In the British papers there has appeared and gained a permanent footing this phrase, "ton for ton." This means that Britain will go on fighting until she has exacted and taken over from Germany the exact equivalent of all the British shipping Germany has submarined.People do not realise that a time may come when Germany will be glad and eager to give Russia, France and Italy all that they require of her, when Great Britain may be quite content to let her allies make an advantageous peace and herself still go on fighting Germany.She does not intend to let that furtively created German mercantile marine ship or coal or exist upon the high seas--so long as it can be used as an economic weapon against her.Neither Britain nor France nor Italy can tolerate anything of the sort.
It has been the peculiar boast of Great Britain that her shipping has been unpatriotic.She has been the impartial carrier of the whole world.Her shippers may have served their own profit; they have never served hers.The fluctuations of freight charges may have been a universal nuisance, but they have certainly not been an aggressive national conspiracy.It is Britain's case against any German ascendancy at sea, an entirely convincing case, that such an ascendancy would be used ruthlessly for the advancement of German world power.The long-standing freedom of the seas vanishes at the German touch.So beyond the present war there opens the agreeable prospect of a mercantile struggle, a bitter freight war and a war of Navigation Acts for the ultimate control in the interests of Germany or of the Anti-German allies, of the world's trade.
Now how in any of these three cases can the bargaining and trickery of diplomatists and the advantage-hunting of the belligerents produce any stable and generally beneficial solution? What all the neutrals want, what every rational and far-sighted man in the belligerent countries wants, what the common sense of the whole world demands, is neither the "ascendancy" of Germany nor the "ascendancy" of Great Britain nor the "ascendancy" of any state or people or interest in the shipping of the world.The plain right thing is a world shipping control, as impartial as the Postal Union.What right and reason and the welfare of coming generations demand in Poland is a unified and autonomous Poland, with Cracow, Danzig, and Posen brought into the same Polish-speaking ring-fence with Warsaw.
What everyone who has looked into the Albanian question desires is that the Albanians shall pasture their flocks and market their sheepskins in peace, free of Serbian control.In every country at present at war, the desire of the majority of people is for a non-contentious solution that will neither crystallise a triumph nor propitiate an enemy, but which will embody the economic and ethnological and geographical common sense of the matter.But while the formulae of national belligerence are easy, familiar, blatant, and instantly present, the gentler, greater formulae of that wider and newer world pacifism has still to be generally understood.It is so much easier to hate and suspect than negotiate generously and patiently; it is so much harder to think than to let go in a shrill storm of hostility.
The rational pacifist is hampered not only by belligerency, but by a sort of malignant extreme pacifism as impatient and silly as the extremest patriotism.
5
I sketch out these ideas of a world pacification from a third-party standpoint, because I find them crystallising out in men's minds.I note how men discuss the suggestion that America may play a large part in such a permanent world pacification.There I end my account rendered.These things are as much a part of my impression of the war as a shell-burst on the Carso or the yellow trenches at Martinpuich.But I do not know how opinion is going in America, and I am quite unable to estimate the power of these new ideas I set down, relative to the blind forces of instinct and tradition that move the mass of mankind.On the whole Ibelieve more in the reason-guided will-power of men than I did in the early half of 1914.If I am doubtful whether after all this war will "end war," I think on the other hand it has had such an effect of demonstration that it may start a process of thought and conviction, it may sow the world with organisations and educational movements considerable enough to grapple with an either arrest or prevent the next great war catastrophe.I am by no means sure even now that this is not the last great war in the experience of men.I still believe it may be.
