It is not so much the character of our impulsive and instinctive life that is changed by these influences, as the direction. The elements of human nature may remain unchangeable, but the manifestations resulting from the changing combinations may be infinitely various as are the forms of matter which result from changing combinations of the same primary elements.
It is not a choice between a life of impulse and emotion on the one side, and wearisome repressions on the other. The perception that certain needs are vital will cause us to use our emotional energy for one purpose instead of another. And just because the traditions that have grouped around nationalism turn our combativeness into the direction of war, the energy brought into play by that impulse is not available for the creativeness of peace. Having become habituated to a certain reagent—the stimulus of some personal or visible enemy—energy fails to react to a stimulus which, with a different way of life, would have sufficed. Because we must have gin to summon up our energy, that is no proof that energy is impossible without it. It is hardly for an inebriate to laud the life of instinct and impulse. For the time being that is not the attitude and tendency that most needs encouragement.
As to the fact that the instinctive and impulsive part of our behaviour is dirigible and malleable by tradition and discussion, that is not only admitted, but it is apt to be over-emphasised—by those who insist upon the ‘unchangeability of human nature.’ The importance which we attached to the repression of pacifist and defeatist propaganda during the War, and of Bolshevist agitation after the War, proves that we believe these feelings, that we allege to be unchangeable, can be changed too easily and readily by the influence of ideas, even wrong ones.
The type of feeling which gave us the Treaty was in a large degree a manufactured feeling, in the sense that it was the result of opinion, formed day by day by a selection only of the facts. For this manufacture of opinion, we consciously created a very elaborate machinery, both of propaganda and of control of news. But that organisation of public opinion, justifiable in itself perhaps as a war measure, was not guided (as the result shows) by an understanding of what the political ends, which, in the early days of the War, we declared to be ours, would need in the way of psychology. Our machinery developed a psychology which made our higher political aims quite impossible of realisation.
Public opinion, ‘human nature,’ would have been more manageable, its ‘instincts’ would have been sounder, and we should have had a Europe less in disintegration, if we had told as far as possible that part of the truth which our public bodies (State, Church, Press, the School) were largely occupied in hiding. But the opinion which dictated the policy of repression is itself the result of refusing to face the truth. To tell the truth is the remedy here suggested.
The Paradox of the Peace
The supreme paradox of the Peace is this:—
We went into the War with certain very definitely proclaimed principles, which we declared to be more valuable than the lives of the men that were sacrificed in their defence. We were completely victorious, and went into the Conference with full power, so far as enemy resistance was concerned, to put those principles into effect.[71] We did not use the victory which our young men had given us to that end, but for enforcing a policy which was in flat contradiction to the principles we had originally proclaimed.
In some respects the spectacle is the most astounding of all history. It is literally true to say that millions of young soldiers gladly gave their lives for ideals to which the survivors, when they had the power to realise them (again so far as physical force can give us power,) showed complete indifference, sometimes a contemptuous hostility.
It was not merely an act of the statesmen. The worst features of the Treaty were imposed by popular feeling—put into the Treaty by statesmen who did not believe in them, and only included them in order to satisfy public opinion. The policy of President Wilson failed in part because of the humane and internationalist opinion of the America of 1916 had become the fiercely chauvinist and coercive opinion of 1919, repudiating the President’s efforts.