All America (or Britain, for that matter: America is only a striking and so a convenient example) knew that the Bismarckian persecution of the Socialists, the imprisonment of Bebel, of Liebknecht, the prosecution of newspapers for anti-militarist doctrines, the rigid control of education, by the Government, were just the natural prelude to what ended in Louvain and Aerschot, to the shooting down of the civilians of an invaded country. Again, that was why Prussia had to be destroyed in the interest of human freedom and the safety of democracy. The newspapers, the professors, the churches, were telling us all this endlessly for five years. Within a year of the end of the War, America is engaged in an anti-Socialist campaign more sweeping, more ruthless, by any test which you care to apply—the numbers arrested, the severity of the sentences imposed, the nature of the offences alleged—than anything ever attempted by Bismarck or the Kaiser. Old men of seventy (one selected by the Socialist party as Presidential Candidate), young girls, college students, are sent to prison with sentences of ten, fifteen, or twenty years. The elected members of State Legislatures are not allowed to sit, on the ground of their Socialist opinions. There are deportations in whole shiploads. If one takes the Espionage Act and compares it with any equivalent German legislation (the tests applied to school teachers or the refusal of mailing privileges to Socialist papers), one finds that the general principle of control of political opinion by the Government, and the limitations imposed upon freedom of discussion, and the Press, are certainly pushed further by the post-war America than they were by the pre-war Germany—the Germany that had to be destroyed for the precise reason that the principle of government by free discussion was more valuable than life itself.
And as to military terrorism. Americans can see—scores of American papers are saying it every day—that the things defended by the British Government in Ireland are indistinguishable from what brought upon Germany the wrath of Allied mankind. But they do not even know and certainly would not care if they did know, that American marines in Hayti—a little independent State that might one day become the hope and symbol of a subject nationality, an unredeemed race that has suffered and does suffer more at American hands than Pole or Alsatian ever suffered at German hands—have killed ten times as many Haytians as the Black and Tans have killed Irish. Nor for that matter do Americans know that every week there takes place in their own country—as there has taken place week after week in the years of peace for half a century—atrocities more ferocious than any which are alleged against even the British or the German. Neither of the latter burn alive, weekly, untried fellow-countrymen with a regularity that makes the thing an institution.
If indeed it was the militarism, the terrorism, the crude assertion of power, the repressions of freedom, which made us hate the German, why are we relatively indifferent when all those evils raise their heads, not far away, among a people for whom after all we are not responsible, but at home, near to us, where we have some measure of responsibility?
For indifferent in some measure to those near-by evils we all are.
The hundred million people who make up America include as many kindly, humane, and decent folk as any other hundred million anywhere in the world. They have a habit of carrying through extraordinary and unusual measures—like Prohibition. Yet nothing effective has been done about lynching, for which the world holds them responsible, any more than we have done anything effective about Ireland, for which the world holds us responsible. Their evil may one day land them in a desperate ‘subject nationality’ problem, just as our Irish problem lands us in political difficulty the world over. Yet neither they nor we can manage to achieve one-tenth of the emotional interest in our own atrocity or oppression, which we managed in a few weeks to achieve in war-time over the German barbarities in Belgium. If we could—if every schoolboy and maid-servant felt as strongly over Balbriggan or Amritsar as they felt over the Lusitania and Louvain—our problem would be solved; whereas the action and policy which arose out of our feeling about Louvain did not solve the evil of military terrorism. It merely made it nearly universal.
It brings us back to the original question. Is it mainly, or at all, the cruelty or the danger of oppression which moves us, which is at the bottom of our flaming indignation over the crimes of the enemy?
We believed that we were fighting because of a passionate feeling for self-rule; for freedom of discussion, of respect for the rights of others, particularly the weak; the hatred of the mere pride of power out of which oppression grows; of the regimentation of minds which is its instrument. But after the War we find that in truth we have no particular feeling about the things we fought to make impossible. We rather welcome them, if they are a means of harassing people that we do not happen to like. We get the monstrous paradox that the very tendencies which it was the object of the War to check, are the very tendencies that have acquired an elusive power in our own country—possibly as the direct result of the War!
Perhaps if we examine in some detail the process of the break-up after war, within the nation, of the unity which marked it during war, we may get some explanation of the other change just indicated.
The unity on which we congratulated ourselves was for a time a fact. But just as certainly the patriotism which prompted the duchess to scrub floors was not simply love of her countrymen, or it would not suddenly cease when the war came to an end. The self-same man who in khaki was a hero to be taken for drives in the duchess’s motor-car, became as workman—a member of some striking union, say—an object of hostility and dislike. The psychology revealed here has a still more curious manifestation.
When in war-time we read of the duke’s son and the cook’s son peeling potatoes into the same tub, we regard this aspect of the working of conscription as something in itself fine and admirable, a real national comradeship in common tasks at last. Colonel Roosevelt orates; our picture papers give us photographs; the country thrills to this note of democracy. But when we learn that for the constructive purposes of peace—for street-cleaning—the Soviet Government has introduced precisely this method and compelled the sons of Grand Dukes to shovel snow beside common workmen, the same papers give the picture as an example of the intolerable tyranny of socialism, as a warning of what may happen in England if the revolutionists are listened to. That for years that very thing had been happening in England for the purposes of war, that we were extremely proud of it, and had lauded it as wholesome discipline and a thing which made conscription fine and democratic, is something that we are unable even to perceive, so strong and yet so subtle are the unconscious factors of opinion. This peculiar psychological twist explains, of course, several things: why we are all socialists for the purposes of war, and why socialism can then give results which nothing else could give; why we cannot apply the same methods successfully to peace; and why the economic miracles possible in war are not possible in peace. And the outcome is that forces, originally social and unifying, are at present factors only of disruption and destruction, not merely internationally, but, as we shall see presently, nationally as well.