There were two main problems to be overcome in this matter, one of which was less pronounced at the time than it became later—the economic interpretation of history. Started by Karl Marx the idea that all history can be interpreted solely by economic causes has come since to have an extraordinary popularity even among those whose own philosophy and sociology are most widely removed from Marx. It is a view which Chesterton would always have dismissed with the contempt it deserves. Both he and Belloc saw as the determining factor in history, because it is the determining factor in human life, the free will of man. This does not mean that they would deny that the economic factor has often been powerful in conquering man's liberty, or a motive in its exercise. But Chesterton regarded the present age as a diseased one precisely because the money motive held so disproportionate a place in it. He looked back to the past and saw the world of today as almost unique in that respect. He looked forward to the future and hoped for a release from it.
And as he looked back into the past he saw something in the history of mankind far stronger than the economic motive—whether that mean the strife for wealth or the mere struggle for subsistence. He saw the all-pervading power of religion, which in bygone ages had presided over man's activities and turned the exercise of that most noble faculty free-will to the building of a civilization today undreamed of.
But in 1914 it was easier to get away from the economic interpretation of history than it was to overcome another difficulty in the minds of those who had not the Chesterton vision of Europe, and to whom it seemed that in a war between nations it was extremely likely that all parties were more or less equally to blame. "History," said Chesterton, "tends to be a façade of faded picturesqueness for most of those who have not specially studied it: a more or less monochrome background for the drama of their own day." But the nature of that background and the vision of today's drama will vary with the varying angle of historic vision.
There were two possible meanings for the statement that all nations were to blame for the world war. All nations had gone away from God. Motives of personal and national greed had ousted the old ideal of Christendom. It might roughly be said that no nation was seriously trying to seek the Kingdom of God and His Justice. International Finance had become a shadow resting on all the earth, and it could not have got this power if Governments had been governing solely for the good of their peoples. "Bow down your heads before God," is the invocation constantly used in the Missal during the penitential season of Lent and the government of every nation needed this call to repentance.
With this interpretation Chesterton would have agreed. All nations were to blame for the predisposing causes that made a world-war possible. But when we come to the question of actual responsibility for making this particular war, the statement means something very different and something with which Chesterton was prepared to join issue. Against him those who disliked France or England, and saw the history of those two countries as a history of Imperialism, were saying: if Germany had not attacked France, France would have attacked Germany; or: England would have been equally treacherous if it had paid her—look at the Treaty of Limerick.
Chesterton kept imploring people simply to look at the facts. Germany had in fact broken her word to France and attacked her. France had not attacked Germany. Germany had invaded Belgium. England had not invaded Holland "to seize a naval and commercial advantage; and whether they say that we wished to do it in our greed or feared to do it in our cowardice, the fact remains that we did not do it. Unless this common-sense principle be kept in view, I cannot conceive how any quarrel can possibly be judged. A contract may be made between two persons solely for material advantage on each side: but the moral advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the person who keeps the contract."*
[* The Barbarism of Berlin, 15-16.]
The promise and the vow were fundamental to Chesterton's view of human life. Discussing divorce he claims as essential to manhood the right to bind oneself and to be taken at one's word. The marriage vow was almost the only vow that remained out of the whole mediaeval conception of chivalry and he could not endure to see it set at nought. But even in the modern world there still remained some notion of the sacredness of a solemn promise.
"It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through time, is what chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages, but from brutes and reptiles. This was noted by the shrewdness of the Old Testament, when it summed up the dark, irresponsible enormity of Leviathan in the words, 'Will he make a pact with thee?' . . . The vow is to the man what the song is to the bird, or the bark to the dog; his voice whereby he is known."* There were two chief marks whereby it seemed to Chesterton that the Prussian invasion of Belgium was fundamentally an attack on civilization. Contempt for a promise was the first. He called it the war on the word.
[* Ibid., 32-33.]