Part 2

There can be only two judgments about this over-charge. Either it was made out of sheer ignorance and levity, or it was made with the deliberate intention of keeping Germany henceforth in arrears and in the wrong, so that at any sign of economic or political revival she could be at once claimed against and stricken down again. Possibly ignorance and levity mingled with foreseeing malignity in the counsels at Versailles. But the temptations created by the situation have proved irresistible. Throughout the years immediately following this Treaty France has never faltered from her conception that the new peace was only the continuation and completion of her ages-long feud against Germany. She has been quietly and steadfastly strangling Germany in the name of her debt. At Washington she refused to discuss the question of land disarmament--some of us can still recall M. Briand’s preposterous speech about the concealed arms and hidden armies of Germany--and across the amiable, foolish face of the Geneva League of Nations she has woven a net of armed alliances, heaping guns and dull and overwhelming expense upon the insolvent peasant States of Eastern Europe, and dissipating the money she owes to Britain and America upon fresh military adventures. She is now indisputably in military control of Europe. Great Britain has displayed no such fixity of intention as France, and, particularly since the downfall of Mr. Lloyd George, has just rolled about in an uneasy, protesting manner. America has withdrawn in a state of virtuous indignation from the mess she helped so carelessly and generously to make.

Until the spring of this year Germany continued to make very considerable but insufficient payments to her conquerors. There seemed, indeed, a possibility that she might presently muddle back to a tolerable and honourable position in European affairs. France perceived that the hour had come for effective action; and Mr. Lloyd George being by that time out of her way, she occupied the Ruhr, the industrial heart of Germany. She occupied it without the consent of her Allies, and so illegally; and with an utter disregard of the interests of Britain, who came to her rescue when she was faint with terror in 1914. She occupied it with every circumstance of petty insolence. Most of us have seen photographs and kinema films of the French troops strutting through the disarmed, defenceless German towns, and the French officers hitting off the hats and smacking the faces of any bystanders who did not display sufficient reverence for their intrusive flag.

I cannot imagine what black murder would not spring up in the hearts of an American or British population treated as the Germans were treated this spring. The behaviour of the Germans has indeed been amazingly patient. The rest of Germany has wrecked itself financially in a desperate attempt to sustain the Ruhr workers in an attitude of passive resistance, and now at last these overwhelming payments have to cease. For the better part of a year the trade and industry of Central Europe has been dislocated. A year of human life and human production has been frittered away in this struggle. The great economic machine of Western Germany is now like some complex piece of apparatus that has been fought for by infuriated children. How deep the physical and moral wounds inflicted on the war-exhausted, depleted being of Germany may be we can as yet only speculate.

But France has achieved a great victory in this new war, for war it is, against an unarmed antagonist. She is victorious, and the tricolour triumphs over Europe. The passive resistance of the Ruhr has been abandoned and the German Government has been unable to get any conditions from France in exchange for this surrender. The debt looms as large as ever, the possibility of effective payments is much remoter than it has been before, and France is in a stronger position argumentatively than she has even been. She can still go on counting her steadily accumulating claim. She can proceed, whenever she wishes to do so, to fresh seizures, further occupations, and further humiliations for her defeated enemy. There is no boundary set, by anything that has happened, to the systematic disintegration of the great civilisation of Germany. Germans may be found vile enough and foolish enough to assist in the political fragmentation of their own people. Presently we may see Germany broken up into half a dozen nasty little retrogressive States, all played off against each other to their mutual enfeeblement by France.

Then, except for an ambiguous Italy, there will be nothing left upon the Continent of Europe but a victorious France and her smashed and broken antagonists and her servile and uncertain allied peasant States, Europe Balkanised from the Rhine to the Black Sea. It will be a realisation of the great dreams of Napoleon I, a hundred and twenty years later. True, Russia will loom rather dark and rather neglected in the background of the French millennium, but the French think that from a military or political point of view Russia is to be counted out for the next fifty years. And, as the happy achievement of “security” in Europe becomes more certain, France will be able to turn her attention to her old rival and temporary ally across the Channel. French ideas of trade and economics have always been nationalist and monopolistic, and at last she will be in a position to apply to Britain with real effect that system of exclusion from the markets of Europe, the Continental system, which failed when Napoleon I first devised and tried it a century or more ago. Moreover, she will be at last able to reopen the discussion of the proper ownership of the vast natural resources of Central Africa, at present largely shared by the British. The victory of the Ruhr is a considerable victory, a great hungry victory, but it is only one in a sustained campaign in the realisation of a policy centuries old, the policy of French predominance in the European world. France has had revolutions and reverses, but her nationalism is the intensest of all nationalism, and her conception of international policy has been the same under Bourbon, Bonaparte, or Republic. She seems to be incapable of any such ideas as co-operation, coalescence, union, pooling, reconciliation, reconstruction on a broader basis, brotherhood of nations or the like. There is no stopping her. She will thrust her fluttering tricolour, her brave little men in horizon blue and steel helmets, her intrigues and her claims, farther and farther over a suffering, disorganised world--until she becomes by common consent impossible.

The Ruhr is a great victory for France, and it has won her nothing. What next will she do after the Ruhr?

IV

THE SINGAPORE ARSENAL

13.10.23

It is proposed that Great Britain, which is too shabbily poor to give the mass of its own children more than half an elementary education, which cannot house its workers with comfort or decency, which has over a million unemployed, shall spend great sums of money upon a naval establishment at Singapore. This undertaking is just not within the positive prohibitions of the Washington Agreement. It is a few hundred miles west of the area involved in that Agreement. But it is flatly contrary to the spirit of the Washington gathering. It is a frank provocation to crippled and devastated Japan; it dominates the route of the French to Tonkin; it is a contemptuous gesture at any American notions about the “freedom of the seas.”

Provided cruisers and battleships are to play a part in the “next war,” it is an admirably chosen position. Let the reader look it up in any atlas and see how its submarines will be able to radiate over the adjacent seas and how all India supports it. It is fairly well placed for air war also. On the supposition that the world is still to go on divided among aggressive sovereign States, with phases of war preparation called peace and acute phases of more and more destructive war, it is quite a good move in the game. On the supposition that the world is growing up to any age of reason and that a world civilisation is attainable, it is a monstrously stupid crime.

When I was at the Washington Conference upon the Limitation of Armaments I denounced the French with what many people thought was an extreme bitterness for their reliance upon submarines and Senegalese troops. This British feat at Singapore deserves an equal denunciation. These preparations of the French and British are equally acts of war against the general peace of mankind. It is no good treating the French as though they alone were outraging the unity of mankind with their great armies and equipments. Great Britain, we now see by this crime at Singapore, is just as mischievously and criminally disposed. Both Powers are disturbers of the peace and destroyers of human hope.

But when the thing is done by one’s own country and by people we know, one sees more of it and more of the humanity of it than when it happens abroad; and I find a particular figure floating before my mind now whenever I hear or read the word Singapore. He will serve as my type specimen for this aggressive and troublesome British imperialism, and very probably the essential wickedness of French policy finds its embodiment in some quite similar personalities.

In which case we are not up against wickedness, but against--what shall I say?--a retardation of mental development.

My type specimen is the First Lord of the Admiralty in the present[1] British Government, Mr. Amery. He is a pleasantly smiling, short, thick-set lad of fifteen. He was born in 1873, but in 1889, when he should have become sixteen, he was living the life of an exceptionally clever boy at Harrow, and somehow just became fifteen again, and he has remained fifteen ever since. Every year his birthday comes round without the slightest effect upon him. He may be a little more substantial, but his bland, clean-shaven face is the same that confronted the Harrow masters. He has just the same smile. He went on to a brilliant career at Balliol College, Oxford, always famous for its retardation of adolescence, and emerged a devotee of the British Empire and of the games of Foreign Policy and War. Kipling was new to men then, and that generation was drunken with him. Cecil Rhodes was a great inspiration in the land. He could not have preached salvation by Anglo-Saxons more earnestly if he had been Mr. Lothrop Stoddard. Mr. Amery, under these influences and by a natural inclination, dedicated his life to the British Empire, any British Empire apparently and whatever it did, and he has been so busy serving it ever since that he has never had time to think what it is at all.

[1] October 1923.

He is one of a group of interesting youths of fifteen who focussed upon Balliol College. But most of the others have become portly or bald, or they have grown whiskers or such-like disguises; none of them still show their fifteen-ness as engagingly as Mr. Amery.

Now the mind of a boy of fifteen is a very interesting sort of mind. Imagination is awake and lively, but it is still a narrow imagination. Many of the emotions and social devotions are still undeveloped. A boy of fifteen is still capable of making a volcano in the garden with all the available explosives; he likes mixing chemicals to see what will happen; he thinks the loveliest possession in the world is a gun. If you give him a toy railway system he will take great pains to arrange for a really smashing collision. Towards women he is a Spartan--a Red Indian. Something of fifteen still lingers in my own composition, though most of me is a little older, and before the war I used to play a great war-game on my barn floor with lead soldiers, realistic scenery and guns that hit, with other boys, actually and sometimes even chronologically fifteen. Unflinching fellows those lead soldiers were; they left no widows and orphans, and if one got disabled there was no pension. You melted him down.

Now both Mr. Amery and I would like to play soldiers with the world. But while Mr. Amery has remained fifteen through and through, large parts of me have gone on growing older. This older section of me can see men as something more than lead soldiers, and realise war in terms of spilled human life and utter waste and as a stupid massacre of boys and young men. Even that war-game we used to play in our barn left the floor in a weary-looking muddle, and was a bore to put away. But the highest expression of Mr. Amery’s being is, I perceive, to play soldiers and battleships with mankind.

And the amazing thing is that we let him!

We are disposed to let this man with the soul of a fifteen-year-old kid spend money for which our schools are being starved, upon this solemn childishness at Singapore. And there may be thousands of us doomed to wounds and blood and tears under the plump hands and knees of Mr. Amery and his little friends and their antagonists as they crawl about their game on the floor of the world.

But if I can see Mr. Amery, not as a black devotee of blood-lust but as an innocent perennial juvenile, then I am bound if I can to see the same thing in France. Those people over there who are opening new boxes of African soldiers and setting them down in Germany, and who are so secret and busy with their submarines, are probably just such innocents as Mr. Amery--just as solemnly fifteen. They have not yet learnt to see the world in terms of life. And, if so, the cure for war is not so much for the world to grow better as for the world to grow up.

Mr. Amery is not a bit terrible personally, but it is terrible that he should have any sort of control of the serious things of life. I think he ought to be kept out of mischief--just as I think another lad of the same age, Mr. Winston Churchill, ought to be kept out of mischief, in some sort of institution where he can play Kriegspiel for the rest of his existence without endangering human life. And I ask reasonable adult men in France whether the time is not ripe for a similar segregation of puerility from their Foreign Office and War Office out of the reach of mischief. Perhaps the 1924 electors will do something in that direction. If these lads presently get a game of war going between France and England we shall have the whole fabric of civilisation so entirely in ruins before it is over that I doubt if it will be reconstructed for many centuries.

V

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AGAIN

20.10.23

I opened this series of articles with an attack on the existing League of Nations at Geneva. This attack provoked a very considerable correspondence in reply. Hardly anyone was disposed to defend the League as perfect or satisfactory, but it was urged that it was a beginning, a germ, a young thing that might accumulate power and prestige, that its intentions were admirable, that it embodied and sustained an ideal, and that if it were destroyed there would be nothing to stand between the nations at all. I was reproached because--after an advocacy of world unity for a quarter of a century--I refused to recognise this poor diplomatic changeling as the birth of my desires.

It is perhaps desirable that I should answer these criticisms and state a little more explicitly why I think this affair at Geneva is worse than no league of mankind at all. I do not think it can ever develop into a serviceable organ for world civilisation, because I think that it was planned from the outset upon the wrong lines; and that it is as reasonable to support it in the hope of its growing to meet the world’s needs as it would be to buy a broken-down perambulator in the hope that it would presently develop into a much needed automobile.

The Geneva League of Nations is a start, I admit, but it is a start in the wrong direction; and before we can get upon the way to any real collective organisation of world affairs we have to retrace our steps to the starting-point before there was any League. The League is malformed in such a way that it can never hope to grow straight and strong.

One primary fault in the structure of this existing League is its complete abandonment to the idea of national sovereignty in its intensest and most mischievous form. Any little bundle of human beings, however small, illiterate, and unimportant, provided only that it was a law unto itself and waved a flag about and insisted upon a cantankerous independence, was regarded as a possible unit by the pedants who devised the League. Any body of people, however numerous, intelligent, and significant in human affairs, provided it had grouped itself into any other larger political aggregation, ceased, on the other hand, to be anything but a merged participator in the League’s affairs. So Abyssinia, in which there are probably not two hundred people capable of understanding the rudiments of world politics, could be considered seriously as a member of this absurd association, while Scotland, the best educated country in Europe, was not to appear except as a button or collar-stud, so to speak, upon the figure of the British representative.

The manifest consequences of such a preposterous recognition of separatism, the inevitable feebleness and disingenuousness of a League based upon such ideas, were pointed out as early as May 1918 in a memorandum issued by the official propaganda organisation of the British Government at Crewe House. Crewe House was rather a thorn in the side of the dear old British Foreign Office; in 1918 it was asking for a definition of Allied war aims and all sorts of inconvenient, honest questions. The memorandum was treated according to the best diplomatic precedents. Although we were making it the basis of extravagant promises to Germany, it was never communicated, as it should have been, to the French and Italians. At the end of the war the promises of Crewe House dropped out of the victorious picture. The reasoning and the warnings of this memorandum were entirely ignored by the hasty gentlemen at Versailles who threw together the Geneva League of Nations.

These gentlemen seem to have been profoundly influenced by an infantile analogy between a sovereign State and an individual man. This is the age of democracy; and the League, most marvellous formula! was “to make the world safe for democracy.” Modern democracy is taken to mean so much political equality between adult and adult as may be achieved by giving each individual a vote. What more easy or--if you think it out--more fallacious than to transfer this idea to sovereign States and give each of them a vote in a wonderful congress of mankind? But one sovereign State is not like another sovereign State, as one individual man is like another; the difference between this sovereign State and that is far profounder even than the difference between animals of different classes. The difference in structure, complexity, function, and destiny, for example, between the organisation known as the United States of America and that known as Nicaragua is a difference as wide as that between the whole plant of a great industrial district and a small domestic mangle. But in the original Covenant of the League both were treated as individuals differing only a little in size and importance. Liberia, Belgium, France, Hayti, and the Hedjaz were all to be--and they are!--citizens in this marvellous republic of States. It is like treating a jar of pickles, an opera house, a battleship, a bundle of sugar-cane, and a small travelling bag as equivalent things. Any old thing with a flag on it--that is the rule.

Can you expect the debates and divisions of a body so constituted to have any restraining influence upon the policies and practices of the Great Powers? It is treated with open contempt in France and Italy, and if there is a sort of support for it in Great Britain it is largely because there is a feeling that with Lord Balfour and Lord Robert Cecil to the fore and with its British Foreign Office Secretary and so forth its procedure can be manipulated in the interests of the--I won’t say British, for that is too good a word to use--the “Anglican” Empire.

Now my case is that this constitution of the League is for the reasons I have stated bad beyond all patching. There is, I hold, no need at all to base the thing we need upon a sham Parliament of a miscellany of sovereign States, big or little, civilised or savage. What civilisation needs are open, efficient, and authoritative controls of certain universal interests, controls representing the great mass of civilised people and their common world interests. For all practical ends it would be infinitely better to let Liberia, Hayti, the Hedjaz, and the like go hang. Such little, such parochial States ought to learn to combine up with kindred organisations--or hold their peace in world affairs. Not one of them contains as many people educated up to ideas of world policy as, let us say, any outlying suburb of Amsterdam. If half a dozen of the bigger political systems of the world, or even two or three, could get together to sustain a common monetary standard, a common transport control, a common law court, a tariff union, a mutual defence system, and a common guarantee of disarmament, they would achieve something beyond the uttermost possibilities of this Geneva affair.

So much political coalescence on the part--to take an example boldly--of the United States, the British system, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries would form a nucleus so large and influential that upon it the rest of the world, however fiercely nationalist at heart, would in the end be obliged to crystallise. I believe all these countries I have named, and Latin America and Spain and Portugal to boot, could pool their foreign policies--for that is what any genuine League of Nations means--without encountering insuperable difficulties. The worst barrier would be tariffs, but I do not believe that would be an invincible barrier. Such a club of civilised peoples would very speedily have all the rest of the world on its waiting list. And I do not see why its achievement should be any more difficult than, or indeed nearly as difficult as, bolstering up this ineffective pretence, the present League of Nations. I contend that instead of there being no alternative to the League of Nations the way would open quite naturally to such alternatives, directly it was cleared out of the way. It would, for instance--if only on account of the United States--be much easier to set up a great International Court of Justice with proper sanctions without the League than with it.