This is the faith for which the Girondins perish, and in dying bequeath

to the nineteenth century the theory of man's destiny which informs its

poetry, its speculative science, its systematic philosophy. It is the

faith of Shelley and of Fichte, of Herbart and of Comte, of John Stuart

Mill, Lassaulx, Quinet, not less than of Tennyson, last of the

Girondins. For the ideal of the Third Age, freedom, knowledge, the

federation of the world, passes as the ideals of the First and of the

Second Age pass. Not in political any more than in religious freedom

could man's unrest find a panacea. The new heavens and the new earth

which Voltaire proclaimed vanished like the city which Tertullian saw

beyond the sunset.

And knowledge--of what avail is knowledge?--or to scan the abysses of

space and search the depths of time? If the utmost dreams of science,

and all the moral and political aims of Girondinism were realized, if

the foundations of life and of being were laid bare, if the curve of

every star were traced, its laws determined, and its structure

analysed, if the revolutions of this globe from its first hour, and the

annals of all the systems that wheel in space, were by some miracle

brought within our scrutiny--it still would leave the spirit

unsatisfied as when these crystal walls did first environ its

infinitude.

The defects, the nobility, and the beauty of the ideal of the Third Age

are conspicuous in the great last work of Condorcet. As Mirabeau, the

intellectual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebellion, that

principle which has drawn the deepest utterances from the world-soul,

from Job to Prometheus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose countenance in

its high and gentle benevolence seems the very expression of that

_bienfaisance_ which the Abbe de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be

styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries his faith beyond

the grave, hallowing the altar of Freedom with his blood. In over a

hundred pamphlets during the four years of his life as a Revolutionist,

Condorcet disseminates his ideas--fortnightly pamphlets, many of them

even now worth reading, lighting up now this, now that aspect of his

faith--kingship, slavery, the destiny of man, two Houses, assignats,

education of the people, finance, the rights of man, economics, free

trade, the rights of women, the Progress of the Human Mind. It is in

this last, written with the shadow of death upon him, that the central

thought of his system is developed. He may have derived it from

Turgot,[5] his master, and the subject of one of his noblest

biographies, but he gave it a consecration of his own, and later

writers have done little more than elaborate, vary, or reduce to

scientific rule and line his living thought. Where they most are

faithful, there his followers are greatest.

In the theory of evolution Condorcet's principles appear to find

scientific expression and warrant, but it is pathetic to observe the

speculative science of a modern systematizer advancing through volume

after volume with the cumbrous but massive force of a traction-engine,

only to find rest at last in a vision of Utopia some centuries hence,

tedious as the Paradise of mediaeval poets or the fabulous Edens of

earlier times.

Indeed, the conception of the infinite perfectibility of man, and of an

eternal progress, carried its own doom in the familiar observation that

there where progress can be traced, there the divine is least immanent.

A distinguished statesman and writer, and a believer in evolution,

recently avowed his perplexity that an age like the present, which has

invented steam, electricity, and the kinematograph, should in painting

and poetry not surpass the Renaissance, nor in sculpture the age of

Phidias. In such perplexity is it not as if one heard again the threat

of Mummius, charging his crew to give good heed to the statues of

Praxiteles, on the peril of replacing them if broken!

Goethe, as the wrecks of his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of

the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius

imparts.[6] But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade

the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek

its peace where he himself had found it, in Art. So the labour of the

scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's

spirit beyond science, brings also a reward of its own to the devotee.

The sun of Art falls in a kind of twilight upon his soul, working

obscurely in words, and then does he most know the Unknowable when, in

the passion of self-imposed ignorance, he rises to a kind of eloquence

in proclaiming its unknowableness. Glimmerings from the Eternal visit

the obscure study where the soul in travail records patiently the

incidents of Time, and elaborates a theory of man's history as if it

were framed to end like an Adelphi melodrama or a three-volume novel.

Sec. 4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE

But from those very failures, those dissatisfactions, the ideal of the

Fourth Age is born, and the law of a greater progress divined. For the

soul, revolting at last against the fleeting illusions of time, the

deceiving Edens of saint, reformer, and revolutionist, freedom from the

body, freedom from religious, or freedom from political oppression,

sets steadily towards the lodestar of its being, whose rising is not in

Time nor its going down in Space. Nor is it in knowledge, whether of

the causes of things, or of the achievements of statesmen, warriors,

legislators, that the peace of the infinite is to be found, but in a

vision of that which was when Time and Cause were not. Then

instruction and the massed treasures of knowledge, established or

theoretic, concerning the past and the future of the planet on which

man plays his part, or of other planets on which other forms of being

play their parts, do indeed dissolve and are rolled together like a

scroll. The Timeless, the Infinite, like a burst of clear ether, an

azure expanse washed of clouds, lures on the delighted spirit, tranced

in ecstasy.

For the symbol of this universe and of man's destiny is not the

prolongation of a line, nor of groups of lines organically co-ordinate,

but, as it were, a sphere shapen from within and moulded by that

Presence whose immanence, ever intensifying, is the Thought which time

realizes as the Deed. Man looks to the future and the coming of

Eternity. How shall the Eternal come or the Infinite be far off?

Behold, the Eternal is _now_, and the Infinite is _here_. And if the

high-upreared architecture of the stars, and the changing fabric of the

worlds, be but shadows, and the pageantry of time but a dream, yet the

dreamer and the dream are God.

If all be Illusion, yet this faith that all is Illusion can be none.

There the realm of Illusion ends, here Reality begins. And thus the

spirit of man, having touched the mother-abyss, arises victorious in

defeat to fix its gaze at last, steadfast and calm, upon the Eternal.

Such is the distinction of the Fourth Age, whose light is all about us,

flooding in from the eastern windows yonder like a great dawn. Man's

spirit, tutored by lost illusion after lost illusion, advances to an

ever deeper reality. The race, too, like the individual and the

nation, is subject to the Law of Tragedy. Once more, in the way of a

thousand years, it knows that it is not in time, nor in any cunning

manipulation or extension of the things of time, that Man the Timeless

can find the word which sums his destiny, and spurning at the phantoms

of space, save as they grant access to the Spaceless, casts itself back

upon God, and in art, thought, and action pierces to the Infinite

through the finite.

This mystic attribute, this _elan_ of the soul, discovers a fellowship

in thinkers wide apart in circumstance and mental environment. It is,

for instance, the trait which Schopenhauer, Tourgenieff,[7] Flaubert,

and Carlyle possess in common[8]. These men are not as others of their

time, but prophet voices that announce the Fourth, the latest Age,

whose dawn has laid its hand upon the eastern hills.

The restless imagination of Flaubert, fused from the blood of the

Norsemen, plunges into one period after another, Carthage, the Rome of

the Caesars, Syria, Egypt, and Galilee, the unchanging East, and the

monotony in change of the West, pursuing the one Vision in many forms,

the Vision which leads on Carlyle from stage to stage of a course

curiously similar. Flaubert has a wider range and more varied

sympathies than Carlyle, and in intensity of vision occasionally

surpasses him. Both are mystics, visionaries, from their youth; but in

ethics Flaubert seems to attain at a bound the point of view which the

dragging years alone revealed to Carlyle.

The chapter on the death of Frederick the Great reads like a passage

from the _Correspondance_ of Flaubert in his first manhood. In Saint

Antoine, Flaubert found the secret of the same mystic inspiration as

Carlyle found in Cromwell. To the brooding soul of the hermit, as to

that of the warrior of Jehovah, what is earth, what are the shapes of

time? Man's path is to the Eternal--_dem Grabe hinan_--and from the

study of the Revolution of 1848 Flaubert arises with the same

embittered insight as marks the close of "Frederick the Great."

And if, in such later works as Flaubert's _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ and the

_Latter-Day Pamphlets_ of Carlyle, only the difference between the two

minds is apparent, the difference is, after all, but a difference in

temperament. It is the contrast between the impassive aloofness of the

artist, and the personal and intrusive vehemence of the prophet.

The structural thought, the essential emotion of the two works are the

same--the revolt of a soul whose impulses are ever beyond the finite

and the transient, against a world immersed in the finite and the

transient. Hence the derision, the bitter scorn, or the laughter with

which they cover the pretensions, the hypocrisies, the loud claims of

modern science and mechanical invention. But whether surveyed with

contemplative calm, or proclaimed with passionate remonstrance to an

unheeding generation, the life vision of these two men is one and the

same--"the eternities, the immensities."[9]

And this same passion for the infinite is the informing thought of

Wagner's tone-dramas and Tschaikowsky's symphonies. Love's mystery is

deepened by the mystery of death, and its splendour has an added touch

by the breath of the grave. The desire of the infinite greatens the

beauty of the finite and lights its sanctuary with a supernatural

radiance. All knowledge there becomes wonder. Truth is not known, but

the soul is there in very deed possessed by the Truth, and is one with

it eternally.

Ibsen's protest against limited horizons, against theorists,

formulists, social codes, conventions, derives its justice from the

worthlessness of those conventions, codes, theories, in the light of

the infinite. The achievements in art most distinctive of the present

age--the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance--proclaim

the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the

immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed,

the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of

unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the

retina of the eye. "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw

a line," said Hokousai. It was as if he had said, "I shall be able to

create a world."

The pressing effects of Imperialism in such an environment, its swift

influences upon the life of an age thus conditioned, thus sharply

defined from all preceding ages, are of an import which it would be

hard to over-estimate. The nation undowered with such an ideal,

menaced with extinction or with a gradual depression to the rank of a

protected nationality, passes easily, as in France and Holland and in

the higher grades of Russian society, to the side of political and

commercial indifferentism, of artistic or literary cosmopolitanism.

But to a race dowered with the genius for empire, it rescues politics

from the taint of local or transient designs, and imparts to public

affairs and the things of State that elevation which was their

characteristic in the Rome of Virgil and the England of Cromwell. For

not only the life of the individual, but the life of States, is by this

conception robed in something of its initial wonder. These, the

individual and the State, as we have seen, are but separate phases,

aspects of one thought, that thought which in the Universe is realized.

And the transformations in man's conception of his relations to the

divine are in turn fraught with consequence to the ideal of imperialism

itself. Life is greatened. The ardour of the periods of history most

memorable awakens again in man, the reverence of the Middle Age, the

energy of the Renaissance. A higher mood than that of the England of

Cromwell has arisen upon the England of to-day. Man's true peace is

not in the finite, but in the infinite; yet in the finite there is a

work to be done, with the high disregard of a race which looks, not to

the judgment of men, but of angels, whose appeal is not to the opinion

of the world, but of God.

Here at the close of a century, side by side existing are two ideals,

one political, the other religious, "a divine philosophy of the mind,"

in Algernon Sidney's phrase--how can the issue and event be other than

auspicious to this empire and to this generation of men? As Puritanism

seemed born for the ideal of Constitutional England, so this ideal of

the Fourth Epoch seems born to be the faith of Imperial England.

Behind Cromwell's armies was the faith of Calvin, the philosophy of the

"Institutes"; behind the French Revolution the thought of Rousseau and

Voltaire; but in this ideal, a thought, a speculative vision, deeper,

wider in range than Calvin's or Rousseau's, is, with every hour that

passes, adding a serener life, an energy more profound.

Sec. 5. THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"

Carlyle's exaltation of the "deed" above the "word," of action above

speech, does not exhaust its meaning in setting the man of deeds, the

soldier or the politician, above the thinker or the artist. It is an

affirmation of the glory of the sole Actor, the Dramatist of the World,

the _Demiourgos_, whose actions are at once the deeds and the thoughts

of men. "Im Anfang war die That." The "deed" is nearer the eternal

fountain than the "word"; though, on the other hand, in this or that

work of art there may converge more rays from the primal source than in

this or that deed. In painting, that impressionism which loves the

line for the line's sake, the tint for the tint's sake, owes its

emotion, sincere or affected, to the same energy of the same divine

thought as that from which the baser enthusiasm of the subject-painter

flows. A consciousness of the same truth reveals itself in Wagner's

lifelong struggle, splendidly heroic, to weld the art of arts into

living, pulsing union with the "deed," the action and its setting, from

which, in such a work as _Tristan_, or as _Parsifal_, that art's

ecstasy or mystery derives.

In the great crises of the world the preliminary actions have always

been indefinite, hesitating, or obscure. Indefiniteness is far from

proving the insincerity or transiency of Imperialism as an ideal. "A

man," says Oliver Cromwell, "never goes so far as when he does not know

whither he is going." What Cromwell meant was that, in the great hours

of life, the supernatural, the illimitable, thrusts itself between man

and the limited, precise ends of common days. Upon such a subject

Cromwell has the right to speak. Great himself, he was the cause of

the greatness that was in others. But in all things it was still

Jehovah that worked in him. Deeply penetrated with this belief,

Cromwell had the gift of making his armies live his life, think his

thought. Each soldier, horse or foot, was a warrior of God.

Man's severing, isolating intelligence is in these moments merged in

the divine intelligence; but in subjection, then is it most free. The

conscious is lost in the unconscious force which works behind the

world. The individual will stands aside. The Will of the universe

advances. Precision of design and purpose are shrouded in that dark

background of Greek tragedy, on which the forms of gods and heroes, in

mortal or immortal beauty, were sketched, subject in all their doings

to this high, dread, and austere power.

So of empires, of races, and of nations. A race never goes so far as

when it knows not whither it is going, when, rising in the

consciousness of its destiny at last, and seeing as yet but a little

way in front, it advances, performs that task as if it were its final

task, as if no other task was reserved for it by time or by nature.

Consciousness of destiny is the consciousness of the will of God and of

the divine purposes. It is the identity of the desire of the race with

the desire of the world-soul, and it moves towards its goal with the

motion of tides and of planets.

Therefore when in thought we summon up remembrance of those empires of

the past, Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Hellas, Rome, and Islam, or those

empires of nearer times, Charles's, Napoleon's, Akbar's, when we throw

ourselves back in imagination across the night of time, endeavouring to

live through their revolutions, and front with each in turn the black

portals of the future--what image is this which of itself starts within

the mind? Is it not the procession of the gladiators and the

amphitheatre of Rome?

Rome beyond all races had the instinct of tragic grandeur in state and

public life, and by that instinct even her cruelty is at times elevated

through the pageantry or impressive circumstance amid which it is

enacted. Does not this vault then, arching above us, appear but as a

vast amphitheatre? And towards the mortal arena the empires of the

world, one by one, defile past the high-upreared, dark, and awful

throne where sits Destiny--the phalanx of Macedon, the Roman legion,

the black banner of the Abbassides, the jewelled mail of Akbar's

chivalry, and the Ottoman's crescent moon. And their resolution,

serene, implacable, sublime, is the resolution of the gladiators, "Ave,

imperator, morituri te salutant! Hail, Caesar, those about to die

salute thee!"

And when the vision sinks, dissolving, and night has once more within

its keeping cuirass and spear and the caparisons of war, the oppressed

mind is beset as by a heavy sound, gathering up from the abysses,

deeper, more dread and mysterious than the death-march of heroes--the

funeral march of the empires of the world, the requiem of faiths, dead

yet not dead, of creeds, institutions, religions, governments,

laws--till through Time's shadows the Eternal breaks, in silence

sweeter than all music, in a darkness beyond all light.

Sec. 6. BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE MANDATE

OF THE PRESENT

Yet with a resolution as deep-hearted as the gladiator's it is for

another cause and unto other ends that the empires of the world have

striven, fulfilled their destiny and disappeared, that this Empire of

Britain now strives, fulfilling its destiny. Fixed in her resolve, the

will of God behind her, whither is her immediate course? The narrow

space of the path in front of her that is discernible even

dimly--whither does it tend or appear to tend?

Empires are successive incarnations of the Divine ideas, and by a

principle which, in its universality and omnipotence in the frame of

Nature, seems itself an attribute of the Divine, the principle of

conflict, these ideas realize their ends in and through conflict. The

scientific form which it assumes in the hypothesis of evolution is but

the pragmatic expression of this mystery. Here is the metaphysical

basis of the Law of Tragedy, the profoundest law in human life, in

human art, in human action. And thus that law, which, as I pointed

out, throws a vivid light upon the first essential transformation in

the life-history of a State dowered with empire, offers us its aid in

interpreting the last transformation of all.

The higher freedom of man in the world of action, and reverie in the

domain of thought, are but two aspects of the idea which Imperial

Britain incarnates, just as Greek freedom and beauty were aspects of

the idea incarnate in Hellas.

The spaces of the past are strewn with the wrecks of dead empires, as

the abysses where the stars wander are strewn with the dust of vanished

systems, sunk without a sound in the havoc of the aeons. But the

Divine presses on to ever deeper realizations, alike through vanished

races and through vanished universes.

Britain is laying the foundations of States unborn, civilizations

undreamed till now, as Rome in the days of Tacitus was laying the

foundations of States and civilizations unknown, and by him darkly

imagined. For Justice men turn to the State in which Justice has no

altar,[10] Freedom no temple; but a higher than Justice, and a greater

than Freedom, has in that State its everlasting seat. Throughout her

bounds, in the city or on the open plain, in the forest or in the

village, under the tropic or in the frozen zone, her subjects shall

find Justice and Freedom as the liberal air, so that enfranchised thus,

and the unfettered use of all his faculties secured, each may fulfil

his being's supreme law.

The highest-mounted thought, the soul's complete attainment, like the

summits of the hills, can be the possession only of the few, but the

paths that lead thither this empire shall open to the daring climber.

Humanity has left the Calvinist and Jacobin behind. And thus Britain

shall become the name of an ideal as well as the designation of a race,

the description of an attitude of mind as well as of traits of blood.

Europe has passed from the conception of an outwardly composed unity of

religion and government to the conception of the inner unity which is

compatible with outward variations in creeds, in manners, in religions,

in social institutions. Harmony, not uniformity, is Nature's end.

Dante, as the years advanced and the poet within him thrust aside the

Ghibelline politician, the author of the _De Monarchia_, discerned this

ever more clearly. Contemplating the empires of the past, he felt the

Divine mystery there incarnate as profoundly as Polybius. In the

fourteenth century he dares to see in the Roman people a race not less

divinely missioned than the Hebrew. Though contemporary of the

generation whose fathers had seen the Inquisition founded, yet like an

Arab _soufi_, Dante, the poet of mediaevalism, points to the spot of

light far-off, insufferably radiant, yet infinitely minute, the source

and centre of all faiths, all creeds, all religions, of this universe

itself, and all the desires of men. In an age which silenced the

scholastics he founded Hell in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle, as on a

traced plan, and he who in his childhood had heard the story of the

great defeat, and of the last of the crusading kings borne homewards on

his bier, dares crest his Paradise with the dearest images of Arab

poetry, the loveliness of flame and the sweetness of the rose.

What does this import, unless that already the mutual harmonies of the

wide earth and of the stars had touched his listening soul, that

already he who stayed to hear Casella sing heard far off a diviner

music, the tones of the everlasting symphony played by the great

Musician of the World, the chords whereof are the deeds of empires, the

achievements of the heroes of humanity, and its most mysterious

cadences are the thoughts, the faiths, the loftiest utterances of the

mind of man?

And to the present age, what an exhortation is implicit in this thought

of Dante's! No unity, no bond amongst men is so strong as that which

is based on religion. Patriotism, class prejudices, ties of affection,

all break before its presence. What a light is cast upon the deeper

places of the human heart by the history of Jesuitism in the

seventeenth century! Genius for religion is rare as other forms of

genius are rare, yet both in the life of the individual and of the

State its rank is primary. In the soul, religion marks the meridian of

the divine. By its remoteness from or nearness to this the value of

all else in life is tested. And there is nothing which a race will not

more willingly surrender than its religion. The race which changes its

religion is either very young, quick to reverence a greater race, and

ardent for all experiment, or very old, made indifferent by experience

or neglectful by despair.

In the conception at which she has at last arrived, and in her present

attitude towards this force, Britain may justly claim to represent

humanity. She combines the utmost reverence for her own faith with

sympathetic intelligence for the faiths of others. And confronting her

at this hour of the world's history is a task higher than the task of

Akbar, and more auspicious. Akbar's design was indeed lofty, and

worthy of that great spirit; but it was a hopeless design. The forms,

the creeds which have been imposed from without upon a religion are no

integral part of that religion's life. Even when by the progress of

the years they have become transfused by the formative influences which

time and the sufferings or the hopes of men supply, they change or are

cast aside without organic convulsion or menace to the life itself.

But the forms and embodiments which a divine thought in the process of

its own irresistible and mighty growth assumes--these are beyond the

touch of outer things, and evade the shaping hand of man. Inseparable

from the thought which they, as it were, reincarnate, their life

changes but with its life, and together they recede into the divine

whence they came. The effort to extract the inmost truth, tearing away

the form which by an obscure yet inviolate process has crystallized

around it, is like breaking a statue to discover the loveliness of its

loveliness. Akbar would have as quickly reached the creative thought,

the _idea_ enshrined in the Athene of Phidias, the immortal cause of

its power, by destroying the form, as have severed the divine thought

immanent in the Magian or Hindoo faiths from their integral embodiments.

But a greater task awaits Britain. Among the races of the earth whose

fate is already dependent, or within a brief period will be dependent

upon Europe, what empire is to aid them, moving with nature, to attain

that harmony which Dante discerned? What empire, disregarding the

mediaeval ideal, the effort to impose upon them systems, rites,

institutions, creeds, to which they are by nature, by their history, by

inherited pride in the traditions of the past, hostile or invincibly

opposed, will adventure the new, the loftier enterprise of developing

all that is permanent and divine within their own civilizations,

institutions, rites, and creeds? Nature and the dead shall lend their

unseen but mighty alliance to such purposes! Thus will Britain turn to

the uses of humanity the valour or the fortune which has brought the

religions of India and the power of Islam beneath her sway.

The continents of the world no longer contain isolated races severed

from each other by the barriers of nature, mutual ignorance, or the

artifices of man, but vast masses, moving into ever-deepening

intimacies, imitations, mutually influenced and influencing. Man grows

conscious to himself as one, and to represent this consciousness on the

round earth, as Rome did once represent it on this half the world, to

be amongst the races of all the earth what Hildebrand dreamed the

Normans might be amongst the nations of Europe, is not this a task

exalted enough to quicken the most sluggish zeal, the most retrograde

"patriotism"? For without such mediation, misunderstanding, envy,

hate, mistrust still erect barriers between the races of mankind more

impassable than continents or seas or the great wall of Ch'in Chi.

This is a part not for the future merely, it is one to which Britain is

already by her past committed. The task is great, for between

civilization and barbarism, the vanguard and the rearguard of humanity,

suspicion, rivalry, and war are undying. From this the Greek division

of mankind into Hellenes and Barbarians derives whatever justice it

possesses.

In those directions and towards those high endeavours amongst the

subjects within her own dominion, and thence amongst the races and

religions of the world, the short space that is illumined of the path

in front of Britain does unmistakably lead. Every year, every month

that passes, is fraught with import of the high and singular destiny

which awaits this realm, this empire, and this race. The actions, the

purposes of other empires and races, seem but to illustrate the

actions, the purposes of this empire, and the distinction of its

relations to Humanity.

Faithful to her past, in conflict for this high cause, if Britain fall,

it will at least be as that hero of the _Iliad_ fell, "doing some

memorable thing." Were not this nobler than by overmuch wisdom to

incur the taunt, _propter vitam vivendi perdere causas_, or that cast

by Dante at him who to fate's summons returned "the great refusal," _a

Dio spiacenti ed a'nemici sui_, "hateful to God and to the enemies of

God"? The nations of the earth ponder our action at this crisis, and

by our vacillation or resolution they are uplifted or dejected; whilst,

in their invisible abodes, the spirits of the dead of our race are in

suspense till the hazard be made and the glorious meed be secured, in

triumph or defeat, to eternity.

There are crises in history when it is not merely fitting to remember

the dead. Their deeds live with us continually, and are not so much

things remembered, as integral parts of our life, moulding the thought

of every hour. In such crises a Senate of the dead were the truest

counsellors of the living, for they alone could with convincing

eloquence plead the cause of the past and of the generations that are

not yet. Warriors, crusaders, patriots, statesmen-soldiers or

statesmen-martyrs, it was for things which are not yet that they died,

and to an end which, though strongly trusting, they but dimly discerned

that they laid the foundations of this Empire. Masters of their own

fates, possessors of their own lives, they gave them lightly as pledges

unredeemed, and for men and things of which they were not masters or

possessors. But they set higher store on glory than on life, and

valued great deeds above length of days. They loved their country,

dying for it, yet did it seem as if it were less for England than for

that which is the excellence of man's life and the very emergence of

the divine within such life, that they fought and fell. And this great

inheritance of fame and of valour is but ours on trust, the fief

inalienable of the dead and of the generations to come.

And now, behold from their martyr graves Russell, Sidney, Eliot arise,

and with phantom fingers beckon England on! From the fields of their

fate and their renown, see Talbot and Falkland, Wolfe and de Montfort

arise, regardful of England and her action at this hour. And lo!

gathering up from the elder centuries, a sound like a trumpet-call,

clear-piercing, far-borne, mystic, ineffable, the call to battle of

hosts invisible, the mustering armies of the dead, the great of other

wars--Brunanburh and Senlac, Crecy, Flodden, Blenheim and Trafalgar.

_Their_ battle-cries await our answer--the chivalry's at Agincourt,

"Heaven for Harry, England and St. George!", Cromwell's war-shout,

which was a prayer, at Dunbar, "The Lord of Hosts! The Lord of

Hosts!"--these await our answer, that response which by this war we at

last send ringing down the ages, "God for Britain, Justice and Freedom

to the world!"

Such witness of the dead is both a challenge and a consolation; a

challenge, to guard this heritage of the past with the chivalry of the

future, nor bate one jot of the ancient spirit and resolution of our

race; a consolation, in the reflection that from a valour at once so

remote and so near a degenerate race can hardly spring.

With us, let me repeat, the decision rests, with us and with this

generation. Never since on Sinai God spoke in thunder has mandate more

imperative been issued to any race, city, or nation than now to this

nation and to this people. And, again, if we should hesitate, or if we

should decide wrongly, it is not the loss of prestige, it is not the

narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is the judgment of the dead and the

despair of the living, of the inarticulate myriads who have trusted to

us, it is the arraigning eyes of the unborn.

[1] I am aware of Spinoza's distinction of the "clara et distincta

idea" and the "inadequat[oe] idea"; but the distinction above flows

from a conception of the universe and of man's destiny which is not

Spinoza's nor Spinozistic.

[2] Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht;

Der Herr der Schoepfung hat alles bedacht.

Dein Loos ist gefallen, verfolge die Weise,

Der Weg ist begonnen, vollende die Reise.

GOETHE, _West-oestlicher Divan, Buch der Sprueche_.

[3] Recent investigation has made it clear that the history of Islamic

Arabia is not severed by any violent convulsion from pre-Mohammedan

Arabia. "The times of ignorance" were not the desolate waste which

Tabari, "the Livy of the Arabs," paints, and down to the close of the

eighteenth century the comparison between England, Rome, and Islam

offers a fair field for speculative politics.

[4] Yet the scientific conception of the _destruction_ or _decay_ of

this whole star-system by fire or ice does of itself turn progress into

a mockery. (See Prof. C. A. Young, _Manual of Astronomy_, p. 571, and

Prof. F. R. Moulton, _Introduction to Astronomy_, p. 486.)

[5] Condorcet's biography (1786) of his master is one of the noblest

works of its class in French literature. Turgot's was one of those

minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter

bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse. The fogs and mists

of Comte's portentous tomes are all derived, it has often been pointed

out, from a few paragraphs of Turgot. And a fragment written by Turgot

in his youth inspired something of the substance and even of the title

of Condorcet's great _Esquisse_.

[6] References to the power over his mind of the French Revolutionary

principles abound in Goethe's writings. The violence of the first

impression, which began with the affair of the necklace, had reached a

climax in '90 and '91, and this, along with the ineffaceable memories

of the _Werther_ and _Goetz_ period, which his heart remembered when in

his intellectual development he had left it far behind, accounts in a

large measure for his yielding temporarily at least to the spell of

Napoleon's genius, and for the studied but unaffected indifference to

German politics and to the War of Liberation. Even of 1809, the year

of Eckmuehl, Essling, and Wagram, and the darkest hour of German

freedom, Goethe can write: "This year, considering the beautiful

returns it brought me, shall ever remain dear and precious to memory,"

and when the final uprising against the French was imminent, he sought

quietude in oriental poetry--Firdusi, Hafiz, and Nisami.

[7] Of his _Contes_ Taine said: "Depuis les Grecs aucun artiste n'a

taille un camee litteraire avec autant de relief, avec une aussi

rigoureuse perfection de forme."

[8] It is remarkable that Carlyle and Schopenhauer should have lived

through four decades together yet neither know in any complete way of

the other's work. Carlyle nowhere mentions the name of Schopenhauer.

Indeed _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, though read by a few, was

practically an unknown book both in Germany and England until a date

when Carlyle was growing old, solitary, and from the present ever more

detached, and new books and new writers had become, as they were to

Goethe in his age, distasteful or a weariness. Schopenhauer, on the

other hand, already in the "thirties," had been attracted by Carlyle's

essays on German literature in the _Edinburgh_, and though ignorant as

yet of the writer's name he was all his life too diligent a reader of

English newspapers and magazines to be unaware of Carlyle's later fame.

But he has left no criticism, nor any distinct references to Carlyle's

teaching, although in his later and miscellaneous writings the

opportunity often presents itself. Wagner, it is known, was a student

both of Schopenhauer and Carlyle. Schopenhauer's proud injunction,

indeed, that he who would understand his writings should prepare

himself by a preliminary study of Plato or Kant, or of the divine

wisdom of the Upanishads, indicates also paths that lead to the higher

teaching of Wagner, and--though in a less degree--of Carlyle.

[9] The friendship of Tourgenieff and Flaubert rested upon speculative

rather than on artistic sympathy. The Russian indeed never quite

understood Flaubert's "rage for the word." Yet the deep inner concord

of the two natures reveals itself in their correspondence. It was the

supreme friendship of Flaubert's later manhood as that with Bouilhet

was the friendship of his earlier years. Yet they met seldom, and

their meetings often resembled those of Thoreau and Emerson, as

described by the former, or those of Carlyle and Tennyson, when after

some three hours' smoking, interrupted by a word or two, the evening

would end with Carlyle's good-night: "Weel, we hae had a grand nicht,

Alfred." It is in one of Tourgenieff's own prose-poems that the

dialogue of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn across the centuries is

darkly shadowed. The evening of the world falls upon spirits sensitive

to its intimations as the diurnal twilight falls upon the hearts of

travellers descending a broad stream near the Ocean and the haven of

its unending rest.

[10] Cf. Philostratus, _Life of Appollonius_. I. 28.

NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE

NOTE.

"Nineteenth Century Europe" was written by Mr. Cramb for the _Daily

News_ Special Number for December 31st, 1900. In it he presents a

survey of the political events and tendencies throughout Europe during

the nineteenth century. He outlines the development of the New German

Empire from the war against Napoleon down to the days of Bismarck and

Wilhelm II, and shows how the Russian general Skobeleff, the hero of

Plevna and the Schipka Pass, foretold over thirty years ago the present

death-struggle between Teuton and Slav in Eastern Europe. The future

_roles_ of France, Italy, and Spain are also clearly indicated by the

author.

NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE

I

DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY

In Europe, as the year 1800 dragged to its bloody close, and the fury

of the conflict between the Monarchies and the Revolution was for a

time stilled on the fields of Marengo and Hohenlinden, men then, as

now, discussed the problems of the relation of a century's end to the

determining forces of human history; then, as now, men remarked half

regretfully, half mockingly, how pallid had grown the light which once

fell from the years of Jubilee of mediaeval or Hebrew times; and then,

as now, critics of a lighter or more positive vein debated the question

whether the coming year were the first or second of the new century,

pointing out that between the last year of a century and man's destiny

there could be no intimate connection, that all the eras were equally

arbitrary, equally determined by local or accidental calculations, that

the century which was closing over the Christian world had but run half

its course to the Mohammedan. Yet in one deep enough matter the mood

of the Europe of 1800 differs significantly from the mood of the Europe

of 1900. Whatever the division in men's minds as to the relation

between the close of the century and a race's history, and the precise

moment at which the old century ends and the new begins, one thing in

1800 was radiantly clear to all men--the glory and the wonder, the

endless peace and felicity not less endless, which the opening century

and the new age dimly portended or securely promised to humanity. The

desert march of eighteen hundred years was ended; the promised land was

in sight. The poet's voice from the Cumberland hills, "Bliss was it in

that dawn to be alive" traversed the North Sea, and beyond the Rhine

was swelled by a song more majestic and not less triumphant:

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen,

Durch des Himmels praecht'gen Plan,

Wandelt, Brueder, eure Bahn,

Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen,

and, passing the Alps and the Vistula, died in a tumultuous hymn of

victory long hoped for, of joy long desired, of freedom long despaired

of, in the cities of Italy, the valleys of Greece, the plains of

Poland, and the Russian steppes. Since those days three generations

have arisen, looked their last upon the sun, and passed to their rest,

and in what another mood does Europe now confront the opening century

and the long vista of its years! Man presents himself no more as he

was delineated by the poets of 1800. Not now does man appear to the

poet's vision as mild by suffering and by freedom strong, rising like

some stately palm on the century's verge; but to the highest-mounted

minds in Russia, Germany, France, Norway, Italy, man presents himself

like some blasted pine, a thunder-riven trunk, tottering on the brink

of the abyss, whilst far below rave the darkness and the storm-drift of

the worlds. From what causes and by the operation of what laws has the

great disillusion fallen upon the heart of Europe? Whither are

vanished the glorious hopes with which the century opened? Is it final

despair, this mood in which it closes, or is it but the temporary

eclipse which hides some mightier hope, a new incarnation of the spirit

of the world, some yet serener endeavour, radiant and more enduring,

wider in its range and in its influences profounder than that of 1789,

of 1793, or of the year of Hohenlinden and Marengo?

In the year 1800, from the Volga to the Irish Sea, from the sunlit

valleys of Calabria to the tormented Norwegian fiords, there was in

every European heart capable of interests other than egoistical and

personal one word, one hope, ardent and unconquerable. That word was

"Freedom"--freedom to the serf from the fury of the boyard, to the

thralls who toiled and suffered throughout the network of

principalities, kingdoms, and duchies, named "Germany"; freedom to the

negro slave; freedom to the newer slaves whom factories were creating;

freedom to Spain from the Inquisition, from the tyranny and shame of

Charles IV and Godoy; freedom to Greece from the yoke of the Ottoman;

to Italy from the slow, unrelenting oppression of the Austrian; freedom

to all men from the feudal State and the feudal Church, from civic

injustice and political disfranchisement, from the immeasurable wrongs

of the elder centuries! A new religion, heralded by a new evangel,

that of Diderot and Montesquieu, Lessing, Beccaria, and Voltaire, and

sanctified by the blood of new martyrs, the Girondins, offered itself

to the world. But as if man, schooled by disillusionment, and deceived

in the fifteenth and in the seventeenth centuries, trembled now lest

this new hope should vanish like the old, he sought a concrete symbol

and a reasoned basis for the intoxicating dream. Therefore, he spoke

the word "Liberty" like a challenge, and as sentinel answers sentinel,

straight there came the response, whispered in his own breast, or

boldly uttered--"France and Bonaparte." Since the death of Mohammed,

no single life had so centred upon itself the deepest hopes and

aspirations of men of every type of genius, intellect, and character.

Chateaubriand, returning from exile, offers him homage, and in the

first year of the century dedicates to him his _Genie du

Christianisme_, that work which, after _La Nouvelle Heloise_, most

deeply moulded the thought of France in the generation which followed.

And in that year, Beethoven throws upon paper, under the name

"Bonaparte," the first sketches of his mighty symphony, the serenest

achievement in art, save the _Prometheus_ of Shelley, that the

Revolutionary epoch has yet inspired. In that year, at Weimar,

Schiller, at the height of his enthusiasm, is repelled, as he had been

in the first ardour of their friendship, by the aloofness or the

disdain of the greater poet. Yet Goethe did most assuredly feel even

then the spell of Napoleon's name. And in that year, the greatest of

English orators, Charles James Fox, joined with the Russian Czar, Paul,

with Canova, the most exquisite of Italian sculptors, and with Hegel,

the most brilliant of German metaphysicians, in offering the heart's

allegiance to this sole man for the hopes his name had kindled in

Europe and in the world. To the calmer devotion of genius was added

the idolatrous enthusiasm of the peoples of France, Italy, Germany.

And, indeed, since Mohammed, no single mind had united within itself

capacities so various in their power over the imaginations of men--an

energy of will, swift, sudden, terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the

prestige of deeds which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of

Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an

imaginative language which found for his ideas words that came as from

a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own

heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, tranquil, when all

around was trouble and disarray--the calm of a spirit habituated to the

Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his

youth upwards. Yes, Mirabeau was long dead, and Danton, Marat, and

Saint-Just, and but three years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly

gifted in politics as in war, had been struck down in the noontide of

his years; but now a greater than Mirabeau, Hoche, or Danton was here.

If the December sun of Hohenlinden diverted men's minds to Moreau, the

victor, it was but for a moment. In the universal horror and joy with

which on Christmas Day, 1800, the rumour of the explosion and failure

of the infernal machine in the Rue St. Nicaise spread over Europe, men

felt more intimately, more consciously, the hopes, the fears, bound up

inextricably with the name, the actions, and the life of the new

world-deliverer, the Consul Bonaparte.

The history of the nineteenth century centres in the successive

transformations of this ideal so highly-pitched. In the gradual

declension of the cause which was then a religion, and to mankind the

warrant of a new era, into a local or party-cry, a watch-word

travestied and degraded, lies the origin of the intellectual despair or

solicitude which marks the closing years of the century. The first

disillusionment came swiftly. Fifteen years pass, years of war and

convulsion unexampled in Europe since the cataclysm of the fifth

century, the century of Alaric and Attila--and within that space, those

fifteen years, what a revolution in all the sentiments, the hopes, the

aspirations of men! The Consul Bonaparte has become the Emperor

Napoleon, the arch-enemy of Liberty and of the human race. France, the

world's forlorn hope in 1800, is, in 1815, the gathering place of the

armies of Europe, risen in arms against her! Emperors and kings,

nations, cities, and principalities, statesmen like Stein, philosophers

like Fichte, poets like Arndt and Koerner, warriors like Kutusov,

Bluecher, and Schwartzenberg, the peoples of Europe and the governments

of Europe, the oppressed and the oppressors, the embittered enmities

and the wrongs of a thousand years forgotten, had leagued together in

this vast enterprise, whose end was the destruction of one nation and

one sole man--the world-deliverer of but fifteen years ago!

What tragedy of a lost leader equals this of Napoleon? What marvel

that it still troubles the minds of men more profoundly than any other

of modern ages. Yet Napoleon did not betray Liberty, nor was France

false to the Revolution. Man's action at its highest is, like his art,

symbolic. To Camille Desmoulins and the mob behind him the capture of

a disused fortress and the liberation of a handful of men made the fall

of the Bastille the symbol and the watchword of Liberty. To the Europe

of Napoleon, the monarchs of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Spain, the

princes of Germany and Italy, the Papal power, "the stone thrust into

the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--these were like the Bastille

to the France of Desmoulins, a symbol of oppression and wrong,

injustice and tyranny. And in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor,

the peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who led against the

tyrants the hosts of the free. What were his own despotisms, his own

rigour, his cruelty, the spy-system of Fouche, the stifled Press, the

_guet-apens_ of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, and one sanguinary

war followed by another--what were these things but the discipline, the

necessary sacrifice, the martyrdom of a generation for the triumph and

felicity of the centuries to come? Napoleon at the height of Imperial

power, with thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and legions

unequalled since those of Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment.

"The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred

years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can

now be trusted to their own guidance." The hour of his death, whether

by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the

hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart. That hour of

penetrating vision into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into

the silence and the darkness. Napoleon, trusting to the word and to

the ideal Liberty, to man's unstable desires and to his own most fixed

star, yokes France in 1800 to his chariot wheels. But at the outset he

has to compromise with the past of France, with the ineradicable traits

of the Celtic race, its passion for the figures on the veil of Maya,

its rancours, and the meditated vengeance for old defeats. Yet it is

in the name of Liberty rather than of France that he greets the sun of

Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod despotism of Prussia, and meets the awful

resistance of the Slav at Eyiau and Friedland. Then, turning to the

West, it is in the name of Liberty that he sends Junot, Marmont, Soult,

and Massena across the Pyrenees to restore honour and law to Spain,

and, as he had ended the mediaeval Empire of the Hapsburgs, to end

there in Madrid the Inquisition and the priestly domination. The

Inquisition, which in 300 years had claimed 300,000 victims, is indeed

suppressed, but Spain, to his amazement, is in arms to a man against

its liberators! But Napoleon cannot pause, his fate, like Hamlet's,

calling out, and whilst his Marshals are still baffled by the lines of

Torres Vedras, he musters his hosts, and, conquering the new Austrian

Empire at Wagram, marches Attila-like across a subjugated Europe

against the Empire and capital of the White Czar.

Napoleon's fall made the purpose of his destiny clear even to the most

ardent of French Royalists, and to the most contented of the servants

of Francis II or Frederick William III. At Vienna the gaily-plumaged

diplomatists undid in a month all that the fifteen years of

unparalleled action and suffering unparalleled had achieved; whilst the

most matter-of-fact of all British Cabinets invested the prison of the

fallen conqueror with a tragic poetry which made the rock in the

Atlantic but too fitting an emblem of the peak in the Caucasus and the

lingering anguish of Prometheus. And if not one man of supreme genius

then living or in after ages has condemned Napoleon, if the poets of

that time, Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Lermontoff, made

themselves votaries of his fame, it was because they felt already what

two generations have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been their

hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that in political freedom no

more than in religious freedom can the peace of the world be found;

that Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's soul freedom can

never be an end in itself, but only the means to an end.

The history of Europe for the thirty-three years following the

abdication at the Elysee is a conflict between the two principles of

Absolutism and Liberty, represented now by the cry for

constitutionalism and the Nation, now by a return to Girondinism and

the watchword of Humanity. In theory the divine right of peoples was

arrayed against the divine right of kings. The conflict was waged

bitterly; yet it was a conflict without a battle. The dungeon, the

torture chamber, the Siberian mine, the fortresses of Spandau or

Spielberg, which Silvio Pellico has made remembered--these were the

weapons of the tyrants. The secret society, the Marianne, the

Carbonari, the offshoots of the Tugendbund, the ineffectual rising or

transient revolution, always bloodily repressed, whether in Italy,

Spain, Russia, Austria, or Poland--these were the sole weapons left to

Liberty, which had once at its summons the legions of Napoleon. And in

this singular conflict, what leaders! In Spain, the heroic Juan

Martin, the brilliant Riego; in Germany, Goerres, the morning-star of

political journalism, Rodbertus or Borne; in France, Saint-Simon, and

the malcontents who still believed in the Bonapartist cause. It was

not an army, but a crowd, without unity of purpose and without the

possibility of united action. Opposed to these were the united

purposes, moved, for a time at least, by a single aim--the repression

of the common enemy, "Revolution," in every State of Europe, in the

great monarchies of Austria, France, Russia, as in the smaller

principalities of Germany, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany,

Piedmont, Venetia, and Modena. To this war against Liberty the Czar

Alexander, the white angel who, in Madame de Kruedener's phrase, had

struck down the black angel Napoleon, added something of the sanctity

of a crusade. From God alone was the sovereign power of the princes of

the earth derived, and it was the task of the Holy Alliance to compel

the peoples to submit to this divinely-appointed and righteous

despotism.

In this crusade Austria and Metternich occupy in Europe till 1848 the

place which France and Bonaparte had occupied in the earlier crusade.

"I was born," says Metternich in the fragment of his autobiography, "to

be the enemy of the Revolution." Nature, indeed, and the environment

of his youth had formed him to act the part of the genius of Reaction.

Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask of the Austrian noble lay a

heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high

with any generous impulse. He was hostile to nobility of thought,

action, and art, for he had intelligence enough to discern in these a

living satire upon himself, his life, his aims. He despised history,

for history is the tragedy of Humanity; and he mocked at philosophy.

But he patronized Schlegel, for his watery volumes were easy reading,

and made rebellion seem uncultured and submission the mark of a

thoughtful mind. Metternich's handsome figure, fine manners, and

interminable _billets-doux_ written between sentences of death, exile,

the solitary dungeon, distinguish his appearance and habits from Philip

II of Spain, but, like him, he governed Europe from his bureau, guiding

the movements of a standing army of 300,000 men, and a police and

espionage department never surpassed and seldom rivalled in the western

world. There was nothing in him that was great. But he was

indisputable master of Europe for thirty-three years. Nesselrode,

Hardenberg, Talleyrand even--whose Memoirs seem the work of genius

beside the beaten level of mediocrity of Metternich's--found their

designs checked whenever they crossed the Austrian's policy. Congress

after Congress--Vienna, Carlsbad, Troppau, Laybach, Verona--exhibited

his triumph to Europe. At Laybach, in 1821, the Emperor's address to

the professors there, and thence to all the professors throughout the

Empire, was dictated by Metternich--"Hold fast by what is old, for that

alone is good. If our forefathers found in this the true path, why

should we seek another? New ideas have arisen amongst you, principles

which I, your Emperor, have not sanctioned, and never will sanction.

Beware of such ideas! It is not scholars I stand in need of, but of

loyal subjects to my Crown, and you, you are here to train up loyal

subjects to me. See that you fulfil this task!" Is there in human

history a document more blasting to the reputation for political wisdom

or foresight of him who penned it? It were an insult to the great

Florentine to style such piteous ineptitudes Machiavellian. Yet they

succeeded. The new evangel had lost its power; the freedom of Humanity

was the dream of a few ideologues; the positive ideals of later times

had not yet arisen. Well might men ask themselves: Has then Voltaire

lived in vain, and the Girondins died in vain? Has all the blood from

Lodi and Arcola to Austerlitz and the Borodino been shed in vain? Hard

on the address to the universities there crept silently across Europe

the message that Napoleon was dead. "It is not an event," said

Talleyrand, "but a piece of news." The remark was just. Europe seemed

now one vast Sainte Helene, and men's hearts a sepulchre in which all

hope or desire for Liberty was vanquished. The solitary grave at

Longwood, the iron railings, the stunted willow, were emblems of a

cause for ever lost.

The Revolution of July lit the gloom with a moment's radiance. Heine's

letters still preserve the electric thrill which the glorious Three

Days awakened. "Lafayette, the tricolour, the _Marseillaise_!" he

writes to Varnhagen, when the "sunbeams wrapped in printer's ink"

reached him in Heligoland, "I am a child of the Revolution, and seize

again the sacred weapons. Bring flowers! I will crown my head for the

fight of death. Give me the lyre that I may sing a song of battle,

words like fiery stars which shoot from Heaven and burn up palaces and

illumine the cabins of the poor." But when Lafayette presented to

France that best of all possible Republics, the fat smile and cotton

umbrella of Louis Philippe; when throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain,

Germany, insurrection was repressed still more coldly and cruelly; when

Paskievitch established order in Warsaw, and Czartoryski resigned the

struggle--then the transient character of the outbreak was visible.

France herself was weary of the illusion. "We had need of a sword," a

Polish patriot wrote, "and France sent us her tears." The taunt was as

foolish as it was unjust. France assuredly had done her part in the

war for Liberty. The hour had come for the States of Europe to work

out their own salvation, or resign themselves to autocracy, Jesuitism,

a gagged Press, the omnipresent spy, the Troubetskoi ravelin, Spandau,

and Metternich.

Eighteen years were to pass before action, but it was action for a more

limited and less glorious, if more practical, ideal than the freedom of

the world. Other despots died--Alexander I in 1825, the two

Ferdinands, of Sicily and of Spain, Francis II himself in 1835, and

Frederick William III in 1840. Gentz, too, was dead, Talleyrand,

Hardenberg, and Pozzo di Borgo; but Metternich lived on--"the gods," as

Sophocles avers, "give long lives to the dastard and the dog-hearted."

The Revolution of July seemed but a test of the stability of the fabric

he had reared. From Guizot and his master he found but little

resistance. The new Czar Nicholas fell at once into the Austrian

system; and, with Gerlach as Minister, Prussia offered as little

resistance as the France of Guizot. Meanwhile, in 1840, by the motion

of Thiers, Napoleon had returned from Saint Helena, and the advance of

his coffin across the seas struck a deeper trouble into the despots of

Europe than the march of an army.

II

NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM

In the political as in the religious ideals of men transformation is

endless and unresting. The moment of collision between an old and a

new principle of human action is a revolution. Such a turning-point is

the movement which finds its climax in Europe in the year 1848. Two

forces there present themselves, hostile to each other, yet

indissolubly united in their determining power upon modern as opposed

to ancient Republicanism--the principle of Nationality and the

principle of the organization of Labour against Capital, which under

various appellations is one of the most profoundly significant forces

of the present age. The freedom of the nation was the form into which

the older ideal of the freedom of man had dwindled. Saint-Simonianism

preserved for a time the old tradition. But the devotees of

Saint-Simon's greatest work, _Le Nouveau Christianisme_, after

anticipating in their banquets, graced sometimes by the presence of

Malibran, the glories of the coming era, quarrelled amongst themselves,

and, returning to common life, became zealous workers not for humanity,

but for France, for Germany, or for Italy. Patriotism was taking the

place of Humanism.

To Lamartine, indeed, and to Victor Hugo, as to cultured Liberalism

throughout Europe, the incidents in Paris of February, 1848, and the

astounding rapidity with which the spirit of Revolutions sped from the

Seine to the Vistula, to the Danube and the frontiers of the Czar--the

barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, the flight of the

Emperor and the hated Metternich, the Congress at Prague, and all

Hungary arming at the summons of Kossuth, the daring proclamation of

the party of Roumanian unity--appeared as a glorious continuance, or

even as an expansion, of the ideals of 1789 and 1792. Louis Napoleon,

entering like the cut-purse King in _Hamlet_, who stole a crown and put

it in his pocket, the flight of Kossuth, the surrender or the treason

of Gorgei, the _coup d'etat_ of December, 1851, shattered these airy

imaginings. Yet Napoleon III understood at least one aspect of the

change which the years had brought better than the rhetorician of the

_Girondins_ or the poet of _Hernani_. For the principle of

Nationality, which in 1848 they ignored, became the foundation of the

second French Empire, of the unity of Italy, and of that new German

Empire which, since 1870, has affected the State system of Europe more

potently and continuously than any other single event since the sudden

unity of Spain under Ferdinand at the close of the fifteenth century.

It was his dexterous and lofty appeal to this same principle which gave

the volumes of Palacky's _History of Bohemia_ a power like that of a

war-song. Nationality did not die in Vienna before the bands of

Windischgratz and Jellachlich, and from his exile Kossuth guided its

course in Hungary to a glorious close--the Magyar nation. Even in

Russia, then its bitter enemy, this principle quickened the ardour of

Pan-Slavism, which the war of 1878--the Schipka Pass, Plevna, the

dazzling heroism of Skobeleff--has made memorable. In the triumph of

this same principle lies the future hope of Spain. Spain has been

exhausted by revolution after revolution, by Carlist intrigue, by the

arrogance of successive dictators, and by the bloody reprisals of

faction; she has lost the last of her great colonies; but to Alphonso

XIII fate seems to reserve the task of completing again by mutual

resignation that union with Portugal of which Castelar indicated the

basis--a common blood and language, the common graves which are their

ancient battle-fields, and the common wars against the Moslem, which

are their glory.

With the names of Marx and Lassalle is associated the second great

principle which, in 1848, definitely takes its place on the front of

the European stage. This is the principle whose votaries confronted

Lamartine at the Hotel-de-Ville on the afternoon of the 25th February.

The famous sentence, fortunate as Danton's call to arms, yet by its

touch of sentimentality marking the distinction between September,

1792, and February, 1848, "The tricolour has made the tour of the

world; the red flag but the tour of the Champ de Mars," has been turned

into derision by subsequent events. The red flag has made the tour of

the world as effectively as the tricolour and the eagles of Bonaparte.

The origins of Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Nihilism--for all four,

however diverging or antagonistic in the ends they immediately pursue,

spring from a common root--have been variously ascribed in France to

the work of Louis Blanc, Fourier, Proudhon, or in Germany to Engels,

Stirner, and Rodbertus, or to the countless secret societies which

arose in Spain, Italy, Austria, and Russia, as a protest against the

broken pledges of kings and governments after the Congress of Vienna.

But the principle which informs alike the writings of individual

thinkers and agitators, though deriving a peculiar force in the first

half of the century from the doctrines and teachings of Fichte and

Schleiermacher, is but the principle to which in all ages suffering and

wrong have made their vain appeal--the responsibility of all for the

misery of the many and the enduring tyranny of the few. Indignant at

the spectacle, the Nihilist in orthodox Russia applies his destructive

criticism to all institutions, civil, religious, political, and finding

all hollow, seeks to overwhelm all in one common ruin. The

Emancipation of 1861 was to the Nihilist but the act of Tyranny veiling

itself as Justice. It left the serf, brutalized by centuries of

oppression, even more completely than before to the mercy of the boyard

and the exploiters of human souls. Michel Bakounine, Kropotkine,

Stepniak, Michaelov, and Sophia Perovskaya, whose handkerchief gave the

signal to the assassins of Alexander II, were but actualisations of

Tourgenieff's imaginary hero Bazaroff, and for a time, indeed,

Bazaroffism was in literary jargon the equivalent of Nihilism. If at

intervals in recent years a shudder passes across Europe at some new

crime, attempted or successful, of Anarchy, if Europe notes the

singular regularity with which the crime is traced to Italy, and is

perplexed at the absence of all the usual characteristics of conspiracy

against society--for what known motives of human action, vanity or

fear, hope or the gratification of revenge, can explain the silence of

the confederates of Malatesta, and the blind obedience of the agents of

his will?--if Europe is perplexed at this apparition of a terror

unknown to the ancient world, the Italian sees in it but the operation

of the law of responsibility. To the nameless sufferings of Italy he

ascribes the temper which leads to the mania of the anarchist; and the

sufferings of Italy in their morbid stage he can trace to the betrayal

of Italy by Europe in 1816, in 1821, in 1831, in 1848, and supremely in

1856. As Europe has grown more conscious of its essential unity as one

State system, diplomacy has wandered from such conceptions as the

Balance of Power, through Gortschakoff's ironic appeal to the equality

of kings, to the derisive theory of the Concert of Europe. But

Communism and Anarchism have afforded a proof of the unity of Europe

more convincing and more terrible, and full of sinister presage to the

future.

A third aspect of this revolt of misery is Socialism. Karl Marx may be

regarded as the chief exponent, if not the founder, of cosmopolitan or

international Socialism, and Lassalle as the actual founder of the

national or Democratic Socialism of Germany. Marx, whose countenance

with its curious resemblance to that of the dwarf of Velasquez,

Sebastian de Morra, seems to single him out as the apostle and avenger

of human degradation and human suffering, published the first sketch of

his principles in 1847, but more completely in the manifesto adopted by

the Paris Commune in 1849. As the Revolution of 1789 is to be traced

to the oppression of the peasantry by feudal insolence, never weary in

wrong-doing, as described by Boisguilbert and Mirabeau _pere_, so the

new revolutionary movement of the close of the nineteenth century has

its origin in the oppression of the artisan class by the new

aristocracy, the _bourgeoisie_. Factory owners and millionaires have

taken the place of the _noblesse_ of last century. And the sufferings

of the proletariat, peasant and artisan alike, have increased with

their numbers. Freedom has taught the myriads of workers new desires.

Heightened intelligence has given them the power to contrast their own

wretchedness with the seeming happiness of others, and a standard by

which to measure their own degradation, and to sound the depths of

their own despair.

Marx's greatest work, _Das Kapital_, published in 1867, was to the new

revolution just such an inspiration and guide as the _Contrat Social_

of Rousseau was to the revolution of '89. The brilliant genius of

Lassalle yielded to the sway of the principle of Nationality, and

ultimately of Empire, as strongly as the narrower and gloomier nature

of Marx was repelled by these principles. It was this trait in his

writings, as well as the fiery energy of his soul and his faith in the

Prussian peasant and the Prussian artisan, that attracted for a time

the interest of Bismarck. Even a State such as Austria Lassalle

regarded as higher than any federal union whatever. The image of

Lassalle's character, his philosophy, and too swift career, may be

found in his earliest work, _Heracleitus_, the god-gifted statesman

whom Plato delineated, seeking not his own, but realizing his life in

that of others, toiling ceaselessly for the oppressed, the dumb,

helpless, leaderless masses who suffer silently, yet know not why they

suffer. A monarchy resting upon the support of the artisan-myriads

against the arrogance of the _bourgeois_, as the Tudor monarchy rested

upon the support of the yeomen and the towns against the arrogance of

the feudal barons--this, in the most effective period of his career,

was Lassalle's ideal State. And it is his remarkable pamphlet in reply

to the deputation from Leipsic in 1863 that has fitly been

characterized as the charter of the whole movement of democratic

socialism in Germany down to the present hour.

The Revolution of 1848 revealed to European Liberalism a more

formidable adversary than Metternich. The youth of Nicholas I had been

formed by the same tutors as that of his elder brother, the Czar

Alexander. The Princess Lieven and his mother, Maria Federovna, the

friend of Stein, and the implacable enemy of Napoleon, had found in him

a pupil at once devoted, imaginative, and unwearied. A resolute will,

dauntless courage, a love of the beautiful in nature and in art, a

high-souled enthusiasm for his country, made him seem the

fate-appointed leader of Russia's awakening energies. The Teuton in

his blood effaced the Slav, and the fixed, the unrelenting pursuit of

one sole purpose gives his career something of the tragic unity of

Napoleon's, and leaves him still the supreme type of the Russian

autocrat. One God, one law, one Church, one State, Russian in

language, Russian in creed, Russian in all the labyrinthine grades of

its civic, military, and municipal life--this was the dream to the

realization of which the thirty crowded years of his reign were

consecrated. There is grandeur as well as swiftness of decision in the

manner in which he encounters and quells the insurrection of the 26th

December. Then, true to the immemorial example of tyrants, he found

employment for sedition in war. He tore from Persia in a single

campaign two rich provinces and an indemnity of 20,000,000 roubles.

The mystic Liberalism of Alexander was abandoned. The free

constitution of Poland, the eyesore of the boyards and the old Russian

party, was overthrown, and a Russian, as distinct from a German, policy

was welcomed with surprise and tumultuous delight. "Despotism," he

declared, "is the principle of my government; my people desires no

other." Yet he endeavoured to win young Russia by flattery, as he had

conquered old Russia by reaction. He encouraged the movement in poetry

against the tasteless imitation of Western models, and in society

against the dominance of the French language. In the first years of

his reign French ceases to be a medium of literary expression, and

Russian prose and Russian verse acquire their own cadences. Yet

liberty is the life-blood of art; and liberty he could not grant. The

freedom of the Press was interdicted; liberty of speech forbidden, and

a strict censorship, exercised by the dullest of officials, stifled

literature. "How unfortunate is this Bonaparte!" a wit remarked when

Pichegru was found strangled on the floor of his dungeon, "all his

prisoners die on his hands." How unfortunate was the Czar Nicholas!

All his men of genius died by violent deaths. Lermontoff and Poushkine

fell in duels before antagonists who represented the _tchinovnik_

class. Rileyev died on the scaffold; Griboiedov was assassinated at

Teheran.

His foreign policy was a return to that of Catherine the Great--the

restoration of the Byzantine Empire. Making admirable use of the

Hellenic enthusiasm of Canning, he destroyed the Turkish fleet at

Navarino. Thus popular at home and abroad, regarded by the Liberals of

Europe as the restorer of Greek freedom, and by the Legitimists as a

stronger successor to Alexander, he was able to crush the Poles.

Enthusiastic Berlin students carried the effigies of Polish leaders in

triumph; but not a sword was drawn. England, France, Austria looked on

silent at the work of Diebitch and Paskievitch, "my two mastiffs," as

the Czar styled them, and the true "_finis Poloniae_" had come. A

Russian Army marching against Kossuth, and the Czar's demand for the

extradition of the heroic Magyar, unmasked the despot. Yet his

European triumph was complete, and the war in the Crimea seemed his

crowning chance--the humiliating of the two Powers which in his eyes

represented Liberty and the Revolution. Every force that personal

rancour, and the devotion of years to one sole end, every measure that

reason and State policy could dictate, lent their aid to stimulate the

efforts of the monarch in this enterprise. The disaster was sudden,

overwhelming, irremediable. Yet in one thing his life was a success,

and that a great one--he had Russianised Russia.

The Crimean War marks a turning-point in the History of Europe only

less significant than the Revolution of 1848. The isolating force of

religion was annulled, and the slowly increasing influence of the East

upon the West affected even the routine of diplomacy. The hopes of the

Carlists and the Jesuits in Spain were frustrated, and Austria,

deprived of the reward of her neutrality, could look no more to the

Muscovite for aid in crushing Italian freedom, as she had crushed

Hungary. From his deep chagrin at the treason of the Powers, Cavour

seemed to gather new strength and a political wisdom which sets his

name with those of the greatest constructive statesmen of all time.

The defeat at Novara was avenged, the policy of Villafranca, and the

designs of that singular saviour of society, Louis Napoleon, were

checked. Venetia was recovered, and when in 1870 the lines around Metz

and Sedan withdrew the French bayonets which hedged in Pio Nono, Victor

Emmanuel entered Rome as King of Italy. Thirty years have passed since

the 20th September, and the burdens of taxation and military sacrifices

which Italy has borne, with the prisoner in the Vatican like a

conspirator on her own hearth, can be compared only with the burdens

which Prussia endured for the sake of glory and her kings before and

after Rossbach. But instead of a Rossbach, Italy has had an Adowa;

instead of justice, a corrupt official class and an army of judges who

make justice a mockery, anarchism in her towns, a superstitious

peasantry, an aristocracy dead to the future and to the memory of the

past. This heroic patriotism, steadfast patience, and fortitude in

disaster have their roots in the noblest hearts of Italy herself, but

there is not one which in the trial hour has not felt its own strength

made stronger, its own resolution made loftier, by the genius and

example of a single man--Giuseppe Mazzini. To modern Republicanism,

not only of Italy, but of Europe, Mazzini gave a higher faith and a

watchword that is great as the watchwords of the world. Equal rights

mean equal duties. The Rights of Man imply the Duties of Man. He

taught the millions of workers in Italy that their life-purpose lay not

in the extortion of privileges, but in making themselves worthy of

those privileges; that it was not in conquering capitalists that the

path of victory lay, but in all classes of Italians striving side by

side towards a common end, the beauty and freedom of Italy, by

establishing freedom and beauty in the soul.

The movement towards unity in Germany is old as the war of Liberation

against Napoleon, old as Luther's appeal to the German Princes in 1520.

The years following Leipsic were consumed by German Liberalism in

efforts to invent a constitution like that of England. It was the

happy period of the doctrinaire, of the pedant, and of the student of

1688 and the pupils of Sieyes. Heine's bitter address to Germany,

"Dream on, thou son of Folly, dream on!" sprang from a chagrin which

every sincere German, Prussian, Bavarian, Wuertemberger, or Rheinlander

felt not less deeply. The Revolution of 1848, the blood spilt at the

barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, did not end this; but

it roused the better spirits amongst the opposition to deeper

perception of the aspiration of all Germany. Which of the multifarious

kingdoms and duchies could form the centre of a new union, federal or

imperial? Austria, with her long line of Hapsburg monarchs, her

tyranny, her obscurantism, her tenacious hold upon the past, had been

the enemy or the oppressor of every State in turn. The Danubian

principalities, Bohemia, Hungary, pointed out to Vienna a task in the

future calculated to try her declining energy to the utmost. Prussia

alone possessed the heroic past, the memory of Frederick, of Bluecher,

of Stein, Scharnhorst, and Yorck; and, if politically despotic, she was

essentially Protestant in religion, and Protestantism offered the hope

of religious tolerance. After Austria's defeat in Italy, the issue

north of the Alps was inevitable. The question was how and in what

shape the end would realize itself. Montesquieu insists that, even

without Caius Julius, the fall of the oligarchy and the establishment

of the Roman Empire was fixed as by a law of fate. Yet, with data

before us, it is hard to imagine the creation of the new German Empire

without Bismarck. His downright Prussianism rises like a rock through

the mists, amid the vaporous Liberalism of the pre-Revolutionary

period. His unbroken resolution gave strength to the wavering purpose

of Frederick William IV. His diplomacy led to Koeniggraetz, and the

manipulated telegram from Ems turned, as Moltke said, a retreat into a

call to battle. And in front of Metz his wisdom kept the Bavarian

legions in the field. From his first definite entry into a State

career in 1848 to the dismissal of 1887, his deep religion, wisdom, and

simplicity of nature are as distinctly Prussian as the glancing ardour

of Skobeleff is distinctly Russian. From the Hohenzollern he looked

for no gratitude. His loyalty was loyalty to the kingship, not to the

individual. He had early studied the career of Strafford, and knew the

value of the word of a King. False or true to all men else, he was

unwaveringly true to Prussia, which to Bismarck meant being true to

himself, true to God. He could not bequeath his secret to those who

came after him any more than Leonardo could bequeath his secret to

Luini. But the Empire he built up has the elements of endurance. It

possesses in the Middle Age common traditions, deep and penetrating, a

common language, and the recent memory of a marvellous triumph.

Protestantism and the Prussian temper ensure religious freedom to

Bavaria. Even in 1870 the old principles of the Seven Years' War,

Protestantism and the neo-Romanism of Pius IX, reappear in the opposing

ranks at Gravelotte and Sedan. The new Empire, whether it be to Europe

a warrant of peace or of war, is at least a bulwark against

Ultramontanism.

The change in French political life finds its expression in the Russian

alliance. Time has atoned for the disasters at the Alma and Inkermann.

Would one discover the secret at the close of the century of the

alliance of Russia and France, freedom's forlorn hope when the century

began? It is contained in the speech of Skobeleff which once startled

Europe: "The struggle between the Slav and the Teuton no human power

can avert. Even now it is near, and the struggle will be long,

terrible, and bloody; but this alone can liberate Russia and the whole

Slavonic race from the tyranny of the intruder. No man's home is a

home till the German has been expelled, and the rush to the East, the

'_Drang nach Osten_' turned back for ever."

III

THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE

In modern Europe political revolutions have invariably been preceded or

accompanied by revolutions in thought or religion. The nineteenth

century, which has been convulsed by thirty-three revolutions, the

overthrow of dynasties, and the assassination of kings, has also been

characterized by the range and daring of its speculative inquiry.

Every system of thought which has perplexed or enthralled the

imagination of man, every faith that has exalted or debased his

intelligence, has had in this age its adherents. The Papacy in each

successive decade has gained by this tumult and mental disquietude.

Thought is anguish to the masses of men, any drug is precious, and to

escape from its misery the soul conspires against her own excellence

and the perfection of Nature. Even in 1802 Napoleon in his Hamlet-like

musings in the Tuileries despaired of Liberty as the safety of the

world, and in his tragic course this despair adds a metaphysical touch

to his doom. Five Popes have succeeded him who anointed Bonaparte, and

the very era of Darwin and Strauss has been illustrated or derided by

the bull, "_Ineffabilis Deus_," the Council of the Vatican, the

thronged pilgrimages to Lourdes, and the neo-Romanism of French

_litterateurs_. The Hellenism of Goethe was a protest against this

movement, at once in its intellectual and its literary forms, the

Romanticism of Tieck and Novalis, the cultured pietism of Lammenais and

Chateaubriand. Yet in _Faust_ Goethe attempted a reconciliation of

Hellas and the Middle Age, and the work is not only the supreme

literary achievement of the century, but its greatest prophetic book.

Then science became the ally of poetry and speculative thought in the

war against Obscurantism, Ultramontanism, and Jesuitism in all its

forms. Geology flung back the aeons of the past till they receded

beyond imagination's wing. Astronomy peopled with a myriad suns the

infinite solitudes of space. The theory of evolution stirred the

common heart of Europe to a fury of debate upon questions confined till

then to the studious calm of the few. The ardour to know all, to be

all, to do all, here upon earth and now, which the nineteenth century

had inherited from the Renaissance, quickened every inventive faculty

of man, and surprise has followed surprise. The aspirations of the

Revolutionary epoch towards some ideal of universal humanity, its

sympathy with the ideals of all the past, Hellas, Islam, the Middle

Age, received from the theories of science, and from increased

facilities of communication and locomotion, a various and most living

impulse. As man to the European imagination became isolated in space,

and the earth a point lost in the sounding vastness of the atom-shower

of the worlds, he also became conscious to himself as one. The bounds

of the earth, his habitation, drew nearer as the stars receded, and

surveying the past, his history seemed less a withdrawal from the

Divine than an ever-deepening of the presence of the Divine within the

soul.

That which in speculation pre-eminently distinguishes the Europe of the

nineteenth century from preceding centuries--the gradually

increasing dominion of Oriental thought, art, and action--has

strengthened this impression. An age mystic in its religion, symbolic

in its art, and in its politics apathetic or absolutist, succeeds an

age of formal religion, conventional art, and Republican enthusiasm.

Goethe in 1809, from the overthrow of dynasties and the crash of

thrones, turned to the East and found peace. What were the armies of

Napoleon and the ruin of Europe's dream to Hafiz and Sadi, and to the

calm of the trackless centuries far behind? The mood of Goethe has

become the characteristic of the art, the poetry, the speculation of

the century's end. The _bizarre_ genius of Nietzsche, whose whole

position is implicit in Goethe's _Divan_, popularized it in Germany.

The youngest of literatures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as

vividly as the oldest, Italy and France. It controls the meditative

depth of Leopardi, the melancholy of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's

dramas, and the cadenced prose of Flaubert. It informs the teaching of

Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschaikowsky. Goethe, at the beginning

of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of

Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in _Tristan_ and in _Parsifal_, has

woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the

Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the _Upanishads_ into a

rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of

Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the

Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of

painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.

What a vision of the new age thus opens before the gaze! The ideal of

Liberty and all its hopes have turned to ashes; but out of the ruins

Europe, tireless in the pursuit of the Ideal, ponders even now some

profounder mystery, some mightier destiny. More than any race known to

history the Teuton has the power of making other religions, other

thoughts, other arts his own, and sealing them with the impress of his

own spirit. The poetry of Shakespeare, of Goethe, the tone-dramas of

Wagner attest this. Out of the thought and faith of Judaea and Hellas,

of Egypt and Rome, the Teutonic imagination has carved the present.

Their ideals have passed into his life imperishably. But the purple

fringe of another dawn is on the horizon. Teutonic heroism and

resolution in action, transformed by the centuries behind and the

ideals of the elder races, confront now, creative, the East, its mighty

calm, its resignation, its scorn of action and the familiar aims of

men, its inward vision, its deep disdain of realized ends. What vistas

arise before the mind which seeks to penetrate the future of this

union! The eighteenth century at its close coincided with an

accomplished hope clearly defined. The last sun of the dying century

goes down upon a world brooding over an unsolved enigma, pursuing an

ideal it but darkly discerns.

GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED, PRINTERS, LETCHWORTH.

Popular Edition, in Paper Covers, 1s. net.

TREITSCHKE BERNHARDI

EXPOUNDED EXPLAINED

GERMANY AND ENGLAND

By Professor Cramb.

With a Preface by A. C. Bradley and an Introduction by the Hon. Joseph

Choate.

LORD ROBERTS said: "I hope that everyone who wishes to understand the

present crisis will read this book. There are in it things which will

cause surprise and pain, but nowhere else are the forces which led to

the war so clearly set forth."

MR. CHOATE says: "Worthy to be placed among English Classics for its

clearness of thought and expression, its restrained eloquence, and its

broad historical knowledge ... it explains very lucidly, not the

occasion, but the cause (the deep-seated cause) of the present war."

The _Times_ says: "A book of warning and enlightenment, written with

all a man's strength and sincerity, for which we must be profoundly

grateful."

The _Spectator_ says: "Let our readers buy this little book and see for

themselves what the nature of the inspiration is at the back of the

German Imperialism. They will learn in the smallest possible space

what Germany is fighting for and what Britain is resisting."

Three Important Works

THE GERMAN WAR BOOK

Being "The Usages of War on Land" issued by the Great General Staff of

the German Army.

Translated, with a Critical Introduction, by J. H. MORGAN, M.A.

Professor of Constitutional Law at University College, London; late

Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford; Joint Author of "War; Its Conduct

and its Legal Results."

_Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._

This official and amazingly cynical War Book of the Prussian General

Staff lays down the rules to be followed by German officers in the

conduct of War in the field, e.g., as to non-combatants, forced levies,

neutrals, hostages. Its importance and interest cannot be exaggerated.

FRANCE IN DANGER

By PAUL VERGNET. Translated by BEATRICE BARSTOW.

_Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._

Monsieur Paul Vergnet in this book did for the French Public what

Professor Cramb did for England. After a careful study of the

Political Movements In Germany, and of German literature, he warned his

countrymen that War was imminent. His aspect of the question has never

been fully discussed in England, and the translation of this book ought

to have a very special interest and value for all students of the Great

War.

WAR, ITS CONDUCT AND ITS LEGAL RESULTS

Including a critical examination of the whole of the emergency

legislation (with a chapter on Martial Law); a chapter on the

Neutrality of Belgium; a survey of the Rules as to the Conduct of War

on Land and Sea, and a complete study of the Effect of War on

Commercial Relations.

By THOMAS BATY, LL.D., D.C.L., and Professor J. H. MORGAN.

_Crown 8vo._

IN WESTERN CANADA BEFORE THE WAR

A STUDY OF COMMUNITIES

By E. B. MITCHELL.

_With Map. Crown 8vo._

This is an attempt to describe truly the social and economic state of

things in the Prairie Provinces of the Dominion in the years 1913-14,

at the end of the great rush. The writer, who is neither a summer

visitor nor a professional advertiser, nor a disappointed immigrant,

had unusual opportunities for the study of life in a small prairie city

and among the real prairie people on the farms; the picture drawn is

neither all gloom nor all brightness. At the present time, when the

War has made the whole Empire realize its unity anew, such a

disinterested study of Western communities is specially useful and

timely.

LONDON: JOHN MURRAY