A common attitude just now is something like this:—
‘With the bitter memory of all that the Allies had suffered strong upon them, it is not astonishing that at the moment of victory an attitude of judicial impartiality proved too much to ask of human nature. The real terms will depend upon the fashion in which the formal terms are enforced. Much of the letter of the Treaty—trial of the Kaiser, etc.—has already disappeared. It is an intolerable priggishness to rake up this very excusable debauch just as we are returning to sobriety.’
And that would be true, if, indeed, we had learned the lesson, and were adopting a new policy. But we are not. We have merely in some measure exchanged passion for lassitude and indifference. Later on we shall plead that the lassitude was as ‘inevitable’ as the passion. On such a line of reasoning, it is no good reacting by a perception of consequences against a mood of the moment. That is bad psychology and disastrous politics. To realise what ‘temperamental politics’ have already involved us in, is the first step towards turning our present drift into a more consciously directed progress.
Note where the drift has already carried us with reference to the problem of the new Germany which it was our declared object to create. There were weeks following the Armistice in Germany, when a faithful adherence to the spirit of the declarations made by the Allies during the War would have brought about the utter moral collapse of the Prussianism we had fought to destroy. The Prussian had said to the people: ‘Only Germany’s military power has stood between her and humiliating ruin. The Allies victorious will use their victory to deprive Germany of her vital rights.’ Again and again had the Allies denied this, and Germany, especially young Germany, watched to see which should prove right. A blockade, falling mainly, as Mr Churchill complacently pointed out (months after an armistice whose terms had included a promise to take into consideration the food needs of Germany) upon the feeble, the helpless, the children, answered that question for millions in Germany. Her schools and universities teem with hundreds of thousands stricken in their health, to whom the words ‘never again’ mean that never more will they put their trust in the ‘naïve innocence’ of an internationalism that could so betray them.
The militarism which morally was at so low an ebb at the Armistice, has been rehabilitated by such things as the blockade and its effects, the terms of the Treaty, and by minor but dramatic features like the retention of German prisoners long after Allied prisoners had returned home, and the occupation of German university town by African negroes. So that to-day a League of Nations offered by the Allies would probably be regarded with a contemptuous scepticism—somewhat similar to that with which America now regards the political beatitudes which it applauded in 1916-17.
We are in fact modifying the Treaty. But those modifications will not meet the present situation, though they might well have met the situation in 1918. If we had done then what we are prepared to do now, Europe would have been set on the right road.
Suppose the Allies had said in December, 1918 (as they are in effect being brought to say in 1920): ‘We are not going to play into the hands of your militarists by demanding the surrender of the Kaiser or the punishment of the war criminals, vile as we believe their offences to be. We are not going to stimulate your waning nationalism by demanding an acknowledgment of your sole guilt. Nor are we going to ruin your industry or shatter your credit. On the contrary, we will start by making you a loan, facilitating your purchases of food and raw materials, and we will admit you into the League of Nations.’
We are coming to that. If it could have been our policy early instead of late, how different this story would have been.
And the tragedy is this: To do it late is to cause it to lose its effectiveness, for the situation changes. The measures which would have been adequate in 1918 are inadequate in 1920. It is the story of Home Rule. In the eighties Ireland would have accepted Gladstonian Home Rule as a basis at least of co-operation. English and Ulster opinion was not ready even for Home Rule. Forty years later it had reconciled itself to Home Rule. But by the time Britain was ready for the remedy, the situation had got quite beyond it. It now demanded something for which slow-moving opinion was unprepared. So with a League of Nations. The plan now supported by Conservatives would, as Lord Grey has avowed, have assuredly prevented this War if adopted in place of the mere Arbitration plans of the Hague Conference. At that date the present League of Nations Covenant would have been adequate to the situation. But some of the self-same Conservatives who now talk the language of internationalism—even in economic terms—poured contumely and scorn upon those of us who used it a decade or two since. And now, it is to be feared, the Government for which they are ready will certainly be inadequate to the situation which we face.