The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

Other patriotisms have like justifications. Yet would defeat, submission, even to Germany, involve worse acts than those we have felt compelled to commit during the War and since—in the work of making our power secure? Did the German ask of the Alsatian or the Pole worse than we have been compelled to ask of our own soldiers in Russia, India, or Ireland?

The old struggle for power goes on. For the purpose of that struggle we are prepared to transform our society in any way that it may demand. For the purposes of the war for power we will accept anything that the strength of the enemy imposes: we will be socialist, autocratic, democratic, or communist; we will conscribe the bodies, souls, wealth of our people; we will proscribe, as we do, the Christian doctrine, and all mercy and humanity; we will organise falsehood and deceit, and call it statecraft and strategy; lie for the purpose of inflaming hate, and rejoice at the effectiveness of our propaganda; we will torture helpless millions by pestilence and famine—as we have done—and look on unmoved; our priests, in the name of Christ, will reprove misplaced pity, and call for the further punishment of the wicked, still greater efforts in the Fight for Right. We shall not care what transformations take place in our society or our natures; or what happens to the human spirit. Obediently, at the behest of the enemy—because, that is, his power demands that conduct of us—shall we do all those things, or anything, save only one: we will not negotiate or make a contract with him. That would limit our ‘independence’; by which we mean that his submission to our mastery would be less complete.

We can do acts of infinite cruelty; disregard all accepted morality; but we cannot allow the enemy to escape the admission of defeat.

If we are to correct the evils of the older tradition, and build up one which will restore to men the art of living together, we must honestly face the fact that the older tradition has failed. So long as the old loyalties and patriotisms, tempting us with power and dominion, calling to the deep hunger excited by those things, and using the banners of righteousness and justice, seem to offer security, and a society which, if not ideal, is at least workable, we certainly shall not pay the price which all profound change of habit demands. We have seen that as a fact of his history man only abandons power and force over others when it fails. At present, almost everywhere, we refuse to face the failure of the old forms of political power. We don’t believe that we need the co-operation of the foreigner, or we believe that we can coerce him.

Little attention has been given here to the machinery of internationalism—League of Nations, Courts of Arbitration, Disarmament. This is not because machinery is unimportant. But if we possessed the Will, if we were ready each to pay his contribution in some sacrifice of his independence, of his opportunity of domination, the difficulties of machinery would largely disappear. The story of America’s essay in internationalism has warned us of the real difficulty. Courts of Arbitration, Leagues of Nations, were devices to which American opinion readily enough agreed; too readily. For the event showed that the old conceptions were not changed. They had only been disregarded. No machinery of internationalism can work so long as the impulses and prepossessions of irresponsible nationalism retain their power. The test we must apply to our sincerity is our answer to the question:—What price, in terms of national independence, are we prepared to pay for a world law? What, in fact, is the price that is asked of us? To this last question, the pages that precede, and to some extent those that follow, have attempted to supply an answer. We should gain many times in freedom and independence the contribution in those things that we made.

Perhaps we may be driven by hunger—the actual need of our children for bread—to forsake a method which cannot give them bread or freedom, in favour of one that can. But, for the failure of power to act as a deterrent upon our desire for it, we must perceive the failure. Our angers and hatreds obscure that failure, or render us indifferent to it. Hunger does not necessarily help the understanding; it may bemuse it by passion and resentment. We may in our passion wreck civilisation as a passionate man in his anger will injure those he loves. Yet, well fed, we may refuse to concern ourselves with problems of the morrow. The mechanical motive will no longer suffice. In the simpler, more animal forms of society, the instinct of each moment, with no thought of ultimate consequence, may be enough. But the Society which man has built up can only go forward or be preserved as it began: by virtue of something which is more than instinct. On man is cast the obligation to be intelligent; the responsibility of will; the burden of thought.

If some of us have felt that, beyond all other evils which translate themselves into public policy, those with which these pages deal constitute the greatest, it is not because war means the loss of life, the killing of men. Many of our noblest activities do that. There are so many of us that it is no great disaster that a few should die. It is not because war means suffering. Suffering endured for a conscious and clearly conceived human purpose is redeemed by hope of real achievement; it may be a glad sacrifice for some worthy end. But if we have floundered hopelessly into a bog because we have forgotten our end and purpose in the heat of futile passion, the consolation which we may gather from the willingness with which men die in the bog should not stand in the way of our determination to rediscover our destination and create afresh our purpose. These pages have been concerned very little with the loss of life, the suffering of the last seven years. What they have dealt with mainly is the fact that the War has left us a less workable society, has been marked by an increase in the forces of chaos and disintegration. That is the ultimate indictment of this War as of all wars: the attitude towards life, the ideas and motive forces out of which it grows, and which it fosters, makes men less able to live together, their society less workable, and must end by making free society impossible. War not only arises out of the failure of human wisdom, from the defect of that intelligence by which alone we can successfully fight the forces of nature; it perpetuates that failure and worsens it. For only by a passion which keeps thought at bay can the ‘morale’ of war be maintained. The very justification which we advance for our war-time censorships and propaganda, our suspension of free speech and discussion, is that if we gave full value to the enemy’s case, saw him as he really is, blundering, foolish, largely helpless like ourselves; saw the defects of our own and our Allies’ policy, saw what our own acts in war really involved and how nearly they resembled those which aroused our anger when done by the enemy, if we saw all this and kept our heads, we should abandon war. A thousand times it has been explained that in an impartial mood we cannot carry on war; that unless the people come to feel that all the right is on our side and all the wrong on the enemy’s, morale will fail. The most righteous war can only be kept going by falsehood. The end of that falsehood is that our mind collapses. And although the mind, thought, judgment, are not all-sufficient for man’s salvation, it is impossible without them. Behind all other explanations of Europe’s creeping paralysis is the blindness of the millions, their inability to see the effects of their demands and policy, to see where they are going.

Only a keener feeling for truth will enable them to see. About indifferent things—about the dead matter that we handle in our science—we can be honest, impartial, true. That is why we succeed in dealing with matter. But about the things we care for—which are ourselves—our desires and lusts, our patriotisms and hates, we find a harder test of thinking straight and truly. Yet there is the greater need; only by that rectitude shall we be saved. There is no refuge but in truth.