THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT }-& /vU-r^> * DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY BY THE SAME AUTHOR BRITAIN AND THE BRITISH SEAS. Second Edition. The Clarendon Press. Net 75. 6d. THE TEACHING OF GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY. Second Edition. Messrs. George Philip & Son, Ltd. Net 23. DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY A STUDY IN THE POLITICS OF RECONSTRUCTION BY H. J. MACKINDER, M.P. LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD 1919 Printed in Great Britain College Library D 523 PREFACE THIS book, whatever its value, is the out- come of more than the merely feverous thought of War time ; the ideas upon which it is based were published in outline a good dozen years ago. In 1904, in a paper on ' The Geographical Pivot of History,' read before the Royal Geographical Society, I sketched the World-Island and the Heart- land ; and in 1905 I wrote in the National Review on the subject of ' Man-power as a Measure of National and Imperial Strength,' an article which I believe first gave vogue to the term Man-power. In that term is implicit not only the idea of fighting strength but also that of productivity, rather than wealth, as the focus of economic reasoning. If I now venture to write on these themes at some- what greater length, it is because I feel that the War has established, and not shaken, my former points of view. H. J. M. 1st February 1919. 105299O CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE L PERSPECTIVE . . . . . . . 1 IL SOCIAL MOMENTUM . . . . . . 6 m. THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW ... 38 IV. THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW . . 93 V. THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES . '. . . 147 VL THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS . . .191 VII. THE FREEDOM OF MEN . .... .236 VIII. POSTSCRIPT ... . . . . 263 APPENDICES A. NOTE ON AN INCIDENT AT THE QT7AI D'ORSAY, 26TH JANUARY 1919. . . . . . 268 B. ANALYSIS, WITH PAGE REFERENCES . . . 269 C. LIST OV DIAGRAMS . . ... . . . 272 PERSPECTIVE OUR memories are still full of the vivid detail of an all-absorbing warfare ; there is, as it were, a screen between us and the things which happened earlier even in our own lives. But the time has at last come to take larger views, and we must begin to think of our long War as of a single great event, a cataract in the stream of history. The last four years have been momentous, because they have been the outcome of one century and the prelude to another. Tension be- tween the nations had slowly accumulated, and, hi the language of diplomacy, there has now been a detente. The temptation of the moment is to believe that unceasing peace will ensue merely because tired men are deter- mined that there shall be no more war. But international tension will accumulate again, though slowly at first ; there was a genera- tion of peace after Waterloo. Who among the diplomats round the Congress table at 2 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Vienna in 1814 foresaw that Prussia would become a menace to the world ? Is it pos- sible for us so to grade the stream bed of future history as that there shall be no more cataracts ? That, and no smaller, is the task before us if we would have posterity think less meanly of our wisdom than we think of that of the diplomats of Vienna. The great wars of history we have had a world- war about every hundred years for the last four centuries are the outcome, direct or indirect, of the unequal growth of nations, and that unequal growth is not wholly due to the greater genius and energy of some nations as compared with others ; in large measure it is the result of the uneven distri- bution of fertility and strategical opportunity upon the face of our Globe. In other words, there is in nature no such thing as equality of opportunity for the nations. Unless I wholly misread the facts of geography, I would go further, and say that the grouping of lands and seas, and of fertility and natural pathways, is such as to lend itself to the growth of empires, and in the e"nd of a single World Empire. If we are to realise our ideal of a League of Nations which shall prevent war in the future, we must recognise these geographical realities and take steps to PERSPECTIVE 3 counter their influence. Last century, under the spell of the Darwinian theory, men came to think that those forms of organisation should survive which adapted themselves best to their natural environment. To-day we realise, as we emerge from our fiery trial, that human victory consists in our rising superior to such mere fatalism. Civilisation is based on the organisation of society so that we may render service to one another, and the higher the civilisation the more minute tends to be the division of labour and the more complex the organisa- tion. A great and advanced society has, in consequence, a powerful momentum ; with- out destroying the society itself you cannot suddenly check or divert its course. Thus it happens that years beforehand detached observers are able to predict a coming clash of societies which are following convergent paths in their development. The historian commonly prefaces his narrative of war with an account of the blindness of men who re- fused to see the writing on the wall, but the fact is, that, like every other going concern, a national society can be shaped to a desired career while it is young, but when it is old its character is fixed and it is incapable of any great change in its mode of existence. To-day 4 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY all the nations of the world are about to start afresh ; is it within the reach of human fore- thought so to set their courses as that, not- withstanding geographical temptation, they shall not clash in the days of our grand- children ? In our anxiety to repudiate the ideas his- torically associated with the Balance of Power, is there not perhaps some danger that we should allow merely juridical conceptions to rule our thoughts in regard to the League of Nations ? It is our ideal that justice should be done between nations, whether they be great or small, precisely as it is our ideal that there should be justice between men, whatever the difference of their positions in society. To maintain justice as between individual men the power of the State is invoked, and we now recognise, after the failure of international law to avert the Great War, that there must be some power or, as the lawyers say, some sanction for the main- tenance of justice as between nation and nation. But the power which is necessary for the rule of law among citizens passes easily into tyranny. Can we establish such a world power as shall suffice to keep the law between great and small States, and yet shall not grow into a world tyranny ? There PERSPECTIVE are two roads to such a tyranny, the one the conquest of all other nations by one nation, the other the perversion of the very international power itself which may be set up to coerce the lawless nation. In our great replanning of human society we must recognise that the skill and opportunity of the robber are prior facts to the Law of Robbery. In other words, we must envisage our vast problem as business men dealing with realities of growth and opportunity, and not merely as lawyers defining rights and remedies. My endeavour, in the following pages, will be to measure the relative significance of the great features of our Globe as tested by the events of history, including the history of the last four years, and then to consider how we may best adjust our ideals of freedom to these lasting realities of our Earthly Home. But first we must recognise certain tendencies of human nature as exhibited in all forms political organisation. II SOCIAL MOMENTUM ' To him that hath shall be given.' IN the year 1789 the lucid French People, in its brain-town of Paris, saw visions, generous visions Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. But presently French Idealism lost its hold on Reality, and drifted into the grip of Fate, in the person of Napoleon. With his military efficiency Napoleon restored order, but in doing so organised a French Power the very law of whose being was a denial of Liberty. The story of the great French Revolution and Empire has influenced all subsequent political thought ; it has seemed a tragedy in the old Greek sense of a disaster predestined in the very character of Revolutionary Idealism. When, therefore, in 1848, the peoples of Europe were again in a vision-seeing mood, their idealism was of a more complex nature. The principle of Nationality was added to that of Liberty, in the hope that liberty might be secured against the overreaching SOCIAL MOMENTUM 7 organiser by the independent spirit of nations. Unfortunately, in that year of revolutions, the good ship Idealism again dragged her anchor, and by and by was swept away by Fate, in the person of Bismarck. With his Prussian efficiency Bismarck perverted the new ideal of German Nationality, just as Napoleon had perverted the simpler French ideals of Liberty and Equality. The tragedy of National Ideal- ism, which we have just seen consummated, was not, however, predestined in the disorder of Liberty, but in the materialism, commonly known as Kultur, of the organiser. The French tragedy was the simple tragedy of the breakdown of Idealism ; but the German tragedy has, in truth, been the tragedy of the substituted Realism. In 1917 the Democratic Nations of the whole Earth thought they had seen a great harbour light when the Russian Czardom fell and the American Republic came into the War. For the time being, at any rate, the Russian Revolution has gone the common revolutionary way, but we still put our hope in Universal Democracy. To the eighteenth- century ideal of Liberty, and the nineteenth- century ideal of Nationality, we have added our twentieth-century ideal of the League of Nations. If a third tragedy were to ensue, 8 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY it would be on a vast scale, for democratic ideals are to-day the working creed of the greater part of humanity. The Germans, with their Real-Politik, their politics of reality something other than merely prac- tical politics regard that disaster as being sooner or later inevitable. The War Lord and the Prussian military caste may have been fighting for the mere maintenance of their power, but large and intelligent sections of German society have acted under the per- suasion of a political philosophy which was none the less sincerely held because we be- lieved it to be wrong. In this War German anticipations have proved wrong in many re- gards, but that has been because we have made them so by a few wise principles of government, and by strenuous effort, not- withstanding our mistakes in policy. Our hardest test has yet to come. What degree of International Reconstruction is necessary if the world is long to remain a safe place for democracies ? And in regard to the internal structure of those democracies, what conditions must be satisfied if we are to suc- ceed in harnessing to the heavy plough of Social Reconstruction the ideals which have inspired heroism in this War ? There can be no more momentous questions. Shall we SOCIAL MOMENTUM 9 succeed in soberly marrying our new Idealism to Reality ? Idealists are the salt of the Earth ; without them to move us, society would soon stag- nate and civilisation fade. Idealism has, however, been associated with two very differ- ent phases of temper. The older idealisms, such as Buddhism, Stoicism, and Mediaeval Christianity, were based on self-denial ; the Franciscan Friars vowed themselves to Chas- tity, Poverty, and Service. But modern democratic idealism, the idealism of the American and French Revolutions, is based on self-realisation. Its aim is that every human being shall live a full and self-respect- ing life. According to the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal and endowed with the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These two tendencies of idealism have corre- sponded historically with two developments of reality. In older times the power of nature over man was still great. Hard reality put limits to his ambitions. In other words the world as a whole was poor, and resignation was the only general road to happiness. The few could, no doubt, obtain some scope in 10 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY life, but only at the cost of the serfdom of the many. Even the so-called Democracy of Athens and the Platonic Utopia were based on domestic and industrial slavery. But the modern world is rich. In no small measure man now controls the forces of nature, and whole classes, formerly resigned to their fate, have become imbued with the idea that with a fairer division of wealth there should be a nearer approach to equality of opportunity. This modern reality of human control over nature, apart from which democratic ideals would be futile, is not wholly due to the advance of scientific knowledge and inven- tion. The greater control which man now wields is conditional, and not absolute like the control of nature over man by famine and pestilence. Human riches and comparative security are based to-day on the division and co-ordination of labour, and on the constant repair of the complicated plant which has replaced the simple tools of primitive society. In other words, the output of modern wealth is conditional on the maintenance of our social organisation and capital. Society is a ' going concern,' and no small part of our well- being may be compared with the intangible * goodwill ' of a business. The owner of a business depends on the habits of his cus- SOCIAL MOMENTUM 11 tomers no less than on the regular running of the machinery in his factory ; both must be kept in repair, and when in repair they have the value of the ' going concern ' ; but should the business stop, they have merely a break-up value the machinery becomes so much scrap metal, and the goodwill is reduced to the book debts. Society reposes on the fact that man is a creature of habit. By interlocking the various habits of many men, society obtains a struc- ture which may be compared with that of a running machine. Mrs. Bouncer was able to form a simple society for the occupation of a room, because Box slept by night and Cox by day, but her society was dislocated when one of her lodgers took a holiday, and for the nonce changed his habit. Let any one try to realise what would happen to himself if all those on whom he depends the postmen, railwaymen, butchers, bakers, printers, and very many others were suddenly to vary their settled routines ; he will then begin to appreciate in how great a degree the power of modern man over nature is due to the fact that society is a ' going concern,' or, in the language of the engineer, has momentum. Stop the running long enough to throw men's habits out of gear with one another, and 12 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY society would quickly run down to the simple reality of control by nature. Vast numbers would die in consequence. Productive power, in short, is a far more important element of reality in relation to modern civilisation than is accumulated wealth. The total visible wealth of a civil- ised country, notwithstanding the antiquity of some of its treasures, is generally estimated as equal to the output of not more than seven or eight years. The significance of this state- ment does not he in its precise accuracy, but in the rapid growth of its practical meaning for modern men, owing to their dependence on a machinery of production, mechanical and social, which in the past four or five genera- tions has become increasingly delicate and complicated. For every advance in the ap- plication of science there has been a corre- sponding change in social organisation. It was by no mere coincidence that Adam Smith was discussing the division of labour when James Watt was inventing the steam-engine. Nor, in our own time, is it by blind coincidence that beside the invention of the internal com- bustion engine the key to the motor-car, submarine, and aeroplane must be placed an unparalleled extension of the credit system. Lubrication of metal machinery depends on SOCIAL MOMENTUM 13 the habits of living men. The assumption of some scientific enthusiasts that the study of the humane arts has ceased to be important will not bear examination ; the management of men, high and low, is more difficult and more important under the conditions of modern reality than it ever was. We describe the managers of the social machine as Organisers, but under that general term are commonly included two distinct categories. In the first place, we have Ad- ministrators, who are not strictly organisers at all begetters, that is to say, of new organs in an organism. It is the function of the administrator to keep the running social machine in repair and to see to its lubrica- tion. When men die, or for reasons of ill- health or old age retire, it is his duty to fill the vacant places with men suitably trained beforehand. A foreman of works is essentially an administrator. A Judge administers the Law, except in so far as in fact, though not in theory, he may make it. In the work of the administrator, pure and simple, there is no idea of progress. Given a certain organi- sation, efficiency is his ideal perfect smooth- ness of working. His characteristic disease is called ' Red Tape.' A complicated society, well administered, tends in fact to a Chinese 14 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY stagnation by the very strength of its momen- tum. The goodwill of a long-established and well-managed business may often be sold for a large sum in the market. Perhaps the most striking illustration of social momentum is to be seen in the immobility of markets themselves. Every seller wishes to go where buyers are in the habit of congregating in order that he may be sure of a purchaser for his wares. On the other hand, every buyer goes, if he can, to the place where sellers are wont to assemble in order that he may buy cheaply as the result of their competition. The authorities have often tried in vain to decentralise the markets of London. In order to appreciate the other type of organiser, the Creator of social mechanism, let us again consider for a moment the common course of Revolutions. A Voltaire criticises i the running concern known as French Govern- ment ; a Rousseau paints the ideal of a happier society ; the authors of the great Encyclopedic prove that the material bases for such a society exist. Presently the new ideas take possession of some well-meaning enthusiasts inexperienced, however, in the difficult art of changing the habits of average mankind. They seize an opportunity for altering the structure of French society. SOCIAL MOMENTUM 15 Incidentally, but unfortunately, they slow down its running. Stoppage of work, actual breakage of the implements of production and government, removal of practised ad- ministrators, and substitution of misfitting amateurs combine to reduce the rate of pro- duction of the necessaries of life, with the result that prices rise, and confidence and credit fall. The Revolutionary leaders are, no doubt, willing enough to be poor for a time in order to realise their ideals, but the hungry millions rise up around them. To gain time the millions are led to suspect that the shortage is due to some interference of the deposed powers, and the Terror inevitably follows. At last men become fatalist, and, abandoning ideals, seek some organiser who shall restore efficiency. The necessity is rein- forced by the fact that foreign enemies are invading the national territory, and that less production and relaxed discipline have re- duced the defensive power of the State. But the organiser needed for the task of recon- struction is no mere administrator ; he must be able to design and make, and not merely to repair and lubricate social machinery. So Carnot, who ' organises victory,' and Napoleon with his Code Civil, win eternal fame by creative effort. 16 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY The possibility of organisation in the con- structive sense depends on discipline. Run- ning society is constituted by the myriad interlocking of the different habits of many men ; if the running social structure is to be altered, even in some relatively small respect, a great number of men and women must simultaneously change various of their habits in complementary ways. It was impossible to introduce Daylight Saving except by an edict of Government, for any partial adher- ence to the change of hour would have thrown society into confusion. The achievement of Daylight Saving was, therefore, dependent on social discipline, which is thus seen to consist not in the habits of men but in the power of simultaneous and correlated change of those habits. In an ordered State the sense of discipline becomes innate, and the police are but rarely called upon to enforce it. In other words, social discipline, or the altera- tion of habit at will or command, itself becomes a habit. Military discipline, in so far as it consists of single acts at the word of command, is of a simpler order, but the pro- fessional soldier knows well the difference between habitual discipline and even the most intelligent fighting by quick-trained men. In times of disorder the interlocking of SOCIAL MOMENTUM 17 productive habits breaks down step by step, and society as a whole becomes progressively poor, though robbers of one kind or another may for a while enrich themselves. Even more serious, however, is the failure of the r habit of discipline, for that implies the loss of the power of recuperation. Consider to ? what a pass Russia was brought by a year of cumulative revolutions ; her condition was like that terrible state of paralysis when the mind still sees and directs, but the nerves fail to elicit any response from the muscles. A nation does not die when so smitten, but the whole mechanism of its society must be reconstituted, and that quickly, if the men and women who survive its impoverishment are not to forget the habits and lose the aptitudes on which their civilisation depends. History shows no remedy but force upon which to found a fresh nucleus of discipline in such circumstances ; but the organiser who rests upon force tends inevitably to treat the recovery of mere efficiency as his end. Idealism does not flourish under his rule. It was because history speaks plainly in this regard, that so many of the idealists of the last two generations have been internationalist; the military recovery of discipline is commonly achieved either by conquest from another B 18 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY national base or incidentally to a successful national resistance to foreign invasion. The great organiser is the great realist. Not that he lacks imagination very far from that ; but his imagination turns to ' ways and means,' and not to elusive ends. His is the mind of Martha and not of Mary. If he be a Captain, of Industry the counters of his thought are labour and capital ; if he be a General of Armies they are units and supplies. His organising is aimed at intermediate ends money if he be an industrial, and victory if he be a soldier. But money and victory are merely the keys to ulterior ends, and those ulterior ends remain elusive for him through- out. He dies still making money, or, if he be a victorious soldier, weeps like Alexander because there are no more worlds to conquer. His one care is that the business or the army which he has organised shall be efficiently administered ; he is hard on his admini- strators. Above all, he values the habit of discipline ; his machine must answer promptly to the lever. The organiser inevitably comes to look upon men as his tools. His is the inverse of the mind of the idealist, for he would move men in brigades and must therefore have regard to material limitations, whereas the idealist SOCIAL MOMENTUM 19 appeals to the soul in each of us, and souls are winged and can soar. It does not follow that the organiser is careless of the well- being of the society beneath him ; on the contrary, he regards that society as so much man-power to be maintained in efficient condition. This is true whether he be militarist or capitalist, provided that he be far-sighted. In the sphere of politics the organiser views men as existing for the State for the ' Leviathan ' of the Stuart philo- sopher Hobbes. But the Democratic Idealist .A barely tolerates the State as a necessary evilX ^ for it limits freedom. In the established Democracies of the West, the ideals of Freedom have been transmuted into the prejudices of the average citizen, and it is on these ' habits of thought ' that the security of our freedom depends, rather than on the passing ecstasies of idealism. For a thousand years such prejudices took root under the insular protection of Britain ; they are the outcome of continuous experiment, and must be treated at least with respect, unless we are prepared to think of our forefathers as fools. One of these prejudices is that it is unwise to take an Expert as Minister of State. In the present time of War, when freedom even in a democracy must yield to efficiency, 20 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY there are those who would have us say that the experts whom we have for the time being installed in some of the high offices should be succeeded henceforth by experts, and that our prejudice is antiquated. None the less even in war time Britain has returned to a Civilian Minister for War ! The fact is, of course, that the inefficiencies of the normally working British Constitution are merely the obverse of the truth that democracy is in- \ compatible with the organisation necessary for war against autocracies. When the present Chilian Minister first came to England he was entertained by some members of the House of Commons. Referring to the Mother of Parliaments, as seen from the far Pacific, and to the chronic grumbling in regard to Parliamentary government which he found on his arrival in London, he exclaimed, ' You forget that one of the chief functions of Parliaments is to prevent things being done ! ' The thought of the organiser is essentially strategical, whereas that of the true democrat is ethical. The organiser is thinking how to < use men ; but the democrat is thinking of the ^C> rights of men, which rights are so many rocks j> was not merely the great business man, which Jis Emerson's description of Napoleon. No statesman ever adjusted war to policy with a nicer judgment than Bismarck. He fought ^ three short and successful campaigns, and made three treaties of peace, from each of which ensued a harvest of advantage to Prussia. Yet what different treaties they were ! After the War of 1864 against Den- mark, Bismarck took Sleswig and Holstein, with the idea, beyond question, of a Kiel Canal. After the War of 1866 against Austria he refused to take Bohemia, and thereby so offended his King that they were not fully reconciled until after the victories of 1870. There can be no doubt that in this clemency SOCIAL MOMENTUM 23 Bismarck foresaw a time when Prussia might need the alliance of Austria. In 1871, after Sedan and the Siege of Paris, Bismarck yielded to the pressure of the military party, and took Lorraine as well as Alsace. . ^*T The great Chancellor had, in truth, what the Prussian, as a rule, lacks, an insight into the minds of other nations than his own. His methods were psychological by prefer- ence. Once he had achieved German unity under Prussia, he waged no more wars. Yet he accomplished great things for a time he ruled Europe and his method was no mere exploitation of military prestige. At the Berlin Congress of 1878 he secured the occupa- tion of the provinces of Bosnia and Herze- govina for Austria, and thereby deepened' the rivalry of Austria and Russia in the Balkan Peninsula. At the same Berlin Congress he privately incited France to occupy Tunis, and when France presently effected that occupa- tion, Italy, as he foresaw, was sharply wounded. The Dual Alliance with Austria followed in 1879, and the Triple Alliance with Austria and Italy in 1881. It was as though he had sent his sheep-dog round his flock to drive his sheep to him. By subtleties of the same order he antagonised France and Britain, and also Britain and Russia. So, too, did he 24 deal in his domestic policy. In 1886 he ceased from struggling with the Vatican, and brought over the Catholic party to his sup- port, thereby neutralising the socialist tend- ency in the industrial but Catholic Province of the Rhineland, and the particularist tend- ency in the Catholic kingdom of Bavaria in the south. The true parallel is to be drawn not be- tween Napoleon and Bismarck, but between Napoleon and the entire Prussian ruling caste. The end of that caste, which we are now witnessing, is like the end of Napoleon ; the blindly organising man goes to his Moscow, and the blindly organising State to its Arma- geddon. Kultur is the name given to that philosophy and education which imbued a whole race with the * ways and means ' mind. The French are an artistic, and therefore an idealistic people ; Napoleon prostituted their idealism with the glory of his genius. Bis- marck, on the other hand, was the child of materialistic Kultur, but, greater than the average of his race, he could reckon also with spiritual forces. Kultur had its origin not in the victories of Frederick the Great, but in the defeat of Jena. The rule of Frederick in the eighteenth century was a personal rule like that of SOCIAL MOMENTUM 25 Napoleon, whereas the Prussia of the nine- teenth century, behind whatever other pre- tence, was governed by an oligarchy of intellectual ' Experts ' staff officers, bureau- crats, professors. Frederick, sole organiser, raised only administrators, with the result that when he died he left Prussia a mere mechanism, to be broken on the field of Jena. In the very winter of Jena the philosopher Fichte came to lecture in Berlin, while it was still in the occupation of the French. 1 There was no University in the Prussian capital of those days, and the lectures were delivered not to young students, but to the maturest brains of the country in the fever of a great crisis. Fichte taught the philosophy of Pa- triotism at a time when the German Univer- sities were devoted to the abstract worship of knowledge and art. In the next few years, between 1806 and 1813, was established that close connection between the army, the bureaucracy, and the schools, or, in other words, between the needs of government and the aims of education, which constituted the essence and perverse strength of the Prussian system. Universal military service was corre- 1 See The. Evolution of Prussia, by Marriott and Grant Robert- son. Clarendon Press, 1915. 26 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY lated with universal compulsory schooling, inaugurated in Prussia two generations before the English Education Act of 1870 ; the University of Berlin, with a brilliant profes- soriate, was established as sister to the Great General Staff. Thus knowledge in Prussia was no longer pursued mainly for its own sake, but as a means to an end, and that end was the success of a State which had experienced bitter disaster. It was a Camp- State, moreover, in the midst of a plain, without the natural bulwarks of a Spain, a France, or a Britain. The end determines the means, and since the Prussian end was military strength, based of necessity on stark discip- line, the means were inevitably materialistic. Judged from the standpoint of Berlin, it was a wonderful thing to have impressed Kultur, or Strategical mentality, on the educated class of a whole people, but from the standpoint of civilisation at large it was a fatal momentum to have given to a nation fatal, that is to say, in the long run, either to civilisation or that nation. We have had for a byword in these times the German war map. It may be questioned, however, whether most people in Britain and America have fully realised the part played by the map in German education during the SOCIAL MOMENTUM 27 past three generations. Maps are the essen- tial apparatus of Kultur, and every educated German is a geographer in a sense that is true of very few Englishmen or Americans. He has been taught to see in maps not merely the conventional boundaries estab- lished by scraps of paper, but permanent physical opportunities ' ways and means ' in the literal sense of the words. His Real- Politik lives in his mind upon a mental map. The serious teaching of geography in German High Schools and Universities dates from the very beginning of Kultur. It was organised in the generation after Jena, mainly by the labours of four men Alexander von Hum- boldt, Berghaus, Carl Ritter, and Stieler who were attached to the new University of Berlin and to the since famous map-house of Perthes of Gotha. To this day, notwith- standing all that has been done by two or three exceptional map-houses in this country, if you want a good map, conveying accurately and yet graphically the fundamental con- trasts, you must have resort as often as not to one of German origin. The reason is that in Germany there are many cartographers who are scholarly geographers and not merely surveyors or draftsmen. They can exist, because there is a wide public educated to 28 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY appreciate and pay for intelligently drawn maps. 1 In this country we value the moral side of education, and it is perhaps intuitively that we have neglected materialistic geography. Before the War not a few teachers, within my knowledge, objected to geography as a sub- ject of education, on the ground that it tended to promote Imperialism, just as they objected to physical drill because it tended to militarism. We may laugh at such excesses of political caution, as men of former centuries scoffed at the anchorites who secreted them- selves from the world, but the protest in each case was against an excess in the opposite direction. Berlin-Baghdad, Berlin-Herat, Berlin-Pekin not heard as mere words, but visualised on the mental relief map involve for most Anglo- Saxons a new mode of thought, lately and imperfectly introduced among us by the rough maps of the newspapers. But your Prussian, and his father, and his grandfather have de- bated such concepts all their lives, pencil in hand. In arranging the detailed terms of peace, our statesmen will, no doubt, have the 1 In my Address to the Geographical Section of the British Association at Ipswich in 1895 will be found an account of the rise of the German schools of geography. SOCIAL MOMENTUM 29 advice of excellent geographical experts, but the German representatives will have behind them not merely a few experts but a great geographically instructed public, long familiar with every important aspect of the questions which will arise, and quick to give a far- sighted support to their leaders. This may easily become a decisive advantage, especially should our people pass into a magnanimous frame of mind. \[t would be a curious thing if the successes of Talleyrand and Metternich, in the secret diplomacy of 1814, were repeated by the spokesmen of the defeated States of our own time under the conditions imposed upon diplomacy by popular govemmenfTTjJ The map habit of thought is no less preg- nant in the sphere of economics than it is in that of strategy. True that Laissez-faire had little use for it, but the ' most favoured nation ' clause which Germany imposed on defeated France in the Treaty of Frankfurt had quite a different meaning for the strategi- cal German mind to that which was attached 1 It is true that there is a ' horse-sense ' of geography among those of us who have travelled. It is true, also, that we keep atlases in our offices and libraries, to be consulted as we would consult a dictionary for the spelling of a word. But correct spelling does not always imply literary power ! A trained sense of geographical perspective is essential to the mode of thought here in question. 30 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY to it by honest Cobdenites. The German bureaucrat built upon it a whole structure of preferences for German trade. Of what use to Britain under her northern skies was the most favoured nation clause when Germany granted a concession to Italy in the matter of import duties on olive-oil ? Would there not also be railway trucks to be returned to Italy ' which might as well return loaded with German exports ? The whole system of most voluminous and intricate commercial treaties between Germany and her neighbours was ' based on a minute study of commercial routes ^ and of the lie of productive areas. The ^j German official was thinking in the concrete detail of ' living,' while his British counter- part was absorbed in the negative principle . \ of * letting live.' * * * 9 * Kaiser Wilhelm told us that this War was a struggle between two views of the world. * View ' is characteristic of the organiser ; he sees things from above. Kipling agreed with the Kaiser, but in the language of simple men below, when he declared that there is V human feeling and German feeling. The organiser, as organiser, is inevitably inhuman, -\or rather unhuman. No doubt both Kaiser SOCIAL MOMENTUM 31 and poet exaggerated in order to emphasise opposing tendencies ; even a democracy must have organisers, just as there must be some remnant of kindliness even among the students of Kultur. The real question is as to which shall have the last word in the State the idealists or the organisers. Internationalists are in futile revolt against all organisation when they would have war of the proletariat on the bourgeoisie. ^Democracy refuses to think strategically * .unless and until compelled to do so for pur- A poses of defence. That, of course, does not prevent democracy from declaring war for an. ideal, as was seen during the French Revolu- ' tion. One of the inconsistencies of our pacifists to-day is that they so often urge intervention in the affairs of other nations. ^^ In the Middle Ages vast unorganised crowds set out to march agains't the infidel and perished fecklessly by the way. It was not from lack of warning that the Western de- mocracies were unprepared for the present War. At the same moment, early in this century, to cite only the case of Great Britain, three honoured voices were appealing to our sovereign people and were not heard ; Lord Rosebery called for efficiency, Mr. Chamber- lain for economic defence, and Lord Roberts 32 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY for military training. Democracy implies rule by consent of the average citizen, who does not view things from the hill-tops, for he must be at his work in the fertile plains. There is no good in railing at the character- istics of popular government, for they are its qualities and no mere defects. President Wilson admits them when he says we must make the world a safe place henceforth for democracies. They were no less admitted in the British House of Commons when re- sponsible Ministers took pride in the fact that, save in respect of the defensive force of the Navy, we were not prepared for the War. The democrat thinks in principles, be they according to his idiosyncrasy ideals, pre- judices, or economic laws. The organiser, on the other hand, plans construction, and, like an architect, must consider the ground for his foundations and the materials with which he will build. It must be concrete and detailed consideration, for bricks may be most suitable for his walls, but stone for his lintels, and timber and slate for his roof. If it be a State which he is erecting jiot, be it noted, a nation which is growing-vie must carefully consider the territory whicn it is desirable to occupy and the social structures not economic laws which are to his hand as the SOCIAL "MOMENTUM 33 result of history. I So he opposes his strategy to the ethics of trie democrat. Fierce moralists allow no extenuation for sin however persistent the temptation, and great undoubtedly must be the reward in heaven for the slum-dweller who ' keeps straight.' But practical reformers give much of their thought to the Housing problem ! Of late our political moralists have been very fierce. They preached the narrow way of ' no annexations, no indemnities.' In other words, they refused to reckon with the realities of geography and economics. Had we but faith as a grain of mustarcj seed in average human nature, could we not remove the mountains ! Practical sense, however, warns us that it would be wise to seize the present oppor- tunity, when for once the democratic nations are efficiently armed, to make the world a safe place for democracies when going about their ordinary business. In other words, we must see to the housing problem of our coining League of Nations. We must reckon presciently with the realities of space and time, and not be content merely to lay down on paper good principles of conduct. The good may not always appear the same even to those who are now Allies, and will pretty c 34 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY surely appear not good, for a time at least, to our present enemies. * No annexations, no indemnities ' was no doubt a rallying cry not meant by its authors to support existing tyrannies. But it is surely legitimate to remark that there is a wide difference between the attitude of the lawyer with his presumptions unless there be proof to the contrary, and that of the business man untied by formulae. The one does things, and the other, at best, allows them to be done. In the past, democracy has looked with suspicion on the activities even of popular governments, and therein has shown a wise self-knowledge. It used to be thought, and sooner or later will be thought again, that the main function of the State in free countries is to prevent tyrannous things from being done whether by offenders at home or invaders from abroad. Average citizenship is not a likely base for daring innovations. Adven- turers, sole or corporate, must therefore be left to blaze the way to progress. In mili- tary and bureaucratic States it is otherwise ; Napoleon could be a pioneer, as might have been Joseph n. if his conservative subjects had not successfully revolted against him. In Prussia all progress has been State- SOCIAL MOMENTUM 35 engineered, but then progress there has meant merely increase of efficiency. 1 ^To save democracy, however, in its recent jeopardy we suspended the very safeguards of democracy, and allowed our govern- ments to organise us not merely for defence but for offence. Had the War been short, this would have been a mere parenthesis in history. But it has been long, and social structures have wasted in part, and in part have been diverted to new uses, so that habits and vested interests have dissolved, and all society is as clay in our hands, if only we have the cunning to mould it while it is still yielding. But the art of the clay-moulder, as of the worker in hot metal, lies not merely hi knowing what he would make, but also in allowing for the properties of the material hi which he is working. He must not only have artistic aims, but also technical know- ledge ; his human initiative must reckon with reality ; he must cultivate his ' ways and means ' mind, while he tries to re tarn his ideals of form, j As the artist endeavours to his dying day to learn ever more about the medium in which he works and not merely more in a scientific 1 Twelve years ago I met a Prussian Staff Officer who told me that he spent his life trying to save half an hour on mobilisation. 36 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY jcvH-zU I ri>t : * IK* 4j;ir.j-! * t u-i sense, but in a practical ' tactile ' way, gaining, as we say, greater command over his material so has it been with the knowledge of humanity at large in regard to the Realities of the round world on which we must practise the intricate art of living together. It is not merely that we have amassed vast encyclo- paedias of fact, but that, as we live through each new epoch, we see all the past and all the present with new eyes and from new standpoints. It is obvious that these four years of war have wrought a change in human outlook the like of which was not effected in all the previous life of those of us who have grey hairs. Yet, when we look back with our present knowledge, is it not clear that the currents of thought now running so tumultu- ously were already setting in gently some twenty years ago ? In the last years of last century and the first of this, the organisers at Berlin and the minorities in London and Paris had already discerned the new drift of the straws. 1 I propose trying to depict some of the Realities, geographical and economic, hi their 1 Mr. Chamberlain resigned from the Cabinet in order to free himself as a leader in September 1903, and Lord Roberts re- signed from Coniinander-in-Chief with a similar idea in January 1904. SOCIAL MOMENTUM 37 twentieth-century perspective. The facts will most of them be old and familiar. But, in the language of the Mediaeval schoolmen, there is a great difference between Vera causa and Causa causans mere academic learning and the realisation which impels to action. Ill THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW ' And God said, Let the waters be gathered together in one place.' THE physical facts of geography have remained substantially the same during the fifty or sixty centuries of recorded human history. Forests have been cut down, marshes have been drained, and deserts may have broadened, but the outlines of land and water, and the lie of mountains and rivers have not altered except in detail. The influence of geo- graphical conditions upon human activities has depended, however, not merely on the realities as we now know them to be and to have been, but in even greater degree on what men imagined in regard to them. The ocean has been one throughout history, but for effective human purposes there were two oceans, Western and Eastern, until the Cape of Good Hope was rounded only four hundred years ago. So did it happen that Admiral Mahan in the closing years of last century 88 THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 39 could still base a new message in regard to sea-power on a text from the first chapter of Genesis. The ocean was one ocean all the time, but the practical meaning of that great reality was not wholly understood until a few years ago perhaps it is only now being grasped in its entirety. Each century has had its own geographical perspective. Men still living, though past the age of military service, were taught from a map of the world on which nearly all the interior of Africa was a blank ; yet last year General Smuts could address the Royal Geographical Society on the German ambition to control the world from the now explored vantage-ground of Central Africa. The geo- graphical perspective of the twentieth century differs, however, from that of all the previous centuries in more than mere extension. In outline our geographical knowledge is now complete. We have lately attained to the North Pole, and have found that it is in the midst of a deep sea, and to the South Pole, and have found it upon a high plateau. With those final discoveries the book of the pioneers has been closed. No considerable fertile new land, no important mountain- range, and no first-class river can 7 any more be the reward of adventure. Moreover, the 40 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY map of the world had hardly been sketched before claims to the political ownership of all the dry land had been pegged out. Whether we think of the physical, economic, military, or political interconnection of things on the surface of the Globe, we are now for the first time presented with a closed system. The known does not fade any longer through the half -known into the unknown ; there is no longer elasticity of political expansion in lands beyond the Pale. Every shock, every disaster or superfluity, is now felt even to the antipodes, and may indeed return from the antipodes, as the air waves from the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in the year 1883 were propelled hi rings over the Globe until they converged to a point in the opposite hemi- sphere, and thence diverged again to meet once more over Krakatoa, the seat of their origin. Every deed of humanity will henceforth be echoed and re-echoed in like manner round the world. That, in the ultimate analysis, is why every considerable State was bound to be drawn into the recent War, if it lasted, as it did last, long enough. To this day, however, our view of the geographical realities is coloured for practical purposes by our preconceptions from the past. In other words, human society is THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 41 still related to the facts of geography not as they are, but in no small measure as they have been approached in the course of history. It is only with an effort that we can yet realise them in the true, the complete, and therefore detached, perspective of the twentieth century. This War has taught us rapidly, but there are still vast numbers of our citizens who look out on to a vivid Western foreground, but only to a very dim Eastern background. In order therefore to appre- ciate where we now stand, it will be worth while to consider shortly the stages by which we have arrived. Let us begin with the succeed- ing phases of the seaman's outlook. Imagine a vast tawny desert, raised a few hundred feet above the sea level. Imagine a valley with precipitous rocky slopes trenched into this desert plateau, and the floor of the valley carpeted with a strip of black soil, through the midst of which winds northward for five hundred miles a silvery navigable river. That river is the Nile flowing from where the granite rocks of Assouan break its navigability at the first cataract to where its waters divide at the head of the Delta. From desert edge to desert edge across the 42 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY valley is a crow-fly distance of some ten or twenty miles. Stand on one of the brinks with the desert behind you ; the rocky descent falls from your feet to the strip of plain below, and away over the floods of the summer- time, or the green of the growing winter- time, or the golden harvests of the spring, you are faced by the opposing wall of rock rising to the other desert. The recesses in those rock fronts were carved long ago in- -* ~ 3 c/ = *v\ to cavernous tem- l?y CATARAc-r| * \(^ pies and tombs, |Vs>: ^ and the salients *y$^ hito mighty effi- *^\VH\\ gies of kings and Fia. 1. A river-world apart. gO( } s . Egypt, in this long sunken belt, was anciently civilised because all the essential physical advantages were here combined for men to work upon. On the one hand were a rich soil, abundant water, and a powerful sunshine ; hence fertility for the support of a population (/> THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 43 in affluence. On the other hand was a smooth water-way within half a dozen miles or less of every field in the country. There was also motive power for shipping, since the river-current carried vessels northward, and the Etesian winds known on the ocean as the trade winds brought them southward again. Fertility and a line of communica- tions man-power and facilities for its organisa- tion ; there are the essen- tial ingredients for a king- dom. We are asked to picture the early condition of Egypt as that of a valley held by a chain of tribes, who fought with one an- other in fleets of great war- canoes, just as later tribes have fought On the river scale as the river naviga- 1 tion opposite. Congo in our own time. Some one of these tribes, having defeated its neighbours, gained possession of a longer section of the valley, a more extensive material basis for its man-power, and on that basis organised further conquests. At last 44 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY the whole length of the valley was brought under a single rule, and the kings of all Egypt established their palace at Thebes. Northward and southward, by boat on the Nile, travelled their administrators their messengers and their magistrates. Eastward and westward lay the strong defence of the deserts, and at the northern limit, against the sea pirates, a belt of marsh round the shore of the Delta. 1 (Now carry your mind to the ' Great Sea,' the^Mediterranean. You have there essenti- ally the same physical ingredients as in Egypt but on a larger scale, and you have based upon them not a mere kingdom but the Roman Empire. From the Phoenician coast for two thousand miles westward lies the broad water-way to its mouth at Gibraltar, and on either hand are fertile shorelands with winter rains and harvest sunshine. But there is a distinction to be made between the dwellers along the Nile banks and those along the Mediterranean shores. The conditions of human activity are relatively uniform in all parts of Egypt ; each of the constituent tribes would x- have its farmers and its boatmen. But the races round the Mediterranean became specialised ; some were content to 1 See The Dawn of History, by Professor J. L. Myres. THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 45 till their fields and navigate their rivers at home, but others gave most of their energy to seamanship and foreign commerce. Side by side, for instance, dwelt the home-staying, corn-growing Egyptians and the adventurous Phoenicians. A longer and more sustained effort of organisation was therefore needed to weld all the kingdoms of the Mediterranean into a single political unit." Modern research has made it plain that the leading seafaring race of antiquity came at all times from that square of water between Europe and Asia which is known alternatively as the ^Egean Sea and the Archipelago, the ' Chief Sea ' of the Greeks. Sailors from this sea would appear to have taught the Phoeni- cians their trade in days when as yet Greek was not spoken in the 'Isles of the Gen tiles.' It is of deepest interest for our present purpose to note that the centre of civilisation in the pre-Greek world of the JSgean, according both to the indications of mythology and the recent excavations, was in the Island of Crete. Was that the first base of sea-power ? From that home did the seamen fare who, sailing northward, saw the coast of the rising sun to their right hand, and of the setting sun to their left hand, and named the one Asia and the other Europe ? Was it from Crete that 46 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY the sea-folk settled round the other shores of the ^Egean ' sea-chamber,' forming to this day a coastal veneer of Greek population in front of peoples of other race a few miles inland ? There are so many islands in the Archipelago that the name has become, like the Delta of Egypt, one of the common descriptive terms of geography. But Crete is the largest and most fruitful of them. Have we here a first instance of the importance of the larger base for sea-power ? The man- power of the sea must be nourished by land- fertility somewhere, and other things being equal such as security of the home and energy of the people that power will control the sea which is based on the greater resources. The next phase of ^gean development teaches apparently the same lesson. Horse- riding tribes of Hellenic speech came down from the north into the peninsula which now forms, the mainland of Greece, and settled, Hellenising the earlier inhabitants. These Hellenes advanced into the terminal limb of the peninsula, the Peloponnese, slenderly attached to the continent by the isthmus of Corinth. Thence, organising sea-power on their re- latively considerable peninsular base, one of the Hellenic tribes, the Dorians, conquered Crete, a smaller though completely insular base. 48 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Some centuries passed, during which the Greeks sailed round the southern headlands of the Peloponnese into the Ionian Sea, and colonised along the shores of that sea also. So the peninsula came to be a citadel in the midst of the Greek sea-world. Along the outer shores of the twin waters, ^Egean and Ionian, the Greek colonists were but a fringe exposed to attack from behind. Only in the central peninsula were they relatively , although as the sequel shows not absolutely, safe. To the eastern, outer shore of the ^Egean the Persians came down from the interior against the Greek cities by the sea, and the Athenian fleet carried aid from the peninsular citadel to the threatened kinsfolk over the water, and issue was joined between sea- power and land-power. A Persian sea-raid was defeated at Marathon, and the Persians then resorted to the obvious strategy of baffled land-power ; under King Xerxes they marched round, throwing a bridge of boats over the Dardanelles, and entered the peninsula from the north, with the idea of destroying the nest whence the wasps emerged which stung them and flew elusively away. The Persian effort failed, and it was reserved for the half- Greek, half-barbaric Macedonians, established in the root of the Greek Peninsula itself, to THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW; 49 end the first cycle of sea-power by conquering to south of them the Greek sea-base, and then marching into Asia, and through Syria into Egypt, and on the way destroying Tyre of the Phoenicians. Thus they made a * closed sea ' of the Eastern Mediterranean by depriving both the Greeks and the Phoe- nicians of their bases. That done, the Macedonian King Alexander could advance light-heartedly into Upper Asia. We may talk of the mobility of ships and of the long arm of the fleet, but, after all, sea-power is fundamentally a matter of appropriate bases, productive and secure. Greek sea-power passed through the same phases as Egyptian river-power. The end of both was the same*; without the protection of a navy commerce moved securely over a water-way because all the shores were held by one and the same land-power. * * * * Now we go to the Western Mediterranean. Rome there began as a fortified town on a hill, at the foot of which was a bridge and a river- wharf. This hill-bridge-port-town was the citadel and market of a small nation of farmers, who tilled Latium, the ' broad land ' or plain, between the Apennines and the sea. D 50 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY * Father ' Tiber was for shipping purposes merely a creek, navigable for the small sea- craft of those days, which entered thus from the coast a few miles into the midst of the plain, but that was enough to give Rome the Fia. 4. Latium, a fertile sea-base. advantage over her rivals, the towns crowning the Alban and Etruscan hills of the neigh- bourhood. Rome had the bridge and the inmost port just as had London. Based on the productivity of Latium, the Romans issued from the Tiber to traffic round THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 51 the shores of the Western Mediterranean. Soon they came into competition with the Carthaginians, who were based on the fertility of the Mejerdeh valley in the opposite pro- montory of Africa. The First Punic or Phoenician War ensued, and t^e Romans ju^^ victoriously held the sea. They then pro- *v* ceecled to widen their base by annexing all the peninsular part of Italy as far as the Rubicon River. In the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian &A*4 ~ " ' O , .. A^*** general, Hannibal, endeavoured to outflank - the Roman sea-power by marching round it, as Xerxes and Alexander had done hi regard to the sea-powers opposed to them. He carried his army over the western narrows from Africa into Spain, and then advanced through Southern Gaul into Italy. He was defeated, and Rome annexed the Mediter- ranean coasts of Gaul and Spain. By taking ^ Carthage itself in the Third Punic War, she made a ' closed sea ' of the Western Mediter- ranean, for all the shores were held by one and the same land-power. There remained the task of uniting the controls of the Western and Eastern basins of the Mediterranean, connected by the Sicilian Strait and the Strait of Messina. The Roman legions passed over into Macedonia and thence -^ . -"< FIG. 5. ^Two famous marches for the purpose of outflanking Macedonia ^_--> r ._ " sea-power ; also a victory which cloned ' the Mediterranean. 54 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY into Asia, but the distinction between Latin West and Greek East remained, as was evident when civil war came to be waged between the Roman Governors of the West and the East, Caesar and Antony. At the sea fight of Actium, one of the decisive battles of the world's history, the Western fleet of v Caesar destroyed the Eastern fleet of Antony. Thenceforth for five centuries the entire Mediterranean was a ' closed sea ' ; and we think hi consequence of the Roman Empire as chiefly a land-power. No fleet was needed, save a few police vessels, to maintain as complete a command of the arterial sea-way of the Mediterranean as ever the Kings of Egypt exercised over their Nile-way. Once more land-power terminated a cycle of com- petition upon the water by depriving sea- power of its bases. True that there had been the culminating sea battle of Actium, and that Caesar's fleet had won the reward of all finally successful fleets, the command over all the sea. But that command was not afterwards maintained upon the sea, but upon the land by holding the coasts. THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 55 When Rome had completed the organisation of her power round the Mediterranean, there followed a long transitional epoch, during which the oceanic development of Western civilisation was gradually preparing. The .transition began with the Roman road system, constructed for the .greater mobility of the marching legions. After the close of the Punic Wars four Latin-speaking provinces encircled the Western Mediterranean Italy, Southern Gaul, Eastern and Southern Spam, and Carthaginian Africa. The outer boundary of the African province was protected by the Sahara Desert, and Italy had in rear the Adriatic moat, but in Gaul and Spain Rome found herself the uncomfortable neighbour of independent Celtic tribes. Thus the familiar dilemma of Empire presented itself; to ad- vance and end the menace, or to entrench and shut it out, but leave it in being. A still virile people chose the former course, and the frontier and the roads were carried through to the ocean along a thousand miles of frontage between Cape St. Vincent and the mouths of the Rhine. As a consequencefjbhe Latin portion of the Empire came to be based on two features of Physical Geography : on the one hand was the Latin Sea the Western Mediterranean ; and on the other hand was the 66 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Latin Peninsula, between the Mediterranean and the ocean.^JJ Julius Caesar penetrated to the Bay of FIG. 6. The Latin Sea, showing the Roman territory after the Punic Wars. Biscay, and built a fleet wherewith he defeated the fleet of the Veneti of Brittany. Then, 1 I do not know whether these names, Latin Sea and Latin Peninsula, have been used beforehand. It seems to me that they serve to crystallise important generalisations, and I propose using them henceforth. THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 57 because the Celts of Britain were giving help to their Gallic kinsmen, he crossed the Channel and smote them in their island base. H A FIG. 7. The Latin Peninsula, occupied by the modern Romance nations. A hundred years later the Romans conquered all the lower and more fruitful portion of Britain, and so eliminated the risk of the rise of a sea-power off the Gallic coast. In this way the Channel also became a ' closed sea,' controlled by land-power. After four centuries the land-power of Rome waned, and the seas on either side of the Latin Peninsula then soon ceased to be ' closed.' The Norsemen raided over the North Sea from their fiords, and through the Channel, and through the Straits of Gibraltar, even into the recesses of the Mediterranean, enveloping with their sea-power the whole great peninsula. They seized forward bases in the islands of Britain and Sicily, and even nibbled at the mainland edges in Normandy and Southern Italy. At the same time the Saracen camel-men came down from Arabia and took Carthage, Egypt, and Syria from the Empire the provinces, that is to say, south of the Mediterranean. Then they launched their fleets on the water, and seized part of Sicily and part of Spain for overseas bases. Thus the Mediterranean ceased to be the arterial way of an Empire, and became the frontier moat dividing Christendom from Islam. But the greater sea-power of the Saracens enabled them to hold Spain, though north of the water, just as at an earlier time the greater sea- power of Rome had enabled her to hold Carthage, though south of the water. For a thousand years Latin Christendom was thus imprisoned in the Latin Peninsula THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 69 and its appendant island of Britain. Fifteen hundred miles north-eastward, measured in a straight line, trends the oceanic coast from the Sacred Promontory of the ancients to the Straits at Copenhagen, and fifteen hundred miles eastward, measured in the same way, lies the sinuous Mediterranean coast from the Sacred Promontory to the Straits at Con- stantinople. A lesser peninsula advances towards the main peninsula at each strait, Scandinavia on the one hand, and Asia Minor on the other ; and behind the land bars so formed are two landgirt basins, the Baltic and Black Seas. If Britain be considered as balancing Italy, the symmetry of the distal end of the main peninsula is such that you might lay a Latin Cross upon it with the head in Germany, the arms in Britain and Italy, the feet in Spain, and the centre in France, thus typifying that ecclesiastical empire of the five nations which, though shifted north- ward, was the mediaeval heir of the Roman Caesars. Towards the East, however, where the Baltic and Black Seas first begin to define the peninsular character of Europe, the out- line is less shapely, for the Balkan peninsula protrudes southward, only tapering finally into the historic little peninsula of Greece. Is it not tempting to speculate on what 60 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY might have happened had Rome not refused to conquer eastward of the Rhine ? Who can say that a single mighty sea-power, wholly Latinised as far as the Black and Baltic Seas, would not have commanded the world from its peninsular base ? But Classical Rome was primarily a Mediterranean and not a peninsular power, and the Rhine-Danube frontier must be regarded as demarking a penetration from the Mediterranean coast rather than as the incomplete achievement of a peninsular policy. It was the ' opening ' again of the seas on either hand which first compacted Europe hi the peninsular sense. Reaction had to be organised, or the pressures from north and south would have obliterated Christendom. So Charlemagne erected an Empire astride of the Rhine, half Latin and half German by speech, but wholly Latin ecclesiastically. With this Empire as base the Crusades were afterwards undertaken. Seen in large per- spective at this distance of time, and from the seaman's point of view, the Crusades, if successful, would have had for their main effect the ' closing ' once more of the Mediter- ranean Sea. The long series of these wars, ex- tending over two centuries, took two courses. On the one hand, fleets were sent out from a i .c i *5 o .S-i So (L have conquered, but had Germany conquered ~T\ she would have established her sea-power on a wider base than any in history, and in fact on the widest possible baseT] The joint eon- I tinent of Europe, Asia, ana Africa, is now effectively, and not merely theoretically, an island. Now and again, lest we forget, let ]fJ\Jil us call it the World-Island hi what foHbws. One reason why the seamen did not long * ago rise to the generalisation implied in the expression ' World-Island, 5 is that they could not make the round voyage of it. An ice- cap, two thousand miles across, floats on the Polar Sea, with one edge aground on the shoals oS the north of Asia. For the^ common purposes of navigation, therefore, the con- tinent is not an island. The seamen of the last four centuries have treated it as a vast promontory stretching southward from a vague north, as a mountain peak may rise out of the clouds from hidden foundations.. Even in the last century, since the opening F 82 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY of the Suez Canal, the eastward voyage has still been round a promontory, though with the point at Singapore instead of Cape Town. This fact and its vastness have made men think of the Continent as though it differed from other islands in more than size. We speak of its parts as Europe, Asia, and Africa in precisely the same way that we speak of the parts of the ocean as Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. In theory even the ancient Greeks regarded it as insular, yet they spoke of it as the ' World.' The school-children of to-day are taught of it as the ' Old World,' in contrast with a certain pair of peninsulas which together constitute the ' New World.' Seamen speak of it merely as ' the Continent,' the continuous land. Let us consider for a- moment the propor- tions and relations of this newly realised Great Island. 1 It is set as it were on the shoulder of the earth with reference to the North Pole. Measuring from Pole to Pole along the central meridian of Asia, we have first a thousand miles of ice-clad sea as far as the northern shore of Siberia, then five thousand miles of land to 1 It would be misleading to attempt to represent the state- ments which follow in map form. They can only be appre- ciated on a globe. Therefore they are illustrated by diagrams ; see Figs. 12 and 13. THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 83 the southern point of India, and then seven thousand miles of sea to the Antarctic cap of ice-clad land. But measured along the meridian of the Bay of Bengal or of the Arabian Sea, Asia is only some three thousand five hundred miles across. From Paris to Vladivostok is six thousand miles, and from Paris to the Cape of Good Hope is a similar distance ; but these measurements are on a Globe twenty-six thousand miles round. Were it not for the ice impediment to its circum- navigation, practical seamen would long ago have spoken of the Great Island by some such name, for it is only a little more than one-fifth as large as their ocean. The World-Island ends in points north- eastward and south-eastward. On a clear day you can see from the north-eastern head- land across Behring Strait to the beginning of the long pair of peninsulas, each measuring about one twenty-sixth of the Globe, which we call the Americas. Superficially there is no doubt a certain resemblance of symmetry in the Old and New Worlds ; each consists of two peninsulas, Africa and Euro-Asia hi the one case, and North and South America in the other. But there is no real likeness between them. The northern and north- eastern shores of Africa for nearly four thou- 84 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY sand miles are so intimately related with the opposite shores of Europe and Asia that the Sahara constitutes a far more effective break in social continuity than does the Mediter- ranean. In the days of air navigation which are coming, sea-power will use the water-way of the Mediterranean and Red Seas only by the sufferance of land-power, for air-power is chiefly an arm of land-power, a new am- phibious cavalry, when the contest with sea- power is in question. But North and South America, slenderly connected at Panama, are for practical pur- poses insular rather than peninsular in regard to one another. South America lies not merely to south, but also in the main to east of North America ; the two lands are in echelon, as soldiers would say, and thus the broad ocean encircles South America, except for a minute proportion of its outline. A like fact is true of North America with reference to Asia, for it stretches out into the ocean from Behring Strait so that, as may be seen upon a globe, the shortest way from Pekin to New York is across Behring Strait, a circumstance which may some day have im- portance for the traveller by railway or air. The third of the new continents, Australia/, lies a thousand miles from the south-eastern THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 85 point of Asia, and measures only one sixty-fifth of the surface of the Globe. Thus the three so-called new continents are in point of area merely satellites of the old continent. There is one ocean covering nine- twelfths of the Globe ; there is one continent the World-Island covering two-twelfths of the Globe ; and there are many smaller islands, whereof North America and South America are for effective purposes two, which together cover the remaining one-twelfth. The term ' New World ' implies, now that we can see the Realities and not merely historic appear- ances, a wrong perspective. The truth, seen with a broad vision, is that in the great World-Promontory, extending southward to the Cape of Good Hope, and in the North American sea-base we have, on a vast scale, yet a third contrast of peninsula and island to be set beside the Greek penin- sula and the island of Crete, and the Latin Peninsula and the British Island. But there is this vital difference, that the World-Promon- tory, when united by modern overland com- munications, is in fact the World-Island, pos- sessed potentially of the advantages both of insularity and of incomparably great resources. Leading Americans have for some time \ \ a THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 87 appreciated the fact that their country is no longer a world apart, and President Wilson had brought his whole people round to that view when they consented to throw themselves into the War. But North America is no longer even a continent ; in this twentieth century it is shrinking to be an island. Americans used ,, r to think of their three millions of square miles as the equivalent of all Europe ; some day, they said, there would be a United States of Europe as sister to the United States of America. Now, though they may not all have realised it, they must no longer think of Europe apart from Asia and Africa. The Old World has become insular, or in other words a unit, incomparably the largest geographical unit on our Globe. There is a remarkable parallelism between the short history of America and the longer history of England ; both countries have now passed through the same succession of Colonial, Continental, and Insular stages. The Angle and Saxon settlements along the east and south coast of Britain have often been regarded as anticipating the thirteen English Colonies along the east coast of North America ; what has not always been remembered is that there was a continental stage in English history to be compared with 88 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY that of Lincoln in America. The wars of Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror were in no small degree between contending parts of England, with the Norsemen inter- vening, and England was not effectively insular until the time of Elizabeth, because not until then was she free from the hostility of Scotland, and herself united, and there- fore a unit, in her relations with the neigh- bouring continent. America is to-day a unit, lor -the American people have fought out 'their internal idifferences, and it is insular, because events are compelling Americans to realise that their so-called continent lies on the same globe as the Continent. Picture upon the map of the world this War as it has been fought in the year 1918. It has been a war between Islanders and Continentals, there can be no doubt of that. It has been fought on the Continent, chiefly across the landward front of peninsular Eranoe ; and ranged on the one side have been Britain, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan -all in- sular. Erance and Italy are peninsular, but evea with that advantage they would not of this unanimity of the Islanders. (The col- t*" lapse of Russia has cleared our view of the realities, as the Russian revolution purified Avc-^ the ideals for which we have been fightingT) The facts appear in the same perspective if we consider the population of the Globe. More than fourteen-sixteenths of all humanity live on the Great Continent, and nearly one- sixteenth more on the closely off-set Islands of Britain and Japan. Even to-day, after four centuries of emigration, only about one- sixteenth live in the lesser continents. Nor is time likely to change these proportions materially. If the middle-west of North America comes presently to support, let us say, another hundred million people, it is probable that the interior of Asia will at the same time carry two hundred millions more than now, and if the Tropical part of South America should feed a hundred millions more, then the Tropical parts of Africa and the Indies may not improbably support two -.o o THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 91 hundred millions more. The Congo Forest alone, subdued to agriculture, would maintain some four hundred million souls if populated with the same density as Java, and the Javanese population is still growing. Have we any right, moreover, to assume that, given its climate and history, the interior of Asia would not nourish a population as virile as that of Europe, North America, or Japan ? What if the Great Continent, the whole World-Island or a large part of it, were at some future time to become a single and united base of sea-power ? Would not the other insular bases be outbuilt as regards ships and out- manned as regards seamen ? Their fleets would no doubt fight with all the heroism begotten of their histories, but the end would be fated. Even in the present War, insular America has had to come to the aid of insular Britain, not because the British fleet could not have held the seas for the time being, but lest such a building and manning base were to be assured to Germany at the Peace, or rather Truce, that Britain would inevitably be outbuilt and outmanned a few years later. The surrender of the German fleet in the Firth of Forth is a dazzling event, but in all soberness, if we would take the long view, must we not still reckon with the possibility 92 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY that a large part of the Great Continent might some day be united under a single sway, and that an invincible sea-power might be based upon ifjj May we not have headed off that danger in this War, and yet leave by our settlement the opening for a fresh attempt in the future ? Ought we not to recognise that that is the great ultimate threat to the World's liberty so far as strategy is concerned, and to provide against it in our new politi- cal system ? Let us look at the matter from the Lands- man's point of view. IV THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW FOUR centuries ago the whole outlook of man- kind was changed in a single generation by the voyages of the great pioneers, Columbus, Da Gama, and Magellan. The idea of the unity of tKe ocean, beforehand merely inferred from the likeness of the tides in the Atlantic and Indian waters, suddenly became a part of the mental equipment of practical men. A similar (revolution is in progress in the present generation in the rapid realisation of the unity of the Continent owing to modern methods of communication by land and airTj The Islanders have been slow to understand' what is happening. Britain went into the War for the defence of her neighbours, Belgium and France, seeing vaguely perhaps that she / was herself threatened through their danger, V but almost unanimous in her decision only .feco . " ^- x / 3 '"*V^ because of a moral tie, her bond in regard to Belgium. America was shocked by the Lusitania tragedy, and was ultimately brought OL^ n 94 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY in because of the general infringement of the rights of neutrals by the German submarines. Neither of the Anglo-Saxon nations at first clearly saw the strategical meaning of the War. Theirs was an external view of the Continent, like that of the seamen who named the Guinea, Malabar, Coromandel, and Murman FIG. 14. Showing the great part of Asia and Europe whose rivers flow either to the icy north, or into salt lakas without exit to the ocean ; also how Africa faces Europe and Asia for 4000 miles. (Equal areas projection.) ' Coasts.' Neither in London nor in New York were International Politics commonly dis- cussed in the way in which they are discussed hi the cafes of Continental Europe. In order, therefore, to appreciate the Continental view we must remove our standpoint from without to within the great ring of the ' Coasts.' THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 95 Let us begin by 'brigading' our data, for only so shall we be able to reason conveniently about the realities which the Continent pre- sents for strategical thought. When you are thinking of large things you must think on broad lines ; the colonel of a battalion thinks in companies, but the general of a division in brigades. For the purpose of forming our brigades, however, it will be necessary at the outset to go into some degree of geographical detail. * 9 * 9 * The northern edge of Asia is the Inacces- sible Coast, beset with ice except for a narrow water lane which opens here and there along the shore in the brief summer owing to the melting of the local ice formed in the winter between the grounded floes and the land. It so happens that three of the largest rivers in the world, the Lena, Yenisei, and Obi, stream northward through Siberia to this coast, and are therefore detached for practical purposes from the general system of the ocean and river navigations. 1 South of Siberia are other 1 This is true up to the present time, though, with the aid of modern ice-breakers, the efforts which are being made, especially by Tyneside enterprise, to open a direct route to the mouths of the Obi and Yenisei may perhaps result in the establishment of a sea-borne summer traffic to Western Siberia. 96 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY regions at least as large, drained into salt lakes having no outlet to the ocean ; such are the basins of the Volga and Ural Rivers flowing to the Caspian Sea, and of the Oxus and Jaxartes to the Sea of AraL Geographers usually describe these inward basins as 1 Continental.' Taken together, the regions of Arctic and Continental drainage measure nearly a half of Asia and a quarter of Europe, and form a great continuous patch in the north and centre of the continent. \That whole patch, extending right across from the icy, flat shore of Siberia to the torrid, steep coasts of Baluchistan and Persia, has been inaccessible to navigation from the ocean. The opening of it by railways for it was practically roadless beforehand and by aeroplane routes in the near future, con- stitutes a revolution in the relations of men to the larger geographical realities of the world. Let us call this great region the [Heartland of the ContinentA The north, centre, ancTwest of the Heart- land are a plain, rising only a few hundred feet at most above sea level. In that greatest lowland on the Globe are included Western Siberia, Turkestan, and the Volga basin of Europe, for the Ural Mountains, though a long range, are not of important 98 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY height, and terminate some three hundred miles north of the Caspian, leaving a broad gateway from Siberia into Europe. Let us speak of this vast plain as the Great Lowland. Southward the Great Lowland ends along the foot of a tableland, whose average elevation is about half a mile, with mountain ridges J rising to a mile and a half. This tableland JK Vjaears upon its broad back the three countries .jK j^of Persia, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan ; for convenience we may describe the whole of it as the Iranian Upland. The Heartland, in the sense of the region of Arctic and Con- tinental drainage, includes most of the Great Lowland and most of the Iranian Upland ; it extends therefore to the long, high, curving brink of the Persian Mountains, beyond which is the depression occupied by the Euphrates Valley and the Persian Gulf. Now let us travel in imagination to the west of Africa. There, between the latitudes of the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, is a Desert Coast: it was the character of that coast, it will be remembered, which so long baffled the effort of the mediaeval sailors to make the southward voyage round Africa. With a breadth of a thousand miles the Sahara spreads thence across the north of Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Valley of the Nile. THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 99 The Sahara is not everywhere an utter desert ; there are many oases trenched valleys with wells to the water percolating underground in their bottoms, or hilly tracts against which at times the clouds gather but these are minute and scattered exceptions upon a barren and riverless area nearly as large as all Europe. The Sahara is the most unbroken natural boundary hi the world ; throughout History it has been a barrier between the White and the Black men. Between the Sahara and the Heartland there is a broad gap which is occupied by Arabia. The two brinks of the Nile Valley are known as Libyan to the West and Arabian to the East ; and away beyond the Lower Euphrates, at the foot of the Persian Moun- tains, is the district known as Arabistan or the country of the Arabs. In complete har- mony, therefore, with local usage, Arabia may be regarded as spreading for 800 miles from the Nile to beyond the Euphrates. From the foot of the Taurus Mountains, north of Aleppo, to the Gulf of Aden, it measures no less than 1800 miles. As to one-half, Arabia is desert, and as to the other half mainly dry steppes ; although it lies in the same latitudes as the Sahara, it is more productive and carries a more considerable population of Fio. 16. The World- Island, divided into six it.ural regions. (Equal areas projection.) 02 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY r wandering Bedouin. Moreover, it has larger oases, and therefore larger cities. What, however, most distinguishes Arabia both from the Heartland and the Sahara is the fact that it is traversed by three great water-ways in connection with the ocean the Nile, the RedjSea, and the Euphrates and Persjaji Gulf. None of these three ways, however, alfords naturally a complete passage across the arid belt. The Nile was navigable from the Mediterranean only to the first cataract, midway across the desert, though locks have now been constructed at Assouan which give access as far as the second cataract ; and the navigation of the Euphrates ascends only to a point a hundred miles from the Mediter- ranean. To-day it is true that the Suez Canal unites the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, but it was not only the isthmus which formerly impeded through traffic by this route ; per- sistent north winds of the trade wind current blow down the northern end of the Red Sea, which is beset with rocks, and sailing ships do not willingly attempt the northward voyage to the Canal, which would therefore have been relatively useless but for steam navigation. The former Red Sea route to the Mediterranean was from Kosseir on the west coast over the desert to the Nile at THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 103 Keneh, and then down the Nile ; that was the way followed by the British Army when sent from India to Egypt more than a hun- dred years ago, at the time of the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and Palestine. It follows from the foregoing description that the Heartland, Arabia, and the Sahara together constitute a broad, curving belt in- accessible to seafaring people, except by the three Arabian water-ways. This belt extends completely across the great continent from the Arctic to the Atlantic shores. In Arabia it touches the Indian Ocean, and, as a conse- quence, divides the remainder of the Continent into three separate regions whose rivers flow to the ice-free ocean. These regions are the Pacific and Indian slopes of Asia ; the peninsulas and islands of Europe and the Mediterranean ; and the great promontory of Africa south of the Sahara. The last-named differs from the other two regions in a very important respect. Its larger rivers, the Niger, Zambesi, and Congo, and also its smaller rivers, such as the Orange and Limpopo, flow across the table- land of the ulterior, and fall steeply over its edge to relatively short seaward reaches in the narrow coastal lowlands. The long up- land courses of these rivers are navigable for several thousand miles, but are for practical 104 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY purposes as completely detached from the ocean as the rivers of Siberia. The same, of course, is true of the Nile above the cataracts. We may, therefore, regard the interior of land,,, Let us speak of it as the Southern Heartland, in contradistinction to the North- ern Heartland of Asia and Europe. Notwithstanding their very different lati- tudes the two Heartlands present other striking similarities. A great belt of forest, mainly of the evergreen type of the pines and firs, spreads from North Germany and the Baltic shore right across to Manchuria, connecting by a forest-ribbon, as it were, the forests of Europe with those of the Pacific Coast. South of this forest zone the Heart- land lies open, with trees only along the river banks and upon the mountains. This vast, open ground is a luscious prairie along the southern border of the forest, and brilliant with bulb-flowers in the spring-time, but southward, as the aridity increases, the grass becomes coarser and more sparse. The whole grassland, rich and poor, is conveniently spoken of as the Steppes, although that name properly belongs only to the less fertile southern tracts which surround the desert patches of Turkestan and Mongolia. The THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 105 Steppes were probably the original habitat of the horse, and hi their southern parts of the two-humped camel (Fig. 18). FIG. 17. The Southern Heartland. = River falls. <- Lines of Arab invasion. The Southern Heartland also has its wide open grasslands, which in the Sudan gradually J 106 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY increase in fertility from the edge of the Sahara towards the tropical forests of the Guinea Coast and the Congo. The forests do not spread completely across to the Indian Ocean, but leave a belt of grassy upland which connects the grasslands of the Sudan with those of South Africa, and this immense, open ground, thus continuous from the Sudan to the Cape Veldt, is the home of the ante- lopes, zebras, and other large, hoofed game, which correspond to the wild horses and wild asses of the Northern Heartland. Though the zebra has not been successfully domesti- cated, and the South African natives had no usual beast of burden, yet the horse and the one-humped camel of Arabia were early introduced into the Sudan, (in both Heart- lands, therefore, although to a greater extent in the Northern than in the Southern, mobility by the aid of animals has been available to replace the riverwise and coastwise mobility of the ships of the Atlantic and Pacific coast- The Northern Heartland adjoins Arabia, as we have seen, for many hundred miles where the Iranian Upland drops to the Euphrates Valley ; the Southern Heartland, at its north- eastern corner in Abyssinia and Somaliland, grasps, though with an interval of sea, the THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 107 southern fertile angle of Arabia, known as Yemen. So the Steppes of Arabia, enfram- ing its deserts, serve as a passage-land between the Northern and Southern Heartlands ; and there is also the way by the banks of the Nile through Nubia. Thus it will be realised that the Northern Heartland, Arabia, and the Southern Heartland afford a broad, grassy way for horsemen and camel-men from Siberia through Persia, Arabia, and Egypt into the Sudan, and that but for the tsetse-fly and other plagues men would probably have pene- trated on horseback and camel-back south- ward almost to the Cape of Good Hope. Outside Arabia, the Sahara, and the two Heartlands, there remain in the World-Island only two comparatively small regions, but those two regions are the most important on the Globe. Around the Mediterranean, and in the European peninsulas and islands, there dwell four hundred million people, and in the southern and eastern coastlands of Asia, or, to use the historic expression, in the Indies, there dwell eight hundred million people. In these two regions, therefore, are three- quarters of the people of the world. From our present point of view the most pertinent way of stating this great fact is to say that four-fifths of the population of the Great 108 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Continent, the World-Island, live in two regions which together measure only one-fifth of its area. r. i o FIG. 18. The Steppes. These two regions resemble one another hi certain other very important respects. In THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 109 the first place, their rivers are for the most part navigable continuously from the ocean. ,t^< v efp ////// Grasslands. In the Indies we have this series of large rivers descending to the open sea; Indus, 110 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawady, Salwen, Menam, Mekong, Songho, Sikiang, Yangtse, Hoangho, Peiho, Liauho, Amur. Most of them are navigable from their mouths for some hundreds of miles ; a British battleship once steamed up the Yangtse to Hankow, five hundred miles from the sea. There is not much space for such large rivers in peninsular Europe, but the Danube, Rhine, and Elbe cany a great traffic in direct con- nection with the ocean. Mannheim, three hundred miles up the Rhine, was one of the principal ports of Europe before the War ; barges a hundred yards long and of a thou- sand tons burden lay beside its wharves. For the rest, the peninsulation of Europe, which limits the development of rivers, itself offers even greater facilities for mobility by water. The similarity of these two ' Coastlands ' is not limited to the navigability of their rivers. If we clear away from the more arid zone on the rainfall map of the World-Island the patches indicative of merely local rains, due to mountain groups, we perceive at once the pre-eminence of the coastlands in fertility, owing to their widespread rainfall on the plains as well as hi the mountains. The Monsoon winds of the summer carry the THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 111 moisture of the ocean from the south-west on to India and from the south-east on to China ; the west winds from the Atlantic bring ram at all seasons upon Europe, and in the winter time upon the Mediterranean. Both coastlands are therefore rich with tillage, and for that reason nourish their great populations. Thus Europe and the Indies are the regions of the ploughmen and ship- men ; whereas the Northern Heartland, Arabia, and the Southern Heartland have for the most part been unploughed, and are inaccessible to sea-going ships. On the other hand, they are naturally adapted to the mobility of horsemen and camel-men, with their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. Even on the savannahs of Tropical Africa, where horses and camels are absent, the wealth of the natives is chiefly of cattle and sheep. These are of course broad generalisa- tions, with many local exceptions ; they are none the less truly and sufficiently descriptive of immense geographical realities. 1 '. P** * * 9 , that is to say, that have conditioned History, and have thus led to the present distribution of population and . civilisation. These same realities have to-day begun to take on . new aspects, owing to the higher organisation of food production on the richer grasslands. * 112 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Let us now call History to our aid, for no practical idea, no idea which moves men to action, can be grasped statically ; we must come to it with a momentum of thought either from our own experience or from the history of the race. The oases of the East Fio. 19. Northern Arabia. count in poetry as the Gardens of the World, only because they are approached over the desert ! Recorded History begins in the great oases round the north of Arabia. The first Inter- national Politics of which we have definite knowledge were concerned with the inter- THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 113 course between two States which had grown up on the alluvial flats of the Lower Euphrates and Lower Nile ; the maintenance of dykes to keep out the water, and of canals to dis- r~ tribute water, inevitably gives an impulse to social order and discipline. There was a, Fio. 20. The mobile conquerors of the ploughed lands. certain difference in the two civilisations which may well have been the basis of interchange between them. In Egypt the rocky sides of the relatively narrow valley offered stone for building, and the papyrus reed afforded a material for writing ; whereas building was of brick hi the broad plain of Babylonia, and H clay tablets bore the cuneiform inscriptions. The road between the two countries ran westward from the Euphrates across the Syrian angle of the Arabian Desert, past the wells o^?almyrap to Damascus, which was built in ~tEe~ oasis formed by the streams Abana and Pharpar descending from Anti- Lebanon and Hermon. From Damascus there were alternative ways into Egypt ; the lower by the coast, and the upper along the edge of the desert plateau east of the Jordan Valley. Aloof, on the rocky ridge of Judea, between these upper and lower ways, was the hill fortress of Jerusalem. In a monkish map, contemporary with the Crusades, which still hangs in Hereford Cathedral, Jerusalem is marked as at the geometrical centre, the navel, of the world, and on the floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem they will show you to this day the precise spot which is the centre. If our study of the geographical realities, as we now know them in their completeness, is leading us to right conclusions, the mediaeval ecclesiastics were not far wrong. If the World- Island be inevitably the principal seat of humanity on this Globe, and if Arabia, as the passage-land from Europe to the Indies and from the Northern to the Southern Heartland, THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 115 be central in the World-Island, then the hill citadel of Jerusalem has a strategical position with reference to world-realities not differing essentially from its ideal position in the per- spective of the Middle Ages, or its strategical position between ancient Babylon and Egypt. As the War has shown, the Suez Canal carries the rich traffic between the IncHes and Europe to within striking distance of an army based on Palestine, and already the trunk railway is being built through the coastal plain by Jaffa, which will connect the Southern with the Northern Heartland. Who owns Damascus, moreover, will have flank access to the alternative route between the oceans down the Euphrates Valley. It cannot be wholly a coincidence that in the self-same region should be the starting point of History and the crossing point of the most vital of modern highways. : ^b/ZiiL^ In the dawn of History we find the children of Shem, the Semites, conquering the culti- vated margins of the Arabian deserts ; there is no small similarity between the ring of their settlements round the sea of sand, and Fio. 21. A mediaeval Wheel-map. 116 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY the settlements of the Greeks round the ^Egean Sea. The invasion of the Promised Land ^ from beyond the Jordan by the Beni-Israel, : ^ the Children of Israel, was probably but one v ^'of many like descents of the Bedouin. The r Chaldees, from whose city of Ur on the desert border Abraham migrated along the beaten ack into Palestine, were Semites who sup- planted the non-Semitic Accadians in the land which became Babylonia ; and the O ^ Dynasty of the Shepherd Kings in Egypt was also apparently of Semitic origin. So it came about that all the peoples of Arabia Arabs, Babylonians, Assyrians, Syrians, Phoenicians, x^-. and Hebrews spoke dialects of the same ^r- Semitic family of speech. To-day Arabic is > ^ the universal tongue from the Taurus to the \ Gulf of Aden, and from the Persian Moun- tains to the oases in the Sahara west of the Nile. The Arabian tableland drops steeply to the sea shores around in all directions save one ; north-eastward it shelves gradually down to the depression occupied by the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf. That depression is 1800 miles long, from the gorge by which the Euphrates issues from its source valley in the Armenian Plateau to the Strait of Ormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf ; throughout THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 117 its length it is overlooked by the range of the Persian Mountains, the high Iranian brink of the Heartland. One of the great events of Classical History was when the Persian Highlanders came down on to the Euphrates plain under their King Cyrus, and, after con- quering Babylon, passed on by the Syrian road through Damascus to the conquest of Egypt. The gorge by which the Euphrates escapes from the Armenian upland is more than 800 miles in a direct line from the river mouth and only a little more than 100 miles from the north-eastern corner of the Mediter- ranean Sea near Aleppo. Immediately west of this gorge the High Upland of Armenia, some one and a half miles in average eleva- tion, drops to the much lower peninsular tableland of Asia Minor. A second great event in Classical History was when the Macedonians, under King Alexander, having crossed the Dardanelles and traversed the open centre of Asia Minor, descended by the Taurus passes into Cilicia, and struck through Syria into Egypt, and then from Egypt back through Syria to the Euphrates, and down the Eu- phrates to Babylon. It is true that Alexander thus led his Macedonians overland into Arabia, but their attack was really based on sea-power, 118 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY as is evident from the rapid rise which ensued of the great Greek-speaking ports of Alexandria and Antioch, the coastal capitals, that is to say, of seamen going inland. If these facts be considered with a geo- graphical eye, a belt of fertility will be seen extending north-westward up the Euphrates, then curving to southward along the rain- gathering mountains of Syria, and ending westward in Egypt. It is a populous belt, for it is inhabited by the settled ploughmen. Except for two intervals of sterility, the trunk road of antiquity ran through its corn-fields from Babylon to Memphis. The key to some of the greater events of Ancient History is to be found in the subjection of the peoples of this agricultural strip now to this and now to that neighbouring race of superior mobility. From the south, with all the depth of Arabia behind them, the Camel-men advanced north- eastward against Mesopotamia, north-west- ward against Syria, and westward against Egypt ; from the north-east, with all the vast depth of the Heartland behind them, the Horsemen came down from the Iranian upland into Mesopotamia ; and from the north-west, whether across the peninsula of Asia Minor or directly to the Levantine shore, came the Shipmen against Syria and Egypt, THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 119 having behind them all the water-ways of Europe. 1 In Asia the Romans did but take over the western portion of the Macedonian conquests. As the Rhine and Danube, defended by the Legions, marked the extent of Roman pene- tration northward from the Mediterranean, so the Upper Euphrates, where it flows from north to south before bending south-eastward, marked the limit, defended by other Legions, of their eastward penetration from the Medi- terranean. (jEhe Roman Empire was, in fact, in the large sense, a local Empire ; it be- longed wholly to the Atlantic Coastland. The further provinces which had been under the Macedonian sway fell in Roman times to the Parthians, successors of the Persians, who in their turn descended from Iran upon Mesopotam J*W- *tAju* |dHU? tfto-C ~ Once more came the opportunity of the camel-men. Inspired by the preaching of Mohammed, the Arabs of the central oasis of Nejd, and of its western extension in the u Hedjaz of Mecca and Medina, sent forth the ' Saracen armies, who drove the Parthians from Mesopotamia, and the Romans from Syria and Egypt, and established a chain of inland Capitals Cairo, Damascus, and Bagh- * See Fig. 20 on p. 113. 120 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY dad in the ancient trackway of fertility. From this fertile base the Saracen power was carried into all the regions around in such manner as to make a bid for a truly World- Empire. North-eastward the Mohammedans ascended from Baghdad into Iran by the same passway which had guided the Parthians and Persians downward, and they spread even into Northern India. Southward they crossed from the Yemen headland of Arabia to the African coast south of the Sahara, and penetrated on their camels and horses through the whole breadth of the Sudan. Thus, like a vast eagle, their Empire of Land-power spread its wings from the Arabian Centre- land, on the one hand over the Northern Heartland, far into the depths of Asia, and on the other hand over the Southern Heart- land equally far into the depths of Africa. But th Saracens were not content with a dominion based only on the means of mobility proper to their steppes and deserts ; like their predecessors, the Phoenicians and Shebans, they took to the sea. Westward they tra- velled along the north coast of Africa, both on sea and land, until they came to two countries, Barbary and Spain, whose broad tablelands, neither utterly sterile like the Sahara, nor yet forested like most of the THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 121 European Peninsula, repeated in some degree the conditions of their own homeland. On the other hand, eastward from Yemen, at the mouth of the Red Sea, and from Oman, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, they sailed on the summer Monsoon to the Malabar coast of India, and even to the far Malay Islands, and returned home on the winter Monsoon. Thus the Arab dhows sketched out a Sea- Empire, extending from the Straits of Gib- raltar to the Straits of Malacca, from the Atlantic gate to the Pacific gate. This vast Saracen design of a northward and southward Dominion of Camel-men crossed by a westward and eastward Dominion of Shipmen was vitiated by one fatal defect ; it lacked in its Arabian base the necessary man- power to make it good. But no student of the realities about which must turn the stra- tegical thought of any government aspiring to world-power can afford to lose sight of the warning thus given by History. The Saracen Empire was overthrown, not from Europe or the Indies, but from the Heartland in the north a significant fact. Arabia is sea-girt or desert-girt in every other direction but towards the Heartland. 122 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY The western sea-power of the Arabs was no doubt countered from Venice and Genoa, and their eastern sea-power was subdued by the Portuguese after they had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, but the downfall of the Saracens in Arabia itself was due to Turkish land-power. We must give some further consideration to the characteristics of the great Northern Heartland, and in the first place to those of the long Grassy Zone which, south of the Forest Zone, extends across its whole breadth, overlapping west- ward and eastward some distance into the adjoining parts of the two Coastlands. The steppes begin in the centre of Europe, where the Hungarian Plain is completely sur- rounded by a ring of forested mountains, the Eastern Alps and the Carpathians. 1 To-day fields of wheat and maize have in large part replaced the native grass, but a hundred years ago, before the railways had brought markets within reach, the sea-like levels of Hungary east of the Danube were a prairie land, and the wealth of the Hungarians was almost exclusively in horses and cattle. Beyond the forested barrier of the Carpathians begin the steppes of the main belt, spreading east- ward, with the shore of the Black Sea to the 1 See Fig. 18, on p. 108. THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 123 south and the edge of the Russian Forest to the north. The forest edge crosses the Russian Plain sinuously, but in a generally oblique direction, from the northern end of the Carpathians in the fiftieth parallel of latitude to the foot of the Ural Range in the fifty-sixth parallel. Moscow stands a short way within the forest, where are the broad clearings which constituted all of inhabited Russia until the recent colonisation of the steppe southward. As far as the Volga and the Don the wheat-fields have now in large measure replaced the steppe grass, but until a hundred years ago the Cossack outposts of Russia were still based on the Dnieper and Don Rivers, the trees along whose banks alone broke the vast levels of waving grass or of snow. The forests which clothe the end of the Ural Mountains form a promontory southward into the open steppes, but the grass is con- tinuous through the gateway of plain which leads from Europe into Asia between the Ural Range and the northern end of the Caspian Sea. Beyond this gateway the steppes expand again to even greater breadth than in Europe. To the north of them are still the forests, but to the south are now the deserts and sub-arid steppes of Turkestan. The Transiberian rail- 124 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY way traverses the Grassy Zone from Chelya- binsk, the station at the eastern foot of the Ural Mountains where the lines from Petrograd and Moscow unite, to Irkutsk on the Angara River just below its exit from Lake Baikal. Wheat-fields are beginning hi large measure to replace the grass along the line of the railway, but the thread of settled population is still a narrow one, and the Tartar and Khirghiz horsemen are still nomad over wide areas. The edge of the forest bends southward along the boundary between Western and Eastern Siberia, for Eastern Siberia is filled with forested mountains and hills, which fall in elevation gradually from the Transbaikalian Plateau into the north-eastern promontory of Asia towards Behring Strait. The Grassy Zone bends south with the forest and con- tinues eastward over the lower level of- the Mongolian uplands. The slope upward from the Great Lowland into Mongolia is through the * Dry Strait ' of Zungaria, between the Tianshan Mountains on the south and Altai Mountains on the north. Beyond Zun- garia the steppes, now at upland level, con- tinue round the southern edge of the forested Altai and Transbaikalian Mountains, with the Gobi Desert to the south of them, until they reach the upper tributaries of the Amur THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 125 River. There is a forest belt along the eastern, outward face of the Kingan Range, by which the Mongolian upland drops to the lowland of Manchuria, but there is a last detached grassland in Manchuria, to be compared with the similarly detached grassland of Hungary five thousand miles away at the west end of the steppe belt. Grassy Manchuria does not, however, extend through to the Pacific shore, for there a coast range of mountains, thickly forested, enframes the open country and deflects the eastward flowing Amur to a northward mouth. Let us clear this long ribbon of steppes of its modern railways and corn-fields, and people it again in imagination with horse-riding Tartars, who are none other than Turks ; it is said that the Turkish language of Con- stantinople can to this day be understood by the Arctic tribe at the mouth of the Lena River. For some recurrent reason it may have been owing to spells of droughty years these Tartar mobile hordes have from time to time in the course of history gathered their whole strength together and fallen like a devastating avalanche upon the settled agri- cultural peoples either of China or Europe. In the West we hear of them first as the Huns, who in the middle of the fifth century after 126 ^DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Christ rode into Hungary under a great but terrible leader, Attila. From Hungary they raided in three directions north-westward, westward, and south-westward. North-west- ward they caused so much commotion among the Germans, that those tribes nearest the sea, the Angles and Saxons, were in part driven over the water to a new home in the island of Britain. Westward they penetrated far into Gaul, but were defeated in the great battle of Chalons, where the Frank, the Goth, and the Roman Provincial, standing shoulder to shoulder against the common enemy from the East, began that fusion from which has sprung the modern French people. South-westward Attila advanced as far as Milan, destroying on the way the important Roman cities of Aquileia and Padua, whose inhabitants fled to the lagoons by the sea and there founded Venice. At Milan Attila was met by Bishop Leo of Rome, and, for whatever reason, went no farther, with the result that the Roman See won a great prestige. Thus can it be said with much truth that from the reaction of the Coastmen against this hammer blow from the Heartland, there arose the English and French nationalities, the sea-power of Venice, and the supreme mediaeval institution of the Papacy. Who shall say what great THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 127 and, let us hope, beneficent things may not grow out of the reaction which has been com- pelled by the hammer blow of our modern Huns ? FIG. 22. Forest and Steppes in East Europe. (After a diagram in my paper on ' The Geographical Pivot o History ' in the Geographical Journal for 1904.) The Hunnish raids ceased after a few years, for it is probable that the man-power behind them was not very considerable ; the force of a blow may be due as much to its speed as 128 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY to its weight. But some Hunnish remnants probably lingered in the grassy vacancy of the Hungarian Plain, to be absorbed by new tribes of horsemen advancing westward, the Avars, against whom Charlemagne made war, and presently the Magyars. In the year 1000 these Magyar Turks, who had done much ravaging in Germany during the previous century, were converted to Christianity from Rome, and became thenceforth some sort of a bulwark to Latin Christendom, so that no more Tartars were admitted into Hungary. But the economic life of the Magyars con- tinued in the main to be that of the steppes until less than a hundred years ago. When we reflect that through several centuries of the Dark Ages the Norse pagans in their ships were at piracy on the northern seas, and the Saracen and Moorish infidels in their ships at piracy on the Mediterranean, and that the horse-riding Turks from Asia raided thus into the very heart of the Christian Peninsula when it was clasped by hostile sea-power, we have some idea of the pounding, as between pestle and mortar, which went to the making of modern Europe. The pestle was land-power from the Heartland. THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 129 If these historical events be followed on the map, the strategical fact of decisive meaning which emerges is that the continuous plains of the Great Lowland overlap from the Continental and Arctic drainage of the Heart- land into the East of the European peninsula. There was no impediment to prevent the horse- men from riding westward into regions drained by such wholly European rivers as the Dnieper and Danube. In sharp contrast to this open passage from the Heartland into Europe is the system of mighty barriers which separate the Heartland along its eastern and south-eastern border from the Indies. The populous lands of China proper and India lie round the eastern and southern slopes of the most massive uplands on the Globe ; the southern face of the Himalaya Range, curving for 1500 miles along the north of India, rises from levels at most only 1000 feet above the sea to peaks of 28,000 and 29,000 feet. But the Himalaya is only the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, which is as large as France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary put together, and of an average elevation of 15,000 feet, or the peak height of Mont Blanc in the Alps. As compared with such facts as these, the distinction between the lower uplands and the lowlands, between the I 130 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Iranian Upland, let us say, and the Great Lowland, becomes altogether subordinate. Tibet, with its attendant Himalaya, Pamirs, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Tianshan call them together the Tibetan Heights has no parallel on Earth for combined height and area, or, hi a single word, for massiveness. When the Sahara shall be crossed and re- crossed daily by the traffic of civilisation, it is probable that Tibet, the ' roof of the world,' will still deflect round its flanks and widely separate the overland routes into China and India, thus giving a special significance to the North-west Frontiers of those two countries. North of Tibet, a considerable part of which has a continental drainage, and is, therefore, included within the Heartland, spreads the Mongolian Upland, also largely of the Heart- land. This Mongolian Upland is of a much lower elevation than Tibet, and is in fact comparable in point of level with the Iranian Upland. Two natural ways come over the arid surface of Mongolia to drop down into the fertile lowland of China ; the one through the Province of Kansu, round the north- eastern corner of Tibet, to the great city of Sinan, of a million inhabitants ; the other directly south-eastward from Lake Baikal to THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 131 Pekin, which city also has about a million inhabitants. Sinan and Pekin, thus just within the Chinese Lowland, are capitals founded by conquerors from the Heartland. Across the Iranian Upland into India there are also two natural ways, the one over the lofty but narrow spine of the Hindu Kush, down the Cabul Valley, and over the terminal Kaibar Pass to the crossing of the Indus River at Attock ; the other through Herat and Kandahar, round the ends of the Afghan ridges, and by the Bolan Gorge down to the Indus. Immediately east of the Indus River is the Indian Desert, extending from the ocean to within a short distance of the Himalaya, and the Bolan and Kaibar ways converge, therefore, through the ante-chamber of the Punjab to the inner entry of India, which is the passage left between the desert and the mountains. Here stands Delhi, at the head of the navigation of the Jumna-Ganges, and Delhi is a capital founded, like Sinan and Pekin in China, by conquerors from the Heartland. By these narrow and difficult ways both China and India have repeatedly been invaded from the Heartland, but the Empires thus founded have usually soon become detached from the rule of the Steppe- men. So was it, for instance, with the Moguls A A Fio. 23. The Tibetan Height* and the approach* to China and India from the Heartland. 134 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY of India, who were derived from the Mongols of the Interior. The conclusion to which this discussion leads is that the connection between the Heartland, and especially its more open western regions of Iran, Turkestan, and Siberia, is much more intimate with Europe and Arabia than it is with China and India, or yet with the Southern Heartland of Africa. The strong natural frontiers of the Sahara Desert and the Tibetan Heights have no equivalent where the Northern Heartland merges with Arabia and Europe. The close connection of these three regions is well typified by that geographical formula into which it was attempted to crystallise just now certain essential aspects of Mesopotamian and Syrian history ; the ploughmen of Mesopotamia and Syria have always been exposed to descents of the horsemen from the Heartland, of the camel-men from Arabia, and of the shipmen from Europe. None the less and indeed just because of its more transitional character the boundary between the Heartland on the one hand, and Arabia and Europe on the other, is worth following with some care. THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 135 The long range of the Persian Mountains bends westward round the upper end of Meso- potamia and becomes the Taurus Range, FIG. 24. The Heartland, with the addition of the basins of the Black and Baltic Seas, and of the uppermost (plateau) valleys of the Chinese and Indian rivers. which is the high southern brink of the penin- sular upland of Asia Minor. The surface of Asia Minor is a patch of steppes, verging on desert in the centre, where salt lakes receive 136 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY some of the streams from the Taurus ; but the larger rivers flow northward to the Black Sea. Beyond the break made by the ^Egean Sea, we have the great basin of the Danube, also draining into the Black Sea ; the head- streams of the Danube tributaries rise almost within sight of the Adriatic, but high on those Illyrian Uplands whose steep outer brink forms the mountain wall above the beautiful Dalmatian coast. That wall we name the Dinaric Alps. Thus the Taurus and the Dinaric Alps present steep fronts to the Mediterranean and Adriatic, but send long rivers down to the Black Sea. But for the Mge&n Sea, breaking through the uplands towards the Black Sea, and but for the Dardanelles, whose current races southward with the water of all the Black Sea rivers, these high, outward fronts of the Taurus and Dinaric Alps would be a single curving range, the edge of a continuous bar of land dividing the inner Black Sea from the outer Mediterranean and Adriatic. Were it not for the Dardanelles that edge would form the border of the Heartland, and the Black Sea and all its rivers would be added to the ' Continental ' systems of drain- age. When the Dardanelles are closed by land-power to the sea-power of the Mediter- 138 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY ranean, as they have been in the Great War, that condition of things is in effect realised so far as human movements are concerned. The Roman Emperors put their Eastern capital at Constantinople, midway between the Danube and Euphrates frontiers, but Constantinople was to them more than the bridge-town from Europe into Asia. Rome, the Mediterranean Power, did not annex the northern shore of the Black Sea, and that sea, therefore, was itself a part of the frontier of the Empire. The steppes were left to the Scythians, as the Turks were then called, and at most a few trading stations were dotted by the seamen along the coast of the Crimea. Thus Constantinople was the point from which Mediterranean sea-power held the middle sea- frontier, as the land-power of the Legions held the western and eastern frontiers along the rivers. Under Rome, sea-power thus ad- vanced into the Heartland, if that term be understood, in a large, a strategical sense, as including Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula. Later history is no less transparent to the underlying facts of geography, but in the inverse direction. Some of the Turks from Central Asia turned aside from the way down into Arabia, and rode over the Median and THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 139 Armenian uplands into the open steppe of Asia Minor, and there made their home, just as the Magyar Turks only a century or two earlier rode round the north of the Black Sea into the Hungarian Steppe. Under great leaders of cavalry of the Ottoman dynasty, these Turks crossed the Dardanelles, and, fol- lowing the ' Corridor ' of the Maritza and Morava valleys through the Balkan Moun- tains, achieved the conquest of Magyar Hun- gary itself. From the moment that the city of Constantinople fell into Turkish hands in 1453, the Black Sea was closed to the Vene- tian and Genoese seamen. Under Rome, the realm of the seamen had been advanced to the northern shore of the Black Sea ; under the Ottoman Turks the Heartland, the realm of the horsemen, was advanced to the Dinaric Alps and the Taurus. This essential fact has been masked by the extension of Turkish dominion into Arabia outside the Heartland ; _ but\jt^is evident again to-day when Britain 4* + has reconquered Arabia for the Arabs,./ Within the Heartland, the Black Sea has oFlate been the path of strategical design eastward for our German enemy. We defined the Heartland originally in accordance with river drainage ; but does not history, as thus recounted, show that for the 140 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY purposes of strategical thought it should be given a somewhat wider extension ? Re- garded from the point of view of human mobility, and of the different modes of mobil- ity, it is evident that since land-power can to-day close the Black Sea, the whole basin of that sea must be regarded as of the Heart- land. Only the Bavarian Danube, of very little value for navigation, may be treated as lying outside. One more circumstance remains to be added, and we shall have before us the whole concep- tion of the Heartland as it emerges from the facts of geography and history. The Baltic is a sea which can now be ' closed ' by land-power. The fact that the German Fleet at Kiel was re- sponsible for the mines and submarines which kept the Allied squadrons from entering the Baltic does not, of course, in any way vitiate the statement that the closing was by land- power; the Allied Armies in France were there by virtue of sea-power, and the German sea defences of the Baltic were there as a result of land-power. It is of prime import- ance in regard to any terms of peace which are to guarantee us against future war that we should recognise that under the conditions of to-day, as was admitted by responsible Ministers in the House of Commons, the THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 141 Fleets of the Islanders could no more pene- trate into the Baltic than they could into the Black Sea. \Tne Heartland, for the purposes of strate- gical thinking, includes the Baltic Sea, the navigable Middle and Lower Danube, the Black Sea, Asia Minor, Armenia, Persia, Tibet, and Mongolia. Within it, therefore, were Brandenburg -Prussia and Austria-Hungary, as well as Russia a vast triple base of man- power, which was lacking to the horse-ride of history. The Heartland is the region to which, under modern conditions, sea-power can be refused access, though the western part of it lies without the region of Arctic and Continental drainage. There is one striking physical circumstance which knits it graphi- cally together ; the whole of it, even to the brink of the Persian Mountains overlooking torrid Mesopotamia, lies under snow in the winter time. The line indicative of an average freezing temperature for the whole month of January passes from the North Cape of Nor- way southward, just within the ' Guard ' of islands along the Norwegian shore, past Den- mark, across Mid-Germany to the Alps, and from the Alps eastward along the Balkan range."}The Bay of Odessa and the Sea of Azof~are frozen over annually, and also the 142 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY greater part of the Baltic Sea. At mid- winter, as seen from the moon, a 'Vast white shield would reveal the Heartland in its largest meaning. When the Russian Cossacks first policed the iteppes at the close of the Middle Ages, a great revolution was effected, for the Tartars, like the Arabs, had lacked the necessary man- V* 1 P ower u P n which to found a lasting Empire, but behind the Cossacks were the Russian <"" ploughmen, who have to-day grown to be a people of a hundred millions on the fertile plains between the Black and Baltic Seas. During the nineteenth century, the Russian Czardom loomed large within the great Heartland, and seemed to threaten all the marginal lands of Asia and Europe. To- wards the end of the century, however, the Germans of Prussia and Austria determined to subdue the Slavs and to exploit them for the occupation of the Heartland, through which run the land-ways into China, India, Arabia, and the African Heartland. The German military colonies of Kiauchau and East Africa were established as termini of the projected overland routes. To-day armies have at their disposal -not only the Trans-Continental Railway but also the Motor-Car. They have, too, the Aero- THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 143 plane, which is of a boomerang nature, a weapon of land-power as against sea-power. (Modern artillery, moreover, is very formidable against ships. In short, a great military >- jJbwer in possession of the Heartland and of v Arabia could take easy possession of the cross- ways of the world at 13uez\ Sea-power would have found it very difficult to hold the Canal if a fleet of submarines had been based from the beginning of the war on the Black Sea. We have defeated the danger on this occasion, but the facts of geography remain, and offer ever-increasing strategical opportunities to land-power as against sea-power. It is evident that the Heartland is as real a physical fact within the World-Island as is the World-Island itself within the Ocean, although its boundaries are not quite so clearly defined. Not until about a hundred years ago, however, was there available a base of man-power sufficient to begin to threaten the liberty of the world from within this citadel of the World-Island. No mere scraps of paper, even though they be the written constitution of a League of Nations, are under the conditions of to-day a sufficient guarantee that the Heartland will not again become the centre of a World-War. Now is the time, when the Nations are fluid, to con- Via. 26. The World-Island united, as it eoon will |^|. sufficient to annihilate you must decide before- and which stroke is to be the feint and which the real attack. Berlin had not decided v i, between her political objectives Hamburg ** and overseas dominion or Baghdad and the .Heartland and therefore her strategical aim also was uncertain. 200 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY The German blunder, under compelling destiny, having given us Victory, it is essen- tial that we should focus our thought on the stable resettlement of the affairs of East Europe and the Heartland. If we accept anything less than a complete solution of the Eastern Question in its largest sense we shall merely have gained a respite, and our de- scendants will find themselves under the necessity of marshalling their power afresh for the siege of the Heartland. The essence of the resettlement must be territorial, for in East Europe, and in still greater measure in the remainder of the Heartland, we have to deal with regions whose economic develop- ment has only commenced. Unless you look forward, the growth of the peoples will by and by unbalance your settlement. No doubt it may be urged that German mentality will be altered by the German defeat. He would be a sanguine man, how- ever, who would trust the future peace of the world to a change in the mentality of any nation. Look back to old Froissard or to Shakespeare, and you will find your English- man, Scotsman, Welshman, and French- man with all their essential characteristics already fixed. The Prussian is a definite type of humanity with his good and his bad THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 201 points, and we shall be wise if we act on the assumption that his kind will breed true to its type. However great the defeat which in the end we may have inflicted on our chief enemy, we should only be cheapening our own achievement if we did not recognise in the North German one of the three or four most viiile races of mankind. Even with revolution in Germany let us not be toe sure in regard to its ultimate effect. The German revolutions of 1848 were almost comic in their futility. Since Bismarck there has only been one German Chancellor with political insight, and he Von Billow has declared hi nis book on Imperial Germany that 'the Geiman has always accomplished his greatest \\orks under strong, steady, and firm guidance. The end of the present dis- order may onlj be a new ruthless organisa- tion, and ruthless organisers do not stop when they hav attained the objects which they at first set ?efore them. It will be replied, of course, that though Prussian mentality remain unchanged, and though a really stable Prussian Democracy be slow in its development, yet that Germany will, in any case, lie so impoverished that she cannot do harm for the better part of a cen- tury to come. Is toere not, however, in that 202 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY idea a misreading of the real nature of riches and poverty under modern conditions ? Is it not productive power which now counts rather than dead wealth ? Shall we not all of us and now in some degree even the Americans also have spent our dead capital, and shall we not all of us, the Germans in- cluded, be starting again in the productive race practically from scratch ? The world was astonished at the rapidity with which France recovered from her disaster of 1870, but the power of industrial production was as nothing then to what it is now. Sober calculation in regard to Britain leads to the conclusion that her increased productive power owing to re- organisation and new methods compelled by the War, should far exceed the interest and sinking fund even of her vast War debts. No doubt you have the Paris Eesolutions, and can deny to a refractory Germany the raw materials wherewith to conpete with you. If you resort to that methcd, however, you postpone your League of Nations, and you remain a League of Allies. Are you certain, moreover, that you would win in an econo- mic war ? You might undoubtedly handicap Germany, but a handicap may only lead to greater effort. Did not Hapoleon limit the Prussian Army after Jeia to 42,000 men THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 203 with the colours, and was not the Prussian effort to circumvent his prohibition the origin of the whole modern system of short-service national armies ? Economic war, with Ger- many exploiting the Slavs, and presently the Heartland, would in the long run merely serve to emphasise the distinction between the Continent and the Islands, and between land- power and sea-power, and no one who con- templates the unity of the Great Continent under modern railway conditions can view unconcernedly either the preparation for the World- War which would be inevitable, or the ultimate result of that War. We, the Western nations, have incurred such tremendous sacrifices in this conflict that we cannot afford to trust to anything that may happen at Berlin ; we must be secure hi any case. In other words, we must settle this question between the Germans and Slavs, and we must see to it that East Europe, like West Europe, is divided into self-contained nations. If we do that, we shall not only reduce the German people to its proper position in the world, a great enough position for any single people, but we shall also have created the conditions precedent to a League of Nations. You plead that if we inflict a decisive peace 204 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY we shall leave such bitter feelings that no workable League of Nations can ensue. You have in mind, of course, the results of the annexation of Alsace in 1871. But the lessons of History are not to be learned from a single instance. The great American Civil War was fought to a finish, and to-day the Southerners are as loyal to the Union as are the North- erners ; the two questions of Negro slavery and of the right of particular States to secede from the Federation were finally decided, and ceased to be the causes of quarrel. The Boer War was fought to a finish, and to-day General Smuts is an honoured member of the British Cabinet. The War of 1866, between Prussia and Austria, was fought to a finish, and within a dozen years Austria had formed the Dual Alliance with Prussia. If you do not now secure the full results of your victory and close this issue between the German and the Slav, you will leave ill-feeling which will not be based on the fading memory of a defeat, but on the daily irritation of millions of proud people. * * * * * The condition of stability in the territorial rearrangement of East Europe is that the division should be into three and not into THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 205 two State-systems. It is a vital necessity that there should be a tier of independent States between Germany and Russia. 1 The Russians are, and for one, if not two, genera- tions must remain, hopelessly incapable of resisting German penetration on any basis but that of a military autocracy, unless they be shielded from direct attack. The Russian peasantry cannot read ; they have obtained the only reward they looked for when they sided with the revolutionaries of the towns, and now as small proprietors they hardly know how to manage their own country-sides. The middle class have so suffered that they were ready to accept order even from the hated Germans. As for the workmen of the towns, only a small minority of the Russian popula- tion, but because of their relative education and of their command of the centres of com- munication the rulers to-day of the country, Kultur knows well how to ' influence ' them. 1 The details of the discussion of the territorial resettlement which here follow will, of course, become in large measure obsolete with the announcement of the decisions of the Peace Congress. My object is not, however, so much to debate certain solutions of the problems immediately confronting us, as to give a concrete aspect to the general idea which I am endeavouring to build up. My purpose will still be served if it is borne in mind that what I have written on these particulars represent* the outlook at Christmas 1913. In the opinion of those who know Russia best, autocratic rule of some sort is almost inevit- able if she is to depend on her own strength to cope with the Germans. The Slav and kindred nations which inhabit the borderland between the Germans and the Russians are, however, of a very different calibre. Consider the Czechs : have they not stood proof against Bolshevism and asserted their capacity of nationhood under amazing conditions in Russia ? Have they not shown the most extraordinary political capacity in creating anew and maintaining Slav Bohemia, though beset on three sides by Germany and on the fourth side by Hun- gary ? Have they not also made Bohemia a hive of modern industry and a seat of modern learning ? They, at any rate, will not lack the will to order and to independence. Between the Baltic and the Mediterranean you have these seven non-German peoples, each on the scale of a European State of the second rank the Poles, the Bohemians (Czechs and Slovaks), the Hungarians (Mag- yars), the South Slavs (Serbians, Croatians, and Slovenes), the Rumanians, the Bulgar- ians, and the Greeks. Of these, two are among our present enemies the Magyars and the Bulgarians. But the Magyars and "' v-6 Petnograd \ 7* >..*- * \ *,. o -\ *" Fia. 31. The Middle Tier of States between Germany and Russia. Many boundary questions have still to be determined. 208 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Bulgarians are engirt by the other five peoples, and neither of them will be powerful for harm without Prussian support. Let us count over these seven peoples. First we have the Poles, some 20 million of them, with the river Vistula for their arterial water-way, and the historic cities of Cracow and Warsaw. The Poles are a more generally civilised people than the Russians, even in that part of Poland which has been tied to Russia ; in the Prussian province of Posen they have enjoyed the advantages of Kultur, without some of the debasement which Kultur brought to the master German. Un- doubtedly there are strong currents of party among the Poles, but now that the Polish aris- tocracy of Galicia is no longer bribed to the support of the Hapsburg throne by leave to oppress the Ruthenians of East Galicia, at least one motive of party, one vested interest, should have disappeared. By some means the new Poland must be given access to the Baltic Sea, not only be- cause that is essential to her economic inde- pendence, but also because it is desirable to have Polish ships on the Baltic, which stra- tegically is a closed sea of the Heartland, and, further, there must be a complete terri- torial buffer between Germany and Russia. THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 209 Unfortunately the province of East Prussia, mainly German by speech and Junker by sentiment, would be detached from Germany by any strip of Poland going down to the sea. Why should we not contemplate an exchange of peoples as between Prussia east of the Vistula, and Polish Posen ? l During this War we have undertaken much vaster things, both in the way of mere transport and also of organisation. In the past, in order to deal with such difficulties, diplo- matists have resorted to all manner of ' servi- tudes ' as the land lawyers would say. But rights-of-way over other people's property usually become inconvenient and lead to dis- putes. Would it not pay Humanity to bear the cost of a radical remedy in this case, a remedy made just and even generous towards individuals in every respect ? Each pro- prietor should be given the option of exchang- ing his property and retaining his nationality or of retaining his property and changing his nationality. But if he selects the latter 1 Since I wrote this paragraph, M. Venizelos, in an interview with a Times correspondent, dated Paris, January 14, 1919, has used these words : ' This would still leave some hundreds of thousands of Greeks under Turkish rule in the centre of Asia Minor. For this there is only one cure, and that is to encourage a wholesale and mutual transfer of population.' O 210 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY alternative there must be no reservation of special rights in respect of schools and other social privileges. The United States in her schools sternly imposes the English language on all her immigrants. Because the conquer- ors of old time did their work ruthlessly, countries like France and England are to-day homogeneous and free from that mixture of races which has made the Near East a plague to humanity. Why should we not use our modern powers of transport and organisation to achieve the same happy condition of affairs justly and generously. The reasons for doing so in this particular instance are far reaching ; a Polish Posen would bite a very threatening bay into the Eastern frontier of Germany, and a German East Prussia would be a stepping-stone for German penetration into Russia. 1 Next among our ' Border ' peoples are the Czechs and Slovaks, until recently severed by the line dividing Austria from Hungary, as the Poles were severed by the frontiers between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The Czechs and Slovaks together number perhaps nine millions ; they will make one of the most 1 To meet the obvious argumentum ad hominem, let me say that I see no really comparable strategical necessities in the case of Ireland I THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 211 virile little peoples in Europe, and theyjare equipped with a remarkable country, offering coal, metals, timber, water-power, corn, and wine, and centred on the main line of railway from the Baltic and Warsaw to Vienna and the Adriatic. Then we come to the South Slavs Jugo means South in their three tribes of Slovenes, Croatians, and Serbs. They number about twelve millions. They also have been sun- dered by the line between Austria and Hungary ; moreover, they are of the rival Latin and Greek Churches. For any one who knows the Balkans, it is eloquent testimony indeed to the effect of Austro-Hungarian tyranny that the Roman Catholic Slovenes and Croatians should have made the pact of Corfu with the Greek Orthodox Serbs. The South Slavs will have access to Dalmatian ports on the Adriatic, and one of the trunk railways of the world will run down the Save Valley to Belgrade, and then through the Morava and Maritza ' Corridor ' to Constantinople. Rumania is the next State of this middle east of Europe. The natural focus of Ru- mania is the great Transylvanian bastion of the Carpathians, with fruitful valleys, metal- liferous mountains, oil wells, and splendid forests. The Transylvanian peasantry is 212 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Rumanian, but a * privileged ' minority of Magyars and ' Saxons ' have been the rulers. Here again it should be no quite impossible feat of statesmanship to arrange for an equit- able exchange of homes, or a full acceptance of Rumanian Nationality, though it must be admitted that the hostility between Saxon and Ruman is not so acute as that between Prussian and Pole. The rest of Rumania, the present kingdom, is the glacis, eastward and southward, of Transylvania, watered by the Transylvanian rivers. This fertile glacis is one of the chief sources in Europe of oil, wheat, and maize ; the twelve million Rumanians will be a rich people. At Galatz, Braila, and Constanza they have ports on the Black Sea, and it will be a prime interest of all free peoples that there should be Rumanian ships on that sea, for it is naturally a closed water of the Heartland. The time will never come when the League of Nations will be able to regard the Baltic and Black Seas without concern, for the Heart- land offers the basis of an all-powerful militarism. Civilisation consists in the con- trol of nature and of ourselves, and the League of Nations, as the supreme organ of united humanity, must closely watch the Heart- land and its possible organisers, for the same THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 213 reason that the control of the police in London and Paris is regarded as a national and not merely a municipal concern. The Greeks were the first of our seven peoples of the Middle Tier to achieve their emancipation from German control in this War for the simple reason that they are out- side the Heartland and therefore accessible to sea -power. But in these days of submarines and aeroplanes, the possession of Greece by a great Heartland power would probably carry with it the control of the World-Island ; the Macedonian history would be re-enacted. Now as to the Magyars and Bulgarians. The truth is that both of them were exploited by, although not subject to, the Prussians. Every one who knows Budapest is aware of the deeply alien feeling of the Magyars to- wards the Germans ; the recent alliance was strictly one of convenience and not of hearts. The ruling Magyar caste of about a million people has been oppressive of the other nine millions of its own race no less than of the subject races. The alliance with Prussia for it has in reality been an alliance with Prussia rather than with Austria has been strictly in return for support of the Magyar oligarchy. No doubt the Magyars have begotten deep feelings of hostility among the 214 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Slavs and Rumanians, but if there be no more profit to be made from farming Slavs in the German behalf, a democratic Hungary will sooner or later adapt herself to the new environment. The Bulgarians fought, let us remember, as allies of the Serbs against the Turks, and the difference between Serb and Bulgar, though bitter for the time being, is a family difference. It is a difference of recent growth, and based largely on rival ecclesiastical organisations of recent founda- tion. The Bulgarians must not be allowed to exploit their treachery in the Second Balkan War, but if an equitable settlement be dictated by the Allies, both nations, the Bulgarians and the Serbs, deeply war- weary, will probably accept it joyfully. For twenty years only one will, that of the German Czar Ferdinand, has counted in Bulgaria. The most important point of strategical significance in regard to these Middle States of East Europe is that the most civilised of them, Poland and Bohemia, lie in the North, in the position most exposed to Prussian aggression. Securely independent the Polish and Bohemian nations cannot be unless as the apex of a broad wedge of inde- pendence, extending from the Adriatic and Black Seas to the Baltic ; but seven inde- THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 215 pendent States, with a total of more than sixty million people, traversed by railways linking them securely with one another, and having access through the Adriatic, Black, and Baltic Seas with the Ocean, will together effectively balance the Germans of Prussia and Austria, and nothing less will suffice for that purpose. None the less the League of Nations should have the right under International Law of sending War fleets into the Black and Baltic Seas. This great deed of International Statesman- ship accomplished, and there would appear to be no impossibility of realising the demo- cratic ideal, the League of Nations, whose mirage has haunted our Western peoples from afar over the desert of War. What are the essential conditions which must be fulfilled if you are to have a real and potent League of Nations ? Viscount Grey, in his recent pamphlet, laid down two such conditions. The first was that * the Idea must be adopted with earnestness and conviction by the Execu- tive Heads of States.' The second was that ' the Governments and Peoples of the States willing to found it understand clearly that it will impose some limitation upon the national 216 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY action of each, and may entail some incon- venient obligation. The stronger nations must forgo the right to make their interests prevail against the weaker by force.' These are excellent and very necessary theses, but do they carry us far enough ? Before you undertake any general obligation, is it not well to consider what it is likely to mean in concrete terms ? Your League will have to reckon with certain realities. There was before the War an incipient League of Nations ; its members were the States party to the system of International Law. ;Have we not had to fight the War just because two of the greater States broke the International Law, first in regard to one and then another of the smaller States, and have not those two greater States very nearly succeeded in de- feating a very powerful League of Nations which intervened hi behalf of the Law ? In the face of such a fact, is it quite adequate to say that stronger nations must ' forgo ' the right to make their interests prevail by force against the weaker ? In a word, do not our ideals involve us in a circle unless we reckon with realities ? Is it not plain that if your League is to last there must be no nation strong enough to have any chance against the general THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 217 will of Humanity ? Or, to put the matter in another way ; there must be no pre- dominant partner or even group of partners in your League. Is there any case of a suc- cessful federation with a predominant partner? In the United States you have the great States of New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, but no one of them counts for more than a small fraction of the whole Union. In Canada you have Quebec and Ontario balancing one another, so that the smaller provinces of the Dominion are never likely to be bullied by either. In the Commonwealth of Australia you have the approximately equal States of New South Wales and Victoria. In Switzer- land not even the large Canton of Berne is anything like predominant. Has not German Federation been a pretence because of the dominance of Prussia ? Is not the chief difficulty in the way of devolution with hi the British Isles, even if Irishmen would agree among themselves, the predominance of Eng- land ? Did not this War originate from the fact that you allowed an almost dominant Germany to arise in Europe ? Have not the great Wars of the past in Europe come from the fact that one State in the European System, under Napoleon, Louis xiv., or Philip n., had become too powerful ? Is it 218 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY not necessary, if your League of Nations is to have any chance of success, to face this cumulative evidence and not to gloss it over ? Is there not also another Reality with which you must reckon ; the Reality of the Going Concern ? If the nations of your League are to settle down to a quiet life, there are two different ways, it seems to me, in which you will have to face the Reality of the Going Concern ; in respect of the Present and of the Future. What is meant by this Reality in the Present will best be conveyed by concrete consideration of the States available as the units to be leagued together. The British Empire is a Going Concern. You will not persuade a majority of Britons to risk the coherence of the Empire, which has so triumphantly stood the test of this War, for any paper scheme of a Universal League. It follows, therefore, that the governing units of the British Empire can only grow by gradual process into their place as units of your League. Yet the relations of six of them are already, in fact, the rela- tions of equality and, under their British League, of independency. Only last year was the last word said in that matter. The Prime Ministers of the Dominions are hence- forth to communicate directly with the Prime THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 219 Minister of the United Kingdom, and no longer through the subordinate Colonial Secre- tary ; the Parliament at Westminster is no longer to be called the Imperial Parliament but only the Parliament of the United King- dom. It only remains that the King should no longer be called King of the United Kingdom and of the Dominions beyond the Seas, but that the equality of all the Dominions should be recognised by some such title as King of all the Britains. Even in respect of realities though in such matters names become realities have we not now the certainty that the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia will each have its own fleet and army, to be put under a single strategical command only on the outbreak of War ? As regards popu- lation, too, is it not now a question of only a few years before Canada and Australia will equal the Motherland in power ? We shall then have the three minor Dominions New Zealand, South Africa, and Newfoundland counting the more because of the balance between the three major Dominions. France and Italy are Going Concerns. Are they going to enter a League in which the British Empire is a unit ? Fortunately we have achieved the single strategical command in the later stages of the War, so that the 220 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY name Versailles has now an added historic meaning. No longer merely through their Ambassadors, but hi the persons of their Prime Ministers, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy have acquired the habit of taking counsel together. These three countries of West Europe are not unfitted by any decisive inequality of size to be fellow members of a League. Is it not probable that occasions will occur when the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia may be called into con- ference with the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, France, and Italy ? They will be occasions of all the more value if you recog- nise the Going Concerns of to-day arid do not attempt to make merely paper progress. Remember that it required the peril of the German offensive of 1918 to secure the unity of strategical command. 1 Then what of the United States ? There is no good in pretending that the separate American States can be units in your League ; the Republic fought the greatest War in History, before this War, in order to weld them together. Yet the United States form something very like a predominant partner as against the separate allied countries of 1 Since this was written the Paris Conference has treated the British Empire as a hybrid a unit for some purposes. THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 221 West Europe. The United States must be in your League ; and that means that, for healthy working, the six Britains must he held together as a counterbalance. Fortu- nately 3000 miles of undefended frontier in North America constitute a fact of good omen, though, to be quite frank, it would signify more if the countries which that frontier has separated had been less unequal ; the test would have been more severe. But the need of a reasonable equality of power as between a considerable number of the members of the League, so that in future crises and they will occur it may not be exposed to danger from predominance in any quarter, is less urgent in respect of the insular than of the continental members. There are the obvious limitations of sea-power ; there are also natural boundaries which define the spread of any one insular, or even peninsular, base of power. The test of the League will be in the Heartland of the Continent. Nature there offers all the prerequisites of ultimate dominance in the world ; it must be for man by his foresight and by the taking of solid guarantees to prevent its attainment. Not- withstanding their revolutions the German and Russian peoples are Going Concerns, each with a powerful historical momentum. 622 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Therefore let the idealists who, now that the nations are locked into a single world system, rightly see in the League of Nations the only alternative to Hell on Earth, con- centrate their attention on the adequate sub- division of East Europe. With a Middle Tier of really independent States between Germany and Russia they will achieve their end, and without it they will not. Any mere trench- line between the German Powers and Russia, such as was contemplated by Naumann in his Central Europe, would have left German and Slav still in dual rivalry, and no lasting stabilitv could have ensued. But the 'Middle mr Tier,' supported by the outer nations of the World League, will accomplish the end of breaking-up East Europe into more than two State-systems. Moreover, the States of that Tier, of approximate equality of power, will themselves be a very acceptable group for the recruitment of the League. Once thus remove the temptation and open- ing to World-Empire, and who can say what will occur among the German and Russian peoples themselves ? There are already in- dications that Prussia, which, unlike England or France, is a purely artificial structure, will be broken into several Federal States. In one region the Prussians belong by history to East Europe and in another to West Europe. Is it not probable that the Russians will fall into a number of States in some sort of loose federation ? Germany and Russia have grown into great Empires out of opposi- tion to one another ; but the peoples of the Middle Tier Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks are much too unlike to federate for any purpose except defence, yet they are all so different both from Germans and Russians that they may be trusted to resist any new organisation of either great neighbour making towards the Empire of East Europe. There are certain strategical positions in the Heartland and Arabia which must be treated as of world importance, for their possession may facilitate or prevent a world domination. It does not, however, follow that it would be wise to commit them forth- with to an untried international administra- tion ; here, too, it is very necessary to bear in mind the truth of the Going Concern. Condominium has not, as a rule, been a success, for the reason that the agents of the joint protecting Powers almost inevitably take sides with the local nationalities or parties. The most effective method of inter- national control would seem to be that of 224 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY commissioning some one Power as trustee for humanity a different Power, of course, in the case of different positions. That was the method experimentally tried when Austria- Hungary was entrusted with the administra- tion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Con- gress of Berlin, and it succeeded so far as the material advancement of the protected pro- vinces was concerned. There is no reason why the new principle and the facts of the Going Concern should not be reconciled in the cases of Panama, Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Aden, and Singapore by regarding the American Republic and the British Empire as World Trustees for the peace of the Ocean and of the straits connecting the basins of the Ocean. This, however, would amount merely to a regularisation of existing facts. The test of the principle, as of most other World prin- ciples, is in connection with the Heartland and Arabia. The Islanders of the world cannot be indifferent to the fate either of Copenhagen or of Constantinople, or yet of the Kiel Canal, for a great Power in the Heartland and East Europe could prepare, within the Baltic and Black Seas, for War on the Ocean. During the present War it has taken the whole naval strength of the Allies to hold the North Sea and the Eastern Medi- THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 225 terranean. An adequate submarine cam* paign, based on the Black Sea from the begin- ning of the War, would probably have given security to an army operating overland against the Suez Canal. It follows, therefore, that Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and the outlets from the Baltic must be internationalised in some manner. In the case of Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia, it has been understood that Britain and France would undertake international trusts. Why should we not solve the problem of Constantinople by making that historic city the Washington of the League of Nations ? When the network of railways has covered the World-Island, Constantinople will be one of the most accessible places on the Globe by Railway, Steamer, and Aero- plane. From Constantinople the leading nations of the West might radiate light through precisely those regions, oppressed during many past centuries, in which light is most to be desired from the point of view of humanity at large ; from Constantinople we might weld together the West and the East, and permanently penetrate the Heartland with oceanic freedom. The Jewish National seat in Palestine will be one of the most important outcomes of p the War. That is a subject on which we can now afford to speak the truth. The Jew, for many centuries shut up in the Ghetto, and shut out of most honourable positions in Society, developed in an unbalanced manner and became hateful to the average Christian by reason of his excellent, no less than his deficient, qualities. German penetration has been conducted in the great commercial centres of the world in no small measure by Jewish agency, just as German domination in South-Eastern Europe was achieved through Magyar and Turk, with Jewish assistance. Jews are among the chief of the Bolsheviks of Russia. The homeless, brainful Jew lent himself to such internationalist work, and Christendom has no great right to be sur- prised by the fact. But you will have no room for these activities in your League of independent, friendly nations. Therefore a National Home, at the physical and historical centre of the world, should make the Jew ' range ' himself. Standards of judgment, brought to bear on Jews by Jews, should result, even among those large Jewish com- munities which will remain as Going Concerns outside Palestine. This, however, will imply the frank acceptance of the position of a Nationality, which some Jews seek to forget. THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 227 There are those who try to distinguish be- tween the Jewish religion and the Hebrew race, but surely the popular view of their broad identity is not far wrong. In the vast and populous regions of Asia and Africa which lie beyond the girdle of the great deserts and plateaux there are Going Concerns, such as the British Raj in India, which it would be folly indeed to shake down in your hurry to realise a world-symmetry for your League of Nations. But it is essential that neither Kiauchau nor East Africa should go back to the Power which took them with a keen strategical eye to the day when armies marching overland should find in each of them a citadel already prepared ; which took them, moreover, with the clear intention that the Chinese and the Negroes should be utilised as subsidiary man-power to help in the conquest of the World-Island. What part may ulti- mately be played by that half of the Human Race which lives in * The Indies ' no man can yet foresee, but it is the plain duty of the Insular peoples to protect the Indians and Chinese from Heartland conquest. German South-West Africa and the German Australasian Colonies must not be returned; the principle of independence within the League implies that, subject to an Inter- 228 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY national Trust in the case of a few critically important positions, each Nation must be mistress in her own house, and that principle holds in regard to South Africa and Australia. Any other principle would leave the seeds of future quarrels and would impede disarma- ment. So much in respect of the starting of the League and of the Going Concern in the Present. It remains for us to speak of the Going Concern in the Future. Viscount Grey has described the state of mind which will be required when we approach this great Inter- national enterprise : is there not something more precise to be said in that matter also ? I have expressed my belief that both Free Trade of the Laissez-faire type and Predatory Protection of the German type are principles of Empire, and that both make for War. Fortunately the younger Britains refused to accept the Free Trade of Manchester ; they used the fiscal independence granted to them by the Motherland to pursue that economic ideal which was foreshadowed by the great American statesman, Alexander Hamilton the ideal of the truly independent nation, balanced in all its development. This does THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 229 not in the least imply that a great inter- national trade should not be done, but it should be a trade so controlled that the effect of it is always tending towards the balance aimed at, and is not accumulating, beyond hope of recovery, economic one-sidedness. No stable League of Nations appears to me possible if any nation is allowed to practise commercial 'penetration,' for the object of that penetration is to deprive other nations of then* fair share of the more skilled forms of employment, and it is inevitable that a general soreness should ensue in so far as it succeeds. Nor, to speak quite plainly, is there any great difference in result if some nations feel that they are reduced to the position of hewers and drawers owing to the industrial specialisation of another country under the regime of un- restricted Cobdenism ; wherever an industry is so developed in one country that it can be content with no less than a world-market for its particular products, the economic balance of other countries tends to be upset. No important country, after this War, is going to allow itself to be deprived either of any ' key ' or of any 'essential' industry. 1 By the time 1 The distinction between these two terms is not always observed. Key industries are those which, although them- selves relatively small, are necessary to other and much greater 230 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY you have exhausted these two categories, you will find that you might just as well have adopted the attractive positive ideal of general economic independence instead of being driven from one expedient to another in mere defensiveness. If you attempt to maintain a negative Cobdenism with excep- tions, you will, under the conditions of the world that are opening before us, very soon build up a large and clumsy body of merely ad hoc machineries. A general system of low duties and bounties would enable you to deal quickly and lightly with each difficulty as it develops, because you would have the appro- priate machinery of control at your hand. But I am not here going into the detail of these questions of machinery ; I am dealing vith the question of ideal and aim. The Cob- ienite believes that international trade is good in itself, and that specialisation as between country and country, provided that industries. Thus, for instance, aniline dye-stuffs to the value of two million pounds a year were utilised in Great Britain before the War in textile and paper manufactures of the annual worth of 200 millions. The proportion was something like that of a key to the door which it unlocks. Essential industries there are which have not this character of a small key; such, for instance, in this twentieth century is the steel industry. It is well to preserve the distinction, because different defensive measures may perhaps be needed in the two cases. THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 231 it arises blindly under the guidance of natural causes, should not be thwarted. The Berliner, on the other hand, has also en- couraged economic specialisation among the nations, but he operates scientifically, accumu- lating in his own country those industries which give most, and most highly-skilled, employment. The result is the same in each case ; a Going Concern of Industry grips the nation and deprives it, as well as other nations, of true independence. The resulting differences accumulate to the point of quarrel and collision. There are three attitudes of mind in regard to the Going Concern which spell tragedy. There is Laissez-faire, which is surrender and fatalism. This attitude produces a condition comparable with that of a disease brought on by self -neglect ; the human body is a going concern which, becoming unbalanced in its functions, is organically affected, so that in the end no doctor's advice or even surgeon's scalpel can avail, since to stop the disease means the stoppage of life itself. No doubt it seemed, in the warm sunshine of Britain in the middle of last century, that the wiser political philosophy was to live for the day and to trust in Providence. Fortunately disease had not progressed to a fatal stage 232 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY when we came to the surgeon's table in August 1914. But a million men of military age classified as unfit for military service constitute a symptom which almost makes one thank God that the War came when it did. The second attitude of mind in relation to the Going Concern is that of Panic. This has been the attitude of Prussia, though it was hidden by the flattering philosophy of the Superman, not less pleasant, while it was credible, than the comforting religion of Laissez-faire. Nakedly stated, however, Kul- tur meant that, being obsessed with the idea of competition and natural selection, as finally expressed in Darwinism, and being frightened, the Prussians decided that if, in the end, men must come to man-eating in order to survive, they, at any rate, would be the cannibals ! So they assiduously cultivated the strength and efficiency of the prize-fighter. But the monster Going Concern into which they de- veloped their country grew hungrier and hungrier, and at last they had to let it feed. Half the cruel and selfish things which are done in this world are done for reasons of Panic. The third attitude is that of the Anarchist and the Bolshevik they would distinguish no doubt between themselves, but whether THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 233 you break the Going Concern or take it to pieces makes little practical difference. This attitude means social suicide. It is vital that discipline should be maintained in the Western Democracies during the period of Reconstruction, whatever Bolshevism may happen in Central as well as East Europe. The Westerners are the Victors, and they alone are able to prevent the whole world from having to pass through the cycle so often repeated in the case of individual nations Idealism, Disorder, Famine, Tyranny. Provided that we do not hasten to dismantle running social machinery, but accomplish our ideals by successive acts of social discipline, we shall maintain the steady output of produc- tion, the fundamental Reality, that is to say, on which now, more than ever before, Civilisa- tion rests. The disorder of a whole World, let us not forget, implies the absence of any remaining National base as a fulcrum for the restoration of order, and therefore the in- definite prolongation of Anarchy and Tyranny. It took several centuries to attain again to the stage of civilisation which had been reached when the Roman World of Antiquity broke down. But if drifting in the grip of the Going Concern leads to disease in a nation, and if 234 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY we must not fall into panic because that results in crime, nor yet suffer revolt because that ends in suicide, what course remains open to us ? Surely that of control, which in a democracy means self-control. If this War has proved anything, it has proved that these gigantic forces of modern production are capable of control. Beforehand it was assumed by many that a World- War would bring so general a financial crash that it would not could not be allowed to take place. Yet how easily, when it actually befell, were the British and German systems of credit dis- engaged by the simple device of using the national credits to carry the roots of indi- vidual credit which were pulled out of the enemy soil. If you once admit control of the Going Concern to be your aim, then the ideal State-unit of your League must be the nation of balanced economic development. Raw materials are unequally distributed over the world, but the primary pursuits of men, other than the growing of the staples of food proper to each region, form in these days but a relatively small part of the total of Industry. Minerals must be won in the mines and tropi- cal produce can only be grown within the tropics, but both minerals and tropical pro- THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 235 duce are now easy of transport, and the higher industries may, therefore, be located at the choice and will of mankind. We are what our occupations make us ; every mature man is imprinted with the characteristics of his calling. So is it with the nations, and no self-respecting nation henceforth will allow itself to be deprived of its share of the higher industries. But these industries are so inter- locked that they cannot be developed except in balance one with another. It follows, therefore, that each nation will strive for development in each great line of industrial activity, and should be allowed to attain to it. This is the ideal, I am firmly persuaded, which will make for peace. In ordinary society it is notoriously difficult for people of very unequal fortune to be friends in the true sense ; that beautiful relationship is not compatible with patronage and dependence. Civilisation, no doubt, consists in the exchange of services, but it should be an equal ex- change. Our economics of money have assessed as equal services of very unequal value from the point of view of the quality of the industrial employment which they give. For the contentment of nations we must contrive to secure some equality of op- portunity for national development. VII THE FREEDOM OF MEN FROM the consideration of the Realities pre- sented by the geography of our Globe we have come to the conclusion that if the Free- dom of Nations is to be secure, it must rest on a reasonable approach to equality of re- sources as between a certain number of the larger Nations. We have also seen that, given the imperious Reality of the Going Concern, it is necessary that the Nations should be so controlled in their economic growth that they do not tend to get out of hand and clash. But what have these principles to do with the Freedom of Men and Women ? Will free Nations in a League be able to give more freedom to their citizens ? Certainly the men who have been fighting, the men who have been sailing our ships through danger on the seas, and the mothers and wives who have been working, waiting, and mourning at home, are not looking for the mere defeat of a danger that threatened ; they have positive visions Hi THE FREEDOM OF MEN 237 of greater happiness in their own lives or in the lives of those dear to them. Let us analyse from this point of view the successive stages of democratic idealism which were referred to hi the opening pages of this book. The American Declaration of Inde- pendence claimed for all men the right to pursue happiness. The French Revolution crystallised this phrase into the single word Liberty, and added Equality, which implies control, and Fraternity, which implies self- control. Fraternity is of the essence of suc- cessful democracy, the highest but the most difficult of all modes of government, since it demands most of the average citizen. That is the first cycle of democratic thought ; it pertains directly and obviously to the Free- dom of Men. In the middle of the nineteenth century began the second cycle, which has aimed at the Freedom of Nations. The claim of Nationality is to the right of a local group of men to pursue happiness together, with their own ways of control to secure equality among them. Fraternal feeling is not easy of attain- ment unless you have been brought up to- gether ; hence the part played by History hi the National sentiment. But mere National* ism claims only the right to pursue happiness 238 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY together ; it is not until we come to the League of Nations that we advance to an ideal which has been thought out to a stage equivalent to that of the great trilogy of the French Revolution. Some degree of control by the League is admittedly necessary to secure the equality of nations before the law, and I believe that in the ideal of the balanced development of each nation we have the self- control which is implied in fraternity. With- out balanced development nations are sure to acquire special hungers, whether neglect- fully or criminally, which can only be satisfied at the expense of other nations. In other words, we can only permanently secure equality among the nations by control from within as well as from without. But this involves the statement that home politics must be con- ducted with an eye to their effect on foreign politics, a truism in the superficial sense, but carrying deeper implications than are com- monly admitted. It carries, I believe, this implication among others, that, since nations are local societies, their organisation must, if they are to last, be based dominantly on local communities within them, and not on nation-wide ' inter- ests.' That is the old English idea of the House of Commons. The word commons is, THE FREEDOM OF MEN 239 of course, identical with the French word ' communes,' signifying communities ; the House of Communities shires and burghs would be the true modern translation. As a fact, the knights and the burgesses of the Middle Ages represented communities of far more complete and balanced life than the artificially equalised constituencies of to-day. If the real organisation of the Nation be by classes and interests and that is the alter- native to organisation by localities 1 it is quite inevitable that the corresponding classes in neighbouring nations will get themselves to- gether, and that what has been described as the horizontal cleavage of international society will ensue. Fortunately the Tower of Babel was the beginning of certain great Going Con- cerns known as Languages, and these have impeded internationalism. But the develop- ment of the modern struggle between capital and labour has led to the use of some inter- national phrases and words which have carried a few key ideas into common currency ; they correspond unfortunately to certain social Realities which were rapidly gathering im- portance when this War came upon us. Inter- 1 As has been pointed out by Mr. H. G. Wells, though he would wrongly as I think yield to current tendencies and accept organisation by ' interests.' 240 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY national Combines of Capital were obtaining such power as to overawe some of the smaller States of the world, and they were being used by Germany for purposes of penetration, or, in other words, to wreck the economic and social balance of rival nations. Labour could only follow suit, and also try to organise in- ternationally. So came the idea of class warfare between the international proletariat and international capitalism. During the pro- gress of the War we have gone to great trouble to break up the international organisation of Capital. Is Labour now to reverse all that has been achieved in this respect by persist- ing with an international organisation which sprang into existence for the very right pur- pose of fighting International Capital ? No less than such a reversal is involved if the momentum of internationally organised labour becomes powerful, for a resuscitation of Inter- national Capitalism would then be inevitable. The economic war that would ensue could only end either in general Bolshevism or in the victory of one of the parties, and that party would then become the real Government of the World, a new Empire of organisers. If labour were to win, it would soon be found that Labour organisers would not differ from their Military and Capitalist predecessors in THE FREEDOM OF MEN 241 the essential respect that they would cling to power and continue blindly to organise until brought down by a new revolution. So the wheels of History would revolve again with the same recurrent phases of disorder and tyranny, and future students would be taught to recognise one more ' Age,' that of the Proletariat, following on the Ages of Ecclesi- asticism, Militarism, and Capitalism. Become supreme, the Labour leaders of the future would no more hesitate to use machine-guns against the mob than any other panic-stricken riders of the whirlwind. But if it be held that organisation based on local communities is essential to the stable and therefore peaceable life of Nations, then those local communities must have as com- plete and balanced a life of their own as is compatible with the life of the Nation itself. In no other way can you prevent a ' class and interest ' organisation from crossing powerfully your locality organisation. /As long as you allow a great metropolis to drain > most of the best young brains from the local *. communities, to cite only one aspect of what goes on, so long must organisation centre unduly in the metropolis and become in- evitably an organisation of nation-wide classes and interesfsTN I believe that whether we Q 242 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY look at the matter from the point of view of the freedom of men or of nations we shall come to the same conclusion ; that the one thing essential is to displace class organisa- tion, with its battle-cries and merely pallia- tive remedies, by substituting an organic ideal, that of the balanced life of provinces, and under the provinces of the lesser com- munities. Let us approach the matter from the other end of the argument, that of the Freedom of Men. What does the ordinary man want ? Mill says that after food and home he wants liberty, but the [more modern democrat lays stress not merely on freedom to take Oppor- tunity, but on the equality of Opportunity itself.) It is for Opportunity to realise what is uTliim, to live a life of ideas and of action for the realisation of those ideas, that the healthy man in ever-increasing number is asking. His ideas may be of love and of the noble upbringing of his children, or of his craft and delight in his dexterity, or of religion and the saving of souls, or of excel- lence in sport of some kind, or of the constitu- tion of society and its improvement, or of the appreciation of beauty and of artistic expres- THE FREEDOM OF MEN 243 sion ; but in one way or another he wishes for the glow of intelligent life, and incidentally for a recognition of his human dignity. By general elementary education we have begun to teach the art of manipulating ideas to those who in Ancient Society were slaves. The wholly unlettered man thinks only in concrete terms ; therefore it was that the great religious teachers have spoken slowly in parables. The unlettered man is not open either to the pleasures or the dangers of idealism. Undoubtedly our Western com- munities are passing through a dangerous stage in this generation. Half-educated people are hi a very susceptible condition, and the world to-day consists mainly of half- educated people. They are capable of seizing ideas, but they have not attained to the habit of testing them and of suspense of mind in the meantime. In other words, most people to-day are very open to ' suggestion,' a fact well known to the experienced in elections, who rarely stop to reason with their audiences. Suggestion is the method of the German propagandist. Now the expression ' Equality of Oppor- tunity ' involves two things. In the first place control, because, given average human nature, there cannot be equality without con- 244 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY f~~i trol ; and inl the second place it implies freedom to do and not merely to think, or, in other words, opportunity to bring ideas to the test of action?^ Mr. Bernard Shaw says that * He who can, does ; he who cannot, teaches. 5 If you interpret the words 'can' and ' cannot ' as implying opportunity and lack of opportunity, then this rather cynical epigram conveys a vital truth. 1 Those who are allowed opportunities of testing their ideas become responsible thinkers, but those who get no such opportunity may continue, for a time, to enjoy ideas, but irresponsibly and, as we say, academically. The latter condition is precisely that of a large part of our intelligent newspaper-reading working classes to-day, and some of them know it and regret it. What is the bane of our modern industrial life 1 Surely monotony monotony of work and of a petty social and communal life. No wonder our men took refuge before the War in betting on football. Most of the respon- sible decisions are reserved for a few, and those few are not even seen at their work, for they are away hi the big centres. What is it that in the last two or three generations has given such strength to the 1 Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 12th edition, p. 230. THE FREEDOM OF MEN 245 Nationality movement ? Nationality had no great hold in the Middle Ages, or indeed in Modern Times until the nineteenth century. It has arisen as the modern States have not only increased in size, but have also grasped wider functions within the Community. Nationalist movements are based on the rest- lessness of intelligent young men who wish for scope to live the life of ideas and to be among those who ' can ' because they are allowed to do. In the old Greek and in the Mediaeval World, Society was so loosely knit that there was plenty of scope in any considerable town. Is it not that fact which makes town-history so interesting until we come to the eighteenth century and then so banal ? Take up the history of one of our more significant British cities, and see whether that be not true. When you come to the last few generations it becomes mere statistic of material growth ; at the best the town becomes specialised hi some important way, but it ceases to be a complete organism. All its institutions are second-rate, because its best people have gone away, unless it have some one establishment or industry of more than local fame, and that establishment or industry usually crushes rather than develops real local life. Why were Athens and Florence the won- 246 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY derful founts of Civilisation which have made them the teachers of the world ? They were small cities as we now count the size of cities, but they were sovereign cities both in the political and economic sense. The men who shook hands in their streets, and whose families intermarried, were not merely rival masters in the same industry or competing merchants on the same exchange ; every principal category of supreme human activity was represented in one intimate circle. Think of the choice of activities open to the able young Florentine, to be practised, remember, in and for his native tow.n, and with no need to go away to some distant capital. Instead of Mayor he might be Prime Minister ; instead of captain of Territorials he might be a general leading the town-force in actual battle a small battle no doubt, but enough to give the fullest scope to the activity of his mind ; if he were a painter, sculptor, or architect he would be employed on the monuments of his own place instead of seeing them designed by some visiting great man. Of course no one suggests that you should or could return to institutions on the Athenian or Florentine scale, but the fact remains that you have drained your local life of most of its value and interest by the development of nation-wide class organisation. THE FREEDOM OF MEN 247 Are you quite sure that the gist of the demand for Home Rule in Ireland, and in a less degree in Scotland, does not come mainly from young men who are agitating, though they do not fully realise it, for equality of opportunity rather than against the assumed wickedness of England ? The Bohemians have achieved a very remarkable economic prosperity under the Austrian tyranny, and yet they fight for their Czecho-Slovak Nation- ality. Is there not something of the same human truth in the refractoriness of the shop stewards in our factories against the Union Ej^ecutives away in London offices ? / lit is the principle of laissez-faire which has J played such havoc with our local life:') For a hundred years we have bowed down before the Going Concern as though it were an irre- sistible God. Undoubtedly it is a Reality, but it can be bent to your service if you have a policy inspired by an ideal. Laissez-faire was no such policy ; it was mere surrender to fate. (You tell me that centralisation is the ' tendency ' of the age : I reply to you / that it is the blind tendency of every age was it not said nineteen hundred years ago that ' to him that hath shall be given ' fj Consider the growth of London. A popula- tion of a million a century ago has risen to 248 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY be more than seven millions to-day; or, to state the fact with more essential point, the London of a century ago contained a sixteenth of the population of England and now it has a fifth. How has it come about ? When Parliament was originally set up, you had not only to pay the members to get them to attend, so busy were they with their absorbing local life, but before long you had also to fine the communities which failed to elect their representatives. That was the right con- dition of things, a federalisation against strong local magnetisms. When Macadamised roads were introduced a star of them was made, radiating from London ; they brought the life of the country up to London, sapping it for the growth of London. When the rail- ways were constructed the main lines formed a star from London, and the expresses run up and down, feeding London, milking the country. Presently the State also must needs step in to accentuate the centralising tendency by establishing such services as the parcel post. Thus it has come about that the market-towns for a hundred miles around are degraded in respect of the variety of their life. Not in four out of five cases does the Londoner profit in any true sense from the THE FREEDOM OF MEN 249 change. He lives in a suburb ; he is shot through a tube to an office-room in the City, and then shot back to his bedroom in the suburb ; only on Saturdays and Sundays has he time for communal life, and then he amuses himself with neighbours who are tied to him by nothing essential. In the great majority of cases he never comes into living contact with a large and trained mind except through the printed page : for him, as for the industrial worker in the country, his life of ideas is detached from his responsible life, and both suffer infinitely in consequence. Centralisation, however, is only one form of a more general process which I would call the segregation of social and economic func- tions owing to the national fatalism in the presence of the Going Concern. You have allowed industrial life to crowd certain dis- tricts and to leave other districts poor. I grant that in the past that was inevitable to some extent owing to the need of generating power near the collieries, but not to the extent that has occurred. By proper control you could have substituted a ' village region,' with a community dependent on each factory or group of small factories, wherein rich and poor, masters and men, might have been held together in a neighbourly responsible relation- 250 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY ship ; but you have allowed instead the East and West Ends to grow up in your great cities. Surely the essential characteristic of true statesmanship is foresight, the prevention of social disease ; but our method for a century past has been to drift, and when things became bad we applied palliative remedies factory legislation, housing legislation, and so forth. As things stand to-day, the only organic remedy is at any cost to loosen out the town. These ideas apply not only to industry but also to our educational institutions and the learned professions. Our English system is to buy we must use plain words, for the element of competition among the colleges exists the best young brains by means of scholarships open to national competition. In the middle of last century we, in large measure, abolished the system of close scholarships, which tied particular schools to particular colleges ; that was, in my opinion, by far the healthier system. By social custom you add to your scholars a number of other fortunate boys from well-to-do homes scattered over the country. So you recruit your public schools and your Oxford and Cambridge ; from the beginning you lift your lads out of their local environment. From the Universities many of them pass into a centralised Civil Service, THE FREEDOM OF MEN 251 a centralised legal profession, and even a centralised medical profession. In London they wait, eating out their hearts during their best years. A few of them come through and shine in a great but unnaturally segregated competition of wits, and you complain of your Government by lawyers ! The whole system results from historical momentum ; when the Midlands, the East, and the South of England were all of England that counted, Oxford and Cambridge were local Universities, and London was the natural market centre of a single country-side. But in the past century the roads and the railways have enabled the Metropolis to attract to itself the careers that were destined for the inspiration of other country-sides. The natural place of an exceptional man is to be leading his own people and helping them to bear their burdens. Your exceptional brain is serving the nation best if it remains racy of its own particular soil. 1 One of the most serious difficulties in the way of the realisation of the balanced local community lies in the difference of dialect spoken by the common people and the upper 1 As a loyal son of Oxford who gratefully recognises what he owes to his Alma Mater, I would not have her flourish leas but more in changing some of her lower functions for higher. 252 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY classes. In England after the Norman Con- quest our peasants talked English, but our knights French, and our priests Latin, with the result that a knight felt himself more at home with a knight from France than with his own people, and so was it also with the priests. To-day there is a curious difference, it seems to me, in this respect, between the Scottish and English peoples. In England the upper professional classes go to the same schools and universities as the landed classes, and the merchants and captains of industry also send their sons to those schools. There- fore the line of social cleavage, as shown by speech and bearing, is between the upper and the lower middle classes. In Scotland, on the other hand, the people of the highest tier of society send their sons for the most part to the English Public Schools and the English Universities, whereas the ministers of the Scottish Churches, the advocates in the Scot- tish Law Courts, and the doctors and school- masters are trained in the main in the local Universities, which are frequented by the sons of the shopkeepers and artisans to a greater extent than in England. The result, as I be- lieve, is that the Scottish aristocracy has been, to a greater degree than in England, detached from the people. I do not blame them, for THE FREEDOM OF MEN 253 they have merely drifted in the grip of fate. It is said that a certain Scottish Baronet who had eight beautiful daughters approaching, some of them, to the age of marriage, put them all on a coach and drove them away from Edinburgh to London, because all the young Scotsmen of his acquaintance who had money, or the wits to make money, had already gone thither ! In the end of the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the nineteenth, Edinburgh was one of the lamps of Europe, with its own particular tinge of flame. To-day it is one more instance of the futility of trying to separate the economic from the other aspects of the life either of a nation or a province. Whether we reason downward from the Freedom of Nations, or upward from the Free- dom of Men, we come to the same conclusion. The nation which is to be fraternal towards other nations, must be independent in an economic as in every other sense ; it must have and keep a complete and balanced life. But it cannot be independent if it is broken into classes and interests which are for ever seeking to range themselves for fighting pur- poses with the equivalent classes and interests 254 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY of other nations. Therefore you must base national organisation on provincial com- munities. But if your province is to have any sufficient power of satisfying local aspira- tions it must, except for the federal reserva- tions, have its own complete and balanced life. That is precisely what the real Freedom of Men requires scope for a full life in their own locality. The organisation by nation- wide classes and interests is the outcome of conflict, but it cannot satisfy, for it removes the larger careers away to the metropolis. Moreover the slums, and most other material afflictions of the people, are the outcome of impotence of local life, for they all result from offences against the principle of keeping that life complete and balanced. Provinces of complete life, of course, imply a federal system. It is not a mere decentrali- sation which is contemplated, but decentrali- sation of the different social functions to the same local units. Undoubtedly that is the tendency at the present time, in the Anglo- Saxon world, in regard to the administration of Government. The United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa are all, in greater or less degree, federal, and in Britain we seem to be not very far from becoming so. Only the Irish question blocks the way, but THE FREEDOM OF MEN 255 it is intrinsically a small question, and we ought not to allow the quarrels of four million people to impede permanently the organic remedy of the ills of more than forty millions. A division of England into Northern and Southern Provinces would probably be needed in order to remove the fact of the predominant partner, but from the point of view here taken that division would in itself be a good thing. To achieve the object in view it would not, however, be enough to give to your provinces merely ' gas and water ' powers ; they must be so involved in the economic life of their regions that both masters and men will base their organisations on the Provincial Areas. If every unit of society the Nation, the Province, the loca- lity were entitled, nay, were desired, to take appropriate steps to maintain the complete- ness and balance of its life, the need for the wide-spreading organisation of any class or interest, save for informative purposes, would gradually cease to be urgent. Consider the life of trees. In the forests of nature competition is severe, and no tree attains to the full and balanced growth of which it is capable. The trees of the middle forest struggle upward to the light ; those of the border spread outward 256 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY one-sidedly ; and in the slum depths are all manner of rottenness and parasitism. If, as in Dante's dream, there were spirits im- prisoned in the trees, one might imagine a forest league of the foliage against the roots for sending up too many trunks, and a forest league of the roots against the foliage for keeping away the sweet light and air. But they would be futile leagues, because each tree consists of roots and foliage. (TChe Land- scape Gardener of civilisation^ with his organic remedies, can alone achieve the per- fect beauty of trees. He plants them apart, so that they may grow independently, each according to the ideal of its kind ; he guides the sapling, prunes the young tree, and cuts away disease from the mature tree. So we enjoy one of the most inspiring sights on earth, a park of noble trees, each complete and balanced in its growth. Only the mon- keys and squirrels, which leap from branch to branch, have suffered the elusive inter- national exploiters and profiteers of the forest. This parable of the Gardener contains also the idea that the functions of growth and control are separate and should be kept separate. When officials of the State become socialistic, and try to initiate instead of THE FREEDOM OF MEN 257 merely assuring growth, they become less capable of their own proper function, which is criticism understanding and sympathetic, but still criticism. The temper of criticism is incompatible with artistic and formative enthusiasm. We have had too little criticism based on steady watchfulness for the signs of unbalance in growth. The British Board of Trade under the regime of Laissez-faire was so penetrated with the advisability of doing nothing, that it had no appreciable machinery for even watching what the Going Concern was doing. Federal authorities of every de- scription, whether of the League of Nations or of the Nations, should consist essentially of defensive and of outlook departments, and the watching or outlook departments should issue warnings, and repeat those warnings, until, thus enlightened, public opinion in the localities concerned intervenes while there is yet time to prevent some monstrous outgrowth of the Going Concern from fatally upsetting the equilibrium of the world or of the nation. In the United States the care of agriculture is, I believe, left to the separate States, but the Federal Bureau of Agriculture it is which issues warnings of the need of conserving the natural resources of the country. In Rome we already have an International Agricultural 258- DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Institute which collects the statistics of the world harvests, and seeks to steady markets and prices by timely warnings ; it has rendered considerable service to the Allies during this War. I have no doubt that I shall be told by practical men that the ideal of complete and balanced economic growth in each locality is contrary to the whole tendency of the age, and is, in fact, archaic. I shall be told that you can only get a great and cheap produc- tion by the method of world-organisation and local specialisation. I admit that such is the present tendency, and that it may give you maximum material results for a while. But if you breed animals, does there not come a time when you have gone as far as you can with inbreeding, and must you not then re- sort again to cross-breeding ? Athens and Florence were great because they saw life whole. If you pursue relentlessly the idols of efficiency and cheapness, you will give us a world in which the young will never see life but only an aspect of life ; national and international organisers will alone hold the keys admitting to the Observatory of the complete view. Is it in that way that you will get a continuous supply of fruitful brains, and happy, because intellectually THE FREEDOM OF MEN 259 active workers ? All specialisation contains the seeds of death ; the most daring army must, at times, wait for the supply columns to come up. In the growth of brains and con- tentment something far more subtle is in- volved than any technical education or healthy housing. Is it quite certain that at the end of a century of refusal to get rich as quickly as possible, we should not have been far richer than we are ? I know that in this War you have set your controllers, and your international committees of controllers, to manage vast trades as single concerns, and that they have not let us starve. But in the crisis you have very rightly been using your capital of intellect and experience. Those men are the men that they are because they have built up private businesses with the fear of bankruptcy ever before them : they have grown up with their business lives always in their hands. Great organisations, whether of combines or Government services, in that they afford a sheltered life, will not give you unlimited crops of such men. You urge that credit and insurance must have broad bases, and I agree : their function is to average away local deficiencies due to the varying seasons and the varying success of undertakings. But let us none the less 260 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY recognise that they present the danger of a financial control of the world. Your League of Nations may have to take them in hand, lest we be ruled by one only of the * interests ' of society. There are two courses open to us in regard to them ; to control them federally, or to fight them and balance them by the international organisation of other ' interests.* The federal authority, whether of the League or the Nation, is constituted of communities of complete growth, and cannot, from its nature, aspire to Empire, since it consists everywhere of balanced humanity. But great specialist organisations, guided by experts, will inevit- ably contend for the upper hand, and the contest must end in the rule of one or other type of expert. That is Empire, for it is unbalanced. * * * * 9 Do you realise that we have now made the circuit of the world, and' that every system is now a closed system, ancTihat you can now alter nothing without altering the balance of everything, and that there are no more desert shores on which the jetsam of incomplete thought can rest undisturbed^?^ Let us attempt logical, symmetrical thought, but practical, cautious action, because we have THE FREEDOM OF MEN 261 to do with a mighty Going Concern. If you stop it, or even slow down its running, it will punish you relentlessly. If you let it run without guidance, it will take you over the cataract again. You cannot guide it by set- ting up mere fences, and by mending those fences if it breaks them down, because this Going Concern consists of hundreds of millions of human beings who are 'pursuing ' happiness, and they will swarm over all your fences like an army of ants. You can only guide Huma- nity by the attraction of ideals. That is why Christianity wins on, after nineteen centuries, through all the impediments set up by criti- cism of its creeds and its miracles. What we need, in my belief, to guide our Reconstruction is a presumption of statesman- ship in favour of the balanced nation, and the balanced province, sinning neither with the Free Trader nor the Protectionist. If we persist for a generation or two, with such an ideal before us, we may gradually change the Going Concern, so that we shall have fraternal nations and fraternal provinces, instead of warring, organised interests ever striving to extend their limits to the international field in order to outflank opposing interests which still lag on the merely national scale. Re- member how that curious negative ideal of 262 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Laissez-faire did through a couple of genera- tions gradually assimilate the whole texture of British society, so that it has taken this World- War to overthrow the vested interests which grew up. At present, it seems to me, we are thinking out our Reconstruction piecemeal, according to this and that detached ideal of the pre- War philanthropist housing, temperance, in- dustrial conciliation, and the rest of them. But if you build three hundred thousand new houses, and put them merely where they are ' wanted,' you may but be drifting again, though with heavier ballast. In the War we have gradually risen to the conception of the single strategical command, and of the single economic control. Have you the courage for measures of like scope in regard to Peace, though more subtle and less executive, because they will deal with growth and not with destruction ? * The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves, that we are underlings.' VIII POSTSCRIPT SINCE the writing of this book I have fought a Parliamentary election in Scotland, with a Liberal and a Socialist for my opponents. Of Liberalism there is nothing just now to be usefully said ; a sturdy individualism will always be one of the elements of character in our British race, whatever the fate of the political party which was its nineteenth- century expression. But the ever-recurrent propaganda of Socialism is at present in a very significant phase. Mere Bureaucratic Socialism has been criticised by events of late ; the more we know of the working of dominant officialdom during the War, the less likely, I think, are we to desire it for a permanent master. My Socialist oppon- ent was out to take away property in land and to abolish interest on capital ; in other words, he would begin with a confis- catory revolution ; but that was not of the essence of his position. His supporters 263 264 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY young men with a burning faith in their eyes, though often without the full power of ex- pressing their argument were, at almost every meeting, boldly defensive of the Russian Bolsheviks. There are two sides to Bol- shevism ; there is the mere violence and tyranny of the Jacobin, upthrown at a cer- tain stage of most great revolutions ; and there is the ' Syndicalist ' idealism. To do them justice, it is the latter aspect of Bol- shevism which really attracts and holds my young Scottish antagonists. The Bolsheviks are in revolt against a Parliamentarism based on local communities or, as they would put it, on so many social pyramids each with its Capitalist at the top. Their ideal is of a federation of vocational Soviets or unions Soviets of workmen, of peasants, and, if you will, of professional men. Therefore the Bolsheviks, both in Petrograd and Berlin, have consistently opposed the meeting of national assemblies for the purpose of framing Parliamentary constitutions on the Western ' bourgeois ' model. Their revolt is towards an organisation by interests rather than localities. 1 For the reasons stated in this 1 The vocational soviet of the peasants is only incidentally local ; it is not local in the fuller sense of combining various local interests into a community. POSTSCRIPT 265 book, such an organisation would, in my belief, lead inevitably to the Marxian War of international classes, of Proletariat against Bourgeoisie, and finally of one section of the Proletariat against the other sections already the Russian town-workers are at issue with the Russian peasants. The end could only be world-anarchy or a world-tyranny. Thus I come back to the quiet of my library with the conviction that what I have written is pertinent to the hot currents of real life in this great crisis of humanity. Our old English conception of the House of Com- mons or Communities, the American concep- tion of the Federation of States and Provinces, and the new ideal of the League of Nations are all of them opposed to the policies cast in the tyrannical moulds of East Europe and the Heartland, whether Dynastic or Bolshevik. It may be the case that Bolshevik tyranny is an extreme reaction from Dynastic tyranny, but it is none the less true that the Russian, Prussian, and Hungarian plains, with their widespread uniformity of social conditions, are favourable alike to the march of militar- ism and to the propaganda of syndicalism. Against this two-headed Eagle of land-power the Westerners and the Islanders must struggle. Even in their own peninsulas and 266 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY islands modern methods of communication are so levelling natural barriers that organisa- tion by interests constitutes a real threat. In the Heartland, where physical contrasts are few, it is only with the aid of a conscious ideal, shaping political life in the direction of nationalities, that we shall be able to entrench true freedom. If only as a basis for ' pene- trating ' this dangerous Heartland, the Oceanic peoples must strive to root ever more firmly their own organisation by loca- lities, each locality with as complete and balanced a life of its own as circumstances may permit of. The effort must go down- ward through the provinces to the cities. East-ends and West-ends divide our cities into castes ; at whatever sacrifice we must tone away such contrasts. The country-side, in which the successful leaders visibly serve the interests of then* weaker brethren, must be our ideal. There was a time when a man addressed his ' friends and neighbours.' We still have our friends, but too often they are scattered over the land and belong to our own caste in society. Or, if they happen to be near us, is it not because our caste has gathered apart into its own quarter of the town ? So was it in the early Middle Ages, when we are told POSTSCRIPT 267 that three men might meet in the market- place the one obeying the Roman law, another the customs of the Franks, and a third those of the Goths. So is it to-day in India with Hindu, and Mohammedan, and Christian. So was it not either in fourteenth-century Flor- ence, or Periclean Athens, or Elizabethan England. With too many of us, in our urban and sub- urban civilisation, that grand old word Neigh- bour has fallen almost into desuetude. It is for Neighbourliness that the world to-day calls aloud, and for a refusal to gad ever about merely because of modern opportunities for communication. Let us recover possession of ourselves, lest we become the mere slaves of the world's geography, exploited by material- istic organisers. Neighbourliness or fraternal duty to those who are our fellow-dwellers, is the only sure foundation of a happy citizen- ship. Its consequences extend upward from the city through the province to the nation, and to the world league of nations. It is the cure alike of the slumdom of the poor and of the boredom of the rich, and of war between classes and war between nations. APPENDICES A NOTE ON AN INCIDENT AT THE QUAI D'ORSAY 25TH JANUARY 1919 THE representatives of the Allied Nations were assembled in the second plenary session of their Conference at Paris. A resolu- tion was before them to appoint committees for the purpose of reporting on the proposed League of Nations and other matters. The constitution of the committees, giving two members to each of the five Great Powers (U.S.A., British Empire, France, Italy, Japan), and five members to the Smaller Powers collectively, had been settled by the Council of Ten, representing only the Great Powers, and this constitution was now brought up at the plenary session for endorsement. There was not unnaturally discontentment among the Smaller Powers. Sir Robert Borden. on behalf of Canada, asked by whom and on what authority the constitution of the committees had been decided ; the question should have been submitted to the Conference. The delegates of Belgium, Brazil, Serbia, Greece, Portugal, Czecho- slovakia, Rumania, Siam, and China rose in turn to claim special representation for their several countries. Then M. Clemenceau interposed from his presidential chair, where he sat between Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George. He pointed out that at the cessation of hostilities, the Great Powers had twelve million men on the field of battle ; that they might have decided the future of the World on their own initiative ; but that, inspired by the new ideals, they had invited the Smaller Powers to co-operate with them. The resolution was passed, nemine contradicente, without alteration. Thus the rule of the world still rests upon force, notwith- standing the juridical assumption of equality between sovereign States, whether great or small. The theme of this book, that we must base our proposed League on Realities, if we would have it last, holds good. Let it be remarked, moreover, that Ml APPENDICES 269 the number of the Great Powers five is precisely the total of the pre-war Dual Alliance (Triple only with Italy) and Triple Entente, whose hostility caused the War. It follows that we shall be able to maintain our League as long as the five Powers now allied, continue to agree. Their number is not sufficient to prevent a bid for predominance on the part of one or two of them. No doubt a new Germany and a new Russia will some day increase them to seven. Perhaps the Smaller Powers, taking note of the naked fact which was exposed by this inci- dent, will set about federating among themselves. A Scandi- navian group, a group of the Middle Tier of East Europe (Poland to Jugo-Siavia), and a Spanish South American group (if not also including Brazil) may all, perhaps, be attainable. In any case the League should do service in bringing the opinion of mankind to bear for the just revision of obsolescent treaties before they become unbearable misfits. But let us be rid of cant : Democracy must reckon with Reality. B ANALYSIS BEING THK HEADS OP ARGUMENT IN THIS BOOK, WITH CHAPTEE AND PAGE REFERENCES I. The Future and peace, 1 ; Causes of past wars, 2 ; Growth of opposing interests, 3 ; Danger of merely juridical concep- tions of the League of Nations, 4 ; The possibility of a World- Tyranny, 5 ; The problem stated, 5. II. Democratic Idealism, its successive tragedies, 6, and its relation to Reality, 9 ; The Economic Reality of the ' Going Concern,' 10 ; The organisers of Going Concerns, 13 ; The emergence of organisers from Revolution, 14 ; The organiser and social discipline, 16 ; The great Organiser is the great Realist, 18 ; Democratic prejudice against Experts, 19 ; The organiser thinks strategically, 20 ; Hia ' ways and means ' mind, 21 ; Napoleon, 21 ; Bismarck, 21 ; The strategical mentality of Prussia, 24 ; ' Kultur ' and strategy, 24 ; The German war map, 26 ; Strategical thought in Economics, 29 ; But Democracy thinks ethically, 31 ; ' No annexations, no indemnities,' 33 ; 270 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY Refuses to think strategically unless compelled to do so for defence, 35 ; Must fail unless it reckons with both geographical and economic Reality, 36. III. The Unity of the Ocean, the first geographical Reality, 38 ; The consequences not yet fully accepted, 40 ; Therefore necessary to take a historical view, 41 ; Contending river-powers in Egypt, 43 ; The Nile ' closed ' by land-power, 44 ; Contend- ing sea-powers hi the Mediterranean, 44; The Mediterranean ' closed ' by land-power, 54 ; The Latin Peninsula as a sea-base, 55 ; The encompassing of the World- Promontory by sea-power from the Latin peninsular base, 67 ; Division within the Latin European Peninsula, 69 ; Hence the opportunity for sea-power from the lesser but insular sea-base of Britain, 70 ; Of sea- bases in general, 76 ; Of sea-power in the Great War, 77 ; The World-Island, 81 ; The ultimate base of sea-power, 91. IV. The World-Island seen from within, 93 ; The Heartland physically defined, 96; The other Natural Regions, 98; The Arabian Centreland, 112; The mobile riders and the plough- men, 118 ; The Arab bid for World Empire, 119 ; The Steppes- belt, 122 ; The Tartar invasions and their consequences, 125 ; The Tibetan Heights and the N.W. entries to China and India, 129 ; The open access from the Heartland to Arabia and to Europe, 134; The Heartland strategically defined, 135; The Black Sea basin included, 136; The Baltic basin included, 140; The Heartland as real a physical fact as the World- Island, 143 ; The ultimate citadel of land-power, 143. V. The Cossack advance over the Heartland, 147 ; The Russian Homeland, sharply delimited, 148 ; The real Europe, 153 ; Divided into East and West Europe, 154 ; History of the relations of East and West Europe, 155 ; Their fundamental opposition, 160 ; Their essential difference, 161 ; German and Slav in East Europe, 162 ; Trafalgar seemed to split the stream of history into two for a century, 170 ; Britain and the Not- Europe, 171; But East Europe is really within the -Heartland, and there were no two streams, 176 ; British and French policy agreed in the Nineteenth Century, 177 ; The Great War caused by German attempt to control East Europe and the Heartland, 178 ; The Economic Reality of organised man-power the Going Concern, 179 ; Political Economy and National Economy, 180 ; The great Economic change of 1878, 181 ; The German policy was to stimulate growth of man-power and then use it APPENDICES 271 to occupy the Heartland, 182 ; But Laissez-faire also a policy of Empire, 186; Clash of the two policies, 188; Inevitable from the fact that they were two Going Concerns, 189. VI. We have won the War, but were nearly defeated, 191 ; Had Germany won, if only on land, you would have had to reckon with a Heartland Empire, 193 ; The Heartland the persistent Geographical threat to World liberty, 194 ; How came Germany to make the mistake of offensive on West front, 198 ; Hamburg and the man-power policy, 199 ; We must now divide up East Europe and the Heartland, 200 ; It must be a division into three not two State-systems, 204 ; The peoples of the Middle Tier, 206 ; Feasibility of League of Nations, if this done, 215 ; But there must be no predominant partner, 217 ; Yet you will have to reckon with Going Concerns. 218; A reasonable equality of power needed among a considerable number of members of your League, 221 ; Of certain strategical positions of World importance, 223 ; The Going Concern in the future, and the unequal growth of Nations, 228 ; The ideal is the Independent Nation of balanced economic development, 228 ; Tragedies of the Going Concern, 231 ; The policy of truly free nations which makes for Peace, 234. VII. Whether men and women will be more free in such free Nations, 236 ; The need of basing organisation within the Nation on localities, 238; The alternative organisation is based on nation-wide classes and interests, 239 ; This leads inevitably to international war of classes, 239 ; Therefore the ideal is balanced provinces within balanced nations, 241 ; Such organisation gives greatest opportunity to greatest number of men, 242 ; Cause of Nationality movement, 245; Opposed to undue centralisation, 247 ; Fraternal nations must be balanced economically, and formed of fraternal provinces. 253 ; Fraternity, if it is to last, depends on controlling the development of Going Concerns, 261. VIII. The recent General Election, its meaning in 'a World setting, 263 ; Of the saving virtue of Neighbourliness, 266. 272 DEMOCRATIC JDEALS AND REALITY LIST OF MAPS AND DIAGRAMS no. PACK 1. A River- world apart Egypt ..... 42 2. A Coastal navigation Britain .... 43 3. The Greek Seas an insular and a peninsular sea-base 47 4. Latium a fertile sea-base ..... 50 6. The Mediterranean two marches to outflank E'.-a-power 52 6. The Latin Sea . 56 7. The Latin Peninsula ...... 57 8. The Latin and Greek Peninsulas Germany and Mace- donia . 61 9. The Seaman's Europe 64 10. The World-Promontory ...... 68 11. The English Plain a fertile sea-base ... 72 12. The World-Island and Satellites relative areas . 86 13. The World- Island and Satellites relative populations 90 14. Euro- Asia Arctic and Inland drainage ... 94 15. The Great Lowland and the Heartland ... 97 16. The World-Island its Natural Regions . . .100 17. The Southern Heartland 105 18. The Steppes of Euro- Asia 108 19. Northern Arabia the fertile belt . . . .112 20. The Invasions of the fertile belt of Arabia . .113 21. A mediaeval Wheel-map . . . . ' . .115 22. East Europe Forest and Steppes .... 127 23. The Tibetan Heights and the N.W. approaches to China and India 132 24. The Heartland including the Baltic and Black Sea basins ........ 135 25. Constantinople when within and when without the Heartland 137 26. The World-Island knit together by Railways and Air-routes ....... 144 27. The Russian Homeland 150 28. The real Europe East and West .... 154 29. Kottbus an inlier of Wendish speech . . . 163 30. The Eastward German settlements . . . ,165 31. The Middle Tier of East European States , . . 207 Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES COLLEGE LIBRARY This book is due on the last date stamped below. (JC: 54 . KECE I V MAIN LOAN Dqsk NOV 2 i9 S4 A.M. 718 CC*DCOL.inH FEB2 1 1968 Book Slip-26m-9,'60(,B236s4)4280 CD UCLA-College Library D 523 M21 1919 L 005 722 675 5 College Library D 523 M21 1919 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 001 002 042 8