§ 3.
The Western world has had its lesson now—the lesson indelibly writ in death: There is no longer room in civilization for despotic Governments. In Germany, in Austria, in the country where despotism most reigns supreme—our ally, Russia—they are doomed in theory, if not as yet in fact.
The Slav is no more by nature the enemy of the Teuton than is the Briton of the Frank. That enmity is a fostered thing of imperial and bureaucratic dreams.
What stands out from all this welter? The ambitious diplomacy of the despotic Powers, in pursuit of so-called “national ideals,” a diplomacy begotten of vicious traditions and the misconceptions of egomania, removed by a ring fence from the people of the nations for whom it professes to speak. An ambitious and cynical diplomacy, battening on the knowledge that it can at almost any time raise for its ends a whirlwind of feeling out of the love men ever have for the land wherein they are born.
It is the divorce of executive power from popular sanction that has made possible this greatest of all the disasters in history. In democratic countries the aggressive faculty is imperceptibly yet continually weakened by the obscure but real link between ministers elect and the people. Only in those countries where, under a cloak perhaps of democratic forms, the administrative force is responsible to none save an imperial director, is a ruthless and unchecked pursuit of so-called national dreams, an aggressive parade of so-called national honour, possible.
If only autocracies—masquerading or naked—go down in the wreckage of this war!
§ 4.
The superstition that unmilitarized nations suffer from fatty degeneration of the heart has perished in the forty-fourth year of its age, at the siege of Liège, blown away by the heroism of a little unmilitary nation!
Democracy and citizen armies! If this war brings that in its train its horror will not have been all hateful. But so surely as States remain autocratic at heart will the dire spirit that animates almighty bureaucracy rear its head again and demand revenge. So surely will this war bring another, and yet another! In these last twenty years civilization has not even marked time; it has gone backward under the curb and pressure of professional armaments masquerading under the words “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” The principle of universal service by men not professionally soldiers, the principle that no man shall be called to fight one step outside his native land—save as part of an international Police to enforce the authority of a League for Peace—these are the only principles that will in the future still the gnawings of anxiety and gradually guarantee the peace of the West. They are principles that, I fear, will never obtain while States are subject to military bureaucracy and dynastic ambitions. If they cannot be purged of these we are “doomed to something great” every generation—the greatness of the shambles! It is enough to make heart stand still and brain reel for ever if one must believe that man is never to find better means of keeping his spirit from rust, his body from decay, than these sporadic outbursts of “greatness.” “War is the only cleanser!” Ah!—because the word “patriotism” has so limited a meaning. But—to believe that this must always be . . . ! When men have ceased to look on war as the proper vehicle for self-sacrifice, will they not turn to a greatness that is not soaked with blood and black with the crows of death, to save their souls alive? Will there not, can there not, arise an emotion as strong as this present patriotism—a sentiment as passionate and sweeping, bearing men on to the use of every faculty and the forgetfulness of self, for the salvation, instead of the destruction, of their fellow-man? Or is this a dream, and are we forever doomed, each generation, to the greatness of tearing each other limb from limb?