I am not without hope that the events of the past ten years modified Mr. Howells’s point of view. If the German State revealed itself as something perilously close to barbarism, the Allied States presented a superb concentration of their peoples’ unfaltering purpose. That the world was saved from degradation too deep to be measured was due to individual heroism, animated, upheld, and focused by the State. Though temperamentally conservative, I feel no shadow of regret for the “obsolete” and very picturesque tyrant who softened or hardened by caprice. I would rather trust our stupid and venal authorities, because, while each member of a legislative body is kind to his own deficiencies, he is hard on his neighbour’s. Collective criticism is a fair antidote for collective despotism, and robs it of its terrors.
If we were less incorrigibly sentimental, we should be more nobly kind. Sentimentalism is, and has always been, virgin of standards. It is, and it has always been, insensible to facts. The moralists who, in the first years of the war, protested against American munitions because they were fresh-made for purposes of destruction, would have flung the victory into Germany’s hands because her vast stores of munitions had been prepared in times of peace. When the news of the Belgian campaign sickened the heart of humanity, more than one voice was raised to say that England had, by her treatment of militant suffragists (a treatment so feeble, so wavering, so irascible, and so soft-hearted that it would not have crushed a rebellious snail), forfeited her right to protest against the dishonouring of Belgian women. The moral confusion which follows mental confusion with a sure and steady step is equally dangerous and distasteful. It denies our integrity, and it makes a mock of our understanding.
An irritated Englishman, who must have come into close quarters with British pacifists,—the least lovely of their species,—has protested in “Blackwood’s Magazine” that the one thing dearer than the criminal to the heart of the humanitarian is the enemy of his country, whose offences he condones, and whose punishment he sincerely pities. Thus it happened that British women joined American women in protesting against the return of the cattle stolen during the last months of the war from northern France. They said—what was undoubtedly true—that German children needed the milk. French children also needed the milk (witness the death-rates from tuberculosis in and about Lille), but this concerned them less. The herds belonged to France, and their sympathy went out to the raiders rather than to the raided.
In fact all pacifists seem disposed to look benignly upon the “noble old piracy game.” The Honourable Bertrand Russell, whose annoyance at England’s going to war deepened into resentment at her winning it (a consummation which, to speak truth, he did his best to avert), expressed regret that the sufferings of Belgium should have been mistakenly attributed to Germany. Not Berlin, he said, but war must be held to blame; and if war were a natural phenomenon, like an earth quake or a thunderstorm, he would have been right. The original Attila was not displeased to be called the “Scourge of God,” and pious Christians of the fifth century acquiesced in this shifting of liability. They said, and they probably believed, that Heaven had chosen a barbarian to punish them for their sins. To-day we are less at home in Zion, and more insistent upon international law. The sternest duty of civilization is the assigning of responsibility for private and for public crimes as the rules of evidence direct.
In the Christmas issue of the “Atlantic Monthly,” 1919, another Englishman of letters, Mr. Clutton-Brock, preached a sermon to Americans (we get a deal of instruction from our neighbours), the burden of which was the paramount duty of forgiveness. Naturally he illustrated his theme with an appeal for Germany, because there is so much to be forgiven her. That he made no distinction between the injuries which a citizen of Lille or Louvain, and the injuries which a reader of the “Atlantic Monthly” has to forgive, was eminently right, forgiveness being due for the greatest as well as for the least of offences. The Frenchman or the Belgian who forgives “from his heart” reaches a higher standard than we do; but the ethics of Christianity bind him to that standard. It is his supreme spiritual test.
What was less endearing in Mr. Clutton-Brock’s sermon was the playful manner in which he made light of wrongs which, to say the least, were not matters for sport. We were called on to pardon, “not as an act of virtue, but in good-humour, because we are all absurd, and all need forgiveness.... We all fail, and we have no right to say that another man’s, or another nation’s, failure is worse than our own.... We must govern our behaviour to each other by the axiom that no man is to be judged by his past.”
These sentences aptly illustrate my contention that the sentimentalist is as unconcerned with standards as with facts. “Absurd” is not the word to apply to Germany’s campaign in France and Flanders. A man whose home has been burned and whose wife has been butchered cannot be expected to regard the incident as an absurdity, or to recall it with good-humour. The sight of a child bayoneted on the roadside (five wounds in one poor little body picked up near Namur) arouses something deep and terrible in the human heart. To say that one man’s failure is no worse than another man’s failure, that one nation’s failure is no worse than another nation’s failure, is to deny any vital distinction between degrees of right and wrong. It is to place the German Kaiser by the side of Belgium’s King, and George Washington by the side of George the Third.
And by what shall men be judged, if not by their past? What other evidence can we seek? What other test can we apply? A man who has run away with his neighbour’s wife may not care to repeat the offence; he may be cured forever of this particular form of covetousness; but he is not welcomed in sedately conducted households. A defaulter may be converted to the belief that honesty is the best policy; but few there are who will entrust him with funds, and fewer still who will receive him as a gentleman. If such behaviour is, as Mr. Clutton-Brock authoritatively asserts, opposed to “a Christian technique,” it defines the value of facts, and it holds upright the standard of honour.
The well-meaning ladies and gentlemen who flood society with appeals to “open the prison door,” and let our good-will shine as a star upon political prisoners, seem curiously indifferent as to what the liberated ones will do with their liberty. There are few of us so base as to desire to deprive our fellow-creatures of sunlight and the open road. There are not many of us so unpractical as to want to keep them a burden upon the State, if we have any assurance that they will not be a menace to the State when released. Sufficiency, security, and freedom have been defined as the prerogatives of civilized man. The cry of the revolutionist for freedom is met by the call of sober citizens for security. Sympathy for the lawless (the beloved sinner) is not warranted in denying equity to the law-abiding, who have a right to protection from the Republic which they voluntarily serve and obey.