The project was bitterly opposed. In the House of Commons it was

prophesied that England would be overrun by foreign rogues and

revolutionaries who would corrupt the morals of the people and destroy

all faith and loyalty in the country.

The exhibition was held in Hyde Park in a great building of glass and

iron--which afterwards was re-erected as the Crystal Palace. Financially

it was a great success. It made many English people realize for the

first time that theirs was not the only industrial country in the world,

and that commercial prosperity was not a divinely appointed British

monopoly. There was the clearest evidence of a Europe recovering

steadily from the devastation of the Napoleonic wars, and rapidly

overtaking the British lead in trade and manufacture. It was followed

directly by the organization of a Science and Art Department (1853), to

recover, if possible, the educational leeway that Britain had lost.

The exhibition released a considerable amount of international talk and

sentiment. It had already found expression in the work of such young

poets as Tennyson, who had glanced down the vista of the future.

“Till the war-drums throb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.”

There was much shallow optimism on the part of comfortable people just

then. Peace seemed to be more secure than it had been for a long time.

The social gales of 1848 had blown, and, it seemed, blown themselves

out. Nowhere had the revolution succeeded. In France it had been

betrayed a second time by a Bonaparte, a nephew of the first Napoleon,

but a much more supple and intelligent man.[479] He had posed as a

revolutionary while availing himself of the glamour of his name; he had

twice attempted raids on France during the Orleans monarchy. He had

written a manual of artillery to link himself to his uncle’s prestige,

and he had also published an account of what he alleged to be Napoleonic

views, _Des Idées Napoléoniennes_, in which he jumbled up socialism,

socialistic reform, and pacificism with the Napoleonic legend. The

republic of 1848 was soon in difficulties with crude labour experiments,

and in October he was able to re-enter the country and stand for

election as President. He took an oath as President to be faithful to

the democratic republic, and to regard as enemies all who attempted to

change the form of government. In two years’ time (December, 1852) he

was Emperor of the French.

At first he was regarded with considerable suspicion by Queen Victoria,

or rather by Baron Stockmar, the friend and servant of King Leopold of

Belgium, and the keeper of the international conscience of the British

queen and her consort. All this group of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha people had a

reasonable and generous enthusiasm for the unity and well-being of

Germany--upon liberal lines--and they were disposed to be alarmed at

this Bonapartist revival. Lord Palmerston, the British foreign minister,

was, on the other hand, friendly with the usurper from the outset; he

offended the queen by sending amiable despatches to the French President

without submitting them for her examination and so giving her

sufficient time to consult Stockmar upon them, and he was obliged to

resign. But subsequently the British Court veered round to a more

cordial attitude to the new adventurer. The opening years of his reign

promised a liberal monarchy rather than a Napoleonic career; a

government of “cheap bread, great public works, and holidays,”[480] and

he expressed himself warmly in favour of the idea of nationalism, which

was naturally a very acceptable idea to any liberal German intelligence.

There had been a brief all-German parliament at Frankfort in 1848, which

was overthrown in 1849 by the Prussian monarchy.

[Illustration: Map of EUROPE, 1848-1871]

(This conflict between Palmerston and the Crown is interesting because

it shows the way in which the aristocratic ruling class of the crowned

republic of the Britain of the early Georges was now, with an uneasy

democracy below it, an educated royal consort above, and an education

which had not kept pace with the times, losing power to the renascent

energy of the Crown. A Stockmar would have been impossible in the reigns

of George I or George II, or in a nineteenth-century Great Britain with

a reasonably well-educated peerage.)

Before 1848 all the great European courts of the Vienna settlement had

been kept in a kind of alliance by the fear of a second and more

universal democratic revolution. After the revolutionary failures of

1848 this fear was lifted, and they were free to resume the scheming and

counter-scheming of the days before 1789--with the vastly more powerful

armies and fleets the first Napoleonic phase had given them. The game of

Great Powers was resumed with zest, after an interval of sixty years,

and it continued until it produced the catastrophe of 1914.

The Tsar of Russia, Nicholas I, was the first to move towards war. He

resumed the traditional thrust of Peter the Great towards

Constantinople. Nicholas invented the phrase of the “sick man of Europe”

for the Sultan, and, finding an excuse in the misgovernment of the

Christian population of the Turkish empire, he occupied the Danubian

principalities in 1853. European diplomatists found themselves with a

question of quite the eighteenth-century pattern. The designs of Russia

were understood to clash with the designs of France in Syria, and to

threaten the Mediterranean route to India of Great Britain, and the

outcome was an alliance of France and England to bolster up Turkey and a

war, the Crimean War, which ended in the repulse of Russia. One might

have thought that the restraint of Russia was rather the business of

Austria and Germany, but the passion of the foreign offices of France

and England for burning their fingers in Russian affairs has always been

very difficult to control.

The next phase of interest in this revival of the Great Power drama was

the exploitation by the Emperor Napoleon III and the king of the small

kingdom of Sardinia in North Italy, of the inconveniences and miseries

of the divided state of Italy, and particularly of the Austrian rule in

the north. The King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel, made an old-time

bargain for Napoleon’s help in return for the provinces of Nice and

Savoy. The war between France and Sardinia on the one hand, and Austria

on the other, broke out in 1859, and was over in a few weeks. The

Austrians were badly beaten at Magenta and Solferino. Then, being

threatened by Prussia on the Rhine, Napoleon made peace, leaving

Sardinia the richer for Lombardy.

[Illustration: The KINGDOM of ITALY, 1861.]

The next move in the game of Victor Emmanuel, and of his chief minister

Cavour, was an insurrectionary movement in Sicily led by the great

Italian patriot Garibaldi. Sicily and Naples were liberated, and all

Italy, except only Rome (which remained loyal to the Pope) and Venetia,

which was held by the Austrians, fell to the king of Sardinia. A general

Italian parliament met at Turin in 1861, and Victor Emmanuel became the

first king of Italy.

But now the interest in this game of European diplomacy shifted to

Germany. Already the common sense of the natural political map had

asserted itself. In 1848 all Germany, including, of course, German

Austria, was for a time united under the Frankfort parliament. But that

sort of union was particularly offensive to all the German courts and

foreign offices; they did not want a Germany united by the will of its

people, they wanted Germany united by regal and diplomatic action--as

Italy was being united. In 1848 the German parliament had insisted that

the largely German provinces of Schleswig-Holstein, which had been in

the German Bund, must belong to Germany. It had ordered the Prussian

army to occupy them, and the king of Prussia had refused to take his

orders from the German parliament, and so had precipitated the downfall

of that body. Now the King of Denmark, Christian IX, for no conceivable

motive except the natural folly of kings, embarked upon a campaign of

annoyance against the Germans in these two duchies. Prussian affairs

were then very much in the hands of a minister of the

seventeenth-century type, Von Bismarck (count in 1865, prince in 1871),

and he saw brilliant opportunities in this trouble. He became the

champion of the German nationality in these duchies--it must be

remembered that the King of Prussia had refused to undertake this rôle

for democratic Germany in 1848--and he persuaded Austria to side with

Prussia in a military intervention. Denmark had no chance against these

Great Powers; she was easily beaten and obliged to relinquish the

duchies. Then Bismarck picked a quarrel with Austria for the possession

of these two small states. So he brought about a needless and

fratricidal war of Germans for the greater glory of Prussia and the

ascendancy of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany. German writers of a

romantic turn of mind represent Bismarck as a great statesman planning

the unity of Germany; but indeed he was doing nothing of the kind. The

unity of Germany was a reality in 1848. It was and is in the nature of

things. The Prussian monarchy was simply delaying the inevitable in

order to seem to achieve it in Prussian fashion. That is why, when at

last Germany was unified, instead of bearing the likeness of a modern

civilized people, it presented itself to the world with the face of this

archaic Bismarck, with a fierce moustache, huge jack boots, a spiked

helmet, and a sword.

In this war between Prussia and Austria, Prussia had for an ally Italy;

most of the smaller German states, who dreaded the schemes of Prussia,

fought on the side of Austria. The reader will naturally want to know

why Napoleon III did not grasp this admirable occasion for statecraft

and come into the war to his own advantage. All the rules of the Great

Power game required that he should. But Napoleon, unhappily for himself,

had got his fingers in a trap on the other side of the Atlantic, and was

in no position to intervene.

[Illustration: Bismarck]

In order to understand the entanglement of this shifty gentleman, it is

necessary to explain that the discord in interests between the northern

and southern states of the American union, due to the economic

differences based on slavery, had at last led to open civil war. The

federal system established in 1789 had to fight the secessionist efforts

of the confederated slave-holding states. We have traced the causes of

that great struggle in Chapter XXXVII, §6; its course we cannot relate

here, nor tell how President Lincoln (born 1809, died 1865, president

from 1861) rose to greatness, how the republic was cleansed from the

stain of slavery, and how the federal government of the union was

preserved.

For four long years (1861-65) this war swung to and fro, through the

rich woods and over the hills of Virginia between Washington and

Richmond, until at last the secessionist left was thrust back and

broken, and Sherman, the unionist general, swept across Georgia to the

sea in the rear of the main confederate (secessionist) armies. All the

elements of reaction in Europe rejoiced during the four years of

republican dissension; the British aristocracy openly sided with the

confederate states, and the British Government permitted several

privateers, and particularly the _Alabama_, to be launched in England

to attack the federal shipping. Napoleon III was even more rash in his

assumption that after all the new world had fallen before the old. The

sure shield of the Monroe Doctrine, it seemed to him, was thrust aside

for good, the Great Powers might meddle again in America, and the

blessings of an adventurous monarchy be restored there. A pretext for

interference was found in certain liberties taken with the property of

foreigners by the Mexican president. A joint expedition of French,

British, and Spanish occupied Vera Cruz, but Napoleon’s projects were

too bold for his allies, and they withdrew when it became clear that he

contemplated nothing less than the establishment of a Mexican empire.

This he did, after much stiff fighting, making the Archduke Maximilian

of Austria, Emperor of Mexico in 1864. The French forces, however,

remained in effectual possession of the country, and a crowd of French

speculators poured into Mexico to exploit its mines and resources.

But in April, 1865, the civil war in the United States was brought to an

end by the surrender of the great southern commander, General Lee, at

Appomattox Court House, and the little group of eager Europeans in

possession of Mexico found themselves faced by the victorious federal

government, in a thoroughly grim mood, with a large, dangerous-looking

army in hand. The French imperialists were bluntly given the alternative

of war with the United States or clearing out of America. In effect this

was an instruction to go. This was the entanglement which prevented

Napoleon III from interference between Prussia and Austria in 1866, and

this was the reason why Bismarck precipitated his struggle with Austria.

While Prussia was fighting Austria, Napoleon III was trying to escape

with dignity from the briars of Mexico. He invented a shabby quarrel

upon financial grounds with Maximilian and withdrew the French troops.

Then, by all the rules of kingship, Maximilian should have abdicated.

But instead he made a fight for his empire; he was defeated by his

recalcitrant subjects, caught, and shot as a public nuisance in 1867. So

the peace of President Monroe was restored to the new world. There

remained only one monarchy in America, the empire of Brazil, where a

branch of the Portuguese royal family continued to reign until 1889. In

that year the emperor was quietly packed off to Paris, and Brazil came

into line with the rest of the continent.

But while Napoleon was busy with his American adventure, Prussia and

Italy were snatching victory over the Austrians (1866). Italy was badly

beaten at Custozza and in the naval battle of Lissa, but the Austrian

army was so crushed by the Prussian at the battle of Sadow, that Austria

made an abject surrender. Italy gained the province of Venetia, so

making one more step towards unity--only Rome and Trieste and a few

small towns on the north and north-western frontiers remained--and

Prussia became the head of a North German Confederation, from which

Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse, and Austria were excluded.

Four years later came the next step towards the natural political map of

Europe, when Napoleon III plunged into war against Prussia. A kind of

self-destroying foolishness urged him to do this. He came near to this

war in 1867 so soon as he was free from Mexico, by demanding Luxembourg

for France; he embarked upon it in 1870, when a cousin of the king of

Prussia became a candidate for the vacant throne of Spain. Napoleon had

some theory in his mind that Austria, Bavaria, Württemberg, and the

other states outside the North German Confederation would side with him

against Prussia.[481] He probably thought this would happen because he

wanted it to happen. But since 1848 the Germans, so far as foreign

meddling was concerned, had been in spirit a united people; Bismarck was

merely imposing the Hohenzollern monarchy, with pomp, ceremony, and

bloodshed, upon accomplished facts. All Germany sided with Prussia.

Early in August, 1870, the united German forces invaded France. After

the battles of Wörth and Gravelotte, one French army under Bazaine was

forced into Metz and surrounded there, and, on September 1st, a second,

with which was Napoleon, was defeated and obliged to capitulate at

Sedan. Paris found herself bare to the invader. For a second time the

promises of Napoleonism had failed France disastrously. On September

4th, France declared herself a republic again, and thus regenerated,

prepared to fight for existence against triumphant Prussianism. For

though it was a united Germany that had overcome French imperialism, it

had Prussia in the saddle. The army in Metz capitulated in October;

Paris, after a siege and bombardment, surrendered in January, 1871.

With pomp and ceremony, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, amidst a

great array of military uniforms, the King of Prussia was declared

German Emperor, and Bismarck and the sword of the Hohenzollerns claimed

the credit for that German unity which a common language and literature

had long since assured.

The peace of Frankfort was a Hohenzollern peace. Bismarck had availed

himself of the national feeling of Germany to secure the aid of the

South German states, but he had no grasp of the essential forces that

had given victory to him and to his royal master. The power that had

driven Prussia to victory was the power of the natural political map of

Europe insisting upon the unity of the German-speaking peoples. In the

east, Germany was already sinning against that natural map by her

administration of Posen and other Polish districts. Now greedy for

territory, and particularly for iron mines, she annexed a considerable

area of French-speaking Lorraine, including Metz, and Alsace, which, in

spite of its German speech, was largely French in sympathy. Inevitably

there was a clash between German rulers and French subjects in these

annexed provinces; inevitably the wrongs and bitterness of the

subjugated France of Lorraine echoed in Paris and kept alive the

passionate resentment of the French....

The natural map had already secured political recognition in the

Austrian Empire after Sadowa (1866). Hungary, which had been

subordinated to Austria, was erected into a kingdom on an equal footing

with Austria, and the Empire of Austria had become the dual “monarchy”

of Austria-Hungary. But in the southeast of this empire, and over the

Turkish empire, the boundaries and subjugations of the conquest period

still remained.

A fresh upthrust of the natural map began in 1875, when the Christian

races in the Balkans, and particularly the Bulgarians, became restless

and insurgent. The Turks adopted violent repressive measures, and

embarked upon massacres of Bulgarians on an enormous scale. Thereupon

Russia intervened (1877), and after a year of costly warfare obliged the

Turks to sign the treaty of San Stefano, which was, on the whole, a

sensible treaty, breaking up the artificial Turkish Empire, and to a

large extent establishing the natural map. But it had become the

tradition of British policy to thwart “the designs of Russia”--heaven

knows why!--whenever Russia appeared to have a design, and the British

foreign office, under the premiership of Lord Beaconsfield, intervened

with a threat of war if a considerable restoration of the Turks’

facilities for exaction, persecution, and massacre was not made. For a

time war seemed very probable. The British music-halls, those lamps to

British foreign policy, were lit with patriotic fire, and the London

errand-boy on his rounds was inspired to chant, with the simple dignity

of a great people conscious of its high destinies, a song declaring

that:

“We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo,[482] if we do,

We got the ships, we got the men, we got the munn-aye too”....

and so on to a climax:

“The Russ’ns shall not ’ave Con-stan-te-no - - - ple.”

In consequence of this British opposition, a conference was assembled in

1878 at Berlin to revise the treaty of San Stefano, chiefly in the

interests of the Turkish and Austrian monarchies, the British acquired

the island of Cyprus, to which they had no sort of right whatever, and

which has never been of the slightest use to them, and Lord Beaconsfield

returned triumphantly from the Berlin Conference, to the extreme

exasperation of Mr. Gladstone, with what the British were given to

understand at the time was “Peace with Honour.”

This treaty of Berlin was the second main factor, the peace of Frankfort

being the first, in bringing about the great war of 1914-18.

These thirty years after 1848 are years of very great interest to the

student of international political methods. Released from their terror

of a world-wide insurrection of the common people, the governments of

Europe were doing their best to resume the game of Great Powers that had

been so rudely interrupted by the American and French revolutions. But

it looked much more like the old game than it was in reality. The

mechanical revolution was making war a far more complete disturbance of

the general life than it had ever been before, and the proceedings of

the diplomatists were ruled, in spite of their efforts to disregard the

fact, by imperatives that Charles V and Louis XIV had never known.

Irritation with misgovernment was capable of far better organization and

far more effective expression than it had ever been before. Statesmen

dressed this up as the work of the spirit of Nationalism, but there were

times and occasions when that costume wore very thin. The grand monarchs

of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had seemed to be free to do

this or that, to make war or to keep the peace, to conquer this province

or cede that as they willed; but such a ruler as Napoleon III went from

one proceeding to another with something of the effect of a man who

feels his way among things unseen.

[Illustration: Map of the BALKANS to illustrate the TREATY of BERLIN

1878]

None of these European governments in the nineteenth century was in fact

a free agent. We look to-day at the maps of Europe since 1814, we

compare them with the natural map, and we see that the game the Great

Powers played was indeed a game of foregone conclusions. Whatever

arrangements they made that were in accordance with the natural

political map of the world, and the trend towards educational democracy,

held, and whatever arrangements they made contrary to these things,

collapsed. We are forced, therefore, to the conclusion, that all the

diplomatic fussing, posturing, and scheming, all the intrigue and

bloodshed of these years, all the monstrous turmoil and waste of kings

and armies, all the wonderful attitudes, deeds, and schemes of the

Cavours, Bismarcks, Disraelis, Bonapartes, and the like “great men,”

might very well have been avoided altogether had Europe but had the

sense to instruct a small body of ordinarily honest ethnologists,

geographers, and sociologists to draw out its proper boundaries and

prescribe suitable forms of government in a reasonable manner. The

romantic phase in history had come to an end. A new age was beginning

with new and greater imperatives, and these nineteenth-century statesmen

were but pretending to control events.

§ 9

We have suggested that in the political history of Europe between 1848

and 1878, the mechanical revolution was not yet producing any very

revolutionary changes. The post-revolutionary Great Powers were still

going on within boundaries of practically the same size and with much

the same formalities as they had done in pre-revolutionary times. But

where the increased speed and certainty of transport and telegraphic

communications were already producing very considerable changes of

condition and method, was in the overseas enterprises of Britain and the

other European powers, and in the reaction of Asia and Africa to Europe.

[Illustration: Comparative Maps of ASIA (a) as part of hemisphere (b) on

Mercator’s projection to show relative sizes of Asiatic Russia and India

in the two cases.]

The end of the eighteenth century was a period of disrupting empires and

disillusioned expansionists. The long and tedious journey between

Britain and Spain and their colonies in America prevented any really

free coming and going between the home land and the daughter lands, and

so the colonies separated into new and distinct communities, with

distinctive ideas and interests and even modes of speech. As they grew

they strained more and more at the feeble and uncertain link of shipping

that joined them. Weak trading-posts in the wilderness, like those of

France in Canada, or trading establishments in great alien communities,

like those of Britain in India, might well cling for bare existence to

the nation which gave them support and a reason for their existence.

That much and no more seemed to many thinkers in the early part of the

nineteenth century to be the limit set to overseas rule. In 1820 the

sketchy great European “empires” outside of Europe that had figured so

bravely in the maps of the middle eighteenth century, had shrunken to

very small dimensions. Only the Russian sprawled as large as ever across

Asia. It sprawled much larger in the imaginations of many Europeans than

in reality, because of their habit of studying the geography of the

world upon Mercator’s projection, which enormously exaggerated the size

of Siberia.

The British Empire in 1815 consisted of the thinly populated coastal

river and lake regions of Canada, and a great hinterland of wilderness

in which the only settlements as yet were the fur-trading stations of

the Hudson Bay Company, about a third of the Indian peninsula, under the

rule of the East India Company, the coast districts of the Cape of Good

Hope inhabited by blacks and rebellious-spirited Dutch settlers; a few

trading stations on the coast of West Africa, the rock of Gibraltar, the

island of Malta, Jamaica, a few minor slave-labour possessions in the

West Indies, British Guiana in South America, and, on the other side of

the world, two dumps for convicts at Botany Bay in Australia and in

Tasmania. Spain retained Cuba and a few settlements in the Philippine

Islands. Portugal had in Africa some vestiges of her ancient claims.

Holland had various islands and possessions in the East Indies and Dutch

Guiana, and Denmark an island or so in the West Indies. France had one

or two West Indian Islands and French Guiana. This seemed to be as much

as the European powers needed, or were likely to acquire of the rest of

the world. Only the East Indian Company showed any spirit of expansion.

[Illustration: The BRITISH EMPIRE in 1815

[Mercator’s Projection]]

In India, as we have already told, a peculiar empire was being built up,

not by the British peoples, nor by the British Government, but by this

company of private adventurers with their monopoly and royal charter.

The company had been forced to become a military and political power

during the years of Indian division and insecurity that followed the

break-up of India after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. It had learnt to

trade in states and peoples during the eighteenth century. Clive

founded, Warren Hastings organized, this strange new sort of empire;

French rivalry was defeated, as we have already told; and by 1798, Lord

Mornington, afterwards the Marquis Wellesley, the elder brother of that

General Wellesley who became the Duke of Wellington, became

Governor-General of India, and set the policy of the company definitely

upon the line of replacing the fading empire of the Grand Mogul by its

own rule. Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt was a direct attack upon the

empire of this British company. While Europe was busy with the

Napoleonic wars, the East India Company, under a succession of

governors-general, was playing much the same rôle in India that had been

played before by Turkoman and such-like invaders from the north. And

after the peace of Vienna it went on, levying its revenues, making wars,

sending ambassadors to Asiatic powers, a quasi-independent state, a

state, however, with a marked disposition to send wealth westward.

In Chapter XXXVI, § 9, we have sketched the break-up of the empire of

the Great Mogul and the appearance of the Mahratta states, the Rajput

principalities, the Moslem kingdoms of Oudh and Bengal, and the Sikhs.

We cannot tell here in any detail how the British company made its way

to supremacy sometimes as the ally of this power, sometimes as that, and

finally as the conqueror of all. Its power spread to Assam, Sind, Oudh.

The map of India began to take on the outlines familiar to the English

schoolboy of to-day, a patchwork of native states embraced and held

together by the great provinces under direct British rule....

Now as this strange unprecedented empire of the company grew in the

period between 1800 and 1858, the mechanical revolution was quietly

abolishing the great distance that had once separated India and Britain.

In the old days the rule of the company had interfered little in the

domestic life of the Indian states; it had given India foreign

overlords, but India was used to foreign overlords, and had hitherto

assimilated them; these Englishmen came into the country young, lived

there most of their lives, and became a part of its system. But now the

mechanical revolution began to alter this state of affairs. It became

easier for the British officials to go home and to have holidays in

Europe, easier for them to bring out wives and families; they ceased to

be Indianized; they remained more conspicuously foreign and western--and

there were more of them. And they began to interfere more vigorously

with Indian customs. Magical and terrible things like the telegraph and

the railway arrived. Christian missions became offensively busy. If they

did not make very many converts, at least they made sceptics among the

adherents of the older faiths. The young men in the towns began to be

“Europeanized” to the great dismay of their elders.

India had endured many changes of rulers before, but never the sort of

changes in her ways that these things portended. The Moslem teachers and

the Brahmins were alike alarmed, and the British were blamed for the

progress of mankind. Conflicts of economic interests grew more acute

with the increasing nearness of Europe; Indian industries, and

particularly the ancient cotton industry, suffered from legislation that

favoured the British manufacturer.[483] A piece of incredible folly on

the part of the company precipitated an outbreak. To the Brahmin a cow

is sacred; to the Moslem the pig is unclean. A new rifle, needing

greased cartridges--which the men had to bite--was served out to the

company’s Indian soldiers; the troops discovered that their cartridges

were greased with the fat of cows and swine. This discovery precipitated

a revolt of the company’s Indian army, the Indian mutiny (1857). First

the troops mutinied at Meerut. Then Delhi rose to restore the empire of

the Great Mogul....

The British public suddenly discovered India. They became aware of that

little garrison of British people, far away in that strange land of

fiery dust and weary sunshine, fighting for life against dark multitudes

of assailants. How they got there and what right they had there, the

British public did not ask. The love of one’s kin in danger overrides

such questions. 1857 was a year of passionate anxiety in Great Britain.

With mere handfuls of troops the British leaders, and notably Lawrence

and Nicholson, did amazing things. They did not sit down to be besieged

while the mutineers organized and gathered prestige; that would have

lost them India for ever. They attacked often against overwhelming odds.

“Clubs, not spades, are trumps,” said Lawrence. The Sikhs, the Gurkhas,

the Punjab troops stuck to the British. The south remained tranquil. Of

the massacres of Cawnpore and Lucknow in Oudh, and how a greatly

outnumbered force of British troops besieged and stormed Delhi, other

histories must tell. By April, 1859, the last embers of the blaze had

been stamped out, and the British were masters of India again. In no

sense had the mutiny been a popular insurrection; it was a mutiny merely

of the Bengal Army, due largely to the unimaginative rule of the company

officials. Its story abounds in instances of Indian help and kindness to

British fugitives. But it was a warning.

The direct result of the mutiny was the annexation of the Indian Empire

to the British Crown. By the act entitled _An Act for the Better

Government of India_, the Governor-General became a Viceroy representing

the Sovereign, and the place of the company was taken by a Secretary of

State for India responsible to the British Parliament. In 1877, Lord

Beaconsfield, to complete this work, caused Queen Victoria to be

proclaimed Empress of India.

Upon these extraordinary lines India and Britain are linked at the

present time. India is still the empire of the Great Mogul, but the

Great Mogul has been replaced by the “crowned republic” of Great

Britain. India is an autocracy without an autocrat. Its rule combines

the disadvantage of absolute monarchy with the impersonality and

irresponsibility of democratic officialdom. The Indian with a complaint

to make has no visible monarch to go to; his Emperor is a golden symbol;

he must circulate pamphlets in England or inspire a question in the

British House of Commons. The more occupied Parliament is with British

affairs, the less attention India will receive, and the more she will be

at the mercy of her small group of higher officials.

This is manifestly impossible as a permanent state of affairs. Indian

life, whatever its restraints, is moving forward with the rest of the

world; India has an increasing service of newspapers, an increasing

number of educated people affected by Western ideas, and an increasing

sense of a common grievance against her government. There had been

little or no corresponding advance in the education and quality of the

British official in India during the century. His tradition is a high

one; he is often a man of exceptional quality, but the system is

unimaginative and inflexible. Moreover, the military power that stands

behind these officials has developed neither in character nor

intelligence during the last century. No other class has been so

stagnant intellectually as the British military caste. Confronted with a

more educated India, the British military man, uneasily aware of his

educational defects and constantly apprehensive of ridicule, has in the

last few years displayed a disposition towards spasmodic violence that

has had some very lamentable results. For a time the great war

altogether diverted what small amount of British public attention was

previously given to India, and drew away the more intelligent military

men from her service. During those years, and the feverish years of

unsettlement that followed, things occurred in India, the massacre of an

unarmed political gathering at Amritzar in which nearly two thousand

people were killed or wounded, floggings and humiliating outrages, a

sort of official’s Terror, that produced a profound moral shock when at

last the Hunter Commission of 1919 brought them before the home public.

In liberal-minded Englishmen, who have been wont to regard their empire

as an incipient league of free peoples, this revelation, of the barbaric

quality in its administrators produced a very understandable dismay....

But the time has not yet come for writing the chapter of history that

India is opening for herself.... We cannot discuss here in detail the

still unsettled problems of the new India that struggles into being.

Already in the Government of India Act of 1919 we may have the opening

of a new and happier era that may culminate in a free and willing group

of Indian peoples taking an equal place among the confederated states of

the world....

The growth of the British Empire in directions other than that of India

was by no means so rapid during the earlier half of the nineteenth

century. A considerable school of political thinkers in Britain was

disposed to regard overseas possessions as a source of weakness to the

kingdom. The Australian settlements developed slowly until in 1842 the

discovery of valuable copper mines, and in 1851 of gold, gave them a new

importance. Improvements in transport were also making Australian wool

an increasingly marketable commodity in Europe. Canada too was not

remarkably progressive until 1849; it was troubled by dissensions

between its French and British inhabitants, there were several serious

revolts, and it was only in 1867 that a new constitution creating a

Federal Dominion of Canada relieved its internal strains. It was the

railway that altered the Canadian outlook. It enabled Canada, just as it

enabled the United States, to expand westward, to market its corn and

other produce in Europe, and in spite of its swift and extensive growth,

to remain in language and sympathy and interests one community. The

railway, the steamship, and the telegraphic cable were indeed changing

all the conditions of colonial development.

Before 1840, English settlements had already begun in New Zealand, and a

new Zealand Land Company had been formed to exploit the possibilities of

the island. In 1840 New Zealand also was added to the colonial

possessions of the British Crown.

Canada, as we have noted, was the first of the British possessions to

respond richly to the new economic possibilities the new methods of

transport were opening. Presently the republics of South America, and

particularly the Argentine Republic, began to feel, in their cattle

trade and coffee growing, the increased nearness of the European market.

Hitherto the chief commodities that had attracted the European powers

into unsettled and barbaric regions had been gold or other metals,

spices, ivory, or slaves. But in the latter quarter of the nineteenth

century the increase of the European populations was obliging their

governments to look abroad for staple foods; and the growth of

scientific industrialism was creating a demand for new raw materials,

fats and greases of every kind, rubber, and other hitherto disregarded

substances. It was plain that Great Britain and Holland and Portugal

were reaping a great and growing commercial advantage from their very

considerable control of tropical and semi-tropical products. After 1871

Germany and presently France and later Italy began to look for unannexed

raw-material areas, or for Oriental countries capable of profitable

modernization.

[Illustration: AFRICA about the middle of the 19th Century]

[Illustration: AFRICA 1914]

So began a fresh scramble all over the world, except in the American

region where the Monroe Doctrine now barred such adventures, for

politically unprotected lands. Close to Europe was the continent of

Africa, full of vaguely known possibilities. In 1850 it was a continent

of black mystery; only Egypt and the coast were known. A map must show

the greatness of the European ignorance at that time. It would need a

book as long as this Outline to do justice to the amazing story of the

explorers and adventurers who first pierced this cloud of darkness, and

to the political agents, administrators, traders, settlers, and

scientific men who followed in their track. Wonderful races of men like

the pigmies, strange beasts like the okapi, marvellous fruits and

flowers and insects, terrible diseases, astounding scenery of forest

and mountain, enormous inland seas, and gigantic rivers and cascades

were revealed; a whole new world. Even remains (at Zimbabwe) of some

unrecorded and vanished civilization, the southward enterprise of an

early people, were discovered. Into this new world came the Europeans,

and found the rifle already there in the hands of the Arab

slave-traders, and negro life in disorder. By 1900, as our second map

must show, all Africa was mapped, explored, estimated, and divided

between the European powers, divided with much snarling and disputation

into portions that left each power uneasy or discontented. Little heed

was given to the welfare of the natives in this scramble. The Arab

slaver was indeed curbed rather than expelled, but the greed for

rubber, which was a wild product collected under compulsion by the

natives in the Belgian Congo, a greed exacerbated by the pitiless

avarice of the King of the Belgians, and the clash of inexperienced

European administrators with the native population in many other

annexations, led to horrible atrocities. No European power has perfectly

clean hands in this matter.

We cannot tell here in any detail how Great Britain got possession of

Egypt in 1883, and remained there in spite of the fact that Egypt was

technically a part of the Turkish Empire, nor how nearly this scramble

led to war between France and Great Britain in 1898, when a certain

Colonel Marchand, crossing Central Africa from the west coast, tried at

Fashoda to seize the Upper Nile. In Uganda the French Catholic and the

British Anglican missionaries disseminated a form of Christianity so

heavily charged with the spirit of Napoleon, and so finely insistent

upon the nuances of doctrine, that a few years after its first glimpse

of European civilization, Mengo, the capital of Uganda, was littered

with dead “Protestants” and “Catholics” extremely difficult to

distinguish from the entirely unspiritual warriors of the old régime.

Nor can we tell how the British Government first let the Boers, or Dutch

settlers, of the Orange River district and the Transvaal set up

independent republics in the inland parts of South Africa, and then

repented and annexed the Transvaal Republic in 1877; nor how the

Transvaal Boers fought for freedom and won it after the Battle of Majuba

Hill (1881). Majuba Hill was made to rankle in the memory of the English

people by a persistent press campaign. A war with both republics broke

out in 1899, a three years’ war enormously costly to the British people,

which ended at last in the surrender of the two republics.

Their period of subjugation was a brief one. In 1907, after the downfall

of the imperialist government which had conquered them, the Liberals

took the South African problem in hand, and these former republics

became free and fairly willing associates with Cape Colony and Natal in

a confederation of all the states of South Africa as one self-governing

republic under the British Crown.

In a quarter of a century the partition of Africa was completed. There

remained unannexed three comparatively small countries: Liberia, a

settlement of liberated negro slaves on the west coast; Morocco, under a

Moslem Sultan;[484] and Abyssinia, a barbaric country, with an ancient

and peculiar form of Christianity, which had successfully maintained its

independence against Italy at the Battle of Adowa in 1896.

§ 10

It is difficult to believe that any large number of people really

accepted this headlong painting of the map of Africa in European colours

as a permanent new settlement of the world’s affairs, but it is the duty

of the historian to record that it was so accepted. There was but a

shallow historical background to the European mind in the nineteenth

century, hardly any sense of what constitutes an enduring political

system, and no habit of penetrating criticism. The quite temporary

advantages that the onset of the mechanical revolution in the west had

given the European great powers over the rest of the old world were

regarded by people, blankly ignorant of the great Mongol conquests of

the thirteenth and following centuries, as evidences of a permanent and

assured leadership. They had no sense of the transferability of science

and its fruits. They did not realize that Chinamen and Indians could

carry on the work of research as ably as Frenchmen or Englishmen. They

believed that there was some innate intellectual drive in the west, and

some innate indolence and conservatism in the east, that assured the

Europeans a world predominance for ever.

The consequence of this infatuation was that the various European

foreign offices set themselves not merely to scramble with the British

for the savage and undeveloped regions of the world’s surface, but also

to carve up the populous and civilized countries of Asia as though these

peoples also were no more than raw material for European exploitation.

The inwardly precarious but outwardly splendid imperialism of the

British ruling class in India, and the extensive and profitable

possessions of the Dutch in the East Indies, filled the ruling and

mercantile classes of the rival great powers with dreams of similar

glories in Persia, in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, and in Further

India, China, and Japan. In the closing years of the nineteenth century

it was assumed, as the reader may verify by an examination of the

current literature of the period, to be a natural and inevitable thing

that all the world should fall under European dominion. With a

hypocritical pretence of reluctant benevolent effort the European mind

prepared itself to take up what Mr. Rudyard Kipling called “the White

Man’s Burthen”--that is to say, the loot and lordship of the earth. The

Powers set themselves to this enterprise in a mood of jostling rivalry,

with half-educated or illiterate populations at home, with a mere

handful of men, a few thousand at most, engaged in scientific research,

with their internal political systems in a state of tension or

convulsive change, with a creaking economic system of the most

provisional sort, and with their religions far gone in decay. They

really believed that the vast populations of eastern Asia could be

permanently subordinated to such a Europe.

Even to-day there are many people who fail to grasp the essential facts

of this situation. They do not realize that in Asia the average brain is

not one whit inferior in quality to the average European brain; that

history shows Asiatics to be as bold, as vigorous, as generous, as

self-sacrificing, and as capable of strong collective action as

Europeans, and that there are and must continue to be a great many more

Asiatics than Europeans in the world. It has always been difficult to

restrain the leakage of knowledge from one population to another, and

now it becomes impossible. Under modern conditions world-wide economic

and educational equalization is in the long run inevitable. An

intellectual and moral rally of the Asiatics is going on at the present

time. The slight leeway of a century or so, a few decades may recover.

At the present time, for example, for one Englishman who knows Chinese

thoroughly, or has any intimate knowledge of Chinese life and thought,

there are hundreds of Chinamen conversant with everything the English

know. The balance of knowledge in favour of India may be even greater.

To Britain, India sends students; to India, Britain sends officials.

There is no organization whatever for the sending of European students,

as students, to examine and inquire into Indian history, archæology, and

current affairs.

Since the year 1898, the year of the seizure of Kiau-Chau by Germany and

of Wei-hai-wei by Britain, and the year after the Russian taking of Port

Arthur, events in China have moved more rapidly than in any other

country except Japan. A great hatred of Europeans swept like a flame

over China, and a political society for the expulsion of Europeans, the

Boxers, grew up and broke out into violence in 1900. This was an

outbreak of rage and mischief on quite old-fashioned lines. In 1900 the

Boxers murdered 250 Europeans and, it is said, nearly 30,000 Christians.

China, not for the first time in history, was under the sway of a

dowager empress, who, like the Empress Theodora of Constantinople, had

once, it is said, been a woman of no repute. She was an ignorant woman,

but of great force of character and in close sympathy with the Boxers.

She supported them, and protected those who perpetrated outrages on the

Europeans. All that again is what might have happened in 500 B.C. or

thereabouts against the Huns.

Things came to a crisis in 1900. The Boxers became more and more

threatening to the Europeans in China. Attempts were made to send up

additional European guards to the Peking legations, but this only

precipitated matters. The German ambassador was shot down in the streets

of Peking by a soldier of the imperial guard. The rest of the foreign

ambassadors gathered together and made a fortification of the more

favourably situated embassies and stood a siege of two months. A

combined allied force of 20,000 under a German general then marched up

to Peking and relieved the legations, and the old Empress fled

northwestward. Some of the European troops committed grave atrocities

upon the Chinese civil population.[485] That brings one up to about the

level of 1850, let us say.

There followed the practical annexation of Manchuria by Russia, a

squabble among the powers, and in 1904 a British invasion of Tibet,

hitherto a forbidden country. But what did not appear on the surface of

these events, and what made all these events fundamentally different,

was that China now contained a considerable number of able people who

had a European education and European knowledge. The Boxer Insurrection

subsided, and then the influence of this new factor began to appear in

talk of a constitution (1906), in the suppression of opium-smoking, and

in educational reforms. A constitution of the Japanese type came into

existence in 1909, making China a limited monarchy. But China is not to

be moulded to the Japanese pattern, and the revolutionary stir

continued. Japan, in her own reorganization, and in accordance with her

temperament, had turned her eyes to the monarchist west, but China was

looking across the Pacific. In 1911 the essential Chinese revolution

began. In 1912 the emperor abdicated, and the greatest community in the

world became a republic. The overthrow of the emperor was also the

overthrow of the Manchus, and the Mongolian pigtail, which had been

compulsory for the Chinese since 1644, vanished again from the land.

At the present time it is probable that there is more good brain matter

and more devoted men working out the modernization and the

reorganization of the Chinese civilization than we should find directed

to the welfare of any single European people. China will presently have

a modernized practicable script, a press, new and vigorous modern

universities, a reorganized industrial system, and a growing body of

scientific and economic inquiry. The natural industry and ingenuity of

her vast population will be released to co-operate upon terms of

equality with the Western world. She may have great internal

difficulties ahead of her yet; of that no man can judge. Nevertheless,

the time may not be very distant when the Federated States of China may

be at one with the United States of America and a pacified and

reconciled Europe in upholding the organized peace of the world.

§ 11

The pioneer country, however, in the recovery of the Asiatic peoples was

not China, but Japan. We have outrun our story in telling of China.

Hitherto Japan has played but a small part in this history; her secluded

civilization has not contributed very largely to the general shaping of

human destinies; she has received much, but she has given little. The

original inhabitants of the Japanese Islands were probably a northern

people with remote Nordic affinities, the Hairy Ainu. But the Japanese

proper are of the Mongolian race. Physically they resemble the

Amerindians, and there are many curious resemblances between the

prehistoric pottery and so forth of Japan and similar Peruvian products.

It is not impossible that they are a back-flow from the trans-Pacific

drift of the early heliolithic culture, but they may also have absorbed

from the south a Malay and even a Negrito element.

Whatever the origin of the Japanese, there can be no doubt that their

civilization, their writing, and their literary and artistic traditions

are derived from the Chinese. They were emerging from barbarism in the

second and third century of the Christian Era, and one of their earliest

acts as a people outside their own country was an invasion of Korea

under a queen Jingo, who seems to have played a large part in

establishing their civilization. Their history is an interesting and

romantic one; they developed a feudal system and a tradition of

chivalry; their attacks upon Korea and China are an Eastern equivalent

of the English wars in France. Japan was first brought into contact with

Europe in the sixteenth century; in 1542 some Portuguese reached it in a

Chinese junk, and in 1549 a Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, began his

teaching there. The Jesuit accounts describe a country greatly

devastated by perpetual feudal war. For a time Japan welcomed European

intercourse, and the Christian missionaries made a great number of

converts. A certain William Adams, of Gillingham, in Kent, became the

most trusted European adviser of the Japanese, and showed them how to

build big ships. There were voyages in Japanese-built ships to India and

Peru. Then arose complicated quarrels between the Spanish Dominicans,

the Portuguese Jesuits, and the English and Dutch Protestants, each

warning the Japanese against the evil political designs of the others.

The Jesuits, in a phase of ascendancy, persecuted and insulted the

Buddhists with great acrimony. These troubles interwove with the feudal

conflicts of the time. In the end the Japanese came to the conclusion

that the Europeans and their Christianity were an intolerable nuisance,

and that Catholic Christianity in particular was a mere cloak for the

political dreams of the Pope and the Spanish monarchy--already in

possession of the Philippine Islands; there was a great and conclusive

persecution of the Christians, and in 1638 Japan was absolutely closed

to Europeans,[486] and remained closed for over 200 years. During those

two centuries the Japanese remained as completely cut off from the rest

of the world as though they lived upon another planet. It was forbidden

to build any ship larger than a mere coasting boat. No Japanese could go

abroad, and no European enter the country.

For two centuries Japan remained outside the main current of history.

She lived on in a state of picturesque feudalism enlivened by blood

feuds, in which about five per cent. of the population, the samurai, or

fighting men, and the nobles and their families, tyrannized without

restraint over the rest of the population. All common men knelt when a

noble passed; to betray the slightest disrespect was to risk being

slashed to death by his _samurai_. The elect classes lived lives of

romantic adventure without one redeeming gleam of novelty; they loved,

murdered, and pursued fine points of honour--which probably bored the

intelligent ones extremely. We can imagine the wretchedness of a curious

mind, tormented by the craving for travel and knowledge, cooped up in

these islands of empty romance.

Meanwhile the great world outside went on to wider visions and new

powers. Strange shipping became more frequent, passing the Japanese

headlands; sometimes ships were wrecked and sailors brought ashore.

Through the Dutch settlement at Deshima, their one link with the outer

universe, came warnings that Japan was not keeping pace with the power

of the Western world. In 1837 a ship sailed into Yedo Bay flying a

strange flag of stripes and stars, and carrying some Japanese sailors

she had picked up far adrift in the Pacific. She was driven off by a

cannon shot. This flag presently reappeared on other ships. One in 1849

came to demand the liberation of eighteen shipwrecked American sailors.

Then in 1853 came four American warships under Commodore Perry, and

refused to be driven away. He lay at anchor in forbidden waters, and

sent messages to the two rulers who at that time shared the control of

Japan. In 1854 he returned with ten ships, amazing ships propelled by

steam, and equipped with big guns, and he made proposals for trade and

intercourse that the Japanese had no power to resist. He landed with a

guard of 500 men to sign the treaty. Incredulous crowds watched this

visitation from the outer world, marching through the streets.

Russia, Holland, and Britain followed in the wake of America. Foreigners

entered the country, and conflicts between them and Japanese gentlemen

of spirit ensued. A British subject was killed in a street brawl, and a

Japanese town was bombarded by the British (1863). A great nobleman

whose estates commanded the Straits of Shimonoseki saw fit to fire on

foreign vessels, and a second bombardment by a fleet of British, French,

Dutch, and American warships destroyed his batteries and scattered his

swordsmen. Finally an allied squadron (1865), at anchor off Kioto,

imposed a ratification of the treaties which opened Japan to the world.

The humiliation of the Japanese by these events was intense, and it

would seem that the salvation of peoples lies largely in such

humiliations. With astonishing energy and intelligence they set

themselves to bring their culture and organization up to the level of

the European powers. Never in all the history of mankind did a nation

make such a stride as Japan then did. In 1866 she was a mediæval people,

a fantastic caricature of the extremist romantic feudalism; in 1899 hers

was a completely Westernized people, on a level with the most advanced

European powers, and well in advance of Russia. She completely dispelled

the persuasion that Asia was in some irrevocable way hopelessly behind

Europe. She made all European progress seem sluggish and tentative by

comparison.

We cannot tell here in any detail of Japan’s war with China in 1894-95.

It demonstrated the extent of her Westernization. She had an efficient

Westernized army and a small but sound fleet. But the significance of

her renascence, though it was appreciated by Britain and the United

States, who were already treating her as if she were a European state,

was not understood by the other great powers engaged in the pursuit of

new Indias in Asia. Russia was pushing down through Manchuria to Korea,

France was already established far to the south in Tonkin and Annam,

Germany was prowling hungrily on the look-out for some settlement. The

three powers combined to prevent Japan reaping any fruits from the

Chinese war, and particularly from establishing herself on the mainland

at the points commanding the Japan sea. She was exhausted by her war

with China, and they threatened her with war.

[Illustration: JAPAN & the Eastern Coast of Asia]

In 1898 Germany descended upon China, and, making the murder of two

missionaries her excuse, annexed a portion of the province of

Shang-tung. Thereupon Russia seized the Liao-tung peninsula, and

extorted the consent of China to an extension of her trans-Siberian

railway to Port Arthur; and in 1900 she occupied Manchuria. Britain was

unable to resist the imitative impulse, and seized the port of

Wei-hai-wei (1898). How alarming these movements must have been to every

intelligent Japanese a glance at the map will show. They led to a war

with Russia which marks an epoch in the history of Asia, the close of

the period of European arrogance. The Russian people were, of course,

innocent and ignorant of this trouble that was being made for them

half-way round the world, and the wiser Russian statesmen were against

these foolish thrusts; but a gang of financial adventurers surrounded

the Tsar, including the Grand Dukes, his cousins. They had gambled

deeply in the prospective looting of Manchuria and China, and they would

suffer no withdrawal. So there began a transportation of great armies of

Japanese soldiers across the sea to Port Arthur and Korea, and the

sending of endless train-loads of Russian peasants along the Siberian

railway to die in those distant battlefields.

The Russians, badly led and dishonestly provided, were beaten on sea and

land alike. The Russian Baltic Fleet sailed round Africa to be utterly

destroyed in the Straits of Tshu-shima. A revolutionary movement among

the common people of Russia, infuriated by this remote and reasonless

slaughter, obliged the Tsar to end the war (1905); he returned the

southern half of Saghalien, which had been seized by Russia in 1875,

evacuated Manchuria, resigned Korea to Japan. The White Man was

beginning to drop his “Burthen” in eastern Asia. For some years,

however, Germany remained in uneasy possession of Kiau-Chau.

§ 12

We have already noted how the enterprise of Italy in Abyssinia had been

checked at the terrible battle of Adowa (1896), in which over 3000

Italians were killed and more than 4000 taken prisoner. The phase of

imperial expansion at the expense of organized non-European states was

manifestly drawing to a close. It had entangled the quite sufficiently

difficult political and social problems of Great Britain, France, Spain,

Italy, Germany, and Russia with the affairs of considerable alien,

unassimilable, and resentful populations; Great Britain had Egypt (not

formally annexed as yet), India, Burmah, and a variety of such minor

problems as Malta and Shanghai; France had cumbered herself with Tonkin

and Annam in addition to Algiers and Tunis; Spain was newly entangled in

Morocco; Italy had found trouble for herself in Tripoli; and German

overseas imperialism, though its “place in the sun” seemed a poor one,

derived what satisfaction it could from the thought of a prospective war

with Japan over Kiau-Chau. All these “subject” lands had populations at

a level of intelligence and education very little lower than those of

the possessing country; the development of a native press, of a

collective self-consciousness, and of demands for self-government was in

each case inevitable, and the statesmen of Europe had been far too busy

achieving these empires to have any clear ideas of what they would do

with them when they got them.

The Western democracies, as they woke up to freedom, discovered

themselves “imperial,” and were considerably embarrassed by the

discovery. The East came to the Western capitals with perplexing

demands. In London the common Englishman, much preoccupied by strikes,

by economic riddles, by questions of nationalization, municipalization,

and the like, found that his path was crossed and his public meetings

attended by a large and increasing number of swarthy gentlemen in

turbans, fezzes, and other strange headgear, all saying in effect: “You

have got us. The people who represent your government have destroyed our

own government, and prevent us from making a new one. What are you going

to do with us?”

(A question whose answer still lies beyond the frontiers of history.)

§ 13

We may note here briefly the very various nature of the constituents of

the British Empire in 1914. It was and is a quite unique political

combination; nothing of the sort has ever existed before.

First and central to the whole system was the “crowned republic” of the

United British Kingdoms, including (against the will of a considerable

part of the Irish people) Ireland. The majority of the British

Parliament, made up of the three united parliaments of England,

Scotland, and Ireland, determines the headship, the quality, and policy

of the ministry, and determines it largely on considerations arising out

of British domestic politics. It is this ministry which is the effective

supreme government, with powers of peace and war, over all the rest of

the empire;

Next in order of political importance to the British States were the

“crowned republics” of Australia, Canada, Newfoundland (the oldest

British possession, 1583), New Zealand, and South Africa, all

practically independent and self-governing states in alliance with Great

Britain, but each with a representative of the Crown appointed by the

Government in office;

Next the Indian Empire, an extension of the empire of the Great Mogul,

with its dependent and “protected” states reaching now from Baluchistan

to Burmah, and including Aden, in all of which empire the British Crown

and the Indian Office (under Parliamentary control) played the rôle of

the original Turkoman dynasty;

Then the ambiguous possession of Egypt, still nominally a part of the

Turkish Empire and still retaining its own monarch, the Khedive, but

under almost despotic British official rule;

Then the still more ambiguous “Anglo-Egyptian” Sudan province, occupied

and administered jointly by the British and by the (British controlled)

Egyptian Government;

Then a number of partially self-governing communities, some British in

origin and some not, with elected legislatures and an appointed

executive, such as Malta,[487] Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Bermuda;

Then the Crown colonies, in which the rule of the British Home

Government (through the Colonial Office), verged on autocracy, as in

Ceylon, Trinidad, and Fiji (where there was an appointed council), and

Gibraltar and St. Helena (where there was a governor);

Then great areas of (chiefly) tropical lands, raw-product areas, with

politically weak and under-civilized native communities, which were

nominally protectorates, and administered either by a High Commissioner

set over native chiefs (as in Basutoland) or over a chartered company

(as in Rhodesia). In some cases the Foreign Office, in some cases the

Colonial Office, and in some cases the India Office had been concerned

in acquiring the possessions that fell into this last and least definite

class of all, but for the most part the Colonial Office was now

responsible for them.

It will be manifest, therefore, that no single office and no single

brain had ever comprehended the British Empire as a whole. It was a

mixture of growths and accumulations entirely different from anything

that has ever been called an empire before. It guaranteed a wide peace

and security; that is why it was endured and sustained by many men of

the “subject” races--in spite of official tyrannies and insufficiencies,

and of much negligence on the part of the “home” public. Like the

“Athenian empire,” it was an overseas empire; its ways were sea ways,

and its common link was the British Navy. Like all empires, its cohesion

was dependent physically upon a method of communication; the development

of seamanship, ship-building, and steamships between the sixteenth and

nineteenth centuries had made it a possible and convenient Pax--the “Pax

Britannica,” and fresh developments of air or swift land transport might

at any time make it inconvenient.

Air transport may indeed be already opening the way to a still more

extensive and universal “Pax,” in which the British system may of its

own accord merge. It is impossible to say whether this unprecedented

imperialism will obstruct or help forward that final unification of the

world’s affairs towards which all history is pointing. A system so

various in its structure has many contradictory aspects, some very

attractive, and some very repellent to a liberal intelligence. The

conversion of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from mere

administered dependencies into quasi-independent allies, has been a very

fine feat of statescraft. But in these cases the British Government had

to deal with largely kindred and sympathetic populations, very ready to

renew the methods of the old country upon a distant soil. In the case of

mainly alien peoples the record is not so good, and, for reasons we

have already partly analyzed (§ 6), it has been worse during the last

few decades than it was before. There has been a deterioration in the

quality of British imperialism in relation to “subject peoples.” Whether

that is a temporary deterioration or whether it is a fated drift towards

disruption is a question of the profoundest moment to an English writer,

but it is one that it is impossible to discuss properly within the

limits of this Outline. But even at its worst it is open to question

whether the British rule in India does not compare favourably with any

other domination of one entirely remote and alien civilization by

another. What is wrong is not so much that Britain rules India and

Egypt, but that any civilized country should be ruled by the legislature

of another, and that there should be no impartial court of appeal in the

world yet to readjust this arrangement.[488]

[Illustration: OVERSEAS EMPIRES of EUROPEAN POWERS, January 1914.]

XL

THE INTERNATIONAL CATASTROPHE OF 1914[489]

§ 1. _The Armed Peace before the Great War._ § 2. _Imperial

Germany._ § 3. _The Spirit of Imperialism in Britain and Ireland._

§ 4. _Imperialism in France, Italy, and the Balkans._ § 5. _Russia

a Grand Monarchy._ § 6. _The United States and the Imperial Idea._

§ 7. _The Immediate Causes of the Great War._ § 8. _A Summary of

the Great War up to 1917._ § 9. _The Great War from the Russian

Collapse to the Armistice._ § 10. _The Political, Economical, and

Social Disorganization Caused by the War._ § 11. _President Wilson

and the Problems of Versailles._ § 12. _Summary of the First

Covenant of the League of Nations._ § 13. _A General Outline of the

Treaties of 1919 and 1920._ § 14. _A Forecast of the “Next War.”_ §

15. _The State of Men’s Minds in 1920._

§ 1

For thirty-six years after the Treaty of San Stefano and the Berlin

Conference, Europe maintained an uneasy peace within its borders; there

was no war between any of the leading states during this period. They

jostled, browbeat, and threatened one another, but they did not come to

actual hostilities. There was a general realization after 1871 that

modern war was a much more serious thing than the professional warfare

of the eighteenth century, an effort of peoples as a whole that might

strain the social fabric very severely, an adventure not to be rashly

embarked upon. The mechanical revolution was giving constantly more

powerful (and expensive) weapons by land and sea, and more rapid methods

of transport; and making it more and more impossible to carry on warfare

without a complete dislocation of the economic life of the community.

Even the foreign offices felt the fear of war.

But though war was dreaded as it had never been dreaded in the world

before, nothing was done in the way of setting up a federal control to

prevent human affairs drifting towards war. In 1898, it is true, the

young Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) issued a rescript inviting the other

Great Powers to a conference of states “seeking to make the great idea

of universal peace triumph over the elements of trouble and discord.”

His rescript recalls the declaration of his predecessor, Alexander I,

which gave its tone to the Holy Alliance, and it is vitiated by the same

assumption that peace can be established between sovereign governments

rather than by a broad appeal to the needs and rights of the one people

of mankind. The lesson of the United States of America, which showed

that there could be neither unity of action nor peace until the thought

of the “people of Virginia” and the “people of Massachusetts” had been

swept aside by the thought of the “people of the United States,” went

entirely disregarded in the European attempts at pacification. Two

conferences were held at The Hague in Holland, one in 1899 and another

in 1907, and at the second nearly all the sovereign states of the world

were represented. They were represented diplomatically, there was no

direction of the general intelligence of the world to their

deliberations, the ordinary common man did not even know that these

conferences were sitting, and for the most part the assembled

representatives haggled cunningly upon points of international law

affecting war, leaving aside the abolition of war as a chimæra. These

Hague Conferences did nothing to dispel the idea that international life

is necessarily competitive. They accepted that idea. They did nothing to

develop the consciousness of a world commonweal overriding sovereigns

and foreign offices. The international lawyers and statesmen who

attended these gatherings were as little disposed to hasten on a world

commonweal on such a basis as were the Prussian statesmen of 1848 to

welcome an all-German parliament overriding the rights and “policy” of

the King of Prussia.

In America a series of three Pan-American conferences in 1889, 1901, and

1906 went some way towards the development of a scheme of international

arbitration for the whole American continent.

The character and good faith of Nicholas II, who initiated these Hague

gatherings, we will not discuss at any length here. He may have thought

that time was on the side of Russia. But of the general unwillingness of

the Great Powers to face the prospect of a merger of sovereign powers,

without which permanent peace projects are absurd, there can be no sort

of doubt whatever. It was no cessation of international competition with

its acute phase of war that they desired, but rather a cheapening of

war, which was becoming too costly. Each wanted to economize the wastage

of minor disputes and conflicts, and to establish international laws

that would embarrass its more formidable opponents in wartime without

incommoding itself. These were the practical ends they sought at the

Hague Conference. It was a gathering they attended to please Nicholas

II, just as the monarchs of Europe had subscribed to the evangelical

propositions of the Holy Alliance to please Alexander I; and as they had

attended it, they tried to make what they conceived to be some use of

it.

§ 2

The peace of Frankfort had left Germany Prussianized and united, the

most formidable of all the Great Powers of Europe. France was humiliated

and crippled. Her lapse into republicanism seemed likely to leave her

without friends in any European court. Italy was as yet a mere

stripling. Austria sank now rapidly to the position of a confederate in

German policy. Russia was vast, but undeveloped; and the British Empire

was mighty only on the sea. Beyond Europe the one power to be reckoned

with by Germany was the United States of America, growing now into a

great industrial nation, but with no army nor navy worth considering by

European standards.

The new Germany which was embodied in the empire that had been created

at Versailles was a complex and astonishing mixture of the fresh

intellectual and material forces of the world, with the narrowest

political traditions of the European system. She was vigorously

educational; she was by far the most educational state in the world; she

made the educational pace for all her neighbours and rivals. In this

time of reckoning for Germany, it may help the British reader to a

balanced attitude to recall the educational stimulation for which his

country has to thank first the German Prince Consort and then German

competition. That mean jealousy of the educated common man on the part

of the British church and ruling class, which no patriotic pride or

generous impulse had ever sufficed to overcome, went down before a

growing fear of German efficiency. And Germany took up the organization

of scientific research and of the application of scientific method to

industrial and social development with such a faith and energy as no

other community had ever shown before. Throughout all this period of the

armed peace she was reaping and sowing afresh and reaping again the

harvests, the unfailing harvests, of freely disseminated knowledge. She

grew swiftly to become a great manufacturing and trading power; her

steel output outran the British; in a hundred new fields of production

and commerce, where intelligence and system was of more account than

mere trader’s cunning, in the manufacture of optical glass, of dyes, and

of a multitude of chemical products and in endless novel processes, she

led the world.

To the British manufacturer who was accustomed to see inventions come

into his works, he knew not whence nor why, begging to be adopted, this

new German method of keeping and paying scientific men seemed abominably

unfair. It was compelling fortune, he felt. It was packing the cards. It

was encouraging a nasty class of intellectuals to interfere in the

affairs of sound business men. Science went abroad from its first home

like an unloved child. The splendid chemical industry of Germany was

built on the work of the Englishman Perkins, who could find no

“practical” English business man to back him. And Germany also led the

way in many forms of social legislation. Germany realized that labour is

a national asset, that it deteriorates through unemployment, and that,

for the common good, it has to be taken care of outside the works. The

British employer was still under the delusion that labour had no

business to exist outside the works, and that the worse such exterior

existence was, the better somehow for him. Moreover, because of his

general illiteracy, he was an intense individualist: his was the

insensate rivalry of the vulgar mind; he hated his fellow manufacturers

about as much as he hated his labour and his customers. German

producers, on the other hand, were persuaded of the great advantages of

combination and civility; their enterprises tended to flow together and

assume more and more the character of national undertakings.

This educating, scientific, and organizing Germany was the natural

development of the liberal Germany of 1848; it had its roots far back in

the recuperative effort after the shame of the Napoleonic conquest. All

that was good, all that was great in this modern Germany, she owed

indeed to her schoolmasters. But this scientific organizing spirit was

only one of the two factors that made up the new German Empire. The

other factor was the Hohenzollern monarchy which had survived Jena,

which had tricked and bested the revolution of 1848, and which, under

the guidance of Bismarck, had now clambered to the legal headship of all

Germany outside Austria. Except the Tsardom, no other European state had

so preserved the tradition of the Grand Monarchy of the eighteenth

century as the Prussian. Through the tradition of Frederick the Great,

Machiavelli now reigned in Germany. In the head of this fine new modern

state, therefore, there sat no fine modern brain to guide it to a world

predominance in world service, but an old spider lusting for power.

Prussianized Germany was at once the newest and the most antiquated

thing in Western Europe. She was the best and the wickedest state of her

time.

The psychology of nations is still but a rudimentary science.

Psychologists have scarcely begun to study the citizen side of the

individual man. But it is of the utmost importance to our subject that

the student of universal history should give some thought to the mental

growth of the generations of Germans educated since the victories of

1871. They were naturally inflated by their sweeping unqualified

successes in war, and by their rapid progress from comparative poverty

to wealth. It would have been more than human in them if they had not

given way to some excesses of patriotic vanity. But this reaction was

deliberately seized upon and fostered and developed by a systematic

exploitation and control of school and college, literature and press, in

the interests of the Hohenzollern dynasty. A teacher, a professor, who

did not teach and preach, in and out of season, the racial, moral,

intellectual, and physical superiority of the Germans to all other

peoples, their extraordinary devotion to war and their dynasty, and

their inevitable destiny under that dynasty to lead the world, was a

marked man, doomed to failure and obscurity.[490] German historical

teaching became an immense systematic falsification of the human past,

with a view to the Hohenzollern future. All other nations were

represented as incompetent and decadent; the Prussians were the leaders

and regenerators of mankind. The young German read this in his

school-books, heard it in church, found it in his literature, had it

poured into him with passionate conviction by his professor. It was

poured into him by all his professors; Hueffer (_op. cit._) says that

lectures in biology or mathematics would break off from their proper

subject to indulge in long passages of royalist patriotic rant. Only

minds of extraordinary toughness and originality could resist such a

torrent of suggestion. Insensibly there was built up in the German mind

a conception of Germany and its emperor as of something splendid and

predominant as nothing else had ever been before, a godlike nation in

“shining armour” brandishing the “good German sword” in a world of

inferior--and very badly disposed--peoples. We have told our story of

Europe; the reader may judge whether the glitter of the German sword is

exceptionally blinding. Germania was deliberately intoxicated, she was

systematically kept drunk, with this sort of patriotic rhetoric. It is

the greatest of the Hohenzollern crimes that the Crown constantly and

persistently tampered with education, and particularly with historical

teaching. No other modern state has so sinned against education. The

oligarchy of the crowned republic of Great Britain may have crippled and

starved education, but the Hohenzollern monarchy corrupted and

prostituted it.

It cannot be too clearly stated, it is the most important fact in the

history of the last half century, that the German people was

methodically indoctrinated with the idea of a German world-predominance

based on might, and with the theory that war was a necessary thing in

life. The key to German historical teaching is to be found in Count

Moltke’s dictum: “Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a

beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained by

God.” (Gladstone, we have noted, in his Tory days showed the same pious

acquiescence in the family slave-holding.) “Without war the world would

stagnate and lose itself in materialism.” And the anti-Christian German

philosopher, Nietzsche, found himself quite at one with the pious

field-marshal. “It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment,” he observes,

“to expect much (even anything at all) from mankind if it forgets how to

make war. As yet no means are known which call so much into action as a

great war that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality

born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness,

that fervour born of effort in the annihilation of the enemy, that proud

indifference to loss, to one’s own existence, to that of one’s fellows,

that earthquake-like soul-shaking which a people needs when it is losing

its vitality.”[491]

This sort of teaching, which pervaded the German Empire from end to end,

was bound to be noted abroad, bound to alarm every other power and

people in the world, bound to provoke an anti-German confederation; and

it was accompanied by a parade of military, and presently of naval

preparation, that threatened France, Russia, and Britain alike. It

affected the thoughts, the manners, and morals of the entire German

people--for they are a plastic people, and not refractory under

instruction like the Irish and English. After 1871, the German abroad

thrust out his chest and raised his voice. He threw a sort of trampling

quality even into the operations of commerce. His machinery came on the

markets of the world, his shipping took the seas with a splash of

patriotic challenge. His very merits he used as a means of offence. (And

probably most other peoples, if they had had the same experiences and

undergone the same training, would have behaved in a similar manner.)

[Illustration: The Emperor William II.]

By one of those accidents in history that personify and precipitate

catastrophes, the ruler of Germany, the emperor William II, embodied the

new education of his people and the Hohenzollern tradition in the

completest form. He came to the throne in 1888 at the age of

twenty-nine; his father, Frederick III, had succeeded his grandfather,

William I, in the March, to die in the June of that year. William II was

the grandson of Queen Victoria on his mother’s side, but his temperament

showed no traces of the liberal German tradition that distinguished the

Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family. His head was full of the frothy stuff of the

new imperialism. He signalized his accession by an address to his army

and navy; his address to his people followed three days later. A high

note of contempt for democracy was sounded: “The soldier and the army,

not parliamentary majorities, have welded together the German Empire. My

trust is placed in the army.” So the patient work of the German

schoolmasters was disowned, and the Hohenzollern declared himself

triumphant.

The next exploit of the young monarch was to quarrel with the old

Chancellor, Bismarck, who had made the new German Empire, and to dismiss

him (1890). There were no profound differences of opinion between them,

but, as Bismarck said, the Emperor intended to be his own chancellor.

These were the opening acts of an active and aggressive career. This

William II meant to make a noise in the world, a louder noise than any

other monarch had ever made. The whole of Europe was soon familiar with

the figure of the new monarch, invariably in military uniform of the

most glittering sort, staring valiantly, fiercely moustached, and with a

withered left arm ingeniously minimized. He affected silver shining

breastplates and long white cloaks. A great restlessness was manifest.

It was clear he conceived himself destined for great things, but for a

time it was not manifest what particular great things these were. There

was no oracle at Delphi now to tell him that he was destined to destroy

a great empire.

The note of theatricality about him and the dismissal of Bismarck

alarmed many of his subjects, but they were presently reassured by the

idea that he was using his influence in the cause of peace and to

consolidate Germany. He travelled much, to London, Vienna, Rome--where

he had private conversations with the Pope--to Athens, where his sister

married the king in 1889, and to Constantinople. He was the first

Christian sovereign to be a Sultan’s guest. He also went to Palestine. A

special gate was knocked through the ancient wall of Jerusalem so that

he could ride into that place; it was beneath his dignity to walk in. He

induced the Sultan to commence the reorganization of the Turkish Army

upon German lines and under German officers. In 1895 he announced that

Germany was a “world power,” and that “the future of Germany lay upon

the water”--regardless of the fact that the British considered that they

were there already--and he began to interest himself more and more in

the building up of a great navy. He also took German art and literature

under his care; he used his influence to retain the distinctive and

blinding German blackletter against the Roman type used by the rest of

western Europe, and he supported the Pan-German movement, which claimed

the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Flemish Belgians and the German Swiss

as members of a great German brotherhood--as in fact good assimilable

stuff for a hungry young empire which meant to grow. All other monarchs

in Europe paled before him.

He used the general hostility against Britain aroused throughout Europe

by the war against the Boer Republics to press forward his schemes for

a great navy, and this, together with the rapid and challenging

extension of the German colonial empire in Africa and the Pacific Ocean,

alarmed and irritated the British extremely. British liberal opinion in

particular found itself under the exasperating necessity of supporting

an ever-increasing British Navy. “I will not rest,” he said, “until I

have brought my navy to the same height at which my army stands.” The

most peace-loving of the islanders could not ignore that threat.

In 1890 he had acquired the small island of Heligoland from Britain.

This he made into a great naval fortress.

As his navy grew, his enterprise increased. He proclaimed the Germans

“the salt of the earth.” They must not “weary in the work of

civilization; Germany, like the spirit of Imperial Rome, must expand and

impose itself.” This he said on Polish soil, in support of the steady

efforts the Germans were making to suppress the Polish language and

culture, and to Germanize their share of Poland. God he described as his

“Divine Ally.” In the old absolutisms the monarch was either God himself

or the adopted agent of God; the Kaiser took God for his trusty

henchman. “Our old God,” he said affectionately. When the Germans seized

Kiau-Chau, he spoke of the German “mailed fist.” When he backed Austria

against Russia, he talked of Germany in her “shining armour.”

The disasters of Russia in Manchuria in 1905 released the spirit of

German imperialism to bolder aggressions. The fear of a joint attack

from France and Russia seemed lifting. The emperor made a kind of regal

progress through the Holy Land, landed at Tangier to assure the Sultan

of Morocco of his support against the French, and inflicted upon France

the crowning indignity of compelling her by a threat of war to dismiss

Delcassé, her foreign minister. He drew tighter the links between

Austria and Germany, and in 1908, Austria, with his support, defied the

rest of Europe by annexing from the Turk the Yugo-Slav provinces of

Bosnia and Herzegovina. So by his naval challenge to Britain and these

aggressions upon France and the Slavs he forced Britain, France, and

Russia into a defensive understanding against him. The Bosnian

annexation had the further effect of estranging Italy, which had

hitherto been his ally.

Such was the personality that the evil fate of Germany set over her to

stimulate, organize, and render intolerable to the rest of the world the

natural pride and self-assertion of a great people who had at last,

after long centuries of division and weakness, escaped from a jungle of

princes to unity and the world’s respect. It was natural that the

commercial and industrial leaders of this new Germany who were now

getting rich, the financiers intent upon overseas exploits, the

officials and the vulgar, should find this leader very much to their

taste. Many Germans who thought him rash or tawdry in their secret

hearts, supported him publicly because he had so taking an air of

success. _Hoch der Kaiser!_

Yet Germany did not yield itself without a struggle to the

strong-flowing tide of imperialism. Important elements in German life

struggled against this swaggering new autocracy. The old German nations,

and particularly the Bavarians, refused to be swallowed up in

Prussianism. And with the spread of education and the rapid

industrialization of Germany, organized labour developed its ideas and a

steady antagonism to the military and patriotic clattering of its ruler.

A new political party was growing up in the state, the Social Democrats,

professing the doctrines of Marx. In the teeth of the utmost opposition

from the official and clerical organizations, and of violently

repressive laws against its propaganda and against combinations, this

party grew. The Kaiser denounced it again and again; its leaders were

sent to prison or driven abroad. Still it grew. When he came to the

throne it polled not half a million votes; in 1907 it polled over three

million. He attempted to concede many things, old age and sickness

insurance, for example, as a condescending gift, things which it claimed

for the workers as their right. His conversion to socialism was noted,

but it gained no converts to imperialism. His naval ambitions were ably

and bitterly denounced; the colonial adventures of the new German

capitalists were incessantly attacked by this party of the common sense

of the common man. But to the army, the Social Democrats accorded a

moderate support, because, much as they detested their home-grown

autocrat, they hated and dreaded the barbaric and retrogressive

autocracy of Russia on their eastern frontier more.

The danger plainly before Germany was that this swaggering imperialism

would compel Britain, Russia, and France into a combined attack upon

her, an offensive-defensive. The Kaiser wavered between a stiff attitude

towards Britain and clumsy attempts to propitiate her, while his fleet

grew and while he prepared for a preliminary struggle with Russia and

France. When in 1913 the British government proposed a cessation on

either hand of naval construction for a year, it was refused. The Kaiser

was afflicted with a son and heir more Hohenzollern, more imperialistic,

more Pan-Germanic than his father. He had been nurtured upon imperialist

propaganda. His toys had been soldiers and guns. He snatched at a

premature popularity by outdoing his father’s patriotic and aggressive

attitudes. His father, it was felt, was growing middle-aged and

over-careful. The Crown Prince renewed him. Germany had never been so

strong, never so ready for a new great adventure and another harvest of

victories. The Russians, he was instructed, were decayed, the French

degenerate, the British on the verge of civil war. This young Crown

Prince was but a sample of the abounding upper-class youth of Germany in

the spring of 1914. They had all drunken from the same cup. Their

professors and teachers, their speakers and leaders, their mothers and

sweethearts, had been preparing them for the great occasion that was now

very nearly at hand. They were full of the tremulous sense of imminent

conflict, of a trumpet call to stupendous achievements, of victory over

mankind abroad, triumph over the recalcitrant workers at home. The

country was taut and excited like an athletic competitor at the end of

his training.

§ 3

Throughout the period of the armed peace Germany was making the pace and

setting the tone for the rest of Europe. The influence of her new

doctrines of aggressive imperialism was particularly strong upon the

British mind, which was ill-equipped to resist a strong intellectual

thrust from abroad. The educational impulse the Prince Consort had given

had died away after his death; the universities of Oxford and Cambridge

were hindered in their task of effective revision of upper-class

education by the fears and prejudices the so-called “conflict of science

and religion” had roused in the clergy who dominated them through

Convocation; popular education was crippled by religious squabbling, by

the extreme parsimony of the public authorities, by the desire of

employers for child labour, and by individualistic objection to

“educating other people’s children.” The old tradition of the English,

the tradition of plain statement, legality, fair play, and a certain

measure of republican freedom had faded considerably during the stresses

of the Napoleonic Wars; romanticism, of which Sir Walter Scott, the

great novelist, was the chief promoter, had infected the national

imagination with a craving for the florid and picturesque. “Mr. Briggs,”

the comic Englishman of _Punch_ in the fifties and sixties, getting

himself into highland costume and stalking deer, was fairly

representative of the spirit of the new movement. It presently dawned

upon Mr. Briggs as a richly coloured and creditable fact he had hitherto

not observed, that the sun never set on his dominions. The country which

had once put Clive and Warren Hastings on trial for their unrighteous

treatment of Indians, was now persuaded to regard them as entirely

chivalrous and devoted figures. They were “empire builders.” Under the

spell of Disraeli’s Oriental imagination, which had made Queen Victoria

an “empress,” the Englishman turned readily enough towards the vague

exaltations of modern imperialism.

The perverted ethnology and distorted history which was persuading the

mixed Slavic, Keltic, and Teutonic Germans that they were a wonderful

race apart, was imitated by English writers who began to exalt a new

ethnological invention, the “Anglo-Saxon.” This remarkable compound was

presented as the culmination of humanity, the crown and reward of the

accumulated effort of Greek and Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Jew, Mongol,

and such-like lowly precursors of its white splendour. The senseless

legend of German superiority did much to exacerbate the irritations of

the Poles in Posen and the French in Lorraine. The even more ridiculous

legend of the superior Anglo-Saxon did not merely increase the

irritations of English rule in Ireland, but it lowered the tone of

British dealings with “subject” peoples throughout the entire world. For

the cessation of respect and the cultivation of “superior” ideas are the

cessation of civility and justice. In the early days of British rule in

India, British officials went out modestly as to a wonderful country to

learn and live; now they went out absurdly, as samples of a wonderful

people, as lights to a great darkness, to profit and prevail.

The imitation of German patriotic misconceptions did not end with this

“Anglo-Saxon” fabrication. The clever young men at the British

universities in the eighties and nineties, bored by the flatness and

insincerities of domestic politics, were moved to imitation and rivalry

by this new teaching of an arrogant, subtle, and forceful nationalist

imperialism, this combination of Machiavelli and Attila, which was being

imposed upon the thought and activities of young Germany. Britain, too,

they thought, must have her shining armour and wave her good sword. The

new British imperialism found its poet in Mr. Kipling and its practical

support in a number of financial and business interests whose way to

monopolies and exploitations was lighted by its glow. These

Prussianizing Englishmen carried their imitation of Germany to the most

extraordinary lengths. Central Europe is one continuous economic system,

best worked as one; and the new Germany had achieved a great customs

union, a Zollverein of all its constituents. It became naturally one

compact system, like a clenched fist. The British Empire sprawled like

an open hand throughout the world, its members different in nature,

need, and relationship, with no common interest except the common

guarantee of safety. But the new Imperialists were blind to that

difference. If new Germany had a Zollverein, then the British Empire

must be in the fashion; and the natural development of its various

elements must be hampered everywhere by “imperial preferences” and the

like....

Yet the imperialist movement in Great Britain never had the authority

nor the unanimity it had in Germany. It was not a natural product of any

of the three united but diverse British peoples. It was not congenial to

them. Queen Victoria and her successors, Edward VII and George V, were

indisposed, either by temperament or tradition, to wear “shining

armour,” shake “mailed fists,” and flourish “good swords” in the

Hohenzollern fashion. They had the wisdom to refrain from any overt

meddling with public ideas. And this “British” imperialist movement had

from the first aroused the hostility of the large number of English,

Welsh, Irish, and Scotch writers who refused to recognize this new

“British” nationality or to accept the theory that they were these

“Anglo-Saxon” supermen. And many great interests in Britain, and notably

the shipping interest, had been built up upon free trade, and regarded

the fiscal proposals of the new imperialists, and the new financial and

mercantile adventurers with whom they were associated, with a

justifiable suspicion. On the other hand, these ideas ran like wildfire

through the military class, through Indian officialdom and the like.

Hitherto there had always been something apologetic about the army man

in England. He was not native to that soil. Here was a movement that

promised to make him as splendidly important as his Prussian brother in

arms. And the imperialist idea also found support in the cheap popular

press that was now coming into existence to cater for the new stratum of

readers created by elementary education. This press wanted plain,

bright, simple ideas adapted to the needs of readers who had scarcely

begun to think.

In spite of such support, and its strong appeal to national vanity,

British imperialism never saturated the mass of the British peoples. The

English are not a mentally docile people, and the noisy and rather

forced enthusiasm for imperialism and higher tariffs of the old Tory

Party, the army class, the country clergy, the music-halls, the

assimilated aliens, the vulgar rich, and the new large employers,

inclined the commoner sort, and particularly organized labour, to a

suspicious attitude. If the continually irritated sore of the Majuba

defeat permitted the country to be rushed into the needless, toilsome,

and costly conquest of the Boer republics in South Africa, the strain of

that adventure produced a sufficient reaction towards decency and

justice to reinstate the Liberal Party in power, and to undo the worst

of that mischief by the creation of a South African confederation.

Considerable advances continued to be made in popular education, and in

the recovery of public interests and the general wealth from the

possession of the few. And in these years of the armed peace, the three

British peoples came very near to a settlement, on fairly just and

reasonable lines, of their long-standing misunderstanding with Ireland.

The great war, unluckily for them, overtook them in the very crisis of

this effort.

Like Japan, Ireland has figured but little in this _Outline of

History_, and for the same reason, because she is an extreme island

country, receiving much, but hitherto giving but little back into the

general drama. Her population is a very mixed one, its basis, and

probably its main substance, being of the dark “Mediterranean” strain,

pre-Nordic and pre-Aryan, like the Basques and the people of Portugal

and south Italy. These people reached the island in Neolithic times; no

Palæolithic remains have been found in Ireland. Over this original basis

there flowed, about the sixth century B.C.--we do not know to what

degree of submergence--a wave of Keltic peoples, in at least sufficient

strength to establish a Keltic language, the Irish Gaelic. There were

comings and goings, invasions and counter-invasions of this and that

Keltic or Kelticized people between Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and

England. The island was Christianized in the fifth century. Later on the

east coast was raided and settled by Northmen, but we do not know to

what extent they altered the racial quality. The Norman-English came in

1169, in the time of Henry II and onward. The Teutonic strain may be as

strong or stronger than the Keltic in modern Ireland. Hitherto Ireland

had been a tribal and barbaric country, with a few centres of security

wherein the artistic tendencies of the more ancient race found scope in

metal-work and the illumination of holy books. Now, in the twelfth

century, there was an imperfect conquest by the English Crown, and

scattered settlements by Normans and English in various parts of the

country. From the outset profound temperamental differences between the

Irish and English were manifest, differences exacerbated by a difference

of language, and these became much more evident after the Protestant

Reformation. The English were naturally a non-sacerdotal people; they

had the Northman’s dislike for and disbelief in priests; the share of

Englishmen in the European Reformation was a leading one. The Irish

found the priest congenial, and resisted the Reformation obstinately and

bitterly.

The English rule in Ireland had been from the first an intermittent

civil war due to the clash of languages and the different laws of land

tenure and inheritance of the two peoples. It was further embittered at

the Reformation by this religious incompatibility. The rebellions,

massacres, and subjugations of the unhappy island during the reigns of

Elizabeth and James I we cannot tell of here; but under James came a

new discord with the confiscation of large areas of Ulster and their

settlement with Presbyterian Scotch colonists. They formed a Protestant

community in necessary permanent conflict with the Catholic remainder of

Ireland.

[Illustration: IRELAND]

In the political conflicts during the reign of Charles I and the

Commonweal, and of James II and William and Mary, the two sides in

English affairs found sympathizers and allies in the Irish parties.

There is a saying in Ireland that England’s misfortune is Ireland’s

opportunity, and the English civil trouble that led to the execution of

Strafford enabled the Irish Catholics to perpetrate a ferocious massacre

of the English in Ireland (1641)--a very cruel and barbaric massacre in

which neither women nor little children were spared. Later on Cromwell

was to avenge that massacre by giving no quarter to any men actually

found under arms, a severity remembered by the Irish Catholics with

extravagant bitterness. Between 1689 and 1691 Ireland was again torn by

civil war. James II sought the support of the Irish Catholics against

William III, and his adherents were badly beaten at the battles of the

Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691).

There was a settlement, the Treaty of Limerick, a disputed settlement in

which the English Government promised much in the way of tolerance for

Catholics and the like, and failed to keep its promises. Limerick is

still a cardinal memory in the long story of Irish embitterment.

Comparatively few English people have even heard of this Treaty of

Limerick; in Ireland it rankles to this day.

The eighteenth century was a century of accumulating grievance. English

commercial jealousy put heavy restraints upon Irish trade, and the

development of a wool industry was destroyed in the south and west. The

Ulster Protestants were treated little better than the Catholics in

these matters, and they were the chief of the rebels. There was more

agrarian revolt in the north than in the south; the Steel Boys, and

later the Peep-o’-Day Boys, were Ulster terrorists. There was a

parliament in Ireland, but it was a Protestant parliament, even more

limited and corrupt than the contemporary British Parliament; there was

a considerable civilization in and about Dublin, and much literary and

scientific activity, conducted in English and centring upon the

Protestant university of Trinity College. This was the Ireland of Swift,

Goldsmith, Burke, Berkeley, and Boyle. It was essentially a part of the

English culture. The Catholic religion and the Irish language were

outcast and persecuted things in the darkness.

It was from this Ireland of the darkness that the recalcitrant Ireland

of the twentieth century arose. The Irish Parliament, its fine

literature, its science, all its culture, gravitated naturally enough to

London, because they were inseparably a part of that world. The more

prosperous landlords went to England to live, and had their children

educated there. The increasing facilities of communication enhanced this

tendency and depleted Dublin. The Act of Union (January 1st, 1801) was

the natural coalescence of two entirely kindred systems, of the

Anglo-Irish Parliament with the British Parliament, both oligarchic,

both politically corrupt in the same fashion. There was a vigorous

opposition on the part, not so much of the outer Irish as of Protestants

settled in Ireland, and a futile insurrection under Robert Emmet in

1803. Dublin, which had been a fine Anglo-Irish city in the middle

eighteenth century, was gradually deserted by its intellectual and

political life, and invaded by the outer Irish of Ireland. Its

fashionable life became more and more official, centring upon the Lord

Lieutenant in Dublin Castle; its chief social occasion is now a horse

show. But while the Ireland of Swift and Goldsmith was part and lot with

the England of Pope, Dr. Johnson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, while there

has never been and is not now any real definable difference except one

of geography between the “governing class” in Ireland and in Britain,

the Irish underworld and the English underworld were essentially

dissimilar. The upward struggle of the English “democracy” to education,

to political recognition, had no Irish counterpart. Britain was

producing a great industrial population, Protestant or sceptical; she

had agricultural labourers indeed, but no peasants. Ireland had become a

land of peasants, blankly ignorant and helplessly priest-ridden. Their

cultivation degenerated more and more into a growing of potatoes and a

feeding of pigs. The people married and bred; except for the consumption

of whisky when it could be got, and a little fighting, family life was

their only amusement. This was the direct result of orthodox Catholic

teaching; the priests were all-powerful with the people and they taught

them nothing; not even washing or drainage; they forbade them to seek

any Protestant learning, they allowed their agricultural science to sink

to mere potato-growing, and they preyed upon their poverty. Here are the

appalling consequences. The population of Ireland

in 1785 was 2,845,932,

in 1803 was 5,536,594,

in 1845 was 8,295,061,

at which date the weary potato gave way under its ever-growing burthen

and there was a frightful famine. Many died, many emigrated, especially

to the United States; an outflow of emigration began that made Ireland

for a time a land of old people and empty nests.

Now because of the Union of the Parliaments, the enfranchisement of the

English and Irish populations went on simultaneously. Catholic

enfranchisement in England meant Catholic enfranchisement in Ireland.

The British got votes because they wanted them; the Irish commonalty got

votes because the English did. Ireland was over-represented in the Union

Parliament, because originally Irish seats had been easier for the

governing class to manipulate than English; and so it came about that

this Irish and Catholic Ireland, which had never before had any

political instrument at all, and which had never sought a political

instrument, found itself with the power to thrust a solid body of

members into the legislature of Great Britain. After the general

election of 1874, the newly enfranchised “democracy” of Britain found

itself confronted by a strange and perplexing Irish “democracy,”

different in its religion, its traditions, and its needs, telling a tale

of wrongs, of which the common English had never heard, clamouring

passionately for separation which they could not understand and which

impressed them chiefly as being needlessly unfriendly. The national

egotism of the Irish is intense; their circumstances have made it

intense; they were incapable of considering the state of affairs in

England; the new Irish party came into the British Parliament to

obstruct and disorder English business until Ireland became free, and to

make themselves a nuisance to the English. This spirit was only too

welcome to the oligarchy which still ruled the British Empire; they

allied themselves with the “loyal” Protestants in the north of

Ireland--loyal that is to the Imperial Government because of their dread

of a Catholic predominance in Ireland--and they watched and assisted the

gradual exasperation of the British common people by this indiscriminate

hostility of the common people of Ireland.

The story of the relation of Ireland to Britain for the last

half-century is one that reflects the utmost discredit upon the

governing class of the British Empire, but it is not one of which the

English commons need be ashamed. Again and again they have given

evidences of goodwill. British legislation in relation to Ireland for

nearly half a century shows a series of clumsy attempts on the part of

liberal England, made in the face of a strenuous opposition from the

Conservative Party and the Ulster Irish, to satisfy Irish complaints and

get to a footing of fellowship. In 1886 Gladstone, in pursuit of his

idea of nationality, brought political disaster upon himself by

introducing the first Irish Home Rule Bill, a genuine attempt to give

over Irish affairs _for the first time in history_ to the Irish people.

In many respects it was a faulty and dangerous proposal, and it provided

no satisfactory assurance to the Protestant Irish, and especially the

Ulster Protestants, of protection against possible injuries from the

priest-ridden illiterates of the south. This may have been a fancied

danger, but these fears should have been respected. The bill broke the

Liberal Party asunder; and a coalition government, the Unionist

Government, replaced that of Mr. Gladstone.

This digression into the history of Ireland now comes up to the time of

infectious imperialism in Europe. The Unionist Government which ousted

Mr. Gladstone had a predominantly Tory element, and was in spirit

“imperialist” as no previous British Government had been. The British

political history of the subsequent years is largely a history of the

conflict of the new imperialism, through which an arrogant “British”

nationalism sought to override the rest of the empire against the

temperamental liberalism and reasonableness of the English, which tended

to develop the empire into a confederation of free and willing allies.

Naturally the “British” imperialists wanted a subjugated Irish;

naturally the English Liberals wanted a free, participating Irish. In

1892 Gladstone struggled back to power with a small Home Rule majority;

and in 1893 his second Home Rule Bill passed the Commons, and was

rejected by the Lords. It was not, however, until 1895 that an

imperialist government took office. The party which sustained it was

called not Imperialist, but “Unionist”--an odd name when we consider how

steadily and strenuously it has worked to destroy any possibility of an

Empire commonweal. These Imperialists remained in power for ten years.

We have already noted their conquest of South Africa. They were defeated

in 1905 in an attempt to establish a tariff wall on the Teutonic model.

The ensuing Liberal Government then turned the conquered South African

Dutch into contented fellow-subjects by creating the self-governing

Dominion of South Africa. After which it embarked upon a long-impending

struggle with the persistently imperialist House of Lords.

This was a very fundamental struggle in British affairs. On the one hand

were the Liberal majority of the people of Great Britain honestly and

wisely anxious to put this Irish affair upon a new and more hopeful

footing, and, if possible, to change the vindictive animosity of the

Irish into friendship; on the other were all the factors of this new

British Imperialism resolved at any cost and in spite of every electoral

verdict, legally, if possible, but if not, illegally, to maintain their

ascendancy over the affairs of the English, Scotch, and Irish and all

the rest of the empire alike. It was, under new names, the age-long

internal struggle of the English community; that same conflict of a free

and liberal-spirited commonalty against powerful “big men” and big

adventures and authoritative persons which we have already dealt with in

our account of the liberation of America. Ireland was merely a

battleground as America had been. In India, in Ireland, in England, the

governing class and their associated adventurers were all of one mind;

but the Irish people, thanks to their religious difference, had little

sense of solidarity with the English. Yet such Irish statesmen as

Redmond, the leader of the Irish party in the House of Commons,

transcended this national narrowness for a time, and gave a generous

response to English good intentions. Slowly yet steadily the barrier of

the House of Lords was broken down, and a third Irish Home Rule Bill was

brought in by Mr. Asquith, the Prime Minister, in 1912. Throughout 1913

and the early part of 1914 this bill was fought and re-fought through

Parliament. At first it gave Home Rule to all Ireland; but an Amending

Act, excluding Ulster on certain conditions, was promised. This struggle

lasted right up to the outbreak of the Great War. The royal assent was

given to this bill after the actual outbreak of war, and also to a bill

suspending the coming into force of Irish Home Rule until after the end

of the war. These bills were put upon the Statute Book.

But from the introduction of the third Home Rule Bill onward the

opposition to it had assumed a violent and extravagant form. Sir Edward

Carson, a Dublin lawyer who had become a member of the English Bar, and

who had held a legal position in the ministry of Mr. Gladstone (before

the Home Rule split) and in the subsequent imperialist government, was

the organizer and leader of this resistance to a reconciliation of the

two peoples. In spite of his Dublin origin, he set up to be a leader of

the Ulster Protestants; and he brought to the conflict that contempt for

law which is all too common a characteristic of the successful

barrister, and those gifts of persistent, unqualified, and

uncompromising hostility which distinguish a certain type of Irishman.

He was the most “un-English” of men, dark, romantic, and violent; and

from the opening of the struggle he talked with gusto of armed

resistance to this freer reunion of the English and Irish which the

third Home Rule Bill contemplated. The excitement intensified throughout

1913. A body of volunteers was organized in Ulster, arms were smuggled

into the country, and Sir Edward Carson and a rising lawyer named F. E.

Smith, trapped up in semi-military style, toured Ulster, inspecting

these volunteers and inflaming local passion. The arms of these

prospective rebels were obtained from Germany, and various utterances of

Sir Edward Carson’s associates hinted at support from “a great

Protestant monarch.” The first bloodshed occurred at Londonderry in

August, 1913. Contrasted with Ulster, the rest of Ireland was at that

time a land of order and decency, relying upon its great leader Redmond

and the good faith of the three British peoples.

Now these threats of civil war from Ireland were not in themselves

anything very exceptional in the record of that unhappy island; what

makes them exceptional and significant in the world’s history is the

vehement support they found among the English military and governing

classes, and the immunity from punishment and restraint of Sir Edward

Carson and his friends. The virus of reaction which came from the

success and splendour of German imperialism had spread widely, as we

have explained, throughout the prevalent and prosperous classes in Great

Britain. A generation had grown up forgetful of the mighty traditions of

their forefathers, and ready to exchange the greatness of English

freedom for the tawdriest of imperialisms. A fund of a million pounds

was raised, chiefly in England, to support the Ulster Rebellion, an

Ulster Provisional Government was formed, prominent English people

mingled in the fray and careered about Ulster in automobiles, assisting

in the gun-running, and there is evidence that a number of British

officers and generals were prepared for a pronunciamento upon South

American lines rather than obedience to the law. The natural result of

all this upper-class disorderliness was to alarm the main part of

Ireland, never a ready friend to England. That Ireland also began in its

turn to organize “National Volunteers” and to smuggle arms. The military

authorities showed themselves much keener in the suppression of the

Nationalist than of the Ulster gun importation, and in July, 1914, an

attempt to run guns at Howth, near Dublin, led to fighting and bloodshed

in the Dublin streets. The British Isles were on the verge of civil war.

Such in outline is the story of the imperialist revolutionary movement

in Great Britain up to the eve of the great war. For revolutionary this

movement of Sir Edward Carson and his associates was. It was plainly an

attempt to set aside parliamentary government and the slow-grown,

imperfect liberties of the British peoples, and, with the assistance of

the army, to substitute a more Prussianized type of rule, using the

Irish conflict as the point of departure. It was the reactionary effort

of a few score thousand people to arrest the world movement towards

democratic law and social justice, strictly parallel to and closely

sympathetic with the new imperialism of the German junkers and rich men.

But in one very important respect British and German imperialism

differed. In Germany it centred upon the crown; its noisiest, most

conspicuous advocate was the heir-apparent. In Great Britain the king

stood aloof. By no single public act did King George V betray the

slightest approval of the new movement, and the behaviour of the Prince

of Wales, his son and heir, has been equally correct.

In August, 1914, the storm of the great war burst upon the world. In

September, Sir Edward Carson was denouncing the placing of the Home Rule

Bill upon the Statute Book. On the same day, Mr. John Redmond was

calling upon the Irish people to take their equal part in the burthen

and effort of the war. For a time Ireland played her part in the war

side by side with England faithfully and well, until in 1915 the Liberal

Government was replaced by a coalition, in which this Sir Edward Carson,

with the bloodshed at Londonderry and Howth upon his head, figured as

Attorney-General (with a salary of £7000 and fees), to be replaced

presently by his associate in the Ulster sedition, Sir F. E. Smith.

Grosser insult was never offered to a friendly people. The work of

reconciliation, begun by Gladstone in 1886, and brought so near to

completion in 1914, was completely and finally wrecked.[492]

In the spring of 1916 Dublin revolted unsuccessfully against this new

government. The ringleaders of this insurrection, many of them mere

boys, were shot with a deliberate and clumsy sternness that, in view of

the treatment of the Ulster rebel leaders, impressed all Ireland as

atrociously unjust. A traitor, Sir Roger Casement, who had been knighted

for previous services to the empire, was tried and executed, no doubt

deservedly, but his prosecutor was Sir F. E. Smith of the Ulster

insurrection, a shocking conjunction. The Dublin revolt had had little

support in Ireland generally, but thereafter the movement for an

independent republic grew rapidly to great proportions. Against this

strong emotional drive there struggled the more moderate ideas of such

Irish statesmen as Sir Horace Plunkett, who wished to see Ireland become

a Dominion, a “crowned republic” that is, within the empire, on an equal

footing with Canada and Australia.[493]

When in December, 1919, Mr. Lloyd George introduced his Home Rule Bill

into the Imperial Parliament there were no Irish members, except Sir

Edward Carson and his followers, to receive it. The rest of Ireland was

away. It refused to begin again that old dreary round of hope and

disappointment. Let the British and their pet Ulstermen do as they

would, said the Irish....

§ 4

Our studies of modern imperialism in Germany and Britain bring out

certain forces common to the two countries, and we shall find these same

forces at work in variable degrees and with various modifications in the

case of the other great modern communities at which we shall now glance.

This modern imperialism is not a synthetic uniting movement like the

older imperialism; it is essentially a _megalomaniac nationalism_, a

nationalism made aggressive by prosperity; and always it finds its

strongest support in the military and official castes, and in the

enterprising and acquisitive strata of society, in new money, that is,

and big business; its chief critics in the educated poor, and its chief

opponents in the peasantry and the labour masses. It accepts monarchy

where it finds it, but it is not necessarily a monarchist movement. It

does, however, need a foreign office of the traditional type for its

full development. Its origin, which we have traced very carefully in

this book of our history, makes this clear. Modern imperialism is the

natural development of the Great Power system which arose, with the

foreign office method of policy, out of the Machiavellian monarchies

after the break-up of Christendom. It will only come to an end when the

intercourse of nations and peoples through embassies and foreign offices

is replaced by an assembly of elected representatives in direct touch

with their peoples.

[Illustration: The BALKAN STATES after the Wars of 1912-13]

French imperialism during the period of the Armed Peace in Europe was

naturally of a less confident type than the German. It called itself

“nationalism” rather than imperialism, and it set itself, by appeals to

patriotic pride, to thwart the efforts of those socialists and

rationalists who sought to get into touch with liberal elements in

German life. It brooded upon the _Revanche_, the return match with

Prussia. But in spite of that pre-occupation, it set itself to the

adventure of annexation and exploitation in the Far East and in Africa,

narrowly escaping a war with Britain upon the Fashoda clash (1898), and

it never relinquished a dream of acquisitions in Syria.[494] Italy too

caught the imperialist fever; the blood letting of Adowa cooled her for

a time, and then she resumed in 1911 with a war upon Turkey and the

annexation of Tripoli.[495]

The Italian imperialists exhorted their countrymen to forget Mazzini and

remember Julius Cæsar; for were they not the heirs of the Roman Empire?

Imperialism touched the Balkans; little countries not a hundred years

from slavery began to betray exalted intentions; King Ferdinand of

Bulgaria assumed the title of Tsar, the latest of the pseudo-Cæsars, and

in the shop-windows of Athens the curious student could study maps

showing the dream of a vast Greek empire in Europe and Asia.

In 1913 the three states of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece fell upon

Turkey, already weakened by her war with Italy, and swept her out of all

her European possessions except the country between Adrianople and

Constantinople; later in that year they quarrelled among themselves over

the division of the spoils. Roumania joined in the game and helped to

crush Bulgaria. Turkey recovered Adrianople. The greater imperialisms of

Austria, Russia, and Italy watched that conflict and one another....

§ 5

While all the world to the west of her was changing rapidly, Russia

throughout the nineteenth century changed very slowly indeed. At the end

of the nineteenth century, as at its beginning, she was still a Grand

Monarchy, of the later seventeenth-century type standing on a basis of

barbarism, she was still at a stage where court intrigues and imperial

favourites could control her international relations. She had driven a

great railway across Siberia to find the disasters of the Japanese war

at the end of it; she was using modern methods and modern weapons so far

as her undeveloped industrialism and her small supply of sufficiently

educated people permitted; such writers as Dostoievski had devised a

sort of mystical imperialism based on the idea of Holy Russia and her

mission, colored by racial illusions and anti-Semitic passion; but, as

events were to show, this had not sunken very deeply into the

imagination of the Russian masses. A vague, very simple Christianity

pervaded the illiterate peasant life, mixed with much superstition. It

was like the pre-Reformation peasant life of France or Germany. The

Russian moujik was supposed to worship and revere his Tsar and to love

to serve a gentleman; in 1913 reactionary English writers were still

praising his simple and unquestioning loyalty. But, as in the case of

the western European peasant of the days of peasant revolts, this

reverence for the monarchy was mixed up with the idea that the monarch

and the nobleman had to be good and beneficial, and this simple loyalty

could, under sufficient provocation, be turned into the same pitiless

intolerance of social injustice that burnt the châteaux in the Jacquerie

(see chapter xxxv, § 3) and set up the theocracy in Münster (chapter

xxxv, § 3). Once the commons were moved to anger, there were no links of

understanding in a generally diffused education in Russia to mitigate

the fury of the outbreak. The upper classes were as much beyond the

sympathy of the lower as a different species of animal. These Russian

masses were three centuries away from such nationalist imperialism as

Germany displayed.

And in another respect Russia differed from modern Western Europe and

paralleled its mediæval phase, and that was in the fact that her

universities were the resort of many very poor students quite out of

touch and out of sympathy with the bureaucratic autocracy. Before 1917

the significance of the proximity of these two factors of revolution,

the fuel of discontent and the match of free ideas, was not recognized

in European thought, and few people realized that in Russia more than in

any other country lay the possibilities of a fundamental

revolution.[496]

§ 6

When we turn from these European Great Powers, with their inheritance of

foreign offices and national policies, to the United States of America,

which broke away completely from the Great Power System in 1776, we find

a most interesting contrast in the operation of the forces which

produced the expansive imperialism of Europe. For America as for Europe

the mechanical revolution had brought all the world within the range of

a few days’ journey. The United States, like the Great Powers, had

worldwide financial and mercantile interests; a great industrialism had

grown up and was in need of overseas markets; the same crises of belief

that had shaken the moral solidarity of Europe had occurred in the

American world. Her people were as patriotic and spirited as any. Why

then did not the United States develop armaments and an aggressive

policy? Why was not the stars and stripes waving over Mexico, and why

was there not a new Indian system growing up in China under that flag?

It was the American who had opened up Japan. After doing so, he had let

that power Europeanize itself and become formidable without a protest.

That alone was enough to make Machiavelli, the father of modern foreign

policy, turn in his grave. If a Europeanized Great Power had been in the

place of the United States, Great Britain would have had to fortify the

Canadian frontier from end to end--it is now absolutely unarmed--and to

maintain a great arsenal in the St. Lawrence. All the divided states of

Central and South America would long since have been subjugated and

placed under the disciplinary control of United States officials of the

“governing class.” There would have been a perpetual campaign to

Americanize Australia and New Zealand, and yet another claimant for a

share in tropical Africa.

And by an odd accident America had produced in President Roosevelt

(President 1901-1908) a man of an energy as restless as the German

Kaiser’s, as eager for large achievements, as florid and eloquent, an

adventurous man with a turn for world politics and an instinct for

armaments, the very man, we might imagine, to have involved his country

in the scramble for overseas possession.

There does not appear to be any other explanation of this general

restraint and abstinence on the part of the United States except in

their fundamentally different institutions and traditions. In the first

place the United States Government has no foreign office and no

diplomatic corps of the European type, no body of “experts” to maintain

the tradition of an aggressive policy. The president has great powers,

but they are subject to the control of the senate, which again is

responsible to the state legislatures and the people. The foreign

relations of the country are thus under open and public control. Secret

treaties are impossible under such a system, and foreign powers complain

of the difficulty and uncertainty of “understandings” with the United

States, a very excellent state of affairs. The United States are

constitutionally incapacitated, therefore, from the kind of foreign

policy that has kept Europe for so long constantly on the verge of war.

And, secondly, there has hitherto existed in the States no organization

for and no tradition of what one may call non-assimilable possessions.

Where there is no crown there cannot be crown colonies. In spreading

across the American continent, the United States had developed a quite

distinctive method of dealing with new territories, admirably adapted

for unsettled lands, but very inconvenient if applied too freely to

areas already containing an alien population. This method was based on

the idea that there cannot be in the United States system a permanently

subject people. The first stage of the ordinary process of assimilation

had been the creation of a “territory” under the federal government,

having a considerable measure of self-government, sending a delegate

(who could not vote) to congress, and destined, in the natural course of

things, as the country became settled and population increased, to

flower at last into full statehood. This had been the process of

development of all the latter states of the Union; the latest

territories to become states being Arizona and New Mexico in 1910. The

frozen wilderness of Alaska, bought from Russia, remained politically

undeveloped simply because it had an insufficient population for state

organization. As the annexations of Germany and Great Britain in the

Pacific threatened to deprive the United States navy of coaling stations

in that ocean, a part of the Samoan Islands (1889) and the Sandwich

Islands (Hawaii) were annexed (1898). Here for the first time the United

States had real subject populations to deal with. But in the absence of

any class comparable to the Anglo-Indian officials who sway British

opinion, the American procedure followed the territorial method. Every

effort was made to bring the educational standards of Hawaii up to the

American level, and a domestic legislature on the territorial pattern

was organized so that these dusky islanders seem destined ultimately to

obtain full United States citizenship. (The small Samoan Islands are

taken care of by a United States naval administrator.)

In 1895 occurred a quarrel between the United States and Britain upon

the subject of Venezuela, and the Monroe Doctrine was upheld stoutly by

President Cleveland. Then Mr. Olney made this remarkable declaration:

“To-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent,

and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its

interposition.” This, together with the various Pan-American congresses

that have been held, points to a real open “foreign policy” of alliance

and mutual help throughout America. Treaties of arbitration hold good

over all that continent, and the future seems to point to a gradual

development of inter-state organization, a Pax Americana, of the

English-speaking and Spanish-speaking peoples, the former in the rôle of

elder brother. Here is something we cannot even call an empire,

something going far beyond the great alliance of the British Empire in

the open equality of its constituent parts.

Consistently with this idea of a common American welfare, the United

States in 1898 intervened in the affairs of Cuba, which had been in a

state of chronic insurrection against Spain for many years. A brief war

ended in the acquisition of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippine

Islands. Cuba is now an independent self-governing republic. Porto Rico

and the Philippines have, however, a special sort of government, with a

popularly elected lower house and an upper body containing members

appointed by the United States senate. It is improbable that either

Porto Rico or the Philippines will become states in the Union. They are

much more likely to become free states in some comprehensive alliance

with both English-speaking and Latin America.

Both Cuba and Porto Rico welcomed the American intervention in their

affairs, but in the Philippine Islands there was a demand for complete

and immediate freedom after the Spanish war, and a considerable

resistance to the American military administration. There it was the

United States came nearest to imperialism of the Great Power type, and

that her record is most questionable. There was much sympathy with the

insurgents in the states. Here is the point of view of ex-President

Roosevelt as he wrote it in his _Autobiography_ (1913):--

“As regards the Philippines, my belief was that we should train them for

self-government as rapidly as possible, and then leave them free to

decide their own fate. I did not believe in setting the time-limit

within which we would give them independence, because I did not believe

it wise to try to forecast how soon they would be fit for

self-government; and once having made the promise, I would have felt

that it was imperative to keep it. Within a few months of my assuming

office we had stamped out the last armed resistance in the Philippines

that was not of merely sporadic character; and as soon as peace was

secured, we turned our energies to developing the islands in the

interests of the natives. We established schools everywhere; we built

roads; we administered an even-handed justice; we did everything

possible to encourage agriculture and industry; and in constantly

increasing measure we employed natives to do their own governing, and

finally provided a legislative chamber.... We are governing, and have

been governing, the islands in the interests of the Filipinos

themselves. If after due time the Filipinos themselves decide that they

do not wish to be thus governed, then I trust that we will leave; but

when we do leave, it must be distinctly understood that we retain no

protectorate--and above all that we take part in no joint

protectorate--over the islands, and give them no guarantee, of

neutrality or otherwise; that in short, we are absolutely quit of

responsibility for them, of every kind and description.”[497]

This is an entirely different outlook from that of a British or French

foreign office or colonial office official. But it is not very widely

different from the spirit that created the Dominions of Canada, South

Africa, and Australia, and brought forward the three Home Rule Bills for

Ireland. It is in the older and more characteristic English tradition

from which the Declaration of Independence derives. It sets aside,

without discussion, the detestable idea of “subject peoples.”

Here we will not enter into political complications attendant upon the

making of the Panama Canal, for they introduce no fresh light upon this

interesting question of the American method in world politics. The

history of Panama is American history purely. But manifestly just as the

political structure of the Union was a new thing in the world, so too

were its relations with the world beyond its borders.[498]

§ 7

We have been at some pains to examine the state of mind of Europe and of

America in regard to international relations in the years that led up to

the world tragedy of 1914 because, as more and more people are coming to

recognize, that great war or some such war was a necessary consequence

of the mentality of the period. All the things that men and nations do

are the outcome of instinctive motives reacting upon the ideas which

talk and books and newspapers and schoolmasters and so forth have put

into people’s heads. Physical necessities, pestilences, changes of

climate, and the like outer things may deflect and distort the growth of

human history, but its living root is thought.

All human history is fundamentally a history of ideas. Between the man

of to-day and the Cro-Magnard the physical and mental differences are

very slight; their essential difference lies in the extent and content

of the mental background which we have acquired in the five or six

hundred generations that intervene.

We are too close to the events of the Great War to pretend that this

_Outline_ can record the verdict of history thereupon, but we may hazard

the guess that when the passions of the conflict have faded, it will be

Germany that will be most blamed for bringing it about, and she will be

blamed not because she was morally and intellectually very different

from her neighbours, but because she had the common disease of

imperialism in its most complete and energetic form. No self-respecting

historian, however superficial and popular his aims may be, can

countenance the legend, produced by the stresses of the war, that the

German is a sort of human being more cruel and abominable than any other

variety of men. All the great states of Europe before 1914 were in a

condition of aggressive nationalism and drifting towards war; the

government of Germany did but lead the general movement. She fell into

the pit first, and she floundered deepest. She became the dreadful

example at which all her fellow sinners could cry out.

For long, Germany and Austria had been plotting an extension of German

influence eastward through Asia Minor to the East. The German idea was

crystallized in the phrase “Berlin to Bagdad.” Antagonized to the German

dreams were those of Russia, which was scheming for an extension of the

Slav ascendancy to Constantinople and through Serbia to the Adriatic.

These lines of ambition lay across one another and were mutually

incompatible. The feverish state of affairs in the Balkans was largely

the outcome of the intrigues and propagandas sustained by the German and

Slav schemes. Turkey turned for support to Germany, Serbia to Russia.

Roumania and Italy, both Latin in tradition, both nominally allies of

Germany, pursued remoter and deeper schemes in common. Ferdinand, the

Tsar of Bulgaria, was following still darker ends; and the squalid

mysteries of the Greek court, whose king was the German Kaiser’s

brother-in-law, are beyond our present powers of inquiry.

But the tangle did not end with Germany on the one hand and Russia on

the other. The greed of Germany in 1871 had made France her inveterate

enemy. The French people, aware of their inability to recover their lost

provinces by their own strength, had conceived exaggerated ideas of the

power and helpfulness of Russia. The French people had subscribed

enormously to Russian loans. France was the ally of Russia. If the

German powers made war upon Russia, France would certainly attack them.