Chapter 15
"Well, I suppose it's a matter of taste--upper-cut or under-cut," Mr. Clarkson answered, smiling at his seriousness. "Most people, I think, prefer under-cut."
"Johnson's right upper-cut is described as the piston of an ocean greyhound making twenty-seven knots," said the man, taking no notice of the answer, and speaking in awestruck tones. "Do you know, one paper describes Johnson as the best piece of fighting machinery the world has ever seen!"
"I thought that was the last _Dreadnought_?" said Mr. Clarkson.
"Perhaps you don't study the literature of the Ring," the other answered, with cold superiority.
"Oh, indeed I do!" cried Mr. Clarkson eagerly. "It is rather remarkable what a fascination the art of boxing has frequently exercised upon the masters of literature. Even the Greeks, in spite of their artistic reverence for the human body, practised boxing with extreme severity, and on their statues, you know, we sometimes find a recognised distortion which they called 'the boxer's ear.' It seems to show that they hit round rather than straight from the shoulder. The ancient boxing-gloves were intended, not to diminish, but to increase the severity of the blow, being made of seven or eight strands of cow-hide, heavily weighted with iron and lead. There is that fine description of a prize-fight in Virgil, where the veteran--'the imperturbable colossus' of his time, I suppose we may call him--almost knocks the life out of the younger man, and sends him from the contest swinging his head to and fro, and spitting out teeth mingled with blood--rather a horrible picture!"
"Ten to six on the boiler-maker," said the cabman; "I'll take ten to six."
"And then, of course," Mr. Clarkson continued, "in recent times there are splendid accounts of the fights in _Lavengro_ and Meredith's _Amazing Marriage_, and Browning once refers to the Tipton Slasher, and we all know Conan Doyle."
"No, we don't," said the cabman.
"It seems rather hard to explain the attraction of prize-fighting," Mr. Clarkson went on, meditatively; "perhaps it comes simply from the dramatic element of battle. It is a war in brief, a concentrated militancy. Or perhaps it is the more barbaric delight in vicarious pain and endurance; and I think sometimes we ought to include the pleasure of our race in fair play and the just and equal rigour of the game."
What other reasons Mr. Clarkson might have found were lost in the yelling of newsboys tearing down the Strand. Too excited to speak, the crowd engulfed them. The papers were torn from their hands. Short cries, short sentences followed. Here and there Mr. Clarkson caught an intelligible word: "Revolvers taken at gate"; "Expected Johnson would be shot if victorious"; "Opening spar almost academic in its calmness"; "Old wound on Jeffries's right eye opened"; "Both cheeks gashed to the bone"; "Jack handed out some wicked lefts"; "Terrible gruelling"; "Both shutters out of working order"; "Defeat certain after eighth round"; "Johnson hooked his left"; "The Circassian remained on his knees"; "Counting went on"; "Fatal ten was reached."
The crowd gasped. Then it shouted, it swore, it broke up swearing.
"Negroes had best crawl underground to-night," said the American; "it ain't good for negroes when their heads grow through their hair."
"Another proof," sighed Mr. Clarkson, "another proof that, on Roosevelt's principle, the United States are unfit for self-government."
When he reached his rooms it was nearly one, but a door opened softly on the top floor, and the landlady's little boy looked over the banisters and asked: "Please, sir, did Jim win, sir?"
"Let me see," said Mr. Clarkson, "which was Jim?"
XXIII
PEACE AND WAR IN THE BALANCE[7]
When your Committee invited me to deliver the Moncure Conway address this year, I was even more surprised at their choice of subject than at their choice of person. For the chosen subject was Peace, and my chief study, interest, and means of livelihood for some twenty years past has been War. It seemed to me like inviting a butcher to lecture on vegetarianism. So I wrote, with regret, to refuse. But your Committee very generously repeated the invitation, giving me free permission to take my own line upon the subject; and then I perceived that you did not ask for the mere celebration of an established doctrine, but were still prepared to join in pursuit, following the track of reason wherever it might lead, as became the traditions of this classic building, which I sometimes think of as reason's last lair. I perceived that what you demanded was not panegyric, or immutable commonplace, but, above all things, sincerity. And sincerity is a dog with nose to the ground, uncertain of the trail, often losing the scent, often harking back, but possessed by an honest determination to hunt down the truth, if by any means it can be caught.
It is one of my many regrets for wasted opportunity that I never heard Moncure Conway; but, with a view to this address, I have lately read a good deal of his writings. Especially I have read the _Autobiography_, an attractive record and commentary on the intellectual history of rapidly-changing years, most of which I remember. On the question of peace Moncure Conway was uncompromising--very nearly uncompromising. Many Americans feel taller when they think of Lexington and the shot that echoed round the world. Moncure Conway only saw lynchers in the champions of freedom who flung the tea-chests into the sea; and in the War of Independence he saw nothing but St. George Washington spearing a George the Third dragon.[8] He quotes with approval the saying of Quaker Mifflin to Washington: "General, the worst peace is better than the best war."[9] Many Americans regard the Civil War between North and South with admiration as a stupendous contest either for freedom and unity, or for self-government and good manners. Moncure Conway was strongly and consistently opposed to it. The question of slavery did not affect his opposition. He thought few men had wrought so much evil as John Brown of Harper's Ferry, whose soul marched with the Northern Armies.[10] "I hated violence more than slavery," he wrote, "and much as I disliked President Buchanan, I thought him right in declining to coerce the seceding States."[11] Just before the war began, he wrote in a famous pamphlet: "War is always wrong; it is because the victories of Peace require so much more courage than those of war that they are rarely won."[12] "I see in the Union War," he wrote, "a great catastrophe." "Alas! the promises of the sword are always broken--always." And in the concluding pages of his _Autobiography_, as though uttering his final message to the world, he wrote:
"There can arise no important literature, nor art, nor real freedom and happiness, among any people until they feel their uniform a livery, and see in every battlefield an inglorious arena of human degradation.... The only cause that can uplift the genius of a people as the anti-slavery cause did in America is the war against war."
For the very last words of his _Autobiography_ he wrote:
"And now, at the end of my work, I offer yet a new plan for ending war--namely, that the friends of peace and justice shall insist on a demand that every declaration of war shall be regarded as a sentence of death by one people on another; and shall be made only after a full and formal judicial inquiry and trial, at which the accused people shall be fairly represented.... The meanest prisoner cannot be executed without a trial. A declaration of war is the most terrible of sentences: it sentences a people to be slain and mutilated, their women to be widowed, their children orphaned, their cities burned, their commerce destroyed. The real motives of every declaration of war are unavowed and unavowable. Let them be dragged into the light! No war would ever occur after a fair judicial trial by a tribunal in any country open to its citizens.
"Implore peace, O my reader, from whom I now part. Implore peace, not of deified thunderclouds, but of every man, woman, or child thou shalt meet. Do not merely offer the prayer, 'Give peace in our time,' but do thy part to answer it! Then, at least, though the world be at strife, there shall be peace in thee."[13]
That sounds uncompromising. We cannot doubt that one of the main motives of Conway's life was "War against War." He suffered for peace; he lost friends and influence for peace; we may almost say he was exiled for peace. Those are the marks of sincerity. He, if anyone, we might suppose, was a "Peace-at-any-price man." But let us remember one passage in an address delivered only a few months before his death. In that address, on William Penn, given in April 1907 (he died in the following November), speaking of Mr. Carnegie's proposal for a compulsory Court of International Arbitration, he said:
"In order to prevent swift attacks of one nation on another without notice, or outrages on weak and helpless tribes, there shall be selected from the armaments of the world a combination armament to act as the international police.... Even if in the last resort there were needed such united force of mankind to prevent any one nation from breaking the peace in which the interests of all nations are involved, that would not be an act of war, but civilisation's self-defence. Self-defence is not war, although the phrase is often used to disguise aggression."[14]
Speaking with all respect for a distinguished man's memory, I disagree with every word of those sentences. An international police, directed by the combined Powers, would almost certainly develop into a tremendous engine of injustice and oppression. The Holy Alliance after Napoleon's overthrow aimed at an international police, and we want no more Holy Alliances. I would not trust a single government in the world to enter into such a combination. I would rather trust Satan to combine with sin. Think of the fate of Egypt from Arabi's time up to the present, or of Turkey controlled by the Powers, or of Persia and Morocco to-day! But the point to notice is that you cannot alter things by altering names. The united force of civilisation brought to bear upon any nation, however guilty, would be an act of war, however much you called it international police. Civilisation's self-defence would be war. Every form of self-defence by violence, whether it disguises aggression or not, is war. For many generations every war has been excused as self-defence of one kind or another. I can hardly imagine a modern war that would not be excused by both sides as defensive. By making these admissions--by maintaining that self-defence is not war--Moncure Conway gives away the whole case of the "peace-at-any-price man," He comes down from the ideal positions of the early Quakers, the modern Tolstoyans, and the Salvation Army. They preach non-resistance to evil consistently. Like all extremists who have no reservations, but will trust to their principle though it slay them, they have gained a certain glow, a fervour of life, which shrivels up our ordinary compromises and political considerations. But by advocating civilisation's self-defence in the form of a combined international armament, Moncure Conway abandoned that vantage ground. He became sensible, arguable, uncertain, submitting himself to the balances of reason and expediency like the rest of us.
A certain glow, a fervour of life--those are signs that always distinguish extremists--men and women who are willing literally to die for their cause. I did not find those signs at the Hague Peace Conference, when I was sent there in 1907 as being a war correspondent. Such an assembly ought to have marked an immense advance in human history. It was the sort of thing that last-century poets dreamed of as the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World. It surpassed Prince Albert's vision of an eternity of International Exhibitions. One would have expected such an occasion to be heralded by Schiller's _Ode to Joy_ sounding through the triumph of the Choral Symphony. Long and dubious has been the music's struggle with pain, but at last, in great simplicity, the voices of the men give out the immortal theme, and the whole universe joins in harmony with a thunder of exultation:
"Seid umschlungen, Millionen, Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!"
Surely at the Hague Conference, in the fulfilment of time, peace had come on earth and goodwill among men. Here once more would sound the song that the morning stars sang together, when all the sons of God shouted for joy.
As loaders in that celestial chorus, I found about 400 frock-coated, top-hatted gentlemen from various parts of the world--elderly diplomatists, ambassadors inured to the stifling atmosphere of courts, Foreign Ministers who had served their time of intrigue, professors who worshipped law, worthy officials primed with a stock of phrases about "the noble sentiments of justice and humanity," but reared in the deadening circle of uniforms, decorations, and insincere courtesy, having no more knowledge of the people's desires than of the people's bacon, and instructed to maintain the cause of peace chiefly by safeguarding their country's military interests. An atmosphere of suspicion and secrecy surrounded them, more dense than the fog of war. For their president they elected an ambassador who had grown old in the service of three Tsars, and now represented a tyrant who refused the first principles of peace to his own people, and repressed the struggle for freedom by methods of barbarism such as no general could use against a belligerent in the stress of war without incurring the execration of mankind.
With commendable industry, those delegates at this Second Peace Conference devoted themselves to careful preparations for the next war, especially for the next naval war. They appeared to me like two farmers making arrangements to abstain from burning each other's hay-ricks. "Look here," says one, "this rick-burning's a dangerous and expensive job. Let us give up wax vestas, and stick to safety matches." "Done!" says the other. "Now mind! Only safety matches in future!" and they part with mutual satisfaction, conscious of thrift and Christian forbearance. Or, again, I thought the situation might be expressed in the form of a fable, how the Fox of the Conference said to the Rabbit of Peace, "With what sauce, Brer Rabbit, would you like to be eaten?" "Please, Mr. Fox, I don't want to be eaten at all," said the Rabbit "Now," answered the Fox, "you are gettin' away from the pint."
Something, no doubt, has been gained. Even the jealous diplomatists and cautious lawyers at The Hague have secured something. Mankind had gradually learnt that certain forms of horror were too horrible for average civilisation, and The Hague confirmed man's veto, in some particulars. Laying mines at sea and the destruction of private property at sea were not forbidden, nor were the rights of belligerents extended to subject races or rebels. Men and women are still exposed to every kind of torture and brutality, provided the brutalities are practised by their own superior government. But it is something, certainly, to have gained a permanent Court of Arbitration for the trial of disputed points between nations. The points are at present minor, it is true. Questions affecting honour, vital interests, and independence are expressly excluded. But the habit of referring any question at all to arbitration is a gain, if only we could trust the members of the Court. So long as those members are appointed by the present governments of Europe, there is danger of the Court becoming merely another engine in the hands of despotism, as was proved by the conduct of the Savarkar case at The Hague in February 1911. But the field of reference will grow imperceptibly, and we have had President Taft protesting that he desires an Arbitration Treaty with England from which even questions of honour, vital interests, and independence shall not be excluded.[15] Out of the eater cometh forth meat. Even a blood-stained Tsar's proposals for peace have not been entirely without effect. But in the midst of the warring diplomatists at The Hague one could discover none of that glow, that fervour of devotion to peace, which distinguished the early Quakers and is still felt among a few fine enthusiasts. The first duty imposed upon every representative at The Hague was to get everyone to do as much as possible for peace, except himself. It is not so that the world is moved.
Neither in the representatives nor in their governments can we find any principle or passionate desire for peace. The emperors, kings, and men of wealth, birth, and leisure who impudently claim the right of deciding questions of peace and war in all nations, display no objection to war, provided it looks profitable. Provided it looks profitable--what a vista of devilry those words call up! What a theme for satire! But also, to some extent, and in the present day, what ground for hope!
They bring us suddenly face to face with a little book which will leave its mark, not only on the mind, but, perhaps, on the actual and external history of man. In my opinion, the next Nobel prize should be shared equally between Mr. J.A. Hobson and Mr. Lane, the younger writer who calls himself Norman Angell. Between them they have completely analysed the motives, the pretexts, the hypocrisies, the deceptions, the corruptions, and the fallacies of modern war.[16] When we say that the men who impudently claim the control of foreign politics among the nations display no objection to war, provided it looks profitable, we enter at once the sphere of that "Great Illusion" which is the distinguishing theme of Norman Angell's pamphlet.
His main contention is that in modern times, owing to the interdependence of nations, especially in trade, the readiness of communication, the conduct of commerce and finance almost entirely by the exchange of bills and cheques, the complicated banking relations, and the solidarity of credit in all great capitals, so that if London credit is shaken the finance of Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, and New York feels the shock almost equally--for all these reasons modern war cannot be profitable even to the victorious Power.
To advocates of peace, here comes a gleam of hope at last--perhaps the strongest gleam that has reached us yet. Upon the kings of the earth, sitting, as Milton said, with awful eye; upon diplomatists, ambassadors, Foreign Office officials, courtiers, clergy, and the governing class in general, appeals to pity, mercy, humanity, religion, or reason have had no effect whatever. If you think I speak too strongly, look around you. Name within the last century any ruler or minister who has been guided by humanity or religion in the question of peace or war. Name any ruler who has abstained from war because force is no argument. With the possible exception of Mr. Gladstone in the cases of the _Alabama_ and Majuba Hill, I can think of none. Against that one possible exception place all the wars of a century past, including three that were among the most terrible in human history--the Napoleonic war, the Franco-German, and the Russo-Japanese. And as to the sweet influences of Christianity, remember the Russian Archbishops, how they blessed the sacred Icons that were to lead the Russian peasants to the slaughter of Japanese peasants. Remember our Archbishop of Canterbury in February 1911 deeply regretting that a previous engagement prevented him from passing on the blessing of the Apostles to the battleship _Thunderer_. Remember how he sent his wife as a substitute to occupy the Apostolic position in the hope that the hand which rocks the cradle might prove equally efficacious.
Against the pugnacity and courage which urge our rulers to send other people to die for them, the claims of humanity, reason, and religion have no effect. The new hope is that self-interest may succeed where the motives that act upon most decent people almost invariably fail. Norman Angell's appeal goes straight to the pocket, and his choice of that objective inspires hope. If rulers can no longer plead that by war they are advancing the material interests of their State, if it is recognised that even a victorious war involves as great disaster as defeat, or even greater (and it is remarkable that, in one of his latest speeches, Moltke maintained that, next to defeat, the greatest disaster which could befall any State was victory)--if it can be shown that, in a war between great nations, trade does not follow the flag, but moves rapidly in the other direction, then one of the pretexts of our rulers will be removed, one veil of hypocrisy will be stripped off. To that extent the hope of peace will have grown brighter, and that extent is large.
On the whole, it is the brightest hope that has lately risen--or the brightest but one which we will speak of later on. I would only hint at two considerations which may obscure it. Granted that in modern times war-power or victory does not give prosperity; that the invader cannot destroy or capture the enemy's trade; that his own finance is equally disturbed; and that the most enormous indemnity can add nothing to the victorious nation's actual wealth--granted all this, nevertheless, the warlike, though vicarious, heroism of our rulers might not on this account be restrained. In many, if not most, recent wars the object has not been national aggrandisement, or even national commerce, but private gain. We have but to think of the South African War, so cleverly engineered in the gold-mining interest, or of the Russo-Japanese war, where so many thousands died for the Russian aristocracy's timber concessions on the Yalu. Or, as permanent incitements to warfare, we may think of all the manufacturers of armaments, the enormous companies that fatten on blood and iron, the contractors, purveyors, horse-breeders, tailors, advertisers, army-coaches, landowners, and well-to-do families whose wealth, livelihood, or position depends mainly upon the continuance of warlike preparations, and whose personal interests are enormously increased by actual war. When a nation is pouring out its wealth at the rate of £2,000,000 or even £10,000,000 a week, as in the future it may well do, much of it will run away to waste, but most of it will stick to one finger or another; and the dirtier the finger the more will stick. It seems silly, it seems almost incredible, that, only a few generations ago, the peoples of Europe were engaged in killing each other as fast as possible over a question of dynasty--whether this or that poor forked radish of a mortal should be called King of Spain or King of France. But in our own days men kill each other for dynasties of cash--for wealthy firms and intermarried families. Nations fight that private companies may show a higher percentage on dividends. It is silly; it is almost incredible. But to shareholders and speculators instigated by these motives Norman Angell's appeal is futile. Even a victorious war may spell disaster to the nation; but even defeat spells cash for them.