The British Illusion
The British Government, after the Armistice and the uncertain Peace, had behaved for a while as though victory had re-established her old strength. Superficially, indeed, and in moral prestige, among the nations of the world, the British Empire had emerged stronger than before the war. The menace of the German fleet was at the bottom of the sea. New territories in Africa had come under British dominion. British spheres of influence had been extended through Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia. But those new “mandates” were a source of weakness and not of power. They were very costly at a time when there was no money to spend on new adventures in Imperialism. At least the vast sums of money poured into Mesopotamia and other Eastern territories on extravagant administration and development could not be justified to British taxpayers confronted by a staggering bill of costs for war purposes which drained the old reserves of wealth. British statesmen, not yet taught the elementary lessons of economic law, behaved with a kind of splendid madness, as though a new Golden Age had arrived in which their people would possess an Oriental Empire such as Alexander had carved out of the old world. They forgot, or did not know, that poverty and something like industrial ruin was creeping over English life. They did not realise that after a devastating war they could not call upon the last reserves of manhood to support military adventures in far lands. They did not understand that the effects of war in Europe from the Rhine to the Volga, and beyond, had so lowered the purchasing power of the defeated peoples, the neutral countries and the new States, that Great Britain, for a long time to come, would lose many of her old markets for the export trade upon which her life depended, as well as the shipping of the world’s merchandise from port to port which had been so great a source of her old wealth. Winston Churchill, with his restless imagination and wide-reaching Imperialism dreamed dreams of British rule extending from the Cape to Cairo and from Tooting to Tibet. Even Lloyd George, for a little while, was intoxicated with the magnificence of the victory in which he claimed a chief share, not to be denied in history in spite of some blunders and a feud with the Army Chiefs.