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beaten to death or sent to a concentration camp. Should he escape across the border, his nearest relative or a friend pays the penalty for him.
It is also extremely probable that English tourists staving at hotels frequented by foreigners in the main cities will see little of what is happening. Last June, I walked down the Kurfurstendamm amongst a number of people shopping and staring quietly at the windows of the various stores. One street away, several men were killed and injured in a so-called political row. The average tourist knowing little of the language would never have heard of it. As for English speaking people there for trade or study, they have either to accept the present regime, even to the point of saying in their letters how wonderful it is, or a pressure of small events will combine to force them to departure. They may talk when they get back to England but they won't while they are there.
For the last fifteen years people have used the words peace and war so much that the sound of them means nothing at all. They have read war books, said " how terrible " and gone on to read accounts of life in the south seas or on a farm or stories of a feudal castle, as if all were equally real or perhaps better, unreal. They have signed resolutions and exchanged armistice memories and sighed (if they are old enough) for " the good old days before the war." But very few have ever made a constructive attempt to prevent the months of 1914 from being repeated on a larger and worse scale.
I do not think a pacifism of theories and pamphlets is of any use. The mass of the people desires action. In this respect both fascism and communism alike respond to primitive psychological needs. Ninety per cent, of any nation want deeds and not ideas.
If this point of view is to govern the world, then we can hope only for war, with intervals of peace. But in one of these upheavals (and in spite of speeches how near we are to it at present) the whole of civilisation may disappear. And we shall not return to the Utopia of the machine-less savage, so often evoked by romantic writers, because the native of the Congo say or the south seas is the product of an elaborate scheme of life that has taken generations of peace to evolve. The barbarism to which we should return would be something so cruel and so stark that only the very cunning or the very strong could hope for survival. It would be comparatively easy even to-day, for half Europe to perish from starvation.
It is said that in the Balkan countries not a child is adequately fed, but that every third person is in uniform. They do not organise their food supplies but they find money for their armies. One rash move on the part of desperate young boys, might loose war right across Europe.
I believe peace still to be possible. But on condition only that we light for it now as hard as we should fight in war.
If we want peace, we must fight for the liberty to think in terms of peace, for all the peoples of Europe. It is useless for us to talk about disarmament when children are being trained in military drill and when every leader of intellectual thought in Germany is exiled or silenced.