Yet even after that Germany will survive. Twice before in her history Germany has arisen out of desolation and defeat. I believe she will rise again out of her present darkness and end at last the central and leading Power, the very keystone, it may be, of a reconstructed Europe. I believe in the German schoolmaster, the German student, in German persistency, and the patient strength of the German brain. I hated and hate that bastard imitative Byzantine-German Imperialism and German Junkerism, and I believe that our war to shatter these things was a necessary war. But I have never faltered in my belief in the greatness and soundness of the German people, and in my appreciation of all that we owe in intellectual, social, and industrial stimulus to Germany.
Her present situation is unparalleled. Every attempt she makes to get to her feet is thwarted by her pitiless, senseless foe. Our English-speaking peoples, in our slow, oafish way, are looking on, are assisting, at an attempt to waste and torment to death a great community as civilised as our own. We never came into the war for any such objective, and I do not believe that we shall stand by to the end in the face of this iniquity.
But anyhow, I believe that Germany will come back. Her common language and now her common miseries will keep her one. She has many enemies, but on her side now is the long reach and the long memory of the printed word. Bohemia, Czecho-Slovakia as we call it now, rose again after an almost complete extinction of three hundred years. Dark years are before Germany and a terrible winter, but in two years or ten years Germany will have found her Masaryk and her Benes and be on her way to recovery.
I would not like to be a German separatist in the days to come.
VIII
THE FUTURE OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
Empire Review. October 1923
The Empire Review has, I perceive, been born again and displays a constellation of gifted contributors writing about subjects of which their knowledge approaches saturation point. Commander Locker Lampson is alive to the need of variety, and for an incidental change he asks me to write upon a topic that he must feel is by no means my specialty. He wants my views about the British Empire. I more than suspect he counts upon my taking a Radical view of that great system. He selects me, an obscure supporter of the Labour Party, as a sample of what men are thinking on that side of the political arena. But I can write only as a man in that street. The official attitude of the party is to be found plainly and simply stated in the publications of the party headquarters.
Yielding to the Editor’s persuasiveness, I will set down a few notes and a few generalities that occur to me. They may offend some of those peculiar people who are all out for the British Empire, any old British Empire whatever it is and whatever it does, but I think that they may be of interest to many—what shall I call them?—Imperialists, and I take it most of the readers of the Empire Review are such, who are prepared for the idea that support of the British Empire may be a conditional support and not a fanaticism.
Let me begin with something that is more than a mere verbal quibble. I wish that this political system could have some other name than Empire, because it is not properly an Empire at all. It is a complex association of at least three different types of territory, and the word “Empire” is endlessly misleading and mischievous in connection with it.
In the last few years, for purposes that need not now concern us, I have had to study a certain amount of history and a number of historians. Many men of commanding intelligence have been historians, and I offer no comparison between the intellectual quality of historians and that of scientific men as such. But trained as I was in the clear, subtle and beautiful disciplines of comparative anatomy, I found myself amazed at the easy carelessness of the average historian’s habitual terminology, his slovenly parallelisms and reckless assumptions. A large part of his work is the study of human communities and political associations. Yet I found him without any intelligible classification of political combinations, any real sense of grades and structural differences between one community and another. He slops the word “Empire” over the whole face of history; Athenian Empire and Aztec Empire, Shang Empire and Sung Empire, Empire of Alexander and Roman Empire, Mongol Empire and Hittite Empire, British Empire and Brazilian Empire; it’s all the same to him. “Cats is dogs,” as the porter said, “rabbits is poultry, but a parrot is a passenger.” As a consequence, the historian argues from the most atrocious analogies. And, though there is a considerable and pretentious literature of political science, there does not yet exist in all political and historical literature any attempt at a clear analysis of the differences and affinities of all these various human complexes. Yet to make such an analysis would be a most attractive and fruitful task. Historical and political science has still to find its Linnæus. History, until that happens, remains a slough of terminological confusion, and the ideas of the ordinary educated man drown in that mud.