The history of America’s attitude towards the War displays a similar line of development. We are apt to forget that the League of Nations idea entered the realm of practical politics as the result of a great spontaneous popular movement in America in 1916, as powerful and striking as any since the movement against chattel-slavery. A year of war morale resulted, as has already been noted, in a complete reversal of attitude. America became the opponent and Britain the protagonist of the League of Nations.
In passing, one of the astonishing things is that statesmen, compelled by the conditions of their profession to work with the raw material of public opinion, seem blind to the fact that the total effect of the forces which they set in motion will be to transform opinion and render it intractable. American advisers of President Wilson scouted the idea, when it was suggested to them early in the War, that the growth of the War temper would make it difficult for the President to carry out his policy.[82] A score of times the present writer has heard it said by Americans who ought to have known better, that the public did not care what the foreign policy of the country was, and that the President could carry out any policy that he liked. At that particular moment it was true, but quite obviously there was growing up at the time, as the direct result of war propaganda, a fierce Chauvinism, which should have made it plain to any one who observed its momentum, that the notion of President Wilson’s policy being put into execution after victory was simply preposterous.
Mr Asquith’s Government was thus largely responsible for creating a balance of force in public opinion (as we shall see presently) which was responsible for its collapse. Mr Lloyd George has himself sanctioned a jingoism which, if useful temporarily, becomes later an insuperable obstacle to the putting into force of workable policies. For while Versailles could do what it liked in matters that did not touch the popular passion of the moment, in the matters that did, the statesmen were the victims of the temper they had done so much to create. There was a story current in Paris at the time of the Conference: ‘You can’t really expect to get an indemnity of ten thousand millions, so what is the good of putting it in the Treaty,’ an expert is said to have remarked. ‘My dear fellow,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘if the election had gone on another fortnight, it would have been fifty thousand millions.’ But the insertion of these mythical millions into the Treaty has not been a joke; it has been an enormous obstacle to the reconstruction of Europe. It was just because public opinion was not ready to face facts in time, that the right thing had to be done at the wrong time, when perhaps it was too late. The effect on French policy has been still more important. It is the illusions concerning illimitable indemnities—directly fostered by the Governments in the early days of the Armistice—still dominating French public opinion, which more than anything else, perhaps, explains an attitude on the part of the French Government that has come near to smashing Europe.
Even minds extraordinarily brilliant, as a rule, miscalculated the weight of this factor of public passion stimulated by the hates of war, and the deliberate exploitation of it for purposes of ‘war morale’ and propaganda. Thus Mr Wells,[83] writing even after two years of war, predicted that if the Germans were to make a revolution and overthrow the Kaiser, the Allies would ‘tumble over each other’ to offer Germany generous terms. What is worse is that British propaganda in enemy countries seems to have been based very largely on this assumption.[84] It constituted an elaboration of the offers implicit in Mr Wilson’s speeches, that once Germany was democratised there should be, in Mr Wilson’s words, ‘no reprisal upon the German people, who have themselves suffered all things in this War which they did not choose.’ The statement made by the German rulers that Germany was fighting against a harsh and destructive fate at the hands of the victors, was, President Wilson said, ‘wantonly false.’ ‘No one is threatening the peaceful enterprise of the German Empire.’ Our propaganda in Germany seems to have been an expansion of this text, while the negotiations which preceded the Armistice morally bound us to a ‘Fourteen Points peace’ (less the British reservation touching the Freedom of the Seas). The economic terms of the Peace Treaty, the meaning of which has been so illuminatingly explained by the representative of the British Treasury at the Conference, give the measure of our respect for that obligation of honour, once we had the Germans at our mercy.[85]
Fundamental Falsehoods and their Outcome
We witnessed both in England and America very great changes in the dynamics of opinion. Not only was one type of public man being brought forward and another thrust into the background, but one group of emotions and of motives of public policy were being developed and another group atrophied. The use of the word ‘opinion,’ with its implication of a rationalised process of intellectual decision, may be misleading. ‘Public opinion’ is here used as the sum of the forces which become articulate in a country, and which a government is compelled not necessarily to obey, but to take into account. (A government may bamboozle it or dodge it, but it cannot openly oppose it.)
And when reference is made to the force of ideas—Nationalist or Socialist or Revolutionary—a power which we all admit by our panic fears of defeatist or Red Propaganda, it is necessary to keep in mind the kind of force that is meant. One speaks of Communist or Socialist, Pacifist or Patriotic ideas gaining influence, or creating a ferment. The idea of Communism, for instance, has obviously played some part in the vast upheavals that have followed the War.[86] But in a world where the great majority are still condemned to intense physical labour in order to live at all, where peoples as a whole are overworked, harassed, pre-occupied, it is impossible that ideas like those of Karl Marx should be subjected to elaborate intellectual analysis. Rather is it an idea—of the common ownership of wealth or its equal distribution, of poverty being the fault of a definite class of the corporate body—an idea which fits into a mood produced largely by the prevailing conditions of life, which thus becomes the predominating factor of the new public opinion. Now foreign policy is certainly influenced, and in some great crises determined, by public opinion. But that opinion is not the resultant of a series of intellectual analyses of problems of Balkan nationalities or of Eastern frontiers; that is an obvious impossibility for a busy headline-reading public, hard at work all day and thirsty for relaxation and entertainment at night. The public opinion which makes itself felt in Foreign Policy—which, when war is in the balance after a longish period of peace, gives the preponderance of power to the most Chauvinistic elements; which, at the end of a war and on the eve of Treaty-making, as in the December 1918 election, insists upon a rigorously punitive peace—this opinion is the result of a few predominant ‘sovereign ideas’ or conceptions giving a direction to certain feelings.
Take one such sovereign idea, that of the enemy nation as a person: the conception of it as a completely responsible corporate body. Some offence is committed by a German: ‘Germany’ did it, Germany including all Germans. To punish any German is to inflict satisfactory punishment for the offence, to avenge it. The idea, when we examine it, is found to be extremely abstract, with but the faintest relation to human realities. ‘They drowned my brother,’ said an Allied airman, when asked his feelings on a reprisal bombing raid over German cities. Thus, because a sailor from Hamburg drowns an Englishman in the North Sea, an old woman in a garret in Freiburg, or some children, who have but dimly heard of the war, and could not even remotely be held responsible for it, or have prevented it, are killed with a clear conscience because they are German. We cannot understand the Chinese, who punish one member of a family for another’s fault, yet that is very much more rational than the conception which we accept as the most natural thing in the world. It is never questioned, indeed, until it is applied to ourselves. When the acts of British troops in Ireland or India, having an extraordinary resemblance to German acts in Belgium, are taken by certain American newspapers as showing that ‘Britain,’ (i.e. British people) is a bloodthirsty monster who delights in the killing of unarmed priests or peasants, we know that somehow the foreign critic has got it all wrong. We should realise that for some Irishman or Indian to dismember a charwoman or decapitate a little girl in Somersetshire, because of the crime of some Black and Tan in Cork, or English General at Amritsar, would be unadulterated savagery, a sort of dementia. In any case the poor folk in Somerset were not responsible; millions of English folk are not. They are only dimly aware of what goes on in India or Ireland, and are not really able in all matters, by any means, to control their government—any more than the Americans are able to control theirs.
Yet the idea of responsibility attaching to a whole group, as justification for retaliation, is a very ancient idea, savage, almost animal in its origin. And anything can make a collectivity. To one small religious sect in a village it is a rival sect who are the enemies of the human race; in the mind of the tortured negro in the Congo any man, woman, or child of the white world could fairly be punished for the pains that he has suffered.[87] The conception has doubtless arisen out of something protective, some instinct useful, indispensable to the race; as have so many of the instincts which, applied unadapted to altered conditions, become socially destructive.
Here then is evidence of a great danger, which can, in some measure, be avoided on one condition: that the truth about the enemy collectively is told in such a way as to be a reminder to us not to slip into injustices that, barbarous in themselves, drag us back into barbarism.