Chapter LV: After a Year of Journalism: an Outbreak of Auto-Obituary 347 (1)

A YEAR OF PROPHESYING

I

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE FEDERATION OF MANKIND

22.9.23

I am one of those people who believe that if human affairs are to go on without decay and catastrophe, there must be an end to the organisation of war. I believe that the power to prepare for war and make war must be withdrawn from separate States, as already it has been withdrawn from separate cities and from districts and from private individuals, and that ultimately there must be a Confederation of all mankind to keep one peace throughout the world.

The United States of America is but the first instance of a federating process which will, I believe, extend at last to the whole world. Since 1917 I have given much more of my waking life to that vision of a confederated mankind than I have given to any other single interest or subject. And yet I am not a supporter of the League of Nations in its present form, and I do not think that the League of Nations at Geneva is ever likely to develop into an effective World Confederation. It is much more likely to develop into a serious obstacle to such a Confederation. The sooner now that it is scrapped and broken up the better, I think, for mankind. I am hostile to the present League of Nations _because_ I desire the Confederation of Mankind.

I do not think that the obstructive possibilities of the existing League of Nations are sufficiently understood by liberal-minded people throughout the world. I do not think they realise how effectively it may be used as a consumer and waster of the creative energy that would otherwise carry us forward toward World Confederation.

The League of Nations that we saw in our visions in those distressful and yet creative years, 1917-18, was to have been a real step forward in human affairs. It was to have been a repetition on a gigantic scale of that magnificent turning-point in the history of America when it was decided that the conferring representatives of the liberated colonies should talk no longer of the people of Virginia, the people of Georgia, and the people of Massachusetts, but instead of the people of the United States. So in a wider stride we were to begin to forget the particular interests of the people of Germany and of the people of France and of the people of England in a new realisation of the common needs and dangers and sacrifices of the people of the world. So we hoped. So we still try to hope.

But that was far too wide a stride for humanity to take all at once. The League we desired was to have been the first loose conference that would have ended in a federal government for the whole earth. It was to have controlled war establishments from the start, constricted or abolished all private armament firms, created and maintained a world standard of currency, of labour legislation, of health and education, watched the world production of staple articles for the common good, restricted malignant tariff hostilities, negotiated and regulated the migrations of populations, and made the ways of the world, the high seas, and the international land routes alike open and safe for all decent men. So we saw it as a new, brave assertion of human sanity and of the right of all men to a certain fullness of life, against old hates, old prejudices, old debts and claims and limitations.

And there seemed to some of us to be sufficient will in the world then for so bold and great a beginning. I wonder--empty speculation though it is now--if we were indeed so wrong in thinking that--if some man or group of men of supreme genius might not have achieved a real world peace even in 1919. All over the world there were millions of people, prepared by immense sufferings and fears for so drastic a change. There were great masses of people everywhere mentally ready for that League. For many months President Wilson, simply because he had said “League of Nations” plainly and clearly, was the greatest man on earth. He overshadowed Kings and Emperors.

Most of us can still recall that false dawn, that phase of hope. When the first great gathering to inaugurate the English League of Nations Union met in Westminster, people were turned away from the dangerously packed hall, not by the hundred but by the thousand. But it is easier to assemble crowds of enthusiastic people than to give them faithful leaders and capable Ministers. The First Crusade might have taught us that. The new movement had no leaders worth considering, and into the vacuum poured all the eager stuff of the old order. I remember how my heart sank that day when I saw the brightest bishops and the best-advertised Nonconformist leaders, politicians needing a new line of goods, the rising Bar and the social collectors, Mrs. Asquith and her set, all the much-photographed and the much-talked-about, swarming up upon the Westminster platform, pushing well into the limelight, nodding and gesticulating to each other, as gay as if they were at a fashionable wedding, before dear Lord Grey, that dignified image of British statesmanship, read out the platitudes he had prepared for the occasion. The common folk of the earth might want a new organisation of peace in the world, but these people of all people I realised would never give it them.

Things come not so swiftly to suffering mankind. The order has indeed gone forth, men know their need, but the master artisan that will fulfil it has still to learn his business and make his tools. Perhaps he has still to be born. And, meanwhile, in the light of this false dawn, a League of Nations, that hardly pretended even to look like what we desired, was planned in Paris hurriedly and cheaply, and run up at Geneva. It has provided a job for Sir Eric Drummond, a British Foreign Office official unknown to the generality of mankind, and Lord Robert Cecil, hitherto prominent chiefly as the inveterate enemy of unsectarian education in England, secured political resuscitation as its leading advocate. With the permission of France and Great Britain this League has negotiated one or two minor settlements that were not too deeply entangled in the policy of these Great Powers, and it has afforded a number of Spanish-American politicians agreeable, if expensive, holidays in Europe. And whenever one wants to talk of the Confederation of Mankind now, it gets in the way.

We had thought that the League of Nations would abolish diplomacy. We found it had merely added another piece, and a very ineffective piece at that, to the already crowded diplomatic game upon the European board.

That great Confederation of Mankind that we desire, that great peace with variety round and about the earth, cannot arise out of such a beginning. This League of Nations at Geneva is not even the germ of such a thing. Rather it is the instinctive effort of the old European order to stifle this creative idea on its birth by encysting it in a tradition of futility and diplomatic methods. The way to human confederation is by a longer route, and the end is not to be attained by any such hasty constitution as that of the League. The Confederation of Man is a task for generations. Tens of thousands of leaderly men and women must serve that idea and live and die for it before it can approach realisation. Millions must respond to the service of their leadership. The idea must become the fundamental political idea of hundreds of millions, ousting kings and flags from men’s imaginations. Then we can begin to get together an effective ruling body. A stupendous task, you say, but not an impossible one. A day will come, I believe, when this great dream will be realised, when all the paraphernalia of war or of national sovereignty--it is the same thing--will have followed the stone gods and human sacrifices to limbo, and when a new phase of human experience will begin.

So far there has been no real civilisation of the world; civilisation is still only an occasional incident, a passing gleam of promise in the lives of a handful of people here and there. But civilisation will come at last for all. It is about that coming of a world confederation and of the world civilisation it will make possible, that I shall be writing chiefly in this series of weekly articles. Now and then I shall diverge to other topics, but that will be my main theme, the realisation of civilisation. I shall consider scientific progress, educational and social work, political happenings, and the general trend of current events, and almost always I shall consider them in direct relation to that new age that lies before mankind. I shall write about the signs of the times and about typical men and women just as they seem to be making or marring these creative hopes. I do not expect my readers to agree with me always. I shall write about contentious things, and my last thought will be of pleasing or propitiating. At times I shall certainly irritate. But I hope to interest. And some few of my younger readers, at least, I hope to infect with that same idea of creative service for the new civilisation which possesses my own life.

II

THE BEAUTY OF FLYING

29.9.23

This last summer I had a number of aeroplane journeys about Europe. I had flights in several of the big omnibus aeroplanes that fly on the more or less regular European services, and also I flew as the single passenger in smaller open machines. There is a delight and wonder in the latter sort of flying altogether lost in the boxed-in aeroplane.

International jealousies, commercial rivalries, and the meanness of outlook universally prevalent in Europe at the present time are muddling away most of the possible freedom and happiness of air travel. I flew from London to Amsterdam, but I had to get my money back for the rest of the journey to Berlin, and take a night train, because of some hitch in the German arrangements, and similarly the Franco-Rumanian service from Vienna via Prague and Strassburg to Paris, so triumphantly inaugurated a little while ago, was in a state of dislocation, and I had to make that journey round by way of Holland to avoid the inconveniences and delays due to the fooleries of French “policy” upon the Rhine. But I flew, when there was a machine to fly in and no patriotic idiocy to prevent it, and I have renewed and strengthened my sense of the sweetness and beauty of air travel--in the small open machine.

As I hung in the crystalline air above the mountains of Slovakia, far above the wooded hills and deep green gorges, with the culminating masses of the Little Carpathians heaped up to the right of me and the line of the White Carpathians away to the left, and ahead of me, still dim and distant, the striped fields and villages of the plain of Bratislava; and as I turned about and looked at the blue Moravian lands behind me, with every stream and pool picked out in molten silver by the afternoon sun, I was as near the summit of felicity as I have been in all my very pleasant life. Ever and again we overtook some little puff of cloud. There were little troops of bright white cloudlets that raced with us eastward, swift and noiseless; their shadows raced our own little shadow up the slopes and across the forest crests below, and their whiteness and their transitory cool embrace as we passed through them, enhanced by contrast the sunlit clearness and brightness of the outspread world.

For the first part of my flight that day I was accompanied by three other Czech machines. They were fighting aeroplanes. They came up abreast of me in the liquid air, and their aviators signalled to me, and then, suddenly, they dived and swept over in a loop and fell down like dead leaves for a thousand feet or so and righted themselves and flew home again to Prague. I have seen such manœuvres before from the ground, but they are far more graceful and lovely when one floats above them and watches the aeroplane drop down like a falling kite, almost, it seems, to the spires and tree-tops.

At last we began to descend, and circled down to Nitra, a place I had never heard of before, a wonderfully beautiful and, I should think, a very prosperous town, with a great church and many spires, and from the aerodrome at Nitra I started again two days later to return to Prague. The weather was unsettled, and the most hopeful time for flying was the early morning. I left Topolcany, where I had been staying, at dawn, therefore, with a full moon shining brightly in a rain-washed sky, and after a little misadventure and a cut head in a ditch, for automobiles are much less safe than aeroplanes, and the roads that morning were wet mire, reached Nitra at sunrise and rose with the red blaze of the sun above the hills.

Sun and aeroplane seemed to soar up together. Never before had I been up in the air so early in the morning. All the little trees below were blobs and dots, but they cast shadows hundreds of feet long, and in the deep blue nooks and crannies of the gold-lit hills the white mists huddled.

The wind rose against us as we returned and blew a gale. We took four hours to make a journey that the other way, before the wind, had taken little more than two. Between Brunn and Prague the aeroplane swayed and danced like a kite on its string, and ever and again found an air pocket and dropped a few score feet. But though I am but a moderate sailor, I do not get air-sick; and to sit loose and lax and unafraid, strapped into an open aeroplane, drenched in sweet air, is altogether different from being enclosed in an air omnibus. I had rather be four hours in an open aeroplane in a high wind than two in an automobile on a bad road or one in a Channel steamboat on a rough day.

Those two flights in Slovakia are among the very happiest experiences I have ever had in my life. And it irks me to think that, because of the incoherent muddle of human affairs, things go so slowly that I shall probably never be able to go round the world in the same delightful fashion, and fly over the deserts of Arabia and the plains of India, and down the gorges of the Yang-tse-Kiang. All these things I might do in a saner world. The places exist, the discoveries have been made, but a magic net of rivalries, obstructions, and vile preoccupations, delays the consummation of these bright possibilities. A happier generation will have all these pleasures within its reach. Such an aeroplane as the one I flew in need not cost more than a Ford car, even now, and it is almost as easy to fly as it is to drive an automobile.

But, of course, all such things must wait, and civilisation must wait, until M. Poincaré has collected the claims of France upon Germany or smashed up Europe. It is so much more important, you understand, to collect these legendary, impossible debts, that one little scrap of Europe has figured up against another little scrap of Europe, than to get on with living. The Germans must not be allowed to develop their air services; that would never do for the politicians; and, indeed, every European country must do all it can to restrain the air development of every other country. We must all get in each other’s way; that is the “common sense” of national “policy.” Why else are we all boxed up in little separate sovereign States? And so you and I, Dear Reader, will never get more than such brief samples and intimations of the happiness we might have in the air, and most people now alive in the world will never get to flying at all. They will die and never know. They will grub along the earth’s surface and die with this great delight almost within their reach, taunting them by its humming passage across their sky.

III

THE TRIUMPH OF FRANCE

6.10.23

The long-spun-out passive resistance in the Ruhr is over, and the controlled, instructed, and disciplined French Press, and the more than French Press which serves the national interests of France in Great Britain and Holland and other European countries, is cock-a-hoop with the clamour of this empty victory. Let us consider what it means for civilisation and the world at large.

Men’s memories are short, and it may be well to remind them of the broad facts that have led up to this outrageous, pitiful struggle of the Ruhr. In November 1918 the German people, after an unexampled struggle of four years, surrendered to the Allied Powers arrayed against them. They surrendered on the promises held out to them by the Fourteen Points of President Wilson and by the British propaganda of Crewe House. They surrendered, and they were disarmed and placed in a position in which it was impossible for them to resume resistance. The Americans and British, at any rate, were bound in honour to see that the virtual pact of the surrender was observed, and they did not do so. A peace was put over the German peoples having no relation to the clear understanding of the virtual pact of the surrender, and the bill for damages and reparations was figured up against them utterly beyond their capacity to pay. The Germans signed the Peace Treaty only after the most strenuous protests and because they were then powerless to do anything else. The Treaty was not a bargain to which they agreed, it was a monstrous and impossible obligation rammed down their throats.

There can be only two judgments about this over-charge. Either it was made out of sheer ignorance and levity, or it was made with the deliberate intention of keeping Germany henceforth in arrears and in the wrong, so that at any sign of economic or political revival she could be at once claimed against and stricken down again. Possibly ignorance and levity mingled with foreseeing malignity in the counsels at Versailles. But the temptations created by the situation have proved irresistible. Throughout the years immediately following this Treaty France has never faltered from her conception that the new peace was only the continuation and completion of her ages-long feud against Germany. She has been quietly and steadfastly strangling Germany in the name of her debt. At Washington she refused to discuss the question of land disarmament--some of us can still recall M. Briand’s preposterous speech about the concealed arms and hidden armies of Germany--and across the amiable, foolish face of the Geneva League of Nations she has woven a net of armed alliances, heaping guns and dull and overwhelming expense upon the insolvent peasant States of Eastern Europe, and dissipating the money she owes to Britain and America upon fresh military adventures. She is now indisputably in military control of Europe. Great Britain has displayed no such fixity of intention as France, and, particularly since the downfall of Mr. Lloyd George, has just rolled about in an uneasy, protesting manner. America has withdrawn in a state of virtuous indignation from the mess she helped so carelessly and generously to make.

Until the spring of this year Germany continued to make very considerable but insufficient payments to her conquerors. There seemed, indeed, a possibility that she might presently muddle back to a tolerable and honourable position in European affairs. France perceived that the hour had come for effective action; and Mr. Lloyd George being by that time out of her way, she occupied the Ruhr, the industrial heart of Germany. She occupied it without the consent of her Allies, and so illegally; and with an utter disregard of the interests of Britain, who came to her rescue when she was faint with terror in 1914. She occupied it with every circumstance of petty insolence. Most of us have seen photographs and kinema films of the French troops strutting through the disarmed, defenceless German towns, and the French officers hitting off the hats and smacking the faces of any bystanders who did not display sufficient reverence for their intrusive flag.

I cannot imagine what black murder would not spring up in the hearts of an American or British population treated as the Germans were treated this spring. The behaviour of the Germans has indeed been amazingly patient. The rest of Germany has wrecked itself financially in a desperate attempt to sustain the Ruhr workers in an attitude of passive resistance, and now at last these overwhelming payments have to cease. For the better part of a year the trade and industry of Central Europe has been dislocated. A year of human life and human production has been frittered away in this struggle. The great economic machine of Western Germany is now like some complex piece of apparatus that has been fought for by infuriated children. How deep the physical and moral wounds inflicted on the war-exhausted, depleted being of Germany may be we can as yet only speculate.

But France has achieved a great victory in this new war, for war it is, against an unarmed antagonist. She is victorious, and the tricolour triumphs over Europe. The passive resistance of the Ruhr has been abandoned and the German Government has been unable to get any conditions from France in exchange for this surrender. The debt looms as large as ever, the possibility of effective payments is much remoter than it has been before, and France is in a stronger position argumentatively than she has even been. She can still go on counting her steadily accumulating claim. She can proceed, whenever she wishes to do so, to fresh seizures, further occupations, and further humiliations for her defeated enemy. There is no boundary set, by anything that has happened, to the systematic disintegration of the great civilisation of Germany. Germans may be found vile enough and foolish enough to assist in the political fragmentation of their own people. Presently we may see Germany broken up into half a dozen nasty little retrogressive States, all played off against each other to their mutual enfeeblement by France.

Then, except for an ambiguous Italy, there will be nothing left upon the Continent of Europe but a victorious France and her smashed and broken antagonists and her servile and uncertain allied peasant States, Europe Balkanised from the Rhine to the Black Sea. It will be a realisation of the great dreams of Napoleon I, a hundred and twenty years later. True, Russia will loom rather dark and rather neglected in the background of the French millennium, but the French think that from a military or political point of view Russia is to be counted out for the next fifty years. And, as the happy achievement of “security” in Europe becomes more certain, France will be able to turn her attention to her old rival and temporary ally across the Channel. French ideas of trade and economics have always been nationalist and monopolistic, and at last she will be in a position to apply to Britain with real effect that system of exclusion from the markets of Europe, the Continental system, which failed when Napoleon I first devised and tried it a century or more ago. Moreover, she will be at last able to reopen the discussion of the proper ownership of the vast natural resources of Central Africa, at present largely shared by the British. The victory of the Ruhr is a considerable victory, a great hungry victory, but it is only one in a sustained campaign in the realisation of a policy centuries old, the policy of French predominance in the European world. France has had revolutions and reverses, but her nationalism is the intensest of all nationalism, and her conception of international policy has been the same under Bourbon, Bonaparte, or Republic. She seems to be incapable of any such ideas as co-operation, coalescence, union, pooling, reconciliation, reconstruction on a broader basis, brotherhood of nations or the like. There is no stopping her. She will thrust her fluttering tricolour, her brave little men in horizon blue and steel helmets, her intrigues and her claims, farther and farther over a suffering, disorganised world--until she becomes by common consent impossible.

The Ruhr is a great victory for France, and it has won her nothing. What next will she do after the Ruhr?

IV

THE SINGAPORE ARSENAL

13.10.23

It is proposed that Great Britain, which is too shabbily poor to give the mass of its own children more than half an elementary education, which cannot house its workers with comfort or decency, which has over a million unemployed, shall spend great sums of money upon a naval establishment at Singapore. This undertaking is just not within the positive prohibitions of the Washington Agreement. It is a few hundred miles west of the area involved in that Agreement. But it is flatly contrary to the spirit of the Washington gathering. It is a frank provocation to crippled and devastated Japan; it dominates the route of the French to Tonkin; it is a contemptuous gesture at any American notions about the “freedom of the seas.”

Provided cruisers and battleships are to play a part in the “next war,” it is an admirably chosen position. Let the reader look it up in any atlas and see how its submarines will be able to radiate over the adjacent seas and how all India supports it. It is fairly well placed for air war also. On the supposition that the world is still to go on divided among aggressive sovereign States, with phases of war preparation called peace and acute phases of more and more destructive war, it is quite a good move in the game. On the supposition that the world is growing up to any age of reason and that a world civilisation is attainable, it is a monstrously stupid crime.

When I was at the Washington Conference upon the Limitation of Armaments I denounced the French with what many people thought was an extreme bitterness for their reliance upon submarines and Senegalese troops. This British feat at Singapore deserves an equal denunciation. These preparations of the French and British are equally acts of war against the general peace of mankind. It is no good treating the French as though they alone were outraging the unity of mankind with their great armies and equipments. Great Britain, we now see by this crime at Singapore, is just as mischievously and criminally disposed. Both Powers are disturbers of the peace and destroyers of human hope.

But when the thing is done by one’s own country and by people we know, one sees more of it and more of the humanity of it than when it happens abroad; and I find a particular figure floating before my mind now whenever I hear or read the word Singapore. He will serve as my type specimen for this aggressive and troublesome British imperialism, and very probably the essential wickedness of French policy finds its embodiment in some quite similar personalities.

In which case we are not up against wickedness, but against--what shall I say?--a retardation of mental development.

My type specimen is the First Lord of the Admiralty in the present[1] British Government, Mr. Amery. He is a pleasantly smiling, short, thick-set lad of fifteen. He was born in 1873, but in 1889, when he should have become sixteen, he was living the life of an exceptionally clever boy at Harrow, and somehow just became fifteen again, and he has remained fifteen ever since. Every year his birthday comes round without the slightest effect upon him. He may be a little more substantial, but his bland, clean-shaven face is the same that confronted the Harrow masters. He has just the same smile. He went on to a brilliant career at Balliol College, Oxford, always famous for its retardation of adolescence, and emerged a devotee of the British Empire and of the games of Foreign Policy and War. Kipling was new to men then, and that generation was drunken with him. Cecil Rhodes was a great inspiration in the land. He could not have preached salvation by Anglo-Saxons more earnestly if he had been Mr. Lothrop Stoddard. Mr. Amery, under these influences and by a natural inclination, dedicated his life to the British Empire, any British Empire apparently and whatever it did, and he has been so busy serving it ever since that he has never had time to think what it is at all.

[1] October 1923.

He is one of a group of interesting youths of fifteen who focussed upon Balliol College. But most of the others have become portly or bald, or they have grown whiskers or such-like disguises; none of them still show their fifteen-ness as engagingly as Mr. Amery.

Now the mind of a boy of fifteen is a very interesting sort of mind. Imagination is awake and lively, but it is still a narrow imagination. Many of the emotions and social devotions are still undeveloped. A boy of fifteen is still capable of making a volcano in the garden with all the available explosives; he likes mixing chemicals to see what will happen; he thinks the loveliest possession in the world is a gun. If you give him a toy railway system he will take great pains to arrange for a really smashing collision. Towards women he is a Spartan--a Red Indian. Something of fifteen still lingers in my own composition, though most of me is a little older, and before the war I used to play a great war-game on my barn floor with lead soldiers, realistic scenery and guns that hit, with other boys, actually and sometimes even chronologically fifteen. Unflinching fellows those lead soldiers were; they left no widows and orphans, and if one got disabled there was no pension. You melted him down.

Now both Mr. Amery and I would like to play soldiers with the world. But while Mr. Amery has remained fifteen through and through, large parts of me have gone on growing older. This older section of me can see men as something more than lead soldiers, and realise war in terms of spilled human life and utter waste and as a stupid massacre of boys and young men. Even that war-game we used to play in our barn left the floor in a weary-looking muddle, and was a bore to put away. But the highest expression of Mr. Amery’s being is, I perceive, to play soldiers and battleships with mankind.

And the amazing thing is that we let him!

We are disposed to let this man with the soul of a fifteen-year-old kid spend money for which our schools are being starved, upon this solemn childishness at Singapore. And there may be thousands of us doomed to wounds and blood and tears under the plump hands and knees of Mr. Amery and his little friends and their antagonists as they crawl about their game on the floor of the world.

But if I can see Mr. Amery, not as a black devotee of blood-lust but as an innocent perennial juvenile, then I am bound if I can to see the same thing in France. Those people over there who are opening new boxes of African soldiers and setting them down in Germany, and who are so secret and busy with their submarines, are probably just such innocents as Mr. Amery--just as solemnly fifteen. They have not yet learnt to see the world in terms of life. And, if so, the cure for war is not so much for the world to grow better as for the world to grow up.

Mr. Amery is not a bit terrible personally, but it is terrible that he should have any sort of control of the serious things of life. I think he ought to be kept out of mischief--just as I think another lad of the same age, Mr. Winston Churchill, ought to be kept out of mischief, in some sort of institution where he can play Kriegspiel for the rest of his existence without endangering human life. And I ask reasonable adult men in France whether the time is not ripe for a similar segregation of puerility from their Foreign Office and War Office out of the reach of mischief. Perhaps the 1924 electors will do something in that direction. If these lads presently get a game of war going between France and England we shall have the whole fabric of civilisation so entirely in ruins before it is over that I doubt if it will be reconstructed for many centuries.

V

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AGAIN

20.10.23

I opened this series of articles with an attack on the existing League of Nations at Geneva. This attack provoked a very considerable correspondence in reply. Hardly anyone was disposed to defend the League as perfect or satisfactory, but it was urged that it was a beginning, a germ, a young thing that might accumulate power and prestige, that its intentions were admirable, that it embodied and sustained an ideal, and that if it were destroyed there would be nothing to stand between the nations at all. I was reproached because--after an advocacy of world unity for a quarter of a century--I refused to recognise this poor diplomatic changeling as the birth of my desires.

It is perhaps desirable that I should answer these criticisms and state a little more explicitly why I think this affair at Geneva is worse than no league of mankind at all. I do not think it can ever develop into a serviceable organ for world civilisation, because I think that it was planned from the outset upon the wrong lines; and that it is as reasonable to support it in the hope of its growing to meet the world’s needs as it would be to buy a broken-down perambulator in the hope that it would presently develop into a much needed automobile.

The Geneva League of Nations is a start, I admit, but it is a start in the wrong direction; and before we can get upon the way to any real collective organisation of world affairs we have to retrace our steps to the starting-point before there was any League. The League is malformed in such a way that it can never hope to grow straight and strong.

One primary fault in the structure of this existing League is its complete abandonment to the idea of national sovereignty in its intensest and most mischievous form. Any little bundle of human beings, however small, illiterate, and unimportant, provided only that it was a law unto itself and waved a flag about and insisted upon a cantankerous independence, was regarded as a possible unit by the pedants who devised the League. Any body of people, however numerous, intelligent, and significant in human affairs, provided it had grouped itself into any other larger political aggregation, ceased, on the other hand, to be anything but a merged participator in the League’s affairs. So Abyssinia, in which there are probably not two hundred people capable of understanding the rudiments of world politics, could be considered seriously as a member of this absurd association, while Scotland, the best educated country in Europe, was not to appear except as a button or collar-stud, so to speak, upon the figure of the British representative.

The manifest consequences of such a preposterous recognition of separatism, the inevitable feebleness and disingenuousness of a League based upon such ideas, were pointed out as early as May 1918 in a memorandum issued by the official propaganda organisation of the British Government at Crewe House. Crewe House was rather a thorn in the side of the dear old British Foreign Office; in 1918 it was asking for a definition of Allied war aims and all sorts of inconvenient, honest questions. The memorandum was treated according to the best diplomatic precedents. Although we were making it the basis of extravagant promises to Germany, it was never communicated, as it should have been, to the French and Italians. At the end of the war the promises of Crewe House dropped out of the victorious picture. The reasoning and the warnings of this memorandum were entirely ignored by the hasty gentlemen at Versailles who threw together the Geneva League of Nations.

These gentlemen seem to have been profoundly influenced by an infantile analogy between a sovereign State and an individual man. This is the age of democracy; and the League, most marvellous formula! was “to make the world safe for democracy.” Modern democracy is taken to mean so much political equality between adult and adult as may be achieved by giving each individual a vote. What more easy or--if you think it out--more fallacious than to transfer this idea to sovereign States and give each of them a vote in a wonderful congress of mankind? But one sovereign State is not like another sovereign State, as one individual man is like another; the difference between this sovereign State and that is far profounder even than the difference between animals of different classes. The difference in structure, complexity, function, and destiny, for example, between the organisation known as the United States of America and that known as Nicaragua is a difference as wide as that between the whole plant of a great industrial district and a small domestic mangle. But in the original Covenant of the League both were treated as individuals differing only a little in size and importance. Liberia, Belgium, France, Hayti, and the Hedjaz were all to be--and they are!--citizens in this marvellous republic of States. It is like treating a jar of pickles, an opera house, a battleship, a bundle of sugar-cane, and a small travelling bag as equivalent things. Any old thing with a flag on it--that is the rule.

Can you expect the debates and divisions of a body so constituted to have any restraining influence upon the policies and practices of the Great Powers? It is treated with open contempt in France and Italy, and if there is a sort of support for it in Great Britain it is largely because there is a feeling that with Lord Balfour and Lord Robert Cecil to the fore and with its British Foreign Office Secretary and so forth its procedure can be manipulated in the interests of the--I won’t say British, for that is too good a word to use--the “Anglican” Empire.

Now my case is that this constitution of the League is for the reasons I have stated bad beyond all patching. There is, I hold, no need at all to base the thing we need upon a sham Parliament of a miscellany of sovereign States, big or little, civilised or savage. What civilisation needs are open, efficient, and authoritative controls of certain universal interests, controls representing the great mass of civilised people and their common world interests. For all practical ends it would be infinitely better to let Liberia, Hayti, the Hedjaz, and the like go hang. Such little, such parochial States ought to learn to combine up with kindred organisations--or hold their peace in world affairs. Not one of them contains as many people educated up to ideas of world policy as, let us say, any outlying suburb of Amsterdam. If half a dozen of the bigger political systems of the world, or even two or three, could get together to sustain a common monetary standard, a common transport control, a common law court, a tariff union, a mutual defence system, and a common guarantee of disarmament, they would achieve something beyond the uttermost possibilities of this Geneva affair.

So much political coalescence on the part--to take an example boldly--of the United States, the British system, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries would form a nucleus so large and influential that upon it the rest of the world, however fiercely nationalist at heart, would in the end be obliged to crystallise. I believe all these countries I have named, and Latin America and Spain and Portugal to boot, could pool their foreign policies--for that is what any genuine League of Nations means--without encountering insuperable difficulties. The worst barrier would be tariffs, but I do not believe that would be an invincible barrier. Such a club of civilised peoples would very speedily have all the rest of the world on its waiting list. And I do not see why its achievement should be any more difficult than, or indeed nearly as difficult as, bolstering up this ineffective pretence, the present League of Nations. I contend that instead of there being no alternative to the League of Nations the way would open quite naturally to such alternatives, directly it was cleared out of the way. It would, for instance--if only on account of the United States--be much easier to set up a great International Court of Justice with proper sanctions without the League than with it.

It is not as though the present League had accumulated any honour or prestige during its four years of life in Geneva. In the case of the Polish attack on Russia, in the case of the Greek aggressions on Turkey, in regard to the occupation of the Ruhr, the murderous bombardment of Corfu, and the stealing of the Greek deposit by the Council of Ambassadors to bring the Italians to evacuate Corfu, it has shown itself trivial, useless, and ridiculous. It is either silent before such outrages or it speaks with a quavering voice and nobody listens. It is a blind alley for good intentions, it is a weedy dump for all the weaknesses of European liberalism. Its past is contemptible, and the briefer the future of its present constitution the better for mankind.

VI

THE AVIATION OF THE HALF-CIVILISED

27.10.23

It is probable that the first adequate and successful inauguration of air transport will be in North and South America, but it is in Europe that the needs and possibilities are greatest; and were it not for the short-sightedness and petty competitiveness of the Europeans it is in Europe that flying might first become the usual method of travel for distances of over three hundred miles. Europe is so cut up by channels, sands, bays, Zuyder Zees, Adriatics and Baltic Seas and the like, she has so clumsy and ill-planned a railway network, planned upon national lines to restrict too ready movements across frontiers, that she calls aloud for the aeroplane to soar over these wet obstacles and tangled confusions. But the chief intent and occupation of European administrators nowadays lies in spoiling the efforts of and making life insupportable for other Europeans, and naturally flying presents itself to them chiefly as a provocation to international sabotage. Most of the air services we hear about in Europe are hopelessly inadequate to the needs of civilised people who want to travel conveniently and beautifully. They are uncomfortable, unpunctual, dangerous, ridiculous, and--in view of what might be--pitiful.

It is as absurd to think of an air tour of Western Europe as it would be to think of an automobile tour of the Balkans and Asia Minor. The countries concerned are not sufficiently civilised to allow of such methods of transport.

Occasionally one sees maps in the newspapers showing the most wonderful network of air routes all over Europe: London to Moscow, Manchester to Constantinople, and the like. Any travel bureau will hand the credulous inquirer neat little handbills of air services, showing how he may breakfast in London and dine in Berlin, and so forth. Let the credulous inquirer try these services. He will find a few tired and badly overhauled machines run by companies with entirely insufficient supplies, plying in a mood of hectic uncertainty over some of these routes. On others the only thing he will find soaring will be soaring promises. And he will find very little hope in the future of any better services.

I tried an air tour of Europe this summer. I did not warn any of the new companies concerned that I meant to write about them. I went as an ordinary passenger. Let me tell my experiences very briefly.

I started with a ticket for Berlin from London, and my first flight was to Amsterdam. I started on a perfect day for flying. But as we approached the Channel it became evident that we were not going to cross the water, but that we were swerving round to Lympne. Something had gone wrong. We landed at Lympne. The aviator apologised; he had an oil leakage. Matters were patched up, and we got up again and flew to Amsterdam. There the oil leakage was worse than ever, and we could not have gone much farther. A head-wind or a sudden storm might have got us into serious trouble. We had been flying in a machine that had not been sedulously overhauled, an overworked machine.

Next day I should have flown on to Berlin. When I went to the Amsterdam office to start, I learned that no aeroplane had come from Berlin for two days--though it was admirable flying weather--and the office could not tell me when a machine would be available. Apparently there had been some financial dislocation of the German service. I had to get round to various European towns I wanted to visit by means of the shabby, disheartened railway services of Central Europe. Returning, I did secure tickets for Paris from Prague by the Franco-Rumanian Air Company, which professes to run a swift and regular service from Bucharest to Paris. At the Prague aerodrome there is a vainglorious monument, an obelisk, to commemorate the foundation of this company. That and the office in Prague, where I got my money back, was as much as I saw of the Franco-Rumanian Company. Thanks to certain fortunate chances, which made me independent of private enterprise aeroplane companies, I had had some beautiful flying in Czecho-Slovakia. I made three delightful flights on three separate days, and on two of these days the French machines were not going to Strassburg “on account of the weather.”

The real trouble of that particular company, however, was not the weather, but a shortage of machines. The company has no understanding with the German Government, and its route lies over German territory from Czecho-Slovakia to Strassburg. Badly overhauled machines are never safe to get to their destination, and, I was told, eleven Franco-Rumanian aeroplanes, forced to descend on German territory, had been seized by the Germans.

’Planes were coming to Prague from Warsaw and Vienna and depositing passengers there to get through to their destinations as well as they could, but there was nothing going on to Strassburg. I got to Paris from Prague by train via Amsterdam! That is the present route between these two places, and I suppose it will remain so until our great-grandchildren, if any, see what is left of the French removed from what is left of the Ruhr Valley.

From Paris I started by an English service for London. We started with an air of tremendous punctuality and efficiency from the Hôtel Crillon at three in the afternoon. I reckoned we should be up by 3.30, and that I should dine in London at half-past seven or eight. But we muddled about at the aerodrome of Le Bourget until nearly five, booking luggage, fooling with passports, packing the all too big and clumsy omnibus machine. I sat in a seat with a lot of valises and hat boxes, tied precariously with string, swaying in front of my nose. The saloon had a worn and weary look; it was not nearly so pretty as it is in the advertisement pictures. We made a fairly good flight to the coast except that now and then the engine popped a little. We rose over the water, as usual, to about five thousand feet. Then as we came within distant sight of Dungeness, one engine began to miss badly. I noticed that we were dropping rapidly. However, we escaped a ducking. We crossed the coast-line while still at nearly two thousand feet and landed at Lympne. Apologies. The defective engine, we were told, was in a hopeless condition, and the company must send us passengers on in cars to a rural railway station and so by slow train to London, to arrive at heaven knows what hour. There was no attempt whatever to bring up a reserve aeroplane from Croydon; I presume because the company has no reserve aeroplanes available. I had the good luck to find a friend at Lympne who took me to his house for the night and turned my misfortune into pleasure, but my fellow-passengers were not so fortunate.

Luckily I was not a passenger in the French Goliath which crashed at West Malling in August last. I have flown successfully on one occasion from Paris to London in a French Goliath, and on another have started from London to Paris and had a forced landing at Lympne. These Goliaths are quite good machines, but they seem to be unlucky ones. That West Malling disaster was only another such story of “private enterprise” flying as I have told, but carried to the pitch of tragedy. The unfortunate machine must have been in a shocking condition of maladjustment. It had already been down at Lympne for patching, and was going on to Croydon. The radiator of the port engine had been leaking. Then as it went on to Croydon the starboard engine failed completely. But we have always been told, perhaps untruthfully, that even if one engine of these double engine machines fails the other suffices to carry on to a safe landing. The port engine was still going. The aviator declared at first that there was a panic among the passengers, and that is why he crashed in a nut plantation. I doubt about the panic. But at any rate, here again was a machine in use in a condition quite unfit for passenger traffic, so that it needed only a momentary nervous failure to destroy it.

The moral I draw here to-day is to repeat exactly what I maintained upon the British Civil Air Transport Commission in 1918. “Private enterprise” cannot run successful European air services. Moreover, it is impossible to control the air services of Europe on nationalist lines. You cannot have nearly forty sovereign countries each trying to wreck the air service of the other thirty-nine. Europe must be one area for air transport under one control, or there can be nothing but a few ferry services in operation. One comprehensive European air trust, with hundreds and presently thousands of aeroplanes in daily flight and two or three in reserve and under over-haul for every one in the air, would have in the end an enormously profitable organisation. But Europe to-day is as morally incapable of producing such an organisation as Central Africa. These risky trips in dud machines and these flowery prospectuses of defective services are as much organised public flying as this generation is likely to see in Europe.

VII

WILL GERMANY BREAK INTO PIECES?

3.11.23

Will Germany break into pieces and become a group of divergent and mutually hostile States?

To some readers this will seem to be an entirely useless question. They will declare that the thing is happening. Germany is breaking up visibly, they will say. Germany has attempted a democratic republic and failed. The daily news is kaleidoscopic. It varies with the day and the political bias of one’s paper. Sometimes Germany is breaking in this way and sometimes in that. But few people seem to have much faith in the final emergence of a united Germany from this sea of disaster and misery in Central Europe.

Perhaps I believe too much in the things of the mind and imagination, in language and writing and literature as a link and a sustaining power in human affairs, but I do not share this belief in the break-up of Germany. I believe she will keep together as Russian-speaking Russia has kept together, and become again a great nation and a great people playing a leading part in the world’s destinies.

It is true that her new democratic institutions have worked feebly and disastrously. But just at present what we call democratic institutions, our old clumsy system of voting and representative government that is, are not working particularly well in any European country. One cannot congratulate either Great Britain or France or Italy upon its triumphant democracy just at the present time. The duly elected British Government is unable to carry out its obvious foreign policy effectively because it is shouted down by a millionaire newspaper-owner suffering from Napoleonic mania, and in France the expression of public opinion is not so much shouted down as battened down under a centralised and all-powerful Press combine. France behaves with the concentrated vigour of monomania, and Great Britain with the self-regardful evasiveness of the feeble-minded, and the common citizen of neither country is really justified in an attitude of superiority towards the distraught and leaderless German.