If our world had considered the advice of William James and insisted upon national service from everyone, national service in the drains or the nationalised mines or the nationalised deep-sea fisheries if not in the army or navy, we should not have had any such men.If it had insisted that wealth and property are no more than a trust for the public benefit, we should have had no genteel indispensables.These discords in our national unanimity are the direct consequence of our bad social organisation.We permit the profiteer and the usurer; they evoke the response of the Reluctant Employee, and the inheritor of their wealth becomes the Genteel Whig.
But that is by the way.It was of course natural and inevitable that the German onslaught upon Belgium and civilisation generally should strike these recluse minds not as a monstrous ugly wickedness to be resisted and overcome at any cost, but merely as a nerve-racking experience.Guns were going off on both sides.
The Genteel Whig was chiefly conscious of a repulsive vast excitement all about him, in which many people did inelegant and irrational things.They waved flags--nasty little flags.This child of the ages, this last fruit of the gigantic and tragic tree of life, could no more than stick its fingers in its ears as say, "Oh, please, do /all/ stop!" and then as the strain grew intenser and intenser set itself with feeble pawings now to clamber "Au-dessus de la Melee," and now to--in some weak way--stop the conflict.("Au-dessus de la Melee"--as the man said when they asked him where he was when the bull gored his sister.) The efforts to stop the conflict at any price, even at the price of entire submission to the German Will, grew more urgent as the necessity that everyone should help against the German Thing grew more manifest.
Of all the strange freaks of distressed thinking that this war has produced, the freaks of the Genteel Whig have been among the most remarkable.With an air of profound wisdom he returns perpetually to his proposition that there are faults on both sides.To say that is his conception of impartiality.I suppose that if a bull gored his sister he would say that there were faults on both sides; his sister ought not to have strayed into the field, she was wearing a red hat of a highly provocative type; she ought to have been a cow and then everything would have been different.In the face of the history of the last forty years, the Genteel Whig struggles persistently to minimise the German outrage upon civilisation and to find excuses for Germany.
He does this, not because he has any real passion for falsehood, but because by training, circumstance, and disposition he is passionately averse from action with the vulgar majority and from self-sacrifice in a common cause, and because he finds in the justification of Germany and, failing that, in the blackening of the Allies to an equal blackness, one line of defence against the wave of impulse that threatens to submerge his private self.But when at last that line is forced he is driven back upon others equally extraordinary.You can often find simultaneously in the same Pacifist paper, and sometimes even in the utterances of the same writer, two entirely incompatible statements.The first is that Germany is so invincible that it is useless to prolong the war since no effort of the Allies is likely to produce any material improvement in their position, and the second is that Germany is so thoroughly beaten that she is now ready to abandon militarism and make terms and compensations entirely acceptable to the countries she has forced into war.And when finally facts are produced to establish the truth that Germany, though still largely wicked and impenitent, is being slowly and conclusively beaten by the sanity, courage and persistence of the Allied common men, then the Genteel Whig retorts with his last defensive absurdity.He invents a national psychology for Germany.
Germany, he invents, loves us and wants to be our dearest friend.
Germany has always loved us.The Germans are a loving, unenvious people.They have been a little mislead--but nice people do not insist upon that fact.But beware of beating Germany, beware of humiliating Germany; then indeed trouble will come.Germany will begin to dislike us.She will plan a revenge.Turning aside from her erstwhile innocent career, she may even think of hate.
What are our obligations to France, Italy, Serbia and Russia, what is the happiness of a few thousands of the Herero, a few millions of the Belgians--whose numbers moreover are constantly diminishing--when we might weigh them against the danger, the most terrible danger, of incurring /permanent German hostility?.../A Frenchman I talked to knew better than that."What will happen to Germany," I asked, "if we are able to do so to her and so;would she take to dreams of a /Revanche?/""She will take to Anglomania," he said, and added after a flash of reflection, "In the long run it will be the worse for you."
