This attack upon the morale of the troops was followed by an unforeseen assault upon a quiet sector, which succeeded in piercing the line at numerous points. In the confusion that followed the whole structure of the defense crumbled, and the result was disastrous.
When the final history of the world-war comes to be written, one of its most interesting chapters will be a description of the methods and devices which were used by the armies on both sides to destroy the will to war in the troops and among the peoples behind the lines. If the application of modern science to war has multiplied the engines of destruction, the increase of communication and the interpenetration of peoples has given war among civilized peoples the character of an internal and internecine struggle. Under these circumstances propaganda, in the sense of an insidious exploitation of the sources of dissension and unrest, may as completely change the character of wars of peoples as they were once changed by the invention of gunpowder.
In this field there is room for investigation and study, for almost all attempts thus far made to put advertising on a scientific basis have been made by students of individual rather than social psychology.
4. Revivals, Religious and Linguistic
For something more than a hundred years Europe has experienced a series of linguistic and literary revivals, that is to say revivals of the folk languages and the folk cultures. The folk languages are the speech of peoples who have been conquered but not yet culturally absorbed by the dominant language group. They are mostly isolated rural populations who have remained to a large extent outside of the cosmopolitan cultures of the cities. These people while not wholly illiterate have never had enough education in the language of the dominant peoples of the cities to enable them to use this alien speech as a medium of education. The consequence is that, except for a relatively small group of intellectuals, they have been cut off from the main current of European life and culture. These linguistic revivals have not been confined to any one nation, since every nation in Europe turns out upon analysis to be a mosaic of minor nationalities and smaller cultural enclaves in which the languages of little and forgotten peoples have been preserved. Linguistic revivals have, in fact, been well-nigh universal. They have taken place in France, Spain, Norway, Denmark, in most of the Balkan States, including Albania, the most isolated of them all, and in all the smaller nationalities along the Slavic-German border—Finland, Esthonia, Letvia, Lithuania, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Roumania, and the Ukraine. Finally, among the Jews of Eastern Europe, there has been the Haskala Movement, as the Jews of Eastern Europe call their period of enlightenment, a movement that has quite unintentionally made the Judeo-German dialect (Yiddish) a literary language.
At first blush, it seems strange that the revivals of the folk speech should have come at a time when the locomotive and the telegraph were extending commerce and communication to the uttermost limits of the earth, when all barriers were breaking down, and the steady expansion of cosmopolitan life and the organization of the Great Society, as Graham Wallas has called it, seemed destined to banish all the minor languages, dialects, and obsolescent forms of speech, the last props of an international provincialism, to the limbo of forgotten things. The competition of the world-languages was already keen; all the little and forgotten peoples of Europe—the Finns, Letts, Ukrainians, Russo-Carpathians, Slovaks, Slovenians, Croatians, the Catalonians of eastern Spain, whose language, by the way, dates back to a period before the Roman Conquest, the Czechs, and the Poles—began to set up presses and establish schools to revive and perpetuate their several racial languages.
To those who, at this time, were looking forward to world-organization and a universal peace through the medium of a universal language, all this agitation had the appearance of an anachronism, not to say a heresy. It seemed a deliberate attempt to set up barriers, where progress demanded that they should be torn down. The success of such a movement, it seemed, must be to bring about a more complete isolation of the peoples, to imprison them, so to speak, in their own languages, and so cut them off from the general culture of Europe.[315]
The actual effect has been different from what was expected. It is difficult, and for the masses of the people impossible, to learn through the medium of a language that they do not speak. The results of the efforts to cultivate Swedish and Russian in Finland, Polish and Russian in Lithuania, Magyar in Slovakia and at the same time to prohibit the publication of books and newspapers in the mother-tongue of the country has been, in the first place, to create an artificial illiteracy and, in the second, to create in the minds of native peoples a sense of social and intellectual inferiority to the alien and dominant race.
The effect of the literary revival of the spoken language, however, has been to create, in spite of the efforts to suppress it, a vernacular press which opened the gates of western culture to great masses of people for whom it did not previously exist. The result has been a great cultural awakening, a genuine renaissance, which has had profound reverberations on the political and social life of Europe.
The literary revival of the folk speech in Europe has invariably been a prelude to the revival of the national spirit in subject peoples. The sentiment of nationality has its roots in memories that attach to the common possessions of the people, the land, the religion, and the language, but particularly the language.