“When the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled
In the Parliament of mankind, the Federation of the World.”
As if in mockery of these hopes came that terrific relapse of civilization between 1855 and 1870. Then came a pause, and hope might have revived had not the war epoch left behind it a strange and appalling condition.
No one so unfortunate as to live between the Bosphorus and the English Channel can view without dread the course Continental Europe has taken since 1870. The armies have increased until France and Germany alone have over six millions of soldiers. The Great Powers have now three armed men for every two of ten years ago. “Our armaments,” says Premier Crispi, “are ruining Europe for the benefit of America.” In a paper picked up in a Venetian café I read these lines:—
“Throughout Europe we now hear of nothing but smokeless powder and small bore rifles, heavy ironclads and swift cruisers, torpedo boats and dynamite guns. Europe seems hastening on to that time foretold by General Grant when, worn out by a fatal and ruinous policy, she will bow to the supremacy of peace-loving America, and learn anew from her the lessons of true civilization.”
Can we wonder that the European despairs? He finds himself aboard a train that seems speeding to sure destruction. Neither pope, nor churches, nor peace societies, nor alliances nor votes, can check its course. Nothing, it seems, can save Europe from the fatal plunge into the abyss of war. A shot on the Alsatian frontier, a plot hatched in a Servian barrack-room, or a riot in the Armenian quarter of Constantinople, may kindle a strife that may last, Von Moltke tells us, for thirty years.
It is true that many alarms have proved false, but then it is the steady strain that tells on the mood. It is pathetic to see on the continent, how men fear to face the future. Public speakers dwell upon the glories of former times. The churches seek to revive the spirit of the Middle Ages. In schools there is immense interest in history, archæology, and the classics. The age yearns to lose itself in the past, and delights in genre pictures of the naive olden time, or of life in remote valleys untouched by the breath of progress. No one has heart to probe the next decade, to ask, “Where shall we be in ten years,—in fifty years?” The outlook is bounded by the next Sunday in the park or the theatre. The people throw themselves into the pleasures of the moment with the desperation of doomed men who hear the ring of the hammer on the scaffold. Ibsen, applying an old sailor’s superstition to the European ship of state, tells how one night he stood on the deck and looked down on the throng of passengers, each the victim of some form of brooding melancholy or dark presentiment, and as he looked he seemed to hear a voice crying, “There’s a corpse on board!”
With the growth of armies has come a gloomier view of life. The vision of the nations “lapped in universal law” has vanished, and the new phrase, “struggle for existence,” seems to sum up human history. War has been raised to the dignity of a means of progress and killing has been consecrated by biology. Not long ago three noted men, Count Von Moltke, General Wolseley, and Ex-Minister Phelps, declared it vain to hope for a time when wars should vanish from the earth. In Germany the youth are filled with the brutal cynicism of Prince Bismarck. “Blood and iron does it,” said a Berlin divinity student to me. “You can no more stop war than you can stop the thunderbolt when two clouds meet charged with opposite electricities.” “No,” said another, “Europe has too many people, too much pressure on the boundaries. There must be a war now and then to thin them out.”
With loss of faith in moral progress men have lost faith in political progress. The ideals of ‘48 are passé. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are exploded bubbles. The imperialism of Bismarck, the foe of popular government and champion of divine right, rules the hour. To the fighting type of society the politics of industrial democracy seem absurd. You cannot set up the hustings in an armed camp of twenty-eight millions. Kings and nobles, rank and privilege, police, spies, and censors—all those hoary abuses that roused the men of ‘48,—are deemed necessary to a strong military state. They are hallowed by the new phrase of political fatalism “historical continuity.”
This drift of thought cannot but lead to a despairing view. Civilization seems to have lost itself in a cul-de-sac. Progress has ended in an aimless discontent. The schools have produced, according to Bismarck, ten times as many overeducated young men as there are places to fill. The thirst for culture has produced a great, hungry, intellectual proletariat. The forces of darkness are still strong, and it seems sometimes as if the Middle Ages will swallow up everything won by modern struggles. The Liberal wonders at moments if he be not really fighting against destiny. Often in his Culturkampf with Ultramontanism has he proved the truth of Gambetta’s saying, “Le clericalism, voila l’ennemi!”