Nor has the spirit of Eton and Harrow abated. Neither the Peninsular nor the Marlborough wars, conspicuous by their examples of daring, exhibit anything that within a brief space quite equals the self-immolating valour displayed in the disastrous openings of this war by those youths, the gens Fabia of modern days, prodigal of their blood, rushing into the Mauser hailstorm, as if in jest each man had sworn to make the sterile veldt blossom like the rose, fertilizing it with the rich drops of his heart, since the rain is powerless!
§ 4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM
Nor is this heroism, and the devotion which inspires it, shut within the tented field or confined to the battle-line. The eyes of the race are upon that drama, and the heart of the race beats within the breasts of the actors. There is something Roman in the nation's unmoved purpose, the concentration of its whole force upon one fixed mark, disregarding the judgment of men, realizing, however bitter the wisdom, that the Empire which the sword and the death-defiant valour of the past have upraised can be maintained only by the sword and a valour not less death-defiant, a self-renunciation not less heroic. Such manifestations of heroism and of a zealous ardour, unexampled in its extent and its intensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, some earnest of that which is to come, some pledge to the new century rising like a planet tremulous on the horizon's verge.
But a widespread error still confounds this imperial patriotism with Cosmopolitanism, this resolution of a great people with Jingoism. Now what is Cosmopolitanism? It is an attitude of mind purely negative; it is a characteristic of protected nationalities, and of decayed races. It passes easily into political indifference, political apathy. It is the negation of patriotism; but it offers no constructive ideal in its stead. Imperialism is active, is constructive.[[6]] It is the passion of Marathon and Trafalgar, it is the patriotism of a de Montfort or a Grenville, at once intensified and heightened by the aspirations of humanity, by the ideals of a Shelley, a Wilberforce, or a Canning. But between mere war-fever, Jingoism, and such free, unfettered enthusiasm, a nation's unaltering loyalty in defeat or in triumph to an ideal born of its past, and its joy in the actions in which this ideal is realized, the gulf is wide. Napoleon knew this. Nothing in history is more illuminating than the bitter remark with which he turned away from the sight of the enthusiasm with which Vienna welcomed its defeated sovereign, Francis II. All his victories could not purchase him that!
Would the critics of "music-hall madness" prefer to see a city stand sullen, silent, indifferent, cursing in the bitterness of its heart the government, the army, the empire? Or would they have it like the Roman mob of the first Caesars, cluster in crowds, careless of empire, battles, or the glory of Rome's name, shouting for a loaf of bread and a circus ticket? Between the cries, the laughter, the tears of a mob and the speech or the silence of a statesman there is a great space; but it were rash to assume that the dissonant clamour of the crowds is but an ignorant or a transient frenzy. In religion itself have we not similar variety of expression? Those faces gathered under the trees or in a public thoroughfare—the expression of emotion there is not that which we witness, say, in Santa Croce, at prime, when the first light falls through the windows on Giotto's frescoes, Herod and Francis, St. Louis and the Soldan, and on the few, the still worshippers—but dare we assert that this alone is sincere, the other unfelt because loud?
§ 5. MILITARISM
And yet beneath this joy, the tumultuous joy of this hour of respite from a hope that in the end became harder to endure than despair, there is perhaps not a single heart in this Empire which does not at moments start as at some menacing, some sinister sound, a foreboding of evil which it endeavours to shake off but cannot, for it returns, louder and more insistent, tyrannously demanding the attention of the most reluctant. Once more on this old earth of ours is witnessed the spectacle of a vast people stirred by one ideal impulse, prepared for all sacrifices for that ideal, prepared to face war, and the outcry of a misunderstanding or envious antagonism. Whither is this impulse to be directed? What minister or parliament is to dare the responsibility of turning this movement, this great and spontaneous movement, to this people's salvation, to this Empire's high purposes? How shall its bounds be made secure against encroachment, its own shores from coalesced foes?
Let me approach this matter from the standpoint of history, the sole standpoint from which I have the right—to use a current phrase—to speak as an expert. First of all let me say, that an axiom or maxim which appears to guide the utterances if not the actions of statesmen, the maxim that the British people will under no circumstances tolerate any form of compulsory service for war, is unjustified by history. It has no foundation in history at all. Nothing in the past justifies the ascription of such a limit to the devotion of this people. Of an ancient lineage, but young in empire, proud, loving freedom, not disdainful of glory, perfectly fearless—who shall assign bounds to its devotion or determine the limits of its endurance? I go further, I affirm that the records of the past, the heroic sacrifices which England made in the sixteenth, in the seventeenth century, and in later times, justify the contrary assumption, justify the assumption that at this crisis—this grave and momentous crisis, a crisis such as I think no council of men has had to face for many centuries, perhaps not since the embassy of the Goths to the Emperor Valens—the ministry or cabinet which but dares, dares to trust this people's resolution, will find that this enthusiasm is not that of men overwrought with war-fever, but the deep-seated purpose of a people strong to defend the heritage of its fathers, and not to swerve from the path which fate itself has marked out for it amongst the empires of the earth. This, I maintain, is the verdict of history upon the matter.
There is a second prominent argument against compulsory service, an argument drawn by analogy from the circumstances of other nations. Men point to Rennes, to the petty tyrannies of military upstarts over civilians in Germany, and cry, "Behold what awaits you from conscription!" Such arguments have precisely the same value as the arguments against Parliamentary Reform fifty years ago, based on the terror of Jacobinism. We might as well condemn all free institutions because of Tammany Hall, as condemn compulsory service because of its abuses in other countries. And an appeal to the Pretorians of Rome or to the Janizzaries of the Ottoman empire would be as relevant as an appeal for warning to the major-generals of Oliver Cromwell. Nor is there any fixed and necessary hostility between militarism and art, between militarism and culture, as the Athens of Plato and of Sophocles, a military State, attests.
All institutions are transfigured by the ideal which calls them into being. And this ideal of Imperial Britain—to bring to the peoples of the earth beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher justice—the world has known none fairer, none more exalted, since that for which Godfrey and Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St. Louis died. There is nothing in our annals which warrants evil presage from the spread of militarism, nothing which precludes the hope, the just confidence that our very blood and the ineffaceable character of our race will save us from any mischief that militarism may have brought to others, and that in the future another chivalry may arise which shall be to other armies and other systems what the Imperial Parliament is to the parliaments of the world—a paragon and an example.