On the Great Relapse

they had been guided by one clear and consistent theory o£ Europe, would have done better work for peace than the League of Nations. These are not views that have o£ late been common; perhaps they are not views that can even now be popular. But they are views in which I myself have never wavered, and in which I have of late been very strongly confirmed. Long ago, before the Balkan Wars or the Russo-Japanese War, I remember writing in this general sense: that there were two forces in the world threatening its peace, because of their history, their philosophy and their externality to the ethics of Christendom; and they were Prussia and Japan. I remember horrifying all my Liberal friends, when I wrote for the Daily News in the days of my youth, by saying this about Japan. I did not, however, modify my view then. I am certainly not likely to modify it now.

But my subject here is the nature of that post-war Reaction. Nobody, I think, has tried to analyse that mood, in which a cold fit of war-weariness followed so very rapidly on a very hot fit of war. Psychologists have been let loose everywhere on every subject; we have heard all about the psychology of war and the psychology of war-propaganda. We have not heard much about the psychology of anti-war propaganda, or why the very same men who were first fanatical for the one should afterwards be equally fanatical for the other. Now, to begin with, I deeply distrust the mood because it was a mood. It is not only true that it was merely emotional; it is almost true that it was merely physical. People were sick of war in the real sense that it made them sick. It was very natural, and, up to a point, even very healthy, as being physically sick can be an indication of health or an improvement of health. But sickness is not an opinion; far less a conviction. Disgust is more violent than disapproval, but it is much less strong than disapproval. And nothing is more essentially unstable than the sort of disgust that merely follows upon excess. In short, the peace mood just after the war was the well-known mood of the Morning After the Night Before. It was the headache of the drunkard whose excesses in drink have gone to his head. As the mere blind bibulous wine-drinker may be weary of wine, so the mere journalistic Jingo was weary of war. Certainly, the reaction was healthy in so far as some of the fevers and ravings of the war period had been unhealthy. Certainly, at least, the reaction was human, because the strain of war is in its nature inhuman. But there is nothing fixed or final or responsible or enduring about a feeling of that kind; even if it is human, even if it is healthy. In a week the drunkard will have lost his headache, and may very probably continue his scientific experiments, directed to test the strength o£ his head. The mere nausea which comes through having seen the same thing for five years will weaken in people who have not seen it for twelve years. A new generation, which has not experienced the horrors of war, will rise brandishing sabres and bayonets; as in Prussia. A remote country, which was not drawn deeply into the war, will soon be ready for a new war of its own; as in Japan.

Peace must not be useful merely as an emetic, but as an ethical diet rather than a medicine. It must be founded on some theory of things; on some conception of history and humanity; on some philosophy of the nature of the nations and the true international ideal. Now there was another and deeper defect in the antiwar reaction in England. It was not a new light on things, or a new theory of things, or a closer comprehension of other countries and the rest of civilization. On the contrary, it was a relapse into all our own old theories about other countries, including our old contempt for other countries. The more Pacifist England was actually a more insular England. For six years we abused our enemies; for six more years we abused our allies. And now our popular patriotic Press seems to have settled down into abusing them both, while refusing to accept any responsibility for the result. We have relapsed into the most insular and insolent and ignorant phase of our past history: the phase in which all French-men were frogs and all Germans were sausages. In patriotic cartoons today you will see all the foreigners dressed up as figures of fun which are no longer even funny, except in the sense that educated people had learnt to laugh at such ignorance even in Victorian times. The Frenchman with waxed moustaches and shrugged shoulders; the German with walrus mous-tache and enormous pipe; the Russian with fur cap and bushy beard — these grotesque fossils of prehistoric prejudice would have been much too crude for the time of Tennyson and Prince Albert. Cultivated men of that Victorian epoch would have classed them with the old legend that the Pope wanted to introduce wooden shoes; or that Boney was a real ogre out of a fairy-tale. Yet the final result of our negative or neutral attitude, to friends and foes, has been a mere sinking back into these old stupidities, which the world had actually out-grown on the day when England and France and Flanders took the field against Prussia. We were more truly international in that international war than we are now in this swaggering, self-flattering, vulgarly Jingo peace.

Finally, in that long stretch of years since the war, which have been full of urgent and feverish talk about the necessity of keeping the peace, nobody has really tried to prevent war at all. Nobody has done the one really difficult and indispensable thing; the only thing that might possibly avert a war in the earlier stages of a quarrel. Nobody has tried to look at the side opposite to his own side. Whenever our Pacifist writers were blaming anything or anybody, they never paused for one moment to ask whether there was any defence for what they attacked. When people thought France was wrong in the quarrel, they wrote exactly as they did when they thought Germany was wrong in the war. They were not trying to compose the quarrel; they were only trying to prove that they were right in the quarrel. If they really wanted to avert war in Europe, they should have started from the very beginning with full statements of the case for each of the quarrelling States of Europe. They should have been careful especially to state the case for those whom they liked least. We know they have done nothing of the sort. Mr. H. G. Wells has written a thousand pages in favour of Peace, but not one page in favour of Poland. Lord Russell has said much, from his point of view, to deter men from fighting, but nothing that would deter Mussolini from fighting; and nothing certainly that could deter any

Communist from fighting Mussolini. To examine, prove, disprove, or reconcile the philosophies o£ Europe — that would be a task for a philosopher, but not for a philosopher like Bertrand Russell. That is the only way to Peace; and few be they that find it.

XXXVI On the Next Hundred Years

EVERYONE will be pleased to see that Mr. H. G. Wells has again resumed his provocative character of prophet, and recently started in a well-known Sunday paper what is described as a History of the Next Hundred Years, It may be suggested that it is rather unfair that such a work should be criticized when it has only just started. Yet I do not admit the objection; for this very vital reason — that the only thing I really object to about the prophecy is the place where it starts.

It does not start from where you and I have to start, poor devils; from the actual crisis and condition in which we find ourselves. It starts from a perfect social condition, that is supposed to exist some indefinite number of centuries hence. Mr. Wells takes his fixed point in the future; and from that finds it easy to show that all our modern politics and economics are unfixed — which, God knows, is very true. But there is always something a little irritating about a man writing as a Utopian; not in the sense of one who desires Utopia, but in the sense of one who already inhabits Utopia. He represents himself as a man living in a society of