CHAPTER VII THE CONFLICT OF SYSTEMS AND IDEAS

The Freiherr's discourse raises a large number of questions, some of them unarguable. Others again are too much so; for if once started upon, argument with regard to them need never end. Some of his contentions have already been dealt with in previous chapters; some on the other hand, such as the British methods of recruiting, will be considered later on. It must, however, be admitted that his taunts and criticisms do not all rebound with blunted points from our shield of self-complacency; some, if only a few, get home and rankle.

We are challenged to contrast our faith in our own political institutions with that of the Germans in theirs; also to measure the intrinsic strength of that form of political organisation called 'democracy' against that other form which is known as 'autocracy.'

The German state is the most highly developed and efficient type of personal monarchy at present known to the world. Its triumphs in certain directions have been apparent from the beginning. It would be sheer waste of time to dispute the fact that Germany was incomparably better prepared, organised, and educated for this war—the purpose of which was the spoliation of her {168} neighbours—than any of her neighbours were for offering resistance.

But what the Freiherr does not touch upon at all is the conflict between certain underlying ideas of right and wrong—old ideas, which are held by Russia, France, and ourselves, and which now find themselves confronted by new and strange ideas which have been exceedingly prevalent among the governing classes in Germany for many years past. He does not raise this issue, any more than his fellow-countrymen now raise it either in America or at home. It is true that there was a flamboyant outburst from a few faithful Treitschkians and Nietzschians, both in prose and poetry, during those weeks of August and September which teemed with German successes; but their voices soon sank below audibility—possibly by order verboten—in a swiftly dying fall. We, however, cannot agree to let this aspect of the matter drop, merely because patriotic Germans happen to have concluded that the present time is inopportune for the discussion of it.

There are two clear and separate issues. From the point of view of posterity the more important of these, perhaps, may prove to be this conflict in the region of moral ideas. From the point of view of the present generation, however, the chief matter of practical interest is the result of a struggle for the preservation of our own institutions, against the aggression of a race which has not yet learned the last and hardest lesson of civilisation—how to live and let live.

DEMOCRACY

The present war may result in the bankruptcy of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties. It is very desirable, however, to make clear the fact {169} that the alternative is the bankruptcy of 'democracy.' Our institutions are now being subjected to a severer strain than they have ever yet experienced. Popular government is standing its trial. It will be judged by the result; and no one can say that this is an unfair test to apply to human institutions.

No nation, unless it be utterly mad, will retain a form of government which from some inherent defect is unable to protect itself against external attack. Is democratic government capable of looking ahead, making adequate and timely preparation, calling for and obtaining from its people the sacrifices which are necessary in order to preserve their own existence? Can it recover ground which has been lost, and maintain a long, costly, and arduous struggle, until, by victory, it has placed national security beyond the reach of danger?

Defeat in the present war would shake popular institutions to their foundations in England as well as France; possibly also in regions which are more remote than either of these. But something far short of defeat—anything indeed in the nature of a drawn game or stalemate—would assuredly bring the credit of democracy so low that it would be driven to make some composition with its creditors.


Words, like other currencies, have a way of changing their values as the world grows older. Until comparatively recent times 'democracy' was a term of contempt, as 'demagogue' still is to-day.

The founders of American union abhorred 'Democracy,'[1] and took every precaution which occurred to them in order to ward it off. Their aim was {170} 'Popular,' or 'Representative Government'—a thing which they conceived to lie almost at the opposite pole. Their ideal was a state, the citizens of which chose their leaders at stated intervals, and trusted them. Democracy, as it appeared in their eyes, was a political chaos where the people chose its servants, and expected from them only servility. There was an ever-present danger, calling for stringent safeguards, that the first, which they esteemed the best of all constitutional arrangements, would degenerate into the second, which they judged to be the worst.

Until times not so very remote it was only the enemies of Representative Government, or its most cringing flatterers, who spoke of it by the title of Democracy. Gradually, however, in the looseness of popular discussions, the sharpness of the original distinction wore off, so that the ideal system and its opposite—the good and the evil—are now confounded together under one name. There is no use fighting against current terminology; but it is well to bear in mind that terminology has no power to alter facts, and that the difference between the two principles still remains as wide as it was at the beginning.

When a people becomes so self-complacent that it mistakes its own ignorance for omniscience—so jealous of authority and impatient of contradiction that it refuses to invest with more than a mere shadow of power those whose business it is to govern—when the stock of leadership gives out, or remains hidden and undiscovered under a litter of showy refuse—when those who succeed in pushing themselves to the front are chiefly concerned not to lead, but merely to act the parts of leaders 'in silver slippers and amid applause'—when the chiefs of parties are {171} so fearful of unpopularity that they will not assert their own opinions, or utter timely warnings, or proclaim what they know to be the truth—when such things as these come to pass the nation has reached that state which was dreaded by the framers of the American Constitution, and which—intending to warn mankind against it—they branded as 'Democracy.'


DANGERS OF SELF-CRITICISM

Self-criticism makes for health in a people; but it may be overdone. If it purges the national spirit it is good; but if it should lead to pessimism, or to some impatient breach with tradition, it is one of the worst evils. One is conscious of a somewhat dangerous tendency in certain quarters at the present time to assume the worst with regard to the working of our own institutions.

Critics of this school have pointed out (what is undoubtedly true) that Germany has been far ahead of us in her preparations. Every month since war began has furnished fresh evidence of the far-sightedness, resourcefulness, thoroughness, and efficiency of all her military arrangements. Her commercial and financial resources have also been husbanded, and organised in a manner which excites our unwilling admiration. And what perhaps has been the rudest shock of all, is the apparent unity and devotion of the whole German people, in support of a war which, without exaggeration, may be said to have cast the shadow of death on every German home.

These critics further insist that our own nation has not shown itself more loyal, and that it did not rouse itself to the emergency with anything approaching the same swiftness. Timidity and a wilful {172} self-deception, they say, have marked our policy for years before this war broke out. They marked it again when the crisis came upon us. Have they not marked it ever since war began? And who can have confidence that they will not continue to mark it until the end, whatever the end may be?

The conclusion therefore at which our more despondent spirits have arrived, is that the representative system has already failed us—that it has suffered that very degradation which liberal minds of the eighteenth century feared so much. How can democracy in the bad sense—democracy which has become decadent—which is concerned mainly with its rights instead of with its duties—with its comforts more than with the sacrifices which are essential to its own preservation—how can such a system make head against an efficient monarchy sustained by the enthusiastic devotion of a vigorous and intelligent people?

It does not seem altogether wise to despair of one's own institutions at the first check. Even democracy, in the best sense, is not a flawless thing. Of all forms of government it is the most delicate, more dependent than any other upon the supply of leaders. There are times of dearth when the crop of leadership is a short one. Nor are popular institutions, any more than our own vile bodies, exempt from disease. Disease, however, is not necessarily fatal. The patient may recover, and in the bracing air of a national crisis, such as the present, conditions are favourable for a cure.

And, after all, we may remind these critics that in 1792 democracy did in fact make head pretty successfully against monarchy. Though it was miserably unprovided, untrained, inferior to its enemies in everything {173} save spirit and leadership, the states of Europe nevertheless—all but England—went down before it, in the years which followed, like a row of ninepins. Then as now, England, guarded by seas and sea-power, had a breathing-space allowed her, in which to adjust the spirit of her people to the new conditions. That Germany will not conquer us with her arms we may well feel confident. But unless we conquer her with our arms—and this is a much longer step—there is a considerable danger that she may yet conquer us with her ideas. In that case the world will be thrown back several hundred years; and the blame for this disaster, should it occur, will be laid—and laid rightly—at the door of Democracy, because it vaunted a system which it had neither the fortitude nor the strength to uphold.


IRRECONCILABLE OPPOSITIONS

When we pass from the conflict between systems of government, and come to the other conflict of ideas as to right and wrong, we find ourselves faced with an antagonism which is wholly incapable of accommodation. In this war the stakes are something more than any of the material interests involved. It is a conflict where one faith is pitted against another. No casuistry will reconcile the ideal which inspires English policy with the ideal which inspires German policy. There is no sense—nothing indeed but danger—in arguing round the circle to prove that the rulers of these two nations are victims of some frightful misunderstanding, and that really at the bottom of their hearts they believe the same things. This is entirely untrue: they believe quite different things; things indeed which are as nearly as possible opposites.

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Our own belief is old, ingrained, and universal. It is accepted equally by the people and their rulers. We have held it so long that the articles of our creed have become somewhat blurred in outline—overgrown, like a memorial tablet, by moss and lichen.

In the case of our enemy the tablet is new and the inscription sharp. He who runs may read it in bold clear-cut lettering. But the belief of the German people in the doctrine which has been carved upon the stone is not yet universal, or anything like universal. It is not even general. It is fully understood and accepted only in certain strata of society; but it is responsible, without a doubt, for the making in cold blood of the policy which has led to this war. When the hour struck which the German rulers deemed favourable for conquest, war, according to their creed, became the duty as well as the interest of the Fatherland.

But so soon as war had been declared, the German people were allowed and even encouraged to believe that the making of war from motives of self-interest was a crime against humanity—the Sin against the Holy Ghost. They were allowed and encouraged to believe that the Allies were guilty of this crime and sin. And not only this, but war itself, which had been hymned in so many professorial rhapsodies, as a noble and splendid restorer of vigour and virtue, was now execrated with wailing and gnashing of teeth, as the most hideous of all human calamities.

It is clear from all this that the greater part of the German people regarded war in exactly the same light as the whole of the English people did. In itself it was a curse; and the man who deliberately contrived it for his own ends, or even for those of his {175} country, was a criminal. The German people applied the same tests as we did, and it is not possible to doubt that in so doing they were perfectly sincere. They acted upon instinct. They had not learned the later doctrines of the pedantocracy, or how to steer by a new magnetic pole. They still held by the old Christian rules as to duties which exist between neighbours. To their simple old-fashioned loyalty what their Kaiser said must be the truth. And what their Kaiser said was that the Fatherland was attacked by treacherous foes. That was enough to banish all doubts. For the common people that was the reality and the only reality. Phrases about world-power and will-to-power—supposing they had ever heard or noticed them—were only mouthfuls of strange words, such as preachers of all kinds love to chew in the intervals of their discourses.

APOSTASY OF THE PRIESTHOOD

When the priests and prophets found themselves at last confronted by those very horrors which they had so often invoked, did their new-found faith desert them, or was it only that their tongues, for some reason, refused to speak the old jargon? Judging by their high-flown indignation against the Allies it would rather seem as if, in the day of wrath, they had hastily abandoned sophistication for the pious memories of their unlettered childhood. Their apostasy was too well done to have been hypocrisy.

With the rulers it was different. They knew clearly enough what they had done, what they were doing, and what they meant to do. When they remained sympathetically silent, amid the popular babble about the horrors of war and iniquity of peace-breakers, their tongues were not paralysed by remorse—they were merely in their cheeks. Their {176} sole concern was to humour public opinion, the results of whose disapproval they feared, quite as much as they despised its judgment.

That war draws out and gives scope to some of the noblest human qualities, which in peace-time are apt to be hidden out of sight, no one will deny. That it is a great getter-rid of words and phrases, which have no real meaning behind them—that it is a great winnower of true men from shams, of staunch men from boasters and blowers of their own trumpets—that it is a great binder-together of classes, a great purifier of the hearts of nations, there is no need to dispute. Occasionally, though very rarely, it has proved itself to be a great destroyer of misunderstanding between the combatants themselves.

But although the whole of this is true, it does not lighten the guilt of the deliberate peace-breaker. Many of the same benefits, though in a lesser degree, arise out of a pestilence, a famine, or any other great national calamity; and it is the acknowledged duty of man to strive to the uttermost against these and to ward them off with all his strength. It is the same with war. To argue, as German intellectuals have done of late, that in order to expand their territories they were justified in scattering infection and deliberately inviting this plague, that the plague itself was a thing greatly for the advantage of the moral sanitation of the world—all this is merely the casuistry of a priesthood whom the vanity of rubbing elbows with men of action has beguiled of their salvation.

THE ARROGANCE OF PEDANTS

Somewhere in one of his essays Emerson introduces an interlocutor whom he salutes as 'little Sir.' One feels tempted to personify the whole corporation of German pedants under the same title. When they {177} talk so vehemently and pompously about the duty of deliberate war-making for the expansion of the Fatherland, for the fulfilment of the theory of evolution, even for the glory of God on high, our minds are filled with wonder and a kind of pity.

Have they ever seen war except in their dreams, or a countryside in devastation? Have they ever looked with their own eyes on shattered limbs, or faces defaced, of which cases, and the like, there are already some hundreds of thousands in the hospitals of Europe, and may be some millions before this war is ended? Have they ever reckoned—except in columns of numerals without human meaning—how many more hundreds of thousands, in the flower of their age, have died and will die, or—more to be pitied—will linger on maimed and impotent when the war is ended? Have they realised any of these things, except in diagrams, and curves, and statistical tables, dealing with the matter—as they would say themselves, in their own dull and dry fashion—'under its broader aspects'—in terms, that is, of population, food-supply, and economic output?

Death, and suffering of many sorts occur in all wars—even in the most humane war. And this is not a humane war which the pedants have let loose upon us. Indeed, they have taught with some emphasis that humanity, under such conditions, is altogether a mistake.

"Sentimentality!" cries the 'little Sir' impatiently, "sickly sentimentality! In a world of men such things must be. God has ordained war."

Possibly. But what one feels is that the making of war is the Lord's own business and not the 'little Sir's.' It is the Lord's, as vengeance is, and {178} earthquakes, floods, and droughts; not an office to be undertaken by mortals.

The 'little Sir,' however, has devised a new order for the world, and apparently he will never rest satisfied until Heaven itself conforms to his initiative. He is audacious, for like the Titans he has challenged Zeus. But at times we are inclined to wonder—is he not perhaps trying too much? Is he not in fact engaged in an attempt to outflank Providence, whose pivot is infinity? And for this he is relying solely upon the resources of his own active little finite mind. He presses his attack most gallantly against human nature—back and forwards, up and down—but opposing all his efforts is there not a screen of adamantine crystal which cannot be pierced, of interminable superficies which cannot be circumvented? Is he not in some ways like a wasp, which beats itself angrily against a pane of glass?


[1] Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jay.