‘The cause of this insanity,’ says Sir Philip Gibbs, ‘is the failure of idealism.’ Others write in much the same strain that selfishness and materialism have reconquered the world. But this does not get us very far. By what moral alchemy was this vast outpouring of unselfishness, which sent millions to their death as to a feast (for men cannot die for selfish motives, unless more certain of their heavenly reward than we in the Western world are in the habit of being) turned into selfishness; their high ideals into low desires—if that is what has happened? Can it be a selfishness which ruins and starves us all? Is it selfishness on the part of the French which causes them to adopt towards Germany a policy of vengeance that prevents them receiving the Reparations that they so sorely need? Is it not indeed what one of their writers had called a ‘holy hate,’ instinctive, intuitive, purged of all calculation of advantage or disadvantage? Would not selfishness—enlightened selfishness—have given us not only a sounder Europe in the material sense, but a more humane Europe, with its hostilities softened by the very fact of contact and co-operation, and the very obviousness of our need for one another? The last thing desired here is to raise the old never-ending question of egoism versus altruism. All that is desired is to point out that a mere appeal to feeling, to a ‘sense of righteousness’ and idealism, is not enough. We have an illimitable capacity for sublimating our own motives, and of convincing ourselves completely, passionately, that our evil is good. And the greater our fear that intellectual inquiry, some sceptical rationalism, might shake the certitude of our righteousness, the greater the passion with which we shall stand by the guide of ‘instinct and intuition.’ Can there not be a destructive idealism as well as a social one? What of the Holy Wars? What of the Prussian who, after all, had his ideal, as the Bolshevist has his? What of all fanatics ready to die for their idealism?
It is never the things that are obviously and patently evil that constitute the real menace to mankind. If Prussian nationalism had been nothing but gross lust and cruelty and oppression, as we managed to persuade ourselves during the War that it was, it would never have menaced the world. It did that because it could rally to its end great enthusiasms; because men were ready to die for it. Then it threatened us. Only those things which have some element of good are dangerous.
A Treaty of the character of that Versailles would never have been possible if men had not been able to justify it to themselves on the ground of its punitive justice. The greeds expressed in the annexation of alien territory, and the violation of the principle of nationality, would never have been possible but for the plea of the sacred egoism of patriotism; our country before the enemy’s, our country right or wrong. The assertion of sheer immoralism embodied in this last slogan can be made into the garments of righteousness if only our idealism is instinctive enough.
Some of the worst crimes against justice have been due to the very fierceness of our passion for righteousness—a passion so fierce that it becomes undiscriminating and unseeing. It was the passion for what men believed to be religious truth which gave us the Inquisition and the religious wars; it was the passion for patriotism which made France for so many years, to the astonishment of the world, refuse justice to Dreyfus; it is a righteous loathing for negro crime which has made lynching possible for half a century in the United States, and which prevents the development of an opinion which will insist on its suppression. It is ‘the just anger that makes men unjust.’ The righteous passion that insists on a criminal’s dying for some foul crime, is the very thing which prevents our seeing that the crime was not committed by him at all.
It was something akin to this that made the Treaty of Versailles possible. That is why merely to appeal to idealism and feeling will fail, unless the defect of vision which makes evil appear good is corrected. It is not the feeling which is at fault; it is the defective vision causing feeling to be misused, as in the case of our feeling against the man accused on what seem to us good grounds, of a detestable offence. He is loathsome to our sight, because the crime is loathsome. But when some one else confesses to the crime, our feeling against the innocent man disappears. The direction it took, the object upon which it settled, was due to a misconception.
Obviously that error may occur in politics. Equally certainly something worse may happen. With some real doubt in our mind whether this man is the criminal, we may yet, in the absence of any other culprit, stifle that doubt because of our anger, and our vague desire to have some victim suffer for so vile a crime. Feeling will be at fault, in such a case, as well as vision. And this thing happens, as many a lynching testifies. (‘The innocence of Dreyfus would be a crime,’ said a famous anti-Dreyfusard.) Both defects may have played their part in the tragedy of Versailles. In making our appeal to idealism, we assume that it is there, somewhere, to be aroused on behalf of justice; we must assume, consequently, that if it has not been aroused, or has attached itself to wrong purposes, it is because it has not seen where justice lay.
Our only protection against these miscarriages, by which our passion is borne into the wrong channel, against the innocent while the guilty escape, is to keep our minds open to all the facts, all the truth. But this principle, which we have proclaimed as the very foundation stone of our democratic faith, was the first to go when we began the War. The idea that in war time, most particularly, a democracy needs to know the enemy’s, or the Pacifist, or even the internationalist and liberal case, would have been regarded as a bad joke. Yet the failure to do just that thing inevitably created a conviction that all the wrong was on one side and all the right on the other, and that the problem of the settlement was mainly a problem of ruthless punishment. One of that temper may have come the errors of the Treaty and the miseries that have flowed from them. It was the virtual suppression of free debate on the purposes and aims of the War and their realisation that delivered public opinion into the keeping of the extremest Jingoes when we came to make the peace.
We create the temper that destroys us
Behind the war-time attitude of the belligerents, when they suppressed whatever news might tell in favour of the enemy, was the conviction that if we could really understand the enemy’s position we should not want to fight him. That is probably true. Let us assume that, and assume consequently the need for control of news and discussion. If we are to come to the control by governments of political belief, as we once attempted control by ecclesiastical authority of religious belief, let us face the fact, and drop pretence about freedom of discussion, and see that the organisation of opinion is honest and efficient. There is a great deal to be said for the suppression of freedom of discussion. Some of the greatest minds in the world have refused to accept it as a working principle of society. Theirs is a perfectly arguable, extremely strong and thoroughly honest case.[80] But virtually to subpress the free dissemination of facts, as we have done not only during, but after the War, and at the same time to go on with our talk about free speech, free Press, free discussion, free democracy is merely to add to the insincerities and falsehoods, which can only end by making society unworkable. We not only disbelieve in free discussion in the really vital crises; we disbelieve in truth. That is one fact. There is another related to it. If we frankly admitted that public opinion has to be ‘managed,’ organised, shaped, we should demand that it be done efficiently with a view to the achievement of conscious ends, which we should place before ourselves. What happened during the War was that everybody, including the governments who ought to have been free from the domination of the myths they were engaged in creating, lost sight of the ultimate purposes of the War, and of the fact that they were creating forces which would make the attainment of those ends impossible; rob victory, that is, of its effectiveness.
Note how the process works. We say when war is declared: ‘A truce to discussion. The time is for action, not words.’ But the truce is a fiction. It means, not that talk and propaganda shall cease, only that all liberal contribution to it must cease. The Daily News suspends its internationalism, but the Daily Mail is more fiercely Chauvinist than ever. We must not debate terms. But Mr Bottomley debates them every week, on the text that Germans are to be exterminated like vermin. What results? The natural defenders of a policy even as liberal as that of an Edward Grey are silenced. The function of the liberal Press is suspended. The only really articulate voices on policy are the voices of Lord Northcliffe and Mr Bottomley. On such subjects as foreign policy those gentlemen do not ordinarily embrace all wisdom; there is something to be said in criticism of their views. But in the matter of the future settlement of Europe, to have criticised those views during the War would have exposed the critic to the charge of pro-Germanism. So Chauvinism had it all its own way. For months and years the country heard one view of policy only. The early policy of silence did really impose a certain silence upon the Daily News or the Manchester Guardian; none whatever upon the Times or the Daily Mail. None of us can, day after day, be under the influence of such a process without being affected by it.[81] The British public were affected by it. Sir Edward Grey’s policy began to appear weak, anæmic, pro-German. And in the end he and his colleagues disappeared, partly, at least, as the result of the very policy of ‘leaving it to the Government’ upon which they had insisted at the beginning of the War. And the very group which, in 1914, was most insistent that there should be no criticism of Asquith, or McKenna, or Grey, were the very group whose criticisms turned those leaders out of office! While in 1914 it was accepted as proof of treason to say a word in criticism of (say) Grey, by 1916 it had almost become evidence of treason to say a word for him ... and that while he was still in office!