When Germany conceived that the fateful moment had arrived, Germany pounced. France was friendly, but not active, Russia active and not friendly, Italy was busily occupied in Abyssinia, and nominally allied with Germany. Austria had her hands full in Macedonia, and was actually allied with Germany. Spain and Portugal did not count. Holland disappeared from the map, following the example of Denmark. The German cormorant swallowed them up, and German squadrons appropriated the harbours on the North Sea, as previously those on the Baltic. While these European changes were being effected with bewildering rapidity, our former allies, the Japanese, who had learnt naval warfare in the English school, played their own hand with notable promptitude and success. Japan had long had her eye on Australia. She wanted elbow room. She wanted to develop Asiatic power. Now was the time, when British warships were engaged in a stupendous struggle thousands of miles away. The little navy that the Australians had got together for purposes of self-defence crumpled up like paper boats under the big guns of the Yellow Fleet. Australia was lost. It made the heart ache to think of the changes wrought by the cruel hand of time—wrought in only a quarter of a century—in the pride of Britannia, in her power and her possessions.
India, that once bright and splendid jewel in the British Crown, the great possession that gave the title of Empress to Queen Victoria of illustrious memory—India, as a British possession, had been sliced to less than half its size by those same Japanese, allied with pampered Hindu millions; and it was problematical whether what was left could be held much longer. The memorable alliance with Japan, running its course for several years, had worn sharp and thin towards the end. It had not been renewed. Japan never had really contemplated pulling chestnuts out of the fire for the sole benefit of Great Britain. They saved us from Russia only to help themselves; and now that Great Britain was derisively spoken of as Beggared Britain, the astute Jap, self-seeking, with limited ideas of gratitude, was England's enemy.
In South Africa, alas! England had lost not only a slice, but all. The men of words had overruled the men of deeds. What had been won in many a hard-fought battle, was surrendered in the House of Commons. Patriotism had been superseded by a policy of expediency. The great Boer War had furnished a hecatomb of twenty thousand British lives. A hundred thousand mourners bowed their heads in resignation for those who died or fought and bled for England. Millions had groaned under the burden of the war tax, and then, after years, we had enabled Brother Boer to secure, by means of a ballot box, what he had lost for the world's good in the stricken field. They had talked of a union of races—a fond thing vainly invented. Oil and water never mix.
Socialists, in alliance with sentimentalists in the swarming ranks of enfranchised women, had reduced the British Lion to the condition of a zoological specimen—a tame and clawless creature. The millennium was to be expedited so that the poor old Lion might learn to eat straw like the ox. If he could not get straw, let him eat dirt—dirt, in any form of humble pie, that other nations thought fit to set before the one-time King of Beasts.
In another part of the world, the link between England and Canada, another great dominion, as Linton Herrick well knew, had worn to the tenuity of thinnest thread. Canada, as yet, had not formally thrown off allegiance to the old country, but the thread might be snapped at any moment.
Linton, who had lived all his life in the Dominion, knew very well how things were tending. The English were no longer the dominant race in those vast tracts. They might have been, if a wise system of colonisation had been organised by British Governments. But the rough material of the race had been allowed to stagnate and rot here in the crowded cities of England. Loafers, hooligans, and alien riff-raff had reached incredible numbers in the course of the last five-and-twenty years. Workhouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, and prisons could not be built fast enough to accommodate the unfit and the criminal. Meanwhile, the vast tracts of grain-growing Canada, where a reinvigorated race of Englishmen might have found unlimited elbow-room, had been largely annexed by astute speculators from the United States. The Canadians, unsupported, had found it impossible to hold their own. The State was too big for them. As far back as 1906, the remnant of the British Government garrison had said good-bye to Halifax; and the power and the glory had gone, too, with the once familiar uniform of Tommy Atkins.
At Quebec and Montreal, all the talk was of deals and dollars. The whole country had been steadily Americanised, and Sir Wilfred Laurier, when he went the ultimate way of all Premiers, was succeeded by office-holders who cared nothing for Imperial ties. For a time they were not keen about being absorbed by the United States, for that would mean loss of highly paid posts and political prestige. The march of events was too strong for them, and between the American and the British stools they were falling to the ground. It was bound to come, that final tumble. The force of things and the whirligig of time would bring in the assured revenges. The big fish swallows the little fish all the world over.
It was the programme of Socialism that had weakened the foundations of the British Empire and paved the way for the troublous times that followed. Cajoled by noisy agitators and the shallow arguments of Labour leaders and Socialists, the working man lost sight of the fact that his living depended on working up raw material into manufactured goods, and thus earning a wage that enabled him to pay for food and shelter. The middle-class had proved not less supine. So long as Britannia ruled the waves, and the butcher and baker were in a position to supply the Briton's daily needs, all went well. But when a family could get only one loaf, instead of four; and two pounds of meat when it wanted five, it necessarily followed that a good many people grew hungry. Hungry people are apt to lose their tempers, their moral sense of right and wrong, and all those nice distinctions between meum et tuum on which the foundations of society so largely depend. Moral chaos becomes painfully accentuated when, as the result of a naval defeat and an incipient panic, the price of bread bounds up to eighteenpence per quartern loaf, with a near prospect of being unprocurable even for its weight in gold. All this had happened in these once favoured isles, because the masses, encouraged by self-seeking and parochially-minded leaders, had been more intent on making war upon the classes than on securing their subsistence through the agency of British shipping, protected by the British Navy at a height of power that could keep all other navies at a distance.
In olden time, when the earth was corrupt and filled with violence, the word came from on high: "Make thee an ark of gopher wood." And Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark, to the saving of his house. But while the ark was a-preparing, the people went about their business, marrying and giving in marriage, making small account of the shipbuilder and his craze. It had been pretty much the same in the twentieth century, when the British people were warned that another sort of flood was coming, and that they, too, would need an ark, of material considerably stronger than gopher wood. They refused to believe in the flood. But it came. It was bound to come.