The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife eBook
Edward Carpenter
in not seeing that Russia, rebuffed in 1908 over Bosnia
and Herzegovina, would never put up with a second
insult of the same kind over Servia. The same
Government was strangely unable to perceive that whatever
it might tactically gain by the invasion and devastation
of Belgium would be more than lost by the moral effect
of such action on the whole world; and notwithstanding
its army of spies, it had not the sense to see that
England, whether morally bound to or not, was certain,
at all costs, to fight in defence of Belgium’s
neutrality. So true it is that without the understanding
which comes from the heart, all the paraphernalia
of science and learning and the material results of
organization and discipline are of little good.
But however we choose to apportion the blame or at
least the responsibility for the situation among the
various Governments concerned, the main point and
the main lesson of it all is to see that any such
apportionment does not much matter! As long as
our Governments are constructed as they are—that
is, on the principle of representing, not the real
masses of their respective peoples, but the interests
of certain classes, especially the commercial, financial,
and military classes—so long will such
wars be inevitable. The real blame rests, not
with the particular Foreign policy of this or that
country but with the fact that Europe, already rising
through her mass-peoples into a far finer and more
human and spiritual life than of old, still lies bound
in the chains of an almost Feudal social order.
When the great German mass-peoples find this out,
when they discover the little rift in the lute which
now separates their real quality from the false standards
of their own dominant military and commercial folk,
then their true role in the world will begin, and
a glorious role it will be.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] “A German,” he said, “could
not live long in the atmosphere of England—an
atmosphere of sham, prudery, conventionality, and
hollowness”! See article on “Treitschke,”
by W.H. Dawson, in the Nineteenth Century
for January 1915.
[14] The influence, however, of Bernhardi in his own
country has been somewhat exaggerated in England.
[15] It seems that the same remark is made about the
Germans in the U.S.A., that they take little interest
in politics there.
[16] This attitude is exactly corroborated by Herr
Maximilian Harden’s manifesto, originally published
in Die Zukunft, and lately reprinted in the
New York Times.
[17] Though this is only, perhaps, true of their State
colonies. In their individual and missionary
colonizing groups, and as pioneer settlers, they seem
to have succeeded well.
