Part 3
Hence the Great Unrest. People scurry to and fro all over the earth, like ants disturbed on their hill by a burning match thrown in among them. They do not know what is the matter, but they feel that they must keep moving. The sensation of inexplicable haste is upon them. There is no time for anything. Pleasure easily palls, and the most agreeable society develops into boredom. The days of reposeful leisure, in which the greatest works of art were created, are ended. Everything must be got through quickly nowadays--“scamped” as a matter of fact. Sweetness and harmony in music are no longer admired--it must be discordant and odd to suit the spirit of the age. Fine painting is a drug in the market unless it be the work of an “old master”--a picture must be “sensational” in colour and in execution to suit the perverted taste of the day. Literature and the drama must present “problems” of a questionable nature before their productions can be pronounced “great” by the very few critics who are more than ordinary paragraphists--while Poetry, the highest of all the arts, is practically dead. The abnormal condition of the human mind displays itself in costume, manners, and social observances and over all things hangs the deepening mist of a universal dissatisfaction for which there seems to be no cause, and for which we can find no name.
Do we mean to go on blindly, pretending we do not see? “Ye hypocrites! Ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it that ye do not discern this time?”
How is it indeed! For “this time” is one of the most fated and historic times in the history of the world--a time when we may perhaps be called upon to witness the commencement of the downfall of the greatest of Empires--the British;--when we may have to watch its magnificent fabric, once the envy of all other nations, crumbling before our very eyes--its pillars of state pulled down by riotous demagogues--its splendid traditions put to shame by both parties in its Parliament--by the one in sheer outlawry, by the other in no less disgraceful inaction. We can look on at this and wonder what new power will arise from its ruins, but we may not dare to prophesy till after the event! For this is but “the beginning of sorrows.” It little matters that the fools and jesters of the hour make mockery of all those who seek to warn off the misguided people from the quicksands whither they are rushing--fools and jesters there have always been and always will be, ready to toss ribaldry in the face of Deity itself without compunction. But the evil which darkly threatens modern civilisation is too near and too evident to be lightly “laughed down.” Every student of history knows that when the foundations of religious faith are shaken--when it becomes “a house divided against itself,” then national disaster is close at hand. Man, deprived of any high spiritual ideal of life, quickly reverts to mere selfish savagery. The Dean of St. Paul’s, called “the gloomy Dean” by a halfpenny daily, because he dares to speak truths which are not altogether pleasant hearing, must have thought long and deeply, and fully made up his mind as to what he meant when he said: “It is the duty of the clergy to maintain that it is ‘other worldliness’ which alone had transformed and could transform this world”--which means that it is only spiritual progress which can make material progress valuable and lasting. The inward enlightenment and uplifting of the soul or spirit of each individual man and woman towards the highest and bravest ideals of life and love, and conformity to the laws of creation as made plainly visible in Nature, is the only true civilisation. This lesson is taught by every scientific truth we are permitted to investigate. It is not preaching or platitudinism--it is an incontestable eternal Fact. Our lives on this planet were intended to be lives of joy, health, beauty, love, and mutual helpfulness--and where we depart from this intention we insult and disobey the Creator, whose design is one of gradual development towards ultimate perfection. We wrong Him when we call this beautiful world “a vale of tears”--for our misfortunes and diseases are chiefly our own fault, and certainly are not His doing. It is time we stood up with a glad courage, giving thanks for all the benefits He has showered upon us without asking for more. Any creed that is selfish and whining is no creed for the soul that aspires to the highest progress. If we invite evils upon ourselves we must expect them to come--nothing will hold them back if we are trespassers against natural and spiritual laws. The Reverend H. Mayne Young, preaching in Westminster Abbey itself, pronounced the following words with a noble daring:--
“The day is not far distant when, unless the Church of England freely re-states and re-models her creeds so as to meet the requirements of the age, she will be left stranded on the shores of time, while the tide of this modern life will leave her for ever farther and farther behind--a sad warning of the inevitable results of an iron-bound system of worn-out dogmas and lifeless traditions.”
“Worn-out dogmas and lifeless traditions!” A bold utterance, but true! And what is true of the Church of England is equally true of all the Churches in the world to-day, notably that of Rome. Man, walking in a darkness of destroyed illusions, is at that point when he may well exclaim with the Apostle--“Who will deliver me from the body of this death?”
It needs no gift of prophecy and no special intuition to see that we are on the brink of some tremendous change in the destinies of the human race. Everything points to it--our tottering creeds, our fluctuating standard of manners and morals. What it is, what it may be no one tries to imagine. People instinctively feel they would rather not think too much about anything, or analyse the condition in which they find themselves. There is “no time” for it, they say. Why is there no time? Is the clock of the universe running down and are the works giving out? Materially speaking, we know that the slightest tilt of the earth on its axis would cause a complete redistribution of its continents and seas, sweeping away every vestige of civilisation as we now know it. We never consider this, imagining that such a catastrophe is not possible. Yet God has willed it so before, and may will it so again. Every physical movement is preconceived by a mental or spiritual one. The Great Unrest is at present one of Spirit which will gradually dominate Matter and move it to equal but louder disturbance. We spin on our earth in a gathering storm-cloud between two fathomless gulfs, the Past and the Future--our Present is the result of the past, and our future will equally be the work of the Present. We know that there is a God of Love to serve, and his Nature-laws to obey, and knowing this, Ourselves alone must decide whether we _will_ do as we should, or whether we shall be _forced_ to do as we would not!
THE WHIRLWIND
It has come at last--that great Storm foretold by national weather prophets--it has come with all the devastating force of a fury long suppressed; and the black cloud has gathered over our heads while yet we drowsed in a dream of sunshine. With a sudden thunderous rush, as though a god or a demon should tread the spaces of the air, heaven has let loose the whirlwind--the whirlwind of War, and far more than War--the whirlwind of Destiny. It has come because it was bound to come, by the Unwritten Law and Code Invisible. Men of the world who form governments, make civilisations, and build up empires are always forgetting this Unwritten Law--the Hand behind the scenes--the inexorable and eternal forward movement of the Cosmos, which in its pre-determined progress overrides their best laid plans and makes chaotic havoc of their most sagacious intentions. Yet it is a perfectly straight and simple Law after all--one that has existed from the beginning of things, and that will ever exist--the law of Nature, visibly expressing the Mind of God, and immutably set against the predominance of evil. It is an output of the Divine Will, resolving itself easily into common, even domestic forms, adapted to the needs of individuals and nations alike. Nature often conducts herself like a practical housewife bent on spring cleaning.
“Where there is dirt,” she says, “it shall be removed; where there is confusion there shall be order.”
And her “cleaning-up” day is invariably a frightful thing. The noise of her sweeping and scouring resounds like thunder through the world. It occurs periodically, marking epochs of history, and we read of its results in the past with placid incredulity, setting down much to exaggeration and more to deliberate lying, idly amused meanwhile at the ridiculous notion, suggested by certain fools, that any such uproar and disaster should ever be experienced by Ourselves who have, so we consider, “advanced” in civilisation and wisdom, and thereby in self-control--Ourselves whose “culture” seems to our own judgment a finer and more perfect attainment than divine justice. The tornado of the French Revolution, the pitiless ravages of the Napoleonic wars have appeared to us like a tale that is told, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”--and we have lazed the time away, getting and spending, in the peaceful high noon of national prosperity and contentment, feeling confident that we should never in our day be shaken from our centre-poise of complacent self-satisfaction by anything of larger disturbance than occasional family quarrels gotten up more for the sake of varying the monotony of peace than with any serious intent. And now, lo!--the bolt falls--the vials of wrath and judgment are opened and poured forth over land and sea--the whirlwind is upon us, and we who slept are awakened by its sweeping rage, its rattling rain, its lightning flashing against our windows of security, and we leap to our feet, startled but not alarmed--unprepared, maybe, but not unready. We realise what the storm means, and we know how to weather it; we are not afraid--we only wish we had not slept quite so long!
Nevertheless, though our sleep may have been heavy, it has refreshed our forces and has not diminished our energies. Our waking is to good purpose. The very shame we feel at the length of our slumber is an excellent tonic and invigorates us. Sleep shall no more weigh down our eyelids--we are alert, strong, and resolute, even in the midst of the whirlwind. For it is a storm in which we alone are not involved. It has swept over a smaller nation than our own, all undeservedly--a little sister nation with the heart of a thousand heroes beating in her small bosom--and her unmerited sorrow has served as the keynote to strike all that is in us of Character and Conduct. We see her defaced with blows, insulted and outraged by ravening cruelties; and the chivalry born from centuries of martial glory rises strong and full-armed in every man that claims justice for her wrongs. We of Britain have not warred for ourselves--our fight is for the better, broader freedom of the whole world. The whirlwind has caught us up in the swoop of its revolving wings solely that we may take our part in the purifying of the House of Man. And our victory will be made manifest in the open response to our inward intention.
* * * * *
The militarism of Prussia is a crime, springing from old roots of human savagery and barbarism which should have died long ago. The brutal War, made treacherous and bloody by new devices of destruction, the inventions of fine science misapplied, was an outbreak of stupidity on the part of an obtuse and stupid set of men, sodden with selfishness and delirious with a drunken dream of World-Power. The teachings of Treitschke and Nietzsche are the teachings of egotists with unsound and ill-balanced brains. Nietzsche went mad, and howled his philosophies to the walls of the padded room. Treitschke was covertly insane; like the “secret drinker” who in public pretends he cannot touch strong liquor, he assumed to be proud and sagacious when he was no more than crazily self-obsessed. He preached the doctrine of Hate, and no sane man ever did that. The German nation, accepting this sort of “Kultur” as gospel, accepted the ravings of the mentally deficient, and, plunging breast-high into a sea of brothers’ blood, proved itself infected by the same madness as that which poisoned the veins of its mad instructors. To any thoughtful student, looking on at such a frightful, wicked, and overwhelmingly stupid slaughter of men by machinery there can be nothing more terrible, more lonely or more accursed in all the realm of fact or fiction than the figure of the Kaiser--the miserable epileptic who is responsible for shrouding his “Fatherland” in the black veil of mourning, and for drowning its peace and progress in a flood of widows’ and orphans’ tears. Mentally unbalanced, physically inefficient, and morally lacking--living as one pursued by the Furies in an armoured cage, and surrounded by guards on earth and in air, lest by chance his “Gott” should kill him, he moves one to amazement and pity--for the whirlwind has him in its centre, twirling him round and round like a veritable mannikin of sport for the dread gods of destiny--a mannikin who hardly knows how he came to be where he is, or where he will find himself when the storm is past. Meanwhile his voice is heard above the storm shouting “To England! England! The one foe! My Mother’s land, which I hate! Would that every drop of British blood in my veins might be drained out of me!”
Well, why not? A calf has been bled before now, and not a drop of its mother’s blood has been left in its carcase--there is nothing to prevent this desirable consummation for the Kaiser since he so devoutly wishes it. The whirlwind may strip him yet, and perform this required kindness! But in the interval the arrogant and half-crazed “War Lord” has sacrificed the best flower and strength of Germany’s manhood to his criminal and insatiable lust of power. The German people have not yet realised the mercilessness of this military despot--but when they do--when they count the desolate homes, the ruined trades, the lost commerce, the ravaged lives and broken hearts which mark the “triumph” of the stagey and spectacular “hero” they have worshipped, there will be an end of the blind credulity with which they have followed a vain ideal.
* * * * *
For us British, the Whirlwind is a grand thing. It is blowing us fiercely clean of Self--it is tearing away from us the silly sophistries of fashion and frivolity and showing us things in their true light. Our ape-like jesters of the press, of the Bernard Shaw type, who have mocked at all things holy, serious, and earnest, are finding their proper level, and shrinking into corners where they are scarcely seen--where it is to be hoped they may be peaceably forgotten. Our “sex-problems,” our “advanced” women, our screaming Doll Tear-sheets of militant suffrage--these trouble the air no more with the hysterics which are engendered by having nothing useful to do. We have no time for trifling. We are face to face with the long-despised Obvious--“Life is real, life is earnest”--and we are casting off the slough of political humbug and social sham, and are as one in the splendid bond of patriotism and love of country. We may trust the Storm; we may welcome the Whirlwind. It has come to clear the sky of miasma and vapour--it is making light to show us where we truly stand. If we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that in latter years we have given ourselves over-much to the pursuit of material gain and personal pleasure, we have neglected our faith in divine and high ideals, and Self has been more or less our god; it was time that we received a wholesome check and a warning before we lost all that has made us great. We have responded swiftly to the goading spur--our crust of selfishness was but thin after all, and has broken and melted away in a flood of magnificent generosity and practical sympathy--for never had nation a nobler Cause than ours, when, as brothers in arms with our brave allies, we fought to right the unspeakable wrongs of unoffending Belgium, and to aid in defending France from the invader and usurper. Should the enemy conquer in this mighty struggle the whole world will be the impoverished loser; should we and our allies win, the whole world will gain by our victory and share with us a wider, nobler freedom than before. It is for this cause that the Whirlwind has come upon us--to cleanse a cancer from our midst, and to put away from ourselves and our neighbours the dread contamination of a disease involving the whole trend of civilisation. We may thank God for it, despite all its terrors, its rain of blood, its thunders of the air and sea, its swift death dealt to thousands of innocent souls--it is a storm that was needed to clear the air. And when it is past, and the sun shines once more, we shall realise that its causes were to be found not in one nation only, but in many--in ourselves as well as in our foes--and that some great and forceful movement of destiny was urgently called for to sweep away from humanity the accumulating mass of its own self-wrought evil. And if victory should be ours, it will behove us to take it with all humility, giving thanks to God--“_lest we forget_!”
THE KAISER’S HARVEST OF DEATH
A CRIME OF STUPIDITY
(_First published in the “Sunday Times”_)
In every great national crisis, when war or revolution brings havoc on existing civilisation and works sudden and violent change in all social, political, and diplomatic relations, we are invariably able to discover One Man--or at the most, perhaps, two or three men--primarily responsible for the general upheaval.
History is impressively explicit concerning these personages. She never fails to show us how, by some strange lack of the most ordinary foresight and common sense, they stumble when apparently on the height of success, and commit irreparable blunders which hasten their careers to a disastrous close. Such was the case with Napoleon and many other would-be Alexanders of ambition; but of all the tragic blunderers of time surely none can equal or surpass the “War Lord” of Germany. Here is a man who had the splendid chance of securing for his country and people the largest share of the commerce of Europe; it lay easily within his grasp. Yet he has let it go, like a handful of sand and shells dropped by a child at play on the seashore. To satisfy the personal cravings of a vaunting, blustering Egoism for blood-and-thunder “effects” he has lost the peaceful conquest of a world!
Amazing, deplorable, and incredible folly!--when such conquest could have been gained without a blow, without the boom of a single gun, without the explosion of a single shell! It could have been attained in the only way by which any truly “civilised” nation should ever seek supremacy--through the development of industry and commerce, and the quiet assumption of the power that industry and commerce give. All that we call “progress” should fortify the stand of human resolution on this basis. It is not necessary, it is not even sane or decent that any peoples should tolerate what Carlyle describes as “the spectacle of men with clenched teeth and hell-fire eyes hacking one another’s flesh, converting precious living bodies and priceless living souls into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip manure”--which is a rough but accurate picture of war deprived of all its devilish excitement and glamour.
WASTED OPPORTUNITY
To Kaiser William more than to any other monarch of his time was given the glorious chance of becoming the greatest benefactor of Germany which that realm had ever known. He could have created for his people such conditions of peace, happiness, and prosperity as were almost incalculable. He stood in the broad sunshine of ripening trade--the markets of the world were open to him--fields of wealth were spreading around him on all sides, and his cheerfully working millions had but to reap the grain their industries had sown and gather in a rich and plenteous harvest. Why, then, in the name of all that is great, noble, and pitiful, did he choose to make a harvest of death instead of life?
A TRAGIC WITNESS
During the grim and ghastly struggle at Verdun we are told the Kaiser, standing “at safe distance,” watched through his field-glasses the fiery mowing down of his countrymen to the number of forty-five thousand! Does any one, reading this, take the trouble to pause and consider what it means? Forty-five thousand strong, brave men in the flower of manhood (for let us hope we are none of us so unjust as to deny our enemies their strength or their courage); forty-five thousand capable human beings fit for every sort of industrial labour--the blood and bone of future generations--slaughtered like vermin; and their Emperor, their sworn Defender and Protector, within sight-range, looking on!
What a “Harvest Home”! Are we able to conceive the nature and temperament of a monarch who _could_ so look on at this massacre of his subjects and not rush among them to stop the advance of their serried ranks and “massed formations,” resulting in such a wanton and wicked waste of life? The crazy antics of Nero were mere child’s play compared with this callous attitude of William of Hohenzollern; an attitude which even his French foes cannot maintain. For, fired with vengeance for old wrongs as they are, and bent on victorious justice, they have declared themselves “sick with slaughter.”
“Such hecatombs,” writes Colonel Rousset, “cannot last. Our adversary, while carrying his disregard of human life to the point of madness, cannot go on throwing his soldiers into the charnel-house without thinking of to-morrow.”
The losses of the Germans at Verdun have been estimated at 10,000 per day! “I dream at night,” writes one French artillery officer, “of those ghastly crumpled heaps of shattered gray-green bodies! Germany’s wives and mothers must curse the Kaiser in their prayers!”
THE CRIME OF STUPIDITY
Voltaire is accredited with the saying that “the only crime is stupidity.” According to this dictum one must come to consider the “All-Highest War Lord” the greatest criminal of an epoch, his stupidity being almost without parallel in history. What man, not entirely mad, seeing a world of prosperity within reach of his hand would clench his fist and knock the whole splendid sphere away from him at one blow! The proposition seems absurd and untenable, yet it has been and continues to be the Kaiser’s policy, or the policy of his ministers and advisers; clear to all save those who remain perversely and wilfully blind.
For it is not too much to say that before the war Germany was pushing quietly but surely through every branch of commerce. From triumph to triumph she moved easily onward; everywhere her ramifications were spreading like the vigorous roots of a fast-growing tree. In Great Britain she had possessed herself of many of our trades; her goods were everywhere; her cutlery, her glass, her woollens, her linens, her dyes, her silver and copper ware, her chemicals--why, even our very window-frames were “Made in Germany”! She was at work in our mines and coal-fields; she was ahead of us in science, in invention, in industry and general “thoroughness.”