On the whole, it is the brightest hope that has lately risen—or the brightest but one which we will speak of later on. I would only hint at two considerations which may obscure it. Granted that in modern times war-power or victory does not give prosperity; that the invader cannot destroy or capture the enemy's trade; that his own finance is equally disturbed; and that the most enormous indemnity can add nothing to the victorious nation's actual wealth—granted all this, nevertheless, the warlike, though vicarious, heroism of our rulers might not on this account be restrained. In many, if not most, recent wars the object has not been national aggrandisement, or even national commerce, but private gain. We have but to think of the South African War, so cleverly engineered in the gold-mining interest, or of the Russo-Japanese war, where so many thousands died for the Russian aristocracy's timber concessions on the Yalu. Or, as permanent incitements to warfare, we may think of all the manufacturers of armaments, the enormous companies that fatten on blood and iron, the contractors, purveyors, horse-breeders, tailors, advertisers, army-coaches, landowners, and well-to-do families whose wealth, livelihood, or position depends mainly upon the continuance of warlike preparations, and whose personal interests are enormously increased by actual war. When a nation is pouring out its wealth at the rate of £2,000,000 or even £10,000,000 a week, as in the future it may well do, much of it will run away to waste, but most of it will stick to one finger or another; and the dirtier the finger the more will stick. It seems silly, it seems almost incredible, that, only a few generations ago, the peoples of Europe were engaged in killing each other as fast as possible over a question of dynasty—whether this or that poor forked radish of a mortal should be called King of Spain or King of France. But in our own days men kill each other for dynasties of cash—for wealthy firms and intermarried families. Nations fight that private companies may show a higher percentage on dividends. It is silly; it is almost incredible. But to shareholders and speculators instigated by these motives Norman Angell's appeal is futile. Even a victorious war may spell disaster to the nation; but even defeat spells cash for them.
Holland was in February 1911 compelled to buy twenty-four inferior big guns from Krupp, without contract or competition, for the defence of her Javanese possessions, which no one thinks of attacking. Do you suppose that Krupp's Company regards war as disadvantageous, or circulates Norman Angell's book for a new gospel? "What plunder!" cried Blücher, looking over London from St. Paul's. Nowadays he would not wait to plunder a foreign nation; he would invest in a Dreadnought company, and plunder his own. Our naval expenditure in 1911-12 amounted to £46,000,000; our army expenditure to nearly £28,000,000—a total of £73,650,000 for what is called defence! Ten years ago we were in the midst of a most expensive war. Nevertheless, in ten years the annual expenditure upon armaments has increased by £14,000,000—far more than enough to double our Old Age Pensions. Within thirty years the naval estimates have more than quadrupled. Are we to suppose that no one grows fat on the people's money? Quidquid delirant reges. The kings of the earth stood up and violently raged together; their subjects died. But now the kings of the earth are raging financiers with a shrewd eye to business, and their subjects starve to pay them. We used to be told that the man who paid the piper called the tune. Do the people call the tune of peace or war? Not at all. The ruling classes both call the tune and pocket the pay.
There is one other point that may obscure the hope arising from Norman Angell's book. His main contention concerns wars between great Powers, nearly equally matched—Powers of high civilisation, with elaborate systems of credit and complicated interdependence of trade. But most recent wars have been attacks—defensive attacks, of course—upon small, powerless, and semi-civilised nations by the great Powers. Under the pretext of extending law and order, justice, peace, good government, and the blessings of the Christian faith, a great Power attacks a small and half-organised people with the object of taking up the White Man's Burden, capturing markets, contracting for railways, and extending territory. To wars of this kind, I think, Norman Angell's comforting theory does not apply—the great illusion does not come in. A strong Power may conquer Morocco, or Persia, or seize Bosnia, or enslave Finland, or penetrate Tibet, or maintain its hold on India, or occupy Egypt, or even destroy the Dutch Republics of South Africa, without disorganising its own commerce or raising a panic on its own credit. Most actual fighting has lately been of this character. It aims at the suppression of freedom in small or unarmed nationalities, the absorption of independent countries into great empires. It is the modern counterpart of the slave-trade. It is supported by similar arguments, and may be quite lucrative, as the slave-trade was.
Actual warfare generally takes this form now, but behind it one may always feel the latent or diplomatic warfare that consists in the calculation of armaments. A great Power says: "How much of Persia, Turkey, China, or Morocco do I dare to swallow? Germany, Russia, France, Japan, England, or Spain (as the case may be) will not like it if I swallow much. But what force could she bring against me, if it came to extremities, and what force could I set against hers?" Then the Powers set to counting up army corps and Dreadnoughts. In Dreadnoughts they seldom get their addition-sums right, but they do their poor best, strike a balance, and declare that a satisfactory agreement has been come to. This latent war is expensive, but cheaper than real war—and it is not bloody; it does not shock credit, though it weakens it; it does not ruin commerce, though it hampers it. The drain upon the nations is exhausting, but it does not kill men so horribly, and our rulers do not feel it; for the people pay, and the concession-hunters, the contractors, the company directors, and suchlike people with whom our rulers chiefly associate, grow very fat.
If, then, Norman Angell's hopeful theory applies only partially to these common wars of Imperial aggrandisement and the perpetual diplomatic war by comparison of armaments, to what may we look for hope? Lord Rosebery would be the last person to whom one would look for hope in general. His hope is too like despair for prudence to smother. Yet, in his speech at the Press banquet during the Imperial Conference of 1909, when he spoke of our modern civilisation "rattling into barbarism," he gave a hint of the movement to which alone I am inclined to trust. "I can only foresee," he exclaimed, "the working-classes of Europe uniting in a great federation to cry: 'We will have no more of this madness and foolery, which is grinding us to powder!'" The words may not have been entirely sincere—something had to be said for the Liberal Press tables, which cheered while the Imperialists sat glum; but there, I believe, lies the ultimate and only possible chance of hope. We must revolutionise our Governments; we must recognise the abject folly of allowing these vital questions of peace, war, and armaments to be decided according to the caprice or advantage of a single man, a clique of courtiers, a gang of adventurers, or the Cabal of a Cabinet formed from the very classes which have most to gain and least to lose, whether from actual war or the competition in armaments. Over this Executive, whether it is called Emperor, King, Court, or Cabinet, the people of the nation has no control—or nothing like adequate control—in foreign affairs and questions of war. In England in the year 1910 not a single hour was allowed for Foreign Office debate in the Commons. In no country of Europe have the men and women of the State a real voice in a matter which touches every man and every woman so closely as war touches them—even distant war, but far more the kind of war that devastates the larder, sweeps out the drawing-room, encamps in the back garden, and at any moment may reduce the family by half.[[17]] One remembers that picture in Carlyle, how thirty souls from the British village of Dumdrudge are brought face to face with thirty souls from a French Dumdrudge, after infinite effort. The word "Fire!" is given, and they blow the souls out of one another:
"Had these men any quarrel?" asks the Sartor. "Busy as
the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart—were
the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe there
was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness
between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had
fallen out; and, instead of shooting one another, had the
cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot."
Slowly and dimly the Dumdrudges of the world—the peasants and artisans, the working people, the people who have most right to count—are beginning to recognise the absurdity of paying and dying for wars of which they know nothing, and in the quarrels of kings and ministers for whom they have neither reverence nor love. "What is the British Empire to me," I heard a Whitechapel man say, "when I have to open the window before I get room to put on my trousers?" A section of the country was opposed to the Crimean War; a far larger section was opposed to the Boer War. Both were ridiculed, persecuted, and maltreated; but nearly everyone now admits that both were right. In the next unjust or unreasonable war the peace party will be stronger still. Something has thus been gained; but the greatest gain ever yet won for the cause of peace was the refusal of the Catalonian reservists to serve in the war against the Riff mountaineers of Morocco in July 1909. "Risk our lives and the subsistence of our little families to secure dividends for shareholders in mining concessions illegally inveigled from a semi-savage chieftain? Never! We will raise hell rather, and die in revolution upon our native streets." So Barcelona flared to heaven, and for nearly a week the people held the vast city. I have seen many noble, as well as many terrible, events, but none more noble or of finer promise for mankind than the sudden uprising of the Catalan working people against a dastardly and inglorious war, waged for the benefit of a few speculators in Paris and Madrid. Ferrer had no direct part in that rising; his only part lay in sowing the seed of freedom by his writings. It was a pity he had no other part. He lost an opportunity such as comes in few men's lives—and he was executed just the same.[[18]]
The event was small and brief, but it was one of the most significant in modern times. If the working classes refuse to fight, what will the kings, ministers, speculators, and contractors do? Will they go out to fight each other? Then, indeed, warfare would become a blessing undisguised, and we could freely join the poet in calling carnage God's daughter. When I was a child I drew up a scheme for a vast British army recruited from our lunatic asylums. With lunatic soldiers, as I explained to my mother, the heavier our losses, the greater would be our gain. It seems to me still a promising idea. But an army recruited from kings, lords, Cabinet Ministers, Members of Parliament, speculators, contractors, and officials—the people who are the primary originators of our wars—would have even greater advantages, and the losses in battle would be balanced by still greater compensations.
The Barcelona rising was, indeed, full of promise. It marked the gradual approach of a time when the working-people, who always supply most of the men to be killed in war, will refuse to fight for the ruling classes, as they would now refuse to fight for dynasties. If they refuse to fight in the ordinary Government wars, either war will cease, or it will rise to the higher stage of war between class and class. It will become either civil war—the most terrible and difficult, but the finest kind of war, because some principle of the highest value must be at stake before civil war can arise; or it will become a combined war of the classes in various countries between whom there is a feeling of sympathy and common interest. That would take the form of a civil war extended throughout Europe, and perhaps America and the highly-developed parts of Asia. The allied forces in the various countries would then strike where the need was greatest, the French or English army corps of working-men going to the assistance of Russian or German working-men against the forces of despotism or capital. But a social war on that scale, however desirable, is like the Spanish fleet in the Critic—it is not yet in sight. The growing perfection of modern arms gives too enormous an advantage to established forces. The movement is much more likely to take the Barcelona form of refusal to fight; and if the peoples of Europe could combine in that determination, the effect would be irresistible. This international movement is, in fact, very slowly, growing. The telegraph, the railway, cheap tickets, Cook's tours, the power of reading, and even the peculiar language taught as French in our schools, combine to wear away the hostility of peoples. The "beastly foreigner" is almost extinct. The man who has been for a week in Germany, or for a trip to lovely Lucerne, feels a reflected glory in saying those foreigners are not so bad. There was a fine old song with a refrain, "He's a good 'un when you know him, but you've got to know him first." Well, we are getting to know the foreigner whom we once called "beastly."
Ultimately the best, the only hope for peace lies in the determination of the peoples not to do anything so silly as to settle the quarrels of their rulers by killing each other. But then come the deeper questions: Do people love peace? Do they hate war? Would the total abolition of war be a good thing for the world? After a lengthy period of peace there usually arises a craving for battle. Nearly fifty years of peace followed the defeat of the Persians in Greece, and at the end of that time, just before the Peloponnesian War, which was to bring ruin on the country, Thucydides tells us that all Greece, being ignorant of the realities of war, stood a-tiptoe with excitement. It was the same in England just before our disastrous South African War, when readers of Kipling glutted themselves with imaginary slaughter, and Henley cried to our country that her whelps wanted blooding. In England this martial spirit was more violent than in Greece, because, when war actually came, the Greeks were themselves exposed to all its horrors and sufferings, but in England the bloodthirsty mind could enjoy the conflict in a suburban train with a half-penny paper. As in bull-fights or gladiatorial shows, the spectators watched the expensive but entertaining scene of blood and death from a safe and comfortable distance. They gave the cash and let the credit go; they thoroughly appreciated the rumble of a distant drum. "Blood! blood!" they cried. "Give us more blood to make our own blood circulate more agreeably under our unbroken skins!" Christianity joined in the cry through the mouths of its best accredited representatives. As at the Crucifixion it is written, "On that day Herod and Pilate were friends," so on the outbreak of a singularly unjust, avaricious, and cruel war, the Christian Churches of England displayed for the first and last time some signs of unity. Canterbury and Armagh kissed each other, and the City Temple applauded the embraces of unrighteousness and war. Dean Farrar of Canterbury, concluding his glorification of the hell which I then saw enacted in South Africa, quoted with heartfelt approval the Archbishop of Armagh's poem:—