The Barbarism of Berlin | Page 3

address my protest
especially to those lovers and pursuers of peace who, very
shortsightedly, have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which
is impatient of these preliminary details about who did this or that, and
whether it was right or wrong. They are satisfied with saying that an
enormous calamity, called war, has been begun by some or all of us and
should be ended by some or all of us. To these people, this preliminary
chapter about the precise happenings must appear not only dry (and it
must of necessity be the driest part of the task) but essentially needless
and barren. I wish to tell these people that they are wrong; that they are
wrong upon all principles of human justice and historic continuity; but
that they are specially and supremely wrong upon their own principles
of arbitration and international peace.
These sincere and high-minded peace-lovers are always telling us that
citizens no longer settle their quarrels by private violence; and that
nations should no longer settle theirs by public violence. They are
always telling us that we no longer fight duels; and need not wage wars.
In short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on the fact that an
ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an axe. But how is he
prevented from revenging himself with an axe? If he hits his neighbour
on the head with the kitchen chopper, what do we do? Do we all join
hands, like children playing Mulberry Bush, and say, "We are all
responsible for this; but let us hope it will not spread. Let us hope for
the happy day when we shall leave off chopping at the man's head; and
when nobody shall ever chop anything for ever and ever." Do we say,

"Let bygones be bygones; why go back to all the dull details with
which the business began; who can tell with what sinister motives the
man was standing there, within reach of the hatchet?" We do not. We
keep the peace in private life by asking for the facts of provocation, and
the proper object of punishment. We do go into the dull details; we do
enquire into the origins; we do emphatically enquire who it was that hit
first. In short, we do what I have done very briefly in this place.
Given this, it is indeed true that behind these facts there are truths;
truths of a terrible, of a spiritual sort. In mere fact, the Germanic power
has been wrong about Servia, wrong about Russia, wrong about
Belgium, wrong about England, wrong about Italy. But there was a
reason for its being wrong everywhere; and of that root reason, which
has moved half the world against it, I shall speak later in this series. For
that is something too omnipresent to be proved, too indisputable to be
helped by detail. It is nothing less than the locating, after more than a
hundred years of recriminations and wrong explanations, of the modern
European evil; the finding of the fountain from which poison has
flowed upon all the nations of the earth.

I
THE WAR ON THE WORD
It will hardly be denied that there is one lingering doubt in many, who
recognise unavoidable self-defence in the instant parry of the English
sword, and who have no great love for the sweeping sabre of Sadowa
and Sedan. That doubt is the doubt whether Russia, as compared with
Prussia, is sufficiently decent and democratic to be the ally of liberal
and civilised powers. I take first, therefore, this matter of civilisation.
It is vital in a discussion like this that we should make sure we are
going by meanings and not by mere words. It is not necessary in any
argument to settle what a word means or ought to mean. But it is
necessary in every argument to settle what we propose to mean by the
word. So long as our opponent understands what is the thing of which
we are talking, it does not matter to the argument whether the word is
or is not the one he would have chosen. A soldier does not say "We
were ordered to go to Mechlin; but I would rather go to Malines." He
may discuss the etymology and archaeology of the difference on the
march: but the point is that he knows where to go. So long as we know

what a given word is to mean in a given discussion, it does not even
matter if it means something else in some other and quite distinct
discussion. We have a perfect right to say that the width of a window
comes to four feet; even if we instantly and cheerfully change the
subject to the larger mammals, and say that an elephant has four