From ‘The Right Spirit of Concentration’, The Spectator, 15 May 1915:
It need not be supposed that we are blind to the dangers which arise from a large number of aliens in our midst. We have several times written of these dangers. But latterly, whenever the subject was debated in Parliament, the answer was that the War Office were responsible for the control of aliens who could do harm, and that the War Office were doing what they thought necessary. We may, if we like, suspect that the War Office were not doing enough, but they, at all events, were in possession of the facts and we were not. In a general way in such circumstances we must trust the War Office, especially as it is obvious that, even on the assumption that the hunting down of aliens is an important piece of national work, there are many other and much more important duties to be performed.
If Lord Kitchener had wanted the process of hunting down to go on, and esteemed it above the operations of producing munitions of war, and of enlisting in the Army, and of obtaining recruits for the Army, he would have said so. He would have sanctioned the plastering of our walls with advertisements to that effect. Instead of “Why have you not enlisted to-day? Think it over,” we should read: “Why have you not hunted down an enemy alien or a naturalized German to-day ? Be sure you do it to-morrow.”
We certainly always understood that a man of foreign birth who became a naturalized British subject had the rights of a British subject for ever; that he could say “Civis Britannicus sum” with as much pride and security as any other British subject. To act as though British citizenship conferred no particular rights after all is to lower the prestige of that famous title as well as to injure the particular persons attacked. We can well believe that British citizenship has often been conferred on too easy terms and without sufficient circumspection. But if mistakes were committed, then it is not for violent mobs to remedy the mistakes, which involve the gravest legal questions. Deprivation of rights for misconduct or suspicious acts should come only from the Government, not from private bodies or persons. The evils of Lynch law are always vastly worse than the wrongs which that law—or rather that condition of no-law—is supposed to remove. The new outburst against aliens has been for the most part a form of reprisal of which any nation intent on concentration should be ashamed.
No one says that people of German birth resident in Britain sank the ‘Lusitania,’ or signalled to the German submarine in order to enable her to fire the torpedo at the right moment. What is said or implied is that people of German birth in Britain are of the same nation as the men who sank the ‘Lusitania,’ and that therefore they ought to have the sins of their brothers visited on them. There is much to be said against such logic and nothing for it. To penalize one person for the crime of another, even though only by minor annoyances such as are possible here, is to do on a small scale what the Germans are doing on a large and diabolical scale. Let us agree that we will have nothing whatever to do with such a principle—a principle which is, so to speak, more alien than the aliens. We are fighting in this war for the right, and we shall regret it bitterly if our children, and the historians who will weigh our acts in coming generations, are able to say that we let wrongful methods help us to sustain the right.
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