As We Have Become

I

WHEN any catastrophe, accidental or deliberately provoked, occurs in this most fortuitous world, a reckoning must always follow as to the extent of the damage incurred; and the calculations needed to arrive at that estimate vary according to the magnitude and the complexity of what has happened. In the case, for instance, of a collision between two motor cars, the process is not a very lengthy one. First aid may have to be rendered to their occupants; then claims must be lodged for the damage done, the responsibility for it has to be settled, and in the end some insurance company pays. If an earthquake wrecks a town, or a tidal wave makes invasion of a coast, the computation of loss in life and property takes longer, though in such a case there is no need to settle on whom the responsibility for the disaster rests. If some great financial house fails, the estimate of losses becomes more complicated, since the ramifications of such a business extend in many directions, and the credit of other banks, in themselves sound, may be affected. Even then a few months’ work on the part of auditors and accountants will probably be sufficient to arrive at the figures of the total loss.

Nineteen years have now elapsed since on June 28, 1914, a half-witted Serbian boy, Gavrilo Princep, jumped on to the step of the motor in which the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were sitting after their reception in the town hall of Sarajevo and fired two shots at them. By consequences as direct as the generations in a genealogical tree, it followed that, at midnight on August 4 of the same year, the time expired by which Berlin had been requested to give a satisfactory reply to the ultimatum of the English Foreign Office that Germany would not violate the neutral territory of Belgium. As far as England — or, indeed, any other European nation — is concerned, we cannot yet form even an approximate estimate of the result of the catastrophe that ensued.

But neither the murder of the Archduke, nor the disastrously premature mobilization of the Russian armies, nor, finally, the British ultimatum to Berlin, was the cause of the war. At most, each in turn was a single lighted match applied, at one point or another, to the vast heap of inflammable material which the European powers had been peacefully piling up for years before. The late President Wilson affirmed that if England, in that week preceding August 4, 1914, had openly declared her solidarity with France and Russia, Germany and Austria would have refrained from making certain moves which, logically, rendered the flare-up inevitable. He may possibly have been right to the extent that war would not have broken out at precisely that date, but he was quite certainly wrong in supposing that war would have been avoided. For the real cause of it would not thus have been rendered sterile: the piling up of armaments which was already beginning to impoverish Europe would have gone on, and other matches would have been found without any difficulty.

This increase of armaments and the mutual suspicions they raised were the true causes of the catastrophe. To these perhaps we may add the spirit of Prussianism. As long ago as the German-Danish war of 1864, Bismarck had laid down the abominable doctrine that diplomacy and arbitration were obsolete and that blood and iron were the only arguments that could settle international disputes. The taste for blood and iron grew: Bismarck’s formula saved statesmen the trouble of thinking, and only entailed vast votes for military or naval programmes. These programmes were issued under the heading of ‘self-defense,’ but they were nothing of the kind. Their object was not, in the long run, defense, but attack, when any power or group of powers found itself, or thought it found itself, in a position to dictate to others. The formula was put to the supreme test in 1914, and it ruined victors and vanquished alike.

The consequences have been so farreaching that we cannot yet estimate them, for fresh ones are continually being discovered. First aid, as in the case of a collision between two motor cars, has not yet been adequately administered; and as for getting an insurance company to pay for the damages, the impossibility of that is at last being recognized. You cannot insure for a catastrophe of this sort, for insured and insurers are equally involved, and nobody can pay.

II

Optimists (those dangerous and attractive reasoners) expected a sort of millennium to dawn as soon as the war was over. Prussianism, the archenemy, which was in England generally held to be responsible for those four years of savagery, was finished with, and Mr. Lloyd George held out hopes of the Kaiser’s being tried at some international bar of justice. For the future, therefore, all other nations would dwell in tranquillity forever beneath their vines and fig trees, with a positive glut of sickles and pruning hooks beaten out of their prodigious armaments. The battleships of useless navies would make winter pleasure cruises in the Mediterranean, and useless guns would be ground down into steel filings to produce blue hydrangeas.

There were, alas, cruel lists of casualties, but even these funereal clouds of fears and mourning presented a silver lining. For every man who had put down his tools to serve his country, and returned alive from the shambles, would have work ready for him. Factories converted into workshops for the engines of war would resume the uses of peace, the huge taxes imposed to pay for the manufacture of them would instantly be remitted, and an era of prosperity would return. Once more we should recapture the stability and security of the Victorian age, with the additional guarantee that Prussia, the great incendiary, was henceforth harmless.

These agreeable prophecies, seemingly logical, did not materialize. Work was not found for everybody; instead, demobilized troops and hands discharged from idle factories gradually formed themselves, without any need of conscription, into a new and weaponless army of three million unemployed. Instead of a return of affluence, the wealth of the nation steadily and swiftly decreased, while the sense of stability and security, so confidently anticipated, was exchanged for blank misgivings as to the future. We had pulled through the war, but puzzled people began to ask themselves if we were going to pull through the peace.

Optimists seemed to have made a miscalculation. Millions of men who were the producers of wealth in every country had been killed, milliards of wealth had been expended in killing them. Money can be productive, as when a farmer spends it in buying food for his chickens and thereby is the gainer, for more than his original outlay in their purchase and their keep is returned to him in his marketing of fowls and eggs. Money can be unproductive, as when a miser hoards it, or when a nation locks up bars of gold in the vaults of its banks, for as long as they remain there they are no more than earth or rubble. But money can also be destructive of wealth when it is spent on engines of war whose sole use is to kill and to lay waste. All the millions spent on the war were of this destructive sort: the money not only produced nothing, but it vastly diminished the wealth of the world. There was nothing to show for it except havoc and death.

III

Here, then, was one of the consequences of the war which optimists had overlooked — possibly it was the least of them. They had been equally unreckoning of the moral effect of it on those of the generation then beginning to enter manhood and womanhood, on whom the burden and brunt of the war had been laid.

The boys went straight from school or from their apprenticeship in trade or business to the battlefields. The legitimate expansions and experiences of their early manhood were taken from them and they entered life through a portal of trenches and barbed wire. For no fault of their own, but for the ill will of nations and the jealousies of those who had directed the affairs of Europe while they were yet unbreeched, they were called upon to forgo the rightful heritage of their youth and save their country from destruction by the sacrifice of themselves. Apart from the joys of their age, all boys of any intelligence revel in the expansion of their more solid powers: they have ambitions, and dreams of a great future; they want to get rich or they want power; or they are knocking at the door, already ajar, which opens to them the faery kingdoms of art and literature. They are eager for life; but it was not the prospect of life that enlarged itself before these boys, but the prospect of death.

They were the scapegoats driven into the wilderness of trenches to atone for the stupidity of their elders. They were the targets put up to prove whether the chemists of Germany or France or England were the best inventors of explosives. With the exception of a few pacifist cranks, they fully and cheerfully, as far as willingness of service went, accepted the necessity which had been forced on them; but many of them, and those the most intelligent, who would otherwise have become leaders in public life, in arts, in inventions, in all the applications of human knowledge that advanced civilization and prosperity, thought a good deal about it, and bitterly resented their fate, though they did not rebel against it. They determined, by a tacit, instinctive agreement, to take whatever chances they could of enjoying themselves without scruple or restraint. No one knew whether they would ever return again when their leave was over, and they must make the most of to-day because there might be no to-morrow.

The girls were in somewhat similar case. They scrubbed the floors of hospitals or mixed explosives, or sat on stools in offices or labored in the fields, doing the work of those who were absent, and they also made the most of their remissions without regard to anything but the whim of the moment.

Thus a new generation came to manhood and womanhood with a wholly different attitude toward tradition: it was the young who were saving their helpless and muddling elders, and now their elders must sit quiet and do as they were told. Slightly astonished, they did so, but they said to themselves that when the war was over they would resume their old positions and be held in respect again. But they were as mistaken as the optimists had been.

IV

At this point we must draw a distinction between the sexes, though both were equally determined to go their own way. The young men who came back from the war alive and uncrippled had given up these years at the call of either patriotism or conscription, and found, to put the matter coarsely, that their country had no further use for them. The places they had vacated were filled, and they were the first victims of unemployment. Their education, whether at school or in business, or as apprentices or young farm laborers, had been interrupted, and their juniors, just too young to have served their country as they had done, were already of the age they had been when they learned their drill, and were installed in their places. Moreover, the trade and the output of the country had enormously decreased: daily and weekly, fresh hands were being discharged from factories and businesses, the owners of which had no longer the capital to keep them open, far less to expand them.

Those who returned, therefore, might manage their own pleasures as they pleased, revolting from tradition and authority, but the one thing they could not do was to find work. Colossal and ghastly as the loss of man power had been in the war, the loss of it through unemployment, when peace was declared, was of even greater magnitude. There was a glut of man power running tragically to waste, because there was this dearth of work. So it came about that the offices of the dole, like the recruiting offices at the beginning of the war, were besieged with petitioners. The difference between the two was that every able-bodied young man had been welcome at the recruiting offices, because there was plenty for him to do; now at the offices of the dole his qualifications were far more strictly examined. He was not wanted; there were enough and more than enough ablebodied young men, and his welcome was not what it had been five years ago. Possibly, though it is by no means certain, we have seen the worst of that situation. But it has been a long lane, and it seemed for fourteen years that it had no turning and grew ever more crowded; the tramp of the feet of three million men made it an almost impassable thoroughfare.

V

The case of the young women and girls when the war was over was very different from that of the young men. Like the latter, they had given up, with eager cheerfulness, many of the legitimate pleasures of their years, and they had acquired, over and above this new measure of liberty, a taste for work. In offices and factories they had taken the place of men, and, whereas men were thrown out of employment in their hundreds of thousands, it is safe to say that female wage earners were far more numerous after the war than they had been before. A perfectly new species of young womanhood had developed, with stools in offices and earned money and (equally earned) latchkeys in their pockets. In their offices they had proved themselves quite as efficient as young men in typing and shorthand; they had a better knowledge of foreign languages, they were more industrious than the majority of male clerks, less prone to forget their instructions, easier to deal with, and less expensive.

And their adaptability was not limited to mere subordinate employments. They had shown themselves during the war to be admirably capable of organization and administrative work, which had hitherto been believed to be quite outside the compass of feminine brains; they could direct and depute, and make the swift decisions that are referred to the heads of departments. The whole status of young womanhood had changed; its recognized range of powers expanded; and the last delusion of Victorian days, already wearing thin, that women were unstable little creatures, incapable of grip or sustained effort, whose practical usefulness was limited to needlework, motherhood, and housekeeping, was blown sky-high into infinitesimal fragments.

This demonstration of the efficiency of women had, of course, been going on before the war, but these years vastly accelerated it. Previously, however, the movement had been retarded by those very women who most earnestly worked for it. Among other equalities with men that they demanded was the franchise, and by way of proving themselves worthy to take part in legislative and political functions they had indulged in antics that only proved them worthy to be inmates of asylums for the insane. They had set fire to houses, they had destroyed works of art, they had schemed to kidnap Mr. Lloyd George when he was playing golf, they had chained themselves up to the railings of Downing Street and thrown the keys of their self-imposed padlocks away. (This possibly showed a remnant of proper feeling, and implied a subconscious conviction that they ought to be locked up.) They had gone to prison with the zeal of martyrs, they had subjected themselves to forcible feeding, and, while demanding to be treated like men, raised the bitter cry that chivalry was dead when that request was granted. They had behaved like Bolshevists in order to get a share in the political direction of their country, and this militant movement had really been a species of idiotic blackmail of which the logic was: ‘We will continue to behave like criminal lunatics till you recognize our qualifications to be citizens.’ Any self-respecting government must have resisted such lawlessness, even though it thought that women ought to have the vote; to extend the franchise to hooligans as a reward for their hooliganism was unthinkable.

Then came the crash, and just as all the agitation in Ireland, where civil war was imminent, subsided, in order that the whole nation might stand firm and united against the national peril, so the militant suffragettes abandoned their own crusade and devoted themselves to the needs of the country. When the war was over, there was no need for them to renew their violences, since, during those four years, they had shown themselves steadfast and efficient workers, wholly capable of taking up all the responsibilities which had hitherto been considered to be in the province of men alone, and there was no longer any question of refusing them the suffrage.

A limited degree of it was at first granted them, and after a few years they were put on precisely the same footing as men, with the result that women can now outvote men. That was a Conservative measure, brought in by Mr. Baldwin. The Conservatives had been more stubborn opponents of female suffrage than either the Liberals or the Labor Party, and their leaders had supposed that the granting of the full suffrage would confirm and increase their majority. Women would surely be grateful to the government that passed the measure. But precisely the opposite happened, and during their term of office the Conservatives completely lost the enormous majority that they had held in the House of Commons. Whether it was the votes of women that brought in Labor again cannot be ascertained, but the extension of the suffrage was coincident with the surprising defeat of the Conservatives at the next election.

VI

But the winning of the suffrage was not the most important prize that the work of women during the war obtained for them. A far greater victory, a smashing victory indeed, was the recognition that in every branch of human enterprise, save where sheer muscular strength was concerned, they were the equals of men. Obviously it is a gain for a nation to find that its number of efficient workers is so vastly increased, even though there is not work for them, since workers are the foundation of wealth, and out of increased competition arises a higher standard of skill. In only one branch of the arts and the industries are women still the inferior of men, and there they acknowledge their inferiority. That exception is an extremely curious one. They are nowhere, compared with men, as designers of their own dresses. Psychologists will easily find the explanation of that.

Of all the consequences of the war this proof, this recognition, in England at any rate, of the efficiency of women in the work of the world, and of their power soberly and strongly to shoulder responsibilities, is the only one that seems to be on the credit side. The gain to themselves was even greater, for they became conscious of their own abilities, and now had the opportunity of expanding them by use. Men and women alike, on the whole, prefer working to being idle, for working brings into play energies which it is a pleasure to employ, and which, if unused, ferment into a mere peevish restlessness. The use of one’s powers, whatever they are, produces an inward satisfaction in all but the brainless or the constitutionally lazy, and these are a very small minority in either women or men. Girls who had languished in an inert domesticity became entirely different creatures when there was a national need for them to exert themselves; and, having once experienced the stimulus and the fatigue of work, they found the former vastly to outweigh the latter, so that when the war was over they stuck to their posts if they possibly could, or, if demobilized, looked for other employment.

Work, moreover, gave them wages and independence, and innumerable couples and companies of girls took to living together and earning their own bread even when iheir parents would gladly have had them back at home again, for work had begotten the taste for work. Marriage ceased to be the only career for a woman, and a new destiny called ‘self-expression’ was heralded. Old-fashioned folk called it by less edifying names and lamented that girls were becoming terribly unsexed, giving instances. But in the main they were not unsexed at all; they only claimed the right to use the gifts which the war had proved they possessed. Certainly they dethroned the Victorian tradition, which King Edward, modern as he was in many ways, and in his time a notable iconoclast of the social idols which he had been brought up to worship, fully shared. He had always been violently opposed to female suffrage, to the extent of thinking it monstrous that Mr. Lloyd George, when holding office in the Cabinet in the year 1909, had taken the chair at a ‘ Votes for Women ’ meeting. The Cabinet was divided on the point, and it was purely a political question, but in consequence of Mr. Lloyd George’s action the King said that in the future he would have as little to do with him as he possibly could. He held similar views about the general ‘unsexing’ of women, which he much deplored. He protested once against eating a dish of venison when he heard that the stag had been shot by a Diane chasseresse. . . .

The growing unemployment, therefore, was much more bitterly felt by men than by women. Employment, in those years of war, had increased for women and diminished for men. One bitterness, however, they shared equally, and that was manifested in their common dislike of the generation now growing up and just younger than themselves. These had escaped the toil and the hazards of the war, owing to their juniority, but they had inherited the liberties their immediate elders had won for the young without paying for them by work or by self-sacrifice. Their elders, in their short remissions from trenches and munition work, had been given unlimited license to amuse themselves as they chose, but the juniors did nothing else. A vague jealousy, as of laborers who had toiled all day, of those who had come into the vineyard not at the eleventh but at the twelfth hour and had received the same wage, may have inspired this feeling; but in addition to that the elders, with sound justification, despised the juniors for what they were. The boys, they said, looked like girls, and the girls looked like nothing at all. They were messy, they were slack, they were epicene, and they were known as the Bright Young People, a definitely post-war product. Lipsticks and powder puffs, cigarettes and cocktails, were their social equipment, and in their rare hours of energy they squealed and had nocturnal treasure hunts and went to dances to which they had not been asked — then fell to yawning again. They were a definite but luckily an ephemeral infliction in social life, and nobody disliked them more than those who were closest to them in point of age. Then somehow they vanished ‘like snow upon the desert’s dusty face.’

VII

A year or two passed, and it became evident that the cessation of war was not the immediate herald of the millennium. The prosperity that should have returned seemed to be retreating as the army of unemployed grew larger; and, though the expenditure of capital on the work of destroying capital had ceased, there was no remission of taxation, and factories continued to close with the dwindling of trade. The tide of the fortunes of England was still on the ebb, though it had sunk far beyond the low watermark of the Napoleonic Wars, and in these years following 1918 successive governments made no kind of attempt to turn it, but devoted themselves to the interests of their party.

They must have known, Labor and Conservative Governments alike (for the Liberal Party had disappeared in some manner as mysterious as the loss of scent from musk), that the most rigid economy was necessary in order to avert national insolvency, and that the problem of unemployment must be dealt with; but they made no effort to economize, they let unemployment deal with itself, and they did not let the nation know how critical the position was becoming — it would be ‘ bad form’ to express any doubts as to the immortal stability that was the birthright of England. The huge expenditure on the dole was paid out of borrowed money; there were immense war debts to be discharged to America out of the indemnities England did not receive, and she was living on a capital that diminished year by year. The nation, in fact, became like the paying guest, at extortionate prices, of a landlady who could not pay her rent or her catering bills. She knew these were piling up beyond hope of discharge, and so she passed them on to the new manager. A Labor Government came in in 1924; it was succeeded by a Conservative Government, which lost its overwhelming majority in the space of five years and was succeeded again by Labor. During these years the poverty and the indebtedness of the nation ruinously increased, till bankruptcy was imminent.

Yet, even while the world was beginning to recognize some at least out of the innumerable disablements wrought by the war, the true causes that had led to it were stirring again. Chemists and scientists in a thousand laboratories were at work over lethal mixtures which, in case another archduke (if there were any left) was murdered, or in case England sent another ultimatum to Berlin, would render the next war infinitely more frightful than the last. New explosives of far vaster power, poison gases of far deadlier potency, bacteria that would spread pestilence among the civilian population, were being ardently studied. The range of aeroplanes was increasing, and these would carry the death bombs of various kinds to the remotest towns of an enemy’s country. No longer was there any nonsense about armies and fleets being intended for defense merely and not aggression; these new engines were designed for swift and wholesale destruction. Armies and fleets would soon be obsolete, for they were slow-moving and inefficient weapons of offense compared with the inventions which had only been in their infancy in 1914.

Meanwhile, with inimitable irony, the streets of Geneva were polylingual with the Senators of the League of Nations who met in constant conclave for the establishment of an international Council to whom quarrels would be referred, and who would arbitrate between the disputants. Armaments would be limited; each nation would have assigned to it its quota of battalions and ships of war for its reasonable defense. But how was any council of nations to prevent chemists studying new explosives, ostensibly for the purposes of mining, or to put a limit on the construction of aeroplanes, officially for the conveyance of posts and peaceful passengers, but capable at any moment of being loaded up with a cargo of death? And how could a council of nations, if one state refused to accept arbitration, prevent it instantly putting all its apparatus of destruction in action, well aware that if it lost a moment its antagonist would do the same? After some years (eight or so) of academic and amiable debate, the Council recognized this difficulty, and began to consider the qualitative as well as the quantitative limitation of armaments. It will take them longer than that to determine how to check the unlimited import into a country of certain chemicals which, when suitably mixed, will make an explosive of which they do not know the formula.

VIII

The English are proverbially a melancholy race when they are engaged in their pleasures, but conversely they are a cheerful race in time of trouble, and they kept up their spirits fairly well during those years of gathering gloom. They did not know all the dangers ahead, for the government kept from them the growing seriousness of the financial position till they were on the verge of bankruptcy, and what worried them chiefly was a general sense of insecurity. Vaguely they were aware that unemployment was increasing, that trade was bad, that expenditure was unchecked, and these and other causes for disquiet made them begin to wonder whether the consequences of the war were not more farreaching than they had imagined. But, equally vaguely, they supposed that things would get better presently, and they diverted themselves much as usual. For the English public, as cannot be too clearly recognized, hates thinking; it will not think until it is obliged to do so in the presence of an imminent calamity, and then it thinks with a speed surprising in so phlegmatic a nation, and casts politics and parties and internal differences to the winds.

It had behaved like this in the two weeks immediately preceding the war in 1914. Cricket, the outrages of suffragettes, the foul blow which Gunboat Smith was thought to have dealt Carpentier in their fight, interested the people much more than the dangerous developments of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Indeed, the public knew very little about it, for the government had behaved just as characteristically, and for a fortnight the Cabinet, divided against itself, had been havering and hesitating, refusing, while the crucial hours slipped by, to take any decisive line. Day by day Mr. Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador, had been imploring them to declare the English solidarity with France, to which they knew they were in honor bound, but he could get no answer — diplomacy on the part of a neutral power might still possibly be effective. It was as if a sundered artery could be staunched with the judicious application of sticking plaster. Then on Sunday, August 2, the leaders of the Conservative Party in the Houses of Lords and Commons, Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Bonar Law, sent a note to the Cabinet, then in session, pointing out that the honor and safety of England demanded intervention, and that the opposition would support it. Hitherto the government had doubted whether the country would be behind it; but France must be overwhelmed if England stood aloof, for the German navy would be bombarding her Channel ports, and the government made up its mind. The violation of Belgium by German troops gave it the opportunity of a popular gesture, and the ultimatum to Berlin followed. Instantly the country responded. Ireland had been on the brink of civil war, serious strikes threatened, but all internal dissensions ceased.

Exactly the same thing happened in 1931. The Labor Government, and the Conservative Government which it succeeded, had put off framing any policy which might avert bankruptcy, till the imminence of the catastrophe forced their hands. As in 1914, the safety of the country was at stake. Any measure that made for national economy, they thought, would have been unpopular and would have lost them votes. Party came before patriotism. The cost of living was steadily falling, but sooner than make any diminution in the dole, which was the chief drain on the country’s revenues, they drifted and drifted, hoping for a favorable wind. Finally, when disclosure could be put off no longer, they were forced to consider the country, and found, as in 1914, that it was solid behind them. The Coalition Government was formed, in which Labor, Conservative, and Liberal Ministers held office. Economy and the balancing of the Budget were its chief aims, and the first step in the right direction had been made.

IX

Fifteen years have elapsed since the war ended, but it is still questionable whether we yet know the full tale of its consequences. England has three million unemployed, trade has been lost, a generation of her sons has been lost, and her resources have been vastly diminished. Perhaps she had prospered too long in an existence to which, with the most fatuous pride, her statesmen had alluded as ‘splendid isolation.’ Never was there a more ridiculous epithet applied to a more pernicious substantive. Isolation, in this world of jostling nations with a thousand strands of interwoven interests, is an impossible condition. No one nation can hope to flourish in self-contained security at the expense of others or without due regard for their well-being.

What England has lost in the war cannot yet be computed; but, however long that bill of detriments proves to be, its total, when ascertained, will be cheap payment for the knowledge that her prosperity depends on the prosperity of others. Many besides her are making efforts to realize that truism, and it is only by their mastering it and consistently acting on it that the damage suffered by them all can be made good.