I—PRELUDE

Peace! The thought of it has become almost strange. Yet we must face that thought, or we shall be as unprepared for it as we were for war. Practical men are fighting this war, practical men will make the peace that comes some day. And this unpractical pen ventures no speculation on how it will be brought about; it jots down merely some of the wider thoughts that throng, when for a moment the vision of Peace starts up before the mind!

Statesmen have said that the sequel of this war must be a League for Peace—a League for the enforcement by international action of international right. Whether that can be brought about at a Round Table Conference of the belligerents, or whether the League must be formed by the victorious Allies with the adherence of the neutral countries, and the Central Empires invited to fall in with their conclusions, on pain of ostracism, I hazard here no opinion. But, by whichever means the League for Peace is formed, it will be valueless unless three elements of security are present. Due machinery to secure time for the arbitration of dispute; due force to secure submission to such arbitration; due intention on the part of individual nations to serve the League loyally for the good of all. And the greatest of these three is the last.

The strength of a League for Peace will depend before all on the conduct of each separate nation. We in this country cannot control the faith, conduct, or stability of the other members of the League; we can control our own.

However it ends, this war must leave the bitterest feelings. League for Peace or none, there will remain for this country a menace from without.

If Germany were what is called “crushed”—a queer notion in connection with sixty-five millions of people—she would smoulder with such a fire of vengeance that a victorious British nation, slumbering in dreams of security, waxing fat and swollen-headed, would in a few years time be in as great danger as ever. If Germany be merely shorn of her pretensions and forced back within her former boundaries, then, unless good fortune bring her a social revolution and the comparative blessings of Democracy, Germany may be much the same as she has been, a soldier-ridden State, quickly or slowly gathering force, to reforge the iron machinery of the Prussian soul, and lead the armoured dance again. Stung to the quick by memory of mistake, knowing that she misjudged our nature and our power, she will not make mistake a second time. However ardently the successful may desire to forget—it takes two to bury the hatchet. Let no one think that Germany will forget. Should we, if we were beaten, or even badly thwarted?

The writer is as great a lover of Peace as any who will resent his suggestion that enmity will not readily be changed. But it is well to remember that the menace from without is only increased by forgetting that human nature is fundamentally the same all the world over; and still more increased by not remembering that what we dream and desire is not as a rule what we can obtain. Granted, that all must hope and strive for the constitution of a League for Peace, and aim at making its conditions permanent, it will still be folly to blink the contingency of further war for years to come.

The validity of such a League will hang on the first years. Keep it intact, enforce respect for its decisions, get men’s minds used to it, and after a short span nothing is more unlikely than that they will forego its blessings. But militarism will automatically and proportionately decrease only as men gain confidence in the League’s authority, recognizing at last that an impartial justice may apply to nations every bit as well as to individuals, when there is the force of general consent behind it. Given a generation of its rule, and the nations will no longer carry daggers to stab each other in the back, or swords to avenge their “honour.” There is no need for premature disarmament. Recognition of the menace from without will not harm a League for Peace during its first years, so long as we shy at all spirit of aggression, and are loyal to its first principle of “All for one, and One for all.”

But Peace will also bring to us in this country the menace from within which was with us before the war began, as it is with every nation at whatever time of life—the menace of its individual failings, of its rankness and its uncompleted justice, its riot after riches at the expense of national health, its exaggerated party strife, its penny wisdom and pound folly, its lack of an ideal, and perpetual drifting it knows not whither. If when the war ends we remain a nation, masters of our own lives—and there is no Briton who is not convinced that we shall—the menace from within must again be faced; faced with a stouter heart and a quicker brain; faced at last with some sort of corporate will to that victory over ourselves, so much more difficult to win than over hostile fleets and fortresses. To win the war, and thereafter lose to our own weakness, would cap the event with irony indeed!

It is the fashion with some to talk glibly of this war as if it were a purge that will drain from our State innumerable ills. The war’s honourable necessity none of us dispute, but for us it has in truth only the one advantage—of having revealed to ourselves our quality, re-established our faith. That quality, that faith, to be of any lasting use, will have to stand not only the dreadful spasm of war, but the long exhaustion, the manifold increase of economic stress and social trouble that will infallibly begin when the war ends. Unless we are resolved to carry on our effort of sacrifice, good-will, and courage long into the future, the last state of this land will be worse than the first. The purge that we like to speak of will be proven nothing but a debauch, paid for, like all debauches, by lassitude and spleen.

All national energy at the moment is inevitably bent to the ending of a state of things dreadful to every man and woman living; but, while doing this with all our might, we need to keep alive in our minds the feeling that the fight is not for mere gratification of the passion to down our foes, not just a spurt of military heroism, to be drowned in the drink and applause of victory; but a fight for something abiding in ourselves and in the world—for spiritual, not material, ends.

If, even while we are at war, we cannot keep the feeling that what we are fighting for is a permanent and steady advance in the just and reasonable life of nations, beginning with ourselves, we had better never have fought, for at the end we shall but have added to our vanity, and taken from the stock of our patience, our humanity, and our sense of justice. And so the feelings of the present are linked with the feelings and necessities that will arrive with peace. If the fine phrases we have used, and are still using, about Liberty, Humanity, Democracy, and Peace are not genuinely felt, they will come home to us and roost most vilely. By the outside world we shall be judged according to the measure of actuality we give hereafter to the claim we now make of being champion of Freedom and Humanity; and only according to our inward habit of thought during the war shall we be able to act when it is over. We can do nothing now perhaps, save prosecute the fight to its appointed end; but, if we are not to turn out fraudulent after the event, it is already time to feel ahead—to accustom our minds to the thought of the future efforts, Imperial and social, needful to meet future dangers, and to fulfil the trusts we shall have taken up.

From facile imaginings and Utopian dreams of a purged social life and a fortified morale to the real conditions that this war will leave is likely to be the farthest cry any of us will ever hear. We cannot have it both ways. If war, as most of us believe, is a terrible calamity, it will not leave an improved world. A sloppy optimism is not the slightest good, no more than a deliberate pessimism. “It will be all right after the war!” is, no doubt, the attitude of many minds just now. It will only be all right after the war if, with all the might of a sustained national will, we take care that it is. A great and solemn opportunity, the greatest our country has ever known, will be there, to be made or marred. The records of history are not too cheering, and experience of human nature in the past brings no very happy augury—for after too great effort comes reaction. But this age has higher aspirations, more self-consciousness than any that has gone before. To turn the possible calamity of this war to blessing we shall have to set our foot on Fatalism. There is no real antagonism between the doctrines of Determinism and Free Will. When things have happened, we see that they must have happened as they did; but how does this affect the freedom of our will before they happen—before we know which way they will turn out? Men and nations are what they make themselves.

What are we going to make ourselves—after?