CHAPTER VIII
A DEMOCRATIC GERMANY AND PEACE
The hope is that Germany may become democratic—perhaps a republic—as the result of the war, but I see no signs of the political genius which is handling the position with that tact which might induce the Germans to translate military defeat into a pacific democracy. We can help the Germans to do that, and we are doing the very opposite. We seem to forget that the German people may rid themselves of the Hohenzollerns and the Junkers, as the French rid themselves of their Emperor in 1871, without wishing to forget the war. The passionate hate with which it is being conducted, the flinging about of insults, the insistence that every crime committed by an army is a badge of the spirit of the whole nation, is but sowing the wind from which the whirlwind is reaped. And both sides are busy with this evil work.
The problem which Germany presents to us is as follows: We have either to exterminate it altogether or we have to make peace with it. If we do neither the one nor the other we retain the antagonism of a people of great energy, great mental power, great industrial enterprise, great organizing capacity, great patience, a people, moreover, prolific in numbers. Hampering them either by political policy or economic manipulation is petty and futile: it only keeps their enmity virulent. If our aim is to crush and keep down, that spells extermination, for there is no halfway resting-place. We cannot face, either alone or in alliance, a generation of studied repression. Every economic war that has been fought between States only shows the futility of those who enter upon it.1 1See Modern Tariff History, by Percy Ashley. A perpetual blockade is impossible, and no political or economic means have yet been devised for keeping an industrial country out of the important markets of the world. A country which has something to sell will find some one to buy.
On the other hand, we may make Germany a co-operator in the keeping of European peace. We may relieve Europe of the menace of German militarism and organized force, of that aggressive and self-conscious German nationalism which threatened to domineer over the other nations; and at the same time we may help to bring a feeling of freedom and relief to the masses of Germans themselves. We can do something of the same kind for ourselves as well. But the methods we are adopting to keep our people in a fighting spirit the inflaming of passion and the maintenance of a squabbling and stupid hate—threaten to defeat this. We are acting as though we deliberately wished to compel Germany to throw back in our teeth any benefits of a political kind which the war may offer to her. We are making the German people a disturbing factor in Europe, irrespective of whether democracy or militarism, the citizen or the soldier, rules in Germany. And, as I have said, the fault is not all on our side.
This is no question of saving the face of Germany, but of studying a problem and devising a solution for it. We can fight this war to an absolute military conclusion irrespective of consequences, one of the most important of which will be its effect upon the future peace of Europe; or we can fight it with our eye fixed steadily upon its political results. We cannot do both, and nothing will be more disastrous, or will be condemned more emphatically by its consequences, than a policy (or, to write more accurately, a want of policy) which expects political results from military operations that have hitherto always brought the opposite of these results.
This war has shown that if nationalism is roused every other political impulse is swept out of people's minds. In peace times we heard much of class wars, of the capitalist being the only enemy, of patriotism being a delusion of a past age. When the war came the men who had been the most unbalanced and loud-mouthed in preaching these doctrines were blown farthest to the other extreme. Those to whom I used to protest that they were going too far, and only raising unnecessary prejudices amongst thinking people owing to gratuitous and somewhat ignorant attacks on patriotism, clothed themselves in their national flags and outdid the most Jingo of their old opponents. The Hervés of all nations are a warning that ought not to be forgotten. The German democracy is German, jealous of its national name, and will be prevented from purging itself from the blood of this war only by the attacks of foreigners.
The mere establishment of democracy in Germany will not therefore save us from having to reap the whirlwind if we now sow the wind.
The greatest weakness of democracy is that it will not think and act for itself. A race that has been conquered and kept subordinate develops the vices and virtues of subordination, and the masses and their leaders cannot in a day free themselves from the mental inheritance of subordination which their ancestors who hewed wood and drew water handed to them. When this war broke out, it was seen at once how sound were the instincts of the people and how ill-equipped were their minds. Every nation was led by its rulers, every people took up the rôle assigned to it in the military scheme. During the war the Press, whose chief work was to keep the fires of passion well stoked and blazing, published absurdities, contradicted itself, palmed off the most palpable nonsense upon the people, but the people's critical intelligence had gone to sleep. Deception was never detected because there was no memory. Thus every nation sincerely believed that it was defending itself, and that the enemy had been planning and preparing for Armageddon for years; during the war, every people believed in the cruelties of the other; newspaper readers knew that the censor was at work, but never paused to think what that meant as regards the news they were permitted to read every day. They must have seen that their papers were carefully selecting from enemy countries news and opinions to create prejudice, and not to reveal the real state of the enemy's mind; and yet there was no caution shown. The people believed and did not think.
We have, therefore, to face the future and form our opinions as to what is to happen with this fact firmly set in our minds, that in matters of national security—our own old "We-want-eight-and-we-won't-wait" agitation, for instance—people are not swayed by calm judgment, but by stormy emotion and by panic. Even under a republican Germany with a grievance and a tender memory, a German Delcasse backed by the popular German Press would be an instrument for breaking the peace of Europe. And he would do this not as an avowed aggressor. There will be plenty of "causes" left unsettled in Europe after this war to give alliances an excuse for fighting—nay, even to drift alliances into war though they do not exactly wish it. I see no prospect of a final solution of Balkan difficulties; I see no chance of a satisfactory settlement of Poland; I see a grave menace in some of the proposed partitions of the Near East and Asia. Above all, I see no prospect of the racial enmity between Slav and Teuton being ended, no hope of removing from Europe by any of the policies now in vogue the dangers of the Pan-Slav and the Pan-Teuton conflict. A democratic Germany will, indeed, have no difficulty in finding many opportunities in the next generation to challenge the decision of this war and to write a sequel to it more congenial to the German spirit than the record that is now being made.
Happy, but profoundly mistaken, is the man who, taking up his newspaper every morning, reads of allied victories and sees in them the security of an abiding peace; reads of German cruelties and believes that by crushing the nation and punishing the innocent and the guilty together, the responsible and the irresponsible in one sentence, he is to cut from our civilization the cancer which corrupts it. He neither diagnoses the disease nor understands the remedy. He is a quack and the victim of quacks. His emotion is good, but his common sense and judgment are far to seek. He is not only not ending Prussian or any other form of militarism: he is handing himself over to the interests and the logic of events which make a continuation of militarism inevitable, and which will drag this country into the vortex. All that we see going on round us to-day, the opinions that are being expressed and the temper in which they are expressed, the policies that are being pursued and prepared for the coming of peace, make militarism an essential condition of national security, and continental alliances and counter-alliances necessary consequences.
It is true that our people have no intention of making this war the parent of militarism, and the words they use and the feelings which possess them are moral and pacific. The sermons they preach to themselves are as usual right, but there is a conduct as well as a sentiment of piety, and that is generally forgotten. Our good intentions sometimes become the very reason why we allow evil to be done.
One of the reasons for this is that when a nation is under the control of emotional piety it is apt to forget that it was ever under such a control before. But during wars it is always under such control. The Allies in the Napoleonic wars proclaimed their purpose to be "the reconstruction of the moral order," "the regeneration of the political system of Europe,"the establishment of"an enduring peace founded on a just redistribution of political forces." Nationality was to be preserved and respected, treaties were to be sacred documents, war was to be ended by arbitration and a Concert of Nations. The war was fought, the peoples suffered for their ideals, Napoleon was crushed, and none of the moral intentions were fulfilled. Revolutionary and Liberal ideas were repressed, and a book which by numerous examples of suggestio falsi offers wrong explanations for this war1 1The War and Democracy, p. 31. has to admit that when this great moral effort was ended" the rewards of that overthrow [Napoleon's], however, were reaped, not by the peoples but by the dynasties and State systems of the old régime."
The moral appeals to the nation to support the Crimean War were equally conspicuous. The Times of the 30th March, 1854, declared that we were fighting because "of the sympathy of this people with right against wrong" and to save Europe "from the predominance of a Power which has violated the faith of treaties and defies the opinion of the civilized world." The day before it had spoken of Russia as "menacing nothing less than the conquest of all Europe." Mr. Sidney Herbert said in the House of Commons (25th July, 1854) that we were fighting for "guarantees which might afford a prospect of peace for the future." The Illustrated London News, attacking America for not having come in on the side of the Allies, told that country, in words which those used to-day do but echo, that it ought to have been "unanimous in support of Great Britain and France in their disinterested and generous struggle against the wicked aggressor [Russia] and disturber of the world's repose." What harvest was reaped from these words and emotions? What guarantee of peace did the Crimean War give? Historians are unanimous about that. Their verdict is expressed by Sir Spencer Walpole:—
From 1856 to 1878 the continent of Europe was afflicted with five great wars—the Franco-Austrian of 1859; the Danish of 1864, the Austro-Prussian of 1866, the Franco-German of 1870, and the Russo-Turkish of 1878—all of which can be lineally traced to the war of 1854.1 1Cambridge Modern History, vol. xi. p. 324.
Lord Salisbury supported the historians when he said that in the Crimean War we had backed the wrong horse.
Wars can never be fought unless the peoples involved believe they are fighting for liberties or for some generous moral issue, but these great purposes have never been secured as the result of wars. There is nothing new in our spirit and our manifestos to-day. They have been published again and again. There will apparently be nothing new in the results. Nor is there anything new in our expectation that after the war our enlightened enemies will come to us in white robes of repentance, confessing that they were wrong all the time and we were right. There will be nothing new about the way in which that expectation will be falsified, and yet we base all our hopes of the German future upon some such confession after a good defeat!
Germany may become a republic next year. The Kaiser may be sent to St. Helena, the military castes to till fields and reap harvests. But unless statesmanship settles the peace there will be no peace, and unless public opinion accepts the terms with no hot feelings in its heart, a German democracy will polish and sharpen the sword and manipulate diplomacy as effectively as any other form of government. The Jingo may rage tumultuously and the people imagine a vain thing, but their ends will elude them. They will never gain what they desire. "Striking at one another desperately," said Juarès in 1905 of Germany and Great Britain, "the two peoples would bruise and wound one another and splash the world with blood; but neither of them would eliminate the other, and after an exhausting struggle they would still have to reckon with one another." This great problem of national conflict is not to be settled by those who stumbled into it in August 1914 for the first time and have acquired all the information they know about it by reading war news since then.