INTRODUCTORY
The following Studies and Notes, made during the earlier
period of the present war and now collected together
for publication, do not—as will be evident
to the reader—pretend to any sort of completeness
in their embrace of the subject, or finality in its
presentation. Rather they are scattered thoughts
suggested by the large and tangled drama which we are
witnessing; and I am sufficiently conscious that their
expression involves contradictions as well as repetitions.
The truth is that affairs of this kind—like
all the great issues of human life, Love, Politics,
Religion, and so forth, do not, at their best, admit
of final dispatch in definite views and phrases.
They are too vast and complex for that. It is,
indeed, quite probable that such things cannot be
adequately represented or put before the human mind
without logical inconsistencies and contradictions.
But (perhaps for that very reason) they are the subjects
of the most violent and dogmatic differences of opinion.
Nothing people quarrel about more bitterly than Politics—unless
it be Religion: both being subjects of which all
that one can really say for certain is—that
nobody understands them.
When, as in the present war, a dozen or more nations
enter into conflict and hurl at each other accusations
of the angriest sort (often quite genuinely made and
yet absolutely irreconcilable one with another), and
when on the top of that scores and hundreds of writers
profess to explain the resulting situation in a few
brief phrases (but unfortunately their explanations
are all different), and calmly affix the blame on
“Russia” or “Germany” or “France”
or “England”—just as if these
names represented certain responsible individuals,
supposed for the purposes of the argument to be of
very wily and far-scheming disposition—whereas
it is perfectly well known that they really represent
most complex whirlpools of political forces, in which
the merest accidents (as whether two members of a
Cabinet have quarrelled, or an Ambassador’s
dinner has disagreed with him) may result in a long
and fatal train of consequences—it becomes
obvious that all so-called “explanations”
(though it may be right that they should be attempted)
fall infinitely short, of the reality.[1]
Feeling thus the impossibility of dealing at all adequately
with the present situation, I have preferred to take
here and there just an aspect of it for consideration,
with a view especially to the differences between
Germany and England. I have thought that instead
of spending time over recriminations one might be
on safer ground by trying to get at the root-causes
of this war (and other wars), thus making one’s
conclusions to some degree independent of a multitude
of details and accidents, most of which must for ever
remain unknown to us.
