Chapter LV: After a Year of Journalism: an Outbreak of Auto-Obituary 347 (2)

Distraught and leaderless the Germans are, and--which is perhaps the greatest misfortune that can happen to a people in the face of a steadfast enemy--without a leading idea to hold them together. We have to remember that this great people, the Germans, lost their way in 1848, and have still to recover it. At that time there was a reasonable prospect of a Republican United States of Germany. It was wrecked by the habitual particularism of Germany, and by the self-seeking treason of the Hohenzollerns. Germany was unified later, but from above and not from below, by a crown and dynasty and not by education and an educated popular will, and Germany is still reaping the consequences of that misfortune.

It is not the least among the endless inconveniences of monarchy that it substitutes an unreal symbol for real ideas of unity. Instead of a cult of brotherhood, instead of a pride in the achievements of one’s own people in science and art and social progress and the service of mankind, there is substituted, more or less completely, an idiot adulation of the crowned head and his womankind and their offspring. The school children of a monarchist country are trained up to a worship of these glorified individuals; the flag becomes a carpet beneath the feet of their deities, and their attention is diverted from their own pride and honour as future members of a great community. Many people never grow up out of the obsessions of a royalist training, and so it is that the collapse of the Hohenzollern system has left great masses of the German people imaginatively bankrupt and utterly confused. Any people who had had the same training and the same experience would be equally at a loss and helpless. The idea of a great German republic, one and indivisible, has to be built up now in an atmosphere of unparalleled storm, confusion, and disaster.

It cannot be built up all at once, and meanwhile anything superficial in the way of separations may happen to Germany. I will not attempt to discuss the bubblings of separatism and monarchist extremism that are going on. But one probability is very present in my mind. It is one of the paradoxes of the Russian situation that the Communist Government of Moscow survives there very largely because under the stress of foreign invasions and the foreign-subsidised devastations of White adventurers it became a patriotic Government. In Germany now, neither the big industrials, the old Junkers, nor the ruling classes generally seem to have the wit and generosity to think of their civilisation as a whole. The Communists do--after their fashion. At present the Communists are showing no overwhelming strength in German affairs, but a time may come when great numbers of the German people, trained in hardship, ruined and desperate, may turn to this one party which tells the same story in the Rhineland and Bavaria and Saxony and Prussia.

We have, I think, to count it among the possibilities of the present situation that a Communist Government may presently be fighting for German integrity against foreign domination in Berlin, and that great masses of the German people, like the Russians, may prefer even Communism to the certain shames and indignities of separatism. In which case Monsieur Poincaré will, I suppose, beat up his armies of blacks and whites and march on Berlin. With an “extension” trip to Moscow to follow.

Yet even after that Germany will survive. Twice before in her history Germany has arisen out of desolation and defeat. I believe she will rise again out of her present darkness and end at last the central and leading Power, the very keystone, it may be, of a reconstructed Europe. I believe in the German schoolmaster, the German student, in German persistency, and the patient strength of the German brain. I hated and hate that bastard imitative Byzantine-German Imperialism and German Junkerism, and I believe that our war to shatter these things was a necessary war. But I have never faltered in my belief in the greatness and soundness of the German people, and in my appreciation of all that we owe in intellectual, social, and industrial stimulus to Germany.

Her present situation is unparalleled. Every attempt she makes to get to her feet is thwarted by her pitiless, senseless foe. Our English-speaking peoples, in our slow, oafish way, are looking on, are assisting, at an attempt to waste and torment to death a great community as civilised as our own. We never came into the war for any such objective, and I do not believe that we shall stand by to the end in the face of this iniquity.

But anyhow, I believe that Germany will come back. Her common language and now her common miseries will keep her one. She has many enemies, but on her side now is the long reach and the long memory of the printed word. Bohemia, Czecho-Slovakia as we call it now, rose again after an almost complete extinction of three hundred years. Dark years are before Germany and a terrible winter, but in two years or ten years Germany will have found her Masaryk and her Benes and be on her way to recovery.

I would not like to be a German separatist in the days to come.

VIII

THE FUTURE OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

_Empire Review. October 1923_

The _Empire Review_ has, I perceive, been born again and displays a constellation of gifted contributors writing about subjects of which their knowledge approaches saturation point. Commander Locker Lampson is alive to the need of variety, and for an incidental change he asks me to write upon a topic that he must feel is by no means my specialty. He wants my views about the British Empire. I more than suspect he counts upon my taking a Radical view of that great system. He selects me, an obscure supporter of the Labour Party, as a sample of what men are thinking on that side of the political arena. But I can write only as a man in that street. The official attitude of the party is to be found plainly and simply stated in the publications of the party headquarters.

Yielding to the Editor’s persuasiveness, I will set down a few notes and a few generalities that occur to me. They may offend some of those peculiar people who are all out for the British Empire, any old British Empire whatever it is and whatever it does, but I think that they may be of interest to many--what shall I call them?--Imperialists, and I take it most of the readers of the _Empire Review_ are such, who are prepared for the idea that support of the British Empire may be a conditional support and not a fanaticism.

Let me begin with something that is more than a mere verbal quibble. I wish that this political system could have some other name than Empire, because it is not properly an Empire at all. It is a complex association of at least three different types of territory, and the word “Empire” is endlessly misleading and mischievous in connection with it.

In the last few years, for purposes that need not now concern us, I have had to study a certain amount of history and a number of historians. Many men of commanding intelligence have been historians, and I offer no comparison between the intellectual quality of historians and that of scientific men as such. But trained as I was in the clear, subtle and beautiful disciplines of comparative anatomy, I found myself amazed at the easy carelessness of the average historian’s habitual terminology, his slovenly parallelisms and reckless assumptions. A large part of his work is the study of human communities and political associations. Yet I found him without any intelligible classification of political combinations, any real sense of grades and structural differences between one community and another. He slops the word “Empire” over the whole face of history; Athenian Empire and Aztec Empire, Shang Empire and Sung Empire, Empire of Alexander and Roman Empire, Mongol Empire and Hittite Empire, British Empire and Brazilian Empire; it’s all the same to him. “Cats is dogs,” as the porter said, “rabbits is poultry, but a parrot is a passenger.” As a consequence, the historian argues from the most atrocious analogies. And, though there is a considerable and pretentious literature of political science, there does not yet exist in all political and historical literature any attempt at a clear analysis of the differences and affinities of all these various human complexes. Yet to make such an analysis would be a most attractive and fruitful task. Historical and political science has still to find its Linnæus. History, until that happens, remains a slough of terminological confusion, and the ideas of the ordinary educated man drown in that mud.

The word “Empire” came into the world with the expansion of the Roman Republic. The Roman Empire was a thing different in many fundamentals from the so-called “Empires” that preceded it, the “Shah-doms,” if I may create a sort of temporary word, of Asia and the “Pharaoh-doms” of Egypt, for example. It differed from them at least as widely in its possibilities, structure and range as a species of Tertiary mammals differs from a species of Mesozoic reptiles. It was unprecedented in arising out of an aristocratic republic instead of a conquering monarchy, and in having a legal tradition of a strength and prestige unknown to any previous community. It was unprecedented in its disposition to extend its citizenship beyond its initial boundaries. Its expansion was concurrent with an increasing use of coined money and of credit based upon coined money; its economic and financial system had a quite novel facility and instability. The Empire was held together by a road-system that made the road-system of the Persians seem a mere preliminary experiment. Its extent was far greater than that of any preceding form of political administration. Reading and writing, already raised to new levels of simplicity and convenience by the Greeks and Hebrews, brought what we should think nowadays a small proportion, but which was in those days a quite unprecedented proportion, of the population into an intelligent participation in public affairs. Iron had become widespread for tools and implements as well as weapons, and the horse was now no longer a war-beast but, with its bastard child the mule, a universally available means of transport. All these things made the Roman Imperial System as new a thing in human experience as the United States of America or the present British “Empire,” both of which, I hold, are new species, fresh beginnings without any true affinities in the past.

There is in all history only one rough parallel to the Roman Empire, and that is its contemporary Chinese Empire. But I will restrain my encyclopædic impulse and leave that out of our present discussion.

Now as Gibbon’s great history shows, the history of all Europe and Western Asia since that time is really the story of this unique thing, the Empire, the Roman Empire, and its struggle to exist, to remain one, and to restore itself, when broken, to complete existence. It was broken naturally by the Adriatic crack, running in towards that fatal wedge out of the great plains of the nomads, Hungary; it was broken by the general incapacity of the Italians for navigation, due perhaps to characteristics of the Italian coast; it was broken by the intellectual inadequacies of a plutocracy. But the Empires that sprang from it, West and East, were only the results of a fission that left the idea of reunion perpetually alive; the Holy Roman Empire, the Tzardom, the Imperialism of Napoleon, even the Austrian Empire and the Hohenzollern Empire, were all logically and legitimately the products of the original Empire, legitimately Empires in origin and intention, attempts to recover a universal sway; parts in a great dreary, futile European drama on which at last in these days the curtain falls.

There has indeed only been one real Empire in the world, this that centred upon Rome and the Mediterranean. Britain played a certain part in this Empire; Henry VIII, for example, was Imperial candidate against Charles V and the King of France; but the rôle of Britain therein has generally been a marginal one. The importance of England to mankind began only when it turned its face from the Empire and from thoughts of the Empire to the ocean. What we call to-day the British Empire is a new thing and a different thing from the Roman Empire, created by new and greater forces, and deserving an entirely distinctive name.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the opening phases of a great process of change in human conditions that has been going on until the present time. From the point of view of one who discusses political or economic agglomerations, the most important thing in that great revolution has been the development of new means of communication between man and man. That revolution began with the appearance of the ocean-going sailing ship and of printed paper; it reaches its climax nowadays in wireless telegraphy and the aeroplane. It is now a commonplace, though for many historians and scholars it is quite a recent discovery, that any change in communications involves new economic, strategic and political adjustments. For a score of centuries the horse, the horse-drawn vehicle, the hand-made high-road, the parchment document, the public speaker and vocal teacher and a feeble coastal shipping had been the limiting conditions of all statecraft. Under these conditions the idea of the Empire had been the highest political idea in men’s minds. Now, however, in that age of Renascence, the ocean which had been an ultimate barrier became almost suddenly a highway; and the printed book, and, presently, the newspaper quickened masses in the community, hitherto politically ineffective, into informed activity. The politics and statecraft of Europe, obsessed--still to this day obsessed--by the doomed Imperial tradition, began nevertheless a clumsy slow adaptation to this process of material change, unable to ignore its pressures and compulsions, but evidently indisposed to recognise its nature.

I use this word “indisposed” deliberately. The political mind, like the legal mind to which it is so closely akin, looks backward habitually, prefers precedents to Utopias, clings to the old and is pushed along by the new. Europe clings still to the Imperial tradition four centuries after it became impracticable; its kindred peoples are divided and they destroy one another in the feuds of a dead issue. Frenchman and German waste Europe, as Asia Minor was wasted by Byzantine and Persian, in a futile search for a kind of supremacy that can never return to this world. They are like rivals who fight for a woman already dead and decayed.

Continental Europe is being desolated and destroyed by imaginative incapacity, by the failure to recognise the obsolescence of its political ideas and traditions. But Europe is not the world, nor will its decline and fall be the end of the human story. In the United States of America, in this so-called British Empire, and now in the United States of Russia, we must recognise a breaking away from tradition as complete as when the Roman Empire broke away from the forms and traditions of any previous political synthesis. These new systems arise not to inherit, but to supersede.

It is this conception of the history of the world during the last four centuries as being essentially, in its broadest aspects, a belated, forced, and largely unconscious process of political adaptation to changing conditions, of vast subconscious and unwilling trials and experiments in new and greater political associations to replace that formerly dominant Imperial idea, that I wish to put before the readers of the _Empire Review_. It carries us on to the further realisation that _since the process of change in communications is only now approaching some sort of limiting completion, the new political systems that have appeared cannot be considered as anything but preliminary and transitory systems_. The United States of America, the Spanish, Dutch and British colonial empires of the eighteenth century, the Russian Asiatic Empire and the second British Empire of the nineteenth century, the British Empire of the _Empire Review_ and of this present discussion, must all from the angle of this conception be seen as things experimental and transient, destined to the most extensive coalescences, readjustments and modifications in a few score years. The form to which these synthetic material forces, this constant abolition of distance between State and State and man and man, are driving us all, even in spite of ourselves, is a common Pax Mundi, a World Commonweal, a federal suppression of armaments, a federal money system, a federal postal system, a federal control of the production and distribution of staple products, a federal direction of main-line sea and land transport and of the movements of population. To these things it seems to me human affairs trend now inexorably. The economic and financial world net grows tighter and closer; war becomes so intimate and inconclusive and destructive as to become impossible. The old ideas may hold our race in a bloody and wasteful subjection for two or three centuries yet; but the Pax Mundi waits at the end of the passage.

A man holding these opinions must necessarily judge the present British Empire without any fanatical loyalty, critically as a possible half-way house or a possible obstacle to a more comprehensive and enduring synthesis. It is not really the same thing as the British “Empire” of 1823, which was a string of trading posts and areas of economic predominance about the world, _plus_ John Company’s fantastic acquisition of the derelict rule of the Great Mogul. The bulk of the present British “Empire” was created and held together by the steamship. This rendered possible the transfer of considerable masses of population to new territories and the importation of bulky staples, of such things as wheat and cattle, across great stretches of ocean. The Dominions were made by the steamship and the telegraphic cable, and they constitute the freshest, most peculiar feature of the present British Imperial system. Colonies the world has known before, but neither the Greek and Phœnician colonies of the old world nor the American colonies of the eighteenth century were linked closely and abundantly enough to the mother country to prevent a final estrangement and detachment. The British Dominions to-day are, on the contrary, kept in touch, and more and more effectively kept in touch, with each other and the mother country. Their mutual relationships are unprecedented. Their unity may be enduring.

But when we turn to the relationship of Great Britain and these Dominions on the one hand, to India on the other, we find something entirely different, a new association also, but of absolutely different structure and different capabilities, something accidental and precarious and manifestly provisional. A London company running a system of trading stations, acquired almost inadvertently amidst a wild political welter in India, the heritage of the Great Mogul. Great Britain has taken over this company’s possessions, enlarged them, given India peace and a certain unity, educated her people, but not widely nor sufficiently, developed her resources, but not very generously, and manifestly has but the vaguest ideas of her future. The educational and intellectual development of the British people has not kept pace with this rapid expansion of British responsibilities. Our world responsibilities have increased a hundredfold in the last century, but our educated class, our supply of potential rulers, directors and the like, our university organisations have not increased tenfold.

It is an open question whether on the whole we have most hampered or benefited India. Or _vice versa_. But at any rate it must be clear that the association of the Indian system with the Dominion system is an accidental and transitory association. They both happen to be parts of the British system, but there is no necessary connection. The two move at different rates and in divergent directions. A man may be--I know Australians who are--what I may call a Dominion-imperialist, but not an Indian-imperialist. He may believe, as I do, in the need for a sedulous preservation and intensification of the intellectual community of the English-speaking peoples, and in an attentive care for every possibility of understanding and sympathetic co-operation with the United States of America, and at the same time he may be as convinced as I am of our duty and obligation to educate and organise India as speedily as possible for separation, for a friendly independent existence within the world commonweal of peoples.

We British have not sufficient natural moral and intellectual superiority to the Indian peoples, we have not a sufficiently organised educational system nor a sufficient surplus of highly educated men, to justify our continued usurpation of India’s right to think out and work out its own rôle in the confederation of mankind. And we are different from these dusky peoples; we do not work with them easily; we hamper them and they hamper us intolerably. But released from our entanglement with a population six or seven times as numerous as our own, our entanglement with this great mix-up of temperamentally alien peoples, the British and the associated English-speaking communities scattered round the earth, extending their educational organisation and developing their still crude intellectual and political possibilities, may play a reasonable and yet leading part in the great synthesis which will ultimately give the world enduring peace. “Disentangle from India, draw near to America, come out of and keep out of ententes and alliances upon the continent of Europe”; these are the broad lines upon which I conceive the British system may best serve itself and mankind.

So far I have considered the British Empire only from the point of view of the English-speaking Dominions and of India. I will leave Egypt and Palestine, as they ought to be left, outside the discussion. They are, I take it, relaxing protectorates. Nor will I say more than a word or so about purely strategic possessions, Malta, Gibraltar and so forth; they are part of our armament, and their destiny is dependent upon the possibility of a world association sufficiently convincing to make disarmament possible. But there still remain great areas that are neither populated by kindred communities nor subject civilisations, barbaric regions that have been taken over in order to exploit their natural resources and prevent their being monopolised and closed against us by some hostile power. The great overseas “Empire” of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was of this type. Such areas of economic subjugation are a very ancient type of foreign possession. In such a spirit Carthage once held Corsica, Sardinia and a large part of Spain. In our own lives we have witnessed the sharing-out of tropical Africa among competing European powers. Behind such division and ownership lies the conception of bitterly competitive, monopolistic trading States as the supreme form of human association. That again is an obsolescent conception.

The Americans decided a century and a half ago that one necessary condition of existence for a federal union of sovereign States was universal free trade. All interference with the free movement of another community’s trade, all tariff barriers and the like, are a mild form of war. It must be plain to everyone that the present division of Africa is extremely unstable, and that if the system of competitive powers in Europe is to go on, it is only a question of how long it will take France to feel secure enough against Germany to set about fighting for the whole of raw-material Africa. The organised peace of the world, the coming world civilisation, demands not only a cessation of armaments, but a cessation of commercial discrimination and such-like material injuries.

But these areas of undeveloped natural resources, of unexploited forests and minerals and the like, sustaining only a sparse or undercivilised population, must have administration and development from without. If that is not to be the dangerous task and privilege of a single exploiting State it must be the task of some as yet non-existent body acting in the common interest. Until that federal body can be developed and equipped with forces and resources of its own--it is the most urgent of all necessary precautions against a future great war--there is nothing for us to do but to go on holding these possessions of the third order, without trading discrimination or settlement discrimination, against any other race or people.

It is part of the fantastic nationalism that still plays so astonishing a rôle in the political life of the world, to hold that every definable region of the earth’s surface belongs, from sky to centre, to the inhabitants it supports. But with ever increasing facilities of movement this becomes constantly more impossible. It would, for example, place the vast mineral wealth of Labrador at the disposal of a few hundred wandering Red Indians. The conception of a federated world system carries with it the idea that all the land and sea of the world, all the natural resources of the world, animal, vegetable or mineral, belong to all the people of the world, and that any assignation, reservation, mandate or monopolisation of this or that region is entirely a temporary arrangement to be superseded by that inevitable world control. The British “Empire” in respect to this class of possession is, therefore, in the position of a trustee for an unborn but inevitable heir. Any Federation of Peoples or League of Nations or whatnot that really undertakes the organisation of a world peace must, as a necessary function, inherit all the overseas and alien possessions that are not yet capable of an intelligent participation in world government, whether they are now “owned” by Great Britain or by any other State in the world.

In any world federation that may arise in the course of the next century or so, the English-speaking communities, which already number over two hundred million people, must necessarily play a leading part. How far it will be the leading part, depends very much upon the educational and general creative energy of these communities during the years immediately before us and upon their power of casting aside crippling prejudices and outworn ideas.

It needs no impossible effort to make the English language even now the _lingua franca_ of India and China, and the creative imagination embodied in English literature a fertilising power throughout the earth. If I as a consistent republican find little joy in being a subject of a King-Emperor, and if I find much of our British Imperialism repulsively base, narrow, short-sighted and suicidal, that is rather because I overestimate than underestimate the share that our English language and civilisation and peoples may play in the future of mankind.

IX

WINSTON

10.11.23

In this tragic and confused world it has been my undeserved lot to lead an amused life. All sorts of bright and entertaining and likeable things have been given me and paraded before me. And among others is my friend, Mr. Winston Churchill: not the American Winston but the British Winston. Our relations are relations of intermittent but I trust affectionate controversy. We had a great slanging match some years ago about Russia, and if I remember rightly Mr. Churchill took the count. That is my pleasant impression of the affair. His may be different, of course. Then, in a little book called _Men Like Gods_, one of the characters got out of my control and began to speak and act in a way so like Mr. Churchill’s that even I could see the resemblance. I was shocked and alarmed. I had to stun that character and hustle it out of the way, but not before it had made a long characteristic speech and started a war....

Now Mr. Churchill has taken the opportunity afforded by an article I wrote about the British Empire for the British _Empire Review_ to open up a fight again. My article, more or less abbreviated, in some cases shorn of its chief arguments, and adorned with the unsolicited crossheads so dear to editors of spirit, has been extensively syndicated in America, and will no doubt be followed round the earth by flying fragments of his reply. It is a spirited and amusing reply. He calls me Citizen Hoopdriver, which is a fair return for the misbehaviour of my fictitious character, and he laments my discursiveness because I will not stick to my proper occupation of imaginative fiction--which from a gentleman much younger than myself who has danced in turn through Admiralty, War Office, Munitions Ministry, Air Ministry, Colonies and Board of Trade, who has been a brilliant cavalry officer and a still more brilliant newspaper correspondent, who has written eight or nine large but entertaining books and painted some excellent pictures, is pretty considerable cheek. But let that pass.

My original article on the British Empire which appeared in the _Empire Review_ pointed out things that are manifest to everyone but the most besotted Imperialist; that the present British Empire is a thing of yesterday, that it is excessively unstable, and that it is bound to undergo great changes and reconstructions in the near future. An Imperial Conference has been struggling in London with the most urgent aspects of these pressing changes. And I should have thought that anyone above the level of a patriotic schoolboy would have seen that any rational constructive change must be in the direction of knitting up the sprawling British system with its kindred civilisations, and especially with the United States of America, in some form of mutual support and co-operation. But Mr. Churchill, regardless of the article he is pretending to criticise, and of all my attacks on the present League of Nations, pretends that I want to put the British Empire forthwith under a world federation upon which Belgians, Chinese, Peruvians, Hottentots, and so forth are to be in a crushing majority. “In this sublime conception,” he writes in his caustic way, “the British inheritance accumulated by the thrift and effort of so many centuries would be liquidated and generously shared with all nations.”

Now this is the poorest of platform nonsense. It is not only nonsense about my proposals, but nonsense about the Empire. The sooner we clear our minds of such cant about thrift and age-long development the better. Putting it as gently as possible, the present British Empire is not an inheritance but a series of--shall we say acquisitions?--and mostly very recent acquisitions. What is the good of canting in the face of facts? We didn’t save up India; Australia wasn’t the reward of abstinence.

The British Empire of a hundred years ago was a mere set of scattered trading-stations and a bit of the present Indian Empire. The present British Empire has been assembled by means of the ocean-going steamship and the railway in the last hundred years, and much of it in the last fifty. Beside the Dutch colonial empire it is a thing of yesterday. The steamship made it and maintains it. It is cemented by steamships. If the steamship is presently superseded by the air-liner the British Empire will become like a wall whose mortar has decayed. But Mr. Churchill will hear nothing of new buttresses and sounder binding for this adventitious band of States.

He goes on to a denunciation of my republicanism. Ignoring steamships, banking, Imperial Preference, and a common language, he declares the only sure link of the Empire is “the golden circle of an ancient crown.” I would hate to say anything in detraction of a devoted and indefatigable royal family, but I do not believe that there is any effective imperial binding force in the cult of snobbery and sentiment, of which its members are at once the divinities and the sacrificial victims. The healthy natural man is a republican, and has a stiff backbone. Nobody really loves or respects a courtier. One of the chief troubles in the Irish settlement has been the excessive distaste of many Irishmen for the forms of royalty. One of the chief barriers between the British and closer co-operation with America is this king-business. The true cement of our communities must be the sense of equal brotherhood and common aims.

After that Mr. Churchill lapses into sheer naughtiness. There are times when the evil spirit comes upon him and when I can think of him only as a very intractable little boy, a mischievous, dangerous little boy, a knee-worthy little boy. Only by thinking of him in that way can one go on liking him. Suddenly he breaks out about Russia, and I am reminded that he has been one of the chief afflictions of that unfortunate country, that he was largely responsible for the waste of scores of million pounds of British money, in arming first one brigand chief and then another to attack and further devastate our war-exhausted ally.

He is still unrepentant. He declares that I was a passionate and am now a disappointed pro-Bolshevik, although I have always been an austere critic and witness of Bolshevik incompetence and unpracticalness. But I have also borne my witness to the fact that the Bolshevik leaders are mainly honest men, fighting against stupendous difficulties and leading hard lives, and that the Russian people would far rather have them as its rulers than any of the vicious, plundering, pogromming White Hopes and Czarist reactionaries patronised by Mr. Churchill. These Russians have fought against tremendous difficulties against invading Japanese, Poles, Esthonians, French-subsidised invaders and British-subsidised invaders, and against famine and a pitiless blockade, and against their own ignorance and the atrociously rough and cruel legacy of Czarism, and it seems as if after all they will pull through and lay the foundations of a renascent Russia.

And this is the handful of mud this English statesman hurls at the struggling rulers of this great land with which we are at peace. “They are just a selfish, plundering crew of tyrants and parasites who descended upon an unhappy land and enslaved or slaughtered its people, soiled its honour, ruined its prosperity, devoured its substance, and enriched themselves and their female belongings.”

That about the “female belongings” isn’t at all the little gentleman. It is not even honest abuse. He knows better. Indeed, we all know better, and why Mr. Churchill keeps up this sort of thing defeats my imagination. Russia is a strained and needy country to-day, but it is bleakly moral; for a time there was no prostitution at all there, and probably even to-day there is less prostitution in Russia than in any other country in the world; the age when getting rich and “feminine belongings” played a large part in its affairs ended with Rasputin and the Czardom. But Mr. Churchill has assumed this attitude of vehement hostility to the present Russian Government, and he persists in it with puerile obstinacy, while that great country passes slowly out of the shadows he helped to darken into the dawn of a new age.

X

THE OTHER SIDE IN FRANCE

17.11.23

In several recent articles I have been girding at France, at the destructive egotism of France, at the relentless political cruelty of France. Let me now look at France from another aspect.

Many of us, I suspect, are excessively bitter with France just now because we love France. We are angry because we are jealous about her. She has seen fit to embody herself in the dull, relentless Poincaré; she has set her face like flint harshly and pitilessly against the recovery and peace of Europe, and it is more than we can endure.

A few months ago I made a little tour in Europe, and outside the boundaries of France everywhere I found the name of France the name of division and mischief. The mark had not yet reached its final degradation, but I went about in a very miserable Germany. Every attempt that Germany made to get to her feet and breathe was met by a thrust that sent her back into the black waters that are drowning her. It was natural for Germany to be resentful. But in the farther countries, also, resentment smouldered; they were carrying great armies--the Czech Army is now greater than the British--they were subjected to a propaganda of an intense and dangerous nationalism, their future was dark with war possibilities, and it was all the work of France. I came back to France through a Europe dying of entangled nationalist policies, and my heart was very black against France.

I went about Paris for some days astonished to see that it did not look consciously wicked. After all--much as I love my native London and much as I delight in the tall vigour of New York--Paris is the Queen of Cities, so gracious and so fine, so hospitably friendly and yet so little meretricious in her quality. I met French friends and talked with them abundantly. I went into Burgundy and into Touraine to meet old friends and new ones, and gradually my nightmare conception of France as an evil spider, stretching its poison claws all over Europe, was mitigated.

That spider is there. It is the old spider of French foreign policy that has lived on through revolutions and empires since the days of the Grand Monarch, but within its limbs it holds so great a literary man as Anatole France, so modern and bold an adventurer in statecraft as Joseph Caillaux, so gentle and sincere a liberalism as that of the gatherings of the Abbaye de Pontigny, and, indeed, a whole inarticulate France of thought, doubt, and righteous intention. It is a France that may at any time thrust Poincaré aside and break through to speech and action and become _the_ France. It is an essential and leading part of that world-wide republic of reasonable men which may yet save the world.

I wanted very much to look at and talk to M. Joseph Caillaux. He has always interested me deeply. I had to make a four-hour automobile journey to see him. I went past Chartres Cathedral, and the roads were gay with blue flowers. He is living in his pleasant house and garden in a little brown and white and green provincial town, and there he is stifled and silenced. He may not go within a hundred kilometres of Paris, nor may he go abroad. What he has got to say is not reported in the Press. Only by way of the bookshop can he get anything through to the public. Imagine our British Foreign Office sending my Lord Rothermere into exile and original authorship at Llandrindod Wells or Matlock on account of his interference with its policy! Imagine Mr. Lloyd George or Lord Birkenhead restrained from excursions to America, and deprived altogether of reverberation!

I lunched with M. and Madame Caillaux and some pleasant neighbours, and we talked of books and flowers and such-like agreeable topics. We exchanged telegraphic greetings with M. Anatole France, whom I had hoped to meet there. M. Caillaux, I learnt incidentally, can take walks and play tennis, but he may not go shooting. He is far too dangerous a man, the French Government thinks, to be entrusted with a shot-gun.

Afterwards we two walked about the garden and talked about the state of Europe. M. Caillaux is neither Anglophile nor Anglophobe, but he thinks, as I do, that Western Europe can only do its full duty to the rest of the world when it is worked as a unity. Reconciliation of the Frenchman and the German has been the dominant idea of all his statecraft. We discussed the riddle why Big Business and the big industrialists are the fiercest, most mischievous of all patriots. We concluded it was due to the fact that they work for profits and not for service, and that a flag means a tariff and such an artificial enhancement of profits as no unified working could give. And finance which is international in outlook is by its nature not creative and revolutionary but watchful, statistical, and extractive. Then also I broached the question whether, if private capital in industry and finance could not give us peace, we must prepare for a harder road to internationalism through the social revolution. And so to other topics.

He asked me not to be hard against France. “You think,” he said, “that this fear of Germany coming back again is a false fear--an excuse for aggression. It isn’t. It’s in the blood of our people. Think! Here we are in the heart of France, and within a little more than a hundred years this countryside has heard the guns of an invader four times, in 1814, 1815, 1871, and again in 1914.”

M. Caillaux stood before his house and watched me get into the automobile that would take me to the Paris he may not visit, and waved his friendly “Good-bye.” Next year, perhaps, they will let him return, he hopes--or the year after. But he is already sixty....

But the most interesting man from my present point of view that I met in France was a man under no outward restraint at all. This was the late M. Philippe Millet, the editor of the _Petit Parisien_, one of the big official papers. We have been friends for many years, we saw a good deal of each other at the Washington Conference, and we had talked to each other very freely and frankly on many occasions about international relations. For long he had maintained an entirely civilised attitude towards the European settlement; he had supported various schemes of economic reconciliation, and he had opposed the occupation of the Ruhr very vigorously. I took him to task for his support of M. Poincaré.

His apologetics went in this fashion, and I think they are typical of the attitude of a considerable section of Frenchmen. He admitted the Ruhr occupation was an outrage, but he argued that once it was done it closed the door on any possibility of an understanding with Germany. Germany had been so antagonised that there was now nothing left for a Frenchman but to go on destroying her. He was like a man on an omnibus that was running away downhill. You must do your best to get control of the thing, but--there is no going back to the top of the hill. France has got Germany by the throat, and such a level of hate and despair has been reached that _she dares not let go_.

Of course, M. Poincaré does not want to let go. But I believe the middling mass of Frenchmen, of whom Philippe Millet was so typical, a mass which, with the parties of the Left, probably constitutes a majority of the French, would welcome any outside help that would enable them to discontinue the strangulation and dismemberment of Central Europe. An American Government and a British Government united enough, understanding enough, and tactful enough, to intervene wisely and generously could swing all that central mass away from Poincaré. A foolish intervention might very easily throw it into a passion of patriotic fear. Its incalculable behaviour is a riddle all Europe is guessing at. The hope of European civilisation rests largely on this central body of French opinion getting to some sort of effective expression before it is too late. The French elections in 1924 will be a very crucial time in human history.

XI

THE LAST OF THE VICTORIANS

24.11.23

Mr. Asquith is now, to use the phrase he coined for a contemporary, the last of the Victorian “giants.” He is the leader of some sort of Liberal Party in England, the oldest and the ripest, I am told, though I confess I am quite unable to make head or tail of these various Liberal parties in England nowadays, and he is always trying to lead his little band back to the nineteenth century, when there were ever so many “giants” in the land, not to mention the Grand Old Man, and when political life made up for its complete want of seriousness by a pompous solemnity and vast personal enthusiasms. Prime Ministers in those days loomed vast; they were none of your little chaps who can hide behind bull-dog pipes and say nuffin. Our Leaders, figures of Pantomimic size, filled the stage and said--_floods_. They were practically all that there was on the stage. The crumbling peace of Europe and the world, the conflict of labour and order with adventurous capital, were not staged in those days. At most one heard of these things in the Legislature as one sometimes catches a rumble of vans and cabs in a London theatre. In the House they dealt with only the thin shadows of great issues; with the Free Breakfast Table, Unsectarian Religious Teaching, Leasehold Enfranchisement, and the like.

One of the most pleasing traits of the Victorian giants was their tremendous scholarly evasion of all complete statement. The vulgarity of a plain assignment of a thing to its broad roots and general principles was never committed. In such matters Mr. Asquith is finely representative of his period. He has to perfection that ability to deal with a part of an issue as if it were the whole which was characteristic of the great Victorian scholars and gentlemen. If Mr. Asquith were a mechanic, and you asked him to make you an automobile, he would presently produce two wheels, a clutch, and a radiator with so perfect and dignified a manner that you would hardly realise that you had not the complete car until you stepped through it. You would feel it ungracious to complain. When Mr. Asquith drew the sword and threw away the scabbard, he did it with so fine a gesture that you scarcely noted that most of the sword wasn’t there. If Mr. Asquith were a domestic hen he would lay eggs consisting of about two-thirds of a shell and as much yolk as would cover a sixpence, but he would cluck so bravely that you would credit him with a complete omelette. I do not blame him, it was the style of his time; but his time has passed, and this is a world too urgent and dangerous for the ample deficiencies of those spaciously empty years.

These remarks are provoked by the fact that Mr. Asquith and his associated and rival Liberal leaders--I can never tell which is which--are now engaged in unfurling the Banner of Free Trade in Great Britain. Encumbered with an immense and growing burden of unemployed workmen Britain is thinking of all sorts of eleventh-hour expedients. Schemes of preference within the Empire, leading towards an Empire Zollverein, are very much to the fore. And in reply this old Free Trade, which figured so largely in the political history of Victorian times, is to be brought out of the shed again, and furbished up and sent round the country to see what it will do for Liberalism.

Now nothing could be more typical than Free Trade of this peculiar incompleteness of the political methods of the “giants” of the “heroic” Victorian Age to which I have already called attention. It is a one-wheeled, engineless, body-less Liberal automobile. It is a project to keep down one’s natural frontier in respect to inward and outward trade, and it ignores all the correlated measures that should go with this most desirable abolition. It ignores the fact that nearly all the separate sovereign competitive States into which the world is divided are always actively engaged in mutual injury, sometimes frankly in open warfare but always by fiscal trickery, monetary tactics, diversion of trade, and the like amiable activities. True Free Trade must be mutual. One-sided Free Trade is like disarmament in the face of malignant military preparation. And if there is to be real Free Trade between any two countries then certain other things follow necessarily, though they never appear on the party programmes and banners.

Production will tend to gravitate to the regions of maximum advantage, and so there must also be a free movement of population over the frontiers to the regions of most advantageous employment. If there is not such free movement, then one of the States may suffer from unemployment in this or that industry and social degeneration while the other is enjoying high wages. But movement of population and the shifting of many industries across frontiers will affect military efficiency, and so there can be no real Free Trade between any two countries unless they are ensured not only against mutual attack but by a mutual guarantee against attack.

Free Trade is, in fact, only a practical proposal between countries prepared also for free movements of population between each other and for a pooling of their defensive resources and foreign policy. The way to permanent and satisfactory Free Trade lies in a steady extension of leagues between friendly peoples prepared for that much waiver of their sovereign independence. But only peoples near the same educational level and with closely similar standards of comfort and behaviour can contemplate so intimate a union as this. There might be such a league of the Latin-American States, or of the English-speaking and Scandinavian and other North-European States, but not of any much more extensive coalescences at present. So long as a State remains potentially at war with any other State, Free Trade between them is a dream.

Great Britain in the Victorian period had a practical monopoly of modern industrial production and benefited by an open frontier that gave her workers cheap food and so kept labour cheap. That was a temporary and now vanished condition of affairs. So long as States insist on their sovereign independence they must be prepared to use tariffs just as they must be prepared to use armies. It is the price of the flag.

Tariffs corrupt. That is true, just as war contracts do. But the way to escape from these diseases of conflict does not lie in the maintenance of fiscal non-resistance by this or that independent, irresponsible State, but in a creative foreign policy that seeks union and coalescence, and aims, openly and educationally, through coalescence in a broadening series, to reach at last world Free Trade, world freedom of movement, and an organised world peace.

But Mr. Asquith will never tell us he means anything so intelligible as that. He will just wave the banner of Free Trade as though it meant anything the imagination of the voter might like. That was how the giants did their business in the grand old days, and he will never do his business in any other way. And it is because of these splendid old traditions of pompous vagueness that more and more of the liberal-minded people of Britain drift towards the Labour camp.

XII

POLITICS AS A PUBLIC NUISANCE

1.12.23

In the United States of America they know when their elections are coming, and prepare for them; in Great Britain they come unheralded, like earthquakes and tidal waves. They may come and come again; there is no period of immunity.

It is only yesterday that in Great Britain we were all speculating about this Mr. Baldwin, who had become Prime Minister. What was he? Where had he come from? Nobody knew. From the first he seemed to share our doubts about himself. He hid as much as possible behind a big, big, manly pipe, and made wise little speeches about nothing in particular at colleges and boys’ schools. He claimed to be a cousin of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Now he seems to have given way to panic at the conspicuousness of his position. The European situation is frightful, and the state of affairs at home is miserable; and I think he has plunged this country into all the expense and confusion of a General Election, in the hope of getting back to the old smoking-room at home, wherever it is, and tranquillity.

Except in Tasmania and Ireland, where they have Proportional Representation and an approach to political sanity, all the elections of the English-speaking democracies are profoundly silly affairs. The common voter hasn’t a dog’s chance of expressing his real opinion of things. Some organisations or other put up a couple of candidates for his constituency, and he votes for the one associated with the political leaders he dislikes and distrusts least. When the issues are manifold, as they are in Britain now, the results may be preposterous. They may fail altogether to indicate the feeling of the country about any public question at all. The voter is generally in the case of a man who wants to go shooting, and is confronted with the choice of taking the family Bible and some cartridges, or a boiled fowl and a gun.

The cardinal fact of the contest is that France is destroying the economic life of Central Europe, with which the prosperity of Great Britain is bound up. Great Britain is congested with unemployed, before whom there does not seem to be any prospect of employment. In the face of this Mr. Baldwin proposes tariffs to make food and everything dearer without increasing the purchasing power of any but the very rich; and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald proposes a levy on large fortunes. Mr. Asquith, to whom Mr. Churchill the anti-Bolshevik and Mr. Lloyd George have rallied, raises, as I have already noted in these articles, the banner of Free Trade--although Free Trade is already in operation in Great Britain without conspicuous success. And nobody says anything in particular about France.