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I
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
Books by PHILIP GIBBS
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD NOW IT CAN BE TOLD PEOPLE OF DESTINY
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK Established 1817
More That Must Be Told
-y
By
Philip Qihhs
Author of "People of Dbstiny" "Now It Can Be Told" etc.
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON
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^
More That Mtw. be Tolo
Copyrieht, ipai. by Harper & Brother* Printed in the United States of America
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CONTENTS
,^.« PAGE CHAP. . .
I. Leaders of the Old Tradition i
II. Ideals of the Humanists 5°
III. The Need of the Spirit 83
IV. The New Germany .'127
V. The Price of Victory in France I7S
VI. The Social Revolution in English Life .... 213
VII. The Warning of Austria 244
VIII. The Truth About Ireland 260
IX. The United States and World Peace 339
X. The Chance of Youth 37°
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
LOOKING back at the three years of history after the ^ armistice — three years of blundering, moral degra- dation, and reaction to the lowest traditions of national politics — the most tolerant of minds examining into the causes of that evil time must formulate a grave in- dictment against one company of men. Arraigned before an honest jury of pubHc opinion, they are a fairly small gang of notorious persons, politically of doubtful charac- ter and shady antecedents. They are the Leaders of Europe — the Old Gang, still for the most part in com- mand of the machinery of government.
These men in England, France, and Italy are those who were playing the game of politics before the war, fighting for place and power, taking their turn, now in, now out, according to the revolutions of the party wheels, but, whether in or out, belonging to the inner circle of that system which under the fair name of "representative government" arranges the fate of peoples without their knowledge or consent, and by art- ful appeals to popular passion and ignorance, by spell words and watchwords of fine sound and empty mean- ing, keeps the mob obedient to their directing wills, even
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though they are led to the shambles with the enticing cry of, "Dilly, dilly, come and be killed."
It would be ridiculous now to re-examine all the psy- chological and political causes of the European war. That argument has been threshed out in millions and billions of words, in white papers and yellow papers and red papers, and in spite of the publication of secret documents from the Russian archives and the papers of other governments revealing the sinister game of bluff and bluster, intrigue and conspiracy, between the old courts of Europe, it is certain, if anything in history is certain, that nothing will ever reverse the verdict of guilty given against the German military caste for having planned, desired, and made the war. The German bureaucracy and bourgeoisie share that guilt by crim- inal consent, though the peasants and common folk must be acquitted on the plea of ignorance and their inability to resist the poison of false propaganda adminis- tered to them by their rulers and teachers. Let us leave it there — this terrible verdict against which there is no court of appeal except at the judgment seat of God.
But the statesmen of Europe among the nations which ranged themselves against the Germanic power cannot be acquitted of all guilt, though they pleaded a dovelike innocence when the frightful challenge of war resounded through Europe and the armies moved to the fields of massacre. They were guilty of maintaining, defending, and intensifying the old regime of interna- tional rivalry, with its political structure resting entirely on armed force and as damnably guilty of hiding from their own peoples the inevitability of the conflict which was approaching them because of this grouping and maneuvering of forces.
For many years before the war the conscience of people without power in many countries had been stirred by the spiritual idea of a closer brotherhood of
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LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
man, united by the common interests of labor and liberty. In France there was a growing revolt against the burden of militarism. The spirit of ''La Revanche,'" any pas- sion of desire to recapture Alsace-Lorraine at the cost of millions of lives, had died down and almost out in the cold ashes of extinct fires. In Germany the Social Democrats, quite sincerely despite their betrayal after- ward, were antimilitarists and the advocates of inter- national peace. In England the people were so devoid of military ambition, so sure that war on the big scale had been abandoned forever by the great Powers of white civilization, that even when it happened they were incredulous, and like the countryman who saw a giraflFe for the first time, said, "Nell! ... I don't beheve it!"
The statesmen of Europe — English, French, Ger- man, Russian, and others — might have allied themselves with the new idealism stirring among the common folk of Europe. Some of them, indeed, paid lip service to those ideals of international peace, and with elaborate insincerity, smiling with cynicism up their sleeves, pro- posed resolutions at The Hague to restrict the horrors of war and to sprinkle its stench with rose-water. But mostly, and with intellectual atheism, they used the immense and secret powers of their governments to kill the pacifist instincts of democratic idealism, to break or buy its leaders, and to secure the continuance of the old game between courts and foreign offices for com- mercial advantages, military alliances, unexploited territories.
These men of the Old Gang were at least no nobler than their predecessors through centuries of conflict. There was not one of them inspired by any vision of world policy higher than immediate material advantage or imperial aggrandizement. Not a man among them, seeing the shadow of a world war creeping nearer, ut- tered a loud cry to the conscience of humanity or any
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warning of approaching doom or any plea for some better argument than that of massacre. They were industrious with squalid bargains for the "undeveloped" spaces of the earth in Africa and Asia. From one foreign office to another went bickering notes, claims, protests, and threats. The Fashoda crisis menaced England with war against France. The Agadir crisis, twenty years later, was a challenge to Germany by England and France — a challenge voiced by Lloyd George, the "leader of democracy," in a speech which summoned up the dreadful vision of Armageddon as lightly, as carelessly as men might tell a fantastic nightmare across the dinner table as a warning against lobster salad. It seemed so to the British people, a little startled, but not shocked into the tragic consciousness that Lloyd George's message was the revelation of enormous forces assembling and getting ready for a conflict in which the 3'outh of Europe, ignorant of that meaning, not told in plain words, not asked for consent, v/ould be slain by millions, because the old men of the old regime were greedy for empire, on this side or that.
It is easy to say that Germany was the wild beast of Europe, with devouring instincts, and that the other nations would have been a feebler prey, ready for the slaughterhouse, if they had been more weakened by the idealism of world peace. That is true. So is it true that in Napoleon's time France was the wild beast of the European jungle, and in other times other nations. So is it true that in England once there were seven kings at war with one another, and in Ireland sixty. So is it true that a century ago there were highwaymen in Hyde Park, and that for any slight off'ense or imagined insult one gentleman would challenge another and kill him, if gifted with great strength or skill or luck. The history of civilization is a gradual taming of the wild beast in human society, an education of human intelli-
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LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
gence to a widening sphere of law and order and self- restraint. So it seemed, until the last war made a mockery of lawmakers and of gentlemen. The old men of Europe (not old in years, but in traditions) made never an effort to tame the wild beast in the heart of Germany (or in their own), never once raised ideals to which the German people might rise with a sense of liberty and brotherhood from the spell of Junkerdom. They made no kind of effort to get Euro- pean civilization out of the jungle darkness to new clearing places of light. They were all in the jungle together. A friend of mine with bitter cynicism com- pared the international politicians before the war with ape-men, peering out of their caves, gibbering and beckoning to friendly apes, frothing and mouthing to hostile apes, collecting great stores of weapons for de- fense and offense, strengthening the approaches to the monkey rooks, Hstening with fear to the crashing of the Great Ape in the undergrowth of his own jungle, whispering together with a grave nodding of heads, a plotting of white hairs, while the young apes played among the trees with the ignorance and carelessness of youth.
That simile is an outrage upon the high intelligence, the fine manners, the culture and refinement of the statesmen who directed the fate of Europe before the war — men like Grey, Asquith, Delcasse, Poincare, Viviani, Briand, Giolitti. Yet outrageous though it be, if the European system were put into the parable of the animal world, by the spirit of i^Esop or of Swift or of Lafontaine, it is with jungle life and with ape life that it could only be compared.
During the war many of the statesmen of the coun- tries engaged in that conflict behaved with the virtue that belongs to patriotism and to the old traditions of national honor, I do not underrate that virtue or those
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traditions. In their time and when necessity demands them they call out the supreme qualities of manhood in all classes directly engaged. When once the war was declared and we were back again to the primitive con- test of nation against nation, there was no other way for honorable men than devotion to the life of one's people, the highest service of one's soul for the national cause, self-sacrifice even to death. In obedience to that last law of patriotism, youth, the best of European manhood, answered the call with illimitable courage, and an immense spiritual fervor never seen on such a scale in human history. Without a murmur of revolt, upUfted by enthusiasm, at least in the early days of war, the legions of British, French, Italian, Russian, and German youth marched to the fields of death and largely died. Diflferent motives impelled them, differ- ent professions of faith were theirs, but on both sides of the fighting lines there was the one common primitive instinct that the life and liberty of one's people could be saved only by the death of the enemy. It was a war to the death without mercy, without chivalry, except in rare cases, on either side — the worst war the world has seen.
II
The old leaders of Europe handed over a great deal of their directive power to the military mind, which despised them with a traditional contempt for politi- cians, reciprocated heartily by those gentlemen who were impatient with the rigid self-conceit, the abrupt and undiplomatic manners, the complete lack of sym- pathy and candor among many members of the High Command. In all countries the politicians responsible for the civil organization of the state complained bit- terly of the autocratic methods, the intellectual narrow- ness of the military command. In all countries the
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High Command — German, French, British — accused the politicians of "betraying" them and undermining the chances of victory.
Outwardly a political truce had been called in all countries. Party opposition had been silenced by Coali- tion governments in which all parties were represented. There was what the French called "L'Union Sacree" before the enemy. Secretly, and with but a thin camou- flage of decency, there were continual intrigues, con- spiracies, and plots among the various groups of po- litical personalities, aided and abetted by people of high rank and social influence. In France and England in- trigues were rife in the Cabinet and the War Office. Kitchener was beset by enemies in high places and low places intent upon pulling him down by fair means or foul. The early failures of the war, the ghastly mis- takes, the endless slaughter, called for victims. Every man in public life, and every woman of social influence, backed his or her fancy for the War Ministry, the Com- mander in Chief, the chief of staff", the army, corps, or divisional generals, and had a private personal alle- giance to this man or that, or a bitter vindictive grudge against him. There were cabals for and against Kitch- ener and Robertson, French and Haig, Fisher and Jelli- coe. Newspaper editors were invited to breakfast, luncheon, dinner, by ministers of state and generals of the High Command, in order to enlist their influence by subtle suggestions in leading articles, or personal paragraphs or open attacks, for or against the latest favorite or the latest scapegoat. Military critics, war correspondents home on leave. Parliamentary corre- spondents and lobby men, were favored by these danger- ous attentions. The press became a hotbed of favoritism and conspiracy. The commanders in the field, Joff"re as well as French, Retain as well as Haig, endeavored to counter-attack the conspirators by forming their own
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bodyguard of political adherents, and directing the press. Colonel Repington, military critic of the Times, busy as Warwick the king-maker, was invited to Sir John French's headquarters and told all the secret history of the relations between the Commander in Chief and the Secretary of War. The war correspondent of the Daily Mail (at that time Mr. Valentine WiUiams, afterward a captain in the Irish Guards) was also a "white-headed boy" at the headquarters of Sir John French. The Daily Mail worked up a sensation about the shortage of high-explosive shells and attacked Lord Kitchener with a ferocity which for a while so angered the British public that they burned their favorite paper in public places — and then renewed their subscriptions.
Sir John French's enemies were too strong for him after the ghastly failure of the Loos battle. Haig's friends triumphed; Robertson succeeded in supreme command when Kitchener was drowned, to the great relief of many patriots. Major-General Sir Frederic Maurice, on Sir John French's staff until his fall, was raised to a higher place as Director of Military Opera- tions on the Imperial General Staff, under Sir William Robertson. Then another set of intrigues went on, and never finished until the ending of the war. Asquith, hounded down by the Daily Mail and betrayed by his own supporters, was succeeded by Lloyd George as Prime Minister of England. Then Repington, the cor- respondent, wonderfully confidential with Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in close liaison with Maurice, Director of Military Operations, conducted a long-range attack upon the new Prime Minister for his conduct of the war, and revealed the most jealously guarded secrets of the Supreme War Council. Haig in France, obstinate against the idea of a unified com- mand which would place him under the authority of a French generalissimo, conscious that Lloyd George
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LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
had little faith in his generalship after the enormous slaughter of the Somme battles and the still more fright- ful losses in Flanders, had his attention diverted from the state of his front to the political danger behind him. With Retain in command of the French armies, he was arranging plans which would keep Foch out of supreme command — a system of mutual defense which broke down utterly when the Germans attacked in March of 1918 and nearly won the war.
Officers home on leave, hearing some of those rumors of intrigue and private rancor, could not reconcile the spirit of it with the marvelous optimism of public men — those very people — in public print. I remember dining with Lord Burnham in London of war time. I had come home on leave from the mud of Flanders, where I had seen the tragic slaughter of our youth, the daily harvest of the wounded boys. I had no notion that it was more than a tete-a-tete with Lord Burnham at the Garrick Club, so, coming up from the country and arriving late in town, did not put on evening clothes. It was a hu- miliation to me (more hurtful to one's vanity than moral delinquency) when I found a company of great people, including Sir William Robertson, Lord Charles Beresford (old "Charlie B.," as he was always called), and a variety of peers and politicians who were helping in divers ways and offices to "win the war." They were the people, anyhow, who pulled many wires of our imperial activities, knew all the secrets of the war on land and sea, and held in their hands the decision of peace, if there ever could be peace, which then seemed doubtful. My ears were alert to catch any words of hope which might be a reprieve to thousands of boys — those I passed daily on the Albert-Bapaume road and other highways of abomination — who otherwise would be condemned to death. These people knew whether the Germans were weakening. To them came all the 2 9
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reports of spies, the ** peace feelers" through neutral countries, the secret views of our allies, beneath official proclamations and triumphant propaganda. God! Here I was in the company of those who held the keys of knowledge and the power of fate in this great drama of tragic history.
They talked freely. One to another they kept the conversation going without a pause. Only one man was silent, and that w^as Robertson. I made out that the navy was not doing well. That the sinking of our ships by German submarines was more serious than the nation knew. (Not good news, I thought, for the boys at the front!) Haig seemed to be hopeless. His battles were bloody but indecisive. It was nonsense to make out that we were winning. It was mere folly to pretend that our losses were lighter than the enemy's. The Ger- mans still had immense reserves of man power. (So the optimism of our Chief of Intelligence did not cheer the company!) The French were troublesome again, letting us down deliberately, not working in close or loyal liaison, intriguing for supreme command. Our reserves were wearing pretty thin, in spite of the high percentage of recovery among lightly wounded men. The war might go on easily for another two years, or three, if the peoples did not break before then. ... I listened with a sinking heart. This was gloomy and dreadful talk, more gloomy than my own forebodings in miserable hours. Here was no hope for boys I knew who would be marching to-night to the line again, sitting again in the dirty ditches under infernal fire, praying with blas- phemous oaths for some miracle that would bring them a reprieve and peace.
"Well, gentlemen," said Sir William Robertson at last, "you are all very pessimistic! All I can say is if we're a bit winded, the enemy is just as puffed. It's a case of who holds on the longest."
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One man there had written to the Times that very day ridiculing the German "peace" offers and pro- claiming our certainty of victory in the end. He had no certainty of faith at dinner that night, but spoke despairingly. Through all the conversation there was a note of querulous irritation against the men in high command, hardly camouflaged even against Robertson, sitting there with them, not answering their criticism of failure and loss.
It was a rainy night, and dark in Garrick Street when I went out. A soldier home on leave lurched by drunk- enly and uttered a foul oath. Away in Flanders his pals would be listening to "crumps" and the whining of high velocities passing overhead and the hiss of the gas shells. The stretcher-bearers would be busy with the usual casualties — arm wounds, stomach wounds, gassed, the ordinary muck of a night's work in the line. ... I had no hope to take out to them. Our leaders were just carrying on, hoping for the odd trick after years more of slaughter. "Just a question," said Robertson, "of who holds out the longest." That was the highest hope of our highest Generalship! . . , And Robertson was right.
Tragic history! Is it worth while washing so much dirty linen in public as that exposed to the vulgar gaze in the memoirs of Colonel Repington, Captain Peter Wright, Doctor Dillon, and many others? There is only one purpose to be served, and that was not, I think, Repington's purpose. It is to give a frightful warning to the world that the leaders who were respon- sible for the destiny of civilization in that time of monstrous conflict were unsafe guides, uncertain of their own way, distrustful of one another. They were but httle men playing a game of hazard with millions of lives. They had, with few exceptions, no vision greater than the safety of their own jobs and the continuance
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of their own prestige. These same men, long in power after all their failures, their intrigues, and their errors, proved themselves incapable of leading the way to new heights which we must attain unless we resign ourselves to a deeper sinking into the abyss of ruin. There was no spiritual light in them, not much of nobility, no in- spiration of genius. They groped and fumbled their way to victory which came by the valor of the youth that died, and then was worthless because of what they have done with it. They put out the best that was in them, but it was not good enough — not big enough, without virtue.
Ill
There never was a time in modern history when there was such a readiness for spiritual guidance among the peoples of Europe. Their guides led them into degradation. They appealed to the lowest instincts of human nature, and not to the highest. Dehberately they chose the lowest.
It began with the Peace Treaty. That document, which, for a little while, had been the promise of a new great charter for the liberties of common folk in all na- tions, was discovered to be nothing better than the intensification of old hatreds by new frontiers, and the aggrandizement of victorious powers by the dismember- ment of defeated empires. Not deliberately, I think, but as a compromise of greedy interests in conflict, it violated in a hundred ways the principles proclaimed by President Wilson as the ideals of peace, and accepted, for a little while, by victors and vanquished. What be- came of the self-determination of peoples? Austria was put under Italian rule and Czech rule and Slovak rule, Germans under Poles, Turks under Greeks, Arabs under French and British. It was not a Peace for the rebuilding of civilization out of the ruins upon nobler lines, but a
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Peace of vengeance, and a Peace of greed, and a Peace of hypocrisy.
The old politicians who had played the game of politics before the war, gambling with the lives and souls of men for new territory, privileged markets, oil fields, native races, coaling stations, and imperial prestige, grabbed the pool which the German gamblers had lost when their last bluff was called, and quarreled over its distribution. The "mandates" obtained by Great Britain and France in Africa and Asia made the cynics chortle with laughter and the politicians of the smaller powers squirm with envy. Italy denounced them all as robbers because her share of loot was small. France was aggrieved with England because she had taken the lion's share. But the statesmen of Europe dividing the world afresh, and reconciling their spoils with the high words of justice and retribution, imagined in their ignorance of world conditions after a war of exhaustion that what they took they could hold, and that out of the ruin of their enemies they could gain great wealth. They did not understand then, nor after three years do they now understand, that not only all their own wealth was spent in four and a half years of destruction, but that all the former wealth of Europe, in all nations engaged in the conflict, had disappeared in shell fire and in blood.
Not to them was it revealed that the paper money which circulated in European countries was but a re- minder of enormous debt, unredeemed and unredeem- able, and a promissory note on the future industry of peoples. No single statesman of the old regime helping to draw up the Treaty of Versailles had intelligence enough to see, or honesty enough to admit, that after the scourge that had passed over Europe, killing the flower of its youth, its young tillers of the soil, its laborers, only mutual helpfulness between one nation and another, former friends and enemies, could bring
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a chance of recovery and economic health. The com- plete ruin of Austria, condemned to death by the Peace Treaty, did but place a pauper population upon the books of the "Reparations Committee." It was just a hospital of starving children and a casual ward of adult unemployed, unable to buy from us or anyone, unable to work for themselves or us (because they could not buy the raw material of industry), just lapsing into decay and death, whose corruption would spread to sur- rounding countries.
So little did the politicians know of economic laws in modern commerce, that they did not foresee the loss to their own trades in the closing of enemy markets, nor the futility of their own industry if there were no cus- tomers to buy their products. They did not even guess that by enlarging their imperial territory, in "man- dates" over races who disliked them, they were relying upon armies that could not be raised (unless we raised the dead) and wasting more millions of borrowed money in new administration, when their imperial treasury was empty except of unpaid debts, and the citizens of empire were already in revolt against the tax collectors.
Yet we must be fair to the leaders of the old tradition. Looking at the Treaty of Versailles upon the plane of thought no higher than that of the statesmen who framed it — that is, as a document carving up Europe according to the old ethics of victors deahng with van- quished and demanding retribution and reparation, it is difficult to see, except in minor details of unnecessary injustice, how a better peace could have been made. The convulsion of Europe had been so great, the conflict so widespread, that the structure of human society everywhere had been immensely upheaved and no group of politicians thinking upon the old lines of thought, each trying to make the best bargain for his own nation or empire, and to secure immediate advan-
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LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
tage without much thought of the future or the com- monwealth of Europe, could reconcile all conflicting interests, rearrange frontiers on reasonable lines, and safeguard the economic life of all peoples. Such an ideal arrangement was indeed impossible of achievement, owing to the geographical confusion of races and na- tionalities. Therefore all criticism of the Peace Treaty is futile, if it is conducted on the basis of the old philos- ophy of international relations in Europe with its balance of power, its rival groups, and the claim of the victor to exact the price of war from the vanquished.
The hope which for a little while leaped up in the hearts of many people was for a Treaty which would give a new call to humanity and, leading it clear away from its old jungle law, would break down the old frontiers, demobilize armed force everywhere, and unite the democracies of Europe in the common interests of labor, liberty, and peace. Whether the peoples of Europe could have risen to such an ideal at that time is uncertain. The mere thought of "letting off" Ger- many would have aroused fury among the Chauvinists in France, England, and the United States. It is im- possible to say with any sure evidence whether the people of Europe would have been capable of rising to a height of idealism which, as we now see, would have been also good business on the most materialistic lines, as true idealism is always good business according to the old adage that honesty is the best policy, and the Christian precept, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
A mutual cancellation of our debts by a stroke of the pen in the Treaty would have been a supreme act of faith in the future of humanity which would have lighted the soul of the world. Yet in a niggling way, by the sheer impossibility of paying even the interest on those debts, or of extracting reparation out of the
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ruin of Austria, and getting a healthy interchange of commerce, we are bound to come to that in the long run, without any light of splendid renunciation in the soul of the world, but only lamentation and recrim- ination.
The rapid demobilization of armies in France as well as in Germany would have been another act of faith, helpful and glorious to the life of Europe. Militarism would have been dethroned, so that the purpose pro- claimed by us in the war would have been fulfilled. In a practical way it would have saved France more than she will ever get from Germany and helped her to recon- struct more rapidly the devastated districts which are still in ruins.
A spiritual appeal to the German people, not based on threats of force, but calling with the voice of one people to another across the fields of dead, might have been answered by the offer of a whole nation to repair the damage they had done, to atone by immense self- sacrifice and service, because of the liberation of their spirit from hatred and from bondage to evil ideas in a new era of fellowship after the agony of universal war. On the plane of realism it would have been better busi- ness, for the Allies would have gained more by consent than they have gained by force, and the impulse to vengeance, burning and smoldering in the heart of Germany now, after so many threats and so much hatred, might not have existed, but might have been melted away in the enthusiasm of the new-found move- ment of humanity.
IV
Such idealism was impossible without great leader- ship, a spiritual leader so high in virtue, so on fire with human charity, so clear and shining in vision that the people of Europe would have been caught up and
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carried on by his call to the New World. If we had had such a man, I believe firmly in my soul that this would have happened. For at that time, immediately before the armistice, and for a little while afterward, there was a mass emotion in Europe, after the long agony of the years, which would have risen to any great call. Europe was stricken, shell shocked, hysterical. And it is by the emotion of peoples that great leaders are able to fulfill their aspirations. In millions of homes families were mourning their dead, aghast at the cruelty of life, hopeless except for a vague hope of spiritual revival. The women of the world had wept until they had no more tears to weep. The fighting men, no longer filled with blood lust, if any of them ever were, for more than the minutes of killing and terror, sick of the stench of death, contemptuous of the honors and glories of their job, cynical of civilization, looking forward to some new scheme of life which would prevent this kind of thing from happening ever again, were in a mood to abandon all the old fetishes of thought which caused this conflict, and to advance to a greater victory by which the beauty and joy of life could be recaptured. But we had no leaders to take advantage of that enor- mous stirring of thought and feeling among the people of the stricken nations so that they might have been lifted out of the old ruts. Alas! Alas!
There seemed for a little while to be one. It was Pres- ident Wilson, the only man in the world who, before the armistice, WTOte words which rang true in the heart of humanity. In dirty places where men lived under the imminent menace of death they were read, as I know, with hopefulness that here at last was a leader who had a greater vision than a war of extermination or a peace of vengeance. His words were like a new Gospel, or the old Gospel recalled in this time of hatred and mas- sacre. He looked across the frontiers of hostility, offered
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just terms to all warring nations, promised a new world to democracy if it would disown the evil of its ruling powers. Among millions of men, to youth being sacri- ficed, in millions of homes, death-haunted, on both sides of No-Man's Land, his words found instant response. They raised enormous hopes. They had a spiritual, almost a divine sweetness. The Germans, below the Junker caste, the German soldiers whom I met on the battlefields, whose letters I grabbed from lousy dug- outs or picked up as they littered the shell-churned earth, put their faith in Wilson, hailed him as the great arbitrator, accepted in their souls his terms of peace. I affirm that with absolute belief. Before the armistice they raised banners in many cities of Germany proclaim- ing their adherence to Wilson's "Fourteen Points." After the armistice for a little while, until one by one the Fourteen Points were abandoned or betrayed, they clam- ored for their fulfillment.
I saw Wilson come to London. It was as though a savior of the world were passing. Miles deep the crowd stood and waited while he passed. Only the fore- most ranks caught a glimpse of his silvered hairs. But from all those vast crowds came a roar of cheers in which there was a note I had never heard before, and the eyes of people about me were wet with tears. So it was in Paris when he came.
We all know now how he failed in many ways, why he failed — his hard, autocratic temper, so that even his advisers like House and Lansing were kept in ignorance of his acts and pledges, the vanity which made him weaken to flattery, the pedagogic quality of his brain, the fatal egotism which caused him to neglect the or- dinary safeguards of statesmanship — consultation with his people and winning of their consent, the right and liberty of their Senate and Congress. He had the greatest chance that any man has had in the whole his-
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tory of the world, and he missed it. But his people missed it too, by the bitterness of their political pas- sion, by desertion of their representative (who should have had their loyalty in this crisis of the world's fate in spite of all his errors), and by a cruelty which killed him as a leader and almost killed him as a man.
All that is old and tragic history. There is nothing new to be said about it, but its tragedy remains, and makes more difficult the task of human progress which then was easier because of that mass emotion leaping up to hope. Quickly came disillusionment, cynicism, a hark back to material and selfish interests. The lowest passions of humanity were prodded up by the press and by the politicians. The noblest so'ds in England in all classes were sickened and dumfounded by the moral depravity of the appeals made to the beast instinct of the mob by ministers of state and all their sycophants. In the khaki election of 191 8, which gave Lloyd George a renewal of his power, there was the promise of great loot from the enemy's treasure and the Kaiser's head was to be the reward of victory. The ideals for which youth had fought in the war, at least the watchwords which had urged them to fight — the war to end war, the downfall of militarism — were flung away and forgotten. The material motive of making Germany pay for all the costs of war of all the victor nations replaced the better hope of establishing a lasting peace between the democracies of Europe.
Germany will be squeezed," said Sir Eric Geddes, until the pips squeak" — a naked betrayal of Wilson's pledge to German democracy which we had counter- signed with our honor. Facilis decensus Averni. The people who were ready for spiritual guidance yielded when appeal was made to the brute in them. They share the guilt of this degradation and are paying for it now, but the greater guilt is that of men who, seeing
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the light, chose the darkness. The old leaders stand condemned. Theirs was the steepest downfall.
The story of President Wilson is tragic. Yet he never hauled down the banner of his idealism, and, torn and tattered though it was after his single fight with enemies in front and behind, he nailed it to the mast with his crippled hand and never surrendered in his poor, dazed soul. He was faithful to the League of Nations, though his people would have none of it. In spite of their abandonment, weakened by the immense loss of their alliance, the League of Nations still lives and struggles in a futile way against unequal odds, and is a memorial of the spirit which created it as the best hope of the world. Even now it might become the machine by which youth could re-create the world.
A-'
Greater than the tragedy of Mr. Wilson was that of the other signatories of the Peace Treaty, whom, having pledged themselves to the League of Nations with the consent of their nations, mocked at it with cynical laughter, flouted its authority, undermined its purpose, and maintained the power of the Supreme Council, whose will and acts have been in direct and open conflict with the whole spirit of the League. They upheld government by force alone, whereas the League is based on government by arbitration and con', sent. They denied the rights of small nations to a voice in the councils of the world by declaring the will of the great victor powers enforced by standing armies. By sending representatives without authority to the as- sembly of the League, they deprived it of all reality in its decisions and of all influence in the settlement of world problems. They betrayed it.
Tragic was the physical breakdown of Wilson, Presi-
20
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dent of the United States. More tragic was the spiritual surrender of Lloyd George, Prime Minister of England.
It is hard for English people to speak or to v/rite about Lloyd George without passion — passion of dislike or passion of hero worship. There have been times when most have hated him, but it is significant that the people who hated him once because of the things for which I and others liked him (his democratic audacity, his amusing vulgarity of challenge to the snob tradition of England) are now those who like him most. I hated him for his speech about the *' Knock-out blow" at a time when there seemed no ending to war except by the extermination of the world's youth. I hated him after- ward for helping to arrange a peace which seemed to me to guarantee the certainty of new and more dreadful war. I hated him for handing over the fate of Ireland to men like Sir Edward Carson, Hamar Greenwood, Sir John French, General Tudor, and the gang of bureau- crats and brass hats in Dublin Castle who tried to break the spirit of a passionate people by methods of Prussian militarism, and tried to stamp out the Sinn Fein terror by a counter-terror which stoked up its fires, put murderous hatred in the heart of every Irish youth, made martyrs of those who died, and dishonored the old fame of England by an abandonment of justice, chivalry, and the spirit of liberty for which so much of English youth had died. For that I hated Lloyd George, and sometimes I think I hate him still.
Yet analyzing my own feelings I find, as so many of his political opponents find, that not hatred, but admira- tion strangely mingled with regret, affection twisted by anger and annoyance, amusement causing laughter with a groan in it, are my dominant impressions of this amazing little man. The straight principles of honorable men are warped under his influence. They weakened, as I have seen them, visibly, under the spell of his babe-
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blue eyes. Men go into his room cursing him in their hearts, determined to resist his blandishments, reso- lutely fixed to arguments and facts and convictions from which they will not budge. In less than an hour with him they have resisted nothing, have budged from all their fixed points, and come out looking sheepish, smiling weakly, saying, "Marvelous!" Time and time again that has happened to trade-union leaders, political critics, newspaper editors, ministers of state, generals.
I remember when he came out to France in the war. It was the time when our G. H. Q. was deeply annoyed by his way with them. Some of our generals expressed their loathing for him openly in their messes. They thought his visit was to spy out things, to make trouble. The least prejudiced were convinced that he would stop them from winning the war — though it was years afterward that the war was won and at that time any process of "winning" was not visible to impartial ob- servers. The inevitable happened. I saw it happen, and in private laughed. After a little while high officers were treading on one another's spurs to get a word with him, to listen to the words that fell from him. His air of simplicity, his apparent candor, his sense of humor, the keenness and alertness of his mind were not to be resisted by them. They were hke school children in the presence of an inspired schoolmaster.
Many people have had the honor of taking breakfast with Mr. Lloyd George at No. lo Downing Street— (Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly!) It is a most dangerous hour to those who wish to preserve a detached judgment. When I had the honor once of being invited to this meal, I was very watchful of the little great man and his menage, trying to get some insight into the secret quality of his genius. There was no ceremony to impress the stranger, but a homeliness and candor far more impressive. Mr. Lloyd George
LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
helped his guests to toast. Mrs. Lloyd George — a nice, homely woman — poured out the morning coffee. Miss Megan came down in a hurry, said, "Good morning, Dad!" and attacked her bacon and eggs with the joyous appetite of youth.
"How are things going in France?" asked Mrs. Lloyd George, with a motherly sigh for all poor boys.
"Yes!" said the Prime Minister. "Dreadful mess, that last battle, wasn't it.^ Haven't heard a word about it from G. H. Q. First I heard was when I read your articles." Subtle flattery and pleasing to a war cor- respondent.
He asked straight questions, listened (unlike most great men) to the answers, uttered indiscreet criticism of high persons, chaffed Miss Megan, passed his cup for some more coffee, groaned over the horror of war with honest emotion, laughed heartily over a comic tale of the trenches, discovered a point of fact he wanted to know — the reason for the invitation to breakfast — and indulged in a bright, uncomplimentary monologue about generals, war offices and newspaper editors, until checked by Mrs. Lloyd George, who said, "Get on with your breakfast, dear."
Going away from that meal I had a glow of personal vanity. This man, holding the fate of an empire, almost the fate of the world, in his hands, had been glad to have my views. He had listened with bright understanding eyes to my explanation of facts. He had picked up a phrase of mine and repeated it to his wife. Is it easy to resist flattery like that? ... It is impossible.
That candor of his blue eye, that frankness of speech, that readiness to alter his own opinion in view of a new fact — ^were they just a camouflage of deep cunning, artfulness developed into a natural habit? I do not think so. There is in the soul of Lloyd George still a certain simplicity, a boyishness, natural and unfeigned.
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At Walton Heath, where he played golf to keep him fit during the strain of war, he used to walk round a friend's garden with a friend's daughter — a chit of a schoolgirl, and talk to her in a comradely way, telling her funny things that had happened in Cabinet meetings, ridiculing the whimsical characteristics of ministers of state, chat- ting about state secrets as though they were the gossip of the village green. With a felt hat thrust sideways on his shaggy locks, an old suit amazingly baggy at the knees, and a gnarled stick like a country squire, he used to stroll into this house, as I have seen him, and discuss the situation breezily with a much closer realization of the stark realities than those whom optimism blinded to truth — yet never with any sign of weariness or despair.
Once with Lord Reading and Albert Thomas, the French Minister of Labor, he came to the war cor- respondents' mess in France. That was a breakfast meal, too, and he was exceedingly vivacious. I noticed that he was a keen listener to one comrade of mine who has the gift of epigrammatic speech, and made a mental note of a descriptive phrase about the battles of the Somme which afterward he adopted as his own. So did Shakespeare use the best he heard, if Bernard Shaw is right.
One other time in the war I met Lloyd George, on a night of great honor in my life, when Robert Donald gave a dinner to me and invited many high people to the board. It was generous of the Prime Minister to come, and he was gracious and kind. Henry Nevinson was there, I remember, an old friend once, and for a time a public enemy of Lloyd George. For Nevinson — as I tell elsevvhere in this book — was a champion of the militant suffragettes, of whom Lloyd George was the arch antag- onist, and he had rebuked and ridiculed Nevinson with personal warmth. For other reasons this old comrade of mine, fastidious in honor, always a rebel against
24
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authority if he thought liberty v/ere threatened, disap- proved of a Prime Minister, once a rebel of that kind, too, who enforced authority against free speech, con- scientious objection, peace propagandists, harshly in time of war. The Prime Minister held out his hand to Nevinson with a fine air of friendliness and pleasure, and only for a second, with a little extra warmth of color creeping into the ruddiness of his face, did Nevin- son hesitate before he took it. The Prime Minister's laugh was heartiest when the veteran war correspondent, alluding to my greenness in my first adventure of war (out in the Balkans), said that I did not know the difference then between a staff officer and a fool.
I had to make a speech that night — an ordeal before a Prime Minister of England and such an orator as this one. Yet I kept my courage to the sticking point for the sake of youth that was being slain so wastefully, in such tragic masses. I wanted to tell Lloyd George the things that happen on a battlefield, the things happening in Flanders, every day, every night, in all the weeks and months of days and nights, so that he should think of the war not in the abstract, not as a conflict between great powers, but in its actual drama, as a shambles of boys and a world of human torture. I told him how a battlefield looked on the morning of battle with its dead, its stretcher-bearers searching for hunks of living flesh, the "walking wounded" crawling on the way back, falling, staggering up again, dropping again, the queues of wounded outside the casualty clearing stations, the blind boys, the men without faces, the "shell shocks." It was not I that was making the speech. It was the voice of the boys on the Western Front that spoke through my lips to this man who was, to some extent at least, the arbiter of their fate. So it seemed to me, speaking in a trance-Uke way. General Smuts was by my side and, though I had been talking with him, im- 3 25
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pressed by his clear judgment and human sympathy, I forgot him then, and all others at the table, and spoke only to Lloyd George. When I finished I was aghast at my own temerity, ashamed of the emotion with which I had spoken, but he shook my hand and spoke some words which told me that he knew and understood. . . . He understands and has great sympathy with all the suffering that the cruelty of life inflicts. It is because he understands so much, feels so rightly, that one is angered when often he supports those who stand for cruelty, oppose peace and reconciliation, and defend evil forces. I believe still that in his instincts Lloyd George is always on the side of humanity and good will, though in many of his acts he compromises with the spirit of harsh reaction, makes friends too readily with the Mammon of Unrighteousness, sells some quality of his soul for po- litical power, the safety of his office, and the advantage of immediate triumph.
A great comrade of mine in the war, with whom I went on many strange adventures, used the name of Lloyd George very much as Louis XIV is said to have done that of his "brother" of England — as an irritant to the liver. This friend, an officer in the regular cavalry, typical of the English gentleman and officer of the old South African war time — a good type (perhaps the best in the world of its class and caste) but old-fashioned and limited in imagination and knowledge — put all the evils of England, and even the war itself, upon the head of this little politician. Lloyd George's revolutionary utterances, his Limehouse speech in which he outraged the aristocracy of England by coarse abuse and reckless libels, seemed to this cavalry officer the direct cause of all the strikes and spirit of revolt in Great Britain. His pro-Boer sympathies labeled him forever in my friend's mind a traitor. His friendship with Jews and financial crooks involving him in the Marconi scandal,
26
LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
"from which," said the worthy captain, "he only escaped by the skin of his teeth and the help of Sir Edward Carson," proved the moral obliquity of the little Welshman. His lip service to God and Nonconformity sickened my friend as the foulest hypocrisy. He sus- pected strongly that he was ready to betray Sir Douglas Haig at any moment, just as he had betrayed Asquith for the sake of the premiership, "just as he would sell the soul of his grandmother," said the cavalry officer, "for any dirty little trick in the political game."
I used to laugh heartily at these tirades. Indeed, to brighten a journey up the Albert-Bapaume road or the road to Peronne, I used to mention the name of Lloyd George a propos of the day's news, rewarded instantly by a warning of England's moral downfall under the governance of a man who bribed the working classes to work, bribed them again when they struck work, and established the most inquisitorial system of bureaucracy under which any people have been stifled. . . . Lloyd George has gone a long way from the time when he could be accused of revolutionary and subversive action, an enemy of Capital. By slow degrees, yet very surely, he was drawn over to the side of the Tory interest. More and more he surrendered to the reactionary policy, the hard materialistic outlook and rigid traditions of Conservatives like Bonar Law and A. J. Balfour, Lord Curzon and Sir Edward Carson, and of financial im- periahsts like Lord Beaverbrook, by whose under- ground work he had been raised to his high place. The Coalition government, founded in time of war to unite all parties in a national policy, became an assembly of tame politicians whose job was to vote solidly for any measure favored by the Prime Minister and his Con- servative backers — and solidly to lean their weight against any criticism or rebellion from independent members. There was no more difference between a
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Coalition Liberal and a Tory than between two tins of canned pork differently labeled. They were men disciplined to obey the government, to flock into the lobbies like sheep at the crack of the government "whips," to defend every government measure as good and holy, to attack all critics as traitors to the country. Whenever there was a bye-election the Coalition Liberals were supported by the government machine, and blessed by Tory Ministers of State, while Independent Liberals, the last of the Old Guard of English Hberalism which had once been the glory of the nation, of Gladstonian tradition, were crushed by this unholy alliance.
The Prime Minister was the architect of this new political system which has done much to deaden the spirit of Parliament and to destroy its influence as the tribunal before which the national interests were argued and resolved. It could no longer be regarded as the safeguard of British Hberty when the Cabinet possessed an autocratic power and moderate opposition was stifled by automatic majorities. It gave the extremists in the Labor world their best argument. "What is the use of appealing to constitutional government," they asked, "when the House is packed by reactionary forces, cleverly organized, unrepresentative of popular will, and antagonistic to all Liberal ideas? Direct action by strikes and threats of strikes, is the only method by which the right of the working classes may be enforced."
Lloyd George, as many other great men have done in the past, identifies himself with the interests of the nation, and the interests of the nation with himself. *' VEtat, c'est moi!" he says, with Louis XV. He is perfectly aware that, owing to his peculiar qualities of genius, there is as yet no other leader in England who can challenge him or take his place. He is unrivaled in oratory, in debate, in quickness of wit, above all in the knowledge which is the greatest gift of generalship and
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governance — when to attack and when to retreat. Always he has his ear to the ground, Hstening to the distant tramp of feet. Whenever it comes too near he gives ground, "according to plan," and then with superb audacity and a sure touch attacks his enemy in an un- expected place. He retreats with the greatest grace in the world, yielding the inevitable with a heau geste^ as a generous gift. In debate his success is largely due to that. He grants so much of his opponents' argument that they are stupefied by his candor and disarmed by his chivalry. As a rule he states their side of the case with more persuasive oratory than they could dream of doing. He goes farther than they would dare. It is what he calls "taking the wind out of the enemy's sails." Then he breaks through their line of battle with "the Nelson touch" and destroys their last resistance with his broadsides.
This is what he most enjoys. It makes him feel young and fresh. His babe-blue eyes glow with the light of battle. It appeals to that keen sense of humor which is a large part of his power and a cause of his weakness — a double-edged weapon. For it is his sense of humor which enables him to preserve his mental poise after years of intense strain bearing down upon him from all quarters. Anxiety, dangers, attacks from front and rear, leave him strangely unscathed because he has the gift of laughter, sees great fun in it all, a merry adventure. The pomposities of great gentlemen like Lord Curzon, the preciosities of Mr. Balfour, the conceits of Winston Churchill, afford him real amuse- ment, and when he is weary of Cabinet discussions, tired with high people, overstrained by the necessity of posing as the new Napoleon, he retires gladly to a little circle of low-class friends, and feels refreshed by their vul- garities, their lack of high morality, their cynical knowl- edge of life, and of him. He can take his ease among
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them with nothing to conceal, nothing to pretend. He knows their human frailties. They know his. They have been well rewarded by him, and hope for more. He likes their loyalty, their rich jests, their memories of old times when together they heard the chimes at mid- night. . . . Mr. Lloyd George will take his place in his- tory as the most remarkable Prime Minister of England since the time of the elder Pitt. It is possible also that he will take his place in history as the man who by sur- rendering his ideals at the time when the world was crying out for spiritual leadership helped Europe fall into moral degradation and material ruin.
Yet time and time again during those three years of history his old instincts of idealism have revealed themselves momentarily. He made a bid for peace with the Russian people by which Bolshevism might have been defeated, but surrendered to Winston Churchill's military adventures on behalf of Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel, and others, which consolidated the power of Trotzky, intensified the Red Terror, and broadened its areas of agony. In dealing with the problem of German reparations, he argued with the French government for a reasonable policy which would give Europe a chance of recovery and enable the German people to pay ac- cording to possibility. But he surrendered to the French militarists in their threat to occupy the Ruhr, acknowledging as he did so that if this "sanction" were fulfilled German industry would "wither" and with this withering all hopes of European regeneration would be quite blighted.
He made fair offers of conciliation with Ireland, but frustrated all eflPorts of moderate men for peace by approving the policy of reprisals, strengthening the powers of the counter-terror, refusing to listen to all pleas for mercy, yielding all methods of statesmanship to the stupidity of "brass-hat" brains, dealing with the
LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
Irish people, of whom 100,000 men had fought by our side in the war, and whose soul has been heroic through a thousand years of history, as though they were rebel "niggers" of a slave-driving power. Whatever peace may come to Ireland by the time this book is published, it will not be due to Lloyd George, once the young David who fought against the tyrant to liberty, but to men who so loved England that they could not bear the thought of her dishonor, as we were dishonored by the madness and badness of our acts in Ireland. The atrocious evil of Sinn Fein, the ferocity and cruelty of its guerrilla warfare, were caused by no peculiar devil in the Irish people, though the devil took possession of the worst of them, but by our long Injustice, the falsity of our political leaders, the irreconcilable fanaticism of men like Sir Edward Carson and the light-hearted cynicism of men like F. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead, Lord Chancellor of England.
/
VI
In the great crisis of English history, when, in these last three years, our national life has been in danger of ruin, and our empire itself is challenged by disintegra- tion and decay, we have had no good fortune in leaders whose wisdom and virtue called out the allegiance of their peoples. Is there any soul in England who believes in the wisdom of Winston Churchill.? Not one, I think, in all the land. Wit he has, a bold spirit of adventure, courage, stubborn self-conceit, the cool audacity of a gambler who plays for big stakes, but no wisdom — no luck, even, except in getting high office. It was aston- ishing in the war how unlucky he was. Men with far less ability, poor dunderheads compared with him, blundered through to great success, or at least covered over great failure and gained high reward. But Winston
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Churchill had abominable luck which revealed his error of judgment at Antwerp. The evacuation of the Dar- danelles was a colossal revelation of failure. The Rus- sian expeditions which he encouraged and helped to organize were so bad that no one dares to tell the truth of what happened. He has the instinct of the gambler, and by a curious subconsciousness of mind speaks con- stantly in terms of gambhng, I remember when I met him during the war he said several times, as though it were a fixed idea: "This war is the greatest gamble in the history of the world. We're playing for the biggest stakes." It did not seem to worry him that we were gambling with the lives of boys — the counters in his "kitty." After the great war we had "Winston's little wars," as they were called derisively by humble men. Mesopotamia was a gamble, too, costing us many million pounds a year when in England the overtaxed citizen was paying six shillings out of every twenty of his income to an imperial exchequer whose debts were spelled in figures beyond the imagination of ordinary men. It was a gamble for the oil fields of the East, but very hazardous and costly, and so far unproductive.
I remember years ago waiting in Churchill's study. I had gone to see him for some interview and he kept me half an hour, so that I had time to examine the photo- graphs on his mantelshelf and desk. There were several of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, his illustrious ancestor and one of the world's greatest gamblers, ad- venturers, and generals. He was there as a youth, fine- faced, in full-bottomed wig, and when Winston Churchill came in I was startled by the likeness. In such a wig he would have looked like this, amazingly. In those days he was called "a young man in a hurry" and there seemed no limit to the possibilities of his career. He might have been as great as Marlborough, as un-
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scrupulous as he was, as fortunate. But it has not been so, though the chance seemed to be within his grasp. Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, lured him, as other men have been lured by their old spell, but the days of empire are passing because of the exhaustion of men after a war of massacre, because the idea of greater empire has died within us and given place to new ideals. Winston Churchill has been gambling with but a few "chips" in his pocket, and the forces of evolution and of fate have been heavily against him. He is not a leader of the new ideals, but a man of yesterday, with to-morrow coming near.
Where are the leaders of the new ideals? Are not all our leaders men of yesterday, in England, France, even the United States? Haphazard, I think of the leaders of England. Lord Curzon, so grave and pompous — • "God's butler," as the Oxford undergraduates called their chancellor; Mr. A. J. Balfour, "dear Arthur," so perfect in courtesy, so philosophical in argument, so gracious in dignity of manner, so debonair, even now, with his silvered hairs, so hard in old ideas, so unbending to new needs of life, so intolerant of human passions, so cynical of enthusiasms and spiritual fervor, so stubborn in hostility to any new adventure of liberty; Chamber- lain, the counterfeit of a greater father, able as a bank manager, correct as an archdeacon, cold as a statue on the Thames Embankment, uninspired as the secretary of an insurance office, but honorable and upright. Who else is there that leaps to one's mind as one of the great figures of history in this astounding period of the world's fate? I can hardly think of the names of those who govern England beyond those I have named. Hamar Greenwood, the Canadian Jew, notorious and marvelous, certainly for the unblushing daily denial of anything undesirable in the administration of Ireland; Mr. Shortt, his predecessor; Doctor Addison, the author of pre-
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posterous failures; Sir Alfred Mond, the caricature of a caricature; numbers of little men, insignificant per- sonalities.
Sir Edward Carson, once a minister of state, for long one of the powers behind the throne of political life, stands out above them. In the memories of history he is sure of a high place. For he has played a big part in a big manner — the old style of melodrama — in the most evil character of recent history. He has stood con- sistently for reaction against all the influences of Liberal progress. He has been for fanaticism instead of for con- ciliation. He has defended cruelty instead of advocating kindness. Upon his head more than upon any other man alive rests the guilt of all that has happened in Ireland. When Home Rule was passed by the British House of Commons in 1914, he raised the banner of rebellion with the sign of the Red Hand of Ulster. Long before that Act was passed by a great majority of Eng- lish Liberals and Irish members, he carried the fiery torch among the Ulster people and with the present Lord Chancellor, then F. E. Smith, as his "galloper" and stump orator, beat up all the old prejudices of re- ligious strife, racial hatred, political passion. Pro- testing his loyalty to the King and the Flag of Union, he raised, drilled, and commanded a rebel army pledged to resist Home Rule by force of arms and to make a mockery of the Act signed by George V. By his consent and under his orders arms were smuggled into Ulster. They were German rifles and ammunition. By a Solemn League and Covenant he engaged the population of Ulster by oath to resist Home Rule to the death, and deliberately, with fiery oratory, and with every art of inflaming passion, he set about the work of organizing civil war.
It was only the Great War which stopped this one in Ireland, for the time being, but he was truly the author
34
LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
of that guerrilla warfare which has been waged by Sinn Fein against the forces of the crown. The Irish outside Ulster, the real Irish race, saw themselves threatened by the rising and arming of the Ulster volunteers. They knew the temper and purpose of these men. Some of them had seen, as I had seen in the back slums of Bel- fast, murderous assaults by Orangemen upon Catholic workingmen who were kicked to death where they fell under unprovoked attack. Some of them had seen, as I had seen, the march past of thousands of young Ulster- men, in military formation, well set up and well drilled, grim, resolute, spoiling for a fight. Some of them heard, as I heard. Sir Edward Carson's speeches promising them "victory." The Irish of the south and west waited for the demobilization of these men by the British govern- ment. The news that came to them was the resignation of British officers in the Curragh camp, who refused to obey the orders of the War Minister to force their sur- render of arms in Ulster. They began to raise their own volunteers, drilled them, but could not arm them. Then the other war happened. . . .
When it happened it seemed to promise for a time reconciliation in Ireland in the face of a great and common danger. Thousands of Irishmen volunteered for service on behalf of the world's liberty, and the Irish people of the old stock believed that at last their country would have the right to rule herself according to the watchwords of the war, "the self-determination of peoples," "the right of the little nations," "the brotherhood of man." They were treated stupidly, tactlessly by the English War Office. Their ardor cooled, and then something happened which seemed an insult to every Irishman outside Ulster. It was an insult when Sir Edward Carson, their avowed enemy, the man who had wrecked Home Rule and raised a rebel army against them, was made a minister of state.
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How could they believe in the honesty or good will of the British government with that man in the Council Chamber? So step by step from exasperation to rebel- lion, punished ruthlessly, though Carson went scot free, from rebellion to general insurrection, to assassina- tion, to guerrilla warfare, the horror of Ireland went on, and all through its agony of murder and arson, govern- ment reprisals and executions, Carson stood behind Lloyd George, a sinister figure, and no word did he speak for peace, though he is Irish, born of an Irish- woman, no word of his was for the ending of bloodshed by a truce of God, but only irreconcilable words, dividing Ulster from the rest of Ireland, though at last he had yielded to a separate Parliament.
"Do I look like a criminal?" asked Sir Edward Carson once, in bland surprise at being called one. As G. K. Chesterton said in answer to this question: "There is only one answer possible. You do!" Many times in those days before the war, when he was playing the Napoleon of the boys of Belfast, I used to study his face, so long and lean, with dark lines under his sunken eyes, and a strange, cynical sneer on his lips. A power- ful face, but without beauty in it, or any touch of kind- ness or spiritual fire or human warmth, a haunted face, I thought it, and guessed it might be haunted by the memories of all the filth and corruption and greed and cruelty which lawyers pass on their way in the criminal courts. Sir Edward Carson himself is a man of honor, according to the average code. He has the manner of a great gentleman. In private life he is, I am told, genial and good-natured. Toward the end of his fight against Irish Home Rule he was, I think, even a little conscience-stricken, and did at least and at last remove his own personality from the arena of strife. But he stands pilloried for all time as a raker-up of old hatreds, old fanaticisms, old vendettas, old tyrannies
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— the Man with the Muck Rake, prodding up the lower passions of ignorant and brutal men.
VII
So, three years after war, was Great Britain governed by men of the old ideas.
In France it was the same, though their leaders were utterly different in type and in temperament.
Clemenceau has passed from the scene, though the acts of his brain remain as a heritage to France. "The Tiger," he was called by his worshipers, remembering the ferocity of his temper, the swift strength of his intel- lectual claws, when he was roused to action in youth and the prime of life. I used to see him now and then in time of war when he looked more like a walrus than a tiger, a poor old walrus in a traveling circus. That was when he used to visit the war zone, to talk with the generals, to see the troops, to get a glimpse of that war machine which he helped to create and to control — ■ perhaps to find death, as some French officers whis- pered to me, when victory seemed impossible and de- feat very near. I met him several times as he sat back in a closed military car by the side of a French staff officer, looking old and worn and sad — nothing of "The Tiger." He went into dangerous places under fire and there seemed no purpose in his being there. But I think his purpose was to inflame his own heart against the enemy, to get new stores and inspiration of hate. That was the passion in him; and all the strength of his old man's soul, remembering the humiliation of 1870, seeing again the trail of the beast through his beloved country, was to live long enough to see Germany smashed and ground to dust.
He had his wish, and did a good deal of the grinding, at the Peace Conference in Paris. Keynes's portrait of
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him will live in history, that little old man wearing gray gloves, which he never took off, shutting his eyes during speeches and interpretations which did not affect the essential purpose of his mind, which was the destruction of Germany and the advantage of France, then waking to instant activity of brain whenever those interests were involved. His outlook upon life seemed to be limited to the instant proof of French victory, in the power to extort crushing indemnities from the beaten enemy, to inflict the utmost severity of punishment, which truly as a people they deserved. He had no pa- tience with anyone who spoke of the perils of future war, no tolerance with arithmeticians who tried to point out that Germany could not pay all the costs of all the nations after her own financial ruin, no ear to give to others like President Wilson who proposed the ideals of a new society of nations by which the peoples of Europe should be relieved of military burdens and safe- guarded by common interests. He mocked at all that with a witty cynicism, sometimes rather blasphemous, as when he said that Wilson imagined himself to be Jesus Christ. It was he who invented the phrase in the early days of the war that "the English would die to the last Frenchman," though he made amends by later enthusiasm for the valor and effort of the English people. He had the gift of making a hon mot on any subject to which his interest could be awakened, but all his best witticisms had a touch of cruelt}^ without which, indeed, wit becomes humor. The old man was a great French- man, a great patriot of the old tradition. Without his spirit, his passion, his obstinacy, his courage, France would have been visibly weaker in her terrible ordeal. But his narrow vision could not envisage the new ideals for which so many men had fought and died — the de- struction of militarism, not only in Germany, but in France, a closer comradeship in the democracies of
38
LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
Europe, an international tribunal before which the claims of peoples would be brought, as a better way of argument than national massacre. Clemenceau was one of those who turned the world back to cynicism and national selfishness. It might have been better for the world if he had found death at the front in one of his expeditions. Another mind in France intrenched, after the armis- tice, in the spirit of the past, defying the hope of the future, was that of Poincare, the war-time President, the later critic of England. In war time he was a nonen- tity, ridiculed in the revues^ the butt of Gallic wit, which never forgot his secret retreat from Paris when the enemy was so close to the gates in the beginning of the evil days. They used to dress up comic figures in a black uniform with a chauffeur's cap, and address them as "M. le President de Bordeaux," and in such a uni- form I saw him visiting his troops and ours, a tall man, with a plump waxen face, expressionless and, I thought, merely stupid. But after the war and his Presidency, he developed a gift for journalism, and his articles had a vicious appeal to the French public because he was venomous in his criticism of the government which did not make Germany "pay" — pay all those fantastic billions of gold marks which the French in their simplicity believed were hidden in the German treasury. It was Poincare who inflamed French suspicion against Eng- land, accused us of treachery to French claims in Syria, and of low commercial interests preventing France from reaping the fruits of victory. In all the conferences that assembled to carry out the Treaty of Versailles, England's influence was depicted by him as unfriendly to French interests, hostile to French policy. He reawakened the old tradition of "perfide Albion" at a time when every little clerk in Paris believed that English artfulness accounted for the fall in the value of the franc, and French peasants (forgetful too quickly of
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the young bodies of English boys that lie in their soil as a pledge of friendship — six hundred thousand of them!) said, as some of them said to me, ''Nous avons gagne la guerrey mats VAngleterre va nous manger'" ("We won the war, but England will devour us"). Alas! Alas! It was not good work by M. Poincare in regard to England. It was worse work for Europe. Because his advocacy of an impossible sum to be paid by Germany delayed the payment of the possible sum which could have been exacted in punishment of her crime against the world. It delayed the recovery of Europe, and perhaps pre- vented it for all time, unless reason prevails very soon.
"Youth," said Herbert Hoover, in an interview I had with him, and which I have chronicled elsewhere, "is busy re-electing its old men. If Briand goes, he will be followed by Poincare into deeper reaction."
Briand became Prime Minister of France, pursuing a policy which was to obtain the military domination of the Continent over the ruin of German militarism.
It is strange to find Aristide Briand in that role, as it is to find Lloyd George the leader of the Conservative party; and, indeed, the careers of these two men who for a time have represented the reactionary policy of the Imperialists in France and England are strangely similar in every way.
Like Lloyd George, Aristide Briand was born of humble parents who stinted and scraped to make their boy a lawyer, and like Lloyd George again, the young Briand was an ardent democrat of advanced and revolu- tionary ideals. His "home town," as the Americans say, was Nantes in Brittany, and here, after his legal studies in Paris, he lounged about in cafes and wine taverns, talking politics to the local demagogues, and waiting for briefs which did not come. Suddenly he leaped into fame for his defense in a cause celebre which he made for himself.
40
LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
It was in this way, as the story has been told to me. A peasant murdered an agent de police in a particularly brutal manner. To him, as he sat in his cell, went young Aristide and asked permission to act as counsel for the defense.
"There is no defense, m'sieu," said the peasant, already prepared for the guillotine.
But when the case was called, Briand stood up and said, "I will defend the prisoner." He called no wit- nesses, for those of the prosecution told the plain, brutal truth. But presently he began his speech for the de- fense. He exalted the poor besotted man into the sub- lime peasant type of France, and the agent de police into the representative of the "brutal tyranny" of the French government. With wonderful oratory he de- scribed the life, the ignorance, the hard unending labor, the very soul of peasant life in France, as Guy de Mau- passant revealed it, as Zola made it terrible in realism. The papers reported the speech, which lasted many hours, and went on from one day to another. France rocked with excitement. In the courthouse the jury were moved to tears. The peasant was acquitted, "without a stain on his character," and young Aristide Briand was embraced by his friends. Nantes was not big enough for him. He went to Paris with a few shirts in his bag. He called on Jean Jaures, the Socialist leader, then editing Ullumanite^ and sent up his card.
"Are you that young lawyer who defended the peasant at Nantes?" asked Jaures.
Briand smiled and bowed.
Jaures embraced him.
"What can I do for you, mon vieux?"
"Give me three hundred francs a month and a seat in your office," said Aristide Briand.
He became a journalist. He wrote scathing articles against the government. He entered politics and made 4 41
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inflammatory speeches in the country on behalf of labor. The government began to take notice of him — began to be afraid of him. With Jean Jaures he helped to organize and strengthen the Confederation Generale du Travail, and worked out a plan for a general strike which would paralyze the government and deliver France into the hands of the syndicates or trade unions. Then the government offered him office. . . .
When I met Aristide Briand before the war he was a Minister of France, hated as a renegade and traitor by Jean Jaures, Gustave Herve, and all the leaders of labor. He had forged the weapon of the general strike, and left it in their hands. It was they who drew the sword to strike him down.
The general strike was declared, and all France was paralyzed. Not a train "marched," as they say. Not a wheel turned. Paris was cut off from supplies, in danger of starvation. At night it was plunged in dark- ness, and I remember the gangs of students trooping down from the Quartier Latin to the boulevards on the right bank, with lanterns and bits of candle, singing lugubrious dirges with the enjoyment of youth in any kind of drama. But the government of France, all law and order, were threatened by general revolution. Then Briand showed the courage in him. He answered the challenge of the general strike by calling all men of several classes to the colors. That meant all the strikers. It was penalty of death if they disobeyed orders. Would they dare disobey.'' That was the question upon which Briand risked not only his own life, but the life of France. History tells that they obeyed — the strongest instinct in the Frenchman's heart, loyalty to the flag, immediate response to military tradition.
I saw Briand at that time face to face, in one of the most interesting interviews I have had in my life. It was in a room furnished in the style of Louis XV, ele-
42
LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
gant with its long mirrors and gilded chairs, and I stood by the side of a writing table where once Napoleon Bonaparte sat as Emperor of the French. I chatted to one of the secretaries, and there were others in the room. Presently the door opened, and a tall, heavy- shouldered man with a shock of black hair and a pale face with somber eyes stood staring at me.
"Monsieur Briand!" whispered the secretary, hur- riedly, because I stared back, not realizing that this was the man, but strangely held by those dark eyes.
He talked in a friendly way, explained the gravity of the situation in France, the need of strong action to re- store the authority of government, his faith in the loyalty of the French people. It was not so much what he said that impressed me then, and now, but the personality of the man, the look of intense fire within him, a kind of mysticism or spiritual exaltation i the depths of that dark gaze of his. He was more typical, I thought, of a revolutionary leader than of French bureaucracy.
During the war he bided his time, took no great share in national events. There were many who thought he would be the Prime Minister of a liberal France, looking beyond the immediate fruits of victory to a new pact of peace in Europe between the democracies of many coun- tries, rising to the ideal of a League of Nations. In- stead, he demanded the advance into the Ruhr which might have been a mortal wound to white civilization in Europe by insuring a war of the future in which the last of our youth would perish. For that policy could only be maintained as long as France held the power of the sword, and one day that will weaken.
VIII
I write these things not in blame; not even in cirti- cism of these leaders of the old tradition in Europe.
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By all the probabilities of psychological law not a man who reads this book of mine would have done otherwise than what he did, or would have been nobler, wiser than any of them. They did their best to the height of their quality and character, to the limit of their national vision.
Looking at the settlement of Europe after the war, and the terms of peace, in the Hght of old precedents, with reference to what was done after other wars and other victories, and with no reaching out to new ideals, they fulfilled their duty loyally, each man, to the imme- diate interests of his own country, as they seemed to him, each man striving for what gain his nation might get. One cannot blame them because as leaders they rose no higher than the ethical average of political morality. One cannot criticize them because they were little statesmen and not great philosophers — the poineers of a new world. One only laments that in this time of enormous crisis in the world's history there appeared no men or man among us with a genius great enough to call humanity to a new advance upon the road of social progress, to call upon all that surging of emotion and ideahsm which was at work in the hearts of peoples because of the agony they had suffered and their dreadful disgust at the thing that had happened.
The failure of the leaders of the old tradition was due to their utter inability to realize that the war which had ended and the victory gained were unhke all others in history.
They did not understand, being poor men at arith- metic, that most of the accumulated wealth of Euro- pean civilization had been destroyed in those four and a half years, leading to such exhaustion among victors as well as vanquished that the industrial Ufe of Europe was threatened with decay and death.
They did not know that by the intricate and deHcate
44
LEADERS OF THE OLD TRADITION
machinery of modern industrial civilization depending upon a liberal interchange of credits, raw material, ex- ports, imports, and all activities of working folk, the ruin of one great people must of necessity injure the commerce of all surrounding countries and lower the average of wealth, the normal standard of life, in every other nation.
Their imagination was not educated to the power of gauging the effect of the enormous loss of man power and of spiritual strength, upon the work in fields and factories of all peoples who had been stricken in the conflict, so that for years their output would be de- creased and their markets damaged, with the inevitable result of widespread unemployment and increasing poverty.
They believed, in their simplicity, that, despite the hideous calamity of Russia, once the granary of Europe, and a great market, notwithstanding the sentence of death they proposed to pass on Austria, and the col- lapse of a great part of central Europe, they could avoid their own bankruptcy and revive their own prosperity, by getting all the costs of war from Germany. Some of their own economic advisers warned them that Germany was also ruined, and that only by future indus- try spread over innumerable years could she ever pay for the actual damage done, and that even then, if she paid back by an enormous output of manufactured articles produced by the sweated labor of a slave popu- lation, the whole balance of trade in the world would be upset and the industry of England, France, and many countries would be undermined. At the same time that they wanted to make Germany pay all the costs of all the victories, which she could only hope to do by an enormous vitality of industry, fatal to the competition of other countries, they wanted to keep her so damaged and depressed that she could not rise again as a menace
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to her enemies. The problem was stated by an American humorist in the form of a question, **How can you keep a mule so weak that it cannot kick you and so strong that it can pull the plow?" I have not found an answer.
Apart altogether from the economic condition of Europe, so desperate that it needed the wisest doctoring of men regarding its disease, not passionately, but with scientific gravity, with the knowledge that all European countries are members of one body, in which the disease of a vital organ means a spreading poison throughout the system — the spiritual results of the war were entirely ignored by the leaders of the old tradition. They acted as though there had been no change in the minds of men and women during that conflict, whereas the psychology of peoples had undergone enormous changes.
The peoples had seen the meaning of modern war in which the civilian was as much a part of its destructive activity as the soldier himself, in which all humanity was overwhelmed by monstrous engines of destruction. The victor peoples did not desire vengeance so much as security from future war. The vanquished, after having spilled torrents of the blood of youth in vain, were ready, for a little while at least, to accept all the penalties of defeat, if they were but given the hope of regeneration. Long before the end of the war the German peasants and artisans had abandoned the ideals of militarism to which they had rallied in the early days. They called the war "The Great Swindle," as I read in hundreds of letters captured from their dugouts. On the Russian Front they were infected with the pacifist philosophy of the Soviets before it became the bloody terror of the Bolsheviks. On the Western Front they acclaimed the Fourteen Points of President Wilson. Something might have been made out of that new psychology by new leaders who did not assume that the psychology of the peoples was the same in 1919 as in 1914.
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In Germany the leaders of the old tradition also be- trayed the new hopes. The German people, by the stupor of defeat, an inherited sense of obedience to their ruling caste, and a national hatred of revolutionary violence, failed to overthrow the caste which had led them to disaster. The Junkers remained in their strongholds and not one of them was hanged up to his gatepost. The old bureaucracy of the Empire remained as the bu- reaucracy of the Republic. Noske, Scheidemann, Ebert, were no more democratic in spirit than Beth- mann-Hollweg or Doctor Solf. Hindenburg and Luden- dorff still remained heroic figures in the imagination of men who remembered that those names had been linked with great victories on many fronts where the German race had fulfilled its pride. The very depths of their defeat, the hatred of all the world to them, caused reac- tion in the mind of the German populace, who had cursed them as tyrants when the war was on, and now softened to them, swung back to them in admiration, as heroes of the time before the great humiliation. The German people, immediately after their defeat, might have flung off their old castes and tyrannies with a great cry of liberation, and asked for the generosity of the world's democracy. I believe they were for a time ready to do so, if any great leader had been with them to help. I believe they are ready even now, if any leader in the world would help them. But instead, they allowed themselves to be led by the old, crafty, auto- cratic minds of the Prussian tradition, whose sole idea of patriotism was to shirk honest payment on any basis of justice and to scorn repentance for great crimes. Their sole idea of statecraft was to bluster and bully before the victor nations and their own people, and their one hope of escape from the consequences of defeat was to divide the Allies by intrigue, and to recapture their own power by economic forces created by the slave
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industry of their half-starved workers. The Supreme Council of the Allies, and the chauvinists of the Allied nations, played into the hands of the German leaders of the old tradition. They declined to follow Wilson's lead of giving German democracy a chance, on condition that German Junkerdom should be destroyed.
By the many injustices of the Peace Treaty which put large Teutonic populations under the domination of Poles, Italians, and Czechs, killed the economic life of Austria, and imposed burdens upon the working people of Germany which seemed to them beyond human toler- ance, the Allies hardened the temper of those people and stifled their hope of deliverance from their own old tyrannies. They were made the pariah people of the earth. No nation would receive them. No enemy would forgive them. No hope would be given to them. It is no wonder that gradually they harked back to their old national sentiment and, being denied a new inter- national ideal, turned to the old caste again, which at least had defended the old nationalism. They intrenched themselves in hate against hate, abandoned thoughts of a new freedom for the hope of a new vengeance.
I am not one of those who minimize the guilt of Ger- many in the war. I remember great brutalities, abom- inable wickedness. Nor do I ignore the claims of justice for due punishment of crimes, and the absolute right of France to the reconstruction of her devastated coun- try and all the ruins of her state. But I believe that if the leaders of the old tradition had been greater in leadership and had called all people to a new philosophy of international life for the sake of future peace and the common weal of Europe, the German people would have paid more willingly, according to their power, and would have labored with all their might of industry to build up the ruins they had caused. Because they and their fellow workers in all countries would have been
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inspired with enthusiasm for the healing of wounds, so that free peoples, cured of the old disease of war, might march joyfully to new conquests in peace. There was a chance of that, and I am not alone in thinking so. All the thinking men and women I meet in many parts of the world believe so too — realists like Hoover, idealists like Robert Cecil, humanists like Anatole France and H. G. Wells. But the leaders of the old tradition would not have it so.
II
roEALS OF THE HUMANISTS
TN this world of cynical old people who stare forward ^ to the future with a melancholy which is masked by an ironical contempt for human nature — has it not proved itself incapable of wisdom or of any sane scheme of progress ? — and who have a secret or avowed convic- tion that Europe is doomed by the fatal consequences of recent history, there are still numbers of men and women, in every country, with an ardent faith in the possibility of building a nobler system of life than that which existed before the ruin into which war plunged the European peoples.
These ideaHsts are brave folk! To their opponents the cynics, they seem ridiculous, though charming — dear, unpractical creatures looking at life through a mirage of sentiment, ignoring plain and frightful facts, trying to twist human nature to standards of conduct which mankind is totally incapable of adopting, fighting, with pretty or futile phrase, against the monstrous powers of evolution, racial pressures, physical distress, primitive and ineradicable instincts of greed, cruelty, and passion which belong to the human animal.
Certainly the history of these recent years seems to be a death blow to the idealists, and it is surprising to find some of them still alive — some of the old guard — scarred and wounded in their souls — but still valiant, undeterred, ardent. Remember what they aimed at and
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how tremendously they failed, as they knew they had failed, on that day of August, 1914, when the greal armies moved and Armageddon came.
Take a man like Jean Jaures, the leader of the French Socialists, one of the old guard who fell in the fight. He was really a sentimentalist, though he roared hke a lion. With a gift of violent oratory at his command when- ever he wished to stir the emotion of mobs, as I saw him stir them in the old days of Paris, intolerant and abusive of a religion which seemed to him the protector and ally of the evil powers of military force and class privilege whom he was fighting, he had a philosophy and a faith which, in its simple motives, in spite of ironical skepti- cism, was really Christian in its idealism. He believed, beneath all the superficial irony of French wit and the stark realism of French intelligence, that human nature in the mass is capable of "salvation" and that its con- science is divine in essence, ready to choose the way of righteousness, rather than of animalism, if liberated from ignorance and filth and from the false spells put upon it by corrupt rulers. He believed — and it was a wonderful faith for a Frenchman — that the peoples of all countries, even of that country which still held Alsace and Lorraine and maintained the menace of an army which threatened France with death, might be united in a common brotherhood, based upon the common interests of a free democracy and upon claims of human nature nobler than national rivalries, the love of wife and babes; the denial of blood lust between laboring men; the right to peace and joy in life among peoples in possession of their soil, with ample security of life's necessities; a little margin of wealth for beauty and recreation for every toiler, and freedom from the tyranny of governing classes, or overrich castes, who made use of the bodies and souls of humbler men for financial warfare or imperial ambitions. That in its
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essence and impulse was the faith of Jean Jaures and of millions of other men who listened to his flaming words. So I heard him proclaim it once in a salle de manege somewhere in a slum of Paris, where the bodies of two thousand cheminots (the railway men) were pressed closely and hotly together, when from their sweaty clothes came a rancid odor, and the heat of their breath was stifling in the whitewashed hall.
He was a revolutionist, though without cruelty in his heart. He proclaimed "The International" and had a childlike optimism in the conversion of the German peo- ple to a pacifist gospel. He spoke grandiose words about "the solidarity of labor" (the new spell word of the toilers) and helped to organize the Confederation General du Travail with Briand, who defeated it when he became Prime Minister for the first time, because it threatened to overthrow the social structure of France, which had once been his own ambition.
Jean Jaures was the champion of the antimilitarists and attacked the system of the three years' service in France with unceasing eloquence which made him feared and hated by those who were preparing for the "inevitable" war with the old enemy. He was bold enough — in France! — to denounce patriotism as a worn- out creed, an evil perpetuation of old feuds, a narrow passion that would lead indeed to a new and inevitable war unless it was broadened by new meanings — and no one who knew Jaures believed that his abuse of patri- otism meant any lack of love for France, because he had an adoration for the French spirit, for her poetry, for all her beauty, for Paris in every nook and corner haunted by old ghosts. His enemies said he had weak- ened France by his life's work, and that I think was true in so far as he succeeded in limiting expenditure on armaments and military preparations. By the failure of his philosophy, the utter breakdown of his hope to
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build a bridge of peace between the laboring folk of Germany and his own, all his turbulent activity had helped to make France less certain of victory when she was faced by the ordeal of war — because he had worked, not for the victory of war, but of peace, when there was no peace. On the first day of war he was struck down by a crazy patriot, and I saw his coffin carried through the Tuileries, followed by many who paid a false homage to his dead body out of fear of the mobs who had loved him. But the mobs marched with their battalions to save France, as he would have marched now that his hopes had failed of a v/orld united in security and brotherhood.
In the opposite camp — among the traditional enemies of France — there was another leader of democracy who was working for the same ideals as those of Jaures, in a less inspired way. It was Edward Bernstein, the leader of the Social Democrats. He, too, had preached the "solidarity of labor," the common interests of working folk across the frontiers of nations, and the doctrine of international peace. Those to whom the Jewish race is a bogey of evil working by subterranean ways to over- turn the structure of civilization, that Israel may reign supreme above its ruin, will scofF at Bernstein's name and denounce him as one of the dark hypocrites of that frightful conspiracy. I thought him an honest man, within the ordinary limitations of political leaders, when I met him in Berlin before the war, and I think so still. So honest in his estimate of actual conditions that he confessed his despair to me and the weakness of his own leadership because he saw the inevitability of the Arma- geddon that was coming, owing to the conflict of powers and castes and traditions which had more sway over the people than any teaching of his.
I remember him now — though between then and now is the war that was fought, and a world that has
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changed — sitting in a swing chair before a roll-top desk, telling me things that did not startle me, because my imagination was incapable of adjusting itself to their significance. His exact words I have forgotten, but he spoke of the lack of education in international ideals among the working classes of Germany. They had adopted international catchwords, sincerely but super- ficially. His teaching and that of his predecessors had not broken down national impulses, the vainglory of national pride, the passionate belief in the invincibility of the German army, the sense of imperial destiny taught in the schools, the influences of militarism, monarchy, and racial loyalty which were inculcated by the whole system and philosophy of German kultur.
"If war comes," said Bernstein, *'the Social Demo- crats who have been theoretical pacifists will march as one man against the enemy, whoever that may be. Our ideals are still in advance of the psychology of peoples."
He spoke the exact dreadful truth, and at the out- break of war Social Democracy in Germany betrayed its faith, unable to resist the call to a false patriotism which seemed higher then than any other gospel, though its aims were devihsh. So most other pacifists in all countries found themselves compelled to declare a moratorium to their hopes of international comradeship and fell back to national aspirations on behalf ot a vic- tory which, for the time being, seemed — on both sides of the line! — decreed by God for justice' sake and hu- man progress.
How foolish, then, how vain and mocking to poor human toilers in world ideals, seemed all the efforts of their Ufe toward a larger fraternity of man! That was one of the worst and most shocking tragedies of war, for to these simple souls — simple most of them, in spite of hard reading and long research into the history of thought — all their faith came toppling down to ruin.
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Whatever God they had worshiped in the secret shrines of their hearts seemed to have betrayed them. The devils laughed at them, crying, "How now, simple- tons?" For they had believed that human nature had reached a stage when it would refuse to go back to the old barbarities of wholesale slaughter in the fields of Europe, and that the level of common intelligence among "civilized" peoples had been lifted above the possibilities of such " a general massacre as now must happen among them. Elementary education had made great strides. The peoples had learned to read. They had read the little pamphlets of the Fabian Society. Sidney Webb had lectured to them. H. G. Wells had written his socialistic novels for them. G. B. Shaw had ridiculed them out of old superstitions. Across the English Channel, Anatole France was the last of a long series of ironists, from Rabelais onward, who had mocked at the slavery of the common folk under the supersti- tion of political and tyrannical dogmas which turned them into gun fodder for the big game of war, played by imperialists and financiers. Even out of Russia, still under tyranny, still illiterate in the mass, had come a new prophet of peace and human brotherhood — Tolstoy. He had written war and peace among his other books, stripping war bare of its old illusions, showing the falsity of its "glory," its squalor and cruelty and stupidity. In all great countries of Europe — except poor Russia, still in chains — the idealists had seen with eyes of faith a general awakening of mass intelligence to the high sanities of life — the reasonable arrangement of inter- national peace, the closer comradeship between "Labor" in all countries, a higher standard of decency and com- fort, with a little leisure and learning for all citizens of civilized states, whose well-being at home might be secured by the abolition of military burdens, following the establishment of international arbitration. That
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blessed word — arbitration! — had been the spell word of the idealists. Long and ardently did they support the labors of the Hague Tribunal — the great guaranty of world peace. In big books and in booklets, how many of them devoted their time and money to bring these ideals to the mind of the masses in a spirit of self-sacrifice for humanity's sake! Then out of the blue sky the bolt fell, and with its falling destroyed all that they had striven to do, all their spiritual toil.
In every country of Europe there were men and women stricken like that. I knew some of them. With some of them I had worked, now and then, half-heartedly, being of more frivolous mind.
II
I saw the tragedy of one of them a few days after the outbreak of war, in Paris, when the first trainloads of mobilises were going eastward to Toul and Belfort and the frontiers of Alsace and Lorraine — few northward where the great shadow was creeping close — and all the streets of Paris were filled with the passion of eternal partings. It was George Herbert Perris, one of the most untiring laborers on the road to international peace. I describe him, not because he was a famous man, though his activity was known in many countries, but because he was a type of many similar minds in England. All his working life a journalist and public speaker, his pen had never betrayed his principles, and his enthusiasm and ardor had been boyish, genially intolerant of all poor blockheads and reactionaries who did not believe with him that victory was in sight — victory for a world court of arbitration, for general disarmament — (how fiercely and with what joyful irony he had exposed the commercial activities of armament firms who grew rich out of war-making!) and for a fraternal democracy of peoples across the frontiers of nationality. He was a
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disciple of Tolstoy and had written his life with rever- ence, though he could not follow the old man through all his gospel, which, in the end, was near to madness, for Perris was practical and in a mystical sense unspiritual. He had sheltered Russian revolutionaries in his suburban home, was the friend of men Hke Kropotkin, and his pen had traveled over reams of paper recording the martyrdom of those who struggled for Russian freedom. He was, in his character and activities, typical of many groups of intellectual workers who in London, Liverpool, and other Enghsh cities devoted themselves to com- mittee work (after hours of professional toil to keep small homes above the poverty line) on behalf of the *' Brotherhood of Man" and all downtrodden folk from Camden Town to Congo.
In Paris I found him, after he had been carried back with the tide of refugees from the frontiers of war — he was the delegate to a meeting of the Peace League! — and in the shabby bedroom of the little Hotel du Dauphin in the rue St. Roch he confessed his agony to me. I remember now the gray look of his face, and his nervous movements in that little room, and his cry of despair.
*'This makes a mockery of all my life," he said. "Everything that I believed is now untrue. Everything I hoped is broken. This puts back civilization a hundred years. There is only one explanation and that is of no avail. It is that Germany has gone mad."
In some such words he spoke to me, hour after hour, while down in the street Frenchmen were trudging with their wives to the railway stations, where they would say "Adieu!" and go to unknown horrors.
"This war," said Perris, "the abominable criminality of the German attack, has killed me as a pacifist. Until Germany is defeated I am a believer in war to the death, for unless Germany is punished for this crime and utterly broken, there can be no hope for the world."
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He, too, like thousands of other men, declared a mora- torium of all international ideals for so long as the enemy remained unbeaten, but for Perris, as for some others, this change of spirit was like tearing out his soul. The cold passion of his hatred for the German war lords who had caused this agony was religious in its devotion. He became a war correspondent with the French army, whose valor and sacrifice he learned to admire with all the homage of his heart. One of the greatest pacifists in England was decorated with the Legion of Honor for his services to the French army, and kissed on both cheeks by the French general who conferred it. After the war I met my friend again, older by more than the four and a half years of war, worn and frail after the strain of it. He was at Geneva, in the Hotel du Beau Rivage, during the Assembly of the League of Nations, and we had long talks together. He had gone back to his faith and philosophy before the war — indeed he maintained that he had never changed any of his ideals. But I think that with him, as with many men, the years of war had been a separate adventure of soul, something apart and distinct from all previous thought and imag- ination, having no relation to previous qualities of character. Afterward the experience of it vanished as a nightmare, and men tried to pick up the threads of the previous life as they had left them, and wondered why they failed and fumbled.
Perris was marvelous in the way he seemed to have gone back to his old way of thought. I think he emerged from the war with his previous ideals sharpened and hardened and deeper dug, though with more caution in his method of persuasion, and with less intolerance of opposition. But he was not so cynical as younger men who surrounded him, and his laughter rang out in challenge to colleagues who jeered at this work of the League of Nations. ''Reactionaries!" he cried.
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"This League holds all the hope of the new world that is coming. You expect too much of it at first. We are on the right lines and doing good work for the healing of the wounded world." So he spoke and worked until he died, there in Geneva, a veteran in the cause of international peace, though the oldest and the newest nations were even then digging new trenches against the international ideal!
At the funeral, when I stood by the coffin of my friend, I saluted him as one of the Old Guard. Others, old comrades of his in the work of his life, stood up to pay their tribute to him, and men like G. N. Barnes, the Labor Member and Privy Councilor, remembered the old ardent days when they, like him, had believed that humanity, free in common sense, would have no more of war on the universal scale . . . Perris was but a type, and a noble one, of many self-sacrificing men in England who did the spade work of a new world without public recognition or hope of fame.
Ill
Rewarded by fame, immensely fortunate in material success and recognition of many-sided genius, one idealist is working away with the energy and precision of an American reaper-and-binder to clear the ground of human intellect from its undergrowth of ignorance and prejudice, so that a fair new world, dedicated to human reason, may be built by youth thereon. That is H. G. Wells, one of the most whimsical prophets and philosophers in the history of ideas. In many ways he must take first place among the idealists who are trying to scheme out a new social structure, because he is more valuable than any of them, most audacious in his far- reaching plans, most definite, precise, and practical in his program, and not so "wild" in his methods of
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argument as those who would tear down the existing structure regardless of human tragedy before attempting to build upon the ruin. H. G. Wells has the artfulness of the "restorer" of ancient monuments, who, by under- pinning and other architectural dodges, produces a brand-new building without outraging public senti- ment by obvious destruction of the old. By this method he is able to avoid the charge of being a " revolutionary, " his articles are printed in newspapers supported by the defenders and producers of "Capital," and he is invited out to dinner with moderately respectable people, including British generals, to whose head- quarters he went during the war with a special pass from G. H. Q.
That is a little strange, when one considers the pres- ent nervousness of English society and the deep sus- picion of the military mind on the subject of revolu- tionary literature. For H. G. Wells is more revolu- tionary in his ideals than men of the trade unions or of the Parliamentary Labor Party, who are branded as "Bolsheviks" by their Conservative opponents. While they are thinking mostly in terms of national politics, to secure more democratic control of the national state, H. G. Wells is theoretically flinging down fron- tiers, overturning the last remaining dynasties, forming a universal aUiance of Labor and establishing the United States of the World. It is the very magnificence of his conceptions that disarms all sense of fear among those who are fearful. They read his visions of that new world state as with amusement and interest they read his "War of the Worlds" and his "Food of the Gods," things too fantastic to be frightening. Then, too, he is labeled as a "funny man." The author of Kipps and Mr. Polly and Tono Bungay, vastly entertaining even to "nice people" of the leisured classes, is not, they think, to be taken seriously when he begins to write
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about God or the English political system. Perhaps they are right, instinctively and surely. It is the tragedy of H. G. Wells (though he is not a tragic figure) that his sense of humor and the spirit of comedy that presided at his birth prevent him from stirring the faith and emotion of people who are seeking guidance through the jungle darkness of this world. Though he holds a light before him, sometimes a clear-shining light of common sense, they suspect him of Pucklike tricks that are only a lure into deep thickets. In spite of the beauty of some of his thoughts (as in a book like Mr. Britling Sees It Throughy where he was more sincere, more emotional in his sense of life's tragedy than ever before), they hear from afar his goblin laugh- ter, sec the mischievous glint of his sideways glance. They are not sure, either, of any divine fire in the man, any true nobility of soul which must be the attribute of those who would lead humanity to a higher range of goodness. In several of his books he thrusts forward a little vulgar man as his hero — he exaggerates his defects — rather below the ordinary standard of the social code, not because of the things he is pleased to do, but because of the way he is pleased to described them. He finds a comical pride in thrusting this vulgarian before the fastidious, as though to say, "We are all hke this, and I dare say so!" But the teachers of the world have not been like that. They have been great sinners, but not little cads. They have agonized over their frailty, not found it rather good, and anyhow quite usual as a habit of the times.
It was the desire of H. G. Wells to show his minute particular knowledge of the modern type of youth and middle age in the great new middle classes which made him put in these touches for the sake of truth. And they are true — true to the little lives of millions whose adventure of soul is confined by small proprieties, and
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whose sins are little sordid, secret immoralities. But that microscopic treatment of modern life has hampered Wells in his larger visions, and tripped up his devotees. I think his sense of humor, his easy tolerance of common weakness, not tender-hearted and all-embracing, but critical and sarcastic, trips up his own steps toward the higher ranges of thought. He stops to laugh at himself, as when he said to me once, after an earnest conversation about the attributes of the Divine Power, "You would hardly believe how much I am nuzzling up to God!" His mysticism fell w4th a crash; his groping for some higher authority than human reason was mocked by this guffaw. In his country house, in Essex, described in all delightful detail in the first chapters of Mr. Britling (even the German tutor was drawn to life), and in his rooms in London I have seen H. G. Wells among his friends and watched the man who, beyond any doubt, is one of the leaders of modern thought, one of the most active, untiring, ardent, courageous "reformers" of this society. It was sur- prising to me that I felt no sense of being in the com- pany of greatness, nor of being inspired by the light of genius. He made little jests, shrewd little comments, amusing and interesting to hear, and he was very watch- ful of his company, as I saw by the quick, penetrating, sideways looks which registered them and all their small tricks of manner in his photographic mind. But he had not the sure dogmatism of a man who has grappled with truth and with the elemental problems of Hfe and come with some certain faith out of dark hours. Nor had he the smiling irony of men who have come through such hours, not with any certain faith, but with a tender and melancholy skepticism which makes them benev- olent to life, very tolerant, wise in the knowledge of their ignorance. H. G. Wells is assertive, dogmatic like a school-teacher, rapid in thought, as the well-
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trained journalist he is, whimsical, restless, and uneasy. In his work he is Hke that — quick, journaHstic, cock- sure, slick in the craftsmanship of his ideas. Yet, after all, astonishing in the universal range and energy of his endeavors, in the courage of his ideas, the gallant way he takes all the world for his province, all history for his background, all the future for his prophecy, all humanity for his microscope. He has, perhaps more than any living writer in the EngUsh language, stirred up the common mind to think beyond the little bound- aries of suburban experience, to see his own little life as in a mirror, to feel in closer touch with the big move- ments of the human family, and to desire more knowl- edge of history and science in order to Hft the human race, and his own personality, to a cleaner and nobler stage of social progress. That is a big thing to do, and H. G. Wells, in spite of httle characteristics not belong- ing to the highest genius, has been big in endeavor and achievement up to that point. With the clean, sharp weapon of his pen he is now educating the middle- class mind in the international idea, which has the uni- versal brotherhood of man as its great ideal.
IV
The "Mob" (as it used to be called with contempt), not belonging to the middle class, but to the ranks of labor — the intelligent mechanic, the factory hand, the skilled laborer — is being educated toward the same ideal by pamphleteers and tract writers unknown by name to all outside that class, and by local oratory and debating societies, and private conversations be- tween shifts of work, for mixed up with idealism is the hard selfishness of narrow trade interests, a cruelty of hatred of the class above, and the wild fervor of revolu- tionary propaganda which has no motive but destruction.
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Between the incalculable ferment that is at work among the masses of working people in all countries of Europe — as yet we do not know what will rise out of that yeasty thought — and the theoretical adventures in reconstruction by the intellectual reformers, there is an immense chasm of psychology so far unbridged. There is, as yet, no one in Europe — at least I do not know him — who speaks with the voice of the people, whose words find an echoing thrill in the heart of the people, whose leadership and magic personality are acknowledged by the people.
No writer has appeared of late to be the interpreter of the great multitude, as Charles Dickens was in his time and within the hmitations of his contemporary thought. No poet hke Victor Hugo has arisen to call to the soul of his folk with a music of words which was magic to every Frenchman, so that they vibrated to his rhythm, were inspired by his passion. No man of action has humanity behind him, ready to go where he beckons, as once Napoleon led his legions in the name of hberty and glory to many battlefields where their bones were strewn. No religious teacher has come out of study or cloister to utter thunder words before which the multitudes tremble and fall down, in obedience to him, or words of love giving life a new sweetness even in sacrifice, and a sense of richness in poverty. Our leaders of thought seem to be enormously ignorant of the instincts, ideas, and purposes of humanity in the mass, of their suffering, their agonies, their hopes, their passions. Too many of them talk from high, bleak altitudes, in the accents of cultured castes, in unpop- ular language, and without the fire of human love to warm the heart of the crowd.
Typical of such men seems to me Lord Robert Cecil in many ways, by many qualities, the leader of the new political ideaUsm in English culture. He stood for
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honesty and honor and truth at a time when the bar- gain between half-hearted Liberals and Tory reaction- aries had resulted in a Coalition Parliament which voted bhndly at the dictates of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, surrendering their duty of criticism, de- fending every ill-conceived act, every extravagance of policy, all unwisdom due to the narrow reactionary brains of the Prime Minister's masters (his very soul was surrendered to them as a bargain for political kingship), with a tame acquiescence hardly known before in the history of the House of Commons. Al- though a Conservative by instinct and education, above all by the immense influence of his family history and the almost sacred traditions of the House of Cecil as the divinely appointed rulers and protectors of England, intrenched against revolutionary change and dangerous tendencies of thought (had it not been so for four hundred years?). Lord Robert's sense of honor, his sensitive repugnance to injustice and brutality, his ethical faith in Christianity appHed to political principles, made him revolt from the intrigues, bar- gainings, sinister adventures, and callous indifference to the ideals which had been the watchwords of war — liberty, the self-determination of peoples, the war to end war — revealed by the Ministers of the Coalition and their rabble of sycophants. He at least was a gentleman, fastidious and nice in his sense of honor, contrasting with the liars, the sharpers, and low-bred adventurers who surrounded the Prime Minister, like Poins, Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol, and the wild cronies of Harry's youth.
His vision of world peace was on nobler lines than national greeds, and as the representative of South Africa (which gave him greater liberty of action with- out committing the Cabinet to his policy) he did more than any other man in Europe to uphold the ideals of
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the League of Nations and to fashion the Assembly out of a chaotic crowd, without precedents of procedure, into a real ParHament of Nations before which the for- eign delegates could bring their proposals for orderly debate.
His long, lank figure, with hunched shoulders and ascetic, monkHke face, arrested the imagination of all members in an Assembly which represented twenty-one nations, and they watched his appearances on the plat- form, his repeated risings to points of order, and the cold fervor of his enthusiasm for abstract principles and legal niceties, with an unabated interest in a strange psychology. One Frenchman by my side in the gallery, looking down upon him, made a grotesque comment in English which I am sure was a mistranslation of the phrase he wanted to use. "This Lord Robert," he whispered, "is Hke a debauched clergyman!" What I fancy he meant to say was an "unfrocked priest," and certainly there is in Lord Robert Cecil's face and manner the continual suggestion of a monastic soul, or, rather, an ecclesiastical quality. He seems a dedicated man, superior by ascetic habit to all human frailties, with the dryness of the old schoolmen in his method of thought. He stands as a rare figure in English political life, fine in courtesy, never stooping to baseness, an aristocrat of intellect and temperament. With broader qualities, more "fire in his belly," more love and knowl- edge of common folk, he would be the ideal leader of a new march forward in the adventure of English life. But that ecclesiastical manner and the legal twist of his brain and an unconscious air of superiority to fellow men (not insolent, but inherent in his very being) will never gain for him the following of great legions.
Yet as one of the "Intellectuals" in England, he has a high and worthy place, and is a standard bearer in the spiritual conflict against the forces of evil which
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threaten to submerge the European peoples. For the larger liberty of Ireland, from coercion and reprisals in a miserable time of terror and counter-terror, he has spoken according to the old standards of English jus- tice and honor when these were forgotten by ministers of state and their hirelings in dirty work. For modera- tion toward the beaten enemy, with justice based on reason rather than passion, when all nations of Europe must unite for economic recovery or surely perish, he has worked with intellectual devotion and risked the anger of a Hun-howUng press which still has power to break a public man if they hate the virtue in him. He has never swerved in his behef that force is the worst way of argument if ever reason gets a chance for settlement by consent, and that is his gospel for the recovery of Europe, if fools will stop their folly, as he once told me, while his long arms clasped his long legs and his ascetic face was just as a craftsman monk would have carved a prior in stone for a cloister effigy — conscious of authority, strong in self-discipline, dry in humor.
A powerful little group of Intellectuals — not revolu- tionary, but "advanced" — surround H. W. Massing- ham, editor of The Nation^ and he is certainly one of the guiding spirits in the intellectual life of England. A strange man I have always thought him, in brief en- counters, with something dark, mysterious, and Celtic in his psychology. Something cankered him years ago, some secret of his soul — disappointed ambition or tragic contempt of human nature which would not go the way he hoped. Long before the war he was a bitter man, darkly melancholy, and with a cold ferocity of attack when he drove his pen against political opponents or
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literary pretenders. He has always been prone to see virtue in all countries but his own, and has been such a lover of liberty that he has almost defended German militarism itself when defeated by stronger force. Anti- imperialist, anti-protectionist, anti-everything in which the Tory mind has found its gospel, and the popular crowd its war cries, he has been the most acid critic of all that John Bull stands for in character and caricature, and John Bull, not the paper, but the type, has hated him for years as a traitor, a crawling pacifist, a coward, and a dirty dog. He is not a traitor, but a sensitive plant to any touch of brutality or injustice that seems to him hurtful to the good name of England and to the human family. He so hates cruelty to the under dog, the weak, the ignorant, that he is cruel himself in his attacks upon those who seem to him bullies in their nature and methods. He is almost morbid in his hatred of spiritual and physical pain, and agonizes over the sufferings of men and women and animals and birds in this cruel conflict of life. The war to him was the supreme downfall of the civilized ideal, the great darkness of our soul and time, and in his oflSce in the Adelphi he suffered with the sufferings of all the wounded, blinded, agonized men.
He never wanted " victoiy." He wanted only "peace." He was what the French called a defaitiste because for a long time before the armistice he clung to every hope of a negotiated peace, strove by all the power of his pen to destroy the policy of the "knock-out blow," and was the fierce, unrelenting critic of ministerial stupidities in the management of the war, not because he wanted the war better managed, but quicker ended, by popular disgust. He had but one glimpse of war's horror on the battlefields when he went on a few days' visit to the western front. He had been invited by the "propaganda" side of the Army Intelligence which
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had a simple belief that a sight of the men in the trenches and at the guns would convert any pacifist into a howl- ing "Hun hater." Massingham came and saw. He stood by a battery of six-pounders up by Posieres in the Somme fields and every round fired seemed to hurt him hke a nail driven through the head. The roar of artillery and the answering scream of German shells seemed to vibrate every quivering nerve in his body and brain. The leprous look of those shell-plowed fields, where no blade of grass grew under the flail of steel, deepened the pallor of his face, and in his eyes was the horror of a man who sees hell before him.
Yet in moral courage Massingham has had few equals, for he dared to attack a government invested with absolute power over the liberty of its citizens, under the Defense of the Realm Act ("Dora" as the wits called it), which in time of war and long afterward was a sharp and ruthless weapon against those who spoke or wrote against its acts, authority, and judgment. He challenged popular opinion at a time when it was passionate and brutal. His letter box received many threats of violence, sometimes a menace of death. He paid no heed to them, but one friend of mine, loyal to this man of ice and fire, used to follow him secretly when he left his office at night, to be close if any ruffian made a pounce. In allegiance to Massingham, many of them his lifelong associates in revolt against cruelty wherever it might be found, are such men as Henry Nevinson, J. L. Hammond, H. N. Brailsford, H. M. Tomlinson, knights-errant of the pen, crusaders all on behalf of the Holy Land which dwells in their vision.
VI
For years before the Great War, Nevinson was a follower of little wars, as an old type of war corre-
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spondent, always hating the stupidity of that way of argument, and its beasthness, yet always allying him- self with any people fighting for liberty. Between the wars of nations, he was an onlooker of revolutions and civil strife, writing on the side of the under dog, a par- tisan of those who challenged tyranny.
Nevinson was bravest and most quixotic when he faced the ridicule of his own people by espousing the cause of the militant suffragettes. Many times in the days of that strange feminine adventure to which cold logic, self-sacrifice for political ideals, and a sense of humor were mixed up with wild hysteria and the vicious- ness of thwarted women, have I seen Nevinson, as the one male escort of suffragette demonstrators forcing their way through rowdy and riotous mobs into which mounted police were charging and foot police were overwhelmed by the pressure of human weight. Nevin- son's tall form, with silver hair and bronzed face, had a knightly look then as always, but men chose him for their rough handhng. He was a tough customer to handle, and once at the Albert Hall when he sprang to the rescue of a woman who had been struck down by a coward's blow, he gave battle to a company of stewards who fell upon him, and dented several of them before they flung him out — this noble, mild-eyed man, so full of courtesy, so benignant, so wise and witty, such a scholar and gentleman.
We met in the Great War, in strange and menacing places. In the first days on the Belgian coast, as when we paced the esplanade at Nieuport when our shells were screaming overhead from monitors at sea, and presently German shells answered back and smashed into the houses about us. Nevinson strolled up and down, up and down, with a most tranquil courage. . . . Our ways parted, and then met again toward the end
of the war when he came again to the western front,
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walked toward German machine-gun fire as though it were but raindrops, received the surrender of German, prisoners from a crowded dugout, though quite unarmed, and as a war correspondent received salutes from all the army, because he looked as a "field marshal" would like to look.
It was inevitable that Nevinson should champion the Irish cause. It was waiting for him. Has he not been on the side of all little nations demanding liberty.? In Ireland after the war he has been chronicling in his cold, unimpassioned way the history of murder and ret- ribution, ambush and reprisal, with an intellectual bias in favor of the Irish people who are suffering under all this anarchy because they will not surrender their claim to be a nation, separated by race and faith, by long and tragic memories, by fires of hatred inflamed in the passion of this recent history, from England, which seeks to impose her rule as on a subject people, by force of arms. Death dodged Nevinson in the Great War. Some bullet will find him in Dublin or in some civil strife at home.
VII
And Tomlinson, whom Nevinson loves as I do — what a strange assistant-editor to Massingham, his chief! Massingham's blood runs cold, but Tomlinson has a burning fever in him. Massingham has the fastidious manner of an intellectual aristocrat, rather arrogant in his range of classical and modern knowledge. Tomlinson, born down Wapping way, the son of a skipper, belongs to the people of poverty and humility, except by a genius which lifts him above them and most of us, however polished. In his youth he discovered the magic of words and found that he could capture its secret. To him words are jewels. By digging for
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them as they lie hidden below the rubbish of common- place speech, he finds in their sound the harmonies of beauty that lie deep in them, and wonderful architec- tural values when he goes building with them. Yet he never uses words as a substitute for thought, for more sensuous music. He is a realist in his way of thinking, cutting his way deep and ruthlessly to truth, seeing life with its cruelty, its stupidity, its incoherence and fumbling. He has written two good books, The Sea and the Jungle and The Port of London, but it is as a journalist, mainly anonymous, that he has done much of his best work. More than as a writer, his personality counts with those who know him — a whim- sical personality, with a face like a friendly gargoyle on a Gothic church, smiling down at humanity passing. He has an ironical humor that makes one laugh with twisted entrails when he is mocking at life's pomposi- ties. A son of the people, he remains a lover of the peo- ple, though he knows their ignorance, their sheeplike instincts, their frenzies and passions. The war, of which he saw much as a war correspondent, left him with a bleeding soul. He groaned over the agonies of youth, over all that wasted flower of Hfe, and afterward he understood the agony hidden in little homes in mean streets — ^the homes of the people he knows best — and all his passion burned in him, consuming him with rage and bitterness, because of the misery of broken manhood and womanhood caused by the brutal sacrificial cruelty of war — of that war which in his soul he believed was forced upon the world not only by the Germans, but by evil forces of greed and corruption in high places on both sides of the fighting line, using the spirit and bodies of humble folk, spellbound by false watchwords, as the counters in this game of deVils.
A most humorous ironical man, in spite of his sense of tragedy, I remember his comical grimaces in strange
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places of the war, as when, through a snowstorm, we came out of the shattered village of Kemmel in Flanders — ^where the old dead in the little cemetery had been torn out of their coffins by shell fire — and passed a civiUan in evening dress without an overcoat, walking quietly to this hunting ground of death. Tomlinson smiled at me most whimsically, tapped his big forehead, and said, with a kind of joy, as though the sight con- firmed all his convictions: "Mad! Mad! We're all mad!"
In the early days of the war, before he wore the uniform of a war correspondent, he was wandering about an ammunition dump close to the lines in darkness illumined only by flashes of shell fire. A Tommy stared at his strange figure hke the Ancient Mariner in a cloth cap, walked round him three times, and said, "Who the 'ell are you?" "I'm the representative of the Times," said the delectable Tomlinson, modestly and hiding the awful fact that he was also represent- ing the Daily News. "Yus, bloody Hkely!" said the gunner, convinced of his capture of a spy. "You come along with me. " And indeed nothing could have been more unlikely than that Tomlinson should be the representative of the Times, or that any civilian soul should be about an ammunition dump at midnight under shell fire.
Deaf in one ear, he had the advantage of that on the battlefields, and when, outside Bapaume, a monstrous shell came screaming, he cocked his head on one side and asked, very simply, "What bird is that?" But the best memory I have of Tomlinson is when with quiet ardor he converted a typical British general to a tolerance of socialistic ideals. . . . The general after- ward lost his job, undermined perhaps by this phi- losophy.
And now Tomlinson is among the idealists, trying to <5 73
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argue the world to sanity and stinging stupidity with whips of irony.
VIII
These men whom I have taken haphazard as types of intellectual leadership in the world after war are all members of groups thinking, talking, writing, organizing, and each group and every individual in each group is backed up by friendship and correspondence with other minds in England, and through Europe, of the same sympathies and ethical outlook. It is to some extent a secret confraternity whose members know one another not by any badge of membership or by fellow- ship of political parties, clubs, and committees, but by the exchange of a smile, an ironical hfting of eyebrows, a quiet comment on some new act of government, a new tyranny of reactionary powers, another stupidity of passion thwarting the reconciliation and peace of people. They meet, as I meet them, in railways trains on the Continent, in wine taverns and tea shops, in newspaper offices, in apartment houses of New York and Washington and Paris, and in London drawing- rooms after dinner, where little groups gather for con- versation, as once before the Revolution in France the Intellectuals came to the salons to discuss the existence of God and the social origins of humanity. All over the world now, as far as I know it, such groups of men and women are talking, talking, in very much the same way, with the same doubtfulness about the future of civilization and a faith in certain ethical remedies which they think alone may save us.
In an apartment house of Washington, where one lady and five men sat curled up in easy chairs, smoking ciga- rettes, sipping the last drops of some precious liquid, discussing the present troubles of Europe and the way of escape, I thought then, with an uncanny sense of the
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intellectual communion of human thought, of all the millions of such little companies who then, at that hour, in poor rooms or splendid rooms, were talking in the same strain, reaching out to the same hopes, relapsing perhaps into the same melancholy. One brain among us dominated the general discussion, the cold, analytical brain of Frank Simonds, one of the greatest journalists in the world, who did not sit back, like the others, in an easy chair, but at a desk, alert and keen. He sorted out the intellectual actions and reactions of the United States, England, France, and central Europe, as a chemist analyzing some compound. He balanced the credit and debit side of European economy, finding all in a bankrupt state. He examined the claim of the Allies to German reparation and dismissed them as impossible by the laws of arithmetic, and then weighed the advantage against the disadvantage of a strong Germany undermining the trade of the world by enor- mous exports, by which alone she could pay the money demanded, and a weak, dismembered Germany, ruining the world by lack of power to trade at all, to buy raw material, to send back manufactured goods. He sketched out the inevitable policy of France, keener to kill Germany than to save herself, discovering that by no freak of luck could she get back the price of all her losses so that her next chance of satisfaction lay in thrusting Germany deep into the mire, though all Europe would slip after her into the bog of ruin. His eyes bright with intellectual vision, his shrill, discordant voice rising into ironical laughter whenever sentiment tried to challenge his realism, leaving no loophole which could trip him up in argument, he prophesied the doom of Europe. A doom inevitable, except through one door of escape, and that a quicker abandonment of national egotism, a fellowship of nations, tearing down thdr trade barriers, demobilizing old hatreds and stand-
75
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
ing armies, forgiving one another's debts, exchanging their fruits of industry on terms of free trade.
It was the same conclusion reached by a Hungarian who came to see me in London. "Europe," he said, after terrible tales of misery in the old Austrian Empire, "is utterly doomed unless we abandon the old super- stitions of hatred, wash out the indemnities of war, and start afresh on a new phase of economic union among the countries of Europe. But there are too many fools about. We ought to start an International Society for the Suppression of Imbeciles!" He laughed when I told him that so many of us might be disquahfied.
IX
It was in the Lotos Club of New York that I listened to one of the great leaders of the world, one of the great doctors of humanity, when Herbert C. Hoover sat in my bedroom and talked of the things he had seen and done and failed to do for stricken people. That was in March of 192 1, just before his appointment under the new President, Harding.
My room was littered with shirts and collars, dis- ordered clothes, opened and unopened letters, for I had had no long warning of his coming, and no time (after a long journey) for tidiness. He paid no heed to that, but for a hour and a half sat in a big armchair, talking moodily, almost introspectively, with a look of sadness, except just now an^ then, when a glint of humor sparkled in his eyes for a second and then died out again. He is a square-built man, with a puggy, clean-shaven face, broad forehead and brown eyes, and has the simplicity of a peasant and the brain of a scientist who sees the problems of life without passion, without preconceived ideas, without sentiment, but in its essential truth.
76
IDEALS OF THE HUMANISTS
He spoke of the state of Europe. The condition of Austria, he said, was worse now than a year ago, fed by charity which he was still organizing in America, but not being healed of its social disease, for charity could do no real good, though it was a duty to do what it could in rescuing. He described his own work after the armistice as a kind of economic dictator, a position of which he was glad to get **quit."
America had "pulled out" after spending a billion and a half dollars upon the relief of the stricken coun- tries, and for a time he had organized a system of credits and supplies which had helped to keep central Europe from certain starvation. But he could do nothing with European statesmen. They would agree on a reasonable conclusion when assembled round a table, and then go away and do nothing to carry out the idea — do everything to thwart it. All the new states got busy putting up frontiers against one another, with customs dues and all kinds of barriers to free intercourse and exchange.
The Poles would not help themselves, and endless intrigue prevented recovery and health. From the Poles in America lOO million dollars had been sent to committees, and if that money had been used as credit for food supplies, the starving population would have been well nourished; but the money was passed through clearing houses of London and Paris so that Poland received perfumes, soaps, luxuries for her profiteers, instead of food for her people.
In Serbia there was an immense store of surplus food which would have been easy of transport to the stricken populations of central Europe. But Serbia would not sell it eastward. She sought higher profits and sent it to Italy, France, and England, while food for her neighbors had to be sent all the way from America to keep them alive.
77
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
"Europe must unite on economic lines or perish," said Hoover, and he did not speak hghtly nor use care- less phrases. Those words on his lips were a sentence of death, if Europe did not heed his warning.
I spoke to him of my hope in a new leadership, and in the coming of youth, and he smiled when he answered and said: "Youth is busy re-electing the old men. If Briand goes, he will be followed by Poincare into deeper reaction." He had seen no signs of a new faith in the League of Nations, but only the old men burking the real issues and playing with truth.
Then he turned his thoughts to America and told me the tremendous difficulty of moving American imagi- nation in the direction of a world policy. The size of America, the provincial character of the American mind in the great Middle West and over the whole continent, makes them incapable of understanding how they are touched by disease in central Europe. He had tried to make them understand. When farm- ers of the Middle West had asked him: "What is Europe to us? Why is the price of hogs dropping down?" he had told them that before the war each individual German had obtained 25 grams of fat per day (if I remember the figures), which was not enough even then for the mass of industrial workers, and now they obtained only 12 grams of fat. The price of hogs in the Middle West depends on the German stand- ard of fat supply. . . . But th^y could not understand and do not remember.
Hoover hoped that President Harding would call a World council and help to build up a new economic union in Europe and cause a plea for gradual and gen- eral disarmament. But he feared that if he did so the old diplomats of Europe would come to thwart it with their old animosities and subtleties and national in- trigues. Yet he hoped. ... It was because he hoped
78
IDEALS OF THE HUMANISTS
In a growing common sense, in the promise of youth, in the spreading of truth, that he went on working, instead of retiring to a private yacht in some sun- soaked sea, abandoning the world to its doom. . . . He saw just a gUmmer of hght ahead.
I perceived among all these individuals and all these groups, clubs, committees, and associations of Intellec- tuals in Europe and America, certain clear, definite, and simple ideas, however vaguely or subtly expressed, however complicated by social and ethical philosophy. They amount just to this: That the war was a homi- cidal insanity which exhausted all the reserves of wealth in Europe, and left such burdens of debt that they will never be redeemed. That, in spite of great human heroism on all sides, it left human nature in Europe demoralized and spiritually weakened. That the arrangement of peace ignored the devastating effects of war in all nations and the complete upheaval of its economic machinery, and created new boundaries, burdens, and rivalries which can only be maintained until another explosion happens, more monstrous than the last and destructive of white civiUzation as we know it and Hke it.
What way out, then? What escape from this ap- proaching doom, whose shadow creeps over the souls of men ? Not by diplomatic conferences of the old school, establishing some new balance of power, not by one nation grabbing at the last reserves of another, not by military occupation of defaulting countries, nor finan- cial juggUngs to postpone an evil day of reckoning in this nation or that, nor by assaults on Capital by Labor or attacks on Labor by Capital, but rather by a com- plete change in the structure of civilization and in the
79
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
hearts of peoples. Under the impending menace of general ruin they believe that humanity in Europe may be inspired to make a clean jump across the abyss that opens before them, instead of crawling slowly to it and falling in. It must be a jump to a new world in which there must be utter abandonment of the herit- age of national hatred and superstitions, spell words and fetishes. The idealists demand a new religion of humanity based not upon force, but upon spiritual comradeship among common folk. They preach not a revolution by blood, but a revolution by love. They believe in love of country — ^the love of the beauty of one's countryside, of one's speech, of one's poetry — but not in the hatred of other people whose speech is different, though their beauty is as ours. They believe in the liberty of nations, but in a communion of inter- national peoples, not denying one another's liberty, rather protecting it, because of common interests, sympathies, and understandings across the present frontiers. Their hope in a possible cessation of war is founded upon their faith in the common sense of human- ity, if it can be liberated from superstitions, and the baser ignorance in which it is kept by artful brains, now that frightful experience has taught them the lesson of its folly. They admit the passions and cruelties and greeds still inherent in the heart of man, but they have a wonderful optimism in the power of ideals and the average virtue of common folk. . . .
Unpractical visionaries! Dreamers out of touch with reality! Sentimentalists regardless of plain facts! Rev- olutionists with rose water! "Intellectuals" playing with the fires which will consume them when the pas- sion of brutality, brutal life itself, makes an auto da fe of such weaklings. So the brutal mind, sure of history, with no faith but in force, gibes at them.
Gibe for gibe, the Intellectuals can hold their own.
80
IDEALS OF THE HUMANISTS
With witty poniard they can stick the bull fellow who rages at them. They know they will never live to see the fulfillment of their hopes, nor any quick harvest come from the seeds they sow. In secret hours they despair because of so much stupidity. Often they face the futility of their ideahsm. Many times they mock at their own little prescriptions for a world disease, and stare moodily at the approach of a greater downfall in which all Europe will be engulfed. Yet they go on talking, writing, trying to Hnk up with one another, and to leaven a mass of ignorance, attacking tyranny in its strongholds, brutality everywhere, cruelty which hurts them more than its victims, teaching beauty, liberty of thought, large toleration, the right of humanity to joy and peace. Of another world beyond the grave they have no definite belief — not many of them. God means mostly to them the ideal love in the minds of men. They are humanists with their eyes on the pur- pose and the agony and the compensations of this life of men and women. Perhaps if they claimed religious authority, spoke as men ordained by a Divine Spirit, they would get a greater following, and lead the world forward on the impulse of some new religious fervor. But this would alter all their character. It would rob them of irony, of self-mockery. They would no longer have a tolerant understanding of human weakness, an indifference to the smaller frailties, a delicate sense of humor. They are not priests, prophets, or fanat- ics, but humanists. It is doubtful if many of them are of the stuff" of martyrs, though I think Tomlinson would die with a whimsical melancholy on behalf of the truth as he sees it, and others, like Nevinson, are careless of death.
They are not of much power in the world. There are other forces moving secretly, stirring in the psychology of peoples, working in subconscious evolutionary ways
8i
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
toward some great change in our social state. But they have some little measure of influence on the acts and thoughts of peoples, and if they could get closer to their kind in all countries, in more intimate association inspired by great leadership, they might lift Europe out of its present morass to a cleaner and brighter height of human progress.
I
III
Ill
THE NEED OF THE SPIRIT
TTHE spiritual fires of white civilization seem to have •■• burnt low since the war. • In many countries they seem to have flickered out, leaving nothing but the dead ash of a hard materialism or the red embers of selfish passion — nowhere very visible the white light of the sacrificial flame.
Many simple souls were startled by the rapid decline in ordinary morality which happened in war time, still more by the manifest lowering of spiritual ideals after the armistice among those who had seemed exalted to wonderful heights of self-sacrifice and spiritual purpose. They could not understand — it was hard to understand — how men who had been so obedient to discipline in the face of death, so reckless of their own lives and self-interest for their country's sake, should come home with sordid, squalid instincts, hating work, desiring nothing but material pleasure, striking, some- times rioting, in senseless conflicts between Capital and Labor, rebelling against authority, demanding the fleshpots of life with hungry appetite. Still less could they understand — those aloof, observing souls — how the w^ar, which seemed to lift up human nature by the enor- mous enthusiasm of patriotism, could be followed by so many revelations of widespread immorality, general laxity of relationship between men and women, and distressing signs of a coarseness and cruelty of mind —
83
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
in all classes — not noticeable before the war. Minis- ters of religion are aghast at the materialism of the times, and cry out in horror from their pulpits, not acknowledg- ing their own share of guilt. Newspaper morahsts record each new aspect of social degeneracy, forgetting that the press which pays them is in a great measure the malign influence producing this mental condition of mass psychology.
The fundamental mistake of those now surprised by the sudden "slump" in idealism is that the war was really a time of spiritual exaltation to all the people engaged in its passionate drama. To many it was. To many young men about to die for their country's sake, in the early days at least, it was a time of divine renunciation of earthly hopes, as one sees in the poems of Rupert Brooks and in the letters of thousands of boys to thousands of mothers. So also among the civilian peoples behind the lines there was a great stir- ring of spiritual faith in the excitement of unaccustomed service and sacrifice for their country's sake. The love of their fighting men was a great love, and that was good. They were iready to deny themselves everything so that "the boys" might have an extra touch of com- fort, some proof of love in their ordeal. They were ready to suffer privation, danger of air raids, the nervous rack of war time, not only for the sake of their youth in the fields of battle, but for the sake of the victory of ideals over the forces of evil. They were simple, clear- cut ideals in simple minds. Right over wrong, liberty over tyranny, and the safety of the mother country — or of the fatherland! Nothing can ever lessen the miracle of all that, at its best, in its purest nobility.
Alas for the frailty of human nature, there were other strains of emotion, not pure or noble, in the deep tides and currents of war enthusiasm. All passions were intensified in that time, evil as well as good, low as well
84
THE NEED OF THE SPIRIT
as high. The love of country and of young kinsmen was horribly blended with hatred and blood lust in the minds of many men, and more women, in whom the emotion of hate had a degrading and coarsening action. It was inflamed and kept at fever heat by atrocity stories — many of them false — and by a long, careful propaganda of hate, not ending with the end of the war, but continuing long after peace. It was the press (sometimes the pulpit) which stirred up and poked about the lowest instincts of the mob mind, with appeals to vengeance, cupidity, cruelty. That is not good food for the soul for seven years. It has a poisonous reaction, and deadens the sensitive nerve cells of the mind.
In England after the war I have been astonished often by the insensitive quality of the popular mind to events which formerly would have aroused instant emotion, of indignation or pity. Horrible accounts of the star- vation of children in central Europe, narratives of whole populations, as in Vienna, striken by disease for lack of fats, did not touch the imagination of many people. Others reacted to such stories with harsh hostility. "Let them die!" was the answer I had from ladies I know. "Why should we feed boy babies who will grow up to be Huns.?" That was logical in its cruelty and perfectly reasonable, if life is to be based on the law of cruelty and human nature to be divided always between "Huns" and "Allies." But it was new in modern England that women — not all, of course, but quite a lot of them — should be so callous of suffering childhood, even in the enemy's country.
More surprising, more callous, was the indifference of the mass of English people to the reign of terror in Ireland. It was not that they hated the Sinn Feiners, or upheld the policy of reprisals by the Black-and-Tans. Theoretically the ranks of labor were sympathetic
85
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
to the Irish rebels and hostile to the government's policy of coercion. Actually they did not care. The dreadful episodes of that struggle, ambushes and arson, assassinations by this side and the other, men dragged out of their beds and shot before their wives and chil- dren, the hanging of boys in batches, all that horror of guerrilla warfare and military repression, left English psychology stone-cold or just mildly interested. Before the war a storm of passion would have swept over England. There would have been a fierce partisanship, wild meetings, passionate protests, mob demonstrations. After the war only small groups of "intellectuals" excited themselves about the state of Ireland. In the streets I used to read newspaper placards with a sense of sickness — "Cork in Flames" — "British Soldiers Am- bushed near Dublin" — "Five More Policemen Shot in Ireland" — "Extensive Raids in Irish Towns" — "More Creameries Destroyed by Crown Forces." But the crowds went by, indifferent, in the Strand. No flame of indignation lit up their lackluster eyes. Ireland might be swept clean by fire and sword, for all they cared. Some filthy divorce case, the legal argument as to whether an archdeacon stayed at a hotel with an unknown lady, and always the latest betting results, were of far more importance in the mind of the people. The murder of a girl at the seaside by two degenerate young soldiers filled columns of the daily papers and the reports were read eagerly by miUions. It was the sex interest which lured them and made those dull eyes light up. The killing of women in Ireland by British soldiers "shooting up" Irish villages did not raise a flicker of interest among the general public in England, nor command more than a few paragraphs in English papers. Enormous calamities, like the great famine in China, did not arouse one throb of emotion, one pitiful tear, as far as I could find, among English folk, and I was, like
86
THE NEED OF THE SPIRIT
them, unable to respond emotionally to the most tragic happenings, unless they were of immediate personal interest. The immense long-continued tragedy of war had destroyed all power of emotional reaction to new and more remote abominations. "Oh, hell!" was the attitude of mind of the average man to any such epi- sode. A subtle coarsening process had overtaken the most refined minds and blunted their finer sensibilities. The least refined minds had just relapsed into brutish- ness, no longer held up to decency by the ethical stand- ard of the world.
II
For some time after the demobilization of the armies civilian populations were astonished and shocked by the disorderly conduct of many home-coming soldiers. Indeed, signs of trouble appeared immediately after the armistice, and the very men who had done their best to win the war, which was won, suddenly adopted an atti- tude of revolt against all discipline. On the western front there were disorderly demonstrations by bodies of men demanding instant demobilization and insulting elderly officers who threatened them with field punish- ment. To Whitehall and the War Office — ^the very Holy of Holies — came troops of soldiers from seaside camps in lorries and ambulances seized without per- mission. They demanded instant hearing from any general in authority. They were not to be awed by red tabs or brass hats. The power of life and death seemed to have gone out of those symbols of command, to the profound annoyance of those who wore them. "The men have been infected with Bolshevism. Foreign agents have been at work among 'em," were words spoken in a frightened way by elderly gentlemen in London clubs. " I 'd turn the machine guns on to them," was the advice of others who, not long before, had been
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MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
acclaiming those men as heroes and the saviors of old England. What had happened? In another book — Now It Can Be Told — I have shown a little of what had happened in the spirit of the men who had fought — their disillusionment with the ideals of war, their bitterness with the old men in the high places of com- mand, responsible for much unnecessary slaughter, their sudden revulsion against discipline when the com- ing of peace seemed to break all need of it, their des- perate desire to get out of khaki and into **civies" again, and their utter sickening weariness of "spit and polish," parade, all the deadening routine of military life as soon as the passionate purpose of the war had gone out of it. It was not Bolshevism that had been at work, but the ordinary actions and reactions of human nature.
Worse things happened later, things not so natural or pardonable as the haste of men to be demobilized, though partly due to the fret ^f waiting for freedom. Soldiers — and especially Canadian soldiers — ran amuck in camps and towns, attacked poHce, looted shops, stormed town halls, fought in a brutal, demoniacal way with the guardians of law and order. There was some- thing unreasonable in these sudden gusts of fury, some- thing that looked like madness, as in the case of young officers even who took part in these affrays and after- ward swore, as I think sincerely, that they could re- member nothing of how they came to be mixed up in the rioting, or what they had done. It was just a sud- den lack of self-control, a sudden uprising of ungov- ernable and unreasoning passion.
It was part of that general disease which doctors called "shell shock," though it afflicted men and women far behind the lines, aloof from shell fire, the long nagging of the war upon the nervous system until it was all worn and frayed, the high tension of war excitement
88
THE NEED OF THE SPIRIT
which suddenly snapped when the armistice was signed, and the subconscious effect of war's Hberating influences upon the animal and moral restraints of civilized nature. The killing of men had been the work of life, the purpose of hfe, for four and a half years. To the gentle lady knitting comforters for the Red Cross that purpose had been a subconscious influence. She was aware of death in the mass, the slaughter of the world's youth, the blood and iron of war. Her gentility had been a little hardened. She was no longer shrinking and sen- sitive at the thought of life's brutality. Even she, with her taper fingers, had lost something of refinement. How much more the man who had walked through fields of dead, whose daily training was to kill better, who had killed! The miracle is that so many thousands of decent men — so many millions — remained decent, un- tainted by blood lust, clean in mind and heart. It was inevitable that others should be brutalized, and that when, after the war, some accidental happening stirred their anger, or their lust, they behaved like primitive men. They had been taught "caveman stuff," as the Americans call it, while they sat in lousy dugouts under fire. There was an epidemic of foul crime in England, France, Italy, other countries. Young soldiers murdered lonely girls after horrible brutality. In drunken brawls they fought one another like gorillas. . . . During the great coal strike in England, the govern- ment called up the Reservists to maintain order in case of rioting by the miners and the army of unemployed. For the most part the miners behaved like lambs, but at Aldershot, Woolwich, and other places the Reservists, all "veterans" of the Great War, broke bounds and started looting and rioting until they were dispersed by cavalry. "Bolshevism!" whispered frightened politi- cians, using the new spell word to explain every symp- tom of social unrest. But in this case what was happen- 7 89
MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
ing was the disgust of men thrust back into the discipline from which they had escaped, after too much of it and after they had thrown it to the four winds in the Hberty they had found in peace. Some of them, by that sudden relaxation of restraint, after a life in which every hour of their day was ordered, had lapsed into a weak lawlessness of soul, incapable of self-control, nervy, restless, lazy not of set purpose, but spiritually lax, and with a mental and physical resentment to concentrated work. In the mass psychology of peoples with the war experience, there was this loosening of old restraints, and after the enormous, driving impulses of war, life seemed purposeless and without any sanc- tions for discipline. No new impluse higher than self- interest replaced the spiritual ideal of sacrifice. The mob, without leadership* contemptuous of those who claimed to be leaders, cynical of ideahsts who had brought the world to a sorry pass, followed its own instincts, devoted itself to its own immediate interests, while many people lower than the average of the crowd (whose instincts are mainly sound) just dropped back into the selfishness of the brutes and adopted the brute code as their law of life.
Ill
One strange after-efi'ect of war, startling the moralist — ^judge or jurymen — by its devastating epidemic, was the ruin of homes by divorce. Here it seems, except to fanatics who favor divorce as something good and admirable in itself, is a clear proof of degradation in social morality — the slippery slope to perdition in Chris- tian civilization. I hate figures because often they confuse the mind instead of clearing it, but I must quote here the divorce statistics of England, which truly show in a dramatic and shocking way the feverish
90
THE NEED OF THE SPIRIT
increase in numbers of those who, in a country still in- stinctively jealous of the marriage laws, have gone to law to break their partnership.
Year
I913 I914
I9IS I916
I917 I918 I919 1920
Dissolution of Marriage |
Nullity of Marriage |
||
Husbands' |
Wives ' |
Husbands' |
Wives' |
Petition |
Petition |
Petition |
Petition |
312 |
234 |
13 |
18 |
436 |
397 |
7 |
16 |
348 |
320 |
6 |
6 |
SIS |
421 |
II |
7 |
641 |
30s |
12 |
20 |
727 |
3SS |
IS |
14 |
1,216 |
413 |
10 |
15 |
2,3Si |
690 |
22 |
27 |
In 1 92 1, for which I have not the complete figures, the numbers mount higher, and in one week at the beginning of May six hundred cases were heard in the courts.
It will be seen that in 1920 there were over three thousand divorce cases, or ten times as many as in the year before the war. Yet it is probable that that number is insignificant in comparison with all the homes in which husbands and wives live in miserable alliance, their spiritual bond having been utterly broken, though they do not apply for dissolution of marriage for lack of money or in fear of scandal. It has been a world malady directly due to the war in many strange, subtle ways. "I do not know one man who went to France now living with his wife again," I was told by an American lady of high social standing. I protested against her exaggeration, knowing many American soldiers still happily married, and asked her to think again and modify her statement, but she said: "I may be unfortunate in my friends, but that is actually my experience of their home life. "
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MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
How can one account for this tragedy of lives? What was the influence of environment and adventure which led to such disloyalty between those who had loved ? For in many cases these divorces are not revelations of ordinary immorality by men and women of low character. On the contrary, many of them have been brought before the law by people of exceptional culture, of good social reputation, and of long-tried virtue. Middle-aged men, fathers of families, who lived honest humdrum lives, contented and happy to all appearances, suddenly broke away, changed all their character, betrayed women who had been utterly faithful to them. So was it with many women. With younger couples it is easier to unflerstand. During war time they married in haste and in peace time repented at leisure. When the menace of the war was present, youth took what it could quickly, before death could intervene, grabbed at life and immediate joy. I knew many boys — airmen and company officers, machine gunners, and observ- ers— who knew that seven days' leave might be their last chance of life. One more little "stunt" above the clouds, one more little *'show" across No-Man's Land, and for them no more. They loved life. Its beauty was boundless to them. They felt their youth with vital intensity of desire. To get "all in" while they had the time was their philosophy, and marriage with a pretty girl was part of the life they would not miss, though it might be only for a splendid week. It was so easy. The girls were of the same philosophy. They too were grabbing at life, seeking fulfillment of youth, before all the boys died. It did not matter very much which boy they married. They were all so splendid and so brave. They were life — under the menace of death. . . .
Youth was right. In the mass it was wise, with sure instinct. Mother Nature created their impulses to
92
THE NEED OF THE SPIRIT
repair so much destruction of life. But there were penalties. Life's little ironies broke in to mock at romance. Many of the boys did not die, though the odds were against them. They came home, badly or lightly wounded, nerve shaken, fretful with the strange and deadly boredom of peace for which they had longed. They could not get jobs, so many of them, for so long a time, and after trudging for jobs came back home dispirited, bad-tempered, quick to resent the little irritations of domestic ways. Young wives were very lonely in war, and hated loneliness and sought the companionship of their husbands' friends, home on leave. "Allah is great, but juxtaposition is greater." Poor children of life, so ignorant of their own quality, their own emotion, the tides of human nature. Here is nothing to marvel at, especially at a time when all laws of life were being rudely challenged, all faith was being questioned, and religion was irreconcilable in many souls with war's peculiar code.
More difficult to understand was the sudden break- down of older men, not ignorant of their own nature, and with long records of loyalty. "How is it," I was asked by a frank-spoken lady, "that men with ladies as their wives, beautiful women, all the highest refine- ment of civilization in their homes, and all the tradi- tion of training behind them, fell to the first little slut they saw in the streets of Paris, or went astray in low haunts .f*" It was not quite so bad as that, though it was bad.
I explain such mysteries in a groping way. The war was a mighty aberration of all restraints built up by the careful checks and boundaries of the civilized code, that powerful system, stronger than religion, which we know as Public Opinion. Human nature is always secretly in revolt against these checks. There is an errant libertism in the soul of every man who sees en-
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MORE THAT MUST BE TOLD
ticing byways of pleasure, deductive short cuts to joy, across which is written the harsh word of the social law, "No Thoroughfare." Everywhere through the quiet hfe of peace in quiet towns, these signboards are staring in the sight of men, and because of the watchful eyes of Public Opinion they dare not trespass. But war flung all these signboards down. Public Opinion altered its own bearings. Its fixed principles shpped. In the convulsion of war it lost its faith. Men went out to France or other fronts in an adventure which changed all life and themselves utterly. It had no hnk with the past, and its future was most uncertain. These men in khaki uniforms were mDt the same men as those who had been in civil clothes, with white collars and cuffs and all, in city offices or pleasant drawing-rooms. They were in a different world and a different life, doing things utterly rem.ote from all their previous experience, and for the most part skep- tical of ever returning to the life they had known. They were revitalized. The old trammels fell from them. They were but soldiers of fortune in an un- ending war. They, too, had to grab quickly at any passing chance of pleasure, lest they should be too late. And the job they had to do was ugly, dirty, cruel. It would end, perhaps, in a dirty kind of death. Once up in the trenches and they would be far from any kind of life's beauty. Behind the lines, in Paris, Amiens, London, there was still beauty, feminine softness, which was the opposite of all that harshness of war's discipline. The rustle of silk sounded better than the scream of a shell. They were not dis- loyal to their wives at home. They were other men in another world — born anew. So they argued, and wondered at themselves.
After the war they were different again. When they went home they pretended they were the same. They
94
I
THE NEED OF THE SPIRIT
dressed up in the same old clothes, sat at the same old table, and knew, so many of them, that the men they pretended to be were dead and that they were mas- queraders of their own ghosts. The woman opposite was no longer the wife of this man who sat glancing at her now and then with searching eyes. She had changed, too, during these years of war. She too had had secret adventures of the soul. They had actually been divorced before quarrels, open infidelities, passionate endeavors for reconciliation, the cold and dreadful certainty that the old love was dead, led them to state their case before the court.
Strange and terrible revelations! After twenty years of married life, men with grown-up children whom they had loved devotedly sought a dissolution of marriage with women who had believed in their eternal faith — or it was the other way about. Some hideous, tremendous im-pulse, long hidden in subconsciousness, had broken its fetters. Men after the years of war had a sense of second youth at their home-coming. They did not desire a return to the old life, but the beginning of a new life. Some other woman offered them that. After the tremendous excitement of the war impulse they craved for some new impulse equally dominating and exciting. New love or its counterfeit provided them with this sensation. I believe in hundreds of cases this was the psychology of their broken partnership, and in the woman's case it was no different. Yet by explaining we do not condone. " Tout savoir, c'est tout pardonner! " That is true, but the weakening of resistance in human nature to the evil of disloyalty is a serious matter for civilization. Lack of self-control is not to be lightly disregarded, nor replaced by easy allegiance to "the spirit of liberty." Christianity, anyhow, must be shipwrecked on these shifting sands, and even the inherited code of morals which in many
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countries, as in England, is for the mass of people the sole remaining heritage of Christian faith.
IV
Is Christianity itself going down, after nineteen cen- turies of struggle to hold its authority as the religion in which humanity may find its ultimate reason for obedience and sacrifice, and its supreme comfort in a world of discomfort — ^this "vale of tears"? Even before the war there had been a steady growth of skep- ticism and revolt, less passionate, but more deadly than in the centuries of conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism, or the days of challenge between science and faith. That old warfare had quieted down. In intellectual circles there was a wider tolerance, on both sides. Science had yielded some of .its "certainties" to faith. Religion, even inside the Catholic Church, had adopted some of the claims of science, admitting the possibility of evolution, though not accepting asser- tions of absolute proof, revising its geological dates, not standing rigidly to the literal interpretation of Old Testament stories. In many ways religion seemed to be regaining old ground, capturing new fields of mission- ary enterprise. The advance of Catholicism in England and the United States was remarkable in mere num- bers, although it must be reckoned with the increase in population. But among Protestant denominations, and in nominally Catholic countries, like France and Italy, there had been a steady abandonment of reUgious fervor, a quite definite undermining of faith in Chris- tian dogma by skeptical philosophy, reaching down to the humblest classes. It was not, as I have said, a fierce skepticism. It was stolid indifference. People could not be "bothered" with religious controversy. There had been too much of it. They had no ill will
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THE NEED OF THE SPIRIT
to folk who liked to go to church — any old church — but they preferred to stay away. Less and less to the middle classes and laboring classes did religion seem to have any real relationship with Ufe and death. The parsons talked a lot of stuff which was obviously in- sincere. At any rate, they were all quarreling with one another as to what it really meant — flatly contradict- ing one another. In France and Italy the old Latin skepticism and cynicism was prevaihng, even in the peasantry, and the young intellectuals of France, in spite of new movements among them, to make religion "good form" again, could not resist the genial incre- dulities of Anatole France, literary successor to Vol- taire, Rabelais, and all the master skeptics of their literary heritage. The harsh and brutal reahsm of Zola and his school, their onslaught upon faith, had become old-fashioned. As in England, indifference rather than challenge was the new spirit. Even CathoHc Frenchmen, or many of them, thought themselves among the faithful if they married in church, baptized their children, and received the last sacraments before death. Otherwise they did not trouble the church, though they doffed their hats to the village priest and thought him a very good fellow if he did not poke his nose into their private affairs.
The state of religious life before the war in France was rather stagnant, Hke this. Only in the universi- ties and among the aristocracy was there an attempt, not altogether unsuccessful, to revive the Catholic spirit as part of the noble heritage of France, and to associate it with a patriotism which foresaw the new ordeal of war with Germany. The army chiefs, like Foch and Castelnau — the inner cHque of the High Command — were Catholics of the old school, devout and firm in the faith that France was ordained by God to attain a new and spiritual victory over the
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barbarians who were now called "Boches." The cult of Jeanne d'Arc became the fashion. On the other side the syndicalists and labor parties generally- attacked the Church with contempt and scurriHty as the great power of reaction, and France was ruled by politicians who had supported destruction of Church and state, and denounced Catholicism with ridicule and blasphemy.
In Prussia, the chosen kingdom of "the good old German God" as the Kaiser used to say, with an air of genial patronage, there had been a rapid dechne in religious and spiritual standards, according to many competent observers, even of their own race. Ever since the victory of 1870 the Prussian people had become more and more arrogant, selfish, and material- istic. Their Protestantism had always been harsh in its character, without the kindness and sweet-tempered quality of our own denominations after the mellowing of the old Puritan austerities or the mild and sentimen- tal spirit of the old German tradition in other parts of the Empire. But the Prussian character deteriorated when its Protestantism was abandoned for a gross materialism, a blatant and bullying atheism, with no more exalted faith than that of world empire under Prussian domination. I am not one of those who be- lieve that every Prussian is possessed by seven devils, that by the very shape of his head he is outside the kinship of the European family, and that the mark of the beast is upon him. That seems to me an exagger- ation convicting us of self-conceit, national self-com- placency, and Phariseeism closely approaching the very characteristics we are condemning. If the Prussian believed before the war that he was the noblest type of human being, and that the Empire he had founded had the close support of God, and that his destiny, his very duty, was to rule less civilized peoples, it must
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be admitted that there have been Englishmen with the same conceit of themselves. I have met them at club dinners, and have listened to their proclamation of such simple faith. But in Prussia, and perhaps to a less degree in other parts of Germany, this stirring of national confidence in a future of enormous conquest was supported by brutal qualities deliberately devel- oped by education and public opinion, and as that educational influence deepened it created a degrada- tion of morality. Spiritual values sank to a low level, and in their painting, their architecture, their drama, and their social amusements one saw a kind of morbid defiance of all that is gentle and refining in life. The word "stark" was a kind of spell upon them. Worse than that, though that was bad and enervating, a strain of degenerate vice attacked them. Without raking up the filth of war propaganda, it must be said that night life in Berlin, for instance, was worse than anything in cities like Paris or London (whose virtue was not unchallenged!), worse in coarseness and com- plete abandonment of any decent code. In the army the Prussian military caste was tainted with very abominable corruption. Prussia, in spite of many fair qualities and many good people, was governed by a spirit of evil. As far back as 1872 one old watcher of life. Cardinal Manning, saw the sowing of these weeds in the Prussian spirit, and in prophetic words foretold what now has happened:
The aberrations of a false philosophy — the inflation of false science — the pride of unbelief — and the contemptuous scorn of those who believe — are preparing Germany for an overthrow or for suicide.
All was not well with Christianity before the war. When war came it was in danger. Its own priests and ministers endangered it. Adopting the material watch- words, in England as well as in Germany, proclaiming
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God and the justice of God to be on the side of their own battalions, in Germany as well as in England and France, in Austria as well as in Italy, they forgot that simple lads who had been to church or had at least heard the words "God is Love," or "Thou shalt not kill, " or "Love one another, " or " Forgive your enemies," asked themselves in dugouts and ditches whether there could be any divine authority for such commands when they were told, by the very men who preached them, not to love, but to hate; not to forgive, but to kill. They were quite certain they had to kill. That was obvious, disgusting though it was to most of them. Therefore what was the truth of a religion which said, "Thou shalt not kill".? Many of them after a time, by fear or by weariness or by some queer idealism, inartic- ulate, but becoming more clearly conscious and con- vincing as the war dragged on in what seemed inter- minable slaughter, came to criticize the whole meaning of the war, to thrust its guilt not only upon Germany, but upon the system of civilization which had made it possible, and the leaders of that civilization, and the teachers.
They worried out crude little syllogisms. "If Christi- anity is right, then war is wrong, or if war is right (or this war), then Christianity is a lie. " And again: "Every- thing that I was taught not to do I am now taught to do, and ordered to do. That means that the whole moral code under which I was brought up was hypoc- risy to keep me quiet. I was taught not to lie, but the newspapers and the politicians lie all the time, and make a virtue of it. I was taught to say my prayers to a good, kind, loving God Who would answer them. But when my pal Bill prayed that he might get through that raid for the sake of his wife and kids (I heard him when he thought I slept), a shell came and blew his blooming head off — and anyhow I don't see any signs of a good,
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THE NEED OF THE SPIRIT
kind, loving God. . . . Where is God, anyway, in this year 1914 (or 1917), and what proot is there of His interest in humanity ? Or what proof is there of human- ity's interest in Him? Christianity has been going a long time. Is this the result of it? It's all a queer mix-up. The Germans seem a pious crowd. Before every battle they pray and take the sacraments, just like some of us, only more so. Is God helping them or us.^ . . . . By God! the weather seems to favor 'em?"
Less crudely than that, but with higher perplexities, secret indignation of soul, other men, more cultured, questioned the truth of Christian faith, and could not reconcile it with the business in hand. Nor could they acquit its ministers of insincerity. They became skeptics even in the presence of death, or found some queer little shrine of faith of their own, some pagan creed of stoicism or fatalism, at which they worshiped, for comfort's sake.
Many of them were like that, as I have told in other writings. Many of them in spite of others who were glad of their chaplains, who became more fervent in religious duties, who became converts to Catholicism and then fell in battle like Christian martyrs to the beasts, who carved the sign of the Cross in the chalk of their dugouts — I have one of those chalk crosses now in a cabinet of relics — or, like the French at Ver- melles, made a little altar to Notre Dame des Tranchees, and crowded round a soldier priest with bent heads, receiving from his earthy hands the body of Christ in the mystery of the Sacrament, with childlike faith, before they died. (Not one escaped in that part of the line.)
I will not dwell on what happened in war. I have written that. Here I would write of what happened
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after the war and is now in action. There has been no spiritual revival. Christianity has not marched to new victories. It is still menaced with heavy losses, a general retreat all along the line of human society. Christian priests and pastors have not yet dispelled the doubt and darkness that came over the spirit of many men. Their authority and their faith are still challenged and a greater indifference than that before the war is in the minds of people toward the claims of Christian dogma.
The enormous turmoils of war loosened all the con- trols of character, upheaved old traditions of thought and conduct and behef. The enormous turmioil of peace loosened them still more, until they rattle. The brakes of the civilized world will not hold back the social machine as it speeds downhill.
The effect of peace was, at the time, like a sudden liberation of souls in bondage. The world breathed a deep sigh and then ran riot. I think now as I write of all the wild scenes I saw in Beligum and France and England during the celebration of the armistice and peace. They were not Christian in their general manifestation. It is true that the churches were thronged, that many prayers of thanksgiving were uttered, but in the streets of great cities and of small it was a Bacchanalia absolutely pagan. The women behaved like maenads and hamadryads, dancing, sing- ing, giving themselves up to the joy of life which had been so long denied. Wild-eyed, ecstatic, with abandon- ment of all restraint, they went to the festivals of the streets to celebrate the return of the heroes. Youth had been reprieved. Old Man Death had been cheated of his last harvest of boys. Love had come back.
Love was unlicensed In the streets. Quick greetings, quick meetings, what mattered in the weeks of armis-
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tice? The soldiers of the Allies — English, French, Belgian, American, Italian — the prisoners of all the armies swarming through the lines again, the women who had waited for them, the girls who had been im- patient of their coming, mingled in the crowds of joy and knew no law but that. Only those who were cold and old resisted the carnival. Only those who were sad and solitary with remembrance.
It was then that the dancing mania took possession of Europe. Even in Germany, defeated, despondent, still a little hungry, youth danced in the Bierhalle and Weinstube, as I saw them on the Rhine. Even in Vienna, where children starved and could not sit up with rickety limbs, there was dancing in the gilded restaurants. I made a tour in Europe through many cities and countries, and everywhere the music of jazz bands, the wild rhythm of them, throbbed in my ears to the beat of dancing feet.
I remember now one little picture among many others of that dancing time. It was on the digue at Zoute Knocke, close to Zeebrugge, where there was the hell of war and where still the wreckage of it lay about.
There were charming girls there of the best Belgian families, and English girls, and Americans, and Russians, and Poles, and Czecho-Slovaks, with young men who, I found, had been prisoners in Germany, or officers at Dixmude, or in a pleasant exile in England, during the war.
The orchestra for the dance was not magnificent. It was a simple piano-organ worked by the untiring arms of a humble philanthropist, not without reward. It played "Tipperary" and "The Broken Doll" un- ceasingly, to the rhythm of the fox-trot and the one-step.
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The light from the cafe windows splashed across the roadway, making shadow pictures on the pavement of the dancers who came within its gleam, whose frocks and faces were touched by its glamour until they danced into the gloom beyond that range of radiance where there was night and the pale sea.
Outside the cafes sat the fathers and mothers of the dancers, smiling as they watched the swaying of young couples, the fantastic steps, the queer rhythmic kaleido- scope of that dance on the digue.
The wind was strong. It caught many a tress and blew it across the laughing face of a girl. It wafted off the hats of the boys and made their hair wild. Frocks were tossed into billows above long white stockings and long black stockings, and in and out of the grown-up dancers small children danced, wonderfully learned in the latest steps, like little marionettes.
Next to me sat a man who had factories at Ypres and Bailleul and Messines, where now there are only ashes and the rags and bones of buildings. Some of his girls were dancing there, and he smiled as he watched them pass, greeting him with their eyes, over the shoulders of their cavaliers.
"It is youth that dances on the edge of ruin," he said in French. *'It is youth that dances to the tune of life."
Another picture comes to my mind — night in the Grande Place of Brussels with shadow pictures in the windows of the old guildhouses near the Hotel de Ville and the Maison du Roi.
Here three centuries ago princes and princesses sat down to banquets in those mansions, and the old Place itself with its beauty of gilded pillars and sculptured stonework, still holding all the memory of the golden age in Flanders, was crowded with nobles and ladies and great merchants coming and going up the flights of steps,
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hollowed out now by the tread of many feet, which lead into the paneled rooms.
I heard music through open windows and went up- stairs into one of those old rooms. It was thronged with young men and women of humble class, dancing together.
In the minstrel's gallery sat a company of large musi- cians playing large instruments loudly. To the blaring noise of it the Flemish dancers surged round, doing the fox-trot and the two-step. The boys danced in bowler hats and billycocks, and the ladies combed their hair between the dances. A negro in a black suit and felt hat came in with a big black box and opened it solemnly. I expected to see a magic carpet brought out, or some wizardry, but he sold lollipops to girls who tried to steal them. The boys banged the girls about good- naturedly in the Flemish style. The girls danced often with each other, with a wonderful knowledge of the latest steps. Now and then a boy and girl sat down heavily together on the boards, and there were shrieks of laughter. Two girls spoke to me in English. One of them showed me the portraits of her lovers. There were twenty of them, and all young English soldiers. She was sorry the war was over. . . . Another girl, waxen-faced, dark-eyed, ugly, kept telling me about a boy named Harry whom she had loved. They had lived together for a month, and when he went she wept her heart away.
A young Belgian soldier spoke to me and explained the spirit of the company.
"For five years there was war," he said; "now there is pleasure. We wish to make up for those five years. It is the same with everybody. We are forgetting the war and finding the pleasure of life. "
"Are there any who remember?" I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. "The poor devils with 8 105
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only one leg, or no legs, cannot dance. There are others who are blind. Some are rotten with disease. The lucky ones dance. It is our luck."
And everywhere in Europe the lucky ones danced.
VI
Then gradually came disillusionment, disgust, except where youth refused to renounce its rights. For a year or more in some countries like England, for much less in others, governments and peoples maintained a fictitious show of prosperity, persuaded themselves that their debts did not exist, that their prosperity was assured, now that victory had come. In England the demobihzed soldiers lived on doles and pensions, and the time of their withdrawal, when they must go to work again, was several times postponed. France was buoyed up by large promises of the fruits of victory, and, though prices soared to a fantastic height, wages rose, too, to most of them. I, and many others wiser than I, prophe- sied the coming of reality and was called a gloomy dog for such dark forebodings. But it came. Steadily reality bore down again the fiction of national arith- metic, international rivalry. Paper money would not buy real things. Real things must be made by hard work. Those who could not work must starve. Disease in one part of Europe would cause ill health in other parts, and Russia, Poland, Austria, were stricken with social ruin. Manufacturers would find production futile if they could find no markets to buy their goods. They could not longer pay high wages, or any wages, if markets were shut against them. Unem- ployment would grow apace if Europe did not set its house in order by reconciliation and free trade in peace. . . .
Those things happened in England, in many countries,
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THE NEED OF THE SPIRIT
even in the United States of America, untouched, as they beheved, by European conditions. And as they happened, the psychology of peoples was affected by bitterness and ill will and suspicion and anger. Where were all the fine promises made to them in war? "A land fit for heroes to live in!" That was the promise to British soldiers. "The fruits of victory!" had been the promise to the peoples of France. Instead, taxation bore down with crushing burdens. Poverty showed its ugly head, men who had been heroes in the war broke their hearts against the hardness of this peace.
Even that was insecure. Wars and rumors of war shook the ground of eastern Europe and of Asia with tremblements de terre that caused uneasiness and alarm on our side of the Continent. The future, for boys old enough to rejoice at peace, was covered with a black pall. The great conflict had been called "a war to end war. " This peace looked like a peace to end peace. By old stupidities or new devilries, the statesmen of Europe seemed to have made a hopeless mess of victory. The peoples looked for new leaders who did not come. Under the tightening pressure of war burdens and peace failures, they became hard, cynical, selfish. It was a fight now, not for high ideals, but for wages that would not be below the 1914 standard of living, reckoned in actual values. It was no longer to be a search for a new world, but a struggle for existence. Not idealism, but materialism, was the gospel of many who for a time had been generous in sacrifice, splendidly forgetful of self. In that state of selfishness are we now, as I write this book.
Yet, by a strange and tragic contradiction, there has been no time in modern history when the peoples of the old civilization have been so desperately eager for spiritual guidance. There is a great thirst for spiritual
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refreshment among those in the dry desert of our present discontent. I find expression of that among many men and women not ''rehgious" in temperament nor of sentimental type, but rather among cynics and ironists and reahsts. In conversation, at the end of pessimism, they are apt to admit that "nothing can save us all but some new prophet of God." Or they cry out for some new faith to inspire nations with some tremendous spiritual impulse leading to renunciation of selfish ambitions, to a cleansing of hearts. Out of the House of Commons, that assembly of "hard-faced men who look as if they had done extremely well out of the war," out of that House of Worldly Wisemen, came a plea for "a spiritual lead."
In the Middle Ages western Europe was united by a single idea which sent the common man in his hundreds of thousands away to the Crusades; which enshrined itself in countless wonderful cathedrals, abbeys, churches; which produced great schools of philosophy and art, great epic poems, and great institutions. It expressed itself in a theory of government manifested in Holy Roman Empire and Holy Catholic Church. It expressed itself likewise in the lives of great men and in the royalty of St. Louis, the sainthood of St. Francis, the statesmanship of Hildebrand. This ideal, like all the ideals by which the great societies of men in the long past of our race have been fashioned, wore out. . . . To-day we possess no common ideal. We thrill with no common hope. We tremble at no common terror. The nations of Europe are all adrift one from another, and the classes within each nation have Hkewise fallen asunder. The respect for real superiorities has vanished, along with that for the traditional superiorities. Rank rests on no recognized sanction. We are all one as good as another. Vulgar ostentation replaces true distinction. The old catchwords are meaningless. . . . The world of our day languishes for a new St. Francis who shall call it to a new knowledge of itself. He will not have to go far for his message. It is not in Heaven, neither is it beyond the sea, "but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it." Who will utter the word in all simplicity ? The world is waiting for his voice. Let him plainly set before us "life and good, and death and evil." There is no doubt which we shall choose.
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So wrote from the smoking room of the House of Commons — reeking with cynicism and haunted by the betrayal of all ideals — Sir Martin Conway, M.P., to the office of the Times.
"We thrill with no common hope," he said; "we trem- ble at no common terror. " He is right in thinking so, in so far as nations are still divided and peoples are unable to link up their hopes and their terror in one united faith and action. Yet I see beneath the Europe of our present state the same hopes and the same terror stirring among all people, and out of them will come, I believe, the salvation of civilization, if it is to be saved. Even this materialism of which I have been writing is largely the bitterness of peoples whose ideals have been frus- trated but not killed, and wjao grab at petty, selfish things because they seem the way to larger hopes. A good deal of the social unrest, the spirit of revolt among us, the violence of revolution, is due to "common hopes" and "common terror," working crudely in many minds in many nations. The terror is the fear of new and devastating wars thrust upon the peoples by evil statesmanship or created by their own passions. To avoid that terror, the spirit of democracy is running about like a rat in a trap, wild-eyed, fierce with fear. It was not the love of militarism, but the fear of another war, which caused the French people to demand ruthless sanctions against the Germans, to support the Polish alliance, to flame with anger against the English who spoke of fair play even to Germany. And it was not a different motive, but the same, which led the EngHsh democrats to protest against too harsh a treatment of Germany, because they believed that only by reconcili- ation and generosity to the beaten enemy, whose strength would one day be great again, could Europe, and France herself, be saved from another orgy of massacre. The dangerous philosophy of revolutionary labor, the wild
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insanity of Bolshevism itself, and its reaction in many countries like Italy and England, fostered by men of evil, with evil manifestations of bloodshed and violence, had their influence over the simple minds of the masses because of their fair promise of fulfilUng the "common hopes" of humanity and averting the ''common terror. " Those hopes were and are the abandonment of slaughter as a method of argument between one nation and another, a closer brotherhood of men under international law, the security of the individual and of his family from degrading poverty, the abolition of rivalry between class and class by greater equality of service and reward, the raising of the general standard of life so that all t
men and women shall have a fair share of life's beauty I
and joy. These are the ideals astir in the democracies -,
of England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, the United '}
States. They are good ideals. They could be blessed |
by Pope and priests and pastors. They are indeed the !
ideals of society set out in the Gospel of Christ for which j
we have all been struggling through centuries of travail. ^
They are now astir, passionately, in the little houses in ■*
mean streets, in peasants' hovels, in city slums, in revo- lutionary committees, in Red armies, in literary debat- ing societies, in the private apartments of the Pope of Rome. Most of the troubles of Europe to-day are due to the desperate eflPorts of peoples to fulfill those ideals. |
In their human bhndness and folly they adopt evil to |
attain the ideal good. English workingmen, like those j
in other countries, think that by striking continually !
they can maintain their wages to the level of a high I
standard of living, whereas the}'' are killing their own source of wealth. The communists believe that by killing capital they can secure equality, which perhaps is true, though it is an equality of ruin. To abolisli war and create an international society, Trotzky raised his Red armies, and Lenin launched his ultimatum
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against all governments, thereby leading to appalling atrocities and to incessant bloodshed. The failure of European statesmen to create a new world out of the ruins of the old, and the power of reactionary leaders to crush the hopes of the idealists looking forward to a reconstruction of society with less inequality between those who work and those who profit, have poisoned the brains of many people not otherwise evil. Indig- nation against "profiteers," a sense of injustice, an impatience with old ways of political argument and with old calls to loyalty and obedience from men who gained most and suffered least when their calls were answered, are seething in the caldron of mass psychol- ogy. Yet the "common hopes, " masked by materialism, expressed in violence, are in their essence the general aspiration of humanity toward a higher phase of social life. Here is a great power of idealism, which some new leader might call upon for immense service. Cleansed from its grossness, lifted above selfishness, spiritualized, it might now very quickly reform the world and lead us forward to new conquests of civilization.
VII
I have said that the ideals of the time are the same in the antechambers of the Pope as in the thatched cot of the peasant. That sounds like an affected phrase, yet not long after the war it was in the Pope's own room, and from the Pope himself, that I heard the proof of that. Looking back upon that interview I had with him in the Vatican, I am astonished at the temerity with which I asked for it and the rapidity with which it was granted, for it was against all precedents and contrary to the austere etiquette and privacy which surround the Vatican. It was not merely the desire for a newspaper "scoop," the vulgarity of which I loathe,
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which led me to Rome, with the ardent wish to speak with that httle man who, as the Holy Father, has the loyalty of millions of men and women in all countries of Christendom. I was distressed with the agony of the world, almost as great in peace as in war, and it seemed to me then, as it does now, that a spiritual message was needed to give a lead to democracy. I remembered how, through the war, many people, not Catholics, had looked to the Pope as the one man who might rise above the conflict and in thundering words, or perhaps in a voice of penetrating sweetness, call the world back to sanity and Christian brotherhood. That did not happen. Sorrowful messages came from him, deploring the "fratricidal strife"; privately he offered himself as mediator and peacemaker, but no message came to stir the hearts of peoples with burning words, irresistible in appeal or command. In England we thought him pro-German. In Germany they thought him pro-Ally. The world ignored him and his own priests were with the world. But even now he might say something worth hearing by peoples looking for leadership. Through the Daily Chronicle of London and the Times of New York I could get the words read by millions of plain folk — ^the nobodies of life who were looking for a spiritual lead. That quite simply and truly was why I asked to interview the Pope.
My intermediary was a certain Monsignor Ceretti, well known in the United States and Australia, where he had learned to speak English with a slight American accent and breezy unconventionality of manner which encouraged audacity. He laughed heartily when I told him of my desire. "Impossible!" he said. "They don't allow journaHsts, even at a public audience." We spoke of other things. Tactfully I abandoned my request until the end of the conversation, when I said,
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"Of course there is no chance?" He smiled and said, "I will let you know."
Of course there was no chance, and I put the idea out of my head until at the Hotel Bristol I received a card permitting me to be received in private audience by iS^ Saintete for twenty minutes, at noon on the following day. The impossible had happened!
It was of course a great honor — President Wilson himself had been granted this same time limit — and to me a great adventure. I remember now my nervous- ness, as I put on evening dress on the morning of the interview — according to etiquette — and wrecked a white tie so miserably that I had to borrow a waiter's, and made a hopeless botch of it. So through the golden sunHght of an October day in Rome, in the year 19 19, I drove in an old carozza to the Vatican. I felt like a man with a great mission, I was going to get a message which might help the sick old world a little. As the great dome of St. Peter's came into view, with the wide- embracing sweep of its colonnades — those mighty columns on each side of the cathedral square — I thought of the great popes who had raised the magnificence of this shrine and whose acts had made Rome the head- quarters of Christendom through every age. Some of them had been evil men, weak men, but many were strong, with a burning passion in them which had lighted new fires of faith, active in charity, unyielding in their assertion of authority, immensely powerful, not only by virtue of their office, but by force of charac- ter, splendor of justice, love of humanity, sainthood. The world needed such leadership now.
In the white entrance hall of the Vatican, to the right of St. Peter's, I was saluted by the halberdiers in their striped tunics and hose, passed up a long flight of marble steps, walked through many antechambers in which stood groups of papal guards, and in a smaller room
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was greeted by a chamberlain who knew my business. Five minutes passed, which seemed longer than ten. A door opened and a monk came out with a smile about his lips as though satisfied with words spoken to him. The chamberlain beckoned me. At the doorway stood Benedict XV.
He was a simple figure, dressed in white, not so tall as I had expected — a tiny man — and with a scholar's look, a little austere at first glance. Only at a glance, for, after my first salute and when I asked him for permission to speak in French, he laughed in a genial way, and said, in French also, *'In that language we shall understand each other. "
Then he took me by the hand and led me to a chair close to his own, so that we sat side by side.
He asked me about America first, having heard that I had been there not long ago, and then asked me to tell him about the little studies I have been making of the conditions of Europe after the war.
I spoke to him about the distress of peoples burdened by high prices and heavy taxation, and about the curious and rather dangerous psychology of many people in England, France, Belgium, and Germany — probably in Italy also — who are in revolt against present conditions, and are disillusioned about that "new world" which they expected after the war.
The Pope listened attentively, and then cut me short, as I had hoped.
"Yes," he said, "the war was a scourge" — he used that word ^^ jieau^ several times in his conversation — "and the effects of it are enormous and incalculable. When it began people imagined that it would be a quick war, lasting three, four, five months. Few guessed that it would last for nearly five years. That long period of strife — ^that terrific scourge — will have far-reaching and enduring results. The people must make up their
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minds to endure the consequence of war. They must steel the?nselves to suffer. At the same time we must do everything in our power to alleviate those sufferings and to ease the burdens of those who can least afford to support them."
I noticed that throughout our conversation the Pope's thoughts seemed to be concentrated mostly upon the conditions of the working classes. He spoke of the people rather than of their rulers, and of the poor rather than of the rich.
When, for instance, I referred agam to the strikes and other symptoms of social unrest in many countries, he said:
"The people have been irritated by a sense of injus- tice. . . . There are many men who have made money out of this war."
He made a gesture with his forefinger and thumb, as though touching money, and said:
"Those who grew rich out of the war will have to pay. The burden of taxation will, no doubt, fall heavily upon them."
He spoke of the great difficulty of the financial situ- ation in all countries which have been at war. He seemed to think there was no easy or quick solution of those economic problems, nor any immediate prospect of bringing down high prices to a normal level.
"It is difficult," he said, "difficult."
I was interested when he referred to the question of the forced loan in Italy. That was a project by which a levy was to be made on all capital in Italy, starting at 5 per cent on all fortunes above £800 and going up to 40 per cent on the largest fortunes.
The Pope did not express any definite opinion upon this measure, but said, "Undoubtedly such taxation as that would lay a heavy burden upon the whole
nation. "
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For a few minutes his mind went back to the great conflict which had caused all this financial ruin in Europe, and he spoke of what the Catholic Church had done and tried to do to alleviate its miseries and agonies.
"We could do very little," he said, "in comparison with the enormous suffering caused by the war; but as far as possible we took every opportunity of relieving the sorrows of people by works of charity. We could do no more than that, and it was only small compared with all the sufl^ering, but it did bring comfort to many poor people — ^wives and mothers, prisoners and wounded — and mitigated some of the severities of military acts. " }
He mentioned briefly some of the work which had I
been achieved under his direction, and referred me to a detailed list of charitable services done during the war by the Holy See.
Among those works which Benedict particularly mentioned were the exchange of prisoners of war in- capacitated for military service, following his telegram dated December 31, 1914, to the sovereigns and heads of belligerent states, and the liberation and exchange of civilian prisoners.
These proposals were accepted, and the exchange of prisoners through Switzerland proceeded quickly, so that between March, 191 5, and November, 1916, 2,343 Germans and 8,868 Frenchmen returned to their own countries, while in a single month 20,000 French people passed from occupied regions to southern France.
Then the Pope mentioned to me the work done under his direction for endeavoring to discover the where- abouts of missing men. Soon after the war began letters began to pour into Rome, mostly addressed to the "Holy Father" himself, imploring news of missing combatants. The Pope read them, took notes, and ordered inquiries to be made, and toward the end of
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1914 he instituted a special bureau, with branches afterward at Paderborn, Freiburg, and Vienna.
"In many cases," said the Pope, **we were able to give news to poor anxious famihes, but of course in many other cases there was disappointment."
Over 100,000 letters were sent to the families of Italian soldiers who were captured or missing.
He also mentioned the work done after his prolonged negotiations with the Powers to secure a refuge in Switzerland for the sick and wounded, and especially for consumptives.
*'We used our influence," he said, "whenever possible, to commute the death penalty of people condemned by military law in Austria and Germany. In a number of cases this was successful."
It was owing to the Pope's intervention that over a hundred French hostages from Roubaix were liberated, and among many other people. Princess Marie de Croy (the friend of Nurse Cavell), who was condemned to ten years' penal servitude for having concealed French and Belgian soldiers, owed the mitigation of her punish- ment and other concessions to the Pope's intercession. It was impossible for him to act in the case of Nurse Cavell, owing to the rapidity and secrecy of her exe- cution.
The Pope made only a passing allusion to these serv- ices, and said again: "It was very little. We did all that was possible, but it only touched the great anguish of the war."
He told me where I could get detailed accounts of the enormous sums of money sent by the Holy See to Bel- gium, Poland, Montenegro, and other countries, for the purpose of feeding starving populations, and of his repeated protests against the brutalities of war by whomsoever they might be committed, and of his three appeals for peace, the last of which, dated August i,
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1917, contained concrete proposals for the beginning of negotiations, very similar to President Wilson's "Fourteen Points" which came later.
I tried to induce the Pope to continue upon that line of conversation, but he came back suddenly to the con- ditions prevailing after the war, and expressed the hope that the disillusionment of peoples, the inevitable rise in prices owing to taxation, and financial distress, would not lead to violence or anarchy.
"It is the duty of all men," he said, "to endeavor to solve these social problems in a lawful and peaceable way and so that the burden will be fairly shared with good will and charity. "
Speaking about the relations between capital and labor, he referred several times to the writings or "Encyclicals" of Leo XIII upon those subjects, which, he said, expressed very clearly and in great detail the Christian principles regarding the rights of working- men and of employers, as well as the duties of the state. He hoped those writings by Leo XIII might be popularized, as they bore directly upon the problems of modern social conditions.
"All their teaching," he said, "may be summed up in two words — Justice and Charity. If men behave justly and with real Christian charity toward one another, many of the troubles of the world will be re- moved. But without justice and charity there will be no social progress. "
After a few more remarks on general subjects, in which he showed his desire for the welfare of the people and for an alleviation of the sufferings which now prevail in so many countries as a direct consequence of the war, the Pope rose from his chair and the audience ended, after exactly twenty minutes, with his direct permission to me to pubhsh the general course of this conversation.
The words he had spoken were not sensational, To
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be quite truthful, I was disappointed with them. There was nothing in what he had said which would call to the hearts of peoples with trumpet notes, no great cry of pity and appeal, no passion of spiritual leadership. Here was a little, scholarly man, using no high-flown phrases, but talking with keen common sense, sincere interest in the problems of democracy, sadness at the tragedy of the world. Most people would see nothing but platitudes in what he told me. Yet, after all, as I reflected, when I went out again into the sun-swept square of St. Peter's, they were platitudes based upon the authority of old and wise tradition, and upon a faith in Christ, and such words spoken by a pope or by a peasant might fall strangely upon the ears of a world deafened by loud and hostile cries, after a war in which such a phrase as "Christian charity" was mocked by hatred and cruelty. After this interview I wrote a sentence which now I read and write again: "Those two words, now, at this present day, in this Europe which I see so full of suffering, revolt, and passion, hold perhaps the truth toward which mankind is groping desperately in all manner of ways, with divers philos- ophies. They overturned the pagan world when Peter came to Rome, and still have power. '*
VIII
Perhaps Christianity is passing beyond the faith of men who have no longer the simplicity of mind to believe its mysteries. We must face that question. If so, is there any new religion likely to arise and com- mand the allegiance of the world with an authority which they acknowledge as divine? For if not, it is certain that there will be no rally up from the spiritual degra- dation into which we have fallen, but still further a lowering of moral standards, a grosser materialism.
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All the experience of human life in history goes to show that mankind will not be obedient long to any law of self-restraint and self-denial unless it is imposed upon their conscience by a supernatural authority which they believe divine. Yet without self-denial, human society must cease to exist, even human life must end abruptly, because men and women will not continue to raise up children unless they are impelled by the fear of sin. For the pursuit of human happiness ends always in disillusion and despair, and without spiritual hope of some compensating life beyond the grave this earthly span will seem but mockery as always it has seemed in the past to thoughtful souls, balancing the debit and credit side of life's account.
There are some who believe that by "Education" |
humanity will reach greater heights of happiness and a nobler code of moral law. That is hard to believe, for the philosophers of the past and present have not claimed great stores of happiness, though they were rich in knowledge. Nor has education worked out to virtue, as far as we may grasp the standards of the high- est culture. Germany was, beyond doubt, the best educated nation in Europe, but the most educated among them were not most virtuous. They were most wicked. In Italy of the Renaissance there were fine scholars, great humorists, lovers of beauty, but they put no curb on passion, nor did all their talent kill their cruelty. The code of virtue is hard to obey. It is the martyr- dom of passion. It is pain to the flesh and torture to the spirit, except among rare souls who find an easy way through life. Nor will any change in the code of morality help human nature to be free of this penalty of pain. Easy divorce may break a marriage which has failed, but will not mend broken hearts. Marriage or no marriage, love free as the four winds, the abohtion of all law and punishment, will not take out of life its
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hardships and Its agonies, and as we know, if the past means anything to the present, the lack of law, the denial of spiritual duties, ordained by a God believed and feared by men, ends in beastiality and blood lust. For the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
It must be the old faith, or a new faith, with divine authority, stronger over the minds of men than man- made law. That is acknowledged, subconsciously, by all people to-day. Those who have abandoned the old faith are not satisfied with atheism or agnosticism. Secretly they grope about for some other God, or Devil. There is an immense amount of this secret groping, this reaching out to a spirit world by means of incantations, spells, and wizardries. It is a bad sign. It was done in Rome before the downfall, in London at its lowest phase, between the Middle Ages and Modernity, when foul old James was king and Kerr with his witch- wife was favorite in Paris before the Revolution. INo new faith to lead humanity forward seems hkely to come from spirit-rappings, table-turnings, planchettes, and all the incoherent revelations of the subconscious mind exhibited in the "spirit-writings'* of Vale Owen and his kind, which have deluded so many simple minds craving for spiritual guidance, for commun- ion with their dead, for certainty in future life.
It has, perhaps, only one redeeming quality, and that is the proof that human beings need some high sanction for their way of life, and reach out to a spiritual law as their one hope of comfort.
All this stirring and strife of the world means that. All this social unrest is but the search for the ideal happi- ness. And everywhere, in all classes and all nations, there are numbers of men and women filled with a pas- sion for service, ready for self-sacrifice, desperately eager for spiritual leadership which will give the world
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greater peace, and the peoples of the world a better chance of happiness in their souls and in their lives. There is an amount of good will in the world to-day which would recreate all social life, if but a leader came to guide it and unite it with a common impulse. I do not think that leader will come, not in the old way, singly, in sainthood, with some message of all-embracing love. I think rather it will be by the closing up of all these separated impulses among the plain folk, by a sudden unity of purpose before a common peril threat- ening them all, and by the combined leadership of many minds, still young and unformed, in our midst, gathering up all these ideals and emotions and hopes and giving form to them, and order. ■
The common peril is the decay of civilization by a J
lowering of the standards of living, due to the breakdown j
of economic machinery which turned the wheels of our old life, and the menace of another devastating war which would stop them altogether. The peoples are conscious of that peril. Instinctively, at least, they are aware of It. I believe that suddenly, when it assumes a more terrifying aspect, they will gather together in a great and common crusade to avert its horrors. All the myriad impulses of good will which I find everywhere in the world beneath the hard crust of national egotism, will flow in a broad, steady river of spiritual purpose, and perhaps the old lamps of Christian faith will be relit.
There is, I fancy, a troubled conscience among some of the ministers of the Christian churches, a sense of guilt and of fear. In the universal tragedy of the war they were rebuked by the pettiness of their sectarian quarrels, their utter loss of touch with the souls of men, condemned to die because their teaching had failed. Now, after the war, they are troubled because in that time they were Impotent, divided into nationalities
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like the warring nations, and into defenders of the state (right or wrong), instead of being united as defend- ers of the Faith. Surely, as they knew, religion must be more universal than that of Juju men of the war- painted tribes. In the Hibbert Journal at which I glance from time to time as an adventure in psychology, there have been great outpourings of heart, confes- sions of failure, pleas for unity, programs for bringing the Christian churches into closer touch with the people. They seem to believe they have their chance now, once more, to restore the old faith to the people, and their last chance. I believe that the Protestant churches will make a desperate bid for that by identifying them- selves with the economic interests of democracy and supporting them in all demands that are clear in justice. This new attempt was seen very clearly in the great British coal strike in the spring of this year, when a group of bishops of the Anglican Church supported the case of the miners and affirmed in the spirit of Pope Leo XIII that the first charge on industry should be the wages of labor sufficient for the decent livelihood of the workers. That was a sign of a new spirit in the Church of England which did not excite more than a passing comment, yet it was remarkable from a body of men who by their tradition of caste and training, since the alli- ance between state and Church, have been aristocratic in their intellectual outlook, stubborn opponents of democratic progress, and, with a few notable exceptions, stanch defenders of the power and privilege of wealth, however unjust in its oppression. Even now the clergy of England as a body, apait from many zealous mis- sionaries among the poor of the cities, stand for the old order and not for the new, for the squirearchy and not for the peasantry, for aristocracy of rank and money against the rising claims of the great crowd. They do §o without corrupt intentions or conscious snobbery,
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being for the most part men of amiable character and devoted service, abominably poor themselves in the small parishes, but it is their intellectual heritage.
There is one among them who is an intellectual champion of the old order, a very dangerous enemy of democracy whose very name he loathes as a foul, ill- flavored word. This is Dean Inge, one of the most remarkable figures in Enghsh hfe to-day — "the gloomy Dean," as he is called in the popuir.r press. A mel- ancholy man, profoundly interested in all the facts of Hfe, able to relate them to the experience of history throughout the ages, he has an angry, irritable contempt for the shabby ignorance, the loose thinking, the lyings, shams, and insincerities of pohticians and pressmen. With a gloomy vision, justified, alas, in its gloom, he re- gards the moral slackness of the masses and the economic misery of Europe without sentiment, and in a hard, realistic spirit. He is contemptuous of the little ex- pedients of humanists and intellectuals to cure the evils of our state. He sees strong tides and currents of social evolution sweeping all such efforts like straws before them. He watches the checks and balances of nature, controUing the destiny of men. He sees man himself as a puppet of blind forces buffeted about, broken, without power over his own direction. Disease, famine, wars, the ebb and flow of trade, the struggle of races, the rise and fall of empires, the progress and retrogression of human society, are the themes with which he deals with a sense of mastery and with a kind of savage joy in revealing the impotence and absurdity of human en- deavor. His arguments have brought him to the con- clusion that the white races will go down before the dark races unless they revert to dirt-cheap labor, abandon all social progress for the masses, and raise greater armies than before to maintain their heritage — even then being bound to lose in course of time
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when the dark races will also arm and advance to destroy.
Testimonies [he wrote] which might easily be multiplied, and which are not contradicted, are sufficient to prove that under a regime of peace, free trade, and unrestricted migration the colored races would outwork, underlive, and eventually exterminate the whites. The importance of this fact cannot be exaggerated. The result of the European, American, and Australian labor movement has been to produce a type of workingman who has no survival value, and who but for protection in its extremest form, the prohi- bition of immigration, would soon be swept out of existence. And this protection rests entirely on armed force; in the last resort, on war. It is useless to turn away from the facts, however unwelcome they may be to our socialists and pacifists. The abolition of war and the establishment of a league to secure justice and equality of treatment for all nations, would seal the doom of the white laborer, such as he has made himself. There was a time when we went to war to compel the Chinese to trade with us, and when we ruined a flourishing Indian trade by the competition of Lancaster cotton. That was the period which it is the fashion to decry as a period of ruthless greed and exploitation. The workingman has brought that period to an end. To-day he is dreaming of fresh rewards, doles, and privileges which are to make the white countries a para- dise for his class. And all the time he is living on sufference, behind an artificial dike of ironclads and bayonets, on the other side of which is a mass of far more efficient labor, which would swallow him up in a generation if the barriers were removed.
In his philosophical writings Dean Inge strives to be unbiased, scientific in his search for truth, but through- out them all he reveals himself as the protagonist of aristocracy and the enemy of the mob, a believer in slave labor, well disciplined, kept tame, subservient to authority by force and moral obedience. He belongs to the school of thought which in the early nineteenth century defended the use of child labor in factories for fourteen hours a day, fought step by step against all the Factory Acts which gave the workers a chance of decency and health, and opposed the trade union which helped to gain those victories as the work of the
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devil. The clergy of the Church of England, especially those in comfortable livings, belonged to that school of thought, and betrayed the Gospel of Christ by their toadyism to the cruelest company of industrial slave drivers that have ever escaped hanging by outraged humanity. It was their callousness to the sufferings of the people that divorced the Church of England from the masses. If Dean Inge prevails over his brethren, the Church of England will disappear under a wave of wrath. But he is a lonely man these days.
Everywhere, in all classes and in all nations, the spirit of the people is rising, claiming new rewards, a bigger share of life's good gifts, and seeking some way of escape from the eternal menace of war, the crushing burdens of armaments, the idiocy of international strife. Ever3rwhere the spirit of good will is gathering strength to fight the spirit of ill will, to obtain union over disunion, and construction instead of destruction. Even Dean Inge ought to see that if the peril of the dark races is real, the only answer is the unity of the white races, rather than endless rivalry with bouts of massacre. |
The people begin to see that. They demand leadership |
to that end. They will produce their own leaders. It is the hope of Europe.
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DURING the war the German people were put out- side the pale of civilization by the Allied propagan- dists and by public opinion, fever-heated not only by those engineers of passion (enormously efficient), but by their own nightmares of imagination and ferocity. The French called them "Bodies" and "Barbares, " the British called them "Huns," and the readers of the Daily Mail and other popular journals believed firmly, and here and there continue to believe, that "German" means the same thing as "Devil," and that German human nature is in none of its characteris- tics similar to the nature of the rest of the human family, but a thing apart — obscene, monstrously cruel, abominable.
Most of these characteristics were recorded, in mil- lions of words, within the first six weeks of war, and became fixed for all the war, and for years to come, in miUions of minds. The invasion of Belgium was the first shock under which the imagination of people who knew nothing of modern warfare (none of us knew) reeled and saw red. Then followed atrocity stories — the cutting off of babies' hands and women's breasts, the shooting of civilians, the burnings in Alost and Louvain, abominable outrages on women and children. These things, told day after day by correspondents, repeated with whispered words of horror in every house
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in France and England, reiterated and confirmed (it seemed) by the Bryce Report — created a hatred of the German race too deep for words, in masses of simple hearts. Those people were surely devilish! Not Attila and his Huns had done worse things in the dawn of his- tory. They were human gorillas, monsters. The re- moval of the women of Lille and other towns for en- forced labor away from their own folks aroused the fury to flaming heights again. The use of poison gas, their treatment of prisoners, and, later, the sinking of merchant ships and the Lusitania and Red Cross ships in an unrestricted U-boat warfare, gave fresh food to those greedy for the continuity of Hate. The Germans from first to last were "Huns" of inhuman wickedness. So many wrote, and so most of those who read believed. I was not one of those who wrote or believed as much as that. Never once throughout the whole war did I call the Germans "Huns," never once, from first to last, did I in my thoughts or in my words credit those who put them outside the human family. I believed always, with what seems to me now a strange obstinacy, though I have not altered my belief, that the Germans as a people were neither better nor worse than others in Europe, though under the discipline of powers a little more evil and cruel, and ruthless in cruelty, than other powers dominating the actions of common men. I have called this conviction of mine a "strange obstinacy" because, looking back on it, I marvel that I withstood the tremendous pressure of public opinion and of Ger- man guilt. I had no blood ties or other bonds with the German folk. Before the war I had only spent a few weeks in their country. My affection was whole- heartedly for the French, and during the war this devel- oped into a deep enthusiasm. I was not a pacifist in the sens€ of a man afraid to fight, or a "conscientious objector" against fighting, for as a correspondent all
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my soul was with the fighting men, and I risked my life with them. Nor could any soul alive have been more sickened by those tales of horror, and by cruelty unde- nied and undeniable. I was there to see the manner of German destruction, day by day, year by year, in ruined cities and ravaged fields, and all their killing of young manhood. Yet never did I believe in their mon- strosity, or their place apart in the human family, as ogre changelings. I think what was always at the back of my mind was the belief that the German people, as a whole, the peasants and the clerks and the manufac- turing fellows, were but victims of a damnable discipline and of a still more damnable philosophy, imposed upon them by military minds of a rigid and almost religious caste; and that those Prussian Junkers were only rather more logical, and very much more efficient, in the fulfillment of their ideas than certain English militarists whom I had happened to meet along the way of life — an opinion in which I have since been confirmed by certain generals in Ireland and others like them in cere- bral structure of anthropoid type.
Again and again I met German prisoners, captured freshly on the field of battle, talked with them, watched them, and read their letters, which I used to grab from dugouts. They were human fellows, all right. They hated the war and called it the "Great Swindle" years before it ended, and cursed their officers. They were afraid, like our men, under barrage fire. They were mostly very civil, and glad of a civil word to them. They loved their wives and children, like most human animals (a little more than most, perhaps), though doubtless they were unfaithful behind the lines in France, being men in exile, and eager for what life could give them before death came. In physique masses of them were extraordinarily like English fellows of country regiments. There was not a bean to choose between
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them. Doubtless some of them got beastly drunk when there was a chance, like some of ours, and men who are beastly drunk do beastly things.
Yes, but atrocities.? . . .
Well, they had shot down civilians in cold blood, or in hot blood, and called them, justly or unjustly, francs- tireurs. Shots had come from Belgian windows, so they said. They had burned Belgian homes and put Belgian men and boys against a wall and killed them. Horrible! — but defended in my hearing by British officers, who said: "We should do the same. It's the law of war. " Doubtless there had been many atroci- ties, but I could never get evidence of any of them. All the evidence I could get myself, throughout the war, in the places where they were alleged to happen, was against the truth of them. No living babies had their hands cut off, nor women their breasts. That is cer- tain, in spite of faked photographs. No Canadians were crucified, though it will be believed in Canada for all time. The evidence was analyzed and rejected by our G. H. Q. There were no German "corpse factories,'* though our Chief of Intelligence patronized the myth. I myself inquired for atrocities in Lille, Liege, and captured villages in which we rescued civilians who had lived for years in Germans hands. I could not get any evidence at all. The civilians themselves, while cursing the Germans as a ''sale race^^^ did not charge them with abominable acts resembhng in any way the atrocity stories of the newspapers. I am convinced that much of the evidence in the Bryce Report is utterly untrust- worthy. Nevertheless, there were, no doubt, atrocities, horrible and disgusting cruelties, on evidence that can- not be Hghtly disregarded, and according to the nature of men — peasants, drunken fellows, degenerate brutes, living in an enemy country in time of war. We have seen in Ireland the cruelty of human passion on both
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sides. There were bad things done by German soldiers, and there were worse things done by the orders of the German High Command. That business of the women in Lille was unpardonable. The sinking of hospital ships was a degradation of humanity itself. The smashing of French machinery in cotton mills and silk industries revealed an evil genius corresponding to the destruction of Irish creameries condoned by Hamar Greenwood and providing amusement to Lloyd George. The use of poison gas aroused an outcry from civilized peoples — among the Allies. Our own intensive use of it rather dulled the sensibilities of public opinion, and our recent experiments in a more deadly form of gas (highly successful) show that our military minds intend to use it in the next war, should military minds still be allowed to have their way. Yet the charge sheet remains heavy against the Germans in the war, nor were the people themselves guiltless in supporting acts then which now, in defeat, they condemn. Not guilt- less, callous of much cruelty, so that they might get victory. Well, we find more cruelty in human nature, outside Germany, then once we cared to believe. In Russia it is not unknown, though Russians w^ere so good and kind when they were still fighting on our side. Even in England, and in Ireland, there are potentiali- ties of cruelty which are not quite reassuring to our self-complacency, though, on the whole, we are a kindly and good-natured folk, unless we have swerved from the straight line of tradition. The more I see of differ- ent peoples, up and down the world, the more I under- stand that they cannot be held guilty for the acts of their rulers, for the policy of their diplomats, for the cruelty of their fellows, or for their own ignorance and stupidity. There is no "England" when foreign folk say "England" does this or does that, thinks this or that. There are millions of English people who do and
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think quite differently, or have no share in what is done or thought in particular cases. There is no "France" when we say "France" is hostile to England, "France" wants to establish a military autocracy in Europe. There are many French people who love England still, many who are antimilitary. So the German house- wife, watching her children develop bulbous heads with rickets (what they call "the English disease") because of our blockade, had very Httle to do, as far as I can see, with the gas attack at Ypres, and the peasant hustled from his plow to front-line trenches was not respon- sible directly for Von Tirpitz and the U-boat war. " But they supported their government," says the logical man. "They did not rise and overthrow their devilish leaders." That is true. But English folk decline to be branded because their government has done things which they detest, villanious things, without honor, dirty things which cannot bear the light of day. The clerks, the shop girls, the farmers' boys, the mechanics, have not overthrown a government which is the most sinister combination of corrupt interests ever known in EngHsh history. They have neither the power, nor the knowledge, to control or check or defy their gov- ernment. Most of them are too busy with their little needs of life to bother about it.
II
The claim of the Germans to an ordinary share of human characteristics was admitted by most of our fighting men throughout the war, who called the man on the opposite side of the way "Fritz" or "Jerry," with a certain sympathy, as being in the same bloody mess, and with real admiration as a first-class fighting man. The claim was also admitted, instantly and astoundingly, by the British troops who occupied the
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Rhine bridgeheads after the armistice. The Germans showed no kind of hostihty against our men. On the contrary, there was something rather humihating at first in their show of friendhness. They went too far, it seemed to some of us, in playing Enghsh patriotic airs in their public restaurants, so soon after their defeat. Fear, perhaps, as well as a desire to be gemilth- ligf was the secret motive of their friendliness. If British soldiers had been ugly tempered, they could have made a hell along the Rhine. Better to keep them good tempered !
All motives apart, there was quickly on the Rhine a "cordial understanding" between our men and German families in whose houses they were billeted. Whether we hke to admit it or not, there is something German in our own blood, in our way of hfe, in our manner of speech. The houses were spotlessly clean, and our Tommies liked this cleanhness. When taps were turned on, water came out, and our men, after expe- rience in French billets, where sanitary engineering is not a strong science, said, "Bloody wonderful!" After- ward some of them, under the tuition of some DeutscheS' Mddcheriy said, "Merkiviirdig!" There German girls were neat and clean and fair and plump, like buxom country wenches at home. They were good inter- preters of German life to British lads.
Our officers yielded more tardily, with certain prick- ings of conscience, and with a stirring of old memories and oaths of hatred, to German civility, until most of those, too, were captured with admiration for the good order of German social life, for their astonishing indus- try and efficiency, for the solid comfort of their homes, and for their habitual sense of discipline. There were certain types of German manhood who remained re- pulsive to Enghsh eyes and ideas — the bald-headed vulture type — but so quickly, so utterly, did all sense
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of Hate disappear, that, sitting in some of those restaurants in Cologne while the gospel of hate was still in full blast at home, I used to think that English maiden ladies and patriotic old gentlemen in St. James's Street clubs, and newspaper leader writers, would have been stricken dumb if suddenly confronted with these scenes where English soldiers chinked beer mugs with German soldiers, sat in joyous company with German girls, and Hstened to German bands playing "The Roast Beef of Old England" and "Britannia Rules the Waves." It was just a recognition that these people, anyhow, were human souls, not individually guilty of atrocities, not "Huns" in their manners and ideas, not particularly responsible for the war, and jolly glad, like our people, that it was all over at last. To me it seemed a great moral lesson in humanity. I saw it as a hope that, after all, human nature might be stronger than international hatreds — ^though I was wrong, at the time, for international hatred reasserted itself, mostly on our side, and the friendliness of men in contact with one another could not overcome the hos- tilities and greeds and plunder spirit of politicians and peoples not in human contact with defeated nations. Justice, also, had to be considered, and as Madame Roland apostrophized liberty from the scaffold, so might we cry out, ''Comme on t'a jouee en ton noml" (What games they have played in thy name!").
Ill
The German people acknowledged defeat. It is a mere newspaper myth which pretends still that they never realized or admitted defeat. The terms of sur- render on Armistice Day were the great acknowledg- ment— an annihilating blow to all their military pride. The signing of the Peace of Versailles was the knell of
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doom to any last vestige of incredulity. The German Empire had surrendered its armies, its fleet, its mer- cantile marine, its property in many countries, and was pledged for years, and generations, to pay such great sums of money in indemnities to the victor nations that no imagination could grasp their significance beyond the certain fact that German industry would be taxed to the utmost limit under the pressure of irre- sistible force. Every soldier who tore off his shoulder straps and went back home told the tale of the last months of war, when there were no reliefs, no reinforce- ments, no chance of holding the front against the enemy attacks, so that they were rounded up like sheep after ghastly slaughter. It is true that men like Ludendorff and other generals tried to fling the blame of defeat on the civilian populations, wrote about "the stab in the back," blamed the revolution for the breakdown of the armies. That cowardly camouflage has not de- ceived the German people, though newspaper corre- spondents accept it on its face value.
"You have gambled. You have lost. You must pay!" said a Socialist Deputy in the Reichstag when I was in Berlin this summer, and he turned to the mem- bers of the Right — representatives of the Junkers — who tried to mock at him, but then were silent under that lash of truth.
They knew they were defeated, the German people, in their bodies and in their souls.
In their bodies they knew long before the ending of the war. We do not yet realize — those, at least, who were not in Germany at once after the armistice — how sharp was the tooth of hunger which bit them and how long it gnawed at them. Even rich people who could pay any money for smuggled food, the practice of schleichhandlung, as they call it, over and above the allowance of their ration cards, found it hard to get
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enough to satisfy their appetites. Even they were always a Httle hungry, just to the point of thinking continually of food, remembering their last good meals, anticipating the next, so that, as I am told by them, it became an obsession. The middle classes, not rich enough for much in the way of schleichhandlung (which is smuggling), and kept to the strict severity of official rationing, never, for two years, had enough to eat, or at least never enough nutritious food. They indulged in chemical products, ersatz food, which gave them a false sense of satisfaction for a time, but no red corpuscles. They saw their children withering, weakening. In the poorer classes there was real star- vation, and the women and children were victims of tuberculosis and every kind of illness due to lack of milk and fats. Women fainted at their work. A strange drowsiness crept over them, so that working girls would drop asleep in tramcars, as I saw them after the armistice, through sheer anaemic weakness. For the children of the cities the last two years of war and the first years of peace were doom years. They, like the babes of Vienna, were so rickety that they did not grow bones in their bodies, but only gristle.
It was at the beginning of 1916 that the pinch began. By October of 1916, when the milk ordinances were in force, most cities had lost their last chance of fat suffi- ciency. German scientists, confirmed by British, have worked out the statistics of "calories" required for a workingman of middle weight as 3,300 a day.
In the summer of 1916 the German folk were reduced to 1,985 per capitum. In the winter 1916-17 they were reduced to 1,344, ^^^ i^i the summer of 1917 to 1,100. The majority of the German folk were obliged to exist on a third of the means of life necessary for normal nourishment. The effect on childbirth and child life was devastating. The birth rate went down during
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the war by 40 per cent, and the death rate of children reached sinister figures.
In Prussia 50,391 children between one and fifteen years of age died in 191 8, compared with 27,730 in the year before the war. In Mecklenburg-Schwerin, an agricultural state, 819 children died in 1918, compared with 360 in 1914. Tuberculosis ravaged children of all ages, as well as adults, mostly women, and in 191 5 there were 61,000 deaths; in 1916, 66,544; i^i 1917, 87,032; and in 191 8 over 97,000 — from that disease, directly due to undernourishment.
Almost worse than the deaths was the weakness of the living, thousands of children crippled for life by hip and joint diseases, and so weakened for life by the hard- ships of their early da^^s that in 1919 a careful analysis of school children proved that 60 per cent of them were from one and a half to two years underdeveloped, accord- ing to the normal standards of their ages. Even in this year 1921 the percentage of children underdeveloped to that extent in the industrial cities remains very high.
So the German people suffered, and the worst thing that women suffered, and many men, was to see their children weakening and dying, or never gaining in health and strength. No wonder, poor souls, that they wished well to a U-boat war which should break the blockade and let food in, did not cry out against the cruelty even of a Lusitania sinking in which the bodies of babes were delivered to the sea, because of millions of German children doomed to death if the blockade lasted with its deadly grip upon German life. To break that net anyhow, by any violence, by any cruelty, was justified in the souls of German men and women besieged through the years of war and watching the blight upon the children they had brought into an evil world. So, if I had been a German father, I should have thought, and so would you, I guess, who read this book. 10 137
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When the armistice was made, the German folk looked for reUef. "At last," they said, "the blockade will be broken and our children saved!" But month after month, as the peace treaty was being drafted and discussed by four or five leisurely and self-interested men, pleased with their high mission to alter the struc- ture of European geography and to build a new world, the blockade was kept tight, and month after month more German babies died, more withered, more sickened with horrible disease. "The justice of God!" said certain pious souls in England. If that is God's jus- tice, it is not pitiful. But it is man's cruelty, and we cannot shelter ourselves behind the back of God. The German folk were bitter against us for that. I think they had a right to be bitter, and that the verdict of history will be against us for that. We had beaten them into absolute surrender. Our force was enough to impose our terms without the need of baby-starving. Nor is it a defense to say that the Germans would have been harsher with us if they had won. Gentlemen do not regulate their conduct by the standard of those whom they condemn as brutes, or should not do so, I imagine. We had such power over our beaten enemy that we could have forgone the privilege of cruelty in that and other things.
There was one thing we did which was the worst form of cruelty — cruelty to animals. That was our holding back the prisoners of war a year and more after the armistice. Even as I write there are still some German prisoners in France, serving terms of punishment. Frightful! It was justified according to the law, utterly unjustified in human psychology. Imagine those poor wretches, just like animals, caged, fed, powerless to resist or protest. The war was over and they had re- joiced at its ending. The war had finished for fighting men, and through their barbed-wire cages they saw ours
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marching for home again, cheering, joyous. Month after month they stayed on, sick with Heimtveh, suf- fering torture of soul for their own women and babes. In Germany this was torture, too. I saw postcards written to the caged men by their women and children. "Why don't you come home, dear father? The war is over. Why do the EngHsh still keep you prisoners?" They were kept as hostages of German surrender until some went mad and tried to kill themselves.
Then at last, in the autumn of 19 19, I saw them going back, trainloads of them, passing over a railway bridge in Cologne. Each train was decked with branches of green stuff; from every window the liberated prisoners leaned out, waving red flags and red rags. I wondered at the reason of that red color. Were they all revolu- tionarists, going to make trouble because of their bitter- ness? The people of Cologne rushed out to the bridge to cheer them. But many people I saw could not cheer. They burst into tears, and stood there weeping. Those were truckloads of human tragedy, a year late for peace. It would have been a larger thing if we had let them go before. It would have done good, and no harm, as a generous act. We had small men, with small brains and small hearts, at the top of things.
IV
The history of Germany after the armistice and just before was a strange study in human psychology. Their "revolution" was the mildest thing of its kind ever known in the turmoil of a nations ruin. It began with a mutiny in the fleet when the seamen marched from Kiel with the red flag, gathering adherents of soldiers, self-demobilized, ruffians liberated from prison, and young boys eager for exciting adventures in the way of shoplifting and looting. Through many towns marched
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this horde of men and boys, and in many places they suspended the Biir germeister y disarmed the poUce, and took over the control of the civic administration as far as occupying the city halls and posting revolutionary placards on walls and lamp-posts where we read them when we made our move toward the Rhine. Some clothing stores were looted, a good many officers were manhandled, having their shoulder straps and badges of rank torn from their uniforms, if they did not them- selves remove those symbols of authority, which most did, in a fearful way. But all that was not very terri- ble, and there were no scenes of bloodshed or passion- ate cruelty. Simultaneously there were moving back through Germany the remnants of broken armies, keeping good order, marching with the same old disci- pline, except when, at each town, men left the ranks, cut off their badges and buttons, and returned to civil life. The home-coming men were received as heroes by their folk. They were heroes, for they had fought in many great battles, won many great victories, and had been defeated, not by lack of courage — their rear- guard resistance had been stubborn to the end — but by their own dwindling numbers under the immense and overwhelming pressure of the Allied armies. They were garlanded with flowers as though they had won the war; and we need not sneer at that, but rather admire the spirit of that welcome home to broken men.
The red-flag columns, looting and shouting and playing at revolution, were not very terrible, as I have said, but they terrified the German civilians, who shrank back from the specter of anarchy suggested by these demonstrations. Far greater was their dread of Bolshe- vism than of Allied troops about to occupy the Rhine towns. It is indeed a fact that they looked for our army with anxious expectation, as guardians of law and
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order. From Cologne, in which the revolutionary seamen had played their usual farce, came an urgent request that our troops should occupy the city before schedule time, and when our first patrols of cavalry, which I accompanied, entered the Dom-Platz, they were received not as enemies, but as friends. Strange paradox, but easily understood by those who knew the German dread of anarchy, their instinctive and in- herited traditions of civic discipline, and their immense relief that the drain of German blood had stopped at last.
The flight of the Kaiser and the proclamation of the Republic comprised the German revolution over the whole territory of the old Empire, except in Berlin, where there was some short and desperate street fight- ing, not between supporters of the old regime and the new Republicans, but between the new Republicans and the communists, or Spartacists as they called them- selves, with Bolshevik ideals, under the leadership of Karl Liebknecht. A Provisional Government had been form.ed by Liberal and Moderate Socialists, of whom the chiefs were Ebert, Scheidemann, and Erzberger, with Doctor Solf as Foreign Minister. In the background were the Junkers and the old imperial bureaucracy, lying low, watching events with an anxiety that was gradually allayed when they realized that the German people were not out for anarchy, nor for vengeance against their old leaders, but in a vast majority were hostile to the small bodies of Spartacists. It was also made clear by Scheidemann and his colleagues (men who had been loyal throughout the war and stanch supporters of every act of military autocracy, in spite of a thin camouflage of democratic protest) that they were determined to establish the Republic on the old traditions of imperialism without the Emperor, or at least as protectors of capital and buorgeois interests.
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The military leaders [says an eyewitness of the revolution (my friend Percy Brown, in his valuable book, Germany in Dissolution)] were at a loss. They had expected the long-suffering masses to turn savagely on their late masters. Hundreds of high officers had fled the country to find that peace and defeat had found Germany merely bewildered, without a sign of revengeful temper. They found the sailors, the only people who really revolted, offering to protect the property of the wealthy until order was restored! If the General Staff had had any sort of a plan by which they could have saved their faces, they could have suppressed the revolutionary movement as easily and as completely as they have kept the people down since Bismarck showed them the way.
Karl Liebknecht and his revolutionary companion, Rosa Luxemburg, as the leaders of the Spartacist groups, the only people who believed in a real revolution of the laboring masses against the forces of capital and of bourgeoisie, m the true style of Lenin, were feared "worse than the plague," says the writer I have already quoted. They organized revolutionary out- breaks and took forcible possession of the Vorzvdrts and other newspaper offices. They were given short shrift by the Green Guards, or military police, of Berlin, under the command of Noske, who had the brain and temper of a Prussian general. With field artillery and machine guns, flame throwers and bombs, the govern- ment forces surrounded the Spartacist strongholds and shot their defenders to pieces. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who had believed in the quick success of the insurrection against the Provisional Government in Berlin, had been trying to rally up the provinces. They remained in hiding after the collapse of their comrades in Berlin, until captured by a trick of Noske's officers. On their way to prison they were brutally murdered. The ''revolution" was at an end, except for sporadic outbursts of a feeble kind here and there. It was no revolution at all, in the old sense of the word. No wild wave of fury swept over the German people
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because of the ruin and defeat into which they had been led by their rulers. There was no bloody vengeance against the military and aristocratic caste which had used the bodies of humble men as gun fodder for their imperial ambitions, and poisoned their very souls by a damnable philosophy of militarism, and for years had disciplined them brutally into servitude. No red flames made bonfires of the country houses into which the Junkers had slunk sulkily. Ludendorff and Von Tirpitz did not dangle from the crossbars of German lamp- posts, nor any other men whose arrogant conceit had brought their country into the deep gulfs of ruin, playing like gamblers with the fate of an empire, and then, when they lost, blaming the people who were victims of this insanity. The Allied peoples would have been more satisfied with the sincerity of a "change of heart" among the German folk if some of their chief thugs had been slit from ear to ear, if there had been something in the Russian style, which they deplored in Russia but desired in Germany. Not a bloodthirsty man myself, I am tempted by the thought that it would have been well if the high military caste and the Junkers of the old regime had been swept out of the country by their own folk under a sentence of lifelong banishment. It would have helped the world forward, and German democracy could have claimed greater generosity from the peoples of other nations.
The German people whom I met after the armistice were stupefied by the immense surrender of all their old pride, and bewildered by the uncertain future ahead of them. I could find no hate in them for the English, and no hate for the authors of their own tragedy. For the Kaiser they had no passionate enthusiasm, but a little pity, a little contempt, and a latent sentiment which they could not annul. They did not, and do not, believe that he "willed the war." They regarded him as a
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figurehead used by the German High Command, and a lover of peace. Out of the depths of their ruin they remembered him in the old days of German splendor and success, a fine personality, the head of the iiouse of HohenzoUern, which was identified with the glory of Prussia and the Empire. They would not fight to get him back, they did not yearn to have him back, but they had no grudge against him. So also it was with Hindenburg, who, unlike LudendorfF — unpopular every- where— remained with the armies to the end and asso- ciated himself with the German people in defeat as well as in victory. His soldiers remembered the magic of his name when he had directed them to victory. Other generals also, the commanders in the field, received that tribute of remembrance which softened the charge against them of reckless leadership to ruin. The "revolution," therefore, was not one of popular fury or vengeance. The very magnitude of their disaster united the German people for self-preservation after the war, and they saw clearly that disunion, anarchy, would lead them into deeper and blacker pits of ruin. That fear of anarchy to an order-loving people, long trained in the philosophy of bourgoise life, protection of property, industry, commerce, was the dominant thought of the masses of German folk, overwhelming all other instincts. . . . And always Russia was a ghastly warning.
So they supported Ebert, Scheidemann, and the moderate program of the Majority Socialists, with their allegiance to bureaucratic traditions and govern- mental authority. Later they swung more and more to the Right rather than to the Left, to the Deutsches Folkspartei with its imperial convictions, and to even more reactionary groups. That was when the Treaty of Versailles was revealed in the full measure of its severity and ruthlessness, and when French and
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British opinion, especially the opinion of French and British newspapers, convinced the German people .that they were still regarded as outside the pale of civilization, could hope for no generosity, for no mercy, for no fair play, even, from the Allied Powers and their Supreme Council. Under the goad of constant in- sults— still called "Huns" and "Boches, " liars and monsters — and under the menace of military "sanc- tions," and in the grip still of that blockade by starva- tion, the German spirit which had been ready for demo- cratic union with other peoples in the League of Nations and for liberation from its old traditions, reacted and hardened and was filled with bitterness.
Their revolution had been real to a degree which we do not even yet admit. It had replaced the Emperor by Ebert the tailor, and all the other kings of Germany had fled. More than that, it did represent a great change in the moral and spiritual outlook of the German people. Gone were the arrogant officers swaggering along the sidewalks and thrusting civilians to the gutter. Gone was all the military pomp and pride which had assumed so great a place in their national life. The immensity of their losses in men and wealth, the stag- gering figures of their national debts, the inevitability and enormity of the price they would have to pay, shocked the soul of Germany to its innermost recesses, uprooted the very foundations of their old faith, and gave them an entirely new vision regarding their past history and their future place. I am convinced from all I heard in Germany after the armistice — though at that time my observation was limited to the occupied zone — that the German people would have responded eagerly and thankfully to any touch of chivalry and to any conviction of real justice. They did not want to avoid punishment, but they hoped, these men and women who were victims of war, that it would not be
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greater than human nature itself could bear without revolt, nor so cruel and vindictive as to reduce them to despair. President Wilson had made great promises to democracy in his Fourteen Points, and he had included the German people in his pledges if they got rid of their old rulers and established a democratic government. Well, the German people had proclaimed their Repub- lic, and Ebert the tailor was their President, and it was stable and lasting and free from anarchy. They had fulfilled their part and shared the hopes of the peoples in open covenants openly arrived at, and the self- determination of nations. There were mass meetings in Berlin, with great placards on which was written "Give us the Fourteen Points!" But they, like all the world, saw that the peace treaty did not fulfill those promises, and carved up Europe regardless of racial boundaries and economic sense. Vienna was condemned to death. The independence of Poland was created at the expense of large German populations placed under Polish domination. Germans and Austrians in the Tyrol were handed over to Italy. And in every clause of the peace treaty the German people saw themselves doomed, as they believed sincerely, though erroneously, I think, to an industrial and commercial servitude which would deprive them for generations to come of all profit out of their own labor, and all hope of recovery. Worse to them even than that pronouncement of doom were the menaces by which it was accompanied. English newspapers, which had cried out to God for vengeance against the "Hun" who sent aircraft to bomb defense- less cities, advocated the bombing of German cities, if the representatives of Germany refused to sign the terms of peace. "Strong Allied airdromes on the Rhine and in Poland," wrote the Evening News, "well equipped with the best machines and pilots, could quickly persuade the injiabitants of the large German cities
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of the folly of having refused to sign the peace. Those considerations are elementary. For that reason they may be overlooked. They are milk for babes."
That last sentence was a sneer against certain senti- mentalists in England who desired to raise the blockade and allow German babies to get some milk. But to enforce the terms of peace, if refusal were contemplated, German babies and German women were to be blown to bits in large numbers as a means of persuasion to their statesmen. The German women and children, indeed, were to be the victims of our policy of enforcing the peace, in any case, and so it happened. The Junkers were still well fed in their country houses. LudendorfF did not go without his meals. Von Tirpitz did not have to swallow his whiskers. It was the women and children, overcrowded in tenement houses, dying of tuberculosis, ravaged by rickets, who were made the hostages of the German government. As pointed out by Mr. Norman Angell in his book, The Fruits of Vic- tory^ Mr. Winston Churchill described the character of the blockade when speaking in the House of Commons on March 3, 1919.
"This weapon of starvation falls mainly on the women and children, upon the old and the weak and the poor, after all the fighting has stopped." And then he added, not a plea for mercy, but the cold statement that we were enforcing the blockade with vigor, and would continue to do so.
Mr. Norman Angell is not going beyond the bounds of justice when he shows the utter lack of connection m the public mind or conscience between our foreign policy and the famine in Europe.
This was revealed in a curious way at the time of the signature of the Treaty. At the gathering of the representatives the German delegate spoke sitting down. It turned out afterward that he was so ill and distraught that he dared not trust himself to stand up.
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Every paper was full of the incident, as also that the paper-cutter in front of him on the table was found afterward to be broken; that he placed his gloves upon the copy of the Treaty, and that he had not thrown away his cigarette on entering the room. These were the offenses which prompted the Daily Mail to say: "After this no one will treat the Hun as civilized or repentant." Almost the entire Press rang with the story of "Rantzau's insult." But not one paper, so far as I could discover, paid any attention to what Rantzau had said. He said:
"I do not want to answer by reproaches to reproaches. . . . Crimes in war may not be excusable, but they are committed in the struggle for victory and in the defense of national existence, and passions are aroused which make the conscience of peoples blunt. The hundreds of thousands of noncombatants who have perished since November nth by reason of the blockades were killed with cold deliberation, after our adversaries had conquered and victory had been assured them. Think of that when you speak of guilt and punishment."
No one seems to have noticed this trifle in presence of the hei- nousness of the cigarette, the glove, and the other crimes. Yet this was an insult indeed. If true, it shamefully disgraced England — if England is responsible. The public, presumably, did not care whether it was true or not.
It is, of course, certain that after the signature of the terms of peace the German officials delayed the fulfill- ment of its provisions, did all in their power to post- pone some of its exactions, failed, not perhaps delib- erately (because of the weakness of undernourished workmen), to make full deliveries of coal, and in the figures presented to the Allied experts from time to time, underestimated the taxable wealth of Germany and her industrial possibilities. That was inevitable and natural. Even people condemned to death do not slip the noose gratefully upon their own necks and ask to be called early for execution. With regard to figures, no amount of anxiety for arithmetical accuracy could prevent a wide difference of calculation between German and Allied experts, both of whom were, and still are, without exact evidence as to the possibilities of German
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industrial and commercial development upon which the payments of indemnities depend. The factors were then, and still are, uncertain. They depend upon the capacity of other countries to buy German goods, upon the future of Russia, the value of the German mark, the policy of the United States regarding credits, the attitude of France regarding Westphalia and Siberia, the good or bad behavior of the Poles, the health and energy of German workmen, the reason or madness of the Supreme Council and Allied politicians, — all very unstable and incalculable quantities upon which to base an estimate of German wealth. Naturally the German experts presented figures which opposed those of the Allied experts. That was not a crime. It was not even insincerity. It was a psychological in- evitability. Yet we made a crime of it, and French and British newspapers flamed into passion against the "insults" of the German offers. "They will cheat you yet, those Junkers!" They were proclaimed to be "ridiculous and insulting" in the French Press, before ever they had been received in Paris. All German offers, even to reconstruct the devastated territories, were denounced as "the deliberate evasion of solemn pledges," and the months dragged on, and the years, while "the fruits of victory" were counted on un- planted trees, and could not be harvested.
In the Allied countries men who called themselves statesmen and were mostly little pettifogging politi- cians worrying about their own places and prestige and public favor, proclaimed the most fantastic promises to their peoples about making Germany "pay." The Germans were to be made to pay all the war costs of all the Allied nations, including pensions. When one
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sets out the simple fact again that England in four and a half years of war spent as much as in two and a half centuries before, it is self-evident that no one nation, not even Germany, which had also exhausted her re- sources by the same supreme effort in destructive energy, could pay back all that expenditure of all the Allied nations, nor any great part of it. Yet the politicians promised, and knew that they lied. They promised in order to keep their people quiet. They promised to get the people's votes, but presently the time came when the people became impatient and full of wrath — especially the French people, who had suffered most and had been promised most, and looked out upon their ravaged lands. In April of 1921 the Bill of Costs was at last presented to Germany. After many rejected offers from the German experts the indemnities were fixed at figures below those regarded as a minimum in Paris, but so enormous that the figures meant nothing to the minds of people unused to the arithmetic of inter- national finance, and were incalculable in their effect upon the world's markets even to financial experts. In the Paris Resolutions, afterward modified a little in method of payment, the Germans were called upon to pay 226 miUiards of gold marks, spread over a period covering forty-two years, in the following sums:
Years
Amounts
1921-22. 1923-25. 1926-28. 1929-31. 1932-62,
2 milliards of gold marks, annually . (( << << <( <<
4 6
At the time of the presentation of this Bill of Costs it required fifteen German paper marks to make one gold mark, and it was of course obvious that apart from ft transfer of currency insignificant compared with the
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total bill, and by a transfer of credits and securities of very little value, owing to Germany's financial condi- tion after war, the only method of payment would be by exports of merchandise, mainly in the form of manu- factured articles.
In order to cover their own national expenses and pay the reparations demanded, the Germans would have to increase their exports by at least five times the prewar figures, exceeding the combined total exportation of manufactured goods by America and England. To achieve such a vast increase in exports after a devastat- ing and ruinous war, the loss of colonies and ships, the slaughter of two million men, the undernourishment of many laborers during the years of war, the deteriora- tion of machinery and rolling stock, and the heavy taxation of capital, would require an industrial effort amounting to the miraculous. If it were achieved, Germany would capture the world's trade and kill the exports of many competing nations, including England and the United States, but at the cost, perhaps, of her own well-being, owing to the necessity of low wages, severe restriction of food imports, and the enor- mous taxation upon all that terrific energy.
It was impossible for the average German to say whether such an adventure in arithmetic were humanly possible or not. Presented with the figures, he was stunned by their enormity and believed that acceptance would involve his people in a life of slavery for genera- tions to come. He was tempted to repudiate them and let happen what would happen. The German govern- ment under Doctor Simon resigned rather than sign. It seemed doubtful whether any government could be found to sign. Days passed, and no government was found to accept the humiHating task, while the date of the ultimatum fast approached.
As it approached, passion rose high in France; the
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French people, with some exceptional groups, were enraged with the delay in getting their fruits of victory, any fruit. "Make them pay!" was the shout of the French masses, led by the French newspapers, and echoed, more doubtfully, in England, Aristide Briand, Prime Minister of France, promised to make them pay by sending "the gendarme to put his hand on the collar of the debtor to collect the debt." His gendarme was the 1919 class of twenty-two-year-old youths, whom he called to the colors and sent up to the Rhine, ready to march into Westphaha, or the Ruhr, as it was called, and seize the German industrial cities Hke Essen, Elber- feld, and others, with their chief coal fields and factories, in lieu of payment. By such an act they would have crippled Germany, but also they would have lost the greater part of their indemnities, too. And by such an act they would have insured another war for another generation of French and German youth, without any manner of doubt. But a fev/ dcLys before the ultimatum expired, a new Chancellor, Doctor Wirth, found a gov- ernment which agreed to sign. And the terms to which his signature was written as a solemn pledge were read out by him in a deadly silence of the Reichstag. Germany had promised to pay, and thereto had pHghted her faith, as far as human possibility.
VI
It was not long after that pledge was made that I went to Berlin to study the conditions of life in Germany, and to get some clear idea, by diligent inquiry of many minds, upon the possibility of payment and the chance of the future in Germany.
Apart altogether from information I obtained from German bankers, business men, political leaders, and ordinary citizens, checked, but mostly confirmed, by
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our own financial experts, and by one very wise Amer- ican— Raymond Swing of the New York Herald — my personal observations of Berlin life showed me in a very few days that a remarkable change had come over the spirit and conditions of the people during the time that had followed the war and the defeat. There in Berlin, and in other cities through which I passed, the people were no longer dejected and despairing. Most of them, the ordinary citizens, were wonderfully cheer- ful. Something had happened to brace them up, to make them keen, to give them a resolute and confident purpose. It was easy to see what had happened. It was work. Everybody who could get any kind of job was working at high pressure and with enthusiasm. A peculiar phenomenon in Europe after war!
I had just left England and London, in the time of the coal strike and of the greatest trade slump in our modern history, when the streets of the poorer districts Vv^ere thronged with listless, workless men, hanging round the labor exchanges to get their government "doles," or rattling collecting boxes in the faces of the passers-by. Everywhere in London then, and in other cities, one noticed slackness in the mental attitude of men, working or not working. They were not keen on their jobs. They were lazy or "tired." The laboring men in trade unions were deliberately limiting their output, so that to watch, as some days I watched, bricklayers building new houses, was a mixture of tragedy and comedy — comedy because of their Pavlova-like attitudes with hods and ladders, their languorous way with bricks and mortar, their frequent rests between the exertion of squaring one brick and another, their long and careful lighting of pipes, their eloquence and argument among one another as to the right thing to do, if ever it were done; and tragedy because of this object lesson in the way to lose our chance of recovery. ... In Hyde 11 153
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Park of an afternoon I saw always immense numbers of men reading newspapers, or dozing in the sunshine, or staring idly at the passers-by. They seemed to have no work to do, and to have no desire for it.
In Berlin it was different. There was no lounging during work hours. Crowds of young men and women were hurrying about, intent on some kind of business. Even in the hotels, the men who made a continual traffic from entrance hall to the rooms were not there for idle pastime or amorous dalliance. They came with little black satchels under their arms, stuffed with papers, and, sitting in groups, discussed estimates, offers, exports, prices, all kinds of business. They seemed to be doing well, doing, at least, a lot of business, whatever their profits might be. These crowds in the streets of Berlin were obviously satisfied with the way things were going with their own affairs. There was no hangdog look about them, but alertness of look. Their clothes were rather shabby. I noticed a good many men of the working classes still wearing their old field-gray jackets without badge or shoulder straps — three years after war — and the German women had not the chic touch of French or English women, but they were clean and neat and good to see if they were pretty. The war strain seemed to have been lifted from them. Hunger no longer gnawed at them. It was clear to see that hundreds of thousands of Berlin folk not only had enough for the necessities of life, but a little margin beyond that for the good fun of life in hours of leisure after a working day.
I went one evening with a British officer, two German bankers — and brothers — and a German lady to Luna Park, one of the popular joy places of Berlin. An immense place of plaster buildings, fantastic as a futur- ist nightmare, it has a vast outdoor restaurant built in a series of terraces around the arena where at night
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there are fireworks displays and always a band playing gay music before a painted scene of wild and whirling women. The outdoor restaurant holds fifty thousand people, and on the evening I went, typical, I was told, of any other evening, there was hardly a vacant place. I watched all these people curiously, and one of the German bankers smiled at me and said, "Do they look Hke barbarians — the Huns?" They were a vast crowd of bourgeoisie — clerks, shopgirls, working-class fam- ilies, respectable middle-class men and women with their children. It was a hot evening, and all the girls were in light cotton frocks, with very httle underneath, I guess. "Cheap stuff," said the German lady by my side, "but easily made and good to wash." Every- body was drinking light beer or coff'ee, or sipping iced drinks, or eating ices. I reckoned that it would cost them about five to ten marks a head, fivepence to ten- pence in English money, ten cents to twenty in American money. There was no rowdyism, no drunkenness. I only saw one policeman in the great crowds, and he was not required by people who were enjoying themselves in a cheerful, orderly way. The side-shows, with special entrance fees, were crammed. People were wasting paper marks in lotteries for chocolate and bottles of scent, spending paper marks freely on "flip-flaps'* and "wiggly-woggles" and scenic railways.
"How is it," I said, "that all these people have so much money to spend? I cannot understand it, after an inquiry into the wages of clerks and shopgirls — seven hundred and fifty marks a month for clerks, much less than that for shopgirls, and the mark worth no more than twopence in purchasing power, even within Germany, and half that in foreign exchange."
"Frankly, I cannot understand it, either," said the German lady. "I would like to tell you that this place gives you a false idea of our prosperity, and that there
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is terrible poverty in the working districts. That would not be quite true. There is terrible poverty, still, as in all great cities of Germany, but this scene is typical of many others. It shows that millions of people have a little money to spend on pleasure."
She thought out an explanation. I think it was a sound one. "It is like this. A single girl, or young man, having to live on what she or he earns alone, has a hard struggle. It is almost impossible to live on seven hundred and fifty marks a month. The cheapest shirt costs fifty marks; a pair of boots two hundred and fifty; the simplest, cheapest meal in a restaurant twenty marks, and then not enough for health and strength. But families pool their earnings. If there are two or three sisters and a brother all working and living at home with a father and mother getting good wages, then there is a margin for pleasure like this. They stint and scrape at home, where they live over- crowded, in order to come out in the evenings and enjoy themselves. They must have this kind of pleasure — fresh air, music, cheerful company, the joy of youth. There is too much love of pleasure, and it leads to immorality. Young girls will sell them- selves for a pretty frock or a night of dancing. The war loosened the old moralities. Youth is enormously tempted. "
After that evening in Luna Park, I went to an office in BerHn which has to do with the feeding of destitute children by German charity. It was a German lady who gave me some information about the state of child life in Berlin. She was a young woman, with the fine gold-spun hair of the prettiest type of Prussian girl, and blue eyes. I guessed by her manner that she belonged to the aristocratic caste. She spoke frankly of the im- provement in the condition of children, thanks to the charity of the Quakers, the Americans, and the work of
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German societies. But there was still a great deal of tuberculosis, owing to overcrowding in tenement houses, and undernourishment among children of parents who could not get work because of ill health or the crippling wounds of war. There was still a great lack of milk for babies.
Then she spoke of the professional classes, and put herself among them.
"We are hard hit, and do not get much help. A pension which was good before the war is now no good at all, owing to the fall of the mark. Even our children do not get the care of the working classes, perhaps because of our pride. I have a little boy — "
She hesitated at making personal revelations, but then explained that her husband, a German officer, had been killed in the war, and that her boy never had enough to eat until, swallowing pride, she had sent him to the soup kitchens. She was paid seven hundred and fifty marks a month for her present work, which she was lucky to get. But without family help it was not enough for life.
"Clothes eat up our wages," she said. "In work like this, receiving visitors, one must dress decently. It is very difficult. One has to go to bed while one's underclothing is in the wash!"
She shook hands and laughed.
"Perhaps things will get better presently."
That was a little glimpse behind the scenes of the outward welfare I saw in Berlin, and doubtless there are hundreds of women like that who have to fight a desperate struggle for decent livelihood, as in most countries of Europe.
That did not alter my conviction that Germany, as a whole, was recovering from the exhaustion of war and regaining a fair measure of prosperity, by a combined intense industrial effort. Her factories were producing
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again at full pace, and at a price which could undersell all competitors.
Better than statistics, clearer to the vision, in showing the variety and activity of German manufacturers, was a visit to a great stores, hke that of Wertheim, corre- sponding to Harrod's, Barker's, and Selfridge's in Eng- land, or Marshal Field's in Chicago. On floor after floor was a display of manufactured articles, porcelain, pottery, leather goods, metal ware, every object of house- hold use and ornament, excellent in design, and, reckoned in foreign exchanges, marvelously cheap. Reckoning the mark at one penny, here was a competition which would beat the markets of the world. I was particu- larly struck by the book department, remembering the shoddy appearance of English pubHcations and their abominable cost — a bad novel on bad paper for seven- and-sixpence, a "cheap" reprint for two shiUings, a volume of history or philosophy for fifteen shillings, horribly produced in flimsy bindings. These German books were printed on splendid paper, well illustrated, well bound, most tastefully produced. A new novel was fifteen marks, or one-and-threepence; the classics of the world were to be had for eight and a half marks.
But the metal goods were even more astonishing in their cheapness, and as I reckoned about a quarter of the price to be found in English shops.
"Tariff or no tariff," said a friend of mine, "how are we going to compete with German goods when, for instance, a safety razor, equal in quality to Gillette's, can be sold wholesale for ninepence?"
He laughed, but I detected a note of anxiety in his voice when he said:
"Germany is working as no other people in the world, and her workingmen are getting sevenpence halfpenny an hour, compared with one-and-ninepence, or half a
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crown in England, producing better stuff, and without limitation of output. What's going to be England's chance? Hugo Stinnes and the big trusts are organiz- ing the greatest industrial machine the world has ever
seen."
VII
Every student of German life is now talking of Stinnes as the great industrial autocrat of Germany, and outside Germany he is regarded as a dark, sinister figure, a kind of evil genius, like a German Lenin, though his philosophy is the antithesis of Bolshevism. He is, undoubtedly, the most powerful personality in Germany to-day, the owner of sixty newspapers serving the interests of the Deutsches Volksparteiy and preaching his own gospel, which is the industrial supremacy of Germany by intensive production based upon cheap labor and revolutionary methods of manufacture, obtaining the highest degree of efficiency, power, combi- nation, and distribution. Creating a gigantic trust for the polling of immense resources of raw material, capital, and labor, his method is to build vertically from coal, iron, and steel to all branches of manufacture in which these raw materials are used, and to capture the world's markets by a quality and cheapness which will put German goods beyond competition. As a young man, he inherited enormous estates, mines, ironworks, and royalties valued at seven million pounds sterling. There was no branch of his own industries in which he did not have technical and personal knowledge. Not the humblest laborer in his employ could stand up and tell him about conditions of life which he had not learned by sweat of body and toil of mind. He had worked as a pit boy, coal hewer, mine foreman. He had been stoker, engineer, ship's officer, and sea captain. He was a slave driver to his own workmen, and imported
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Polish labor to keep wages low. His philosophy of life would have been heartily indorsed by a Manchester mill owner of the early nineteenth century, using women and children as slaves of the machines. The Stinnes Trust consisted last year of six great companies employ- ing two hundred and fifty thousand men and having a capital of twelve million marks, but always their tenta- cles are stretching out to more industries — of electricity, coal, iron, shipping, and factory work, absorbing their capital and power and extending their activities over fresh fields. Every form of by-product is used and marketed. Other countries are being invaded by the Stinnes power. The blast furnaces of Austria are work- ing again with the raw material sent to them by his headquarters. He is negotiating in Hungary for enor- mous ironworks. The iron ore of Upper Silesia finds its way to his factories. His agents are active in Russia, and he is ready to rebuild their worn - out railways, to manufacture engines at the rate of eight thousand a year, and trucks at the rate of sixty thou- sand, when the time comes for Russia to do business again.
Stinnes is only one, though the most powerful, of the German industrial kings who are succeeding to the old monarchies of the Empire. August Thyssen is another employing a hundred and twenty-five thousand men, of whom sixty-five thousand are at Muelheim, which is one great city of furnaces and factories. Peter Kloeckner is another of the steel and iron magnates with a capital as great as that of old man Thyssen, and second in the list of coal producers. More romantic to the imagination is the transformation of Krupp's. After the years of war and prewar activity during which they produced nothing but great guns and armaments of all kinds, they accepted instantly the conditions of military defeat and with marvelous rapidity and skill
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adapted their machinery to the demands of peace. Railway engines, agricultural implements, cash regis- ters, every kind of metal work, are produced in vast quantities in the sheds where great guns and machine guns were once produced, and in every part of the world the agents of Krupp are exploring new markets, arrang- ing contracts, feeling the pulse of trade.
These trusts are acquiring a tremendous social power in the German state which one day may quickly take over the state. Already they are proposing to tax themselves for the benefit of the German Reich, accord- ing to their own calculations of industrial revenue and the taxable value of their output. A certain amount of latitude is given to the views of the workers, who are represented by councils, and their wages are regulated according to the standard cost of life sufficient to keep them in working health. In the summer of 192 1 that was reckoned at about sixty marks for a full working day, or five shillings in English money. It is to some extent an actual demonstration of the French syndicat idea, and it is within the bounds of possibility that it is a new form of government by industrial trusts grad- ually absorbing the power and control of the state. At present, however, political ideas are being kept subordinate to the need of the economic reconstruction of Germany, and it is to the industrial genius and energy- of these organizers that Germany owes it that she is recovering steadily from the enormous exhaustion of war.
By the summer of 192 1 Germany's coal production amounted to about two-thirds of the prewar quantity; and half the amount of prewar tonnage (though largely under foreign flags) was coming to the port of Hamburg, which had been silent and deserted for so many years. The deposits in the big banks had gone up by fifty per cent in little more than a year. The effect of the
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recovery of trade was visible in the life of the people. When I arrived in Berlin at the beginning of June all food cards had been done away with, except the bread card, which was due to go within a few weeks. Mean- while it was possible to buy white rolls, and in some cases white bread, without cards in the shops. The harvest reports were very good, and it was estimated that for the first time since the end of 1916 the supply of cereals for bread would be suflftcient. Germany's trade was increasing in many countries. A special push was being made in the "neutral" nations and in South America. While in February, 1921, as compared with February, 1920, South America's trade with the whole of Europe went down by nearly fifty per cent, that with Germany alone increased by twenty per cent. In 19 1 9 Germany sent to the United States about ten miUion dollars' worth of goods; in 1920 she sent eighty-eight million dollars' worth. She had Great Britain thoroughly beaten in the automobile trade in European countries, sending to Switzerland, for example, motor cars, motor cycles, and accessories to sixty times the value of British exports to that country. In Holland especially she had a stronger commercial hold than in the year before the war.
All these facts reveal the progress of German trade, astonishing for a country so utterly defeated, so drained of blood and treasure, so powerless, for a time, under the military and economic menace of Great Britain and France. Yet this progress did not amount, even then, to the prosperity of prewar conditions, though, to judge from the fantasies of French and British newspapers, one might imagine that Germany, by some economic miracle, had gained new and enormous wealth. The miracle really was that in two and a half years of peace she was about two-thirds ''normal" compared with her prewar trade and leaving out of account her vast
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war debts and the indemnities which she had pledged herself to pay.
VIII
In Berlin I attended the meeting of the Reichstag when Doctor Wirth, the Chancellor, outlined, broadly and vaguely, the manner in which he proposed that Germany should pay that Bill of Costs. All his oratory could be reduced to four words — intense industry, economy, efficiency. It was, nevertheless, a historic scene, memorable and exciting to me, as to all those German Deputies who listened to words which emphasized heavily and without optimism the enormous burden which Germany must support for half a century. From the extreme Left, where sat the little communist group, came derisive cries, and from the extreme Right of Junker tradition occasional outbursts of anger and scorn. But mostly those men sat silent, moody, introspective.
To me the scene in the assembly and in the lobbies outside was astonishing as a psychological adventure. Here were many of the men who in this same building had heard the declaration of war and echoed the procla- mation of many victories, had listened exultantly to the terms of peace which would be imposed upon Eng- land and France, had year after year voted the sup- plies to carry on the war, and, at last, had faced, here again, the news of utter, irretrievable defeat and ruin. Count BernstorfF passed me in the lobby, and I had some words with him, watching his debonair manner, detecting a faint trace of American accent. If he had been a greater diplomat and an honester man, perhaps Germany would not have lost the war. . . . Scheide- mann went by, the Socialist who put his party at the service of the militarists with the same patriotic fervor as the Labor Party did in England. . . . Not many
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other men did I know, even by name, but I knew them as those who represented the German people at a time when any EngHshman coming to this Reichstag would have been killed Hke a rat, and when No-Man's Land, with its death pits, divided them and us. Queer to be standing in the midst of them, listening to that talk! A little shiver passed down my spine as the thought came to me. A German coming to our House of Com- mons for the first time after war would perhaps be affected in the same way.
The change in the attitude of men one to another was suggested at a dinner table in Berlin one night, when I sat next to a German banker who had fought all through the war, and opposite a British major who was four years on the western front. It was the banker's brother who made the remark, in an aside to me.
"How ridiculous is war!" he said. "Three years ago your major and my brother would have tried to kill each other at sight. Now they are sitting at the same table, discussing political economy, and there is no temptation in the knives beside their plates!"
This gentleman made another remark which interested me. We were walking down the Friedrichstrasse, speaking English in loud voices, because of the crowd about us. No one turned to glance at us, there was no hostile look because of the English speech, and the German by my side pointed the moral.
"You see, we can speak English without arousing dislike. It is only the Germans in foreign countries who have to lower their voices when they speak their hated tongue."
There is indeed in Germany now no touch of hostility to English folk. On the contrary, their nationality is a passport to German favor in the hotels, in the street cars, anywhere. We are popular, strange as it may seem, and the Germans believe in our sense of
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magnanimity and in our tradition for fair play. "Gott strafe England!" is a forgotten song, never, as a matter of fact, well known in Germany, though we made the most of it in war time. The strangest, most paradox- ical, most grotesque revulsion of popular sentiment — yet, on the whole, hopeful to humanity — ^which struck my imagination in BerHn during that visit was when I stood amid a crowd of Germans reading a bulletin from Upper Silesia on the board of a newspaper office. It described the arrival of British troops into the dis- puted zone between the Poles and Germans. The Black Watch had come, and officers and men were being carried shoulder high and garlanded with flowers by the German population. The Black Watch! Three years before they were called "The Ladies from Hell" by the German soldiers, who dreaded their bayonet work, their ruthlessness in killing. Now they were the champions of German claims, the darlings of the German crowds.
"The EngHsh are our friends," said a German in the crowd. "The French will always be our enemies."
I moved away from the crowd with a sense of the irony of life and the idiocy of men. For four and a half years of frightful history we had called the Germans "Huns," had exhausted all our wealth and hurled the flower of our youth into the furnace fires in order to kill them in great numbers, as they killed us. The French had been our comrades, and we had (as we thought) sealed our friendship eternally by the mystical union of common sacrifice. Now British soldiers were being carried shoulder high by German people, and the French were scowling at us, even in Paris, if we spoke English so that the passers-by could hear. The bottom was knocked out of the meaning of the war, if ever it had any meaning beyond the bloody rivalry of politi- cians using the bodies and souls of men for their dirty
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game, and the insanity of mobs, deluded by race pas- sion, inflamed by their leaders. Is there any sense at all in the turning of the wheel of international policy, so that our enemies of yesterday are our friends of to-day, and our friends of to-day our enemies of to-morrow?
Norman Angell, in his book, The Fruits of Victory, points out the absurdity of these rapid changes:
At the head of the Polish armies is Marshal Pilsudski, who fought under Austro-German command against Russia. His ally is the Ukrainian adventurer, General Petlura, who first made a separate peace at Brest-Litovsk, and entreated them to let the German armies into the Ukraine, and to deliver to them the stores of grain. These in May, 1920, were the friends of the AlHes. The Polish Prime Minister at the time we were aiding Poland was Baron Bilinski, a gentleman who filled the same post in the Austrian Cabinet which let loose the world war, insisted hotly on the ultimatum to Serbia, helped to ruin the finances of the Hapsburg dominions by war, and then, after the collapse, repeated the same operations in Poland. On the other side, the command has passed, it is said, to General Brusiloff, who again and again saved the eastern front from German and Austrian offensives. He is now the "enemy," and his oppo- nents our "allies." They are fighting to tear the "Ukraine, which means all South Russia, away from the Russian state. The pre- ceding year we sent millions to achieve the opposite result. The French sent their troops to Odessa, and we gave our tanks to Deni- kin, in order to enable him to recover this region for imperial Russia."
How long is this madness going to prevail in Europe.? Is there no hope at all in the common sense of peoples, seeing at last the monstrous absurdity of these group- ings and regroupings of armed powers controlled and directed now this way, now that, by the sinister ambi- tions of statesmen who shift their principles and trans- fer their allegiance as easily as they change their shirts?
IX
When I was last in Germany two thoughts dominated the mind of every man and woman with whom I spoke,
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and both thoughts were inseparably Hnked. Could Germany pay the vast indemnities to which she was pledged, and would France and Great Britain so divide Upper Silesia that the Poles would remain in possession of the greatest stronghold of German industry? That the payment of indemnities depended upon the settle- ment of Upper Silesia in favor of German claims and German votes was the absolute and sincere belief not only of the Germans themselves, but of all British experts with whom I spoke. More even than the economic position of Germany was involved, though that would decide the fate of Europe. The German people believed it to be a test case of justice and "fair play" among the democracies of Europe. If the Polish insurgents were allowed to hold what they had seized against the authority of the Inter-Allied Commission and contrary to the German votes of six to four in the plebiscite which had been taken under Allied control, then Germany would know that in spite of her pledge to pay the penalties of defeat — and her payments — she was to be given no chance of recovery, nor any justice, and that the policy of France was to prevent her recov- ery upon any terms whatever.
That was the talk of a group of young Germans, obviously ex-officers, with whom I sat at table, waiting for an interview with Herr Stresemann, the leader of the Deutsches Volkspartei and the political representa- tive of Hugo Stimies, the industrial magnate. The scene was curious, for it was in the club of the Volks- partei after Doctor Wirth 's speech in the Reichstag out- lining the program for the payment of indemnities. With young Raymond Swing, the American correspond- ent, I was shown into an antechamber divided by a curtain from a room in which Stresemann was speaking to the members of his party. The waiter placed chairs for us and offered us refreshment. There was nothing
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to hinder us from standing by the curtain and Hstening to the words which Stresemann was speaking with harsh and rapid eloquence. I could not help wondering what would have happened if two Germans had entered the Constitutional Club while Lord Curzon, perhaps, was addressing a private gathering of Tories and out- lining the future policy of his party. They would not have been received with such friendly confidence, . . . Presently the speech ended and there was a surging move- ment of men, among whom were a few ladies, to the room in which I sat with my friend. Groups took possession of small tables, ordered beer and sand- wiches, and discussed their leader's speech. Although it was the eve of a day when Germany was face to face with the gigantic burdens of her war penalties, there was no sign of dejection in this crowd of politicians. They were cheerful, vivacious, argumentative, and keen. Herr Stresemann, buttonholed on all sides, broke away to ask for my patience a little while longer and introduced me to the group of young men who made a place for me at their table. Instantly the con- versation turned to Upper Silesia, and I was asked why the Allies had allowed the Poles to "jump the claim" at the very time when Germany was asked to pay in- demnities which would strain all her industrial resources. Before I could answer, Stresemann came to me and said, "At last!" and led me away to a little table reserved for himself.
"What were you talking about .^" he asked, glancing at the group of men I had left; and when I said, "Upper Silesia" and laughed, he started at once upon that subject, which was a kind of obsession in the German mind.
"Yes," he said, as though continuing a discussion. "If we lose Upper Silesia, or any considerable part of it, we shall be unable to pay the indemnities. Our
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whole economic position depends on that. There lie our main sources of raw material for manufactures. There exist our greatest strongholds of industry. Ger- man capital, labor, and organization have built up the prosperity of Silesia. Take that from us and we are crippled."
I had a long conversation with this energetic little man, who, everybody told me, was the ablest politician in Germany, sure of bsing Chancellor after the down- fall of Doctor Wirth's v/eak Coalition. Reactionary in the sense of supporting the old traditions of German national pride and monarchist sentiment — "the Kaiser did not will the war, " he said, very solemnly — he told me frankly that he has no use for democracy unless well disciplined and kept working. But he is progres- sive according to the ideals of Stinnes, his master, upon economic lines of advance.
He spoke to me at length about French policy and his voice took a deeper note of passion.
**The instincts of the German people," he said, "are for peace. Our future is in peace and not in war. We would willingly have made friends with France and worked to repair her ruin, if her people had been only a little generous, only a little courteous, after our defeat. But they have done their best, and are doing it, to arouse feelings of enmity and rage. In our occupied districts they have been needlessly arrogant."
He told me a story of how the French general fined the Mayor of Duisburg (which French troops entered to enforce the signing of the indemnities) the sum of five thousand marks for delay in answering his summons to appear before him, and when the mayor asked, very civilly, "What further wishes have you?" fined him another five thousand for using the word "wishes" instead of "commands." ... I did not tell Herr Stresemann many similar and more painful stories of
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the German treatment of French mayors in time of war. I was Hstening and not talking.
"Those are but pin pricks," he said, "but in their policy and in their Press they reveal a hatred, a desire to humiliate, a ruthless injustice, outrageous to our honor and dignity, which make it impossible for German people to be on friendly terms with them. They are deliberately stirring up a desire for revenge instead of trying to allay the hatreds of war."
He told me the French policy was seeking to repair three mistakes to which Napoleon confessed. Napoleon said, "My mistakes were to let Prussia get strong, to let Poland be weak, and to misunderstand Russia. "
"French diplomacy now," said Stresemann, "is to weaken Prussia, strengthen Poland, and dominate Russia, by setting up a czar as a puppet of France."
But their policy would fail, he thought, because there is no tendency in Germany to break away from Prussia, in spite of all French hopes and intrigues, while Poland will always be weak and ready to fall apart because of the inherent instability of Polish character. As for Russia, French puppets like Denikin and Wrangel had failed miserably, and modern France, more than Napoleon himself, could not understand the spirit of Russia.
Stresemann went at length Into the question of repa- rations, and held the view that after a few years during which Germany will desperately endeavor to fulfill her pledges, European peoples will realize the folly of maintaining such abnormal conditions in world trade, and will call another conference to revise the whole treaty of peace and develop a scheme of international economic union by which the interests of all European nations would be secured, with some better arrange- ment than wild, destructive competition with tariflF walls and national rivalries. He suggested a scheme
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which, as I previously knew, is one of the pet ideas of Hugo Stinnes.
"The war debts of all nations could be wiped out in a few years," said Stresemann, "by a small tax on raw material, hke coal or cotton, paid by all purchasers and put into a common pool for that purpose."
In his opinion Germany, with the best will in the world, will be unable to continue her payment of indemnities for half a century, and this will be recognized, he thinks, by the increasing common sense of European peoples.
That, undoubtedly, was the official view of the Deutsches Falksparteiy but while I was in Berlin it was challenged by Rathenau, one of the greatest and most liberal-minded of social reformers in Germany, who said definitely in the Reichstag, as Minister of Recon- struction, "We can pay." Stresemann 's pessimism was also repudiated by Scheidemann, leader of the Majority Socialists, with whom I had a talk in company with his friend and adviser, Doctor Helphand, a millionaire Socialist. In reply to my request for an interview, they sent an automobile for me in Berlin, and I journeyed out through the glorious woods of the Griinewald to the edge of Wansee, which is one of the beautiful lakes outside the city to which BerHners go for bathing and boating. A most pleasant spot for any SociaHst, es- pecially if he lived in such an elegantly furnished villa as that of Doctor Helphand.
I was curious to see Scheidemann, who helped to found the Republic after the war, in which he was but a mild critic of German militarism, and a stanch supporter of imperial policy and war credits until the great wreck happened. He came into the room a few min- utes after my arrival, and in a light linen suit he looked to me like a French painter, with his tall, rather elegant figure, his silver hair, and little pointed beard.
Scheidemann's view of Germany's future, interpreted
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in voluble French by Doctor Helphand (whose accent is enormously Teutonic), expressed a belief in the possi- bility of payment on condition that the German people were given peace and fair play by France and England. That was an utterly essential condition, but if fulfilled, Germany could, without doubt, pay her penalties.
By demobilization of the army they would save eighteen thousand milliards of gold marks annually, which would go some way to pay off the yearly tribute. They could save other sums by restricting imports of luxuries, by more efficient organization, and by heavier internal taxation. Then, by intensive production and rapid trade development of countries like Russia, they could pay their Bill of Costs in full — provided they were helped and not hindered. If Upper Silesia were taken Germany would be put out of business, and there would be no possible payment of indemnities. But if the Allies and the United States of America were prepared to give German industry a free and full chance, it would wipe out all debts. To do that they must have credit and capital to renew the wear and tear of machinery and rolling stock, enormously depreciated during the war, and to develop their industrial possibilities. Russia was waiting for them. As soon as the Russians returned to ordinary methods of business Germany would be ready also to supply them with machinery, engines, agricultural implements, every necessity of civilized life, so repairing her devastation. By geographical position and old trade relations, this task of Russian reconstruction would inevitably come to Germany, but the German people would only be able to do it in full measure, to the benefit of the whole world, if they were supported by the credit of the United States, Great Britain, and other countries. German labor and organization would repay such credit by good interest, the fulfillment of all pledges, and the revival of world
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trade. That was the hope of Germany. Surely, said Scheidemann, it v/as also the hope of Europe, whose common interests would be served.
I think these men spoke sincerely. I think that all the people I met in Berlin, and afterward on the Rhine, faced very frankly the realities of their situation. They Were under no illusions. They knew and admitted that military power had passed from them, at least for a long time, and that they could resist nothing in the way of armed force set in motion by France and England. That, no doubt, is gall and wormwood to the old mili- tary caste, the Junkers, and the nationalists who look back to the old pomp and parade with the same ferocious sentiment, and forward to a war of revenge with hungry souls. But I believe, perhaps without sufficient evi- dence, that the mass of the German people, and many of their Republican leaders, like Scheidemann himself, are relieved by the disappearance of militarism, and do not want it back again, but look forward honestly to an era of industrial peace and progress by which they will lift Germany out of financial peril and gain great victories, even industrial supremacy, by the energy and genius of labor and science. Something has lifted from the German spirit. Even in Berlin the people, I am told by those who know them better than I do, are more gemuthlig, good natured, and open hearted. It is militarism which has been lifted from them. The old word '^verboteUy" the old bullying of German youth in the barracks and on the parade ground, has passed as a dark spell. Everyday life is more agreeable without the swaggering bullies on the sidewalks. Citi- zenship is no longer oppressed by the military caste. Defeat has not been bad for them in every way, and in many ways may be the greatest blessing, cleansing to the soul of Germany, bracing to her national spirit. They see the mockery and futility of war and remember
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its enormous horror. In the heart of the German people there is, I am almost certain, no desire for another bout of massacre. If I am right, then Germany will gain first the victory for which the Allies professed to fight — the death of militarism — and she will emerge from all those years of evil cleaner and brighter and kinder, with a philosophy of peace which will help to save Europe. I may be too hopeful, and the old devil in Germany may raise its head again, the devil of military pride, when the nation has regained its strength and the sword of the Allies has been put aside.
I would not trust men like Stresemann or Scheidemann too far. They belong to the old tradition. I would not put any faith in the reform of the Junker, for his nature is not to be converted. But I would trust these people who bore the agony of war and now pay most of its costs.
It is for us to help the German folk to resist the uprising ever again of that devil in a spiked hat which once controlled them, and we can only do this by cast- ing out our own devil in brass hat or kepi, and the spirit of the war makers in old and evil brains.
THE PRICE OF VICTORY IN FRANCE
AFTER the day of armistice in 191 8 the French people • were filled with the intoxication of victory. The faith with which they had fought had been fulfilled. It was the faith that, in spite of the immense power of the Germans, their military supremacy at the beginning of the war in man power and machine power and the crippling blows they inflicted on France in the first rush and afterward, they would be beaten in the end, beaten to the dust, by the heroism of the French armies, the genius of French generals, and the unconquerable spirit of the French.
"On les aura!" ("We shall have them!") was the cry of France even in days when the enemy was sprawled over their northern provinces, when they struck close to the heart of Paris, and when masses of French troops reeled back from their frightful onslaughts.
It is true, as I know, that at times this faith in ulti- mate victory burned low in the hearts of some French men and women whose souls were staggered by the enormous and unceasing slaughter of their youth, and by the narrow, hair-breadth line which sometimes stood between the safety and the death of France — as when the Germans reached the Marne in August of the first year, and again after years of infernal struggle which strewed the fields of France with death, in July, 191 8. But the hope never flickered out into absolute despair,
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rose again into a flame whenever the luck of war changed, and became a certainty of victory when, with American help and British, Marshal Foch hurled the enemy across the Marne for the second time and forced them into a retreat which only ended with absolute surrender.
So France rejoiced on the day of armistice, and on many other days that followed. The national pride of the French was satisfied. They were not ungrateful for the services of their allies and friends, but they believed that victory was due most of all to the heroic spirit of France. They had fought most, made greatest sacrifice, and won by the military genius of Foch. . . . As an Englishman, who saw, through the years of war, the valor of their men, the miseries and the courage of their women, the marvelous, unfailing, supernatural heroism of the whole French nation, I agree with them, though I know (more than they will ever know or admit) what British soldiers did, and, in the end, the Americans, Their joy in victory was my joy, too, though I wondered then, even in the midst of that wild intoxication of the Parisian crowds after the surrender of the enemy, how soon it would be before they were sobered by the remembrance of their million dead, their two million maimed, blind, and shell-shocked men, their enormous war debts, their devastated fields, their failing birth rate, their price of victory.
It was not very long before that remembrance, and the dreadful actuality of truth, came to them. Even on the day of armistice there were thousands of women who wept in small rooms and in back streets. "It is victory," they said, "but it will not bring back our men. " Their tears were hidden because of the rejoicing of living youth, and their cry of anguish was stifled so that it should not be heard above the cheers which greeted the men who had come back with victory on their banners.
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THE PRICE OF VICTORY IN FRANCE
For some time after that the gradual awakening of the French people to a sense of dismal reality was soothed by the promises of their statesmen and diplo- mats. There were to be great fruits of victory harvested from the wealth of Germany. By the terms of the peace treaty, the Germans would be made to pay for all the damage they had done, apart from the resur- rection of dead youth. They would be forced to pay indemnities which would reconstruct the ravaged lands of France, build up her ruins, wipe out the war debt, pay for the pensions of crippled men and widowed women. German coal from the Saar or the Ruhr would be delivered or seized, in return for the German destruction of the coal mines around Lens. The finan- cial ruin of France, as revealed by the falling value of the franc in foreign exchange, and by the budget state- ments which admitted a lack of revenue to pay even the interests on unimaginable debts, would be restored by consignments of German gold. By the peace treaty also, ruthless in the severity of its terms to an ignoble and brutal enemy, France would be secured from the menace of further wars, because Germany would be so crushed and strangled and held so tightly to the forfeit of future payments, that she would never be allowed to recover her strength and power, however great the industry of her workers or the genius of her financiers.
II
These promises that Germany would pay for every- thing were held up to the French people as an induce- ment to keep quiet, settle down to work, and suffer patiently their present poverty. There was to be a period of reconstruction under the direction of a benevo- lent government. For a year the word "reconstruc- tion" was used as a kind of spell word to lull the impa-
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tience and growing incredulity of French people. For another year French statesmen kept up the hope or the pretense that the fruits of victory were only delayed and that in a little while Germany would be made to disgorge the expenses of the war to the last sou. They still maintained their claim to the 261 milHards of francs, which represents more than twenty times the annual total of German exports at their maximum figure before the war, while Britain's claim amounted to 8,000 miUions of pounds sterhng, or, according to a financial authority, "far more than all the world's gold produc- tion since the dawn of history, plus the estimated con- tents of all the gold mines at present known. "
Gradually public opinion in France became impatient of promises. They wanted the delivery of the gold. They wanted the fulfillment of the Treaty of Versailles, utterly and quickly. Germany had not fulfilled it. Her coal deliveries were shoit of the amounts required, she had delayed disarmament, she had taken no steps to punish her war criminals. Again and again she had delayed and dodged the payment of her indemnities. Even in the spring of 1921 the Allied governments had not decided upon their final terms, and Germany was still making offers which the whole of the French Press and the majority of French people (with the exception of the advanced Socialists) denounced passionately as ridiculous and insulting. They were offers mon- strously out of keeping with the promise of "the fruits of victory," made by French statesmen to their people. Passion was rising to dangerous heights in France. Ex-President Poincare directed part of it against Eng- land. It was per fide Albion again thwarting the fulfill- ment of French claims by some secret pro-Germanism among their politicians and financiers, or some jealousy of France. Briand, the Prime Minister, had to get ready or go. Unless he could give the Chamber a
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THE PRICE OF VICTORY IN FRANCE
definite guaranty that Germany would at last be pre- sented with her bill and forced to pay, he would be flung out of office by the representatives of the people's pas- sion. To understand that passion, one must know the condition of life in France and the mentality of the French people.
To say that they were suffering from "soul sickness" is but a mild way of describing their disillusionment and disgust with the eff'ects of victory. In their polit- ical activities as well as in their private Hfe they showed an intense irritation with the state of affairs, and a sense of fear which had followed the intoxication of victory, a tendency to quarrel with those who were their friends and aUies — because they thought that they who won the greatest share of victory had gained least of all from peace — and a desperate endeavor to grasp by any force in their power the fulfillment of their most fantastic hopes.
Truly the working classes and professional middle class of France — the latter especially — had been mocked by that phrase, "the fruits of victory. " It had been a dead-sea fruit, bitter to the taste. The price of food- stuffs and all necessities of life were at least five times higher than at prewar rates. The clerk, the journalist, the salesman in a small shop, that vast multitude of men who in a civilized community have to eke out a respectable livelihood on fixed salaries, that do not depend on manual labor or provide opportunities of profit by commercial prosperity, found themselves pinched to the point of sharp distress.
Certain articles of food and living had risen in price like rockets, in Paris and other cities. Mutton, for instance, was fifteen and seventeen francs; ham, sixteen to eighteen francs a pound. A suit of clothes which cost a hundred francs in 1914 was not to be had from any tailor in 192 1 for less than seven hundred francs.
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As I have said, the middle classes, and especially the clerical classes, had suffered most. In some cases their salaries had been tripled, but this increase was not in proportion to that of the laboring classes. A workman, for instance, earning six francs a day before the war, might now get thirty francs, or even more. A ticket collector on an omnibus got a much higher wage than a school-teacher. But these wages were all in excess of the possibilities of national economy, and were not justified by the production of labor, so that unem- ployment was bound to ensue, or the downfall of indus- trial enterprise.
In France, as in most other countries of Europe, exasperation at high prices was inflamed by the convic- tion that some part of them, at least, was due to the profiteering of unscrupulous traders, utterly callous of the common people, and supported in a sinister way by corrupt influences in the government, sympathiz- ing with the old claims of a selfish capitalism in- trenched against the growing menace of revolutionary labor. I heard strange stories of immense stores of vegetables left to rot in warehouses while the prices soared to fantastic heights in the Paris markets; of great quantities of meat going bad in the storage houses, while small families were starved of meat. The peasant was profiteering at the expense of the townsman, the manufacturer was profiteering at the expense of the peasant, and the government was juggling with the figures of bankruptcy, by issuing paper money which had no reality. There was truth in all these things, and it did not make for economic recovery or health.
Ill
The magic word "reconstruction" did not have much power over the bodies and souls of those French peas-
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THE PRICE OF VICTORY IN FRANCE
ants and villagers who returned to the long, broad belt of country which stretches across France hke an open wound. A year after the war had finished I went back to that country to see new life where for more than four years I had seen a lot of death, and the reravaging of earth already ravaged by every kind of explosive gas force and poisonous gas. Nothing much had altered except that grass grew rankly on ground which was bare and barren when the guns had done with it. Many of the old trenches had silted in, and the shell holes which used to be six or eight feet deep were now filled up by the effect of rain, and the cemeteries — those little forests of our dead — were more neatly kept. In the general landscape there was not much difference, though as I looked closer I saw that the peasants had actually reclaimed many of these acres, especially around Peronne and south of the Somme, by digging out the chunks of steel that lay thick in the soil and searching for unexploded shells with a care that did not prevent many deaths. They had plowed the land, and furrowed it, and sowed some kind of crop, and their industry had gone on since then with untiring spirit, so that now a broader stretch of country is under cultivation.
I found little colonies of wooden huts, like the en- campments of nomad folk, constructed at places like Passchendaele and Langemarck and Gheluvelt, where men of ours lived in dirty ditches from which they rose on days of battle to cross through a storm of fire, in which many fell, a score of yards or so, to where the enemy waited with machine guns, bombs, and trench mortars. In these wooden huts live the repatriated peasants who fled from the red tide of war, and I talked with many of them and heard the truth that was in them, and the passion, and the despair.
The point of view as expressed by those people v/ho
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had suffered and were suffering from the outrage of war is different from what one would hear from great people, and closer to the truth of life as it is seen in peasants' cottages and middle-class homes.
We know what the great people think, or, at least, say. I am sure M. Poincare would have nothing new to tell me, if I sought the honor of an interview with him. Even M. Briand would only utter large generali- ties on the subject of future liberty, justice, and progress, and the necessity of maintaining the Entente Cordiale.
From old people in wooden huts on the edge of desert lands, from drivers of hired motor cars, from visitors who were soldiers, from little groups of people sitting round wooden tables in wayside inns, and from business men trying to "reconstruct" that which had been destroyed, I studied the popular psychology of France after the war, and found it interesting.
These people were great realists. They faced facts squarely and did not camouflage them by fanciful hopes or rose-colored romance.
Not even victory, and its pageantry, covered up by one grain of dust their realization of the immense horror of war and of its price in blood and ruin.
Military glory had no meaning to them except in stem duty and the endurance of abominable things which had to be endured.
It was a waiter who expressed a kind of rebuke to me one night, when he had been explaining the difference between a bronze star and a silver star and a palm on a miHtary decoration. The first is for an act of valor "cited" to his regiment; the second "cited" (in the orders of the day) to the division; the third to the whole army throughout France.
He had the palm, and I said, '' Magnifique, ga!'*
He turned away for a moment with a queer, contemp- tuous grimace,
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"Magnificent! Bah! ... It is a reward for dirty- work. Up to your knees in mud. Dead bodies every- where. Stench, blood, fear, abomination. ... It is better to be here, serving coffee and beer, and adding up Httle figures. It is a better job."
This man, and others Hke him, look back to the years of war with disgust, and not as a jolly adventure with good comradeship and good fun between the ugly hours, hke some of our men. They did what they did because it was necessary to save France, but they hated it all.
And now they face the present and the future with, mostly, an unflinching sense of truth. Even those who have hope in the future, because of their own strength of character, do not disguise from themselves the slow rate of progress by which it will be possible to clear away all this ruin about them and rebuild.
"Twenty years," "thirty years," were the figures given by people in the devastated regions for the resur- rection of their villages and farms.
They shrugged their shoulders at the word "recon- struction," used as a watchword by the newspapers and politicians, and said: "That is a fine phrase! . . . Meanwhile we have no material, no indemnities for our loss, no means of getting labor. The government does nothing. Perhaps it is powerless to do anything because of our drain of blood, this great devastation, and the poverty of all but the profiteers."
I had a strange little meal in a wooden shanty on the Somme battlefields, with a soldier, a farmer, and a commercial traveler.
In the next room was a wedding feast, and we were given what was left over, between each course, served by the wife of an English sergeant who had settled down in France after the war. We had to wait long, and filled up the gaps by conversation.
It was the commercial traveler who talked most,
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and as he came from Paris, talked well, with a cynical sense of humor, beneath which lay a real sadness, as of a man who sees a glory that has passed.
After the usual ribaldries about the bride and bride- groom in the next room, he spoke of the conditions of France, and the coming elections, and the psychology of French men and women after the war.
"The war," he said, "has finished France as a great Power. We are going downstairs."
"We won the war," said the young farmer. "We climbed up to victory, in spite of the power of Germany."
"We had people on each side, pushing us up," said the commercial traveler. He enumerated the crowds that had propped up France — "English, Scots, Irish, Australians, Canadians, Americans, black men, yellow men, and chocolate men.
"As a nation we are going downstairs. We have had our last fling — and we have flung the best of our life into the pool. Our population, what is it?
"Fortunately there are still marriages — I drink to the health of the bride next door! but we are dwindling down, and always Germany is producing fat boys. Financially, too, we are down. We are beggars of the United States."
"And England," said the soldier, who listened more than he talked, "will gobble us up little by httle."
"That's true," said the commercial traveler.
"How's that?" I asked.
The soldier hestitated. Then he said: "We are speak- ing frankly. England is a great country, logical, businesslike. Our weakness will be her advantage. She will capture our markets. She will enlarge her empire at our expense. Even now she begrudges us Syria."
His mind had been affected by the campaign of propaganda which was being developed not only in
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THE PRICE OF VICTORY IN FRANCE
the Paris papers, but in every local sheet in France, on the question of Syria and the "devotion of France to the self-determination of the Egyptian people." We were accused of hypocrisy for our policy in Egypt, and it was not good reading.
The commercial traveler began to talk about the elections.
"They are all faked," he said. "The French people do not govern themselves. They are governed by a swarm of professional politicians, who control the whole machine of bureaucracy, which is spread like a network over the whole of France — by swarms of little paid officials, who do nothing but draw their salaries.
"It has been like that before the war, and will be so after the war.
"A new party will come into power with fine words in its mouth. Do you think they will bring water to these devastated regions or build up destroyed villages? Oh, monsieur, you are an optimist!"
I found everywhere this contempt for politicians. France shrugs its shoulders at them all, and says: "It is a game! It has no reality."
They pin their faith to local initiative, individual energy, to build up on the ruins, yet are aghast at the enormity of the task.
Most of the individuals I met had suffered the loss of all their prewar possessions.
The driver of a motor car owned his own garage before the war. The government requisitioned his cars, sold them afterward for double the price he had given, but as yet he has recovered no indemnity, and is now a hired chauffeur.
The old woman who kept an inn on the Menin Road
fled from it when the German shells came near, and
was now back in a wooden shack. On the wall was a
larger poster setting forth the claims for damage which
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must be made to the government before a certain date. She had made them months ago, but had not touched a penny.
So it was in millions of cases, and there was exaspera- tion, just or unjust, I know not, because there was no repayment out of the national treasury for losses in- curred by the acts of war.
The lack of labor in France Is serious, and made worse by the constant strikes for higher wages and by the high scale of wages now demanded by men who are not much inclined to work with their old industry, whatever their reward. They will work a little bit, and then take a holiday and enjoy themselves. They were in the mud of the war. They lived in trenches. They were surrounded with death. They escaped. . . . Shall they not enjoy life now, like the profiteers who did nothing but get rich?
So after the armistice the cafes were crowded. There were throngs outside the cinemas. In Lille, where conditions were very bad, they were not so bad that they stopped the fun of the fair or failed to crowd the circus where French clowns caused shouts of laughter, and strong men did prodigious feats, and Japanese wrestlers defied the laws of anatomy.
In a great tent there were four thousand people at least, under the glare of lights. I looked at their faces, intense, gaping, laughing at comic antics. They were soldiers and ex-soldiers with their wives and sweethearts. Every man there and every woman knew the tragedy of the war in their souls. They had been prisoners, many of them. They went through years of hell. Now they were shouting and screaming with laughter. It was their need in life. They must have laughter, light, shows, pleasure. They had come out of the darkness. Not even work must interfere too much with their vital need, which, in this afterwar psychology, was amusement.
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THE PRICE OF VICTORY IN FRANCE
But as one man told me, and I believed him, "if the people do not laugh they must weep, for truly victory has not brought much joy, but only a peace which is full of danger and a knowledge of a ruin which can only be repaired after many generations."
Cardinal Mercier's words that "Germany is already preparing a war of revenge which may come in fifteen years, " struck a chill in the hearts of many people who read these words in local papers.
It is a terrifying idea — another war.
French peasants and the bourgeoisie regret that they could not crush Germany more. If only they had gone to Berlin!
The idea that there may be any comradeship of democ- racy between French workers and German workers, so preventing another war, is held only by international Socialists of the old type, who have many new adherents, but do not represent the majority of the working classes in France.
Many of them regard that as an illusion, and some of them as a treachery.
They shrug their shoulders at a gospel of brotherhood, and say "the Boche is a bandit, an assassin."
For England there is, in the north, where our troops were known and where they fought, a friendly and affectionate remembrance.
''Nous avons un bon souvenir des soldats anglais,** iaid an old peasant woman who had served many of them behind the lines, and such words were spoken by many others.
But that does not prevent a growing suspicion in the minds of many French people that England has got **all the fat," as they say, out of the peace terms, and that she has waxed fat herself out of the war.
It was no use telling them that we were spending twq millions a day more than our income,
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They say: "England is rich. England is enlarging her empire. England and America are masters of the world. "
IV
For some time there was, beneath the loud expression of joy in France because the victory was hers, a secret and sinister bitterness of revolutionary passion. Re- member that when war broke out in 19 14 the followers of Jean Jaures, the Socialist leader, who was murdered on the first day (his murderer was acquitted at the end of the war), rallied to the flag of France with exalted patriotism. They said: "We are the enemies of war, but this was forced on us. This is the war to end war. By killing German militarism we shall destroy our own, for there will be no need of it. By defeating German tyranny we shall gain greater liberty ourselves. There will be a * sacred union' of classes, and labor, which will save France, by its body and by its soul, shall get greater reward. Capitalism of the old evil kind will be dethroned, and capital and labor shall go hand in hand, not as enemies, but as friends and partners."
Over and over again I heard French soldiers say those things in the early days when all France was stirred by passionate enthusiasm and the spirit of sacrifice. . . . They left off saying them when the war settled down into trenches, when slaughter was piled up month after month, when it seemed unending, and when the poliusy in those wet ditches, thought back to Paris, where the politicians and the rich seemed to be quite comfortable, making lots of money out of army contracts, and ready to go on fighting — by proxy — for years and years. What bitterness, what suspicion, what hatred of poli- ticians and profiteers, was in the hearts of the French fighting men may be read in the books of Henri Bar- busse; and I, myself, talking to those poliusy in their
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trenches and dugouts and in ruined villages behind the Hne, have heard all that passion of resentment. It seemed to these men — and seems to some of them now • — ^that Jean Jaures, their old leader, was right, after all, when he said that modern warfare was made to bolster up one set of capitalists against another set whose markets they coveted, or whose power they feared, and that the peoples who fought and died were not fighting altogether for their own liberties or for their own reward. After the war, when the French troops were demobilized and came back to the little homes, stinted of the barest necessities of life because of the rising prices, while French society of the well-to-do classes rioted in a mad kind of luxury during the peace negotiations, these men became even more bitter, and their spirit was menacing.
I went, one night in Paris, to a meeting of a society called Clarte. It was founded by the friends of that French author, Henri Barbusse, whose book, Le Feu, gives the most realistic and dreadful picture of the ag- onies and horrors of modern warfare, and contains the fiercest accusation of the evil elements in civilization which led up to the European war. Clarte means clearness — clarity — and the idea of the society is to bring together numbers of young men in France and other countries who went through the war and who are able to think clearly on the problems of life, the struc- ture of society, and the means by which liberty, brother- hood, and peace may prevail over injustice, hatred, and the spirit of war. It was a night in August when I went to a back street in Paris and the rooms in which this meeting was being held. The rooms were so crowded that I could hardly push my way in, and so hot that one woman fainted, and sweat poured down the foreheads of French soldiers, and the whole company looked half stifled. It was a queer company, made up
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of many types and classes of men and women. Keeping the door was a handsome young officer in the sky-blue uniform of the Chasseurs ^ wearing many medals for valor and service. Here and there were other officers and private soldiers in uniform, some of them scarred or maimed, and one of them blinded. Those were the best types in the room. Others were clearly of foreign origin, including many Jews and Slavs, with rather sinister faces of a kind I have often seen in revolutionary gatherings in London and other capitals of Europe. With them were young women with black eyes staring moodily out of dead-white faces, and young men with long, uncombed hair and neurasthenic eyes, roving restlessly, and sullen in their gaze. On a small wooden platform sat the secretary of the society, a young man also, smartly dressed, dapper, hke a clerk in a bank, and with the sharp, self-confident manner of a com- mercial traveler. He explained the objects of the society and the progress he had to report.
Standing there at the back of the room, with my collar going limp in the heat, and the hot breath of the people about me making me feel sick and faint, I listened to the program of Clarte for the reformation of life. It was nothing more nor less than the Bolshevism of Lenin translated into French. It advocated the abolition of private property, the ruthless destruction of capitalism, the control by the laboring masses of all the sources and machinery of wealth, the promotion of an inter- national fellowship among the workers of the world. Old stuff, the revolutionary "dope," the old class hatred, and the old call to violence. The company listened to it in silence except for the noise of their breathing. I watched the faces of the young French soldiers, to whom all this dangerous philosophy was new, perhaps, but I could not guess the effect it had upon them, nor read the riddle of those mask-like faces still bronzed
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with sun and wind as when I had seen them under steel helmets staring across No-Man's Land from their trenches and Hstening to the rush of shells which threat- ened them with death. I thought back to bitter words I had heard from their Hps in those days, their words of scorn for politicians, profiteers, corrupt society, luxurious women, old men who gained by the death of youth. Out of that bitterness, unjust very often, overcharged with their resentment against the fate which had thrust them into the ditches of death, and now, inflamed by the thought of a poor reward for all their suffering, had come this spirit of revolt, this desire for sweeping and violent change, expressed in the sub- versive gospel of Clarte. ... A dangerous crowd, yet not big enough in numbers, not representative enough of French mentality, to be any real menace to the secu- rity of the French government and state.
It was the young officer in the Fouragere who explained to me the meaning and purpose of the Clarte movement.
He spoke of the horrors of the war, and shrugged his shoulders, and said: "You know all about that. Let us not waste words on it. . . . Men who went through that business have come out changed, with new ideas. In the trenches they said, 'This must not happen again.' Then they went farther than that and said; *To prevent this happening again we must alter the relations of people with one another, and kill all the old ideas which led to this massacre. Society must start afresh, on new lines, not marked out by frontiers of hatred. Working people of all classes must get together and recognize that they have common interests, to get on with their work in peace, without being flung against one another by people on top who make wealth out of them, or by their own passions, obedient to foolish old traditions.'"
He pointed to a few sentences In a manifesto of the
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new league: "The war has broken the mask of things. It has brought to hght the lies, the old errors, the clever sophistry which made the past a long martyrdom of justice. Our present need is to organize social life according to the laws of reason. It is the Intellectuals who must prepare the reign of the spirit over that of material force."
While the young officer talked to me I thought of something that had happened a long time ago, very close to the room in which we sat — a Feast to the Goddess of Reason, whose archpriest was Robespierre, after a Reign of Terror. Were these the same old ideas clothed in new phrases .?
"The principles of a just society are simple," say these young men of France, though I shook my head and laughed when I heard that word "simple." . . . "All great thinkers, all great moralists, all founders of religion have always agreed on the principles. Reality is reasonable."
I heard other ** axioms" read in that crowded room to that strange little crowd of French "intellectuals":
"Power ought to be common to all, as an ideal. Only work, manual or intellectual, ought to be paid for. Speculation is a crime against the crowd. Heritage is a theft."
Those who prepare for war prepare wars. " It is thought which has created progress. Men of thought must lend their life to progress."
"Those who do nothing are the militants of the status quo."
A man by my side said, "If I stay here I shall stifle, and I have heard these ideas before."
He used his shoulder to push his way out, and I followed him. We talked together under the trees of a dark street where the air was fresh. Under those trees many young Frenchmen, through the centuries,
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have talked about idealism, brotherhood of man, social contracts, the reign of Reason. The man by my side was, I should say, a mechanic, and something in his deep-set eyes told me that he had been through the realities of war.
"What do you think of it all.?" I asked.
He laughed, not in a mocking way, but with a kind of shrug in his spirit. "Comrades of mine used to talk like that in the trenches, until they had their heads blown off. . . . There is some truth in it. Society is all wrong, somehow. We ought to build something better out of the ruin of the war. But human nature, monsieur, is greedy, cruel, and stupid in the mass. Ideals are at the mercy of low passions. Look at the world now — after the war! I see no approach to the brother- hood of man. We are beginning new hatreds, pre- paring perhaps for new wars, worse than the last."
"Then you don't believe in the movement of the Clarte?" I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"It is playing in a literary way with revolutionary ideals which are at work among the masses. They will write articles; they will bring out a paper; they will hold conferences. The police will not interfere because they are men of letters. . . . But it is the high price of food and the falsity of German pledges which will move the masses. The war has left us with much trouble."
He shook hands with me and said, "American?"
"No, English."
He shook hands again.
"England, too, has her troubles, like all the world."
In spite of many currents of bitter thoughts in the minds of the French people, there is no spirit of revo-
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lution in France, but rather an intense emotional desire for stable government, good leadership, economy, and reconstruction which will- bring back prosperity and peace to France. So far from desiring to abolish private property, the French peasant, who is his own proprietor, the French shopkeeper and small tradesman, the clerk and professional man, the large merchant and the manufacturer, wish to increase the safeguards of property, to be more fully assured of the interest on money invested in government bonds, and to be repaid for all those loans which were made to Russia before and during the war. Their anger, their discontent, their utter disgust with the effects of the peace treaty are due to a sense of fear that their private property is not safeguarded and that they will get nothing out of victory to repay their losses.
All the foreign policy of France, all the irritation of the French people with those who were her friends, are due to their desperate anxiety to make their victory real, permanent, and profitable. France is haunted by the fear that her frontiers are no safer now than they were in 1914, in spite of all her immense sacrifice and losses and all her brilliant victories, and that she is not sure of peace itself for more than another spell of preparation for war. She realizes with dreadful misgivings that her population is declining steadily. In 1920 there were 220,000 more deaths than births, and in another twenty, thirty, or forty years the man- power of France will be terribly less in proportion to the Germans on the other side of her frontiers than it was in August of 19 14. What if Germany recovers her wealth and strength.^ What if Germany, unrepentant and passionate for vengeance, allies herself with Russia, which has betrayed France and hates her.^ What if the German peoples, now split into smaller states, with Austria cut oflf from the supplies of life, regroup them-
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selves and rearm themselves, in alliance with Russian Bolshevism, or a Russian autocracy that may follow Bolshevism? Dreadful, disturbing thoughts, that are in the brain of many French men and women not only in Ministerial chambers, but in city offices and shop parlors, and little rooms in apartment houses.
As far as Germany is concerned, France is determined to prevent her economic recovery at all costs, by the strict enforcement of the peace terms, which, if carried out to the letter, will strip her to the bone and keep her poor for at least a generation. However hard she works, the product of her toil will be seized to repay the damage of war in the Allied countries. Whatever her enter- prise in other countries, the profits of her industrial genius will be taken if she does not pay to the full the bill which France and England, Italy and Belgium, and all the other countries whom she warred against have presented to her. If it is impossible for Germany to pay all those claims, or if she tries to dodge them, it is a sure thing that France will try to seize her future credits and keep her with her nose to the grindstone. If need be, France will seize the left bank of the Rhine, and if need be again, sit down in Berlin. That is the clear- cut, definite policy of France, coinciding with the senti- ment of the people with regard to the Germans, and it is for that reason that they are perplexed, irritated, even exasperated with England, Italy, and the United States because they seem to see a different and con- flicting point of view, a certain yielding weakness to the Germans, and actual acts of concession which seem to France a betrayal and a breach of friendship.
So it is with England's agreement with Germany not to seize the postwar values of German enterprise abroad in the event of her inability to pay the entire sum of indemnities by the times required. France is enraged with that concession, which weakens her power of keep-
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ing Germany in a permanent state of poverty. She abominated the pressure brought to bear on her, and the promises she was forced to make under pressure, to present a bill of claims to Germany based upon the present immediate capacity of Germany to pay. France said, with a great deal of truth and justice, it is absurd to reduce our claims now because Germany is in a state of ruin. Twenty years from now, by industry, by the discovery of some new chemical secret, by some inven- tion needed by all the world, Germany may, and prob- ably will, be the richest country in Europe. Why, then, should we be in a hurry to present our bill for immediate payment, based upon present resources, when her future wealth is incalculable?
VI
Before the final presentation of the Bill of Costs to Germany, at the end of April, 1921, there was a severe strain upon the friendly relations between France and Great Britain.
England's view was based upon a different line of reasoning, which clashed with the French view in a fundamental way. When I say England's view I mean the unofficial, instinctive reasoning of the ordinary Englishman who looks at realities without passion and in a business way. He said, and still thinks, more or less: **This idea of keeping Germany poor for ever and ever, of holding her in the position of a slave state working for the rest of Europe, so that all the profits of her industry go to the payment of her debts for several generations, is ridiculous and unsound. In the first place, there will be no recovery in Europe, in an economic way, so long as Germany is poverty-stricken. We want to trade with Germany. We want to sell our goods in German markets. We want Germany to buy our raw
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material and send us back manufactured goods in exchange. Italy needs that more than we do. Italy- is in a bad way because Austria and Germany, her best markets, cannot pay for her produce. The United States want the German markets. All the world is hit because central Europe is paralyzed. But, apart from all that, which is common sense, the French policy is enormously dangerous. They think that Germany will submit to the position of a slave state. Germany won't. It is not in human nature. Certainly not in the human nature of a people sullen with defeat, re- membering their strength and pride. If the pressure is made too severe, the punishment unbearable, Germany will either yield to anarchy and carry the disease of Bolshevism to the frontiers of France, or (which is much more likely) will form a close alliance with the inevitable autocracy of Russia under Lenin or some other, which will substitute a military regime for communistic the- ories, and then there will be another and more dreadful war which France will be too weak to resist. All civilization, as we know it, will go down, and we cannot afford to take that risk. We must not ask of Germany more than human nature will stand, and if possible we must make her a peaceful partner in some kind of a League of Nations, working with all of us for the regen- eration of a stricken Europe. "
To that argument the French replied with scorn and laughter, dubbing it the weakness of sentimental gibber- ing coupled with the treachery of forgetful friends.
The French Press, inspired by their Foreign Office, revealed a bellicose ardor which was deplored by that disillusioned, cynical, but wise old Frenchman, Anatole France, and a small minority of far-seeing men. Even some of the most radical papers, like the Rappely clamored for the immediate occupation of the whole of Germany. The editor of the Democratie Nouvelle,
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another radical organ, insisted daily upon the occupa- tion of the Ruhr Valley. M. Maurice Barres, one of the most famous authors of France, was passionate in his desire for the left bank of the Rhine, and tried to win over English opinion to that policy by the most fantastic argument. "It is necessary," he said, "to the security of England. England needs a zone of security on the Rhine. Let her allow us to organize it!" In those words he abandoned the French argument that the Treaty of Versailles must be kept to the letter as a sacred document. He also challenged the English view, deep seated in every English brain, I know, that if the French were to take over the left bank of the Rhine with its immense German populations, the certainty of another war would be complete and both France and England would have to spend all their remaining strength and all their remaining wealth, or poverty, in preparing for the next struggle. In the most advanced socialist papers of France there was a prolonged campaign of Anglophobia, due to this difference in policy, and the editor of L'CEuvre, which used to be pacifist and inter- national, harked back to a narrow and bitter nationahsm, allied with violent attacks upon England, whose dead lie thick in the fields of France.
All this stirring up of passion and prejudice was the prelude to the political pressure brought to bear upon the British government by Aristide Briand and the French Foreign Office, before the final settlement of the German reparations. Briand, former SociaUst, and then Prime Minister of France, found himself appointed as the representative of French nationalism to engage in an intellectual duel with Lloyd George, former Radical and now head of a Conservative and Imperial Coalition. Briand chose his weapon, which was force, based upon the strength of the French armies. He galled up the class of 19 19 recruits, the lads of twenty-
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two, and moved them toward the Ruhr, ready for an immediate advance. Speaking in the French Chamber on April 12, 192 1, he put the case with brutal frankness and simpHcity so that the Germans, and incidentally the British, might understand. "On the first of May Germany will find herself confronted with the state- ment of her obligations and how she has fulfilled them. We have a right to execution. The bailiff having been sent, the gendarmes must accompany him if the debtor persists in being recalcitrant. It is not a question of war; it is a question of pure justice." He intimated quite clearly that France was prepared to act alone. They had the arms. They were ready to use them.
It can hardly be doubted that Briand had the mass of his people behind him. Press propaganda, as well as years of disappointment with the peace, had created a sense of rage. Yet there were men and women in France who were not pleased at the sight of their boys leaving the plow again and putting on uniforms. It re- called too sharply the dreadful days of '14. Yet most of them said, "Perhaps it is the only way of getting our rights." Paris, always most inflammable, seemed in a set mood for a march on the Ruhr, whether the Germans agreed to pay or not. To capture the great German factories of Essen, the coal fields, arsenals, and industries, and hold them to ransom, seemed to them the best policy and the best business. It would keep Germany weak and drained. It would cut off fifteen million Germans from their Fatherland. It would provide much wealth at the expense of German labor. So the population talked over cafe tables.
VII
Meanwhile, the experts were working feverishly at figures, reckoning out the resources of Germany, her
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taxable capacity, the utmost burden she could bear. It is doubtful whether even the German experts had accurate figures before them. From a private source, well informed, I received information that all classes in Germany were evading internal and external taxation by hiding what wealth they had, transferring enormous sums into neutral countries, dodging income-tax re- turns, hoarding paper money, buying precious stones and objects of art of marketable value which do not appear in any available figures. On the other hand, the big German trusts, organized by Stinnes and other magnates, had been developing industry with enormous strides, and by the pooling of capital, raw material, and profits were paying high dividends to their shareholders. It was clear that the estimates on each side would never agree. The Paris settlement fixed five thousand millions as the cash value of Ger- many's obligations, with a twelve-per-cent levy on German exports. The payment spread over forty-two years at five per cent interest would total eleven thou- sand three hundred millions. The last German offer, represented as being the utmost they could pay, recog- nized a cash obligation of two thousand five hundred million pounds, reaching a total of ten thousand million pounds spread over an unstated number of years with interest. This last offer was transmitted to the United States of America with a plea of the arbitration of that country, the decision of which Germany pledged her- self to accept. It was a last desperate attempt to split the Allies, for if the United States had accepted this office and had abated the terms to Germany upon fair consideration, a storm of fury would have broken out in France which would have been dangerous to the peace of Europe. England's agreement with the United States, which would have been certain, would have led to the breaking of friendship with the French
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people. President Harding and his advisers saw the danger of this trap, the utter impossibihty of acceptance, and they notified very quickly to Germany, after cable communications with the French and British govern- ments, that they did not regard the German offer as acceptable.
Historic meetings took place between Lloyd George and Briand, with Marshal Foch, Count Sforza, the Japanese ambassador, and others in attendance. The experts of the Reparations Commission now fixed six thousand six hundred million pounds as the total obligation in cash value to be accepted by Germany not later than May ist. All the other clauses of the treaty respecting disarmament and the trial of war prisoners were to be strictly enforced.
The differences between the two Premiers were mainly limited to the question of "sanctions," the form of pressure, and the date by which Germany was to be compelled to pay. Briand, with Marshal Foch at his right hand, insisted that on May ist the French armies should march into the Ruhr if Germany had not sub- mitted. Lloyd George held out for a period of grace. Instinctively and intellectually the Prime Minister of England shrank from the thought of the occupation of the Ruhr. It seemed to him a policy of extreme dan- ger. He did not need the private protests of a group of British bankers, and of Mr. Asquith, Lord Robert Cecil, and other statesmen (though their arguments enforced his own convictions) to feel profoundly that such an occupation would mean the "withering" of German industry so that the indemnity could never be paid, and the fatal assurance of a new war in the un- known but not distant future. Those arguments he placed before M. Briand with a certain touch of brutality which he can use at times with great effect, but they were countered by the burning resolve of Briand to
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"act" alone, if need be, on behalf of France, whose patience was exhausted, as Cardinal Dubois wrote to the Cardinal Archbishop of Cologne.
Lloyd George was faced with a stupendous dilemma. The Germans were watching this psychological and historical drama, with full understanding of its sig- nificance, ready to take advantage of the slightest sign of weakening. The whole Treaty of Versailles would fall with a crash if the divergence of views between France and England widened much further or did not find some bridge of compromise. A compromise was found. Six days' grace were given to the Germans for unconditional acceptance. Refusing to send British troops into the Ruhr — "not a man and not a gun" — Lloyd George agreed to lend the British fleet for a block- ade of German ports if Germany refused to submit to the terms. At the same time the German ambassador was privately notified that if his government accepted, the British government would on their side uphold the spirit of the treaty with the strictest regard to German interests, as far as they were safeguarded and as far as our honor was pledged, especially in regard to Upper Silesia, coveted by the Poles with the tacit approval of the French.
The German government, reconstituted under Doctor Wirth, accepted without reservations, and of all men in the world, Lloyd George must have breathed a sigh of thankfulness. He made no secret of his dread of the threatened seizure of the Ruhr by France. He did not believe it possible that German workmen could be per- suaded to serve their factories with enthusiastic indus- try under the stimulus of foreign control by foreign bayonets. He made no disguise of his conviction that the economic recovery of Europe depends a great deal on whether the German workmen will continue to
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work. And he foresaw the time when Germany, in alliance with Russia, would inevitably declare a war of vengeance if she were pressed to the limit of human patience.
Those views, held by the Prime Minister at least for a few days — though God alone could tell how quickly he would shift his ground or what undercurrents of polit- ical or other interests had impelled him in that direc- tion— did, I think, represent the average opinion of the British people. The}^ wished a fair deal to be given to Germany, if she agreed to pay up and made honest efforts to do so. They were afraid of an entry into the Ruhr, believing that it would guarantee a future war — and the idea of a future war was to them sickening and horrible and insane.
Aristide Briand departed from England in a state of gloomy exaltation. To the photographers on board his ship he said that nothing v/ould give him greater pleasure than to see a film showing the British fleet steaming into Hamburg. It was the blurting out of his secret hope that the Germans would not accept, and that the "sanctions" would have to be appHed. The fire eaters in France, and the passion of light-headed people, were disappointed by the German acceptance. It was received coldly, without thankfulness or enthu- siasm. They disbelieved in the German promises to pay more than the first installments. It is certain that many of them disbelieved the German power to pay. What they wanted was the forcible possession of German industry and means of wealth, which they would ransom and then ruin as — do not let us forget that — Germany had ransomed and ruined the industry of Lille and other French cities in the time of war. There was hardly a Frenchman who could see that the ruin of German industry would mean the final downfall
of the European trading system upon which all our
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hope of recovered prosperity depends. France felt thwarted by her friends.
VIII
The attitude of France toward Russia had been another cause of ill will and distress in French mentality. Russia's desertion of the AUied cause when revolution broke out and led to the peace of Brest-Litovsk was a frightful blow to France and to all of us. In the French mind there was no allowance made for the immense, bloody, and futile sacrifices of Russian soldiers, sent forward like sheep to the slaughter, badly equipped, often without arms and ammunition, against the flail of German machine guns and the storm of fire from German artillery. No allowance for the savage rage of the Russian masses against a corrupt, inefficient, and sometimes treacherous government, so that at least they cried out in despair and passion, "Our enemy is not in front of us, but behind us!"
One reason for the intense bitterness of the French against the Russians is easy to understand, and of immense importance to the individual Frenchman. Years before the war the French government had backed the issue of Russian bonds and had encouraged its people to subscribe to them. Every little shopkeeper, every bourgeois with a sum of money to invest, had bought Russian stock, which was the price and pledge of Russian military aid in the event of war with Germany. Now, with the Russian plunge into Bolshevism, all that money was jeopardized and probably irrecoverable. The thought worked like madness in the brains of the French middle classes. It dictated the policy of the French Foreign Office and French War Office, who supported every counter-revolutionary general, pro- viding him with arms, ammunition, and money, in the
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hope that the Lenin regime would be overthrown by a new dictator who would redeem the Russian bonds. Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel in turn became the hope of France, and their successive disasters fell like icy waters on the spirit of the French people.
Yet it is profoundly significant that the soldiers of France, the men who had come out tired and resentful from the Great War, exhausted morally and mentally, would not engage themselves in any adventure on behalf of Russia which would lead to renewed fighting on their part. At the mere rumor that some of them were going to be sent to Russia, two regiments broke into something like mutiny. French policy was therefore directed to the urging on of other peoples against the Russian Bolsheviki and ardently encouraged Poland in her "offensive-defensive" warfare, which, after many setbacks and a retreat which looked like final disaster, rallied under French generalship and certainly inflicted on Trotzky's Red armies the most damaging defeat they had ever suffered. France would have no peace with Red Russia, and, though Europe was suffering hunger and dearth in many countries for lack of Russian trade and grain, France resented with exceeding wrath certain tentative proposals by England and the United States to arrange a commercial and political peace with the Russian people for the sake of the world's health and reconstruction, with the ulterior motive of over- throwing the Bolshevik devil by letting in the hght to the victims of its bloody rule.
France has no faith in a League of Nations. Cle- menceau shrugged his shoulders at the idea of it, and yielded to President Vv'ilson's dream for the sake of practical support in the other items of the peace treaty. The French people will not admit their German enemies to any society of nations on terms of equality, and do not see any kind of guaranty in such a league for their
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frontiers and their national safety. The present rulers of France, men of ardent patriotism, not looking to any- advance in the ideas of civiUzation, having no faith in the virtues of human nature to resist the call of venge- ance and of greed, take the old cynical view of the European jungle, and rely upon the old philosophy of alliances, groups united in self-interest, buffer states between them and their hereditary foes, which made up the old policy of the balance of power.
So with Belgium, with Poland, with the aristocratic party in Hungary, with the small states formed out of the slaughter of the Austrian Empire, France has es- tablished secret understandings, military and economic and political, which will safeguard her, she hopes, against the menace of that time when Germany may have recovered enough to be dangerous again — ^though by all efforts of France that time will be far postponed. It is a logical, a clear-cut, in many ways a justified policy. The only argument against it is that it harks back to the state of national rivalry, suspicion, diplomatic jugglings, military engagements and burdens, v/hich cast a black spell over Europe before the late war; and that it is a preparation for a renewed conflict at some future time, when this new balance of power will be tested in the scales of fate, and Europe again will be drenched in the blood of warring nations. In defense of this policy the French people, who believed that the last conflict was a war to end war, that the killing of German militarism was to be the relief from their own burden of military service, will have to maintain a great standing army, and — in their present poverty — will have to find somehow money enough to pay for it, with its desperate struggle to keep ahead of all other military powers in eflficiency and the invention of the machinery of slaughter. And the mothers of babes just born will know, as they rock them in their cradles, that they,
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like their fathers, will one day be sent forward into the fires of hell to be torn to bits by flying steel, to be choked with poison gas, to be blinded, maimed, maddened, or killed. Is it for that reason that just now there are net many mothers in France^ not many babies being born?
IX
The soul of France is not happy nor at peace. Her agonies are too fresh, her wounds are still unhealed, and the price of victory has been too great. Whether one goes to the chateau of the landowner, or to the cottage of the peasant, or to the poor rooms of city needlewomen and workers, one is confronted instantly, four times out of five, with the ghost of some dead boy or man who haunts the living.
In the little wooden shanties which have been built up on the old battlefields I spoke, as I have told, to French people who have come back again. Several of them told me that their gladness was spoiled by the thought of the sons who would never help them in the fields again, or come tramping into the kitchen, or work for them in their old age.
One old woman said to me: **When peace came with its excitement which made us a little mad with joy I thought my son would come back. They told me he was killed, but I believed he would come back. Now I know he will not come back, and this work I do seems useless."
Other w^omen spoke like that in some such words.
The men who have come back into these villages are not altogether merry. Some of them are rather sullen. There are quarrels between them and their women folk. For five years they were away from home, ex- cept for brief visits on leave, if they were lucky. During their absence their villages were the billeting places of
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English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, AustraHan and American soldiers. There were flirtations, love aff'airs, inevitable episodes between some of their women and these foreign soldiers. Some women's tongues are sharp, some of them have long memories for things done by their sisters in time of war. Gossip, slander, back- biting, happen in moments of malice. . . . The young Frenchmen with sisters and sweethearts are not very grateful to British soldiers and others for what they did in the war. They are jealous, suspicious, resentful of the friendship they established with the women of France. It is an aspect, and a tragic aspect, of war psychology which must not be left out of account in the reaction which has injured the old comradeship between the nations who fought together.
England has suffered most by that reaction. France for a time has been suspicious of England, jealous of her. Conscious that they lost more men in the war, suffered most damage — frightful and irretrievable dam- age to beautiful towns and churches and cathedrals and countrysides — and that they bore the cruelest shocks of war, they believe that England gained most from the peace. They point to the widened spheres of the British imperial rule, in Palestine and Mesopo- tamia, the German colonies in Africa, and they think that British policy now is inspired by mere commercial selfishness, and that our power stands across the path of French interests and bars the way of France to those fruits of victory still unharvested from the beaten enemy.
In May of 192 1, not a fortnight after the German ac- ceptance of the Bill of Costs, there arose an international crisis which put a more severe strain upon the friendly relations between France and England. It had been
2q8
THE PRICE OF VICTORY IN FRANCE
agreed by the Supreme Council that the question as to the separation of Upper Silesia with its rnixed population of Germans and Poles should be put to a plebiscite determining whether the whole, or part of it, should re- main within the German Reich or go to Poland. The result of this plebiscite, superintended by an Allied commission under the protection of French and Italian troops, and a body of British officers, was by six to four in favor of Germany, though it was still within the right of the Supreme Council to decide the exact boundary line between Germany and Poland. With- out waiting for that decision, Korfanty, a Polish leader, played the part of D'Annunzio in Fiume, aroused the fervor of the Polish masses, and incited them to occupy German districts. The French stood by without oppos- ing their advance. The Italians resisted, and lost a number of men before they retreated under overwhelm- ing numbers of Polish insurgents. British officers of the Allied mission, there to uphold international jus- tice, in fairness to Germany as to Poland, found them- selves in a powerless and humiliating position, surrounded by rebels against their authority whose officers they were compelled to salute.
When this news reached England, Lloyd George waited a little while and then gave tongue. He spoke raspingly, with something like violence, and the words had an ugly sound in the ears of France. In his first statement he did not mention France by more than a passing reference, but inveighed against Poland, the ally and foster-child of France, with very bitter words. The hardest thing he said was that her part in the war had been divided between those who fought by the side of Russia and broke when Russia broke, and those who fought to the end on the side of Germany against French and British troops. She owed her nationality to the Allies, and it was her duty to respect the Treaty
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of Versailles which had created her as a nation. He made it plain that he would not tolerate this invasion of Silesia, and suggested that German troops might be given the authority to repel it.
A storm of protest and hostile comment arose the next morning in the French Press. Lloyd George was warned that his words were ''dangerous," that France would not tolerate such insults to her ally, and that they revealed something like a pro-German spirit. Aristide Briand, the Prime Minister, accepted the fact that the Treaty of Versailles must be respected in Silesia as elsewhere, but warned Germany that any military adventure against the PoUsh insurgents would be regarded as an act of war by France. A few days passed, and it seemed as though the French Press had received orders to pour oil on the troubled waters. They made certain half-hearted apologies for the heat of their language and said that Mr. Lloyd George's statement had been inaccurately reported. There had been a "misunderstanding." But Lloyd George was resolved that there should be no misunderstanding of his views. On the evening of May 17th he issued another statement, more vigorous than the first, more provoc- ative of French sentiment, not unjustified but challeng- ing. To their Press he addressed severe and warning words: "In all respect, I would say to the French Press that their habit of treating every expression of Allied opinion which does not coincide with their own as im- pertinence, is fraught with mischief. That attitude of mind, if persisted in, will be fatal to any entente." In addition he used certain words which seemed to have a sinister meaning, suggestive of a new grouping of Powers in which France might be isolated from the friendship of Great Britain.
"The course of the world in coming years cannot be forecast. The mists ahead are more than usually
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dense. Much will depend on the Allies holding together. Apart from the treaty obligations, events which can- not be foreseen must determine the future groupings of nations y and the future of the worlds especially of Europe y will he determined by old or new friendships. "
That last sentence, if it had any meaning, and it was not uttered lightly, could have only one meaning, and that the warning that the Anglo-French entente might be broken in favor of an Anglo-German entente. As such it was taken by the French people, and it came to them as a blow in the face. In every newspaper in France this statement by the Prime Minister of England, following his first speech about Silesia, was regarded as an unfriendly, offensive, and brutal utterance, which they refused to accept as representative of the views of the English people.
They were right in refusing to accept that. In spite of the annoyance of many of our people at the long series of rather bitter articles appearing in French newspapers, the thought that our friendship with France should actually be endangered — broken — came as a sharp shock. The thought was abominable, for if that were to happen, if in the future groupings of nations we should find ourselves allied to the enemies of France and not with them, then indeed the whole of the Great War had been but a grisly massacre without any spiritual purpose at all, and the six hundred thousand British dead in the fields of France had been slain for the devil's jest in a game of mockery.
We must have differences with France. Our general attitude toward the foundations of peace in Europe was not the same as hers, because her peril was greater, her sense of unforgivable injury more poignant, her future more uncertain, her desire to keep Germany weak and poor a desperate and all-consuming passion, because of hideous memories and ever-present fears.
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But though we might afford to be more generous to a beaten enemy, and look forw2trd to a peace based upon concihation rather than upon the mihtary supremacy of a new balance of powder, there could be no honest question of abandoning France for any new allegiance. It would be the deepest, blackest dishonor, the viola- tion of all the tragic sacrifice and the most heroic memo- ries of that war which we have fought together. I remember at the beginning of the war the shouts of *'Vive les Anglais!" when the first of our boys came marching through French villages; the tears of the men and women w^io thrust fruit and flowers into their hands; the cry of "Camarades!" ... I remember our troops in the villages behind the lines year after year, where every Tommy had friends who kissed him when he went off to battle and cried when news came of his death. ... I remember the entry into Lille, toward the end of it all, when the liberated people hailed us and wept with joy at the sight of us. Was all that to be wiped out, forgotten, and disgraced by the quarrels of politicians and a drifting apart.? Never; for while there are men alive in England who fought in France, they will remember the heroic spirit of those people, their long, patient suffering, their gayety even in the ditches of tragedy, their valor of soul. And in France they remember our men, the "Tommies" they admired, the graves they tend still with flowers kept fresh.
To me, now and always, though I see the hope of the future with a vision impossible to many Frenchmen, the name of France is like an old song, and I love her people, her history, her beauty, with something like passion. I am not alone in that, and there are between France and England sacred ties which can only be broken if honor is broken, and faith is defiled, and a spiritual union in desperate sacrifice utterly forgotten.
VI
THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLISH LIFE
TN many subtle ways, not apparent on the surface *■ of things, the social spirit of England has been more changed in the last six years of history than in the six centuries preceding them. Such a statement may seem fantastic in exaggeration for the sake of an easy and arresting phrase, yet it is exactly true of certain characteristics of English life and habit, for the war was a convulsion which shook England to the core and broke up many of its old instincts and traditions of social faith.
In spite of the modern developments of democ- racy and industry, the progress of education, and the growth of cities, England remained, until the World War, amazingly feudal in its structure and insular in its habits of thought. The old landed aristocracy maintained in the countryside the power and allegiance which they had possessed for hundreds of years, and the small farmers and tenantry, fast rooted to their soil, had no sense of change and no desire for change.
In counties like Somerset and Devon, Warwick and Gloucester, Norfolk and Suffolk, the peasant laborer was, in his ways of speech and thought, but little differ- ent from his forefathers of Tudor and Plantagenet times, spoke almost the language of Chaucer, so that to the London man, modernized, quick witted, the
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"yokel'* of the south, west, and north was incompre- hensible in his dialect and primitive in his outlook and understanding. The landed gentry, in old country mansions, changed the cut of their clothes, danced the fox-trot, adopted the latest social fashion, but instinc- tively, in the very fiber of their bodies, in allegiance to a tradition of life and to a certain plot of land which was theirs, were intensely insular.
I remember a 3^ear or two before the war a startling instance of the conservatism of English life beyond the cities. It was when the craze for "pageants" had caught hold of English imagination, so that in many old towns the people dressed themselves in the costumes of the past, reread the history of their forefathers, and acted the drama of the centuries from Saxon times to their own present. In Norfolk there was such a pag- eant, and one scene of it was to represent a chapter of history when, five hundred years ago, the gentlemen of Norfolk, with their squires, came to pay homage to Mary Tudor, their princess. Five centuries had passed, but every actor in the scene bore the same name, lived on the same soil, held the same place, as those ancestors of his who had knelt before the Tudor princess.
In a thousand ways like this England held to the past. The people were insular, and the sea which divided them from the Continent was a great water of defense against the spirit of change, except in outward, super- ficial things.
Then the war came and changed much in the spirit of English people. ... At first it seemed as though it would be like other wars of England — a foreign expedition of a little professional army, and of young lads eager to see "foreign parts" by taking the king's shilling. They would fight gallantly, many would be killed, there would be exciting reading in the news- prints, and then the bells would ring for victory, the
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lads would come marching back, and English life would go on again, hardly touched or altered. Even at Water- loo there had been only twenty-five thousand English soldiers. To the mass of English folk the Napoleonic wars had been a remote and distant thing, not affect- ing their own lives much. When the great World War broke out the British troops who were sent, according to the pledge with France, were called the "Expedi- tionary Force," as in the old days. But presently the Regular Army was spent, and presently all the youth of the nation was sent out, the younger brothers follow- ing the elder brothers, the married following the single men, fathers of families conscripted like the boys at school. England was all in — all her men, all her women, and no escape for any of them in the service of death. No living body in England was exempt from the menace of destruction. Death came out of the skies and chose old men and women, nursing mothers, babies, anyone. The enemy attacked them in little homes in back streets, in big factory centers, in the heart of London. ... So England was no longer safe in her island. An island people, uninvaded for a thousand years, with utter reliance on her fleet as an invincible shield, were suddenly shocked into the knowledge that the sea about them was no longer an impassable gult between them and all foreign foes. It was a shock which broke up the old psychology. We have not recovered from it yet, nor ever shall do.
English youths went out to the death fields, hundred thousand after hundred thousand, until four million men had gone that way. From first to last on all fronts, the men of the English counties — not Irish nor Scots, nor Welsh nor Canadian nor Australian — made up sixty-four per cent of the British fighting forces. They were English soldiers who fought most, and endured most, and died most, because there were most of them,
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though the world heard least of them, because the Enghsh people don't talk most about themselves. Out of every four men who went out to the World War one did not come back again, and of those who came back many are maimed and blind and some are mad. England and the spirit and mind of England were altered by so great an ordeal which had come to every home and heart.
II
In many ways the alteration was plainly visible during the war, especially to fighting men who came home from the dirty ditches on three days' leave, or seven. The home-staying people — the old and middle- aged, the workers in the factories providing the material and munitions of war, the government officials, clerks, and employers of labor, even the young girls — were possessed by a new energy, a more vital spirit, a restless and energetic excitement. They were all "out to win." They were all, in big ways or little, dynamic in their activities. Caste was for a time in abeyance, though not abolished. (That in England, where we are all snobs, from the plumber's mate and the greengrocer's wife to the Eton boy and the dowager duchess, would be expecting too much, too quickly.) University pro- fessors were acting as field laborers. Patrician women were making munitions with factory girls. A great, strong, spiritual wind seemed to have swept through all classes of English life. It had cleansed even the slums of great English cities which had seemed past cleansing.
Before the war, an immense population in England crowded into the cities, had lived below the poverty line or on the thin edge of it — miserably, precariously, dirtily. There was a mass of floating, casual labor, often out of work, huddled in the hovels of back streets,
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THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLISH LIFE
in filthy conditions. Their children were ragged, barefooted, underfed. Now those conditions had been altered by the war. The demand for labor was so great that every able-bodied man could get a good wage. The government and the employers paid great wages for skilled work. Mechanics who had found trouble in getting forty or fifty shillings a week now gained two hundred or three hundred shillings a week. Any girl with her hair hanging down her back or tied into a pigtail could get a wage that her father would have envied before the war. Munition girls were getting three or four pounds a week, some of them far more than that. Small families, all working, paid by government money, raked in an incredible weekly revenue. For the first time they had a broad margin of money for the fun of life as well as for its sharp necessities.
I remember being home on leave once during the war and walking in the park of a poor district of London on a bank holiday — when the poor people used to come out of their slums in their rags to enjoy a little liberty. This time there were no rags, but well-dressed children, girls overdressed in the imitation of fashionable ladies, a strange new look of prosperity and well-being. At that time the workers in factory towns had more money than they knew how to use, and bought absurd little luxuries, and grabbed at the amusements of life without thought of the morrow. There were pianos in the homes of coal heavers, and the wives of laborers wore fur coats — in summer as well as in winter.
The fighting man, back from the trenches, where he risked death every day and every minute of every day for one shilling and twopence, was startled by the money made by the luckier men who worked for war at home. He saw injustice there, inequality of service and reward, and sometimes was bitter and blasphemous on the subject. But on the whole, the soldier did not 15 217
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begrudge the money earned by the home workers. They were his folks. He was glad of their luck, though he did not share it. He believed that when he came home — ij he came home! — he, too, would get high wages for any job he might get. His wrath and the wrath of the home workers (in spite of their own prosperity) were reserved for the manufacturers and financiers who were making enormous profits out of government con- tracts— vast profits out of the massacre.
"The profiteers," as they were called, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, became the worst hated class in England as in other countries, by the masses of working people, and by the old gentry who gave their youth to war, according to old traditions and the law of their caste, without any reward but that of pride and honor. The old aristocracy saw themselves doomed by the uprising of the New Rich. The small landowner, the country squire, the nobleman of the old order, aloof from trade and manufactures, gave their wealth to the service of the state, as they gave their sons, and upon them fell, year by year, a heavier bur- den of taxation. Before the end of the war, and after the end of it, many of them sold their estates, which had been in their families for hundreds of years, sold also their family treasures. The New Rich took pos- session of many old mansions, bought the family heir- looms of the old regime, renovated and vulgarized old historic places. I know one family of the ancient order whose history in the war is typical of others. There were four sons, and all of them were in the army or the navy, and two of them were killed. The daughters became nurses and devoted themselves to the wounded during all the years of war. The mother died by the strain of war. Increasing taxation bore down heavily upon an already impoverished estate. The father, a peer whose name belongs to the great memories of Eng-
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land, sold the pictures of his ancestors to an American millionaire, then the treasures and relics of his house. It is now an empty shell, and the eldest son, back from the war, farms a little plot of land on the edge of the old park which belonged to the family since the first Charles was king.
Ill
A social revolution has been accomplished in England by this turn in the wheel of fortune. The New Poor — once the old gentry — are scraping along fairly well, as they must confess, on the remnants of former wealth; the New Rich possess many of their places, and so far have not learned those traditions of kindness, of gener- osity, and of noble manners which made the old gentry pleasant people, whatever faults they had. In a way previously unknown to a great extent in England, small traders, little manufacturers, business adven- turers, without capital or power, seized the chance of war, the needs of a government reckless of all cost provided the supplies of war came in, and made rapid progress to great prosperity. Their profits mounted higher and higher, and, though the government imposed upon them an excess-profits duty, most of them dodged it, in one way or another.
From this class there has risen up a new "smart set" whose appearance and ways are surprising to those who knew England before the war and came back with observant eyes. They have invaded the places which used to be sanctuaries of the old aristocracy — Prince's restaurant, the Hyde Park Hotel, the royal inclosure at Ascot, the lawns of Ranelagh and Hurlingham, the river gardens of Henley. They dress loudly and talk loudly, in a nasal way. The young men are singularly lacking in good manners. They sprawl in the presence of their women folk. Their idea of gallantry is horse-
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play with pretty girls. They pufF cigarette smoke into the faces of their dancing partners, and play the giddy goat in public places. It is they who crowd into public dancing rooms with girls expensively dressed but not expensively educated. Hour after hour they gyrate with the grotesque movements of the modern dance, cheek to cheek with their little ladies, yet singularly indifferent, it seems, to amorous dalliance. It is a ritual which they perform earnestly as part of their new duties in life, but as far as I have observed them, they do not get any real pleasure out of the exercise or out of the company of the girls. They pass from one partner to another as they would change omnibuses on the way to the City. The girls themselves, in this particular set, are a curious compound of feminine artificiality and tomboy simplicity. They paint their lips, wear hideous little frocks and openwork stockings, but they will drive a motor car through the thickest traffic without turning a hair, and box a boy's ears if his "cheek" gets too much on their nerves. They are self-possessed, bad-mannered, vulgar young people, su- premely indifferent to public opinion, pleased to shock the sensibilities of old-fashioned folk, yet not outrage- ous in the larger moralities. Generally, I think, they are able to look after themselves with perfect propriety, though they take risks which would horrify the ghosts of their grandmothers, and behave with a loose frivolity which would arouse the suspicions of the most charita- ble. Those young people are the children of those who did well out of the war. They have not yet acquired the refinements of wealth, though they have lost the simplicity of the class to which their parents belonged. Their faces, their voices, their manners betray a lowly origin, for heredity still has something to say, and they have not found a real place in English life, though they make so much noise and take up so much room.
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It was the middle-class man or woman that was hard- est hit by taxation before the ending of the war, and by the prices of life's necessities rising higher and higher every month. The laboring classes kept mostly beyond the pace of these rising prices by rising wages. Well organized and fully aware of their new importance as the workers for victory, they saw to it that their wages should always be on the upgrade and beyond the tide of living costs. If this did not happen, they went on strike, and the government yielded — every time. The government paid every kind of wage for work, though secretly it knew that there would be a fearful reckoning when victory was assured, if it might be assured, v/hich was not always certain. But there were many people between the devil and the deep sea — between profiteers and organized labor. They were unorganized. They were living on the interest of small capital. They were dependent on fixed salaries or professional fees which could not be increased. Their rents were raised. The income-tax assessor had no mercy on them. The cost of living frightened them. They v/ere reduced to a state of stinting and scraping, underfeeding, clinging to shabby clothes. They, more than any, belonged to the New Poor. . . . Then at last the war ended, and masses of men came back from the battlefields, leaving an Army of Ghosts behind them — their dead comrades. Then all things changed under the surface of English life.
IV
The men who came back were not the same men as those who had gone away. They had been utterly changed. They had gone out from villages in England where their life had been very narrow, very limited in ideas and speech. Many of the boys in those villages
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were as simple and unthinking as the peasants of the Middle Ages. From the city slums they had gone out in the big battalions, and the under-sized, under- fed, ill-aired lads of that city had been broadened and strengthened, well fed, well aired in an outdoor life that was healthy and fine when it was not deadly and dreadful. They had taken frightful risks as a daily habit, until the thought of death was not much to them. They had mixed and talked with men of many minds. They had thought strange thoughts in the silence of night watches with the instant menace of death about them. Some of them were broken in nerve. Some of them were brutalized and demoralized by this life of war. Many of them were bitter and resentful of the things they had had to do and suffer and see. All of them hated war. Most of them had come to think that not only the Germans were guilty of that war, though most guilty, but that something was wrong with civilization itself, with the governments of nations, with the old men who had sent the young men to the trenches because this massacre had been arranged or allowed.
They were eager to get back home, and thousands were kept rotting in mind and body in many far places — as far as Mesopotamia — months after peace. When they came home they were not eager at first to get to work. They had earned, they thought, a hoHday, a long rest. They had served England. England could keep them for a bit. So for many months they idled, played around, restlessly, never quite satisfied, not fitting easily again into civil Hfe and home life — and the government still kept them on unemployed doles, piling up the national debt, printing more paper money, which was nothing but a promissory note on future industry. Prices did not fall; they rose higher. The profiteers, big and small, capitalist and shopkeeper,
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still demanded the same margin of profit on goods made and sold. The ex-soldier v/as exasperated by these prices. His government dole was not large enough to give him much of a margin for the fun of life. Presently he began to demand work. The mass of skilled hands found it easily enough, on the whole, and at war wages. But there was a great mass of unskilled labor which could not get work. It was very skilled labor in the art and craft of war. It was made up of expert machine gunners, experienced airmen, riflemen, bombers, trench- mortar experts, fellows who could use a bayonet dex- terously. But it was utterly unskilled in the arts and crafts of peace. These men had been boys when they were recruits. They had gone out to war straight from school. They had skipped apprenticeship to any trade. They had not even learned typewriting or clerical work. When they asked for jobs the trade-unions said:
"Where is your apprenticeship ticket?"
"I was in the army," said the unemployed man. ''*I was fighting for England and the whole damn crowd of stay-at-homes."
"Sorry," said the trade-union foreman. "You were little heroes, no doubt, and we're much obliged to you, but we don't dilute skilled labor with unskilled trash. It's against trade-union rules."
It was also, it seemed, against the principles of many employers of labor in the great cities, the managers of city offices. Young gentlemen who had been officers in the infantry or the aircraft, in the tanks or machine- gun corps, called upon them in search of clerkships. These were the loyal gentlemen who, while the young men were fighting and dying, said, "We will fight to the last man — to the bitter end." But now that the end had come, with victory, some of them looked doubtfully at the ex-officer boys who had had the luck to come back, and uttered disconcerting words.
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"You are hardly fitted for work in this oifice. You have been wasting your time in the army. Probably you have acquired habits which would not make you useful in this business. On the whole, we prefer boys just out of school or just down from the university."
So young ex-officers after various experiences of this kind went away using language they had learned in Flanders — strong, unprintable language — with great bitterness in their hearts.
On Christmas Eve last in London, while the streets were filled with people doing their shopping, some of these ex-officers — heroes of the war — stood on the sidewalks, turning the handles of piano-organs, appeal- ing to the charity of passers-by. Probably they were the worst and not the best of the unemployed officers, the scallywags, but it was not good to see them. The sight of them there sickened some of us who had been with them in the war. I know a lieutenant colonel who was reduced to hawking about a book from house to house. By an irony of fate it was a History of the Great War, in which he had played an honorable part. On the sales of the book he was to get a small commission, but at the end of his first week's work, when he had agonized with shyness and shame, afraid to ask for the "lady of the house" lest she should be one with whom he had taken tea in better days, he was fourpence down on his expenses. There are many men like that — some are friends of mine — who have never been able to get a decent job since the armistice. Civil life had no place for them, in spite of Lord Haig's constant appeals to the nation on their behalf. The men had a better chance than their officers, and until recent days the majority did get assimilated into the ranks of labor, although a minority remained unemployed, and, in some cases, owing to nervous debility after the shock of war, unemployable.
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The government was not unmindful of these men. Every unemployed soldier received, and still receives, a weekly allowance, now reduced to one pound, and this helps a single man to scrape along without starvation, but no more than that, and without any sense of good reward. The man who doesn't like work makes it do. The man who wants to work and can't receives this dole without gratitude — with a curse in his heart at a nation's ingratitude.
Among his rivals, keeping him out of work, were the girls of England. During the years when manhood was away in masses the girls came out of their homes, took the places of men in many kinds of work — rough work as well as soft work — and did wonderfully well. They were happy in that work, earning good wages which enabled them to buy pretty frocks, to amuse themselves in holiday hours, to be magnificently inde- pendent of the stuffy little homes in which they had been like caged birds. English girlhood found its wmgs in the war, and flew away from the old traditions of inclosure to a larger liberty.
That has been an immense social change. Apart from the peculiarities of the New Rich which I have mentioned, it has changed the manners and spirit of English life, and these clear-eyed girls of war-time England, now grown to womanhood, have nothing in common w4th the prim and timid ways of their mammas and grandmammas, but face life without shyness of fear — confident, frank, adventurous, out for fun at any price — ^which is sometimes too high and horrible.
Since the war a new generation of youth — boys as v/ell as girls — has grown up. The younger brothers are filling the places of the elder brothers who were in the fighting fields and did not come back. It is a new kind of youth in England, belonging to a new life strange to VIS older men. It is not touched by the shadow of
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war. It has got clear away from that. It refuses to be gloomy with present conditions; it is impatient of the tragedy that hangs over older minds. It is very daring in its desire to cut clean away from old traditions of thought and manner. It is joyous, reckless, amazingly thoughtless of trouble ahead. It joins the dance of life, eager to crowd a lot into the passing hour. The lessons and the memories of war do not seem to sober it or touch it with any gravity.
It seems to superficial observers, even sometimes to men hke myself, whose job it is to observe below the surface, that the English people have forgotten too quickly the things that happened — the men who died, the men who live in blindness, in madness, in hospitals for cripples and shell-shock cases. Many times I have been saddened by this thought of quick forgetfulness and have been startled by the apparent callousness of my own country after the blood sacrifice of its youth.
England is not callous. A great proof of piety and remembrance and pride was given on the last anniver- sary of armistice, when the body of an unknown soldier was brought down Whitehall, past the Cenotaph, on the way to a grave in the Abbey. The King and his generals waited there to salute this body of a man whom no one knew except as one of those who had fallen in the defense of England, whom no one knew, yet was known in the hearts of all of us. In the night women came out into the streets of London to wait for the dawn, to be ready for the man who was their man — husband or lover or brother or son. Not thousands of women, but hundreds of thousands. Men, too, mostly ex-soldiers, came to welcome back a pal who had died out there in that great comradeship of death. To each
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THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLISH LIFE
woman the unknown soldier was her man; to each soldier his pal. There were few tears in the crowd when the coffin came, with an old tin hat and gas mask on the flag which draped it. No tears, but a wonderful silence and the spirit of remembrance. And when the coffin passed, led by the King and his generals, there was an endless line of folk passing by the Ceno- taph to lay little bunches of flowers on the pedestal of that empty shrine. All through the da^^s and nights for a week of days and nights, never stopping, never speaking, a living tide flowed by, paying the homage of their souls to the dead, and for more than a week of days and nights they passed into the Abbey, to walk by the grave of the unknown soldier who was theirs. The soul of England remembers.
But her people hide their wounds, and foreigners who go to England are startled to find so little trace of war's scars. They see the streets thronged by cheer- ful people, well dressed, well fed, prosperous looking. "England has recovered marvelously," they say. '*She has returned to normal. She is the same old England. "
That is untrue. There will never be the same old England again. It is a new and diff'erent England. Not yet has the country recovered from the drains of war, nor paid the price of victory.
VI
For a long time England was the great, rich, strong country of the Allies. In the early years of war English gold, all the savings of centuries, was the Fortunatus's purse of other fighting nations. We supplied France, Italy, Russia, Greece with money and materials of war. They borrowed and borrowed from us. Then our wealth was exhausted and it was our turn to borrow, from a nation richer than we had been. At the present
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time we owe one thousand millions of pounds sterling to the American people, and I suppose one day we shall pay our debt, unless there is a general understanding to wipe out the Allied debts all round. Meanwhile the wealth of England is no more than the promise of the future as it may be fulfilled by the industry of the people. All the money — the paper, anyway — issued by the government is a promissory note on the future. Deeper and deeper the government is pledging the future in order to make present payments. The cost of carrying on the country is ten times more than it was before the war, owing to the increased cost of every- thing that is essential to the life and safety of the nation or to the ambitions and purposes of Enghsh leaders. After "the war to end war" the army and navy cost two hundred and seventy millions of pounds a year, which is much more than twice as much as the prewar annual budget for all the purposes of national life and progress. On our military and administrative adventure in Meso- potamia the government spent forty millions of pounds a year, until the pressure of public opinion forced it to curtail this cost, which served no other purpose than to "boost" up the oil sharks.
The interest on our national debt is each year three hundred and forty-five miUions of pounds, nearly three times as much as the prewar annual budget. To obtain this revenue the Enghsh folk are taxed beyond their patience and endurance. There is no mercy in this taxation. Capital is squeezed of all its profits now, and the profiteer is outraged by this capture of his wealth. But all employers and manufacturers are hit hard — bludgeoned — by the tax collectors. One man I know, a big coal owner and employer of labor, has to pay twelve shillings and sixpence out of every twenty shillings of his revenue. The middle-class man of small fortune pays twenty-five per cent of his
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income in taxation. At the beginning of 1921, when economic reaUties were faced for the first time, money was so "tight" in England that the banks refused further loans to commercial and industrial companies, and many manufacturers found it impossible to "carry on." They were in a tragic dilemma. The markets of central Europe, Russia, and Asia had collapsed. Those were unable to buy either manufactured goods or raw material on any scale suJEficient to sustain the old prosperity of Enghsh factories. At the same time labor in England refused to lower its scale of wages to anything like the prewar level, or, indeed, at all, the consequence being that the cost of production re- mained too high for competition in any foreign markets, and the retail prices in England were not falling, and could not fall, to their old level. Capital itself was nervous of "cutting its losses" by wholesale reductions in prices, and decided to challenge the whole position of labor by declaring a lockout, closing down factories, and biding its time until the rising tide of unemployment — a tidal wave — brought the workingmen to their senses. Unless they reduced their wage claims England would soon be threatened with bankruptcy.
VII
The first round in the great struggle was fought out with the coal miners. They had for a long time been a privileged class of labor, earning high wages during the war, yet never satisfied, even at the time of their prosperity, owing to certain inequalities of conditions and rewards in the various coal fields. Influenced by local leaders, many of them men of fine character and brain power, and by agitators of a low, revolutionary, tub-thumping kind, they were deeply suspicious of the owners, whose profits seemed to them out of all propor-
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tion with that of labor. They could see no reason why men like the Duke of Northumberland or women hke Viscountess Rhondda, by a mere accident of birth which put them in one cradle rather than another, should get royalties on all the mineral beneath their inherited land, without doing a hand's turn of work to improve the machinery or management of the mines. For some time the idea of nationalization appealed to them as the Magna Charta of the mine industry. If all mines were worked by the government, their inequalities of service and reward could be adjusted, and a greater common wage could be secured for the workers. This question was forced to the front after repeated strikes, especially in South Wales, the storm center, and at last the government under Lloyd George appointed a commission to inquire into the whole problem of the coal industry, with a pledge that they would not refuse the report of the majority on the commission under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Sankey. After many sittings of a dramatic character in which ducal coal owners and others were subjected to keen cross-exami- nation by the miners' representatives, and made but a poor showing, as most people admitted, in defense of their hereditary privileges and their amazing ignorance of their own source of wealth, the Sankey report was issued and was in favor of nationalization. The min- ers naturally demanded the fulfillment of the govern- ment pledges to act upon its findings, and when a year passed and it became plain that the government had no intention whatever of doing so, the word ''betrayal" was used from Cardiff to Newcastle by millions of men. From that time their confidence in the government was destroyed. They had "no use" for Lloyd George, who once had been their hero. In 1920, when the export of coal to foreign countries was still a source of great profit, owing to exorbitant rates charged to foreign countries,
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the miners tried their strength by striking for a bigger share of those profits. To win the favor of pubHc opinion, they also demanded that fourteen shilhngs and sixpence a ton should be taken off the price to home consumers. They were beaten on both issues, and surrendered temporarily, not without anger and smol- dering discontent.
Then in the spring of 192 1 the government flung a bombshell into the coal industry by an abrupt abandon- ment of "control." Throughout the war and for two and a half years afterward the government had "controlled" the industry by an arrangement with the owners by which they received a certain share of profit in return for subsidizing the cost of production in order to maintain the men's wages at the level agreed upon from time to time. It had been officially an- nounced that the government control would continue until August, but without warning the date was altered to March. Again the miners used the word "betrayal," and even some of the mine owners protested against the alteration. What had happened to alter the gov- ernment plans was a sudden icy blast of fear on the sub- ject of national finance. Expert advisers warned the Cabinet that if their policy of expenditure, at home and abroad, were continued much longer, the bottom would fall out of the Treasury. The millions of pounds spent on pensions, doles, and subsidies, to say nothing of imperial expenditure, could not be balanced by income from the national industry, which was showing signs of rapid declirle. The burden of taxation on capital was crippling all enterprise and development. Employers of labor were shutting down their works on all sides, and our export trade suddenly "slumped" to an alarm- ing degree. Coal exports above all dropped with a rush for lack of orders. France, Italy, and other countries which had been forced to pay our high prices in their
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desperate need of fuel after the war, could now do without ours. The German deliveries were beyond the capacity of France to use in her own factories. The surplus she sold to Italy and others. American coal was coming cheaper to the Continent, across the Atlantic, than we could sell it from South Wales. The cost of production in our coal fields, owing to the high standard of wages and low standard of output, was no longer possible in respect of these new conditions. It was then that the government abandoned control and handed back the mines to the owners, with the sugges- tion that they must make the best of a bad business. Between mine owners, managers, and Cabinet Ministers there were a few whispered words, a slight deflection of eyelids, a nod of assent. "The men must be brought to heel. A drastic cut in wages! Of course they'll fight, but now is the time, and it's got to be done." It was done in the worst possible way and led to the gravest risk. It was the risk of civil war.
It is hardly to be denied by honest thinkers with some knowledge of human passion that England was very near to revolution in the critical days of the coal crisis in the spring of 1921. Only a few hours and a few men were between the challenge and the conflict. If ten o'clock had struck on Friday night, the 15th of April, without a repeal of the notices to the railway and transport men, there would have been, certainly, a class warfare leading to bloodshed and civil disorder of the wildest kind.
That was not in any way because the miners and their allies desired revolution. But when certain forces are set in motion certain results are bound to happen, according to all laws of human experience, and those forces were assembling on two sides, directly hostile, ready for action. On the one side were millions of
men believing honestly that there was a powerful con-
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spiracy against them on the part of the employers of labor and the government to force them to the accept- ance of wages below the level of decent livelihood and to smash the power of their labor organization by which they had obtained protection and a decent wage rate after centuries of struggle. On the other side was the government supported by the aristocracy and mid- dle class (from whom they were recruiting a powerful Defense Force) believing with equal sincerity, and more fear, that the general strike was a revolutionary blow at the life of the nation, and a deliberate menace to all constitutional authority which must be defended by all available force. If that is not setting the hsts for an ordeal by battle between two great classes then history is a mockery of fact.
It is not difficult to tell what would have happened. I have seen strikes in England before, and in other countries, localized and trivial in comparison with this one menaced, which give me a fair idea of the larger scale. The members of all the trades in the Triple AUiance would have been divided. Many of the rail- way men and transport workers would have refused to obey the strike orders. It was for that reason that J. H. Thomas withdrew them. But this division among the men themselves would have led inevitably to passion and violence with the cry of "Scabs" and "Blacklegs." The government, with crowds of volunteers from the middle class and the ranks of the nonstrikers, would have carried out an effective service for the elementary necessities of national life — not more than that. This success would have still further embittered milHons of men, standing idle, loafing about goods yards and station entrances, congregating in mobs around fire- eating orators, among whom would have been the revolutionar}^ fanatics, the communists ready for social destruction at all costs, and the usual minority of young
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thieves and blackguards scenting loot, with itching fingers for other folks' property. Presently there would have been restlessness among the out-of-works, sullen boredom, then hunger. There would have been darkness in the great cities, the wailing of ill-fed children in workless homes, the excitement of women, the sense of fear, which is the father of cruelty. A riot, an order to fire, a young officer losing his head, new recruits shooting into unarmed mobs — ^what could prevent that sequence of events in many places often repeated .? Then the fury of mobs denouncing "bloody tyranny," "the butchery of the people," and shouting for venge- ance. Among the Defense Force, the "White Guards," as they were already called derisively by the communist group — there were great numbers of miners, thousands of laborers glad to get "back to the army again" because they had been out of a job, but not keen to kill their own class, . . . One's imagination need go on no farther. It might have completed the ruin of old England, of all Great Britain, and brought the Empire down.
Now what brought England to such a possibility — ■ so near, so horribly near? The answer to this is the same as in most conflicts which risk the use of force by which no victory may be gained except at the price of ruin. Sheer stupidity and a little wickedness. It is clear that there was astonishing stupidity on both sides and something of the other.
To take the government and the mine owners first. They showed an immense lack ot foresight, a crass ignorance of ordinary psychology, in allowing the situ- ation to come to the crisis with a crash, by the abrupt decontrol of the coal industry six months earlier than their promise, without any system by which the decrease in wages could be gradually adjusted to the falling of prices in the cost of living, or any warning to the men.
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' Did they think the miners would accept the new con- , ditions, so paralyzing to their standard of hving during the period of subsidized prosperity, without a desperate struggle which would inevitably cost the nation more than a transitional period of financial aid? The cost of the Defense Force was nearly a million pounds a I week, out of the pockets of the taxpayers. The loss in coal output and trade was many millions a week- — far more than a decreasing scale of assistance which would tide over the time of "slump," while wages were being readjusted gradually.
And the mine owners — did they believe when they issued the lockout notices and flung the new scale of wages at the miners, with a "take it" or "leave it," that those men would say: "How good and kind you are, dear gentlemen! Of course we will work for wages which will reduce a million of us to the old standards of sweated industries, because we love our country so much!" The mine owners knew perfectly well that the men would reject this new scale utterly. They knew, and they have afterward admitted, under pressure, that the proposed wage "cuts" were excessively severe, unreasonable, and unacceptable, to such an extent that afterward they were forced to revise them sub- stantially in favor of the poorer classes of mine labor. Why this admission after the conflict had begun? Why not have put reasonable, instead of unreasonable, proposals before the miners and the public, some months before the lockout notices were posted, so that all would have had full warning and time for discussion, negotiation, and compromise while the pits were still working ? It is the curse of our national life that these industrial troubles are conducted on lines of warfare between capital and labor — secret mobifizing, a sud- den ultimatum, wild and whirling appeals to preju- dice by the propaganda departments, then clearing
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for action. In this crisis the mine owners risked the whole Hfe of the nation by adopting that method of argument, with a willful and wicked disregard of con- sequences. Their ultimatum to the miners was as provocative as the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia which led to the World War. It was unacceptable by self- respecting men, anxious for the decent living of wives and children. It was intended to be unacceptable — and that is the guilt of the mine owners, with the secret connivance of the government.
The miners were equally lacking in wisdom, and, in one particular, criminal in their folly. They were right in rejecting terms which would have reduced at least a million of them to wages in real value below the line of bare necessity, wages, for instance, which in the case of South Wales laborers would be cut by forty-nine and a half per cent, reducing them to 38j-. i\d. per week, reckoned in purchasing power as ijs. at 1914 prices — a slave wage. Their insanity was in alienating the vast majority of the nation by the threat to wreck the mines, their own future livelihood, and the industry of the country itself, by the withdrawal of the safety men and violent opposition to volunteers. It is true that the mine owners handed the lockout notices to the pump men as to all others, thereby asking for the trouble that came, but the miners should have made themselves guardians of their own source of life, according to the elementary rules of common sense and a quality of spirit nobler than blind passion.
The Triple Alliance conducted its negotiations and its strategy with a staggering lack of discretion, and a recklessness of national consequence which would have sent us all hurtling into the gulfs of ruin but for a sudden confession of their own "bluff" on the edge of the chasm. The leaders of the railway and transport workers knew
that they would not get the allegiance of great numbers
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of their men to the call for a general strike. They knew that such a strike would develop into a class warfare in which their own members would be divided against each other. ... It is to the credit of J. H. Thomas and some others that in the end they forced the extremists to look at the stark realities of the ruin they faced in- stead of mouthing passionate nonsense and leading broken battalions to disaster.
The cross-examination of the mine owners and of Frank Hodges, the miners' young leader, in a committee room of the House of Commons by a crowd of members, inspired at last by the gravity of national danger to act like respectable men instead of like a flock of sheep under the discipline of the Welsh shepherd, was one of the most dramatic episodes in English history, and did something to restore the position and independence of the private members which had been utterly lost. It revealed facts which had been concealed by the vague generalities of challenge and counter-challenge. It tore out the falsity of propaganda from the case of the mine owners, dragged admissions from them about the injustice of the new wage proposals. From Frank Hodges it produced the possibility of concessions from the points ot pride and passion, and made new negotia- tions possible, giving J. H. Thomas his chance of escape from "direct action" and the suicide of the General Strike.
The second breakdown of negotiations between the miners, owners, and government produced a reaction of public sympathy against the miners, who had won a good deal of sympathy by the earlier presentation of their case. The offer of a temporary subsidy of ten millions of pounds from the government seemed a generous departure from the rigid principle they had laid down, and the miners' renewed insistence upon a national pool seemed to superficial minds, especially to
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those who have Bolshevism on the brain, the revelation of a sinister motive, plainly political and revolutionary instead of economic.
This accusation, made as his last word in the House of Commons by Sir Robert Home, in his gloomy announce- ment of the breakdown of negotiations, was repudiated firmly by the miners' leaders, and it was clear to all who followed the arguments of Frank Hodges with care and understanding that his conviction was stub- born on the point that without some kind of a national pool, regulating district wages, there could be no chance of equality in earnings between those who worked just as hard in places of poorer possibilities. However much one might disagree with the idea of "pooling," upon general principles related to all industry, it was surely not "political" in its argument, and it was difficult to understand the stubborn refusal of the government to enter even into a discussion of the plan unless they were partisans, unconsciously or consciously, of the mine owners.
VIII
One thing was made clear by this disastrous conflict which in a few weeks inflicted enormous and irretriev- able damage upon the main industries of Great Britain, produced widespread unemployment which will not soon be remedied, and startled the world by a revelation of social strife in this country at a time when they were looking for our leadership in reconstruction. It is the urgent, desperate need of a new spirit of under- standing and self-sacrifice among employers and em- ployed for the sake of the nation itself which is drawing rapidly near to economic disaster. The men must be educated in the knowledge that British industry is so crippled that there must be harder work and less wages, or no work and no wages. The employers must be
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led to realize that they must guarantee a decent living wage and reduce their standards and hopes of profit accordingly, or lose all they have in a general bank- ruptcy. There is no other way out than self-sacrifice all round.
But what tragedy it all has been, and Is — this ma- neuvering for positions in a national conflict, this lack of candor and reason on both sides, this playing with fire, this refusal by the leaders of the nation, the news- papers and the people, to look truth in the face, and to understand the real causes and conditions of our present state! We are still playing the fool with facts, concen- trating on quack remedies for minor ailments, while we are stricken by a disease which can only be cured by a combined national policy based upon understanding of larger issues, enormous courage, general sacrifice, and spiritual magnanimity.
What is now the character and temper of British labor? Upon that answer depends not only the future of England, and of the British Empire, but to a great extent the future of white civilization in Europe. For England is still the rock upon which the European nations largely cling for safety — a moral as well as a material rock. If England were to go the way of revolution, or fall into chaos and anarchy, it is my firm conviction that there would be no hope at all for Europe, which w^ould fall rapidly itself into decay and despair. France cannot save herself without English help; Italy cannot; there would be no indemnities from Germany. Russian Bolshevism would find open gates; the Mohammedan powers would sweep down upon defenseless minorities; the moral structure of Europe would collapse. All that is certain, beyond all arguments or dispute. What, then, is the character and temper of English labor?
It is truculent, aggressive, and, in minorities here and
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there, revolutionary. The actual labor leaders, men like Thomas, G. N. Barnes, Clynes, Lansbury, and others, are more moderate than the rank and file be- hind them. Thomas especially is a man of statesmanlike views, much education and experience, who has no desire to become a revolutionary figure or to work the machine of labor organization by violent and shattering con- flict. Behind the moderate leaders, however, there is a strong pressure of younger and more reckless men who are eager to use the power of the trade-union for political as well as economic purposes — ^which is a new claim as far as English labor is concerned. Several times they have tried their strength in this way, with doubtful results, because it is contrary to the instincts of the great body of middle-class folk who still repre- sent the deciding factor in English hfe. The attempt of the coal miners to dictate the policy of the govern- ment beyond the arbitrament of wages, to regulate prices to the consumer, failed quickly and resulted in surrender. But there was recently another action on the part of organized labor which proved the poUti- cal power of their organization when supported by the general conviction of the country. It was when there was a rumor, not unsupported by evidence, that the government proposed to raise a military expedition for the attempted overthrow of the Soviet regime in Russia, in defense of Poland. This was more than mere popular rumor. It was sufficiently grave to cause a leading article in the London Times announcing that England was as near to a new great war, calling upon all the strength and sacrifice of the people, as in 1914. The trade-unions set up overnight a central committee which they called a Council of Action, and sent word to the government that the whole power of organized labor in England would be used to prevent any such war. The government repUed that they had no inten-
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tion of preparing a new military expedition. ... It did not take place.
All this is undoubtedly revolutionary in its spirit. It is a new phase of the labor movement in England, which up to recent years was entirely limited to the economic conditions of industrial life. It is stoked up and inflamed by the outpost leaders of Bolshevism who have estabhshed themselves strongly in Glasgow, Liver- pool, and Wales. They are out for destruction. They want to smash all the structure of English government, all order, all law. They are in direct touch with Russian and other foreign communists, and they do not shrink from the thought of the same methods and the same results as those in the Russian upheaval. Lately, however, the communist theory has been discredited and largely abandoned by the mass of English workers, many of whom, for a time, were inclined to believe that this was the new and true gospel of democratic progress. The visits of English labor leaders to Russia, and their unanimous condemnation of the Bolshevik autocracy and the slave state of the Russian workers, undeceived the majority even of the younger hotheads. But although the philosophy of communism has been dropped hke a sharp-edged weapon cutting the hand that held it, there is still a vague, loose, and dangerous current of revolutionary impulse in English labor ranks, not less menacing because undecided in its purpose.
The successive waves of unemployment which many of the workers believe to be deliberately engineered by employers in order to keep down prices are intensifying the spirit of revolt and of challenge to the present order of things. This spirit is patronized, rather flattered, by a number of the younger intellectuals, who play about with the idea of revolution as children with fire, not knowing that they will be burned up if the red embers jump out of the grate.
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It is certain that the actions of the Coahtion govern- ment since the war have created a sense of exasperation and distrust in the minds of the people, and at the pres- ent time there is a wide, unbridgeable gulf between that government and the spirit and ideals of the nation as a whole. The capitahst as well as the workingman is aghast at the reckless expenditure of the government on imperial adventures, on the army and navy, and on purposes that seem to them wasteful and sinister. Disappointment with the effects of peace, the increasing troubles of industry, the spread of social decay in central Europe, the burden of armaments still pressing heavily, and the fear of new wars have reacted against all confidence in the men who still control the destiny of England. They have settled nothing. They have failed in the larger vision. They are acting in Ireland with passion and no wisdom. They have tried to buy off trouble in England by promises which cannot be redeemed. This failure — almost inevitable without great leadership, which is lacking — has produced a seething discontent which will lead to unpleasant events, serious disturbances, in the order of English life. And the state of Europe, its general malady, is beginning to touch England very closely.
Yet, though I see the gravity of all this, and its darkness, I believe that England will pull through and carry on. There is in Enghsh character still an intui- tive, inarticulate wisdom. In spite of all the modi- fications caused by war, there is a solid common sense, a sense of compromise and the middle way, which be- longs to centuries of English tradition and is not yet deadened. The passion of the extremists leaves the main body of English men and women cold as ice. Dis- content, distress, exasperation, lead to violent speech, but rarely to violent action within the heart of England untouched by the fire of the Celtic fringe. In the past
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centuries there have been worse times than now, but people have suffered them with patience, with hard resolution, with high and noble valor. They have always taken the middle way. I think they will now. Out of present trouble England will emerge with her old spirit of stolidity, resource, and energy. If not, then other peoples will be hurt, grievously. If England goes down in decay, so will all Europe, and even America will not be scathless. If the British Empire, depend- ent still on England as the axle wheel of its progress, breaks up or falls apart, there will be a flaming anarchy in its ancient possessions — in India, Egypt, Africa — ■ before which the horrors of the last war will be but playful things. If the English people take the road to revolution no country will be safe for democracy, or in any way secure of life, and white civilization, as we now know it and like it, will be doomed. Other races, not white, will press forward over our ruin and decadence. But that, by the grace of God and the spirit of a great race, shall not happen yet, unless madness overtakes all sanity, which must not happen.
VII
THE WARNING OF AUSTRIA
THE new Republic of Austria created by the Treaty of Versailles — that is to say, by certain elderly diplomats sitting round a table and rearranging the map of the world without much knowledge of the human hopes and agonies involved in their decisions — became a tragic object lesson of all that was most miserable, hope- less, and diseased in the malady of Europe after the war. All the economic evils that afflicted such a country as Italy and threatened many other countries like France and Germany, and to some extent England, reached their fullest development in Austria.
Other countries were overburdened by war debts, weakened by the decreasing production of labor, and poverty-stricken by the inflation of money, which was turned out easily enough from the printing presses but had not reality enough to buy raw material or the ele- mentary necessities of life from more prosperous parts of the world, so that the value of this paper money dropped low in foreign exchanges, while prices soared to fantastic heights and wages struggled to keep pace with them — and failed. Even England was touched by that disease — England which was envied by all her neighbors as rich and fat in her prosperity — and France and Italy were seriously sick of the same eco- nomic malady. But Austria was more than sick —
Austria was dying.
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It was a ghoulish thing to sit at the deathbed of those Austrian people, as I did, studying the symptoms of this mortality, watching the death agony, probing into the cause of this scourge. Yet if Europe would save herself from something like the same doom and find a way of escape from a general danger which was creeping closer to many countries, the truth must be known. For the state of Austria was a tremendous rebuke to the shortsighted diplomacy which utterly failed to realize that a rearrangement of political frontiers must be based upon the physical needs and conditions of the people within those boundaries, and that it is not possi- ble to violate historical evolution for the sake of a theory without upsetting a natural equilibrium. It was also a tragic warning to all the nations of Europe that if they harked back to an intense national egotism, building barriers between themselves and their neighbors, checking the natural flow of trade and refusing co-oper- ation and mutual helpfulness, their own vitality and wealth would be impoverished and their own Hfe men- aced by the illness of surrounding peoples. That lesson has not yet been learned.
Poor Austria was the world's most horrible example of the results of political cruelty and stupidity, and yet by a strange irony of fate was also the most striking case of a general desire in the hearts of mankind for charity and brotherhood leading to some new system of international politics which might give real life and power to a League of Nations. That was a most ex- traordinary state of things which startled one as soon as one entered the city of Vienna with its stricken popu- lation. The psychology of those two and a half million people almost defied analysis because of this conflict between cruelty and charity of which they were the vic- tims. They saw themselves literally sentenced to death by the provisions of the peace treaty. Once belonging
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to the capital of a great empire, a highly civilized, artistic, music-loving folk, living on the products of other people's labor, on the business of exchange, finance, clerkship, the handling of merchandise, the demand and supply of Hfe's little luxuries, the profits of administration and officialism, like so many of the inhabitants of other great cities, such as London, Paris, and New York, they saw themselves cut off from all their old sources of supply and from all their trade rela- tions with surrounding peoples who had once been under their government. The diplomats at Versailles who drew the boundaries of the new Austrian Republic as an isolation camp in the center of the old Austrian Empire — divided now into groups of peoples of different races — cut off the head of the empire from its body, so that Vienna is a bulbous-headed thing without a torso.
It is exactly as though New York were suddenly amputated from the United States, or as though London were bounded on one side by Surrey and Sussex and on the north by the shires of Bedford and Warwick, divorced from its great industrial centers, its shipping trade, its mineral wealth, and its imperial business. A state of six and a half million inhabitants, Austria is obliged to import nearly ninety per cent of her coal, lacks all raw material necessary for her factories, with the exception of wood and iron ore, has neither wool, linen, leather, nor copper, possesses no more agricultural land than at its maximum may support its inhabitants for three months a year, and is surrounded by new states Hke Czecho-Slovakia and Jugo-Slavia and Hun- gary, once of her own em.pire, which now are so narrow in their national egotism that they will not send any supplies to the relief of Vienna except under the pressure of foreign influence.
But here comes the strange dilemma in Austrian minds. Aghast as they were at the doom which befell
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them, they might well have hated the nations who were their judges and their executioners. But the very peoples who condemned them to death were those who by charity and not by cruelty endeavored to postpone execution and to keep them alive. Sir William Goode, who went to Vienna as chairman of the reparation com- mittee charged with the task of securing the indemnity according to the treaty, found himself obliged by all the instincts of humanity, with the consent of the govern- ments he represented, to transform his reparation com- mittee into a committee of relief. Great Britain voted a sum of thirty-five miUion pounds for the relief of Austria. The Swiss Red Cross, first to attempt rescue of the stricken Austrians, was followed by the enormous organization of Mr. Hoover, distributing supplies from the United States and Canada. The Scandinavian nations co-operated in this work of international charity, which, as Mr. Joseph Redlich, the Austrian represent- ative on the League of Nations, has written, was the first, and for some time the only, manifestation of that spirit of national solidarity which during the war had been preached by President Wilson in his famous messages. This distinguished Austrian reveals the gratitude of his people in the following words:
''This work of international charity has saved the lives of thousands of babies in Vienna. It has, through the organization of the Society of Friends of England, healed innumerable mothers. It has, by the energy and humanity of Mr. Hoover and his compatriots, nourished for more than two years hundreds of thousands of chil- dren in the schools of Vienna and industrial centers. It has lavished on us inestimable consolations, because not only have we benefited by such magnificent charity, but all humanity itself, crushed by this terrible war, has obtained moral profit from it. It is, therefore, the sacred duty of an Austrian to celebrate with all his
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heart such a manifestation of brotherhood. Never- theless, the misery of the masses, and still more of the middle classes, which still continues in spite of all this charity should not be misunderstood. It is not the result of a temporary situation or the passing incapacity of a people unable to re-establish themselves. On the con- trary, the material and moral causes are too powerful to be conquered by an enfeebled and stricken people. "
II
When I went to the city of Vienna, after a long and dreadful journey from Trieste, the train in which I traveled was crowded with men and women who seemed desperately anxious to reach that city, and I wondered then, and wonder now, what evil spell enticed them that way. For Vienna had no room for them, no food for them except at monstrous prices, no fuel, no trade, and no hope for any of them, if they were of Austrian race. Yet every day I stayed there more people were crowd- ing into the city and not leaving it, owing to some freak of psychology at which I could only guess — a desire for a mad kind of gayety in their world of ruin, a herd- ing together of doomed people, the old spirit which in times of plague made men "eat, drink, and be merry; for to-morrow we die." There were others who came as vultures follow the trail of death and feed upon the corpses. They were human vultures growing fat on the disease of a nation by financial jugglings and com- mercial adventures in bankrupt stock. They were rich enemies of Austria, once within her empire, now getting the value of the foreign exchange which made their money worth ten times or fifty times as much as the Austrian paper money. They were the profiteers of her own people, who even in the general ruin had managed to loot fortunes, so that they could fling about
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these paper notes from vast stocks of paper with reck- less hands. So every hotel in a city of hotels was crowded with people sleeping on sofas, in bathrooms and drawing-rooms — anywhere for shelter.
On the night of my arrival I hired a cab with two horses driven by a man who had the skill and passion of a Roman charioteer. At a furious gallop through a wet darkness he took me to many hotels in different parts of the city, laughed heartily when I was refused admittance time and time again, and shook hands like a friend and a brother when by a wild stroke of luck I managed to struggle into a small hotel owing to the favor of an Austrian waiter who had fond memories of Leicester Square. I paid my driver what I thought was three times his proper fare, but he scrunched up the notes and said: "I have to live! This would not buy me a packet of cigarettes!" In the end I gave him a hundred kronen and thought I had been robbed, but one day in Vienna was enough to teach me that this sum would hardly buy a meal in any modest restaurant.
On that first night in Vienna a dreadful gloom, spiritual as well as physical, encompassed me when I went out into the streets for an evening walk — those streets which I remembered as so full of light and gayety and music before the war. Only a few lights glimmered. The great arc lamps were not burning. No gleam came through the shuttered windows. At six o'clock all the shops were closed, and there were not many people about in the darkness. They passed me like ghosts, and I saw through the gloom pale, haggard faces of men and women who shivered as they walked. Children with bare feet padded past on the wet pavements. One woman with a baby in her arms stopped before me and held out a skinny, clawlike hand and begged for money. Truly, I thought, I have come to a city of tragedy. 17 249
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After other nights in Vienna I knew that it was indeed a city of tragedy, more tragic than any other city I have seen in the world after the years of war, filled with masses of people, semistarved or three-quarters starved, with rickety children so wizened and weak that they looked like little monkeys after six months or more of life, with diseased mothers unable to feed them at the breast, with men of good education and good birth starving slowly but very surely on a diet of cabbage soup, with beautiful girls selling their beauty for one night's meal, and middle-class women watching their children wither and die, and a hopeless misery among these millions in the back streets of that great and splen- did city, with its palaces, its picture galleries, its glorious gardens, its noble architecture of banks and offices and mansions.
Yet here were strange, bewildering contrasts between reckless luxury and starving poverty, between gayety and despair, which deceived many observers who saw only one side, or could not reconcile both sides with any reason. Night after night, after exploring the back streets and the places of malady, the hospitals and babies' creches, the feeding centers of charity, I used to push through the swing doors of some restaurant or concert hall and sit there to watch the crowd and listen to the music and find some clue to the riddle of things.
These places were always crowded, and the crowd was always made up of the same types. There were great numbers of prosperous-looking men who seemed to have ilhmitable supplies of paper money. Some of them were Italians, some of them Greeks, Czechs, Serb- ians, Hungarians, and Jews. Many of them were Jews of no certain nationality and speaking every kind of language. Here and there were Austrian families, sitting here for the light and warmth, and lingering for a long time over cups of coffee and glasses of cold water,
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while the band played piece after piece with a brilliant gayety which seemed to pretend that life is very merry, free from care, full of sunshine, beauty, laughter, love.
There was plenty of love in these places, but not of a kind good to see on the whole. Now and then my eyes were taken by young Austrian couples, who sat hand in hand or with their faces very close together and their eyes Hghted by each other's light, and I thought they were pitiful to see, yet beautiful, like lovers shipwrecked on a desert place, with death about them and drawing near, so that perhaps this love was all they had, and enough. But mostly the lovemaking was bought by the prosperous-looking men, who were giving wine and cake to girls who, I guessed, had had no sohd food that day and were paying for it by laughter and flirta- tion and the open marketing of their youth. They seemed nice girls, as good as your sisters or mine, of middle class, of decent upbringing, but now citizens of Vienna, which is starving, victims of a hfe where death is on the prowl, and a creeping disease of weakness, and where hunger is a familiar and frightening thing. Here in these places of luxury there was the glitter of Hght and warmth, at least of human breath and bodies, and the splendor of marble halls and the blare of jazz bands and fancy cakes for those whose purses bulged with paper money. Such a chatter! Such ripples of laughter! Such a joyous rhythm in the music of the band! But I thought of the hours, of the days, I had spent am.ong rickety children, scrofulous children, and children who are saved from the hunger death only by the charity of their former enemies. I thought of words spoken to me by one of the men who know best the conditions of their country:
"Unless the powers formulate some policy — on a broader line than free meals and temporary aid — the Austrian people are doomed beyond any hope of
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life, and there will be a morbid poison in the heart of Europe."
Those laughing people around me — how could they laugh and listen to light music and spend those kronen like counters in a game ? Some of them were living on the last of their capital. Others were parasites of profiteers. Others preferred laughter to tears, and came to listen to this gay music for forgetfulness. They were like the people in Boccaccio's novels who, with plague raging around them, gathered together and told amorous, wicked tales and wondered idly when death would touch them on the shoulder. Was Austria alone hke that? Were there not many countries of Europe, perhaps even England — so rich and fat, as she was called until the unrealities of her arithmetic were put to the cruel test of truth — who were playing at the gay old game of life carelessly while outside disease crept nearer — ^the European malady which must be cured quickly lest we die ?
HI
Profiteering was shameless in Vienna during the war, and there were still millionaires — in paper money — ^who were able to afford the necessities and even the luxuries of life in spite of the wild insanity of the prices charged. It was they and the foreigners and middle-class folk who had saved up money who entirely ignored the market prices controlled by the government — theoret- ically— and adopted a system of smuggling — Schleich- handlung as it is called — so open and unabashed that it was a mockery of its name. The rich folk hired their smugglers. The middle-class folk did their own job, and on several days a week the tramcars going out to the market gardens and small farms in the country out- side the city were crowded with young men who had
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gone to buy their week's supplies direct from the peas- ants. Those country folk demanded more and more paper money for their eggs and butter and bacon and vegetables. In some districts they would not deHver their goods for any price in paper, but insisted upon a system of barter by which in return for food they got tobacco, boots, clothes, and manufactured articles.
I know the case of a man who went to one of these peasants to buy food for his wedding. He wore a new jacket which he had saved for his wedding day.
The peasant farmer refused his paper money, made an ugly grimace at it, and said: "That filth is no good to me. I will give you a sucking pig for that jacket.'*
The bargain was made, and the bridegroom went home in his shirt sleeves with his wedding feast under his arm.
The peasant's point of view is more apparent when I say that a cheap suit of clothes in Vienna cost four thousand kronen when I was in that city. After that prices steadily mounted in paper values, and price of meat and fat had risen by a third and even a half, so that one pound of lard cost, nominally, five pounds, or twenty-five dollars in American money, with exchange at the normal rate, at the end of last year. The peas- ants raised the price of flour to such an extent that it was beyond the reach of all but the robber profiteers — those gangs of financial harpies who still, by juggling with the money market and gambling in the rise and fall of Austrian securities, contrived to amass vast stocks of paper currency. It was they and the foreign- ers crowding into the city who spent five hundred kronen for a single person at dinner, and five times that amount if they indulged in expensive wines. The cost of a dinner followed by a dance, given by an American and his wife to members of Viennese society at the Hotel Bristol was more than a million kronen, worth forty-two
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thousand pounds in English money, according to the prewar value of Austrian kronen.
It will be said by my readers: "But, after all, that means very little, because the money is turned out of the printing presses and has hardly any real value."
That is true for those who can get hold of the print- ing press, as it were, but it is not true in the case of the struggling middle-class folk — clerks, schoolmasters, doctors, university professors, workingwomen with little homes and hungry babes, and the whole class of laboring men. They do not get unlimited supplies of this paper. I asked a young clerk in a newspaper ojBice how much he was paid a week, and he told me a hundred and sixty kronen. I remembered that it had cost me more than a hundred kronen to get a meal of three thin courses which left me hungry.
"How do you live?" I asked.
"I don't," he said.
In a babies' clinic filled with haggard, anaemic women who had brought their terrible little babes, all scrofu- lous and boneless, for medical examination, I spoke to a young Austrian doctor, and he told me very frankly that his own case was hopeless.
"I get under two hundred kronen a week," he said, "and for three years I have lived mostly on cabbage soup, with now and then potatoes for a treat. Not in all this time have I eaten meat. These clothes I wear date from before the war. You see they have been turned. When they wear out and fall away from me I shall be like old Adam, for how can I buy a new suit.? My case is no worse than thousands of others. It is beggary and starvation."
In the great hospitals of Vienna, the best medical schools in the world before the w^ar by universal repu- tation, it became almost impossible to carry on the work, owing to the dearth of supplies. Fuel was their great
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need, and many of the wards closed down because they could not be heated at all, and the patients were crowded together for warmth's sake in spite of the dangers of bad ventilation. Coal was almost out of the question, and wood was gathered from the neighboring country- side as much as possible. It was the only source of fuel for poor folk, and one of the sights of Vienna was the crowd of wood gatherers coming back laden with logs and branches under which children and women staggered to their hearthsides.
IV
In the midst of all this misery, and of the false, mad gayety which mocks at it, the relief committees, American and British, the Society of Friends, and other charitable agencies bring some light and joy by the enormous rescue work they continue to do among the children and nursing mothers. The network of this organiza- tion is on a wide-reaching scale, and one of the most moving and pathetic sights that have ever met my eyes was when I went to the old palace of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose death was the straw which set Europe alight, and watched the feeding of more than a thousand children under the direction of an American officer and his assistants.
I talked with many of the little ones as they bent over the bowls of soup and offered up a grace to God before their first spoonful. For many of them it was the first meal of the day, and for some the only meal. They were grateful for it, with the smiling gratitude of children who were born to suffering as a usual, common thing. But in spite of all this international work of charity, the large sums of money poured into Vienna from many countries, there is still a large population there which is not touched by the work of rescue. The
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grown-up folk do not get free meals. Genteel poverty in Vienna is unaided. The workingmen in the factories do not get enough raw material any more for their own bodies than for the machines they mind. Both are un- dernourished. In the National Assembly the Social Democrats and Christian Socialists have vied with each other in the fierceness of their denunciations of the rationed bread which is baked with a fifty-per-cent ingredient of uneatable maize flour producing horrible eff"ects upon the bodies of those who eat it. In Decem- ber last many railway men and other workers went on strike as a protest against this filthy food, and the Social Democrats announced to the Assembly that they found it hard to calm the workmen in the factories, bitter and despairing because of their hunger, for hunger is the food of revolution.
The conditions I have described still prevail.
Intellectually as well as physically the people of Vienna are at least half starved. The university cannot afford to buy foreign books, the science men cannot keep abreast with modern research for the same reason. Even in the elementary schools teaching suff'ers because both teachers and scholars are listless with weakness at their work. So in all departments of life in Vienna one sees a devitalizing process, a slow death of all na- tional and individual energies, a creeping paralysis in the social body.
Yet so cruel is the extent to which national egotism and intensification of selfishness and cynicism have been developed since the war by a failure to reshape the society of nations on more ideal lines that the neighbors of Austria, and even her own peasants, are abominably callous to that agony in Vienna. Jugo-Slavia and Czecho-Slovakia, once of the Austrian Empire, and now republican states, will not forgive Vienna for her
old political domination and tyranny, and will not lift
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a hand to rescue the Viennese. The Czechs, with those old memories still rankling, deal contemptuously and tyrannically with the German minorities in their midst, and make it a crime for them to use their own language in the streets and public places of towns where they form a great part of the population. There is no hope for Vienna nor — carrying the argument over to other countries — for Europe itself, if that national and racial enmity is maintained.
This state of things in Austria ought to be a tremen- dous warning to all Europeans. What is happening in Vienna so acutely — all those symptoms of disease — will become apparent in many other countries of Europe unless there is a speedy cure. These symptoms of social plague are the inflation of paper money, which is a mere sham covering the lack of real values; the difficulty of procuring raw material from more prosperous countries owing to the difference in exchange; the gradual weaken- ing of the individual worker and of the nation as a whole in physical well-being and moral will power; the debility of children, working mothers and laboring men, so that the future of the race is endangered and the birth rate is lowered, while the death rate goes up; a spiritual carelessness as to these evil conditions so that they come to be accepted as inevitable, and a levity of the social mind among those who still have money to spend, which disregards the necessity of urgent action, desperate remedies, in order to maintain the old stand- ards of civilization.
It is difficult for ordinary minds to think in terms of Europe or beyond the frontiers of nationality; but if one studies the health chart of Europe as a whole one will find very clearly a spreading blackness correspond- ing to the areas constantly enlarging and embracing new peoples, in which there is economic disease and what I may call the withering of civilized hfe. The whole
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of Russia is in this condition, as far as we can get scien- tific evidence, owing to the break-up of its poHtical machine and economic machine, bad as they were, followed by the wearing out of transport material and the lowering of production both in agriculture and in in- dustry— all this due more to the exhaustion and effort of war than to the methods of the Bolshevik regime. It is certain that Russia is dropping not so much into barbarism as into a material and spiritual decadence, so that all the impulses toward a higher type of civiliza- tion are for a time at least deadened. Its people are fighting with hunger, fighting with disease, fighting for the barest necessities of life, and not for beauty, art and luxury and joy, in which civilization comes to flower.
The Russian disease is reaching out to neighboring states like Esthonia and Lithuania. They, too, are withering from the same causes — lack of abundant food, devitalizing of labor, physical disease, general debility. Poland is a strong soul with a stricken body.
Is this plague creeping westward.? Is there any certainty that it will stop at the frontiers of Germany ? Austria is engulfed already, as I have shown, and there are signs that in spite of German efforts to get back to the old standards of work, the enormous energy and profit of the big trusts to recapture old markets, her people are sickening.
Already at the end of last year hundreds of thousands of children in Germany were suffering from malnutri- tion, and not only the children, but workingmen. Seven hundred thousand children and mothers were being fed on charity, and everywhere in the big cities the shadow of starvation, if not actual hunger in its acute and terrible stage, was creeping over the country.
So far, Austria, whose condition I have described at length, is the worst case of national decay, and all students of humanity and of social history must take
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it as the outstanding example of tragedy, due not to inherent weakness, but to the evil structure of inter- national relations. There is only one hope of rescue for Austria, and that is the breaking down of the hatred round her, the opening of trade relationships with her neighbors, a give-and-take in the matter of raw material, labor and commercial credit, co-operation instead of isolation and rivalry, Christian fellowship for mutual help and protection, instead of the cutthroat code of the old tribal laws. And that, in my humble judgment, is the one hope of rescue not only for Austria, but for Europe as a whole.
VIII
THE TRUTH ABOUT IRELAND
TO England as well as to Ireland friendship between our two peoples is utterly necessary for the sake of liberty, progress, honor, and peace of mind. The self-government of the Irish people is essential to the liberties of the English people, because until that is obtained we who are English or Scottish will never be free from a political conflict within our own island which cuts across every party issue, obscures our own domestic interests, and gives passionate war cries on one side or the other, to politicians who prefer passion as a bait for votes rather than intellectual argument.
But England needs peace with Ireland for higher reasons than that. She needs it to regain her moral character in the judgment of foreign nations and of her own people in the far dominions; she needs it for her own soul's sake.
The Irish tragedy poisoned the mind of the world against us, and the wells of our own faith. It convicted us against our will, against our own sense of truth and honor, against the noblest and most generous instincts of the best among us, of most damnable hypocrisy. •Justly or unjustly, by truth or by lies — I will tell what I think is the truth — ^the Irish people were able to charge us with that vice and bring down upon us the scorn or wrath of all our enemies (and we have many), while arousing suspicion or surprise among our few best
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friends. During the war we had proclaimed high ideals for humanity, and hundreds of thousands of our men died, as many of them thought, to make them prevail. It was, we said, a spiritual fight against the brute force of militarism. It was a war against Prussianism in all its forms. Afterward, when peace should come, we would demand the self-determination of oppressed nations, we should protect the right of the little peoples, we should establish a reign of liberty within a League of Nations governed by an international court of justice administering a new code of world- wide peace. Into these high sentiments, expressed fervently by English idealists, came inevitably at pubhc meetings one sharp interjection — "What about Ireland?" That question was what a friend of mine calls a "conversation stopper." At best it would make the most fluent speaker pause a moment in his rush of oratory.
Yes, after all, what about Ireland? We had estab- lished martial law there of a kind never known even in Austria or Russia on such a scale in proportion to popu- lation, v/ith tanks, armored cars, machine guns, air- planes, all the equipment of modern warfare, after "the war to end war." Justly or unjustly, we had at least adopted Prussian methods, after killing Prussian militarism. In Ireland, rightly or wrongly, we had abandoned the ideal of self-determination. And plead- ing abominable provocation, the essential justice of checking a murder campaign, the right to repress rebellion against the Crown, we were allowing our military and police forces to adopt the old primitive law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, without any reference at all to other laws of a more recent and more civilized kind.
All civil law was abolished in Ireland, at a time when
English idealists were pleading for its extension to inter-
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national affairs as a nobler method of argument than that of war. In Ireland trial by jury had been replaced by courts-martial, in which the accused were often the judges. Inquests on the bodies of murdered civilians had been replaced by military inquiries in which no evidence was admitted if distasteful to the court. Any Irish man or woman could be arrested without a charge and imprisoned without trial, and thousands of them were thus arrested and imprisoned. Though Ministers of the Crown referred to the strife in Ireland as "war," we shot or hanged our prisoners if taken with arms in their hands, and though for many months the same Ministers denied that our soldiers and police took re- venge for their own losses by "reprisals" against Irish people and property, that system of meeting terror by counter-terror was afterward admitted and made official. When, therefore, our Prime Minister and his colleagues, or any other public or private person, spoke of the spiritual hopes of the world, the right of majori- ties to the liberty of self-government, the duty of France to demobihze her armies and her hatreds, the justice of the punishment inflicted upon Austria for her former tyrannies against subject peoples, or the cruelties of Germany in Belgium, that cry of, "What about Ire- land?" came as a confusing and conscience-pricking interruption.
For it is not in the English character to be insensitive to criticism or satire so poignant as that. If we are hypocritical as a people, it is not through insincerity, but through stupidity or ignorance, or particular preju- dice. We do not and cannot, as a nation, ride rough- shod over justice, or hberty, or fair play, without stir- rings of conscience that hurt horribly. Not deliberately, or without an immense amount of argument in self- justification, can we, as a people, accept a policy of l^rutality or tyranny. There is an inexhaustible store
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of generous feeling among English folk, amounting almost to weakness, in regard to smaller people than themselves, to all helpless and little things, to all under dogs. That generosity can only be overwhelmed by a wave of passion, or blinded by ignorance that tyranny is at work or injustice established. This Irish tragedy, therefore, has been England's tragedy as well, for it tortured many minds among us, and was bitterly re- sented by those who desired to crush the rebellion by all ways of force, as well as by those who detested the methods and morals of military repression, because the very name of Ireland laid us open to attack, put disgrace upon us, challenged our honor and our decent reputation in the world. The Irish made use of that weapon, more powerful against our prestige than the revolvers of their "gunmen." They knew that we were vulnerable to that form of attack, because, what- ever our faults may be, we stand or fall in the world by our reputation for justice, and not by the power of guns. So Ireland felt sure of winning most of what she wanted if she could put us in the wrong, and our poli- ticians gave them a thousand chances.
Irish propaganda — hke all propaganda one-sided and not careful of exact truth — was wonderfully organ- ized and far reaching. It found its way, day after day, month after month, into the newspapers of Amer- ica, France (when France was annoyed with us), Italy, Russia, Poland, and all our own dominions, where its accounts of raids and imprisonings, shootings, hangings, and burnings stirred the deepest emotion of people who had Irish blood in their veins, or a sense of chivalry and indignation among others. The darker, murderous side of Sinn Fein outrages were but lightly touched, and the Irish picture presented to the world through its hterary agents was the simple and stirring spectacle of a little people fighting with heroic spirit against a brutal
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and obstinate tyranny. Such friends as we had were disconcerted and mystified.
Their first incredulity was overborne by apparent weight of evidence and by repetition, and they were aghast at the reign of anarchy which England had made in her sister island. "How is it," they asked, "that the English, who are not a brutal people, whose men (as the war proved) are generally kind-hearted, even to their enemies, who for centuries have led the way to civil progress in Europe, should lose their moral qualities and betray their best ideals in the case of Ireland.'' We cannot understand!"
So spoke our friends in America, in France, and in other countries, as I knew by letters I received. Even the French people, who are not soft in putting down rebellion, who are not tolerant of political revolt, were scandalized by the English treatment of Ireland. From one Frenchman who served with our armies in the war on the western front, I had a letter in which he ex- plained his perplexity about Ireland and added a post- script in which he summed up his indignation in one savage little sentence," Your government disgusts us!"
If our friends talked like that, what of our enemies? They found this Irish business to their liking. It provided them with one more proof of the incurable abomination of England. "John Bull," they said, "always was and always will be a hypocrite and a bully. For centuries he has prated about liberty while he has thrust his fist into the face of all rivals, trodden down the native races of his colonial and captured territories, increased and held his empire by brute force, exercised the most cynical diplomatic policy, and done all things in the names of righteousness and God. His present terrorism in Ireland is only one more proof of his tradi- tional brutality, and does not surprise us in the least." That, in a mild way, was the verdict of England's
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THE TRUTH ABOUT IRELAND
enemies in every part of the world to which Irish propa- ganda reached.
It reached every civilized country except England. Owing to the government control of many newspapers (bought by members of the Coalition to stifle criticism and spread political propaganda of their own), and on account of the timidity or incredulity or dishonesty of others not so bought, the only facts published in the majority of English newspapers after the Irish rebellion of 1916 were those provided by Dublin Castle or the Front Bench in the House of Commons. In that way there was, for a long time, an almost complete boycott of any news which tended to discredit our officials or armed forces in Ireland, while on the other hand full pubhcity was given to all Sinn Fein outrages and crimes. A few journals, like the Daily News, the Manchester Guardian, and The Nation, succeeded in breaking through this conspiracy of silence, but they only reached a limited public and were under suspicion as unpatriotic or revolutionary sheets by readers who think that all criticism of government is unpatriotic and that all truth which disturbs the self-righteousness of the Enghsh conservative mind is revolutionary.
The Sinn Fein activists of the "Irish Republican Army," described more briefly as the "Irish gunmen," spoiled the beautiful picture of a heroic people fighting nobly for liberty's sake, by acts of brutality and methods of warfare which could not be condoned or forgiven by any soul alive who hated cruelty and still had faith in Christian ethics. These acts were reported to the English people without mention of reprisals or cruelties on the other side, or with absolute denials by public officials of any such charge against themselves and their agents. Only by rumors, by tales told privately, in whispers, by seeing smoke and suspecting fire, was the average Englishman aware of any dirty work which
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might smirch our honor in the world. That was so for at least a year after the ending of the war, until admissions were made in the House of Commons, and facts were admitted in papers like the Times, which charged our Irish administration with action and policy contrary — to say the least — to our traditions of honor and justice. I think our only excuse in history, as a people, for permitting the dishonesty and villainy of some of our statesmen, who played into^the hands of Sinn Fein by adopting evil as a cure for evil, is our general ignorance of what was happening, and the wide, unbridgeable gulf that lies between English and Irish mentality.
II
There is, of course, one type of mind in England which made any reasonable settlement of Ireland im- possible through the centuries, and will make it impos- sible now if he can. He is actually the old type of John Bull Englishman, hardly exaggerated by his carica- ture, but utterly unrepresentative of the nation as a whole — hard in his imperialism, narrow in his Protes- tantism, reactionary against any effort of change or progress, sure that the Englishman of his own type is the noblest effort of God, disliking all aliens, including Irish, Welsh, and Scotch, and a firm believer in ''reso- lute rule" with machine guns and tanks for all rebellious people, such as native races, and workingmen who want more wages. He was the defender of the Amritsar massacre. He is all for shooting down the unemployed if they make themselves annoying. He would hke to see a rounding up of all socialists, labor leaders, and intellectual theorists who are endeavoring to change the old structure of English life with its Heaven-sent prerogatives of great landed estates for the "good famihes, " high profits for the capitalists, and low
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wages for the working class. His ideas on Ireland are clear and sharp. "The Irish people," he says, "are just savages, and they must be dealt with as such. Shoot 'em down wholesale if they won't obey English law. Reprisals? Certainly, and plenty of them. More power to their elbow! as Mr Balfour said. Let our men have a free hand and teach 'em what's what! If necessary, have a new conquest of Ireland, with blood and fire, and do it well this time. The best thing would be to sink the whole damned island."
That type of man is still to be found in many places and classes of English life, and it was his type which supported Sir Hamar Greenwood and the Prime Minis- ter's Tory masters in their policy of reprisals and coun- ter-terror. He is to be found in sporting clubs down Pall Mall and St. James's Street, on the race course at Epsom, in the crowd that goes to see a prize fight, in the manor house of a country squire, often in the rectory of a country parish. But his type — not without use in its time — is old-fashioned and dwindling away. Even before the war he was passing, and when the war came his dogmatic opinions were heard with laughter at mess tables where young officers of ours who had been thinking hard about many problems of life and death, the causes of the war and the hopes of the world, were not taking his blusterings as the last word in the way of wisdom. But he still exists, and writes letters to the Morning Post, which is published exclusively for his class and ideas. Throughout the Irish trouble he sat solid in the Coalition Government, fuming and fretting over the weakness of the Prime Minister who was always tempted to compromise with the forces of disorder and hardly restrained. He snorted with laughter when Terence McSwiney — with mistaken fa- naticism, perhaps, but with no ignoble motive and a burning love for Ireland in his heart — died in his hunger
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strike, and he became purple in the face with rage when the pohcy of reprisals was challenged by Mr. Asquith. It was his belief in force — and force alone — as a means of settlement that enabled the government to abandon statesmanship in all their dealings with Ireland, and to leave it to the devil.
But all through these recent years that type of mind has been a small minority, though powerful in its com- mand of the political machine. It did not represent the great body of moderate EngHshmen who during the years of this tragedy were anxious to know the truth, but could not, and to find some kind of reasonable solution to the Irish problem, which seemed insoluble.
This average Enghshman, as I met him in tramcars, teashops, and other places of middle-class circumstance, was mightily perplexed about the whole business, and had poor sources of information. He did not under- stand the Irish temperament, nor see any way out of the Irish problem. He still clung to old sentiments and old illusions. For one thing, he could not bring himself to believe that the Irish had any real hatred, or cause of hatred, for England and the English. He saw no adequate reason for hatred, and argued that the Irish with whom he came in contact in London or else- where were nice people, with a simple faith and a sense of humor, not at all murderous in their instincts. He liked most of their men, and all their women, as far as he knew them, and believed firmly, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that Sinn Fein and its "wild m.en" were only a minority of extremists who did not at all represent the great body of Irish people, and that, therefore, their violence was artificially engineered, and if defeated by English resolution would be followed by a renewal of friendship between our two peoples, provided Ireland was given a generous measure of Home Rule.
It was only after Sinn Fein had killed many police-
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men and soldiers that be began to tbink tbat tbere were some qualities in tbe Irish character which baffled him. His remembrance of old novels by Charles Lever, Samuel Lover, and other writers, as well as the stage type of Irishman traditional for a long time in England, still held his imagination with the figure of a breezy, laughing, devil-may-care, romantic soul who helped to win most of England's battles and was loyal to the flag. Gradually he was aware that there was something wrong in that picture. He found an unexpected cruelty in the Irish people, the cruelty of the peasant mind brooding over old grievances, unforgiving, relentless in the pursuit of vengeance. Where he expected weakness he found surprising strength — most obstinate resistance to English "reason." Where he looked for sentiment, especially in the war with Germany, he found the hard- est realism, a most selfish refusal of allegiance, and, worst of all, black treachery to Old England in her hour of need. What was the meaning of that? "What the devil," he asked, plaintively, "is the matter with these people?"
It must be remembered that the average Englishman knows very little of Irish history. He does not read it in his school books; he does not find it in his news- papers. Vaguely he knows and admits that England in the old days was "rather rough" on Ireland, and, generously, as it seems to him, he wishes to make amends. He thinks he made amends by the Wyndham Land Acts which enabled the peasants to buy their land with English credit, and for the life of him he cannot under- stand why the Irish hark back to the past and refuse to recognize that England is a good friend.
He does not realize that anything England does for Ireland, or has done, or will do, is not received with gratitude as a favor, or as a generous act, but is re- garded as a long-delayed concession forced from us,
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and as dust in the balance compared with half a thousand years of tyranny, robbery, and brutality. He does not understand that the claim for national independence has never been abandoned for all that time, and that, though the spark burns dim in times of misery, it flames up again and spreads, as nov/ it spreads again, like a prairie fire throughout those island people with their frightful remembrance of history, their cherished faith, their undying pride.
The average Englishman, of whom I was one, was shocked to his inmost soul by the rebellion of 1916. I shall never forget when that dreadful news came to us on the western front. We had been through a ghastly winter when the Germans held all the good positions against us on the ridges in Flanders, while we were in the flats and swamps at a time when we were still weak in artillery, so that they pounded our men with shell fire and we could answer back but feebly. Day after day, night after night, our men were blown to bits, our casualty lists lengthened with the names of our noblest youth, and we knew that the Germans were hardly touched in strength, while on the other fronts they were winning stupendous victories and England's Ufe was menaced. At that very time the Irish tried to stab us in the back — did stab us in the back. Young officers of ours, and of theirs, on leave in Dublin, were shot down, sometimes without arms in their hands. Young Irish boys sniped English soldiers from the roofs, though some of our officers would not give the word of command to fire back on them, as I know, because of the youth of those lads. There was proof since, admitted without shame, that the Irish leaders were in negotiation with the Germans for active help. They expected German ships to arrive with arms and ammunition, and with fighting men. They were willing to get any kind of German help in order to defeat England in her time of
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peril. Count Plunkett, I am told, went in disguise to Germany to negotiate this aid. Casement in Germany was acting on his own initiative, tortured by his con- science and by his fears. When that news came to us it seemed at first incredible, and then unforgivable. It is still hard to forget or forgive by any Englishman, and by some Irishmen. An Irish general said to me: "I can never go back to Ireland — never! I can never take off my hat to an Irishman again." There were tears in his eyes as he spoke.
The average Englishman did not know the Irish defense of that act of rebeUion, and, if he knew, would not admit a word of it. I know, and will set it out with fairness. The Sinn Feiner said, as one of their leaders said to me: *'We would have fought for you if you had guaranteed our national claims. We would have fought for you if you had let us fight under our own flag and in our own Irish brigades. The NationaHst leaders (wrongly, as we now think) arranged a scheme of re- cruiting— ^which was turned down by your War Office. Hundreds of thousands of young Irishmen (stupidly, as we now believe) did volunteer and were drafted, not in their own brigade, as a rule, but in English battalions, and died in heaps to save the liberty of England while strengthening England's tyranny in Ireland. Gradually we saw this. England's fight for liberty was not to be our liberty. What was happening in Ulster? The Ulster volunteers who had been allowed to arm against us in I9i4were still kept back in Ulster, while our men were being massacred in Gallipoli and France. They stood solid as a menace to southern Ireland, with preferential treatment and secret help from England. Very well! We began to recruit our own volunteers. At first there w^ere two groups — John Redmond's, designed for the help of England, and James Connolly's, for the liberty of Ireland. A split took place, led by
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Connolly. Presently the Redmond men drifted over to Connolly's side — for Ireland and not for England. Then we thought we saw our chance of victory. Eng- land was hard pressed. Germany seemed certain of victory. It was Ireland's chance of liberty. There were divided counsels — some wanting to wait until we were stronger. Pearse was overborne by the spirit of Connolly. But the arrangements were faulty, and the aflPair was a tactical mistake. At first the people of Dublin were against us. They cursed us for our fool- hardy act. After three days, when the 'rebels,' as England called them, were hard pressed and losing, and being killed in large numbers, the people were all for us. They were set on fire by the heroism of those boys, and the spirit of Ireland, the soul of Ireland, was stirred to its depths by pity, by pride, by the old call of nation- ality, and then by an undying hatred of England, when General Maxwell began his Bloody Assizes, executed James Connolly and fourteen others, and swept into prison, with unnecessary brutalities and horrors, three thousand young Irish lads. After that Sinn Fein was established in every Irish home outside Protestant Ulster, and the whole people were dedicated anew to the liberty of their nation. "
The liberty of their nation! Were they, then, groan- ing under a brutal tyranny, these Irish people, who talked like that with a passionate sincerity which could not be doubted, because so many of them were ready to die, and did die, for their faith? It is that which baffled the English mind, not conscious of imposing tyranny on Ireland before they rose in rebellion.
Ill
Now what is the actual truth about all this tragedy.? Was Ireland utterly right, or utterly wrong, in rising
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in revolt against our rule and going to all lengths in guerrilla warfare with complete ruthlessness, to obtain her desires? Or was England utterly right — or utterly- wrong — in regarding this warfare as murder and trying to stamp it out by methods as ruthless as those used against her? Will England be justified in history — or Ireland? Above all, by what madness, or badness, or insanity, or stupidity, on one side or on both sides, did our two peoples come to such a pass when all law was abandoned for a bloody struggle of civil strife, ghastly in its commentary on those hopes of inter- national peace and the progress of humanity which surged up in many hearts out of the utter horror of the European war?
To answer these questions one must go back to ancient history, and deal with passion as well as with facts, and with illusion as well as with reaUty, for there can be no understanding of what has happened in recent days without a knowledge of the past.
The past calls to the present in the Irish mind, like the cry of the banshee wailing through the ages of Irish history. The English forget their past, at least in its most hideous aspect, looking at the present with reaHs- tic eyes and forward to the future with what hope they have. But the Irish have a long, bitter, relentless mem- ory which is a morbid wound in their psychology. The English say, "Let the dead past bury its dead," but the Irish rake over old bones and make relics of them for animating their passion afresh.
I saw the strength and passion of Irish memory before the war, in Dublin. On a Saturday night there would be little groups of people at the corners of back streets listening to young men or girls standing on orange boxes and singing or reciting old songs and ballads. I listened to them sometimes, and always they were ballads of Irish episodes long forgotten and meaningless in the
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English mind. They were about the battles of Limerick and the Boyne, and the siege of Drogheda, and the old evictions of Irish peasants, and the shooting of Irish by English redcoats. Hardly one EngUshman in two million could tell anything at all about those battles. He would not know when they were fought, or by whom they were fought, or what side won. But in the Irish memory they belong to yesterday.
Their songs are filled with a mournful spirit and with the passion of a people under tyranny, and they are sung in Irish ears from the cradle to the grave. I remember going one night to a httle place called "Mooney's Oyster Bar" with some Irish and English friends and one young Jew. Outside in the yard an Irish girl was playing a fiddle and we called her in and asked her to play some jig tunes for our gayety. But presently the tunes she played made us all sad because of the notes of tragedy that broke even through her jigs, and when the Irishmen in our company began to sing old songs to her fiddle, the young Jew with us, who was a little drunk, wept in sympathy, and claimed as his excuse that he was descended from one of the kings of Ireland! If that was the effect on a Jew, what must happen in the spirit of an Irish Catholic when he hears these old ballads of his race? They are crooned into his ears as he lies in his cradle, or is carried in the arms of a peasant mother. From the time he learns to speak he hears old tales and old songs, in which the Irish have but one enemy — the Enghsh. And from the time he begins to read, his books are filled with "the wrongs of Ireland," the bloody tyranny of the Saxon. From a thousand years ago the ghosts of Irish history call to him. In old wells, and in the ruins of chapels, castles, shrines, he hears their voices, telling him of the glory of Ireland when it was an island of saints and scholars, poets and painters, whose illuminated missals and golden chalices and em-
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broidered gowns and all the arts and crafts of life gave them a civilization and a culture at a time when England was inhabited by brutal, unlettered Saxons, and when northern Europe was still uncultured.
Some of that is true, but what is less known to the Irish is the downfall of their own glory by an internecine strife in which the English had no part, when their own "kings" — at one time no less than sixty — fought against one another until the island was laid waste and its people reduced to misery by the incessant raids and ravagings, burnings and slaughterings, of rival clans.
"Why did the English ever go to Ireland? Who asked them to go, anyway .f*" shouted a voice from the gallery of a hall in New York when I was lecturing there, and not to score a point, but as a fact of history, I gave the answer that the English went at the request of Pope Adrian IV, in the reign of Henry II, "to check the tide of crime, to restore Christian worship, and to reform the manners of the people," as he wrote in his papal bull. But, as I admitted to the New York audience, also in the interests of truth and history, the advent of the English and their subsequent acts did not give the world, or the Irish, an object lesson in good manners. Our manners were disgusting, and our methods abominable.
They were Normans rather than English who went to Ireland with the consent of Henry II, and they parceled out Ireland, after fierce fights with the Irish chieftains, very much as their predecessors had invaded and par- titioned England in the time of William the Conqueror. But there was always a territory which the Norman chiefs in Ireland never penetrated, and in this country "be- yond the pale," as it was called, the Irish kept to their own customs and laws until they captured their conquer- ors by the beauty of their women, and many of the Nor- man invaders, like the Geraldines, became "more Irish than the Irish."
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It was in the sixteenth century, during the reign of Henry VH, that EngHsh law began to press heavily upon the Irish people, and that was due to the policy of the Anglo-Irish chieftains who supported the two impostors, Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel, in their claim to the English crown. In retaliation, Tudor Henry sent over a strong army under Sir Edward Poynings, and at Drogheda he forced the Irish Parlia- ment to pass a measure called Poyning's Act, which declared that all Enghsh laws should have force in Ireland and that all legislation in the Irish Parliament should be confined to measures which had first been approved by the King and the Privy Council in England. That was really the beginning of the long and desperate struggle between the Irish and the English peoples. Always there have been patriots in Ireland to raise revolt against the power and practice of that Act, always the ruling caste in England has endeavored to enforce its authority, though its very name was forgotten except by lawyers and historians.
The story of that beginning is forgotten in Ireland itself, but they still remember the heroic O'Neills who defied the English right to rule in Ireland, and the bloody massacres by Elizabeth's Earl of Essex, who was sent to suppress their uprisings.
A fatal thing, the worst of all for England as for Ireland, happened when the Stuarts followed the Tudors. It was under James I that Ireland, weak after long strife, was first colonized by Scottish and Protes- tant settlers in Ulster, whose numbers were increased, after a massacre in 1641 by Irish CathoHcs, when Oliver Cromwell came over to revenge himself for the Irish support of Charles I, and to crush their claim to inde- pendence under another O'Neill. By that colonization of Ulster, Ireland became no longer one people, but two peoples, divided in race, in religion, in every strain of
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temperament, in every political tradition. It was the sowing of dragon's teeth in Ireland.
OUver and his Roundheads killed the Irish CathoHcs with the joy of religious fanaticism, and the deeds they did in the name of the Lord are remembered with the sweat of agony in Irish blood. Oliver had his own plan to end all Irish trouble. It was to fill the island with more Scots and English, and transport the Irish to penal settlements beyond the sea, where most of them might die. In some measure his plan was fulfilled. Connaught alone was made into a reservation for the Irish, into which thousands of them were driven like cattle, and Irish women and girls were shipped off to slavery in the West Indies. It was a crime that cried out to God for vengeance, and Sinn Fein has remembered it after three centuries. What is one of the miracles of history is the survival of the Irish spirit and of their race and faith. With one brief respite in the reign of James II, for whom they rose when he lost the English crown, and then the Irish harp, at the battle of the Boyne, the policy of Protestant England for those three hundred years or so was to kill Catholicism in Ireland, and destroy the Catholic Irish, if not by physical ex- termination, at least by causing the death of their trade, their industries, their political power, their racial spirit, their language, their laws, and their religion.
William III enacted the penal laws which in successive reigns ruled out a Catholic Irishman from all human dignity. No Catholic was allowed to sit in the Irish Parliament (whose privileges were constantly reduced), nor to have any voice in making the laws of his own land, nor to hold any public office. His priests were hunted like vermin from hovel to hovel, and killed when caught. No Irishman, as late as the nineteenth cen- tury, could own a horse worth more than five pounds,
and any Protestant enemy might demand it from him
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on payment of that sum. The Irish peasantry were the serfs of English, or Anglo-Irish, landlords — worse, indeed, than slaves, who are well fed by their owners, for they had to scrape their own livelihood out of plots they hired at a rental beyond their means, and were dispossessed of the land if they could not pay their rents, increased remorselessly if the value of the land went up owing to their industry and their improvements.
IV
So great was the misery of the people, and yet so won- derful their spirit, so infamous was the injustice of English rule which deHberately destroyed Irish industry lest it should compete with English trade, that even the Protestant members of the Irish Parliament, like Henry Grattan, revolted against the suppression of the Catholics and voted for their emancipation. It was at the time of the American War of Independence, and Grattan was supported by a large number of Irish volunteers who had enrolled themselves as a defense force against American attack. Under the pressure of this movement, the British government agreed to pass an Act of Catholic emancipation, but George HI, with the Catholic bogey always in his mad old mind, took fright, at the eleventh hour, and refused his assent. It was then that the volunteers, who had been a loyal force, under the name of United Irishmen, turned to rebellion. In the time of the French Revolution they made overtures to Napoleon to help them in their cause, as a century later, without the same excuse, another body of Irishmen turned to Germany for the same kind of aid. A French fleet was wrecked by storms, and the United Irishmen were crushed by Sir Ralph Aber- crombie with his English redcoats in a bloody and ruth- less way.
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In 1782, before the outburst of that rebellion, but when there was a demand for coercive measures against the Irish volunteers, Charles James Fox warned the British government of the danger of such policy, and the liberality and wisdom of his words might have rung in the ears of British Ministers when, after a hundred and thirty years, history repeated itself.
The Irish, finding that they had nothing to expect in the British House of Commons from the justice of their demands, found resources in themselves; they armed; their Parliament spoke out; and the very next year, the same Minister who had before put a negative on all their expectations, came down to the House and made the amende honorable for his past conduct, gave to the demands of an armed people infinitely more than he had refused to the modest application of an unarmed, humble nation. Such had been the conduct of the then Minister and his colleagues; and this was the les- son which the Irish had been taught: "If you want anything, seek for it not unarmed and humbly, but take up arms and speak manfully and boldly to the British Ministry, and you will obtain more than at first you might have ventured to expect."
This was the consequence, said Fox, of the ill use of the superintending power of the British Parliament, which had made millions of subjects rise against a Power which they felt only as a scourge. At the same time Fox made it plain that he yielded to the demands of the Irish for the right to legislate for themselves with- out interference because he believed them to be founded on justice, and not because they were demanded with the force of arms :
"He must be a shallow politician who would resort to such means (those taken in the war with America) to enforce obedience to laws which were odious to those whom they were made to bind." For his part, he would
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rather see Ireland totally separated from the Crown of England than kept in obedience only by force. Un- willing subjects were little better than enemies; it would be better not to have subjects at all than to have such as would be continually on the watch to seize the opportunity of making themselves free. If this country should attempt to coerce Ireland, and succeed in the attempt, the consequence would be that, at the breaking out of war with every foreign Power, the first step must be to send troops over to secure Ireland instead of calling upon her to give a willing support to the common cause. . . . He desired to look forward to that happy period when Ireland should experience the blessings that attend freedom of trade and constitution; when by the richness and fertility of her soil, the indus- try of her manufacturers, and the increase of her popu- lation she should become a powerful country. Then might England look for powerful assistance in seamen to man her fleets, and soldiers to fight her battles. England renouncing all right to legislate for Ireland, the latter would more cordially support the former as a friend whom she loved. If this country, on the other hand, was to assume the powers of making laws for Ireland, she must only make an enemy instead of a friend; for where there was not a community of inter- ests, and a mutual regard for those interests, there the party whose interests were sacrificed became an enemy.
After the failure of the Irish rebellion, Pitt and his agents set to work to unite Ireland and England under one legislature, and they found bribery an easy way. By payments of money, and land, and places, the Irish votes in the Dublin Parliam.ent were bought in numbers sufficient to pass the Act of Union.
It was an Act which Mr. Gladstone said "was carried by means so indescribably foul and vile that it can have no moral title to existence whatever."
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And, as Lecky wrote: "In a country where the sen- timent of nationality was as intense as in any part of Europe, it destroyed the national legislature contrary to the manifest wish of the people, and by means so corrupt, treacherous, and shameful that they are never likely to be forgotten. The Union of 1800 was not only a great crime, but, like most crimes — a great blunder."
After that, in the beginning of the industrial era of England, the work of ruin in Ireland was completed by "Cutthroat Castlereagh" and the manufacturing interests in the English House of Commons, who put up tariff walls against Irish industries, so blockading the commercial life of that unhappy island. Catholic emancipation was gained at last by the renewal of revolt under Daniel O'Connell, to which George IV yielded on the advice of the Duke of Wellington, who said he "wanted no more war," but the spiritual relief of the victory was overwhelmed by the agony of another tragedy in Irish history — the great famine of 1845.
I fell into trouble in America by saying that the English were not responsible at least for that act of nature, which was caused by the blight of the potato crop, upon which the main bulk of the people lived. And perhaps my critics were right in saying that, though we did not cause the blight, the famine itself would not have come if the Irish people had not been reduced to such a single source of Ufe by our brutahties. Indeed, they were right. We cannot even claim that as com- fort to our conscience. It was a chapter as terrible as anything in human history. Thousands perished of starvation and disease. They fell dead on the roadsides, and children like living skeletons climbed about the corpses of their mothers until they too died. One woman went mad and ate her own child. The Irish people fled from their own island as though it were plague-stricken, as indeed it was. They crowded into 19 281
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any kind of vessel which would carry them to America, and many died in the holds before they could reach the promised land. The tide of emigration which then began ceased only for a spell when war broke out in 1914, and the population of Ireland dwindled down in every decade, as these figures show:
1841 8,170,000
1851 6,sss,ooo
1861 5,790,000
1871 5,410,000
1881 5,170,000
1891 4,700,000
1901 4,450,000
1911 4,390,000
The figures for 1 921 will perhaps never be known, for the Census was opposed by Sinn Fein. It is certain, however, that they show an increase over 191 1, on account of the ban upon emigration by the leaders of the Irish Republican Army, who wished to retain Irish youth for their guerrilla warfare.
These figures of depopulation tell a tragic tale, yet the significance of them is exaggerated by Irish writers, for if there had been no famine, the lure of America would have led to a great emigration from a Httle island not large enough to support its population after inten- sive agriculture had been replaced by cattle farming after the repeal of the corn laws. Nevertheless, in its first phase it was due to famine.
What is the use of raking up that old, old history.? . . . Because unless we remind ourselves from time to time of its leading facts, we cannot begin to under- stand the things that have happened in these recent years. What I have told in a few pages is but the outline of the story which in Ireland is celebrated in all its details of horror — and they are horrible — written
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and rewritten, read and reread in history books and romances, told and retold with wrath, and tears, and pity, and pride (pride in the Irish spirit of resistance, its unbreakable spirit through the centuries), in every Irish school, among every Irish group of "intellectuals," and by every Irish priest. All that black drama is in the background of the Irish mind, as a tradition stronger than all modern influence, as a national heritage of the soil which inspires all their folk songs, and as a passion which may burn low at times but is ready to flame up again when the embers are stirred.
It burned low, that old passion of remembrance, some years before the war. There was almost a chance of its dying out at the end of the last century, when the Irish peasants were doing well and liberty was no longer outraged. But at that very time of increasing prosperity there was a renaissance of Irish culture, which began to stir up the embers — poets like W. B. Yeats and George Russell, historians hke Barry O'Brien and Gavin Duffy, and a group of brilliant young men, both Protestant and Catholic, called back to the past and summoned up its ghosts. At first it was a purely literary move- ment. The Gaelic League was started to revive the Irish language and literature. Irish literary societies were estabhshed in many cities. Irish art and music, from the tenth century onward, were rediscovered and made popular. All that intellectual activity, not rebellious in its purpose, brilliant and scholarly in its expression, accepted with sympathy and enthusiasm by English students, was a new flowering time of the Irish spirit, reveahng anew its wonderful endurance and its great sources of inspiration. But it awakened the old national instincts, and opened the old wounds so that they bled afresh.
Another thing happened, not without tragic con- sequences in the future. The Irish priesthood had
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formerly received its training outside Ireland, in Eng- land, in France, and other countries, where these young men, the sons of small Irish farmers for the most part, broadened their vision of life, and realized that Ireland was not the only country in the world nor the one which had all the troubles. But the Catholic hierarchy established Maynooth as the training college for Irish priests and it became the training ground also for Sinn Fein. For there, in an Irish atmosphere, among Irish books, meeting none but Irish minds, these candidates for the priesthood were closed in from the outside world and became intensely national and introspective. The woes of Ireland in the past worked in their brains. The glory of Ireland a thousand years ago was their starting point in historical vision. The martyrdom of Catholic Ireland in the days of the penal laws fired them with their own faith and enthusiasm. The crimes of England burned also in their hearts again, and in their narrow sphere of life they could not dissociate the past from the present in their view of English character. Those young men became the parish priests of Ireland, the teachers in the schools, the leaders of every Httle group of adult scholars, the chairmen of political meet- ings, and the dominating influence in social and rehgious life of rural districts. It was they above all who re- vived old memories and, with them, their bitterness and their hate. Afterward, when Sinn Fein replaced the old Nationalists and raised the Republican flag, it was the priests from Maynooth who gave a spiritual sanc- tion to the guerrilla war, inflamed the ardors of Irish boys, comforted the wounded and the prisoners, ab- solved those condemned to execution, and promised the crown of martyrdom to those who died for Ireland's sake. It was no harder for them to reconcile their faith in Christ with this way of warfare than for our own chaplains to reconcile theirs with the endless killing
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of Germans — though how it was done in either case was hard to understand by many simple men who beheved that Christ's message was one of peace and charity rather than war and hate, at least among people who professed to worship the same God.
The intensity with which the Irish mind has been fixed upon the tragedy of Irish history has a morbid effect not unlike the "persecution mania" of advanced melancholia. To hear an Irishman talk of all the woes of the distressful isle, one might imagine that other people — and especially the English — enjoyed full liberty of self-government, a human code of laws, and great material prosperity throughout those centuries when Ireland was under the tyranny of a despotic Power, miserably impoverished, and crushed by the brutality of the penal laws. Nothing can ever excuse the abomi- nable treatment of Ireland by English kings and states- men prior to the Victorian era, and I shall write nothing to whitewash that black injustice, but the Irish people should broaden the horizon of their imagination by a wider knowledge of world history, including that of England. At the time when Catholics in Ireland were being hunted for their faith, there was no mercy to Catholics in England. Their priests were chased, tortured, and killed, and by unrelenting severity the old faith was destroyed throughout the length and breadth of the land. The peasants of England were hardly better than serfs, and had no land of their own, but were the hired men of the tenant farmers, paid wretched wages and thrust into miserable hovels. Even as late as the year of the last European war the farm laborers of Somersetshire and many parts of England were paid no more than fourteen shillings a week, upon which they had to keep their families. As for liberty, it needed a long and desperate struggle before the English masses were able to vote as free men
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and to share in the making of the laws which governed them. Chartist riots, the "Peterloo" massacre, the threat and fear of revolutions in the early nineteenth century, preceded the granting of the franchise to the working classes. In the industrial era which followed the invention of the steam engine and the "spinning jenny," it is doubtful whether the life of Irish peasants in the poorest parts of Connaught, and in the worst period of English misrule and cruelty, was not prefer- able by far to that of the factory hands in such towns as Manchester, Bolton, Oldham, Wigan, and Sheffield. The Irish peasant, if he did not die in the famine of '45, lived at least a human Hfe, under God's free sky. He preserved his manhood and dignity of soul, and his women and children kept their beauty and grace. But in the industrial towns of England, men and women and little children endured a w^orse form of slavery than that of ancient Rome, suffered more cruelty in their bodies and souls, and were stunted and made inhuman by the hardships and filthy conditions of their Hfe. They worked fourteen hours and more a day in overcrowded and insanitary mills, without sufficient hght and air for human beings, and their children were made slaves of the machines and werea bominably ill used before they had known the first joys of childhood or any kind of joy. Their hovels were worse than Irish hovels, more foul, more pestilential, and the hard-faced manu- facturers of the North and Midlands were more cruel taskmasters than the Anglo-Irish landlords, who in many cases were kindly and easy-going men. Where was the liberty of the English folk in the eighteenth century? It is our ignorance of history which pretends they had the right or power to govern themselves. They were ruled, brutally, by the same people who made the tragedy of Ireland. The Irish penal laws were infamous. So also were the penal laws of England in
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that cruel century of history which preceded the Act of Union, and afterward.
As I write, I have by my side a document which I picked up by hazard in the Old Bailey of London, before a new Court of Justice replaced the former building. It reveals in a blinding Ught the social state of England in the Napoleonic era. It is a list of one hundred convicts ''embarked on board the Morly for New South Wales from the Dolphin Hulk at Chatham, this 29th day of July 1829, pursuant to the Right Honour- able Robert Peel's order of the 15th day of July 1829." Most of the men were under middle age, many of them young boys, and all of them were sentenced to terms varying from fourteen years to penal servitude for life and transportation to Botany Bay, for petty crimes which now would be dealt with under the First Offend- ders Act, without imprisonment.
Thomas Cook, a boy of fifteen, gets a life sentence (which in many cases meant a death sentence, as all know who have read the story of those prison ships on their way to Australia) — for stealing an apron.
Peter Haigh, eighteen years of age, is sentenced to penal servitude for life for stealing a piece of printed cotton.
For stealing a candlestick, Thomas Porter, sixteen j'^ears of age, is sentenced to fourteen years and trans- portation. For stealing a piece of worsted, James JefFeries, aged seventeen, is sentenced to fourteen years and transportation; and so on throughout the list. For breaking a threshing machine (in the time of the machin- ery riots); for stealing handkerchiefs, or bread when they were starving, girls, as well as boys, were sentenced to death and hanged in batches as late as the early nineteenth century, in Merrie England. Looking back upon that time, I fancy Ireland was a happier isle in spite of all her misery. It was a cruel time everywhere
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and until recent years most of us believed that we had got beyond it, to an age of greater human kindness. But the European war, and history that has happened afterward, spoiled that illusion, with many others.
When all is said and done, England used the enhghten- ment that came to her in happier times, to make amends in Ireland. Liberal thought in England did at last prevail as our people struggled forward to greater liberty of their own, and at last regained it. The Irish are not grateful, and pretend that we have behaved always toward them with the same intolerance and the same selfishness, but that is not the verdict of impartial his- tory. The series of Land Acts which have enabled the Irish peasantry to possess their own soil by means of English credits were generous in their inspiration and beneficent in their result. Nor is it true to say, as Irish writers say, that those concessions were forced upon the House of Commons by the power of the Nationahst votes, for though Mr. Gladstone's first Home Rule bill of 1 886 may have been influenced by that thought, the great Land Act of 1903 was passed by a Parliament in which Unionists were in a great majority over Liberals and Nationalists combined.
The story of the land in Ireland is, of course, the key to many of her historical troubles, from the time the Normans seized most of it, and the best of it, from the Irish chieftains. Throughout the centuries the people were mainly agricultural, and it was the repeal of the Corn Laws in the middle of the nineteenth century which diminished wheat-growing in Ireland (as well as in England) and changed it to a cattle-raising country. This had an immense effect upon the small
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tenant farmers, for the landlords desired to get rid of them from their holdings, in order to increase the pas- ture land. Evictions took place with pitiable scenes, and, unable to get work in factories like the English peasants who were also pushed off the land, their only chance was emigration to the United States. That, as well as the famine, was, as I have said, the cause of the human tide flowing from Ireland to America.
It was in 1870 that a first attempt was made to reform the miserable land system of Ireland, and the tenant was recognized in a limited way as part owner of the soil on which he labored. Later, in 1881, Mr. Gladstone still further improved the status of the Irish tenant farmer by an Act known as the Three F's — Fair Rent, Free Sale, and Fixity of Tenure. But the beginning of prosperity in Ireland was made a reality by the Land Acts of 1 891 and 1905, founded by George Wyndham, a descendant of the Irish Geraldines and a brilliant, sympathetic man, under Mr. Balfour's administration, enabling tenants to purchase their holdings on money advanced by the British government to a special Land Stock, bearing interest at 2^ per cent. Compulsory powers of purchase were given to the commissions appointed to administer these Acts, so that landlords could not refuse to part with their soil when it was desperately needed.
The total amount of money advanced by us for land purchase in Ireland from 1870 to 1919 was a hun- dred and five and a half million pounds— an immense amount of money, even now when our minds have been stunned by the grotesque figures of war debts. Nor were the Irish people asked to pay a higher interest when by war exhaustion England was forced to beg and borrow. While we were raising loans at 6 per cent, we were lending to Ireland at less than 3 per cent. In addition to the hundred and five and a half miUions
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mentioned above, we advanced nearly five million pounds to the Irish rural district councils for the build- ing of laborers' cottages.
The world ought to know these facts, and that is why I am writing them — in case a few people in the world may read them. For it is fair and just to say that the English people had made some amends at least, not inconsiderable, not ungenerous, for their bad treat- ment of Ireland, and that in material prosperity as well as in the affairs of local government they were already a world away from the misery that followed the famine of '45. This cannot be disputed with any honesty by Irish writers. It is undeniable, and confirmed by many of their own leaders. Take, for instance, words spoken by John Redmond, a year after the beginning of the Great War. Though he lost favor with his own people before dying with a broken heart, no Irishman, if he has any honesty, will deny that he was a great patriot and a great gentleman, whose whole life was devoted to the country he loved. It was John Redmond who made the following statement in Australia, comparing the condition of Ireland with what it was thirty years earlier.
I went to Australia to make an appeal on behalf of an enslaved, famine-hunted, despairing people, a people in the throes of semi- revolution, bereft of all political liberties and engaged in a life-and- death struggle with the system of a most brutal and drastic coercion. Only thirty-three or thirty-four years have passed since then, but what a revolution has occurred in the interval. To-day the people, broadly speaking, own the soil; to-day the laborers live in decent habitations; to-day there is absolute freedom in the local government and the local taxation of the country; to-day we have the widest Parliament in the municipal franchise; to-day we know that the evicted tenants who are the wounded soldiers of the land war have been restored to their homes, or to other homes as good as those from which they had been originally driven. We know that the congested districts, the scene of some of the most awful horrors of
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the old famine days, have been transformed, that the farms have been enlarged, decent dwellings have been provided, and a new spirit of hope and independence is to-day among the people. We know that in the towns legislation has been passed facilitating the housing of the working classes. So far as the town tenants are concerned, we have this consolation, that we have passed for Ireland an Act whereby they are protected against arbitrary eviction, and are given compensation not only for disturbance from their homes, but for the good-will of the business they had created, a piece of legislation far in advance of anything obtained for the town tenants of England. I may add, far in advance of any legislation obtained for the town tenants of any other country. We know that we have at least won educational freedom in university education for most of the youth of Ireland, and we know that in primary and standard education the thirty-four years that have passed have witnessed an enormous advance in efficiency and in the means provided for bringing effi- ciency about. To-day we have a system of old-age pensions in Ire- land whereby every old man and woman over seventy is saved from the workhouse, free to spend their last days in comparative comfort. We have a system of national industrial insurance which provides for the health of the people and makes it impossible for the poor hard-working man and woman, when sickness comes to the door, to be carried away to the workhouse hospital, and makes it certain that they will receive decent, Christian treatment during their illness.
In her material, and, indeed, in her spiritual state, Ireland, therefore, was no longer wretched and down- trodden, but well fed, gaining in wealth, with a sense of well-being. So it was before the war; and after the War, and throughout the war, Ireland was prosperous as few other countries, and suffered none of the privations which came to England. At a time when middle-class English households were strictly rationed, when middle- class Enghsh mothers were standing in long queues in the dark, wet days, to get their allowances of meat or groceries, when milk was difficult to get for babes, when butter could not be got, and eggs had disappeared, the Irish folk had all these good things in rich abun-
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dance. Their imports jumped up, from seventy-three miUion pounds sterling in 1914, to a hundred and twenty- six million pounds in 191 8, and their exports from seventy-seven million pounds sterling in 1914 to a hundred and fifty-two millions in 1918. In 1916 the value of cattle and beef exported from Ireland to Great Britain far exceeded the value imported from any other country. From Ireland it amounted to £20,580,000; from the Argentine, £12,785,000, and from the United States, £3,520,000. As an exporter of bacon, hams, pork, and pigs, Ireland stood second to the United States. Her exports of poultry and eggs to Great Britain were higher than those from any other country. In butter she stood second to Denmark, and in oats third to the United States and the Argentine. Her in- crease in private wealth during the years of war is shown to some extent by the Irish Bank deposits, which were £61,955,000 in 1914, and £91,361,000 in 1917.
Nobody in England begrudges Ireland this advance in prosperity. It does not pay back for centuries of poverty due to misrule, and for many extortions of Anglo-Irish lords and gentlemen. But at least it is a proof that the evil regime had ended and that Ireland was well on the road to national welfare. They had no need to whine about their misery, for they were not miserable.
I, for one, however, understand that material well- being is not the greatest thing in Ufe, and that the satisfaction of national sentiment, racial pride, liberty of self-government, are desires of the human heart stronger and nobler, if nobly expressed, than wealth or comfort. The Irish were still denied their old claim to rule themselves as a separate people, and material progress did not weaken, but rather strengthened, their passion for political liberty; and the European war, which intensified all ideals, hopes, fears, hatreds, and
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other emotions of men and women in the whole world, caused a profound stirring up of passion in Ireland.
VI
Before this happened, other things had happened which were fatal links in the chain of Irish tragedy. A Home Rule Act (limited and imperfect, it is true) had at last been placed upon the statute book, after more than half a century of pohtical strife, and Ulster had refused to acknowledge it.
The history of that half century of struggle in the House of Commons by a solid block of Irish members, under leaders Hke Parnell and Redmond, preceding that Act by Asquith's government, is too long and complicated to summarize, and is anyhow the record of a dismal and depressing drama. The Irish Nation- alists had to fight against a dead weight of English prejudice throughout the Victorian era, which seemed invincible in its smugness and self-complacency, un- breakable in its intolerance and arrogance. The Queen herself symbolized, in a royal way, the narrow bigotry of the English middle class, which only broadened and mellowed to Liberal ideas when the Education Act of 1870 and other enlightening influences had begun to operate. The new imperialism of the Cecil Rhodes type, popularized by Kipling, made a political creed by Chamberlain, helped later to create an atmosphere of intolerance toward Irish claims for self-government. Religious prejudice acted also against Irish interests, for the Protestant cry of "No Popery" still had power to stir popular passion and to raise votes against any concessions to a Catholic people, lest Home Rule should spell Rome Rule, with the Inquisition at work again, with new Bartholomew massacres, with Jesuits in dis- guise conspiring against the Protestant Crown, and
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with all the bogeys which still lurked in the memory of Puritan England from the days when the Catholic Church was regarded as "The Scarlet Woman" and "The Whore of Babylon."
Gradually that rehgious bigotry was softened by many influences which broke the spell of Victorianism — on one side the Oxford Movement, with its return to Catholic mysticism; on the other side the wave of agnosticism reflected in such popular books as Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward, the progress of science, and a wider knowledge of history. The group of Irish members in the House of Commons were defeated decade after decade by that solid wall of prejudice still existing in the mass psychology of mid-Victorian England; and their own faction fights, their utter dis- regard of English sensibilities, their own fanaticism, and the Celtic temperament which no Englishman could even dimly apprehend, destroyed their political strategy time and time again. Not even Gladstone's oratory, the fire of his spirit, his wizard spell over the imagina- tion of Liberal minds, could break down the sinister fears which belonged to the old Conservative instincts of the English people in their dealings with CathoHc Ireland. Yet by a curious paradox, due to a privilege of caste stronger than religious sympathy, the English Catholics of the old aristocracy were as bitterly hostile to Irish Home Rule as the Protestants of the most Puritan type.
One fatality dogged the efforts of the Irish Nation- alists to obtain victory by political pressure. Over and over again their chances were spoiled by the acts of crime committed by secret gangs in Ireland. Im- patient of political strategy, stirred by passionate incitements of Irish exiles in America, young Irishmen adopted terrorism as their weapon, and always it was double-edged, hurting their own cause most. The
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hedgerow murders and sinister conspiracies of Moon- lighters and Fenians hardened the EngHsh mind against any measure of Home Rule, made them stubborn against a plea for Hberty by a people who used American dollars to organize assassination, cattle maiming, and boy- cotting.
Another source of anger and of political hatred against the Irish Nationalists was the manner in which their block in the House of Commons used their voting powers as a threat or as a bribe to English political parties. The Irish vote could turn out a government or wreck a bill which had nothing to do with Irish interests, and with relentless strategy the Irish leaders made use of this power whenever it suited their purpose, utterly indifferent to the welfare of the English people. That, at least, was a nagging thought among our politicians, though it is doubtful whether the Irish party thwarted any important measures which lay outside the interests of Ireland. Be that as it may, there were many people who cried out to be rid of that hostile, alien group on the Irish benches, with their cynical wit and mocking laughter, so that we ourselves might enjoy Home Rule for England.
It was John Redmond, as leader of the Nationalists, who at last succeeded in securing a majority in the House of Commons for Irish Home Rule, so winning victory, it seemed, after the long and uphill struggle.
That was after something like a political revolution in England, which, with the help of the Irish votes, had destroyed the veto of the House of Lords by pressure brought to bear upon the King to create sufficient peers to overthrow them if they did not surrender their own power. They surrendered at the eleventh hour, and as one of the first fruits of victory for the Liberals in the Commons, the Home Rule bill became law. But two things happened to spill these fruits out of the basket
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of hope. One was the menace of civil war, the other was the coming of the Great War.
VII
Looking back at the recent horrors in Ireland, it seems to me, and to most men I know, unless they are blinded by passion, that they are directly due to what happened in Ulster before the passing of the Home Rule bill. What happened there was the raking up of old passions and bigotries by men like Carson and F. E. Smith (who is now Lord Birkenhead and Lord Chan- cellor of England), and the public organization of a rebel army whose avowed purpose was to resist an Act of ParUament by force of arms, to defy the King's authority, and, if need be, the King's troops. It is true that they proclaimed their loyalty, but one banner which flaunted across a Belfast street was not con- vincing in its patriotism. It said, "We would rather be ruled by the Kaiser than by the Pope of Rome." In view of what happened on August 4, 1914, that refer- ence to the Kaiser was at least unfortunate. It is also hard now to remember that the rifles which were smug- gled into Ulster for the arming of the volunteers were mostly of German manufacture.
I saw a good deal of Belfast in those days, and what I saw I did not like. I saw an ugly intolerance of mind among the leaders of the Orange lodges toward their fellow Irishmen of Catholic faith, which startled me by its mingled quality of sheer brutality and religious fanaticism. One decade of the twentieth century had passed (and the European war had not yet come with new revelations of human cruelty), yet in this era of enlightenment and civilization men of good stand- ing, ministers of religion, great lawyers of the English bar were talking stufi^ which might have been uttered,
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in better language, by Oliver Cromwell himself — stuff belonging to the old, dark bigotries of the Thirty Years* War or the Rise of the Dutch Republic; stuff of igno- rance, of hatred, and of cruelty which left me aghast, because I believed we had passed beyond all that. This verbosity of intolerance was translated into acts, as I saw with my own eyes in back streets of Belfast and in the neighborhood of Queen's Island, where Protestant laborers fell upon Catholic workingmen and kicked them to death, or bruised and battered them so that the hospitals were busy with these casualties. At that time, anyhow, the Catholic Irish were not the aggres- sors, nor in places where there were Protestant minori- ties did they take vengeance by reprisals.
In March of 1914 a large consignment of arms was landed at Larne without let or hindrance from govern- ment officials, thereby persuading John Redmond to encourage recruiting of his own volunteers. But when in July the Irish volunteers tried to distribute arms they were opposed by troops who afterward fired on an unarmed crowd in Dubhn.
After the swearing of the "Covenant," the drilling of battalions, and the establishment of a "Provisional Government" by the Ulster leaders, there happened the incident at the Curragh when Gough and other cavalry officers gave clear notice that they would refuse to obey orders if they were called upon to disarm the Ulster volunteers. If any man was a rebel, Carson was a rebel. If any body of men were conspiring with armed forces to defeat the authority of the Crown and Parlia- ment, those men were the Ulster volunteers. Yet no action was taken against Sir Edward Carson or his riflemen, though a search was made for arm.s in southern Ireland when the Catholics raised their own volunteers in defense of the threats of war by Ulster.
The Great War came, and for a time washed out all
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smaller strife in a sea of blood. The cavalry officers of the Curragh camp went out first of all to meet the Uhlans of Germany. Irishmen of north and south, Protestants and Catholics, offered themselves to defend their country against the common enemy.
"I say to the government," proclaimed John Red- mond, "that they may to-morrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland. Ireland will be defended by her armed sons from invasion, and for that purpose the armed Catholics in the south will be only too glad to join with the armed Protestant Ulster men."
It was the great chance to end the historic feud be- tween Great Britain and Ireland. Greater men than we had would have seized it, calling upon the heroic spirit of Ireland, with a full and fair pledge of self-govern- ment as a sister nation. Instead, pettifogging minds at the War Office got to work, ignoring or thwarting all plans of Irish recruiting in the south and west, and playing up to Ulster as the only "loyalists." The Catholic Irish wanted to fight in their own brigades, under their own flag, and with their priests as chaplains. Why not, in God's name? Instead, Irish volunteers were drafted into English battalions, Irish gentlemen were not allowed to command their own men. All offers of raising bodies of Irish youth were discouraged. Even Lloyd George admitted afterward that he was aghast at the methods adopted toward Irish recruiting, and confessed that it seemed as if "malignancy" had been at work. He did not add that those sinister in- fluences were the work of his own colleagues.
The first fires of enthusiasm were damped down, and died out. They were put clean out for the Catholic Irish when Sir Edward Carson, their avowed enemy, the leader of the Ulster volunteers, the rebel, was made a Cabinet Minister, with a seat in the War Council. It seemed to them a deliberate affront, a public declaration
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of partisanship with those who had sworn to resist Home Rule. On our side it was a colossal blunder, Worse than a crime, and showed an ignorance of Irish psychology only equal to the German ignorance of our own.
Meanwhile a hundred thousand Catholic Irish were fighting for the liberty of civilization and for the safety of Great Britain. At first they believed that they were fighting also for the liberty of their own little isle, but gradually that belief left them and they w^ere sadder and wiser men. Yet they went on fighting, gallantly, desperately, in the Dardanelles, on the western front, in Palestine, cut off from their own folk, reinforced by drafts from EngHsh battalions, commanded by ojfficers not of their faith or race.
I was often with the troops of the i6th Irish Divi- sion in France and Planders, because I wanted to give them what honor I could, by recording their valor and their loyalty at a time when they felt isolated from their own folk and from ours. They played their pipes for me in old French barns outside of Arras, and these Irish lads made whimsical jokes about the Jerry boys, as they called the Germans, and about their way of life and death. I remember one boy sitting in the straw below the rafters of a barn, who told me in a fine brogue that the place swarmed with rats who sat up on their hind legs and sang "God save Ireland" — "And sure," he said, "it's the truth I'm after telling you!" I saw them go into battle at Guillemont and Guinchy "when the Jerry boys ran so fast you couldn't see their tails for dust," and come out again across the shell-ravaged fields through the roar of guns, with all their officers gone, and sergeants or corporals leading little groups of tired, staggering men who were the few that were left out of the strong companies that had marched into that hell on earth. I stood by the side of their brigadier,
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not an Irishman, but a lover of these boys in his com- mand, and the tears ran down his face as he shouted words of praise to them.
"Bravo, Connaughts! Bravo, Munsters! You did damn well, Dublins!"
At the sight of him standing there, at those words of his, they pulled themselves up, turned eyes left, were glad of this tribute to a heroism not surpassed in the "war to end war," as we called it in our simplicity.
The Irish division did not get a fair deal. It was left in the trenches month after month, shifted from one part of the line to another, without a rest, and in August of 1917, in Flanders, up against the German pill boxes at "Beck House" and "Borry Farm" it was just a massacre. They were alongside the Ulster men, who shared their sacrifice, and with whom they were comrades, forgetful, there, in France and Flanders, of political and religious feuds, but Irishmen together. Left for three weeks in ditches of death, under a cease- less storm of German gunfire, each of these two Irish divisions lost nearly two thousand men and over a hundred and fifty oflScers before they were sent "over the top" in a great assault. And then without mercy for their losses they were pushed into a battle which cost them another two thousand men for each division, and almost the last of their officers. Some of their battahons lost 64, and even 66 per cent of their fighting strength. Some companies were almost anni- hilated. It was not war. It was a murder of men who fought to the extreme limits of human heroism in impossible conditions and in obedience to outrageous orders.
For General Hickey, their divisional commander, I had a warm regard. He had a charming Irish way and was proud of his men, but I think he failed in getting
fair play for them and allowed them to be used too
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ruthlessly by our High Command. Both divisions were remade by scraping up drafts of men from conva- lescent camps and from English depots. In the German offensive of 191 8 they were holding the line in the Fifth Army front, and fought again until they were almost destroyed. On the outskirts of Amiens, after a terrible week against the overwhelming tide, General Nugent, commanding the Ulster division, was asked by a French general coming up to our relief, to make another attack while the French troops detrained. General Nugent's answer to the message was a revelation of his tragedy. "Tell your general," he said, "that I have only three hundred men who can stand up" — three hundred out of a whole division! — "but they will attack again."
Any man who denies the valor of the Irish in the war is a liar. They had not the same discipline as the English (their temperament was different), some of their officers were not so well trained, but their courage was magnificent and their spirit heroic. As an English- man, I am glad to pay them this tribute in truth and honesty, and especially because, in Ireland, that re- belHon in Easter week of 1916, before the battles of the Somme, before their agony in those fields and in Flanders, cut them off from their own people and put them to a supreme test of loyalty.
VIII
For that rebellion there is no excuse. Not even the tragic heritage of Irish history, nor our own stupidities in dealing with a temperamental people, nor Carson's sinister influence, palliates the black treachery of that act. It was treachery not only against the English people, who, whatever the acts of their government,
had been patient with Ireland, generously inclined,
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but treachery to civilization itself, to our French allies, to the whole code of honor. The enemy was desper- ately strong against us. We were hard pressed, and the Irish troops themselves, as I have told, were being mowed down by German gun fire and German machine-gun bullets. If Germany had won, more would have gone down than England. Irish liberty would have gone down with ours. Europe would have been Prussianized, and there would have been no mercy under German Pickelhauben for Irish rebels. The Prussian does not believe in rebels when they have served his purpose. He has a short way with them. The British Empire would have been broken up, and the ruin of England would not have helped Ireland, but would have made her poverty-stricken with us, and fellow slaves under the yoke of a real tyranny. The Irish rebellion was mad- ness as well as badness.
Of the compHcity of the Irish conspirators with our enemy there is no doubt. Roger Casement was not the only man in correspondence with Germany. Through Irish-Americans and Count BernstorfF in Washington, the leaders of the rebelUon were in direct touch with the German government. Their whole plans were based upon German assistance, as P. H. Pearse admitted in a letter written the night before his execution:
The help I expected from Germany failed; the British sank the ships.
Judge Cohalan in the United States requested Count Bernstorff to forward the following message to the German Foreign Office:
The Irish revolt can only succeed if assisted by Germany. Other- wise England will be able to crush it, although after a severe struggle. Assistance required. There should be an air raid on England and a naval attack timed to coincide with the rising, followed by a landing of troops and munitions and also of some officers, perhaps from a warship.
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It might then be possible to close the Irish harbors against England, set up bases for submarines, and cut off food export to England. A successful rising may decide the war.
John Devoy was the leader of the revolutionary plot in the United States, and in close and constant commu- nication with the German ambassador at Washington. On February i8, 1916, Count Bernstorff attached the following message surreptitiously to a note regarding the Lusitania negotiations, sanctioned and passed through by the State Department of the American government :
The Irish leader, John Devoy, informs me that rising is to begin in Ireland on Easter Sunday. Please send arms to (arrive at) Limerick, west coast of Ireland, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. To put it oflF longer is impossible. Let me know if help may be expected from Germany.
Bernstorff.
There is one mitigating fact in the indictment of the Irish people regarding the rebellion which broke out in Dublin during that Easter week and led to the death of many English soldiers, many Irish boys, hundreds of casualties on both sides, the destruction of the best part of Dublin from artillery fire, and the abomination of martial law. Its outbreak was bitterly condemned and resented by the majority of Irish citizens, who re- garded it, for the first day or two at least, as an act of criminal madness. From many sources of information, English as v/ell as Irish, I have evidence of that. But when its failure was assured and large numbers of Irish lads and their leaders were surrounded by superior forces and strong artillery, without a dog's chance of escape, sentiment was intensely stirred and every Irish heart bled at the thought of their inevitable death unless they surrendered. Whatever the original folly or crime, all people must feel like that for their fellow
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countrymen, as we felt in the time of the Jameson raid. National sentiment, pity, horror, and then a flame of hatred swept over Ireland when, after the rebellion, the Irish prisons were crowded with captives to the number of one thousand eight hundred and forty, and fifteen of their leaders were picked out for the Bloody Assizes under General Maxwell, sentenced to death, and executed. According to all laws of all countries, those executions were justified. In compar- ison with what other countries would have done — Germany, France, even the United States — I think — we were mild in punishment. But if we had been more merciful we should have been more wise. Those men like Pearse, Macdonagh, and Connolly were not evil men in their nature, though they had done a mad, bad thing. They were men of lofty ideals, patriots and visionaries, though grievously misguided by fanaticism. We might have known that to execute them would make martyrs of them, and that the spirit of the Irish people would be flung into allegiance with the extrem- ists by their tragic deaths, by their last words of love for Ireland, by the tranquil courage with which they went to execution. It is knowledge of psychology which makes great statesmen and leaders. A man like Gen- eral Maxwell has as much knowledge of psychology as a German drill sergeant. He has the brass-hat brain. Our own statesmen were not big enough for generosity, not brave enough to risk an error on the side of mercy. They went by the book of the old code of law, and stood by "the need of justice. " Any schoolboy might have quoted Shakespeare to them for a text —
The quality of mercy is not strained . . .
• ••••••
And earthly power doth then show likest God's, When mercy seasons justice. . . .
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From the lowest point of view, the low cunning of political strategy, we should have done better to have kept those men in prison for a while, to have treated them with chivalry, as now and again in the past English kings treated rebellious subjects, and then have called to the heart of Ireland for loyalty on generous terms. So General Botha dealt with the rebelHon of De Wet in the early days of the war. For the leaders there were short terms of imprisonment, then a general amnesty. "We want to put that out of our memories," he said. That way might have failed in Ireland, for the Irish are a Celtic people and many of them are not easily forgetful of what they think is unfair and are cynical of generous dealing, which they mistake for weakness, and incurably suspicious. Mercy might have failed to win their thanks. But lack of mercy was bound to fail.
It did fail most horribly. The most moderate men and women in Ireland revolted against the "martyrdom" of the Sinn Fein leaders, and the Irish Republican Army, as the Irish volunteers now called themselves, received recruits from the great body of Irish youth. On the western front many Irish soldiers, still fighting for us, dedicated themselves anew to Irish freedom, and after the war, if they had the luck, or misfortune, to live, joined the ranks of the rebel forces.
Abortive attempts were made by Mr. Asquith, in the last months of his office as Prime Minister, to reshape the government of Ireland, and he appointed Lloyd George to negotiate with John Redmond and Sir Edward Carson, in order that the first principles of a new bill might be agreed upon. Redmond obtained a written document which oucHned the government proposals, for setting up an Irish Parliament, with a responsible Irish executive, and arranging to leave out the six counties of Ulster during the war, upon the ending of which the problem of partition would be raised again
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before a council of the Empire. In the meantime the original number of Irish members would sit at West- minster. These proposals were carried at a Nation- alist convention, and accepted by the Ulster Council in June, 1916. Later, however, Lord Lansdowne, as leader of the Unionist peers, refused to agree to the terms of Redmond's document, Sir Edward Carson interpreted the government promises as meaning the permanent partition of Ireland, and Bonar Law repu- diated the binding nature of the pledge given to the Irish leader, so the poor John Redmond knew that his own people would have their worst suspicions confirmed and would repudiate his leadership.
The war was still going on and the minds of people in England, Scotland, and Wales had no room for polit- ical strife in Ireland, but were obsessed, and agonized, and deadened by the continuing and increasing slaugh- ter in France and Flanders, without a hope or illusion left of rapid victory. In spite of tremendous battles, with their long death rolls, our generals did not seem to get in sight of any promised land. They called for more men, and still more, for the dreadful sacrifice. Intrigue was rife at home, because of long disappoint- ment, and criticism of the conduct of the war, leading to behef that a change of leadership might quicken the chance of victory. By a political intrigue in which Bonar Law and Lloyd George were the principals, with a Canadian journalist and pubhcity man — the present Lord Beaverbrook — as chief wirepuller — Asquith was unseated and Lloyd George became Prime Minister of the Coalition, dependent on the support of Carson and Bonar Law, with their Orange fanaticism still unabated, and on the backing of press favorites to whom he prom- ised largesse in the future, which later he richly paid, so that Fleet Street is now paved w^ith coronets and its
purheus infested with barons.
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Lloyd George had great qualities of leadership which might have made him more powerful than those who kept the rein upon his finer instincts. He had imagination, sympathy, generous impulses, splendid audacity, re- vealed from time to time in spite of all those hide-bound pettifogging brains which surrounded him closely and watchfully and suspiciously, and whose power over other people of their kind was able to thwart him or change his direction, whenever he tried to be free of them.
So it was in his dealings with Ireland. His first action was maganimous and he set free large numbers of young Irishmen who had been imprisoned since the rebellion of Easter week in 1916, though he refused to annul the sentences of those who were in penal servitude. But when Sinn Fein began to win by-elections — Count Plunkett being elected for Roscommon in Feb- ruary 1917 — he allowed himself to be influenced by the fears of his supporters and gave his consent to a new campaign of coercion, with wholesale arrests, house-to- house searches, imprisonment without trial, and all the rigors of military rule. In the House of Commons Major Willie Redmond made a moving and noble appeal for peaceful settlement by a quick and generous measure of self-government for Ireland. "In the name of God, we here, who are perhaps about to die, ask you to do that which largely induced us to leave our homes."
I read that speech of Major Redmond's, much stirred by its pathos, when I was recording the daily routine of the war, and three months later, when I went among the Irish battalions on a great day of battle at Messines, I remembered his words, when an Irish soldier told me that "Major WilHe" had been killed not far from where I stood, by Wytschaete Wood. A few days later I was present at his graveside in a convent garden when soldiers of Protestant Ulster and CathoHc Ireland fired the last salute above his dust. He had died Uke many
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of his comrades in the vain hope that by their loyalty to the Empire Ireland might gain her heart's -desire.
But in Ireland and in England there was no reconciling spirit. Less in Ireland than in England, then, for once again prisoners were released — among them being De Valera, afterward appointed leader of Sinn Fein and President of the *' Irish Republic" — and when an Irish convention was summoned to discuss a plan for the self-government of Ireland, within the Empire, by all parties of the Irish people, Sinn Fein refused to send representatives, having nailed its RepubHcan flag to the mast.
All through the autumn and winter of 1917 the Irish people became more and more skeptical of the conven- tion, as news reached them that Ulster was as irrecon- cilable as ever, and would not abate a jot of her claims to separation, for the sake of national unity. Yet under the chairmanship of Sir Horace Plunkett, a wise, devoted, and patriotic Irishman, the convention repre- sented all shades of opinion in Ireland, apart from Sinn Fein. Among its members were five Nationalists, five Ulster Unionists, three southern Unionists, four Cath- olic bishops, two bishops of the Church of Ireland, thirty-one chairmen of county councils, four mayors, eight urban councilors, seven labor representatives, and such great Irishmen as "A. E.," Sir Horace Windle, Lord MacDowell, Lord Desert, and Doctor MahafFy, provost of Trinity College.
They could not agree. Before the end, John Redmond resigned, and died of soul shock. Yet its report pre- sented to Lloyd George the faith and convictions of men who knew the psychology of their countrymen and who in many solemn and inspiring words proclaimed the age-long aspirations of Ireland to political liberty. They were mostly agreed to a Federal scheme which would give Ireland a constitution within the Empire,
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and there is hardly a doubt that even then a full promise of Dominion Home Rule for Ireland, with a temporary arrangement for Ulster, would have received the alle- giance of the great majority of Irish people, if it had been made without reservation and as a great act of recon- cihation and justice by the British government. But the British government ignored the points of agreement in the report, the common bond of national sentiment that united all but the Ulster group, and Lloyd George put all the work of the convention on one side, as a failure from which there was nothing to be learned. He learned nothing, not even the unanimous conviction of the subcommittee on national defense that, after all that had happened, there could be no conscription in Ireland without the consent of an Irish Parliament. After the German offensive of 1918 he announced that conscription would be extended to Ireland, and there was not a single party in that island, hardly an indi- vidual, who did not regard that statement as the final breaking of all pledges and as an outrageous insult to Irish pride. For as a people they would not allow their men to be taken without the consent of their own National Assembly, as though they were but slaves of the English who denied them the rights of common freedom.
It is hard for the Enghsh people, even now, to under- stand that point of view. We keep on harping on the fact that Ireland "belongs" to England. We have in our bones the feeUng that the Irish and the Enghsh are blood relations, united under the King, with the same interests, the same duties, the same loyalties. In the war, when the best of our manhood was being sent to the shambles, it seemed black treachery or cow- ardice that Irish youth should escape scot free while ours was fighting for "the liberty of the world." Even now, the majority of people in England hold that view,
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and it would, I think, be a right view, if Ireland had indeed been a partner with us in the same interests, the same duties, and the same loyalties. But that was not so. The Irish people believed that we had forfeited our right to loyalty by violating their interests, trampling on their loyalty, and absolving them from all duty by refusing their liberty.
Again one must go back to the grim old past and to the intrigues, trickeries, stupidities, misunderstandings, and irreconcilable passions of present politics, to under- stand the fire of indignation which swept over Ireland at that threat of conscription. The Irish people rose as one man to resist it. At the Mansion House in Dublin representatives of the Nationalists, Labor party, Sinn Fein, and all-for-Ireland group met in conference, and on April i8, 1918, issued the following declaration:
Taking our stand on Ireland's separate and distinct nation- hood, and affirming the principle of Hberty that the governments of nations derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, we deny the right of the British government or any external authority to impose compulsory military service in Ireland against the clearly expressed will of the Irish people. The passing of the Conscription bill by the British House of Commons must be regarded as a decla- ration of war on the Irish nation. The alternative to accepting it as such is to surrender our liberties and to acknowledge ourselves slaves. It is in direct violation of the rights of small nationalities to self-determination, which even the Prime Minister of England ■ — now preparing to employ naked militarism and force his Act upon Ireland — himself announced as an essential condition for peace at the Peace Congress. The attempt to enforce it is an un- warrantable aggression which we call upon all Irishmen to resist by the most effective means at their disposal.
The Irish Catholic bishops also issued a declaration which contained the following words:
In view especially of the historic relations between the two countries from the very beginning up to this moment, we consider
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that conscription is an oppressive and inhuman law which the Irish people have a right to resist by every means that are consonant with the law of God.
The British government did not try to enforce con- scription in Ireland in face of this storm of popular indignation, but from that time forward they turned the screw of martial law with ever-increasing severity.
In 191 8 there were over eleven hundred arrests, and several Irishmen had been bayoneted or shot for re- sisting arrest or trying to escape, while others had died in prison. Up to the end of that year only one police- man had been killed. British officers, and the Royal Irish Constabulary acting under their orders, were intolerant of Irish sentiment, customs, and free speech, behaving with oppressive attempts to break the spirit of the people, which had the effect of hardening that spirit into a cold hatred and contempt of English ''tyranny." It was tyranny, as we must confess, done, not by the will of the Enghsh people, who were utterly ignorant of what was happening in Ireland, owing to the boycott of Irish news in a bought or partisan press, but by military and police officials with the narrow intelli- gence, the pride in a little brief authority, the exagger- ated sense of "discipline," and the spirit of "We'll teach 'em what's what!" which are characteristic qualities of many professional soldiers and of all police.
Men were arrested and imprisoned for^ "offenses" of the most trivial kind, or for mere political opinions. For being in possession of Sinn Fein literature, for read- ing, or listening to, political manifestoes they were sen- tenced to years of captivity. Boys and girls were imprisoned for "whistling derisively" at the police (just as French and Belgian boys and girls were impris- oned by the Germans for mocking at the "goose step"), or for singing old Irish songs, or speaking the Irish lan- guage. Small crowds of farmers, with their women folk,
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in village market places, were broken up, and fairs, necessary for country life and trade, were forbidden. Not a day passed without some act of oppression or intolerance which excited the anger of Irish folk, who among all the people in the world are quickest to take offense and most remembering of insult and injustice.
In December, 191 8, there was a general election in Ireland which revealed the temper of the people. The Nationalists of the old Irish party were swept on one side, and only seven were returned. Sinn Fein captured seventy-three seats, and pledged themselves not to sit at Westminster, but to establish their own ParHament, called Dail Eirann, to set up their own courts of justice, to administer the republic they had proclaimed. This they proceeded to do with an efficiency, an organizing genius, and a respect for the rules of justice and equity which astonished all who had believed that the Irish people were incapable of ruling themselves. The best brains in Ireland, their most distinguished lawyers and magistrates, served in those courts, and settled innu- merable disputes in regard to land and property with advantage to the Irish people, according to all the evidence we have. But instead of turning a blind eye to a system of training in self-government which could have been adapted to a generous measure of Home Rule, still promised but still delayed, the British govern- ment increased their military forces in Ireland and made innumerable raids, house-to-house searches, and arrests, for the purpose of breaking up the courts, until most of the RepubHcan leaders were in prison or in hiding.
The Irish people had one great hope — illusory and vain. It was that in the Peace Conference, when many small nations were being given the right of "self-deter- mination," and when, out of the wreckage of old em- pires, new republics, like that of Jugo-SIavia and Czecho-Slovakia, were being created, the claims of
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Ireland would be given a hearing, and admitted by the great Powers, especially by the United States of America. Through the influence of Irish-Americans great pressure was brought to bear upon President Wilson, and Irish emissaries dogged the precincts of Versailles, with urgent pleas to obtain a hearing. It was of course im- possible for Great Britain to put the case of Ireland on to the conference table. It would have been a surrender of pride and a confession of impotence which her people would not tolerate for a second, even in imagina- tion. Only the simpHcity of the Irish mind, simple even with all its shrewdness and its cunning, could have hoped for such a surrender — in the days of England's victory. It is foolish to ask something beyond the bounds of human nature as it is now constituted, and that was one thing. Lloyd George merely smiled at such audacity, or was impatient at the mention of it. President Wilson bluntly told his Irish-Americans that that question belonged to Great Britain's domestic politics, and could not be touched by other Powers.
Yet the high-sounding phrases on the Hps of our statesmen during the peace discussions were but a mock- ery so long as Ireland remained under martial law, and the more honest men at least who related their phrases to their deeds, and who were touched by the inspiration of victory which after long agony and a heritage of ruin promised the beginning of a new chap- ter in the history of the world, would have put themselves right with their conscience by a magnanimous settlement in Ireland. There was no magnanimity. While there was talk of a more generous measure of Home Rule, and houses were being searched for arms in Catholic Ireland (but never one in Protestant Ireland), Sir Edward Carson went to Ireland and threatened to renew his rebellion if the government brought in a Home Rule bill of which he did not approve. He was not arrested
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for rebellious speech. On the contrary, Mr. Bonar Law and his friends found no harm in it, though in Catholic Ireland a man was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for singing an old rebel song.
When at last the Irish people saw their hopes of the peace treaty dashed to the ground, when they found that they were still at the mercy of military and police governance (with all their best men in jail), something broke in them and the floodgates of passion were opened, and out of the bitterness of their hearts came the spirit of vengeance, and the will to kill.
IX
It was the beginning of a horrible guerrilla warfare, worse even than modern war between regular armies, because of its moral degradation, its secret acts, its individual cruelties, its action among women and children, its effect upon the psychology of the rival forces, its red Indian methods. The boys who enlisted in the "Irish Republican Army" wore no uniforms, were not distinguishable from the civilian population, and carried out their work of killing by craft and cun- ning rather than by open courage. Their first attacks were upon the Royal Irish Constabulary, whom they regarded as the agents of an alien tyranny, or as spies and informers. One by one, these men were killed like dogs, without a dog's chance of self-defense. The British government tried to stamp out this campaign of death by unlimited coercion. According to Erskine Childers, in his book. Military Rule in Ireland, there were, between January, 1919, and March, 1920, 22,279 raids on houses, 2,332 political arrests, 151 deportations, 429 proclamations suppressing meetings and newspapers.
By the autumn of 1920 one hundred and six constables had been killed by Sinn Feiners, and in the summer of
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that year, abandoning all policy of reconciliation, the British government passed an Act which took away all civil rights from the Irish people. Courts-martial were established, civil inquests were abandoned; any Irish man, woman, or child could be arrested on suspicion, and imprisoned without trial, for holding political opinions with which British officers did not agree, for belonging to societies which upheld the Irish claim to self-government, for any act or word or gesture, or the absence of any act or word, to the annoyance of any patrol of military or police, drunk or sober. That was not the legal wording of the Act, but those were the pow- ers it gave and the powers that were used.
The policy of coercion was intrusted by the British government to the Chief Secretary, Sir Hamar Green- wood, a Canadian Jew, who in my judgment has done more to dishonor the British Empire than any Hving man. He owed his position to that group of interests led by Lord Beaverbrook (formerly Max Aitken of Canada) with the approval of Bonar Law and the sanction of Lloyd George, and he held it by a bluff, breezy, John Bull manner, which was the camouflage of craft, and by a courage and obstinacy in a dangerous policy which was the admiration of Tory minds with Prussian instincts, while he astonished and delighted them by his blank denials of undeniable evidence, his utter contempt for criticism and rebuke, his audacious handling of truth, his superb refusal to be intimidated by accusations of dishonor, lying, brutality, and con- nivance with crime. In Ireland, General Macready, old and artful in war and civil strife, was put in com- mand of military operations, and General Tudor, who has the soul of a Welsh chieftain in the eleventh century, was made responsible for the police, including a special body of volunteers, recruits from the unemployed soldiers of the Great War, at a high rate of pay, and known by
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their nickname of Black-and-Tans, which will live in history, with unenviable fame.
The stage was set for the dirtiest kind of warfare which has ever happened in modern times.
The Sinn Feiners adopted the ambush method as their main system of attack, their first purpose being the capture of arms and ammunition. It was an easy, though dangerous, game for them to come at night into a district away from their own homes, and to lie in wait for a military convoy or a lorry full of soldiers, from whom they were concealed behind hedges or walls. Irish chemists had concocted bombs for them which would blow a lorry to bits or make a mess of a party of soldiers. I am told they were "better" bombs than those used in the European war. Later, by attacks on Irish "barracks" — generally a small house or white- washed building, containing a few constables, whom they isolated first by feUing trees across the roads of approach and cutting telephone wires — they obtained small stores of arms, and then as their strength increased and they were able to attack stronger garrisons, large stores of arms.
Their "Intelligence" was highly efficient, as they had their recruits in every town and village of Ireland, in every post office, at every railway station, in banks and government buildings, even in Dublin Castle itself. By clever strategy and the ruthless use of firearms, they captured many mails and discovered the plans and activities of British officers, police constables, and private individuals. Any man of English, Scottish, or Irish race who conveyed information against members of the Irish Republican Army was marked down for execution as a spy, and with long patience and cunning they tracked him down until one day his body was riddled with bullets by a sudden attack in a lonely place, and left there with the words, "Spy, tried, con-
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victed and shot. I. R. A." as a warning to others of his kind. They shot some of their own women for "conversation" with the enemy, or cut off their hair in the market place, as I saw women treated in Belgium for the same offense with Germans. No enemy of theirs was safe, eating or drinking, praying or sleeping, indoors or out, with wife and children or with fellow worshipers in church. Into lonely farmhouses broke parties of masked men, to drag out some trembling fellow, in spite of the shrieks of his women folk, to shoot him in the back yard, or, if he struggled, in the presence of his wife and children. A British officer, retired after the European war, sat at table with his wife in a house near Dublin. As usual, his revolver lay ready at his elbow. It was the wife who noticed movements of men first. The husband had time to raise his hand and dodge as two men came in and fired. His hand received the bullet, and he shot his enemy through the stomach. The wife seized the other man by the throat and grabbed his revolver. He fled after a second of struggle, and the husband and wife escaped that night from Ireland, more lucky than others. More lucky, for instance, than the unfortunate officers who were billeted in Dublin and murdered in their bedrooms in the presence of their wives. ... If women were in the way, there was no mercy for them, at least in the case of an officer named Blake, who had been playing tennis with a friend until dark, and then joined two ladies in a motor car. After a short drive, he got down to open a park gate, and as he did so a party of men leaped out and shot him. One of the ladies (who was expecting a child) flung herself between the assassins and the second officer, and shared his fate, which was death. The other lady was allowed to escape. Such incidents were not rare.
Inspired by a cold hatred of any man in British
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uniform, embittered by prison treatment, which is never a reconciling remedy, and inflamed by the rough handhng of soldiers or jailers, by the terror inflicted on mothers and sisters in midnight searches, when often they had to submit to the brutal insults of drunken men, and above all by a fanatical beUef in the justice of their cause, young Irishmen in all parts of the country engaged in this red Indian warfare, and had no kind of human pity, no softening touch of conscience, when it came to the killing of a "spy," the ambush of troops, or the execution of men whom they called murderers because in courts-martial they had condemned Irish rebels to death.
These Irish boys received their orders from head- quarters, and obeyed them with the knowledge that if they disobeyed they would be condemned as cowards and traitors. By all laws of human nature there must have been boys among them who had no spirit for the fight, who hated the thought of kilUng or being killed — gentle lads, taught to love Christ and the peace of Christ — and I am told that some of them wept and agonized when the secret orders came. But for the most part, as I am told also by their friends, they were eager to go into "action," impatient to get the order for an ambush, grim, resolute, and cunning in this way of attack, and heroic in their off"er of death for Ireland's sake, as they believed, if they were shot in action or hanged in jail.
These boys were incited, inspired, and comforted by many of their women and many of their priests, who regarded them as soldiers in a war of liberation, justified in the sight of God and by the code of human honor. To the reproach that they were not in uniform, they talked about the Boers. To the accusation of murder, they asked what England did to German spies. To a death sentence for carrying firearms or being
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caught In an ambush, they rebuked their judges — Brit-' ish officers of courts-martial — for killing their prison- ers. And theoretically there was logic in those answers, as British officers I know admit. But the logic of this kind of war is devil's logic. Not even for liberty's sake is the kiUing of men in cold blood or before their women folk justified. Not even savage warfare could be more cruel than some of the acts committed by the I. R. A., like the assassination of officers on leave in Dublin.
The spirit of it belongs to the Paleolithic Age, and is not to be reconciled with the Christian faith by any casuistry, though Catholic priests gave it their blessing and inspired its action by their own ardor. Now and again some of their bishops protested against the horror of this way of war and denounced it in solemn words.
In his Advent pastoral. Cardinal Logue wrote the following words referring to the murder of fifteen officers in Dublin:
The tragedies of last Sunday have oppressed me with a deep sense of sadness and a feeling akin to despair. I have never hesitated to condemn, in the strongest terms at my command, such deeds of blood, from whatever source they may have sprung. I believe that every man and woman in Ireland who retains a spark of Chris- tian feeling, or even the instincts of humanity, deplores, detests, and condemns the cold-blooded murders of Sunday morning. No object could excuse them; no motive could justify them; no heart, unless hardened and steeled against pity, could tolerate their cruelty. Patriotism is a noble virtue when it pursues its object by means that are sincere, honorable, just, and in strict accordance with God's law; otherwise it degenerates into a blind, brutal, reckless passion, inspired not by love of country, but by Satan, "who was a murderer from the beginning." The perpetrators of such crimes are not real patriots, but the enemies of their country, robbing her of just sympathy and raising obstacles to her progress and im- pressing a deep stain on her fair fame.
The cardinal also condemned in the same pastoral the general, indiscriminate massacre of innocent and
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inoffensive victims which was perpetrated by the forces of the Crown in Croke Park on Sunday evening — when Black-and-Tans fired into a football crowd, causing fifty casualties, as a retaliation for the morning crimes. A week later fifteen of the auxiliary cadets were am- bushed in County Cork and the wounded were killed to a man, in revenge for their action at Croke Park. In revenge again for that the police burned down a large sector of the most prosperous quarter of Cork.
On December 12, 1920, Doctor Cohalan, the Catholic Bishop of Cork, issued a proclamation in reference to ambushes, kidnapping, and murder. He said that besides the guilt involved in these acts by reason of their opposition to the law of God, anyone who should within the diocese of Cork organize or take part in an ambush, or in kidnapping, or otherwise should be guilty of murder or attempt at murder, should incur, by the very act, the censure of excommunication.
In the course of his sermon at the cathedral. Bishop Cohalan said it was a safe exploit to murder a police- man from behind a screen, and until reprisals began there was no danger to the general community, but, even leaving aside the moral aspect of the question for the moment, what has the country gained pohtically by the murder of policemen? Some Republicans spoke of such and such districts of the country being deHvered from British sway when policemen were murdered and barracks burned. It was a narrow view, and v/ho would now mention any district that had been delivered from British rule by the murder of the old Royal Irish Constabulary men and the burning of barracks? No, the killing of the Royal Irish Constabulary men was murder, and the burning of barracks was simply the de- struction of Irish property.
The bishop continued that reprisals began with the murder of the late Lord Mayor MacCurtain, and now
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it was like a devil's competition between some members of the Republicans and agents of the Crown, in feats of murder and arson. Recently ambushes had taken place with serious loss of Ufe, and he would say this about ambushes (leaving out of the question for the moment their moral aspect) — the ambushers come to a place from no one knows where, and when their work is done they depart to no one knows what destination. There is not much risk to the ambushers personally, but by this time boys or men taking part in ambushes must know that by their criminal acts they are expos- ing perhaps a whole countryside, perhaps a town or city, to the danger of terrible reprisals; that when they depart and disperse in safety they are leaving the hves and property of a number of innocent people unprotected and undefended, to the fury of reprisals at the hands of servants of the government. Then, over and above all, there was the moral aspect of these ambushes. Let there be no doubt about it — there was no doubt about it — that these ambushers were murderers, and every life taken in an ambush was a murder. Notwithstanding repeated condemnations of murder, and repeated warn- ing, terrible murders had been committed these past few weeks. As a result of the ambush the previous night at Dillon's Cross, the city had suffered, the bishop thought, as much damage at the hands of the servants of the government as Dublin had suffered during the rebellion of 1916. It was all very well to talk of the city of Cork being under the care and solicitude of the Republican Army. The city was nearly a ruin, and the ruin had followed on the murderous ambush at Dillon's Cross. If any section or member of the volunteer organization refused to hear the Church's teaching about murder, there was no remedy but the extreme remedy of excommunication from the Church, and the bishop said he would certainly issue a decree ex-
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communicating anyone who, after that notice, should take part in an ambush or in kidnapping, or otherwise should be guilty of murder or attempted murder, or arson.
The bishop concluded by asking the congregation to pray that God in His mercy would vouchsafe an honor- able peace which would of itself be an effective means of putting an end to crime and re-establishing order.
Those pastoral denunciations fell on deaf ears, not without consequences which the CathoUc Church in Ireland will rue for many a long day, as for the first time in history Irishmen in great numbers broke free from the authority of their ecclesiastical leaders, and denied their right to interfere in this political and national struggle by any religious call to obedience and discipline.
X
That is one side of the picture. Sinn Fein murders, ambushes, and raids, the blowing up of trains, the burning down of old mansions, the terrorism of armed and secret bands undistinguished by any sign or badge among ordinary civilians, unless they were caught red-handed.
There is another side, and in all honesty we must bring it to the light of truth. The forces of "law and order" in Ireland, above all that force known as the Black-and-Tans (because of black belts on khaki tunics), under General Tudor, committed acts exactly like those of the Sinn Fein "gunmen," not more justified. A famous case which could not be hushed up was the murder of Mr. McCurtain, Lord Mayor of Cork, by masked men who killed him at dead of night before his wife's eyes. In spite of all government denials there is little doubt in the public mind, both in Ireland and in England, that the Lord Mayor was the victim of a police
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reprisal. That was only one of many less-known cases. This guerrilla warfare became a vendetta like that of Sicilian bandits. The Sinn Feiners killed a British soldier or policeman. To revenge his death, British troops or police — mostly General Tudor's "lions" — killed the first Sinn Feiners they could lay hands on. A British patrol was ambushed near a village. Shortly afterward troops would appear in lorries shooting up the street, spraying bullets from machine guns, and at their leisure burning a few houses, the local stores, or the creamery. Men would be dragged out of their beds and shot, young boys would be battered in their back yards, and women frightened out of their wits by midnight raids.
Then the next chapter would begin. Those troops would be marked down, their officers identified by private letters captured in the mails, and there would be fresh ambushes, fresh murders, leading to more reprisals, more raids, more burnings, and the "accidental" shoot- ing of women standing at their shop doors, children playing in the village street, old men working in their fields, young men who ran away when called to halt, knowing that if they halted they would, as likely as not, be shot or bayoneted or clubbed — innocent or guilty.
I can understand the psychology of our men, as I imagine (perhaps quite falsely) that I understand the psychology of the Sinn Feiners, though I loathe their way of war. It is indeed easy to understand the men- tality of a body of young British soldiers or "Black-and- Tans," sent to a district in Ireland. In the beginning they thought it was going to be "a soft job." They had visions of a brush or two with Irish rebels who would then be good boys and see the folly of their game, up against tanks, machine guns, and well-trained troops who had been through the Great War. There would be flirtations with pretty Irish lasses, plenty of milk in the
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farmhouses, a gay time in Dublin or Cork, and friendly greetings on the "long, long way to Tipperary." . . .
What was the reality? They found themselves in a hostile population in which there were enemies who might kill them if they walked alone, by a shot in the back at the next turn of the road, between the village stores and the post office, at the corner of a country lane, at any time of the day or night. Whichever way they looked, they saw hostile eyes staring at them, eyes w4th hatred in them, eyes which had a menace of death. If they spoke to a pretty girl she did not smile, like the girls in France, but became pale with fear or red with anger. There was a sense of menace always about them. Out of a crowd in a market place there might come a group of men to shoot them down like dogs when they were buying picture postcards. Pres- ently they were not allowed to go about, except in military formation or in armored cars and lorries. They were cooped up in barracks where they could drink as much as they liked. There was nothing to do except drink and play cards, until night came and they were ordered to form search parties. They were taught their duty. General Tudor gave lectures to his officers about the short way with rebels. The officers passed the word on to the men. There was no sentiment about it. No gentle chivalry! . . .
Passion took hold of them at times. A favorite comrade had been shot in a lonely place. They had been sniped as they passed down a village street. A mess of flesh and blood was all that was left of some pals in a lorry proceeding up a country road near a lonely farm- house or wayside inn or little Irish town. Where was the enemy? Nowhere — and everywhere. How could one distinguish between innocent and guilty? They were all guilty — "Sinn Fein up to the neck," as the British soldier said. "Give them a taste of their own
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THE TRUTH ABOUT IRELAND
poison!" ... So reprisals happened. They were as logical as hell — but not a credit to the fame of England, or Scotland, not in our old code of honor, not good for pubUcation.
The only place in which they were not reported for publication was in the newspaper press of Great Britain. Mr. Lloyd George's newspaper friends did not like to hurt his feelings. Other papers did not Hke to hurt the feelings of readers more interested in our nobility of ideals or our divorce-court cases. Questions were asked in the House, and Sir Hamar Greenwood showed his quality in answering them. He first denied all accusations blankly and firmly. Reprisals? Certainly not! Never! No such thing! Sinn Fein propaganda! General Tudor's young gentlemen were noble fellows — heroes of the Great War. He could find no evidence at all — after careful inquiry — for any alleged acts of violence.
In every country in the world Sinn Fein was report- ing tragic episodes, shocking misdeeds, by men wearing British uniforms, arousing the suspicion or horror of our friends, the hatred of our enemies. But in England for a long time we heard nothing but Sinn Fein atroci- ties, in full detail. The English people were unable to obtain evidence of things done to their dishonor, and it is to their credit that without such evidence they were slow to believe that British Ministers or British officers would connive at a policy of terrorism which violated all our best traditions. Presently ugly facts did begin to thrust through the screen of silence. The represent- atives of some newspapers like the Times ^ the Daily NezvSy and the Manchester Guardian were allowed by their editors to tell the things they had seen and the evidence they had gained. Mr. Hugh Martin, of the Daily News, was especially courageous in unmasking the truth, and his reports of the burning and sacking of
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Irish villages, the flogging and battering of Irish boys, the shooting of civilians in cold blood by bodies of Black-and-Tans, and the terrori /.ation of Irish women in midnight raids by drunken or brutalized mihtary police, could not be denied, excepting by Sir Hamar Greenwood.
One of the most notorious cases, not more terrible than many others, but less easy to conceal because a resident magistrate risked his life by giving evidence, was the murder of Canon Magner and Timothy Crowley. The facts, as officially admitted, were that at i p.m. on December 17, 1920, about thirty auxiliary police left Dunmanway, in two motor lorries, with a cadet named Hart in charge, to go to Cork to attend the funeral of one of their force who was recently shot dead at Cork. About a mile on the road they met Canon Magner, the seventy-three-year-old parish priest of Dunmanway, and Timothy Crowley, aged twenty-four, a farmer's son. The cadet in charge stopped the lor- ries, walked up to Timothy Crowley, asked him for a permit, and then shot him dead with his revolver. He then turned to the priest and, according to the evi- dence of one of the police, "started talking to him." Two other cadets went toward him, but he turned round, waving his revolver. While they were returning. Cadet Hart seized the hat from the priest's head and threw it on the ground and made him kneel down. He fired and wounded him, and then fired again, killing him. He went through the priest's pockets. Mr. Brady, the resident magistrate, who was a witness of the murder, was also threatened with death, but took cover and escaped. It was evident that Cadet Hart had been drinking heavily. He was arrested, and certified as "insane" by his superior officers.
In the House of Commons, on March 3, 1921, Com- mander Kenworthy asked Sir Hamar Greenwood whether he was aware that Mr. Brady, resident magistrate,
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THE TRUTH ABOUT IRELAND
present at the murder of Crowley and Canon Magner, stated that the other cadets in the lorry made no attempt to interfere, that Mr. Brady's house was subsequently raided; whether Mr. Brady was called as a witness at the special investigation; whether these other cadets were punished in any way, and whether any of them are now employed in Ireland.
Sir Hamar Greenwood answered:
A written statement by Mr. Brady, setting out the full circumstances of the murder, was fully considered in the course of the official investigation into the con- duct of the cadets who were witnesses of the occurrence. As a result of this investigation it was decided that these cadets were in no v/ay responsible for the crime and that no action was called for in their case.
On March 19th, three months after the murder, Ministers were asked whether Mr. Brady's house had been raided by the auxiliaries, whether they had threat- ened him, and whether he had left the country on the advice of the right honorable gentleman's responsible officers.
Replying for Sir Hamar Greenwood, Mr. Henry could not deny this statement, but professed ignorance of the whereabouts of Mr. Brady, who had obtained leave of absence and was "broken down in nerves."
It was in September, 1920, that the burning and loot- ing of Balbriggan drew national attention to a policy of reprisals that had already been in force and could no longer be denied by the British government. Lord Grey, Lord Robert Cecil, Mr. Asquith, and Mr. Hender- son called for an inquiry, and that was replied to flippantly by Mr. Lloyd George, who seemed to find singular amusement in the destruction of Irish cream- eries. Mr. Winston Churchill defended the conduct of the military and police in Ireland, and said that if the armed forces of the Crown were punished for their
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conduct they would revolt. General Macready had already admitted that it was "a delicate and difficult matter" to punish men who, under his authority, did acts of indiscipline in the way of reprisals. Later, at Carnarvon, the Prime Minister of England admitted and defended reprisals in a speech of memorable bru- tality.
The Irish Catholic bishops issued a manifesto denounc- ing the reign of terror caused by reprisals as solemnly as they denounced the Sinn Fein warfare.
We know that latterly, at least, all pretense of strict discipline has been thrown to the winds and that those who profess to be the guardians of law and order have become the most ardent votaries of lawlessness and disorder; that they are running wild through the country, making night hideous by raids; that reckless and indis- criminate shootings in crowded places have made many innocent victims; that towns are sacked as in the rude warfare of earlier ages; that those who run through fear are shot at sight. . . . For all this not the men, but their masters, are chiefly to blame. It is not a question of hasty reprisals, which, however unjustifiable, might be attributed to extreme provocation, nor of quick retaliation on evildoers, nor of lynch law for miscreants — much less of self-defense of any kind whatsoever. It is an indiscriminate vengeance delib- erately wreaked on a whole countryside, without any proof of its complicity in crime, by those who ostensibly are employed by the British government to protect the lives and property of the people and restore order in Ireland.
While this was happening, the Home Rule Act was annulled and a new and utterly inadequate measure was passed through Parliament, disregarding the advice, warning, and pleading of English Liberals and Irish Moderates. It divided Ireland into two nations, one with a population of three and a quarter millions, the other of one and a quarter, and there could not be a single legislature unless the majority agreed to give half the representation to the minority. That alone secured its condemnation by every Irishman in the
}2S
THE TRUTH ABOUT IRELAND
South and West; neither Protestant Ulster nor Cath- olic Ireland believed in it as a promise of peace.
XI
All through the year of 1920 and half the year of 1921 the reign of terror continued in Ireland, with increasing ruthlessness on both sides, and with a complete aban- donment of statesmanship by the British government in favor of what was called by the Lord Chancellor of England, in sinister words, *'The Reconquest of Ire- land"! Yet it was denied that we were at war with the Irish people, until June, 1921, when the word "war" was used by Ministers in the House of Commons, not carelessly, I think, but as a preparation of the public mind for an intensive military campaign in Catholic Ireland after the inauguration of the Ulster Parliament. Because we were not officially at war with the Irish peo- ple, it was permissible to shoot or hang our captives as rebels and murderers, and not as prisoners of war.
On November i, 1920, a youth named Kevin Barry, captured in action, was hanged in DubHn. He met his death with a cheerful and heroic courage, while outside the prison vast crowds of Irish people wept and prayed for him.
On February i, 1921, Cornelius Murphy was shot at Cork for being in possession of a revolver and ammu- nition. On February 26th five Irish lads were shot at Cork for "levying war." On February 28th another man was shot for "being improperly in possession of a revolver and ammunition." On March 14th six men were hanged in batches at Dublin — two on a charge of murder, and four on a charge of "high treason and levying war." Ten others followed to their death by shooting or hanging in Dublin and Cork "for being improperly in possession of arms and ammunition," 22 329
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a charge which would condemn the entire youth of Ireland to death, in Ulster (where no arrest was ever made on such a charge) as well as in the Catholic provinces.
There was no cessation of hostilities or of reprisals as the day came nearer when the Home Rule Act of 1920 was to be put into operation. It was known in advance that no single Sinn Fein member would attend the Southern Parliament, but the British were determined to set up the Ulster Parliament as a preliminary to "re- conquest" in the other parts.
On June ist, only a few weeks before that new era in Irish history, Sir Hamar Greenwood made a speech on reprisals in Ireland, in which he made the following statement:
I have said at this bar time and again, in reference to reprisals, that no one tried more strenuously than I have to put them down, and I think I have succeeded in doing so.
Those words of his will become a mockery in history, for during his administration, which began on April 3, 1920, the ''unofficial" and "official" reprisals increased at a monstrous rate. Whereas in April there were eleven buildings in Ireland wholly or partially destroyed, in May there were thirty-eight, in June twenty-four, in July two hundred and forty-four, in August two hundred and two, and in the first five months of 192 1 over one thousand.
Sir Hamar Greenwood also said that in the non- martial law area, which comprises the great part of Ireland, there never have been official reprisals.
"Reprisals are rare. Unofficial reprisals are now rare indeed, so rare that we may say they never occur in Ireland." That statement, soothing to our British conscience, was immediately challenged by the Irish people, who issued the following rejoinder:
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THE TRUTH ABOUT IRELAND
Unofficial Reprisals in the Non-martial Law Area
The havoc in Headford, Co. Galway, on January i8th, 1920, and subsequent days when 19 residences, farmhouses and shops were destroyed, was only one of many "unofficial" reprisals in that month. The wrecking of Donegal town in which 100 shops and residences were destroyed or damaged occurred in February. The town of Clifden, Connemara, was sacked on March i6th. Sixteen buildings were wholly or partially destroyed in the town of West- port, Co. Mayo, on March 26th. During the month of April many residences, shops and other premises were destroyed in fifteen towns not in the Martial Law area. And in one week ending May 21st, ten farmhouses, seven private residences, four shops, two hotels, a granary and a mill were destroyed in the Non-martial Law counties of Galway, Mayo and Offaly (King's Co.).
Unofficial Reprisals in the Martial Law Area
So much for some of the "Unofficial" reprisals, "so rare that we may say that they never occur." There are others. In the eight counties under Martial Law the number of buildings and property of all kinds destroyed "unofficially" by British forces was more than twice the number of the buildings and property officially de- stroyed. The following is a comparison covering the period January 1st, 1921, to May 28th, 1921, between the premises and property destroyed or damaged by order of the British Military Governors in the Martial Law area and those destroyed or damaged by roving bands of Constables and Troops. The phrase "Premises and Property" covers crops, furniture and personal effects, as well as shops, farmhouses, residences, public halls, factories and works:
Year 1921 |
Premises and property destroyed or damaged under official order |
Premises and property destroyed or damaged unofficially |
January |
22 7 9 36 88 |
52 |
February |
76 |
|
March |
19 |
|
April |
35 |
|
May (ist-28th) |
172 |
|
162 |
354 |
The wholesale destruction of the houses of non- combatant Irish men and women, "officially" and
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"unofficially" — and I can see no distinction in the evil of either method of collective punishment — failed to terrorize them into a surrender of their claim to self- government, though their daily life was haunted by fear and their nights were terror-stricken. Sir Hamar Greenwood, faced with his failure, sought refuge in the pretense that the destruction of property was not considerable. In the words of an Irish leader, "over three thousand ruined buildings in Ireland gave him the lie."
XII
I have set down what I believe to be the true facts about Ireland, impartially, without special pleading for one side or the other. For that is how history will be written and we shall not be able to dodge its verdict. To my mind now looking at the whole tragedy as it is close to us, I think the verdict will be against England, or at least against British statesmen who betrayed the honor and good name of England, and the ideals for which so many of our men died in the European war. By their lack of generosity in early days when it would have been so easy to be generous, and so fruitful of friendship, by their utter disregard of the Irish temper- ament and traditions, by their malign favoritism toward the truculance of Ulster — the first to take up arms and proclaim rebelUon — by their poHtical intrigues and breaking of pledges, by their adoption of Prussian methods after a war for Hberty, by their abandonment of government in Ireland to military and police officials with narrow brains and soulless instincts, by conniving at the indiscIpHne and private vengeance of armed police, among whom were men of evil character tempted by opportunity, and provoked into passion, by ridiculing all efforts at peace and reconcihation by thousands of liberal minds in England, and faUing back upon old
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THE TRUTH ABOUT IRELAND
traditions of tyranny and coercion, by hiding the happen- ings in Ireland from pubHc knowledge in England, and by proceeding stubbornly upon a line of policy which was bound to fail according to all historical experience, and was essentially evil in its principles, they raised up enemies against us in all parts of the world, and so blackened^^our reputation that it will need the saving grace of time to wash it clean again in years of nobler leadership.
Yet, having written these words, which are not pleasant to write, it is impossible to acquit the Irish people of evil acts and obstinate stupidities which would make one despair of them if they were not re- deemed by fine qualities of spirit and character. That guerrilla warfare of theirs was a dirty business, not justified by any claim to liberty. It was a hark back to the cave men, not a lead forward to a new era of civili- zation and human progress. There are limits even to the claims of hberty, for otherwise all governments would go down in a welter of bloody anarchy, because a majority or minority accused them of "tyranny." The Irish people had a right to demand self-government within the Empire, by all methods consistent with a decent code of honor. Personally I cannot think that the Easter rebellion belonged to that code. Because, whatever the measure of our misdeeds in the past and our tactlessness or stupidity in the beginning of the war, Ireland was not suffering under any grinding tyranny which justified such action. Her people were prosper- ous. They were free in all but separate government. At that time they were not arrested or imprisoned or coerced for political reasons. They had freedom in their faith. The English people had not been hostile to them. There were ties of friendship and of love between many English and many Irish. Their writers, players, painters, had been accepted with enthusiastic
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homage in England. Their claim for Home Rule was supported by all liberal Englishmen. In spite of all that happened afterward, their cold-blooded killing of policemen and soldiers went outside the bounds of legitimate warfare, even if we grant their right to resist coercive measures by force of arms.
Their way of argument, as well as their way of warfare, was cunningly unfair. They adopted, to the world, the pose of an innocent people suffering Christian mar- tyrdom under a bloody and ruthless terror, not acknowl- edging that at least in bloodshed they took the lead, and that men who are attacked have the right to retali- ate according to all human law. They seemed to beheve, at least for propaganda purposes, that British troops should allow themselves to be ambushed with impunity, that officers or men should allow themselves to be murdered in the presence of their wives, without a gesture of self-defense, that very grim and terrible deeds might be done in the name of Irish liberty, and become ennobled. In the name of Russian liberty the Bolsheviki massacred the Tsar and his daughters with dreadful cruelty, killed thousands of political prisoners, committed acts of great atrocity which are not made white as snow because there was tyranny under Tsardom or cruelty under counter-revolutionary generals of the old regime.
Nor did Sinn Fein reveal any knowledge of English psychology, by imagining that our people would be frightened or fought into surrender. Every ambush they made on British troops was a setback in their claim to self-government, for it choked sympathy and hardened hearts. Every ''gunman" they sent to England to burn signal boxes or shipyards was an enemy of people striving for peace with Ireland. The English people were shamed and sickened and startled, not by the ambushes of the I. R. A., but by the policy of
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THE TRUTH ABOUT IRELAND
reprisals. Their desire for a peaceful settlement was due not to fear, but to that generosity of soul which the Irish denied. When Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, died in Brixton prison by hunger striking, there were sarcastic comments, it is true, in the House of Commons, but in the streets of London, when his body passed with a guard of honor in Sinn Fein uniform, the people doffed their hats and were pitiful. And in June of 1 92 1, before the King's visit to Belfast, when the Irish ambushes were in full swing and English soldiers were being killed, there were Sinn Fein proces- sions in London, with the Irish carrying the Republican flags, playing their pipes, singing old rebel songs, and shouting, " Up, Sinn Fein ! " The London crowds watched them without hostility, without a scuffle, even with smiling sympathy, for there is something in us which might seem Hke weakness but for our record in the Great War, and it is not weakness, but a generous spirit toward liberty and those who struggle for it, even though our own government is for a while opposed to it in spirit and in act. I doubt whether any other people in the world would have been so magnanimous, so "sporting." I doubt whether the Irish themselves will learn a lesson from it, for in spite of many beautiful qualities of Irish character, they are, as a Celtic people, unforgiving, ungenerous to those they call their enemy, likely to receive a gift as an insult, to answer fair play by ill will, and good humor with ill temper, nourishing grievances for their own sake.
So it was, to cite a trivial instance, when I went to the United States. I was scrupulously fair to the Irish, and though I denounced the acts of Sinn Fein, as I have denounced them here, I also denounced the acts of "reprisals" in stronger terms still. I gave the facts of Irish history as I have given them here, fairly, without bias, except, perhaps, leaning a little to the
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Irish side — because I am English — with strict regard to historical truth, as far as I know it. But the Irish- Americans shouted me down in New York, Chicago, and other cities, and they shouted louder when I spoke fair things about the Irish than when I admitted the injustice of England in the past. They did not want fair play. They wanted passionate unreason, excuse for violence, more food for hatred; and it seemed to me that their love of Ireland was less than their hatred of England.
All that is in the bad old past. As I write there is new hope for Ireland, as for England and the world.
On the eve of the King's visit to Belfast to open the Ulster Parliament on June 22d there had been Cabinet dissensions which still belong to secret political history. Unionists and Coalition Liberals were violently divided as to the future policy in Ireland, some demanding a new offer of concihation, some urging a stronger measure of military coercion in the South and West. The Prime Minister was, it seems, for coercion, and that night in the House of Lords, Lord Birkenhead, who, at the Cabinet, was for concihation, made a truculent speech which seemed to close all doors of hope. In reply to some Irish Unionist peers who pressed for the enlarge- ment of the financial powers given to the two Parlia- ments of Ireland under the new Act, he said that such expedients were useless, that there was war in Ireland, and that the Irish must be crushed by the dispatch of large bodies of fresh troops.
At the same time the Sinn Fein leaders intercepted a letter dated June i6th, from Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff, to Sir James Craig, Premier of the Northern Parliament, regretting that he could not attend the opening of that Parliament, as he was engaged in dispatching large reinforcements to Ireland for the purpose of finally crushing the Sinn Fein rebellion.
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THE TRUTH ABOUT IRELAND
In such black thunderclouds of political strife the King and Queen set out for Belfast, risking their lives gladly for the sake of peace in Ireland, though their Ministers were afraid to risk their jobs. Belfast gave them a great welcome, and the heart of Ireland itself was touched by this courageous act and by the King's speech, in which he declared his love for the Irish people and prayed that they might work together in the cause of peace. The text for his speech was "Let us forget and forgive."
The effect of this call from the King was instanta- neous throughout the world, and in every country there was an appeal for a new policy of conciliation, and a stern criticism of the contrast between the King's magnanimity and the harshness of that speech by the Lord Chancellor, "the keeper of his conscience."
On that night, June 22d, De Valera, "President of the Irish Republic," was arrested in a house at Black- rock, Dublin, but released next day, when his identity was discovered; and on June 26th a letter was dispatched to him by the Prime Minister of England:
June 24th, 1921. Sir:
The British Government are deeply anxious that so far as they can assure it, the King's appeal for reconciliation in Ireland shall not have been made in vain. Rather than allow yet another oppor- tunity of settlement in Ireland to be cast aside, they feel it incum- bent upon them to make a final appeal in the spirit of the King's words for a conference between themselves and the representatives of Southern and Northern Ireland.
I write, therefore, to convey the following invitation to you as the chosen leader of the great majority in Southern Ireland, and to Sir James Craig, the Premier of Northern Ireland.
(i) That you should attend a conference here in London, in company with Sir James Craig, to explore to the utmost the pos- sibility of a settlement.
(2) That you should bring with you for the purpose any col- leagues whom you may select. The Government will of course
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give a safe conduct to all who may be chosen to participate in the conference.
We make this invitation with a fervent desire to end the ruin- ous conflict which has for centuries divided Ireland and embittered the relations of the peoples of these two islands, who ought to live in neighbourly harmony with each other, and whose co-operation would mean so much not only to the Empire but to humanity.
We wish that no endeavour should be lacking on our part to realize the King's prayer, and we ask you to meet us, as we will meet you, in the spirit of conciliation for which His Majesty appealed. I am, sir, your obedient servant,
(Signed) D. Lloyd George.
This invitation to a conference was accepted by Sir James Craig, to whom it was sent in the same terms, and De Valera replied guardedly that, while earnestly de- siring to help in bringing about a lasting peace between the people of these two islands, he saw no means by which it could be reached if the Prime Minister denied Ireland's essential unity and set aside the principle of national self-determination. Before replying more fully he desired to consult with representatives of the "political minority" in Ireland.
Those consultations with the Irish Unionists followed by conferences with the British government are now taking place, and it is the prayer of the English and Irish peoples that out of the darkness of long and tragic strife there may come the light of a lasting peace between two peoples whose union in liberty and in affection will be a promise of hope for the youth that is coming to make the new world.
The tragedy of Ireland through a thousand years of history may be replaced by the happiness of her future, free among the federation of British peoples, and in the society of all the nations.
IX
THE UNITED STATES AND WORLD PEACE
IN the beginning of 192 1 I had an opportunity of studying at first hand, and with extraordinary opportu- nities of knowledge, one of the most important questions of the world, upon which the future of civilization, and especially of our European life, largely depends. It was the question of what the United States of America would do under the new leadership which had come to her with President Harding, and what part her people would play in international policy. That question is not yet answered in full, because the future holds its own secrets, but as far as we know it the reply is hopeful.
For whether we like it or not — and there are some who don't — America has largely in her hands the great deci- sion as to whether white civilization, as we know it, and as most of us like it, will progress in an orderly way to a higher plane of development in peaceful industry, with a little more comfort for plain folk, with a good margin for the little things of art and beauty which make up the joy of life, greater security against the menace of war, and a relief from the deadening weight of armaments, or whether it will fall, as some European nations have already fallen, into decay and disease, poverty-stricken, underfed, staggering and fainting through a jungle darkness.
If America withdrew into herself, holding herself aloof
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from the world problems, demanding full payment of her loans, refusing extension of credit, and hardening into antagonism against the Allies in the war, it would be impossible, I am sure, to heal the wounds of Europe. We cannot do without American grains, fats, raw mate- rial, and manufactured goods. Who thinks so is a fool, without any knowledge of world conditions. More than that, Europe needs the moral support and judgment and friendliness of the United States. The League of Na- tions is at present, in spite of the good efforts of many good men, utterly impotent to deal with the vital prob- lems of world peace and health or to enforce its decisions upon conflicting nationalities, interests, and rivalries, so long as the most powerful nation in the world to-day stays outside the family council. That is as clear as sunlight to a thinking mind. On the other hand, the entry of the United States into a league of peoples, or at least a world council called to consider the way of recovery and a rebuilding of international relations, will make real what is now unreal and give immense strength to any common agreement. America can support her will by strong argument, because we are all so deeply in her debt, and in the future will need desperately her surplus of food supplies on easy terms. Do not let us forget that the United States of America, being made up of human beings, might be more than aloof and disinterested in the welfare of Europe, which is bad enough, because it checks the chance of quick recovery. Her people might become unfriendly, hos- tile— swept by passion if we played the fool with them, beyond patience, by a series of blunders, the stupidities of statesmen, the tit-for-tat game in the Press. She can take a clear choice between the part of destroyer and the part of builder. In a little while she could raise the greatest army in the world, in a little while she will have the biggest navy. She could destroy the
340
THE UNITED STATES AND WORLD PEACE
last chance of civilized progress in Europe, and, hav- ing done that, would be herself destroyed. But that choice is hers, if she likes to take it, and the power is hers.
She can choose, as I beheve she will, the part of builder. It is her national quality. Her people are builders and not destroyers. They have already built a great New World, splendid and strong, in spite of evil elements. Under her new leadership she could help to build another New World, better than her own, ours as well as hers, that New World to which we all look forward with the coming of youth. Will she do that.'* In what way will she help in reconstruction and the new building on the ruins that were made?
I found some clue to the answer after a visit of eight weeks in the United States, when every day was filled with the experience of meeting large numbers of men and women eager to get some trustworthy evidence about the actual conditions of Europe, anxious for some guiding principles upon which their country may fix its faith in dealing with those present problems, and keen to "put me wise" about the stresses and strains of American Hfe in this crisis of the world's history.
During those two crowded months I visited about thirty cities, going no farther west than Chicago and Milwaukee. Most of them are cities about equal in size to our nothern industrial towns, like Bolton and Wigan, but with more comfort for the individual citizen, more opportunities for social recreation, more luxury for the rich and less squalor for the poor, than in the same type of town in England. Here, in these places, I found the real America, more than in New York, which is so vast, so complicated with alien populations, and so cosmopolitan in its interests, that is has no single and definite character. But in places like Worcester, Troy,
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Scranton, Utica, Wilkes-Barre, and Detroit one finds the typical qualities of American character and Ufe. I met the people of good standing — men who had built up their fortunes in the industry of these cities and have a local pride and patriotism, the leading manufacturers and business men, lawyers, doctors, and school-teachers, newspaper proprietors and editors, and the women, their wives and daughters — who organize, ceaselessly and strenuously, the innumerable charities of the town, women's clubs (far more important than our own in size and activity), literary and musical societies, Red Cross and relief works, and all kinds of "leagues" and labors of social service.
These people are ''provincial" in the sense that their experience of life is mostly Umited to their own cities, though many of them go fairly often to New York, spend their summer hoHdays on the coast of Maine, or California, and look back to a European trip or two with abiding memories. The women, especially, are great readers of contemporary literature, and do not limit themselves to works of fiction, but concentrate more on biographies, memoirs, and books of an ethical kind which contain some "spiritual upUft." Everywhere they were reading Mrs. Asquith's autobiography, startled, more than a little scandalized, but highly amused by its indiscretions. H. G. Wells's Outline of History was a first favorite at the moment, and they found it an easy guide to the enormous adventure of the ages. Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, was the "best seller" among their own novels, and with photographic realism pic- tures the narrow interests, the local scandals, the small world, of the ordinary American citizen in the Middle West towns, utterly out of touch with any other style of civilization, knowing nothing and caring noth- ing about problems of the human family remote from his own petty and selfish interests.
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I did not meet the Main Street type. The people I met — and I met hundreds of them in those brief eight weeks — were of better intellectual standing and wider human sympathy, and I look back upon a long portrait gallery of keen, energetic, thoughtful men, and of kind, frank, generous-mannered women, who were thinking hard and talking hard about what America would do now that Harding had succeeded Wilson, and now that the nation had to make up its mind about its future policy in the world. There are milHons of such people in the United States, and, though I only met hun- dreds of them, I believe that I was able to get from them the general convictions and tendency of thought of their class and kind.
Those I met were nearly all Republicans. They had voted against Wilson and the Wilsonian policy, partly, I imagine, because they believed that Wilson had flouted the Constitution and the instincts of his people by playing "a. lone hand" in Europe, without getting the advice or consent of the Senate and Congress, partly because they resented the length of time he had kept them out of the war, but largely because they believed he had failed in his handling of the European situation, to the hurt of American prestige and interests. The immense defeat of the Democrats, and of Mr. Wilson, was not entirely a proof of desire to wash their hands of international obligations. A deep sense of resentment against Mr. Wilson himself was reinforced by irrita- tions with American administration during the war, which had hurt individual susceptibilities. As a friend of mine put it briefly, the question asked in the presi- dential election was, "Are you sick and tired of the present administration.?" and the answer was, "By God! we are!" The Irish-Americans flung their weight against Wilson because of non-interference in the matter
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of Ireland; the German-Americans, because of his share in the peace treaty.
II
For some time after the war enthusiasm had died out there was the same lethargy and exhaustion of emotion in the United States as had overtaken other countries. No new impulse had replaced that emotion, no new national ideal. The spirit of the American people had drawn back into itself. They were dis- gusted with European rivalries and greeds. They said, in effect: *'Let us leave those Europeans to stew in their own juice. We can't do anything with them, anyhow. Let us get an administration which will pull us out of that mess, collect the debts owing to us, keep us free from entanglements and obligations with alien peoples, and concentrate upon an exclusively American policy according to our old historic traditions." Not an unreasonable policy, if it were possible.
When I arrived in the United States two things were happening which were already beginning to modify, among the educated classes, this philosophy of national isolation and independence. One was the financial situation leading to heavy losses in almost every branch of commerce, and a rising tide of unemployment. The other was the coming into office of President Harding and his colleagues and the anxious questioning of all serious citizens as to whether, after all, the new President, and the men whom he was selecting as his counselors, would be equal to the increasing difficulties of the gov- erning task. Even during my short stay I was able to observe a change of view. . . .
Financially the United States was going through a bad time — worse than most of us in England realized. Over and over again in the smoking cars of long-distance
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trains I overheard business men deploring the heavy losses they had suffered. Prices were toppling down everywhere. Buyers of any kind of stocks — copper, i leather, grain, motor cars, railroads — had been badly hit, in many cases ruined. Exporters were choked up with undelivered goods which they had bought at a high price and could not sell at cutthroat rates. Manufacturers had overproduced, and the cost of production was so great, owing to the price of labor, that they could not hope to compete in foreign markets. There were five and a half million unemployed men in the United States. Real distress was creeping up in cities like Detroit, from where there was an exodus of factory hands back to the land. The situation improved a little, but not much.
Now the American mind was searching around for the reasons behind this sudden *'slump," and was inclined to attribute it to local conditions, the aggres- sive wage demands of labor, and temporary causes. At first the American "plain man" resented the sug- gestion that the simple cause of this stagnation in trade was, and is, the collapse of the world markets, the social rot that has overtaken Russia, Poland, Austria, the heavy burden of taxation that destroys the purchasing power of France, Italy, Germany, and England. At first I found people challenge me when in my lectures I pointed out the economic impossibility of the United States existing with anything like the measure of her present prosperity without entering into a close trade relationship with the European nations. They were silent for a little while when I stated that America was almost as dependent upon Europe, as Europe upon America. They were inclined to shrink back from the logical result of my argument, when I urged them, for their own sakes, as well as for white civilization itself, to come into an association of nations — never mind 23 345
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whether it is called the League of Nations — to extend long credits to the poorer countries, to lead the way to gradual disarmament, and to aid the recovery of the world by a free exchange of raw material and manufac- tured goods. But I perceived before the end of my stay a general recognition of these facts, not due to my poor speeches, but to pressure of events.
The American mind, at least among the thinking, reading classes, was already abandoning the idea of ''isolation." The well-to-do business man in places like Worcester and Troy had already reached the posi- tion of the high financier in New York, that America must come into the settlement of the world crisis, and must ease the burden of the stricken peoples even to the extent, if need be, of holding over the payment of their debts. The women had come to that conclusion before the men.
Then, after the sound and fury of the presidential election and all the bitter, personal vendetta against Mr. Wilson, there was a sense of anxiety about Presi- dent Harding and his administration. People were asking themselves whether Mr. Harding would rise to anything like the leadership they desired, whether he was able to call to the heart and soul of the people, giving them some enthusiasm and ideal higher than "big business." It may seem sentimental and untrue, but I am certain that I am right when I say that great numbers of American people, after temporary reaction, are craving for some impulse higher than m.ere material satisfaction. They wish that to be secured first — and they see no security in the present state of affairs — but beyond and above that, they yearn for a touch of nobility in national policy — for some high leadership which would guide them in a spiritual way. They did not expect that from Mr. Harding, though they found him honest and a man of good will, but rather "Main
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Street" in his mind. They comforted themselves with the hope that there would be good teamwork, and some of them clung to the name of Hoover as the shining star to which they yoked their faith. But here again they hesitated. Would Hoover — the man who organ- ized the food supplies of starving Europe, the food dictator of the world (for that he was) — play up to the party machine, compromise with men hke Daugherty, the new Attorney-General, and be tactful with the wirepullers of the machine which breaks any man who tries to put a spoke in its wheels or give them a different kind of spin? They were afraid that Hoover might get out, or be put out, before he had gone very far.
Secretary Hughes was the greatest hope of the Repub- lican party in the field of foreign affairs, though some of them thought he had too much of the ''lawyer mind." I have met Mr. Hughes several times, and have had long talks with him — not for pubHcation. He has a penetrating mind, clear, cool judgment, complete in- tellectual honesty, and I found in him (what others are surprised to find) a humane outlook upon fife, a sensi- tive sympathy with the sufferings of stricken people. Yet people doubted whether he would obtain the allegiance of the Senate in altruistic ideals.
So many told me, as to a friend, candidly, and I saw in this anxiety the wistfulness of people who have been disappointed with the official actions of their country, felt just a little conscience-stricken because of a failure to come up to their own ideals, and desired earnestly to fulfill their duty to the world, whatever that might be. They wanted to get on to the plane of idealism again, if only it could be squared with reality and common sense. They would even raise an exten- uating word for Wilson — though they hated him, so many of them. "He did put up certain broad ideals to which we must feel our way forward. Perhaps his
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ideals will be remembered when his personal faults have been forgotten." Now and then in big audiences I heard a section fire of applause, or isolated handclaps, when I mentioned Wilson's name. They pitied him, anyhow, for the immensity of his personal tragedy.
The League of Nations still had its adherents, and was gaining more every day. I tested that in the same way, and it never failed to get a quick response, espe- cially from the women. But they would prefer to come in to an assembly of nations called by some other name. It is a matter of pride with the Senate especially, which killed the League in order to kill Wilson. They cannot accept the name of Wilson's instrument. But they must "come in." They felt that in every place where I touched the pulse of public opinion. As one great American leader put it to me — his influence extends to a million people — "it isn't a question of 'coming in.* It's much rather a question of 'getting out.' We are in already. We were in when we sent over our first transports of troops. We are in up to the neck, be- cause we have debts to the value of five billion dollars. We are in because our trade depends upon the markets of the world. The question is, how are we to get out of this world crisis with any business and security and honor." But that amounts to the same thing. The very laws of economics will force America to come into a council of nations, and by the power of her natural resources, her immense reserves of industry, her means of granting credits, it is certain that she will take the lead in the reconstruction of Europe, which means as much to her as to ourselves.
Ill
In nearly every section of American society which I touched — I was unable to come in contact with the
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factory hands and working classes, which was a great omission — I found a genuine friendship, often an emo- tional sentiment, for England and Great Britain. This was voiced by the President, with whom I had a personal interview, lasting only for a minute or two, in the White House, a few days after his inauguration. A number of visitors were wanting to see him, trooping in through the open gates (shut during Wilson's term of office) and sitting about the antechambers. They were Senators and Congressmen from the West and Middle West, an old general of Civil War days, a hand- some young colonel of the air-craft corps, several ladies of social standing, a little girl sitting with folded hands, looking wide-eyed through big spectacles with tortoise- shell rims, a group of newspaper men smoking cigarettes incessantly. The President's secretary chatted with the visitors as he sat at a desk on which was a great bouquet of roses. This social atmosphere of the White House was simple, informal — a striking contrast, I was told, to the austerity of Mr. Wilson's time. The new President was giving "the glad hand" to everybody, keeping open house, breaking the autocratic spell of his predecessor.
One of his secretaries beckoned me, and I went in and found Mr. Harding receiving his visitors — a tall, heavily built man with a powerful face, deeply lined, puffed under his eyes, square of jaw, with a good-humored mouth and kind eyes, and silver hair. He gripped my hand and asked a few questions, and was a little startled, I fancy, when I asked him suddenly for a message to the English people. He laughed, and could not think of one on the spur of the moment, alluding to newspaper controversy, and bitter things said on both sides, in disjointed sentences. Then he spoke earnestly, with real emotion, I thought, while he still held my hand in a strong grasp.
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"Friendship between the United States and Great Britain," he said, "is essential for the welfare of the world. Americans of the old stock look upon England as the mother country, and we regard that always as a cherished inheritance, not to be forgotten,"
What the President said was told me in other words by hundreds of other people — I could say thousands, without exaggeration — and with absolute sincerity. Senator Knox was one of those who spoke to me about the misunderstanding of the American attitude to England, the mistaken idea that there was an underlying hostility likely to lead one day to war.
"The mere idea of it is impossible and ridiculous," he said, and he mentioned the wave of indignation and incredulity which had passed through America like an electric shock when such words as "drifting toward war" were used (or reported as having been used, which is quite a different thing) by one of our representatives. He admitted that there were historical prejudices, fostered in the school book, which created a bad impres- sion in the minds of American children, hard to eradi- cate. But that impression of England's bad action in the past was counterbalanced by other influences of literature and tradition, and in any case the universities were helping to form a fairer point of view about the War of Independence and other periods. He once astonished a fellow Senator during a visit to Windsor Castle by laying a bunch of flowers reverently before a statue of George HI.
"What on earth are you doing that for?" asked his friend.
"I am paying a tribute to the Father of the American Republic," said Senator Knox. "If that fellow hadn't been such an old blockhead w^e might still have been ^ under British rule." H
The only trace of hostility I found was among the ^g
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extreme section of the Irish-Americans, and certainly that was fierce, unreasoning, and dangerous. At my first lecture in the Carnegie Hall, New York, I had only been going five minutes or so before the first interruption began, in a rich Irish brogue, from a top gallery. I heard the words, "Why don't you take the marbles out of your mouth?" And thinking this was merely a friendly criticism of my hopelessly "English" accent, I squared my chest and spoke louder. But that was only the beginning of trouble, deliberate and hostile, to what- ever I said, and I was speaking about Austria, and not Ireland. Amidst a hubbub of sound and fury I heard the words, "English poltroon," "Cutthroat English," and, "What about Egypt .f*" I tried to tell a story about a young Austrian doctor. Several times I began a description of his suflPering. Then I had to abandon him to his fate. Standing alone on a big platform, I heard waves of tumultuous noise, and could see in the galleries a series of running fights, separate skirmishes, the pounce of small groups on isolated individuals. I felt curiously far off and aloof, intensely interested in that drama which seemed to have nothing to do with me. Down in the stalls a fat man wedged in his chair was bellowing incoherently until silenced by his neigh- bors. A voice below the platform called up to me, "We have sent for the police." Presently I went on talking, with spasmodic interruptions from the galleries. I was able to get through my address, and I found that any simple words of mine about England and Anglo- American friendship aroused wonderful applause. The great audience desired to express to me their utter dis- gust with the Irish demonstration, their friendly feeling to an Englishman on the platform, to England for whom he spoke with fairness to Ireland. The hostile element was in a minority of fifty to three thousand or more.
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After that I had other experiences, as at Chicago, on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, when it was forty-five min- utes before I could finish my first sentence. Immediately I stepped on the platform, the din began, deafening and menacing. Fifty young Irishmen shouted orations at me from the galleries. Two hundred or more hooted and yelled. In the top gallery a gang of girls catcalled in shrill unison. The men were angry and violent. They desired, it seemed, to tear me limb from Hmb, and fought desperately with the police when at last they were ejected. For the first time in my life I was com- pelled to accept a bodyguard of detectives. They ex- plained politely that it was not so much for my sake as for theirs that they wished to sit by my side in a taxicab, to walk with me on the way to the hotel. " It's our reputation w^e want to safeguard," they said. **If anything happens to you we should get the kick."
Even on my last night in New York, when I received the greatest honor of my Hfe at a banquet to me by a thousand people under the auspices of the Allied Loyalty League, there came to my table all through the dinner hostile messages from the world outside. I opened one letter and it said, "You are a dirty English rat." I opened another, and it said, "You are the hell-hound of a dirty race." Outside the Biltmore Hotel small boys, paid a few cents for their job, distributed leaflets accus- ing me of horrible lies.
"This man has insulted every loyal American," said one of the leaflets. "All who associate with him, dine with him., or honor him in any way are disloyal Amer- icans. This man should be deported at once."
The violence of the Irish-American sentiment, the amazing lack of reason in their methods, may be judged by this series of attacks upon me, for in Ireland I was known as a good friend, and in England I had not hesi-
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tated to criticize and condemn the British government for what I considered the stupidity and brutahty of many of their actions in Ireland. So in America I spoke honestly and fairly, setting out the plain truth, allowing all that could be allowed to the Irish point of view, pleading for reconciliation and peace which should give liberty to Ireland under Dominion Home Rule, if they were wilUng to abandon their guerrilla warfare. But nothing that I said made the sUghtest difference. They howled at me as an Englishman, and in their pamphlets and leaflets made no secret of their desire to force a war between America and Great Britain.
It had that amount of importance that it was linked up with other sinister movements — Bolshevik and Pan- German — and with the persistent, venomous anti- British propaganda of Hearst's newspapers, with their immense popular circulation among the masses of working people. It was important enough in its in- fluence upon unthinking crowds, unable to discriminate between falsity and truth, and quickly moved to passion, to be a warning to the British government to settle the Irish question rapidly, sensibly, without temper or passion, with a return to sanity and statesmanship. For so long as it remained unsettled there would be this cancerous poison, spreading ill will in the minds of a section of the American people. Apart from that it had no influence upon the American mind as a whole. On the contrary, the unjust, ridiculous, and ill-mannered methods of the Sinn Fein minority among the Irish- Americans disgusted all decent citizens and produced a warm reaction in favor of England. An Irish-German- American demonstration, Deutschland-go-Bragh, as it was called by a wit, in Madison Square Garden, where disloyal speeches were made, was followed by the mon- ster counter-demonstration at which General Pershing and other speakers proclaimed the loyalty of America to
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those with whom they had fought in the war, amidst scenes of enormous enthusiasm.
In a personal but wonderful way I gained by the same reaction against violence and lack of fair play. The Sinn Fein disturbers of my meetings were never more than 5 per cent. The other 95, angered by what hap- pened, gave me tremendous ovations for England's sake, so that I was uphfted on waves of enthusiastic applause.
IV
America has many difficult problems to face, some fears haunt the minds of the people, inherited, tradi- tional habits of mind drag her back from a free vision of new necessities, and her political leaders are not, on the whole, representative of the best instincts of her wisest folk. Her difficulties with labor are intensifying, for men who enjoyed high wages and became used to a higher standard of life do not lightly drop back to a lower scale, especially when there is such a wide gulf between their highest wage and the great luxury of the very rich. Among her ahen populations not quickly assimilated in the melting pot there are dangerous currents of thought. But the risk is being minimized by the falling prices, and wise concessions by employers of labor in many great industries.
One fear she has, especially on the Pacific coast, is that of Japan, and when I was last in the United States there was uneasy talk about an ''inevitable war" among people who, I think, exaggerated the menace. It was that thought which gave aid to the demand for a big navy, at a time when the world was ready for a call to disarmament. In America, as in all countries anxious of great power, there is an imperialist group eager to acquire new territory as a proof of power, and now and then one hears loose talk about "clearing up
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Mexico," But that is quite opposed to the instincts of the people as a whole, who hate the thought of such adventures.
The poHtical machine in America, controlled in Washington, is antiquated in its views of life, I fancy, and a heavy drag upon the progress of liberal and gen- erous ideals. At a time when the whole world was in need of free trade, including America herself, it was proposed to put up a tariff against Canadian wheat and other tariffs against foreign goods — a muddle-headed arithmetic which would hurt American commerce and limit its activities. At a time when, as I am certain, the great body of American people who read and think and feel are eager to help in the reconstruction of Europe and the recovery of the world's markets by carrying on the work they began when they sent their boys to France, or went themselves, old Senators from the West, Congressmen from "Main Street," are harking back to the policy of isolation, calling themselves " lOO per cent American" and believing that that means the narrow selfishness of the Chinese wall. They will, it is certain, try to pull at the coat-tails of President Harding whenever he wishes to take a step forward into a larger relationship with the human family. They will shout to him, "We put you in to keep us out!" and the ignorant masses, no more ignorant than ours, but more remote from Europe, will give their backing to those old and unwise men.
As an Englishman I ought not, perhaps, to write these things, yet the American people will forgive me, for I have been frank with them on all things, and candid in any criticism of English faults. I believe, too, unlike some of their own pessimists, among whom is the most brilliant brain they have in the field of journalism — my friend Frank Simonds — that liberal ideas will prevail over narrow instincts, and that the
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generous impulses of the intellectuals will move the sluggish, inert mass of unthinking folk.
Steadily through this year of 1921 the Harding administration gave unmistakable signs of abandoning the policy of "isolation" and of coming in to the coun- cils of the nations with good will and helpfulness, as I had ventured to prophesy after my visit. In spite of the apparent inconsistency of voting great credits for a big navy, due, as I have said, to anxiety about Japan, President Harding intimated very quickly his intention of summoning the Powers of the world to a conference for the discussion of a practical measure of all-round reduction in armaments and the establishment of an international tribunal to arbitrate on all matters of potential dispute. That intention was fulfilled in July of this year, when the President made a definite pro- posal to the Allied Powers for a conference on disarma- ment, thereby making a practical appeal to the human race to abandon war as an argument. It is a good memory of mine that I was able to put in some words on behalf of that proposal at the Capitol in Washington, when I had the rare honor of being invited to give evi- dence before the committee of Congress on naval affairs, on the possibility and scope of such a conference.
Before his great appeal, the President, acting upon the advice of Secretary Hughes, decided that as America had an interest in the question of German reparations, it would be logical to have a representative on the Reparations Committee, and that as the supreme coun- cil of the Allies was dealing with the world affairs which intensely affected the interests of the United States, it would be only reasonable to have an American am- bassador present at least while the deliberations were in progress. People in England, as well as people in Amer- ica, watched these moves away from isolation toward international partnership, and drew their breath a little
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and said, "Perhaps, after all, there is a chance for the League of Nations!" Strange! for in America the doom of the League has long ago been sealed in yard-long headings across American newspapers:
"The League is dead!"
A friend of mine, named Lowell Mallett, one of the shrewdest observers of American politics, described the psychological effect in Washington of finding sud- denly that that cry may have been rather premature.
"Solemnly or exultantly, prayerfully or profanely, earnestly or indifferently, one has heard it proclaimed in America every day since Harding was elected. Those who desired the League's death have announced the consummation of their wish so frequently that they have come to believe it true. Of course they have had to presuppose that because America was not a member there wasn't any League, but they have been quite equal to this presupposition.
"'The League is . . . I*
"The familiar phase was broken in two on a day not long ago. It was the day that President Harding and Secretary Hughes announced their decision to partici- pate, to some extent, in the councils of the Allies. The suspended exclamation might have been heard in the cloakrooms of Congress where our statesmen gather to smoke and talk about themselves. It was completed by one such statesman in this manner —
'Alive! My gosh! the blamed thing lives!' 'This Senator accepted the decision to participate in Allied councils as the beginning of the end of the struggle that has been going on under cover within the administration since March 4th. And his view is shared by many other bitter opponents of the League. It is not accepted gracefully, however. It is fairly safe to predict that Washington will witness the bitterest sort of a death battle over the question, but more than one oppo-
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nent of the League, who is bravely kissing his wife and little ones farewell and preparing to march forth to take part in that battle, is already admitting that he is going forth to glory, not to victory.
"For they are not bUnd to the situation. They knew all the time they were chanting the League's requiem that they ran the risk of having the late lamented rise up from the bier to ask what all the fuss was about. They knew they could only keep it dead so long as they kept Harding convinced that the people of the United States had decreed its death. Harding in his campaign for election committed himself fairly firmly in favor of both hfe and death for the League. The opponents of the League have been more vociferous in claiming it was their victory when the returns made him President, but the RepubHcan supporters of the League idea, while saying not a great deal, were equally sure that the elec- tion meant nothing of the kind."
American financiers and business men were no longer so hostile to the League idea, at least to a share in the councils of Europe. For the sake of their increasing investments in European commercial ventures, the time had come to cease playing politics with international affairs. In the twelve months preceding June, 1921, three hundred and fifty million dollars had been loaned to foreign borrowers by private American capital, despite widespread economic depression in the United States. As Mallett said, "With approximately a mil- lion dollars daily flowing from their vaults into foreign fields, American bankers are fairly unanimous in favor- ing a policy that will protect those dollars." If not by the League, or the League "idea," at least not by isolation.
A mighty whack at the League was declared by Colonel Harvey, the American ambassador at the Court of St. James's, in his first pubUc speech in
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London. He banged, barred, and bolted the door, it seemed, upon any American participation in any kind of League of Nations. More interesting than his speech, however, were the comments upon it in the American Press. There was a widespread expression of opinion that the ambassador had gone beyond his book and had not spoken the mind of the American people as a whole, nor of the Harding administration, which, as I was informed on good authority, *'was busily searching the dictionary for some other word than "League"!
I am not a fanatic on the subject of the League. I believe that the general good will of people and their spiritual renaissance are more important to the world than any machinery of international justice. Never- theless, good will itself needs an organization by which it may express its ideals and give orderly effect to its agreements. For that purpose the League of Nations provides an organized system by which all nations may come into conference and consider their national prob- lems in relation to the rest of the world, and gain the free consent and support of other peoples for their national interests and rights and claims, while consent- ing themselves to equal rights for all other peoples, provided they do not inflict damage upon the family of nations.
It should be a parliament of peoples, whose power is based not upon force, but on agreement, at least, on moral force rather than on physical force. The decrees of its assembly should advise rather than command, and the work of its councilors should be scientific and not political. It will never be a super state, dominating in its power over peoples who try to resist its decrees or who dispute its authority, though the expression of a
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great majority of national representatives would have an influence not lightly to be disregarded, if they had the real support of their own governments and peoples. The failures of the League, in so far as it has failed, have been due to the insincerity of delegates, or to their im- potence, because while dealing with the world problems on lines of scientific argument the statesmen of Europe were dealing with the same problems on lines of passion and political intrigue. That weakness of the League will not be overcome until its delegates are truly repre- sentative of their parliaments, so that when they speak their words are responsible, and that will only be attained when the peoples themselves insist upon that respon- sibility and insure its fulfillment. Another and fatal cause of weakness in the present League is that it is only half a League, or at least incomplete, with many empty chairs. Without Germany, Russia, and the United States, no proposal or agreement on affairs aflPecting the interests of those nations could have authority.
In spite of that, and of many other limitations, be- cause the spiritual state of the world has been at a low ebb in the years after the war, not rising to the high ideal of international justice preached by the leaders of the war spirit and then flung to the devil as out- worn rubbish, the League of Nations has done useful work. Alone it has upheld the banner of that idealism before the imagination of the peoples, and has gathered to itself forces of plain folk who believe in its watchwords, though some of its spokesmen are cynical and others disheartened. Outside the Assembly where the talking is done, there has been a body of scientific work prepared by experts whose enthusiasm is real and devoted. They have the young spirit for which the world has been waiting. In committees formed by economists, organ- izers, scientists, of many nations, among those forty- eight who belong to the League, and of some who do not
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belong thereto (like the United States of America), keen brains and untired hearts have been studying world problems of health, commerce, wages, hourt of work, armaments, transport, communication, and finance, not in a political way, limited by national egotism, but in a scientific way, across the frontiers of prejudice and rivalry. They have been learning to think internationally. They have been preparing the groundwork for the new architecture of human progress. They have actual achievements to their credit for the reshaping of international relations in the thoughts of statesmen and financiers, if not yet in law.
The financial conference produced a scheme of inter- national credits which is the basis of all present discus- sion in America and Europe.
The Barcelona conference set out a number of valua- ble methods of securing freedom of communication and transit.
The international health organization will, without doubt, be a new charter for the prevention of epidemic disease and other scourges of the human race.
Another committee has devised means of co-ordinating preventive measures against the traffic in opium, cocaine, and other dangerous drugs.
Recommendations have been made for breaking down the world-wide conspiracy of the white-slave traffic.
Plans have been prepared for the institution of a permanent court of international justice, and com- mittees have been at work on the possibility of limiting armaments among the great Powers and prohibiting the introduction of arms and ammunition among savage or semicivilized races.
That work may be thrown on one side by the wicked- ness of governments or the indifference of peoples, but, whatever insanity may take possession of the world, that work has been for sanity and well done. 24 361
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The United States of America, whose late President was part author of the League idea, did not share in that work officially, and their ambassador declared that his government "will not have anything whatsoever to do with the League, directly or indirectly, openly or furtively." Experience of history and realities of life challenged the ambassador. The case has been well put by Reginald Berkeley, secretary of the League of Nations Union.
Suppose that in two or three years' time a serious dispute between two great Powers threatened the peace of the world — suppose one broke out to-morrow. Suppose that dispute came before the League of Nations, and, whilst it was still in the process of settlement, and in spite of the provisions of the Covenant, one of these great Powers suddenly mobilized its forces, thus threatening by implication at any moment to break the Covenant and throw itself upon its opponent: an act of war against the whole League. It is surely inconceivable that in such circumstances the United States would not throw in its weight on the side of the League for the preservation of peace. This does not mean that the United States would then be liable to send its troops to Europe. Now as formerly that would be entirely its own affair. But it does mean that the immense moral forces of America would be ranged, as they have always been ranged, on the side of law and order. One nation alone, however powerful, cannot kill a League of forty-eight others by abstaining from it, and it is as certain as anything in this world can be said to be, that if the League proves by its deeds its usefulness to mankind, no nation will be able or willing to stand aside from it for long.
Outside the League or inside, America cannot and will not ignore its evidence and its hopes. President Harding himself has said so in clear words. "We never were and never will be able to maintain isolation." And again, "We are ready to associate ourselves with the nations of the world, great and small, for conference and for counsel, to seek the world's opinion. . . . We must understand that ties of trade alone bind nations in closest intimacy, and none may receive except he gives."
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If that spirit is fulfilled, it is good enough. In friendly alHance with the League of Nations — a League vivified by the interests and allegiance of millions of nobodies — America will exercise her influence in Europe, and share the counsels of the world. In England there is a growing allegiance for the purpose of the League, rather moving and revealing in its manifestations, as when tens of thousands gathered together in the parks of English cities on a summer day this year, and proclaimed their faith anew in its purpose and possibilities. The idea had taken root in little houses of back streets, in simple minds stricken by the misery of war and looking for a new wisdom of men, in the hearts of many mothers of boys. They came out in their masses for no selfish interest of class or trade, but for the new hope of human- ity symboHzed at least by the League as a supreme court of international justice. For as my friend G. H. Perris said in the last words he wrote before his death in the service of the League —
Internationalism is not a negative thing, a state of continual protestation; it is a positive growth towards a fuller and finer life. This is but a first hesitating step. I look forward to the day — not in my lifetime — when all Nations of the world will be in permanent combination not only for arbitration instead of war, for the regula- tion of their traffic and their laws, for the abolition of disease and of slave-trade, but in the effort to grapple with that terrible enemy — the periodic trade crisis — and to join in turning the forces of nature to the highest account for the universal benefit. The immediate task and the distant vision, both are essential to a full life.
That, after all, is the idea of the League, and though the United States may never enter the League itself, many milHons of her people, as I know, not by second- hand report, but by what I have seen and heard, have already given their allegiance to the idea, and in every city of the United States there is, I am certain, a group of men and women whose forward-looking imagination sees
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that vision of world governance in some such form as outUned in the dying words of that friend I have quoted.
VI
Despite the strains and stresses of national life, the pride and egotism of a virile people untouched by the sadness of the Old World, the noisy expression of a selfish "Americanism" by newspapers and public orators, the individual men and women, as I have met them, in the United States, have a profound belief in the increasing sense of human nature, which will abolish the old bar- barisms, break down the old frontiers, and make human life cleaner, more efficient, better organized for general happiness. People who believe that are already work- ing members of a League of good will, and in so far as the American people fulfill that spirit, which is theirs as a national faith and a working rule of life, they are with us all the way, and sometimes take the lead, as in the rescue of starving people and the call to disarmament — • a lead not to be kept if they are directed by mere self- ishness, or misled by passionate claims and conflicts with other nations of the world.
Quietly, behind the scenes, in ways that will never be recorded, American business men have all through this year been working for world peace on economic lines, and their financial knowledge and advice have had no small influence upon the policy of Europe. I have had the advantage of meeting many of these American bankers and business men, both in the United States and England, and always I have come away from such meet- ings with the conviction that these men are not only wide-eyed and alert to the reaUties of international commerce, and free from the inherited hatreds and sus- picions which clog the machinery of Europe, but as far as human nature permits of altruism with self-defense,
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wonderfully Idealistic in their outlook. I mean that they want to help, and not merely to profit. They want to restore the health of Europe as well as to safe- guard their own trade, both objects going hand in hand.
That was the spirit with which the delegates on the International Chamber of Conferences made their pro- posals in London, and especially of the group of experts in association with Mr. Filene. They based their philosophy of international finance for the restoration of Europe on the resolutions of the Brussels conference, which, in their conviction, gave to the world the first statement of the necessary steps which must be taken by each country, in order to start Europe on the road to a sound financial and economic condition. The most important advice they gave to Europe was the necessity of a strict policy regarding taxation and economy, the avoidance of additional borrowing, and the deflation of currency. Mr. Filene and his friends made plain their belief that ruin and revolution are unavoidable unless the nations of Europe disarm and economize, and they wished this belief to be publicly and widely expressed, so that governments might be strengthened in action which would be, inevitably, unpopular and unpleasant, when they tried to square the illusions of public hope with the stern realities of economic laws. So far many governments have been overthrown by their people whenever they tried to enforce such a policy or to hint plainly at disagreeable truth. It is only by a campaign of truthtelling that economy may be accepted by people still thirsting for the "fruits of victory" promised them by politicians in return for votes.
On the other hand, many business men of the United States have not been grudging in their promise to grant credits to impoverished nations, in order to recover their own prosperity of trade and revive the activities of European laborers. I am not good enough as an
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economist to weigh up the relative values of the vari- ous resolutions adopted by the London conference or proposed by the American groups. I can only judge of their general spirit as I judge most things, and that is by psychological impressions, and after meeting the Ameri- can delegates I had a sense of hopefulness for the stricken countries of Europe because these men were so keen to help, so quick to understand, so high above the mere sordid interests of a little trade advantage here and there. They were looking at the problem of world trade as scientists, without prejudice, with a knowledge of cause and effect.
All details of finance, however, are of minor impor- tance after all, compared with the general trend and purpose of the United States as a world power. I am not blind to certain elements of weakness, and of evil, and of danger, in the character of the American people (as in that of all peoples not exalted above the ordinary frailties of nature), though I am an enthusiastic admirer of all their splendid qualities, and have a devoted friend- ship for them which nothing will change or weaken. Their strength, their self-confidence, and their sense of youth give them a certain intolerance of mind to- ward those who differ from them in opinion or in action. In the mass they have no use for halftones of thought and sentiment, and do not compromise between convictions and doubts, or balance conflicting evidence in dehcate scales of judgment. They think in blacks and whites, in sharp and clear lines, approving wholly or condemning utterly. As a people they cannot understand, and do not like, the easy tolerances of the English mind which enabled our crowds, for instance, to smile at Sinn Fein flags passing down the Strand when Sinn Fein gunmen were shooting British soldiers. That seemed to the American mind intellectual insincerity. They cannot understand a people who admired the Irish for their
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resistance to British coercion (while supporting coer- cion), who cHnked beer mugs with German soldiers a few days after armistice, who allow anarchists to talk their folly in the parks, and who criticize their own government, as I have done, with profound love for their country, whose faults they also admit and ex- aggerate. The American mind has a religious reverence for "the state," which sometimes lends itself to intel- lectual tyranny and to a hard intolerance of minorities, cranks, conscientious objectors, passive resisters, radi- cals, and "reformers."
Majority opinion in the United States is all-powerful, and too powerful, and the clear-cut mind of the American citizen, with his straight verdict on all questions of life, is hkely to lead to trouble, perhaps even to conflict, within the state or without, when it comes sharp up against a challenge of forces which may only be avoided by delicate compromise, by understanding of opposing views, and by a little yielding to other folks' ideas. As a nation the American people are self-conscious and oversensitive to criticism, at least in comparison w^th the English people, who have a weakness for self-criti- cism and depreciation. I write these things frankly, with the privilege of friendship which must be sincere without being fulsome. But I have written at length my impressions of American life and character in another book, and need not repeat them here, but will only say that I believe with all my heart and soul that the spirit of the people in the mass, and among those I know with individual friendship, is inspired by a splendid common sense, by a fine simplicity of outlook, and by an instinc- tive desire to act in honor and in justice to all the world. Despite some elements of hostility due to foreign in- fluence, among groups of people still stirred by the rivalries of race in Europe, the heart of the American people, as a whole, and the sentiment of most of its
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intellectual leaders, desire friendship with the British people and offer it with generous emotion, believing, as I believe and know, that we two peoples have more in common, by heritage, by speech, by law, and by ideals, than any other peoples in the world, and that any con- flict between us would be a death blow to civilization from w^hich the white race itself would not recover. In many cities of the United States I found a proof of that faith and of that friendship expressed with a sincerity of emotion beyond all doubt, with a generosity that was wonderfully kind. We may have differences, and per- haps must have them, and the evil part of the Press in both countries, which now in its lowest form is very evil, and other forces in the dark caves of thought and passion, in both countries, will make the most of them, and try to fan up hatred and passion and popular sus- picions, but unless we give them just cause of quarrel by some madness or badness in our own future leadership, there is a body of opinion in America strong and sane and chivalrous, which will overwhelm such treachery to the hopes of humanity.
I remember on my last visit, in a small city a thousand miles west of New York, having luncheon with a company of leading men of the community, and our host was an old gentleman whom all the others honored. He was courteous and gay in his old-fashioned way, making little jests to keep the table bright. But presently his face became grave, and he rose and raised his glass and said with profound emotion: ''Gentlemen, I give you a toast: To the deathless friendship between the United States and Great Britain," and at that all the men rose and drank in silence, I have seen many demonstrations of enthusiasm and friendly tribute between our two peoples, but somehow that scene in a private house of a Middle West town always comes back to my mind as a kind of symbol and pledge. In millions of other houses
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throughout the United States there is this hope for unbroken friendship between our two peoples, and on our side we have in our bones so strong a sense of our common heritage of history and tradition that we are apt to presume on it too much and be a Httle too free in comment and in criticism, as though actually we were members of the same family who may dispense with formal courtesies.
We are not the same people. Our psychology has many differences. Our angle of vision is from opposite sides of the world. Little accidental ways of manner and speech and custom may irritate one another now and then. But in all large things, in all the things that matter, we may, I think, count upon each other and work together. That is one of the best guaranties of hope for the future of the whole family, unless it is spoiled by some unknown folly waiting in the years to come for its time of madness and of ruin.
X
THE CHANCE OF YOUTH
AMONG certain common Ideas which seemed to ger- minate and develop strongly in millions of minds all over the world during the war — minds separated from one another by barbed wire and deep trenches and poison gas, as well as by geographical distances — there was one which I imagined would have a revolutionary effect upon the world when the war ended, if, as then seemed doubtful, it ever ended for this generation of men. It was the idea of youth that the old men were responsible for the massacre, "the bloody mess," as they called it, and guilty of supporting a social and political philosophy in Europe which had made all that inevitable. Youth hated the old men.
In the war the boys who were ordered to go out on raids when the chances were all against them and no useful purpose served, hated the elderly generals of divisions, corps, and armies, who sat well behind the lines and engaged in competitions as to the number of raids they could report to G. H. Q., and the number of casualties they could record as a proof of activity and "the fighting spirit." They hated these same white-haired old buffers who held chatty and cheery conferences in the sunny chateaux of France, and arranged bloody battles against the enemy's strongest positions with a light-hearted optimism which invari- ably underestimated the enemy's fighting quality and
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never failed to incur enormous casualties on our side for no perceptible advantage of position or ascendancy. Young officers and young private soldiers cursed the old men for their orders and counter-orders, for their "spit-and-polish" discipline, for their "eye wash," and their sham heroics. This attitude of mind was not limited to British soldiers. As far as I can find out, it was prevalent in all armies.
But the detestation of youth for the old men went much farther back than the headquarters staffs. It went back intensively to the elderly civilians at home who kept reiterating, year after year, with splendid patriot- ism, "We will fight to the last man." Or in French, ^^ Jusqu'au bout!" I have heard language not to be repeated about those old gentlemen in Parliament, in government offices, in the City, and in the great indus- tries devoted, for the time being, to war contracts. The suggestion in one mess that those elderly patriots should be used as sand bags to prop up the front-line parapets was received with uproarious applause. The conviction that in the next war — if ever human insanity "asked" for another — the rule should be made, "Old men first," was unanimously approved. Young poets of the trenches wrote mordant sonnets to their old murderers, to those fat and prosperous men who made fortunes out of the carnival of death, to the hard-faced men who ordered youth into the shambles, to the old ruffians who gained honors and rewards until they had flower-borders on their breasts, in "cushy" jobs beyond sound of the guns.
This condemnation of the old men was unkind, and in great numbers of cases unjust. Fathers bled at the heart for their sons, were killed themselves by a slow and agonizing death when the boy they loved best in the world went down. They played up gamely, so many of the old buffers, showed that they had the
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stuff of courage and sacrifice. But broadly, in its general accusation, the argument of youth was right. The old men zvere responsible for the thing that happened.
Not consciously and deliberately were they guilty, but they will be condemned by history, as by youth, because they upheld the old ideas of international rivalry, the old traditions of diplomacy, military power, force as the basis of argument, the narrowest patriotism or national egotism, as the supreme virtue of citizenship, class privilege, and caste pride, regardless of the economic needs of peoples, and did not foresee that their system of governance, or their obedience to that system, was bound to produce the monstrous conflict which has now been recorded, and if continued must lead as surely to another. The old men with the old ideas cannot be condemned individually, "for they are all honorable men" (with exceptions!), but they must be condemned generally, as their predecessors who burned old women as witches, or defended slavery as a sacred right, or forced women and children to labor fourteen hours a day in their factories, or (as late as 1830 in England) sentenced boys and girls to death and hanged them in batches for pilfering and petty crimes, caused by their own economic cruelties. As such, representatives of an old order evil in its morality and achievement, and in its sinister betrayal of new ideals and new hopes, youth, during the war, and afterward, brought in a verdict against them.
They have pleaded guilty. Over and over again I have heard gray-headed men since the war say: "Noth- ing can be done until the old men disappear. The world must wait for the rising generation. It is up to youth to save civilization." The failure of the peace treaty to secure any permanency of peace, the betrayal of the League of Nations by those who had paid lip service to its ideals, the regrouping of Powers in Europe,
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the corruption and cynical disregard of the peoples* interests by the old politicians who still keep a firm grip on the party machines, have still further convinced men of hope in a better and cleaner phase of civilization governed by reason instead of passion and by economic unity instead of greedy rivalry, that the malady of our strife is incurable until the old men pass away and youth leaps into the saddle. I am one of those who think so, though youth is no longer mine.
I think that is the great hope of civilization, but I do not think it is a certain hope. At the present time there is no assurance that the young men who were in the war and came back again, or were young enough to escape the experience, are going to lead the world forward to a new plane of material and spiritual quality. What has youth done since the war.? In what way has it carried out its challenge.? As Herbert Hoover said to me sadly, in New York, when I expressed my hope, "Youth has been busy re-electing the old men." And that is true, in all countries that I know. The old men are still in command, supported by the young men. The very men most cursed and damned by youth have received their allegiance. The House of Commons in England is still, at the time I write, filled with "the hard-faced men who did extremely well out of the war." By-elections have not brought a younger, fresher type to the fore. General Townshend, "the hero of Kut," hated by all the men who slogged back through the sun-baked desert, fainting and dying as prisoners of the Turk, while he received all courtesies and com- forts on the isle of Prinkipo, was one of those sent as a new member to the House, where in his speeches on Ireland he revealed the Prussianism of the brass-hat brain. The Antiwaste candidates brought in by triumphant majorities as a protest against the insane and callous betrayal of national security by the Coali-
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tion were, for the most part, not young men of ardent ideals, but bald-headed, pot-beHied old reactionaries, scared by the thought of being more heavily taxed, and eager to beat down the workingman in his stand- ard of life to the degradation of tame and cheap labor by which their own profits would be increased. Winston Churchill, imperial gambler, the advocate of diastrous adventures, the most reckless spendthrift of public money in profitless campaigns, remained as a maker of trouble three years after war, and in the pages of Punchy which made a hero of him, his plump, smiHng face, under absurd and clownish hats, failed to arouse the fury of youth by its self-complacent smirk. Lord Curzon, with his narrow, mid-Victorian mind, his impregnable conceit, still conducted the foreign policy of a people who had bled white because men hke him- self had controlled their destiny. In France, in Italy, in Germany (though less in Germany) the old type of brain, heirs to the old traditions, rearranged the policy and structure of Europe and made a new and ghastly mess of it. Where was youth? What was it doing?
II
As I have described elsewhere in this book, youth was doing a lot of dancing, making up for lost time in the fun of life, not worrying much about the future, not worrying at all about the damned old past. That was all right. That was the privilege and nature of youth.
But many of us expected that, in so far as youth was active, thoughtful, interested in the affairs of life out- side the desire for good fun, it would reveal itself on new lines and moving in a hopeful direction toward a new philosophy. We expected that those who had cursed the folly of the war so heartily would at least depart from that particular kind of folly, and that those
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who had looked forward to a new era of common sense, and of liberty, would stand for those ideals.
Looking around the world, what did one see in the way of youth's adventure? In Ireland one saw, cer- tainly, an intense, ardent, fanatical demand for national liberty, not without a spiritual virtue, because the youth of Ireland was willing to die for its faith, and did die, on the scaffold and in the streets, with heroic courage for Ireland's sake, as they truly thought. But they adopted old, bloody, and evil methods, as old as sin. If this Irish youth had put up some form of passive resistance to a governance they hated, if they had relied only on spirit- ual force, or Christian sacrifice, according to their faith, they would, I am certain, have captured the allegiance of all lovers of liberty in England as in all countries, and would have gained their hearts' desire more rapidly, more certainly, and more completely. No power on earth, and least of all England, whose people are instinctively on the side of liberty, could have resisted their spirit, if revealed in that way. But Irish youth did not leap forward to a new idea or a new way. They went back to "cave-man stuff." Their methods of warfare were as far back as those of ancient Britons or of paleoHthic men, though they had modern weapons for their killing. They laid traps for their enemy — our soldiers — and shot them to pieces. They were as cruel as dogs of hell, some of those Irish lads who shot men before the eyes of their women, and shot women who were friendly to our men. Their burnings of signal boxes, warehouses, docks, in England as well as Ireland, their execution in cold blood of men whom they labeled, rightly or wrongly, as "spies," were not worse, perhaps, than what has been done by other people fighting for national liberty, but were not any advance in spiritual methods or in the code of war, since the time of the anthropoid ape fighting for the liberty of his rock^
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dwelling, or of Russian Bolsheviki fighting for the liberty of Soviet governance. The spiritual faith of the Irish people, wonderful through many centuries, was spoiled by the savagery of those young gunmen.
On the other side were the Black-and-Tans. Was that service good enough for English and Scottish youth which had fought for the liberty of the world in France and many other fields.'' Was a guinea a day a decent excuse to suppress the claim of a little nation for self- government .f' Was their job of counter-terror, repri- sals, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a creamery for a barracks, a private house of a maiden lady for the bombing of a patrol, a step forward by youth to the new hope of the world, after a war to end war, a war to stamp out militarism?
In Italy youth was active. When I happened to be there the youth of the masses had organized itself into bands of communists, sacking factories and shops, terrorizing respectable citizens, raising the red flag with a call to revolution. Then the youth of the classes organized a counter-terror, under the name of Fascisti, and those White Guards beat unarmed men to death, smashed up the furniture in restaurants, let loose revol- vers in a casual way, fell in gangs upon political oppo- nents, and surrounded the polHng booths with murder in their hearts and in their hands, for those who might dare to vote against them. Nothing new in all that! Only a hark-back to the days of Dante, of Bianchi and Negri, Montague and Capulets, when out of dark courtyards in Florence, Padua, and Verona young noblemen and their retainers clashed with their rival houses, and spitted each other on their swords, and stabbed each other through the throat, and did not settle any argument. Must, then, the vitality and courage of youth still find their outlet in these old-fashioned ways? Is youth not moving forward, but rather going back to
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liberated passion, the code of the Elizabethan swash- buckler, the young bravado with a quick turn of the wrist, the days when every man was a law to himself and very free in his judgment?
Less than three years had passed since France listened with a strange wonder, as in the presence of a blessed miracle, to the silence that followed the long laboring of guns. The hospitals were still filled with the wreckage of young men maimed horribly, blinded, shell-shocked. Across France was the belt of horror . . . when Aristide Briand called up the 1919 class to march, if need be, into the Ruhr, to enforce the payment of indemnities. They were lads of twenty-two. All of them had been witnesses of the misery of war, which had robbed them of fathers, elder brothers, so many comrades. But I am told by Frenchmen that many of those lads looked forward to ''trouble" with the Germans hopefully. They wanted a taste of war, a little street fighting, work with machine guns and bayonets.
An American friend of mine went for a tour through the Belgian battlefields not long after the silence of the guns. Those fields had not yet been cleaned up. The unburied dead still lay there amidst the chaos of broken weapons, unexploded shells, gun wheels, the rags and tatters of uniforms, sand bags, the litter of the life and death that had passed. A young Belgian officer was his guide. Some mention was made of Holland, and instantly the Belgian officer "went up into the air" (as the American said), and in a blaze of passion declared that Belgium ought to knock hell out of Holland. He wanted more war. The ruin in which he stood had not satisfied him.
Over in the United States there was no ruin. In the
university of Yale there was a crowd of youth whose
knowledge of war was limited to newspaper reports and
the talk of older men who had been to France and back
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again, and the sight of long banners in American halls spangled with golden stars for those who died in action. I had luncheon with some of the undergraduates — a fresh and cheery ^' bunch" of men. One of them, rather older than the others, had been in the marines and had served in France. He had a fine gravity, and spoke thoughtfully as I walked with him alone after the luncheon party.
"What do those fellows think of the war?" I asked him.
He glanced at me sideways.
''Which one? The last, or the next?"
When I cried out against that "next," he told me that most of the Yale men who had been too young to get into the war were just kicking themselves for losing that experience. They were jealous of their elder brothers. They, too, wanted to be captains of air-craft, machine gunners, infantry officers. They wanted the great adventure of it all. "Of course they don't under- stand," he said.
I told him that what he was telling me was the worst thing I had heard in the United States, and he grinned when he said, "That's so!"
So before the old trenches have silted in and the ruin has been cleared away, the youth of the world is looking forward to "the great adventure" again! Their vitality, their pluck, the desire of youth to get out of the humdrum boredom of everyday life lure them on to the drama of war, in spite of the recent experience of war's enormous tragedy, the aftermath of its ruin, the bloodcurdling tales of men who came back from the hunting fields of death. If that were true of youth everywhere, then it is futile to hand on to them the experience of agony, or the lessons of that last war's folly, or the certainty that civilization itself will suffer shipwreck if another happens on the grand scale. If I thought youth were
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incorrigible in that way, I for one should abandon hope of any step forward by the human race.
I have not abandoned hope yet, though I confess that, so far, youth is disappointing, slow to seize its chance, reactionary in its present mood, if judged only by surface appearances. What is happening below the surface, in the subconscious minds of young men who are thinking out, not consciously or deliberately, but in a groping, secretive way, the line of action ahead of them.'' It is hard to find that out. I try to get a lead from Oxford, where the new men are being formed, perhaps, for the next phase of Enghsh history, unless, as may be more probable, they come from less privileged places. But the undergraduates at Oxford do not give me more encouragement than those at Yale.
''What do you talk about?" I ask some of them, and their answer is, "Just the usual things — college sports, personalities, dances, motor cars, the Australian cricketers, all that sort of tosh."
"Politics.?"
Not much of that. They glance at the headlines of the Daily Mail. They don't bother to wade through Parliamentary reports, unless they have to mug them up for an insincere debate in which they speak to a brief. Of course there is a political crowd. There are clubs in which the political and economical problems of the world are discussed with a certain amount of intensity, but without any real conviction or any new school of thought. The old traditions prevail, — the belief that a pohtical career depends upon party patronage, and is the same old game of "ins" and "outs." Men discuss whether it will be better to link up with the Coalition or the Independent Liberals, or even with labor, for the sake of a career, office, and rewards. There is no sign, except among a few wild birds, of soaring clear away from the old party groups to a new political philosophy. There is
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no Oxford Movement, it seems, which will change the current of English Ufe. The men fall naturally into the old divisions of class prejudice and tradition. The Ruskin College men are still fair game because they dress badly, drop their h's, utter crude nonsense round the Martyrs' Memorial, and ask for trouble, and get it. At the beginning of the coal conflict, when Lloyd George revived his ''Defense Force" to put down any civil disorder that might arise among millions of unemployed men, Oxford undergraduates volunteered with their motor bikes, and were ready for service on the side of their own class, without heartburnings as to the rights of laboring men to resist *'wage cuts" which were afterward acknowledged to be too severe even by the owners who had issued them. No message came from young Oxford on behalf of Irish peace or in favor of a wiser policy of international peace — or in protest against a government leading the nation to the edge of economic ruin. Oxford remained a sanctuary aloof from the stress and strain of social England, cut off from the running tide of popular thought, and exclusively interested in the work and pleasure of university life. That, at least, was the report given to me by some of the undergrad- uates, surprised themselves that the immense convul- sion of war in which they had been caught up should leave the spirit of Oxford so untouched and unchanged, as far as they could see. Perhaps they did not see very far. It seems to me certain that those undergraduates have a diflPerent outlook on life from their predecessors of 1913, and that, unknown to themselves, they belong to a different epoch, utterly divorced in its instincts and impulses from that prewar time. Their background is not the same. It is the background of Armageddon. Their horizon of vision is not the same. They look out upon a changing world. In ten years from now pre- war England will seem as remote and archaic as the
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eighteenth century. It seems to me likely that the first-year and the second-year men at Oxford now will see the last phase of that University history when caste and wealth maintained their pleasant privilege almost unchallenged. Democracy, with its rough accent, will break in.
Ill
A change, visible, unmistakable, aggressive, has over- taken the youth of democracy itself. The boys of the laboring classes in England, and of what we still call, with our fine distinction of caste, **the lower middle class," have developed into a new type, and are reaching out to new ideas which, beyond any doubt at all, will either de- stroy England or transform it. These lads of eighteen, nineteen, or so were more intimately touched by the war than those of their same age in higher ranks of English life. They were far more closely involved in the terrific churning up of English mass psychology, and habits of life and labor. Born and bred in the back streets of London and great cities, their first memories of childhood go back to prewar days when their parents lived un- easily, hardly, on the edge of dire poverty. Life then was a humdrum routine of work on small wages with a little margin at the best for small pleasures. It seemed unchanging and unchangeable, as inevitable as the laws of nature. It was rather squalid, dreary, and uninspir- ing. There was not much adventure in it, except for rare and daring souls, such as Lipton, Lever, and some others, who broke away and climbed high beyond the luck of those in the ruck of ill-paid toil. Then the war came, knocking at those small doors in mean streets. The first knocks were a summons to the older brothers or the younger fathers — "Your King and country need you!" Well, that was rather wonderful! They had never been needed before so urgently and importantly
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by King and country. They answered the summons, exalted out of the old ruck, proud and glad, eager for an adventure which made life less squalid, and gave it a nobler meaning. The little houses in the back streets poured forth the youngish men, who went away to strange places, leaving their women folk, and the small boys and the hobbledehoy lads too young to serve. Then came other knocks at the doors. It was death that came knocking. The youngish father or the elder brother had fallen on the field of honor or was "wounded, reported missing." As the years passed, single knocks became double knocks at the hearts of women as well as at the doors of houses. First one lad, then another — in some houses three or four — now gone forever. The little houses in the mean streets of London and great cities, and cottages in country villages, provided the great majority of casualties — these long daily lists of deaths, in "other ranks." Small boys, growing big, saw their mothers weeping, heard of fathers' deaths, and wondered and thought about the meaning of it all. But other things were happening in their little homes. Things not so miserable, rather wonder- ful. Boys too young to serve as soldiers were old enough to work in munition factories and get good wages. Girls' hands were wanted as well as male hands. Wages kept rising. Money was plentiful. Never had these little households seen so much good money flowing in week by week.
Separation allowances made a good beginning. Pen- sions for badly wounded men helped to comfort their women. With two or three girls in the family, a growing boy or two, an older lad exempted because of his trade, or the father too old to be taken, the week's wages in war time amounted to a little fortune. Easy come, easy go. No stinting of food for working families. Good clothes and good boots. The "pictures" twice a
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week, a gramophone in the parlor. After all, for lucky households where death did not come knocking at the door the war was not so bad. It was not at all bad for boys of jRfteen and sixteen and seventeen, who jingled money in their pockets Hke young lords, stood treat to the girls whenever they Hked, felt gloriously independent. They remembered the early days before the war, when there had been stinting and scraping, how miserable and squalid they were! Well, they would never go back to that. Labor had come into its own.
So it seemed, until the war ended and long after the war ended, until gradually unemployment grew apace, and the men who came back could not get jobs, or would not work, or struck for wages which presently could not be granted because victory had cost a lot of money and trade disappeared.
The lads of nineteen, twenty, twenty-one have been through the gamut of that experience, have seen the pendulum swing visibly this way and that, and have listened to exciting conversations in small parlors and back kitchens, where these rapid changes now happened to the Hves of working famiHes. They have heard the tales of returned soldiers, their fathers and brothers who escaped, and listened to their curses against war, and their blasphemous comments on peace without re- ward. The shrill talk of working mothers, inveighing against injustice, has been in their ears. And they have done a deal of thinking and talking at street comers.
Some of them have been reading a bit, and learning to debate in local clubs, and getting hold of books and facts to help them in debate. The youth of democracy is not indifferent to the affairs of Ufe. Not indifferent, but ignorant of any larger truth than they find in venom- ous little pamphlets or lying little paragraphs of revo- idtionary rags inciting them to a holy war against the
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"idle rich." Their knowledge of economics is limited to the rate of wages compared with the cost of life, and they have no notion of the interdependence of nations, or of the effect of dear labor and limited output upon a country like their own which gained its commer- cial prosperity by cheap labor and large output. They are taught, and they believe, that "capital" has such inexhaustible resources of wealth that if its unjust profits are distributed among those who do the hardest toil there could be large wages and short hours for all of them. Not yet has it been brought home to them that after a war which destroyed the savings of centuries and mortgaged the industry of future generations the only escape from ruin is by way of longer hours, less pay, and increased efficiency. The youth of democracy, inspired by a one-eyed propaganda, fed on half truths and false science, see the progress of life only in terms of class conflict, view it all as a union of classes moving toward a common goal. Capital is the "enemy" of labor. The idea that it might be the ally of labor does not enter into their imagination.
After all, those boys of the back streets see the facts of Hfe shrewdly, as far as they can be visualized in their own experience, and cannot be expected to have a wider vision, without any kind of guidance. They see the little cheats and corruptions and robberies of the retail trades- man whom they serve as shopboys and counterjumpers. They see the ruthless grind of small employers of labor who became war profiteers by exploiting the needs of the people with unashamed dishonesty. They saw those profiteers in the making, were witnesses of their tricks and dodges, watched their progress to prosperity while young men died in dirty ditches for ideals loudly proclaimed by these old bandits who wanted the war to go on forever and were callous of its massacres. No wonder the boys of the back streets are cynical and
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selfish in their own aims. The capitalists and the govern- ment do not act in a way to disarm their hostility. With but a thin camouflage of justice, capital and its po- litical defenders play their own game, protect their own interests, and "dig in" for a trench warfare against the claims of democracy for a greater share of reward, a greater knowledge of secret diplomacy, a closer co-opera- tion in the management of the business in which they happen to be working. During the war labor was petted and pampered, promised an immense harvest of the fruits of victory, a land fit for heroes to live in, and security of Hfe and limb. Those promises were flung away with cynical contempt when the war ended. The governments of Europe arranged a peace which was to be a preparation for new wars. They ignored the economics of life for political adventures paid for out of the poverty of exhausted peoples. Reckless of the finan- cial ruin of their countries after the exhaustion of war, they increased the burdens of taxation by a wild levity of extravagance, as though stricken mad by victory, I'ntil, brought abruptly to a check by panic, they tried to save themselves by a sudden onslaught upon working- men's wages. There was no attempt, in England, any- how, to arrange a gradual reduction of wages according to a gradual descent in costs of living, no kind of attempt to organize a new fellowship between capital and labor, by means of which the interests of both would be served, greater efficiency might be secured, and the prosperity of the nation saved from the menace of complete de- struction. Just as labor declared war on capital, so capital declared war on labor (after licking its boots in time of need), and neither side had any vision beyond the narrow conflict. Youth failed to come forward with a new call to its battalions. Youth played into the hands of corrupt old politicians, or else did not bother. At the time of writing this book, youth is still lagging behind,
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afraid to take its place, or not wanting its place. Yet the chance of youth is the hope of the world.
What is that chance? . . . That is hard to define. It would be great audacity to outline a program for the youth of the world, and any such attempt would be, rightly, ridiculed by the younger generation. They will not be bound by hard and fast rules laid down for their guidance by the old men whom they despise. They are not to be tied to labels or enrolled into new parties of high-sounding names. They will not make an act of faith in any ready-made creed of political philosophy, or be governed by laws laid down by ancient precedent. The youth of the coming world will, like its predecessors, indulge in a free play of ideas and individual liberty of opinion, ranging itself instinctively, by hereditary influences, or conditions of character, temper, prejudice, and passion, with con- flicting groups. There will be the eternal fight between those who see differing aspects of truth and think their view is the full and perfect vision, between the activists and the passivists, the vitalists and the mechanists, the egotists and the altruists. The House of Youth will have its Guelphs and its Ghibellines, its Negri and Bianchi, as throughout the history of the world. And that is good, for it would be a bad world if the ardor of youth, its gay sense of adventure, its valors, should be marshaled into one disciplined force, obeying some single idea imposed by the tyranny of a theoretical monster, or by some new fanaticism. Yet with perfect liberty and a myriad diflPerences of ideas and methods, there may surely be a new jumping-off ground for the race of youth to new goals. There may be general consent about certain undoubted facts of life, as there
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is about the sun shining in the heavens, in spite of Relativity, and about the need of food to human life, though doctors may differ about the number of calories required for human sustenance.
The new jumping-ofF ground might well be a line cutting across history on November li, 191 8, and dividing the Old World from the New, as Before the War and After the War. Youth might at least say: "What happened Before the War was all wrong. It is for us to see that its immense stupidity of wrongness shall not happen again." From that starting point they could go ahead, casting away all the old baggage of racial and historical hatreds, diplomatic intrigues and sacrifices, military traditions and superstitions. If youth cannot yet formulate a positive faith, they can at least assert a negative faith annihilating the folly of the past.
*'I do not believe in war as a reasonable way of argument.
"I do not believe that preparation for war is a pre- ventive of war.
*'I do not believe that armed conflict is necessary to the spiritual vigor of mankind.
"I do not believe that the victory of one nation over another increases the wealth of the victor nation.
*'I do not believe that national egotism is the supreme virtue of the individual and the state.
*'I do not believe that there must be an eternal con- flict between those who do the rough work of the world and those who organize the produce of their labor.
"I do not beheve that civilization reached its highest phase in 1914.
"I do not beheve that cruelty is an essential element of human nature, that selfishness is the highest and strongest motive of individuals and nations, and that the pursuit of spiritual truth and beauty are mere illusions of disordered minds.
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"I do not believe that the poHtical and economic system of Europe as laid down in the Treaty of Ver- sailles was divinely inspired by Heaven-sent messengers named Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau, and therefore unalterable by human effort without grievous sin.
"I do not believe that men and women are incapable of simple reasoning, and of actions which may preserve them from otherwise certain famine, disease, slaughter, and extermination." ^
It is not too much to ask youth to accept these nega- tions, after a little argument and a call for evidence. Indeed, my own belief is that the younger generation is satisfied with the evidence, and has already cleared all that useless lumber out of its mind. As far as I know some of these younger men, they do not believe that war is a reasonable way of argument. They see no sense in it at all, though they may see a nonsensical adventure which provides an escape from boredom, or an unpleasant way of life. I fancy they would grant without further debate (except for the amusement of debate) the other negatives I have set out, and if they would only get positive about a new system of Hfe and thought starting cleanly from the sponging out of old traditions, the world would move apace beyond its present state of misery. "Perhaps to new and unknown miseries!" cries the pessimist. Alas, yes! But I think of the latest definition I heard of a pessimist — a man who wears two pairs of braces and a belt. One can't move a step without a risk.
It is even possible to set up the goal posts for the new race of youth, and hope that they will start in that direction without a backward glance, and with good wind and heart. The world knows its own quagmires, its own danger spots, the place of the precipice over which we all must plunge if we go much farther in that
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direction. Battlefields are not the only danger spots — and perhaps I am inclined to harp too much on the peril of a new war, not saying so much about the peril of world famine, of disease, of moral and spiritual de- cadence. But it is certain to all thinking minds that a new war on the scale of the last (and a new war would be worse than the last) would lead to all those other plagues, and end all our hopes. The danger of it is so great and evident that at least any new goal set up by youth must first of all avoid that old pitfall. Why not.'' What is the difficulty? I see none, if youth will say with conviction, "I do not beheve in war as a reasonable way of argument"; still less, if there may be less than none (which is possible), if youth will say with positive and triumphant assertion, "I do believe in peace!"
Given that assertion, there is a program ready for youth, not too formal or cut and dried, but nobly out- lined, as a fine clear vision across a fair field unexplored by pioneers.
There is one man in Europe to-day — not belonging to the battalion of youth, yet never one of the old men, though he stood among them, aghast at their stupidity, indignant with their wickedness — who has marked out the goal for the younger generation of the English- speaking world, in the field of foreign policy. That is General Smuts, who looks forward with courage, and not in a cowardly way, backward. I think his speech before the imperial conference in June of 1921, reported in scraps and mostly ignored in the gutter press, gave a clear call to youth for their work in the building of a new world — to the youth of the English-speaking peoples in the great family of the British Empire. His first words were but a repetition of one word ringing like
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a bell In the ears of those who listened, and it rang again and again throughout his speech:
''What the world most needs to-day," he said, "is peace, a return to a peaceful temper, and to the resump- tion of peaceful and normal industry. To my mind that is the test of all true policy to-day. Peace is wanted by the world. Peace is wanted especially by the peoples of the British Empire. We are a peaceful empire; our very nature is such that peace is necessary for us. We have no military aims to serve, we have no militarist ideals, and it is only in a peaceful world that our ideals can be realized.
"It should therefore be the main — in fact the only — object of the British policy," said General Smuts, "to secure real peace for the empire and the world generally. The question of reparations, which was, perhaps, the most difficult and intricate with which we had to deal in Paris, has finally been ehminated, in a settlement which, I venture to hope, will prove final and workable. That is a very great advance. The other great advance that has been made — and it is an enormous advance — is the final disarmament of Germany. That the greatest miHtary empire that ever existed in history should be reduced to a peace estabUshment of 100,000 men is something which I considered practically impossible. It is a great achievement, so- far reaching, indeed, that it ought to become the basis of a new departure in world policy."
He pointed out that "we cannot stop with Germany, we cannot stop with the disarmament of Germany. It is impossible for us to continue to envisage the future of the world from the point of view of war. . . . Such a policy would be criminal, it would be the betrayal of the causes for which we fought during the war, and if we embarked on such a policy it would be our undoing. If we are to go forward into the future staggering under
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the load of military and naval armaments, while our competitors in central Europe are free from the incubus of great armies, we shall be severely handicapped and in the end we shall have the fruits of victory lost to us by our postwar policy. Already under the operation of inexorable economic factors we find that the position is developing to the advantage of central Europe.
"Armaments depend upon policy, and therefore," said Smuts, "I press very strongly that our policy should be such as to make the race for armaments impossible. That should be the cardinal feature of our foreign policy. We should not go into the future under this awful handicap of having to support great armaments, build new fleets, raise new armies, while our economic competitors are free of that hability under the peace treaty.
"The most fatal mistake of all in my humble opinion would be a race of armaments against America. America is the nation that is closest to us in all the human ties. The Dominions look upon her as the oldest of them. She is the relation with whom we most closely agree and with whom we can most cordially work together. She left our circle a long time ago because of a great historic mistake. I am not sure that a wise policy after the great events through which we have recently passed might not repair the effects of that great historic error and once more bring America on to lines of general co-operation with the British Empire.
"To my mind it seems clear that the only path of safety for the British Empire is a path on which she can walk together with America. In saying this I do not wish to be understood as advocating an American alliance. Nothing of the kind. I do not advocate an alliance or any exclusive arrangement with America. It would be undesirable, it would be impossible and un- necessary. The British Empire is not in need of exclu-
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sive allies. It emerged from the war quite the greatest power in the world, and it is only unwisdom or unsound policy that could rob her of that great position. She does not want exclusive alliances. What she wants to see established is more universal friendship in the world. The nations of the British Empire work to make all the nations of the world more friendly to one another. We wish to remove grounds for misunder- standings and causes of friction, and to bring together all the free peoples of the world in a system of friendly conferences and consultations in regard to their difficul- ties. We wish to see a real society of nations, away from the old ideas and practices of national domination or imperial domination, which were the real root causes of the Great War. Although America is not a member of the League of Nations, there is no doubt that co- operation between her and the British Empire would be the easy and natural thing, and there is no doubt it would be the wise thing.
*'In shaping our course for the future, we must bear in mind that the whole world position has radic?lly altered as a result of the war. The old viewpoint from which we considered Europe has completely altered. She suffers from an exhaustion which is the most ap- palling fact of history; and the victorious countries of Europe are not much better off than the vanquished. No, the scene has shifted on the great stage. To my mind that is the most important fact in the world to- day, and the fact to which our foreign policy should have special regard. Our temptation is still to look upon the European stage as of the first importance. It is no longer so; and I suggest that we should not be too deeply preoccupied with it. . . . Therefore, not from feelings of selfishness, but in a spirit of wisdom, one would counsel prudence and reserve in our continental commitments; that we do not let ourselves in for
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European entanglements more than is necessary, and that we be impartial, friendly, and helpful to all alike, and avoid any partisan attitude in the concerns of the Continent of Europe.
"Undoubtedly the scene has shifted away from Eu- rope to the Far East and to the Pacific. The problems of the Pacific are to my mind the world problems of the next fifty years or more. In these problems we are, as an empire, very vitally interested. Three of the Do- minions border on the Pacific; India is next door; there, too, are the United States and Japan. There also is China; the fate of the greatest human population on earth will have to be decided. There Europe, Asia, and America are meeting, and there, I beHeve, the next great chapter in human history will be enacted. I ask myself what will be the character of that history.
"Shall we act in continuous friendly consultation in the true spirit of a society of nations, or will there once more be a repetition of rival groups, of exclusive alli- ances, and finally of a terrible catastrophe more fatal than the one we have passed through? That, to my mind, is the alternative. That is the parting of the ways at which we have arrived now."
With a plea that the British Empire should act as mediator between the East and West, General Smuts turned to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, with the reminder of something that that man had helped to create and afterward had tried to kill, by contempt and neglect. It was the reminder that the world had at hand an instrument of comparison, consultation, and inter- national justice which might be used to Hft the world out of its morass. That instrument was the League of Nations, which even yet could be made good in fulfill- ment of the hopes for which it had been shaped.
There is a policy which youth might adopt, within the English-speaking world. It is a free policy, not fixed to 26 393
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narrow lines, not tied up to tradition, not defined as an austere dogma, but points the goal that may be reached by many ways and methods if the spirit of the army leaders is directed toward the ideal of world peace, not only with white races, but with black, and brown, and yellow races.
VI
Youth should find this a great adventure. Its soul will not be cramped for lack of opportunity, and looking near at hand in that Europe from which, as General Smuts thinks, the balance of power is shifting, there is other work to do, not without ability and adventurous intelligence. The nations of Europe have still to re- shape their internal life, to revitalize their own energies, to start afresh in a new era of hope and social effort. We are tired, now, in Europe. Our countries are filled with people who became old in the four years of war, and stayed weary with continuing lassitude. We are unable to rouse ourselves to new efforts, to begin the world again. But in a little while we old, tired people will go to rest, and youth, with its freshness, not de- jected by that aging experience, that inward weariness of soul caused by the tension of a long-drawn agony, will be ready for new beginnings. They will do well if they make a clean sweep of old watchwords and old labels. They will start well if they sweep away at once the labels of the old quack remedies of political cheap- jacks — Tory, Liberal, Communist, Socialist, Bolshevist. If they must have labels and quack remedies, let them be new and freshly mixed, for the others have grown musty and soured. I think the spirit of youth should get to work first to reconstruct national life by a new philosophy of social duty. That sounds rather hard and dogmatic, but it seems to me that no reconstruction
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may be well done unless it is based upon certain laws of which we can have new knowledge.
It is certain, for instance, and very clear to all minds after three years of muddled peace, that there can be no recovery of Europe so long as nations do not recognize their economic interplay, or so long as there is this wild confusion of interests, this madness of hostility between sections of society, within the nations them- selves. Experiments have been made of many old ideas which seemed to hold some virtue in them until their failure and falsity were proved to all the world.
Communism had its chance in Russia, and its destruc- tion of capital and private property and individual liberty, and all the delicate machinery of modern life, in a desperate effort for absolute equality, has given to the world a ghastly exhibition of famine, typhus, and tyranny. It has proved itself wrong in psychology as well as in economic science. Lenin was defeated by the instincts of human nature more than by the break- down of transport and supplies.
There have been other experiments which now belong to the long catalogue of human folly. The German ex- periment of a world dominance by military power came to a very ruinous result, and this, too, was defeated, not so much by counter-forces of the same kind as by cer- tain spiritual powers working in the minds of humble men and rallying them to passionate resistance. There has been the general breakdown of a materialistic philosophy which had Europe, and the whole world, indeed, within its grips. The very objects which the human family was striving to attain have been proved false.
Happiness is, after all, the main purpose of human life, but there was no great sum of human happiness visible in the world before the war, even among those people who seemed to have gained all that others were
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striving and failing to gain. Material comfort, the relaxations of life, the power of wealth, the pleasures of the world, seemed to promise satisfaction to their pos- sessors and to be the unattainable good to people in the squalor and peril of poverty. All civilized society was engaged in a desperate struggle to reach or hold those material values, and it was a cutthroat conflict between possessors and dispossessed. Yet the successful man did not seem to bask in his success. He seemed balked by some psychological bunker. He had no restfulness of soul, but strove always for more wealth and more power. The pleasures of life did not seem wonderfully pleasing to those who wallowed in them. Indeed, one cynic said that Hfe would be endurable but for its pleasures. Eng- lish society before the war had secured all there was in the way of material happiness, yet to an outside observer like myself there was not much evidence that those people were really happy, or even honestly amused. They were weary with the pleasures of the London sea- son, they were bored at Ascot and bored again at Cowes. In their country houses they quarreled with their wives more savagely than less lucky men in country cottages. They had a sense of emptiness which they tried to fill by artificial means, Hke gambling or playing dangerous games with other men's women or w4th other women's men. If, then, the possession of all that society desires in material prosperity brings no satisfaction, it seems clearly demonstrated that society is pursuing an illu- sion in the search for happiness. The very goal of their desire is a mirage leading them on through desperate ways to a waterless desert. There must be some other conception of human happiness. Mere materiaUsm is not good enough. Manchester, Wigan, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, Essen and Elberfeld, even London, Paris, New York, and Berlin, do not demonstrate in their richer quarters a high standard of human happiness, though
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in their poorer quarters and in other parts or their civilized jungles there is a frightful conflict for some share of it.
Here is a problem for the coming youth to solve, and surely the solution is that material and spiritual progress must be intertwined, that poverty of spirit is as bad as poverty in material things, or worse, and that the ideal of human happiness is not to be found in mere posses- sion, but perhaps in the honor of service, in work which has a spiritual purpose as well as material reward, in security rather than in wealth, in energy rather than in idleness, in welfare of mind as well as of body, and in the pursuit of an ideal not wholly selfish.
It is perhaps possible that youth may reconstruct society on a more spiritual basis which would tend to abolish the jungle conflict between classes and in- dividuals by the modification of human greed, and by a union of interests instead of open warfare, within the nation. In home aff'airs as well as in international politics, warfare has been proved a senseless form of argument, and very wasteful.
Force has failed definitely, for just as in wars between modern nations victory hurts as much as defeat, because energy given to destruction has no productive value, so in industrial warfare successful strikes or successful strike breaking means unsuccessful trade to both sides. All these sectional conflicts lessen the wealth of a people, whichever way they go, and at a time now, when, after the exhaustion of war, there is no energy at all for waste.
It is clear that if labor in England demands and gains wages at war rates, or double war rates, such victory will be without value to them in our present conditions of trade. For with exports down by 50 per cent, and cost of production higher than the means of home or foreign markets, and taxation reducing the purchasing power of
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all consumers, these high wages will not balance with high prices, nor create prosperity by which they may be justified. They will result only in the increase of poverty and unemployment, and the wages themselves will have no more than a fictitious value, as in Germany, where the workingman is now paid sixty marks a day instead of five marks as in prewar days. The German workman has therefore multipHed his wages by twelve times, but he is not so simple as to think that he has gained a stupendous victory in material progress. On the contrary, he knows that his sixty marks are worth less to him in real value than the five marks of a happier time.
On the other hand, employers of labor in Great Britain will gain no victory by smashing the trade unions and beating labor to its knees. That process will be costly, dangerous, and disastrous. They will lose more by such a conflict than by an orderly, just, and reasonable ar- rangement based upon the consent of free and spirited men. They lost millions of pounds more in the great coal conflict of this year, 1921, by a ruthless ultimatum cutting the wages of the miners by nearly 50 per cent than if they had made an easy sliding scale spread over a long period and adjusted to falling prices. The govern- ment, supporting their poUcy of ruthlessness, expended vast sums of public money in raising a Defense Force to protect the nation in case of riots (which did not happen) and to pay the pensions of two million men outside the mining districts unemployed because factories were shut down for lack of fuel. It is impossible to estimate the loss to Great Britain due to that insane method of con- ducting national industry, for apart from the direct costs and losses amounting to at least two million pounds a day during the whole period of the struggle, covering the third part of a working year, the indirect loss of trade which will not be recovered for many years, if
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ever at all, is incalculable. One expert reckons it as two hundred and forty million pounds.
Yet that injury to the nation was caused not by inevitable forces coming into conflict, nor by any prin- ciple of justice against injustice, which must be fought out lest the soul should perish, but by sheer stupidity on both sides. The owners with their funny little bureau- cratic brains, their greedy insincerities, their pose of being "strong men," whereas they are weak men of feeble vision and petulant character, flung a wage schedule at the colliers' heads with a "Take it or leave it," knowing, as they afterward admitted, that the proposed wages were below the minimum standard of life compared with the existing costs of life's necessities. On the other side, colliers failed to understand the realities of national and international arithmetic and believed that the government should continue to sub- sidize unprofitable mines. No man among them all, on both sides of the struggle, had any broader vision than that of hostility — cat-and-dog politics — nor saw what Vv^as clear to all outsiders, that by friendly understanding of facts and figures, a union of common interests for the good of the industry, an increased efl&ciency of organiza- tion and output, a rigid economy of management and cost, a combined effort for renewed prosperity by a tem- porary abatement of profits all round, and an intensifi- cation of energy, above all, perhaps, by the elimination of corrupt and greedy middlemen so that the price of coal at the pit-head should not be monstrously increased when it arrived at the coal cellar, the greater part of the trouble might be overcome to the benefit of everybody.
That case is typical of all industrial "unrest" in Great Britain. All sections of society are thinking in terms of conflict and not in terms of combination. They are adopting the tactics of warfare instead of the policy of conciliation. The principles of the League of Nations,
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so enthusiastically applauded by *'labor" as the hope of the world, for the sake of world peace and inter- national justice, are utterly ignored in home affairs.
VII
It is surely *'up to youth," the intelligence of the coming generation, to abandon these absurdities of the old tradition, and to estabhsh a new system by breaking down the old frontiers of hostility between classes as well as nations. The curse of English hfe, which is snobbishness — snobbishness of the masses as well as snobbishness of the classes — must go first of all, for there will be no hope so long as the workingman has a silly pride in his own exclusive caste which forbids him to associate on equal terms with a man working just as hard in a black coat instead of corduroys, and as long as the black-coated fellow resents comradeship with those who wear clothes of a different cut and spend their days without a collar. It must be recognized in the New World that manual labor is not less "genteel" than intellectual labor, provided the laborer plays the game, does his job well, and looks at life without a squint. It must also be acknowledged by the "prole- tariat" (one of those words to be condemned by the makers of the New Dictionary) that the brain worker, the artist, the writer of books, is also entitled to his wages, according to the value of his output, and is not necessarily a "parasite," gorging himself on the blood of the toiling masses, but, on the contrary, in many cases, a harder-working person, a more indefatigable and enthusiastic craftsman, than the bricklayer or the car- penter, and, now and then, a greater benefactor of human society.
The snobbishness of labor, its self-conceit, its unrea-
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THE CHANCE OF YOUTH
sonable hatred of the intellectuals, must be severely- checked.
Here, then, is another task for youth — a great icon- oclasm, a joyous destruction of all those Aunt Sallies smirking in Vanity Fair, and a smashing of all fetishes which belong to the tribal days when a nation was divided, as now, into hostile bands calling themselves SociaUsts, Individualists, Tories, Radicals, and other totem names, each convinced that it holds the true faith, and each ignoring the common interests of the nation for the narrow and sectional interests of its own denomination.
I have granted that youth will always be divided in ideas, for without that there would be no liberty, but I have a theory that the way of division may in future be vertical rather than horizontal. Now it is clearly hori- zontal. Straight lines are drawn between classes so that they are Uke the strata of world-old rocks. But a vertical division would divide industries rather than classes, activities rather than possessions, methods rather than objects. It is hard to explain, unless one imagines a nursery full of children playing with a box of bricks. They have the same number of bricks, and each one de- sires to build a high house. Some build in one way, some in another, according to fancy. But they are all building up from the base and not overlaying one another's bricks. Their differences are expressed not horizontally, but ver- tically. So in the business of life and the structure of society it may be possible to build up from the common base of national resource, all efforts mounting higher, according to varying ideals, and not overlaying one another and crushing one another into the hard strata of castes, but working with the same impulse of attain- ment, though with different ideas, different methods, different results.
Germany is attempting something of that sort in the
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industrial organization by great combinations of raw material, labor, and mechanical energy, building up from that base to every branch of manufacture. There are at least twenty such combinations in Germany to- day, embracing practically the whole of her industrial life. Their common impulse is to restore the economic health of their country and to attain industrial su- premacy in Europe. It is true that there is still the under dog and the top dog in that vertical system, and that German labor is badly paid, but within the great German trusts there is such a general desire for effi- ciency, and such a general spirit of service, that the wages of the men are not being considered as subject to the old ruthless laws of economics, but in relation to human factors of efficiency — the need of food, the need of leisure, the need of health, the need of mental satis- faction— and because labor is recognized as the basis of all energy and the source of all wealth, the position of labor in Germany to-day is powerful and admit- ted, and it is by consent and not by tyranny that its wages are arranged. In each factory, and in each bank, indeed, there is a council which represents he interests of the employees, puts forward claims for in- creased wages, better conditions of service, and so on, and in spite of the German spirit of discipline, and the industrial autocracy of men Hke Stinnes, these repre- sentatives are given a fair hearing and in most cases the claims are conceded if based on the interests of the business, the first principle of which is efficiency. Upon such lines as that, the lines of co-operation between the various branches of industrial activity, youth might organize a new system of service which would eliminate some at least of our present evils by greater equality of reward for good service (though not absolute equality which would destroy initiative) and by giving workers
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greater interest in their toil because a real partnership in the progress and profits of the industry.
VIII
Looking with unprejudiced vision at the problem of Hfe, it is possible that the younger generation — that new spirit which I call Youth, though its leaders may not be beardless boys — will largely abandon industri- aUsm as we now know it, and reshape civilization on simpler and more natural foundations. It is indeed likely that we are seeing the last of the industrial era as it is composed of monstrous, overcrowded cities filled with people who live on the exchange of artificial com- modities and unnecessary luxuries, and sustained by the joyless labor of men and women in unhealthy fac- tories where their toil is machine-minding and their activity of mind and body limited to the damnable iteration of some small gesture. This will sound like heresy to the big manufacturers, but I believe that hu- manity is already in revolt against that kind of labor. They are breaking away from its deadening influence. Limitation of output, and the claim to short, and still shorter, hours, are but symptoms of a general detesta- tion of grinding, unimaginative, and inhuman toil.
The war with all its horrors was not without one great joy. It liberated masses of men from their machine-like life, took them back to nature, gave them liberty of movement, change of scene, infinite variety. Millions of men who had that experience, feeling their humanity, decline to go back again to the dead mechanism of their previous work, or, if they go back for sheer need of bread, use the strike as a means of temporary hberation, and go slow in their effort of production. The economic change in Europe is likely to destroy big cities as well as
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big industries, or at least to diminish their size and importance.
Both of them depend for their life largely upon the exchange and manufacture of luxuries. But the poverty that is creeping over Europe will not permit of luxuries to anything like the old extent. It is idle to manufac- ture expensive porcelain, grand pianos, silk robes, all the gauds and toys of rich life, if there is no margin of wealth left to buy them, and that is happening. It has happened in Russia, in Austria, in Poland. It is beginning to happen in Germany, in France, and in England. In those first three countries I have mentioned and in others that I have lately visited, like Italy, the reality of wealth is in the hands of one class. Richer than a Russian noble with millions of rubles (worthless as waste paper) is the Russian peasant with a plot of earth from which he receives a crop of grain or on which he feeds a flock of sheep. Luckier than the aristocracy of Vienna (watching their clothes wear out and their flesh wear thin) is the Austrian peasantry, getting enough to eat out of their soil and ready to sell their surplus — not for money, not for wads of paper — in exchange for boots, plows, tobacco, smocks, or other garments for their women.
There is a growing hostility among the peasantry in many countries to the city-dwelling folk. They call them parasites, and names not so nice as that. FeeHng in Austria was so bitter that, rather than sell their stuff to Vienna, some of the peasants burned their surplus stores of food! The great industrial cities in England are not threatened with such hostility, for England, alas! has destroyed its peasantry. But they are threatened with starvation. They are already besieged by the menace of economic death. Their manufactures are not being bought much in the world's markets. Their export trade is dwindling down to nothing in com-
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THE CHANCE OF YOUTH
parison with their needs of life, for these great popula- tions of English industrial cities depend for their food upon the exchange of imports for exports. There is not enough food produced in England to last for three months on fair rations. All supplies for the other nine months have to be bought and paid for in foreign coun- tries. They can only be paid for by excess of exports over imports. Therefore if the export trade of England does not recover mighty quick (and German reparations will not help recovery!) there will be an exodus of starv- ing folk from Manchester, Wigan, Sheffield, Cardiff, a hundred other cities. The factories will be deserted for the fields again. Life will be simpler, more primitive in its conditions and amusements (if there is to be any kind of fun!), and it will be the task of youth — the new leadership — to reconstruct national life on a ground plan of agricultural industry, as in the springtime of our history. Perhaps the individual will be happier again, and Merrie England will be filled with song and laughter which were silent when machinery whirred above its wheels.
Civilization may not work out that way — it is im- possible to forecast the near future, still less the distant vision, but, whatever happens, youth has its chance of building anew, on cleaner, straighter lines, with ideals of beauty and human happiness, and spiritual service, broader than the boundaries of a caste or class, nobler than the interest of wealth or wages.
Science must be the servant of youth, and not its master; machinery must not overpower men. In the last war human courage, physical excellence, the highest virtue of manhood, were at the mercy of big engines. At the tug of a string twenty miles away by some low- browed churl in charge of a gun, a knight sans peur et sans reproche was made into a mess of blood and pulp, without a chance of self-defense, without warning of his
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peril, as he lay asleep in a cottage or joked over his bowl of soup.
Science used its secrets, not for human happiness, but for misery and destruction. The very victory of the air, won entirely by the valor of boys playing pranks with death high above the earth, was used for the increase of human slaughter and not for joy and liberation. Even now, after the war, with its bloody agony still fresh in the imagination of peoples, scientists, betraying their souls, are at work in laboratories, in the United States and in England, inventing devilish gases to enlarge the area of their spreading poison for "the next war," which is now in preparation by dark minds. There are experi- ments of pilotless airplanes, controlled from wireless stations, and equipped with clockwork bombs for the dropping of the poison vapors which will choke whole cities and blast all vegetation and any kind of life where it falls.
Youth, if it has any new spiritual purpose, any valor for the rescue of humanity, will declare war upon scien- tists who work with such evil intent, will rescue science itself from its lunacy, and dedicate it anew to the service of human happiness.
There is much to be done by youth, no lack of worlds to conquer. A crusade of health is a desperate need of our days, for disease is creeping apace over many peoples and countries, eating into the physique of the white races and ordaining a new massacre of innocents. Tu- berculosis, rickets, horrible plagues that have their origin in filth, and a general decadence of physical standards caused by ill nourishment, overcrowding, lack of exercise, stinking conditions of life, threaten vast populations. In England war-time conscription revealed an alarming degeneracy of physical quality. The third- line troops were a poor and weedy lot in many battalions, arousing the astonishment and contempt of Dominion
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THE CHANCE OF YOUTH
troops, who said, "Something's wrong with Mother Eng- land if these are her sons!" I shall never forget the ap- pearance of the bantam divisions on the British front in 1916. They were recruited from the undersized fel- lows of the industrial districts, and their average height was about five feet. Some of them were smart little fellows, with the spirit of Hop-o'-My-Thumb, keen and valiant, but many more were stunted in mind as well as in body, with button heads and weedy legs, hollow chests and match-stick arms. When they came into General Haldane's corps he went down their lines, pointing his stick at those obviously unfit for fighting ranks, and put back two-thirds of them for work behind the fines. French peasants watching the Bantam Brigade marching up the roads cried out in pity : " Cre nom de Dieu! UAn- gleterre envoie ses enfantsi" They thought these little undersized men were boys from school.
England and France, above all, must look to their natural physique. The best of their men, the flower of their youth, were cut down in swaths. The unfit, the **C 3" class, the poor weeds of city life, were left alive to be the fathers of the next generation. Only by a national system of physical training, and by a return to natural conditions of fife, shall we restore the old stand- ards of our race and raise the splendor of our youth again. It is up to youth to defend its own rights to physical excellence, to raise itself to heroic heights, and, having gained that glory of manhood, to refuse in their souls to let it be destroyed again in the hard wastefulness of senseless wars.
The youth of the new world that is coming need have no fear that peace will rob it of romance and adventure. The building of that new world upon the ruins of the old; the reshaping of social relations between classes and nations; the pursuit of spiritual truth and beauty; the killing of cruel and evil powers; the conquest of dis-
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ease; the resurrection of art and poetry and lovely j
handicrafts; the calhng back of song and laughter to human Hfe; the joy of flight made safe from death; the prolongation of human life by new discoveries of science; ,
and the reconciling of life and death by faith re-estab- lished in the soul of the world — will be adventure enough to last, let us say, a thousand years from now. ,
That is the chance of youth, standing now at the '
open door, wondering what there is to do and which |
way to take to meet the future. God! If I had youth j
again, I should hke that good adventure, and take the chance.
THE END
ZJ.
ro
THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
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