[114] Cf. Karl Hildebrand, Ein starkes Volk, p. 122.
[115] It is noticed by the Italian and French press; cf., for instance, Roma, October 31, 1915.
[116] On March 16, 1916.
[117] The New York World, in a leading article published March 18, writes: “No pacifist proclaims the doctrine that, although Americans had a legal right to live near the border, they should have taken themselves out of the danger zone in the interest of peace. No German-American Alliance holds meetings to proclaim the dead at Columbus as ‘Guardian angels.’ No German language newspaper has spoken of the New Mexico massacre as undertaken in a holy cause, or referred to the President as incapable of understanding either German militarism or German Kultur. Yet the Americans who were assassinated on the Lusitania and the Arabic had as much right to be where they were as the Americans who were dragged from their beds at Columbus and slaughtered. The Lusitania murder was deliberately planned and ordered by the Government in Berlin, which has assumed full responsibility therefore, and presented but one excuse, that its victims were unexpectedly numerous. The New Mexico murder was planned and executed by a savage, with no pretence that there is a Government behind him, the guilt of the outlaw of the border being not one whit less than that of the outlaw of the sea.”
CHAPTER XX
PROBLEMS OF THE FUTURE
Plain though these facts are, the Entente nations, and in particular the British people, either ignore them wholly or misinterpret their purport. Hence we continue absorbed in the pursuit of interests, parochial and parliamentary, which though quite human, are utterly off the line of racial and imperial progress. We obstinately shut our eyes to the magnitude of the Sphinx question that confronts us, and we address ourselves to one—and that the least important—of its many facets, and content ourselves with tackling that. We descant upon the turpitude of the Teuton who from the regions of idealism in which Goethe, Herder and their contemporaries dwelt has sunk into shift, treason and murder, and we proclaim our faith in the ultimate triumph of right, justice and of the democracy in which alone they flourish. But this frame of mind, which moves us to identify ourselves with all that is best in humanity, if cultivated will prove fatal. It accustoms us to dangerous hallucinations. We assume that we are the chosen people, and we neglect the virtues which alone would justify our election. For generations we have been reaping and wasting, instead of ploughing and sowing. We have been living on our capital, nay, on our credit, and have long since overdrawn our account. Our successes in the past, sometimes the result of fortuitous circumstances, more often of the blunders of our rivals, inspire a presumptuous confidence in successes for the future and a conviction that come what may we are destined to muddle through. A special providence is watching over us—a cousin German to the Kaiser’s “good old God.” In truth we are tempting Fate, postulating an exception to the law of cause and effect, and looking for Hebrew miracles in the twentieth century after Christ.
Were it otherwise, the nation would not have continued to entrust its destinies to the men who misguided it consistently and perseveringly for so many years, to the watchmen who saw nothing of the rocks and sandbanks ahead which it was their function to discern and their duty to avoid, and who are now unwittingly but effectually deluding the people into believing that the present campaign, which is but a single episode in a long-spun-out contest, is an independent event which began in August 1914 and may end this year or the next. These same leaders are busily inculcating the delusive notion that the diplomatic instrument which will one day close hostilities will be a treaty of peace. And they are seemingly prepared to negotiate its terms on that assumption.
In truth, we are engaged in a duel which began thirty years ago, gave the Germans such booty as Heligoland, their world-trade, their wealth, their formidable navy, their Baghdad Railway, their various overseas colonies, their European Allies, and the enormous resources with which when this acute phase of the contest is over they will re-transfer the venue to the economic and political domains and carry on the struggle with greater vigour than before. And peace terms concluded on any other supposition cannot be conducive to the national welfare. We are locked in a deadly embrace with a compact people of 120,000,000, of indomitable spirit, boundless resources, unquenchable faith and a single aim. Yet we are already looking forward to the time in the near future when our intercourse, however circumscribed, with this nation will be essentially pacific, and when we can revert to our cherished narrow interests and our easy-going dilettantism. We feed upon the hope that in a few brief years the British nation will have got safely back to its old beaten grooves, and not only business and sport but everything else will go on as usual. Yet all the salient facts which force themselves on our attention to-day, all the decisive events of the past thirty years are cogent proofs of the unbroken sequence of a trial of strength which the future historian and the present statesman, if there be one, must characterize as a life-and-death struggle between the champions of the new Teuton politico-social ordering and the partisans of the old. But after the lapse of a generation and with the record of all our losses before us, we have not yet formed a right conception of the situation, and its issues, or of the historic forces at work. In these circumstances, no degree of sagacity can help us to devise the only policy in which salvation resides. The prevailing mistaken conception must be rectified before any headway can be made against the currents that are fast bearing us down. And the time at our disposal is brief.
It needs few words to characterize the effects which the dreamy optimism of the Entente nations had on their method of mobilizing their resources to carry on the war. Taken unawares they had nothing ready. Misapprehending the nature of the issues and the redoubtable character of the contest, they pursued subordinate aims with insufficient means. The most daring strategical moves of the enemy, in war as in diplomacy, they ridiculed as either bluff or madness. The journalistic campaign in neutral countries they scoffed at as vain, and put their faith in the final triumph of truth. Their financial measures, oscillating from one extreme to another, denoted the absence of any settled plan, of any clear-cut picture of the needs of the moment. The odds in their favour, which circumstance had given and circumstance might take away again, they looked upon as inalienable, until they ended by forfeiting them all. Viewing the campaign as a transient event, the British Government prosecuted it by means of make-shifts, instead of radical measures. Obligatory service was scouted at as un-English. Discriminating customs tariffs were condemned as heretical. It was not until the enemy had occupied Poland, overrun Serbia, driven the Allied troops from the Dardanelles, bent Montenegro to the yoke, threatened Egypt, Riga and Petrograd, that some rays of light penetrated the atmosphere of ignorance and prejudice through which the Allies surveyed the European welter. They had begun by counting upon the breaking up of the Habsburg Monarchy. They felt sure that the Tsar’s armies would capture Budapest and advance on Berlin. They planned the defeat of Germany by famine. They built another fabric of hopes on “Kitchener’s Great Army” in the spring of 1915. But one after another these anticipations were belied by events. And now the nation blithely accepts the further forecasts of the men who are chargeable with this long sequence of avoidable errors.