Chapter VII · COULD THE WAR HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?

‘BUT the real irrelevance of all this discussion,’ it will be said, ‘is that however complete our recognition of these truths might have been, that recognition would not have affected Germany’s action. We did not want territory, or colonies, or mines, or oil-wells, or phosphate islands, or railway concessions. We fought simply to resist aggression. The alternatives for us were sheer submission to aggression, or war, a war of self-defence.’

Let us see. Our danger came from Germany’s aggressiveness. What made her more aggressive than other nations, than those who later became our Allies—Russia, Rumania, Italy, Japan, France? Sheer original sin, apart from political or economic circumstance?

Now it was an extraordinary thing that those who were most clamant about the danger were for the most part quite ready to admit—even to urge and emphasise as part of their case—that Germany’s aggression was not due to inherent wickedness, but that any nation placed in her position would behave in just about the same way. That, indeed, was the view of very many pre-eminent before the War in their warnings of the German peril, of among others, Lord Roberts, Admiral Mahan, Mr Frederic Harrison, Mr Blatchford, Professor Wilkinson.

Let us recall, for instance, Mr Harrison’s case for German aggression—Germany’s ‘poor access to the sea and its expanding population’:—

‘A mighty nation of 65,000,000, with such superb resources both for peace and war, and such overweening pride in its own superiority and might, finds itself closed up in a ring-fence too narrow for its fecundity as for its pretensions, constructed more by history, geography, and circumstances than by design—a fence maintained by the fears rather than the hostility of its weaker neighbours. That is the rumbling subterranean volcano on which the European State system rests.

‘It is inevitable but that a nation with the magnificent resources of the German, hemmed in a territory so inadequate to their needs and pretensions, and dominated by a soldier, bureaucratic, and literary caste, all deeply imbued with the Bismarckian doctrine, should thirst to extend their dominions, and their power at any sacrifice—of life, of wealth, and of justice. One must take facts as they are, and it is idle to be blind to facts, or to rail against them. It is as silly to gloss over manifest perils as it is to preach moralities about them.... England, Europe, civilisation, is in imminent peril from German expansion.’[136]

Very well. We are to drop preaching moralities and look at the facts. Would successful war by us remove the economic and political causes which were part at least of the explanation of German aggression? Would her need for expansion become less? The preceding pages answer that question. Successful war by us would not dispose of the pressure of German population.

If the German menace was due in part at least to such causes as ‘poor access to the sea,’ the absence of any assurance as to future provision for an expanding population, what measures were proposed for the removal of those causes?

None whatever. Not only so, but any effort towards a frank facing of the economic difficulty was resisted by the very people who had previously urged the economic factors of the conflict, as a ‘sordid’ interpretation of that conflict. We have seen what happened, for instance, in the case of Admiral Mahan. He urged that the competition for undeveloped territory and raw materials lay behind the political struggle. So be it; replies some one; let us see whether we cannot remove that economic cause of conflict, whether indeed there is any real economic conflict at all. And the Admiral then retorts that economics have nothing to do with it. To Mr Frederic Harrison ‘The Great Illusion policy is childish and mischievous rubbish.’ What was that policy? To deny the existence of the German or other aggressiveness? The whole policy was prompted by the very fact of that danger. Did the policy suggest that we should simply yield to German political pretensions? Again, as we have seen, such a course was rejected with every possible emphasis. The one outstanding implication of the policy was that while arming we must find a basis of co-operation by which both peoples could live.

In any serious effort to that end, one overpowering question had to be answered by Englishmen who felt some responsibility for the welfare of their people. Would that co-operation, giving security to others, demand the sacrifice of the interest or welfare of their own people? The Great Illusion replied, No, and set forth the reasons for that reply. And the setting-forth of those reasons made the book an ‘appeal to avarice against patriotism,’ an attempt ‘to restore the blessed hour of money getting.’ Eminent Nonconformist divines and patriotic stockbrokers joined hands in condemning the appalling sordidness of the demonstration which might have led to a removal of the economic causes of international quarrel.

It is not true to say that in the decade preceding Armageddon the alternatives to fighting Germany were exhausted, and that nothing was left but war or submission. We simply had not tried the remedy of removing the economic excuse for aggression. The fact that Germany did face these difficulties and much future uncertainty was indeed urged by those of the school of Mr Harrison and Lord Roberts as a conclusive argument against the possibility of peace or any form of agreement with her. The idea that agreement should reach to such fundamental things as the means of subsistence seemed to involve such an invasion of sovereignty as not even to be imaginable.

To show that such an agreement would not ask a sacrifice of vital national interest, that indeed the economic advantages which could be exacted by military preponderance were exceedingly small or non-existent, seemed the first indispensable step towards bringing some international code of economic right within the area of practical politics, of giving it any chance of acceptance by public opinion. Yet the effort towards that was disparaged and derided as ‘materialistic.’

One hoped at least that this disparagement of material interest as a motive in international politics might give us a peace settlement which would be free from it. But economic interest which is ‘sordid’ when appealed to as a means of preserving the peace, becomes a sacred egoism when invoked on behalf of a policy which makes war almost inevitable.

Why did it create such bitter resentment before the War to suggest that we should discuss the economic grounds of international conflict—why before the War were many writers who now demand that discussion so angry at it being suggested? Among the very hostile critics of The Great Illusion—hostile mainly on the ground that it misread the motive forces in international politics—was Mr J. L. Garvin. Yet his own first post-war book is entitled: The Economic Foundations of Peace, and its first Chapter Summary begins thus:—

‘A primary war, largely about food and raw materials: inseparable connection of the politics and economics of the peace.’

And his first paragraph contains the following:—

‘The war with many names was in one main aspect a war about food supply and raw materials. To this extent it was Germany’s fight to escape from the economic position of interdependence without security into which she had insensibly fallen—to obtain for herself independent control of an ample share in the world’s supplies of primary resources. The war meant much else, but it meant this as well and this was a vital factor in its causes.’

His second chapter is thus summarised:—

‘Former international conditions transformed by the revolution in transport and telegraphic intelligence; great nations lose their former self-sufficient basis: growth of interdependence between peoples and continents.... Germany without sea power follows Britain’s economic example; interdependence without security: national necessities and cosmopolitan speculation: an Armageddon unavoidable.’

Lord Grey has said that if there had existed in 1914 a League of Nations as tentative even as that embodied in the Covenant, Armageddon could in any case have been delayed, and delay might well have meant prevention. We know now that if war had been delayed the mere march of events would have altered the situation. It is unlikely that a Russian revolution of one kind or another could have been prevented even if there had been no war; and a change in the character of the Russian government might well have terminated on the one side the Serbian agitation against Austria, and on the other the genuine fear of German democrats concerning Russia’s imperialist ambitions. The death of the old Austrian emperor was another factor that might have made for peace.[137]

Assume, in addition to such factors, that Britain had been prepared to recognise Germany’s economic needs and difficulties, as Mr Garvin now urges we should recognise them. Whether even this would have prevented war, no man can say. But we can say—and it is implicit in the economic case now so commonly urged as to the need of Germany for economic security—that since we did not give her that security we did not do all that we might have done to remove the causes of war. ‘Here in the struggle for primary raw materials’ says Mr Garvin in effect over the six hundred pages more or less of his book, ‘are causes of war that must be dealt with if we are to have peace.’ If then, in the years that preceded Armageddon, the world had wanted to avoid that orgy, and had had the necessary wisdom, these are things with which it would have occupied itself.

Yet when the attempt was made to draw the attention of the world to just those factors, publicists even as sincere and able as Mr Garvin disparaged it; and very many misrepresented it by silly distortion. It is easy now to see where that pre-war attempt to work towards some solution was most defective: if greater emphasis had been given to some definite scheme for assuring Germany’s necessary access to resources, the real issue might have been made plainer. A fair implication of The Great Illusion was that as Britain had no real interest in thwarting German expansion, the best hope for the future lay in an increasingly clear demonstration of the fact of community of interest. The more valid conclusion would have been that the absence of conflict in vital interests should have been seized upon as affording an opportunity for concluding definite conventions and obligations which would assuage fears on both sides. But criticism, instead of bringing out this defect, directed itself, for the most part, to an attempt to show that the economic fears or facts had nothing to do with the conflict. Had criticism consisted in taking up the problem where The Great Illusion left it, much more might have been done—perhaps sufficient—to make Armageddon unnecessary.[138]

The importance of the phenomenon we have just touched upon—the disparagement before war of truths we are compelled to face after war—lies in its revelation of subconscious or unconscious motive. There grows up after some years of peace in every nation possessing military and naval traditions and a habit of dominion, a real desire for domination, perhaps even for war itself; the opportunity that it affords for the assertion of collective power; the mysterious dramatic impulse to ‘stop the cackle with a blow; strike, and strike home.’

For the moment we are at the ebb of that feeling and another is beginning perhaps to flow. The results are showing in our policy. We find in what would have been ten years ago very strange places for such things, attacks upon the government for its policy of ‘reckless militarism’ in Mesopotamia or Persia. Although public opinion did not manage to impose a policy of peace with Russia, it did at least make open and declared war impossible, and all the efforts of the Northcliffe Press to inflame passion by stories of Bolshevist atrocities fell completely flat. For thirty years it has been a crime of lèse patrie to mention the fact that we have given solemn and repeated pledges for the evacuation of Egypt. And indeed to secure a free hand in Egypt we were ready to acquiesce in the French evasion of international obligations in Morocco, a policy which played no small part in widening the gulf between ourselves and Germany. Yet the political position on behalf of which ten years ago these risks were taken is to-day surrendered with barely a protest. A policy of almost unqualified ‘scuttle’ which no Cabinet could have faced a decade since, to-day causes scarcely a ripple. And as to the Treaty, certain clauses therein, around which centred less than two years ago a true dementia—the trial of the Kaiser in London, the trial of war prisoners—we have simply forgotten all about.

It is certain that sheer exhaustion of the emotions associated with war explains a good deal. But Turks, Poles, Arabs, Russians, who have suffered war much longer, still fight. The policy of the loan to Germany, the independence of Egypt, the evacuation of Mesopotamia, the refusal to attempt the removal of the Bolshevist ‘menace to freedom and civilisation’ by military means, are explained in part at least by a growing recognition of both the political and the economic futility of the military means, and the absolute need of replacing or supplementing the military method by an increasing measure of agreement and co-operation. The order of events has been such as to induce an interpretation, bring home a conviction, which has influenced policy. But the strength and permanence of the conviction will depend upon the degree of intelligence with which the interpretation is made. Discussion is indispensable and that justifies this re-examination of the suggestions made in The Great Illusion.

In so far as it is mere emotional exhaustion which we are now feeling, and not the beginning of a new tradition and new attitude in which intelligence, however dimly, has its part, it has in it little hope. For inertia has its dangers as grave as those of unseeing passion. In the one case the ship is driven helplessly by a gale on to the rocks, in the other it drifts just as helplessly into the whirlpool. A consciousness of direction, a desire at least to be master of our fate and to make the effort of thought to that end, is the indispensable condition of freedom, salvation. That is the first and last justification for the discussion we have just summarised.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

wth Great Britain=> with Great Britain {pg xvii}

his colleages=> his colleagues {pg 38}

retore devastated districts=> restore devastated districts {pg 39}

aquiescence=> acquiescence {pg 45}

indispensible=> indispensable {pg 46}

the Lorrarine work=> the Lorraine work {pg 86}

rcently passed=> recently passed {pg 135}

Allied aerodomes on the Rhine=> Allied aerodromes on the Rhine {pg 163}

the sublest=> the subtlest {pg 239}

the enemy’s propetry=> the enemy’s property {pg 294}

a monoply=> a monopoly {pg 299}

goverments=> governments {pg 299}

econmic=> economic {pg 303}