22
PARTISAN REVIEW
from anyone.' 'We were here for five years, and no one ever looked
at us nicely or showed us a kind act. Not one.'
The oldest man said: 'Thirty thousand people were killed in the
town where we came from. My son here is with me.' 'Yes,' said his
son, 'I am with my father, but we know nothing of my mother and
my sister. All the others here have lost all their relatives.'
There was a silence, then one of them said: 'We were paid 20
marks a month for our labour, but most even of that was taken away.'
'Look, two of us were told to unload a whole railway wagon in a
morning.'
'If
we couldn't do it, we were fined of our wages.'
'We would sooner work twenty years under the Americans or
the British than for one year under the Germans.'
SOME CONCLUSIONS
It is surely true that there exists now, in all the world, an inter–
national of well-intentioned men and women.
If
I were to define their
characteristics, I would say that they were not necessarily either de–
mocratic or anti-democratic, left or right, or the representatives of
any class. On the whole, though, they regard the evils of the demo–
cratic systems of government as decisively less than those of the
authoritarian ones, their sympathies are more often towards the left
than towards the right (although not always so ) , and a proof of their
good will is a serious concern with the welfare of ordinary people.
Their conscious or unconscious faith is Christianity, and probably the
most serious division of opinion between these people of good will
is as to whether they regard human nature as more good than bad
or more bad than good. But as to aims they would agree that at this
stage in the world's history any sacrifice of nationalist or class in–
terest is not only justified but necessary if it is in the interests of
establishing peace; that all aggressive nationalist intentions are to be
absolutely condemned; that civilization can only be saved if it is
founded on a double security of peace and social justice. Above all
these people feel that it is their duty to express and make clear these
aims which are already in men's hearts and minds, so that when it
becomes clear that they are in fact the deepest wishes of all people
in
all
nations, the doubt and suspicion and self-interest which obstruct
their being fulfilled will be the more easily cleared away.
If
the previous paragraph sketches a state of mind which is very
wide-spread and which indeed predominates in every international
conference which I have ever attended (though it rarely leads to any
