THE DANGER OF EUROPE

BY SIR PHILIP GIBBS.

X.—THE FAILURE OF CIVILISATION.

Before 1914 civilisation seemed safe, and rather good. It seemed to most of us who thought about the matter at all—the majority of people took it for granted—that we had definitely beaten the evil forces that make for the misery of mankind. The brute beast in human nature seemed to be chained up for ever, at least over wide territories of the civilised world, though occasionally it might escape in wild places like the Congo or in the slums of great cities.
We had passed (we believed) through dark periods of history into the Enlightened Age. The old gaiety and idealism and faith of the Middle Ages which had redeemed the brutality and ignorance of those times had been followed by the cruelty of religious wars, and then by the passionate outbreak of the French revolution, with its wild cry of liberty and equality, and then by the long agony of the Napoleonic wars, which left Europe exhausted and miserable. After that the invention and development of industrial machinery revived the prosperity of many nations, but produced a reign of ugliness and a new tyranny of wealth over sweated labour, which was worse in England, certainly, than the period of warfare. It took the people from the fields into the factories, were they were subject to poisonous conditions and economic slavery. It stunted their souls as well as their bodies, it withered the beauty of children fastened to the looms. It created the slum, with its foul habitations, its criminal outcasts, its gin palaces, its thieves' kitchens, its debtors' prisons, with the gallows waiting for those caught in the wheels of "justice." Even the London of young Charles Dickens was a city in which tragedy and brutality, cruelly and crime, lurked in dark courtyards, narrow alleys, work-houses, foundling hospitals, prisons, and schools. The names of Squeers, Fagin, Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield recall to one's mind the misery inflicted upon young children, and the dark shadows that lurked behind the smug respectability of early Victorian London. But thanks to men like Dickens, and a gallant band of reformers and idealists, the worst evils of industrialism were gradually removed. The cruelty of the penal laws, which had sentenced men and women and young boys and girls to long terms of penal servitude, or death itself, for petty crimes produced by the evil conditions of their life, were abolished. Primary education was established, raising the standard of life and manners. A wave of Liberalism and humanitarianism gave the working people a chance of decent life, enabled them to gain political liberties, and thereby many reforms in the condition of their labour, and, above all, so penetrated the spirit of the people in all classes that cruelty was checked, brutality refined, and civilisation secured, it seemed, to a very notable extent. In many countries of the world, notably the United States, Germany, and England, there was a rapid progress in the quality and character of social life.
The majority of the population was well fed and well dressed, with a constantly rising standard of home comfort. The higher luxuries and beauties of life which in old days had been the privilege of a small aristocratic class were enjoyed as a matter of course by an immense middle class. Education was free to all, and books multiplied and cheapened so that there was hardly a barrier to knowledge.
This widespread education, though often trivial in its quality, owing to the flood of popular and frivolous literature, had a great effect upon the minds of peoples. It made them tolerant of other people's ideas and creeds, taught them sympathy with suffering. Art was popularised. Beauty was no longer the perquisite of rich and leisured folk. In public museums and picture galleries; in prints and papers, the poorest citizen could, if he liked—many did— enjoy the great masterpieces of all times, or reproductions of them, and understand their spiritual message to the world. All over Europe, except in the most backward countries, there was rapid advance of knowledge, an immense enthusiasm for liberal ideals, a steady improvement in the ordinary code of manners and morals. In millions and hundreds of millions of little homes there was not only comfort in a material way, but also a spirit of well-being, of peace, and security. The young generation had a wonderful time. Parents were no longer severe in their discipline, schools were places of delight, or at least not places of terror, as in earlier times.
In every phase of life from childhood upwards brute beast was chained up and kept out of sight. Many believed that it had died a natural death, killed at last by education and enlightenment, never to arise again in the heart of the civilised world.
When so many people were reading pleasant novels and poetry from which the ugly realities of life were left out, or listening to good music and sentimental ballads, attending lectures on charity and good citizenship, learning every day of some new scientific invention for the benefit of mankind, and bringing up their children to nice behaviour with a decent code of ethics and a sense of duty to their fellow creatures, it seemed, on good evidence, that civilisation was well established, and on its way to nobler and more splendid things. Men like H. G. Wells dreamed of a modern Utopia, where even law and punishment would be unnecessary, where there would be a bath in every bedroom, and new wonders of science applied to the comfort everyday life. It was all so comfortable, so safe, so hopeful, so genteel—for all but the very poor—until August, 1914!
Then, in Europe, everything crashed. The brute beast was unchained again, not dead, but terribly alive. All the nice little ideas of education, all its bright little code of decency and kindness, all the dreams of poets, the hopes of idealists, the watchwords of religion, the manners and morals of a generation without brutality, went down into the pits where men blew each other to bits with high explosives, choked each other with poison gas, sniped each other through telescopic sights, bombed each other's cities from aeroplanes, lived in earth-holes like the ape men of the cave age, gave up the daily bath, and were eaten by vermin, abandoned chivalry and killed each other in a shambles of mud and blood, using all their knowledge, all their science, all their civilised possessions to increase the sum of human slaughter. . . Civilisation had failed.
It has not yet recovered. Looking around Europe to-day, one must admit that there has not only been a definite breakdown of civilisation, but that all its heritage is gravely imperilled. After the devastating struggle of the last war and its awful consequences in human suffering and misery, Europe is stricken not only by a disease of its economic life, but by a disease of the soul. The chief symptoms of that disease are a deep pessimism which robs many people of the will power to resist avoidable evils, a loss of faith in any kind of Divine or spiritual purpose in life, an abandonment of the ethical code of Christianity, and a revival of pagan belief in physical force, tribal rights, and the material basis of life.
It was, of course, inevitable that the tremendous shock of the war should have broken the faith of many people from its old moorings. It smashed the foundations of philosophy in the minds of many simple men and women who had believed them to be so strong and enduring. All those nice, old, comforting watchwords of the Christian home seemed like mockery. "God is love." They had believed that. But now, in time of war, their preachers taught from a text of God is Hate. They were not to for give their enemy "seventy times seven" but to go on hating him and killing him and hating him as much after war as before it. "See how these Christians love one another!" said the old pagans, and the very moon laughed down on the trenches where masses of men waited for another attack at dawn, all Christians, worshipping the same God, using the same prayers. . . . Perhaps somewhere God wept.
After the war there was a further loosing of the old restraints which had belonged even to those who merely kept to the Christian code of ethics by tradition and custom rather than by faith and conviction. In the celebrations of victory in many cities and countries it was a new paganism in full riot—wild pagan women, the ecstasy of pagan youth liberated from the dark jungles of death, an orgy of joy in the life of the senses which had been so thwarted and denied during the years of war. I saw it from one end of Europe to the other, in dancing halls, in the night life of European capitals, in its streets. Christianity itself reeled.
The reaction came with disappointed hopes. It came most sharply to those who had held on to idealism, not yielding to paganism. Hundreds of millions of people among victor nations and vanquished had only reconciled themselves to the war because of the promise that after that bloody sacrifice the world would be "made safe for democracy," that militarism would be dethroned for ever, that the common folk of Europe would be safe in their homes, with a better chance of reward for their labour, with brighter and cleaner lives, with justice and liberty and peace as their payment for their war work. Those things did not happen. They have not happened yet. There is less reward for labour in Europe—no chance of labour even for millions of men in many countries—and less safety for the common folk, and no kind of justice or liberty or peace between nation and nation, but a rising tide of hatred, new causes of quarrel, preparations for another and different kind of war. The leaders of the world have failed. The people of Europe have failed. Cynicism and fatalism have replaced the generous emotion that uplifted many hearts for just a little while after peace. Now they are back again on the basis of Force. Might is Right between nation and nation, as in the old days of the robber barons, and worse than in those days, because the barons, on the whole, were not bad fellows, and had a certain kind of chivalry. Is it any wonder that there is a disease of the soul in Europe—the creeping paralysis of despair?
Somehow or other education has failed. What was the use of all those schools and colleges, all those pleasant novels and pretty poems, all the newspapers with their quick, cheap news, if the end of it is to be—Armageddon and poison gas?
What was the cause of that failure of education in the Enlightened Age? It was, I think the evil spirit of Nietzsche with his gospel of force which invaded German philosophy, and the complete indifference, or rather the absolute antagonism, of the military, and aristocratic castes in all European countries to the liberal ideals of the common folk. Teachers and preachers in most of these nations had not advanced with the spirit of the age. They were in England, as well as in France, the supporters of militarism, "Jingoes" of the most advanced type, and recruiting agents for the army and navy. Their motives were admirable, their patriotism was high minded, but their education, mostly classical and unscientific, did not enable them to see that the industrial system established in Europe was dependent on peace, and that the advancement of science had been so rapid that a war between highly civilised nations would be utterly different from the old style of warfare, in which professional armies had the field to themselves, and, whatever the fortunes of war, did not affect very much the life of their people.
Spiritually the rulers of Europe, their system of education, and their influence of youth of the well-to-do classes, were not in pace with the advance of science or with the liberal thought of all those reformers, idealists, and peaceful citizens who believed the world had finished with the barbarism of international conflict except in outlying regions beyond the pale of civilisation. In France, in Germany, in Russia, even in England, the old regime, the traditionalists, the military caste, was less educated in the spiritual values of life than the writers of books and their average readers, and hopelessly out of touch with the spirit of tolerance which had permeated the common thought of civilised peoples. Education failed because its most advanced teaching had failed to enter the minds of the rulers, their statesmen, their castes, and their military academies. They were thinking in terms of the eighteenth century instead of the twentieth.
Indeed, it is true to say that mankind as a whole had not caught up morally or spiritually with the scientific discoveries of their age. Nor have they done so yet. In the old days knowledge progressed so slowly that men were able to adapt themselves to its revelations. Their moral nature advanced with their control of natural forces. They remained masters of the instruments invented for their use. Their mind were superior to their machines. But see what has happened during the past hundred years, even during the past twenty years. Scientists suddenly broke through to knowledge which had been veiled from mankind through all the ages. In less than a hundred, years they have discovered the knowledge of forces which were unknown or but dimly apprehended for two thousand years before. They created engines which revolutionised all the age-long habit of mankind, and altered the natural conditions of life as it had been lived since the beginning of history. These engines, increasing in power, in speed, in intricacy of action, so that many of them seem not only human but superhuman, have put a responsibility upon the moral character of men to which they are not yet equal.
Men are not the masters of machines. Machinery is becoming the master of men. At least, it is exactly true to say that men have made no laws, have not risen to any new spiritual codes which control the use of those mighty engine which they have created.
It is the great betrayal of science. For science and all knowledge, should be adapted to the use of men, and should be used for the attainment of spiritual power in humanity, and surely not to destroy mankind. Yet to that we have come. Science is now the instrument of slaughter. The monstrous machines it has invented are a menace to the very life of their creators.
In the last war human courage, the noblest qualities of character, physical strength and beauty, were of no avail against mechanical force. What was the splendour of youth when some pig-like lout 40 miles away, might pull a string, and by liberating the force of a great gun send a high explosive shell to make a shambles in a crowded trench or a billet, behind the lines where heroes slept? What were the valour of soul, the dream of a poet, the vision of a great reformer, when some engine away in a muddy field could belch out death and destroy blindly the noblest of mankind? What is the value of human life itself, of its training towards civilised ideals, its care of youth its moral education, when thousands of men, the picked splendour of their race, may be swept down in an hour or less, torn to bits of blood and flesh, maimed, blinded, or maddened by a tornado of fire from massed guns, as I have seen? Surely, when it has come to that, mankind is not the master of machinery, but is at its mercy, which is merciless.
And it has come to worse than that, for since the last war guns have a longer range, a greater power of destruction, and bombs dropped from aeroplanes will destroy in greater masses not only the armed forces of a nation but its woman and children in crowded cities.
For thousands of years men of imagination, watching birds fly, dreamed of man's conquest of flight. That would be the most wonderful achievement, the most, beautiful, the highest reach of man, with all his other attributes, to Godhead. In less than 20 years after all those thousands the wonder has been achieved. Man flies more strongly and surely than the birds. He has flown above the clouds in the light of the sun. His speed of wing is miraculous. More wonderful than in the old tales of enchantment he can have breakfast in London, luncheon in Paris, and be home again for supper. Over cities and woods and fields his aeroplane flies faster than the eagle, like Mercury, the messenger of the immortal gods. And that gift to man from science has been grabbed for destruction, for the murder of babes in their beds, or dropping down death, on darkened cities. What an outrage against God What a betrayal of knowledge! What a surrender of man's moral nature to devilish powers!
These powers are uncontrolled by civilisation. There is no law for their limitation or use. They are getting out of hand, and are a direct threat to mankind. The old vicious system of competition in armaments is taking place with aeroplanes. France has 2500. Because of that, Great Britain, almost defenceless in the air, has voted credits for new aircraft. Russia is buying aeroplanes from British manufacturers and Germans. Germany is hastening up with "civil aviation," destined for war purposes. As soon as the next war is declared the wretched peoples of these nations will find themselves defenceless against their own destruction, although they are able to destroy others. For one lesson of the last war was this— One cannot guard the passes of the air against hostile craft.
There must be an international law for the abolition of aerial bombing, or the greatest cities of Europe will be laid low by this evil use of the greatest scientific achievement of mankind. Those very words were used to me, a day before I have written them down, by the most famous manufacturer of weight carrying planes in England. He said, "Though it would mean my ruin, I would vote for any international compact to abolish all aeroplanes for military purposes, and would go willingly to the workhouse if I thought that public opinion had destroyed my own inventions for bomb-carrying and bomb-dropping."
I believe the scientists of the world would be willing to make a compact for the control of the powers they have created. If not, I believe civilised mankind itself must arise and destroy the unlimited use of those powers, before it is itself destroyed. Science applied to destruction is a new diabolism, worse than that old black magic of the past, more devilish, more blasphemous, and more damnable, because it is not based on the dark superstitions of ignorant souls, but upon knowledge almost Divine in its intelligence.
Christianity has failed, because of the infidelity of Christians. Education has failed, because of its low standards of moral values and its allegiance to old catch-words and outworn ideas. Science has been betrayed by the scientists. And now democracy itself has broken down.
It is the fashion to sneer at democracy, even to abuse it. In many nations of Europe one sees a reaction of autocratic forms of government, either by monarchy or dictatorship. Parliamentary forms of government are thrust on one side, or utterly overthrown, though they were fought for as the one precious safeguard of liberty through centuries of history. Mussolini is now the hero of the reactionary mind, not only in Europe but in the United States of America, where the Klu Klux Klan is another name for "Fascism."
Democracy certainly failed. It failed to defend itself against the propaganda of hate and national egotism which was pumped into its brain and heart. It failed to live up to its own ideals and interests when, in Russia, it allied itself with a new form of tyranny, in Germany to the arrogance of a brutal militarism, and now, in France, to the gospel of Poincare. It is no wonder that democracy is almost a term of abuse and ridicule, for the democrat hauled down his colours, and made a pitiful surrender of his soul. But I am one of those who still believe in the spirit of democracy, in the government of the people by the people. It is true that democracy has not so far shown itself more tolerant than autocracy, less inclined to go to war than when it was under the heel of military despotism, more intelligent in world affairs than the old autocratic diplomacy. The French people supported Poincare in his most rigid measures, the Italian people supported Mussolini in his adventure at Corfu, everywhere the people are easily inflamed to fever by appeals to national pride (of the "hundred per cent." variety) and patriotic egotism.
Nevertheless, it is only by an enlightened democracy that the world can have peace, only by the morality and the power of democracy itself, raised to higher standards of fair play, and nobler visions of human brotherhood, saner views on the common interests of nations, that humanity can make a move forward to a better civilisation. We are not going to move forward by the intolerance of autocratic government, or by the revival of militarism. Unless the peoples of Europe regain the liberties of Parliamentary government, control of the political machine, freedom of speech and thought, and, above all, the old idealism which animated the liberal thought of all their leaders in the past, democracy will find itself enslaved, and civilisation will hardly escape all the perils I have named.
As it stands now, bewildered, crippled, demoralised, and disillusioned, swinging back fast to reactionary ideas, democracy is not equal to its task or its destiny. It must be inspired by a new philosophy of life, beginning with tolerance of other peoples, rising to a spiritual plane of thought in which men shall master the tyranny of mechanism, dedicate science to life and not to death, and re-establish moral law in their own souls, not for national unity alone, but for human service.
Democracy, the common will of common folk, believing in peace, desiring a better standard of life, ready for conciliation, loyal to fair play, not quick to quarrel, with Christian ethics, if not Christian faith, holding fast to a high code of honour, loving beauty, and charity, and human kindness, killing the Brute in man, and looking into the light of knowledge, can save civilisation from that downfall which is threatened. I see no other way in which civilisation can be saved, and no other way of escape from the danger of Europe, which is creeping close. - (Concluded.)

Examiner (Launceston, Tas. : 1900 - 1954), Saturday 9 February 1924, page 3