England and the War | Page 9

flock, Trim
swordsmen they push forth, yet try thy steel; Thou, fighting for poor
human kind, shalt feel The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew A
chasm sheer into the barrier rock, And bring the army of the faithful
through.

THE WAR OF IDEAS
An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, December 12, 1916
I hold, as I daresay you do, that we are at a crisis of our history where

there is not much room for talk. The time when this struggle might
have been averted or won by talk is long past. During the hundred years
before the war we have not talked much, or listened much, to the
Germans. For fifty of those years at least the head of waters that has
now been let loose in a devastating flood over Europe was steadily
accumulating; but we paid little attention to it. People sometimes speak
of the negotiations of the twelve days before the war as if the whole
secret and cause of the war could be found there; but it is not so.
Statesmen, it is true, are the keepers of the lock-gates, but those keepers
can only delay, they cannot prevent an inundation that has great natural
causes. The world has in it evil enough, and darkness enough. But it is
not so bad and so dark that a slip in diplomacy, a careless word, or an
impolite gesture, can instantaneously, as if by magic, involve twenty
million men in a struggle to the death. It is only clever, conceited men,
proud of their neat little minds, who think that because they cannot
fathom the causes of the war, it might easily have been prevented. I
confess I find it difficult to conceive of the war in terms of simple right
and wrong. We must respect the tides, and their huge unintelligible
force teaches us to respect them.
It is not a war of race. For all our differences with the Germans, any
cool and impartial mind must admit that we have many points of
kinship with them. During the years before the war our naval officers in
the Mediterranean found, I believe, that it was easier to associate on
terms of social friendship with the Austrians than with the officers of
any other foreign navy. We have a passionate admiration for France,
and a real devotion to her, but that is a love affair, not a family tie. We
begin to be experienced in love affairs, for Ireland steadily refuses to be
treated on any other footing. In any case, we are much closer to the
Germans than they are to the Bulgarians or the Turks. Of these three we
like the Turks the best, because they are chivalrous and generous
enemies, which the Germans are not.
It is a war of ideas. We are fighting an armed doctrine. Yet Burke's use
of those words to describe the military power of Revolutionary France
should warn us against fallacious attempts to simplify the issue. When
ideas become motives and are filtered into practice, they lose their

clearness of outline and are often hard to recognize. They leaven the
lump, but the lump is still human clay, with its passions and prejudices,
its pride and its hate. I remember seeing in a provincial paper, in the
early days of the war, two adjacent columns, both dealing with the war.
The first was headed 'A Holy War' and set forth the great principles of
nationality, respect for treaties, and protection of the weak, which in
our opinion are the main motives of the Allies in this war. The second
was headed 'The War on Commerce; Tips to capture German trade',
and set forth those other principles and motives which, in the opinion
of the Germans, brought England into this war.
I am not going to defend England against the charge that she entered
this war on a cold calculation of mercantile profit. Every one here
knows that the charge is utterly untrue. Those who believe the charge
could not be shaken in their belief except by being educated all over
again, and introduced to some knowledge of human nature. It is enough
to remark that this charge is a commonplace between belligerent
nations. They all like to believe that their adversaries entertain only
base motives, while they themselves act only on the loftiest ideal
promptings. If the charge means only that every nation at war is bound
to think of its own interests, to conserve its own strength, and to seize
on all material gains that are within its reach, the charge is true and
harmless. When two angry women quarrel in a back street, they
commonly accuse each other of being amorous. They might just as well
accuse each other of being human. The charge