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　　CHAPTER VIII

　　Out of such talk revolution is born, and revolution will not be averted by pretending that such words are not being spoken and that such thoughts are not seething among our working-classes. It will only be averted by cutting at the root of public suspicion, by cleansing our political state of its corruption and folly, and by a clear, strong call of noble-minded men to a new way of life in which a great people believing in the honor and honesty of its leadership and in fair reward for good labor shall face a period of poverty with courage, and co-operate unselfishly for the good of the commonwealth, inspired by a sense of fellowship with the workers of other nations. We have a long way to go and many storms to weather before we reach that state, if, by any grace that is in us, and above us, we reach it.

　　For there are disease and insanity in our present state, due to the travail of the war and the education of the war. The daily newspapers for many months have been filled with the record of dreadful crimes, of violence and passion. Most of them have been done by soldiers or ex-soldiers. The attack on the police station at Epsom, the destruction of the town hall at Luton, revealed a brutality of passion, a murderous instinct, which have been manifested again and again in other riots and street rows and solitary crimes. Those last are the worst because they are not inspired by a sense of injustice, however false, or any mob passion, but by homicidal mania and secret lust. The many murders of young women, the outrages upon little girls, the violent robberies that have happened since the demobilizing of the armies have appalled decent—minded people. They cannot understand the cause of this epidemic after a period when there was less crime than usual.

　　The cause is easy to understand. It is caused by the discipline and training of modern warfare. Our armies, as all armies, established an intensive culture of brutality. They were schools of slaughter. It was the duty of officers like Col. Ronald Campbell—“O.C. Bayonets” (a delightful man)—to inspire blood-lust in the brains of gentle boys who instinctively disliked butcher's work. By an ingenious system of psychology he played upon their nature, calling out the primitive barbarism which has been overlaid by civilized restraints, liberating the brute which has been long chained up by law and the social code of gentle life, but lurks always in the secret lairs of the human heart. It is difficult when the brute has been unchained, for the purpose of killing Germans, to get it into the collar again with a cry of, “Down, dog, down!” Generals, as I have told, were against the “soft stuff” preached by parsons, who were not quite militarized, though army chaplains. They demanded the gospel of hate, not that of love. But hate, when it dominates the psychology of men, is not restricted to one objective, such as a body of men behind barbed wire. It is a spreading poison. It envenoms the whole mind. Like jealousy.

　　It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

　　Our men, living in holes in the earth like ape-men, were taught the ancient code of the jungle law, to track down human beasts in No Man's Land, to jump upon their bodies in the trenches, to kill quickly, silently, in a raid, to drop a hand-grenade down a dugout crowded with men, blowing their bodies to bits, to lie patiently for hours in a shell-hole for a sniping shot at any head which showed, to bludgeon their enemy to death or spit him on a bit of steel, to get at his throat if need be with nails and teeth. The code of the ape-man is bad for some temperaments. It is apt to become a habit of mind. It may surge up again when there are no Germans present, but some old woman behind an open till, or some policeman with a bull's-eye lantern and a truncheon, or in a street riot where fellow-citizens are for the time being “the enemy.”

　　Death, their own or other people's, does not mean very much to some who, in the trenches, sat within a few yards of stinking corpses, knowing that the next shell might make such of them. Life was cheap in war. Is it not cheap in peace?...

　　The discipline of military life is mainly an imposed discipline—mechanical, and enforced in the last resort not by reason, but by field punishment or by a firing platoon. Whereas many men were made brisk and alert by discipline and saw the need of it for the general good, others were always in secret rebellion against its restraints of the individual will, and as soon as they were liberated broke away from it as slaves from their chains, and did not substitute self-discipline for that which had weighed heavy on them. With all its discipline, army life was full of lounging, hanging about, waste of time, waiting for things to happen. It was an irresponsible life for the rank and file. Food was brought to them, clothes were given to them, entertainments were provided behind the line, sports organized, their day ordered by high powers. There was no need to think for themselves, to act for themselves. They moved in herds dependent on their leaders. That, too, was a bad training for the individualism of civil life. It tended to destroy personal initiative and willpower. Another evil of the abnormal life of war sowed the seeds of insanity in the brains of men not strong enough to resist it. Sexually they were starved. For months they lived out of the sight and presence of women. But they came back into villages or towns where they were tempted by any poor slut who winked at them and infected them with illness. Men went to hospital with venereal disease in appalling numbers. Boys were ruined and poisoned for life. Future generations will pay the price of war not only in poverty and by the loss of the unborn children of the boys who died, but by an enfeebled stock and the heritage of insanity.

　　The Prime Minister said one day, “The world is suffering from shell-shock.” That was true. But it suffered also from the symptoms of all that illness which comes from syphilis, whose breeding-ground is war.

　　The majority of our men were clean-living and clean—hearted fellows who struggled to come unscathed in soul from most of the horrors of war. They resisted the education of brutality and were not envenomed by the gospel of hate. Out of the dark depths of their experience they looked up to the light, and had visions of some better law of life than that which led to the world-tragedy. It would be a foul libel on many of them to besmirch their honor by a general accusation of lowered morality and brutal tendencies. Something in the spirit of our race and in the quality of our home life kept great numbers of them sound, chivalrous, generous-hearted, in spite of the frightful influences of degradation bearing down upon them out of the conditions of modern warfare. But the weak men, the vicious, the murderous, the primitive, were overwhelmed by these influences, and all that was base in them was intensified, and their passions were unleashed, with what result we have seen, and shall see, to our sorrow and the nation's peril.

　　The nation was in great peril after this war, and that peril will not pass in our lifetime except by heroic remedies. We won victory in the field and at the cost of our own ruin. We smashed Germany and Austria and Turkey, but the structure of our own wealth and industry was shattered, and the very foundations of our power were shaken and sapped. Nine months after the armistice Great Britain was spending at the rate of £2,000,000 a day in excess of her revenue. She was burdened with a national debt which had risen from 645 millions in 1914 to 7,800 millions in 1919. The pre-war expenditure of £200,000,000 per annum on the navy, army, and civil service pensions and interest on national debt had risen to 750 millions.

　　Our exports were dwindling down, owing to decreased output, so that foreign exchanges were rising against us and the American dollar was increasing in value as our proud old sovereign was losing its ancient standard. So that for all imports from the United States we were paying higher prices, which rose every time the rate of exchange dropped against us. The slaughter of 900,000 men of ours, the disablement of many more than that, had depleted our ranks of labor, and there was a paralysis of all our industry, owing to the dislocation of its machinery for purposes of war, the soaring cost of raw material, the crippling effect of high taxation, the rise in wages to meet high prices, and the lethargy of the workers. Ruin, immense, engulfing, annihilating to our strength as a nation and as an empire, stares us brutally in the eyes at the time I write this book, and I find no consolation in the thought that other nations in Europe, including the German people, are in the same desperate plight, or worse. Now It Can Be Told