The War and Democracy | Page 5

whole, we had embarked on every kind of
international co-operation and cosmopolitan effort. The Hague
Congress, convened by the Tsar of Russia, looked forward to the day
when war, and the causes of war, should be obsolete. The Socialist
Movement, a growing force in all industrial communities, stood for the
same ideal, and for the international comradeship of the working class.
Law and medicine, science and scholarship followed suit; and every
summer, in quest of health and change, thousands of plain citizens have
crossed international frontiers with scarcely greater sense of change
than in moving from province to province in a single State. Commerce
and industry, the greatest material forces of our time, have become
inextricably international, and in the palpable injury in which a war
would involve them some thinkers of clear but limited vision saw the
best hope of averting a European conflagration.
And yet, throughout these two generations of economic and social
development, the fear of war has never been absent from the mind of
Europe. Her emperors and statesmen have talked of peace; but they
have prepared for war, more skilfully and more persistently than ever
before in the history of Europe or of the world. Almost the entire
manhood of every European nation but England has been trained to
arms; and the annual war budget of Europe rose, in time of peace, to
over 300 million pounds. The States of Europe, each afraid to stand
alone against a coalition of possible rivals, formed themselves into

opposing groups; and each of the groups armed feverishly against the
other, fearful lest, by any change in the diplomatic or political situation,
they might be caught unawares and suffer loss. Thus, it ought not to
have surprised us that finally, through the accident of a royal murder,
the spark should be fired and the explosion ensue, and that merchants
and manufacturers, propagandists and philanthropists, scholars and
scientists, should find the ground shaken beneath their feet and the
projects patiently built up through years of international co-operation
shattered by the events of a few days.
Now that the war has come it is easy to see that they were mistaken.
They had built up the structure of a cosmopolitan society without
looking to the foundations. The economic activities of mankind have
indeed brought a World-Society and a World-Industry into being; but
its political analogue, a World-State, can only be formed, not through
the co-operation of individuals or groups of individuals, but through the
union of nations and the federation of national governments. The first
task of our time for Europe, as we shall try to show in the next chapter,
is to lay firm the foundations of those nations by carrying to victory the
twin principles of Nationality and Democracy--to secure that the
peoples of Europe shall be enabled to have governments corresponding
to their national needs and responsible to their own control, and to
build up, under the care and protection of those governments, the social
institutions and the civilisation of their choice. So long as there are
peoples in Europe under alien governments, curtailed in the use of their
own language,[1] in the propagation of their literature and ideas, in
their social intercourse, in their corporate life, in all that we in Great
Britain understand by civil liberty, so long will there be men who will
mock at the very idea of international peace, and look forward to war,
not as an outworn instrument of a barbarous age, but as a means to
national freedom and self-expression. Englishmen sometimes forget
that there are worse evils than open war, both in political and industrial
relations, and that the political causes for which their fathers fought and
died have still to be carried to victory on the Continent. Nationality and
their national institutions are the very life-blood of English people.
They are as natural to them as the air they breathe. That is what makes
it sometimes so difficult for them to understand, as the history of

Ireland and even of Ulster shows, what nationality means to other
peoples. And that is why they have not realised, not only that there are
peoples in Europe living under alien governments, but that there are
governments in Europe so foolish as to think that men and women
deprived of their national institutions, humiliated in their deepest
feelings, and forced into an alien mould, can make good citizens,
trustworthy soldiers, or even obedient subjects.
[Footnote 1: The German official _communiqué_ on August 26, 1914,
reports as follows: "All the newspapers in Belgium, with the exception
of those in Antwerp, are printed in the German language." This, of
course, is on the model of the Prussian administration of Poland. The
Magyars are more repressive even than the Germans. See the
bibliography given in General Books below.]