Unless one be a poet, it is difficult, as may perhaps be gathered from the preceding paragraph, sufficiently to praise genuine patriotism without falling into vague rhetoric. But I submit that there is nothing to show that this political emotion is created, stimulated, or even discovered by war. Actually it seems that the reverse is the case, if one may judge by the fact that war is invariably accompanied by an overwhelming outbreak of every spurious form of patriotism that was ever invented by the devil to make an honest man ashamed of his country. True patriotism is a calm and lovely orientation of the spirit towards the vital beauty of England. It has no noisy manifestations and consequently one may not be able to find it among the crowds who shout most loudly for war.
One finds instead a sort of violent fever and calenture which not merely deflects, as any emotion may, but totally inhibits the rational operations of the mind. The newspapers supply a legion of witnesses.
Thus the Evening Standard perorates against some pacificist lecturer (who had attempted to clear his views from all sorts of misrepresentations) with the magnificent comment that he had not "repudiated his remarks as to the pleasure which the tune of the Austrian National Anthem gave him."[16] But I should weary you were I to transcribe a tithe of the stupid remarks made by persons in authority under the influence of war. The record, I believe, in England is held at present by Mr. Bodkin, K.C.
It may be said of course that men, and newspapers, are equally stupid in time of peace; and I fear that fundamentally this is true. War does not change their nature, but only brings to the bubbling surface the dregs and vileness and scum. War does not change any one's nature; and that is why it is vain to expect that under its influence those crowds will love their country who never loved anything before. But if war cannot create it may at least be supposed to discover and test the existent patriotism of the nation. And this supposition is corroborated at first sight by the realisation that hundreds of thousands, that actually millions of previously ordinary young men have implied by enlisting their willingness to die for England. One might, of course, reason that no individual recruit really believes he is going to be killed, that each boy thinks he will be one of the lucky ones who escape all the bullets unhurt to enjoy an honoured return, that recruiting would have failed entirely if the barracks were explicitly a grave and enlistment the certainty of violent death or mutilation. But somehow I don't think that would be a fair argument. It is more pertinent if less easy to remember that a readiness to die for one's country is not the highest form of political virtue. If it be, as it is, a solemn and wonderful thing to be willing to die for the salvation (ex hypothesi) of England, it must be much more wonderful and solemn to be willing to die in order slightly to increase the income of one's family. And every schoolboy knows that the Chinaman of the old regime was willing to have his head cut off for the payment of a few dollars to his next of kin. Let no one ever deny our soldiers the honour of their courage and nobility; but the fact remains that the readiness to die for England is a less adequate test of patriotism than a readiness to live for England; and if the readiness to live for the State rather than for private interests had been for a hundred years a social virtue whose votaries could be numbered by the million, then indeed England would be to-day a nation worth dying for.
§ 4
The "Moral Test"
The theory that war is beneficial as a moral test, a furnace in which character is proved—ut fulvum spectatur in ignibus aurum—is that generally adopted by the Christian Churches, who may be said without disrespect to have taken every advantage of their founder's unique reference to the sword. I cannot help thinking that there is something fundamental in this ecclesiastical advocacy of war; that some psychological theory could be outlined to correlate this almost uniform advocacy with the facts that such religious men as Tennyson and Ruskin were among the loudest in their support of the Crimean War, that such a militarist as Rudyard Kipling in his best work (in Kim, in Puck of Pook's Hill and the intercalated poems, in the most successful of his short stories) shows himself to be at heart a deeply religious mystic; and that in France the very active Clerical party, one consequence of a disestablished Church, is always closely supported by the Chauvinists. In many cases, however, I have no doubt that the pious Christian, finding himself confronted with war, and not having the moral courage or the political detachment to condemn it, only applies automatically to its justification the arguments which he habitually uses to explain the existence of evil and pain. It is certain at least that the theories of war as a Moral Test or a School of Character bear a strong resemblance to the commonplaces of religious consolation which almost any good Christian will offer to the bereaved and afflicted. Any one who has seen an innocent friend slowly tortured to death by some vile disease will know the futility of the Christian defence (for these religious consolations amount theologically to a defence) that pain ennobles the character and "proves" the moral courage of the sufferer.[17] The leading fallacy of the defence that war, or pain, is valuable as a moral test is akin to the common misunderstanding of the word "prove" in the saying that "the exception proves the rule"; the truth being that a strong and noble character, one of whose corollary qualities is a capacity to bear pain, is not less strong and noble if it is never called upon to exercise that capacity. The San Francisco earthquake was not a blessing in disguise because it happened to "test" and "prove" the strength and flexibility of modern American architecture.