Men were becoming weary of the incessant patter about class consciousness and were beginning to understand that in the economic crisis which has involved the entire world only the nations who can pull together can hope to weather the storm.
The coal strike was economic and not revolutionary until the communists tried to exploit it as a ‘Jumping-Off Place’ for ‘the Day’.
But the Herald should have worn a black border for the Triple Alliance. Like other alliances known to history, it was all right as long as it was never asked to function. In fact, it lay in the sky like a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. Every now and then it blew itself out portentously and obscured the sun. The clouds were big with thunder and men trembled and then, as sometimes happens in the firmament, they dispersed without a storm. It had been so in the railway strike. We went about with bowed heads for quite a week. The day was fixed when we were to wear out our shoe-leather by tramping about our business, because the streets were to be silent and grass-grown and the rails of the Underground were to rust in their chairs, but at the ninth or tenth hour there appeared a Conciliation Committee, consisting of the two component bodies of the Triple Alliance who had not come out and wanted to hold back by the coat-tails those who had. It was not, let it be understood, out of pure philanthropy, but for that very cogent reason that if they did call a strike among their own men the strike would be abortive because a very large percentage of them would stay at work.
This time it was not the tenth but the eleventh hour. It was not the government preparations, the trains of lorries, the gathering Reserves, the stirring recruiting of the Defence Force, but the fact, which was borne in upon the delegates at their secret meeting late on Friday afternoon, that they might call a strike at 10 p.m. but that nobody would be a penny the worse, that all the essential services would be maintained, not by volunteers but by the professionals themselves and – and this was the most important point – that the leaders would be left out in the cold and might very well lose their jobs.
It would not be right to say that the Triple Alliance is dead and lies upon its bier unwept, but rather that it never existed, except as a figment of the brain and that it never can exist where so many diverse interests are concerned and as long as human nature, the one immutable thing in this world of ours, remains unchanged.
Towards the middle of 1921 it became known that the supply of gold in Moscow was running short. This was borne out by a growing disinclination on the part of the Third International to subsidise revolutionary movements abroad; but at the same time the Third International awoke to the possibilities of turning the great masses of unemployed in all countries to account. A document that had been circulated in Norway showed how this was to be done. The unemployed were to organise themselves into bodies with a Central Executive Committee. They were to go down to the relieving officer and demand a rate of relief equal to the trade union rate of wages. The local authority would then be compelled to draw upon the national exchequer and in a short time the country would be involved in bankruptcy. As the Third International put it:
By uniting the unemployed with the proletarian vanguards in the struggle for the social revolution, the Communist Party will restrain the most rebellious and impatient elements among the unemployed from individual desperate acts and enable the entire mass actively to support under favourable circumstances the struggle of the proletariat … In a word, this entire mass, from a reserve army of industry, will be transferred into an active army of the revolution.
And, in another place:
As Municipalities are more likely to yield to demands, the first attacks of this kind should be made upon Municipalities and made in such a way as to exclude any possibility of tracing them back to a general scheme. The demands should appear to be local, having no apparent connection with similar attempts in the same country.
These instructions were acted upon in London and other places. Most of the agitators among the unemployed were communists with headquarters at the International Socialist Club, which had received a subsidy of £1,000. It is unnecessary to add that they were drawing salaries.
The unemployed leaders did not find the guardians as pliable as they had hoped. Even when they engaged in a system of bullying individuals, as in the case of a certain chairman of a London board who was a beneficed clergyman and whose church was visited with the express intention of disturbing the service, they could not extort grants approaching what they demanded and the boards which were controlled by Labour members had no balance in their banks and could not obtain an overdraft without the consent of the Ministry of Health, which, of course, laid down a reasonable scale beyond which they could not go. I do not know that the fear of being surcharged personally would have deterred them, for most of these gentlemen, having few possessions, would welcome the advertisement of an attempt at distraint upon their goods, but the impossibility of getting money from the bank was a difficulty not to be got over. The real unemployed took no part in these demonstrations. They were orderly and reasonable folk who had begun to realise that unemployment was a condition far beyond the control of the government of a single country, but a world phenomenon which had to be lived through as patiently as possible, and consequently the revolutionary agitators failed again.
The famine in Russia brought a new factor into the situation. Russia is so huge a country that there have been always periodical famines in one part of it or another. As long as there was an efficient central government it was possible to relieve the want in one province by the superfluities in another, but under the communists the entire railway system had broken down and it was no longer possible to carry supplies to the Volga. So the communists began to appeal to foreign countries. They represented the famine as having been caused by the intervention of capitalist states and when this argument was found unconvincing they accused first Denikin and Kolchak and then the weather. The central government did not seem to care how many of the wretched peasants perished, but they did want to convince the distant provinces that it was only to the communists that they could look for relief. Their great dread was that someone else would take the credit from them.
Strange stories reached us from time to time. In some provinces the Bolsheviks had made a clean sweep of the priests and churches and in many of the villages there had been no religious teaching for four years. In a few of these it was alleged that people had reverted to paganism and had hoisted the head of a bull into a tree and made offerings to it. These stories were never confirmed, but they are consistent with the religious aspect of the Russian peasant character.
About the middle of 1921 the communists realised that it was impossible longer to maintain the pretence that communism was an economic success. They had spent their gold reserve lavishly and they had got very little in return for it and now they saw the day approaching when there would be nothing left. Faced with these prospects, there was nothing for it but to agree with their enemies, the capitalists, quickly. True, they could continue to hold the reins of power because they had been careful to disarm all the Red Army except a few trusted battalions, but inevitably a government which cannot pay its way, is bankrupt as a concern and has made it impossible for its subjects to pay any taxes, must fall and so the Lenin Party announced publicly that it intended to veer to the right. This announcement was hailed by all the people who wanted to begin trading with Russia as a genuine conversion. It was bitterly opposed in Russia by the ‘die-hard’ communists, who argued quite reasonably that the admission of the foreign capitalist or, indeed, of any foreigner at all, would sound the death-knell of the Soviet. And then M. Krassin took upon himself to explain what the moderates really meant by reversion to capitalistic principles. They would die sooner than surrender the railways or big industries, or land or mines, to private ownership: all they intended was to grant leases to concessionaires, who would be permitted to work their concessions under Soviet control, giving a share of their profits to the Soviet government, who would provide them with the necessar
y labour. The communists would not listen to a suggestion that they should recognise their debts to foreigners until the foreign governments had agreed fully to recognise them as a sovereign state. He seemed to have a childlike belief that political recognition would immediately result in financial advances to the Russian government. He, too, appeared to believe that the British government keeps vast hoards of gold in its vaults and that all it has to do when it makes an advance is to scoop up so many millions and hand them over to M. Krassin himself. After all, his own government, as long as it had gold to play with, financed people in just this way. But credits are provided ultimately by the man in the street, who has outlets for his savings in nearly every part of the world among honest men who pay their debts, and why should he, therefore, adventure his money among people who make a boast of their contempt for monetary obligations and who have proved that even when they had money they lacked the ordinary business ability for turning it to account?
All those who have had to do with Russia realise that it is useless to talk of reconstructing the country until the communist power has become as it did in Hungary – a nightmare of the past. All this talk of conferences extending from Prinkipo to Genoa is merely putting off that inevitable day.
The fixed idea that without exports from Russia prices cannot fall in England is a very curious obsession not only of Labour but of some of those who have access to the trade returns. In 1900 Russia exported very little to foreign countries at all and the world got on. In the next decade the exports gradually increased until in the record year, 1913, they amounted to £28,000,000, but this was a small proportion of the £600,000,000 of our foreign imports. In that year we exported £17,000,000 to Russia. The bulk of the Russian exports was cereals, of which nearly all was produced by the large landowners, who have ceased to exist. The peasants, who then had manure from their beasts, exported very little: their surplus went to the large towns. But now the beasts, like the landowners, are gone. On the Soviet figures, the horses have been reduced from 28,000,000 to 3,000,000, of which only half are fit for agricultural work. Think what this means in a country like Russia, where every pound of produce has to be taken an average of 30 miles to the nearest railway and where ploughing is the first essential! What the Soviet government thinks of it is shown by a curious little incident. Early in the year M. Krassin sent to a firm of agricultural machine-makers the working drawings of a human tractor which had been prepared in Moscow by a Russian engineer. It was to be made on the principle of the trolleys used by platelayers on the railway. It was to have two levers, each operated by three men – forced labour, of course – and the seventh man was to steer. A plough was to be attached to it. The firm refused the order for the twofold reason that the machine would scarcely be powerful enough to carry the seven men without the plough and that it was inhuman to employ men to do the work of animals under such conditions.
If trade with Russia is essential to a low cost of living in this country, why have prices continued to fall? The reason is given in the Board of Trade returns. The world, having done without Russian exports for eight years, has readjusted itself. The cereals, butter, eggs, timber and flax, which we formerly had from Russia, are now being produced in Canada, the Argentine and other countries. Half the flax-producing provinces of Russia now lie outside her frontiers. The world can do without Russia until such time as she recovers her sanity. As long as she continues to tolerate the form of government that has brought her to economic ruin she is beyond help.
Trade with Russia has been opened for the past eighteen months and there has been no trade. This has not been for lack of enterprise on the part of traders. It is due to the fact that Russia now has practically nothing to give in exchange, but there is the further factor that one cannot trade with people of bad faith. Two or three vessels carried goods to Odessa last winter. They were not allowed to sell them except at prices fixed by the Moscow Soviet and these prices were below cost.
A Belgian firm undertook to repair and run the Odessa tramways. They had to pay a large deposit for the concession. As soon as the tramways were running the local Soviet stepped in and sequestrated the tramway as Soviet property and when the syndicate protested it was threatened with arrest by the Tcheka. It then demanded the return of the deposit, which at first was refused: in the end half only of the deposit was repaid.
It is difficult for those who do not know the communists to understand this policy of suicide. The fact is that only 10 per cent of the communists in Russia are men of education; the remaining 90 per cent are illiterate workmen, peasants and jailbirds, who have achieved by the Revolution a position of power and comparative affluence which they never dreamed of under the old regime. They have just sense enough to know that, if foreign capital is admitted into the country and the Russians are freed from the Terror, their day will be done. Lenin and his colleagues may propose; they, the majority, dispose; and while Lenin may quite honestly mean what he says about a change of heart he is powerless to carry out his promises.
One of the most curious of the obsessions is the fear of anarchy if the Reds fall. There is anarchy already. Russia is the last country in the world to fall into the sort of anarchy feared by our statesmen. For centuries she has been accustomed to village councils, with which the Czarist government interfered very little. She has them now and all that will happen when the communists fall, as fall they must, is that the country will break up into these little entities, each stretching out hands to its neighbours. In such conditions the last state of Russia will be better than the first.
Meanwhile, the real government, so far as there is a central government at all, is the Tcheka, the Extraordinary Commission, which has changed its name but not its nature. It is now called a political committee under the Commissary of the Interior and in due course, when its new name becomes as much hated as its old name, it will change it again. Even Lenin himself would not be exempt from its attentions and he knows it. This terror that walks by day and night is the real government of Russia.
The conviction, honestly held by all classes of Germans, that the war was forced upon them by an inexorable ring of steel that hemmed them in, is not to be dismissed lightly as the figment of their military party. It was a subconscious impulse like that of a hive of bees before they swarm and, like the bees, they were armed with stings. It is even now idle to point out to them that their surplus population was as free as air; the sparsely populated regions of the earth lay open to it; it could do as so many thousands of Germans had done and form German-speaking communities, not in German tropical colonies, which have never been successful, but in temperate zones where men can reap the fruits of their own labour; that was not their vision of a place in the sun. Nor is their conviction shaken by the argument that by their industry and their commercial enterprise abroad they were already beginning to inherit the earth. Perhaps the Great War was the first premonition of what is to be the destiny of poor humanity. Far back in the ages the millions of Asia, driven out of their own lands by drought and famine, swarmed westward and swept away the Roman Empire, but then there was land enough for all and as a torrent pouring down a mountain canyon comes to rest in the broad waters of the lake, so the irruptions from the East spent themselves and subsided. But when there is no longer any lake, what then? In the time of Elizabeth the population of England and Wales was 5,000,000, as late as 1750 it was only 6,500,000 and in 1801, the year of the first census, under 9,000,000. Up to that date these islands were self-supporting. During the last century it has increased at a rate of more than 2,000,000 every ten years, in spite of emigration, and if we were cut off from supplies from abroad we should be starving in a few weeks. The population of the earth is now estimated at something over 1,500,000,000: at the present rate of increase it may be 3,000,000,000 in less than a century. The empty spaces of the world are rapidly filling and when all those in which men can support themselves are filled up, posterity will have to look to itself. Nature’s old remedy, plague and the early death of
the weakly and the ailing, have been subdued and unless the birth-rate is artificially regulated the subconscious swarming instinct, having no outlet, must behave as it does in the hive and whole nations and classes will fall upon one another for the right to live. Beside such a vital struggle the Great War will seem as insignificant as the Crimea. The generation upon which this catastrophe falls will find plenty of reasons to justify the breach of peace and it will remain ignorant of the root cause to the end.
Therefore it is idle to think that the world has seen the last of war: conferences on disarmament and the revival of world trade are mere temporary palliatives which can do nothing for any generation but our own, for the one unchanging thing in the world is human nature and the strongest instinct in human nature is self-preservation. This terror will not come in our time nor in that of our children, but come it will.
Subconscious impulse is manifested in little things as well as in great. The dress of women is passing through a period of décolletage as it did immediately after the Napoleonic campaigns and after all the great wars of modern times. There was always a marked deterioration of public morals in every country after visitations of plague, as if the race were unconsciously obeying an instinct to quicken up the process of replacement. Fashion is supposed to be controlled by the dressmakers: is it not more likely that the dressmakers are merely quick to interpret the inclinations of those whom their clothes are to adorn? A whole generation of young women have lost the mates of their own ages; another generation who were in the schoolroom during those tremendous years are treading hard upon their heels. Are they to lose their birthright of wifehood and motherhood and tamely be laid upon the shelf? Their subconscious instinct impels them to attract; their dressmaker divines the impulse and obeys it. The dress shrinks to its narrowest dimensions.
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