Part 7

I will say nothing of the social war this Government has waged at home. Grave as that is, it is dwarfed by the monstrous dangers of the international situation. I will not say that the British Government wants war--with two possible exceptions among its members. But it is stupid; its stupidity is that sort of mental inflexibility which makes men inadaptable to new circumstances. It goes on upon the old diplomatic, militarist, nationalist, and competitive lines that carried Europe so inevitably to the smash of 1914, and it has not the imagination to see plainly how surely it drives to another smash. If the present British Government remains in office for another five years that smash, I believe, will come.

I am not indulging here in single-handed prophecy. What I am writing here is realized now more or less lucidly by an immense multitude of observers. It lies upon the surface of things, just as the war of 1914 lay plainly on the surface of things for years before it came. And one might reasonably imagine that this great multitude would set about preparing to push the Government out of office effectively and thoroughly, would make sure of a complete purge of its supporter at the next general election. Nothing could be further from the reality of the case. The same want of imagination that allows the British Government to drum along with international bickerings and military preparations towards a new great war robs the huge majority of people who are against the Government of any effective coherence. The Great War seems to have passed over the politicians in opposition with as small intellectual profit as it has over the Ministers in office.

In the face of a rapidly approaching disaster that may wreck civilized life, these people go on with the old tricks and the old antics that distinguished political life in those days of apparently eternal security when good Queen Victoria sat upon the throne. They do not seem to see that there is any situation or any stream of events outside the little arena in which they manœuvre against each other for office and the petty glories of a party triumph. Two figures in particular I contemplate with blank amazement. One is Sir Herbert Samuel. I am loth to believe him as silly as his public proceedings. But of their immense silliness there can be no doubt. He is the figure-head of pure party Liberalism. He is the typical advocate of the candidature of those five hundred Liberal candidates who are everywhere to wage implacable warfare against the Labour Party. Everywhere they are to busy themselves in breaking up the peace vote and, if they cannot get in themselves, letting in the Tory--and war.

Over against him is Ramsay MacDonald, a figure of fantastic vanity and secretiveness, equally resolute on keeping the Labour Party in bitter antagonism to the Liberals--though the heavens fall. The poor little “Daily Herald” under his influence spends most of its ammunition on the Liberals, and the mere whisper of “coalition” is treated like an attack upon fundamental political virtue. The implacable stupidity of both these groups, the pure party Liberals and the pure party Labourites, exceeds even the unteachable stupidity of the Government policy. And they are helping it forward. When the bombs begin to burst and the smash comes Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, because of their inveterate party spirit, will be as responsible for the disaster as Mr. Amery or Mr. Baldwin.

But the question I have been asking myself and most of the people I have been meeting lately is, “What are we personally going to do about it?” Like the majority of people in Great Britain, I want a coalition of the Liberal and Labour Parties. That plainly is our salvation. I realize--surely everyone realizes--that the internal legislation and the foreign policy of a Liberal Government in Great Britain for the next ten years at least would be substantially the same as that of a Labour Government. Of the two Mr. MacDonald is the least likely to move a step towards Socialism. The pretence of any irreconcilable fundamental differences does not deceive 5 per cent. of the British Electorate. The Liberals might be rather more economical and skimpy over social services and the Labour people more snobbish and more extravagant over the army, navy, and air services. The blend might indeed be better than either party, faults might cancel out. And since I am convinced that people like Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald are incurably set upon their party follies, I am obliged, we are obliged, to cast about for other figures upon which we may concentrate our enthusiasm and to whom we may look for some sort of leadership beyond mere party strategy in the approaching struggle.

One’s mind turns to Mr. Lloyd George. He is a seasoned Coalitionist, and he is plainly disposed towards another Coalition. He has made alluring gestures towards the left, but an unusual hesitation to return them is apparent. Plainly Labour, though it may work with him, will not put itself under him.

And that applies not merely to the party-obsessed Labour people. We all like Mr. Lloyd George, but at times he veils his solid worth beneath an agility and flexibility that leaves us uneasy. I do not know if we can look at him to play a secondary rôle in a combination. It would necessarily be a very considerable rôle. And, after all, he is technically a Liberal, and the majority of the anti-Government mass is Labour. The headship of any combination for the preservation of peace in the world should reside in the majority. The leader should be a Labour man. This also excludes Lord Cecil, with his traditional attitude towards Church and land, from the formal leadership. So one turns to the Labour Party and looks for a Coalitionist there.

I consider Henderson, Thomas, Clynes, all surely Ministers in a coalition, but none of them quite what we require as a figure-head. Then I come to Snowden and stop. There, I believe, is the man who can best lead the British Empire, under a Coalition Government, back to sanity, security, and the service of peace. There is a certain quality of greatness about Snowden which is not very widely distributed in our political world to-day. I suppose that among statesmen, politicians, and public servants of all types and parties, Philip Snowden is more generally respected and would be more willingly trusted than any other contemporary. He is a man whose public character, quite as much as his private character, is without spot or blemish. He is a man of real capacity and great personal force. He is the man we want. And I do not see why we, the growing multitude of British people who want to get rid of this dangerous Government of ours who do not care a rap either way for the Liberal “machine” or the Labour “machine,” should not set about getting him now.

Would he serve us? Probably not at first. He might plead his allegiance to his party. But there are popular invitations that have the force of commands. Would Mr. Lloyd George work with him? I do not know. Mr. Lloyd George has neither the narrow-mindedness of Sir Herbert Samuel nor the lonely vanity of Mr. MacDonald. He is quite capable of magnanimity; and for him also a strong popular feeling, effectively expressed, might have imperative force. Many of the dissentient Liberals, on account of minor feuds and unforgettable sayings during those feuds, would, I know, serve much more gladly under Snowden as a leader than under Lloyd George.

But at the present stage of affairs I do not see why we should wait upon the Tadpoles and Tapers to fix up this arrangement for us. The growing multitude of people who see things in this way has the power to force this combination over the heads of the party managers. We can write; we can organize; we are not without a Press. Why wait while the leaders negotiate?

At the next election it will be comparatively simple for us to disregard the difference between Liberalism and Labour altogether. When we find ourselves in any constituency where a Liberal is trying to cut down a Labour majority or where a Labour candidate is trying to cut down a Liberal majority, we can vote solidly for the legitimate claimant to the seat, whether he be Liberal or Labour. When we hear the Liberal beginning to make his little points against Labour or the Labour man chipping the Liberal, instead of getting on to the real business in hand, the proper comment is a loud “Bah!” repeated until the gentleman takes notice. Then we shall get the maximum number of Liberals and Labour men into the House of Commons, and when they are there they will have to shake down into a coalition whether they like it or not.

The Labour Party is surely not so foolish as to take office in a minority again, with the Liberals primly in possession of what Sir Herbert Samuel calls the “casting vote,” and equally will the Liberals refuse to shoulder responsibility alone. Everybody in Parliament knows that Coalition waits at the end of the passage even if a second election intervenes. Why have the expense and delay of a second election? As practical people with an empire to save, let us get on to that coalition now.

_27 November, 1927._

VIII

COMMUNISM AND WITCHCRAFT

I have recently been reading the “History of Witchcraft and Demonology,” by Mr. Montague Summers, and various utterances upon the Soviet Government of Russia by supporters of the present enlightened Government of the British Empire, and I find a curious confusion in my mind between the two. Mr. Summers, like all good Catholics, is a believer in witchcraft; and he hates witches as soundly and sincerely as the British county families hate the “Reds”; and he believes as freely and fiercely about the detested breed. Here is a passage, and I will leave the reader to guess whether it is from the pages of Mr. Summers or the columns of a Conservative newspaper on the eve of a general election:

The witch or the Red (as the case may be) is “an evil liver; a social pest and parasite; the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed; an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and all creeping crimes; a member of a powerful secret organization inimical to Church and State; a blasphemer in word and deed; swaying the villagers by terror and superstition; a charlatan and a quack sometimes, a...”--here I censor my authority--“an...”--the censorship is really imperative; “a minister of vice and inconceivable corruption; battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age.”

The doubts the simple, honest reader of the British Conservative Press will feel--whether this is the more accurate description of Mother Shipton, Gilles de Rais, any Knight Templar, the late Mr. Krassin, Mr. Lunacharsky, or Lenin--will do much to carry out the interesting views of that great historical writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, that modern Communism is the lineal descendant of the black traditions of medieval sorcery, Manichean heresies, Free Masonry, and the Witch of Endor. Be that as it may, modern Communism is certainly heir now to the estate of fear and terror which descends to us from the past.

Perhaps mankind has a standing need for somebody to tar, feather, and burn. Perhaps if there was no devil, men would have to invent one. In a more perfect world we may have to draw lots to find who shall be the witch or the “Red,” or the heretic or the nigger, in order that one man may suffer for the people. Mr. Summers’ book makes interesting, disagreeable reading of the sort that enhances its excitement here and there by a coy resort to transparent Latin; and it shows Popes and prelates and Puritans, kings and judges, all manner of respectable people, succumbing to exactly the same sort of emotional disturbance that now makes membership of the Communist Party so dangerous, exciting, and attractive to the light-minded young of Western Europe and America. Nothing was too dreadful for belief about witches and warlocks, and, alas for the feebleness of the human imagination, most things, it is felt, were not nearly dreadful enough. They made mischief, they fostered strikes, and they raised storms and insurrections in such scanty leisure as a constant round of Witches’ Sabbaths allowed. They were drowned, tortured, beaten, and burnt alive, and still the kindly righteous had a baffling sense of inadequate retort to all the bestial cruelty and wickedness charged against them.

As one turns over the record of Mr. Summers’ book, it is fairly plain to any one not under a conscientious necessity to believe in witchcraft that all these waves of inquisition and cruelty were a sort of pooling of the normal indignation of mankind against the orgies and queer and vile acts that lurk at the roots of our animal nature, and of our fear of the tricks and malicious resentments of inferior and unhappy people, and a direction of this pooled force of disapproval and hostility against heresy, sedition, and unpopular opinions generally. Gilles de Rais was an insane murderer, guilty of almost incredibly bestial cruelties, but his wickedness was pinned to heresy and made an excuse against the gentlest and purest of unbelievers. Evil men, you said were heretics, and then when some one ventured to differ from your high orthodoxy you charged him promptly with organized association with filth and every form of evil. If any one questioned your theology, well, manifestly he was a second Gilles de Rais. Mr. Summers, for instance, has no doubt that great epidemics of witchcraft followed doctrinal disputes; that religious doubt and a flirtatious alliance with the devil were in the sequence of cause and effect.

To-day there are many signs that the “Red” has a good chance of playing the part of the witch of older times in a new world mania. The examination of Sacco and Vanzetti, charged with ordinary murder and robbery, upon their political opinions, in the Massachusetts courts, was quite in the vein of the old witch trials. “Tell me what you think,” said the prosecution, “and what you did may be judged by that.” It is wonderful how witch-hanging Massachusetts has kept true to its old traditions.

This tendency to associate unpopular opinions with murderable offences seems to be an increasing one on both sides of the Atlantic. I am sure it needs only a very slight Press campaign to convince any number of people in London that when Sir W. Joynson-Hicks made his preposterous raid on the Soviet business headquarters in search of an alleged stolen paper, members of the Arcos staff escaped on broomsticks from an upper window with that wonderful confidential document the police sought and never found. When I came back from Russia in 1920 and wrote that Lenin seemed an intelligent little man, who was rather at a loss what to do with the great country that had fallen so wonderfully into his hands, I pleased nobody. The Communists and Left Labour people wanted extravagant praise and a glorification of a state of affairs that seemed to me to be a frightful muddle, and the anti-Bolshevik witch-hunters wanted yarns about orgies in the Kremlin, Mme. Lenin dressed up in the Russian Crown jewels, drinking champagne out of cups of gold in the worst possible taste, and aristocratic babies being tortured and murdered after dinner just for fun and devilry by commissars. They wanted to excite themselves about Moscow, just as the mediæval witch-hunters excited themselves with wild imaginations about the Witches’ Sabbaths.

Failing “hot stuff” of that sort, the anti-Bolsheviks were convinced I was in the pay of Moscow. They wanted their Bolsheviks not small and bothered, but horrible. They wanted me to make their blood run cold. They wanted to work themselves up into a frenzy of indignation, terror, and violence.

And they wanted to do so because, as I say, there seems to be in the dark, tortuous, and dangerous heart of man a real craving for vehement self-righteous persecution and enthusiastic and irrational punishment. I know. I have felt it in me. If I have never killed and massacred in the waking day, I have known all these bright reliefs and excitements in dreams. And in reveries.

To any one who can think about Bolshevism and retain a normal temperature the facts are as plain as daylight. Russia has been, is, and must remain for some time to come a largely barbaric country. Large areas of Russia are still as backward as England was in Tudor times, and few of its towns have a social life much in advance of early nineteenth-century conditions in Great Britain. It was in the days of the Czar, and it is to-day, a backward land of hardships and intense discomforts, a land of rough methods, frequent crimes, and much sporadic cruelty. Until ten years ago it was ruled by a stupid, disorderly, and tyrannous autocracy--superstitious and hostile to education--which collapsed through sheer inherent rottenness under the stresses of the Great War. The resources of Russia were so wasted, and its army so ruthlessly handled in that war, as to wreck the whole social system. Those Bolsheviks are in possession of the wreck. They are in possession because they were the only people with sufficient faith, discipline, and determination to hold together in the general chaos.

But they are neither gods nor devils. They are limited, conceited, and as liable to witch panics and suspicion mania as the most enlightened citizens of Middlesex or Massachusetts. Their “reprisals” for the Arcos raid and for the various recent murders of their members would have disgraced a lynching State in the American Union. They cling to the old theories and dogmas of Marx, half a century stale. They seem as little capable of modern industrial organization as the British coal-owners, and their need is far more urgent. They have a percentage of cads, roughs, and scoundrels hanging to them which may or may not be higher than the similar percentage of any political party in Britain or America. They are as a whole just a band of worried, rather incompetent doctrinaires, some able and sympathetic, some obtuse and dangerous, and they have an empire on their hands. There they are, the only possible Government for Russia, and if they are submerged, nothing will be left of Russia but a wilderness of warring brigand armies and barbaric peasants. Failing them Russia will repeat on a larger, more dreadful scale, and without the same substructure of civilized urban tradition, the Germany of the Thirty Years’ War.

They will probably resent my conception of them as muddled, overstrained men with an old-fashioned and inapplicable social theory to guide them in an overwhelming job, far more than the current idea of them as a crew of super-devils. Like the mediæval witches, they threaten and boast to keep up their self-respect, and so they bring down upon themselves the cowardly violence of the timid. Whatever happens abroad to the discomfort of the American or European capitalists they claim as the result of their marvellous machinations. It is a pitiful posturing.

I do not believe that the coal muddle and that dismal strike of last year would have happened any differently if Russia had never existed. They have a conceit of ordering about the labouring classes of the earth. It is touching. I found poor Lenin in the Kremlin swallowing the stuff in Miss Sylvia Pankhurst’s “Dreadnought” as the current opinion of the British “proletariat.”

As a matter of fact, in all the world from end to end outside Russia--I am not forgetting China--the Communist Party cannot count upon the services of twenty thousand men or raise half a million pounds. It is always poking into gatherings and claiming to have called them, jumping on coaches driven by other people and pretending to run them. The only advantage of this sort of rubbish to the Bolsheviks is to give the simple Russian worker a good conceit of himself and his rulers, but it is disastrous to the friends of the worker everywhere. It supplies the witch-finder and the hunter of radicals with just the “’orrible ’orrible” evidence he needs.

When I visited the House of Science in Petrograd in 1920, there was a Communist Party representative who had poked in among the men of science to explain how different and superior “Marxist” chemistry and astronomy were to the bourgeois teaching, and Fülop-Miller’s “Geist and Gesicht des Bolshewismus” (which has recently been translated into English) collects, with destructive malice and deadly illustrations, flagrant examples of the nonsense about new philosophy, new science, new art, new religion, new everything, newer and better than ever before, with which the Bolsheviks console themselves in their grim and from many aspects amazingly plucky struggle to keep a strained and damaged civilization going and even progressing, in the face of the extravagant hatred and hostility of the outer world.

If only people would recognize, first, that Russia is, and must be for some decades, a very backward country, and that, whatever Government rules there, rough and barbaric things are bound to happen; second, that the whole of the Bolshevik propaganda is about as injurious to modern capitalism as the brews and spells of those poor old women our ancestors found such satisfaction in burning alive were to the people against whom they were aimed; third, that panic, violence, brag, bad manners, and petty irritations towards foreigners are not the monopoly of the Bolsheviks; and, fourth, that the existing Government of Russia is the only possible Government there at the present time; and that the only hope of saving the vast areas and resources of European and Asiatic Russia for civilization lies in getting to some working compromise with that Government and co-operating in its development--if, I say, people would bear these fairly obvious things in mind, I should be able to look forward with more confidence to the immediate future of the world than I feel at the present time. But with Britain in the hands of a Government suffering from witch mania with regard to Russia and the ruling powers of America in little better case, with the liberalism of the world leaderless, misrepresented, and confused, there is a very considerable probability that that ailing State will be, as a potential modern State, ruined and destroyed in the next few decades. Nothing will be achieved by the overthrow of Bolshevism in Russia as the result of this witch mania but the completer desolation of a great area of the old world.

_21 August, 1927._

IX

THE FUTURE OF LABOUR. THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN CAPITAL AND LABOUR. CONTROVERSIAL HALLUCINATIONS

A correspondent in America writes to suggest an article on the struggle between Capital and Labour, and what it is coming to. To-morrow in the United States is the legal holiday for the celebration of Labour, and it seems an appropriate date for some general remarks that have been accumulating in my mind about this indisputable struggle.