The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife

XVI
NEVER AGAIN!

Like a great cry these words to-day rise from the lips of the nations—"Never Again!" Never before certainly have such enormous masses of human beings been locked in deadly grip with each other over the earth, and never before, equally certainly, has their warfare been so horrible in its deliberate preparation, so hideous, so ghastly in its after-effects, as to-day. The nations stand round paralysed with disgust and despair, almost unable to articulate; and when they do find voice it is with the words above written.

How are we to give effect to the cry? Must we not call upon the Workers of all countries—those who are the least responsible for the inception of wars, and yet who suffer most by them, who bear the brunt of the wounds, the slaughter, the disease, and the misery which are a necessary part of them—to rise up and forbid them for ever from the earth? Let us do so! For though few may follow and join with us to-day, yet to-morrow and every day in the future, and every year, as the mass-peoples come into their own, and to the knowledge of what they are and what they desire to be, those numbers will increase, till the cry itself is no longer a mere cry but an accomplished fact.

It is a hopeful sign that not only among bewildered onlookers and outsiders but among the soldiers themselves (of the more civilized countries) this cry is being taken up. Who, indeed, should know better than they what they are talking about? The same words are on the lips at this moment of thousands and thousands of French and English and German soldiers,³⁰ and in no faint-hearted or evasive sense, but with the conviction and indignation of experience. We may hope they will not be forgotten this time when the war is over.

The truth is that not only was this particular war "bound to come," but (among the civilized peoples) the refusal of war is also bound to come. Two great developments are leading to this result. On the one hand, the soldiers themselves, the fighters, are as a class becoming infinitely more sensitive, more intelligent, more capable of humane feeling, less stupidly "patriotic" and prejudiced against their enemies than were the soldiers of a century ago—say, of the time of Wellington; on the other hand, the horrors, the hideousness, the folly, and the waste of war are infinitely greater. It is inevitable that these two contradictory movements, mounting up on opposite sides, must at last clash. The rising conscience of Humanity must in the end say to the War-fiend, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" Never before have there passed over the fields of Europe armies so intelligent, so trained, so observant, so sensitive as those to-day of Belgium, France, England, and Germany. Some day or other they will return to their homes; but when they do it will be with a tale that will give to the Western world an understanding of what war means, such as it never had before.

All the same, if the word is to be "Never Again!" it must come through the masses themselves (from whom the fighters are mainly drawn); it must be through them that this consummation must be realized. It must be through the banding together and determined and combined effort of the Unions, local, national, and international, and through the weight of the workers' influence in all their associations and in all countries. To put much reliance in this matter upon the "classes" is rash; for though just now the latter are sentimentalizing freely over the subject—having got into nearer touch with it than ever before—yet when all is settled down, and the day arrives once more that their interests point to war, it is only too likely that they (or the majority of them) will not hesitate to sacrifice the masses—unless, indeed, the power to do so has already departed from them.

And it is no good for us to sentimentalize on the subject. We must not blink facts. And the fact is that "it's a long way" to Never Again. The causes of War must be destroyed first; and, as I have more than once tried to make clear, the causes ramify through our midst; they are like the roots, pervading the body politic, of some fell disease whose outbreak on the surface shocks and affrights us. To dislodge and extirpate these roots is a long business. But there is this consolation about it—that it is a business which we can all of us begin at once, in our own lives!

Probably wars will still for many a century continue, though less frequent we hope. And if the people themselves want to fight, and must fight, who is to say them Nay? In such case we need not be overmuch troubled. There are many things worse than fighting; and there are many wounds and injuries which people inflict on each other worse than bodily wounds and injuries—only they are not so plain to see. But I certainly would say—as indeed the peasant says in every land—"Let those who begin the quarrel do the fighting"; and let those who have to do the fighting and bear the brunt of it (including the women) decide whether there shall be fighting or not. To leave the dread arbitrament of War in the hands of private groups and cliques who, for their own ends and interests, are willing to see the widespread slaughter of their fellow-countrymen and the ruin of innumerable homes is hateful beyond words.

XVII
THE TREE OF LIFE

February, 1915.

Finally, and looking back on all we have said, and especially on the Christmas scenes and celebrations between the trenches in this war and the many similar fraternizations of the rank and file of opposing armies in former wars, one realizes the monstrosity and absurdity of the present conflict—its anachronism and out-of-dateness in the existing age of human thought and feeling. The whole European situation resembles a game of marbles played by schoolboys. It is not much more dignified than that. Each boy tries on the quiet to appropriate some of the marbles out of another boy's bag. From time to time, in consequence, furious scrimmages arise—generally between two boys—the others looking' on and laughing, knowing well that they themselves are guilty of the same tricks. Presently, in the fortunes of the game, one boy—a little more blundering or a little less disguised than the others—lays himself open to the accusations of the whole crew. They all fall upon him, and give him a good drubbing; and even some of them say they are punishing him for his good! When shall we make an end, once for all, of this murderous nonsense?

However our Tommy Atkinses have been worked up to fighting point by fears for the safety of old England, or by indignation at atrocities actually observed or distantly reported; however the German soldiers have been affected by similar fears and indignations, or the French the same; however the political coil has been engineered (as engineered in such cases it always is), and whatever inducements of pay or patriotism have been put in operation and sentiments circulated by the Press—one thing remains perfectly certain: that left to themselves these men would never have quarrelled, never have attacked each other. One thing is perfectly certain: that such a war as the present is the result of the activity of governing cliques and classes in the various nations, acting through what are called "Diplomatic" channels, for the most part in secret and unbeknown to their respective mass-peoples, and for motives best known to themselves.

One would not venture to say that all wars are so engineered, for there certainly are occasionally wars which are the spontaneous expression of two nations' natural hostility and hatred; but these are rare, very rare, and the war in which we are concerned at present is certainly not one of them. Also one would not venture to say that though in the present affair the actuating motives have been of class origin, and have been worked through secret channels, the motives so put in action have all been base and mean. That would be going too far. Some of the motives may have been high-minded and generous, some may have been mean, and others may have been mean and yet unconsciously so. But certainly when one looks at the conditions of public and political life, and the arrangements and concatenations by which influence there is exerted and secured, and sees (as one must) the pretty bad corruption which pervades the various parties in all the modern States—the commercial briberies, the lies of the Press, the poses and prevarications of Diplomats and Ministers—one cannot but realize the great probability that the private advantage of individuals or classes has been (in the present case) a prevailing instigation. The fact that in Britain two influential and honourable Cabinet Ministers resigned at once on the declaration of war (a fact upon which the Press has been curiously silent) cannot but "give one to think." One cannot but realize that the fighting men in all these nations are the pawns and counters of a game which is being played for the benefit—or supposed benefit—of certain classes; that public opinion is a huge millstream which has to be engineered; that the Press is a channel for its direction, and Money the secret power which commands the situation.

The fact is sad, but it must be faced. And the facing of it leads inevitably to the question, "How, then, can Healing ever come?" If (it will be said) the origin of wars is in the diseased condition of the nations, what prospect is there of their ever ceasing? And one sees at once that the prospect is not immediate. One sees at once that Peace Societies and Nobel Prizes and Hague Tribunals and reforms of the Diplomatic Service and democratic control of Foreign Secretaries and Quaker and Tolstoyan preachments—though all these things may be good in their way—will never bring us swiftly to the realization of peace. The roots of the Tree of Life lie deeper.

We have seen it a dozen times in the foregoing pages. Only when the nations cease to be diseased in themselves will they cease fighting with each other. And the disease of the modern nations is the disease of disunity—not, as I have already said, the mere existence of variety of occupation and habit, for that is perfectly natural and healthy, but the disease by which one class preys upon another and upon the nation—the disease of parasitism and selfish domination. The health of a people consists in that people's real unity, the organic life by which each section contributes freely and generously to the welfare of the whole, identifies itself with that welfare, and holds it a dishonour to snatch for itself the life which should belong to all. A nation which realized that kind of life would be powerful and healthy beyond words; it would not only be splendidly glad and prosperous and unassailable in itself, but it would inevitably infect all other nations with whom it had dealings with the same principle. Having the Tree of Life well rooted within its own garden, its leaves and fruit and all its acts and expressions would be for the healing of the peoples around. But a nation divided against itself by parasitic and self-exalting cliques and sections could never stand. It could never be healthy. No armaments nor ingenuity of science and organization could save it, and even though the form of its institutions were democratic, if the reality of Democracy were not there, its peace crusades and prizes and sentimental Conferences and Christianities would be of little avail.

At this juncture, then, all over Europe, when the classes are failing us and by their underhand machinations continually embroiling one nation with another, it is above all necessary that the mass-peoples should move and insist upon the representation of their great unitary and communal life and interests. It is high time that they should open their eyes and see with clear vision what is going on over their heads, and more than high time that they should refuse to take part in the Quarrels of those who (professionally) live upon their labour. It is indeed astonishing that the awakening has been so long in coming; but surely it cannot be greatly delayed now. Underneath all the ambitions of certain individuals and groups; underneath all the greed and chicanery of others; underneath the widespread ignorance, mother of prejudice, which sunders folk of different race or colour-deep down the human heart beats practically the same in all lands, drawing us little mortals together.

Strangely enough—and yet not strangely—it beats strongest and clearest often in the simplest, the least sophisticated. Those who live nearest the truth of their own hearts are nearest to the hearts of others. Those who have known the realities of the world, and what Life is close to the earth—they are the same in all lands—they have at least the key to the understanding of each other. The old needs of life, its destinies and fatalities, its sorrows and joys, its exaltations and depressions —these are the same everywhere; and to the manual workers —the peasant, the labourer, the sailor, the mechanic—the world-old trades, pursuits, crafts, and callings with which they are so familiar supply a kind of freemasonry which ensures them even among strangers a kindly welcome and an easy admittance. If you want to travel in foreign lands, you will find that to be skilled in one or two manual trades is better than a high official passport.

Among such people there is no natural hatred of each other. Despite all the foam and fury of the Press over the present war, I doubt whether there is any really violent feeling of the working masses on either side between England and Germany. There certainly is no great amount in England, either among the country-folk or the town artisans and mechanics; and if there be much in Germany (which is quite doubtful) it is fairly obviously due to the animus which has been aroused and the virus which has been propagated by political and social schemers.

We have had enough of Hatred and Jealousy. For a century now commercial rivalry and competition, the perfectionment of the engines of war, and the science of destruction have sufficiently occupied the nations—with results only of disaster and distress and ruin to all concerned. To-day surely another epoch opens before us—an epoch of intelligent helpfulness and fraternity, an epoch even of the simplest common sense. We have rejoiced to tread and trample the other peoples underfoot, to malign and traduce them, to single out and magnify their defects, to boast ourselves over them. And acting thus we have but made the more enemies. Now surely comes an era of recognition and understanding, and with it the glad assurance that we have friends in all the ends of the earth.

We—and I speak of the European nations generally—have talked loudly of our own glory; but have we welcomed and acclaimed the glory and beauty of the other peoples and races around us—among whom it is our privilege to dwell? We have boasted to love each our own country, but have we cared at all for the other countries too? Verily I suspect that it is because we have not truly loved our own countries, but have betrayed them for private profit, that we have thought fit to hate our neighbours and ill-use them for our profit too.

What a wonderful old globe this is, with its jewelled constellations of humanity! Alfred Russel Wallace, in his Travels on the Amazon (1853, ch. xvii), says: "I do not remember a single circumstance in my travels so striking and so new, or that so well fulfilled all previous expectation, as my first view of the real uncivilized inhabitants of the river Uaupés…. I felt that I was as much in the midst of something new and startling, as if I had been instantaneously transported to a distant and unknown country." He then speaks of the "quiet, good-natured, inoffensive" character of these copper-coloured natives, and of their quickness of hand and skill, and continues: "Their figures are generally superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human form." Elsewhere he says³¹: "Their whole aspect and manner were different [from the semi-civilized Indians]; they walked with the free step of the independent forest-dweller … original and self-sustaining as the wild animals of the forest … living their own lives in their own way, as they had done for countless generations before America was discovered. The true denizen of the Amazonian forests, like the forest itself, is unique and not to be forgotten."

Not long ago I was talking to a shrewd, vigorous old English lady who had spent some forty years of her life among the Kafirs in South Africa and knew them intimately. She said (not knowing anything about my feelings): "Ah! you British think a great deal about yourselves. You think you are the finest race on earth; but I tell you the Kafirs are finer. They are splendid. Whether for their physical attributes, or their mental, or for their qualities of soul, I sometimes think they are the finest people in the world." Whether the old lady was right (and one has heard others say much the same), or whether she was carried away by her enthusiasm, the fact remains that here is a people capable of exciting such enthusiasm, and certainly capable of exciting much admiration among all who know them well.

Read the accounts of the Polynesian peoples at an early period—before commerce and the missionaries had come among them—as given in the pages of Captain Cook, of Herman Melville, or even as adumbrated in their past life in the writings of R.L. Stevenson—what a picture of health and gaiety and beauty! Surely never was there a more charming and happy folk—even if long-pig did occasionally in their feasts alternate with wild-pig.

And yet how strange that the white man, with all his science and all his so-called Christianity, has only come among these three peoples mentioned (and how many more?) to destroy and defile them—to flog the mild and innocent native of the Amazons to death for greed of his rubber; to rob the Kafir of his free wild lands and blast his life with drink and slavery in the diamond mines; to degrade and exterminate the Pacific islanders with all the vices and diseases of "civilization"!

Think of the Chinese—that extraordinary people coming down from the remotest ages of history, with their habits and institutions apparently but little changed—so kindly, so "all there," so bent on making the best of this world. "At the first sight of these ugly, cheery, vigorous people I loved them. Their gaiety, as of children, their friendliness, their profound humanity, struck me from the first and remained with me to the last."³² And the verdict of all who know the people well—in the interior of the country of course—is the same. Think of the Japanese with their slight and simple, but exceedingly artistic and exceedingly heroic type of civilization.

Or, again, of the East Indian peoples, so unfitted as a rule for making the best of this world, so passive, dreamy, subtle, unpractical, and yet with their marvellous spiritual gift, their intuition (also since the dawn of history) and conviction of another plane of being than that in which we mostly move, and their occasional power of distinctly sensing that plane and acting on its indications. Think of their ancient religious philosophy—their doctrine of world-unity—absolutely foundational and inexpugnable, the corner-stone of all metaphysics, science, and politics, and of the latest most modern democracy; and still realized and believed in in India as nowhere else in the world.

Think of the gentle Buddhistic Burmese, the active, social Malays, the hard-featured, hard-lived Thibetans and Mongolians. Think of the Arabian and Moorish and Berber races, who, once the masters of the science and comforts of civilization, of their own accord (but in accordance also with their religion) abandoned the worship of all these idols and returned to the Biblical simplicity of four thousand years ago—having realized that they already possessed something better, namely, the glory of the sky and the earth, the sun and the desert sands, and the freedom of love and adventure. How strange, and yet how natural, that sundered only by a narrow strip of sea they even now should look back upon all the laborious, feverish, and overcrowded wealth of Europe and seeing the cost thereof should feel for it only contempt! For that, indeed, is actually for the most part the case—though not of course without exceptions among certain sections of the population.

Or again, the millions and millions of Great and Little Russian peasants. Big-framed, big-hearted, patient, friendly, with a great natural gift for association and co-operation, peacefully minded and profoundly religious; yet superstitious, and capable of rising at any moment en masse to the call of a great crusade or "holy war"; it might seem that they hold all Western Europe in the hollow of their hands. Indeed they constitute not only a hope and promise of deliverance to our modern world, but also a considerable danger. All depends on how we dispose ourselves towards them. Should the nations of Western Europe rouse their hatred by chicanery and mean treatment the result might be fatal. If their flood once began to move, no battle array of armaments would be of any use—any more than a revolver against a rising tide—the flood would flow round and over us. But if on the other hand we could really reach the heart of this great people, if we could treat them really generously and with understanding, we should create a response there, and a recognition, which would remove all risk to ourselves, and possibly help to free Russia from the great burden of political servitude and ignorance which has so long oppressed her peasantry.

Or think of the Servians—that hospitable people, good lovers and good haters, with their ancient, almost prehistoric, system of family communities surviving down to modern days, and blossoming out in a perfect genius for co-operative agriculture and Raffeisen banks!

Or the Finns, the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the Danes (if I may class these together); what a clear, clean-minded, healthy people are these, so direct in their touch on Nature and the human instincts, so democratic, bold, and progressive in their social organizations—what a privilege to have them as our near neighbours and relatives! Or the Germans, in many ways resembling the last mentioned group, only richer and more varied in their culture and racial characteristics! Or the Dutch, so well-based and broad-seated both in body and mind, with their ample bowels of compassion and their well-equipped brains, so full of tenderness and of sturdy commonsense, what a gift has been theirs to Europe, what a legacy of artistic treasure and of heroic record! Or the Spanish with their beautiful and dignified women, or the French with their fine logical and artistic sense, or the Hungarians, Greeks, and Italians!

Have we nothing to do but to prepare engines of death and of slaughter against all these peoples? Is our main idea of relation to them one of domination and profit? Have we no use for them but to gain their riches, and in exchange to lose our own souls? Or shall we, like the Prussians, seek to "impose" our own standards of so-called culture on them, and trim their infinite variety and grace to one sorry pattern? These are all in their diverse glory and beauty as leaves of the one great Tree whose branches spread over the earth. Whoever understands this, and penetrating to the great heart beneath, recognizes the same original life in them all, will possess the secret of salvation; whatever nation first casts aside the filthy rags of its own self-righteousness and the defiling and sordid garment of mercenary gain, and accepts the others frankly as its brother and sister nations, all of one family—that nation will become the Healer and Redeemer of the World.

It is interesting to find that, according to the Book of Revelation, the tree of which we have been speaking grows with its roots "in the pure river of the water of Life, which proceeds from the throne of God and the Lamb." What exactly the author of the book meant by this passage has been much debated. It is clear that there is here a veiled allusion to the Zodiac—that mysterious belt of constellations which runs like a river round the whole starry heavens, and rises in the constellation of the Ram or He-lamb—but to debate that question now would be unprofitable, even were one fully competent to do so. More to the point is it to see that this remarkable simile has an inner sense applicable to mankind, and so far independent of any allusion to the Zodiac. This Tree that is for the healing of the nations has its roots in the pure water of Life which flows from the great Throne. We have seen in an early chapter where the roots of Strife between the nations are to be sought for, and whence they draw their nourishment. They are to be found in the very muddy waters of domination and selfishness and greed. But the roots of the Tree of Healing are in the pure waters of Life. Right down below all the folly and meanness which clouds men's souls flows the universal Life pure from its original source. The longer you live, the more clearly and certainly you will perceive it. In the eyes of the men and women around you you will perceive it, and in the eyes of the children—aye, and even of the animals. Unclean, no doubt, will the surface be—muddied with meannesses and self-motives; and among those classes and currents of people who chiefly delight to dwell in the midst of such things (who dwell in the floating mire of malice and envy and self-assertion and avarice and conceit and deceit and domination and other such refuse), the waters will be foul indeed; but below these classes, among the simple, comparatively unselfconscious types of humanity who everywhere represent the universal life (without, in a sense, being aware of it), and again, above them, among those whose spirits have passed "in compassion and determination around the whole earth and found only equals and lovers," the water flows pure and free. These two groups—between them forming far the largest and most important mass of human kind—are those whose influence and tendency is toward peace and amity. It is only the scurrying, avaricious, fever-stricken, and, for all their wealth, poverty-stricken classes and cliques of the civilization-period who are the sources of discord and strife—and they only for a time. In the end it will be found that by every river and stream and tiny brook over the whole earth grows the invincible Tree of Life, whose roots are deep in the human heart, and whose leaves are for the healing of the Nations.

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