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Page 24
Lord Robert Cecil need not adopt the tricks of a mountebank to achieve
leadership of the British nation, but he must contract so entire a faith
in the sacred character of his mission that all the inhibiting
diffidencies of his modest nature will henceforth seem to him like the
whisperings of temptation. He must cease to watch the shifts of public
opinion. He must cease merely to recommend the probable advantage of
rather more idealism in the politics of Europe. He must act. He must
learn to know that a man cannot give a great idea to the world without
giving himself along with it. The cause must consume the person.
Individual peace must be sacrificed for world's peace.
From the very beginning of the War Lord Robert Cecil perceived that the
need of the nation was not for a great political leader, but for a great
moral leader. He told me so with an unforgettable emphasis, well aware
that under the public show of our national life the heart of the British
people was famishing for such guidance. He numbered himself among those
anxiously scanning the horizon for such a leader. He should have been
instead answering the inarticulate cry of the people for that leader.
No good man of my acquaintance is more powerfully convinced of the
goodness of British nature. He watches the British people with an
abiding affection. He believes that they possess, even those of them who
appear most degraded and sordid, the foundational virtues of Christian
character--a love of justice, an instinct for kindness, and faith in
truth. He knows that they are more capable than any other people in
Europe of generous self-sacrifice, and that any absence of grace in
their manner which must distress the superficial observer comes rather
of a passion for honesty than a lack of beauty. And this knowledge of
his goes with the conviction that no man will ever appeal to the British
nation in vain who bases his appeal on justice, fair play, and charity.
What a nation to lead! What an inspiration for a true leader!
He is convinced that no moral appeal has ever been made to the British
people in vain. And yet he has never made that appeal. With grief and
sorrow he watches the stampeding of the nation he so deeply admires into
murderous and indiscriminate hatred of our enemies in the late war. He
saw the majority of the British people's war-like mood degraded and
vulgarized by the propaganda of hate. But he made no move to save the
national honour. The better part, and as I firmly believe the greater
part, of the nation was waiting for moral leadership: particularly were
the young men of the nation who marched to death with the purest flame
of patriotism in their hearts hungering for such leadership; but Lord
Robert Cecil, the one man in Parliament who might have sounded that
note, was silent. The voice that should have made Britain's glory
articulate, the voice that might have brought America into the War in
1914 and rendered Germany from the outset a house divided against
itself, was never heard. Lord Robert Cecil looked on, and Mr. Lloyd
George sprang into the prize-ring with his battle-cry of the knock-out
blow.
I wonder if even the sublimest humility can excuse so fatal a silence.
Great powers have surely great responsibilities.
I remember speaking to Lord Robert on one occasion of the shooting of
Miss Cavell--a brutal act which distressed him very deeply. I said I
thought we weakened our case against Germany by speaking of that
atrocious act as a "murder," since by the rules of war, as she herself
confessed, Miss Cavell incurred the penalty of death. He replied: "What
strikes me as most serious in that act is not so much that the Germans
should think it no crime to shoot a woman, but that they should be
wholly incapable of realizing how such an atrocious deed would shock the
conscience of the world. They were surprised--think of it!--by the
world's indignation!"
In this remark you may see how far deeper his reflections take him than
what passes for reflection among the propagandists of hate. Abuse of
Germany never occupied his mind, which was sorrowfully engaged in
striving to comprehend the spiritual conditions of the German people: he
realized, that is to say, that we were not fighting an enemy who could
be shouted down or made ashamed by abusive epithets, but that we were
opposing a spirit whose anger and temper were entirely different from
our own, and therefore a spirit which must be understood if we were to
conquer it. It was not merely the armies of Germany which must be
defeated, it was the soul of Germany which had to be converted. He saw
this clearly: he never ceased to work to that end; but he failed to take
the nation into his confidence and the public never understood what he
was after. A fanatic would have left the nation in no doubt of his
purpose.
Every now and then he has half let the nation see what was in his mind.
For example, he has taken those illuminating, those surely inspired,
words of Edith Cavell as the text for more than one address--_Patriotism
is not enough_. But beautiful and convincing as these addresses have
been, their spirit has always had the wistful and _piano_ tones of
philosophy, never the consuming fervour of fanaticism. He knows, as few
other men know, that without a League of Nations the future of
civilization is in peril, even the future of the white races; but he has
never made the world feel genuine alarm for this danger or genuine
enthusiasm for the sole means that can avert it. He has not preached
the League of Nations as a way of salvation; he has only recommended it
as a legal tribunal.
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