H. G. WELLS' VIEWS ON PEACE1
H. G. Wells' Views on Peace Noted English Writer Says That Allied Diplomats Must Abandon Evasive and Vague Diplomacy of the Past and Give People of All Nations Specific Answers to Specific...
...Unless the allied statesmen fail to understand the implications of their own general professions they mean that...
...Given reparation in Europe, is Germany to be allowed a fair share in the control and trade of a pooled and neutralized Central Africa...
...Neither Germany, France, Britain, Italy or Russla can live prosperously if its trade and enterprise are shut out from this cardinally important area...
...Why not state it plainly now...
...They unify the German people...
...Why are we, and why are the German people, not given some definite assurance in this matter...
...We want an end to this economic strategy, we want an end to this plotting of governments against the welfare of their neighbors...
...Central African Problem LET the reader ask himself the following questions: Does he know what the Allies mean to do with the problem of Central Africa...
...Whatever happens, that Humpty Dumpty cannot be put back as it wa» before the war...
...Could anything be more palpably shifty and unsatisfactory, more senile, more feebly artful, than the recent utterances of the German Chancellor...
...And consider how the matter looks "over there...
...THE INTERNATIONAL situation at the present time is beyond question the most wonderful that the world has ever seen...
...Wells believes that the big problem of the present day...
...And at least equally remarkable is the dragging inadaptability of European states-craft...
...It teas perhaps to be expected...
...Sooner or later we must come to some such arrangement...
...Manifestly because a small minority of people in positions of peculiar advantage, in positions of trust and authority, prevent or delay its assembling...
...VERY FEW PEOPLE WOULD RESPECT A GERMAN' WHO WOULD...
...none the less it has to be attempted, it has to be attempted because there is no other way of peace...
...There are to be no conquests, no domination of recalcitrant populations, no bitter insistence upon vindictive penalties, and there must be something in the nature of a world-wide League of Nations to keep the peace securely in future, to "make the world safe for democracy," and maintain international justice...
...Let us put a question that goes to the very heart of the problem...
...It requires no special knowledge nor wisdom to see that...
...He will argoe naturally enough and reasonably enough that he may as well die fighting as starve...
...The answer whiph seems to suffice in all the Allied countries that the German Imperial government, that the German Imperial government alone, stands in the way, that its tradition is incurably a tradition of conquest and aggression, that until German militarism is overthrown, etc...
...It is one of the ideas most potent in nerving the overstrained German people to continue their fight...
...To that the general mind of the world has come today...
...Why is not the Peace Conference sitting now...
...because it is bound to it and the wolves pursue...
...They prolong the war...
...Why do they justify imperialism to Germany...
...Why do they not shout it so compactly and loudly that all Germany will hear and understand...
...The German government assures the German people that the Allies intend to cut off Germany from the African supply of raw material...
...The manifest solution of the problem of the German colonies in Africa is neither to return them to her nor deprive her of them but to give her a share in the pooled general control of mid-Africa...
...There is not a country in which the great majority of sensible people is not passionately desirous of peace, of an enduring peace, and—the war goes on...
...Few people in the Allied countries will dispute that that is broadly true...
...It is something far more vital to the mass of Germany than any questions of Belgium or Alsace-Lorraine...
...So she can be deprived of all power for political mischief in Africa without humiliation or economic injury...
...And if it is true have the statesmen of the Allies made it as transparently and convincingly clear to the German people as possible...
...But has the reader any assurance that this sane solution of the African problem has the support of the Allied' governments...
...They unify the German people...
...At best he has only a vague persuasion...
...But why do they not say it plainly...
...This is a far more vital issue te him than tho Belgian issue or Poland or Alsace-Lorraine...
...After three years of war the air offensive, which is the only possible decisive blow to strike, is still merely talked of...
...Let it be granted that that will be a difficult control to organize...
...The conditions of peace can now be stated in general terms that are as acceptable to a reasonable man in Berlin as they are to a reasonable man in Paris or London or Petrograd or Constantinople...
...The German people sticks to its militarist imperialism as Mazeppa stuck to his horse...
...There is therefore no alternative, if we are to have a satisfactory permanent pacification of the world, but local self-development in these regions under honestly conceived international control of police and transit and trade...
...By doing so they leave Germany no choice but a war of desperation...
...I FIND THAT I MYSELF AN OF THIS WAY OF THINKING, THAT WHETHER KXGLAXD HAS DONE RIGHT OK WRONG IN THK PAST— AND I HAVE SOMETIMES CRITICIZED MY COUNTRY VERY BITTERLY—I WILL NOT ENDURE THK PROSPECT OF SEEING HER AT THK FOOT OF SOME VICTORIOUS FOREIGN NA-TION, NEITHER WILL ANY GKRMAX WHO MATTERS...
...Is there nothing more to be done on our side...
...H. G. Wells' Views on Peace Noted English Writer Says That Allied Diplomats Must Abandon Evasive and Vague Diplomacy of the Past and Give People of All Nations Specific Answers to Specific Problems...
...So, too, we can head off— and in no other way can we head off—the power for evil, the power of developing quarrels, inherent in "imperialism" other than German...
...They keep on with the tricks and feints of a departed age, with bureau politics...
...Anyone but a statesman absolutely flaccid with overstrain can sea that...
...Why do they justify imperialism to Germany...
...That would mean the practical destruction of German economic life...
...The answer to that question is not overwhelmingly difficult...
...They seem incapable of that plain speaking to the world audience which alone can bring about a peace...
...Reason For Grip BUT the case for the Allies is that this great argument by which, and by.which alone, the German Imperial government keeps its grip upon the German people at the present time and keeps them facing their enemies, is untrue...
...as far as ultimate peace is concerned, is to make the German people believe that the allies have no designs for ten-itorial aggression or economic reprisals.—The Editor's Xote...
...And, on our own side—• Let us examine the three leading points about this peace business in which this jaded statescraft is most apparent...
...But is it the whole and complete truth...
...The idea of the German Imperialist, the idea of our own little band of noisy but influential imperialist vulgarians, is evidently a game of grab, a perilous cutting up of these areas into jostling protectorates, and spheres of influence, from which either the Germans or the Allies (according to the side you are on) are to be viciously shut out...
...The military history of the war has still to be written, the grim story of machinery misunderstood, improvements resisted, antiquated methods persisted in, but the broad facts are already before the public mind...
...Why then does the waste and killing go on...
...Few, if any, men of over five and forty completely readjust themselves to changed conditions, however novel and, challenging the changes may be, and nearly all the leading figures in these affairs are elderly men, not only trained in a tradition of diplomatic ineffectiveness, but overworked and overstrained to a pitch of complete inelasticity...
...This is possible only under some supreme international control, a control in which each nation interested can exercise a share corresponding to its original possessions...
...Shut out from all trade, unable to buy food, deprived of raw material, peace would be as bad for Germany as war...
...they want merely to see certain gaping wounds inflicted by Germany repaired, and beyond that reasonable requirement they want nothing but to be assured, completely assured, absolutely assured, against any further aggressions en the part of GermanyWells On The War "THE only way to enduring peace lies through internationalism, through an international survey of commercial treaties, through an international control of interstate shipping and transport rates...
...For most men in most countries it would be a convincing argument, strong enough to override considerations of riabt and wrong...
...A second question is equally essential to any really permanent settlement and it is one upon which these eloquent but unsatisfactory mouthpieces of ours turn their backs with an equal resolution, and that is the fate of the Ottoman Empire...
...They underline and endorse the claim of German imperialism that this is war for bare existence...
...The Allies declare that they do not want to destroy the German people, they do not want to cripple the German people...
...However difficult it may prove to work out in detail such an international control must therefore be worked out...
...Our statesmen wa3te their breath and slight our Intelligence wheu these foreground questions are thrust in front of the really fundamental matters...
...They chaffer while civilization bleeds to death...
...Why do they maintain a threatening ambiguity towards Germany on all these matters...
...The Third Problem THE THIRD great issue about which there is nothing but fog and uncertainty is the so-called "War after the War," the idea of a permanent economic alliance to prevent the economic recuperation of Germany...
...Why do they not shout it so compactly andMoudly that all Germany will hear and understand...
...Unless the Allied statesmen fail to understand the implications of their own general professions they mean that...
...But why do they not say it plainly...
...G. Wells is one of England's most famous writers...
...Both on the side of the Allies and on the side of the Germans the declarations of public policy remain childishly vague and disingenuous, childishly "diplomatic...
...It is impossible...
...They prolong the war...
...Because in the answer to it lies the reason why so many men were killed yesterday on the eastern and western fronts, so many ships sunk, so much property destroyed, so much human energy wasted forever upon mere destruction, and why, tomorrow and the next day and the day after—through many months yet perhaps—the same killing and destroying must still go on...
...Wells, at least, cannot be subjected to the prevalent charge of being pro-German...
...In such offenses Germany lias been the chief of sinners, but which among the belligerent nations can throw the first stone...
...Upon that idea German imperialism in its frantic efforts to keep its people fighting, naturally puts the utmost stress...
...What in plain English are we up to there...
...There can be permanent peace in the world only when tropical and sub-tropical Africa constitute a field free to the commercial enterprise of everyone, irrespective of nationality, when this is no longer an area of competition between nations...
...Is that true...
...They seem to be incapable even of thinking how the war may be brought to an end...
...In many respects this war has been an amazing display of human inadaptability...
...Here again the way to the world's peace, the only way to enduring peace, lies through internationalism, through an international survey of commercial treaties, through an international control of interstate shipping and transport rates...
...A schoolboy can see it...
...They go on as if it were still 1913...
...The attentive student of the home and foreign propaganda literature of the German government will realize that the case made by German imperialism,the main argument by which it sticks to power is this, that the Allied governments are also imperialist, that they also aim at conquest and aggression, that for Germany the choice is world empire or downfall and utter ruin...
...This is the argument that holds the German people stiffly united...
...We cannot too earnestly examine it...
...Our leaders say so and we believe them...
...That is one of the supreme questions of the present time...
...By doing so they leave Germany no choice but a war of desperation...
...Everywhere the failure of ministers and statesmen to rise to the urgent definite necessities of the present time is glaringly conspicuous...
...In the current issue of The New Republic he writes an article in which he applies some trenchant and specific questions to allied diplomats...
...The threat of a War after the War robs the reasonable German of his last inducement to make peace...
...It is the clear common sense of the African situation that while these precious regions of raw material remain divided up between a number of competitive European imperialisms, each resolutely set upon the exploitation of its "possessions" tc its own advantage and the disadvantage of the others, there can be no permanent peace in the world...
...On snch a basis this war is a war to the death...
...But as the mass of sensible people lu every country concerned, in Germany just as much as in France or Great Britain, know perfectly well, unimpeded trade- is good for everyone exec-pt a few rich advetturers, and restricted trade destroys limitless wealth and welfare for mankind to make a few private fortunes or secure an advantage for some imperialistic clique...
...But once that conception has been clearly formulated a second great motive why Germany should continue fighting will have gone...
...They underline and endorse the claim of German imperialism that this is a war for bare existence...
...Why does the great mass of the German people still cling to its incurably belligerent government...
Vol. 9 • September 1917 • No. 9
