Secondly, a word may be ventured about the war in so far as the consideration of Germany alone can guide us. As I have tried to show, her morale is more rigidly conditioned than that of her opponents. They have merely to maintain their resistance, to do which they have certain psychological advantages, and they must win. She must continue aggressive efforts, and if these can be held by her enemies—not more—she must go on galvanizing her weary nerves until they fail to respond. I am not for a moment venturing to suppose myself {194} competent to give the slightest hint upon the conduct of the war; I am merely pointing out what I regard as a psychological fact. Whether it has any practical military value is not in my province to decide.
If one claimed the liberty of all free men, to have over and above considered judgment a real guess, one would be inclined to venture the opinion that, however well things go with the enemies of Germany, there will not be much fighting on German soil.
The proposition that the strength and weakness of Germany are rigidly conditioned by definite and ascertainable psychological necessities is, if it is valid, chiefly of interest to the strategist and those who are responsible for the general lines of the campaign against her. We may well, however, ask whether psychological principle yields any hint of guidance in the solution of the further and equally important problem of how her enemies are to secure and render permanent the fruits of the victory upon which they are resolved.
This problem has already been the subject of a good deal of controversy, which is likely to increase as the matter comes more and more into the field of practical affairs.
Two types of solution have been expounded which, apart from what inessential agreement they may show in demanding the resurrection of such small nations as Germany has been able to assassinate, differ profoundly in the treatment they propose for the actual enemy herself. Both profess to be based upon the desire for a really permanent peace, and the establishment of a truly stable equilibrium between the antagonists. It is upon the means by which this result is to be secured that differences arise.
The official solution, and that almost universally accepted by the bulk of the people, insists that the {195} “military domination of Prussia,” “German militarism,” or the “German military system” as it is variously phrased, must be wholly and finally destroyed. This doctrine has received many interpretations. In spite, however, of criticism by moderates on the one hand and by unpractically ferocious root-and-branch men on the other, it seems to remain—significantly enough—an expression of policy which the common man feels for the time to be adequate.
The most considerable criticism has come from the small class of accomplished and intellectual writers who from their pacifist and “international” tendencies have to some extent been accused, no doubt falsely, of being pro-German in the sense of anti-English. The complaint of this school against the official declaration of policy is, that it does not disclose a sufficiently definite object or the means by which this object is to be attained. We are told that as a nation we do not know what we are fighting for, and, what amounts to the same thing, that we cannot attain the object we profess to pursue by the exercise of military force however drastically it may be applied. We are warned that we should seek a “reasonable” peace and one which by its moderation would have an educative effect upon the German people, that to crush and especially in any way to dismember the German Empire would confirm its people in their belief that this war is a war of aggression by envious neighbours, and make revenge a national aspiration.
Such criticism has not always been very effectually answered, and the generally current feeling has proved disconcertingly inarticulate in the presence of its agile and well-equipped opponents. Indeed, upon the ordinary assumptions of political debate, it is doubtful whether any quite satisfactory answer {196} can be produced. It is just, however, these very assumptions which must be abandoned and replaced by more appropriate psychological principles when we are trying to obtain light upon the relations of two peoples of profoundly different social type and instinctive reaction. The common man seems to be dimly aware of this difference though he cannot define it; the intellectual of what, for want of a better term, I may call the pacifist type in all its various grades, proceeds upon the assumption that no such difference exists. Much as one must respect the courage and capacity of many of these latter, one cannot but recognize that their conceptions, however logical and however ingenious, lack the invigorating contact with reality which the instinctive feelings of the common man have not altogether failed to attain.
Let us now consider what guidance in the solution of the problem can be got from a consideration of the peculiarities of the social type which the Germans of the present day so characteristically present.
Regarded from this point of view, the war is seen to be directed against a social type which, when endowed with the technical resources of modern civilization, is, and must continue to be, a dangerous anachronism. A people of the aggressive social habit can never be in a state of stable equilibrium with its neighbours. The constitution of its society presents a rigid barrier to smooth and continuous internal integration; its energy, therefore, must be occupied upon essentially, though not always superficially, external objects, and its history will necessarily be made up of alternating periods of aggression and periods of preparation. Such a people has no conception of the benign use of power. It must regard war as an end in itself, as the summit of its national activities, as the recurring apogee {197} of its secular orbit; it must regard peace as a necessary and somewhat irksome preparation for war in which it may savour reminiscently the joys of conquest by dragooning its new territories and drastically imposing upon them its national type. This instinctive insistence upon uniformity makes every conquest by such a people an impoverishment of the human race, and makes the resistance of such aggression an elementary human duty.