In the face of the history of the last forty years,
the Genteel Whig struggles persistently to minimise the German outrage
upon civilisation and to find excuses for Germany. He does this, not
because he has any real passion for falsehood, but because by training,
circumstance, and disposition he is passionately averse from action
with the vulgar majority and from self-sacrifice in a common cause, and
because he finds in the justification of Germany and, failing that, in
the blackening of the Allies to an equal blackness, one line of defence
against the wave of impulse that threatens to submerge his private
self. But when at last that line is forced he is driven back upon others
equally extraordinary. You can often find simultaneously in the same
Pacifist paper, and sometimes even in the utterances of the same writer,
two entirely incompatible statements. The first is that Germany is so
invincible that it is useless to prolong the war since no effort of the
Allies is likely to produce any material improvement in their position,
and the second is that Germany is so thoroughly beaten that she is now
ready to abandon militarism and make terms and compensations entirely
acceptable to the countries she has forced into war. And when finally
facts are produced to establish the truth that Germany, though still
largely wicked and impenitent, is being slowly and conclusively beaten
by the sanity, courage and persistence of the Allied common men, then
the Genteel Whig retorts with his last defensive absurdity.
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