Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:

LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAMKIPPSMR. POLLYTHE WHEELS OF CHANCETHE NEW MACHIAVELLIANN VERONICATONO BUNGAYMARRIAGEBEALBYTHE PASSIONATE FRIENDSTHE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMANTHE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENTMR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGHTHE SOUL OF A BISHOP

The following fantastic and imaginative romances:

THE WAR OF THE WORLDSTHE TIME MACHINETHE WONDERFUL VISITTHE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAUTHE SEA LADYTHE SLEEPER AWAKESTHE FOOD OF THE GODSTHE WAR IN THE AIRTHE FIRST MEN IN THE MOONIN THE DAYS OF THE COMETTHE WORLD SET FREE

And numerous Short Stories now collected in OneVolume under the title of

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

A Series of books upon Social, Religious and Political questions:

ANTICIPATIONS (1900)MANKIND IN THE MAKINGFIRST AND LAST THINGSNEW WORLDS FOR OLDA MODERN UTOPIATHE FUTURE IN AMERICAAN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLDWHAT IS COMING?WAR AND THE FUTUREGOD THE INVISIBLE KING

And two little books about children's play, called:

FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS

IN THE FOURTH YEAR

ANTICIPATIONS OF A WORLD PEACE

BY

H. G. WELLS

AUTHOR OF "MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH, ""THE WAR AND THE FUTURE, " "WHAT IS COMING?" "THE WAR THAT WILLEND WAR, " "THE WORLD SET FREE, " "IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET, " AND"A MODERN UTOPIA"

1918

PREFACE

In the latter half of 1914 a few of us were writing that this war was a"War of Ideas. " A phrase, "The War to end War, " got into circulation, amidst much sceptical comment. It was a phrase powerful enough to swaymany men, essentially pacifists, towards taking an active part in thewar against German imperialism, but it was a phrase whose chief contentwas its aspiration. People were already writing in those early days ofdisarmament and of the abolition of the armament industry throughout theworld; they realized fully the element of industrial belligerency behindthe shining armour of imperialism, and they denounced the "Krupp-Kaiser"alliance. But against such writing and such thought we had to count, inthose days, great and powerful realities. Even to those who expressedthese ideas there lay visibly upon them the shadow of impracticability;they were very "advanced" ideas in 1914, very Utopian. Against them wasan unbroken mass of mental habit and public tradition. While we talkedof this "war to end war, " the diplomatists of the Powers allied againstGermany were busily spinning a disastrous web of greedy secret treaties, were answering aggression by schemes of aggression, were seeing in thetreacherous violence of Germany only the justification forcountervailing evil acts. To them it was only another war for"ascendancy. " That was three years and a half ago, and since then this"war of ideas" has gone on to a phase few of us had dared hope for inthose opening days. The Russian revolution put a match to that pile ofsecret treaties and indeed to all the imperialist plans of the Allies;in the end it will burn them all. The greatest of the Western Allies isnow the United States of America, and the Americans have come into thiswar simply for an idea. Three years and a half ago a few of us weresaying this was a war against the idea of imperialism, not Germanimperialism merely, but British and French and Russian imperialism, andwe were saying this not because it was so, but because we hoped to seeit become so. To-day we can say so, because now it is so. 

In those days, moreover, we said this is the "war to end war, " and westill did not know clearly how. We thought in terms of treaties andalliances. It is largely the detachment and practical genius of thegreat English-speaking nation across the Atlantic that has carried theworld on beyond and replaced that phrase by the phrase, "The League ofNations, " a phrase suggesting plainly the organization of a sufficientinstrument by which war may be ended for ever. In 1913 talk of a WorldLeague of Nations would have seemed, to the extremest pitch, "Utopian. "To-day the project has an air not only of being so practicable, but ofbeing so urgent and necessary and so manifestly the sane thing beforemankind that not to be busied upon it, not to be making it more widelyknown and better understood, not to be working out its problems andbringing it about, is to be living outside of the contemporary life ofthe world. For a book upon any other subject at the present time someapology may be necessary, but a book upon this subject is as natural athing to produce now as a pair of skates in winter when the ice beginsto bear. 

All we writers find ourselves engaged perforce in some part or other ofa world-wide propaganda of this the most creative and hopeful ofpolitical ideas that has ever dawned upon the consciousness of mankind. With no concerted plan we feel called upon to serve it. And in noconnection would one so like to think oneself un-original as in thisconnection. It would be a dismaying thing to realize that one werewriting anything here which was not the possible thought of greatmultitudes of other people, and capable of becoming the common thoughtof mankind. One writes in such a book as this not to express oneself butto swell a chorus. The idea of the League of Nations is so great a onethat it may well override the pretensions and command the allegiance ofkings; much more does it claim the self-subjugation of the journalisticwriter. Our innumerable books upon this great edifice of a World Peacedo not constitute a scramble for attention, but an attempt to express inevery variety of phrase and aspect this one system of ideas which nowpossesses us all. In the same way the elementary facts and ideas of thescience of chemistry might conceivably be put completely and fully intoone text-book, but, as a matter of fact, it is far more convenient totell that same story over in a thousand different forms, in a text-bookfor boys here, for a different sort or class of boy there, for adultstudents, for reference, for people expert in mathematics, for peopleunused to the scientific method, and so on. For the last year the writerhas been doing what he can--and a number of other writers have beendoing what they can--to bring about a united declaration of all theAtlantic Allies in favour of a League of Nations, and to define thenecessary nature of that League. He has, in the course of this work, written a series of articles upon the League and upon _the necessarysacrifices of preconceptions_ that the idea involves in the Londonpress. He has also been trying to clear his own mind upon the realmeaning of that ambiguous word "democracy, " for which the League is tomake the world "safe. " The bulk of this book is made up of thesediscussions. For a very considerable number of readers, it may be wellto admit here, it can have no possible interest; they will have come atthese questions themselves from different angles and they will have longsince got to their own conclusions. But there may be others whose angleof approach may be similar to the writer's, who may have asked some ormost of the questions he has had to ask, and who may be activelyinterested in the answers and the working out of the answers he has madeto these questions. For them this book is printed. 

H. G. WELLS. 

_May_, 1918. 

It is a dangerous thing to recommend specific books out of so large andvarious a literature as the "League of Nations" idea has alreadyproduced, but the reader who wishes to reach beyond the range of thisbook, or who does not like its tone and method, will probably findsomething to meet his needs and tastes better in Marburg's "League ofNations, " a straightforward account of the American side of the movementby the former United States Minister in Belgium, on the one hand, or inthe concluding parts of Mr. Fayle's "Great Settlement" (1915), a franklysceptical treatment from the British Imperialist point of view, on theother. An illuminating discussion, advocating peace treaties rather thana league, is Sir Walter Phillimore's "Three Centuries of Treaties. " Twoexcellent books from America, that chance to be on my table, are Mr. Goldsmith's "League to Enforce Peace" and "A World in Ferment" byPresident Nicholas Murray Butler. Mater's "Société des Nations" (Didier)is an able presentation of a French point of view. Brailsford's "ALeague of Nations" is already a classic of the movement in England, anda very full and thorough book; and Hobson's "Towards InternationalGovernment" is a very sympathetic contribution from the English liberalleft; but the reader must understand that these two writers seemdisposed to welcome a peace with an unrevolutionized Germany, an idea towhich, in common with most British people, I am bitterly opposed. Walsh's "World Rebuilt" is a good exhortation, and Mugge's "Parliamentof Man" is fresh and sane and able. The omnivorous reader will find goodsense and quaint English in Judge Mejdell's "_Jus Gentium_, " publishedin English by Olsen's of Christiania. There is an active League ofNations Society in Dublin, as well as the London and Washington ones, publishing pamphlets and conducting propaganda. All these books andpamphlets I have named happen to lie upon my study table as I write, butI have made no systematic effort to get together literature upon thesubject, and probably there are just as many books as good of which Ihave never even heard. There must, I am sure, be statements of theLeague of Nations idea forthcoming from various religious standpoints, but I do not know any sufficiently well to recommend them. It isincredible that neither the Roman Catholic Church, the English EpiscopalChurch, nor any Nonconformist body has made any effort as anorganization to forward this essentially religious end of peace onearth. And also there must be German writings upon this same topic. Imention these diverse sources not in order to present a bibliography, but because I should be sorry to have the reader think that this littlebook pretends to state _the_ case rather than _a_ case for the League ofNations. 

CONTENTS

 I. THE WAY TO CONCRETE REALIZATION

 II. THE LEAGUE MUST BE REPRESENTATIVE

 III. THE NECESSARY POWERS OF THE LEAGUE

 IV. THE LABOUR VIEW OF MIDDLE AFRICA

 V. GETTING THE LEAGUE IDEA CLEAR IN RELATION TO IMPERIALISM

 VI. THE WAR AIMS OF THE WESTERN ALLIES COMPACTLY STATED

 VII. THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY

 VIII. THE PLAIN NECESSITY FOR A LEAGUE

 IX. DEMOCRACY

 X. THE RECENT STRUGGLE FOR PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION IN GREAT BRITAIN

 XI. THE STUDY AND PROPAGANDA OF DEMOCRACY

IN THE FOURTH YEAR

THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS

I

THE WAY TO CONCRETE REALIZATION

More and more frequently does one hear this phrase, The League ofNations, used to express the outline idea of the new world that willcome out of the war. There can be no doubt that the phrase has takenhold of the imaginations of great multitudes of people: it is one ofthose creative phrases that may alter the whole destiny of mankind. Butas yet it is still a very vague phrase, a cloudy promise of peace. Imake no apology therefore, for casting my discussion of it in the mostgeneral terms. The idea is the idea of united human effort to put an endto wars; the first practical question, that must precede all others, ishow far can we hope to get to a concrete realization of that?

But first let me note the fourth word in the second title of this book. The common talk is of a "League of Nations" merely. I follow the man whois, more than any other man, the leader of English political thoughtthroughout the world to-day, President Wilson, in inserting thatsignificant adjective "Free. " We western allies know to-day what isinvolved in making bargains with governments that do not stand for theirpeoples; we have had all our Russian deal, for example, repudiated andthrust back upon our hands; and it is clearly in his mind, as it must bein the minds of all reasonable men, that no mere "scrap of paper, " withjust a monarch's or a chancellor's endorsement, is a good enough earnestof fellowship in the league. It cannot be a diplomatist's league. TheLeague of Nations, if it is to have any such effect as people seem tohope from it, must be, in the first place, "understanded of the people. "It must be supported by sustained, deliberate explanation, and byteaching in school and church and press of the whole mass of all thepeoples concerned. I underline the adjective "Free" here to set aside, once for all, any possible misconception that this modern idea of aLeague of Nations has any affinity to that Holy Alliance of thediplomatists, which set out to keep the peace of Europe so disastrouslya century ago. 

Later I will discuss the powers of the League. But before I come tothat I would like to say a little about the more general question of itsnature and authority. What sort of gathering will embody it? Thesuggestions made range from a mere advisory body, rather like the Hagueconvention, which will merely pronounce on the rights and wrongs of anyinternational conflict, to the idea of a sort of Super-State, aParliament of Mankind, a "Super National" Authority, practically takingover the sovereignty of the existing states and empires of the world. Most people's ideas of the League fall between these extremes. They wantthe League to be something more than an ethical court, they want aLeague that will act, but on the other hand they shrink from any loss of"our independence. " There seems to be a conflict here. There is a realneed for many people to tidy up their ideas at this point. We cannothave our cake and eat it. If association is worth while, there must besome sacrifice of freedom to association. As a very distinguishedcolonial representative said to me the other day: "Here we are talkingof the freedom of small nations and the 'self-determination' of peoples, and at the same time of the Council of the League of Nations and allsorts of international controls. Which do we want?"

The answer, I think, is "Both. " It is a matter of more or less, ofgetting the best thing at the cost of the second-best. We may want torelax an old association in order to make a newer and wider one. It isquite understandable that peoples aware of a distinctive nationalcharacter and involved in some big existing political complex, shouldwish to disentangle themselves from one group of associations in orderto enter more effectively into another, a greater, and more satisfactoryone. The Finn or the Pole, who has hitherto been a rather reluctantmember of the synthesis of the Russian empire, may well wish to end thatattachment in order to become a free member of a worldwide brotherhood. The desire for free arrangement is not a desire for chaos. There is sucha thing as untying your parcels in order to pack them better, and I donot see myself how we can possibly contemplate a great league of freedomand reason in the world without a considerable amount of suchpreliminary dissolution. 

It happens, very fortunately for the world, that a century and a quarterago thirteen various and very jealous states worked out the problem of aUnion, and became--after an enormous, exhausting wrangle--the UnitedStates of America. Now the way they solved their riddle was bydelegating and giving over jealously specified sovereign powers anddoing all that was possible to retain the residuum. They remainedessentially sovereign states. New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, forexample, remained legally independent. The practical fusion of thesepeoples into one people outran the legal bargain. It was only after longyears of discussion that the point was conceded; it was indeed onlyafter the Civil War that the implications were fully established, thatthere resided a sovereignty in the American people as a whole, asdistinguished from the peoples of the several states. This is aprecedent that every one who talks about the League of Nations shouldbear in mind. These states set up a congress and president in Washingtonwith strictly delegated powers. That congress and president theydelegated to look after certain common interests, to deal withinterstate trade, to deal with foreign powers, to maintain a supremecourt of law. Everything else--education, militia, powers of life anddeath--the states retained for themselves. To this day, for instance, the federal courts and the federal officials have no power to interfereto protect the lives or property of aliens in any part of the unionoutside the district of Columbia. The state governments still see tothat. The federal government has the legal right perhaps to intervene, but it is still chary of such intervention. And these states of theAmerican Union were at the outset so independent-spirited that theywould not even adopt a common name. To this day they have no commonname. We have to call them Americans, which is a ridiculous name when weconsider that Canada, Mexico, Peru, Brazil are all of them also inAmerica. Or else we have to call them Virginians, Californians, NewEnglanders, and so forth. Their legal and nominal separateness weighsnothing against the real fusion that their great league has now madepossible. 

Now, that clearly is a precedent of the utmost value in our schemes forthis council of the League of Nations. We must begin by delegating, asthe States began by delegating. It is a far cry to the time when weshall talk and think of the Sovereign People of the Earth. That councilof the League of Nations will be a tie as strong, we hope, but certainlynot so close and multiplex as the early tie of the States at Washington. It will begin by having certain delegated powers and no others. It willbe an "_ad hoc_" body. Later its powers may grow as mankind becomesaccustomed to it. But at first it will have, directly or mediately, allthe powers that seem necessary to restrain the world from war--andunless I know nothing of patriotic jealousies it will have not a scrapof power more. The danger is much more that its powers will beinsufficient than that they will be excessive. Of that later. What Iwant to discuss here now is the constitution of this delegated body. Iwant to discuss that first in order to set aside out of the discussioncertain fantastic notions that will otherwise get very seriously in ourway. Fantastic as they are, they have played a large part in reducingthe Hague Tribunal to an ineffective squeak amidst the thunders of thiswar. 

A number of gentlemen scheming out world unity in studies have beguntheir proposals with the simple suggestion that each sovereign powershould send one member to the projected parliament of mankind. This hasa pleasant democratic air; one sovereign state, one vote. Now let us runover a list of sovereign states and see to what this leads us. We findour list includes the British Empire, with a population of four hundredmillions, of which probably half can read and write some language orother; Bogota with a population of a million, mostly poets; Hayti with apopulation of a million and a third, almost entirely illiterate andliable at any time to further political disruption; Andorra with apopulation of four or five thousand souls. The mere suggestion of equalrepresentation between such "powers" is enough to make the BritishEmpire burst into a thousand (voting) fragments. A certain concessionto population, one must admit, was made by the theorists; a state ofover three millions got, if I remember rightly, two delegates, and ifover twenty, three, and some of the small states were given a kind ofintermittent appearance, they only came every other time or something ofthat sort; but at The Hague things still remained in such a posture thatthree or four minute and backward states could outvote the BritishEmpire or the United States. Therein lies the clue to the insignificanceof The Hague. Such projects as these are idle projects and we must putthem out of our heads; they are against nature; the great nations willnot suffer them for a moment. 

But when we dismiss this idea of representation by states, we are leftwith the problem of the proportion of representation and of relativeweight in the Council of the League on our hands. It is the sort ofproblem that appeals terribly to the ingenious. We cannot solve it bymaking population a basis, because that will give a monstrous importanceto the illiterate millions of India and China. Ingenious statisticalschemes have been framed in which the number of university graduates andthe steel output come in as multipliers, but for my own part I am notgreatly impressed by statistical schemes. At the risk of seemingsomething of a Prussian, I would like to insist upon certain brutefacts. The business of the League of Nations is to keep the peace of theworld and nothing else. No power will ever dare to break the peace ofthe world if the powers that are capable of making war under modernconditions say "_No_. " And there are only four powers certainly capableat the present time of producing the men and materials needed for amodern war in sufficient abundance to go on fighting: Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. There are three others which are verydoubtfully capable: Italy, Japan, and Austria. Russia I will mark--it isall that one can do with Russia just now--with a note of interrogation. Some day China may be war capable--I hope never, but it is apossibility. Personally I don't think that any other power on earthwould have a ghost of a chance to resist the will--if it could be anhonestly united will--of the first-named four. All the rest fight by thesanction of and by association with these leaders. They can only fightbecause of the split will of the war-complete powers. Some are forced tofight by that very division. 

No one can vie with me in my appreciation of the civilization ofSwitzerland, Sweden, or Holland, but the plain fact of the case is thatsuch powers are absolutely incapable of uttering an effective protestagainst war. Far less so are your Haytis and Liberias. The preservationof the world-peace rests with the great powers and with the great powersalone. If they have the will for peace, it is peace. If they have not, it is conflict. The four powers I have named can now, if they see fit, dictate the peace of the world for ever. 

Let us keep our grip on that. Peace is the business of the great powersprimarily. Steel output, university graduates, and so forth may beconvenient secondary criteria, may be useful ways of measuring warefficiency, but the meat and substance of the Council of the League ofNations must embody the wills of those leading peoples. They can give anenduring peace to the little nations and the whole of mankind. It canarrive in no other way. So I take it that the Council of an ideal Leagueof Nations must consist chiefly of the representatives of the greatbelligerent powers, and that the representatives of the minor allies andof the neutrals--essential though their presence will be--must not beallowed to swamp the voices of these larger masses of mankind. 

And this state of affairs may come about more easily than logical, statistical-minded people may be disposed to think. Our first impulse, when we discuss the League of Nations idea, is to think of some veryelaborate and definite scheme of members on the model of existinglegislative bodies, called together one hardly knows how, and sittingin a specially built League of Nations Congress House. All schemes aremore methodical than reality. We think of somebody, learned and"expert, " in spectacles, with a thin clear voice, reading over the"Projected Constitution of a League of Nations" to an attentive andrespectful Peace Congress. But there is a more natural way to a leaguethan that. Instead of being made like a machine, the League of Nationsmay come about like a marriage. The Peace Congress that must sooner orlater meet may itself become, after a time, the Council of a League ofNations. The League of Nations may come upon us by degrees, almostimperceptibly. I am strongly obsessed by the idea that that PeaceCongress will necessarily become--and that it is highly desirable thatit should become--a most prolonged and persistent gathering. Why shouldit not become at length a permanent gathering, inviting representativesto aid its deliberations from the neutral states, and graduallyadjusting itself to conditions of permanency?

I can conceive no such Peace Congress as those that have settled upafter other wars, settling up after this war. Not only has the war beenenormously bigger than any other war, but it has struck deeper at thefoundations of social and economic life. I doubt if we begin to realizehow much of the old system is dead to-day, how much has to be remade. Since the beginnings of history there has been a credible promise ofgold payments underneath our financial arrangements. It is now anincredible promise. The value of a pound note waves about while you lookat it. What will happen to it when peace comes no man can tell. Nor whatwill happen to the mark. The rouble has gone into the Abyss. Our giddymoney specialists clutch their handfuls of paper and watch it flyingdown the steep. Much as we may hate the Germans, some of us will have tosit down with some of the enemy to arrange a common scheme for thepreservation of credit in money. And I presume that it is not proposedto end this war in a wild scramble of buyers for such food as remains inthe world. There is a shortage now, a greater shortage ahead of theworld, and there will be shortages of supply at the source and transportin food and all raw materials for some years to come. The Peace Congresswill have to sit and organize a share-out and distribution andreorganization of these shattered supplies. It will have to Rhondda thenations. Probably, too, we shall have to deal collectively with apestilence before we are out of the mess. Then there are such littlejobs as the reconstruction of Belgium and Serbia. There are considerablerectifications of boundaries to be made. There are fresh states to becreated, in Poland and Armenia for example. About all these smallerstates, new and old, that the peace must call into being, there must bea system of guarantees of the most difficult and complicated sort. 

I do not see the Press Congress getting through such matters as these ina session of weeks or months. The idea the Germans betrayed at Brest, that things were going to be done in the Versailles fashion by greatmoustached heroes frowning and drawing lines with a large blacksoldierly thumbnail across maps, is--old-fashioned. They have made theireastern treaties, it is true, in this mode, but they are still lookingfor some really responsible government to keep them now that they aremade. From first to last clearly the main peace negotiations are goingto follow unprecedented courses. This preliminary discussion of war aimsby means of great public speeches, that has been getting more and moreexplicit now for many months, is quite unprecedented. Apparently all thebroad preliminaries are to be stated and accepted in the sight of allmankind before even an armistice occurs on the main, the western front. The German diplomatists hate this process. So do a lot of ours. So dosome of the diplomatic Frenchmen. The German junkers are dodging andlying, they are fighting desperately to keep back everything theypossibly can for the bargaining and bullying and table-banging of thecouncil chamber, but that way there is no peace. And when at lastGermany says snip sufficiently to the Allies' snap, and the PeaceCongress begins, it will almost certainly be as unprecedented as itsprelude. Before it meets, the broad lines of the settlement will havebeen drawn plainly with the approval of the mass of mankind. 

II

THE LEAGUE MUST BE REPRESENTATIVE

A Peace Congress, growing permanent, then, may prove to be the mostpractical and convenient embodiment of this idea of a League of Nationsthat has taken possession of the imagination of the world. A mostnecessary preliminary to a Peace Congress, with such possibilitiesinherent in it, must obviously be the meeting and organization of apreliminary League of the Allied Nations. That point I would nowenlarge. 

Half a world peace is better than none. There seems no reason whateverwhy the world should wait for the Central Powers before it begins thisnecessary work. Mr. McCurdy has been asking lately, "Why not the Leagueof Nations _now_?" That is a question a great number of people wouldlike to echo very heartily. The nearer the Allies can come to a Leagueof Free Nations before the Peace Congress the more prospect there isthat that body will approximate in nature to a League of Nations for thewhole world. 

In one most unexpected quarter the same idea has been endorsed. TheKing's Speech on the prorogation of Parliament this February was one ofthe most remarkable royal utterances that have ever been made from theBritish throne. There was less of the old-fashioned King and more of themodern President about it than the most republican-minded of us couldhave anticipated. For the first time in a King's Speech we heard of the"democracies" of the world, and there was a clear claim that the Alliesat present fighting the Central Powers did themselves constitute aLeague of Nations. 

But we must admit that at present they do so only in a very rhetoricalsense. There is no real council of empowered representatives, andnothing in the nature of a united front has been prepared. Unless weprovide beforehand for something more effective, Italy, France, theUnited States, Japan, and this country will send separate groups ofrepresentatives, with separate instructions, unequal status, and veryprobably conflicting views upon many subjects, to the ultimate peacediscussions. It is quite conceivable--it is a very serious danger--thatat this discussion skilful diplomacy on the part of the Central Powersmay open a cleft among the Allies that has never appeared during theactual war. Have the British settled, for example, with Italy andFrance for the supply of metallurgical coal after the war? Thosecountries must have it somehow. Across the board Germany can make sometempting bids in that respect. Or take another question: Have theBritish arrived at common views with France, Belgium, Portugal, andSouth Africa about the administration of Central Africa? Suppose Germanymakes sudden proposals affecting native labour that win over thePortuguese and the Boers? There are a score of such points upon which weshall find the Allied representatives haggling with each other in thepresence of the enemy if they have not been settled beforehand. 

It is the plainest common sense that we should be fixing up all suchmatters with our Allies now, and knitting together a common front forthe final deal with German Imperialism. And these things are not to bedone effectively and bindingly nowadays by official gentlemen indiscreet undertones. They need to be done with the full knowledge andauthority of the participating peoples. 

The Russian example has taught the world the instability of diplomaticbargains in a time of such fundamental issues as the present. There islittle hope and little strength in hole-and-corner bargainings betweenthe officials or politicians who happen to be at the head of this orthat nation for the time being. Our Labour people will not stand thissort of thing and they will not be bound by it. There will be the plaindanger of repudiation for all arrangements made in that fashion. Agathering of somebody or other approved by the British Foreign Officeand of somebody or other approved by the French Foreign Office, ofsomebody with vague powers from America, and so on and so on, will be anentirely ineffective gathering. But that is the sort of gathering of theAllies we have been having hitherto, and that is the sort of gatheringthat is likely to continue unless there is a considerable expression ofopinion in favour of something more representative and responsible. 

Even our Foreign Office must be aware that in every country in the worldthere is now bitter suspicion of and keen hostility towards merelydiplomatic representatives. One of the most significant features of thetime is the evident desire of the Labour movement in every Europeancountry to take part in a collateral conference of Labour that shallmeet when and where the Peace Congress does and deliberate and commenton its proceedings. For a year now the demand of the masses for such aLabour conference has been growing. It marks a distrust of officialdomwhose intensity officialdom would do well to ponder. But it is thenatural consequence of, it is the popular attempt at a corrective to, the aloofness and obscurity that have hitherto been so evil acharacteristic of international negotiations. I do not think Labour andintelligent people anywhere are going to be fobbed off with anold-fashioned diplomatic gathering as being that League of Free Nationsthey demand. 

On the other hand, I do not contemplate this bi-cameral conference withthe diplomatists trying to best and humbug the Labour people as well aseach other and the Labour people getting more and more irritated, suspicious, and extremist, with anything but dread. The Allied countriesmust go into the conference _solid_, and they can only hope to do thatby heeding and incorporating Labour ideas before they come to theconference. The only alternative that I can see to this unsatisfactoryprospect of a Peace Congress sitting side by side with a dissentient andprobably revolutionary Labour and Socialist convention--both gatheringswith unsatisfactory credentials contradicting one another and driftingto opposite extremes--is that the delegates the Allied Powers send tothe Peace Conference (the same delegates which, if they are wise, theywill have previously sent to a preliminary League of Allied Nations todiscuss their common action at the Peace Congress), should be elected_ad hoc_ upon democratic lines. 

I know that this will be a very shocking proposal to all our ablespecialists in foreign policy. They will talk at once about the"ignorance" of people like the Labour leaders and myself about suchmatters, and so on. What do we know of the treaty of so-and-so that wassigned in the year seventeen something?--and so on. To which the answeris that we ought not to have been kept ignorant of these things. A daywill come when the Foreign Offices of all countries will have torecognize that what the people do not know of international agreements"ain't facts. " A secret treaty is only binding upon the persons in thesecret. But what I, as a sample common person, am not ignorant of isthis: that the business that goes on at the Peace Congress will eithermake or mar the lives of everyone I care for in the world, and thatsomehow, by representative or what not, _I have to be there_. The PeaceCongress deals with the blood and happiness of my children and thefuture of my world. Speaking as one of the hundreds of millions of "rankoutsiders" in public affairs, I do not mean to respect any peace treatythat may end this war unless I am honestly represented at its making. Ithink everywhere there is a tendency in people to follow the Russianexample to this extent and to repudiate bargains in which they have hadno voice. 

I do not see that any genuine realization of the hopes with which allthis talk about the League of Nations is charged can be possible, unlessthe two bodies which should naturally lead up to the League ofNations--that is to say, firstly, the Conference of the Allies, and thenthe Peace Congress--are elected bodies, speaking confidently for thewhole mass of the peoples behind them. It may be a troublesome thing toelect them, but it will involve much more troublesome consequences ifthey are not elected. This, I think, is one of the considerations forwhich many people's minds are still unprepared. But unless we are tohave over again after all this bloodshed and effort some such "Peacewith Honour" foolery as we had performed by "Dizzy" and Salisbury atthat fatal Berlin Conference in which this present war was begotten, wemust sit up to this novel proposal of electoral representation in thepeace negotiations. Something more than common sense binds our statesmento this idea. They are morally pledged to it. President Wilson and ourBritish and French spokesmen alike have said over and over again thatthey want to deal not with the Hohenzollerns but with the German people. In other words, we have demanded elected representatives from the Germanpeople with whom we may deal, and how can we make a demand of that sortunless we on our part are already prepared to send our own electedrepresentatives to meet them? It is up to us to indicate by our ownpractice how we on our side, professing as we do to act for democracies, to make democracy safe on the earth, and so on, intend to meet this newoccasion. 

Yet it has to be remarked that, so far, not one of the League of Nationsprojects I have seen have included any practicable proposals for theappointment of delegates either to that ultimate body or to its twonecessary predecessors, the Council of the Allies and the PeaceCongress. It is evident that here, again, we are neglecting to get onwith something of very urgent importance. I will venture, therefore, tosay a word or two here about the possible way in which a moderncommunity may appoint its international representatives. 

And here, again, I turn from any European precedents to that politicaloutcome of the British mind, the Constitution of the United States. (Because we must always remember that while our political institutionsin Britain are a patch-up of feudalism, Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverianmonarchist traditions and urgent merely European necessities, a patch-upthat has been made quasi-democratic in a series of after-thoughts, theAmerican Constitution is a real, deliberate creation of theEnglish-speaking intelligence. ) The President of the United States, then, we have to note, is elected in a most extraordinary way, and in away that has now the justification of very great successes indeed. Onseveral occasions the United States has achieved indisputable greatnessin its Presidents, and very rarely has it failed to set up very leaderlyand distinguished men. It is worth while, therefore, to inquire how thisPresident is elected. He is neither elected directly by the people norappointed by any legislative body. He is chosen by a special collegeelected by the people. This college exists to elect him; it meets, elects him, and disperses. (I will not here go into the preliminarycomplications that makes the election of a President follow upon apreliminary election of two Presidential Candidates. The point I ammaking here is that he is a specially selected man chosen _ad hoc_. ) Isthere any reason why we should, not adopt this method in this newnecessity we are under of sending representatives, first, to the longoverdue and necessary Allied Council, then to the Peace Congress, andthen to the hoped-for Council of the League of Nations?

I am anxious here only to start for discussion the idea of an electoralrepresentation of the nations upon these three bodies that must insuccession set themselves to define, organize, and maintain the peaceof the world. I do not wish to complicate the question by any tooexplicit advocacy of methods of election or the like. In the UnitedStates this college which elects the President is elected on the sameregister of voters as that which elects the Senate and Congress, and atthe same time. But I suppose if we are to give a popular mandate to thethree or five or twelve or twenty (or whatever number it is) men to whomwe are going to entrust our Empire's share in this great task of thepeace negotiations, it will be more decisive of the will of the wholenation if the college that had to appoint them is elected at a specialelection. I suppose that the great British common-weals over-seas, atpresent not represented in Parliament, would also and separately at thesame time elect colleges to appoint their representatives. I supposethere would be at least one Indian representative elected, perhaps bysome special electoral conference of Indian princes and leading men. Thechief defect of the American Presidential election is that as the oldsingle vote method of election is employed it has to be fought on purelyparty lines. He is the select man of the Democratic half, or of theRepublican half of the nation. He is not the select man of the wholenation. It would give a far more representative character to theelectoral college if it could be elected by fair modern methods, if forthis particular purpose parliamentary constituencies could be groupedand the clean scientific method of proportional representation could beused. But I suppose the party politician in this, as in most of ouraffairs, must still have his pound of our flesh--and we must reckon withhim later for the bloodshed. 

These are all, however, secondary considerations. The above paragraphis, so to speak, in the nature of a footnote. The fundamental matter, ifwe are to get towards any realization of this ideal of a world peacesustained by a League of Nations, is to get straight away to theconception of direct special electoral mandates in this matter. Atpresent all the political luncheon and dinner parties in London are busywith smirking discussions of "Who is to go?" The titled ladies areparticularly busy. They are talking about it as if we poor, ignorant, tax-paying, blood-paying common people did not exist. "L. G. , " they say, will of course "_insist_ on going, " but there is much talk of the "OldMan. " People are getting quite nice again about "the Old Man'sfeelings. " It would be such a pretty thing to send him. But if "L. G. "goes we want him to go with something more than a backing of intriguesand snatched authority. And I do not think the mass of people have anyenthusiasm for the Old Man. It is difficult again--by the dinner-partystandards--to know how Lord Curzon can be restrained. But we commonpeople do not care if he is restrained to the point of extinction. Probably there will be nobody who talks or understands Russian among theBritish representatives. But, of course, the British governing class haswashed its hands of the Russians. They were always very difficult, andnow they are "impossible, my dear, perfectly impossible. "

No! That sort of thing will not do now. This Peace Congress is too big ajob for party politicians and society and county families. The bulk ofBritish opinion cannot go on being represented for ever by PresidentWilson. We cannot always look to the Americans to express our ideas anddo our work for democracy. The foolery of the Berlin Treaty must not berepeated. We cannot have another popular Prime Minister come triumphingback to England with a gross of pink spectacles--through which we maysurvey the prospect of the next great war. The League of Free Nationsmeans something very big and solid; it is not a rhetorical phrase to beused to pacify a restless, distressed, and anxious public, and to besneered out of existence when that use is past. When the popular mindnow demands a League of Free Nations it demands a reality. The only wayto that reality is through the direct participation of the nation as awhole in the settlement, and that is possible only through the directelection for this particular issue of representative and responsiblemen. 

III

THE NECESSARY POWERS OF THE LEAGUE

If this phrase, "the League of Free Nations, " is to signify anythingmore than a rhetorical flourish, then certain consequences follow thathave to be faced now. No man can join a partnership and remain anabsolutely free man. You cannot bind yourself to do this and not to dothat and to consult and act with your associates in certaineventualities without a loss of your sovereign freedom. People in thiscountry and in France do not seem to be sitting up manfully to thesenecessary propositions. 

If this League of Free Nations is really to be an effectual thing forthe preservation of the peace of the world it must possess power andexercise power, powers must be delegated to it. Otherwise it will onlyhelp, with all other half-hearted good resolutions, to pave the road ofmankind to hell. Nothing in all the world so strengthens evil as thehalf-hearted attempts of good to make good. 

It scarcely needs repeating here--it has been so generally said--thatno League of Free Nations can hope to keep the peace unless every memberof it is indeed a free member, represented by duly elected persons. Nobody, of course, asks to "dictate the internal government" of anycountry to that country. If Germans, for instance, like to wallow inabsolutism after the war they can do so. But if they or any otherpeoples wish to take part in a permanent League of Free Nations it isonly reasonable to insist that so far as their representatives on thecouncil go they must be duly elected under conditions that are by thestandards of the general league satisfactorily democratic. That seems tobe only the common sense of the matter. Every court is a potentialconspiracy against freedom, and the League cannot tolerate merely courtappointments. If courts are to exist anywhere in the new world of thefuture, they will be wise to stand aloof from international meddling. Ofcourse if a people, after due provision for electoral representation, choose to elect dynastic candidates, that is an altogether differentmatter. 

And now let us consider what are the powers that must be delegated tothis proposed council of a League of Free Nations, if that is reallyeffectually to prevent war and to organize and establish and make peacepermanent in the world. 

Firstly, then, it must be able to adjudicate upon all internationaldisputes whatever. Its first function must clearly be that. Before a warcan break out there must be the possibility of a world decision upon itsrights and wrongs. The League, therefore, will have as its primaryfunction to maintain a Supreme Court, whose decisions will be final, before which every sovereign power may appear as plaintiff against anyother sovereign power or group of powers. The plea, I take it, willalways be in the form that the defendant power or powers is engaged inproceedings "calculated to lead to a breach of the peace, " and callingupon the League for an injunction against such proceedings. I supposethe proceedings that can be brought into court in this way fall undersuch headings as these that follow; restraint of trade by injurioustariffs or suchlike differentiations or by interference with throughtraffic, improper treatment of the subjects _or their property_ (here Iput a query) of the plaintiff nation in the defendant state, aggressivemilitary or naval preparation, disorder spreading over the frontier, trespass (as, for instance, by airships), propaganda of disorder, espionage, permitting the organization of injurious activities, such asraids or piracy. Clearly all such actions must come within the purviewof any world-supreme court organized to prevent war. But in additionthere is a more doubtful and delicate class of case, arising out of thediscontent of patches of one race or religion in the dominions ofanother. How far may the supreme court of the world attend to grievancesbetween subject and sovereign?

Such cases are highly probable, and no large, vague propositions aboutthe "self-determination" of peoples can meet all the cases. InMacedonia, for instance, there is a jumble of Albanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek and Rumanian villages always jostling one another andmaintaining an intense irritation between the kindred nations close athand. And quite a large number of areas and cities in the world, it hasto be remembered, are not homogeneous at all. Will the great nations ofthe world have the self-abnegation to permit a scattered subjectpopulation to appeal against the treatment of its ruling power to theSupreme Court? This is a much more serious interference with sovereigntythan intervention in an external quarrel. Could a Greek village inBulgarian Macedonia plead in the Supreme Court? Could the Armenians inConstantinople, or the Jews in Roumania, or the Poles in West Prussia, or the negroes in Georgia, or the Indians in the Transvaal make such anappeal? Could any Indian population in India appeal? Personally I shouldlike to see the power of the Supreme Court extend as far as this. I donot see how we can possibly prevent a kindred nation pleading for thescattered people of its own race and culture, or any nation presenting acase on behalf of some otherwise unrepresented people--the UnitedStates, for example, presenting a case on behalf of the Armenians. But Idoubt if many people have made up their minds yet to see the powers ofthe Supreme Court of the League of Nations go so far as this. I doubtif, to begin with, it will be possible to provide for these cases. Iwould like to see it done, but I doubt if the majority of the sovereignpeoples concerned will reconcile their national pride with the idea, atleast so far as their own subject populations go. 

Here, you see, I do no more than ask a question. It is a difficult one, and it has to be answered before we can clear the way to the League ofFree Nations. 

But the Supreme Court, whether it is to have the wider or the narrowerscope here suggested, would be merely the central function of the Leagueof Free Nations. Behind the decisions of the Supreme Court must liepower. And here come fresh difficulties for patriotic digestions. Thearmies and navies of the world must be at the disposal of the League ofFree Nations, and that opens up a new large area of delegated authority. The first impulse of any power disposed to challenge the decisions ofthe Supreme Court will be, of course, to arm; and it is difficult toimagine how the League of Free Nations can exercise any practicalauthority unless it has power to restrain such armament. The League ofFree Nations must, in fact, if it is to be a working reality, have powerto define and limit the military and naval and aerial equipment of everycountry in the world. This means something more than a restriction ofstate forces. It must have power and freedom to investigate the militaryand naval and aerial establishments of all its constituent powers. Itmust also have effective control over every armament industry. Andarmament industries are not always easy to define. Are aeroplanes, forexample, armament? Its powers, I suggest, must extend even to arestraint upon the belligerent propaganda which is the naturaladvertisement campaign of every armament industry. It must have theright, for example, to raise the question of the proprietorship ofnewspapers by armament interests. Disarmament is, in fact, a necessaryfactor of any League of Free Nations, and you cannot have disarmamentunless you are prepared to see the powers of the council of the Leagueextend thus far. The very existence of the League presupposes that itand it alone is to have and to exercise military force. Any otherbelligerency or preparation or incitement to belligerency becomesrebellion, and any other arming a threat of rebellion, in a world Leagueof Free Nations. 

But here, again, has the general mind yet thought out all that isinvolved in this proposition? In all the great belligerent countries thearmament industries are now huge interests with enormous powers. Krupp'sbusiness alone is as powerful a thing in Germany as the Crown. In everycountry a heavily subsidized "patriotic" press will fight desperatelyagainst giving powers so extensive and thorough as those here suggestedto an international body. So long, of course, as the League of FreeNations remains a project in the air, without body or parts, such apress will sneer at it gently as "Utopian, " and even patronize itkindly. But so soon as the League takes on the shape its generalproposition makes logically necessary, the armament interest will takefright. Then it is we shall hear the drum patriotic loud in defence ofthe human blood trade. Are we to hand over these most intimate affairsof ours to "a lot of foreigners"? Among these "foreigners" who will beappealed to to terrify the patriotic souls of the British will be the"Americans. " Are we men of English blood and tradition to see ouraffairs controlled by such "foreigners" as Wilson, Lincoln, Webster andWashington? Perish the thought! When they might be controlled byDisraelis, Wettins, Mount-Battens, and what not! And so on and so on. Krupp's agents and the agents of the kindred firms in Great Britain andFrance will also be very busy with the national pride of France. InGermany they have already created a colossal suspicion of England. 

Here is a giant in the path.... 

But let us remember that it is only necessary to defeat the propagandaof this vile and dangerous industry in four great countries. And for thecommon citizen, touched on the tenderest part of his patrioticsusceptibilities, there are certain irrefutable arguments. Whether theways of the world in the years to come are to be the paths of peace orthe paths of war is not going to alter this essential fact, that thegreat educated world communities, with a social and industrialorganization on a war-capable scale, are going to dominate humanaffairs. Whether they spend their power in killing or in educating andcreating, France, Germany, however much we may resent it, the two greatEnglish-speaking communities, Italy, Japan China, and presently perhapsa renascent Russia, are jointly going to control the destinies ofmankind. Whether that joint control comes through arms or through thelaw is a secondary consideration. To refuse to bring our affairs into acommon council does not make us independent of foreigners. It makes usmore dependent upon them, as a very little consideration will show. 

I am suggesting here that the League of Free Nations shall practicallycontrol the army, navy, air forces, and armament industry of everynation in the world. What is the alternative to that? To do as weplease? No, the alternative is that any malignant country will be freeto force upon all the rest just the maximum amount of armament itchooses to adopt. Since 1871 France, we say, has been free in militarymatters. What has been the value of that freedom? The truth is, she hasbeen the bond-slave of Germany, bound to watch Germany as a slavewatches a master, bound to launch submarine for submarine and cast gunfor gun, to sweep all her youth into her army, to subdue her trade, herliterature, her education, her whole life to the necessity ofpreparations imposed upon her by her drill-master over the Rhine. AndMichael, too, has been a slave to his imperial master for the self-samereason, for the reason that Germany and France were both so proudlysovereign and independent. Both countries have been slaves to Kruppismand Zabernism--_because they were sovereign and free_! So it will alwaysbe. So long as patriotic cant can keep the common man jealous ofinternational controls over his belligerent possibilities, so long willhe be the helpless slave of the foreign threat, and "Peace" remain amere name for the resting phase between wars. 

But power over the military resources of the world is by no means thelimit of the necessary powers of an effective League of Free Nations. There are still more indigestible implications in the idea, and, sincethey have got to be digested sooner or later if civilization is not tocollapse, there is no reason why we should not begin to bite upon themnow. I was much interested to read the British press upon the allegedproposal of the German Chancellor that we should give up (presumably toGermany) Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt, and suchlike key possessions. Itseemed to excite several of our politicians extremely. I read over theGerman Chancellor's speech very carefully, so far as it was available, and it is clear that he did not propose anything of the sort. Wilfullyor blindly our press and our demagogues screamed over a false issue. TheChancellor was defending the idea of the Germans remaining in Belgiumand Lorraine because of the strategic and economic importance of thoseregions to Germany, and he was arguing that before we English got intosuch a feverish state of indignation about that, we should first askourselves what we were doing in Gibraltar, etc. , etc. That is adifferent thing altogether. And it is an argument that is not to bedisposed of by misrepresentation. The British have to think hard overthis quite legitimate German _tu quoque_. It is no good getting into apatriotic bad temper and refusing to answer that question. We Britishpeople are so persuaded of the purity and unselfishness with which wedischarge our imperial responsibilities, we have been so trained inimperial self-satisfaction, we know so certainly that all our subjectnations call us blessed, that it is a little difficult for us to seejust how the fact that we are, for example, so deeply rooted in Egyptlooks to an outside intelligence. Of course the German imperialist ideais a wicked and aggressive idea, as Lord Robert Cecil has explained;they want to set up all over the earth coaling stations and strategicpoints, _on the pattern of ours. _ Well, they argue, we are only tryingto do what you British have done. If we are not to do so--because it isaggression and so on and so on--is not the time ripe for you to makesome concessions to the public opinion of the world? That is the Germanargument. Either, they say, tolerate this idea of a Germany withadvantageous posts and possessions round and about the earth, orreconsider your own position. 

Well, at the risk of rousing much patriotic wrath, I must admit that Ithink we _have_ to reconsider our position. Our argument is that inIndia, Egypt, Africa and elsewhere, we stand for order and civilization, we are the trustees of freedom, the agents of knowledge and efficiency. On the whole the record of British rule is a pretty respectable one; Iam not ashamed of our record. Nevertheless _the case is altering_. 

It is quite justifiable for us British, no doubt, if we do really playthe part of honest trustees, to remain in Egypt and in India underexisting conditions; it is even possible for us to glance at thehelplessness of Arabia, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, as yet incapable ofself-government, helpless as new-born infants. But our case, our onlyjustifiable case, is that we are trustees because there is no bettertrustee possible. And the creation of a council of a League of FreeNations would be like the creation of a Public Trustee for the world. The creation of a League of Free Nations must necessarily be thecreation of an authority that may legitimately call existing empires togive an account of their stewardship. For an unchecked fragmentarycontrol of tropical and chaotic regions, it substitutes the possibilityof a general authority. And this must necessarily alter the problems notonly of the politically immature nations and the control of the tropics, but also of the regulation of the sea ways, the regulation of the comingair routes, and the distribution of staple products in the world. I willnot go in detail over the items of this list, because the reader canfill in the essentials of the argument from what has gone before. Iwant simply to suggest how widely this project of a League of FreeNations swings when once you have let it swing freely in your mind! Andif you do not let it swing freely in your mind, it remains nothing--asentimental gesture. 

The plain truth is that the League of Free Nations, if it is to be areality, if it is to effect a real pacification of the world, must do noless than supersede Empire; it must end not only this new Germanimperialism, which is struggling so savagely and powerfully to possessthe earth, but it must also wind up British imperialism and Frenchimperialism, which do now so largely and inaggressively possess it. And, moreover, this idea queries the adjective of Belgian, Portuguese, French, and British Central Africa alike, just as emphatically as itqueries "German. " Still more effectually does the League forbid thosecreations of the futurist imagination, the imperialism of Italy andGreece, which make such threatening gestures at the world of ourchildren. Are these incompatibilities understood? Until people havefaced the clear antagonism that exists between imperialism andinternationalism, they have not begun to suspect the real significanceof this project of the League of Free Nations. They have not begun torealize that peace also has its price. 

IV

THE LABOUR VIEW OF MIDDLE AFRICA

I was recently privileged to hear the views of one of those titled andinfluential ladies--with a general education at about the fifth standardlevel, plus a little French, German, Italian, and music--who do so muchto make our England what it is at the present time, upon the Labour ideaof an international control of "tropical" Africa. She was loud andderisive about the "ignorance" of Labour. "What can _they_ know aboutforeign politics?" she said, with gestures to indicate her conception of_them_. 

I was moved to ask her what she would do about Africa. "Leave it to LordRobert!" she said, leaning forward impressively. "_Leave it to thepeople who know. _"

Unhappily I share the evident opinion of Labour that we are not blessedwith any profoundly wise class of people who have definite knowledge andclear intentions about Africa, that these "_people who know_" are mostlya pretentious bluff, and so, in spite of a very earnest desire to takerefuge in my "ignorance" from the burthen of thinking about Africanproblems, I find myself obliged, like most other people, to do so. Inthe interests of our country, our children, and the world, we commonpersons _have_ to have opinions about these matters. A muddle-up inAfrica this year may kill your son and mine in the course of the nextdecade. I know this is not a claim to be interested in things African, such as the promoter of a tropical railway or an oil speculator has;still it is a claim. And for the life of me I cannot see what is wrongabout the Labour proposals, or what alternative exists that can giveeven a hope of peace in and about Africa. 

The gist of the Labour proposal is an international control of Africabetween the Zambesi and the Sahara. This has been received with loudprotests by men whose work one is obliged to respect, by Sir Harry, Johnston, for example, and Sir Alfred Sharpe, and with somethingapproaching a shriek of hostility by Mr. Cunninghame Graham. But I thinkthese gentlemen have not perhaps given the Labour proposal quite as muchattention as they have spent upon the details of African conditions. Ithink they have jumped to conclusions at the mere sound of the word"international. " There have been some gross failures in the past to setup international administrations in Africa and the Near East. And thesegentlemen think at once of some new Congo administration and ofnondescript police forces commanded by cosmopolitan adventurers. (SeeJoseph Conrad's "Out-post of Civilization. ") They think ofinternationalism with greedy Great Powers in the background outside theinternationalized area, intriguing to create disorder and mischief withideas of an ultimate annexation. But I doubt if such nightmares do anysort of justice to the Labour intention. 

And the essential thing I would like to point out to these authoritiesupon African questions is that not one of them even hints at any otherformula which covers the broad essentials of the African riddle. 

What are these broad essentials? What are the ends that _must_ beachieved if Africa is not to continue a festering sore in the body ofmankind?

The first most obvious danger of Africa is the militarization of theblack. General Smuts has pointed this out plainly. The negro makes agood soldier; he is hardy, he stands the sea, and he stands cold. (Therewas a negro in the little party which reached the North Pole. ) It isabsolutely essential to the peace of the world that there should be noarming of the negroes beyond the minimum necessary for the policing ofAfrica. But how is this to be watched and prevented if there is nooverriding body representing civilization to say "Stop" to thebeginnings of any such militarization? I do not see how Sir HarryJohnston, Sir Alfred Sharpe, and the other authorities can object to atleast an international African "Disarmament Commission" to watch, warn, and protest. At least they must concede that. 

But in practice this involves something else. A practical consequence ofthis disarmament idea must be an effective control of the importation ofarms into the "tutelage" areas of Africa. That rat at the dykes ofcivilization, that ultimate expression of political scoundrelism, theGun-Runner, has to be kept under and stamped out in Africa aseverywhere. A Disarmament Commission that has no forces available toprevent the arms trade will be just another Hague Convention, justanother vague, well-intentioned, futile gesture. 

And closely connected with this function of controlling the arms tradeis another great necessity of Africa under "tutelage, " and that is thenecessity of a common collective agreement not to demoralize the nativepopulation. That demoralization, physical and moral, has already gonefar. The whole negro population of Africa is now rotten with diseasesintroduced by Arabs and Europeans during the last century, and suchAfrican statesmen as Sir Harry Johnston are eloquent upon the necessityof saving the blacks--and the baser whites--from the effects of tradegin and similar alluring articles of commerce. Moreover, from Africathere is always something new in the way of tropical diseases, andpresently Africa, if we let it continue to fester as it festers now, mayproduce an epidemic that will stand exportation to a temperate climate. A bacterium that may kill you or me in some novel and disgusting way mayeven now be developing in some Congo muck-heap. So here is the need foranother Commission to look after the Health of Africa. That, too, shouldbe of authority over all the area of "tutelage" Africa. It is no goodstamping out infectious disease in Nyasaland while it is being bred inPortuguese East Africa. And if there is a Disarmament Commission alreadycontrolling the importation of arms, why should not that body alsocontrol at the same time the importation of trade gin and similardelicacies, and direct quarantine and such-like health regulations?

But there is another question in Africa upon which our "ignorant" Labourclass is far better informed than our dear old eighteenth-century upperclass which still squats so firmly in our Foreign and Colonial Offices, and that is the question of forced labour. We cannot tolerate anypossibilities of the enslavement of black Africa. Long ago the UnitedStates found out the impossibility of having slave labour working in thesame system with white. To cure that anomaly cost the United States along and bloody war. The slave-owner, the exploiter of the black, becomes a threat and a nuisance to any white democracy. He brings backhis loot to corrupt Press and life at home. What happened in America inthe midst of the last century between Federals and Confederates must nothappen again on a larger scale between white Europe and middle Africa. Slavery in Africa, open or disguised, whether enforced by the lash orbrought about by iniquitous land-stealing, strikes at the home andfreedom of every European worker--_and Labour knows this_. 

But how are we to prevent the enslavement and economic exploitation ofthe blacks if we have no general watcher of African conditions? We wanta common law for Africa, a general Declaration of Rights, of certainelementary rights, and we want a common authority to which the black manand the native tribe may appeal for justice. What is the good of tryingto elevate the population of Uganda and to give it a free and hopefullife if some other population close at hand is competing against theBaganda worker under lash and tax? So here is a third aspect of ourinternational Commission, as a native protectorate and court of appeal!

There is still a fourth aspect of the African question in which everymother's son in Europe is closely interested, and that is the tradequestion. Africa is the great source of many of the most necessary rawmaterials upon which our modern comforts and conveniences depend; moreparticularly is it the source of cheap fat in the form of palm oil. Oneof the most powerful levers in the hands of the Allied democracies atthe present time in their struggle against the imperial brigands ofPotsdam is the complete control we have now obtained over theseessential supplies. We can, if we choose, cut off Germany altogetherfrom these vital economic necessities, if she does not consent toabandon militant imperialism for some more civilized form of government. We hope that this war will end in that renunciation, and that Germanywill re-enter the community of nations. But whether that is so or not, whether Germany is or is not to be one of the interested parties in theAfrican solution, the fact remains that it is impossible to contemplatea continuing struggle for the African raw material supply between theinterested Powers. Sooner or later that means a renewal of war. International trade rivalry is, indeed, only war--_smouldering_. Weneed, and Labour demands, a fair, frank treatment of African trade, andthat can only be done by some overriding regulative power, a Commissionwhich, so far as I can see, might also be the same Commission as that wehave already hypothesized as being necessary to control the Customs inorder to prevent gun-running and the gin trade. That Commission mightvery conveniently have a voice in the administration of the greatwaterways of Africa (which often run through the possessions of severalPowers) and in the regulation of the big railway lines and air routesthat will speedily follow the conclusion of peace. 

Now this I take it is the gist of the Labour proposal. This--and no morethan this--is what is intended by the "international control of tropicalAfrica. " _I do not read that phrase as abrogating existing sovereigntiesin Africa_. What is contemplated is a delegation of authority. Every oneshould know, though unhappily the badness of our history teaching makesit doubtful if every one does know, that the Federal Government of theUnited States of America did not begin as a sovereign Government, andhas now only a very questionable sovereignty. Each State was sovereign, and each State delegated certain powers to Washington. That was theinitial idea of the union. Only later did the idea of a people of theStates as a whole emerge. In the same way I understand the Labourproposal as meaning that we should delegate to an African Commission themiddle African Customs, the regulation of inter-State trade, inter-Staterailways and waterways, quarantine and health generally, and theestablishment of a Supreme Court for middle African affairs. One or twominor matters, such as the preservation of rare animals, might very wellfall under the same authority. 

Upon that Commission the interested nations, that is to say--puttingthem in alphabetical order--the Africander, the Briton, the Belgian, theEgyptian, the Frenchman, the Italian, the Indian the Portuguese--mightall be represented in proportion to their interest. Whether the Germanwould come in is really a question for the German to consider; he cancome in as a good European, he cannot come in as an imperialist brigand. Whether, too, any other nations can claim to have an interest in Africanaffairs, whether the Commission would not be better appointed by aLeague of Free Nations than directly by the interested Governments, anda number of other such questions, need not be considered here. Here weare discussing only the main idea of the Labour proposal. 

Now beneath the supervision and restraint of such a delegatedCommission I do not see why the existing administrations of tutelageAfrica should not continue. I do not believe that the Labour proposalcontemplates any humiliating cession of European sovereignty. Under thatinternational Commission the French flag may still wave in Senegal andthe British over the protected State of Uganda. Given a new spirit inGermany I do not see why the German flag should not presently berestored in German East Africa. But over all, standing forrighteousness, patience, fair play for the black, and the common welfareof mankind would wave a new flag, the Sun of Africa representing theCentral African Commission of the League of Free Nations. 

That is my vision of the Labour project. It is something very different, I know, from the nightmare of an international police of cosmopolitanscoundrels in nondescript uniforms, hastening to loot and ravish hisdear Uganda and his beloved Nigeria, which distresses the crumpledpillow of Sir Harry Johnston. But if it is not the solution, then it isup to him and his fellow authorities to tell us what is the solution ofthe African riddle. 

V

GETTING THE LEAGUE IDEA CLEAR IN RELATION TO IMPERIALISM

§ 1

It is idle to pretend that even at the present time the idea of theLeague of Free Nations has secure possession of the British mind. Thereis quite naturally a sustained opposition to it in all the fastnesses ofaggressive imperialism. Such papers as the _Times_ and the _MorningPost_ remain hostile and obstructive to the expression of internationalideas. Most of our elder statesmen seem to have learnt nothing andforgotten nothing during the years of wildest change the world has everknown. But in the general mind of the British peoples the movement ofopinion from a narrow imperialism towards internationalism has been wideand swift. And it continues steadily. One can trace week by week andalmost day by day the Americanization of the British conception of theAllied War Aims. It may be interesting to reproduce here threecommunications upon this question made at different times by thepresent writer to the press. The circumstances of their publication aresignificant. The first is in substance identical with a letter which wassent to the _Times_ late in May, 1917, and rejected as being altogethertoo revolutionary. For nowadays the correspondence in the _Times_ hasceased to be an impartial expression of public opinion. Thecorrespondence of the _Times_ is now apparently selected and edited inaccordance with the views upon public policy held by the acting editorfor the day. More and more has that paper become the organ of a sort ofOxford Imperialism, three or four years behind the times and very ripeand "expert. " The letter is here given as it was finally printed in theissue of the _Daily Chronicle_ for June 4th, 1917, under the heading, "Wanted a Statement of Imperial Policy. "

Sir, --The time seems to have come for much clearer statements of outlookand intention from this country than it has hitherto been possible tomake. The entry of America into the war and the banishment of autocracyand aggressive diplomacy from Russia have enormously cleared the air, and the recent great speech of General Smuts at the Savoy Hotel isprobably only the first of a series of experiments in statement. It isdesirable alike to clear our own heads, to unify our efforts, and togive the nations of the world some assurance and standard for ournational conduct in the future, that we should now define the Idea ofour Empire and its relation to the world outlook much more clearly thanhas ever hitherto been done. Never before in the history of mankind hasopinion counted for so much and persons and organizations for so littleas in this war. Never before has the need for clear ideas, widelyunderstood and consistently sustained, been so commandingly vital. 

What do we mean by our Empire, and what is its relation to thatuniversal desire of mankind, the permanent rule of peace and justice inthe world? The whole world will be the better for a very plain answer tothat question. 

Is it not time for us British not merely to admit to ourselves, but toassure the world that our Empire as it exists to-day is a provisionalthing, that in scarcely any part of the world do we regard it as morethan an emergency arrangement, as a necessary association that must giveplace ultimately to the higher synthesis of a world league, that here wehold as trustees and there on account of strategic considerations thatmay presently disappear, and that though we will not contemplate thereplacement of our flag anywhere by the flag of any other competingnation, though we do hope to hold together with our kin and with thosewho increasingly share our tradition and our language, nevertheless weare prepared to welcome great renunciations of our present ascendencyand privileges in the interests of mankind as a whole. We need to makethe world understand that we do not put our nation nor our Empire beforethe commonwealth of man. Unless presently we are to follow Germany alongthe tragic path her national vanity and her world ambitions have madefor her, that is what we have to make clear now. It is not only our dutyto mankind, it is also the sane course for our own preservation. 

Is it not the plain lesson of this stupendous and disastrous war thatthere is no way to secure civilization from destruction except by animpartial control and protection in the interests of the whole humanrace, a control representing the best intelligence of mankind, of thesemain causes of war. 

(1) The politically undeveloped tropics;

(2) Shipping and international trade; and

(3) Small nationalities and all regions in a state of politicalimpotence or confusion?

It is our case against the Germans that in all these three cases theyhave subordinated every consideration of justice and the general humanwelfare to a monstrous national egotism. That argument has a doubleedge. At present there is a vigorous campaign in America, Russia, theneutral countries generally, to represent British patriotism as equallyegotistic, and our purpose in this war as a mere parallel to the Germanpurpose. In the same manner, though perhaps with less persistency, France and Italy are also caricatured. We are supposed to be grabbing atMesopotamia and Palestine, France at Syria; Italy is represented aspursuing a Machiavellian policy towards the unfortunate Greekrepublicans, with her eyes on the Greek islands and Greece in Asia. Isit not time that these base imputations were repudiated clearly andconclusively by our Alliance? And is it not time that we began todiscuss in much more frank and definite terms than has hitherto beendone, the nature of the international arrangement that will be needed tosecure the safety of such liberated populations as those of Palestine, of the Arab regions of the old Turkish empire, of Armenia, of reunitedPoland, and the like?

I do not mean here mere diplomatic discussions and "understandings, " Imean such full and plain statements as will be spread through the wholeworld and grasped and assimilated by ordinary people everywhere, statements by which we, as a people, will be prepared to stand or fall. 

Almost as urgent is the need for some definite statement about Africa. General Smuts has warned not only the Empire, but the whole world of thegigantic threat to civilization that lies in the present division ofAfrica between various keenly competitive European Powers, any one ofwhich will be free to misuse the great natural resources at its disposaland to arm millions of black soldiers for aggression. A mere eliminationof Germany from Africa will not solve that difficulty. What we have toeliminate is not this nation or that, but the system of national shovingand elbowing, the treatment of Africa as the board for a game ofbeggar-my-neighbour-and-damn-the-niggers, in which a few syndicates, masquerading as national interests, snatch a profit to the infinite lossof all mankind. We want a lowering of barriers and a unification ofinterests, we want an international control of these disputed regions, to override nationalist exploitation. The whole world wants it. It is achastened and reasonable world we live in to-day, and the time for whitereason and the wide treatment of these problems is now. 

Finally, the time is drawing near when the Egyptian and the nations ofIndia will ask us, "Are things going on for ever here as they go on now, or are we to look for the time when we, too, like the Africander, theCanadian and the Australian, will be your confessed and equal partners?"Would it not be wise to answer that question in the affirmative beforethe voice in which it is asked grows thick with anger? In Egypt, forexample, we are either robbers very like--except for a certaindifference in touch--the Germans in Belgium, or we are honourabletrustees. It is our claim and pride to be honourable trustees. Nothingso becomes a trustee as a cheerful openness of disposition. GreatBritain has to table her world policy. It is a thing overdue. No doubtwe have already a literature of liberal imperialism and a considerableaccumulation of declarations by this statesman or that. But what isneeded is a formulation much more representative, official and permanentthan that, something that can be put beside President Wilson's clearrendering of the American idea. We want all our peoples to understand, and we want all mankind to understand that our Empire is not a net aboutthe world in which the progress of mankind is entangled, but aself-conscious political system working side by side with the otherdemocracies of the earth, preparing the way for, and prepared at last tosacrifice and merge itself in, the world confederation of free and equalpeoples. 

§ 2

This letter was presently followed up by an article in the _Daily News_, entitled "A Reasonable Man's Peace. " This article provoked aconsiderable controversy in the imperialist press, and it was reprintedas a pamphlet by a Free Trade organization, which distributed over200, 000 copies. It is particularly interesting to note, in view of whatfollows it, that it was attacked with great virulence in the _EveningNews_, the little fierce mud-throwing brother of the _Daily Mail_. 

The international situation at the present time is beyond question themost wonderful that the world has ever seen. There is not a country inthe world in which the great majority of sensible people are notpassionately desirous of peace, of an enduring peace, and--the war goeson. The conditions of peace can now be stated, in general terms that areas acceptable to a reasonable man in Berlin as they are to a reasonableman in Paris or London or Petrograd or Constantinople. There are to beno conquests, no domination of recalcitrant populations, no bitterinsistence upon vindictive penalties, and there must be something in thenature of a world-wide League of Nations to keep the peace securely infuture, to "make the world safe for democracy, " and maintaininternational justice. To that the general mind of the world has cometo-day. 

Why, then, does the waste and killing go on? Why is not the PeaceConference sitting now?

Manifestly because a small minority of people in positions of peculiaradvantage, in positions of trust and authority, and particularly theGerman reactionaries, prevent or delay its assembling. 

The answer which seems to suffice in all the Allied countries is thatthe German Imperial Government--that the German Imperial Governmentalone--stands in the way, that its tradition is incurably a tradition ofconquest and aggression, that until German militarism is overthrown, etc. Few people in the Allied countries will dispute that that isbroadly true. But is it the whole and complete truth? Is there nothingmore to be done on our side? Let us put a question that goes to the veryheart of the problem. Why does the great mass of the German people stillcling to its incurably belligerent Government?

The answer to that question is not overwhelmingly difficult. The Germanpeople sticks to its militarist imperialism as Mazeppa stuck to hishorse; because it is bound to it, and the wolves pursue. The attentivestudent of the home and foreign propaganda literature of the GermanGovernment will realize that the case made by German imperialism, themain argument by which it sticks to power, is this, that the AlliedGovernments are also imperialist, that they also aim at conquest andaggression, that for Germany the choice is world empire or downfall andutter ruin. This is the argument that holds the German people stifflyunited. For most men in most countries it would be a convincingargument, strong enough to override considerations of right and wrong. Ifind that I myself am of this way of thinking, that whether England hasdone right or wrong in the past--and I have sometimes criticized mycountry very bitterly--I will not endure the prospect of seeing her atthe foot of some victorious foreign nation. Neither will any German whomatters. Very few people would respect a German who did. But the casefor the Allies is that this great argument by which, and by which alone, the German Imperial Government keeps its grip upon the German people atthe present time, and keeps them facing their enemies, is untrue. TheAllies declare that they do not want to destroy the German people, theydo not want to cripple the German people; they want merely to seecertain gaping wounds inflicted by Germany repaired, and beyond thatreasonable requirement they want nothing but to be assured, completelyassured, absolutely assured, against any further aggressions on thepart of Germany. 

Is that true? Our leaders say so, and we believe them. We would notsupport them if we did not. And if it is true, have the statesmen of theAllies made it as transparently and convincingly clear to the Germanpeople as possible? That is one of the supreme questions of the presenttime. We cannot too earnestly examine it. Because in the answer to itlies the reason why so many men were killed yesterday on the eastern andwestern front, so many ships sunk, so much property destroyed, so muchhuman energy wasted for ever upon mere destruction, and why to-morrowand the next day and the day after--through many months yet, perhaps--the same killing and destroying must still go on. 

In many respects this war has been an amazing display of humaninadaptability. The military history of the war has still to be written, the grim story of machinery misunderstood, improvements resisted, antiquated methods persisted in; but the broad facts are already beforethe public mind. After three years of war the air offensive, the onlypossible decisive blow, is still merely talked of. Not once nor twiceonly have the Western Allies had victory within their grasp--and failedto grip it. The British cavalry generals wasted the great invention ofthe tanks as a careless child breaks a toy. At least equally remarkableis the dragging inadaptability of European statecraft. Everywhere thefailure of ministers and statesmen to rise to the urgent definitenecessities of the present time is glaringly conspicuous. They seem tobe incapable even of thinking how the war may be brought to an end. Theyseem incapable of that plain speaking to the world audience which alonecan bring about a peace. They keep on with the tricks and feints of adeparted age. Both on the side of the Allies and on the side of theGermans the declarations of public policy remain childishly vague anddisingenuous, childishly "diplomatic. " They chaffer like happy imbecileswhile civilization bleeds to death. It was perhaps to be expected. Few, if any, men of over five-and-forty completely readjust themselves tochanged conditions, however novel and challenging the changes may be, and nearly all the leading figures in these affairs are elderly mentrained in a tradition of diplomatic ineffectiveness, and now overworkedand overstrained to a pitch of complete inelasticity. They go on as ifit were still 1913. Could anything be more palpably shifty andunsatisfactory, more senile, more feebly artful, than the recentutterances of the German Chancellor? And, on our own side--

Let us examine the three leading points about this peace business inwhich this jaded statecraft is most apparent. 

Let the reader ask himself the following questions:--

Does he know what the Allies mean to do with the problem of CentralAfrica? It is the clear common sense of the African situation that whilethese precious regions of raw material remain divided up between anumber of competitive European imperialisms, each resolutely set uponthe exploitation of its "possessions" to its own advantage and thedisadvantage of the others, there can be no permanent peace in theworld. There can be permanent peace in the world only when tropical andsub-tropical Africa constitute a field free to the commercial enterpriseof every one irrespective of nationality, when this is no longer an areaof competition between nations. This is possible only under some supremeinternational control. It requires no special knowledge nor wisdom tosee that. A schoolboy can see it. Any one but a statesman absolutelyflaccid with overstrain can see that. However difficult it may prove towork out in detail, such an international control _must_ therefore beworked out. The manifest solution of the problem of the German coloniesin Africa is neither to return them to her nor deprive her of them, butto give her a share in the pooled general control of mid-Africa. Inthat way she can be deprived of all power for political mischief inAfrica without humiliation or economic injury. In that way, too, we canhead off--and in no other way can we head off--the power for evil, thepower of developing quarrels inherent in "imperialisms" other thanGerman. 

But has the reader any assurance that this sane solution of the Africanproblem has the support of the Allied Governments? At best he has only avague persuasion. And consider how the matter looks "over there. " TheGerman Government assures the German people that the Allies intend tocut off Germany from the African supply of raw material. That would meanthe practical destruction of German economic life. It is something farmore vital to the mass of Germans than any question of Belgium orAlsace-Lorraine. It is, therefore, one of the ideas most potent innerving the overstrained German people to continue their fight. Why arewe, and why are the German people, not given some definite assurance inthis matter? Given reparation in Europe, is Germany to be allowed a fairshare in the control and trade of a pooled and neutralized CentralAfrica? Sooner or later we must come to some such arrangement. Why notstate it plainly now?

A second question is equally essential to any really permanentsettlement, and it is one upon which these eloquent but unsatisfactorymouthpieces of ours turn their backs with an equal resolution, and thatis the fate of the Ottoman Empire. What in plain English are we up tothere? Whatever happens, that Humpty Dumpty cannot be put back as it wasbefore the war. The idea of the German imperialist, the idea of our ownlittle band of noisy but influential imperialist vulgarians, isevidently a game of grab, a perilous cutting up of these areas intojostling protectorates and spheres of influence, from which either theGermans or the Allies (according to the side you are on) are to beviciously shut out. On such a basis this war is a war to the death. Neither Germany, France, Britain, Italy, nor Russia can liveprosperously if its trade and enterprise is shut out from thiscardinally important area. There is, therefore, no alternative, if weare to have a satisfactory permanent pacification of the world, butlocal self-development in these regions under honestly conceivedinternational control of police and transit and trade. Let it be grantedthat that will be a difficult control to organize. None the less it hasto be attempted. It has to be attempted because _there is no other wayof peace_. But once that conception has been clearly formulated, asecond great motive why Germany should continue fighting will havegone. 

The third great issue about which there is nothing but fog anduncertainty is the so-called "War After the War, " the idea of apermanent economic alliance to prevent the economic recuperation ofGermany. Upon that idea German imperialism, in its frantic effort tokeep its tormented people fighting, naturally puts the utmost stress. The threat of War after the War robs the reasonable German of his lastinducement to turn on his Government and insist upon peace. Shut outfrom all trade, unable to buy food, deprived of raw material, peacewould be as bad for Germany as war. He will argue naturally enough andreasonably enough that he may as well die fighting as starve. This is afar more vital issue to him than the Belgian issue or Poland orAlsace-Lorraine. Our statesmen waste their breath and slight ourintelligence when these foreground questions are thrust in front of thereally fundamental matters. But as the mass of sensible people in everycountry concerned, in Germany just as much as in France or GreatBritain, know perfectly well, unimpeded trade is good for every oneexcept a few rich adventurers, and restricted trade destroys limitlesswealth and welfare for mankind to make a few private fortunes or securean advantage for some imperialist clique. We want an end to thiseconomic strategy, we want an end to this plotting of Governmentalcliques against the general welfare. In such offences Germany has beenthe chief of sinners, but which among the belligerent nations can throwthe first stone? Here again the way to the world's peace, the only wayto enduring peace, lies through internationalism, through aninternational survey of commercial treaties, through an internationalcontrol of inter-State shipping and transport rates. Unless the Alliedstatesmen fail to understand the implications of their own generalprofessions they mean that. But why do they not say it plainly? Why dothey not shout it so compactly and loudly that all Germany will hear andunderstand? Why do they justify imperialism to Germany? Why do theymaintain a threatening ambiguity towards Germany on all these matters?

By doing so they leave Germany no choice but a war of desperation. Theyunderline and endorse the claim of German imperialism that this is a warfor bare existence. They unify the German people. They prolong the war. 

§ 3

Some weeks later I was able, at the invitation of the editor, to carrythe controversy against imperialism into the _Daily Mail_, which hashitherto counted as a strictly imperialist paper. The article thatfollows was published in the _Daily Mail_ under the heading, "Are weSticking to the Point? A Discussion of War Aims. "

Has this War-Aims controversy really got down to essentials? Is thepurpose of this world conflict from first to last too complicated forbrevity, or can we boil it down into a statement compact enough for anewspaper article?

And if we can, why is there all this voluminous, uneasy, unquenchabledisputation about War Aims?

As to the first question, I would say that the gist of the disputebetween the Central Powers and the world can be written easily withoutundue cramping in an ordinary handwriting upon a postcard. It is thesecond question that needs answering. And the reason why the secondquestion has to be asked and answered is this, that several of theAllies, and particularly we British, are not being perfectly plain andsimple-minded in our answer to the first, that there is a division amongus and in our minds, and that our division is making us ambiguous in ourbehaviour, that it is weakening and dividing our action andstrengthening and consolidating the enemy, and that unless we can dragthis slurred-over division of aim and spirit into the light of day and_settle it now_, we are likely to remain double-minded to the end of thewar, to split our strength while the war continues and to come out ofthe settlement at the end with nothing nearly worth the strain andsacrifice it has cost us. 

And first, let us deal with that postcard and say what is the essentialaim of the war, the aim to which all other aims are subsidiary. It is, we have heard repeated again and again by every statesman of importancein every Allied country, to defeat and destroy military imperialism, tomake the world safe for ever against any such deliberate aggression asGermany prepared for forty years and brought to a climax when shecrossed the Belgian frontier in 1914. We want to make anything of thatkind on the part of Germany or of any other Power henceforth impossiblein this world. That is our great aim. Whatever other objects may besought in this war no responsible statesman dare claim them as anythingbut subsidiary to that; one can say, in fact, this is our sole aim, ourother aims being but parts of it. Better that millions should die now, we declare, than that hundreds of millions still unborn should go onliving, generation after generation, under the black tyranny of thisimperialist threat. 

There is our common agreement. So far, at any rate, we are united. Thequestion I would put to the reader is this: Are we all logically, sincerely, and fully carrying out the plain implications of this WarAim? Or are we to any extent muddling about with it in such a way as toconfuse and disorganize our Allies, weaken our internal will, andstrengthen the enemy?

Now the plain meaning of this supreme declared War Aim is that we areasking Germany to alter her ways. We are asking Germany to become adifferent Germany. Either Germany has to be utterly smashed up anddestroyed or else Germany has to cease to be an aggressive militaryimperialism. The former alternative is dismissed by most responsiblestatesmen. They declare that they do not wish to destroy the Germanpeople or the German nationality or the civilized life of Germany. Iwill not enlarge here upon the tedium and difficulties such anundertaking would present. I will dismiss it as being not onlyimpossible, but also as an insanely wicked project. The secondalternative, therefore, remains as our War Aim. I do not see how thesloppiest reasoner can evade that. As we do not want to kill Germany wemust want to change Germany. If we do not want to wipe Germany off theface of the earth, then we want Germany to become the prospective andtrust-worthy friend of her fellow nations. And if words have any meaningat all, that is saying that we are fighting to bring about a Revolutionin Germany. We want Germany to become a democratically controlled State, such as is the United States to-day, with open methods and pacificintentions, instead of remaining a clenched fist. If we can bring thatabout we have achieved our War Aim; if we cannot, then this struggle hasbeen for us only such loss and failure as humanity has never knownbefore. 

But do we, as a nation, stick closely to this clear and necessary, thisonly possible, meaning of our declared War Aim? That great, clear-mindedleader among the Allies, that Englishman who more than any other singleman speaks for the whole English-speaking and Western-thinkingcommunity, President Wilson, has said definitely that this is hismeaning. America, with him as her spokesman, is under no delusion; sheis fighting consciously for a German Revolution as the essential WarAim. We in Europe do not seem to be so lucid. I think myself we havebeen, and are still, fatally and disastrously not lucid. It is hightime, and over, that we cleared our minds and got down to the essentialsof the war. We have muddled about in blood and dirt and secondary issueslong enough. 

We in Britain are not clear-minded, I would point out, because we aredouble-minded. No good end is served by trying to ignore in the fanciedinterests of "unity" a division of spirit and intention that trips usup at every step. We are, we declare, fighting for a complete change ininternational methods, and we are bound to stick to the logicalconsequences of that. We have placed ourselves on the side of democraticrevolution against autocratic monarchy, and we cannot afford to go onshilly-shallying with that choice. We cannot in these days of black orwhite play the part of lukewarm friends to freedom. I will not remindthe reader here of the horrible vacillations and inconsistencies ofpolicy in Greece that have prolonged the war and cost us wealth andlives beyond measure, but President Wilson himself has reminded uspungently enough and sufficiently enough of the follies anddisingenuousness of our early treatment of the Russian Revolution. WhatI want to point out here is the supreme importance of a clear lead inthis matter _now_ in order that we should state our War Aimseffectively. 

In every war there must be two sets of War Aims kept in mind; we oughtto know what we mean to do in the event of victory so complete that wecan dictate what terms we choose, and we ought to know what, in theevent of a not altogether conclusive tussle, are the minimum terms thatwe should consider justified us in a discontinuance of the tussle. Now, unless our leading statesmen are humbugs and unless we are prepared toquarrel with America in the interests of the monarchist institutions ofEurope, we should, in the event of an overwhelming victory, destroy boththe Hohenzollern and Hapsburg Imperialisms, and that means, if it meansanything at all and is not mere lying rhetoric, that we should insistupon Germany becoming free and democratic, that is to say, in effect ifnot in form republican, and upon a series of national republics, Polish, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and the like, in Eastern Europe, grouped together if possible into congenial groups--crowned republics itmight be in some cases, in the case of the Serb for example, but in nocase too much crowned--that we should join with this renascent Germanyand with these thus liberalized Powers and with our Allies and with theneutrals in one great League of Free Nations, trading freely with oneanother, guaranteeing each other freedom, and maintaining a world-widepeace and disarmament and a new reign of law for mankind. 

If that is not what we are out for, then I do not understand what we areout for; there is dishonesty and trickery and diplomacy and foolery inthe struggle, and I am no longer whole-hearted for such a half-heartedwar. If after a complete victory we are to bolster up the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs, and their relations, set up a constellation of more cheatinglittle subordinate kings, and reinstate that system of diplomacies andsecret treaties and secret understandings, that endless drama ofinternational threatening and plotting, that never-ending arming, thathas led us after a hundred years of waste and muddle to the supremetragedy of this war, then the world is not good enough for me and Ishall be glad to close my eyes upon it. I am not alone in thesesentiments. I believe that in writing thus I am writing the opinion ofthe great mass of reasonable British, French, Italian, Russian, andAmerican men. I believe, too, that this is the desire also of greatnumbers of Germans, and that they would, if they could believe us, gladly set aside their present rulers to achieve this plain common goodfor mankind. 

But, the reader will say, what evidence is there of any republicanfeeling in Germany? That is always the objection made to any reasonablediscussion of the war--and as most of us are denied access to Germanpapers, it is difficult to produce quotations; and even when one does, there are plenty of fools to suggest and believe that the entire GermanPress is an elaborate camouflage. Yet in the German Press there is farmore criticism of militant imperialism than those who have no access toit can imagine. There is far franker criticism of militarism in Germanythan there is of reactionary Toryism in this country, and it is morefree to speak its mind. 

That, however, is a question by the way. It is not the main thing that Ihave to say here. What I have to say here is that in Great Britain--Iwill not discuss the affairs of any of our Allies--there are groups andclasses of people, not numerous, not representative, but placed in highand influential positions and capable of free and public utterance, whoare secretly and bitterly hostile to this great War Aim, which inspiresall the Allied peoples. These people are permitted to deny--our peculiarcensorship does not hamper them--loudly and publicly that we arefighting for democracy and world freedom; "Tosh, " they say to our deadin the trenches, "you died for a mistake"; they jeer at this idea of aLeague of Nations making an end to war, an idea that has inspiredcountless brave lads to face death and such pains and hardships as outdoeven death itself; they perplex and irritate our Allies by propoundingschemes for some precious economic league of the British Empire--that isto treat all "foreigners" with a common base selfishness and stupidhatred--and they intrigue with the most reactionary forces in Russia. 

These British reactionaries openly, and with perfect impunity, representour war as a thing as mean and shameful as Germany's attack on Belgium, and they do it because generosity and justice in the world is asterrible to them as dawn is to the creatures of the night. Our Toriesblundered into this great war, not seeing whither it would take them. Inparticular it is manifest now by a hundred signs that they dread thefall of monarchy in Germany and Austria. Far rather would they make themost abject surrenders to the Kaiser than deal with a renascentRepublican Germany. The recent letter of Lord Lansdowne, urging a peacewith German imperialism, was but a feeler from the pacifist side of thismost un-English, and unhappily most influential, section of our publiclife. Lord Lansdowne's letter was the letter of a Peer who fearsrevolution more than national dishonour. 

But it is the truculent wing of this same anti-democratic movement thatis far more active. While our sons suffer and die for their comforts andconceit, these people scheme to prevent any communication between theRepublican and Socialist classes in Germany and the Allied population. At any cost this class of pampered and privileged traitors intend tohave peace while the Kaiser is still on his throne. If not they face anew world--in which their part will be small indeed. And with the utmostingenuity they maintain a dangerous vagueness about the Allied peaceterms, _with the sole object of preventing a revolutionary movement inGermany_. 

Let me put it to the reader exactly why our failure to say plainly andexactly and conclusively what we mean to do about a score of points, andparticularly about German economic life after the war, paralyses thepenitents and friends and helpers that we could now find in Germany. Letme ask the reader to suppose himself a German in Germany at the presenttime. Of course if he was, he is sure that he would hate the Kaiser asthe source of this atrocious war, he would be bitterly ashamed of theBelgian iniquity, of the submarine murders, and a score of such stainsupon his national honour; and he would want to alter his national systemand make peace. Hundreds of thousands of Germans are in that mood now. But as most of us have had to learn, a man may be bitterly ashamed ofthis or that incident in his country's history--what Englishman, forinstance, can be proud of Glencoe?--he may disbelieve in half itsinstitutions and still love his country far too much to suffer thethought of its destruction. I prefer to see my country right, but if itcomes to the pinch and my country sins I will fight to save her from thedestruction her sins may have brought upon her. That is the natural wayof a man. 

But suppose a German wished to try to start a revolutionary movement inGermany at the present time, have we given him any reason at all forsupposing that a Germany liberated and democratized, but, of course, divided and weakened as she would be bound to be in the process, wouldget better terms from the Allies than a Germany still facing them, militant, imperialist, and wicked? He would have no reason for believinganything of the sort. If we Allies are honest, then if a revolutionstarted in Germany to-day we should if anything lower the price of peaceto Germany. But these people who pretend to lead us will state nothingof the sort. For them a revolution in Germany would be the signal forputting up the price of peace. At any risk they are resolved that thatGerman revolution shall not happen. Your sane, good German, let meassert, is up against that as hard as if he was a wicked one. And so, poor devil, he has to put his revolutionary ideas away, they arehopeless ideas for him because of the power of the British reactionary, they are hopeless because of the line we as a nation take in thismatter, and he has to go on fighting for his masters. 

A plain statement of our war aims that did no more than set out honestlyand convincingly the terms the Allies would make with a democraticrepublican Germany--republican I say, because where a scrap ofHohenzollern is left to-day there will be a fresh militarismto-morrow--would absolutely revolutionize the internal psychology ofGermany. We should no longer face a solid people. We should havereplaced the false issue of Germany and Britain fighting for thehegemony of Europe, the lie upon which the German Government has alwaystraded, and in which our extreme Tory Press has always supported theGerman Government, by the true issue, which is freedom versusimperialism, the League of Nations versus that net of diplomatic rogueryand of aristocratic, plutocratic, and autocratic greed and conceit whichdragged us all into this vast welter of bloodshed and loss. 

VI

THE WAR AIMS OF THE WESTERN ALLIES

Here, quite compactly, is the plain statement of the essential cause andprocess of the war to which I would like to see the Allied ForeignOffices subscribe, and which I would like to have placed plainly beforethe German mind. It embodies much that has been learnt and thought outsince this war began, and I think it is much truer and more fundamentalthan that mere raging against German "militarism, " upon which ourpoliticians and press still so largely subsist. 

The enormous development of war methods and war material within the lastfifty years has made war so horrible and destructive that it isimpossible to contemplate a future for mankind from which it has notbeen eliminated; the increased facilities of railway, steamship, automobile travel and air navigation have brought mankind so closetogether that ordinary human life is no longer safe anywhere in theboundaries of the little states in which it was once secure. In somefashion it is now necessary to achieve sufficient human unity toestablish a world peace and save the future of mankind. 

In one or other of two ways only is that unification possible. Eithermen may set up a common league to keep the peace of the earth, or onestate must ultimately become so great and powerful as to repeat for allthe world what Rome did for Europe two thousand years ago. Either wemust have human unity by a league of existing states or by an ImperialConquest. The former is now the declared Aim of our country and itsAllies; the latter is manifestly the ambition of the present rulers ofGermany. Whatever the complications may have been in the earlier stagesof the war, due to treaties that are now dead letters and agreementsthat are extinct, the essential issue now before every man in the worldis this: Is the unity of mankind to be the unity of a common freedom, inwhich every race and nationality may participate with completeself-respect, playing its part, according to its character, in one greatworld community, or is it to be reached--and it can only be so reachedthrough many generations of bloodshed and struggle still, even if it canbe ever reached in this way at all--through conquest and a Germanhegemony?

While the rulers of Germany to-day are more openly aggressive andimperialist than they were in August, 1914, the Allies arrayed againstthem have made great progress in clearing up and realizing the instinctsand ideals which brought them originally into the struggle. The Germangovernment offers the world to-day a warring future in which Germanyalone is to be secure and powerful and proud. _Mankind will not endurethat_. The Allies offer the world more and more definitely the scheme ofan organized League of Free Nations, a rule of law and justice about theearth. To fight for that and for no other conceivable end, the UnitedStates of America, with the full sympathy and co-operation of everystate in the western hemisphere, has entered the war. The BritishEmpire, in the midst of the stress of the great war, has set up inDublin a Convention of Irishmen of all opinions with the fullest powersof deciding upon the future of their country. If Ireland were notdivided against herself she could be free and equal with Englandto-morrow. It is the open intention of Great Britain to developrepresentative government, where it has not hitherto existed, in Indiaand Egypt, to go on steadfastly increasing the share of the natives ofthese countries in the government of their own lands, until they toobecome free and equal members of the world league. Neither France norItaly nor Britain nor America has ever tampered with the shipping ofother countries except in time of war, and the trade of the BritishEmpire has been impartially open to all the world. The extra-national"possessions, " the so-called "subject nations" in the Empires ofBritain, France, Italy, and Japan, are, in fact, possessions held intrust against the day when the League of Free Nations will inherit formankind. 

Is it to be union by conquest or is it to be union by league? For anysort of man except the German the question is, Will you be a freecitizen or will you be an underling to the German imperialism? For theGerman now the question is a far graver and more tragic one. For him itis this: "You belong to a people not now increasing very rapidly, anumerous people, but not so numerous as some of the great peoples of theworld, a people very highly trained, very well drilled and well armed, perhaps as well trained and drilled and equipped as ever it will be. Thecollapse of Russian imperialism has made you safe if now you can getpeace, and you _can_ get a peace now that will neither destroy you norhumiliate you nor open up the prospect of fresh wars. The Allies offeryou such a peace. To accept it, we must warn you plainly, means refusingto go on with the manifest intentions of your present rulers, which areto launch you and your children and your children's children upon acareer of struggle for war predominance, which may no doubt inflictuntold deprivations and miseries upon the rest of mankind, but whose endin the long run, for Germany and things German, can be only Judgment andDeath. "

In such terms as these the Oceanic Allies could now state their war-willand carry the world straightway into a new phase of human history. Theycould but they do not. For alas! not one of them is free from theentanglements of past things; when we look for the wisdom of statesmenwe find the cunning of politicians; when open speech and plain reasonmight save the world, courts, bureaucrats, financiers and profiteersconspire. 

VII

THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY

From the very outset of this war it was manifest to the clear-headedobserver that only the complete victory of German imperialism could savethe dynastic system in Europe from the fate that it had challenged. Thatcurious system had been the natural and unplanned development of thepolitical complications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Twosystems of monarchies, the Bourbon system and the German, then ruledEurope between them. With the latter was associated the tradition of theEuropean unity under the Roman empire; all the Germanic monarchs had anitch to be called Caesar. The Kaiser of the Austro-Hungarian empire andthe Czar had, so to speak, the prior claim to the title. The Prussianking set up as a Caesar in 1871; Queen Victoria became the Caesar ofIndia (Kaisir-i-Hind) under the auspices of Lord Beaconsfield, and lastand least, that most detestable of all Coburgers, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, gave Kaiserism a touch of quaint absurdity by setting up as Czar ofBulgaria. The weakening of the Bourbon system by the French revolutionand the Napoleonic adventure cleared the way for the complete ascendancyof the Germanic monarchies in spite of the breaking away of the UnitedStates from that system. 

After 1871, a constellation of quasi-divine Teutonic monarchs, of whichthe German Emperor, the German Queen Victoria, the German Czar, were thegreatest stars, formed a caste apart, intermarried only amongthemselves, dominated the world and was regarded with a mystical awe bythe ignorant and foolish in most European countries. The marriages, thefunerals, the coronations, the obstetrics of this amazing breed of idolswere matters of almost universal worship. The Czar and Queen Victoriaprofessed also to be the heads of religion upon earth. Thecourt-centered diplomacies of the more firmly rooted monarchies steeredall the great liberating movements of the nineteenth century intomonarchical channels. Italy was made a monarchy; Greece, the motherlandof republics, was handed over to a needy scion of the Danish royalfamily; the sturdy peasants of Bulgaria suffered from a kindredimposition. Even Norway was saddled with as much of a king as it wouldstand, as a condition of its independence. At the dawn of the twentiethcentury republican freedom seemed a remote dream beyond the confines ofSwitzerland and France--and it had no very secure air in France. Reactionary scheming has been an intermittent fever in the Frenchrepublic for six and forty years. The French foreign office is stillundemocratic in tradition and temper. But for the restless disloyalty ofthe Hohenzollerns this German kingly caste might be dominating the worldto this day. 

Of course the stability of this Teutonic dynastic system inEurope--which will presently seem to the student of history so curious ahalting-place upon the way to human unity--rested very largely upon themaintenance of peace. It was the failure to understand this on the partof the German and Bulgarian rulers in particular that has now broughtall monarchy to the question. The implicit theory that supported theintermarrying German royal families in Europe was that theirinter-relationship and their aloofness from their subjects was amitigation of national and racial animosities. In the days when QueenVictoria was the grandmother of Europe this was a plausible argument. King, Czar and Emperor, or Emperor and Emperor would meet, and it wasunderstood that these meetings were the lubrication of European affairs. The monarchs married largely, conspicuously, and very expensively forour good. Royal funerals, marriages, christenings, coronations, andjubilees interrupted traffic and stimulated trade everywhere. Theyseemed to give a _raison d'être_ for mankind. It is the Emperor Williamand the Czar Ferdinand who have betrayed not only humanity but their ownstrange caste by shattering all these pleasant illusions. The wisdom ofKant is justified, and we know now that kings cause wars. It needed theshock of the great war to bring home the wisdom of that old Scotchman ofKönigsberg to the mind of the ordinary man. Moreover in support of thedynastic system was the fact that it did exist as the system inpossession, and all prosperous and intelligent people are chary ofdisturbing existing things. Life is full of vestigial structures, and itis a long way to logical perfection. Let us keep on, they would argue, with what we have. And another idea which, rightly or wrongly, made menpatient with the emperors and kings was an exaggerated idea of theinsecurity of republican institutions. 

You can still hear very old dull men say gravely that "kings are betterthan pronunciamentos"; there was an article upon Greece to this effectquite recently in that uncertain paper _The New Statesman_. Then a kindof illustrative gesture would be made to the South American republics, although the internal disturbances of the South American republics havediminished to very small dimensions in the last three decades andalthough pronunciamentos rarely disturb the traffic in Switzerland, theUnited States, or France. But there can be no doubt that the influenceof the Germanic monarchy up to the death of Queen Victoria upon Britishthought was in the direction of estrangement from the two great modernrepublics and in the direction of assistance and propitiation toGermany. We surrendered Heligoland, we made great concessions to Germancolonial ambitions, we allowed ourselves to be jockeyed into a phase ofdangerous hostility to France. A practice of sneering at things Americanhas died only very recently out of English journalism and literature, asany one who cares to consult the bound magazines of the 'seventies and'eighties may soon see for himself. It is well too in these days not toforget Colonel Marchand, if only to remember that such a clash mustnever recur. But in justice to our monarchy we must remember that afterthe death of Queen Victoria, the spirit, if not the forms, of Britishkingship was greatly modified by the exceptional character and abilityof King Edward VII. He was curiously anti-German in spirit; he hadessentially democratic instincts; in a few precious years he restoredgood will between France and Great Britain. It is no slight upon hissuccessor to doubt whether any one could have handled the presentopportunities and risks of monarchy in Great Britain as Edward couldhave handled them. 

Because no doubt if monarchy is to survive in the British Empire it mustspeedily undergo the profoundest modification. The old state of affairscannot continue. The European dynastic system, based upon theintermarriage of a group of mainly German royal families, is deadto-day; it is freshly dead, but it is as dead as the rule of the Incas. It is idle to close our eyes to this fact. The revolution in Russia, thesetting up of a republic in China, demonstrating the ripeness of theEast for free institutions, the entry of the American republics intoworld politics--these things slam the door on any idea of working backto the old nineteenth-century system. People calls to people. "No peacewith the Hohenzollerns" is a cry that carries with it the finalrepudiation of emperors and kings. The man in the street will assure youhe wants no diplomatic peace. Beyond the unstable shapes of the presentthe political forms of the future rise now so clearly that they are thecommon talk of men. Kant's lucid thought told us long ago that the peaceof the world demanded a world union of republics. That is a commonplaceremark now in every civilized community. 

The stars in their courses, the logic of circumstances, the everydayneeds and everyday intelligence of men, all these things marchirresistibly towards a permanent world peace based on democraticrepublicanism. The question of the future of monarchy is not whether itwill be able to resist and overcome that trend; it has as little chanceof doing that as the Lama of Thibet has of becoming Emperor of theEarth. It is whether it will resist openly, become the centre and symbolof a reactionary resistance, and have to be abolished and swept awayaltogether everywhere, as the Romanoffs have already been swept away inRussia, or whether it will be able in this country and that to adaptitself to the necessities of the great age that dawns upon mankind, totake a generous and helpful attitude towards its own modification, andso survive, for a time at any rate, in that larger air. 

It is the fashion for the apologists of monarchy in the British Empireto speak of the British system as a crowned republic. That is anattractive phrase to people of republican sentiments. It is quiteconceivable that the British Empire may be able to make that phrase areality and that the royal line may continue, a line of hereditarypresidents, with some of the ancient trappings and something of thepicturesque prestige that, as the oldest monarchy in Europe, it hasto-day. Two kings in Europe have already gone far towards realizingthis conception of a life president; both the King of Italy and the Kingof Norway live as simply as if they were in the White House and are farmore accessible. Along that line the British monarchy must go if it isnot to go altogether. Will it go along those lines?

There are many reasons for hoping that it will do so. The _Times_ hasstyled the crown the "golden link" of the empire. Australians andCanadians, it was argued, had little love for the motherland but thegreatest devotion to the sovereign, and still truer was this of Indians, Egyptians, and the like. It might be easy to press this theory ofdevotion too far, but there can be little doubt that the British Crowndoes at present stand as a symbol of unity over diversity such as noother crown, unless it be that of Austria-Hungary, can be said to do. The British crown is not like other crowns; it may conceivably take aline of its own and emerge--possibly a little more like a hat and alittle less like a crown--from trials that may destroy every othermonarchial system in the world. 

Now many things are going on behind the scenes, many little indicationspeep out upon the speculative watcher and vanish again; but there isvery little that is definite to go upon at the present time todetermine how far the monarchy will rise to the needs of this greatoccasion. Certain acts and changes, the initiative to which would comemost gracefully from royalty itself, could be done at this present time. They may be done quite soon. Upon the doing of them wait great masses ofpublic opinion. The first of these things is for the British monarchy tosever itself definitely from the German dynastic system, with which itis so fatally entangled by marriage and descent, and to make itsintention of becoming henceforth more and more British in blood as wellas spirit, unmistakably plain. This idea has been put forth quiteprominently in the _Times_. The king has been asked to give hiscountenance to the sweeping away of all those restrictions first set upby George the Third, upon the marriage of the Royal Princes withBritish, French and American subjects. The British Empire is very nearthe limit of its endurance of a kingly caste of Germans. The choice ofBritish royalty between its peoples and its cousins cannot beindefinitely delayed. Were it made now publicly and boldly, there can beno doubt that the decision would mean a renascence of monarchy, aconsiderable outbreak of royalist enthusiasm in the Empire. There aretimes when a king or queen must need be dramatic and must a littleanticipate occasions. It is not seemly to make concessions perforce;kings may not make obviously unwilling surrenders; it is the indecisivekings who lose their crowns. 

No doubt the Anglicization of the royal family by national marriageswould gradually merge that family into the general body of the Britishpeerage. Its consequent loss of distinction might be accompanied by anassociated fading out of function, until the King became at last hardlymore functional than was the late Duke of Norfolk as premier peer. Possibly that is the most desirable course from many points of view. 

It must be admitted that the abandonment of marriages within the royalcaste and a bold attempt to introduce a strain of British blood in theroyal family does not in itself fulfil all that is needed if the Britishking is indeed to become the crowned president of his people and thenominal and accepted leader of the movement towards republicaninstitutions. A thing that is productive of an enormous amount ofrepublican talk in Great Britain is the suspicion--I believe anill-founded suspicion--that there are influences at work at courtantagonistic to republican institutions in friendly states and thatthere is a disposition even to sacrifice the interests of the liberalallies to dynastic sympathies. These things are not to be believed, butit would be a feat of vast impressiveness if there were something likea royal and public repudiation of the weaknesses of cousinship. Thebehaviour of the Allies towards that great Balkan statesman Venizelos, the sacrificing of the friendly Greek republicans in favour of themanifestly treacherous King of Greece, has produced the deepest shameand disgust in many quarters that are altogether friendly, that are evenwarmly "loyal" to the British monarchy. 

And in a phase of tottering thrones it is very undesirable that theBritish habit of asylum should be abused. We have already in England thedethroned monarch of a friendly republic; he is no doubt duly lookedafter. In the future there may be a shaking of the autumnal boughs and ashower of emperors and kings. We do not want Great Britain to become ahotbed of reactionary plotting and the starting-point of restorationraids into the territories of emancipated peoples. This is particularlydesirable if presently, after the Kaiser's death--which by all thestatistics of Hohenzollern mortality cannot be delayed now for manyyears--the present Crown Prince goes a-wandering. We do not want anyGerman ex-monarchs; Sweden is always open to them and friendly, and toSweden they ought to go; and particularly do British people dread anirruption of Hohenzollerns or Coburgers. Almost as undesirable would bethe arrival of the Czar and Czarina. It is supremely important that nowind of suspicion should blow between us and the freedom of Russia. After the war even more than during the war will the enemy be anxious tosow discord between the great Russian-speaking and English-speakingdemocracies. Quite apart from the scandal of their inelegantdomesticities, the establishment of the Czar and Czarina in England withfrequent and easy access to our royal family may be extraordinarilyunfortunate for the British monarchy. I will confess a certain sympathyfor the Czar myself. He is not an evil figure, he is not a strongfigure, but he has that sort of weakness, that failure in decision, which trails revolution in its wake. He has ended one dynasty already. The British royal family owes it to itself, that he bring not theinfection of his misfortunes to Windsor. 

The security of the British monarchy lies in such a courageous severanceof its destinies from the Teutonic dynastic system. Will it make thatseverance? There I share an almost universal ignorance. The loyalty ofthe British is not to what kings are too prone to call "my person, " notto a chosen and admired family, but to a renascent mankind. We havefought in this war for Belgium, for France, for general freedom, forcivilization and the whole future of mankind, far more than forourselves. We have not fought for a king. We are discovering in thatspirit of human unity that lies below the idea of a League of FreeNations the real invisible king of our heart and race. But we will verygladly go on with our task under a nominal king unless he hampers us inthe task that grows ever more plainly before us. ... That, I think, is afair statement of British public opinion on this question. But every daywhen I am in London I walk past Buckingham Palace to lunch at my club, and I look at that not very expressive façade and wonder--and we allwonder--what thoughts are going on behind it and what acts are beingconceived there. Out of it there might yet come some gesture ofacceptance magnificent enough to set beside President Wilson'smagnificent declaration of war. ... 

These are things in the scales of fate. I will not pretend to be able toguess even which way the scales will swing. 

VIII

THE PLAIN NECESSITY FOR A LEAGUE

Great as the sacrifices of prejudice and preconception which anyeffective realization of this idea of a League of Free Nations willdemand, difficult as the necessary delegations of sovereignty must be, none the less are such sacrifices and difficulties unavoidable. Peoplein France and Italy and Great Britain and Germany alike have to subduetheir minds to the realization that some such League is now a necessityfor them if their peace and national life are to continue. There is noprospect before them but either some such League or else greathumiliation and disastrous warfare driving them down towards socialdissolution; and for the United States it is only a question of a littlelonger time before the same alternatives have to be faced. 

Whether this war ends in the complete defeat of Germany and Germanimperialism, or in a revolutionary modernization of Germany, or in apractical triumph for the Hohenzollerns, are considerations that affectthe nature and scope of the League, but do not affect its essentialnecessity. In the first two cases the League of Free Nations will be aworld league including Germany as a principal partner, in the lattercase the League of Free Nations will be a defensive league standingsteadfast against the threat of a world imperialism, and watching andrestraining with one common will the homicidal maniac in its midst. Butin all these cases there can be no great alleviation of the evils thatnow blacken and threaten to ruin human life altogether, unless all thecivilized and peace-seeking peoples of the world are pledged and lockedtogether under a common law and a common world policy. There must ratherbe an intensification of these evils. There must be wars more evil thanthis war continuing this war, and more destructive of civilized life. There can be no peace and hope for our race but an organized peace andhope, armed against disturbance as a state is armed against mad, ferocious, and criminal men. 

Now, there are two chief arguments, running one into the other, for thenecessity of merging our existing sovereignties into a greater and, ifpossible, a world-wide league. The first is the present geographicalimpossibility of nearly all the existing European states and empires;and the second is the steadily increasing disproportion between thetortures and destructions inflicted by modern warfare and any possibleadvantages that may arise from it. Underlying both arguments is the factthat modern developments of mechanical science have brought the nationsof Europe together into too close a proximity. This present war, morethan anything else, is a violent struggle between old political ideasand new antagonistic conditions. 

It is the unhappy usage of our schools and universities to study thehistory of mankind only during periods of mechanical unprogressiveness. The historical ideas of Europe range between the time when the Greekswere going about the world on foot or horseback or in galleys or sailingships to the days when Napoleon, Wellington, and Nelson were going aboutat very much the same pace in much the same vehicles and vessels. At theadvent of steam and electricity the muse of history holds her nose andshuts her eyes. Science will study and get the better of a moderndisease, as, for example, sleeping sickness, in spite of the fact thatit has no classical standing; but our history schools would be shockedat the bare idea of studying the effect of modern means of communicationupon administrative areas, large or small. This defect in our historicaltraining has made our minds politically sluggish. We fail to adaptreadily enough. In small things and great alike we are trying to run theworld in areas marked out in or before the eighteenth century, regardless of the fact that a man or an army or an aeroplane can get ina few minutes or a few hours to points that it would have taken days orweeks to reach under the old foot-and-horse conditions. That mattersnothing to the learned men who instruct our statesmen and politicians. It matters everything from the point of view of social and economic andpolitical life. And the grave fact to consider is that all the greatstates of Europe, except for the unification of Italy and Germany, arestill much of the size and in much the same boundaries that made themstrong and safe in the eighteenth century, that is to say, in theclosing years of the foot-horse period. The British empire grew and wasorganized under those conditions, and had to modify itself only a littleto meet the needs of steam shipping. All over the world are its linkedpossessions and its ports and coaling stations and fastnesses on thetrade routes. And British people still look at the red-splashed map ofthe world with the profoundest self-satisfaction, blind to the swiftchanges that are making that scattered empire--if it is to remain anisolated system--almost the most dangerous conceivable. 

Let me ask the British reader who is disposed to sneer at the League ofNations and say he is very well content with the empire, thank you, toget his atlas and consider one or two propositions. And, first, let himthink of aviation. I can assure him, because upon this matter I havesome special knowledge, that long-distance air travel for men, forletters and light goods and for bombs, is continually becoming morepracticable. But the air routes that air transport will follow must goover a certain amount of land, for this reason that every few hundredmiles at the longest the machine must come down for petrol. A flyingmachine with a safe non-stop range of 1500 miles is still a long wayoff. It may indeed be permanently impracticable because there seems tobe an upward limit to the size of an aeroplane engine. And now will thereader take the map of the world and study the air routes from London tothe rest of the empire? He will find them perplexing--if he wants themto be "All-Red. " Happily this is not a British difficulty only. Will henext study the air routes from Paris to the rest of the Frenchpossessions? And, finally, will he study the air routes out of Germanyto anywhere? The Germans are as badly off as any people. But we are allbadly off. So far as world air transit goes any country can, if itchooses, choke any adjacent country. Directly any trade difficultybreaks out, any country can begin a vexatious campaign against itsneighbour's air traffic. It can oblige it to alight at the frontier, tofollow prescribed routes, to land at specified places on those routesand undergo examinations that will waste precious hours. But so far as Ican see, no European statesman, German or Allied, have begun to givetheir attention to this amazing difficulty. Without a great pooling ofair control, either a world-wide pooling or a pooling at least of theAtlantic-Mediterranean Allies in one Air League, the splendid peacepossibilities of air transport--and they are indeed splendid--mustremain very largely a forbidden possibility to mankind. 

And as a second illustration of the way in which changing conditions arealtering political questions, let the reader take his atlas and considerthe case of that impregnable fastness, that great naval station, thatKey to the Mediterranean, Gibraltar. British boys are brought up onGibraltar and the Gibraltar idea. To the British imagination Gibraltaris almost as sacred a national symbol as the lions in Trafalgar Square. Now, in his atlas the reader will almost certainly find an inset map ofthis valuable possession, coloured bright red. The inset map will haveattached to it a small scale of miles. From that he will be able tosatisfy himself that there is not an inch of the rock anywhere that isnot within five miles or less of Spanish land, and that there is rathermore than a semicircle of hills round the rock within a range of sevenor eight miles. That is much less than the range of a sixteen-inch gun. In other words, the Spaniards are in a position to knock Gibraltar tobits whenever they want to do so, or to smash and sink any ships in itsharbour. They can hit it on every side. Consider, moreover, that thereare long sweeps of coast north, south, and west of the Rock, from whichtorpedoes could be discharged at any ship that approached. Inquirefurther where on the Rock an aeroplane can land. And having ascertainedthese things, ask yourself what is the present value of Gibraltar?

I will not multiply disagreeable instances of this sort, though it wouldbe easy enough to do so in the case both of France and Italy as well asof Great Britain. I give them as illustrations of the way in whicheverywhere old securities and old arrangements must be upset by thegreater range of modern things. Let us get on to more generalconditions. There is not a capital city in Europe that twenty years fromnow will not be liable to a bombing raid done by hundreds or eventhousands of big aeroplanes, upon or even before a declaration of war, and there is not a line of sea communication that will not be aspromptly interrupted by the hostile submarine. I point these things outhere only to carry home the fact that the ideas of sovereign isolationand detachment that were perfectly valid in 1900, the self-sufficientempire, Imperial Zollverein and all that stuff, and damn the foreigner!are now, because of the enormous changes in range of action and facilityof locomotion that have been going on, almost as wild--or would be if wewere not so fatally accustomed to them--and quite as dangerous, as theidea of setting up a free and sovereign state in the Isle of Dogs. Allthe European empires are becoming vulnerable at every point. Surely themoral is obvious. The only wise course before the allied European powersnow is to put their national conceit in their pockets and to combine tolock up their foreign policy, their trade interests, and all theirimperial and international interests into a League so big as to be ableto withstand the most sudden and treacherous of blows. And surely theonly completely safe course for them and mankind--hard and nearlyimpossible though it may seem at the present juncture--is for them tolock up into one unity with a democratized Germany and with all theother states of the earth into one peace-maintaining League. 

If the reader will revert again to his atlas he will see very clearlythat a strongly consolidated League of Free Nations, even if itconsisted only of our present allies, would in itself form acombination with so close a system of communication about the world, andso great an economic advantage, that in the long run it could obligeGermany and the rest of the world to come in to its council. Divided theOceanic Allies are, to speak plainly, geographical rags and nakedness;united they are a world. To set about organizing that League now, withits necessary repudiation on the part of Britain, France, and Italy, ofa selfish and, it must be remembered in the light of these things I havebut hinted at here, a _now hopelessly unpracticable imperialism_, would, I am convinced, lead quite rapidly to a great change of heart in Germanyand to a satisfactory peace. But even if I am wrong in that, then allthe stronger is the reason for binding, locking and uniting the alliedpowers together. It is the most dangerous of delusions for each and allof them to suppose that either Britain, France or Italy can ever standalone again and be secure. 

And turning now to the other aspect of these consequences of thedevelopment of material science, it is too often assumed that this waris being as horrible and destructive as war can be. There never was sogreat a delusion. This war has only begun to be horrible. No doubt it ismuch more horrible and destructive than any former war, but even incomparison with the full possibilities of known and existing means ofdestruction it is still a mild war. Perhaps it will never rise to itsfull possibilities. At the present stage there is not a combatant, except perhaps America, which is not now practising a pinching economyof steel and other mechanical material. The Germans are running short offirst-class flying men, and if we and our allies continue to press theair attack, and seek out and train our own vastly greater resources offirst quality young airmen, the Germans may come as near to being"driven out of the air" as is possible. I am a firmer believer than everI was in the possibility of a complete victory over Germany--through andby the air. But the occasional dropping of a big bomb or so in London isnot to be taken as anything but a minimum display of what air war cando. In a little while now our alliance should be in a position tocommence day and night continuous attacks upon the Rhine towns. Nothour-long raids such as London knows, but week-long raids. Then and thenonly shall we be able to gauge the really horrible possibilities of theair war. They are in our hands and not in the hands of the Germans. Inaddition the Germans are at a huge disadvantage in their submarinecampaign. Their submarine campaign is only the feeble shadow of what asubmarine campaign might be. Turning again to the atlas the reader cansee for himself that the German and Austrian submarines are obliged tocome out across very narrow fronts. A fence of mines less than threehundred miles long and two hundred feet deep would, for example, completely bar their exit through the North Sea. The U-boats run thegauntlet of that long narrow sea and pay a heavy toll to it. If only ourAdmiralty would tell the German public what that toll is now, therewould come a time when German seamen would no longer consent to go downin them. Consider, however, what a submarine campaign would be for GreatBritain if instead of struggling through this bottle-neck it wereconducted from the coast of Norway, where these pests might harbour in ahundred fiords. Consider too what this weapon may be in twenty years'time in the hands of a country in the position of the United States. Great Britain, if she is not altogether mad, will cease to be an islandas soon as possible after the war, by piercing the Channel Tunnel--howdifferent our transport problem would be if we had that now!--but suchcountries as Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, directly they areinvolved in the future in a war against any efficient naval power withan unimpeded sea access, will be isolated forthwith. I cannot conceivethat any of the great ocean powers will rest content until such atremendous possibility of blockade as the submarine has created issecurely vested in the hands of a common league beyond any power ofsudden abuse. 

It must always be remembered that this war is a mechanical war conductedby men whose discipline renders them uninventive, who know little ornothing of mechanism, who are for the most part struggling blindly toget things back to the conditions for which they were trained, toNapoleonic conditions, with infantry and cavalry and comparatively lightguns, the so-called "war of manoeuvres. " It is like a man engaged in adesperate duel who keeps on trying to make it a game of cricket. Most ofthese soldiers detest every sort of mechanical device; the tanks, forexample, which, used with imagination, might have given the British andFrench overwhelming victory on the western front, were subordinated tothe usual cavalry "break through" idea. I am not making any particularcomplaint against the British and French generals in saying this. It iswhat must happen to any country which entrusts its welfare to soldiers. A soldier has to be a severely disciplined man, and a severelydisciplined man cannot be a versatile man, and on the whole the Britisharmy has been as receptive to novelties as any. The German generals havedone no better; indeed, they have not done so well as the generals ofthe Allies in this respect. But after the war, if the world does notorganize rapidly for peace, then as resources accumulate a little, themechanical genius will get to work on the possibilities of these ideasthat have merely been sketched out in this war. We shall get big landironclads which will smash towns. We shall get air offensives--let theexperienced London reader think of an air raid going on hour after hour, day after day--that will really burn out and wreck towns, that willdrive people mad by the thousand. We shall get a very complete cessationof sea transit. Even land transit may be enormously hampered by aerialattack. I doubt if any sort of social order will really be able to standthe strain of a fully worked out modern war. We have still, of course, to feel the full shock effects even of this war. Most of the combatantsare going on, as sometimes men who have incurred grave wounds will stillgo on for a time--without feeling them. The educational, biological, social, economic punishment that has already been taken by each of theEuropean countries is, I feel, very much greater than we yet realize. Russia, the heaviest and worst-trained combatant, has indeed shown theeffects and is down and sick, but in three years' time all Europe willknow far better than it does now the full price of this war. And theshock effects of the next war will have much the same relation to theshock effects of this, as the shock of breaking a finger-nail has to theshock of crushing in a body. In Russia to-day we have seen, not indeedsocial revolution, not the replacement of one social order by another, but disintegration. Let not national conceit blind us. Germany, France, Italy, Britain are all slipping about on that same slope down whichRussia has slid. Which goes first, it is hard to guess, or whether weshall all hold out to some kind of Peace. At present the socialdiscipline of France and Britain seems to be at least as good as that ofGermany, and the _morale_ of the Rhineland and Bavaria has probably toundergo very severe testing by systematized and steadily increasing airpunishment as this year goes on. The next war--if a next war comes--willsee all Germany, from end to end, vulnerable to aircraft.... 

Such are the two sets of considerations that will, I think, ultimatelyprevail over every prejudice and every difficulty in the way of theLeague of Free Nations. Existing states have become impossible asabsolutely independent sovereignties. The new conditions bring them soclose together and give them such extravagant powers of mutual injurythat they must either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions insubordination to the common welfare of mankind or else utterly shatterone another. It becomes more and more plainly a choice between theLeague of Free Nations and a famished race of men looting in search ofnon-existent food amidst the smouldering ruins of civilization. In theend I believe that the common sense of mankind will prefer a revision ofits ideas of nationality and imperialism, to the latter alternative. Itmay take obstinate men a few more years yet of blood and horror to learnthis lesson, but for my own part I cherish an obstinate belief in thepotential reasonableness of mankind. 

IX

DEMOCRACY

All the talk, all the aspiration and work that is making now towardsthis conception of a world securely at peace, under the direction of aLeague of Free Nations, has interwoven with it an idea that is oftenrather felt than understood, the idea of Democracy. Not only is justiceto prevail between race and race and nation and nation, but also betweenman and man; there is to be a universal respect for human lifethroughout the earth; the world, in the words of President Wilson, is tobe made "safe for democracy. " I would like to subject that word to acertain scrutiny to see whether the things we are apt to think andassume about it correspond exactly with the feeling of the word. I wouldlike to ask what, under modern conditions, does democracy mean, andwhether we have got it now anywhere in the world in its fulness andcompletion. 

And to begin with I must have a quarrel with the word itself. Theeccentricities of modern education make us dependent for a number ofour primary political terms upon those used by the thinkers of the smallGreek republics of ancient times before those petty states collapsed, through sheer political ineptitude, before the Macedonians. They thoughtin terms of states so small that it was possible to gather all thecitizens together for the purposes of legislation. These states werescarcely more than what we English might call sovereign urban districts. Fast communications were made by runners; even the policeman with abicycle of the modern urban district was beyond the scope of the Greekimagination. There were no railways, telegraphs, telephones, books ornewspapers, there was no need for the state to maintain a system ofeducation, and the affairs of the state were so simple that they couldbe discussed and decided by the human voice and open voting in anassembly of all the citizens. That is what democracy, meant. In Andorra, or perhaps in Canton Uri, such democracy may still be possible; in anyother modern state it cannot exist. The opposite term to it wasoligarchy, in which a small council of men controlled the affairs of thestate. Oligarchy, narrowed down to one man, became monarchy. If youwished to be polite to an oligarchy you called it an aristocracy; if youwished to point out that a monarch was rather by way of beingself-appointed, you called him a Tyrant. An oligarchy with a propertyqualification was a plutocracy. 

Now the modern intelligence, being under a sort of magic slavery to theancient Greeks, has to adapt all these terms to the problems of statesso vast and complex that they have the same relation to the Greek statesthat the anatomy of a man has to the anatomy of a jellyfish. They arenot only greater in extent and denser in population, but they areincreasingly innervated by more and more rapid means of communicationand excitement. In the classical past--except for such special cases asthe feeding of Rome with Egyptian corn--trade was a traffic in luxuriesor slaves, war a small specialized affair of infantry and horsemen insearch of slaves and loot, and empire the exaction of tribute. Themodern state must conduct its enormous businesses through a system ofministries; its vital interests go all round the earth; nothing that anyancient Greek would have recognized as democracy is conceivable in agreat modern state. It is absolutely necessary, if we are to get thingsclear in our minds about what democracy really means in relation tomodern politics, first to make a quite fresh classification in order tofind what items there really are to consider, and then to inquire whichseem to correspond more or less closely in spirit with our ideas aboutancient democracy. 

Now there are two primary classes of idea about government in themodern world depending upon our conception of the political capacity ofthe common man. We may suppose he is a microcosm, with complete ideasand wishes about the state and the world, or we may suppose that heisn't. We may believe that the common man can govern, or we may believethat he can't. We may think further along the first line that he is sowise and good and right that we only have to get out of his way for himto act rightly and for the good of all mankind, or we may doubt it. Andif we doubt that we may still believe that, though perhaps "you can foolall the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, "the common man, expressing himself by a majority vote, still remains thesecure source of human wisdom. But next, while we may deny thisuniversal distribution of political wisdom, we may, if we aresufficiently under the sway of modern ideas about collective psychology, believe that it is necessary to poke up the political indifference andinability of the common man as much as possible, to thrust politicalideas and facts upon him, to incite him to a watchful and criticalattitude towards them, and above all to secure his assent to theproceedings of the able people who are managing public affairs. Orfinally, we may treat him as a thing to be ruled and not consulted. Letme at this stage make out a classificatory diagram of these elementaryideas of government in a modern country. 

CLASS I. It is supposed that the common man _can_ govern:

(1) without further organization (Anarchy);

(2) through a majority vote by delegates. 

CLASS II. It is supposed that the common man _cannot_ govern, and thatgovernment therefore must be through the agency of Able Persons who maybe classified under one of the following sub-heads, either as

(1) persons elected by the common man because he believes them to bepersons able to govern--just as he chooses his doctors as persons ableto secure health, and his electrical engineers as persons able to attendto his tramways, lighting, etc. , etc. ;

(2) persons of a special class, as, for example, persons born andeducated to rule (e. G. _Aristocracy_), or rich business adventurers_(Plutocracy)_ who rule without consulting the common man at all. 

To which two sub-classes we may perhaps add a sort of intermediate stagebetween them, namely:

(3) persons elected by a special class of voter. 

Monarchy may be either a special case of Class II. (1), (2) or (3), inwhich the persons who rule have narrowed down in number to one person, and the duration of monarchy may be either for life or a term of years. These two classes and the five sub-classes cover, I believe, all theelementary political types in our world. 

Now in the constitution of a modern state, because of the conflict andconfusion of ideas, all or most of these five sub-classes may usually befound intertwined. The British constitution, for instance, is acomplicated tangle of arrangements, due to a struggle between the ideasof Class I. (2), Class II. (3), tending to become Class II. (1) and ClassII. (2) in both its aristocratic and monarchist forms. The Americanconstitution is largely dominated by Class I. (2), from which it breaksaway in the case of the President to a short-term monarchist aspect ofClass II. (1). I will not elaborate this classification further. I havemade it here in order to render clear first, that what we moderns meanby democracy is not what the Greeks meant at all, that is to say, directgovernment by the assembly of all the citizens, and secondly and moreimportant, that the word "democracy" is being used very largely incurrent discussion, so that it is impossible to say in any particularcase whether the intention is Class I. (2) or Class II. (1), and that wehave to make up our minds whether we mean, if I may coin two phrases, "delegate democracy" or "selective democracy, " or some definitecombination of these two, when we talk about "democracy, " before we canget on much beyond a generous gesture of equality and enfranchisementtowards our brother man. The word is being used, in fact, confusinglyfor these two quite widely different things. 

Now, it seems to me that though there has been no very clear discussionof the issue between those two very opposite conceptions of democracy, largely because of the want of proper distinctive terms, there hasnevertheless been a wide movement of public opinion away from "delegatedemocracy" and towards "selective democracy. " People have gone on saying"democracy, " while gradually changing its meaning from the former to thelatter. It is notable in Great Britain, for example, that while therehas been no perceptible diminution in our faith in democracy, there hasbeen a growing criticism of "party" and "politicians, " and a greatweakening in the power and influence of representatives andrepresentative institutions. There has been a growing demand forpersonality and initiative in elected persons. The press, which was onceentirely subordinate politically to parliamentary politics, adopts anattitude towards parliament and party leaders nowadays which would haveseemed inconceivable insolence in the days of Lord Palmerston. And therehas been a vigorous agitation in support of electoral methods which aremanifestly calculated to subordinate "delegated" to "selected" men. 

The movement for electoral reform in Great Britain at the present timeis one of quite fundamental importance in the development of moderndemocracy. The case of the reformers is that heretofore modern democracyhas not had a fair opportunity of showing its best possibilities to theworld, because the methods of election have persistently set aside thebetter types of public men, or rather of would-be public men, in favourof mere party hacks. That is a story common to Britain and the Americandemocracies, but in America it was expressed in rather different termsand dealt with in a less analytical fashion than it has been in GreatBritain. It was not at first clearly understood that the failure ofdemocracy to produce good government came through the preference of"delegated" over "selected" men, the idea of delegation did in factdominate the minds of both electoral reformers and electoralconservatives alike, and the earlier stages of the reform movement inGreat Britain were inspired not so much by the idea of getting a bettertype of representative as by the idea of getting a fairerrepresentation of minorities. It was only slowly that the idea thatsensible men do not usually belong to any political "party" took hold. It is only now being realized that what sensible men desire in a memberof parliament is honour and capacity rather than a mechanical loyalty toa "platform. " They do not want to dictate to their representative; theywant a man they can trust as their representative. In the fifties andsixties of the last century, in which this electoral reform movementbegan and the method of Proportional Representation was thought out, itwas possible for the reformers to work untroubled upon the assumptionthat if a man was not necessarily born a

 "... Little Liber-al, or else a little Conservative, "

he must at least be a Liberal-Unionist or a Conservative Free-Trader. But seeking a fair representation for party minorities, these reformersproduced a system of voting at once simple and incapable ofmanipulation, that leads straight, not to the representation of smallparties, but to a type of democratic government by selected best men. 

Before giving the essential features of that system, it may be well tostate in its simplest form the evils at which the reform aims. Anelection, the reformers point out, is not the simple matter it appearsto be at the first blush. Methods of voting can be manipulated invarious ways, and nearly every method has its own liability tofalsification. We may take for illustration the commonest, simplestcase--the case that is the perplexity of every clear-thinking voterunder British or American conditions--the case of a constituency inwhich every elector has one vote, and which returns one representativeto Parliament. The naive theory on which people go is that all thepossible candidates are put up, that each voter votes for the one helikes best, and that the best man wins. The bitter experience is thathardly ever are there more than two candidates, and still more rarely iseither of these the best man possible. Suppose, for example, theconstituency is mainly Conservative. A little group of pothousepoliticians, wire-pullers, busybodies, local journalists, and smalllawyers, working for various monetary interests, have "captured" thelocal Conservative organization. They have time and energy to captureit, because they have no other interest in life except that. It is their"business, " and honest men are busy with other duties. For reasons thatdo not appear these local "workers" put up an unknown Mr. Goldbug as theofficial Conservative candidate. He professes a generally Conservativeview of things, but few people are sure of him and few people trust him. Against him the weaker (and therefore still more venal) Liberalorganization now puts up a Mr. Kentshire (formerly Wurstberg) torepresent the broader thought and finer generosities of the Englishmind. A number of Conservative gentlemen, generally too busy about theirhonest businesses to attend the party "smokers" and the party cave, realize suddenly that they want Goldbug hardly more than they wantWurstberg. They put up their long-admired, trusted, and able friend Mr. Sanity as an Independent Conservative. 

Every one knows the trouble that follows. Mr. Sanity is "going to splitthe party vote. " The hesitating voter is told, with considerable truth, that a vote given for Mr. Sanity is a vote given for Wurstberg. At anyprice the constituency does not want Wurstberg. So at the eleventh hourMr. Sanity is induced to withdraw, and Mr. Goldbug goes into Parliamentto misrepresent this constituency. And so with most constituencies, andthe result is a legislative body consisting largely of men of unknowncharacter and obscure aims, whose only credential is the wearing of aparty label. They come into parliament not to forward the greatinterests they ostensibly support, but with an eye to the railwayjobbery, corporation business, concessions and financial operations thatnecessarily go on in and about the national legislature. That in itssimplest form is the dilemma of democracy. The problem that hasconfronted modern democracy since its beginning has not really been therepresentation of organized minorities--they are very well able to lookafter themselves--but _the protection of the unorganized mass of busilyoccupied, fairly intelligent men from the tricks of the specialists whowork the party machines_. We know Mr. Sanity, we want Mr. Sanity, but weare too busy to watch the incessant intrigues to oust him in favour ofthe obscurely influential people, politically docile, who are favouredby the organization. We want an organizer-proof method of voting. It isin answer to this demand, as the outcome of a most careful examinationof the ways in which voting may be protected from the exploitation ofthose who _work_ elections, that the method of ProportionalRepresentation with a single transferable vote has been evolved. It isorganizer-proof. It defies the caucus. If you do not like Mr. Goldbugyou can put up and vote for Mr. Sanity, giving Mr. Goldbug your secondchoice, in the most perfect confidence that in any case your vote cannothelp to return Mr. Wurstberg. 

With Proportional Representation with a single transferable vote (thisspecification is necessary, because there are also the inferiorimitations of various election-riggers figuring as proportionalrepresentation), it is _impossible to prevent the effective candidatureof independent men of repute beside the official candidates_. 

The method of voting under the Proportional Representation system hasbeen ignorantly represented as complex. It is really almost ideallysimple. You mark the list of candidates with numbers in the order ofyour preference. For example, you believe A to be absolutely the bestman for parliament; you mark him 1. But B you think is the next bestman; you mark him 2. That means that if A gets an enormous amount ofsupport, ever so many more votes than he requires for his return, yourvote will not be wasted. Only so much of your vote as is needed will goto A; the rest will go to B. Or, on the other hand, if A has so littlesupport that his chances are hopeless, you will not have thrown yourvote away upon him; it will go to B. Similarly you may indicate a third, a fourth, and a fifth choice; if you like you may mark every name onyour paper with a number to indicate the order of your preferences. Andthat is all the voter has to do. The reckoning and counting of the votespresents not the slightest difficulty to any one used to the businessof computation. Silly and dishonest men, appealing to still sillieraudiences, have got themselves and their audiences into humorous muddlesover this business, but the principles are perfectly plain and simple. Let me state them here; they can be fully and exactly stated, withvarious ornaments, comments, arguments, sarcastic remarks, anddigressions, in seventy lines of this type. 

It will be evident that, in any election under this system, any one whohas got a certain proportion of No. 1 votes will be elected. If, forinstance, five people have to be elected and 20, 000 voters vote, thenany one who has got 4001 first votes or more _must_ be elected. 4001votes is in that case enough to elect a candidate. This sufficientnumber of votes is called the _quota_, and any one who has more thanthat number of votes has obviously got more votes than is needful forelection. So, to begin with, the voting papers are classified accordingto their first votes, and any candidates who have got more than a quotaof first votes are forthwith declared elected. But most of these electedmen would under the old system waste votes because they would have toomany; for manifestly a candidate who gets more than the quota of votes_needs only a fraction of each of these votes to return him_. If, forinstance, he gets double the quota he needs only half each vote. Hetakes that fraction, therefore, under this new and better system, andthe rest of each vote is entered on to No. 2 upon that voting paper. Andso on. Now this is an extremely easy job for an accountant or skilledcomputer, and it is quite easily checked by any other accountant andskilled computer. A reader with a bad arithmetical education, ignorantof the very existence of such a thing as a slide rule, knowing nothingof account keeping, who thinks of himself working out the resultantfractions with a stumpy pencil on a bit of greasy paper in a bad light, may easily think of this transfer of fractions as a dangerous andterrifying process. It is, for a properly trained man, the easiest, exactest job conceivable. The Cash Register people will invent machinesto do it for you while you wait. What happens, then, is that everycandidate with more than a quota, beginning with the top candidate, sheds a traction of each vote he has received, down the list, and thenext one sheds his surplus fraction in the same way, and so on untilcandidates lower in the list, who are at first below the quota, fill upto it. When all the surplus votes of the candidates at the head of thelist have been disposed of, then the hopeless candidates at the bottomof the list are dealt with. The second votes on their voting papers aretreated as whole votes and distributed up the list, and so on. It willbe plain to the quick-minded that, towards the end, there will be acertain chasing about of little fractions of votes, and a slightmodification of the quota due to voting papers having no second or thirdpreferences marked upon them, a chasing about that it will be difficultfor an untrained intelligence to follow. _But untrained intelligencesare not required to follow it_. For the skilled computer these thingsoffer no difficulty at all. And they are not difficulties of principlebut of manipulation. One might as well refuse to travel in a taxicabuntil the driver had explained the magneto as refuse to accept theprinciple of Proportional Representation by the single transferable voteuntil one had remedied all the deficiencies of one's arithmeticaleducation. The fundamental principle of the thing, that a candidate whogets more votes than he wants is made to hand on a fraction of each voteto the voter's second choice, and that a candidate whose chances arehopeless is made to hand on the whole vote to the voter's second choice, so that practically only a small number of votes are ineffective, iswithin the compass of the mind of a boy of ten. 

But simple as this method is, it completely kills the organization andmanipulation of voting. It completely solves the Goldbug-Wurstberg-Sanity problem. It is knave-proof--short of forging, stealing, ordestroying voting papers. A man of repute, a leaderly man, may defy allthe party organizations in existence and stand beside and be returnedover the head of a worthless man, though the latter be smothered withparty labels. That is the gist of this business. The difference ineffect between Proportional Representation and the old method of votingmust ultimately be to change the moral and intellectual quality ofelected persons profoundly. People are only beginning to realize thehuge possibilities of advance inherent in this change of politicalmethod. It means no less than a revolution from "delegate democracy"to "selective democracy. "

Now, I will not pretend to be anything but a strong partizan in thismatter. When I speak of "democracy" I mean "selective democracy. " Ibelieve that "delegate democracy" is already provably a failure in theworld, and that the reason why to-day, after three and a half years ofstruggle, we are still fighting German autocracy and fighting with nocertainty of absolute victory, is because the affairs of the three greatAtlantic democracies have been largely in the hands not of selected menbut of delegated men, men of intrigue and the party machine, of dodgesrather than initiatives, second-rate men. When Lord Haldane, defendinghis party for certain insufficiencies in their preparation for theeventuality of the great war, pleaded that they had no "mandate" fromthe country to do anything of the sort, he did more than commitpolitical suicide, he bore conclusive witness against the whole systemwhich had made him what he was. Neither Britain nor France in thisstruggle has produced better statesmen nor better generals than theGerman autocracy. The British and French Foreign Offices are oldmonarchist organizations still. To this day the British and Frenchpoliticians haggle and argue with the German ministers upon petty pointsand debating society advantages, smart and cunning, while the peoplesperish. The one man who has risen to the greatness of this greatoccasion, the man who is, in default of any rival, rapidly becoming theleader of the world towards peace, is neither a delegate politician northe choice of a monarch and his councillors. He is the one authoritativefigure in these transactions whose mind has not been subdued either bylong discipline in the party machine or by court intrigue, who hascontinued his education beyond those early twenties when the mind of the"budding politician" ceases to expand, who has thought, and thoughtthings out, who is an educated man among dexterous under-educatedspecialists. By something very like a belated accident in the framingof the American constitution, the President of the United States is morein the nature of a selected man than any other conspicuous figure at thepresent time. He is specially elected by a special electoral collegeafter an elaborate preliminary selection of candidates by the two greatparty machines. And be it remembered that Mr. Wilson is not the firstgreat President the United States have had, he is one of a series offigures who tower over their European contemporaries. The United Stateshave had many advantageous circumstances to thank for their presentascendancy in the world's affairs: isolation from militarist pressurefor a century and a quarter, a vast virgin continent, plenty of land, freedom from centralization, freedom from titles and social vulgarities, common schools, a real democratic spirit in its people, and a greatenthusiasm for universities; but no single advantage has been so greatas this happy accident which has given it a specially selected man asits voice and figurehead in the world's affairs. In the averagecongressman, in the average senator, as Ostrogorski's great book soindustriously demonstrated, the United States have no great occasion forpride. Neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives seem to riseabove the level of the British Houses of Parliament, with a Governmentunable to control the rebel forces of Ulster, unable to promote ordismiss generals without an outcry, weakly amenable to the press, andterrifyingly incapable of great designs. It is to the United States ofAmerica we must look now if the world is to be made "safe fordemocracy. " It is to the method of selection, as distinguished fromdelegation, that we must look if democracy is to be saved from itself. 

X

THE RECENT STRUGGLE FOR PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION IN GREAT BRITAIN

British political life resists cleansing with all the vigour of a dirtylittle boy. It is nothing to your politician that the economic andsocial organization of all the world, is strained almost to the pitch ofcollapse, and that it is vitally important to mankind that everywherethe whole will and intelligence of the race should be enlisted in thegreat tasks of making a permanent peace and reconstructing the shatteredframework of society. These are remote, unreal considerations to thepolitician. What is the world to him? He has scarcely heard of it. Hehas been far too busy as a politician. He has been thinking of smartlittle tricks in the lobby and brilliant exploits at question time. Hehas been thinking of jobs and appointments, of whether Mr. Asquith islikely to "come back" and how far it is safe to bank upon L. G. His onesupreme purpose is to keep affairs in the hands of his own specializedset, to keep the old obscure party game going, to rig his little tricksbehind a vast, silly camouflage of sham issues, to keep out able men anddisinterested men, the public mind, and the general intelligence, fromany effective interference with his disastrous manipulations of thecommon weal. 

I do not see how any intelligent and informed man can have followed therecent debates in the House of Commons upon Proportional Representationwithout some gusts of angry contempt. They were the most pitiful andalarming demonstration of the intellectual and moral quality of Britishpublic life at the present time. 

From the wire-pullers of the Fabian Society and from the partyorganizers of both Liberal and Tory party alike, and from the knowingcards, the pothouse shepherds, and jobbing lawyers who "work" theconstituencies, comes the chief opposition to this straightening out ofour electoral system so urgently necessary and so long overdue. Theyhave fought it with a zeal and efficiency that is rarely displayed inthe nation's interest. From nearly every outstanding man outside thatlittle inner world of political shams and dodges, who has given anyattention to the question, comes, on the other hand, support for thisreform. Even the great party leaders, Mr. Balfour and Mr. Asquith, werein its favour. One might safely judge this question by considering whoare the advocates on either side. But the best arguments forProportional Representation arise out of its opponents' speeches, and tothese I will confine my attention now. Consider Lord Harcourt--heir tothe most sacred traditions of the party game--hurling scorn at a projectthat would introduce "faddists, mugwumps, " and so on and so on--in factindependent thinking men--into the legislature. Consider the value ofLord Curzon's statement that London "rose in revolt" against theproject. Do you remember that day, dear reader, when the streets ofLondon boiled with passionate men shouting, "No ProportionalRepresentation! Down with Proportional Representation"? You don't. Nordo I. But what happened was that the guinea-pigs and solicitors andnobodies, the party hacks who form the bulk of London'smisrepresentation in the House of Commons, stampeded in terror against aproposal that threatened to wipe them out and replace them by known andresponsible men. London, alas! does not seem to care how its members areelected. What Londoner knows anything about his member? Hundreds ofthousands of Londoners do not even know which of the ridiculousconstituencies into which the politicians have dismembered our Londonthey are in. Only as I was writing this in my flat in St. James's Court, Westminster, did it occur to me to inquire who was representing me inthe councils of the nation while I write.... 

After some slight difficulty I ascertained that my representative is aMr. Burdett Coutts, who was, in the romantic eighties, Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett. And by a convenient accident I find that the other dayhe moved to reject the Proportional Representation Amendment made by theHouse of Lords to the Representation of the People Bill, so that I amable to look up the debate in Hansard and study my opinions as herepresented them and this question at one and the same time. And, takinglittle things first, I am proud and happy to discover that the memberfor me was the only participator in the debate who, in the vulgar andreprehensible phrase, "threw a dead cat, " or, in polite terms, displayedclassical learning. My member said, "_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_, "with a rather graceful compliment to the Labour Conference atNottingham. "I could not help thinking to myself, " said my member, "thatat that conference there must have been many men of sufficient classicalreading to say to themselves, '_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_. '" Inwhich surmise he was quite right. Except perhaps for "_Tempus fugit, "_"_verbum sap. _, " "_Arma virumque_, " and "_Quis custodiet_, " there is nobetter known relic of antiquity. But my member went a little beyond myideas when he said: "We are asked to enter upon a method of legislationwhich can bear no other description than that of law-making in thedark, " because I think it can bear quite a lot of other descriptions. This was, however, the artistic prelude to a large, vague, gloomydissertation about nothing very definite, a muddling up of the mainquestion with the minor issue of a schedule of constituencies involvedin the proposal. 

The other parts of my member's speech do not, I confess, fill me withthe easy confidence I would like to feel in my proxy. Let me extract afew gems of eloquence from the speech of this voice which speaks for me, and give also the only argument he advanced that needs consideration. "History repeats itself, " he said, "very often in curious ways as tofacts, but generally with very different results. " That, honestly, Ilike. It is a sentence one can read over several times. But he went onto talk of the entirely different scheme for minority representation, which was introduced into the Reform Bill of 1867, and there I amobliged to part company with him. That was a silly scheme for giving twovotes to each voter in a three-member constituency. It has about as muchresemblance to the method of scientific voting under discussion as abath-chair has to an aeroplane. "But that measure of minorityrepresentation led to a baneful invention, " my representative went onto say, "and left behind it a hateful memory in the Birmingham caucus. Iwell remember that when I stood for Parliament thirty-two years ago _wehad no better platform weapon than repeating over and over again in asentence the name of Mr. Schnadhorst, _ and I am not sure that it wouldnot serve the same purpose now. Under that system the work of the caucuswas, of course, far simpler than it will be if this system ever comesinto operation. All the caucus had to do under that measure was todivide the electors into three groups and with three candidates, A. , B. , and C. , to order one group to vote for A. And B. , another for B. And C. , and the third for A. And C. , and they carried the whole of theircandidates and kept them for many years. But the multiplicity of ordinalpreferences, second, third, fourth, fifth, up to tenth, which the singletransferable vote system would involve, will require a more scientifichandling in party interests, and neither party will be able to face anelection with any hope of success without the assistance of the mostdrastic form of caucus and _without its orders being carried out by theelectors_. "

Now, I swear by Heaven that, lowly creature as I am, a lost vote, anothing, voiceless and helpless in public affairs, I am not going tostand the imputation that that sort of reasoning represents the averagemental quality of Westminster--outside Parliament, that is. Most of myneighbours in St. James's Court, for example, have quite large pieces ofhead above their eyebrows. Read these above sentences over and pondertheir significance--so far as they have any significance. Never mind mykeen personal humiliation at this display of the mental calibre of myrepresentative, but consider what the mental calibre of a House must bethat did not break out into loud guffaws at such a passage. The line ofargument is about as lucid as if one reasoned that because one can breaka window with a stone it is no use buying a telescope. And it remainsentirely a matter for speculation whether my member is arguing that acaucus _can_ rig an election carried on under the ProportionalRepresentation system or that it cannot. At the first blush it seems toread as if he intended the former. But be careful! Did he? Let mesuggest that in that last sentence he really expresses the opinion thatit cannot. It can be read either way. Electors under modern conditionsare not going to obey the "orders" of even the "most drasticcaucus"--whatever a "drastic caucus" may be. Why should they? In theBirmingham instance it was only a section of the majority, voting bywards, in an election on purely party lines, which "obeyed" in order tokeep out the minority party candidate. I think myself that my member'smind waggled. Perhaps his real thoughts shone out through an argumentnot intended to betray them. What he did say as much as he said anythingwas that under Proportional Representation, elections are going to bevery troublesome and difficult for party candidates. If that was hisintention, then, after all, I forgive him much. I think that and morethan that. I think that they are going to make party candidates who aremerely party candidates impossible. That is exactly what we reformersare after. Then I shall get a representative more to my taste than Mr. Burdett Coutts. 

But let me turn now to the views of other people's representatives. 

Perhaps the most damning thing ever said against the present system, damning because of its empty absurdity, was uttered by Sir ThomasWhittaker. He was making the usual exaggerations of the supposeddifficulties of the method. He said English people didn't like such"complications. " They like a "straight fight between two men. " Think ofit! A straight fight! For more than a quarter-century I have been avoter, usually with votes in two or three constituencies, and never inall that long political life have I seen a single straight fight in anelection, but only the dismallest sham fights it is possible toconceive. Thrice only in all that time have I cast a vote for a man whomI respected. On all other occasions the election that mocked mycitizenship was either an arranged walk-over for one party or the other, or I had a choice between two unknown persons, mysteriously selected ascandidates by obscure busy people with local interests in theconstituency. Every intelligent person knows that this is the usualexperience of a free and independent voter in England. The "fight" of anordinary Parliamentary election in England is about as "straight" as thebusiness of a thimble rigger. 

And consider just what these "complications" are of which the opponentsof Proportional Representation chant so loudly. In the sham election ofto-day, which the politicians claim gives them a mandate to muddle upour affairs, the voter puts a x against the name of the least detestableof the two candidates that are thrust upon him. Under the ProportionalRepresentation method there will be a larger constituency, a larger listof candidates, and a larger number of people to be elected, and he willput I against the name of the man he most wants to be elected, 2 againsthis second choice, and if he likes he may indulge in marking a third, oreven a further choice. He may, if he thinks fit, number off the wholelist of candidates. That is all he will have to do. That is thestupendous intricacy of the method that flattens out the minds of LordHarcourt and Sir Thomas Whittaker. And as for the working of it, if youmust go into that, all that happens is that if your first choice getsmore votes than he needs for his return, he takes only the fraction ofyour vote that he requires, and the rest of the vote goes on to yourNumber 2. If 2 isn't in need of all of it, the rest goes on to 3. And soon. That is the profound mathematical mystery, that is the riddle beyondthe wit of Westminster, which overpowers these fine intelligences andsets them babbling of "senior wranglers. " Each time there is a debate onthis question in the House, member after member hostile to the proposalwill play the ignorant fool and pretend to be confused himself, and willtry to confuse others, by deliberately clumsy statements of these mostelementary ideas. Surely if there were no other argument for a change oftype in the House, these poor knitted brows, these public perspirationsof the gentry who "cannot understand P. R. , " should suffice. 

But let us be just; it is not all pretence; the inability of Mr. AustenChamberlain to grasp the simple facts before him was undoubtedlygenuine. He followed Mr. Burdett Coutts, in support of Mr. BurdettCoutts, with the most Christian disregard of the nasty things Mr. Burdett Coutts had seemed to be saying about the Birmingham caucus fromwhich he sprang. He had a childish story to tell of how voters would notgive their first votes to their real preferences, because they wouldassume he "would get in in any case"--God knows why. Of course on theassumption that the voter behaves like an idiot, anything is possible. And never apparently having heard of fractions, this great Birminghamleader was unable to understand that a voter who puts 1 against acandidate's name votes for that candidate anyhow. He could not imagineany feeling on the part of the voter that No. 1 was his man. A vote is avote to this simple rather than lucid mind, a thing one and indivisible. Read this--

"Birmingham, " he said, referring to a Schedule under consideration, "isto be cut into three constituencies of four members each. I am to have aconstituency of 100, 000 electors, I suppose. How many thousandinhabitants I do not know. _Every effort will be made to prevent any ofthose electors knowing--in fact, it would be impossible for any of themto know--whether they voted for me or not, or at any rate whether theyeffectively voted for me or not, or whether the vote which they wishedto give to me was really diverted to somebody else_. "

Only in a house of habitually inattentive men could any one talk suchnonsense without reproof, but I look in vain through Hansard's recordof this debate for a single contemptuous reference to Mr. Chamberlain'sobtuseness. And the rest of his speech was a lamentable account of thetime and trouble he would have to spend upon his constituents if the newmethod came in. He was the perfect figure of the parochially importantperson in a state of defensive excitement. No doubt his speech appealedto many in the House. 

Of course Lord Harcourt was quite right in saying that the character ofthe average House of Commons member will be changed by ProportionalRepresentation. It will. It will make the election of obscure andunknown men, of carpet-bag candidates who work a constituency as ahawker works a village, of local pomposities and village-pump "leaders"almost impossible. It will replace such candidates by better known andmore widely known men. It will make the House of Commons so much themore a real gathering of the nation, so much the more a house ofrepresentative men. (Lord Harcourt's "faddists and mugwumps. ") And it isperfectly true as Mr. Ramsay Macdonald (also an opponent) declares, thatProportional Representation means constituencies so big that it will beimpossible for a poor man to cultivate and work them. That isunquestionable. But, mark another point, it will also make it useless, as Mr. Chamberlain has testified, for rich men to cultivate and workthem. All this cultivating and working, all this going about and makingthings right with this little jobber here, that contractor there, allthe squaring of small political clubs and organizations, all thesubscription blackmail and charity bribery, that now makes aParliamentary candidature so utterly rotten an influence upon publiclife, will be killed dead by Proportional Representation. You cannot jobmen into Parliament by Proportional Representation. ProportionalRepresentation lets in the outsider. It lets in the common, unassignedvoter who isn't in the local clique. That is the clue to nearly all thisopposition of the politicians. It makes democracy possible for the firsttime in modern history. And that poor man of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald'simagination, instead of cadging about a constituency in order to startpolitician, will have to make good in some more useful way--as a leaderof the workers in their practical affairs, for example--before peoplewill hear of him and begin to believe in him. 

The opposition to Proportional Representation of Mr. Sidney Webb and hislittle circle is a trifle more "scientific" in tone than these naiveobjections of the common run of antagonist, but underlying it is thesame passionate desire to keep politics a close game for the politicianand to bar out the politically unspecialized man. There is more conceitand less jobbery behind the criticisms of this type of mind. It is anopposition based on the idea that the common man is a fool who does notknow what is good for him. So he has to be stampeded. Politics, according to this school, is a sort of cattle-driving. 

The Webbites do not deny the broad facts of the case. Our presentelectoral system, with our big modern constituencies of thousands ofvoters, leads to huge turnovers of political power with a relativelysmall shifting of public opinion. It makes a mock of public opinion bycaricature, and Parliament becomes the distorting mirror of the nation. Under some loud false issue a few score of thousands of votes turn over, and in goes this party or that with a big sham majority. This theWebbites admit. But they applaud it. It gives us, they say, "a strongGovernment. " Public opinion, the intelligent man outside the House, isruled out of the game. He has no power of intervention at all. Theartful little Fabian politicians rub their hands and say, "_Now_ we canget to work with the wires! No one can stop us. " And when the publiccomplains of the results, there is always the repartee, "_You_ electedthem. " But the Fabian psychology is the psychology of a very small groupof pedants who believe that fair ends may be reached by foul means. Itis much easier and more natural to serve foul ends by foul means. Inpractice it is not tricky benevolence but tricky bargaining among theinterests that will secure control of the political wires. That is a badenough state of affairs in ordinary times, but in times of tragicnecessity like the present men will not be mocked in this way. Life isgoing to be very intense in the years ahead of us. If we go right on toanother caricature Parliament, with perhaps half a hundred leading menin it and the rest hacks and nobodies, the baffled and discontentedoutsiders in the streets may presently be driven to rioting and thethrowing of bombs. Unless, indeed, the insurrection of the outsiderstakes a still graver form, and the Press, which has ceased entirely tobe a Party Press in Great Britain, helps some adventurous Prime Ministerto flout and set aside the lower House altogether. There is neither muchmoral nor much physical force behind the House of Commons at the presenttime. 

The argument of the Fabian opponents to Proportional Representation isfrankly that the strongest Government is got in a House of half ahundred or fewer leading men, with the rest of the Parliament drivensheep. But the whole mischief of the present system is that the obscuremembers of Parliament are not sheep; they are a crowd of little-minded, second-rate men just as greedy and eager and self-seeking as any of us. They vote straight indeed on all the main party questions, they obeytheir Whips like sheep then; but there is a great bulk of business inParliament outside the main party questions, and obedience is notwithout its price. These are matters vitally affecting our railways andships and communications generally, the food and health of the people, armaments, every sort of employment, the appointment of public servants, the everyday texture of all our lives. Then the nobody becomes somebody, the party hack gets busy, the rat is in the granary.... 

In these recent debates in the House of Commons one can see every stocktrick of the wire-puller in operation. Particularly we have the olddodge of the man who is "in theory quite in sympathy with ProportionalRepresentation, but ... " It is, he declares regretfully, too late. Itwill cause delay. Difficult to make arrangements. Later on perhaps. Andso on. It is never too late for a vital issue. Upon the speedy adoptionof Proportional Representation depends, as Mr. Balfour made plain in anadmirable speech, whether the great occasions of the peace and after thepeace are to be handled by a grand council of all that is best and mostleaderlike in the nation, or whether they are to be left to a fewleaders, apparently leading, but really profoundly swayed by the obscurecrowd of politicians and jobbers behind them. Are the politicians tohamper and stifle us in this supreme crisis of our national destinies orare we British peoples to have a real control of our own affairs in thismomentous time? Are men of light and purpose to have a voice in publicaffairs or not? Proportional Representation is supremely a testquestion. It is a question that no adverse decision in the House ofCommons can stifle. There are too many people now who grasp itsimportance and significance. Every one who sets a proper value uponpurity in public life and the vitality of democratic institutions will, I am convinced, vote and continue to vote across every other questionagainst the antiquated, foul, and fraudulent electoral methods that havehitherto robbed democracy of three-quarters of its efficiency. 

XI

THE STUDY AND PROPAGANDA OF DEMOCRACY

In the preceding chapter I have dealt with the discussion ofProportional Representation in the British House of Commons in order toillustrate the intellectual squalor amidst which public affairs have tobe handled at the present time, even in a country professedly"democratic. " I have taken this one discussion as a sample to illustratethe present imperfection of our democratic instrument. All over theworld, in every country, great multitudes of intelligent and seriouspeople are now inspired by the idea of a new order of things in theworld, of a world-wide establishment of peace and mutual aid betweennation and nation and man and man. But, chiefly because of theelementary crudity of existing electoral methods, hardly anywhere atpresent, except at Washington, do these great ideas and this world-widewill find expression. Amidst the other politicians and statesmen of theworld President Wilson towers up with an effect almost divine. But itis no ingratitude to him to say that he is not nearly so exceptional abeing among educated men as he is among the official leaders of mankind. Everywhere now one may find something of the Wilson purpose andintelligence, but nearly everywhere it is silenced or muffled or madeineffective by the political advantage of privileged or of violent andadventurous inferior men. He is "one of us, " but it is his good fortuneto have got his head out of the sack that is about the heads of most ofus. In the official world, in the world of rulers and representativesand "statesmen, " he almost alone, speaks for the modern intelligence. 

This general stifling of the better intelligence of the world and itspossible release to expression and power, seems to me to be thefundamental issue underlying all the present troubles of mankind. Wecannot get on while everywhere fools and vulgarians hold the levers thatcan kill, imprison, silence and starve men. We cannot get on with falsegovernment and we cannot get on with mob government; we must have rightgovernment. The intellectual people of the world have a duty ofco-operation they have too long neglected. The modernization ofpolitical institutions, the study of these institutions until we haveworked out and achieved the very best and most efficient methods wherebythe whole community of mankind may work together under the direction ofits chosen intelligences, is the common duty of every one who has abrain for the service. And before everything else we have to realizethis crudity and imperfection in what we call "democracy" at the presenttime. Democracy is still chiefly an aspiration, it is a spirit, it is anidea; for the most part its methods are still to seek. And still more isthis "League of Free Nations" as yet but an aspiration. Let us notunderrate the task before us. Only the disinterested devotion ofhundreds of thousands of active brains in school, in pulpit, in book andpress and assembly can ever bring these redeeming conceptions down tothe solid earth to rule. 

All round the world there is this same obscuration of the realintelligence of men. In Germany, human good will and every fine mind aresubordinated to political forms that have for a mouthpiece a Chancellorwith his brains manifestly addled by the theories of _Welt-Politik_ andthe Bismarckian tradition, and for a figurehead a mad Kaiser. Nevertheless there comes even from Germany muffled cries for a new age. A grinning figure like a bloodstained Punch is all that speaks for thebest brains in Bulgaria. Yes. We Western allies know all that by heart;but, after all, the immediate question for each one of us is, "_Whatspeaks for me?_" So far as official political forms go I myself am asineffective as any right-thinking German or Bulgarian could possibly be. I am more ineffective than a Galician Pole or a Bohemian who votes forhis nationalist representative. Politically I am a negligible item inthe constituency of this Mr. Burdett Coutts into whose brain we havebeen peeping. Politically I am less than a waistcoat button on thatquaint figure. And that is all I am--except that I revolt. I havewritten of it so far as if it were just a joke. But indeed bad andfoolish political institutions cannot be a joke. Sooner or later theyprove themselves to be tragedy. This war is that. It is yesterday'slazy, tolerant, "sense of humour" wading out now into the lakes of bloodit refused to foresee. 

It is absurd to suppose that anywhere to-day the nationalisms, thesuspicions and hatreds, the cants and policies, and dead phrases thatsway men represent the current intelligence of mankind. They are merelythe evidences of its disorganization. Even now we _know_ we could do farbetter. Give mankind but a generation or so of peace and right educationand this world could mock at the poor imaginations that conceived amillennium. But we have to get intelligences together, we have tocanalize thought before it can work and produce its due effects. To thatend, I suppose, there has been a vast amount of mental activity amongus political "negligibles. " For my own part I have thought of the ideaof God as the banner of human unity and justice, and I have made sometentatives in that direction, but men, I perceive, have arguedthemselves mean and petty about religion. At the word "God" passionsbristle. The word "God" does not unite men, it angers them. But I doubtif God cares greatly whether we call Him God or no. His service is theservice of man. This double idea of the League of Free Nations, linkedwith the idea of democracy as universal justice, is free from thejealousy of the theologians and great enough for men to unite uponeverywhere. I know how warily one must reckon with the spite of thepriest, but surely these ideas may call upon the teachers of all thegreat world religions for their support. The world is full now ofconfused propaganda, propaganda of national ideas, of traditions ofhate, of sentimental and degrading loyalties, of every sort of errorthat divides and tortures and slays mankind. All human institutions aremade of propaganda, are sustained by propaganda and perish when itceases; they must be continually explained and re-explained to the youngand the negligent. And for this new world of democracy and the League ofFree Nations to which all reasonable men are looking, there must needsbe the greatest of all propagandas. For that cause every one mustbecome a teacher and a missionary. "Persuade to it and make the idea ofit and the necessity for it plain, " that is the duty of every schoolteacher, every tutor, every religious teacher, every writer, everylecturer, every parent, every trusted friend throughout the world. Forit, too, every one must become a student, must go on with the task ofmaking vague intentions into definite intentions, of analyzing anddestroying obstacles, of mastering the ten thousand difficulties ofdetail.... 

I am a man who looks now towards the end of life; fifty-one years have Iscratched off from my calendar, another slips by, and I cannot tell howmany more of the sparse remainder of possible years are really mine. Ilive in days of hardship and privation, when it seems more natural tofeel ill than well; without holidays or rest or peace; friends and thesons of my friends have been killed; death seems to be feeling alwaysnow for those I most love; the newspapers that come in to my house tellmostly of blood and disaster, of drownings and slaughterings, ofcruelties and base intrigues. Yet never have I been so sure that thereis a divinity in man and that a great order of human life, a reign ofjustice and world-wide happiness, of plenty, power, hope, and giganticcreative effort, lies close at hand. Even now we have the science andthe ability available for a universal welfare, though it is scatteredabout the world like a handful of money dropped by a child; even nowthere exists all the knowledge that is needed to make mankinduniversally free and human life sweet and noble. We need but the faithfor it, and it is at hand; we need but the courage to lay our hands uponit and in a little space of years it can be ours. 

THE END.