Читать книгу A Woman and the War онлайн

16 страница из 40

In the early nineties there was a literary movement of great promise in London; the Boer War extinguished it; in the last half-dozen years we have seen a brisk effort towards the development of a national or even international social programme; this war may set it back for a generation; War is ever fatal to ideas. Men whose minds were being turned slowly and reluctantly to questions they had been educated to ignore are now concerned with two problems—winning the war and making good the injuries it has entailed. The increased taxation, the business losses, seemingly irrecoverable, will develop a certain natural hardness of fibre, and there is a danger that the social movements, slow in times of prosperity, will halt in the times to come.

The season of trouble for those "resolved to write" is upon the publicists of the social reform movement. They must be prepared for hard knocks and for all the arts of misrepresentation and vilification. The general reader will first denounce, then ignore and finally listen to the survivors of the common-sense crusade. The people who start to state facts will be the leaders of a forlorn hope, and our brave fellow-countrymen did not face as great an odds in the retreat from Mons. A fight for the universal reduction of armaments and for the remodelling of the existing system of government will be met by indignant cries for conscription and less freedom. The ubiquitous hand of the German will be traced in every line that pleads for toleration, good will, and the removal of all autocracies under whatever name; any suggestion of a return to Christian teaching will be denounced as the highest immorality. There are many who hold that a conscript Army and a larger Navy would have saved us from this war; they cannot see that we should have done no more than postpone the evil day until it dawned upon Europe in a still greater magnitude of evil, if this be possible, and that our commercial class, impeded by forced service, would have been unable to provide the means to pay the bill. The ulcer of European armament has burst at last, and the remedy proposed for the debilitated body of the Western World will be a still larger ulcer to take the place of the one that demanded so much labour to feed and so much life-blood to cleanse it.