These things Niebuhr and Mommsen forgot when they proposed to Germany the splendid example of Rome; and history will have its revenge on its great interpreters by recording the close in tragedy of this new imperialism which they inspired. Other historians boldly quoted Greece—Alexander of Macedon—and the fallacy is even more piteous. Athens assuredly did not become great by war. Its most brilliant period opens after a crushing and devastating reverse, and its achievements were entirely due to its statesmen, its artists, and its thinkers. But from the moment when the shadow of the Macedonian empire fell on it, a blight came swiftly over its culture. Its glory departed for ever when it became part of a great military power. Greece, as a whole, was impoverished and ruined by war. Sparta itself, one of the most strenuous military powers that ever lived, is a classical proof that war invigorates only to destroy.
To whatever nation we turn, we learn the same lesson of history. Egypt survived the strain, owing to the constant infusion of foreign blood, for eight thousand years, but sank at last so exhausted that it seems almost beyond the hope of reanimation. Assyria and Babylonia were prepared for destruction by the same steady drain of their healthiest blood. The Hittites, the Lydians, the Phœnicians, the Medes, the Persians followed the same course. From the first founding of civilisation in the valley of the Nile, ten thousand years ago, war has brooded over its cities and cornfields, and has time after time blighted its achievements and its hopes. It is as though some god were jealous of the advance of man, and maintained on the earth this corroding pest to eat into the life of each successive empire, and, by destroying it, to interrupt the progress of the race.
In the history of Europe since the fall of Rome we witness the same human tragedy. I do not overlook the other evil influences, such as fiscal disorder and industrial parasitism, which have contributed to the fall of empires, but the share of war in these tragedies was incalculable. The fate of early England, battling against invaders and rent by internal quarrels for centuries, is typical. The greater England of modern times, or the real greatness of modern England, was built in periods of comparative peace by merchants and manufacturers and scholars. Over the whole of Europe the vampire still brooded, fastening on each young nation that advanced beyond its fellows. The medieval republics of Italy were wrecked by war. Holland and Portugal, once the most promising powers of Europe, were exhausted by it. Not vice, not enervation, not a dwindling birth-rate—which are rather consequences than causes—but the incessant exhaustion of their resources on the seas and the battlefield condemned them to decay. Italy fell back into the state of impotence which gave Austria and the Papacy their ignoble opportunity. Once more the advance of civilisation was checked by the jealous god of war.
It is, of course, true that warfare produced fine types of men; but for every Bayard there were ten thousand brutal soldiers, whose march across Europe left a broad track of rape and ruin. It is true that the naval or military successes of Venice and Genoa and Florence enabled them to raise marble palaces and to foster the art of painters and the research of scholars; but it is equally true that prosperity based on such a foundation was generally doomed. The example of medieval Rome shows that a military basis was not essential. The peoples from whom the tribute had been wrung awaited their hour—the hour when the vampire had sucked the great frame weak and bloodless—and then, by the same law of might, they smote the oppressor. The historian who reads the whole chronicle of man is saddened even in contemplating a nation’s prosperity. Amidst the cries of joy and triumph and love he seems to hear the cynical laughter of the war-god.
I need not follow the devastation of war through the later history of Europe. The Thirty Years War laid Germany desolate, and postponed its cultural development for more than a century. Spain, Portugal, and Holland, which had won empire by the sword, lost it to the sword. The Ottoman Empire sank into weakness and shame. All this was due, in the first place, to what Count von Moltke calls “the institution of God”: the institution without which “the world would fall into decay and lose itself in materialism.” Even while he spoke Germany was prospering by peace as few nations had ever prospered before. Could there possibly be a more perverse reading of the lesson of history? Could there be a greater mockery conceived than to imagine God smiling on this blood-reeking Europe, or to call this a spiritual triumph over materialism? Is any man, with the present desolation of Europe before him, tempted to place the soldier above the artist, the scientist, or the engineer as an instrument of progress? Let us grant militarism all that it has really achieved. It remains, in the mind of the historian, the greatest curse that mankind has endured since the primitive humans were first gathered into tribes and disputed each other’s “spheres of influence.”
Blind to this ghastly tragedy of history, we have maintained and cherished militarism until it has brought on us in turn the greatest catastrophe that a single year ever embraced. Probably our grandchildren, probably many a child that gazes now with wide eyes on our troops and banners, will look back on our civilisation with amazement. They may smile at a drill-sergeant like Count von Moltke telling illiterate rustics of the glorious moral qualities which war develops in—the men who traversed Belgium! But we civilians will honestly puzzle them. We had the history of the world unfolded before us, and we saw this institution plainly emerging from barbarism and leaving its bloody and defacing splashes on every page of the chronicle. We traced the evolution of justice, and we saw that, as it was a mighty gain to men when tribunals were set up to adjudicate on the quarrels of individuals or clans, it would be a far mightier gain to erect a tribunal for settling the quarrels of nations. Yet we took this stupid burden from the shoulders of our fathers, and we made it incalculably heavier for ourselves and our children.
I need not set out the weight of the burden in figures. When I first wrote this page I dilated on the seventy million sterling per year which we English were compelled to spend on defence: I imagined it expended on social betterment and human help—on a magnificent scheme of education, for children and adults, and so on. Then I observed—two years ago—with a shudder that at any moment a war might double our National Debt and compel us to find a further £40,000,000 a year to pay for our militarism. And here, within less than twelve months, we have incurred this monstrous burden, yet we linger still on the very fringe of the mighty battlefield we have to traverse. Think what the future may be if we retain militarism. In the past one hundred years, or a little more, war has cost Europe about £4,000,000,000. In one year a modern war has cost Europe more than that sum, and may cost it double. Add to this, if you can calculate it, the value of the millions of the more robust workers who die on the field: the appalling loss to productive industry: the portentous devastation of property. I suppose that, soberly, the total cost of this war will be something between ten and twenty thousand million sterling. What will be the cost of the next war, which may come within ten years? And what might we have done in Europe with ten thousand million sterling?
I am not, it will be observed, relying on disputed speculations like those of Mr. Norman Angell. I do not accept his characteristic theory; but it need not now be discussed, as our experience rather suggests that a modern war will prove so exhausting,