A terrible and serious crisis, as I have already said, awaits us—even when the War is over—a crisis probably worse than that which we are passing through now. We have to remember the debts that are being piled up. If the nations are staggering along now under the enormous load of idlers and parasites living on interest, how will it be then? Unless we can reorganize our Western societies on a real foundation of actual life, of practical capacity, of honest and square living, and of mutual help instead of mutual robbery, they will infallibly collapse, or pass into strange and alien hands. Now is the critical moment when with the enormous powers of production which we wield it may be possible to make a new start, and base the social life of the future on a generous recognition of the fellowship of all. How many times have the civilizations of the past, ignoring this salvation, gone down into the gulf! Can we find a better hope for our civilization to-day?
It is clear, I think, that any nation that wants to stand the shock of events in the future, and to hold its own in the vast flux of racial and political changes which is coming on the world, will have to found its life, not on theories and views, or on the shifting sands of literature and fashion, but on the solid rock of the real material capability of its citizens, and on their willingness, their readiness to help each other—their ingrained instinct of mutual service. A conscript army, forced upon us by a government and becoming inevitably a tool for the use of a governing class, we do not want and we will not have; but a nation of capable men and women, who know what life is and are prepared to meet it at all points—who will in many cases make a free gift of their capital and land for such purposes as I have just outlined—we must have. Personally I would not even here—though the need is a crying one—advocate downright compulsion; but I would make these things a part of the recognized system of education, with appropriate regulations and the strongest recommendations and inducements to every individual to fall in and co-operate with them. Thus in time an urgent public opinion might be formed which would brand as disgraceful the conduct of any person who refused to qualify himself for useful service, or who, when qualified, deliberately refused to respond to the call for such service, if needed. Under such conditions the question of military defence would solve itself. Thousands and thousands of men would of their own free choice at an early age and during a certain period qualify themselves in military matters; other thousands, men and women, would qualify in nursing or ambulance work; other millions, again, would be prepared to aid in transport work, or in the production of food, clothing, shelter, and the thousand and one necessaries of life. No one would be called upon to do work which he had not chosen, no one would be forced to take up an activity which was hateful to him, yet all would feel that what they could do and did do would be helpful to the other ranks and ranges, and would be solidaire with the rest of the nation. Such a nation would be sane and prosperous in time of peace, and absolutely safe and impregnable in the hour of danger.
X
HOW SHALL THE PLAGUE BE STAYED?
Christmas, 1914.
People ask what new arrangements of diplomacy or revivals of Christianity—what alliances, ententes, leagues of peace, Hague tribunals, regulation of armaments, weeks of prayer, or tons of Christmas puddings sent into the enemies' camps—will finally scotch this pestilence of war. And there is no answer, because the answer is too close at hand for us to see it.
Nothing but the general abandonment of the system of living on the labour of others will avail. There is no other way. This, whether as between individuals or as between nations, is—and has been since the beginning of the world—the root-cause of war. Early and primitive wars were for this—to raid crops and cattle, to carry off slaves on whose toil the conquerors could subsist; and the latest wars are the same. To acquire rubber concessions, gold-mines, diamond-mines, where coloured labour may be exploited to its bitterest extreme; to secure colonies and outlying lands, where giant capitalist enterprises (with either white or coloured labour) may make huge dividends out of the raising of minerals and other industrial products; to crush any other Power which stands in the way of these greedy and inhuman ambitions—such are the objects of wars to-day. And we do not see the cause of the sore because it is so near to us, because it is in our blood. The whole private life of the commercial and capitalist classes (who stand as the representatives of the nations to-day) is founded on the same principle. As individuals our one object is to find some worker or group of workers whose labour value we can appropriate. Look at the endless columns of stock and share quotations in the daily papers, and consider the armies of those who scan these lists over their breakfast-tables with the one view of finding some-where an industrial concern whose slave-driven toilers will yield the shareholder 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 per cent, on his capital. Undisguised and shameless parasitism is the order, or disorder, of our days. The rapacity of beasts of prey is in our social life but thinly veiled—thinly veiled indeed by a wash of "Christian" sentiment and by a network of philanthropic institutions for the supposed benefit of the very victims whom we have robbed.
Is it any wonder that this principle of internecine warfare and rapacity which rules in our midst, this vulgar greed, which loads people's bodies with jewels and furs and their tables with costly food, regardless of those from whom these comforts are snatched, should eventuate ultimately in rapacity and violence on the vast stage of the drama of nations, and in red letters of war and conflict written across the continents? It is no good, with a pious snuffle, to say we are out to put down warfare and militarism, and all the time to encourage in our own lives, and in our Church and Empire Leagues and other institutions, the most sordid and selfish commercialism—which itself is in essence a warfare, only a warfare of a far meaner and more cowardly kind than that which is signalized by the shock of troops or the rage of rifles and cannon.
No, there is no other way; and only by the general abandonment of our present commercial and capitalist system will the plague of war be stayed.[23]