Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Brett Koonce and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
being
delivered during the warand now first collected
by
1918
MIGHT IS RIGHT
First published as one of the Oxford Pamphlets,
October 1914.
THE WAR OF IDEAS
An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute,
December 12, 1916.
THE FAITH OF ENGLAND
An Address to the Union Society of University
College, London, March 22, 1917.
SOME GAINS OF THE WAR
An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute,
February 13, 1918.
THE WAR AND THE PRESS
A Paper read to the Essay Society, Eton College,
March 14, 1918.
SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND
The Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British
Academy, delivered July 4, 1918.
This book was not planned, but grew out of the troubles of the time.When, on one occasion or another, I was invited to lecture, I did notfind, with Milton's Satan, that the mind is its own place; I could speakonly of what I was thinking of, and my mind was fixed on the War. I amunacquainted with military science, so my treatment of the War waslimited to an estimate of the characters of the antagonists.
The character of Germany and the Germans is a riddle. I have seen noconvincing solution of it by any Englishman, and hardly any confidentattempt at a solution which did not speak the uncontrolled language ofpassion. There is the same difficulty with the lower animals; ourdescription of them tends to be a description of nothing but our ownloves and hates. Who has ever fathomed the mind of a rhinoceros; or hasremembered, while he faces the beast, that a good rhinoceros is apleasant member of the community in which his life is passed? We seeonly the folded hide, the horn, and the angry little eye. We know thathe is strong and cunning, and that his desires and instincts areinconsistent with our welfare. Yet a rhinoceros is a simpler creaturethan a German, and does not trouble our thought by conforming, onoccasion, to civilized standards and humane conditions.
It seems unreasonable to lay great stress on racial differences. Theinsuperable barrier that divides England from Germany has grown out ofcircumstance and habit and thought. For many hundreds of years theGerman peoples have stood to arms in their own defence against theencroachments of successive empires; and modern Germany learned thedoctrine of the omnipotence of force by prolonged suffering at the handsof the greatest master of that immoral school—the Emperor Napoleon. NoGerman can understand the attitude of disinterested patronage which theEnglish mind quite naturally assumes when it is brought into contactwith foreigners. The best example of this superiority of attitude is tobe seen in the people who are called pacifists. They are a peculiarlyEnglish type, and they are the most arrogant of all the English. Theidea that they should ever have to fight for their lives is to themsupremely absurd. There must be some mistake, they think, which can beeasily remedied once it is pointed out. Their title to existence is soclear to themselves that they are convinced it will be univer