"'>ir^ WAR AND PEACE HOBHOUSE, DXitt g)HCllttfH**«- THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE WOEILD IN CONFLICT Cloth, 1/- net. "The distinctive merit o Mr. Hobhouse's volume is the analysis of the causes working for war."— T/ie Tivies. " One of the best sketches we have seen of the general mind of warring Europe."— TAe Out- look. T. FISHER UNWIN, Ltd., LONDON. QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE L. T. HOBHOUSE, D.Litt. Martin-White Professor of Sociology in the University of London T. FISHER UNWIN Ltd. ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON First published in igi6 [All rights reserveci] >- CONTENTS PAGE I. — The Soul of Civilisation - 7 II. — The Hope of the World - 33 * III. — The Future of Internation- alism 183 411933 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE I THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION A Dialogue Marryat is a man who, without being a pessimist, is subject to pessimistic moods. Some internal spring of scepticism breaks out within him from time to time and sends waves that submerge for a while all his most cherished beliefs, his beliefs in other men, in himself and in the eternal meaning of things. But the flood always recedes and the convictions emerge once more, unchanged, perhaps a little blurred 7 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE and ragged at the edges through the wear and tear, but not so much as to frustrate 'his fine Uterar}' and practical work. I was not surprised to find the floodgates open when I met him on the day on which the Coahtion was announced. " Let us make no mistake," he said, "it is the end of everything that you and I have cared about and worked for these twenty years. Oh, I know, a nation's fife is long and there is time for many changes. But, I mean, it is the end so far as you and I are concerned. We are middle- aged men. We may live twenty or thirty years, but that will not be long enough to undo the mischief, to say nothing of any real social progress. So far as we are concerned Actum est. All the old problems will remain, and they will even get more acute. We have been unprofitable ser- 8 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION vants, and all our toil has been for nothing." " Does the mere ending of the Liberal Ministry affect you so much ? " I asked. " I know your faith in them has survived mine by some years ; but after all, look back on their record for nearly ten years and ask what they have actually done for the social condition of the people. Old-age pensions I grant you, and the Wages Boards. But in the last six or seven years ? Much talk, some experi- ments, one big measure of essentially Con- servative social reform. One or two of them meant more, and meant it honestly, but they could get nothing done. The social forces were too strong for them." " Well," he said, '' I admit constant disappointment. I have always been living in anticipation, going on with them for 9 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE what they were just going to do, and always beheving that the next obstacle would be the last. But that is not the main point. The vital thing is that mili- tarism has won the day. I don't mean that we shall be beaten, but we shall win only by adopting German methods. It will be * GrcBcia capta ' again, only the wrong way round. Beaten Germany will force her barbarous methods on the civilised victors. No ; it is not a military defeat that I fear, but the break up of civilisation, the stifling of all the germs of a better social life that we could see quite well, though we knew that they were only germs. You go on talking about morals evolving and the rest of it. I don't want to be rude, but I cannot help laughing when I hear you. Don't you see that morals have come to an end, and that the 10 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION only thing the world believes in, and in fact the only thing real, is sheer force ? " " I know you don't mean half you say," I replied, ** so you may laugh as much as you like. But, after all, we always knew that such a war was one of the things to be reckoned with " " Such a war ! " he cried. " Do you mean that you, with your evolving ethics, wouldn't at any time have confidently maintained, on the basis of comparative sociology and psychology and ethnology, and at least five other elaborately-con- structed sciences, that anything like the present war had become historically im- possible ? What does all your jargon mean if it doesn't mean that the twentieth century differs from the seventeenth ? Yet here you have barbarity piled on barbarity, you have Alva and Tilly and all the rest II QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE of them working with all the most refined resources of your beloved science. And to what end ? Alva, at any rate, thought that he acted for the glory of God, but Hindenburg and von Kluck have no mo- tive beyond the German State. That is their god, and that is the measure of your * progress ' — a meaner deity inspiring dirtier things." Now, I am something given to pessimism myself, and am not cheered by the light- hearted confidence that is termed " pa- triotic." The daily optimism of the news- paper headlines dips me deep in the vortex of despair, and whenever I see smashing victories announced my soul forebodes disaster. Nor during the war have I found this contrariness lacking in justification. But when I meet a man more gloomy than myself some hidden spring of ultimate 12 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION belief is touched, and so it was on this occasion that I spake with my tongue. ** I know pretty well what you are feel- ing," I said, " and if we had been talking in this way six or eight months ago I should have agreed with you. But, do you know, the very things that appal you most have been the saving of the situation to me ? " " I thought you didn't love paradox," he said. " Personally I cannot extract much comfort from the Belgian Commis- sioners' report or the sinking of the Lusitania." " It is no paradox," I replied. " It is simply the fact that the more Germany shows her real mind, the more I see that this war, far from being the deathblow to our civiUsation, is the means of life, and may even be the beginning of a better life. 13 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE Let me explain. You would be the first to agree with me that when we are judging of the future what really matters is not externals — not even such big externals as victory or defeat — but something in- ward and vital, something that we call the soul, whether we are talking of a man or a state, or even an entire civilisation. We agree that if the soul is diseased there will be decay and death in the end, no matter what the external course of events may be, but if the soul is alive and healthy it will live down disaster and retrieve ruin. What we have to ask, then, is whether the war proves the soul of Western civilisation to be diseased and dying or alive and vigorous. By Western civilisation I mean what you would mean — the new ideas that budded out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ideas that centre, I 14 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION suppose, upon the sacredness of human personaUty and radiate out into all our familiar democratic and humanitarian con- ceptions — all very imperfect and experi- mental no doubt, but none the less charged with real and profound meaning. Now, militarism I would freely admit would be in the end the death of those ideas, and if we were given up to militarism I should say with you * Actum est.' But is that the case ? Well, I freely admit that when the war first broke out I had my doubts. Of course, from the first Germany put herself hopelessly in the wrong by the attack on Belgium. But though Germany was wrong, I was not at all convinced that we were right. You and I know the kind of forces that were working up anti- German feeHng, and for a moment what seemed to matter most was that those 15 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE had triumphed. There seemed in no country to be any sohd fulcrum for a peace party, and, looking at the quarrel as a whole, might it not be said that, at any rate until the final act, all Europe shared the blame ? Then began the Bel- gian resistance and the German * fright- fulness.' Well, you and I know something about charges of atrocity in war time, and were not disposed to be credulous. But the German general staff settled all doubts. Faced with a series of appalling charges, they referred everything to the military necessity of a frightful example — and this in the first days of war and in a country with which they had no quarrel, and where they themselves knew they had no right to be. This was only the first of the long series of acts now familiar to all the world which showed the mind i6 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION of Germany to be something quite other than most of us had known or even con- ceived as possible — something — and this is the point — which the world cannot live with, something which, if it cannot be extirpated, will extirpate civilisation. Well then that, to begin with, is to me the justification and necessity of the war. No doubt our people made their mistakes. Those of us who criticised Grey's diplo- macy in the pre-war days are by no means bound to withdraw everything that we said. But we are bound to realise that Grey was, perhaps inarticulately, aware of the kind of being that he was up against in his deahngs with German statesman- ship. We did not know it in the same way, and to that extent we misjudged him. As to one or two of our friends who continue to harp on this or that phrase 17 B QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE in a dispatch which might have been more pacific, they might as well excuse a mur- derer on the ground that his victim laughed at the wrong moment. How anyone who opposes militarism can excuse Germany, how people who call themselves friends of hberty and champions of the rights of small states can paUiate the attack on Belgium passes my comprehension." " There I am with you," he said, " but I don't begin to see the drift of your argu- ment. The German abominations merely prove my thesis, that modern civihsation was never anything but skin-deep, and we have now got beneath the skin." " My point," I replied, " is to distinguish between German ' Kultur ' and Western civihsation. It would be unfair to say that German thinkers never accepted or understood the ideas of which we were i8 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION speaking just now. Kant was a great humanitarian, and looked forward to uni- versal peace. But after the French Revo- lution, in particular after Jena, Germany reacted strongly against the whole liberali- sing humanitarian principle. Good philo- sophic idealists among ourselves go about trying to prove that the reaction in Ger- many is modern, and represents a sad falling-off from the idealism of Hegel. But the truth is that Hegel is the father and by long odds the most serious cham- pion of everything reactionary in the nineteenth century. The deification of the State and the belief that it is the supreme type of human organisation, the contempt for democracy, the unreal identification of liberty with law which simply put every personal right at the mercy of the legislator, the upholding of war as a necessity, the 19 A>W^ QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE disregard of humanity, the denial of the sanctity of treaties and of international law can all be traced to the Philosophie des Rechts. I have no doubt that they go further back, and I suppose that the ideaUstic nationalism of Fichte was in some sort the medium between the hu- manitarianism of Kant and this idealism turned inside out of the Hegelian school. But however that may be, you find all the essentials of a brutal, autocratic, militant, unscrupulous nationaUsm tricked out with the finest phrases in the HegeUan philo- sophy. This is no exceptional peculiarity of one system. Fellow German thought down through the century, and you will only find more and more insistence on force, power, ascendancy, and more and more repudiation of any binding law or any general sense of the unity of mankind. 20 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION You find these things equally in Treitschke who exalts, and in Nietzsche who despises, the State. As to counter currents, Liberal- ism died in Germany after 1848, and social democracy was all along materialistic in basis and revolutionary in method, so that its influence on the directing forces was negligible, and might even be negative. Therefore I say Germany was the chosen home of the reaction against the Western ideal, and now we see for ourselves what this reaction meant." " I dare say that is true," Marry at put in ; " but, all the same, you academic people immensely exaggerate the influence of theories. You go about lecturing, and because people listen politely you imagine that you convince them. The truth is that they never accept a philosophical theory unless they want to do so for their 21 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE own purposes, and then they may find its phrases convenient to them." " Even if that were true," I said, " it would show that German philosophy was a good index to the popular trend of Ger- man thought and feeling. But we all know that in Germany the professors have had far more influence than elsewhere, and it is the most damaging thing that can be said about professors as a class. It isn't only the regular philosophers. Take any German work on history, ethnology, and the like. Notice the way in which they deal with the ethical and human issues. You remember your Mommsen, his Caesar worship, his contempt for the elements of republican idealism, because the current of events moved otherwise. You remember his remark on the suicide of Cato — the farce of the Republic was THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION played out and the fool spoke the epilogue ? But Mommsen, at any rate, is human enough to be a partisan. In the more typical case you will find the German academic treatment of ethical and human issues merely bloodless in its impartiality. The quality has its advantages, and the English or French writer who gets excited about these points is apt to take sides, to palliate or to condemn, and very often to moralise. But, at any rate, these de- fects proceed from a real interest in the heart of human and social phenomena, which the Germans so frequently miss. How many tomes, for example, have they given us on Greek choruses, and what are all these worth — I don't say in themselves, but as means to understanding Greek tragedies — compared with one Chorus in Gilbert Murray's Hippolytus ? Or, to take 23 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE quite a different case, contrast the extreme wealth of human interest in James's Psy- chology, for instance, with the arid wastes that stretch across Wundt's portentous volumes. There is just as much science in the American, and beyond and below it there is the real thing, the human soul, of which Wundt seems to know about as much as an intelligent child. The quite abnormal lack of humour, which no one denies, is merely one symptom of the blankness of the German academic tra- dition on one side." " Well," said Marryat, " this may be very true, but I still do not see your drift. Admit that German professors are not as a rule humorists and that Wundt's Vol- kerpsychologie is five times too long. What has that to do with the war and the future of civilisation ? " 24 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION '* If the German professors had some humour," I repHed, " they would not have issued so absurd a manifesto on the war, for you will grant that humour involves some power of seeing the other man's point of view. But what I was coming to is this. Germany stood out from the new civilisation of the West. She reacted against all the ideals that sprang up in France, England, America, and countries in sympathy with them. She did not return to barbarism. She developed a new variant in civilisation — in point of fact a new religion. This religion had a god — one being in two incarnations. One incarnation was called Energy or Power, or perhaps Will. The other was called the State — the State conceived really in terms of a War Lord and a general staff driving the organised Power of a people to 25 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE victory. Militarism, therefore, is the link between the two incarnations of this novel German deity, and you can understand why Nietzsche and Treitschke — in many respects worlds asunder — both contribute to the cult. Germany is not materialistic or irreligious as people say. She has a faith, and an infernal faith it is, too — ' the vilest birth of time ' Shelley might legitimately have called it. Now I, for one, never understood this till the war began. But if you will saturate yourself for some months with the writers I have been naming, reading their theories day by day to the refrain of the war news, you will be less sceptical about the relations between the academic and the practical, and you will also understand me when I say that the course of the war has made me feel that there is here not the break- 26 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION up of a civilisation, but the clash of two civilisations with two religions — the one whose god is Force, and the other whose god is that which I shall not be able to describe in any terms on which we two would agree, but, at any rate (this we shall both accept), a God whose service is perfect Freedom. Between these religions there was bound to come a decision. If we had been more faithful servants, per- haps, we might have conquered by moral means. If the Western nations had shown the world the example of a life embodying in the arts of peace that same Perfect Freedom of which we speak, they would have converted the world. (They would certainly have convinced some German professor, who would have returned home and proved to his countrymen by statistics that their gods were false.) But, as we 27 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE took for granted at the outset, the ideal of Freedom is realised only in germ. It is still struggling for existence, even in the lands to which it pecuHarly belongs. But if Germany had overthrown France and Belgium last year it would have been destroyed for good and all in Europe. As it is, the war has quickened it into new life and a much fuller consciousness. " So now perhaps you see what I mean. At the beginning I feared that we had blundered into a war devoid of historic necessity through surrender to the mili- taristic elements among ourselves. As events came crowding on, I, for one, saw — and I am sure that countless others had much the same experience — that the strug- gle was quite different from anything I supposed, that essentially it was not a fight between one country and another, 28 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION but a struggle for the elements of a free and human civilisation as we understand the terms. In such a struggle many things may go under, but as long as we fight in this spirit we shall save our souls aUve." "And yet, as the result, we ourselves may become a mihtarist nation, with con- scription, Tariff Reform, and all the ac- customed paraphemaha." " It may be so. There is alwa^'s danger after a war of the reactionary parties coming to the top. As to this, I should only Uke to say in passing that Burt, the economist, who insisted on enhsting as a private, and has pretty good means, there- fore, of samphng the temper of the men in his battahon, tells me that while they are perfectly resolute about the task before them, they are equally resolved that there shall be no more wars or mihtary ser\-ice 29 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE if they can help it. James — an ex-Pacifi- cist like myself — tells me the same thing of the French soldiers, of whom he has seen a good deal. But let us grant the possibility that out of the confusion of parties may come political wreckage. Un- fortunate, of course. Still, I claim your admission that if we have saved our souls alive we shall in the end sweep away political reaction and reconstruct the move- ment of liberation. People will have come to feel much more genuinely about many things — nationahty, for example, and pub- lic right — than ever they did in the past. I can conceive a new Holy Alliance coming about, which should not be anti-demo- cratic, but should be more like Mazzini's dream. That, however, is as it may be. All I contend is that the vital element is safe. There had grown up in Europe a 30 THE SOUL OF CIVILISATION giant Power, which, with all the science and material culture of the West, rejected its newer ideals and lived by a light of its own. Had we been infinitely wiser and better than we are we might have wrestled with it successfully on a higher plane. But Germany brought the question sud- denly to an issue of life and death. It is a calamity, but a calamity that has be- fallen us from without, not the corruption from within of which nations perish. The loss of young life is overwhelming, and the destruction of so many of its best must impoverish Europe for thirty years. The surplus of wealth that we needed for social reorganisation is mopped up. Political parties are in confusion, and it may quite well be that reactionary principles will gain a temporary ascendant. But under all this the essential truth remains. Civili- 31 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE sation — our free Western civilisation — has saved its soul, and shall live." " Well," he said, *' I will not argue the point. I see what you mean, and am only too desirous to beUeve. But if the soul is saved she will have some strange transformations of the body politic to effect before she comes to her own." " That is true," I conceded ; '' and that fragment of the nation's soul called Marryat will play no mean part in the work."* * Reprinted by kind permission of the Editor from the Contemporary Review for August, 1915- 32 II THE HOPE OF THE WORLD A Dialogue It was New Year's Eve and we were not a merry party. A gale raged outside. At any other time the fireside would have been cosy and comfortable by contrast, but now we thought of the men in the trenches and chid ourselves for enjoying our ease while they toiled and suffered. Few of us but had some personal loss to look back upon as we reckoned up the year, or some personal anxiety for the coming twelvemonths. The loss of a great ship with 300 lives put the finishing touch to the tale of public disaster. 33 c QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE At such a time we were not particularly cheered by the appearance of Loder coming into the room as though he were a blast from the south-westerly gale detached with the special mission of sweeping all despond- ency away. Loder is one of those hyper- cheerful souls for whom nothing that is is wrong and everything that is going to be is better. A world cannot be much awry which has recognised Loder's merit and brought him prosperity, and the worst fault that he will admit in the scheme of things is that it makes no provision for an omelette which does not involve the breaking of eggs. Loder knows more of strategy than Joffre and Hindenburg com- bined, and his optimism sees in every movement either victory to-day or a double victory to-morrow. An advance to him is an advance and naught beside, but a 34 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD retreat is always a masterly strategical movement on the road to a completer success. If the Germans take a position it is a failure relatively to the enormous expenditure of men over a wide front. If the Allies take one, no question of expenditure is allowed. Naturally on this occasion Loder thought it his duty to revive our drooping spirits. A better New Year ? Nonsense ! What better could we desire ? Germany was rapidly wearing herself out. She had lost 3,000,000 men — permanently lost. The German official list only 2,500,000 gross casualties ? Very likely — but who would trust a German official list ? And as Loder developed the argument half millions and millions began to fly. Whole armies were annihilated, populations dwindled, and mere hundreds of thousands ceased to count. Loder's 35 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE arithmetic was in full spate when Pris- cilla's cool incisive voice broke in : " All this," she said, " is to me a capital illus- tration of the real meaning of war. You would shudder at the sight of one man slain or mutilated, but in masses they are all so many figures to you. You gloat over the millions of dead, of men maimed for life, legless, armless, blinded — fancy being blind at twenty and otherwise strong with fifty years of darkness before you. No, you will not fancy it, you refuse. You shut your mind to the individual and you count in thousands and millions, forgetting that each one of the millions is a human being, suffering flesh and blood, the son of a weeping mother, husband of some patient woman who can only wait and wonder what fresh evils the rulers of the world will inflict on her. 36 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD War makes you men all alike. You care for nothing when physical victory is at stake. You will drench the world in blood for your pride, and when it is all over as likely as not you will cheerfully admit it was all a mistake and that you were putting your money on the wrong horse ! " Priscilla, it must be owned, is no ad- mirer of the masculine intellect. An exceedingly competent manager herself she finds a use for the male animal when she wants a nail driven in or a screw taken out, but in the higher things she has no use for them, and she derives a certain melancholy satisfaction from the break- down of the male conduct of affairs to which the war is witness. Her inter- vention checked Loder in full career, and a check to Loder is apt to be a temporary 37 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE upset, requiring an interval for the re- arrangement of his faculties. Mrs. Bourne took up the defence. Her boy had just gone back to Flanders, and she might be excused for some vehemence. " Mr. Loder was speaking of Germans, Priscilla," she said. " I am sure neither he nor any of us are regardless of all these dreadful sufferings, and when I think of Rufus knee deep in the mud — but at any rate I sent him out with six pairs of really well-knitted socks, for if you had seen the holes — but what I mean is that I am sure Mr. Loder feels it as much as we all do, and if there are so few Germans left then the war will be over all the sooner, and the suffering so much the less." Priscilla was patience itself, but could not restrain a slight inflection of sarcasm 38 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD when she said : " But you see, Mrs. Bourne, the German mothers are feehng and saying just the same things. They " " German mothers," broke in Mrs. Bourne. " But why did they let the men do it ? Why did they bring this horrible war upon us ? " " You see," said Priscilla, " they were afraid, and when men are afraid their way is to hit out and try to get their blow in first. The Germans had a good deal to be afraid of ; they were afraid of Russia who mobilised her huge army on their frontier, and of France who wanted to take back Alsace-Lorraine, and of Eng- land who was jealous of their commerce and wanted to destroy their fleet. What they did not understand was that Russia and France and England were all equally afraid of them, so when they saw Russia 39 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE massing her troops they did not dare to wait, but struck the first blow." " At httle Belgium," put in Bourne, coming to his wife's rescue, with more courage than discretion. " I have noticed," remarked Priscilla, " that when men wish to screen selfishness behind sentimentality they have a habit of using the adjective ' little.' Give them something little and they begin to cuddle and cosset it until it never escapes. I don't know how far the Belgians were deceived into thinking that we should protect them, or how far they rushed on their fate open-eyed, but in any event they served us as a most convenient pre- text. As to neutrahty, how can a country be neutral which is blocking the way ? You don't leave much neutrality to the unfortunate Greeks. And as to treaties, 40 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD when do men hold to any engagements unless there is someone to hold them ? " ** But in this case," I ventured, " there was someone who sought to hold them, and might it not be rather a good thing if one great Power once in history should have staked itself on the maintenance of the treaty right of a small nation ? " " We had a perfect right," she replied, " to use moral influence. We should have shown the Germans that we disapproved of the attack and the Belgians that they were equally wrong to resist. As it is they have drawn the sword and perished by the sword." " Then," said Bourne, " there is no distinction between attacking and resist- ing ? Killing dehberately and kilHng in self-defence ? Clean warfare and fright- fulness ? " 41 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE ** Who can ever tell," she retorted, " which is attack and which is defence ? The Germans, as I have said, were afraid of France and Russia and wanted to defend themselves. Belgium got in their way and refused to listen though they promised faithfully to treat them as friends, pay for anything they took, and give them back their country afterwards. As to what you call frightfulness, you men believe every story against the Germans just as they believe every story against us. Both are feeding on hate and, like all men in wartime, believe everything that is evil." " But," remarked Bourne, " you said just now that men did not keep their promises unless someone held them to them. I rather sympathise with the little American boy, who spoilt Dernburg's 42 THE PIOPE OF THE WORLD rehearsal of the German promises by asking him how the Belgians were to know that the Germans would keep their promises." " You forget," she said, " that there is such a thing as public opinion. The Ger- mans are a highly-civilised people, and if you would only trust to the real forces that make for harmony and fair dealing in the world, you would rely on them to see justice done. What could they really do in Belgium, or in England for that matter, if we chose not to resist them ? If there were no one to fight them, how could they kill anyone ? Civilised people do not make slaves or interfere with one another's rehgions. The old motives for warfare are gone and only fear remains. If we had set the example of being un- afraid, we should not only have been per- fectly secure ourselves but might, by our 43 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE example, have saved Europe. But the truth is that we wanted to have it out with Germany. Some wanted to destroy her trade and others were pining to show that our men were as good as hers. The quarrel with Russia was the opportunity and Belgium the pretext." It was apparent that for us Priscilla admitted a motive quite other than fear, but I hesitated to point out the incon- sistency. The atmosphere was getting too sultry. Bourne and Loder were both at boiling-point. The truth is that Priscilla's virtues are a little too manifest, and apt to produce in the less regenerate, sudden and tempestuous explosions of the old Adam. But deliverance came from an unexpected quarter. A calm but deep and strong voice broke in as Priscilla paused for breath. 44 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD " Thy zeal is not always according to knowledge, Priscilla Mary," said old Mrs. Swainson. " Thee would'st have men keep the peace and that is well, but to dispose their hearts aright, thee must be just to thy friends as well as to thy enemies. The Word is clear, that men should not slay, not even in a just cause, but thee knowest, as I do, that the nations have never listened to the Word and have sought to build up customs and laws to prevent strife and lessen its inhumanity. These customs and laws are not Christian for they admit warfare to be possible, yet are they not without effect. Such as they are they have built up civilisation, and he who offends against them is doubly wrong, while he who abides by them is doing justly according to his lights, which are not ours. Now, you all know I am 45 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE a neutral, and I was not brought up in my country to love England more than other nations. I have passed years in Germany and have many good friends there, so when the war broke out I was doubly grieved and I concerned myself to study the matter and discern the motives of men. I knew there were many in England who wanted war, and I read articles in some of your leading papers in that fatal week which clamoured for bloodshed, so that at first I thought it was but the old story of the Jingoes, as you used to call them here, in all nations alike forcing war upon the peaceable folk. But as the whole story came out bit by bit I had to see that this was not just. I saw that Germany alone had made herself ready, that even Austria would have drawn back at the last had Germany 46 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD allowed, and that Germany herself might not have fought if her generals had left the question to her statesmen. I daresay the generals acted according to their lights, but all they could see was that it was the mission of Germany to become supreme in Europe and that the way thereto was to strike first and to use terror, not even sparing women and children. Now, these were offences not only against the perfect rule but against the very imperfect laws of men, and there is no gain in denying it. Nor wilt thou make men peaceably in- clined nor dispose them to gentler ways by denying them to be right according to their own lights when the fact is so. Rather grant them all the justice they claim and then try to show them the more excellent way." Mrs. Swainson's words produced a re- 47 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE markable calm. She was too old and authoritative for Priscilla to answer back according to her wont, and, moreover, this flank attack really shattered her formations, a thing which so pleased us all that for the moment we were disposed, for the first time for many months, to pacifism. Bourne was the first to shake off the spell. " I think everyone respects your atti- tude, Mrs. Swainson," he said, " and we can see that it would be a much better world if everyone believed as you do. But the trouble is that yours is a principle which must be accepted by all or none. Logically it is anarchism. If all the good men refuse to employ force under all circumstances, they stand at the mercy of any unscrupulous person, and just the same applies to nations. The war itself 48 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD has shown that the unarmed or half- armed countries Uke Belgium are at the mercy of any unscrupulous aggressor. You grant that a peaceful civilisation, however imperfect, is worth something. How would you preserve it on your prin- ciples ? " " I might ask you, Mr. Bourne," said the old lady, " whether you are sure of preserving it on yours. Are you not sink- ing into the slough of militarism more deeply month by month ? But that would be to answer you according to your own hghts, which are imperfect. What I am concerned to say is rather that the Word is clear to me and I must abide by it with- out fear of consequences. ' Thou shalt not kill' is a clear command. I must obey, and believe that obedience will be in the end for the best, though I cannot 49 i> QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE tell how. Yet even as to consequences we have some light. There are spiritual forces in the lives of men which are en- larged where men do right and contracted where they hide the light that is within them. If but one whole nation were so given over to peace that it would not depart from its ways, not even in the greatest stress of temptation, it would liberate, as the scientific men say, such an amount of energy — only it would be spiritual energy — as would subdue the world. It is true — the meek shall inherit the earth, not heaven only but this world as well." *' But again," said he, " there comes the difficulty. Men are not made so. Here and there a man or perhaps more often a woman, genuinely brave and fear- less, will yet endure everything rather 50 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD than strike, and passive resistance by a single person is both finer and more effec- tive than violence. But you could not, for example, in this crisis go among the armed nations, which have all been self- seeking, and in one way or another inimical to peace, and expect to convert one of them suddenly and wholesale to your principle. Nor would any of the others believe in the conversion. It would be put down to weakness, and the moral and spiritual forces of which you speak would be dissipated in an atmosphere of denial and ridicule." " That is true according to the wisdom of the world," she replied. " None the less those who have the light, be they few or many, must follow where it leads. You would agree that there are things that you would not do, however great 51 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE the disasters they might seem to avert. It is so with us. We must not kill or take part in killing, be the consequences what they may. I have tried to show you how the consequences might be other than you think, but it is not given to me to be certain on that point. I only know what I must do and must not do, just like one of your soldiers under your own mihtary law." " But," said Pentire, " for many of us this is just the tragedy of the situa- tion. Your rule may save the individual but it cannot save humanity. I mean that the individual who holds as you do may keep his conscience pure if he is pre- pared to face the supreme consequence, but he cannot save the world, which after all is organised into great States, governed by average men who know of 52 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD no such law. If you want peace, not merely as an ideal to be talked of, or perhaps as a law to be followed by con- scientious individuals, but as a real state that is to be achieved by mankind, you must work through institutions and govern- ment and all the humdrum makeshifts and contrivances of statesmen. Now, fifty years ago it was thought by many that through these means the world was actually approaching a reign of peace, and all serious thinkers agreed that in this lay the great hope for humanity. It is not merely our temporary happiness, not merely the life of a generation that has been destroyed, but this larger hope whicti has received a shattering blow. If the war had been a sudden calamity, an explosion of unseen forces, it would have been bad enough. The actual suffering 53 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE and loss would have been the same. But in relation to the history of humanity, it is even worse, it is the last product of a chain of causes which have under- mined the civilisation that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were building up. It is the logical culmination of dis- ruptive tendencies which have been at work for generations, and which we must take as rooted deeply in the entire political structure of Europe and even, I am afraid, in human nature. It is not to be ascribed to a double dose of original sin in the Teutonic race. I quite grant you. Bourne, that Germany is primarily responsible both for the outbreak of the war and for the relapse into barbarism which its methods involve. I grant you that at the moment we could not have stood out, and that if we had done so Europe would have been 54 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD crushed, and would in effect have become a German dependency. But Europe can be saved from German militarism only by Russian, French, and now British militarism. There seems to be no third course. Submission to a central miUtary power, or a system of armed States watch- ing each other with the utmost jealousy and upholding a precarious balance with the certainty that whenever it topples this way or that there will be another catastrophe. Between these alternatives lies the future of the continent, a future in which we are now definitely involved. In such a future what chance is there for internal liberty or for humanitarian progress ? " " But," I said, " will not much depend on the military event ? If we win, Ger- man miUtarism will be discredited in its 55 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE own home. The German people will exact a reckoning ; and among ourselves the German idea of the State, which is the guiding conception of all our reactionary movements, will go out of fashion." " Doesn't it look like it ! " was the ironical retort. " Our ruling classes, who long ago discovered that the German State organisation was the only sound method of baffling democracy, have now persuaded the democracy itself that it is the only method of beating Germany. Consider the steps. First the Press is brought under control. The Government becomes the sole source of trustworthy information. The primary object of course is to pre- vent information reaching Germany, and so far as all military matters are concerned that is of course a legitimate consequence of a state of war. But the effect is to 56 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD withhold from the pubUc all means of checking the Government by criticism, and the principle is extended to domestic affairs, so that it becomes an offence to publish a report of a meeting that is hostile to a Minister. Then comes the coercion of the Trade Unions, and this takes a very characteristic form. Works of public importance are not nationalised, but the men working in them are brought under discipline. The employer class is treated as a branch of the State organisa- tion, and is given powers over the workers in the name of the common necessity. Do you suppose these powers will be readily relinquished after the war ? Then comes conscription. Then comes, already loom- ing as a sequel to the war of arms, the war of trade, with some form of Protection as its consequence. Now, all these things 57 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE form a coherent whole. They are the elements of German statecraft. Taken together they build up the ideal of the self-contained, bureaucratic miUtary State. It is quite an intelligible ideal and to a point a good one. For good as for evil it is the reverse of the laissez /aire principle of the old Liberalism. It will not leave the weakest to go to the wall. It will make provision for the elements of physical efhciency for every man. It proposes a complete organisation of society proceed- ing from above in which the powerful classes are constituted the working allies of the Government, while the weaker are protected as well as disciplined. All the resources of the nation, its people, its material wealth, its industry, are organised in subservience to the supreme end of increasing the power of the State as a 58 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD self-contained entity. The State is, in Hegel's expression, the ultimate end. This is the idea on which Germany has worked, and whatever its eftect on the soul, it makes so effective a fighting machine that it can only be met by the creation of a similar machine. The Democracies may win, but democracy is beaten." " You are governed too much," I replied, " by the incidents of the war. We were bound to organise ourselves, and I quite grant that the Germanisers among us have made the most of their opportunity. But it does not follow that they will hold their gains when the war is over. On the contrary, there will be a reaction, and we shall be able to say that the very fact that democracy proved capable of organising itself effectively and spontane- ously in a crisis is proof of the possibihty 59 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE of combining free government with effi- ciency — a possibility which has always been the doubtful point in the philosophy of liberty." " I should be more inclined to believe in your reaction," he said, " if the Ger- manising tendency had begun with the war, but it is of much older date. It has dominated the academic world in this country for two generations. Through the influence of Balliol it inspired the Imperial group which paralysed the Liberal party in the 'nineties, and has now extruded the older tradition from the party life. It guided the Tariff Reform movement at the beginning of the century, and finally it captured the so-called Liberal Government in 191 1. It was not without reason that a Labour member in the conscription debate argued that if the 60 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD State may compel a man to insure, it may compel him to serve. Both forms of compulsion are integral parts of the German idea. Now comes the war, and it is the very opportunity that the Ger- manisers have longed for. Conscription was the worst fence in the run, and they have persuaded the nation to take it blindly. After this it is an easy canter home — plain going all the way. But further than this, the reaction is not merely political. It does not depend on a change in the balance of parties, nor even in new ideas about political machinery. It is the outcome of a slow but decisive moral revolution. The Liberal State was not merely a political institution or a political ideal. It rested upon an ethical basis, and this ethical basis was humanitarian- ism. More or less consciously and clearly 6i QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE it conceived a future of peaceful co-opera- tion in science, in art, in philosophy, as well as in industry and in government. It held that the world had passed beyond the military and entered on the industrial phase, and by industrialism it understood the whole sum of energies in which man- kind can co-operate, not perhaps without emulation and rivalry, but without any final internecine struggle. Thus it con- ceived the future of the world to be one of peace, and in a world of peace the functions of government are diminished in one of their oldest and most important aspects. That is why it could rely so wholeheartedly upon the free individual, could dispense with ideas of territorial aggression, could regard armaments as an apparatus maintained by inertia from an older regime destined gradually to 62 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD become superfluous ; could look forward to the extension of women's influence in public life, and could imagine that the nationalism, which on all sides was really threatening its structure, would never- theless be tamed and softened by liberty itself and that the peoples struggling to be free would cease from violence when they attained justice. Now, humanitarian- ism conceived itself to be the culmination of all previous ethical and religious de- velopments. It was Comte who, all eccen- tricities apart, gave it the best general definition. Humanity, all that is distinc- tive in the human soul, is itself the real object of effort and of worship, of worship for that which it has attained, seeing that it is only in the great and good men that we come into contact through actual experience with the spiritual ; and of 63 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE effort in the sense that the development of what is great and good in man, the wider extension and the deeper harmoni- sation of human hfe, is itself the supreme end which gives meaning and value to all the older religions. The theological religions were good in so far as they in- corporated elements of the idea of human- ity and crystallised them in a hero, a saint, an apostle or a god. But the truth was that it was these elements themselves, or rather the spiritual order which com- prehends and makes a synthesis of them all, which is the essential of religion, and to comprehend this order and work it out in human life from the widest social relations to the humblest personal inter- course was the true religion which the world had at length come to understand. All previous history might be regarded 64 THE HOPE OF THE^WORLD as an ascent to this point of view, and future history would be the descent, the more rapid and continuous process of distributing the fertilising waters over the plain from the head among the hilltops, up to which they had been raised by the exhausting labour of countless generations. "Now this conception of humanity has broken in our hands. The ideal has shown itself either too high or too abstract and rarefied for the actual human being. It has fallen an easy prey to counter influences, first to the biological conception of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, and then to the German State conception of the necessary rivalry of organised communities. The world has been falHng away from it for two genera- tions, and the great war is the signal for its complete breakdown. Far from being 65 E QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE the goal of a grand historic tendency, we ought, looking back over the centuries, on Comte's own method of judging by the prevailing line or trend of development, to regard humanitarianism as merely the product of certain local and temporary forces emerging in France towards the middle of the eighteenth century, culmina- ting in the Revolution, and enjoying a St. Martin's summer in the period of peace and middle-class Liberalism which followed upon the close of the Revolutionary wars. The moment the forces of revolution and combativeness began to organise them- selves again in the new States, the hu- manitarian ideal was shattered beyond the possibility of repair. That is the position, from which I see no outlet. Humanitarian religion, confronted with the facts, has proved as delusive as every 66 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD other. Ethically its ideal is just, and to my mind the only ideal on which a con- sistent ethical doctrine can be based. But as a working force in human life it is even more impotent than Christianity. It is up against the facts of human nature and they are too hard for it. Such is the out- look — at least as I see it — and you will grant that, for the humanitarian, it is sufficiently dark.'* " Your admissions," said Moore, " are very interesting, but if you will let your candour carry you a little further, I think you may escape the sheer pessimism in which you have ended. You want a re- ligion, according to your own theory, to be based upon the ultimate facts of human nature — at least that is what I suppose a Positive religion to be — and so far I quite agree with you. But where I have always 67 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE differed until to-day is in this : tliat you have seemed to me to refuse to look at the facts. What is man ? He is not the co- operative animal, peaceful and industrious and, to say the truth, rather namby- pamby, that you conceive. He is indus- trious and he is social, and he has a respect for justice and for order and for all the softer and more tender side of life ; but besides being an industrious animal he is also a fighting animal. Besides being co- operative he is competitive, and his social life always has been and always will be the life of a group organised for order and co-operation within, so that it may be the more efficient in holding its own against rivals. Take away from him this sense of rivalry, destroy the fighting in- stincts, and you cut the nerve which braces human energy and indeed holds 68 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD social life together. Your one-sided hu- manitarianism is sheer effeminacy, just as your one-sided industrialism is purely material. If you doubt me, look at the facts of the industrial order as you would yourself describe them if you were plead- ing for some social reform. Look at the grey, monotonous life of the mass of the workers, a life becoming ever more grey and more monotonous as the sub-division of labour advances and the gulf between employer and employed widens. Look, on the other hand, at the vulgarism of the successful classes, the absorption in pleasures, which may be harmless, but are petty and unworthy, of five-sixths of that enormous surplus which this mono- tonous industry is for ever pihng up. Can you imagine any ideal capable of sustaining enthusiasm along these lines ? 69 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE Of course you were always going to re- form it. There was to come about some social revolution, which would abolish the contrasts of rich and poor, and somehow diffuse the fruits of industry more equably and with more regard to the sum of human happiness. But, in the first place, this ideal was like the horizon. It always receded with every advance that you made towards it. And, in the second place, no one has ever succeeded even in for- mulating it in such a way as to preserve any of the elements of romance, beauty and real dignity in human life. It was an ideal limited by the eight hour, or the seven hour, or, if you like, the six hour day, with plenty of picture palaces and foot- ball matches to beguile the increased lei- sure. Your ideal has perished because it did not answer to the true needs of man, 70 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD who, if he wants repose and love with one side of his nature, demands it only as a foil to the strenuous endeavour, self-sacri- fice and hardship which the rest of his nature craves. Your rehgion failed for lack of the element of asceticism. It left out a whole set of human instincts. Now, I have a notion that in the organism of a State there is just this synthesis that you lack. The State of the future will be much more social even than anything of which you have dreamed. It will be a complete, self-contained organisation, not based upon illusory theories of human equality but, in a genuine scientific spirit, on the facts of human nature, which clearly indicate that it is for some to lead and for others to follow and serve. But the servants of this State will be far better cared for than the equal citizens of a 71 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE nebulous humanitarianism. They will be protected from oppression by individuals. They will have their functions duly as- signed to them, and will reap the reward which is the hire of which the labourer is worthy. It will be a reward always suffi- cient for physical efficiency — for the first object of the State, even as a fighting organisation, is to secure the maximum of physical efficiency in the maximum number of its citizens. And from the highest to the lowest, every man in such a State will feel himself, not as a matter of academic formulae but in a living and genuine sense, the servant of the com- munity, just as he will feel that the com- munity is the just and considerate master who cares for him, protects him, educates him, and caters for his needs. This sense he obtains from his knowledge that he may 72 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD at any time be called to fight for his com- munity, to sacrifice everything, life itself if he is of military age, wealth, conven- ience, comfort, and the lives of his sons if he is above military age. You may talk as 3^ou will of public spirit and sacri- fice to the common good, but it is only in war that the sacrifice becomes genuine and conscious. These millions of young men who have volunteered among our- selves are having the time of their lives. Hundreds and thousands of them are better fed, better clothed, and physically more fit than they could hope ever to be in your peaceful organisation of industry. War has done for them even materially what peace could not do. But it is on the moral side that the real gain is to be seen. For the first time, the young man to whom life presented no alternative 73 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE between daily drudgery and insipid plea- sure, feels himself at once a man and a citizen, a man doing man's work, a citizen serving a glorious cause for a social end. All that your social ethics talks about is here reaUsed at a stroke. There is a moral uphft which means infinitely more to humanity than all humanitarianism. There is an actual sacrifice of material goods, of riches, of comfort, of Ufe and hmb such as the older rehgions might preach but which they left only to the select few to practise ; and here at a stroke you have all the populations of the greatest nations of the world ready to give up their all cheerfully at the call of the public need. War of course has its cruel side. In populations so dense as those of the modern world, and with the weapons now at our disposal, it must 74 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD inflict suffering on a tremendous scale, and for that reason it must become rare. But the war spirit can be retained within the intervals of peace. It can and will still brace men to their duty, animating the individual, with a readiness, persis- tent and active, though it may not have to be called upon for the final display, to sacrifice his all, and maintaining as a sheer necessity the discipUne and the unity which makes the sum of a healthy social order." "And what," I asked, "is the out- come of all this. You conceive that each State is to strive unceasingly for the mas- tery, do you not ? " " Undoubtedly," he answered, " a power- ful nation may rightly struggle for mastery just as the subject nation may rightly struggle to be free." 75 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE " But," I said, " supposing that one State achieved the mastery over all others. Would it be right to aim at that ? " " Undoubtedly," he replied, " provided the State was sufficiently powerful. If it slackened its activities, it would at once begin to go back." " But," I asked, "if it was sufficiently successful, would it not subdue the re- mainder and so put an end to warfare ? " " Fortunately," he said, " I do not think that it is possible as the world is actually organised. If it were, the result would be a Roman peace, wherein there would be no outer barbarians to save the world from final corruption. But of course, the State must always fight to the top of its power." " Then," I said, ** according to you, it is the business of every powerful State 76 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD to strive for an end which it can only attain at the cost of losing all that makes its life worth having ? " *'Well," he replied, "that is to apply rationalistic ideas to human life. The truth is that you cannot judge human character or conduct by rational tests. The interests of life, as everybody knows, lie in process and not in achievement." " Then," I said, " the aim of a war is not victory but fighting ? " " Ultimately," he said, ** I suppose that is so, but one has to have the ideal of victory before one or the process itself cannot be maintained. There is no doubt an element of illusion, but it is no greater than the illusion of the lover, and in- finitely more noble than the illusion of the man who seeks riches. Who cares for winning anything, whether it be a wife QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE or wealth or a race when they are once attained ? It is in the actual strife that one puts forth effort, and the putting forth of the effort is its own justification." " It seems to me," I said, " that your successful State would reach a point at which it would have to guard against its own victories. It would have to keep minor States as a kind of preserved big game for it to hunt from time to time for fear its energies should rust. That is an interesting notion which has occurred to me now and again when I have been turning over the pages of Treitschke. Of course he never says it in so many words, but I confess it has struck me that the German glorification of mihtarism has al- ways rested on the tacit assumption that in every war that was coming Germany was going to win. But I should Hke to 78 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD know your view in its application to the present struggle." " That is simpHcity itself," he said. " We are out to crush Germany." " But finally ? " I asked. " Finally without doubt," he said. " An inconclusive peace is the one real danger upon the horizon." " But if Germany is finally crushed, we shall never fight her again, and here would be one of your opportunities of war vanish- ing." " Well," he said, " you referred to Treitschke, and I will quote him : * God will see to it that this dreadful medicine never fails humanity.' " *' Still, to future wars, as to the present, my logic will apply." ** Oh, well, if you come to logic," he said, " you go outside the facts of human 79 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE nature and take refuge in ideals, of which Pentire has already shown you the futiUty." " Still," I said, " I personally happen to be interested in logical ideals, and what you have shown me very clearly is that if Pentire's ideal has failed to meet the demands of human nature, your view of the demands of human nature is shown, by your own admissions, to be incom- patible either with ideahsm or with logic. If we are to get on without these, we are left free to follow our own devices and to try to work with that which seems attractive to us without regard to con- sistency or to final consequences. Per- sonally I think that after this war is over, we shall find a good many who have revolted against your view of life and will be inclined to try again on something like Pentire's fines." 80 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD " 111 that case," said Burnell, " I hope they will have learnt a little wisdom froni experience. To my mind, Moore's ideal is at any rate more consistent than Pen- tire's. Moore is principally mistaken in supposing himself to be exceedingly modern and up-to-date. The truth is that he and his friends have gone back to the most ancient theory of the State in history, only he has gone back to it consistently. He is what they used to call a whole- hogger, while Pentire has thought he can take shreds and patches out of the old ideal of the State and fit them on to the new one without any loss of coherence. The old State, of course, was frankly mihtarist just as it was frankly authori- tarian. It was not so powerful an or- ganisation as the German State, for ex- ample, simply because the mechanism of 8i F QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE government was not so far advanced, the means of communication were rudimen- tary, the whole bureaucratic organisation was deficient in technique ; but the idea of the old world was clear enough. It was that the kings and the nobles governed the common people, at bottom because they led them in war, and with a view to leading them in war. War was the supreme human activity. Industry was slovenly. The world was poor and the only fun was to be got by fighting. Well, the time came when the mass of the people began to revolt against this system and they asked for liberty. They demanded the protection of law against arbitrary processes. They demanded freedom of conscience. They demanded freedom of trade. Little by little they gained their demands. Every gain was an encroach- 82 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD ment upon the sphere of government, and every gain was justified by the growth of industry and the enrichment of the world. The uses of government became less and less, and it was clear to every man of common-sense, though it wanted the genius of Cobden to bring it home to them, that the real future of the world lay in freedom of production and ex- change, and that in such a world governments would be reduced to the performance of certain elementary police functions. Now, just at that stage in came people like our friend Pentire. Pro- gress was not fast enough for them. They saw that while a great many people were getting richer and a still larger number were becoming comfortable, there re- mained of course a great many who were still very poor. They wanted to remedy 83 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE the poverty and they thought they could do so by abohshing competition. Now, at this point, they ran up against one of Moore's facts of human nature. When Moore says that human nature demands competition in various forms, he lays his finger upon a truth which Pentire and his friends consistently ignore. Without competition you get slackness and in- efficiency, and that is why a government department will never run industry suc- cessfully. Conceive any business man setting out to organise a new undertaking on the lines of the War Office ! However, Pentire in his wisdom sought to abolish competition, and accordingly he and his friends began to set the organised State upon its legs again. Of course, they were not the only influence at work. There were all the forces of the old regime, all 84 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD the military men on the look-out for titles and pensions, and all the shipbuilders thirsting for contracts. But these men would never have had their way if Pentire had not helped them. It was the union of Socialism — if all the sloppy sentimen- tahty which has promoted our recent legislation deserves so definite a name — — with the old militaristic ideas which has produced the new State organisation, an organisation which, of course, means a perpetual oscillation between actual war and an armed peace, just as Pentire has described it. But what Pentire fails to see is that it is he and his friends who have brought about the very consummation over which he is wringing his hands. He has tried to make the best of both worlds, the old and the new, and he has ended, very naturally, by getting the worst of 85 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE them. You cannot have Hberty by halves. You cannot be at one and the same time belauding the State and seeking in it the consolation of all human ills, and yet depreciating patriotism as a sentiment that leads to warfare and destruction. If you want strenuous government you must take the consequences, and the consequences are the abandonment of all notions of liberty and equality, and the reversion to Moore's ideas of military discipline ; in fine, an organisation of which the natural outcome and the real purpose is war. Now, my belief is that after this frenzy the world in general will be inclined to return to commonsense. It will see what the self-contained State really means. So many millions of young men dead, blinded, maimed for life, and so many thousand millions of the accumulated treasure of 86 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD generations thrown away. People will look at it from a business point of view. Think of it only in terms of some of Pentire's pet schemes. Imagine one-tenth of the money spent upon education, or a hun- dredth part of it on old age pensions, and conceive the difference that it would make. After all, it is a commercial age, and my belief is that there are enough men of commonsense to decide very coolly when once their passions are laid to rest, that the thing does not pay. We shall have a return to saner methods and fewer laws." At this point Pentire, who had been chafing under the imputation of incon- sistency, broke in. " You regard liberty and law then, Burnell, as opposites, do you ? " " Oh," said Burnell, " of course, I grant 87 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE you that a certain minimum of law is necessary to public order. Force and fraud must be put down in any civilised State, and the territory must be protected from foreign enemies. But that being granted, the ideal of government is to efface itself. The old Radicals were perfectly right. The more people are free to follow their own interests, the faster the world goes on." " In fact," said Pentire, " you are a follower of Treitschke. You regard the State as force exercised within or without as the case may be." " But with this difference," said Bumell, " that where Treitschke regarded force as an ideal, it is to me a necessary evil of which we ought to have as little as possible. Force should exist only to quell force." THE HOPE OF THE WORLD " But what kind of force are you think- ing of ? " asked Pentire. " If A is physically stronger than B and could rob him of his watch or of anything else that he pleases so far as mere physical strength is con- cerned, you agree that the State must intervene to protect B. But supposing that A is not physically, but let us say commercially stronger — suppose that he is a capitalist employer and that B is a destitute workman, and that A pro- ceeds to impose starvation wages or any other infamous conditions when B asks him for employment, would you say that the State is unconcerned in that matter ? " " I should say," he replied, " that the business of the State is to secure free contract. That is to say, there should be no regulations allowed preventing B 89 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE going to C or D, who might give him better terms." " But supposing he could get no better terms, and since he is by hypothesis starving, suppose that his internal mechan- ism makes it excessively inconvenient for him to wait, or rather to tramp round from one shop to another seeking work ? " " Well," said Bumell, " that is very unfortunate for him, and if I knew of such a case I should sympathise and endeavour to help it. It is a matter for philanthropy and not for the State." " A fair field for all," said Pentire, " and philanthropy take the hindmost, appears to be your social philosophy." " Well," he said, " that is the philosophy of freedom. It is intended to define the sphere not of morals but of law, and it is quite true that the action of the philan- 90 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD thropist, whom your comparison treats rather cavaherly, is always necessary to deal with hard cases that are left over by any system. None the less, freedom upon the whole works better than coercion." " But," said Pentire, " my precise point is that here we are dealing with coercion. We have a society in which the greatest economic inequalities have grown up. How they have developed in the past, whether through too much law or too little ; whether through bad law or well-intentioned law, or without particular reference to law, does not matter for the moment. You will grant with me that they exist, and you cannot deny that such inequalities give enormous advantages to the possess- ors of wealth in any bargain that they make with those who are not equally fortunate — advantages which in extreme 91 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE cases amount to sheer coercion, quite real though possibly indirect. Now, our case is that in the whole mass of industrial legislation, interfering, as the ordinary phrase goes, with freedom of contract, the freedom has been illusory, and the inter- ference, therefore, a complete misnomer. The true object is one which in reality accords with your own formula, if for physical force we substitute the wider and truer term ' coercion.' The State has used, if you will, coercion against coercion, and whenever it does so, with any just appre- ciation of the circumstances, it is not restricting but extending freedom. Just as there is no freedom for the physically weak in a society where the physically strong can use his strength according to his pleasure, so there is no sufficient free- dom for those who are weak in any 92 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD essential respect, as long as those who are strong in that respect can use their strength to compel them to do that to which no reasonable man would agree if he were on terms of equality for the purpose of the bargain. There is no freedom of con- tract where there is great and permanent inequality between the contracting parties." " Then," he said, " do you conceive a Government office as capable of deciding what a man ought to work at, and for how many hours, and what he ought to be paid, and I suppose what clothes he ought to wear and what boots he ought to put on, instead of leaving these things to the natural laws of demand and supply ? " " I don't know," said Pentire, " in what sense the laws of demand and supply are more natural than any other. The free operation of demand and supply seems 93 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE to be a process only guaranteed, on your own showing, by a developed and refined system of man-made law. My conten- tion is that those laws are still imperfect in any society in which great economic inequahty has arisen, and that to complete them, they require those extensions of control which we have found to be neces- sary during the last two or three genera- tions. Whether the State makes a good or bad judge in particular cases is of course open to question, but we are con- cerned here with the meaning and the tendency of all this branch of legislation, and my point is merely that, whatever the degree of wisdom with which it has been guided in detail, its aim is not the contraction but the expansion of the sphere of freedom. Take your old Radical ideas of liberty and equahty, in short, and I 94 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD say that industrial regulation, so far as it is a restraint upon the strong, comes not to destroy but to fulfil." *' Even if we grant that for the sake of argument," he replied, "it would not cover more than a fragment of social legislation. Your modern State not only prevents a man from making his own bargain with an employer, but, under the pretext of compelling him to save against sickness, fines him 46.. a week out of his wages, at the same time mulcting the employer of another 3d'. Where is freedom of contract in that ? It taxes the well-to-do man for the education of the spendthrift's child, at the same time compelling the said spendthrift to send his child to an elementary school to re- ceive the education which the State pre- scribes. It confiscates a portion of the 95 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE thrifty man's savings to give an old-age pension to a man who has saved nothing. How do you bring these developments under the conception of coercion in restraint of coercion ? " " I should do nothing of the kind," was the answer, ** but the instances that you have taken raise, as I think, rather different principles, and I will take them separately. First of all, do I understand you to oppose State education ? Are you unfaithful to Cobden in that respect ? " ** Well," he said, "in a society like ours, where education is at a discount and parents do not spend money on a prime necessity for their children, I admit that an exception had to be made. Be- sides, you may remember that Cobden himself was not opposed to the industrial protection of children up to the age of 96 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD thirteen. His reason was that children are not in a position either to bargain or to judge for themselves. As a sound individuahst, he was prepared to protect children against their parents as well as against other people. In insisting on edu- cation, the State secured a certain primary right to those who are not in a position to obtain it for themselves." " So far, so good," Pentire rejoined. " You recognise by implication the doc- trine that there are other ways than those by direct force or fraud of impairing the rights of a citizen. But I take it that this is not the sole ground upon which State expenditure on education is to be justified. I should put it that it is the function of the State to employ the public resources for certain great matters of pubHc urgency, one of which is the pro- 97 G QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE vision for all its citizens of at least the elements of instruction, and I should apply this same principle to old-age pen- sions, which is the provision for the aged of at least the bare maintenance of life, independent of institutions and of philanthropy." " What public resources do you speak of ? " he asked. " A State is not a great owner of land or capital. Its expenditure is derived from revenue, and revenue is derived from the taxation of individuals, and taxation in turn means a restriction of individuals in their right to do what they please with their own." " That," said Pentire, " is a very long question, not to be settled offhand. It involves the whole theory of property, its basis and its obligations. My con- tention, put very briefly, would be this : 98 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD that in all value there is a certain social as well as an individual element. The entire body of the rights of property rests upon the protection of the State, and the actual production of wealth is de- pendent, on the one side no doubt upon individual exertions, but on the other on the civilisation which the State main- tains, the growth of population, the main- tenance of order, and so on. Further, when you come to the economic analysis of the means by which wealth is gained, these rest in part upon individual exer- tion, but in part also on elements of monopoly value, and in part upon the system of inheritance. Two cases will be sufficient for my argument. One is site value, which is certainly not created by the owner ; and the other is inherited wealth, which may have been created by 99 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE the owner's father or grandfather or more remote ancestors, but is not due to his own exertions, and would not be impaired if they were slackened. I recognise no natural right of individual property in these elements of value. They are, in a sense, no man's property ; that is to say, they are every man's, and the only way in which they can be made every man's is by their falling into the coffers of the State." " All this," he said, " implies a very scientific system of taxation." " To be executed perfectly," replied Pen- tire, " no doubt it does, but in the first place I should say that a good many of our financial readjustments have been guided, not without success, by this dis- tinction ; and in the second place we are dealing with aims and tendencies, not 100 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD merely with their imperfect realisation, and my point is that, in acquiring for itself those elements of wealth which are in reahty the product, not of this or that living individual but rather of the people as a whole, the State is not robbing anyone nor diminishing anyone's liberty to do as he will with that which is morally his own, but is rather garnering into its own storehouse that which should never have been allowed to pass out of it. Moreover, it is by allowing these elements of wealth to pass into private hands that the grosser economic inequalities have arisen and are perpetuated, and it is these inequahties again which impair the liberty of the less fortunate. Once more, therefore, I maintain that in reclaiming for itself the elements of social value, the State, far from sinning against the principles of lOI QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE liberty and equality, is so acting as to give them a genuine and human inter- pretation. " Not that that is an exhaustive state- ment of its purpose. Its purpose is the enrichment of the common life, and, quite apart from the liberty and equality of individuals, it justly and properly uses any of the national resources, as I have defined them, for the purpose of further- ing the work of civilisation. In two words, the State uses coercion in restraint of coercion, and it employs the national re- sources for the development of the common life." " And how," said he, " does this apply to the Insurance Act ? Which principle governs the State in mulcting a man of 4d. out of that wage which you regard as so pitiful ? " 102 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD " Ah," said Pentire, " there I think you touch upon a difficulty. I am not so sure that all modern legislative de- velopments come within these principles that I have tried to define, and I am not so sure that it is not just at this point that they have gone wrong. You will remember that your complaint against me was that I was not wholehearted enough in my support of such interference as you call it, and that Moore presented us with a more coherent social ideal. Moore's State was to be disciplined in and out, through and through, with a discipline that should be military, indus- trial, commercial, educational, and you consider this to be the only consistent alternative to your principle of complete laissez /aire. Now, my object was to show you that there was a consistent theory 103 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE of the development of State action which would not clash with the old ideals of liberty and equality, but would rather perfect them, though it would undoubtedly add to them a deepening sense of the meaning and possibilities of the common life. My suggestion is that some of our reforming spirits have fallen precisely into the same pit which you digged for me. Having once begun to think in terms of the State, they have abandoned the idea of liberty in its entirety, and they have gone on to conceive a Germanised State which prescribes to every man whatever the authorities may happen to think good for him. Here was a point at which the Radical and the reactionary could unite, and I think, in a measure, have united in recent years. The Radical got so tired of hearing the name of liberty invoked 104 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD against every attempt to restrain economic tyranny that it lost all meaning for him, while the reactionary, like Bismarck him- self, was quite willing to insure some better portion of the material goods of life to the working classes if by so doing he could tame them. The workers on their side were not altogether indisposed to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. Now we are practically told by some of those who only the other day were de- nounced as revolutionary firebrands, that the ideal is a disciplined society, a Ger- many without its militarism. This is Moore's conception, but without Moore's insight into the working of sociological cause and effect. In Germany the ultimate motive of the whole organised system is military. Take away this keystone from the arch and it would crumble. Take 105 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE away militarism — that is the whole atmos- phere of fear, apprehension and ignorance as to the external factor in politics — and you will get, in this country as else- where, a free development of democracy, which would revert to its primary ideal and insist upon rights for the indi- vidual and the true springs of national wealth for the nation." '* Well," said Moore, " I am glad to have your description of the Liberal State, because it is so easy to show what it leaves out. With liberty, as you define it, I have no vital quarrel, and with what you say of the community and the organisa- tion of its resources, many of my friends would warmly agree. What you utterly neglect is discipline. You forget that out- side ideahstic treatises this is a very hard world in which men have to be schooled io6 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD to live their lives by stern measures. Put the militarist idea aside if you can. Find something better than war if you can. I do not believe you will, but let that pass. What I demand of the State is disciphne, authority, the tight rein. That is what your democracies have lacked, and that has been the root of our troubles since August, 1914." ** I challenge you on the point of fact," said Pentire. " Ever since war broke out our people have been almost pathetically asking their leaders to organise them. There is nothing they would not give, no restriction to which they would not submit if they could only be shown a way in which they could help. The defect has been in leadership, not in the people." " That is true enough," said Bourne, " but Moore might reply that a democracy 107 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE gets the leaders it deserves. We have hved slackly, we disUked organisation, and so we let slack men get into high places and allow ourselves to be satisfied with a phrase when we should be at grips with reality." " Oh well," said Pentire, " if you mean that there has been too much golf, I agree. But if southern England has been given over to amusement, that is because there has been not too much social demo- cracy but too little." "It is not only golf," said Bourne. " I mean that it is not only that you have a leisured class which amuses itself instead of working for public ends. It is a certain slackness that has pervaded all classes. Everyone seeks to put away the least fragment of an idea about his work the moment he slams the office door behind io8 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD him. He treats his work as a by-product and all his serious interest is in some game or another. Now, you must admit that the war changed all this, and that Moore is right in saying that literally milhons of men found a real and deep and serious purpose for the first time." " There is some truth in what you say," said Pentire. " Some of us have, I think, allowed too httle for the place of disciphne and asceticism in life. But to begin with, I should trace a good deal of the dulness of work to economic individualism. It is not only that competition has taken art out of industry, but more than that, it kills the sense of public service. My line of reform would be that of Mill — to try and make men feel that they could dig or weave for the community as well as fight for it, and if you had that 109 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE development of the common life which I tried to sketch, combined with fair treat- ment of the individual, I think you would give this spirit its chance. War exists at bottom, I grant you, because peace has been a failure. The world has not yet learnt how to use its industry, how to co-operate, how to find romance and glory in construction. But I will go further and grant that more of discipline is essential to a social ideal. Still, I should contend that it is not for the State to exercise discipline. It belongs to religion and ethics. It is wrong to try to make men better. The right thing is to proffer them the conditions under which they can make themselves better, and persuade them by precept and example to use them. Give the State unlimited authority and it will use it for the benefit of the powerful no THE HOPE OF THE WORLD classes on whom it will always have to lean. Read what the German Socialists have to say in this respect on the virtues of the belauded German State organisa- tion. I must concede to Moore that the Germans have had more of the habit of discipline than we, and still more they have had at the head men selected for organising power. These things have stood them in good stead. But it is at this particular point that I do see the possi- bility of some good coming out of the gigantic evil. We had a lesson to learn and I think it will abide by us." " But," said I, " if this is your con- ception of the future I do not understand the grounds of your pessimism. If you can form a coherent social theory, pro- viding for the three terms, liberty, equality, and social duty, why be downcast because III QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE for some few years leading men — and, if you will, the democracy itself stimulated by reaction against a conception of liberty which you yourself admit to be onesided — have swung too far towards the opposite pole ? There is a very natural action and reaction, and when the present calam- ity is overpast, why should not society settle down to a normal development, along some such lines as those which you have traced out ? " " Ah," said he, " I have been talking of ideals. It is easy to form a social theory which shall show that all the principles that really matter are coherent, that is to say, that they could be con- sistently applied if people cared enough and were independent enough to apply them. The real mischief is a lack either of the will or of the capacity. It is not 112 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD the principles which are wrong but the failure of the democracy to grasp them." " But," I urged, " at any rate the calamity of this war is not the work of democracy. Essentially it is the will of that organised military system which you reprobate, and even if you throw a part of the responsibility upon England and Russia, still it is not the peoples whom you can justly blame but the Govern- ments." " In a democracy," he retorted, " the Governments are what the peoples have made them, or at any rate have allowed them to be. But so far as the war is con- cerned, I do not press that point. I have convinced myself, as most Englishmen have done, on as careful a review of the evidence as I have been able to carry through, that this war was deliberately 113 H QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE willed by the ruling powers of Germany, whoever they may have been — the Kaiser, or the Crown Prince, or the General Staff. That, unfortunately, does not alter the fact that, as Europe is constituted, it is in the power of a great organised military autocracy to impose the state of warfare upon the continent as a whole, and thereby to arrest the development of the more democratic States and inevitably to give it a militarist and autocratic turn. We are compelled, as was said at the outset, to Germanise ourselves in some measure in sheer self-protection. Nor do I see any hope of such improved international relations as will save us from this standing menace to free institutions. " But even that is not the whole of my case. Apart from and before the war, I should contend, the democratic machinery 114 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD in this country, not to speak of others which one knows less perfectly, was visibly breaking down. By general admission the authority of the House of Commons year by year was growing less, and its dimin- ished importance was reflected in a lack of able and commanding personalities, of which in public life the necessities of the war have made us painfully aware. Ask anyone why he acquiesces in the retention of power by the present Government. The answer would be that he sees no alternative. Our public life has become so poor that there exists no other set of men, there scarcely exist any indi- viduals in the public eye capable of im- porting better management, keener vision, a more alert initiative, and a more com- prehensive view into the conduct of our affairs at a time when the whole nation QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE would turn instinctively to such a man if he should appear. It is the breakdown of Parliament which is responsible for the growth of Syndicalism, which is at bottom an idea of the collective self-help of groups of men, under conditions in which the democratic machine to which they had previously looked, had broken in their hands. If Parliament as a whole has failed, it is the breakdown of the more democratic parties which is the most con- spicuous feature in the debacle. What is the career of a democratic leader in a society like ours ? He rises perhaps from the humbler classes. He knows their life and is part of it. All his sympathies are theirs. He understands their ways and their needs, but the moment that he begins to emerge he becomes a middle- class man. Still denounced as a firebrand ii6 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD by society and its Press, he is insensibly drifting away from his supports. He learns to conduct correspondence, passes his hfe in an office, has clerks and assist- ants, and begins to understand the diffi- culties of negotiating with men of affairs. Very soon he finds that he cannot give his supporters all they want. They are not practical, and he is learning to be practical. Still perfectly sincere and heart- whole in his sympathies, he begins to realise the unreasonableness of extremes. Then the extremists in their turn begin to attack him, and just as he is getting into Parhament he finds in his constitu- ency a small group who are already de- nouncing him as a Moderate. Gradually he finds points of sympathy with the very class that he has been attacking, and this class, with a kind of instinct 117 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE perfected by long experience in handling leaders of revolts, seizes the psychological moment for a change of tone. He meets capitalists and landlords in the House of Commons. He likes their manners, finds that after all they are good fellows, experiences more courteous treatment and greater forbearance at their hands than from the extreme left in his rear — in short, he is on the way to conversion, and presently some Father Ogniben reviewing his career announces that he has now seen four-and-twenty leaders of revolts. The Greek tyrant lopped off the heads of the stalks of wheat that had grown above the others in the field. Modern society uproots them with tender care and trans- plants them to its own garden. But in both cases the effect is the same. The mass is always leaderless. Thus, even ii8 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD apart from external politics, the case of democracy would be nearly desperate ; but with the growing pressure of nation- ahst militarism it may reasonably abandon all hope." " You have sketched the career of the workman in politics," I said, " but have you not omitted the middle-class leader of democracy ? " " His case," he replied, " is substan- tially the same. What is your middle- class leader ? He begins as a young man who imbibes a certain amount of demo- cratic enthusiasm in his student days. The next twenty years he devotes to push- ing his fortunes, spending an occasional evening at a workmen's club or in lecturing for a Liberal association. By the age of fort}', when he is emerging, the glamour is gone and a great part of his physical 119 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE energy has been spent in the struggle for existence. He has married a clever wife, who shows her ability in cultivating social connections advantageous to her husband's career, and she involves him in the meshes of smart society, or at least society as smart as she can afford. He still rests his hopes on what he calls the people, and his first election addresses have the true democratic ring. He shows a little independence in his earliest essays in the House of Commons and probably the Government think it worth while to tame him by throwing him a minor office. He then commences statesman, and assumes willingly or unwillingly responsibility for one hundred and one acts of Government which are not particularly easy to square with his principles, and as he still works his way up his enunciation of principles becomes ever 120 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD more resounding and platitudinous, while every one of his acts is a purely tem- porary exception to the generalisations which he proclaims. Every exception is applauded by the Press and charms the society in which he actually moves, while his rounded formulae serve the double function of placating his own conscience and convincing the mass of his democratic supporters that he is only biding his time for the great coup which is to set all politics on a new plane. No, I see no more hope in a middle-class leader. He was already weighed in the balance and found wanting when democracy sought its own leaders from its own ranks. English society as actually constituted, the framework which its law, its Press, its social life, even its Civil Service, all together form, is a gigantic mill for grinding revolutionism to powder. 121 QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE I don't know whether it grinds very slowly, but it grinds exceeding small." " Still," I said, " in all this don't you think you are too much influenced by temporary conditions ? I should grant you that there has been a serious reaction in England, and even throughout the world, cutting across the democratic move- ment during the last thirty or forty years, but still the movement has gone on. There has been action and reaction, and it is hard to say to which side the balance is inclined. Just now it has dipped sharply on the wrong side, but if we take a wider view — we were beginning by considering the course of history as a whole — does not the broad progressive tendency hold ? Is it not at least sufficiently marked to enable us to work, not merely in the kind of desperation you suggest, but with some 122 THE HOPE OF THE WORLD degree of rational hope that our efforts will come to fruition ? " " Oh," he said, " you seem to me to be hankering after that law of progress which for me, as I frankly confess, was the basis of politics, I may even say of ethics and religion, for many years of my life. But I must tell you, as a candid man, I have been forced to abandon it. It is useless to talk of basing conduct and belief upon science unless we first have the scientific temper, and to say the truth, I have come to the conclusion — most regretfully and mournfully — that the supposed laws of progress are just as much the outcome of prejudice or, if you will, of faith, or at any rate of an emo- tional predisposition, as any of the older theologies. You may say that laws are general truths a