HOW PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THE WAR

I. DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL?

All human affairs are mental affairs; the bright ideas of to-day are the realities of to-morrow.  The real history of mankind is the history of how ideas have arisen, how they have taken possession of men’s minds, how they have struggled, altered, proliferated, decayed.  There is nothing in this war at all but a conflict of ideas, traditions, and mental habits.  The German Will clothed in conceptions of aggression and fortified by cynical falsehood, struggles against the fundamental sanity of the German mind and the confused protest of mankind.  So that the most permanently important thing in the tragic process of this war is the change of opinion that is going on.  What are people making of it?  Is it producing any great common understandings, any fruitful unanimities?

No doubt it is producing enormous quantities of cerebration, but is it anything more than chaotic and futile cerebration?  We are told all sorts of things in answer to that, things without a scrap of evidence or probability to support them.  It is, we are assured, turning people to religion, making them moral and thoughtful.  It is also, we are assured with equal confidence, turning them to despair and moral disaster.  It will be followed by (1) a period of moral renascence, and (2) a debauch.  It is going to make the workers (1) more and (2) less obedient and industrious.  It is (1) inuring men to war and (2) filling them with a passionate resolve never to suffer war again.  And so on.  I propose now to ask what is really happening in this matter?  How is human opinion changing?  I have opinions of my own and they are bound to colour my discussion.  The reader must allow for that, and as far as possible I will remind him where necessary to make his allowance.

Now first I would ask, is any really continuous and thorough mental process going on at all about this war?  I mean, is there any considerable number of people who are seeing it as a whole, taking it in as a whole, trying to get a general idea of it from which they can form directing conclusions for the future?  Is there any considerable number of people even trying to do that?  At any rate let me point out first that there is quite an enormous mass of people who—­in spite of the fact that their minds are concentrated on aspects of this war, who are at present hearing, talking, experiencing little else than the war—­are nevertheless neither doing nor trying to do anything that deserves to be called thinking about it at all.  They may even be suffering quite terribly by it.  But they are no more mastering its causes, reasons, conditions, and the possibility of its future prevention than a monkey that has been rescued in a scorching condition from the burning of a house will have mastered the problem of a fire.  It is just happening to and about them.  It may, for anything they have learnt about it, happen to them again.