New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1916-08-16
The New Spirit in England.

months there has been a very marked
change coming in all that should reveal
the spirit and thought of the British peo-
pie. Mr.. Garvin, in his admirable letter
published in The Tribune yesterday, dis
cusses and discloses this, but his is only
one voice among many.
The thing that one must see and feel is
that, after long delays, after hesitations
and dubitations, the real significance of
this struggle to all that England means to
her millions of people and all the empire
means alike to Britain and those who dwell
in the lands beyond the seas, THE Domin-
IONS" as the contemporary phrase has 1t,
has got home. There were weeks and there
were months when it seemed as if the Brit
ism people alone of the great peoples en-
gagged in the war failed 10 grasp the dead
" seriousness of the issues at stake. There
was a time when Britain's allies, as well
as Britain's friends, looked with apprehen-
sion and frank bewilderment at the ap-
parent lack of clear vision or accurate ap-
praisal of the struggle in England.
How much Of this was real, how much
due the habits of mind and expression of
the Englishman, one may not say. Yet 1t
is true that the British people as a mass
far less clearly perceived the actual situa-
ton in Europe in July, 1914, than did the
people of any other nation in Europe. Above
all. they perceived less clearly than any
other people that the fate of the British
Empire was at stake and that the real de-
sign of German policy was to destroy the
foundations of the British Empire.
Tangier Bosnia, Agadir, the three crises
that preceded the storm, carried their full
meaning to France, to Russia, to Austria
and to Germany. There were millions of
Frenchmen who said after Tangier that
the hope of permanent peace had gone;
there were few Frenchmen after Agadir
who believed general war could long be
postponed. When the Austrian ultimatum
was uttered France and Russia alike had
neither doubts nor hopes. In Paris, as in
Petrograd, men said to each other, $50,
it has come at last" and the whole course
of French and Russian craftsmanship In
the last days of the last crisis showed
together with a willingness to make any
sacrifice for peace clear CONVICTION that
war was inevitable.
This was not true of British statesman
ship, Of British leadership. Blinded by
his illusory influence in the Albanian time,
Sir Edward Grey chung long to the hope
that peace could be preserved, and, taking
their views from their statesmen the mass
of the British people looked on the whole
Serbian affair as one more incident" one
more in the series of newspaper crises that
would be settled after some delay and bad
temper, as the three preceding crises had
been.
The greatest fault of the British govern
ment in the years of Liberal Radical SUI
premacy had been that it had misunder-
stood its Europe and permitted its people
to become totally oblivious to the exact
state of world affairs. Thus, when war
came it came almost in the night, and it
came to a people not yet advised of the
issues, not yet aware Of the German aims
and ambitions, not yet conscious of COM
pretending that new Napoleonic peril, a
new and even more dangerous Louis XIV,
had arisen on the Continent and that 1t
was not the question of Serbia, which con-
cerned no Englshman nearly, but the life
of the empire that was in the balance.
One can trace, if he chooses, the slow
but steady growth of British understand
ing of the meaning of the war to Britons.
1t is not an easy or a simple thing for
100000 Of people to pass from the state
of mind of peace TO that of war sudden
ly. Even Belgium, while it momentarily
fired the chivalry and awakened the SYM
pathy of the masses Of Britons, did not
serve TO bring home the lesson that 1t was
to make Britain another Belgium that Ger
many had undertaken her great war.
A democracy, plunged over ten years
into the most eHgrossing and absorbing
of domestic quarrels and political war
fares, its ears filled with the forecasts not
of foreign wars but of civil strife. classes of
its population turned against other classes,
all thought of the outside world eXtin-
guished. its mind obsessed by vague and
vain Utopian ideas of the arrival of uni
versal peace, suddenly found itself at war
with nation whose destructive purposes
il did not understand, whose deliberate, if
stealthy, preparation it had not seen,
whose propaganda of hate it did not dis
tinguish.
What followed over a year and more
than year was the process Of moral and
intellectual mobilization of Britain.
France was an open frontier; the MEM
cries Of 1870 and a closer knowledge Of
Germanism modified in mind and soul
with the coming Of war. But neither in
body nor in soul could the British people
mobilize until that hour when they per-
ceived at last what was actually at stake.