XII.

THE TEMPTATION OF PEACE.1

THE trials of war inevitably beget a desire for peace, and peace is so fair a thing in herself, and so seductive in her moral garb, that it seems almost blasphemy to suggest that peace hath her temptations no less insidious than war. A tale of sacrifice ever growing in length, a hope of victory deferred again and again, the delusion that the objects for which we entered upon war are already within our grasp, and the contention that the further prosecution of hostilities is merely for revenge make an appeal to public sentiment which can hardly be ignored; and Cabinet Ministers are being diverted from urgent tasks of administration to an oratorical campaign which should be a work of supererogation, at least so far as they are concerned. It is for them to strengthen the arm which wields the sword; and if the pen be mightier than the sword, it is pen that must parry pen.

The morality of peace is the strongest weapon of the pacifist, and there is no assumption more common or more confident in that school of thought than that the conscientious objector is the superman of pure

1 "The Times" Literary Supplement, 7 December, 1916; Germany's peace proposals were announced five days later, on 12 December, and President Wilson's peace note was published on 20 December.

reason and a paragon of virtue; if all men reasoned as they do there would be no war, and the prevalence of war is due to animal instinct and low rationality. That, no doubt, is true as an abstract proposition, and it is not a mere coincidence that the intellectual protagonist of pacifism in England is an expert in the field of mathematical abstraction. The more human and practical problems of peace and war arise from the absence of that universal reason and from the active presence of potentates, philosophers, and people who believe in the gospel of war and deny, by precept and practice, the premises of the pacifist. Shrewd men, even lawyers when divested of wig and gown, have maintained that it is wise to suffer almost any wrong rather than go to law for right. But the most ethical pacifist is constrained to plead when an action is brought against him; even he cannot let his character and his belongings go by default before a litigious attack; and it appears to be illogical and no more moral to refuse to defend a suit in the arbitrament of war. The doctrine of the absolute sanctity of human life might perhaps be pressed into the service of a distinction between litigation and war, and the commandment to do no murder has been interpreted as an injunction not to save others if our own lives are endangered in the effort. But most advocates of peace at any price shrink from these moral conclusions, and one of them has admitted that we were right in resisting the Spanish Armada. In point of fact that Armada was only dispatched because we had been attacking Philip's dominions and assisting his rebellious subjects in the Netherlands; and the modern pacifist position appears to be that the Belgians were justified in opposing

a hopeless resistance to Germany but we were not justified in attempting to make that resistance successful.

The admission of any justification for war is, however, a weak-kneed concession from the point of view of the logical pacifist—that is to say, if he is really the superman he pretends to be. Many artists, we are told, have remained wholly untouched by the passion of the war because their creative instinct renders them immune from the impulses which make for war and death," and the few men in whom the scientific impulse is dominant have noticed the rival myths of warring groups, and have been led through understanding to neutrality". It is with the morals of pacifism that we are concerned; and it has often been remarked that art is neither moral nor immoral; it is non-moral. The self-concentration of the artist is a poor guide for the community of man; and it was to degenerate Cynics that opposition is said to have been provoked by their overweening display of superiority. Neutrality may also be reached by easier paths than by following scientific impulse. There is the broad highway of moral cowardice and intellectual indolence. If we want to shirk a decision between right and wrong and to avoid the sacrifice involved in assisting the one and repressing the other, the readiest and the meanest expedient is to proclaim that it is a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other, and that the war is a conflict of rival myths. Neutrality is for the most part a threadbare cloak for individual or national selfishness; and the assertion of the immorality of the war is often but a plea to be excused the moral obligation of participating in the strife of good and evil.

More colourable is the appeal to the sacrifice involved in the prosecution of the suit, and no one can be indifferent to that claim. Nevertheless, it is not an appeal to morality. The moral and spiritual progress of mankind has only been bought by sacrifice, and he is more blessed who gives than he who receives. To dilate on the sacrifice with the object of showing or suggesting that moral gain is not worth pain is the work of the Tempter and not a sign of moral superiority. A nation's capacity for sacrifice in moral causes is the test of its morality. The pacifist, to do him justice, is less sceptical of the morality of our motives than many fervent advocates of war; but he thinks they might have been attained by other methods, and as a variation on this theme he now urges that they have been brought within our reach by our success upon the Somme. It is here that political ineptitude

comes to the aid of moral obtuseness. We could make, we are told, this winter " a peace which would secure the objects for which the British people entered the war; which would secure the complete evacuation of Belgium, France, and Serbia; which would go a long way towards establishing the principle of nationality; which would defeat all the plans of aggression and domination put forward by the Prussian militarists; which would lay the foundations of a permanent partnership for the settlement of international disputes". The least fanciful of these exercises of the imagination is perhaps the assumption that the Germans would purchase peace by the evacuation of Belgium, France, and Serbia; but could there be a greater illusion than that this evacuation would secure the objects for which the British people entered the

war? Before the war broke out the German Ambassador in London assured Viscount Grey that Austria would take no Serbian territory, to which Viscount Grey very naturally replied that it was easy to reduce a State to vassalage without absorbing its territory; and the moderate Germans, who profess to be willing, for the sake of peace, to evacuate Belgium, stipulate for "material guarantees" that Belgium shall not be used as a means for invading Germany. Inasmuch as Germany used the guaranteed neutrality of Belgium as a means of invading France, it is not difficult to foresee the interpretation she would put upon the material guarantees for her own protection in Belgium.

But the objects for which the British people entered the war have been defined, once and for all, by Mr. Asquith. He said we should never sheath the sword—not until Belgium was evacuated but-" until Belgium recovers in full measure all and more than all that she has sacrificed". Literally, that pledge is not capable of fulfilment. Belgium can never recover the precious lives of which the German invader despoiled her, and Louvain and Ypres can never be what they were before the war. But there is still left a world of difference between evacuation and the atonement the Kaiser will have to make with a heart that will bleed for other things than Louvain. How would mere evacuation repay the hundreds of millions of which Belgium has been robbed during German occupation, the military executions and atrocities, and the slavery inflicted on the people? Nor is justice satisfied by the restitution of stolen property or the resuscitation of the victim of a murderous attack. It was rudimentary advance in our primitive jurisprudence