HOW ENGLAND FELL.
So much for the man. What of the Empire? Nicholas Jardine had
witnessed, and assisted in, its collapse. He had witnessed the result
of a "corner" in food stuffs, and discovered that Uncle Sam was not
the man to miss his chance of making millions merely because in theory
blood is thicker than water. He had witnessed, also, some of the
effects of the great international confidence trick. The feature of
the common swindle so described is that the trickster makes ingenuous
professions. The dupe, not to be outdone in generous sentiments,
places his watch or his bank-notes in the trickster's hands--just to
show confidence. The trickster goes outside and does not come back
again. So, in the matter of national armaments, Germany had avowed
the friendliest disposition towards Great Britain. England, fatuously
eager to believe in another _entente cordiale_, obligingly sapped her
own resources. Germany, with her tongue in her cheek, went ahead,
determined that England should not catch up to her. Thus had the way
been paved for certain disastrous events: the cutting of the lion's
claws, the clipping of his venerable tail, and the annexation of vast
outlying domains in which the once unchallenged beast aforetime had
held his own, monarch of all he surveyed.
When Germany conceived that the fateful moment had arrived, Germany
pounced. France was friendly, but not active, Russia active and not
friendly, Italy was busily occupied in Abyssinia, and nominally
allied with Germany. Austria had her hands full in Macedonia, and was
actually allied with Germany. Spain and Portugal did not count. Holland
disappeared from the map, following the example of Denmark. The German
cormorant swallowed them up, and German squadrons appropriated the
harbours on the North Sea, as previously those on the Baltic. While
these European changes were being effected with bewildering rapidity,
our former allies, the Japanese, who had learnt naval warfare in the
English school, played their own hand with notable promptitude and
success. Japan had long had her eye on Australia. She wanted elbow
room. She wanted to develop Asiatic power. Now was the time, when
British warships were engaged in a stupendous struggle thousands of
miles away. The little navy that the Australians had got together for
purposes of self-defence crumpled up like paper boats under the big
guns of the Yellow Fleet. Australia was lost. It made the heart ache to
think of the changes wrought by the cruel hand of time--wrought in only
a quarter of a century--in the pride of Britannia, in her power and her
possessions.
India, that once bright and splendid jewel in the British Crown, the
great possession that gave the title of Empress to Queen Victoria of
illustrious memory--India, as a British possession, had been sliced to
less than half its size by those same Japanese, allied with pampered
Hindu millions; and it was problematical whether what was left could
be held much longer. The memorable alliance with Japan, running its
course for several years, had worn sharp and thin towards the end.
It had not been renewed. Japan never had really contemplated pulling
chestnuts out of the fire for the sole benefit of Great Britain. They
saved us from Russia only to help themselves; and now that Great
Britain was derisively spoken of as Beggared Britain, the astute Jap,
self-seeking, with limited ideas of gratitude, was England's enemy.
In South Africa, alas! England had lost not only a slice, but all.
The men of words had overruled the men of deeds. What had been won in
many a hard-fought battle, was surrendered in the House of Commons.
Patriotism had been superseded by a policy of expediency. The great
Boer War had furnished a hecatomb of twenty thousand British lives. A
hundred thousand mourners bowed their heads in resignation for those
who died or fought and bled for England. Millions had groaned under the
burden of the war tax, and then, after years, we had enabled Brother
Boer to secure, by means of a ballot box, what he had lost for the
world's good in the stricken field. They had talked of a union of
races--a fond thing vainly invented. Oil and water never mix.
Socialists, in alliance with sentimentalists in the swarming ranks of
enfranchised women, had reduced the British Lion to the condition of
a zoological specimen--a tame and clawless creature. The millennium
was to be expedited so that the poor old Lion might learn to eat straw
like the ox. If he could not get straw, let him eat dirt--dirt, in any
form of humble pie, that other nations thought fit to set before the
one-time King of Beasts.
In another part of the world, the link between England and Canada,
another great dominion, as Linton Herrick well knew, had worn to the
tenuity of thinnest thread. Canada, as yet, had not formally thrown off
allegiance to the old country, but the thread might be snapped at any
moment.
Linton, who had lived all his life in the Dominion, knew very well
how things were tending. The English were no longer the dominant
race in those vast tracts. They might have been, if a wise system of
colonisation had been organised by British Governments. But the rough
material of the race had been allowed to stagnate and rot here in the
crowded cities of England. Loafers, hooligans, and alien riff-raff had
reached incredible numbers in the course of the last five-and-twenty
years. Workhouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, and prisons could not be
built fast enough to accommodate the unfit and the criminal. Meanwhile,
the vast tracts of grain-growing Canada, where a reinvigorated race
of Englishmen might have found unlimited elbow-room, had been largely
annexed by astute speculators from the United States. The Canadians,
unsupported, had found it impossible to hold their own. The State was
too big for them. As far back as 1906, the remnant of the British
Government garrison had said good-bye to Halifax; and the power and the
glory had gone, too, with the once familiar uniform of Tommy Atkins.
At Quebec and Montreal, all the talk was of deals and dollars. The
whole country had been steadily Americanised, and Sir Wilfred Laurier,
when he went the ultimate way of all Premiers, was succeeded by
office-holders who cared nothing for Imperial ties. For a time they
were not keen about being absorbed by the United States, for that
would mean loss of highly paid posts and political prestige. The march
of events was too strong for them, and between the American and the
British stools they were falling to the ground. It was bound to come,
that final tumble. The force of things and the whirligig of time would
bring in the assured revenges. The big fish swallows the little fish
all the world over.
It was the programme of Socialism that had weakened the foundations
of the British Empire and paved the way for the troublous times that
followed. Cajoled by noisy agitators and the shallow arguments of
Labour leaders and Socialists, the working man lost sight of the fact
that his living depended on working up raw material into manufactured
goods, and thus earning a wage that enabled him to pay for food
and shelter. The middle-class had proved not less supine. So long
as Britannia ruled the waves, and the butcher and baker were in a
position to supply the Briton's daily needs, all went well. But when
a family could get only one loaf, instead of four; and two pounds of
meat when it wanted five, it necessarily followed that a good many
people grew hungry. Hungry people are apt to lose their tempers,
their moral sense of right and wrong, and all those nice distinctions
between _meum et tuum_ on which the foundations of society so largely
depend. Moral chaos becomes painfully accentuated when, as the result
of a naval defeat and an incipient panic, the price of bread bounds
up to eighteenpence per quartern loaf, with a near prospect of being
unprocurable even for its weight in gold. All this had happened
in these once favoured isles, because the masses, encouraged by
self-seeking and parochially-minded leaders, had been more intent on
making war upon the classes than on securing their subsistence through
the agency of British shipping, protected by the British Navy at a
height of power that could keep all other navies at a distance.
In olden time, when the earth was corrupt and filled with violence,
the word came from on high: "Make thee an ark of gopher wood." And
Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear,
prepared an ark, to the saving of his house. But while the ark was
a-preparing, the people went about their business, marrying and giving
in marriage, making small account of the shipbuilder and his craze.
It had been pretty much the same in the twentieth century, when the
British people were warned that another sort of flood was coming, and
that they, too, would need an ark, of material considerably stronger
than gopher wood. They refused to believe in the flood. But it came. It
was bound to come.
We fought, yes; when it came to the critical hour, we fought for dear
life and liberty--fought hard, fought desperately, but under conditions
that made comparative defeat inevitable. And the fight was for unequal
stakes. To us it was an issue of life or death. To our foes it was
an affair of wounds that would heal. The law of nations, the law of
humanity, itself counted for nothing in that deadly and colossal
struggle. Our merchant ships were sent to the bottom, crews and all.
No advantage of strength or numbers served to inspire magnanimity. It
was a fight, bloody, desperate, and remorseless for the sovereignty of
the seas, a fight to the bitter end. And it was over, for all practical
purposes, in a week. The British Government did not dare to maintain
the struggle any longer. The Navy would have fought on till victory
had been attained or every British warship had been sunk or disabled.
The spirit of the service did credit to both officers and men, for
much had been feared from disaffection. Socialism had crept into the
fleet. Political cheapjacks with their leaflets and promises had sown
discord between officers and men, and here and there had been clear
indications of a mutinous spirit. But when it came to the pinch, one
and all--officers, seamen, and stokers--had manfully done their duty.
Where they were victorious, they were humane. When they were beaten,
they faced the fortune of war, and death itself, with firmness and
discipline. But all in vain as regards the general result. England's
rulers for the time being, alarmed at the accumulating signs of a
crumbling empire, daunted by the popular disturbances that broke out
in London and the provinces, made all haste to negotiate such terms of
peace, and agreed to such an indemnity that the dust of Nelson, and
of Pitt, may well have shivered in their graves. Peace, peace at any
price! was the cry. Peace now, lest a worse thing happen through a
continuance of the struggle. Germany, however, would not have stayed
her hand, and England would have become a conscript province, but for
the daring feat of a little band of Englishmen. Six of them, in the
best equipped air-ship that money could buy, by means of bombs almost
entirely destroyed the enormous works of Messrs. Krupp at Essen. By
this means Germany's resources were so gravely prejudiced that it
suited her to stay her hand for the time being. Out of this act of
retaliation sprang the famous Air-Ship Convention, of which the outcome
will appear presently.
During these dire events the women had votes, and many of them had
seats in Parliament. Their sex was dominant. They heard the cry of
the children. The men heard the lamentations of the women, and were
unmanned.
Thus was Great Britain reduced to the level of a third-rate Power--a
downfall not without precedent in the history of the world's great
empires. But sadder even than the accomplished downfall was the fact
that vast numbers of Britons had grown used to the situation, had so
lost the patriotic spirit and fibre of their forefathers that the loss
of race-dominance and of the mighty influence of good which Empire
had sustained, seemed to them of little moment compared with their
immediate individual advantage and petty personal interests.