and after that the little black dots would not simply creep but run.
They would appear now so rapidly, it would be almost as though they
were being put on by some sort of spraying machine. And suddenly here
and then there would appear the first stars to indicate the first great
cities of a hundred thousand people. First one or two and then a
multitude of cities—each like a knot in the growing net of the
railways.
The growth of the United States is a process that has no precedent in
the world’s history; it is a new kind of occurrence. Such a community
could not have come into existence before, and if it had, without
railways it would certainly have dropped to pieces long before now.
Without railways or telegraph it would be far easier to administer
California from Pekin than from Washington. But this great population
of the United States of America has not only grown outrageously; it has
kept uniform. Nay, it has become more uniform. The man of San
Francisco is more like the man of New York to-day than the man of
Virginia was like the man of New England a century ago. And the
process of assimilation goes on unimpeded. The United States is being
woven by railway, by telegraph, more and more into one vast unity,
speaking, thinking and acting harmoniously with itself. Soon aviation
will be helping in the work.
This great community of the United States is an altogether new thing in
history. There have been great empires before with populations
exceeding 100 millions, but these were associations of divergent
peoples; there has never been one single people on this scale before.
We want a new term for this new thing. We call the United States a
country just as we call France or Holland a country. But the two
things are as different as an automobile and a one-horse shay. They
are the creations of different periods and different conditions; they
are going to work at a different pace and in an entirely different way.
The United States in scale and possibility is halfway between a
European state and a United States of all the world.
But on the way to this present greatness and security the American
people passed through one phase of dire conflict. The river steamboats,
the railways, the telegraph, and their associate facilities, did not
come soon enough to avert a deepening conflict of interests and ideas
between the southern and northern states of the Union. The former were
slave-holding states; the latter, states in which all men were free.
The railways and steamboats at first did but bring into sharper
conflict an already established difference between the two sections of
the United States. The increasing unification due to the new means of
transport made the question whether the southern spirit or the northern
should prevail an ever more urgent one. There was little possibility
of compromise. The northern spirit was free and individualistic; the
southern made for great estates and a conscious gentility ruling over a
dusky subject multitude.
Every new territory that was organized into a state as the tide of
population swept westward, every new incorporation into the fast
growing American system, became a field of conflict between the two
ideas, whether it should become a state of free citizens, or whether
the estate and slavery system should prevail. From 1833 an American
anti-slavery society was not merely resisting the extension of the
institution but agitating the whole country for its complete abolition.
The issue flamed up into open conflict over the admission of Texas to
the Union. Texas had originally been a part of the republic of Mexico,
but it was largely colonized by Americans from the slave-holding
states, and it seceded from Mexico, established its independence in
1835, and was annexed to the United States in 1844. Under the Mexican
law slavery had been forbidden in Texas, but now the South claimed
Texas for slavery and got it.
Meanwhile the development of ocean navigation was bringing a growing
swarm of immigrants from Europe to swell the spreading population of
the northern states, and the raising of Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and
Oregon, all northern farm lands, to state level, gave the anti-slavery
North the possibility of predominance both in the Senate and the House
of Representatives. The cotton- growing South, irritated by the
growing threat of the Abolitionist movement, and fearing this
predominance in Congress, began to talk of secession from the Union.
Southerners began to dream of annexations to the south of them in
Mexico and the West Indies, and of great slave state, detached from the
North and reaching to Panama.
The return of Abraham Lincoln as an anti-extension President in 1860
decided the South to split the Union. South Carolina passed an
“ordinance of secession” and prepared for war. Mississippi, Florida,
Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas joined her, and a convention met
at Montgomery in Alabama, elected Jefferson Davis president of the
“Confederated States” of America, and adopted a constitution
specifically upholding “the institution of negro slavery.”
ONE OF THE FIRST AMERICAN RIVER STEAMERS
ONE OF THE FIRST AMERICAN RIVER STEAMERS
Abraham Lincoln was, it chanced, a man entirely typical of the new
people that had grown up after the War of Independence. His early
years had been spent as a drifting particle in the general westward
flow of the population. He was born in Kentucky (1809), was taken to
Indiana as a boy and later on to Illinois. Life was rough in the
backwoods of Indiana in those days; the house was a mere log cabin in
the wilderness, and his schooling was poor and casual. But his mother
taught him to read early, and he became a voracious reader. At
seventeen he was a big athletic youth, a great wrestler and runner. He
worked for a time as clerk in a store, went into business as a
storekeeper with a drunken partner, and contracted debts that he did
not fully pay off for fifteen years. In 1834, when he was still only
five and twenty, he was elected member of the House of Representatives
for the State of Illinois. In Illinois particularly the question of
slavery flamed because the great leader of the party for the extension
of slavery in the national Congress was Senator Douglas of Illinois.
Douglas was a man of great ability and prestige, and for some years
Lincoln fought against him by speech and pamphlet, rising steadily to
the position of his most formidable and finally victorious antagonist.
Their culminating struggle was the presidential campaign of 1860, and
on the fourth of March, 1861, Lincoln was inaugurated President, with
the southern states already in active secession from the rule of the
federal government at Washington, and committing acts of war.
This civil war in America was fought by improvised armies that grew
steadily from a few score thousands to hundreds of thousands—until at
last the Federal forces exceeded a million men; it was fought over a
vast area between New Mexico and the eastern sea, Washington and
Richmond were the chief objectives. It is beyond our scope here to
tell of the mounting energy of that epic struggle that rolled to and
fro across the hills and woods of Tennessee and Virginia and down the
Mississippi. There was a terrible waste and killing of men. Thrust
was followed by counter thrust; hope gave way to despondency, and
returned and was again disappointed. Sometimes Washington seemed within
the Confederate grasp; again the Federal armies were driving towards
Richmond. The Confederates, outnumbered and far poorer in resources,
fought under a general of supreme ability, General Lee. The
generalship of the Union was far inferior. Generals were dismissed,
new generals appointed; until at last, under Sherman and Grant, came
victory over the ragged and depleted South. In October, 1864, a
Federal army under Sherman broke through the Confederate left and
marched down from Tennessee through Georgia to the coast, right across
the Confederate country, and then turned up through the Carolinas,
coming in upon the rear of the Confederate armies. Meanwhile Grant
held Lee before Richmond until Sherman closed on him. On April 9th,
1865, Lee and his army surrendered at Appomattox Court House, and
within a month all the remaining secessionist armies had laid down
their arms and the Confederacy was at an end.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
This four years’ struggle had meant an enormous physical and moral
strain for the people of the United States. The principle of state
autonomy was very dear to many minds, and the North seemed in effect to
be forcing abolition upon the South. In the border states brothers and
cousins, even fathers and sons, would take opposite sides and find
themselves in antagonistic armies. The North felt its cause a
righteous one, but for great numbers of people it was not a full-bodied
and unchallenged righteousness. But for Lincoln there was no doubt.
He was a clear-minded man in the midst of much confusion. He stood for
union; he stood for the wide peace of America. He was opposed to
slavery, but slavery he held to be a secondary issue; his primary
purpose was that the United States should not be torn into two
contrasted and jarring fragments.
When in the opening stages of the war Congress and the Federal generals
embarked upon a precipitate emancipation, Lincoln opposed and mitigated
their enthusiasm. He was for emancipation by stages and with
compensation. It was only in January, 1865, that the situation had
ripened to a point when Congress could propose to abolish slavery for
ever by a constitutional amendment, and the war was already over before
this amendment was ratified by the states.
As the war dragged on through 1862 and 1863, the first passions and
enthusiasms waned, and America learnt all the phases of war weariness
and war disgust. The President found himself with defeatists,
traitors, dismissed generals, tortuous party politicians, and a
doubting and fatigued people behind him and uninspired generals and
depressed troops before him; his chief consolation must have been that
Jefferson Davis at Richmond could be in little better case. The English
government misbehaved, and permitted the Confederate agents in England
to launch and man three swift privateer ships—the _Alabama_ is the best
remembered of them—which chased United States shipping from the seas.
The French army in Mexico was trampling the Monroe Doctrine in the
dirt. Came subtle proposals from Richmond to drop the war, leave the
issues of the war for subsequent discussion, and turn, Federal and
Confederate in alliance, upon the French in Mexico. But Lincoln would
not listen to such proposals unless the supremacy of the Union was
maintained. The Americans might do such things as one people but not
as two.
He held the United States together through long weary months of
reverses and ineffective effort, through black phases of division and
failing courage; and there is no record that he ever faltered from his
purpose. There were times when there was nothing to be done, when he
sat in the White House silent and motionless, a grim monument of
resolve; times when he relaxed his mind by jesting and broad anecdotes.
He saw the Union triumphant. He entered Richmond the day after its
surrender, and heard of Lee’s capitulation. He returned to Washington,
and on April 11th made his last public address. His theme was
reconciliation and the reconstruction of loyal government in the
defeated states. On the evening of April 14th he went to Ford’s theatre
in Washington, and as he sat looking at the stage, he was shot in the
back of the head and killed by an actor named Booth who had some sort
of grievance against him, and who had crept into the box unobserved.
But Lincoln’s work was done; the Union was saved.
At the beginning of the war there was no railway to the Pacific coast;
after it the railways spread like a swiftly growing plant until now
they have clutched and held and woven all the vast territory of the
United States into one indissoluble mental and material unity—the
greatest real community—until the common folk of China have learnt to
read—in the world.
LXI
THE RISE OF GERMANY TO PREDOMINANCE IN EUROPE
WE have told how after the convulsion of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic adventure, Europe settled down again for a time to an
insecure peace and a sort of modernized revival of the political
conditions of fifty years before. Until the middle of the century the
new facilities in the handling of steel and the railway and steamship
produced no marked political consequences. But the social tension due
to the development of urban industrialism grew. France remained a
conspicuously uneasy country. The revolution of 1830 was followed by
another in 1848. Then Napoleon III, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte,
became first President, and then (in 1852) Emperor.
He set about rebuilding Paris, and changed it from a picturesque
seventeenth century insanitary city into the spacious Latinized city of
marble it is to-day. He set about rebuilding France, and made it into
a brilliant-looking modernized imperialism. He displayed a disposition
to revive that competitiveness of the Great Powers which had kept
Europe busy with futile wars during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. The Tsar Nicholas I of Russia (1825- 1856) was also
becoming aggressive and pressing southward upon the Turkish Empire with
his eyes on Constantinople.
After the turn of the century Europe broke out into a fresh cycle of
wars. They were chiefly “balance-of- power” and ascendancy wars.
England, France and Sardinia assailed Russia in the Crimean war in
defence of Turkey; Prussia (with Italy as an ally) and Austria fought
for the leadership of Germany, France liberated North Italy from
Austria at the price of Savoy, and Italy gradually unified itself into
one kingdom. Then Napoleon III was so ill advised as to attempt
adventures in Mexico, during the American Civil War; he set up an
Emperor Maximilian there and abandoned him hastily to his fate—he was
shot by the Mexicans—when the victorious Federal Government showed its
teeth.
Map of Europe, 1848-1871
In 1870 came a long-pending struggle for predominance in Europe between
France and Prussia. Prussia had long foreseen and prepared for this
struggle, and France was rotten with financial corruption. Her defeat
was swift and dramatic. The Germans invaded France in August, one great
French army under the Emperor capitulated at Sedan in September,
another surrendered in October at Metz, and in January 1871, Paris,
after a siege and bombardment, fell into German hands. Peace was
signed at Frankfort surrendering the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine
to the Germans. Germany, excluding Austria, was unified as an empire,
and the King of Prussia was added to the galaxy of European Cæsars, as
the German Emperor.
For the next forty-three years Germany was the leading power upon the
European continent. There was a Russo-Turkish war in 1877-8, but
thereafter, except for certain readjustments in the Balkans, European
frontiers remained uneasily stable for thirty years.
LXII
THE NEW OVERSEAS EMPIRES OF STEAMSHIP AND RAILWAY
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 had 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.
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 India Company
showed any spirit of expansion.
While Europe was busy with the Napoleonic wars the East India Company,
under a succession of Governors-General, was playing much the same role
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, however, with a marked disposition to send wealth
westward.
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. . . .
In 1859, following upon a serious mutiny of the native troops in India,
this empire of the East India Company was annexed to the British Crown.
By an 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 the 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.
RAILWAY BRIDGE OVER THE GORGE, VICTORIA FALLS, OF THE ZAMBESI, SOUTHERN
RHODESIA
RAILWAY BRIDGE OVER THE GORGE, VICTORIA FALLS, OF THE ZAMBESI, SOUTHERN
RHODESIA
_Photo: British South African Co._
Apart from India, there was no great expansion of any European Empire
until the railways and the steamships were in effective action. 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 telegraph 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 that 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 sub-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.
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. Here we have no space to tell the amazing
story of the explorers and adventurers who first pierced the African
darkness, and of the political agents, administrators, traders,
settlers and scientific men who followed in their track. Wonderful
races of men like the pygmies, 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.
Map: The British Empire in 1815
By 1900, in half a century, all Africa was mapped, explored, estimated
and divided between the European powers. 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 clash of inexperienced European
administrators with the native population, led to horrible atrocities.
No European power has perfectly clean hands in this matter.