Part 1 (1/2)
The United States and the War.
by George Gilbert Aime Murray.
I.
It is dangerous to comment too freely on the psychology of foreign nations. I knew a man who held the opinion that Americans cared for only three things in the world--comfort, money, and safety--objects which notoriously inspire aversion in the normal Briton. And he explained this view at some length to two young Americans, one of whom had been working fourteen hours a day at the relief of distress in Belgium, while the other, with a sad disregard for truth and the feelings of his parents, had pa.s.sed himself off as a Canadian in order to fight in the British Army.
I know another man, an American man of letters, who went off at his own expense at the time of the German advance in Poland to help the Polish refugees. He worked for months on end among people starving and dying of typhus, often going without food himself and entirely abstaining from some of the most ordinary comforts of life. When I last met him he had seen a thousand people dead around him at one time. He was then on his way back to continue his work, and I felt some nervousness on hearing he was to pa.s.s through England. I have an inward feeling that someone at this moment is explaining to him that Americans ask no questions about the war except how much money they can make out of it, and the one thing you can be sure of about a Yank is that he will be too proud to fight.
This particular man will very likely not retaliate. He will smile sadly and search his conscience, and reflect sympathetically that people who are suffering cannot help being irritable. But some millions of his fellow-countrymen will answer for him, and they have rather a pretty wit when they set about answering. A placard over a certain large cinema show in New York once put the point neatly: ENGLISHMEN! YOUR KING AND COUNTRY WANT YOU. WE DON'T.
The beauty of that statement is that it finishes the matter and leaves nothing to argue about. But if you are unwise enough to wish to argue, you will find ample material. Think of all the things, to begin with, that are said against England by Englishmen. Remember all the things that your most Radical friends have said in the past against the Tories and Imperialists, and add it to all that the Tories used to say about Lloyd George; double it by all that the U.D.C. on the one hand and Mr.
Maxse and the _Morning Post_ on the other are saying about everyone who does not wors.h.i.+p in their own particular tabernacles; sum them all together, and put in front of them the words: ”Honest Englishmen themselves confess----!” The effect will be quite surprising. It would be no wonder if the simple-minded American should feel some prejudice against a nation whose leaders are all in the pay of Germany and whose working-cla.s.ses spend their lives in a constant debauch; a nation which makes up for its inefficiency in the field by riotous levity at home, by ferocious persecution of conscience and free speech, and by the extreme bloodthirstiness of its ultimate intentions towards the enemy. The wonder is that he feels it so little; that some sane instinct generally helps him to know the grosser kind of lie when he sees it, and some profound consciousness of ultimate brotherhood between the two great English-speaking peoples is so much stronger than all the recurrent incidents of superficial friction.
The main cause of friction is, without doubt, that in the greatest crisis of our history we expected more from America than she was disposed to give. We felt to her a little as the Danes felt towards us in 1864, as the French felt towards us in 1870. When Belgium was invaded, when the _Lusitania_ was sunk, the average Englishman did, without doubt, look expectantly towards America, and America did not respond to our expectations. Were those expectations reasonable and natural, or were they not?
The answer seems to me quite clear. They were entirely natural, but not quite reasonable. We could not help feeling them; but it was not at all likely that the average American voter should feel as we did. How should he? One need not speak of the six million Germans, and the innumerable other aliens in the United States; nor yet of the traditional anti-British feeling in the political ”mob.” The plain fact is that nations do not go to war for remote philanthropic objects. They get near it sometimes, as we got near it with Turkey in 1895, over the Armenian ma.s.sacres. But they do not go over the edge, except where the philanthropic indignation is reinforced by other motives or causes of quarrel. And even there, time is needed to awake a whole nation. Mental preparation is needed; the culprit must have a bad character already; the proof of the crime committed must be exceedingly clear. None of these conditions was present in 1914. The Germans were greatly respected in the United States. There had been a powerful and a.s.siduous court paid to American opinion. Every single crime committed by Germany was accompanied by a cloud of dust and counter-accusation. It was the Russians who insisted on war; it was France which invaded Belgium; it was the Belgian women and children who committed atrocities on the German soldiers; it was the English who used explosive bullets and poisonous gas; I forget whether it was the _Lusitania_ which tried to sink the poor submarine, or if that was only the _Arabic_; but at every single point at which the national indignation of America might have exploded the issue was confused and befogged. We should remember the immortal words of the Pope, when confronted by the twentieth or thirtieth demonstration of the b.e.s.t.i.a.lities done by the Germans in Belgium: ”_But you know, they say they didn't._” The same answer was always open not only to Colonel Bryan (why should that eminent pacifist be denied his full claim to military glory?), but to men of much less nebulous judgment than he.
No; it was not reasonable to expect the United States to plunge into war for motives of philanthropy. And if one begins to put the question on other grounds, then clearly it is not for us foreigners to decide what course best suits the interest or dignity of the United States. They know their own case, _pro_ and _con_, far better than we can, and we certainly need not complain of either the skill or the fervour with which our friends in that great, strange country have stated our case.
But the matter is decided. America will not join in this war. Both political parties are united on that point; and only a few voices of independent thinkers, voices sometimes of great weight and eloquence, are lifted in protest. I do not, of course, say that there might not arise some new and unexpected issue which would compel her to change her policy; but, as far as the issues are now known, the Americans have made up their minds to have no war.
Such a decision has, of course, had its consequences. Any person who, after hesitating, comes to a decision, likes afterwards to have as many grounds as possible for justifying himself, and the same holds of a nation. If America had, for good or evil, plunged into the war, she would have found easily a thousand reasons for being enthusiastic about it and for justifying her intimate sympathy with us. It is now the other way. She cannot help feeling a certain coldness towards people who, as she thinks, tempted her to dangerous courses; who certainly felt, however unreasonably, a shade of disappointment about her. What right had we to be disappointed; to hint by our manner, if not by words, that she had chosen safety rather than the _beau role_? After all, why should she fight England's battles? Wicked as the Germans are--and hardly any normal American defends them--is England so entirely disinterested and blameless? Is Ireland so much more contented than Alsace-Lorraine? Do the ”Black List” and the Paris Resolutions and the ”Orders in Council”
suggest that the new Liberal England is so very different from the old England that was America's natural enemy? The President has used language which looks like a repudiation of all moral or human interest in Europe's quarrels: ”With the causes and objects of the war America is not concerned.” I do not believe that the President himself really would hold to that dictum, and I am sure his countrymen would not. The principle is too cynical for either. But, as far as direct public action is concerned, that statement holds the field. Belgium, Armenia, Poland, Miss Cavell, the horrors of Wittenberg, the wholesale deportations of women, the habitual killing of unarmed civilians; all these are to count as matters of indifference for the executive government of the United States.
But not for the human beings who compose the United States, whether in the Government or out of it. The more they have decided not to intervene publicly in the war, the more they are ready to pour out their sympathy, their work, and their riches to help the distresses of the war. Never was there a nation so generous, so ready in sympathy, so quick to respond to the call of suffering. They exceed England in these qualities almost as much as England exceeds the average of Europe. They will stand aloof from the savage old struggle, free, unpolluted, rejoicing in their own peace and exceeding prosperity, but always ready to send their missionaries and almoners to bind the wounds of more benighted lands.
The wars of Europe are not their business.
Unless, indeed, after the war, the victor should come out too powerful?
A victorious Germany is fortunately out of the question; but a victorious England--might not that bring trouble? America must after all be ”prepared.”
II.
It is hard for an Englishman to understand how a very great nation, a very proud nation, whom we, accustomed to range the whole circuit of the world and find our brothers trading or governing in the antipodes, look upon instinctively as our own kinsmen and natural friends, should be content to stay apart from the great movement of the world, and to strike no blow either for Democracy or Absolutism; to leave it to others to decide whether peace or war shall be the main regulator of national life, whether treaties shall be sacred or not, whether or not ”Government of the people by the people for the people” shall perish from the greater part of the earth. And many Americans feel as we do.
The most brilliant and magnetic of America's recent Presidents feels as we do. But, as a rule, I believe, the average American is not only content, but proud to stand thus aloof and indifferent. The line of thought leading to such a pride is one familiar to many generations of Americans, the glory of their immense isolation.
Why should they turn back to mix again in the misery and blood-guiltiness of that evil old world from which their fathers and mothers fled? They will forgive it, now that they are free and safe.
They will forgive it; they will revisit it sometimes with a kind of affection; they will pour out their abundant riches to alleviate its sufferings, but they will never again be entangled in its schemes and policies, they will never again give it power over them.
Generation after generation of American settlers have been refugees from European persecution. Refugee Puritans, refugee Quakers, refugee Catholics, French Huguenots, English and German Republicans, in later days persecuted Jews and Poles and Russian revolutionaries have all found shelter and freedom in America, and most of them some degree of prosperity and public respect. And far more numerous than these definite sufferers from religious or political persecution have been the swarms of settlers who, for one reason or another, had found life too hard in the Old World. In every generation the effect is repeated. Europe is the place that people fly from; the place of tyrants and aristocracies, of wars and crooked diplomacy, the place where the poor are so miserable that they leave their homes and families and spend their last s.h.i.+lling in order to work at the lowest manual labour in the one land on earth which will really a.s.sure them ”life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” No wonder it is easy for an American to reject all responsibility for the troubles of Europe!
Nay, when you meet an American who is really interested in Europe, you will be surprised to find how little he cares for the things that we consider liberal or progressive. Such things are not what he wants of Europe. He can get them at home. He likes Europe to be European. What he asks of Europe is picturesqueness; old castles, and Louis XIV., and Austrian rules of etiquette and an unreformed House of Lords. When we reform such things away he is rather regretful, as we in England might be at the Chinese cutting off their pigtails. In his leisure hours he likes us as we are, and when it comes to business his only determination is that we shall never again interfere with him.