The outbreak of war marked the death of liberalism. Freedom of speech was curtailed and suppressed until one scrupulous patriot asked in the House of Commons whether the Sermon on the Mount should not be regarded as subversive of military discipline; freedom of action was drowned by a wave of collective hysteria in which governors and governed vied with one another to impose new burdens and to bend submissive and welcoming necks to receive them. The theory of representative government, shaken to its foundations when a House of Commons which had been elected to carry the parliament bill engaged—as a parergon—in a European war, was finally destroyed when conscription was imposed without election or referendum. The lusty growth of autocracy soon choked such sickly flowers of liberalism as a care for the rights of minorities and a concern for the pleadings of conscience; though a moment's reflection would have shewn that, if Christianity is persistently thrust down the throats of all English children, a few will almost certainly accept it literally, those who looked for no qualifications to the injunction that a man must not kill were quickly taught that Christianity was not a practicable creed for times of war; and a country which prided itself on a traditional love of fair play first reviled and then persecuted conscientious objectors with so little discrimination that, when one Quaker who had acted as a stretcher-bearer received the Mons medal, he could only wear it in the prison to which he had been confined for refusing to undertake military service.
Whenever, in the first two years of the war, an article of liberal faith came in conflict with the heterogeneous policy of a coalition government, the article of faith was thrust aside. The resolutions of the Paris economic conference committed Great Britain to a tariff war with her enemies; the treaty of London converted a war which had been undertaken to satisfy British obligations to Belgium into an imperialist war in which the present and future allies of Great Britain were invited to help themselves at the expense of their neighbours; gradually there was heard less talk of a crusade on behalf of small nationalities, and the liberal party committed itself to a "knock-out blow". So committed, it could neither utter nor listen to proposals which involved less than unconditional surrender; and, though Belgian neutrality might perhaps have been vindicated and reparation secured before the war had run half its ultimate course, the imperialist policy in which liberalism acquiesced allowed of no check to hostilities until Europe was exhausted and revolution had been unloosed in Russia, to spread no man knows whither. The peace party in English politics finally assented to a settlement of which any militarist in France or Prussia would have been proud to acknowledge the authorship.
It was not to be expected that any set of political principles could remain unchanged by war, though liberalism would have been less violently mutilated if it had appealed to the heart rather than to the head of liberal leaders. How far their foreign policy contributed to the war which destroyed liberalism must be discussed later.
CHAPTER VI
ON THE EVE
Τῶνδε δὲ ὄυτε πλούτον tis τις τὴν ἒτι ἀπόλαυσιν προτιμήσας ἐμαλακίσθη οῦτε πενίας ἐλπίδι, ὡς κᾶν ἒτι διαφογὼν αοτὴν πλουτήσειεν, ἀναβολὴν τοῦ δεινοῦ ἐποιήσατο. Τὴν δὲ τῶν ἐναντίων timôτιμωρίαν ποθεινοτέραμ αὐτῶν λαβὀντες καὶ κινδύνωυ ἀμα τὂνδε κάλλιστον νομίσαντες ἑβουλήθησαν μετ, αύτοῦ τοὺς μὲν τιμωρεῖσθαι, τὼν δε ἐφιεσθαι, ἐλπίδι μὲν τὸ ἀφανὲς τοῦ κατορθώσειν επιτρέψαντες, ἕργῳ δὲ περὶ τοῦ ἤδη ὁρομόνου σφίσιν αυτοῖς ἀξιοῦντες πεποιθέναι, καὶ ἑν αὐτῷ τῶ ἀμύνεσθαι καὶ παθεῖν μᾶλλον ἡγησάμενοι ἢ [τὸ] ἐνδόντες σώζεσθαι, τὸ μὲν αἲσχρὸν τοῧ λὀγου ἔφυγον, τὸ δ' ἔργον τῷ σόματι ὑπέμειναν καὶ δι, ἐλαχιστου καιροῦ τύχης ἃμα ἀκμῆ τῆς δόξης μᾶλλον ἢ τοῧ δέος ἀπηλλάγησαν
Thucydides, II. 42.