A year of prophesying

by H. G. Wells

He asked me not to be hard against France. “You think,” he said, “that this fear of Germany coming back again is a false fear—an excuse for aggression. It isn’t. It’s in the blood of our people. Think! Here we are in the heart of France, and within a little more than a hundred years this countryside has heard the guns of an invader four times, in 1814, 1815, 1871, and again in 1914.”

M. Caillaux stood before his house and watched me get into the automobile that would take me to the Paris he may not visit, and waved his friendly “Good-bye.” Next year, perhaps, they will let him return, he hopes—or the year after. But he is already sixty....

But the most interesting man from my present point of view that I met in France was a man under no outward restraint at all. This was the late M. Philippe Millet, the editor of the Petit Parisien, one of the big official papers. We have been friends for many years, we saw a good deal of each other at the Washington Conference, and we had talked to each other very freely and frankly on many occasions about international relations. For long he had maintained an entirely civilised attitude towards the European settlement; he had supported various schemes of economic reconciliation, and he had opposed the occupation of the Ruhr very vigorously. I took him to task for his support of M. Poincaré.

His apologetics went in this fashion, and I think they are typical of the attitude of a considerable section of Frenchmen. He admitted the Ruhr occupation was an outrage, but he argued that once it was done it closed the door on any possibility of an understanding with Germany. Germany had been so antagonised that there was now nothing left for a Frenchman but to go on destroying her. He was like a man on an omnibus that was running away downhill. You must do your best to get control of the thing, but—there is no going back to the top of the hill. France has got Germany by the throat, and such a level of hate and despair has been reached that she dares not let go.

Of course, M. Poincaré does not want to let go. But I believe the middling mass of Frenchmen, of whom Philippe Millet was so typical, a mass which, with the parties of the Left, probably constitutes a majority of the French, would welcome any outside help that would enable them to discontinue the strangulation and dismemberment of Central Europe. An American Government and a British Government united enough, understanding enough, and tactful enough, to intervene wisely and generously could swing all that central mass away from Poincaré. A foolish intervention might very easily throw it into a passion of patriotic fear. Its incalculable behaviour is a riddle all Europe is guessing at. The hope of European civilisation rests largely on this central body of French opinion getting to some sort of effective expression before it is too late. The French elections in 1924 will be a very crucial time in human history.

XI
THE LAST OF THE VICTORIANS

24.11.23

Mr. Asquith is now, to use the phrase he coined for a contemporary, the last of the Victorian “giants.” He is the leader of some sort of Liberal Party in England, the oldest and the ripest, I am told, though I confess I am quite unable to make head or tail of these various Liberal parties in England nowadays, and he is always trying to lead his little band back to the nineteenth century, when there were ever so many “giants” in the land, not to mention the Grand Old Man, and when political life made up for its complete want of seriousness by a pompous solemnity and vast personal enthusiasms. Prime Ministers in those days loomed vast; they were none of your little chaps who can hide behind bull-dog pipes and say nuffin. Our Leaders, figures of Pantomimic size, filled the stage and said—floods. They were practically all that there was on the stage. The crumbling peace of Europe and the world, the conflict of labour and order with adventurous capital, were not staged in those days. At most one heard of these things in the Legislature as one sometimes catches a rumble of vans and cabs in a London theatre. In the House they dealt with only the thin shadows of great issues; with the Free Breakfast Table, Unsectarian Religious Teaching, Leasehold Enfranchisement, and the like.

One of the most pleasing traits of the Victorian giants was their tremendous scholarly evasion of all complete statement. The vulgarity of a plain assignment of a thing to its broad roots and general principles was never committed. In such matters Mr. Asquith is finely representative of his period. He has to perfection that ability to deal with a part of an issue as if it were the whole which was characteristic of the great Victorian scholars and gentlemen. If Mr. Asquith were a mechanic, and you asked him to make you an automobile, he would presently produce two wheels, a clutch, and a radiator with so perfect and dignified a manner that you would hardly realise that you had not the complete car until you stepped through it. You would feel it ungracious to complain. When Mr. Asquith drew the sword and threw away the scabbard, he did it with so fine a gesture that you scarcely noted that most of the sword wasn’t there. If Mr. Asquith were a domestic hen he would lay eggs consisting of about two-thirds of a shell and as much yolk as would cover a sixpence, but he would cluck so bravely that you would credit him with a complete omelette. I do not blame him, it was the style of his time; but his time has passed, and this is a world too urgent and dangerous for the ample deficiencies of those spaciously empty years.

These remarks are provoked by the fact that Mr. Asquith and his associated and rival Liberal leaders—I can never tell which is which—are now engaged in unfurling the Banner of Free Trade in Great Britain. Encumbered with an immense and growing burden of unemployed workmen Britain is thinking of all sorts of eleventh-hour expedients. Schemes of preference within the Empire, leading towards an Empire Zollverein, are very much to the fore. And in reply this old Free Trade, which figured so largely in the political history of Victorian times, is to be brought out of the shed again, and furbished up and sent round the country to see what it will do for Liberalism.