It is a considerable number of years since the most distinguished Tory statesman of his time impressed upon his fellow-countrymen as a maxim of policy, that Peace is the greatest of British interests. There was an unexpectedness about Lord Salisbury's words, coming as they did from the leader of a party which had hitherto lain under suspicion of jingoism, which gave the phrase almost the colour of an epigram. The truth of the saying, however, gradually became manifest to all men; and thereupon a new danger arose out of this very fact.
As a nation we are in some ways a great deal too modest; or it may be, looking at the matter from a critical standpoint, too self-centred. We have always been inclined to assume in our calculations that we ourselves are the only possible disturbers of the peace, and that if we do not seek war, or provoke it, no other Power will dream of forcing war upon us. This unfortunately has rarely been the case; and those persons who, in recent times, have refused most scornfully to consider the lessons of past history, have now at last learned from a sterner schoolmaster the falseness of their favourite doctrine.
The United Kingdom needed and desired peace, so that it might proceed undistracted, and with firm purpose, to set its house in order. The Dominions needed peace, so that they might have time to people their fertile but empty lands, to strike deep roots and become secure. To the Indian Empire and the Dependencies peace was essential, if a system of government, which aimed, not unsuccessfully, at giving justice and fostering well-being, was to maintain its power and prestige unshaken. The whole British race had nothing material to gain by war, but much to lose, much at any rate which would be put in jeopardy by war. In spite of all these weighty considerations which no man of sense and knowledge will venture to dispute, we should have been wiser had we taken into account the fact, that they did not apply to other nations, that in the main they affected ourselves alone, and that our case was no less singular than, in one sense at all events, it was fortunate.
We did not covet territory or new subjects. Still less were we likely to engage in campaigns out of a thirst for glory. In the latter particular at least we were on a par with the rest of the world. The cloud of anxiety which for ten or more years has brooded over the great conscript nations, growing steadily darker, contained many dangers, but among these we cannot reckon such antiquated motives as trivial bravado, light-hearted knight-errantry, or the vain pursuit of military renown.
What is called in history books 'an insult' seemed also to have lost much of its ancient power for plunging nations into war. The Chancelleries of Europe had grown cautious, and were on the watch against being misled by the emotions of the moment. A sensational but unintended injury was not allowed to drive us into war with Russia in 1904, and this precedent seemed of good augury. Moreover, when every statesman in Europe was fully alive to the electric condition of the atmosphere, a deliberate insult was not very likely to be offered from mere ill-manners or in a fit of temper, but only if there were some serious purpose behind it, in which case it would fall under a different category.
Fear was a great danger, and everybody knew it to be so—fear lest this nation, or that, might be secretly engaged in strengthening its position in order to crush one of its neighbours at some future date, unless that neighbour took time by the forelock and struck out forthwith. Among the causes which might bring about a surprise outbreak of war this was the most serious and probable. It was difficult to insure against it. But though perilous in the extreme while it lasts, panic is of the nature of an epidemic: it rages for a while and passes away. It had been raging now with great severity ever since 1909,[[1]] and by midsummer 1914 optimists were inclined to seek consolation in the thought that the crisis must surely be over.
DANGERS TO PEACE
More dangerous to peace in the long run even than fear, were certain aims and aspirations, which from one standpoint were concrete and practical, but regarded from another were among the cloudiest of abstractions—'political interests,' need of new markets, hunger for fresh territory to absorb the outflow of emigrants, and the like; on the other hand, those hopes and anxieties which haunt the imaginations of eager men as they look into the future, and dream dreams and see visions of a grand national fulfilment.
If the British race ever beheld a vision of this sort, it had been realised already. We should have been wise had we remembered that this accomplished fact, these staked-out claims of the British Empire, appeared to fall like a shadow across visions seen by other eyes, blotting out some of the fairest hopes, and spoiling the noble proportions of the patriot's dream.
There is a region where words stumble after truth, like children chasing a rainbow across a meadow to find the pot of fairy gold. Multitudinous volumes stuffed with the cant of pacifism and militarism will never explain to us the nature of peace and war. But a few bars of music may sometimes make clear things which all the moralists, and divines, and philosophers—even the poets themselves for the most part, though they come nearer to it at times than the rest—have struggled vainly to show us in their true proportions. The songs of a nation, its national anthems—if they be truly national and not merely some commissioned exercise—are better interpreters than state papers. A man will learn more of the causes of wars, perhaps even of the rights and wrongs of them, by listening to the burst and fall of the French hymn, the ebb and surge of the Russian, in Tschaikovsky's famous overture, than he ever will from books or speeches, argument or oratory.