When the accomplishment of certain things—the production of shells, the assembling of certain forces, the carriage of cargoes—became a matter of life and death, we did not argue about nationalisation or socialism; we put it into effect, and it worked. There existed for war a will which found a way round all the difficulties of credit adjustment, distribution, adequate wages, unemployment, incapacitation. We could take over the country’s railways and mines, control its trade, ration its bread, and decide without much discussion that those things were indispensable for its purposes. But we can do none of these things for the upbuilding of the country in peace time. The measures to which we turn when we feel that the country must produce or perish, are precisely the measures which, when the war is over, we declare are the least likely to get anything done at all. We could make munitions; we cannot make houses. We could clothe and feed our soldiers and satisfy all their material wants; we cannot do that for the workers. Unemployment in war-time was practically unknown; the problem of unemployment in peace time seems beyond us. Millions go unclothed; thousands of workers who could make clothes are without employment. One speaks of the sufferings of the army of poverty as though they were dispensations of heaven. We did not speak thus of the needs of soldiers in war-time. If soldiers wanted uniforms and wool was obtainable, weavers did not go unemployed. Then there existed a will and common purpose. That will and common purpose the patriotism of peace-time cannot give us.
Yet, again, we cannot always be at war. Women must have time and opportunity to bear and to bring up children, and men to build up a country-side, if only in order to have men for war to slay and things for war to destroy. Patriotism fails as a social cement within the nation at peace, it fails as a stimulus to its constructive tasks; and as between nations, we know it acts as a violent irritant and disruptive force.
We need not question the genuineness of the emotion which moves our duchess when she knits socks for the dear boys in the trenches—or when she fulminates against the same dear boys as working men when they come home. As soldiers she loved them because her hatred of Germans—that atrocious, hostile ‘herd’—was deep and genuine. She felt like killing Germans herself. Consequently, to those who risked their lives to fulfil this wish of hers, her affections went out readily enough. But why should she feel any particular affection for men who mine coal, or couple railway trucks, or catch fish in the North Sea? Dangerous as are those tasks, they are not visibly and intimately related to her own fierce emotions. The men performing them are just workpeople, the relation of whose labour to her own life is not, perhaps, always very clear. The suggestion that she should scrub floors or knit socks for them would appear to her as merely silly or offensive.
But unfortunately the story does not end there. During these years of war her very genuine emotions of hate were fed and nourished by war propaganda; her emotional hunger was satisfied in some measure by the daily tale of victories over the enemy. She had, as it were, ten thousand Germans for breakfast every morning. And when the War stopped, certainly something went out of her life. No one would pretend that these flaming passions of five years went for so little in her emotional experience that they could just be dropped from one day to another without something going unsatisfied.
And then she cannot get coal; her projected journey to the Riviera is delayed by a railway strike; she has troubles with servants; faces a preposterous super-tax and death duties; an historical country seat can no longer be maintained and old associations must be broken up; Labour threatens revolution—or her morning paper says it does; Labour leaders say grossly unfair things about dukes. Here, indeed, is a new hostility, a new enemy tribe, on which the emotions cultivated so assiduously during five years, but hungry and unfed since the War, can once more feed and find some satisfaction. The Bolshevist, or the Labour agitator, takes the place of the Hun; the elements of enmity and disruption are already present.
And something similar takes place with the miner, or labour man, in reference to the duchess and what she stands for. For him also the main problem of life had resolved itself during the War into something simple and emotional; an enemy to be fought and overcome. Not a puzzling intellectual difficulty, with all the hesitations and uncertainties of intellectual decision dependent upon sustained mental effort. The rights and wrongs were settled for him; right was our side, wrong the enemy’s. What we had to do was to crush him. That done, it would be a better world, his country ‘a land fit for heroes to live in.’
On return from the War he does not find quite that. He can, for instance, get no house fit to live in at all. High prices, precarious employment. What is wrong? There are fifty theories, all puzzling. As to housing, he is sometimes told it is his own fault; the building unions won’t permit dilution. When the ‘high-brows’ are all at sixes and sevens, what is a man to think? But it is suggested to him that behind all this is one enemy: the Capitalist. His papers have a picture of him: very like the Hun. Now here is something emotionally familiar. For years he has learned to hate and fight, to embody all problems in the one problem of fighting some definite—preferably personified—enemy. Smash him; get him by the throat, and then all these brain-racking puzzles will clear themselves up. Our side, our class, our tribe, will then be on top, and there will be no real solution until it is. To this respond all the emotions, the whole state of feeling which years of war have cultivated. Once more the problem of life is simple; one of power, domination, the fight for mastery; loyalty to our side, our lot, ‘right or wrong.’ Workers to be masters, workers who have been shoved and ordered about, to do the shoving and the ordering. Dictatorship of the proletariat. The headaches disappear and one can live emotionally free once more.
There are ‘high-brows’ who will even philosophise the thing for him, and explain that only the psychology of war and violence will give the emotional drive to get anything done; that only by the myths which mark patriotism can real social change be made. Just as for the hate which keeps war going, the enemy State must be a single ‘person,’ a collectivity in which any one German can be killed as vengeance or reprisal for any other,[63] so ‘the capitalist class’ must be a personality, if class hatred is to be kept alive in such a way as to bring the class war to victory.
But that theory overlooks the fact that just as the nationalism which makes war also destroys the Alliances by which victory can be made effective, so the transfer of the psychology of Nationalism to the industrial field has the same effect of Balkanisation. We get in both areas, not the definite triumph of a cohesive group putting into operation a clear-cut and understandable programme or policy, but the chaotic conflict of an infinite number of groups unable to co-operate effectively for any programme.
If the hostilities which react to the Syndicalistic appeal were confined to the Capitalist, there might be something to be said for it from the point of view of the Labour movement. But forces so purely instinctive, by their very nature repelling the restraint of self-imposed discipline by intelligent foresight of consequences, cannot be the servant of an intelligent purpose, they become its master. The hostility becomes more important than the purpose. To the industrial Jingo, as to the nationalist Jingo, all foreigners are potential enemies. The hostile tribe or herd may be constituted by very small differences; slight variations of occupation, interest, race, speech, and—most potently of all perhaps—dogma or belief. Heresy-hunting is, of course, one manifestation of tribal animosity; and a heretic is the person who has the insufferable impudence to disagree with us.