Another post-war critic—on the other side of the Atlantic—writes:—
‘Mr. Angell has received too much solace from the unwisdom of his critics. Those who have denounced him most vehemently are those who patently have not read his books. For example, he cannot properly be classed, as frequently asserted in recent months, as one of those Utopian pacifists who went about proclaiming war impossible. A number of passages in The Great Illusion show him fully alive to the danger of the present collapse; indeed, from the narrower view of politics his book was one of the several fruitless attempts to check that growing estrangement between England and Germany whose sinister menace far-sighted men discerned. Even less justifiable are the flippant sneers which discard his argument as mercenary or sordid. Mr Angell has never taken an “account book” or “breeches pocket” view of war. He inveighs against what he terms its political and moral futilities as earnestly as against its economic futility.’
It may be said that there must be some cause for so persistent a misrepresentation. There is. Its cause is that obstinate and deep-seated fatalism which is so large a part of the prevailing attitude to war and against which the book under consideration was a protest. Take it as an axiom that war comes upon us as an outside force, like the rain or the earthquake, and not as something that we can influence, and a man who ‘does not believe in war,’ must be a person who believes that war is not coming;[98] that men are naturally peaceable. To be a Pacifist because one believes that the danger of war is very great indeed, or because one believes men to be naturally extremely prone to war, is a position incomprehensible until we have rid our minds of the fatalism which regards war as an ‘inevitable’ result of uncontrollable forces.
What is a writer to do, however, in the face of persistent misrepresentation such as this? If he were a manufacturer of soap and some one said his soap was underweight, or he were a grocer and some one said his sugar was half sand, he could of course obtain enormous damages. But a mere writer, having given some years of his life to the study of the most important problem of his time, is quite helpless when a tired headline writer, or a journalist indulging his resentment, or what he thinks is likely to be the resentment of his readers, describes a book as proclaiming one thing when as a matter of simple fact it proclaims the exact contrary.
So much for myth or misrepresentation No. 1. We come to a second, namely, that The Great Illusion is an appeal to avarice; that it urges men not to defend their country ‘because to do so does not pay;’ that it would have us place ‘pocket before patriotism,’ a view reflected in Benjamin Kidd’s last book, pages of which are devoted to the condemnation of the ‘degeneracy and futility’ of resting the cause of peace on no higher ground than that it is ‘a great illusion to believe that a national policy founded on war can be a profitable policy for any people in the long run.’[99] He quotes approvingly Sir William Robertson Nicoll for denouncing those who condemn war because ‘it would postpone the blessed hour of tranquil money getting.’[100] As a means of obscuring truths which it is important to realise, of creating by misrepresentation a moral repulsion to a thesis, and thus depriving it of consideration, this second line of attack is even more important than the first.
To say of a book that it prophesied ‘the impossibility of war,’ is to imply that it is mere silly rubbish, and its author a fool. Sir William Robertson Nicoll’s phrase would of course imply that its doctrine was morally contemptible.
The reader must judge, after considering dispassionately what follows, whether this second description is any truer than the first.
CHAPTER II
‘ECONOMIC’ AND ‘MORAL’ MOTIVES IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
The Great Illusion dealt—among other factors of international conflict—with the means by which the population of the world is driven to support itself; and studied the effect of those efforts to find sustenance upon the relations of States. It therefore dealt with economics.
On the strength of this, certain critics (like some of those quoted in the last chapter) who cannot possibly have read the book thoroughly, seem to have argued: If this book about war deals with ‘economics,’ it must deal with money and profits. To bring money and profits into a discussion of war is to imply that men fight for money, and won’t fight if they don’t get money from it; that war does not ‘pay.’ This is wicked and horrible. Let us denounce the writer for a shallow Hedonist and money-grubber....