I do not wish to accuse or exonerate any of the countries that have turned Europe into a stage for the rehearsal of Christianity’s masterpiece, the rollicking farce Hell on Earth. There have been enough already to inflame racial resentments and flood the press with taunts and recriminations. Ours is a bigger and worthier task: to assuage, not to incense; to re-create order from chaos; to prepare the way for peace, and for what must follow peace.
Recrimination is so useless now. We have to face the future: we cannot undo the past. We have learnt our lesson, surely, once for all: shall the spectre of militarism again loom devilishly through such a nightmare as Europe has endured for the last decade? Animosities and jealousies may die out: France has forgotten Fashoda, England has forgiven Russia for the blunder of the Dogger Bank. But the expectation of war, the preparation for war, the whole habit and incidence of militarism, must lead sooner or later to the clash. If the guns were not ready, if the nations had to be drilled and armed before they could be hurled at each others’ throats, there would be time for reflection, for the subsidence of passions, for the revival of dignity and decency. Militarism damns both the menacer and the menaced. All the nations have suffered from that curse, Germany, perhaps, the worst of all. The world has not yet forgotten Bismarck’s gospel of blood and iron, so relentlessly preached and practised. The inevitable results of the blood-and-iron doctrine, modernized as the dogma of the “mailed fist,” can be seen to-day in the cataclysm that has swept Europe. The pity of it, and the shame of it, that all the skill of all the statesmen of the great Powers could produce no better result than a continent divided into two armed camps, waiting for the slaughter that was bound to come!
As for Russia, and the assumed Slavonic menace, one must tread somewhat diffidently where George Bernard Shaw has rushed in with characteristic Shavian impetuosity. The world owes to Mr. Shaw the discovery of a new nationality—himself; and it is impossible for any citizen of the world to ignore the obligation. But even if Russia achieves her never-forgotten dream of Constantinople and a purified St. Sophia, Europe and civilization will not necessarily stand aghast, trembling at each rumor of Cossack brutalities. Tennyson, who foresaw the aërial navies “grappling in the central blue,” indeed proclaimed, in one of the most execrable of his sonnets, that—
“… The heart of Poland hath not ceased
To quiver, though her sacred blood doth drown
The fields, and out of every smouldering town
Cries to Thee, lest brute power be increased
Till that o’ergrown barbarian in the East
Transgress his ample bounds to some new crown:
Cries to Thee, ‘Lord, how long shall these things be,