Part 12

Let us consider first the justice of this. Think what we thrust upon the youth of eighteen in our communities. We voters, a good third of us above military age, will treat him as citizen enough to undergo the utmost fatigues and horrors of war, and to be maimed and to die for us, and the girl of fourteen (is it?) may marry, and the girl of sixteen may commit herself to dishonour, and either man or girl may toil in factory or foundry. All that we put upon them. We force them by need and circumstance to forgo the better part of their education, to subdue all the wide and wonderful imaginations of these opening years, and we oblige them to contribute to the wealth of the State in unattractive work. But they may have no voice in matters in general until they are thoroughly broken in. I can see a sort of expediency in disenfranchising unsuccessful people after forty or so, they are dull and cowed by that time and will bring little to the polls but their fears and inferiorities. But why gag the young for three of their most vivid years?

And next there is to be considered the benefit to the individual citizen of stepping straight from learning to responsibility. He will be brought into conscious and effective relationship with political and industrial institutions at the same time; he will face them as two aspects of one thing just when the spirit of inquiry is strongest in him. And such of the younger women who are waking up to what Sir Martin Conway calls the “glory of life” will realise that childbearing is a thing of issues wider than the fireside; they will be called upon to think of war and education and the whole future in the very time when the continuity of life is brought most effectively before their minds. What sort of a world, what sort of political process can Sir Martin be thinking about when he suggests that a vision of the glory of life ought to disqualify a voter?

And finally let us consider the benefit to the country and the world at large of a more youthful electorate. To bring in voters in their nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first years will be to bring in three million and more fresh minds, all unsettled as yet, all facing the world adventurously. They will be a wholesome counterweight to the grudging rate-payer, the small shopkeeper, the _rentier_, the anxious and hopeless and fearful multitude of the unsuccessful and defensive middle-aged, the great supporters of “Anti-Waste” campaigns, “safety” armaments, policies of “security,” and all sorts of patriotic cowardice. These elder folk think of the next quarter day or the next year; it is all that interests them; they will be dead soon and they want to shuffle along as comfortably and with as little troublesome novelty as possible until then. The interests of the youth of eighteen reach forward half a century and they may work with a reasonable hope of a better world for themselves as well as their children. They may have the more wisdom for the very reason that they have acquired less worldly discretion. And for all of us who believe that education is already touched by a new spirit and that it is surely being made better, the younger the age of enfranchisement the greater our hopes of an early effect of the new education upon the affairs of mankind.

“Universal education up to eighteen, universal enfranchisement at eighteen”; along that line lies our path to a real civilisation. Along that path we shall go as the breath of a new generation blows into Congress and Parliament and these assemblies cease to be the gatherings of political botchers and tinkers representing the broken spirit and curtailed desires of a forty-year-old electorate. For round about forty must be the average age of the present-day British elector.

XXX

OLIVE BRANCHES OF STEEL: SHOULD THE ANGELS OF PEACE CARRY BOMBS?

5.4.24

_The will for peace is futile without the courage to disarm._ I would like to have that proposition printed in large letters and put up at all the meetings of the British League of Nations Union, just to see what the worthy practitioners in easy optimism who fill these gatherings would make of it. I doubt if half the kindly idealists who support the League of Nations in Britain and America are prepared for any effectual disarmament of their own countries. For others--yes; but not for their own dear land.

Since the refusal of France even to discuss land disarmament or the question of submarines at Washington I have kept up a pretty steady fire of disagreeable allusions to France. I have sung and sung again, with variations and amplifications, my little refrain about Senegalese and Submarines in--quite a number of journals. But France has her excuses, the next election may release her from the Bloc National and the Armament firms to the free exercise of international virtue, and after all virtue should begin at home. Are not both the United States and the British Empire, considered in the rôle of peace-seeking States, overarmed? The general will of all the English-speaking communities is, we all know and say and repeat, for an enduring world peace. But even a savage understands that he must drop and leave his weapons and hold up innocent hands before he can get to honest peace talk.

Consider a crude form of the issue. Suppose the United States and the British Empire got together and disarmed completely, suppose they retained the merest police force and placed all the rest of their joint navies at the disposal of an international council, on which they would have an adequate representation of course, what would happen? There would be an immediate reduction of public expenditure and so much relief of economic life from taxation. Would anything else happen? Would Japan suddenly fling herself upon California, Italy seize Malta and Egypt, the Red Army pour down into India, or France destroy London? Does anyone--unless it be my dear old friends Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and Mr. Leo Maxse--believe any of these things would happen? Or anything of the sort?

As a matter of fact we have France now, at the present time, so much more powerfully equipped in the air than Britain and with the British anti-aircraft establishment so reduced, that she could, if she wished to do so and dared to do so, smash up London and put most of the English naval and commercial ports out of action before any really effective counterstroke could be made. There has been a powerful Press campaign in France against Britain, and there is plenty of hostile feeling there. Led by a propagandist Press a great multitude of Frenchmen really believe that the favourite occupation of the English-speaking peoples is buying francs at one price in order to sell them at a lower one. Nevertheless, that attack doesn’t come and it never will come. The temporary satisfaction would be so poor that it would not balance the disagreeable anticipation of an ultimate revenge. Moreover, the immediate financial and economic collapse both of France and Britain would manifestly ensue. Air warfare and poison gas have so enhanced the destructiveness of war and made it so inconclusive, and France and Britain are so close together now and so accessible one to the other, that they have to face the fact--an annoying fact for every true patriot--that they can no longer regard war as a means of settling even their worst differences. As well think of settling a dispute between two next-door neighbours by burning both their houses and massacring all the inmates. It really does not matter now which of the two Powers is the stronger on land or sea. It is a consideration of no practical value whatever between them.

And just as an attack of France upon Britain is unthinkable at the present time, although all the military advantage lies at present with France, so, too, any attack upon the vast joint territories of the United States and the British Empire, though they neither of them had a battleship in commission nor a ton of explosive ready, would be an absurd proposition. There is no other Power on earth that could do it to any profit at all, and without the ultimate certainty of a crushing rearmament and revenge. It would be like a tiger-cat trying to kill and eat an elephant. In all the world now there are only four countries capable of starting-in at complete first-class modern warfare: Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. Italy has neither the coal nor the ore necessary for so heavy an enterprise; the hairiest, loudest Fascisti in the world will not make up for that; and Russia has not the industrial plant for the necessary munitions of aggression. She has vast resisting power, as ever, but no attacking power. All the other countries of the world, if they fight nowadays, must fight with the munitions and loans the four possible belligerents grant them. These four countries therefore, of themselves, could inaugurate a world peace; and the interests of their peoples, as distinguished from the armament interests, urgently demand a secure world peace. The difficulty is to begin. The Press of each of the armament-capable four is closely interwoven with the armament profiteers, and the Press of either country will begin a campaign of panic about what the other three are doing directly there is any serious possibility of relaxed armament anywhere. Since the United States and Britain are easily first in preaching peace and arbitration to the world, I suggest that it is for them to set the example and begin. But at the first intimations of a serious abandonment of “preparedness” Lord Rothermere and his American equivalents--if there are equivalents of Lord Rothermere in America--will see to it that the nervous householder dreams of aeroplanes coming down the chimney and submarines coming up the sink, and wakes gibbering of “security” like a _Matin_-soaked French patriot.

And most of the tremendous outfit we English-speaking peoples carry isn’t even good for war. It is like a battle-axe in a tramcar, a terrifying offensive affair, but not really effective in a fight at close quarters. The time when war was a generalised thing is past. You can no longer have an army or navy that goes anywhere and does everything. For Britain to fight France, or Japan, or the United States, or Russia, or Italy, demands in each case a different sort of warfare, with different methods and different appliances. British battleships camouflaged as cruisers and docks for them half-way round the earth would be no good against Russia or Italy, and very little use against France. Against Japan they would be good for her submarines to chase and blockade while our submarines chased and blockaded the Japanese warships. A big air force, again, would be little use against the United States or Japan. Considered in relation to any possible specific war they may have to wage, the present war establishments of the great belligerent Powers, the miscellaneous elaborate material that the armament people and their unimaginative army traditions have induced them to buy are as likely to be efficient as the equipment of the White Knight in _Alice in Wonderland_. The methods and objectives and so forth of any next war that may surprise the politicians (just as children are surprised by fires when they play with matches), conducted by the sort of soldiers we possess and with the stuff they will handle as “equipment,” will certainly be more discursive and silly and ineffective even than those great pushes and counter-attacks and raids and bombings and so forth of the last great war, and in their inconclusive way infinitely more destructive.

But if these preposterous armaments are unlikely to be conclusive in warfare, they do at any rate block the way very effectively to any reorganisation of the world for peace. You can’t make love in armour. All this lumpish preparedness keeps the atmosphere of human life unwholesome; it prevents the settlement by any frank concerted action of the tariff conflicts, financial squabbles, currency annoyance, and mutual economic injuries that are rapidly destroying the present social system. Every big nation comes into such discussions an implicit bully. The nations have to learn the same lessons that individuals learnt in the middle ages, they have to learn not to bear arms even in the company of those who do. In the middle ages, when the loving-cup went round, one’s neighbour stood as one drank to protect one’s back from the assassin’s knife. At last some reckless souls took heart to sit and drink and trust their fellow men. Other desperate spirits left their weapons at home--and survived. But the nations are still half-way back to barbarism. Our cartoonists draw Uncle Sam and John Bull as decent peaceable everyday citizens. They flatter our countries. Really the Great Powers should be drawn as completely canned warriors with their wary eyes and noses just peeping out of their preparedness. And this in spite of the fact that the only serious danger to either is that the weight and clumsiness of this silly equipment and of the world-wide distrust it produces will undermine his business and his national health altogether.

XXXI

THE CASE OF UNAMUNO: THE FEEBLE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

12.4.24

There is nothing greater in the world of men than thought. Science, literature, and art; what other glories has man? And yet the company of men of science and letters and art forms but the feeblest of republic throughout the world, is insignificant socially and politically, and wins only posthumous respect.

A time may come when men will have a better sense of the values of things, and when the creative experimenter and writer and artist will be accorded something of the respect and something of the immunity we now give to royalties with the urbanity of second-rate waiters or the pluck of second-rate jockeys, and to those casual possessors of disproportionate spending power or disproportionate impudence, our social leaders. But that day when the philosopher, or the discoverer, or the great artist will be King, when there will be no recognised nobility but the nobility of the mind, is still far away. Perhaps it will never come. Perhaps there is a permanent necessity in our natures, requiring us to exalt the common qualities we share and understand and to contemn rare gifts. King Carnival, with his vast nose and goggling eyes, is the most real, most natural of all human kings, because he is frankly grotesque, a common creature raised up and magnified. Such kings and princes, such popular heroes and fashionable leaders as we have, assist us in our self-protective struggle against the insupportable suspicion that we lack distinctive quality. We can tell ourselves that they are in no way different from us except that they are luckier. But it tortures our self-esteem to honour those who have qualities we cannot pretend to possess. That is why we love to think of the man of science as a foolish, absent-minded thing with spectacles and a butterfly-net, and listen so greedily to rumours of vice and wickedness in men of genius. There may be a profound instinctive reasonableness in this acceptance of the gift and this rejection of the giver. Ingratitude is better for the common man than servility. If we did not distrust and restrain the exceptional people in the world, they might run away from us or run away with us, until we became no more than animals under direction and control. A king is the surest protection against regal personalities and an aristocracy against any rule of the best.

The exceptional men--because they are exceptional men--have no flock instinct to hold them together for mutual protection against the crowd and its leaders. Nearly all men of distinctive gifts are jealous. They are driven by an inner necessity to assert their own special quality against the aggressive special qualities of their fellows. There is little generosity when men of science or literary and artistic men talk of one another. Their mission is to do the thing they have to do and not be good fellows with one another. When one considers this, one may be reconciled to much egoism and lack of gregariousness in the man of intellectual gifts and yet at times one may be startled by some reminder of the extreme moral disintegration which is the normal state of the “republics” of science and art and letters.

I recall my own amazement at the sudden outbreak of nationalism on the part of the men of science of all countries at the beginning of the war, and still more so at the reluctance with which they came together after the armistice, when they had had four years to think it over. When I went to the secretary of the Royal Society in 1920 and told him of the poverty of such great men as Pavloff in Petersburg and of the urgent need of the Russian men of science for Western publications and for instruments and material kept out by our blockade, I thought the society would take up the matter forthwith as a simple obvious duty. It did nothing of the sort. It was argued that Pavloff and the others ought to have come out of Russia as white refugees, and that a body adorned with all the dukes and royal princes of Great Britain had other things to consider than mere protection of research in the world. The Royal Society was indeed, I found, not so much a society for the promotion and exaltation of science, as a society of scientific men for mutual restraint.

And now in the scandalous case of Don Miguel Unamuno comes a fresh instance of the lack of any feeling of solidarity among the world’s intellectuals. Here is a great writer and professor, the ex-Rector of the University of Salamanca, a man of undisputed pre-eminence. He is a professor of classical learning: not one of the scientific or sociological fellows. He utters some lucid and deserved reproofs to the King of Spain. As all the world knows, the King of Spain has consented to, and possibly connived at, the illegal usurpation of his Government by a military junta with a dictator of straw, a sham Mussolini, Primo de Rivera. It is a dull, bad Government, chiefly concerned with the suppression of opinion and the entirely incompetent maintenance of an endless war with the Moors. For if Spanish generals have at times to display the backs of their brilliant uniforms to the Moors, they can at least keep a brave overbearing front towards Spain. No country was ever in such need of drastic public criticism as Spain at the present time. But so soon as Don Unamuno speaks plainly, he is seized and sent without trial to the Canary Islands, away from his books, his students, and all contact with the current activities of mankind. It is a purely arbitrary act. There is not even an appeal to some pseudo-academic court. It is done on the authority of the dull imitation who is failing to be the Spanish Mussolini. An oaf in uniform has struck a great teacher on the mouth and silenced him. In recent times in Europe there has never been so plain and violent a challenge to the freedom and honour of the intellectual world.

What protest has there been from that world? One might have expected vigorous outcries on behalf of Salamanca from Oxford and Cambridge, from London and the British Academy, from Harvard and Yale and Chicago, and the hundred and one universities and colleges of North and South America, an immense outbreak of indignation. I have heard of scarcely any. From the University of Paris there has been a fairly representative protest, and Lisbon has spoken. I have seen a few paragraphs in the highbrow weeklies of Britain and America. But the intellectual workers of our English-speaking world seem as a whole to have been as little affected by this particular exploit of the King of Spain’s Dictator as a flock of grazing sheep by the death of one of its number. So far as they are concerned he may shut up all the Universities of Spain and maroon their entire staffs. Their sense of any community of interests among the Universities of the world seems to be almost completely lacking. The ordinary miner or transport worker has much to teach the university professor in the matter of occupational self-respect.

Of course, both in England and America in the last dozen years or so there have been rather similar cases to this crowning outrage of vulgar force upon mind. There was the case of Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, during the war, and in America it is inadvisable for professors of economics and social science to lean too visibly towards collectivism. And Mr. William Jennings Bryan knows all about creation and incites backward States to dismiss teachers of biology who teach contrary to the beliefs of this favoured confidant of the Deity. Perhaps an uneasy consciousness of such facts has hampered the English-speaking communities in this affair. Meanwhile Don Miguel Unamuno studies the seascapes of the Canary Islands, and, so far as his opinion of King Alfonso goes, he is restricted to conversation with the islanders.

And if by any chance King Alfonso should visit England and go to Oxford or Cambridge, all the dons and deans and heads would put on their fullest plumage to bow and scrape to him.

XXXII

AN OPEN LETTER TO ANATOLE FRANCE ON HIS EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY

(WRITTEN AS THE ENGLISH CONTRIBUTION TO A BOOKLET OF CONGRATULATION)

19.5.24

_Cher Maître_,--You write for the whole world, and the whole world salutes you on this happy occasion of your eightieth birthday. You are eighty years old, and yet it seemed to me a little time ago, when I paid my personal homage to you and found you, as ever, smiling, friendly, interested, and amused, that you were still untouched by age. And indeed what has age to do with you, who are already immortal, staying on here in the pleasant land of France for a time, but having made for yourself a sure habitation among that great company of writers already in Elysium who talk to youth with the freshness of youth, and to all with a living wisdom, now and for centuries to come? Millions of readers yet unborn will grow up to find in you a liberator, a choice companion, a very dear friend. We your contemporaries are only the first-comers of your following, and of those who will love and honour your name.