Yet there is no escape for us; if we are to avoid chaos, if the daily life of the world is to be re-established and carried on, there must be an understanding between nations, and there is no possible way to come to an understanding save by the action and words of representative men on the one side and the other. Such representative men there are; there is no reason to doubt that they do in the main truly express the aspirations and wishes of their people, and on both sides they have either explicitly or virtually made offers. The offer of the Allied Powers is on record. What does Germany offer? She has refused to make a definite statement, but her rulers have talked a great deal, and what she intends is not really in doubt; only she is not sure whether she can get it, and still clings to the hope that a favourable turn of events may relieve her of the duty of making proposals, and put her in a position to dictate a settlement. We all know what that settlement would be.

The German offer for a solution of the problem of world-government is German sentiments, German racial pride, German manners and customs, an immense increase of German territory and German influence, and above all an acknowledged supremacy for the German race among the nations of the world. She thinks she has not stated these aims in so many words; but she has. When it was suggested that the future peace of the world might be assured by the formation of a League to Enforce Peace, Germany, through her official spokesmen, expressed her sympathy with that idea, and stated that she would very gladly put herself at the head of such a League. I can hardly help loving the Germans when their rustic simplicity and rustic cunning lead them all unconsciously into self-revelation. The very idea of a League to Enforce Peace implies equality among the contracting parties; and Germany does not understand equality. 'By all means', she says,'let us sit at a round table, and I will sit at the top of it.' Her panacea for human ills is Germanism. She has nothing to offer but a purely national sentiment, which some, greatly privileged, may share, and the rest must revere and bow to. In the Book of Genesis we are told how Joseph was thrown into a pit by his elder brothers for talking just like this; but he meant it quite innocently, and so do the Germans. They do not intend irreverence to God when they call Him the good German God. On the contrary, they choose for His praise a word that to them stands for all goodness and all greatness. Their worship expresses itself naturally in the tribal ritual and the tribal creed. This tribal creed, there can be no doubt, is what they offer us for a talisman to ensure the right ordering of the world.

Patriotism and loyalty to hearth and home are passions so strong in humanity that a creed like this, when men are under its influence, is not easily seen to be absurd. The Saxon boy, whom I saw in his prison camp, probably would not quarrel with it. And even in the wider world of thought the illusions of nationalism are all-pervading. I once heard Professor Henry Sidgwick remark that it is not easy for us to understand how the troops of Portugal are stirred to heroic effort when their commanders call on them to remember that they are Portuguese. He would no doubt have been the first to admit, for he had an alert and sceptical mind, that it is only our stupidity which finds anything comic in such an appeal. But it is stupidity of this kind which unfits men to deal with other races, and it is stupidity of this kind which has been exalted by the Germans as a primal duty, and has, indeed, been advanced by them as their principal claim to undertake the government of the world.

This extreme nationalism, this unwillingness to feel any sympathy for other peoples, or to show them any consideration, has stupefied and blinded the Germans. One of the heaviest charges that can be brought against them is that they have seen no virtue in France, I do not ask that they shall interrupt the War to express admiration for their enemies: I am speaking of the time before the War. France is the chief modern inheritor of that great Roman civilization which found us painted savages, and made us into citizens of the world. The French mind, it is admitted, and admitted most readily by the most intelligent men, is quick and delicate and perceptive, surer and clearer in its operation than the average European mind. Yet the Germans, infatuated with a belief in their own numbers and their own brute strength, have dared to express contempt for the genius of France. A contempt for foreigners is common enough among the vulgar and unthinking of all nations, but I do not believe that you will find anywhere but in Germany a large number of men trained in the learned professions who are so besotted by vanity as to deny to France her place in the vanguard of civilization. These louts cannot be informed or argued with; they are interested in no one but themselves, and naked self-assertion is their only idea of political argument. Treitschke, who was for twenty years Professor of History at Berlin, and who did perhaps more than any other man to build up the modern German creed, has crystallized German politics in a single sentence. 'War', he says, 'is politics par excellence,' that is to say, politics at their purest and highest. Our political doctrine, if it must be put in as brief a form, would be better expressed in the sentence, 'War is the failure of politics'.

If England were given over to nationalism as Germany is given over, then a war between these two Powers, though it would still be a great dramatic spectacle, would have as little meaning as a duel between two rival gamebirds in a cockpit. We know, and it will some day dawn on the Germans, that this War has a deeper meaning than that. We are not nationalist; we are too deeply experienced in politics to stumble into that trap. We have had a better and longer political education than has come to Germany in her short and feverish national life. It is often said that the Germans are better educated than we are, and in a sense that is true; they are better furnished with schools and colleges and the public means of education. The best boy in a school is the boy who best minds his book, and even if he dutifully believes all that it tells him, that will not lose him the prize. When he leaves school and graduates in a wider world, where men must depend on their own judgement and their own energy, he is often a little disconcerted to find that some of his less bookish fellows easily outgo him in quickness of understanding and resource. German education is too elaborate; it attempts to do for its pupils much that they had better be left to do for themselves. The pupils are docile and obedient, not troubled with unruly doubts and questionings, so that the German system of public education is a system of public mesmerism, and, now that we see it in its effects, may be truly described as a national disease.

I have said that England is not nationalist. If the English believed in England as the Germans believe in Germany, there would be nothing for it but a duel to the death, the extinction of one people or the other, and darkness as the burier of the dead. Peace would be attained by a great simplification and impoverishment of the world. But the English do not believe in themselves in that mad-bull fashion. They come of mixed blood, and have been accustomed for many long centuries to settle their differences by compromise and mutual accommodation. They do not inquire too curiously into a man's descent if he shares their ideas. They have shown again and again that they prefer a tolerant and intelligent foreigner to rule over them rather than an obstinate and wrong-headed man of native origin. The earliest strong union of the various parts of England was achieved by William the Norman, a man of French and Scandinavian descent. Our native-born king, Charles the First, was put to death by his people; his son, James the Second, was banished, and the Dutchman, William the Third, who had proved himself a statesman and soldier of genius in his opposition to Louis the Fourteenth, was elected to the throne of England. The fierce struggles of the seventeenth century, between Royalists and Parliamentarians, between Cavaliers and Puritans, were settled at last, not by the destruction of either party, but by the stereotyping of the dispute in the milder and more tolerable shape of the party system. The only people we have ever shown ourselves unwilling to tolerate are the people who will tolerate no one but their own kind. We hate all Acts of Uniformity with a deadly hatred. We are careful for the rights of minorities. We think life should be made possible, and we do not object to its being made happy, for dissenters. Voltaire, the acutest French mind of his age, remarked on this when he visited England in 1726. 'England', he says, 'is the country of sects. "In my father's house are many mansions".... Although the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians are the two dominant sects in Great Britain, all the others are welcomed there, and live together very fairly, whilst most of the preachers hate one another almost as cordially as a Jansenist damns a Jesuit. Enter the London Exchange, a place much more worthy of respect than most Courts, and you see assembled for the benefit of mankind representatives of all nations. There the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian deal with each other as if they were of the same religion, and call infidels only those who become bankrupt. There the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Anabaptist relies on the promise of the Quaker. On leaving these free and peaceful assemblies, some proceed to the synagogue, others to the tavern.... If in England there were only one religion, its despotism would be to be dreaded; if there were only two, their followers would cut each other's throats; but there are thirty of them, and they live in peace and happiness.'

Since we have had so much practice in tolerating one another, and in living together even when our ideas on life and the conduct of life seem absolutely incompatible, it is no wonder that we approach the treatment of international affairs in a temper very unlike the solemn and dogmatic ferocity of the German. We do not expect or desire that other peoples shall resemble us. The world is wide; and the world-drama is enriched by multiplicity and diversity of character. We like bad men, if there is salt and spirit in their badness. We even admire a brute, if he is a whole-hearted brute. I have often thought that if the Germans had been true to their principles and their programme—if, after proclaiming that they meant to win by sheer strength and that they recognized no other right, they had continued as they began, and had battered and hacked, burned and killed, without fear or pity, a certain reluctant admiration for them might have been felt in this country. There is no chance of that now, since they took to whining about humanity. Yet it is very difficult wholly to alienate the sympathies of the English people. It is perhaps in some ways a weakness, as it is certainly in other ways a strength, that we are fanciers of other peoples. Our soldiers have a tendency to make pets of their prisoners, to cherish them as curiosities and souvenirs. The fancy becomes a passion when we find a little fellow struggling valiantly against odds. I suppose we should be at war with Germany to-day, even if the Germans had respected the neutrality of Belgium. But the unprovoked assault upon a little people that asked only to be let alone united all opinions in this country and brought us in with a rush. I believe there is one German, at least (I hope he is alive), who understands this. Early in July, 1914, a German student at Oxford, who was a friend and pupil of mine, came to say good-bye to me. I have since wondered whether he was under orders to join his regiment. Anyhow, we talked very freely of many things, and he told me of an adventure that had befallen him in an Oxford picture-palace. Portraits of notabilities were being thrown on the screen. When a portrait of the German Emperor appeared, a youth, sitting just behind my friend, shouted out an insulting and scurrilous remark. So my friend stood up and turned round and, catching him a cuff on the head, said,'That's my emperor'. The house was full of undergraduates, and he expected to be seized and thrown into the street. To his great surprise the undergraduates, many of whom have now fallen on the fields of France, broke into rounds of cheering. 'I should like to think', my friend said, 'that a thing like that could possibly happen in a German city, but I am afraid that the feeling there would always be against the foreigner. I admire the English; they are so just.' I have heard nothing of him since, except a rumour that he is with the German army of occupation in Belgium. If so, I like to think of him at a regimental mess, suggesting doubts, or, if that is an impossible breach of military discipline, keeping silence, when the loud-voiced major explains that the sympathy of the English for Belgium is all pretence and cant.

Ideal and disinterested motives are always to be reckoned with in human nature. What the Germans call 'real politics', that is to say, politics which treat disinterested motives as negligible, have led them into a morass and have bogged them there. How easy it is to explain that the British Empire depends on trade, that we are a nation of traders, that all our policy is shaped by trade, that therefore it can only be hypocrisy in us to pretend to any of the finer feelings. This is not, as you might suppose, the harmless sally of a one-eyed wit; it is the carefully reasoned belief of Germany's profoundest political thinkers. They do not understand a cavalier, so they confidently assert that there is no such thing in nature. That is a bad mistake to make about any nation, but perhaps worst when it is made about the English, for the cavalier temper in England runs through all classes. You can find it in the schoolmaster, the small trader, the clerk, and the labourer, as readily as in the officer of dragoons, or the Arctic explorer. The Roundheads won the Civil War, and bequeathed to us their political achievements. From the Cavaliers we have a more intimate bequest: it is from them, not from the Puritans, that the fighting forces of the British Empire inherit their outlook on the world, their freedom from pedantry, and that gaiety and lightness of courage which makes them carry their lives like a feather in the cap.

I am not saying that our qualities, good or bad, commend us very readily to strangers. The people of England, on the whole, are respected more than they are liked. When I call them fanciers of other nations, I feel it only fair to add that some of those other nations express the same truth in different language. I have often heard the complaint made that Englishmen cannot speak of foreigners without an air of patronage. It is impossible to deny this charge, for, in a question of manners, the impressions you produce are your manners; and there is no doubt about this impression. There is a certain coldness about the upright and humane Englishman which repels and intimidates any trivial human being who approaches him. Most men would forgo their claim to justice for the chance of being liked. They would rather have their heads broken, or accept a bribe, than be the objects of a dispassionate judgement, however kindly. They feel this so strongly that they experience a dull discomfort in any relationship that is not tinctured with passion. As there are many such relationships, not to be avoided even by the most emotional natures, they escape from them by simulating lively feeling, and are sometimes exaggerated and insincere in manner. They issue a very large paper currency on a very small gold reserve. This, which is commonly known as the Irish Question, is an insoluble problem, for it is a clash not of interests but of temperaments. The English, it must in fairness be admitted, do as they would be done by. No Englishman pure and simple is incommoded by the coldness of strangers. He prefers it, for there are many stupid little businesses in the world, which are falsified when they are made much of; and even when important facts are to be told, he would rather have them told in a dreary manner. He hates a fuss.

The Germans, who are a highly emotional and excitable people, have concentrated all their energy on a few simple ideas. Their moral outlook is as narrow as their geographical outlook is wide. Will their faith prevail by its intensity, narrow and false though it be? I cannot prove that it will not, but I have a suspicion, which I think has already occurred to some of them, that the world is too large and wilful and strong to be mastered by them. We have seen what their hatchets and explosives can do, and they are nearing the end of their resources. They can still repeat some of their old exploits, but they make no headway, and time is not their friend.

One service, perhaps, they have done to civilization. There is a growing number of people who hold that when this War is over international relations must not be permitted to slip back into the unstable condition which tempted the Germans to their crime. A good many pacific theorists, no doubt, have not the experience and the imagination which would enable them to pass a useful judgement, or to make a valuable suggestion, on the affairs of nations. The abolition of war would be easily obtained if it were generally agreed that war is the worst thing that can befall a people. But this is not generally agreed; and, further, it is not true. While men are men they cannot be sure that they will never be challenged on a point of deep and intimate concern, where they would rather die than yield. But something can perhaps be done to discourage gamblers' wars, though even here any stockbroker will tell you how difficult it is to suppress gambling without injuring the spirit of enterprise. The only real check on war is an understanding between nations. For the strengthening of such an understanding the Allies have a great opportunity, and admirable instruments. I do not think that we shall call on Germany to preside at our conferences. But we shall have the help of all those qualities of heart and mind which are possessed by France, by Russia, by Italy, and by America, who, for all her caution, hates cruelty even more than she loves peace. There has never been an alliance of greater promise for the government and peace of the world.

What is the contribution of the British Empire, and of England, towards this settlement? Many of our domestic problems, as I have said, bear a curious resemblance to international problems. We have not solved them all. We have had many stumblings and many backslidings. But we have shown again and again that we believe in toleration on the widest possible basis, and that we are capable of generosity, which is a virtue much more commonly shown by private persons than by communities. We abolished the slave trade. We granted self-government to South Africa just after our war with her. Only a few days ago we gave India her will, and allowed her to impose a duty on our manufactures. Ireland could have self-government to-morrow if she did not value her feuds more than anything else in the world. All these are peoples to whom we have been bound by ties of kinship or trusteeship. A wider and greater opportunity is on its way to us. We are to see whether we are capable of generosity and trust towards peoples who are neither our kin nor our wards. Our understanding with France and Russia will call for great goodwill on both sides, not so much in the drafting of formal treaties as in indulging one another in our national habits. Families who fail to live together in unity commonly fail not because they quarrel about large interests, but because they do not like each other's little ways. The French are not a dull people; and the Russians are not a tedious people (what they do they do suddenly, without explanation); so that if we fail to take pleasure in them we have ourselves to blame. If we are not equal to our opportunities, if we do not learn to feel any affection for them, then not all the pacts and congresses in the world can make peace secure.

Of Germany it is too early to speak. We have not yet defeated her. If we do defeat her, no one who is acquainted with our temper and our record believes that we shall impose cruel or vindictive terms. If it were only the engineers of this war who were in question, we would destroy them gladly as common pests. But the thing is not so easy. A single home is in many ways a greater and more appealing thing than a nation; we should find ourselves thinking of the miseries of simple and ignorant people who have given their all for the country of their birth; and our hearts would fail us.

The Germans would certainly despise this address of mine, for I have talked only of morality, while they talk and think chiefly of machines. Zeppelins are a sad disappointment; but if any address on the War is being delivered to-night by a German professor, there can be no doubt that it deals with submarines, and treats them as the saviours of the Fatherland. Well, I know very little about submarines, but I notice that they have not had much success against ships of war. We are so easy-going that we expected to carry on our commerce in war very much as we did in peace. We have to change all that, and it will cost us not a little inconvenience, or even great hardships. But I cannot believe that a scheme of privy attacks on the traders of all nations, devised as a last resort, in lieu of naval victory, can be successful when it is no longer a surprise. And when I read history, I am strengthened in my belief that morality is all-important. I do not find that any war between great nations was ever won by a machine. The Trojan horse will be trotted out against me, but that was a municipal affair. Wars are won by the temper of a people. Serbia is not yet defeated. It is a frenzied and desperate quest that the Germans undertook when they began to seek for some mechanical trick or dodge, some monstrous engine, which should enable the less resolved and more excited people to defeat the more resolved and less excited. If we are to be defeated, it must be by them, not by their bogey-men. We got their measure on the Somme, and we found that when their guns failed to protect them, many of them threw up their hands. These men will never be our masters until we deserve to be their slaves.

So I am glad to be able to end on a note of agreement with the German military party. If they defeat us, it will be no more than we deserve. Till then, or till they throw up their hands, we shall fight them, and God will defend the right.



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR

An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, February 13, 1918

Our losses in this War continue to be enormous, and we are not yet near to the end. So it may seem absurd to speak of our gains, of gains that we have already achieved. But if you will look at the thing in a large light, I think you will see that it is not absurd.

I do not speak of gains of territory, and prisoners, and booty. It is true that we have taken from the Germans about a million square miles of land in Africa, where land is cheap. We have taken more prisoners from them than they have taken from us, and we have whole parks of German artillery to set over against the battered and broken remnants of British field-guns which were exhibited in Berlin—a monument to the immortal valour of the little old Army. I am speaking rather of gains which cannot be counted as guns are counted, or measured as land is measured, but which are none the less real and important.

The Germans have achieved certain great material gains in this War, and they are fighting now to hold them. If they fail to hold them, the Germany of the war-lords is ruined. She will have to give up all her bloated ambitions, to purge and live cleanly, and painfully to reconstruct her prosperity on a quieter and sounder basis. She will not do this until she is forced to it by defeat. No doubt there are moderate and sensible men in Germany, as in other countries; but in Germany they are without influence, and can do nothing. War is the national industry of Prussia; Prussia has knit together the several states of the larger Germany by means of war, and has promised them prosperity and power in the future, to be achieved by war. You know the Prussian doctrine of war. Every one now knows it. According to that doctrine it is a foolish thing for a nation to wait till it is attacked. It should carefully calculate its own strength and the strength of its neighbours, and, when it is ready, it should attack them, on any pretext, suddenly, without warning, and should take from them money and land. When it has gained territory in this fashion, it should subject the population of the conquered territory to the strictest laws of military service, and so supply itself with an instrument for new and bolder aggression. This is not only the German doctrine; it is the German practice. In this way and no other modern Germany has been built up. It is a huge new State, founded on force, cemented by fear, and financed on speculative gains to be derived from the great gamble of war. You may have noticed that the German people have not been called on, as yet, to pay any considerable sum in taxation towards the expenses of this war. Those expenses (that, at least, was the original idea) were to be borne wholly by the conquered enemy. There are hundreds of thousands of Germans to-day who firmly believe that their war-lords will return in triumph from the stricken field, bringing with them the spoils of war, and scattering a largess of peace and plenty.

To us it seems a marvel that any people should accept such a doctrine, and should willingly give their lives and their fortunes to the work of carrying it out in practice; but it is not so marvellous as it seems. The German peoples are brave and obedient, and so make good soldiers; they are easily lured by the hope of profit; they are naturally attracted by the spectacular and sentimental side of war; above all, they are so curiously stupid that many of them do actually believe that they are a divinely chosen race, superior to the other races of the world. They are very carefully educated, and their education, which is ordered by the State, is part of the military machine. Their thinking is done for them by officials. It would require an extraordinary degree of courage and independence for a German youth to cut himself loose and begin thinking and judging for himself. It must always be remembered, moreover, that their recent history seems to justify their creed. I will not go back to Frederick the Great, though the history of his wars is the Prussian handbook, which teaches all the characteristic Prussian methods of treachery and deceit. But consider only the last two German wars. How, in the face of these, can it be proved to any German that war is not the most profitable of adventures? In 1866 Prussia had war with Austria. The war lasted forty days, and Prussia had from five to six thousand soldiers killed in action. As a consequence of the war Prussia gained much territory, and established her control over the states of greater Germany. In 1870 she had war with France. Her total casualties in that war were approximately a hundred thousand, just about the same as our casualties in Gallipoli. From the war she gained, besides a great increase of strength at home, the rich provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, with all their mineral wealth, and an indemnity of two hundred million pounds, that is to say, four times the actual cost of the war in money. How then can it be maintained that war is not good business? If you say so to any Prussian, he thinks you are talking like a child.

Not only were these two wars rich in profit for the Germans, but they did not lose them much esteem. There was sympathy in this country for the union of the German peoples, just as there was sympathy, a few years earlier, for the union of the various states of Italy. There was not a little admiration for German efficiency and strength. So that Bismarck, who was an expert in all the uses of bullying, blackmail, and fraud, was accepted as a great European statesman. I have always believed, and I still believe, that Germany will have to pay a heavy price for Bismarck—all the heavier because the payment has been so long deferred.

The present War, then, is in the direct line of succession to these former wars; it was planned by Germany, elaborately and deliberately planned, on a calculation of the profits to be derived from operations on a large scale.

Well, as I said, we, as a people, do not believe in gambling in human misery to attain uncertain speculative gains. We hold that war can be justified only by a good cause, not by a lucky event. The German doctrine seems to us impious and wicked. Though we have defined our war aims in detail, and the Germans have not dared publicly to define theirs, our real and sufficient war aim is to break the monstrous and inhuman doctrine and practice of the enemy—to make their calculations miscarry. And observe, if their calculations miscarry, they have fought and suffered for nothing. They entered into this War for profit, and in the conduct of the War, though they have made many mistakes, they have made none of those generous and magnanimous mistakes which redeem and beautify a losing cause.

The essence of our cause, and its greatest strength, is that we are not fighting for profit. We are fighting for no privilege except the privilege of possessing our souls, of being ourselves—a privilege which we claim also for other weaker nations. The inestimable strength of that position is that if the odds are against us it does not matter. If you see a ruffian torturing a child, and interfere to prevent him, do you feel that your attempt was a wrong one because he knocks you down? And if you succeed, what material profit is there in saving a child from torture? We have sometimes fought in the past for doubtful causes and for wrong causes, but this time there is no mistake. Our cause is better than we deserve; we embraced it by an act of faith, and it is only by continuing in that faith that we shall see it through. The little old Army, when they went to France in August 1914, did not ask what profits were likely to come their way. They knew that there were none, but they were willing to sacrifice themselves to save decency and humanity from being trampled in the mud. This was the Army that the Germans called a mercenary Army, and its epitaph has been written by a good poet:

These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling, And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the heavens suspended, They stood, and earth's foundations stay, What God abandoned these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.

We must follow their example, for we shall never get a better. We must not make too much of calculation, especially when it deals with incalculable things. Nervous public critics, like Mr. H.G. Wells, are always calling out for more cleverness in our methods, for new and effective tricks, so that we may win the War. I would never disparage cleverness; the more you can get of it, the better; but it is useless unless it is in the service of something stronger and greater than itself, and that is character. Cleverness can grasp; it is only character that can hold. The Duke of Wellington was not a clever man; he was a man of simple and honourable mind, with an infinite capacity for patience, persistence, and endurance, so that neither unexpected reverses abroad nor a flood of idle criticism at home could shake him or change him. So he bore a chief part in laying low the last great tyranny that desolated Europe.

None of our great wars was won by cleverness; they were all won by resolution and perseverance. In all of them we were near to despair and did not despair. In all of them we won through to victory in the end.

But in none of them did victory come in the expected shape. The worst of making elaborate plans of victory, and programmes of all that is to follow victory, is that the mixed event is sure to defeat those plans. Not every war finds its decision in a single great battle. Think of our war with Spain in the sixteenth century. Spain was then the greatest of European Powers. She had larger armies than we could raise; she had more than our wealth, and more than our shipping. The newly discovered continent of America was an appanage of Spain, and her great galleons were wafted lazily to and fro, bringing her all the treasures of the western hemisphere. We defeated her by standing out and holding on. We fought her in the Low Countries, which she enslaved and oppressed. We refused to recognize her exclusive rights in America, and our merchant seamen kept the sea undaunted, as they have kept it for the last three years. When at last we became an intolerable vexation to Spain, she collected a great Armada, or war-fleet, to invade and destroy us; and it was shattered, by the winds of heaven and the sailors of England, in 1588. The defeat of the Armada was the turning-point of the war, but it was not the end. It lifted a great shadow of fear from the hearts of the people, as a great shadow of fear has already been lifted from their hearts in the present War, but during the years that followed we suffered many and serious reverses at the hand of Spain, before peace and security were reached. So late as 1601, thirteen years after the defeat of the Armada, the King of Denmark offered to mediate between England and Spain, so that the long and disastrous war might be ended. Queen Elizabeth was then old and frail, but this was what she said—and if you want to understand why she was almost adored by her people, listen to her words: 'I would have the King of Denmark, and all Princes Christian and Heathen to know, that England hath no need to crave peace; nor myself endured one hour's fear since I attained the crown thereof, being guarded with so valiant and faithful subjects.' In the end the power and menace of Spain faded away, and when peace was made, in 1604, this nation never again, from that day to this, feared the worst that Spain could do.

What were our gains from the war with Spain? Freedom to live our lives in our own way, unthreatened; freedom to colonize America. The gains of a great war are never visible immediately; they are deferred, and extended over many years. What did we gain by our war with Napoleon, which ended in the victory of Waterloo? For long years after Waterloo this country was full of riots and discontents; there were rick-burnings, agitations, popular risings, and something very near to famine in the land. But all these things, from a distance, are now seen to have been the broken water that follows the passage of a great storm. The real gains of Waterloo, and still more of Trafalgar, are evident in the enormous commercial and industrial development of England during the nineteenth century, and in the peaceful foundation of the great dominions of Canada, Australia, and South Africa, which was made possible only by our unchallenged use of the seas. The men who won those two great battles did not live to gather the fruits of their victory; but their children did. If we defeat Germany as completely as we hope, we shall not be able to point at once to our gains. But it is not a rash forecast to say that our children and children's children will live in greater security and freedom than we have ever tasted.

A man must have a good and wide imagination if he is to be willing to face wounds and death for the sake of his unborn descendants and kinsfolk. We cannot count on the popular imagination being equal to the task. Fortunately, there is a substitute for imagination which does the work as well or better, and that is character. Our people are sound in instinct; they understand a fight. They know that a wrestler who considers, while he is in the grip of his adversary, whether he would not do well to give over, and so put an end to the weariness and the strain, is no sort of a wrestler. They have never failed under a strain of this kind, and they will not fail now. The people who do the half-hearted and timid talking are either young egotists, who are angry at being deprived of their personal ease and independence; or elderly pensive gentlemen, in public offices and clubs, who are no longer fit for action, and, being denied action, fall into melancholy; or feverish journalists, who live on the proceeds of excitement, who feel the pulse and take the temperature of the War every morning, and then rush into the street to announce their fluttering hopes and fears; or cosmopolitan philosophers, to whom the change from London to Berlin means nothing but a change in diet and a pleasant addition to their opportunities of hearing good music; or aliens in heart, to whom the historic fame of England, 'dear for her reputation through the world,' is less than nothing; or practical jokers, who are calm and confident enough themselves, but delight in startling and depressing others. These are not the people of England; they are the parasites of the people of England. The people of England understand a fight.

That brings me to the first great gain of the War. We have found ourselves. Which of us, in the early months of 1914, would have dared to predict the splendours of the youth of this Empire—splendours which are now a part of our history? We are adepts at self-criticism and self-depreciation. We hate the language of emotion. Some of us, if we were taken to heaven and asked what we thought of it, would say that it is decent, or not so bad. I suppose we are jealous to keep our standard high, and to have something to say if a better place should be found. But in spite of all this, we do now know, and it is worth knowing, that we are not weaker than our fathers. We know that the people who inhabit these islands and this commonwealth of nations cannot be pushed on one side, or driven under, or denied a great share in the future ordering of the world. We know this, and our knowledge of it is the debt that we owe to our dead. It is not vanity to admit that we know it; on the contrary, it would be vanity to pretend that we do not know it. It is visible to other eyes than ours. Some time ago I heard an address given by a friend of mine, an Indian Mohammedan of warrior descent, to University students of his own faith. He was urging on them the futility of dreams and the necessity of self-discipline and self-devotion. 'Why do the people of this country', he said, 'count for so much all the world over? It is not because of their dreams; it is because thousands of them are lying at the bottom of the sea.'

Further, we have not only found ourselves; we have found one another. A new kindliness has grown up, during the War, between people divided by the barriers of class, or wealth, or circumstance. A statesman of the seventeenth century remarks that It is a Misfortune for a Man not to have a Friend in the World, but for that reason he shall have no Enemy. I might invert his maxim and say, It is a Misfortune for a Man to have many Enemies, but for that reason he shall know who are his Friends. No Radical member of Parliament will again, while any of us live, cast contempt on 'the carpet Captains of Mayfair'. No idle Tory talker will again dare to say that the working men of England care nothing for their country. Even the manners of railway travel have improved. I was travelling in a third-class compartment of a crowded train the other day; we were twenty in the compartment, but it seemed a pity to leave any one behind, and we made room for number twenty-one. Nothing but a very kindly human feeling could have packed us tight enough for this. Yet now is the time that has been chosen by some of these pensive gentlemen that I spoke of, and by some of these excitable journalists, to threaten us with class-war, and to try to make our flesh creep by conjuring up the horrors of revolution. I advise them to take their opinions to the third-class compartment and discuss them there. It is a good tribunal, for, sooner or later, you will find every one there—even officers, when they are travelling in mufti at their own expense. I have visited this tribunal very often, and I have always come away from it with the same impression, that this people means to win the War. But I do not travel much in the North of England, so I asked a friend of mine, whose dealings are with the industrial North, what the workpeople of Lancashire and Yorkshire think of the War. He said, 'Their view is very simple: they mean to win it; and they mean to make as much money out of it as ever they can.' Certainly, that is very simple; but before you judge them, put yourselves in their place. There are great outcries against profiteers, for making exorbitant profits out of the War, and against munition workers, for delaying work in order to get higher wages. I do not defend either of them; they are unimaginative and selfish, and I do not care how severely they are dealt with; but I do say that the majority of them are not wicked in intention. A good many of the more innocent profiteers are men whose sin is that they take an offer of two shillings rather than an offer of eighteenpence for what cost them one and a penny. Some of us, in our weaker moments, might be betrayed into doing the same. As for the munition workers, I remember what Goldsmith, who had known the bitterest poverty, wrote to his brother. 'Avarice', he said, 'in the lower orders of mankind is true ambition; avarice is the only ladder the poor can use to preferment. Preach then, my dear Sir, to your son, not the excellence of human nature nor the disrespect of riches, but endeavour to teach him thrift and economy. Let his poor wandering uncle's example be placed in his eyes. I had learned from books to love virtue before I was taught from experience the necessity of being selfish.'

The profiteers and the munition workers are endeavouring, incidentally, to better their own position. But make no mistake; the bulk of these people would rather die than allow one spire of English grass to be trodden under the foot of a foreign trespasser. Their chief sin is that they do not fear. They think that there is plenty of time to do a little business for themselves on the way to defeat the enemy. I cannot help remembering the mutiny at the Nore, which broke out in our fleet during the Napoleonic wars. The mutineers struck for more pay and better treatment, but they agreed together that if the French fleet should put in an appearance during the mutiny, all their claims should be postponed for a time, and the French fleet should have their first attention.

Employers and employed do, no doubt, find in some trades to-day that their relations are strained and irksome. They would do well to take a lesson from the Army, where, with very few exceptions, there is harmony and understanding between those who take orders and those who give them. It is only in the Army that you can see realized the ideal of ancient Rome.

Then none was for a party, Then all were for the State; Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great.

Why is the Army so far superior to most commercial and industrial businesses? The secret does not lie in State employment. There is plenty of discontent and unrest among the State-employed railway men and munition workers. It lies rather in the habit of mutual help and mutual trust. If any civilian employer of labour wants to have willing workpeople, let him take a hint from the Army. Let him live with his workpeople, and share all their dangers and discomforts. Let him take thought for their welfare before his own, and teach self-sacrifice by example. Let him put the good of the nation before all private interests; and those whom he commands will do for him anything that he asks.

I cannot believe that the benefits which have come to us from the Army will pass away with the passing of the War. Those who have been comrades in danger will surely take with them something of the old spirit into civil life. And those who have kept clear of the Army in order to carry on their own trades and businesses will surely realize that they have missed the great opportunity of their lives.

In a wider sense the War has brought us to an understanding of one another. This great Commonwealth of independent nations which is called the British Empire is scattered over the surface of the habitable globe. It embraces people who live ten thousand miles apart, and whose ways of life are so different that they might seem to have nothing in common. But the War has brought them together, and has done more than half a century of peace could do to promote a common understanding. Hundreds of thousands of men of our blood who, before the War, had never seen this little island, have now made acquaintance with it. Hundreds of thousands of the inhabitants of this island to whom the Dominions were strange, far places, if, after the War, they should be called on to settle there, will not feel that they are leaving home. I can only hope that the Canadians and Anzacs think as well of us as we do of them. We do not like to praise our friends in their hearing, so I will say no more than this: I am told that a new kind of peerage, very haughty and very self-important, has arisen in South London. Its members are those house-holders who have been privileged to have Anzac soldiers billeted on them. It is private ties of this kind, invisible to the constitutional lawyer and the political historian, which make the fine meshes of the web of Empire.

Because he knew that the strength of the whole texture depends on the strength of the fine meshes, Earl Grey, who died last year, will always be remembered in our history. Not many men have his opportunity to make acquaintance with the domain that is their birthright, for he had administered a province of South Africa, and had been Governor-General of Canada, He rediscovered the glory of the Empire, as poets rediscover the glory of common speech. 'He had breathed its air,' a friend of his says, 'fished its rivers, walked in its valleys, stood on its mountains, met its people face to face. He had seen it in all the zones of the world. He knew what it meant to mankind. Under the British flag, wherever he journeyed, he found men of English speech living in an atmosphere of liberty and carrying on the dear domestic traditions of the British Isles. He saw justice firmly planted there, industry and invention hard at work unfettered by tyrants of any kind, domestic life prospering in natural conditions, and our old English kindness and cheerfulness and broad-minded tolerance keeping things together. But he also saw room under that same flag, ample room, for millions and millions more of the human race. The Empire wasn't a word to him. It was a vast, an almost boundless, home for honest men.'

The War did not dishearten him. When he died, in August, 1917, he said, 'Here I lie on my death-bed, looking clear into the Promised Land. I'm not allowed to enter it, but there it is before my eyes. After the War the people of this country will enter it, and those who laughed at me for a dreamer will see that I wasn't so wrong after all. But there's still work to do for those who didn't laugh, hard work, and with much opposition in the way; all the same, it is work right up against the goal. My dreams have come true.'

One of the clear gains of the War is to be found in the increased activity and alertness of our own people. The motto of to-day is, 'Let those now work who never worked before, And those who always worked now work the more.' Before the War we had a great national reputation for idleness—in this island, at least. I remember a friendly critic from Canada who, some five or six years ago, expressed to me, with much disquiet, his opinion that there was something very far wrong with the old country; that we had gone soft. As for our German critics, they expressed the same view in gross and unmistakable fashion. Wit is not a native product in Germany, it all has to be imported, so they could not satirize us; but their caricatures of the typical Englishman showed us what they thought. He was a young weakling with a foolish face, and was dressed in cricketing flannels. It would have been worth their while to notice what they did not notice, that his muscles and nerves are not soft. They learned that later, when the bank-clerks of Manchester broke the Prussian Guard into fragments at Contalmaison. This must have been a sad surprise, for the Germans had always taught, in their delightful authoritative fashion, that the chief industries of the young Englishman are lawn-tennis and afternoon tea. They are a fussy people, and they find it difficult to understand the calm of the man who, having nothing to do, does it. Perhaps they were right, and we were too idle. The disease was never so serious as they thought it, and now, thanks to them, we are in a fair way to recovery. The idle classes have turned their hand to the lathe and the plough. Women are doing a hundred things that they never did before, and are doing them well. The elasticity and resourcefulness that the War has developed will not be lost or destroyed by the coming of peace. Least of all will those qualities be lost if we should prove unable, in this War, to impose our own terms on Germany. Then the peace that follows will be a long struggle, and in that struggle we shall prevail. In the last long peace we were not suspicious; we felt friendly enough to the Germans, and we gave them every advantage. They despised us for our friendliness and used the peace to prepare our downfall. That will never happen again. If we cannot tame the cunning animal that has assaulted humanity, at least we can and will tether him. Laws will not be necessary; there are millions of others besides the seamen of England who will have no dealings with an unsubdued and unrepentant Germany. What the Germans are not taught by the War they will have to learn in the more tedious and no less costly school of peace.

In any case, whether we win through to real peace and real security, or whether we are thrown back on an armed peace and the duty of unbroken vigilance, we shall be dependent for our future on the children who are now learning in the schools or playing in the streets. It is a good dependence. The children of to-day are better than the children whom I knew when I was a child. I think they have more intelligence and sympathy; they certainly have more public spirit. We cannot do too much for them. The most that we can do is nothing to what they are going to do for us, for their own nation and people. I am not concerned to discuss the education problem. Formal education, carried on chiefly by means of books, is a very small part of the making of a man or a woman. But I am interested to know what the children are thinking. You cannot fathom a child's thoughts, but we know who are their best teachers, and what lessons have been stamped indelibly on their minds. Their teachers, whom they never saw, and whose lessons they will never forget, lie in graves in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and Syria and Mesopotamia, or unburied at the bottom of the sea. The runner falls, but the torch is carried forward. This is what Julian Grenfell, who gave his mind and his life to the War, has said in his splendid poem called Into Battle:

And life is colour and warmth and light, And a striving evermore for these; And he is dead who will not fight, And who dies fighting hath increase.

Those who died fighting will have such increase that a whole new generation, better even than the old, will be ready, no long time hence, to uphold and extend and decorate the Commonwealth of nations which their fathers and brothers saved from ruin.

One thing I have never heard discussed, but it is the clearest gain of all, and already it may be called a certain gain. After the War the English language will have such a position as it has never had before. It will be established in world-wide security. Even before the War, it may be truly said, our language was in no danger from the competition of the German language. The Germans have never had much success in the attempt to get their language adopted by other peoples. Not all the military laws of Prussia can drive out French from the hearts and homes of the people of Alsace. In the ports of the near and far East you will hear English spoken—pidgin English, as it is called, that is to say, a selection of English words suited for the business of daily life. But you may roam the world over, and you will hear no pidgin German. Before the War many Germans learned English, while very few English-speaking people learned German. In other matters we disagreed, but we both knew which way the wind was blowing. It may be said, and said truly, that our well-known laziness was one cause of our failing or neglecting to learn German. But it was not the only cause; and we are not lazy in tasks which we believe to be worth our while. Rather we had an instinctive belief that the future does not belong to the German tongue. That belief is not likely to be impaired by the War. Armed ruffians can do some things, but one thing they cannot do; they cannot endear their language to those who have suffered from their violence. The Germans poisoned the wells in South-West Africa; in Europe they did all they could to poison the wells of mutual trust and mutual understanding among civilized men. Do they think that these things will make a good advertisement for the explosive guttural sounds and the huddled deformed syntax of the speech in which they express their arrogance and their hate? Which of the chief European languages will come first, after the War, with the little nations? Will Serbia be content to speak German? Will Norway and Denmark feel a new affection for the speech of the men who have degraded the old humanity of the seas? Neighbourhood, kinship, and the necessities of commerce may retain for the German language a certain measure of custom in Sweden and Switzerland, and in Holland. But for the most part Germans will have to be content to be addressed in their own tongue only by those who fear them, or by those who hope to cheat them.

This gain, which I make bold to predict for the English language, is a real gain, apart from all patriotic bias. The English language is incomparably richer, more fluid, and more vital than the German language. Where the German has but one way of saying a thing, we have two or three, each with its distinctions and its subtleties of usage. Our capital wealth is greater, and so are our powers of borrowing. English sprang from the old Teutonic stock, and we can still coin new words, such as 'food-hoard' and 'joy-ride', in the German fashion. But long centuries ago we added thousands of Romance words, words which came into English through the French or Norman-French, and brought with them the ideas of Latin civilization and of mediaeval Christianity. Later on, when the renewed study of Latin and Greek quickened the intellectual life of Europe, we imported thousands of Greek and Latin words direct from the ancient world, learned words, many of them, suitable for philosophers, or for writers who pride themselves on shooting a little above the vulgar apprehension. Yet many of these, too, have found their way into daily speech, so that we can say most things in three ways, according as we draw on one or another of the three main sources of our speech. Thus, you can Begin, or Commence, or Initiate an undertaking, with Boldness, or Courage, or Resolution. If you are a Workman, or Labourer, or Operative, you can Ask, or Bequest, or Solicit your employer to Yield, or Grant, or Concede, an increase in the Earnings, or Wages, or Remuneration which fall to the lot of your Fellow, or Companion, or Associate. Your employer is perhaps Old, or Veteran, or Superannuated, which may Hinder, or Delay, or Retard the success of your application. But if you Foretell, or Prophesy, or Predict that the War will have an End, or Close, or Termination that shall not only be Speedy, or Rapid, or Accelerated, but also Great, or Grand, or Magnificent, you may perhaps Stir, or Move, or Actuate him to have Ruth, or Pity, or Compassion on your Mate, or Colleague, or Collaborator. The English language, then, is a language of great wealth—much greater wealth than can be illustrated by any brief example. But wealth is nothing unless you can use it. The real strength of English lies in the inspired freedom and variety of its syntax. There is no grammar of the English speech which is not comic in its stiffness and inadequacy. An English grammar does not explain all that we can do with our speech; it merely explains what shackles and restraints we must put upon our speech if we would bring it within the comprehension of a school-bred grammarian. But the speech itself is like the sea, and soon breaks down the dykes built by the inland engineer. It was the fashion, in the eighteenth century, to speak of the divine Shakespeare. The reach and catholicity of his imagination was what earned him that extravagant praise; but his syntax has no less title to be called divine. It is not cast or wrought, like metal; it leaps like fire, and moves like air. So is every one that is born of the spirit. Our speech is our great charter. Far better than in the long constitutional process whereby we subjected our kings to law, and gave dignity and strength to our Commons, the meaning of English freedom is to be seen in the illimitable freedom of our English speech.

Our literature is almost as rich as our language. Modern German literature begins in the eighteenth century. Modern English literature began with Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, and has been full of great names and great books ever since. Nothing has been done in German literature for which we have not a counterpart, done as well or better—except the work of Heine, and Heine was a Jew. His opinion of the Prussians was that they are a compost of beer, deceit, and sand. French literature and English literature can be compared, throughout their long course, sometimes to the great advantage of the French. German literature cannot seriously be compared with either.

It may be objected that literature and art are ornamental affairs, which count for little in the deadly strife of nations. But that is not so. Our language cannot go anywhere without taking our ideas and our creed with it, not to mention our institutions and our games. If the Germans could understand what Chaucer means when he says of his Knight that

he loved chivalry, Truth and honour, freedom and courtesy,

then indeed we might be near to an understanding. I asked a good German scholar the other day what is the German word for 'fair play'. He replied, as they do in Parliament, that he must ask for notice of that question. I fear there is no German word for 'fair play'.

The little countries, the pawns and victims of German policy, understand our ideas better. The peoples who have suffered from tyranny and oppression look to England for help, and it is a generous weakness in us that we sometimes deceive them by our sympathy, for our power is limited, and we cannot help them all. But it will not count against us at the final reckoning that in most places where humanity has suffered cruelty and indignity the name of England has been invoked: not always in vain.

And now, for I have kept to the last what I believe to be the greatest gain of all, the entry of America into the War assures the triumph of our common language. America is peopled by many races; only a minority of the inhabitants—an influential and governing minority—are of the English stock. But here, again, the language carries it; and the ideas that inspire America are ideas which had their origin in the long English struggle for freedom. Our sufferings in this War are great, but they are not so great that we cannot recognize virtue in a new recruit to the cause. No nation, in the whole course of human history, has ever made a more splendid decision, or performed a more magnanimous act, than America, when she decided to enter this War. She had nothing to gain, for, to say the bare truth, she had little to lose. If Germany were to dominate the world, America, no doubt, would be ruined; but in all human likelihood, Germany's impious attempt would have spent itself and been broken long before it reached the coasts of America. America might have stood out of the War in the assurance that her own interests were safe, and that, when the tempest had passed, the centre of civilization would be transferred from a broken and exhausted Europe to a peaceful and prosperous America. Some few Americans talked in this strain, and favoured a decision in this sense. But it was not for nothing that America was founded upon religion. When she saw humanity in anguish, she did not pass by on the other side. Her entry into the War has put an end, I hope for ever, to the family quarrel, not very profound or significant, which for a century and a half has been a jarring note in the relations of mother and daughter. And it has put an end to another danger. It seemed at one time not unlikely that the English language as it is spoken overseas would set up a life of its own, and become separated from the language of the old country. A development of this kind would be natural enough. The Boers of South Africa speak Dutch, but not the Dutch spoken in Holland. The French Canadians speak French, but not the French of Moliere. Half a century ago, when America was exploring and settling her own country, in wild and lone places, her pioneers enriched the English speech with all kinds of new and vivid phrases. The tendency was then for America to go her own way, and to cultivate what is new in language at the expense of what is old. She prided herself even on having a spelling of her own, and seemed almost willing to break loose from tradition and to coin a new American English.

This has not happened; and now, I think, it will not happen. For one thing, the American colonists left us when already we had a great literature. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Spenser belong to America no less than to us, and America has never forgotten them. The education which has been fostered in American schools and colleges keeps the whole nation in touch with the past. Some of their best authors write in a style that Milton and Burke would understand and approve. There is no more beautiful English prose than Nathaniel Hawthorne's. The best speeches of Abraham Lincoln, and, we may truly add, of President Wilson, are merely classic English. During my own lifetime I am sure I have seen the speech usages of the two peoples draw closer together. For one thing, we on this side now borrow, and borrow very freely, the more picturesque colloquialisms of America. On informal occasions I sometimes brighten my own speech with phrases which I think I owe to one of the best of living American authors, Mr. George Ade, of Chicago, the author of Fables in Slang. The press, the telegraph, the telephone, and the growing habit of travel bind us closer together every year; and the English that we speak, however rich and various it may be, is going to remain one and the same English, our common inheritance.

One question, the most important and difficult of all, remains to be asked. Will this War, in its course and in its effects, tend to prevent or discourage later wars? If the gains that it brings prove to be merely partial and national gains, if it exalts one nation by unjustly depressing another, and conquers cruelty by equal cruelty, then nothing can be more certain than that the peace of the world is farther off than ever. When she was near her death, Edith Cavell, patriot and martyr, said that patriotism is not enough. Every one who thinks on international affairs knows this; almost every one forgets it in time of war. What can be done to prevent nations from appealing to the wild justice of revenge?

A League of Nations may do good, but I am surprised that any one who has imagination and a knowledge of the facts should entertain high hopes of it as a full solution. There is a League of Nations to-day which has given a verdict against the Central Powers, and that verdict is being enforced by the most terrible War in all human history. If the verdict had been given before the War began, it may be said, then Germany might have accepted it, and refrained. So she might, but what then? She would have felt herself wronged; she would have deferred the War, and, in ways that she knows so well, would have set about making a party for herself among the nations of the League. Who can be confident that she would have failed either to divide her judges, or to accumulate such elements of strength that she might dare to defy them? A League of Nations would work well only if its verdicts were loyally accepted by all the nations composing it. To make majority-rule possible you must have a community made up of members who are reasonably well informed upon one another's affairs, and who are bound together by a tie of loyalty stronger and more enduring than their causes of difference. It would be a happy thing if the nations of the world made such a community; and the sufferings of this War have brought them nearer to desiring it. But those who believe that such a community can be formed to-day or to-morrow are too sanguine. It must not be forgotten that the very principle of the League, if its judgements are to take effect, involves a world-war in cases where a strong minority resists those judgements. Every war would become a world-war. Perhaps this very fact would prevent wars, but it cannot be said that experience favours such a conclusion.

There is no escape for us by way of the Gospels. The Gospel precept to turn the other cheek to the aggressor was not addressed to a meeting of trustees. Christianity has never shirked war, or even much disliked it. Where the whole soul is set on things unseen, wounds and death become of less account. And if the Christians have not helped us to avoid war, how should the pacifists be of use? Those of them whom I happen to know, or to have met, have shown themselves, in the relations of civil life, to be irritable, self-willed, combative creatures, where the average soldier is calm, unselfish, and placable. There is something incongruous and absurd in the pacifist of British descent. He has fighting in his blood, and when his creed, or his nervous sensibility to physical horrors, denies him the use of fighting, his blood turns sour. He can argue, and object, and criticize, but he cannot lead. All that he can offer us in effect is eternal quarrels in place of occasional fights.

No one can do anything to prevent war who does not recognize its splendour, for it is by its splendour that it keeps its hold on humanity, and persists. The wickedest and most selfish war in the world is not fought by wicked and selfish soldiers. The spirit of man is immense, and for an old memory, a pledged word, a sense of fellowship, offers this frail and complicated tissue of flesh and blood, which a pin or a grain of sand will disorder, to be the victim of all the atrocities that the wit of man can compound out of fire and steel and poison. If that spirit is to be changed, or directed into new courses, it must be by one who understands it, and approaches it reverently, with bared head.

The best hope seems to me to lie in paying chief attention to the improvement of war rather than to its abolition; to the decencies of the craft; to the style rather than the matter. Style is often more important than matter, and this War would not have been so fierce or so prolonged if it had not become largely a war on a point of style, a war, that is to say, to determine the question how war should be waged. If the Germans had behaved humanely and considerately to the civil population of Belgium, if they had kept their solemn promise not to use poison-gas, if they had refrained from murder at sea, if their valour had been accompanied by chivalry, the War might now have been ended, perhaps not in their disfavour, for it would not have been felt, as it now is felt, that they must be defeated at no matter how great a cost, or civilization will perish.

Even as things are, there have been some gains in the manner of conducting war, which, when future generations look back on them, will be seen to be considerable. It is true that modern science has devised new and appalling weapons. The invention of a new weapon in war always arouses protest, but it does not usually, in the long run, make war more inhuman. There was a great outcry in Europe when the broadsword was superseded by the rapier, and a tall man of his hands could be spitted like a cat or a rabbit by any dexterous little fellow with a trained wrist. There was a wave of indignation, which was a hundred years in passing, when musketry first came into use, and a man-at-arms of great prowess could be killed from behind a wall by one who would not have dared to meet him in open combat. But these changes did not, in effect, make war crueller or more deadly. They gave more play to intelligence, and abolished the tyranny of the bully, who took the wall of every man he met, and made himself a public nuisance. The introduction of poison-gas, which is a small thing compared with the invention of fire-arms, has given the chemist a place in the ranks of fighting-men. And if science has lent its aid to the destruction of life, it has spent greater zeal and more prolonged effort on the saving of life. No previous war will compare with this in care for the wounded and maimed. In all countries, and on all fronts, an army of skilled workers devote themselves to this single end. I believe that this quickening of the human conscience, for that is what it is, will prove to be the greatest gain of the War, and the greatest advance made in restraint of war. If the nations come to recognize that their first duty, and their first responsibility, is to those who give so much in their service, that recognition will of itself do more than can be done by any conclave of statesmen to discourage war. It was the monk Telemachus, according to the old story, who stopped the gladiatorial games at Rome, and was stoned by the people. If war, in process of time, shall be abolished, or, failing that, shall be governed by the codes of humanity and chivalry, like a decent tournament; then the one sacrificial figure which will everywhere be honoured for the change will be the figure not of a priest or a politician, but of a hospital nurse.



THE WAR AND THE PRESS

A paper read to the Essay Society, Eton College, March 14, 1918.

When you asked me to read or speak to you, I promised to speak about the War. What I have to say is wholly orthodox, but it is none the worse for that. Indeed, when I think how entirely the War possesses our thoughts and how entirely we are agreed concerning it, I seem to see a new meaning in the creeds of the religions. These creeds grew up by general consent, and no one who believed them grudged repeating them. In the face of an indifferent or hostile world the faithful found themselves obliged to define their belief, and to strengthen themselves by an unwearying and united profession of faith. It is the enemy who gives meaning to a religious creed: without our creed we cannot win. So I am willing to remind you of what you know, rather than to try to introduce you to novelties.

The strength of the enemy lies in his creed; not in the lands that he has ravished from his neighbours. If his creed does not prevail, his lands will not help him. Germany has taken lands from Belgium, Serbia, Roumania, Russia, and the rest, but unless her digestion is as strong as her appetite, she will fail to keep them. If she is to hold them in peace, the peoples who inhabit these lands must be either exterminated or converted to the German creed. Lands can be annexed by a successful campaign; they can be permanently conquered only by the operations of peace. The people who survive will be a weakness to the German Empire unless they accept what they are offered, a share in the German creed.

That creed has not many natural attractions for the peoples on whom it is imposed by force. It is an intensely patriotic creed; it insists on racial supremacy, and on unity to be achieved by violence. Pleading and persuasion have little part in it except as instruments of deceit. There is no use in listening to what the Germans say; they do not believe it themselves. What they say is for others; what they do is for themselves. While they are at war, language for them has only two uses—to conceal their thoughts, and to deceive their enemies.

The creed of Western civilization, for which they feel nothing but contempt, and on which they will be broken, is not a simple thing, like theirs. The words by which it is commonly expressed—democracy, parliamentarism, individual liberty, diversity, free development—are puzzling theoretic words, which make no instinctive appeal to the heart. Nevertheless, we stand for growth as against order; and for life as against death. If Germany wins this war, her system will have to be broken or to decay before growth can start again. Must we lose even a hundred years in shaking ourselves free from the paralysis of the German nightmare?

The Germans have shown themselves strong in their unity, and strong in their willingness to make great sacrifices to preserve that unity. No one can deny nobility to the sacrifice made by the simple-minded German soldier who dies fighting bravely for his people and his creed. His narrowness is his strength, and makes unselfishness easier by saving his mind from question. 'This one thing you shall do', his country says to him, 'fight and die for your country, so that your country and your people shall have lordship over other countries and other peoples. You are nothing; Germany is everything.'

We who live in this island love our country with at least as deep a passion; but a creed so simple as the German creed will never do for us. We are patriotic, but our patriotism is often overlaid and confused by a wider thought and a wider sympathy than the Germans have ever known. Much extravagant praise has lately been given to the German power of thinking, which produces the elaborate marvels of German organization. But this thinking is slave-thinking, not master-thinking; it spends itself wholly on devising complicated means to achieve a very simple end. That is what makes the Germans so like the animals. Their wisdom is all cunning. I have had German friends, two or three, in the course of my life, but none of them ever understood a word that I said if I tried to say what I thought. You could talk to them about food, and they responded easily. It was all very restful and pleasant, like talking to an intelligent dog.

If each of the allied nations were devoted to the creed of nationalism, the alliance could not endure. We depend for our strength on what we hold in common. The weakness of this wider creed is that it makes no such immediate and strong appeal to the natural instincts as is made by the mother-country. It demands the habitual exercise of reason and imagination. Further, seeing that we are infinitely less tame and less docile than the Germans, we depend for our strength on informing and convincing our people, and on obtaining agreement among them. Questions which in Germany are discussed only in the gloomy Berlin head-quarters of the General Staff are discussed here in the newspapers. In the press, even under the censorship, we think aloud. It records our differences and debates our policy. You could not suppress these differences and these debates without damaging our cause. There is no freedom worth having which does not, sooner or later, include the freedom to say what you think.

No doubt we could, if necessary, carry on for a time without the press; and I agree with those newspaper writers who have been saying recently that the importance of the press is monstrously exaggerated by some of its critics. The working-man, so far as I know him, does not depend for his patriotism on the leader-writers of the newspapers. He takes even the news with a very large grain of salt. 'So the papers say', he remarks; 'it may be true or it may not.' Yet the press has done good service, and might do better, in putting the meaning of the War before our people and in holding them together. Freedom means that we must love our diversity well enough to be willing to unite to protect it. We must die for our differences as cheerfully as the Germans die for their pattern. Or, if we can sketch a design of our cause, we must be as passionate in defence of that large vague design as the Germans are passionate in defence of their tight uniformity and their drill. If we were to fail to keep together, our cause, I believe, would still prevail, but at a cost that we dare not contemplate, by way of anarchy, and the dissolution of societies, by long tortures, and tears, and martyrdoms. If we refuse to die in the ranks against the German tyranny we can keep our faith by dying at the stake. There are those who think martyrdom the better way; and certainly that was how Christianity prevailed in Europe; you can read the story in Caxton's translation of the Golden Legend. But these saints and martyrs were making a beginning; we are fighting to keep what we have won, and it would be a huge failure on our part if we could keep nothing of it, but had to begin all over again.

The business of the press, then, at this present crisis, is to keep the cause for which we are fighting clearly before us, and this it has done well; also, because we do not fight best in blinders, to tell us all that can be known of the facts of the situation, and this it has done not so well.

The power of the newspapers is that most people read them, and that many people read nothing else. Their weakness is that they have to sell or cease to be, so that by a natural instinct of self-preservation they fall back on the two sure methods whereby you can always capture the attention of the public. Any man who is trying to say what he thinks, making full allowance for all doubts and differences, runs the risk of losing his audience. He can regain their attention by flattering them or by frightening them. Flattery and fright, the one following the other from day to day, and often from paragraph to paragraph, is a very large part of the newspaper reader's diet. If he is a sane and busy man, he is not too much impressed by either. He is not mercurial enough for the quick changes of an orator's or journalist's fancy, whereby he is called on, one day, to dig the German warships like rats out of their harbour, and, not many days later, to spend his last shilling on the purchase of the last bullet to shoot at the German invader. He knows that this is such stuff as dreams are made of. He knows also that the orator or journalist, after calling on him for these achievements, goes home to dinner. No great harm is done, just as no great harm is done by bad novels. But an opportunity is lost; the press and the platform might do more than they do to strengthen us and inform us, and help forward our cause.

I name the press and the platform together because they are essentially the same thing. Journalism is a kind of talk. The press, it is fair to say, is ourselves; and every people, it may truly be said, has the press that it deserves. But reading is a thing that we do chiefly for indulgence and pleasure in our idle time; and the press falls in with our mood, and supplies us with what we want in our weaker and lazier moments. No responsible man, with an eager and active mind, spends much of his time on the newspapers. Those who are excited to action by what they read in the papers are mostly content with the mild exercise of writing to these same papers to explain that some one else ought to do something and to do it at once. Their excitement worries themselves more than it hurts others. When the devil, with horns and hooves, appeared to Cuvier, the naturalist, and threatened to devour him, Cuvier, who was asleep at the time, opened his eyes and looked at the terrible apparition. 'Hm,' he said, 'cloven-footed; graminivorous; needn't be afraid of you;' and he went to sleep again. A man who says that he has not time to read the morning papers carefully is commonly a man who counts; he knows what he has to do, and he goes on doing it. So far as I have observed, the cadets who are training for command in the army take very little interest in the exhortations of the newspapers. They even prefer the miserable trickle which is all that is left of football news.

One of the chief problems connected with the press is therefore this—how can it be prevented from producing hysteria in the feeble-minded? In time of war the censorship no doubt does something to prevent this; and I think it might do more. 'Scare-lines', as they are called—that is, sensational headings in large capital letters—might be reduced by law to modest dimensions. More important, the censorship might insist that all who write shall sign their names to their articles. Why should journalists alone be relieved of responsibility to their country? Is it possible that the Government is afraid of the press? There is no need for fear. 'Beware of Aristophanes', says Landor, 'he can cast your name as a byword to a thousand cities of Asia for a thousand years. But all that the press can do by its disfavour is to keep your name obscure in a hundred cities of England for a hundred days. Signed articles are robbed of their vague impressiveness, and are known for what they are—the opinions of one man. I would also recommend that a photograph of the author be placed at the head of every article. I have been saved from many bad novels by the helpful pictorial advertisements of modern publishers.

The real work of the Press, as I said, is to help to hold the people together. Nothing else that it can do is of any importance compared with this. We are at one in this War as we have never been at one before within living memory, as we were not at one against Napoleon or against Louis XIV. Our trial is on us; and if we cannot preserve our oneness, we fail. What would be left to us I do not know; but I am sure that an England which had accepted conditions of peace at Germany's hands would not be the England that any of us know. There might still be a few Englishmen, but they would have to look about for somewhere to live. Serbia would be a good place; it has made no peace-treaty with Germany.

We are profoundly at one; and are divided only by illusions, which the press, in times past, has done much to keep alive. One of these illusions is the illusion of party. I have never been behind the scenes, among the creaking machinery, but my impression, as a spectator, is that parties in England are made very much as you pick up sides for a game. I have observed that they are all conservative. The affections are conservative; every one has a liking for his old habits and his old associates. There is something comic in a well-nourished rich man who believes that he is a bold reformer and a destructive thinker. For real clotted reactionary sentiment I know nothing to match the table-talk of any aged parliamentary Radical. When we get a Labour Government, it will be patriotic, prejudiced, opposed to all innovation, superstitiously reverential of the past, sticky and, probably, tyrannical.

The party illusion has been much weakened by the War, and those who still repeat the old catch-words are very near to lunacy. There is a deeper and more dangerous illusion which has not been killed—the class illusion. We are all very much alike; but we live in water-tight compartments called classes, and the inhabitants of each compartment tend to believe that they alone are patriotic. This illusion, to be just, is not fostered chiefly by the press, which wants to sell its work to all classes; but it has strong hold of the Government office. The Government does not know the people, except as an actor knows the audience; and therefore does not trust the people. It is pathetic to hear officials talking timidly of the people—will they endure hardships and sacrifices, will they carry through? Yet most of the successes we have won in the War have to be credited not so much to the skill of the management as to the amazing high courage of the ordinary soldier and sailor. Even soldiers are often subject to class illusion. I remember listening, in the first month of the War, to a retired colonel, who explained, with some heat, that the territorials could never be of any use. That illusion has gone. Then it was Kitchener's army—well-meaning people, no doubt, but impossible for a European war. Kitchener's army made good. Now it is the civil population, who, though they are the blood relatives of the soldiers, are distrusted, and believed to be likely to fail under a strain. Yet all the time, if you want to hear half-hearted, timid, pusillanimous talk, the place where you are most likely to hear it is in the public offices. Most of those who talk in this way would be brave enough in fight, but they are kept at desks, and worried with detailed business, and harassed by speculative dangers, and they lose perspective. Soon or late, we are going to win this War; and it is the people who are going to win it.

If the press (or perhaps the Government, which controls the press) is not afraid of the people, why does it tell them so little about our reverses, and the merits of our enemies? For information concerning these things we have to depend wholly on conversation with returned soldiers. For instance, the horrible stories that we hear of the brutal treatment of our prisoners are numerous, and are true, and make a heavy bill against Germany, which bill we mean to present. But are they fair examples of the average treatment? We cannot tell; the accounts published are almost exclusively confined to the worst happenings. Most of the officers with whom I have talked who had been in several German military prisons said that they had nothing serious to complain of. Prison is not a good place, and it is not pleasant to have your pea-soup and your coffee, one after the other, in the same tin dipper; but they were soldiers, and they agreed that it would be absurd to make a grievance of things like that. One private soldier was an even greater philosopher. 'No', he said, 'I have nothing to complain of. Of course, they do spit at you a good deal.' That man was unconquerable.

In shipping returns and the like we are given averages; why are we told nothing at all of the milder experiences of our soldier prisoners? It would not make us less resolved to do all that we can to better the lot of those who are suffering insult and torture, and to exact full retribution from the enemy. And it would bring some hope to those whose husbands or children or friends are in German military prisons, and who are racked every day by tales of what, in fact, are exceptional atrocities.

Or take the question of the conduct of German officers. We know that the Prussian military Government, in its approved handbooks, teaches its officers the use of brutality and terror as military weapons. The German philosophy of war, of which this is a part, is not really a philosophy of war; it is a philosophy of victory. For a long time now the Germans have been accustomed to victory, and have studied the arts of breaking the spirit and torturing the mind of the peoples whom they invade. Their philosophy of war will have to be rewritten when the time comes for them to accommodate their doctrine to their own defeat. In the meantime they teach frightfulness to their officers, and most of their officers prove ready pupils. There must be some, one would think, here and there, if only a sprinkling, who fall short of the Prussian doctrine, and are betrayed by human feeling into what we should recognize as decent and honourable conduct. And so there are; only we do not hear of them through the press. I should like to tell two stories which come to me from personal sources. The first may be called the story of the Christmas truce and the German captain. In the lull which fell on the fighting at the time of the first Christmas of the War, a British officer was disquieted to notice that his men were fraternizing with the Germans, who were standing about with them in No-man's land, laughing and talking. He went out to them at once, to bring them back to their own trenches. When he came up to his men, he met a German captain who had arrived on the same errand. The two officers, British and German, fell into talk, and while they were standing together, in not unfriendly fashion, one of the men took a snapshot photograph of them, copies of which were afterwards circulated in the trenches. Then the men were recalled to their duty, on the one side and the other, and, after an interval of some days, the war began again. A little time after this the British officer was in charge of a patrol, and, having lost his way, found himself in the German trenches, where he and his men were surrounded and captured. As they were being marched off along the trenches, they met the German captain, who ordered the men to be taken to the rear, and then, addressing the officer without any sign of recognition, said in a loud voice, 'You, follow me!' He led him by complicated ways along a whole series of trenches and up a sap, at the end of which he stopped, saluted, and, pointing with his hand, said 'Your trenches are there. Good day.'

My second story, the story of the British lieutenant in No-man's land, is briefer. I was with a friend of mine, a young officer back from the front, wounded, and the conduct of German officers was being discussed. He said, 'You can't expect me to be very hard on German officers, for one of them saved my life'. He then told how he and a companion crept out into No-man's land to bring in some of our wounded who were lying there. When they had reached the wounded, and were preparing to bring them in, they were discovered by the Germans opposite, who at once whipped up a machine-gun and turned it on them. Their lives were not worth half a minute's purchase, when suddenly a German officer leapt up on to the parapet, and, angrily waving back the machine-gunners, called out, in English, 'That's all right. You may take them in.'

These are no doubt exceptional cases; the rule is very different. But a good many of such cases are known to soldiers, and I have seen none of them in the press. Soldiers are silent by law, and journalists either do not hear these things, or, believing that hate is a valuable asset, suppress all mention of them. If England could ever be disgraced by a mishap, she would be disgraced by having given birth to those Englishmen, few and wretched, who, when an enemy behaves generously, conceal or deny the fact. And consider the effect of this silence on the Germans. There are some German officers, as I said, who are better than the German military handbooks, and better than their monstrous chiefs. Which of them will pay the smallest attention to what our papers say when he finds that they collect only atrocities, and are blind to humanity if they see it in an enemy? He will regard our press accounts of the German army as the work of malicious cripples; and our perfectly true narrative of the unspeakable brutality and filthiness of the German army's doings will lose credit with him.