EUROPE UNBOUND.*
Is this delightfully written series of essays Mr. March Phillipps philoso- phizes on the meaning of the war. As he says, failure to find a morally satisfying meaning in this bloodstained and destructive confusion is enough to unhinge a man's mind. Writing as a Liberal, he sees that all Liberalism, as he understands it, stands now to be redeemed or lost. The war is not only worth fighting, but had to be fought. It is one of the comparatively few wars of which it could be said that they must be fought to a decision or nothing will be settled. The wars which arose from the whims of Kings were a very different matter. The Plantagencts wanted to extort from the French an acknowledgment of English sovereignty, but the liberties of the world were not really at issue. Looking back on history, Englishmen may be as content as Macaulay was that the English policy of those days did not succeed— and that not so much for the sake of Franco as for the sake of England. There have even been wars that were fought nominally for popular and national rights and yet were unnecessary wars. A " Jenkina's oar" could generally be found ready to hand when the practice of a little self-deception was convenient. The mark of all unnecessary wars
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tea B ueutmps Unbound. By Lisle March Philipps. London : Duckworth and Co. . .1
is that the combatants can leave off fighting when they are tired of the strife, and the world is none the worse because it has all ended in a compromise. It would be interesting to run through the wars or history and divide the sheep from the goats—the vital wars from the accidental wars. To take a few examples : the Greeks fought a vital war against Persia because Greece held the Gate of the West for democracy against the despotism of Xerxes and Darius ; Europe fought a vital war to hold back the Saracens ; Elizabeth fought a vital war against Philip of Spain because eho fought to save Protestantism ; Cromwell fought a vital war for Constitutional liberty ; and Lincoln fought a vital war to save the Union and end slavery. On the other side are such wars as the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War. No moral principle was involved ; after enough fighting to induce reason, or cool down ambition, both sides were ready to negotiate terms without any humilia- tion or sense of perfidy to a cause.
The present war is "Freedom's Battle." It is probably the most vital war ever fought. It is an " argument "—to use Shakespeare's description of war—about the principles on which the governance and social relations of men shall proceed. No war which is an argument can be classed among the stupid wars. The proof that the present war is for liberty is signalized not only by the argument it presents, but by the very record of the countries engaged. Germany is indeed fitly mated with Austria and Turkey—Austria, which for a generation has sanctioned a German-Magyar ascendancy for the oppression of her South Slav subjects, and Turkey, which has long been a septic growth in the European system, professing an inelastic creed which has never consorted with progress, and outraging that creed by her prodigies of massacre. On the side of the Allies, Britain and France are notoriously familiar with liberty, and, as Mr. March Phillipps points out, British Imperial freedom has ceased to be of merely national importance. Our freedom stands for the freedom of the world, and meets the German aspiration towards domination in a battle of principles.
In general Mr. March Phillipps sees—in what seems to us to be a somewhat faulty antithesis—the Western world standing for liberty and the Eastern for autocracy :— , e What is that mysterious instinct in Western races which wages so inveterate a war with the Eastern ideal ; which forbids acquiescence in the passive state of slavery ; which, even when conditions are hopeless, prompts the vain protest and desperate act of self-sacrifice ? Four cen- turies of Turkish rule could not extinguish that instinct in the Balkans. Those years have no history, no coherent record of events. Their only articulate accents are the occasional strains of poets whose verse still fed and kept alive (as an inspiration no matter how remote from reality) the instinct of freedom in the breasts of the people. . . . Those years, I say, have no history, yet they were the years during which the character of the Balkan people was formed, and formed under such stresses that it can no more change than the character of rocks can change which were forged long since in the Eery laboratory of the earth's interior. Hatred of oppression, hatred of the passive and stationary attitude of a ruled people, a determination, be the time long or short, to number themselves among the free nations of Europe, such are the un- shakable resolves of the Balkan races. A love of liberty which so pro- longed a Turkish dominion could not quench may claim the right to be called unquenchable, and may be specified as the essential attribute of that people. Such attributes change never. They are so much the pith of the national life that, though obscured by temporary aberration, they never can be permanently superseded."
We fear that several of the Balkan peoples understand liberty for them- selves but not for others—for their weaker neighbours, for example— but that is not an understanding of liberty at all. And is the Eastern ideal as absolute as it is presented in this book ? We would suggest that the vast population of China has for ages known something of the ideal of liberty. The provinces have never known how to obey a central will, and though Republicanism is a recent growth, it seems to have taken a firmer hold of the soil in China than in any Eastern country where it has been introduced by political revolution. But though hero and elsewhere Mr. March Phillipps's generalizations are disputable, we cannot hesitate to say that both his conception and his presentation of the idea of liberty are noble and inspiring. He has a passion for liberty, and for him it is a very real and meaning thing. No ties to a political party silence him when he discovers imperfect service to the goddess, even among his own Liberal friends. He is a democrat who really trusts the people. Describing the liberty-loving Englishman, he says : " Bad laws or good laws, he might not know, he might not care ; but he would take care of one thing—that, bad or good, he would make them. He would not be an Englishman, he would not be able to look English fields and trees in the face, if he had parted with that right." His faith in democracy is exceptionally penetrating and reasonable. He does not pretend that a democracy always makes good laws. He sees that the heart of the matter is that democracy mud make its own laws simply because it is free. It must work out its own salvation and can accept no fiat from any one. No one denies that a wise despot might make better laws than a democracy often makes, but they could never have the same sanction. In the very process of threshing out its laws democracy finds itself and learns to know good from evil. This is a most important fact, and Mr. March Phillipps states it admirably :—
" There is, then, in the popular instinct and imagination, something in the mere making of the laws, apart from their intrinsic value, which is of primary concern. And in this popular instinct shows its usual good sense. For what does the making of laws under a Constitutional Government involver Let the reader consider the general tenor of the great series of Acts dealing with emancipation, education. and ref orm,iu
which pengreas largely, consists. Before these laws. are passed they have to be votedfor, and before they are-voted for they have to be laid before the countly and explained to the country. They are attacked and defended by newspapers, analysed by orators; and. discussed at length and in detail throughout every constituency in the land. The law which, as a result of all this arguing and discussion, comes into being is the expression, as near as may be, of the will of the people on that subject. It embodies what seems to them justice. But is the law itself the only result ? Would its effectsr have been precisely the same had it been passed by a- group of our best citizens;' or by a beneficent despot'? Is the prolonged threshing out of such a question as Catholic Emancipation all over the country, the slow and intricate process of the thinking of the people, the gleams of light shed in dark places, the recognition of trust- worthy leaders and of those who speak with authority, the minds of a majority gradually convinced and made up, and the-final determination that a group of fellow-citizens, however alien and suspect in religion, shall .suffer spiritual injustice no longer--is this all of no account 2" Similarly, Mr. March Phillipps writes of the profound instinctive im- pulses all over the world (which resist or condemn the German motive of domination) as being none the less potent because they are inarticu- late. Popular instinct is overwhelmingly on the side of the Allies. " If endorsed by official and Court circles and Governments that instinct finds immediate expression in action ; it opposed it slowly deepens like water behind a dam and bides its time. But its presence is one of the main portents in this war. It constitutes, indeed, the basis of our strength."
Justice would not be clone to Mr. March Phillipps's survey of liberty if it were not added that his essays are largely a cry for more spirituality in our life. If he finds Toryism selfish (though we must say that he condemns a Toryism which seems to us be in considerable part the- conventional figment of its enemies), he finds Liberalism grossly material- istic. He has listened to Liberalism continually appealing to the acquisitive instincts, hardly ever boldly asking for sacrifice and service. And we heartily agree with him in the resentment he implies against the town-dwelling orators who carry their cheap appeals into the country- side, and have never discovered that the rustle population, though they may not be able to express their thoughts, do think mom than they are given credit for, do revolve new ideas in their minds for weeks after they have heard them, and are capable of an idealism which would surprise most of the political purveyors of programmes. Mr. March Phillipps laments a decline in spirituality from the standard of the guilds and of mediaeval art. We would protest, however, that art, though se vehicle of spirituality, does not provide an indispensable test, as Mr. March Phillipps seems to imply. What about Puritanism, which suppressed art 7 Would Mr. March Phillipps deny the spirituality there 7 Our own feeling is that we would rather that art did not try habitually to be spiritual unless it can be so sincerely. The man who paints, as it were, with a brush in one hand and =a Bible in the other may be a prophet to his generation, but there is nothing to be regretted in the passing of a convention that has become hollow. Mr. Mach Phillipps himself must know the difference between the truly spiritual painting of Madonnas and the painting of them when conviction had slipped away and sly and worldly touches became embodied in the convention. We are much interested in Mr. March Phillippa's belief (which we do not share) that German Higher Criticism was a deliberate attempt to kill Christianity, since Christianity had been found unsuited to German purposes.
However much readers may disagree with many of the author's points of view, they would be dull of soul if they did not find these essays stimulating and purifying in a high degree. Only a Milton could describe the clash of light and darkness in this war. The evil force which seeks to bind, and the spiritual force which aims at setting free, are titanic. We agree with Mr. March Phillipps in his fine and hopeful saying that the nature of thought renders it inevitable that in the end Europe shall not be bound.
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