We of the Allied countries must surely long for such a plan; nor, I think can any neutral nation which has watched and trembled at this war be other than well-disposed towards it; and, whatever their rulers and journalists may desire, the peoples of the Central Empires will not wish to be left out. Yet when the time comes for peace discussions one sees only too well the deadlock. The Allied nations, if victorious, will not want a round table séance with their enemies and a cosy settlement. The Central Empires will not wish to accept forced membership of a League for Peace founded by their enemies, in which—however mistakenly—they believe they will always be outvoted. This vicious deadlock, however, is less real, I think, than it seems. There are new forces at work; and if a League for Peace can make even a lame and partial start, it may by these new forces soon be fortified. After this war, deep-planted in the heart of every people, whether fighting or looking on, will be the loathing of national aggressiveness! Such a feeling has never existed before because men have never before been so stirred, so injured, and so frightened. We soon forget, of course, all save that of which we are constantly reminded; but the aftermath of this war will be full of startling revelations of the ruin it has caused; the world will reek with reminder that so-called national aspirations cannot with impunity be aggressively pursued; that so-called defensive wars cannot be light-heartedly incepted. During the march of a war, however terrible, the fascination of strife colours and subdues its horror; its heroisms hypnotize, its rancours drug all reason, blur all vision. But in the cold thinned blood of a maimed future, how different it will all seem, how terrifically disproportionate!
Love of country has never before had such calls made on it; men have never so suffered for their patriotism. That, too, must bring a sweeping reaction, which will gradually force the hands of reluctant Governments into adhesion to any scheme which promises relief from a repetition of such agonies. And so, in spite of all the difficulties, I believe some sort of League for Peace will come, imperfect and experimental at first, but which, once founded, will wax and grow strong, in the real—not merely pious—horror of war which will follow this fearful carnival. Let it but hold together for a few years, survive one or two serious trials, and I think no sane nation will ever desire its dissolution.
Such a scheme will not come down to us from Heaven. From our own brains and wills it must spring; from our sense of—shall we say—the inconvenience of wars like this. If the killing and disablement of some ten million men, the waste of some ten to twenty thousand million pounds, persuades us to nothing but the leaving of the world exactly as it was, as liable to these irruptions of death and misery—then, better say with the Spanish poet, “Of all the misfortunes of man, the greatest is to have been born.”
Even before the guns cease roaring, shall not our nine Allied peoples agree informally among themselves upon the structure of a League for Peace, and secure the sympathetic understanding of America, and the other neutral countries, on whose wisdom and good-will so much depends?
I, for one, would wish my Country foremost in pursuing this great chance—wish that she might place all her power in the favouring scale; I would wish to see her as ready to submit to the decisions of an International Tribunal, as each one of us is ready as a matter of course to submit to the decisions of our judges.
We in this green Britain of ours, still free of the invader’s foot, can measure the value of freedom now, looking across to lands waiting for deliverance. No country of Europe but has suffered, during long centuries, outrage and trampling, siege and slaughter, that we have been spared—saved by our sea. It is not irony that calls these the islands of the blessed.
But Fortune is a jealous goddess; and offerings are due to her who has given us an inviolate soil. I seem to see Fortune standing apart, watching—wondering. “What have they made—what are they going to make of their Land?” I seem to see Fortune thinking: “If I grant them success once more, these islanders, are they great enough to survive it? Under my smile the empires of the past one by one went down—Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Rome, others of long, long ago. Will this empire live, or will it too rot away, and sink?”
Those empires of the past fell through prosperity, through inordinate pride, through luxury and slavery hand in hand. May Fortune hold up a mirror to us, that we see ourselves as we are! Freedom and Humanity are not mere words; nor is a people’s greatness measured in acres or in pounds, in the number of its ships on the sea, or of the rifles it can muster. A people’s greatness is in the breadth and quality of its soul, in its fortitude, alertness, justice, gentleness, within itself and to the world without; and in its faith that man has his fate in his own hands.
As the individual, so the State; the aggregate of individual virtue decides and shapes the lot of nations. May there be no slaves among us and none who fatten upon slavery; no brutes among us and none who cower under brutality! Let us not hold ourselves as the elect in a blind patriotism, but have some vision of the world beyond our shores, of its hopes and dreads and natural ambitions. A narrow national spirit never served mankind!
Let the sea be our inspiration and our reminder! For, if it is our fortification, the sea is also our link with all the world, and the greatest force of untamed Nature. It seems to me that they who live dependent on the sea should never be puffed up. Its changing moods and salt winds, its wildness, beauty, desolation, the sudden fates that lurk within it, that leap and clutch and draw away from us our best; the great spaces of it beneath sun and stars—these are constant, and to our souls should surely carry breadth, sweep out of us the littleness of Imperial complacency. The sea is never chained, and the eyes of sailors have in them a look that any man might covet—a steady fronting of something inscrutable, shifting, dangerous. They know the little worth of human strength, the need of unity; they know that when a man slackens his watch, Fate leaps upon him.