August ID, I9I7 
LAND & WATER 
'5, 
organs which they maintained in the Press and the voices 
•which they command in Parliament, could not stand .against 
the universal wave of popular feeling. -• • • • 
But time did its work. The collapse of Russia came with 
its three phases of breakdown ; in failure of munitions ; 
in treason upon the part of certain politicians of the old 
regime ; and lastly, in the anarchy of the capital and the 
predominance there of alien elements — with the consequent 
disintegration of the army. . It led to a rapid lov ering of that 
process of attrition which is the essence of a siege. The 
enemy's rate of casualties fell to. i^erhaps, half what they had 
been, or little more : and it was clear that the war would 
thereby be considerably prolonged. 
The phrases which had become current in the latter period 
of all this helped the peace-mongers. They were phrases 
originated by the enemy and carefully propagated b\- his 
agents. They talked of " a war of tlefence " ; of " freedom 
of the seas " ; of " the evil of annexations and indemnities." 
In general, Prussia, giving the lie to her whole nature and 
reversing every one of her own boasted formulas, did every- 
thing to attract to her cause as many dupes as might be. 
Meanwhile, the iron discipline which the Prussian Higher 
Command has established upon a basis of terror, kept the 
outer world largely ignorant of the terrible and increasing 
strain from which our enemies suffered. The effect of the 
blockade, the straits in which the C.erman and Austrian 
populations find themselves, which a wise statesmanship 
would have thrown into the utmost relief, was allowed to 
fall into the background of the jniblic mind ; and to-day 
for one man who understands what such a detail as the lack 
of lubricants means for enemy transport and machinery 
there are a thousand who know what the Eastern situation 
means for the prolongation of the war, and hundreds, perhaps, 
who have accepted in various degrees such t mpty abstrac- 
tions as the " democratisation " of the Prussian herd, or 
the falsehood that this war for the very existence of Europe 
in some way subserves the interests of wealth and is designed 
for the oppression of the populace. 
The next element in this deplorable situation, and the 
one which has been most vividly present in the last few days, 
is the action of certain political caucuses in the various 
belligerent nations ; of which caucuses the last to act, the 
caucuses of so-called " Labour leaders " in the various 
belligerent countries, is the most directly dangerous. 
It is significant that these gentry fear above all things a 
direct appeal to those whom they pretend to represent. The 
EhrUcbs, tlve Goldenbergs, and the other naif Slavs of the 
" Russian " Committees, detest nothing so much as the 
National spirit of the Russian people and fear nothing 
so much as its revival. The tiny handful of Internationalists 
in the French Parliament (one of them is Karl Marx's heir!) 
arc in the same boat ; they detest the Erench peasantry and 
the traditional French spirit. There is not in this country 
the same divorce between these isolated beings and those 
for whom they profess to speak. But there is, perhaps, 
to a greater extent than elsewhere, because here more than 
elsewhere have representative institutions grown old, and 
fossilised, a startling contrast between the jerky shuffle of 
sham representation and the reality of national feeling. 
Sundry individuals using a special and thoroughly false 
system of voting, pretend to speak for what they call 
'' Labour," and the results of this quite false mechanical 
process arc watched for almost as eagerly by those who dread 
it as by those who applaud it. It is a figment and a grotesque 
tigment. 
By " labour " is meant the totality of those families 
who live in this country on a wage earned in some form of 
physical operation : men (as the phrase goes) who " work 
with their hands " 
If we could summon the whole nation and separate that 
minority which either does nothing, or earns its living in 
clerical and professional occupations, from the great majority 
who live upon manual labour of every kind ; if we were to 
appeal to that body as a whole, to ask individual by individual, 
whether each desired to achieve full victory over the enemy 
or to compromise in this last stage and save him ; if we did 
this can there be any doubt what the result of such a vote 
would be ? 
It is precisely that mass of the populace, the men who work 
with their hands who wouljl be oveiwhelmingly, practically 
unanimously.'in favour of the only possible national policy. 
The tiny remnant who would favour compromise would be 
found for the most part not in the popular ranks at all, but 
in that peculiar world which foreigners call " the Intellectual, " 
the world out of which men like Mr. Macdonald and .Mr. 
Snowdcn come ; a woild which uses words of six syllables 
in discussing the i)lainest social problems, and is .steeped 
in all t^e last pedantries of abstruse (and false) economic 
theories. It would indeed b<; an amazing thing if, in this 
supreme turn of the world's history, this most acute moment 
in the story .01 £,ngiauu, lae ueau maclunery ot a Caucus 
prove powerful to betray the living voice of a whole people, 
and if sundry cards and ballots presented by sundry officials 
and wirepullers were to decide the ruin of the living mass 
which is' so utterly different from and superior to themselves. 
But there is a third element standing behind these two. 
It is the most powerful and the most to be. dreaded.- It'Ss 
this ekment which pulls the strings and this clement which 
is the master of the game. I mean, what is called inter- 
national finance. 
Briefly, this powerful cosmopolitan element whose interests 
belong to no one nation, nor even to Europe as a whole, 
believes the moment opportune to make peace bv negotiation. 
They believe that the great loans which have "hitherto sup- 
ported the war have now reached a point beyond which no 
advantage can accrue to themselves. It is, judged that 
they can be maintained upon a heavy strain as they now 
stand. ; In other words, that the credit of the Governments 
that ha\e pledged ie\enue as against the money lent and the 
power of those governments to discover such re\enue, still 
stands. But it is also judged that any considerable pro- 
longation of the conflict will prove the inability of continuing 
this process of mortgaging the energies of the nation to the 
lenders. In such circumstances any min whose interest in 
life is not concerned with a nation, but with a financial 
process, and who prefers the success of the latter to the sur- 
vival or greatness of the former, inclines to a disastrous peace. 
Financial Interests and Motives 
It is a great error to accuse the men who are thus more 
and more openly opposed to our holding .on for victory, of 
sympathy with -the German Government ; still less hav«j 
they sympathy with its atrocities in war. Because some of 
them bear German-sounding names, because many of their 
immediate ancestors have been born within the lirnits of the 
modern Germin Empire, is nothing to the case ; the real 
motive is not national at all. It is one that seems to them and 
would Sinn to any one else indifferent to nationality, obvious, 
.Awful sufiering is prolonged ; grave diminution of their 
])rivate wealth is threatened, and all this merely for an ideal 
with which they are not concerned and with which they cannot 
in the nature of things be concerned. That is the position 
of what we call international finance at this moment. 
You do not see its action in a direct form because that 
form would ruin its own objects. You do not hnd (Jermaa 
methods of war praised, nor even direct appeals for peace in 
those papers which, in the various Allied Capitals are, as it 
were, the jackals of this power. Paris, in , particular has 
suffered from this plague. 
If you look closely you will see a perpetual and growing 
allusion to the enemy's strength, to his power of endurance, 
to his organisation, and all the rest of it ; a perpetual sug- 
gestion that the war is endless, and a perpetual indoctrination 
of the mass which reads such things with the falsehood that 
the enemy's power does not decline. The most absurd state- 
ments on his strength find their best market in such papers, 
and the chief attacks upon those who would keep opinion 
sane, are to be discovered there also. • , 
At the other end of the scale (but in exactly the same 
world) you have the same effort, strictly parallel,' going on. 
You have the financiers who will say in ccmversation-, though 
they would not print it or put it into a public speech, that 
the continuance of the war is absurd ; that neither party 
can win- -and all the re.st of it. It is the same .spirit, and in 
a sense it is a sincere spirit, for the people who say these 
things probably believe them. But their motive is a motive 
quite indifferent to the strength or the decline of England. By 
an accident this force now serves the enemy indirectly simply 
because it is the enemy who will profit by an early peace. 
And here let me conclude with the argument of this, though 
surely by this time it should be sufficiently famihar. 
I will suppose a man to say to me— for there are such men^ 
" What can be said against a negotiated peace at this moment ? 
The fourth summer of the war is far advanced and is passing. ; 
the ne.xt German class, that of 1919, will be in the held in a 
few weeks. The failure of Russia has so lowered the rate of the 
enemy's casualties as to alter the whole nature of the war. 
A prolongation of hostilities merely means, without the 
advance of either side, an increase of ruin, of pain and of 
death. \Ve may reach a point where not the enemy, but 
Europe itself will break down. If — not at any price— but 
at the price of the enemy's evacuating the territory he has 
occupied and submitting to a conference for the regulation 
of frontiers, we call the thing a draw, what is there to be said 
against such a policy ? " 
This is the reply. 
The main result of all war is its effect upon the spirit of the 
main belligerents engaged, and of the world that has watched 
or taken part in the conflict. The immediate result is the 
