Note 11 — CHAPTER THE FIRST

This was written several months before the outbreak of the Great War, which England had invited by allowing her peace-fanatics to bill and coo in her foreign politics. Instead of reading the arrogant books on blood-lust that nourished the well-advertised aims of Germany, England played the fool with epicene triflers of all sorts and conditions, and turned her back on Lord Roberts, her truthful statesman. She babbled about peace until she received from the Prussian junkerdom proposals so abominable that they brought her to the fighting point of honour; and then she cried out for a million new soldiers. Yet British statesmen, even then, paid many compliments to their bad old habit of ingenuous pacifism. No political dove wanted the world to believe that there had been anything of the eagle in his attitude to German war-culture. As if this truism could be a consolation to heroic little Belgium, the Jeanne d’Arc of nations, whose safety England had guaranteed, and whose experiences in the hell of Teutonic savagery had left her scorched, mutilated, yet unconquered. Can anyone explain why the word “peace” has been hypnotic to Anglo-Celtic minds? Every phase of human enterprise must be a phase of war, because it claims a battle-toll of killed and wounded and maimed. Poverty alone is such a terrible phase of permanent war that pacifists ought to devote all their energy to its gradual betterment. Even the accidents of civilization—street and railway accidents, colliery explosions, sea tragedies, and so forth—equal in a century the casualties on stricken fields. If only our sentimentalists would try to think! Then they would learn that the occasional strife between armies never destroys in a century as many lives as the multiform continuous strife called peace. And we may be certain that all the human war of the future will not belong to “peace” alone. The birth of many a new era will be aided by the fierce midwifery of military and naval warfare. To-day is the 26th of September, 1914, and England in two months has nearly outgrown the routine claptrap of her effete idealism. To-day she is eager to bear any amount of self-sacrifice; two months ago her peace-mania was a crime against the Empire and against her treaty obligations to Belgium. She had no faith in National Service till Germany had passed from arrogant warnings to barbaric aggressions. Agadir was not enough to put common sense into her dreamful solicitude about international “peace.” “Peace” in her home affairs she never tried to get; she wanted peace to conquer the nations, not to cure industrial conflicts and the Irish Question. What a comic tragedy! And let us remember that our peace-fanatics, though silent to-day, are not dead. Their influence will become active again after the overthrow of Germany. New mischief will flow from their sentimentalism. To lose the flower of British youth, while keeping our peace-fanatics: here indeed is a sinister fact.