LIV. The American War of Independence
Washington and Lafayette look over the troops at
Valley Forge
THE THIRD quarter of the eighteenth century thus saw the remarkable
and unstable spectacle of a Europe divided against itself, and no longer
with any unifying political or religious idea, yet through the immense
stimulation of men’s imaginations by the printed book, the printed map,
and the opportunity of the new ocean-going shipping, able in a
disorganized and contentious manner to dominate all the coasts of the
world. It was a planless, incoherent ebullition of enterprise due to
temporary and almost accidental advantages over the rest of mankind. By
virtue of these advantages this new and still largely empty continent of
America was peopled mainly from Western European sources, and South
Africa and Australia and New Zealand marked down as prospective homes
for a European population.
The motive that had sent Columbus to America and Vasco da Gama to India
was the perennial first motive of all sailors since the beginning of
things—trade. But while in the already populous and productive East the
trade motive remained dominant, and the European settlements remained
trading settlements from which the European inhabitants hoped to return
home to spend their money, the Europeans in America, dealing with
communities at a very much lower level of productive activity, found a
new inducement for persistence in the search for gold and silver.
Particularly did the mines of Spanish America yield silver. The
Europeans had to go to America not simply as armed merchants but as
prospectors, miners, searchers after natural products, and presently as
planters. In the north they sought furs. Mines and plantations
necessitated settlements. They obliged people to set up permanent
overseas homes. Finally in some cases, as when the English Puritans went
to New England in the early seventeenth century to escape religious
persecution, when in the eighteenth Oglethorpe sent people from the
English debtors’ prisons to Georgia, and when in the end of the
eighteenth the Dutch sent orphans to the Cape of Good Hope, the
Europeans frankly crossed the seas to find new homes for good. In the
nineteenth century, and especially after the coming of the steamship,
the stream of European emigration to the new empty lands of America and
Australia rose for some decades to the scale of a great migration.
So there grew up permanent overseas populations of Europeans, and the
European culture was transplanted to much larger areas than those in
which it had been developed. These new communities bringing a ready-made
civilization with them to these new lands grew up, as it were, unplanned
and unperceived; the statecraft of Europe did not foresee them, and was
unprepared with any ideas about their treatment. The politicians and
ministers of Europe continued to regard them as essentially
expeditionary establishments, sources of revenue, “possessions” and
“dependencies,” long after their peoples had developed a keen sense of
their separate social life. And also they continued to treat them as
helplessly subject to the mother country long after the population had
spread inland out of reach of any effectual punitive operations from the
sea.
Because until right into the nineteenth century, it must be remembered,
the link of all these overseas empires was the oceangoing sailing ship.
On land the swiftest thing was still the horse, and the cohesion and
unity of political systems on land was still limited by the limitations
of horse communications.
Now at the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century the
northern two-thirds of North America was under the British crown. France
had abandoned America. Except for Brazil, which was Portuguese, and one
or two small islands and areas in French, British, Danish and Dutch
hands, Florida, Louisiana, California and all America to the south was
Spanish. It was the British colonies south of Maine and Lake Ontario
that first demonstrated the inadequacy of the sailing ship to hold
overseas populations together in one political system.
These British colonies were very miscellaneous in their origin and
character. There were French, Swedish and Dutch settlements as well as
British; there were British Catholics in Maryland and British
ultra-Protestants in New England, and while the New Englanders farmed
their own land and denounced slavery, the British in Virginia and the
south were planters employing a swelling multitude of imported negro
slaves. There was no natural common unity in such states. To get from
one to the other might mean a coasting voyage hardly less tedious than
the transatlantic crossing. But the union that diverse origin and
natural conditions denied the British Americans was forced upon them by
the selfishness and stupidity of the British government in London. They
were taxed without any voice in the spending of the taxes; their trade
was sacrificed to British interests; the highly profitable slave trade
was maintained by the British government in spite of the opposition of
the Virginians who—though quite willing to hold and use slaves—feared to
be swamped by an evergrowing barbaric black population.
Britain at that time was lapsing towards an intenser form of monarchy,
and the obstinate personality of George III (1760–1820) did much to
force on a struggle between the home and the colonial governments.
The conflict was precipitated by legislation which favoured the London
East India Company at the expense of the American shipper. Three cargoes
of tea which were imported under the new conditions were thrown
overboard in Boston harbour by a band of men disguised as Indians
(1773). Fighting only began in 1775 when the British government
attempted to arrest two of the American leaders at Lexington near
Boston. The first shots were fired in Lexington by the British; the
first fighting occurred at Concord.
So the American War of Independence began, though for more than a year
the colonists showed themselves extremely unwilling to sever their links
with the mother land. It was not until the middle of 1776 that the
Congress of the insurgent states issued “The Declaration of
Independence.” George Washington, who like many of the leading colonists
of the time had had a military training in the wars against the French,
was made commander-in-chief. In 1777 a British general, General
Burgoyne, in an attempt to reach New York from Canada, was defeated at
Freemans Farm and obliged to surrender at Saratoga. In the same year the
French and Spanish declared war upon Great Britain, greatly hampering
her sea communications. A second British army under General Cornwallis
was caught in the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia and obliged to
capitulate in 1781. In 1783 peace was made in Paris, and the Thirteen
Colonies from Maine to Georgia became a union of independent sovereign
States. So the United States of America came into existence. Canada
remained loyal to the British flag.
For four years these States had only a very feeble central government
under certain Articles of Confederation, and they seemed destined to
break up into separate independent communities. Their immediate
separation was delayed by the hostility of the British and a certain
aggressiveness on the part of the French which brought home to them the
immediate dangers of division. A Constitution was drawn up and ratified
in 1788 establishing a more efficient Federal government with a
President holding very considerable powers, and the weak sense of
national unity was invigorated by a second war with Britain in 1812.
Nevertheless the area covered by the States was so wide and their
interests so diverse at that time, that—given only the means of
communication then available—a disintegration of the Union into separate
states on the European scale of size was merely a question of time.
Attendance at Washington meant a long, tedious and insecure journey for
the senators and congressmen of the remoter districts, and the
mechanical impediments to the diffusion of a common education and a
common literature and intelligence were practically insurmountable.
Forces were at work in the world however that were to arrest the process
of differentiation altogether. Presently came the river steamboat and
then the railway and the telegraph to save the United States from
fragmentation, and weave its dispersed people together again into the
first of great modern nations.
Twenty-two years later the Spanish colonies in America were to follow
the example of the Thirteen and break their connection with Europe. But
being more dispersed over the continent and separated by great
mountainous chains and deserts and forests and by the Portuguese Empire
of Brazil, they did not achieve a union among themselves. They became a
constellation of republican states, very prone at first to wars among
themselves and to revolutions.
Brazil followed a rather different line towards the inevitable
separation. In 1807 the French armies under Napoleon had occupied the
mother country of Portugal, and the monarchy had fled to Brazil. From
that time on until they separated, Portugal was rather a dependency of
Brazil than Brazil of Portugal. In 1822 Brazil declared itself a
separate Empire under Pedro I, a son of the Portuguese King. But the new
world has never been very favourable to monarchy. In 1889 the Emperor of
Brazil was shipped off quietly to Europe, and the United States of
Brazil fell into line with the rest of republican America.
LV. The French Revolution and the Restoration of
Monarchy in France
The National Assembly takes the Tennis Court Oath
in Versailles on June 20, 1789
Sketch by Jacques-Louis
David
BRITAIN had hardly lost the Thirteen Colonies-in America before a
profound social and political convulsion at the very heart of Grand
Monarchy was to remind Europe still more vividly of the essentially
temporary nature of the political arrangements of the world.
We have said that the French monarchy was the most successful of the
personal monarchies in Europe. It was the envy and model of a multitude
of competing and minor courts. But it flourished on a basis of injustice
that led to its dramatic collapse. It was brilliant and aggressive, but
it was wasteful of the life and substance of its common people. The
clergy and nobility were protected from taxation by a system of
exemption that threw the whole burden of the state upon the middle and
lower classes. The peasants were ground down by taxation; the middle
classes were dominated and humiliated by the nobility.
In 1787 this French monarchy found itself bankrupt and obliged to call
representatives of the different classes of the realm into consultation
upon the perplexities of defective income and excessive expenditure. In
1789 the States General, a gathering of the nobles, clergy and commons,
roughly equivalent to the earlier form of the British Parliament, was
called together at Versailles. It had not assembled since 1610. For all
that time France had been an absolute monarchy. Now the people found a
means of expressing their long fermenting discontent. Disputes
immediately broke out between the three estates, due to the resolve of
the Third Estate, the Commons, to control the Assembly. The Commons got
the better of these disputes and the States General became a National
Assembly, clearly resolved to keep the crown in order, as the British
Parliament kept the British crown in order. The king (Louis XVI)
prepared for a struggle and brought up troops from the provinces.
Whereupon Paris and France revolted.
The collapse of the absolute monarchy was very swift. The grim-looking
prison of the Bastille was stormed by the people of Paris, and the
insurrection spread rapidly throughout France. In the east and
north-west provinces many chateaux belonging to the nobility were burnt
by the peasants, their title-deeds carefully destroyed, and the owners
murdered or driven away. In a month the ancient and decayed system of
the aristocratic order had collapsed. Many of the leading princes and
courtiers of the queen’s party fled abroad. A provisional city
government was set up in Paris and in most of the other large cities,
and a new armed force, the National Guard, a force designed primarily
and plainly to resist the forces of the crown, was brought into
existence by these municipal bodies. The National Assembly found itself
called upon to create a new political and social system for a new age.
It was a task that tried the powers of that gathering to the utmost. It
made a great sweep of the chief injustices of the absolutist regime; it
abolished tax exemptions, serfdom, aristocratic titles and privileges
and sought to establish a constitutional monarchy in Paris. The king
abandoned Versailles and its splendours and kept a diminished state in
the palace of the Tuileries in Paris.
For two years it seemed that the National Assembly might struggle
through to an effective modernized government. Much of its work was
sound and still endures, if much was experimental and had to be undone.
Much was ineffective. There was a clearing up of the penal code;
torture, arbitrary imprisonment and persecutions for heresy were
abolished. The ancient provinces of France, Normandy, Burgundy and the
like gave place to eighty departments. Promotion to the highest ranks in
the army was laid open to men of every class. An excellent and simple
system of law courts was set up, but its value was much vitiated by
having the judges appointed by popular election for short periods of
time. This made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal, and the
judges, like the members of the Assembly, were forced to play to the
gallery. And the whole vast property of the church was seized and
administered by the state; religious establishments not engaged in
education or works of charity were broken up, and the salaries of the
clergy made a charge upon the nation. This in itself was not a bad thing
for the lower clergy in France, who were often scandalously underpaid in
comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in addition the choice of
priests and bishops was made elective, which struck at the very root
idea of the Roman Church, which centred everything upon the Pope, and in
which all authority is from above downward. Practically the National
Assembly wanted at one blow to make the church in France Protestant, in
organization if not in doctrine. Everywhere there were disputes and
conflicts between the state priests created by the National Assembly and
the recalcitrant (non-juring) priests who were loyal to Rome.
In 1791 the experiment of Constitutional monarchy in France was brought
to an abrupt end by the action of the king and queen, working in concert
with their aristocratic and monarchist friends abroad. Foreign armies
gathered on the Eastern frontier and one night in June the king and
queen and their children slipped away from the Tuileries and fled to
join the foreigners and the aristocratic exiles. They were caught at
Varennes and brought back to Paris, and all France flamed up into a
passion of patriotic republicanism. A Republic was proclaimed, open war
with Austria and Prussia ensued, and the king was tried and executed
(January, 1793) on the model already set by England, for treason to his
people.
And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French people.
There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and the Republic.
There was to be an end to compromise at home and abroad; at home
royalists and every form of disloyalty were to be stamped out; abroad
France was to be the protector and helper of all revolutionaries. All
Europe, all the world, was to become Republican. The youth of France
poured into the Republican armies; a new and wonderful song spread
through the land, a song that still warms the blood like wine, the
Marseillaise. Before that chant and the leaping columns of French
bayonets and their enthusiastically served guns the foreign armies
rolled back; before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far
beyond the utmost achievements of Louis XIV; everywhere they stood on
foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy, they had
raided to Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland. Then the
French Government did an unwise thing. It had been exasperated by the
expulsion of its representative from England upon the execution of
Louis, and it declared war against England. It was an unwise thing to
do, because the revolution which had given France a new enthusiastic
infantry and a brilliant artillery released from its aristocratic
officers and many cramping conditions had destroyed the discipline of
the navy, and the English were supreme upon the sea. And this
provocation united all England against France, whereas there had been at
first a very considerable liberal movement in Great Britain in sympathy
with the revolution.
Of the fight that France made in the next few years against a European
coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove the Austrians for ever
out of Belgium, and made Holland a republic. The Dutch fleet, frozen in
the Texel, surrendered to a handful of cavalry without firing its guns.
For some time the French thrust towards Ita’y was hung up, and it was
only in 1796 that a new general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the ragged and
hungry republican armies in triumph across Piedmont to Mantua and
Verona. Says C. F. Atkinson, “What astonished the Allies most of all was
the number and the velocity of the Republicans. These improvised armies
had in fact nothing to delay them. Tents were unprocurable for want of
money, untransportable for want of the enormous number of wagons that
would have been required, and also unnecessary, for the discomfort that
would have caused wholesale desertion in professional armies was
cheerfully borne by the men of 1793–94. Supplies for armies of then
unheard-of size could not be carried in convoys, and the French soon
became familiar with ‘living on the country.’ Thus 1793 saw the birth of
the modern system of war—rapidity of movement, full development of
national strength, bivouacs, requisitions and force as against cautious
manœuvring, small professional armies, tents and full rations, and
chicane. The first represented the decision-compelling spirit, the
second the spirit of risking little to gain a little.”
And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the
Marseillaise and fighting for la France, manifestly never quite clear in
their minds whether they were looting or liberating the countries into
which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in Paris was spending
itself in a far less glorious fashion. The revolution was now under the
sway of a fanatical leader, Robespierre. This man is difficult to judge;
he was a man of poor physique, naturally timid, and a prig. But he had
that most necessary gift for power, faith. He set himself to save the
Republic as he conceived it, and he imagined it could be saved by no
other man than he. So that to keep in power was to save the Republic.
The living spirit of the Republic, it seemed, had sprung from a
slaughter of royalists and the execution of the king. There were
insurrections; one in the west, in the district of La Vendée, where the
people rose against the conscription and against the dispossession of
the orthodox clergy, and were led by noblemen and priests; one in the
south, where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the royalists of Toulon
had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. To which there seemed no
more effectual reply than to go on killing royalists.
The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering
began. The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mood. The
queen was guillotined, most of Robespierre’s antagonists were
guillotined, atheists who argued that there was no Supreme Being were
guillotined; day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine chopped
off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre lived, it
seemed, on blood; and needed more and more, as an opium-taker needs more
and more opium.
Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was overthrown and
guillotined. He was succeeded by a Directory of five men which carried
on the war of defence abroad and held France together at home for five
years. Their reign formed a curious interlude in this history of violent
changes. They took things as they found them. The propagandist zeal of
the revolution carried the French armies into Holland, Belgium,
Switzerland, south Germany and north Italy. Everywhere kings were
expelled and republics set up. But such propagandist zeal as animated
the Directorate did not prevent the looting of the treasures of the
liberated peoples to relieve the financial embarrassment of the French
Government. Their wars became less and less the holy wars of freedom,
and more and more like the aggressive wars of the ancient regime. The
last feature of Grand Monarchy that France was disposed to discard was
her tradition of foreign policy. One discovers it still as vigorous
under the Directorate as if there had been no revolution.
Unhappily for France and the world a man arose who embodied in its
intensest form this national egotism of the French. He gave that country
ten years of glory and the humiliation of a final defeat. This was that
same Napoleon Bonaparte who had led the armies of the Directory to
victory in Italy.
Throughout the five years of the Directorate he had been scheming and
working for self-advancement. Gradually he clambered to supreme power.
He was a man of severely limited understanding but of ruthless
directness and great energy. He had begun life as an extremist of the
school of Robespierre; he owed his first promotion to that side; but he
had no real grasp of the new forces that were working in Europe. His
utmost political imagination carried him to a belated and tawdry attempt
to restore the Western Empire. He tried to destroy the remains of the
old Holy Roman Empire, intending to replace it by a new one centring
upon Paris. The Emperor in Vienna ceased to be the Holy Roman Emperor
and became simply Emperor of Austria. Napoleon divorced his French wife
in order to marry an Austrian princess.
He became practically monarch of France as First Consul in 1799, and he
made himself Emperor of France in 1804 in direct imitation of
Charlemagne. He was crowned by the Pope in Paris, taking the crown from
the Pope and putting it upon his own head himself as Charlemagne had
directed. His son was crowned King of Rome.
For some years Napoleon’s reign was a career of victory. He conquered
most of Italy and Spain, defeated Prussia and Austria, and dominated all
Europe west of Russia. But he never won the command of the sea from the
British and his fleets sustained a conclusive defeat inflicted by the
British Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar (1805). Spain rose against him in
1808 and a British army under Wellington thrust the French armies slowly
northward out of the peninsula. In 1811 Napoleon came into conflict with
the Tsar Alexander I, and in 1812 he invaded Russia with a great
conglomerate army of 600,000 men, that was defeated and largely
destroyed by the Russians and the Russian winter. Germany rose against
him, Sweden turned against him. The French armies were beaten back and
at Fontainebleau Napoleon abdicated (1814). He was exiled to Elba,
returned to France for one last effort in 1815 and was defeated by the
allied British, Belgians and Prussians at Waterloo. He died a British
prisoner at St. Helena in 1821.
The forces released by the French revolution were wasted and finished. A
great Congress of the victorious allies met at Vienna to restore as far
as possible the state of affairs that the great storm had rent to
pieces. For nearly forty years a sort of peace, a peace of exhausted
effort, was maintained in Europe.In his article, “French Revolutionary
Wars,” in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
LVI. The Uneasy Peace in Europe That Followed the Fall
of Napoleon
Consecration of Charles X, by François Gérard
TWO main causes prevented that period from being a complete social
and international peace, and prepared the way for the cycle of wars
between 1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency of the royal
courts concerned, towards the restoration of unfair privilege and
interference with freedom of thought and writing and teaching. The
second was the impossible system of boundaries drawn by the diplomatists
of Vienna.
The inherent disposition of monarchy to march back towards past
conditions was first and most particularly manifest in Spain. Here even
the Inquisition was restored. Across the Atlantic the Spanish colonies
had followed the example of the United States and revolted against the
European Great Power System, when Napoleon set his brother Joseph on the
Spanish throne in 1810. The George Washington of South America was
General Bolivar. Spain was unable to suppress this revolt, it dragged on
much as the United States War of Independence had dragged on, and at
last the suggestion was made by Austria, in accordance with the spirit
of the Holy Alliance, that the European monarch should assist Spain in
this struggle. This was opposed by Britain in Europe, but it was the
prompt action of President Monroe of the United States in 1823 which
conclusively warned off this projected monarchist restoration. He
announced that the United States would regard any extension of the
European system in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile act. Thus arose
the Monroe Doctrine, the doctrine that there must be no extension of
extra-American government in America, which has kept the Great Power
system out of America for nearly a hundred years and permitted the new
states of Spanish America to work out their destinies along their own
lines.
But if Spanish monarchism lost its colonies, it could at least, under
the protection of the Concert of Europe, do what it chose in Europe. A
popular insurrection in Spain was crushed by a French army in 1823, with
a mandate from a European congress, and simultaneously Austria
suppressed a revolution in Naples.
In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by Charles X. Charles set
himself to destroy the liberty of the press and universities, and to
restore absolute government; the sum of a billion francs was voted to
compensate the nobles for the chateau burnings and sequestrations of
1789. In 1830 Paris rose against this embodiment of the ancient regime,
and replaced him by Louis Philippe, the son of that Philip, Duke of
Orleans, who was executed during the Terror. The other continental
monarchies, in face of the open approval of the revolution by Great
Britain and a strong liberal ferment in Germany and Austria, did not
interfere in this affair. After all, France was still a monarchy. This
man Louis Philippe (1830–48) remained the constitutional King of France
for eighteen years.
Such were the uneasy swayings of the peace of the Congress of Vienna,
which were provoked by the reactionary proceedings of the monarchists.
The stresses that arose from the unscientific boundaries planned by the
diplomatists at Vienna gathered force more deliberately, but they were
even more dangerous to the peace of mankind. It is extraordinarily
inconvenient to administer together the affairs of peoples speaking
different languages and so reading different literatures and having
different general ideas, especially if those differences are exacerbated
by religious disputes. Only some strong mutual interest, such as the
common defensive needs of the Swiss mountaineers, can justify a close
linking of peoples of dissimilar languages and faiths; and even in
Switzerland there is the utmost local autonomy. When, as in Macedonia,
populations are mixed in a patchwork of villages and districts, the
cantonal system is imperatively needed. But if the reader will look at
the map of Europe as the Congress of Vienna drew it, he will see that
this gathering seems almost as if it had planned the maximum of local
exasperation.
It destroyed the Dutch Republic, quite needlessly, it lumped together
the Protestant Dutch with the French-speaking Catholics of the old
Spanish (Austrian) Netherlands, and set up a kingdom of the Netherlands.
It handed over not merely the old republic of Venice, but all of North
Italy as far as Milan to the German-speaking Austrians. French-speaking
Savoy it combined with pieces of Italy to restore the kingdom of
Sardinia. Austria and Hungary, already a sufficiently explosive mixture
of discordant nationalities, Germans, Hungarians, Czecho-Slovaks,
Jugo-Slavs, Roumanians, and now Italians, was made still more impossible
by confirming Austria’s Polish acquisitions of 1772 and 1795. The
Catholic and republican-spirited Polish people were chiefly given over
to the less civilized rule of the Greek-orthodox Tsar, but important
districts went to Protestant Prussia. The Tsar was also confirmed in his
acquisition of the entirely alien Finns. The very dissimilar Norwegian
and Swedish peoples were bound together under one king. Germany, the
reader will see, was left in a particularly dangerous state of muddle.
Prussia and Austria were both partly in and partly out of a German
confederation, which included a multitude of minor states. The King of
Denmark came into the German confederation by virtue of certain
German-speaking possessions in Holstein. Luxembourg was included in the
German confederation, though its ruler was also King of the Netherlands,
and though many of its peoples talked French.
Here was a complete disregard of the fact that the people who talk
German and base their ideas on German literature, the people who talk
Italian and base their ideas on Italian literature, and the people who
talk Polish and base their ideas on Polish literature, will all be far
better off and most helpful and least obnoxious to the rest of mankind
if they conduct their own affairs in their own idiom within the
ring-fence of their own speech. Is it any wonder that one of the most
popular songs in Germany during this period declared that wherever the
German tongue was spoken, there was the German Fatherland!
In 1830 French-speaking Belgium, stirred up by the current revolution in
France, revolted against its Dutch association in the kingdom of the
Netherlands. The powers, terrified at the possibilities of a republic or
of annexation to France, hurried in to pacify this situation, and gave
the Belgians a monarch, Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. There were also
ineffectual revolts in Italy and Germany in 1830, and a much more
serious one in Russian Poland. A republican government held out in
Warsaw for a year against Nicholas I (who succeeded Alexander in 1825),
and was then stamped out of existence with great violence and cruelty.
The Polish language was banned, and the Greek Orthodox church was
substituted for the Roman Catholic as the state religion.
In 1821 there was an insurrection of the Greeks against the Turks. For
six years they fought a desperate war, while the governments of Europe
looked on. Liberal opinion protested against this inactivity; volunteers
from every European country joined the insurgents, and at last Britain,
France and Russia took joint action. The Turkish fleet was destroyed by
the French and English at the battle of Navarino (1827), and the Tsar
invaded Turkey. By the treaty of Adrianople (1829) Greece was declared
free, but she was not permitted to resume her ancient republican
traditions. A German king was found for Greece, one Prince Otto of
Bavaria, and Christian governors were set up in the Danubian provinces
(which are now Roumania) and Serbia (a part of the Jugo-Slav region).
Much blood had still to run however before the Turk was altogether
expelled from these lands.
LVII. The Development of Material Knowledge
"SMS Kaiserin Augusta," second-class protected
cruiser
THROUGHOUT the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the opening
years of the nineteenth century, while these conflicts of the powers and
princes were going on in Europe, and the patchwork of the treaty of
Westphalia (1648) was changing kaleidoscopically into the patchwork of
the treaty of Vienna (1815), and while the sailing ship was spreading
European influence throughout the world, a steady growth of knowledge
and a general clearing up of men’s ideas about the world in which they
lived was in progress in the European and Europeanized world.
It went on disconnected from political life, and producing throughout
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no striking immediate results
in political life. Nor was it affecting popular thought very profoundly
during this period. These reactions were to come later, and only in
their full force in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was a
process that went on chiefly in a small world of prosperous and
independent-spirited people. Without what the English call the “private
gentleman,” the scientific process could not have begun in Greece, and
could not have been renewed in Europe. The universities played a part
but not a leading part in the philosophical and scientific thought of
this period. Endowed learning is apt to be timid and conservative
learning, lacking in initiative and resistent to innovation, unless it
has the spur of contact with independent minds.
We have already noted the formation of the Royal Society in 1662 and its
work in realizing the dream of Bacon’s New Atlantis. Throughout the
eighteenth century there was much clearing up of general ideas about
matter and motion, much mathematical advance, a systematic development
of the use of optical glass in microscope and telescope, a renewed
energy in classificatory natural history, a great revival of anatomical
science. The science of geology—foreshadowed by Aristotle and
anticipated by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)—began its great task of
interpreting the Record of the Rocks.
The progress of physical science reacted upon metallurgy. Improved
metallurgy, affording the possibility of a larger and bolder handling of
masses of metal and other materials, reacted upon practical inventions.
Machinery on a new scale and in a new abundance appeared to
revolutionize industry.
In 1804 Trevithick adapted the Watt engine to transport and made the
first locomotive. In 1825 the first railway, between Stockton and
Darlington, was opened, and Stephenson’s “Rocket,” with a thirteen-ton
train, got up to a speed of forty-four miles per hour. From 1830 onward
railways multiplied. By the middle of the century a network of railways
had spread all over Europe.
Here was a sudden change in what had long been a fixed condition of
human life, the maximum rate of land transport. After the Russian
disaster, Napoleon travelled from near Vilna to Paris in 312 hours. This
was a journey of about 1,400 miles. He was travelling with every
conceivable advantage, and he averaged under 5 miles an hour. An
ordinary traveller could not have done this distance in twice the time.
These were about the same maximum rates of travel as held good between
Rome and Gaul in the first century A.D. Then suddenly came this
tremendous change. The railways reduced this journey for any ordinary
traveller to less than forty-eight hours. That is to say, they reduced
the chief European distances to about a tenth of what they had been.
They made it possible to carry out administrative work in areas ten
times as great as any that had hitherto been workable under one
administration. The full significance of that possibility in Europe
still remains to be realized. Europe is still netted in boundaries drawn
in the horse and road era. In America the effects were immediate. To the
United States of America, sprawling westward, it meant the possibility
of a continuous access to Washington, however far the frontier travelled
across the continent. It meant unity, sustained on a scale that would
otherwise have been impossible.
The steamboat was, if anything, a little ahead of the steam engine in
its earlier phases. There was a steamboat, the Charlotte Dundas, on the
Firth of Clyde Canal in 1802, and in 1807 an American named Fulton had a
steamer, the Clermont, with British-built engines, upon the Hudson River
above New York. The first steamship to put to sea was also an American,
the Phœnix, which went from New York (Hoboken) to Philadelphia. So, too,
was the first ship using steam (she also had sails) to cross the
Atlantic, the Savannah (1819). All these were paddle-wheel boats and
paddlewheel boats are not adapted to work in heavy seas. The paddles
smash too easily, and the boat is then disabled. The screw steamship
followed rather slowly. Many difficulties had to be surmounted before
the screw was a practicable thing. Not until the middle of the century
did the tonnage of steamships upon the sea begin to overhaul that of
sailing ships. After that the evolution in sea transport was rapid. For
the first time men began to cross the seas and oceans with some
certainty as to the date of their arrival. The transatlantic crossing,
which had been an uncertain adventure of several weeks—which might
stretch to months—was accelerated, until in 1910 it was brought down, in
the case of the fastest boats, to under five days, with a practically
notifiable hour of arrival.
Concurrently with the development of steam transport upon land and sea a
new and striking addition to the facilities of human intercourse arose
out of the investigations of Volta, Galvani and Faraday into various
electrical phenomena. The electric telegraph came into existence in
1835. The first underseas cable was laid in 1851 between France and
England. In a few years the telegraph system had spread over the
civilized world, and news which had hitherto travelled slowly from point
to point became practically simultaneous throughout the earth.
These things, the steam railway and the electric telegraph, were to the
popular imagination of the middle nineteenth century the most striking
and revolutionary of inventions, but they were only the most conspicuous
and clumsy first fruits of a far more extensive process. Technical
knowledge and skill were developing with an extraordinary rapidity, and
to an extraordinary extent measured by the progress of any previous age.
Far less conspicuous at first in everyday life, but finally far more
important, was the extension of man’s power over various structural
materials. Before the middle of the eighteenth century iron was reduced
from its ores by means of wood charcoal, was handled in small pieces,
and hammered and wrought into shape. It was material for a craftsman.
Quality and treatment were enormously dependent upon the experience and
sagacity of the individual iron-worker. The largest masses of iron that
could be dealt with under those conditions amounted at most (in the
sixteenth century) to two or three tons. (There was a very definite
upward limit, therefore, to the size of cannon.) The blast-furnace rose
in the eighteenth century and developed with the use of coke. Not before
the eighteenth century do we find rolled sheet iron (1728) and rolled
rods and bars (1783). Nasmyth’s steam hammer came as late as 1838.
The ancient world, because of its metallurgical inferiority, could not
use steam. The steam engine, even the primitive pumping engine, could
not develop before sheet iron was available. The early engines seem to
the modern eye very pitiful and clumsy bits of ironmongery, but they
were the utmost that the metallurgical science of the time could do. As
late as 1856 came the Bessemer process, and presently (1864) the
open-hearth process, in which steel and every sort of iron could be
melted, purified and cast in a manner and upon a scale hitherto unheard
of. To-day in the electric furnace one may see tons of incandescent
steel swirling about like boiling milk in a saucepan. Nothing in the
previous practical advances of mankind is comparable in its consequences
to the complete mastery over enormous masses of steel and iron and over
their texture and quality which man has now achieved. The railways and
early engines of all sorts were the mere first triumphs of the new
metallurgical methods. Presently came ships of iron and steel, vast
bridges, and a new way of building with steel upon a gigantic scale. Men
realized too late that they had planned their railways with far too
timid a gauge, that they could have organized their travelling with far
more steadiness and comfort upon a much bigger scale.
Before the nineteenth century there were no ships in the world much over
2,000 tons burthen; now there is nothing wonderful about a 50,000-ton
liner. There are people who sneer at this kind of progress as being a
progress in “mere size,” but that sort of sneering merely marks the
intellectual limitations of those who indulge in it. The great ship or
the steel-frame building is not, as they imagine, a magnified version of
the small ship or building of the past; it is a thing different in kind,
more lightly and strongly built, of finer and stronger materials;
instead of being a thing of precedent and rule-of-thumb, it is a thing
of subtle and intricate calculation. In the old house or ship, matter
was dominant—the material and its needs had to be slavishly obeyed; in
the new, matter had been captured, changed, coerced. Think of the coal
and iron and sand dragged out of the banks and pits, wrenched, wrought,
molten and cast, to be flung at last, a slender glittering pinnacle of
steel and glass, six hundred feet above the crowded city!
We have given these particulars of the advance in man’s knowledge of the
metallurgy of steel and its results by way of illustration. A parallel
story could be told of the metallurgy of copper and tin, and of a
multitude of metals, nickel and aluminum to name but two, unknown before
the nineteenth century dawned. It is in this great and growing mastery
over substances, over different sorts of glass, over rocks and plasters
and the like, over colours and textures, that the main triumphs of the
mechanical revolution have thus far been achieved. Yet we are still in
the stage of the first fruits in the matter. We have the power, but we
have still to learn how to use our power. Many of the first employments
of these gifts of science have been vulgar, tawdry, stupid or horrible.
The artist and the adaptor have still hardly begun to work with the
endless variety of substances now at their disposal.
Parallel with this extension of mechanical possibilities the new science
of electricity grew up. It was only in the eighties of the nineteenth
century that this body of enquiry began to yield results to impress the
vulgar mind. Then suddenly came electric light and electric traction,
and the transmutation of forces, the possibility of sending power, that
could be changed into mechanical motion or light or heat as one chose,
along a copper wire, as water is sent along a pipe, began to come
through to the ideas of ordinary people.
The British and French were at first the leading peoples in this great
proliferation of knowledge; but presently the Germans, who had learnt
humility under Napoleon, showed such zeal and pertinacity in scientific
enquiry as to overhaul these leaders. British science was largely the
creation of Englishmen and Scotchmen working outside the ordinary
centres of erudition.
The universities of Britain were at this time in a state of educational
retrogression, largely given over to a pedantic conning of the Latin and
Greek classics. French education, too, was dominated by the classical
tradition of the Jesuit schools, and consequently it was not difficult
for the Germans to organize a body of investigators, small indeed in
relation to the possibilities of the case, but large in proportion to
the little band of British and French inventors and experimentalists.
And though this work of research and experiment was making Britain and
France the most rich and powerful countries in the world, it was not
making scientific and inventive men rich and powerful. There is a
necessary unworldliness about a sincere scientific man; he is too
preoccupied with his research to plan and scheme how to make money out
of it. The economic exploitation of his discoveries falls very easily
and naturally, therefore, into the hands of a more acquisitive type; and
so we find that the crops of rich men which every fresh phase of
scientific and technical progress has produced in Great Britain, though
they have not displayed quite the same passionate desire to insult and
kill the goose that laid the national golden eggs as the scholastic and
clerical professions, have been quite content to let that profitable
creature starve. Inventors and discoverers came by nature, they thought,
for cleverer people to profit by.
In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The German “learned” did
not display the same vehement hatred of the new learning. They permitted
its development. The German business man and manufacturer again had not
quite the same contempt for the man of science as had his British
competitor. Knowledge, these Germans believed, might be a cultivated
crop, responsive to fertilizers. They did concede, therefore, a certain
amount of opportunity to the scientific mind; their public expenditure
on scientific work was relatively greater, and this expenditure was
abundantly rewarded. By the latter half of the nineteenth century the
German scientific worker had made German a necessary language for every
science student who wished to keep abreast with the latest work in his
department, and in certain branches, and particularly in chemistry,
Germany acquired a very great superiority over her western neighbours.
The scientific effort of the sixties and seventies in Germany began to
tell after the eighties, and the German gained steadily upon Britain and
France in technical and industrial prosperity.
A fresh phase in the history of invention opened when in the eighties a
new type of engine came into use, an engine in which the expansive force
of an explosive mixture replaced the expansive force of steam. The
light, highly efficient engines that were thus made possible were
applied to the automobile, and developed at last to reach such a pitch
of lightness and efficiency as to render flight—long known to be
possible—a practical achievement. A successful flying machine—but not a
machine large enough to take up a human body—was made by Professor
Langley of the Smithsonian Institute of Washington as early as 1897. By
1909 the aeroplane was available for human locomotion. There had seemed
to be a pause in the increase of human speed with the perfection of
railways and automobile road traction, but with the flying machine came
fresh reductions in the effective distance between one point of the
earth’s surface and another. In the eighteenth century the distance from
London to Edinburgh was an eight days’ journey; in 1918 the British
Civil Air Transport Commission reported that the journey from London to
Melbourne, halfway round the earth, would probably in a few years’ time
be accomplished in that same period of eight days.
Too much stress must not be laid upon these striking reductions in the
time distances of one place from another. They are merely one aspect of
a much profounder and more momentous enlargement of human possibility.
The science of agriculture and agricultural chemistry, for instance,
made quite parallel advances during the nineteenth century. Men learnt
so to fertilize the soil as to produce quadruple and quintuple the crops
got from the same area in the seventeenth century. There was a still
more extraordinary advance in medical science; the average duration of
life rose, the daily efficiency increased, the waste of life through
ill-health diminished.
Now here altogether we have such a change in human life as to constitute
a fresh phase of history. In a little more than a century this
mechanical revolution has been brought about. In that time man made a
stride in the material conditions of his life vaster than he had done
during the whole long interval between the palæolithic stage and the age
of cultivation, or between the days of Pepi in Egypt and those of George
III. A new gigantic material framework for human affairs has come into
existence. Clearly it demands great readjustments of our social,
economical and political methods. But these readjustments have
necessarily waited upon the development of the mechanical revolution,
and they are still only in their opening stage to-day.
LVIII. The Industrial Revolution
THERE is a tendency in many histories to confuse together what we
have here called the mechanical revolution, which was an entirely new
thing in human experience arising out of the development of organized
science, a new step like the invention of agriculture or the discovery
of metals, with something else, quite different in its origins,
something for which there was already an historical precedent, the
social and financial development which is called the industrial
revolution. The two processes were going on together, they were
constantly reacting upon each other, but they were in root and essence
different. There would have been an industrial revolution of sorts if
there had been no coal, no steam, no machinery; but in that case it
would probably have followed far more closely upon the lines of the
social and financial developments of the later years of the Roman
Republic. It would have repeated the story of dispossessed free
cultivators, gang labour, great estates, great financial fortunes, and a
socially destructive financial process. Even the factory method came
before power and machinery. Factories were the product not of machinery,
but of the “division of labour.” Drilled and sweated workers were making
such things as millinery cardboard boxes and furniture, and colouring
maps and book illustrations and so forth, before even water-wheels had
been used for industrial purposes. There were factories in Rome in the
days of Augustus. New books, for instance, were dictated to rows of
copyists in the factories of the book-sellers. The attentive student of
Defoe and of the political pamphlets of Fielding will realize that the
idea of herding poor people into establishments to work collectively for
their living was already current in Britain before the close of the
seventeenth century. There are intimations of it even as early as More’s
Utopia (1516). It was a social and not a mechanical development.
Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social and economic
history of western Europe was in fact retreading the path along which
the Roman state had gone in the last three centuries B.C. But the
political disunions of Europe, the political convulsions against
monarchy, the recalcitrance of the common folk and perhaps also the
greater accessibility of the western European intelligence to mechanical
ideas and inventions, turned the process into quite novel directions.
Ideas of human solidarity, thanks to Christianity, were far more widely
diffused in the newer European world, political power was not so
concentrated, and the man of energy anxious to get rich turned his mind,
therefore, very willingly from the ideas of the slave and of gang labour
to the idea of mechanical power and the machine.
The mechanical revolution, the process of mechanical invention and
discovery, was a new thing in human experience and it went on regardless
of the social, political, economic and industrial consequences it might
produce. The industrial revolution, on the other hand, like most other
human affairs, was and is more and more profoundly changed and deflected
by the constant variation in human conditions caused by the mechanical
revolution. And the essential difference between the amassing of riches,
the extinction of small farmers and small business men, and the phase of
big finance in the latter centuries of the Roman Republic on the one
hand, and the very similar concentration of capital in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries on the other, lies in the profound difference
in the character of labour that the mechanical revolution was bringing
about. The power of the old world was human power; everything depended
ultimately upon the driving power of human muscle, the muscle of
ignorant and subjugated men. A little animal muscle, supplied by draft
oxen, horse traction and the like, contributed. Where a weight had to be
lifted, men lifted it; where a rock had to be quarried, men chipped it
out; where a field had to be ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it; the
Roman equivalent of the steamship was the galley with its bank of
sweating rowers. A vast proportion of mankind in the early civilizations
were employed in purely mechanical drudgery. At its onset, power-driven
machinery did not seem to promise any release from such unintelligent
toil. Great gangs of men were employed in excavating canals, in making
railway cuttings and embankments, and the like. The number of miners
increased enormously. But the extension of facilities and the output of
commodities increased much more. And as the nineteenth century went on,
the plain logic of the new situation asserted itself more clearly. Human
beings were no longer wanted as a source of mere indiscriminated power.
What could be done mechanically by a human being could be done faster
and better by a machine. The human being was needed now only where
choice and intelligence had to be exercised. Human beings were wanted
only as human beings. The drudge, on whom all the previous civilizations
had rested, the creature of mere obedience, the man whose brains were
superfluous, had become unnecessary to the welfare of mankind.
This was as true of such ancient industries as agriculture and mining as
it was of the newest metallurgical processes. For ploughing, sowing and
harvesting, swift machines came forward to do the work of scores of men.
The Roman civilization was built upon cheap and degraded human beings;
modern civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap mechanical power. For a
hundred years power has been getting cheaper and labour dearer. If for a
generation or so machinery has had to wait its turn in the mine, it is
simply because for a time men were cheaper than machinery.
Now here was a change-over of quite primary importance in human affairs.
The chief solicitude of the rich and of the ruler in the old
civilization had been to keep up a supply of drudges. As the nineteenth
century went on, it became more and more plain to the intelligent
directive people that the common man had now to be something better than
a drudge. He had to be educated—if only to secure “industrial
efficiency.” He had to understand what he was about. From the days of
the first Christian propaganda, popular education had been smouldering
in Europe, just as it had smouldered in Asia wherever Islam has set its
foot, because of the necessity of making the believer understand a
little of the belief by which he is saved, and of enabling him to read a
little in the sacred books by which his belief is conveyed. Christian
controversies, with their competition for adherents, ploughed the ground
for the harvest of popular education. In England, for instance, by the
thirties and forties of the nineteenth century, the disputes of the
sects and the necessity of catching adherents young had produced a
series of competing educational organizations for children, the church
“National” schools, the dissenting “British” schools, and even Roman
Catholic elementary schools. The second half of the nineteenth century
was a period of rapid advance in popular education throughout all the
Westernized world. There was no parallel advance in the education of the
upper classes—some advance, no doubt, but nothing to correspond—and so
the great gulf that had divided that world hitherto into the readers and
the non-reading mass became little more than a slightly perceptible
difference in educational level. At the back of this process was the
mechanical revolution, apparently regardless of social conditions, but
really insisting inexorably upon the complete abolition of a totally
illiterate class throughout the world.
The economic revolution of the Roman Republic had never been clearly
apprehended by the common people of Rome. The ordinary Roman citizen
never saw the changes through which he lived, clearly and
comprehensively as we see them. But the industrial revolution, as it
went on towards the end of the nineteenth century, was more and more
distinctly seen as one whole process by the common people it was
affecting, because presently they could read and discuss and
communicate, and because they went about and saw things as no commonalty
had ever done before.
LIX. The Development of Modern Political and Social Ideas
THE INSTITUTIONS and customs and political ideas of the ancient
civilizations grew up slowly, age by age, no man designing and no man
foreseeing. It was only in that great century of human adolescence, the
sixth century B.C., that men began to think clearly about their
relations to one another, and first to question and first propose to
alter and rearrange the established beliefs and laws and methods of
human government.
We have told of the glorious intellectual dawn of Greece and Alexandria,
and how presently the collapse of the slave-holding civilizations and
the clouds of religious intolerance and absolutist government darkened
the promise of that beginning. The light of fearless thinking did not
break through the European obscurity again effectually until the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We have tried to show something of
the share of the great winds of Arab curiosity and Mongol conquest in
this gradual clearing of the mental skies of Europe. And at first it was
chiefly material knowledge that increased. The first fruits of the
recovered manhood of the race were material achievements and material
power. The science of human relationship, of individual and social
psychology, of education and of economics, are not only more subtle and
intricate in themselves but also bound up inextricably with much
emotional matter. The advances made in them have been slower and made
against greater opposition. Men will listen dispassionately to the most
diverse suggestions about stars or molecules, but ideas about our ways
of life touch and reflect upon everyone about us.
And just as in Greece the bold speculations of Plato came before
Aristotle’s hard search for fact, so in Europe the first political
enquiries of the new phase were put in the form of “Utopian” stories,
directly imitated from Plato’s Republic and his Laws. Sir Thomas More’s
Utopia is a curious imitation of Plato that bore fruit in a new English
poor law. The Neapolitan Campanella’s City of the Sun was more fantastic
and less fruitful.
By the end of the seventeenth century we find a considerable and growing
literature of political and social science was being produced. Among the
pioneers in this discussion was John Locke, the son of an English
republican, an Oxford scholar who first directed his attention to
chemistry and medicine. His treatises on government, toleration and
education show a mind fully awake to the possibilities of social
reconstruction. Parallel with and a little later than John Locke in
England, Montesquieu (1689–1755) in France subjected social, political
and religious institutions to a searching and fundamental analysis. He
stripped the magical prestige from the absolutist monarchy in France. He
shares with Locke the credit for clearing away many of the false ideas
that had hitherto prevented deliberate and conscious attempts to
reconstruct human society.
The generation that followed him in the middle and later decades of the
eighteenth century was boldly speculative upon the moral and
intellectual clearings he had made. A group of brilliant writers, the
“Encyclopædists,” mostly rebel spirits from the excellent schools of the
Jesuits, set themselves to scheme out a new world (1766). Side by side
with the Encyclopaedists were the Economists or Physiocrats, who were
making bold and crude enquiries into the production and distribution of
food and goods. Morelly, the author of the Code de la Nature, denounced
the institution of private property and proposed a communistic
organization of society. He was the precursor of that large and various
school of collectivist thinkers in the nineteenth century who are lumped
together as Socialists.
What is Socialism? There are a hundred definitions of Socialism and a
thousand sects of Socialists. Essentially Socialism is no more and no
less than a criticism of the idea of property in the light of the public
good. We may review the history of that idea through the ages very
briefly. That and the idea of internationalism are the two cardinal
ideas upon which most of our political life is turning.
The idea of property arises out of the combative instincts of the
species. Long before men were men, the ancestral ape was a proprietor.
Primitive property is what a beast will fight for. The dog and his bone,
the tigress and her lair, the roaring stag and his herd, these are
proprietorship blazing. No more nonsensical expression is conceivable in
sociology than the term “primitive communism.” The Old Man of the family
tribe of early palælithic times insisted upon his proprietorship
in his wives and daughters, in his tools, in his visible universe. If
any other man wandered into his visible universe he fought him, and if
he could he slew him. The tribe grew in the course of ages, as Atkinson
showed convincingly in his Primal Law, by the gradual toleration by the
Old Man of the existence of the younger men, and of their proprietorship
in the wives they captured from outside the tribe, and in the tools and
ornaments they made and the game they slew. Human society grew by a
compromise between this one’s property and that. It was a compromise
with instinct which was forced upon men by the necessity of driving some
other tribe out of its visible universe. If the hills and forests and
streams were not your land or my land, it was because they had to be our
land. Each of us would have preferred to have it my land, but that would
not work. In that case the other fellows would have destroyed us.
Society, therefore, is from its beginning a mitigation of ownership.
Ownership in the beast and in the primitive savage was far more intense
a thing than it is in the civilized world to-day. It is rooted more
strongly in our instincts than in our reason.
In the natural savage and in the untutored man to-day there is no
limitation to the sphere of ownership. Whatever you can fight for, you
can own; women-folk, spared captive, captured beast, forest glade,
stone-pit or what not. As the community grew, a sort of law came to
restrain internecine fighting, men developed rough-and-ready methods of
settling proprietorship. Men could own what they were the first to make
or capture or claim. It seemed natural that a debtor who could not pay
should become the property of his creditor. Equally natural was it that
after claiming a patch of land a man should exact payments from anyone
who wanted to use it. It was only slowly, as the possibilities of
organized life dawned on men, that this unlimited property in anything
whatever began to be recognized as a nuisance. Men found themselves born
into a universe all owned and claimed, nay! they found themselves born
owned and claimed. The social struggles of the earlier civilization are
difficult to trace now, but the history we have told of the Roman
Republic shows a community waking up to the idea that debts may become a
public inconvenience and should then be repudiated, and that the
unlimited ownership of land is also an inconvenience. We find that later
Babylonia severely limited the rights of property in slaves. Finally, we
find in the teaching of that great revolutionist, Jesus of Nazareth,
such an attack upon property as had never been before. Easier it was, he
said, for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the owner
of great possessions to enter the kingdom of heaven. A steady,
continuous criticism of the permissible scope of property seems to have
been going on in the world for the last twenty-five or thirty centuries.
Nineteen hundred years after Jesus of Nazareth we find all the world
that has come under the Christian teaching persuaded that there could be
no property in human beings. And also the idea that “a man may do what
he likes with his own” was very much shaken in relation to other sorts
of property.
But this world of the closing eighteenth century was still only in the
interrogative stage in this matter. It had got nothing clear enough,
much less settled enough, to act upon. One of its primary impulses was
to protect property against the greed and waste of kings and the
exploitation of noble adventurers. It was largely to protect private
property from taxation that the French Revolution began. But the
equalitarian formulæ of the Revolution carried it into a criticism
of the very property it had risen to protect. How can men be free and
equal when numbers of them have no ground to stand upon and nothing to
eat, and the owners will neither feed nor lodge them unless they toil?
Excessively—the poor complained.
To which riddle the reply of one important political group was to set
about “dividing up.” They wanted to intensify and universalize property.
Aiming at the same end by another route, there were the primitive
socialists—or, to be more exact, communists—who wanted to “abolish”
private property altogether. The state (a democratic state was of course
understood) was to own all property.
It is paradoxical that different men seeking the same ends of liberty
and happiness should propose on the one hand to make property as
absolute as possible, and on the other to put an end to it altogether.
But so it was. And the clue to this paradox is to be found in the fact
that ownership is not one thing but a multitude of different things.
It was only as the nineteenth century developed that men began to
realize that property was not one simple thing, but a great complex of
ownerships of different values and consequences, that many things (such
as one’s body, the implements of an artist, clothing, toothbrushes) are
very profoundly and incurably one’s personal property, and that there is
a very great range of things, railways, machinery of various sorts,
homes, cultivated gardens, pleasure boats, for example, which need each
to be considered very particularly to determine how far and under what
limitations it may come under private ownership, and how far it falls
into the public domain and may be administered and let out by the state
in the collective interest. On the practical side these questions pass
into politics, and the problem of making and sustaining efficient state
administration. They open up issues in social psychology, and interact
with the enquiries of educational science. The criticism of property is
still a vast and passionate ferment rather than a science. On the one
hand are the Individualists, who would protect and enlarge our present
freedoms with what we possess, and on the other the Socialists who would
in many directions pool our ownerships and restrain our proprietary
acts. In practice one will find every gradation between the extreme
individualist, who will scarcely tolerate a tax of any sort to support a
government, and the communist who would deny any possessions at all. The
ordinary socialist of to-day is what is called a collectivist; he would
allow a considerable amount of private property but put such affairs as
education, transport, mines, land-owning, most mass productions of
staple articles, and the like, into the hands of a highly organized
state. Nowadays there does seem to be a gradual convergence of
reasonable men towards a moderate socialism scientifically studied and
planned. It is realized more and more clearly that the untutored man
does not co-operate easily and successfully in large undertakings, and
that every step towards a more complex state and every function that the
state takes over from private enterprise, necessitates a corresponding
educational advance and the organization of a proper criticism and
control. Both the press and the political methods of the contemporary
state are far too crude for any large extension of collective
activities.
But for a time the stresses between employer and employed and
particularly between selfish employers and reluctant workers, led to a
world-wide dissemination of the very harsh and elementary form of
communism which is associated with the name of Marx. Marx based his
theories on a belief that men’s minds are limited by their economic
necessities, and that there is a necessary conflict of interests in our
present civilization between the prosperous and employing classes of
people and the employed mass. With the advance in education necessitated
by the mechanical revolution, this great employed majority will become
more and more class-conscious and more and more solid in antagonism to
the (class-conscious) ruling minority. In some way the class-conscious
workers would seize power, he prophesied, and inaugurate a new social
state. The antagonism, the insurrection, the possible revolution are
understandable enough, but it does not follow that a new social state or
anything but a socially destructive process will ensue. Put to the test
in Russia, Marxism, as we shall note later, has proved singularly
uncreative.
Marx sought to replace national antagonism by class antagonisms; Marxism
has produced in succession a First, a Second and a Third Workers’
International. But from the starting point of modern individualistic
thought it is also possible to reach international ideas. From the days
of that great English economist, Adam Smith, onward there has been an
increasing realization that for world-wide prosperity free and
unencumbered trade about the earth is needed. The individualist with his
hostility to the state is hostile also to tariffs and boundaries and all
the restraints upon free act and movement that national boundaries seem
to justify. It is interesting to see two lines of thought, so diverse in
spirit, so different in substance as this class-war socialism of the
Marxists and the individualistic freetrading philosophy of the British
business men of the Victorian age heading at last, in spite of these
primary differences, towards the same intimations of a new world-wide
treatment of human affairs outside the boundaries and limitations of any
existing state. The logic of reality triumphs over the logic of theory.
We begin to perceive that from widely divergent starting points
individualist theory and socialist theory are part of a common search, a
search for more spacious social and political ideas and interpretations,
upon which men may contrive to work together, a search that began again
in Europe and has intensified as men’s confidence in the ideas of the
Holy Roman Empire and in Christendom decayed, and as the age of
discovery broadened their horizons from the world of the Mediterranean
to the whole wide world.
To bring this description of the elaboration and development of social,
economic and political ideas right down to the discussions of the
present day, would be to introduce issues altogether too controversial
for the scope and intentions of this book. But regarding these things,
as we do here, from the vast perspectives of the student of world
history, we are bound to recognize that this reconstruction of these
directive ideas in the human mind is still an unfinished task—we cannot
even estimate yet how unfinished the task may be. Certain common beliefs
do seem to be emerging, and their influence is very perceptible upon the
political events and public acts of today; but at present they are not
clear enough nor convincing enough to compel men definitely and
systematically towards their realization. Men’s acts waver between
tradition and the new, and on the whole they rather gravitate towards
the traditional. Yet, compared with the thought of even a brief lifetime
ago, there does seem to be an outline shaping itself of a new order in
human affairs. It is a sketchy outline, vanishing into vagueness at this
point and that, and fluctuating in detail and formulæ, yet it
grows steadfastly clearer, and its main lines change less and less.
It is becoming plainer and plainer each year that in many respects and
in an increasing range of affairs, mankind is becoming one community,
and that it is more and more necessary that in such matters there should
be a common world-wide control. For example, it is steadily truer that
the whole planet is now one economic community, that the proper
exploitation of its natural resources demands one comprehensive
direction, and that the greater power and range that discovery has given
human effort makes the present fragmentary and contentious
administration of such affairs more and more wasteful and dangerous.
Financial and monetary expedients also become world-wide interests to be
dealt with successfully only on world-wide lines. Infectious diseases
and the increase and migrations of population are also now plainly seen
to be world-wide concerns. The greater power and range of human
activities has also made war disproportionately destructive and
disorganizing, and, even as a clumsy way of settling issues between
government and government and people and people, ineffective. All these
things clamour for controls and authorities of a greater range and
greater comprehensiveness than any government that has hitherto existed.
But it does not follow that the solution of these problems lies in some
super-government of all the world arising by conquest or by the
coalescence of existing governments. By analogy with existing
institutions men have thought of the Parliament of Mankind, of a World
Congress, of a President or Emperor of the Earth. Our first natural
reaction is towards some such conclusion, but the discussion and
experiences of half a century of suggestions and attempts has on the
whole discouraged belief in that first obvious idea. Along that line to
world unity the resistances are too great. The drift of thought seems
now to be in the direction of a number of special committees or
organizations, with world-wide power delegated to them by existing
governments in this group of matters or that, bodies concerned with the
waste or development of natural wealth, with the equalization of labour
conditions, with world peace, with currency, population and health, and
so forth.
The world may discover that all its common interests are being managed
as one concern, while it still fails to realize that a world government
exists. But before even so much human unity is attained, before such
international arrangements can be put above patriotic suspicions and
jealousies, it is necessary that the common mind of the race should be
possessed of that idea of human unity, and that the idea of mankind as
one family should be a matter of universal instruction and
understanding.
For a score of centuries or more the spirit of the great universal
religions has been struggling to maintain and extend that idea of a
universal human brotherhood, but to this day the spites, angers and
distrusts of tribal, national and racial friction obstruct, and
successfully obstruct, the broader views and more generous impulses
which would make every man the servant of all mankind. The idea of human
brotherhood struggles now to possess the human soul, just as the idea of
Christendom struggled to possess the soul of Europe in the confusion and
disorder of the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era. The
dissemination and triumph of such ideas must be the work of a multitude
of devoted and undistinguished missionaries, and no contemporary writer
can presume to guess how far such work has gone or what harvest it may
be preparing.
Social and economic questions seem to be inseparably mingled with
international ones. The solution in each case lies in an appeal to that
same spirit of service which can enter and inspire the human heart. The
distrust, intractability and egotism of nations reflects and is
reflected by the distrust, intractability and egotism of the individual
owner and worker in the face of the common good. Exaggerations of
possessiveness in the individual are parallel and of a piece with the
clutching greed of nations and emperors. They are products of the same
instinctive tendencies, and the same ignorances and traditions.
Internationalism is the socialism of nations. No one who has wrestled
with these problems can feel that there yet exists a sufficient depth
and strength of psychological science and a sufficiently planned-out
educational method and organization for any real and final solution of
these riddles of human intercourse and cooperation. We are as incapable
of planning a really effective peace organization of the world to-day as
were men in 1820 to plan an electric railway system, but for all we know
the thing is equally practicable and may be as nearly at hand.
No man can go beyond his own knowledge, no thought can reach beyond
contemporary thought, and it is impossible for us to guess or foretell
how many generations of humanity may have to live in war and waste and
insecurity and misery before the dawn of the great peace to which all
history seems to be pointing, peace in the heart and peace in the world,
ends our night of wasteful and aimless living. Our proposed solutions
are still vague and crude. Passion and suspicion surround them. A great
task of intellectual reconstruction is going on, it is still incomplete,
and our conceptions grow clearer and more exact—slowly, rapidly, it is
hard to tell which. But as they grow clearer they will gather power over
the minds and imaginations of men. Their present lack of grip is due to
their lack of assurance and exact rightness. They are misunderstood
because they are variously and confusingly presented. But with precision
and certainty the new vision of the world will gain compelling power. It
may presently gain power very rapidly. And a great work of educational
reconstruction will follow logically and necessarily upon that clearer
understanding.
LX. The Expansion of the United States
THE REGION of the world that displayed the most immediate and
striking results from the new inventions in transport was North America.
Politically the United States embodied, and its constitution
crystallized, the liberal ideas of the middle eighteenth century. It
dispensed with state-church or crown, it would have no titles, it
protected property very jealously as a method of freedom, and—the exact
practice varied at first in the different states—it gave nearly every
adult male citizen a vote. Its method of voting was barbarically crude,
and as a consequence its political life fell very soon under the control
of highly organized party machines, but that did not prevent the newly
emancipated population developing an energy, enterprise and public
spirit far beyond that of any other contemporary population.
Then came that acceleration of locomotion to which we have already
called attention. It is a curious thing that America, which owes most to
this acceleration in locomotion, has felt it least. The United States
have taken the railway, the river steamboat, the telegraph and so forth
as though they were a natural part of their growth. They were not. These
things happened to come along just in time to save American unity. The
United States of to-day were made first by the river steamboat, and then
by the railway. Without these things, the present United States, this
vast continental nation, would have been altogether impossible. The
westward flow of population would have been far more sluggish. It might
never have crossed the great central plains. It took nearly two hundred
years for effective settlement to reach from the coast to Missouri, much
less than halfway across the continent. The first state established
beyond the river was the steamboat state of Missouri in 1821. But the
rest of the distance to the Pacific was done in a few decades.
If we had the resources of the cinema it would be interesting to show a
map of North America year by year from 1600 onward, with little dots to
represent hundreds of people, each dot a hundred, and stars to represent
cities of a hundred thousand people.
For two hundred years the reader would see that stippling creeping
slowly along the coastal districts and navigable waters, spreading still
more gradually into Indiana, Kentucky and so forth. Then somewhere about
1810 would come a change. Things would get more lively along the river
courses. The dots would be multiplying and spreading. That would be the
steamboat. The pioneer dots would be spreading soon over Kansas and
Nebraska from a number of jumping-off places along the great rivers.
Then from about 1830 onward would come the black lines of the railways,
and after that the little black dots would not simply creep but run.
They would appear now so rapidly, it would be almost as though they were
being put on by some sort of spraying machine. And suddenly here and
then there would appear the first stars to indicate the first great
cities of a hundred thousand people. First one or two and then a
multitude of cities—each like a knot in the growing net of the railways.
The growth of the United States is a process that has no precedent in
the world’s history; it is a new kind of occurrence. Such a community
could not have come into existence before, and if it had, without
railways it would certainly have dropped to pieces long before now.
Without railways or telegraph it would be far easier to administer
California from Pekin than from Washington. But this great population of
the United States of America has not only grown outrageously; it has
kept uniform. Nay, it has become more uniform. The man of San Francisco
is more like the man of New York to-day than the man of Virginia was
like the man of New England a century ago. And the process of
assimilation goes on unimpeded. The United States is being woven by
railway, by telegraph, more and more into one vast unity, speaking,
thinking and acting harmoniously with itself. Soon aviation will be
helping in the work.
This great community of the United States is an altogether new thing in
history. There have been great empires before with populations exceeding
100 millions, but these were associations of divergent peoples; there
has never been one single people on this scale before. We want a new
term for this new thing. We call the United States a country just as we
call France or Holland a country. But the two things are as different as
an automobile and a one-horse shay. They are the creations of different
periods and different conditions; they are going to work at a different
pace and in an entirely different way. The United States in scale and
possibility is halfway between a European state and a United States of
all the world.
But on the way to this present greatness and security the American
people passed through one phase of dire conflict. The river steamboats,
the railways, the telegraph, and their associate facilities, did not
come soon enough to avert a deepening conflict of interests and ideas
between the southern and northern states of the Union. The former were
slave-holding states; the latter, states in which all men were free. The
railways and steamboats at first did but bring into sharper conflict an
already established difference between the two sections of the United
States. The increasing unification due to the new means of transport
made the question whether the southern spirit or the northern should
prevail an ever more urgent one. There was little possibility of
compromise. The northern spirit was free and individualistic; the
southern made for great estates and a conscious gentility ruling over a
dusky subject multitude.
Every new territory that was organized into a state as the tide of
population swept westward, every new incorporation into the fast growing
American system, became a field of conflict between the two ideas,
whether it should become a state of free citizens, or whether the estate
and slavery system should prevail. From 1833 an American anti-slavery
society was not merely resisting the extension of the institution but
agitating the whole country for its complete abolition. The issue flamed
up into open conflict over the admission of Texas to the Union. Texas
had originally been a part of the republic of Mexico, but it was largely
colonized by Americans from the slave-holding states, and it seceded
from Mexico, established its independence in 1835, and was annexed to
the United States in 1844. Under the Mexican law slavery had been
forbidden in Texas, but now the South claimed Texas for slavery and got
it.
Meanwhile the development of ocean navigation was bringing a growing
swarm of immigrants from Europe to swell the spreading population of the
northern states, and the raising of Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and
Oregon, all northern farm lands, to state level, gave the anti-slavery
North the possibility of predominance both in the Senate and the House
of Representatives. The cotton-growing South, irritated by the growing
threat of the Abolitionist movement, and fearing this predominance in
Congress, began to talk of secession from the Union. Southerners began
to dream of annexations to the south of them in Mexico and the West
Indies, and of a great slave state, detached from the North and reaching
to Panama.
The return of Abraham Lincoln as an anti-extension President in 1860
decided the South to split the Union. South Carolina passed an
“ordinance of secession,” and prepared for war. Mississippi, Florida,
Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas joined her, and a convention met
at Montgomery in Alabama, elected Jefferson Davis president of the
“Confederated States” of America, and adopted a constitution
specifically upholding “the institution of negro slavery.”
Abraham Lincoln was, it chanced, a man entirely typical of the new
people that had grown up after the War of Independence. His early years
had been spent as a drifting particle in the general westward flow of
the population. He was born in Kentucky (1809), was taken to Indiana as
a boy and later on to Illinois. Life was rough in the backwoods of
Indiana in those days; the house was a mere log cabin in the wilderness,
and his schooling was poor and casual. But his mother taught him to read
early, and he became a voracious reader. At seventeen he was a big
athletic youth, a great wrestler and runner. He worked for a time as
clerk in a store, went into business as a storekeeper with a drunken
partner, and contracted debts that he did not fully pay off for fifteen
years. In 1834, when he was still only five and twenty, he was elected
member of the House of Representatives for the State of Illinois. In
Illinois particularly the question of slavery flamed because the great
leader of the party for the extension of slavery in the national
Congress was Senator Douglas of Illinois. Douglas was a man of great
ability and prestige, and for some years Lincoln fought against him by
speech and pamphlet, rising steadily to the position of his most
formidable and finally victorious antagonist. Their culminating struggle
was the presidential campaign of 1860, and on the fourth of March, 1861,
Lincoln was inaugurated President, with the southern states already in
active secession from the rule of the federal government at Washington,
and committing acts of war.
This civil war in America was fought by improvised armies that grew
steadily from a few score thousands to hundreds of thousands—until at
last the Federal forces exceeded a million men; it was fought over a
vast area between New Mexico and the eastern sea, Washington and
Richmond were the chief objectives. It is beyond our scope here to tell
of the mounting energy of that epic struggle that rolled to and fro
across the hills and woods of Tennessee and Virginia and down the
Mississippi. There was a terrible waste and killing of men. Thrust was
followed by counter thrust; hope gave way to despondency, and returned
and was again disappointed. Sometimes Washington seemed within the
Confederate grasp; again the Federal armies were driving towards
Richmond. The Confederates, outnumbered and far poorer in resources,
fought under a general of supreme ability, General Lee. The generalship
of the Union was far inferior. Generals were dismissed, new generals
appointed; until at last, under Sherman and Grant, came victory over the
ragged and depleted South. In October, 1864, a Federal army under
Sherman broke through the Confederate left and marched down from
Tennessee through Georgia to the coast, right across the Confederate
country, and then turned up through the Carolinas, coming in upon the
rear of the Confederate armies. Meanwhile Grant held Lee before Richmond
until Sherman closed on him. On April 9th, 1865, Lee and his army
surrendered at Appomattox Court House, and within a month all the
remaining secessionist armies had laid down their arms and the
Confederacy was at an end.
This four years’ struggle had meant an enormous physical and moral
strain for the people of the United States. The principle of state
autonomy was very dear to many minds, and the North seemed in effect to
be forcing abolition upon the South. In the border states brothers and
cousins, even fathers and sons, would take opposite sides and find
themselves in antagonistic armies. The North felt its cause a righteous
one, but for great numbers of people it was not a full-bodied and
unchallenged righteousness. But for Lincoln there was no doubt. He was a
clear-minded man in the midst of much confusion. He stood for union; he
stood for the wide peace of America. He was opposed to slavery, but
slavery he held to be a secondary issue; his primary purpose was that
the United States should not be torn into two contrasted and jarring
fragments.
When in the opening stages of the war Congress and the Federal generals
embarked upon a precipitate emancipation, Lincoln opposed and mitigated
their enthusiasm. He was for emancipation by stages and with
compensation. It was only in January, 1865, that the situation had
ripened to a point when Congress could propose to abolish slavery for
ever by a constitutional amendment, and the war was already over before
this amendment was ratified by the states.
As the war dragged on through 1862 and 1863, the first passions and
enthusiasms waned, and America learnt all the phases of war weariness
and war disgust. The President found himself with defeatists, traitors,
dismissed generals, tortuous party politicians, and a doubting and
fatigued people behind him and uninspired generals and depressed troops
before him; his chief consolation must have been that Jefferson Davis at
Richmond could be in little better case. The English government
misbehaved, and permitted the Confederate agents in England to launch
and man three swift privateer ships—the Alabama is the best remembered
of them—which chased United States shipping from the seas. The French
army in Mexico was trampling the Monroe Doctrine in the dirt. Came
subtle proposals from Richmond to drop the war, leave the issues of the
war for subsequent discussion, and turn, Federal and Confederate in
alliance, upon the French in Mexico. But Lincoln would not listen to
such proposals unless the supremacy of the Union was maintained. The
Americans might do such things as one people but not as two.
He held the United States together through long weary months of reverses
and ineffective effort, through black phases of division and failing
courage; and there is no record that he ever faltered from his purpose.
There were times when there was nothing to be done, when he sat in the
White House silent and motionless, a grim monument of resolve; times
when he relaxed his mind by jesting and broad anecdotes.
He saw the Union triumphant. He entered Richmond the day after its
surrender, and heard of Lee’s capitulation. He returned to Washington,
and on April 11th made his last public address. His theme was
reconciliation and the reconstruction of loyal government in the
defeated states. On the evening of April 14th he went to Ford’s theatre
in Washington, and as he sat looking at the stage, he was shot in the
back of the head and killed by an actor named Booth who had some sort of
grievance against him, and who had crept into the box unobserved. But
Lincoln’s work was done; the Union was saved.
At the beginning of the war there was no railway to the Pacific coast;
after it the railways spread like a swiftly growing plant until now they
have clutched and held and woven all the vast territory of the United
States into one indissoluble mental and material unity—the greatest real
community—until the common folk of China have learnt to read—in the
world.
LXI. The Rise of Germany to Predominance in Europe
Napoleon III receiving the Siamese embassy at the
palace of Fontainebleau in 1864
WE have told how after the convulsion of the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic adventure, Europe settled down again for a time to an
insecure peace and a sort of modernized revival of the political
conditions of fifty years before. Until the middle of the century the
new facilities in the handling of steel and the railway and steamship
produced no marked political consequences. But the social tension due to
the development of urban industrialism grew. France remained a
conspicuously uneasy country. The revolution of 1830 was followed by
another in 1848. Then Napoleon III, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte,
became first President, and then (in 1852) Emperor.
He set about rebuilding Paris, and changed it from a picturesque
seventeenth century insanitary city into the spacious Latinized city of
marble it is to-day. He set about rebuilding France, and made it into a
brilliant-looking modernized imperialism. He displayed a disposition to
revive that competitiveness of the Great Powers which had kept Europe
busy with futile wars during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Tsar Nicholas I of Russia (1825–1856) was also becoming aggressive
and pressing southward upon the Turkish Empire with his eyes on
Constantinople.
After the turn of the century Europe broke out into a fresh cycle of
wars. They were chiefly “balance-of-power” and ascendancy wars. England,
France and Sardinia assailed Russia in the Crimean war in defence of
Turkey; Prussia (with Italy as an ally) and Austria fought for the
leadership of Germany, France liberated North Italy from Austria at the
price of Savoy, and Italy gradually unified itself into one kingdom.
Then Napoleon III was so ill advised as to attempt adventures in Mexico,
during the American Civil War; he set up an Emperor Maximilian there and
abandoned him hastily to his fate—he was shot by the Mexicans—when the
victorious Federal Government showed its teeth.
In 1870 came a long-pending struggle for predominance in Europe between
France and Prussia. Prussia had long foreseen and prepared for this
struggle, and France was rotten with financial corruption. Her defeat
was swift and dramatic. The Germans invaded France in August, one great
French army under the Emperor capitulated at Sedan in September, another
surrendered in October at Metz, and in January 1871, Paris, after a
siege and bombardment, fell into German hands. Peace was signed at
Frankfort surrendering the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the
Germans. Germany, excluding Austria, was unified as an empire, and the
King of Prussia was added to the galaxy of European Cæsars, as the
German Emperor.
For the next forty-three years Germany was the leading power upon the
European continent. There was a Russo-Turkish war in 1877–8, but
thereafter, except for certain readjustments in the Balkans, European
frontiers remained uneasily stable for thirty years.
LXII. The New Overseas Empires of Steamship and Railway
THE END of the eighteenth century was a period of disrupting empires
and disillusioned expansionists. The long and tedious journey between
Britain and Spain and their colonies in America prevented any really
free coming and going between the home land and the daughter lands, and
so the colonies separated into new and distinct communities, with
distinctive ideas and interests and even modes of speech. As they grew
they strained more and more at the feeble and uncertain link of shipping
that had joined them. Weak trading-posts in the wilderness, like those
of France in Canada, or trading establishments in great alien
communities, like those of Britain in India, might well cling for bare
existence to the nation which gave them support and a reason for their
existence. That much and no more seemed to many thinkers in the early
part of the nineteenth century to be the limit set to overseas rule. In
1820 the sketchy great European “empires” outside of Europe that had
figured so bravely in the maps of the middle eighteenth century, had
shrunken to very small dimensions. Only the Russian sprawled as large as
ever across Asia.
The British Empire in 1815 consisted of the thinly populated coastal
river and lake regions of Canada, and a great hinterland of wilderness
in which the only settlements as yet were the fur-trading stations of
the Hudson Bay Company, about a third of the Indian peninsula, under the
rule of the East India Company, the coast districts of the Cape of Good
Hope inhabited by blacks and rebellious-spirited Dutch settlers; a few
trading stations on the coast of West Africa, the rock of Gibraltar, the
island of Malta, Jamaica, a few minor slave-labour possessions in the
West Indies, British Guiana in South America, and, on the other side of
the world, two dumps for convicts at Botany Bay in Australia and in
Tasmania. Spain retained Cuba and a few settlements in the Philippine
Islands. Portugal had in Africa some vestiges of her ancient claims.
Holland had various islands and possessions in the East Indies and Dutch
Guiana, and Denmark an island or so in the West Indies. France had one
or two West Indian islands and French Guiana. This seemed to be as much
as the European powers needed, or were likely to acquire of the rest of
the world. Only the East India Company showed any spirit of expansion.
While Europe was busy with the Napoleonic wars the East India Company,
under a succession of Governors-General, was playing much the same rôle
in India that had been played before by Turkoman and such-like invaders
from the north. And after the peace of Vienna it went on, levying its
revenues, making wars, sending ambassadors to Asiatic powers, a
quasi-independent state, however, with a marked disposition to send
wealth westward.
We cannot tell here in any detail how the British Company made its way
to supremacy sometimes as the ally of this power, sometimes as that, and
finally as the conqueror of all. Its power spread to Assam, Sind, Oudh.
The map of India began to take on the outlines familiar to the English
schoolboy of to-day, a patchwork of native states embraced and held
together by the great provinces under direct British rule.
In 1859, following upon a serious mutiny of the native troops in India,
this empire of the East India Company was annexed to the British Crown.
By an Act entitled An Act for the Better Government of India, the
Governor-General became a Viceroy representing the Sovereign, and the
place of the Company was taken by a Secretary of State for India
responsible to the British Parliament. In 1877, Lord Beaconsfield, to
complete the work, caused Queen Victoria to be proclaimed Empress of
India. 5
Upon these extraordinary lines India and Britain are linked at the
present time. India is still the empire of the Great Mogul, but the
Great Mogul has been replaced by the “crowned republic” of Great
Britain. India is an autocracy without an autocrat. Its rule combines
the disadvantage of absolute monarchy with the impersonality and
irresponsibility of democratic officialdom. The Indian with a complaint
to make has no visible monarch to go to; his Emperor is a golden symbol;
he must circulate pamphlets in England or inspire a question in the
British House of Commons. The more occupied Parliament is with British
affairs, the less attention India will receive, and the more she will be
at the mercy of her small group of higher officials.
Apart from India, there was no great expansion of any European Empire
until the railways and the steamships were in effective action. A
considerable school of political thinkers in Britain was disposed to
regard overseas possessions as a source of weakness to the kingdom. The
Australian settlements developed slowly until in 1842 the discovery of
valuable copper mines, and in 1851 of gold, gave them a new importance.
Improvements in transport were also making Australian wool an
increasingly marketable commodity in Europe. Canada, too, was not
remarkably progressive until 1849; it was troubled by dissensions
between its French and British inhabitants, there were several serious
revolts, and it was only in 1867 that a new constitution creating a
Federal Dominion of Canada relieved its internal strains. It was the
railway that altered the Canadian outlook. It enabled Canada, just as it
enabled the United States, to expand westward, to market its corn and
other produce in Europe, and in spite of its swift and extensive growth,
to remain in language and sympathy and interests one community. The
railway, the steamship and the telegraph cable were indeed changing all
the conditions of colonial development.
Before 1840, English settlements had already begun in New Zealand, and a
New Zealand Land Company had been formed to exploit the possibilities of
the island. In 1840 New Zealand also was added to the colonial
possessions of the British Crown.
Canada, as we have noted, was the first of the British possessions to
respond richly to the new economic possibilities that the new methods of
transport were opening. Presently the republics of South America, and
particularly the Argentine Republic, began to feel in their cattle trade
and coffee growing the increased nearness of the European market.
Hitherto the chief commodities that had attracted the European powers
into unsettled and barbaric regions had been gold or other metals,
spices, ivory, or slaves. But in the latter quarter of the nineteenth
century the increase of the European populations was obliging their
governments to look abroad for staple foods; and the growth of
scientific industrialism was creating a demand for new raw materials,
fats and greases of every kind, rubber, and other hitherto disregarded
substances. It was plain that Great Britain and Holland and Portugal
were reaping a great and growing commercial advantage from their very
considerable control of tropical and sub-tropical products. After 1871
Germany, and presently France and later Italy, began to look for
unannexed raw-material areas, or for Oriental countries capable of
profitable modernization.
So began a fresh scramble all over the world, except in the American
region where the Monroe Doctrine now barred such adventures, for
politically unprotected lands.
Close to Europe was the continent of Africa, full of vaguely known
possibilities. In 1850 it was a continent of black mystery; only Egypt
and the coast were known. Here we have no space to tell the amazing
story of the explorers and adventurers who first pierced the African
darkness, and of the political agents, administrators, traders, settlers
and scientific men who followed in their track. Wonderful races of men
like the pygmies, strange beasts like the okapi, marvellous fruits and
flowers and insects, terrible diseases, astounding scenery of forest and
mountain, enormous inland seas and gigantic rivers and cascades were
revealed; a whole new world. Even remains (at Zimbabwe) of some
unrecorded and vanished civilization, the southward enterprise of an
early people, were discovered. Into this new world came the Europeans,
and found the rifle already there in the hands of the Arab
slave-traders, and negro life in disorder.
By 1900, in half a century, all Africa was mapped, explored, estimated
and divided between the European powers. Little heed was given to the
welfare of the natives in this scramble. The Arab slaver was indeed
curbed rather than expelled, but the greed for rubber, which was a wild
product collected under compulsion by the natives in the Belgian Congo,
a greed exacerbated by the clash of inexperienced European
administrators with the native population, led to horrible atrocities.
No European power has perfectly clean hands in this matter.
We cannot tell here in any detail how Great Britain got possession of
Egypt in 1883 and remained there in spite of the fact that Egypt was
technically a part of the Turkish Empire, nor how nearly this scramble
led to war between France and Great Britain in 1898, when a certain
Colonel Marchand, crossing Central Africa from the west coast, tried at
Fashoda to seize the Upper Nile.
Nor can we tell how the British Government first let the Boers, or Dutch
settlers, of the Orange River district and the Transvaal set up
independent republics in the inland parts of South Africa, and then
repented and annexed the Transvaal Republic in 1877; nor how the
Transvaal Boers fought for freedom and won it after the battle of Majuba
Hill (1881). Majuba Hill was made to rankle in the memory of the English
people by a persistent press campaign. A war with both republics broke
out in 1899, a three years’ war enormously costly to the British people,
which ended at last in the surrender of the two republics.
Their period of subjugation was a brief one. In 1907, after the downfall
of the imperialist government which had conquered them, the Liberals
took the South African problem in hand, and these former republics
became free and fairly willing associates with Cape Colony and Natal in
a Confederation of all the states of South Africa as one self-governing
republic under the British Crown.
In a quarter of a century the partition of Africa was completed. There
remained unannexed three comparatively small countries: Liberia, a
settlement of liberated negro slaves on the west coast; Morocco, under a
Moslem Sultan; and Abyssinia, a barbaric country, with an ancient and
peculiar form of Christianity, which had successfully maintained its
independence against Italy at the battle of Adowa in 1896.
LXIII. European Aggression in Asia, and the Rise of Japan
Flight of Japanese Legation 1882
IT is difficult to believe that any large number of people really
accepted this headlong painting of the map of Africa in European colours
as a permanent new settlement of the world’s affairs, but it is the duty
of the historian to record that it was so accepted. There was but a
shallow historical background to the European mind in the nineteenth
century, and no habit of penetrating criticism. The quite temporary
advantages that the mechanical revolution in the west had given the
Europeans over the rest of the old world were regarded by people,
blankly ignorant of such events as the great Mongol conquests, as
evidences of a permanent and assured European leadership of mankind.
They had no sense of the transferability of science and its fruits. They
did not realize that Chinamen and Indians could carry on the work of
research as ably as Frenchmen or Englishmen. They believed that there
was some innate intellectual drive in the west, and some innate
indolence and conservatism in the east, that assured the Europeans a
world predominance for ever.
The consequence of this infatuation was that the various European
foreign offices set themselves not merely to scramble with the British
for the savage and undeveloped regions of the world’s surface, but also
to carve up the populous and civilized countries of Asia as though these
people also were no more than raw material for exploitation. The
inwardly precarious but outwardly splendid imperialism of the British
ruling class in India, and the extensive and profitable possessions of
the Dutch in the East Indies, filled the rival Great Powers with dreams
of similar glories in Persia, in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, and
in Further India, China and Japan.
In 1898 Germany seized Kiau Chau in China. Britain responded by seizing
Wei-hai-wei, and the next year the Russians took possession of Port
Arthur. A flame of hatred for the Europeans swept through China. There
were massacres of Europeans and Christian converts, and in 1900 an
attack upon and siege of the European legations in Pekin. A combined
force of Europeans made a punitive expedition to Pekin, rescued the
legations, and stole an enormous amount of valuable property. The
Russians then seized Manchuria, and in 1904 the British invaded Tibet.
But now a new Power appeared in the struggle of the Great Powers, Japan.
Hitherto Japan has played but a small part in this history; her secluded
civilization has not contributed very largely to the general shaping of
human destinies; she has received much, but she has given little. The
Japanese proper are of the Mongolian race. Their civilization, their
writing and their literary and artistic traditions are derived from the
Chinese. Their history is an interesting and romantic one; they
developed a feudal system and a system of chivalry in the earlier
centuries of the Christian era; their attacks upon Korea and China are
an Eastern equivalent of the English wars in France. Japan was first
brought into contact with Europe in the sixteenth century; in 1542 some
Portuguese reached it in a Chinese junk, and in 1549 a Jesuit
missionary, Francis Xavier, began his teaching there. For a time Japan
welcomed European intercourse, and the Christian missionaries made a
great number of converts. A certain William Adams became the most
trusted European adviser of the Japanese, and showed them how to build
big ships. There were voyages in Japanese-built ships to India and Peru.
Then arose complicated quarrels between the Spanish Dominicans, the
Portuguese Jesuits, and the English and Dutch Protestants, each warning
the Japanese against the political designs of the others. The Jesuits,
in a phase of ascendancy, persecuted and insulted the Buddhists with
great acrimony. In the end the Japanese came to the conclusion that the
Europeans were an intolerable nuisance, and that Catholic Christianity
in particular was a mere cloak for the political dreams of the Pope and
the Spanish monarchy—already in possession of the Philippine Islands;
there was a great persecution of the Christians, and in 1638 Japan was
absolutely closed to Europeans, and remained closed for over 200 years.
During those two centuries the Japanese were as completely cut off from
the rest of the world as though they lived upon another planet. It was
forbidden to build any ship larger than a mere coasting boat. No
Japanese could go abroad, and no European enter the country.
For two centuries Japan remained outside the main current of history.
She lived on in a state of picturesque feudalism in which about five per
cent. of the population, the samurai, or fighting men, and the nobles
and their families, tyrannized without restraint over the rest of the
population. Meanwhile the great world outside went on to wider visions
and new powers. Strange shipping became more frequent, passing the
Japanese headlands; sometimes ships were wrecked and sailors brought
ashore. Through the Dutch settlement in the island of Deshima, their one
link with the outer universe, came warnings that Japan was not keeping
pace with the power of the Western world. In 1837 a ship sailed into
Yedo Bay flying a strange flag of stripes and stars, and carrying some
Japanese sailors she had picked up far adrift in the Pacific. She was
driven off by cannon shot. This flag presently reappeared on other
ships. One in 1849 came to demand the liberation of eighteen shipwrecked
American sailors. Then in 1853 came four American warships under
Commodore Perry, and refused to be driven away. He lay at anchor in
forbidden waters, and sent messages to the two rulers who at that time
shared the control of Japan. In 1854 he returned with ten ships, amazing
ships propelled by steam, and equipped with big guns, and he made
proposals for trade and intercourse that the Japanese had no power to
resist. He landed with a guard of 500 men to sign the treaty.
Incredulous crowds watched this visitation from the outer world,
marching through the streets.
Russia, Holland and Britain followed in the wake of America. A great
nobleman whose estates commanded the Straits of Shimonoseki saw fit to
fire on foreign vessels, and a bombardment by a fleet of British,
French, Dutch and American warships destroyed his batteries and
scattered his swordsmen. Finally an allied squadron (1865), at anchor
off Kioto, imposed a ratification of the treaties which opened Japan to
the world.
The humiliation of the Japanese by these events was intense. With
astonishing energy and intelligence they set themselves to bring their
culture and organization to the level of the European Powers. Never in
all the history of mankind did a nation make such a stride as Japan then
did. In 1866 she was a medieval people, a fantastic caricature of the
extremest romantic feudalism; in 1899 hers was a completely Westernized
people, on a level with the most advanced European Powers. She
completely dispelled the persuasion that Asia was in some irrevocable
way hopelessly behind Europe. She made all European progress seem
sluggish by comparison.
We cannot tell here in any detail of Japan’s war with China in 1894–95.
It demonstrated the extent of her Westernization. She had an efficient
Westernized army and a small but sound fleet. But the significance of
her renascence, though it was appreciated by Britain and the United
States, who were already treating her as if she were a European state,
was not understood by the other Great Powers engaged in the pursuit of
new Indias in Asia. Russia was pushing down through Manchuria to Korea.
France was already established far to the south in Tonkin and Annam,
Germany was prowling hungrily on the look-out for some settlement. The
three Powers combined to prevent Japan reaping any fruits from the
Chinese war. She was exhausted by the struggle, and they threatened her
with war.
Japan submitted for a time and gathered her forces. Within ten years she
was ready for a struggle with Russia, which marks an epoch in the
history of Asia, the close of the period of European arrogance. The
Russian people were, of course, innocent and ignorant of this trouble
that was being made for them halfway round the world, and the wiser
Russian statesmen were against these foolish thrusts; but a gang of
financial adventurers, including the Grand Dukes, his cousins,
surrounded the Tsar. They had gambled deeply in the prospective looting
of Manchuria and China, and they would suffer no withdrawal. So there
began a transportation of great armies of Japanese soldiers across the
sea to Port Arthur and Korea, and the sending of endless trainloads of
Russian peasants along the Siberian railway to die in those distant
battlefields.
The Russians, badly led and dishonestly provided, were beaten on sea and
land alike. The Russian Baltic Fleet sailed round Africa to be utterly
destroyed in the Straits of Tshushima. A revolutionary movement among
the common people of Russia, infuriated by this remote and reasonless
slaughter, obliged the Tsar to end the war (1905); he returned the
southern half of Saghalien, which had been seized by Russia in 1875,
evacuated Manchuria, resigned Korea to Japan. The European invasion of
Asia was coming to an end and the retraction of Europe’s tentacles was
beginning.
LXIV. The British Empire in 1914
The Rhodes Colossus
WE may note here briefly the varied nature of the constituents of the
British Empire in 1914 which the steamship and railway had brought
together. It was and is a quite unique political combination; nothing of
the sort has ever existed before.
First and central to the whole system was the “crowned republic” of the
United British Kingdom, including (against the will of a considerable
part of the Irish people) Ireland. The majority of the British
Parliament, made up of the three united parliaments of England and
Wales, Scotland and Ireland, determines the headship, the quality and
policy of the ministry, and determines it largely on considerations
arising out of British domestic politics. It is this ministry which is
the effective supreme government, with powers of peace and war, over all
the rest of the empire.
Next in order of political importance to the British States were the
“crowned republics” of Australia, Canada, Newfoundland (the oldest
British possession, 1583), New Zealand and South Africa, all practically
independent and self-governing states in alliance with Great Britain,
but each with a representative of the Crown appointed by the Government
in office;
Next the Indian Empire, an extension of the Empire of the Great Mogul,
with its dependent and “protected” states reaching now from Beluchistan
to Burma, and including Aden, in all of which empire the British Crown
and the India Office (under Parliamentary control) played the rôle of
the original Turkoman dynasty;
Then the ambiguous possession of Egypt, still nominally a part of the
Turkish Empire and still retaining its own monarch, the Khedive, but
under almost despotic British official rule;
Then the still more ambiguous “Anglo-Egyptian” Sudan province, occupied
and administered jointly by the British and by the (British controlled)
Egyptian Government;
Then a number of partially self-governing communities, some British in
origin and some not, with elected legislatures and an appointed
executive, such as Malta, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Bermuda;
Then the Crown colonies, in which the rule of the British Home
Government (through the Colonial Office) verged on autocracy, as in
Ceylon, Trinidad and Fiji (where there was an appointed council), and
Gibraltar and St. Helena (where there was a governor);
Then great areas of (chiefly) tropical lands, raw-product areas, with
politically weak and under-civilized native communities which were
nominally protectorates, and administered either by a High Commissioner
set over native chiefs (as in Basutoland) or over a chartered company
(as in Rhodesia). In some cases the Foreign Office, in some cases the
Colonial Office, and in some cases the India Office, has been concerned
in acquiring the possessions that fell into this last and least definite
class of all, but for the most part the Colonial Office was now
responsible for them.
It will be manifest, therefore, that no single office and no single
brain had ever comprehended the British Empire as a whole. It was a
mixture of growths and accumulations entirely different from anything
that has ever been called an empire before. It guaranteed a wide peace
and security; that is why it was endured and sustained by many men of
the “subject” races—in spite of official tyrannies and insufficiencies,
and of much negligence on the part of the “home” public. Like the
Athenian Empire, it was an overseas empire; its ways were sea ways, and
its common link was the British Navy. Like all empires, its cohesion was
dependent physically upon a method of communication; the development of
seamanship, shipbuilding and steamships between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries had made it a possible and convenient Pax—the “Pax
Britannica,” and fresh developments of air or swift land transport might
at any time make it inconvenient.
LXV. The Age of Armament in Europe, and the Great War of 1914–18
A French assault on German positions. Champagne,
France., 1917
THE PROGRESS in material science that created this vast
steamboat-and-railway republic of America and spread this precarious
British steamship empire over the world, produced quite other effects
upon the congested nations upon the continent of Europe. They found
themselves confined within boundaries fixed during the
horse-and-high-road period of human life, and their expansion overseas
had been very largely anticipated by Great Britain. Only Russia had any
freedom to expand eastward; and she drove a great railway across Siberia
until she entangled herself in a conflict with Japan, and pushed
south-eastwardly towards the borders of Persia and India to the
annoyance of Britain. The rest of the European Powers were in a state of
intensifying congestion. In order to realize the full possibilities of
the new apparatus of human life they had to rearrange their affairs upon
a broader basis, either by some sort of voluntary union or by a union
imposed upon them by some predominant power. The tendency of modern
thought was in the direction of the former alternative, but all-the
force of political tradition drove Europe towards the latter.
The downfall of the “empire” of Napoleon III, the establishment of the
new German Empire, pointed men’s hopes and fears towards the idea of a
Europe consolidated under German auspices. For thirty-six years of
uneasy peace the politics of Europe centred upon that possibility.
France, the steadfast rival of Germany for European ascendancy since the
division of the empire of Charlemagne, sought to correct her own
weakness by a close alliance with Russia, and Germany linked herself
closely with the Austrian Empire (it had ceased to be the Holy Roman
Empire in the days of Napoleon I) and less successfully with the new
kingdom of Italy. At first Great Britain stood as usual half in and half
out of continental affairs. But she was gradually forced into a close
association with the Franco-Russian group by the aggressive development
of a great German navy. The grandiose imagination of the Emperor William
II (1888–1918) thrust Germany into premature overseas enterprise that
ultimately brought not only Great Britain but Japan and the United
States into the circle of her enemies.
All these nations armed. Year after year the proportion of national
production devoted to the making of guns, equipment, battleships and the
like increased. Year after year the balance of things seemed trembling
towards war, and then war would be averted. At last it came. Germany and
Austria struck at France and Russia and Serbia; the German armies
marching through Belgium, Britain immediately came into the war on the
side of Belgium, bringing in Japan as her ally, and very soon Turkey
followed on the German side. Italy entered the war against Austria in
1915, and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in the October of that
year. In 1916 Rumania, and in 1917 the United States and China were
forced into war against Germany. It is not within the scope of this
history to define the exact share of blame for this vast catastrophe.
The more interesting question is not why the Great War was begun but why
the Great War was not anticipated and prevented. It is a far graver
thing for mankind that scores of millions of people were too
“patriotic,” stupid, or apathetic to prevent this disaster by a movement
towards European unity upon frank and generous lines, than that a small
number of people may have been active in bringing it about.
It is impossible within the space at our command here to trace the
intricate details of the war. Within a few months it became apparent
that the progress of modern technical science had changed the nature of
warfare very profoundly. Physical science gives power, power over steel,
over distance, over disease; whether that power is used well or ill
depends upon the moral and political intelligence of the world. The
governments of Europe, inspired by antiquated policies of hate and
suspicion, found themselves with unexampled powers both of destruction
and resistance in their hands. The war became a consuming fire round and
about the world, causing losses both to victors and vanquished out of
all proportion to the issues involved. The first phase of the war was a
tremendous rush of the Germans upon Paris and an invasion of East
Prussia by the Russians. Both attacks were held and turned. Then the
power of the defensive developed; there was a rapid elaboration of
trench warfare until for a time the opposing armies lay entrenched in
long lines right across Europe, unable to make any advance without
enormous losses. The armies were millions strong, and behind them entire
populations were organized for the supply of food and munitions to the
front. There was a cessation of nearly every sort of productive activity
except such as contributed to military operations. All the able-bodied
manhood of Europe was drawn into the armies or navies or into the
improvised factories that served them. There was an enormous replacement
of men by women in industry. Probably more than half the people in the
belligerent countries of Europe changed their employment altogether
during this stupendous struggle. They were socially uprooted and
transplanted. Education and normal scientific work were restricted or
diverted to immediate military ends, and the distribution of news was
crippled and corrupted by military control and “propaganda” activities.
The phase of military deadlock passed slowly into one of aggression upon
the combatant populations behind the fronts by the destruction of food
supplies and by attacks through the air. And also there was a steady
improvement in the size and range of the guns employed and of such
ingenious devices as poison-gas shells and the small mobile forts known
as tanks, to break down the resistance of troops in the trenches. The
air offensive was the most revolutionary of all the new methods. It
carried warfare from two dimensions into three. Hitherto in the history
of mankind war had gone on only where the armies marched and met. Now it
went on everywhere. First the Zeppelin and then the bombing aeroplane
carried war over and past the front to an ever-increasing area of
civilian activities beyond. The old distinction maintained in civilized
warfare between the civilian and combatant population disappeared.
Everyone who grew food, or who sewed a garment, everyone who felled a
tree or repaired a house, every railway station and every warehouse was
held to be fair game for destruction. The air offensive increased in
range and terror with every month in the war. At last great areas of
Europe were in a state of siege and subject to nightly raids. Such
exposed cities as London and Paris passed sleepless night after
sleepless night while the bombs burst, the anti-aircraft guns maintained
an intolerable racket, and the fire engines and ambulances rattled
headlong through the darkened and deserted streets. The effects upon the
minds and health of old people and of young children were particularly
distressing and destructive.
Pestilence, that old follower of warfare, did not arrive until the very
end of the fighting in 1918. For four years medical science staved off
any general epidemic; then came a great outbreak of influenza about the
world which destroyed many millions of people. Famine also was staved
off for some time. By the beginning of 1918 however most of Europe was
in a state of mitigated and regulated famine. The production of food
throughout the world had fallen very greatly through the calling off of
peasant mankind to the fronts, and the distribution of such food as was
produced was impeded by the havoc wrought by the submarine, by the
rupture of customary routes through the closing of frontiers, and by the
disorganization of the transport system of the world. The various
governments took possession of the dwindling food supplies, and, with
more or less success, rationed their populations. By the fourth year the
whole world was suffering from shortages of clothing and housing and of
most of the normal gear of life as well as of food. Business and
economic life were profoundly disorganized. Everyone was worried, and
most people were leading lives of unwonted discomfort.
The actual warfare ceased in November, 1918. After a supreme effort in
the spring of 1918 that almost carried the Germans to Paris, the Central
Powers collapsed. They had come to an end of their spirit and resources.
LXVI. The Revolution and Famine in Russia
Bolshevik forces marching on Red
Square, Moscow
BUT a good year and more before the collapse of the Central Powers
the half oriental monarchy of Russia, which had professed to be the
continuation of the Byzantine Empire, had collapsed. The Tsardom had
been showing signs of profound rottenness for some years before the war;
the court was under the sway of a fantastic religious impostor,
Rasputin, and the public administration, civil and military, was in a
state of extreme inefficiency and corruption. At the outset of the war
there was a great flare of patriotic enthusiasm in Russia. A vast
conscript army was called up, for which there was neither adequate
military equipment nor a proper supply of competent officers, and this
great host, ill supplied and badly handled, was hurled against the
German and Austrian frontiers.
There can be no doubt that the early appearance of Russian armies in
East Prussia in September, 1914, diverted the energies and attention of
the Germans from their first victorious drive upon Paris. The sufferings
and deaths of scores of thousands of ill-led Russian peasants saved
France from complete overthrow in that momentous opening campaign, and
made all western Europe the debtors of that great and tragic people. But
the strain of the war upon this sprawling, ill-organized empire was too
heavy for its strength. The Russian common soldiers were sent into
battle without guns to support them, without even rifle ammunition; they
were wasted by their officers and generals in a delirium of militarist
enthusiasm. For a time they seemed to be suffering mutely as the beasts
suffer; but there is a limit to the endurance even of the most ignorant.
A profound disgust for Tsardom was creeping through these armies of
betrayed and wasted men. From the close of 1915 onward Russia was a
source of deepening anxiety to her Western Allies. Throughout 1916 she
remained largely on defensive, and there were rumours of a separate
peace with Germany.
On December 29th, 1916, the monk Rasputin was murdered at a dinner party
in Petrograd, and a belated attempt was made to put the Tsardom in
order. By March things were moving rapidly; food riots in Petrograd
developed into a revolutionary insurrection; there was an attempted
suppression of the Duma, the representative body, there were attempted
arrests of liberal leaders, the formation of a provisional government
under Prince Lvoff, and an abdication (March 15th) by the Tsar. For a
time it seemed that a moderate and controlled revolution might be
possible—perhaps under a new Tsar. Then it became evident that the
destruction of popular confidence in Russia had gone too far for any
such adjustments. The Russian people were sick to death of the old order
of things in Europe, of Tsars and wars and of Great Powers; it wanted
relief, and that speedily, from unendurable miseries. The Allies had no
understanding of Russian realities; their diplomatists were ignorant of
Russian, genteel persons with their attention directed to the Russian
Court rather than to Russia, they blundered steadily with the new
situation. There was little goodwill among these diplomatists for
republicanism, and a manifest disposition to embarrass the new
government as much as possible. At the head of the Russian republican
government was an eloquent and picturesque leader, Kerensky, who found
himself assailed by the forces of a profounder revolutionary movement,
the “social revolution,” at home and cold-shouldered by the Allied
governments abroad. His Allies would neither let him give the Russian
peasants the land for which they craved nor peace beyond their
frontiers. The French and the British press pestered their exhausted
ally for a fresh offensive, but when presently the Germans made a strong
attack by sea and land upon Riga, the British Admiralty quailed before
the prospect of a Baltic expedition in relief. The new Russian Republic
had to fight unsupported. In spite of their naval predominance and the
bitter protests of the great English admiral, Lord Fisher (1841–1920),
it is to be noted that the British and their Allies, except for some
submarine attacks, left the Germans the complete mastery of the Baltic
throughout the war.
The Russian masses, however, were resolute to end the war. At any cost.
There had come into existence in Petrograd a body representing the
workers and common soldiers, the Soviet, and this body clamoured for an
international conference of socialists at Stockholm. Food riots were
occurring in Berlin at this time, war weariness in Austria and Germany
was profound, and there can be little doubt, in the light of subsequent
events, that such a conference would have precipitated a reasonable
peace on democratic lines in 1917 and a German revolution. Kerensky
implored his Western allies to allow this conference to take place, but,
fearful of a worldwide outbreak of socialism and republicanism, they
refused, in spite of the favourable response of a small majority of the
British Labour Party. Without either moral or physical help from the
Allies, the unhappy “moderate” Russian Republic still fought on and made
a last desperate offensive effort in July. It failed after some
preliminary successes, and there came another great slaughtering of
Russians.
The limit of Russian endurance was reached. Mutinies broke out in the
Russian armies, and particularly upon the northern front, and on
November 7th, 1917, Kerensky’s government was overthrown and power was
seized by the Soviets, dominated by the Bolshevik socialists under
Lenin, and pledged to make peace regardless of the Western powers. On
March 2nd, 1918, a separate peace between Russia and Germany was signed
at Brest-Litovsk.
It speedily became evident that these Bolshevik socialists were men of a
very different quality from the rhetorical constitutionalists and
revolutionaries of the Kerensky phase. They were fanatical Marxist
communists. They believed that their accession to power in Russia was
only the opening of a world-wide social revolution, and they set about
changing the social and economic order with the thoroughness of perfect
faith and absolute inexperience. The western European and the American
governments were themselves much too ill-informed and incapable to guide
or help this extraordinary experiment, and the press set itself to
discredit and the ruling classes to wreck these usurpers upon any terms
and at any cost to themselves or to Russia. A propaganda of abominable
and disgusting inventions went on unchecked in the press of the world;
the Bolshevik leaders were represented as incredible monsters glutted
with blood and plunder and living lives of sensuality before which the
realities of the Tsarist court during the Rasputin regime paled to a
white purity. Expeditions were launched at the exhausted country,
insurgents and raiders were encouraged, armed and subsidized, and no
method of attack was too mean or too monstrous for the frightened
enemies of the Bolshevik regime. In 1919, the Russian Bolsheviks, ruling
a country already exhausted and disorganized by five years of intensive
warfare, were fighting a British Expedition at Archangel, Japanese
invaders in Eastern Siberia, Roumanians with French and Greek
contingents in the south, the Russian Admiral Koltchak in Siberia and
General Deniken, supported by the French fleet, in the Crimea. In July
of that year an Esthonian army, under General Yudenitch, almost got to
Petersburg. In 1920 the Poles, incited by the French, made a new attack
on Russia; and a new reactionary raider, General Wrangel, took over the
task of General Deniken in invading and devastating his own country. In
March, 1921, the sailors at Cronstadt revolted. The Russian Government
under its president, Lenin, survived all these various attacks. It
showed an amazing tenacity, and the common people of Russia sustained it
unswervingly under conditions of extreme hardship. By the end of 1921
both Britain and Italy had made a sort of recognition of the communist
rule.
But if the Bolshevik Government was successful in its struggle against
foreign intervention and internal revolt, it was far less happy in its
attempts to set up a new social order based upon communist ideas in
Russia. The Russian peasant is a small land-hungry proprietor, as far
from communism in his thoughts and methods as a whale is from flying;
the revolution gave him the land of the great landowners but could not
make him grow food for anything but negotiable money, and the
revolution, among other things, had practically destroyed the value of
money. Agricultural production, already greatly disordered by the
collapse of the railways through war-strain, shrank to a mere
cultivation of food by the peasants for their own consumption. The towns
starved. Hasty and ill-planned attempts to make over industrial
production in accordance with communist ideas were equally unsuccessful.
By 1920 Russia presented the unprecedented spectacle of a modern
civilization in complete collapse. Railways were rusting and passing out
of use, towns were falling into ruin, everywhere there was an immense
mortality. Yet the country still fought with its enemies at its gates.
In 1921 came a drought and a great famine among the peasant cultivators
in the war-devastated south-east provinces. Millions of people starved.
But the question of the distresses and the possible recuperation of
Russia brings us too close to current controversies to be discussed
here.
LXVII. The Political and Social Reconstruction of the World
First meeting of the League assembly in 1920
THE SCHEME and scale upon which this History is planned do not permit
us to enter into the complicated and acrimonious disputes that centre
about the treaties, and particularly of the treaty of Versailles, which
concluded the Great War. We are beginning to realize that that conflict,
terrible and enormous as it was, ended nothing, began nothing and
settled nothing. It killed millions of people; it wasted and
impoverished the world. It smashed Russia altogether. It was at best an
acute and frightful reminder that we were living foolishly and
confusedly without much plan or foresight in a dangerous and
unsympathetic universe. The crudely organized egotisms and passions of
national and imperial greed that carried mankind into that tragedy,
emerged from it sufficiently unimpaired to make some other similar
disaster highly probable so soon as the world has a little recovered
from its war exhaustion and fatigue. Wars and revolutions make nothing;
their utmost service to mankind is that, in a very rough and painful
way, they destroy superannuated and obstructive things. The great war
lifted the threat of German imperialism from Europe, and shattered the
imperialism of Russia. It cleared away a number of monarchies. But a
multitude of flags still waves in Europe, the frontiers still
exasperate, great armies accumulate fresh stores of equipment.
The Peace Conference at Versailles was a gathering very ill adapted to
do more than carry out the conflicts and defeats of the war to their
logical conclusions. The Germans, Austrians, Turks and Bulgarians were
permitted no share in its deliberations; they were only to accept the
decisions it dictated to them. From the point of view of human welfare
the choice of the place of meeting was particularly unfortunate. It was
at Versailles in 1871 that, with every circumstance of triumphant
vulgarity, the new German Empire had been proclaimed. The suggestion of
a melodramatic reversal of that scene, in the same Hall of Mirrors, was
overpowering.
Whatever generosities had appeared in the opening phases of the Great
War had long been exhausted. The populations of the victorious countries
were acutely aware of their own losses and sufferings, and entirely
regardless of the fact that the defeated had paid in the like manner.
The war had arisen as a natural and inevitable consequence of the
competitive nationalisms of Europe and the absence of any Federal
adjustment of these competitive forces; war is the necessary logical
consummation of independent sovereign nationalities living in too small
an area with too powerful an armament; and if the great war had not come
in the form it did it would have come in some similar form—just as it
will certainly return upon a still more disastrous scale in twenty or
thirty years’ time if no political unification anticipates and prevents
it. States organized for war will make wars as surely as hens will lay
eggs, but the feeling of these distressed and war-worn countries
disregarded this fact, and the whole of the defeated peoples were
treated as morally and materially responsible for all the damage, as
they would no doubt have treated the victor peoples had the issue of war
been different. The French and English thought the Germans were to
blame, the Germans thought the Russians, French and English were to
blame, and only an intelligent minority thought that there was anything
to blame in the fragmentary political constitution of Europe. The treaty
of Versailles was intended to be exemplary and vindictive; it provided
tremendous penalties for the vanquished; it sought to provide
compensations for the wounded and suffering victors by imposing enormous
debts upon nations already bankrupt, and its attempts to reconstitute
international relations by the establishment of a League of Nations
against war were manifestly insincere and inadequate.
So far as Europe was concerned it is doubtful if there would have been
any attempt whatever to organize international relations for a permanent
peace. The proposal of the League of Nations was brought into practical
politics by the President of the United States of America, President
Wilson. Its chief support was in America. So far the United States, this
new modern state, had developed no distinctive ideas of international
relationship beyond the Monroe Doctrine, which protected the new world
from European interference. Now suddenly it was called upon for its
mental contribution to the vast problem of the time. It had none. The
natural disposition of the American people was towards a permanent world
peace. With this however was linked a strong traditional distrust of
old-world politics and a habit of isolation from old-world
entanglements. The Americans had hardly begun to think out an American
solution of world problems when the submarine campaign of the Germans
dragged them into the war on the side of the anti-German allies.
President Wilson’s scheme of a League of Nations was an attempt at short
notice to create a distinctively American world project. It was a
sketchy, inadequate and dangerous scheme. In Europe however it was taken
as a matured American point of view. The generality of mankind in
1918–19 was intensely weary of war and anxious at almost any sacrifice
to erect barriers against its recurrence, but there was not a single
government in the old world willing to waive one iota of its sovereign
independence to attain any such end. The public utterances of President
Wilson leading up to the project of a World League of Nations seemed for
a time to appeal right over the heads of the governments to the peoples
of the world; they were taken as expressing the ripe intentions of
America, and the response was enormous. Unhappily President Wilson had
to deal with governments and not with peoples; he was a man capable of
tremendous flashes of vision and yet when put to the test egotistical
and limited, and the great wave of enthusiasm he evoked passed and was
wasted.
Says Dr. Dillon in his book, The Peace Conference: “Europe, when the
President touched its shores, was as clay ready for the creative potter.
Never before were the nations so eager to follow a Moses who would take
them to the long-promised land where wars are prohibited and blockades
unknown. And to their thinking he was just that great leader. In France
men bowed down before him with awe and affection. Labour leaders in
Paris told me that they shed tears of joy in his presence, and that
their comrades would go through fire and water to help him to realize
his noble schemes. To the working classes in Italy his name was a
heavenly clarion at the sound of which the earth would be renewed. The
Germans regarded him and his doctrine as their sheet-anchor of safety.
The fearless Herr Muehlon said: ‘If President Wilson were to address the
Germans, and pronounce a severe sentence upon them, they would accept it
with resignation and without a murmur and set to work at once.’ In
German-Austria his fame was that of a saviour, and the mere mention of
his name brought balm to the suffering and surcease of sorrow to the
afflictedƒ.”
Such were the overpowering expectations that President Wilson raised.
How completely he disappointed them and how weak and futile was the
League of Nations he made is too long and too distressful a story to
tell here. He exaggerated in his person our common human tragedy, he was
so very great in his dreams and so incapable in his performance. America
dissented from the acts of its President and would not join the League
Europe accepted from him. There was a slow realization on the part of
the American people that it had been rushed into something for which it
was totally unprepared. There was a corresponding realization on the
part of Europe that America had nothing ready to give to the old world
in its extremity. Born prematurely and crippled at its birth, that
League has become indeed, with its elaborate and unpractical
constitution and its manifest limitations of power, a serious obstacle
in the way of any effective reorganization of international
relationships. The problem would be a clearer one if the League did not
yet exist. Yet that world-wide blaze of enthusiasm that first welcomed
the project, that readiness of men everywhere round and about the earth,
of men, that is, as distinguished from governments, for a world control
of war, is a thing to be recorded with emphasis in any history. Behind
the short-sighted governments that divide and mismanage human affairs, a
real force for world unity and world order exists and grows.
From 1918 onward the world entered upon an age of conferences. Of these
the Conference at Washington called by President Harding (1921) has been
the most successful and suggestive. Notable, too, is the Genoa
Conference (1922) for the appearance of German and Russian delegates at
its deliberations. We will not discuss this long procession of
conferences and tentatives in any detail. It becomes more and more
clearly manifest that a huge work of reconstruction has to be done by
mankind if a crescendo of such convulsions and world massacres as that
of the great war is to be averted. No such hasty improvisation as the
League of Nations, no patched-up system of Conferences between this
group of states and that, which change nothing with an air of settling
everything, will meet the complex political needs of the new age that
lies before us. A systematic development and a systematic application of
the sciences of human relationship, of personal and group psychology, of
financial and economic science and of education, sciences still only in
their infancy, is required. Narrow and obsolete, dead and dying moral
and political ideas have to be replaced by a clearer and a simpler
conception of the common origins and destinies of our kind.
But if the dangers, confusions and disasters that crowd upon man in
these days are enormous beyond any experience of the past, it is because
science has brought him such powers as he never had before. And the
scientific method of fearless thought, exhaustively lucid statement, and
exhaustively criticized planning, which has given him these as yet
uncontrollable powers, gives him also the hope of controlling these
powers. Man is still only adolescent. His troubles are not the troubles
of senility and exhaustion but of increasing and still undisciplined
strength. When we look at all history as one process, as we have been
doing in this book, when we see the steadfast upward struggle of life
towards vision and control, then we see in their true proportions the
hopes and dangers of the present time. As yet we are hardly in the
earliest dawn of human greatness. But in the beauty of flower and
sunset, in the happy and perfect movement of young animals and in the
delight of ten thousand various landscapes, we have some intimations of
what life can do for us, and in some few works of plastic and pictorial
art, in some great music, in a few noble buildings and happy gardens, we
have an intimation of what the human will can do with material
possibilities. We have dreams; we have at present undisciplined but ever
increasing power. Can we doubt that presently our race will more than
realize our boldest imaginations, that it will achieve unity and peace,
that it will live, the children of our blood and lives will live, in a
world made more splendid and lovely than any palace or garden that we
know, going on from strength to strength in an ever widening circle of
adventure and achievement? What man has done, the little triumphs of his
present state, and all this history we have told, form but the prelude
to the things that man has got to do.
