With a sufficiently urgent realisation of their need of peace and security, and with a realisation also that the way to avoid war is to avoid the ways and means of in
ternational jealousy and of the national discriminations out of which international jealousy grows, it is conceivable that a government which should reflect the British temper and the British hopes might go so far in insisting on a neutralisation of the peoples of the Fatherland as would leave them without the dynastic apparatus with which warlike enterprise is set afoot, and so leave them also perforce in a pacific frame of mind. In time, in the absence of their dearly beloved leavings of feudalism, an enforced reliance on their own discretion and initiative, and an enforced respite from the rant and prance of warlike swagger, would reasonably be expected to grow into a popular habit. The German people are by no means less capable of tolerance and neighbourly decorum than their British or Scandinavian neighbours of the same blood,—if they can only be left to their own devices, untroubled by the maggoty conceit of national domination.
There is no intention herewith to express an expectation that this out-and-out neutralisation of the Fatherland's international relations and of its dynastic government will come to pass on the return of peace, or that the German people will, as a precaution against recurrent Imperial rabies, be organised on a democratic pattern by constraint of the pacific nations of the league. The point is only that this measure of neutralisation appears to be the necessary condition, in the absence of which no such neutral league can succeed, and that so long as the war goes on there is something of a chance that the British community may in time reach a frame of mind combining such settled determination to safeguard the peace at all costs, with such a degree of disregard for outworn conventions, that their spokesmen in the negotiations may push the neutralisation of these peoples to that length.
The achievement of such an outcome would evidently take time as well as harsh experience, more time and harsher experience, perhaps, than one likes to contemplate.
Most men, therefore, would scarcely rate the chance of such an outcome at all high. And yet it is to be called to mind that the war has lasted long and the effect of its demands and its experience has already gone far, and that the longer it lasts the greater are the chances of its prolongation and of its continued hardships, at least to the extent that with every month of war that passes the prospect of the allied nations making peace on any terms short of unconditional surrender grows less. And unconditional surrender is the first step in the direction of an unconditional dispossession of the Imperial establishment and its war prophets,—depending primarily on the state of mind of the British people at the time. And however unlikely, it is also always possible, as some contend, that in the course of further war experience the common man in the Fatherland may come to reflect on the use and value of the Imperial establishment, with the result of discarding and disowning it and all its works. Such an expectation would doubtless underrate the force of ancient habit, and would also involve a misapprehension of the psychological incidence of a warlike experience. The German people have substantially none of those preconceptions of independence and self-direction to go on, in the absence of which an effectual revulsion against dynastic rule can not come to pass.
Embedded in the common sense of the British population at large is a certain large and somewhat sullen sense of fair dealing. In this they are not greatly different from their neighbours, if at all, except that the body of common
sense in which this British sense of fair dealing lies embedded is a maturer fashion of common sense than that which serves to guide the workday life of many of their neighbours. And the maturity in question appears to be chiefly a matter of their having unlearned, divested themselves of, or been by force of disuse divested of, an exceptionally large proportion of that burden of untoward conceits which western Europe, and more particularly middle Europe, at large has carried over from the Middle Ages. They have had time and occasion to forget more of what the exigencies of modern life make it expedient to have forgotten. And yet they are reputed slow, conservative. But they have been well placed for losing much of what would be well lost.
Among other things, their preconception of national animosity is not secure, in the absence of provocation. They are now again in a position to learn to do without some of the useless legacy out of the past,—useless, that is, for life as it runs today, however it may be rated in the setting in which it was all placed in that past out of which it has come. And the question is whether now, under the pressure of exigencies that make for a disestablishment of much cumbersome inherited apparatus for doing what need not be done, they will be ruled by their sense of expediency and of fair dealing to the extent of cancelling out of their own scheme of life so much of this legacy of conventional preconceptions as has now come visibly to hinder their own material well-being, and at the same time to defeat that peace and security for which they have shown themselves willing to fight. It is, of course, a simpler matter to fight than it is to put away a preconceived, even if it is a bootless, superstition; as, e.g., the prestige of hereditary wealth, hereditary gentil
ity, national vainglory, and perhaps especially national hatred. But if the school is hard enough and the discipline protracted enough there is no reason in the nature of things why the common run of the British people should not unlearn these futilities that once were the substance of things under an older and outworn order. They have already shown their capacity for divesting themselves of outworn institutional bonds, in discarding the main substance of dynastic rule; and when they now come to face the exigencies of this new situation it should cause no great surprise if they are able to see their way to do what further is necessary to meet these exigencies.