THE TEST

T HAS been my fortune to see something of the war with the

IT

army in France, and something also of what war means for those at home who, having sent out sons and brothers, are themselves compelled to wait and watch. I have seen suffering beyond imagination, pain, hardship and misery. I have seen anxiety and sorrow which I should have guessed beforehand men could not have borne without going mad. But I have also seen the human spirit rise to wonderful heights. Men and women have shown themselves greater, nobler, stronger than in the old days of peace I thought they could be.

It would not be very astonishing if the strain of war had called forth a fresh greatness in those whose lives were already seen to be in some way great; in our leaders, our teachers, our thinkers. Or if an added nobility had appeared in our aristocracies of birth, intellect, education, wealth, or whatever other accidents set men above the mass of their fellows. Of such we expect a great response to a great demand. And we have not been disappointed. The old rule of life, Noblesse Oblige, has proved that it still possesses driving force with the most of those to whom it applies. The thing which has amazed me is the greatness of the common

man.

This I in no way expected or looked for. I confess that, before the war, I was no believer in the great qualities of those who are called "the people." They seemed to me to be living lives either selfish, sometimes brutal, always sordid; or else mean, narrow, and circumscribed by senseless conventions. I believed that society, if it progressed at all, would be forced forward by the few, that the many had not in them the qualities necessary for advance, were

incapable of the far visions which make advance desirable. I know now that I was wrong, and I have come to the faith that the hope of the future is in the common people who have shown themselves great.

So, I suppose, I may contribute to a book with such a title as "The Defenders of Democracy." For now I am sure that democracy has promise and hope in it. Only I am not sure that democracy has even begun to understand itself. The common people have displayed virtues so great that those who have seen them unite in a chorus of praise. Their leaders, elected persons, guides chosen by votes and popular acclamation, have shown in a hundred ways that they will not, dare not, trust the people. Our silly censorships, our concealments of unpleasant truths, our suppres sion of criticism, our galling infringements of personal liberty, witness to the fact that authority distrusts the source from which it sprang; that the leaders of our democracy reckon the common people unfit to know, to think or to act. If we are defending democracy we are sacrificing liberty. Will you, in America, do better in this respect than we have done? You believed in the common people before England did. You believe in them, if we may trust your words, more completely than England does. Do you believe in them sufficiently to trust them? Or do you think that democracy can be defended only after it has been blindfolded, hand-cuffed and gagged? This is what you have got to show the world. No one doubts that you can fight. No one doubts that you will fight, with all your strength, as England is fighting. What we wonder is whether your great principle of government, by the people and for the people, will stand the test of a war like this.

D

THE NEW COMRADESHIP

EMOCRACY is the outward and visible sign that a nation recognizes its own needs and aspirations. Democracy wells up from the very pit of things. Its value is its foundation in actuality, its concordance with the slow unending process of man's evolution from the animal he was. Democracy, for one with any comic and cosmic animal sense, is the only natural form of government, because alone it recognizes States as organisms, with spontaneous growth, and a free will of their own. Democracy is final; other forms of government are but steps on the way to it. It is the big thing, because it can and does embody and make use of Aristocracy. It is the rule of the future, because all human progress gradually tends to recognition of God in man, and not outside of him; to the establishment of the humanistic creed, and the belief that we have the future in our own hands.

In life at large, whom does one respect-the man who gropes and stumbles upward to control of his instincts, and full development of his powers, confronting each new darkness and obstacle as it arises; or the man who shelters in a cloister, and lives by rote and rules hung up for him by another in his cell? The first man lives, the second does but exist. So it is with nations.

The American and the Englishman are fundamentally democratic because they are fundamentally self-reliant. Each demands to know why he should do a thing before he does it. This is, I think, the great link between two peoples in many ways very different; and they who ardently desire abiding friendship between our two countries will do well never to lose sight of it. Any sapping of this quality of self-reliance, or judging for oneself, in either country, any undermining of the basis of democracy will imperil

our new-found comradeship. You in America have before all things to fear the warping power of great Trusts; we in England to dread the paralyzing influence of Press groups. We have both to beware of the force which the pressure of a great war inevitably puts into the hands of Military Directorates. We are for the time being hardly democracies, even on the surface; the democratic machinery still exists, but is so ungeared by Censorship and Universal Service, that probably it could not work even if it wanted to. We are now in the nature of business concerns, run by Directors safe in office till General Meetings, which cannot be held till after the War. But I am not greatly alarmed. When the War is over, the pendulum will swing back; the individual conscience which is our guarantee for democracy and friendship will come into its own again, and shape our destinies in common towards freedom and humanity. The English-speaking democracies, in firm union, can and ought to be the unshifting ballast of a better world.

John Galsworthing

I

QUESTIONINGS

HAVE a brilliant idea which, without any parade of modesty, I hereby commend to the notice of the American, French and British Governments. Let them get together as soon as may be and give us an authoritative definition of Democracy. Then we shall know where, collectively, we are. Of course you may say that it has been defined for all time by Abraham Lincoln. But thrilling in its clear simplicity as his slogan epigram may be, a complex political and social system cannot be fully dealt with in fifteen words. I thought I knew what it was until a tidy few millions of friends and myself were knocked silly by recent events in Russia. Here, where the privates of a regiment hold a mass meeting and discuss for hours an order to advance to the relief of sorely pressed comrades and decide not to obey it, and eventually throw down their rifles and with a meus conscia recti, proudly run away, we have Democracy with a vengeance. Not one of the Defenders of Democracy who are writing in this book would stand for it a second. Nor would they stand for the slobbering maniacs who yearn to throw themselves into the arms of the Germans, and, with the kiss of peace and universal brotherhood, kiss away their brothers' blood from their blood-smeared faces. Nor would they stand entirely for those staunch democrats who, inspired with a burning sense of human wrongs but with none of proportion or humor, would sacrifice vital interests of humanity in general for the transient amelioration of the lot of a particular section of the community. For years these visionaries told us that every penny spent on army or navy was a robbery of the working-man. We yielded him many pennies; but alas, they now have to be repaid in blood.