‘But the purpose! That justifies it! What purpose? To obtain the signature to the Treaty of Peace. Many Englishmen—not Pacifists, not sentimentalists, not conscientious objectors, or other vermin of that kind, but Bishops, Judges, Members of the House of Lords, great public educators. Tory editors—have declared that this Treaty is a monstrous injustice. Some Englishmen at least think so. But if the Germans say so, that becomes a crime which we shall know how to punish. “The enemy have been reminded already” says the Times, proud organ of British respectability, of Conservatism, of distinguished editors and ennobled proprietors, “that the machinery of the blockade can again be put into force at a few hours’ notice ... the intention of the Allies to take military action if necessary.... Rejection of the Peace terms now offered them, will assuredly lead to fresh chastisement.”
‘But will not Mr Lloyd George be able to bring back signatures? Will he not have made Peace—permanent Peace? Shall we not have destroyed this Prussian philosophy of frightfulness, force, and hate? Shall we not have proved to the world that a State without military power can trust to the good faith and humanity of its neighbours? Can we not, then, celebrate victory with light hearts, honour our dead and glorify our arms? Have we not served faithfully those ideals of right and justice, mercy and chivalry, for which a whole generation of youth went through hell and gave their lives?’
CHAPTER VI
THE ALTERNATIVE RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT
THE facts of the present situation in Europe, so far sketched, reveal broadly this spectacle: everywhere the failure of national power to indispensable ends, sustenance, political security, nationality, right; everywhere a fierce struggle for national power.
Germany, which successfully fed her expanding population by a system which did not rest upon national power, wrecked that system in order to attempt one which all experience showed could not succeed. The Allied world pilloried both the folly and the wickedness of such a statecraft; and at the peace proceeded to imitate it in every particular. The faith in the complete efficacy of preponderant power which the economic and other demands of the Treaty of Versailles and the policy towards Russia reveal, is already seen to be groundless (for the demands, in fact, are being abandoned). There is in that document an element of naïveté, and in the subsequent policy a cruelty which will be the amazement of history—if our race remains capable of history.
Yet the men who made the Treaty, and accelerated the famine and break-up of half a world, including those, like M. Tardieu, who still demand a ruined Germany and an indemnity-paying one, were the ablest statesmen of Europe, experienced, realist, and certainly not morally monsters. They were probably no worse morally, and certainly more practical, than the passionate democracies, American and European, who encouraged all the destructive elements of policy and were hostile to all that was recuperative and healing.
It is perfectly true—and this truth is essential to the thesis here discussed—that the statesmen at Versailles were neither fools or villains. Neither were the Cardinals and the Princes of the Church, who for five hundred years, more or less, attempted to use physical coercion for the purpose of suppressing religious error. There is, of course an immeasurably stronger case for the Inquisition as an instrument of social order than there is for the use of competing national military power as the basis of modern European society. And the stronger case for the Inquisition as an instrument of social by a modern statesman when he goes to war. It was less. The inquisitor, in burning and torturing the heretic, passionately believed that he obeyed the voice of God, as the modern statesman believes that he is justified by the highest dictates of patriotism. We are now able to see that the Inquisitor was wrong, his judgment twisted by some overpowering prepossession: Is some similar prepossession distorting vision and political wisdom in modern statecraft? And if so, what is the nature of this prepossession?
As an essay towards the understanding of its nature, the following suggestions are put forward:—
The assertion of national power, domination, is always in line with popular feeling. And in crises—like that of the settlement with Germany—popular feeling dictates policy.