Crimes and Mercies. James Bacque

’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

       The throned monarch better than his crown;

       His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

       The attribute to awe and majesty,

       Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

       But mercy is above this sceptred sway,

       It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

       It is an attribute to God himself;

       And earthly power doth then show likest God’s

       When mercy seasons justice.

      WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

      The Merchant of Venice

I A PIRATICAL STATE

       ‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.’

      GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

      During the century before 1914, the Western democracies began a series of reforms such as the world had never witnessed. All of them abolished cruel institutions – duelling, slavery, religious discrimination and child labour. In Ontario, the first universal, free, long-term education system in the history of the world was begun and perfected within forty years. In the US and UK, cures for diseases were discovered, electricity made useful, aeroplanes invented and hunger abolished among millions of people. All the democracies began the process of electoral reform that brought the polling booths to everyone by 1925.¹ In agriculture, industry and science, advances were made that produced prosperity for the great majority of their citizens, something that had never happened before. The democracies did these things under no threat from enemies, nor to surpass other societies. These things occurred because there was a civilizing genius among the people based on their ancient beliefs.

      The rapid improvement of life that seemed inevitable in 1900 was slowed to a walk by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. These were prefigured largely in the century before.

      Darwin, Marx and Freud had all invented new beliefs for mankind, which had in common the idea that people must forever struggle against each other. In society, class must fight class; in the natural world, individual must compete against individual; and within the individual, ego must war with libido, or instinct with learned behaviour.

      These ideas ignored the fact that the very definition of society is people co-operating to a greater good. Co-operation and trust alone enabled societies to survive, but ideas such as permanent class warfare, the Oedipus complex and survival of the fittest created conflict and mistrust in personal relations, political revolutions, wars between nations and eugenics programs which were a major part of the social catastrophes of this century.

      The nineteenth-century spirit of generous reform in England, Canada, Germany, France and the US continued into the twentieth century. But now the powers of the state were being vastly extended by the reformers themselves in order to implement their generous ideals. Under the fascists and communists, the reforming passions were taken over by the state. They animated the state and were controlled by it. In the brilliant phrase of the philosopher Michael Polanyi, ‘The generous passions of our age could now covertly explode inside the engines of a pitiless machinery of violence.’²

      What saved the democracies from the fate of these authoritarian states were, largely, traditions deriving from the Protestant Reformation that previously had expressed and limited the faith of people in a central power, whether church, feudal monarchy or modern state. The people had already freed their individual consciences from the priests, aristocrats and bureaucrats who had controlled them through a vast machinery of patronizing moral condescension, the class system, hypocritical imputations of basic guilt, reciprocal loyalties and violence.

      Totalitarianism was far stronger in Italy, Spain and Russia, where the Protestant revolution had not occurred, or where it had been curtailed by the older authoritarian traditions, as in Germany. Among the particular traditions that protected the democracies were freedom of conscience, expressed as freedom of speech; mass literacy; habeas corpus; the extended franchise; and the various other constitutional protections of individual rights all proceeding largely from the Reformation and the Enlightenment. That these traditions did not always guide the foreign policies of the democracies was clear to see in Ireland and in the American west. But by far the most spectacular failures were in Europe, after the German wars.

      Two men struggled for the soul of the west in London during the First World War. They were Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, the very model of the arrogant, conservative power of the British Empire, and Herbert Hoover. Churchill’s sea blockade, intended to strangle the German war effort, was also starving millions of Belgian children. This pained Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer from Iowa, unknown to politics. He was typical of the reforming, generous, independent spirit of many Americans: opposed to Empire and big government, with a naïve faith in the goodness of democratic peoples.

      Beginning only a few months after the declaration of war in August 1914, Hoover met many times in London with the most powerful men in the British Empire – Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, First Sea Lord Winston Churchill and Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, who soon succeeded Asquith as Prime Minister. Hoover was always trying to relieve the miseries of the war, first for American citizens trapped in Europe, then for Belgian and French civilians starving under German occupation.

      He wanted to get permission from the British government to ship food from Canada and the US through the British sea blockade to Belgium. Churchill refused. The Germans, having occupied Belgium and northern France, were responsible for feeding the people, Churchill said. Any food imported into Belgium would relieve some of the pressure that the blockade was exerting on the Germans.

      Hoover went around Churchill, straight to Germany, to make them promise to all inspectors to supervise the issue of rations directly to the children. He found the Berlin bureaucrats to be ‘automatic and inhuman,’³ but he got them to agree. On his return to London, he found Churchill in alliance with Lord Kitchener, organizing opposition to all relief regardless of the widespread starvation in Belgium, now spreading to occupied France.

      The British themselves were under tremendous pressure after the first year of war, because their armies were losing the land battle, the French army was growing mutinous, their ally Czarist Russia was collapsing, and in fact made peace with Germany in 1917. British shipping, including much of their own food supply, was being destroyed wholesale by the German U-boat campaign.

      What Hoover was proposing to the worried British ministers could not decide the war, so they were reluctant even to hear him. But Hoover played adroitly on one British hope: they desperately needed American help. No help was likely if the Americans thought the British were deliberately refusing to let Hoover ship food to starving Belgian women and children.

      Hoover’s forceful moralizing soon got him into serious trouble with Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1915. Hoover had asked Asquith to release to his control 20,000 tons of Canadian flour stockpiled in England. He wanted this for seven million people ‘surrounded by a ring of steel and utterly unable by any conceivable effort to save themselves.’ As Hoover himself admitted, it was with ‘some abruptness’ that he told Asquith that the Belgians were starving because of the British blockade, yet the British claimed to be fighting to save Belgium. He said that he was not begging for the Canadian flour, but asking permission to buy it. If he were to leave the meeting without the flour, he would be forced to make this public, and the American public, so far sympathetic to Great Britain, would be disgusted. Asquith remarked that it was not