The War and Democracy | Page 4

the people have slowly realised this hard truth.
After a generation or more of attempts and failures and
disillusionments many thousands of workpeople have learnt the lesson
that power without knowledge is not power at all, and that knowledge,
whether for public affairs or for any other purpose, cannot be gained
without effort and discipline. They have come to realise that
Democracy needs, for its full working, not only schools in which to
train its young, but also--what no Democracy save those of the ancient
world has ever possessed--such facilities for the education for its adult
citizens, engaged in the active work of the community, as will enable
them to maintain unimpaired their intellectual freshness and vigour,
and to face with wisdom and courage the problems for which, as
citizens, they have assumed responsibility. They have come to think of
Education, not as a time of tutelage or training, but as a part of active
life itself, woven of the same texture and concerned with the same
issues, as being, in fact, the effort to understand the world in which
they live. But they have naturally tended to confine those issues within
the limits of their own domestic interests and experience. They are
called upon now to widen their horizon, and to apply the democratic

conception of education to the new problems which have arisen owing
to the part which Great Britain is now playing in the affairs of Europe.
It is never easy to think things out clearly and coldly. But it is hardest
of all in the crisis of a great war, when men's minds are blurred by
passionate emotions of sorrow, anxiety, and indignation. Hence a time
of war is the heyday of fallacies and delusions, of misleading hopes and
premature disillusionments: men tend to live in an unreal world of
phrases and catchwords. Yet never is it more necessary than at such a
period, in the old Greek phrase, "to follow the argument whithersoe'er
it leads," to look facts squarely in the face, and, particularly, the great
ugly outstanding fact of war itself, the survival of which democrats,
especially in Great Britain and the United States, have of recent years
been so greatly tempted to ignore.
People speak as if war were a new sudden and terrible phenomenon.
There is nothing new about the fact of war. What is new about this war
is the scale on which it is waged, the science and skill expended on it,
and the fact that it is being carried on by national armies, numbering
millions, instead of by professional bodies of soldiers. But war itself is
as old as the world: and if it surprises and shocks us this is due to our
own blindness. There are only two ways of settling disputes between
nations, by law or by war. As there is as yet no World-State, with the
power to enforce a World-law between the nations, the possibility of
war, with all its contingent horrors, should have been before our eyes
all the time. The occasion of this war was no doubt a surprise. But that
it could happen at all should not be a surprise to us, still less a
disillusionment. It does not mark a backward step in human civilisation.
It only registers the fact that civilisation is still grievously incomplete
and unconsolidated. Terrible as this war is in its effect on individual
lives and happiness, it ought not to depress us--even if, in our blindness,
we imagined the world to be a far better organised place than it actually
is. The fact that many of the combatants regard war as an anachronism
adds to the tragedy, but also to the hope, of the struggle. It shows that
civilised opinion is gathering strength for that deepening and extension
of the meaning and range of citizenship which alone can make war
between the nations of the world as obsolete as it has become between

the nations of the British Empire or between the component parts of the
United States.
It was perhaps inevitable that British citizens in particular, removed
from the storm centres of Continental Europe, and never very logical in
their thinking, should have failed to realise the possibility of another
great war, similar to the Napoleonic struggle of a hundred years ago.
For nearly half a century the great European States had been at peace:
and we had come to look upon their condition, and the attachment of
their peoples, as being as ancient and as stable as our own. We had
grown used to the map of Europe as it had been left by the great
convulsions between 1848 and 1871. Upon the basis of that map and of
the governments represented on it, and in response to the growing
needs of the world as a