Part 5

That about the “female belongings” isn’t at all the little gentleman. It is not even honest abuse. He knows better. Indeed, we all know better, and why Mr. Churchill keeps up this sort of thing defeats my imagination. Russia is a strained and needy country to-day, but it is bleakly moral; for a time there was no prostitution at all there, and probably even to-day there is less prostitution in Russia than in any other country in the world; the age when getting rich and “feminine belongings” played a large part in its affairs ended with Rasputin and the Czardom. But Mr. Churchill has assumed this attitude of vehement hostility to the present Russian Government, and he persists in it with puerile obstinacy, while that great country passes slowly out of the shadows he helped to darken into the dawn of a new age.

X

THE OTHER SIDE IN FRANCE

17.11.23

In several recent articles I have been girding at France, at the destructive egotism of France, at the relentless political cruelty of France. Let me now look at France from another aspect.

Many of us, I suspect, are excessively bitter with France just now because we love France. We are angry because we are jealous about her. She has seen fit to embody herself in the dull, relentless Poincaré; she has set her face like flint harshly and pitilessly against the recovery and peace of Europe, and it is more than we can endure.

A few months ago I made a little tour in Europe, and outside the boundaries of France everywhere I found the name of France the name of division and mischief. The mark had not yet reached its final degradation, but I went about in a very miserable Germany. Every attempt that Germany made to get to her feet and breathe was met by a thrust that sent her back into the black waters that are drowning her. It was natural for Germany to be resentful. But in the farther countries, also, resentment smouldered; they were carrying great armies--the Czech Army is now greater than the British--they were subjected to a propaganda of an intense and dangerous nationalism, their future was dark with war possibilities, and it was all the work of France. I came back to France through a Europe dying of entangled nationalist policies, and my heart was very black against France.

I went about Paris for some days astonished to see that it did not look consciously wicked. After all--much as I love my native London and much as I delight in the tall vigour of New York--Paris is the Queen of Cities, so gracious and so fine, so hospitably friendly and yet so little meretricious in her quality. I met French friends and talked with them abundantly. I went into Burgundy and into Touraine to meet old friends and new ones, and gradually my nightmare conception of France as an evil spider, stretching its poison claws all over Europe, was mitigated.

That spider is there. It is the old spider of French foreign policy that has lived on through revolutions and empires since the days of the Grand Monarch, but within its limbs it holds so great a literary man as Anatole France, so modern and bold an adventurer in statecraft as Joseph Caillaux, so gentle and sincere a liberalism as that of the gatherings of the Abbaye de Pontigny, and, indeed, a whole inarticulate France of thought, doubt, and righteous intention. It is a France that may at any time thrust Poincaré aside and break through to speech and

## action and become _the_ France. It is an essential and leading part of

that world-wide republic of reasonable men which may yet save the world.

I wanted very much to look at and talk to M. Joseph Caillaux. He has always interested me deeply. I had to make a four-hour automobile journey to see him. I went past Chartres Cathedral, and the roads were gay with blue flowers. He is living in his pleasant house and garden in a little brown and white and green provincial town, and there he is stifled and silenced. He may not go within a hundred kilometres of Paris, nor may he go abroad. What he has got to say is not reported in the Press. Only by way of the bookshop can he get anything through to the public. Imagine our British Foreign Office sending my Lord Rothermere into exile and original authorship at Llandrindod Wells or Matlock on account of his interference with its policy! Imagine Mr. Lloyd George or Lord Birkenhead restrained from excursions to America, and deprived altogether of reverberation!

I lunched with M. and Madame Caillaux and some pleasant neighbours, and we talked of books and flowers and such-like agreeable topics. We exchanged telegraphic greetings with M. Anatole France, whom I had hoped to meet there. M. Caillaux, I learnt incidentally, can take walks and play tennis, but he may not go shooting. He is far too dangerous a man, the French Government thinks, to be entrusted with a shot-gun.

Afterwards we two walked about the garden and talked about the state of Europe. M. Caillaux is neither Anglophile nor Anglophobe, but he thinks, as I do, that Western Europe can only do its full duty to the rest of the world when it is worked as a unity. Reconciliation of the Frenchman and the German has been the dominant idea of all his statecraft. We discussed the riddle why Big Business and the big industrialists are the fiercest, most mischievous of all patriots. We concluded it was due to the fact that they work for profits and not for service, and that a flag means a tariff and such an artificial enhancement of profits as no unified working could give. And finance which is international in outlook is by its nature not creative and revolutionary but watchful, statistical, and extractive. Then also I broached the question whether, if private capital in industry and finance could not give us peace, we must prepare for a harder road to internationalism through the social revolution. And so to other topics.

He asked me not to be hard against France. “You think,” he said, “that this fear of Germany coming back again is a false fear--an excuse for aggression. It isn’t. It’s in the blood of our people. Think! Here we are in the heart of France, and within a little more than a hundred years this countryside has heard the guns of an invader four times, in 1814, 1815, 1871, and again in 1914.”

M. Caillaux stood before his house and watched me get into the automobile that would take me to the Paris he may not visit, and waved his friendly “Good-bye.” Next year, perhaps, they will let him return, he hopes--or the year after. But he is already sixty....

But the most interesting man from my present point of view that I met in France was a man under no outward restraint at all. This was the late M. Philippe Millet, the editor of the _Petit Parisien_, one of the big official papers. We have been friends for many years, we saw a good deal of each other at the Washington Conference, and we had talked to each other very freely and frankly on many occasions about international relations. For long he had maintained an entirely civilised attitude towards the European settlement; he had supported various schemes of economic reconciliation, and he had opposed the occupation of the Ruhr very vigorously. I took him to task for his support of M. Poincaré.

His apologetics went in this fashion, and I think they are typical of the attitude of a considerable section of Frenchmen. He admitted the Ruhr occupation was an outrage, but he argued that once it was done it closed the door on any possibility of an understanding with Germany. Germany had been so antagonised that there was now nothing left for a Frenchman but to go on destroying her. He was like a man on an omnibus that was running away downhill. You must do your best to get control of the thing, but--there is no going back to the top of the hill. France has got Germany by the throat, and such a level of hate and despair has been reached that _she dares not let go_.

Of course, M. Poincaré does not want to let go. But I believe the middling mass of Frenchmen, of whom Philippe Millet was so typical, a mass which, with the parties of the Left, probably constitutes a majority of the French, would welcome any outside help that would enable them to discontinue the strangulation and dismemberment of Central Europe. An American Government and a British Government united enough, understanding enough, and tactful enough, to intervene wisely and generously could swing all that central mass away from Poincaré. A foolish intervention might very easily throw it into a passion of patriotic fear. Its incalculable behaviour is a riddle all Europe is guessing at. The hope of European civilisation rests largely on this central body of French opinion getting to some sort of effective expression before it is too late. The French elections in 1924 will be a very crucial time in human history.

XI

THE LAST OF THE VICTORIANS

24.11.23

Mr. Asquith is now, to use the phrase he coined for a contemporary, the last of the Victorian “giants.” He is the leader of some sort of Liberal Party in England, the oldest and the ripest, I am told, though I confess I am quite unable to make head or tail of these various Liberal parties in England nowadays, and he is always trying to lead his little band back to the nineteenth century, when there were ever so many “giants” in the land, not to mention the Grand Old Man, and when political life made up for its complete want of seriousness by a pompous solemnity and vast personal enthusiasms. Prime Ministers in those days loomed vast; they were none of your little chaps who can hide behind bull-dog pipes and say nuffin. Our Leaders, figures of Pantomimic size, filled the stage and said--_floods_. They were practically all that there was on the stage. The crumbling peace of Europe and the world, the conflict of labour and order with adventurous capital, were not staged in those days. At most one heard of these things in the Legislature as one sometimes catches a rumble of vans and cabs in a London theatre. In the House they dealt with only the thin shadows of great issues; with the Free Breakfast Table, Unsectarian Religious Teaching, Leasehold Enfranchisement, and the like.

One of the most pleasing traits of the Victorian giants was their tremendous scholarly evasion of all complete statement. The vulgarity of a plain assignment of a thing to its broad roots and general principles was never committed. In such matters Mr. Asquith is finely representative of his period. He has to perfection that ability to deal with a part of an issue as if it were the whole which was characteristic of the great Victorian scholars and gentlemen. If Mr. Asquith were a mechanic, and you asked him to make you an automobile, he would presently produce two wheels, a clutch, and a radiator with so perfect and dignified a manner that you would hardly realise that you had not the complete car until you stepped through it. You would feel it ungracious to complain. When Mr. Asquith drew the sword and threw away the scabbard, he did it with so fine a gesture that you scarcely noted that most of the sword wasn’t there. If Mr. Asquith were a domestic hen he would lay eggs consisting of about two-thirds of a shell and as much yolk as would cover a sixpence, but he would cluck so bravely that you would credit him with a complete omelette. I do not blame him, it was the style of his time; but his time has passed, and this is a world too urgent and dangerous for the ample deficiencies of those spaciously empty years.

These remarks are provoked by the fact that Mr. Asquith and his associated and rival Liberal leaders--I can never tell which is which--are now engaged in unfurling the Banner of Free Trade in Great Britain. Encumbered with an immense and growing burden of unemployed workmen Britain is thinking of all sorts of eleventh-hour expedients. Schemes of preference within the Empire, leading towards an Empire Zollverein, are very much to the fore. And in reply this old Free Trade, which figured so largely in the political history of Victorian times, is to be brought out of the shed again, and furbished up and sent round the country to see what it will do for Liberalism.

Now nothing could be more typical than Free Trade of this peculiar incompleteness of the political methods of the “giants” of the “heroic” Victorian Age to which I have already called attention. It is a one-wheeled, engineless, body-less Liberal automobile. It is a project to keep down one’s natural frontier in respect to inward and outward trade, and it ignores all the correlated measures that should go with this most desirable abolition. It ignores the fact that nearly all the separate sovereign competitive States into which the world is divided are always actively engaged in mutual injury, sometimes frankly in open warfare but always by fiscal trickery, monetary tactics, diversion of trade, and the like amiable activities. True Free Trade must be mutual. One-sided Free Trade is like disarmament in the face of malignant military preparation. And if there is to be real Free Trade between any two countries then certain other things follow necessarily, though they never appear on the party programmes and banners.

Production will tend to gravitate to the regions of maximum advantage, and so there must also be a free movement of population over the frontiers to the regions of most advantageous employment. If there is not such free movement, then one of the States may suffer from unemployment in this or that industry and social degeneration while the other is enjoying high wages. But movement of population and the shifting of many industries across frontiers will affect military efficiency, and so there can be no real Free Trade between any two countries unless they are ensured not only against mutual attack but by a mutual guarantee against attack.

Free Trade is, in fact, only a practical proposal between countries prepared also for free movements of population between each other and for a pooling of their defensive resources and foreign policy. The way to permanent and satisfactory Free Trade lies in a steady extension of leagues between friendly peoples prepared for that much waiver of their sovereign independence. But only peoples near the same educational level and with closely similar standards of comfort and behaviour can contemplate so intimate a union as this. There might be such a league of the Latin-American States, or of the English-speaking and Scandinavian and other North-European States, but not of any much more extensive coalescences at present. So long as a State remains potentially at war with any other State, Free Trade between them is a dream.

Great Britain in the Victorian period had a practical monopoly of modern industrial production and benefited by an open frontier that gave her workers cheap food and so kept labour cheap. That was a temporary and now vanished condition of affairs. So long as States insist on their sovereign independence they must be prepared to use tariffs just as they must be prepared to use armies. It is the price of the flag.

Tariffs corrupt. That is true, just as war contracts do. But the way to escape from these diseases of conflict does not lie in the maintenance of fiscal non-resistance by this or that independent, irresponsible State, but in a creative foreign policy that seeks union and coalescence, and aims, openly and educationally, through coalescence in a broadening series, to reach at last world Free Trade, world freedom of movement, and an organised world peace.

But Mr. Asquith will never tell us he means anything so intelligible as that. He will just wave the banner of Free Trade as though it meant anything the imagination of the voter might like. That was how the giants did their business in the grand old days, and he will never do his business in any other way. And it is because of these splendid old traditions of pompous vagueness that more and more of the liberal-minded people of Britain drift towards the Labour camp.

XII

POLITICS AS A PUBLIC NUISANCE

1.12.23

In the United States of America they know when their elections are coming, and prepare for them; in Great Britain they come unheralded, like earthquakes and tidal waves. They may come and come again; there is no period of immunity.

It is only yesterday that in Great Britain we were all speculating about this Mr. Baldwin, who had become Prime Minister. What was he? Where had he come from? Nobody knew. From the first he seemed to share our doubts about himself. He hid as much as possible behind a big, big, manly pipe, and made wise little speeches about nothing in particular at colleges and boys’ schools. He claimed to be a cousin of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Now he seems to have given way to panic at the conspicuousness of his position. The European situation is frightful, and the state of affairs at home is miserable; and I think he has plunged this country into all the expense and confusion of a General Election, in the hope of getting back to the old smoking-room at home, wherever it is, and tranquillity.

Except in Tasmania and Ireland, where they have Proportional Representation and an approach to political sanity, all the elections of the English-speaking democracies are profoundly silly affairs. The common voter hasn’t a dog’s chance of expressing his real opinion of things. Some organisations or other put up a couple of candidates for his constituency, and he votes for the one associated with the political leaders he dislikes and distrusts least. When the issues are manifold, as they are in Britain now, the results may be preposterous. They may fail altogether to indicate the feeling of the country about any public question at all. The voter is generally in the case of a man who wants to go shooting, and is confronted with the choice of taking the family Bible and some cartridges, or a boiled fowl and a gun.

The cardinal fact of the contest is that France is destroying the economic life of Central Europe, with which the prosperity of Great Britain is bound up. Great Britain is congested with unemployed, before whom there does not seem to be any prospect of employment. In the face of this Mr. Baldwin proposes tariffs to make food and everything dearer without increasing the purchasing power of any but the very rich; and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald proposes a levy on large fortunes. Mr. Asquith, to whom Mr. Churchill the anti-Bolshevik and Mr. Lloyd George have rallied, raises, as I have already noted in these articles, the banner of Free Trade--although Free Trade is already in operation in Great Britain without conspicuous success. And nobody says anything in

## particular about France.

Under these circumstances anything may happen. Exaggerated estimates of the effect of the tariff upon food prices will be used to scare the struggling voter, and particularly the women, against Protection, and--as the Labour Party has no Press worth talking about--tremendous lies will be told about the Capital Levy. It will be represented as a raid upon the savings bank deposits of the servant girl and the children’s money-boxes, although as a matter of fact it is not to touch any fortune under five thousand pounds, and only begins to press heavily upon twenty thousand and upward. The Labour leaders, being for the most part respectable but inaudible men, will never get that over to the public in time. And in the ensuing panic and scrimmage it is quite possible that that extraordinary old omnibus, the Liberal Party, with Mr. Asquith the elder statesman, Mr. Churchill the junker, Mr. Lloyd George the rather world-stained democrat, Sir John Simon, Mr. Asquith’s once prospective successor, and a miscellany of other people, pledged really to no more than the negative policy of no Protection and no Capital Levy, will make quite a respectable run and get quite a large proportion of its four hundred odd passengers into Westminster. And what they will do there Heaven knows. Possibly fight among themselves, and have another dissolution.

Meanwhile, as the struggle for the wheel goes on, the British ship of state will drift through the winter as it has drifted through the autumn, and M. Poincaré will continue to do what he likes with Europe.

Now this is really too preposterous a way of running the affairs of a great people. It is bound to end in some great disaster. These spasmodic appeals to the country whenever a Prime Minister gets frightened by the aspect of the skies or whenever a quarrelsome group has to be reunited somehow, produce a terrible vacillation and ineffectiveness in the national conduct. It is time Great Britain came up to date with a triennial or quadrennial election of the Legislature, after the American and French fashion, and then stayed _put_. And it is time, too, that Great Britain went beyond, and gave a lead to America and most of the world by abandoning the present method of voting with a single vote in a limited constituency, which absolutely destroys any real choice of representation by the common man. The only civilised method of democracy is Proportional Representation; in large constituencies returning many members there is no other method which gives the individual voter a reasonable opportunity of expressing his real preference. It is the right way, and all other ways are wrong and bad. This present election in Great Britain is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the current system. In the seething mass of British opinion there are:

Out-and-out Protectionists hostile to Russia and France.

Ditto friendly to Russia but hostile to France.

Ditto hostile to Russia but abject to France.

Protectionists for industry but not for food, hostile to France.

Ditto, but “Hats off to France.”

Anti-Bolshevik Free Traders like Mr. Churchill.

Free Traders friendly to Russia.

Any of the above may or may not be in frantic opposition to an imaginary Capital Levy upon everybody’s savings.

Labourite Free Traders weak on the Capital Levy.

Labourite Free Traders strong on the Capital Levy.

Labourites strong on the Capital Levy, but weak on Free Trade.

All of the above may be weak or strong or hostile about the present League of Nations.

All of the above may be strong for the new education, or they may be anti-educational.

And the poor mutt of a voter in any particular constituency has to indicate his opinion of things by voting for one of three gentlemen or ladies selected by the three local political clubs. As candidates they will do as little as possible in the way of positive statements and pledges. They will engage chiefly in hostile noises against the other

## parties. We shall never get any clear indication from this election