The University and the Universe
BY E. M. FORSTER.
AFEW young men at Oxford, who are said not to represent the Union, which is said not to represent the University, pass a resolution declining to fight for their King and country, and are said not to mean what they say. Why has there been such a fuss about them ? Why so much resentment or relief ? The Press has been full of letters from angry gentlemen who were once at Oxford or are thankful they went to Cambridge, angry ladies go into the chicken run to gather up the feathers from their Wyandottes and post them anony- mously, pacifists of position regret the unwise wording of the motion, thousands of the working class realize for the first time that Oxford is not a boat-club. Meanwhile the young men go forward, strengthened no doubt by attempts made by pushful visitors to intimidate them. They wear the feathers of the Wyandottes, they drop some stink-bombs to prove their detestation of force, and, by an enormous majority, they refuse to expunge their decision from the minute book.
Does the University mean anything to the nation at large ? On rare occasions, such as the present, it does. As a rule it is regarded as a backwater of boys and dons, but now and then it manages to enter the main stream of events and dramatizes a public issue. At the beginning of the century, Cambridge dramatized the movement for women's rights. The fact that she then refused, and has since refused, to grant women a degree is not, in the larger sense, important. What is important is that she brought the whole woman's question vividly into notice because she was a university and had this intermittent power. And now the Oxford undergraduates have brought to notice the supreme question of peace and war, and with the courage and the crudity of youth have planked down the emotion-fraught phrase "King and country" and have rejected it. Had they substituted some less colourful phrase they would have shown better taste and given less offence. They would also have removed the debate one degree further from reality. They would have fallen into that droning fairmindedness which is so characteristic of English debates and so undesirable at the present crisis—a fairmindedness which is not really fair and which has little to do with the mind. They have chosen the more dramatic course, and in consequence they have made people think. One might compare the universities to- theatres where most of the action is performed "off." The work and even the games take place in the wings, among academic onlookers. The stage remains empty, the audience inattentive. Then suddenly all is excitement. Youth enters. The actors declaim against a mediaeval back- drop, but the lighting proves to be modern, even ultra- modern, and the audience breaks into hisses or cheers.
The example of Oxford in holding a pacifist debate has been followed by her sister university, her cousins, and her nieces. The Cambridge Union has preferred Socialism to Fascism—a tactful restatement of the deci- sion. Manchester has come to the same conclusion as Oxford, by a large majority. So has Cardiff. So has Glasgow. Nottingham tried to debate the motion, but was stopped by the authorities. No such prohibition was extended to Belfast, where the students decided to fight. At Edinburgh Sir Ian Hamilton was shouted down when he tried to eulogize Japan in his rectorial address. All- over the country youth has been sorting itself into camps and has excited its elders and the public generally.
There are two people—both of them recently dead— who come into one's mind in connexion with the Oxford vote and its reverberations. They would both of them have been interested and, presumably, sympathetic. One of these people is Lofts Dickinson—the don who did so much through his writing to connect his own University with the world. Dickinson was a pacifist of the modern type. He did not say war was wrong—that question he left to the churches, who have usually condemned war in theory and supported it in practice. He did say that war, under modern conditions, is insane and that the methods of advertising it need examining. The sword, the bayonet, the rifle, the cannon are all anachronisms and Will soon only survive in a military tattoo. The destruction they caused was local, and so the sentiments connected with them are out of date. In the war of the future destruction will be universal. Bacterial bombs as well as poison gas will fall from the sky, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants will disappear, women and children will be as suitable a target as men, and it is not this or that king and country which will go down in the general catastrophe but all kings and all countries. War has moved from chivalry to chemicals, and unless we can get this into our heads we are doomed, kings included. Lowes Dickinson realized this. He says in one of his letters that the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, which once he had found paradoxical, seemed to him in the light of the modern developments of warfare to be the merest common sense. The peace makers are not only blessed, but they have become in the course of events the children of this world also. Unless peace can be made and maintained there will be nothing for anyone to inherit.
The other man who comes into one's mind is a man in every way contrasted with Lowes Dickinson, a self-made man, hard, determined, practical, and, professionally, a soldier. Sir William Robertson rose from the bottom of the army to the top, he spent all his life fighting or organiz- ing. Yet he came to the same conclusion as the academic thinker : that war under modern conditions is insane ; he came to loathe it, and he left instructions in his will that he was to be buried without military honours, and that if officers came to his funeral they must be dressed as civilians. His instructions were carried out, and representatives of the French army were consequently unable to be present. It is curious that the man of action and the untried idealists of the University should thus join hands ; curious until we recollect that the problem of war is, in one sense, much simpler than it has ever been before, because a war to-morrow might int•an something it has never meant in the past ; the end of civilization ; and both the soldier and the theorist can realize this. If critics complain that the wording of the Oxford motion was provocative they are quite right. But in 1933 provocativeness is better than evasion, and the University has, at least on this occasion, proved its importance to the world.
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