Wickham SteedAmerican delegation promptly asked me for a memorandum these Syrian conversations and sent it to the President. An extra copy being made for the American colonial expert, Mr. Beer. But, before matters could proceed far, a flutter was caused by the return from Moscow of Messrs. William C. Bullitt (descendent of Hyam Solomon) and Lincoln Steffens who had been sent to Russia towards the middle of February by Colonel House and Mr. Lansing, “for the purpose of studying conditions, political and economic, therein for the benefit of the American Commisioners plenipotentiary to negotiate peace.” Mr. Philip Kerr and, presumably, Mr. Lloyd George knew and approved of this mission. Mr. Bullitt was instructed to return if possible by the time President Wilson should have come back to Paris from the United States. Potent international financial interests were at work in favour of the immediate recognition of the Bolshevists. Those influences had been largely responsible for the Anglo-American proposal in January to call Bolshevist representatives to Paris at the beginning of the Peace Conference — a proposal which had failed after having been transformed into a suggestion for a Conference with the Bolshevists at Prinkipo. The well-known American Jewish banker, Mr. Jacob Schiff, was known to be anxious to secure recognition for the Bolshevists, among whom Jewish influence was predominant; and Tchitcherin, the Bolshevist Commissary for Foreign Affairs, had revealed the meaning of the January proposal by offering extensive commercial and economic concessions in return for recognition. At a moment when the Bolshevists were doing their utmost to spread revolution throughout Europe, and when the Allies were supposed to be making peace in the name of high moral principles, a policy of recognizing them, as the price of commercial concessions, would have sufficed to wreck the whole Peace Conference and Europe with it. At the end of March, Hungary was already Bolshevist; Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and even Germany were in danger, and European feeling against the blood-stained fanatics of Russia ran extremely high. Therefore, when it transpired that an American official, connected with the Peace Conference, had returned, after a week's visit to Moscow, with an optimistic report upon the state of Russia and with an authorized Russian proposal for the virtual recognition of the Bolshevist regime by April 10th, dismay was felt everywhere except by those who had been privy to the sending of Mr. Bullitt. Yet another complication, it was apprehended, would be added to the general muddle into which the Conference had got itself, and the chances of its succeeding at all would be seriously diminished.
On the afternoon of March 26th an American friend inadvertently gave me a notion that a revival of the Prinkipo proposal, in some form, was in the air. That evening I wrote to Northcliffe:
The Americans are again talking of recognizing the Russian Bolshevists. If they want to destroy the whole moral basis of the Peace and of the League of Nations they have only to do so.
And, in the Paris Daily Mail of March 27th, (1919) I wrote strongly against any proposal to recognize
the desperadoes whose avowed aim is to turn upside down the whole basis of Western civilization.
That day Colonel House asked me to call upon him. I found him worried both by my criticism of any recognition of the Bolshevists and by the certainty, which he had not previously realized, that if the President were to recognize the Bolshevists in return for commercial concessions his whole “idealism” would be hopelessly compromised as commercialism in disguise. I pointed out to him that not only would Wilson be utterly discredited but that the League of Nations would go by the board, because all the small peoples and many of the big peoples of Europe would be unable to resist the Bolshevism which Wilson would have accredited. I insisted that, unknown to him, the prime movers were Jacob Schiff, Warburg, and other international financiers, who wished above all to bolster up the Jewish Bolshevists in order to secure a field for German and Jewish exploitation of Russia. Colonel House argued, however, that without relations of some kind with the Bolshevists it would be impossible to prevent the utter ruin of Russia and the starvation of thousands of the best Russians who were without food; and that, if supplies could be sent to Russia under proper control, the needy might be relieved and the Allied and Associated Governments might get trustworthy information of the true position in Russia. He asked me therefore to meet him and Auchincloss next morning to see if some sound line of policy could not be worked out. This I agreed to do; but, shortly after leaving Colonel House, information reached me that Mr. Lloyd George and President Wilson would probably agree next morning to recognize the Bolshevists in accordance with Mr. Bullitt's suggestions. Feeling that there was no time to lose I wrote, forthwith, a leading article for the Paris Daily Mail of March 28th, called “Peace with Honour.” Its principal passage ran:
The issue is whether the Allied and Associated Governments shall, directly or indirectly, accredit an evil thing known as Bolshevism. Prospects of lucrative commercial enterprise in Russia, of economic concessions and of guarantees for debts, are held out to them if they will only fall down and worship Lenin and Trotsky.
There is one man to whom such temptation cannot appeal. His name is Woodrow Wilson. Since he led his country into war against German Imperialist militarism and all the forces of international finance and unmoral commercialism that supported it, he has done more than any Allied or Associated statesman to accredit sane idealism as a positive force in the life of nations. He has stood out as the champion of small peoples and of their rights. He threw the whole strength of the American people into the struggle in support of the ideals he formulated for the world, and he promised them a peace with honour and justice. Were he to bring them a peace with commercialism, belief in the sincerity of Anglo-Saxon idealism would die the world over.
Who are the tempters that would dare whisper into the ears of the Allied and Associated Governments? They are not far removed from the men who preached peace with profitable dishonour to the British people in July, 1914. They are akin to, if not identical with, the men who sent Trotsky and some scores of associate desperadoes to ruin the Russian Revolution as a democratic, anti-German force in the spring of 1917. They are the spiritual authors of the Prinkipo policy, and they it is who, in reality, inspired the offer of Tchitcherin, the Bolshevist Commissary for foreign affairs, to make economic and commercial concessions to the Allies in connection with the Prinkipo Conference. ...
That intrigue failed. It may be revived. Lenin, who is a sinister fanatic, would promise any price to secure the recognition he needs in order that his agents and helpers in Allied and Associated countries may be able to raise their heads and openly to encompass the ruin of ordered democratic civilization by claiming that what Allied and Associated Governments had sanctioned in Russia is lawful and laudable elsewhere. ...
The establishment of just conditions of peace will by itself help to counteract Bolshevism. But the essential thing is that the Allied and Associated Governments should keep their escutcheon clean and be utterly resolved to have no peace that is not a true peace with honour.
I had hardly sent this article to the printers when an American friend, Mr. Charles R. Crane, who had been dining with President Wilson, called to see me. He showed great alarm at the turn things were taking. “Bullitt is back,” he said, “and the President is already talking Bullitt's language. I fear he may ruin everything. Our people at home will certainly not stand for the recognition of the Bolshevists at the bidding of Wall Street.” He urged me to point out the danger clearly in the Daily Mail. I reassured him and told him that what I could say was already said and that he would find it in the Daily Mail next morning.
Before I was up next day, Colonel House telephoned to say that he wished to see me urgently. Apparently, to use an Americanism, my article “had got under the President's hide.” When I reached the Crillon, House and Auchincloss looked grave. I told them that, had I waited to discuss policy with them before writing my article, the chances were that there would have been no policy to discuss because the President and, possibly, Lloyd George would have committed themselves to recognition of the Bolshevists that very morning. The Colonel begged me, however, in view of the delicacy of the situation to refrain from further comment until it could be seen how things would go; and I consented, on the understanding that nothing irrevocable would be done unless I were informed beforehand. Then the Colonel, Auchinclosa, and I went for a long drive during which we discussed a possible policy in regard to the Bolshevists. Its main lines were that relations should be established with them in order to secure protection for a kind of Hoover revictualling mission on conditions that would ensure the relief of non-Bolshevist as well as of Bolshevist Russians; that military operations supported or undertaken by the Allies against the Bolshevists would cease; that there should be no Bolshevist propaganda in Central Europe or in Allied countries; and that the question of recognition should be reserved until the Bolshevists had shown their wish and their power to maintain orderly government and to respect international engagements.
We returned to the Crillon at midday. As I passed through the secretaries' room on my way to that of Colonel House, Arthur Frazier held up his hand to stop me. He had the telephone receiver at his ear and was engaged in conversation. When it ended, he said, “You have done it this time. Recognition has gone bu'st. That was Bullitt talking. He tells me that he breakfasted this morning with Lloyd George who had the Daily Mail before him, and that Lloyd George said it was impossible to go on with recognition while the Daily Mail was talking like that.”
In his evidence before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, on September 12, 1919, Mr. Bullitt gave the following account of his breakfast with Mr. Lloyd George:
The next morning [March 28] I had breakfast with Mr. Lloyd George at his apartment. General Smuts and Sir Maurice Hankey and Mr. Philip Kerr were also present, and we discussed the matter at considerable length. I brought Mr. Lloyd George the official text of the [Bolshevist] proposal, the same official one in that same envelope which I have just shown to you. He had previously read it, it having been telegraphed from Helsingfors. As he had previously read it, he merely glanced over it and said, “That is the same one I have already read,” and he handed it to General Smuts, who was across the table, and said, “General, this is of the utmost importance and interest, and you ought to read it right away.” General Smuts read it immediately and said he thought it should not be allowed to lapse; that it was of the utmost importance. Mr. Lloyd George, however, said that he did not know what he could do with British public opinion. He had a copy of the Daily Mail in his hand, and he said, “As long as the British press is doing this kind of thing, how can you expect me to be sensible about Russia?”
Mr. Lloyd George's version of this incident was given by him in the House of Commons on April 16, 1919, little more than a fortnight after it occurred. In reply to a question from Mr. Clynes whether the Prime Minister could make any statement “on the approaches or the representations alleged to have been made to his Government by persons acting on behalf of such government as there is in Central Russia,” Mr. Lloyd George said:
“No, we have had no approaches at all. Of course, there are constantly men of all nationalities coming and going from Russia who are always coming back with their own tales from Russia. But we have had nothing authentic. We have had no approaches of any sort or kind. I have only heard of reports that others have got proposals which they assume have come from authentic quarters, but these have never been put before the Peace Conference by any member of that Conference at all. Therefore, we have not considered them. I think I know what Mr. Clynes refers to. There was some suggestion that there was some young American who had come back. All that I can say about that is that it is not for me to judge the value of these communications. But if the President of the United States had attached any value to them he would have brought them before the Conference, and he certainly did not.
In his statement to the United States Committee on Foreign Relations (page 1272 of the Official Report) in September, 1919, Mr. Bullitt dealt with this answer, saying:
About a week after I had handed to Mr. Lloyd George the [Bolshevist] official proposal, with my own hands, in the presence of three other persons, he made a speech before the British Parliament, and gave the British people to understand that he knew nothing whatever about any such proposal. It was the most egregious case of misleading the public, perhaps the boldest that I have even known in my life. On the occasion of that statement of Mr. Lloyd George, I wrote to the President. I clipped his statement from a newspaper and sent it to the President; and I asked the President to inform me whether the statement of Mr. Lloyd George was true or untrue. He was unable to answer, inasmuch as would have had to reply on paper that Mr. Lloyd George had made an untrue statement. So flagrant was this that various members of the British Mission called on me at the Crillon a day or so later and apologized for the Prime Minister's action in the case.
It was explained to me by the members of the British Delegation who called on me, that the reason for this deception was that although, when Lloyd George got back to London, he intended to make a statement there favourable to peace with Russia, he found that Lord Northcliffe, acting through Mr. Wickham Steed, the editor of The Times, and Mr. Winston Churchill, British Secretary for War, had rigged the Conservative majority of the House of Commons against him, and that they were ready to slay him then and there if he attempted to speak what was his own opinion at the moment on Russian policies.
The truth is that the action I had taken against the recognition of the Bolshevists was taken publicly, ten days before there was any question of correspondence between Lord Northcliffe and members of the House of Commons; and, on Mr. Bullitt's own showing, it was my article, “Peace with Honour” in the Paris Daily Mail of March 28th that caused Mr. Lloyd George not to proceed with the proposal which Mr. Bullitt had brought back from Russia. With that article Lord Northcliffe had nothing whatever to do.
SOME thirty years ago I listened in Paris to a public discussion on the philosophy of history. The speakers were two leading French Socialists, Jean Jaurès, the great orator, and Paul Lafargue, a son-in-law of Karl Marx. With poetical passion, Jaurès contended that historical changes are mainly the result of spiritual influences which, in various ways and in different degrees, inspire men to struggle for a realization of their ideals. Lafargue replied by insisting upon the materialistic view of history which Marx propounded, and by claiming that idealism or religion had merely been a cloak for the realities of economic strife. In a phrase which I have quoted elsewhere, he boasted that “Marx turned God out of History.”
Some years later, when the absence of idealism in his own life had made him feel that it was no longer worth living, Lafargue and his wife committed suicide. Jaurès remained a leader of French social thought until he fell to the bullet of a reactionary fanatic on the eve of the war. Once a passage from his writings was even read by a French bishop in a Lenten sermon at Lyons. When devout ladies afterwards wished to know the name of the divine whose words had edified them, the Bishop asked them to guess it. Their guesses ranged from Chrysostom to Father Didon. At last, the Bishop whispered into their scandalized ears the name of the “Reverend Father” Jaurès.
I have often pondered over the two views of history held by Jaurès and Lafargue. Though neither of them is exhaustive, and though the truth may well lie somewhere between the two, I think that the idealist view lies nearer than the materialist to the heart of things. “To turn God out of History” is a formidable business. However potent may be economic pressure, over-population, famine, pestilence, or climate, their influence seems to me to have been weaker at many critical epochs in the history of civilized humanity than that of the ideals which men and nations have cherished. Nor has reflection upon the War of 1914 and its causes altered my belief. It is still too early to judge whether the war marked a definite turn for the better in the fortunes of mankind or whether further disasters will be needed to convince the present or a future generation that national and international ways of life must be changed unless civilization itself is to perish. That grave issue still hangs in the balance. Some, indeed, ask whether the war was “worth while.” To us who knew the world before the war, that question seems beside the point. Is freedom, moral and political, “worth while”? In thinking of the war and its sequel we are, besides, too apt to remember its vicissitudes, the havoc it wrought, and the wrangling that followed it rather than the profound and, on the whole, beneficent changes which it brought about. It swept away three powerful Imperial systems — the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian. It overthrew polities founded upon mediaeval conceptions and it carried forward the work of European liberation which the French Revolution and Napoleon began. As the military exponent of the French Revolution, Napoleon not only destroyed what remained of the Holy Roman Empire “of German nation,” but he infused the spirit of nationality into a dozen submerged races. The Holy Alliance strove to undo this work, and undid it in part; but it could not stifle permanently the German or the Italian aspirations towards freedom and unity. Those aspirations led the Italians to Rome in 1870. In a Bismarckian perversion, they also led the German Princes to Versailles in 1871. The enthronement of the Hohenzollerns as hereditary German Emperors implied, however, the strengthening in Germany of the mediaevalism against which the liberal partisans of German unity had long contended; and the German people were presently corrupted by the material prosperity which the Hohenzollern Empire fostered. Moreover, the League of the Three Emperors, like the Triple Alliance that replaced it, put the interests of dynasties once more above the welfare of peoples. This modern medisevalism, strengthened by the support of science and by that of vast business organizations, was bound to expand and dominate or to perish in the attempt. It could not live as an equal among equals. The German watchword “World Mastery or Downfall” tersely stated the alternatives confronting it. Eager to extend their sway, politically and economically, to impose their Kultur upon larger and larger sections of the human race, the Germans of the Hohenzollern Empire conceived their own political system and ways of life as intrinsically superior to all others. German philosophy from Hegel to Nietzsche — without forgetting Marx, who dreamed of the world-dictatorship of a proletariat inspired by German-Jewish ideas—had built up this conception. The rest of the world had to choose between submission and resistance to it.
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That was the plainest issue in August, 1914. But other issues were linked with it. Among them, none was greater than that of the future of the non-Germanic and non-Magyar peoples of Central Europe. For them, the question was whether they should be permanently enslaved by a pan-German Empire, stretching from Belgium across Central and Southeastern Europe far into Asia and Africa, or whether they should burst their bonds and gain freedom once more to share, as independent nations, in European development. The importance of this issue was tardily perceived by the Western Allies. Indeed, as long as the Russian Empire stood, they could not face it frankly in its bearing upon Poland and the border races of Russia. Yet upon it hung the fortunes of the war. Practically, this issue resolved itself into the question whether Allied policy should seek to preserve Austria-Hungary or whether it should deliberately aim at the liberation of the subject Hapsburg races, without prejudice to their eventual regrouping in some more elastic form of Central European organization.
As I have explained, my own mind was made up on this point as early as 1909 when the High Treason trial at Agram and the Friedjung trial in Vienna showed that the Hapsburg Monarchy had lost whatever inner virtue it may once have possessed. The course of the Bosnian annexation crisis had already proved it to be bound, hand and foot, to Germany. Masaryk, who knew Austria-Hungary far better than I, reached the same conclusion about the same time, though he only told me of it during the war. To him more than to any man belongs the credit for having brought the Allied Governments in Europe, and the Government of the United States, to some understanding of this crucial truth; though not until the eleventh hour, under pressure of the German offensive in March, 1918, did their comprehension of it triumph over adverse influences.
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Of those influences I am persuaded that the power of international Jewry was the strongest. International Clericalism, proceeding from the—to my mind—mistaken view of the interests of the Roman Church which has prevailed in the Vatican and among the Jesuits since the Counter-Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, certainly worked to save the Hapsburgs and, with them, the pan-German cause, as did the snobbishness and dull Conservatism of small aristocratic cliques in Allied countries. Yet Jewish influence was more persistent and more efficient. Had it been united, and could it have been coherently directed, it might well have prevailed; but, in point of fact, Jewish idealism served, in part, to counteract the work of Jewish finance and of Jewish cosmopolitan agencies. This Jewish idealism was of two kinds. Though, in one of its forms, it strengthened for a time the pro-German and pan-German tendencies of Jewish finance by bringing Jewish hatred of Imperial Russia into line with Jewish attachment to Germanism, its support of Germanism slackened when the Russian Empire fell. Those who hold that Jewry is always guided by material considerations are apt to be woefully wrong. The gulf that severed Western Europe from Russia during the latter half of the 19th century was dug and kept open chiefly by Jewish resentment of Russian persecution of the Jews. Yet that resentment sprang also from Jewish detestation of the Russian Holy Synod and of the Russian Orthodox Church as survivals of mediaeval Christianity and as promoters of a crusade for the possession of “Tsarigrad” (Constantinople) and of the Holy Places. Against Russian Christian fanaticism was ranged an intense Jewish fanaticism hardly to be paralleled save among the more militant sects of Islam. This Jewish fanaticism allied itself with the anti-Russian forces before and during the earlier years of the war. It abated only when the Russian Revolution of March 1917 and the subsequent advent of Bolshevism, largely Jewish in doctrine and in personnel, overthrew the Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church. The joy of Jewry at these events was not merely the joy of triumph over an oppressor but was also gladness at the downfall of hostile religious and semi-religious institutions — a joy, moreover, in which the Vatican shared, as its attitude towards the Bolshevist delegates to the Genoa Conference of April, 1922, significantly indicated.
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When international Jewish sentiment had thus ceased to be actively pro-German, another form of Jewish idealism came more effectively into play. The Zionist, or Jewish National, movement which was started by the late Dr. Theodore Herzl in the last decade of the 19th century, had fired the imaginations of millions of the younger and poorer Jews throughout the world. Frowned upon and discouraged by the wealthier “assimilationist” and “semi-assimilationist” Jews in various countries, it had, nevertheless, kindled in the Jewish masses a spirit akin to that of the Maccabeans and had acted upon them as a regenerating force. Towards the end of 1916, mainly through the instrumentality of the late Sir Mark Sykes, then an Under-Secretary to the British War Cabinet, and of Mr. James A. Malcolm, a prominent British Armenian, the Zionist organizations in Europe and the United States began to identify themselves with the Allied cause. Mr. Malcolm rightly urged that the Jews were less pro-German than anti-Russian and that their national aspirations were not inimical to the Allied cause. As a result of discussions with Zionist leaders in England, especially Dr. Weizmann, Mr. Sokolow, and Dr. Greenberg, communications were established with prominent American Zionists who used their influence in favour of American participation in the war. The German Government had, at various times, approached the Zionists, but had finally estranged them by insisting that German rather than Hebrew should be the recognized Jewish language. Several members of the British Government were, on the contrary, frankly in sympathy with Zionism; and, in November, 1917, the Foreign Secretary, Mr. Balfour, made an official declaration in favour of the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Not only did this declaration increase the interest of American Jewry in the war, but it tended to neutralize the influence in Russia of the pro-German Jewish Socialists who were working with the Bolshevists. The efforts subsequently made to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine and the difficulties inherent both in the nature of things and in some aspects of the Jewish character, belong rather to the history of the Zionist movement than to the consideration of the broad factors that operated in favour of an Allied victory; but it is incontestable that Zionism played a part in the defeat of the pan-Germanism with which so many Jewish financiers and business interests had been identified. General Ludendorff is alleged to have said, after the war, that “the Balfour Declaration was the cleverest thing done by the Allies in the way of propaganda,” and that he wished Germany had thought of it first. This is a truly German view. The Balfour Declaration was not intended merely as propaganda. It expressed the sincere intention of the British Government: It proceeded from recognition of the fact that the soundest and healthiest element in modern Jewry is the spirit which prompts Jews to be proud of their race and to seek, as Jews, openings for their great gifts, rather than as what some Zionists call “one hundred and five per cent.” Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, or Americans.
The future of Jewry cannot be foreseen. Since the war, anti-Semitism has revived in many countries. Jewish speculation in the debased currencies of Europe has accentuated hostility towards Jews in general; and Jewish association with Bolshevism has not tended to decrease it. Should the Russian peasantry throw off the “dictatorship of the proletariat” set up by Lenin and Trotsky in the name of their prophet Marx, the world may witness massacres beside which the pogroms of Tsardom would pale into insignificance. Then again a great gulf might yawn between the Western world and Russia — a gulf even harder to bridge than that over which the Franco-Russian Alliance was built at the end of last century. “Anti-Semitism” is no cure for the evils which the presence of a disproportionate number of Jews usually bring upon non-Jewish communities. The cure, if cure there be, can only lie in the patient and sympathetic study of Jewry by non-Jews, and in the leadership of Jewry itself by Jews intelligent and courageous enough to perceive the limitations of the Jewish genius and to take them into account in framing Jewish policy.
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Like many another problem, in appearance insoluble, the Jewish question may ultimately be affected by the greatest result of the war — the establishment of the League of Nations. Without the inspiration of the ideal which the League of Nations represents — albeit imperfectly, as yet — I doubt whether the Allied and Associated peoples could have won the war. The League embodies the aspirations of the better part of mankind towards a settlement of international disputes otherwise than by arms. Its aim is to subject the use of force in the affairs of nations to rules and restrictions like those which, in civilized communities, govern the treatment of wrong-doers. Wittingly or unwittingly, its establishment was a step towards the federalization of peoples; though, like most steps in, human progress, it was inspired by a negative rather than by a positive purpose — the avoidance of recognized evil rather than the achievement of an ideal good. Whether or not President Wilson was wise to insist on putting the amended Covenant of the League into the Treaty of Versailles, and on making the League the warden and moderator of the Treaty, is now mainly an academic question. Both the Treaty and the League are in being. The one may be progressively improved by consent through the agency of the other; but neither the one nor the other can be upset, or be drastically revised from without, unless the chief fruit of the war is to wither and a disappointed humanity is to fall into a chaos compared with which the qualified mediaevalism of the 19th century would seem to have been a Golden Age.
Yet, if the League of Nations is to fulfill its purpose, it will need to be completed by the association with it of the great peoples who either hold aloof from it or are excluded from membership. Of these peoples—the Americans, the Germans, and the Russians—the Germans hold the clearest position. They can, if they wish, qualify for admission to the League by shouldering manfully the consequences of defeat in a war for which the German Imperial Government was chiefly responsible and in which the German peoples were not unwilling accomplices. A generation may pass before the Germans are able to view the war in perspective and to recover from the moral effects of the isolation it entailed; and even a generation may not suffice unless there arise in Germany new leaders and teachers endowed with vision to see the truth and with courage to tell it to their own people. The admission of Germany to the League of Nations might hasten this process. The Allied peoples and Governments might also accelerate it by friendly treatment of Germany when her recognition of her past errors has clearly hardened into a resolve to eschew them in future. But it is essential that the renewal of friendly intercourse with Germany should not involve, on the :part of Allied peoples and governments, any retrospective weakening of their grip upon the principles and ideals in whose name they fought and won the war.
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President Wilson's phrase that the object of the war was to make the world “safe for democracy” has been much derided. Nevertheless, it expresses a fundamental truth which only needs accurate definition to become axiomatic. Historically, “democracy” is a negative concept. It implied the imposition of restrictions upon absolute or arbitrary rule. It was the negation of the doctrine of Divine Right. Its purpose was to protect communities and their individual members against the dangers inherent in government by monarchs or oligarchies. But it remains to be proved that the transformation of this original, negative conception of democracy into a positive doctrine that, the wider the “bounds of freedom” are drawn, the safer and the healthier a community will be, is a sane and sound development. The battle between the representative system in democracy and the tendencies which aim at “direct” government “by the people,” has yet to be fought out; and, before it is won, the principles of individual liberty may need to be stated afresh. Here, again, issue is joined between negative and positive concepts. Broadly speaking, liberal principles imply the removal of as many restrictions upon the freedom of individuals as the welfare of the “greater number” may permit. They are incompatible with the more modern tendencies which would establish the tyranny of organized masses, or of armed “popular” dictatorships over individual citizens, no matter whether those tendencies take the form of “Bolshevism” or of “Fascism.” The world cannot be “safe for democracy” until these tendencies have been vanquished or placed under restraint for the general good.
Hence, it is impossible to speak with confidence of the future of Russia or of her progress towards membership of the League of Nations. She may have to pass through more than one bloody ordeal before her peoples find the path of ordered freedom. In the long run, she may, indeed, prove to have rendered, inadvertently, a service to civilization by becoming an experimental ground for the devastating theories of Karl Marx. Meanwhile, those Western countries in which Bolshevist doctrines have, in part, perverted the ethical elements in the Socialist and Labour movements; and those where, as in Italy, Bolshevism has acted as an irritant productive of Nationalist and semi-military reactions, may find it no easy task to eliminate the poison from their social systems. This cannot be done merely by unintelligent denunciations of Bolshevism or by the establishment of counter-tyrannies. It must be done by thinkers and political leaders capable of restating and of inculcating upon the people the doctrine of the duties and the rights of individuals in the form of a new Liberalism that shall take full account of economic and scientific progress.
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This restatement of democratic doctrine is most likely to come from Europe. Wide as is the field for democratic essay in the United States, one important element seems to be lacking in the political life of the American people—the element of risk. The United States has not lived under any tangible menace to its security — a great advantage which has also entailed drawbacks. In Europe, the sense of risk lends reality to questions which might otherwise be academic. But while the American people are averse from participation in the politics of Europe and in the risks which those politics involve, European efforts to consolidate the moral and political gains of the war, which America helped to win, will appeal powerfully to American idealism. If the United States is ever to renew its “association” with Europe, the European peoples may need to revise their views of American intervention in the war. The wonder is not that the American nation — separated from Europe by more than three thousand miles of sea and, as regards some of its regions, by another three thousand miles of land — should have withdrawn from a Peace Settlement which it did not and could not understand, but rather that it should have come into the war at all. In many ways, the revulsion of feeling that caused the United States to reject the Treaty of Versailles and to cut adrift from Europe after the war was more natural, in view of the physical detachment of the United States from Europe, than American participation in the war. To treat this physical detachment as a negligible factor and to imagine that the American people as a whole — among whom the influence of the dwellers in the Middle West and the West is increasingly powerful — will readily return to the position of 1917 and 1918, is to cherish a fond illusion. The truth is rather that the American people will be drawn towards Europe in proportion as the policies and the conduct of European nations appeal at once to American idealism and seem to offer the United States some prospect of advantageous cooperation. Europeans ought never to forget that the United States has its own problems to solve; that within its immense territory, still largely unpeopled, it has wide scope for its energies; that the issues raised by the opening of the Panama Canal are turning its eyes southward; and that questions may arise in the Pacific which will deflect American attention from Europe and European troubles. Yet, as the Washington Conference showed, the Pacific Ocean may form a link between the United States and those European countries which have interests to safeguard in Pacific waters; and, as that Conference also showed, the power of hastening or retarding the association of the United States with Europe lies chiefly in the hands of Great Britain and France.
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They, too, hold the key to the European problem itself. It has grown worse with their estrangement and their attempts to pursue divergent courses. Critics of an Anglo-French Entente have consistently failed to suggest any sound alternative policy for either country. A French attempt to dominate Europe single-handed, or with the sole support of the new Central European nations established by the Peace Treaties would, sooner or later, lead to another European upheaval in which the sympathies of the rest of the world might not support French policy. A British association with Germany against France would as inevitably bring on a conflict the very idea of which the British people abhor. Doubtless, the desire of the French people for security has inspired, directly and indirectly, many of the vagaries that have weaned British feeling from France; while the insularity of British conceptions of Europe has dulled, in the British people, the sense which they acquired, tardily and temporarily, during the wax that the security of France is as essentially a British interest as the security of Great Britain is an interest of France. The contingent truth that the security of Germany is a joint Franco-British interest has, however, been more fully perceived on the British than on the French side of the English Channel. German security can be peacefully safeguarded only under the auspices of the League of Nations when once Germany shall have accepted the new order in Europe; but the League of Nations itself cannot thrive unless France and Great Britain go hand in hand. Through it they can ensure the existence of the new nations which their common sacrifices helped to create. They can also establish solid ground upon which the United States may set its foot should it ever desire again to tread the path which President Wilson descried. And they can, if they will, bring Europe nearer to some form of federation that would at once banish the danger of war and open new fields for cooperation to her peoples.
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For this to be possible, England must be true to the traditions she has — albeit with some lapses — upheld for centuries. She must not live for herself alone or imagine that her physical severance from the continent of Europe entitles her to cherish insular notions, however much those notions may be universalized by solidarity between her and the self-governing Dominions of the British Empire. Her people need to strengthen their grasp upon the principle that their existence is bound up with the preservation of freedom. They need to understand that, while they have curtailed the rights of the Crown and have transformed its functions into those of an hereditary presidency over the nation and the Empire, other forms of arbitrary rule may be more dangerous and more insidious than those derived from the Divine Right of Kings. Some of these dangers are inherent in the growth of officialdom, and in its deadening effect upon the sense of individual responsibility. Others lie in the perversion of Parliamentary Government into a system under which groups and cliques and interests control the executive. Others, again, proceed from the interpenetration of the official world and high finance, and from the deification of political economy as the source of all wisdom in public affairs. Yet others are involved in the efforts of class or trade organizations to impose their tyranny upon the public, careless of its welfare so long as their immediate points be gained: All these tendencies need to be watched, fought and curbed, if a healthy public spirit is to be preserved in England, and if she is to keep in the world the place she held of old. Her very detachment from the Continent should help her to view its affairs serenely, while the spirit of compromise and the sense of practical reality which are joined, in her people, with an almost mystical faith in the virtue of trying to do what is right because it is right, may enable her still to set an unostentatious and beneficent example.
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The monk to whom Giovanni dalle Bande Nere made his soldierly confession, understood, with a truly Catholic intelligence, that it was enough — and shrove him. He exercised not merely the charity that “shall cover a multitude of sins” but the charity born of comprehension that men — and peoples — who live and work according to their talents, most nearly obey the injunction to strive after sincerity as the cardinal principle of life. Throughout these pages I have sought to be sincere; and, despite the frankness of many passages in my narrative, I trust that charitable readers will grant me some measure of absolution. I believe that, in the main, I saw rightly, spoke truly, and tried to do things worth doing. Not otherwise do I hope to speak and to act during as many of the next thirty years as may be allotted to me.
THE END