Statesman

I am, in this very practical sense,entirely for trusting the government… It is this—that we are not trusting them as extraordinary men, but as ordinary men. Strength is the great weakness of politicians. They are haunted by the decayed Carlylean fancy that a nation in peril must be saved by a Great Man; and each of them is always trying to prove that he was the Great Man and all his colleagues were impiously blind to the fact. They are wrong from the very root. A great nation in peril is saved by a great nation, or else it is not saved at all. Napoleon could have done nothing without Revolutionary France. Finding a Napoleon is a strength; but looking for a Napoleon is invariably a weakness. General Joffre, in an anecdote which may not be true, but which would be very creditable to his strong humour and sense, is reported as having said that Napoleon “would probably have thought of something.” This is true; it is also useless. Merely trying to think of something leads to thinking of anything. We see it in the sterile violence of the new schools of art, which say “I am going to do something original,” when they have not thought of anything to do. Here is the great snare for the statesmen. And we, who are supporting their sane authority against sedition and panic, must warn them against this great temptation. They must be cured of being strong men. They must be saved from saving the State. Serving the State is all that is asked of them, and this they are quite competent to do. 327

Risking Your Life

The causes which will or will not make a man risk his life are necessarily quite different in kind from those that will make him risk any pleasure that depends on his life. You can only bribe him to die with certain things, and not others. And one of the things with which you can bribe him can be most shortly described as a brass band. He will cheerfully die in an atmosphere of triumph--nay, he will even cheerfully be defeated in an atmosphere of trump. But he will not do the same things in an atmosphere of defeat. This romance is the most real of all the realities of war. Its necessity is as practical as that of petrol for motors or food for men. It is proved by experiment in the fact that successes have often been gained through the presence of some commander even when he did not command, or that under a certain degree of failure in the whole body the moral breaks and there is rout...Men will only accept such tragedy if they may treat it as comedy. It is necessary, I say, to dwell for a moment on this fact, lest anyone should still suppose that in recruitment one can make progress by pessimism. The men are not needed because of our defeats. The are needed for our victory 320

More Prussia

The Germans believe that the Prussians, who have conquered them, can conquer anybody. They have no fear of external danger for the same reason that they have no hope of internal revolt.We cannot rescue the German from the Prussian until we can rescue him from the fear of the Prussian. In other words, we are at war with a legend---or to put it more correctly, a spell. Now, it is characteristic of all such spells that they cling on as long as there is any sort of doubt; and half-defeats of them are no defeats at all.

Prussian Peace

The question of an inconclusive peace, which shall leave an unrepentant Prussia at the head of an undefeated German race, is now for the first time seriously brought before us. I would ask the reader to regard it in the light of the following considerations. We must first dismiss from our minds altogether a very current notion of making a treaty with the men of Germany. We might as well talk about making a treaty with the horses of Germany. We are dealing with the ambitious and audacious Prussian Monarchy, which has pursued one policy for two centuries. Why the large, blond, bulky, handsome cart-horse of Germany allows itself to be ridden by this beggar on horseback ---or rather, burglar on horseback ---we do not know. But we do know that its subordination is subordination and nothing else: that it is no case of one nation being deputed to represent a race. We do know, for a fact, that Germany no more dreams of directing Prussia than a horse rides on a man. It is not merely that the King of Prussia does not definitely claim to represent the Germans. The King of Prussia definitely refused to represent the Germans. And he refused upon the positive ground that he did not want to represent them because he did want to rule them.

German Mind

For the mass which is the German mind is not convinced of God. And Germans hold, with excellent reason, of the absence of God. And Germans hold, with excellent reason, that the absence of God would be very much on their side. As for the German Emperor, he is neither a diabolist nor a divine-righter. He is a journalist. His deity is the cliche, and not a creed. One of his cliches, for instance, was that the Germans are “the salt of the earth,” evidently used in the bulgar, unthinking sense of the staple or substance---that is, the meat of the earth. But salt is not a piece de resistance. It is a corrective. It is the priest, not the man. The meaning of salt is that there exists something which we cannot live on, but cannot live without.

Choosing Chimneys

English chimneys are swept when the householder chooses, and German chimneys when the town council chooses. xxx277

forms

Vol 28 185 fixed forms wake men up

headlines

Most of us cannot count on getting our news only from headquarters but we can avoid getting it only from headlines. xxx 282

1915 France and Germany

And the deep and real irritation which people so different as the French, the Poles, and the Serbians feel against the Germans is largely the irritation against this underbred cleverness. It is the anger of a people that have had tragedies against a people that has never had anything but melodramas. xxx 273

Funny Men

No one but an Englishman could have described the democracy as consisting of free men, but yet of funny men. xxxv 208

Prussians

The Prussian has spoken of justice. When he speaks of justice he has begun to hope for mercy. For more than a hundred years he has spread and sunned himself in the summer of mere success; he has openly exulted in his freedom from scruple and religious restraint; he has pointed to his perjuries as other men point to their promises. He has never dreamed of answering the charge that he was false and cruel save by saying that he is cunning and strong. He has never pretended to recognise any law, human or divine, save in the sense that possession was nine points of it. When he begins to defend himself on the tenth point, it is proof that he has little left but a tenth. When the Prussian says he has the right to do a thing, you may be pretty sure he has no longer the might to do it. xxx 267

Self Government

Self-government arose among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the ancients) out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood. The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes of it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be consulted as one consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked a lot of fancy questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellows are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives. They shall decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of the spade or the spear. The men of the valley shall settle whether the valley shall be devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the men of the town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or splendid with spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall gather under a patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place. Eugenics and Other Evils

First things first

Orthodoxy------ There is a great deal of truth in Lord Hugh Cecil's suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era of change is over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose. But probably it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realized (what is certainly the case) that ours is only an age of conservation because it is an age of complete unbelief. Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy--the plain fruit of all of them is that the Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed g This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed