  The Will to Peace (From the Daily Mail, 1909.) I was walking in the district known as Notting Dale looking for signs of the Millennium, when I saw on a poster these words: “Why England and Germany must go to war.” I stood gazing at them in the company of a woman the worse for drink, a brutal-looking man, a consumptive boy, and a half-starved horse harnessed to a cart. With the exception of the horse, these persons were soon replaced by a little labourer with a very sad face, and a sick-looking woman, in a ragged shawl. When they, in turn, passed on, I was joined in front of the poster by three girls going home from work—the sound of whose laughter was like the snapping of dried sticks—and by a whisky-perfumed man with that peculiar, brazen look in the eye which is liable to sudden eclipse. These, too, stayed but a short time, and their places before the poster were filled by two youths in ragged clothes, with dun-coloured faces, and the stumps of cigarettes between pale lips. Their foot-steps and obscenity having died away, I was left alone with the poster and the horse. This horse’s ribs were conspicuous, and from the size of eggcup-shaped hollows above eyes covered with a bluish film, he had evidently laboured to the limit of his capacity. He was resting one thin leg—too hairless at the knee, too hairy at the heel. Two very young children came now, and, holding each other’s hands, flattened their noses against the poster in the shop window. One of them moved her feet continually as if her boots hurt her, while on the feet of the other were the wrecks of boots. And I said to myself: In hundreds of towns all over the country, people like this are standing before that poster, or passing by it. One third of the population are below the line of reasonable subsistence, another third are able by the constant employment of every energy to keep their heads just on that line. We are the richest country in the world, so that even in organised Germany conditions little better may very well be prevalent. This poster declares that England and Germany must go to war. And this poster is no joke, but the indication of a frame of mind. Moreover, I mused, credit for sincerity being due to all men until the opposite is proved against them, this frame of mind must be honest and founded on genuine fear—must be, in fact, the conviction of many, not only in this country, but in Germany. They contemplate a war between two nations, two thirds of whose respective populations are as yet barely able to make a living; a war that means wasting many hundred million pounds and the earning power of many hundred thousand lives; a war that will in six months cast on to the dust heap twenty years of social progress; a war that may well have no semblance of nobility, no great motto, no inspiring cause, but be a mere sordid struggle between two business communities, for so-called commercial ends; a war that may be unparalleled for cold-blooded horror and myopic puerility. And the poster speaks of this war as if it were inevitable! Where, I asked myself, can the people who thus think and speak have lived? Where have they kept their hearts, and brains, and eyes, and noses? Can they not see these millions of ghosts in their midst? Or do they think to fatten them by war? Do they think by war to cheapen the price of bread and coals, to spread education, to foster the growth of science and of the arts? Will they by war preserve the strongest males for the improvement of the human stock? Will they by war advance in any single way the slow process of humanizing a civilization which still produces in millions the beings who have been standing with me here before that poster? No—I thought—they will certainly reply: “War is an evil, but it is necessary; for the human race is divided into breeds, distinct from one another, and plunged into struggle from their births up. Only in each country’s jealous preservation of itself can we look for the welfare of the whole. There is no avail in dreams of peace; no use in preparation for it; men have always killed each other for their own advantage and always will; if they did not so kill their neighbours they could not themselves survive. Life is so conditioned; there is not enough for all. We know, therefore, that this war must come. We see it coming. We have fastened our eyes on it. We cannot get out of its way. We must offer ourselves up in holy sacrifice before this bloody, predestined monster.” Well!—I thought—if it is sacrifice you want, look at that horse! Look at all the people who have stood before this poster! They will take all your powers of sacrifice before you have done with them! And I, myself, looked at the horse; with his bleared eyes and the curves at the corners of his mouth, I thought I had never seen such a cynical-looking creature. “What are you, after all,” he seemed to be saying to me, “but a set of sanguinary tailless animals?” But suddenly the eyes of my mind travelled beyond sight of that poster, and as in a vision I seemed to see all the great lives men have lived, all the high thoughts they have conceived, all their wonderful ingenuity and perseverance and strength of will; how they have always found a way to fulfil that on which they have set their hearts. And as background to that vision there seemed disclosed to me the untold, unexploited wealth of the fields, woods, and waters under the sun. And I thought: “What that poster says is only true of such as will it to be true. Where there is a will to peace there is a way.
|
|
