Chapter X: Part 10

We have not yet got to the moment on which the whole future will hang. When we do, I fancy that this competitive soul of ours may want too much to have things both ways. Whatever the terms of the peace that comes, that peace will not last without a League of Nations to guarantee it; and such a League we cannot have unless impartiality be its backbone; unless we mean that it shall judge justly, and enforce judgment without fear or favour; unless we are willing to accept its judgments in all matters, and not merely when it suits us. A man does not guarantee the health of his body just by holding his neighbour down; and the true path to security and a great future lies in the efforts we make to improve ourselves, rather than in those we make to injure others. The freedom and fair opportunity which are vital to a lasting peace need not bar us from national preparedness, from intelligent effort to save ourselves and our Allies from unfair commercial competition, need not prevent us from assuring our safety and improving our corporate life. But they do mean that we must keep free of a militarist and tyrannical spirit. How far will our competitive British soul, when peace comes, be proof against that virus? Are we, in the winning of military victory, going quietly to accept moral defeat, letting our ideals turn turtle and float with their keels to the stars? I wonder.

This League for Peace we talk of—that even statesmen talk of—will not be born of violent minds, but out of level and long-headedness, and the desire to benefit not only our own country, but the world. It is an undertaking fraught with the most poignant difficulty. If you imagine it fledged from birth, with wings full grown—if you imagine a world disarmed, immediately responsive to law—it is but an Utopian dream. The world will assuredly remain armed; at a single stride one cannot step from hell to heaven. But armedness need not prevent the nations from establishing procedure for the delay of warlike action—a tribunal to which all disputes must be referred; need not prevent them from pledging themselves to forcible support of its decisions, from declaring commerce _sacro-sanct_ between members of the League, and punishing by blockade and ostracism any nation that betrays its membership, or flouts a decision, so that the sanctity of a nation’s commerce may in future depend on that nation’s loyalty to other nations; nor need it prevent States from taking the manufacture of war material out of private hands. Only on the proved efficacy of such measures as these will the disarmament of nations follow, slowly, surely, equally; for man will then be acting, as he loves to act, not by rote and theory, but on the evidence of facts.

Is all this a wild-cat notion, or a mere natural growth out of what went before the war, and out of the terrific tragedy of the war itself—a plan tentative and experimental, that may gradually force its way to confidence, till the Court of Nations reaches the unquestioned authority and permanence of each individual nation’s courts of justice?

We of the Allied countries must surely long for such a plan; nor, I think can any neutral nation which has watched and trembled at this war be other than well-disposed towards it; and, whatever their rulers and journalists may desire, the _peoples_ of the Central Empires will not wish to be left out. Yet when the time comes for peace discussions one sees only too well the deadlock. The Allied nations, if victorious, will not want a round table _séance_ with their enemies and a cosy settlement. The Central Empires will not wish to accept forced membership of a League for Peace founded by their enemies, in which—however mistakenly—they believe they will always be outvoted. This vicious deadlock, however, is less real, I think, than it seems. There are new forces at work; and if a League for Peace can make even a lame and partial start, it may by these new forces soon be fortified. After this war, deep-planted in the heart of every people, whether fighting or looking on, will be the loathing of national aggressiveness! Such a feeling has never existed before because men have never before been so stirred, so injured, and so frightened. We soon forget, of course, all save that of which we are constantly reminded; but the aftermath of this war will be full of startling revelations of the ruin it has caused; the world will reek with reminder that so-called national aspirations cannot with impunity be aggressively pursued; that so-called defensive wars cannot be light-heartedly incepted. During the march of a war, however terrible, the fascination of strife colours and subdues its horror; its heroisms hypnotize, its rancours drug all reason, blur all vision. But in the cold thinned blood of a maimed future, how different it will all seem, how terrifically disproportionate!

Love of country has never before had such calls made on it; men have never so suffered for their patriotism. That, too, must bring a sweeping reaction, which will gradually force the hands of reluctant Governments into adhesion to any scheme which promises relief from a repetition of such agonies. And so, in spite of all the difficulties, I believe some sort of League for Peace will come, imperfect and experimental at first, but which, once founded, will wax and grow strong, in the real—not merely pious—horror of war which will follow this fearful carnival. Let it but hold together for a few years, survive one or two serious trials, and I think no sane nation will ever desire its dissolution.

Such a scheme will not come down to us from Heaven. From our own brains and wills it must spring; from our sense of—shall we say—the inconvenience of wars like this. If the killing and disablement of some ten million men, the waste of some ten to twenty thousand million pounds, persuades us to nothing but the leaving of the world exactly as it was, as liable to these irruptions of death and misery—then, better say with the Spanish poet, “Of all the misfortunes of man, the greatest is to have been born.”

Even before the guns cease roaring, shall not our nine Allied peoples agree informally among themselves upon the structure of a League for Peace, and secure the sympathetic understanding of America, and the other neutral countries, on whose wisdom and good-will so much depends?

I, for one, would wish my Country foremost in pursuing this great chance—wish that she might place all her power in the favouring scale; I would wish to see her as ready to submit to the decisions of an International Tribunal, as each one of us is ready as a matter of course to submit to the decisions of our judges.

We in this green Britain of ours, still free of the invader’s foot, can measure the value of freedom now, looking across to lands waiting for deliverance. No country of Europe but has suffered, during long centuries, outrage and trampling, siege and slaughter, that we have been spared—saved by our sea. It is not irony that calls these the islands of the blessed.

But Fortune is a jealous goddess; and offerings are due to her who has given us an inviolate soil. I seem to see Fortune standing apart, watching—wondering. “What have they made—what are they going to make of their Land?” I seem to see Fortune thinking: “If I grant them success once more, these islanders, are they great enough to survive it? Under my smile the empires of the past one by one went down—Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Rome, others of long, long ago. Will this empire live, or will it too rot away, and sink?”

Those empires of the past fell through prosperity, through inordinate pride, through luxury and slavery hand in hand. May Fortune hold up a mirror to us, that we see ourselves as we are! Freedom and Humanity are not mere words; nor is a people’s greatness measured in acres or in pounds, in the number of its ships on the sea, or of the rifles it can muster. A people’s greatness is in the breadth and quality of its soul, in its fortitude, alertness, justice, gentleness, within itself and to the world without; and in its faith that man has his fate in his own hands.

As the individual, so the State; the aggregate of individual virtue decides and shapes the lot of nations. May there be no slaves among us and none who fatten upon slavery; no brutes among us and none who cower under brutality! Let us not hold ourselves as the elect in a blind patriotism, but have some vision of the world beyond our shores, of its hopes and dreads and natural ambitions. A narrow national spirit never served mankind!

Let the sea be our inspiration and our reminder! For, if it is our fortification, the sea is also our link with all the world, and the greatest force of untamed Nature. It seems to me that they who live dependent on the sea should never be puffed up. Its changing moods and salt winds, its wildness, beauty, desolation, the sudden fates that lurk within it, that leap and clutch and draw away from us our best; the great spaces of it beneath sun and stars—these are constant, and to our souls should surely carry breadth, sweep out of us the littleness of Imperial complacency. The sea is never chained, and the eyes of sailors have in them a look that any man might covet—a steady fronting of something inscrutable, shifting, dangerous. They know the little worth of human strength, the need of unity; they know that when a man slackens his watch, Fate leaps upon him.

The ship of each nation sails a sea of incalculable currents and uncharted channels. Sailing that sea, may we have the eyes of sailors, lest our Fate leap upon us!

Who would not desire, rushing through the thick dark of the future, to stand on the cliffs of vision—two hundred years, say, hence—and view this world?

Will there then be this League for War, this cauldron where, beneath the thin crust, a boiling lava bubbles, and at any minute may break through and leap up, as now, jet high? Will there still be reek and desolation, and man at the mercy of the machines he has made; still be narrow national policies and rancours, and such mutual fear, that no country dare be generous? Or will there be over the whole world something of the glamour that each one of us now sees hovering above his own country; and men and women—all—feel they are natives of one land? Who dare say?

When the guns cease fire and all is still, from the woods and fields and seas, from the skeleton towns of ravaged countries, the wistful dead will rise, and with their eyes accuse us. In that hour we shall have for answer only this: We fought for a better Future for Mankind!

Did we? Do we? That is the great question. Is our gaze really fixed on the far horizon? Or do we only dream it; and have the slain no comfort in their untimely darkness; the maimed, the ruined, the bereaved, no shred of consolation? Is it all to be for nothing but the salving of national prides? And shall the Ironic Spirit fill the whole world with his laughter?

Or shall the nations take the first step in that grand march of real deliverance which will make the whole earth—at last—the islands of the blessed?

THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS, LTD., LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._

_Issued by William Heinemann._

THE ISLAND PHARISEES.
THE MAN OF PROPERTY.
THE COUNTRY HOUSE.
FRATERNITY.
THE PATRICIAN.
THE DARK FLOWER.
THE FREELANDS.

* * * * *

A MOTLEY.
THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY.
THE LITTLE MAN AND OTHER SATIRES.

* * * * *

MOODS, SONGS, AND DOGGERELS.

* * * * *

MEMORIES.
_Illustrated by_ MAUD EARL.

* * * * *

_Issued by other Publishers._

VILLA RUBEIN AND OTHER STORIES.
PLAYS: 3 vols.
A COMMENTARY.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

The list of other works by the author has been moved from the
front of the book to the end. Spelling and hyphenation have been
left as in the original. A few obvious typesetting punctuation
errors have been corrected without note.

[The end of _A Sheaf_ by John Galsworthy]