The New Europe/Volume 5/Mr. Norman Angell and Professor Gilbert Murray on War Aims

by G. G.

Review

It is a pity that Mr. Norman Angell, by a certain tactless and, perhaps, ingrained inability to appreciate fully the ideal which brought the present Alliance into being, has very largely discounted in the public mind those saner views of his which, if enunciated by a less controversial pen, would carry with them a large measure of conviction. The main proposition of his War Aims (Headley Bros., pp. 127, 2s. 6d. net) is, in essence, the same as that propounded only the other day by President Wilson himself; and yet his unfortunate aggressiveness of tone does actual harm to the very cause which most of us have sincerely at heart, and which is of the very essence of the Allied purpose. No one in his senses now-a-days talks of crushing the German nation; we are all agreed that the one enemy, common alike to the German people and to the world at large, is that immoral militarism which has been carried to cynical perfection by the Prussian Government. But we most of us differ from Mr. Angell in this, that we clearly recognise the imminence and the reality of that danger, and can see no hope of any sort of peace until that incubus is finally and irretrievably crushed, and until the European comity of nations is infused with an entirely different spirit. Liberal opinion in this country is quite as alive to the danger from without as it is to that from within; it is the latter which seems to obsess Mr. Angell. One turns, by way of contrast, to the sane, idealistic and yet practical exposition of the Liberal attitude to the war as given by Professor Gilbert Murray and reinforced by a preface by Lord Grey, in The Way Forward (Allen & Unwin, pp. 43, 1s. net). Here one may read the interpretation by a gifted and imaginative mind of the true goal to which those who have not lost the idealism of 1914 are striving the substitution of public right as the law of the civilised world; the realisation of freedom for all nations and for all the men and women within the nations; and the final deliverance of mankind from the power of the sword.

G. G.