So the Sorelian philosophy of violence and instinctive pugnacity gives us, not the effective drive of a whole movement against the present social order (for that would require order, discipline, self-control, tolerance, and toleration); it gives us the tendency to an infinite splitting of the Labour movement. No sooner does the Left of some party break off and found a new party than it is immediately confronted by its own ‘Leftism.’ And your dogmatist hates the dissenting member of his own sect more fiercely than the rival sect; your Communist some rival Communism more bitterly than the Capitalist. Already the Labour movement is crossed by the hostilities of Communist against Socialist, the Second International against the Third, the Third against the Fourth; Trades Unionism by the hostility of skilled against unskilled, and in much of Europe there is also the conflict of town against country.
This tendency has happily not yet gone far in England; but here, as elsewhere, it represents the one great danger, the tendency to be watched. And it is a tendency that has its moral and psychological roots in the same forces which have given us the chaos in the international field: The deep human lust for coercion, domination; the irksomeness of toleration, thought, self-discipline.
The final difficulty in social and political discussion is, of course, the fact that the ultimate values—what is the highest good, what is the worst evil—cannot usually be argued about at all; you accept them, you see that they are good or bad as the case may be, or you don’t.
Yet we cannot organise a society save on the basis of some sort of agreement concerning these least common denominators; the final argument for the view that Western Europe had to destroy German Prussianism was that the system challenged certain ultimate moral values common to Western society. On the morrow of the sinking of the Lusitania an American writer pointed out that if the cold-blooded slaughter of innocent women and children were accepted as a normal incident of war, like any other, the whole moral standards of the West would then definitely be placed on another plane. That elusive but immeasurably important moral sense, which gives a society sufficient community of aim to make common action possible, would have been radically altered. The ancient world—highly civilised and cultured as much of it was—had a Sittlichkeit which made the chattel-slavery of the greater part of the human race an entirely normal—and, as they thought, inevitable—condition of things. It was accepted by the slaves themselves, and it was this acquiescence in the arrangement by both parties to it which mainly accounted for its continuance through a very long period of a very high civilisation. The position of women illustrates the same thing. There are to-day highly developed civilisations in which a man of education buys a wife, or several, as in the West he would buy a racehorse. And the wife, or wives, accept that situation; there can be no change in that particular matter until certain quite ‘unarguable’ moral values have altered in the minds of those concerned.
The American writer raised, therefore, an extremely important question in relation to the War. Has its total outcome affected certain values of the fundamental kind just indicated? What has been its effect upon social impulses? Has it any direct relation to certain moral tendencies that have succeeded it?
Perhaps the War is now old enough to enable us to face a few quite undeniable facts with some measure of detachment.
When the Germans bombarded Scarborough early in the War, there was such a hurricane of moralisation that one rejoiced that this War would not be marked on our side, at least, by the bombardment of open cities. But when our Press began to print reports of French bombs falling on circus tents full of children, scores being killed, there was simply no protest at all. And one of the humours of the situation was that after more than a year, in which scores of such reports had appeared in the Press, some journalistic genius began an agitation on behalf of ‘reprisals’ for air raids.[64]
At a time when it seemed doubtful whether the Germans would sign the Treaty or not, and just what would be the form of the Hungarian Government, the Evening News printed the following editorial:—
‘It might take weeks or months to bring the Hungarian Bolshevists and recalcitrant Germans to book by extensive operations with large forces. It might take but a few days to bring them to reason by adequate use of aircraft.
‘Allied airmen could reach Buda-pest in a few hours, and teach its inhabitants such a lesson that Bolshevism would lose its attractions for them.