Part 5 (1/2)
The immediate result of defeat would mean, of course, that insolvency would take place in a very large number of commercial businesses, and others would speedily follow. Those who cannot get away will starve unless large relief funds are forthcoming from, say, Canada and the United States, for this country, bereft of its manufactures, will not be able to sustain a population of more than a very few millions.--From an Article by ”A Well-known Diplomatist” in _The Throne_, June 12, 1912.
These are but samples; and this sort of thing is going on in England and Germany alike. And when one protests that it is wicked rubbish born of funk and ignorance, that whatever happens in war this does not happen, and that it is based on false economics and grows into utterly false conceptions of international relations.h.i.+p, one is shouted down as an anti-armament man and an enemy of his country.
Well, if that view is persisted in, if in reality it is necessary for a people to have lies and nonsense told to them in order to induce them to defend themselves, some will be apt to decide that they are not worth defending. Or rather will they decide that this phase of the pro-armament campaign--which is not so much a campaign in favour of armament as one against education and understanding--will end in turning us into a nation either of poltroons or of bullies and aggressors, and that since life is a matter of the choice of risks it is wiser and more courageous to choose the less evil. A nation may be defeated and still live in the esteem of men--and in its own. No civilized man esteems a nation of Bas.h.i.+-Bazouks or Prussian Junkers. Of the two risks involved--the risk of attack arising from a possible superiority of armament on the part of a rival, and the risk of drifting into conflict because, concentrating all our energies on the mere instrument of combat, we have taken no adequate trouble to understand the facts of this case--it is at least an arguable proposition that the second risk is the greater. And I am prompted to this expression of opinion without surrendering one iota of a lifelong and pa.s.sionate belief that a nation attacked should defend itself to the last penny and to the last man.
And you think that this idea that the nations--ours amongst them--may drift into futile war from sheer panic and funk arising out of the terror inspired by phantoms born of ignorance, is merely the idea of Pacifist cranks?
The following, referring to the ”precautionary measures” (_i.e._, mobilization of armies) taken by the various Powers, is from a leading article of the _Times_:--
”Precautions” are understandable, but the remark of our Berlin Correspondent that they may produce an untenable position from which retreat must be humiliating is applicable in more than one direction. Our Vienna Correspondent truly says that ”there is no valid reason to believe war between Austria-Hungary and Russia to be inevitable, or even immediately probable.” We entirely agree, but wish we could add that the absence of any valid reason was placing strict limitations upon the scope of ”precautions.” The same correspondent says he is constantly being asked:--”Is there no means of avoiding war?” The same question is now being asked, with some bewilderment, by millions of men in this country, who want to know what difficulties there are in the present situation which should threaten Europe with a general war, or even a collision larger than that already witnessed.... There is no great nation in Europe which to-day has the least desire that millions of men should be torn from their homes and flung headlong to destruction at the bidding of vain ambitions. The Balkan peoples fought for a cause which was peculiarly their own. They were inspired by the memories of centuries of wrong which they were burning to avenge.
The larger nations have no such quarrel, unless it is wilfully manufactured for them. The common sense of the peoples of Europe is well aware that no issue has been presented which could not be settled by amicable discussion. In England men will learn with amazement and incredulity that war is possible over the question of a Servian port, or even over the larger issues which are said to lie behind it. Yet that is whither the nations are blindly drifting Who, then, makes war? The answer is to be found in the Chancelleries of Europe, among the men who have too long played with human lives as p.a.w.ns in a game of chess, who have become so enmeshed in formulas and the jargon of diplomacy that they have ceased to be conscious of the poignant realities with which they trifle. And thus will war continue to be made, until the great ma.s.ses who are the sport of professional schemers and dreamers say the word which, shall bring, not eternal peace, for that is impossible, but a determination that wars shall be fought only in a just and righteous and vital cause. If that word is ever to be spoken, there never was a more appropriate occasion than the present; and we trust it will be spoken while there is yet time.
And the very next day there appeared in the _Daily Mail_ an article by Mr. Lovat Fraser ending thus:--
The real answer rests, or ought to rest, with the man in the train.
Does he want to join in Armageddon? It is time that he began to think about it, for his answer may soon be sought.
Now we have here, stated in the first case by the most authoritative of English newspapers, and in the second by an habitual contributor of the most popular, the whole case of Pacifism as I have attempted to expound it, namely: (1) That our current statecraft--its fundamental conceptions, its ”axioms,” its terminology--has become obsolete by virtue of the changed conditions of European society; that the causes of conflict which it creates are half the time based on illusions, upon meaningless and empty formulas; (2) that its survival is at bottom due to popular ignorance and indifference--the survival on the part of the great ma.s.s of just those conceptions born of the old and now obsolete conditions--since diplomacy, like all functions of government, is a reflection of average opinion; (3) that this public opinion is not something which descends upon us from the skies but is the sum of the opinions of each one of us and is the outcome of our daily contacts, our writing and talking and discussion, and that the road to safety lies in having that general public opinion better informed not in directly discouraging such better information; (4) that the mere multiplication of ”precautions” in the shape of increased armaments and a readiness for war, in the absence of a corresponding and parallel improvement of opinion, will merely increase and not exorcise the danger, and, finally, (5) that the problem of war is necessarily a problem of at least two parties, and that if we are to solve it, to understand it even, we must consider it in terms of two parties, not one; it is not a question of what shall be the policy of each without reference to the other, but what the final upshot of the two policies taken in conjunction will be.
Now in all this the _Times_, especially in one outstanding central idea, is embodying a conception which is the ant.i.thesis of that expressed by Militarists of the type of Mr. Churchill, and, I am sorry to say, of Lord Roberts. To these latter war is not something that we, the peoples of Europe, create by our ignorance and temper, by the nursing of old and vicious theories, by the poorness and defects of the ideas our intellectual activities have developed during the last generation or two, but something that ”comes upon us” like the rain or the earthquake, and against which we can only protect ourselves by one thing: more arms, a greater readiness to fight.
In effect the anti-Educationalists say this: ”What, as practical men, we have to do, is to be stronger than our enemy; the rest is theory and does not matter.”
Well the inevitable outcome of such an att.i.tude is catastrophe.
I have said elsewhere that in this matter it seems fatally easy to secure either one of two kinds of action: that of the ”practical man”
who limits his energies to securing a policy which will perfect the machinery of war and disregard anything else; or that of the idealist, who, persuaded of the brutality or immorality of war, is apt to show a certain indifference concerning self-defence. What is needed is the type of activity which will include both halves of the problem: provision for education, for a Political Reformation in this matter, _as well as_ such means of defence as will meantime counterbalance the existing impulse to aggression. To concentrate on either half to the exclusion of the other half is to render the whole problem insoluble.
What must inevitably happen if the nations take the line of the ”practical man,” and limit their energies simply and purely to piling up armaments?
A critic once put to me what he evidently deemed a poser: ”Do you urge that we shall be stronger than our enemy, or weaker?”
To which I replied: ”The last time that question was asked me was in Berlin, by Germans. What would you have had me reply to those Germans?”--a reply which, of course, meant this: In attempting to find the solution of this question in terms of one party, you are attempting the impossible. The outcome will be war, and war would not settle it. It would all have to be begun over again.
The Navy League catechism says: ”Defence consists in being so strong that it will be dangerous for your enemy to attack you.”[11] Mr.
Churchill, however, goes farther than the Navy League, and says: ”The way to make war impossible is to make victory certain.”
The Navy League definition is at least possible of application to practical politics, because rough equality of the two parties would make attack by either dangerous. Mr. Churchill's principle is impossible of application to practical politics, because it could only be applied by one party, and would, in the terms of the Navy League principle, deprive the other party of the right of defence. As a matter of simple fact, both the Navy League, by its demand for two s.h.i.+ps to one, and Mr.
Churchill, by his demand for certain victory, deny in this matter Germany's right to defend herself; and such denial is bound, on the part of a people animated by like motives to ourselves, to provoke a challenge. When the Navy League says, as it does, that a self-respecting nation should not depend upon the goodwill of foreigners for its safety, but upon its own strength, it recommends Germany to maintain her efforts to arrive at some sort of equality with ourselves. When Mr. Churchill goes further and says that a nation should be so strong as to make victory over its rivals certain, he knows that if Germany were to adopt his own doctrine its inevitable outcome would be war.
The issue is plain: We get a better understanding of certain political facts in Europe, or we have war. And the Bellicist at present is resolutely opposed to such political education. And it is for that reason, not because he is asking for adequate armament, that some of the best of this country look with the deepest misgiving upon his work, and will continue to do so in increasing degree unless his policy be changed.
Now a word as to the peace Pacifist--the Pacifist sans phrases--as distinct from the military Pacifist. It is not because I am in favour of defence that I have at times with some emphasis disa.s.sociated myself from certain features and methods of the peace movement, for non-resistance is no necessary part of that movement, and, indeed, so far as I know, it is no appreciable part. It is the methods not the object or the ideals of the peace movement which I have ventured to criticize, without, I hope, offence to men whom I respect in the very highest and sincerest degree. The methods of Pacifism have in the past, to some extent at least, implied a disposition to allow easy emotion to take the place of hard thinking, good intention to stand for intellectual justification; and it is as plain as anything well can be that some of the best emotion of the world has been expended upon some of the very worst objects, and that in no field of human effort--medicine, commerce, engineering, legislation--has good intention ever been able to dispense with the necessity of knowing the how and the why.
It is not that the somewhat question-begging and emotional terminology of some Pacifists--the appeal to brotherly love and humanity--connotes things which are in themselves poor or mean (as the average Militarist would imply), but because so much of Pacifism in the past has failed to reconcile intellectually the claims of these things with what are the fundamental needs of men and to show their relation and practical application to actual problems and conditions.
[Footnote 8: As a matter of fact, of course, the work of these two men has not been fruitless. As Lord Morley truly says: ”They were routed on the question of the Crimean War, but it was the rapid spread of their principles which within the next twenty years made intervention impossible in the Franco-Austrian War, in the American War, in the Danish War, in the Franco-German War, and above all, in the war between Russia and Turkey, which broke out only the other day.”]