January 13, 19 iG. 
LAND AND WATER 
THE FORUM. 
A Commentary on Present-day Problems. 
DETACHMENT is an admirable quality 
but it may be carried to extreme 
limits. It is being so carried by a 
number of admirable people, who while 
claiming, not always with complete candour, not 
to be averse from the effective prosecution of the 
war, are engaged in presenting so coldly balanced 
a case that plain folk, anxious to be fair-minded 
and immeasurably saddened by the tragic slaughter 
and intolerable delays of the War are apt to be a 
little bewildered. An air of sweet reasonableness 
which is the weapon of the detached is always a most 
persuasive thing. And there are singularly few, 
if any, cases so good that a skilful intellectualist, 
taking advantage of partial flaws inevitable in 
human affairs, cannot contrive to give them an 
appearance of weakness. 
Let us suppose a man brought up on a charge of 
robbing a traveller in circumstances of exceptional 
brutality and violence. Suppose the facts attested 
on unbiassed evidence. It would be perfectly 
possible for a magistrate to point out that the 
world was in fact arranged on a very inequitable 
plan. The traveller was rich, and in a perfectly, 
ordered state there would be no such inequalities 
to excite the passion of envy. There would 
clearly have been no assault if the traveller had 
been poor. Moreover it was clear that the traveller 
when attacked had struck at his assailant, so that 
obviously he could not honestly raise the point 
that violence was criminal. It was the fact that 
the rich man, though he bore a good character 
in general, had in the past sanctioned some lesser 
transaction that was not strictly honest. It was 
reasonably certain that his ancestors had been 
rascals. We were all extraordinarily imperfect 
and it was not for so essentially frail a mortal as 
himself to judge between plaintiff and defendant. 
The assailant could not reasonably be expected 
to restore the money because he held the unusual 
but apparently perfectly sincere view that the 
rich man had no right to it. Moreover he had 
spent it and they were therefore both equally 
deprived of it. And as for punishment that was a 
sterile thing. Beings gifted as the defendant 
was with the high endowment of human reason 
were more susceptible to argument than to force 
which never yet solved any difficulty. The de- 
fendant was the victim of an opportunity ; of a 
system. It was our duty to set to work to alter 
the system. The case would be accordingly 
dismissed. 
That is admirable as an exercise in philosophic 
detachment, but it is poor administration of the 
law. It meets no difficulties of the situation. It 
provides no guarantee that the defendant will not 
fall upon the plaintiff as he leaves the court and 
relieve him of his replenished purse ; nor that the 
loafers in the gallery will not proceed to follow his 
example. .Such mischief indeed will be done long 
before "the system is altered." And the magis- 
trate unless protected by stout minions of the law 
will share the traveller's fate. 
Nor is this by any means so malicious or ex- 
travagant a travesty of the trend of speech and 
writing of many of our detached intellectuals. 
Is such detachment human ? Is it not 
essentially the reverse, too cold, too dispassionate 
and disembodied ? We live under a human law, 
man-made, administered by men for men. Divine 
sanctions there may be, not less real because 
veiled, but no divine interferences. Man in his 
upward progress or (to beg no question) in his 
complex development has elaborated a mode of 
living ; he laboriously builds order out of chaos by 
a series of agreed codes without which a stable life 
is impossible ; in commerce, honest currency and 
fulfilment of obligations ; in marriage, fidelity ; 
in professional counsel, secrecy ; in friendship, 
truth ; in international relations, faith in treaties ; 
in sport, fair play ; even in war, agreed and 
definite mitigations of its worst horrors. 
The embodiment of all these elaborate codes 
ot greater and less essential significance is law. 
Its ultimate sanction may be force or the threat 
of force ; but its daily operation is the result of 
united good-will and a higher human faith and 
honour in which force has no part. To break 
down this faith and honour is the greatest of crimes 
against humanity. It is of the essence of the 
German crime. We may be all guilty of this war, 
which is the first premiss of our detached ones (just 
as our judge assumed we were all guilty of the 
system under which our traveller was robbed), 
but that is ah abstract and academic guilt com- 
pared with the red guilt of action. 
Can anyone seriously maintain that that guilt 
was ours ? Assume Germany ringed round with 
enemies Was that ring forged in aggression 01 
defence ? In the light of the after German con- 
duct, of hymns of hate, of the sickening iteration 
" England" is the enemy," "England planned the 
war " can we on the analogy of normal life draw 
no true deduction favourable to ourselves ? Does 
not our almost fatuous innocence cry to heaven 
for recognition ? In the days of our unchallenged 
supremacy what right was denied her, what 
pathway to her ships, what privileges to her 
trade or her subjects ? Does no one remember 
when in the first decade of this century a very 
few truculent spirits of the extreme blue water 
school murmured in their clubs and at their 
dinner tables that Germany meant us ill (as in fact 
she did) and that we had best strike at her when 
we could break her, did any among us pay the 
very slightest attention to them ? There is more 
support for our cause in the significant impotence 
of those few truculents than in reams of document- 
ary evidence. Who supposes that -a war could 
have ever been made acceptable to us as a nation 
on grounds like these. 
Could the German challenge when it did 
come have been in honour . refused ? Such 
grossly obvious questions must be asked to 
straighten out this all important matter, for 
on the answer depends the answer to further 
question which may at any time be pressed 
