THE CENTRAL ASIAN QUESTION
"The Germans have reached their day, the English their mid-day, the French their afternoon, the Italians their evening, the Spanish their night; but the Slavs stand on the threshold of the morning."--MADAME NOVIKOFF ("O.K.")--The Friends and Foes of Russia.
The years 1879-85 which witnessed the conclusion of the various questions opened up by the Treaty of Berlin and the formation of the Triple Alliance mark the end of a momentous period in European history. The quarter of a century which followed the Franco-Austrian War of 1859 in Northern Italy will always stand out as one of the most momentous epochs in State-building that the world has ever seen. Italy, Denmark, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Turkey, assumed their present form. The Christians of the Balkan Peninsula made greater strides towards liberty than they had taken in the previous century. Finally, the new diplomatic grouping of the Powers helped to endow these changes with a permanence which was altogether wanting to the fitful efforts of the period 1815-59. That earlier period was one of feverish impulse and picturesque failure; the two later decades were characterised by stern organisation and prosaic success.
It generally happens to nations as to individuals that a period devoted to recovery from internal disorders is followed by a time of great productive and expansive power. The introspective epoch gives place to one of practical achievement. Faust gives up his barren speculations and feels his way from thought to action. From "In the beginning was the Word" he wins his way onward through "the Thought" and "the Might," until he rewrites the dictum "In the beginning was the Deed." That is the change which came over Germany and Europe in the years 1850-80. The age of the theorisers of the Vor-Parlament at Frankfurt gave place to the age of Bismarck. The ideals of Mazzini paled in the garish noonday of the monarchical triumph at Rome.
Alas! too, the age of great achievement, that of the years 1859-85, makes way for a period characterised by satiety, torpor, and an indefinable malaise. Europe rests from the generous struggles of the past, and settles down uneasily into a time of veiled hostility and armed peace. Having framed their State systems and covering alliances, the nations no longer give heed to constitutions, rights of man, or duties of man; they plunge into commercialism, and search for new markets. Their attitude now is that of Ancient Pistol when he exclaims
"The world's mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open."
In Europe itself there is little to chronicle in the years 1885-1900, which are singularly dull in regard to political achievement. No popular movement (not even those of the distressed Cretans and Armenians) has aroused enough sympathy to bring it to the goal. The reason for this fact seems to be that the human race, like the individual, is subject to certain alternating moods which may be termed the enthusiastic and the practical; and that, during the latter phase, the material needs of life are so far exalted at the expense of the higher impulses that small struggling communities receive not a tithe of the sympathy which they would have aroused in more generous times.
The fact need not beget despair. On the contrary, it should inspire the belief that, when the fit passes away, the healthier, nobler mood will once more come; and then the world will pulsate with new life, making wholesome use of the wealth previously stored up but not assimilated. It is significant that Gervinus, writing in 1853, spoke of that epoch as showing signs of disenchantment and exhaustion in the political sphere. In reality he was but six years removed from the beginning of an age of constructive activity the like of which has never been seen.
Further, we may point out that the ebb in the tide of human affairs which set in about the year 1885 was due to specific causes operating with varied force on different peoples. First in point of time, at the close of the year 1879, came the decision of Bismarck and of the German Reichstag to abandon the cause of Free Trade in favour of a narrow commercial nationalism. Next came the murder of the Czar Alexander II. (March 1881), and the grinding down of the reformers and of all alien elements by his stern successor. Thus, the national impulse, which had helped on that of democracy in the previous generation, now lent its strength to the cause of economic, religious, and political reaction in the two greatest of European States.
In other lands that vital force frittered itself away in the frothy rhetoric of Déroulède and the futile prancings of Boulanger, in the gibberings of Italia Irredenta, or in the noisy obstruction of Czechs and Parnellites in the Parliaments of Vienna and London. Everything proclaimed that the national principle had spent its force and could now merely turn and wobble until it came to rest.