The Tyranny of Shams. Joseph McCabe

its verdicts or suppress illegal attempts to arm.

      There is nothing Utopian or academic about this reform. A body of high-minded lawyers and statesmen have for years discussed the details of the scheme, and are ready to launch it whenever the various Governments are compelled by public opinion to adopt it. The immediate task is to create this pressure of public opinion. We may hope that, after our ghastly lesson in the price of the military method, we shall no longer be rebuffed with vapid phrases like: “Do not force the pace.” A business-man who talked nonsense of that kind would soon find his level. We need to conduct our national and international life on business-principles, to get rid as speedily as possible of a waste and disorder which are an outrage on the intelligence of the race. I look more confidently to business-men than to speech-making politicians and sentimental moralists for the triumph of the reform. Certain industries will, of course, be gravely dislocated, even annihilated, by the change; and vast bodies of additional workers will, in most ​countries, be thrown upon a crowded labour-market. From the abstract economical point of view it is only a question of transfer. Fifty millions which were spent on military industries will now be used in enlarging other industries or creating new. In reality there will be grave confusion; but that is due to the utterly disorganised nature of our industrial world, which I discuss later. In any case to allege this industrial difficulty as a serious reason against disarmament is a very singular piece of folly. The cost and trouble of adjusting this temporary dislocation would be infinitely less than the cost and trouble of a war.

      We need, therefore, to persuade the public, which has borne its military yoke and endured the occasional lash of war with the placidity of a draught-ox—that is, candidly, how we shall appear in the social history of the future—that it may escape the yoke and the lash when it wills. Our Churches might make some atonement for a long and lamentable neglect of their duty by organising a really spirited collective campaign in this greatest of moral interests. The central educative body should, however, be quite unsectarian. I take it that an amalgamation of the various Peace Societies, strengthened by the adhesion of our commercial and industrial leaders, would form this central educative body. The present war would furnish it with a superb text and an unanswerable argument. It ought, in the circumstances, to capture each country in Europe more speedily than Cobden’s ​famous league captured England. The press would begin to assist at a certain stage of progress. Even the politicians would presently lend their oratory; especially as their prestige, at least in this country, would hardly survive a second strain such as this war has put on it. Every agency ought to be enlisted in impressing upon the public that, whatever other reforms may imply, here we ask no sacrifice; we indicate a way in which the community may, when it wills, rid itself of a stupendous burden and set free enormous resources for social improvement.

      Reformers are widely, and with some reason, accused of being dreamy and unpractical. Here, at least, it will be seen that it is rather the public and the opponents of reform who are dreamy, romantic, and unpractical: that the reform itself is a business proposition of the most attractive and promising character. But let us be even more practical. To forecast the future is an interesting intellectual recreation; but to close one’s mind entirely against the possibilities and dangers of the future is positive folly. Let us glance at the future.

      I have not the faintest hope that the Allied Powers will, as they ought to do, disarm Germany and Austria and then disarm themselves, when the war is over. Then Germany will concentrate all its marvellous power of organisation, dissimulation, and intrigue in a dream of revanche. The appalling incompetence displayed by what we may call, in the broadest sense, our Intelligence Department and our War Office will return, when the temporary ​accession of business-ability has been withdrawn from it. There will be no serious inquiry into our scandalous indolence in the early period of the war, our complete failure to forecast the conditions of war, and our heavy somnolence during Germany’s feverish preparations, although the documents published by the French Government show that, by 1913 at least, sharp-sighted foreign representatives saw clearly that war was, to put it moderately, highly probable. In point of fact, our authorities knew that war was gravely imminent. I happen to know, from a little breach of confidence, that our War Office secretly warned certain reservists in June 1914 (even before the Serajevo murder) to be ready. The men were ready, and have borne their share superbly; but our authorities had to confess that, even after nine months’ experience of the war, they were immeasurably behind Germany in the production of the two vital necessaries of a modern war—machine-guns and high-explosive shells.

      Our experts will return to this comfortable somnolence. There will be no serious inquiry. Politicians and their advisers will escape in a cloud of thrilling emotions and enthusiastic rhetoric. Persistent questioners, who are rudely impatient of party-discipline, will be snubbed and evaded. Any other questioners, not of the political world, will be ignored. We shall return to British dignity and placidity. Germany will work and intrigue as it never worked and intrigued before. There ​will be grave domestic trouble in Russia and, as in the case of Turkey, German representatives will think while British representatives play. The preparations may occupy ten years or twenty years, but they will proceed. The aim will be a war with Russia neutral or friendly to Germany. If it occurs … One has only to imagine where we should be to-day if Germany had not made the error of abandoning the Bismarckian tradition.

      Behind this is a further possibility. China is just as capable as Japan of learning the use of thirteen-inch guns and maxims. Sir Hiram Maxim, in fact, who knows both China and the gun, quite agrees with me on that. And China has, behind that stoical and almost child-like expression it presents to Europe, an acute memory that for thirty years we have treated it with flagrant injustice. It may take decades to undo the evil of ages of Manchu misgovernment and organise the resources of the country, but the day will come when an alert and powerful nation of 500,000,000 Orientals will press against its frontiers. We may remember that the Mongol banners have before now fluttered over Moscow and reached the Mediterranean. And the Mongols are not the only awakening people. We may yet see an anti-European combination from the Asiatic shore of the Pacific to the African shore of the Atlantic. These are some of the possibilities we hand on to our children if we do not in time abandon the military system.

      ​To that pass has it brought us. We writhe and groan under the terrible burden it lays on us, and we shrink from contemplating the future; yet we might cast off the burden and rid the future of peril when we will. We disavow the buccaneering spirit, and protest that we arm only in defence against each other; and one wonders whether to smile or weep at the obtuseness which prevents us from adopting a simple and humane means of defence instead of this exhausting barbarism. We “humanise” war, yet cling needlessly to the whole inhuman business. We are teaching the backward nations to arm—we would gladly supply them with tutors and arms at any time—and may be thus preparing a more colossal conflict than ever. Surely the man or woman of the twenty-first century will find us an enigma!

      Let me close with a repetition of my protest against the misconstruction to which such a book as this is always exposed. I advocate no Utopian scheme, but one which some of the ablest lawyers, statesmen, and business-men in Europe have discussed for years and warmly endorsed. I have no wish to conceal technical difficulties under sentimental phrases, but these men, to whom I refer, are prepared to meet the difficulties. I regard the work of the soldier as honourable and worthy, as long as we impose the military system on each other; and at this particular juncture regret only that I am long past the age of bearing arms. I plead, as long as the system lasts, for unquestionable ​efficiency in national defence, whatever it cost. But I say that, in this military system, we are enthroning the hollowest and most ghastly sham that ever deluded humanity: that, when we have the courage or wisdom to strip it of its tinselled robes, we will shudder at sight of the gaunt frame of death which has ruled civilisation for so many thousand years: that nothing is wanting but the general will to dethrone this mockery of a god: and that, when we have abolished militarism and war, we shall advance along the way of social improvement with far lighter steps and vastly increased resources.