THE NATIONAL REVIEW No. 519. MAY 1926 Lest we EPISODES OF THE MONTH OUR readers may have heard of this classic remark of an American speaker at an unreported function in London when discussing Anglo-Irish-American affairs: "The trouble is that the Irish forget nothing, the English remember nothing, and the Americans know nothing." Without pausing to explore the soundness of the orator's observations concerning his own compatriots and our Irish neighbours, we are bound to admit the shrewdness of this thrust at ourselves. Forgetfulness is a conspicuous British trait, perhaps most highly developed in our public men, whose capacity for ignoring whatever is inconvenient amounts to an obsession. They have now reached the stage of resenting any reminder of events prior to August 1914. Before long they will object to any reference to the years 1914-1918. We understand their attitude as a matter of amour propre, because if there be any period of our history in which Talking Men and Writing Men did not shine it was during the blind years from 1900 to 1914, when they would neither see what stared them in the face nor heed any warning of coming catastrophe. And as regards the war itself, Responsible Statesmen must be dimly conscious that their rôle was less magnificent than was made out at one time by their sycophants on the Press, who invented the legend of "the Man who won the War" for electioneering purposes. History will probably pronounce that the Great War, like most previous wars, was won by the Fighting Men-that Talking Men contributed little to the victory. Conceivably it may find that had the standard of our soldiers and sailors been on no higher level than our Statesmanship, we should as inevitably have VOL. LXXXVII 21 lost in the field as completely as the Politicians subsequently lost in the Council Chamber-victory being converted into defeat at the Paris Peace Conference. The Post-War OUR national forgetfulness-which is by no means confined to Politicians-is vividly recalled by the outstanding international event of the past month which has bewildered official and journalistic Bourbons who would seek to explain it away, though in so doing they give themselves away and dissipate illusions and delusions they have palmed off on the British public throughout the past winter. Of these the most fashionable and the most popular is the amiable but groundless belief that there has been such a moral transformation of Germany and the Germans, such a holy change of heart, that the post-war Fatherland is a totally different community to the pre-war Fatherland, and that any precautions that might have been deemed desirable in dealing with the Kaiser's Government are superfluous in our intercourse with the high-minded and broad-minded men who nowadays steer the German Republic along the path of Peace and Good Will towards mankind in general and ourselves in particular. These optimists forget-forgetfulness being their forte-that precisely the same thing was said before 1914 of Wilhelm II and his advisers, whom Lord Haldane and other Infallibles trusted as completely as our present Government would like to trust the present régime in Berlin. During the fateful years in which Germany was sounding "the dreadful note of preparation," on which all our wiseacres insisted on turning a deaf ear, "Trust the German Emperor," or "Trust the German People," were the accepted slogans that caused any and every expression of distrust to be resented and denounced as mere scaremongering" or "blatant Jingoism." In those happy days an Anglo-German War was "impossible "—until it occurred and had become "inevitable." To-day we are told there is nothing to apprehend from Germany because the war is over, and what is over is done with. All we need do is to banish the spectre of the late war from our minds, "let bygones be bygones," and cultivate that solid friendship with "the Great Protestant nation across the North Sea," who afforded conclusive evidence of her intention to turn over a new leaf at Locarno, and now only asks to be allowed to take her proper place at Geneva so that she may play her part in the Comity of Nations and promote the reconstruction of shattered European Civilization. 66 SUCH was the legend which a credulous Cabinet, with the enthusiastic approval of all ex-Cabinets and the propaganda of a powerful Press, pianted on the unsuspectLocarno ing people of this country. It was a fable of the same texture as the pre-war variety which inspired the British Government of the day to completely misjudge the situation and to conduct an utterly unprepared nation into the most frightful war it every waged. We are still up against" the same old Germany-Prussianized to the core-temporarily camouflaged as a Republic until the time is ripe for a Hohenzollern Restoration. Its rulers are exclusively of the old régime, governed by the old ideas, pursuing the old policy by the same tortuous methodsrealists of the deepest dye who regard other nations as mere pawns to be moved as the needs of the Fatherland demand. It devolved on The Times correspondent in Berlin to disclose the carefully guarded secret that renders ridiculous the whole Locarno Campaign, with its pathetic insistence on "German good will" and " German good faith "-two attributes to which in all fairness we must admit the Prussians have never pretended to lay claim. This revelation has already produced some prize wriggling among our Mugwumps, who are hard put to it to explain away Germany's "Reinsurance" Treaty with Bolshevist Russia. The plain English of this pregnant event is that Europe has reverted to the Bismarckian system of diplomacy, in which as the Iron Chancellor boasted he was prepared to play "the honest broker," or, in other words, make mischief, and levy blackmail first on one Power and then on the other-his trump card being the exploitation of the antagonism between Great Britain and Russia, and both of whom paid extortion |