most powerful weapon against her, and as our peace policy was determined by our war policy, we preserved this relic of barbarism. The inevitable consequence of our diplomacy was to give German Jingoism an irresistible argument for the increase of the German Fleet. The increase in the German Fleet was described in threatening language by Mr. Churchill, and was matched by an increase in our own. The burden of armaments increased, and unremunerative expenditure drained the resources which should have been available for the costs of social reform. Such was the foreign policy of Great Britain until the outbreak of the Balkan War at the end of 1912. There may have been information in the possession of the Foreign Office which justified this persistent hostility towards Germany. That country may have been animated by some desire to destroy our commerce, or to appropriate our Colonies. So far as we are allowed by our governors to learn any facts at all, there is no more than a shadow of a foundation for such an assumption. Up to the end of 1912 we were bound straight for a conflict, of the causes of which not one Englishman in ten thousand knew anything definite, and not one in a thousand knew anything at all. All the Gladstonian principles, rightly or wrongly, had been forsaken. We made no serious attempt to establish the comity of nations, we carefully distinguished between Germany and the rest of the world, and we entangled ourselves in engagements with France and Russia, which brought us no profit, and served only to increase the suspicions of the German people. This violation of Liberal principle, which was also a violation of the practice of the last Tory Foreign Secretary, may have been inevitable. But its justification is not contained in anything that has yet been said or written on behalf of Sir Edward Grey, and those of us who held by the old rules during the Boer War can get only a melancholy satisfaction out of a comparison of the failure of this Imperialist Liberal in foreign affairs with the successes of his Pro-Boer associates in South Africa, in India, and in Social Reform.[[374]]
The departure from principle which has most disgusted the supporters of the Government is the alliance with Russia. This, like so many of our modern associations, is cemented by finance, and the union of the two Governments has been followed by a steady flow of British capital into Russian municipal and industrial securities. It is suggested that the object of both the diplomatic and the financial support is the same, to restore the influence of Russia, seriously impaired by her humiliation at the hands of Japan and by her violent internal dissensions, in the councils of Europe. In other words, we have strengthened the Russian Government as part of our scheme for keeping Germany in her place. This is one of those alliances which would have been repugnant to a Liberal of the old school. Russian Government and British Government are essentially different. The temper of national independence, which is welcomed by English Liberals everywhere, and even by English Tories outside the boundaries of the Empire, is to the governing class of Russia what a heap of dirt is to a sanitary inspector. It is a perpetual menace to what it is their business to protect, and they devote to the extinction of some of the noblest of human aspirations the untiring zeal with which better men apply themselves to the destruction of evil. No Government in the world has so persistently violated the rules of morality in its dealings with its own subjects or with the foreign peoples who lie without its boundaries. In five years of the
twentieth century it executed 3,750 persons, its courts of law sentenced 31,885 political offenders to imprisonment or exile, and its administrative orders transported 28,173 others without trial. More than 30,000 of its Jewish subjects have been massacred in organized riots at which it has connived. In these affairs it has had to deal with all sorts of persons. But it has exercised little discrimination in its treatment, and if some of its victims have been the vilest of criminals, it has also caused thousands of honourable men and women to be shot or bludgeoned, to be exiled, or to rot in crowded prisons. It has even employed agents to promote the assassination of its own associates, that it might have the better excuse for taking violent measures to suppress peaceful agitation. It has now crowned its career of domestic misgovernment by beginning to destroy the liberties of the Finnish people, whose social policy has been at once the admiration of the civilized world, and a standing rebuke to the comparative brutality of Russia. It is not the business of Great Britain to dictate to established Governments, or to go to war with them for the better regulation of their internal affairs. Nor is it the business of a British Government to refuse to make agreements with any foreign Government for the management of matters in which they are jointly concerned. But it is the duty of a British Government not to corrupt its own people by involving itself intimately with a Government whose methods are not only different but are utterly alien from its own. An alliance with France is bad only in so far as it is turned into a combination against Germany. An alliance with Russia is in itself unnatural and horrible.
The Persian Agreement of 1907 appears to have been twisted into such an alliance. Originally that Agreement, like the Moroccan Agreement with France, provided merely for the settlement of outstanding disputes in Asia, and as such it was welcomed by all Liberals. It has been converted into an instrument for the destruction of the independence of Persia, which both Powers had solemnly declared it was their intention to maintain, and more recently into a means of enabling Russia
to blackmail the struggling Chinese Republic. The successive steps of Russian aggression cannot be described here. In effect, the Northern Sphere, marked out by the Agreement solely for the purposes of financial and commercial development, has been annexed politically to Russia, and occupation by her troops has been followed by outrages of almost indescribable brutality. The attempt of the Persian Government to restore the finances of the country, with the aid of the American Mr. Morgan Shuster, was frustrated by Russian intervention, and for want of money the protection of trade routes, life, and private property has ceased in many districts. In each successive act of Russian insolence, except the foul barbarities at Tabriz, Sir Edward Grey has acquiesced, and he actively assisted in the removal of Mr. Shuster. He has apparently acted Liberally in only two matters, in his protest against the outrages which followed the Russian occupation, and in his refusal to participate in the guilt of a formal partition. But the national independence of Persia to which the recent revolution seemed to give a new justification, has been practically destroyed, and the supposed limitations on British freedom of action by war of protest are construed out of that Agreement, which professed to be based upon its preservation. The strangling of Persia has not been such a plain affair of right and wrong as some critics of Sir Edward Grey suggest. Generations of misgovernment had corrupted the native system. Mr. Shuster gave provocation by his straightforward independence where a more supple diplomatist might have succeeded in managing even Russia. But he was the only hope of Persia, and if he could have been supported as Afghanistan has been supported, even Russia might have been forced to hold her hand.[[375]] Here again we are brought up against our policy of isolating Germany. At all costs Russia was to be kept out of the orbit of German diplomacy. We acquiesced in Russian appropriations in Persia for the same reason that we supported French exploitations of Morocco. We were bound to make it to the
interest of our allies to prefer association with us to association with our enemy. Where we might have defended a people against Russia on moral grounds, we sacrificed them for our diplomatic interests. Where we might have promoted international agreements for the disposition of uncivilized races, we were compelled to resist them in the interest of the ally, with whom we had just arranged a private deal. All came back to our settled policy of acting in opposition to Germany. There may be excuses, of which we have as yet no knowledge. But it is unquestionable that the present Government had lost the habit of expressing Liberalism in foreign policy. Liberals had certainly reason to regret it. Posterity alone will know whether or not they had also reason to be ashamed.
More recent events have lightened the general gloom. The Persian disgrace remains, and the Russian penetration of Mongolia proceeds steadily. But just as the rising tide of French Jingoism seems to have found a President and a Premier who will float easily upon its surface, the Anglo-German feud has begun to ebb. Apparently by no effort of our own, but simply through the overwhelming pressure of our common interest in peace, the Balkan crisis has united Great Britain, France, and Germany in preventing war between Austria and Russia. We have not lacked suggestions that we should make war on Germany because Russia wished to prevent Austria from attacking Servia. This would have been the climax of anti-Liberalism; to engage in war because Servia wished to impose her will upon that of the Albanians, and because the allies with whom we were entangled decided to support her.[[376]] From this disgrace, and from the destruction of European civilization which such a war would have involved, we have been preserved. The reality of common interests and common aims has broken the fiction of the Balance of Power into pieces, and Sir Edward Grey, whose career had been watched with dismay by the most Liberal of his followers, now finds
himself in universal favour as he expresses once more the pure theory of Liberalism. The Concert of Europe has been revived, with Great Britain at the head of it, and if the Foreign Secretary can make out of our temporary association with Germany something in the nature of a permanent friendship he will render a greater service to his country than any of his predecessors. The gross brutality of Denshawi in 1906 and the unexplained provocation of Germany in 1911 will not be obliterated by a peaceful and honourable issue out of our afflictions, and the Russian difficulty is only now beginning. It is possible that there can be no such thing as a permanently Liberal Foreign Policy, that the systematic application of Liberal principles to foreign affairs can never be undertaken with any chance of success. No Liberal as yet will be content with that desperate assumption, and the recent improvement in the international situation rather confirms than weakens his belief that abroad, as at home, politics will ultimately rest upon a basis of ethics. His chief hope is not in the chancelleries, but in the large and increasing body of international associations of private persons. Unions for the purpose of promoting peace, and for the discussion of the unnational interests of women and of working men, and periodical meetings of representatives of all nations to determine the principles of commercial law, and even the rules of war, are steadily uniting the nations by "organic filaments." For what the present Government has apparently done in the way of preventing rather than encouraging union, Liberals are ready enough to find excuses. But until they are presented with more facts than have yet been published by the Government itself, they will continue to contemplate its foreign record with more regret than satisfaction.