If ever there was a nation which ought to have a fellow-feeling with
subject races it is the inhabitants of England. I have heard of no land
so frequently subjected, unless, perhaps, it were northern India.
Long-headed builders of long tombs were subjected by round-headed
builders of round tombs; and round-headed builders of tombs were
subjected by builders of Stonehenge; for five hundred years the builders
of Stonehenge were a subject race to Rome; Roman-British civilisation
was subjected to barbarous Jutes and heavy Saxons; Britons, Jutes and
Saxons became the subjects of Danes; Britons, Jutes, Saxons and Danes
lay as one subject race at the feet of the Normans. As far as subjection
goes, English history is like a house that Jack built:
"This is the Norman nobly born,
Who conquered the Dane that drank from a horn.
Who harried the Saxon's kine and corn,
Who banished the Roman all forlorn,
Who tidied the Celt so tattered and torn,"
and so on, back to the prehistoric Jack who built the long house of the
dead.
Our later subjections to the French, the Scots, the Dutch and the
Germans, who have in turn ruled our courts and fattened on their
favours, have not been so violent or so complete; but for some
centuries they depressed our people with a sense of humiliation, and
they have left their mark upon our national character and language.
Indeed, our language is a synopsis of conquests, a stratification of
subjections. We can hardly speak a sentence without recording a certain
number of the subject races from which we have sprung. The only one ever
left out is the British, and that survives in the names of our most
beautiful rivers and mountains. It is true that all of our conquerors
have come to stay--all with the one exception of Rome. We have never
formed part of a distant and foreign empire except the Roman. Even our
Norman invaders soon regarded our country as the centre of their power
and not as a province. Nevertheless, nearly every strand of our
interwoven ancestry has at one time or other suffered as a subject race,
and perhaps from that source we derive the quality that Mark Twain
perceived when at the Jubilee Procession of our Empire he observed,
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Perhaps also
for this reason we raise the Recessional prayer for a humble and
contrite heart, lest we forget our history--lest we forget.
We pray in contrite humility to remember, but we have forgotten. In
speaking of Finland's loss of liberty, Madame Malmberg, the Finnish
patriot, once said that in old days, when their liberties seemed secure,
the Finns felt no sympathy with other nationalities--the Poles, the
Georgians, or the Russians themselves--struggling to be free. They did
not know what it was to be a subject race. They could not realise the
degrading loss of nationality. They were soon to learn, and they know
now. We have not learned. We have forgotten our lesson. That is why we
remain so indifferent to the cry of freedom, and to the suppression of
nationality all over the world.
Let us for a moment imagine that something terrible has happened; that
our statesmen have at last got their addition sums in Dreadnoughts
right, and have learned by hard experience that we have less than two to
one and therefore are wiped from the seas; or that our august Russian
ally, using Finland as a base, has established an immense naval port in
the Norwegian fiords and thence poured the Tartar and Cossack hordes
over our islands. Let us imagine anything that might leave some dominant
Power supreme in London and reduce us for the sixth or seventh time to
the position of a subject race. Where should we feel the difference
most? Let us suppose that the conqueror retained our country as part of
his empire, just as we have retained Ireland, India, Egypt, and the
South-African Dutch republics; or as Russia has retained Poland,
Georgia, Finland, the Baltic Provinces and Siberia, and is on the point
of retaining Persia; or as Germany has retained Poland and
Alsace-Lorraine; or as France has retained Tonquin and an enormous
empire in north-west Africa and is on the point of retaining Morocco; or
as Austria has retained Bohemia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, and many
other nationalities, and is constantly plotting to retain Albania. Let
us only judge of what might happen to us by observing what is actually
happening in other instances at this moment.
* * * * *
The dominant Power--let us call it Germany for short and merely as an
illustration--would at once appoint its own subjects to all the high
positions of State. England would be divided into four sections under
German Governor-Generals and there would be German Governor-Generals in
Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Germans would be appointed as District
Commissioners to collect revenue, try cases, and control the police. A
Council of Germans, with a proportion of nominated British lords and
squires, would legislate for each province, and perhaps, after a century
or so, as a great concession a small franchise might be granted, with
special advantages to Presbyterians, so as to keep religious differences
alive, the German Governor-General retaining the right to reject any
candidate and to veto all legislation. A German Viceroy, surrounded by a
Council in which the majority was always German, and the chief offices
of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Commander-in-Chief of the army, and so
forth, were always filled by Germans, would hold a Court at Windsor or
at Balmoral in summer and Buckingham Palace in winter. We should have to
undertake the support of Lutheran Churches for the spiritual consolation
of our rulers. We should be given a German Lord Mayor. German would be
the official language of the country, though interpreters might be
allowed in the law courts. Public examinations would be conducted in
German, and all candidates for the highest civilian posts would have to
go to Germany to be educated. The leading newspapers would be published
in German and a strict censorship established over the _Times_ and other
rebellious organs. The smallest criticism of the German Government would
be prosecuted as sedition. English papers would be confiscated, English
editors heavily fined or imprisoned, English politicians deported to the
Orkneys without trial or cause shown. Writers on liberty, such as
Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Burke, Mill, and Lord Morley would be
prohibited. The works of even German authors like Schiller, Heine, and
Karl Marx would be forbidden, and a pamphlet written by a German and
founded on official evidence to prove the injustice and tortures to
which the English people were exposed under the German system of police
would be destroyed. On our railways English gentlemen and ladies would
be expected to travel second or third class, or, if they travelled
first, they would be exposed to the Teutonic insolence of the dominant
race, and would probably be turned out by some German official. Public
buildings would be erected in the German style. English manufacturers
and all industries would be hampered by an elaborate system of excise
which would flood our markets with German goods. Such art as England
possesses would disappear. Arms would be prohibited. The common people,
especially in Scotland and the North-West Provinces, would be encouraged
to recruit in the native army under the command of German officers, and
the Scottish regiments would maintain their proud tradition; but no
British officer would be allowed to rise above the rank of
sergeant-major. The Territorials would be disbanded. The Boy Scouts
would be declared seditious associations. If a party of German officers
went fox-shooting in Leicestershire, and the villagers resisted the
slaughter of the sacred animal, some of the leading villagers would be
hanged and others flogged during the execution. Our National Anthem
would begin: "God save our German king! Long live our foreign king!" The
singing of "Rule, Britannia," would be regarded as a seditious act.
I am not saying that so complete a subjection of England is possible. We
may believe that in a powerful, wealthy, proud, and highly civilised
country like ours it would not be possible. All I say is that, if we
assume it possible, something like that would be our condition if we
were treated by the dominant Power as we ourselves are treating other
races which were powerful, wealthy, proud and, in their own estimation,
highly civilised when we invaded or otherwise obtained the mastery over
them. I am only trying to suggest to ourselves the mood and feelings of
a subject race--the humble and contrite heart for which we pray as God's
ancient sacrifice. If we wish to be done by as we do, these are some
incidents in the government we should wish to lie under when we were
reduced beneath a dominant Power, as India and Egypt are reduced beneath
ourselves. I have not taken the worst instances of the treatment of
subject races I could find. I have not spoken of the old methods of
partial or complete extermination whether in Roman Europe or Spanish and
British Americas; nor have I spoken of the partial or complete
enslavement of subject races in the Dutch, British, Portuguese, Belgian,
and French regions of Africa. I have not dwelt upon the hideous scenes
of massacre, torture, devastation and lust which I have myself witnessed
in Macedonia under the Turks, and in the Caucasus, the Baltic Provinces,
and Poland under Russia when subject races attempted some poor effort to
regain their freedom. I have not even mentioned the old ruin and
slaughter of Ireland, or the latest murder of a nation in Finland or in
Persia. I have taken my comparison from the government of subject races
at what is probably its very best; at all events, at what the English
people regard as its best--the administration of India and Egypt--and we
have no reason to suppose that Germany would administer England better
if we were a subject race under the German Empire.
* * * * *
If Germany did as well she would have something to say for herself. She
might lay stress on the great material advantages she would bestow on
this country. Such industries as she left us she would reorganise on the
Kartel system. She would much improve our railways by unifying them as a
State property, so that even our South-Eastern trains might arrive in
time. She would overhaul our education, ending the long wrangle between
religious sects by abolishing all distinctions. She would erect an
entirely new standard of knowledge, especially in natural science,
chemistry, and book-keeping. She would institute special classes for
prospective chauffeurs and commercial travellers. She would abolish
Eton, Harrow, and the other public schools, together with the college
buildings of Oxford and Cambridge, converting them all into barracks,
while the students would find their own lodgings in the towns and stand
on far greater equality in regard to wealth. German is not a very
beautiful language, but it has a literature, and we should have the
advantage of speaking German and learning something of German literature
and history. Great improvements would be introduced in sanitation,
town-planning, and municipal government, and we should all learn to eat
black bread, which is much more wholesome than white.
In a large part of the country peasant proprietors would be established,
and the peasants as a whole would be far better protected against the
exactions and petty tyranny of the landlords than they are at present.
Under the pressure of external rule, all the troublesome divisions and
small animosities between English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh would tend to
disappear, though the Germans might show special favour to the Scots and
Presbyterians generally on the principle of "Divide and Rule," just as
we show special favour to the Mohammedans of India. We should, of
course, be compelled to contribute to the defence of the Empire, and
should pay the expenses of the large German garrisons quartered in our
midst and of the German cruisers that patrolled our shores. But as we
should have no fleet of our own to maintain, and in case of foreign
aggression could draw upon the vast resources of the German Empire, our
taxation for defence would probably be considerably reduced from its
present figure of something over seventy millions a year.
That, I think, is an impartial statement of the reasons which some
dominant Power, such as Germany, might fairly advance in defence of her
rule if we were included in a foreign Empire. At all events, they very
closely resemble the reasons we put forward to glorify the services of
our Empire to India and Egypt. I suppose also that the Fabians among
ourselves would support the foreign domination, just as their leaders
supported the overthrow of the Boer republics, on the ground that larger
states bring the Fabian--the very Fabian--revolution nearer. And,
perhaps, the Social Democrats would support it by an extension of their
theory that the social millennium can best arrive out of a condition of
general enslavement. The Cosmopolitans would support it as tending to
obliterate the old-fashioned distinctions of nationality that impede the
unity of mankind, while a host of German pedants and poets would pour
out libraries in praise of the Anglo-Teutonic races united at last in
irresistible brotherhood and standing ready to take up the Teuton's
burden imposed upon the Blood by the special ordinance of the Lord.
The parallel is false, some may say; the conditions are not the same; in
spite of all material and educational advantages, we in England would
never endure such subjection; we should live in a state of perpetual
rebellion; our troops would mutiny; much as we all detest assassination,
the lives of our foreign Governors would hardly be secure. I agree. I
hope there is implanted in all of us such a hatred of subjection that we
should conspire to die rather than endure it. I only wish to suggest the
mood of a subject race, under the best actual conditions of
subjection--to suggest that other peoples may possibly feel an equal
hatred toward foreign domination--and to supply in ourselves something
of that imaginative sympathy which Madame Malmberg tells us the Finns
only learned after their own freedom had been overthrown.
We feel at once that something far more valuable than all the material,
or even moral, advantages which a dominant Power might give us would be
involved in the overthrow of our independent nationality. That something
is nationality itself. But what is nationality? Like the camel in the
familiar saying, it is difficult to define, but we know it when we see
it. Or, as St. Augustine said of Time, "I know what it is when you don't
ask me." Nationality implies a stock or race, an inborn temperament,
with certain instincts and capacities. It is the slow production of
forgotten movements and obscure endeavours that cannot be repeated or
restored. It is sanctified by the long struggles of growth, and by the
affection that has gathered round its history. If nationality has
kindled and maintained the light of freedom, it is illuminated by a
glory that transforms mountain poverty into splendour. If it has endured
tyranny, its people are welded together by a common suffering and a
common indignation. At the lowest, the people of the same nationality
have their customs, their religion, generally their language--that most
intimate bond--and always the familiar outward scenes of earth and
water, hill and plain and sky, breathing with memories. Nationality
enters into the soul of each man or woman who possesses it. Mr.
Chesterton has well described it as a sacrament. It is a silent oath, an
invisible mark. Life receives from it a particular colour. It is felt as
an influence in action and in emotion, almost in every thought. In
freedom it sustains conduct with a proud assurance of community and
reputation. Under oppression, it may fuse all the pleasant uses of
existence into one consuming impulse of fanatical devotion. It has
inspired the noblest literature and all the finest forms of art, and
chiefly in countries where the flame of nationality burned strong and
clear has the human mind achieved its greatest miracles of beauty,
thought, and invention.
Nationality possesses that demonic and incalculable quality from which
almost anything may be expected in the way of marvel, just as certain
spiky plants that have not varied winter or summer for years in their
habitual unattractiveness will suddenly shoot up a ten-foot spire of
radiant blossom abounding in honey. Partly by nationality has the human
race been preserved from the dreariness of ant-like uniformity and has
retained the power of variation which appears to be essential for the
highest development of life. With what pleasure, during our travels, we
discover the evidences of nationality even in such things as dress,
ornaments, food, songs, and dancing; still more in thought, speech,
proverbs, literature, music, and the higher arts! With what regret we
see those characteristics swept away by the advancing tide of dominant
monotony and Imperial dullness! The loss may seem trivial compared with
the loss of personal or political freedom, but it is not trivial. It is
a symptom of spiritual ruin. How deep a degradation of intellect and
personality is shown by the introduction of English music-hall songs
among a highly poetic people like the Irish, or by the vulgar corruption
of India's superb manufactures and forms of art under the blight of
British commerce! You know the Persian carpets, of what magical beauty
they are in design and colour. When I was on the borders of Persia in
1907 the Persian carpet merchants were selling one kind of carpet with a
huge red lion being shot by a sportsman in the middle of it to please
the English, and another kind decorated with a Parisian lady in a motor
to please the Russians. From those carpets one may realise what the
English Government's acquiescence in the subjection of Persia really
involves.
No subject race can entirely escape this degradation. No matter how good
the government may be or how protective, all forms of subjection involve
a certain loss of manhood. Under an alien Power the nature of the
subject nationality becomes soft and dependent. Instead of working out
its own salvation, it looks to the government for direction or
assistance in every difficulty. Atrophy destroys its power of action. It
loses the political sense and grows incapable of self-help or
self-reliance. The stronger faculties, if not extinguished, become
mutilated. In Ireland, even to-day, we see the result of domination in
the continued belief that the British Government which has brought the
country to ruin possesses the sole power of restoring it to prosperity.
In India we see a people so enervated by alien and paternal government
that they have hardly the courage or energy to take up such small
responsibilities in local government as may be granted them. This is
what a true Liberal statesman, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, meant by
his wise saying that self-government is better than good government. And
it might be further illustrated by the present condition of the largest
subject race in the world--the race of women--to whom all the protective
legislation and boasted chivalry and lap-dog petting, fondly supposed to
be lavished upon them by men, are not to be compared in personal value
with just the small right to a voice in the management of their own and
national affairs.
Such mutilation of character is the penalty of subjection at its best.
At its worst the subject race pays the penalty in tormenting rancour,
undying hatred, and the savage indignation that tears the heart. It may
be said that indignation is at all events better than loss of manhood,
and again I agree. Where there is despotism it may well be that for this
reason a cruel despotism is less harmful than a paternal despotism--less
harmful, I mean, to the individual soul, which is the only thing that
counts. But the soul that is choked by hatred and torn by indignation is
not at its best. Its functions go wrong, its sight is distorted, its
judgment perturbed, its sweetness poisoned, its laughter killed. The
whole being suffers and is changed. For a time it may blaze with a
fierce, a magnificent intensity. But we talk of a "consuming rage," and
the phrase is terribly true. Rage is a consuming fire, always a glorious
fire, a wild beacon in the night of darkness, but it consumes to ashes
the nature that is its fuel.
Loss of manhood or perpetual rancour--those are the penalties imposed on
the soul of a subject race. Nor does the dominant race escape scot free.
Far from it. On the whole, it suffers a deeper degradation. A dominant
race, like a domineering person, is always disagreeable and always a
bore, and the nearer it is to the scene of domination the more
disagreeable and wearisome it becomes, just as a tyrannical man is worst
at home. I have known English people start as quiet, pleasing, modest,
and amiable passengers in a P. & O. from Marseilles, but become less
endurable every twenty-four hours of the fortnight to Bombay. There are
noble and conspicuous exceptions alike in the army, the Indian Civil
Service, and among the officials scattered over the Empire. But, as a
rule, we may say that the worst characteristics not only of our own but
of all dominant races, such as the French, Germans, and Russians, are
displayed among their subject peoples. If, indeed, the subjects are on a
level with spaniels that can be beaten or patted alternately and retain
a constant affection and respect, the English son of squires thoroughly
enjoys his position and does the beating and patting well. But it is
always with a certain loss of humour and common humanity: it brings a
kind of stiffness and pedantry such as Charles Lamb complained of in the
old-fashioned type of schoolmaster. It exaggerates a sense of
Heaven-born superiority which the English squire has no need to
exaggerate.
I am not one of those who set out to "crab" their countrymen. We have
lately had so much criticism and contempt poured upon us by more
intelligent people like the Irish, the Germans, and an ex-President of
the United States that sometimes I have been driven to wonder whether we
may not somewhere possess some element worthy of respect. But, keeping
the lash in our own discriminating hands, we should all perhaps confess
that in regard to other people's feelings and ideas we are rather
insensitive as a nation. This form of unimaginative obtuseness
undoubtedly increased during the extension of our grip upon subject
races between the overthrow of Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill and the
end of the Boer War. Perhaps those fifteen years were the most entirely
vulgar period of our history, and vulgarity springs from an insensitive
condition of mind. It will be a terrible recompense if the price of our
world-wide Empire is an Imperial vulgarity upon which the sun never
sets.
There is another danger, not so subtle and pervading, but more likely to
escape the notice of people who are not themselves acquainted with the
frontiers of Empire. It is the production and encouragement of a set of
scoundrels and wasters who trade upon our country's prestige to rob,
harry, and even enslave the members of a subject race while they pose as
pioneers of Empire and are held up by sentimental travellers, like Mr.
Roosevelt, as examples of toughness and courage to the victims of
monotonous toil who live at home at ease. There is no call either for
Mr. Roosevelt's pity or admiration. I have known those wasters well, and
have studied all their tricks for turning a dirty half-crown. They enjoy
more pleasure and greater ease in a day than any London shop assistant
or bank clerk in a month. They take up the white man's burden and find
it light, because it is the black man who carries it. Of all the
impostors that nestle under our flag, I have found none more contented
with their lot or more harmful to our national repute than the "toughs"
who devour our subject races and stand in photographic attitudes for Mr.
Kipling to slobber over. These scoundrels and wasters are a far worse
evil than most people think, for they erect a false ideal which easily
corrupts youth with its attraction, and they furnish ready instruments
for land-grabbers and company directors, as is too often seen in their
onslaughts upon Zulus, Basutos, and other half-savage peoples whom they
desire to exterminate or enslave. They are a singularly poisonous
by-product of Empire, all the more poisonous for their brag; and though
they belong to the class whom their relations gladly contribute to
emigrate, they are far worse employed in debauching and plundering our
so-called fellow-subjects in Africa than they would be in the
public-houses, gambling-dens, pigeon-shooting enclosures, workhouses,
and jails of their native land. Of course, it is very useful to have
dumping-grounds for our wasters, and it is pleasant to reflect upon the
seven thousand miles of sea between one's self and one's worthless
nephew, but a dumping-ground for nepotism can scarcely be considered the
noblest aim of conquest.
Why is it, then, that one nation desires to subjugate another at all?
Sometimes the object has simply been space--the pressure of population
upon the extent of ground. Pastoral and nomad hordes, like the
"Barbarians" and Tartars, have had that object, but, as a rule, it has
ended in their own absorption. The motives of the Roman Empire were
strangely mixed. Plunder certainly came in; trade came in; in later
times the slave-trade and the supply of corn to Rome were great
incentives. The personal advantage and ambition of prominent statesmen
like Sulla or Caesar were among the aims of many conquests. The
extension of religion had little to do with it, for the Romans had the
decency to keep their gods to themselves and never slaughtered in the
name of Jove. But they were compelled to Empire by a peculiar conviction
of destiny. They did not destroy or subdue other peoples so much for
glory as from a sense of duty. It was their Heaven-sent mission to
rule. Their poet advised other nations to occupy themselves with wisdom,
learning, statuary, the arts, or what other trivialities they pleased;
it was the Roman's task to hold the world in sway. To the Roman the
object of Empire was Empire. It seemed to him the natural thing to
conquer every other nation, making the world one Rome. That was, in
fact, his true religion, and we can but congratulate him on the unshaken
faith of his self-esteem. The Turk, on the other hand, who was the next
Imperial race, boasted no city and no self-conscious superiority of laws
or race. He subdued the nations only in the name of God, and to all who
accepted God he nobly extended the vision of Paradise and a complete
equality of earthly squalor. The motives of mediaeval and more recent
conquests were the strangest of all. They were usually dynastic. They
depended on the family claim of some family man to a title implying
actual possession of another country and all its population. There was
always one claimant contending against another claimant, this heir
against that heir, as though the destinies of nationality could be
settled by a strip of parchment or a love-affair with a princess. People
grew so accustomed to this folly that even now we hardly realise its
absurdity. Yet I suppose if the King of Spain left his kingdom by will
to his well-beloved cousin George of England, not an English wherry
would stir to take possession, and our newspapers would merely remark
that there was always a strain of insanity in the Spanish branch of the
Bourbons. Two hundred years ago such a will would have produced a
prolonged and devastating war. Something is gained. We have eliminated
royal dynasties from the motives of conquest.
In the extension and maintenance of our own Empire all previous motives
have been combined. We have pleaded want of space; we have sought slaves
either for export or for local labour; we have sought plunder and also
trade or "markets"; we have sought dumping-grounds for our wasters, and
careers for our public school-boys; like the Turks and Spaniards, we
have sought to promote the knowledge of God by the slaughter and
enslavement of His creatures; like the Romans, we have thought it our
manifest duty to paint the world red and rule it. But within the last
sixty or seventy years we have added the further motive most aptly
expressed by the late King Leopold of Belgium in the document by which
he obtained his rights over the Congo: I mean "the moral and material
amelioration" of the subject peoples. That was a motive unknown to the
ancients, though the Romans came near it when they granted equal
citizenship to all provincials--a measure far in advance of any
concession of ours. And it was unknown to the Middle Ages, though Turks
and Spaniards came near it when they destroyed the infidels for their
good and opened heaven to converted slaves and corpses. To subjugate a
nationality for its own moral and material advantage is something almost
new in history. It sounds the true modern note. That is not a pleasant
note, but it is a sign of change, an evidence of hope. In the Boer War
our real objects were to paint the country red on the maps and to
exploit the gold-mines. But some people said we were fighting for equal
rights; some said it was to insure good treatment for the natives; some
thought we were Christianising the Boers; one man told me "the Boers
wanted washing." Those excuses may have been false and hypocritical,
but, at all events, they were tributes to virtue. They were a
recognition that the old motives of Empire no longer sufficed. They
exposed the hypocrites themselves to the retort of serious and innocent
people: "Very well, then. If these were your motives, give equal rights,
protect the natives, Christianise the Boers, wash them if you can." It
is a retort against which hypocrisy cannot long stand out. It proves
that a new standard of judgment is slowly forming in the world. But for
this new standard, where would be the Congo agitation, or the movement
against the Portuguese cocoa slavery, or such sympathy as exists with
the Nationalists of India, Egypt, and Persia? When the doctrines of
equal rights or even of moral and material amelioration are assumed,
honesty will at last raise her protest and hypocrites be no longer
allowed to reap the harvest of a quiet lie.
It is an advance. As history counts time it is a rapid advance. Now that
Russia is reducing Finland to a state of entire subjection without even
a pretext of right or the shadow of a pretence at improved civilisation,
a general feeling of shame and loss pervades Europe. The governments do
not move, but here and there the peoples raise a protest. Not even the
most thorough-going champions of Imperialism, such as the _Times_, have
ventured to defend the action. They have contented themselves with
Cain's excuse that the murder was no affair of ours. A century and a
half ago they would not have needed an excuse. No protest would have
been raised, for it did not matter what nationality was enslaved. There
is an advance, and we have now to extend it. In regard to races already
subject, we have but to act up to the pleadings of our own hypocrisy; we
have to maintain among them equal justice, equal rights and equal
consideration as members of one great community, instead of depriving
them of their manhood and kicking them out of their own railway
carriages. We have to train them on the way to self-government, instead
of clapping them into prison if they mention the subject.
And in regard to nationalities that still retain their freedom, we must
bring our governments up into line with the leading thought of the day.
We must show them that the destruction of a free people like Finland or
Persia is not a local or distant disaster only, but affects the whole
community of nations and spreads like a poison, blighting the growth of
freedom in every land and encouraging all the black forces of tyranny,
darkness, and suppression. Rapidly growing among us, there is already a
certain solidarity between free States, and the problem of the immediate
future is how to make their common action effective on the side of
liberty. When I saw Tolstoy during the Russian revolution of 1905 he
said to me:
"The present movement in Russia is not a riot; it is not even
a revolution; it is the end of an age. The age that is ending
is the age of Empires--the collection of smaller States under
one large State. There is no true community of heart or thought
between Russia, Finland, Poland, the Caucasus and all our
other States and races. And what has Hungary, Bohemia,
Syria, or the Tyrol to do with Austria? No more than Canada,
Australia, India, or Ireland has to do with England. People
are now beginning to see the absurdity of these things, and in
the end people are reasonable. That is why the age of Empires
is passing away."
It was a bold prophecy, but it contains the root of the whole matter.
Only where there is community of heart and thought is national or
personal life possible in any worthy sense. Unless that community exists
between the various nationalities within an Empire, we may be sure the
Empire is moribund. It is dying, as Napoleon said, of indigestion, and
that other community of the world which is slowly taking shape among
free and reasonable peoples will demand its dissolution. Our hope is
that the other community will further proceed to demand that these
disastrous experiments in the overthrow and subjection of free
nationalities shall no longer be tolerated by the combined forces of
liberty.