- •An Englishman Looks at the World
- •I do not think that the arrival of m. Blйriot means a panic resort to
- •Imminent. We ancient survivors of those who believed in and wrote about
- •In immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for him
- •Immediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history of
- •Inundation of loyalty. The most elaborately conceived, the most stately
- •Is to be no rфle of almost indifferent abstinence from the broad
- •Into a secondary position among the peoples of the world?
- •In blood and bitterness the obvious fact that barbed wire had its
- •Irksome thoroughness, could oblige Canada to remain in the Empire if the
- •In an open drawer in my bureau there lies before me now a crumpled card
- •It meridianally. Obviously its main routes and trades and relations lie
- •In the end it will be lost, I fear, by the intellectual inertness of
- •In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the stewardesses and bandsmen
- •Indiscipline. And the remedy in the first place lies not in social
- •It prevents their settlement, and leads to their renewal. I have tried
- •If those old class reliances on which our system is based are to be
- •Is absolutely antagonistic to the creative impulses of the constructive
- •Independent representative man at a hopeless disadvantage against the
- •In the preceding pages I have discussed certain aspects of the present
- •Is the need of getting a living. But that is not the complete answer.
- •Illiterate, incurious; he read nothing, lived his own life, and if he
- •In the place of that old convenient labour comes a new sort of labour,
- •Is over, but of establishing a new method of co-operation with those who
- •If we are to meet these enlarged requirements upon which the insurgent
- •It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation that
- •Impossible upon any basis of weekly wages and intermittent employment;
- •Imperceptible increments into a method of salary and pension--for it is
- •View. The employer's concern with the man who does his work is day-long
- •It hard to see how we can reconcile the intermittency of competitive
- •Immense opportunity for voluntary effort. Deference to our official
- •Its serving, as the means and instrument of that national conference
- •1800! "No current politics," whispers the schoolmaster, "no
- •Is exactly what everybody seems to be doing in our present discussion
- •It is merely a gust of abuse and insult for schools, and more
- •Insistence upon creative power than has been shown in the past, but for
- •Impatient of the large constructive developments of modern Socialism,
- •In order to do so it has been convenient to coin two expressions, and to
- •Individuals, and the individuals are grouped in generally monogamic
- •Intensive culture. There may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood, and
- •Intermarries within its limits.
- •It at a page where the surplus forces appear to be in more or less
- •Inevitable social basis. If that is so, then the new ways of living may
- •Innovation and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who
- •Intelligent democratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of large
- •In his repudiation of and antagonism to plans and arrangements, in his
- •Imperialist, and so do the American civic and social reformers. Under
- •Influence outside the socialist ranks altogether. Few wealthy people
- •Its huge development of expropriated labour, and the schemes of the
- •Is already food, shelter, and clothing of a sort for everyone, in spite
- •Intelligent science of economics should afford standards and
- •Vindictiveness for construction. Supremely important is it to keep
- •Impart it. And our Empire is at a peculiar disadvantage in the matter,
- •In the present armament competition there are certain considerations
- •I want to suggest that we are spending too much money in the former and
- •Industrious increase of men of the officer-aviator type, of the
- •India resuming its former central position in our ideas of international
- •Impulses making life sweet. He wants romance without its defiance, and
- •It is a merit in a hunter to refuse even the highest of fences. Nearly
- •Is reflected upon the novel from a difference in the general way of
- •Intellectual revolution amidst which we are living to-day, that
- •Very like the crumplings and separations and complications of an immense
- •Is by comparison irresponsible and free. Because its characters are
- •I am now about to make for an absolutely free hand for the novelist in
- •Indeed, is why I am giving them this library."
- •Visitors who would have the power to examine qualifications, endorse the
- •It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life to be a painted
- •In charge of the expert, that wonderful last gift of time. He will talk
- •In a very obvious way, sociology seemed to Comte to crown the edifice of
- •Incorrect one is infinitely more convenient.
- •Individuality as pieces of cloud; they come, they go, they fuse and
- •If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set aside Comte and
- •Is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what _is_,
- •Is not an eternal bond, but a bond we may break on this account or that,
- •In discussing what the common experience confutes Neither is it
- •Infidelity leading to supposititious children in the case of the wife,
- •Is a nastiness, a stream of social contagion and an extreme cruelty, and
- •Is difficult to avoid agreeing with him either in his observation or in
- •Interest an intelligent adolescent. At the approach of all such things
- •In our modern world. So long as they remain "unencumbered" they can
- •Income tax there would be no social injustice whatever in such an
- •Increase the inducement until it sufficed.
- •Instead of his being a private adventurer, he were a member of a sanely
- •Is the specialist available; there are no properly organised information
- •If one looks into the conditions of industrial employment specialisation
- •In no way is this disappearance of specialisation more marked than in
- •Is there a people?
- •Is entirely made up of the individuals that compose it, and that the
- •In Great Britain and France is particularly remarkable. These people
- •India and South Africa which will, if they are not arrested, end in our
- •Instead of this arrangement, your community is divided into twelve
- •Voters who would have voted for a if they had a chance vote instead for
- •I trust the reader will bear with me through these alphabetical
- •I had the slightest confidence. Commonly my choice of a "representative"
- •Impossible nearly every way of forcing candidates upon constituencies,
- •I imagined in my last paper, a constituency in which candidates
- •Is at bottom a foolish thing, and that electoral methods are to pacify
- •Individualised figures; and at the end they would be only half a dozen
- •It will be a much smaller part in the new than in the old. It is like
- •1840 Has, with the exception of the East European Jews, consisted of
- •If we compare any European nation with the American, we perceive at once
- •It followed the normal development of the middle class under Progress
- •Is, in fact, in process of destroying the realities of freedom and
- •Is a very distinguished man, quite over and above the fact that he is
- •In due course the graveyard rat will gnaw as calmly at
- •In jail. Because out of place, they are a danger. A sorry
- •In the making of very rich men there is always a factor of good fortune
- •Is true that so far American Socialism has very largely taken an
- •Is of an immense general discontent in the working class and of a
- •Violence, taking some other title and far more destructive methods. This
- •Irresistible movement for secession between west and east. That is
- •View of the possible mediatory action of the universities, for
- •In Sec. 5 I enumerated what I called the silent factors in the American
- •Increase had the birth-rate of the opening of the century been
- •Individualist element in the citizen, stands over against and resists
- •Is in New York that one meets the people who matter, and the New York
- •Voices, perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain as to what they may
- •Into the daily papers. At every point there will be economies and
- •It is in quite other directions that the scientific achievements to
- •Interests which legitimately belongs to it.
- •Indigestion as the case may be. No one would be so careless and ignorant
- •It is not only that an amplifying science may give mankind happier
- •Its original circumstances, fitting itself to novel needs, leaving the
- •Invented the plough and the ship, and subjugated most of the domestic
- •It would seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift change and expansion
Impart it. And our Empire is at a peculiar disadvantage in the matter,
because India and our other vast areas of service and opportunity
overseas drain away a large proportion of just those able and educated
men who would in other countries gravitate towards the army. Such small
wealth of officers as we have--and I am quite prepared to believe that
the officers we have are among the very best in the world--are scarcely
enough to go round our present supply of private soldiers. And the best
and most brilliant among this scanty supply are being drawn upon more
and more for aerial work, and for all that increasing quantity of highly
specialised services which are manifestly destined to be the real
fighting forces of the future. We cannot spare the best of our officers
for training conscripts; we shall get the dismallest results from the
worst of them; and so even if it were a vital necessity for our country
to have an army of all its manhood now, we could not have it, and it
would be a mere last convulsion to attempt to make it with the means at
our disposal.
But that brings me to my second contention, which is that we do not want
such an army. I believe that the vast masses of men in uniform
maintained by the Continental Powers at the present time are enormously
overrated as fighting machines. I see Germany in the likeness of a boxer
with a mailed fist as big as and rather heavier than its body, and I am
convinced that when the moment comes for that mailed fist to be lifted,
the whole disproportionate system will topple over. The military
ascendancy of the future lies with the country that dares to experiment
most, that experiments best, and meanwhile keeps its actual fighting
force fit and admirable and small and flexible. The experience of war
during the last fifteen years has been to show repeatedly the enormous
defensive power of small, scientifically handled bodies of men. These
huge conscript armies are made up not of masses of military muscle, but
of a huge proportion of military fat. Their one way of fighting will be
to fall upon an antagonist with all their available weight, and if he is
mobile and dexterous enough to decline that issue of adiposity they will
become a mere embarrassment to their own people. Modern weapons and
modern contrivance are continually decreasing the number of men who can
be employed efficiently upon a length of front. I doubt if there is any
use for more than 400,000 men upon the whole Franco-Belgian frontier at
the present time. Such an army, properly supplied, could--so far as
terrestrial forces are concerned--hold that frontier against any number
of assailants. The bigger the forces brought against it the sooner the
exhaustion of the attacking power. Now, it is for employment upon that
frontier, and for no other conceivable purpose in the world, that Great
Britain is asked to create a gigantic conscript army.
And if too big an army is likely to be a mere encumbrance in war, it is
perhaps even a still graver blunder to maintain one during that conflict
of preparation which is at present the European substitute for actual
hostilities. It consumes. It produces nothing. It not only eats and
drinks and wears out its clothes and withdraws men from industry, but
under the stress of invention it needs constantly to be re-armed and
freshly equipped at an expenditure proportionate to its size. So long as
the conflict of preparation goes on, then the bigger the army your
adversary maintains under arms the bigger is his expenditure and the
less his earning power. The less the force you employ to keep your
adversary over-armed, and the longer you remain at peace with him while
he is over-armed, the greater is your advantage. There is only one
profitable use for any army, and that is victorious conflict. Every army
that is not engaged in victorious conflict is an organ of national
expenditure, an exhausting growth in the national body. And for Great
Britain an attempt to create a conscript army would involve the very
maximum of moral and material exhaustion with the minimum of military
efficiency. It would be a disastrous waste of resources that we need
most urgently for other things.
Sec. 2
In the popular imagination the Dreadnought is still the one instrument
of naval war. We count our strength in Dreadnoughts and
Super-Dreadnoughts, and so long as we are spending our national
resources upon them faster than any other country, if we sink at least
Ј160 for every Ј100 sunk in these obsolescent monsters by Germany, we
have a reassuring sense of keeping ahead and being thoroughly safe. This
confidence in big, very expensive battleships is, I believe and hope,
shared by the German Government and by Europe generally, but it is,
nevertheless, a very unreasonable confidence, and it may easily lead us
into the most tragic of national disillusionments.
We of the general public are led to suppose that the next naval war--if
ever we engage in another naval war--will begin with a decisive fleet
action. The plan of action is presented with an alluring simplicity. Our
adversary will come out to us, in a ratio of 10 to 16, or in some ratio
still more advantageous to us, according as our adversary happens to be
this Power or that Power, there will be some tremendous business with
guns and torpedoes, and our admirals will return victorious to discuss
the discipline and details of the battle and each other's little
weaknesses in the monthly magazines. This is a desirable but improbable
anticipation. No hostile Power is in the least likely to send out any
battleships at all against our invincible Dreadnoughts. They will
promenade the seas, always in the ratio of 16 or more to 10, looking for
fleets securely tucked away out of reach. They will not, of course, go
too near the enemy's coast, on account of mines, and, meanwhile, our
cruisers will hunt the enemy's commerce into port.
Then other things will happen.
The enemy we shall discover using unsportsmanlike devices against our
capital ships. Unless he is a lunatic, he will prove to be much stronger
in reality than he is on paper in the matter of submarines,
torpedo-boats, waterplanes and aeroplanes. These are things cheap to
make and easy to conceal. He will be richly stocked with ingenious
devices for getting explosives up to these two million pound triumphs of
our naval engineering. On the cloudy and foggy nights so frequent about
these islands he will have extraordinary chances, and sooner or later,
unless we beat him thoroughly in the air above and in the waters
beneath, for neither of which proceedings we are prepared, some of these
chances will come off, and we shall lose a Dreadnought.
It will be a poor consolation if an ill-advised and stranded Zeppelin or
so enlivens the quiet of the English countryside by coming down and
capitulating. It will be a trifling countershock to wing an aeroplane or
so, or blow a torpedo-boat out of the water. Our Dreadnoughts will cease
to be a source of unmitigated confidence A second battleship disaster
will excite the Press extremely. A third will probably lead to a
retirement of the battle fleet to some east coast harbour, a refuge
liable to aeroplanes, or to the west coast of Ireland--and the real
naval war, which, as I have argued in an earlier chapter, will be a war
of destroyers, submarines and hydroplanes, will begin. Incidentally a
commerce destroyer may take advantage of the retirement of our fleet to
raid our trade routes.
We shall then realise that the actual naval weapons are these smaller
weapons, and especially the destroyer, the submarine, and the
waterplane--the waterplane most of all, because of its possibilities of
a comparative bigness--in the hands of competent and daring men. And I
find myself, as a patriotic Englishman, more and more troubled by doubts
whether we are as certainly superior to any possible adversary in these
essential things as we are in the matter of Dreadnoughts. I find myself
awake at nights, after a day much agitated by a belligerent Press,
wondering whether the real Empire of the Sea may not even now have
slipped out of our hands while our attention has been fixed on our
stately procession of giant warships, while our country has been in a
dream, hypnotised by the Dreadnought idea.
For some years there seems to have been a complete arrest of the British
imagination in naval and military matters. That declining faculty, never
a very active or well-exercised one, staggered up to the conception of a
Dreadnought, and seems now to have sat down for good. Its reply to every
demand upon it has been "more Dreadnoughts." The future, as we British
seem to see it, is an avenue of Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts and
Super-Super-Dreadnoughts, getting bigger and bigger in a kind of
inverted perspective. But the ascendancy of fleets of great battleships
in naval warfare, like the phase of huge conscript armies upon land,
draws to its close. The progress of invention makes both the big ship
and the army crowd more and more vulnerable and less and less effective.
A new phase of warfare opens beyond the vista of our current programmes.
Smaller, more numerous and various and mobile weapons and craft and
contrivances, manned by daring and highly skilled men, must ultimately
take the place of those massivenesses. We are entering upon a period in
which the invention of methods and material for war is likely to be more
rapid and diversified than it has ever been before, and the question of
what we have been doing behind the splendid line of our Dreadnoughts to
meet the demands of this new phase is one of supreme importance.
Knowing, as I do, the imaginative indolence of my countrymen, it is a
question I face with something very near to dismay.
But it is one that has to be faced. The question that should occupy our
directing minds now is no longer "How can we get more Dreadnoughts?" but
"What have we to follow the Dreadnought?"
To the Power that has most nearly guessed the answer to that riddle
belongs the future Empire of the Seas. It is interesting to guess for
oneself and to speculate upon the possibility of a kind of armoured
mother-ship for waterplanes and submarines and torpedo craft, but
necessarily that would be a mere journalistic and amateurish guessing. I
am not guessing, but asking urgent questions. What force, what council,
how many imaginative and inventive men has the country got at the
present time employed not casually but professionally in anticipating
the new strategy, the new tactics, the new material, the new training
that invention is so rapidly rendering necessary? I have the gravest
doubts whether we are doing anything systematic at all in this way.
Now, it is the tremendous seriousness of this deficiency to which I want
to call attention. Great Britain has in her armour a gap more dangerous
and vital than any mere numerical insufficiency of men or ships. She is
short of minds. Behind its strength of current armaments to-day, a
strength that begins to evaporate and grow obsolete from the very moment
it comes into being, a country needs more and more this profounder
strength of intellectual and creative activity.
This country most of all, which was left so far behind in the production
of submarines, airships and aeroplanes, must be made to realise the
folly of its trust in established things. Each new thing we take up more
belatedly and reluctantly than its predecessor. The time is not far
distant when we shall be "caught" lagging unless we change all this.
We need a new arm to our service; we need it urgently, and we shall need
it more and more, and that arm is Research. We need to place inquiry and
experiment upon a new footing altogether, to enlist for them and
organise them, to secure the pick of our young chemists and physicists
and engineers, and to get them to work systematically upon the
anticipation and preparation of our future war equipment. We need a
service of invention to recover our lost lead in these matters.
And it is because I feel so keenly the want of such a service, and the
want of great sums of money for it, that I deplore the disposition to
waste millions upon the hasty creation of a universal service army and
upon excessive Dreadnoughting. I am convinced that we are spending upon
the things of yesterday the money that is sorely needed for the things
of to-morrow.
With our eyes averted obstinately from the future we are backing towards
disaster.
Sec. 3