Gilbert Murray

“ The League of Nations is not an alliance. She is asked only to sit in council with the other nations—as free and unpledged as they, or, if she wishes, still more so—to help those who have suffered, and are in part still sick in body and brain with their suffering, to face the vast problems which now confront mankind, and which the rest of us have pledged ourselves to face in the spirit of peace and justice and common sense which we thought was characteristically American. ”

“ It could only be brought about by a strong and persistent lead from those who possessed the ear of the world and the confidence of their own people. Never in the whole course of modern history has there been a more magnificent opportunity than then lay before the British Prime Minister, never has there been a clearer call of plain duty. He was free, as men in public life are seldom free. Great Britain hung on his lips, and Europe was waiting for the lead of Great Britain. ”

“ The British Empire holds such a vast extent of the earth's surface that it has inevitably given hostages to fortune. So huge an empire can only be tolerated if it behaves tolerably. If we keep to ourselves and use for our own profit all the overwhelmingly large stores of food and raw material which by our vast annexations of territory we now control, thereby reducing other nations first to a stagnation of trade and then to starvation, the natural and inevitable answer to such a proceeding would seem to be a world crusade for our destruction. ”

“ The old German Government had committed a vast crime against humanity; its people had backed it up, as all European peoples back up their own Governments, and could not expect to escape heavy punishment. The one question we need ask ourselves is this: Is it not as certain, as anything in human nature can be, that a treaty of such a character, imposed on a conquered nation by force, if not also by treachery, will, as a matter of course and without the faintest scruple, be broken as soon as there is a favourable opportunity for breaking it? ”

“ Russian peasantry are said to be peculiarly ignorant and devoid of national feeling; the land-owners and well-to-do classes are mostly Poles. Is it surprising that the Poles of Poland hate the idea of handing their countrymen over to a Russia which will, as a matter of course, set the peasants to burn their houses, destroy their cattle, and hunt them themselves down like vermin? And when that is done, they reflect, Bolshevism will only be nearer to Warsaw.
Like the early Moslems, the true Bolsheviks care more for their faith than for territory. ”

“ America is absent. Germany and Russia are absent. France cannot yet quite escape from her war psychology. But if Great Britain is faithful, it will be hard for other nations to be obviously and grossly false. The European neutrals, like Switzerland, Holland, and Norway, will be clear voices for justice and fair dealing. The beaten nations, when once admitted, will probably be on the same side, since when wrong-doing begins it is the weak who are first to suffer. And, after all, all human beings have a strong dislike of injustice, when they do not directly gain by it. ”

“ It does not make war formally impossible. It does not bind all its members to make war on any Covenant-breaker. It does not even bind any member of the League to accept the decision of the majority. It leaves its members almost as free as if they were outside. They are pledged to accept, if they ask for it, a decision of the International Court; they are pledged to the principle of mandate; they are pledged to boycott any deliberate war-maker. But that is practically all. The League's true weapon is not force, but publicity. ”

“ The craving for this Peace which has not come is, I believe, still the unspoken and often unconscious motive of millions who seem, at first glance, to be only brawling for revenges or revolutions; it lies, like a mysterious torment, at the heart of this storm-tossed and embittered world, crying for it knows not what. ”

“ As was said quite truly: "Millions of poor men in divers regions of the world have been dragged suddenly and without any previous action of their own into a quarrel which they neither made nor desired nor understood, and in the course of that quarrel have been subjected again and again to the very extremity of possible human suffering." The war naturally and inevitably created in Europe a passionate wish for some revolutionary transformation of a world in which rich and clever people in parliaments and governments had the power of inflicting such pains upon the poor. ”

“ Engagements between human beings must needs be as elastic as human nature itself. Had the Covenant laid down that every member of the League was to make war or peace, or change its foreign policy, in obedience to the majority of the Council or Assembly and in disregard of the wishes of its own parliament, the result would have been either that no nations would join such a League or that, if they did, the League would break at the first strain. ”

“ It does seem to them at moments as if only some one thing was wrong with the world, and as if that one flaw must surely be definite and remediable: some one bold step is all that is needed—say, the abolition of the family, or of property, or of competition, or of wages, or of interest, or of compulsory law, or some other of the fundamental institutions of society. ”

“ It is only by the compulsion of a lost war that Germany has been compelled to disarm while her enemies stand round her with large armies, and even in Germany the process is evidently very difficult to enforce. Too many rifles and machine guns have got loose in private hands. No League could compel Poland or Rumania to disarm while the Red Army of Russia stood waiting across the frontier; or compel Great Britain to disarm while the northwest frontier of India is constantly attacked, while the Bolsheviks are in Persia and British officials are besieged in Mesopotamia. ”

“ There has been too much war, and too much of many things that naturally go with war; too much force and fraud, too much intrigue and lying, too much impatience, violence, avarice, unreasonableness, and lack of principle. Before the war I was a Liberal, and I believe now that nothing but the sincere practice of Liberal principles [Pg vi] will save European society from imminent revolution and collapse. But I am conscious of a certain change of emphasis in my feeling. Before the war I was eager for large and sweeping reforms, I was intolerant of Conservatism and I laughed at risks. ”

“ Government without principle has many conveniences; if life consisted of isolated moments it might be entirely successful. But life is continuous, and human beings have memories and expectations. And almost any policy that is continuous and consistent and true to itself is more likely to succeed in the end than a mixture of momentary expedients and plunges for safety. It is conceivable that a perfectly resolute and unfaltering military coercion of India, Egypt, and Mesopotamia might have succeeded. ”

“ Russia? To ask the question is to answer it. England? Who would wish to coöperate with the British Government in holding down Ireland by "competition in crime," in reëstablishing her slippery grasp on Mesopotamia, laboriously pacifying India and Egypt, and struggling indefinitely against Russian conspiracies to destroy her influence in the Moslem world? How can an American wish to remit England's debt to America when she is at this moment invading Germany in order to collect "to the last farthing" a claim which the American delegates at the Peace Conference rejected as extortionate? ”

“ On the contrary, I think that in most of the international problems of Europe the influence of Great Britain, and in [Pg xvi] particular of the British Prime Minister, is generally an influence for good, though not nearly such a strong and clear influence as it might be. I confine these criticisms to our own policy because the scolding of foreign countries is a notoriously profitless task. The only criticism that has any chance of being useful is that of matters for which the critic or his readers have some degree of responsibility. ”

“ No one who studies even superficially the history of average Oriental governments, from Morocco or Bokhara to Oudh, can be surprised or sorry that they have been superseded by the better governments of the West. The peoples of the East themselves have gained by Western penetration; nay, more, they are conscious of their need of the West. But they have had too much [Pg 73] of it; they resent it, and they are frightened of it. The Moslem nations have lost their independence one after another. At the beginning of the Great War only one Moslem Power remained free and powerful—the Turkish Empire. ”

“ Further, if any clause in the treaty appears to 'have become inapplicable' or to give rise to 'international conditions which might endanger the peace of the world,' under Article XXIII the Assembly of the League may at any time 'advise their reconsideration.' You complain that the terms of the present treaty were imposed upon you, without discussion, by implacable enemies who had you at their mercy; that you have been made a sort of outlaw nation, without freedom, without colonies, without ships, sitting apart while the world is administered by your enemies. ”

“ All the States on the borders of Russia—Finland, Lithuania, Poland, the Ukraine, Hungary, Rumania, the new republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and the kingdom of Persia—are either at war or in fear of war or just recovering from war with Russia, or from civil war fomented by Russian agents and propagandists. Inside Russia itself, civil war has never ceased since the first outbreak of the Revolution in 1917. It is true that the civil war has been largely helped by foreign munitions and stirred up by foreign intrigues. ”

“ The right policy is something very easy to state and extremely difficult to carry out, even for a single-minded and clear-headed Government. It needs first, perhaps, an effort of imaginative understanding more far-reaching than has ever yet in history been demanded of an Imperial Power. Only those who understand the East can win the respect and confidence of the East. ”

“ But the world is not merely threatened by the prospect of future wars. It is filled with wars at the present moment. There are quarrels and bickerings between most of the newly liberated states in eastern Europe; there is a war, sometimes avowed and sometimes underground, between Communist Russia and all her neighbours and rivals, a war whose tentacles reach far throughout Europe and Asia; and there are wars against the British and French in various parts of the East. ”

“ In one sense, indeed, armaments are actually operating now as a cause of war. There are far too many firearms lying about. America, England, and France have made very lavish gifts or sales of lethal weapons to various bodies with whom they sympathized. And the arms have by no means always stayed in the place for which they were intended. Guns which we sent to Denikin were sold by corrupt officials to the Bolsheviks, and passed on by them to the Afghans to use against us on the Indian frontier. Such things cause some deaths and some laughter, but are not permanent evils. ”

“ The League will not succeed unless in some of the great nations, above all in Great Britain, there are at the head of affairs statesmen who believe firmly in the principles of the League and are capable both of effort and of self-sacrifice for the sake of them, and behind the statesmen a strong and intelligent determination in the mass of the people to see that the League is made genuinely the leading force in international politics. ”

“ Every revolutionary outburst since the war has been marked by ferocious cruelties and followed by still more ferocious reprisals. Revolution leads not to peace, but to reciprocal reigns of terror, first Red and then White, till the exhaustion of suffering produces some sort of equilibrium. ”

“ The present disorder of the world is one of those in which the remedy is not obscure, but perfectly ascertained. The only difficulty lies in applying it. The nations of the world must coöperate; and for that they must trust one another; and for that the only way is for each Government separately to be worthy of trust. ”

“ The second of these great causes of war, protection and the competition for markets, has somewhat changed its aspect since the comparative exhaustion of the world supplies of food and raw material. Before the war, nations chiefly wanted to sell. Markets were the great object of ambition, and tariff walls the great means of offence. Great Britain, of course, kept her doors everywhere open to the trade of the world. ”

“ There is only one great nation which, [Pg 103] if words are to be believed, thinks seriously of starting a competition in armaments. It has been announced, more than once, by the American Government that, like Germany in the years before 1914, they have arranged a naval programme which will effectually put an end to the British command of the seas and give the United States "world primacy" (see speech of Mr. Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, in the Times of September 1, 1920) . ”

“ Only when he was armed and the rest of the people unarmed could the real proletarian—the man who had no savings, no talent, no education, no notable good qualities, nothing that makes for success in life—hope to beat the men who always outstripped him. It is strange that even in a [Pg 85] moment of extreme misery such a theory could have established itself in any country as a principle of government. But the military collapse of Russia gave it a unique chance. The common soldiers, anxious to fight no more, already possessed arms. ”

“ The Peace of Versailles has, like most settlements imposed by conquerors upon their beaten enemies, produced a condition so intolerable that the vanquished must be expected to seize the first favourable opportunity for fighting to free themselves. ”

“ To hate your neighbours, whom you know, and love your neighbours' enemies, whom you do not know, is a consistent and not uncommon frame of mind; though the element of love in it seems less important and prominent than the hate. But to expect European peace and good-will by means of a revolution in all countries argues a lack of understanding not far removed from madness. ”

“ It seems that Germany is absolutely bound to fight, if there is no other way of recovering her freedom and her right to live, while France is absolutely bound to hold her enemy down mercilessly, if there is no other way of securing her own safety. ”

“ A great imperialist Poland, on bad terms with her neighbours, but backed by France, will need a large and effective army, and will be ready to strike at Germany's rear the moment she attempts to move westward. Unfortunately, Poland is apt to be on bad terms with Russia; and as things now are Russia is so much the enemy of the Entente that she is thrown into the arms of Germany. That is deplorable and must not be allowed to continue. The Bolsheviks must be overthrown and a Government set up in Russia which is dependent for its existence on French support. ”

“ Germany is the enemy. Germany will fight again as soon as she is strong enough. Therefore she must never be allowed to become strong enough. M. Hanotaux, who was Foreign Minister during the years 1894-98, when French foreign policy was more ably managed than now, has recently published a book in criticism of the Treaty of Versailles. He does not deal in any Wilsonian phrases about justice or humanity; he considers the treaty solely with a view to the security of France, and he finds it sadly wanting. And a large mass of opinion, probably the prevailing opinion, in France supports him. ”