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NOTES OF THE WEEK . FOREIGN AFFAIRS. By S. Verdad . FIAT Lux-(concluded). By Verax . A VISIT TO THEFRONT-11. By Ramiro de Maeztu SOCIALORGANISATIONFOR THE WAR-III-IV By Professor Edward V. Arnold . THE EMANCIPATION OF THE Jews (concluded). By Dr. Angelo S. Rappoport . DRAMA. By John Francis Hope . READERS AND WRITERS. By R. H. C. . LETTERS FROM FRANCE-VIII. By Huntly Carter GERMANISMAND THE HUMAN MIND-I. By Pierre Lasserre. (Authorised Translation by Fred Rothwell) . NOTES OF THE WEEK.
Tales
OF To-Day A SELF-SATISFIED NOVELETTE. By c. E. Bechhofer . . VIEWS AND REVIEWS A CRITIC OF COLLECTIVISM. ’ : By A. E. R. . REVIEWS . PASTICHE. By C. S. D., P. Selver, X. . 5 HOME LETTERS FROM GERMAN SOLDIERS. Translated by P. Selver . LETTERS TO THE EDITOR from T. G. K., Jeremiah Johnson, Word to the Wise, G. W. Huntly Carter, Gladys F. Hiss, Bipp, W. K. . PRESS CUTTINGS . community must inevitably suffer as much more as the railwaymen will now enjoy. And, to make matters worse, the men have made liars of themselves in a double sense. Not content with having posed as championsof a general misfortune and with extracting a private advantage out of it, they have even lied or been misled upon their own account. Either the ten shillings they demanded was the very minimum of their needs--as they swore it was-or the five shillings they have obtained is useless and would justify their refusal of it. Which is it and what are we to believe? That they are not now satisfied when their leaders say that they are? Or that they deliberately overstated their needs in the first instance? In either case, the quality of sincerity their conduct reveals is lamentable ; and we may confess that we can see little of the English spirit in it. *** Very differently, we believe, would the South Wales railwaymen have behaved if they, instead of the buildog breed, had been in charge of the negotiations. Very differently, too, have the American railwaymen conducted their case against their American masters. The action of the latter, indeed, is worth chronicling as an example of what may be done by determined men even under the most difficult circumstances. For with what had the American railwaymen to contend and with what resources had they to fight to secure their victory? They had against them the public opinion of America carefully created, we are told, by no fewer than seventeen thousand paid articles advocating the companies’ view in the American Press. They had, needless to say, the railway corporations numbering among themselves the most powerful secret anarchist societies in America. They had against them as a matter of course, a majority of the Congress. And on their own side they mustered no more than one in five of the total number of railway employees. Yet their demand for an immediate eight-hours’ day, made only last March for the first time, and repeated under threat of a strike in Jute ~ was conceded not merely in full and by the companies, butwith all the solemnity of a Bill in Congress introduced and supported by President Wilson himself There were the usual lies told, too, to frighten them and to prejudice the public in their disfavour, The railways
WE cannot congratulate the railwaymen on the result of their agitation. It is neither a splendid success nor a splendid failure. To have refused to take advantage of the economic situation on their own account alone would have been to invite the nation to share in the benefits that would have come from a general reduction of foodprices. To have stood out for the whole amount of their demand even to the extent of striking to secure it would have resulted in a splendid failure. And to have exchanged their present power of resistance for the right to share in the management of the railways would have resulted in a victory as memorable as the year in which it would have been won. As it is, however,with their remarkably supple and accommodating leaders to speak for them, they have patched up an ignominious peace, they have compromised upon their demands, they have, in fact, done everything that they declare the nation should not do in dealing with Germany; and all, as far as we can see, because they had not the moral courage to refrain from making demands or, when making them, to mean them. This compromising spirit, however it may be lauded by people who profit by it, is none the less fundamentally untruthful; nor is it in any way condoned by the plea that the matter in dispute was domestic. To begin with, we should deny entirely the right of any Union, occupying the position of the railwaymen at this moment, to strike for any less object than as a means to some public as well as private advantage. What, in our opinion, alone redeemed the agitation of the railwaymen and distinguished it from highway robbery under duress was the fact that their grievance was the general grievance of high prices, and their object to call attention to it and to compel the Government to consider it. But has that object, we ask, been any further advanced by the victory the railwaymen have won? On the contrary, as we may see in a moment, not only has the Government been spared, so far as nearly a million workers are concerned, the pressure of public opinion in the direction of reducing food-prices, but the rest of the
would be ruined, grass would be growing upon many of the present tracks, rates would be raised, commerce would suffer and the world would fall to pieces. Still more than this, the blackmailing of the whole nation (we quote the “New York Times”) and the extortion of legislation by terror would reduce a hundred million people to a condition of vassalage-the which could not and would not be tolerated. We do not deny that there is truth in this, either. For it is indeed an intolerable thing that a single union of workmen should be able to hold up a nation to ransom. On the other hand, it is not a whit less true that it is intolerable that a single capitalist or, a single group of capitalists should be able to hold up a nation to ransom. And the two intolerables may be said to cancel out. The end of it all will be, when each intolerable makes itself positively intolerable, that society will put an end to both. Until, however, one or the other does so, society will continue to believe that the lion may lie down with the lamb. *** Insincerity, however, is not a monopoly of the Labour movement. We have seen, it is true, a great Union declare on one day of the week that ten shillings is their minimum and on the next day accept five shillings with complete satisfaction; but the habit of lying in such matters has long ago been formed in the school of capitalism Capitalism, in fact, seems to be incapable of making a disinterested public statement; and all its utterances must be discounted by the money value that is at stake in them. It may be remembered, perhaps, with what apparent earnestness we were told, for example, some years ago that the Scottish moors were really uncultivable, and that their production for the nation was greater as deer-preserves (in income derived from American pork-butchers) than as sheep-pastures, still more as wood-lands. With that explanation, indeed, the majority of people were content, and allowed the process of depasturisation to continue until at this moment no less than a fifth of the whole of Scotland is devoted to the sport of the wealthy. The truth, however,under the pressure of economic need, has now begun to appear. Not only have deer-preserves multiplied forty times during the last century, but they have multiplied at the loss of a good couple of million acres of land, well below the woodland limit, and much of it capable, moreover, of feeding sheep if not of growing crops. The proposal, in fact, is now being made by the very proprietors themselves that they shall restore to cultivation at the State’s expense the cultivable lands which they once reduced to wilderness for their own pleasure. But what double-faced scoundrels they herein show themselves to be. While converting sheep-land into deer-waste they professed that the land was fit for no better purpose than to stretch their legs. To-day, however, because the nation has need of it, the wilderness becomes almost a rose-garden-for rent ! We have said that one of the consequences of our railwaymen’s “success” will be the slackening of the demand for a general reduction of prices. It follows, does it not, that if of the two ways of combating the high cost of living the way of increased wages is chosen, the other way, the way of limited prices, will be necessarily neglected. And how neglected it is likely to be may be gathered from the semi-official letter issued to the Press by the President of the Board of Trade. Mr. Runciman must surely think that as a nation we are the biggest fools upon the face of the earth if we can be appeased by the apologies and explanations he offers US. We might almost be a neutral nation in the opinion of the Board of Trade, and entitled to no franker arguments than are usually served out to them. We hear, in his letter, for about the hundredth time not what the Government is doing, or is about to do, but what in the almost pre-historic days of the war the Government, in the person of Mr. Runciman himself, has done. Wheat,
meat and sugar, sugar, meat and wheat, meat, sugar and wheat-upon these Mr. Runciman rings the changes as if he were getting a new triple bob-major out of them. But apart from the fact that even the poorest of the poor have other needs than sugar and wheat and meat, the fact that needs explanation is the enormous increase in the retail price of even these subjects of Mr. Runciman's paternal care. Why, for instance, can sugar be procured by our profiteering jam-concoctors and not by our housewives? Why is the loaf selling at twice the price it used to be sold at? Above all, as the “Times” asks, why is Colonial meat double the price retail in London at which the Government buys it of the Colonial Governments? Mr. Runciman offers us no explanation of these things; but on the contrary, he deliberately raises a false issue in which to obscure them. He tells us that in comparison with Germany and Austria we ought to consider ourselves well off, since in these enemy countries prices have risen much more than they have in England. We should think so indeed. Cut off from the greater part of the world-market, with a homedemand much greater than ours, and with a homesupply relatively not much more, Germany and Austria ought not to be quoted against England even if prices in those countries should be four or a score times greater than here. But the fact is that taking into account the actual circumstances, prices in Germany and Austria are really not very much higher than in England. They are certainly not nearly as high as they would be if Mr. Runciman had the management of them. We calculate, indeed, that if the German Government and our own Government were to change places, prices in Germany would be double what they are, while prices in England would come down by a half. This, and not the complacent parallel of Mr. Runciman, is the true comparison to be made of our state with that of Germany and it suggests that in conceding the railwaymen’s demand for an increase of wages the Government prefers this course to the more patriotic and statesmanlike course of reducing prices. *** Mr. Henderson’s appeal to the Labour groups to produce their plans for dealing with Labour after the war is a suffcient reply to those who say that after the war may look after itself. There are, however, dangers in Mr. Henderson’s invitation as well as compliments; and among them are the following. What if it should be the case that the Cabinet intends to put us in the position of Protagoras debating with Socrates-that is, of requiring every answer to its question save the right answer? For it is a matter of easy speculation that its appeal will be followed by the production of a host of suggestions in the melee of which the proper suggestion may be completely covered and confused. And what would then be more natural than to turn upon us and to lay the blame upon ourselves for our failure to speak with a ”single voice? Again, it is a matter of common experience that in the multitude of counsellors there is no counsel. Presented, as we may expect the Government will be, with a thousand and one schemes of reconstruction, what will be easier than to ignore them all and for the Government to gang its ain gait as if no counsel had, in fact, been offered it? And even if the list includes, as it very well may, suggestions good enough in themselves, who is to decide upon the vital question of the order and precedence in which they shall be adopted? The occasion is really one for a special conference of the Trade Union Congress charged by its constituent Unions with the drawing up of a simple Charter of Labour, the simpler the better. What is needed is not the wearisome list of “reforms” periodiccally repeated by the Congress, but a clear-cut programme applicable to the present circumstances and calculated to initiate a new epoch in the history of Labour. Who will call such a Congress? In the absence of any General Staff of Labour we do not see why Mr. Henderson should not call it himself. If Mr.
Lloyd George can requisition a Special Congress for the purposes of the Munition Act, much more safely might Mr. Henderson or the Government requisition a Congressfor the discussion of the after-war problems. *** In the matter of suggestions already beginning to flood the Press, two proposals seem to stand out relatively to the rest. They are the proposal to institute a general minimum wage and a standard working-day; and the proposal to entrust to workmen a share in workshop Against both these proposals, however, management. there is so much to be said that even if, as may be the case, they should survive the incompetent discussion likely to be given to them, they cannot survive more the than a month or two of actual practice. Consider first, .for example, which, we believe, commands the wildest dreams or nightmares of Mr. Sidney Webb. What guarantee is contained in a minimum wage or in a standard working-day, first, that industry as a whole will be better organised and more productive: or, secondly, That unemployment will not exist and even be intensified? It is all very well to require that a minimum rate shall be paid to men in actual employment, but neither can employers be compelled to pay it without corresponding privileges which would annul its advantages nor can they be compelled to employ everybody. And what is to become of the men whom no employer finds it worth his while to employ at even the minimum rate? Are they to be provided with State-work, that is, with work of minimum utility and maximum cost? Concerning the other proposal, the proposal to admit the Unions to a share in workshop management, though, to our surprise, the Chairman and the Secretary of the National Guilds League both endorse it, there is not a word to be said for it. Even the “Times” is disgusted that the powerful Trade Unions of to-day should demand so little and demand what, after all, is as impracticable as it is small. The employers, as the “Times” points out, are under this scheme to continue to have sole control of the direction course destination and cargo of the ship of industry, but the crew is to determine how and whether the employers’ orders shall be carried out. The former are to have all their present responsibility, but the latter are to share in power with no responsibility to industry whatever. Such a division of control is, we need not say, as far away from our conception of the proper division of control as it is from practicability. And the Union that asks for it will deserve to be snubbed for its pains. *** When a tent is down there are two ways of setting about putting it up again. One is to gather the cloth together round about from the bottom and to prop it up inch by inch with supports until the very top is The other is to erect a new tentpole. Now, in reached. this image will be found a very precise illustration of our present situation and of the attempts now being made to extricate us from it. On the one hand, there is no doubt that our tent of industry is unmistakably down; and, on the other hand, there is equally no doubt that, of our two main schools of. advisers, one is all for setting it up piecemeal, and the other is all for elevating a new principle round about which the fallen industry will naturally re-assemble itself. To which of these schools belong the advisers who are now advocating a series of “reforms,” extending from a minimum wage to an extension of the suffrage, it is easy enough to see. Incapable, apparently, of realising the nature of a tent and ignorant of the very existence of a tentpole or principle of industry (as of everything else) they spend their time in fussily lifting first this side and then that of the whole fabric and in devising means to keep it in position. You have only to look at the swarm of busy little Webbs engaged in this lilliputian task to realise at once its absurdity and its futility. Nor is it the least less absurd or futile for managing with infinite
pains to prop up some part of the fallen structure. But contrast these “practical” little people with the other school, with the school that but for them would long ago have had the tent-pole up and therewith the tent itself. What is their proposal? It is to formulate and to initiate in practice a new principle of industry, namely, the principle of Trade Union responsibility. And not of Trade Union responsibility in respect of Trade Union members alone-leaving out in the cold non-unionists whether employed or unemployed-nor alone of the material welfare of the mere workmen in any given industry-but responsibility for the industry as a whole, and as a national organ entrusted with the discharge of a national function. But to this conception it appears, though as simple as it is revolutionary, the minds of our contemporaries find it hard to climb. Or is it that they prefer, as better suited to their jobbing talents, the multitudinous reforms each of which provides them with an excuse for existence ? *** Without venturing at this moment to lay down a complete programme-the drafting of which we leave to the Trade Union Congress-we can nevertheless indicate one or two of the conditions required to erect a new tent-pole in industry. The primary conception, it will be gathered, is that of a functional Trade Union, an association of men, that is, with a specific place and part and responsibility in industry. From an association for common defence against’ employers we would have the Trade Union become an association for the public defence and advancement, not only of its members but of the interests of the nation as contained within the industry itself. And the means to this end are surely not beyond imagination. They imply, in the first place, that each great industry shall be organised as to its necessary labour in such a way that every man employed in it shall belong to the Trade Union that controls it. In the next place it is required that every contract for Labour shall be made, not with the individual workman, but with the Union of which he is a member. Finally it is required that as the Union accepts responsibility for the maintenance in efficiency of all its members, the earnings of all its members shall be pooled in the Union bank and paid out on a uniform scale to each of the members, whether working or unemployed. Is that programme too ambitious for our Labour leaders to adopt? But there are two considerations that make it probable that sooner or later some such course will be forced upon them. It is inconceivable that the nation will much longer permit the existence in its midst of powerful associations of workmen that repudiate responsibility and yet exercise the power of dislocating industry at any moment. It is no less inconceivable that the Trade Unions can now be abolished. Some reconciliation, therefore, of the claims of the community and the claims of the Trade Unions must be brought about; and, for the life of us, we can see no better ground for it than the ground of control. You exercise your power,” the State may say to Labour, “periodically to threaten the nation’s industry with ruin. Very well, now accept a share of the responsibility. And either do this or the State will attempt to take your power away.’’ The position, indeed, is most clear and logical; and the decision before both the State and Labour is as clear-cut as it could be. The worser alternative for both parties is the intensification of a continuing struggle in which each party will suffer the wounds of both. The better alternative is the agreement to share control together with responsibility. Which is it to be? Are the Trade Unions to become national organs chartered to perform national services ? Or are they to remain licensed self-victuallers, responsible to nobody and for nothing but themselves? The moment to decide is now; and we should like to see the Trade Unions responding as a whole to the appeal of Mr. Henderson as patriotically, unanimously, intelligentlyand clearly as individually they have responded to the appeal of the War Office, I
Foreign
Affairs.
By S. Verdad.
AN article by Major Moraht in the “Berliner Tageblatt” of the 13th inst. merits serious attention from supporters of the Allies. This soundest of German military critics deals particularly with leadership ; and incidentally mentions the interesting fact that the commandson the western front have now been reduced to three, those of the Archduke of Wurttemberg, the German Crown Prince, and the Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. This, as Moraht points out, tends to simplify plans of operations and the giving of directions from General Headquarters. Then he proceeds to mention Freytag-Loringhoven’s great work on the strategy of Napoleon, insisting especially on the principle emphasised with much stress by Freytag, namely, that all Napoleon’s campaigns were planned and led by him in person, and that it was not until 1812 and 1813 that he appointed separate army leaders and allotted commands to them. Napoleon had reason, however, to complain that his generals lacked scientific training-they were men of action, he wrote, nothing more When Napoleon “wanted heads” on several fronts, he “only found arms. ” *** Germany and her allies, Moraht holds, are in a better position. The great Moltke was able to create a school, and time and space have been bridged since Napoleon’s day. Hindenburg himself is a product of the Moltke school, and has in turn created a small school of his own. The result is, in Moraht’s opinion, that the directing force of the German armies in the field-the “want heads” and find them ‘ Headquarters Staff-can to order on all fronts. But, adds Moraht, in what is really a brilliant article, there are more “arms” than “heads” on the side of the enemy; and he directs this observation particularly to England. ’ England’s failures in Gallipoli and at Kut-el-Ainara were due for the most part to lack of brains. The telephone and the telegraph, steamers and railways, were not enough; and a brain would have been required in the centre of operations if the campaigns were to take a more favourable course. On the Vardar, during the winter season of 1915-16, General Sarrail did only moderate “ arm ” work. I therefore cannot believe that his brain, in the meanwhile, has improved in the heat of Greece. . . . How the Allies would rejoice if only they could discover a “head” among their leaders! They feel the need of one, and a war council of a hundred leaders cannot compensate for the lack of one genius. The enemy, however, still keeps his countenance. The Press, especially the English Press, expresses itself with exceeding frankness, and the confidence of the people, therefore, has not diminished. *** . General Sarrail has always been a favourite butt of the Major’s; chiefly, I fancy, because Sarrail’s admirable plans for fortifying Verdun resulted in the falsification of a “Tageblatt” prophecy or two about the possibility of the Crown Prince’s army reaching Paris. This is not the main point. How far do we deserve these strictures? Are there any brains at the head of our Army? Before replying to these questions it is necessary to consider the task which was thrust so suddenly on the group of soldiers who now form the General Staff. The experiences of the Boer War led us to pay much more attention to our infantry and artillery maneuvres and it is probable that the Expeditionary Force which so successfully held up Kluck at Mons and yet escaped from his clutches was the best army of its size in the world. More than one German critic has borne testimony to the strategy which enabled Sir John French, as he was then, to elude the “claws’’ which Kluck kept shooting out at him. But that army has all but disappeared, and the fragments of it are swamped in the new formations. , That was the problem our General Staff had to consider ; the problem of
dealingwith a force of three millions on one front instead of a force of a hundred thousand or so. Small wonder that, in such rapidly altered circumstances, the “arm” was much more prominent than the “head,” and indeed still is. Our General Staff had, in fact, an impossible task to perform; all that could be expected of them was that they should perform it with the least inefficiency possible, since they could not perform it efficiently. Their task was to direct the movements of a huge army on the western front, and smaller expeditions elsewhere. *** Let us see how that task has been carried out. It is impossible to excuse the General Staff their share of blame for the recruiting muddle. Until quite recently, the great defect of the Expeditionary Force was its lack of modern guns and shells. Large numbers of skilled men were (and still are) required to make these instruments of war. But the recruiting authorities permitted men to be enlisted at haphazard, without regard to the ‘industrial requirements of the war. Even under the Derby scheme such men were attested and called up; and managers of factories have had the greatest difficulty in securing the exemption of skilled men. And how much more does this remark apply to men required for the export industries! It is impossible not to feel that the General Staff, temporarily unbaIanced by the sudden exuberance of power and prestige, were seized with the crude ideas of the sensational Press and, disregarding both the Navy and industry, thought every man a shirker who was not in khaki. The direction of the army was none too good in the earlier stages of the campaign, for international politics necessarily influenced the war, and Kitchener could hardly be expected to raise armies train them, equip them, and draw up plans of fighting into the bargain. But after Lord Kitchener’s death the General Staff found themselves in possession I do not say of all the men they wanted, but, at any rate, of all the men the country could affordThe “New” armies had been raised and very largely trained; the Derby groups were in readiness, and military service for all was fast becominglaw. It is usually suggested that, despite the Military Service Acts, the pressure on the west (apart from other fields, requiring a relatively small number of men) was so great as to demand more and yet more soldiers. At first the authorities thought voluntary service would suffice. Then they thought the Derby scheme would provide an adequate number of men, especially as it was supplemented by compulsion for single men. Then they thought compulsion for the married was necessary; and now we have a suggestion that the age is to be raised to forty-five, and possibly to forty-eight. How are we to expIain such a series of gross miscalculations on the part of responsible authorities? Major Moraht, I think, has given us the solution of this difficulty, this apparently unanswerable question, when he tells us tersely that we have been using quantity against quality. Ever since the western offensive of July I began Moraht and other critics in the German Press had laid emphasis on the enormous British casualties. I know as well as anybody that many such statements have been invented with the object of causing the German public to slumber; but I also know that this criticism is, in the main, justified. The fact is that, far from having too few troops in the field, we have had, during the last year at any rate, far too many. The enemy knows perfectly well that skilful leadership would have obviated a large proportion of our casualties. So do many ’ military critics in this country; but they are afraid to say so. Immediate developments at home may encourage them to tell the truth about our General Staff. It is best to begin by reminding not a few of them that an admirable imitation of Prussian bounce and swagger by no means makes up for the absence of Prussian military trainingfor officers, and Prussian brains.
Fiat
Lux.
111. IT follows from this modest conception of his role on the international stage that John Bull finds it impossible to look upon a rival as anything but a villain. Is not that the character assigned in every drama, and melodrama,to the person who thwarts the hero? No other attitude can be expected from one brought up in the faith that his own policy is always righteous and that of everybody else, when it conflicts with his, always wicked. It was a similar faith in their own sanctity that made the Israelites of old regard their enemies as the enemies of God. How much of the similarity is due to the excessive influence which that Asiatic tribe’s Book has been allowed to exercise over English education for- three hundred years, and how much to other causes, who could tell? But that it is so-that the Briton believes, as the Jew believed, that Heaven has elected his nation to be a holy and special nation, above all nations-that are upon the face of the earth-who that has lived in Britain more than a few days can help ‘ realising? From this infatuation springs another : Deeds which are denounced as crimes when done by our enemies cease to be crimes when done by ourselves or our allies. Naturally; for the Chosen People can do no wrong. Of such duality of measures the present war has sup plied many curious illustrations. The English newspapers which exhausted their powers of vituperation when Germany violated the neutrality of Belgium, which refused to entertain for a moment the German plea of military necessity, which saw in the German Chancellor’s reference to an international contract as a “scrap of paper” the limit of lawless cynicism-the same newspapers, a few months later, defended the brutal coercion of Greece as dictated by military necessity, abused the English Government for not enforcing the blockade of Germany out of respect for the interests of neutrals ; bitterly complaining that “&he power of the Navy ti hurt the enemy was being limited by a series of scraps of paper,” and roundly declaring that “there could be no more absurd delusion than that a great European war can be waged without causing inconvenience to neutrals.” Strange it is that men should admit the validity of an argument as regards themselves, but object to their opponents profiting by it; unable to see that, unless the argument is good for everybody, it is not good for anybody In like manner the German aviators who throw bombs into English towns are assassins, the English and French airmen who throw bombs into German towns perform a perfectly justified act of war. While the German Admiralty was held up to the execration of the world for drowning women and children, our Admiralty was censured for failing to starve to death the women and children of the enemy. Again-but of such illustrations there is no end. . . . That people should condemn in others what they applaud in themselves, to the sane mind, implies an obvious mental hiatus : a screw loose somewhere. But, though apparently indistinguishable from hypocrisy, their attitude is not hypocritical. it gives rise to really genuine abhorrence. The Englishman’s indignation at the German’s action in this war is one of the most unequivocal cases of moral feeling that have come within my experience. And so is his self-approbation. At the very moment when the British Fleet was starving Greece, bullying her King into abandoning his neutrality,trying to drag a friendly and helpless little State into the horrors of war-at that very moment, Mr. Balfour spoke of the British Fleet in the House of Commons as “the mighty maritime weapon on which the liberties of the world now more than ever depend.” The reasoning (if reasoning is the right word) seeks to be somewhat as follows : I am a hero; the German is
my enemy : therefore, the German is a villain. The ‘acts of a hero are heroic; the acts of a villain are villainous : therefore, my acts are heroic, the German’s villainous. I have long ceased to wonder at the peculiar mentality which finds satisfaction in logic of this kind, and fails to perceive the impression it makes on other people, For it is English all through-part and parcel of the Englishman’s usual readiness to substitute for disagreeable reality some pleasant fiction of his habitual inability to see himself as others see him. Thanks to these characteristics he fills in the modern world a place analogous to that which the Jew filled in antiquity. He is a being apart : outside that community of feeling and thought which, despite all their animosities and misunderstandings, bind all other nations together. To his enemies he is a sinister compound of selfishness and insolence: a primitive barbarian still untouched by the spirit of civilisation; and the best his friends can find to say in his defence is that he is mad. This estimate of the Englishman is recorded in the pages of every modern literature-French, German, Russian, Scandinavian, American-as clearly as the similar estimate of the Jew is recorded in the pages of ancient literature-Greek and Roman. But, instead of quoting from bocks which can be found in any public library, I will quote from memory. The scene was a tramcar in a Southern European town. Behind me sat two French-speaking individuals. Suddenly I heard the following dialogue :“Qui est celui-la? The allusion was to an eccentrically dressed Briton swaggering past. “C’est le Correspondent du T-.” “Ah ! Mais pourquoi est-il tellement bete?” “Que voulez-vous? C’est un Anglais.” Does the Englishman regret his isolation? Not at all. He makes a boast of it. It is his pride not to be like other men. Mistrusted, laughed at, and unloved, yet he moves through the world with his hands in his trouser-pockets and his nose up in the air, as who would say, “I am, and there is none beside me!” And not only is the Englishman perfectly indifferent to the feelings which he inspires in others; but is apt, with an exquisite lack of humour, to transfer his own attributes to his enemies. As I write, I have before me a singularly amusing instance of this delusion. I will give it for the benefit of those of my readers who happen to be interested in problems of national pathology : “The Germans fondly believe that whatsoever belongs to them is better than that which belongs to anyone else, and that to them and them alone is permitted the last excess of wanton savagery. In their own eyes they can do no wrong. It is not merely that for them the end justifies the means. It is that a sin committed by one of their race becomes a shining virtue in their eyes. For this reason they are doomed to live apart-to live and to think alone.” The present war has offered frequent opportunities for a comparison between the two combatants; and sometimes the result may’ be to our advantage. But in one respect at least how vast is the superiority on the side of Germany! German statesmen did not make themselves ridiculous by trying to moralise politics. They left all this pitiful slush to the gutter Press-its proper channel. The German Chancellor did not attempt to justify the attack on Belgium. He had the candour to confess that it was a great wrong. This was in accord with the traditional frankness of German statesmanship from Frederick the Great onwards. “We must, before all things, pursue a policy of self-interest,” said Bismarck. The saying is an example of. what Englishmen are pleased to stigmatise as Prussian cynicism Personally, if I may confess a partiality, I prefer the brigand who demands my purse pistol in hand, to the pious rascal who accosts me with a homily on “the rights of humanity,” or “the brotherhood of men,’’ while he picks my pocket. If we cannot be moral, let us, at least for heaven’s
sake, for our own sake, be cynical. Whatever the consequences of cynicism may be, they are not so fatal as the consequences of cant. How can he ever get well who will not even avow that he is ill? There are among us amiable Panglosses who, happy in their Sunday-school creed that “tout est au mieux, talk of the purifying influence of this war. They picture to themselves a new England , automatically rising, Phoenix-like, out of the ashes of this conflagration-an England from which the old life with its pretences and its falsehoods will have burned itself out, never to return. Alas ! this also is illusion. Such miraculous metamorphoses, my friend, .belong exclusively to the realm of mythology. Real history, believe me, knows them not. This war, like every other big war in which England has been engaged in the past, will burn up much rubbish, to be sure. But for every ton of rubbish thus consumed it will bring two in its train; and the new heap will be bigger and fouler than the old. No, my amiable friend-, salvation cannot be won by the sword. It is not victory over others that this lie-ridden nation primarily needs, but victory over itself. It needs, first and most, a “purging and unscaling her long-abused sight. ” It requires courage to undertake a task in which one must begin by shocking the sensibilities of his countrymen -all the more courage because reticence, too long continued and too intense, has had its usual effect in making the sensibilities abnormally acute. The man who would now try to persuade the people of this country to Look at true things, And unilluded view things, And count to bear undue things, would, find himself opposed by the whole body of English tradition. Not a lawyer or shopkeeper, not a priest or publican, not a lady or lady’s maid, I may venture to say, but will feel insulted, outraged, enraged. The exhibiting of sores is not a popular €unction. But there is no other way. The beginning of salvation is confession of sin. Scrutiny, unflinching and unashamed, must precede any effort at repair. All the ugly things must be unclothed, dragged into the fierce light of day, and people must be made to see their ugliness before the blessed work of reform can even begin. Here, in the substitution of candour for cant, we have the only path out of the self-created morass in which the English soul ,has been asphyxiating for ages. It is a narrow path and a long one. The soul of a nation is slow in working itself clear of any vice with which it has once been polluted. The difficulties must be freely admitted; they are many and grave. To remove this load of accumulated mendacity, conscious and unconscious, we need a lever of colossal dimensions, and a multitude of arms bent upon it with all the energy of manly determination-of heroic fortitude-of prophetic enthusiasm. But, though not easy, the thing is not impossible. The very magnitude of the labour should act as an inspiration; and the perception of its urgency should call forth all that is hghest and healthiest in us. I assume that, despite the corrupting power of secular reticence, there are still people in this country whose minds have not lost all touch with reality, in whose hearts the natural impulse towards truth is not dead, but merely in a state of abeyance. Let these people decide, either in combination or each in their several provinces of activity-the platform or the pulpit, the class-room or the drawingroom, speaking or writing-to fight against the cult of, secrecy as their forefathers fought against the cult of superstition. Let them uproot from our midst that poisonous plant which enables England’s enemies to scorn her as “the central seat of all hypocrisy.” And then we may see Milton’s vision realised--the vision of “a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks : as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam.” VERAX.
A
11.-THE SANITARY SERVICE. WE saw two large hospitals as soon as we landed in France. There are two wars in this war : the war which the belligerents have undertaken against life, and the war which the doctors and nurses are waging against death. This is the first big war in which the doctors have been able to test on a large scale the many wondersof aseptics and antiseptics. In the war of 1870 aseptics had scarcely been discovered. In the RussoJapanese war the field of operations was too far away from the belligerents to permit of great complexity in the sanitary service. But the bloodiest battles of this war are being fought in countries where all or almost all plagues have already been stamped out, and where the germ theory prevails among nine doctors out of ten. To-day people do not believe in any other illness than the known or unknown microbe. Consumption is a microbe; a cold is a microbe it has even been said that weakness and madness and old age are also microbes, although the naughty beasts have not yet been isolated. The advance of surgery consists, above all, in having discovered that wounded men do not happen to die from the fractures caused by hits, but by the putrefaction developed by these fractures in interrupting the circulation of the blood. What is life but an incessant process of disinfection? What are the lungs for but to cleanse from germs the blood in our veins, so as to fit it to run again through the arteries? To the modern surgeon only one thing matters : to clean the wound and extract the corruption. Once the wound is clean, the modern surgeon mends everything-the skull or the- leg, the bowels or the liver. There are wounded whose hearts have been stitched and who are still alive. The first hospital we saw is devoted chiefly to wounds in the head: teeth, jaws, ears, nose, eyes, and skull. It is a hospital for the .seriously wounded, those who cannot stand the journey to England. They are brought from the front in the Red Cross motor-cars. There are wounded who have arrived at the hospital within two hours of being hit. The hospital is made up of wooden huts with zinc roofs, carefully painted outside and inside. We were surprised to find that these huts were surrounded with gardens : but we attributed that-to the care of the aristocratic lady who patronises the establishment. Not ’at all. Wherever the English in France have built a hut destined to last for more than three months, the first thing they have done is to lay out a garden. Perhaps every Englishman brings a garden within himself. As they cannot dye their grey skies they put some colour into the earth instead. AT the head of the hospital there is another artist also in love with his garden, but his garden is not of earth, but of pus. He is a surgeon some fifty years old, tall and fat, of high complexion and boundless energy, who before the war devoted himself in Canada to performing circus feats with teeth. His assistants and not he did the easy things. He had to be puzzled before setting himself to work. Once puzzled, his whole soul was in it. It is said of this surgeon that he often pulled out all a man’s teeth and exchanged them with the teeth of a friend. “Nature,” said he, “does not give to everyone his own teeth; sometimes she makes mistakes, and they must be corrected.” But as interesting cases were few, our surgeon, as soon as the war broke out, put on khaki and crossed the sea. Now he is happy. As the war produces every kind of monstrosity, the man can devote himself to reconstructing faces, without having to descend to vulgarities. The wounded arrive in his department with enormous patches of pus instead of faces. We have seen many photos in which no trace could be found of eyes, nose, ears, or mouth. It is evident, even to a layman, that these wounds cannot be caused by ordinary bullets. “How were they done?” we asked. “With explosive bullets,”
Visit to the Front. By Ramiro de Maeztu.
the doctors answered. “On your word of honour?” “Word of honouur We pause for a moment. It would be worth while for neutral nations to send a medical commission to the military hospitals so that the world could verify the crime. And what should be done immediately is that many young surgeons from abroad ought, on their own initiative, to. come and work in these hospitals. The chance is unique, and there is work for all. Well, then, this artist devotes himself to reconstructing those faces which have been obliterated by explosive bullets. There is a soldier in a bed who has no nose at all, but who instead shows in the forehead a strange protuberance. You must not think that his nose has come up to his brow. What has happened to him is much more wonderful than that. In the hole which he has in the place of a nose there is stretched lengthwise a thin plaster, like a fiddlestring. The first thing done with this man was to wash his wound; and immediately afterwards the doctor cut out a piece of skin from his stomach and a piece of a healthy rib.. With this skin and bone he formed a ball which will become, in time, the missing nose. Afterwards his forehead was opened, and inside were placed the piece of skin and the piece of rib They were there; we touched them. When these pieces of rib and skin have regenerated (or whatever it may be) they will be again extracted from the forehead and placed where the nose ought to be. In six or seven weeks this boy will go home with a new nose. At first not even his own mother will recognise him. But ever) time this wounded lad thinks that they are making a new nose for him in the incubator of his forehead, with a piece of his own rib, a smile comes to his lips. There is another wonderful case a man wounded in the lungs, whose breath escapes into his blood and blows out his whale body. This poor wretch, who had been thin, is now like a balloon; but he is getting better, and, in the end, he will be cured. They showed us several bottles containing extracted eyes ; but we cannot stop for long before these horrors. They showed us also a very powerful magnet, which can extract any piece of iron, large or small, from the eye, no matter how deeply it may have lodged. A dentist tells us proudly that in this hospital alone more than five thousand double sets of teeth have been replaced. We go on seeing the most complicated apparatus-the radiographic section, and the department for the inspection of eyes and ears. They show us different baths-first came the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Arabs, and, later on, the English. There has always been a nation which has taken upon itself to spread throughout the world the ritual of the bath. We are shown the chapel, where on Sundays the Roman Catholic mass and the Church of England services are held alternately. We are shown the kitchen. Excellent food ! The milk comes daily from England. We pass again through another hospital. Needless to mention the spotless whiteness of the sheets. Everything is clean. A wounded man moans. But that is the only note of grief. The wounded feel that they are being attended like millionaires in times of peace. At half-past four in the afternoon the motor-car brings us to a convalescent hospital-an .enormous establishment, rising on the high tableland, far from the dust of the town. This hospital has no other function than to care for those soldiers who can return straight to the front without having to go home. There are many soldiers momentarily unfitted for the trenches simply by nervous fatigue. There is nothing the matter with them. Only shock; perhaps caused by the noise of a shell. This is one of the commonest illnesses of the war. What will you! The modern man’s nerves are always strained. One more shock is enough to send him to the infirmary. Science will yet discover, if it has not already done so, what precisely shell-shock is. Good. These soldiers are treated as a mother treats a frightened child. They are -entertained. They are amused
with small daily tasks. They play all kinds of games, and have plenty to eat. That is the main thing. Breakfast at half-past seven; dinner at twelve-thirty, tea at four-thirty, and supper at seven. They are given daily a pound and aquarter of bread, five potatoes, sugar, tea, cheese, butter, jam, ham, and a pound of lean and fat beef. The tea is formidable. The slices of bread and butter are cut for men of wide capacity The puddings are such as have not, alas ! been served in the ordinary English household since the age, now remote, when the Bible was translated into English for the first time, and the printer made the strange mistake of setting “kitchen’? instead of “serpent” in the chapter telling of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Jehovah commanded that an eternal hatred should divide the woman from the serpent; and this hatred exists in England, not between the woman and the serpent, but between the woman and the kitchen. In this convalescent hospital there were some 2,700 soldiers. They live in their wooden and zinc huts; and some in big field tents, built in such a way that they can expand or contract according to the number of their occupants. ‘I here are various Y.M.C.A. huts, where the convalescents play billiards, draughts, chess, and , ping-pong. A few others do light work in the kitchen gardens, for most of the vegetables used in the hospital are produced in its own grounds. There is also a tinshop, where old tins are converted into new plates and cups for the soldiers. In a big hut some N.C.O.’s are enjoying themselves round a good piano, sent expressly from England by some charitable soul. It is, in short, a town built expressly to attend to the tired, to the slightly wounded, and to those suffering from shell-shock. ‘‘And those afflicted with trenchfever?” we asked one of the military doctors. “Not they are sent to England.” Trench-fever is one of the great mysteries of the war. What cold feet are, is more or less known. What trench-fever is remains a secret. It must be some kind of malaria. In former times,- when people used to live crowded together in small spaces, there was probably some illness of this kind. It is not impossible that the rats may transmit it by their own parasites. To combat it the trenches are disinfected as much as possible. The mystery has not yet been solved. An implacable war is being waged against all kinds of dirt. All septic water is made aseptic by disinfectants and filters, and all solid refuse is burnt. Wherever there are English in France there are also furnaces for burning the refuse. When the English leave France they will be able to say proudly that they have not left half a pound of refuse in the country. It is The doctors invite us to tea and cigarettes time to go. In a few minutes the rapid motor-car makes us feel ourselves far removed from the military bases and the bustIe of war. Only now and then we meet on the way an English soldier or a military motor. This is the land of France, fat, green, undulating, as it was in peace time. At dusk we enter the spacious wooded garden of the old chateau where we shall pass the night. It is a strange hazard which makes me begin these notes with a description of the hospitals. I do so, of , course, because I write first of what I have seen first. But these lines were written after the visit. And when I try to embrace in a glance the totality of the recollections I have brought from France, I realise that the sanitation and cleanliness of the English Army are not only one among different aspects of it, but perhaps the most characteristic. I see everywhere English soldiers splashing themselves with water, in the canals of Flanders, or the chalky lands of Picardy; lathering themselves for shaving, and showing, when they laugh that the brush has been passed over their teeth. They all clean their clothes and shave; the majority wash their bodies every day ; a good half brush their teeth. And that in the bases, in the rearguard, and in the lines of fire.
Social
Organisation for the War. By Professor Edward V, Arnold.
HISTORY OF THE WAR FROM THE GERMAN STANDPOINT. ON the outbreak of the war the military policy of Germany was necessarily twofold. First, she desired to use her ripe organisation for speedy blows to be dealt right and left; secondly, to build up new sources of strength to be held in reserve in the event of disappointment. The quick blows were dealt in Belgium and France, and met with startling but not unlimited success. Reserves of ,strength were looked for in countries in alliance or to be brought into alliance, and in rebellious movements in enemy countries. Germany has met with success in Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, and Ireland, with failure in Italy, Roumania, South Africa, and India. Her successes in diplomacy have been the ripe fruit of her successes in wars; but how is a German to interpret the failures? Either it must be admitted that Germany has not succeeded in making it perfectly plain to outside nations that she will in the end be the victor, or else it is not entirely true that nations are guided by self-interest in forming their alliances. We believe that Germany has paid heavily for her unprovoked attack on Belgium. She has indeed inspired fear in all the lesser Powers of Europe, but that fear has not always led to submission, On the contrary, it has provoked defiance. The most critical and the most difficult to understand are the relations of Germany to Austria, her principal ally. As we have seen, the defence of AustroHungary was the nominal cause of the war, and the only feature in German policy which could be regarded as idealistic. Had Germany sincerely pursued this object, a comparatively small force might have held France in check, whilst great German armies could have secured Austria against Russian attack until the Austrian armies were mobilised and made efficient. This course was not pursued. In the early months of the war Austria suffered a humiliating defeat at the hand of the Servians; and nine months after its outbreak, whole provinces were in the possession of the Russians. Not till then did Germany seriously turn her attention to the position of her ally. We must conclude that the calculations of the militarists miscarried. They successfully provoked war had with England, overran Belgium, took Antwerp, defeated the French army at Le Cateau, and yet did not attain their end. If ever the road to Paris or to Calais was open to them, they failed to seize the opportunity. Yet to attain these ends they had left Austria in the lurch, and exposed East Prussia to a Russian invasion . The defeat of the Russians by von Hindenburg and an extemporised army was a glorious success for Germany, but it was not won by the militarists, nor did it form any part of their plans. The second period of the war. extending over the summer of 1915, is that to which a German patriot can look back with most satisfaction. The confidence of the country in its military leaders had been rudely shaken; danger was on the horizon. The whole country bent its back to the work of the war, that is, of the defensive war which united both parties. The people submitted cheerfully to have their food doled out to them in rations they worked incessantly at renewing the depleted stores of munitions. They were aided by a stroke of fortune, for the Russian supply of ammunition suddenly failed. The German success was brilliant; the invading armies were swept out of Austria, far across the Russian frontier, and almost out of Europe altogether; the rush of success brought in a new ally, Bulgaria; and with hardly a pause for breath the Central Powers overran the whole of Servia and Bulgaria, and terrorised Greece into an abject acquiescence. Thus in October, 1915, it seemed to many Germans that the war had been won, and they were encouraged
111.-THE
to expect an early peace. It did not come. The fatal rift in German politics again opened out. At this time Germany might have had a peace which would have secured her and her allies all their possessions, and which would have protected them from Russian attack for a generation to come. Such a peace would have given every satisfaction to the civilian, party, but once more they found themselves overborbe by the militarists. The Government threw the blame upon the enemy Powers, who (they said) did\ not know when they were beaten, and who, by prolonging the war, made themselves responsible for its horrors : Germany, on the other hand, if her opponents sued for peace, was prepared to grant it upon the basis of accomplished facts Here it is only necessary to note that not one of the belligerent Powers expressed a desire for peace to any neutral nation. The events of the last twelve months are fresh in all our minds. The enemies of Germany have hardened on every side, and have begun once more to hurl themselves against the wall of steel with which the Central Powers have sur rounded themselves. They have won distinct successes on more than one front and have obtained a new ally in Roumania. Germany has not been successful in her assault can Verdun, to which she invited the attention of all the world. Thus she appears for the moment to be baffled and without resource. But, from the German point of view, these enemy successes are not of any great moment. Germany still stands in shining armour and with uplifted sword. Her territory is immune from invasion, and she is not much concerned for the distresses of her unfortunate allies. She has men and money in abundance; and her enormous resources in coal and iron make it unlikely that she will long suffer from any shortage of munitions The English ‘‘starvation-plan” has conspicuously failed; and after a time of short rations, borne with exemplary patience, she can now look forward to a period of comparative plenty. Defeat is to her mind unthinkable (ausgeschlossen) : the peace proposals of the civilian party are every day becoming more distasteful. Germany is thinking hard, but not of “giving in.” What her plans may be, and what her powers of bringing them to effect, we shall see in due time. To sum up : whatever individual Germans or sections of the German people may desire, the dominant party remains resolute. Undismayed by the checks which it regards as temporary, it presses towards the aim which it has had consistently in view, the subjugation of England and the destruction of the British Empire. It believes that Germany possesses in her Zeppelins and her submarines the necessary instruments for this purpose. counts up the daily toll of sunken vessels, It measures the rapidly rising freights, and already sees the spectre of famine threatening our land. These speculations may disappoint Germany, as has been the case with her former calculations; but, on the other hand, it is premature for us in England to rejoice at this time in a victory which we have not yet won. An enemy, still strong and more merciless than ever, stands opposite us, bent on striking at the roots of our prosperityand even our existence: and it is for us to organise our resources to the utmost to frustrate that aim. Of an attack on Germany in her own territory it is too early to speak, or even to dream; the duty of selfdefence claims $11 our attention, and it will be well if we use the present breathing-space to make good the weak points in our armour. 1V.-ENGLAND AT WAR. The British Government and people were not unprepared for the present war. Public opinion, guided by that eminent journalist the late Mr. W. T. Stead, had called out for a Big Fleet and a little Army; and an obedient Ministry had provided both. The plan of campaign was settled beforehand. The British Navy was to hold the sea, the French Army to build a stone wall to ward off the German attack, and in a short time the Russians in their millions were to crash over
Prussia as a steam-roller. Fragments of this plan have been carried into effect ; in the main it has broken down before the superior resources of Germany and her allies. For disappointments and reverses England had made no preparation at all, and the story of the conduct of the war is that of a series of efforts made by individuals gradually winning support from large sections of the people, and finally approved by a reluctant Government This way of carrying on war is the very opposite the German system of organisation from above; of it is unscientific, dilatory, and wasteful; but in spite of all these drawbacks it has achieved remarkable results. The good seed was sown by the late Lord Roberts when he began his missionary journeys to teach Englishmen that to defend their country they must fight in person, and not by paid deputies. His small band of converts organised themselves, with the aid of Lord Haldane, as the Territorial Army; and the idea took root more widely than was known at the time. But to the great majority a European war was a thing too terrible to be contemplated ; and when the critical moment arrived the Government shrank from the responsibility of, a decision, and left the choice between peace and war to the House of Commons. The members rose to greatness. They forgot the shibboleths of a lifetime, and responded to the deeper feelings of the people. In a moment they seemed to realise the meaning of a great fleet built up to face the British coasts; of the shameless defiance of international law by the invasion of Belgium of the fate impending over peace-loving France ; of the essential defencelessness of the British Empire if it now allowed its allies to be crushed. Party feeling was forgotten for one whole evening, and those who were not convinced were silenced by the general emotion. The die was cast. With the great decision came a sudden change in the intellectual outlook of the people. The old plan of campaign still held the field, and the Governmetit had no thought of altering it. From that part of the people which had learnt from Lord Roberts came the cry : “We must become a great Army.’’ We had no Minister of War, but there was one general at least whose came was familiar; and the Ministry, ever on the alert to catch the loudest of the cries raised by discordant constituents, consented to accept Lord Kitchener as a colleague. Thus fell in a day the British Constitution as interpreted by Party Government; and a new precedent was set by appointing a man to office on the ground of his competence. Such an appointment, as all history has shown, is the first step to a dictatorship, and without doubt many who called for Lord Kitchener’s appointment hoped that he would play the part. The event proved otherwise; but a decisive step had been taken towards the ideal of a National Army. First individuals, then whole classes were seized with the desire to sacrifice themselves to save their country. Without uniforms, without rifles, without trained officers, without guns they paraded for months the streets of English towns, until Government at last made provision for their necessities. Meanwhile the official plan of campaign, at enormous cost, had won England a respite. As a matter of scientific calculation, no one could call it prudent to set 150,000 men of the English regular army, imperfectly armed and led by men inexperienced in European methods of war, to face a German invading force of five times their strength in numbers, and ten times their resources in munitions. No one had a right to expect these men, representing sections of English society not highly respected by politicians, to fight day and night for twenty-one days, snatching little food and still less sleep, and keep up energy and heart for a resistance in which them was no hope of rescue or reinforcement. When at last physical strength failed them and the small remnant could fight no more, it was “the impossible,” at any rate the incalculable, that occurred The road to Calais lay open over the corpses of the British Army; but no German army passed along
it. At the critical moment either men or munitions or nerve failed the enemy, and the British Territorials now came up steadily to build up the line which has been defended ever since. But no deed in history equals in heroism the self-immolation of the British professional army before Ypres; and no deed has been so carefully kept from the knowledge of the British people, whom it saved from invasion. We do not need now to dwell upon the futile, exploits of Antwerp, Gallipoli and Kut, or upon the hardly more profitable adventures of Neuve Chapelle and Loos. A people that will not learn by reason must learn by experience; and in this sense all these attempts were a necessary part of the education of the British people and their new Army. We must not ignore the fact that the most disastrous failure of all befel an expedition planned in India, a country which is governed by experts selected by purely intellectual tests, and in which the War Department had recently been reorganised by Lord Kitchener himself. But even if there is much to regret in the past, the facts stand out all the more conspicuously that the British National Army, of which almost every man was a year ago an untrained civilian, faces at this moment the best troops of Germany, and gains advantages over them. We cannot take stock of the countless individual efforts which have gone to bring about this transformation; but one side of it, the supply of munitions, has been revealed to us. In the supply of munitions, which is now increasing? regarded as the chief contribution of Great Britain to the war, we have to recognise the working of conspiracy. The British public called for men, but it did not understand, and could not measure the need for guns. The Government was complacently selfsatisfied; it had signed orders for as many guns as possible, and what more can a Government do? Yet all through the spring of 1915 the British Army was perishing for lack of munitions. Then a British general, defying all professional restrictions, risked his position to save his country. He sent for the military correspondent of the “Times”; and, in consequence, the correspondent went to Lord Northcliffe, and Lord Northcliffe to Mr. Lloyd George. Between them these men plotted to out-general their own Government and its Minister of War. They secured the establishment of a Ministry of Munitions, nationalised every engineering workshop in the country as a “controlled establishment called for volunteer workers, both men and women, accepted the services of men of scientific reputation,and within twelve months produced the changed conditions of affairs which we see to-day. It is true that this plot, nefarious in the eyes of the Party politician because it involved the co-operation of a Conservative and a Liberal in the service of the country, has been exposed; it may also be safe to say that it has been condoned. The supply of men has now once mere become an urgent question. Over this there has been a fierce wrangle between the adherents of the so-called "voluntary” “compulsory” principles. There is, in fact, and no deep opposition between the two. Our professional army alone has been composed of true “voluntarists,” that is, of men who have chosen the military calling as they might have chosen any other. They were followed by men who answered the call, some of them under the compulsion of their own consciences, and others because they were stirred by the example and the feelings of their neighbours. Next came the “Derby men,” who felt it just that a tribunal should decide for them the path of duty. All these are classed as “voluntarists" and their total number (after making all allowance for official exaggeration) can hardly be placed lower than 3,000,o~o. Another group of men have now entered the Army, submitting more or less willingly to the demands of successive Acts of Parliament their number may be guessed as about one-tenth that of their predecessors. There remain in the United Kingdom another 3,000,000 men at least of military age, all of them exempted from the Acts for compulsory
service. All Irishmen are exempt, all members of the work of organisation. It lies with individuals to study powerful ‘Trades Unions, all persons who can urge the problem, to find out the path of least resistance, to either “serious hardship’’ or determined unwillingness. encourage the willing and persuade the recalcitrant. It But there has been a process of steadily developing is evident that the key to the position lies with the great organisation, and of the recognition of a social call and Trade Unions. These have been formed to support a common conscience. When Once any civilised society, the interests of working-men, and their machinery whether British or German, has grasped a fundamental cannot all at once be adapted for a wider purpose. principle, it is only a matter of time before any Their members, having been constantly informed on consequent obligation is brought home to its individual the highest authority that a British victory is certain, members by a steady increase in the application of cannot see why they should go out of their way to moral and physical pressure. secure it. But if once it is brought home to them that The story of the war from the British standpoint is victory depends on their co-operation, they will not for a moment refuse it. ’To obtain that co-operation it is , the steady development of the organisation of the nation for the purpose of self-defence. That organisation necessary to accept as a basis social principles which they recognise as just and necessary, and to sweep has at no stage been initiated by the Government, but has been forced upon it by the pressure of individuals aside all the prejudices and obstructions which come from those who are wedded to decaying social forces. and of patriotic organisations. Parliamentary The task is not easy it demands, study, patience, and and party associations have more often hindered than promoted the work. When Mr. Bonar Law stated faith; but it is imperative that it should be taken in hand without delay. that in joining a Coalition Government he asked nothing for the country, but only a fair share for his Party in the profits and honours of office, and when Mr. Asquith stated that the one essential article in his policy was The Emancipation of the Jews that in all events he should himself remain Prime Minister, neither of them was making an intentionally and the Conquest of Palestine, cynical or unpatriotic remark. They merely formulated the essential principle under which the war is conducted By Dr. Angelo S. Rappoport. under our present Parliamentary system, namely, that the relative position of the old parties should remain 11.-THE CONQUEST OF PALESTINE BY unaltered, and that the initiative in all measures of JEWISH REGIMENTS. organisation must come from the outside. THE question of enlisting the non-naturalised Russian From this position the duty of the individual citizen Jews living in Great ,Britain or transporting them to can be clearly deduced. We have seen that England is still faced by a menace to her existence, coming from Russia has agitated pubIic opinion, and led to discussions and protests. “Fairplay” is the appanage of the a Power superior to her in a military sense, which can only be resisted so long as England is supported by Briton. Now let me say at the outset that, in my . strong allies. It is vitally important that there should opinion, it is only right that every man of military age be no weak point in England’s defences. and medically fit should do his duty by swelling the Yet at least one such weak spot remains. Now, as ranks of those who are fighting a desperate foe and ever, the very life of the British people depends upon its defending the cause of justice. This ,is so evident that merchant shipping. Slowly but surely this shipping is it requires no further elucidation or pieces justificatives. being impaired in quality and quantity by the demands Had I myself been of military age or, at least, medically of the Imperial Navy and the submarine attacks of our fit I should have hastened at the very beginning enemies. For our safety it would not be too much if we were engaged in building 1,000 ships with an average of the war to set an example to those whom I am presumingto advise. Preaching LO do one’s duty should, tonnage of 5,000 tons, each to be armed for its own defence. Not only are we not doing this; we have not always be preceded by practice. The British Government even dreamt of doing it; yet without it our commerce has a perfect ethical right thus to speak to the our supply of munitions, and our food supply are non-naturalised Russian Jews in England : “Now that seriously endangered we have introduced conscription you, strangers at our gates, must quickly make up your minds: Join the We need further organisation to make good this and by doing so you eo ipso become other demands. We have still three -million men of British Army-and British subjects, sharing all the duties but also all the military age exempted from the Military Service Acts, privileges of the natural-born Briton. If you prefer, of whom a considerable number will be needed to supply gaps in our armies, but the majority are required for however, to keep your Russian nationality and yet refuse to return to your native land to perform your work of vital national importance in other directions. militaryduties there, for reasons which we understand and We have other men, and a great number of women, quite appreciate, we must consider you as military who can and do help them in the second task. Most of deserters of an allied nation. Some years ago we gave these are already organised, but none of them are you an asylum on our hospitable shores, but, alas, organised for the direct service of the nation. Same circumstances have changed, and we can no longer harbour of them are working too hard, or under unwholesome in our midst military deserters of a friendly Power at conditions. Others are not working so steadily or so war with our common foe. You must leave our shores diligently as they should. A third section are not in and emigrate wherever you like. You trusted us when sympathy with the national needs, some of them (as the you came here years ago, and we Britons never retract Sinn Feiners) desiring to thwart the national purpose, even a tacit promise, and even if there is no vestige others endeavouring to use the war as an opportunity of a scrap of paper. We have no intention to keep you to promote ends of their own, some of which are like mice in a trap Join, therefore, the British Army reconcilable with the national interests and others not, as British subjects, or leave Great Britain, going whilst all are pressed out of all proportion to our immediate wherever you like, to Russia or elsewhere, c’est votre needs The result is a waste or diversion of affaire. ” However sad are the circumstances necessitating energy, If all the powers latent in the nation were such a step--no juris-consult can question the fully utilised, we could not only maintain the work that legal and ethical right of the British Government to we are now doing, but we could build a new Merchant speak thus. To enlist, however, these young men in Fleet which would ensure our food supplies and the British Army without at once granting them British disappoint the last hopes of our enemies. citizenship is illogical; to transport them to Russia, where, as yet, they have no rights, except those of It is useless to look to Government to carry out this
dying for their native land is, methinks, unethical. Personally, I should like to see all the Russian Jews in England not only enlisting in the British Army, but also forming Jewish battalions as separate units. It would be a splendid proof of Jewish solidarity-which is after all not so strong as one is inclined to imagine. Many Zionists, however, in appealing to these Jews to enlist have strengthened their appeal by the argument that in doing so the recruits would be helping the cause of Israel, lend strength to the claims of Jewry to emancipation or an autonomous State. Now it seems to me that there is a vast difference between sacrificing Our own lives on the altar of duty, and telling our fellow-men to give their lives for a great cause, so that over their bodies we may lead the remaining millions to the goal. Moses himself never saw the promised land; he died in the desert, and only caught a glimpse of Palestine from the heights of Pisgah. Leaders of great movements usually fall on the roadway. What these Zionist leaders are practically aiming at is nothing less than buying Jewish emancipation or a Jewish autonomous State, and paying for these boons, with the lives of a few thousands of their race. I confess that the gifts would be cheap at this price-and just because they would be cheap I am afraid that the price would be considered inadequate. If the price to be paid for Jewish emancipation and a Jewish autonomous State are the lives of so many Jews, then, I venture to think, the price has been paid already a thousandfold long ago ! 6oo,ooo Jewish soldiers are fighting on Armageddon’s battlefields. 350,000 Jewish soldiers are serving in the ranks of the Russian army. Would an additional 15 or 20,000 make all the difference? And is it likely that the Council of Nations would grant the Jews their claims if 620,060 Jews are serving, but refuse if there were only 600,000? It has again been suggested that the 15,000 or 20,000 Russian Jews in England should be enlisted, formed into battalions, and sent to Egypt to fight for and conquer Palestine. The idea is not a new one-and if it were really possible to gather all the Jewish soldiers all ’over the world and send them as a huge army to fight the Turk and conquer Palestine, I, for one, would applaud it. I would greet it as a Messianic sign to see the old Maccabean spirit which is stilI alive among the Jews, as their deeds of bravery on the battlefield testify, utilised in such a way. But the Zionist leaders seem to forget one important factor viz. : That the Jews are not gathered in one army, but are scattered, serving in all the belligerent armies. It is a, tragic fact, but a fact nevertheless, and in their ardour these Zionist leaders seen to be forgetting that they must also reckon with the enemy. Let me explain. Before the outbreak of the present cosmic cataclasm the centre of gravity of Zionism, as far as leadership is concerned, was in the Central Empires. The late Dr. Th. Herzl, the creator of the Zionist Congresses, was an Austrian Jew, Dr. Nordau is a Hungarian Jew. The Zionist leadership has now been shifted to America, but there are still thousands of Zionists in Germany and The in Austria and many in Turkey and Bulgaria. Rabbi of Strasburg, Dr. Emil Levy, is a militant Zionist. The official language at the Zionist Congresses used to be German; the official Zionist organ, “Die Welt,” was published in German. Now suppose that 15,000 or 20,000 Jews are sent out by the Allies, by England, to be precise, to fight in Egypt with a view to conquering Palestine. What is to prevent the enemy in his diabolical cunning,* what is to prevent the modern Caligula from picking out a huge army of Jews, preferably Zionists, and sending them, headed by some German Zionist leaders, with the Rabbi of Strasburg as chaplain, to fight on the soil of Palestine against the Jewish battalion:: sent out by Great Britain or Russia? The * See Bloodshed,” by Ignotus, published in 1914, where I compared William II to Caligula, based on Quidde’s famous pamphlet.
mind positively freezes at the thought of such an event, but it is quite-within the range of possibility. Did not the Germans send Bulgarian detachments against Russia? They might equally send Jews to fight Jews on the soil of Palestine. It would be a devilish, device, a tragedy too terrible to contemplate, but which may be expected from those who committed unspeakable atrocities in Flanders and Northern France! What is to prevent the enemy from sending the Chief Rabbi of Turkey, M. Naoum, whom, by the way, the Porte is sending as Ambassador to America (a clever trick!), to fire and stimulate the ardour of their Jewish battalions? I am, of course, aware that there are many Zionists steeped in Realpolitik, who readily scoff at the Jewish spirit, the ancient religious superstition, but then the very restoration of the Jews to Palestine is considered a dream and a superstition by many, and the superstition of politics has no right to scoff at the superstition of . faith. The chasm yawning between the real Jewish spirit and a conquest of Palestine by the Jews, as a separate army, is too vast to be overbridged. The idea of a conquest of Palestine, by the Jews, is neither Jewish nor Christian. It is a German and pagan doctrine, based upon the Nietzscheism of the conquering blond beast. It is Germany who started this war with a view to annexation-not the, Allies. The latter are fighting not for new lands and territories, but for right and justice. France never abandoned her claim to Alsace-Lorraine, Italy never gave up Trieste-but neither France nor Italy wanted a war, and would never have started it, had it not been forced upon them by Germany. But even if Christians sometimes forget the teaching of the Saviour, there is no reason why Zionists should ignore the spirit of Judaism, the teaching of the Prophets which superseded the book of Joshua. And,. after all, the walls of Jericho never fell by heavy artillery, but at the blast of the horn ! Germany,” says Mr. Zangwill rightly, “has challenged the world on the lower plane of matter; she is trying to assert ‘herself in fire and is writing her edicts in blood. But fire burns down and blood dries up and fades, and the only durable influence is the power of the Spirit.” If the Jews, I say, have not disappeared in the Dispersion, and Zionists are able to speak of a Jewish entity, it is not the result of the Jewish sword but of the Spirit, still alive. To build up a new Jewish State with the sword is an anachronism. Jews all over the world are fighting on Armageddon’s battlefields, and are shedding their blood not with a view to conquests, but in defence of their adopted homes. As a matter of fact, they went out to fight not because they expected emancipation or a Jewish autonomous State as a reward, but they may reasonably expect human treatment all over the world, because they have been and are fighting the battles of civilisation. Voila la difference ! Let the advocates of Jewish battalions conquering Palestine beware lest they put the share the Jews are taking in the war on a politic rather than patriotic plane. The Jews, like the Christians, are simply doing their duty, and the true Jew does not expect a reward for his duty. As one of Israel’s great sons, though excommunicated by the Synagogue, said : “Beatitudo non est virtutis pretium, sed ip sa virtus.” The Briton is not fighting Britain’s battles because Great Britain promised him the fleshpots of Egypt, nor is the Jew in the Allied Armies fighting because he has been promised the vineyards and fig trees of Judaea. No, if I may venture to make a suggestion, I say that all the non-naturalised Russian Jews in Englandshould enlist because they owe a deep and everlasting debt of gratitude to England, the home of liberty, the champion of the downtrodden and oppressed, but let them ask to be sent to Flanders and France. Let them go and fight on the banks of the Somme instead of the Jordan, let them conquer Cologne and Berlin! Israel will have done her duty in the cause of civilisation, and, I feel sure, civilised Christendom will not cannot forget it. Noblesse oblige.
Drama.
By John Francis Hope. THE autumn season is upon us, and comedy, mostly feminine, holds the stage; and this steady drift of public taste raises once again, for me, the question of the war. I have before suggested that it was by a simple reaction from the horrors of war that people turned to comedy; but I doubt the validity of that inference now. There is no trace of reaction in the programme of the autumn season ; there is manifest an instinctive preference for the things that amuse. It is as though there were no war, or, if there were, that it could make no difference to the people of this country; and it would be easy, of course, to accuse them of blindness to the reality, to prophesy woe to them if they did not change their ways. Indeed, we are not without the prophets of woe; and we know that their main text is that this war is the greatest spiritual event since Lucifer stormed the heights of Heaven and made a drama in the absolute. Yet it is precisely those agencies that were supposed to be spiritual that have failed us at this time, the Church first; for it has been recorded that the people which turned to God when war began turned away to Charlie Chaplin when it continued. With the solitary exception of Stephen Phillips’ “ Armageddon,” there has been no tragic treatment of the war on the stage ; the English composers seem to write merry, bustling music, as though war had quickened the largo of life into an allegro vivace. Look where we will; it seems that war has only stimulated the national energy, and found outlets for it, but has effected no change in the spirit of the people. If these people were the most insensitive, there would be nothing to perplex an observer. We should simply say that they were incapable of understanding, and leave them to die in their ignorance. But we cannot adopt that lofty attitude ; these people, whatever they may lack in expression, are not without understanding, nor without perception of the magnitude of the European struggle. But it is precisely at this point that, I think, they differ from the interpreters of the war; to them, this war differs from others only by its size, not by its quality ; and magnitude is measurable. “To the civilised man,” said Shaw, “the eleventh is only another unit; to the Bushman, who cannot count beyond ten, it is an illimitable myriad.” The perception that the war, whatever numbers it engaged, was not infinite and could not be eternal, restored the sense of proportion to our people; they were not face to face with a spiritual revolution, as they had been told, they were confronted only with a numerical problem, and each man was exhorted to “do his bit” to make up the quota of the national effort. But with that perception, the “spiritualists” were superseded; the war became not a trial of faith, not a call to conversion, but a matter of. fact, a test of strength and endurance. ’They might be told that the world would never be the same again; they knew that, whatever happened, it would never be different, because they would be the same. There was nothing to fight but the Germans; and although the technical problem of beating the Germans might require some extension of existing methods of dealing with facts, a larger coordination of effort, it could not transform the nature of the people. The unit of management might become larger, but it remained only an unit, it did not become a new universe. The deeper issues of the war, as they were called, ceased to have any meaning, for, to them, they were not the deeper, but the more superficial, of the . issues of the war. This was not a battle in the air, between the German spirit and the English spirit, with God as a sort of umpire; it was a matter of men, munitions and money, all concrete things that could be handled, weighed measured, and counted. The war
gave a turn to industry, that was all the war became Anglicised, and lost its spiritual importance. And in that state of mind Comedy flourishes; for Comedy also deals with the calculable. Tragedy is really only a preparation for life; Comedy is life itself. It is only in the throes of emotion that things are incalculable; it is youth that yearns for the unknown with unutterable longing, that wrestles with the angels and defeats the devils. Tragedy is the gymnastics of the spirit; it should purge us, as Aristotle said, of fear and terror, so that we may face life unafraid. You will never meet anything worse than yourself, ” someone has said ; certainly, life holds no suffering comparable with that agony that the young feel when witnessing tragedy. But one is not always young ; experience teaches, and it is only the first time that a vital experience has the appearance of infinity. Life becomes a matter of rules, calculations, measurements ; Comedy itself refines from buffoonery, which is only the unregulated play of the merry spirit, to the subtlest criticism of the slightest deviation from the expected. When we complain of the triviality of modern comedy, we forget that life has no surprises for middle-aged people, that we pass, or should pass, from principle to detail at about the age of thirty. Did not Byron say : “No man, until thirty, should perceive there’s a plain woman ? When he does so perceive, he has passed from the sex to the individual, from the lyric to the drama, from Tragedy to He no longer wants to see life and see it Comedy. whole; he knows how to live, and is interested in details. And it is for this reason, I think, that the war has failed to affect our stage. The English are middle-aged, not vitally, but intellectually. They hate change; and when first confronted with the possibility, they shaw temper, and determine to settle the matter, once for all. “Never again,” is always the English cry; and then they settle down to consider ways and means of removing the menace to their established way of living. For they have sat here for a thousand years, and have always been about forty years of age; and, so help them God, they will continue being forty years old until the crack of doom. It is characteristic that the great period of English tragedy was the Elizabethan, when a new world had opened before men’s eyes, and for a time its novelty appealed to the youth of England. But there are no more undiscovered continents ; the earth, the very earth, has been weighed and measured, and all that can happen is a re-arrangement, not even of the peoples on its surface, but of theboundaries that mark them off from each other. Life itself has become calculable, and its only problems are problems of management, and the magnitude of the unit to be controlled. And that really is what civilisation means. The luxury of fine emotions, a characteristically English phrase, is for those who have not learned to be practical. Everything in a settled community is a job for someone; we cannot fall in love without paying someone to marry us, we cannot even -be born without professional assistance and to die makes work for the most miserablelooking men. It ought to have been God’s own Englishman, although it was David Hume, who said : “If we take in hand any volume of divinity, or school metaphysics, let us ask : Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number ? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. For it is not only of divinity or metaphysics that the Englishman asks these questions; and the agelong neglect of the artist is probably due to the fact that the Englishman can find no use for him. When he is ill, he can. call in the doctor to make him well ; he can call in the comedian to make him merry; but what can he do with an artist who talks about something called beauty, and behaves like a boy? He turns back to his committee of supply, his committee of ways and means ; and goes to see a revue in the evening.
Readers
and
Writers.
ABBOTT AND SEELEY’S“English Lesson for English Readers,” which I have just read for the first time, was originally published in 1871 Readers, what a wilderness the popular English mind must then have been in ! There were few or no guides to English compositionnothing but grammars. English was not taught as a subject apart from grammar in schools. The authors of this work were almost the first to include Prosody in a And even they were text-book of English literature. unable to discover the bases of the rhythm of prose, though they were aware that such a rhythm must exist Contrast this state with our own. We have scores of guides to writing, including directions for cultivating every conceivable style of composition; English is on the time-table of every elementary school, Prosody is known in all its branches to eleven hundred and fiftyseven accomplished poets, not to speak of as many critics; and as for prose-rhythms, have they not now been classified and labelled for eternity by Professor Saintsbury? Brudders, what progress is there ! Ought we not to bless the days in which we are born? And yet-speaking as one of the most fortunate to the fortunate, I have to confess that I have still much to learn from those who walked in darkness before us. From this very text-book, written before I could say Boo to a goose, I am almost ashamed to say how much remains to be gathered. After all, it seems, there were great men before Agamemnon ! *** Without dwelling on lamentable discoveries, which, on the contrary, I prefer my readers to make for themselves I would draw attention to the excellent discussion of Quantity contained in this text-book. Quantity as you very well know, is a quality of words of which little use has been made in English; or, shall we say, little deliberate use. It is “the time necessary to pronounce a syllable distinctly. ” Accent, on the other hand, is the distinguishing characteristic of English rhythm as quantity was of Latin and Greek. The discussion herein contained, however, sets one wondering, in the first place, whether an unconscious regard for quantity is not revealed in all good English style; and, in the second place, whether the quality I turn to some ought not to be deliberately cultivated. well-known poem, for example, and there, besides the accentual rhythm, I find a quantitative rhythm which is scarcely less obvious when it is once sought for. Was the writer aware of it, or was he led simply by taste? And, again, I ask the, question whether quantitative exercises ought not more frequently to be written if only to bring into conscious art what is perhaps now only instinctive taste? Such exercises are easy enough to attempt, and we might, at any rate, train our ear upon them, to extract still more pleasure from good English. For the heard melodies of accent may be sweet, but who knows but that those unheard of quantity may be sweeter? Therefore, play on. *** How sensible the authors are may be gathered from one single piece of advice to the would-be orator. It is not Action, and again Action, and still again Action. That advice I never thought of very much value, for it left unanswered the rather vital question of what action. No, it is this : “the audience must be presumed, not only inattentive, but forgetful, and even dull. ” There is a world of experience in that piece of advice; and I would humbly commend it to writers (as, indeed, I often have!) no less than to orators. The implication is not necessarily that in fact your audience or your readers are either inattentive, forgetful or dull. They may be, but, again, they may not be. The implication, on the other hand, is that you must presume that they are and speak and write as if, in fact, they were indisposed to attend to you and required to be compelled. The psychology of the reader when reading or of an
audiencewhen listening to a speech is extraordinarily interesting; above all, it ought to be a subject of study for every young writer and speaker. The mood is not, I am sure, ordinarily unfriendly or consciously critical. At the same time, it acts very often as if it were both; and the effect is to throw upon the speaker or writer the whole responsibility for the effect of his words. The reaction, I need not say, is easier to discern when speaking than when writing. A speaker who sees his audience dozing or dispersing cannot delude himself into the belief that he is enthralling his audience. Failure in what he set out to do is visible before him. The writer, however, must imagine the effects. And he will be well advised, as a rule, to imagine the worst. *** The study of “Samuel Butler” which Mr. John F. Harris has just published (Grant Richards, 6s. net) cannot be said to carry us much further towards a complete appreciation of either the man or the writer; but Butlerians-of whom I am not one, though 1 like the school-will find a heap of material in it. Mr. Harris is not himself, to begin with, a ‘discriminating critic or a careful writer. He is inclined to regard Butler: as not only the most considerable of Victorian enfants terribles, but as the only one of the kind, forgetful of the digs of Arnold and Bagehot, not to speak of a dozen others. Arid his own style, especially where he is writing solo in the introductory chapter, suggests that he has mistaken an enthusiasm for reading for a talent for writing. Writing, however, is an art which is no more related to reading than the playing of football is related to watching it; or, perhaps (not to exaggerate), only a little more.. And as for criticismwell, the best critics make mistakes, and the worst make nothing else ! Mr. Harris, nevertheless, brings out some points about Butler very clearly : his prevalent mood of friendly satire. for instance, which he claims “was directed against law-abiding people who ’ made others unhappy” ; his anticipation of the modern doctrine of the anteriority of instinct over reason; his brilliant common sense. And all this is good, even if it is, with Butler’s own works now easily accessible, a trifle superfluous. But, as I have said, he goes no deeper than Butler and leaves us still to gauge the man’s value for ourselves. Which I am quite prepared to do! A “Times” reviewer guesses, I see, that the “Translations ” anonymously edited by “ S. C., ’ ’ and published by Messrs. Blackwell (2s. net), are the recreations of a classical scholar at the Front. Some of them are quite beautiful and read, indeed, like English imitations of Greek epigrams. The following, for instance, might even pass for a translation :Go not into the woods, go not into the woods, Chrysilla lest the hounds of Artemis tear thee to pieces, jealous for their mistress, because one more fair than she has come to their secret abode. Others, again, I will swear are neither translations nor even imitations, but simply exercises in the prose poetic style, such as any student might write, though not usually so well. *** Mr. Leonard Green’s essays, “Dream Comrades and other Prose Sketches’’ (Blackwell, 2s. 6d. net), cry a great deal, but they yield little wool. The author professes to have a world of imagination of his own which he shares with nobody. But all I can say is that he has stolen its parts from the world that is common to all. Here he is pagan (p. 45), there he has borrowed of Maeterlinck and Trine (p. 61). On p. 29 and elsewhere he writes the prose of the minor poet; and in many passages (notably p. Sg) he is simply the daily journalist. Such eclecticism, however, will never make a good essay, the chief merit of which is the uniformity of personality it reveals. R. H. C.
’
Letters
VII1.-THE LAST
from
OF THE
France.
MASS CITIES.
WITH respect to the book on “Cities in Evolution,” ‘ which I proposed to consider, let me begin by saying it is an attempt to make out a case for the renewal of “regional personality” and the “Revivance of Cities” in harmony with the Greco-Mediaeval ideal. Cities are to be surveyed, planned and built in accordance with the highest ideals of life, labour, health, efficiency and “in that fuller vision and interpretation of the past and present life of cities towards which we are searching as students.” And they are to be constructed with a strict regard to the antecedent individual unity which is the cause and principle of construction of each. This seed of unity underlies each natural region. As the author says, “each place has a true personality.” So that, in a manner of speaking, there are countless seeds of unity, each, however, differenced from every other, each containing “unique elements, ” and therefore capable of assuming a different form. Each form has to be determined before it is attracted from the shell, so to speak. So it is necessary to analyse the seed with the finest tools of observation and investigation. It should not be overlooked that countless seeds of the same kind, each of which demands the same process of development, are buried beneath countless incoherent and misbuilt cities. Or, some places have “a personality much asleep, it may be.” Now the city too regionalist thinks it would be wise and highly expedient to bring such cities into touch with the working principle of unity in each. “It is the task of the planner as master-artist to awaken” the sleeping personality. London, for instance, which is a city of cities chiefly occupied by Americans, might be changed from the capital of the United States of America to the capital of a united states of its own. Of course, the desire to create a world of particular wholes linked by spiritual affinity into a universal whole is simply a desire to enter upon a protracted period of surveying, planning, rebuilding, to say nothing of botching-up generally. Indeed, “Regional Surveys and their ApplicationRural Development, Town Planning, City Designthese are destined to become master-thoughts and practical ambitions for the opening generation, not less fully than have been Business, Politics and War to the past and passing one.” So “Civic Revivance” is to be the new ideal actuating mankind. No doubt it is a desirable ideal. And “Civic Revivance is at hand.” But is it? 1s the time even ripe for “Civic Revivance”? Is the War co-operating by revealing ideal city openings to a generation liberally endowed with civic insight and good-will? Are we Middle Agers? Or, depressing thought, has the War come too soon? Professor Geddes closes his book with these words : “Such are ’the Utopias already dawning-here, there, and everywhere. Despite the present set-back of European war, with its more than materially destructive consequences, the generation thus coming into activity must henceforward all the more apply its best minds to re-synthetic problems, to reconstructive tasks. Hence the tangled Evolution of Cities will be more clearly unravelled and interpreted, the Revivance of Cities more effectually begun. ” What are these dawning Utopias? HOW will this tangle of “Evolving Cities” be unravelled and the ‘‘Revivance of Cities” effectually begun? For answer I must turn to the opening chapters. The first Utopia appears in the word “conurbation.” This word is specially coined to open the door upon a period of our world’s history in which a “New Heptarchy,in vast forms of industrial aggregations, aided by water supplies, coal-fields, and kindred essential local affairs.” is rapidly and entirely superseding an age of semi-detached towns. A glance at the population map gives its clear meaning. There is London, a vast, irregular growth, like a main-reef, spreading and
swallowing apparently for ever. ” There are Lancashire, up Yorkshire, Midland, Staffordshire, and South Wales towns “agglomerating. ” In fact, the growth-process is taking place everywhere throughout the civilised world, reducing vast areas to. dead and depressing monotony. Cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh, different in type and spirit, and others even more strongly contrasted “in geographical, meteorological, racial and spiritual” ways are being joined by swiftIy spreading house, rail. and waterway, telegraph and other links; their individual characters destroyed ; all differences submerged beneath the rising tide. “Some name far these city-regions. these town-aggregations is wanted. ” “Constellations” and “conglomerations” are not suitable “What of conurbations?” Thus Professor Geddes reaches a term which describes the form of place, of population-groupink and character of the local government. And apparently each main conurbation aspires to a name. So “why not Lancaston, TyneWear-Tees, Midlanton, Waleston,” and so on unto the seventh? Why not, indeed? Surely these names are appropriately ugly. But where is the Utopian way out of this hopeless entanglement of octopus-like towns, with their debased crops of human population to match? It seems a further division and more appalling names are needed to uncover it. “Although our economist‘s have been and are in the habit of speaking of our present civilisation, since the advent of steam and its associated machinery, with all its technic strivings and masteries, as the "Industrial Age,’ we press for the analysis of these into two broadly and clearly distinguishable types and phases. ” So come “Paleotechnic” to distinguish the earlier and ruder elements of the Industrial Age, and “Neotechnic,” the newer and incipient ones. "Paleotechnic” then ‘furnishes a picture of England in the coal-hole stage, riddled throughout with black collieries and blasted throughout with furnaces, and peopled by men who wallow in sooty slime and live in labyrinthine grassless towns united by coiling smoke like sepulchres riveted together in a sulphurous hell. “Neotechnic” offers a more pleasing picture. It does not arrest the Paleotechnic city growth-process, but it shows clearly and certainly this process undergoing refinement. Now oddly enough, Nature is the vehicle of refinement. Finding one set of resources exhausted it offers another, and with it a renewed embrace and a new vision of economy What is happening is this. The old coalholeorder of industrialism, which began with Watts’ condenser and culminated in vast coal-fed conurbations and the false economic man, is, owing to a threatened coal-famine, rapidly being replaced by a new order which began with Kelvin, the Prometheus of electricity. This order received an impulse from the perception of the possible exhaustion of certain material resources, and of the necessity of being prepared with others. This is what prevailed with scientists to study the fundamentals of natural and national resources. The vitalist, botanist, forester, statesman-agriculturist, economist, chemist, physicist felt and submitted to this necessity with results that can only be briefly described. They recognised that conservation must replace dissipationof resources ; “to dissipate national resources as Pittsburghers have been doing is not economics, but’ waste. ” Electric power must replace coal-power and make for the emancipation of the worker. And Vital wealth must replace Money wealth in the sense that Ruskin and Morris desired. Implicit in these changes is a proposal to rescue the terms economy and wealth from the false and vulgar meanings imposed on them by gross ignorance and the criminal misusage of the labour market. The rescue has begun. Along with the electric intensive culture and, the new economic vision has come a partial recovery of the nature phase of life and labour. For proof there are the numerous garden-towers on the fiords of Norway, all subsisting on the “white-coal” won from swift-running streams. Surely this is a prophecy of the beginning of the end of mass-cities. Huntly CARTER. I
Germanism
and the: Human By PierreLasserre
Mind.
(Authorised Translation by FRED ROTHWELL.) Each victory won by Rome has been a victory of the reason--Ernest RENAN. 1.-THE QUESTION. Truth never loses its rights, and I know most irreproachablepatriots who, in virtue of this saying, feel annoyed and irritated at the reprisals put into operation ever since the beginning of August, 1914, by a portion of our Press and our writers, against the great philosophicand scientific, artistic and literary men of Germany. is not Goethe, they say, nor Kant, nor Fichte, It nor Hegel, nor Heine, nor Schopenhauer, nor Nietzsche who have violated Belgian neutrality, burned Louvain, massacred thousands of innocent victims 2nd let loose upon the world torrents of blood and fire. Why insist on regarding them as the source of such horrors? And why, on the sole pretest that they are, or rather, were Germans, transform them into anticipatory accomplices or preparers of the barbarities committed by Imperial armies and policies? What should we think of the critical ability of a Prussian political writer who, when Napoleon was meditating the downfall of Prussia, laid the blame of it on Racine, Pascal or Voltaire? His reasoning would have been just as unsound. In principle and theory I admit such a protest, for it is based on mental integrity and a solicitude for true culture. In the domain“ of fact, if confronted with the real and particular elements of the question, it calls for a distinction, without which this very integrity and scrupulousness would run a grave risk of being deceived. Amongst all the writers and poets of Germany somewhat vaguely implicated, there are assuredly many whose writings can in no way be regarded as the cause of the events now happening, and these give the personswho professed to admire and follow them, no good reason of any kind to condemn their own choice or taste. For Instance, when I observe some particular attempt to accuse Goethe of a certain responsibility for the German atrocities, attributing, to the man himself cynical maxims uttered by characters in his plays, then the situation seems to me a-most annoying and vexatious one; and whilst I understand only too well the kind of satisfaction some men may find in profiting by the present circumstances to dishonour the mind of Goethe, I also understand that this satisfaction has nothing to do with feelings of patriotism. But is that which is true in the case of Goethe and some others, against whom the same charges are made with just as little reason, and by means of no less crooked and disingenuous arguments . . . is this necessarily true of everything, in modern Germany, that has taken place and become famous under the mantle of philosophy and thought ? It wouId appear somewhat simple-minded of us to claim this nowadays. There exist German philosophers to whom many cultured Frenchmen have hitherto not been sparing in bestowing the consideration due, speaking generally to the successors of Aristotle, and whose very thought appears under a regrettably novel aspect, in the light of the crisis brought about by their nation. This thought was what it was; all the same, it held concealed within itself principles which all men had not discerned therein with sufficient clearness ; translated into acts and transferred from speculation into practice, they now lie open to all eyes. I call to witness my dear and revered master, M. Boutroux, as little liable to the suspicion of being even partially prejudiced against German metaphysicians as he would be of dogmatic versatility. In a very remarkable article” in the “Revue des Deux-Mondes” (Sept. 15, 1914 M. Boutroux delivered on. the doctrine of Fichte a judgment thoroughly justified by the lessons of the * “Germany 1915. 6d.) and the War.” (David Nutt, London.
war. He recognised that this doctrine represented the German people as God’s elect, the special missionary of His designs concerning mankind, and that it supplied the subjects of the Kaiser with a sort of moral justification for the crimes committed by Germans in the service of their country. It is possible to dispute M. Boutroux’s reasons. But if they are well founded-as I know for my own part that they are, and as the great authority of M. Boutrox will dispose all men to admit -then it must be acknowledged that the metaphysics of Fichte aims far less at the search for truth, which is not German but universal in its nature, than at the fomenting and exalting of German vanity. Consequently, they did this metaphysics too much honour who regarded it as sincere, and classed it alongside of the ideas of Aristotle. Descartes, or Leibnitz in the common patrimony of the human mind. And it is through the war that numbers of Frenchmen will have beem warned of this illusion. There are two opposite extremes to be avoided in the tendencies we manifest as regards German thought. The one consists in considering all famous manifestations as having one single tendency, as though, being German, they could have received their inspiration only from the conduct of Germany. The other extreme is based on the erroneous impartiality which does not admit of any particular suspicion against doctrines and speculations of German origin, and claims for them the respect generally due to the products of disinterested thought, no matter from what country these products may have been given to the world. Of these two extremes, the former carries with it its own condemnation, and it could not become generalised without doing grievous wrong to our fair renown in the order of intelligence The latter invokes noble and specious considerations in its favour; it puts forward a just and necessary principle : the distinction of kinds. The question, however, is whether this principle can be applied unreservedly in this case, whether it may not be rash to enable a German to profit thereby on the sole claim of being a famous metaphysician What we want to know is whether a German who thinks is not to be suspected more than any other man of thinking The example of without a certain disinterestedness. Fichte is very significant, all the more so as this doctrine of his, which looks upon the Germans as the instruments of divinity, and the French-those who have read the “Speeches to the German Nation” will bear witness that I am not exaggerating-as limbs of Satan, is readily and easily interpreted by his confused mind as both transcendent and rational. I shalt be told that herein lies the proof of his good faith. I have not the faintest doubt of it. Still, is not his case only the more to be regretted as, at all events, the more compromising for Germany? Here is a man whom she extols as a sublime philosopher of genius, and yet in whom it is but too evident that reason, in so far as it concerns sensibility and passion, did not possess that independence of vision and of judgment whereby truly civilised intellects and well-regulated souls are. known. I ask if the instance of the illustrious Fichte is exceptional, or, if perchance he does not represent a frequent and comparatively normal modality of thought in Germany. If this is so, we must distinguish, amongst the Germans who have made a profession of thinking, and thereby obtained influence, between those who, more sensitive to the pleasure of thought itself, have exercised it with a view to truth, and those who more sensitive to other things and with minds still struggling in the toils of the unconscious and the suggestions of instinct, have devoted their thought to the service not of truth but of some interest, national or other. The object of the present investigation is to sift and get to the bottom of this distinction by proffering a few characteristic applications of it. Were I to say that it affords a general idea of the intellectual influence of Germany in the nineteenth century, I should be looked upon as madly ambitious. I do not claim, however, to
* take up the whole of this immense question; I wish to deal only with one point, a central one all the same. *** Germany’s position and action in the intellectual commerce of the nations have a very strange character. In this order of things, she is the last comer of all the European nations After remaining almost alien to the Renaissance movement-the starting point in the advance of modern science, philosophy and literatureever since the end of the Middle Ages, for a period of three centuries, she has been vegetating, just keeping alive and no more. The eminent men she has produced in the course of these centuries, the greatest of whom is Leibnitz, have sought elsewhere that culture which no one would have dreamed of obtaining from Germany herself. They have not found in their own language an instrument for the expression and communication of their own thought. They have written-and sometimes written very well-in French and Latin; and this presupposes, in virtue of the close relation between thought and language, a classical education of the intellect. They have remained isolated individuals in their own nation. With the exception of the slow diffusion of Leibnitzianism in the Universities through the agency of Wolff, there have not appeared in Germany any of those collective movements of ideas, those literary and philosophical groupings and schools, such as have succeeded one another without a break in France and England. In what our fathers called the universal republic of letters, Germany is a sort of vast uninhabitedprovince. There is nothing that more truly characterises her position and rank than the scorn manifested Frederick the Second, who affirmed that culture by and politeness were essentially French, and the obedient zeal with which all German princes advocated in their own Territories the imitation of our theatre and art, our monuments and gardens. In the second half of the eighteenth century a complete change comes about. There is a general and a rapid awakening. The period of fifty years during which appear the criticism of Lessing and the philosophy Kant, the works of Goethe, Schiller and of Herder-to mention only the greatest names-affords us evidence of the most exuberant fertility in every realm of literature and thought. It is as though some obstacle, which for centuries had condemned a productive field to accidental sterility, had suddenly been removed. What is important to note is that this awakening, according to most of itsrepresentatives-though Goethe is not one of these-is affirmed to be an absolute emancipation, this affirmation becomes, as the years pass, and ever more radical and daring, especially after the wars of the Revolution and the Empire. The Germans are unwilling to be pupils who, as the result of studying their masters, have made themselves capable of excelling in their turn, and, perhaps, becoming supreme in the very art of these masters. They consider it a profoundmistake to have hitherto received help from alien sources. Within themselves they discover inexhaustible resources of original creation; surely they can do nothing better than deduce everything from their own substance, and give full expression to the spontaneous efflorescence of their nature. They pride themselves on their long backward condition or slowness of development interpreting it in the light-or the obscurity-of Rousseau, in whose conceptions they place great faith, as having literally revealed them to themselves. This slowness of growth they set forward as both a cause and an effect of their superiority. Whereas the spirit of polished and refined nations gradually became stunted and spoiled by the artificial rules of civilisation and academic disciplines, the Germans maintained close contact with Nature; they remained the primitive and original people, the virgin nation, Urvolk Now, Nature is good; she is truth and goodness; she is divine. On her children she pours inspiration, giving them intuitions that are inaccessible to a humanity separated from her by the entire range of the Graeco-Latin heritage Hence the unique scope and hearing of the German mind. It sees further and more profoundly than the mind of other peoples; it is inimitable in the ability to penetrate the sacred obscurities which enfold the absolute principles of things and to deduce therefrom poetico-scientific views on the universal generation and economy of the cosmos, in the ability to comprehend the mind and genius of the old human races and the philosophy of history-whose prospects, after all, her position as a quasi-divine people enables her to dominate--and finally, in the power to restore religion to its “pure” essence, by setting it free from its contingent forms. . . . Wonderful to relate, this claim-which I present, you see, just as it presents itself-did not find its very anomalous nature to be any drawback to its success. Outside of Germany, and particularly in France, it has been widely followed and acknowledged, by such individuals as Madame de Stael, Victor Cousin, Michelet, Quinet, Pierre Leroux, Taine and Renan. They have bowed before the German mind,. extolled it in expressions which would nowadays appear fabulous, discovering in it a kind of new revelation. Owing to such heralds the intellectual influence of Germany spread throughout the Europe of the nineteenth century. They acknowledge that from modern Germany there flowed an incomparable’ spring for the revival of philosophy and religion, poetry and the historic sense. Were they wholly deceived and mistaken? Anyone who judged so would at all events have to admit that so sweeping a delusion is a potent and important fact which requires explanation, and which cannot be usefully resisted or wisely corrected except in the degree in which it is understood. On this question I should like to throw light by defining the Germanic mind, not in the mythical and mysticalterms used by the Germans, but in terms that command the approval both of nature and of reason. But what a strange question it is ! The Germanic mind consists not simply of certain dispositions of temperament and humour peculiar to the Germans, and which, in them, colour the ideas and feelings common to the various civilised nations and races. This mind must be understood and defined in its very substance. It is said to be based on a groundwork of ideas and feelings There would appear to be ideas and feelings which are German in themselves, and which would not have existed without the existence of that combination of human nature which calls itself the German people. The result of ‘this conception is something which would have seemed monstrous to a Frenchman of the seventeenth century, fashioned in the school of Descartes, and that something may be called the nationalisation of the mind. Hitherto, no doubt, it was well known that each human grouping has, in its mode of feeling and its moral constitution, particularities clearly marked in its intellectual works, and which give them a certain distinct flavour. But only slight attention was paid to this affected and obscure element; the thing sought after in a French or English work or genius was not so much the French or English element they contained as the . element of universality. To do the contrary would have seemed as opposed to the true order of things as to arrange a bouquet of flowers with corolla below and stem above. No sooner, however, did the Germans claim for their nationality a special genius than the other nationalities refused to be behindhand, and so the French .mind and the French genius began to be spoken about far more than had hitherto been the custom. They were regarded as a sort of ideal model, composed by Nature herself, which it was necessary to return to and imitate. Inspirations and directions were sought for in the French “inconscient,” unfair advantage was taken of “tradition,” and that intellectual nationalism to which one was in a way led and almost reduced by Germany became a means of reaction and defence against the oppression of German influence. As such it has been ,
able to render indispensable, though momentary, limited and only negative service by putting a stop to an encroaching Germanisation. It can neither have the last word nor win the victory; for it places the combat on a ground unfavourable to the French. Either the French mind is universal and human, or it is non-existent. It was even desired to create a “French philosophy,” as though the glory of France did not consist in having produced, through such men as Montaigne, Pascal, Descartes and Voltaire, a philosophy which must also be understood wherever human intelligence and experience are to be found. In these men of genius, does this universal character lower the national character? Who would dare to claim this? Do we not find in them a sort of blend of the French temperament and fire, along with all the vigour and glory of seductions and attractions which are only French?* Tales By C. of Today.
E. Bechhofer.
XXI1.-A SELF-SATISFIED NOVELETTE. [This entertaining narrative is conceived and executed in the best manner of Mr. J. C. Snaith’s well-known “Broke of Covenden. ’’I LORD DEDBROKE OF LOVENDING clasped his adorable Ermyntrude to his bosom. “Be mine,” he cried, “be mine for ever !” “For ever?” Ermyntrude gasped, with a vivid blush o’ershadowing her face with its strange assertive front teeth. What did the Gods in Olympus say to this, as they sat watching this gem of a vast collection of mundane films unfold itself upon the ethereal sheet? But first, say, gentle reader, say if it is not a brilliant idea that the Gods look upon the world as such a modern form of entertainment as a cinematograph. Of course, almost anyone could call our human life with its warp and woof of passions and emotions, almost anyone, we repeat, could call it the “play” or “theatre” of the Gods. How banal this becomes beside our more up-to-date version ! If only the printer permitted, we should have laid our stern commands upon him to print every word of these philosophic reflections of ours in italics. However let us return to our muttons. Imagine, if you can the delight of the immortals when this piquant scene from a piquant film passed before their ambrosial gaze. Just imagine how they applauded the ingenious author, i.e., ourselves. After all, what could be cleverer, more ingenious, more original ? Consider the situation :-Lord Dedbroke, with the concentrated blue blood of a thousand barons circulating in his veins, actually takes into his arms Ermyntrude, his mother’s cook, takes her into his arms, we say, and cries, “Be mine €or ever !” To this Ermyntrude replies-you can surely picture the embarrassed mingling of rapture and surprise-she replies with a question which is a symbol of the black doubts weighing upon her soul; she replies with two simple words and a question-mark. The first word is monosyllabic, the second dissyllabic ; she replies, “For ever?” Can you wonder, reader, that the immortal Gods acclaimed the ingenuity of the author who had conceived this situation? “Yes,” said Dedbroke, as his lips sought hers, “yes, for ever and a day !” “Oh,“ answered Ermyntrude, in the fullness of her joy. The author feels that it is his duty to explain to his myriad readers at this juncture the extraordinary significance * What was called for a number of years in the nineteenth century “ the French Philosophy ” was a somewhat odd doctrinal compound containing a strong dose of Schelling.
of the foregoing remarks. He will permit himselfthe luxury of another exhaustive analysis of the situation. In the first place, Lord Dedbroke is heir to millions-of ancestors, not acres. His has been a name to conjure with in England for many a long year. His earliest ancestors came over with the Conqueror (10661087)) and a long line of Dedbrokes has been coming it over the. inhabitants of the country ever since. In long, Lord Dedbroke is, as his name denotes, a lord of the line of the Norman de Dedbrokes, and Ermyntrude is a cook. Have we made this sufficiently clear? If we have not, you might say that the situation we are describing is of no particular interest. But, against this unworthy suggestion on your part, we may remind you, reader, how the immortal Gods, a5 we have seen, applauded it and expressed the opinion that it was “doosed witty, doncher know. ” Come, try again, realise the piquantly contrasted position of Lord She, beloved of a lord, is a Dedbrokeand Ermyntrude! plebeian, a proletarian, a predestined progeny-producer, a margarine-masticator, in a word, a domestic servant. Is not the irony of this ingenious situation gradually of our becoming visible to the least experienced innumerable readers ? Are we not rubbing it well in ? “Piemerriber,” said Ermyntrude, “our relative positions. Your rank is not the same as mine; nor, by an unhappy coincidence, is mine the same as yours. You are the son of a belted earl ; I am the darter of a dustman. Have you ever read ‘Pygmalion’ by Mr. Bernard Shaw ? ’ ’ “Indeed I have,” said Dedbroke, speaking in a voice neither slower nor quicker than his usual tone, and not attempting to sit down. “I have read also the works of the famous Oliver Goldsmith.” “But you will agree with me,” said Ermyntrude, “that, bar Shakespeare and Rupert Brooke, George Meredith is the greatest writer that ever chose chapterheadings ?” We need hardly pause to observe that at this point the celestial sightseers could no longer restrain their applause. They understood how, by this revelation of Ermyntrude’s good taste and magnificent power of judgment, the clever author was drawing still closer the knots of his ingenious situation. The tension thickened every moment. “I agree with you,” said Lord Dedbroke, ‘‘adorable Ermyntrude. But let us leave these literary digressions Be mine!” to a later chapter. “A horrid doubt assails me,” said Ermyntrude. “What will your father, the aged and implacable duke, say when he learns of your attachment to me, who am, broadly speaking, only a mere scullery ’un?” ‘ “He will say,” laughed Dedbroke, “he will say, ‘The matter-ah-is out-ah-of the question-ah, ’ which will vividly illuminate his innermost old feudal mind.” “What shall we do?” asked Ermyntrude. “Neither you nor I have a penny to bless ourselves with. We are as poor as the proverbial-you remember the proverb -the proverbial church mice. What shall we do?” she repeated with a flood of tears. The celestial audience applauded loudly as these plaintive words, “What shall we do?” were thrown upon the screen. They felt that the marvellous handling of this unexampledly ingenious situation was fast approaching its climax. They had thought that nothing could possibly improve upon Lord Dedbroke’s witty revelation of his father’s innermost being. But now they realised that Ermyntrude’s poser had transcended even that in cleverness. No wonder the film flickered for a moment unsteadily amidst the frantic applause of the Gods “My father,” hissed Dedbroke, “has a fatal way of becoming blind to the most obvious signs of the times
in which we live, and this ineradicable, almost medieval, conservatism militates against the possibility of his consenting even to consider the prospect of a union such as we desire to achieve. Ermyntrude, do you not recall when, on the strength of my winning the third prize in a Missing Word competition, the editor of ‘Home Notes’ offered me a, place upon his staff at a commencing salary of f;s,ooo a year, how my father insisted upon my refusing the offer. I remember his exact words. He said, Algernon-ah-my boy, I-ah -can understand-ah-a Dedbroke drinking beer-ah -and riding to hounds-ah-but I cannot-ah-bring myself-&-to contemplate a Dedbroke--.ah-in-ah -Grub Street, not even-ah-Upper Grub Street. ’ And my mother agreed with him.” “Nevertheless, my beloved,’’ said Ermyntrude, “I will tell you a way whereby we may overcome your father’s intensely feudal prejudices and turn your mother into an eager furtherer of our alliance.” “How, beloved?’’ You may imagine how the immortals held their breath while they awaited. the denouement of this crisis. The situation had become more dramatically ingenious than evet. How could anyone write so cleverly as this ! “I have been, “Listen, dearest, said Ermyntrude. as you know, your mother’s cook for the term of nearly one month. As you are aware, it is nowadays a matter almost of impossibility to find a cook, or, having found one, to retain her in service. The result is that your parents prize and honour me to an extent only equalled by the homage they still pay to their anachronistic feudal prejudices. It is these prejudices which make your parents’ consent to our match impossible. For us it is necessary that this old-fashioned mentality of theirs should be overcome. This is how I propose to act‘:-I will give notice ! As we cooks are nowadays in the happy position of enjoying a virtual monopoly of our labour, my mere threat to leave your parents’ service will be enough to make them throw over for ever their ingrained ideas and to consent to make us happy.” Dedbroke clasped Ermyntrude closer in his arms and pressed innumerable kisses upon her throbbing cheek. Near by, from a neighbouring house, came the dramatic wail of a new-born baby ! Even the cherubs, who are considered the the celestial critics, had to admit that, since Covenden,” they had never witnessed a film ingenious, clever, witty and wise, as the one just ended. What a comfort it is for us know we are appreciated in Heaven ! severest of “Broke of at once so which was authors to
Views
and
Reviews.
A CRITIC OF COLLECTIVISM. AT a time when everybody is calling upon the State to do everything, such an inquiry as this* is particularly useful, if only as a warning. The criticism of Collectivistactivity is by no means novel; and the general conclusions concerning Collectivism, that it neither irnproves the lot of the workers nor studies the interests of the consumers, are familiar to the readers of THE NEW AGE, at least. Just as the Collectivists criticised the Capitalists, so the Syndicalists criticised the Collectivists and the Guild Socialists criticised them all. But an elaborate statistical inquiry like Mr. Madsen’s work, which presses its arguments into the details, is much more than a mere demonstration of the failure of Collectivism to satisfy the aspirations of the workers or the desires of the consumers; it really raises the question whether this disability is not inherent in the very “The State as Manufactufer and Trader : An Examination of Government Tobacco Monopolies.” By A. W. Madsen. (Fisher Unwin 7s. 6d. net.)
nature of monopolistic industry. It is Mr. Madsen’s contention that competitive industry not only pays the workers equally well, and perhaps better, but that it more adequately satisfies the consumer. In mere variety of products, for example, the taste of the purchaser is far more extensively provided for in England than in any of the countries that have made a State monopoly of the tobacco trade. In those countries, says Mr. Madsen, the assortment offered to the public is so limited that the smoker can, as a rule, obtain only one article for one price ; the retailer is forbidden to manipulate the tobacco in any way, he must not make cigarettes, or make a mixture of the tobaccos in stock. The consumer has to take what the State factories provide, at a price that is determined not by the value of the goods but by the needs of the Treasury. To reach this deplorable result, the retailers are impoverished, the workers are sweated, and the planters are harassed by innumerable restrictions. Mr. Madsen argues that a better system of accountancy would show that even the Treasury does not benefit, for his indictment is comprehensive. What the facts do show distinctly is that these results are not confined to any one country, they are common to all the countries that have monopolised their tobacco trade. But it is not so clear that these results are due to the State control of the monopoly, rather than to the monopoly itself. Certainly, there are some disadvantages peculiar to the State monopoly ; for example, “the practice of using the retail selling rights as an outlet for State patronage and as a substitute for military and civil pensions places the control over retail business in the hands of privileged persons whose interests as holders of sinecures are frequently in conflict with the interests of the actual shopkeepers. ” If is certainly a most ingenious method of robbing Peter to pay Paul, of making the retailer work to pay the concessionaire what the State ought to have paid him as a pension; and it is obviously one of the disadvantages that would not attach to any other form of monopoly. But the other disadvantages are probably due to monopoly itself, to one control being exercised at all stages of the production and distribution of the product. Production on a large scale tends to a less varied product, and so long as the product can be sold, there is no incentive to produce alternatives. It is only- by standardising the product that the processes of its manufacture can be simplified, and the greatest economy in production be effected. That standardising of the product is common to all large businesses ; how many varieties at the same price are there of Quaker Oats, or Bass’s Ale, or Pears’ Soap, for example? Advertising only temporarily adds to the variety on the market, for the one product tends to exclude the other from the market; and advertising is admittedly only an aid to the creation of a monopoly. And whether the control of industry be State, capitalist, or producers’ control the effect would be the same, I think, if the particular industry became a monopoly. The consumer will always have to consume what he can get, unless he can find some way (as in the Co-operative movement) of making industry supply him with what he wants. The ideal system would be one of free production and common marketing but that would be incompatible with any monopoly. But if Collectivism does not improve the lot of the workers nor study the wants of the consumers, neither does it effect the great economy that it always advocates. The abolition of the middleman is, curiously enough, the dream of the advocates of production on the largest scale. The middleman can only be abolished when buyer and producer come face to face, and that cannot happen with any business larger than one shop. Just as the Co-operative movement has its wholesale and retail societies so the State tobacco monopolies have their wholesalers and retailers. They are the necessary machinery of distribution on a large scale; “under whatever auspices the work of marketing widely
consumed articles is carried on, whether by private or by public enterprise, it must use the machinery of wholesalers on the one hand to relieve the manufacturer of the cost of handling small consignments and running numerous small transactions, and, on the other hand, to save the retailer the expense of carrying a larger stock than he can readily sell and replace within short periods The retailer on his part serves the consumer by giving him convenient access to the small purchases he makes from day to day, and by offering him the opportunity to select his requirements on the apt.’’ Abolish the middleman, and Collectivism will neither be able to collect nor to distribute its products; and the organisation of the system of distribution under the monopolies only has the effect of placing the retailer at the mercy of one wholesaler, who seems frequently above considering the wants of his customers, or even of executing the orders sent to him. But the chief disadvantage of Collectivism, which is recognised in the Fabian report before mentioned, is its intolerable restriction of the workers in the national industry. Trade Unionism, for example, is hardly toleratedamong them; and not only are the political rights of the workers limited, but even their political opinions are denied expression. That an employee should not publicly criticise his own department is, of course a . necessary rule of -discipline, although perhaps the Postmaster-General interpreted it too strictly when he forbade criticism of the administration, and particularly of the higher officials, in the monthly journal of that Trade Union. But democratic France requires its State officials to vote for the candidate of the administration, on penalty of dismissal; “even so democratic a State as New South Wales,’’ says the Fabian report, “allows its Public Service Board to ordain, not only for its own Civil Servants of all grades, but also for all employees of ‘corporate bodies immediately controlled by the Government of the State,’ that no officer shall ‘publicly comment upon the administration of any department of the State.’ Thus, a New South Wales railway guard must not complain in public about the inefficiency of the Post Office in failing to deliver his letters, nor may a postman criticise the curriculum of the State schools to which he has to send his children.” The loss of liberty of the worker corresponds with a restriction of choice of the consumer. A. E. R. REVIEWS The ,
a healthy soul.” He concludes that “if the universal mind gave us creative powers and enabled us to establish a super-world over the natural world, then it can only be done on the same principles, by the same methods. If the universal mind has to work and fight matter for the realisation of his creative impulses then we have likewise to work and fight for the development of our civilisation.” It is a pity that Mr. Drake does not tell us why, the more highly developed our control over the resources of the natural world, the more we have to work for the bare necessaries of life. Is it that the Universal Mind likes work, and likes also to see the young ones at it; or is it simply that Mr. Drake knows nothing and cares nothing for economics? Create, work, and fight may be a very inspiring summary of the purpose of the Universal Mind, but Christianity (which Mr. Drake supersedes) did not forget the question of pay. “Great is your reward in heaven.” Mr. Drake will not even pay us in heaven, and his Universal Mind is like the unprofitable master in the parable, who expected to find his talents increased while he journeyed into a far country. But even he rewarded one of his servants by letting him gnash his teeth! Food Values: What They Are and How to Calculate Them. By Margaret McKillop, M.A. (Routledge. IS. net.) The object of this little book of seven chapters is “to present as much information as possible on the requisites in diet and the composition of ordinary foodstuffs, for the most part in condensed and tabular form. I have then given numerous examples of the ways in which calculations are made from the tables,, assuming that some at any rate of my readers are shy of decimals, and even need a little help with arithmetical problems. ” We can, if we like, imagine the cook working out the “CO-efficient of digestibility of cereals, ” or followings with marked attention Miss McKillop’s demonstration ’ of the absorption of water by rice, thus : “Let I oz. rice absorb x oz. water, thus becoming (I + x) oz. after cooking 0.12 oz. water +x oz. water =0.72 of (I +x) oz. water. Making the decimals whole numbers : II + IOOX =72 + 72x. x=72-12 60 15 =-=-, -2 I/7 100-72 28 7 Therefore rice absorbs a little more than twice its weight of water.” We have submitted this to the cook, and she agrees that it is substantially true-“in parts,” as she said with an afterthought; but we accept it as cheerfully as the rice does the water. Patriotism and the Fellowship of Nations. By F. Melian Stawell. (Dent.) This book is rightly called “A little primer of great problems”; in, the space of less than a hundred pages, it deals with such questions as “The Growth of Nations,” “The Nation and Mankind,’’ “Co-operation in Labour and Trade and Ideas,” “National Security and National Expansion,” “The Protectorates and the Backward Races,” and “The Future.” It reduces the pacifist programme to its most infantile expression, it enunciates the “much richer conception 6f a Family of Nations where the Elder Brothers train the younger and all agree so to divide the goods of the world that there is enough for ’all to live on.” It would not be apparent to any pupil of Miss Stawell that there were some difficulties the way of the realisation of this idea, that even in the infantile phrases have perhaps more than one meaning A Family, far instance, is not necessarily a Happy Family, the Elder Brothers are much more likely to be courting the Elder Sisters than to be training the younger, and in any division of goods the younger are likely to get only what the Elder have outgrown and do not want. It is not an explanation but a perversion of the problem to put forward a conception that is valid only within the four walls of a home, and not always there. The Nations are not a family; they are a menagerie.
Universal Mind and the Great War. By Edward Drake. (C. W. Daniel. 2s. 6d. net.) “There are many different religions and systems of philosophy, all contradicting each other more or less; but there is only ‘one science, there is only one truth; of this we may be convinced by basing our investigations on this undisputed rock of truth, and thus, freed from all doubts, re-establish the normal balance of our mind and soul-seeing and understanding the momentous events taking place in this world from a new standpoint.” Asserting that there are only two entities, Mind and Matter, the one working creatively with the other, and individualising itself in its handiwork, Mr. Drake argues that dogmatic religion is dead, and that Universalism, which accepts both matter and mind, is the new religion, the cult of which is Education. He runs swiftly over the main facts of evolution to prove that Darwinism only reveals-ihe process, not the cause, the cause being, in his opinion, a Creative Intellect that learns by its failures and successes, and is aiming at a complete expression of itself through the body of its creation “Our civilisation is a super-world over the natural world : a new opening for a wider and more intense manifestation of the universal mind. Our highest ideal can therefore only consist in the desire to form a healthy basis in ourselves for the manifestation of the universal mind : to consider our body as a sacred seat for this manifestation and to concentrate all our efforts to maintain a healthy body, a healthy mind and
Pastiche,
BALLADE. To THE MEMORYOF NATIONAL GUILDS. There was a time before th’ impending cloud Of dread-inspiring war burst o’er the land, When slaves, who to a mighty monster bowed The head, and, circumspectly licked his hand, Arose and challenged his supreme command ; Ay, swore they’d bring him to his knees in fear. Their hopes have since received quick reprimand : Where are the golden dreams of yesteryear? In ’12, when a dissentient, bick’ring crowd Of Fabians counselled Labour to disband, We read our special page (or sage) and vowed Eternal constance to the Guildsman’s band. We saw a theory that could well withstand The critic’s eye, and, scatheless, reappear. We built our fine Utopias of sand : Where are thegolden dreams of yesteryear ? Just then the Despot, clamorous and loud, Struck down the best traditions of our land; And fairest Freedom thus became a shroud, And men were branded with a servile brand. The while fools slept, and would not understand, Although we shouted ‘I Danger ! ” in their ear. Shorn are the blossoms of our English strand : Where are the golden dreams of yesteryear? Envoi Prince, know that Britons may no more demand The right to live; Destruction hovers near. Our hopes are buried in oblivion; and Where are those golden dreams of yesteryear? C. S. D. By EATING HIS WORDS. TEFFI (NADYOZHDAALEXANDROVNA BUTCHINSKAYA). Translated from the Russian by P. SELVER. [The title in the original is “ Bab’ya Kniga,” i.e. ‘‘ The Woman’s Book,” with a flavour of disparagement. As no equivalent phrase suitable for a title suggested itself, I have altered it as above but where it occurs in the first paragraph I have rendered it as “A Book by a Female Person. ”-P. S.] Herman Yensky, the young aesthete stylist, modernist, and critic, was sitting in his study and perusing a book by a female person. He was getting irritated. The book by a female person was a thickish novel, full of gush and rant, simperings and whimperings. . . . I love you ! ” whispered the artist passionately, encircling Lydia’s slender waist. . . “We are urged, one to the other, by some overwhelming power, against which we cannot struggle. . . .” “ Are you laughing at me?’’ “ I am so taken up with you that everything else has lost its meaning for me.” ‘‘ Bah, what bosh ! ” groaned Herman Yensky. “ As if an artist would talk like that! We are urged by an overwhelming power, and cannot struggle and all the rest of that rot ! Well yes, a counter-jumper might squeeze out such remarks-a counter-jumper from a fancy-goods establishment, with whom this fool of a woman would certainly start an affair, just for the sake of describing it.” “ I feel that I have never loved anyone before this. . . ” “ This is like a dream. . . .” “How foolish it is! I want to nestle against you!” (‘ Whew! That’s enough for me!” And he flung the book aside. (( Here we work, perfecting style and form ; we seek fresh ideas and fresh states of mind; we cast all this before the mob. Look The whole sky full of stars is above you-take whichever you desire. No! They see nothing, they desire nothing. But don’t slander us, at any rate. Don’t lead people to believe that an artist would utter your cow-like thoughts. ” He got into such a bad temper that he could no longer stay at home. He dressed, and went to pay a call. While still on the way, he felt a pleasant stimulation, the unconscious anticipation of something radiant and captivating. And when he entered the brilliant diningroom, and took in the company gathered round the teatable, he realised what he wanted and what he expected. Madame Vikulina was there, and alone, without her husband.
Under cover of the loud outbursts which proceeded from the general conversation, Yensky whispered to Madame Vikulina : “ You know, it’s a strange thing; but I had a feeling I should meet you.” “ Really? And have you had it long ?” ‘‘ Oh, yes, for quite a long time! Perhaps even for my whole life. )’ Madame Vikulina enjoyed this. She reddened, and said languidly : “ I’m afraid you’re a thorough Don Juan.” Yensky looked at her agitated eyes, at her expectant, excited face, and he replied earnestly and with inmost conviction : ‘‘ You know, Ifeel now that I have never loved anyone before this. )’ She half-closed her eyes, bending towards him a little, and waiting for his next remark. And he remarked : “ I love you !” Here someone addressed him, hooked him with some phrase or other, and drew him into the general conversation And Madame Vikulina also turned aside and likewise began to gossip, to ask questions, to laugh. Both became just like all the others at table, animated, affable --quite above-board. Herman Yensky spoke wittily, neatly, and vivaciously, but inwardly he had become quite still and pondered: “ Whatever was it? Whatever was it? Why ate the stars singing in my soul?” And, turning to Madame Vikulina, he suddenly saw that she had bent towards him afresh and was waiting. Then he wanted to say something radiant and profound to her; he was intent Upon her expectation; he was intent upon his own soul and in an enraptured and passionate manner he whispered : “This is like a dream. . . . J, She again half-closed her eyes and smiled just a very little, quite fervently and happily, but suddenly he became uneasy. He caught the echo of something strangely familiar and unpleasant, something humiliating, in the words he had said. “ What can it be? What is the matter?”--with such questions did he rack his brains. “Perhaps I have ~ already used these phrases long ago, and used them not in love, not sincerely, and now I feel ashamed. I can’t understand it. ” Again he looked at Madame Vikulina, but she suddenly moved aside and whispered hastily : “ Be careful ! I fancy we are attracting attention. . . .” He also moved aside, and, endeavouring to give his countenance a placid expression, he said softly : “ Pardon me ! I am so taken up with you that everything else has lost its meaning for me.” And again some dull vexation crept into his mind, and again he could not understand whence or why it came. ‘‘ I am in love, I am in love, and I am speaking about my love so sincerely and simply that there can be nothing shabby or nasty about it. Why am I worrying so And he said to Madame Vikulina : ‘‘ I do not know. Perhaps you are laughing at me. . . . I do not want to say anything. I cannot. I want to nestle against you. . . .” A lump came into his throat, and he stopped speaking. He accompanied her home, and all was settled Tomorrow she would come to see him. Their happiness would be beautiful, unheard of and unseen. “This is like a dream. . . . J, Only she felt just a little sorry for her husband. But Herman Yensky drew her towards him and talked her over : I‘ What are we to do, dear one,” he said, “ if we are urged, one to the other by some overwhelming power against which we cannot struggle ?” (‘ How foolish it is ! ” she whispered. “ How foolish it is!” he repeated. . He returned home, as if in delirium. He went smiling from room to room, and the stars were singing in his soul. “ To-morrow ! ” he whispered. “ To-morrow ! Oh, what will to-morrow bring ? ” And because all people in love are superstitious, he mechanically took from the table the first book that came to hand, opened it, thrust his finger in, and read: She was the first to regain her composure, and she asked softly : ‘‘ You do not despise me, Eugene?” It How strange!” murmured Yensky with a smile.
“The answer is clear-I have asked fate exactly the same question. What thing is this?” And the thing was as commonplace as could be. It was simply and solely the following chapter from the book by a female person. Suddenly his radiance became quite dull; he cowered, and crept away from the table on tiptoe. And that night the stars were not singing in his soul ‘ RELIGION. Men have sung psalms and bowed the knee in churches As far apart as England and Hong Kong; Their brains have pondered biblical researches’ And dwelled in parsons’ paradises longUntil they suffered from the whips and birches With which the World belaboureth “the strong.” Then, quitting God, they kissed Life’s stains and smirches And sold religion for a comic song. Ding-dofig, with rattle, fife and big bassoon All arms a-link, and laughing, high-heeled shoon, Silk frills and shiny hats, the dancers go As if they thought that God would have it so. To Hell strolls Piety beneath the moon : And Satan twirls a pirouetting toe. s.
Home
Letters Soldiers. Translated by
from
German
P.
Selver.
[NoTE.--The following letters were originally published in various German papers. They are arranged here according to the particular aspect of the war with which they deal, and reference is given in each case to the source from which they are derived.] (IO) From an Uhlaa who was present at the entry into. Antwerp (I‘ Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger,” October zIst). How everything has changed in the last week! I am once more peacefully ensconced at Brussels, and patrols, infantry fire, and thunder of cannon are now only a dream. They were splendid, memorable days of victory that it was my privilege to witness with the -th Uhlans under K.’s leadership! A kind fairy guarded me the whole time, for I was continually on patrol and daily under fire for twelve days, and in spite of it I lost neither man nor horse. And our achievements were brilliant, although partly through mere chance. While a fort was being shelled, we got with 1,000 to 500 yards of it in the capacity of a scouting patrol, and in this way we were able to supply our famous 42-centimetre artillery with valuable information. It was a horribly beautiful sight when on the 7th our last shot exploded a powder magazine against the red evening sky. We did our work thoroughly, as I was able to corroborate personally on the next day. On the 9th in the morning, we acted as patrol against Antwerp itself. Towards noon we heard that negotiations for surrender were in progress. Then there was no holding us. Forward we went without a stop, singing ‘‘ Heil dir im Siegerkranz our horses decorated with oak-leaves, straight into the town to the market-place. There were only a few inhabitants, hut didn’t they just open their eyes! By the town hall the “ Wacht am Rhein ” was sung again; then on we went again, at a trot, out in front of the town gates. . . . We were the first of the whole division to get in. It was not until the next morning that the brigade made its official entry, K. and I at the head in Prussian colours. . . . We felt very proud. You see, it was already the second entry, Now we are waiting for our black and white decoration. Out of 50 people, 29 are going to get itthat speaks for itself, I think. Not for anything would I have missed these 18 days, which are probably unique in history: “ Lieb Vaterland magst ruhig sein.” * When are we going on? To France very soon, I hope. Belgium is cleared! From a German officer who visited Antwerp immediately after it had been taken (“Vossische Zeitung,” October 16). I can scarcely describe to you? the impressions I have * Dear Fatherland, thou needst not fear (from the Wacht am Rhein ”). f The familiar form “ du” is used. (11)
recently received around and in Antwerp. I wish you were here, so that I could take you in a car through the places where we fought and where German glory was gained, as I did yesterday with the foreign military attaches All were of the opinion that no other army in the world could have been a match for Germany by taking the strongest fortress with a garrison of over IOO,OOO men in nine days. We were able to follow the successive stages of the fighting, and see the incredible effect of our guns and those of Austria. . . . Everywhere our position and the enemy’s are indicated by trenches. We then come to the forts around which the effect of the artillery was specially terrible. Here, too, is the zone of inundation. We fought our passage through by means of artillery.. Then we go on, through villages that are still smouldering. In front of the houses are sofas, tables, and chairs, on which the troops rested while they were waiting. Cattle, running about in a free and easy manner, peep out from the windows of the burning houses. Then comes another line of forts. By this time we are getting to the villas of the wealthy classes of Antwerp. Together with their flower-gardens they have been included within the line of fortifications; the parks, with their trees all felled, contain deep trenches with dug-outs. Everywhere deep shell craters, trees smashed to splinters, and so on. All Antwerp is surrounded by narrow nets of barbed wire, partly invisible in cabbage-fields. When the city was stormed, our men were to be caught in them, stumble, and then be shot down. It did not get to that pitch, for in the darkness of the last nights, Belgians and English slipped off with soft tread, like a thief in the night. So now back again to Antwerp! All entrances had been barricaded, but were cleared by our pioneers. Still, it is hard for the car to get through. And when you get into a captured fortress, you open your eyes as you have never done before. We drive through the green ramparts and are in the town. A few German soldiers are to be seen, but no inhabitants. A cow runs about helplessly and breaks into the park. All the shutters are down, and in front of the cellar windows lie sacks of sand as a protection against fragments of shell. So the inhabitants are shut up in the cellars. Soon the traces of the bombardment can be seen. The car is often obliged to avoid shell craters made in the street. Here a house is burning-not a soul troubles about it; there a wide shell-hole gapes in the front wall, and destroyed furniture and pictures are revealed. At another spot ten houses in one row lie in ruins; only the bare and charred side-gables are still standing; and over there, again, flames are darting froin a palatial building. The town was bombarded for three days and two nights. Every IOO yards you come upon dreadful traces of the most varying kinds; but up above, on the Cathedral, over 370 feet in height, waves the German flag, clearly lit up by the sun. We stop at an old, venerable town-hall on the Grande Place. Now and then an inhabitant ventures to come to the front door. Suddenly we hear the sound of music. The big drum can be heard plainly, and singing blends with it; round the corner by the square appears the first German regiment, with flying colours, adorned with flowers, singing the German song with a vigour which is heightened by the victor’s pride, ‘‘ Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles ! ”
THE FIGHTING ON THE WESTERN (12) The first great battle in Alsace-Lorraine Zeitung,” August 25).
FRONT. (‘‘ Kolnische
August 9. To-day, Sunday morning, on the morning of the great battle at Mulhausen, I am able, in our bivouac on the Baden side of the Rhine, to write you the first letter from the seat of war in Upper Alsace. In the last two days, events followed each other with a rush, after we had spent five days in helping to secure the movement of our army through Baden by keeping faithful watch upon the frontier in the Vosges mountains. Our four divisions kept their positions along the frontier for all that time, without being specially menaced by enemy forces. . . . From Friday afternoon, the enemy advanced on the whole line and occupied the first German places on this side of the frontier; thereupon we concentrated our weak troops yesterday morning near Illfurt the headquarters of our staff. In that place, from noon onwards,
fighting developed on a large scale, after a battery from here as well had moved over to strengthen our supplies. They say that the six guns thoroughly cleared the French up, while our artillery did not lose a single man-not even from the three batteries of our opponents. The losses of our infantry are said to amount to between 70 and IOO men. While the fighting was in progress I received orders to withdraw our baggage to Habsheim and this took till 5 o’clock. As by a divisional order all our forces ,fell back in the evening as far as the Rhine, I barricaded myself in the place with my infantry escort of 20; but fortunately, at 11.30 at night, I received another order to return. Yesterday, Saturday afternoon, our two regiments of cavalry again advanced to clear the way, but at 2 in the morning they all came back with the report that all the places as far as the Haardtwald (a narrow strip of wood along the Rhine, about 3 miles across), including Habsheim,were occupied by forces of all kinds in great numbers. were told that several brigades had victoriously We entered Mulhausen. The intention of our supreme command, to let the enemy enter Upper Alsace and to strike a blow at him there from the north, has consequently been realised for the present. Let us hope that the attack begun to-day will terminate victoriously, so that the French and Alsatians down here will get a thorough lesson once and for all. From a quarter to six the advance has begun here, the four divisions of dragoons again to the fore. Just this instant, at g o’clock, a military train arrived here with further supplies of artillery. In addition, fresh battalions are constantly passing our bivouacs. It is a pleasure to see how alertly and cheerfully they all go to meet the enemy. . . . The whole movement of the troops proceeds so faultlessly without a hitch, that it leaves no doubt as to the safe working of the whole of the huge apparatus. For the time being, I am remaining here in the bivouac as a frontier observer, and I shall only receive the order to join in with the reserve supplies when the enemy has been beaten back from the vicinity of Mulhausen, and it is just possible that this cannot be accomplished till late in the evening, supposing that our opponent, in his newly occupied position, really admits an attack from such numerous forces Altogether, the battle seems slow in starting today; as far as can be heard, the artillery does not appear to have opened fire. Only a few men slightly wounded have returned from the foremost line of patrols. My commanding officer, who will gain renown to-day, I hope, has just ridden by. The weather is splendid-brightest sunshine and, so far, not too hot. I shall probably see little of my luggage which was left behind in Mulhausen, as in the meantime the French will have had their quarters there . . . . August 11. Our to-day’s advance from Neuenburg has already brought us in closer touch with the horrors of war. After substantial losses, the enemy evacuated Mulhausen again, and now the uncertain elements among the population are receiving short shrift. Probably after further fighting in the course of the next few days, we shall cross the French frontier and lie low for some time in front of the fortress of Belfort. . . . I am going on fine. The two days’ bivouac at Neuenburg did me a lot of good. Everyone is in good spirits over the recovery of Alsace. August 12. Within the last few days, the Director of battles has vouchsafed us the first great victory, and, while I am writing this, the final French stragglers will have again evacuated the soil of Alsace, which they entered with great hopes of victory only four days ago. As I hinted to you in my last letter, what can be called an extensive battle has actually taken place about Mulhausen the last two days, on the 9th and 10th of in August. In it about ~zo,ooo combatants were opposed. The idea of our supreme command was to cut off the French retreat to Belfort, in order then to harass them from north and east, or to force them over the Swiss frontier. Unfortunately this scheme was not carried out, in spite of all our forced marches. But the French went back in full flight, as appears from the narratives of the inhabitants, and the large amount of equipment, the many knapsacks and rifles that were thrown away. From here alone we sent back a whole cartload of rifles and lances this morning. We have at least cleared the enemy out of Upper Alsace again, and this in itself is a very fine achievement. In Mulhausen the French posted up long proclamations, in which the districts of Altkirch and I Mulhausen were officially declared to have been annexed by France. Their joy lasted just a bare 24 hours.
LETTERS
TO
THE
EDITOR.
POST=WAR PROBLEMS. Sir,-To enable the nation to meet the enormous burden of the war-whether to discharge the War Loan is not quite clear-most people insist that the trade unions must relinquish their pre-war restrictions, and that the “ war standard ” of output shall continue. If production alone be all that is necessary to discharge our indebtedness one wonders why the nations have ever been burdenedwith a national debt. Increased production has always been open to the capitalist class; a permanent army of unemployed is witness to this; in fact, certain produce has been destroyed because of its abundance! All, from the lordly writers in the ‘‘ Times ” downwards, seem to lose sight of the pivot of capitalist production : the product must be sold. Now, to whom is the proposed increase of production to be sold? Answer that, ye lords Surely not to the capitalist class who already wallow in luxury, and certainly not to the workers who have not the means to buy. An increase of production is possible only by allowing the workers an increased consumption, but this, of course, will not repay the War Loan; and so the problem remains. From Hyndman’s ‘‘ Commercial Crises of the 19th Century,” I learn that the same preparation for a trade boom was made towards the close of the Napoleonic wars as we are now making, with the inevitable result of overproduction and the following crisis. This demand for a feverish speed in production following the present war can have no other result, sooner or later, than a crisis of the first magnitude. T. G. K. THE SKILLED SALARIAT. Sir,-“ T. C.” is to be congratulated on his suggestion. Would that it could be adopted soon and quickly! In the perfect Capitalistic State there can be but two economic facts-wages and profits, and the greater of these is profits. Salaries already are anachronistic. If Labour is the hope of the world, the Skilled Salariat is the only hope of Labour. If the Skilled Salariat does not lead Labour, it will soon find itself yoked with Labour-and both will be damned together. When will the Skilled Salariat realise its responsibility ? When will Labour command that service ? How long, 0 Lord, how long will the Gosling Wardle? JEREMIAH JOHNSON. +*+ SOUTH AFRICA. Sir,-The Union Government has apparently established a strong claim to the gratitude of the Empire. Yet, notwithstanding this, it is to be hoped that the recommendations urge forthesettlement ofGermany’s African it may colonies will be subject to severe scrutiny. An attempt, supported by powerful financial interests, will probably be made to incorporate the south-west territory in the Union, and to bestow the franchise upon the Germans there resident at the first opportunity. This should be resisted. The British vote in the Union is already lamentably weak, and is subject to constant attrition. The new Miners’ Phthisis Act will, if rigorously applied, reduce the number of British-born miners on the Witwatersrand by approximately five thousand men, the majority of whom, with their families, will be obliged to leave the country, Recruitment for the armies has seriously depleted the British political power in South Africa, for a large proportion of the soldiers will for various reasons not return. Boers and aliens are steadily displacing Britons in the Civil Service, private offices, and other fields of employment ; while the Botha Government, no less than the Hertzog party has made manifest its intention to oppose the immigration of Britons from oversea. However admirable may be the motive which inspires General Botha’s war policy, its effect is to strengthen the Empire’s enemies. German firms, immune from interference, by virtue of that innocuous measure known as the Enemy Trading Act, are tightening their grip upon the commerce of the country, and very properly exhibited their gratitude by supporting, not Hertzog, but General Botha at the last election. “ De Valkstern,” a Government organ, trusts that “ no Britishers will be employed in the Civil Service in the conquered territory,” where, indeed, at the present time, the Germans, including Lieut .-Colonel Francke (brother it is said, of Mr. Max Francke, late chairman of the Central Mining and Investment Company) and Dr. Leitz, enjoy perfect freedom to go about their business as usual. The well-poisoners, and those
who committed damnable atrocities upon natives and British prisoners of war, are having a very good time of it. In short, there is reason to suppose that the Germans entertain feelings which are not unfriendly to the Botha Government. WORD TO THE WISE.
V.C. AND S S. D. Sir,-I have been looking for criticisms of the policy of tipping our airmen. But none that I am aware of has been made-at least, not in print. To me, however, the idea of tipping a man for a deed for which he gets the GOOD OLD “PUNCH”! V.C. is both ridiculous and insulting. Is bravery a Sir,--“ Punch ” is too funny, really. Listen to this thing to be rewarded in the same fashion as you reward from the current “ Charivaria )’ :the waiter who brings you your hat? Does the nation “ ‘ The egg,’ says the ‘ Daily Mail, is disappearing think that honour is no longer its own or a sufficient from the breakfast table..’ Even the humblest of us, reward? Must everything be reduced to cash terms? however, can still enjoy our daily mare’s-nest.” The noblest deeds are those performed without promise He, he, he! Ha, ha, ha! Ho, ho-o! What! Don’t or even hope of reward. That surely is why our men you see the joke! Dear, dear! Let me show you theer-‘‘ correspondences,” as that bounder Baudelaire at the front are called heroes. They risk their lives without either thought or desire for personal credit. Should would say. List ! Egg, nest; “ Mail,” female (understood a V.C. come a man’s way, well, the broader the smile, i.e., hen) ; the “ Daily Mail,” our daily mare; but his pride is that the act which won it carried with it table, stable (understood). See it now? Ho, ho, ho! no promise of return of any kind. To put a price on the The “Daily Mail’s’’ egg, the daily mare’s-nest! Ho, destruction of a Zeppelin is, in my opinion, to rob the ho, ho! Can the “ M Mail lay eggs ? Can a mare build ” deed of just that distinction. Of course, I am not nests ? Ho ho, ho ! Go ho, ho! Oh, dear me ! Huh ! suggesting that Lieutenant Robinson, for example, Ho, ho, ho ! “ Punch ” is too funnee, r-really ! behaved so gallantly because of the cheques awaiting him BIPP. *** below. He did as he did in spite of them. What I do THE NEW DRAMA. mean is that it is unfair to our airmen thus to earmark Sir,-Mr. Margrie is very cock-sure. “The great their bravery. They will do their duty quite well problem for women after the war,” he writes, ‘‘ will be without having cheques waved before them. G. W. to capture men, not to run away from them.” I wonder. REGIONALISM. Of course, Mr. Margrie may be right, and after the war Sir,-Mr Harold B. Harrison’s statement that ‘‘ the we may find women anxious to exchange the man’s work idea of Regionalism appears to have been thought of at for the man. Rut is it not at least equally possible that the close of the Thirty Years’ War” needs correcting. the exact opposite will be the case? Thousands-by the What Mr. ’Harrison intends to say is that an idea was end of the war, perhaps millions-of women will, for the thought of. As I have pointed out, Regionalism is not first time in their lives, have tasted some of the by no new, being, in fact, as old as the Garden of Eden, if not means unpleasant fruits of economic independence. They considerably older. And the ideas associated with it are will have found other fields than the Garden of Eden to many and varied. Therefore it may be said to be capable roam in. Their choice will no longer be between an of assuming different forms having different qualities. uncomfortable home, say, and the first offer of marriage. Each form is moulded by the experience of the Age which In any case, I should not be the least surprised if, applies its principles. To-day there are new experiences contrary to Mr. Margrie’s absolute assertion that “ Nora in re-forming it. For instance, a changing conception of the ‘ Doll’s House ’ represents nobody but herself,” quite economics which promises to replace the idea of Moneya number of Mr. Margries awake to find that all wealth by that of Energy-wealth; the new view of race unsuspected they have been cherishing a Nora in their based on the assumption that Man is a regionalist by bosoms. Economic independence is a wonderful souldesign and a nationalist by accident; and the growth of restorer. The woman who for the first time in her life a unified conception of the correlation of forms of finds herself economically independent of men may even productiveoccupation so as to achieve one big expression. know what it is to be born again. And this time perhaps Besides these factors, there is a very significant she will require something more of men than a house agricultural movement. We know that urgent necessity is and children. She may even want what Nora wantedremoving a national indifference to agricultural pursuits. equity The War is, in fact, forcing us to reorganise the Mr. Margrie, by the way, objects to “snubs, ridicule, productiveresources of the land for the purpose of providing and silent contempt.” I don’t wonder But does he the country with an adequate supply of food. Thus treat others as he would be treated? Listen to him : “ I Salisbury is beginning to yield beet for sugar ; Bedfordshire believe that Mr. G. K. Chesterton wrote a farcical is busy reviving osier-culture; and the Isle of book. . . .” Believe, indeed! Just as though he couldn’t Wight is shooting forth a drug-producing plant. Indeed be bothered to find out, Mr. Chesterton not being his much is being done to alter the view of the Frenchman weight, I suppose. “ But my plays,” on he goes, “are who, before the War, was apt to receive our farnot Chestertonian farces. I use my head to think with, spreading empty landscapes with the lament, ‘‘ Rien, not to stand on. I’m the greatest revolutionary of rien a se mettre sous la dent.” To such a Frenchman, modern times, because I make a speciality of sanity, accustomed to contemplate his own self-supporting, selfwhereas all recent Continental geniuses have had a screw sufficing vine, wood, and fruit clad country, England’s loose somewhere.” Mr. Margrie may think with his head bare acres were incomprehensible. So this new Regionalism , -though he should provide proof with his charge-but he certainly writes through his trumpet. Look, again, is not a Middle-Age Regionalism, not an after-theThirty-Years-War Regionalism, not a Little-Englander how he short-circuits poor little Ibsen : “ Ibsen is already Regionalism aiming to shut England up in a water-tight obsolete. . . . All Ibsen could do was to ask questions, compartment. It must not be confused with these. and any fool can do that.” Really, Mr. Margrie? I Simply, it is a Regionalism seeking to throw off little knew that any fool could make assertions, but Mr. kingdoms as spiritually universal as St. Augustine’s Margrie’s assertion leaves me by no means so confident HUNTLY CARTER. (‘ City of God.” as he is. Even Shakespeare does not escape : “ Messrs. Bernard Shaw and William Archer overrated him Ibsen LAUGHTER IX THE TRENCHES. almost as much as the average man overrates Shakespeare Sir,-I have not read Mr. Lucas’s book, “Cloud and W. K. speare.” Poor old Shakespeare ! Silver,” so I know not to what reasons, other than those ‘(R. H. C.” mentions, he ascribes “laughter in the trenches.” Here, however, is a scrap from a letter from the trenches, which seems to me to be nearer to likelihood than either “R. H. C.’s” surmise or Mr. Lucas’s. The (‘ Tommy ” writing to me says, ‘‘ You see, it is so very difficult for me to describe the conditions out here, and, for another thing, I don’t want to make one long groan about it. Really, that’s all it’s worth-people must know that, and yet, if we looked on it in that way, we should That is why become so depressed as to be useless. Tommy is always so cheerful.’’
Wounded and home on leave, this same boy repeated that statement, and added words to this effect : ‘( Yes, and now I’m home and it doesn’t matter, I’m going to ‘ let out ’ and curse it and swear at it-because it doesn’t matter at home here. When I go back, I shall have to sing and play the fool again to keep myself from thinking. ” I think this is quite an adequate explanation of “ laughter in the trenches GLADYS F. Biss
--
Press
Cuttings.
Le president de la reunion a cru devoir adopter les suggestions exprimees dernierement par les groupes intellectuels ouvriers reclamant le droit de s’ingerer dans ‘ l’administration et la direction des manufactures et des maisons de commerce, sans prejudice de celui de participer l’etablissement et a la fixation des salaires. Les a renseignements recueillis apres la seance, aupres des patrons et des chefs ouvriers donnent l’impression que les suggestions exposees par Gosling au nom des intellectuels ouvriers, ont une tres grande importance. Jusqu’a present les ouvriers avaient limite leurs demandes aux augmentations de salaires ou aux participations dans les benefices d’accord en cela le plus souvent avec les patrons qui se reservaient la direction et l’administration totales de leurs etablissements. Mais, aujourd’hui, le probleme est inverse, les ouvriers abandonnentl’idee de la participation dans les benefices, en echange d’une participation dans 1’administration et la direction. La discussion fut close sans qu’une resolution ait ete adoptee sur ce sujet, mais des maintenant les Trade-Unions vont probablement preparer une campagne vigoureuse et, apres la guerre, ils chercheront sans doute un appui a leurs revendications aupres des syndicats francais qu’ils appelleront en Congres international.“ L’Humanite To the Editor of the “Times,” Sir,-The Bishop of Winchester’s letter in your issue of September 15 is surely an admirable letter, and I feel nothing but gratitude to him for having put his points with such precision. But as regards his first point, I think he has not defined the issue sufficiently. He confines himself finally to the question of the division of the profits of industry -the question :--Can the workers be admitted to share the profits unless they are able to share the losses? But, as the Bishop himself implies, this is not the only question. The demand of labour is not only (perhaps not chiefly) a demand for a larger share in profits; it is a demand for more recognition of the rights of the ’ workers as persons. Even though no change be made in the wage system; even though that be still left to bargaining, as it is at the present day; or be regulated by an extension of the system of the wages board, there still remains the possibility that the workers should be admitted to a share of the control of industry, so far as it affects their convenience and human rights-that they should be consulted as a matter of right as to the conditionsunder which the work is to be done, as to overtime, as to everything that concerns the conditions of labour, as distinguished from the remuneration of labour. I have no doubt that one who is much more intimate than I can pretend to be with the question could give further precision to this distinction. But I am very anxious that the Bishop of Winchester’s letter should not pass unchallenged on this single point, because he seems to assume that the really crucial claim of labour concerns the division of the profits of industry, whereas I think that it more vitally concerns the control of the conditions of industry. e. OXON. Paris, September 18. M. Rodin, since his last splendid gift to France, has now executed a deed of gift to the State of all his works of art (his own and the works in his collection), all his writings, published or unpublished, and all his rights and royalties upon such works after his death. The collections thus given to France include 14 marbles, 28 bronzes, 111 terra-cottas, 300 water-colours, 40 drawings, and 39 albums containing 1,160 sketches. M. Rodin has also formally promised to leave to the State his house and studio at Meudon, where casts of his works which cannot be housed at the Hotel Biron will remain.‘‘ Times.” Mr. Runciman assures his correspondent that the subject has engaged the anxious attention of Ministers and Departments since the beginning of the war, that the Government have not been inactive, but have taken entire control of sugar requisitioned all the refrigerated tonnage in the Australasian and South American meat trade, purchased and distributed large supplies of meat,
and controlled the wheat supply on similar lines. We give the Government credit for all this, and more and have no doubt that but for their action prices would be much higher than they are. Nor do we complain that they have not taken various steps urged upon them in many quarters. Quite the contrary. Their mistake is of a different character. It lies in ignoring the dangerous agitation about “ profiteering ” or the dishonest inflation of prices by unscrupulous persons for private gain. What is needed--and needed quickly-is either drastic action to stop such practices, or detailed and convincing proof that the rise of prices is not due to them, or, in so far as it is, that they cannot be effectively stopped.--“ Times.” It is seldom the decisions of the Trade Union Congress that one needs to criticise; it is the means of getting those decisions translated into action where the weakness lies. The delegates pass resolutions, but neither they nor their unions are in any real sense bound by them after the Congress is over. It is this which, in the main, justifies Mr. Sidney Webb’s description of the Congress as ‘‘ an unorganised public meeting utterly unable to formulate any consistent or practical policy.” Parliament has been also described by Bagehot as (‘government by public meeting,” but, then, the decisions of Parliament become operative and powerful, because they are relegated to an Executive which executes its decrees and io a Cabinet which both guides and obeys. The Trade Union movement noExecutive and no Cabinet. The. has Parliamentary Committee is not a Cabinet, is not an Executive is not even a general staff. It is almost purely advisory. It possesses little or no authority over the unions. It speaks but cannot act, for the Trade Union movement. It is officered by a secretary and one clerk. The consequence is that in this crisis-when Trade Unionism is numerically growing stronger, when its influence is more powerful than ever it was, it lacks that guidance and control which can direct its energies into those channels which would prove must useful to its future and formulate coherent policies to meet the urgent and. pressing demands of the time.-“ The Railway Review.” I confess I read the debates of the Trade Union Congresswith some sinking of the heart. * The occasion was tremendous; no body of workmen ever had such a complexi of difficulties before it. But the best observers came away with a depressed view of the leadership which has somehow got to find a way out of them. The note pitched was very low ; even Mr. Gosling seemed to aim at a share in management which went beneath Mr. Chamberlain’s admission of what, on a large view, capital might be willing to concede to labour when the future conduct of industry became a practical question. But the trouble all through was the want of a considered plan of discussion. The Congress went on its old lines of procedure by pious resolution What was wanted was an official statement of general policy, thrashed out in bureaux, and remitted to a Council empowered to act for the trade union world, or at least to present its case-not on one point only-to the Government and to the representatives of capital. For the moment, the danger is that one side will organise. concentrate, and make up its mind and policy, while the other beats the air. That is not the way to get a good National Industrial Agreement.-“ A wayfarer ’’ in the (‘ Nation.” Proceeding to discuss a policy for the removal of the causes of friction, Professor Kirkaldy insisted on the need for national organisation. It was plain that we needed a better system of industrial and commercial intelligence To a Ministry of Commerce should be transferred some of the functions of the Board of Trade, while that new Ministry should be responsible for maintaining a general survey over trade and Commerce. Employers should be organised into national and local associations of one trade, and into national and local federations while workpeople should have unions and federations corresponding to those of the employers. From these two representative bodies there could be elected an industrial council as a Court of Appeal, representative of the whole industrial activity of the country, and, so far as these bodies were approved by the State, should enjoy farreaching powers.-British ASSOCIATION. ..
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