# The Future of England/Chapter 7

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CHAPTER VII
OUR INTERNATIONAL FUTURE
So far, then, it had seemed that the maintenance of liberty, the extension of industrialism, and the initiation of racialism, or the care of the race, would constitute our domestic future. It was normal and healthy that a nation should realise its destiny in this order, just as an individual aspires first to independence, then to earning wealth, and next to the foundation of a family.
Yet this conclusion had scarcely been reached ere its inadequacy stood confessed. For clearly, a nation cannot cry halt when it has rendered its citizens the freest, the most prosperous, and the most healthy in the world. Its very success in so arduous a work must inevitably awake new ambitions, wider desires, and loftier interests not yet accounted for. The people must aspire to rise on the stepping-stones of these acquired advantages, and to assert themselves in the world. And the sight of London, stretching interminably under the afternoon sun, strengthened that conviction. For she draws so much of her power and life from intercourse with many peoples, and looks oversea. Internationalism, then, or our due ​relationship with the nations yonder, is the next issue to confront us. What will democracy do here?
Our immediate problem is, of course, with Europe.
During the nineteenth century, from the close of the Napoleonic struggle, two opposite European policies contended for mastery with us. The one found its most authoritative exposition in Sir Robert Peel's last speech, in 1850. He argued with weight that we should keep clear of Europe altogether, and that we had no call to exercise even "moral influence" in that quarter, even in the name of "constitutional liberty." Far better attend to our own business, which is urgent enough, and give a wide berth to continental complications.
The other view was best advocated by Mr. Gladstone, in what Mr. Balfour has called his "unequalled" speech of 1877, when the orator exerted himself to recommend the opposite policy of interposition. "Sir, there were other days when England was the hope of freedom"; when, in fact, all those who struggled to be free could look to us for succour. In his appeal to bring those days back again, the master harped on a very tuneful string.
But though either of these policies may have been possible in the nineteenth century, neither of them will command the allegiance of the twentieth.
​Taking the view of Sir Robert Peel first, we all agree in theory that, burdened as we are with our extra-European interests, it would be highly convenient if we could act as though Europe were not. But, unfortunately, as time goes on, it is becoming increasingly apparent that we cannot escape by any possibility from the direct influence of, and intimate contact with, the continental powers.
For instance, our dealings with the world outside Europe have multiplied enormously since 1850, and, strangely enough, it is these which have brought us into closer contact with Europe. That was the inwardness of Bismarck's meaning when he said that he could defend the German colonies "against France, at the gates of Metz; or against England, in Egypt." Or again, it is well known that the Boers, during the years prior to the last South African War, were guided in the main outline of their policy by the knowledge that some sympathies in Europe were on their side. Thus nowadays, our critics in Europe, without lifting a finger or moving a gun, cross the sea without ships, stand impalpably in the battle, and mulct us in treasure and in blood.
Or again, it is Europe which enters vitally into our domestic finance, and actually determines to a very considerable extent our internal economy. For not only is the immense bulk of our national debt due to our past wars in Europe, but to-day the barometer of our army and navy estimates ​accords mainly with the atmospheric depressions advancing, or receding, across the Channel. Today, as Sir Edward Grey said recently, our expenditure must be dependent upon the expenditure of other powers. It is thus necessary to conclude that our avoidance of Europe is more and more impossible, that we are indissolubly associated, and that we cannot put the continent by. For it is largely in that precipitous watershed that the torrent of our national expenditure has origin; the chief lions in our path can be traced to that lair.
This consideration pushes us a stage into the subject. In the twentieth century, to wash our hands of Europe is to decline to have anything to do with our most crucial interests and our most vital necessities.
If, then, the policy indicated by Sir Robert Peel is becoming, on the whole, unacceptable; so, also, on the other hand, is the policy of active moral action so finely enforced by Mr. Gladstone. The ground of this view can be stated in a single sentence. Now that constitutional government obtains everywhere, the good things of freedom are presumably already within the reach of all. But, more than this, we have not the power. For instance, all Englishmen probably disapprove of Germany's treatment of the Poles in East Prussia. Here freedom might well summon us to interfere. No need to waste words in proving laboriously that the day is gone by for any such sentimental journey into the fatherland.
​Hence, if both the continental policies which commended themselves to nineteenth-century statesmen are obsolete, whither shall we steer in Europe, since steer we must?
The two policies above mentioned, though apparently divergent, were fundamentally rooted alike in the same hypothesis. That hypothesis was one of pessimism as regards the European world. For the advocates of the first policy assumed that Europe was such a whirlpool that it was best to avoid it altogether; while the advocates of the second equally assumed the continent to be so incapable of managing its own affairs properly that England was bound to intervene occasionally for freedom's sake.
Our present point of view must be somewhat different. We start from the assumption that, in our day, we cannot avoid constant association with Europe. Accordingly, the precise issue now before us is whether we shall restrict that association as far as possible, or whether we shall extend and regularise it, on a settled plan.
At the European ball, shall we dance every turn, or shall we merely be agreeable to the dowagers? That depends on Europe.
If any Briton, now or at any time, were to ask for a forecast of European affairs, he would hear, no doubt, that things are at their gravest, that they were never more threatening, and that war, if not actually declared, would break out somewhere and soon. Yet our dismayed islander might take ​some heart of grace, if he remembered that, for the last fifteen centuries since the entry of our barbarous ancestors into the Roman Empire, not a decade has passed in which Europe has not been either at war or in active preparation for it. For the continental nations have never lived otherwise than in crises, excursions, and alarms.
The causes of this preternatural vehemence, implanted in the peoples of the western stock, lie inscrutably far beyond knowledge. No analysis can account for that bacillus of mutual hatred with which our tribal parents, issuing from the German forests and the Asiatic steppes, inoculated the West. In the South-Eastern Europe of our own time, that brasier of so many races, these primitive passions may be witnessed still, burning with the crude and unalloyed fire of antiquity. See the Bulgarian, all muscle, next to the Greek, all nerve; the Servian, haunted by memories of an heroic past and of a lost imperialism, cheek by jowl with the robber race of Albania. For these peoples to quarrel, any pretext has been enough. Meanwhile, the advanced peoples of Europe, while contemning these archaisms and taking longer views of mutual destruction, have hastened to fill the intervals of their wars with the increase of their armaments.
So much for the past. But it is the future that concerns us. Democracy has been busy conquering Europe since the French Revolution, and now that it has definitely become dominant, will it tend ​towards international peace or war? On this issue, so vital for ourselves, we have two diametrically opposite schools of thought to guide us. These must be interrogated and cross-examined, for, according as we answer this question, our future course in Europe depends.
One side prophesies that the people will be all for peace. If so, goodwill among the nations will be the embrocation patented by democracy. These thinkers look forward confidently to the coming advent of that time, so long wished for and never yet realised, when nations shall finally lay aside the sword. The other side asserts precisely the opposite. It declares that demos will prove the very imp of international mischief, demos who, blatant with unruly passions and windy ignorance, will seek wars and ensue them. Thus the former agree with Mazzini that democracy is progress under the best and wisest; the latter endorse the verdict of Talleyrand that it is an aristocracy of roughs.
The latter opinion has, in our epoch, found its most convinced and impressive champions in Moltke on the continent, and in Lord Salisbury here. Moltke, speaking in the Reichstag upon the Army Bill of 1890, said, "princes and governments do not really bring about wars in our day. The era of cabinet wars is over. We have now only peoples' wars. The truth is that the factors which militate against peace are to be found in the people themselves." The German Imperial ​Chancellor, in March 1911, speaking in the Reichstag, repeated and emphasised these views. He said that the time had passed away when European wars could be made by governments, and that nowadays wars only arose from antagonisms rooted in popular sentiment.
Lord Salisbury, throughout his career, held the same opinion, and constantly insisted upon it. As early as 1864 he wrote that "moderation has never been characteristic of democracy. In the old hemisphere, or the new, a thirst for empire and a readiness for aggression have always marked it." And to this idea he constantly recurred with all the increased authority of ripening experience, pointing out in 1888, that the real peril to peace came "from the bursts of uninformed feeling among the masses of the people"; in 1897, that it was the "unofficial people" who made war nowadays; and in 1900, that the governments are pacific, but are "always liable to be overthrown by the violent and vehement operations of mere ignorance." This devout lover of peace profoundly distrusted the international proclivities of the people, and set himself throughout his career to pluck the finest feathers from the wing of high-flying sentimentalism. He was the plumassier of democracy.
These two schools of thought, then, stand diametrically opposed. One side opines democracy to be a tree fruitful in olive-branches. To the other, it is a stem which is certain to put forth, ​one day or another, the red bloom of war. Let us see which is right, and then act accordingly.
The first argument, and not the least powerful, adduced in favour of a peaceful future to be provided by democracy, is derivable from the United States. What the leading democracy in the world thinks of war to-day, surely the democracies of Europe will think to-morrow. Mr. Bryce, in his classic work, The American Commonwealth, states that "no country is at bottom more pervaded by a hatred of war." The Americans, he repeats, "have no lust of conquest—have no earth-hunger." From such a pronouncement it must be difficult to appeal.
Nevertheless, if we look a little more closely at the United States, any such argument drawn from that instance must appear of doubtful import. For, against the view just cited, must be set that which Burke, followed by others up to our own time, entertained of the Americans. He considered them to possess all the characteristics of an ambitious race. "Fierce" was the epithet which he thought most applicable to them: "we cannot falsify the pedigree of this fierce people," and he noticed in them all the marks of "the haughtiness of domination." And surely, the people who, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, could not even settle the question of domestic slavery without a terrible civil war, can hardly be held up safely as a model of peaceful democracy.
Besides, if they are a nation who feel "no lust of conquest" and no "earth-hunger," how is it ​that, during a century, they have absorbed an immense portion of the earth's surface; have ousted from their neighbourhood three great nations, Russia from Alaska, France from Louisiana, Spain from all the South and West; have proclaimed by the Monroe doctrine that they will not allow any European power to "extend its system in any portion of this hemisphere"; have, recently, embarked on a most vigorous and expansive foreign policy in regard to Venezuela, Hawaii, Cuba, Spain, and the Philippines; have reorganised their army; and finally, are busy adopting measures of armament calculated to render them the second naval power in the world? According to Mr. Roosevelt, they are "a nation already of giant strength, which is but a foretaste of the power that is to come."
The next argument favouring a peaceful future in Europe is that so ably presented by Jeremy Bentham and his followers. To them monarchy is essentially warlike, and therefore democracy, a species of inverted monarchy, is essentially peaceful. Hobbes in former days had defined democracy as political power divided into small fragments, and Bentham said of it similarly that it is a polity where everybody counts for one, and nobody for more than one. The latter and his school inferred from this that, whereas monarchy is amenable to "sinister" influences, democracy avoids that pitfall, and remains in the broad and open way of peace.
​Applying that to ourselves, we remember that democracy was definitely installed upon its throne here by the statutes of 1867 and 1885. Yet when the South African War broke out in 1899, those who held the Benthamite view in question were almost unanimous in recording their opinion that our democracy, at this its crucial test, had been duped by the "Kaffir circus," that Park Lane had outwitted Parliament, and that Beit and Co. had pulled the strings, with England for their marionette. Thus they bastinadoed us. But, in saying all this, they cut away the best anticipations for democracy. For, if one side recognises it to be inveterately warlike, and the other admits it to be utterly gullible, the world stands a poor chance. Small hope if the serpent, capital, can so easily corrupt the morals of the dove, democracy.
But, thirdly, abstract arguments about democracy apart, it is said that war must be particularly abominable to the working classes who rule us now. For war, we are told, breeds the sultanised satrap and the plumed proconsul; and empire, according to James Mill, is "a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes." Glory is stated to be a dividend for everybody but the artisan, and the "lower races," whom we are to "foster," a euphemism for slave-labour. The new diplomacy is stigmatised as finance "in the know"; public opinion as Fleet Street; naval and military scares as merely the big armament firms on the prowl for orders. The masses, we are informed, ​cannot away with "rectifications" of frontier, and "hinterlands," and "concessions of territory," and "trusteeships for civilisation," and "manifest destinies," and all the jargon about "efficiency." It is anathema to them even to "think imperially."
Such is a fair statement of the main reason given why wars shall presently be put on the shelf, and why our democracy and those of Europe may prepare to lie down in amity. This argument, like the rest, is worth an examination.
Democracy, in its modern phase, was inaugurated in Europe as long ago as 1789, and, therefore, its essential lineaments may be fairly discerned by now. It is evident that at first, in 1789 and 1790, the new France was thoroughly animated by hopes of universal peace. Mirabeau, towards the close of the latter year, solemnly asseverated "our unalterable desire for peace and the renunciation of all conquests," naming this country as "our elder brother in liberty." Unfortunately, in its high despotic temper, the Revolution, in the brief space of two years, had generated that warlike spirit which it required a quarter of a century of war to quench.
With the close of 1815, however, and amid the general exhaustion of Christendom, it might have been hoped that order and peace would have resumed sway. But the generation succeeding to 1815 was best characterised by Prince Metternich, when, writing in 1859, he uttered the lament that "the revolution to-day counts seventy years of ​life—it has passed from a flagrant to a chronic state." And, indeed, this was the age of permanent revolutionary unrest. From 1815 to 1830 alone, political cyclones swept over Europe, and shook established authority in Spain, in Portugal, in Italy, and in Greece. These were followed by the French Revolution of 1830, and by others in Belgium and Poland. Seven revolutions in little more than fifteen years! After 1830 the movement culminated in 1848 with a series of explosions which burst throughout Europe.
It might be thought, then, and it was thought by the men of 1850, that, war having played every trick upon democracy, peace was now at last definitely in sight. Britons began to descant on the parliament of man, on war drums beating no longer, and on the federation of the world. Our universal exhibition was organised to usher in the brotherhood of peoples, and good men gushed over the inauguration of universal peace.
From that moment, however, wars raged in almost all quarters of the globe. In Europe alone, Italy fought Austria; Austria fought Germany; Germany fought France; France fought Russia; Russia fought England; Germany fought Denmark; Russia fought Turkey; and so on with the catalogue. Triumphant democracy!
But surely, with the close of the latter war, and with the successful conclusion of the Berlin Conference, the nations could at last consent to cease from aggression and the rape of territories ​not their own. Here, in 1880, we consigned Lord Beaconsfield to his political grave, turned our backs on "scientific frontiers" and oriental adventure, and deemed ourselves ripe to be friends with all the world. Yet from that very date we, and our fellow European nations, embarked on the most rapid and vast career of acquisition and conquest that the world had witnessed since the days of Islam.
For instance, speaking in 1896, Lord Rosebery could say: "During the last twelve years you have been laying your hands with almost frantic eagerness on every tract of territory adjacent to your own, or desirable from any other point of view. In twelve years you have added to the empire, whether in the shape of actual annexation or of dominion, or of what is called a sphere of influence, 2,600,000 square miles of territory … twenty-two areas as large as the United Kingdom itself." And since then we have rapidly gone forward with immense annexations on the same lines. So too with France. The extension of her empire into Senegal and Sahara by 1880 was promptly followed by the annexation of Tunis. She scrambled for Africa in 1884, at the same time consolidating her Asiatic empire in Tongking and Laos. Since 1880 France has acquired 3,500,000 square miles, with a native population of about 40,000,000. So with the other nations.
Nevertheless, even these stupendous conquests ​have not been able for a moment to satiate the warlike instincts of the European world. Not content with subduing the extra- European races, we arm ruinously against each other. "Never," said Lord Derby as early as 1876, "since the world began, have such masses of men been drilled and disciplined for purposes of war"; and, of course, the armaments of 1876 were mere toys to what they are to-day. For, yearly, new expedients of conscription cram the barrack-yards of the Continent, and young navies dispute the roadway of the high seas. All done on the highest principles, and in order to promote the sacred cause of peace!
So far, then, as the arguments of those who believe in the future peacefulness of European democracy have been examined, they do not appear to be as solid as might be wished.
Nevertheless, it would be inadvisable to draw a hasty conclusion. On an issue so complex and so all -important for ourselves, no argumentative precaution is superfluous. We must heave the lead every inch of the way over the red coral and the volcanic floor. Therefore, let us weigh with equal care the arguments of those who, with Moltke and Lord Salisbury, hold democracy to be essentially inimical to peace. These reasons may prove to be weak in their turn. If so, we shall have to adjust our views accordingly, and strike a balance between rival uncertainties.
Lord Salisbury himself, in 1898, furnished a ​signal argument in favour of his belief in a warlike future. He analysed the nations into those living and those dying, and pointed out that some are decaying as fast as others progress. The weak States, he said, are becoming weaker in the too intense rivalry of our epoch, while the strong States are becoming stronger. Therefore, he concluded it to be certain that "the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying, and the seeds and causes of conflict among civilised nations will speedily appear."
And yet, if the recent history of Europe be considered even in the example most favourable to Lord Salisbury's view, some modification may be appended to his proposition, a modification serving to bring a principle of the European organism, not yet touched upon, into light.
Turkey is the classic case in point of a "decaying" nation, of a "sick man." And truly, the decrepitude of the invalid on the Bosphorus invited and caused a great European outbreak, not to mention minor disturbances, twice during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The first, the Crimean War, was due to Russia's conviction that the Turk was on his death-bed. A second conflagration began in 1875, when Herzegovina thought herself strong enough to defy the Crescent, and the flame spread right along the Balkans, burning the outlying homesteads of the sick man. We witnessed another stage of that process when, in the autumn of 1908, Bulgaria suddenly pro​claimed her sovereignty, and Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina; and when, in 1911, Italy attacked Tripoli.
Thus, the angina pectoris of Turkey has, indeed, caused wars in Europe, and this, so far, justifies the assertion that the inevitable decay of States will provoke strife in the future. Nevertheless, an important additional fact must here be brought into notice. Who have been the beneficiaries of this process of partition? Has it been wholly the "stronger" States who have "encroached," and been the legatees of the patient on the Golden Horn? Certainly, to some degree. But it is remarkable that it has been the "weaker" States who have done well, no less, in face of these overwhelming protagonists. Roumania, and Servia, and Bulgaria have carved out their independence; Montenegro has consolidated her position; Greece, when overwhelmed in 1897 by Turkey, was rescued by Europe. Viewed broadly, then, the property of the Sultan has devolved as much to sustain the weak as to enlarge the strong, so that even in Europe, and even in the southeastern part of it, force has not ruled absolutely, and weakness can live and flourish. How is it that the rays, shorn from the horns of the waning Crescent, have made an aureole for such humble brows? Who, if not democracy, has cried halt to the "Drang nach Osten" of Austria and Russia? Perhaps the Roumanian blood, at the foot of the Grivitsa redoubt, was the seed of power and ​of freedom. Perhaps Joseph de Maistre was right in saying that if you bury Slavonic aspirations under a fortress, they will blow it up.
We may find another illustration of the same point if we look at the opposite end of Europe, where, wedged in between the three great powers of France, England, and Germany, lie the two small States of the Netherlands. In 1814, Europe decided to form them into one State strong enough, it was calculated, to resist France. But, in 1830, Belgium revolted in order to form a separate sovereignty. And in complete defiance, though eventually with the acquiescence, of Europe, she succeeded in establishing herself without war.
If, not content with these instances, we generalise our view of the continental polity, we must be struck with the large number of small States which manage to exist in face of the great—Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Montenegro, Servia, Bulgaria, Roumania, and Greece. It may be said, no doubt, that these only maintain their life because it is to the interest of the big powers to let them be. But to this it may be answered that, viewed as mere engines of greed and aggression, the latter would find it much more profitable to partition them, as Austria, Prussia, and Russia partitioned Poland in old days. In fact, to carry the argument the other way, it might even be maintained that it is autocracy, and not democracy, which has so keen an appetite for weakness. At the Treaty of Westphalia the ​numberless Germanic sovereigns were cut down to about 350, and again, by the date of the Treaty of Vienna, to a mere handful of 40, whence the Prussian autocracy reduced them to their position to-day. So far, then, from democracy being coincident with the rule of force, it may be not impossible that it will prove favourable to the rule of right and equity. Indeed, at the Hague Conference of 1907, the world witnessed with surprise Europe's welcome to the small States of South and Central America as equal members of the European fraternity. The perch and the pike somehow live together.
The next argument employed against democracy is that it foments nationality, and that the latter is an association of individuals who feel their interests to be distinct from, and opposed to, those of their neighbours. Thus nations, it is concluded, are necessarily hostile to each other, since, otherwise, they would not exist at all. More than this, democracy augments that native animus, if, according to Maine, "the prejudices of the people are far stronger and more dangerous than those of the privileged classes." De Tocqueville had the same thought in mind when he wrote that nations, like men, prefer their passions to their interests.
Nevertheless, this proposition, if rigidly tested, can hardly be accepted as accurate. When Burke and Fox pressed that thesis upon Pitt in 1787 he stigmatised it as "weak and childish"; and Beaconsfield, in his day, told the House of Commons ​that those who thought so, might as well argue that 5 per cent was the natural rate of interest.
The truth is that neither in ancient, nor in modern, times have the European nations entertained fixed animosities against each other, and this we can see best in our own case. Between us and Russia the fiercest hatred has been alight during the nineteenth century. Yet during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we were regarded as her natural and ancient friend. It was only as the eighteenth century ended that our feeling changed towards suspicion of Russia, from the date when Catherine II. organised the league of the Armed Neutrality against us, a feeling much strengthened when, in 1800, the Czar turned against England, and, above all, when, in 1807, after Friedland, he abruptly abandoned our alliance at a most critical hour.
But this suspicion changed to genuine dislike during the years succeeding 1820, as we witnessed the rapid approach of Russia towards India and Constantinople, marked by the Treaties of Turco-Manchai and Unkiar Skelessi. This emotion has lasted almost up to the present date, when, for reasons known to all of us, the tide of public sentiment which, since 1780 and the days of Catherine II., had been running strongly against Russia, has reverted to its more ancient direction of friendship and goodwill.
Or take again our feelings towards Spain. To an Elizabethan Englishman our animosity with ​Spain appeared axiomatic, final, and ordained as by a law of nature. Yet during the Middle Ages we were on very friendly terms with the Spaniards, even up to the early years of the reign of Henry VIII. The alienation between us began somewhat suddenly in 1528. It lasted up till 1656, at any rate, for in that year Cromwell still could say to the House of Commons that "the Spaniard is your enemy, naturally and providentially." This antagonism, however, tended to decline in 1660, and, in the next year, Pepys noted in his Diary that now "we do naturally all love the Spanish." For certain reasons, however, the sense of antipathy revived in the eighteenth century, though the course of the nineteenth, since Trafalgar, has seen us resume our mediæval disposition of amity towards Spain, happily sealed in our time by a royal marriage.
In a word, history altogether belies the view that nations are fundamentally hostile. Nor can democracy be charged with any such impulse, if our improved relationship with Spain and Russia, since the introduction of democratic ideas into both those countries, be borne in mind.
Another argument employed to establish the warlike disposition of democracy is drawn from economics. European democracy may, in its economic aspect, be defined as, in the first place, an attempt upon the part of the masses to procure a fair equality of fortune with the privileged or propertied classes. For instance, Taine said that the real French Revolution consisted in this that, ​whereas the French peasant in 1789 could only keep a tiny portion of his net savings for himself after discharging his feudal dues, in 1800 that condition was precisely reversed. But as the appetite is thus whetted, this struggle for redistribution, it may be argued, merges into one for wresting more opportunities of wealth from neighbouring powers, thus providing the root of innumerable rivalries among the nations. As Bismarck said, "the war of the future will be the economic war, the struggle for existence on the largest scale. May my successor always bear this in mind, and always take care that Germany will be prepared when this battle has to be fought."
An apposite instance of how such a conflict might arise may be drawn from Bismarck's own country. Economically, Germany labours under a disadvantage. Her fields of coal and iron, and therefore her main industrial centres, lie far from the sea. But this defect is remedied by the fact that, Saxony apart, those centres lie on, or near, the Rhine and its tributaries, so that thus the major part of her exports are carried abroad by an easy and cheap transit. As against this, however, the lower course of that river is possessed by Holland, who thus takes toll of her neighbour, and German writers are not slow to point out the advantage to the fatherland of possessing the estuary of the Rhine. In the words of Treitschke, "the very part of the Rhine which is materially most valuable to us has fallen into the hands of ​foreigners. It is an indispensable duty of German policy to regain the mouths of that river." Here would be fine fuel for European war.
Russia, too, may furnish no less suitable an illustration of how war may spring from an economic source. The history of Russia is that certain tribesmen living around the sources of the Dnieper have, within the space of a thousand years, expanded into a nation ruling from the Baltic to the Pacific, and from Persia to the Polar Sea. That stupendous exodus had a cause partly economic, and partly political. The tribesmen fled before a niggard nature, and before fiercer man. For nature drove them with the whip of hunger, and their rulers with the knout. Yet in the main the cause was economic, and their wars, arising out of their necessities, have formed some of the bloodiest chapters in the history of humankind. Why, because at the last hour of ten centuries they have procured a Duma and a democracy, should their expansive energies and their aggressions vanish from the page of history? It is too soon to forget Mouravieff Amurski, and the diplomacy of Ignatieff, and the pledges of Gortchakoff. Remember Frederick the Great's prophecy, that all Europe will one day tremble before Russia; or Metternich's saying, that she is forever insatiable; or Palmerston's, that she is the universal aggressor; or Napoleon's, that Europe will be Republican or Cossack. She was the only nightmare of Bismarck.
​This argument, when formulated, may be held to be that, since there has been an immense increase in the European population during recent times, and since democracy attempts to establish a higher standard of comfort for all the members of that teeming host, this twofold process must inevitably and mechanically result in a sharp accentuation of the struggle for existence among the modern democracies, and therefore in war.
But, on a strict examination, this proposition, like the others, will appear doubtful.
During our own age the European world has been busy providing for itself many safety valves and overflow pipes against the dangerous social forces just described. If we look at Russia there has been, no doubt, an enormous expansion recently in her population, accompanied by marked unrest and distress. But this is being met in three ways. The Russian agriculturists have been marching by millions into the regions, hitherto pastoral, which extend north of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Caspian, and still farther east. Also, farther north they have been penetrating into Central Asia on a scale of immigration unknown till now. Secondly, within Russia itself a strong conviction is spreading that as yet the soil has only been scratched, that intensive culture must supersede the primitive methods of the nomad, and that the salvation of the peasantry must be sought, not in new territories but in the soil underfoot. Thirdly, industrialism, with all ​its pains and penalties, but with its many gifts, is rendering first aid to Russia's stricken economic life; presently, it will touch the dead corpse of her prosperity, which will spring to its feet. And in all these movements her young democracy has a profound interest. Here, then, are causes definitely counteracting the argument for economic war.
So too with Germany. Germany has been in past years depleted of her surplus economic element, which otherwise would have tended long ago to break bounds in Europe. Of the 90,000,000 Germans in the world, there are 60,000,000, or thereabouts, in the fatherland; but of the balance no less than about 13,000,000 are oversea. What the prairie and the steppe are to the Russian peasant, the Americas, north and south, are to the German refugee. On behalf of those who remain within her boundary it may be urged that, though they have waged several wars in the nineteenth century against Austria, and Denmark, and France, their sword has been drawn in the cause of national unity, that for forty years, and more, they have abstained from that arbitrament, and that temptations of wealth and comfort entice the fingers of the mailed fist from the hilt of the sword.
Another, and the final, argument pointing to the militant nature of democracy is that it foments race hatred, and therefore war. The two main manifestations of this spirit are known as Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism.
Pan-Slavism had really little root in the world ​until Russia, the chief Slav power, had beaten Napoleon. After that date its professors could hold up their heads, and maintain that Germany has reached her day, England her mid-day, France her afternoon, Italy her evening, Spain her night; but the Slavs stand on the threshold of the morning. This Slavonic idea reached a practical point when, in 1877, Russia drew her sword on behalf of the oppressed Slavonic nationalities of the Balkans.
Another example of the Slavonic faith is represented in the words of Skobeleff; "our enemy is the German. The battle is unavoidable between German and Slav." It is certainly remarkable that the organised antagonism between Russians and Germans is of a most recent date. For centuries the tendency ran in the opposite direction; the Baltic provinces were little more than a German hinterland; and the Czars, from the time of Peter the Great, exerted themselves to open "a window on the west." But, as the nineteenth century proceeded, all that was changed under the stimulus of the Slavonic consciousness. Chiefly since Alexander III. became Czar in 1881, the russification of the Baltic provinces has been enforced with ruthless brutality against the Germans, and has aroused the most intense indignation and wrath in the fatherland. It may be argued, then, that Pan-Slavism, fomented by democracy, is preparing a tremendous conflict. Yet, in truth, democracy is not culpable, and can be shown to be actually the great obstacle to the Pan-Slav.
​The Pan-Slavonic idea will not work in Europe because the Slavs are beginning to prefer democracy to Pan-Slavism. The Russians have already painfully realised that truth in the Balkans, where the young Slav peoples have preferred to establish their little states on a democratic basis rather than to coalesce with Russia. That democracy is rapidly laying its axe against Slavonic unity can be judged from the case of Austria. Austrian democracy is actually striving, with some prospect of success, to reconcile the Slavonic with the Teutonic and the Magyar races, and thus to foster peace and harmony among these intense antagonisms.
In Austria, democracy works also to amalgamate the Slavs into one people, but not on Pan-Slavonic lines. The recent policy of the Emperor, in urging his peoples to adopt universal suffrage, had no other object than to cure racial hatred by democracy. Thus Austria, by means of democracy, bids fair to refute the sarcasm of Gortchakoff that she is not a nation, or even a State, but only a government. For her, the question of the unity of her southern Slavs with each other, and of their consolidation in the Dual Monarchy, is a main question, and a main hope for to-morrow.
In a word, European democracy, so far from fomenting Pan-Slavism, on the one hand, gathers the Slavs into separate nations; and, on the other, attempts to harmonise their intestine quarrels, and even to reconcile them with their Teutonic fellowcitizens under the Hapsburg ægis.
​But, of course, Pan-Germanism is the main instance of a racial movement tending to strife. Pan-Germanism was born at the same time as Pan-Slavism, but in the humiliation of defeat at the hands of Napoleon, not in the pride of victory. Its first-fruits was the battle of Leipzig, and its first classic was Arndt's song, "Was ist des deutschen Vaterland?" The poet answered his own question by saying that the German's fatherland exists "where'er is heard the German tongue," a revolutionary saying on the basis of which a whole literature has arisen to-day.
The main practical result of Pan-Germanism has been the determined attempt of Germany to stamp out the Poles of her eastern province. In his great speech of 1886, Bismarck opened the question, declaring that since 1814 Prussia had treated the Poles kindly, but "I do not care a straw for the pledges of those days." Germanism was being extinguished in Prussian Poland no less than in Hungary and Bohemia. "Let the Poles go to Paris or Monte Carlo." "We must stand on feet not of clay, but of iron." Thus the persecution began. Over twenty years later, in 1907, Prince Bülow reviewed the whole policy in Poland, and disclosed a rather melancholy state of affairs from a German point of view. In spite of all the government's efforts, more land was passing into Polish hands than vice versa. Expropriation must be resorted to, for, indeed, there was no possibility of preserving German nationality in ​the Polish provinces unless far more stringent measures were adopted, even than those of Bismarck. Thus in the very fatherland itself, Pan-Germanism has its difficulties with national sentiment.
Yet these difficulties are literally as nothing compared with the external obstacles to Pan-Germanism raised by democracy. Of the 30,000,000 Germans who choose to reside outside Germany, how many wish to place themselves under the sceptre of the Kaiser? Not 1,000,000, not 500,000 at most. The Pan-German agitation has been most active among the 11,000,000 of Austro-Hungarian Germans, but has yielded the poorest result. The Germans scattered through Hungary and through Bohemia are gradually throwing in their lot with the Magyars or the Czechs. In Austria itself, when Pan-Germanism raises its head, the whole force of the Catholic Church, whose policy is opposed to union with Protestants, is raised to quell it, and amid an entirely Catholic population of Germans that Church wields immense force. When Pan-Germans, in their disgust and in order to cover their retreat, raised the cry of "Los von Rom," the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Este replied in the famous words: "Away from Rome is away from Austria." The observation was unanswerable.
Still less do the men of the Germanic stock in Switzerland, or Holland, or Belgium, or the United States, yearn for the Pan-German ideal. For no ​people has proved so ready to bring the fuel of race into the oven of democracy.
The arguments of those who believe in the future peacefulness of democracy, when examined earlier, were found to be insufficient. And now the arguments of those who believe in the tendency of democracy to breed war, have been examined also, and it must be said that they too are not quite convincing. So we are in presence of two sets of opposite arguments, alike weak and therefore alike inconclusive. At first sight, that might be thought to be a valueless outcome. But, on the contrary, it bears with it a positive result for ourselves. For if, as appears, continental democracy is something other than a mere vendetta; if the tug-of-war between the barbarous and the civilised instincts of the West is even arguably level to-day; if the fiercest races in the world are not so unanimously thirsty for blood as they have been ere now; and if, for the first time since Roman days, some peace in Christendom has become, at all events, conceivable; if history and homicide are now possibly distinguishable terms—that is a new fact of much, and even immense, moment.
From it a practical consequence follows. For if, as already shown, our interests are increasingly concerned and involved in Europe; if, further, our pessimism of the nineteenth century in regard to the continent may give way to a hope, however modest, that the tangled skein of continental policy ​is not a mere noose to hang any intruder; if, therefore, we may enter where our interests call us so imperatively, without sheer foolhardiness or wanton folly—then forward, in the name of prudence itself, and in abandonment of the splendid isolation of old days. We must be Europeans. The future designs it. How?