i6 
Land & Water 
February 14, 191 8 
or prefer cooked meat to raw. The man who pretends to 
doubt it would pretend to doubt the nose on a man's face, 
because it slightly differed from the nose in his portrait. 
Representation, at its best, does not profess to gi\'e anything 
more than a picture or emblem of the multitudinous mind 
of the people. WTien that mind is so unanimous and so 
uproarious that anybody can see it in the street, and almost 
breathe it in the air, the man who prefers to believe the figure 
rather than the fact is something very much worse than a 
lunatic. 
I stress this parenthesis because I conceive myself primarily 
to be bearing witness to facts for the benefit of foreign opinion ; 
and whether or no the Internationalists think this popular 
feeling should be gratified, it can do no kind of good, even 
to their own cause, that they should be simply ignorant of 
anything so human and so huge. 
Now a democrat, fpr whom democracy is a living conviction 
and not merely a long word, has nothing whatever to do, 
qua democrat, with the wisdom or perfection of a popular 
demand as any modification of its political right. When 
he is sure of the people's will, he must admit the people's 
authority, if he is a democrat, and if he is also an honest 
man. That all retribution or expiation is barbaric may be 
a part of enlightenment, but it is not a part of democracy ; 
and any Use of it to evade a general demand is a denial of 
democracy. To believe that the German criminal will 
spontaneously repent of his crimes may be in itself charitable, 
but it is not in itself democratic ; and if it is used against the 
general will it is anti-democratic. Particular men who hold 
the de-mocratic thesis may also hold that men should not be 
punished for murdering girls. For that matter, they may 
hold that ipen should not be discouraged from murdering 
girls, or that men should be warmly and enthusiastically 
urged towards murdering girls. But they do not hold these 
things as part of the democratic thesis ; and, if they let them 
prevail against the general will, they do not believe in the 
democratic thesis at all. In the case of the English people 
there is only onei possible alternative. Either Germany must 
pay for the wrong which the people believes it has suffered ; 
or else the people has no right to have an opinion, or no right 
to express an opinion, or no right to make the opinion which 
it holds prevail. 
But it will no doubt be very earnestly urged that an opinion 
may be democratic in appearance while being very undemo- 
cratic in origin. It is implied that the anti-German feeling 
in England was officially and therefore artificially produced. 
It is contended, to summarise briefly what is to be said for 
this view, that our diplomatists had darker motives for 
spreadmg a theory that a British promise when made to 
Belgmm ought to be kept, and that a German promise when 
made to Belgium ought not to be broken. These intellectual 
departures, it is implied, were first encouraged by a small 
knot of officials a few years ago ; and so subtly disseminated 
by them that they have since come to have much the appear- 
ance of bemg the common morality of mankind. In the same 
way these British sophists so prepared the soil of our men- 
tality, that when a German soldier (in the fulfilment of his 
native discipline and natural duty) killed the village priest 
as a punishment for the patriotism of the village atheist, it 
seemed somehow that we should always have regarded such 
an action as in some way unreasonable or unjust. The 
ordinary mass of men (it is argued) would inevitably have 
thought It natural that the village priest should be regarded 
as having performed the actions of the village atheist or even 
of the village idiot, had not the subtle, fluent, brilliantly 
eloquent and bewilderingly universal philosophers, who are 
the younger sons of our English countv families and the 
products of our English public schools, misled the multitude 
by the music of their rhetoric and the audacious novelty of 
their reasoning. 
I may be excused if I absolve myself from the further strain 
ot stating this thesis seriously ; but it is a thesis on which our 
enemies almost entirely rely. As it happens, it is not only 
intrinsically imbecile, but is relatively the precise reverse of 
tne tact. It is not so much an injustice to the British Govern- 
ment and governing class as a gross and verv excessive compli- 
ment to them. It attributes to them much more foresight 
than they had, and an attitude in which they would since have 
been entirely justified if only they had had it. It supposes 
the governing classes to have been the anti-German influence. 
As a fact. It was the governing classes who had always been 
the pro-Germari influence, and the only pro-German influence. 
It IS the real and very damaging joke against the most educated 
part of England that for decades past it had been trying to 
educate the mob, and trying to educate it all wrong The 
universities were pro-German, the fashionable philosophies 
and religions were pro-German, the practical politics, the 
social reform and slumming, were all copied from Germany ; 
for It IS the whole art of slumming to pay no attention to the 
opmioD of the slums. Only in the slumps would you have 
found alread}' a resentment against the German shopkeeper, 
more especially as the German shopkeeper was commonly a 
German Jew. ^ 
Friendship towards Germany. 
Similarly the great aristocratic statesmen like Salisbury 
and Rosebery kept in close alliance with the German Emperor ; 
the great quarterlies and the graver magazines discussed him 
as the architect of Germany and the' arbiter of Europe. It 
was only the coarse caricaturists of the gutter who called him 
then the lunatic we are all calling him now. 
That Germany has suffered wrong from <jur statesmen is 
arguable ; that she has inflicted wrong on our citizens is 
self-evident. To say that these things are merely incidents 
of war is merely to quarrel about words. The fact which a 
democrat will feel important is the fact that this democracy 
does regard these acts as something much worse than war. 
The Germans, for instance, have poisoned wells ; and the 
wickedness of poisoning wells has long been an ordinary 
. English proverb and figure of speech. The Germans intro- 
duced the use of venomous vapours in battle ; and the poor 
people whose sons and husbands have been " gassed " do in 
fact speak of them in a style never used about other wars, 
in which they have been merely wounded. In the presence 
of this popular feeling all the international talk about quarrels 
manufactured by Governments is perfectly true and perfectly 
irrelevant. Cynical British statesmen might have poisoned 
men's minds against Germany. But the indignation is there 
because men's bodies have been poisoned by Germans. 
Sensational journalists might have taken away the characters 
of a race of foreigners. But the feeling has not been created 
by the taking away of characters, but by the taking away of 
lives. 
This democratic decision was embodied and emphasised in 
the famous refusal of the Seamen's Trade Union to take Mr. 
Macdonald to Stockholm. Here again it is quite possible to' 
talk of the intrigue^ of politicians ; and here again it is quite 
irrelevant. Anyone who chooses is at liberty to say that the 
strike may not have been spontaneous, or may have been 
prompted by a secret Government order ; just as he is free to 
say that it may have been prompted by an ancient English 
prejudice against Cossacks or by an ancient Highland feud 
against Macdonalds. But if anybody says that such a strike 
could not have been spontaneous, or niust'huve been prompted 
from above, he simply knows no more about any kind of 
poor Englishmen than I do about the man in the moon. 
The matter seems so far to resolve itself into the very 
simple question of whether the democratic conference of 
Europe shall or shall not express the real views of the real 
democracies. If it is to express them, there is not the shadow 
of a doubt, in the case of the allied peoples in the West, about 
what those views really are. It is, I suppose, physically 
possible (though morally most improbable) that they should ' 
be forced to renounce these opinions by the prolonged torture 
of a pitiless war ; just as it is possible 'for a philosopher to be 
forced to renounce his opinions on the rack. But that is 
not the procedure now most favoured in the enlightened * 
schools of international democracy, as a method of finding 
out a man's opinions. It is presumably conceivable in the 
abstract that we should be physically compelled to pay 
attention to German proposals, as we might be physically 
forced to pay ransom to a brigand. But we should not say 
he was an international fellow-worker ; we should say he was 
a blackmailer as well as a brigand. The fact remains that 
upon the worst and wildest possibility, our public testimony 
could only be pacifist if it were tortured or terrorised ; it could 
not possibly be so as long as it was true. 
I repeat therefore that the question simply is whether the 
democracies are to dare to say what they mean ; or whether 
a tew self-appointed public orators are to announce to the 
world that they mean something else, which we all know 
tiiey do not mean. This strikes me as involving a degree 
of meekness and self-effacement in the masses infinitely more • 
abject and absolute than that demanded by the old despotic 
foreign policy of which I have always disapproved. We 
talk of denouncing secret diplomacy ; but at least the diplo- 
macy did have to be secret. That a policy was concealed from 
the people was itself a confession of the power of the people. 
Princes and Chancellors hid themselves in dark places from 
a thing like a thundercloud or a deluge— democracy. But now 
fi,T u/""!^ ^""^ '" ^'■^^^ daylight that all democrats believe 
that black IS white ; and it must be received in religious 
silence, tor those who were once hailed throughout the worid 
as democrats are democrats no longer. The democrats have 
all become diplomatists. In- truth, we have all become secret 
diplomatists, and must for ever hide our hearts from each 
other ; for in each will be the dark tale of a, frustrated justice, 
which we desired and dared not demand. 
