Part 12 (1/2)
I met a British officer in France who is also a landowner. I got him to talk about his administrative work upon his property. He was very keen upon new methods. He said he tried to do his duty by his land.
”How much land?” I asked.
”Just over nine thousand acres,” he said.
”But you could manage forty or fifty thousand with little more trouble.”
”If I had it. In some ways it would be easier.”
”What a waste!” I said. ”Of course you ought not to _own_ these acres; what you ought to be is the agricultural controller of just as big an estate of the public lands as you could manage--with a suitable salary.”
He reflected upon that idea. He said he did not get much of a salary out of his land as it was, and made a regrettable allusion to Mr. Lloyd George. ”When a man tries to do his duty by his land,” he said...
But here running through the thoughts of the Englishman and the Italian and the Frenchman and the American alike one finds just the same idea of a kind of officialdom in owners.h.i.+p. It is an idea that pervades our thought and public discussion to-day everywhere, and it is an idea that is scarcely traceable at all in the thought of the early half of the nineteenth century. The idea of service and responsibility in property has increased and is increasing, the conception of ”hold-up,” the usurer's conception of his right to be bought out of the way, fades.
And the process has been enormously enhanced by the various big-scale experiments in temporary socialism that have been forced upon the belligerent powers. Men of the most individualistic quality are being educated up to the possibilities of concerted collective action. My friend and fellow-student Y, inventor and business organiser, who used to make the best steam omnibuses in the world, and who is now making all sorts of things for the army, would go pink with suspicious anger at the mere words ”inspector” or ”socialism” three or four years ago. He does not do so now.
A great proportion of this sort of man, this energetic directive sort of man in England, is thinking socialism to-day. They may not be saying socialism, but they are thinking it. When labour begins to realise what is adrift it will be divided between two things: between appreciative co-operation, for which guild socialism in particular has prepared its mind, and traditional suspicion. I will not over to guess here which will prevail.
3
The impression I have of the present mental process in the European communities is that while the official cla.s.s and the _rentier_ cla.s.s is thinking very poorly and inadequately and with a merely obstructive disposition; while the churches are merely wasting their energies in futile self-advertis.e.m.e.nt; while the labour ma.s.s is suspicious and disposed to make terms for itself rather than come into any large schemes of reconstruction that will abolish profit as a primary aim in economic life, there is still a very considerable movement towards such a reconstruction. Nothing is so misleading as a careless a.n.a.logy. In the dead years that followed the Napoleonic wars, which are often quoted as a precedent for expectation now, the spirit of collective service was near its minimum; it was never so strong and never so manifestly spreading and increasing as it is to-day.
But service to what?
I have my own very strong preconceptions here, and since my temperament is sanguine they necessarily colour my view. I believe that this impulse to collective service can satisfy itself only under the formula that mankind is one state of which G.o.d is the undying king, and that the service of men's collective needs is the true wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d. But eagerly as I would grasp at any evidence that this idea is being developed and taken up by the general consciousness, I am quite unable to persuade myself that anything of the sort is going on. I do perceive a search for large forms into which the prevalent impulse to devotion can be thrown. But the organised religious bodies, with their creeds and badges and their instinct for self-preservation at any cost, stand between men and their spiritual growth in just the same way the forestallers stand between men and food. Their activities at present are an almost intolerable nuisance. One cannot say ”G.o.d” but some tout is instantly seeking to pluck one into his particular cave of flummery and orthodoxy. What a rational man means by G.o.d is just G.o.d. The more you define and argue about G.o.d the more he remains the same simple thing.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, modern Hindu religious thought, all agree in declaring that there is one G.o.d, master and leader of all mankind, in unending conflict with cruelty, disorder, folly and waste. To my mind, it follows immediately that there can be no king, no government of any sort, which is not either a subordinate or a rebel government, a local usurpation, in the kingdom of G.o.d. But no organised religious body has ever had the courage and honesty to insist upon this. They all pander to nationalism and to powers and princes. They exists so to pander. Every organised religion in the world exists only to exploit and divert and waste the religious impulse in man.
This conviction that the world kingdom of G.o.d is the only true method of human service, is so clear and final in my own mind, it seems so inevitably the conviction to which all right-thinking men must ultimately come, that I feel almost like a looker-on at a game of blind-man's bluff as I watch the discussion of synthetic political ideas. The blind man thrusts his seeking hands into the oddest corners, he clutches at chairs and curtains, but at last he must surely find and hold and feel over and guess the name of the plainly visible quarry.
Some of the French and Italian people I talked to said they were fighting for ”Civilisation.” That is one name for the kingdom of G.o.d, and I have heard English people use it too. But much of the contemporary thought of England stills wanders with its back to the light. Most of it is pawing over jerry-built, secondary things. I have before me a little book, the joint work of Dr. Grey and Mr. Turner, of an ex-public schoolmaster and a manufacturer, called _Eclipse or Empire?_ (The t.i.tle _World Might or Downfall?_ had already been secured in another quarter.) It is a book that has been enormously advertised; it has been almost impossible to escape its column-long advertis.e.m.e.nts; it is billed upon the h.o.a.rdings, and it is on the whole a very able and right-spirited book. It calls for more and better education, for more scientific methods, for less cla.s.s suspicion and more social explicitness and understanding, for a franker and fairer treatment of labour. But why does it call for these things? Does it call for them because they are right? Because in accomplis.h.i.+ng them one serves G.o.d?
Not at all. But because otherwise this strange sprawling empire of ours will drop back into a secondary place in the world. These two writers really seem to think that the slack workman, the slacker wealthy man, the negligent official, the conservative schoolmaster, the greedy usurer, the comfortable obstructive, confronted with this alternative, terrified at this idea of something or other called the Empire being ”eclipsed,” eager for the continuance of this undefined glory over their fellow-creatures called ”Empire,” will perceive the error of their ways and become energetic, devoted, capable. They think an ideal of that sort is going to change the daily lives of men.... I sympathise with their purpose, and I deplore their conception of motives. If men will not give themselves for righteousness, they will not give themselves for a geographical score. If they will not work well for the hatred of bad work, they will not work well for the hatred of Germans. This ”Empire”
idea has been cadging about the British empire, trying to collect enthusiasm and devotion, since the days of Disraeli. It is, I submit, too big for the mean-spirited, and too tawdry and limited for the fine and generous. It leaves out the French and the Italians and the Belgians and all our blood brotherhood of allies. It has no compelling force in it. We British are not naturally Imperialist; we are something greater--or something less. For two years and a half now we have been fighting against Imperialism in its most extravagant form. It is a poor incentive to right living to propose to parody the devil we fight against.
The blind man must lunge again.
For when the right answer is seized it answers not only the question why men should work for their fellow-men but also why nation should cease to arm and plan and contrive against nation. The social problem is only the international problem in retail, the international problem is only the social one in gross.
My bias rules me altogether here. I see men in social, in economic and in international affairs alike, eager to put an end to conflict, inexpressibly weary of conflict and the waste and pain and death it involves. But to end conflict one must abandon aggressive or uncordial pretensions. Labour is sick at the idea of more strikes and struggles after the war, industrialism is sick of compet.i.tion and anxious for service, everybody is sick of war. But how can they end any of these clashes except by the definition and recognition of a common end which will establish a standard for the trial of every conceivable issue, to which, that is, every other issue can be subordinated; and what common end can there be in all the world except this idea of the world kingdom of G.o.d? What is the good of orienting one's devotion to a firm, or to cla.s.s solidarity, or _La Republique Francais_, or Poland, or Albania, or such love and loyalty as people profess for King George or King Albert or the Duc d'Orleans--it puzzles me why--or any such intermediate object of self-abandonment? We need a standard so universal that the platelayer may say to the barrister or the d.u.c.h.ess, or the Red Indian to the Limehouse sailor, or the Anzac soldier to the Sinn Feiner or the Chinaman, ”What are we two doing for it?” And to fill the place of that ”it,” no other idea is great enough or commanding enough, but only the world kingdom of G.o.d.
However long he may have to hunt, the blind man who is seeking service and an end to bickerings will come to that at last, because of all the thousand other things he may clutch at, nothing else can satisfy his manifest need.
VI. THE ENDING OF THE WAR
1
About the end of the war there are two chief ways of thinking, there is a simpler sort of mind which desires merely a date, and a more complex kind which wants particulars. To the former cla.s.s belong most of the men out at the front. They are so bored by this war that they would welcome any peace that did not definitely admit defeat--and examine the particulars later. The ”tone” of the German army, to judge by its captured letters, is even lower. It would welcome peace in any form.
Never in the whole history of the world has a war been so universally unpopular as this war.
The mind of the soldier is obsessed by a vision of home-coming for good, so vivid and alluring that it blots out nearly every other consideration. The visions of people at home are of plenty instead of privation, lights up, and the cessation of a hundred tiresome restrictions. And it is natural therefore that a writer rather given to guesses and forecasts should be asked very frequently to guess how long the war has still to run.