The World in Chains

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War is an artificial process for accelerating that concentration of
wealth in the hands of a small class which distinguishes the present
unholy stage of political development.[63]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 60: _The Great Illusion, passim_.]

[Footnote 61: This is not necessarily inconsistent with H. N.
Brailsford's similar remark (_The War of Steel and Gold_, p. 163): "War
is a folly from the standpoint of national self-interest; it may none
the less be perfectly rational from the standpoint of a small but
powerful governing class."]

[Footnote 62: Reviewing a work on South America in _The Nation_,
November 6, 1915.]

[Footnote 63: This process is further accelerated by the fact that the
War is being paid for very largely by means of Loans, subscribed
naturally by the richer classes; in future the richer classes will be
receiving the interest on these loans. But in order to pay this interest
the State will have to resort to taxation, some part of which will fall
presumably on the poor. See Professor Pigou's _Economy and Finance of
the War_.]

CHAPTER IV

Candide etait etendu dans la rue et couvert de debris. Il disait a
Pangloss: Helas! procure-moi un pen de vin et d'huile; je me meurs.
Ce tremblement de terre n'est pas une chose nouvelle, repondit
Pangloss; la ville de Lima eprouva les memes secousses en Amerique
l'annee passee; memes causes, memes effets: il y a certainement une
trainee de souphre sous terre depuis Lima jusqu'a Lisbonne. Rien
n'est plus probable, dit Candide; mais, pour Dieu, un peu d'huile
et de vin. Comment, probable? repliqua le philosophe; je soutiens
que la chose est demontree.

Candide perdit connaissance, ... et Pangloss lui apporta un peu
d'eau d'une fontaine voisine.

VOLTAIRE, _Candide_.

Sec. 1

Dialectics round the Death-bed

Philosophical aloofness is all very well in its way, but while we argue
about economic causes and attempt to induce a philosophy of earthquakes,
our bright young democracy lies bleeding under the ruins. The urgent
necessity is a little first aid, a little cessation of the killing. I
don't know how many young men in different parts of the world have been
deliberately and scientifically murdered during the writing of this
protest. England alone, who has been criticised for her delay in
exposing her youth to the slaughter, is having about half a million of
her best citizens stabbed or pierced or crushed or mutilated or poisoned
or torn to pieces in one year[64] of modern warfare. And life is not the
only instrument of vital progress that is being thrown away. Britannia
has beaten her trident into a shovel, and with it is shovelling gold;
and not only gold, but youth and love and happiness into the deep sea.
The belligerent nations are frantically engaged in destroying two
thousand years of education and all the accumulated capital of humanity.
Only the enemies of civilisation, the sellers of arms and the sowers of
hatred, are growing rich on its ruins. It is impossible to deny that the
longer the war continues the greater will be the subsequent sufferings,
spiritual and material, of every nation engaged. It is impossible to
maintain that any nation or class or individual will be any better in
any respect for the Great War, with the single exception of that
parasitic class who, as a class, and therefore perhaps not consciously,
are chiefly responsible for its inception. We must have Peace first and
congresses afterwards. The survivors of civilisation cannot discuss a
lasting settlement while they are still under fire.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 64: The total British casualties from the beginning of the war
till July 18, 1915, were given as 321,889, of whom 61,384 were killed.]

Sec. 2

German Responsibility for the War

Nor is it necessary to continue the slaughter while we argue about which
belligerent must bear the chief responsibility for the outbreak. The
dialectical exercises of the German Chancellor and Mr. Asquith are so
futile that they remind us only of two naughty children who drag out
their squabble with stubborn outcries of "He began it." The first
consideration is to stop fighting. Such academic discussions are
necessarily endless, for the simple reason that every nation has its
faults, to which criminal motives can always be attached: every nation
has its fools, whom its enemies can describe as typical representatives.
The question of responsibility for the Great War must be left to the
historians of the future. I am quite confident (though even Viscount
Grey or Professor Gilbert Murray cannot prove) that they will hold
Germany responsible: but I am equally confident that the blame they
throw on the nation responsible for the war will be less pronounced than
the praise they will reserve for the nation which first has the courage
to speak of peace. My belief in Germany's responsibility is based
largely on German apologetics and strengthened by the evidence of
commercial conditions in Germany before the outbreak. Professor
Millioud, for instance, has shown that "German industry was built up on
a top-heavy system of credit, unable to keep solvent without expansion,
and unable to expand sufficiently without war."[65] Or if a good
working test of German responsibility were needed it would be sufficient
to point out that no nation innocent of aggressive intentions would have
drafted such an ultimatum as that which Austria, with German connivance,
sent to Serbia; and that no nation anxious for war would have drafted
such a conciliatory reply as that which Serbia returned to Austria by
Russia's instructions. It is in fact clear that as long ago as 1913
Austria had determined to crush Serbia, and that in 1913 that
determination was only postponed; and postponed not, as we thought at
the time, by the tact of Lord Grey at the Conference of London, but only
by Italy's refusal to join in the adventure, as we now know from the
revelations of San Giuliano and Salandra. Similarly, knowing as we do
that England is no exception to the rule that no imperial nation can be
wholly compact of righteousness, we might hesitate to accept _The
Times'_ version of British innocence, and we might hesitate to accept
Lord Bryce's report on the German atrocities in Belgium, knowing as we
do that it is based almost entirely on the hearsay evidence of refugees
who would be anxious to distinguish themselves as witnesses from the
general ruck of destitution; but it happens that the general charges of
German aggressiveness and German brutality are fully corroborated by
German literature.[66] Unfortunately these distinctions between brutal
and chevaleresque methods of warfare remain only questions of method;
they concern manners rather than morals, and are as irrelevant to our
hopes for the abolition of war as the questions of diplomatic method
already mentioned.[67] Equally irrelevant, in any discussion of the
possibility of substituting "compulsory arbitration" for war, is the
attempt to distinguish between aggressive and defensive war, or to
throw all the blame of aggression on either of the two belligerents; for
the simple reason that each belligerent will perhaps never believe and
will quite certainly never admit that his own intentions were anything
but defensive or altruistic.[68] The _locus classicus_ for such
protestations of innocence occurs in the Italian Green Book, where
Austrian diplomats may be found declaring, _with every appearance of
sincerity_, that the invasion of Serbia was a purely defensive measure.
And in a sense, in such a well-armed continent, every aggression is
indeed a fore-arming against the future. It might also be suggested that
the crime of aggression is an offence not against an individual but
against the peace of the community: and until the European community is
constituted the guilt of such a crime cannot be brought home to either
of the belligerents.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 65: _The Ruling Caste and Frenzied Trade in Germany_, by
Maurice Millioud, Professor of Sociology in the University of Lausanne.
(1915.) Reviewed in the _Manchester Guardian_ by R. C. K. E.]

[Footnote 66: All that we need know, for instance, of German military
conduct in Belgium is contained in the following communication made to
the _Koelnische Zeitung_ by Captain Walter Brum, adjutant to the
Governor-General of Belgium, who may be presumed to know the inner
history of these appalling transactions:--

"The principle according to which the whole community must be punished
for the fault of a single individual is justified by the theory of
_terrorisation_. The innocent must suffer with the guilty; if the latter
are unknown the innocent must even be punished in their place, and note
that the punishment is applied not _because_ a misdeed has been
committed, but _in order that_ no more shall be committed. To burn a
neighbourhood, shoot hostages, decimate a population which has taken up
arms against the army--all this is far less a reprisal than the sounding
of a _note of warning_ for the territory not yet occupied. Do not doubt
it; it was as a note of warning that Baltin, Herve, Louvain, and Dinant
were burned. The burnings and bloodshed at the opening of the war showed
the great cities of Belgium how perilous it was for them ..." etc.]

[Footnote 67: Chapter I, Sec.Sec. 9-11.]

[Footnote 68: See below, note on p. 113; and compare Brailsford, _The
War of Steel and Gold_, p. 22, on "preparations which are always
supposed to be defensive," and p. 264, on the methods used to support
the plea that large navies are purely "defensive."]

Sec. 3

The Value of German Culture

The question whether Germany is actually attempting or would be
justified in attempting to impose her culture on the rest of Europe; or
whether England has good reasons for the limitation or suppression of
German culture, is another side-issue. German culture (in Matthew
Arnold's correct use of the word, meaning, that is, the average of
intellectual and social civilisation), has not on a general inspection
much to be proud of. The modern literature of Germany is largely a
transcription of Russian, French and English authors, and it is
significant that among foreign authors the widest success is reserved
for purveyors of _le faux bon_, writers whose work is distinguished by
its spirited failure quite to attain the first-class.[69] The most
promising of modern authors writing in the German language, Schnitzler,
is an Austrian Jew. Hauptmann, the most distinguished and original of
German dramatists, has for thirty years been writing plays which would
pass for imitations of Mr. John Galsworthy's failures. Sudermann's style
reminds one of a snail crawling over the Indian lilies which he
describes.... Germany, it is true, has reason to be proud of her
theatres, but that is a matter of State enterprise, rather than an
indication of national culture. The German State has been efficient
enough to perceive that good theatres are a fundamental necessity of
national education, and that good theatres, owing to the excessive rents
they have to pay, can never be kept going without a State subsidy. But
these admirable theatres can hardly be called the vehicles of a high
native culture. Their famous Reinhardts are more efficient only because
more acquisitive than our own Jewish impresarios. The ideas they have
acquired are chiefly Russian or English: and they have profited by the
ideas of Granville Barker and Gordon Craig in order to produce the plays
of Shakespeare and Shaw--(just as industrial Germany profited by the
ideas of Bessemer[70] and Perkins). Germany's claim to artistic
vitality, to genuinely original culture, can be supported only by a
certain distinct excellence in sculpture and caricature, two arts which
often seem to go hand in hand, perhaps because both are based on a
precise simplification of form. But for the activity of a small band of
sculptors and caricaturists centred for the most part in Munich,[71] we
might be content to regard Germany not as a fount of culture but rather
as one of the world's workshops, a well-organised _ergastulum_ for
dealing with the drudgery of modern civilisation, for manipulating
secondary products and extracting derivatives, a large factory for the
production of dictionaries, drugs and electrical machinery.[72]

The extraordinary efficiency of Germany, _as a workshop_, is not due to
any intellectual pre-eminence of the nation as a whole. It is most
clearly and emphatically due to the fact that the German autocracy,
whatever its political iniquity, has had the intelligence and the
national solidarity to choose its business men from among the brains of
the community. In Germany any man of conspicuous intellectual capacity
may be picked out, roughly speaking, and assigned to the direction of a
particular industry. In England we achieve inefficiency by the contrary
process, and are only willing to regard a man as capable and revere him
as an "expert" if he happens to have been occupied exclusively for a
certain number of years in the narrow routine of a particular subject.
This pernicious fallacy of the "Expert" is actually preached in England
as a means to the very Efficiency which in fact it almost invariably
excludes. It is commonly assumed that no man can write a good play
unless he has been a bad actor, or that a retired admiral, quite
incapable of grasping any general idea that was not popular in the Navy
twenty years ago or in the smoking-room of his club, would be better
able to direct the affairs of the Navy than Mr. Winston Churchill or Mr.
Balfour.[73] There is a similar outcry for a government of "Business
Men," although anyone who happens to have heard a couple of average
business men discuss a problem of their own business in one of their own
offices will hardly be able to deny that a capable poet and a capable
painter would have settled the question in a quarter of the time.
Instead of superstitiously believing that only "Business Men" can be
efficient, Germany picks out her business men (and her bureaucrats) for
their general efficiency. She has attained efficiency by abandoning the
fallacy of the Expert in favour of the maxim of Confucius--"the Higher
type of man is not like a vessel which is designed for some special
use."[74]

But from the fact that German industry and German theatres are better
managed than our own it does not follow that there is any natural or
national antagonism between England and Germany. The real hatred of
Germany if it exists in England at all should be found among what it is
becoming the fashion to call "the intelligentsia." Such a purely
intellectual hatred of the sentimental melodrama of _Faust_ and of the
semitic luxuriance of Wagner and Reinhardt is not likely to become a
democratic motive in England. Here brains are always unpopular, and Park
Lane will never be stormed by the mob until it is inhabited by the
Bernard Shaws, the Lowes Dickinsons and the Bertrand Russells, instead
of by German financiers.

There is no national hatred between England and Germany. The two peoples
are natural friends. Even the men in the trenches (or perhaps I should
say particularly the men in the trenches), fraternise with their
opponents whenever they get the chance.[75] Even now a press campaign of
a few months would suffice to make Germany popular in England; and if
that were ever to happen, which is not improbable, only the
"intellectuals," who are most strongly opposed to this war, would still
find much to dislike, but not to fight about, in the national culture
produced by the German character.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 69: E.g. Oscar Wilde and Artzibashev.]

[Footnote 70: "The whole industrial expansion of Germany dates from the
introduction of the Bessemer process in 1879, by which its supplies of
iron became possible to work at a profit."--_Bertrand Russell_.]

[Footnote 71: It is unnecessary to refer at length to the world-famous
caricaturists of _Simplicissimus_, although it may be noted that the
best of them, Gulbrannson, is a Norwegian, while his chief rival, Heine,
is a Jew. Munich sculptors whose names might be mentioned are
Hildebrand, Taschner, Hahn, and Wrba.]

[Footnote 72: Even such scientific achievements as those of Ehrlich and
Ostwald should be regarded as results of regulated industry and diligent
experiment.]

[Footnote 73: Another instance of the fallacy is the quite unjustified
prejudice in the Army in favour of "Regular" officers.]

[Footnote 74: The foundation of German business efficiency not on the
practical science of the specialist but on theoretic and general mental
exercise is further illustrated by the great and increasing prevalence
of Latin and Greek in German education ... while again our own "Business
Experts" are reversing the process. The passages that follow are quoted
from a letter of Dr. Rice Holmes in _The Times_ of August 11, 1916.

"In German schools not only are classics taught more systematically and
more thoroughly than in all but a few of our own, but they are learned
by a greater proportion of the population; and, moreover, the hours
devoted to natural science in those schools in which it is taught are
fewer than in our public schools.... Since 1903 the number of German
boys receiving a classical education has steadily increased. In 1904
there were 196,175 pupils in schools (_Gymnasien_ and _Realgymnasien_)
where Latin is compulsory, of whom 153,680 belonged to the classical
schools (_Gymnasien_), and therefore learned Greek as well (W. Lexis,
_Unterrichtswesen im Deutschen Reich_, ii. 218); in 1911, as Mr. R. W.
Livingstone has shown (_The Times Educational Supplement_, April 4, p.
49, col. 2), the corresponding figures were 240,000 and 170,000; and in
1908, 'out of a total of 31,622 students entering 18 out of 21 German
universities (Munich, Erlangen, and Wurzburg not reporting), ... only
7-1/2 per cent entered without Latin or Greek' (Professor Francis W.
Kelsey, _Latin and Greek in American Education_, 1911, p. 43). "Moege das
Studium der griechischen und roemischen Literatur immerfort die Basis der
hoeheren Bildung bleiben." So wrote the greatest of the Germans; and the
countrymen of Goethe, whose genius was scientific as well as poetical,
have not forgotten his words. On the other hand, in the modern schools
(_Realgymnasien_ and _Oberrealschulen_) only a small fraction of the
time-table--from two hours a week (out of twenty-five) to six (out of
thirty-one)--is devoted to natural science. To anyone who has read
Matthew Arnold's _Higher Schools and Universities in Germany_, or Dr. M.
E. Sadler's _The Realschulen in Berlin_, or who is acquainted with the
opinions expressed by Helmholtz, A. W. Hofmann, Bauer, and other
'eminent scientific professors,' it will not appear paradoxical that the
object of thus restricting the hours devoted to the teaching of natural
science in schools is to promote the scientific efficiency of the German
nation. It was with this object that by the regulations published in
1901 the time devoted to Latin in the _Realgymnasien_ was increased. And
those who do not learn natural science learn what for the nation is
equally important--the value of scientific method."]

[Footnote 75: The Daily News, October 20, 1915:--

"A pathetic story is told in the _Vorwaerts_ by Herr Adolf Koester (who
acts as war correspondent for the German Socialist Press) in connection
with the recent fighting at Hooge. A German soldier told him of a young
Scotsman whom he had killed with a hand-grenade in whose pocket he had
found a little pocket-book:--

"'We looked through the booklet. It contained postcards from the front,
from home, from a sister and from a sweetheart--photographs from the
battlefields of brave soldiers and from home. There was also a small
amateur photograph, rather badly made, of a young girl sitting at a
typewriter. She had blonde hair and on the back of the photo she had
written: "Look at the waves of my hair and note also how very diligent I
am" (English in the original). One of us asked the soldier to give him
this photograph. But he replied: "You can take the whole book, photos,
postcards, etc. But this picture I will keep in memory of my friend." By
"his friend" he meant the Scotsman whom he had killed by his
hand-grenade.'"]

Sec. 4

The Manufacture of Hatred

But if there is no natural hatred between the two belligerent
protagonists, there is a feverish production of the artificial variety.
Indeed this diligent manufacture of hatred is probably the most
demoralising result of warfare, particularly disastrous in its ethical
effect on the individual. It proceeds by the ordinary methods of deceit,
suppression of the true and suggestion of the untrue, and by means of
the newspapers this process of moral degeneration is sometimes actively
directed, sometimes only permitted or encouraged by the Governments
concerned. The London press is always ready to swallow the pathetic
fabrications of unscrupulous refugees, and publishes with joy any
Rotterdam rumour about German bestiality; but refuses to print any
report however authentic which ventures to suggest that the Germans are
as human as ourselves. There was, for instance, a Canadian woman, Dr.
Scarlett-Synge, who under the aegis of her medical diploma, returned
from Serbia through Germany, and discovered that some of the German
internment camps are not as bad as they are commonly believed to be.
Whatever her qualifications and opportunities for forming a correct
opinion, and they happen to have been particularly good, there is no
doubt that this woman's report was of the highest interest. Yet not a
single daily paper in England would consider its publication, on the
ground presumably that it might reduce the national inflammation and
thereby "prejudice recruiting." As if true patriotism, sane and lovely,
had anything to do with the pathological condition of hatred.
"Recruiting be damned," says the patriotic philosopher, "_odium nunquam
potest esse bonum_."[76] The method of distortion is also abundantly
used by journalists of both parties. German hatred of England has often
been stoked up by isolated mistranslations of sentences from _The
Times_, and English and French journalists have not been slow in
following the German example. It is said that after the fall of Antwerp
the _Koelnische Zeitung_ announced that "as soon as the fall of Antwerp
was known the church bells in Germany were rung," a harmless message
which was successively distorted by the _Matin_, the _Daily Mail_, and
the _Corriere della Sera_, until it finally reappeared in the _Matin_ in
the following form: "According to the information of the _Corriere della
Sera_ from London and Cologne it is confirmed that the barbaric
conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their
heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living
clappers to the bells with their heads downwards."[77]

The Manufacture of Hatred is unfortunately become a part of the
Nationalist Movement in nearly all modern European States. The spurious
Nationalism which is the result not of race but of education, depends
for its existence almost entirely on so-called ethnological propaganda
and continues to thrive by the cultivation of two propositions, neither
of which is true: that all the members of one national group are
racially different from all the members of the neighbouring group; and
that this racial difference naturally and necessarily and properly
implies the mutual hatred of the two nations. They proclaim, in fact,
that certain nations are the "natural enemies " of certain others, by
hating which they are only fulfilling the national function of
self-realisation. By such arguments, which have no genuine ethnological
foundation, the false prophets of nationalism are filling Europe with
the racial prejudice of artificial Kelts, artificial Poles, and
artificial Teutons. Of course race hatred between Slav and Teuton is no
more "natural" than family hatred between Jones and Robinson; and even
if it were, even that is if the cultures of two neighbouring races were
mutually exclusive, it could still be argued--as it must in any case be
argued--that no nation is racially pure. The last "Pole" I met proudly
professed that the hatred of Russia was _in his blood_. Yet he was born
in Bessarabia, and it was therefore not surprising that his facial type
was distinctly Roumanian; he came, that is, if race means anything at
all, of a Graeco-Latin stock, and his hatred of Russia, which seemed to
be the beginning and the end of his programme of "Polish nationalism,"
was the result of a few years of neglected education. Half the
conflicting "Nationalisms" of Europe are programmes of artificial
hatred, the propagandists of which may actually be of the same blood as
their opponents; a single generation suffices for the manufacture of the
racial enthusiast, which is often completed by a modification of the
family name. Even Greeks and Bulgars are frequently of common descent.
When a Macedonian village changes hands the Greek Karagiozes has been
known to develop into the Bulgarian Karagiozoff; and a Mazarakis will
boast a racial incompatibility with his second cousin Madjarieff. The
same process for the manufacture of nationalism may be detected at the
other end of Europe: at Mons of glorious memory there was a Walloon with
the good old Walloon name of Le Grand, whose grandfather had been an
equally enthusiastic Fleming with the good old Flemish name of De
Groodt.

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