WHERE ARE WE GOING?
I THE GREAT PERIL
If a man on a bright July morning in 1914 had sailed abroad and had the misfortune to be wrecked on a desert island, returning to civilisation a week ago, the change which Europe presented to him would be sufficient to induce him to believe that his long solitude had unhinged his mind. To him it would have appeared as the stuff of which dreams are made. He would have remembered a German empire with an august head, ruling with autocratic sway a population striding with giant steps into prosperity and wealth, possessing a matchless army, whose tread terrified Europe; with a fleet that provoked articles and novels and agitations about the invasion of England; with vast possessions across the seas. In its place he would see Germany, instead of being a confident, powerful, arrogant empire, a timid, nervous, and apologetic republic presided over by a respectable and intelligent workman, her minister issuing notes to propitiate Belgium, and having them sent back like the stupid exercises of a backward schoolboy to be rewritten in accordance with the pleasure of the taskmaster; the great army reduced to a force one-half the size of that of Serbia; the menacing fleet at the bottom of the sea; the watch on the Rhine kept by French, British, and Belgian soldiers. He would see the Krupp works in French occupation; not a German colony left.
Russia he would have recollected as a powerful autocracy rooted in a superstitious belief by the peasantry in the divinity of its head. He would find it now a revolutionary area ruled by the exiles of yesterday, shunned by the rest of the world because of the violence of its communistic doctrines; tsardom, with its gilded retinue of splendour, flung into a hideous doom, and the sceptre of Peter the Great enforcing the doctrines of Karl Marx. He would see the Austrian empire as much a thing of the past as the empire of Nebuchadnezzar, a poor province lifted out of beggary by the charity of her foes: new states, which had been dead and buried for centuries, risen from the dead, casting off their shrouds, marching in full panoply; Trieste an Italian port; the Dolomites an Italian bastion. The Turk alone quite unchanged, a few more amputating operations performed upon him, but still preserving sufficient vitality to massacre Christians irrespective of denomination or race, and to become a sore trial and perplexity to the rest of the world.
If our returned voyager travelled through Europe he would find even more fundamental changes in the world of finance, trade and commerce. He would find impoverishment, dislocation; the elaborate and finely-spun web of commerce rent to pieces, and its torn threads floating in the wind. With a few sovereigns in his pocket, he would expect in return 25 francs, 20 marks, and about 26 lire. Instead of that, with a paper sovereign he would find that he could buy 70 francs, nearly 100 lire, 250,000 German marks, 300,000 Austrian kronen, and millions of Russian roubles. The money-changers who once prospered on decimal fractions now earning a precarious livelihood in the flights of the multiplication table. That would give him a better indication perhaps of the reality of the change than even the fall of empires. On his journeys he would travel through prosperous provinces rutted and overturned as by a gigantic earthquake; he would pass vast cemeteries where 10,000,000 young men fallen in the Great War were having their last sleep; he would see on all hands signs of mutilation of men who had been engaged in the great struggle. Taxation everywhere quintupled with nothing but debt to show for it; industry with its back bent under a burden of taxation which when he left existed only in the nightmares of the dyspeptic rich. He would then be able to realise something of the tremendous upheaval that had taken place in the world.
But what would surprise him more than all these amazing and bewildering transformations would be the one thing in which there was no change. He would naturally expect that after such terrifying experiences, the world would have learnt its lesson, turned its back finally on war, its crimes and its follies, and set its face resolutely toward peace. It is the one thing he discovers has not changed—the world has not learned one single syllable. Suspicions amongst nations exist just as ever, only more intense; hatreds between races and peoples, only fiercer; combinations forming everywhere for the next war; great armies drilling; conventions and compacts for joint action when the tocsin sounds; general staffs meeting to arrange whether they should march, where they should march, how they should march, and where they should strike; little nations only just hatched, just out of the shell, staggering under the burden of great armaments, and marching along towards unknown battlefields; new machinery of destruction and slaughter being devised and manufactured with feverish anxiety; every day science being brought under contribution to discover new methods to destroy human life—in fact, a deep laid and powerfully concerted plot against civilisation, openly organised in the light of the sun. And that after his experience of four or five years ago! Man the builder, and man the breaker, working side by side in the same workshop, and apparently on the best of terms with each other, playing their part in the eternal round of creation and dissolution, with characteristic human energy. What a complex creature is man! It is little wonder that God gave him up repeatedly in despair. He is unteachable.
I wonder whether it is realised that if war were to break out again, the calamity would be a hundredfold greater than that of the last experience. Next time, cities will be laid waste. Possible, and I am sorry to say, probable enemy nations are more closely intertwined, and the engines of havoc are becoming more and more terrible. I have called attention repeatedly to the developments which took place during the late War, in the variety, the range, and the power of destructive weapons. Compare the aëroplane at the beginning of the war, and its small bomb which could easily be manhandled, with the same machine at the end. By the end of the war machines had been built, and but for the armistice would have been used, the devastating power of which was terrific. Since then the power of the machine, the weight of the explosive, and the incendiary material it drops, have grown, and are still growing. Science is perfecting old methods of destruction, and searching out new methods. One day, in its exploration, it may hit on something that may make the fabric of civilisation rock.
Can anything be done to avert this approaching catastrophe? That is the problem of all problems for those who love their fellowmen. I warn you that it is madness to trust to the hope that mankind, after such an experience, will not be so rash as to court another disaster of the same kind. The memory of the terrors, the losses, the sufferings of the war, will not restrain men from precipitating the world into something which is infinitely worse, and those who think so, and, therefore, urge that it is not necessary to engage in a new crusade for peace, have not studied the perverse, the stubborn, and the reckless nature of man. There is the danger that the last war may even make some nations believe in war.