Chapter IX: Fighting in the Caucasus (9)

For all the foregoing argument no military expertise is necessary. It lies on a plane above military expertise. It appeals to common-sense and it cannot be gainsaid. I have not yet met anybody of real authority who has attempted to gainsay it, or who has not endorsed it. The sole question is, not whether we shall win or lose, but when we shall win.

For this reason I strongly object to statesmen, no matter who they be, going about and asserting to listening multitudes that we are fighting for our very existence as a nation. We most emphatically are not. It is just conceivable that certain unscrupulous marplots might by chicane produce such domestic discord in this country as would undermine the very basis of victory. I regard the thing as in the very highest degree improbable, but it can be conceived. The result might be an inconclusive peace, and another war, say, in twenty years, when we probably _should_ be fighting for our very existence as a nation. But we are not now, and at the worst shall not be for a long time, fighting for our very existence as a nation. Nobody believes such an assertion; pessimists themselves do not believe it. And when statesmen give utterance to it in the hope of startling the working-class into a desired course of conduct, they under-rate the intelligence of the working-class and the result of such oratory is far from what they could wish.

Our national existence is as safe as it has been any time this century; indeed, it is safer, for its chief menace has received a terrible blow, and the Prussian superstition is exploded. All that can be urged is that we have an international job to finish; that in order to finish it properly and within a reasonable period we must work with a will and in full concord; and that if we fail to do this the job will be botched, with a risk of sinister consequences to the next generation. The notion that to impress the public it is necessary to pile on the agony with statements that no moderately enlightened person can credit, is a wrong notion, and, like all wrong notions, can only do harm. The general public is all right, quite as all right as the present Government or any other. Had it not been so we should not be where we are today, but in a far less satisfactory position. Not Governments, not generals, but the masses make success in these mighty altercations. Read Tolstoi's "War and Peace."

The War and Racial Progress

[From the Morning Post of London, July 2, 1915]

Major Leonard Darwin, in his presidential address on "Eugenics During and After the War" to the Eugenics Education Society at the Grafton Galleries yesterday, said that our military system seemed to be devised with the object of insuring that all who were defective should be exempt from risks, whilst the strong, courageous, and patriotic should be endangered. Men with noble qualities were being destroyed, whilst the unfit remained at home to become fathers of families, and this must deteriorate the natural qualities of the coming generations. The chances of stopping war were small, and we must consider how to minimize its evils. If conscription were adopted future wars would produce less injury to the race, because the casualty lists would more nearly represent a chance selection of the population; though whether a conscript army would ever fight as well as our men were doing in France was very doubtful. The injurious effects of the war on all useful sections of the community should be mitigated. Military training was eugenic if the men were kept with the colours only for short periods. Officers must, of course, be engaged for long periods, and amongst them the birth rate was very low. An increase of pay would be beneficial in this respect, but only if given in the form of an additional allowance for each living child. In the hope of increasing the birth rate attempts were likely to be made to exalt the "unmarried wife," a detestable term against which all true wives should protest. If a change in moral standards was demanded in the hope that an increase in the habit of forming irregular unions would result in an increase in the population, that plea entirely failed because the desired effect would not thus be produced. A special effort ought now to be made on eugenic as well as on other grounds to maintain the high standards of home life which had ever existed in our race, and which had been in large measure the basis of our social and racial progress in the past. If we did not now take some steps to insure our own racial progress being at least as rapid as that of our neighbours, and if our nation should in consequence cease in future to play a great part in the noble and eternal struggle for human advancement, then the fault would be ours.

The English Word, Thought, and Life

By Russian Men of Letters

A group of sixty-seven Russian writers and publicists,
comprising the best men of letters of the nation, with the
exception of Vladimir Korolenko, who is at present in
France, have signed a reply to the tribute to the writers of
Russia by English men of letters, a translation of which was
printed in CURRENT HISTORY for February, 1915. The text of
the reply, given below, is taken from the Moscow daily
newspaper, Outro Rossii; its translation into English by Leo
Pasvolsky appeared in the New York Evening Post of June
20th.

We have known you for a long time. We have known you since we Russians came to a communion with Western Europe and began to draw from the great spiritual treasury created by our brethren of Western Europe.

From generation to generation we have watched intently the life of England, and have stored away in our minds and our hearts everything brilliant, peculiar, and individual, that has impressed itself upon the English word, the English thought, and the English life.

We have always wondered at the breadth and the manifoldness of the English soul, in whose literature one finds, side by side, Milton and Swift, Scott and Shelley, Shakespeare and Byron. We have always been amazed by the incessant and constantly growing power of civic life in England; we have always known that the English people was the first among the peoples of the world to enter upon a struggle for civic rights, and that nowhere does the word _freedom_ ring so proud and so triumphant as it does in England.

With wonder and veneration, have we watched the English people, that combines the greatest idealism with the most marvellous creative genius, that constantly transforms words into deeds, aspirations into actions, thoughts and feelings into institutions, go onward, from step to step, reaching out into the heavens, yet never relinquishing the earth, higher and higher along its triumphant road, still onward in its work of creating the life of England.

Kingdoms and peoples, cultures and institutions, pass away like dreams. But thoughts and words remain, whether they be of white men, or black, or yellow, whether they be of Jews or of Hellenes, whether they be inscribed on slabs of stone, or on boards of clay, or on strips of papyrus. Words and thoughts live to the present day; they still move us and uplift us, even though we have already forgotten the names of those who spoke them. And we know that only the winged words live on, the words that are intelligible to the whole of mankind, that appeal to the whole of humanity, to the common human mind, the common heart.

We know the vast power of the English word. We know what a marvellous contribution the English writers have made to the life not of England alone, but to that of the whole world, the whole humanity. It is with a feeling of long-standing affection and veneration that we turn to the ancient book, called "England," whose pages never grow yellow, whose letters are never effaced, whose thoughts never become dim, whose new chapters bear witness to the fact that the book is still being written, that new pages are still being added, and that these new pages are permeated with that same bright and powerful spirit of humanity that illumines and enlivens the pages of the past.

We feel proud because you have recognized the great individual worth of the Russian literature, and we are moved by your ardent expressions of sympathy and friendship. You scarcely know what Lord Byron was to us at the dawn of our literature, how our greatest poets, Poushkin and Lermontov, were swayed by him. You scarcely know to what an extent the Shakespearean Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, has become a part of our literature, how near to us is Hamlet's tragedy.

We, too, pronounce the names of Copperfield and Snodgrass with a little difficulty, but the name of Dickens is as familiar to us and as near to our hearts as the names of some of our own writers.

We trust, and we even permit ourselves to hope, that our friendship will not end on the fields of battle, but that our mutual understanding will continue to grow, as it lives on together with those sincere and heartfelt words, with which you have addressed us. We trust that it will be transformed into a spiritual unity between us, a unity based on the universal achievements of the spirit of humanity.

We trust even further. We trust that evil will finally become extinguished in the hearts of men, that mutual ill-feeling will be bitter and poignant no longer, and that, when ears of corn will be again fluttering upon the fields, mutilated by trenches and ramparts, and drenched in human blood, when wild flowers will begin to grow over the countless unknown graves, time will come, when the nations that are separated by such a tremendous gulf today, will come together again upon the one great road of humanity and will turn back once more to the great, universal words, that are common to all men.

We trust, and we hope.

Greetings to you.

(Signed)