Europe--which will presently seem to the student of history so curious a
halting-place upon the way to human unity--rested very largely upon the
maintenance of peace. It was the failure to understand this on the part
of the German and Bulgarian rulers in particular that has now brought
all monarchy to the question. The implicit theory that supported the
intermarrying German royal families in Europe was that their
inter-relationship and their aloofness from their subjects was a
mitigation of national and racial animosities. In the days when Queen
Victoria was the grandmother of Europe this was a plausible argument.
King, Czar and Emperor, or Emperor and Emperor would meet, and it was
understood that these meetings were the lubrication of European affairs.
The monarchs married largely, conspicuously, and very expensively for
our good. Royal funerals, marriages, christenings, coronations, and
jubilees interrupted traffic and stimulated trade everywhere. They
seemed to give a _raison d'être_ for mankind. It is the Emperor William
and the Czar Ferdinand who have betrayed not only humanity but their own
strange caste by shattering all these pleasant illusions. The wisdom of
Kant is justified, and we know now that kings cause wars. It needed the
shock of the great war to bring home the wisdom of that old Scotchman of
Königsberg to the mind of the ordinary man. Moreover in support of the
dynastic system was the fact that it did exist as the system in
possession, and all prosperous and intelligent people are chary of
disturbing existing things. Life is full of vestigial structures, and it
is a long way to logical perfection. Let us keep on, they would argue,
with what we have. And another idea which, rightly or wrongly, made men
patient with the emperors and kings was an exaggerated idea of the
insecurity of republican institutions.
You can still hear very old dull men say gravely that "kings are better
than pronunciamentos"; there was an article upon Greece to this effect
quite recently in that uncertain paper _The New Statesman_. Then a kind
of illustrative gesture would be made to the South American republics,
although the internal disturbances of the South American republics have
diminished to very small dimensions in the last three decades and
although pronunciamentos rarely disturb the traffic in Switzerland, the
United States, or France. But there can be no doubt that the influence
of the Germanic monarchy up to the death of Queen Victoria upon British
thought was in the direction of estrangement from the two great modern
republics and in the direction of assistance and propitiation to
Germany. We surrendered Heligoland, we made great concessions to German
colonial ambitions, we allowed ourselves to be jockeyed into a phase of
dangerous hostility to France. A practice of sneering at things American
has died only very recently out of English journalism and literature, as
any one who cares to consult the bound magazines of the 'seventies and
'eighties may soon see for himself. It is well too in these days not to
forget Colonel Marchand, if only to remember that such a clash must
never recur. But in justice to our monarchy we must remember that after
the death of Queen Victoria, the spirit, if not the forms, of British
kingship was greatly modified by the exceptional character and ability
of King Edward VII. He was curiously anti-German in spirit; he had
essentially democratic instincts; in a few precious years he restored
good will between France and Great Britain. It is no slight upon his
successor to doubt whether any one could have handled the present
opportunities and risks of monarchy in Great Britain as Edward could
have handled them.
Because no doubt if monarchy is to survive in the British Empire it must
speedily undergo the profoundest modification. The old state of affairs
cannot continue. The European dynastic system, based upon the
intermarriage of a group of mainly German royal families, is dead
to-day; it is freshly dead, but it is as dead as the rule of the Incas.
It is idle to close our eyes to this fact. The revolution in Russia, the
setting up of a republic in China, demonstrating the ripeness of the
East for free institutions, the entry of the American republics into
world politics--these things slam the door on any idea of working back
to the old nineteenth-century system. People calls to people. "No peace
with the Hohenzollerns" is a cry that carries with it the final
repudiation of emperors and kings. The man in the street will assure you
he wants no diplomatic peace. Beyond the unstable shapes of the present
the political forms of the future rise now so clearly that they are the
common talk of men. Kant's lucid thought told us long ago that the peace
of the world demanded a world union of republics. That is a commonplace
remark now in every civilized community.
The stars in their courses, the logic of circumstances, the everyday
needs and everyday intelligence of men, all these things march
irresistibly towards a permanent world peace based on democratic
republicanism. The question of the future of monarchy is not whether it
will be able to resist and overcome that trend; it has as little chance
of doing that as the Lama of Thibet has of becoming Emperor of the
Earth. It is whether it will resist openly, become the centre and symbol
of a reactionary resistance, and have to be abolished and swept away
altogether everywhere, as the Romanoffs have already been swept away in
Russia, or whether it will be able in this country and that to adapt
itself to the necessities of the great age that dawns upon mankind, to
take a generous and helpful attitude towards its own modification, and
so survive, for a time at any rate, in that larger air.
It is the fashion for the apologists of monarchy in the British Empire
to speak of the British system as a crowned republic. That is an
attractive phrase to people of republican sentiments. It is quite
conceivable that the British Empire may be able to make that phrase a
reality and that the royal line may continue, a line of hereditary
presidents, with some of the ancient trappings and something of the
picturesque prestige that, as the oldest monarchy in Europe, it has
to-day. Two kings in Europe have already gone far towards realizing
this conception of a life president; both the King of Italy and the King
of Norway live as simply as if they were in the White House and are far
more accessible. Along that line the British monarchy must go if it is
not to go altogether. Will it go along those lines?
There are many reasons for hoping that it will do so. The _Times_ has
styled the crown the "golden link" of the empire. Australians and
Canadians, it was argued, had little love for the motherland but the
greatest devotion to the sovereign, and still truer was this of Indians,
Egyptians, and the like. It might be easy to press this theory of
devotion too far, but there can be little doubt that the British Crown
does at present stand as a symbol of unity over diversity such as no
other crown, unless it be that of Austria-Hungary, can be said to do.
The British crown is not like other crowns; it may conceivably take a
line of its own and emerge--possibly a little more like a hat and a
little less like a crown--from trials that may destroy every other
monarchial system in the world.
Now many things are going on behind the scenes, many little indications
peep out upon the speculative watcher and vanish again; but there is
very little that is definite to go upon at the present time to
determine how far the monarchy will rise to the needs of this great
occasion. Certain acts and changes, the initiative to which would come
most gracefully from royalty itself, could be done at this present time.
They may be done quite soon. Upon the doing of them wait great masses of
public opinion. The first of these things is for the British monarchy to
sever itself definitely from the German dynastic system, with which it
is so fatally entangled by marriage and descent, and to make its
intention of becoming henceforth more and more British in blood as well
as spirit, unmistakably plain. This idea has been put forth quite
prominently in the _Times_. The king has been asked to give his
countenance to the sweeping away of all those restrictions first set up
by George the Third, upon the marriage of the Royal Princes with
British, French and American subjects. The British Empire is very near
the limit of its endurance of a kingly caste of Germans. The choice of
British royalty between its peoples and its cousins cannot be
indefinitely delayed. Were it made now publicly and boldly, there can be
no doubt that the decision would mean a renascence of monarchy, a
considerable outbreak of royalist enthusiasm in the Empire. There are
times when a king or queen must need be dramatic and must a little
anticipate occasions. It is not seemly to make concessions perforce;
kings may not make obviously unwilling surrenders; it is the indecisive
kings who lose their crowns.
No doubt the Anglicization of the royal family by national marriages
would gradually merge that family into the general body of the British
peerage. Its consequent loss of distinction might be accompanied by an
associated fading out of function, until the King became at last hardly
more functional than was the late Duke of Norfolk as premier peer.
Possibly that is the most desirable course from many points of view.
It must be admitted that the abandonment of marriages within the royal
caste and a bold attempt to introduce a strain of British blood in the
royal family does not in itself fulfil all that is needed if the British
king is indeed to become the crowned president of his people and the
nominal and accepted leader of the movement towards republican
institutions. A thing that is productive of an enormous amount of
republican talk in Great Britain is the suspicion--I believe an
ill-founded suspicion--that there are influences at work at court
antagonistic to republican institutions in friendly states and that
there is a disposition even to sacrifice the interests of the liberal
allies to dynastic sympathies. These things are not to be believed, but
it would be a feat of vast impressiveness if there were something like
a royal and public repudiation of the weaknesses of cousinship. The
behaviour of the Allies towards that great Balkan statesman Venizelos,
the sacrificing of the friendly Greek republicans in favour of the
manifestly treacherous King of Greece, has produced the deepest shame
and disgust in many quarters that are altogether friendly, that are even
warmly "loyal" to the British monarchy.
And in a phase of tottering thrones it is very undesirable that the
British habit of asylum should be abused. We have already in England the
dethroned monarch of a friendly republic; he is no doubt duly looked
after. In the future there may be a shaking of the autumnal boughs and a
shower of emperors and kings. We do not want Great Britain to become a
hotbed of reactionary plotting and the starting-point of restoration
raids into the territories of emancipated peoples. This is particularly
desirable if presently, after the Kaiser's death--which by all the
statistics of Hohenzollern mortality cannot be delayed now for many
years--the present Crown Prince goes a-wandering. We do not want any
German ex-monarchs; Sweden is always open to them and friendly, and to
Sweden they ought to go; and particularly do British people dread an
irruption of Hohenzollerns or Coburgers. Almost as undesirable would be
the arrival of the Czar and Czarina. It is supremely important that no
wind of suspicion should blow between us and the freedom of Russia.
After the war even more than during the war will the enemy be anxious to
sow discord between the great Russian-speaking and English-speaking
democracies. Quite apart from the scandal of their inelegant
domesticities, the establishment of the Czar and Czarina in England with
frequent and easy access to our royal family may be extraordinarily
unfortunate for the British monarchy. I will confess a certain sympathy
for the Czar myself. He is not an evil figure, he is not a strong
figure, but he has that sort of weakness, that failure in decision,
which trails revolution in its wake. He has ended one dynasty already.
The British royal family owes it to itself, that he bring not the
infection of his misfortunes to Windsor.
The security of the British monarchy lies in such a courageous severance
of its destinies from the Teutonic dynastic system. Will it make that
severance? There I share an almost universal ignorance. The loyalty of
the British is not to what kings are too prone to call "my person," not
to a chosen and admired family, but to a renascent mankind. We have
fought in this war for Belgium, for France, for general freedom, for
civilization and the whole future of mankind, far more than for
ourselves. We have not fought for a king. We are discovering in that
spirit of human unity that lies below the idea of a League of Free
Nations the real invisible king of our heart and race. But we will very
gladly go on with our task under a nominal king unless he hampers us in
the task that grows ever more plainly before us. ... That, I think, is a
fair statement of British public opinion on this question. But every day
when I am in London I walk past Buckingham Palace to lunch at my club,
and I look at that not very expressive façade and wonder--and we all
wonder--what thoughts are going on behind it and what acts are being
conceived there. Out of it there might yet come some gesture of
acceptance magnificent enough to set beside President Wilson's
magnificent declaration of war. ...
These are things in the scales of fate. I will not pretend to be able to
guess even which way the scales will swing.
VIII
THE PLAIN NECESSITY FOR A LEAGUE
Great as the sacrifices of prejudice and preconception which any
effective realization of this idea of a League of Free Nations will
demand, difficult as the necessary delegations of sovereignty must be,
none the less are such sacrifices and difficulties unavoidable. People
in France and Italy and Great Britain and Germany alike have to subdue
their minds to the realization that some such League is now a necessity
for them if their peace and national life are to continue. There is no
prospect before them but either some such League or else great
humiliation and disastrous warfare driving them down towards social
dissolution; and for the United States it is only a question of a little
longer time before the same alternatives have to be faced.
Whether this war ends in the complete defeat of Germany and German
imperialism, or in a revolutionary modernization of Germany, or in a
practical triumph for the Hohenzollerns, are considerations that affect
the nature and scope of the League, but do not affect its essential
necessity. In the first two cases the League of Free Nations will be a
world league including Germany as a principal partner, in the latter
case the League of Free Nations will be a defensive league standing
steadfast against the threat of a world imperialism, and watching and
restraining with one common will the homicidal maniac in its midst. But
in all these cases there can be no great alleviation of the evils that
now blacken and threaten to ruin human life altogether, unless all the
civilized and peace-seeking peoples of the world are pledged and locked
together under a common law and a common world policy. There must rather
be an intensification of these evils. There must be wars more evil than
this war continuing this war, and more destructive of civilized life.
There can be no peace and hope for our race but an organized peace and
hope, armed against disturbance as a state is armed against mad,
ferocious, and criminal men.
Now, there are two chief arguments, running one into the other, for the
necessity of merging our existing sovereignties into a greater and, if
possible, a world-wide league. The first is the present geographical
impossibility of nearly all the existing European states and empires;
and the second is the steadily increasing disproportion between the
tortures and destructions inflicted by modern warfare and any possible
advantages that may arise from it. Underlying both arguments is the fact
that modern developments of mechanical science have brought the nations
of Europe together into too close a proximity. This present war, more
than anything else, is a violent struggle between old political ideas
and new antagonistic conditions.
It is the unhappy usage of our schools and universities to study the
history of mankind only during periods of mechanical unprogressiveness.
The historical ideas of Europe range between the time when the Greeks
were going about the world on foot or horseback or in galleys or sailing
ships to the days when Napoleon, Wellington, and Nelson were going about
at very much the same pace in much the same vehicles and vessels. At the
advent of steam and electricity the muse of history holds her nose and
shuts her eyes. Science will study and get the better of a modern
disease, as, for example, sleeping sickness, in spite of the fact that
it has no classical standing; but our history schools would be shocked
at the bare idea of studying the effect of modern means of communication
upon administrative areas, large or small. This defect in our historical
training has made our minds politically sluggish. We fail to adapt
readily enough. In small things and great alike we are trying to run the
world in areas marked out in or before the eighteenth century,
regardless of the fact that a man or an army or an aeroplane can get in
a few minutes or a few hours to points that it would have taken days or
weeks to reach under the old foot-and-horse conditions. That matters
nothing to the learned men who instruct our statesmen and politicians.
It matters everything from the point of view of social and economic and
political life. And the grave fact to consider is that all the great
states of Europe, except for the unification of Italy and Germany, are
still much of the size and in much the same boundaries that made them
strong and safe in the eighteenth century, that is to say, in the
closing years of the foot-horse period. The British empire grew and was
organized under those conditions, and had to modify itself only a little
to meet the needs of steam shipping. All over the world are its linked
possessions and its ports and coaling stations and fastnesses on the
trade routes. And British people still look at the red-splashed map of
the world with the profoundest self-satisfaction, blind to the swift
changes that are making that scattered empire--if it is to remain an
isolated system--almost the most dangerous conceivable.
Let me ask the British reader who is disposed to sneer at the League of
Nations and say he is very well content with the empire, thank you, to
get his atlas and consider one or two propositions. And, first, let him
think of aviation. I can assure him, because upon this matter I have
some special knowledge, that long-distance air travel for men, for
letters and light goods and for bombs, is continually becoming more
practicable. But the air routes that air transport will follow must go
over a certain amount of land, for this reason that every few hundred
miles at the longest the machine must come down for petrol. A flying
machine with a safe non-stop range of 1500 miles is still a long way
off. It may indeed be permanently impracticable because there seems to
be an upward limit to the size of an aeroplane engine. And now will the
reader take the map of the world and study the air routes from London to
the rest of the empire? He will find them perplexing--if he wants them
to be "All-Red." Happily this is not a British difficulty only. Will he
next study the air routes from Paris to the rest of the French
possessions? And, finally, will he study the air routes out of Germany
to anywhere? The Germans are as badly off as any people. But we are all
badly off. So far as world air transit goes any country can, if it
chooses, choke any adjacent country. Directly any trade difficulty
breaks out, any country can begin a vexatious campaign against its
neighbour's air traffic. It can oblige it to alight at the frontier, to
follow prescribed routes, to land at specified places on those routes
and undergo examinations that will waste precious hours. But so far as I
can see, no European statesman, German or Allied, have begun to give
their attention to this amazing difficulty. Without a great pooling of
air control, either a world-wide pooling or a pooling at least of the
Atlantic-Mediterranean Allies in one Air League, the splendid peace
possibilities of air transport--and they are indeed splendid--must
remain very largely a forbidden possibility to mankind.
And as a second illustration of the way in which changing conditions are
altering political questions, let the reader take his atlas and consider
the case of that impregnable fastness, that great naval station, that
Key to the Mediterranean, Gibraltar. British boys are brought up on
Gibraltar and the Gibraltar idea. To the British imagination Gibraltar
is almost as sacred a national symbol as the lions in Trafalgar Square.
Now, in his atlas the reader will almost certainly find an inset map of
this valuable possession, coloured bright red. The inset map will have
attached to it a small scale of miles. From that he will be able to
satisfy himself that there is not an inch of the rock anywhere that is
not within five miles or less of Spanish land, and that there is rather
more than a semicircle of hills round the rock within a range of seven
or eight miles. That is much less than the range of a sixteen-inch gun.
In other words, the Spaniards are in a position to knock Gibraltar to
bits whenever they want to do so, or to smash and sink any ships in its
harbour. They can hit it on every side. Consider, moreover, that there
are long sweeps of coast north, south, and west of the Rock, from which
torpedoes could be discharged at any ship that approached. Inquire
further where on the Rock an aeroplane can land. And having ascertained
these things, ask yourself what is the present value of Gibraltar?
I will not multiply disagreeable instances of this sort, though it would
be easy enough to do so in the case both of France and Italy as well as
of Great Britain. I give them as illustrations of the way in which
everywhere old securities and old arrangements must be upset by the
greater range of modern things. Let us get on to more general
conditions. There is not a capital city in Europe that twenty years from
now will not be liable to a bombing raid done by hundreds or even
thousands of big aeroplanes, upon or even before a declaration of war,
and there is not a line of sea communication that will not be as
promptly interrupted by the hostile submarine. I point these things out
here only to carry home the fact that the ideas of sovereign isolation
and detachment that were perfectly valid in 1900, the self-sufficient
empire, Imperial Zollverein and all that stuff, and damn the foreigner!
are now, because of the enormous changes in range of action and facility
of locomotion that have been going on, almost as wild--or would be if we
were not so fatally accustomed to them--and quite as dangerous, as the
idea of setting up a free and sovereign state in the Isle of Dogs. All
the European empires are becoming vulnerable at every point. Surely the
moral is obvious. The only wise course before the allied European powers
now is to put their national conceit in their pockets and to combine to
lock up their foreign policy, their trade interests, and all their
imperial and international interests into a League so big as to be able
to withstand the most sudden and treacherous of blows. And surely the
only completely safe course for them and mankind--hard and nearly
impossible though it may seem at the present juncture--is for them to
lock up into one unity with a democratized Germany and with all the
other states of the earth into one peace-maintaining League.
If the reader will revert again to his atlas he will see very clearly
that a strongly consolidated League of Free Nations, even if it
consisted only of our present allies, would in itself form a
combination with so close a system of communication about the world, and
so great an economic advantage, that in the long run it could oblige
Germany and the rest of the world to come in to its council. Divided the
Oceanic Allies are, to speak plainly, geographical rags and nakedness;
united they are a world. To set about organizing that League now, with
its necessary repudiation on the part of Britain, France, and Italy, of
a selfish and, it must be remembered in the light of these things I have
but hinted at here, a _now hopelessly unpracticable imperialism_, would,
I am convinced, lead quite rapidly to a great change of heart in Germany
and to a satisfactory peace. But even if I am wrong in that, then all
the stronger is the reason for binding, locking and uniting the allied
powers together. It is the most dangerous of delusions for each and all
of them to suppose that either Britain, France or Italy can ever stand
alone again and be secure.