Ordeal by Battle

by Frederick Scott Oliver

The British Empire, like the Roman, built itself slowly. It was the way of both nations to deal with needs as needs occurred, and not before. Neither of them charted out their projects in advance, thereafter working to them, like Lenôtre, when he laid out the gardens of Versailles. On the contrary, a strip was added here, a kingdom there, as time went on, but not in accordance with any plan or system. In certain cases, no doubt, the reason for annexation was a simple desire for possession. But much more often the motive was apprehension of one kind or another. Empire-builders have usually achieved empire as an accident attending their search after security—security against the ambition of a neighbour, against lawless hordes which threaten the frontier, against the fires of revolution and disorder spreading from adjacent territories. Britain, like Rome before her, built up her empire piecemeal; for the most part reluctantly; always reckoning up and dreading the cost, labour, and burden of it; hating the responsibility of expansion, and shouldering it only when there seemed to be no other course open to her in honour or safety. Symmetry did not appeal to either of these nations any more than vastness. Their realms spread out and extended, as chance and circumstances willed they should, like pools of water in the fields when floods are out.

We cannot but distrust the soundness of recent German policy, with its grandiose visions of universal empire, if we consider it in the light of other things which happened when the world was somewhat younger, though possibly no less wise. The great imaginative conquerors, though the fame of their deeds still rings down the ages, do not make so brave a show, when we begin to examine into the permanency of their achievements. The imperial projects of Alexander, of the Habsburgs, the Grand Monarque, and Napoleon—each of whom drew out a vast pattern and worked to it—are not among those things which can be said with any justice to have endured. None of them were ever fully achieved; while some were broken in pieces, even during the lifetimes of their architects.

To treat the whole world as if it were a huge garden, for which one small race of men, who have worked busily in a single corner of it, can aspire to make and carry out an all-comprehending plan, is in reality a proof of littleness and not largeness of mind. Such vaulting ambitions are the symptoms of a dangerous disease, to be noted and distrusted. And none ever noted these tendencies more carefully or distrusted them more heartily than the two greatest statesmen whom Prussia has produced. Frederick the Great rode his own Pegasus-vision on curb and martingale. The Great Bismarck reined back the Pegasus-vision of his fellow-countrymen on to its haunches with an even sterner hand. "One cannot," so he wrote in later years—"one cannot see the cards of Providence so closely as to anticipate historical development according to one's own calculation."

MASTERY OF THE WORLD

Those very qualities of vastness and symmetry which appear to have such fatal attraction for the pedantocracy repel the practical statesman; and woe to the nation which follows after the former class rather than the latter, when the ways of the two part company! To the foreign observer it seems as if Germany, for a good many years past, has been making this mistake. Perhaps it is her destiny so to do. Possibly the reigns of Frederick and Bismarck were only interludes. For Germany followed the pedantocracy during a century or more, while it preached political inaction and contentment with a shorn and parcelled Fatherland. She was following it still, when Bismarck turned constitutionalism out of doors and went his own stern way to union. And now once again she seems to be marching in a fatal procession after the same Pied Pipers, who this time are engaged, with a surpassing eloquence and fervour, in preaching discontent with the narrow limits of a united empire, and in exhorting their fellow-countrymen to proceed to the Mastery of the World.

Among an imaginative race like the Germans, those who wield the weapons of rhetoric and fancy are only too likely to get the better of those surer guides, who know from hard experience that the world is a diverse and incalculable place, where no man, and no acre of land, are precisely the same as their next-door neighbours, where history never repeats itself, and refuses always—out of malice or disdain—to travel along the way which ingenious Titans have charted for it. But it is not every generation which succeeds in producing a Frederick the Great or a Bismarck, to tame the dreamers and use them as beasts of draught and burden.

The complete mosaic of the German vision is an empire incomparably greater in extent, in riches, and in population, than any which has yet existed since the world first began to keep its records. Visionaries are always in a hurry. This stupendous rearrangement of the Earth's surface is confidently anticipated to occur within the first half of the present century. It is to be accomplished by a race distinguished for its courage, industry, and devotion,—let us admit so much without grudging. But in numbers—even if we count the Teutons of the Habsburg Empire along with those of the Hohenzollern—it amounts upon the highest computation to less than eighty millions. This is the grain of mustard-seed which is confidently believed to have in it 'the property to get up and spread,' until within little more than a generation, it will dominate and control more than seven hundred millions of human souls.

Nor to German eyes, which dwell lovingly, and apparently without misgiving, upon this appalling prospect of symmetry and vastness, are these the sum total of its attractions. The achievement of their vision would bring peace to mankind. For there would then be but two empires remaining, which need give the overlords of the world the smallest concern. Of these Russia, in their opinion, needs a century at least in which to emerge out of primitive barbarism and become a serious danger; while in less than a century, the United States must inevitably crumble to nonentity, through the worship of false gods and the corruption of a decadent democracy. Neither of these two empires could ever hope to challenge the German Mastery of the World.

In South America as in North, there is already a German garrison, possessing great wealth and influence. And in the South, at any rate, it may well become, very speedily, an imperative obligation on the Fatherland to secure, for its exiled children, more settled conditions under which to extend the advantages of German commerce and Kultur. President Monroe has already been dead a hundred years or more. According to the calculations of the pedantocracy, his famous doctrine will need some stronger backing than the moral disapprobation of a hundred millions of materially-minded and unwarlike people, in order to withstand the pressure of German diplomacy, if it should summon war-ships and transports to its aid.

UNIVERSAL PEACE