ABSTRACT
My adult life has been passed in a very gloomy period, and what has made it gloomy is war and the fear of war. When I was very young, under the influence of the Sidney Webbs, I was not averse from British imperialism, and I was even tolerant of the Boer War. But, while it was in progress, my feelings changed completely. I was horrified by the concentration camps which the British invented and which have since been developed by the Nazis and the Communists. It was during that war that British statesmen became persuaded of the need of Continental allies although the alliances then concluded led, as statesmen should have foreseen, to increasingly hostile relations with Germany and ultimately to the First World War. I first heard the policy of the Entente advocated in a private discussion club by Sir Edward Grey in 1902, two years before it became the policy of the British Government. I vehemently opposed the policy then and there and saw no reason to change my opinion when it produced its inevitable consequences in 1914. I thought, and still think,
that it would have been better for the world and for our own country if Britain had been neutral in that war. We were toldfor example, by H. G. Wells-that it was a war to end war and a war against militarism. It had, in fact, exactly the opposite effect. It led directly to Communism in Russia and, through the punitive vindictiveness of the Versailles Treaty, to Nazi domination in Germany. The world since 1914 has been one in which civilized ways of life and humane feeling have steadily decayed; and there is, as yet, little sign of a contrary tendency.
