Seventy Years Among Savages

by Henry S. Salt

The despised “Conchie” was, in truth, the hero and poet of the occasion.

Again, it must be owing to fear, above all other impulses, that when a war is over, the conquerors, instead of offering generous terms—a course which would be at least as much to their own advantage as to that of the vanquished—enforce hard and ruinous conditions which rob them of a permanent peace. This they do from what Leigh Hunt calls

The consciousness of strength in enemies,
Who must be strain’d upon, or else they rise.

It was this that caused the Germans, fifty years ago, to dictate at Paris those shameful terms which have now been their own undoing; and it was this which caused the French, in their hour of victory, to imitate the worst blunders of their enemies.

We are but a world of savages, or we should see that in international as in personal affairs generosity is much more mighty than vengeance. Some years before the war there appeared in the Daily News an article by its Paris correspondent, the late Mr. J. F. Macdonald, which even at the time was very impressive, and which now, as one looks back over the horrors of the war, has still greater and more melancholy significance. He called it “A Dream.” He pointed out that the sole obstacle to a friendly relationship between France and Germany, and the chief peril to European peace, was the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine.

“During my fifteen years’ residence in France I have often dreamt a dream—so audacious, so quixotic, so startling, that I can hardly put it down on paper. It was that the German Emperor restored the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine to France.... What a thrill throughout the world, what a heroic and imperishable place in history for the German Emperor, were the centenary of Waterloo to be commemorated by the generous, the magnificent release of Alsace-Lorraine.”

A dream, indeed, and of a kind which at present flits through the ivory gate; but a true dream in the sense that it conveyed a great psychological fact, and of the sort which will yet have to be fulfilled, if ever the world is to become a fit place for civilized beings—not to mention “heroes”—to dwell in.

But let us return to realities and to the Cave-Man. However irrational the Hatred which surged up in so many hearts, it nevertheless had power to trample every humane principle under foot. That gorilla-like visage which looked out at us from numbers of human faces meant that our humanitarian cause, if not killed or mortally injured by the war-spirit, was at least, in military parlance, “interned.” What we were advocating was a more sympathetic conduct of life with regard to both our human and our non-human fellow-beings, and what we mainly relied on, and aimed at developing by the aid of reason, was the compassionate instinct which cannot view any suffering unmoved. We had advanced to a point where some sort of reprobation, however inadequate, was beginning to be felt for certain barbarous practices; and though we could not claim to have done more than curb the ferocious spirit of cruelty that had come down to us from the past, it was at least some satisfaction that limits were beginning to be imposed on it. What result, then, was inevitable, when, in a considerable area of the world, all such ethical restrictions were suddenly and completely withdrawn, and mankind was exhorted to take a deep draught of aboriginal savagery?

Terrible as are the wrongs that countless human beings have to suffer, when great military despotisms are adjusting by the sword their “balance of power,” and exhibiting their entire lack of balance of mind, still more terrible are the cruelties inflicted on the innocent non-human races whose fate it is to be involved in the internecine battles of men. In a message addressed to the German people, the Kaiser was reported to have said: “We shall resist to the last breath of man and of horse.” As if the horse could enjoy the comforts of “patriotism,” and were not ruthlessly sacrificed, like a mere machine, for a quarrel in which he had neither lot nor part! More suffering is caused to animals in a day of war than in a year of peace; and so long as wars last it is idle to suppose that a humane treatment of animals can be secured. Do the opponents of blood-sports, of butchery, of vivisection, wonder at the obstinate continuance of those evils? Let them consider what goes on (blessed by bishops) in warfare, and they need not wonder any more.

“Do men gather figs from thistles?” It seemed as if some of our sages expected men to do so, if one might judge from the anticipations of a regenerated Europe that was to arise after the close of the war! Already we see the vanity of such prophesyings—of making a sanguinary struggle the foundation of idealistic hopes. Not all the wisdom of all the prophets can alter the fact that like breeds like, that savage methods perpetuate savage methods, that evil cannot be suppressed by evil, nor one kind of militarism extinguished by another kind of militarism. Hell, we say, is paved with good intentions; but those who assumed that the converse was true, and that the pathway of their good intentions could be paved with hell, have been woefully disillusioned by the event.