The New Year

The Canadian Forum/Editorial/1921-01

The New Year written by E. H. Blake

After The Deluge

From The Canadian Forum, January 1921, p. 102

Both the war and the peace have brought about a great change in the position and outlook of the Canadian people. Forces and events that seemed remote or even entirely extraneous only a few years ago now crowd in upon us and touch our lives at many points. Familiar problems present new difficulties and involve broader considerations; business depression and industrial unrest, the inflation of the currency and the variations in exchange, are too obviously connected with general conditions and collective influences in the post-war world for them to be regarded any longer as primarily domestic concerns. But not only has our outlook changed: our position has changed too, for Canada, as a member of the League of Nations, has assumed a new status that carries with it wider obligations as well as fresh opportunities.

Our political leaders recognize this change and are disposed to take some credit for bringing it about. Mr. Meighen tells us that the position of Canada in the family of nations is just where the people of Canada desire it to be; but except for such casual comments as this both he and his colleagues seem inclined to leave the discussion of this really vital subject to the leaders of the Farmers' Party. No attempt has been made by the government to enlighten either parliament or the country upon its attitude towards the League of Nations and foreign affairs generally; indeed the first intimation of what that attitude is has come to us through the cabled reports of our representatives' speeches at the Geneva assembly. We learn that Mr. Doherty has criticized Article X., and that Mr. Rowell has defined the American attitude towards certain aspects of the Covenant. We learn, too, with some surprise, that the proposal to create a permanent commission to supervise the distribution of raw products — a proposal that may have been quite innocuous in so far as Canada was concerned — prompted Mr. Rowell to launch out upon a general denunciation of European statesmanship for having already drenched the world in blood. Our daily press, in hailing these speeches as triumphs for Canadian policy, seems to have overlooked the fact that they bear a fairly close resemblance to the critical utterances of the Republican politicians of the United States. Fortunately Mr. Rowell's interview at the close of the session has gone far towards removing this impression. He speaks of the discomfort which this first meeting of the Assembly has brought to the enemies of the League, and of the comfort which it has brought to its friends both in Europe and elsewhere. This is reassuring; for obviously the new world is not going to be built out of vague denunciations of the past sins of European statesmanship however well deserved; and our government, if it really intends to take its share in the tremendous task of reconstruction, cannot afford to adopt, even in a modified form, the American attitude of shrewd but undiscriminating holiness that so far has only served to impede the better elements of Europe in their efforts to reach a true re-settlement.

Europe to-day is indeed not the new world of President Wilson's rhetoric and Mr. Lloyd George's perorations, but it is certainly not the same wicked world in which M. Clemenceau quarrelled and jested for so many years. It is something strange and unexpected; neither what was promised, nor yet what is familiar. Many of the idols of the nineteenth century have been pulled off their pedestals. Sightseers gape at the empty thrones. The great representative bodies such as Parliament have lost authority. Europe is governed by a handful of men with the assistance of improvised secretariats. The principle of nationality is worshipped and denied. Democracy serves as a convenient stalking-horse for the new Welt-Politik. Old-fashioned liberalism seems to have lost its conviction and its purpose; but the parties of the extremes gain strength. Outrageous reactions clash with strange new experiments in government. Man's faith in the old economic order languishes, but the new systems often wear a garb that is repulsive. Over the greater part of Europe and Asia there is strife and hunger and misery, and everywhere there is apprehension and unrest. It is a world of disenchantment, of unfulfilled expectations.

The Englishman or Frenchman who regards himself as a good European, and who took the politicians at their word is distressed by the spectacle that the world presents to-day. At home, even though he lives in one of the victorious countries, he sees depression and often reaction. He sees free opinion persecuted and Labour cajoled and bullied. He resents the undiminished burden of taxation because he believes that it might alread[y] be growing smaller if the just and sensible peace that was promised had not been discarded for a peace of revenge. And when he looks abroad he is disgusted because he sees almost everywhere a negation or perversion of the principles for which he was told the allies were fighting. The former enemy peoples, who deposed their rulers at the bidding of the allied leaders, are reduced to such a state of starvation and misery that they are not only unable to make proper reparation but actually threaten to poison the rest of Europe. In Ireland the foremost protagonist of democracy employs the very methods of coercion and ruthlessness that it most condemned in the Germans; in India the success of the tardy reforms is prejudiced by the memory of the [p.103] massacre outside Amritsar; and in Mesopotamia and Syria the British and French governments deliberately violate the mandatory system by withholding from the Arab tribesmen, who fought with them against the Turks, the independent native governments to which they are entitled.

Yet the man of goodwill is not the only person who suffers from disillusion; the chauvinists of all countries are almost equally disgusted with the results of the peace conference. While M. Clemenceau's aged and cynical eyes are refreshing themselves in distant lands, he is being bitterly attacked by Marshal Foch and the royalists of the Action Française for the part he took in framing the treaty. They complain that, thanks to M. Clemenceau's leniency, not one of the really essential objects of French policy has been attained. France is still poor; her devastated areas are still in ruins; the indemnity remains unpaid; the coal deliveries have been reduced below the treaty figure; the cordon sanitaire has broken down; and Bolshevism survives. All this is in a sense perfectly true, but is it due to the soft flaw that has been so unexpectedly discovered in M. Clemenceau's character? May it not be due rather to the very success of his policy — to the completeness with which he has encompassed the ruin of Central Europe? The chauvinists do not think so; for in the same breath in which they execrate the treaty, they proclaim its inviolability and insist upon its enforcement. They pursue obstinately the ruinous policy of Versailles; they try to revive the crusade against Bolshevism; they seek, by promoting reaction in Hungary and Bavaria, to renew the broken links in the cordon sanitaire; they search for some pretext that will justify them in occupying the Ruhr. Their success would not in the long run mean a single extra mark or a single extra ton of coal for France; it would mean less; and it would mean still greater misery for Europe. Moderate French opinion realizes this, and its protest is voiced by the foremost man of letters in France. "When one considers," said M. Anatole France a few months ago, "what was the position of France during the war and what it is to day, one is stupefied. But yesterday, in answer to her appeal, a hundred peoples 'from the ends of the earth', united against Germany, 'crossed mountains and seas to destroy her.' What have we done with our allies? What has become of our friends? Not a single one remains to us. We have worn them all out by our arrogance, our suspicious temper, and by a bellicose ardour that one is surprised to see surviving so long and cruel a war."

Is there then no real ground for hope among the confusions and anomalies, the reactions and revolutions of the present day? Is Europe, or Eastern Europe at any rate, destined to revert to a condition bordering on barbarism in which stupid, violent Junkers and illiterate peasants will inhabit the depopulated centres of what was once a flourishing civilization? Or will it find itself after a staggering economic revolution swept clear of all but an occasional vestige of the amenities and beauties upon which man fondly believed his civilization to be built? This is the fear that haunts many of the educated men of Central Europe itself; and it is a fear that has recently found philosophical expression in a book that has gained a great hold on the German mind. Der Untergang des Abendlandes is not an ephemeral product of the war; it is a very careful and a very systematic application of a not entirely novel philosophy of history. The author believes that the history of mankind is made up of entirely separate and independent eras of civilization; he believes that each of these eras runs its course in about a thousand years, and then dissolves, leaving mankind to make a fresh start. After each collapse a new mystical religion springs up; a new civilization with its own characteristics is laboriously constructed, passes through various stages of progress, and in its turn crumbles like all the others. The author's startling thesis is that the world to-day is in the midst of one of these periodic disintegrations, and that the downfall of western civilization has actually begun.

It is not altogether surprising that this philosophy, which seems to explain so much, should have impressed the German people. The English-speaking peoples both in Europe and America are more likely, however, to be attracted by the philosophy of hopefulness that inspires Mr. Wells's Outline of History. His story is not a story of great futile cycles ending always in disaster; it is a story of a slow irregular rise — a rise with many falls and set-backs. He believes that mankind is capable of far greater development in the future than has ever been achieved in the past; but he insists that the future will depend upon man himself. "History," he says, "becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." Mr. Wells is distressed when he looks at the world to-day, but he bids us reflect upon "the true measure and transitoriness of all the conflicts, deprivations, and miseries of this present period of painful yet hopeful change;" and he prophesies that though "new falsities may arise and hold men in some unrighteous and fated scheme of order for a time before they collapse amidst the misery and slaughter of generations, yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world progresses and will progress."

Already there are signs of a change. English policy becomes, in European affairs at any rate, increasingly a policy of goodwill. Italian policy is already that. The Balkan and Danubian states have created in the Little Entente a league that aims at a real re-settlement. The Greeks, sick of martial law and mobilization, have declared against the policy of expansion. Of the three men who, in spite of their wide differences in ability and outlook, occupy similar places in the minds of their countrymen as the [p.104] champions of peace and reconstruction, two have already emerged from the obscurity or disgrace into which the war threw them; Signor Giolitti is prime minister of Italy, and Constantine has regained his throne; some morning we may awake to find M. Caillaux leading a government in France.

These are the movements and influences in European affairs that call for the support of moderate, well-disposed men in all countries — of men who believe in the idea of the League of Nations, and who, like Mr. Wells, look forward beyond these present miseries and discontents to a better world. The evil forces from which the smaller nations in Europe are struggling to free themselves are in fact those very forces to which Mr. Rowell referred when he spoke of the enemies of the League; for in Europe as elsewhere it is the reactionaries who decry the League and seek to impede its growth. The League may not be a perfect instrument; it is in fact an inadequate instrument; compared with the vast pretensions of the Supreme Council its powers seem futile and insignificant; yet the League for all its weaknesses and imperfections seems at last to have started upon its career as a great force in world affairs. Our interests lie mainly in Canada, but we shall be blind indeed if we allow ourselves to believe that the path of safety lies in holding aloof from this renewed effort to effect a true re-settlement; many serious questions must arise in the future in which our interests will be identical with those of men of goodwill in Europe. The next world war will not be brewed in Canada; if it comes, it will be the work of the reactionary elements in European politics who distrust and despise the League of Nations. Those who care most for the future of this country will, therefore, turn instinctively to Geneva, in the hope that there may be found a real safeguard of the peace and happiness of the coming generation of Canadians.

E. H. Blake.