1923

Gradually the whole horrible truth about the war is being revealed. Every new book destroys some further illusion. How can we ever again believe anything when we compare the solemn pretensions of statesmen with the cynically conceived secret treaties? Here was simply a tremendous contest for power between two great alliances of states in which the caprice of statesmen combined with basic economic conflicts to dictate the peculiar form of the alliances. Next time the cards will be shuffled in a different way and the “fellowship in arms” will consist of different fellows.

As the truth becomes known there are however some compensations for the disillusionment. If the moral pretensions of the heroes were bogus, the iniquity of the villains was not as malicious as it once appeared. The Kaiser was evidently a boob who was puerile enough to permit the German navalists to force him into policies which he did not understand. Von Tirpitz and his crowd may have been the real villains but they probably did not want the war so much as they wanted to glorify the navy and themselves through it. If Poincaré was the villain, it was the limitations of a narrow and bigoted nationalism rather than the malice of an evil heart which prompted his policies. The poor little Czar was the victim of a neurotic wife, and she in turn the tool of religious fanatics and fear-tormented bureaucrats.

There doesn’t seem to be very much malice in the world. There is simply not enough intelligence to conduct the intricate affairs of a complex civilization. All the chief actors in the war appear now in the light of children who played with dangerous toys. If they were criminal it was in the sense that the weal of millions was involved in their dangerous games and they didn’t let that fact dissuade them from their play. All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.

But that is not a fact which justifies moral nihilism. The consequences are obvious and inevitable enough to deter a sensitive soul from the course which leads to destruction. Not merely ignorance but callousness to human welfare is an ingredient in the compound of social and personal evil.

In one sense modern civilization substitutes unconscious sins of more destructive consequences for conscious sins of less destructive consequences. Men try consciously to eliminate the atrocities of society, but meanwhile they unheedingly build a civilization which is more destructive of moral and personal values than anything intended in a more primitive society.