The War and Democracy | Page 5

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.]
The political causes of the present war, then, and of the half century of Armed Peace which preceded it are to be found, not in the particular schemes and ambitions of any of the governments of Europe, nor in their secret diplomacy, nor in the machinations of the great armament interests allied to them, sinister though all these may have been, but in the nature of some of those governments themselves, and in their relation to the peoples over whom they rule.
"If it were possible," writes Prince Büllow, who directed