4i8 



Ihe Heview ot Kevlews, 



October 1. 1906. 



sentery and bad poetiy, and a few hundred deaths 

 in battle, conquered the South African Boers at a 

 jgToss cost of about three thousand pounds per head. 

 They could have bought the whole of that prepos- 

 terous imitation of a nation for a tenth of .that 

 sura ; and, except for a few substitutions of person- 

 alities, this group of partially corrupt officials in the 

 place of that, and so forth, the permanent change 

 was altogether insignificant. (But an excitable 

 young man in Austria committed suicide when at 

 length the Transvaal ceased to be a " nation.") Men 

 went through the seat of that war after it was all 

 over, and found humanity unchanged, except for a 

 general impoverishment, and the convenience of an 

 unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed 

 wire and cartridge cases — unchanged and resuming, 

 with a slight perplexity, all its old habits and mis- 

 understandings, t-he nigger still in his slum-like 

 kraal, the white in his ugly, ill-managed shant)'. 



But we in England saw all these things, or did 

 not see them, through the mirage of the " New 

 Paper " in a light of mania. All my adolescence, 

 from fourteen to seventeen, went to the music of 

 that monstrous, resonating futilit)', the cheering, the 

 anxieties, the songs and the waving of flags, the 

 wrongs of the generous Buller and the glo- 

 rious heroism of De Wet — who always got 

 away ; that was the great point about the 

 heroic De Wet — and it never occurred to 

 lis that the total population we fought 

 against was less than half the number of those who 

 lived cramped, ignoble lives within the compass of 

 the Four Towns. 



But before and after that stupid conflict of stu- 

 pidities, a greater antagonism was coming into be- 

 ing, was slowly and quietly defining itself as a thing 

 inevitable, sinking now a little out of attention, only 

 to resume more emphatically, now flashing into 

 some acute, definite expression, and now percolat- 

 ing and pervading some new region of thought, and 

 that was the antagonism of Germany and Great 

 Britain. 



Here were we British, forty-one millions of peo- 

 ple, in a state of almost indescribablv aimless, 

 economic, and moral muddle that we had neither 

 the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to im- 

 prove. Most of us had hardly the courage to think 

 about it, and our affairs were hopelessly entangled 

 with the entirely different confusions of three hun- 

 dred and fifty million other persons scattered about 

 the globe. And here were the Germans over against 

 us, fifty-six millions, in a state of confusion no whit 

 better than our own. The noisv little creatures 

 who directed papers and wrote books and gave lec- 

 tures, generally in that time of world-dementia, pre- 

 tended to be the national mind. Thev were busv 

 in both countries, with a sort of infernal unanimity, 

 exhorting — and not only exhorting, but successfullv 

 persuading — the two peoples to divert such small, 



comnion store of material, moral and intellectual 

 energy as either possessed, into the purely destruc- 

 tive and wasteful business of war. And — I have to 

 tell you these things even if you do not believe 

 them, because they are vital to my stor)- — there was 

 not a man alive who could have told you of any 

 real, permanent benefit, of anything whatever to 

 counterbalance the obvious waste and evil, that 

 would result from a war between England and Ger- 

 manv, whether England shattered Germany, or was 

 smashed and overwhelmed, or whatever the end 

 might be. 



The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational ob- 

 session ; it was in the macrocosm of our nation, 

 curiously parallel to the egotistical wrath and jeal- 

 ousv that swayed my individual microcosm. It 

 measured the excess of common emotion over the 

 common intelligence, the legacy of inordinate pas- 

 sion we have received from the brute from which 

 we came. Just as I had become the slave of my 

 own surprise and anger, and went hither and thither 

 with a loaded revolver, seeking and intending vague, 

 fluctuating crimes, so these two nations went about 

 the earth, hot-eared and muddle-headed, with load- 

 ed na\ies and armies terribly ready at hand. Only, 

 there was not even a Nettie to justify their stupidit>'. 

 There was nothing but quite imaginary thwarting 

 on either side. 



And the press was the chief instrument that kept 

 these two huge multitudes of people directed 

 against each other. 



The press — those newspapers that are now so 

 strange to us — like the '• Empires," the " nations," 

 the ■• Trusts," and all the other great monstrous 

 shapes of that extraordinary time — was in the 

 nature of an unanticipated accident. It had hap- 

 pened, as weeds happen in abandoned gardens, just 

 as all our world had happened, because there was 

 no clear Will in the world to bring about anything 

 better. Toward the end this " press " was almost 

 entirely under the direction of youngish men of that 

 eager, rather unintelligent type, that is never able 

 to detect itself aimlessly, that pursues nothing with 

 incredible pride and zeal. If you would really un- 

 derstand this mad era the comet brought to an end, 

 vou must keep in mind that every phase in the pro- 

 duction of these queer old things was pervaded by 

 a strong, aimless energ\', and happened in a con- 

 centrated rush. 



Let me describe to you, ver\ briefly, a newspaper 

 day. 



Figure first, then, a hastily-erected, and still more 

 hastily-designed, building in a dirty, paper-littered 

 back street of old London, and a number of shab- 

 bily-dressed men coming and going in this with 

 projectile swiftness. Within this factory, companies 

 nf printers, tensely active with nimble fingers— they 

 were ahvavs speeding up the printers — ply their 

 tvpe-setting machines, and cast and arrange masses 



