THE MAKING OF THE FUTURE

Transcription

THE MAKING OF THE
FUTURE
IDEAS AT WAR
THE MAKING OF THE
FUTURE
E D I T E D BY
PATRICK
G E D D E S and V I C T O R
BRANFORD.
T H E COMING POLITY : A Study in Reconstruction. By the Editors.
IDEAS AT WAR. By Prof. GEDDES and
Dr. GILBERT SLATER.
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY IN WESTERN
EUROPE. By Prof. H . J. FLEURE.
SOCIAL FINANCE.
By CHARLES FERGUSON.
UNIVERSITY A N D CITY: A Study in
Personality and Citizenship. By the Editors.
T H E LAND AND T H E PEOPLE : A Study
in Rural Development.
By HAROLD PEAKE
and others.
WESTMINSTER
TEMPORAL A N D
S P I R I T U A L : An Interpretative Survey.
Illustrated.
SCIENCE AND SANCTITY: A Study in
Spiritual Renewal. By the Editors. With
an Introduction by MARGARET MACMILLAN.
The Making of the Future
IDEAS AT W A R
BY
PATRICK GEDDES
PROFESSOR OF BOTANY, UNIVERSITY OF S T . ANDREWS
HON. LIBRARIAN TOWN PLANNING I N S T I T U T E
AND
GILBERT SLATER, D.Sc.
PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF MADRAS ; FORMERLY
PRINCIPAL RUSKIN COLLEGE, OXFORD
LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 2
I917
INTRODUCTION TO
SERIES
THE
SINCE the Industrial Revolution, there has
gone on an organized sacrifice^ of men to
things, a large-scale subordination of life to
machinery. During a still longer period,
there has been a growing tendency to value
personal worth in terms of wealth. To
the millionaire has, in effect, passed the
royal inheritance of " right divine."
Things have been in the saddle and ridden
mankind. The cult of force in statecraft has
been brought to logical perfection in Prussian
" frightfulness." The cult of " profiteering " in business has had a similar goal in
the striving for monopoly by ruthless elimination of rivals. Prussianism and profiteering
are thus twin evils. Historically they have
risen together. Is it not possible they are
destined to fall together before the rising
tide of a new vitalism ?
The reversal of all these tendencies, mechanistic and venal, would be the preoccupation
of a more vital era than that from which we
are escaping. Its educational aim would be
to think out and prepare the needed transition from a machine, and a money economy,
vi INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
towards one of Life, Personality and Citizenship. The war has a been gigantic Dance of
Death, for which modern business, with its
associated politics, has been the prolonged
rehearsal. Is it not now the turn of Life to
take the .floor and call the tune; and if so,
on a scale of corresponding magnificence?
For the war is not merely the poisonous fruit
of pitiless competition and Machiavellian
diplomacy. It is also a spiritual protest
and rebound against the mammon of materialism. In its nobler aspects and finer issues,
its heroisms and self-sacrifices, does not the
war hold proof and promise of renewing Life
liberated from a long repression? And may
not the pursuit of personal wealth grow less
exigent, as we gain a sense of social well-being
expressed in betterment of environment and
enrichment of life? May not the struggle
for existence within the nations, and even
across their frontiers, be increasingly replaced
by the orderly culture of life, in its full cycle
from infancy to age, and at all its expanding levels from home and neighbourhood
outwards ?
Those who foresee, in sequel to the war, a
social rebirth, with accompanying moral purgation, will furnish to all these questions
answers coloured by their hopes. The fears
of the pessimists will dictate a contrary set
of replies. To substantiate those hopes, to
arrest these fears is needed a doctrine that
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
vii
not only goes beyond the Germanic Philosophies, which before the war dominated our
universities, but also is corrective of their
defects. The " idealisms " of these recently
fashionable philosophies were bastard offspring of archaic thought detached from the
living world. Such abstract idealisms must
be replaced by definite ideals, concrete and
human, if all men of goodwill are to be brought
together for the making of a new and better
civilization. So may men inherit the ancient
promise of "peace on earth to men of goodwill/'
It is the aim of this Series to gather together existing elements of reconstructive
doctrine, and present them as a body of truth
growing towards unity and already fruitful in
outlook and application. There are three
schools of thought from which the Series will
mainly draw. One of them lays stress upon
family life, contacts with nature, the significance of labour, the interests of locality.
Elaborated into a doctrine this becomes the
'' regionalism'' of France. Its scientific foundations were laid two generations ago by LePlay. The influence of its many and diverse
groups is, steadily growing in France, and
unobtrusively spreading to other countries;
as, for example, in England, through the
economic and social surveys of Charles Booth
and Seebohm Rowntree; through the activities of the Regional Association and of the
Oxford School of Geography.
viii INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
Another guiding outlook, which is rather a
tradition than a school, sees the progress of
mankind as an unfolding of ideas and ideals.
Two thinkers of post-Revolutionary France
discerned this vision with compelling clearness. Auguste Comte saw it as a procession
of great personalities, linked in apostolic
succession. Joseph de Maistre saw it as a
movement and manifestation of religious life.
There have resulted two re-interpretations of
life, mind, morals and society. They are
divergent in appearance, but alike in essence.
Both present a view of life and the world,
inimical to the Prussian cult of force. The
twofold influence of this humanist tradition
is world-wide. Witness the writings of William
James, Madame Montessori, Prince Kropotkin
and F. W. Foerster of Munich—to name but
four among the many recent and contemporary
humanists whose roots penetrate this fertile
soil. The vitalistic philosophy of Bergson is
manifestly racy of the same soil.
In the third place, there is the incipient
Civism of independent origin and rapid recent
growth in Britain, in America and in Germany.
This incipient Civism has been the parent
of constructive Betterment and to no small
extent of Child Welfare also. It has inspired
the repair and renewal of historic cities, the
tidying up of confused industrial towns, the
guidance and gardening of their suburban
growths.
ix
The Hebraic ideal of adjusting city life to
the care and culture of child life was thus in
active renewal before the war. So also was
the Hellenic ideal of seeking the Good, the
True, the Beautiful through a citizenship,
active and contemplative. With the downfall
of Tsardom achieved and the reduction of
Kaiser ism in process, this civic renascence will
continue; and not least splendidly in the
ancient cities of Burgher Germany, released
from their Prussic enchantment. From this
source maybe will come in the after-war
generation, a formative contribution towards
the sphinx-riddle of politics : How to federate
Free Cities and their Regions ? Reflecting in
the tranquillity of peace, on the penalties of
imperial attachment to Berlin, will not these
once free cities seek determinately for some
form of union without metropolitan subjection ? But that is the federal problem, whose
solution has so long evaded the grasp of the
western world.
Behind the rise and fall of states, nations
and empires, may be discerned the struggle
of cities for freedom to develop their own
regional life. And again, around and within
the civic drama is the play of the rustic
elements from which the city's life is perennially renewed. Civic life is thus the crown
and fulfilment of regional life. Their joint
development makes a partnership of Man
and Nature in a ceaseless game of skill with
x
Interfering Circumstance. The stakes are cities
with their accumulated heritage of art, learning and wealth. When the twin partnership
is winning, civic life flourishes, as in Athens
and Jerusalem of old, in Florence of the middle
time, or in Louvain but yesterday. When
Interfering Circumstance is dominant, then
is the occasion for predatory empires to expand
like Assyria, Macedonia, or Prussia.
As correctives of predatory imperialism,
regional and humanist ideas naturally ^arise.
But regionalism and humanism are not
mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they
are, for the awakened and educated citizen,
the two necessary and complementary poles
of his civilization. The needle of the mariner's
compass gains stability by oscillating between
the two poles of the world of nature. So,
regionalism and humanism indicate the two
poles of man's world; and the art of civics is
his mariner's compass. Through the making
and the maintenance of cities, man is ever
seeking a bi-polar stability. On the one hand
he obeys the call of family, of neighbourhood
and of region. On the other, he reaches out
to the widening appeal of nation and federation, of civilization and humanity. In the
measure that cities work efficiently on each
and all of these levels, the progress of the world
continues harmoniously.
The supreme triumphs of Art have been won
in these manifold services of the city. Pyramid
xi
and Temple, Acropolis and Forum, Cathedral
and Town Hall, are peaks in the chequered
evolution of civic life. What of this evolution
to-day and to-morrow ? It is significant that
in the development and decline of cities,
Beauty and Efficiency have come and gone
together. The cogent lesson for our own
times is that Art and Industry, Education
and Health, Morals and Business, so generally
severed in the passing age, must henceforth
advance in unison. But how in practice effect
the mutuality of understanding and the unity
of purpose, requisite for concerted activity?
Surely by experimental but deliberate and
continuous working together of all for the
efficiency of city and ennoblement of citizen
on each plane, domestic and regional, national
and federal, international and humanist.
Behind the war of armies is a war of ideas.
In the latter warfare the fortresses are Universities. They have in all countries in the passing generation been strongholds of Germanic
Thought. Hence the boast of professors that
Teutonic Kultur was destined to rule the
world, seemed not unreasonable. But the
countering ideas, regional, civic and humanist,
have also been fermenting in the universities.
Therefrom is emerging a doctrine deeper,
truer, and more creative than the mechanical
and venal philosophy which has had its fulfilments in Prussian Militarism and Competitive
Business.
xii
The re-awakening movement of the universities has been slow, timid, blindfold, because
lacking in civic vision. Now, therefore, is
urgent an arousal of the universities to their
spiritual responsibilities for the fullness of life,
in all its phases, individual and social. In every
region is needed a comprehensive working together of city and university on each plane of
the ascending spiral from home to humanity.
In spite of a political system democratic
in form, the People have played but a passive
role in the departing age of money and machine
economy. In the coming age of life economy,
the activity of the People will be creative in
proportion as two conditions are satisfied.
The inner life must be purified and enriched,
and opportunities without distinction of class,
rank, or sex, must be accorded for the development of personality through citizenship. In
the needed intellectual and moral transformation, the university is called upon to play a
part, simultaneously redemptive for itself,
for the people, and for its city and region. It
must not only aid the birth of the new
doctrine, bat also boldly suggest and even
plan the practical applications thereof. Thus
may unity of thought, and concert of purpose
develop together in a common citizenship.
A sound psychology, for instance, teaches
that the aggressive spirit which characterizes
Militarism may be transmuted, not eliminated.
Attempts at repression do but drive its mani-
xiii
testations into underground channels. Constructive outlets have, therefore, to be found
for the adventurous dispositions of Youth,
the affirmative energies of Maturity, the
political ambitions of Age. Towards this
ennoblement of masculine passion, William
James bequeathed to mankind the idea of
inventing " moral equivalents of war." For
example, consider how the Boy Scouts are
helping to tackle that growth of juvenile
crime which is one of the evil results of the
war already visible. They transform the
young delinquent into a Temporary Scout,
and harness him to some simple constructive
endeavour. Here, then, is a mode of Reconstruction, which also, and at the same time,
exemplifies what the French call Re-education,
and what moral teachers call Renewal. Out
of the general principles here seen at work,
may be built up a social policy. Thus starting from regionalism, with its complement of
humanist teaching, and proceeding through
civic applications of both, we reach a policy
of " the three R's," new style.
Through the redemptive quality of war, the
nation has shed not a little of its competitive
individualism, and achieved a closer working
together of all for the common good. How
now to maintain and advance the sense of
community, the energy of collective effort,
the self-abnegation of individuals and families?
Clearly, in the after-war polity, there must
xiv INTRODUCTION TO T H E SERIES
be arousal among all classes of a personal sense
of definite responsibilities, including and
transcending one's own life and work. There
must be some vision, clear yet moving, of a
better future. And knowledge and goodwill
towards its gradual realization must not be
lacking. All these aims, the Series will endeavour to elucidate and advance, and not
only through application of regionalist, civic
and humanist teaching, but also by culling
what is vital and essential from other schools
of practical sociology.
The design on the cover of the books is
adapted from a stained glass window in the
Outlook Tower, Edinburgh. The window is
a student's commemoration of teaching and
research devoted to an interpretation of the
Past and the Present for the foresight and
guidance of the Future. The symbolism of
this Arbor Sceculorum is explained in one of the
two introductory volumes : " Ideas at War/'
by Professor Geddes and Dr. Gilbert Salter.
It might be mentioned, for the sake of
inquiring students, that each of the two
Editors of the Series has elsewhere made an
endeavour towards the popular presentment
of Civism as a doctrine combining the regional
and humanist approaches. The two resulting
volumes are Cities in Evolution, by Professor
Geddes, and Interpretations and Forecasts, by
Mr. Branford.
PREFACE
IN 1915 there was held at King's College,
London, a " Summer Meeting " devoted to
war and after-war problems. It was initiated
and organized by Professor Geddes and Dr.
Gilbert Slater. Both of them delivered
courses of lectures. Those of Professor Geddes
were stenographed. By selection and editing
of the stenographer's notes and by incorporation of matter from his own lectures, Dr.
Slater undertook the preparation of a volume
for publication. Before his task was complete he was called away to an appointment
in the University of Madras. He left in my
hands, for completion, the unfinished manuscript and the stenographer's transcript of
Professor Geddes' lectures. The difficulties
in the way of completing the book were
further increased by Professor Geddes' engagements for public work in India, which,
during the past three years, have kept him
XV
xvi
PREFACE
away from Great Britain for not less than
seven months out of each twelve. These and
other obstacles have made it impossible to
submit to either of the joint authors the final
version of the book as it now appears.
The assistance of Mrs. Rachel Annand
Taylor has been of much value in preparing
the book for the Press.
VICTOR BRANFORD.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
1*
ii.
.
THE STUDY OF WAR AND PEACE
„
„
„
III.
T H E MODERN
IV.
THE MECHANICAL AGE
V.
VI.
.
{continued)
TRANSITION
.
.
.
.
IMPERIAL AND FINANCIAL AGE
SPIRITUAL
ASPECTS
OF
THE
MECHANICAL
IMPERIAL-FINANCIAL AGE .
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
THE MATERIALS OF RECONSTRUCTION
RECONSTRUCTION IN RUINED AREAS
RECONSTRUCTION IN THE WORLD
RECONSTRUCTION
TOWARDS ARTS AND CRAFTS
WAR CAPITALS
CONCLUSION
.
.
.
.
xvii
.
.
.
.
IDEAS AT WAR
INTRODUCTION
does it all mean? Whither are we
drifting? These are amongst the questions
which thoughtful inquirers are asking about
the European crisis? We cannot answer
such great questions, it will be said : yet we
cannot but go on asking them. It is by asking
all manner of questions that we at last find
the right questions—that is, the questions to
which answers more or less definite may be
found by research or by reflection. So each
science has grown, and is still growing : why
not, then, begin our questioning towards a more
scientific comprehension of these stupendous
problems of war and peace, which, as we now
see, so far exceed in difficulty, and in urgency
also, all those specific problems and tasks
to which each of us was devoted before the
WHAT
B
2
IDEAS AT WAR
war? Then most of us left war to the
soldiers or the historians; peace to the
"pacifists" or the diplomatists; but now
we are beginning to realize how deeply they
concern us all. We see that our daily life
has been enclosed within a larger and a sterner
grasp of fate than we knew. For before
this war, it was with the mass of all the
peoples as with the passengers of the Lusitania
before their catastrophe, despite kindred
forebodings in both cases. But now many of
us begin to realize that this terrific outburst
of war is no mere stroke of fate, or bolt from
the blue, but—like all dramatic expressions
of fate—a resultant, and of forces, which,
however stupendous in mass, however intricate in character, we cannot be content to
leave mysterious and unexplored, or to accept
either as " inevitable " or as " providential-"
—as rival thought-shirkers would have us.
This would be the bankruptcy of the social
sciences; nay, worse, their desertion in face
of the enemy, yielding up all thought to the
physical sciences, with their merely palliative
range.
Threatening, difficult, obscure though a
INTRODUCTION
3
situation be, we are saved from despair as
long as we can honestly reflect upon it; and
a glimmer of light may guide us towards a
clearer one. We are all the time experiencing
this. In every conversation, as in every
leading article, we assign specific parts and
responsibilities to particular nations and
their leaders; we distinguish the historic
factors for which our predecessors are responsible, from the contemporary causes of
which the responsibility lies upon our own
generation and day. And, since the most
fatalistic and the most theological of our
friends alike do this in practice, we need not
despair of their also carrying their inquiries
onwards; in fact, into presentments of social
science, and those, perhaps, needed to complete our own. Suppose, further, we begin to
realize—as we so much failed to do before
the war—that though our life went on with
little thought of war and peace, it was, and
perhaps none the less, counting for something
in one or other direction, and that our
occupations and interests, our leisure-activities, and our expenditure, our control of and
influence on others, have belonged to and
4
IDEAS AT WAR
helped to make up currents of social tendency,
here more war-ward, there more peace-ward,
than we knew. We, in short, have been
concerned all along; and not merely the
purposive or professional " bellicists" and
"pacifists/' or the diplomatists striving among
the ruins of both. The more we reflect upon
this, the more it becomes plain that war
and peace are less simple, intelligible, manageable than we were wont to assume : and much
less simply material also.
Ideas count, every way; and for more than
" practical men/' with us especially, have
ever admitted. This holds true, not simply
for the explanation of the war, but for its
conduct likewise. Men, Munitions and Money
were successively called for in the early
pleas, each time with loud asseverance that
here was the one thing needful, and at length
with a perfect shout of assurance that in this
formula, as at once triple and alliterative,
we might safely rest, secure in the recipe of
victory. But the piteous inadequacy of such
faith! Thus, even on the material side,
here so strictly emphasized, it is well not
only to remember what the lack of maps
INTRODUCTION
5
cost us in the Boer War, but what the general
lack of skill in using them has cost us in gallant
officers geographically uninstructed beyond
the percentage in other armies, all in this
respect less pitiably schooled. But this
matter of maps, as we see, raises the question
of minds; minds of statesmen and of administrators, minds of generals and organizers
of all ranks, minds of their men as well.
It is good to put faith in our Ministers,
but do we not too easily expect such as these
to play the part of a complete Providence, and
watch over us like children while we mentally
sleep ? Nowhere, happily for us not even in
Germany, is the whole community, or even
its organizers, anything like fully awake;
but it is surely time to be realizing that we
need to increase not less than the amount of
muscle in the fighting line, the proportion of
brain behind it. We are not alone deficient;
for with our brilliant Allies, our superiors in
arts as well as our peers in arms, it has been
estimated that the greater visibility of their
uniforms, especially at the outset of the
campaign, cost them casualties running into
hundreds of thousands. Yet nowhere more
6
IDEAS AT WAR
than in Paris were there naturalists and artists
able and willing to experiment together
towards inconspicuousness; so that it is
apparently about as difficult to reach their
War Office with an idea as to penetrate our
own. However, it happened that after nearly
a year of war, a scientific committee was at
last appointed by the Government to consider
inventions; and so far well 1 Still it remains
plain that in every one of the industrial regions
of the three kingdoms, its groups of University
and Technical Colleges, the local inventors, its
local camp and training corps, might, could,
would and should have been productively
busied upon such tasks and trials since the
very beginning : and a wave of scientific
impulse and productive invention might have
been aroused throughout all classes and the
whole nation, instead of the definite and
deplorable discouragement which even the
appointment of a respectable Board in the
metropolis could not efficiently remove, the
more so since all other centres realize that
London has not that leadership in invention
or in science which she enjoys in finance and
politics, and in power and press.
INTRODUCTION
7
Nor are minds all: of moods even more
might be said. But enough for illustration;
for, if we add to our materialistic war cry of
Men, Munitions and Money, the demand for
Maps, Minds and Moods as not unreasonable,
it is enough to justify the basal thesis of this
book: that war and peace are not only
matters of material resources and appliances,
but have to be viewed as states of mind; in
short, that Wardom and Peacedom arise
alike from Ideas. It is Ideas which are at
war.
Hence, behind the chronicles of the war,
or of the political considerations involved,
or even the interpretation of these, interesting
and important as all such writings are, there
naturally arise writers whose endeavour it
is to elicit the characteristic ideas which are
at conflict, and to discuss these, primarily
seeking some clearer understanding of the
causes, conditions, processes of war and
peace, in general and in particular, but likewise bringing such contribution as may be
to the needed reconstructive e n d e a v o u r s no t only material, but also intellectual and
moral,
8
IDEAS AT WAR
Let no reader, however, expect an orderly
treatise, a comprehensive body of recommendations; nor be unduly disappointed
when he fails to find this. At best we can
but be suggestive, not yet systematic.
CHAPTER I
the historic annals are said to
contain accounts of three thousand wars,
and often with copious and detailed description, with philosophic reflections often also,
no adequately scientific treatment of wars in
general has as yet emerged, apart, of course,
from the technical treatises on strategy and
tactics prepared by and for the use of soldiers.
Let us at least ask a few of the questions for
beginning the inquiries of such a science.
First we may ask the historians. " What
in your judgment have been the main and
characteristic wars of history, particularly
of recent history ? Can any order or periodicity be discerned in their recurrence? And
if so, of what kinds ? What, too, of the corresponding geography? for example, in what
regions have wars especially prevailed ? And
THOUGH
9
10
IDEAS AT WAR
where have they been rarest ? How may we
sum up all these geographic and historic
outlines, towards some understanding of wars
from early times and simple societies onwards ?
For instance, are wars, so commonly described
as racial even in present times, really and
demonstrably racial? "
Let no impatient reader think this is
" academic " in the sense of remoteness from
present issues. Nothing since the Crusades
has been more warlike than much of German
academic anthropology; so it is desirable,
relevant, even urgent and necessary to ask
whether its foundations are historic and
anthropologic, as our own historians with
their Anglo-Saxons, Celts, etc., have accepted
and believed, or essentially recent mythic
and romantic invention, from Count Gobineau
and his like onwards, through sophistication
and worse ? As definite example—does such
a work as Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century essentially represent facts, as its enthusiastic
translator, Lord Redesdale (of whose British
patriotism there is no question) would have
u$ accept—or essentially fiction? Person-
THE STUDY OF WAR AND PEACE n
ally, we believe the latter, and for reasons :
yet not with sufficient knowledge to enable
us to challenge it in every substantial particular as fully as we distrust these.
To the racial theories of wars, we find
substantially opposed theories of essentially
economic character; and these from to-day's
" place in the s u n " and " future on the
water" to early and fundamental occupational activities. Thus the swarming of North
Sea fishermen lies deep in western history,
from Norse and Norman conquests onwards
to Dutch expansion and our own; and the
analogous history of the Mediterranean is a
yet longer one, from the days of Phoenicians
onwards. How far, again, did such adventurous occupations as fishing and hunting
underlie, prepare for, give initiative to the
navies and armies of to-day ? And how far is
peace more deeply and organically connected
with the labours of shepherd and peasant?
And if so, why? If there be elemental
beginnings, how far have they been modified
by natural circumstances, as of climate, soil,
etc.; and how far by immaterial influences
of religion, of philosophy, of ideas and ideals ?
12
IDEAS AT WAR
Why, for instance, have the magnificent
hunter and warrior Assyrians so long ago
vanished, while their contemporaries, the
peaceful Chinese peasants, still inhabit the
earth and in increasing multitudes? Yet
why do the ambitions and the interests, even
the sympathies of Western culture peoples
(and their present main activities accordingly)
adhere so closely to the Assyrian prototype,
that the introduction of the term " Assyrioid "
is really needed fitly to describe the perfections and virtues of many of their dominant
types, and this not in Prussia merely : whereas
the epithet " Chinese/' though the name of
one of the greatest and most efficient, most
moralized and most refined of peoples, is
commonly applied with depreciation, even to
our own European mandarinate?
There is a large popular literature of war;
and much of it with great pretensions—with
Bernhardi, and others too numerous to
mention, for its prophets; and this, as at any
rate a pro-sociology—however inadequate,
mythic, or even baseless and false—cannot
but be stimulating and suggestive. Such
writers, moreover, despite their immediate
13
and homiletic purposes, are wont to go yet
farther back into Man's origins than do those
of historical and anthropological pretensions;
they claim to know man's biology and
psychology from the beginning, and these
with the broadest generalization (the most
sweeping affirmation, at any rate, which by
press-fed multitudes, if not altogether by
science, is considered quite the same), that
of man as essentially combative—initially,
continuously, permanently and for evermore,
so that in war he lives, moves, and has his
being, his progress; in fact, all that makes him
man. By sheer iteration at least as much as
by evidence this monotheism of Mars has
come to be believed in by vast sections of
every European public; and no doubt partly
in rebound from contrary exaggerations.
Yet where in any scientific forms are these
arguments to be found? Not in Darwin's
Descent of Man, nor any other serious work
known to workers in science. Where, again,
are the answers of the clamantly bellicose
writers to such well-illustrated arguments
as those of Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, or
of many writings of Tolstoi, to name only
14
IDEAS AT WAR
writers of foremost authority in their respective scientific and psychologic ways ?
Such, then, are some of the problems which
arise when we set out in quest of this new
science. It will, of course, be said, " This is
not the time for such inquiries/' but this
foolishness may be answered. First, it is
still less a time for believing in pseudoscience, and leaving it in possession of the
field. Second, it is just in war-time that we
may best try to understand war, just as in
rainy season rainfall, and in time of epidemic
inquire into the nature of the disease. Treatment before and without diagnosis, or hasty
and false diagnosis, has always appealed to
the warm-hearted and warm-headed; and
this in matters social and political, no less
than matters medical. Still, in the latter,
the endeavours of diagnosis before treatment
are no longer so discouraged, even in wartime, and there is thus no reason to despair
of the coming in of social diagnosis also, as a
principle generally accepted, and not merely,
as at present, by a student here and there.
It may be supposed that the Sociological
Societies now tardily struggling into existence
15
here and there have paid attention to such
studies of war and peace as we are asking
for; yet, in fact, we know of none. What,
then, of the many Peace Societies, all with
libraries, we presume; but, we suspect, too
strictly of a homiletic sort? A fine library
hall has been provided in the Hague Palace,
but we doubt whether as yet with any
definite intentions of scientific inquiry. Has
Mr. Carnegie's great foundation, or the various
minor ones any such purpose ? We trust so,
but have no data.
Let us plead then, briefly but emphatically,
that such bodies, with their means and
workers, should prepare (or collaborate towards preparing, as scientific societies do)
that condensed summary of the world's wars,
and those manifold studies and classifications
of them, which must be the first scientific
preliminary to their fuller and more general
interpretation. At first, no doubt, the problem seems insuperably difficult—the unravelling of an often-repeated, yet never
identical, game of life and death for multitudes, in fitful recurrence (or is it labyrinthine
continuity?) since man first left us his traces
16
IDEAS AT WAR
upon the earth, a game in which the changing
pieces are also players, and in which the
greatest players may also be but pieces in
their turn.
Nevertheless, in this tangled and confused
chronology of wars, are there not observable
some periodicities of recurrence—waves corresponding to generations—like 1066 and 1099,
for Norman Conquest and First Crusade, or
like " the '15 and the '45 " for the last outbursts of war in Great Britain. Again, as
populations have grown denser, society more
complex, are not semi-generational waves also
discernible—as, for France, 1800, 1815, 1830,
1848-51, 1870-1, 1887, 1900-1, 1914-15?
And very similarly for ourselves : 1800, 1815,
1832, 1846-51, 1870, 1887, I 9 0 0 a n d 1914
also. These waves have been independently
pointed out again and again, and apparently
as often forgotten. Yet there they are; and
the more clearly we look into the world of
chronology, even irregularities have been
ingeniously and rationally explained. The
history of wars may thus be more orderly
than it has seemed.
So may not the various war-centres and
17
war-frontiers be marked out, in contrast with
the more stable areas, upon the maps of
different periods. Nothing, not even war
itself, has seemed so utterly fortuitous, so
utterly catastrophic, as the occurrence of
earthquakes, the activity of volcanoes; yet
behold, within a generation or less of the
coming in of orderly observation and records,
elements of order, that is, of rhythm and
periodicity, begin to appear, and the faith of
science in nature's order begins to be justified
even here, and seismology and vulcanology
win acceptance among the geological subsciences. We are not here insidiously implying an analogy of fatalistic character, but
suggesting that just as the occurrence of
crimes is found to be of seasonal and other
regular average incidence, so even wars may
tend to rhythmic recurrence also.
Yet why not to extinction ? See our once
sharply divided isle. Survey the map of
Europe. Search lor its longest-continued
and oftenest bloodstained frontier : this is not
even that of the Rhine, the Danube, desperate
and gigantic though struggles there have been,
but the region between the Roman walls,
c
18
IDEAS AT WAR
and centring on the Tweed ! The Douglas
who carried the Brace's heart to Spain, threw
it onward into what was his seventy-first and
final battle, of which all before had been for
the maintenance of this old border. Or what
other fortress-city of all Europe has changed
hands so often, or with more desperate proportional slaughter, as Berwick-upon-Tweed
—fourteen times in a single century—not by
half-generations this time ? Yet all this seems
ancient history, extinct as the volcanoes of
Auvergne. But if enemies so old and long
and desperate be now indissolubly friends,
who need despair of peace in Europe ?
The wars in space, the wars in time, are but
simple and initial groupings. The problem
grows more difiicult as we face its social
character. We have thus to consider the
social functioning of different peoples, the
clash of their different interests and institutions, of their ideas, and, above all, of their
ideals.
We thus approach the problems of civil
wars. What are they? Again of varied
kinds. Not simply of various regions, occupations, languages, communities, " races/' but
19
largely of social classes, and these again in
various contrasts and combinations. Many
wars have raged among the People, and these
both of country and of towns, but still more
among the Chiefs, the governing classes—
many also between people and chiefs, with
results here democratic, there oligarchic,
aristocratic, monarchical, even despotic.
Though wars are mainly thought of as of
the temporal forces, the spiritual powers of
every age have also taken no small part in
them, and wars of religion have thus ever
become intenser, more embittered and more
prolonged than those of economic or personal
interests : for these burn themselves out,
while the spiritual hatreds burn themselves
in. Hence our stories, pageants, masques
of war would be incomplete, indeed, without
the..burning glow of the "seculars/' and this
in the widest sense, whether they be mediaeval
preachers, political orators, or Tyrtaean singers.
Nor can we omit the flash and glare of the
cloistered intellectuals, before and since their
invention of gunpowder, for instance, on until
the grim researches which so perfect the
slaughter of to-day.
20
IDEAS AT WAR
The historians have accumulated no small
material towards the answering of such
questions and more; but the unsuccessful
endeavours of older generations towards a
" philosophy of history/' which could not be
brought into accord, still discourage their
successors from renewing these. All the more
need for the sociologists in their conventicles,
the peace-worshippers in their palatial institutes.
To give all this yet clearer definition, let
us map out once more the stream of history,
as one of those " Graphic Charts/' which were
so common in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, and are again coming
into every adequately conducted historyclass. But now on a larger and fuller scale
than usual (not less, for instance, than the
metre per century of our Edinburgh Outlook
Tower endeavour); and marked not merely
with the succession of princes and their most
" decisive battles." With a more vivid notation, let us insert the long waves, the surging
eddies of national and international wars.
We have thus a means of comparison of wars
which is as objective as any other statistical
21
notation. Professed historians still go on
telling us that there is no discernible order
in events; but such a chart is strangely
suggestive. It yields general ideas verifiable
by repeated recurrence, of which a single
example, well worth pondering, may • be
offered here. Given a war between two
parties, or alliances, A and B : advantages
arising from this are frequently observed to
accrue to some third party or parties, C,—by
the combatants unforeseen, it may be even
unknown. Leave now to our student-assistants the continuance of this ordinary annalist's
chart of universal history, with its names
and wars and dates there inserted to the full.
Beyond this arises a -yet more ambitious
endeavour. Can we not construct a fresh
graphic, that of the more general presentment
of history—no longer of individual wars and
names and dates, but of the main social
formations, the great historic periods, of
which these were but the details? Cease to
concentrate attention on the individual wavecrests and wave-marks, but map the great
tides of time to which the waves belonged.
In broad and simple ways we all do this : as
22
IDEAS AT WAR
when we speak of Egyptian and Hebrew,
Greek and Roman, times and their civilizations, and again of the Middle Ages, of the
Renaissance, of the Revolution, and as we
shall especially do in the following chapters,
of the evolution of the industrially, mechanically and politically Liberal age into an Imperial order, as this into a Financial period.
The latter three peculiarly cohere and coexist to-day, yet in varying proportions; but
the earlier ages are still also with us, in part
in actual living survivals, and still more in
culture-heritages, though we must not pause
here to discuss these. Finally, while the seers
and prophets despised as utopists have long
been more or less confident of new forms of
society struggling towards birth, a vague
consciousness of this is now more generally
incipient, and this may emerge more emphatically, express itself more clearly, as the war
draws to its end. 1
The chart of annals is readily imaged as
a stream, the august River of Time; but this
1
The Russian Revolution, and its repercussion elsewhere, bring nearer the social changes anticipated in
the text, which was written in 1915,
23
more general presentment will be found to
suit best a more organic imagery, perhaps
most conveniently that of a World-Tree. As
over against the apple-tree of knowledge,
there grows the vine of life, so beside the
AfiBOR SAECULORUM.
Cosmic Tree, Ygdrasil, we see this Historic
Tree, Arbor Saeculorum.
This tree takes definite and simple shape;
it is like a young pine, with definite nodes,
one for each great period, and each with its
radiating branches, for their essential types,
their characteristic social formations. To the
left hand, for each period let us allocate a
24
IDEAS AT WAR
pair of these branches for the temporal power,
the plebeians and patricians, the people and
chiefs of each period; and to the right hand a
corresponding pair of branches for the spiritual
power, the " intellectuals and the emotionals,"
" the regulars and the seculars/' or, in terms
more modern (and still unsatisfactory), the
intuitionals and expressionals, the initiators
and realizers (or shall we say, again in antique
parlance, initiates and adepts?). To give this
definiteness we mark along the right and left
margins a series of symbols at once defining
each branch, and correlating each pair, each
node.
Thus, reading from below upwards, we see
half-submerged, on the one hand, the crown of
Egypt, on the other the winged orb of immortality. Above these are the,star of Solomon
for the temporal greatness of Israel, and to the
right the sacred name. So for the Greeks
with their vivid practical and intellectual life
—the galley, of trade or of Ulysses, balanced
by the aegis of Pallas. With the Roman
order, patrician and plebeian orders become
clearly differentiated. Hence for the former,
the Standard for power, colonization, conquest
25
and empire, with the Fasces for law and justice
as the virtual religion and science characteristic of old Rome at its best; while also for
the slave, the chain of temporal bondage on
one hand, but the sacred monogram, badge of
enfranchisement, upon the other.
So for the Middle Ages. The helmet of
chivalry is followed by the charter of the
borough, guarantee of civic democracy. The
first is balanced on the spiritual side by the
papal tiara; while for spiritual emblem of the
town life we have here—too cynically, be it
confessed—but the barrels of the Kermesse,
the intemperance in which urban prosperity
is ever wont to drown its idealism of fraternity
while seeking to express it.
Next the Renaissance, with the plebeian
origin of its new nobles suggested upon their
blazons, and following upon these the Puritan
hat. On the spiritual side Correspond the
Greek letters for the intellectual aristocracy
of the Renaissance, and the open Bible with
the spiritual keys transferred to it, as the
central- authority of emotional conviction
and guidance of the Reformation.
Then the Revolution ! On the temporal
26
IDEAS AT WAR
side the (materialistic) crozier and sword go
down below the toothed wheel of industry;
while on the spiritual side the fleur-de-lis
of Divine Right sinks below the Cap of
Liberty. Alwrays, as before, we have each
pair of corresponding branches, four in
all, for People and Emotionals, Chiefs and
Intellectuals respectively. 1
Finally, in our present or passing time, the
strife of labour and capital, the contrast of
empty hands unemployed or in strike, with
golden purse, and on the other the corresponding flags, black and red, of anarchy and
of socialism (blowing in what should be contrary winds of doctrine). Yet beyond this
node, the Phoenix of action, the Psyche of
thought, are again flying free : while, between
them, there rises a new quatrefoil, enclosing
the long-dreamed flotver, whose buds may
some day open.
So far this first climbing of the tree of
general history. With each re-ascent new
1
This reading of history as an interplay of Temporal
and Spiritual Powers is considered in some of its larger
political bearings in a companion volume of this series:
The Coming Polity ; see especially chapter ii, " History
arid Politics," of that book,
27
general ideas will appear. Enough, however,
here to note once more, that each node is
concealed from its predecessor and successor
by a twining wreath of smoke—symbol of our
forgetfulness of the past ages, our blindness
to those succeeding. Yet for this present
purpose of the study of wars, also observe how
it may express the destructive crises, the wars
external, internal, or both, in and through
which each great transition has been accomplished. Rebellion'and Exodus of Hebrews;
antagonism of Israel and Greece, of Greece
and Rome; Fall of Rome before the rise of
the Middle Ages; breakdown of these with
the fall of Constantinople, with Renaissance
and Reformation and their wars ! Wars of
the Revolution and wars of Empire; above
all, war of to-day ! Yet all this is expressed
in ar stained window set up by the students of
an Edinburgh Summer Meeting a full halfgeneration ago, to record the essentials of a
course which had interested them.
The reader may be saying : " All very fine;
but unless we can see this tree of history for
ourselves, and in no mere stained window, but
in the open world, what good is it ? "
28
IDEAS AT WAR
But this tree of history, the observant
traveller will find in every city he visits, every
village, often hamlet even. Upon the changing town-plan, with its corresponding monuments, edifices, survivals of all kinds, he
reconstructs the main aspect of its branchings, and this often in the strangest completeness of detail, not only the main ramifications
here shown, but the minor branching of these.
Why, then, did our history teachers not
show us all this and more? From all time
they have done so, more or less; but of late
the library and still more the document-room
have absorbed them, until they have wellnigh forgotten that history is nearly as openair a science as those of nature, and written
far more fully and truthfully in the works
and ways of cities than upon the papers,
accessory illuminants though these often
may be.
Hence our War Exhibition, while spreading
on tables the contemporary books for reference, regards these as but the minor exhibits.
The essentials are maps and plans, graphics,
photographs and sketches, caricatures even :
and by their aid, and despite all incomplete-
29
ness, a far more vivid account alike of this war,
of earlier wars, and of the relations of each
crop of dragon's teeth to preceding sowings
has been set forth than libraries and museums,
with their far greater resources, have yet
attempted to provide. If statesmen in their
councils, and editors on their tripods, do not
trouble to provide themselves with such
resources, it is not to their advantage or their
efficiency : and, to bring this long discussion
to a head, it may be sharply and pointedly
affirmed that were either Downing Street or
the British Museum, War Office or Universities
to be awakened from their mental torpor of
official habits, aroused from their stupor of
routine, to this most vital and essential, most
urgent and pressing necessity of effort towards
comprehensive understanding of the war, we
should neither have needed to make our own
little war exhibition, nor been allowed to
dismantle it when done. But this is a matter
of maps and minds, and war has been convincingly shown by the accepted folklore of
Londoners of all classes to be a simple material
affair—of muscle, munitions and money alone
—so no war exhibition for them. It would
30
IDEAS AT WAR
be unsettling. Right honourable gentlemen
would begin to find themselves out; even
editors might suspect that they have something to learn. 1
It may not even now be too late here or
there to stir or sting some one of the hundred
bodies—governing or learned, bibliographical
or " pacifist "—with their libraries (sometimes
even museums and galleries, or at any rate
the means of obtaining the use of these) to
a step beyond that too merely mechanical
collection and shelving of materials for which
they are mostly all willing enough. A modest
symptom of this openness was afforded by
the recent and not ill-received appeal made
by an eminent member of the British Museum
staff to the provincial societies and museums
represented at the British Association in
Manchester in 1915, to make a commemorative collection—-of recruiting posters !
1
Since this was written, steps have been taken
towards a Public War Exhibition, appropriately to be
housed in the Tower of London. It may be hoped that
the collection will in time grow into an orderly presentation of the history and development of war, and not
remain what it is likely to be at first, a miscellaneous
collection of oddments illustrating the present war.
31
Suppose again—is the supposition hopelessly wild?—that some of the great bodies
above indicated (or even of the small, which
might so easily surpass the modest collections of private individuals like the writers'),
were to ask : " What more than recruiting
posters? and, to what examples of larger
beginnings can we turn to save time? "—
the most convenient answer would be to recollect, and hang anew the little War Exhibition already referred to; the lines of needed
fuller development would thus be made clear.
For fuller suggestions, those of its actual
origins may be recalled. First, the collection
of M. Jean de Bloch, author of La Guerre,
that massive four-volumed history of war and
plea towards peace to which the proposal of
the Hague Congress by the then young Czar
is commonly ascribed. This collection was
made by M. de Bloch at the Paris Exhibition
in 1900—with the assistance of members
of the Edinburgh Outlook Tower,—and was
thence removed to his war museum at
Lausanne. The collection of such materials
has since been irregularly continued as one
of the tasks of the aforesaid Tower; and it
32
IDEAS AT WAR
was forming an important part of the Cities
and Town Planning Exhibition, especially
at Ghent in 1913, and Dublin in 1914. On its
way to Madras thereafter, the whole collection was sunk by the Emden, and the recent
war exhibition was thus a beginning of renewal.
The study of such repeated accumulations,
incomplete though they are, fairly justifies
the claim—if need be the challenge—to the
documentary historian and annalist, that the
study of regions and cities is not less necessary than his own line of study, nor less fruitful. Further, this direct reading of history
from towns and cities and regions with the
help of their plans and pictures yields results,
not only exceeding in particulars, but differing
substantially in interpretation from those
of more official historians. But, if so, there
is all the clearer need for a serious introduction of these graphic methods for the deciphering as well as the recording of history,
and for a reconsideration of our views upon the whole subject in this freshened light.
An indication of this re-reading of wars in
their effect upon the civilization of cities and
countries, &nd above all in the aggrandisement
33
of metropolitan cities with the generalized
nationalism for which these stand (and their
too little recognized productivity as regards
wars) will be found later on in this volume
(Chapter X). Fuller indications will be found
(a) in the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, and in the (too condensed) theses of its
catalogues; (6) in the growing Survey of
Edinburgh (a peculiarly complete and representative war-city from its earliest times) in
the Outlook Tower; and (c) in the corresponding Surveys now arising in various towns
and cities great and small, as part of the
growing movement towards Regional Surveys,
geographic and historic, contemporary and
social, with corresponding applications to
practice at many levels.
Enough, however, has surely been said to
express the present thesis—that of possible
and needed presentments, studies and interpretations of War, upon a scale of greater
completeness and care than that yet attempted
by literary and documental historians. Yet
it is, after all, only what is customarily given
in every natural science, and even for its
smaller fields.
D
CHAPTER II
{continued)
people, comparatively few, are working at the problem of permanent peace. To
the majority of these the problem to be
solved is that of recovering and maintaining
a state of peace, similar to that which was
destroyed in 1914, but differing from it
chiefly by the existence of some political
machinery which shall effectively prevent
international wars, and thereby gradually
make obsolete the whole apparatus of armies
and navies and of alliances built up for the
sake of securing success in warfare. The
discussion of this problem has developed to
such an extent that it is easy already to
make some classification of the disputants.
All who propose with confidence a solution
look forward to some sort of superior international authority; and the more sanguine
34.
SOME
35
hope to see the first steps towards its creation
taken at or soon after the end of the present
war. The less sanguine anticipate gradual
approach towards a less definite authority,
by means of treaties securing arbitration in
international disputes, or at any rate a waiting period during which conciliation may be
effective.
The first question, on which peace-desiring
opinion is sharply divided, is whether the
new international situation is to be reached
by co-operation between the Allies and the
Central Empires, or whether it should be
built upon the basis of the existing Alliance
alone. The one school urges that, though
the effort to constitute some International
Council or Court capable of settling disputes
and preventing wars might be made by a
few only of the Great Powers, trusting that,
once the beginning was made, others would
co-operate, yet that it is essential that
Germany from the beginning shall be a
participator. Otherwise, i t points out, the
International League would be viewed with
distrust by Germany, would be regarded as
having an anti-German bias, and would
36
IDEAS AT WAR
stimulate Germany towards new armaments
in order that her interests might not be
sacrificed to the harmony of a combination
of Powers from which she was left out. The
other section, with equal force, insists that
the present Alliance is the natural and only
secure foundation on which to build; that
it would be easy for the Powers which are
fighting side by side to make provision for
a permanent International Council, and for
the avoidance of war between one another,
and to invite all neutral Powers to enter
into this circle; but that, since the moral
basis of the whole international organization
must be confidence in the disposition of all
States concerned to respect any solemn
obligations which they have accepted, there
cannot be, within any moderate period, any
such trust among other nations in the honour
of the German Government.
An equally difficult question arises with
regard to the composition of the International
Court. There is, on the one hand, a widely
spread feeling that it would be idle to entrust the Governments and diplomats who,
whatever their intentions may have been
37
have failed to maintain peace, with the control of the machinery for the prevention of
future wars. Hence various suggestions are
made for some sort of representation of the
mass of the people, or of their religious and
industrial leaders, in the International Council,
even to the exclusion of the representatives
of the Governments in Europe. But the
forcible criticism of all these proposals is
made, that the crux of the whole problem is
to secure the loyal adhesion of national
governments to the International Council,
and that the hope of securing the adhesion
is practically thrown away if the national
governments are not themselves directly
represented.
On the whole the detailed and earnest
study of the problem of even reasonably
permanent peace has as yet aroused in the
majority of its seekers a feeling of depression
and disappointment. The case for peace,
when stated broadly, is overwhelmingly
strong : the absurdity of devoting the intense energies of strenuously organized nations
to mutual destruction is so glaring, that it
seems to each new apostle of peace quite a
38
IDEAS AT WAR
simple matter for nations to arrange merely
not to fight. But, directly the field of
generalities is abandoned, and the problem
of preventing war is faced in detail, we get
the disappointing result that the " pacifists "
themselves are divided into sections which
consider each other's proposals futile, if
not mischievous. The question thus arises,
whether it is not possible to probe the situation more deeply than either peace-lover or
war-worshipper has yet done, and to gain
fresh lights on the nature and conditions of
both peace and war.
We cannot, without a special effort, think
generally and calmly of peace and war in the
abstract, or of the periods of peace, and war
in the past. We are impelled instead to
think vividly of the present war and of the
peace that immediately preceded it. Some
think of it as a descent towards Avernus
from the heights of peace as we know them,
crowned by the Palace of the Hague, to the
horrors of war, themselves to be followed by
the tragedies of a peace in which the world
struggles under a crushing burden of debt
and poverty towards some melancholy future.
39
The first correction to this state of mind is
to be obtained from a critical appreciation
of the peace that has been terminated. It
was no such high state. It was not peace
at all: few generations have known peace
at all, but ours less than most. What we
~~">J-
PEACE
1
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<& PQ ^ rf
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> w ^ 2
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were wont to call peace was really warpeace—thinly disguised but latent and potential war : in the dominant organization and
purpose of its administration, and in the
armaments which formed the first claim on
its resources, latent war; in its diplomacy,
at best delayed war; in even its philanthropic
conventions, only mitigated war; and in the
treaties, the results of wars put on record,
40
IDEAS AT WAR
And if we look deeper than this, and examine
the fundamental characteristics either of the
stage of civilization from which this war
marks a transition, or of the philosophy
which has been dominant in men's minds,
we see the same fact. The nineteenth century has been a mechanical age, an age of
industrial competition (a competition so virulent as to amount to intra-social war); and
this has just the same relation to international war as heat has to motion. In
every way, then, the war is giving to mechanicians " the time of their lives ! " And as
for our philosophy, while it is customary for
people to think that they belong to various
historic Churches, and while they may as a
matter of fact so belong in real sentiment
and in various activities, yet the creeds and
the ties of these Churches have usually far
less influence upon their thinking than have
the economic, political and scientific theories
which are the intellectual expressions of the
Mechanical Age.
For fifty years the mind of the civilized
world has been dominated by the Theory
of Evolution, by the Natural Selection of
41
favourable variations in a world of Struggle.
This Darwinian theory is the projection into
the whole universe of the conceptions of
mechanics. It generalizes from facts of the
improvement and adaptation of machines by
cumulative patenting on the one hand, and
by the competitive struggle between industrialists on the other. It endeavours to interpret all life, social life and spiritual life, by
means of those generalizations; and their
applicability cannot be disputed; it is only
their all-sufficiency which may be. To carry
this theory into political action was only
logical; and it is upon a philosophy which
all the world has accepted that Prussia has
merely acted with surpassing logic and
thoroughness — in our father's time, in
Schleswig-Holstein, in South Germany, in
Alsace-Lorraine; and now in ours, in Belgium, in Poland, and in Serbia. If this
philosophy of life, which beyond doubt is
partially true—that is, of mechanisms, and
of living beings and societies also, in so far
as they are also mechanisms—be also completely true and adequate, as many in all
countries think (and still more take as a
42
IDEAS AT WAR
faith to act and live by), then nothing more
remains except for us also to apply it to
national policy, and to accept the Prussian
view of national ethics and state obligations,
bearing in mind that in the long run victory
is to thought and not merely to munitions.
But if this be true, then our peace is but
the interval between wars occurring roughfy
every half generation or generation, or say
generation and a half for longest, and history
merely an alternation between preparation
for war and actual war—a period of reconstruction animated by the desire for revenge,
and then war again. Frankly, this is what
many people believe, and we must needs
give this view all the consideration it deserves.
But suppose, instead, that this Darwinian
and Mechanical interpretation of life is inadequate ! Suppose that Natural Selection
is merely the condition, and not the driving
force of Evolution, and that this must be
sought for, not simply in the elan vital, the
vital stress, as many of us have long contended, and as M. Bergson now so vividly
and freshly sustains, but in the definite
interaction of its reproductive energy, its
T H E STUDY OF WAR AND PEACE
43
species-maintaining and altruistic impulses
(and these on higher and higher levels), with
the nutritive and self-maintaining processes
—thus raising them from the crude and combative egoism and individualism dear to the
extreme (or " Prussicated ") Darwinian, to a
self-realization and individuality worthy of
the philosopher, German or other, at his
moral climax. For in this definite evolutionary way, the struggle for existence rises
into the culture of existence. And so the
whole outlook before life and humanity
bears an altogether different aspect and
interpretation. 1
But let us leave our general philosophy and
science alike and return to the present crisis
which is the test of them—as of all theories.
1
Into the general evolutionary thesis we shall not
enter more fully here. The reader will find a fuller
indication of the argument in " Darwinian Theory
and Evolution " in Chambers Encyclopedia; " Variation
and Selection" in Encyclopedia Britannica, as also in
Evolution and Sex in the " Home University Series/'
by Profs. Arthur Thomson and Geddes, and the same
writers' Evolution of Sex (1889). Books like Kropotkin's
Mutual Aid will also be found rich in concrete argument
and illustration, and of course the works of Bergson
and other " vitalists," for general statement,
44
IDEAS AT WAR
The first step which it behoves the " pacifist " to take, before he can reach a better
theory, a clearer vision, and a more living
hope, is to do far more justice to war than
he has commonly yet done. Wars may be
and have been ignoble; but does he not
commonly feel that wars have at least often
been, like the god Janus, two-faced—unjustifiable, tyrannic or sordid on one side, but
inevitable and even noble on the other ? To
a nation as to an individual, the crisis of
fate may come, when it must " put it to the
touch, to win or lose it all." Broadly speaking, all wars of independence have been of
this nobler character. In the United Kingdom,
for instance, the contrast between Scotland,
on the whole unconquerable, and Ireland,
too often overpowered and crushed, shows
how much the victorious effort to assert
independence is worth—in the first place to
the threatened nationality, in the second
place to humanity generally, and in the
third place even to the nation baulked in
its efforts at forcible dominion. Similarly,
England as well as France has reason to
worship Joan of Arc; Spain as well as
45
England to be grateful for the defeat of the
Armada. What " pacifist" regrets Thermopylae and Marathon? And what would
such pacifism avail the world to-day? The
conversion of M. Herve and his comrades,
after protests against war more extreme and
passionate, more continuous and self-sacrificing than any other on record, to strenuous
campaigning in the present war—which they
now see as the supreme crisis alike for France
and all those best human things she stands
for—is the noblest evidence that the so-called
" pacifist " needs but to be assured of the
justice and the value of his cause, the inevitableness of its danger, to be thrice nerved
in its defence. After that passive martyrdom
of the apostle of peace, which was his first
sacrifice, active martyrdom with the hero is
indeed comparatively easy, since in this there
is more of the natural man whom it is the
problem of " pacifism " to restrain—and to
the last moment. But not beyond : there is
a time for war, and without it peace would
be no peace.
At the present time we see that in spite of
a strange ignorance and misinterpretation of
46
IDEAS AT WAR
human nature among those in authority,
which too often leads the soldier, and nearly
always the bureaucrat, to blunders, and
worse, in the handling of men, our simple
youths when in khaki become more strenuous,
more restrained, vitalized, and disciplined.
To one who lives in Lawnmarket, Edinburgh,
between the Castle and the squalid old city,
it is impossible (despite a most unfavourable
criticism of drill-methods, and this on many
grounds, but for which this is not the place)
to deny that superiority of our military
education, bad though it be, over our
scholastic and our industrial education put
together. For here one sees constantly repeated the simple miracle whereby the slack
youth, deteriorated by his wretched home
and schooling, by his inadequate industrial
training, and above all by the manifold evils
of unemployment, is speedily set up anew,
till he becomes an element in some such
cutting edge of desperate battle as the Black
Watch, See the schools of our time, offering
' their boys the pitiful stimulus of " marks," a
sort of ghost of money, and of " prizes/' each
as a symbol of the individualistic success
47
which they are expected to contend for as
men. But war, in the phrase of Garibaldi's
poster (so much truer to life and character
than the poor, the dull, the vulgar appeals
by which our War Office has too largely
repelled as well as attracted recruits), offers
" hardships, wounds, privations and death ! "
Hence the youth goes, requiring no compulsion, for the spring of idealism within him
has been, opened. He feels and knows that
he has become, and often for the first time,
part of a definite organization towards social,
and no longer individual, ends, when he becomes part of the army. He realizes the
army as an ethopolity, although he never
heard the term, a group informed and penetrated by an ethical idea, calling on him for
subordination and sacrifice. In the army,
too, there is no more of the industrial exploitation which is the death of our industrial
peace : soldiers in British and French armies
alike are effectively in love with their officers,
and follow them eagerly, while the officers
on their part fully return the feeling, and
claim the elder brothers' larger share of
dangers.
48
IDEAS AT WAR
So we find that in warfare the qualities of
men are aroused and multiplied. An Edinburgh newsboy wins the Victoria Cross : now
a simple Cockney workman, or again a quiet
Manchester schoolmaster, stands above the
enemy's trench, hurling bombs for many
hours on end, in Berserk fury of battle unsurpassed by anything in the Sagas. An
army in action is an extraordinary synergy,
a solidarity of feeling, a combination of individual action all dramatically intensified, of
which peace has not yet found the secret.
There is in war an element of social transformation, and the war may thus afford a
moral, intellectual and spiritual awakening
from the peace which has preceded it. So
much is war marked by increased ethical and
practical tension that we find throughout all
ages the association of war with religion and
with government : and if the sharp division
of classes between the war-loving patricians
and the peace-loving plebeians is to be brought
to an end, each must be infused with the
best qualities of the other.
All this we can express in the simplest way
by turning our diagram round. The passing
49
of our mechanical and money-making peace
into this war waged in defence of the rights
of nations to live their independent lives, is
not to be seen merely as an economic fall,
but as an upward thrust of moral energies
which have been too long denied their expression and outlook. Thence let us look onward
Reorganization — as
PEACE-WAR
/
Inspired by Idealism
WAR
/
WAR-PEACE
to the after-war task, not as a return to the
peace we have left, but as a further step, an
upward progress, demanding fresh heroisms.
The problem is that of Reconstruction.
" How are *y ou S°^nS to reconstruct ? "
people ask. " How are you going to get the
money—when so much will have been spent,
and the burden of debt will rest so heavily
upon us all? " The answer is, that we do
E
50
IDEAS AT WAR
not reconstruct with money, but with life;
with the life and labour of the future, and
not with the savings of the past. When the
Asiatic millions swept into Greece, and the
Athenians betook themselves to their ships,
the enemy made short work of the Acropolis
and town alike. When after Salamis the
Athenians returned, they found all in ashes :
their protective goddess's temple shattered,
even her sacred olive tree broken and burned.
Yet from the stump one green shoot was
striving into fresh growth. Here was their
start, their boundless capital of hopeful
augury. So they built up their Acropolis
anew, no mere reproduction of what had
been destroyed, but the Parthenon—a whole
earthly Paradise of gods and men, which
none again, not even the ruthless Turk,
desired to destroy. Their spirit has often
returned. Saint Andrew's Cathedral is the
memorial of the Scottish War of Independence, as Leyden University * of its city's
heroic stand for Holland; and there have
been many such monuments, on to that lately
exhibited at South Kensington, in which
Mestrovich expressed Serbia's uprise, after
51
five centuries of mourning for her defeat and
enslavement by the Turks at Kossovo. Much
of the same spirit was in the citizens of
Burgos, who " resolved to build their cathedral so that future generations should say,
we were mad to have attempted it." This
spirit and these aspirations are stirring among
many oppressed peoples. The architects of
Belgium are at work in exile, re-designing
their cities, aiming at no mere restoration,
nor merely more efficient re-planning, roads,
railways and all; but at nobler and grander
designs also. The Poles before the war had
great designs, as for a splendid Acropolis at
Cracow : and from the very agonies of greater
Poland new ideas will call for realization.
The tasks of the future call upon us to
utilize this vital seed from this red and flaming
flower of War, to concentrate this synergy
of humanity which war everywhere proves is
latent in us, and so develop its suggestions
of a new and better society towards fulfilment. We shall be impoverished, it is true;
but, when we no longer divide our wealth
between creature comforts and munitions, as
in the recent past and present, we shall find
52
IDEAS AT WAR
our resources ample for greater achievements
than in our days of fat utilitarian prosperity
(and its heavy war insurance) we ever dared
to dream. Women, children and old men
may all contribute, and share in the tasks
of this more vital peace as they have so
effectively done in those of the war. Peace,
to be peace indeed, must utilize at once the
best resources and methods of past peace, and
the best spirit and organization of past war,
and avoid their respective wastes and evils.
Such peace would be a true peace, because a
spiritual warfare for ideals, which may become more and more clearly defined to us as
we labour for them.
CHAPTER III
THE MODERN TRANSITION
IN the previous chapter three definite
suggestions are expressed or latent. The
first is, that we do well to regard the problem
before the nations not merely as of war and
peace, but as of Wardom and Peacedom.
Wardom is the term we propose for the whole
complex of social institutions and processes,
political and economic, with the corresponding spiritual forces, emotional and intellectual,
which are now finding their extreme expression and resultant in War. Peacedom is the
other term we would fain bring into common
usage. None will deny that, albeit in these
times less conspicuous, less authoritative, and
less developed, there are also in our society
political and economic factors, ethical and
cultural factors also which make for p e a c e true and permanent, because vital peace;
53
54
IDEAS AT WAR
towards which, despite all appearances and
influences to the contrary, many men of all
lands, and perhaps even more women, are
even now in deep desire.
When the problem is regarded from this
broad and "general point of view, the need for
a wider survey of the living forces which are
working out our social affairs becomes apparent. We are reminded of the intricate interrelations between acts, facts and thoughts,
between passions and deeds; between the
events of industrial, and even of domestic
life, and the resolutions of statesmen and
monarchs which determine the fate of empires.
This inter-connection will be illustrated repeatedly in what follows; but in passing one
example will make what is meant more vivid.
Take an example from India. A lady who
has been travelling in India says to us :
" What do you men see of the causes lying
deep in Indian unrest? Here is an example
for you. The Rajah is hypnotized by the
prestige of Europe, and so calls in an English
architect to build him his new palace. So,
quite naturally from the English point of
view, it gets a sloping roof instead of a flat
55
one, and an open park instead of the old
enclosed gardens. But the women will not
go out into this park, open to many eyes;
and they cannot take the air on the sloping
roof. So consumption rages in the women's
apartments; they and their children die.
The grandmother understands the reason :
she sees the whole European system in one
piece. She grows more and more furious;
at last she gives some passionate young
conspirator a handful of her jewels to pay for
seditious placards and bombs/' Does not this
throw light on the story of the " Mutiny " ?
And, in principle, may we not apply it all
round? People mean well—or at any rate
mean to mean well—like the Germans at
their very best behaviour in Alsace; or (as
we have heard even Belfast Unionists say),
like John Bull doing his best for Ireland.
This leads us to a second suggestion, that
peacedom, to prevail, rrpjvst be no mere
mixture of the vague aspirations and excellent
sermonizings of too many " pacifists/' They
too often recall the new curate, who, having
urged his congregation in many words and
with much eloquence to " B e "good ! " to his
56
IDEAS AT WAR
anxious inquirers on how to be good, could
but answer-—" But, my brethren, I have no
theory of the secular life ! " Peacedom must
be concrete, definite, founded upon a survey
of facts, organized, active, vivid, vigilant,
resourceful, strenuous and militant as wardom
itself.
Bring together, as we have lately done in
a War Exhibition, books written from the
peacedom standpoint and others by the
militarists. As a rule do we not find the
former abstract and vague, the latter definite
and concrete ? Compare civil and military ;
note, for instance, how the Board of Education,
in its syllabus for the training of its active
officers, has dropped both History and Geography (i.e. adopted an Education out of
time and space !) as the Universities also do
too largely. Whereas the soldier learns upon
field and map, and the more thoroughly, the
more efficient he. is. True, our poor young
officers go, and lead to the. slaughter (are
even led there) without adequate map-reading,
sometimes without any; but that is our
wretchedly unreal civilian education paralysing our military, our war officials and colleges
57
alike. A colonel lately said, " If my subalterns,
my non-coms, and men, knew even the
cardinal points, it would save ten per cent, of
them/' But of the seventeen lieutenants
and captains one of us has observed in this
matter during the war, only one has yet
become intelligently interested in the maps.
Meantime the War Office sends out its officers
untrained in maps, but has time to impede
free locomotion, by which a little geography
might be learned, by circulars forbidding the
turning up of trousers ! See, however, a real
general on campaign; Moltke day by day,
in the Franco-Prussian War, cleared out the
biggest room he could find for his own
quarters, so that he could spread out his
detailed maps, place on them his toy cavalry,
infantry and artillery of all his armies, his
opponents' also; and thus devise, before he
went to bed, the marches and actions whereby
the enemy were repulsed and outflanked,
crushed or surrounded. But in London—
city of ancient peace—the civilian population
has lost even the sense of the four points of
the compass: some 'bus conductors it is said
'do not know whether they are going east or
58
IDEAS AT WAR
west ! It is a general truth, alike for thoughts
and things, that he who organizes controls.
The most intense and complete form of
authority is that of the captain on board his
ship. He is our absolute master, because
he alone knows the course, knows where the
ship is, and how it must be steered, therefore
the crew must obey; hence even the silly
passenger has respect for him accordingly.
The idea that human affairs can really be
guided and governed by barristers addressing
electorates like juries, and settling things by
the counting of votes, is a pleasing illusion;
but it lasts only as long as the War-Lords
please. The wolf does not care how many
the sheep may be; during war we have just
as much liberty as the War-Lords and their
Censor allow, and after the war a good many
of the soldiers who are coming back will have
little respect for the forms of constitutional
democracy.
Now our third suggestion : that this definite
and militant Peacedom, which realizes life
in space and in time, in history and in geography, must work upon the map like the
great general, but in the converse hemisphere
59
of action, that of reconstruction. But what
is to be reconstructed? What has been
destroyed? We think of Rheims and of
Louvain, as types of the worst destruction;
and we may well wonder whether any rebuilding worthy of the name be possible. Yet
what was Rheims, before 1914, for the Champagne city, province, or for France? Had
not the religious life mostly gone out of it,
save for a faithful few, and the political
tradition, of coronation-minster, altogether?
Admired and reverenced as it rightly was,
was it much more than the memorial of a
vanished past, before ever it was struck by
German shells, though indeed a unique and
undying image for lovers of art and idealism.
The Cathedral of Cologne stands untouched
by war, restored with care and magnificence,
cleared of all the minor churches which stood
around, and which were in the way of the
great cosmopolitan hotels which now circle
it to show it better. There it is like the head
of a prophet on a charger—a fate more tragic
in its way, and not less full of mourning than
that of Rheims.
Real reconstruction is th.us essentially not
6o
IDEAS AT WAR
of mere buildings, however venerable and
beautiful : it is a renewal of social life.
But on what principle, with what guiding
ideas, can Europe attempt to reconstruct
the social life? That is the problem before
us all. To get to grips with it, we must
examine our social state in the period closed
by the outbreak of the war. First, what was
its dominant sociological character? Then,
looking beneath these dominants, we may see
the buds of the new social growths of the
future.
But in order to attempt this examination
of the era which ended with July 1914, we
must go back into the past for some centuries,
since the easiest way of understanding any
social state is to see how it grew up. To
comprehend either the,crisis of the present
or the task of the future, we should search
back, through the European history of the
nineteenth century, to the Great Revolution,
political and industrial alike; through great
eighteenth-century wars to the age of Louis
XIV, and so, by way of the Thirty Years'
War, to the period of the Reformation and
the Renaissance, Nobody has ever succeeded
61
in writing history in this retrospective order ;
but this is one reason why history is so apt
to lose its life, and its power of interpretation,
suggestiveness and application.
We can but start in the ordinary way upon
an Historical Survey, necessarily in broadest
outline only, with the Middle Ages—which
let no one continue to confound, in disastrous
mistake, with the Dark Ages. The Dark
Ages were the period of chaos, slaughter and
misery, during which Goths, Vandals and
Huns tore to pieces the Roman Empire;
the Middle Ages the period of reconstruction
which followed, and during which masterpieces like those of Louvain and Rheims were
built. Rome and Constantinople, though no
longer exercising temporal sway over Northern
and Western Europe, were then the great
centres of spiritual and intellectual influences,
as great cities have constantly tended to be;
as, for instance, in earlier ages had been the
great city of Mesopotamia known by many
names, Din-Tir, the life of the forest, Babylon,
the gate of the God, Asgard, the garth and
stronghold of Asia.
Professor Vinogradov has pointed out that
62
IDEAS AT WAR
the Feudal system characteristic of the Middle
Ages was essentially an equilibrium, a balance
ih the State between the power of the King
and his Peers; in the village between the
authority of the lord and the bold spirit of
the peasants. Regarding the Middle Ages
geographically, as well as logically and economically, we note also the balance between rural
and urban life, the greater aggregate but
scattered mass of the country population being
off-set by the more intense life of the cities,
which sprang up, proud and intensely organized, in so many centres. Again, viewing
the Middle Ages sociologically with the help
of Comte's generalization, that in social
functioning there are four great classes, the
" chiefs and people/' as the " temporal
power/' the " intellectuals and emotionals,"
as the " spiritual power/' we note also the
equilibrium among these—-temporal being
more fully balanced by spiritual than has
been the case before or since. We have the
oscillation of this equilibrium expressed in
general history in the long rivalry of the
Papacy and the Empire, as in picturesque
incidents without number—of the meek
63
Anselm confronting the wild and reckless
William Rufus, or of Pope Gregory the Great
successfully facing Attila. We have this
equilibrium expressed in literature in Dante's
political treatise " De Monarchia," in which
he urges the equal sanctity and dignity of
the government of the Church and the universal Empire. We have it expressed in
buildings, the castle of the barons, the city
homes of the burghers, and the compact
village of the peasants being paralleled by
the Cathedral of the Church and the preacher,
and the abbey or monastery, where the
cloistered recluse carried on the tradition and
development of learning. In short, then,
people and secular clergy, chiefs and regular
clergy, have ever been associated; and always
are and must be. The occupations and the
institutions, the manners and customs, laws
and status of the chiefs and people change,
as their buildings and their costumes so
plainly express; but they go on for ever, and
must do so, while elders command youngers.
But so do the seculars and the regulars. The
Monasteries of the latter were destroyed at
the Reformation, but their culture elements,
64
IDEAS AT WAR
their library, their scriptorium, took new
forms in the more widely diffused learning
and science of the Renaissance. The secular
clergy, as in more direct relation to the life
of the people, have gone on baptizing and
marrying, burying, consoling, preaching, much
as of old; yet they too spread out their ecclesiastical limits, until in this very real and
definite sociological sense, their work of
exhortation is shared with the modern order
of seculars, more usually called journalists.
The thoughtful regular, and his popular
exponent as preacher, alike still largely hail
from the modern priories, called universities
and colleges, which the monastic orders of
old did so much to awaken and to found;
so that, however they may both have lapsed
from mediaeval or reformation orthodoxies
alike, the specialist at the British Association
and the leader-writer who explains and discusses his discovery or theory are still, from
the sociological point of view, really representing the imperishable elements of the
undying, though Protean, spiritual power, as
did the monk and priest of old. That the
musician and the artist, the novelist and the
65
playwright, are all still carrying on their part
of emotional education, of old more unified,
will also be evident. That, when understood
in this way the drama of history is not a little
simplified, becomes increasingly clear.
Broadly to realize the intellectual and
emotional condition of the Middle Ages,
which is a very practical and useful aim for
our present purpose, one may read William
Morris, or select contemporary documents
for oneself. Thus the Dream of John Ball
is illustrated by the " Kent Custumal," put
on record in the reign of Edward I, which
sets out the rights and privileges of tenants
in gavelkind, the local tenure which was
characteristic of the humbler peasants, even
of those who held but an acre or two and paid
their rent in ploughshares, hens or eggs.
It begins with the statements that these
are the laws of Kent as they were at the
Conquest, and have been since the Conquest
and before the Conquest, and that the bodies
of Kentish tenants in gavelkind are as free as
those of any free Englishmen. Or we may
take Henry Fs Charter, given to the City of
London, which grants in addition to the
66
IDEAS AT WAR
rights of the citizens to have and to administer
their own law instead of the King's law, many
remarkable privileges, including that of the
hunt in Kent, Surrey and the Chiltern Hills.
And with this we may read the somewhat
later Preface to Fitz-Stephen's Life of Thomas
a Becket, which is devoted to the praise of
London, and which celebrates the antiquity,
the sewers and watercourses, the institutions,
justice, sports and schools of the city, the
dances of its maidens and the virtue of its
wives. Such documents are useful as correctives to the idea vaguely and generally
entertained that the Middle Ages were times
of oppression and serfdom—the fact of the
matter being that throughout Western Europe
this period is marked by a continual rise in
the status of the simple man as man, the
gradual abolition of slavery, and a steady
increase in real wages, which reached into
the Renaissance and attained a maximum both
in England and France towards the end of
the fifteenth century. But perhaps the best
way to get an insight into the character of
this time is to stand in some great old cathedral, Salisbury or York Minster, for example,
67
still more in Rheims or Chartres, and ask
oneself for what cause it would be possible
to erect such a building in the twentieth
century, though the power of handling masses
of stone has so enormously increased, and in
many other ways the cost of construction
vastly lightened. For a moment one thus
realizes that the men of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries were no less willing to
spend their substance and toil to build an
enduring edifice to the glory of God and for
the purification of the souls of men, than we
are to pay and toil for the construction of
the floating cathedrals of our age, those
transient expressions of the fears and forces
of destruction, which we call Dreadnoughts.
If social labours be an expression of social
character, the old cathedrals, and many an
old village church, tell us that the Middle
Ages had something in the quality of life
that later times have missed; something
that our efforts at reconstruction after the
war must aim at recovering.
The Renaissance was the upset of the
equilibrium of the Middle Ages. In the
State the power of the king now overbalanced
68
IDEAS AT WAR
the nobles; in the village, that of the lord
overpowered the peasantry; and in the
whole of Western European society, Catholic
as well as Protestant, the temporal power
overbore the spiritual. Of all the material
features of this great, transition, especially
from the point of view of this discussion of
Peace and War, the most significant is the
development of the effective use of gunpowder ; and in this [respect the startingpoint of the Renaissance was not Florence,
but the house on Folly Bridge at Oxford,
where Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar,
lived and experimented, or the cloister in
Freiburg, where the statue of his successor,
Berthold Schwartz, has long been standing,
in forecast, it would seem, of how Germany
would increasingly better the lessons of
England. During the Middle Ages from time
to time baron battled with baron, duke with
duke, city with city and king with king; but
these were for the most part but military
sports compared with our wars of gunpowder.
True, again and again there were the great
European expeditions eastwards to fight the
Moslems, Crusades evoking Crescentades, of
69
which the Dardanelles campaign, the recent
Balkan wars, and more recent Armenian
massacres—in short, the whole Eastern Question^ in all its ramifications, may be regarded
as directly continuous. Yet the spirit of
wardom in Europe itself was largely brought
under control, as is shown by the extension
of two principles—" The Peace of God,"
which did to some extent protect priests and
peasants, women and children, from molestation during war, and " The Truce of God,"
which prohibited private warfare during certain days in the week and year, the number
of which was increased from time to time
till there were left but sixty during which
the militarist might indulge his passion without mortal sin. But the wars which began
during the Renaissance, and which grew
steadily during the period of the Reformation
until they reached their terrible maximum in
the Thirty Years' War, whereby the population of Germany was reduced to a miserable
and starving remnant, with sufferings and
hatreds which have so much determined her
subsequent history, to this very year—these
were wars of a very different character.
70
IDEAS AT WAR
Old plans show the cities of the Middle
Ages as places, fortified it is true, but with
simple wall and towers and moat, and laid
out pleasantly with gardens and open spaces
for recreation and public life, as well as for
markets and for exercise of arms. The
devastating wars of the Renaissance period
were in some ways throughout Europe the
great slum-producers, since it was necessary
to make the fortifications stronger, with
cannon-bastions, increasingly vaster and more
elaborate. The circuit of the walls had to be
shortened as much as possible, so that there
might be the smallest possible length to be
attacked and defended, and also that the
density of the crowded population within
might provide the maximum number of defenders for each yard of ramparts. Gardens
and suburbs together were thus, with some
notable exceptions in Italy, cut away without
mercy; widows and orphans increased within ; while rural fugitives crowded from without ; and it is essentially through such warwork that the squalor and depression arose
which the modern industrial age has so
extended by exploiting.
71
The period of the later Renaissance and
the Reformation is marked, and not in
England alone, by the plunder of the cathedral
and the monastery. Thus, instead of, on
the one side, the feudal baron of the Middle
Ages, in his castle—a simple and heavy
cavalryman, as his very name implies, unable
in all probability to write his own name—and
the cathedral with its pictures, the abbey
with its library; on the other, we find the
gentleman of the Renaissance, in a great
mansion, to this day often continuous with
the abbey building itself. Besides the.mansion and lands, he has retained the pictures
and the library, and even increased them,
appreciated them; hence a new type appears,
that of the scholar and gentleman. This
new ideal of cultured humanity is realized
in the familiar example, the " Admirable
Crichton," learned and chivalrous, accomplished in the classics, in theology and in
the sciences, yet also an incomparable swordsman. But to understand the special significance of these Admirable Crichtons—we grant
the new lords at their best—we must think
also of the impoverished peasantry and the
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IDEAS AT WAR
degraded towns their extravagant costliness
involved : so that in their jewelled and
embroidered grace they not only created
peasant revolts, but also their climax, the
French Revolution. This new noble class
which founded its family glories and family
libraries and galleries, for a long time did
read and understand the books and appreciate
the pictures; only in later generations has
this culture declined, till now, when perhaps
it is only the old housekeeper who may know
the names of the portraits, or the painters
of the treasures which are being sold to
America. The decline of intellectual life
which followed this monopolization of culture
by the aristocratic class has been quaintly
illustrated by the tests for degrees in Oxford.
In the Middle Ages the candidate had to
prepare his thesis, and argue it in Latin,
before an examiner, and against three antagonists, for three hours; the student who passed
this test proved that he was fully acquainted
with the learning of his age, that he could
think and vigorously express his thoughts
in the common learned language of Europe;
such a man could travel from land to land
73
and hold converse with similarly educated
peers wherever he went. But by the eighteenth century merely the form was observed ;
the candidate attended at the Examination
Schools, and the Examiner and the Antagonists had to be present for the prescribed
three hours. The examination fee having
been paid, the rest of the test was considered
unnecessary : examiner, candidate and antagonists sat together in silence, and read or
otherwise amused themselves till the time
was up, and the degree could be conferred.
Through the influence of the undergraduate
entitled to a gold-tasselled cap, the noble,
the gentleman-commoner, the formalities became yet simpler. And any who think that
universities are now reformed, because such
obvious abuses have been recently and
decently cleared away, have not scrutinized
their processes or products very keenly.
England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, as regards wars, less
unfortunate than the rest of Western Europe.
Yet, as elsewhere, the whole tone of economic
life was marked from the beginning of the
sixteenth century by a new and intense
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IDEAS AT WAR
passion for money-getting, a passion which
was ministered to by the flood of silver which
came through Spain and the Netherlands
from Mexico and Peru, and which had its
corresponding effect and rebound in luxury
and display. Many a gentleman wore a
whole year's income on his back when Henry
VIII met Francis I and Charles V upon
the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and the
peasants had to pay. Nay more ! Beyond
a year's rent to clothe and embroider him,
he must rack farms and cut forests to jewel
him, and by and by this and more, to pay
his gambling debts. Such rack-renting and
the wholesale evictions it involved, again
produced widespread poverty, and likewise
the extraordinary increase in crime made
familiar to us by Sir Thomas More, by preambles to Acts of Parliament, and by much
contemporary literature. The dominating
commercial idea of the Middle Ages, the
conception of the justum pretiurn, had disappeared : the idea, that is, that buyers and
sellers and regulators of markets should
collectively determine to pay and to receive
a price for each commodity which should
75
be equal and fair to the producer and to
the consumer. The thunderings of Franciscan
friars against usury died away, leaving but
a feeble echo behind in the Book of Common
Prayer. The confiscation of monastic lands
had produced a tremendous scramble for
the means of getting rich quickly, in which
the greediest and most unscrupulous gathered
the greatest share of wealth and power.
But in England during the same time there
also grew up an intense national patriotism;
and three great statesmen, Sir Thomas More,
Lord Burleigh and Lord Bacon struggled to
deal with the social and economic evils of
the time, and to reconstitute, by means of
statutes and of the authority of the Privy
Council, some of the broken customs of the
Middle Ages. Thus the " Statute of Apprentices " and other laws aimed at preserving
the most essential features of the Guild
organization of industry; the Poor Law
intended to keep alive the custom of each
village maintaining its own poor; and Depopulation Acts and the Cottagers' Act
endeavoured to safeguard the economic life
of the peasant. Further, the shrewd oppor-
76
IDEAS AT WAR
tunist policy of the Tudor monarchs in relation
to religion postponed for England the period
of religious war, and somewhat altered its
character; so that while the Huguenot Wars,
and the Wars of the Netherlands began in the
earlier part of the sixteenth century, and the
Thirty Years' War ranged from 1618 to 1648,
the English Civil War did not break out till
1642, and, when it did come, it was more
political, less religious, and therefore in general
character less intense and embittered than
had been the wars between Protestants and
Catholics in Scotland, Ireland and Western
Europe.
Even this Civil War, however, was marked
by the death in battle, the proscription or
banishment of the nobler Cavaliers, of the
nobler Puritans also. From this destructive
selection the less courageous and meaner
representatives of each faction especially
survived, and continued their social species,
so that in succeeding times we find the
Cavalier tradition often resting more upon the
public-house and the horse-race than on
the squire and parson, and the Puritan
tradition embodied in the huckster's shop,
77
or the harshly driven factory, more actively
than in the Quakers' Meeting or the Congregational chapel. It is with the coming of
the eighteenth century, and most vividly,
perhaps, at the time of the South Sea Bubble,
that we see fully developing these sordid
aspects of the long break-down from the
Middle Ages.
We find this many-sided transition effected
in every Western country, most tragically
in Ireland and in Germany, most typically
in Scotland and in France, most successfully
and heroically in Holland. On the whole,
it is generally in France that the features
of each historic phase and process are logically
worked out, on the greatest scale and with the
clearest prominence. Two periods of widespread civil war were followed by the concentration alike of the cultural resources of
the cities and of the wealth of the provinces
upon a single great capital, henceforth overgrown within a land bled white. Louis XIV,
" Le Roi Soleil," is the typical monarch
of the post-Renaissance period, as Versailles
is its typical product; henceforth even the
pettiest German prince must build his palace
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IDEAS AT WAR
after the model of Versailles, and create a
Court with an even exaggerated etiquette.
Of this imitation, the present Kaiser is a
colossal exemplar. After Louis XIV comes
quite logically the Revolution; this also
awaits Germany in her turn.
CHAPTER IV
THE MECHANICAL AGE
before the date of the French
Revolution, the new age which was to succeed
the later Renaissance was in England ushered
in by the inventions of the Industrial
Revolution. With regard to these, three
essential facts are generally overlooked. In
the first place, as Mr. Hillaire Belloc quite correctly says in The Servile State, the idea
generally held among working-class radicals and
students, British and Continental alike, that
the Industrial Revolution was the essential
cause of the social injustices which they feel
so keenly, is fundamentally mistaken. The
deeper cause of the oppression of the factory
operative, and of the terrible degradation
and pauperization of the agricultural labourer,
was not the mere fact that machines were
invented which multiplied the efficiency of
EVEN
79
80
IDEAS AT WAR
labour, but the previous monopolization, in
the period of the Renaissance and the
Reformation, and during the earlier part of
the eighteenth century, of the land and of
education. The great change then took place
in the current philosophy of life, which made
the whole of the governing classes of England,
with exceptions practically negligible, accept
with avidity the idea merely more clearly
formulated by political economists, that the
highest duty of man was to buy in the cheapest
and sell in the dearest market. We next
have to note that it is this exaltation of
wealth-getting which was the fundamental
fact, that it naturally created the frame of
mind in which men sought diligently for new
sources of wealth-production, and having
found them, put them into use without any
qualms about their indirect effects. It was
the desire of the results of invention that made
inventions. Thirdly, we have to realize that
the new industry had the democratic aspect.
Its leaders sprang from the dispossessed
peasantry, and from that body of craftsmen
who were so harassed by the struggle of
unregulated competition that Adam Smith
THE MECHANICAL AGE
81
tells us the normal working life of the London
carpenter in the middle of the eighteenth
century was only nine years. It was the
efforts of poor men that made inventions,
built the factories, and developed the businesses of the new age, of men working frantically, driving and sweating those whom they
employed, and building up our great factory
towns under their palls of smoke by the help
of principles which were generations, even
centuries, older than Mr. Samuel Smiles supposed in his glowing expositions of them.
The mechanical age, however, re-formulated
such characteristic ethics, as well as economics
—the one strenuous, the other harsh, and
both inadequate; and these economics and1
ethics were subsequently expanded into a
philosophy by the utilitarians, under Bentham,
and into an interpretation of life and the
cosmos by Darwin and his disciples. But
it has also its idealists, typically in the Welsh
peasant Robert Owen, and in the Wessex
peasant Richard Cobden, exiled from their
homes to New Lanark and Lancashire. With
Owen and his conception of the perfectibility
of human nature, his correspondingly daring
G
8a
IDEAS AT WAR
social initiatives, whereby he is the father
of modern English trade-unionism, of cooperation, of industrial improvement, of
democratic education, of factory regulation,
and of the Garden City movement, we are
not here concerned, save to note that such
doctrines and endeavours, with all their hopes
and promises of peace, still remain powerless
among their direct heirs, the Socialists of
Germany and other countries. But that
middle-class idealism of mechanical production
and free exchange of which Richard Cobden
was the greatest exponent, has borne more
directly upon the problem of international
peace; and Norman Angell is best understood
as a vivid and able continuator of Richard
Cobden.
The doctrines of the Manchester school are
still familiar and still have great authority,
particularly among Nonconformists, Liberals
and Freetraders. But already even these
have practically forgotten the process of
reasoning by which they were reached; and
they would find it very difficult to realize the
intensity with which these convictions were
held, and the sense of pained amazement
THE MECHANICAL AGE
83
with which such criticisms as those of Carlyle
and Ruskin were received. Cobden and his
colleagues were in the extraordinarily enviable
position of finding their doctrines supported
both by experience as they interpreted it,
and by the fashionable economic theory, and
still more in their conviction that the policies
which they advocated were equally advantageous to their own class and sectional
interests, and to those of the nation as a
whole; and even to all other nations with
which England had commercial dealings.
In considering the doctrines of laisserfaire, free-trade, the sanctity of contract, and
also the intense and religious conviction with
which these were advocated—in short, their
respective presentment as doctrine by the
regulars of their day, and as the working
religion of their day by eloquent seculars—
we can see at once the psychology of the
trader and the manufacturer, and that of
the expropriated peasant who had struggled
into prosperity and influence by the way of
the factory town. If Edwin Chadwick could
see the hideous squalor of Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, and the Earl of Shaftesbury
84
IDEAS AT WAR
could horrify southern England with the
revelations of the conditions of labour in
the coal mines, and both of them could turn
Bluebooks into literature unsurpassed for
its grim sensationalism; if even a tough old
farmer like William Marshall could be so
horrified by the conditions under which the
new machinery was exploited that when he
wanted to describe a disorderly workhouse
as a place of intolerable torture he wrote
that it was almost like a cotton-mill, to the
successful manufacturer such criticisms appeared beside the mark. There might be
some regrettable features about employment
in mines and factories, nevertheless the mere
fact that free-born Englishmen were willing
to accept such conditions for themselves,
their wives and children, showed that the
employer was offering them a life better on
the whole than the landlords of the agricultural villages whence they trooped into the
industrial districts. As for the individual
worker, the gospel for him was self-help.
Let him work hard, live abstemiously, save
money, abstain from early marriage and
parentage, and the upward path was open
THE MECHANICAL AGE
85
to him as to those who had preceded him.
With regard to employes in the mass, the
one important thing for them was to abstain
at all costs from strikes, and to promote to
the utmost the interests of their employers;
and for the government on their behalf to
abstain from grandmotherly interference with
the conditions and hours of labour, dangerous
machinery, and insanitary conditions. For
the employer knew best what was most
profitable to him; and if only the employer's
profits were increased, the competition for
labour would put up wages, and with higher
wages men could keep their wives and
children at home, command more and more
of the comforts of life, and secure for themselves all the advantages which the philanthropists of Chadwick's school and the
humanitarians of the Earl of Shaftesbury's
school could desire for them.
Carlyle derided as " Pig Philosophy " this
doctrine of " Self-Help/' this idea that a
properly and rightly ordered State could be
reached by the principle of every individual
striving with a single mind to promote his
own pecuniary interests. To the man of
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IDEAS AT WAR
the Manchester school it was clear that
Carlyle simply failed to understand the working of the blessed principle of competition,
whereby the chaotic selfishnesses of individuals
were harmonized in the service of humanity.
The praises of the principle of competition
in some of the early nineteenth-century
authors become almost lyrical. One such
passage depicts in glowing phrase how perfectly the task of the provisioning of London,
a task which would exhaust the energies of
the greatest organizer whom militarism has
ever evolved, was daily accomplished by
thousands of separate wheat-growers, grocers,
market-gardeners, carriers, butchers, bakers,
and the rest, each working in independence,
and making as big a profit as possible for
himself, without being concerned for the
interests of his neighbours, or inspired by
any philanthropic benevolence for the great
mass of Londoners, yet nevertheless constrained by competition to work on their
behalf with the maximum of effectiveness
and the minimum of cost.
This fatal complacence of the manufacturing philosopher with regard to the working
THE MECHANICAL AGE
87
of individualistic profit-seeking enterprise in
internal relations characterised equally his
view of international relations. He saw
international trade as merely another exemplification of the principle that harmonious
co-operation resulted from the pursuit of
individual profit under competitive conditions.
If any foreign country purchased goods from
England it must have done so because it
secured a profit by so doing; we had something to buy, that to sell. That, by selling
it, made a profit, and England, in purchasing,
also made a profit; for the essential character
of any bargain is that both parties foresee
a profit in making it. Buying and selling
was in fact the human transaction which was
truly twice blest, for it blessed both him who
bought and him who sold, whereas all transactions based upon pity and sympathy were
very dangerous and suspect. Those therefore
who interfered with the free exchange of
British hardware and cotton goods for Polish
wheat, French silks and Portuguese wines,
were guilty of a stupidity more mischievous
than any ordinary wickedness; for they were
spreading misery on both sides of the Channel,
88
IDEAS AT WAR
as well as impiously contending against the
laws of Political Economy. Cobden could
compare their action only to that of some
devil drawing a line between the north and
south of England and forbidding the manufacturers of the north to trade with the
agriculturists of the south; no creature but
a devil, he said, could be capable of such a
monstrosity.
Hence it was, as the foundation of a blessed
future, not only of peace in the sense of the
avoidance of actual war, but of real and
harmonious co-operation between nations,
that the doctrines of the Manchester school
were preached during the forty years that
followed the battle of Waterloo; and, when
the test question of the untaxed importation
of corn was triumphantly carried in 1846,
by a similar impulse to that by which great
temples have been built in other ages, the
Crystal Palace was thereafter erected at
Kensington, for the first International Exhibition, where the emancipated British industrialist might set up, for the worship and
admiration of the world, his machine-made
goods.
THE MECHANICAL AGE
89
The " pacifism/' then, of Richard Cobden,
which is closely related to the " pacifism "
of Norman Angell and of modern Liberalism,
was part of a general doctrine of business and
human relations. We recognize to-day that
this doctrine embodied a substantial substratum of truth, but that it persistently ignored
modifying circumstances. It is at least as
necessary to emphasize the fundamental truth
as it is to detect and point out the fallacies.
What is fundamental in it is the conception
of the nature of a bargain. It is entirely
true that, if the possibilities of trickery,
extortion and compulsion, direct or indirect,
are excluded, and if both parties meet with
equal bargaining advantages, and are equally
free to conclude or not to conclude the bargain,
then, if they come to terms, each has derived
an advantage. It is further true that the
great majority of material exchanges are
bargains of this character, and that, in
consequence, they promote good feeling between the individuals concerned, and in
foreign trade peace and friendship between
nations. With regard to another fundamental conception, the salutariness, under all
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IDEAS AT WAR
conditions, of competition, it is true again that,
provided the elements of fraud and force
can be excluded, 'competition leads to efficiency, and we express a fairly accurate
judgment in popular language on the principle
by the phrase " Healthy competition/'
Unfortunately,
however, the optimistic
hypotheses on which the whole theory rests
are frequently contradicted by facts; and
the break-down of the pacifism of the
Manchester school in international relations
is exactly paralleled by the break-down of
the theory of laisser-fairem. internal relations.
Carlyle was, of course, right in maintaining
that there was no magic—not even in the
principle of competition—whereby finally a
sound compound could be built up out of
individual selfishnesses. In actual practice
there is always a certain proportion of bargains
of the Jacob and Esau type. The vitiating
elements may be either the helplessness of
one party through necessity or through
ignorance, his deception by adulteration or
some other form of trickery; or a needy
purchaser may be tempted by easy credit,
and become enslaved by debt, And in the
THE MECHANICAL AGE
91
process of competition, even the legitimate
exploitation of some honestly acquired advantage by one competitor may bring ruin upon
others. John Bright saw that " adulteration
is a form of competition " ; but instead of
drawing the correct inference that competition
is capable of taking anti-social forms, and
needs to be restrained by authority if the
restraint of the conscience of the competitor
breaks down, he drew the opposite inference,
that all laws to prevent adulteration should
be kept off the statute book. In this particular
case the unpleasantness of the facts could
not be ignored; but there were other failures
of the new industrialism which the whole
Manchester school did ignore. They were
apparently quite ignorant of the fact that
one of the chief reasons why the agricultural
population, under pressure of starvation, was
willing to migrate to factories and mines,
was that first the domestic spinning industries
and later the industry of the hand-loom
weavers was destroyed by the competition
of machinery. These domestic industries
helped to eke out wages and returns for
small holders. They were probably equally
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IDEAS AT WAR
ignorant of the fact that the notable triumph
of free-trade principles in 1782, whereby
English manufactures were introduced under
light duties into France created widespread
ruin among French industrialists, and was
one of the immediate provocations of the
Revolution. Nor even now has sufficient
attention been paid, in estimating the net
advantage of the textile inventions, to the
fact that in India there were up to the beginning of the twentieth century still five million
hand-loom weavers (that number being but
slightly, if at all reduced at the present time),
compelled to reduce their standard of life to
such a point that they could compete in
cost of production with the power looms of
Lancashire, and to undergo this grinding
rivalry using the unimproved hand-loom
superseded in England in 1733.
In fact, the principles of laisser-faire and
self-help, of buying in the cheapest and selling
in the dearest market, are like the Frankenstein monster—once given their way, they
are not to be checked by the limitations
imagined by their creator. The trader with
a single eye to profit has naturally for his
THE MECHANICAL AGE
93
ideal bargain that with an ignorant or
helpless purchaser, as when the African
trader buys tusks of ivory for beads or
looking-glasses. In dealing with competent
purchasers his ideal is to command a monopoly, preferably a monoply of some necessity
of life. And the principle of competition,
experience has similarly shown, if pushed to
its logical extreme, involves very often the
ruin of many of the competitors and the
building up of the remainder into a monopolist
combination. The blessings of free-trade and
free competition which were so vigorously sung
in England when England had a great start
in industrial processes were even then not
so apparent to other countries, and since
that advantage has diminished they have
become matters of controversy over here.
The too abstract politics of the elder
generation, the too abstract socialism of a
later one, are alike products of mis-education
—the barrister's metaphysical schooling upon
" rights " (and wrongs) instead of duties and
functions. The too strictly concrete mind,
narrowed by the machine process and crushed
into its image, captured also by arithmetic
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IDEAS AT WAR
(that potent notation which makes the very
wheel of fortune a treadmill for the steady
minds and a gamble for the more original),
hypnotized by self-admiration, produces the
" practical man," ready for any quantity
of theory such as the above. It has taken
this whole group of misinterpretations of
life and activity, combined in our fathers'
time, to produce the practical man's still too
current theories, his negation of art in favour
of the mechanical process, his negation of
thought in favour of the barristerial process
while yet a Liberal, and now of the bureaucratic one, as he becomes Imperialist or
Socialist; for, as we now see in Germany, for instance, those two are deeply one, and
their apparent contrast is little more than
that of the complemental perspectives of
substantially the same plan of society.
So far the mass-philosophy of the Mechanical
Age, for philosophy it must be called, as
underlying general practice, the life of industrial and business activities, whether these
are for mere necessaries of livelihood, for
comforts of prosperity, or for luxuries. of
wealth. Hence three social classes, lower,
THE MECHANICAL AGE
95
middle and upper, differentiating as " populace, philistines, and barbarians " respectively,
to recall Matthew Arnold's real contribution
to sociology. Industrial invention, and its
corresponding division of labour, its resultant
complexity of transports and exchanges,
might be safely left at freedom, to work in
its own way, of the cheapest market, the
cheapest individuals naturally also; and to
the best advantage of favourably situated
people and even of the people; and of other
people, and often peoples, in the long run.
This is Cobdenism in a nutshell.
Politics thus becomes of the simplest; any
successful employer, and not merely a squire
or a barrister, could become an M.P.; for its
art was practically reducible on one side to
an interestingly dramatic appeal for the aid
of the people towards the removal of profitable
privileges of historic character, valued and
maintained by the lords of the barbarians;
and on the other side to the quieter, but even
more remunerative maintenance of reaction
(usually, but not invariably, aided by the
barbarians) against the presumptions of the
populace to share in comforts, and even
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IDEAS AT WAR
luxuries also, and the opposition of any
restrictions to its free exploitation which
might be clamoured for by its tribunes.
With such twofold^ services to liberty, and
with the proceeds from each side as well as
from the main industrial process going to
the increase in wealth, numbers and power
of the middle class, the whole regime was seen
as an operation of natural economic laws,
because duly appreciated by itself as a
" Liberal" one. Elements of more social
character, suitable to this term,, have increasingly appeared, as wealth softened its
possessors, and as with power the sense of
responsibility increased. Still, throughout
this volume we prefer to adhere to the more
fundamental term, Mechanical, for this phase
of Industrial evolution, and its corresponding
politics.
It would be unjust to the MechanicalLiberal system to assume it as of strict
material character. About the opening of
its third generation, and with the appearance
of foreign competition, aesthetic factors were
discovered to be a commercial bait to purchasers. This revelation was commemorated
THE MECHANICAL AGE
97
in a temple of crystal erected for this among
other purposes in 1851, and even by a permanent Museum at South Kensington thereafter. Hence intermittently since that date,
such factors have been considered admissible
in production, so far as rivalry may compel,
and loyalty to mechanical methods allow.
Physical science and even chemistry have
also won a place beside mechanics and steam
in the curriculum of education, so that a
" Science and Art Department" appeared,
and even laboratories in schools and universities. The antidote to these dangerously
unsettling studies was, however, providentially supplied by its own growing bureaucracy, a well-organized system of lectures,
text-books, examinations, and certificates
qualifying to lecture in turn.
Adulteration was interfered with, and
domestic (sanitary) conditions were improved;
and, despite the protests of true Liberals against
these interferences with competition and with
the Englishman's castellated home, both
operations were found profitable to all concerned. Bye-law towns of well-standardized
semi-slum began to extend beyond the slums
H
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IDEAS AT WAR
proper; and their monotony and blankness
aided the rise of a less undisciplined generation. This rising generation was further
taken in hand by the introduction of a system of instruction in the three R's, termed
" Education/' by its large and ever-increasing official. bureaucracy as priesthood, and
teachers as the corresponding " levites." This
improved the supply of the clerkly caste in
quality, still more in quantity. Further
economies resulted accordingly; and " E d u cation " thus stands high among the achievements of Liberalism. Successful beyond
anticipation in destroying the old-fashioned
provincial interest in rural life and its bucolic
occupations, it not only completed the impulsion of the rising generation to the towns,
but provided both their amusement and their
continued anaesthesia through creating demand for the appropriate press, of " pars,"
snippets, and tales adjusted to continue
those of the reading-book. Through arithmetical teaching of an intensity unprecedented
in any subject since the introduction of
letters at the Renaissance, there was successfully popularized the obsession of that potent
THE MECHANICAL AGE
99
money-notation which had been hitherto
the monopoly, on the simple levels, of the
market-place and counting-house, and, in its
higher flights of imagination and effort, of
the ghetto. Hence the resultant diversion of
the mass of workers from their last surviving
rural interest, that in real wages, and their
successful concentration subsequently upon
demands for money-wages, which are so much
more easily directly resisted, so much more
easily outflanked. Individual persons of the
emotional and dramatic temperament requisite for true popular leadership were thus
also for the most part side-tracked into the
fearful j oys of gambling. More unimaginative
and timid intelligences were left to conduct
the endeavours and express the appeals of
the people towards improved conditions, to
their substantial non-success accordingly, and
even their frequent discredit.
CHAPTER V
THE mechanical age, without in any way
ceasing to be mechanical, passes on into the
Neo-Imperial age, in which the countries of
mechanicahzed industry demand extension
of territory, by preference in countries of
thin population, remote and tropical, or inhabited by peoples unskilled in the use of
machinery. It is difficult to date the transition. For England it perhaps took place
fully at the time of the Indian Mutiny, when
the threatened destruction of British dominion
was followed by a marked change in the
attitude of the English mind towards colonies
and dependencies. After the Indian Mutiny
came in logical succession the substitution of
the direct control of the Crown for the rule
of the East India Company, the new title
of Empress of India conferred by Lord
Beaconsfield on Queen Victoria, and the
101
annexation of Cyprus, Burmah and Baluchistan, the veiled annexation of Egypt,
together with the Afghan War, the Soudan
War, and the British share in the partitioning
of Africa.
So far as Europe is concerned, the FrancoPrussian War marks a distinct departure,
for; thereafter France began to build up,
beyond her earlier beginnings in Algeria, her
great African and Asiatic empire, encouraged
in this enterprise by Bismarck, who regarded
colonies as excellent things for other countries
to possess. But the example of France soon
reacted upon Germany, which, though coming
late into the field in the quest, and obtaining an exceptional proportion accordingly of
deserts, of tropical swamps and sub-tropical
wildernesses, was yet bitten all the more
deeply by the expansionist fever.
But the most important spring of this
imperial movement was not in Europe but
in America. The greatest pioneer of the
new order, the James Watt of the new age,
it appears, was a certain Peter Watson,
freight agent in the year 1873 for the Lake
Erie Railway. He it was who first grasped
102
IDEAS AT WAR
the potentialities of " Big Business/' and
invented the industrial device called by Mr.
H. D. Lloyd " the smokeless rebate/' It
was he who first conceived the idea of an
oil monopoly, and arranged that in each
centre of the business of oil refining one
firm should be selected to enter into a secret
combination, and that the various railway
companies which carried crude and refined
oil should not only remit to the firms in the
combination about half the published rates
for carriage, but that they should also hand
over to those firms the same proportion of
the rates which they received from all competitors. In order that this arrangement
might be effected, the presidents of the railways (and their immediate circle), having
at that time an absolute control, were to
receive, according to popular belief, about
half the sum paid in rebates to the combination of oil firms. Thus the shareholders of
the railway companies were to be swindled,
and the competitors of Mr. Watson's combination were to be ruined. This was the
foundation of the Standard Oil Trust, the
beginning of industrial monopolies,
103
It was, however, not merely the possibilities of industrial monopoly and the vast
profits to be obtained therefrom that were
thus first demonstrated in America, but also
the power exercised, particularly in a new
country of great distances, and vast potential wealth, by those who control the railways. It is an American proverb, that those
who own the transportation system of a
country own the country. Though railways
began in England, naturally in a small island
with an extraordinary length of coast line,
numerous ports, and many miles of navigable
rivers, a considerable system of canals, and a
highly developed system of roads already in
existence before the railways came, the full
importance of the railway for exploitation
cannot be completely grasped.
Exactly what the railway system means
varies from country to country : the English
system was mainly devised to link the
provincial towns with London, and it has
in consequences become a great centralizing
agency for the speedy dissemination over
the whole country of London newspapers
and the latest catchy song of the London
104
IDEAS AT WAR
music-halls. In France this centralizing
tendency is even more apparent, and is
accentuated by the more stringent character
of the internal administrative system. In
Germany the railways were developed under
a supervision of Bismarckian type; and to
their strategic qualities their other merits
have been subordinated. This strategic
quality is to be noted, not only in the actual
plan of the lines, but also in the manner in
which they were owned and administered
by the Empire and the constituent States,
so as to yield a great public revenue, which
was, of course, independent of taxation and
therefore free from interference by representative Assemblies.
But it was not until comparatively lately
that the great Trunk Railways of the Old
World began to be planned, and the full
importance of railways as an international
problem began to be realized. Of these
trans-continental lines only one is actually
at wrork, the Trans-Siberian Railway. Its
beginning was marked by the Chino-Japanese
war; its completion by the Russo-Japanese.
The second, the Cape to Cairo line, remains
105
still an aspiration, but it is one fraught with
much international rivalry; and it would
probably be safe to guess that from the
time that the idea was promulgated by
Cecil Rhodes, it has been the fixed intention
of the German Government to prevent its
realization. The third great trunk line, yet
more important in international relations,
is in an intermediate condition; it already
runs from Vienna, where it meets railways
from all the cities of Germany, and, for that
matter, from Belgium, Holland and France,
to Buda-Pesth, thence to Belgrade, Sofia,
Adrianople, Constantinople; and, starting
again on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus,
it traverses much of Anatolia, but, at any
rate up to the outbreak of the war, had
failed to pierce the Taurus mountains. Here,
and in two other places, difficult engineering
works are involved before it can reach the
Euphrates valley, and thence run on to
Bagdad, and through Mesopotamia, to join
the navigable course of the combined
Euphrates and Tigris, and thus reach the
Persian Gulf; from which again it is but a
stage to India. But already, by 1910, Prince
io6
IDEAS AT WAR
Biilow was able to record the success of the
diplomatic policy he had so patiently pursued for many years, whereby the control
of the whole Asiatic portion of this line
was vested in German hands. The rise of
Serbia, of the spirit of Serb independence,
and the prospect of a complete emancipation
of Serbia, with Russian help, from Austrian
domination, because it directly threatened
Berlin control over this line, was a factor in
the present war.
Summarizing the phenomena of the transition from the purely mechanical to the
mechanical-imperialistic age on the economic
side, we may say that the driving force has
been the growing rise of businesses and
increase of manufacturing power. This intensifies competition, and in some industries
gives more importance to monopolies. In
all industries it makes the discovery of
markets a necessary condition of success,
and therefore creates an intense demand for
preferential markets among the leading industrialists of the countries which are foremost in the commercial race. Simultaneously
the tremendously rapid development of manu-
107
facturing power causes the world to be
ransacked for raw material; and here again
the industrial leaders of various countries
are not content merely to buy such raw
material as and where it is extracted by the
natives of undeveloped countries, but wish
to secure a purchasing monopoly by means
of trading and mining concessions, and either
political authority over the countries themselves, or political influence over native
rulers. These two factors in industrial success, preferential markets and command over
the natural resources of undeveloped countries,
being the objects sought for, the control of
railroads is, where attainable, the readiest
means of securing both.
It is extremely doubtful whether as a
business proposition commercial Imperialism
pays. Is not the surer path to commercial
success for any and every European country
to cultivate its own soil scientifically and
effectively, to safeguard the physical wellbeing of its own children, to apply and
extend the available knowledge of the laws
of intellectual and spiritual growth, to encourage invention^ to facilitate the perfecting
io8
IDEAS AT WAR
of processes, and to aim at the highest
possible quality in all the products that it
sells? And if so, will it not be in a safe
position to dispense with the extrinsic advantages obtained by political influences
abroad or by foreign dominion, whether
these are to end in catastrophe, as we hope
and fight to ensure for Germany, or by the
inevitable up-growth of vaster powers upon
more spacious lands, whether in the Empire,
as in Canada, or outside it, like the United
States ? In such a spirit as this, New Zealand
insists that every carcase of mutton exported
from her shores shall be of first-class quality,
and Denmark has developed her system of
agriculture and of rural and technical education to the present world-educating levels.
But, though in international affairs in the
long run honesty may be the best policy,
the advantages to be obtained by various
forms and combinations of force and fraud
are from the purely material and immediate
points of view not to be altogether denied,
just as it is too commonly not without such
means that the dazzling fortunes of multimillionaires have been builded.
109
It is curious that, while Britain contributed—with one exception, viz. the cotton
ginning-machine—all the most important inventions whereby the mechanical age was
introduced, and while at the same time the
British Empire contains stupendous tracts
of undeveloped country, the natural field
for a great imperialized industry, yet she
has not so fully led the van in the development of the mechanical-imperialistic age as
her advantage might suggest. The main
explanation of the fact is to be found in the
education and psychology of the British
governing class. As indicated above, our
inventors and great industrial leaders almost
without exception were drawn from the class
of manual workers, Hargreaves, Crompton,
Arkwright, Watt, Brindley, Stephenson.
In short, the aristocratic class, which till
1832 predominated in the government, and
after 1832 only very slowly yielded its
share in political power to the new industrial
class, lapsed almost completely from examples like that of the Duke of Bridgwater,
and was content to watch the development
of canals, railways, factories, manufactures,
no
IDEAS AT WAR
and a system of world transport by steam,
like Olympian gods, surveying the petty toils
of inferior mortals from a serene height,
despising the nouveaux riches, but taking
care to extract the maximum tribute in
such forms as compensation for land required for railways, and ground-rents for
the land of growing towns. But if the
aristocrat condescended to make indirect
profits from the new industry he did not
condescend to understand it. His system
of education was perpetuated from the Renaissance period, unchanged except that his
study of the classics had become more formal
and pedantic, while his limited stock of
mathematics-had lost touch more and more
with actualities. The principle of compulsory Greek, maintained with special obstinacy
and severity in Oxford, has determined the
curriculum of the Public Schools, and impressed upon the^ higher-class youth the idea
that the purpose of higher education was to
mark a man off as a member of a superior
class by giving him a culture, which was all
the more mysteriously elevating because it
seemed to have little intelligible relation to
in
contemporary life. For how much of Greek
or of Latin either, survives to compensate
him for his massive ignorance of science, of
nature and of social life?
The result of the obstinate tradition of
English upper-class education has been a
severance between social and political leadership on one hand, and industrial leadership
on the other. The industrial leaders of the
country on their side have inclined to regard
higher education as something which unfits
a man for the practical business of life, and
in consequence British industry has been
starved of science and the services of the
higher forms of intelligence. This explains,
among other results, a failure among our
industrial chiefs in the power to understand
the significance of; new inventions and the
value of new processes, even when the originality and inventiveness of the British mind
has triumphed over the absurd obstacles put
in the path of the inventor. Add to this the
scorn of the governing and official class at
once of the practical man of business and
industry on one hand, and of the scientist
on the other. T h e typical example of the
ii2
IDEAS AT WAR
former weakness is the familiar story of the
aniline dyes, the process of making these
being discovered in England, but the industry killed there by the ignorance and
conservatism of English business men. A
typical example of the second is to be found
in the fact that the present war had continued some months before the Government
realized that it needed the services of competent chemists; and then, having discovered
this fact, it offered scientific men who were
willing to serve a wage of thirty shillings per
week! Under such circumstances it has
been impossible in England for science, industry, and government to work in concert
effectively, and this concert is the essence
of success, whether in peace or war, as long
as the mechanical-imperialistic age lasts.
Of the tragic delay in consideration of
science and invention as regards the present
war, much might here be said, and that
strongly; and even of the present tardy
recognition, which is far too much in the
hands of the centralized bureaucracies of
London, who have never invented anything,
and never will, and are not likely to ade-
113
quately revive and make efficient the wasted
and discouraged talent of scientists and
inventors in every great city and university.
The leadership, therefore, of the world
in these matters passed to Germany and
America, with Japan preparing to surpass
America, it may be. Professor Sombart has
recently published a book in which he maintains that, while England is a nation of
shopkeepers, Germany is a nation of heroes.
Such a view tends to make us smile with
the feeling of conscious superiority in the
quality of English over German heroism.
But it is better instead to search for the
element of truth behind such a conception.
We find it in the fact that shopkeeping, and
all that is implied in the widest use of that
word, has been regarded in the current
teaching of political economists, leader-writers
and political speakers in England as an end
in itself, but in Germany as only a means
for the greater enrichment and glorification
of the State. But, while the State has
subordinated industry in Germany to its own
aggrandisement, it has promoted industrial
progress with extraordinary efficiency and
1
ii4
IDEAS AT WAR
success. This is so well known a fact, that
even so striking an example as the thrusting
of the most disagreeable tasks ever imposed
upon a commercial traveller upon Kaiser
Wilhelm, as at Jerusalem or in Morocco, is
so familiar, that it need not be enlarged on
here. What is more worth emphasizing is
the probable interdependence between these
two phenomena—the subordination of industrial interests to the State and the fostering of industry by the State, and the relation
of both these facts to the mastery of the
State by a proud and highly militarized aristocracy, an aristocracy intensively educated,
at any rate, to the extent of the understanding and utilizing of specialists in such subjects
as it conceives to be necessary for efficient
State administration in modern times.
All these phenomena are observable similarly in Japan, where also we observe a proud
aristocracy, intensely modern in its survey,
keenly desirous of obtaining efficiency not
only in naval, military, and governmental
matters, but also in the industrial sciences
and arts; with an hereditary scorn for personal
trade, yet vigorously using the power of the
115
State to push forward commercial enterprises. Here the disquieting thought is suggested that there may be possibly some
parallel between the relations between Japan
and China on the one hand, and Germany
and the British Empire on the other.
We noted above the fact that the coming
of the mechanical age was marked by the
development of peaceful intercourse. All the
hopes, however, which had stimulated that
golden moment of social idealism which
ranged from 1845-6 to 1848, and thence
again renewed itself in 1851, faded away
later, with the coming of that age of NeoImperialism of which Napoleon III was but
the foremost symbol and victim. European
wars followed one another in rapid succession
from 1854 to 1878; and, if thenceforward to
the war of 1914 the European Powers were
nominally at peace among themselves, this
was nothing better than war-peace. International relations were marked by a slowly
growing inflammation, with perpetually increasing armies, and still more increasing
navies; they were full of diplomatic manoeuvring and contests, the results of which
u6
IDEAS AT WAR
were once and again decided by the rattling
of the sabres, by " the mailed fist, the shining
armour/' whose crude diplomatic successes,
and also insuccesses, have led on Germany
to her marvellous display,,her unexpectedly
victorious expansions, that have yet been
but pushing back her doom.
But the mechanical age as it becomes
imperial, simultaneously or speedily evolves
also as the financial age. Few things in
history are more marvellous than this new
development, which is specially characteristic of the last fifty years.
Banking in England has a history of a
little more than two hundred years; the
father of all our Joint Stock Companies, the
East India Company, dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century, but a
hundred years later it was still the only
company the market price of whose stock
was quoted in periodical publications. With
the huge development of the National Debt
during the Napoleonic wars, a great class
of fund-holders was created which drew a
national tribute of close on thirty millions
per annum from the tax-payers, a sum which,
117
in proportion to the tax-paying power of the
community, would be roughly proportional
to three hundred million to-day. At the
same time, numerous country banks were
busily financing improving landlords, who
required capital especially for the expensive
process of getting Enclosure Acts through
Parliament, and for the subsequent process
of hedging the land, and, in many places, of
draining marshes and reclaiming moors, while
turnpike roads were being constructed by
means of the floating of loans on the security
of the tolls, and canals were being made by
joint stock companies.
Early in the nineteenth century, a great
investing class was being created, which later
found its tremendous opportunity in the
building of railways. But the real triumph
of the financial age was made possible in
England by the legalization of limited liability in 1862; and it can scarcely be said
to have been consummated till the time of
the great rage for the conversion of private
businesses to Limited Liability Companies
towards the end of the nineteenth century;
some^of the most striking incidents of which
n8
IDEAS AT WAR
were the Kaffir boom, the cycle boom, the
Westralian boom, the brewrery boom, and
the rubber boom ! At the outbreak of the
war the British investors were believed to
have nearly £3,000,000,000 invested in India
and the Colonies, and somewhat more than
£2,000,000,000 invested in foreign countries,
while French and German foreign investments were both ' believed to amount to
approximately the same sum. Meanwhile,
within the country, the process of contriving
the representation of the assets of all sorts of
businesses by bonds and shares has been
pushed forward to a degree which is brought
home to the mind immediately in glancing
over the financial column of a daily paper.
This process is such a constant part of
our daily experience that its significance
escapes examination. It involves new conditions both numerous and important to our
lives. In the first place, the object which is
increasingly sought after by responsible heads
of businesses is to make their assets fluid and
realizable, so that they can, if necessary,
borrow on the strength of every asset they
possess, whether it be land, buildings, un-
119
expired leases, stock, machinery, debts due
to them, or the anticipation of expected
profits. As business is conducted at the
present time, the power of seizing opportunities for expansion on old lines of enterprise, or of initiation of new lines, depends
very largely upon the facilities which are
provided for the treatment of all these
assets as securities on which to borrow.
Here, again, it is Germany that leads the
van; and we find, on the one hand, that
English industrialists complain of the unfair
advantages which their German rivals obtain
from the German banking system, and, on
the other, that English bankers shake their
heads prophetically over the unsoundness of
the German financial system.
Next we have to note that the new system
involves the use of the shares and debentures
of the businesses, as counters to be gambled
in, and as income-producing entities to be
bought and sold on a valuation based upon
the current expectation of the amount of
income likely to be yielded. In one generation the thrifty peasant or working man,
trained in the hard school of poverty, labori-
IDEAS AT WAR
ously and painfully builds up a small business;
his son develops and expands it to such a
point that he becomes a rich man; his grandsons and granddaughters desire to divide it
between them without destroying its unity,
they turn it into a Limited Liability Company. More capital is desired, the general
public is invited to subscribe, and the original
owners from time to time for various reasons
sell their shares, until the real owners are
a completely heterogeneous body of men,
women, and trustees for minors, scattered
over this and possibly other countries, knowing nothing of one another except by accident,
and utterly unfitted to bear any of the responsibilities which naturally appertain to
the ownership of the business. Further, for
probably every one of the shareholders in
this particular business, his holding is a
matter of relatively small concern, for the
elementary wisdom of the investor is not to
put all his eggs in one basket; if he is a
part owner in this business, which may be,
for example, a boot factory in Leicester, he
is similarly a part owner of railways in India,
the Argentine, Canada and the United States,
121
in breweries, in gold mines in many countries;
and possesses in addition, very likely, the
stock of various municipalities and foreign
countries. Meanwhile the men and women
who work the machine in the Leicester factory
are left to the control and supervision of a
manager, who is paid to extract the greatest
possible profit from their labours, and on a
scale roughly proportioned to his presumed
ability to secure this maximum. The solidarity of feeling and sense of loyalty which
originally may have bound them to the
original employer now naturally evaporates;
and is succeeded by a sense of solidarity with
other manual workers, particularly those of
their own town or their own craft, and by
loyalty to their own trade union and their
own co-operative society. With this is combined a deep and deepening distrust of the
whole propertied and governing class.
But next we have to note the further
consequence—that the old pathway of the
father's success in business now for the son
leads directly onward to a parasitic existence.
The original founder of the business, and his
son who succeeded him, had their minds
122
IDEAS AT WAR
trained and their will-power developed by a
training somewhat narrow, perhaps, but intense and specialized. The new owners who
have followed them are people who are not
called upon as owners to do more than buy
stocks when they are likely to appreciate,
and sell them when they are likely to depreciate : the art of business success is thus
seductively simplified—" Getting to know of
a good thing," and " Being let in on the
ground floor/' Their social manners improve as individuals, they may even surpass
the old personal owner in softness of heart;
but on an average the character of the men
and boys among them seriously deteriorates.
We say especially men and boys, for a larger
proportion of women can withstand the virus
of idle prosperity; but even this proportion
is not enough to save the system.
From the point of view of peace and war,
the special characteristic of the Financial
Age is its cosmopolitanism. France and
England took the lead in this development,
Belgium and Holland came close behind;
but in the matter of the widespread gambling
in stocks America has surpassed all four
123
countries, and in the mobilization of assets,
as has been mentioned, Germany leads. It
is, however, in England and France that the
psychological and other effects of parasitic
wealth have had the longest time in which
to develop. But the people financialized in
the highest degree are, of course, those of
the cosmopolitan nation, the Jews; and one
great effect upon other peoples is also to
cosmopolitanize them. Returning once more
to our illustration of the boot factory, we
notice that the working manufacturer was
probably born in Leicester or some Leicestershire village, that he spoke its dialect, that
he knew, and, in his way, loved his town,
but knew little and cared less probably for
any other. His son was less attached to
Leicester and more to London. His grandsons probably do not live in Leicester at all,
and know nothing real of any town or any
country; their chief tie, even to London,
being the mental inertia and lack of sympathy
which prevents them from effectively learning any foreign language. But in proportion
as this difficulty has been evaded by the
evolution of a specially polyglot class of
124
IDEAS AT WAR
couriers and hotel servants, they have learned
to live in the cosmopolitan hotels of Europe.
Under certain circumstances this financializing of industry has worked for war. The
shareholders in Kaffirs were no doubt finally
responsible for the South African War. One
at least of the causes of the present war is to
be found in the recent practice of German
Junker families, feeling the strain of the
extravagance of the life of the army officer,
of speculating in the shares of Krupps and
other armament firms. Still more important
have been the operations of the financiers,
with the investors behind them, in enabling
the little peasant nations of the south-east
of Europe to carry on war by mortgaging
their future production, and in a definite
degree by selling their people into future
slavery; since war loans mean interest, and
interest heavy taxation, through which a
considerable proportion of the daily labour
of the Greek, Serb, and Bulgarian peasantry
must be given without remuneration to the
service of the bond-holders.
But so far as the advanced countries themselves are concerned, the most important
125
effect hitherto observable is that the development of the Financial Age tends to make
them less capable of carrying on war efficiently. This was observed as long ago
as the seventeenth century in Holland, the
pioneer of modern finance; and is to be
observed at the present time by the lowering
of organizing power and sense of responsibility among our own wealthy class. The
action of the Government has been hampered
by the craving among the members of the
governing class for quickly and easily got
wealth; and this is one cause of the disasters
of the first stage of the war. It is a truly
extraordinary phase of things and of ideas,
that the rich family that gives its sons as
freely as any to the army, cannot yet forbear
from driving a hard bargain with any Government department with which it deals; so
that the drastic taxation of war profits has
to be called for, and even then leaves the
profiteers richer than is good for them or the
world they live in.
It is possible that, as Mr. Angell so conspicuously hopes, still further development
of financialism throughout the world will
126
IDEAS AT WAR
bring as its compensating advantage the
disinclination to make war at all. Thus in
Germany the class that holds investments
in England, France, Belgium, Italy and the
United States must have suffered considerable
losses in consequence of the war. If this
class were to extend greatly, it would afford
a counter-balance to the military class, but
we cannot feel very sanguine of this. Here,
too, we may note the feeling which is revealed
very clearly in German militarist writers,
that in advocating war they are pleading for
the only possible safeguard of the ancient
Spartan virtues of the German people against
the debilitating influences of cosmopolitan
luxury. The assumption is again and again
clearly implied that the youth of the governing class, if he is not kept to drill, to the
parade-ground, to manoeuvres and the study
of the art of slaughter, will relax into effeminacy
and dissipation; and that the mass of the
people will follow his example. But again,
we do not thus " despair of the Republic/'
CHAPTER VI
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS OF THE MECHANICALIMPERIAL-FINANCIAL AGE
ON the material side, what have been the
great accomplishments of the past century?
First, certainly, the transformation of manufactures and transport, through their equipment and new machinery, and the bringing
of the genii of steam and electricity into
profitable subjection. Secondly, the correspondingly progressive economic re-discovery
of the world and domination of it, so that
all natural resources open out to exploitation,
all lands to cropping or to deforestation, all
mineral deposits call for exploration and extraction, all markets beckon to the manufacturer, and all governments come into touch
with the money-lender. Thirdly, how from
all this has proceeded not only the development of appropriate law and administration,
127
128
IDEAS AT WAR
but the expansion of empires, is now dramatically obvious in their present clashing.
Fourthly, furthermore, the new mechanism
of finance, with its subordination of oldfashioned commerce and banking, upon the
regional and local and civic scale, to metropolitan direction, and to imperial, or international uses (yet with gains to persons, to
groups or trusts beyond all former dreams of
avarice)—has established, and goes on effecting, the sharp divorce of wealth from its
former responsibilities, and this with but
small vision of any in the future.
In the present chapter an attempt will be
made to estimate the spiritual significance
of these material changes, for the more we
reflect upon it, the more we see that this
spiritual significance has been far-reaching,
deep, even overwhelming. The mind lives
upon its experiences—daily sights and sounds,
impulses excited, whether fulfilled or thwarted,
actions, whether habitual, subconscious, or
the result of resolve. What we see and hear,
what we feel and do, what we think and
imagine, are all conditioned for us by our
environment in, of course, the widest social
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
129
sense. But if. all this has been or is being
transformed by the Mechanical - ImperialFinancial Age, how deep must be the
stamp upon us !
Return to Comte's generalization, that
human society in every age organizes itself into
four groups, of chiefs and people, emotionals
and intellectuals; we may look for these in
relation to the aspects of the modern town.
We find our Mechanical chiefs—who arose
from the successful inventors like Arkwright
and Watt, the pioneers of new transport
equipment like Stephenson with his railways,
Fulton and Bell with their steamers—continued
by the whole body of master manufacturers
and engineers. Similarly the chiefs who have
pioneered imperial developments leap to the
mind—here creators of industries on an
imperial scale like Rockefeller and Carnegie,
there pioneers like Strathcona and Cecil
Rhodes; and, closely following them, political
leaders like Chamberlain, soldiers like Kitchener, armament-makers like Krupp. More
veiled from public view, but not less influential
or masterful as personalities, are the Financial
chiefs, the Speyers and Morgans, and in
K
130
IDEAS AT WAR
Germany the men who made the Deutsche
Bank; with whom, again, are linked those
leaders of a more modern and technical
efficiency than we can boast—the moving
spirits of the North-German Lloyd and of
the Allgemeine Electricitats-Gesellschaft.
In relation to the world, the tendency of
the age is to treat the habitable globe, in
measure as it becomes accessible, as so much
booty to be captured. Everywhere the search
is for something to be " developed," " realized "—that is, to be sold and dissipated.
Forests are destroyed without being replaced,
as is now being done with our English woods
under stimulus of war needs and prices; birds
of plumage, fur seals, elephants are hunted, too
often towards extinction. All is right as long
as the doing of it yields a profit to somebody.
With regard to human life, in spite of the
rapidly developing science of sanitation, and
of successful efforts to cope with specific
diseases and to reduce death-rates, the
dominant attitude of mind is yet that which
regards at least the great majority of human
beings as instruments of production; and,
while it is concerned for physical well-being,
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
131
scarcely considers the question of the inner
harmony of the soul of the labourer, be he
Indian peasant or Welsh miner, as a question
which need concern practical politics.
Sir Walter Besant, in his Revolt of Man,
attempts to give a picture of English life
as it would be after two or three generations
of rule by woman. He depicts a great
advance towards organic perfection, yet railways and machinery represented only by iron
rust; and under the rule of women he seems
to say that their determination to prevent
accidents, and to prohibit processes noxious
to the health of the worker, would lead to the
suppression of steam transit and steamdriven machinery. The truth in this exaggeration is that it is in fact the natural task
of women to safeguard life. As in simple
societies, we may still broadly classify human
activities under the heads of masculine and
feminine; and on this principle the bent
towards material tasks, and the tendency to
specialize in them, the tendency to think
more of the material end than of the human
instrument, and the tendency to drill and
regiment, are all masculine. In every respect
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IDEAS AT WAR
our modern age, unequalled in mechanical,
imperial and financial manifestations, shows
an excess of masculinity. Corresponding
feminine characteristics are to carry on work
in a more direct and less specialized manner,
even though greater expenditure of labour
be involved, to spend more care upon the
beautifying of the home, more thought upon
the home country, and less upon the acquisition and exploitation of distant possessions;
and above all, with some, to think less of
statistics of imports and exports, less of
taxes and party politics, but more of human
life, its health, and happiness, and so, most
of all, of children and their future. How
all these and similar divergences develop
others, as for the men towards interest in
money wages and freer spending, for the
women towards real wages, family budgets
and saving, may be traced out upon the
economic plane. So in turn on others. Witness the bias of men towards competition and
combat, that of women towards family solidarity and tribal unity, with the present
renewal of the culmination of these, the bulk
of manhood deep in furious war, that of
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
133
womanhood in proud sorrow anc^productive
work, and at the same time in conscious or
instinctive search anew for such elements of
guidance and of consolation as may be
renewed by religion. It has taken both
sexes to make the world, with such civilization as it possesses; neither is free from
blame for its shortcomings, its present breakdown; and both are needed for the vast
reconstruction which must follow,, rising from
conservatism of nature and of life to their
fuller interaction, their higher development.
Deep, even fundamental, in the culture of
an age is the type of human relations which
it tends to accentuate. Two main forms of
organization are possible. Men may be organized from without through fear; or they may
be inspired from within, through fellowship,
love, and loyalty. The Economical-ImperialFinancial Age in each of its three stages has
involved a fresh development of organization,
and in each case the motive which organizers
have relied upon is fear, and habit founded
on fear. Hunger is the drill-sergeant of the
factory owner, and a singularly effective one.
The drill and regimentation of workers of
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IDEAS AT WAR
all orders fas been pushed forward more and
more by employers, until in very self-defence
the workers have proceeded to drill and regiment themselves in trade unions. Social
reformers again, rightly or wrongly, express
perhaps nine-tenths of their schemes for the
amelioration of the condition of the people
in forms which involve further drilling and
regimentation. Yet, at the same time, the
development of the financial system has
created a body of irresponsible owners exempt
from all discipline, but determining the tasks
of those who work, by the whims of their
expenditure.
On questioning men as to their feeling with
regard to their work, we find that, just in
proportion as the work becomes distinctively mechanical, officialized, monetarized, the
work itself becomes abhorrent. Take, first,
the old-world occupations : the agricultural
worker, if he grumbles, grumbles at his
economic conditions; he admits that the
work itself is a pleasure to him. The carpenter says : " A strong man goes out to his
work rejoicing; it is only when he is unfit
that he finds it a pain." But among miners.
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
135
stokers, textile operatives, factory workers,
machine-minders of any sort, the predominant,
well-nigh universal judgment is that the only
pleasure to be derived from work is the
prospect of the week's pay. And so too
much with the shop-assistant, still more the
clerk, and this at most of his many levels.
The evil grows : occupations most naturally
attractive have become poisoned by it—more
and' more with each decade, the old folks
say.
The fundamental reason is probably overspecialization. Specialization is the workers'
side of mechanical progress. The prophet
of the Mechanical Age, Adam Smith, was the
first to sound its praises; indeed, in the judgment of Friedrich List, his pre-eminence
rests upon his discovery of the advantages
of the division of labour. Inventors and
factory-owners have gone on dividing and
sub-dividing processes, and the operative
has suffered an unchecked narrowing of the
scope of the activities by which he earns his
living. At last, such a point has been reached
that when it occurs (still too rarely) to a
sympathetic employer who learns something
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IDEAS AT WAR
of the state of mind produced in a man who,
week in and week out, for his eight hours a
day, repeats one tiny process without end,
to shift his men round, so that each man has
some other minute operation to perform, he
is astonished to find a considerable increase
in his output.
When we look for the expression of mechanical, imperial, and financial society in cultural
forms, whether of theory and exposition or
of emotional and artistic expression, we find
a curious phenomenon which marks out this
modern period from all other ages. It is
generally, in fact almost invariably, the fact
that the great literature of any time expresses
the spirit of its own age and country. Thus
it was with the great Greeks from Homer to
Menander; so too with Rome; so also it
has been with Italy, Spain, Portugal and
France. Similarly with our own country,
from Caedmon onwards, through Spenser,
Shakespeare and Milton, to Pope and Dr.
Johnson, all our great writers were exponents
of the spirit of their age, men who gloried in
its accomplishments. But from the beginning
of the Mechanical Age it has been otherwise
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
137
Our great poets and tale-tellers, who have
made effective appeal to the hearts of the
people, have turned their backs upon their
own time, to seek their inspiration from
unspoiled nature, from early times, or from
other countries; and this whether romantics,
as Byron, Scott and Tennyson, or Ruskin
and Morris, or nature-poets, like Wordsworth, or instinctive classics, like Keats;
c?r else they have expressed the spirit of
revolt; often, of course, both spirits, romantic
and revolutionary as well; witness Shelley,
the early Wordsworth and Coleridge, or the
more mature phase of Byron and the young
Carlyle, with the strongly interested Ruskin
and Morris, Thus it is still with nearly all
our living writers of the foremost rank. But
the believing intellectuals of the Mechanical
Age have been but Adam Smith and his
innumerable less-gifted successors; and its
emotionals have been Mr. Samuel Smiles and
the hustings orator of " progress." When
we pass on to the Imperial Age we do get a
group of imperial historians, headed by
Carlyle in his later phase, Macaulay, and
Seeley, but tailing ofi downwards, For
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IDEAS AT WAR
emotionals we have had Rudyard Kipling,
and lesser men of the same school, to sing the
pride of race and the glory of Empire; while
Germany has been rich in historians, not
without such singers, and still more productive in writers notable both for their
coercive aspirations and their limitations, as
notably in Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
When, however, we come to the Financial
Age, Seeley's comprehensive grasp and Kipling's life and passion alike fail us. We have
to look for its intellectual expression in the
articles in the Financial Press and financial
pages of the general Press, no doubt often
shrewd and admirably informed. But, for
its appeal to the imagination and the emotions,
what have we beyond those impassioned
scribes who write the prospectuses of new
companies ? Or those minor prophets of
the snippety Press who promise us something
for nothing beyond participation in the latest
and easiest competition among their subscribers ?
Turning to the Arts, and first to the great
art of architecture, the Mechanical Age has
accomplished the creation of various new and
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
139
striking forms, no doubt as distinctive in their
way as were the Parthenon or the Gothic
cathedral. First, we had the warehouse and
factory, the railway station, each at its best
built with the same sincerity and confidence
of exact rightness as was in its time the
Norman castle. Then the coming of the
Imperial and Bureaucratic Age was marked
by the building not only of barracks, but of
new and capacious gaols, hygienic after their
fashion, aiming at a certain order and cleanliness and respectability. Clearly planned
cloisters, these gaols, each with its corridors,
its rows of solitary cells, its exercise yard :
a strong contrast to the nondescript buildings in which prisoners were huddled together
in previous times. Next followed the Board
Schools, in which children are taught the
three R's on wholesale principles—Reading,
to satisfy the liberal and democratic demands
of the mechanical and industrial revolution;
'Riting, to furnish it with cheaper clerks,
and by and by to meet the calls of bureaucracy also, for.its ever-multiplying officialism;
while 'Rithmetic, most important study of all,
not only meets the modest mathematical
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IDEAS AT WAR
requirements of the two dispensations, but,
by initiating us to potent notation of money,
admits us to at least' the outer courts of that
Temple of Finance which gives its centre to
the modern " City," and even a new meaning
to that once sacred name. Returning, however, to the planning of these four typeinstitutions of the modern order—see how in
the school design, elements derived from
the factory, barrack and gaol are apparent,
most gaol-like, for example, being the asphalte
playground surrounded by its unclimbable
walls. And so for each of the others : the
harmony of the four castes is complete, the
people in the factory, the future chiefs going
to school. If intellectuals proper be few, we
have at any rate in the cellular prison a true
cloister of solitude, provided for instruction
and meditation, for penance, repentance and
new resolve. Though not always successful
in producing these, but their opposites, its
moral, intellectual and spiritual purpose, as
the cloister (and to a considerable extent
also the inquisition) of the Protestant world,
may be the more easily realized when we
recall the main founder and organizer, Sir
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
141
Edmund Ducane, as also President of the
Huguenot Society in England. So, too, though
effective emotionals, artists, dramatists,
preachers, or leaders be few, we have always
the soldiers in their barracks; reflecting thus,
we find that the impulse which makes so
many long for more and more of this type of
institution and culture is more easily understood.
Within our cities it is interesting to notice
the struggle for existence among different
types of business in competition for the most
costly sities; the public-house, at first so
prominent everywhere, is in great cities
elbowed out by the draper's shop. Shops,
again, give way to banks and insurance
offices, which by monopolizing the most
commanding sites on the busiest thoroughfares, and using the most costly methods
and styles of building, proclaim the present
dominance of finance; while in the capitals
the Government Offices, since the coming
of the Imperial Age, have also been blossoming into kindred magnitude and splendour—
once more reviving, though with less refinement, the tradition of the great mansions of
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IDEAS AT WAR
the despots of the Italian Renaissance, with
their massive and costly walling, their proud
and vigilant balconies, their strong and
masterful faces frowning down from every
keystone upon those entering below. Upon
the narrow site of Manhattan Island, with its
consequent supercongestion of business, arises
a new type of construction, the many-storied
skyscraper with its internal steel frame, as
yet too much disguised by stone-veneering
of more or less traditional character, yet by
sheer loftiness and magnitude creating an
unparalleled city of towers, with a weird
beauty of its own.
Turning to domestic architecture, here
also we find a characteristic new type marked
by the impress of its age. The eighteenth
century had seen the creation of the " select
residential neighbourhood" on lines determined by a compromise between the taste
of English territorial magnates and that
of older Italian urban grandees, as notably
in Bloomsbury, the squares of which recall
at once the village greens and the mansion
parks of rural England, yet with something
of the tradition of the Imperial Fora also.
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
143
Through the migration of the well-to-do to
such new and exclusive quarters, there is
created the most prominent feature of the
town of the nineteenth century, the exclusively
working-class quarter. Originally these working-class quarters were the cast-off houses
of the rich, left to be overcrowded and
sub-divided into slums, as so notably in
Dublin to this day. But after the railroadizing of the world was well in hand, with its
stimulus to industries, its new demand for
strength and skill, and the uplift of money
wages, there has gone on for two dreary
generations the building of the working-class
quarters and suburbs, each a grim area of
monotonous, mean streets with their cramped
backyards, at best their apologies for gardens,
and always their riotous expenditure upon
macadamized roads; for in an unparalleled
mileage and acreage of these, far more was
spent, under bye-laws intended to be both
sanitary and utilitarian, than is needed to
create an equivalent area of Garden Village.
In all this building do we find the architect ?
He, like the poet, was left unemployed, and
in revolt. He was not asked to design either
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IDEAS AT WAR
the factory or the cottage; and so for a time
not only fell out of employment, but wellnigh died out—only reviving with the Romantic Movement, or the reaction from it,
but even now far from restored to the mastership he had enjoyed for centuries. At this
day he is but partially recovering his all but
lost traditions, and this again too often without adequate comprehension of modern conditions and requirements; so that when he
gets employment, his function is too often
to introduce meretricious ornament, or to
induce client and builder to sacrifice what is
really wanted for internal use and convenience
to some external similitude to the architectural
styles of other ages. Thus, architect or no
architect, our confused and colossal cities
have been built, and the covering of the earth
with structures of brick and stone, steel and
cement, for the most part not less expressive of mechanical, imperial and financial
limitations, than of powers, proceeds
rapidly.
Painting, again, with the coming of the
Mechanical Age, acquired new functions, and
intensified some of its activities. It is not
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
145
without significance that the great English
landscape-painters appeared contemporaneously with the factory town. From such a
painter's point of view the function of the
factory town is to make the place where men
live unspeakably ugly, but to leave untouched
some spots where nature's beauty not only
remains uncontaminated, but is by contrast
more vividly realized than ever before; then
the painter, by his canvas in its frame hung
upon your walls, can open a " magic casement " to your living-room, which will not
look into the scene you know and loathe,
which meets you out of doors, but far away
on the mountain or the sea. The painter,
moreover, sends us out into the world with
eyes which have caught something of his own
openness; he has thus revived the " grand
t o u r " and popularized it throughout every
land, so that to him summer resort and
watering-place, railway system and tourist
agent also owe no little of their greatness.
And for the many for whom the painter's
oils are too expensive, there are cheap
reproductions without end, down to processblock and picture-postcard.
L
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IDEAS AT WAR
Curious again is it, and obviously not
without significance, that this age should
see the revival of great sculpture, and this
beyond the realistic portrait waxworks of
our grandfathers' time, or the colder classical
or would-be rhetorical and official sculpture
of the past generation; for Rodin marks a
new departure, as did Phidias or Michael
Angelo. For sculpture is the analogue in
plastic art to tragedy; the theme of tragedy
is the struggle of the soul of man against a
daemonic environment—and must we not say
that in no age more than the present has that
struggle been renewed with greater intensity ?
Is not such sculpture like the great music in
which the past century has been so rich,
partly the retreat and rebound of the spirit
from the coarsened modern environment,
partly the anticipation and the shaping forth
to us of the ideals of a better and coming
time?
If we turn to the most elemental and
primitive of arts, to those which arise spontaneously among savages of every clime—the
arts of Dance and Song—here also we see the
frankest expression of our age, the thirst for
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
147
relief and recreation from the gloom, in the
music-hall steps and ditties that spread with
such wonderful certainty and speed from
London to Land's End, thus proving the
directness of their appeal to personal instincts.
After a long lapse, people are searching out
the old folk-songs, and trying, not without
some success, to interest youth and children
in them; but the " Raggle Taggle Gypsies "
never caught on like, " Has any one here seen
K e l l y ? " Why?
Of all artistic impulses and instincts,
beyond doubt the deepest and most powerful
are those which seek expression in dance.
The struggle of renewing art with the deterioration and debasement of the times is now less
hopeless than it has long seemed; and with
such social and civic awakening as that expressed in books like Jane Adams' Spirit of
Youth and the City Streets, its victory may
come sooner than we think. There are two
phases of dancing, that in which the people
dance themselves—those, at least, who are
young enough—and that in which they come
to see dancing admirably performed by
experts. Yet our two great modern dances
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IDEAS AT WAR
are not generally recognized as such; for,
again, as in early societies, both are masculine.
One is called Association Football; and it
appeals at once to the boys, who perform in
every yard and street, and to the mass of
men of all ages, who crowd in their thousands
to admire the swiftness and agility, the
energy and endurance, the concerted movement, yet vivid initiative, in permutations of
unending variety.
The other dance, of course, is War-dance,
modern gymnastics and drill alike, increasingly recovering more and more of this
tradition of simpler and earlier peoples, by
help of which it is open to any active-minded
instructor to go in his turn as far beyond
Swedish gymnastics as this has done beyond
Prussian goose-step, not to speak of the
heart-disease drill in which the British Army
won an evil pre-eminence. Of drill and gymnastics as factors of war, not only preparing
for defence, but for offence also, much might
here be said. For the barrack-yard playgrounds to which the childhood and youth of
the nineteenth century have been condemned
are the perfected environment for the evils of
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS
149
militarism, each a garden of competitive
struggle and war more perfect in its way
than anything as yet realized in the returning
school-garden of constructive peace. Even
in such things as the vogue of Football, or
in the less ecstatic joys of treating or drinking
at public-house bars, of betting at horse-races,
we see in the urban working-man the same
emotional attitude towards the spirit of the
age as in the poet or artist. Everywhere the
same notes are alternatively sounded, the
craving to escape, the spirit of revolt. But
many are too enmeshed to escape, too hopeless to revolt; they seek relief in laughter.
When Pandora let the evils out from her box,
there remained at the bottom Hope. Does
this also fail and fade, it is helped out by
Humour. So we find humour of a sort the
dominant note of the poorer London of to-day,
as of Chicago, as of Ireland after the Famine.
Cockney humour is difficult to analyse; but
in it there is a sort of stoical pride in viewing
what is sordid and ugly and painful without
blinking, and managing to get a jeer out of it,
a touch of kindliness happily as well. Here
lay the popular appeal of Dickens' Human
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IDEAS AT WAR
Comedy of London; but there are signs in
too many great capitals of a growing bitterness since his time—and this again is an
element not to be forgotten in analysing out
the factors of war.
CHAPTER VII
THE MATERIALS OF RECONSTRUCTION
WHAT,
and wherewith, shall we recon-
struct ?
Just as in the beginning of the war there
was much wild talk about the speedy financial
exhaustion of Germany, so since then there
has been frequent and grim anticipation of
an appalling condition among the belligerents
of after-war poverty, debt, and general bankruptcy. If such fears be reasonable, the
problem of reconstruction would be essentially a slow struggling back from such poverty
to the level of material productivity and comfort which the world had previously attained.
But we must regard all such forecasts with
discrimination, and seek out the economic
fundamentals of the situation for ourselves.
It is, moreover, an old observation that after
war even a defeated belligerent may recover
151
152
IDEAS AT WAR
with unexpected rapidity; as so notably
France after 1870-71. Why is this?
What are the forces by which material
wealth is produced? Let us take them in
order, and consider to what extent war such
as we are experiencing, prolonged up to
(say) three years, would be likely to impair
them. First, there are the materials and the
energies of nature; the sunshine and the
rain, the fertility of the soil, the stores of
metals, coals, oil and stone buried in the
earth, the vegetation upon the land, and the
fish in the sea. The effect of three years'
war upon these is in most respects precisely
nothing. True, forests may have been destroyed in some places, and mineral wealth
in coal, oil and metals torn out of the earth
and dissipated, or put into forms useless for
reproductive purposes; but, on the whole,
the dissipation of such things will not be
much greater during three years' war than
three years of such peace as preceded the
war.
We come next to the loss of life. This is
more serious by far; yet it is extraordinarily
small in comparison with human fertility.
MATERIALS OF RECONSTRUCTION 153
The loss of life for all the Allies engaged is
certainly less in proportion than that for
Germany; and whatever figure may be
established as the correct one due to the
war in Germany for the first year, it was
probably less than the 800,000, which is the
normal annual excess of births over deaths
of that country. True, while the excess of
births over deaths in any one year is divided
between the two sexes, with a slight preponderance on the female side, the loss of life
through the war is preponderatingly male.
Further, the loss of these men as potential
fathers must also be taken into account.
The quality of the losses by death is also
sorrowful, since the fallen are ordinarily
young men at the maximum of working
power; hence a corresponding deterioration
of the average working capacity of the
population. We must also consider a further
deterioration, which is even more serious, in
the results of wounds and disease, which
will leave great numbers of men incapable
of ordinary efficiency of labour, and a yet
greater number with their powers or their
expectation of life, or both, somewhat
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IDEAS AT WAR
impaired. Yet all these losses, great as they
are, may well be balanced by that ordinary
increase in productive power of a very few
years of peace, which is commonly estimated
by economists in such terms as that of the
normal increase of the horse-power of engines
in use, and by the normal rate of improvement in the efficiency of such engines.
If we turn now to material capital, namely
the world's working equipment, of buildings,
machinery, etc., used for material purposes,
of railways and ships, of working horses and
cattle, and also of stocks of commodities in
process of consumption, we are faced with a
considerable destruction of these, as especially
in Poland, Serbia, Belgium, Northern France
and Roumania. The amount of destruction
regarded locally is appalling; but, if we look
away from the actual scene of the most
stubborn fighting and consider the total area
of the States engaged in the war, it may be
doubted whether the actual amount of productive plant and materials destroyed be so
much more than can be replaced without
exhausting effort by the belligerent Powers
within an equal period of peace. During
recent years England is supposed to have
annually invested about £200,000,000 per
annum in the Colonies, India and foreign
countries, and perhaps an equal sum at
home; and this in spite of an enormous
expenditure on luxuries and follies, which is
at present being substantially reduced. It
is even conceivable that a valuation of all
the productive capital in the world, made
on the day the German troops crossed the
Belgian frontier, and another on the day of
recrossing, might show no net reduction, the
normal increase in the areas not directly
affected counterbalancing the ravage; since
definite advances, of inventions and economics,
are being made meanwhile. We may note
especially the great increase in labour-saving
tools introduced into the munition factories
ol the belligerent countries, and available
thereafter for the industries of peace.
The Belgian and North Frenchman, the
Serbian, the Pole and the Roumanian may
here say : " What is the world's wealth to
us, if we be ruined? " Yet this economic
presentment has no such callous purpose,
but the very converse—that of showing that
156
IDEAS AT WAR
the world's rich harvests may well afford
them speedy, full and generous help to rebuild. Also we do freely admit that in this
war much has been violated and destroyed
that can never be restored to humanity.
The material capital of the world, however,
is of less importance than its immaterial
capital. By far the most important part of
the wealth possessed at. any moment is the
store of knowledge, with, of course, the skill
to apply it. The latter is being lost, and to
a very appreciable extent, but is also being
rapidly replaced, and even diffused, though
not so freely as... the former. If men as a
result of the fighting were to lose all knowledge and memory of the principles of the
dynamo or the steam-engine (and such things
seem to have taken place through past wars),
then capital would be destroyed in reality;
but, as a matter of fact, war tends to create
a vastly quickened appreciation of the value
of mechanical knowledge and invention, and
the material value of the effect thus attained
may be stupendous. For example, a banker
estimated that the introduction of the eucalyptus tree into Mexico by the French under
Napoleon III, in a dozen years counterbalanced the loss caused by the terrible civil
war that followed upon that disastrous
expedition. Or, again, we may note that,
while the armies have been making deserts,
Professor Bottomley in King's College has
been pushing forward his researches into the
conditions of plant-growth with results which
promise a new and wonderful era for intensive culture, and this largely through utilization of the peat mosses which have been
hitherto such comparatively unproductive
assets of all the northern Powers. In many
ways, then, war acts as a stimulus to inventors, and the best of their results substantially help to pay for it. The increased
respect for German efficiency in scientific
and technical knowledge is plainly reacting
upon all other countries; arousing Russia,
for instance, from her backwardness, and
us from our too-easy self-satisfaction and
habitual reliance upon our former leadership.
The fifth of the great factors is Organization. With regard to this factor it is impossible to forecast the effect of the war, save
that here, again, the example of Germany is
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IDEAS AT WAR
stimulating us—only too much, it may be.
Will there be on the whole more or less of
co-operation throughout the world? On the
one hand it is clear that within each country
war tends to bring people together. Strikes
and lock-outs are less numerous; people
think more of getting the job done, and less
of securing the maximum reward for taking
part in the doing. Voluntary organization,
too, is quickened; women, as well as men,
who previously politely ignored one another's
existence, become fellow-workers. New resources in intelligence and initiative and
good-will are continually being discovered.
The value of all this does not end when the
war is over. Further, among the countries
which are allies in war, a far closer contact
and co-operation develops: thus the permanent gain which we in particular may
reap from the war through closer touch with
France, Russia and Italy, and from more
adequate contact with their languages, cannot
be adequately measured on its material side.
True, it may be asked : " Will not all these
advantages be neutralized, and more than
neutralized, by an increase of hatred and
mistrust lasting on after the conclusion of
peace between the two hostile Alliances? "
A cool and dispassioned view of the probabilities should be taken. From Germany,
a few days before this passage was written,
the report came that Lissauer, the author of
the " Hymn of H a t e / ' had partially repudiated the sentiments expressed in it; and
this is only one of many signs tending in a
similar direction. And even the vogue of
the " Hymn of Hate " was not in itself such
a very discouraging symptom. The idea expressed was that there should be no hatred
among Germans towards Belgium, France
and Russia, only towards England, and that
this hatred towards England was the German
answer to the supposed crime of the British
people and Government in plotting and preparing the war. If the accusation had been
as true as Lissauer and his compatriots had
persuaded themselves that it was, the excess
of hate, if somewhat hysterical, would not
have been unnatural. In the British Isles
the determination to carry the war through
to a victorious conclusion was singularly
uncontaminated by hatred for Germans,
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IDEAS AT WAR
Austrians or Turks. The ordinary man had
simply come, with sincere regret, to the
conclusion that the Junker caste had to be
compelled to keep the peace, and had to be
taught, by severe experience, to prefer peace
to war, though later, to be sure, he acquired
disgust and contempt for German disregard
of the rules of the game.
It would be too sanguine to hope for such
a speedy development of after-war friendship between. the Allies and Germany as that
which followed in 1815 between England and
France, although as regards Austrians, Hungarians and Turks this is not impossible. The
methods of warfare employed by Germany
have outraged the feelings of humanity too
deeply. It is a true saying that, whatever
be the ineffectiveness of International Law in
preventing war, or of Hague Conventions in
regulating it, they both at any rate help
nations to live together again when the war
is over. But even here we have to recognize
that the peculiarity of Germany lies in her
success in attaining ]p.er end rather than in
her choice of end. Other States have endeavoured to create in their populations a
sense of supreme obligation towards the
State; other States have been slow to admit
and still slower to act upon any sense of
obligation to humanity as a whole; other
States have been materialistic in their aims
and cynical in their choice of means. Germany, or rather Prussia, has actually converted Germans into fanatical State-idolators;
she has definitely repudiated the idea that
there exists anything above the State; she
has glorified collective materialism as " RealPolitik "; she has done thoroughly the evil
that all others have done but half-heartedly.
But, because she has deliberately set before
herself the ideal of searching out all implements and methods of action which can help
the State to attain victory, and of using them
without scruple, because she has more completely than others enslaved the souls of her
own people and terrorized others, it does not
follow that the German people have a so
much greater or more permanent dose of
original sin than others. To us it certainly
appears that Germany, possessing the great
gift of thoroughness, has applied it in being
foremost in the devil-worship of the MachiaM
162
IDEAS AT WAR
vellian (and Frederician) tradition; yet let a
new intellectual impulse, a more vital and
moral political philosophy emerge from the
war, and she too may turn in a new and
more hopeful direction, and with a transformed ambition, to help to lead the world
instead of driving it.
Of this, however, we can have no certainty; and we cannot put aside the fear
that international distrusts (and the interests
which utilize them) will impose on us and
other States greater burdens of armaments
than they have hitheto borne in times of
peace. This is the most uncertain feature
in the economic forecast. Is there any possibility of getting round the difficulty, supposing it is found to be a real one? For
Britain the problem may perhaps crystallize
round the question of compulsory military
service. If so, the country will be more and
more sharply split into two new parties
violently struggling for and against Conscription. Can a via media be found by
each recognizing the best elements pf the
other's case, that is, the need of social solidarity of sacrifice, yet of individual liberty
MAf ERIALS OF RECONSTRUCTION 163
also, even to define the best and fullest ways
of giving this? Again, a via media may be
found in practice also, and both parties
brought to an agreement, as notably by the
further development and recognition of the
many useful voluntary services created
towards the carrying on of the war, and
their after-war increase. Is it not possible
to substitute for the proposal of compulsory
military service that of universal half-time
education for all boys between the ages of
fourteen and seventeen, not in drill only,
or even primarily, but in those elemental
arts, and skilled crafts which are found to
be essential for efficiency in peace and war
alike? The country would gain, not lose,
by the withdrawal of youth from industrial
labour for half the working hours imposed
on adults. The sense of reality brought into
their education would make it vital; their
value as workers and citizens in time of peace
would be multiplied; and, if the time of
national emergency recur, they would spring
to arms as volunteers needing but brief additional training. What is learnt between the
ages of fourteen and eighteen is learnt
164
IDEAS AT WAR
quickly, and is not easily forgotten. By this
means, again, the State would become
powerful for defence, which is what the
conscriptionists desire, without becoming proportionately powerful for offence, or for
internal control, which things are what the
anti-conscriptionists dread. In yet simpler
terms, let us make Baden Powell our Education Minister, yet with emphasis in his
mandate upon that more pacific and constructive side of boy-scouting, which is its
increasingly vital and important factor, even
for military efficiency itself. No blunder is
more complete or deeply rooted than the
notion that drill, or even shooting, is the
essential preparation for soldiering. To exist
and work in touch with nature, to labour in
touch alike with arts and sciences, and with
all these co-ordinated and vitalized by social
service, is an education which fits men for
living for their country, an education which
would both make them readier to risk dying
for it, and also less in danger of merely
being killed on account of its shortcomings
as regards their upbringing, in these days a
far too common fate. Experiments in this
vital education have long been making;
indeed, every active boy has tried at times
to make them for himself; and here as elsewhere but little of the too customary centralizing organization is needed to develop
these to fuller efficiency and more public
purpose. The Boy Scout movement is fundamentally a naturalistic movement, not a
military one. It is the element of SetonThompson in Baden Powell more than that
of a Colonel in Seton-Thompson which has
made the success of this movement on both
sides of the Atlantic. More thoughtful educators than either have also given attention
and even successful experiment to this line
of education, as notably William James,
Stanley Hall, and Dewey in the United
States; while on this side not a few successful examples of the applications of such
practical education might be given.
Summing up this survey, and taking all
the factors in the production of wealth
together, we see no reason for anticipating
that their net efficiency will be impaired to
anything like the extent which so many
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IDEAS AT WAR
dread; and, if only fresh international war
can be avoided, and internal conflict minimized,
the control already possessed by humanity
over the secrets and powers of nature is such
as to make possible a state of material wellbeing beyond the scope of present-day memory,
or even of imagination.
We must next consider the possibility that
the nation, though not crippled by poverty,
may be crippled by debt. -Though the resources for the production of wealth were
ample, they might fail to be utilized, through
the burden of interest, rent and taxation
being greater than industry can bear. It is
well known that the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars was followed by a period of distress in England far beyond any experienced
during the war, or within the memory of
living men. The circumstances of that distress are not very likely to be paralleled, if
only by reason of the greater accumulation
and diffusion of knowledge for dealing with
such situations. The question of good-will
in the application of such knowledge is a
more difficult anticipation.
CHAPTER VIII
RECONSTRUCTION IN RUINED AREAS
war is distinguished from all previous
wars by the calculated ferocity with which
every available method, new and old, has
been utilized for the destruction of human
life; it has been no less conspicuous for the
manner in which the protection and salvation of lives has evoked strenuous and
organized effort. Never before have the
ravage^ of disease among soldiers borne so
small a ratio to the numbers killed by the
enemy. Immediately the war began, donations were poured forth into funds for relieving war-distress within the country in
anticipation of economic consequences which
did not result. What is much more important is the international response that came
to the cry for help from Belgium and other
countries exposed to the full fury of war;
and no sooner were the armies of Germany
THIS
167
i68
IDEAS AT WAR
turned back from the River Aisne than the
Society of Friends was at work in the recovered area, building huts, providing seeds,
making possible some resumption of normal
life and agricultural activity. With that
experience there is also the possible beginning of what we may call the science and
art of reconstruction.
It is one of the terrible effects of war that
the mind refuses to grasp the human relation
of the events reported in the newspapers.
We hear, for example, that Warsaw has been
captured; we think of it as a fortress, as a
railway junction, as the crossing-place of the
Vistula, as a salient in the Russian line, and
estimate its military importance on such
bases as these : we forget to think of its
hundreds of thousands of men, women and
children, and their probable hardships and
their certain mental agony. As long as the
issue was in the balance this attitude of
mind was probably inevitable, but sooner or
later we see the whole situation with other
eyes, with the resultant awakening of the
world to the urgency and greatness of the
task of reconstruction.
RUINED AREAS
169
" What hand and brain went ever paired ? "
asks Browning. Such is the curse of overspecialization which has come upon the
world that we have on the one hand our
scientific men who cannot act, and on the
other our active men who cannot think.
With all their defects, the practical men who
ignore science, but who go straight at the
actual situation and do something, are less
futile than the scientific men who cannot
act. Yet if it were possible—and it should
be possible—how much better it would be
that hearts, heads and hands should be
equally enlisted, and the action prompted by
feeling be guided and not retarded by careful
thought.
The rudimentary beginnings of the mobilization of science and invention attempted
by the Government is capable of vast extension and application to peace. Similarly, war
brought back into activity men who had
retired into the cloisters of universities or
the repose of private life. Reconstruction
also makes its call upon the veterans. One
class peculiarly able to do great service is the
large number of administrators experienced
170
IDEAS AT WAR
in government, engineering and sanitation, who have returned from India and
foreign colonies, who usually doze or grumble
in London clubs, or potter about golf links.
These men have experience in dealing with
disaster, famine and pestilence. Repeatedly
they have thrown aside the routine in which
they are ordinarily submerged and quitted
themselves like men in actual struggles of
relief and reorganization. Another class to
which the Government, late in the day, made
some appeal, was that of the agriculturists.
Their labourers were taken from them, and
they were urged to increase their production
of food. The expert agriculturist should be
a great force in the work of reconstruction.
With all its faults—and they are many—
British agriculture under landlord guidance
is at least supreme in the world in the breeding of stock, and in this field even Belgium
has much to learn from England, and Poland
might reap incalculable benefits.
Reconstruction, however, is a matter of
detail. It calls not only for wide plans and
assertive action, but also for the particular
care of this little village and that little
RUINED AREAS
171
hamlet. Miss Kathleen Burke makes her
appeal to search out capable women who are
in a position to throw themselves into this
work, and it is one that peculiarly calls for
the direct, instinctive organizing power of
women, which is developed by the management of a household. The time may be ripe
for a new Jeanne d'Arc, a new Saint Theresa,
a new Florence Nightingale. Florence Nightingale did not receive any summons from the
War Office, but she carried her lamp so fearlessly into it that it illuminated its dusky
labyrinth. Saint Theresa, visiting a stricken
city, said to the citizens : " You need a
hospital, and here are two pennies." And
they built it.
Can the student of sociology throw any
special light upon the problem of reconstruction? First, this suggestion—that the practical man, the administrator, the agriculturist,
and the benevolent who write cheques, all
tend to lay too much stress upon the material
and too little upon the psychical side of the
task. It is the searing of the memory, the
dragging down of character, which is the most
terrible side of the destruction of war ; it is
172
IDEAS AT WAR
to deal with this side of the problem that the
most thoughtful effort is required. Professor
Freud of Vienna, who has given a great new
advance to the science of psychology, has
shown what an enormous amount of the evil
and unhappiness of life proceeds from old
shocks experienced in childhood, usually
sunken altogether from conscious memory,
yet leading to hysteria, in extreme cases to
insanity, but in most cases to mental and
moral deterioration which is not recognized
as disease. We may divide all human beings
into those who have been happy children
and those who have not; to have had a
happy childhood is the first condition of an
efficient and healthy life.
Hence the first great clue to the problem
of reconstruction in ruined areas is in the care
of the children : some who have been unconscious of the tragedy through which they have
passed, and some who have sustained some
deep and serious shock. For the elders the
great possible source of relief and consolation which is available is the effort to recover
the world in their successors and to improve
it for them. For the women especially who
RUINED AREAS
173
have suffered through the war, the great
remedy is to form some new pact with life.
Hence we have, to begin with, the study of
childhood and effective natural education.
Solomon sent the sluggard to the ant; we
should send the Board of Education to watch
the mother-bird teaching her nestlings to
fly, and the mother-otter teaching her young
to swim. Natural play, which is natural
education, is always related to adult activity.
The true elementary school is " helping
mother/' the true secondary school, " helping f a t h e r " ; whereas many a school of
handicraft effectively discourages you from
ever wishing to make a box, and Darwin
became a scientist because he was a truant
at Edinburgh and Cambridge. The effective
artists are those who have broken with the
schools, the ineffective, most often, those
who have there succeeded. And, while the
sufferings of childhood bear evil fruit in the
adult and future generations, yet even from
poverty endured in childhood there may
come strange new stimulus to thought.
Le Play was one of the founders of geography
and sociology, the master craftsman of his
174
IDEAS AT WAR
time, the supreme miner, the organizer of
the first Paris Exhibition, the master interpreter of the industries of the world; and
the original stimulus that started him on his
career was the intense poverty of his youth,
which drove him to the elementary savage
industry of collecting berries for food, and
so gave him that unrivalled vividness of
grasp of the most elementary of economic
and geographical facts.
The second key idea that sociology can
offer may be put as follows : Life seen from
the Darwinian, which is the mechanical,
point of view, is regarded as the environment acting upon the organism. Applied to
human life we can express this in the formula—
Place -> Work -> Folk.
What exists in the district in which people
live—seas, mountains, plains, forests and the
like—determine what occupations are possible, and the occupations demand certain
qualities in the people following them, and
by natural selection enforce the attainment
of such qualities upon the people. That is
true, but it is only half the truth; and the
RUINED AREAS
175
other half of the truth, which is the one
that it is even more important for us to
bear in mind, is expressed by the reversal of
the formula, reading i t Folk -> Work -> Place.
For the people can determine what they will
be, by choosing what they will do, and having
chosen their work, they can fashion the place;
they can mould the environment in harmony
with their ideals.
On this principle the Dutch say : " God
made the sea, we made the land/' When,
after the war in which Denmark was crushed
under the heel of Prussia, Bishop Grundtvig
took up the work of reconstruction, he began
at the right end. He did not start by making
butter, though every one who eats a pound
of Danish butter is a debtor to him; he
began by renewing the vital spirit of the
people of Denmark through their art and
history and their ancient Sagas and Epics;
he made them feel that they counted for
something in the world, and thus in the
first place he put fresh heart into the people.
Next he set to work to give them fresh
176
IDEAS AT WAR
intelligence; he organized schools for the
grown-ups, schools which are now famous
throughout the world, and keenly valued
by all the people of Denmark, schools which
have attained not only the original German
ideal of " Lehren Freiheit, Lernen Freiheit,"
but which also are vitally related to the
lives of the people who study in them. The
inspirited hearts of the people and their
enlightened heads gave a new efficiency to
their hands, and Denmark embarked upon a
definite policy of draining her marshes, cultivating her heaths, renewing her wastes,
establishing her peasantry, and as the inevitable result captured the English market
for butter and eggs. To the practical man
this result at least seems an important
achievement. The butter dealer would be
incredulous if you told him that the first
step was the writing of new songs based
upon the prehistoric Edda, but as an actual
and undeniable fact it was so.
With all the merits of the Society of
Friends, which gives itself to the work of
reconstruction, it is open to this criticism,
that they are somewhat blinded by too
RUINED AREAS
177
easy-going middle-class British prosperity. In
their actual achievements and their plans
one misses the note of the tocsin or carillon,
the appeal to the deeper emotions. It is a
fundamental mistake; it is in fact the completion of the tragedy of war, if we aim at
reconstruction after the war on a lower level
than the life before the war. Because people
are thrown back upon primary needs and
have to tackle afresh elementary tasks, that
is the very reason why, armed with the
painfully acquired knowledge of past ages,
they should make a fresh start and resolve
to achieve something that will make the
subsequent peace even more memorable than
the war. This is the spirit which is animating, no doubt amongst many others, at least
the Belgian architects. Plans worked out in
exile in London for a new and more admirable
Belgium, a new and greater Antwerp, may
have a broadness and clearness of aim that
it is probable they would never have attained
but for the war.
The first decisive note of the war was the
opening move against Serbia, and the second
the violation of Belgium. Each was a great
N
178
IDEAS AT WAR
national issue; and together they clearly
brought out the main international situation,
as well as defined our own national part in
it. Yet within this vast European (and
extra-European) conflict of great states, this
stupendous struggle of each for its very
existence, consider what may seem to most
an apparently quite secondary struggle, yet
one hardly less significant—the struggle of
cities. It is cities, central and metropolitan,
which each essentially direct the policy of
its state; and their provincial cities each
obey the capital, maintaining it, defending
it, suffering for it, even dying for it. In
this civic aspect of the war, the first dramatic
event was the heroic defence of Lifege; but
since this was primarily a frontier fortress
battle, it needed the massacre of little Vise,
and beyond this the tragic fate of Louvain,
a city truly great, to make plain what has
long been a main process of such wars of
expansion and aggression—not simply the
conquest of new provinces, nor even the subdual of their cities to tribute, but the depression, if possible the destruction, of the
characteristic individuality and culture of
RUINED AREAS
179
these cities, and thus of their significance
and influence as the historic centres of their
regional life.
Lidge, as for a thousand years one of the
stoutest points of regional and civic independence, was thus naturally anathema to
the Hohenzollern for one reason, as was the
great Catholic University city of Louvain for
another. Moreover, with the destruction of
these two, the temporal ruin and the spiritual
subjection of the hated Walloon half of
Belgium by the fanatic Pan-Germanism of
its conquerors, needed, they thought, only
some further " frightfulness " for its full success. Hence, too, the comparative sparing of
most Flemish-speaking cities, like Ghent and
Bruges for choice. The philologic mania which
has so long excited its exponents has thus
had at least this use, that of getting such
cities milder treatment.
For the clearer elucidation of centralizing
politics and powers as they have worked in
and upon cities through history, let us rapidly
turn through earlier records than those of
this war. Hellas, with all her faults, has
the supreme merit of creating many free
180
IDEAS AT WAR
cities, of infusing these with mutual respect
for their political independence, their intellectual and artistic individuality, and of
uniting them by many ties not only of commercial interchange, but of political equality,
as, for example, the Amphictyony, of which
our modern Hague Congress and Peace Palace
is but a long-delayed renewal, indeed in many
ways a still imperfect beginning. This was
done, above all, by ties of culture, and these
at every level—from simple goat-song and
dithyramb to highest tragedy, from child's
play to Olympian games, from conversations
bright and keen to philosophies deep and high,
from quiet shrines and village rites to great
temples and stately festivals, and from rude
memorials and archaic shapes to sculpture
unsurpassed by man. Thus did Hellas create
the ideal of free cities.
True, Sparta, the Prussia of that age,
strove to dominate her neighbours. She
created Megalopolis—ominous name ! Even
Athens, that bright Paris of the past, sought
to subjugate Syracuse; but dearly she paid
for it with the flower of her life. Here, too,
was the evil side, as Demosthenes saw, of
RUINED AREAS
181
that next and greater Prussia, Macedonia,
with its conquering war-lords Philip and
Alexander. Above all, we see here the evil
aspect of expanding Rome. For, as her
unparalleled expansion went on, the ideals of
justice and of productive peace, which for a
time ennobled this, as inevitably declined.
Before what? What but the hunger of an
overgrown metropolis for authority and taxation, for power and prestige, for gain and
glory, for booty and triumphs; and at last
for all these in naked and shameless cry of
" panem et circenses "—bread and shows (or,
as we now might say, of pubs and musichalls, tea-shops and cinemas). Despite all
mitigating elements, and even endeavours to
the contrary, Rome thus passed from metropolis to megalopolis, parasitopolis, canceropolis; and so fell, with the latifundia she
had sucked empty throughout her own Italy,
each a gap opening for more of her alien
invaders.
How this ever-recurrent disease of metropolitan cities passed to Byzantium as New
Rome, Constantinople, and there festered
another thousand years until she, too, fell
182
IDEAS AT WAR
before the barbarian, is summed up in the
associations, predominantly evil, which centre
in the very name of the Byzantine Empire—
so evil that they are apt to hide services to
civilization of no small value even to this
day. And what more natural city can we
find in the world? Where, indeed, a more
necessary one ? May not, must not, its reconquest, for which we are now fighting
what may be the last Crusade, be again
significant in world-history? Its destiny is
assuredly one of the main problems of the
coming settlement—at once full of hope as
a free city, of danger as a renewed imperial
metropolis.
Consider the great cities of Spain (say,
rather, with old Spanish clearness, "todas
las Espafias "—all the Spains), from Barcelona round to Cadiz and Seville. Consider
how much they accomplished—for themselves, for the arts, for literature, and for
the extending world. Next see the spread
of centralization, now in stroke of militarism
or again in grip of bureaucracy, until all
power centres in the Escurial, and its executive in Madrid. It is worth study in detail,
RUINED AREAS
183
this process of the destruction of all the
Spains by their new metropolis; for even
the terrible Inquisition is not understood
until we realize it as no mere engine of
religious fanaticism, but also in no small
measure a political apparatus of unparalleled
centralizing power—through the destructive
selection, in every once free city upon the
sea, by and for the new central tyrant city
of the midland plateau, of all their most
individual and initiative types—largely, no
doubt, of Moorish, Jewish or Protestant
faith, and necessarily of such contacts. This
tyranny, of the all-centralizing metropolis
of Madrid, has been too long concealed by
debiting it to the account of His Holiness in
Rome.
Turn next to old Austria, with its superlative jingo motto of A.E.I.O.U—" Austrian
est imperare orbi universo ! " What was
this but the hunger and insolence of Vienna,
aggressive and expansive from its beginnings,
already dreaming that " World-Lordship "
which has been so frankly disclosed as the
renewed and strengthened purpose of PanGermanism for the present war?
184
IDEAS AT WAR
Turn west once more, and this time to
Paris, queen of cities since mediaeval times,
although she be now, as so often before, the
very protagonist of freedom, and hence the
main goal of the enemy in 1914. But is
Paris blameless? " We feel sometimes a
little tired/' said the Dean of I^yons University to one of the present writers thirty and
more years ago, " of France being always
governed as a conquered country, for the
benefit of two million Parisians ! "
Here, then, through this long historic outline, we are reaching what is a main factor
of the present war. Every metropolitan
city, of course, increases its power immeasurably over its own country in war-time, and
keeps this, too, as far as it can, when peace
returns. Thus to Paris the war brings, and
inevitably, a stronger grip on France, Petrograd on Russia, and so on; not excepting
London on Britain and the Dominions !
But these only point us to the dominant
storm-centre. For what is Germany, or
Austria-Hungary, or Turkey above all, but
each a stalking-horse, as Pan-Germanism is a
cloak of—Megalo-Berlinism ? As the capital
RUINED AREAS
185
of Brandenburg, Berlin might by this time
have had a hundred thousand people. But
only as an exploiting and militant metropolis,
originating expanding rings of conquest, can
it explain its colossal growth since 1864-66,
1870-71. For it has all this time raced, and
kept pace, with the agglomerating and multiplying millions of Chicago itself. By a
Prusso-German victory Berlin would above
all profit. While from defeat is it not Berlin
which must, above all cities, feel the blow—
and this to a degree rarely, if ever, paralleled
in history, and whether hostile armies reach
her or no ? For though she may, indeed
must, retain her hold upon her historic
region of the Prussian plain, must not the
Germany she has deluded sooner or later
revolt from her ? What quarrel had we,
what even had France, with the peaceful
merchantmen of Hamburg, with the skilled
workers of Nuremberg, the artists of Munich,
or with the genuine culture-tradition of
Frankfort or of Vienna? Must it not in
time become plain to all these that it was
Berlin which brought ruin to Hamburg upon
the seas, and made us turn away, perhaps
186
IDEAS AT WAR
for generations, from all that these great
cities have so long given to us ? And if so,
must not the mass of Germany—a land
naturally heterogeneous, made by nature
and by history for small states and free
cities—first turn upon Berlin, and then turn
away from her ?
Here, then, we have reached the prime
condition of the renewal of true cities, and
this from shattered Ypres to menaced Riga,
to Warsaw itself, and, not least, throughout
Germany too, throughout France as well.
It is the abatement of the great centralizing
capitals, the increase of that decentralizing
process, that regional revival and renewal
which even France herself, though restrained
by the constant menace of Prussia, has been
for the past generation increasingly preparing
for and realizing.
Here, too, is a main factor in the emancipation of the Balkans—as in the unrest of
the Slavonic peoples. Here, too, lies the
freedom of Switzerland, the strength of
Belgium, each a land of many and worthy
cities, because of no all-overpowering metropolis. Such cities are not chained to 4heir
RUINED AREAS
187
political or commercial capital, and hence
doubly resist the mingled force and fraud of
Berlin; and in renewing their multiplex network of inter-civic relations there lies at
once the hope of renewing peace and the
exemplar of its continuance. In that spirit
we can hope for the renewal of well-being (it
may be even beauty) beyond that destroyed;
for we shall again judge, as of old, of the
true greatness of nations, empires, alliances,
by the freedom and individuality of their
many cities, great and small, and, correspondingly, of their citizens.
CHAPTER IX
RECONSTRUCTION IN THE WORLD
THE nature of the problem of Reconstruction in the world is indicated immediately by
the criticism of the world as it is. It is to
secure the passage out of the MechanicalImperial-Financial Age into an age which
without letting slip what has been gained of
real, human, value by mechanical invention,
imperial organization, and the international
network of financial relations, shall yet win
for it those essentials of a saner, nobler and
happier human life which have most conspicuously been deficient. We must therefore look for leadership in three great social
efforts.
The great deficiency of the Mechanical Age
is its sacrifice of Life to Things. Therefore
the first effort for the new age must be to
make it eutechnic : not only must physical
188
RECONSTRUCTION IN WORLD
189
health bulk more largely in our minds than
the possession of commodities endowed with
exchange values, but also physical health
and well-being must be regarded as important and valuable mainly as a condition of
the inner life of the soul. Mr. H. G. Wells,
in one of his books, which figures the complete
triumph of the unchecked tyranny of the
commercial order, has suggested that this
must needs give way to the sway of the
medical caste. As a matter of fact, the power
of the physician already vies in importance
with that of the financer, as was amusingly
illustrated when the wealthiest man in the
whole world was condemned to hard labour
and short commons by his medical adviser,
and needed no gaoler to compel him to work
out his term of punishment. But we cannot stop short at a mere quest for physical
well-being; but, in dog-Latin, we must drop
the ideal of maximum production for that of
Optimum Cerebration. Even already there
are many signs of a new surge in this direction. There is the rise and rapid spread
through communities which have regarded
themselves as almost proof against mysticism,
i9o
IDEAS AT WAR
of two new and strange pseudo-religions,
originating each from a determined woman,
in Theosophy and Christian Science. . To
attempt to disentangle the truth and error in
either would be a difficult task, indeed an impossible one. Even to express an opinion here
as to whether there is any new truth in either
is unnecessary; all that we are concerned to
note is the insistence in both on the view that
what happens in the spiritual world is immeasurably more important than physical
pain, disease or death. Condemn these two
movements as utterly as you may, we have to
admit their importance as indications of the
promptings of the soul of humanity.
Of much greater practical importance is
the new movement in education led by
that remarkable revolutionist, Miss Margaret
MacMillan. She is teaching us to see that,
just as the science of the preservation of health
had to get its start by the study of the physical
phenomena observed in those who are ill, so
the science of the fostering and enhancing of
mental and spiritual health is likely to begin
with the study of those who have more or
less failed to enjoy it. Therefore, while other
191
educationists devote themselves to building
schools or founding colleges or drawing up
codes, Miss Macmillan strikes a new note by
putting first the demand for a new hierarchy
of teachers; and singularly worthy of notice
is her statement of the Four Orders of Teachers
required for the residential school necessary
for those somewhat unfortunate children
whom she has specially in view; and most
particularly noticeable is the order of importance in which she places them—first, the
Night Guardian; next, the Voice Producer ;
third, the Head, and fourth, the teacher of
drawing and trainer in construction.
Here, again, what makes the supreme importance of the agitation which Miss MacMillan
has so long carried on amidst all the difficulties due to public and official inertness and
indifference, is that she is merely the foremost
representative of a type, the Super Mother,
to which type belong not only many thousands of active women, some childless, others
who have completed all the more urgent part
of their duties to their children, but also in
sbme degree every actual mother and every
woman teacher. The average woman teacher
192
IDEAS AT WAR
is better than the Code which is imposed upon
her, and superior to the red tape which entangles her hands. A little aiding, a little
organizing, a little more freedom, and great
strides can easily be taken towards that
humanization of elementary education which
is the first step to be taken towards the attainment of the eutechnic age.
On the masculine side the great new figure
in education is, of course, Baden Powell.
Perhaps the Boy Scout Movement has in it
an excess of militarism; nevertheless, it is
informed by a very accurate conception of the
normal growth of the boy's soul, and the
manner in which he can best be helped to
become a disciplined, responsible and selfrespecting man. To the help of this movement something valuable may come from the
new science of child-psychology; but, as
yet, perhaps the most notable text-book for
the schoolmaster is the almost forgotten one
of Bevis, by Richard Jefferies.
The present age being Imperialistic, the new
age must aim at being Geotechnic : that is,
we must regard the world not as something
to be administered and exploited, but as some-
193
thing to be cared for, as the gardener converts
a waste patch into an oasis of beauty and
fertility. Here, again, we see next year's
buds already formed. Nowhere, perhaps, has
the pillaging of natural resources proceeded
more recklessly than in the United States of
America. Already the vast forests have been
so ruthlessly destroyed, that the newspaper
proprietor has to set up his lumber mills in
Canada and import his material across the
country. But in America also the programme
of conservation has become a definite, practical, aim; and Mr. Pinchot holds a position
somewhat similar to that of Horace Plunkett
in Ireland. From America, too, comes the
science of dry farming, which is capable of
giving a measure of fertility to much land
that would otherwise be arid desert. Meanwhile a little nation, that of old led the way
in geotechnics, continues to aim at still greater
achievements. The Dutch have worked out
their designs for the draining of the Zuyder
Zee, and we may expect that great enterprise to begin not long after the restoration
of normal conditions.
Geotechnics has its rural and its urban side,
o
194
IDEAS AT WAR
its grandiose efforts and its opportunities for
the humblest labours. The principle of it is
that the country-dweller should survey his
hillside or his valley, or the section of plain
on which he lives, that he should consider the
actual advantages and beauties, and set to
work to preserve them; and its possible improvements, and set to work to achieve them,
whether it be by planting a tree, or securing a
good water-supply for the village, or making
a new road. For the citizen it means that
he should survey his city, and town-plan
to secure that its new growth shall give a
maximum of health and convenience; and
add, moreover, the idea of city design to that
of town plan, realizing that, just as traditionally it is the cathedral that distinguishes a
city from a town, so in every urban community
what makes an aggregation of buildings
something more than a mere aggregation is
the presence of an appeal to the sense of
beauty, the feeling of a common life, and the
prompting of noble aspirations. The world
is blessed or burdened at the present moment
with many monstrous aggregations of houses
—London, Paris, Berlin, Chicago, Calcutta—
195
and the best of these has been compared with
hell. In all history it has produced two
supremely great cities, Athens and Jerusalem,
and what is noble in any city is some reflection from the glory of these. The geotechnic
idea is an appeal to patriotism : it teaches a
man to love his own country in the only
practical way, for love must needs be generated by knowledge and service. Knowledge
and service of our country must start with
knowing and serving that particular portion
of it with which we are especially associated
by birth, or accident, or occupation. The
true patriotism is that of the citizen who
beautifies and enriches some corner of his own
country, rather than that of the Pro-Consul
or newspaper editor who covets some portion
of foreign territory.
Lastly, the effort of the new age must be
Neotechnic, instead of Financial. Anthropologists, divide the Stone Age into the
Palaeolithic period of rude flint axes and a
savage, possibly cannibalistic, hunting life,
and the Neolithic Age of daintily polished
flint arrow-heads, which saw also the taming
of all our common domestic animals and the
196
IDEAS AT WAR
beginning of the culture of the soil. Similarly, we may divide the age of Machinery
into the palaeotechnic age of smoke and the
steam engine, and the neotechnic age of electricity and radium, of finer implements, the
conquest of noise, and the utilization of waste.
Nor need this be slow, because every mechanic
and engineer in the country is conscious of
the fact that we need to pass from the present
to the neotechnic stage, and his ambition is
to do something to help through the transition. What here we wish to urge is the
special relation between the Neotechnic Age
and the Financial Age, to emphasize the idea
that it is perfectly natural and feasible to
replace in the ears of the young the siren song
which tempts them to desire unearned and
irresponsible wealth, by the invitation to
practice the finer arts of craftsmanship, the
craftsmanship that utilizes the most delicate
and accurate tools and does not despise the
aid of automatic machinery.
In this forecast we have ignored all those
numerous plans for political reconstruction
that are being devised by the " pacifists/'
with a view to the prevention of future wars.
RECONSTRUCTION-IN WORLD
197
This is not from any indisposition to wish
well to all such efforts, but rather from a
melancholy suspicion that there may be something in the militant condemnation of all such
schemes as futile. In general the aim is at
some sort of representative super-national
authority: that is, beyond our existing
national representatives, there are to be supernational representatives, beyond our statesmen, super-statesmen, beyond our lawyers,
super-lawyers. But have our representative
system, our statesmen, and our BarristerPrime-Ministers, done so well by us that we
can hope great things from a mere extension
of the principles underlying them into the
sphere of the unitary control of States ? We
can test the representative system in daily
life, and every suburban London matron does
test it daily. Morning after morning, when
Mr. Smith catches his train into the City,
Mrs. Smith charges him to do this or that,
and every night she grieves because he has
forgotten or blundered his commission. But
when Mr. Smith has a definite job that he
understands, though it be a much more
difficult one than any of Mrs. Smith's com-
198
IDEAS AT WAR
missions—grading teas, let us say—he does it
in an efficient and trustworthy fashion. Does
not the representative system somewhat
ignore this elementary psychological fact?
When the Member for the borough goes to
Westminster, can anything be more confused
than the mandate he has received from his
constituents? What chance is there, for a
correct interpretation by the Member, of the
will o:f the constituency and the conscientious
discharge of it? He may feel an obligation
to his own party and his own party leader,
or to the Church of which he is a member,
or to the railway company of which he is a
director, and so on, and all these ties upon
him are likely to count for more than the
mandate of his constituency because they are
more definite.
Meanwhile there are no fewer than 500
international organizations already at work,
each with some special end.
Is it not possible that more can be done to
build up peace on a secure foundation by the
definite organization of common international
services, inspired by Eutechnic, Geotechnic,
and Neotechnic ideals, than by any Congress
199
of Representatives of Powers, sitting in the
Palace of the Hague or in some European
capital ? The first great effort at creating the
science of peace was the work of M. de Bloch,
and he was the pioneer of railways in Poland,
the meeting-place of empires, the designer
of those very railway systems which have been
the key-note of the "greatest struggles in the
present war. We are all too familiar with
strategic railways; is there not a possibility
of the creation of the science of pacific international transport systems, railways, motor
roads and canals ? Already, as a forecast of
some such development, we have the International Congress of Postmaster-Generals,
the chair of which was offered, significantly
enough, to the Postmaster-General of no
great State, but of New Zealand, because he
had been a pioneer in International Penny
Postage.
On some such lines as these there might
be developed not one super-national authority,
but many, each consisting of experts in some
particular province of thought or action, and
meeting in the most appropriate centre. Thus
the botanists of the world might have their
200
IDEAS AT WAR
capital at Auxerre, the archaeologists at Athens,
the chemists at Cambridge, the opticians at
Jena, and so on; and in the creation of these
new capitals, each exercising real authority
without coercion, there is no need to wait
upon the hesitations of diplomats or the whims
of war-lords.
CHAPTER X
RECONSTRUCTION TOWARDS ARTS AND CRAFTS
IN ways such as those of the foregoing
chapters we are seeking-—and at least to some
extent finding—approaches to the " Internal
Social Problems of the W a r / ' and these from
a higher standpoint than that of relief funds,
or other philanthropies and palliatives, more
or less limited by the thought-range of Society,
of wardom, or both. We venture even to
think of, and to submit, these approaches
as more fuhy constructive than the Fabian
Society's well-known memorandum, and this
apart altogether from its having shared the
error into which we all more or less fell at
the outset of the war, as to the immediate oncoming of unemployment; for this unemployment may be only postponed. To affirm this
in face of such keenly reasoning and practically systematizing people is a challenge, a
201
202
IDEAS AT WAR
" trailing of our coats/' in fact, which it is
not safe to make without some consideration,
since they can usually be trusted to defend
themselves—and not only with vigour (the
Press can beat them at that)—but with skilful
and cogent argument. Yet is not this allegation of deficient constructiveness a type of
error into which that brilliant society too
easily falls, by its very brilliance tending to
overlook the existence of other and no doubt
less luminous agencies and endeavours towards public service and guidance beyond
its own?
The first example we choose for this
criticism—that of not going far or fast enough
—of growing elderly and conservative (superFabian, shall we say?), is that of Mr. Sidney
Webb's excellent plea for public works, and
these of many kinds. Unanswerably convincing it is; and that we should have such
experienced advice and powerful persuasion
at hand, when the moment comes, is indeed
fortunate. What, then, is our complaint?
Merely this—a trifle perhaps to Fabians, but
serious to us—that these recommendations
remain too much a scattered set of mere
ARTS AND CRAFTS
203
individual suggestions in detail, without sufficient expression of that more general civic
vision for which the times have ripened since
the golden youth of the Fabian Society, and,
no doubt, in a measure owing to the radiant
activity of their rising through the London
fog.
We do not seek, then, to take away one
jot of Mr. Webb's recommendations in this
matter, nor to weaken the appeal he makes
with such well-earned authority; we plead
only with him and his fellows that they are
not going on far and fast enough, and that it
is time to be moving on, once more ahead
of that municipal opinion they have so often
guided, instead of allowing themselves, as
here, to be overtaken and outrun by it. We
would have him add to his plea for public
works the fuller conception of them; and this
not only from the pecuniary and other economic and administrative points of view so
familiar to him, but also from those of the
fuller and higher requirements of citizenship
in general, and of the locality in particular.
These conditions, he may say, are, of course,
assumed. But they amount to City Design,
204
IDEAS AT WAR
and to Town Planning, and these both in
general and in particular, vast activities,
which cannot be assumed, and which need
definite support and exposition.
To get the Fabian Society to turn, even for
a month or two, from the nationalization of
transport and industries, the city budgets
and valuations, city constitutions and governments, and so on, among which they have so
long laboured, and now revel in the increasing
fruition of their labours—to consider what a
city is, where it is, how it grew, through the
various phases of its past, into its present
conformation and aspect, and thus acquired
its visible material assets, its limitations and
deficiencies also, would be no small help to
all of us whose hopes and work lie largely in
the Town Planning Movement; while, with
the new concreteness which such touching of
the mother-city's homely earth would give,
the whole society, let alone its eminent pastorate, would doubtless display the rejuvenation of Antaeus, and enter upon a new period
of victorious combats. Indeed, the only
danger might be of their taking over henceforward under their protection and manage-
ARTS AND CRAFTS
205
ment the whole of town planning altogether,
and replacing its insufficiently Fabian hands
by truly Fabian heads. Still, such is our need
of championship and of effective propaganda,
that we would face even those risks of
unemployment.
Imagine, for instance, the Town Planning
Institute to surrender its stud of aeroplanes,
the whole fleet of reconnoitring balloons and
airships to the Fabian Society, and conceive
these as soaring upwards, over the dome of the
new L.C.C. sacred building, and though the
thought, we feel, verges on profanity, attaining an outlook wider than that of the new
Fabian building itself. To see the boroughs
of London, in their concrete confusion and
bungle and welter, yet in daily cheerfulness
and beerfulness, muddling through, would be
a freshening field of exercise for the young
and critical spirits of the society, while those
on whom their accustomed litanies of commination must by this time pall, would be
moved straightway to enter upon a second
childhood and happier youth of constructive
activity, henceforward planning, housing, gardening their boroughs, and finding it better
206
IDEAS AT WAR
fun than attending meetings, reading papers,
scoring off the preceding speakers, and so
being reported in the Press.
Architecture has always claimed and sought
to organize the visible arts, with their many
detailed crafts and industries and all their
accessories in turn, thus covering well-nigh
the whole field of industry, since most of the
family budget is determined by or adjusted
to the home. But architecture has failed,
has been increasingly failing since it was taken
away from the city and cathedral building
after the Renaissance to fortify power, to
adorn its magnificence and exalt its pretensions. It is thus to no small extent the failure
of the Royal Institute of British Architects,
and their predecessors and compeers, to
accomplish their social functions, which called
into being the Fabians and their predecessors,
the Radicals and Chartists.
Now, as architecture sought to organize its
own arts and crafts, and even others through
home-guided standards, so now town-planning seeks to organize architecture. And not
architecture only, but other co-ordinative
endeavours as well, even tliose apparently
ARTS AND CRAFTS
207
most abstracted from material environment
and well-being, such as economic and political
activities for choice; since the first is ever
losing itself among the bland and dreary corridors of bureaucracy and administration, and
the second making these resonate and tremble
with the eloquent thunders or the appealing
wails of lawyerdom. But since economists and
politicians are the very opposite of intentionally futilitarian in their purposes, and did
really set out for the ends of better environment and civilized well-doing which only their
means, too complicated, verbal and abstract,
have led them into their habitual forgetting,
the Town Planning Movement offers a means
of setting both economist and politician up
again in social health and purpose, and on
the march once more to the real and constructive front, no less than does the present warwrard movement for the un- or mis-employed
upon more youthful levels.
Sharply we may be asked to summarize
what fault we find with the politician or
philanthropist, the economist or the socialist,
and what exactly we want him to do. Definitely as far as may be to replace, or at
208
IDEAS AT WAR
any rate to reinforce, his verbal appeals and
programmes of action by more concrete proposals, and those whenever possible graphically expressed—schemes expressible primarily
in plans and perspectives, and their accompanying reports, on city development, regional
development, imperial development. But this
is still at best, it will be said, all in the phases
of discussion, of criticism, of the merest
awakening to the needs of such great practical
endeavours. True! But these, too, must
correspondingly progress beyond their customary and traditional verbalism, and become
graphic also — geographic, historic, actual
presentments of all obtainable knowledge,
knowledge therefore of good and evil. In
a word, then, as political movements become
more concrete as social movements, and these
as civic movements, so now we are but pressing that the time is ripe to take the next step
and initiate City Survey Movements.
This step, in fact, is at length actually being
taken. Though the Rt. Hon. Charles Booth's
Life and Labour in London showed the way
to civic policy through city survey, his monumental mappings have not been kept up to
ARTS AND CRAFTS
209
date, though any day the London County
Council and its boroughs may awake to this as
a main duty. So the surveys of the Edinburgh Outlook Tower, of the Cities and Town
Planning Exhibition, of the Oxford School
of Geography, of the Ecological Society, or
of the new Regional Association have had
but small success as regards any general and
public appeals outside their widening circles.
But with the war, and its sudden sequence of
unemployment to the architectural profession,
this Civic Survey Movement has taken a fresh
start, developing into a real survey of Greater
London, and spreading thence to Greater
Manchester, to Leeds, to Glasgow, and, as it
soon must, to every other great centre of
population and intelligence.
This sudden expansion of what has been too
long viewed as a merely academic movement
into one of practical interest to the public
has been in progress for ten or fifteen years
past in America. But the architectural profession has been slow to move. Now, however, in London and other great centres, the
intention is at work, and is affecting architects in other countries as well, the more since
2io
IDEAS AT WAR
these are not only suffering a similar check to
their professional activities through the war,
but have much positive reconstruction to
anticipate at its close. The moment and the
milieu thus being favourable, the man to take
the lead has appeared in Mr. H. V. Lanchester, long one of our most effective architects, but of late years doubled in effectiveness as also town-planner—indeed, trebled as
citizen. The coalition of forces already incipient, of architecture, arts, and crafts, with
education, and of all with civic service and
city development, is thus rapidly progressing
from the small beginnings of discussion and
endeavour to the higher level of effective
policy—ethopolity, civics proper. The recent
exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society, in
the galleries of the Royal Academy, was a
sign of the times which the least observant
could not fail to read. Mr. Henry Wilson,
third in apostolic succession to William Morris
and Walter Crane, signalized his accession to
power by making an Exhibition, which was
no mere collection of beautiful objects, but
was genuinely civic. The Exhibition itself
ARTS AND CRAFTS
211
in its design, expressed and made manifest
the spirit of the city and its due ordering and
adornment. The first president of the society
was the chief educator of the public in the
meaning of the House Beautiful. Mr. Henry
Wilson is extending that educative work to the
idea of the City Beautiful.
At the outset of war, and again with the
flotation of each new loan, under the incidence
of each new pressure of taxation, the need of
reduction of material expenditures becomes
felt, and this more and more sharply. The
more thoughtful the economist, the more
responsible the statesman, the more seriously
he impresses this need upon us. Thus it is
hardly too much to say that Mr. J. A. Hobson's manifold criticisms and exhortations, as
our colleague in the recent Summer School,
with all their marshalling of statistical facts
and financial figures, might broadly be summarized as a gentle and decorous breaking of
the news that the time is coming on to be
thinking of adjusting our consumption to the
ancestral scale, that of home-made frocks and
smoGk, the home-baked loaf and the porridge-
212
IDEAS AT WAR
pot, the cabbage and ball, home grown, too,
as far as may be. 1
Even if this reduction of our comforts to
such bare levels of necessities be beyond our
present resolves, or even fears, we are all
more or less willing to dispense with luxuries.
And of these, of course, first of all, the remoter
luxuries, such as literature and the arts.
Education, too, is jubilantly denounced; and
as for any small outlays in the direction of
sciences not directly destructive, but merely
remedial or constructive, they are not to be
thought of. In this respect, as in so many
others, we are no worse governed than we
deserve; and such a pruning down as that of
scientific research by the Treasury is thus a
natural and appropriate expression of public
feeling, even though one may not too uncharitably suspect it informed with a touch of
Public-schoolboy grudge against "stinks and
bones/' or young Oxonian superiority to
knowledge. Yet here, in such economies of
the higher elements of life, of thought and art,
1
This was written in 1915. Since then, things have
moved nearer towards the fulfilment of Mr. Hobson's
prediction.
ARTS AND CRAFTS
213
of books and music, we have a new social
danger, that of losing swiftly much of the little
progress in these matters we have so slowly
made. While as for the reduction of expense,
of luxuries in the older ordinary sense, say in
chiffon or cigarettes (not that there is yet
much sign of either), is not this the confession
of that mere past " peace " (of which, as so
much war-peace or peace of decadence, we
cannot wholly regret the ending) that its
luxuries were largely trivial, when not unworthy? For when, as in far past peacedom's
times, the luxuries and arts were of nobler
kinds, it was the comforts that were more
readily dispensed with. In modern London,
as we have known it throughout our lives,
would not the very suggestion of such economies be considered the unlikeliest and the
least practical of any in these chapters?
True, it is the universal condition of modern
war-peace, and of war far more fully, that the
reaction of provinces to capital is simple and
clear : the first shall starve ere the second
want. (What else, for instance, is so fundamental a principle of the French Constitution ?—or what else so inspiring and dominant
214
IDEAS AT WAR
of German war policy? The blessed word
" Imperial " has had many meanings, but
not one so continuous, or so essential, as metropolitan and megalopolitan.) Still, since the
capital pipes to us in the provinces, so we
dance, and the casting away of our luxuries
is thus beginning.
Therefore the hasty abandonment of the
artist to unemployment and its deteriorating
influences. Therefore the arrest of the more
learned publishing. Therefore the paralysis
of the drama, the neglect of music, though
with proportionate increase of the lighter
substitutions for these, in revues, rag-time and
the rest. Therefore, too, the lowering of
education.
That all this often thinks and proclaims
itself as a wave of virtuous asceticism, almost
a " bon-fire of the vanities/' may be to some
extent granted, yet mainly as a fresh instance
of that strange power of honest self-deception
which foreigners too harshly call our " British
hypocrisy/' For in these economies is there
not a large element of the instinctive reaction
of what we call the palseotechnic order, and
all its divisions, mechanical, imperial and
ARTS AND CRAFTS
215
financial, for self-preservation against the
finer elements, the neotechnic forces and resources which were beginning to sap its predominance and shake its authority ?
If as sociologists we are really awakening
to current problems, must we not consider
this aspect of the war-situation—that as wardom, war-peace, and war advance with the
mechanical and chemical arts and sciences,
so peace—peacedom, true peace, yet more
needs the fine arts, the organic arts and
sciences, and with all these a finer and more
psychic education, a fuller social one ?
If so, and if we were but theoretically clear
enough, practically bold enough, we should
be making this difficulty of the architectural,
constructive and artistic unemployed the occasion of a mobilization of which the aforementioned architects' war committee and
its city surveys are but a single example.
For here lie the possibilities of preparing the
renewal of our cities, by raising their industries to finer and finer levels. Here is a field
of economic endeavour far more enduring,
far otherwise helpful than are the current
appeals and attempts to " collar Germany's
216
IDEAS AT WAR
t r a d e / ' which, not always indeed, but as yet
too often descend to those cheaper and more
sweated levels that appeal especially to the
advertising profiteer, and through him to the
palaeotechnic public generally.
Hopeful signs of the needed reorganization
are afforded by some at least of the musical
endeavours for the enlivenment of the trenches
or the hospitals. The appointment of Botrel,
as Chansonnier to the French armies, is thus
a true revival of the mediaeval balladist and
minstrel, nor are glee-maidens far behind.
Initiatives like that of Miss Lena Ashwell are
true beginnings of the reorganization of the
higher types of the unemployed among the
musical and dramatic professions, towards
recital and play now, and why not by and
by noble drama, worthy masque and seemly
ritual, expressing the higher national aspirations, so apt in war-time to be stated mainly
in their elementary forms? We remember
always also that high internationalism of
European freedom, which is so deep a bond of
the Allies in the present war, and which only
waits a creative emotional and artistic impulse to give it a greater strength in the
ARTS AND CRAFTS
217
present, and a surer and fuller endurance
against the strains to which it cannot but be
subjected after the war. The thrill of such
drama not only tends to cheer and support
the soldier at the front and the civilian at
home, to invigorate or inspire to a fuller productivity, a more vigorous endurance, and a
more strenuous yet chivalrous use of arms;
but also to restore the Muses to their place
in a civilization worthier the name than ours
has recently been, or indeed as yet commonly
aspires to be.
Consider again the utilization of the higher
unemployed in that rise of true education beyond mere public instruction, which is so
essential to our progress from wardom to
peacedom, and palaeotechnic to neotechnic.
The working world is rightly discerning that
it is less desirable at this time than ever to go
on hurrying what is still childhood at its
school-leaving age into production. Here is
an agency which, by its cheap competition,
may readily be used to undo the hard-won
improvements of the past in the condition of
labour, and one which accordingly is eagerly
called for in many quarters, more simply by
218
IDEAS AT WAR
the rural obscurantist and more astutely by
the urban profiteer. Yet in their arguments
there is an element of truth which must not
be overlooked, at the children's peril. For in
occupations, and in rustic occupations above
all, when rightly pursued, apart from exploitation of the producers, there are educative
elements far exceeding those of the three R's
•—those of the three H's, heart, head and hand
—of which we have already cited Bishop
Gruntvig's admirable example in his organization for Denmark.
Here, then, among the skilled unemployed,
those of crafts and arts, music and literature,
sciences and their skills, have we not the
possibility of nothing less than a new branch
of the Education Service? Had this but its
organizer, its Bishop Gruntvig, its Baden
Powell upon the adult plane, the beginnings
of such accessory Education Corps might be
created. With good-will from the existing
schools and their management, as also from
the ruling bureaucracy, all not impossible,
however difficult to bring about, these new
and inexperienced but high-hearted recruits
would soon find place and take form. Thus
ARTS AND CRAFTS
219
the existing Education Departments would be
notably reinforced and aided, and would
soon and increasingly be turning out a new
type of youth, ready for incorporation into
neotechnic industry and civic life.
The boy-scout is contrasted with the hooligan he will soon have eliminated, by incorporating and transforming vigour previously
left undirected by a too bookish school staff,
and a too clerkly school direction. Yet even
the boy-scout is but the first crop of a better
culture than that of those administrations
unc^r glass, which have surely now had their
day; and, as he presents the invigoration
of the too pallid schoolikin or the too lawless streetikin of our recent (and still too
much surviving) output, so this deeper, higher,
fuller, richer education, which is at call in
the market-place, would be a further advance
no less significant and productive than that
of scouting.
As a single concrete example of this incipient co-operation may be cited that of the
Architects' Survey of Greater London with
teaching like that of Mr. Valentine Bell in
Lambeth and Nunhead, and with the Messenger
220
IDEAS AT WAR
Boys of the War Office. (Why not, then,
some day even with the Education Offices,
English and Scottish?)
Return now from art in education to art in
itself, and consider the social change involved
if art were reclaimed from its long predominant tasks of multiplying luxuries for the
indifferent, or sketches for itself alone. For
here has long been the sad alternative before
the artist, the hard choice between bowing
down to Mammon and adorning his throneroom with the products of the Royal Academy,
or gilding and adorning his hoofs with prettifications through the shops; or else sitting
down through years of discouragement, to
fall short of expressing one's heart's desire,
too often only to fill some sketch-books, or
carve some secret cherrystone, itself left unfinished by death. But art and artists in the
service of the City—that would indeed be a
Renaissance.well-nigh forgotten since the days
of the cathedral-builders.
Of course, we are well aware that to many
all this must seem but Utopian and impossible.
Yet it is only the objector that is uninformed.
In our small Summer Gathering at King's
ARTS AND CRAFTS
221
College in July 1915, we had one conference
after another in which teachers primary,
secondary and higher were actually meeting
active artists and craftsmen, architects and
town-planners, and planning out the ways
and means of initiating, carrying on and
carrying out such schemes and dreams as
above indicated. Those who sneer at Utopias
do so because, having lost civic sense for a
time, they have lost sight of Eutopia with
it. Yet it is in the city around us, and each
day's work in the right spirit is already building i t : we are but considering plans and
procedures towards acceleration and efficiency,
and learning from war and its opportunities
something of the strategy of peacedom. In
this social change, wherever beginning, of
art reclaimed from its bondage of multiplying luxuries for the indifferent and recovering
its ancient place of spiritual appeal and
aspiration, and recreation in one, we have an
earnest of a return of peacedom lost, wellnigh forgotten, since the best days of the
adoration of the God of love and beauty.
To the facile criticism of, " How is all this
t o be paid for? " the answer is partly easy,
222
IDEAS AT WAR
partly difficult. Easy because, since people
have to be kept alive somehow, they had
better be producing what they can, than be
undergoing the deterioration of the unemployed (which is very nearly all that the
utilitarian, throughout his history, has had
to propose for them). Difficult too, no
doubt, in our present terms of finance and
economics ! But that is only because our
current feeble "economics" is mainly money
economics, and its city " finance " is palaeotechnic finance. These have, they tell us,
neither the ways nor the means of organizing
the notation or the book-keeping of such
artistic tasks. They therefore argue that these
are unpractical, and cannot be attempted,
so that—of course with all regrets—the artists
must remain unemployed. But suppose it
be the architects and artists who are becoming practical? Suppose that they, not content with surveying the civic task, set about
performing it ? In that case the danger arises
(not yet immediate, we regretfully admit,
though we trust real) of the conventional
financier and his economist becoming unemployed. Yet, since people are never entirely
ARTS AND CRAFTS
223
fools, not even the practical mammonolater,
the speculative mammonosopher need be
despaired of. For our constructive tasks a
more civic notation than that of money is
required, adaptable to higher forms of wealth
and modes of services than those for which
our money routines and credit have been built
up. Why should not such a notation be
invented in principle, worked out in practice ?
Practical and scientific minds, like M. Solvay's,
have long been laying the foundations of
this better notation, the comtabilite sociale.
As civic reconstruction, and the measured
records of it get more clearly and generally
under weigh, the resulting spread of unemployment in the financial and profiteering
world may be abated by other methods than
those of the unskilled labour.bureau; for a
moderate number of tally-keepers will always
be wanted. But probably more women than
men.
Reorganization of finance, its activities, its
notation, and its theories together, in course
of the civic renewal of the arts and sciences
—that and no less is the transformation which
is beginning. It involves, of course, the
224
IDEAS AT WAR
ending, say, rather, the transmutation, of the
long-established neglect of the arts, retardation of the sciences, even debasement of them
both, which has so long been maintained by
the mechanical-financial order. Yet this is
no separate and unattainable Utopia, as of the
idealistic Socialists who sought to reform
society by doing away with money : it is but
the quantitative expression of that single
change from palaeotechnic to neotechnic, from
wardom to peacedom, which we have been
studying throughout this volume.
CHAPTER XI
WAR CAPITALS
one is familiar with the enormous
change in the distribution of population
produced by the coming of the Mechanical
Age in England : for example, the shifting
of the main density of population from the
south-east to north-west, the relative depopulation of the agricultural area, and the
massing of proletarian humanity on the coalfields and their ports. Somewhat less familiar
is the recognition of the new grouping of
population produced by the coming of the
Imperial Age. When King James I threatened the citizens of London with the removal
of the Court to Oxford, the Lord Mayor
listened unmoved, and suavely expressed the
hope " that His Majesty would be graciously
pleased to leave them the Thames/' But
at the present time London proper, the
EVERY
Q
225
226
IDEAS AT WAR
ancient trading port of the Thames Valley,
has sunk into relative unimportance compared with London Number Two, or more
properly Westminster; for this, not London,
is the capital of the British Empire, to such
an extent has the diminutive Court of King
James—which could have been moved to
any of the little midland towns, as in his
son's time to Oxford—grown into a huge
complex of legislative and administrative
machinery. Moreover, the ancient trading
city has further given place to London
Number Three, the modern " City," the
centre of the world's finance and exchange.
These two latter have evolved between them
what is practically a London Number Four,
the West End and its extensions; while the
City has the innumerable " dormitory " extensions of its own, spreading in all directions, a Fifth London, accounting for a good
half of the London County Council area, and
much of Greater London beyond that. The
vast East End-—an extension of the trading
port, and crowding for many miles along the
river east of the Tower before one comes to
an adequate playground—has also in many
WAR CAPITALS
227
ways to be considered by itself, as yet a
Sixth London. The strangling of the dozens
of old towns and villages of this region by
the immense modern growth of these various
Londons has produced the tangled labyrinth
of to-day; while around this, again, lies yet
another circle of boroughs, some forty or
fifty more, whose entanglement into a Seventh
London-—a " Greater London " still—is fully
beginning. To administer the five Londons
outside the first has been no small achievement; but now to survey the whole, to
reorganize i t ! Here is the most immense
and complex task ever set before a civic
government and its citizens.
Much of this growth and complication has,
of course, been going on in every great city,
and especially in the leading capitals; for
each has been more or less like old Rome or
modern London, growing up from the differentiation and consolidation of adjacent
villages. The history of these cities may be
considered as fairly known, or at any rate
as in active progress, so far as annalist,
archaeologist, and antiquary are concerned,
architect and artist also. Yet despite all
228
IDEAS AT WAR
such endeavours in detail, the historic synthesis of these specialized labours mostly
remains to be made; despite the admirable
initiative of Sir Laurence Gomme, the graphic
presentment remains to be compiled, the
pageant to be shown. Still more the interpretation of all the stream of events, and of
its present significance. For this we need a
science of cities, a fuller comparison of them,
in their development, their function and
structure. We need to reach both the story
and the theory of their evolution, and this
alike material and psychological, ethical and
economic in one.
Such an interpretation of cities is only in
its beginnings. Every one, however, sees
that, besides the modern and again renewing
Rome itself, and the old " New Rome " now
called Constantinople, there are in Europe
no fewer than five other great modern
Romes—London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna and
Petrograd—each and all reproducing many
conspicuous features of the City of the
Caesars, though without the splendours of its
public life.
And as from old time " all roads lead to
WAR CAPITALS
229
Rome/' so the railway systems of their respective countries have formed their centres in
the imperial cities, whose modern immensity
they have thus developed, and these again
drag into their maw the corn and milk
and meat of their provinces. Just as from
eighteen to fifteen centuries ago oysters were
shipped from the Thames and the Colne to
Rome, so that, as an amiable Roman moralist
remarked, " even the poor barbarous Briton
has his uses/' so to-day the wheat of Canada
as well as of East Anglia, the mutton of
New Zealand as well as the Downs, are
brought to London markets. And more or
less similarly for each of the other Romes,
as far as their influence can reach. Thus
population grows, and hunger with it, until
at length the feeding of each great metropolis
becomes not simply the most gigantic of its
own tasks, as admiring economists explain,
but also, as they gently pass over, the most
heavy of burdens upon its provinces, near
and far. For within these cities the legions
of functionaries maintained by imperial taxation have gone on growing from year to
year, and this at incredible rate, until in
230
IDEAS AT WAR
Paris the established term for the functionary
is not simple " Mandarin/' but " Budgetivore." Meantime the mass of the population
of each imperial city increasingly reproduces
that ignorance and levity, that passion for
amusement accordingly, which the moralists
of the old Empire so rightly deplored. Further, each imperial city at once exhausts and
depresses the intellectual and spiritual life of
the smaller centres. It crushes them by the
arrogance of its superior prestige; it kills
their- local literature and journalism; it
attracts to itself and puts its own stamp on
their rising men; it replaces them with its
own products; and with its sneers at the
" vie de province/' at the " Krahwinkel/'
and at the " parish pump " it belittles in
the minds of the provincials themselves their
own most vital interests. Each and every
one of these seven neo-Imperialisms has thus
long been repeating the downward evolution of Rome. How shall it avoid the like
results ?
Does the reader protest that this dual yet
unitary process of outward centralization and
inward decay may be all very true of modern
WAR CAPITALS
231
Paris, as of old Rome; true, of course, of
Vienna, of Petrograd, of Berlin too, and
above all; but surely not of London ? Here,
at any rate, we are not as these foreigners !
Think of how the Londoner clings to his
rural connections and origins, and acts so
independently of his social status. Think
how free he has been, too, from any feeling
of pride of citizenship in his petty London
borough, at least since John Gilpin's day,
and until John Burns and his fellow-senators
of the London County Council began to put
some proper civic spirit into him. He
honestly believes that the provincial cities
(ominous epithet) are not at all centralized,
for do they not send their members to Westminster? And does not Manchester, to this
day, support its Guardian ? Yet surely this
sole star of the provincial Press which
penetrates the atmosphere of Fleet Street
emphasizes its own continuity with that of
Dr. Johnson's paradise of letters and debate,
rather than disproves it? And though it
was in our youth a pretended secret, for
how many years has it been undenied, even
affirmed, that candidates are no longer ex-
232
IDEAS AT WAR
pected to pose as " local" or " representative "
or in any serious way as the " choice " of
their electors, but are frankly sent down
from London, in alternative pairs (whether
in carpet-bags, brief-bags, or semi-official
envelopes matters little, since it is in every
case their caucus club certificate that matters),
before being " returned " to Westminster, as
the phrase goes, a phrase in this case more
literally correct than it pretends?
This is, in fact, one of the latest of the
many developments of the British Constitution, the most thorough of its Protean re-*
adaptations, and towards a metropolitan
constitution in essential fact. Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain, to begin with, was no doubt a
real member for Birmingham, Captain Craig
still stands for Belfast, and there are many
others; but are they not survivals standing
apart from the main tendency? Who, for
instance, has ever thought of Mr. Asquith
as a representative of West Fife, or of Mr.
Churchill for Dundee, or of minor members
generally as representing anywhere—but London ? If this be felt as an extreme statement,
let it stand for the impression of lives fairly
WAR CAPITALS
233
divided between London and the Provinces,
and not without experience of votes in
each.
Looking at this matter of centralization
in a larger way, it is commonly justified as
means to some higher end. Is it not obvious
and necessary, such defenders ask, that the
national unity, the growing and imperial
unity, should alike demand centralization,
and therefore inevitably increase it? True
so far, and hence we are right in realizing
now, and far more clearly than before, the
centralized and centralizing character of all
the great capitals of the Continent, from
Rome of old, through Vienna, Madrid and
Paris, to Berlin to-day. For war is the
supreme among centralizing processes; and
w;ar has ever been subjugating, exploiting,
conquering for the capital its own provinces,
indeed these far more surely and completely
than any others; and when peace returns,
" improved administration " steadily goes to
work to consolidate the provincial conquest.
Hence the great and grandiose Paris, undisputed centre of a France long, long ago bled
white, by Monarchy, by Republic and by
234
IDEAS AT WAR
Empire in turns, and since 1871 by the
Republic anew. " Plus ga change, plus c'est
la meme chose/' And in a regime of wardom, whose peace is mere war-peace, what
else can be done? Ever since 1875, how
often has France felt the menace of Prussian
re-invasion—menaces compared with which
her sporadic murmurings of revanche have
been but as dust in the balance ?
But of all centres, give us modern Berlin.
For here is the city of which the growth has
kept pace with that of Chicago itself. Chicago
—at once railway and lake centre, for metals,
for beef and pork, and corn beyond all previous wealth of agriculture—may well spread
over its interminable levels like a mould in
its jam-paradise; but how can Berlin, upon
its poor sandy plain, its rye and potato field
of Prussia, compare with it? Obviously by
two methods and two methods only : by consuming its provinces on the one hand, and
by conquering more provinces with them on
the other. Here, in fact, briefly and harshly
stated, is the true inwardness of the history
too long and generally called Prussian, but
now better seen and termed Prussia As tho
WAR CAPITALS
235
Iliad is summed now as the Epic of Troy,
or, again, that of the Wrath of Achilles, so
that tremendous saga-cycle which includes
the deeds of Frederick, the wars of obscurantism against the French Revolution, the
wars of Bismarck, and now that of Kaiser
Wilhelm, will all increasingly be remembered
as those of " the Hunger of Berlin/' Here
is the prime reason why, in Mirabeau's vivid
phrase, " War is the national industry of
Prussia/ * In realizing this historic reason
which has made Prussia so formidable in
the past, and again to-day, we may also
realize more clearly the sternness of her
resistance. Other countries have been defeated before now, and their capital, well
situated for peace as well as for war, has
survived the shock; but how can a defeated
Berlin go on? Industries, manufactures,
transports, commerce—in not one of these
can she compete with her own subject cities,
much less with the capitals of all the empires
around. With defeat, inevitable decline thus
lies before her, for her return to minor rank
as merely the capital of Prussia will not
more than half maintain her, if, indeed, so
236
IDEAS AT WAR
much; while a defeated Prussia will less
tamely "include her heavy yoke.
Can any instance be clearer of how both
politics and war alike turn on ideas? In
the old decentralized Germany, of many
region-states, and of Free as well as provincial
Cities, each a capital in itself, and often
significant in the European world as well
as the Germanic one, there was little word,
much less foreboding, of this great and
terrible Berlin. But with the Rome-like
evolution of modern capitals, of Paris and
Vienna, of Petrograd, of London too, Berlin
has come to the very front, and successfully
exploited anew for her own purposes the
mediaeval Germanic myth of the " Holy
Roman Empire/' Its very success has been
largely because its militant and centralizing
purposes have been so much less interfered
with by the normal economic factors of city
growth than is the case with its elder rivals,
with their more pacific elements and tendencies. Here, then, is the model and ideal
Empire-City, that most purely Assyrioid of
any since the days of Assyria herself. What
more natural, more inevitable, than that she
WAR CAPITALS
237
should now stake her very existence, with
that of her conquered Germany (greater
Germany including now Austro-Hungary too),
in an alternative and adventure which her
own phrase of " World Dominion or Downfall " (" Weltherrschaft oder Niederfall") so
precisely and frankly states and boldly faces ?
Never more fully in history has appeared the
mighty image of Empire, with its head of
gold, its frame of iron, and its feet of clay.
And certainly never more resolutely was its
shattering resolved upon.
Is it said, as well it may be, this would-be
shattering is but by the rival images? In
the first place, yes, undeniably. We are all
nowadays military empires and so far more
or less alike, so far prussicated accordingly.
In France, with her advanced democracy,
in Italy, with her generous aspirations, in
Britain, with her pride of constitutional
progress, conscious and yet more subconscious
Prussicators have all been at their deadly
work; while the defects of Russia, not only
past but recent, if half the stories be true,
are not a little to be explained as the work
of prussicated reactionaries, unshrinkingly
238
IDEAS AT WAR
logical, even to the extremest treasons, and
these from court back stairs to munition
works, even battlefield itself.1
Yet beneath this War of Empires there is
fermenting towards clearness a larger warfare, of ideas and ideals, and this in every
land. Recall Lincoln's immortal aphorism :
" You can humbug all the people for a time,
and some people all the time, but not all
the people all the time/' and apply it to
Germany. She has surprised us by her unity;
her political education from Berlin has been
a marvel to us; yet must there not be
already a sane minority, negligible, of course,
during the campaigns, but none the less
destined to grow towards influence and
articulateness, who begin to say to themselves : " Perhaps old Germany, in her regionalism and particularism, greatly though
she suffered for it while other empires were
in the making, was also deeply right; while
this new Prussia, dazzling though her imperial
1
Written before the Russian Revolution. Its effects
on the capital city and the centralizing process have yet
to be seen.
WAR CAPITALS
239
successes have been to us, is turning out to
have been deeply mistaken, and has been"
costing us far too dear? The surrounding
Powers, still more their industrial cities, had
no quarrel with ours; in Hamburg and
Bremen, Diisseldorf and Elberfeld, Cologne,
Leipzig and Dresden, Munich and Nuremberg,
Breslau and Konigsberg, and still more in
Prague or Presburg, we never realized how
that magnificent Weltpolitik, with which
Berlin so intoxicated us, was to bring us this
inexorable ring of enemies, whose resolution
our costly victories have only stiffened. We
have given this Prussian Junkerdom its trial,
the very fullest of trials. Is it not time to
be trying again the ideas which have given
us so much more of what we really value in
this old Fatherland of ours, those of its
many better and happier provinces than
Prussia, its more historic and more truly
vital cities than Berlin? May we not start
afresh with these, and upon some more truly
upward spiral? "
Where this line of criticism and reconstruction may lead to in Germany and in
Austria is too long and too speculative a
240
IDEAS AT WAR
question for our simple forecasting; enough
for the moment if such criticism be admitted
as possible. But if so, where also may the
like criticism more readily appear after the
war than in Italy? The unification of Italy
ran in many ways parallel to that of Germany, not simply in time with it; and while
war, and that largely an irredentist war, is
in progress, this is not yet the time for
criticism of it. Yet must not this arise?
Not only Venice and Genoa, Florence and
Naples, Milan and Turin, are ancient capitals,
each the centre of a true nationality, but
smaller cities also; while the States of the
Church, despite their willing absorption into
the larger Italy, are one of the oldest of all.
Is it possible that the Sardinian conquest of
Italy, so like the Prussian dominion of Germany, can remain the last word of Italian
evolution? Great, undeniable, has been the
glamour of Imperial Rome, but where great
Rome gave way to a new order of ideas and
ideals, with corresponding decentralization
throughout its subject Europe, how shall
this small kingly and archaeological Rome
prevent it? If there be any country of
WAR CAPITALS
241
Europe suitable for regional renewal, for
civic renascence, is it not Italy? May it
not, indeed, be for her to work out for the
world, as the next of her repeated leaderships, the supreme example of that coordination of linguistic and literary unity
with the civism, regionalism, federalism, for
which not only her geography and her history,
but her rich and varied individuality, have
so long been preparing her ! In her position,
central among Latin, Teuton and Slav, central
in the Mediterranean, central in the world,
even in the English-speaking world, as its
routes increasingly show, what new influence
may she not acquire? The people who
organized the Western world, in the age of
the Romans, who organized it ^.new for the
yet longer age of mediaeval Catholicism, who
made the Renascence, who weathered and
countered the Reformation—must not their
ambition return to make a Renascence anew ?
Towards this they have already no small
union of resources in progress. Even in
the generation past, with all its faults and
limitations, they have been becoming not
less efficiently steeped in scientific specialism
R
242
IDEAS AT WAR
than Germany; not less aspirant towards
synthesis and towards democracy than
France, not less practical than Britain or
even America. Such a people has assuredly
not produced its last men of power and
purpose in those of the Risorgimento of two
generations back. Where better than in such
uniquely individual cities—cities admired and
valued by all the world, and hated by none—
may we expect the next great enthusiasm of
civilization? And why not eyjen the corresponding post-imperial and federal organization of it also? Has not Paris herself thus
opening before her the greatest of all her many
rivalries for the leadership of civilization ?
From Portugal and Spain to greater Greece
—that is, throughout the whole Mediterranean
from end to end—the same renewal of cities
is incipient. Sometimes even, as in Barcelona
—which is significantly the most modern and
industrial (or post-industrial) of them all—
this is clearly expressed. From her point of
view " all the Spains " are again to have
their day, and not merely her immediate
Catalonia.
To Western nations, their unity of language
WAR CAPITALS
243
—EnglishrFrench, Spanish, Italian, and above
all German—seems elemental and indispensable for nationality. Yet the nationality
of Belgium and Switzerland has long proved
itself no less independent of this. Scandinavian tri-unity is arising and in true, otherrespecting, fashion; and, as it was one of
the most encouraging signs of recent times
that Norway and Sweden could separate without a war, so it is again that they can come
together and with Denmark without thought
of renewing their repeated centralization of
old.
But ties are needed beyond the limit of
languages and nations. When all is said for
Italia Irredentia, how is Trieste to live, save
as the port of its geographic and economic
hinterland? and how Fiume also? So that
after all has been done to break and to embitter these essential geographic and economic
relations, they must come together again,
and much as they were before. The bl|nd
hunger of Vienna, its ancient despotism, its
metropolitan tyranny, its official insolence,
will, we hope, have had their lesson; yet,
to do Vienna justice, it seemed to have learned
244
IDEAS AT WAR
much of this as regards Austrian Poland
before and without the war. And must not
Buda-Pesth, which so successfully obtained
its own Home Rule from Vienna during the
present reign, now be learning that to have
played Vienna in its turn, to Hungarian provinces first, and to Roumanian and other
provinces afterwards, is also no permanent
solution, whether for herself or them ?
Again, what of that fermentation of Russia
which has been so conspicuous a feature of
our time ? The forces of centralization which
have long held Poland in their grip are now
openly disavowed, as having been definitely
Prussian in their origin and their character,
their theory and their practice. If so, must
not the freedom of Finland be coming, and
this not simply on its old and constitutional
grounds, but as part of a more general
evolution—that of a manifold Russian regionalism, which sees that Petersburgia was
Retrogradia; and so henceforth may keep
Petrograd within bounds?
And what of our own empire? Our first
crop of new Imperialists was well-nigh as
essentially continental, that is, as centralizing,
WAR CAPITALS
245
in their essential outlook and philosophy, if
not their practice, as have been Parisian
cockneys, Petrograd policemen, or Berlin
bullies. For the essential centres of empire
present in their minds were but Whitehall,
Fleet Street, or the Strand, according as their
politics, their Press, or their patriotic and
lyric piety came uppermost. But now, with
all the help of Canadians and of Anzacs,
generous as it has been, is there not also
among them the note of regional individuality, that is, of reasonable independence of
London, no less clearly than among the Irish
themselves? And, happily, without tinge of
bitterness.
In Ireland, in which it has been too long
the foolish fashion of John Bull to see only
the aspects of disorder, patent or latent (and
so to foster these), is not this regional reaffirmation in peculiarly characteristic and
even hopeful progress? That the general
movement of nationalism, so characteristic
of the nineteenth century in Europe, should
have deeply affected Ireland is no wonder.
But, just as we have been realizing the
protest of Barcelona against Madrid, or fore-
246
IDEAS AT WAR
seeing that of Milan, Naples and Trieste
against Rome, must we not comprehend a
little the protest of the modern industrial
Belfast against centralization to the nonindustrial Dublin? And beyond that lately
threatened intercivic clash of arms which we
hope is now averted for good, may we not
see returning to men's minds the old constitution of Ireland, with its natural Regions,
its four great Provinces, each again an
essential working unit of a greater whole?
These centralized only for arbitrational purposes, as of old at Tara, yet united in cultural
tradition and spirit, throughout Europe and
America alike, through Latin and through
northern Christianity also, and as binding
all these more fully than ever into one.
Here is a very different view of Europe
and its politics from that of the warring
empires—-its seven Romes instead of one.
Deep in the hearts of those who are responsible for the policies of these seven Romes
there must needs be doubt whether this is
a state which can possibly be stable. Can
seven such centres of empire co-exist per-
WAR CAPITALS
247
manently ? If not, how many ? Must not
Europe, now held together by far easier
means of communication than in the time
of Augustus, with her difficulties of languages increasingly being overcome, and with
more and more rapid permeation of ideas
evolved in any one European language into
all the others—a Europe in consequence
which is again acquiring a common culture,
as well as an inter-related financial and
industrial life—be brought sooner or later
under the rule of one Rome only? It is
this question to which Germany set out in
1914 to supply the answer, from Holy Roman
Berlin, True, each of the allied peoples, let
alone their statesmen, in the counter-contest
resolved that such a single pseudo-Rome
should not survive.
It has thus been in the main but the
imperial and metropolitan cities that have
been standing for Wardom—not their component regions, their cities. If so, must not
these by and by weary of the blood-tax they
have so generously been paying, and say :
" Surely the wit of man might evolve some
248
IDEAS AT WAR
more truly peaceful organization of Europe
than that of the Balance of Imperial Powers,
which experience shows to be the most
warful of any " ?
That at the moment of conflict all these
ideas may well seem unpractical we do not
deny. We do not offer them as immediately
practical; for that much farther and fuller
development will be needed. But we ask
any one to whom they may seem unpractical
or insignificant if he has ever noticed the
buds of next year. If not, let him look for
them—at any season, even in this spring for
next year. For each has a full twelvemonths'
growth before it opens for the few months of
conspicuous life which lie between its single
spring and its autumn. He may then ponder
a little whether this may not also be the
way with social growths. As we read history,
it is; and as we read civic evolution, now is
the day of small things. The great leaves
have been falling in showers of blood and
gold throughout these long autumn storms
WAR CAPITALS
249
of war; and the new are not yet ready to
appear. Now is the winter of our discontent; yet a new spring is none the less
approaching, chill though the herald-blasts
may be.
CHAPTER XII
CONCLUSION
is a saying recorded of one of the
Popes: " I am now a very old man; I have
practically seen three generations of men :
and they were each characterized by a very
different manner of thinking/' Without being
so very advanced in years, have we not seen
the Liberals replaced by new Imperialists,
and the Mechanical-Imperial-Financial order
first formulated in peace, and now applied in
war? We remember the Radicals; we are
surrounded by Socialists everywhere in every
country, and we have heard and known the
Anarchists too. But what we are trying
gently to submit to these great parties, all
alike, is that they are passing away, that their
synthesis is, and has always been, quite insufficient, that their leaders seem to us becoming no less mainly of historic and biographic
THERE
250
CONCLUSION
251
interest—sometimes even archaeological interest—than is the recently commanding
figure of Mr. Gladstone or of Mr. Herbert
Spencer. This may seem a hard saying of
Lord Milner and Lord Curzon, of Lord Northcliffe or of Sir F. E. Smith, of Mr. Webb and
Mr. Shaw, and of any other seemingly up-todate figures still conspicuous on the British
stage, as of their contemporaries on other
stages; and it is certainly not intended as a
gentle one, though any historic criticism, to
be at all just, involves appreciation and conciliation also. It is none the less a warning
from among the audience that it is time
for some to be retiring from the leading
parts.
The needed peace, in too large measure,
passes our small understanding; and we can
but end, as we began and have proceeded,
with outlines of a very general nature, needing
fuller development at every point. Still the
initial thesis, that our past so-called peace
(and this is too true of much even of
the peace of " pacifists ") was but wardom
in thin disguise, is surely everywhere being
realized; as also that of war as no wholly
252
IDEAS AT WAR
unmixed catastrophe, but as the entering in
of the considerations left out by war-peace,
by mechanical-imperial-financial minds, that
is. For the war is full of ethical and social
responsibility, of life (as centrally of psychic
interest, not of mere organic survival, and
practical activity), because it is skilled and
socially purposive, not so dependent on commercial returns as economists had supposed.
To hold fast by these elements of social philosophy which are emerging with war, and apply
them towards true peace henceforth reconstructive and evolutionary, regional therefore
and civic to its utmost details, yet also
European, Occidental, Mondial, is no doubt
a vast Eutopia. But of the Kakotopias of
Wardom have we not had enough ?
One characteristic of the types we have just
named as approaching their retirement is their
strangely complete immunity to any vision
of science beyond that of the mechanicalimperial and financial order. The wholly
different series and perspective and application of the sciences (ethopolitic, psychogenic,
eutechnic) which we claim as incipient, is
far from mature—in fact, is still lying deep
CONCLUSION
253
within the coming bud of the world-tree, as
its developing flower; and with its future
fruit most faintly discernible of all. To
counsel faith in this, amid full Dead-SeaApple-Market, may thus seem Eutopian.
Yet which type of fruit we are henceforth to
set about cultivating is surely after all.the
most practical problem that can engage us.
There is nothing merely figurative in this.
To survey the ruined provinces and cities of
the war-theatres, and to plan and organize
rather than any mere mending of them, the
flaming up of their civilization, and that of all
our civilization with them, is as definite a
task for Belgian and Northern France, for
Poland and for Serbia to-morrow, as it was
for Athens and Attica after the passing of the
Persians; and not less may come of it. That,
at any rate, is a field for the imagination and
the endeavour of youth which the recent
" peace "—of mechanical manufactures, of
business percentagers and profiteers, of futile
politicians and paper administrators, with
sleek diplomatists and booted and helmeted
tyrants above all—can no longer satisfy, any
more than can its corresponding " Prosperity "
254
IDEAS AT WAR
of huxters and potmen, of bridge-players and
Cookists, of upholsterers and upholstered.
We are disillusioned with the great nations
of imperial aspiration. We see the day of the
small peoples returning. In their darkest
hour, who among us has failed to see the
Belgians, the Poles, the Serbians, too, greater
than their Prussian conquerors? And if so,
why may not a new idealism worthy of Israel
under captivity, of Hellas after her emancipation, appear anew, and again permeate the
world, and slowly but surely construct the
unison of a vital peace ?
Woman is not the simple and submissive
housewife of the Tory, the cheap drudge of the
mechanical order, the plaything of the imperial age, the market-thing of the financial,
nor yet the exasperated fury who lately awoke
to all these situations—all that our " peace "
had to offer. She has been during the war
more than ever the mainstay of society, in
the fields, in the hospitals and even in the
factories. Beyond this is she not ever
mother, lover, inspirer, goddess and muse in
one, directrix of man's life for good or evil.
Why not then a society and a civilization
CONCLUSION
255
which should recognize all this, and utilize
it? Must it not survive, as more effective
than our existing disorder ?
So also Youth is not the mere jumbled
waste-basket for dead educations, whether
physical or mental. Not the reserve in our
three social classes, of our mechanical industries, of our profit-hunting speculation, or of
our solemn official nullity. Nor yet the mere
limitless supply of " cannon-fodder/' as Prussian and Prussic-enthusiast would fain have
it. The full possibilities and latencies of
youth, at once human and god-like, are coming towards recognition anew, and a fresh
education, for evoking correspondingly ethical
and civic, vital and creative careers, is already
shaping itself accordingly. With the dull
myth of the "average m i n d " we have done;
for the realized psychological truth is that
adolescence is thrilling with genius—genius
moral and intellectual, genius creative and
constructive. In the clear sunlight, then, of
ethics, politics and science regenerated and
socialized from those of the mechanicalimperial phase, we may go forward anew, as
of old—to reshape each city and region, so
256
IDEAS AT WAR
that men may again lead and share " the
good life," and express all in them that is
most human. Nor shall the coming generations fail, hard though it may be, to weave
these into the vast World-Amphictyony of
Peacedom.
THE
END
P R I N T E D IN G R E A T BRITAIN BY R I C H A R D CLAY & SONS, L I M I T E D ,
BRUNSWICK S I . S T A M F O R D ST., S.E., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

THE MAKING OF THE FUTURE

Transcription

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