Volume 2 — A Famous Englishman's Diagnosis of the War Disease and His Prescription for a Permanent Cure

By H.G. Wells

(COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY.)

(Copyrighted in Great Britain and Ireland.)

I.

Probably there have never been before in the whole past of mankind so many people convinced of the dreadfulness of war, nor so large a proportion anxious to end war, to rearrange the world's affairs so that this huge hideousness of hardship, suffering, destruction, and killing that still continues in Europe may never again be repeated.

The present writer is one of this great majority. He wants as far as possible to end war altogether, and contrive things so that when any unavoidable outbreak does occur it may be as little cruel and mischievous as it can be.

But it is one thing to desire a thing and another thing to get it. It does not follow because this aspiration for world-peace is almost universal that it will be realized. There may be faults in ourselves, unsuspected influences within us and without, that may be working to defeat our superficial sentiments. There must be not only a desire for peace, but a will for peace, if peace is to be established forever. If out of a hundred men ninety-nine desire peace and trouble no further, the one man over will arm himself and set up oppression and war again. Peace must be organized and maintained. This present monstrous catastrophe is the outcome of forty-three years of skillful, industrious, systematic world armament. Only by a disarmament as systematic, as skillful, and as devoted may we hope to achieve centuries of peace.

No apology is needed, therefore, for a discussion of the way in which peace may be organized and established out of the settlement of this war. I am going to set out and estimate as carefully as I can the forces that make for a peace organization and the forces that make for war. I am going to do my best to diagnose the war disorder. I want to find out first for my own guidance, and then with a view to my co-operation with other people, what has to be done to prevent the continuation and recrudescence of warfare.

Such an inquiry is manifestly the necessary first stage in any world pacification. So manifestly that, of course, countless others are also setting to work upon it. It is a research. It is a research exactly like a scientific exploration. Each of us will probably get out a lot of truth and a considerable amount of error; the truth will be the same and the errors will confute and disperse each other. But it is clear that there is no simple panacea in this matter, and that only by intentness and persistence shall we disentangle a general conception of the road the peace-desiring multitude must follow.

Now, first be it noted that there is in every one a certain discord with regard to war. Every man is divided against himself. On the whole, most of us want peace. But hardly any one is without a lurking belligerence, a lurking admiration for the vivid impacts, the imaginative appeals of war. I am sitting down to write for the peace of the world, but immediately before I sat down to write I was reading the morning's paper, and particularly of the fight between the Sydney and the Emden at Cocos Island.

I confess to the utmost satisfaction in the account of the smashing blows delivered by the guns of the Australian. There is a sensation of greatness, a beautiful tremendousness, in many of the crude facts of war; they excite in one a kind of vigorous exaltation; we have that destructive streak in us, and it is no good pretending that we have not; the first thing we must do for the peace of the world is to control that. And to control it one can do nothing more effective than to keep in mind the other side of the realities of war.

As my own corrective I have at hand certain letters from a very able woman doctor who returned last week from Calais. Lockjaw, gangrene, men tied with filthy rags and lying bitterly cold in coaly sheds; men unwounded, but so broken by the chill horrors of the Yser trenches as to be near demented—such things make the substance of her picture. One young officer talked to her rather dryly of the operations, of the ruined towns and villages, of the stench of dead men and horses, of the losses and wounds and mutilations among his men, of the list of pals he had lost. "Suddenly he began to cry. He broke down just like an overtaxed child. And he could not stop crying. He cried and cried, and I could do nothing to help him." He was a strong man and a brave man, and to that three months of war had brought him.

And then this again:

There were a fair number of Belgian doctors, but no nurses except the usual untrained French girls, almost no equipment, and no place for clean surgery. We heard of a house containing sixty-one men with no doctor or nurses—several died without having received any medical aid at all. Mrs. —— and I even on the following Wednesday found four men lying on straw in a shop with leg and foot wounds who had not been dressed since Friday and had never been seen by a doctor. In addition there were hundreds and hundreds of wounded who could walk trying to find shelter in some corner, besides the many unwounded French and Belgian soldiers quartered in the town.

As if this inferno of misery were not enough, there were added the refugees! These were not Belgians, as I had imagined, but French. It appears that both English and French armies have to clear the civil population out of the whole fighting area—partly to prevent spying and treachery, (which has been a curse to both armies,) and partly because they would starve. They are sent to Calais, and then by boat to Havre.

That first Sunday evening an endless procession flowed from the station to the quays in the drenching rain. Each family had a perambulator, (a surprisingly handsome one, too,) piled with sticks of bread, a few bundles of goods, and, when we peered inside, a couple of crying babies. There were few young people; mostly it was whimpering, frightened-looking children and wretched, bent old men and women. It seemed too bad to be true; even when they brushed past us in the rain we could not believe that their sodden figures were real. They were dematerialized by misery in some odd way.

Some of them slept in skating rinks, trucks, some in the Amiral Ganteaume. (One's senses could not realize that to the horrors of exile these people had added those of shipwreck next day.) Some certainly stood in the Booking Hall outside our hotel all night through. This sort of thing went on all the week, and was going on when we left.

Nevertheless, I was stirred agreeably by the imagination of the shells smashing the Emden and the men inside the Emden, and when I read the other day that the naval guns had destroyed over 4,000 men in the German trenches about Middlekirche I remarked that we were "doing well." It is only on the whole that we who want to end war hate and condemn war; we are constantly lapsing into fierceness, and if we forget this lurking bellicosity and admiration for hard blows in our own nature then we shall set about the task of making an end to it under hopelessly disabling misconceptions. We shall underrate and misunderstand altogether the very powerful forces that are against pacifist effort.

Let us consider first, then, the forces that are directly opposed to the pacification of the world, the forces that will work openly and definitely for the preservation of war as a human condition. And it has to be remembered that the forces that are for a thing are almost always more unified, more concentrated and effective than the forces that are against it. We who are against war and want to stop it are against it for a great multitude of reasons. There are other things in life that we prefer, and war stops these other things. Some of us want to pursue art, some want to live industrious lives in town or country, some would pursue scientific developments, some want pleasures of this sort or that, some would live lives of religion and kindliness, or religion and austerity.

But we all agree in fixing our minds upon something else than war. And since we fix our minds on other things, war becomes possible and probable through our general inattention. We do not observe it, and meanwhile the people who really care for war and soldiering fix their minds upon it. They scheme how it shall be done, they scheme to bring it about. Then we discover suddenly—as the art and social development, the industry and pleasant living, the cultivation of the civil enterprise of England, France, Germany, and Russia have discovered—that everything must be pushed aside when the war thinkers have decided upon their game. And until we of the pacific majority contrive some satisfactory organization to watch the war-makers we shall never end war, any more than a country can end crime and robbery without a police. Specialist must watch specialist in either case. Mere expressions of a virtuous abhorrence of war will never end war until the crack of doom.

The people who actually want war are perhaps never at any time very numerous. Most people sometimes want war, and a few people always want war. It is these last who are, so to speak, the living nucleus of the war creature that we want to destroy. That liking for an effective smash which gleamed out in me for a moment when I heard of the naval guns is with them a dominating motive. It is not outweighed and overcome in them as it is in me by the sense of waste, and by pity and horror and by love for men who can do brave deeds and yet weep bitterly for misery and the deaths of good friends. These war-lovers are creatures of a simpler constitution. And they seem capable of an ampler hate.

You will discover, if you talk to them skillfully, that they hold that war "ennobles," and that when they say ennobles they mean that it is destructive to the ten thousand things in life that they do not enjoy or understand or tolerate, things that fill them, therefore, with envy and perplexity—such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful and happier living.

The military peoples of the world have almost always been harsh and rather stupid peoples, full of a virtuous indignation of all they did not understand. The modern Prussian goes to war today with as supreme a sense of moral superiority as the Arabs when they swept down upon Egypt and North Africa. The burning of the library of Alexandria remains forever the symbol of the triumph of a militarist "culture" over civilization. This easy belief of the dull and violent that war "braces" comes out of a real instinct of self-preservation against the subtler tests of peace. This type of person will keep on with war if it can. It is to politics what the criminal type is to social order; it will be resentful and hostile to every attempt to fix up a pacific order in the world.

This heavy envy which is the dominant characteristic of the pro-military type is by no means confined to it. More or less it is in all of us. In England one finds it far less frequently in professional soldiers than among sedentary learned men. In Germany, too, the more uncompromising and ferocious pro-militarism is to be found in the frock coats of the professors. Just at present England is full of virtuous reprehension of German military professors, but there is really no monopoly of such in Germany, and before Germany England produced some of the most perfect specimens of aggressive militarist conceivable. To read Froude upon Ireland or Carlyle upon the Franco-German War is to savor this hate-dripping temperament in its perfection.

Much of this literary bellicosity is pathological. Men overmuch in studies and universities get ill in their livers and sluggish in their circulations; they suffer from shyness, from a persuasion of excessive and neglected merit, old maid's melancholy, and a detestation of all the levities of life. And their suffering finds its vent in ferocious thoughts. A vigorous daily bath, a complete stoppage of wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco, and two hours of hockey in the afternoon would probably make decently tolerant men of all these fermenting professional militarists. Such a regimen would certainly have been the salvation of both Froude and Carlyle. It would probably have saved the world from the vituperation of the Hebrew prophets—those models for infinite mischief.

The extremist cases pass to the average case through insensible degrees. We are all probably, as a species, a little too prone to intolerance, and if we do in all sincerity mean to end war in the world we must prepare ourselves for considerable exercises in restraint when strange people look, behave, believe, and live in a manner different from our own. The minority of permanently bitter souls who want to see objectionable cities burning and men fleeing and dying form the real strength in our occasional complicities.

The world has had its latest object lesson in the German abuse of English and French as "degenerates," of the Russians as "Mongol hordes," of the Japanese as "yellow savages," but it is not only Germans who let themselves slip into national vanity and these ugly hostilities to unfamiliar life. The first line of attack against war must be an attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance. These things are the germ of uncompromising and incurable militarism everywhere.

Now, the attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance and the stern, self-satisfied militarism that arises naturally out of these things is to be made in a number of ways. The first is a sedulous propaganda of the truth about war, a steadfast resolve to keep the pain of warfare alive in the nerves of the careless, to keep the stench of war under the else indifferent nose. It is only in the study of the gloomily megalomaniac historian that aggressive war becomes a large and glorious thing. In reality it is a filthy outrage upon life, an idiot's smashing of the furniture of homes, a mangling, a malignant mischief, a scalding of stokers, a disemboweling of gunners, a raping of caught women by drunken soldiers. By book and pamphlet, by picture and cinematograph film, the pacifist must organize wisdom in these matters.

And not only indignation and distress must come to this task. The stern, uncompromising militarist will not be moved from his determinations by our horror and hostility. These things will but "brace" him. He has a more vulnerable side. The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other than theatrical and silly.

The greater part of the world is in an agony, a fever, but that does not make the cause of that fever noble or great. A man may die of yellow fever through the bite of a mosquito; that does not make a mosquito anything more than a dirty little insect or an aggressive imperialist better than a pothouse fool.

Henceforth we must recognize no heroic war but defensive war, and as the only honorable warriors such men as those peasants of Visé who went out with shotguns against the multitudinous overwhelming nuisance of invasion that trampled down their fields.

Or war to aid such defensive war.

II.

But the people who positively admire and advocate and want war for its own sake are only a small, feverish minority of mankind. The greater obstacle to the pacification of the world is not the war-seeker, but the vast masses of people who for the most various motives support and maintain all kinds of institutions and separations that make for war. They do not want war, they do not like war, but they will not make sacrifices, they will not exert themselves in any way to make war difficult or impossible.

It is they who give the war maniac his opportunity. They will not lock the gun away from him, they will not put a reasonable limit to the disputes into which he can ultimately thrust his violent substitute for a solution. They are like the people who dread and detest yellow fever, but oppose that putting of petrol on the ponds which is necessary to prevent it because of the injury to the water flowers.

Now, it is necessary, if we are to have an intelligently directed anti-war campaign, that we should make a clear, sound classification of these half-hearted people, these people who do not want war, but who permit it. Their indecisions, their vagueness, these are the really effective barriers to our desire to end war forever.

And first, there is one thing very obvious, and that is the necessity for some controlling world authority if treaties are to be respected and war abolished. While there are numerous sovereign States in the world each absolutely free to do what it chooses, to arm its people or repudiate engagements, there can be no sure peace. But great multitudes of those who sincerely desire peace forever cannot realize this. There are, for example, many old-fashioned English liberals who denounce militarism and "treaty entanglements" with equal ardor; they want Britain to stand alone, unaggressive, but free; not realizing that such an isolation is the surest encouragement to any war-enamored power. Exactly the same type is to be found in the United States, and is probably even more influential there. But only by so spinning a web of treaties that all countries are linked by general obligations to mutual protection can a real world-pacification be achieved.

The present alliance against the insufferable militarism of Germany may very probably be the precursor of a much wider alliance against any aggression whatever in the future. Only through some such arrangement is there any reasonable hope of a control and cessation of that constant international bickering and pressure, that rivalry in finance, that competition for influence in weak neutral countries, which has initiated all the struggles of the last century, and which is bound to accumulate tensions for fresh wars so long as it goes on.

Already several States, and particularly the Government of the United States of America, have signed treaties of arbitration, and The Hague Tribunal spins a first web of obligations, exemplary if gossamer, between the countries of the world. But these are but the faint initial suggestions of much greater possibilities, and it is these greater possibilities that have now to be realized if all the talk we have had about a war to end war is to bear any fruit. What is now with each week of the present struggle becoming more practicable is the setting up of a new assembly that will take the place of the various embassies and diplomatic organizations, of a mediaeval pattern and tradition, which have hitherto conducted international affairs.

This war must end in a public settlement, to which all of the belligerents will set their hands; it will not be a bundle of treaties, but one treaty binding eight or nine or more powers. This settlement will almost certainly be attained at a conference of representatives of the various Foreign Offices involved. Quite possibly interested neutral powers will also send representatives. There is no reason whatever why this conference should dissolve, why it should not become a permanent conference upon the inter-relations of the participating powers and the maintenance of the peace of the world. It could have a seat and officials, a staff, and a revenue of its own; it could sit and debate openly, publish the generally binding treaties between its constituent powers, and claim for the support of its decisions their military and naval resources.

The predominance of the greater powers could be secured either by the representatives having multiple votes, according to the population represented, or by some sort of proportional representation. Each power could appoint its representatives through its Foreign Office or by whatever other means it thought fit. They could as conveniently be elected by a legislature or a nation. And such a body would not only be of enormous authority in the statement, interpretation, and enforcement of treaties, but it could also discharge a hundred useful functions in relation to world hygiene, international trade and travel, the control of the ocean, the exploration and conservation of the world's supplies of raw material and food supply. It would be, in fact, a World Council.

Today this is an entirely practicable and hopeful proposal if only we can overcome the opposition of those who cling to the belief that it is possible for a country to be at the same time entirely pacific and entirely unresponsible to and detached from the rest of mankind.

Given such a body, such a great alliance of world powers, much else in the direction of world pacification becomes possible. Without it we may perhaps expect a certain benefit from the improved good feeling of mankind and the salutary overthrow of the German military culture, but we cannot hope for any real organized establishment of peace.

I believe that a powerful support for the assembly and continuance of such a world congress as this could be easily and rapidly developed in North and South America, in Britain and the British Empire generally, in France and Italy, in all the smaller States of northern, central, and western Europe. It would probably have the personal support of the Czar, unless he has profoundly changed the opinions with which he opened his reign, the warm accordance of educated China and Japan, and the good will of a renascent Germany. It would open a new era for mankind.

III.

Now, this idea of a congress of the belligerents to arrange the peace settlements after this war, expanding by the accession of neutral powers into a permanent world congress for the enforcement of international law and the maintenance of the peace of mankind, is so reasonable and attractive and desirable that if it were properly explained it would probably receive the support of nineteen out of every twenty intelligent persons.

Nevertheless, its realization is, on the whole, improbable. A mere universal disgust with war is no more likely to end war than the universal dislike for dying has ended death. And though war, unlike dying, seems to be an avoidable fate, it does not follow that its present extreme unpopularity will end it unless people not only desire but see to the accomplishment of their desire.

And here again one is likely to meet an active and influential opposition. Though the general will and welfare may point to the future management of international relations through a world congress, the whole mass of those whose business has been the direction of international relations is likely to be either skeptical or actively hostile to such an experiment. All the foreign offices and foreign ministers, the diplomatists universally, the politicians who have specialized in national assertion, and the courts that have symbolized and embodied it, all the people, in fact, who will be in control of the settlement, are likely to be against so revolutionary a change.

For it would be an entirely revolutionary change. It would put an end to secrecy. It would end all that is usually understood by diplomacy. It would clear the world altogether of those private understandings and provisional secret agreements, those intrigues, wire-pullings, and quasi-financial operations that have been the very substance of international relations hitherto. To these able and interested people, for the most part highly seasoned by the present conditions, finished and elaborated players at the old game, this is to propose a new, crude, difficult, and unsympathetic game. They may all of them, or most of them, hate war, but they will cling to the belief that their method of operating may now, after a new settlement, be able to prevent or palliate war.

All men get set in a way of living, and it is as little in human nature to give up cheerfully in the middle of life a familiar method of dealing with things in favor of a new and untried one as it is to change one's language or emigrate to an entirely different land. I realize what this proposal means to diplomatists when I try to suppose myself united to assist in the abolition of written books and journalism in favor of the gramophone and the cinematograph. Or united to adopt German as my means of expression. It is only by an enormous pressure of opinion in the world behind these monarchs, ministers, and representatives that they will be induced even to consider the possibility of adapting themselves to this novel style of international dealing through a permanent congress. It is only the consideration of its enormous hopefulness for the rest of the world that gives one the courage to advocate it.

In the question of the possible abolition of the present diplomatic system, just as in the case of the possible abolition of war, while on the side for abolition there must be a hugely preponderating interest and a hugely preponderating majority, it is, nevertheless, a dispersed interest and an unorganized, miscellaneous majority. The minority is, on the other hand, compact, more intensively and more immediately interested and able to resist such great changes with a maximum of efficiency. There is a tremendous need, therefore, for a world congress organization propaganda if this advantageously posted minority is to be overcome.

And from such countries as the American States in particular, and from the small liberal neutrals in Europe, whose diplomacy is least developed and least influential, liberal-minded people through the world are most disposed to expect, and do expect, a lead in this particular matter. The liberal forces in Britain, France, and Russia are extraordinarily embarrassed and enslaved by the vast belligerent necessities into which their lives have been caught. But they would take up such a lead with the utmost vigor and enthusiasm.

No one who has followed the diplomatic history of the negotiations that led to this war can doubt that if there had been no secret treaties, but instead open proclamations of intentions and an open discussion of international ambitions, the world might have been saved this catastrophe. It is no condemnation of any person or country to say this. The reserves and hesitations and misconceptions that led Germany to suppose that England would wait patiently while France and Belgium were destroyed before she herself received attention were unavoidable under the existing diplomatic conditions. What reasonable people have to do now is not to recriminate over the details in the working of a system that we can now all of us perceive to be hopelessly bad, but to do our utmost in this season of opportunity to destroy the obscurities in which fresh mischief may fester for our children.

Let me restate this section in slightly different words. At the end of this war there must be a congress of adjustment. The suggestion in this section is to make this congress permanent, to use it as a clearing house of international relationships and to abolish embassies.

Instead of there being a British Ambassador, for example, at every sufficiently important capital, and an ambassador from every important State in London, and a complex tangle of relationships, misstatements, and misconceptions arising from the ill-co-ordinated activities of this double system of agents, it is proposed to send one or several ambassadors to some central point, such as The Hague, to meet there all the ambassadors of all the significant States in the world and to deal with international questions with a novel frankness in a collective meeting.

This has now become a possible way of doing the world's business because of the development of the means of communication and information. The embassy in a foreign country, as a watching, remonstrating, proposing extension of its country of origin, a sort of eye and finger at the heart of the host country, is now clumsy, unnecessary, inefficient, and dangerous. For most routine work, for reports of all sorts, for legal action, and so forth, on behalf of traveling nationals, the consular service is adequate, or can easily be made adequate. What remains of the ambassadorial apparatus might very well merge with the consular system and the embassy become an international court civility, a ceremonial vestige without any diplomatic value at all.

IV.

Given a permanent world congress developed out of the congress of settlement between the belligerents, a world alliance, with as a last resort a call upon the forces of the associated powers, for dealing with recalcitrants, then a great number of possibilities open out to humanity that must otherwise remain inaccessible. But before we go on to consider these it may be wise to point out how much more likely a world congress is to effect a satisfactory settlement at the end of this war than a congress confined to the belligerents.

The war has progressed sufficiently to convince every one that there is now no possibility of an overwhelming victory for Germany. It must end in a more or less complete defeat of the German and Turkish alliance, and in a considerable readjustment of Austrian and Turkish boundaries. Assisted by the generosity of the doomed Austrians and Turks, the Germans are fighting now to secure a voice as large as possible in the final settlement, and it is conceivable that in the end that settlement may be made quite an attractive one for Germany proper by the crowning sacrifice of suicide on the part of her two subordinated allies.

There can be little doubt that Russia will gain the enormous advantage of a free opening into the Mediterranean and that the battle of the Marne turned the fortunes of France from disaster to expansion. But the rest of the settlement is still vague and uncertain, and German imperialism, at least, is already working hard and intelligently for a favorable situation at the climax, a situation that will enable this militarist empire to emerge still strong, still capable of recuperation and of a renewal at no very remote date of the struggle for European predominance. This is a thing as little for the good of the saner German people as it is for the rest of the world, but it is the only way in which militant imperialism can survive at all.

The alternative of an imperialism shorn of the glamour of aggression, becoming constitutional and democratic—the alternative, that is to say, of a great liberal Germany—is one that will be as distasteful almost to the people who control the destinies of Germany today, and who will speak and act for Germany in the final settlement, as a complete submission to a Serbian conqueror would be.

At the final conference of settlement Germany will not be really represented at all. The Prussian militarist empire will still be in existence, and it will sit at the council, working primarily for its own survival. Unless the Allies insist upon the presence of representatives of Saxony, Bavaria, and so forth, and demand the evidence of popular sanctions—a thing they are very unlikely to demand—that is what "Germany" will signify at the conference. And what is true of Germany will be true, more or less, of several other of the allied powers.

A conference confined purely to the belligerents will be, in fact, a conference not even representative of the belligerents. And it will be tainted with all the traditional policies, aggressions, suspicions, and subterfuges that led up to the war. It will not be the end of the old game, but the readjustment of the old game, the old game which is such an abominable nuisance to the development of modern civilization. The idealism of the great alliance will certainly be subjected to enormous strains, and the whole energy of the Central European diplomatists will be directed to developing and utilizing these stresses.

This, I think, must be manifest even to the foreign offices most concerned. They must see already ahead of them a terrible puzzle of arrangement, a puzzle their own bad traditions will certainly never permit them to solve. "God save us," they may very well pray, "from our own cleverness and sharp dealing," and they may even welcome the promise of an enlarged outlook that the entry of the neutral powers would bring with it.

Every foreign office has its ugly, evil elements, and probably every foreign office dreads those elements. There are certainly Russian fools who dream about India, German fools who dream about Canada and South America, British fools who dream about Africa and the East; aggressionists in the blood, people who can no more let nations live in peace than kleptomaniacs can keep their hands in their own pockets. But quite conceivably there are honest monarchs and sane foreign ministers very ready to snatch at the chance of swamping the evil in their own Chancelleries.

It is just here that the value of neutral participation will come in. Whatever ambitions the neutral powers may have of their own, it may be said generally that they are keenly interested in preventing the settlement from degenerating into a deal in points of vantage for any further aggressions in any direction. Both the United States of America and China are traditionally and incurably pacific powers, professing and practicing an unaggressive policy, and the chief outstanding minor States are equally concerned in securing a settlement that shall settle.

And moreover, so wide reaching now are all international agreements that they have not only a claim to intervene juridically, but they have the much more pressing claim to participate on the ground that no sort of readjustment of Europe, Western Asia, and Africa can leave their own futures unaffected. They are wanted not only in the interests of the belligerent peoples, but for their own sakes and the welfare of the world all together.

V.

Now a world conference, once it is assembled, can take up certain questions that no partial treatment can ever hope to meet. The first of the questions is disarmament. No one who has watched the politics of the last forty years can doubt the very great share the business and finance of armament manufacture has played in bringing about the present horrible killing, and no one who has read accounts of the fighting can doubt how much this industry has enhanced the torment, cruelty, and monstrosity of war.

In the old warfare a man was either stabbed, shot, or thrust through after an hour or so of excitement, and all the wounded on the field were either comfortably murdered or attended to before the dawn of the next day. One was killed by human hands, with understandable and tolerable injuries. But in this war the bulk of the dead—of the western Allies, at any rate—have been killed by machinery, the wounds have been often of an inconceivable horribleness, and the fate of the wounded has been more frightful than was ever the plight of wounded in the hands of victorious savages. For days multitudes of men have been left mangled, half buried in mud and filth, or soaked with water, or frozen, crying, raving between the contending trenches. The number of men that the war, without actual physical wounds, has shattered mentally and driven insane because of its noise, its stresses, its strange unnaturalness, is enormous. Horror in this war has overcome more men than did all the arrows of Cressy.

Almost all this enhanced terribleness of war is due to the novel machinery of destruction that science has rendered possible. The wholesale mangling and destroying of men by implements they have never seen, without any chance of retaliation, has been its most constant feature. You cannot open a paper of any date since the war began without reading of men burned, scalded, and drowned by the bursting of torpedoes from submarines, of men falling out of the sky from shattered aeroplanes, of women and children in Antwerp or Paris mutilated frightfully or torn to ribbons by aerial bombs, of men smashed and buried alive by shells. An indiscriminate, diabolical violence of explosives resulting in cruelties for the most part ineffective from the military point of view is the incessant refrain of this history.

The increased dreadfulness of war due to modern weapons is, however, only one consequence of their development. The practicability of aggressive war in settled countries now is entirely dependent on the use of elaborate artillery on land and warships at sea. Were there only rifles in the world, were an ordinary rifle the largest kind of gun permitted, and were ships specifically made for war not so made, then it would be impossible to invade any country defended by a patriotic and spirited population with any hopes of success because of the enormous defensive capacity of entrenched riflemen not subjected to an unhampered artillery attack.

Modern war is entirely dependent upon equipment of the most costly and elaborate sort. A general agreement to reduce that equipment would not only greatly minimize the evil of any war that did break out, but it would go a long way toward the abolition of war. A community of men might be unwilling to renounce their right of fighting one another if occasion arose, but they might still be willing to agree not to carry arms or to carry arms of a not too lethal sort, to carry pistols instead of rifles or sticks instead of swords. That, indeed, has been the history of social amelioration in a number of communities; it has led straight to a reduction in the number of encounters. So in the same way the powers of the world might be willing to adopt such a limitation of armaments, while still retaining the sovereign right of declaring war in certain eventualities. Under the assurances of a world council threatening a general intervention, such a partial disarmament would be greatly facilitated.

And another aspect of disarmament which needs to be taken up and which only a world congress can take up must be the arming of barbaric or industrially backward powers by the industrially and artillery forces in such countries as efficient powers, the creation of navies Turkey, Servia, Peru, and the like. In Belgium countless Germans were blown to pieces by German-made guns, Europe arms Mexico against the United States; China, Africa, Arabia are full of European and American weapons. It is only the mutual jealousies of the highly organized States that permit this leakage of power. The tremendous warnings of our war should serve to temper their foolish hostilities, and now, if ever, is the time to restrain this insane arming of the less advanced communities.

But before that can be done it is necessary that the manufacture of war material should cease to be a private industry and a source of profit to private individuals, that all the invention and enterprise that blossoms about business should be directed no longer to the steady improvement of man-killing. It is a preposterous and unanticipated thing that respectable British gentlemen should be directing magnificently organized masses of artisans upon the Tyneside in the business of making weapons that may ultimately smash some of those very artisans to smithereens.

At the risk of being called "Utopian" I would submit that the world is not so foolish as to allow that sort of thing to go on indefinitely. It is, indeed, quite a recent human development. All this great business of armament upon commercial lines is the growth of half a century. But it has grown with the vigor of an evil weed, it has thrown out a dark jungle of indirect advertisement, and it has compromised and corrupted great numbers of investors and financial people. It is perhaps the most powerful single interest of all those that will fight against the systematic minimization and abolition of war, and rather than lose his end it may be necessary for the pacifist to buy out all these concerns, to insist upon the various States that have sheltered them taking them over, lock, stock, and barrel, as going businesses.

From what we know of officialism everywhere, the mere transfer will involve almost at once a decline in their vigor and innovating energy. It is perhaps fortunate that the very crown of the private armaments business is the Krupp organization and that its capture and suppression is a matter of supreme importance to all the allied powers. Russia, with her huge population, has not as yet developed armament works upon a very large scale and would probably welcome proposals that minimized the value of machinery and so enhanced that of men. Beyond this and certain American plants for the making of rifles and machine guns only British and French capital is very deeply involved in the armaments trade. The problem is surely not too difficult for human art and honesty.

It is not being suggested that the making of arms should cease in the world, but only that in every country it should become a State monopoly and so completely under Government control. If the State can monopolize the manufacture and sale of spirits, as Russia has done, if it can, after the manner of Great Britain, control the making and sale of such a small, elusive substance as saccharin, it is ridiculous to suppose that it cannot keep itself fully informed of the existence of such elaborated machinery as is needed to make a modern rifle barrel. And it demands a very minimum of alertness, good faith, and good intentions for the various manufacturing countries to keep each other and the world generally informed upon the question of the respective military equipments. From this state of affairs to a definition of a permissible maximum of strength on land and sea for all the high contracting powers is an altogether practicable step. Disarmament is not a dream; it is a thing more practicable than a general hygienic convention and more easily enforced than custom and excise.

Now none of this really involves the abandonment of armies or uniforms or national service. Indeed, to a certain extent it restores the importance of the soldier at the expense of machinery. A world conference for the suppressing of the peace and the preservation of armaments would neither interfere with such dear incorrigible squabbles as that of the orange and green factions in Ireland, (though it might deprive them of their more deadly weapons,) nor absolutely prohibit war between adjacent States. It would, however, be a very powerful delaying force against the outbreak of war, and it would be able to insist with a quite novel strength upon the observation of the rules of war.

It is no good pretending that mere pacifism will end war; what will end war, what, indeed, may be ending war at the present time, is war—against militarism. Force respects itself and no other power. The hope for a world of peace in the future lies in that, in the possibility of a great alliance, so powerful that it will compel adhesions, an alliance prepared to make war upon and destroy and replace the Government of any State that became aggressive in its militarism. This alliance will be in effect a world congress perpetually restraining aggressive secession, and obviously it must regard all the No-Man's Lands—and particularly that wild waste, the ocean—as its highway. The fleets and marines of the allied world powers must become the police of the wastes and waters of the earth.

VI.

Now, such a collective control of belligerence and international relations is the obvious common sense settlement of the present world conflict, it is so manifest, so straight-forward that were it put plainly to them it would probably receive the assent of nineteen sane men out of twenty in the world. This, or some such thing as this, they would agree, is far better than isolations and the perpetual threat of fresh warfare.

But against it there work forces, within these people and without, that render the attainment of this generally acceptable solution far less probable than a kind of no-solution that will only be a reopening of all our hostilities and conflicts upon a fresh footing. Some of these forces are vague and general, and can only be combated by a various and abundant liberal literature, in a widely dispersed battle in which each right-thinking man must do as his conscience directs him. There are the vague national antagonisms, the reservations in favor of one's own country's righteousness, harsh religious and social and moral cant of the Carlyle type, greed, resentment, and suspicion. The greatest of these vague oppositions is that want of faith which makes man say war has always been and must always be, which makes them prophesy that whatever we do will become corrupted and evil, even in the face of intolerable present evils and corruptions.

When at the outbreak of the war I published an article headed "The War That Will End War," at once Mr. W.L. George hastened to reprove my dreaming impracticability. "War there has always been." Great is the magic of a word! He was quite oblivious to the fact that war has changed completely in its character half a dozen times in half a dozen centuries; that the war we fought in South Africa and the present war and the wars of mediaeval Italy and the wars of the Red Indians have about as much in common as a cat and a man and a pair of scissors and a motor car—namely, that they may all be the means of death.

If war can change its character as much as it has done it can change it altogether; if peace can be kept indefinitely in India or North America, it can be kept throughout the world. It is not I who dream, but Mr. George and his like who are not yet fully awake, and it is their somnolence that I dread more than anything else when I think of the great task of settlement before the world.

It is this rather hopeless, inert, pseudo-sage mass of unbelievers who render possible the continuation of war dangers. They give scope for the activities of the evil minority which hates, which lives by pride and grim satisfactions, and which is therefore anxious to have more war and more. And it is these inert half-willed people who will obstruct the disentanglement of the settlement from diplomatic hands. "What do we know about the nuance of such things?" they will ask, with that laziness that apes modesty. It is they who will complain when we seek to buy out the armaments people. Probably all the private armament firms in the world could be bought up for seventy million pounds, but the unbelievers will shake their heads and say: "Then there will only be something else instead."

Yet there are many ungauged forces on the side of the greater settlement. Cynicism is never more than a half-truth, and because man is imperfect it does not follow that he must be futile. Russia is a land of strange silences, but it is manifest that whatever the innermost quality of the Czar may be, he is no clap-trap vulgar conqueror of the Wilhelm-Napoleon pattern. He began his reign, and he may yet crown his reign, with an attempt to establish peace on a newer, broader foundation. His religion, it would seem, is his master and not his servant. There has been no Russian Bernhardi.

And there has been much in America, much said and much done, since the war broke out that has surprised the world. I may confess for myself, and I believe that I shall speak for many other Europeans in this matter, that what we feared most in the United States was levity. We expected mere excitement, violent fluctuations of opinion, a confused irresponsibility, and possibly mischievous and disastrous interventions. It is no good hiding an open secret. We judged America by the peace headline. It is time we began to offer our apologies to America and democracy. The result of reading endless various American newspapers and articles, of following the actions of the American Government, of talking to representative Americans, is to realize the existence of a very clear, strong national mentality, a firm, self-controlled, collective will, far more considerable in its totality than the world has ever seen before.

We thought the United States would be sentimentally patriotic and irresponsible, that they would behave as though the New World was, indeed, a separate planet, and as though they had neither duties nor brotherhood in Europe. It is quite clear, on the contrary, that the people of the United States consider this war as their affair also, and that they have the keenest sense of their responsibility for the general welfare of mankind.

So that as a second chance, after the possibility of a broad handling of the settlement by the Czar, and as a very much bigger probability, is the insistence by America upon her right to a voice in the ultimate settlement and an initiative from the Western Hemisphere that will lead to a world congress. There are the two most hopeful sources of that great proposal. It is the tradition of British national conduct to be commonplace to the pitch of dullness, and all the stifled intelligence of Great Britain will beat in vain against the national passion for the ordinary. Britain, in the guise of Sir Edward Grey, will come to the congress like a family solicitor among the Gods. What is the good of shamming about this least heroic of Fatherlands? But Britain would follow a lead; the family solicitor is honest and well-meaning. France and Belgium and Italy are too deeply in the affair, or without sufficient moral prestige, for a revolutionary initiative in international relationship.

There is, however, a possible third source from which the proposal for a world congress might come, with the support of both neutrals and belligerents, and that is The Hague. Were there a man of force and genius at The Hague now, a man speaking with authority and not as the scribes, he might thrust enormous benefits upon the world.

It is from these three sources that I most hope for leading now. Of the new Pope and his influence I know nothing. But in the present situation of the world's affairs it behooves us ill to wait idle until leaders clear the way for us. Every man who realizes the broad conditions of the situation, every one who can talk or write or echo, can do his utmost to spread his realization of the possibilities of a world congress and the establishment of world law and world peace that lie behind the monstrous agonies and cruelties and confusions of this catastrophic year. Given an immense body of opinion initiatives may break out effectively anywhere; failing it, they will be fruitless everywhere.