'Militarism,' as used by these enthusiasts, was a comprehensive term. It covered with ridicule and disrepute even such things as preparation for the defence of the national existence. International law was solemnly recommended as a safer defence than battleships.
Better certainly, they allowed, if militarism could be rooted out in all countries; but at any rate England, the land of their birth or adoption, must be saved from the contamination of this brutalising idea. In their anxiety to discredit Continental exemplars they even went so far as to evolve an ingenious theory, that foreign nations which followed in the paths of militarism, did so at serious loss to themselves, but with wholly innocent intentions. More especially, they insisted, was this true in the case of Germany.
The Liberal party appeared to listen to these opinions with respect; Radicals hailed them with enthusiasm; while the Labour party was at one time so much impressed, as to propose through some of its more progressive spirits that, in the exceedingly unlikely event of a German landing, working-men should continue steadily at their usual labours and pay no heed to the military operations of the invaders.
In Berlin, apparently, all this respect and enthusiasm for pacifism, together with the concrete proposals for putting its principles into practice, were taken at their face value. There at any rate it was confidently believed that the speculators and the 'speculatists' had succeeded in changing or erasing the spots of the English leopard.
ERRORS OF INFERENCE
But in order to arrive at such a conclusion as this the able German bureaucrats must have understood very little, one would think, of human nature in general, and of British human nature in particular. Clearly they built more hopes on our supposed conversion to pacifism than the foundations would stand. They were right, of course, in counting it a benefit to themselves that we were unprepared and unsuspicious of attack; that we had pared down our exiguous army and stinted our navy somewhat beyond the limits of prudence. They were foolish, however, not to perceive that if the British people found themselves confronted with the choice, between a war which they believed to be righteous, and a peace which they saw clearly would not only be wounding to their own honour but ruinous to their security, all their fine abstract convictions would go by the board; that party distinctions would then for the time being disappear, and the speculators and the 'speculatists' would be interned in the nethermost pit of national distrust.... In so far, therefore, as the Germans reckoned on our unpreparedness they were wise; but in counting upon British neutrality they were singularly wide of the mark.
One imagines that among the idealists of Berlin there must surely have been a few sceptics who did not altogether credit this wholesale conversion and quakerisation of the British race. But for these doubters, if indeed they existed, there were other considerations of a more practical kind which seemed to indicate that Britain must certainly stand aside.
The first and most important of these was the imminence of civil war in Ireland. If Prince Lichnowsky and Baron von Kuhlmann reported that this had become inevitable, small blame to their perspicacity! For in this their judgment only tallied with that of most people in the United Kingdom who had any knowledge of the true facts.
In March an incident occurred among the troops stationed in Ireland which must have given comfort at Berlin, even in greater measure than it caused disquiet at home. For it showed in a vivid flash the intrinsic dangers of the Irish situation, and the tension, almost to breaking-point, which existed between the civil authorities and the fighting services.