The Change of Mind in England

The Best Opinion in Britain is That the Traditional Technique of Imperialism is Now Utterly Antiquated

WALTER LIPPMANN

NOW that the steel chest has been opened, it can do no harm to tell another bit of gossip about the Peace Conference. The gossip I am repeating may be literally true. But even if it is not, the story is as true an allegory as was ever invented about politicians.

During the late winter or early spring of 1919 the British delegation was at odds with itself. One camp of experts insisted that Germany must bind herself to pay the fabulous indemnity which was promised to the British voters in the election of 1918. The other camp wished to ignore the election, and limit Germany's debt to the reasonable sum stipulated in the armistice agreement. The question was critical; the battleground was the mind of the Prime Minister; the stakes were the honour of the Allies and the prospects of recovery of Europe. Germany would not actually pay more, mind you, under one scheme than under the other. For even the smaller demand was an enormous sum for a beaten and exhausted country. The difference was not over what Germany would pay, but over what it was wise to make her promise to pay. If the advocates of a Fabulous Indemnity won, not one gold mark would be collected, but the effort to collect would keep Europe armed and in turmoil as long as men continued to nurse the illusion of payment.

Politicians and Public Opinion

IT was obvious, of course, to these Britons that until they had had a week-end over it, they would not be able to decide. So they went off to the country and debated. According to the version I heard the question for debate was put in this form: "Shall we make a Heaven or a Hell peace?" By Monday morning the angels had won, and the delegation came back to Paris, the Prime Minister glowing with righteousness. He was determined to support President Wilson, and to let a greater loyalty to the facts of Europe wash out the smaller insincerity of his campaign speeches. News of this decision soon reached London. And at once more than a hundred hard-faced men in Parliament addressed a glowering telegram to the Prime Minister. The Northcliffe press, through its London and Paris organs, began to thunder. The blood in the Prime Minister's veins curdled.

This sort of thing is often described as the act of bowing to the will of the people. And if you believe that the ideal statesman is a weathercock, fitted with a universal joint so that he can spin more readily in the breezes of propaganda, you must say with pensive mellowness that this is democracy, and that democrats have no right to complain. But if you do not subscribe to the weathercock theory, with its accompaniment of mellowness, it will be because you do not believe that any of us can, while he sits at the breakfast table, arrive at a useful opinion about so complicated a matter as, for example, German reparations. The subject is quite literally meaningless and the opinion worthless. For there is nothing in any layman's experience to make the subject comprehensible, no matter how earnestly he lets his conscience be his guide. Nobody is born with a conscience for estimating the subtlest economic problem that ever confronted mortal men. And consequently the politician makes nonsense out of democracy, when he waits for the mandate of public opinion, as he calls it, while he and his little circle hide the essential knowledge on which a respectable opinion might be based. Carefully concealing the real egg, he expects public opinion to hatch out a glass egg by some miraculous excitement.

Propaganda and the Realities

ALL these apologies which are assembled to explain that statesmen do what they know to be dangerous and leave undone what they know to be necessary, because "public feeling is not ready", ought to make men cold and suspicious. When I read, years after the event, what an excellent fight for righteousness somebody made in the dark, and how he caved in because popular feeling was against him, I want to ask how in the name of Ivan the Terrible he expects popular feeling to be with him, if he keeps his excellent arguments and his superior information and his prophetic insight for a few chosen spirits?

Everywhere in Europe, it does not matter where you go, statesmen are wrestling to free themselves from the coils of illusion, which most of them never sincerely believed in themselves, though they once pretended in public to regard them as the highest patriotism. In all our western world men are slowly, painfully, and at the price of cruel disappointments, extricating themselves from the opinions which the immensely discreet insiders never shared, or, at least, abandoned long ago. The public opinion which statesmen point to as their excuse for not following their own best judgment is mainly opinion created by their own ministries of propaganda and maintained by their own censorships and secret services. That is why almost every reporter has had the disconcerting experience of emerging from a confidential talk with the eminent only to find that obscure people were being browbeaten, inspected, and ostracized for expressing opinions that the eminent man assumed as a matter of course.

The spiritual progress of the last three years is a record of the gradual closing of the gap between the state of mind created by propaganda and the state of mind which has some resemblance to the realities. Nowhere is that progress more dramatic and more sharply defined than in England, and nowhere is there a more perfect barometer of the change than Mr. Lloyd George. Three years ago this supreme indicator might have gone down to utter defeat as a politician and to immortal fame as a prophet, had he said what he knew and believed. There is a text of Mohammed's that was made for him: "Ye are in an age," Mr. Lloyd George might have warned his party, "in which, if ye abandon one-tenth of that which is ordered (by the Tory Coalitionists), ye will be ruined. After this a time will come when he who shall observe one-tenth of what is now ordered will be redeemed". Mr. Lloyd George, of course, said no such thing. He did not abandon onetenth of the indemnity estimates. Therefore, he was not ruined, whatever may have happened to European civilization. But now the time has come when he is prepared to observe just about one-tenth of what was then ordered. And so he now figures everywhere as the redeemer of Europe.

A Victory Without Elation

HE has fled, as fast as words could carry him, from the position of 1918. He has fled from the position he was forced into by the hard-faced men who worked up a bewildered and stricken people. He has installed himself in a new and quite contradictory position insistently pointed out to him by what is now virtually the whole British nation. He reflects a very great change of mind.

There has been some change of mind in every country to be sure, but the change in England is perhaps the most remarkable. It is not surprising, for example, that America, which was stirred out of isolation only by the most zealous effort, should have swung back temporarily to its older habits, when the immediate stimulus disappeared. The change in England is of a different sort. It is not reversion. The change is more like that which came over the Romans in the age of the Antonines, when the spirit of competitive imperialism gave way to a tolerant internationalism.

The British emerged victorious from the war, but without elation. Although by all the traditional rules of international politics the victory was overwhelming, the British have not been able to feel the romantic enthusiasm of the victor. They have felt, rather, how close they were to starvation and defeat, how dependent they were upon the aid of other nations. They know that their navy could not alone have exercised control of the seas, and that the successful blockade of Germany was possible only by a series of quite remarkable coincidences. They know, too, that inventions have been made, like the submarine, the bombing plane, the poison gas, which need only be perfected in order to take away all sense of security based on the possession of a supreme navy. The war, they realize, has demonstrated that their old ideas of offense and defense are nearly obsolete. And thus, while they escaped the mortal blow this time, they know how vulnerable modem science has made the British Isles.

A Decadent Order

EVENTS since the end of the war have added to their growing conviction that the old international order, based on superior force, is somehow deeply decadent. For thousands of years it has been an axiom among statesmen that the strong could rule the weak. Is that axiom still true? And if it is true to-day, will it still be true in another generation? I think it is no exaggeration to say that the directing minds of England have been the first to grasp how very antiquated is the traditional technic of imperialism. This is not because they have taken Tolstoy to heart or the Sermon on the Mount, but because in relation to Ireland, India, the self-governing dominions, conquered Germany, and prostrate Russia, they have encountered a new kind of force and a new resistance, not described in the text books of government, that frustrates the best plans of the best general staff.

A story, which is being repeated with evident pleasure by all sorts of Englishmen, will illustrate what I mean. Last summer the Cabinet were disgusted with the results of half-hearted coercion in Ireland, and they had come to the point where they had either to make coercion a success or to quit it altogether. Before coming to a decision it was thought wise to ask the Commanding General at Dublin for a confidential report on the cost of subduing the rebellion. He drew up a detailed memorandum saying,—I am not sure of the figures—, that thoroughgoing frightfulness would require four hundred thousand men and a three years' campaign, and then added that at the end of the three years the Irish question would still be unsolved. A special courier started for London with the report. On his way to the ship, he was held up by a Sinn Fein band. The rebels opened the report, read it, put it back into the envelope, stamped across it: "Passed by the Irish Censor", and wished the courier God-speed on his journey to Downing Street.

Against that kind of resistance orthodox military teaching is ultimately helpless. And that is just exactly the kind of resistance with which governments have more and more to deal. The experience of the English with it has been accumulating for a long time. They first encountered it in 1776. They met it again, though in different form, in the events that led up to the Canadian settlement during the Nineteenth Century. They had a bitter experience with it in the South African war. They ran into it again and again in the period of Russian intervention. But Ireland has been the most tremendous object lesson of all, and behind Ireland they see the so-called passive resistance of Egypt and India, which threatens to spread throughout the whole of the Near East and Asia. What the English are discovering is that you can impose your will on a people, if that people has an organized center which you can coerce. But if it has no well defined organization, if the resistance is individual and dispersed, subtle and passive, there are not soldiers enough anywhere to make a whole nation do what it does not wish to do.

It is still possible by force to impose all sorts of suffering on a rebellious nation, but no amount of force can make the people of that nation work together for the purposes of the conqueror. You can make the nominal government of the conquered people promise anything. But you cannot make individual workingmen, shopkeepers, investors, peasants and traders obey the promises which their government has made. In Germany, for example, you can extract almost any agreement from Chancellor Wirth, but with armies of occupation and the like you cannot make the economic organization of Germany function so as to make good the promise. Modern civilization has become so intricately dependent on credit, faith, and willingness, and modem education has made people so individualistic and so protestant, that, short of the peculiar morale of war, the whole process of life can elude the command of the politician. He bales out water with a sieve.

The Settlement With War Memories

THESE realizations more and more possess the mind of England. But still it is remarkable how quickly, relative to other European nations, their intelligence has been liberated so that it could begin to take account of such extremely novel and disconcerting truths. Ordinarily, a dazzling victory intoxicates a nation with the splendor of force, and makes it reject impatiently any teaching which suggests the limitations of force. And for a considerable time after the war is over, peace is difficult because those who wish to act with mercy and justice have not the heart to wrangle with those who cry out that the dead will have died in vain. That cry has wracked Europe from end to end.

Nothing else, I think, reveals better the heroic quality of their tradition than the simple way the English have refused to disturb their dead by exploiting them in politics. Almost never, unless he is goaded as Mr. Balfour was at Washington by M. Briand's speech, does an Englishman support his argument by offering to compare British losses with those of other people. For reasons which I do not pretend to understand the sense of tragedy very quickly pervaded the English memory of their sacrifices. They seemed to feel the pity and the terror of the war, rather than the victory of good over evil. They could not weigh, they could not assess, the loss was not an account that could be settled. And however they might deal with the German survivors, behind a facade of temporary consistency with the moral commitments of the war, there spread through England a poignant sense of the weakness and peril of our whole civilization from which such horror had issued. They could not any longer be glib, and cocksure, and super-righteous, as civilians have to be if they are to keep up their courage in war. They were too imaginative to think that a few formulae, struck out in August, 1914, could forever express so immense a catastrophe. Their tradition is too long and too unbroken, too well recorded and too finely interpreted for them to feel, without inner contradiction, that the whole war was a melodramatic eruption in an otherwise satisfactory universe.

The translation of war feeling into tragic pity has meant that the division of Europe into the permanently blessed and the everlasting damned no longer confuses their judgment. More and more they think of all Europe struggling in the grip of fate. There is little or no conflict left between personal memories, their reason, and the evidence. They are able, without choking over bogies and taboos, to take account of the underlying unities of civilization, because grief and anger and hatred and fear have been lifted out of the theatricalism of good and evil to the place where such judgments are vain.

The Nation of Shopkeepers

YOU do not understand the change in England until you understand this sublimation of the war memories. If you travel about the continent you will be told over and over again, as a sort of dark secret, that the British are preaching reconciliation and mercy because trade is at a standstill. Their willingness to lift up the enemy and to come to terms with Russia is analyzed for you with detailed statistics as a search for customers by a nation of shopkeepers. The explanation does not explain. It is true that Great Britain has a most urgent economic interest in the restoration of Europe. It is true that many of the British wonder whether they can support their present population unless trade recovers soon. It is true that their need of peace is desperate. But all these things are just as true of all the other nations in Europe as well. Everywhere, France included, the need of peace is desperate, the standards of life are in danger.

It is not true that the British alone have an "interest" in the restoration of Europe. Nor is it true that they have a special interest. Nor is it true that the exchange of goods by means of trade is a peculiar device for the benefit of the British. What is true is that the British are the first victorious nation to see clearly their interest in the restoration of peace, and the first nation to begin acting on what they see. They are the first to approach realistically the settlement of Europe, because they were the first to make a settlement in their own souls with the memories of the war. Much more slowly the rest of Europe is demobilizing its mind, extricating its judgments from its memories, and learning to face the facts of Europe without concentrating on its pains and its fears. There can be no real settlement until this process is far more advanced than it is today. No doubt the continent is more deeply involved and no doubt America is too abstractly involved to make so quick an adjustment. I have no wish to force a comparison. But the fact remains that the British have made the quickest spiritual adjustment, thanks, I suppose, to their insular tolerance, their imperial experience, and their imaginative inheritance.