of Nations.
 
 COULD THE WAR HAVE BEEN PREVENTED? 337 
 
 though public opinion did not manage to impose a policy of 
 peace with Russia, it did at least make open and declared war 
 impossible, and all the efforts of the Northcliffe Press to in- 
 flame passion by stories of Bolshevist atrocities fell completely 
 flat. For thirty years it has been a crime of Use patrie to men- 
 tion the fact that we have given solemn and repeated pledges 
 for the evacuation of Egypt. And indeed to secure a free 
 hand in Egypt we were ready to acquiesce in the French evasion 
 of international obligations in Morocco, a policy which played 
 no small part in widening the gulf between ourselves and Ger- 
 many. Yet the political position on behalf of which ten years 
 ago these risks were taken is to-day surrendered with barely 
 a protest. A policy of almost unqualified 'scuttle' which no 
 Cabinet could have faced a decade since, to-day causes scarcely 
 a ripple. And as to the Treaty, certain clauses therein, around 
 which centred less than two years ago a true dementia the 
 trial of the Kaiser in London, the trial of war prisoners we 
 have simply forgotten all about. 
 
 It is certain that sheer exhaustion of the emotions associated 
 with war explains a good deal. But Turks, Poles, Arabs, Rus- 
 sians, who have suffered war much longer, still fight. The 
 policy of the loan to Germany, the independence of Egypt, the 
 evacuation of Mesopotamia, the refusal to attempt the removal 
 of the Bolshevist 'menace to freedom and civilisation' by military 
 means, are explained in part at least by a growing recognition 
 of both the political and the economic futility of the military 
 means, and the absolute need of replacing or supplementing the 
 military method by an increasing measure of agreement and 
 co-operation. The order of events has been such as to induce 
 an interpretation, bring home a conviction, which has influenced 
 policy. But the strength and permanence of the conviction will 
 depend upon the degree of intelligence with which the interpre- 
 tation is made. Discussion is indispensable and that justifies 
 this re-examination of the suggestions made in The Great 
 Illusion. 
 
 29
 
 338 THE FRUITS OF VICTORY 
 
 In so far as it is mere emotional exhaustion which we are 
 now feeling, and not the beginning of a new tradition and new 
 attitude in which intelligence, however dimly, has its part, it 
 has in it little hope. For inertia has its dangers as grave as 
 those of unseeing passion. In the one case the ship is driven 
 helplessly by a gale on to the rocks, in the other it drifts just 
 as helplessly into the whirlpool. A consciousness of direction, 
 a desire at least to be master of our fate and to make the 
 effort of thought to that end, is the indispensable condition of 
 freedom, salvation. That is the first and last justification for 
 the discussion we have just summarised.
 
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