STUDENTS ON THE MAKE
Mr. F. E. Smith: "Master of epigram—like me!"
Mr. Winston Churchill: "Wrote a novel in his youth—like me!"
Together: "Travelled in the East—like us. How does it end?"
(Mr. W. F. Monypenny's official "Life of Disraeli" has just been published.)
Foes and Friends
Looking back, in the light of fuller knowledge, on the South African war of 1899-1902, we cannot fail to recognize how narrowly we escaped the active hostility of more than one European Power; how much we owe to the wise magnanimity of the British Government in granting full autonomy to the Transvaal in 1906—an act not only justified by the sequel but approved by those who voted against it. It converted the most formidable of those who fought against us into loyal servants of the Empire in her hour of greatest need; it allayed the misgivings of those at home who had opposed the Boer war, and it silenced the criticisms of foreigners who had denounced our aim as the extermination of a people rightly struggling to be free. Whatever views may be held as to the origin of the Boer war—that it was forced on by mining magnates, or that it was the inevitable result of a reactionary system which threatened our hold on South Africa—it remains one of the very few examples of a war which, in the long run, left things better than they had been, and satisfied the aspirations of the majority of the conquered. And if we did not learn all the lessons that we might have learned from the military point of view, the experience was not thrown away. The services of Kitchener, Plumer and Byng, to mention only three out of scores of names, proved that what was comparatively a little war was a true school of leadership for the greatest of all.
Great Britain's warlike operations throughout this period were intra-Imperial, and the scale of the South African campaign, in which from first to last we put 250,000 men into the field, dwarfed the troubles in Ashanti and on the Indian frontier into insignificance. That we kept out of all the other wars which convulsed the world between 1892 and 1914 must be put down to good management as well as good luck. It is remarkable to notice the steady if gradual convergence of the war clouds on Europe, the drawing in of the war zone from the circumference to the centre, beginning with the conflict between China and Japan. The brief and inglorious Greco-Turkish war hardly counts, and Europe was not physically engaged in the Spanish-American war, where all the fighting was done in the New World. Politically its significance was far-reaching, as revising the Monroe Doctrine and enlarging the Imperial horizons of the United States. Politically, again, the "Boxer" rising in China affected the European Powers, whose competing interests in the "integrity of China" were not reconciled by their joint expedition for the relief of the Legations in 1900. Here again the fighting was in the Far East, as it was in the Russo-Japanese war, if we except the "regrettable incident" of the Dogger Bank; and Russia has always been as much an Oriental as a Western Power. But the Russo-Japanese war shook Tsardom to its foundations, promoted Japan to the status of a Great Power, and compensated her largely for the intervention of Russia, Germany and France in robbing her of the spoils of her victory over China. The European conflagration broke out in 1912 with the war of the Balkan League on Turkey. Victory crowned the efforts of a righteous cause—the relief of oppressed nationalities from the oppressions and exactions of a corrupt and tyrannous rule—but was wasted by the internecine quarrels and irreconcilable demands of the victors. Serbia, who had lived down much of the odium excited by the barbarous murders of Alexander and Draga, and had borne more than her share of the war against Turkey, was isolated, partly by her own intransigence, mainly by the greed, the diplomatic manoeuvres and the treachery of her allies, and in her isolation fell a victim to the dynastic ambitions of Austria. The assassination of the Crown Prince Ferdinand at Sarajevo was the excuse for Austria's ultimatum to Serbia, the proximate cause of the Great War of 1914. Whether engineered in Vienna or not, the murder secured the removal of an heir whose succession to the throne of Austria-Hungary was looked upon with grave suspicion by a powerful group in Austria who had no desire to upset the House of Hapsburg but profoundly distrusted the Crown Prince. In the homely phrase Sarajevo killed two birds with one stone. It eliminated an uncertain and unpopular prince, and furnished Austria with an opportunity for gratifying her long-standing hostility to Serbia. But there was a third and bigger bird; for the complicity of Germany in dispatching the Ultimatum is no matter for surmise. Without her support and pressure it would never have been sent.