ENGLAND AND THE WAR

being

SUNDRY ADDRESSES

delivered during the warand now first collected

by

WALTER RALEIGH

OXFORD

1918

CONTENTS

PREFACE

MIGHT IS RIGHT First published as one of the Oxford Pamphlets, October 1914. 

THE WAR OF IDEAS An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, December 12, 1916. 

THE FAITH OF ENGLAND An Address to the Union Society of University College, London, March 22, 1917. 

SOME GAINS OF THE WAR An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, February 13, 1918. 

THE WAR AND THE PRESS A Paper read to the Essay Society, Eton College, March 14, 1918. 

SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND The Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, delivered July 4, 1918. 

PREFACE

This book was not planned, but grew out of the troubles of the time. When, on one occasion or another, I was invited to lecture, I did notfind, with Milton's Satan, that the mind is its own place; I could speakonly of what I was thinking of, and my mind was fixed on the War. I amunacquainted with military science, so my treatment of the War waslimited to an estimate of the characters of the antagonists. 

The character of Germany and the Germans is a riddle. I have seen noconvincing solution of it by any Englishman, and hardly any confidentattempt at a solution which did not speak the uncontrolled language ofpassion. There is the same difficulty with the lower animals; ourdescription of them tends to be a description of nothing but our ownloves and hates. Who has ever fathomed the mind of a rhinoceros; or hasremembered, while he faces the beast, that a good rhinoceros is apleasant member of the community in which his life is passed? We seeonly the folded hide, the horn, and the angry little eye. We know thathe is strong and cunning, and that his desires and instincts areinconsistent with our welfare. Yet a rhinoceros is a simpler creaturethan a German, and does not trouble our thought by conforming, onoccasion, to civilized standards and humane conditions. 

It seems unreasonable to lay great stress on racial differences. Theinsuperable barrier that divides England from Germany has grown out ofcircumstance and habit and thought. For many hundreds of years theGerman peoples have stood to arms in their own defence against theencroachments of successive empires; and modern Germany learned thedoctrine of the omnipotence of force by prolonged suffering at the handsof the greatest master of that immoral school--the Emperor Napoleon. NoGerman can understand the attitude of disinterested patronage which theEnglish mind quite naturally assumes when it is brought into contactwith foreigners. The best example of this superiority of attitude is tobe seen in the people who are called pacifists. They are a peculiarlyEnglish type, and they are the most arrogant of all the English. Theidea that they should ever have to fight for their lives is to themsupremely absurd. There must be some mistake, they think, which can beeasily remedied once it is pointed out. Their title to existence is soclear to themselves that they are convinced it will be universallyrecognized; it must not be made a matter of international conflict. Partly, no doubt, this belief is fostered by lack of imagination. Thesheltered conditions and leisured life which they enjoy as the parasitesof a dominant race have produced in them a false sense of security. Butthere is something also of the English strength and obstinacy ofcharacter in their self-confidence, and if ever Germany were to conquerEngland some of them would spring to their full stature as the heroes ofan age-long and indomitable resistance. They are not held in much esteemto-day among their own people; they are useless for the work in hand;and their credit has suffered from the multitude of pretenders who makeprinciple a cover for cowardice. But for all that, they are kin to themakers of England, and the fact that Germany would never tolerate themfor an instant is not without its lesson. 

We shall never understand the Germans. Some of their traits may possiblybe explained by their history. Their passionate devotion to the State, their amazing vulgarity, their worship of mechanism and mechanicalefficiency, are explicable in a people who are not strong in individualcharacter, who have suffered much to achieve union, and who haveachieved it by subordinating themselves, soul and body, to a brutaltaskmaster. But the convulsions of war have thrown up things that aredeeper than these, primaeval things, which, until recently, civilizationwas believed to have destroyed. The old monstrous gods who gave theirnames to the days of the week are alive again in Germany. The Englishsoldier of to-day goes into action with the cold courage of a man who isprepared to make the best of a bad job. The German soldier sacrificeshimself, in a frenzy of religious exaltation, to the War-God. Thefilthiness that the Germans use, their deliberate befouling of all thatis elegant and gracious and antique, their spitting into the food thatis to be eaten by their prisoners, their defiling with ordure the sacredvessels in the churches--all these things, too numerous and toomonotonous to describe, are not the instinctive coarsenesses of thebrute beast; they are a solemn ritual of filth, religiously practised, by officers no less than by men. The waves of emotional exaltation whichfrom time to time pass over the whole people have the same character, the character of savage religion. 

If they are alien to civilization when they fight, they are doubly alienwhen they reason. They are glib and fluent in the use of the terms whichhave been devised for the needs of thought and argument, but their useof these terms is empty, and exhibits all the intellectual processeswith the intelligence left out. I know nothing more distressing than theattempt to follow any German argument concerning the War. If it weremerely wrong-headed, cunning, deceitful, there might still be somecompensation in its cleverness. There is no such compensation. Thestatements made are not false, but empty; the arguments used are notbad, but meaningless. It is as if they despised language, and made useof it only because they believe that it is an instrument of deceit. Buta man who has no respect for language cannot possibly use it in such amanner as to deceive others, especially if those others are accustomedto handle it delicately and powerfully. It ought surely to be easy toapologize for a war that commands the whole-hearted support of a nation;but no apology worthy of the name has been produced in Germany. Thepleadings which have been used are servile things, written to order, anddirected to some particular address, as if the truth were of noimportance. No one of these appeals has produced any appreciable effecton the minds of educated Frenchmen, or Englishmen, or Americans, evenamong those who are eager to hear all that the enemy has to say forhimself. This is a strange thing; and is perhaps the widest breach ofall. We are hopelessly separated from the Germans; we have lost the useof a common language, and cannot talk with them if we would. 

We cannot understand them; is it remotely possible that they will everunderstand us? Here, too, the difficulties seem insuperable. It is truethat in the past they have shown themselves willing to study us and toimitate us. But unless they change their minds and their habits, it isnot easy to see how they are to get near enough to us to carry on theirstudy. While they remain what they are we do not want them in ourneighbourhood. We are not fighting to anglicize Germany, or to imposeourselves on the Germans; our work is being done, as work is so oftendone in this idle sport-loving country, with a view to a holiday. Wewish to forget the Germans; and when once we have policed them intoquiet and decency we shall have earned the right to forget them, atleast for a time. The time of our respite perhaps will not be long. Ifthe Allies defeat them, as the Allies will, it seems as certain as anyuncertain thing can be that a mania for imitating British and Americancivilization will take possession of Germany. We are not vindictive to abeaten enemy, and when the Germans offer themselves as pupils we are notlikely to be either enthusiastic in our welcome or obstinate in ourrefusal. We shall be bored but concessive. I confess that there aresome things in the prospect of this imitation which haunt me like anightmare. The British soldier, whom the German knows to be second tonone, is distinguished for the levity and jocularity of his bearing inthe face of danger. What will happen when the German soldier attempts toimitate that? We shall be delivered from the German peril as when Israelcame out of Egypt, and the mountains skipped like rams. 

The only parts of this book for which I claim any measure of authorityare the parts which describe the English character. No one of purelyEnglish descent has ever been known to describe the English character, or to attempt to describe it. The English newspapers are full of praisesof almost any of the allied troops other than the English regiments. Ihave more Scottish and Irish blood in my veins than English; and I thinkI can see the English character truly, from a little distance. If, bysome fantastic chance, the statesmen of Germany could learn what I tellthem, it would save their country from a vast loss of life and from manyhopeless misadventures. The English character is not a removable part ofthe British Empire; it is the foundation of the whole structure, and thesecret strength of the American Republic. But the statesmen of Germany, who fall easy victims to anything foolish in the shape of a theory thatflatters their vanity, would not believe a word of my essays even ifthey were to read them, so they must learn to know the English characterin the usual way, as King George the Third learned to know it fromEnglishmen resident in America. 

A habit of lying and a belief in the utility of lying are oftenattended by the most unhappy and paralysing effects. The liars becomeunable to recognize the truth when it is presented to them. This is themisery which fate has fixed on the German cause. War, the Germans arefond of remarking, is war. In almost all wars there is something to besaid on both sides of the question. To know that one side or the otheris right may be difficult; but it is always useful to know why yourenemies are fighting. We know why Germany is fighting; she explained itvery fully, by her most authoritative voices, on the very eve of thestruggle, and she has repeated it many times since in moments ofconfidence or inadvertence. But here is the tragedy of Germany: she doesnot know why we are fighting. We have told her often enough, but shedoes not believe it, and treats our statement as an exercise in thecunning use of what she calls ethical propaganda. Why ethics, or morals, should be good enough to inspire sympathy, but not good enough toinspire war, is one of the mysteries of German thought. No German, noteven any of those few feeble German writers who have fitfully criticizedthe German plan, has any conception of the deep, sincere, unselfish, andrighteous anger that was aroused in millions of hearts by the crueltiesof the cowardly assault on Serbia and on Belgium. The late GermanChancellor became uneasily aware that the crucifixion of Belgium was oneof the causes which made this war a truceless war, and his offer, whichno doubt seemed to him perfectly reasonable, was that Germany is willingto bargain about Belgium, and to relax her hold, in exchange for solidadvantages elsewhere. Perhaps he knew that if the Allies were to spendfive minutes in bargaining about Belgium they would thereby condone theGerman crime and would lose all that they have fought for. But it seemsmore likely that he did not know it. The Allies know it. 

There is hope in these clear-cut issues. Of all wars that ever werefought this war is least likely to have an indecisive ending. It must besettled one way or the other. If the Allied Governments were to makepeace to-day, there would be no peace; the peoples of the free countrieswould not suffer it. Germany cannot make peace, for she is bound byheavy promises to her people, and she cannot deliver the goods. She istied to the stake, and must fight the course. Emaciated, exhausted, repeating, as if in a bad dream, the old boastful appeals to militaryglory, she must go on till she drops, and then at last there will bepeace. 

These may themselves seem boastful words; they cannot be proved exceptby the event. There are some few Englishmen, with no stomach for afight, who think that England is in a bad way because she is engaged ina war of which the end is not demonstrably certain. If the issues ofwars were known beforehand, and could be discounted, there would be nowars. Good wars are fought by nations who make their choice, and wouldrather die than lose what they are fighting for. Military fortunes arenotoriously variable, and depend on a hundred accidents. Moral causesare constant, and operate all the time. The chief of these moral causesis the character of a people. Germany, by her vaunted study of the artand science of war, has got herself into a position where no success cancome to her except by way of the collapse or failure of theEnglish-speaking peoples. A study of the moral causes, if she werecapable of making it, would not encourage her in her old impious beliefthat God will destroy these peoples in order to clear the way for thedominion of the Hohenzollerns. 

MIGHT IS RIGHT

_First published as one of the Oxford Pamphlets, October 1914_

It is now recognized in England that our enemy in this war is not atyrant military caste, but the united people of modern Germany. We haveto combat an armed doctrine which is virtually the creed of all Germany. Saxony and Bavaria, it is true, would never have invented the doctrine;but they have accepted it from Prussia, and they believe it. ThePrussian doctrine has paid the German people handsomely; it has giventhem their place in the world. When it ceases to pay them, and not tillthen, they will reconsider it. They will not think, till they arecompelled to think. When they find themselves face to face with agreater and more enduring strength than their own, they will renouncetheir idol. But they are a brave people, a faithful people, and a stupidpeople, so that they will need rough proofs. They cannot be driven fromtheir position by a little paper shot. In their present mood, if theyhear an appeal to pity, sensibility, and sympathy, they take it for acry of weakness. I am reminded of what I once heard said by a genial andhumane Irish officer concerning a proposal to treat with the leaders ofa Zulu rebellion. 'Kill them all, ' he said, 'it's the only thing theyunderstand. ' He meant that the Zulu chiefs would mistake moderation fora sign of fear. By the irony of human history this sentence has becomealmost true of the great German people, who built up the structure ofmodern metaphysics. They can be argued with only by those who have thewill and the power to punish them. 

The doctrine that Might is Right, though it is true, is an unprofitabledoctrine, for it is true only in so broad and simple a sense that no onewould dream of denying it. If a single nation can conquer, depress, anddestroy all the other nations of the earth and acquire for itself a soledominion, there may be matter for question whether God approves thatdominion; what is certain is that He permits it. No earthly governor whois conscious of his power will waste time in listening to argumentsconcerning what his power ought to be. His right to wield the sword canbe challenged only by the sword. An all-powerful governor who feared noassault would never trouble himself to assert that Might is Right. Hewould smile and sit still. The doctrine, when it is propounded by weakhumanity, is never a statement of abstract truth; it is a declaration ofintention, a threat, a boast, an advertisement. It has no value exceptwhen there is some one to be frightened. But it is a very dangerousdoctrine when it becomes the creed of a stupid people, for it flatterstheir self-sufficiency, and distracts their attention from thedifficult, subtle, frail, and wavering conditions of human power. Thetragic question for Germany to-day is what she can do, not whether it isright for her to do it. The buffaloes, it must be allowed, had aperfect right to dominate the prairie of America, till the hunters came. They moved in herds, they practised shock-tactics, they were violent, and very cunning. There are but few of them now. A nation of men whomistake violence for strength, and cunning for wisdom, may conceivablysuffer the fate of the buffaloes and perish without knowing why. 

To the English mind the German political doctrine is so incrediblystupid that for many long years, while men in high authority in theGerman Empire, ministers, generals, and professors, expounded thatdoctrine at great length and with perfect clearness, hardly any onecould be found in England to take it seriously, or to regard it asanything but the vapourings of a crazy sect. England knows better now;the scream of the guns has awakened her. The German doctrine is to beput to the proof. Who dares to say what the result will be? To predictcertain failure to the German arms is only a kind of boasting. Yet thereare guarded beliefs which a modest man is free to hold till they areseen to be groundless. The Germans have taken Antwerp; they may possiblydestroy the British fleet, overrun England and France, repel Russia, establish themselves as the dictators of Europe--in short, fulfil theirdreams. What then? At an immense cost of human suffering they will haveachieved, as it seems to us, a colossal and agonizing failure. Theirengines of destruction will never serve them to create anything so fairas the civilization of France. Their uneasy jealousy and self-assertionis a miserable substitute for the old laws of chivalry and regard forthe weak, which they have renounced and forgotten. The will and highpermission of all-ruling Heaven may leave them at large for a time, toseek evil to others. When they have finished with it, the world willhave to be remade. 

We cannot be sure that the Ruler of the world will forbid this. Wecannot even be sure that the destroyers, in the peace that theirdestruction will procure for them, may not themselves learn to rebuild. The Goths, who destroyed the fabric of the Roman Empire, gave theirname, in time, to the greatest mediaeval art. Nature, it is well known, loves the strong, and gives to them, and to them alone, the chance ofbecoming civilized. Are the German people strong enough to earn thatchance? That is what we are to see. They have some admirable elements ofstrength, above any other European people. No other European army can bemarched, in close order, regiment after regiment, up the slope of aglacis, under the fire of machine guns, without flinching, to certaindeath. This corporate courage and corporate discipline is so great andimpressive a thing that it may well contain a promise for the future. Moreover, they are, within the circle of their own kin, affectionate anddutiful beyond the average of human society. If they succeed in theirworldly ambitions, it will be a triumph of plain brute morality over allthe subtler movements of the mind and heart. 

On the other hand, it is true to say that history shows no precedent forthe attainment of world-wide power by a people so politically stupid asthe German people are to-day. There is no mistake about this; theinstances of German stupidity are so numerous that they make somethinglike a complete history of German international relations. Here is one. Any time during the last twenty years it has been matter of commonknowledge in England that one event, and one only, would make itimpossible for England to remain a spectator in a European war--thatevent being the violation of the neutrality of Holland or Belgium. Therewas never any secret about this, it was quite well known to many peoplewho took no special interest in foreign politics. Germany has maintainedin this country, for many years, an army of spies and secret agents; yetnot one of them informed her of this important truth. Perhaps theradical difference between the German and the English political systemsblinded the astute agents. In England nothing really important is asecret, and the amount of privileged political information to be gleanedin barbers' shops, even when they are patronized by Civil servants, isdistressingly small. Two hours of sympathetic conversation with anordinary Englishman would have told the German Chancellor more aboutEnglish politics than ever he heard in his life. For some reason orother he was unable to make use of this source of intelligence, so thathe remained in complete ignorance of what every one in England knew andsaid. 

Here is another instance. The programme of German ambition has beenvoluminously published for the benefit of the world. France was first tobe crushed; then Russia; then, by means of the indemnities procured fromthese conquests, after some years of recuperation and effort, the navalpower of England was to be challenged and destroyed. This programme wasset forth by high authorities, and was generally accepted; there was nocriticism, and no demur. The crime against the civilization of the worldforeshadowed in the horrible words 'France is to be crushed' is before ahigh tribunal; it would be idle to condemn it here. What happened isthis. The French and Russian part of the programme was put into actionlast July. England, who had been told that her turn was not yet, thatGermany would be ready for her in a matter of five or ten years, verynaturally refused to wait her turn. She crowded up on to the scaffold, which even now is in peril of breaking down under the weight of itsvictims, and of burying the executioner in its ruins. But becauseEngland would not wait her turn, she is overwhelmed with accusations oftreachery and inhumanity by a sincerely indignant Germany. Couldstupidity, the stupidity of the wise men of Gotham, be more fantastic ormore monstrous?

German stupidity was even more monstrous. A part of the accusationagainst England is that she has raised her hand against the nationnearest to her in blood. The alleged close kinship of England andGermany is based on bad history and doubtful theory. The English are amixed race, with enormous infusions of Celtic and Roman blood. The Romansculpture gallery at Naples is full of English faces. If the Germanagents would turn their attention to hatters' shops, and give thebarbers a rest, they would find that no English hat fits any Germanhead. But suppose we were cousins, or brothers even, what kind ofargument is that on the lips of those who but a short time before wereexplaining, with a good deal of zest and with absolute frankness, howthey intended to compass our ruin? There is something almost amiable infatuity like this. A touch of the fool softens the brute. 

The Germans have a magnificent war-machine which rolls on its way, crushing all that it touches. We shall break it if we can. If we fail, the German nation is at the beginning, not the end, of its troubles. With the making of peace, even an armed peace, the war-machine hasserved its turn; some other instrument of government must then beinvented. There is no trace of a design for this new instrument in anyof the German shops. The governors of Alsace-Lorraine offer nosuggestions. The bald fact is that there is no spot in the world wherethe Germans govern another race and are not hated. They know this, andare disquieted; they meet with coldness on all hands, and their remedyfor the coldness is self-assertion and brag. The Russian statesman wasright who remarked that modern Germany has been too early admitted intothe comity of European nations. Her behaviour, in her new internationalrelations, is like the behaviour of an uneasy, jealous upstart in anold-fashioned quiet drawing-room. She has no genius for equality; hermanners are a compound of threatening and flattery. When she wishes toassert herself, she bullies; when she wishes to endear herself, shecrawls; and the one device is no more successful than the other. 

Might is Right; but the sort of might which enables one nation to governanother in time of peace is very unlike the armoured thrust of thewar-engine. It is a power compounded of sympathy and justice. TheEnglish (it is admitted by many foreign critics) have studied justiceand desired justice. They have inquired into and protected rights thatwere unfamiliar, and even grotesque, to their own ideas, because theybelieved them to be rights. In the matter of sympathy their reputationdoes not stand so high; they are chill in manner, and dislike alleffusive demonstrations of feeling. Yet those who come to know them knowthat they are not unimaginative; they have a genius for equality; andthey do try to put themselves in the other fellow's place, to see howthe position looks from that side. What has happened in India mayperhaps be taken to prove, among many other things, that the inhabitantsof India begin to know that England has done her best, and does feel adisinterested solicitude for the peoples under her charge. She has longbeen a mother of nations, and is not frightened by the problems ofadolescence. 

The Germans have as yet shown no sign of skill in governing otherpeoples. Might is Right; and it is quite conceivable that they mayacquire colonies by violence. If they want to keep them they will haveto shut their own professors' books, and study the intimate history ofthe British Empire. We are old hands at the business; we have lost morecolonies than ever they owned, and we begin to think that we have learntthe secret of success. At any rate, our experience has done much for us, and has helped us to avoid failure. Yet the German colonial party stareat us with bovine malevolence. In all the library of German theorizingyou will look in vain for any explanation of the fact that the Boersare, in the main, loyal to the British Empire. If German politicalthinkers could understand that political situation, which seems toEnglish minds so simple, there might yet be hope for them. But theyregard it all as a piece of black magic, and refuse to reason about it. How should a herd of cattle be driven without goads? Witchcraft, witchcraft!

Their world-wide experience it is, perhaps, which has made the Englishquick to appreciate the virtues of other peoples. I have never known anEnglishman who travelled in Russia without falling in love with theRussian people. I have never heard a German speak of the Russian peoplewithout contempt and dislike. Indeed the Germans are so unable to seeany charm in that profound and humane people that they believe that theEnglish liking for them must be an insincere pretence, put forward forwicked or selfish reasons. What would they say if they saw a sight thatis common in Indian towns, a British soldier and a Gurkha arm in arm, rolling down the street in cheerful brotherhood? And how is it that ithas never occurred to any of them that this sort of brotherhood has itsvalue in Empire-building? The new German political doctrine has biddenfarewell to Christianity, but there are some political advantages inChristianity which should not be overlooked. It teaches human beings tothink of one another and to care for one another. It is an antidote tothe worst and most poisonous kind of political stupidity. 

Another thing that the Germans will have to learn for the welfare oftheir much-talked Empire is the value of the lone man. The architectsand builders of the British Empire were all lone men. Might is Right;but when a young Englishman is set down at an outpost of Empire togovern a warlike tribe, he has to do a good deal of hard thinking on theproblem of political power and its foundations. He has to trust tohimself, to form his own conclusions, and to choose his own line ofaction. He has to try to find out what is in the mind of others. A youngGerman, inured to skilled slavery, does not shine in such a position. Man for man, in all that asks for initiative and self-dependence, Englishmen are the better men, and some Germans know it. There is an oldjest that if you settle an Englishman and a German together in a newcountry, at the end of a year you will find the Englishman governor, andthe German his head clerk. A German must know the rules before he canget to work. 

More than three hundred years ago a book was written in England which isin some ways a very exact counterpart to General von Bernhardi'snotorious treatise. It is called _Tamburlaine_, and, unlike itssuccessor, is full of poetry and beauty. Our own colonization began witha great deal of violent work, and much wrong done to others. We sufferedfor our misdeeds, and we learned our lesson, in part at least. Why, itmay be asked, should not the Germans begin in the same manner, and bydegrees adapt themselves to the new task? Perhaps they may, but if theydo, they cannot claim the Elizabethans for their model. Of all men onearth the German is least like the undisciplined, exuberant Elizabethanadventurer. He is reluctant to go anywhere without a copy of the rules, a guarantee of support, and a regular pension. His outlook is as prosaicas General von Bernhardi's or General von der Golt's own, and that issaying a great deal. In all the German political treatises there is animmeasurable dreariness. They lay down rules for life, and if they beasked what makes such a life worth living they are without any hint ofan answer. Their world is a workhouse, tyrannically ordered, and full ofpusillanimous jealousies. 

It is not impious to be hopeful. A Germanized world would be anightmare. We have never attempted or desired to govern them, and wemust not think that God will so far forget them as to permit them toattempt to govern us. Now they hate us, but they do not know for howmany years the cheerful brutality of their political talk has shockedand disgusted us. I remember meeting, in one of the French Mediterraneandependencies, with a Prussian nobleman, a well-bred and pleasant man, who was fond of expounding the Prussian creed. He was said to be apolitical agent of sorts, but he certainly learned nothing inconversation. He talked all the time, and propounded the most monstrousparadoxes with an air of mathematical precision. Now it was thecharacter of Sir Edward Grey, a cunning Machiavel, whose only aim was toset Europe by the ears and make neighbours fall out. A friend who waswith me, an American, laughed aloud at this, and protested, withoutproducing the smallest effect. The stream of talk went on. The error ofthe Germans, we were told, was always that they are too humane; theirdislike of cruelty amounts to a weakness in them. They let France escapewith a paltry fine, next time France must be beaten to the dust. Alwayswith a pleasant outward courtesy, he passed on to England. England wasdecadent and powerless, her rule must pass to the Germans. 'But we shalltreat England rather less severely than France, ' said this bland apostleof Prussian culture, 'for we wish to make it possible for ourselves toremain in friendly relations with other English-speaking peoples. ' Andso on--the whole of the Bernhardi doctrine, explained in quiet fashionby a man whose very debility of mind made his talk the more impressive, for he was simply parroting what he had often heard. No one criticizedhis proposals, nor did we dislike him. It all seemed too mad; a ratherclumsy jest. His world of ideas did not touch our world at any point, sothat real talk between us was impossible. He came to see us severaltimes, and always gave the same kind of mesmerized recital of Germany'spolicy. The grossness of the whole thing was in curious contrast withthe polite and quiet voice with which he uttered his insolences. When Iremember his talk I find it easy to believe that the German Emperor andthe German Chancellor have also talked in such a manner that they havenever had the smallest opportunity of learning what Englishmen think andmean. 

While the German doctrine was the plaything merely of hysterical andsupersensitive persons, like Carlyle and Nietzsche, it mattered littleto the world of politics. An excitable man, of vivid imagination andinvalid constitution, like Carlyle, feels a natural predilection for thecult of the healthy brute. Carlyle's English style is itself a kind ofepilepsy. Nietzsche was so nervously sensitive that everyday life was ananguish to him, and broke his strength. Both were poets, as Marlowe wasa poet, and both sang the song of Power. The brutes of the swamp and thefield, who gathered round them and listened, found nothing new orunfamiliar in the message of the poets. 'This', they said, 'is what wehave always known, but we did not know that it is poetry. Now that greatpoets teach it, we need no longer be ashamed of it. ' So they went awayresolved to be twice the brutes that they were before, and they namedthemselves Culture-brutes. 

It is difficult to see how the world, or any considerable part of it, can belong to Germany, till she changes her mind. If she can do that, she might make a good ruler, for she has solid virtues and goodinstincts. It is her intellect that has gone wrong. Bishop Butler wasone day found pondering the problem whether, a whole nation can go mad. If he had lived to-day what would he have said about it? Would he haveadmitted that that strangest of grim fancies is realized?

It would be vain for Germany to take the world; she could not keep it;nor, though she can make a vast number of people miserable for a longtime, could she ever hope to make all the inhabitants of the worldmiserable for all time. She has a giant's power, and does not think itinfamous to use it like a giant. She can make a winter hideous, but shecannot prohibit the return of spring, or annul the cleansing power ofwater. Sanity is not only better than insanity; it is much stronger, andMight is Right. 

Meantime, it is a delight and a consolation to Englishmen that Englandis herself again. She has a cause that it is good to fight for, whetherit succeed or fail. The hope that uplifts her is the hope of a betterworld, which our children shall see. She has wonderful friends. Fromwhat self-governing nations in the world can Germany hear such messagesas came to England from the Dominions oversea? 'When England is at war, Canada is at war. ' 'To the last man and the last shilling, Australiawill support the cause of the Empire. ' These are simple words, andsufficient; having said them, Canada and Australia said no more. In thecompany of such friends, and for the creed that she holds, England mightbe proud to die; but surely her time is not yet. 

 Our faith is ours, and comes not on a tide; And whether Earth's great offspring by decree Must rot if they abjure rapacity, Not argument, but effort shall decide. They number many heads in that hard flock, Trim swordsmen they push forth, yet try thy steel; Thou, fighting for poor human kind, shalt feel The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew A chasm sheer into the barrier rock, And bring the army of the faithful through. 

THE WAR OF IDEAS

_An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, December 12, 1916_

I hold, as I daresay you do, that we are at a crisis of our historywhere there is not much room for talk. The time when this struggle mighthave been averted or won by talk is long past. During the hundred yearsbefore the war we have not talked much, or listened much, to theGermans. For fifty of those years at least the head of waters that hasnow been let loose in a devastating flood over Europe was steadilyaccumulating; but we paid little attention to it. People sometimes speakof the negotiations of the twelve days before the war as if the wholesecret and cause of the war could be found there; but it is not so. Statesmen, it is true, are the keepers of the lock-gates, but thosekeepers can only delay, they cannot prevent an inundation that has greatnatural causes. The world has in it evil enough, and darkness enough. But it is not so bad and so dark that a slip in diplomacy, a carelessword, or an impolite gesture, can instantaneously, as if by magic, involve twenty million men in a struggle to the death. It is onlyclever, conceited men, proud of their neat little minds, who think thatbecause they cannot fathom the causes of the war, it might easily havebeen prevented. I confess I find it difficult to conceive of the war interms of simple right and wrong. We must respect the tides, and theirhuge unintelligible force teaches us to respect them. 

It is not a war of race. For all our differences with the Germans, anycool and impartial mind must admit that we have many points of kinshipwith them. During the years before the war our naval officers in theMediterranean found, I believe, that it was easier to associate on termsof social friendship with the Austrians than with the officers of anyother foreign navy. We have a passionate admiration for France, and areal devotion to her, but that is a love affair, not a family tie. Webegin to be experienced in love affairs, for Ireland steadily refuses tobe treated on any other footing. In any case, we are much closer to theGermans than they are to the Bulgarians or the Turks. Of these three welike the Turks the best, because they are chivalrous and generousenemies, which the Germans are not. 

It is a war of ideas. We are fighting an armed doctrine. Yet Burke's useof those words to describe the military power of Revolutionary Franceshould warn us against fallacious attempts to simplify the issue. Whenideas become motives and are filtered into practice, they lose theirclearness of outline and are often hard to recognize. They leaven thelump, but the lump is still human clay, with its passions andprejudices, its pride and its hate. I remember seeing in a provincialpaper, in the early days of the war, two adjacent columns, both dealingwith the war. The first was headed 'A Holy War' and set forth the greatprinciples of nationality, respect for treaties, and protection of theweak, which in our opinion are the main motives of the Allies in thiswar. The second was headed 'The War on Commerce; Tips to capture Germantrade', and set forth those other principles and motives which, in theopinion of the Germans, brought England into this war. 

I am not going to defend England against the charge that she enteredthis war on a cold calculation of mercantile profit. Every one hereknows that the charge is utterly untrue. Those who believe the chargecould not be shaken in their belief except by being educated all overagain, and introduced to some knowledge of human nature. It is enough toremark that this charge is a commonplace between belligerent nations. They all like to believe that their adversaries entertain only basemotives, while they themselves act only on the loftiest idealpromptings. If the charge means only that every nation at war is boundto think of its own interests, to conserve its own strength, and toseize on all material gains that are within its reach, the charge istrue and harmless. When two angry women quarrel in a back street, theycommonly accuse each other of being amorous. They might just as wellaccuse each other of being human. The charge is true and insignificant. So also with nations; they all cherish themselves and seek to preservetheir means of livelihood. 

If this were their sole concern, there would be few wars; certainly thiswar, which is desolating and impoverishing Europe, would be impossible. No one, surely, can look at the war and say that nations are moved onlyby their material interests. It would be more plausible to say that theyare too little moved by those interests. Bacon, in his essay _Of Death_, remarks that the fear of death does not much affect mankind. 'There isno passion in the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters thefear of death; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a manhath so many attendants about him that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honour aspireth to it;grief flieth to it, fear pre-occupateth it; nay, we read, after Otho theEmperor had slain himself, pity (which is the tenderest of affections)provoked many to die out of mere compassion to their sovereign, and asthe truest sort of followers. ' If this is true of the fear of death, howmuch truer it is of the love of material gain. Any whim, or point ofpride, or fixed idea, or old habit, is enough to make a man or a nationforgo the hope of profit and fight for a creed. 

The German creed is by this time well known. Before the war we tooklittle notice of it. We sometimes saw it stated in print, but it seemedto us too monstrous and inhuman to be the creed of a whole people. Wewere wrong; it was the creed of a whole people. By the mesmerism ofState education, by the discipline of universal military service, by thepride of the German people in their past victories, and by the fearsnatural to a nation that finds enemies on all its fronts, an absolutebelief in the State, in war as the highest activity of the State, and inthe right of the State to enslave all its subjects, body and soul, toits purposes, had become the creed of all those diverse peoples that areunited under the Prussian Monarchy. Most of them are not naturallywarlike peoples. They have been lured, and frightened, and drilled, andbribed into war, but it is true to say that, on the whole, they enjoyfighting less than we do. One of the truest remarks ever made on the warwas that famous remark of a British private soldier, who was tellinghow his company took a trench from the enemy. Fearing that his accountof the affair might sound boastful, he added, 'You see, Sir, they're nota military people, like we are. ' Only the word was wrong, the meaningwas right. They are, as every one knows, an enormously military people, and, if they want to fight at all, they have to be a military people, for the vast majority of them are not a warlike people. A first-classarmy could never have been fashioned in Germany out of volunteercivilians, like our army on the Somme. That army has a little shaken thefaith of the Germans in their creed. Again I must quote one of oursoldiers: 'I don't say', he remarked, 'that our average can run ringsround their best; what I say is that our average is better than theiraverage, and our best is better than their best. ' The Germans alreadyare uneasy about their creed and their system, but there is no escapefor them; they have sacrificed everything to it; they have impoverishedthe mind and drilled the imagination of every German citizen, so thatGermany appears before the world with the body of a giant and the mindof a dwarf; they have sacrificed themselves in millions that their creedmay prevail, and with their creed they must stand or fall. The State, organized as absolute power, responsible to no one, with no duties toits neighbour, and with only nominal duties to a strictly subordinateGod, has challenged the soul of man in its dearest possessions. Wecannot predict the course of military operations; but if we were notsure of the ultimate issue of this great struggle, we should have nosufficient motive for continuing to breathe. The State has challengedthe soul of man before now, and has always been defeated. A miserableremnant of men and women, tied to stakes or starved in dungeons, havebefore now shattered what seemed an omnipotent tyranny, because theystood for the soul and were not prompted by vanity or self-regard. Theyhad great allies--

 'Their friends were exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind. '

If we are defeated we shall be defeated not by German strength but byour own weakness. The worst enemy of the martyr is doubt and the dividedmind, which suggests the question, 'Is it, after all, worth while?' Wemust know what we have believed. What do we stand for in this war? It isonly the immovable conviction that we stand for something ultimate andessential that can help us and carry us through. No war of this kind andon this scale is good enough to fight unless it is good enough to failin. 'The calculation of profit', said Burke, 'in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogs-heads of sugarare purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man shouldnever be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for ourfamily, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. Therest is vanity; the rest is crime. '

The question I have asked is a difficult question to answer, or, rather, the answer is not easy to formulate briefly and clearly. Most of the menat the front know quite well what they are fighting for; they know thatit is for their country, but that it is also for their kind--for certainideals of humanity. We at home know that we are at war for liberty andhumanity. But these words are invoked by different nations in differentsenses; the Germans, or at least most of them, have as much liberty asthey desire, and believe that the highest good of humanity is to befound in the prevalence of their own ideas and of their own type ofgovernment and society. No abstract demonstration can help us. Libertyis a highly comparative notion; no one asks for it complete. Humanity isa highly variable notion; it is interpreted in different senses bydifferent societies. What we are confronted by is two types ofcharacter, two sets of aims, two ideals for society. There can be noharm in trying to understand both. 

The Germans can never be understood by those who neglect their history. They are a solid, brave, and earnest people, who, till quite recenttimes, have been denied their share in the government of Europe. In thesixteenth century they were deeply stirred by questions of religion, andwere rent asunder by the Reformation. Compromise proved futile; thesmall German states were ranked on this side or on that at the will oftheir rulers and princes; men of the same race were ranged in mortalopposition on the question of religious belief, and there was nosolution but war. For thirty years in the seventeenth century the warraged. It was conducted with a fierceness and inhumanity that even thepresent war has not equalled. The civilian population sufferedhideously. Whole provinces were desolated and whole states were bereavedof their men. When, from mere exhaustion, the war came to an end, Germany lay prostrate, and the chief gains of the war fell to the risingmonarchy of France, which had intervened in the middle of the struggle. By the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 Alsace and Lorraine went to France, and the rule of the great monarch, Louis XIV, had nothing to fear fromthe German peoples. The ambitions of Germany, for long after this, weremainly cosmopolitan and intellectual. But political ambitions, thoughthey seemed almost dead, were revived by the hardy state of Prussia, andthe rest of Germany's history, down to our own time, is the history ofthe welding of the Germanic peoples into a single state by Prussianmonarchs and statesmen. 

This history explains many things. If a people has a corporate memory, if it can learn from its own sufferings, Germany has reason enough tocherish with a passionate devotion her late achieved unity. And Germanbrutality, which is not the less brutality because Germans regard it asquite natural and right, has its origin in German history. The Prussianis a Spartan, a natural brute, but brutal to himself as well as toothers, capable of extremes of self-denial and self-discipline. From thePrussians the softer and more emotional German peoples of the Southreceived the gift of national unity, and they repaid the debt byextravagant admiration for Prussian prowess and hardihood, which hadbeen so serviceable to their cause. The Southern Germans, the Bavariansespecially, have developed a sort of sentimentalism of brutality, expressed in the hysterical Hymn of Hate (which hails from Munich), expressed also in those monstrous excesses and cruelties, surpassinganything that mere insensibility can produce, which have given theBavarian troops their foul reputation in the present war. 

The last half century of German history must also be remembered. Threeassaults on neighbouring states were rewarded by a great increase ofterritory and of strength. From Denmark, in 1864, Prussia tookSchleswig-Holstein. The defeat of Austria in 1866 brought Hanover andBavaria under the Prussian leadership; Alsace and Lorraine were regainedfrom France in 1870. The Prussian mind, which is not remarkable forsubtlety, found a justification in these three wars for its favouritedoctrine of frightfulness. That doctrine, put briefly, is that peoplecan always be frightened into submission, and that it is cheaper tofrighten them than to fight them to the bitter end. Denmark was a smallnation, and moreover was left utterly unsupported by the European powerswho had guaranteed her integrity. Bavaria was frightened, and will befrightened again when her hot fit gives way to her cold fit. France wasdivided and half-hearted under a tinsel emperor. It is Germany'smisfortune that on these three special cases she based a generaldoctrine of war. A very little knowledge of human nature--a knowledge soalien to her that she calls it psychology and assigns it tospecialists--would have taught her that, for the most part, human beingswhen they are fighting for their homes and their faith cannot befrightened, and must be killed or conciliated. The practice offrightfulness has not worked very well in this war. It has steeled theheart of Germany's enemies. It has produced in her victims a temper ofhate that will outlive this generation, and will make the small peopleswhom she has kicked and trampled on impossible subjects of the GermanEmpire. Worst of all it has suggested to onlookers that the people whohave so plenary a belief in frightfulness are not themselves strangersto fear. There is an old English proverb, hackneyed and stale threehundred years ago, but now freshened again by disuse, that the goodwifewould never have looked for her daughter in the oven unless she had beenthere herself. 

How shall I describe the English temper, which the Germans, high andlow, learned and ignorant, have so profoundly mistaken? You can get nodescription of it from the Englishman pure and simple; he has no theoryof himself, and it bores him to hear himself described. Yet it is thistemper which has given England her great place in the world and whichhas cemented the British Empire. It is to be found not in England alone, but wherever there is a strain of English blood or an acceptance ofEnglish institutions. You can find it in Australia, in Canada, inAmerica; it infects Scotland, and impresses Wales. It is everywhere inour trenches to-day. It is not clannish, or even national, it isessentially the lonely temper of a man independent to the verge ofmelancholy. An admirable French writer of to-day has said that the besthandbook and guide to the English temper is Defoe's romance of _RobinsonCrusoe_. Crusoe is practical, but is conscious of the over-shadowingpresence of the things that are greater than man. He makes his ownclothing, teaches his goats to dance, and wrestles in thought with theproblems suggested by his Bible. Another example of the same temper maybe seen in Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, and yet another inWordsworth's _Prelude_. There is no danger that English thought willever underestimate the value and meaning of the individual soul. Thegreatest English literature, it might almost be said, from Shakespeare's_Hamlet_ to Browning's _The Ring and the Book_, is concerned with noother subject. The age-long satire against the English is that inEngland every man claims the right to go to heaven his own way. Englishinstitutions, instead of subduing men to a single pattern, are devisedchiefly with the object of saving the rights of the subject and theliberty of the individual. 'Every man in his humour' is an Englishproverb, and might almost be a statement of English constitutionaldoctrine. But this extreme individualism is the right of all, and doesnot favour self-exaltation. The English temper has an almost morbiddislike of all that is showy or dramatic in expression. I remember how aWinchester boy, when he was reproached with the fact that Winchester hasproduced hardly any great men, replied, 'No, indeed, I should think not. We would pretty soon have knocked that out of them. ' And the epigrams ofthe English temper usually take the form of understatement. 'GiveDayrolles a chair' were the last dying words of Lord Chesterfield, spoken of the friend who had come to see him. When the French troops goover the parapet to make an advance, their battle cry shouts the praisesof their Country. The British troops prefer to celebrate the advance ina more trivial fashion, 'This way to the early door, sixpence extra. '

I might go on interminably with this dissertation, but I have saidenough for my purpose. The history of England has had much to do withmoulding the English temper. We have been protected from directexposure to the storms that have swept the Continent. Our wars on landhave been adventures undertaken by expeditionary forces. At sea, whilethe power of England was growing, we have been explorers, pirates, buccaneers. Now that we are involved in a great European war on land, our methods have been changed. The artillery and infantry of a modernarmy cannot act effectively on their own impulse. We hold the sea, andthe pirates' work for the present has passed into other hands. But ourspirit and temper is the same as of old. It has found a new world in theair. War in the air, under the conditions of to-day, demands all the oldgallantry and initiative. The airman depends on his own brain and nerve;he cannot fall back on orders from his superiors. Our airmen of to-dayare the true inheritors of Drake; they have the same inspiredrecklessness, the same coolness, and the same chivalry to a vanquishedenemy. 

I am a very bad example of the English temper; for the English tempergrumbles at all this, to the great relief of our enemies, who believethat what a man admits against his own nation must be true. Ourpessimists, by indulging their natural vein, serve us, without reward, quite as well as Germany is served by her wireless press. They deceivethe enemy. 

Modern Germany has organized and regimented her people like an ant-hillor a beehive. The people themselves, including many who belong to theupper class, are often simple villagers in temper, full of kindness andanger, much subject to envy and jealousy, not magnanimous, docile andobedient to a fault. If they claimed, as individuals, to represent thehighest reach of European civilization, the claim would be merelyabsurd. So they shift their ground, and pretend that society is greaterthan man, and that by their painstaking organization their society hasbeen raised to the pinnacle of human greatness. They make this claim soinsistently, and in such obvious good faith, that some few weak tempersand foolish minds in England have been impressed by it. Thesepanic-stricken counsellors advise us, without delay, to reform ourinstitutions and organize them upon the German model. Only thus, theytell us, can we hold our own against so huge a power. But if we were totake their advice, we should have nothing of our own left to hold. It isreasonable and good to co-operate and organize in order to attain anagreed object, but German organization goes far beyond this. The Germannation is a carefully built, smooth-running machine, with powerfulengines. It has only one fault--that any fool can drive it; and seeingthat the governing class in Germany is obstinate and unimaginative, there is no lack of drivers to pilot it to disaster. The best ability ofGermany is seen in her military organization. Napoleon is her worshippedmodel, and, like many admirers of Napoleon, she thinks only of his greatcampaigns; she forgets that he died in St. Helena, and that his schemesfor the reorganization of Europe failed. 

I know that many people in England are not daunted but depressed by themilitary successes of the enemy. Our soldiers in the field are notdepressed. But we who are kept at home suffer from the miasma of theback-parlour. We read the headlines of newspapers--a form of literaturethat is exciting enough, but does not merit the praise given toSophocles, who saw life steadily and saw it whole. We keep our ears tothe telephone, and we forget that the great causes which are always atwork, and which will shape the issues of this war, are not recorded uponthe telephone. There are things truer and more important than the latestdispatches. Here is one of them. The organization of the second-rate cannever produce anything first-rate. We do not understand a people who, when it comes to the last push of man against man, throw up their handsand utter the pathetic cry of 'Kamerad'. To surrender is a weakness thatno one who has not been under modern artillery fire has any right tocondemn; to profess a sudden affection for the advancing enemy is notweakness but baseness. Or rather, it would be baseness in a voluntarysoldier; in the Germans it means only that the war is not their own war;that they are fighting as slaves, not as free men. The idea that wecould ever live under the rule of these people is merely comic. To dothem justice, they do not now entertain the idea, though they havedallied with it in the past. 

No harm can be done, I think, by preaching to the English people thenecessity for organization and discipline. We shall still be ourselves, and there is no danger that we shall overdo discipline or makeorganization a thing to be worshipped for its own sake. The danger isall the other way. We have learnt much from the war, and the work thatwe shall have to do when it ends is almost more important than the termsof peace, or concessions made this way and that. If the treacherousassault of the Germans on the liberties and peace of Europe is rewardedby any solid gain to the German Empire, then history may forgive them, but this people of the British Empire will not forgive them. Nothingwill be as it was before; and our cause, which will not be lost in thewar, will still have to be won in the so-called peace. I know that somesay, 'Let us have war when we are at war, and peace when we are atpeace'. It sounds plausible and magnanimous, but it is Utopian. You mustreckon with your own people. They know that when we last had peace, thesunshine of that peace was used by the Germans to hatch the spawn ofmalice and treason. If the Germans are defeated in the war, we shall, Isuppose, forgive them, for the very English reason that it is a bore notto forgive your enemies. But if they escape without decisive defeat inbattle, their harder trial is yet to come. 

In some ways we are stronger than we have been in all our long history. We have found ourselves, and we have found our friends. Our dead havetaught the children of to-day more and better than any living teacherscan teach them. No one in this country will ever forget how the peopleof the Dominions, at the first note of war, sprang to arms like one man. We must not thank or praise them; like the Navy, they regard our thanksand praise as something of an impertinence. They are not fighting, theysay, for us. But that is how we discovered them. They are doing muchbetter than fighting for us, they are fighting with us, because, withouta word of explanation or appeal, their ideas and ours are the same. Wenever have discussed with them, and we never shall discuss, what isdecent and clean and honourable in human behaviour. A philosopher whois interested in this question can find plenty of intellectual exerciseby discussing it with the Germans, Where an Englishman, a Canadian, andan Australian are met, there is no material for such a debate. 

It would be extravagant to suppose that a discovery like this can leaveour future relations untouched. We now know that we are profoundlyunited in a union much stronger and deeper than any mechanism canproduce. I know how difficult a problem it is to hit on the best devicefor giving political expression to this union between States separatedfrom one another by the whole world's diameter, differing in theircircumstances, their needs, and their outlook. I do not dare toprescribe; but I should like to make a few remarks, and to callattention to a few points which are perhaps more present to the mind ofthe ordinary citizen than they are in the discussions of constitutionalexperts. 

We must arrange for co-operation and mutual support. If the arrangementis complicated and lengthy, we must not wait for it; we must meet anddiscuss our common affairs. Ministers from the Dominions have alreadysat with the British Cabinet. We can never go back on that; it is alandmark in our history. Our Ministers must travel; if their supportersare impatient of their absence on the affairs of the Empire, they mustfind some less parochial set of supporters. We have begun in the rightway; the right way is not to pass laws determining what you are to do;but to do what is needful, and do it at once, --do a lot of things, andregularize your successes by later legislation. Now is the time, whilethe Empire is white-hot. Our first need is not lawyers, but men who, feeling friendly, know how to behave as friends do. They will not beimpeached if they go beyond the letter of the law. One act of faith isworth a hundred arguments. This is a family affair; the habits of anaffectionate and united family are the only good model. 

As for the Crown Colonies and India, the Dominions must share ourburden. It is objected, both here and in India, that life in theDominions is a very inadequate education for the sympathetic handling ofalien races and customs. So is life in many parts of this island. Thefact is that the process of learning to govern these alien peoples isthe best education in the world. The Indian Civil Service is a greatCollege, and it governs India. I can speak to this point, for I havelived there and seen it at work. If India were really governed by theideas of the young novices who go out there fresh from theirexaminations, she would be a distressful country. But the novice istaken in hand at once by the older members of the service; he worksunder the eye of the Collector and the Assistant Collector; theyshoulder him and instruct him as tame elephants shoulder and instructthe wild; they are kind to him, and he lives in their company while hisprejudices and follies peel off him; so that within a few years hebecomes a tolerant, wise, and devoted civil servant, who speaks thelanguage of the College and is proud to belong to it. The success of theGovernment of India is not to be credited to the classes from which theCivil Service is recruited, but to the discipline of the Service itself, a Service so high in tradition and so free from corruption thatadvancement in it is to be gained only by intelligence and sympathy. What I am saying is that I can imagine no finer raw material for thepolitical discipline of the Indian Civil Service than some of thegenerous and clean-run spirits who have come from the Dominions to helpin this war. They could be introduced to a share of our responsibilitieswithout impeding or retarding the movement to give to selected nativesof India a larger share in the government of their country. 

But the war is not over, so I return to the main issue--the conflictbetween the English idea and the German idea of world government. It isnot an accident, as Baron von Hügel remarks in his book on _The GermanSoul_, that the chief colonizing nation of the world should be a nationwithout a national army. We have depended enormously in the past on theinitiative and virtue of the individual adventurer; if our adventurerswere to fail us, which is not likely, or if the State were to supersedethem, and attempt to do their work, which is not conceivable, ourpolitical power and influence would vanish with them. The world mightperhaps be well ordered, but there would be no freedom, and no fun. Thebeauty of the adventurer is that he is practically invincible. He doesnot wait for orders. Under the most perfect police system that Germanycould devise, he would be up and at it again. We are not so numerous asthe Germans, but there are enough and to spare of us to make Germangovernment impossible in any place where we pitch our tents. We arepractised hands at upsetting governments. Our political system is atraining school for rebels. This is what makes our very existence anoffence to the moral instincts of the German people. They are quiteright to want to kill us; the only way to abolish fun and freedom is toabolish life. But I must not be unjust to them; their forethoughtprovides for everything, and no doubt they would prescribe authorizedforms of fun for half an hour a week, and would gather together theirsubjects in public assembly, under municipal regulations, to performapproved exercises in freedom. 

Mankind lives by ideas; and if an irreconcilable difference in ideasmakes a good war, then this is a good war. The contrast between the twoideas is profound and far-reaching. My business lies in a University. For a good many years before the war certain selected German students, who had had a University education in their own country, came as Rhodesscholars to Oxford. The intention of Mr. Rhodes was benevolent; hethought that if German students were to reside for four years at Oxfordand to associate there, at an impressionable time of life, with youngEnglishmen, understanding and fellowship would be encouraged between thetwo peoples. But the German government took care to defeat Mr. Rhodes'sintention. Instead of sending a small number of students for the fullperiod, as Mr. Rhodes had provided, Germany asked and (by whose mistakeI do not know) obtained leave to send a larger number for a shorterstay. The students selected were intended for the political anddiplomatic service, and were older than the usual run of Oxfordfreshmen. Their behaviour had a certain ambassadorial flavour about it. They did not mix much in the many undergraduate societies which flourishin a college, but met together in clubs of their own to drink patriotictoasts. They were nothing if not superior. I remember a conversation Ihad with one of them who came to consult me. He wished, he said, to dosome definite piece of research work in English literature. I asked himwhat problems or questions in English literature most interested him, and he replied that he would do anything that I advised. We had a talkof some length, wholly at cross-purposes. At last I tried to make mypoint of view clear by reminding him that research means finding theanswer to a question, and that if his reading of English literature, which had been fairly extensive, had suggested no questions to his mind, he was not in the happiest possible position to begin research. Thistouched his national pride, and he gave me something not unlike alecture. In Germany, he said, the professor tells you what you are todo; he gives you a subject for investigation, he names the books you areto read, and advises you on what you are to write; you follow hisadvice, and produce a thesis, which gains you the degree of Doctor ofLetters. I have seen a good many of these theses, and I am sure thisaccount is correct. With very rare exceptions they are as dead asmutton, and much less nourishing. The upshot of our conversation wasthat he thought me an incompetent professor, and I thought him anunprofitable student. 

There are many people in England to-day who praise the thoroughness ofthe Germans, and their devotion to systematic thought. Has any one evertaken the trouble to trace the development of the thesis habit, and itsinfluence on their national life? They theorize everything, and theybelieve in their theories. They have solemn theories of the Englishcharacter, of the French character, of the nature of war, of the historyof the world. No breath of scepticism dims their complacency, althoughevents steadily prove their theories wrong. They have courage, and whenthey are seeking truth by the process of reasoning, they accept theconclusions attained by the process, however monstrous these conclusionsmay be. They not only accept them, they act upon them, and, as every oneknows, their behaviour in Belgium was dictated to them by theirphilosophy. 

Thought of this kind is the enemy of the human race. It intoxicatessluggish minds, to whom thought is not natural. It suppresses all thegentler instincts of the heart and supplies a basis of orthodoxy for allthe cruelty and treachery in the world. I do not know, none of us knows, when or how this war will end. But I know that it is worth fighting tothe end, whatever it may cost to all and each of us. We may have peacewith the Germans, the peace of exhaustion or the peace that is only abreathing space in a long struggle. We can never have peace with theGerman idea. It was not the idea of the older German thinkers--of Kant, or of Goethe, who were good Europeans. Kant said that there is nothinggood in the world except the good will. The modern German doctrine isthat there is nothing good in the world except what tends to the powerand glory of the State. The inventor of this doctrine, it may beremembered, was the Devil, who offered to the Son of Man the glory ofall the kingdoms of the world, if only He would fall down and worshiphim. The Germans, exposed to a like temptation, have accepted the offerand have fulfilled the condition. They can have no assurance that faithwill be kept with them. On the other hand, we can have no assurance thatthey will suffer any signal or dramatic reverse. Human history does notusually observe the laws of melodrama. But we know that their newlypurchased doctrine can be fought, in war and in peace, and we know thatin the end it will not prevail. 

THE FAITH OF ENGLAND

_An Address to the Union Society of University College, London, March22, 1917_

When Professor W. P. Ker asked me to address you on this ceremonialoccasion I felt none of the confidence of the man who knows what hewants to say, and is looking for an audience. But Professor Ker is myold friend, and this place is the place where I picked up many of thosefragmentary impressions which I suppose must be called my education. SoI thought it would be ungrateful to refuse, even though it should provethat I have nothing to express save goodwill and the affections ofmemory. 

When I matriculated in the University of London and became a student inthis place, my professors were Professor Goodwin, Professor Church, Professor Henrici, Professor Groom Robertson, and Professor HenryMorley. I remember all these, though, if they were alive, I do not thinkthat any of them would remember me. The indescribable exhilaration, which must be familiar to many of you, of leaving school and enteringcollege, is in great part the exhilaration of making acquaintance withteachers who care much about their subject and little or nothing abouttheir pupils. To escape from the eternal personal judgements which makea school a place of torment is to walk upon air. The schoolmaster looksat you; the college professor looks the way you are looking. Thestatements made by Euclid, that thoughtful Greek, are no longerencumbered at college with all those preposterous and irrelevant moralconsiderations which desolate the atmosphere of a school. The questionnow is not whether you have perfectly acquainted yourself with whatEuclid said, but whether what he said is true. In my earliest days atcollege I heard a complete exposition of the first six books of Euclid, given in four lectures, with masterly ease and freedom, by ProfessorHenrici, who did not hesitate to employ methods of demonstration which, though they are perfectly legitimate and convincing, were rejected bythe daintiness of the Greek. Professor Groom Robertson introduced hispupils to the mysteries of mental and moral philosophy, and incidentallydisaffected some of us by what seemed to us his excessive reverence forthe works of Alexander Bain. Those works were our favourite theme forsatirical verse, which we did not pain our Professor by publishing. Professor Henry Morley lectured hour after hour to successive classes ina room half way down the passage, on the left. Even overwork could notdeaden his enormous vitality; but I hope that his immediate successordoes not lecture so often. Outside the classrooms I remember thepassages, which resembled the cellars of an unsuccessful sculptor, thelibrary, where I first read _Romeo and Juliet_, and the refectory, wherewe discussed human life in most, if not in all, of its aspects. In theneighbourhood of the College there was the classic severity of GowerStreet, and, for those who preferred the richer variety of romance, there was always the Tottenham Court Road. Beyond all, and throughoutall, there was friendship, and there was freedom. The College wasfounded, I believe, partly in the interests of those who object tosubscribe to a conclusion before they are permitted to examine thegrounds for it. It has always been a free place; and if I remember it asa place of delight, that is because I found here the delights offreedom. 

My thoughts in these days are never very long away from the War, so thatI should feel it difficult to speak of anything else. Yet there are somany ways in which it would be unprofitable for me to pretend to speakof it, that the difficulty remains. I have no knowledge of military ornaval strategy. I am not intimately acquainted with Germany or withGerman culture. I could praise our own people, and our own fighting men, from a full heart; but that, I think, is not exactly what you want fromme. So I am reduced to attempting what we have all had to attempt duringthe past two years or more, to try to state, for myself as much as foryou, the meaning of this War so far as we can perceive it. 

It seems to be a decree of fate that this country shall be compelledevery hundred years to fight for her very life. We live in an islandthat lies across the mouths of the Rhine, and guards the access to allthe ports of northern Europe. In this island we have had enough safetyand enough leisure to develop for ourselves a system of constitutionaland individual liberty which has had an enormous influence on othernations. It has been admired and imitated; it has also been hated andattacked. To the majority of European statesmen and politicians it hasbeen merely unintelligible. Some of them have regarded it with a kindof superstitious reverence; for we have been very successful in theworld at large, and how could so foolish and ineffective a systemachieve success except by adventitious aid? Others, including all thestatesmen and political theorists who prepared Germany for this War, have refused to admire; the power of England, they have taught, is notreal power; she has been crafty and lucky; she has kept herself freefrom the entanglements and strifes of the Continent, and has enrichedherself by filching the property of the combatants. If once she werecompelled to hold by force what she won by guile, her pretensions wouldcollapse, and she would fall back into her natural position as a smallagricultural island, inhabited by a people whose proudest boast wouldthen be that they are poor cousins of the Germans. 

It is difficult to discuss this question with German professors andpoliticians: they have such simple minds, and they talk like angrychildren. Their opinions concerning England are not original; theirviews were held with equal fervour and expressed in very similarlanguage by Philip of Spain in the sixteenth century, by Louis XIV ofFrance in the seventeenth century, and by Napoleon at the close of theeighteenth century. 'These all died in faith, not having received thepromises, but having seen them afar off. ' I will ask you to consider theattack made upon England by each of these three powerful rulers. 

Any one who reads the history of these three great wars will feel asense of illusion, as if he were reading the history of to-day. Thepoints of resemblance in all four wars are so many and so great that itseems as if the four wars were all one war, repeated every century. Thecause of the war is always an ambitious ruler who covets supremacy onthe European Continent. England is always opposed to him--inevitably andinstinctively. It took the Germans twenty years to prepare their peoplefor this War. It took us two days to prepare ours. Our instinct is quickand sound; for the resources and wealth of the Continent, if once theywere controlled by a single autocratic power, would make it impossiblefor England to follow her fortunes upon the sea. But we never standquite alone. The smaller peoples of the Continent, who desireself-government, or have achieved it, always give the conqueror trouble, and rebel against him or resist him. England always sends help to them, the help of an expeditionary force, or, failing that, the help ofirregular volunteers. Sir Philip Sidney dies at Zutphen; Sir John Mooreat Corunna. There is always desperate fighting in the Low Countries; andthe names of Mons, Liège, Namur, and Lille recur again and again. England always succeeds in maintaining herself, though not without somereverses, on the sea. In the end the power of the master of legions, Philip, Louis, Napoleon, and shall we say William, crumbles and melts;his ambitions are too costly to endure, his people chafe under his lash, and his kingdom falls into insignificance or is transformed by internalrevolution. 

In all these wars there is one other resemblance which it is good toremember to-day. The position of England, at one time or another in thecourse of the war, always seems desperate. When Philip of Spain invadedEngland with the greatest navy of the world, he was met on the seas by afleet made up chiefly of volunteers. When Louis overshadowed Europe andthreatened England, our king was in his pay and had made a secret treatywith him; our statesmen, moreover, had destroyed our alliance with themaritime powers of Sweden and Holland, we had war with the Dutch, andour fleet was beaten by them. During the war against Napoleon we were inan even worse plight; the plausible political doctrines of theRevolution found many sympathizers in this country; our sailors mutiniedat the Nore; Ireland was aflame with discontent; and we were involved inthe Mahratta War in India, not to mention the naval war with America. Even after Trafalgar, our European allies failed us, Napoleon disposedof Austria and Prussia, and concluded a separate treaty with Russia. Itwas then that Wordsworth wrote--

 ''Tis well! from this day forward we shall know That in ourselves our safety must be sought; That by our own right hands it must be wrought; That we must stand unpropped, or be laid low. O dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer! We shall exult, if they who rule the land Be men who hold its many blessings dear, Wise, upright, valiant; not a servile band, Who are to judge of dangers which they fear, And honour which they do not understand. '

Always in the same cause, we have suffered worse things than we aresuffering to-day, and if there is worse to come we hope that we areready. The youngest and best of us, who carry on and go through withit, though many of them are dead and many more will not live to see theday of victory, have been easily the happiest and most confident amongus. They have believed that, at a price, they can save decency andcivilization in Europe, and, if they are wrong, they have known, as weknow, that the day when decency and civilization are trampled under thefoot of the brute is a day when it is good to die. 

When I speak of the German nation as the brute I am not speakingcontroversially or rhetorically; the whole German nation has given itshearty assent to a brutal doctrine of war and politics; no facts need bedisputed between us: what to us is their shame, to them is their glory. This is a grave difference; yet it would be wrong to suppose that we cantreat it adequately by condemning the whole German nation as a nation ofconfessed criminals. It is the paradox of war that there is always righton both sides. When a man is ready and willing to sacrifice his life, you cannot deny him the right to choose what he will die for. The mostbeautiful virtues, faith and courage and devotion, grow like weeds uponthe battle-field. The fighters recognize these virtues in each other, and the front lines, for all their mud and slaughter, are breathed on bythe airs of heaven. Hate and pusillanimity have little there to nourishthem. To find the meaner passions you must seek further back. Johnson, speaking in the _Idler_ of the calamities produced by war, admits thathe does not know 'whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled withsoldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblersaccustomed to lie'. Now that our army is the nation in arms, the dangerfrom a lawless soldiery has become less, or has vanished; but the otherdanger has increased. Journalists are not the only offenders. It is astrange, squalid background for the nobility of the soldier that is madeby the deceits and boasts of diplomatists and statesmen. In one of theprison camps of England, some weeks ago, I saw a Saxon boy who hadfought bravely for his country. Simplicity and openness and loyalty werewritten on his face. There are hundreds like him, and I would notmention him if it were not that that same day I read with a new andheightened sense of disgust a speech by the German Chancellor, writhingwith timidity and dishonesty and uneasy braggadocio. Those who feel thiscontrast as I did may be excused, I think, if they come to theconclusion that to talk about war is an accursed trade, and that tofight well, whether on the one side or the other, is the only noblepart. 

Yet there is no escape for us; if we are to avoid chaos, if the dailylife of the world is to be re-established and carried on, there must bean understanding between nations, and there is no possible way to cometo an understanding save by the action and words of representative menon the one side and the other. Such representative men there are; thereis no reason to doubt that they do in the main truly express theaspirations and wishes of their people, and on both sides they haveeither explicitly or virtually made offers. The offer of the AlliedPowers is on record. What does Germany offer? She has refused to make adefinite statement, but her rulers have talked a great deal, and whatshe intends is not really in doubt; only she is not sure whether she canget it, and still clings to the hope that a favourable turn of eventsmay relieve her of the duty of making proposals, and put her in aposition to dictate a settlement. We all know what that settlement wouldbe. 

The German offer for a solution of the problem of world-government isGerman sentiments, German racial pride, German manners and customs, animmense increase of German territory and German influence, and above allan acknowledged supremacy for the German race among the nations of theworld. She thinks she has not stated these aims in so many words; butshe has. When it was suggested that the future peace of the world mightbe assured by the formation of a League to Enforce Peace, Germany, through her official spokesmen, expressed her sympathy with that idea, and stated that she would very gladly put herself at the head of such aLeague. I can hardly help loving the Germans when their rusticsimplicity and rustic cunning lead them all unconsciously intoself-revelation. The very idea of a League to Enforce Peace impliesequality among the contracting parties; and Germany does not understandequality. 'By all means', she says, 'let us sit at a round table, and Iwill sit at the top of it. ' Her panacea for human ills is Germanism. Shehas nothing to offer but a purely national sentiment, which some, greatly privileged, may share, and the rest must revere and bow to. Inthe Book of Genesis we are told how Joseph was thrown into a pit by hiselder brothers for talking just like this; but he meant it quiteinnocently, and so do the Germans. They do not intend irreverence to Godwhen they call Him the good German God. On the contrary, they choose forHis praise a word that to them stands for all goodness and allgreatness. Their worship expresses itself naturally in the tribal ritualand the tribal creed. This tribal creed, there can be no doubt, is whatthey offer us for a talisman to ensure the right ordering of the world. 

Patriotism and loyalty to hearth and home are passions so strong inhumanity that a creed like this, when men are under its influence, isnot easily seen to be absurd. The Saxon boy, whom I saw in his prisoncamp, probably would not quarrel with it. And even in the wider world ofthought the illusions of nationalism are all-pervading. I once heardProfessor Henry Sidgwick remark that it is not easy for us to understandhow the troops of Portugal are stirred to heroic effort when theircommanders call on them to remember that they are Portuguese. He wouldno doubt have been the first to admit, for he had an alert and scepticalmind, that it is only our stupidity which finds anything comic in suchan appeal. But it is stupidity of this kind which unfits men to dealwith other races, and it is stupidity of this kind which has beenexalted by the Germans as a primal duty, and has, indeed, been advancedby them as their principal claim to undertake the government of theworld. 

This extreme nationalism, this unwillingness to feel any sympathy forother peoples, or to show them any consideration, has stupefied andblinded the Germans. One of the heaviest charges that can be broughtagainst them is that they have seen no virtue in France, I do not askthat they shall interrupt the War to express admiration for theirenemies: I am speaking of the time before the War. France is the chiefmodern inheritor of that great Roman civilization which found us paintedsavages, and made us into citizens of the world. The French mind, it isadmitted, and admitted most readily by the most intelligent men, isquick and delicate and perceptive, surer and clearer in its operationthan the average European mind. Yet the Germans, infatuated with abelief in their own numbers and their own brute strength, have dared toexpress contempt for the genius of France. A contempt for foreigners iscommon enough among the vulgar and unthinking of all nations, but I donot believe that you will find anywhere but in Germany a large number ofmen trained in the learned professions who are so besotted by vanity asto deny to France her place in the vanguard of civilization. These loutscannot be informed or argued with; they are interested in no one butthemselves, and naked self-assertion is their only idea of politicalargument. Treitschke, who was for twenty years Professor of History atBerlin, and who did perhaps more than any other man to build up themodern German creed, has crystallized German politics in a singlesentence. 'War', he says, 'is politics _par excellence_, ' that is tosay, politics at their purest and highest. Our political doctrine, if itmust be put in as brief a form, would be better expressed in thesentence, 'War is the failure of politics'. 

If England were given over to nationalism as Germany is given over, then a war between these two Powers, though it would still be a greatdramatic spectacle, would have as little meaning as a duel between tworival gamebirds in a cockpit. We know, and it will some day dawn on theGermans, that this War has a deeper meaning than that. We are notnationalist; we are too deeply experienced in politics to stumble intothat trap. We have had a better and longer political education than hascome to Germany in her short and feverish national life. It is oftensaid that the Germans are better educated than we are, and in a sensethat is true; they are better furnished with schools and colleges andthe public means of education. The best boy in a school is the boy whobest minds his book, and even if he dutifully believes all that it tellshim, that will not lose him the prize. When he leaves school andgraduates in a wider world, where men must depend on their own judgementand their own energy, he is often a little disconcerted to find thatsome of his less bookish fellows easily outgo him in quickness ofunderstanding and resource. German education is too elaborate; itattempts to do for its pupils much that they had better be left to dofor themselves. The pupils are docile and obedient, not troubled withunruly doubts and questionings, so that the German system of publiceducation is a system of public mesmerism, and, now that we see it inits effects, may be truly described as a national disease. 

I have said that England is not nationalist. If the English believed inEngland as the Germans believe in Germany, there would be nothing forit but a duel to the death, the extinction of one people or the other, and darkness as the burier of the dead. Peace would be attained by agreat simplification and impoverishment of the world. But the English donot believe in themselves in that mad-bull fashion. They come of mixedblood, and have been accustomed for many long centuries to settle theirdifferences by compromise and mutual accommodation. They do not inquiretoo curiously into a man's descent if he shares their ideas. They haveshown again and again that they prefer a tolerant and intelligentforeigner to rule over them rather than an obstinate and wrong-headedman of native origin. The earliest strong union of the various parts ofEngland was achieved by William the Norman, a man of French andScandinavian descent. Our native-born king, Charles the First, was putto death by his people; his son, James the Second, was banished, and theDutchman, William the Third, who had proved himself a statesman andsoldier of genius in his opposition to Louis the Fourteenth, was electedto the throne of England. The fierce struggles of the seventeenthcentury, between Royalists and Parliamentarians, between Cavaliers andPuritans, were settled at last, not by the destruction of either party, but by the stereotyping of the dispute in the milder and more tolerableshape of the party system. The only people we have ever shown ourselvesunwilling to tolerate are the people who will tolerate no one but theirown kind. We hate all Acts of Uniformity with a deadly hatred. We arecareful for the rights of minorities. We think life should be madepossible, and we do not object to its being made happy, for dissenters. Voltaire, the acutest French mind of his age, remarked on this when hevisited England in 1726. 'England', he says, 'is the country of sects. "In my father's house are many mansions". .. . Although the Episcopaliansand the Presbyterians are the two dominant sects in Great Britain, allthe others are welcomed there, and live together very fairly, whilstmost of the preachers hate one another almost as cordially as aJansenist damns a Jesuit. Enter the London Exchange, a place much moreworthy of respect than most Courts, and you see assembled for thebenefit of mankind representatives of all nations. There the Jew, theMohammedan, and the Christian deal with each other as if they were ofthe same religion, and call infidels only those who become bankrupt. There the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Anabaptist relieson the promise of the Quaker. On leaving these free and peacefulassemblies, some proceed to the synagogue, others to the tavern. .. . Ifin England there were only one religion, its despotism would be to bedreaded; if there were only two, their followers would cut each other'sthroats; but there are thirty of them, and they live in peace andhappiness. '

Since we have had so much practice in tolerating one another, and inliving together even when our ideas on life and the conduct of life seemabsolutely incompatible, it is no wonder that we approach the treatmentof international affairs in a temper very unlike the solemn and dogmaticferocity of the German. We do not expect or desire that other peoplesshall resemble us. The world is wide; and the world-drama is enrichedby multiplicity and diversity of character. We like bad men, if there issalt and spirit in their badness. We even admire a brute, if he is awhole-hearted brute. I have often thought that if the Germans had beentrue to their principles and their programme--if, after proclaiming thatthey meant to win by sheer strength and that they recognized no otherright, they had continued as they began, and had battered and hacked, burned and killed, without fear or pity, a certain reluctant admirationfor them might have been felt in this country. There is no chance ofthat now, since they took to whining about humanity. Yet it is verydifficult wholly to alienate the sympathies of the English people. It isperhaps in some ways a weakness, as it is certainly in other ways astrength, that we are fanciers of other peoples. Our soldiers have atendency to make pets of their prisoners, to cherish them as curiositiesand souvenirs. The fancy becomes a passion when we find a little fellowstruggling valiantly against odds. I suppose we should be at war withGermany to-day, even if the Germans had respected the neutrality ofBelgium. But the unprovoked assault upon a little people that asked onlyto be let alone united all opinions in this country and brought us inwith a rush. I believe there is one German, at least (I hope he isalive), who understands this. Early in July, 1914, a German student atOxford, who was a friend and pupil of mine, came to say good-bye to me. I have since wondered whether he was under orders to join his regiment. Anyhow, we talked very freely of many things, and he told me of anadventure that had befallen him in an Oxford picture-palace. Portraitsof notabilities were being thrown on the screen. When a portrait of theGerman Emperor appeared, a youth, sitting just behind my friend, shoutedout an insulting and scurrilous remark. So my friend stood up and turnedround and, catching him a cuff on the head, said, 'That's my emperor'. The house was full of undergraduates, and he expected to be seized andthrown into the street. To his great surprise the undergraduates, manyof whom have now fallen on the fields of France, broke into rounds ofcheering. 'I should like to think', my friend said, 'that a thing likethat could possibly happen in a German city, but I am afraid that thefeeling there would always be against the foreigner. I admire theEnglish; they are so just. ' I have heard nothing of him since, except arumour that he is with the German army of occupation in Belgium. If so, I like to think of him at a regimental mess, suggesting doubts, or, ifthat is an impossible breach of military discipline, keeping silence, when the loud-voiced major explains that the sympathy of the English forBelgium is all pretence and cant. 

Ideal and disinterested motives are always to be reckoned with in humannature. What the Germans call 'real politics', that is to say, politicswhich treat disinterested motives as negligible, have led them into amorass and have bogged them there. How easy it is to explain that theBritish Empire depends on trade, that we are a nation of traders, thatall our policy is shaped by trade, that therefore it can only behypocrisy in us to pretend to any of the finer feelings. This is not, as you might suppose, the harmless sally of a one-eyed wit; it is thecarefully reasoned belief of Germany's profoundest political thinkers. They do not understand a cavalier, so they confidently assert that thereis no such thing in nature. That is a bad mistake to make about anynation, but perhaps worst when it is made about the English, for thecavalier temper in England runs through all classes. You can find it inthe schoolmaster, the small trader, the clerk, and the labourer, asreadily as in the officer of dragoons, or the Arctic explorer. TheRoundheads won the Civil War, and bequeathed to us their politicalachievements. From the Cavaliers we have a more intimate bequest: it isfrom them, not from the Puritans, that the fighting forces of theBritish Empire inherit their outlook on the world, their freedom frompedantry, and that gaiety and lightness of courage which makes themcarry their lives like a feather in the cap. 

I am not saying that our qualities, good or bad, commend us very readilyto strangers. The people of England, on the whole, are respected morethan they are liked. When I call them fanciers of other nations, I feelit only fair to add that some of those other nations express the sametruth in different language. I have often heard the complaint made thatEnglishmen cannot speak of foreigners without an air of patronage. It isimpossible to deny this charge, for, in a question of manners, theimpressions you produce are your manners; and there is no doubt aboutthis impression. There is a certain coldness about the upright andhumane Englishman which repels and intimidates any trivial human beingwho approaches him. Most men would forgo their claim to justice for thechance of being liked. They would rather have their heads broken, oraccept a bribe, than be the objects of a dispassionate judgement, however kindly. They feel this so strongly that they experience a dulldiscomfort in any relationship that is not tinctured with passion. Asthere are many such relationships, not to be avoided even by the mostemotional natures, they escape from them by simulating lively feeling, and are sometimes exaggerated and insincere in manner. They issue a verylarge paper currency on a very small gold reserve. This, which iscommonly known as the Irish Question, is an insoluble problem, for it isa clash not of interests but of temperaments. The English, it must infairness be admitted, do as they would be done by. No Englishman pureand simple is incommoded by the coldness of strangers. He prefers it, for there are many stupid little businesses in the world, which arefalsified when they are made much of; and even when important facts areto be told, he would rather have them told in a dreary manner. He hatesa fuss. 

The Germans, who are a highly emotional and excitable people, haveconcentrated all their energy on a few simple ideas. Their moral outlookis as narrow as their geographical outlook is wide. Will their faithprevail by its intensity, narrow and false though it be? I cannot provethat it will not, but I have a suspicion, which I think has alreadyoccurred to some of them, that the world is too large and wilful andstrong to be mastered by them. We have seen what their hatchets andexplosives can do, and they are nearing the end of their resources. Theycan still repeat some of their old exploits, but they make no headway, and time is not their friend. 

One service, perhaps, they have done to civilization. There is a growingnumber of people who hold that when this War is over internationalrelations must not be permitted to slip back into the unstable conditionwhich tempted the Germans to their crime. A good many pacific theorists, no doubt, have not the experience and the imagination which would enablethem to pass a useful judgement, or to make a valuable suggestion, onthe affairs of nations. The abolition of war would be easily obtained ifit were generally agreed that war is the worst thing that can befall apeople. But this is not generally agreed; and, further, it is not true. While men are men they cannot be sure that they will never be challengedon a point of deep and intimate concern, where they would rather diethan yield. But something can perhaps be done to discourage gamblers'wars, though even here any stockbroker will tell you how difficult it isto suppress gambling without injuring the spirit of enterprise. The onlyreal check on war is an understanding between nations. For thestrengthening of such an understanding the Allies have a greatopportunity, and admirable instruments. I do not think that we shallcall on Germany to preside at our conferences. But we shall have thehelp of all those qualities of heart and mind which are possessed byFrance, by Russia, by Italy, and by America, who, for all her caution, hates cruelty even more than she loves peace. There has never been analliance of greater promise for the government and peace of the world. 

What is the contribution of the British Empire, and of England, towardsthis settlement? Many of our domestic problems, as I have said, bear acurious resemblance to international problems. We have not solved themall. We have had many stumblings and many backslidings. But we haveshown again and again that we believe in toleration on the widestpossible basis, and that we are capable of generosity, which is a virtuemuch more commonly shown by private persons than by communities. Weabolished the slave trade. We granted self-government to South Africajust after our war with her. Only a few days ago we gave India her will, and allowed her to impose a duty on our manufactures. Ireland could haveself-government to-morrow if she did not value her feuds more thananything else in the world. All these are peoples to whom we have beenbound by ties of kinship or trusteeship. A wider and greater opportunityis on its way to us. We are to see whether we are capable of generosityand trust towards peoples who are neither our kin nor our wards. Ourunderstanding with France and Russia will call for great goodwill onboth sides, not so much in the drafting of formal treaties as inindulging one another in our national habits. Families who fail to livetogether in unity commonly fail not because they quarrel about largeinterests, but because they do not like each other's little ways. TheFrench are not a dull people; and the Russians are not a tedious people(what they do they do suddenly, without explanation); so that if wefail to take pleasure in them we have ourselves to blame. If we are notequal to our opportunities, if we do not learn to feel any affection forthem, then not all the pacts and congresses in the world can make peacesecure. 

Of Germany it is too early to speak. We have not yet defeated her. If wedo defeat her, no one who is acquainted with our temper and our recordbelieves that we shall impose cruel or vindictive terms. If it were onlythe engineers of this war who were in question, we would destroy themgladly as common pests. But the thing is not so easy. A single home isin many ways a greater and more appealing thing than a nation; we shouldfind ourselves thinking of the miseries of simple and ignorant peoplewho have given their all for the country of their birth; and our heartswould fail us. 

The Germans would certainly despise this address of mine, for I havetalked only of morality, while they talk and think chiefly of machines. Zeppelins are a sad disappointment; but if any address on the War isbeing delivered to-night by a German professor, there can be no doubtthat it deals with submarines, and treats them as the saviours of theFatherland. Well, I know very little about submarines, but I notice thatthey have not had much success against ships of war. We are soeasy-going that we expected to carry on our commerce in war very much aswe did in peace. We have to change all that, and it will cost us not alittle inconvenience, or even great hardships. But I cannot believe thata scheme of privy attacks on the traders of all nations, devised as alast resort, in lieu of naval victory, can be successful when it is nolonger a surprise. And when I read history, I am strengthened in mybelief that morality is all-important. I do not find that any warbetween great nations was ever won by a machine. The Trojan horse willbe trotted out against me, but that was a municipal affair. Wars are wonby the temper of a people. Serbia is not yet defeated. It is a frenziedand desperate quest that the Germans undertook when they began to seekfor some mechanical trick or dodge, some monstrous engine, which shouldenable the less resolved and more excited people to defeat the moreresolved and less excited. If we are to be defeated, it must be by them, not by their bogey-men. We got their measure on the Somme, and we foundthat when their guns failed to protect them, many of them threw up theirhands. These men will never be our masters until we deserve to be theirslaves. 

So I am glad to be able to end on a note of agreement with the Germanmilitary party. If they defeat us, it will be no more than we deserve. Till then, or till they throw up their hands, we shall fight them, andGod will defend the right. 

SOME GAINS OF THE WAR

_An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, February 13, 1918_

Our losses in this War continue to be enormous, and we are not yet nearto the end. So it may seem absurd to speak of our gains, of gains thatwe have already achieved. But if you will look at the thing in a largelight, I think you will see that it is not absurd. 

I do not speak of gains of territory, and prisoners, and booty. It istrue that we have taken from the Germans about a million square miles ofland in Africa, where land is cheap. We have taken more prisoners fromthem than they have taken from us, and we have whole parks of Germanartillery to set over against the battered and broken remnants ofBritish field-guns which were exhibited in Berlin--a monument to theimmortal valour of the little old Army. I am speaking rather of gainswhich cannot be counted as guns are counted, or measured as land ismeasured, but which are none the less real and important. 

The Germans have achieved certain great material gains in this War, andthey are fighting now to hold them. If they fail to hold them, theGermany of the war-lords is ruined. She will have to give up all herbloated ambitions, to purge and live cleanly, and painfully toreconstruct her prosperity on a quieter and sounder basis. She will notdo this until she is forced to it by defeat. No doubt there are moderateand sensible men in Germany, as in other countries; but in Germany theyare without influence, and can do nothing. War is the national industryof Prussia; Prussia has knit together the several states of the largerGermany by means of war, and has promised them prosperity and power inthe future, to be achieved by war. You know the Prussian doctrine ofwar. Every one now knows it. According to that doctrine it is a foolishthing for a nation to wait till it is attacked. It should carefullycalculate its own strength and the strength of its neighbours, and, whenit is ready, it should attack them, on any pretext, suddenly, withoutwarning, and should take from them money and land. When it has gainedterritory in this fashion, it should subject the population of theconquered territory to the strictest laws of military service, and sosupply itself with an instrument for new and bolder aggression. This isnot only the German doctrine; it is the German practice. In this way andno other modern Germany has been built up. It is a huge new State, founded on force, cemented by fear, and financed on speculative gains tobe derived from the great gamble of war. You may have noticed that theGerman people have not been called on, as yet, to pay any considerablesum in taxation towards the expenses of this war. Those expenses (that, at least, was the original idea) were to be borne wholly by theconquered enemy. There are hundreds of thousands of Germans to-day whofirmly believe that their war-lords will return in triumph from thestricken field, bringing with them the spoils of war, and scattering alargess of peace and plenty. 

To us it seems a marvel that any people should accept such a doctrine, and should willingly give their lives and their fortunes to the work ofcarrying it out in practice; but it is not so marvellous as it seems. The German peoples are brave and obedient, and so make good soldiers;they are easily lured by the hope of profit; they are naturallyattracted by the spectacular and sentimental side of war; above all, they are so curiously stupid that many of them do actually believe thatthey are a divinely chosen race, superior to the other races of theworld. They are very carefully educated, and their education, which isordered by the State, is part of the military machine. Their thinking isdone for them by officials. It would require an extraordinary degree ofcourage and independence for a German youth to cut himself loose andbegin thinking and judging for himself. It must always be remembered, moreover, that their recent history seems to justify their creed. I willnot go back to Frederick the Great, though the history of his wars isthe Prussian handbook, which teaches all the characteristic Prussianmethods of treachery and deceit. But consider only the last two Germanwars. How, in the face of these, can it be proved to any German that waris not the most profitable of adventures? In 1866 Prussia had war withAustria. The war lasted forty days, and Prussia had from five to sixthousand soldiers killed in action. As a consequence of the war Prussiagained much territory, and established her control over the states ofgreater Germany. In 1870 she had war with France. Her total casualtiesin that war were approximately a hundred thousand, just about the sameas our casualties in Gallipoli. From the war she gained, besides a greatincrease of strength at home, the rich provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, with all their mineral wealth, and an indemnity of two hundred millionpounds, that is to say, four times the actual cost of the war in money. How then can it be maintained that war is not good business? If you sayso to any Prussian, he thinks you are talking like a child. 

Not only were these two wars rich in profit for the Germans, but theydid not lose them much esteem. There was sympathy in this country forthe union of the German peoples, just as there was sympathy, a few yearsearlier, for the union of the various states of Italy. There was not alittle admiration for German efficiency and strength. So that Bismarck, who was an expert in all the uses of bullying, blackmail, and fraud, wasaccepted as a great European statesman. I have always believed, and Istill believe, that Germany will have to pay a heavy price forBismarck--all the heavier because the payment has been so long deferred. 

The present War, then, is in the direct line of succession to theseformer wars; it was planned by Germany, elaborately and deliberatelyplanned, on a calculation of the profits to be derived from operationson a large scale. 

Well, as I said, we, as a people, do not believe in gambling in humanmisery to attain uncertain speculative gains. We hold that war can bejustified only by a good cause, not by a lucky event. The Germandoctrine seems to us impious and wicked. Though we have defined our waraims in detail, and the Germans have not dared publicly to definetheirs, our real and sufficient war aim is to break the monstrous andinhuman doctrine and practice of the enemy--to make their calculationsmiscarry. And observe, if their calculations miscarry, they have foughtand suffered for nothing. They entered into this War for profit, and inthe conduct of the War, though they have made many mistakes, they havemade none of those generous and magnanimous mistakes which redeem andbeautify a losing cause. 

The essence of our cause, and its greatest strength, is that we are notfighting for profit. We are fighting for no privilege except theprivilege of possessing our souls, of being ourselves--a privilege whichwe claim also for other weaker nations. The inestimable strength of thatposition is that if the odds are against us it does not matter. If yousee a ruffian torturing a child, and interfere to prevent him, do youfeel that your attempt was a wrong one because he knocks you down? Andif you succeed, what material profit is there in saving a child fromtorture? We have sometimes fought in the past for doubtful causes andfor wrong causes, but this time there is no mistake. Our cause is betterthan we deserve; we embraced it by an act of faith, and it is only bycontinuing in that faith that we shall see it through. The little oldArmy, when they went to France in August 1914, did not ask what profitswere likely to come their way. They knew that there were none, but theywere willing to sacrifice themselves to save decency and humanity frombeing trampled in the mud. This was the Army that the Germans called amercenary Army, and its epitaph has been written by a good poet:

 These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling, And took their wages, and are dead. 

 Their shoulders held the heavens suspended, They stood, and earth's foundations stay, What God abandoned these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay. 

We must follow their example, for we shall never get a better. We mustnot make too much of calculation, especially when it deals withincalculable things. Nervous public critics, like Mr. H. G. Wells, arealways calling out for more cleverness in our methods, for new andeffective tricks, so that we may win the War. I would never disparagecleverness; the more you can get of it, the better; but it is uselessunless it is in the service of something stronger and greater thanitself, and that is character. Cleverness can grasp; it is onlycharacter that can hold. The Duke of Wellington was not a clever man; hewas a man of simple and honourable mind, with an infinite capacity forpatience, persistence, and endurance, so that neither unexpectedreverses abroad nor a flood of idle criticism at home could shake him orchange him. So he bore a chief part in laying low the last great tyrannythat desolated Europe. 

None of our great wars was won by cleverness; they were all won byresolution and perseverance. In all of them we were near to despair anddid not despair. In all of them we won through to victory in the end. 

But in none of them did victory come in the expected shape. The worst ofmaking elaborate plans of victory, and programmes of all that is tofollow victory, is that the mixed event is sure to defeat those plans. Not every war finds its decision in a single great battle. Think of ourwar with Spain in the sixteenth century. Spain was then the greatest ofEuropean Powers. She had larger armies than we could raise; she hadmore than our wealth, and more than our shipping. The newly discoveredcontinent of America was an appanage of Spain, and her great galleonswere wafted lazily to and fro, bringing her all the treasures of thewestern hemisphere. We defeated her by standing out and holding on. Wefought her in the Low Countries, which she enslaved and oppressed. Werefused to recognize her exclusive rights in America, and our merchantseamen kept the sea undaunted, as they have kept it for the last threeyears. When at last we became an intolerable vexation to Spain, shecollected a great Armada, or war-fleet, to invade and destroy us; and itwas shattered, by the winds of heaven and the sailors of England, in1588. The defeat of the Armada was the turning-point of the war, but itwas not the end. It lifted a great shadow of fear from the hearts of thepeople, as a great shadow of fear has already been lifted from theirhearts in the present War, but during the years that followed wesuffered many and serious reverses at the hand of Spain, before peaceand security were reached. So late as 1601, thirteen years after thedefeat of the Armada, the King of Denmark offered to mediate betweenEngland and Spain, so that the long and disastrous war might be ended. Queen Elizabeth was then old and frail, but this was what she said--andif you want to understand why she was almost adored by her people, listen to her words: 'I would have the King of Denmark, and all PrincesChristian and Heathen to know, that England hath no need to crave peace;nor myself endured one hour's fear since I attained the crown thereof, being guarded with so valiant and faithful subjects. ' In the end thepower and menace of Spain faded away, and when peace was made, in 1604, this nation never again, from that day to this, feared the worst thatSpain could do. 

What were our gains from the war with Spain? Freedom to live our livesin our own way, unthreatened; freedom to colonize America. The gains ofa great war are never visible immediately; they are deferred, andextended over many years. What did we gain by our war with Napoleon, which ended in the victory of Waterloo? For long years after Waterloothis country was full of riots and discontents; there wererick-burnings, agitations, popular risings, and something very near tofamine in the land. But all these things, from a distance, are now seento have been the broken water that follows the passage of a great storm. The real gains of Waterloo, and still more of Trafalgar, are evident inthe enormous commercial and industrial development of England during thenineteenth century, and in the peaceful foundation of the greatdominions of Canada, Australia, and South Africa, which was madepossible only by our unchallenged use of the seas. The men who won thosetwo great battles did not live to gather the fruits of their victory;but their children did. If we defeat Germany as completely as we hope, we shall not be able to point at once to our gains. But it is not a rashforecast to say that our children and children's children will live ingreater security and freedom than we have ever tasted. 

A man must have a good and wide imagination if he is to be willing toface wounds and death for the sake of his unborn descendants andkinsfolk. We cannot count on the popular imagination being equal to thetask. Fortunately, there is a substitute for imagination which does thework as well or better, and that is character. Our people are sound ininstinct; they understand a fight. They know that a wrestler whoconsiders, while he is in the grip of his adversary, whether he wouldnot do well to give over, and so put an end to the weariness and thestrain, is no sort of a wrestler. They have never failed under a strainof this kind, and they will not fail now. The people who do thehalf-hearted and timid talking are either young egotists, who are angryat being deprived of their personal ease and independence; or elderlypensive gentlemen, in public offices and clubs, who are no longer fitfor action, and, being denied action, fall into melancholy; or feverishjournalists, who live on the proceeds of excitement, who feel the pulseand take the temperature of the War every morning, and then rush intothe street to announce their fluttering hopes and fears; or cosmopolitanphilosophers, to whom the change from London to Berlin means nothing buta change in diet and a pleasant addition to their opportunities ofhearing good music; or aliens in heart, to whom the historic fame ofEngland, 'dear for her reputation through the world, ' is less thannothing; or practical jokers, who are calm and confident enoughthemselves, but delight in startling and depressing others. These arenot the people of England; they are the parasites of the people ofEngland. The people of England understand a fight. 

That brings me to the first great gain of the War. We have foundourselves. Which of us, in the early months of 1914, would have daredto predict the splendours of the youth of this Empire--splendours whichare now a part of our history? We are adepts at self-criticism andself-depreciation. We hate the language of emotion. Some of us, if wewere taken to heaven and asked what we thought of it, would say that itis decent, or not so bad. I suppose we are jealous to keep our standardhigh, and to have something to say if a better place should be found. But in spite of all this, we do now know, and it is worth knowing, thatwe are not weaker than our fathers. We know that the people who inhabitthese islands and this commonwealth of nations cannot be pushed on oneside, or driven under, or denied a great share in the future ordering ofthe world. We know this, and our knowledge of it is the debt that we oweto our dead. It is not vanity to admit that we know it; on the contrary, it would be vanity to pretend that we do not know it. It is visible toother eyes than ours. Some time ago I heard an address given by a friendof mine, an Indian Mohammedan of warrior descent, to University studentsof his own faith. He was urging on them the futility of dreams and thenecessity of self-discipline and self-devotion. 'Why do the people ofthis country', he said, 'count for so much all the world over? It is notbecause of their dreams; it is because thousands of them are lying atthe bottom of the sea. '

Further, we have not only found ourselves; we have found one another. Anew kindliness has grown up, during the War, between people divided bythe barriers of class, or wealth, or circumstance. A statesman of theseventeenth century remarks that _It is a Misfortune for a Man not tohave a Friend in the World, but for that reason he shall have no Enemy_. I might invert his maxim and say, _It is a Misfortune for a Man to havemany Enemies, but for that reason he shall know who are his Friends_. NoRadical member of Parliament will again, while any of us live, castcontempt on 'the carpet Captains of Mayfair'. No idle Tory talker willagain dare to say that the working men of England care nothing for theircountry. Even the manners of railway travel have improved. I wastravelling in a third-class compartment of a crowded train the otherday; we were twenty in the compartment, but it seemed a pity to leaveany one behind, and we made room for number twenty-one. Nothing but avery kindly human feeling could have packed us tight enough for this. Yet now is the time that has been chosen by some of these pensivegentlemen that I spoke of, and by some of these excitable journalists, to threaten us with class-war, and to try to make our flesh creep byconjuring up the horrors of revolution. I advise them to take theiropinions to the third-class compartment and discuss them there. It is agood tribunal, for, sooner or later, you will find every one there--evenofficers, when they are travelling in mufti at their own expense. I havevisited this tribunal very often, and I have always come away from itwith the same impression, that this people means to win the War. But Ido not travel much in the North of England, so I asked a friend of mine, whose dealings are with the industrial North, what the workpeople ofLancashire and Yorkshire think of the War. He said, 'Their view is verysimple: they mean to win it; and they mean to make as much money out ofit as ever they can. ' Certainly, that is very simple; but before youjudge them, put yourselves in their place. There are great outcriesagainst profiteers, for making exorbitant profits out of the War, andagainst munition workers, for delaying work in order to get higherwages. I do not defend either of them; they are unimaginative andselfish, and I do not care how severely they are dealt with; but I dosay that the majority of them are not wicked in intention. A good manyof the more innocent profiteers are men whose sin is that they take anoffer of two shillings rather than an offer of eighteenpence for whatcost them one and a penny. Some of us, in our weaker moments, might bebetrayed into doing the same. As for the munition workers, I rememberwhat Goldsmith, who had known the bitterest poverty, wrote to hisbrother. 'Avarice', he said, 'in the lower orders of mankind is trueambition; avarice is the only ladder the poor can use to preferment. Preach then, my dear Sir, to your son, not the excellence of humannature nor the disrespect of riches, but endeavour to teach him thriftand economy. Let his poor wandering uncle's example be placed in hiseyes. I had learned from books to love virtue before I was taught fromexperience the necessity of being selfish. '

The profiteers and the munition workers are endeavouring, incidentally, to better their own position. But make no mistake; the bulk of thesepeople would rather die than allow one spire of English grass to betrodden under the foot of a foreign trespasser. Their chief sin is thatthey do not fear. They think that there is plenty of time to do a littlebusiness for themselves on the way to defeat the enemy. I cannot helpremembering the mutiny at the Nore, which broke out in our fleet duringthe Napoleonic wars. The mutineers struck for more pay and bettertreatment, but they agreed together that if the French fleet should putin an appearance during the mutiny, all their claims should be postponedfor a time, and the French fleet should have their first attention. 

Employers and employed do, no doubt, find in some trades to-day thattheir relations are strained and irksome. They would do well to take alesson from the Army, where, with very few exceptions, there is harmonyand understanding between those who take orders and those who give them. It is only in the Army that you can see realized the ideal of ancientRome. 

 Then none was for a party, Then all were for the State; Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great. 

Why is the Army so far superior to most commercial and industrialbusinesses? The secret does not lie in State employment. There is plentyof discontent and unrest among the State-employed railway men andmunition workers. It lies rather in the habit of mutual help and mutualtrust. If any civilian employer of labour wants to have willingworkpeople, let him take a hint from the Army. Let him live with hisworkpeople, and share all their dangers and discomforts. Let him takethought for their welfare before his own, and teach self-sacrifice byexample. Let him put the good of the nation before all privateinterests; and those whom he commands will do for him anything that heasks. 

I cannot believe that the benefits which have come to us from the Armywill pass away with the passing of the War. Those who have been comradesin danger will surely take with them something of the old spirit intocivil life. And those who have kept clear of the Army in order to carryon their own trades and businesses will surely realize that they havemissed the great opportunity of their lives. 

In a wider sense the War has brought us to an understanding of oneanother. This great Commonwealth of independent nations which is calledthe British Empire is scattered over the surface of the habitable globe. It embraces people who live ten thousand miles apart, and whose ways oflife are so different that they might seem to have nothing in common. But the War has brought them together, and has done more than half acentury of peace could do to promote a common understanding. Hundreds ofthousands of men of our blood who, before the War, had never seen thislittle island, have now made acquaintance with it. Hundreds of thousandsof the inhabitants of this island to whom the Dominions were strange, far places, if, after the War, they should be called on to settle there, will not feel that they are leaving home. I can only hope that theCanadians and Anzacs think as well of us as we do of them. We do notlike to praise our friends in their hearing, so I will say no more thanthis: I am told that a new kind of peerage, very haughty and veryself-important, has arisen in South London. Its members are thosehouse-holders who have been privileged to have Anzac soldiers billetedon them. It is private ties of this kind, invisible to theconstitutional lawyer and the political historian, which make the finemeshes of the web of Empire. 

Because he knew that the strength of the whole texture depends on thestrength of the fine meshes, Earl Grey, who died last year, will alwaysbe remembered in our history. Not many men have his opportunity to makeacquaintance with the domain that is their birthright, for he hadadministered a province of South Africa, and had been Governor-Generalof Canada, He rediscovered the glory of the Empire, as poets rediscoverthe glory of common speech. 'He had breathed its air, ' a friend of hissays, 'fished its rivers, walked in its valleys, stood on its mountains, met its people face to face. He had seen it in all the zones of theworld. He knew what it meant to mankind. Under the British flag, wherever he journeyed, he found men of English speech living in anatmosphere of liberty and carrying on the dear domestic traditions ofthe British Isles. He saw justice firmly planted there, industry andinvention hard at work unfettered by tyrants of any kind, domestic lifeprospering in natural conditions, and our old English kindness andcheerfulness and broad-minded tolerance keeping things together. But healso saw room under that same flag, ample room, for millions andmillions more of the human race. The Empire wasn't a word to him. It wasa vast, an almost boundless, home for honest men. '

The War did not dishearten him. When he died, in August, 1917, he said, 'Here I lie on my death-bed, looking clear into the Promised Land. I'mnot allowed to enter it, but there it is before my eyes. After the Warthe people of this country will enter it, and those who laughed at mefor a dreamer will see that I wasn't so wrong after all. But there'sstill work to do for those who didn't laugh, hard work, and with muchopposition in the way; all the same, it is work right up against thegoal. My dreams have come true. '

One of the clear gains of the War is to be found in the increasedactivity and alertness of our own people. The motto of to-day is, 'Letthose now work who never worked before, And those who always worked nowwork the more. ' Before the War we had a great national reputation foridleness--in this island, at least. I remember a friendly critic fromCanada who, some five or six years ago, expressed to me, with muchdisquiet, his opinion that there was something very far wrong with theold country; that we had gone soft. As for our German critics, theyexpressed the same view in gross and unmistakable fashion. Wit is not anative product in Germany, it all has to be imported, so they could notsatirize us; but their caricatures of the typical Englishman showed uswhat they thought. He was a young weakling with a foolish face, and wasdressed in cricketing flannels. It would have been worth their while tonotice what they did not notice, that his muscles and nerves are notsoft. They learned that later, when the bank-clerks of Manchester brokethe Prussian Guard into fragments at Contalmaison. This must have been asad surprise, for the Germans had always taught, in their delightfulauthoritative fashion, that the chief industries of the young Englishmanare lawn-tennis and afternoon tea. They are a fussy people, and theyfind it difficult to understand the calm of the man who, having nothingto do, does it. Perhaps they were right, and we were too idle. Thedisease was never so serious as they thought it, and now, thanks tothem, we are in a fair way to recovery. The idle classes have turnedtheir hand to the lathe and the plough. Women are doing a hundred thingsthat they never did before, and are doing them well. The elasticity andresourcefulness that the War has developed will not be lost or destroyedby the coming of peace. Least of all will those qualities be lost if weshould prove unable, in this War, to impose our own terms on Germany. Then the peace that follows will be a long struggle, and in thatstruggle we shall prevail. In the last long peace we were notsuspicious; we felt friendly enough to the Germans, and we gave themevery advantage. They despised us for our friendliness and used thepeace to prepare our downfall. That will never happen again. If wecannot tame the cunning animal that has assaulted humanity, at least wecan and will tether him. Laws will not be necessary; there are millionsof others besides the seamen of England who will have no dealings withan unsubdued and unrepentant Germany. What the Germans are not taught bythe War they will have to learn in the more tedious and no less costlyschool of peace. 

In any case, whether we win through to real peace and real security, orwhether we are thrown back on an armed peace and the duty of unbrokenvigilance, we shall be dependent for our future on the children who arenow learning in the schools or playing in the streets. It is a gooddependence. The children of to-day are better than the children whom Iknew when I was a child. I think they have more intelligence andsympathy; they certainly have more public spirit. We cannot do too muchfor them. The most that we can do is nothing to what they are going todo for us, for their own nation and people. I am not concerned todiscuss the education problem. Formal education, carried on chiefly bymeans of books, is a very small part of the making of a man or a woman. But I am interested to know what the children are thinking. You cannotfathom a child's thoughts, but we know who are their best teachers, andwhat lessons have been stamped indelibly on their minds. Their teachers, whom they never saw, and whose lessons they will never forget, lie ingraves in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and Syria and Mesopotamia, or unburied at the bottom of the sea. The runner falls, but the torch iscarried forward. This is what Julian Grenfell, who gave his mind and hislife to the War, has said in his splendid poem called _Into Battle_:

 And life is colour and warmth and light, And a striving evermore for these; And he is dead who will not fight, And who dies fighting hath increase. 

Those who died fighting will have such increase that a whole newgeneration, better even than the old, will be ready, no long time hence, to uphold and extend and decorate the Commonwealth of nations whichtheir fathers and brothers saved from ruin. 

One thing I have never heard discussed, but it is the clearest gain ofall, and already it may be called a certain gain. After the War theEnglish language will have such a position as it has never had before. It will be established in world-wide security. Even before the War, itmay be truly said, our language was in no danger from the competition ofthe German language. The Germans have never had much success in theattempt to get their language adopted by other peoples. Not all themilitary laws of Prussia can drive out French from the hearts and homesof the people of Alsace. In the ports of the near and far East you willhear English spoken--pidgin English, as it is called, that is to say, aselection of English words suited for the business of daily life. Butyou may roam the world over, and you will hear no pidgin German. Beforethe War many Germans learned English, while very few English-speakingpeople learned German. In other matters we disagreed, but we both knewwhich way the wind was blowing. It may be said, and said truly, that ourwell-known laziness was one cause of our failing or neglecting to learnGerman. But it was not the only cause; and we are not lazy in taskswhich we believe to be worth our while. Rather we had an instinctivebelief that the future does not belong to the German tongue. That beliefis not likely to be impaired by the War. Armed ruffians can do somethings, but one thing they cannot do; they cannot endear their languageto those who have suffered from their violence. The Germans poisoned thewells in South-West Africa; in Europe they did all they could to poisonthe wells of mutual trust and mutual understanding among civilized men. Do they think that these things will make a good advertisement for theexplosive guttural sounds and the huddled deformed syntax of the speechin which they express their arrogance and their hate? Which of thechief European languages will come first, after the War, with the littlenations? Will Serbia be content to speak German? Will Norway and Denmarkfeel a new affection for the speech of the men who have degraded the oldhumanity of the seas? Neighbourhood, kinship, and the necessities ofcommerce may retain for the German language a certain measure of customin Sweden and Switzerland, and in Holland. But for the most part Germanswill have to be content to be addressed in their own tongue only bythose who fear them, or by those who hope to cheat them. 

This gain, which I make bold to predict for the English language, is areal gain, apart from all patriotic bias. The English language isincomparably richer, more fluid, and more vital than the Germanlanguage. Where the German has but one way of saying a thing, we havetwo or three, each with its distinctions and its subtleties of usage. Our capital wealth is greater, and so are our powers of borrowing. English sprang from the old Teutonic stock, and we can still coin newwords, such as 'food-hoard' and 'joy-ride', in the German fashion. Butlong centuries ago we added thousands of Romance words, words which cameinto English through the French or Norman-French, and brought with themthe ideas of Latin civilization and of mediaeval Christianity. Later on, when the renewed study of Latin and Greek quickened the intellectuallife of Europe, we imported thousands of Greek and Latin words directfrom the ancient world, learned words, many of them, suitable forphilosophers, or for writers who pride themselves on shooting a littleabove the vulgar apprehension. Yet many of these, too, have found theirway into daily speech, so that we can say most things in three ways, according as we draw on one or another of the three main sources of ourspeech. Thus, you can Begin, or Commence, or Initiate an undertaking, with Boldness, or Courage, or Resolution. If you are a Workman, orLabourer, or Operative, you can Ask, or Bequest, or Solicit youremployer to Yield, or Grant, or Concede, an increase in the Earnings, orWages, or Remuneration which fall to the lot of your Fellow, orCompanion, or Associate. Your employer is perhaps Old, or Veteran, orSuperannuated, which may Hinder, or Delay, or Retard the success of yourapplication. But if you Foretell, or Prophesy, or Predict that the Warwill have an End, or Close, or Termination that shall not only beSpeedy, or Rapid, or Accelerated, but also Great, or Grand, orMagnificent, you may perhaps Stir, or Move, or Actuate him to have Ruth, or Pity, or Compassion on your Mate, or Colleague, or Collaborator. TheEnglish language, then, is a language of great wealth--much greaterwealth than can be illustrated by any brief example. But wealth isnothing unless you can use it. The real strength of English lies in theinspired freedom and variety of its syntax. There is no grammar of theEnglish speech which is not comic in its stiffness and inadequacy. AnEnglish grammar does not explain all that we can do with our speech; itmerely explains what shackles and restraints we must put upon our speechif we would bring it within the comprehension of a school-bredgrammarian. But the speech itself is like the sea, and soon breaks downthe dykes built by the inland engineer. It was the fashion, in theeighteenth century, to speak of the divine Shakespeare. The reach andcatholicity of his imagination was what earned him that extravagantpraise; but his syntax has no less title to be called divine. It is notcast or wrought, like metal; it leaps like fire, and moves like air. Sois every one that is born of the spirit. Our speech is our greatcharter. Far better than in the long constitutional process whereby wesubjected our kings to law, and gave dignity and strength to ourCommons, the meaning of English freedom is to be seen in the illimitablefreedom of our English speech. 

Our literature is almost as rich as our language. Modern Germanliterature begins in the eighteenth century. Modern English literaturebegan with Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, and has been full ofgreat names and great books ever since. Nothing has been done in Germanliterature for which we have not a counterpart, done as well orbetter--except the work of Heine, and Heine was a Jew. His opinion ofthe Prussians was that they are a compost of beer, deceit, and sand. French literature and English literature can be compared, throughouttheir long course, sometimes to the great advantage of the French. German literature cannot seriously be compared with either. 

It may be objected that literature and art are ornamental affairs, whichcount for little in the deadly strife of nations. But that is not so. Our language cannot go anywhere without taking our ideas and our creedwith it, not to mention our institutions and our games. If the Germanscould understand what Chaucer means when he says of his Knight that

 he lovèd chivalry, Truth and honoùr, freedom and courtesy, then indeed we might be near to an understanding. I asked a good Germanscholar the other day what is the German word for 'fair play'. Hereplied, as they do in Parliament, that he must ask for notice of thatquestion. I fear there is no German word for 'fair play'. 

The little countries, the pawns and victims of German policy, understandour ideas better. The peoples who have suffered from tyranny andoppression look to England for help, and it is a generous weakness in usthat we sometimes deceive them by our sympathy, for our power islimited, and we cannot help them all. But it will not count against usat the final reckoning that in most places where humanity has sufferedcruelty and indignity the name of England has been invoked: not alwaysin vain. 

And now, for I have kept to the last what I believe to be the greatestgain of all, the entry of America into the War assures the triumph ofour common language. America is peopled by many races; only a minorityof the inhabitants--an influential and governing minority--are of theEnglish stock. But here, again, the language carries it; and the ideasthat inspire America are ideas which had their origin in the longEnglish struggle for freedom. Our sufferings in this War are great, butthey are not so great that we cannot recognize virtue in a new recruitto the cause. No nation, in the whole course of human history, has evermade a more splendid decision, or performed a more magnanimous act, thanAmerica, when she decided to enter this War. She had nothing to gain, for, to say the bare truth, she had little to lose. If Germany were todominate the world, America, no doubt, would be ruined; but in all humanlikelihood, Germany's impious attempt would have spent itself and beenbroken long before it reached the coasts of America. America might havestood out of the War in the assurance that her own interests were safe, and that, when the tempest had passed, the centre of civilization wouldbe transferred from a broken and exhausted Europe to a peaceful andprosperous America. Some few Americans talked in this strain, andfavoured a decision in this sense. But it was not for nothing thatAmerica was founded upon religion. When she saw humanity in anguish, shedid not pass by on the other side. Her entry into the War has put anend, I hope for ever, to the family quarrel, not very profound orsignificant, which for a century and a half has been a jarring note inthe relations of mother and daughter. And it has put an end to anotherdanger. It seemed at one time not unlikely that the English language asit is spoken overseas would set up a life of its own, and becomeseparated from the language of the old country. A development of thiskind would be natural enough. The Boers of South Africa speak Dutch, butnot the Dutch spoken in Holland. The French Canadians speak French, butnot the French of Molière. Half a century ago, when America wasexploring and settling her own country, in wild and lone places, herpioneers enriched the English speech with all kinds of new and vividphrases. The tendency was then for America to go her own way, and tocultivate what is new in language at the expense of what is old. Sheprided herself even on having a spelling of her own, and seemed almostwilling to break loose from tradition and to coin a new AmericanEnglish. 

This has not happened; and now, I think, it will not happen. For onething, the American colonists left us when already we had a greatliterature. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Spenser belong to America no lessthan to us, and America has never forgotten them. The education whichhas been fostered in American schools and colleges keeps the wholenation in touch with the past. Some of their best authors write in astyle that Milton and Burke would understand and approve. There is nomore beautiful English prose than Nathaniel Hawthorne's. The bestspeeches of Abraham Lincoln, and, we may truly add, of President Wilson, are merely classic English. During my own lifetime I am sure I have seenthe speech usages of the two peoples draw closer together. For onething, we on this side now borrow, and borrow very freely, the morepicturesque colloquialisms of America. On informal occasions I sometimesbrighten my own speech with phrases which I think I owe to one of thebest of living American authors, Mr. George Ade, of Chicago, the authorof _Fables in Slang_. The press, the telegraph, the telephone, and thegrowing habit of travel bind us closer together every year; and theEnglish that we speak, however rich and various it may be, is going toremain one and the same English, our common inheritance. 

One question, the most important and difficult of all, remains to beasked. Will this War, in its course and in its effects, tend to preventor discourage later wars? If the gains that it brings prove to be merelypartial and national gains, if it exalts one nation by unjustlydepressing another, and conquers cruelty by equal cruelty, then nothingcan be more certain than that the peace of the world is farther off thanever. When she was near her death, Edith Cavell, patriot and martyr, said that patriotism is not enough. Every one who thinks oninternational affairs knows this; almost every one forgets it in time ofwar. What can be done to prevent nations from appealing to the wildjustice of revenge?

A League of Nations may do good, but I am surprised that any one who hasimagination and a knowledge of the facts should entertain high hopes ofit as a full solution. There is a League of Nations to-day which hasgiven a verdict against the Central Powers, and that verdict is beingenforced by the most terrible War in all human history. If the verdicthad been given before the War began, it may be said, then Germany mighthave accepted it, and refrained. So she might, but what then? She wouldhave felt herself wronged; she would have deferred the War, and, in waysthat she knows so well, would have set about making a party for herselfamong the nations of the League. Who can be confident that she wouldhave failed either to divide her judges, or to accumulate such elementsof strength that she might dare to defy them? A League of Nations wouldwork well only if its verdicts were loyally accepted by all the nationscomposing it. To make majority-rule possible you must have a communitymade up of members who are reasonably well informed upon one another'saffairs, and who are bound together by a tie of loyalty stronger andmore enduring than their causes of difference. It would be a happy thingif the nations of the world made such a community; and the sufferings ofthis War have brought them nearer to desiring it. But those who believethat such a community can be formed to-day or to-morrow are toosanguine. It must not be forgotten that the very principle of theLeague, if its judgements are to take effect, involves a world-war incases where a strong minority resists those judgements. Every war wouldbecome a world-war. Perhaps this very fact would prevent wars, but itcannot be said that experience favours such a conclusion. 

There is no escape for us by way of the Gospels. The Gospel precept toturn the other cheek to the aggressor was not addressed to a meeting oftrustees. Christianity has never shirked war, or even much disliked it. Where the whole soul is set on things unseen, wounds and death become ofless account. And if the Christians have not helped us to avoid war, howshould the pacifists be of use? Those of them whom I happen to know, orto have met, have shown themselves, in the relations of civil life, tobe irritable, self-willed, combative creatures, where the averagesoldier is calm, unselfish, and placable. There is something incongruousand absurd in the pacifist of British descent. He has fighting in hisblood, and when his creed, or his nervous sensibility to physicalhorrors, denies him the use of fighting, his blood turns sour. He canargue, and object, and criticize, but he cannot lead. All that he canoffer us in effect is eternal quarrels in place of occasional fights. 

No one can do anything to prevent war who does not recognize itssplendour, for it is by its splendour that it keeps its hold onhumanity, and persists. The wickedest and most selfish war in the worldis not fought by wicked and selfish soldiers. The spirit of man isimmense, and for an old memory, a pledged word, a sense of fellowship, offers this frail and complicated tissue of flesh and blood, which a pinor a grain of sand will disorder, to be the victim of all the atrocitiesthat the wit of man can compound out of fire and steel and poison. Ifthat spirit is to be changed, or directed into new courses, it must beby one who understands it, and approaches it reverently, with baredhead. 

The best hope seems to me to lie in paying chief attention to theimprovement of war rather than to its abolition; to the decencies of thecraft; to the style rather than the matter. Style is often moreimportant than matter, and this War would not have been so fierce or soprolonged if it had not become largely a war on a point of style, a war, that is to say, to determine the question how war should be waged. Ifthe Germans had behaved humanely and considerately to the civilpopulation of Belgium, if they had kept their solemn promise not to usepoison-gas, if they had refrained from murder at sea, if their valourhad been accompanied by chivalry, the War might now have been ended, perhaps not in their disfavour, for it would not have been felt, as itnow is felt, that they must be defeated at no matter how great a cost, or civilization will perish. 

Even as things are, there have been some gains in the manner ofconducting war, which, when future generations look back on them, willbe seen to be considerable. It is true that modern science has devisednew and appalling weapons. The invention of a new weapon in war alwaysarouses protest, but it does not usually, in the long run, make war moreinhuman. There was a great outcry in Europe when the broadsword wassuperseded by the rapier, and a tall man of his hands could be spittedlike a cat or a rabbit by any dexterous little fellow with a trainedwrist. There was a wave of indignation, which was a hundred years inpassing, when musketry first came into use, and a man-at-arms of greatprowess could be killed from behind a wall by one who would not havedared to meet him in open combat. But these changes did not, in effect, make war crueller or more deadly. They gave more play to intelligence, and abolished the tyranny of the bully, who took the wall of every manhe met, and made himself a public nuisance. The introduction ofpoison-gas, which is a small thing compared with the invention offire-arms, has given the chemist a place in the ranks of fighting-men. And if science has lent its aid to the destruction of life, it has spentgreater zeal and more prolonged effort on the saving of life. Noprevious war will compare with this in care for the wounded and maimed. In all countries, and on all fronts, an army of skilled workers devotethemselves to this single end. I believe that this quickening of thehuman conscience, for that is what it is, will prove to be the greatestgain of the War, and the greatest advance made in restraint of war. Ifthe nations come to recognize that their first duty, and their firstresponsibility, is to those who give so much in their service, thatrecognition will of itself do more than can be done by any conclave ofstatesmen to discourage war. It was the monk Telemachus, according tothe old story, who stopped the gladiatorial games at Rome, and wasstoned by the people. If war, in process of time, shall be abolished, or, failing that, shall be governed by the codes of humanity andchivalry, like a decent tournament; then the one sacrificial figurewhich will everywhere be honoured for the change will be the figure notof a priest or a politician, but of a hospital nurse. 

THE WAR AND THE PRESS

_A paper read to the Essay Society, Eton College, March 14, 1918. _

When you asked me to read or speak to you, I promised to speak about theWar. What I have to say is wholly orthodox, but it is none the worse forthat. Indeed, when I think how entirely the War possesses our thoughtsand how entirely we are agreed concerning it, I seem to see a newmeaning in the creeds of the religions. These creeds grew up by generalconsent, and no one who believed them grudged repeating them. In theface of an indifferent or hostile world the faithful found themselvesobliged to define their belief, and to strengthen themselves by anunwearying and united profession of faith. It is the enemy who givesmeaning to a religious creed: without our creed we cannot win. So I amwilling to remind you of what you know, rather than to try to introduceyou to novelties. 

The strength of the enemy lies in his creed; not in the lands that hehas ravished from his neighbours. If his creed does not prevail, hislands will not help him. Germany has taken lands from Belgium, Serbia, Roumania, Russia, and the rest, but unless her digestion is as strong asher appetite, she will fail to keep them. If she is to hold them inpeace, the peoples who inhabit these lands must be either exterminatedor converted to the German creed. Lands can be annexed by a successfulcampaign; they can be permanently conquered only by the operations ofpeace. The people who survive will be a weakness to the German Empireunless they accept what they are offered, a share in the German creed. 

That creed has not many natural attractions for the peoples on whom itis imposed by force. It is an intensely patriotic creed; it insists onracial supremacy, and on unity to be achieved by violence. Pleading andpersuasion have little part in it except as instruments of deceit. Thereis no use in listening to what the Germans say; they do not believe itthemselves. What they say is for others; what they do is for themselves. While they are at war, language for them has only two uses--to concealtheir thoughts, and to deceive their enemies. 

The creed of Western civilization, for which they feel nothing butcontempt, and on which they will be broken, is not a simple thing, liketheirs. The words by which it is commonly expressed--democracy, parliamentarism, individual liberty, diversity, free development--arepuzzling theoretic words, which make no instinctive appeal to the heart. Nevertheless, we stand for growth as against order; and for life asagainst death. If Germany wins this war, her system will have to bebroken or to decay before growth can start again. Must we lose even ahundred years in shaking ourselves free from the paralysis of the Germannightmare?

The Germans have shown themselves strong in their unity, and strong intheir willingness to make great sacrifices to preserve that unity. Noone can deny nobility to the sacrifice made by the simple-minded Germansoldier who dies fighting bravely for his people and his creed. Hisnarrowness is his strength, and makes unselfishness easier by saving hismind from question. 'This one thing you shall do', his country says tohim, 'fight and die for your country, so that your country and yourpeople shall have lordship over other countries and other peoples. Youare nothing; Germany is everything. '

We who live in this island love our country with at least as deep apassion; but a creed so simple as the German creed will never do for us. We are patriotic, but our patriotism is often overlaid and confused by awider thought and a wider sympathy than the Germans have ever known. Much extravagant praise has lately been given to the German power ofthinking, which produces the elaborate marvels of German organization. But this thinking is slave-thinking, not master-thinking; it spendsitself wholly on devising complicated means to achieve a very simpleend. That is what makes the Germans so like the animals. Their wisdom isall cunning. I have had German friends, two or three, in the course ofmy life, but none of them ever understood a word that I said if I triedto say what I thought. You could talk to them about food, and theyresponded easily. It was all very restful and pleasant, like talking toan intelligent dog. 

If each of the allied nations were devoted to the creed of nationalism, the alliance could not endure. We depend for our strength on what wehold in common. The weakness of this wider creed is that it makes nosuch immediate and strong appeal to the natural instincts as is made bythe mother-country. It demands the habitual exercise of reason andimagination. Further, seeing that we are infinitely less tame and lessdocile than the Germans, we depend for our strength on informing andconvincing our people, and on obtaining agreement among them. Questionswhich in Germany are discussed only in the gloomy Berlin head-quartersof the General Staff are discussed here in the newspapers. In the press, even under the censorship, we think aloud. It records our differencesand debates our policy. You could not suppress these differences andthese debates without damaging our cause. There is no freedom worthhaving which does not, sooner or later, include the freedom to say whatyou think. 

No doubt we could, if necessary, carry on for a time without the press;and I agree with those newspaper writers who have been saying recentlythat the importance of the press is monstrously exaggerated by some ofits critics. The working-man, so far as I know him, does not depend forhis patriotism on the leader-writers of the newspapers. He takes eventhe news with a very large grain of salt. 'So the papers say', heremarks; 'it may be true or it may not. ' Yet the press has done goodservice, and might do better, in putting the meaning of the War beforeour people and in holding them together. Freedom means that we must loveour diversity well enough to be willing to unite to protect it. We mustdie for our differences as cheerfully as the Germans die for theirpattern. Or, if we can sketch a design of our cause, we must be aspassionate in defence of that large vague design as the Germans arepassionate in defence of their tight uniformity and their drill. If wewere to fail to keep together, our cause, I believe, would stillprevail, but at a cost that we dare not contemplate, by way of anarchy, and the dissolution of societies, by long tortures, and tears, andmartyrdoms. If we refuse to die in the ranks against the German tyrannywe can keep our faith by dying at the stake. There are those who thinkmartyrdom the better way; and certainly that was how Christianityprevailed in Europe; you can read the story in Caxton's translation ofthe _Golden Legend_. But these saints and martyrs were making abeginning; we are fighting to keep what we have won, and it would be ahuge failure on our part if we could keep nothing of it, but had tobegin all over again. 

The business of the press, then, at this present crisis, is to keep thecause for which we are fighting clearly before us, and this it has donewell; also, because we do not fight best in blinders, to tell us allthat can be known of the facts of the situation, and this it has donenot so well. 

The power of the newspapers is that most people read them, and that manypeople read nothing else. Their weakness is that they have to sell orcease to be, so that by a natural instinct of self-preservation theyfall back on the two sure methods whereby you can always capture theattention of the public. Any man who is trying to say what he thinks, making full allowance for all doubts and differences, runs the risk oflosing his audience. He can regain their attention by flattering them orby frightening them. Flattery and fright, the one following the otherfrom day to day, and often from paragraph to paragraph, is a very largepart of the newspaper reader's diet. If he is a sane and busy man, he isnot too much impressed by either. He is not mercurial enough for thequick changes of an orator's or journalist's fancy, whereby he is calledon, one day, to dig the German warships like rats out of their harbour, and, not many days later, to spend his last shilling on the purchase ofthe last bullet to shoot at the German invader. He knows that this issuch stuff as dreams are made of. He knows also that the orator orjournalist, after calling on him for these achievements, goes home todinner. No great harm is done, just as no great harm is done by badnovels. But an opportunity is lost; the press and the platform might domore than they do to strengthen us and inform us, and help forward ourcause. 

I name the press and the platform together because they are essentiallythe same thing. Journalism is a kind of talk. The press, it is fair tosay, is ourselves; and every people, it may truly be said, has the pressthat it deserves. But reading is a thing that we do chiefly forindulgence and pleasure in our idle time; and the press falls in withour mood, and supplies us with what we want in our weaker and laziermoments. No responsible man, with an eager and active mind, spends muchof his time on the newspapers. Those who are excited to action by whatthey read in the papers are mostly content with the mild exercise ofwriting to these same papers to explain that some one else ought to dosomething and to do it at once. Their excitement worries themselves morethan it hurts others. When the devil, with horns and hooves, appeared toCuvier, the naturalist, and threatened to devour him, Cuvier, who wasasleep at the time, opened his eyes and looked at the terribleapparition. 'Hm, ' he said, 'cloven-footed; graminivorous; needn't beafraid of you;' and he went to sleep again. A man who says that he hasnot time to read the morning papers carefully is commonly a man whocounts; he knows what he has to do, and he goes on doing it. So far as Ihave observed, the cadets who are training for command in the army takevery little interest in the exhortations of the newspapers. They evenprefer the miserable trickle which is all that is left of football news. 

One of the chief problems connected with the press is thereforethis--how can it be prevented from producing hysteria in thefeeble-minded? In time of war the censorship no doubt does something toprevent this; and I think it might do more. 'Scare-lines', as they arecalled--that is, sensational headings in large capital letters--might bereduced by law to modest dimensions. More important, the censorshipmight insist that all who write shall sign their names to theirarticles. Why should journalists alone be relieved of responsibility totheir country? Is it possible that the Government is afraid of thepress? There is no need for fear. 'Beware of Aristophanes', says Landor, 'he can cast your name as a byword to a thousand cities of Asia for athousand years. But all that the press can do by its disfavour is tokeep your name obscure in a hundred cities of England for a hundreddays. Signed articles are robbed of their vague impressiveness, and areknown for what they are--the opinions of one man. I would also recommendthat a photograph of the author be placed at the head of every article. I have been saved from many bad novels by the helpful pictorialadvertisements of modern publishers. 

The real work of the Press, as I said, is to help to hold the peopletogether. Nothing else that it can do is of any importance compared withthis. We are at one in this War as we have never been at one beforewithin living memory, as we were not at one against Napoleon or againstLouis XIV. Our trial is on us; and if we cannot preserve our oneness, wefail. What would be left to us I do not know; but I am sure that anEngland which had accepted conditions of peace at Germany's hands wouldnot be the England that any of us know. There might still be a fewEnglishmen, but they would have to look about for somewhere to live. Serbia would be a good place; it has made no peace-treaty with Germany. 

We are profoundly at one; and are divided only by illusions, which thepress, in times past, has done much to keep alive. One of theseillusions is the illusion of party. I have never been behind the scenes, among the creaking machinery, but my impression, as a spectator, is thatparties in England are made very much as you pick up sides for a game. Ihave observed that they are all conservative. The affections areconservative; every one has a liking for his old habits and his oldassociates. There is something comic in a well-nourished rich man whobelieves that he is a bold reformer and a destructive thinker. For realclotted reactionary sentiment I know nothing to match the table-talk ofany aged parliamentary Radical. When we get a Labour Government, it willbe patriotic, prejudiced, opposed to all innovation, superstitiouslyreverential of the past, sticky and, probably, tyrannical. 

The party illusion has been much weakened by the War, and those whostill repeat the old catch-words are very near to lunacy. There is adeeper and more dangerous illusion which has not been killed--the classillusion. We are all very much alike; but we live in water-tightcompartments called classes, and the inhabitants of each compartmenttend to believe that they alone are patriotic. This illusion, to bejust, is not fostered chiefly by the press, which wants to sell its workto all classes; but it has strong hold of the Government office. TheGovernment does not know the people, except as an actor knows theaudience; and therefore does not trust the people. It is pathetic tohear officials talking timidly of the people--will they endure hardshipsand sacrifices, will they carry through? Yet most of the successes wehave won in the War have to be credited not so much to the skill of themanagement as to the amazing high courage of the ordinary soldier andsailor. Even soldiers are often subject to class illusion. I rememberlistening, in the first month of the War, to a retired colonel, whoexplained, with some heat, that the territorials could never be of anyuse. That illusion has gone. Then it was Kitchener's army--well-meaningpeople, no doubt, but impossible for a European war. Kitchener's armymade good. Now it is the civil population, who, though they are theblood relatives of the soldiers, are distrusted, and believed to belikely to fail under a strain. Yet all the time, if you want to hearhalf-hearted, timid, pusillanimous talk, the place where you are mostlikely to hear it is in the public offices. Most of those who talk inthis way would be brave enough in fight, but they are kept at desks, andworried with detailed business, and harassed by speculative dangers, andthey lose perspective. Soon or late, we are going to win this War; andit is the people who are going to win it. 

If the press (or perhaps the Government, which controls the press) isnot afraid of the people, why does it tell them so little about ourreverses, and the merits of our enemies? For information concerningthese things we have to depend wholly on conversation with returnedsoldiers. For instance, the horrible stories that we hear of the brutaltreatment of our prisoners are numerous, and are true, and make a heavybill against Germany, which bill we mean to present. But are they fairexamples of the average treatment? We cannot tell; the accountspublished are almost exclusively confined to the worst happenings. Mostof the officers with whom I have talked who had been in several Germanmilitary prisons said that they had nothing serious to complain of. Prison is not a good place, and it is not pleasant to have yourpea-soup and your coffee, one after the other, in the same tin dipper;but they were soldiers, and they agreed that it would be absurd to makea grievance of things like that. One private soldier was an even greaterphilosopher. 'No', he said, 'I have nothing to complain of. Of course, they do spit at you a good deal. ' That man was unconquerable. 

In shipping returns and the like we are given averages; why are we toldnothing at all of the milder experiences of our soldier prisoners? Itwould not make us less resolved to do all that we can to better the lotof those who are suffering insult and torture, and to exact fullretribution from the enemy. And it would bring some hope to those whosehusbands or children or friends are in German military prisons, and whoare racked every day by tales of what, in fact, are exceptionalatrocities. 

Or take the question of the conduct of German officers. We know that thePrussian military Government, in its approved handbooks, teaches itsofficers the use of brutality and terror as military weapons. The Germanphilosophy of war, of which this is a part, is not really a philosophyof war; it is a philosophy of victory. For a long time now the Germanshave been accustomed to victory, and have studied the arts of breakingthe spirit and torturing the mind of the peoples whom they invade. Theirphilosophy of war will have to be rewritten when the time comes for themto accommodate their doctrine to their own defeat. In the meantime theyteach frightfulness to their officers, and most of their officers proveready pupils. There must be some, one would think, here and there, ifonly a sprinkling, who fall short of the Prussian doctrine, and arebetrayed by human feeling into what we should recognize as decent andhonourable conduct. And so there are; only we do not hear of themthrough the press. I should like to tell two stories which come to mefrom personal sources. The first may be called the story of theChristmas truce and the German captain. In the lull which fell on thefighting at the time of the first Christmas of the War, a Britishofficer was disquieted to notice that his men were fraternizing with theGermans, who were standing about with them in No-man's land, laughingand talking. He went out to them at once, to bring them back to theirown trenches. When he came up to his men, he met a German captain whohad arrived on the same errand. The two officers, British and German, fell into talk, and while they were standing together, in not unfriendlyfashion, one of the men took a snapshot photograph of them, copies ofwhich were afterwards circulated in the trenches. Then the men wererecalled to their duty, on the one side and the other, and, after aninterval of some days, the war began again. A little time after this theBritish officer was in charge of a patrol, and, having lost his way, found himself in the German trenches, where he and his men weresurrounded and captured. As they were being marched off along thetrenches, they met the German captain, who ordered the men to be takento the rear, and then, addressing the officer without any sign ofrecognition, said in a loud voice, 'You, follow me!' He led him bycomplicated ways along a whole series of trenches and up a sap, at theend of which he stopped, saluted, and, pointing with his hand, said'Your trenches are there. Good day. '

My second story, the story of the British lieutenant in No-man's land, is briefer. I was with a friend of mine, a young officer back from thefront, wounded, and the conduct of German officers was being discussed. He said, 'You can't expect me to be very hard on German officers, forone of them saved my life'. He then told how he and a companion creptout into No-man's land to bring in some of our wounded who were lyingthere. When they had reached the wounded, and were preparing to bringthem in, they were discovered by the Germans opposite, who at oncewhipped up a machine-gun and turned it on them. Their lives were notworth half a minute's purchase, when suddenly a German officer leapt upon to the parapet, and, angrily waving back the machine-gunners, calledout, in English, 'That's all right. You may take them in. '

These are no doubt exceptional cases; the rule is very different. But agood many of such cases are known to soldiers, and I have seen none ofthem in the press. Soldiers are silent by law, and journalists either donot hear these things, or, believing that hate is a valuable asset, suppress all mention of them. If England could ever be disgraced by amishap, she would be disgraced by having given birth to thoseEnglishmen, few and wretched, who, when an enemy behaves generously, conceal or deny the fact. And consider the effect of this silence on theGermans. There are some German officers, as I said, who are better thanthe German military handbooks, and better than their monstrous chiefs. Which of them will pay the smallest attention to what our papers saywhen he finds that they collect only atrocities, and are blind tohumanity if they see it in an enemy? He will regard our press accountsof the German army as the work of malicious cripples; and our perfectlytrue narrative of the unspeakable brutality and filthiness of the Germanarmy's doings will lose credit with him. 

If I had my way, I would staff the newspaper offices, as far aspossible, with wounded soldiers, and I would give some of the presentstaff a holiday as stretcher-bearers. Then we should hear more of thetruth. 

Is it feared that we should have no heart for the War if once we areconvinced that among the Germans there are some human beings? Is itbelieved that our people can be heroic on one condition only, that theyshall be asked to fight no one but orangoutangs? Our airmen fight aswell as any one, in this world or above it, has ever fought; and we owethem a great debt of thanks for maintaining, and, by their example, actually teaching the Germans to maintain, a high standard of decency. 

This War has shown, what we might have gathered from our history, thatwe fight best up hill. From our history also we may learn that it doesnot relax our sinews to be told that our enemy has some good qualities. We should like him better as an enemy if he had more. We know what wehave believed; and we are not going to fail in resolve or perseverancebecause we find that our task is difficult, and that we have not amonopoly of all the virtues. 

Most of us will not live to see it, for our recovery from this diseasewill be long and troublesome, but the War will do great things for us. It will make a reality of the British Commonwealth, which until now hasbeen only an aspiration and a dream. It will lay the sure foundation ofa League of Nations in the affection and understanding which it haspromoted among all English-speaking peoples, and in the relations ofmutual respect and mutual service which it has established between theEnglish-speaking peoples and the Latin races. Our united Rolls of Honourmake the most magnificent list of benefactors that the world has everseen. In the end, the War may perhaps even save the soul of the maincriminal, awaken him from his bloody dream, and lead him back by degreesto the possibility of innocence and goodwill. 

SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND

_Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, delivered July 4, 1918_

There is nothing new and important to be said of Shakespeare. In recentyears antiquaries have made some additions to our knowledge of the factsof his life. These additions are all tantalizing and comparativelyinsignificant. The history of the publication of his works has alsobecome clearer and more intelligible, especially by the labours of Mr. Pollard; but the whole question of quartos and folios remains thorny anddifficult, so that no one can reach any definite conclusion in thismatter without a liberal use of conjecture. 

I propose to return to the old catholic doctrine which has beenilluminated by so many disciples of Shakespeare, and to speak of him asour great national poet. He embodies and exemplifies all the virtues, and most of the faults, of England. Any one who reads and understandshim understands England. This method of studying Shakespeare by readinghim has perhaps gone somewhat out of vogue in favour of more roundaboutways of approach, but it is the best method for all that. Shakespearetells us more about himself and his mind than we could learn even fromthose who knew him in his habit as he lived, if they were all alive andall talking. To learn what he tells we have only to listen. 

I think there is no national poet, of any great nation whatsoever, whois so completely representative of his own people as Shakespeare isrepresentative of the English. There is certainly no other English poetwho comes near to Shakespeare in embodying our character and ourfoibles. No one, in this connexion, would venture even to mentionSpenser or Milton. Chaucer is English, but he lived at a time whenEngland was not yet completely English, so that he is onlyhalf-conscious of his nation. Wordsworth is English, but he was arecluse. Browning is English, but he lived apart or abroad, and was atourist of genius. The most English of all our great men of letters, next to Shakespeare, is certainly Dr. Johnson, but he was no great poet. Shakespeare, it may be suspected, is too poetic to be a perfectEnglishman; but his works refute that suspicion. He is the Englishmanendowed, by a fortunate chance, with matchless powers of expression. Heis not silent or dull; but he understands silent men, and he enters intothe minds of dull men. Moreover, the Englishman seems duller than he is. It is a point of pride with him not to be witty and not to give voice tohis feelings. The shepherd Corin, who was never in court, has the truephilosophy. 'He that hath learned no wit by nature nor art may complainof good breeding or comes of a very dull kindred. '

Shakespeare knew nothing of the British Empire. He was an islander, andhis patriotism was centred on

 This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands. 

When he speaks of Britons and British he always means the Celticpeoples of the island. Once only he makes a slip. There is a passage in_King Lear_ (IV. Vi. 249) where the followers of the King, who in thetext of the quarto versions are correctly called 'the British party', appear in the folio version as 'the English party'. Perhaps the quartoscontain Shakespeare's own correction of his own inadvertence; but thoseof us, and we are many, who have been blamed by northern patriots forthe misuse of the word English may claim Shakespeare as a brother inmisfortune. 

Our critics, at home and abroad, accuse us of arrogance. I doubt if wecan prove them wrong; but they do not always understand the nature ofEnglish arrogance. It does not commonly take the form of self-assertion. Shakespeare's casual allusions to our national characteristics arealmost all of a kind; they are humorous and depreciatory. Here are someof them. Every holiday fool in England, we learn from Trinculo in _TheTempest_, would give a piece of silver to see a strange fish, though noone will give a doit to relieve a lame beggar. The English arequarrelsome, Master Slender testifies, at the game of bear-baiting. Theyare great drinkers, says Iago, 'most potent in potting; your Dane, yourGerman, and your swag-bellied Hollander are nothing to your English'. They are epicures, says Macbeth. They will eat like wolves and fightlike devils, says the Constable of France. An English nobleman, according to the Lady of Belmont, can speak no language but his own. AnEnglish tailor, according to the porter of Macbeth's castle, will stealcloth where there is hardly any cloth to be stolen, out of a Frenchhose. The devil, says the clown in _All's Well_, has an English name; heis called the Black Prince. 

Nothing has been changed in this vein of humorous banter sinceShakespeare died. One of the best pieces of Shakespeare criticism everwritten is contained in four words of the present Poet Laureate's Odefor the Tercentenary of Shakespeare, 'London's laughter is thine'. Thewit of our trenches in this war, especially perhaps among the Cockneyand South country regiments, is pure Shakespeare. Falstaff would findhimself at home there, and would recognize a brother in Old Bill. 

The best known of Shakespeare's allusions to England are no doubt thosesplendid outbursts of patriotism which occur in _King John_, and_Richard II, _ and _Henry V_. And of these the dying speech of John ofGaunt, in _Richard II_, is the deepest in feeling. It is a lament uponthe decay of England, 'this dear, dear land'. Since we began to be anation we have always lamented our decay. I am afraid that the Germans, whose self-esteem takes another form, were deceived by this. To theright English temper all bragging is a thing of evil omen. That temperis well expressed, where perhaps you would least expect to find it, inthe speech of King Henry V to the French herald:

 To say the sooth, -- Though 'tis no wisdom to confess so much Unto an enemy of craft and vantage, -- My people are with sickness much enfeebled, My numbers lessened, and those few I have Almost no better than so many French; Who, when they were in health, I tell thee, herald, I thought upon one pair of English legs Did march three Frenchmen. Yet, forgive me, God, That I do brag thus! This your air of France Hath blown that vice in me; I must repent. Go therefore, tell thy master here I am: My ransom is this frail and worthless trunk; My army but a weak and sickly guard; Yet, God before, tell him we will come on, Though France himself and such another neighbour Stand in our way. There's for thy labour, Montjoy. Go bid thy master well advise himself: If we may pass, we will; if we be hindered, We shall your tawny ground with your red blood Discolour; and so, Montjoy, fare you well. The sum of all our answer is but this: We would not seek a battle as we are; Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it; So tell your master. 

That speech might have been written for the war which we are wagingto-day against a less honourable enemy. But, indeed, Shakespeare is fullof prophecy. Here is his description of the volunteers who flocked tothe colours in the early days of the war:

 Rash inconsiderate fiery voluntaries, With ladies' faces and fierce dragons' spleens, Have sold their fortunes at their native homes, Bearing their birthrights proudly on their backs, To make a hazard of new fortunes here. In brief, a braver choice of dauntless spirits Than now the English bottoms have waft o'er Did never float upon the swelling tide. 

And here is his sermon on national unity, preached by the Bishop ofCarlisle:

 O, if you rear this house against this house, It will the woefullest division prove That ever fell upon this cursed earth. Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so, Lest child, child's children, cry against you 'Woe!'

The patriotism of the women is described by the Bastard in _King John_:

 Your own ladies and pale-visag'd maids Like Amazons come tripping after drums: Their thimbles into armed gauntlets change, Their needles to lances, and their gentle hearts To fierce and bloody inclination. 

Lastly, Queen Isabella's blessing, spoken over King Henry V and hisFrench bride, predicts an enduring friendship between England andFrance:

 As man and wife, being two, are one in love, So be there 'twixt your kingdoms such a spousal, That never may ill office, or fell jealousy, Which troubles oft the bed of blessed marriage, Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms, To make divorce of their incorporate league; That English may as French, French Englishmen, Receive each other! God speak this Amen!

One of the delights of a literature as rich and as old as ours is thatat every step we take backwards we find ourselves again. We aredelivered from that foolish vein of thought, so dear to ignorantconceit, which degrades the past in order to exalt the present and thefuture. It is easy to feel ourselves superior to men who no longerbreathe and walk, and whom we do not trouble to understand. Here is thereal benefit of scholarship; it reduces men to kinship with their race. Science, pressing forward, and beating against the bars which guard thesecrets of the future, has no such sympathy in its gift. 

Anyhow, in Shakespeare's time, England was already old England; which ifshe could ever cease to be, she might be Jerusalem, or Paradise, butwould not be England at all. What Shakespeare and his fellows of thesixteenth century gave her was a new self-consciousness and a newself-confidence. They foraged in the past; they recognized themselves intheir ancestors; they found feudal England, which had existed for manyhundreds of years, a dumb thing; and when she did not know her ownmeaning, they endowed her purposes with words. They gave her a newdelight in herself, a new sense of power and exhilaration, which hasremained with her to this day, surviving all the airy philosophictheories of humanity which thought to supersede the old solid nationaltemper. The English national temper is better fitted for traffic withthe world than any mere doctrine can ever be, for it is marked by animmense tolerance. And this, too, Shakespeare has expressed. Falstaff isperhaps the most tolerant man who was ever made in God's image. But itis rather late in the day to introduce Falstaff to an English audience. Perhaps you will let me modernize a brief scene from Shakespeare, altering nothing essential, to illustrate how completely his spirit isthe spirit of our troops in Flanders and France. 

A small British expeditionary force, bound on an international mission, finds itself stranded in an unknown country. The force is composed ofmen very various in rank and profession. Two of them, whom we may calla non-commissioned officer and a private, go exploring by themselves, and take one of the natives of the place prisoner. This native is anugly low-born creature, of great physical strength and violent criminaltendencies, a liar, and ready at any time for theft, rape, and murder. He is a child of Nature, a lover of music, slavish in his devotion topower and rank, and very easily imposed upon by authority. His captorsdo not fear him, and, which is more, they do not dislike him. They foundhim lying out in a kind of no-man's land, drenched to the skin, so theydetermine to keep him as a souvenir, and to take him home with them. They nickname him, in friendly fashion, the monster, and the mooncalf, as who should say Fritz, or the Boche. But their first care is to givehim a drink, and to make him swear allegiance upon the bottle. 'Wherethe devil should he learn our language?' says the non-commissionedofficer, when the monster speaks. 'I will give him some relief, if it bebut for that. ' The prisoner then offers to kiss the foot of his captor. 'I shall laugh myself to death', says the private, 'at this puppy-headedmonster. A most scurvy monster! I could find in my heart to beat him, but that the poor monster's in drink. ' When the private continues torail at the monster, his officer calls him to order. 'Trinculo, keep agood tongue in your head: if you prove a mutineer, the next tree------The poor monster's my subject, and he shall not suffer indignity. '

In this scene from _The Tempest_, everything is English except thenames. The incident has been repeated many times in the last four years. 'This is Bill, ' one private said, introducing a German soldier to hiscompany. 'He's my prisoner. I wounded him, and I took him, and where Igo he goes. Come on, Bill, old man. ' The Germans have known manyfailures since they began the War, but one failure is more tragic thanall the rest. They love to be impressive, to produce a panic ofapprehension and a thrill of reverence in their enemy; and they havecompletely failed to impress the ordinary British private. He remainsincurably humorous, and so little moved to passion that his dailyoffices of kindness are hardly interrupted. 

Shakespeare's tolerance, which is no greater than the tolerance of thecommon English soldier, may be well seen in his treatment of hisvillains. Is a liar, or a thief, merely a bad man? Shakespeare does notmuch encourage you to think so. Is a murderer a bad man? He would be anundiscerning critic who should accept that phrase as a true and adequatedescription of Macbeth. Shakespeare does not dislike liars, thieves, andmurderers as such, and he does not pretend to dislike them. He has hisown dislikes. I once asked a friend of mine, long since dead, whorefused to condemn almost anything, whether there were any vices that hecould not find it in his heart to tolerate. He replied at once thatthere were two--cruelty, and bilking; which, if the word is notacademic, I may paraphrase as cheating the helpless, swindling a childout of its pennies, or leaving a house by the back door in order toavoid paying your cabman his lawful fare. These exclusions from mercyShakespeare would accept; and I think he would add a third. His worstvillains are all theorists, who cheat and murder by the book ofarithmetic. They are men of principle, and are ready to expound theirprinciple and to defend it in argument. They follow it, without remorseor mitigation, wherever it leads them. It is Iago's logic that makes himso terrible; his mind is as cold as a snake and as hard as a surgeon'sknife. The Italian Renaissance did produce some such men; the modernGerman imitation is a grosser and feebler thing, brutality trying toemulate the glitter and flourish of refined cruelty. 

With his wonderful quickness of intuition and his unsurpassed subtletyof expression Shakespeare drew the characters of the Englishmen that hesaw around him. Why is it that he has given us no full-length portrait, carefully drawn, of a hypocrite? It can hardly have been for lack ofmodels. Outside England, not only among our enemies, but among ourfriends and allies, it is agreed that hypocrisy is our national vice, our ruling passion. There must be some meaning in so widely held anopinion; and, on our side, there are damaging admissions by manywitnesses. The portrait gallery of Charles Dickens is crowded withhypocrites. Some of them are greasy and servile, like Mr. Pumblechook orUriah Heep; others rise to poetic heights of daring, like Mr. Chadbandor Mr. Squeers. But Shakespeare's hypocrites enjoy themselves too much;they are artists to the finger-tips. It may be said, no doubt, thatShakespeare lived before organized religious dissent had developed a newtype of character among the weaker brethren. But the Low ChurchProtestant, whom Shakespeare certainly knew, is not very different fromthe evangelical dissenter of later days; and he did not interestShakespeare. 

My own impression is that Shakespeare had a free and happy childhood, and grew up without much check from his elders. It is the child who seeshypocrites. These preposterous grown-up people, who, if they arewell-mannered, do not seem to enjoy their food, who are fussy aboutmeaningless employments, and never give way to natural impulses, mustsurely assume this veil of decorum with intent to deceive. CharlesDickens was hard driven in his childhood, and the impressions that werethen burnt into him governed all his seeing. The creative spirit in himtransformed his sufferings into delight; but he never outgrew them; and, when he died, the eyes of a child were closed upon a scene touched, itis true, here and there with rapturous pleasure, rich in oddity, andtrembling with pathos, but, in the main, as bleak and unsatisfying asthe wards of a workhouse. The intense emotions of his childhood made theusual fervours of adolescence a faint thing in the comparison, and ifyou want to know how lovers think and feel you do not go to Dickens totell you. You go to Shakespeare, who put his childhood behind him, sothat he almost forgot it, and ran forward to seize life with both hands. He sometimes looked back on children, and saw them through the eyes oftheir elders. Dickens saw men and women as they appear to children. 

This comparison suggests a certain lack of sympathy or lack ofunderstanding in those who are quick to see hypocrisy in others. InDickens lack of sympathy was a fair revenge; moreover, his hypocritesamused him so much that he did not wish to understand them. What a lossit would have been to the world if he had explained them away! But it isdifficult, I think, to see a hypocrite in a man whose intimacy you havecultivated, whose mind you have entered into, as Shakespeare enteredinto the mind of his creatures. Hypocrisy, in its ordinary forms, is asuperficial thing--a skin disease, not a cancer. It is not easy, atbest, to bring the outward and inward relations of the soul into perfectharmony; a hypocrite is one who too readily consents to theirseparation. The English, for I am ready now to return to my point, are apeople of a divided mind, slow to drive anything through on principle, very ready to find reason in compromise. They are passionate, and theyare idealists, but they are also a practical people, and they dare notgive the rein to a passion or an idea. They know that in this world anunmitigated principle simply will not work; that a clean cut will nevertake you through the maze. So they restrain themselves, and listen, andseem patient. They are not so patient as they seem; they must behypocrites! A cruder, simpler people like the Germans feel indignation, not unmixed perhaps with envy, when they hear the quiet voice and seethe white lips of the thoroughbred Englishman who is angry. It is notmanly or honest, they think, to be angry without getting red in theface. They certainly feel pride in their own honesty when they giveexplosive vent to their emotions. They have not learned the elements ofself-distrust. The Englishman is seldom quite content to be himself;often his thoughts are troubled by something better. He suffers from thedivided mind; and earns the reputation of a hypocrite. But the simplernature that indulges itself and believes in itself has an even heavierpenalty to pay. If, in the name of honesty, you cease to distinguishbetween what you are and what you would wish to be, between how you actand how you would like to act, you are in some danger of reeling backinto the beast. It is true that man is an animal; and before long youfeel a glow of conscious virtue in proclaiming and illustrating thattruth. You scorn the hypocrisy of pretending to be better than you are, and that very scorn fixes you in what you are. 'He that is unjust, lethim be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still. 'That is the epitaph on German honesty. I have drifted away fromShakespeare, who knew nothing of the sea of troubles that England wouldone day take arms against, and who could not know that on that day shewould outgo his most splendid praise and more than vindicate hisreverence and his affection. But Shakespeare is still so live a mindthat it is vain to try to expound him by selected texts, or to pin himto a mosaic of quotations from his book. Often, if you seek to know whathe thought on questions which must have exercised his imagination, youcan gather it only from a hint dropped by accident, and quiteirrelevant. What were his views on literature, and on the literarycontroversies which have been agitated from his day to our own? He tellsus very little. He must have heard discussions and arguments on metre, on classical precedent, on the ancient and modern drama; but he makes nomention of these questions. He does not seem to have attached anyprophetic importance to poetry. The poets who exalt their craft are of amore slender build. Is it conceivable that he would have given hissupport to a literary academy, --a project which began to find advocatesduring his lifetime? I think not. It is true that he is full of goodsense, and that an academy exists to promulgate good sense. Moreover hisown free experiments brought him nearer and nearer into conformity withclassical models. _Othello_ and _Macbeth_ are better constructed playsthan _Hamlet_. The only one of his plays which, whether by chance or bydesign, observes the so-called unities, of action and time and place, isone of his latest plays--_The Tempest_. But he was an Englishman, andwould have been jealous of his freedom and independence. When thegrave-digger remarks that it is no great matter if Hamlet do not recoverhis wits in England, because there the men are as mad as he, the satirehas a sympathetic ring in it. Shakespeare did not wish to see the madEnglish altered. Nor are they likely to alter; our fears and our hopesare vain. We entered on the greatest of our wars with an army no bigger, so we are told, than the Bulgarian army. Since that time we haveregimented and organized our people, not without success; and oursoothsayers are now directing our attention to the danger that after thewar we shall be kept in uniform and shall become tame creatures, losingour independence and our spirit of enterprise. There is nothing thatsoothsayers will not predict when they are gravelled for lack of matter, but this is the stupidest of all their efforts. The national characteris not so flimsy a thing; it has gone through good and evil fortune forhundreds of years without turning a hair. You can make a soldier, and agood soldier, of a humorist; but you cannot militarize him. He remains afree thinker. 

New institutions do not flourish in England. The town is a comparativelymodern innovation; it has never, so to say, caught on. Most schemes oftown-planning are schemes for pretending that you live in the country. This is one of the most persistent of our many hypocrisies. Whereverworking people inhabit a street of continuous red-brick cottages, thenames that they give to their homes are one long catalogue of romanticlies. The houses have no gardens, and the only prospect that theycommand is the view of over the way. But read their names--The Dingle, The Elms, Pine Grove, Windermere, The Nook, The Nest. Even socialpretence, which is said to be one of our weaknesses, and which may beread in such names as Belvoir or Apsley House, is less in evidence thanthe Englishman's passion for the country. He cannot bear to think thathe lives in a town. He does not much respect the institutions of a town. A policeman, before he has been long in the force, has to face the factthat he is generally regarded as a comic character. The police areEnglishmen and good fellows, and they accept a situation which wouldrouse any continental gendarme to heroic indignation. Mayors, Aldermen, and Justices of the Peace are comic, and take it not quite so well. Beadles were so wholly dedicated to the purposes of comedy that Isuppose they found their position unendurable and went to earth; at anyrate it is very difficult to catch one in his official costume. 

All this is reflected in Shakespeare. He knew the country, and he knewthe town; and he has not left it in doubt which was the cherished homeof his imagination. He preferred the fields to the streets, but theArcadia of his choice is not agricultural or even pastoral; it is rathera desert island, or the uninhabited stretches of wild and woodlandcountry. Indeed, he has both described it and named it. 'Where will theold Duke live?' says Oliver in _As You Like It_. 'They say he is alreadyin the forest of Arden, ' says Charles the wrestler, 'and a many merrymen with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the timecarelessly, as they did in the golden world. ' That is Shakespeare'sArcadia; and who that has read _As You Like It_ will deny that itbreathes the air of Paradise?

It is quite plain that the freedom that Shakespeare valued was in factfreedom, not any of those ingenious mechanisms to which that name hasbeen applied by political theorists. He thought long and profoundly onthe problems of society; and anarchy has no place among his politicalideals. It is by all means to be avoided--at a cost. But what harm wouldanarchy do if it meant no more than freedom for all the impulses of theenlightened imagination and the tender heart? The ideals of his heartwere not political; and when he indulges himself, as he did in hislatest plays, you must look for him in the wilds; whether on the roadnear the shepherd's cottage, or in the cave among the mountains ofWales, or on the seashore in the Bermudas. The laws that are imposedupon the intricate relations of men in society were a weariness to him;and in this he is thoroughly English. The Englishman has always been anobjector, and he has a right to object, though it may very well be heldthat he is too fond of larding his objection with the plea ofconscience. But even this has a meaning in our annals; as a merequestion of right we are very slow to prefer the claim of the organizedopinions of society to the claim of the individual conscience. We knowthat there is no good in a man who is doing what he does not will to do. We are not like our poets or our men of action to be void ofinspiration. A gift is nothing if there is no benevolence in the giver:

 For to the noble mind Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. 

We ask for the impulse as well as the deed. Even when he is speaking ofsocial obligations Shakespeare makes his strongest appeal not to forceor command, but to the natural piety of the heart:

 If ever you have looked on better days, If ever been where bells have knolled to church, If ever sat at any good man's feast, If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear, And know what 'tis to pity and be pitied, Let gentleness my strong enforcement be: In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword. 

So speaks Orlando when the Duke has met his threats with fair words;and he adds an apology:

 Pardon me, I pray you; I thought that all things had been savage here, And therefore put I on the countenance Of stern commandment. 

The ultimate law between man and man, according to Shakespeare, is thelaw of pity. I suppose that most of us have had our ears so dulled byearly familiarity with Portia's famous speech, which we probably knew byheart long before we were fit to understand it, that the heavenlyquality of it, equal to almost anything in the New Testament, isobscured and lost. There is no remedy but to read it again; to rememberthat it was conceived in passion; and to notice how the meaning israised and perfected as line follows line:

 _Portia_. Then must the Jew be merciful. 

 _Shylock_. On what compulsion must I? Tell me that. 

 _Portia_. The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath; it is twice bless'd; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: 'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown. His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway, It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself, And earthly power doth then show likest God's When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy. 

That speech rises above the strife of nations; it belongs to humanity. But an Englishman wrote it; and the author, we may be sure, if he evermet with the doctrine that a man who is called on to help his own peopleis in duty bound to set aside the claims of humanity, and to stop hisears to the call of mercy, knew that the doctrine is an invention of thedevil, stupid and angry, as the devil commonly is. There are hundreds ofthousands of Englishmen who, though they could not have written thespeech, yet know all that it teaches, and act on the knowledge. It ispart of the creed of the Navy. We can speak more confidently than wecould have spoken three or four years ago. We know that not theextremest pressure of circumstance could ever bring the people ofEngland to forget all the natural pieties, to permit official duties toannul private charities, and to join in the frenzied dance of hate andlust which leads to the mouth of the pit. 

Yet Germany, where all this seems to have happened, was not very longago a country where it was easy to find humanity, and simplicity, andkindness. It was a country of quiet industry and content, the home offairy stories, which Shakespeare himself would have loved. The Germansof our day have made a religion of war and terror, and have usedcommerce as a means for the treacherous destruction of the independenceand freedom of others. They were not always like that. In the fifteenthcentury they spread the art of printing through Europe, for the serviceof man, by the method of peaceful penetration. My friend Mr. JohnSampson recently expressed to me a hope that our air-forces would notbomb Mainz, 'for Mainz', he said, 'is a sacred place to thebibliographer'. According to a statement published in Cologne in 1499, 'the highly valuable art of printing was invented first of all inGermany at Mainz on the Rhine. And it is a great honour to the Germannation that such ingenious men are to be found among them. .. . And in theyear of our Lord 1450 it was a golden year, and they began to print, andthe first book they printed was the Bible in Latin: it was printed in alarge character, resembling the types with which the present mass-booksare printed. ' Gutenberg, the printer of this Bible, never mentions hisown name, and the only personal note we have of his, in the colophon ofthe _Catholicon_, printed in 1460, is a hymn in praise of his city:'With the aid of the Most High, who unlooses the tongues of infants andoft-times reveals to babes that which is hidden from learned men, thisadmirable book, the _Catholicon_, was finished in the year of theincarnation of our Saviour MCCCCLX, in the foster town of Mainz, a townof the famous German nation, which God in his clemency, by granting toit this high illumination of the mind, has preferred before the othernations of the world. '

There is something not quite unlike modern Germany in that; and yetthese older activities of the Germans make a strange contrast with theirwork to-day. It was in the city of Cologne that Caxton first madeacquaintance with his craft. Everywhere the Germans spread printing likea new religion, adapting it to existing conditions. In Bavaria they usedthe skill of the wood-engravers, and at Augsburg, Ulm, and Nurembergproduced the first illustrated printed books. It was two Germans of theold school, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who carried the art toItaly, casting the first type in Roman characters, and printing editionsof the classics, first in the Benedictine monastery of St. Scholasticaat Subiaco, and later at Rome. They also cast the first Greek type. Itwas three Germans, Gering, Kranz, and Freyburger, who first printed atParis, in 1470. It was a German who set up the first printing-press inSpain, in 1474. The Germans were once the cherishers, as now they arethe destroyers, of the inheritance of civilization. I do not pretend toexplain the change. Perhaps it is a tragedy of education. That is adangerous moment in the life of a child when he begins to be uneasilyaware that he is valued for his simplicity and innocence. Then heresolves to break with the past, to put away childish things, to forgoaffection, and to earn respect by imitating the activities of hiselders. The strange power of words and the virtues of abstract thoughtbegin to fascinate him. He loses touch with the things of sense, andceases to speak as a child. If his first attempts at argument and dogmawin him praise and esteem, if he proves himself a better fighter than anolder boy next door, who has often bullied him, and if at the same timehe comes into money, he is on the road to ruin. His very simplicity is asnare to him. 'What a fool I was', he thinks, 'to let myself be putupon; I now see that I am a great philosopher and a splendid soldier, born to subdue others rather than to agree with them, and entitled to achief share in all the luxuries of the world. It is for me to say whatis good and true, and if any of these people contradict me I shall knockthem down. ' He suits his behaviour to his new conception of himself, andis soon hated by all the neighbours. Then he turns bitter. These people, he thinks, are all in a plot against him. They must be blind to goodnessand beauty, or why do they dislike him! His rage reaches the point ofmadness; he stabs and poisons the villagers, and burns down theirhouses. We are still waiting to see what will become of him. 

This outbreak has been long preparing. Seventy years before the War theGerman poet Freiligrath wrote a poem to prove that Germany is Hamlet, urged by the spirit of her fathers to claim her inheritance, vacillatingand lost in thought, but destined, before the Fifth Act ends, to strewthe stage with the corpses of her enemies. Only a German could have hiton the idea that Germany is Hamlet. The English, for whom the play waswritten, know that Hamlet is Hamlet, and that Shakespeare was thinkingof a young man, not of the pomposities of national ambition. But ifthese clumsy allegories must be imposed upon great poets, Germany neednot go abroad to seek the likeness of her destiny. Germany is Faust; shedesired science and power and pleasure, and to get them on a short leaseshe paid the price of her soul. 

For the present, at any rate, the best thing the Germans can do withShakespeare is to leave him alone. They have divorced themselves fromtheir own great poets, to follow vulgar half-witted political prophets. As for Shakespeare, they have studied him assiduously, with the completeapparatus of criticism, for a hundred years, and they do not understandthe plainest words of all his teaching. 

In England he has always been understood; and it is only fair, to himand to ourselves, to add that he has never been regarded first andforemost as a national poet. His humanity is too calm and broad tosuffer the prejudices and exclusions of international enmities. Thesovereignty that he holds has been allowed to him by men of all parties. The schools of literature have, from the very first, united in hispraise. Ben Jonson, who knew him and loved him, was a classical scholar, and disapproved of some of his romantic escapades, yet no one will everoutgo Ben Jonson's praise of Shakespeare. 

 Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show, To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not-of an ago, but for all time!

The sects of religion forget their disputes and recognize the spirit ofreligion in this profane author. He cannot be identified with anyinstitution. According to the old saying, he gave up the Church and tookto religion. Ho gave up the State, and took to humanity. The formulariesand breviaries to which political and religious philosophers professtheir allegiance were nothing to him. These formularies are a convenientshorthand, to save the trouble of thinking. But Shakespeare alwaysthought. Every question that he treats is brought out of the realm ofabstraction, and exhibited in its relation to daily life and the mindsand hearts of men. He could never have been satisfied with such a smugphrase as 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. His mindwould have been eager for details. In what do the greatest number findtheir happiness? How far is the happiness of one consistent with thehappiness of another? What difficulties and miscarriages attend thebusiness of transmuting the recognized materials for happiness intoliving human joy? Even these questions he would not have been content tohandle in high philosophic fashion; he would have insisted on instances, and would have subscribed to no code that is not carefully built out ofcase-law. He knew that sanity is in the life of the senses; and that ifthere are some philosophers who are not mad it is because they live adouble life, and have consolations and resources of which their bookstell you nothing. It is the part of their life which they do not thinkit worth their while to mention that would have interested Shakespeare. He loves to reduce things to their elements. 'Is man no more than this?'says the old king on the heath, as he gazes on the naked madman. 'Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, thesheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here's three of us aresophisticated! Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no morebut such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, youlendings!' That is how Shakespeare lays the mind of man bare, and stripshim of his pretences, to try if he be indeed noble. And he finds thatman, naked and weak, hunted by misfortune, liable to all the sins andall the evils that follow frailty, still has faith left to him, andcharity. King Lear is still every inch a king. 

That is not a little discovery, for when his mind came to grips withhuman life Shakespeare did not deal in rhetoric; so that the good hefinds is real good--''tis in grain; 'twill endure wind and weather'. Nothing is easier than to make a party of humanity, and to exalt mankindby ignorantly vilifying the rest of the animal creation, which is fullof strange virtues and abilities. Shakespeare refused that way; he sawman weak and wretched, not able to maintain himself except as apensioner on the bounty of the world, curiously ignorant of his natureand his destiny, yet endowed with certain gifts in which he can findsustenance and rest, brave by instinct, so that courage is not so muchhis virtue as cowardice is his lamentable and exceptional fault, readyto forget his pains or to turn them into pleasures by the alchemy of hismind, quick to believe, and slow to suspect or distrust, generous andtender to others, in so far as his thought and imagination, which arethe weakest things about him, enable him to bridge the spaces thatseparate man from man, willing to make of life a great thing while hehas it, and a little thing when he comes to lose it. These are some ofhis gifts; and Shakespeare would not have denied the saying of a thinkerwith whom he has no very strong or natural affinity, that 'the greatestof these is charity'.