I have often thought that Walter Crane’s cartoon, “The Triumph of Labour,” has a deep esoteric meaning, though perhaps not intended by its author. Every socialist knows the picture—a May-day procession, in which a number of working-folk are riding to the festival in a large wain, with a brave flutter of flags and banners, and supporting above them, with upturned palms, a ponderous-looking globe on which is inscribed “The Solidarity of Labour”—the whole party being drawn by two sturdy Oxen, the true heroes of the scene, who must be wishing the solidarity of labour were a little less solid, for it would appear that those heedless merry-makers ought to be prosecuted for overloading their faithful friends. The Triumph of Labour seems a fit title for the scene, but in a sense which democrats would do well to lay to heart. Do not horses and other “beasts of burden” deserve their share of citizenship? Centuries hence, perhaps, some learned antiquarian will reconstruct, from such anatomical data as may be procurable, the gaunt, misshapen, pitiable figure of our now vanishing cab-horse, and a more civilized posterity will shudder at the sight of what we still regard as a legitimate agent in locomotion.
Such, then, was the position of our Forlorn Hope in the years that saw the menace of Armageddon looming larger. Like every one else, humanitarians underrated the vastness of the catastrophe towards which the world was drifting; but some at least saw the madness of the scaremongers who were persistently fostering in their respective nations the spirit of hatred; and five years before the crash came it was pointed out in the Humanitarian that a terrible war was, consciously or unconsciously, the aim and end of the outcry that was being raised about the wicked designs of Germany, to the concealment of the more important fact that every nation’s worst enemies are the quarrelsome or interested persons within its own borders, who would involve two naturally friendly peoples in a foolish and fratricidal strife.
We knew too well, from the lessons of the Boer War, what sort of folk some of these were, who, themselves without the least intention of fighting, had stirred up such warlike passions in the Yellow Press. I had been acquainted with some of them at that time, and had not forgotten how, meeting one such firebrand, I noticed with surprise that he had become facially, as well as journalistically, yellow, his cheeks having assumed an ochreous hue since I had seen him a day or two before. He confided his secret to me. He had once enlisted in the army; and having, as he supposed, been discharged, was now stupefied by receiving a notice to rejoin his regiment. And there he sat, wondering how he could meet his country’s call, a yellow journalist indeed: I saw him in his true colours that day.
But even thus, though we suspected, with a great eruption in prospect, that to pursue our humanitarian work was but to cultivate the slopes of a volcano, we did not at all guess the magnitude of the coming disaster. It might bring a return, we feared, to the ethics of, say, the Middle Ages; our countrymen’s innate savagery would be rather more openly and avowedly practised—that would be all. They would be like the troupe of monkeys who, having been trained to go through their performance with grave and sedate demeanour, were loosed suddenly, by the flinging of a handful of nuts, into all their native lawlessness. What we did not anticipate—the very thing that happened—was that the atavism aroused by such a conflict would bring to light much more aboriginal instincts than those of a few centuries back; that it was not the medieval man who was being summoned from the vasty deep, but the prehistoric troglodyte, or Cave-Man, who, far from having become extinct, as was fondly supposed, still survived in each and all of us, awaiting his chance of resurrection.
XV
THE CAVE-MAN RE-EMERGES
I scan him now,
Beastlier than any phantom of his kind
That ever butted his rough brother-brute
For lust or lusty blood or provender.
Tennyson.
IT is a subject of speculation among zoologists whether the swamps and forests of Central Africa may still harbour some surviving Dinosaur, or Brontosaur, a gigantic dragon-like monster, half-elephant, half-reptile, a relic of a far bygone age. The thought is thrilling, though the hope is probably doomed to disappointment. What is more certain is that not less marvellous prodigies may be studied, by those naturalists who have the eyes to see them, much nearer home; for though Africa has been truly called a wonderful museum, it cannot compare in that respect with the human mind, a repository that still teems with griffins and gorgons, centaurs and chimæras, not less real because they are not creatures of flesh and blood. Two thousand years ago it was shown by the Roman poet Lucretius that what mortals had to fear was not such fabled pests as the Nemean lion, the Arcadian boar, or the Cretan bull, but the much more terrible in-dwelling monsters of the mind. In like manner, it was from some hidden mental recesses that there emerged that immemorial savage, the Cave-Man, who, released by the great upheaval of the war, was sighted by many eye-witnesses, on many occasions, during the five-years’ carnival of Hatred.[41]
Some day, perhaps, a true history of the war will be written, and it will then be made plain how such conflict had been rendered all but inevitable by the ambitious schemes and machinations not of one Empire, but of several; by the piling up of huge armaments under the pretence of insuring peace; by the greed of commercialists; and by the spirit of jealousy and suspicion deliberately created by reckless speakers and writers on both sides; further, how, when the crisis arrived, the working-classes in all the nations concerned were bluffed and cajoled into a contest which to their interests was certain in any event to be ruinous. Then, the flame once lit, there followed in this country the clever engineering of enforced military service, rendered possible by the preceding Registration Act (disguised under the pretence of a quite different purpose), and by a number of illusory pledges and promises for the protection of conscientious objectors to warfare. The whole story, faithfully told, will be a long record of violence and trickery masquerading as “patriotism”; but what I am concerned with here is less the war itself than the brutal spirit of hatred and persecution which the war engendered.
As a single instance of Cave-Man’s ferocity, take the ill-treatment of “enemy aliens” by non-combatants, who, themselves running no personal risks, turned their insensate malice against helpless foreigners who had every claim to a generous nation’s protection. “They are an accursed race,” said a typical speaker at one of the meetings held in London. “Intern them all, or rather leave out the n, and inter them all. Let the name ‘German’ be handed down to posterity, and be known to the historian as everything that was bestial, damnable, and abominable.” These would be words of criminal lunacy—nothing less—in the mouth of civilized beings, yet they are merely examples of things said on innumerable occasions in every part of our land. Great masses of Englishmen were, for the time, in a mental state lower than that of remote tribes whom we regard as Bushmen and cannibals.
Perhaps the most curious feature of this orgie of patriotic Hatred was its artificial nature: it was at home, not at the front, that it flourished; and if those who indulged in it had been sane enough to read even the war-news with intelligence, they would there have found ample disproof of their denunciations. Half a dozen lines from one of Mr. Philip Gibbs’s descriptions would have put their ravings to shame. “Some of them [English wounded] were helped down by German prisoners, and it was queer to see one of our men with his arms round the necks of two Germans. German wounded, helped down by our men less hurt than they, walked in the same way, with their arms round the necks of our men; and sometimes an English soldier and a German soldier came along together very slowly, arm in arm, like old cronies.” Not much patriotic Hatred there.