Part of the story of these transformations has been told in the preceding pages. Let us summarise the story as a whole.
We saw at the beginning of the War a real feeling for the right of peoples to choose their own form of government, for the principle of nationality. At the end of the War we deny that right in half a score of cases,[72] where it suits our momentary political or military interest. The very justification of ‘necessity,’ which shocks our conscience when put forward by the enemy, is the one we invoke callously at the peace—or before it, as when we agree to allow Czarist Russia to do what she will with Poland, and Italy with Serbia. Having sacrificed the small State to Russia in 1916, we are prepared to sacrifice Russia to the small State in 1919, by encouraging the formation of border independencies, which, if complete independencies, must throttle Russia, and which no ‘White’ Russian would accept. While encouraging the lesser States to make war on Russia, we subsidise White Russian military leaders who will certainly destroy the small States if successful. We entered the War for the destruction of militarism, and to make disarmament possible, declaring that German arms were the cause of our arms; and having destroyed German arms, we make ours greater than they were before the War, and introduce such new elements as the systematic arming of African savages for European warfare. We fought to make the secret bringing about of war by military or diplomatic cliques impossible, and after the Armistice the decision to wage war on the Russian Republic is made without even public knowledge, in opposition to sections in the Cabinets concerned, by cliques of whose composition the public is completely ignorant.[73] The invasion of Russia from the north, south, east, and west, by European, Asiatic, and negro troops, is made without a declaration of war, after a solemn statement by the chief spokesman of the Allies that there should be no invasion. Having declared, during the War, on a score of occasions, that we were not fighting against any right or interest of the German people[74]—or the German people at all—because we realised that only by ensuring that right and interest ourselves could we turn Germany from the ways of the past, at the peace we impose conditions which make it impossible for the German people even adequately to feed their population, and leave them no recourse but the recreation of their power. Having promised at the Armistice not to use our power for the purpose of preventing the due feeding of Germany, we continue for months a blockade which, even by the testimony of our own officials, creates famine conditions and literally kills very many of the children.
At the beginning of the War, our statesmen, if not our public, had some rudimentary sense of the economic unity of mankind, of our need of one another’s work, and the idea of blockading half a world in time of dire scarcity would have appalled them. Yet at the Armistice it was done so light-heartedly that, having at last abandoned it, they have never even explained what they proposed to accomplish by it, for, says Mr Maynard Keynes. ‘It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problem of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four.’[75] At the beginning of the War we invoked high heaven to witness the danger and anomaly of autocratic government in our day. We were fighting for Parliamentary institutions, ‘open Covenants openly arrived at.’ After victory, we leave the real settlement of Europe to be made by two or three Prime Ministers, rendering no account of their secret deliberations and discussions to any Parliament until, in practice, it is too late to alter them. At the beginning of the War we were profoundly moved by the wickedness of military terrorism; at its close we employ it—whether by means of starvation, blockade, armed negro savages in German cities, reprisals in Ireland, or the ruthless slaughter of unarmed civilians in India—without creating any strong revulsion of feeling at home. At the beginning of the War we realised that the governmental organisation of hatred with the prostitution of art to ‘hymns of hate’ was vile and despicable. We copied that governmental organisation of hatred, and famous English authors duly produce our hymns of hate.[76] We felt at the beginning that all human freedom was menaced by the German theory of the State as the master of man and not as his instrument, with all that means of political inquisition and repression. When some of its worst features are applied at home, we are so indifferent to the fact that we do not even recognise that the thing against which we fought has been imposed upon ourselves.[77]
Many will dissent from this indictment. Yet its most important item—our indifference to the very evils against which we fought—is something upon which practically all witnesses testifying to the state of public opinion to-day agree. It is a commonplace of current discussion of present-day feeling. Take one or two at random, Sir Philip Gibbs and Mr. Sisley Huddleston, both English journalists. (I choose journalists because it is their business to know the nature of the public mind and spirit.) Speaking of the wholesale starvation, unimaginable misery, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Mr. Huddleston writes:—
‘We read these things. They make not the smallest impression on us. Why? How is it that we are not horrified and do not resolve that not for a single day shall any preventable evil exist? How is it, that, on the contrary, for two years we have been cheerfully engaged in intensifying the sum of human suffering? Why are we so heedless? Why are we so callous? Why do we allow to be committed, in our name, a thousand atrocities, and to be written, in our name and for our delectation, a million vile words which reveal the most amazing lack either of feeling or of common sense?
‘There have been crimes perpetrated by the politicians—by all the politicians—which no condemnation could fitly characterise. But the peoples must be blamed. The peoples support the war-making politicians. It is my business to follow the course of events day by day, and it is sometimes difficult to stand back and take a general view. Whenever I do so, I am appalled at the blundering or the wickedness of the leaders of the world. Without party prejudices or personal predilections, an impartial observer, I cannot conceive how it is possible to be always blind to the truth, the glaring truth, that since the Armistice we have never sought to make peace, but have sought only some pretext and method for prolonging the War.
‘Hate exudes from every journal in speaking of certain peoples—a weary hate, a conventional hate, a hate which is always whipping itself into a passion. It is, perhaps, more strictly, apathy masquerading as hate—which is worst of all. The people are blasé: they seek only bread and circuses for themselves. They regard no bread for others as a rather boring circus for themselves.’
Mr. Huddleston was present throughout most of the Conference. This is his verdict:—
’ ... Cynicism soon became naked. In the East all pretence of righteousness was abandoned. Every successive Treaty was more frankly the expression of shameful appetites. There was no pretence of conscience in politics. Force rules without disguise. What was still more amazing was the way in which strife was stirred up gratuitously. What advantage was it, even for a moment, to any one to foment civil war in Russia, to send against the unhappy, famine-stricken country army after army? The result was so obviously to consolidate the Bolshevist Government around which were obliged to rally all Russians who had the spirit of nationality. It seemed as if everywhere we were plotting our own ruin and hastening our own end. A strange dementia seized our rulers, who thought peace, replenishment of empty larders, the fraternisation of sorely tired nations, ignoble and delusive objects. It appeared that war was for evermore to be humanity’s fate.
‘Time after time I saw excellent opportunities of universal peace deliberately rejected. There was somebody to wreck every Prinkipo, every Spa. It was almost with dismay that all Europeans who had kept their intelligence unclouded saw the frustration of peace, and heard the peoples applaud the men who frustrated peace. I care not whether they still enjoy esteem: history will judge them harshly and will judge harshly the turbulence which men plumed themselves on creating two years after the War.’