A far-sighted policy, which while never failing in fairness is withal generous and reasonable, is as the poles removed from that of a weak sentimentality which refuses to face the difficult facts of the present situation. The withdrawal of any great nation from the urgent task of work and production means loss and detriment to the world at large. Hence the need to let Germany both eat and work; more, the need to help her start afresh. She lies a beaten and prostrate nation to-day. We may push her over the brink and so precipitate new catastrophes. Or without sentiment and without illusion we may take a longer view; we may direct our policy towards ultimate ends of appeasement, towards the establishment of a saner and a better Europe unhaunted by the menace of vast aggressive forces, towards the recovery by Germany herself of her old birthright of music, poetry, and philosophy bartered by her for evil dreams of world power and domination. That new order cannot be founded on any basis of enduring hatred. We cannot offer the ideal of the League of Nations with the one hand, and policies which resolve themselves into starvation and oppression with the other. The policies are incompatible, and we must choose between them.
The miserable suggestion frequently advanced, that as a victorious Germany would have ground us to powder, we should do to her as she would have done to us, cannot be sustained for a moment. Is our policy to be directed by German standards and influenced by German principles? All along we have proclaimed loudly that the war was fought so that the spirit and the principles of Germany should no longer terrorise the world. To adopt her principles, even in some modified form, is to give her in defeat a victory lost by her in the field. Our moral pretensions in this struggle have been very high ones, and moral pretensions are intolerable unless some effort is made to live up to them.
Not all the dark and sordid happenings which wait inevitably on five years of world conflagration, not all the dragging in the mire of many a noble idea, should make us forget the great principles of liberty and justice which drew us originally into the war. It was no idle phrase that England staked everything for an ideal when the wrong done to Belgium brought her into the field. At no moment in her history has she risen to moral heights so great as when she stepped forth in August 1914 to vindicate the cause of the oppressed. The principles to which she consecrated herself in that supreme moment of testing demand a service no less inexorable from us to-day, though to hold by them steadily in the dark and stony ways of peace is proving, as we all know to our cost, a test of endurance greater far than that of the actual conflict. Yet surely failure at this point is to fail our dead most miserably—the men who died with the light of a great vision in their eyes: that vision of a world purged from evil through their sacrifice. No miracles of leadership won the war. It was won by the grit and by the endurance of the great mass of the British peoples. And where statesmanship has failed, we look to the rank and file of the nation to win the peace. It rests with our countrymen to see that there is no further deepening of the ruts of hatred and mutual ignorance, for what England wills in this matter is decisive as regards the future.
And France—France who was in such a special sense the soul of the war? Is it too much to ask that France, despite her sufferings and sacrifices, should brace herself for one supreme effort, nobler than all which have gone before—the effort to make herself greater than the wrong done to her? Then would her triumph over the dark and evil forces which brought about the war be supreme indeed. France who means so much to the mind of Europe, who has given to it eternal principles of truth and liberty—will not France in this matter rise to the level of her own heroic stature?
The established democracies of the world have in these troubled times to hold up each others arms. So long as the great Republic of the West stands aloof, the chain of brotherhood and common effort is broken at a vital point. The darkness is greater, the task infinitely more hard, because she has withdrawn her companionship from what should have been a united purpose. The intervention of America led to the complete overthrow of Germany. Without her great resources flung on the Allied side the war must have had a very different end resulting in compromise, not victory. We appreciate her difficulties; we do not presume to dictate. We would, however, beg her to remember she too has responsibilities as regards the burthen of Europe. But though the action of the United States may have made the goal of European appeasement more remote, more difficult to attain, the goal itself is clear.
The Watch on the Rhine is of value just so far as it helps to clear our minds as to the true objectives that we are seeking. The soldiers have done their work well and truly in the war. Their task accomplished, its results have now passed largely into other hands. Our unworthiness and unfitness to carry so great a responsibility are but too painfully apparent. Yet the responsibility is there. The dead have in special measure left a sacrifice to be perfected. The torch fell lighted from their hands. Supreme shame would it be if it suffers extinction through the sordid ambitions and mean desires of men who live because other men have died. The threat of moral bankruptcy, real as it is, can only be averted through a steady devotion to ideal ends. Those ideal ends have been sung by one of our younger poets in words which, to me at least, sum up the faith I have endeavoured haltingly to express as regards the future:
“This then is yours; to build exultingly
High and yet more high
The knowledgeable towers above base wars
And sinful surges, reaching up to lay