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(From The Observer, 1916.)

Peace! The thought of it has become almost strange. Yet we must face that thought, or we shall be as unprepared for it as we were for war. Practical men are fighting this war, practical men will make the peace that comes some day. And this unpractical pen ventures no speculation on how it will be brought about; it jots down merely some of the wider thoughts that throng, when for a moment the vision of Peace starts up before the mind!

Statesmen have said that the sequel of this war must be a League for Peace—a League for the enforcement by international action of international right. Whether that can be brought about at a Round Table Conference of the belligerents, or whether the League must be formed by the victorious Allies with the adherence of the neutral countries, and the Central Empires invited to fall in with their conclusions, on pain of ostracism, I hazard here no opinion. But, by whichever means the League for Peace is formed, it will be valueless unless three elements of security are present. Due machinery to secure time for the arbitration of dispute; due force to secure submission to such arbitration; due intention on the part of individual nations to serve the League loyally for the good of all. And the greatest of these three is the last.

The strength of a League for Peace will depend before all on the conduct of each separate nation. We in this country cannot control the faith, conduct, or stability of the other members of the League; we can control our own.

However it ends, this war must leave the bitterest feelings. League for Peace or none, there will remain for this country a menace from without.

If Germany were what is called “crushed”—a queer notion in connection with sixty-five millions of people—she would smoulder with such a fire of vengeance that a victorious British nation, slumbering in dreams of security, waxing fat and swollen-headed, would in a few years time be in as great danger as ever. If Germany be merely shorn of her pretensions and forced back within her former boundaries, then, unless good fortune bring her a social revolution and the comparative blessings of Democracy, Germany may be much the same as she has been, a soldier-ridden State, quickly or slowly gathering force, to reforge the iron machinery of the Prussian soul, and lead the armoured dance again. Stung to the quick by memory of mistake, knowing that she misjudged our nature and our power, she will not make mistake a second time. However ardently the successful may desire to forget—it takes two to bury the hatchet. Let no one think that Germany will forget. Should we, if we were beaten, or even badly thwarted?

The writer is as great a lover of Peace as any who will resent his suggestion that enmity will not readily be changed. But it is well to remember that the menace from without is only increased by forgetting that human nature is fundamentally the same all the world over; and still more increased by not remembering that what we dream and desire is not as a rule what we can obtain. Granted, that all must hope and strive for the constitution of a League for Peace, and aim at making its conditions permanent, it will still be folly to blink the contingency of further war for years to come.

The validity of such a League will hang on the first years. Keep it intact, enforce respect for its decisions, get men’s minds used to it, and after a short span nothing is more unlikely than that they will forego its blessings. But militarism will automatically and proportionately decrease only as men gain confidence in the League’s authority, recognizing at last that an impartial justice may apply to nations every bit as well as to individuals, when there is the force of general consent behind it. Given a generation of its rule, and the nations will no longer carry daggers to stab each other in the back, or swords to avenge their “honour.” There is no need for premature disarmament. Recognition of the menace from without will not harm a League for Peace during its first years, so long as we shy at all spirit of aggression, and are loyal to its first principle of “All for one, and One for all.”

But Peace will also bring to us in this country the menace from within which was with us before the war began, as it is with every nation at whatever time of life—the menace of its individual failings, of its rankness and its uncompleted justice, its riot after riches at the expense of national health, its exaggerated party strife, its penny wisdom and pound folly, its lack of an ideal, and perpetual drifting it knows not whither. If when the war ends we remain a nation, masters of our own lives—and there is no Briton who is not convinced that we shall—the menace from within must again be faced; faced with a stouter heart and a quicker brain; faced at last with some sort of corporate will to that victory over ourselves, so much more difficult to win than over hostile fleets and fortresses. To win the war, and thereafter lose to our own weakness, would cap the event with irony indeed!

It is the fashion with some to talk glibly of this war as if it were a purge that will drain from our State innumerable ills. The war’s honourable necessity none of us dispute, but for us it has in truth only the one advantage—of having revealed to ourselves our quality, re-established our faith. That quality, that faith, to be of any lasting use, will have to stand not only the dreadful spasm of war, but the long exhaustion, the manifold increase of economic stress and social trouble that will infallibly begin when the war ends. Unless we are resolved to carry on our effort of sacrifice, good-will, and courage long into the future, the last state of this land will be worse than the first. The purge that we like to speak of will be proven nothing but a debauch, paid for, like all debauches, by lassitude and spleen.

All national energy at the moment is inevitably bent to the ending of a state of things dreadful to every man and woman living; but, while doing this with all our might, we need to keep alive in our minds the feeling that the fight is not for mere gratification of the passion to down our foes, not just a spurt of military heroism, to be drowned in the drink and applause of victory; but a fight for something abiding in ourselves and in the world—for spiritual, not material, ends.

If, even while we are at war, we cannot keep the feeling that what we are fighting for is a permanent and steady advance in the just and reasonable life of nations, beginning with ourselves, we had better never have fought, for at the end we shall but have added to our vanity, and taken from the stock of our patience, our humanity, and our sense of justice. And so the feelings of the present are linked with the feelings and necessities that will arrive with peace. If the fine phrases we have used, and are still using, about Liberty, Humanity, Democracy, and Peace are not genuinely felt, they will come home to us and roost most vilely. By the outside world we shall be judged according to the measure of actuality we give hereafter to the claim we now make of being champion of Freedom and Humanity; and only according to our inward habit of thought during the war shall we be able to act when it is over. We can do nothing now perhaps, save prosecute the fight to its appointed end; but, if we are not to turn out fraudulent after the event, it is already time to feel ahead—to accustom our minds to the thought of the future efforts, Imperial and social, needful to meet future dangers, and to fulfil the trusts we shall have taken up.

From facile imaginings and Utopian dreams of a purged social life and a fortified morale to the real conditions that this war will leave is likely to be the farthest cry any of us will ever hear. We cannot have it both ways. If war, as most of us believe, is a terrible calamity, it will not leave an improved world. A sloppy optimism is not the slightest good, no more than a deliberate pessimism. “It will be all right after the war!” is, no doubt, the attitude of many minds just now. It will only be all right after the war if, with all the might of a sustained national will, we take care that it is. A great and solemn opportunity, the greatest our country has ever known, will be there, to be made or marred. The records of history are not too cheering, and experience of human nature in the past brings no very happy augury—for after too great effort comes reaction. But this age has higher aspirations, more self-consciousness than any that has gone before. To turn the possible calamity of this war to blessing we shall have to set our foot on Fatalism. There is no real antagonism between the doctrines of Determinism and Free Will. When things have happened, we see that they must have happened as they did; but how does this affect the freedom of our will before they happen—before we know which way they will turn out? Men and nations are what they make themselves.

What are we going to make ourselves—after?

What is this thing called the British Empire? A family of children, ruled by a Mother, or a gathering of kinsfolk under the roof of one ideal? Is it in reality an Empire or a Confederacy? It has been the first, it is fast becoming the second.

Imperialism is governed for good or ill by the principle that underlies it. At the time of the American War of Independence British government stood for the principle of Domination; even so late as the Boer War there is much doubt whether, for the moment at least, it stood for anything very different. A great change has come. The British Empire stands now, as it never yet stood, for the principle “Live and let live”; for coherence through common ideals and affections, rather than for coherence through force. In this war we have not ceased to assert that, besides the preservation of our own safety, we fight for the independence of little countries, and the rights of nations to settle their own affairs. By this declared championship, unless we wish to bring down poetic justice on our heads, we have consecrated the principle of Freedom within the confederacy of the British Empire; we have abrogated the right of coercion. Whether we realize it or no, we have fixed our national attitude. When the war is over, the feeling of Britain towards her kindred will be warmer and more generous than it has ever been; they have stood side by side with us like men and brothers, in touching loyalty. And the feeling in the kindred countries will be warmer and fuller of respect; they have seen the Old Country on her trial, have seen that she did not fail of what the world expected from her; seen that she had stuff in her beyond their hopes—for a new country is ever inclined to impatience, even to a certain contempt, for an old country. It was just as well for Britain’s reputation with her kinsfolk that this war came.

Yes, we shall be a true Confederacy, a great Democratic Confederacy, bound in honour to observe towards the world the principles that it observes towards itself; to keep its hands clean of narrow and provincial patriotism, of that raw overriding of the rights and interests of others, the ugliness of which we have just seen in the violation of Belgium, the Nemesis of which we are about to see.

And, looking first at home, we have got to get used now, at once, while we are still fighting, before we have the leisure and the energy to revive old animosities and party cries, to the idea that civil strife in Ireland after this war is over would be criminal lunacy, making us the playboy of the world, and destroying the prestige we shall have gained. It seems that our statesmen now recognize this. But whatever seems to settle the Irish question in time of war may not survive the strain of the peace that follows. If the lamentable cleavage in Ireland reappears—as it well may, for it is based on such real differences of temperament—let us in England be resolute not to be re-involved in partizanship. Let us resolve to force neither one party nor the other; confine ourselves to insisting that those who object so strenuously to inclusion in an opposite camp shall be as loth to include their opponents as they are to be included. Only of its own free will can Ireland ever be made one. If the halves be not forced, they will become one the faster. Time is the healer; time and forbearance, given an elastic machinery to encourage and ripen reconciliation. Of a surety, renewed trouble over Ireland would be the very worst augury for the future of an Empire that stands, and is to stand, for Freedom.

To be trustee for the principle “Live and let live”; watchdog against aggression by herself or any other; cornerstone of a world so built that all peoples, however small and weak, may know that they can safely work out their own destinies—that would be for Britain the grand ideal. But the British Empire can only hope to stand for it by keeping the form of a Free Confederacy, by the most rigid scrutiny of its own conduct, and by developing the feeling that it is beneath Imperial dignity to wrest material benefit from the losses of others.

When the war began we were in what is commonly called “a tidy mess.” If we really want to extract from the furnace of this fearful conflagration some gold of comfort, we shall see to it that we do not go back to the deadlock of futile and bitter strife that was then paralyzing the country’s soul. We shall see to it over Ireland; and over the woman’s question. Strife is the very condition of life and human progress, but in the name of reason let us have it over real live issues, not over those on which the national conscience has already in secret given judgment. Will not the first act of justice be the giving of the vote to women on the same terms as to men—with, perhaps, some limitation of age to equalize numbers, since the preponderance of women is brought about mainly by the less dangerous nature of their lives? A more humiliating or poisonous relation than that which prevailed between the sexes in this country before the war over the question of the vote can hardly be conceived. In the supreme appeal to our patriotism, that grievous trouble, that mischievous irritation, has vanished. The war has exorcised mutual exasperation, refounded mutual faith, healed many wounds, laid the ghosts of many doubts and arguments. The old bogeys are gone—that women are more bellicose than men; that they are less bellicose than men; that national safety would be imperilled one way or the other. The old plea is gone—that, since women do not fight and suffer for the State, they are not worthy to vote for her—gone, dispersed by service, sacrifice, and suffering. Every man has had to ask his heart which he would rather do: Go, as a man goes, to the trenches, or sit at home, as a woman has had to do, waiting for news of his life or death. And every man knows the answer.

The women of Britain have put themselves and their claims aside, to work and suffer for the country of which they are not yet citizens. It will be too black altogether if, after all they have gone through, they are again refused admittance to that citizenship.

Women who do not want the vote need never exercise it; women who think the vote bad for their sex will still be free as air, when the vote has been given, to organise their sex against use of the deadly thing. But to continue after this war to debar from being citizens, if they so wish, the hundreds of thousands of women who have served as loyally as men, and suffered more; to hang up again in hopeless chancery a measure of common justice that has long commended itself to nearly all the best minds in the country, a measure that, but for political accidents, would have already been granted, would be an unspeakable piece of national folly and ingratitude. There is surely now a general will to give the vote. What our minds must be turned to is the need, at the conclusion of the war, to have ready some means by which that general desire may be carried into effect, and women welcomed into the body politic, before the old deadlock difficulties and heart-burnings can begin again.

It is not my part to suggest to superior wisdom what those means should be; but perhaps one may express the personal conviction that a measure of universal suffrage, granting one vote to every man above a certain age (not necessarily so young as twenty-one), and one vote to every woman—possibly over such higher age as would equalize the voting power of the sexes, though I myself do not fear that inequality—that such a measure would not affect to any appreciable extent the balance between the great parties in the State, and would ensure that those parties in future sprang from the main cleavages of human nature rather than from the accidents of privilege. Is it too much to hope that, in heroic times, such a measure might be passed by consent? Too much to expect that after this struggle, where all stand shoulder to shoulder, we shall feel that a man, however poor, and a woman, however humble, has a stake in the country which has done so little for him or her, yet for which he or she is suffering perhaps more than the rest of us, and, extending the hand of fellowship, say: “It is time you stood shoulder to shoulder with us in peace as well as war.” The voteless man! The woman! How many of the first will have given their lives; how many of the second their hearts! Have heroism, death, sacrifice, gone by privilege of property or sex, in this war? Shall we really take the lives, the wounds, the sufferings of the many men debarred from citizenship by mere lack of property, the services and sacrifice of innumerable women, and just say: “Thank you, helots!” For in a real democracy what is he or she who has no vote, save a helot, at the absolute disposal of the enfranchised community? It is as the symbol of freedom that the vote is so precious! Granted! But if from the infancy of this country we had not been sticklers for symbols, should we now be the free people that we are—as peoples go?

If there is not to emerge from this community of suffering some community of fellowship and gladness, some sweeping out of old rancours from our hearts and of prejudices from our brains, and a resolve to fight the contests of the future with a greater generosity—then Peace will be a sorry festival.

There is so much work to be done, so great a fight for the nation’s health, ahead. It is time the decks were cleared of lumber!

We have adopted Compulsion, become a militarist Power! Melancholy consummation; but for the period of the war it was always, I think, a foregone conclusion. What is to happen after? How is national security to be guaranteed without permanent surrender to militarism?

Assuming that attention will be paid to retaining due command at sea and in the air, what further will be necessary to fit us for our part in a League for Peace if it comes, or, if it does not come, to make us safe?

There will here be put forward in roughest outline a notion—long in the writer’s mind, but for which there has seemed hitherto little chance of serious consideration—with the plea that there is really no alternative solution commensurate with the need for being thoroughly prepared, no other adequate way, in fact, out of a dilemma, short of retaining a measure of Continental militarism, repugnant to our traditions, and ruinously costly to a people in our position.

Put with the utmost brevity it is this: That all boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, not then at school, shall pass four months yearly in camps, which shall give them continuation schooling so far as practicable, technical education in the craft, trade, or occupation for which the boy is most suited or intends to adopt, together with training in all the essentials of a soldier’s life. At the close of their fourth training the boys should be affiliated to Territorial regiments, and pass at once to one definite period of military service, from three to six months, as may be necessary to convert them into potential soldiers; and that, from that point on, we should rely, as hitherto, on purely voluntary service. From such a nucleus a really efficient Territorial force of at least a million could probably be enrolled, and the skeleton of a much larger force kept in being.

The scheme is admittedly heroic, but it could be as gingerly introduced as seemed good to more practical men than is this writer.

There are in England, Scotland, and Wales some 1,500,000 boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen; there are eight months in the year when such education and training could be carried on. There will be an infinity of camps in being before the war is over. And however unsuited these camps may be at the moment for combining technical instruction with military training, many of them could undoubtedly be adapted. The chance of so much suitable material at hand, so much organizing capacity, and so much sense of awakened public spirit and necessity, will never come again. Some plan more or less heroic has got to be adopted, and it is submitted that no other could possibly kill so many birds with one stone. For, to the writer this proposal is even more important in relation to the menace from within than in relation to the menace from without.

The worst feature of our social scheme at present—the most dangerous flaw in the machine—is the waste, the absolute throwing away of the years between fourteen and eighteen, the most important period of the male life (and, for that matter, of the female life), the years when physique and character are forming when the instrument is malleable; years for the most part now left to chance and to blind-alley occupations. If we want to be a strong and healthy nation, this is the weakness of all others to overcome. The following is taken from the introduction to Mr. Arnold Freeman’s intimate and careful book: “Boy Life and Labour”:—

Now, if the richer classes of this country could be brought face to face with a sight of their own boys from fourteen to eighteen planted in this morass that boys of the poorer classes have as a matter of course to struggle through, they would marvel that the poorer classes have not long ago demanded that it be drained. Working-class parents have not demanded this chiefly because the boy from fourteen to eighteen has meant so many scanty shillings in the family pocket. When shillings are scarce one more or less seems vital. But, economically as well as nationally speaking, such rotting-down of the boys is grievously short-sighted. By this scheme, I believe, the working classes would be the first to benefit, and, after a few years, the last to wish it given up. Their ultimate gain would be incalculable, and, collectively speaking, their immediate loss even would be small. One million five hundred thousand boys training four months in the year means a seeming withdrawal of one boy in three, or half a million boys annually, from labour. But the number of boys between fourteen and eighteen actually employed before the war was only 1,264,000, so that there would be available some unemployed towards filling the places of the half million withdrawn. In the withdrawal too, of so large a number of boys from the labour market lies some chance of solving a problem that will begin to loom as soon as Peace comes: How to find places for the women whom the war has accustomed to work and wages? By this withdrawal, also, old and unemployed men would benefit; we shall want all the help we can get to minimize the unemployment that will sooner or later follow the war. So far as the labour market is concerned, the problem, in fact, would be mainly one of adjustment, but boys could be paired for their four years of training, one taking the other’s job—boy A. working it eight months the first and third years and four months the second and fourth year; vice vers with boy B. A nation which has achieved in these last few months such miracles of organization is surely equal to a task of adjustment no harder of accomplishment than that which has long confronted every militarist country in time of peace, and which may at any moment confront this country, if it neglects adequate preparation for home defence on some such lines.

Consider the life of the working man at present. The State provides him as a boy with education up to the age of fourteen; provides him as a man with labour exchanges, insurance, and old-age pensions. The one period, which in the more fortunate ranks of Society is regarded as above all preparatory for life, is the one period of which the State takes no account. It is a fatal hole in the ballot. Why should not the workers have the privilege for their sons that belongs by mere good fortune to the wealthier classes—the privilege of a training that will give them greater health, greater knowledge and technical skill, better habits, more self-respect, and the power as well as the inclination to defend their country if need be?

After this war the national readjustments that take place to meet the menace from without and the menace from within must surely have relation to fundamental necessities, and not merely be the top-dressing and timorous expedients that accompany the piping times of a long-unshaken peace.

In the expenditure of large sums to achieve its ends the State need not look for its money back this year or next, so long as there is a certainty of the money back manifold ten and twenty years hence.

The expense of a national scheme for the training and technical education of all boys from fourteen to eighteen would have been looked on before the war as an insuperable objection. But the truly wonderful example of faith shown by the Russian Government in cutting off their own colossal revenue from drink at the outbreak of the war, and the immediate incalculable advantage to the strength of the Russian nation that accrued thereby, has knocked penny-wisdom off its perch.

This is not the time or place, nor am I qualified to examine the cost in detail. But, whatever that cost, can there be any doubt that the increased physical and industrial efficiency, coupled with the national security guaranteed by such training, would bring the outlay back tenfold within a generation? And can there be any question that it would conserve wealth, which adult training would but dissipate? When the war is over there will be great numbers of men whose lives have been hopelessly jolted, who have to find new occupations—men qualified, and probably only too willing, to take positions of technical instruction and military training under such a scheme. And the boys of the nation, already infected with desire to stand for something in the national security, would fall in with good spirit.

Apart from the question of expense, opposition would come, no doubt, from the employers of boy labour, and from the working-class parents of boys who are contributing to the family purse.

Both these objections can surely be met in the main by careful organization and dovetailing of employment. Only half the boys would be training at once; and for the winter months, of greatest stress for the poorer classes, none would be training; boy-labour is not highly-skilled labour, it is rarely of a nature that cannot equally well be supplied by another boy, and, failing that, by women, or men past the prime of work. With good-will and co-operation it should not surpass the wit either of employers or of the officials of special Boy-Labour Exchanges to cope with the dislocation. A boy’s earnings are not vast; when his own keep has been paid there remain but few shillings for the family exchequer. The value of these few shillings is in many cases, however, enormous; the loss might be made good by some system of insurance. Nor is it inconceivable that camp work would produce a small wage that could go to the assistance of the boys’ families. Omelettes cannot be made without breaking eggs; and, even if distress were caused at the start, can it be seriously weighed against the great ultimate benefit to the working classes, and the overwhelming advantages of rejuvenation in the blood and brain of a whole nation? The war has shown what those who have had to do with camp life for boys knew well before—the vast change that can be made in the physique and bearing of young fellows by a few months of fresh air and training. If those months are repeated yearly for four years, the training combined with civil instruction, and followed by a short spell of full military service, the country will have not only potential soldiers, but real men and citizens, at the end.

This is interference with the liberty of the subject. Yes; but a boy is only a boy. In the richer classes he is sent to school till he is eighteen without any say whatever in his fate. And as to interference with the liberty of the parents: Are they not now completely interfered with, in reference to their children up to the age of fourteen; and is there any sane reason why that interference should not be continued partially, for the good of the boys, and of us all, up to the age of eighteen?

The scheme is nothing but a form of militarism! Yes, but facts must be faced. After the lesson of this war, its appalling suddenness, its complete disregard of the law of nations, after the hatred it has evoked and the burning for revenge it will leave, are we prepared to trust our country and all that it stands for, to old-time methods and—luck? If not what form of training can we have that will be less militarist than this? To relapse into our unpreparedness is but to court the chances of an attack, to shirk our share perhaps of duty under a League for Peace; and to risk being forced into rank militarism, in one of those panics certain to come freely after such a war.

If I thought such a scheme of boy-training would bolster up privilege, foster a dangerous docility, put power into the hands of our Junkers, and generally convert our country into a kind of Germany, I would shun it like the devil. To keep boys of that age at it all the time would be dangerous; to train them for civil and military life four months in the year, with one short final period of military service—harmless. After the war—perhaps not at once, but within a few years—there will almost certainly be serious civil troubles, and any such scheme of boy training would need to be inaugurated under the most solemn engagements not to employ the youth of the nation in the quelling of strikes, civil riot, or what-not. It would be for Labour to fix those guarantees before they gave adherence to the plan. Having secured themselves, I believe they might look forward to nothing but benefit, after the first rubs and jolts.

Consider, too, that except under some such scheme there is practically no chance of putting into practice another national dream—the resettlement of the land. By attaching farm lands to those camps, town boys could be instructed in the difficult work of modern agriculture. Farm workers do not grow on thorn-trees, or even spring full-fledged from the brains of ardent reformers. They are made, not born, and made in youth. It is time to begin making them, if indeed it is not already too late. No adequate land scheme will flourish without machinery on a large scale for educating boys in modern farm work.

But there is another aspect of this matter worth more than passing attention. If the war ends victoriously, Great Britain will bulk very large, dangerously large, in the eyes of the world. The German cry is: “Great Britain is the tyrant; the Fleet of England is the menace, threatening every country!” No effort will be left untried to din that whisper into every ear, to implant that suspicion in every mind. To escape the world’s jealousy will not be possible. And, if in addition to a dominant Fleet, and possibly a dominant air service, we preserve militarism on the present Continental lines, we shall excite—whatever the peaceful nature of our conduct and intentions—the most profound uneasiness and envy in quarters where we most wish to be regarded with perfect equanimity. On the one hand, then, we have the danger of relapsing into a state of unpreparedness that may provoke another war; on the other, the danger of rousing too great fear and envy by an ostentatious strength, and of increasing a burden of armament already too heavy on our shoulders. Between these dangers lies a path of safety in the training of our boys. But there lies much more than that. There lies the grander social future of our country—an incalculable physical, moral and economic uplifting, a nation more self-reliant and more eager, purged of that don’t-care look, of the town blight which was settling on it fast—there is no nation suffering from town life to anything like the extent to which we suffer from it. Just now the war has lifted that blight; but with peace it will come down again, unless we fight it.

Is this lamely outlined plan a mere dream, or is it a possible, nay, a probable, measure, in times big with chances—in times such as we may never have again, for tuning up our life, for equalizing fortune, removing foul places, and essential weakness?

With the suggestion that it is worth thinking over, at any rate, the writer leaves the answer to those less fatuous than himself.

What were already glaring national ills before the war will, afterwards, be ills demanding the most immediate, sustained, and resolute attention.

There exists in America a vehicle called the “rubber-neck” car, in which the tourist is taken and shown the interesting features of the neighbourhood. Before the political machine settles down again to work, legislators, editors, business men, writers—we might all with profit take a round trip and see again evils that our country has never really faced in the past, but will have to face, and grievously swollen at that, in the future. At the back of all lack of effort is lack of realization. Statistics of national problems may foster an impersonal and scientific attitude, but they do nothing to supply the feeling from which alone comes driving force.

Take our slums! The powers vested in the State or in local bodies for dealing with slum areas are obviously either not sufficient or not sufficiently put to use. Not, of course, that any quick or light-hearted transformation can be expected; the roots of this evil are too tortuously coiled in economies and natural selfishness.

Still, just as realization of our country’s danger at the hands of Germany has produced a marvellous crop of effort and sacrifice, so realization of the equally distressing menace to the country from within should produce something similar, when patriotic attention is once more free, and time and strength at liberty, for fighting dangers at home.

The housing problem desperately needs attention; but, though much can be done, good gamblers cut their losses, and the adult generation of the slums has got more or less to be cut, that greater effort may be concentrated on the children.

The war has focussed attention on the need for arresting infant mortality. Good! But there is little use in saving babies if you are not going to feed them decently when they are out of swaddling clothes. A big step forward has been taken of late years towards the feeding of necessitous children, both at school and in crÊches but many more steps need to be taken. If this is not a State matter, then nothing is. To neglect the nourishment of its children is at once the paltriest economy, the least sagacious policy, and the worst inhumanity of which a nation can be guilty. The old-fashioned idea that children must go hungry or be fed so as to grow up rickety because their parents (being “rotters” already) must not be rotted further is a doctrine devoid both of common sense and compassion. A nation either has a will towards a future, or it has none. If it has none, for what are we fighting this most bloody war? What does our honour matter, or our independence either? But the future of a nation is its children. As they grow up, healthy, clean, hopeful, efficient, so will our future be. As they grow up—half-fed, dirty, don’t care, and ignorant—so will Britain! If to look after the children makes worse paupers of the parents, well—let it! Have some courage. Do not be hypnotized by a word, and, grasping the shadow, lose the substance. Give the children blood in their little bodies, and hope in their little brains. Any decent parent will be the better for that; the indecent parent is a loss already, and must be cut. Working-class mothers who neglect to feed their children better than themselves are but exceptions, nor will a sounder system of State-help seriously alter the deepest instinct of human nature. The heroism of British soldiers in the trenches is no greater than the lifelong heroism of British mothers in the slums struggling against want. This is a matter that should not be left to the discretion of local bodies. Once the principle has been admitted—and who can honestly deny that it has?—the rest should be simply a question of fact medically certified not here and there, but all over the country. Either it is justice and wisdom to feed the children, or it is not, and the scruples, however philosophical, of gentlemen prepared to watch other people’s children go hungry should not any longer be indulged.

The estimated number of school children in England and Wales being fed by the State in 1911-1912 was 230,000 out of a school population of 5,357,367. The estimated number of this school population showing signs of malnutrition is variously given at from 10 to 20 per cent. Taking it at 15 per cent., or 800,000 children, we have more than half a million school children wanting meals and not getting them. This is appalling. There is no other word for it. But when the children under school age who need food and are not getting it, are added to this number, the proportions of this national folly and inhumanity stagger the brain. It does not yet seem to be grasped that these children, who are fighting not only against insufficiency of proper food, but against bad air and bad housing, grow up with so much per cent. knocked off their national value. A stitch in time is supposed to save nine. A pound spent on the age of growth brings back many pounds from the age of stability. To those few who ride the doctrine of Liberty to the death of national health it may simply be said: So long as you have no hope of repealing compulsory education, you have no right to let children receive it in an unfit condition. Education and decent nourishment are inseparable; and decent nourishment is as necessary in the years that come before as in the years of schooling. No! In reality the principle is now rooted, and, like other things, it’s all a question of money. But a country with a capital of £16,000,000,000 and an income of £2,100,000,000 cannot really afford to allow this state of affairs to continue—especially after the gold-letting of this war. The state our national finances will be in makes it all the more imperative that we should have a well-nourished and efficient population, or we shall never get out of the slough.

During this war our heroism has jibbed at Liquor. That jovial monster looms nearly as large as ever. We shall have a National Debt after the war of three or four thousand millions, perhaps more. And yet the cheapest thing that could possibly be done, in the long run, would be to increase it and buy up the Liquor Trade; achieve that dream of Joseph Chamberlain, “the total and absolute elimination of any idea of private gain in the retail sale of liquor”; convert drink into food to the tune of some eighty millions a year; and vastly diminish the number of children that require State nourishment, and the number of underfed men and women. In 1911, £162,797,229 was the drink bill of the nation; of which it is estimated that about £110,000,000 was spent by the working class. The working classes are no more inclined to liquor than the rest of the population, but they have obviously less to spare for the indulgence of their inclination. With proper control of the liquor traffic they will perhaps spend half what they spend now, extracting therefrom just as much enjoyment, and most of the other half will go into the bodies of themselves and their children in the form of food.

Before the war one-tenth of our people were getting too little food; two-tenths more just balanced on a knife-edge of bare sufficiency. And the great majority of this third of our population were too closely or too badly housed for health.

What is it going to be—after—unless our measures in regard to food, to housing, and to drink, are heroic? For heroic measures we shall need a keener sense of justice, a larger humanity, than we have ever had. Though the war may conceivably not diminish humane feeling in those who fight, it blunts the sensibilities of those who do not see its horrors at first-hand. Tales of others’ sufferings have become the daily fodder of the brain; narratives of death and misery the companions of every hour. Alongside the brutalities and agonies of the war, the injustice and cruelties of normal civil live seem pale and tame. Man has only a certain capacity for feeling; one expects callousness now towards civil inhumanities. But must that callousness last after peace has come? If so, we are in a bad way.

What is it that our modern State is reaching after? Presumably health, and balance. And what are these qualities built on, if not on Justice? At the back of all social inhumanities will be found a lack of reasonable freedom and opportunity for some people, and the possession in other people of too much freedom and opportunity. And for the swift redress of social cruelties, the thorough attainment of social justice, we have at present not only to contend with human nature, but with an admitted deficiency in our legislative machinery.

When the chief obstacle to laws is not the callousness of public opinion, but a mere block on the lines of procedure, some drastic change is due, a new departure wanted. Before the war many measures of reform hung in the wind year after year, not because there was no public feeling behind them, not even because there were the usual political cleavages concerning them, but simply because time could not be found in which to pass them. Of such were: Measures for the feeding and education of children; the control of drink; rural housing; improvement of slum areas; furtherance of the minimum wage; reform of the Poor Law; of the Divorce Law; of the disability that attends the needy in their access to civil justice; of the imprisonment of poor persons for debt; of the procedure in regard to pauper lunatics; of the prison system; of provision for the blind; measures for the better treatment of animals. All these and others hung in the wind; are they to go on hanging those when the war is over? Wanted before, they will be wanted still more badly then, because the general conditions of life will for some years, perhaps many years, be harder; and economic pressure fosters rough and unjust treatment.

Is it too early for a united effort, to think out, in readiness for peace, a scheme of parliamentary procedure which shall afford time for the serious and uninterrupted consideration of non-party measures, and the furtherance of needed reforms?

Party no longer exists, but they who think it has gone for good dwell in a fools’ paradise. As sure as fate it will spring up again, because it is rooted in temperamental difference. But must it come back with all its old cat-and-dog propensities, and waste of national time? It will, unless some method be devised that will remove some of party’s unhandsome opportunities and save it from itself. Politicians alone know the difficulties, many and great, in the way of a better procedure. Surely, while faction is in abeyance, Parliament will set its wits to overcoming those difficulties, so that when the war ends we may not witness again the tedious and distressful blocking of so many needed measures that prevailed aforetime. Party was made for the Country, not the Country for Party; and what was tolerated with Job-like patience before this vast upheaval is not by any means likely to be tolerated after. Needs will be more insistent; the sense of reality much greater; the aspiration towards National Health a live thing, because it will be so desperately necessary.

Reform of parliamentary procedure is obviously the prime precedent for national reform. Shall not then the question be even now given all the attention that can be spared to it? What better moment—when men of all parties are filled with the one great thought—Our Country!

One more word before these vapourings cease. The national task in this war is still mighty enough to absorb all action, but not quite all thought, for it is no spasmodic effort, meaning nothing to the future. To carry the spirit of to-day into a long to-morrow, making of our patriotism not a mere torrent soon spent and leaving an arid plain, but a life-giving, even-flowing river—for that one must not lose the sense of continuity; one must think ahead. More! One must resolve—resolve that this new unity shall stand not only the strain of war, but the greater strain of the coming Peace. After—will come the test. Having guaranteed our country for the moment from destructive powers without, shall we at once redeliver it to the destructive powers within—go back to strife over Ireland, the Suffrage, the Welsh Church, and the Second Chamber? Or, preserving our new-found unity, settle generously and in a large spirit those distressful matters, and pass on to the real work—to a wider and freer view of Empire, to the right training of the nation, the right feeding of the nation, to securing for each man, woman, and child a solid foundation of health and hope; to the restoration of the land and of our food supply; to clearance of mutual suspicions, and the stablishing of a new trustfulness between Labour and Capital; to the banishment of inhumanity; the freeing of the eyes of Justice; and interment of the privileges of class?

Shall we go back to rolling in the troughs of a dirty sea or set new sail and steer out with a true faith in our destiny as the Ship of Freedom and Justice?

Is that to be our case? Let us not underrate the danger. At this moment and until the war is over, we are full of patriotism and good-will. We have to be. There’s the trouble. Once Peace comes, and the unifying force of our common peril is over, what then? Is the old raw party spirit to ramp among us again? If a man would discover what danger there is of a return to every kind of disunity, let him take a definite national question and see how much of his private interest or conviction he is prepared to abate for the sake of the public good. Mighty little! Are we to dissolve again into those “rascally Radicals” and those “infernal Tories”; into “grinders of the poor” and “discontented devils”; into “brutal men” and “hysterical females” with all the other warring tribes of the Armageddon of Peace? Are we to lose utterly the inspiring vision of our Country, in the squabbles of domestic life? Some of that intense vision must go, alas! But surely not all. And yet all will go unless we keep in mind the thought that this war is not an end, but the means to an end, which none of us will see, but all of us can further in time of peace as well as in time of war—an end for whose attainment the blood and treasure now spilled is but as a preliminary.

It will be heart-breaking if from this stupendous cataclysm no lasting good to the world and to Britain can be brought forth. Its horror, even now, few realize who are not at the front. One who was many months on ambulance duty in the French lines wrote these words:

If from this horror, fought through and endured, as we believe, for the future of our Land and the future of mankind, there is to come no blessing, no advance to freedom and health and justice.... What then? Nothing will be easier than to take up again the peace life of Britain as it was, and worse than it was, because coarsened by the passions of war, and embittered by the strain of a greater economic stress. Nothing will be easier than to give rein to the instincts of greed, pugnacity, and rancour, now hard held in by sentiment and the common peril; to step back and walk blindly in a country where all is faction; where class shuns class, and men and women are bitterly opposed; where the youth of the nation is all the time running to seed; where children go hungry and millions throughout the land are miserably housed and fed; where the access to justice is often still beyond the reach of the poor; where helplessness is not yet a guarantee against ill-usage. Once the war effort is over, nothing will be easier than—from a resolved and united nation—to become a crowd pressing this way and that, without view and without vision, seeking purse and place, or, at the best, fulfilment of small factious policies.

No one can tell yet what will be the world-sequel of this war—whether it will bring a long peace or other wars; the enlargement of democracy or the hardening of autocratic rule; the United States of Europe or a congery of distrustful Powers working for another “Day.” Only one thing we know, that in our charge will be our own national life, to make or to mar; to prepare against whatever fortune the outer world shall brew, to prepare against the subtle march of inward dissolution. Our future does not lie on the knees of the gods; it lies in our own hands, and hearts, and brains, and the use that we shall make of them.

Swift is the descent to hell, and no wings fly so fast thither as the wings of material success. Shall we go that way? Or shall we, having fixed our eyes on a goal far beyond the finish of this war, quietly, resolutely in our conduct to the outer world and in our national life, begin at once transmuting into deeds those words: Freedom, Health, Justice for All?

As a man thinks and dreams, so does he act. It is time to think and dream a little of the future, while the spirit of unity is on us, the vision of our Country with us; so that, when we see again the face of Peace, we may continue to act in unity, having in our hearts the good of our Land, and in our eyes the vision of her, growing ever to truer greatness and beauty.

I suppose there are Britons who have never seen the sea; thousands, perhaps—unfortunate. But is there a Briton who has not in some sort the feeling that he is a member of a great ship’s crew? Is there one who never rejoices that his Land sails in space, unboarded, untouched by other lands? It must be strange to be native of a country where, strolling forth, one may pass into the fields or woods of another race. In all that we are, have been, and shall be, the sea comes first—the sea, sighing up quiet beaches, thundering off headlands, the sea blue and smiling under our white cliffs, or lashing the long sands, the sea out beyond foreshore and green fields, or rolling in on wind-blown rocks and wastes. The sea with its smile, and its frown, and its restless music; the grim, loyal, protecting sea—our mother and our comrade, our mysterious friend!

The ancients dreamed of “the islands of the blessed”; we of these green and misty isles almost, I think, believe that we inhabit them.

A strange and abiding sense is love of Country! Though reason may revolt, and life here be hard, ugly, thankless, though one may even say, “I care no more for my own countrymen than for those of other lands; I am a citizen of the world!” No use! A stealing love has us fast bound; a web of who knows what memories of misty fields, and scents of clover and turned earth; of summer evenings, when sounds are far and clear; of long streets half-lighted, and town sights, not beautiful but homely; of the skies we were born beneath, and the roads we have trodden all our lives. What memories, too, of names and tales, small visions all upside down perhaps, yet true and warm to us because we listened and saw when we were no older than foals at their dams’ heels. It is not our actual Country, but its halo, that we love—the halo each one of us has made for it. There are evenings under the moon, dewy mornings, late afternoons, when over field and wood, over moor or park or town, unearthliness hovers; so, over our native land hovers a glamour that burns brighter when we are absent, and flames up in glory above her when we see her driven or hard pressed. No man yet knows the depths of our love for these islands of the blessed. May no man ever know it!

And to each of us there will be some ingle-nook where the spirit of our country most inhabits, where the fire of hearth and home glows best, and draws us with its warmth from wanderings bodily or spiritual. To know that in these isles no native-born but has a quiet shrine, be it lovely, or devoid of earthly beauty, where he or she in fancy worships the whole land, gives reality to the word Patriotism.

This love of country is so deep and sacred that we cannot utter it; let us not forget that it is as deep and sacred to the natives of other lands!

Looking back into the dark of history, how quaint is our origin—offspring of invading robbers, wave after wave, for some two thousand years before the Norman Conquest! If these be not in truth the blessed islands that the ancients dreamed of, they seem to have been sufficiently attractive. Who our Neolithic forerunners were, whence they came, or whether they were here before our isles cut loose from the mainland and set out on an endless voyage, we shall never, I suppose, know. A strain of their blood, more than we think perhaps, must still be alive within us; the rest of it is freebooting fluid—Celts and Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, all robbers; blent at last—and in Ireland not yet quite blent—to the observance of honour among thieves.

Ever since the sea brought us here—all but the Neolithic few—in the long-ships of the past, what a slow, ceaseless fusing has gone to the making of the modern Briton—that most singular among men! I hold the theory—how far scientifically tenable I know not—that the continued vitality of a race depends on two main conditions: the presence of many strains of blood not too violently differing one from the other, and the absence of too much sun. I hold that nations may become too inbred; or may have the sap dried out of them by heat. In Britain we cannot yet have reached the point of perfect fusion—are not in danger for a long time of becoming too inbred. Nor can the sun be called a desperate peril. We are “game,” as they say, for centuries yet; unless——! For our besetting danger is another.

How many of us realize that far beyond all other nations we are town dwellers, subject to town blight? That is a new, an insidious, malady, whose virulence we have hardly yet appreciated or had time to study. Can it be arrested by homoeopathy—or must sweeping allopathic remedies be applied? Will town blight be cured by better town conditions, and our gradual adaptation—or by going back to the land? By both. But, if not by both within the next half-century, then—I fear—by neither. Town blight has had as yet but two full generations to lay its grip on us. We have time for its defeat if we have courage and sense. But it is an enemy more deadly than the Germans; not so easy to see and to fight against!

When children first discover gooseberries or other kindly fruits of the earth, they eat too quickly and too much. We were the first people to discover the means to “happiness” known as modern industrialism. With huge appetite we set upon it, and are caught by surfeit. I have heard this view of our case seriously countered—the Cockney and the northern townsman are thought to be our most vital types. Verily they have a pretty courage; but to such as are light-hearted on this matter I would say: “Go, in summer, to some seaside place where humble townsfolk have come to make holiday, as healthy and little pallid as they ever are, and—watch. Then wing off to some remote fishing village, or countryside where such peasants as are left are not too badly off, and—watch. Then summon your candour, and tell in which of your two fields of observation you have seen more vigour of limb, beauty of face, or at all events more freedom from petty distortions and a look of dwindling.”

I cannot explain exactly what I mean by town blight. It is not mere pallor or weakliness, but rather a loss of balance—a tendency to jut here and be squashed in there; an over-narrowness of head; an over-development of this feature at the expense of that; with a look of living too fast, of giving out more than is taken in. The modifications of the Briton through town life are countless, and all the time subtly going on. I do not deny that there is much good, too, in the transformation—the quickening of a temperament by no means quick; a widening of sympathies in a character not too sympathetic; the deepening of humaneness and the love of justice in a nature with an old Adam in it of brutality. A frank humanitarian and humanist, like myself, dwells cheerfully on that, for it does seem, while other changes in human life are always arguable—such as the increase of efficiency purchased by loss of breadth and kindliness; economic gain by loss of health and balance; greater will-power by loss of understanding and tolerance—that the increase of humane instinct, with which is bound up the love of justice, is alone sheer gain. Some, I know, think it bought at the expense of what is called “virility.” To those I recommend a steady glimpse at the modern British sailor. Of late years I have been reading accounts of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. There is no better study for those who doubt whether men can be brave and hard and at the same time chivalrous and gentle. One returns from mental travel with those heroes convinced that true humanity and gentleness and justice actually depend on bravery and stoicism. Picked men, you say! Well, go to the British Fleet, or the British Army—in a word, to the British male population of robust age—and you will come back, I believe, with the same general conviction—that where the truest bravery is there also is humaneness—that these qualities grow naturally twined together. All evidence from the war proves that the Briton is as hard a fighter, and far better behaved, than he ever was. Better behaviour under war conditions means nothing but increase in each individual fighter, of just and humane instinct, and that sense of personal responsibility which is the other main advantage coming to us from town life. In towns a man finds his level, acquires the corporate sense, sees himself as part of the civic whole, learns that his own ills are shared by too many, to bear thinking of save with a touch of humour and contempt. The British sailor whose shattered arm was being dressed in the battle of Jutland well summed up what I mean: “To hell with my arm, doctor; I want to get up there again and give the boys a hand!” That would seem very much the spirit of the modern town-bred British.

Now, is there anything which in some sort differentiates this Britain of ours from other lands?

A country is such a huge conglomeration of types and qualities; such a seething mass of energies! It seems sometimes as impossible to thread one’s way to the heart of that maze as to fix the pattern of a thousand gnats dancing in a sunlit lane! One turns eyes here, there, follows this movement and that, thinks one has the clue, falls back gaping. Is there any essence which sets the British soul apart, as an oak is set apart from beech or lime tree? Can there, indeed, be any single essence in a land where Iberian and Celt, Saxon and Norseman, still quarrel in the blood? I think there is, and will hazard an attempt to throw on the screen some faint shadow of the elusive thing.

Take certain salient British characteristics: Our peculiar national under-emphasis and stolidity; our want of imagination; that desire to have things both ways—which is generally called our “hypocrisy”; our turn of ironic humour; our bulldog grip; our lack of joie de vivre; our snobbishness—dying, but dying very hard; our perpetual desire for the moral in action or art; our regard for “good form”; our slow dumb idealism, hand in hand with our profound distrust of ideas; our propensity for grumbling under prosperity, and our cheeriness under hardship; our passion for games, and our creed of “playing the game”; our love of individual liberty—even our perversity and crankiness.... Take them all, and consider whether there is not some fundamental underlying instinct.

I believe that the mainspring of the British soul, concealed by a layer of mental laziness from superficial scrutiny, is nothing but an inveterate instinct for competition. The Briton is the most competitive creature on the face of the earth—save possibly the American of British descent. True—we would, as they phrase it on the turf, make a race with a donkey, for our climate has certainly sluggarded the circulation of our blood. None the less, we have a perpetual secret itch for competition, so bone deep that most of us do not even know of it. All through our lives we are playing a match. When the Briton is not secretly pitting himself against somebody or something, he can hardly be said to be alive. I do not think, speaking racially, that he cares so much for what he gets by the game as for the game itself and victory in it. He sets little store by the perfection of his handiwork so long as it beats the handiwork of others; or—and this is the saving grace—so long as in the accomplishment he has defeated the slackness or cowardice in his own nature—won the match within himself.

Let us turn them over one by one, those salient British characteristics:

Stolidity! Under-emphasis! It is surely nothing but contempt of fuss; and what is fuss but allowing too much importance to the task or person you are up against? The instinct of competition forbids that in the Briton; he is so competitive that he does not deign to let people see that he is stretching himself.

Want of imagination! That is partly the mental laziness, no doubt, engendered by our thick climate; but much of it, I think, is only the subconscious refusal by our competitive natures to see too quickly and clearly what we have before us, lest we be discouraged. A great help—to have muddled through most of the battle before you are aware of the size and length of it!

Our rather grim turn of humour! Is it not generally a jest at the expense of a fate which thought it could set us down?

Our hypocrisy! One would not admit a physical defeat, but clench the teeth and have at it again; then, how admit moral defeat? Impossible! Face must be saved—instinctively again, unconsciously—for the last thing we plead guilty to is our “hypocrisy.”

The bulldog grip—speaks for itself.

Our lack of joie de vivre! We are playing a match—we have no chance or time to relax, to lie on our backs and let the sunlight warm our faces. We have not time to give ourselves up to life; there is so much to beat—we are playing a match.

Our veneration for rank of every kind! Snobbishness! This is surely nothing but our recognition of the value of attainment; acknowledgment of victories won, if not in the present, in the past; tacit confession that we, too, want to win such victories.

Our craving for a moral! Well, what is a moral, if not the triumph of what we call “good” over what we call “evil”? We crave that triumph—not only in action, but also, I fear, in art. Art must not merely excite within us impersonal emotion; it must be useful to us in our match with life—a pity!

Our worship of “good form” is partly dread of that ridicule which would be a proof of our having fallen short, and partly recognition by a people who have long lived an exceptionally stable social life, that this competitive instinct of ours, unchecked by rules, becomes a nuisance to ourselves and others. In the same way, “playing the game” is but the necessary check on our passion for a match.

Our inveterate dumb idealism is of course a primary constituent element in the fighting nature; and our distrust of ideas a natural lazy dread of being pushed on too fast by that idealism.

Our grumbling habits, when there is little or nothing to grumble at, show, I think, that in slackness and prosperity we are really out of our element; while our ironic cheerfulness under hardship—the cry “Are we down-hearted? No-o!” proves that times of stress suit our competitive temperament.

Our love of individual liberty! A man, the joy of whose life is winning an event over himself or others, naturally desires the utmost latitude for these perpetual contests. And so the Briton becomes “a crank” more often than members of any other race.

One should never drive theory too far, but I seriously believe that the foundation of the Briton’s soul is this dumb and utter refusal to admit that he ever can be beaten, either by himself or any other. He is concerned to win, rather than to understand or to enjoy. I do not know whether this is admirable, but I am pretty sure that it is true. And behind and beyond all the better reasons for pursuing this war to a victorious end, there is always the inarticulate, intense, instinctive feeling, that we must win the match, since to fail would mean not only defeat by the Germans, but the defeat within us of our will and of our own nature.

If I am right as to this essence of the British soul, what does it signify to the world of our friends and enemies? It means, of course, a rock on which our friends may build—it assures the fulfilment of all pledges, and endurance till the day of victory; but it carries with it a certain element of danger. Vice treads on the heels of Virtue in the competitive soul. How far may our nature become a peril, not only to ourselves, but to our Allies and the whole world?

Underneath all our resolution not to fall short of such measure of victory as shall free the invaded lands, and prove to all that the over-riding of a little harmless neutral country has not paid; underneath this absolute resolve, which of us does not long for a real peace, an end of a world that is like a powder magazine which malevolent or foolish hands can fire at any moment? The difficulties that lie between us and such a peace are very great; far be it from me to minimize them, or blink the seeming impasse of the situation ahead. When the end draws near, in every warring land the great dumb mass-of-the-people’s only thought will be: “For God’s sake, have done with it, and let us get back to life!” But, jutting out of this mass, in each country, and especially in our own, there will be, on the one hand, idealists and dreamers, a little band, seeing a vision too visionary, telling of it to the wind; on the other, a far larger, louder band of men of affairs, judging of matters with the immediate eye, for immediate profit, or, as they will rather phrase it, for permanent profit, under the waving flags of patriotism; of men talking of a lasting peace and genuinely wishing for it—so long as it does not mean foregoing anything, so long as they may let go no advantage so dearly bought. Already the cry on both sides is for a commercial war starting from the final battle. All that is stupendously natural! But in this medley of demand, how will statesmen steer? Will they, who have to remake the world, have a large vision, and see that, vital before all else, is the seizing of a chance—that has never come before and may never come again—to establish and set going a Court of Nations, backed this time by real force? Will they grasp the wisdom implicit in the feeling of the great dumb multitudes: “For God’s sake have done with it, and let us live!”

We have not yet got to the moment on which the whole future will hang. When we do, I fancy that this competitive soul of ours may want too much to have things both ways. Whatever the terms of the peace that comes, that peace will not last without a League of Nations to guarantee it; and such a League we cannot have unless impartiality be its backbone; unless we mean that it shall judge justly, and enforce judgment without fear or favour; unless we are willing to accept its judgments in all matters, and not merely when it suits us. A man does not guarantee the health of his body just by holding his neighbour down; and the true path to security and a great future lies in the efforts we make to improve ourselves, rather than in those we make to injure others. The freedom and fair opportunity which are vital to a lasting peace need not bar us from national preparedness, from intelligent effort to save ourselves and our Allies from unfair commercial competition, need not prevent us from assuring our safety and improving our corporate life. But they do mean that we must keep free of a militarist and tyrannical spirit. How far will our competitive British soul, when peace comes, be proof against that virus? Are we, in the winning of military victory, going quietly to accept moral defeat, letting our ideals turn turtle and float with their keels to the stars? I wonder.

This League for Peace we talk of—that even statesmen talk of—will not be born of violent minds, but out of level and long-headedness, and the desire to benefit not only our own country, but the world. It is an undertaking fraught with the most poignant difficulty. If you imagine it fledged from birth, with wings full grown—if you imagine a world disarmed, immediately responsive to law—it is but an Utopian dream. The world will assuredly remain armed; at a single stride one cannot step from hell to heaven. But armedness need not prevent the nations from establishing procedure for the delay of warlike action—a tribunal to which all disputes must be referred; need not prevent them from pledging themselves to forcible support of its decisions, from declaring commerce sacro-sanct between members of the League, and punishing by blockade and ostracism any nation that betrays its membership, or flouts a decision, so that the sanctity of a nation’s commerce may in future depend on that nation’s loyalty to other nations; nor need it prevent States from taking the manufacture of war material out of private hands. Only on the proved efficacy of such measures as these will the disarmament of nations follow, slowly, surely, equally; for man will then be acting, as he loves to act, not by rote and theory, but on the evidence of facts.

Is all this a wild-cat notion, or a mere natural growth out of what went before the war, and out of the terrific tragedy of the war itself—a plan tentative and experimental, that may gradually force its way to confidence, till the Court of Nations reaches the unquestioned authority and permanence of each individual nation’s courts of justice?

We of the Allied countries must surely long for such a plan; nor, I think can any neutral nation which has watched and trembled at this war be other than well-disposed towards it; and, whatever their rulers and journalists may desire, the peoples of the Central Empires will not wish to be left out. Yet when the time comes for peace discussions one sees only too well the deadlock. The Allied nations, if victorious, will not want a round table sÉance with their enemies and a cosy settlement. The Central Empires will not wish to accept forced membership of a League for Peace founded by their enemies, in which—however mistakenly—they believe they will always be outvoted. This vicious deadlock, however, is less real, I think, than it seems. There are new forces at work; and if a League for Peace can make even a lame and partial start, it may by these new forces soon be fortified. After this war, deep-planted in the heart of every people, whether fighting or looking on, will be the loathing of national aggressiveness! Such a feeling has never existed before because men have never before been so stirred, so injured, and so frightened. We soon forget, of course, all save that of which we are constantly reminded; but the aftermath of this war will be full of startling revelations of the ruin it has caused; the world will reek with reminder that so-called national aspirations cannot with impunity be aggressively pursued; that so-called defensive wars cannot be light-heartedly incepted. During the march of a war, however terrible, the fascination of strife colours and subdues its horror; its heroisms hypnotize, its rancours drug all reason, blur all vision. But in the cold thinned blood of a maimed future, how different it will all seem, how terrifically disproportionate!

Love of country has never before had such calls made on it; men have never so suffered for their patriotism. That, too, must bring a sweeping reaction, which will gradually force the hands of reluctant Governments into adhesion to any scheme which promises relief from a repetition of such agonies. And so, in spite of all the difficulties, I believe some sort of League for Peace will come, imperfect and experimental at first, but which, once founded, will wax and grow strong, in the real—not merely pious—horror of war which will follow this fearful carnival. Let it but hold together for a few years, survive one or two serious trials, and I think no sane nation will ever desire its dissolution.

Such a scheme will not come down to us from Heaven. From our own brains and wills it must spring; from our sense of—shall we say—the inconvenience of wars like this. If the killing and disablement of some ten million men, the waste of some ten to twenty thousand million pounds, persuades us to nothing but the leaving of the world exactly as it was, as liable to these irruptions of death and misery—then, better say with the Spanish poet, “Of all the misfortunes of man, the greatest is to have been born.”

Even before the guns cease roaring, shall not our nine Allied peoples agree informally among themselves upon the structure of a League for Peace, and secure the sympathetic understanding of America, and the other neutral countries, on whose wisdom and good-will so much depends?

I, for one, would wish my Country foremost in pursuing this great chance—wish that she might place all her power in the favouring scale; I would wish to see her as ready to submit to the decisions of an International Tribunal, as each one of us is ready as a matter of course to submit to the decisions of our judges.

We in this green Britain of ours, still free of the invader’s foot, can measure the value of freedom now, looking across to lands waiting for deliverance. No country of Europe but has suffered, during long centuries, outrage and trampling, siege and slaughter, that we have been spared—saved by our sea. It is not irony that calls these the islands of the blessed.

But Fortune is a jealous goddess; and offerings are due to her who has given us an inviolate soil. I seem to see Fortune standing apart, watching—wondering. “What have they made—what are they going to make of their Land?” I seem to see Fortune thinking: “If I grant them success once more, these islanders, are they great enough to survive it? Under my smile the empires of the past one by one went down—Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Rome, others of long, long ago. Will this empire live, or will it too rot away, and sink?”

Those empires of the past fell through prosperity, through inordinate pride, through luxury and slavery hand in hand. May Fortune hold up a mirror to us, that we see ourselves as we are! Freedom and Humanity are not mere words; nor is a people’s greatness measured in acres or in pounds, in the number of its ships on the sea, or of the rifles it can muster. A people’s greatness is in the breadth and quality of its soul, in its fortitude, alertness, justice, gentleness, within itself and to the world without; and in its faith that man has his fate in his own hands.

As the individual, so the State; the aggregate of individual virtue decides and shapes the lot of nations. May there be no slaves among us and none who fatten upon slavery; no brutes among us and none who cower under brutality! Let us not hold ourselves as the elect in a blind patriotism, but have some vision of the world beyond our shores, of its hopes and dreads and natural ambitions. A narrow national spirit never served mankind!

Let the sea be our inspiration and our reminder! For, if it is our fortification, the sea is also our link with all the world, and the greatest force of untamed Nature. It seems to me that they who live dependent on the sea should never be puffed up. Its changing moods and salt winds, its wildness, beauty, desolation, the sudden fates that lurk within it, that leap and clutch and draw away from us our best; the great spaces of it beneath sun and stars—these are constant, and to our souls should surely carry breadth, sweep out of us the littleness of Imperial complacency. The sea is never chained, and the eyes of sailors have in them a look that any man might covet—a steady fronting of something inscrutable, shifting, dangerous. They know the little worth of human strength, the need of unity; they know that when a man slackens his watch, Fate leaps upon him.

The ship of each nation sails a sea of incalculable currents and uncharted channels. Sailing that sea, may we have the eyes of sailors, lest our Fate leap upon us!

Who would not desire, rushing through the thick dark of the future, to stand on the cliffs of vision—two hundred years, say, hence—and view this world?

Will there then be this League for War, this cauldron where, beneath the thin crust, a boiling lava bubbles, and at any minute may break through and leap up, as now, jet high? Will there still be reek and desolation, and man at the mercy of the machines he has made; still be narrow national policies and rancours, and such mutual fear, that no country dare be generous? Or will there be over the whole world something of the glamour that each one of us now sees hovering above his own country; and men and women—all—feel they are natives of one land? Who dare say?

When the guns cease fire and all is still, from the woods and fields and seas, from the skeleton towns of ravaged countries, the wistful dead will rise, and with their eyes accuse us. In that hour we shall have for answer only this: We fought for a better Future for Mankind!

Did we? Do we? That is the great question. Is our gaze really fixed on the far horizon? Or do we only dream it; and have the slain no comfort in their untimely darkness; the maimed, the ruined, the bereaved, no shred of consolation? Is it all to be for nothing but the salving of national prides? And shall the Ironic Spirit fill the whole world with his laughter?

Or shall the nations take the first step in that grand march of real deliverance which will make the whole earth—at last—the islands of the blessed?

THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS, LTD., LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

[The end of A Sheaf by John Galsworthy]