IWVERSITY OF PROBLEMS OF POWER PROBLEMS OF POWER A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS FROM SADOWA TO KIRK-KILISSE By WM. MORTON FULLERTON Author of "In Cairo," "Patriotism and Science," and " Terres Francaises " i (Sometime Correspondent of The Times) NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1913 " Cum igitur animum ad Politicam applicuerim, nihil quod novum, vel inauditum est ; sed tantum ea, quae cum praxi uptime conveniunt, certa, et indubitata ratione demonstrare, aut ex ipsa humanae naturae conditione deducere, intendi ; et ut ea, quae ad hanc scientiam spectant, eddem animi libertate, qud res Mathematical solemus, inquirerem, sedulo curavi, humanas actiones non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari ; sed intelligere : atque adeo humanos affectus, ut sunt amor, odium, ira, invidia, gloria, misericordia, et reliquae animi commotiones, non ut humanae naturae vitia ; sed ut proprie- tates contemplatus sum, quae ad ipsam ita pertinent, ut ad naturam aeris aestus, frigus, tempestas, tonitru, et alia hujus- modi, quae, tametsi incommoda sunt, necessaria tamen sunt certasque habent causas, per quas eorum naturam intelligere conamur, et Mens^eorum verd contemplatione aeque gaudet, ac earum rerum cognitione, quae sensibus gratae sunt." SPINOZA : Tractatus Politicks, capnt I. 4. INTRODUCTION " T T 7 HEN God wipes out," says Bossuet, " he is getting VV ready to write." " Quand Dieu efface c'est qu'il se prepare a ecrire." During the last ten years the Eternal would seem to have been preparing what one of his vicegerents, the Ger- man Chancellor, recently called " the policy of the clean slate." Not even Bossuet would venture to divine the sense of the still-hidden writing on the wall. Modern Europe is working out its destiny in blind obedience to the will of its two demiurgic creators, Napoleon and Bismarck. But neither the one nor the other saw ten years ahead. When Napoleon, at Tilsitt, in conversation with the Tsar Alexander and the King of Prussia, said to the latter, on his complaining of the humiliating conditions of peace imposed by the great Emperor, " It is part of my system to weaken Prussia ; I mean that she shall no longer be a power in the political balance of Europe," J he magnificently formulated a policy which might have become the principle of action of successive French statesmen ; but he could not guess that within seven years Stein and Hardenberg, Fichte, Schiller and Schleiermacher would have inflamed the soul of a regenerated Prussia, and that that Prussia would be at the 1 " II est dans mon systeme d'affaiblir la Prusse ; je veux qu'elle ne soit plus une puissance dans la balance politique de 1'Europe." Quoted from the " Report of the Princess Louise on the interview of Tilsitt," addressed to her husband when he was on a mission to Vienna. See Quarante-Cinq Annees de Ma Vie : 1770-1815, by Princess Radziwill. vii b viii INTRODUCTION head of the coalition to which he himself was to succumb at Waterloo. Nor could the same Napoleon who prophesied, " Within a hundred years Europe will be Republican or Cossack," foresee Bismarck, Sadowa and Sedan. Bismarck, who presided at Versailles over the conferences that resulted in the dismemberment of France, failed to perceive the logical consequence of his own vast designs, a Franco-Russian Alliance and a Triple Entente resolutely directed towards giving a more reasonable modern form to the perspicacious provisions embodied by Napoleon in the Treaty of Tilsitt. Nor did the same Bismarck, who said to Lord Salisbury in 1876 that the Eastern question was " not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier," reflect that, by driving Austria- Hungary eastward down the Danube and towards the Balkans, in order to bring her face to face with the Cossack, he prepared the movement of Pan-Slavism which was soon to result in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 rendered in- evitable in 1878 the Congress of Berlin, whence Russia was to come forth humiliated, and the potential friend of Ger- many's mortal enemy ; and created those new nationalities, the alliance of which a generation later was to stultify the efforts of the Powers to maintain the integrity of the Otto- man Empire, and to establish on the ruins of European Turkey a United States of Balkany. 1 " Prevision of the past," to use an ingenious phrase of M. Clemenceau, is not altogether beyond the powers of 1 On March 28, 1903, one of the leaders of the Bulgarian revolu- tionary committees for the organization of Macedonian autonomy, the orator and poet Mikhailowsky, told M. Maurice Kahn (vide Courriers de Mac6doine, Cahiers de la Quinzaine, Aug. 1903), that the only way for the Balkan States to avoid falling under German protection was to form a Balkan federation. The Servians, Bul- garians, Rumanians and Greeks, he said, were less different than Bretons, Burgundians and Gascons. Dread of the foreigner had forced union on the Gallic tribes. The German peril would impose union on the Slav peoples. Six years later the Bulgarian poet's dream came true. INTRODUCTION ix the human intelligence. Plotting the curve of the future is quite another matter. It is certain, moreover, that neither any approximately accurate forecast of the future, however immediate, nor yet any satisfactory compre- hension of the present, is possible without careful scrutiny of the past. Present, Past and Future are merely three moods of one and the same active Verb. Their reciprocal relations are organic. The observer who sur- veys the latest forty years of history from the quaking vantage point of his own moment of time inevitably dis- covers that, although what are called " events " seem to hang so neatly together that they might be strung, like beads, on chains of general laws, this impression is an illusion, and that no philosophy of history is possible. But he per- ceives, at the same time, that there is an art of history, and that this art consists in representing, in any given field, Actions in their right perspective. History treated as an art becomes less a record of the vicissitudes of artificially isolated States, less a eulogy of heroes, less a matter of edification, than a kind of telescopic penetration and fore- shortening of the human nebulae, those agglomerations com- posed of bustling molecules, whose infinitely complex move- ments are determined by the size, the weight, and the individual drift of their myriad fellows. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION HISTORY AN ART . . . . . * . vii Napoleon and Bismarck, the Creators of Modern Europe Their inability to foresee the future " Prevision of the past " No philo- sophy of history possible An art of history possible History as an art, the representation of actions in their right perspective. FIRST BOOK World History from Sedan to the Coup d'Agadir. CHAPTER I THE Two FORCES DETERMINING THE DESTINY OF THE WORLD .,,. . . . . . . . . . i CHAPTER II ECONOMIC INTERESTS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF STATES . i Illustrations of the fact that money is the key of history. CHAPTER III PUBLIC OPINION AND THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY . . 4 CHAPTER IV ECONOMIC CONDITIONS AND MODERN POLITICAL EVOLUTION . 5 Internationalization of the human consciousness and of social problems Political aspect of the World Situation described by Count Berchtold Significance of " insurance " treaties Subordina- tion of national, to general, interests, shown by the results of the temporary closing of the Dardanelles The duel between national patriotism and European, or world, patriotism Real nature of the modern outburst of nationalism National spirit manifested only when nationality is menaced. CHAPTER V THE SURVIVAL OF MODERN STATES IN SPITE OF THE CORROSIVE ACTION OF ECONOMIC FACTS 10 xi xii CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER VI THE CASE OF THE UNITED STATES n Effect of the expansion of American trade on American curiosity as to international conditions The two cardinal American policies : the " Monroe Doctrine " and the " Open Door " The America of twenty years ago and the America of to-day The "sky-scraper" and American idealism Steady advance in political and social unification Awakening of a national spirit American individual- ism doomed A new sense of joint responsibility Comparison between the passion for sport in America and that of the ancient Greeks New conception of play An American eleventh command- ment Effect of sport on the human type in America Survival of the old religious ideals as " forms of thought " accounting for Ameri- can idealism and optimism General ignorance of the United States in Europe European recognition of America as a world-power due to career of Mr. Roosevelt Mr. Roosevelt's visit to Europe in 1909 His visit to France especially significant Justification of this statement by analysis of French state of mind as regards the Franco- Russian Alliance The appeal of the Tsar in 1898, in favour of disarmament French disappointment when the nation realized that the Franco- Russian forces were the " Army of the Hague " Ambiguous consequences of Franco- Russian Alliance : pacifism or war ? Apparent solution offered by rough-rider of Cuba, who had also been the laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize Anxious curiosity in France as to Mr. Roosevelt's "Message" Impressiveness for Frenchmen of a President of the American type The Consular character of Republican Government in the United States illus- trated by Mr. Roosevelt's policy in San Domingo and at Panama Possible risks of Presidential independence for popular liberty Comparison of the constitutional role of the German Emperor No analogy between "republican" government in France and in the United States Analysis of the French Constitution of 1875 as regards the part played by the head of the state Signs of prevailing desire in France for reform of the Constitution. THE CASE OF EUROPE : THE SEQUENCE OF EUROPEAN EVENTS SINCE THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR .... 43 The plans of Bismarck, and the struggle in Europe for the balance of power The Treaty of Berlin Colonial expansion of France and its European consequences Fall of Bismarck Attitude of William II The German Emperor and the Tsar Proposed Franco- Germano- Russian Alliance German overtures to France Russian aspirations in the Far East Results of German policy from 1890 to 1898, Adowa, Port Arthur, Manchuria, Fashoda Importance of the date of 1898 The Balkans and Europe The Dreyfus affair Germany triumphant, Italy, England and France unhappy Powers Italian mediations : a Franco- Italian entente The Mediter- ranean policy of M. Delcasse Effects of Transvaal War The Anglo-French agreement of 1904. CONTENTS xiii PAGB CHAPTER VIII THE CASE OF EUROPE : CONSEQUENCES OF EUROPEAN EVENTS SINCE THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR ... 58 The dove-tailing of the nations National interests matters of international concern Sense of the word " Nationalities " for Louis Napoleon Results of his pathetic blunder Mystical states- men "The International [Mind" The commonsense view of Spinoza: human passions "properties" of human nature Resist- ance of England to the influences making for the dove-tailing of the nations Detailed examination of the doctrine of " splendid isolation " The Rise of German naval power and its effect on England's policy Sir Edward Grey on the Liberal policy of indis- criminate interference in world affairs Necessity for England of a military convention with France. CHAPTER IX THE CASE OF EUROPE : SUMMARY OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF EUROPEAN EVENTS SINCE THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR . 68 A new era opened in Europe by the Anglo-French Entente William II at Tangiers German aims to destroy the friendship between France and England The fall of M. Delcasse Unexpected consequences : revival of French national spirit. SECOND BOOK The Domestic Crises of the European States and the Foreign Policy of the Powers. French Domestic Politics and British Domestic Politics and German Foreign Policy. CHAPTER I THE STABILITY OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC ... 73 Influence of French home politics on French policy Necessity of examining French domestic politics to understand European history Pretensions of the foreigner to meddle in French affairs France, the most stable and conservative state in Europe. CHAPTER II CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE ..... 75 The expulsion of religious orders, the abolition of the Concordat and disestablishment of the Churches, a logical incident in develop- ment of French Society History of France, steady effort of seculari- xiv CONTENTS PAGE zation Foundation of the Republic, a " necessary accident " Difficulties that beset its founders The Constitution of 1875 Attitude of the Catholic Church towards the Republican regime The French clergy functionaries of the State Condition of servility of the bishops owing to the Concordat Political utility of mainten- ance of Concordat during early period of the Republic Advantages of the pact slowly transferred to the Catholics owing to new social legislation Role of the French clergy during period of Republican combat against reactionary parties The Syllabus of Pius IX Collusion between Anti- Republican parties and the French Catholics " Le clericalisme, voilk 1'enneroi " Catholic persecution of the Republic Counter-persecution of the Catholics by fanatical Repub- licans A national school system Hostile attitude of the clergy to the State schools Catholic political organizations Episcopal breaches of the Concordat The accession of Leo XIII Bou- langism Leo XIII's encyclical recommending submission to the Government Conciliatory temper of French Government Ideal of an open and tolerated Republic Attitude of the irreconcilable reactionaries, revival of hostilities The Meline Ministry, the Dreyfus case, the Croix, the "Nationalists" Republican defence under Waldeck- Rousseau The Associations Law of 1901 Excessive abuse of this law by M. Combes : State persecution of religious orders Impolitic attitude of the Vatican M. Loubet's visit to Italy The "Temporal Power" Rupture of the Concordat Consequent embarrassment of France as regards its foreign relations. CHAPTER III THE DREYFUS CASE ........ 95 Its politico-religious character Conflict between two French ideals : la raison d'etat and les droits de I'homme Almost universal ignorance of real significance of this ten years' civil war Foreign incapacity to understand real character of French form of civiliza- tion Construction of a strongly-centralized Power, the real evolution of France Revocation of the Edict of Nantes Logical fitness of sacrifice of individual in French State Antisemitism, anti- Protestantism French characteristics explained by nature of French political and social evolution The " genius " of France contrasted with the " genius " of other countries Natural division of Frenchmen into Dreyfusists and Anti-Dreyfusists Two legitimate forms of French patriotism Pressure by the foreigner a necessary condition of French national unity. CHAPTER IV THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EVOLUTION OF FRANCE . . 100 " The only absolute fact in the world is that all things are rela- tive " The Postman's Strike, 1909, and the Jacquerie in the Cham- pagne district, 1911, indications of the crisis of the State in France Necessity of studying in detail the political and administrative organization of France Purely relative character of socio-political phenomena General cause of the crisis of the State in France, clash between Napoleonic administration and Parliament Pecu- liarity of French Parliamentary Government : antinomy between representative government and the French civil service system Eight million voters and nine hundred thousand functionaries CONTENTS xv PAGE Omnipotence of the deputy Effect of the syndical movement on the centralized French administration Proposed solution : a bill determining the status of civil servants Malady of France, a con- fusion of powers Social unrest in France, legitimate ground for optimism Craving for reform Question of " Pretenders " Government in France, the tyrannical monopoly of a minority Absence of a constitutional opposition in France No real parlia- mentary government The Constitution of 1875 a concoction of the Orleanists, intended to facilitate restoration of the monarchy Irreconcilability of the Royalist Constitution of 1875 and the Re- publico-Napoleonic Administration French civic and social irrespon- sibility Disappearance of spirit of authority Tyranny of the deputy in France The idealistic Republican period Scrutin de liste and Scrutin d'arrondissement Necessity of reestablishment of the principle of separation of powers Need, to this end, of creation of a party system, based on reform of the electoral law which has produced in France a tyrannical boss-system Need of decentralization and of an independent magistracy (study of the role of the Constil d'Etaf) Need of organizing the status of function- aries Reasons for optimism as to Frenchmen's capacity to effect the necessary reforms. CHAPTER V THE BALKAN QUESTION, AND THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE MEMBERS OF THE TRIPLE ENTENTE PRIOR TO THE " COUP D'AGADIR " ........ 131 Before dealing with the British internal crisis advisability of summarizing previous chapters in connexion with the Balkan Ques- tion Germany and the Eastern Question Plausible explanation of German policy after 1904 The Young Turks and Macedonia The Committee of Union and Progress Presumption of its Members Possibility of Balkan Federation including Turkey The Turkish Revolution Inevitable Growth of the Balkan League The Berlin Treaty and the Treaty of San Stefano Anti-German policy of Bismarck Temporary success of German policy, however, during the period from 1904 to the formation of the Balkan League and to the Coup d'Agadir Anglo- Franco -Russian ataxy England's indifference and irresolution, prior to Agadir, owing to her grave domestic situation Russia's parallel absorption in her home affairs Summary of French feeling with regard to the significance of the Alliance with Russia Germany's attempts to utilize the Alliance in her own interests Birth of the Entente Cordiale Discomfiture and embarrassment of Germany Causes of the growth in France of a European sense Reasons for her keen concern as to England's domestic affairs Surprise in France at the persistence in England in 1910 and 1911 of ignorance as to the strategic conditions governing European politics France has learned the lessons of experience Practical interpretation by the French of the meaning of the words " Triple Entente " Inability of England and Russia to realize the real conditions of European equilibrium Doubts in France as to the utility of the Entente England about to be roused from her lethargy by the Coup d'Agadir The havoc wrought, meanwhile, by Mr. Taft's proposals relative to the settlement of "matters of national honour " by Courts of Arbitration Optical illusion of the xv CONTENTS PAGE foreigner as to the " real France " The real France, a France aware of its responsibilities as an integral part of continental European soil The question of Alsace-Lorraine Text of the declaration of French deputies protesting against the alienation of Alsace-Lor- raine European armaments, the result of seizure by Germany of the two French provinces French feeling as to Mr. Taft's pro- posals relative to arbitration Impossibility of disarmament for France Self-respect requires France never to forget Alsace-Lorraine Criticism of The Great Illusion by Mr. Norman Angell Feeling in Alsace-Lorraine as regards France and Germany The New Constitution for the Reichsland The buffer-States between France and Germany Worthlessness of international treaties not based on common interests The spoils-policy of the cave-dweller iden- tical with the modern "principle of neighbourhood rights" Meaning for Frenchmen of the word "national-honour" " Neigh- bourhood rights " and Holland The fortification of Flushing Necessity of converting the Entente Cordiale into a close Dual Alliance The beatific apathy of England in 1910 and 1911 con- trasted with France's sceptical vigilance. CHAPTER VI THE " COUP D'AGADIR " AND BRITISH DOMESTIC POLITICS . 172 Despatch, July, 1911, of a German armed vessel to Agadir Motives of this surprising act The Franco-German Agreement of 1909 German misconception of the internal condition of France and England British constitutional crisis General considera- tions as to Parliamentary Government Modern social legislation Lord Morley on danger of entrusting public affairs to doctrinaire politicians The British Parliament Bill Party government and the "rights of the majority" The "Royal Prerogative" Lack of checks to hasty legislation : Single-Chamber government Was the British parliamentary crisis a constitutional crisis ? Effects of crisis in England on England's position abroad Reciprocity between the United States and Canada Tendency of British Empire to disintegration Opinion in Canada, opinion in the United States, opinion in England Contagion of American ideas in Canada ; Cana- dian forms of the Monroe Doctrine Sir Wilfrid Laurier's attitude at the Imperial Conference Sudden effect of Germany's action in Morocco Reciprocity buried, the Anglo-American arbitration treaty paralysed, Mr. Borden the new Prime Minister of an awakened Canada Real identity of the ends sought by Sir W. Laurier and Mr. Borden England saved. THIRD BOOK Economic Factors affecting the Political Attitude of Modern States CHAPTER I CONTEMPORARY MONEY-GETTING AND MODERN IDEALISM . 195 Statement of the problem of this "Book" Modern peoples want Reform as much as they want Money Are these cravings different aspects of the same state of mind ? CONTENTS xvii PAGE CHAPTER II WORKING-CLASS MIGRATION, LABOUR PROTECTIONISM, AND INDUSTRIAL INTERNATIONALISM ..... 196 The " Internationale " The world- wide emigration of the working- man Demand for protection on the part of labour-syndicates against competition of transient foreign labour Detailed analysis of this phenomenon Signer Giuseppe Prato's book Typical illustrations of the movement : the Case of Luxembourg and of the Valley of the Meuse International frontiers scaled by the nomad labourer The German metallurgists and Luxembourg inde- pendence The interest of France in this question. CHAPTER III GERMAN COMMERCIAL EXPANSION . . . . 206 The flag follows trade Industrial development of Germany Plausible reasons for growth of German naval estimates Germany's ambiguous action as regards England's proposals for disarmament The peace of the world depends on Germany,[Hkewise her own prosperity By abandoning an aggressive policy Germany could outstrip all the Powers Her genius for the only kind of colonial expansion that tells German colonizers are of the cuckoo-race Germany, a parvenu Power, and a legitimate object of sympathy owing to the nature of her national problems In international relations Germany reduced to a day-by-day policy of opportunism Optimism of the plutocratic Germany oligarchy German Commercial Imperialism in South America Pan-Germanism and the Monroe Doctrine Germans ceasing to emigrate Necessity of an open market for purchase of essential products The various stages of Germany's fiscal policy Her flexible, but precarious, banking system The lesson of September and October, 1911 The legend of the " encircle- ment " of Germany Germany has no legitimate grievance Peculiar German view that the world owes her something : " theory of com- pensations " Germany treats other world- tribes as primitive peoples : the match-striking trick The imperious call of iron Curious interdependence of French iron-masters and German mining proprietors German efforts to bribe France into dangerous financial and commercial arrangements An economic forecast The German Emperor and Corneille. CHAPTER IV GENERAL CONCLUSIONS FROM THE FOREGOING ECONOMIC FACTS 226 The facts adduced in preceding chapter may be used indiscrimi- nately by the apostles of peace and the prophets of war Fresh proofs of importance of part played by public opinion and inter- national finance Public opinion to-day, often more bellicose than Governments. xviii CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER V ~ . 229 Criticism of the admirable French credit system Necessity of reform of French banking system Question of credit for small shop- keepers and business men The question of the exodus of French capital Lack of private initiative and individual responsibility in France The French testamentary law The depopulation of France Complex causes of the enfeeblement of the spirit of enterprise, consequent on French thrift Political and social advantages of French economic and industrial backwardness France, the most conservative, least revolutionary, of nations Potential useful role of syndicalism. CHAPTER VI THE POLITICO-ECONOMIC RELATIONS BETWEEN FRANCE AND GERMANY ......... 239 Radical difference of temperament between the two peoples : impossibility of understanding each other's points of view Diplo- matic methods of France ; diplomatic methods of Germany " Busi- ness " the sole principle of German diplomatic action These ideas illustrated by the history of the diplomatic relations between France and Germany since 1909 The Agreement of 1909 A method of solving the Moroccan problem that would have destroyed the Entente Cordiale Franco-German Economic Co-operation : the Ngoko- Sangha ; Scheme for a railway through the French Congo and the German Cameroons The Caillaux Ministry ; the role of M. Andre Tardieu The Franco-German Treaty of November 4, 1911. CHAPTER VII PREDOMINANCE OF SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL, OVER POLITICAL, QUESTIONS . . . . . .247 The first obligation of the modern diplomatists, acquaintance with economic facts Necessity of scrutinizing diplomatic instru- ments to the letter, illustrated by Franco-German Treaty and numer- ous instances Two remarkable and typical illustrations of the in- creasing force of financial considerations in determining the policy of States : the Turco-Italian War and Servia's struggle for economic emancipation Final answer to the question formulated in first chapter of this " Book." FOURTH BOOK The Present Outlook. CHAPTER I GERMANY AFTER THE SETTLEMENT OF HER MOROCCAN DIFFI- CULTIES WITH FRANCE . . . . . -255 Failure of German efforts to sunder England, France and Russia The Moroccan Question settled, yet the Great Misunderstanding persists World-wide consequences of Germany's foreign policy CONTENTS xix PAGE Germany temporarily learns the lesson of her discomfiture The meeting of the German Emperor and the Tsar at Port-Baltic Ger- many's confession on that occasion Baron Marschall von Bieber- stein and his successor Necessity for the members of the Triple Entente to keep ever before them the precariousness of European peace, owing to peculiar condition of Germany. CHAPTER II THE PRESENT GROUPING OF THE POWERS : How THE RELA- TIONS BETWEEN THE GROUPS CAN BE MAINTAINED . . 260 The real conditions of international peace Germany remains Germany in spite of the Balkan League Field of common action of the members of the Triple Entente The [necessary preliminary of such action The " European Concert " no longer possible The kind of international business that can be carried on with Germany Views of the ex- President of the Iron and Steel Institute The limits of England's " business-relations " with Germany. CHAPTER III THE DOMESTIC PROBLEMS OF THE MEMBERS OF THE TRIPLE ENTENTE ......... 264 The internal problems confronting France, England and Russia Rapid improvement in the domestic situation in France Pro- blems now being solved The case of England The admirable con- sequences of the incident of Agadir Formation of a Commonwealth of British nations Growth of a sense of unity The Imperial symbol of unity : sudden aggrandizement of the constitutional significance of the sovereign King George Construction of a brand new Im- perial Constitution now imperative. CHAPTER IV SPHERES OF COMMON ACTION OF THE TRIPLE ENTENTE : THE NORTH SEA 271 CHAPTER V SPHERES OF COMMON ACTION OF THE TRIPLE ENTENTE : THE MEDITERRANEAN ...... 272 The lapsing of the Triple Alliance Utility of its renewal Circum- stances in which Italy decided to renew the Alliance Real nature of the Triple Alliance : a self-denying ordinance between three mortal enemies Chronic and latent hostility between Italy and Austria : the Tripolitan expedition and Albania Italian nationalism The Triple Entente has need of the Triple Alliance to simplify its own problems Common aims of France and England in the Mediter- ranean Effects of the Italo-Turkish War and of the victories of the Balkan States Kirk-Kiliss6, the beginning of a new era Turkey no longer a European Power Consequences of this fact : effect on Russia ; effect on Germany ; effect on Austria-Hungary Detailed analysis of the new situation of Austria-Hungary Kirk-Kiliss6, a xx CONTENTS PAGE blessing in disguise for Austria Crispi's interview with Bismarck in 1877 The re-birth of German Austria Effect of this new situation on Italy Italy humiliated by Austria and Germany at the Berlin Congress Steady encroachments of Austria in the Eastern Adriatic Forms assumed by Italian vengeance Italy's " insurance " treaties with England and France concerning the Mediterranean Remarkable results of Italian diplomacy Italy's probable future policy The New Year's day speech of M. Barrere Settlement of the questions raised by Italo-Turkish War and by the success of the Balkan League, will be the supreme test of the solidity of the Triple Entente. CHAPTER VI SPHERES OF COMMON ACTION OF THE TRIPLE ENTENTE : THE FAR EAST 293 The three special arrangements fixing the conditions of action in the Far East The Russo-Japanese Agreement, and the duties thereby imposed on England and France Mr. Taft's Manchurian policy and the Open Door The Russo-Mongolian Agreement The Anglo- Japanese treaties of alliance and the Taft project of unre- stricted arbitration The bugaboo of the Yellow Peril Advantages for Great Britain, France and the United States of Russo-Japanese co-operation in China Japan, pacific : her policy of retrenchment Projects for the opening of the hinterland of Asia to the play of economic and financial forces The Trans-Persian Railway. CHAPTER VII SPHERES OF COMMON ACTION OF THE TRIPLE ENTENTE : THE CARIBBEAN ....... 299 Close of the era of ' ' narrow views " The opening of the Panama Canal The Powers are rushing into the Caribbean France and England confronted in the American Mediterranean with a new Power Is the United States yet aware of the changes in store for her owing to the Panama revolution and the construction of the Canal ? Summary of growth of American Imperialism after the Spanish-American War Difficulty of readjustment of Monroe Doctrine to modern conditions Immediate necessity for the United States to adopt a consistent world-policy American coast- wise trade and fortification of the Panama Canal The Canal and the Dardanelles Suggestion of Italian confiscation of foreign life- insurance companies established in Italy Opinion of international jurists on limits set to the rights of a State to legislate in sovereign independence Need of the United States to construct a powerful battle fleet The fate of the United States sealed by her decision to build the Panama Canal The United States has come forth definitively from her magnificent isolation The Canadian frontier, a frontier of the British Empire The question no longer is : "Is an Anglo-American alliance useful ? " but "Is an Anglo-American Alliance imperative ? " The warring interests of the Powers in the Pacific Asiatic immigration Shifting of geographical centre of gravity from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean Practical conse- quences for the United States Necessity of an understanding with the British Empire The dream of Jefferson Preparations of the Powers to establish themselves in the Pacific The French " all-blue " route A Franco- Anglo- American pact for the peace of the world. BOOK I BOOK I BEHIND the fa$ade of Governments two occult powers are now determining the destinies of the world. One of these is the disseminated Wealth of the Democracy, canalized both by the plutocratic oligarchy of the Bankers (la Haute Finance), whose clients, the Modern States, great and small, are constrained to apply to them for immense loans, and by the great manufacturers and mining pro- prietors, who tend to be actuated solely by economic interest, and who often combine in international trusts, the opera- tions of which are merely hampered by patriotic questions of national policy and national honour. The other power is the mysterious pervasive force known as Public Opinion, which is becoming more and more conscious of its efficacy, and, as its curiosity concerning the public weal and concerning international facts and corre- lations grows more alert, is manifesting a proportionately livelier jealousy of its prerogatives. II It is a commonplace to say that the entire social edifice is reared on a substructure of economic interests. From the colonizing activity of the Greeks, in the Dark Ages before Solon, seeking in Sicily and on the north shores of the Pontus the foreign corn which their own land could i B 2 PROBLEMS OF POWER not produce, 1 to the period of Caesar's colonial expeditions in Gaul ; from the Spanish voyages into the West in search of the wealth of the Indies, and from the declar- ation of American Independence, consequent upon the violation of the principle of no taxation without represen- tation, to the most recent consortium of Franco-German capitalists in the Congo, or to the episodes connected with the efforts of the Chinese Republic to negotiate loans with the Western Powers, money has been the key that generally unlocks the problems of history. For instance, the development of the transport system in America is part not only of the social and political, and even Constitutional, evolution of the United States, but also of the economic and social development of Europe. The detailed history of the European State loans to the Turkish Government, from the Crimean War to 1912, and of the development of the Administration of the Public Debt, in consequence of the activity of the bankers of Galata, is a tale of usury at which even the imagina- tion of a Prince of Golconda would marvel, but it is likewise one of the salient chapters of world-history, and it concerns not merely the Anatolian peasant, but the British publican, the New England farmer and the Breton sailor. In one great modern State in particular, the French Republic, eight or nine gigantic establishments of credit have formed a veritable trust which has tended to kill the minor banks, and, by whetting the French middle-class dis- trust of modern democratic social legislation, [have cultivated the prejudice that French securities are unsafe, and thereby so monopolized the employment of the public wealth that France may be said without exaggeration to be virtually a financial monarchy. The apathy of the French parlia- ment as regards the construction of great public works, 1 See Thucydides and the History of His Age, by G. B. Grundy, pp. 58-96. (Murray 1911.) A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 3 such as modern ports and canals, is often cited as one of the main causes of the relative industrial backwardness of France, and of the increasing invasion of French territory by enterprising German, Belgian or Swiss capitalists. A more potent cause assuredly is the fact that a large pro- portion of French savings are systematically exported abroad, on the pretext of assisting needy foreign States while affording safe investments to the French rentier, but, in reality, with the object of securing monstrous profits which benefit only the banks in question, a few interme- diaries and a certain section of the press, and with the result of developing the wealth and the defensive force of rival peoples, favouring the depopulation of France, and preparing the gravest complications for that country in case of a European war. 1 1 During the Balkan Scare of October 1912 no country, not even Austria-Hungary, was so immediately interested in the maintenance of peace as France. More than one thousand million francs of French capital have been lent to Rumania, Bulgaria and Servia. M. Alfred Neymarck, the Vice-President of the French " Society of Political Economy," states (vide L' Information, Jan. 10, 1913) that France possesses at present, in foreign State bonds and foreign securities, forty milliards of francs, paying an annual interest of about two milliards. He argues that " a great country which has at its disposal a considerable stock of annual savings, and which, after having satisfied its own needs, employs a part of its savings in carefully chosen investments in foreign State bonds and foreign securities without hampering its national foreign policy, and after having taken all necessary guarantees far from impoverishing itself, puts money by." This is incontestable. But M. Neymarck, in this carefully worded sentence, begs the whole question. The question is whether France is now " satisfying its own needs," before lending money abroad, and whether " all necessary guarantees " are being' taken before sending a part of its money out of the country. Finan- cial protection and financial nationalism are absurd. It is a policy which even the socialist leader, M. Jaures, has called etroit et sterili- sant ; and, as M. Briand recently said in the French Chamber of Deputies, c'est une force pour le pays qu'on ait a 1'exterieur le desir de son or ; but a country should always have the control of its money- market, and the present fiscal regime in France, whatever its advan- tages, is in certain respects open to adverse criticism. See pp. 229238. 4 PROBLEMS OF POWER III The other power, the power of Public Opinion, has not been a steady factor in the evolution of society. Though preponderant in Greece after the Medic wars, and not less obviously potent at many another moment of history in the Europe of the Crusades, in the France of 1789, in the American Colonies prior to the Revolution, in the Italy of Garibaldi, or in that of 1911 and 1912, and in the Balkans of the autumn and winter of 1912 it has not been one of the constant determinants of historical events. There have been vast periods when societies have apathetically allowed themselves to be governed by rulers whom they had not chosen or even sanctioned : whole epochs when, owing to the inorganic character of the community, no national self- consciousness could thrive, and when the destinies of a people seemed committed to the accidental charge of a mere handful of men. A different state of things characterizes the present period. The varied facilities for the dissemination of ideas have re- suscitated the authority of Public Opinion, stimulated its energy, and increased it a thousand-fold. No sociological phenomenon has greater importance to-day than the re- appearance of Demos in discussions of problems which, at certain moments of the past, have been debated between a responsible few in the ivory towers of diplomacy. An Aehrenthal and a Prince of Bulgaria may still effectively conspire to tear up a "Treaty of Berlin," and a half-dozen Indian specialists may, of their own initiative, secure the consent of the British India office and of the Emperor of India to a measure revolutionizing the administration of Hindustan ; but the consequences of these acts are not spent ; Public Opinion alone is to determine their direction and how pretend even that such acts have been " accom- plished " until, some years hence, it shall be possible to pro- nounce a verdict as to some of their international bearings ? A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 5 IV The political evolution of modern Europe, which has been the fatal consequence of the method mistakenly adopted by Prussian statesmen for the formation of a united Germany namely, the seizure of Alsace, and a part of Lorraine, in order to convert those French provinces into German soil intended to be the keystone of the Empire this evolution, which has been characterized by the incapacity of the Great Powers to settle the Eastern Question, and which has resulted to-day in the creation of two reciprocally hostile groups of virtually allied nations, the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, has been continually affected, frequently hampered, and partially compromised, by the action of a set of general causes which, while not peculiar to the present time, have never been manifested so unremittingly, or on so vast a scale. These general causes are the whole series of economic conditions so exceptionally characteristic of our industrial and financial period. The moment is one in which the exchange of products, the marvellous develop- ment in the organization of credit, and the intercommunica- tion of discoveries and ideas, are altering the whole content of the human consciousness and the moral aspirations of the masses of mankind, and are giving an international aspect to many a social problem that had hitherto been solely national. Count Berchtold, the successor of Count Aehrenthal in the post of Austro-Hungarian Minister for Foreign Affairs, addressing the Hungarian Delegations on April 30, 1912, thus summed up suggestively the political aspect of the world-situation : " Until the close of the nineteenth century the grouping of the Powers inaugurated by the Triplice appeared to be merely a clearly denned pattern. Since then, in consequence of England's abandon- ment of the principle of splendid isolation, in consequence of Japan's entrance into a European alliance, in consequence of the working 6 PROBLEMS OF POWER arrangement between Japan and Russia, and, what is no less im- portant, in consequence of the determination, by agreement among the Great European Powers, of the advantages that they could draw from Asia and Africa, a closely woven network of agreements and ententes has been formed between the Powers belonging to the same groups or to different groups, a fact which necessarily profoundly complicates the international situation. We must not forget that such new combinations may help to temper the contrasted differences and to serve the cause of peace. But, on the other hand, we must remember that the spheres of interest recently created under the shelter of these special agreements have brought into existence other points of contact and other zones of friction, a fact that has intro- duced into foreign politics an element of trouble, of which it is prudent for us to take note in time." The counter " insurance " treaties referred to by the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister are indeed among the most characteristic marks of the present situation. But they are superficial phenomena, the sole interest of which lies in the fact that they are the signs of essential changes below the surface. They are the evidence, not of a peaceful world-condition, but of a latent state-of-war. They are the indication of the risks involved in the expansive tendency of modern communities under the pressure of econ- omic motives ; they are the necessary political formulas of compromise intended to conjure away possibilities of international collision due to other than political causes. They bear witness, thus, to the most salient reality of modern civilization, namely, the increasing predominance of economic laws, with the consequent interpenetration of peoples, a state of things that has multiplied zones of friction ; the blind but ineluctable evolution towards a condition of " socialistic " reciprocity, coterminous with the circumference of the planet, and tending to annihilate national barriers. In April and May, 1912, the Turks temporarily closed the Dardanelles. One of the largest markets in the world was thus shut off from the activities of the British shipowner. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 7 The grain of Russia was left to rot in the bins of the wharves of the Black Sea, and her loss amounted to millions of pounds. England lost 15,000 to 20,000 per day ; Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece as much. British steamers, headed for the Black Sea, had to be diverted through the Suez Canal towards Indian markets, with the result of de- pressing freights from the East, and with a consequent further loss to the shipowner. The world was thus pro- vided with a singularly clear and instructive object-lesson in International Political Economy. The Turk had sealed the straits and he awaited the result, while the nations looked helplessly on. It was merely a laboratory experi- ment in Physics on a scale sufficiently vast to permit of the demonstration being visible in every quarter of the Medi- terranean amphitheatre. Lord Lansdowne, as one of the trained observers who witnessed the plight of the 185 vessels anchored east and west of Constantinople on May 2, 1912, lost no time in deploring the financial losses involved. He remarked quietly to his colleagues in the House of Lords that " sooner or later " the nations would have to decide to what extent a belligerent Power, controlling narrow waters which form a great trade avenue for the commerce of the world, was justified in entirely closing such an avenue in order to facilitate the hostile operations in which that Power might find itself involved. And, enlarging the inquiry to all its philosophic bearings, he observed : " Just as public opinion in any country would be slow to tolerate arrangements under which a local trade dispute might have the effect of paralysing the whole industrial life of the country, so public opinion amongst the Great Nations would be slow to tolerate a state of things under which a local conflict involving only two Powers would be allowed to create such serious detriment and disturbance to the whole trading community of the world." Thus, in Lord Lansdowne 's view, the lesson taught by the Dardanelles experiment was that perhaps, after all, the life and death interests even of two nations 8 PROBLEMS OF POWER must, in certain circumstances, be sacrificed to the interests of " the trading community of the world." 1 Whatever the verdict on this question, no man can have any doubt that the question has arisen, and that the reason is to be found in the fact, the stupendous modern fact, of the predominance to-day of economic over political conditions. The problem of the maintenance of national traditions, national characteristics, national integrity im- plies a constant compromise between world-interests, human interests in general, on the one hand, irrespective of national classifications, and, on the other hand, those sentimental, hereditary, beautifully persistent impulses and prejudices that shape a nation's soul, as such a soul has been created by the interplay of historical accidents and geographical determinism. It is a mark of the time that the same duel which formerly took place in France between la raison d'etat and les droits de I'homme is now taking place between national patriotism and European, or world, patriotism. Every natural impulse of conservative feeling peculiar to the citizens of whatever country is now aggravated by the necessity of self-preservation against the assaults of the corrosive influences, economic and financial, set to work by modern scientific inventions. The modern outburst of nationalism is general. A quarter of a century ago the ideal of the federation of the world and the parliament of man, a " passion for the planet," fired many a heart. To- day, throughout the world, the steady encroachment of the wave of imperialism would make Alexander the Great 1 The lesson of the Dardanelles incident is an ominous one for the United States, when that incident is reviewed in connexion with certain potential aspects of the problem of the control of the Panama Canal (see p. 302 et passim). The lesson, moreover, will have eventually to be learned in other parts of the world. There is a " Question of Flushing " which will one day have to be settled. The Scheldt is an international highway. It is not only the natural access to Antwerp ; it is one of the historic roads between the two French interior ports, Conde and Valenciennes, and the sea. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 9 or Genghiz Khan feel at home in both hemispheres. Na- tionalistic concentration is general. Italy, France, Eng- land, even the United States, Austria, China, Turkey, Canada, the Balkan States, above all Germany, impres- sively illustrate the strange, apparently reactionary recoil. At Count Aehrenthal's death, his compatriots who, as Mr. Steed wrote in The Times, are not given to critical analysis, but are usually guided by large undifferential impressions mourned the loss of the statesman who had taken Bosnia-Herzegovina, but chiefly of the statesman who had affirmed Austro-Hungarian independence of Germany, and who had caused the name of his country to be once again respected and feared in the world. " He appealed to their pride, which, for all its being timidly hidden or masked by self-depreciation, is still their strongest senti- ment." Thus, the twentieth century tendency will almost uni- formly be found to be towards a greater " national " activity. This activity is real, but the question is what is its origin, what is likely to be its duration. The chances are that the present phenomena of national expansion and of nation- alistic concentration fall under the general " law " that " nationalism," national spirit, is manifested only when nationality is menaced. The long agony of the several States which are being gradually throttled by the bonds of international finance and of the labour conditions that have everywhere engendered class-war, and which are being crushed into a monotonous uniformity by the combined pressure of all the forces that make for the creation of a standard " minimum man," l the product of a virtually identical set of educative influences in the several countries this agony might be, and probably will be, prolonged by a series of wars which will aggravate the present temporary tendency of each State to seek to pre- 1 See The Future of England, by the Hon. George Peel. Mac- millan, 1911. io PROBLEMS OF POWER serve its national traditions, and its national integrity ; but, from any comprehensive point of view, this revival of nationalism the world over is only the death-throe of the principle of nationality. It is a magnificent reaction, a pathetic convulsion of the principle of life, in each of these separate organisms, calculated, biologically speaking, to retard the disintegration with which they are menaced in a hostile environment. It is no doubt the drift of the time, but the drift of only a very brief instant of time ; and it signifies, in reality, a general tendency of just the opposite character : national spirit is manifested only when nationality is menaced. V This is an appreciation, the accuracy of which it is obvi- ously impossible to prove. That some such conclusion may be rendered plausible will, however, probably be suggested by the considerations, based on concrete facts, to be devel- oped later on. But the new economic facts that are be- coming that, indeed, have already become such a pre- dominant element in determining the nature or world civilization, are not, after all, exercising their influence in a void. They are acting on governments, communities, administrations that possess definite political and social characteristics. They are altering the whole conception of the State, and they are making breaches in frontiers ; but these frontiers are boundaries fixed by treaty, and maintained superficially intact by military force, or by the still powerful prestige of international convention. Before displaying one's little collection of economic facts, all belonging to a class calculated to cosmopolitanize the still very appreciably differentiated rival nations and peoples, 1 it will be well to review the present political and social con- dition of such States as are most exposed to these economic ravages. The social state of the Europe and the United States of to-day constitutes a kind of definite pattern woven 1 See Book III. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS n in political looms. But the pattern is being rapidly over- laid by fresh designs, and no time should be lost if the spectator would contemplate it approximately as it first came from the hands of its famous artisans. Before illus- trating by typical instances, and with some detail, the work- ing of the occult forces that, relentlessly destroying the society in which we were born, are now making over the world anew, it will be useful to cast a rapid glance at the last few years of the political history of certain of the Powers. It is important to note the present political and social aspects of the picture on which the new economic influences are now wreaking their indelible and curious work. VI The United States may properly, perhaps, be dealt with before any of the European Powers, as being apparently a more isolated case ; though this isolation, as the merest scrutiny shows, is only a " mirage of the map," and the next few years, following upon the opening of the Panama Canal, will reveal the immense increase, during less than the last quarter of a century, of the number of purely North Ameri- can factors in the total data now determining, not only the policy of the conscious nations, but the well-being, or the ad- versity, of the inhabitants of the earth as a whole. Rear- Admiral Mahan, who, with Mr. Chamberlain, has been one of the seminal minds of the last generation, relates in his brilliantly suggestive essay, " The Interest of America in International Conditions," that not so very long ago a shrewd old Member of Congress advised a newly-elected colleague " to avoid service on a fancy Committee like that of Foreign Affairs if he wished to retain his hold upon his constituents, because they cared nothing about international questions." It is no longer witty even for the average voter in America to express such an opinion as this. Every American citizen is vaguely aware that the expansion of world trade has 12 PROBLEMS OF POWER slowly altered the bearings of the famous Doctrine of Monroe, making of this rapidly rusting weapon, forged solely for defensive purposes, an intermittently flashing effective in- strument of imperialism. The chain of logical sequence in the rise of American national power has been clearly denned by the philosopher of Anglo-Saxon Sea-Power : the birth of industry, the need for markets, the demand for control of the highways leading to them by means of a navy, and the consequent necessity of establishing naval bases. Thus a certain American spread-eagleism had the same cause as the British political egoism that gave rise in France to the legend of per fide Albion, and as the present aggressiveness of a Ger- many bent on establishing her preponderance in all the con- tinents and on every sea. It is by the force of things that the United States has evolved two cardinal policies : a hitherto practically effective " Monroe Doctrine," and also a less successful principle, that of " The Open Door." Non-inter- ference with European international relations has ceased to be possible for that Power, owing to its own imperial ini- tiatives, to the birth of a real British Empire, and to the par- allel rise of German and Japanese aspirations in the Pacific. And the force of things, the force of economic things, may ultimately cause the United States to be brought to bay by rival Powers summoning her, if not to repudiate the first of her cardinal policies, the Monroe Doctrine, at least so to readjust it as to bring it into harmony with the new interests of those Powers. 1 If the United States Senate had sanc- tioned such a treaty of Arbitration as was proposed in 1911 by President Taft to the British and French ambassadors at Washington, their Governments, as well as those of Germany and Japan and the South American States, might easily one day raise " justiciable " questions, with regard to which American " national honour " could not temporize. The points to be insisted on for the moment are that the United 1 See pp. 299-314. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 13 States has become a World-Power, and that in becoming members of a World-Power the Americans have been so astonishingly transformed that even one who has been absent from their shores for a period of only twenty years must inevitably, upon his return, find his compatriots almost un- recognizable. An Englishman returning to London after so long a period, from a sojourn in Montreal, New York, or Seattle ; a French- man coming back to Paris after the same length of time passed in Canada or in the United States, would not find the familiar aspects of his home essentially altered. There is still in London " the same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street " as when Matthew Arnold wrote the preface to his Essays in Criticism. And the Boulevards are still the axis round whose polished surface spins the bright Parisian world. The English ancestral domains, and the French national parks, are still, in spite of Mr. Lloyd George and of the French Radicals in spite of the economic conditions that are altering the whole content of the human consciousness inhabited and frequented by men and women who are think- ing and feeling in the same British or Gallic fashion in which they felt and thought a quarter of a century ago. In the United States, on the contrary, so numerous have been the changes within the period reaching from 1890 to 1910 that they have cumulatively resulted in differentiating the America of to-day from the America of the earlier date by a real and impressive alteration in quality and in kind. Not merely the surfaces of things have changed : the mental and the moral traits of the American people have seemed to alter. It is obvious, however, that this latter change is partially an illusion. The American of to-day, who was " in being " in the America of twenty years ago, is only developing, with astounding rapidity, and in an unexpected variety of ways, the traditional American characteristics. But when the for- eigner, fresh come to the New World, or the exile who returns to it after a long lapse of time, is suddenly confronted with I 4 PROBLEMS OF POWER the bewildering bulk of these transformations, both super- ficial and moral, he cannot but contemplate the spectacle with wonder. This impression of astonishment is due not merely to the feeling of being dwarfed by the "sky-scraper." The " sky-scraper " is as natural and as inevitable a pro- duct of the human effort to adapt itself to the pro- visional environment, it is as logical a consequence of the interplay of the social, geographic and economic conditions of civilization on Manhattan Island and even now in other characteristic centres of American life as was its early model at Lyons, where the houses, constructed on a tongue of land hemmed in between the Saone and the Rhone, reach heights for the most part unknown in Paris ; as was the Roman amphitheatre, rising from the broad expanse of flat meadow- lands, or the Greco-Roman theatre, imbedded in a side-hill, with the convex of its tiers of seats backed against the after- noon sun. No other form of architectural expression was so beautifully suited at once to the topography of the spot and to the social purposes of the structure. And one of the happier consequences of the combination of the steel frame- work and of the " elevator," is that New York of to-day among the great cities is virtually the only one where you can see the stars. The insolence of its Shinar towers is a constant affront to the gods. But the idealism of American life for idealism is the most characteristic note of the American character is expressed in these structures as completely as is the practical energy of this people, whose preoccupation with a certain class of fact, whose inevitable interest in the tangible or visi- ble thing, has so often led the foreigner to describe them as " material." It is a spectacle as disconcerting as it is ex- hilarating to behold a whole nation rushing in where angels fear to tread. The ignoring of obstacles, the shattering of conventions, the faith in individual action, the callous neglect of all those inhibitions which arrest wild impulse, these are A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 15 traits of character which no one but an Athenian of the fourth century, an Italian of the Renaissance or a man of their temperament would have understood. The electoral period of 1910 brought to the surface, even for the detached observer, cumulative illustration, and in fact definitive proof, of the disconcerting mixture of idealism and practical sense in the American people ; and the Presidential campaign of 1912 gave added confirmation of the impressions that were to be gathered two years previously. The founders of American society were ideal- istic even unto mysticism, but they were practical and hard-headed even to sharpness, " cuteness " and canniness. Dr. Henry van Dyke, in his excellent lectures on The Spirit of America, affirms that the blended strains of blood which made the American people in the beginning " are still the dominant factors in the American people of to-day." And this intellectual and spiritual heredity has been communi- cated to millions of immigrants from all parts of the world. Throughout the electoral period of October and November, 1910, and again of 1912, the spectacle was one which re- sembled nothing which has ever taken place elsewhere. It revealed the existence, after all, of a national spirit, capable of ultimately completing the work of unification* which even 1 The work of unification will be a long effort in " constructive nationalism." It is not merely " the problem of the preservation of the national resources " of the United States, which has been sketched out by Mr. Roosevelt in his article on " The Pioneer Spirit and American Problems " (The Outlook, Sept. 10, 1910), and which Mr. Frank Bumngton Vrooman analyzed brilliantly in his lecture delivered to the Oxford School of Geography on March 8, 1909 (cf. " Theodore Roosevelt : Dynamic Geographer." Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press). It is the achievement of a national policy, and a national responsibility, based on a national unity. Many of the " rights " of the several States must be amalgamated in a general " law of the land " rendering impossible, for instance, such scandalous anomalies as the fact of the continued existence of defaulting American States over which the central Administration has only inadequate control. In the autumn of 1912 North Carolina, which has defaulted obligations amounting to over $12,000,000, 16 PROBLEMS OF POWER the Civil War, supplemented by the vast material co-ordinat- ing forces of our time railways, electricity, the printing-press had not yet sufficed to achieve. A genuine passion for reform ; a desire oh, sometimes a very exorbitant and fanatical desire to make social re- lations and civic ideals square with a crude notion of justice and fair play ; a recognition of the fact that the old con- fidence in the inevitable success and the obvious superi- ority of the American democracy was stupid and childish, and must give way before a systematic endeavour to work out a social ideal on a rational basis ; the rejection of the former insolent attitude of laisser-aller , of devil-we-care fatuousness, for the adoption of strenuous and methodical tactics aiming at the organization of a really democratic existence, in which the useful impetus of characteristic Ameri- can individualism,]or the sacrosanct principle of State rights, would be curbed only in so far as individualism and State appealed for a loan of $550,000 based on the credit of the State. Mississippi also, notwithstanding her repudiated debt of $7,000,000, is trying to borrow. A memorandum of the British Council of Foreign Bondholders recently recalled that the official Controller of Savings Banks in the United States had taken steps to compel certain of the banks to sell then: holdings of bonds of some of the Southern States, as, although such bonds were being regularly paid, the Savings Bank Law prohibits investment by the banks in securities of States which are in default on previously contracted obligations. The British Council of Foreign Bondholders expresses its surprise that prosperous and wealthy communities should persist in sheer refusal to enter into a reasonable arrangement with the holders of their defaulted obligations. They recommend an uncompromising opposition to the attempts of these States to obtain new money. At present the only two countries in the world in default, outside of the Southern States of the American Union, are Guatemala and Honduras. Constructive statesmanshp in the United States would find some way to render it no longer possible for a paper like the London Times to comment as follows on the present situation : "Unless the American States take prompt steps to remedy the present regrettable state of affairs it would appear probable that they will incur the unenviable distinction of being the only communities barred from the money markets of the world." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 17 Autonomy injured the interests of the vast community at large all these signs of an awakened national spirit, these preoccupations of practical reform which had moralized politics, and which were peculiar to no political party, but which were as much the key-note in 1910 of the speeches of the Democratic candidate for governor of New Jersey (destined to be President of the United States) as they were the war-cry of 1912 of the Nimrod of the Progressist party, bespoke a transformation in American conditions which marked only a newer and more potent phase of the earlier high-minded sense of obligation to subordinate life to a moral ideal. The period of what the Canadians of the West call " making good," is ended, and the American population is now developing a critical spirit as to the quality of the results of their civilization. It is taking to politics with a " strenuousness " that has an ethical fervour. The legitimacy or the illegitimacy of the triumphs of a rampant individualism the literally imperial achieve- ments of the unmolested money-getters who have built the railways and founded the corporations of the United States ; the problems of national economic conservation ; the present position and the future of American women ; the moral aspects of tariff bills or of banking legislation : such subjects as these are the recurrent themes of the great popular magazines and reviews which are read by hundreds of thousands of American citizens and gibbering candidates for American citizenship. This last fact is in itself extraor- dinarily impressive. The sense of a moral purpose, constantly revealed by the articles in the American magazines, is a fact classing itself immediately with the general impression left by the whole spectacle of American life. It is one with the cases of advertised philanthropy on the part of the plutocrats ; one with the titles of the books published by the presidents of the colleges ; one with the inspiration of the sermons in the churches, and one with the texture of the various c i8 PROBLEMS OF POWER planks in the political platforms. Save for the cult of sport and, after all, why exclude this Hellenic passion from the category of moral impulses ? no activity is any longer conceivable in America except in relation to the whole problem of the national interest and of national improvement. Heedless individualism, inspired by the merely selfish instinct of getting rich, or of being a success without thought of one's neighbour, is no longer American. The theory of " equal rights " has been tried and found wanting. The tradition of that persistent Jeffersonian principle is being hopelessly demolished by the lessons which Americans of the last generation have drawn from their political and economic experience. Everything now to be seen, everything to be read, everything heard in America, leads the observer to believe that American society is already becoming what Mr. Croly, in his remark- able book, The Promise of American Life, declares that it must become, short of utter failure. It is becoming a democracy of selected individuals, who are obliged constantly to justify their selection. It is no longer, as Matthew Arnold called it, the home of das Gemeine. Its members are be- coming united in a sense of joint responsibility for the success of their political and social ideal. A Bossuet, rhetorically falsifying history in conformity with an a priori principle of pre-established harmony, might be tempted grandiloquently to recall that the north and south axis of the planet is that of the five great com- mercial and ethnic highways of world-civilization : the Canal of Panama, the Suez Canal, the Nile valley, the valley of the Rhone, and Manhattan Island, and to find a " providential " fitness in the fact that a self-conscious people, with a common political and social ideal, should be developed round each of these highways. But he would roll out anathema at one of the most characteristic aspects of American life, the universal interest in sport, the passion for play. Autumn in America to-day is, indeed, a season in A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 19 which not merely the youth, who are donning the toga virilis, and their beautiful partners, but men and women of all ages, abandon themselves to strenuous amusement. Join the wonderful crowds who assemble in their several amphitheatres, round the football field, from Andover Hill, by way of New Haven and Cambridge, to West Point. It is an imperial spectacle, and the spectator will have the sensations of a patrician. A quarter of a century ago the great American public cared little for the fate of a university team pitted against its rival. In America to-day the entire community participates in the tense curiosity with which the college graduates hasten, with their womenkind, to the tournament fields to see the youth who are more like gladiators than like knights do battle, and the newspapers of the continent, in the small as in the great towns, devote as much space to the games as they do to home politics, and infinitely more than they do to foreign affairs. That thirty thou- sand or forty thousand people, among those who are doing all the serious things in the society of their time, should scramble for the privilege of watching a football game, that the fifty thousand others who are excluded from the privilege, more or less by chance, should envy them their good fortune, and that hundreds of thousands of others should be waiting at nightfall, at the ends of the telegraph wires and in front of the bulletins posted up by the newspapers, to learn the result of a battle lasting ninety minutes ; this is a fact which Europe could not understand, but of which it has perhaps gained an inkling, since the American victories in the Olympic Games of 1912 at Stockholm. It is a fact of a Pindaric quality, and one which throws a beautiful light on the growth of the hero- cult in the civilization of Greece. America has not yet a national poet like Pindar, capable of celebrating the glory of a Boston, or a Duluth, or a New York, or a Rich- mond, or a Chicago boy, in verses to the glory of these 20 PROBLEMS OF POWER several cities, but it already has the pretext and the incen- tive for a Pindar ; and when such a writer is born he will say in English, as his predecessor said in Greek : " Best of physicians for a man's accomplished toil is festive joy." At Lenox, where the rich families of New York have created vast domains around their country houses; exactly as the rich Roman and Gallo-Roman colonists of the Bur- gundian highlands, by natural capillary advance up the Rhone valley, built in a wilderness villas crammed with the art treasures of Greece or of the home-country on Long Island, on the Connecticut slopes, in the hinterland of the Boston suburbs, or at Morristown, in New Jersey, where, in an atmosphere of admirable history, and in a region of beautiful hills and poetic waters, still other favourites of American fortune have organized a life warm with a rich comfort which only England's aristocracy had anticipated ; the impression left upon the visitor is of an- other kind. It is distinctly that which Signer Ferrero, the historian of Rome, has chronicled in his notes on American society. The immense extension of the class which possesses the money to buy leisure, and enough money to buy the leisure to be wise even if all of them be not yet wise enough to buy that kind of leisure is a new fact which illustrates once more how useful the economic key may be to open the problems set by history. And these citizens, who can now afford to play, are being imitated by the entire people, all of whom are " making money," or who are somehow enjoying the mysterious privilege of economic credit. A quarter. of a century ago, most Americans doubted whether they had a right to play. None thought it " moral " to play long. This feeling was part and parcel of the emo- tion with which they clung to the validity of the univer- sally disseminated eleventh commandment : Thou shall not like. Of that commandment not a shred remains. The Americans have issued forth from the dank Puritanism of A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 21 their old-time places of worship and of study. They have come out into the open. They have treated their moral rheumatism by a bath of sunlight. They are marching to the step of an imperial movement, and they are rapidly substituting for the old precepts a moral philosophy as realistic, as " pragmatic," as that which was born in the Greek palaestra, and which a little effort of mysticism might easily enhance and no doubt will with all the virtues of the famous kalokagathos. 1 At present America has only reached the stage of calisthenics. With their emancipation from the book, the Americans are, alas, recklessly shat- tering the language, inventing new idioms, sharpening certain words, or destroying others ; but they are, mean- while, evolving in the open a physical type of man and woman which has already considerably altered the appear- ance of the race. Dr. van Dyke, in the book already cited, denies the truth of the contention that any general and fundamental change has taken place in the human type in America. But that very trait of Americans, the expressions of which he analy- ses so suggestively, their spirit of self-reliance the char- acteristic which Professor Miinsterberg calls the " spirit of self-direction " has unquestionably given to the male and female face a look which distinguishes it from the ex- pression of the British, French,\>r German, face, and which climatic or other external causes would not have sufficed to induce. The British, Dutch, or Irish animal, homo, transplanted to America, might, perhaps, have become what Quatrefages declared he was becoming, a species of man resembling the North American Indian, if it had not been for the play of moral and economic factors which have saved him from that degeneracy. At all events, it is just because these handsomer and 1 The Catholic University of America has conferred on Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan a unique degree : " Patron of Fine Arts and Letters." (N.Y. Herald, Jan. 3, 1913.) 22 PROBLEMS OF POWER healthier Americans of the present generation are 'the de- scendants of men and women who had a peculiar endow- ment of energy, and a special training that was productive of real will-power ; it is, in a word, just because they have been able to preserve their " forms of thought," that they have been able to expand with such abounding elasticity, and such a steady, and often insolent, optimism, within the vast limits of their continent, and that, furthermore, now those limits have been reached, they have been able to develop the sanely sceptical attitude as regards the quality of their achievements, and the unflinching resolve to justify their belief in themselves, which are bound to strike any observer as characteristic of American society to-day. The horizon of a religious mind is not confined within the meridians traced on the surface of the earth. For many generations the Americans were profoundly re- ligious, and their perspectives reached outward into spaces the reality of which was as characteristic as their remote- ness. The Americans of to-day are less religious, notwith- standing the evidence afforded by the statistics of church- membership. But the habit that they have acquired, of taking the idealistic, mystical, religious, far-view of human actions, their utter failure to comprehend the narrow terre- d-terre point of view, remains with them as a " form " of thought, which has been singularly and happily adjusted to the purely geographical conditions of their national ex- pansion. An energy and a will to organize American society on a national basis, is now being manifested in a spirit hostile to some of the most sacred political and social traditions of the people of the independent States. This is the impressive im- plication of the whole wondrous spectacle of modern America. Now, this pervasive domestic unrest, the internal trans- formations, have uniformly escaped the notice of the foreign observer, or, when he has obtained some inkling of them, he has usually misinterpreted them. The great fact, how- ever, which has impressed itself upon him with extraordinary A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 23 lucidity is that the United States has become a World- Power, and he is taking this fact into his calculations to a degree that is unsuspected by the average American, and is sufficiently appreciated only by certain members of the Senatorial Committee for Foreign Affairs. When, in 1909, ex-President Roosevelt, coming up out of Africa, made his tour of the European continent, the gravest ex- ponent of British public opinion welcomed him in language which it is pertinent to recall. The spectacle of the un- failing enthusiasm excited by Theodore Roosevelt, as he passed from country to country, was compared to the fer- vour aroused by Garibaldi, when his romantic exploits were still fresh in men's minds, and his red shirt was the symbol of struggling causes. " There has been nothing like it in Europe since the days of Peter the Hermit," said The Times', and this great organ of British feeling under- took to account for the mystery of a phenomenon which the mere psychology of crowds is admittedly inadequate to explain. The reason why Mr. Roosevelt's progress in Europe was such as the greatest monarchs have not always enjoyed, was taken to be the fact that the substance of all his speeches was one needful and welcome. Mr. Roosevelt came to a Europe which was sick and very weary of talk, perpetual talk, about rights ; and it listened with avidity and hope to a man who spoke of duties, and spoke of them plainly and emphatically. The opportuneness of Mr. Roosevelt's message is the explanation which was given of the astonishing success of his odyssey. There is no reason for rejecting this version of the matter ; but it should be borne in mind that Mr. Roosevelt's message was an " Ameri- can " message, and that the importance ascribed to his utterances and, in fact, his very presence in Europe, was due to the significance attributed to-day by the rest of the world to any characteristic American demonstration. In order to illustrate this truth one single episode of Mr. Roose- velt's journey suffices his visit to France. The great im- 24 PROBLEMS OF POWER pression left by Mr. Roosevelt in France could not have been made if he had not arrived there with a singular pres- tige. To Europe he was a convenient symbol of American world-power ; and France, in particular, had just had excellent reasons for congratulating herself on having greeted Franklin with sympathy a century and a half ago, and for having aided the British colonies beyond the Atlantic to achieve their independence. At Algeciras she reaped the reward for her attitude during the Anglo-American diffi- culties of the eighteenth century. At Algeciras the con- ciliatory intervention of President Roosevelt, by thwart- ing the German Emperor's efforts to destroy the diplomatic block which gave France a firm stand in the defence of her Moroccan interests, did more than save that country from a humiliation which might have led to a European war. It confirmed again a fact which Continental Europe had learned during the Spanish-American War, but which, if it had not been for Mr. Roosevelt's conspicuous personality, it might easily have forgotten the fact that the United States existed, and that the Monroe Doctrine did not neces- sarily imply that the American Government ignored the presence of other Powers on this planet. Mr. Roosevelt, who had been a soldier in Cuba, and an official of the Navy Department, had also been the foremost promoter of arbitration among the nations. At The Hague, at Alge- ciras, and at Portsmouth, he proved to Europe that America was no mere cartographic figment. For France, as for the rest of the European Continent, Mr. Roosevelt meant the United States. His coming was the arrival of the magician who had made America to loom over the top of the sea, and finally to become visible from Madrid, Paris, Berlin and Lon- don, and even from China and from the islands of a the Pacific. Such was the European point of view. Its correctness or its superficiality need not here be discussed. The fact remains : for France, as for Europe, Mr. Roosevelt personi- fied, and still personifies, an epoch of American history. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 25 The curiosity which the ex-president evoked in Paris sprang from a feeling of genuine and disinterested admiration for the man who had made the Republic of the United States more than merely visible to the naked eye, who seemed to have introduced it into the concert of the Powers ; and the sympathy with which he was greeted in France was but the natural payment of a debt of gratitude to a man who had done that country signal service at a moment of grave crisis. Moreover, as chance would have it, he came to France " in the nick of time." He was the representative, it is true, of ideals which are not new, some of which, indeed, had been uttered by a foreigner more than twelve years before, but which had then fallen on stony soil. The time was ripe for his visit. During the period in which the United States was material- izing for European observers out of the mirage which had seemed for so long a time a mere cloud-bank in the Western Atlantic, the relations of the European States were evolving in accordance with the laws of equilibrium, which, in the language of politics, means that those States were engaged in a struggle for the^balance of power. Bismarck did more than create an approximately united Germany ; he destroyed Europe. He pitted the Continental nations against one another in a reciprocal enmity which seemed likely to endure. The history of Europe during the last twenty years has been, in its broadest aspect, merely the often blind but consecu- tive effort to shatter German hegemony, and to establish equilibrium among the Great Powers. A necessary condi- tion of the restoration of equilibrium in Europe was the re- nascence of France. England was long in coming to this point of view, but Russia clearly perceived the fact only a few years after the conclusion of the Treaty of Frankfort, and the result of her perspicacity was the Franco-Russian Alli- ance, and ultimately the Triple Entente between France, Russia, and England, which was a device for counter- balancing the prestige of the Triple Alliance. No fact is more characteristic of our time than the Franco- 26 PROBLEMS OF POWER Russian Alliance. But no fact was for a long period more misunderstood, even in France. The French Foreign Office left French public opinion in such complete ignorance of the real diplomatic bearings, and of the practical significance of that alliance which was interpreted by the nation as an ear- nest of ultimate recovery of Alsace-Lorraine that when, in August, 1898, the Tsar appealed to Europe in arms to meet for discussion of the problem of disbanding the standing armies, there was a spontaneous protest, a wail of disenchant- ment, throughout the whole French nation. When the young Tsar visited Versailles, in the autumn of 1896, he was led through the famous Galerie des Glaces, where the Ger- man Princes had proclaimed the birth of an empire won by the partial dismemberment of France. The presence, in that accursed spot, of a more arbitrary potentate than even a Hohenzollern drunk with victory, was given almost a lustral importance by certain observers, who had no difficulty in con- vincing the quick French imagination of their perspicacity. 1 Nicholas II was conceived by them as a great and friendly 1 I was one of the few unofficial guests of the French Government, in the Palace of Versailles, on the occasion of the Tsar's visit, October 8, 1896. That night I telegraphed to the London Times a long dispatch describing the scene in the Palace. That dispatch contained the following paragraph : " We were in the historic hall, where the old Emperor William, all the German Sovereigns, and the Iron Chancellor proclaimed the German Empire. We were awaiting the coming of the great Imperial friend of France, who, by his presence, was, in the eyes of Frenchmen, to purify this hall of the associations that for twenty-five years have made Versailles a name not of glory, but of humiliation. We had been convened to witness an act almost religious in its seriousness. High over our heads, at the base of the central painting of the ceiling, was the legend ' Le Roi Gouverne Par Lui-meme.' Beneath this haughty assump- tion of the old Monarchy, William I had proclaimed the birth of an Empire won by the partial dismemberment of France. He had chosen this proud vantage-point with a bitter irony, the sting of which could be mitigated only by the passage across this spot of a monarch still more autocratic than he. The palace had waited a quarter of a century for the grand purification which was soon to restore it unsullied to the admiration of Frenchmen." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 27 monarch who had hunted the German spectre from that historic hall, and had purified it for French ends. If the French nation, as a whole, welcomed the Russian Alliance, it was because it felt that France could now hold up her head in Europe, and that one day, perhaps, she could tear up the Treaty of Frankfort. The burst of enthusiasm which greeted the Russian sovereigns on their several visits to France had no other meaning than this : " You are our friends, and some day you and we together will put Prussia in her place." Thus, two great people, utilizing all the democratic forces of publicity at their disposal, so transformed the arts of diplomacy that the union which they had formed could no longer be defined in the old idioms, and by such oft- used words as " treaty " and " alliance." But there was to be a rude awakening. In August, 1898, the Imperial Russian Gazette published the appeal of the Tsar in favour of disarmament. In France this publication was an unexpected peal of thunder shattering all the hopes of the nation. 1 Public opinion in France, dumbfounded at the blow, accused her rulers of having been duped by the Russian Foreign Office, which was re- presented as having acted in the interests of the two autocratic conspirators, the German Emperor and the Tsar. An eminent historian, M. Lavisse, Academician and professor at the Sorbonne, expressed on this occasion the feeling not only of the masses but of the nation as a whole when he said : " Never has our Government taken care to explain to us the exact meaning of the alliance. It has thus far spoken and acted as if there were an under- standing warranting vast hopes. It has encouraged the very natural illusions of a country given to enthusiasms. It has not perceived that we needed the real truths, naked and dry harsh if necessary." The " real truth " was that the French statesmen who had extolled an alliance with Russia had done so in the 1 See note, p. 48. 28 PROBLEMS OF POWER interests of peace, but that they were of the school of Gam- betta, whose maxim was that if France would come to an understanding with Russia, she could do more than recover her position in Europe : she would be able to destroy Ger- man hegemony. In a period when the carking desire for the revanche still dominated French society, it would have been impossible, in a democratic community like that of France, to undertake to dispel or even to temper " the natural illusions of a country given to enthusiasms," and to substitute for the misconstructions of French opinion as to the Russian Alliance truer conceptions of the European situ- ation, and an exact notion of the scope of the defensive alliance with the Tsar. The essential thing for those who were responsible for the destinies of France was to effect the alliance at all costs. Its bearing and significance could be explained later on. The disillusionment caused throughout France, as Frenchmen gradually grew to understand that the alliance implied no active policy of aggression culminat- ing in the revanche, but meant the melancholy maintenance of the status quo as determined by the Treaty of Frankfort, 1 and that all that subsisted of the " long hopes and the vast thoughts " of the early epoch of enthusiasm was the some- what mystical faith of Gambetta in an " immanent justice," this disillusionment was one of the most tragic experiences that ever befel a generous nation. The experience tended 1 The situation was, I believe, described with absolute accuracy by the Socialist leader, M. Jaures, in a speech in the Chamber of Deputies on March 22, 1912. He said : " Vous savez bien que 1'al- liance russe n'a pas eu explicitement pour base le maintien du statu quo, mais si vous voulez scruter a fond les evenements, si vous voulez recueillir le temoignage, le jugement que portait M. Albert Vandal et que notre collegue M. Denys Cochin commentait 1'autre joureloquemmentarAcademieFran9aise, vous verrez qu'en fait la Russie, tou jours ten tee, malgre tout, de menager la dynastie alle- mande ne vous a donne la main que pour une oeuvre de paix continuee ; et vous savez bien que si la revanche, si la reparation devrait dependre d'entreprises belliqueuses, vous savez bien que tout le jeu de votre politique, depuis quarante-deux ans, aurait etc de I'ajourner." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 29 to cultivate in it as a whole that spirit of positivism and resignation which had previously been characteristic of only a part of the nation. It cultivated also the stoic courage to see and to take things as they are, which is the primary condition of practical statesmanship ; and France, in seeking to readjust herself to the conditions revealed by her belated perspicacity, fell back upon the resolve to " make the best " of the best bargain which her rulers had been able to arrange in their efforts to restore her to her place in the world. The Tsar's appeal to Europe was examined in this fresh light. On reflection it was seen to be, after all, an utterance and an act inspired by some of the soundest of French tra- ditions. What it really amounted to was the convocation of the Etats-Generaux of the nineteenth century ; and it was not that by a figure of speech, but actually that. Only the conditions of our " laic " l time, the multiple material conditions, had made such an appeal possible. Europe as a whole, to-day, is smaller than the France whose woes and reclamations were considered in 1789 by Necker and the king ; but to-day, as then, " orders " corresponding with those of the ancien regime are interested in preventing the possibility of the reform proposed by the Tsar. The National Assembly had declared " fraternity," had cried urbi et orbi : " there shall be no more war." The time was not yet ripe. It was not ripe when the reform was extolled by Napoleon III in i863. 2 But it was all but ripe in 1898, and it is still riper to-day because of the march of the factors, or rather the multiplication of the peculiar material conditions, which are transforming the very mentality of the race. 1 See note, p. 80. 2 My old chief, M. de Blowitz, writing in The Times of August 30, 1898, on the subject of the Tsar's proposal, compared that monarch to Napoleon III, and said : " Napoleon III once dreamed of some- thing of the sort, and in a solemn speech published his dream to an astonished world. The dream melted away, before common- sense and reality, without bringing about a catastrophe." 30 PROBLEMS OF POWER Bismarck retarded the work of the French Revolution, gagging France and flinging Europe back into the old regime. Louis Napoleon had begun in the revolutionary spirit, but Germany blocked the way. At last France resumed her onward march, and irony of ironies ! the Tsar, arriving with his historic appeal to the nations, showed himself the real heir of the Revolution, the continuator of the work of the National Assembly. There are two French ideals : that of les droits de I'homme, and that of la raison d'etat, and the struggle between them makes French history the most fascinating and human of all histories. 1 The Tsar, personifying the first of these ideals, pointed the way to France, and gave voice to her revolu- tionary spirit, her concern for right and human liberty, her scorn for privilege and la raison d'etat, her sublime Utopian logic. Three years after his famous appeal in favour of dis- armament the Tsar paid a second visit to France. At Com- piegne, on Friday, September 19, 1901, he gave audience to M. Bourgeois, the French plenipotentiary at the Hague Conference. This was the morrow of the day spent by the Tsar on the field of manoeuvres at Betheny, where at luncheon, in the casemates of the Fort of Vitry, he proposed a toast in the following words : " I drink to the brave French army, to its glory and to its prosperity, and I like to look upon it as a powerful support for those principles of equity on which repose the general order, the peace, and the well- being of the nations." It was impossible to affirm more explicitly that the army of the Franco-Russian Alliance was the army of the Hague. " Equity " on the lips of a Russian emperor was synonymous with " Justice " in the mouth of a Roosevelt. France no longer had any excuse for not understanding. She did understand : not merely her rulers, but her people. And yet, how many of their sentimental instincts were wounded, how many of their natural impulses arrested, * See pp. 96-99. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 31 by the certainty that " the principles of equity on which re- pose the general order, the peace, and the well-being of the nations " must henceforth be their only resource ! The Tsar had sown, in the teeth of a driving Gallic wind, the germs of pacifism in France. 1 But the seeds had pushed to the light amid a rank undergrowth of aspirations towards " revenge." Was there no way of making a harmonious garden-plot of these blades of corn and of these scarlet poppies ? Pacifism and War ! Here were two reciprocal contradictory ideals. Could nothing be done to reconcile them ? The problem seemed to the French to have been solved by the ex-president of a friendly nation and a " sister re- public." The rough-rider of Cuba had been the laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize. Frenchmen awaited Mr. Roose- velt's arrival with anxious expectations, hoping to learn from his lips the formula which the United States had found useful, and which might serve as a remedy for their own malaise. They were not disappointed. Here is what the ex-president said to them at the University of Paris, in a lecture which was disseminated by the Temps among some fifty thousand school-teachers throughout the country : " The good man should be strong and brave, that is to say, capable of fighting, of serving his country as a soldier, should the occasion arise. There are well-intentioned philosophers who declaim against the iniquity of war. They are right, provided they insist merely on the iniquity. War is a horrible thing ; and an unjust war is a crime against humanity. But it is a crime of this sort because it is unjust, not because it is war. The choice should always be in favour of right, whether the alternative is peace or war. The ques- tion should not be simply : ' Is there going to be peace or war ? ' The question should be ; ' Shall the cause of right prevail ? Are the great laws of justice once more to be observed ? ' And the reply of a strong and virile people will be : ' Yes, whatever the risk may be.' No honourable effort should ever be neglected in order to avoid war, just as no honourable effort should be neglected by an indi- vidual, in private life, to avoid a quarrel ; but no self-respecting individual, and no self-respecting nation, should submit to injustice." 1 See p. 159. 32 PROBLEMS OF POWER And dotting the i's with a vigorous stroke, in a hand- writing which all could read, the speaker concluded with an inspiriting and illuminating definition of patriotism, and of its bearing on international relations. He seemed to be giving a voice to the finer idealism of French foreign policy under the Third Republic. The truly patriotic nation, he said, made the best member of the family of nations. It should stand up for its rights, but it should respect the rights of others. " International law," however, was not private law, and it lacked as yet a recognized sanction. For the present, every nation must be the final judge of its own vital interests, and in the last resort must have the will and the strength to withstand the wrong which another would inflict upon it. The nations were all for peace and justice, but " if peace and justice were at loggerheads, they would despise the man who did not take the side of justice, even though the whole world were to rise up in arms against him." No lips since Gambetta's had addressed Frenchmen with this lucidity and this authority. And the lips were those of the one distinguished foreigner whose sincerity was beyond suspicion. Mr. Roosevelt justified Frenchmen to them- selves. 1 He capped the work of the Tsar, reconciling the two great principles which had presided over the evolution of French history : the spirit that had informed the De- claration of the Rights of Man, and the spirit that, from the defeat of Ariovistus to the Treaty of Nimegue, had animated the soul of the nation in its long struggle towards unity and la raison d'etat. The man who had thus eloquently expressed the aspira- tions of the French soul and its anxious reflections on problems which concern the very existence of France as a 1 The author of Le Patriotisme en France et I' Stranger, 1912, M. Paul Pilant, publishes in his excellent book an article written by him in June 1910, and " dedicated to the French pacifists," in which he cites Mr. Roosevelt as an admirable professor of energy for the French people. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 33 nation, could be permitted to utter certain home truths which would have been tolerated from no one else ; and Mr. Roosevelt made the most of his advantage. It was not merely a matter of his reminding a people who had inscribed the word " Egalite " on all their public monuments (not excepting the portals of their cemeteries perhaps the only place where it deserves to figure) that " Equality " is an absurdity ; that there are degrees of worth, and thus degrees of legitimate superiority, and consequently of desert and social rank ; and that only men who are equal are equal. It was not merely a matter of his paean in honour of the man of action and character, which contained pas- sages of withering scorn for the cynic who watches the fray from afar, regarding it as vulgar to take part in the battle and " distinguished " to criticize, and to count the blows dealt by others utterances as stinging as those in which the Abbe Coyer castigated the aristocracy of his time for their indiffer- ence to the great civic, political and commercial interests of the community ; and utterances, moreover, that were singularly audacious in a society where so small a proportion of the electorate care to indulge in their right of suffrage. It was not even Mr. Roosevelt's haughty assumption to be speaking to the doctors of the Sorbonne as the Paul of a New Dispensation, and his venturing to assure these Gama- liels that all the science of the schools is as nothing in com- parison with common sense and those qualities which, while giving a man self-confidence, give him at the same time a sentiment of his responsibility as a member of society. It was not the fact of Mr. Roosevelt's fulminating as a kind of Protestant Savonarola, in the downright Anglo-Saxon way, that moved the heart of France. It was the mere fact of his existence as a type ; the fact that a man who had been President of a Republic should possess ideas of his own, and take himself seriously as a leader of men and a teacher, whereas in their own country the head of the State was a vague personage without known views of any kind, without D 34 PROBLEMS OF POWER initiative or authority, and a man who, if he were to venture to enunciate any ideas or to play a role, would expose him- self, in spite of the Constitution, 1 to the French form of im- peachment, and perhaps eventually be brought up for trial before Parliament sitting as a High Court of Justice. As an illustration of what one may, what, indeed, one must, call the Consular character of Republican government in the United States, one need only quote the words of Mr. Roosevelt in his address delivered at Christiania, May 5, 1910, on " The Colonial Policy of the United States." He warned his hearers on that occasion that his remarks on peace as incumbent of the Nobel Prize should be taken in the light of what he " actually did " as President. The United States kept her promise to the letter as to the eva- cuation of Cuba, and her intervention in San Domingo was solely to " prevent the need of taking possession of the island." But what was the President's role, his " manner " as a responsible exponent of American policy ? In a period of anarchy and revolution Mr. Roosevelt negotiated a treaty with the Government of the Island in virtue of which an American was placed at the head of the Customs Houses and the United States agreed to turn over to the San Domingo Government 45 per cent, of the revenue, keeping 55 per cent. 1 " In spite of the Constitution." The French Constitution un- questionably grants the President the rights of message and sus- pension, the rights of prorogation and dissolution of Parliament. And no doubt, as Mr. Henry Leyret says in his brilliant book : Le President de la Republique (Colin, 1913), p. ix, " not to use these rights c'est trahir les citoyens." The whole question, however, is whether the President is free to apply the Constitution. Elected by the members of the two Houses can he be expected to take initia- tives which may create friction between the Chamber and himself ? M. Leyret argues that he can, provided he keeps ever in mind the principle of the Separation of Powers. But that principle has become painfully blurred in France. At all events, whatever may be the letter of the Constitution, its practical application has more and more tended to limit the role of the President, and the real problem at present, as will be seen later on (pp. 127-129), is how to restore the Separation of Powers, so as to prevent usurpation of the executive by the legislative authority. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 35 as a fund to be applied to a settlement with the creditors. The creditors acquiesced. The United States Senate alone held out. But, says Mr. Roosevelt, " / went ahead anyhow and executed the treaty until it was ratified." By his " going ahead anyhow," without constitutional sanction, the San Domingo Government has received nearly double the amount of the revenues they got when they collected it all themselves, and the United States gave the world the im- pression that it was acting in good faith. Mr. Roosevelt's policy in San Domingo was attacked by those whom he calls " the hysterical sentimentalists for peace," but " he went straight ahead and did the job," in spite of the charge that he had " declared war " against San Domingo. In the same way, referring to the Isthmus of Panama, where the responsible Government was incapable of crushing out lawlessness, he says : "As nobody else was able to deal with the matter, I dealt with it myself, on behalf of the United States Government, and now the Canal is being dug, and the people of Panama have their independence and a pros- perity hitherto unknown in that country." One need not for the moment concern oneself with the result of these policies, but merely with their Constitutional character ; and the obvious fact is that the Constitution of the United States, alone among the Constitutions of the civilized Powers, is sufficiently elastic to permit the Head of the State to act thus irresponsibly for responsible ends ; to " deal with the matter himself on behalf of the Government " ; to " go ahead anyhow," provisionally indifferent as to the Constitutional sanction of his actions. This is a form of real-politik which is Bismarckian in its processes, but which no modern Bismarck, even in Germany, could successfully imitate. No British sovereign, or French President, or Turkish Sultan, hardly any Russian Tsar, could act in a manner so arbitrary. The fact that the scope of the powers of the Head of the United States is potentially of this almost unlimited, positively Montenegrin, character is one of the 36 PROBLEMS OF POWER most interesting and singular features in the whole history of Constitutional government. This fact, to be sure, can be viewed under another light ; it is not merely " interesting and singular " : it may conceivably constitute a danger for what is called popular liberty. In connexion with the Presidential campaign of 1912, above all with reference to the discussion of the question of the third term for Mr. Roosevelt himself, there was proposed to Congress a scheme extending the American President's term of office from four to six years, and rendering him in- eligible for a second term. The framers of this measure were fully aware of the immense range of powers conferred in the United States upon the Executive Authority. Commander- in-Chief of the army and the navy, the President, as the appointing officer, has also beneath him a great army of civilian officials who look to him for their continuance in office. As the organ of Mr. Roosevelt, the Outlook, acknow- ledged (May 25, 1912, p. 152), "There are other powers inherent in the executive authority that help to render the President of the United States powerful beyond the dreams of many a king." The high-minded but doctrinaire, and therefore unsound, thinkers who (notwithstanding their recognition of the fact that " there is undoubtedly an evil in the misuse of patronage/' and that " there is a danger in the possibility of a President's continuing himself in power longer than the people wish ") objected to the proposal to limit the President's authority, ventured upon the fol- lowing : " Any President who is continued in office through the mandate of the people furnishes no danger of dictatorship." It is a beautiful case of deductive reasoning, of a scholastic perfection, the rotten root of which is the petitio principii that the people can do no wrong ; that the people have a right to rule ; and that right in this last phrase has a clear, axiomatic, religiously binding, sense, requiring no com- mentary or justification. Worse still, the assumption that a President who is not ousted by 92 million Americans, to 37 whom he owes his election by " direct primaries," is neces- sarily the best exponent of the people's wishes, is a kind of a priori major premiss which the most superficial knowledge of history, from Csesar to Napoleon III, tends to discredit. The truth is that " any President who is continued in office through the mandate of the people furnishes " many a " danger of dictatorship." There is at the same time even more abundant evidence in historic precedent, as well as in psychology, to show that the whole idea of mandate, of representative government, of plebiscitary elections, or refer- endum legislation, are relatively primitive conceptions for the attainment of that social justice for which democratic com- munities are all clamouring, but which their leaders seem less and less likely to be able to offer them. The case of Ger- many throws on these problems only a dim light, for the Prussian King who, by the Constitution, has become the " German Emperor," that is to say a life-president, is the visible and central keystone that holds together the arch of the confederated German States. Therein lies his chief utility as an essential part of the Constitutional mechanism. A stable head-of-the-state is a logical corollary of the idea of German unity. Less organically bound up with that idea is, perhaps, the Bismarckian notion that the Emperor, through his Chancellor, is the necessary counterpart of uni- versal suffrage, and that there should exist a " Federal Council " independent of the Reichstag. When, in the last German elections, no socialists were returned to the Reichstag, Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor, took occasion to remind his compatriots that Germany is not a land of parliamentary government, and to proclaim that he was independent of any parliamentary manifesta- tion of the people's will as expressed in the elections. These brave words, however, cannot drown the murmurs of un- rest that are more and more loudly heard in Germany, as the signs of a Constitutional crisis accumulate. 1 1 See p. 211. 38 PROBLEMS OF POWER Mr. Roosevelt's visit to France coincided with the period of the general elections for the Chamber of Deputies. The ex-Minister of Finance, M. Jules Roche, a leading Paris editor, stood in those elections, as he had stood for many years, for a constituency in the Department of the Ardeche, and was elected. In his address to his constituents, in which he thanked them for their confidence, he said : " At the very moment when the ex-President of the United States was so magnificently expounding in Paris the conditions of a true republic and the role of a citizen, you were offering the example of an entire population of free citizens in a false republic, which is at the mercy of arbitrary action and the prey of anarchy. It was in vain that certain so-called republican electors trampled under foot the essential principles of a republic, and acted in a spirit of hostility toward liberty and right. You proclaimed in loud utterances, you as well as Mr. Roosevelt, that there is no republic without citizens, and no citizens without the love and exercise of liberty, and no liberty without institutions which are its consecration and its guarantee." M. Roche's electoral rhetoric should be taken cum grano sails ; but the passage cited is significant in connexion with what followed it. This was nothing less than the announce- ment of M. Roche's intention to propose a radical revision of the Constitution of 1875, in addition to the indispensable electoral reform ; a revision which would embody two of the essential principles of the American Constitution and yet the United States is a Republic ! to wit : the guarantee of the necessary rights and liberties of the citizen, and a re- sponsible President who would choose his ministers outside of Parliament. M. Jules Roche revived here ideas analogous to those of M. Deroulede. The latter is one of the most honourable and sympathetic of contemporary Frenchmen, and if ever the irony of fortune had lifted him to the Elysee, it seems not improbable to many close observers that he would have been a president of the stamp of Mr. Roosevelt : instead of which, France ostracized him as a danger to the State ! But France, as it happens, is not yet convinced that she wants a president of that stamp. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 39 Neither a Deroulede nor a Roche is ever likely to rule her, and their cases have been cited merely because it is inter- esting to observe that their ideas, which in the present state of the Republic in France are bound to class them among the reactionaries and almost to appear subversive, are the commonplaces of Republicanism in the great democratic community of the West. The fact would really seem to imply a curious anomaly. It would suggest, at all events, that there are more forms and kinds of republics than are usually supposed to exist, and that there is no obvious reason for using the word in description of two communities governed in ways so radi- cally disparate as are the United States and France. Of course M. Jules Roche, for his own political pur- poses, put his finger on one of the essential differences be- tween France and the United States. As he has observed with admiration, in the United States a responsible man is placed at the head of the State, whereas in France the fear of a " man " has for forty years been the beginning of poli- tical wisdom. The fear of a " man " has been an inevitable state of mind of the French republicans, since the Republic in its development has had to fight for its life amid a world of enemies surviving from the old regimes. The Con- stitution of 1875, under which France is now vegetating, was adopted by a majority of but one vote, 1 and that Constitution was only a step a moment of repose when the nation seemed to be marking time in the century-long effort, which has by no means yet been realized, to organize the sovereignty of the people in a free country, with a responsible government that should be controlled by the nation. The spirit of unity, inoculated in the French soul by the monarchy, has above 1 See p. 121. The Wallon amendment : " Le President de la Republique est elu pour sept ans . . . ," was passed by 353 votes to 352. " By the irony of things the most convinced monarchists had said some time before : nous ferons la monarchic, fut-ce d une voix de ntajorite." (Souvenirs 1848-1878. By C. de Freycinet, P- 3I7-) 40 PROBLEMS OF POWER all been imposed by the geographical position of France. In the United States, on the contrary, the political ten- dencies were all centrifugal, and the natural principle was that of federalism until the unity of the nation was achieved perhaps provisionally by the enormous sacrifice of blood during the Civil War. In France the fear of a " man " was the form assumed by dread memories : the two experi- ments of the monarchy and of the empire, two foreign in- vasions (1814-1815 and 1870-1871), and three revolutions (1789, 1830 and 1848). As the historian of the Third Republic, M. Hanotaux, puts it : " Les esprits eclair es qui dirigeaient I'Assemblee Nationale avaient la honte, la haine, I'horreur du pouvoir personnel, du despotisms et de la dictature. Done la volonte nationale etait unitaire tandis que la prudence nationale etait liber taire." The Constitution of 1875, there- fore, maintained national unity, and preserved the admir- able scaffolding of government known as the administra- tion, but did everything in its power to discourage personal ambition and to enfeeble such ideas of citizenship as were bound to be extolled by Theodore Roosevelt, the most authoritative exponent of the traditionally American political philosophy to whom France was ever likely to listen. " Rarely," says M. Hanotaux, speaking of the Constitution of 1875, " has a more complicated pagoda been constructed to shelter a more diminutive god." And he is right. All that Republican France desired was a visible figure-head at the summit of the monument. The type of chef d'etat represented by a President of the United States is a monster from the point of view of the Constitution of the Parliamen- tary Republic of France. " Every act of the president of the Republic," says Clause 3 of that Constitution, " must be countersigned by a minister," and these ministers are re- sponsible not to the head of the State, but to the Chamber of Deputies, upon whom they depend. In the France of the Third Republic superiority of every kind has been damned in the name of equality, and suppressed in the name of la rai- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 41 sow d'etat. Nothing resembling an organized democracy has ever existed in France, where the ship of state is still sailed by a small crew the " Government of the ten thousand," to use Bismarck's phrase who have seized and manned the Napoleonic administration and the political machinery. The role of the head of the State, as it has worked out in practice under the Third Republic, has shrunk to an even narrower compass than the delimitation fixed by the Con- stitution of 1875. Discipline, inter-subordination, beginning with the president, are the marks of French citizenship. There is no recognized place for individual initiative. French youths have uniformly aspired to become " func- tionaries," civil servants, a part, however subordinate, of the vast machine ; few have dreamed of becoming leaders of men, and of " serving " the body-politic in the American way. All this has produced an automatic civic life in which the Chambers and the administration have directed the acts of committees known as governments. It is a state of things radically the opposite of that resulting from the American Constitution. A career like that of Mr. Roose- velt would be impossible for a public man in France, and were a Frenchman to try to test the elasticity of the French Constitution, and seek to secure the personal authority and prestige of a Roosevelt, he would quickly become the in- carnation of all the reactionary aspirations in the country, and might, ultimately, as has been said, be impeached before the Haute-Cour. France, even Republican France, suffers, as will be seen later on, 1 from the monotony of the bureaucratic auto- matism of its civic life, in which the form of ballot known as/e scrutin d'arrondissement prevents the education of the elector on any question of general policy and renders the deputy the creature of the State official. Yet the nation longs for a franker party organization, for the opportunity to discuss great national questions, for the thrill of a really 1 See Book II, Ch. 4. 42 PROBLEMS OF POWER democratic existence. There is no doubt that its citizens are eager to escape from the individual veulerie which tends to be the political fate of men who have not even, as under the Second Empire, the compensation of being able to satisfy their liking for a glorious facade and of cherishing the senti- ment of respect. Now Mr. Roosevelt, in his categorical way, gave utterance, with clarion-toned efficiency, to the unexpressed longings of the Republicans, while still seeming to speak the language of the liberal, even of the reactionary, opposition. The Republicans, who one and all agreed with him, but dared not openly confess it, since such confession would have classed them with the reactionaries, tolerated Mr. Roosevelt's home truths, solely because they came from American and " Republican " lips ; but from any other per- sonality of his eminence crowned head or other many of the ideas to which he gave expression would have been held to verge on impertinence. The conservatives and the reactionaries, on the other hand, are always chiding the Re- public, and they welcomed Mr. Roosevelt as a timely visitor loaded with unexpected grist for their mills. " We told you so ! " they cried to their republican compatriots. " What a lesson ! " But the Republicans were, in reality, no less delighted, since they, too, recognize the urgent necessity of reform ; and the reform has already begun to come in the spirit of Mr. Roosevelt's counsel. France has entered upon a period of unrest, of adminis- trative and electoral reform, which is bound ultimately to transform the very foundations of her Constitution. It was not in vain that in the hour of crisis an ex-president of the " Republic " of the United States fearlessly lectured the " sister Republic " on the duties of citizenship, and that he said to modern France such things as these : " A good citizen will insist on liberty for himself, and make it his pride that others should have it as well as he. Perhaps the best test of the point reached in any country by the love of liberty is the way in which minorities are treated there. Not only should there A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 43 be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but there should be complete liberty for each individual to lead the life that suits him, provided that in so doing he does no harm to his neighbour. . . . In a republic it is necessary, in order to avoid failure, to learn how to combine intensity of conviction with a large tolerance for differ- ences of conviction. Vast divergencies of opinion relative to reli- gious, political and social beliefs will exist necessarily, if the intelli- gence and the conscience are not to be stifled, but to develop sanely. The bitter fratricidal hatreds based on such divergencies are not a sign of ardent belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether it be religious or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself merely the manifestation of sinister bigotry, which is in turn the primary cause of the downfall of so many nations." Since Mr. Roosevelt's departure, France has been saying to herself, in the words of Dante when Virgil chided : " The self-same tongue first wounded and then healed me." VII " Bismarck," as has been seen, " did more than create an approximately united Germany ; he destroyed Europe. . . . Bismarck retarded the work of the French Revolution, gagging France and flinging Europe back into the old regime." After the defeat of France, the first steps towards the recon- struction of Europe, by the restoration of the balance of power, were taken by the French Republic and the Tsar. That, however, is only a brief portion of the story. The normal evolution of every nation in Europe has been dis- turbed, if not utterly deranged, by the action of Germany in annexing Schleswig-Holstein and in seizing the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The trend of European history during the last forty years has been determined by these titanic blunders ; and the word determined should be taken in its scientific sense. Few intellectual exercises are more amusing than the examination of the internal inter- play of European events since the Franco-German war. It is a constant spectacle of resultants of force revealing in those events a logical, apparently fatal, sequence. To enjoy this spectacle it is sufficient to group the salient, essential facts round certain crucial dates. 44 PROBLEMS OF POWER The date of the fall of Bismarck, in 1890, which cuts this period almost exactly in two, is more than a convenient rallying point for perplexed observers of the European movement. Bismarck gone, responsibility for Germany's destinies was assumed by a young sovereign of exceptionally alert intelligence, fully abreast of his time, and perfectly aware of the deficiencies, as well as of the greatness, of the work of the Founder of the Empire. Bismarck had relied mainly on his political intuition to insure yet he^took the precaution to re-insure by treaty German prestige. 1 He presided over the beginnings of German economic enterprise without completely compre- hending the drift of the time. An astute, daring and unscru- pulous diplomacy, varied, when necessary, by a policy of intimidation based on an invincible military force, seemed to him sufficient to maintain his country at the point provi- sionally guaranteed to her by the Treaty of Frankfort. Too practical, too realistic entirely to ignore the existence of those subtle factors determining human action, which he called " the imponderables," he was nevertheless constantly led by his superstitious self-confidence to leave too many of them out of account. When he had successfully managed the Berlin Congress which he had organized, and during which his chief care was the preparation of the Alliance between Austria and Germany, he fancied he had forced Europe to guarantee a status quo based on the stipulations of the Treaty of Frankfort, on the concrete reality of a crushed and dismembered France. He proceeded to take 1 " A visitor of Bismarck's once reminded him that Schopenhauer used to sit with him at dinner every day in the hotel at Frankfort. ' I had no business with him ; I had neither time nor inclination for philosophy/ said Bismarck, ' and I know nothing of Schopenhauer's system.' It was summarily explained to him as vesting the primacy of the will in self -consciousness. ' I daresay that may be all right,' he said, ' for myself, at least, I have often noticed that my will had decided before my thinking was finished.' Improvisation has more to do in politics than people think." Anecdote quoted by Lord Morley, in his speech as Chancellor of Manchester University, June 28, 1912. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 45 the obviouslyjiecessary precautions. He came to an arrange- ment with Austria in 1879, an d simultaneously with a show of magnanimity that imperfectly concealed his real plan to keep France busy outside of Europe he favoured French expansion in Tunis. This was a quick way of alienat- ing Italian sympathy from the Power that not so long before had helped Italy to achieve her independence. 1 1881 is the date of the Treaty of Bardo, whereby Tunis was given to France ; and in 1882 Italy joined Germany and Austria in an alliance which was thus made Triple. This Treaty, although ostensibly concluded " for the consolidation of European peace," was avowedly anti- Russian ; Bismarck was aiming solely at European hege- mony ; the necessity of the world-policy that William II was to inaugurate was almost, unsuspected by him ; the Eastern question seemed to him " not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier " ; what more dread potential enemy had Germany than the Empire of the Tsars, one of whom, Alexander II, had cried : " Hands off ! " when, only five years after Sedan (the " French Scare," 1875), Bismarck threatened to give a resilient France her definitive quietus ? Moreover, had not Russia come forth from the Berlin Con- gress even more humiliated than France ? That Russia was suspicious of her great western neighbour, that Alexander II, arbitrary potentate as he was, still perceived that a blighted France, even though that France was the France of the Marseillaise, deprived him of a potentially useful friend in Europe, was shown by a succession of little un- mistakable indications, 2 all culminating in the interesting 1 " Prince Bismarck, twelve years after Sadowa, had actually- given territory to Austria, and ... he asked for an alliance in order to cover him against Russia." M. de Blowitz : " Prince Bis- marck and German Unification," The Times, August 3, 1898. If, ten years after Sedan, Bismarck had given European territory to France, instead of hoarding the lands he had stolen from her in 1870, the history of Europe would have been utterly changed. 2 See Ambassaded Paris du Baron de Mohr enheim (1884-1898) par Jules Hansen. Flammarion. 46 PROBLEMS OF POWER fact of the decision of France to lend Russia 500,000,000 of francs. This was in 1888. Almost twenty years had passed since the Franco-Ger- man war ; ten since the Treaty of Berlin. That Treaty, which had confirmed German hegemony, had established in South-Eastern Europe a series of small States, left by Germany to shift for themselves under the vigilant guardian- ship of Russia and Austria-Hungary, and calculated, in the German Chancellor's eyes, to absorb the entire attention of those Powers. Bismarck believed that he had crushed and completely isolated France, and that the Eastern Question had been settled for a generation. What he had really done was to render an alliance between the Tsar and the Republic inevitable, and to alienate Russia from Austria-Hungary, while making her the friend of Italy ; and it was no longer Bismarck, but the spire of Strasbourg cathedral and the Balkans, that dominated European politics. Les convenances de I' Europe sont le droit, said the Tsar Alex- ander to Talleyrand in 1814 at Vienna. Bismarck had sought to substitute for this famous formula another : My will is the law of Europe. In reality he had prepared Agadir and Kirk-Kilisse. Meanwhile, France, which had gone to Tunis in 1881, was in Tongking in 1885. England was watching her with jealous eyes. At the same tune her domestic difficulties, notably the anti-republican coalition conspiracy known as Boulangism, paralysed her energy, and compromised her authority in Europe. Bismarck saw no reason to complain of the situation. Now and then as in the Schnoebele affair of April 1887, when he imprisoned the police-commissioner of Pagny, releasing him only after eight days he invented a frontier incident calculated to remind France that Germany was on her guard. Simul- taneously, the same Bismarck who had signed an anti- Russian alliance with Austria and Italy arranged a re- insurance pact with Russia. The tendency of Russia to A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 47 draw nearer to France doubtless interfered with the complete realization of the Bismarckian plan. But Bismarck never considered it beyond his capacity to solve a problem of that kind. He was engaged upon it when his new master, William II, abruptly requested him to resign, and with his resignation a new period in European history begins. All that was before 1890. The Zeitgeist was to grant William II less than ten years in which to justify his drop- ping his pilot. The year 1898 is the third critical date since the close of the Franco-German War. The German Emperor had broken the career of Bismarck, but he had inherited the Bismarckian policy. That he might pursue that policy in his own way, it was necessary that the Tsar Alexander should disappear. Alexander died only in 1894, after having signed a defensive military alliance with France in 1892. That is to say, the fall of Bismarck had unquestionably hastened the completion of the negotiations that had been proceeding for some five years between France and Russia. But the young Emperor, on taking office, was too buoyantly optimistic, and too keen-sighted, to concern himself over the conclusion of an alliance, as to the pacific character of which he had received the most reassuring in- formation. While France was interpreting that pact as an earnest of the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, William II well knew that it confirmed once again the European status quo. Relieved of all anxiety on that score, the new Master looked out upon a new Germany : a Germany increasing in wealth, industry and foreign trade, a Germany which, under the protectionist system applied from 1880 to 1891, had grown so rapidly, so miraculously even, that Bismarck had hardly understood the first syllable of the new economic gospel which he had himself inspired. Surveying this exhilarating spectacle, and beholding the German acquisi- tions in the Cameroons and at Samoa, William II inaugur- ated a new era for which he was to find the formula a few years later in his famous appeal delivered from the steps 48 PROBLEMS OF POWER of the Bismarck monument at Hamburg : " Our future is on the water. The more the Germans go upon the water the better will it be for us." This was in 1901, but the date of the first German naval programme is 1893. In the following year it happened that a mystical youth became Tsar of all the Russias, and in 1895, at the opening of the Kiel Canal, a ceremony symbolizing the aspirations of the new Germany, French ironclads were anchored by the side of Russian men-of-war in German waters. The significance of this demonstration was clear. With the accession of the new Tsar, Nicholas II, the pacific character of the Franco- Russian Alliance was so emphasized that its political raison d'etre, from the point of view of European balance of power, was stultified. Nicholas II, not less pacific, humanitarian even, than his father, quickly fell under the commanding personality of his plausible and fascinating German cousin. The Tsar became the creature of the German Emperor. William II, adroitly using the Franco-Russian Alliance for his own imperial German ends, was for a time the silent partner in a combination including the French Foreign Minister, M. Hanotaux, 1 who was daily multiplying diffi- culties with England in Africa and in Asia. The French Colonial Office Jiad been created in 1894. Vast schemes were broached in favour of a Franco-Germano-Russian entente calculated to isolate England. In the Far East, after the Chino- Japanese War, the strange alliance was, for the moment, successful. Under the pressure of the three Powers, Japan was constrained to tear up the Treaty of Shimonoseke ; she began to perceive the advantages of flinging herself into the arms of England. After the Jame- 1 The reader will recall (p. 27) the consternation caused in France by Count Muravieff's Circular to the Powers inviting them to meet in a Congress for the study of the means of securing to the world the benefits of a lasting peace. In August 1898 La Gazette de France, in an article entitled " From Kiel to Disarmament," remarked that the Republic had become " the miserable maidservant of the Euro- pean Monarchies." See p. 53. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 49 son Raid (New Year's Day, 1896) William II despatched to President Kruger the famous telegram which was as much intended to lead to an understanding with France as satisfy the imperialistic instincts of nascent Pan-Germanism. Strasburg and Metz seemed to have been utterly forgotten. Thus, with the resignation of Bismarck and the death of Alexander III, a new movement began in Europe. That movement was to culminate in the removal of Russia from her European spheres of influence, and her exile during a protracted period in Manchuria, where her military power was eventually to be shattered at Mukden. Italy, contin- ually instigated to enter upon colonial enterprises wherever she might risk colliding with England or with France, found herself in 1896 deploring the slaughter of her legions at Adowa. France, left unmolested to pursue her African adventure, was being driven daily, almost hourly, along the fatal path leading to war with England. She awoke in July 1898 to the tragic moment of Fashoda, when Kit- chener and Marchand stood suddenly at bay in the desert. Great Britain had just beheld Manchuria and Port Arthur in the hands of her secular enemy. Thus, by 1898, Germany, Bismarck and William II had manoeuvred so admirably that, while maintaining intact the alliance with Austria and Italy, they had all but paralysed the Franco-Russian Alliance, infuriated Italy against France, and nearly brought on a war between France and England. These results had been symbolized in three events of world-wide significance, which, though they had taken place in succession, may be regarded, from the point of view of historic psychology, as simultaneous. The results of German policy from 1890 to 1898 were Adowa, Port Arthur-Manchuria and Fashoda. But, mean- while, beyond the boundaries of Europe, events had been taking place that did not escape the notice of the German Emperor. 1898 was also the year of the close of that Spanish-American war which first reminded William II that pan-Germanism had other rivals in the world than the s 50 PROBLEMS OF POWER " Yellow Peril " ; the year of the annexation of Hawaii by the United States and the year of the May Day of Manila. That is why 1898 is a critical year. Finally, 1898, the year of the Austro-Russian Agreement concerning the Balkans (when the Powers recognized the " superior interest " of Austria and Russia in the provinces of European Turkey) marks the moment when Russia first began to realize the inconvenience of her Far-Eastern policy, and to doubt the disinterestedness of her German friends. Dreaming of victories in Manchuria, she was forced to neglect the pursuit of her traditional Panslavist policy in the Balkans. She was obliged to adopt the policy of the pan-Germans. Partially paralysed in Europe, Russia could neither actively favour, nor effectually arrest, the ambitions of the Balkan States to fling the Turks across the Sea of Marmara, and to extend their boundaries in Macedonia and Thrace. She was constrained to a policy of marking time. Meanwhile Germany, impelled by the ever-increasing momentum of her drang nach Osten, was assuring, through her Austro-Hungarian allies, her economic preponderance in the Balkan States ; while, benefiting by the persistent antago- nism of Russia and England, she became the protector of the Turkish Empire, and the concessionaire of that Baghdad Railway which was intended to be the instrument of the establishment of her protectorate over Asiatic Turkey. Thus, owing to Russia's policy in the Far-East, and owing to the reciprocal jealousies and apprehensions of the Powers, all hope of settling the Eastern Question was indefinitely postponed. Bulgaria, Servia and Montenegro were left to work out their national salvation alone, and the Macedonians were exposed to periodic massacre. Just as Alsace-Lorraine appeared to have been forgotten by France, so the small Slav States seemed to have been abandoned by the Tsar. Germany had apparently contrived to stifle the Eastern Question, and to suppress every influence, direct or indirect, likely to thwart her main objects : the maintenance of her A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 51 political preponderance in Western Europe, and absorption of the markets of the Middle East. But throughout this period the Balkan nationalities were slowly awakening to self-knowledge. Liberty, national rancour, and a sense of responsibility were transforming them into self-reliant Powers. The evolution did not escape the notice of good observers ; l but who could foresee that within a period of only fourteen years the sovereigns of Bulgaria, Servia, Greece and Montenegro were to cross their several frontiers at the head of their allied armies, " imploring the benediction of the Almighty on their New Crusade " 2 against the Turk ? But it is not easy to have done with 1898. 1898 meant more even than this, more even than all this. Already the period of civil war known as the " Dreyfus Affair " had begun in France. 1 The most remarkable of these observers was the author of a book published in 1905 : " Une Confederation Orientale comme Solution de la Question d'Orient " (Plon). This writer, signing himself " A Latin," began by laying down the principle that the policy of im- posing reforms upon the Turkish Government was, at its best, merely a palliative, capable of prolonging for only a brief period the agony of the Ottoman regime. At a moment when the Servians, the Greeks and the Bulgarians were insidiously intriguing, or savagely fighting, for the mastery in Macedonia, when, moreover, the attitude of the Great Powers, assembled round the bed of the Homtne Malade, was that of rival heirs waiting to rifle the treasures of a dying relative, this astonishing observer argued that a Balkan League (to include Rumania and Greece), in which the several States should sink their differences to achieve their higher hopes, was feasible. He pro- posed that the new Federation should be placed under the Presi- dency of Italy, and he published a map indicating the necessary territorial changes. Read in November, 1912, when the Servians had already entered Uskub, when Greece and Bulgaria were at Salo- nica, and when the Bulgarians were all but in sight of St. Sophia after a war which was, to be sure, a Russian revenge for Austria's seizure of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but which was, at the same time, part of the Italian combinazione of the Tripolitan Expedition this book stood forth, among the studies of the last twenty years on the Eastern Question, as the work of a veritable prophet and seer. 2 Telegram of the King of Greece, October 20, 1912, to the Allied Sovereigns of the Balkan League. 52 PROBLEMS OF POWER " We recall an evening in January 1898, at the Aurora. Sud- denly towards eleven o'clock some anarchists rushed in with an im- probable piece of news. They had just invaded a public meeting held by the nationalists and had captured the platform, tearing down the decorations of the tricolour flags. They were young men, who laughed as they told the story of the assault, and we laughed too, little dreaming that one day, twelve years later, partially be- cause of this exploit regarded by us as a triumph, and because of our laughter, a French soldier would fling the flag of his regiment into the latrines. What were our thoughts ? Merely this : So the nationalist mob oppressing us can be beaten into shape ; it can be hustled and dispersed. Action was then the great thing ! Cle- menceau, who had been sent for ; Clemenceau, perfect leader of the band and always gay, laughed with the rest of us, and his laughter was even more wonderful than ours." x Confronting thus a triumphant and optimistic Germany were three Powers which, in 1898, had just publicly under- gone national humiliation. Russia and Germany alone seemed to be happy nations ; but Russia, lured eastward out of Europe, partially by German wiles, was already doomed, and Germany alone seemed likely to reap the fruit of her intelligent diplomatic action. In reality she had overstepped the mark. Italy, England and France, colonial rivals, almost bitter foes, had nevertheless one thing in common : all three had been unfortunate ; all three were in need of friends. With the departure from the Quai d'Orsay of M. Hanotaux, who had practically paralysed the Dual Alliance by his compliance with the schemes suggested by the German Emperor to the Tsar, the new minister for Foreign Affairs, the Pyrenean M. Delcasse, was free to adopt a new policy. M. Cambon, who had been appointed ambassador in London 1 " Apologie pour notre passe," in Luttes et ProbUmes, by Daniel Haldvy, pp. 59-60. M. Halevy suggests plausibly that even the Affaire was ingeniously created by Germany in order to compromise the French general-staff. (See pp. 32-35 of his book.) The reasons he gives are not conclusive, but they are impressive. They are impressive, above all, to one who, like the present writer, was an eye and ear witness of every episode of the affair from the trial of Zola to the tragic August at Rennes. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 53 in September 1898, was to treat with Lord Salisbury in the name of M. Delcasse for the settlement of the Fashoda crisis. M. Barrere, meanwhile, in December 1897, had arrived as French ambassador in Rome. In November 1898, he succeeded in arranging a treaty of commerce, which indicated that the two " Latin sisters " were awakening to the fact that the Bismarckian policy of the galliphobe Italian statesman Crispi was not necessarily in the interests of either Power ; and this treaty was the first step in that magnificent Mediterranean policy pursued by M. Delcasse, out of which was to come the Anglo-French Entente, England's definitive establishment in Egypt, the French Protectorate over Morocco, the Italian seizure of Tripoli (which France had acquiesced in in 1901), and the Europe of 1910, 1911 and 1912. " I should be sorry to leave office," said M. Delcasse to M. Victor Berard, early in November 1898, "before I had established a good understanding with England." 1 M. Cambon, moreover, went to London resolved to negotiate. 2 Just before the departure of M. Hanotaux from office, Germany had made a last desperate effort to come to terms with France for a kind of defensive colonial and commercial alliance, implying reciprocal ex- change of territory, the whole arrangement being directed against England. This plot had failed owing to the double crisis of Fashoda and the Dreyfus Affair. 8 TheWilhelmstrasse, 1 Revue de Paris, July i, 1905. 1 M. de Blowitz, Times Correspondence, November 16, 1898 : " I consider him ... a man who is desirous of putting an end to the tension now existing between the two nations which border on the Channel. . . . He will go to his post with his eyes open, and ... he will begin in a liberal spirit the pourparlers intended to bring about satisfactory solutions." 3 On this critical episode of Germany's proposal to M. Hanotaux to enter on negotiations with regard to Africa directed against England, see Fachoda, by M. G. Hanotaux (Flammarion) ; France et Allemagne by M. Rene Pinon (Perrin) ; De la Paix de Francfort a la Conference d'Algesiras, by M. Andre M6vil (Plon) ; Le Coup 54 PROBLEMS OF POWER M. Hanotaux gone, perceived, with its usual celerity, the signs of the change in the European situation. Lord Salis- bury still remained pro-German, anti-French. England was one of the Powers in need of friends. There was public proof of it. Mr. Chamberlain was acclaiming the idea of an Anglo-Saxon Alliance (Birmingham Speech, May 13, 1898). Italy might, for the moment, be left on one side, to be dealt with later on, and Russia could be counted on blindly to continue her fatal march towards the abysmal Orient. " Seizing the event," Germany induced England, at this juncture, to renounce secretly and tentatively her policy of " splendid isolation," and to sign that mysterious arrange- ment with regard to the future of the Portuguese possessions in Africa, which subsequent, and equally secret, treaties, signed in Lisbon in 1904, were to nullify. 1 Thus, while Russia was dragging France towards the disaster of Mukden, Germany turned with a candid face to the people whose sea-power her own growing navy was already begin- ning to menace, and sought to convince them of her unalloyed sincerity. So long as Lord Salisbury remained at the head of the Foreign Office, France would strive in vain to thwart Germany's action. For that statesman, even for his august Queen, France and Russia were the hereditary enemies. German policy, in driving Russia into the East, had en- hanced England's suspicion of Russia. England regarded opting for Germany as a less dangerous choice than making up with Russia ; moreover, she was the deadly foe of Russia's d'Agadir,by M. Pierre Albin (Alcan), and Kiel et T anger, byM. Charles Maurras (Nouvelle LibrairieNationale). As a matter of fact, Count Miinster's diplomacy in Paris was thwarted by the revelations of M. de Blowitz, who rendered England and France in 1898 hardly less effective service than during the famous " French scare " of 1875.' 1 Already in December 1900, King Charles of Portugal had been formally received on board Admiral Rawson's flagship, and had drunk the health of the " friendly and allied nation." This was one of the first events that revealed to Europe the new spirit animating the British Foreign Office. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 55 ally. And thus it was that Germany could still continue to develop to their logical limits all the ramifications of the Bismarckian policy ; she could still play to her heart's content the part of the honest broker, while, under another disguise, she was actively planting her flag throughout the world. 1 But in October, 1899, the Transvaal War broke out, and for two and a half years England's sinews were wrung in the heroic duel. Now at last she opened her eyes to those perils of isolation as to which Mr. Chamberlain had warned her in 1898 ; for her enemies might, for argu- ment's sake, almost class her among the " dying nations " on whose territory, in the words of her ironic prime-minister, Lord Salisbury (May 4, 1898), the living nations were bound to encroach. To China, Turkey, Spain, the France of the Panama Scandals, the Dreyfus Case and Fashoda, was now added the England of Ladysmith. Lord Salisbury disappeared from the Foreign Office, being succeeded by Lord Lansdowne, in October, 1900. A few days later Queen Victoria died and was succeeded by King Edward, 2 who 1 Prince Radziwill, who represented the German Emperor at the funeral of M. Flix Faure, was interviewed on February 26, 1899, by the Paris Liberte, and made the following amusing, but suggestive, statement on the Anglo-German arrangement just concluded : " Nothing in this arrangement is in opposition to a rapprochement between my country and yours, a rapprochement desired by all minds free from passion. As for England, it does not seem to me that, now that Germany has become one of her greatest commercial rivals, a complete agreement can ever be secured between two countries whose interests are so different. But there is another country against which the Continental Powers should indeed come to an under- standing for the organization of their economic defence. There is the United States, whose pretensions and riches are becoming a danger for us all." 8 " King Edward," said Mr. Balfour in the House of Commons on May n, 1910, "was a great monarch. He did that which no Minister, no Cabinet, no Ambassadors, neither treaties, nor protocols, nor understandings, which no debates, no banquets, no speeches, were able to perform. He, by his personality alone, brought home to the minds of millions on the Continent, as nothing that we could have done could have brought it home to them, the friendly feelings of the country over which King Edward ruled." 56 PROBLEMS OF POWER was immediately greeted by French public opinion as a sovereign " capable of doing much to better the relations between the two countries." * At all events the tension between France and England could last no longer without a war. Something had to be done. For both England and France the hour was ripe for meditation over their individual national problems. They stood, for an instant, silent and face to face, blinking in the glare of the new light that illu- minated the dread cross-roads of Fashoda and Ladysmith. 2 1 Let the reader recall (p. 53) M. Delcasse's words in 1898. Here is what he said a few weeks later publicly (January 23, 1899), in the course of a debate on Foreign Affairs : " My reason, my patriotism, tells me that if in the last few months I have been able to render any service . . . the service which I consider the greatest is the preven- tion of a conflict which would be a calamity for the world. . . . Now as ever, calm and dignified, governed by her essential interests, France is ready to consider and discuss everything with the resolution to claim nothing but her rights, and the hope that those rights will be recognized, but with the conviction that she is under nobody's orders, ... I am no pessimist. It is impossible to be so, when one knows what France is, and that, under the scum which certain persons find an abominable pleasure in agitating (the Dreyfus Affair), there lives and labours a people pre-eminently honest and sane, as thrifty as it is hard-working, which is alive to the fact that its destiny is not ful- filled, which is amenable to noble sentiments, and of which you can expect anything if you take care to keep its vision lifted towards an ideal of justice and high civilization. It is, nevertheless, true that profound transformations are in preparation from one end of the world to the other, and France must not be weakened. Hence the need of a vigilant and thoughtful policy which distinguishes between our interests and classifies them according to their importance, which leaves nothing to chance, and does not squander its efforts. To this policy I ask for the reflecting adhesion of the country." These grave words, luminous with prophetic fire, read to-day, after the coup d'Agadir, assume a singular significance. 1 England's situation at the beginning of 1900 was analysed in a telegram to The Times by M. de Blowitz, who reminded his readers that " pourparlers w 'ere then going on between at least three of the Continental Powers to force England to enter into negotiations for the settlement of the questions still pending by taking advantage of her present embarrassments." In that prophetic article M. de Blowitz forestalled the necessity of just such a general liquidation of Franco- British differences as was destined to be achieved four years later, A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 57 Simultaneously they saw the sardonic grin, and heard the triumphal chuckle, of Germany. France and England were face to face like birds in a cockpit, while Europe, under German leadership, was fastening their spurs, and impatient to see them fight to the death. Then suddenly they both raised their heads and moved back to the fence. They had decided not to fight, and the face of European things was transformed. On February 2, 1903, The Times published from the pen of the present writer (who was then one of its European correspondents) the following telegram dated Madrid, February i. This message, printed a year before the conclusion of the Anglo-French Agreement of 1904, was the first public mention in Europe of negotiations which, when thus revealed, were regarded as utterly incredible and ridiculed for several months by the whole European press. " The prudent reserve of the Spanish Government during the present crisis in Morocco has been noted by attentive observers, to whom it has caused some surprise. . . . When Senor Abarzuza became Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Silvela Cabinet, he lost no time in seeking to obtain assurances from France and England to the effect that for the present no intervention was contemplated. He was given to understand that an agreement had been come to between these two Powers for the maintenance, at all events for the present, of the status quo in Morocco. This tranquillizing assurance, strictly warranted, so far as it went, by what had taken place between the two Powers, told, however, only half the truth. The real facts are such that the Spanish Government can hardly look upon them with unalloyed satisfaction. " What the Spanish Government had not entirely understood is that, in spite of the assurances given to Spain as regards her North African possessions and the neutralization of Tangiers, France and England had thought of solving the whole question of Morocco with- out necessarily waiting for her good offices. Towards the end of last summer M. Delcasse, through his ambassador in London, made over- tures to Lord Lansdowne for the complete and detailed settlement of the whole Moroccan question. At that time M. Delcasse presented to Lord but which seemed at the time to be beyond the limits of the wildest divination. The article passed unnoticed by the great public. It remains, however, one of the most astonishing instances which the columns of The Times can show of this great journalist's perspicacity. 58 PROBLEMS OF POWER Lansdowne, with a loyalty which would appear to have been appreciated by the British Government, certain complete, decisive and business- like proposals (des propositions fermes] which if accepted at the time would have had, if I may say so, not merely North African, but Euro- pean consequences. The essential characteristic of these proposals was that France and England should settle the Moroccan question in connexion with the question of Egypt. In compensation for French official recognition of the British occupation of Egypt, France was to be allowed a free hand in dealing with Moroccan territory save on the North African coast line. If I am correctly informed this highly interesting bargain was not unfavourably received by Lord Lansdowne. But, occupied at the time by South African affairs, and (when reminded later on) by Venezuela, the British Government requested to be allowed to postpone serious and consecutive pourparlers on Morocco until after the definitive arrangement of these two affairs. . . . M. Delcass&'s scheme, which still remains virtually unanswered, was nothing more nor less than a proposal to England to leave France alone to secure the suzerainty of Morocco when and how she cared to do so by pacific penetration. It was part and parcel of the whole Mediterranean policy of France, the corollary of the Franco-Italian arrangement con- cerning Tripoli. And the most ardent partisans of French hegemony in the f Latin ' sea really need not have complained." VIII This grouping of the salient and essential facts of the period between the Franco-German War and the Anglo- French Entente of 1904 " round the critical dates " of that period will have justified the statement that " the examination of the international play of European events," during those thirty odd years, " reveals, in those events, a logical, apparently fatal sequence." It gives, moreover, new significance to the utterances of Count Berchtold when he so suggestively summed up the present political aspect of the world-situation: " Until the close of the nineteenth century (the critical date of 1898) the grouping of the Powers inaugurated by the Triplice merely appeared to be a clearly defined pattern. Since then ... a closely woven network of agreements and ententes has been formed between the Powers belonging to the same groups or to different groups, a fact which profoundly complicates the international situation." This is a truth which the foregoing pages have amply illus- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 59 trated. The demonstration will be indirectly, and^less systematically, enforced by the detailed consideration of the events that have taken place since the opening of the new era marked by the Entente between France and England, the veritable significance of which was speedily defined by the organization of the Triple Entente. Meanwhile, it is evident that one can no longer chronicle the doings of any individual nation without writing, at the same time, the history of all the other peoples. Such is the modern dovetailing of the nations that national interests have become matters of international concern : national facts and events have become international facts and events ; " nationalities " have been transformed into " interna- tionalities." Obviously the word " nationalities " is here used in a special arbitrary sense. It means something very different from what it meant fifty years ago on the lips of a Louis Napoleon, and from what it means to-day to the Macedonians. It seemed, indeed, to Napoleon III that " national interests " had become " matters of international concern," but he gave to his own formula a dangerous philosophic sense ; and Louis Napoleon's case is typical. It should never be forgotten that the defeat of France in 1870 was less the consequence of the inefficiency of her military power than the logical conclusion of the perilous foreign policy of Napoleon III. The Emperor was a gener- ous ideologue, and his foreign policy was in sublime and absurd opposition to the best French national precedents and traditions. His passionate longing to substitute for the modus vivendi of the treaties of 1813 a more scientific and more logical state of international relations, to revise, in a word, the map of Europe by grouping peoples according to racial or linguistic affinities, was one of the most character- istically doctrinaire notions that ever clouded a clear French brain. It was at the same time an absurdly pedantic and impracticable principle of diplomatic action, which put its 60 PROBLEMS OF POWER author in the light of an international meddler, who, even when most disinterested, laid himself open to the charge of double-dealing. It was also un-French, in the sense of being, from the point of view of French interests, an anti- national policy. It was lacking in realism. The substance of Napoleon Ill's policy was metaphysic fiction, not the tangible stuff of contemporary European fact and cir- cumstance. And thus, fanatically devoted as he was to the principle of nationalities, the upshot of his policy was the ironic reductio ad absurdum that the one " na- tionality " whose interests he left unsafeguarded was France itself. He was too keenly alive to the woes of the Poles, the Italians, the Hungarians, to have time to con- sider the positive interests of the French. The result was Sedan ! It was left to the Third Republic to restore the French tradition, to re-establish French authority in Europe, and to reaffirm a national policy which could be linked with the national policy of the Old Regime, from Henri IV and Richelieu to the Republican armies of Napoleon I. 1 1 " The Third Republic, after the war of 1870 and the Commune of 1871, found the 3 per cent, rente between 50 and 51. It had to repair disasters such as had never befallen any nation. It had to pay a ransom, the enormous amount of which astounded even those who had imposed it. It had to contract colossal loans to defray the costs of the war, and to re-establish the country, for, after 1870, France, la noble blessee, as she was called by M. Thiers (whose memory should be imperishable, for he was literally the ' liberator of the territory '), was altogether ruined. It had to borrow both for war and for peace, for public works and for the colonies. It had to establish heavy taxes, and in spite of all these burdens it raised the credit of the State to a point that had been unknown under the Restoration, under the July Monarchy, or under the Second Empire. The present quotations of the 3 per cent, rentes, 92 fr. 50, may be contrasted with the highest points 86 -10, quoted under the Restoration, the highest, 86-65, quoted under the July Monarchy, the highest 86, quoted under the Second Empire. The Third Republic can say and show that our 3 per cent, rente, in spite of the disasters of 1870, is now negotiated at from 12 to 13 francs higher than German and Russian rente, and that the credit of the conquered country is superior A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 61 Difficult as the task was bound to be, it did not dismay those to whose lot it first fell ; and the restoration under the Third Republic of the authority of France in the counsels of Europe notwithstanding the dangerous lapses of certain of its leaders acting in the humanitarian spirit of Napoleon III is one of the most impressive accidents that history can show. Napoleon Ill's pathetic blunder sprang, no doubt, from an ideal no less magnanimous than that of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who dreamed of " a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to the equal rights and equal freedom of a people." But Napoleon III, Marcus Aurelius, Mr. Gladstone, even Mr. Hay, who declared that American diplomacy had but two con- trolling maxims, the Golden Rule and the Open Door, were rather mystics and philosophers in office than practical statesmen. They had what President Butler of Columbia University has recently called " the international mind " : " that habit of thinking of foreign relations and business, and that habit of dealing with them, which regard the several nations of the civilized world as friendly and co-operating equals in aiding the progress of civilization, in developing commerce and industry, and in spreading enlightenment and culture through the world." * Such a habit as this may look desirable on paper, but it is pernicious in prac- tice. It seems to be an idiosyncrasy of the " international mind " to take an altruistic pleasure in sacrificing its own patriotic impulses to the prejudices of its neighbours. Its principle of action is that of the Golden Rule, and its notion to that of its victorious foe. ... La rente Franfaise, c'est la signa- ture de la France qui circule." Alfred Neyraarck : " Les 119 Ans de la Rente Fran9aise " (L' Information, Aug. 21, 1912). 1 Address of Nicholas Murray Butler, as President of the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, May 15, 1912. President Butler has outdone Cardinal Newman, who invented the phrase, " the European mind." 62 PROBLEMS OF POWER of duty may be summed up in the famous exclamation of Professor Freeman : " Perish the interests of England, perish our dominion in India, rather than that we should strike one blow or speak one word on behalf of the wrong against the right." The folly of the man who would apply an " international mind " to the problems of diplomacy has been indicated by Spinoza. He too was a philosopher, but he was well aware that to the historian human passions, love, hate, anger, envy, vanity, pity, and all the other " movements of the soul," are not virtues or vices, but merely " properties," as heat and cold are properties of the air. " Little stable (minime stabile)," says the author of the Ethics, " will be that State whose safety depends on individual honesty, and whose business can be carried on solely on condition of its being entrusted to honest hands. For a State to last, public business must be so arranged that those who are responsible, whether they be actuated by reason or by passion, cannot be tempted to act from bad motives or to do wrong. For it matters little, as regards the security of the State, what the motives of rulers may be in the successful adminis- tration of affairs. Liberty or strength of soul are the virtue of private persons ; the virtue of the State is security. Finally, inasmuch as men, whether barbarian or civilized, unite everywhere in some form of civil society, it follows that we must not seek for the principles and natural foundations of the State in the maxims of reason, but that we must deduce them from the common characteristics and condition of human nature as a whole (ex homimum communi natura seu conditione] ." 1 The successful reappearance of France in the counsels of Europe was partially due to the fact that, after Sedan, she ceased for a time to cultivate an " international mind," and that her reappearance coincided with the opening of the modern era of " international dovetailing " to which allusion has been made. England, one of the greatest of the Powers, sought for a long period to ignore the be- ginnings of this epoch, but was finally forced to recognize the altered conditions of the times. 1 Tractatus Politicus. Cap. I, 6, 7. Spinoza, Opera Posthuma 1667, pp. 269, 270. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 63 Up to the Franco-German War, up to forty years ago, 1 England possessed the monopoly of trade and commerce throughout the world. She could afford to indulge her- self spasmodically in unrealistic, even in sentimental and humanitarian policies. She was free to bide her time for action, to conform her foreign policy to " Liberal " ideas, even to the Golden Rule if she liked, while she was filling the coffers of Lombard Street. She could intervene or not in Continental affairs, as a disinterested idealism, or an interested Protestant propagandism, might impel her, 2 and, having eased her conscience, she could retire in splendid isolation into her island fastness, with the proud sense of accumulated and accumulating wealth, and of duty done. Premonitory rumblings from the nether world which had been formed of the new social and economic layers deposited by her own unmolested unrivalled industrial activity had not yet reached her ears. For British statesmen the problem of foreign policy was still comparatively simple : while her world-wide hegemony went unchallenged, England had solely to con- cern herself with the maintenance of the European balance of power. This had uniformly been her object, and it is an ideal that had hitherto implied meddling, or non-meddling, as the case might be. Henri IV had backed her against Philip II ; the German States and Spain were her allies against Louis XIV ; all Europe aided, abetted and applauded her at Waterloo. If Napoleon III had accepted her assistance, Prussia would never have constructed a Kiel Canal on Danish soil ; Germany would not have fatally discovered that her future was on the water, and the dream of Bis- marck to render German unity (Einheit) as real as German 1 It may, however, be admitted with Gen. Homer Lea that Prus- sia's seizure of Schleswig-Holstein " ended the period when England gave down the law to Europe." The Day of the Saxon, p. 160. * John Stuart Mill would have said, " A concern for her own security." See his essay, 1857, A Few Words on Non-intervention, 64 PROBLEMS OF POWER union (Einigung) would not now be approximately realized. Finally, it should not be forgotten that in 1875 an opportune hint from Queen Victoria and the Tsar had sent Bismarck back growling to his kennel. The two apparently opposed policies which commanded the allegiance of England in the nineteenth century that of Sir Robert Peel's last speech in 1850 arguing in favour of complete indifference to Continental complications, and that of Mr. Gladstone in his speech of 1877, when the great ideologue exclaimed : " Sir, there were other days when England was the hope of freedom " 1 these policies were not, after all, as reciprocally hostile as they might seem ; for, as long as the sea-girt imperial island, master of the trade-routes, remained unassailable, as long as England continued to be without a rival among the world-carriers, so long could she offer herself the luxury of choosing between action or spectatorship, between intervention or non- intervention, according to her mood of the moment. If this aristocratic privilege is now lost to her, probably for ever ; if, as Lord Rosebery said, in his speech at the Univer- sity of Glasgow (January 12, 1912), " For good or for evil, we are now embraced in the midst of the Continental system, and that I regard as perhaps the gravest fact in the later portion of my life " ; if , in a word, England, the champion of freedom, is no longer herself free to choose, if she is de- prived of the faculty of will, the right of decision ; if she is so entangled in the network of European forces that she is living deterministically under a regime of vague liabilities, she must, of course, draw the necessary conclusions, and stoically bear the consequences. But she must first, and above all, face the fact the facts ! and not hypocritically ignore it or them. Fourteen years before Lord Rosebery, on May 13, 1898, Mr. Chamberlain had stated with frankness, in a remarkable 1 See The Future of England, by Hon. George Peel, p. 114. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 65 speech extolling an Anglo-Saxon Alliance, the exact situa- tion of England. " Since the Crimean War," he said, " nearly fifty years ago, the policy of this country has been a policy of strict isolation. We have had no allies I am afraid we have had no friends. ... A new situation has arisen. All the powerful States of Europe have made alliances and . . . we are liable to be confronted at any moment with a combination of Great Powers so powerful that not even the most extreme politician would be able to contemplate it without a certain sense of uneasiness. We stand alone." In 1898, however, the British Government was think- ing, not of Germany with whom she was signing secret agreements nor yet of France, but of Russia, who had already seized Port Arthur. It seems like the most ancient of " ancient history " to read the terms in which Mr. Goschen, speaking on July 22, 1898, on the Navy Estimates, justified his remarks for supplemental credits. "It is impossible," he said, " to conceal the fact that it is the action of Russia, and the programme on which she has entered, which is the cause of our strengthening our fleet and taking parallel action with her." It is not unimportant to note that France was sceptical as to the pretext put forward by Mr. Goschen for increasing the strength of the British Navy. The United States had recently become an oceanic power by the annexation of Hawaii, and the Spanish- American War had been fertile in lessons for the admiralties of all countries. The Journal des Debats raised the question whether Mr, Goschen's haste was not to be explained by his prudent desire to forestall a morrow of international complications in which the United States might feel called on to take an aggressive part. At all events, Mr. Goschen's initiative marks a date in the British policy of steady progression in naval outlay. It was not long before the menace of German naval ex- pansion rendered the movement chronic, and sooner still the destruction of the Russian Navy was to leave Great 66 PROBLEMS OF POWER Britain to face but one hostile fleet in the North Sea. On March r8, 1912, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Churchill, made to Germany a perfectly frank though irritatingly ingenious proposal for arresting the keen and costly naval rivalry between the two countries. He showed Germany how she might co-operate with England in a plan involving more than a merely platonic demonstration in favour of disarmament. " If you will slow down in 1913," he said to Germany, " we will slow down too ; if you decide not to build the three ships now contemplated you will automatically wipe out no fewer than five British potential super-Dreadnoughts ! " Germany retorted by passing a Navy Bill increasing the naval force cruising in the North Sea from seventeen fully-manned battleships to twenty-five, with sixteen in reserve. Consequently Mr. Churchill took the immediate action expected of him. Speaking on May 15, at a dinner of the Worshipful Company of Shipwrights, he said, amid loud cheers : "It will be my duty to come again to Parliament this year for men, money and material." And the First Lord thereupon expounded the consequences of the policy of the " concentration of the British fleet in decisive theatres " (necessitated by the stubborn efforts of Germany to shatter British sea-power), namely, the growth, in the great Dominions over sea, of an effective naval force capable of guarding and patrolling the British Empire while England herself maintains a sea-supremacy against all comers at the decisive point. These developments shed a new light on the inconveni- ences of that policy of altruistically indiscriminate inter- ference in world affairs which doctrinaire liberalism has always inspired. These inconveniences were clearly stated in January 1912, in a speech by Sir Edward Grey at the village of North Sunderland. He said : " Let me put you on your guard against people who, as I think, are very bad advisers with regard to foreign policy. There is a cer- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 67 tain section, I have no doubt, in the Liberal Party which think we do not interfere nearly enough, especially in certain parts of the world, in Asia. Mongolia, I think, was the last selected as a part in which we should take an active interest. Believe me if you are going to pursue a foreign policy of that kind, and this country is going to interfere actively in Central Asian questions far beyond our own Indian frontier, you are going to incur, not only the very heavy naval expenditure which we have already, but a vastly in- creased military expenditure as well ; and the people who press upon me a different foreign policy to that which is now being pursued are, it seems to me, people who are really advocating as a foreign policy the maximum of interference in the affairs of the world at large and the minimum of friendship ; because the policy, if it were carried out, would soon leave us without a friend in Europe. (Cheers.) Now, believe me, that is the most futile and expensive policy that this country could adopt, and I consider it from every point of view, whether it be the point of view of the party or the point of view of national interest I consider it the duty, I would say, of any Govern- ment, whether Liberal or Conservative, to resist a policy of that kind." On the other hand, both the Secretary for War and the Marquis of Crewe acknowledged, in a debate on Foreign and Military Policy in the House of Lords on May 15, 1912, that " the policy of splendid isolation was over" ; but they demurred to the idea of a " close alliance with great European Powers," they repudiated the principle of " en- tangling military alliances." British ministers have still, perhaps, a few months ahead of them in which to continue to affirm their scepticism as to the utility of a military con- vention with France. But the time is not far distant when, in spite of the aid given by the Dominions, they will have to eat their words, and when the English people realizing, at last, that the Territorial Force is merely a make-believe army 1 will bring them to book on the charge of neglect of duty. 1 " The Territorial Force is a failure in discipline, a failure in numbers, a failure in equipment, and a failure in energy." Speech of Lord Roberts, November 27, 1912, at the annual dinner of the Association of Men of Kent and Kentish Men. Admiral Tirpitz's 68 PROBLEMS OF POWER IX "1870," " 1878, "" 1890," " 1898," "1904," "1911," "1912." The Dismemberment of France ; the Berlin Congress ; the Fall of Bismarck ; Adowa, Port Arthur, Fashoda ; the Dreyfus Affair ; the Anglo-French Entente ; Agadir ; Kirk-Kilisse : these are the dates and names on the links of the fatal chain which Bismarck forged and which, at the present hour, has been stretched almost to the breaking point. Eight years after Bismarck's resignation, his successor, William II, could legitimately believe that he was about to found an Imperial Germany greater than the Empire of the First Napoleon. Less than five years later all his hopes were dashed. By the Anglo-French Entente a new period was opened in Europe. Without losing a minute Germany began the assault of that Entente. The Agreement had been signed on the eighth of April, 1904. On the eve of April Fool's Day, just a year later, the German Emperor landed at Tangiers. Yet in May 1902, when the possibility of an Anglo-French Entente appeared to be the dream of a madman, the Chancellor of the German Empire, Count von Billow, had said to M. Andre Tardieu in Berlin : " Peace is assured ; we have the benefit of it, and we shall always be with those who defend it, against those who trouble it. ... As regards Morocco, where our interests are less than in China, I do not consider that question as one likely so very soon to interest our dip- lomacy. We have no bay- window frontage on the Mediterranean. . . . We pursue no personal policy there." x alleged declaration on February 7, 1913, that Germany could safely accept the relative proportion (i6to 10) between British and German Dreadnoughts proposed by Mr. Churchill in March 1912 was made simultaneously with the proposal for the increase of the German aerial fleet (cf. pp. 271, 272), and just before the announcement of the plan for the augmentation of the German army until it numbers 865,000 men ! The reply of France was immediate, yet England still hesitates to look facts in the face. Cf. pp. 207, 208. 1 Le Figaro, May 30, 1902. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 69 From 1905 to the present hour Germany has had but one dream, one aim. Prince Billow, indeed, stated publicly in 1896, with a Bismarckian frankness, that the sole object of German policy was to supplement the Entente Cordiale by an equally cordial understanding between Germany and England. The Deutsche Revue published, in September of that year, just after the German Emperor and King Edward had met at Friedrichshof, an article unquestionably in- spired by the Imperial Chancellor, in which, after resus- citating the legend that " the traditions of the Delcasse policy were still at work with undiminished force in French diplomacy a policy of which the object is to hem in Ger- many diplomatically, with the help of England, Russia and other States," the writer gave the following menacing description of England's alternatives : " Towards Germany England has only the choice between the policy which might easily become disastrous, of an Anglo-French counterpoise, and that of including Germany within the circle of her friendship." When Sir Edward Grey failed to take the hint, when England refused to modify its relations with France, "whether by addition or sub- traction," as The Times put it, 1 Prince Biilow drew the logical conclusion : he stuck to the programme that he had published in the Deutsche Revue, and strove more fanatically than ever to destroy the Entente Cordiale by a policy of alternating intimidation and blandishment. Germany, ever since, has been butting about the European corrida like a maddened bull, seeking in vain to reach and to toss the French toreador who waves before her the Union Jack. It is superfluous to recall the vicissitudes of a sport marked by such " events " as the fall of M. Delcasse, the Con- ference of Algeciras, Casablanca. The consequences of Germany's action are alone important. What has become patent to every one to-day was obvious 1 Leading article, September 5, 1906. 70 PROBLEMS OF POWER to professional observers in 1906 : the fall of M. Delcasse". the sacrifice of the French Foreign Minister by his colleagues to the German Moloch, was an event bound to bring home to the most indifferent of Frenchmen certain realities of their international situation ; and consequent prolonged reflection on those realities, coupled with the growing dis- satisfaction aroused by the tyranny of the radical regime, could not fail to determine a revival of the French national spirit. In 1906 it was clear that however mobile the French temperament was, however pusillanimously reluctant the Republican Government might be to allow diplomatic incidents to degenerate into war, however profoundly the French people seemed to have forgotten Alsace-Lorraine, however scandalously the quarrels of the agora, the squabbles of the political sects, the backbiting and vitupera- tion of the press, were preoccupying Frenchmen to the neglect of so many of their great national interests, there were certain things that French national pride could not be expected to tolerate. A period of what the French call recueillement, of silent meditation that quickly became articulate, assuming the sanest forms of self-criticism, marked the inevitable conversion'of the French soul. While foreign observers beheld only a France torn by domestic factions, quarrelling over the expulsion of monks and nuns, and over the separation of the Church and the State ; a Republic in which the rebellion of 5,000 civil servants (the Postmen's Strike) seemed to be menacing the very existence of the Republican regime ; a society in which whole com- munities of peaceful wine-growers seemed to have gone suddenly as mad as Dionysiac revellers ; France was recover- ing the sense of her national integrity. She was beginning to float on the high tide of one of those miraculous moral " resurgences " peculiar to the soil that has given birth to Vercingetorix, St. Louis, Joan of Arc and Gambetta BOOK II BOOK II THE French domestic crises, the ensuing National Reaction, 1 and the more recent British crisis, the solution of which the world is now witnessing, have been the necessary condition of Germany's agitation of her peculiar aggressive policy, and now of her provisionally more prudent, but not less dangerous, manifestations during the period extending from Boulangism to the fall of M. Delcasse and the arrival of the " Panther " at Agadir ; and from the Franco-German Convention of November 4, 1911, to the present ambiguous hour. I During more than a quarter of a century after the Franco- German War it was taken for granted by European states- men, whether British, German, Russian or Italian, that the French Republic was an unstable Government. The con- viction that anarchy was a parasite of French Republican- ism became what the mathematicians call a function of the foreign policy of all the Great Powers. The influence of French home politics on French policy from Jules Ferry to M. Caillaux has been frequently noted, and often contested. The proofs of that influence are, however, innumerable. These proofs are so genuine that it is impossible to interpret the last forty years of European history without a preliminary effort to understand the 1 The idea expressed in the phrase, " The moral resurgence of contemporary France," has been formulated by M. Etienne Rey perhaps even more accurately in the title of his book : La Renaissance de I'Orgueil Franfais " " The Revival of French Self- Respect." 73 74 PROBLEMS OF POWER nature of the more important questions which, during that period, have occupied the attention of French politi- cians and the French public. Even Lord Salisbury might have come to terms with France and Russia in 1887-1888 and England would thereby have chosen of her own free will, and for purely political, diplomatic motives, a path into which vital necessity drove her fifteen years later if it had not been for the perils and uncertainty of the moment in Paris. In October 1887 (the date of the first Russian entente being August 1891) Baron de Mohrenheim, Russian ambassador in Paris, wrote to his friend, M. Jules Hansen : " I have reminded you a thousand times that without greater governmental stability all the present plans would be compromised. Take it definitely to heart, once for all : il y a France et France. I have never ceased saying this everywhere, so that my conscience, at all events, is clear." * The fall of Jules Ferry, the fall of M. Delcasse, the fall of M. Pichon, are examples of events, the sole interest of which is that they illustrate the singular incapacity of the French politician to subordinate party passions to the general in- terests of his country. That France, the Third Republic, in spite of the pretension of the foreigner to meddle in French affairs, and in spite of the complaisance with which certain Frenchmen have now and then abetted him in his incredible machinations, should not only have survived longer than any of the regimes immediately preceding it, but should have become perhaps the most stable and conservative State in Europe, is one of the happiest accidents of history. From Boulangism through the Panama Scandal to the Dreyfus Case, the Republic has repeatedly appeared to outsiders to be doomed to a speedy end. The Real France a has almost invariably escaped the notice of the average 1 Ambassade A Paris du Baron de Mohrenheim (1884-1898). By Jules Hansen. p. 68. 2 Title of a remarkable book by Mr. Laurence Jerrold (Methuen, 1911). A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 75 well-informed German, Englishman or American. The world-wide misconception with regard to the significance of French domestic policy, and the singular influence of French home policy upon French foreign policy, make it necessary to study in some detail the political development of the Third Republic ; to survey the ground as it was before the continual blows of the Nibelungen picks finally released the subterranean current of French patriotism. II Among the domestic problems that dominated French political life for almost an entire generation, and often diverted the attention of French politicians from foreign questions, that of the relations between the State and the Catholic Church was, perhaps, the most inveterately absorb- ing. During the crisis of the Dreyfus Case this problem became for the Republic a matter of vital interest. The events that occurred in France from 1903 to 1907 in connexion with the dissolution of the religious orders, the expulsion of monks and nuns, the abolition of the Concordat established in 1801, and the readjustment of the relations between Catholicism and the State were a matter of astonishment to the rest of the world. Yet these events, culminating in the separation of the Churches and the State, were produced by no sudden outburst of anti- clerical passion : they were a logical incident in the develop- ment of French society. Instead of being a sign of moral decadence and social ruin, they were a proof not only of the stability of Republican institutions, but also of the Republic's right to claim legitimate heirship to the great regimes preceding it : the whole history of France has been a steady effort of secularization. The Republic was, in a sense, an accident, but it was a necessary and inevitable one. After the fall of the Empire a Republican governmental form was alone possible. But its durability was problematic. The survivors of the older 76 PROBLEMS OF POWER regimes thronged political life ; pretenders and " saviours of society " abounded. The old political parties were all eager for office, and each had its special nostrum for the cure of the alleged maladies of the body-politic. Their agents still held high and responsible positions in the French Administration. The bench, for instance, was honey- combed with them. The Army was crowded with officers who had served another regime too loyally to feel them- selves at home in a Republic. After the debacle the respon- sibility for the re-organization of French society fell upon a handful of disinterested patriots convinced that a Republican form was the least distasteful to the nation, and the only one practical, given the mutually warring interests of the rival political parties. Thiers was a Re- publican President not from conviction, but by the force of things and of his political sense. Round him, in spite of their suspicion of him, rallied the Republicans by convic- tion. Politically, no other coalition was possible. But the Republic, which had thus managed to escape strangling in its cradle, was beset throughout its infancy by the same quarrelsome foes whose reciprocal envy and ambitions had been the sole reason of its surviving. To the Republican bodyguard that watched over the child fell the duty of re-organizing the whole of French society. The political part of their task was achieved inadequately in the Constitution of 1875, under which Frenchmen are still living, and which preserved the old Napoleonic social scaf- folding, although it added fresh beams to fortify and unite the political and administrative functions. 1 So admirable 1 The " origins of contemporary France " are really buried in the Old Regime. The historian of the Political and Administrative Institutions of France, M. Paul Viollet, says admirably : " Notre notion de 1'etat omnipotent, est, a bien prendre, 1'instinct dirigeant de 1'ancien regime erige en systeme. L'etat moderne n'est autre chose que le roi des derniers siecles qui continue triomphalement son labeur acharne, etouffant toutes h'bertes locales, nivelant sans rel aches." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 77 was the new machine that a mere handful of officials could run it. But this task accomplished, it remained first to choose the handful ; secondly, to organize national nurseries of functionaries knowing their Republican busi- ness. The real history of France and the line of its growth during the last thirty-five years of Republican government has been that of the squabble between the Republican crew in office and the Royalist, Imperialist or other gangs out of office. Now, the effort to man the French administrative machine with trusty Republicans could not go on without friction. It meant both cashiering of upright old officials, as in the operation known as " the purification of the magistracy," and the creating, by school legislation, of a Republican youth and electorate, free from the bias of the loyalties of the former generations. The Catholic Church could either immensely facilitate or seriously hamper this process. What part did it choose to play ? By the Concordat, and by the Organic Articles which the First Consul regarded as merely the application of his convention with the Pope, the Central Administration held the French clergy in leash. They were functionaries of the State. The high officials (the Bishops) could virtually be chosen by the State, the Pope merely conferring canonical authority on the elect of the Civil Power ; and although the Bishops chose the parish priests, the choice had to be confirmed by the State. The Bishops were obliged to swear obedience and fidelity to the Government, and to promise " to have no intelligence, to assist at no council, to have nothing to do with any league, either in France or abroad, contrary to the public peace." Furthermore, they were pledged to inform the central authority if they learned of any scheme concocted to its prejudice. This oath, imposed upon the minor clergy, absorbed them also into the magnificent system of officialdom with which the First Consul thought effectively to police French society. 78 PROBLEMS OF POWER In return for the extraordinary services thus conceded by the Vatican, France agreed to ensure her ecclesiastical agents " a proper stipend." The Organic Articles tightened the Church's bonds, interdicting all publication of Papal brief or encyclical in France without Government authority ; forbidding the Bishops to meet in general assembly ; forcing them to obtain Government permission if they desired to leave their dioceses. On the slightest pretext of rebellion the State could bring the Bishops to book and punish them. In a word, it was a state of servility that was in reality an humiliation for the Church, though not honestly regretted by it, since it was a step on the way leading to complete absorption of the civil authority. On the other hand, the Concordat, at the outset, put the French Administration on a solid basis. In fact, when the Third Republic was founded the Concordat was the chief trump it held, if not an absolutely necessary condition of success. Republican statesmen knew this, and one after another the Opportunist leaders, from Ferry and Gambetta to Freycinet and Rouvier, rejected the impolitic proposals of the radicals for abrogation of the Concordat, and the suppression of the Embassy at the Vatican. They were well aware that such a policy would deprive the Government of all police authority over an army of Churchmen to a large extent hostile to Republicanism by definition, and taking their cue from a foreign Power which was always claiming the right to govern. These Republican statesmen felt that to break all ties between the State and the Catholic forces would leave the latter free to follow their natural anti-Republican allegiances, and to continue in the open certain manoeuvres they had all along been secretly con- ducting behind the scenes. Political prudence seemed to the Opportunists, from Ferry to Waldeck-Rousseau, and even to M. Combes, to require the maintenance of the Concordat. In proportion, however, as the work of laying the founda- tions of the Republic approached completion, the utility of A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 79 the Concordat for the State became less and less evident. There came a time when the advantages of the pact were largely on the side of the Catholics. It should not be for- gotten that, owing to the changed conditions of modern life, most of the guarantees demanded by Napoleon were rapidly ceasing to have any real applicability under the Republic. They were counterbalanced by the new laws of liberty enacted by the Republic, laws benefiting the clergy and the Church as much as the other citizens the liberty to teach, liberty of the Press, liberty of association so that, as a matter of fact, in spite of the Concordat, the Church had recovered her territorial power and her political power, and the State was actually in a position of inferiority with regard to her. The State assured the Church a privi- lege and paid its ministers a living stipend which made it possible for them to use their other resources for political ends. Nothing is more characteristic of the way the Con- cordat was finally ceasing to be of any positive political utility to the State, than the argument used in a letter written by Mgr. Fuzet, the Archbishop of Rouen, to the senatorial reporter of the Separation Bill, with the purpose of proving that Separation would be a blunder. " Do not Republican politicians understand," said the Archbishop, " that it is to their advantage to keep the religious question always under discussion ? For the advanced parties clericalism is not only the enemy, it is their daily bread. It is the big drum used to unite the victorious majorities when division seems impending. Are you going to burst that magic drum ? . . . Every good Re- publican is bound to be in favour of the Concordat. To be in favour of the Concordat is not to be clerical, it is to be far-sighted." To the disinterested critic this naive appeal to the senti- ment of middle-class Republican camaraderie is of an incom- parable humour. Yet it was not wanting in perspicacity. The important thing is that the Concordat had come to this : it had the value of a tom-tom ! And yet . . . reflecting Republican statesmen, while fully aware of the fact, still hesitated ; and who can wonder ? Even M. 8o PROBLEMS OF POWER Combes did not wish to hear of Separation. He recalled, perhaps, the wise warning of Jules Ferry to his electors of the Vosges in 1881 : " This formula of separation, just because it is a simple formula, is a deceptive one. . . . The first fact that completely enlightened me was . . . the religious revolution introduced by the Vatican into the doctrines and the general affairs of the Catholic Church. . . . That is for me a decisive reason for preserving the Concordat, inas- much as the more ecclesiastical authority is concentrated, centra- lized, the more it takes on the semblance of a veritable Cesarism. . . The more the Government of the Catholic world resembles absolute authority, the more the national churches are disciplined in a com- mon obedience and the more important it is for a Government like our own to have with it a good contract." There can be little doubt that, even now, Separation would not be the accomplished, though bastard, fact it is but for the diplomatic inexperience of the present Pope, whose blundering policy forced upon the State and, against their will, upon the majority of the French clergy the events leading up to Separation. But what part did the French clergy play throughout the entire period when the Republic was literally fighting for its life the period extending from the Government of National Defence down almost to 1905 ? In the first place, the Syllabus of Pius IX, which was known to define the attitude of the reigning Pope up to the accession of Leo XIII in 1878, had more than awakened the distrust of the Republican statesmen : it was a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night to the members of the Republican Masonic Lodges. By the blast of the Syllabus, as from an archangel's trumpet, society was informed, urbi et orbi, that the forces of Vaticanism were out to all the points of the compass, feeling for their prey, namely, for every manifestation of the " modern spirit " and of laic 1 1 " Laic ? The word is French rather than English ; and, as yet, in communities of people who speak English, the term has no force, because no vogue. On the continent of Europe, however, laic has A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 81 society. The Vatican thereby declared its hostility, not merely against the scientific method of thought, but against the right of the individual to choose his own religion. It declared the supremacy of the Church over the civil author- ity, the infallibility of the Pope, the natural right of the Church to acquire and possess property, and to ignore the civil tribunals, and the right of ecclesiastics to claim ex- emption from military service. It affirmed, notably, the criminal character of all legislation placing public schools under State supervision, making them neutral as regards religious instruction, and freeing them from the authority of the Church. It reproved the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. It anathematized the " error " according to which " it was permissible to refuse obedience to legitimate princes, and even to revolt against them," thus lending the support of the Church to pretenders like the Comte de Chambord. It condemned divorce laws, and, in fact, the whole of the French legislation on marriage. In a word, while this famous document (it matters little whether or no it be taken as ex cathedra} constituted a chal- lenge to many of the ideals of modern civilizations, and ignored the seemingly inveterate tendency to an increasing separation of the spiritual and temporal powers, the State and the country which Pius IX appeared to be singling out for a long time now been growing in familiarity as a name for all the impulses that mark the temper of persons resentful of authority ; it is less exact to say, but briefer and more intelligible, a name for all the impulses of the ' people.' Science has not to approve or condemn the thing thus named. Its sole business is to draw attention to the fact. ... A fresh spirit is growing on our planet ... a spirit which, having at first its origin in a feeling of reaction against ecclesias- tical authority alone, is rapidly broadening, so as to include the entire series of feelings of suspicion of all authority whatsoever, of dislike of whatsoever institutions, and compact monopolizing organisms ; and it is this feeling, binding together the ' people ' in every country east and west, which deserves a name, and which, in want of a bet- ter, I have called laic. . . ." Patriotism and Science, by the Author, p. 149, Boston, 1893. G 82 PROBLEMS OF POWER for special reprobation was the France of the Revolution and of the " rights of man " : Republican France, whose ideas of liberty of conscience he condemned as iniquitous, and whose efforts for the emancipation of the State from religious authority he described as impious. Wherever French Republican statesmen looked, they saw the standard of reactionary conservatism, which the Vatican had raised, intertwined with the flags of the forces enlisted against the Republic. On the morrow of the con- spiracy of May 16, and of the elections of 1877, the hands of the clergy were everywhere visible in the coups de theatre of those episodes. The historian Rambaud points out that the " clerical party had been the cement that had held together the various political parties " during that assault ; and he recalls the fact that, in 1877, the counsels given by the Vatican under Pius IX's pontificate were by no means those that arrived from Rome later on under the pontificate of Leo XIII. Jules Ferry was not exaggerating when, addressing his Vosgian constituents in 1879, ne sa ^ : " Ten years of such laisser-aller as the present, of such blindness, and you will see all this fine system of free schools, inde- pendent of state control, . . . crowned by a final liberty, that of civil war." Not that all Catholics were reactionary and anti-republican ; but all anti-Republicans and Reac- tionaries were Catholic. The Syllabus of Pius IX was a warning. It suggested the necessity of a programme of Republican, therefore national, defence. In the minds of the Republican leaders it justified distrust of the Church. It speedily inspired an energetic response to her declara- tions and acts of war. Gambetta's le clericalisme, voild I'en- nemi was the plastic form assumed by this pervasive senti- ment of fear. The Republicans congratulated themselves that, after all, they had the instrument of the Concordat by which to maintain a certain discipline in at least one of the potential armies of its enemies. But, after all, the French Catholics could not be held A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 83 responsible for the Syllabus, as long as they kept their oath of allegiance to the State and obeyed its laws. How did they undertake to dissipate the distrust which their depen- dency upon Rome excited ? Above all, what was the posi- tive role of the French bishops and clergy, and of the French Catholics, placed, as they were, in a position so immensely to facilitate, or so seriously to hamper, the establishment of Republican Government in France ? It may be summed up in a single word : persecution of the Republic. And when they were refused the right to persecute, they them- selves cried out that they were being persecuted. Those who accuse the " eldest daughter of the Church " of occa- sionally unfilial sentiment towards her spiritual parent forget that that parent has often acted the part of a step- mother. The Church seemed often to be attacking all that the Republic held dear. It appeared to be a vast syndicate opposed to every ideal and conquest of Republi- can legislation. It is impossible, within the limits of the present book, to give any but an inadequate account of the dangerous and systematic war waged against the Republic by the occult Catholic Party in France ; but a few instances will suffice to account for the attitude of Republican statesmen and Republican citizens in their resistance to the unpatriotic work of the clerical power. The cases and the methods here cited will show how inevitable it was that such persecution should give birth, in certain fanatical portions of the Republican party, to a spirit of counter-persecution : witness the out- rageous delation scandals of the War Office under General Andre*. A la guerre comme a la guerre. But these facts, by contrast, will render all the more surprising the self- possession of the French Parliament when it was finally called upon to solve the problem of Separation, and when, instead of passing a Bill inspired by anti-clerical animosity, it prepared and enacted, under the guidance of M. Briand, and in a spirit of judicial calm, a measure of adequate 84 PROBLEMS OF POWER liberty for the Church, consonant, not only with the French, but even with the Anglo-Saxon, ideal of justice, and in harmony with the other conquests of French idealism during the nineteenth century. The supreme " error " of France, that which, in the opinion of the Vatican, required the mobilization of all its agents to combat it, was the effort of French statesmen to establish a national school system free from clerical domination. The task is not yet accomplished, but the Republic has little by little substituted the principle of independent and methodical research for that of authority and tradition, the scientific impulse for the religious ; and this achievement the Catholics still find it difficult to forgive. The freedom of thought and the spirit of tolerance manifested during the debate on the Separation Bill of 1905, were the social fruits of an intellectual education of this sort. The Re- public has aimed at reaping a harvest of those civic virtues which characterize a self-respecting democracy. A State School was regarded as the most efficient method of Republi- can action. The Church protested. It described as per- secution the limitation of one of its monopolies. The con- scious effort of Republican and Democratic France to organize society according to the dominant principles of our laic time, was a movement which was bound to meet with resistance from theocratic vested interests. By means of the primary schools founded by the Republic, which were the greatest work of Ferry, the Republican statesmen wit- tingly sought to wrest the boys and girls of France from exclusive clerical training, and to educate them for their duty as responsible Republican citizens. This steady, in- evitable and characteristic work of the Republic to assure the existence of a neutral laic school seemed, to the Church, a work of irreligion, of impiety. And when the French State is accused of persecution, one of the motives of the charge may be confidently ascribed to the poignant regret with which the Catholics have seen the Republic rooting A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 85 itself steadily in the hearts of the people by the device of a national school system. Nothing would be easier than to cite passages from the pastoral letters and the minutes of Church Congresses, or to adduce typical instances of active ecclesiastical pressure, condemning and combating the school laws of successive Republican governments. When Mgr. Freppel, Bishop of Angers, was not addressing circulars to his flock character- izing the French National Fete of July 14 as the " anniver- sary of one of the most odious massacres of which French history preserves the memory," he was contesting inch by inch in the Chamber the ground on which the Republic was seeking to rear the national free school. Referring to the law on primary instruction, another prelate, this time an Archbishop, Mgr. de Cambrai, described that measure as having been " more dangerous for France than the war of 1870 and than the loss of her two provinces," adding that if the system lasted ten years France would be " rotten to the core, struck from the rank of civilized nations." M. de Cambrai's prophecy has not yet been fulfilled. He went on to " preach a new crusade against the barbarians, who had made a pedestal of the word liberty, and who were now confiscating every liberty. Let the Catholics hold themselves hi readiness, let all Conservatives band them- selves together to the cry of ' Dieuleveut.' ' Still another prelate, in his pastoral letter, said : " In all the districts where the pernicious scheme of removing the schools from the influence of the Church may be formed and carried out, it will be rigorously incumbent upon the Church to inform the faithful that they cannot conscientiously allow their children to frequent those schools." In 1885 the Interna- tional Catholic Congress of Lyons declared : "It would be in vain to seek in the State the right, the competence, or the mission, without which no one should be allowed to teach. Hence the practical impossibility of admitting the organization of a corps of teachers deriving its mission, 86 PROBLEMS OF POWER its competence and its right, from the State, which does not possess these qualifications." These are typical utterances of the monotonous diapason that rang in the ears of the Republican rulers for more than a quarter of a century, and amid which they calmly went on forging that admirable instrument, the public school system of France. Nor are these utterances mere out- bursts of petulance. The Church suited the action to the word. It organized all over France political associations under episcopal authority, the consequence of a mot d'ordre of the sovereign pontiff, admirable machines of political warfare against which the Republican government had to fight, with rare moments of truce, from May 16 down to the time of the Dreyfus case. Evidently the advantages of the Concordat for the State, in spite of Ferry's striking argument, were no longer what they were when that instru- ment was signed by the First Consul. As M. Jules Roche said in a speech in the French Chamber, the French pre- lates and priests were organized in a " permanent and mul- tiple conspiracy against the Republic, against modern society, and against universal suffrage, in order to alter it, corrupt it, and oppress it." in this rapid survey no mention has been made of the constant breaches of the Concordat on the part of French Bishops, their reckless readiness to create compromising incidents, the irreconcilable attitude of the Freppels and the Gouthe-Soulards. 1 The persecution of the State by the Church during the period previous to the accession of Pope Leo XIII is a fact of history, and a fact of which the Church is proud. When Leo XIII took office in 1878, France was entering upon the throes of the war on behalf of laic instruction. The Pope, cautious diplomatist, seemed to be studying the map of Europe. France, under the leadership of Ferry, appeared to be forgetting the dangers 1 See the present writer's Patriotism and Science, pp. 24-38. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 87 at home in the effort which Bismarck seconded, for his own ends, to re-establish in Europe the prestige jeopardized by the Treaty of Frankfort. She began and continued the policy of Colonial expansion, which has finally resulted in her recovering her place among the great powers. But the old parties remained inveterately hostile. They con- tinued then: systematic opposition. It is noteworthy that Mgr. Freppel, no doubt acting in obedience to the Pope, sought to deter them from their anti-French tactics of abdi- cation in the Colonies. There was a lull in the war between Church and State, for although Leo XIII's first encyclical had declared that the policy of Pius IX was to be continued, the new Pope's manner was obviously conciliatory, and the counsels that emanated from the Vatican were no longer those of Pius IX. But if the Vatican seemed quiet, the French Pretenders were still on the alert. The famous affair of Boulangism was a fresh and desperate assault. Let one of the leading Republican Catholics in France enlighten the reader as to the way the Church was once more com- promised by that affair. In Les Catholiques Republicains ; Histoire et Souvenirs, 1890-190", the Abbe Pierre Dabry says : " Just as the Conservatives did not mean to let the country have peace, so likewise they were equally averse to giving peace to the Church. The Catholics had committed the blunder of enlisting in the monarchical army, and of fight- ing at the side of the Conservatives in every battle. They were their prisoners." The " Conservatives " had but one object, namely, to upset the Republic ; and in the " shame- less " Boulangist episode, as this priest does not hesitate to call it, they obliged the honest Catholics, whom they duped with effrontery, to accept once again an alliance which would have compromised them irremediably if it had not been for the political sense of the Pope. This " shameless " episode of Boulangism opened the eyes of Leo XIII. After it the Republic seemed definitively established. " Ne trouvez-vous pas qu'en voild assez?" 88 PROBLEMS OF POWER said the Pope one day to the Archbishop of Algiers, with reference to the way the affairs of the Church were being conducted in France. His meaning was clear. A few weeks later the famous toast of Cardinal Lavigerie at Algiers, calling upon the Catholics to defend the Republic and to adhere to it sans arriere pensee, heralded the encyclical of 1892, urging on all French Catholics submission to the Government ; an instrument shortly followed up by a brief enforcing obedience. This pronouncement opened a new era. It seemed a harbinger of peace and of reconciliation. It was welcomed by the Republican rulers in a spirit of genuine deference for the Pope and of confidence in his sincerity. Who can pierce the mystery of a man's real motives ? They are as secret as the movements of the Pleiades. At all events Leo XIII's act was not only one of supreme political perspicacity, but also one of genuine loyalty. That, moreover, was the impression of the Gam- bettists, who had never forgotten the terms in which their chief had greeted the accession of Cardinal Pecci. It was the opinion of M. de Blowitz, to whom Leo XIII, speaking of the Royalist and Conservative parties, said, " L'eglise du Christ ne s' attache qu'd un seul cadavre, a celui qui est lui- meme attache sur la croix " a stupendous utterance, which takes its place among the finest that history preserves. It is the testimony, moreover, of a score of eminent Catholic authorities, among whom the latest is Mr. Wilfred Ward : " I well remember Cardinal Rampolla's unquenchable hopefulness, in conversation, that if only the conciliatory policy was continued long enough it would bear fruit at last." The Republican statesmen took the Pope at his word. They believed in his sincerity and rejoiced in the oppor- tunity of sheathing the swords they had had to use for twenty years to defend themselves against the Catholic assault. No eye-witness can ever forget the strange inspira- tion, as by a sort of Pentacostal influence, that filled the A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 89 Chamber of Deputies in that famous sitting of March 3, 1894, when M. Spuller, Minister of public worship, the confidant and inspirer of Gambetta, delivered the great speech which marks an epoch in the history of the Third Republic. Developing the religious policy of the Govern- ment, M. Spuller explained the new spirit of tolerance and charity which the Republican State henceforth intended to apply. A wave of genuine enthusiasm overswept the country. Leo XIII, who had put himself at the head of the Democracy, and abandoned the " corpse " of the Con- servative party, was regarded as the benefactor of the State. The Republican Government, eager to lay down their arms, responded loyally to the papal overtures. All along it had been their dream to open wide the doors of the Republic. Never for a quarter of a century had it been possible, for outside had pressed a howling mob, led by non- descript pretenders, the immense Catholic -army at their back, ready to invade and sack the entire house. At last a Pope of keen political intelligence had made it possible to realize the ideal of an open and tolerant Republic. This state of national union was of short duration. There was gnashing of teeth among the irreconcilable survivors of the old regimes. After a show of submission they hardened their hearts like Pharaoh. In this way they played into the hands of the Radical Republicans, whose anti-clerical- ism they revived. Little by little the old battle began afresh, but, as before, the first blows were dealt by the clerico-conservative coalition, and it became obvious that, whatever the sincerity of the Pope's motives, the conse- quences of his policy were likely to be the opposite of his intentions. The order to the Catholics to rally to the Re- public was without ulterior motive. Its results went to justify the scepticism of the Brissons and the Clemenceaus who, from the very first, regarded it as a deep-laid scheme for laying hold of the Republic, in a word as the classic policy of the Trojan horse. Frenchmen rapidly lost their go PROBLEMS OF POWER illusions as to the sincerity of the Conservative Catholic parties, and the Republicans found themselves compelled to attack the Catholics on the same old battlefield. The history is familiar to all observers of France during the period from 1895 to 1905. As an immediate result, how- ever, of the encyclical of 1892, and of the " new spirit " in the Republican Government, France for five years had a series of moderate ministries. Down to 1898 anti-clerical legislation was banished from Parliament, no words of hos- tility to religious liberty were uttered at the tribune. But what was the consequence ? Let a Catholic writer reply, although when he wrote he was hardly aware that he was giving a response to that question : " Between 1894 an ^ I 9 t ne Catholics were free to extend and to develop their ceuvres. Their schools and their colleges were filled. The religious orders, victims of the expulsion of 1880, com- pleted the reconstitution of their establishments, the reopening of their chapels, and openly resumed direction of educational institu- tions. Religious activity, in a word, assumed a development to which we were too much in a hurry, perhaps, to draw attention." This statement of the advantages of the golden age of the Meline and other administrations is taken from a re- markable anonymous study due., it is believed, to a well- known Jesuit : La Grande Faute des Catholiques (Perrin) . The author might have added that the bureaux of the War Office had been sedulously packed by reactionary youth educated in Church schools, and that the invasion of laic society by the Church had been all but completed, so far, at all events, as the Army and Navy were concerned. The justification of this statement is unnecessary for those who recall the Dreyfus Case. The Catholic witness forgets to note, further- more, among the consequences of what he calls the souffle liberal, the extension of the " good press," and the marvellous and pernicious politico-religious part played by the news- paper La Croix during the Dreyfus Affair. Boulangism had opened the eyes of the Pope to the perils of the Church's A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 91 policy of persecution of the Republic. The Dreyfus Affair showed the entire country that even the sovereign pontiff had not succeeded in convincing all French Catholics that the Republic was the only possible form of government for the French democracy ; and that, after the first loyal im- pulses to obey him, they had allowed themselves to be drawn with the enemies of the regime (the " Nationalists ") into a fresh campaign of assault against the State. In 1901, after the Dreyfus case, France was on the morrow of an ardent battle, in which the very existence of the Republic had been at stake. The campaign of the " Nationalists " and of the " Patrie Fran9aise " had been more terrible than that of Boulangism. Republican discipline under M. Waldeck- Rousseau saved the State. But it had not been the fault of the religious orders the Jesuits and Assumptionists nor of the religious newspapers, if the Republic did not go to the wall. Politically there was no time to be lost. The danger had been conjured, but it had been immense. No government could defer taking legitimate precautions. M. Waldeck-Rousseau took them. The form that those pre- cautions assumed was inevitable. It is known as the Associ- ations Law of July rgor, and it resulted in the expulsion from France, pell-mell with some of the worst ecclesiastical conspirators that have ever troubled the public peace in any country, of a large number of innocent persons whom reactionary political wire-pullers had duped into complicity with the anti-Republican monks and bishops. The esprit nouveau had failed owing to the disloyalty and the lack of political sense of certain of the French Catholic leaders. The Republican State once more unsheathed its sword and assumed its former attitude of defence. Leo XIII died in 1903 broken-hearted. What Gallicanism and Catholicism thereby lost, Vatican- ism and, it should be said, the Triple Alliance was to win. Three years before his death Leo XIII had written a firm and eloquent letter to the Archbishop of Bourges, 92 PROBLEMS OF POWER renewing in accents of bitter, although restrained, indigna- tion his protests against the indiscipline of certain French Catholics in their incorrigible resistance to the Republic, and their refusal to accept the principle of Democracy. An immense Catholic organization known as the Action Liberate resolutely set its face against the counsels of the Vatican, and its Catholic Republican attitude towards the Christian democracy once more compromised Catholicism in the eyes of the Republicans. M. Combes, who succeeded M. Wal- deck-Rousseau, largely actuated by the manoeuvres of the clergy and of the religious orders in the elections, applied the Associations Law in a spirit which, if not that of the pro- moters of the law, was generally recognized by Parliament as necessitated by the renewed rebellious activity of the anti-Republican prelates in resisting the law. M. Waldeck- Rousseau, however, protested violently against the dis- tortion, not only of his intentions as promoter of the law, but also of the spirit of that measure, a distortion which resulted in the closing of at least 15,000 Catholic schools and the illegal persecution of many thousands of inoffensive monks and nuns. The last speech he delivered was an eloquent appeal in favour of the right of " authorized " religious orders to teach. He reaffirmed the obligation of Parliament to consider on their merits all requests for authorization. He was not heeded. The result was that the Associations Law, which was meant to be a measure of State control, became one of virtually wholesale exclusion. This was a breach of faith as well as a grave political blunder. It resulted in " persecution," recalling the most characteristic acts of hostility of the Church towards the State. But, what was worse, it gave the Vatican legitimate ground for protest, and created that atmosphere of mistrust which later on was to warp the Papal judgment in connexion with the acceptance of the Separa- tion Law. The Republic was bound to suffer for this mis- construction of the Associations Law, through the effect A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 93 which the inevitable manoeuvres of resentful monks pro- duced upon the new Pope. It is noteworthy, however, that Leo XIII did not retaliate, and it is certain that the so-called " expulsion " of the monks was an event that had no rela- tion whatever with the subsequent measure of Separation, which was largely due to the difficulties raised by Pius X in connexion with the Concordat and M. Loubet's visit to Rome. With the accession of the new Pope the partisans of the old regime recovered their liberty and their audacity. Pius X, the dupe of the insinuations of exiled monks, and the victim of anti-French influences in the Triple Alliance, and of his own doctrinaire piety, abandoned the prudent tem- porizations of his predecessor, and indulged in act after act (such as sending his benediction to the League of French Women, a dangerous engine of war against the Republic) which renewed the old and dangerous policy of the Pope of the Syllabus. When M. Loubet visited the King of Italy Pius X addressed to the European Powers a protest against that visit, couched in terms offensive to France. The insult to France was aggravated by the fact that certain phrases relating to an eventual recall of the papal nuncio did not figure in the copy sent to the French Government. For the Vatican the visit of the President of the Republic to the King of Italy was that of a Catholic sovereign to the heir of the State that had despoiled the head of the Church of his temporal authority. That temporal power is regarded by the Vatican as the keystone of law and justice throughout the planet. By the destruction of that keystone in 1870 all the stones of the arch, one after another, necessarily fell. From the point of view of the Vatican the visit of M. Loubet was an affront. The policy of the Vatican has been to pit France against Italy, compromising the " Eldest Daughter of the Church," by the affirmation of a persistent and naive confidence in her intention to intervene sooner or later for the restoration of the temporal power. Were the Vatican 94 PROBLEMS OF POWER to abandon the dream of recovering its territorial sovereignty it would be more than the loss of a hope, it would be positive abdication. As the French Deputy, the late Abb6 Gayraud, has said : "It was of profound political wisdom and of far-reaching social significance that the Pope should appear before the whole world, not as the citizen of any nation, nor as the subject of any State, but amid the complete radiance of his apostolic independence." The French Government held that it was not its business to contribute to the consolidation of the papal " royalty." Its retort to the protest of the Vatican was immediate and logical. It recalled its ambassador lest his further presence at the Vatican be interpreted by the Holy See in a sense favourable to its pretensions to the temporal power, and also as a protest against the Vatican's claim to meddle in French foreign affairs. Four hundred and twenty-seven deputies against ninety-five approved this act of the Government. Until then M. Combes had been opposed to the separation of Church and State. The Pope, by his ill-advised but obviously responsible policy, and by his anti-concordatory acts, rendered that separation logical. The cup of Republican indignation ran over when, contrary to the terms of the Concordat, the Pope refused canonical investiture to priests whom the Government promoted to the episcopate. Later on, without co-operation with the State, the Vatican deprived two French Bishops of their rights ; and this also was a breach of the Concordat. Wantonly, one would say and later events, in fact, showed that it was the application of a deep- laid plot of hostility to France the Vatican was seeking a quarrel with the French State. There had not yet, however, been complete rupture between the two, since, after all, it depended on the French Parliament to decide whether the Concordat should be abrogated. But finally, when one of the Bishops appointed by the State had been suspended from his functions by the Pope, this new affront was so excessive that M. Combes no longer hesitated. The honour of France A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 95 was at stake. He gave the Pope twenty-four hours to withdraw the letters written to the Bishops, under penalty of the immediate rupture of diplomatic relations. Not having obtained satisfaction he recalled from Rome what remained of the Embassy. The door was wide open for the great reform of a free Church in a free State. But meanwhile French foreign policy was bound to suffer by the rupture of relations be- tween the Quai d'Orsay and the Vatican. In Syria, in the islands of the Pacific, and finally in Morocco, France learned the inconvenience of not possessing normal facilities for diplomatic conversation with a Power which, after the Powers of Money and Democracy, is still the greatest in the world. Whenever a French Government begins negotia- tions with the Pope for the re-establishment of an Embassy at the Vatican the measure will not only consolidate the authority of France and the effective influence of the Triple Entente, but will meet with the approval of the immense majority of French citizens. To use the words of M. Poin- care, the French Prime Minister, on his return from Russia (August 1912), it will " preserve and enhance cette conscience collective et cette unite de sentiment national qui font la gran- deur, la gloire et I'immortalite des -peuples." Ill The adjustment of the relations between the Churches and the State has been only one of the problems absorbing the attention of political parties in France. The politico- religious character of the Dreyfus Case was unmistakable. The Dreyfus Case was in reality a revival of the Wars of the League during the reign of Henri IV. What Dr. Gustave Lebon calls the " pyschology of revolutions " will class these two episodes as events of the same general order. The Dreyfus Case was a ten years' period of civil war which seemed to be interrupting the steady advance of French society, but which, when all was over, was seen to have 96 PROBLEMS OF POWER precipitated that advance, and to have transformed the nation and the State. The political and social consequences of the Dreyfus Case were immense and are not yet spent. 1 In that great religious war two conflicting French ideals fought almost to the death ; the ideal of the raison d'etat and the ideal of les droits de I'homme ; the ideal of a sovereign centralized State, repres- sive of individual privilege, and the ideal of individual right chafing against laws and conventions that subordinate the individual to the interests of the community ; the ideal of a justice based on national expediency, and of a justice rooted in the conviction peculiar to every human conscious- ness, that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is no illusion. The significance of this ten years' civil war in France rarely appealed to the foreigner. When, in 1898, the late M. Brune- tiere harped, in articles in the Revue des deux Mondes, and in a series of vigorous pamphlets, on the single string that 1 The virus secreted by the Dreyfus Affair still remains singularly potent whenever it touches certain vulnerable organs of the body- politic. On January n, 1913, M. Millerand, the ablest minister of War that France has had for many years, was led, under pressure of the Extreme Radical deputies, to resign, because he had rein- tegrated in the territorial force," Lt.-Col. du Paty de Clam, one of the staff-officers who had played a predominant part in the incrimina- tion of Captain Dreyfus for high treason. The Minister's resignation took place at the critical moment when Rumanian blackmail of the Balkan League, synchronizing with a deadlock in London, between the Balkan and Turkish peace-plenipotentiaries, appeared to be placing Europe within grave danger of a general war. It would not be easy to find in the annals of French domestic policy a finer instance of the tyranny and caprice of the Legislative Authority, nor a more sinister proof of the crying need in France of a reinforce- ment of the principle of the Separation of Powers. The occasion was one to recall the remark of Dr. Woodrow Wilson (The State, p. 232) : " Almost every public man of experience and ability in France has now been in one way or another discredited by the action of the Chamber of Deputies ; and France is staggering under that most burdensome, that most intolerable, of all forms of government, government by mass-meeting by an inorganic popular assembly." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 97 " individualism " was the great danger for his countrymen ; when the State Attorney, in the trial of Emile Zola, at Versailles, accused that novelist of " not understanding the genius of France," public opinion throughout the Anglo-Saxon world failed completely to seize the drift of these sayings. No Englishman, no German, no American, seemed to be aware, or they had all forgotten, that the age-long endeavour of France had been, wittingly or unwittingly, the construction of a strongly centralized power, a machine in which all the separate parts, all the members of the body-politic, should be mute accessories, simple functionaries anonymous fulfillers of a function without individual rights or privileges. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had ejected certain elements that clogged the machine and were a cause of friction. Their absence rendered the problem of the construction of a really national unity much easier to solve. No such State as the French was ever before formed on so vast a scale. The maintenance of such a State implies the sacrifice of the individual citizen to the glory and beauty of the whole. It creates an excellent soil for the cultivation of such weeds as Antisemitism, and it demands the enactment of excessive repressive legislation, like that of 1894 against the anarchists, measures that were rushed through the Chamber of Deputies without debate, and that were of easy application to " crimes of opinion," to differences of view on social problems and social duties. But, at the same time, in such a State, the faults of the individuals composing it will almost all belong to the category of amiable defects, in contradistinction to the odious merits produced among a people that have evolved according to an opposite ideal of justice and national duty. The faults will be the defects of children scheming for place and advancement, for ribbons and for honours, in a word for recognition by the community, for some form of national sanction of their conduct. In such a State the word honour will have a double sense. H 9 8 PROBLEMS OF POWER The qualities, therefore, which in France are to shine in the individual, are not those that make the glory of the citizen in the lands where Protestantism has triumphed, and where the notions of social and civic justice have not grown out of a tendency to centralization : self-assertive- ness, self-reliance, moral and civic courage but, on the contrary, the qualities that are most effective in an organic community : all the social qualities, in a word, ranging from an ideal of discipline like that of the Japanese Bushido, with its reflection in the Japanese smile, to the most agree- able forms of French urbanity, and to the French gift for festal demonstrations. Society in such a State becomes organized politeness. Literature and art are pre-eminently expected to show symptoms of gout ; that is to say, of codified taste. Thought must, at all costs, be made intelligible ; and if possible its expression must be rendered average. Renan's confession, in the preface of his L'Avenir de la Science, as to his intentional effort to alter his literary style in order to please his compatriots, is only the echo of the principles of a Vaugelas. In such a State we shall find the clear, correct, straightforward style of prose recognized as useful. And as a consequence of the genius of France, patriotism in France is arguably another thing than in England, or Holland, or the United States, where the genius of the inhabitants makes for the aggrandizement of the indivi- dual rather than for the development of man in society, or for the completer perfecting of the social organism. French- men have always preferred the latter form of civilization, and in spite of Democracy they prefer it still. Napoleon came and, completing the work of Richelieu and Louis XIV, constructed the scaffolding patented over and over again by successive governments, even by the Third Republic with which the French are still building their great sample nation. It ought not to have caused any surprise, there- fore, in 1898, during the Dreyfus case at that critical moment when the idea of abstract justice seemed likely to A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 99 throw the whole machine out of gear that many a French- man, keenly alive to, or at least sub-consciously divining, what is unquestionably the genius of French history, should have rallied to the side of the Anti-Dreyfusists with Brune- tiere and M. Jules Lemaitre, with M. Bourget, M. Barres and M. Charles Maurras and with ninety-nine per cent, of the French army. Moreover, all that has just been said, not only explains the feeling of persistent hostility to aggressive minorities, to the Protestants, for instance, and the Free-Masons, but even partially justifies that feeling. Patriotic duty in France, from 1895 to 1905, was conceivably quite another thing than what it is to-day, or than it ever has been, for instance, in England. And this touches the essential point. If French history is so absorbingly interesting, in a philosophic sense, it is because of the age-long struggle in France between two opposite theories of human develop- ment, the Protestant and the Catholic, between Indivi- dualism and Solidarity, between Free Thought and Author- ity. The ideal of the Michelets and the Quinets was that of the founders of New England : "A Church without a Bishop and a State without a King." The Dreyfus Affair was the revenge of the Edict of Nantes. But even this patent fact escaped the perspicacity of foreign observers, who regarded the glorious " Affair " as a monstrous scandal render- ing France a by-word among the nations. They did not know that in France there are two forms of patriotism, that of the men who either protest as idealists, or who sulk as envious outsiders ; and that of the men who either acquiesce as conservatives, or sell their birthright for a place at the budgetary board. French history is the record of the duel between these two patriotisms. Whenever Frenchmen have forgotten that they belong to a national community that forms part of Europe, the clash between their two patriotisms has resulted in civil war, and the enemies of France have rubbed their hands in glee. Whenever France has been hard-pressed by the foreigner, these two patriotisms have ioo PROBLEMS OF POWER sunk their differences, and France, recovering her national self-consciousness, has presented to the world an impregnable battle-front. IV The foregoing pages show the obvious absurdity of using for the interpretation of French events the same general ideas which serve to explain events occurring among peoples who live according to another social system, and are there- fore the product of quite another historic evolution. The struggle in France between the Catholic Church and the Republican State, as well as the Dreyfus Affair, are excellent illustrations of this truth. The record of the purely political and constitutional development of France, as affected by its social and economic evolution, is no less conclusive proof that the only absolute fact in the world is that all things are relative. During an entire week in March 1909 some five or six thousand Parisian postmen and telegraph clerks, assisted by their comrades in the provinces, remained absent from their posts and imposed their will on nearly forty millions of their fellow-citizens. Startled spectators in other countries im- mediately concluded that France was in revolution. The event in question was called a " strike," but it was a strike of a new kind, in reality an interesting symptom of the evolution of French society under the influence of De- mocratic principles. It was the revolt of a considerable group of one privileged class of the French nation against the national Parliament ; and the executive authority in the nation was, for a tune, so paralysed that none of the numerous acts of insubordination connected with the event was punished, while, in order to restore the normal life of the community, the Prime Minister was obliged to parley directly with the representatives of the group of State officials, as Roman Emperors negotiated with the pretorians. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 101 Small wonder if an incident of so peculiar a character imposed attention. The enemies of the Republic were sure to seize upon it as reinforcing their theory of the essential anarchy inherent in a Republican State. They interpreted the strike as the beginning of the end of the present political system in France. The authority of the French Parliament, they said, had become in- ferior even to that of the Russian Duma. " Pronuncia- miento Syndical," " Fin de Regime," " La Trahison des Employes de 1'Etat " such were some of the formulas in which public opinion, in France and abroad, crystallized its astonishment and its apprehensions. A French historian and professor, M. Aulard, described the strike as " nothing more or less than the most considerable event which has occurred since the French Revolution." No apology is required for the attempt to analyse curiously, and some- what more scientifically than would hitherto appear to have been done, the nature of an event which aroused such exceptional comment. One preliminary observation, more- over, must be made in definition of the event taken in and by itself, without reference to its origin or consequences. That observation is this : the biologic law of specialization of function seems to have its analogy in the departments of political and social science, the number of vital points in any given society becoming more and more numerous as the community becomes more organic, more highly developed what we call more " civilized." In most modern States a minority can overrule the will of the vast majority, and easily effect the provisional disruption of the social organism. In March 1909, in France the syndical energy of some eight thousand individuals, grouped for common action, annihilated for a considerable period the united force of the national sovereignty. The interests of a single syndicate outweighed those of the syndicate of consumers, of the whole mass of tax-payers the syndicate of the nation. PROBLEMS OF POWER Two years later, in the summer of 1911, another series of incidents in another part of France, gave rise to similar apprehensions. Again startled spectators, both at home and in other countries, exclaimed that France was in revolution. Fortunately the student of political science has an advan- tage which not all scientists enjoy. His experiments are prepared for him by other people ; he has only to sit quietly, like the astronomer, and watch the changing phenomena. In France, owing to the Frenchman's repugnance for blurred edges, his logical, systematizing intelligence, political facts uni- formly assume an exceptional neatness of outline which tends to enhance their apparent importance. They loom larger than life. Events there isolate themselves automatically, as if for the more convenient investigation of the observer. Thus in 1911 in France certain of the Eastern provinces became the scene of what can only be described as a revival of the Dionysiac orgies. It was an impressive spectacle. As the bands of Bacchic and Maenad revellers reeled, burning and pillaging, through the vineyards of Champagne, the torch-lit terror of the Thracian nights seemed no longer a poet's dream. But the scene was not merely an interesting occasion for aesthetic pleasure, not merely even a happy opportunity for the kine- matographer. It was also a fresh symptom, after so many others, of a certain state of the French body- politic, and it was no doubt what is called a prodrome of a possible change in the French political and social organism. The terrifying events in Champagne occurred under the eye of a Government apparently powerless to arrest them, and of a Parliament incompetent to suggest a solution. The Prime Minister of France sat like Bel- shazzar at the feast, gazing with dismay at the awful letter- ing on the midnight sky, while the Deputies wrung their hands like a Greek chorus. The lettering on the wall was Greek to the Prime Minister. What may have been the reflections of the President of the Republic, who had A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 103 chosen the stalwart Radical Senator, Monsieur Moms, to govern France, is not known : the Head of the State in' France is, by the real, if not by the legal, constitution, 1 a mute idol in a pagoda, without responsibility or initiative. The reflections of the public were not so inarticulate. These two startling manifestations of an unrest which the superficial foreign observer may be excused for having regarded as revolutionary, in the legendary French sense of the word, may be studied from various points of view ; but it would be a mistake not to class them together as typical instances illustrating what may, without exag- geration, be called the crisis of the State in France. An effort has been made, in the earlier pages of this book, 2 to compare certain aspects of the French and American Con- stitutions. It is useful to continue the investigation thus begun by a somewhat more detailed scrutiny of the political and administrative organization of France. The situation in that country is not entirely without its suggestion for other countries ; yet, at this juncture, it is more important than ever to insist on the absurdity of hoping to determine the effects of socio-political phenomena in a given society by comparing those effects with the consequences of apparently similar phenomena in communities differently organized, or hardly organized at all. Michelet remarked, for instance, that the whole of Eng- lish history could be summed up in the single sentence : " England is an island." When, in her characteristically brutal fashion Germany sought, by the despatch of a gunboat to the ideally strategic point of Agadir, on one of the world-routes of the Atlantic, to separate England and France, and to imperil the efficacy of their entente, while tear- ing up two diplomatic conventions, the Algeciras agreement and her own agreement with France concerning Morocco, the immediate consequences of her action merely illustrated once again the profound truth of Michelet 's axiom. 1 See notes, p. 34 and p. 40. 2 See pp. 39-41. 104 PROBLEMS OF POWER But if the formula of Michelet, intelligently interpreted, is the sum and substance of British history, it is no less easy, no less pertinent and suggestive, to sum up French history by a parallel formula, based on considerations drawn from the geographical position of France in relation to other con- tinental European Powers. Continental Europe is in reality the western promontory of Asia, and France is merely an isthmus, all but converting that promontory into a peninsula, an isthmus linking the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the North Sea. French soil is the central historic road of civilization during at least the last three thousand years. All the Pisgah heights look down upon her. 1 A great nation has been evolved in so exposed and coveted a corner of the Continent solely by the adoption of relentlessly centralizing methods, which have determined the manners, the tem- perament, the character and the lack of character of its members. It is because Frenchmen have had to live and move and have their secular being at this particular spot of the globe that their ideals and their problems, their history, in a word, has differed from that of any other national com- munity. The attempt to account for events of the originality and magnitude of the Postmen's Strike and of the Jacquerie in the vineyards of Champagne implies an effort to unravel, in the tangle of causes, those that are general and those that are specific and immediate ; to distinguish between what Taine called the " great acting and permanent forces " and 1 In a map of the world of about 1050, known as the map of Saint Severin (Gascony), in which Rome is figured as the virtual centre of the oval universe, and in which the lacustrine sources of the Nile are lavishly affirmed, Gallia occupies almost a full quarter of the space, and she is crowded with great cities ; while Germany, the vague Regia Germania, is but a meagre cone-shaped area crushed between a distorted Danube and an extravagant Rhine, and seemingly in danger of being utterly squeezed out into the German Ocean. France preserves much the same proportions in the Hereford map of about 1280. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 105 " the donnees that are more or less accidental and deter- minant of change." 1 The general cause of the crisis of the State in France is the inability to co-ordinate, in the machinery of government in that country, two parts of the machine which ought to have remained reciprocally independent : the administrative and bureaucratic, which is an inheritance of the Napoleonic regime, and the Parliamentary, to which, in conditions that must be explained, an excessive importance has been given. In France two governmental systems have become entangled, creating a state of friction which, if it were to continue, would ruin the entire machine. The antinomy between the Napoleonic regime maintained by the Third Republic and the system of Parliamentarism established by the Con- stitution of 1875 would of itself in the course of time have entailed a revision of the Constitution. But the need for reform has been precipitated by the introduction of a new factor in the problem, the Syndical Movement. It has been seen, 2 in connexion with the problem of the separation of Church and State in France, that the founders of the Third Republic, in their effort to re-organize French society, achieved the political part of their task but inade- quately, by framing a Constitution which preserved the old Napoleonic social scaffolding, and even by adding fresh beams that rendered the political and administrative func- tions more organic and more centralized. A mere handful of officials sufficed to run the machine. But it was necessary not only to choose a select and trusty personnel whose busi- ness it should be to tend the machine, but also to organize national nurseries of civil servants knowing their Republican business. If the Government of France had consisted merely of the bureaux and the Cabinet, this operation of manning the French Administration with trusty Republicans might have proceeded without excessive friction. But the 1 See letter of January -2, 1882, to M. A. Leroy-Beaulieu : Revue des deux Mondes, April 15, 1907. 2 See pp. 76, 77. 106 PROBLEMS OF POWER Constitution had concentrated the national sovereignty in a Chamber of Deputies, and made the Cabinet dependent on that all but autocratic assembly. The real work of France was done by the bureaux, and the Chamber held the Cabinet responsible for its being well done. But to get that work well done, from the point of view of the " representatives of the people " it was imperative that it should be done by persons on whom they themselves could count. Moreover, no deputy in any country in the world but is convinced that the interests of the community re- quire his election and re-election. In a country of universal suffrage, where the power of Number is predominant, the sheer numerical value of the mass-vote of vast groups of civil servants is an essential factor of the problem of election. The phenomenon has been excellently illustrated on a vast scale in the United States under the name of the " spoils system " ; and the Pension system of the United States, where nearly 200,000,000 dollars J are paid out annually, is an equally pretty instance of the same phenomenon. Hence the tendency both to ingratiate oneself with the functionaries and to increase then- number. The pro- cesses of seduction are varied, ranging from the classical method of the sop to Cerberus the Income Tax Bill in France is a misplaced effort of the kind to out- right intimidation, or even blackmail, as was seen in the delation scandals under M. Combes' Ministry. With Bills of demagogic appeal the French democracy has been 1 The Outlook, May 25, 1912. The case of England is worth citing in comparison. In the last 25 years the Civil Service Estimates have risen from 15,700,000 to 46,787,873 (exclusive of the Revenue Departments). No fewer than 2,700 new offices for the service of the State have been created since 1906. Under the Insurance Act large numbers of similar appointments have been made, most of them without public competition. A Royal Commission on the Civil Ser- vice was appointed in March 1912, but it remains to be seen how far it will succeed in clearing the steady growth of official appointments from all suspicion of jobbery or party preference. Cf . leading article in The Times, March 15, 1912. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 107 drawn steadily^on to the point of liberty it has reached to- day ; it has been given the right of free speech, the right of public meeting, the right of combination. But at the same time the Cabinets responsible for order and discipline have striven strenuously to reconcile these liberties with the principle of authority of which they are constitutionally the guardian. Some 900,000 servants of the State, em- ployeVof the nation, many of whom owe their appointments that is to say, their privileged existence to the favour of a Minister or the intervention of a politician,'are expected to repay their benefactors by ensuring the election or the re-election of the individuals designated by the Republican leaders. That is, in France, an essential part of the mechan- ism of government, and until within the last few years it had never occurred to any French politician that another system was conceivable. In a letter written in 1881 to M. Georges Saint-Rene Taillandier, Taine said : " Under the name of sovereignty of the people we possess an excessive centralization, the intervention of the State in private life, a system of universal bureaucracy, with all its consequences. Centralization and universal suffrage, these are the two main characteristics of contemporary France, and they have given it an organi- zation which is both apoplectic and anaemic." What Taine meant, and what no close observer could fail to note, was indeed the whole set of "consequences" involved in the simple fact that there are some eight millions of voters in France, and that at least 900,000 of them are civil servants, employes of the State. The French expression I'assiette au beurre, which refers simply to the desire of all French citizens to be given a place at the Budgetary buffet, and to be allowed to " put their fingers in the pie " as often and as conveniently as they like, sums up picturesquely the Gargantuan spectacle organized by the Republican caterers since the downfall of the Empire. In the earlier period, as has been seen, the primary-school teachers were io8 PROBLEMS OF POWER enlisted as a disciplined Republican army throughout the French communes, and were made electoral agents. The letter-carriers were converted into emissaries of the Republican general staff. The mayors, sub-prefects and prefects were the officers of this immense army of functionaries, dependent on the Minister of the Interior, and enabling him to " make the elections." That operation consisted in the exclusion from all participation in the banquet, and from the distribution of plums, of citizens who sulked or openly sought to seize the whole cake for themselves. The process of government which it implied was in principle of an extreme simplicity, but in practice it was astonishingly and amusingly complicated. The main occupation of the rulers of France was, and still is, to procure for their clients as many posts and advantages of every kind as possible. This has resulted in the multi- plication of sinecures, until to-day, as has been pointed out, an eighth at least of the electorate owe their social con- sideration, and the majority their economic well-being, to the successive Governments of the last thirty-five years. Favours of the most varied description the offer of tobacco shops, newspaper kiosques, red, yellow and blue ribbons, and exemptions from military service are extended to Frenchmen who promise to vote for the orthodox candidate. And to this magnificent system of national bribery has been added, in the interests of Republican administrative discipline, the power of intimidation. If the mayor of a village shows signs of reactionary independence and all independence tends to be classed as reactionary the interests of his commune are systematically ignored by his chiefs. The inhabitants of the township or hamlet are made to realize that the installation of a telegraph line or the con- struction of a road are matters not essentially of social or economic importance, but of political interest. 1 The habit 1 See La Republique et les Politiciens, by M. Henry Leyret. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 109 has become deep-rooted of appealing to the authorities for all those improvements which in less centralized com- munities are left to private enterprise. Individual enthu- siasms, private initiative, are at a discount. France, in fact, has advanced steadily towards that " apoplectic " state to which Taine alluded ; and the role of Parliament has been to facilitate rather than to retard the dangerous moment of utter congestion. The deputy has become per- force the ambulant intermediary between the central Govern- ment and the electorate. It is through his intervention that the office-seekers, tuft-hunters, or the mere snobs, ambitious to inscribe their official dignities on their visiting cards, are able to get at the paid organizers of the banquet, the Ministers in office. The deputy is tempted to become a travelling salesman of political or social favours and gim- cracks, in return for votes or local influence. The illusion of his omnipotence has grown apace, until the clients to whom he had promised the moon have become disillusioned as to his ability to procure it for them. The Government has thus little by little been reduced to the undignified role of catering to the clients of its majority, and replying to the sarcasms and repelling the assaults of the party not invited to the banquet. Their entire time is occupied in this double task. Happily the real government of France is in the bureaux, the great State administrations. 1 For a number of years 1 When I first gave utterance to these ideas in the National Review of May, 1909, 1 was taxed with exaggeration. Two years later, even the Republican press was ringing with them ; they formed the staple of one of the most brilliant books of political criticism Les Tyrans Ridicules, by M. Henry Leyret that has investigated the state of the French body-politic since Prevost Paradol. And still a year later, on June 25, 1912, the Prime Minister of France, M. Poincare, in a speech in the Chamber of Deputies on the reform of the electoral law, used language no less vigorous than my own, to describe the plight of the representative of the people, who is merely the creature of a local " boss " indifferent to all the general interests of France, so long as the petty interets de clocher are zealously protected. M. no PROBLEMS OF POWER all seemed to be going as well as possible behind the scenes. Conservative by tradition, addicted to the bour- geois virtues, animated by a real spirit of strenuous and continuous labour, the great administrations would have remained disciplined had it not been for the interplay of the reciprocally antagonistic factors of French social and political evolution : the extension to the democracy of the various liberties that seem inseparable from our time, and the effort to maintain a centralized mon- archical administration. There is an immanent logic as there is an immanent justice. The radical inconsistency of the two conceptions was bound one day to result in that state of general unrest which has characterized the French body-politic and French society during the last seven or eight years, and which finally, by the happy accident of the postmen's " strike," was so localized that the real nature of the disorder could be diagnosed as an acute attack of articular rheumatism in one of the great arms of the French administration, the result of long-protracted and silent Poincare said : "La refonne electorate n'est pas seulement la representation sincere et juste des partis politiques, c'est surtout la renovation de certaines moeurs electorates et administratives et le changement d'habitudes dont nous avons etc et sommes tous les jours, tous plus ou moins victimes. . . . L'etroitesse des circon- scriptions electorates met forcement les elus a la merci des influences locales. Vous le savez aussi bien que moi. M. Andrieux annon9ait hier que les senateurs auraient tot ou tard le sort des deputes ; mais j'ai ete assez longtemps depute pour connaitre les conditions dans lesquelles, le plus sou vent, nous sommes amenes a exercer ce mandat. Nous sommes obliges d' employer la plus grande partie de notre activite a des besognesfastidieuses, d des demarches ingrates, et nous en arrivons, sous la pression des influences locales, a consider er comme une necessite vitale, pour conserver notre mandat, notre ingerence quotidienne dans toutes les questions administratives. Et toutes les responsabilites se trouvent ainsi deplacees : les chefs des administrations, debordes par les sollicitations, ont toutes les peines du monde a defendre leur propre impartialite. C'est ainsi que les mecontentements se multi- plient. Je ne fais, en ce moment, que repeter tout haut ce que tout le monde dit tout bas." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS in secretions of a gouty or arthritic character, which must be ruthlessly combated at whatever cost. Now, in a nation as completely organic as that of France, an organism so compact, so highly developed as regards specialization of function, where everyone is either a part of the machinery of administration or of government, or a candi- date for participation in administrative responsibilities, a nation which topological causes have made more homo- geneous than any other modern people in such a nation, where almost all the quarrels are only family feuds, the introduction of the right to combine was the introduction of a subtle poison bound to transform the whole internal economy ; and Parliament, instead of finding the necessary antidotes for the secret ravages produced, seemed to be blindly, perversely perfecting an ideal bouillon de culture. How did it set about the concoction of this dangerous mixture ? How did it manage to create so favourable a milieu for the rapid evolution of the malady ? The answers to these questions will give the efficient cause of the present crisis. In the first place, the deputies representing the Republic were obliged by the attitude of the Catholics, and of the parties loyal to successive Pretenders, to defend their inter- ests and those of the new regime against the Church and against Reaction. This contest absorbed the attention of the Republic so long and so completely that relatively little time was left for the consideration of that prudent policy of social reform which figures seductively on Radical pro- grammes down even to that of M. Clemenceau in November 1906. Hypnotized by these grave questions of self-preser- vation and the organization of secular education was an integral part of the struggle against influences hostile to the Republic the Republican Cabinets were too strongly tempt- ed to ignore the fundamental changes which were taking place in what Gambetta called the nouvelles couches sociales, and in the economic relations between the bourgeoisie and H2 PROBLEMS OF POWER the people, as a result of the new liberties which the Re- publican party had bestowed on the democracy. There had not been wanting prophets, however, Republican leaders of great distinction and political sense, like Waldeck-Rous- seau, who foresaw the vast development to which the Syndical Movement was predestined. These men, who perceived that the law of 1884 on professional trade unions created an alien influence, destructive of almost all the traditional notions on which French society and the French adminis- tration had subsisted for a century, nevertheless recognized that thus, and thus only, could that society evolve amid the new economic conditions. And the greatest of them, the statesman responsible for the law of 1884, Waldeck- Rousseau himself, sought untiringly to convince his country- men that, to prevent the syndicates from becoming a State within a State, supplementary legislation was required. In a speech delivered at Roubaix in 1898, before six thousand working men, Waldeck-Rousseau referred to the law of 1884 (of which more recent legislation tolerating associations and combination in the Government offices is but the dan- gerous logical development) as " un des meilleurs chapitres de ma vie." And he remarked, in a note of philosophy echoed over and over again in La Melee Sociale of M. Clemenceau : "If it be believed, as I believe, that it is with society as with individuals, in that they obey a positive law of growth, that they inevitably advance in the path of progress, then it will be seen that we were well inspired in sweeping away the obstacles in the path of the labouring classes and in releasing them from the dilemma of resignation or revolt." But he went on to point out that the professional syndicates must be allowed to acquire property, that, within the im- mediate future, " il faudrait que le capital travaille et, par une reciprocite certaine, que le travail possede," in order that the new trade unions might bring about what he regarded as the necessary solution, namely, " the participation of the A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 113 wage-earning class in industrial and commercial property." How was this great Republican leader heeded ? The French Parliament frivolously shut its eyes to the danger, and refused to look the facts in the face. Yet these facts were numerous and startling enough to arouse the most indifferent. The details of the rapid progress of the trade union move- ment in France since 1884, a progress leading up to the feder- ation in 1895 of the various unions in a vast Confeder- ation du Travail, with the " general strike " and " direct action " (in distinction from Parliamentary action) as their tactics of battle these details have no place in a study dealing with the general aspects of a crisis which, as has already been seen, is political and social rather than econo- mic. The facts so unwisely neglected by the French Par- liament were the signs of revolt in the great army of civil servants of whom the deputies were themselves the creatures indications which a prudent statesmanship would have scrutinized with the utmost concern. First there was the congress of school teachers, opened to the strains of the Internationale, * and conducted in a spirit of menacing independence. Then the personnel in the naval arsenals began to agitate. At Lyons there was a strike of policemen. In Bordeaux and Paris the hospital assistants demanded less work and higher wages. A kind of epidemic of " syn- dicomania " began to rage in France among the civil ser- vants, who, by a law voted in 1901, were granted the right to combine without being expressly given the right to strike. At present there are in France at least 488 " Professional Associations of State Employes " in the big central Govern- ment offices, and 202 unions representing the State employes in the match factories, the tobacco factories, the Mint, the State railways, etc.,, etc. These various unions are united in a general federation, and it is this colossal new force, which has been encouraged by the State, that was 1 See p. 197, ii 4 PROBLEMS OF POWER suddenly brought to the notice of the public by the Post- men's Strike of March 1909. This grouping of State employes took place so rapidly that the vigilance of even the professional politicians was surprised. When M. Clemenceau took office his programme contained the following passage : " As regards professional trade unions, the Government will pro- pose to you to introduce into the law of March 21, 1884, the improve- ments which past experience has shown to be necessary. The time appears to the Government to have arrived for increasing the civil capacity of the trade unions. ... At the same time the Govern- ment will submit to you a Bill determining the status of civil ser- vants. This Bill, while granting them liberty of combination, and guaranteeing them against arbitrary action, will ensure the steady accomplishment of their duty to the State, which is responsible for the public administrative services." That is to say, M. Clemenceau showed himself alive to the disquieting character of the movement among the State employes : he announced his intention of legislating in the spirit of the warning of his predecessor Waldeck-Rousseau, and he promised the servants of the State that their long- ignored demand to possess a definite charter "guaranteeing them against arbitrary action " should at last be granted. That was seven years ago. Since then nothing has been done to realize this promise. The familiar methods of favouritism, due to the necessity of satisfying the claims of some eight hundred deputies and senators, still continue. In more than one speech M. Clemenceau fulminated against the shameless intervention of the politicians and their outrageous demands ; his protests and those of his successors were necessarily vain. In order to live they had to do as their predecessors had done to satisfy the " majority " ; while that majority, to be re-elected, has to distribute ribbons and crosses, baubles and places. The Cabinet is the dispenser of these things, and it has no choice but to turn, with the other wheels and cogwheels, in the same set of vicious circles, until the whole machine breaks A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 115 down. The machine, however, has now become clogged and sadly requires cleaning. One of the abuses that has most irritated the State employes of all ranks is the scandalous way in which each new Minister has intro- duced into the service, under the guise of attaches to his Cabinet, a little band of parasites who block the path of normal promotion to all the functionaries of that branch of the administration. Fifteen years ago a Minister's Cabinet included at most but two or three functionaries. Nowadays a Minister is supposed to be protected against the importunate by a directeur de Cabinet, a chef de Cabinet, two or three chefs-adjoints, a few sous-chefs, a chef du secretariat -particu- lier, a certain number of chefs-adjoints au secretariat particulier, one or more private secretaries, and a score of attaches. This phalanx of officials, who are mere political parasites, usually destitute of technical knowledge and training, are rightly regarded by the trained servants of the administration as interlopers standing in the way of their automatic promotion. Instead of protecting the Minister againt the machinations of the deputies they provide fresh channels of access to the powers that be. There results from this state of things a scandalous injustice, which can be redressed by appeal to the Conseil d'Etat 1 if the civil servant chooses to risk calling down upon himself the indignation of his superiors. But such audacity is rare, and the world of functionaries has finally invented a more effective way of abolishing these iniquities by uniting for common action in the syndicates, or professional unions, some of which are claiming the right to strike, but the majority of which are agitating solely with a view to thrusting the politicians back into their own domain, and to obtaining some form of charter which will protect civil servants against arbitrary authority, nepotism and favouritism. Such are the general causes that have brought about the grave crisis in the French State. The malady from which 1 See p. 128. 116 PROBLEMS OF POWER it suffers is a confusion of powers leading to incoherency in the function of government. Representative government in France has become unworthy of the name, owing to its having developed in conjunction with a bureaucratic Napoleonic administration. The keystone of the system is a Cabinet chosen from the little oligarchy of Parliamen- tarians, who themselves depend for their existence on the very functionaries they originally created. The executive authority has slowly but steadily lost all prestige. The remedy for this situation has not yet been found. But not for twenty years have problems of statecraft and politics aroused such curiosity in France as they are arousing to-day. The entire nation is alive to the real nature of the crisis, and resolved to find a solution for it. The solutions pro- posed are being discussed not merely at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques and in the Press, but by all French citizens. France has already entered on an era of active political and economic reform. They who interpreted the pronunciamiento of the Post Office employes as the forerunner of revolution betrayed their ignorance of the real factors which have gone to the making of contemporary France and are to determine the trend of that country's evolution. That strike was a phenomenon of reorganization, or, as Proudhon would say, of recomposition, not of decomposition. The same is true of the scenes of civil war in Champagne, although those events, again, flattered the ineradicable con- viction of foreigners x that France was going to the legend- ary dogs ; that the tricolour was already flying from the 1 The foreigner most prone to such illusions is the German. Dr. Gustave Lebon cites, in the Revue Bleue of May 26,1906, a significant utterance of a German professor : " We shall perhaps think of making war on you when your pacifists, your internationalists, your anti- militarists, and other imbeciles of that sort, will have sufficiently weakened you, and destroyed in your souls the idea of patrie which makes us so strong. . . . We shall merely wait and we shall not have to wait long until your divisions and your anarchy have made you incapable of self-defence." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 117 stern of Charon's bark, and the Republic shortly to be judged and found wanting. The civil war in the Eastern depart- ments was but one of a rapidly accumulating series of unto- ward events, signs of an apparent national disintegration which again led the Royalist and Imperialist pretenders those saviours of society always ready to start up in their absurd jack-in-the-box fashion on any and every pretext to sign manifestos and galvanize their apathetic followers into active opposition. Even certain leaders of the Re- public caught the contagion and talked openly of the possi- bility of a real revolution, while more than one French journal raised the question : " Whither are we going ? To the King ? To the Emperor ? Or towards the Fourth Re- public ? " The unrest now pervading French Society, the outspoken dissatisfaction with the present political and social regime, is a new phase of French life ; a new phase, that is, under the Third Republic, for nothing like it has been witnessed in France during the last forty years. Not Boulangism, nor the Panama and Dreyfus scandals, can be cited to the contrary. The pessimism and unrest of France have, how- ever, contemporary parallels. 1 As a social and political 1 Unrest, social disorder, is, of course, a general phenomenon. It is becoming manifest throughout the world in proportion as that social order, which it is the business of the State to preserve, and which is the necessary condition of the normal working of the laws that have hitherto determined the economic organism of our modern civilization, is being imperilled both by the weakness of Governments (sentimentalism, humanitarianism, indiscipline, revolutionary ideal- ism), and by the tyranny of Governments (state intervention and state socialism, demagogic legislation, inspired by mystical notions of solidarity, privileges accorded to syndicalism). A French con- seiller d'tat and member of the Institute, M. Colson, has admirably developed in a recent book, Organisme Economique et Dfcordre Social (Flammarion, 1912), the ideas and principles to which the present writer gave expression, nineteen years ago, in the chapter entitled " Democracy " in his book Patriotism and Science. In presence of the forms assumed by social disorder during the last ten years in England, France, Germany and the United States, it n8 PROBLEMS OF POWER phenomenon it is, for instance, if not exactly of the same nature as the unrest and pessimism of the United States, yet potentially to be compared with it. In both countries at this hour the same moral hypochondria is engendering the same malarial visions. When a senator from Iowa, an ex-Governor of his State, says in an address to the students of the Washington College of Law, " We are living in a period of revolution ; our institutions at this day are in the balance," his voice is pitched in the same key as those of a Millevoye, a Drumont, a Henri Beranger, a Poincare, a Maurras and a Jaures. Yet all these utterances (since they are not isolated, nor confined to any political party, but characteristic of the feeling of the several audiences to which they appeal) are the most fertile ground for optimism. In France, at this moment, there is a widespread craving for positive reform ; a growing insistence that something must be done to purify French political and administrative life ; a resolve to effect certain radical changes, however drastic, and at whatever sacrifice of persons, in the relations of the several parts of the great political and administrative machine ; a repudiation of French ideology and a revival of idealism in the English sense of the word ; a spirit of relentless and vigilant criticism, and a moral purpose which may be described as the forerunner of a French Re- naissance. But in seeking to comprehend this new state of things, foreign observers easily go wrong. They should always begin by understanding that the " pretenders " who would fain profit by the dissatisfaction of France with many of her existing institutions to substitute for the Re- public a Monarchy or an Empire, are following, in their may be claimed that this book was in many respects a forecast. Such is the complexity of the social and economic movements of the present moment, that one must ride upon a cherub to secure any real perspective of the Present ; but twenty years ago a seed could serve the seer and the seeds of the future unrest were visible enough to any one who took the trouble merely to light a candle. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 119 familiar way, evanescent will-o'-the-wisps. The reforms which are destined to come will be of the nature of a read- justment of the Republican Constitution to modern con- ditions, not of the upsetting of the Republic. The dried fruit of the Old Regime is no longer succulent to the French palate. In spite of its occasional mephitic iridescence, it is the deadest of the dead fruits of a Dead Sea. No one has any real hope of restoring what Andre Ch6nier was wont to call " Gothic institutions." It is impossible, however, to exaggerate the admirable and useful role of certain leaders of the anti-Republican opposition in helping to create discontent in France and to transmute that discontent into a force capable of destroying grave abuses. The services rendered to French society, and even to the Republic, by M. Charles Maurras, the Royalist leader, are invaluable. It has been seen that Government in France is the tyran- nical monopoly of a minority. For a great many years one of the classical methods of the Republican system of govern- ment was to maintain a state of war in France. The Republi- cans found ready to their hands an incomparably compact and centralized Administration, and their main object was to hold the citadel of that Administration, and to man all its bastions and outworks by sworn members of their party. They treated the rank and file of the nation as enemies who could not be trusted. To consolidate their troops the Republican leaders invented the useful bug-a-boo of an anti-Republican and anti-Constitutional opposition. Not that the nucleus of such an opposition did not really exist, but the utility of preserving it, the advisability of exasper- ating it by methods of persecution, in order to cultivate the illusion in the country that Republican order was being chronically menaced, was the accepted device for the pre- servation of Republican power. The disinterested sporadic efforts of this or that leader Gambetta, Spuller, Meline, Briand to dismantle the Republican donjon, to substitute 120 PROBLEMS OF POWER Republican for Feudal rule, to make the Republic a real Republic, in which all France should have the same rights as the compact little garrison in the citadel to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, have been systematically misunderstood, not to say regarded as treason, by the pro- fessional politicians ; and meanwhile, behind the scenes, the privileged troops manning the battlements have battened off the assiette au beurre, corrupted French character by the distribution of " places " to idle functionaries, bought, thus indirectly, the votes of their clients, and made the Re- public no longer worthy of the name. Fear of the foreigner is the great force that instantly assured to the Poincare Ministry a national popularity and authority which none of its predecessors, not even the Clemenceau Ministry, had pos- sessed since the early days of the Republic. It was, more- over, because M. Poincare, by his insistence on a policy of electoral reform, and by his prudent and firm defence of French interests during the Balkan war, had come to per- sonify French national aspirations, that, on the eve of the anniversary (January 18, 1871) of t the foundation of the German Empire in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, he was chosen President of the Republic by an Assembly finally respectful of the national will. There is no such thing in France as a constitutional oppo- sition, because French " parliamentarism " is in no particu- lar such a method of democratic government as is connoted by the words " parliamentary government." In view of the fact that France is not a Monarchy, it may be technically correct, as it is certainly convenient, to call it a Republic ; but its government is obviously not that of a democratic Re- public. Its government is not, as in England, a parliamentary government by the device of well-defined parties appealing directly to the Democracy, nor yet, as in the United States, is it the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, of the Consular Republican form. Yet it was undoubtedly the object of the Constitution of 1875 to es- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 121 tablish Parliamentary Government. How happens it that that object has never been attained ? The Constitution of 1875 was a concoction of the Orleanist party. That party hoped by easy stages to restore the Monarchy, and it counted on election by the Congress of a Comte de Paris or a Due d'Aumale as President of the " Republic," in succession to Marshal McMahon. As an independent critic of singular perspicacity, Monsieur Georges Thiebaud, has pointed out in his instructive book, Les Secrets du Regne, there were precedents for this method, notably the expedient used in 1830 for the choice of Louis Philippe, after Lafayette, on the balcony of the Hotel-de-Ville, had baptized him La Meilleure des Republiques. Once the majority in the two Chambers were rendered unmistakably monarchical, it was held that it would not be difficult to utilize the clause of the Constitution which permits revision, 1 in order to restore the Old Regime in favour of the younger branch of the French Bourbons. The Orleanist project failed. But the Royalist Constitution remained ; and most of the woes from which France is suffering to-day are due to two facts : first, the fact that she is still living under a Constitution which, while it is admirably adapted to thwarting the possible rise of a dictator of the Napoleonic type, is utterly inadequate for the realization of the democratic dream of Representative Government, according to an ideal of liberty and of social and economic progress by free discussion under the party system ; secondly, the fact that while her political Constitution is Royalist her Administra- tive machinery is centralized and Napoleonic. It is a psychological impossibility to reconcile for purposes of human government systems so disparate as this Royalist Constitution of 1875 and the Republico-Napoleonic Admin- 1 This point has been clearly brought out by Dr. Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, in his remarkable study in compara- tive politics, The State (D. C. Heath & Co.) pp. 216-218. 122 PROBLEMS OF POWER istration. The friction caused by the effort to make the Constitution and that Administration work in harmony has now assumed the dimensions of a scandal. It accounts for the present unrest throughout French society. It has, in fact, brought about a Constitutional crisis. French official historians hesitate frankly to acknow- ledge the fact which is as little familiar to the average Frenchman as to the foreigner that the Constitution of the Third Republic was never intended to serve any other end than the re-establishment of the Monarchy. Yet such is the case, and it would be difficult to devise a system of government less well adapted to the organization of a modern democracy. The civic and social irresponsibility which their Administrative regime has been creating among Frenchmen ever since the First Empire (vide, among a score of testimonies, the recent books of Monsieur Faguet : Le Culte de V Incompetence and . . . el I'Horreur des Respon- sabilites) has been enhanced by the political Constitution under which they have been living. During the last thirty years public opinion in civilized communities has demanded, at all events, two things of a government : Stability and Authority ; and, of the two, Authority is the more necessary and the more useful. For some time now in France save during the briefest of inter- vals there has existed neither the one nor the other. During what one of the most original of modern French writers, M. Charles Peguy, has called the " mystical period " of the Republic (by which is meant the period of disin- terested Republican idealism preceding the modern political period of caucus bickerings), the solid conservatism and in- grained loyalty of the French nation engendered respect for the Republican rulers and surrounded them with a halo of Authority. Gradually, however, the inadequacy of the governmental machinery in France, its incapacity to pro- vide the taxpayer with the kinds of product which any political and administrative machinery worthy of the name A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 123 is reasonably expected to turn out, has been revealed to the entire reflecting nation. In the United States, Authority is to a certain extent secured by the very terms of the Con- stitution, since the Head of the State, who is the elect of the nation, and who represents the nation as a whole, is held responsible for the management of affairs. In France, on the other hand, the subtle aim of the Constitution of 1875 was, as has been seen, to provide a means of transition from the Republican form of government to a regime of Con- stitutional Monarchy with Parliamentary Government. But the device by which this evolution was to take place, the election of the Head of the State by a Congress composed of Senators and Deputies, has become the regular method of the election of the President of the Republic. The conse- quence, as has already been pointed out, is that the French President, instead of representing the nation, is the creature of Parliamentary groups. He is irresponsible, and he plays no known active or essential role in the government of his country. There is in France, therefore, no supreme arbiter of parties. Nor are there any parties, for the simple and curious reason that the opposition is anti-constitutional that is, unconstitutional. The Republican politicians have managed, little by little, to oust their Orleanist accomplices and to assume the direction, which they undertake by relays, of the French Administration. A party in office which regards as unconstitutional any organized legal resistance to its party programme necessarily becomes tyrannical. A regime in which there is no constitutional opposition is anything that one may like to call it, but is, at all events, just the opposite of a regime of party government, and bears no resemblance to " parliamentary government." The old Republicans of the idealistic Republican period, a period when Republicanism was a religious ideal and not merely a cant catchword of politics, 1 cherished a faith in 1 " La R6publique, en tant qu'idee politique, en tant qu'idee ' force' est finie" (Charles Maurras, L' Action Franfaise, May 17, 124 PROBLEMS OF POWER Universal Suffrage which may almost be described as sublime ; and it was they, and not the reactionaries, who extolled an electoral system based on the Scrutin de Liste. " If you are living under a Republic," said Gambetta in 1881, " you owe the fact to the system of Scrutin de Liste," and he went on to say, " the Scrutin d'arrondissement is a weapon forged by your enemies, a weapon which was used to destroy you together with the Republic." Thus when, in connexion with the reform of French institutions inscribed in the Con- stitution of 1875, the electoral law was discussed, and when 357 members of the National Assembly voted against the maintenance of the Scrutin de Liste, and 326 voted in favour of that system, an analysis of the division showed that the majority was composed of Bonapartists and Royalists and that the Republicans were in the minority. Why did the reactionary political forces wish to re-establish the Scrutin d'arrondissement ? Solely because it seemed to them the only way to maintain the supremacy of individual influence and of personal prestige in the constituencies. The Scrutin d'arrondissement left the door open to all the classical forms of political, social and financial corruption. It was the only method enabling the central authority to act directly upon the electorate by means of the local functionaries. It would be easy to prove and M. Henry Leyret, has already drawn attention to this fact x that although the Republicans were victorious at the Seize Mai and during the Boulangist episode, their victory was achieved not because, but in spite of, the Scrutin d'arrondissement. -The famous phalanx of the 363, who were opposed by the Elysee, the Government, the Administration, the upper middle class and the leading business interests, had the country behind them. In 1877 the very existence of the Republic was at stake, and what 1912). This is a royalist verdict, justifiable, I believe, if taken in the sense which M. Peguy and the present writer have given to the idea. 1 Le Temps. June 7, 1911. See his book, Les Tyrans Ridicules. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 125 happened was that its existence was made the object of a national plebiscite. In fact, for Napoleon III, as for the Orleanist party of 1875, the Scnitin d'arrondissement was in favour because it was an excellent system of corruption and a perfect device for oppression. It is for this reason, and not for any other it is because, owing to the predomin- ance thereby given to parochial over national interests, all French deputies tend to be the delegates of local wire- pullers and are expected to obey the orders of their party leaders and their party caucuses 1 that the Radical Republi- cans, who have been governing France for the last ten years, and have little by little made the constituencies into " rotten boroughs " that are poisoning France (mares stagnantes, to quote M. Briand) , have fought so strenuously the project of electoral reform for the re-establishment of the Scrutin de Liste with the representation of minorities. The so-called " Republican majority " in the French Chamber is probably the most " unrepresentative " Parlia- mentary " majority " in the world this side of Constantinople. Owing to the existing electoral system the entire Chamber, in fact, " represents " only forty-six per cent, of the electoral body, so that the " majority " speaks and acts in the name of only three million electors in a country where there are perhaps nearer a million than nine hundred thousand State functionaries. And if that majority, deep-rooted in the electoral districts by means of the ingenious mechanism of the local committees (which M. Faguet is no doubt right in regarding as the institution essentielle of the Third Republic) , presumes to govern the Government, as it does to-day ; if, forgetting its sole raison d'etre, that of sober legislative action in co-operation with the Senate, that " majority " presumes to meddle, as it meddles to-day, in matters that concern only the Executive ; if, worse still, that " majority " unhesitatingly dictates to the Judicial Authority, to such 1 Cf. the period of the Jacksonian Democracy in America. 126 PROBLEMS OF POWER an extent that the Magistracy is no longer as free as it was under the pre-revolutionary regime, and that no French citizen can feel sure of justice being done in any affair where- in politics can possibly play a part if this be the case, it is^obvious that the words : " Government in France is the tyrannical monopoly of a minority," serve but inade- quately to paint the real consequences of the effort to " work " the Constitution of 1875 in connexion with the Administra- tion of 1913. Nor is it surprising that in proportion as facts of this nature become known, French public opinion should display a steady evolution towards a more realistic attitude as regards public affairs. As a particularly keen observer of French facts, Mr. Laurence Jerrold, has recently put it, " the Third Republic is perhaps at the beginning of a great revolution ; it may be making up its mind to inoculate the idealism of its politics with the realism of its life." At present in France the Deputies are more omnipotent than was any sovereign of the Old Regime, 1 and may say of themselves more truly than Louis XIV ever said : " L'etat c'est moi." The central power having set the example of the abdication of Authority, the prefects and the sub- prefects also have bent the knee before the local Deputy. There was a time during the early days of the Republic when the average citizen was enchanted at the idea of humiliating the agents of the Central Authority. Those were the mystical days to which allusion has been made, the days of faith in the virtues of Universal Suffrage, the days when the dilatory methods, the tyrannously vexatious red- tapism, the insolence, even, of the Administration had irri- tated the country beyond endurance. When the Republi- cans obtained office France counted on them to help her to thrust this unsympathetic guardian of their liberties back into her place. The intervention of the Deputies was 1 -They themselves, however, are the slaves of the local committees in the constituencies. See the passage cited from M. Poincare, p. no. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 127 everywhere sought against the arbitrary action of the agents of the Central Government. The Representatives of the People posed as the avengers of wrong, the defenders of liberty and justice. Those were the halcyon Republican days when the Deputy was popular and respected. But the " Representatives of the People " contracted a dangerous habit. They fancied themselves, almost by virtue of the Constitution, to be the indispensable intermediaries be- tween the Administration and the Public. They had attacked Administrative oppression. They have now merely sub- stituted themselves for the Administration, and they have become in turn the oppressor. Authority, Constitutional Order, can therefore be restored in France solely by the re-establishment of the principle of Separation of Powers. This implies, first and above all, emancipation of the Government from the despotism of the Chamber of Deputies. But that ideal is to be achieved only through the creation of real Parliamentary Government by means [of the party system, a condition itself unattainable without a reform of that Electoral Law which has produced in France a tyrannical boss-system. 1 The re-establishment of the principle of the Separation of Powers, and consequently t the ^restoration of Authority, im- plies, furthermore, certain forms of decentralization, at all events of deconcentration, among which perhaps the most urgent is the establishment of an independent Magistracy, a Judicial authority unshackled by the Executive power, and beyond the reach of Legislative influence. As things now are in France, there is no power on French soil capable of 1 " The Chamber treats the ministers as if they were still the agents and the appointees of a monarch, instead of its own representatives, and is jealous and suspicious of them at every turn. The system no doubt waits for its successful operation the formation of two coherent national parties, capable of organizing for government, instead of merely for rivalry." Dr. Woodrow Wilson, The State, p. 230, 128 PROBLEMS OF POWER thwarting the arbitrary action of the Government * ; and 1 There are signs, however, that the Conseil d'Etat may gradually assume a position rendering it, as a Constitutional organ, extraordin- arily like the famous Supreme Court of the United States ; a Court, that is, of almost Olympian appeal, judging in entire independence, and entrusted even with the grave obligation of " interpreting " the very Constitution, as if it were a kind of executive emanation of the sage ruminations of the National Conscience. It is, at all events, significant that on various contemporary occasions of national crisis, when neither Chamber nor Government, nor yet even the President, dared take a decision which would engage their responsibility, the only possible solution to the crises which either Cabinet or Chamber could suggest, was appeal to the Conseil d'Etat. One need only recall the attitude of that " High Assembly " in annulling political appointments made by the Executive contrary to good administrative regulations, and in overthrowing the bungling work of Parliament with regard to the delimitations of the wine-growing regions. The Conseil d'Etat, in fact, is an aristocratic body, absolutely independent of the Democracy. The impartial analysis of its function will justify the conclusions of the brilliant critic, Francis Delaisi in his La Democratic et les Finan- ciers. (Editions de la Guerre Sociale, pp. 115, 116). He points out that its members possess, in reality, the legislative, executive, and judicial authority in France. " C'est le haut et inaccessible donjon ou le grand capitalisme conservateur a enferme ses supremes res- sources." In this connexion, it is pertinent to note that, while the system of Government by " checks and balances " almost peculiar to the Con- stitution of the United States appears to be meeting with growing favour in France, the evolution is almost universally the other way in other countries. During the last few years in England there has been a rapid advance in the realization of the pure democratic ideal of " government of the people, by the people, and for the people," by recognition of the legitimacy of the rule of the majority. Likewise in the United States most of the reform proposals made by the " Progressives," and notably by Mr. Roosevelt, are inspired by a faith in the divine right of sheer Number, and tend to shatter the devices invented by the framers of the Constitution in order to check hasty legislation, or what Prof. J. Allen Smith calls, in his Spirit of American Government, " Democratic Innovation." Thus Mr. Roose- velt's bitterly criticized proposal known as " the recall of decisions " in virtue of which the people in any state should be allowed to give their opinion by referendum on the action of a Court in declaring to be un-constitutional this or that law duly passed by a State Legisla- ture and signed by a Governor is, no doubt, revolutionary from the point of view of American Hamiltonian traditions, but, as com- pared with British, and most European methods, it is an anodine A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 129 inasmuch as the Executive has little by little allowed its normal authority to be transferred to, and disseminated among, the members of the Chamber, Frenchmen are in reality the prey of a Despotic regime. Thirdly, the re-establishment of the principle of the Separation of Powers, and consequently the restoration of Authority, implies the definitive organization of the status of the three-quarters of a million of functionaries, in such a manner as to protect them against favouritism ; to protect, as well, the Legislative power against the temptation to utilize the functionary system for base demagogic ends ; to complete the isolation of the Government within the sphere of its normal Executive role ; and (finally) to render rebellion impossible. One of the main elements of this reform ought to be the abolition of the privilege of State pensions to func- tionaries, an institution which costs France one hundred millions of francs annually, and which has done more to emasculate French character, to destroy French initiative, and to arrest the normal evolution of French individualism, than any of the causes growing out of the Napoleonic scheme for the government of Frenchmen. The resurrection of Authority, the restoration of Con- stitutional order, are thus the crying needs of France at the present hour. Chronic German aggression, 1 and the exist- and almost conservative proposal. That important attribute of sovereignty, known as the right of Parliaments to interpret the Con- stitution, belongs, in the United States, to the Federal judiciary, an unheard of state of things from the point of view of most other civi- lized states. Government in the United States may really be said, as Mr. S. S. McClure has put it, to be Government by Courts. (Mc- Clure's Magazine, May 1912). The proposal of Mr. Roosevelt may, or may not, be prudent. That proposal, at all events, is one which does not justify the anathema of the convinced partisans of Demo- cratic Government. 1 Prince Bismarck once said of the French : " Leave them alone. If you leave them alone, they will devour each other. If you attack them from abroad, they will gather together to face the foreigner." See Paris correspondence of the Times, December 20, 1898. K I 3 o PROBLEMS OF POWER ence at home of a Democracy as yet not wholly nationalized Herve'ism, Anti-Militarism, Revolutionary Syndicalism must be regarded, no doubt, as indispensable factors in the maintenance of sane, stable and efficient Government in France. But something else, and something more legiti- mate, is needed, and that something has been clearly seen by the author of one of the remarkable books of recent years, The Promise of American Life. The author, Mr. Croly, says with discernment : " The French have not yet come to realize that the success of their whole Democratic experi- ment depends upon their ability to reach a good under- standing with then- fellow-countrymen, and that just in so far as their Democracy fails to be nationally constructive, it is ignoring the most essential conditions of its own vitality and perpetuity." The organization of Democracy in France implies a policy of constructive nationalism. At the same time, France must learn, in the words of Nietzsche, to " live dangerously " ; and that ideal is impossible until she wakes from her petit-bourgeois dreams, and develops, for internal national constructive ends, an alert and active national self-consciousness. Frenchmen must learn not to be afraid to assume responsibility. They must take to heart the patriotic and pregnant political philosophy of the most suggestive, and one of the most intelligent, of their contemporary thinkers : La vitalite des democraties se mesure a la force genitrice d' aristocraties qu'elles portent en elles. 1 But no friend of France need feel discouraged as to the capacity of Frenchmen eventually to learn these truths, or as to their ability to put their house in order. It is noticeable, as one of the most hopeful of the signs of the undiminished vitality of France, that, in proportion as, under the action of the wind and rain, the three mystical words, Libert^, Egalite', Fraternite, fade from the fa9ades of her public buildings, no one thinks of restoring them to their pristine 1 .... et I'Horreur des Responsabilitts. By Emile Faguet. p. 200, A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 131 glitter ; and that, though there are still Frenchmen who believe in Fraternity, and others who long for Liberty, none, from Normandy to Aquitaine, and from the two Burgundies to Poitou, but knows that Equality is an absurd and a dangerous lie. V Before submitting the question of the British internal crisis to the careful scrutiny that has been applied to the problem of unrest in France, it seems useful, at this stage, first briefly to summarize in connexion with a rapid survey of the question of the Balkans the foregoing detailed narra- tive of the political development of Europe as determined by the peculiar method chosen by Prussian statesmen for the formation of a united Germany ; and secondly, to analyse the relations existing between the members of the Triple Entente during the three or four years that preceded the revival by Germany in July 1911 of an aggressively imperialist policy. .If Germany once again ventured, at that date, to risk dis- turbing the peace of Europe by the dispatch of a gunboat to Agadir, it was largely because the absorption of each of the partners of the Triple Entente in its own domestic concerns had distracted the attention of those Powers from matters affecting their common interests, and had suggested to Germany that the time was favourable for furthering her own interests at the expense of her rivals. Germany had, mean- while, taken all the necessary precautions to prevent her pro- jects in Africa and in Western Europe from being disturbed by any untoward event elsewhere. She had frankly decided to help the Sultan to keep the peace in an intangible Ottoman Empire. The " Eastern Question " remained in abeyance. Europe, still shirking its responsibilities, continued to find it convenient hypocritically to confide the question of Macedonian Reform to the two Powers " more particularly interested " (Agreement of Muertzsteg, 1903). How could France and England keep a vigilant eye on Yildiz Kiosque 132 PROBLEMS OF POWER and the Balkans while Germany absorbed every moment of their attention which was not given to their own domestic difficulties ? The Macedonian sore was accordingly allowed to fester, for at all costs the " integrity of the Ottoman Empire " had to be maintained. The Balkan States were told to watch and pray, but to keep the peace. They obeyed ; but meanwhile they borrowed money in Paris and London and Berlin ; they bought Creusot guns ; they kept the peace, but kept, at the same time, their powder dry. The tune was at hand when they were to flout the cynical and craven nations to which they owed their very existence. But for the moment the leading signatories of the Treaty of Berlin were free to ignore the Eastern Question, and Ger- many could continue to carry out the Bismarckian dream : " Russia in the Far-East, Austria in the East, France n'importe ou." 1 The motives of the Wilhelmstrasse after 1904 may be divined. German policy hi regard to Morocco was a pro- longed bluff, but it was not that alone. It was above all, no doubt, a rationally conceived experiment to test the solidity of the Anglo-French Entente ; but it was also a feint, en- abling Germany to make a series of embarrassing surprise attacks at another point of the diplomatic ring. The Moroccan Question tended to absorb the entire attention of France and even of England, and to leave Germany free to pursue, more or less secretly, her policy of pacific penetration in the Middle East, from Macedonia to Constantinople and from Smyrna to the Persian Gulf. Viewed in this light, German policy becomes a rational effort to further German Imperial ends. In order to keep an open market in the Middle East for her expanding trade, Germany acquiesced in the tyrannical and arbitrary methods of Abdul Hamid. She combated British and French influence by exciting that monarch's 1 Speech on Foreign Policy, by M. Paul Deschanel, November 19, 1903, in the Chamber of Deputies. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 133 dread of " liberal ideas." The " Young Turks " were, to a large degree, the product of French " philosophy " from Condorcet to Comte, or of French culture disseminated in the numerous schools founded by French monks. Modern ideas in the Ottoman Empire were, at all events, expressed in French, and Marshal von der Goltz often complained of this. Nowhere were the [mystic watchwords of the French Revolution, " Liberty " " Equality," " Fraternity," taken more touchingly to the letter than among the young Ottoman reformists. Exiled in Paris, London or Geneva, they propagated, from those safe vantage-points, in their caustic little newspapers and pamphlets, the principles of Western civilization. 1 The Sultan was master on the Golden Horn, but in Macedonia, where the " honour " of the Christian Powers occasionally required Europe to in- tervene with a programme of reforms, Abdul Hamid found it less easy to " make a solitude and call it peace." It was at Salonica and Monastir, on Ottoman soil, in con- tact with the Greek, the Bulgarian, and the Servian, that the Young Turks first managed to co-ordinate their efforts, and to form the famous secret committee known as " the Committee of Union and Progress." Ottoman pride, even Turkish pariotism, was humiliated by the arrival in 1904 of the foreign officers imposed on Turkey by Europe to reor- ganize the Macedonian gendarmerie. The number of these officers was doubled in 1905, and in 1906 Europe obliged the 1 During more than ten years the present writer remained in con- tact, in Paris, with many of the conspirators who were destined to play a leading part in the Revolution of 1908. The genuineness of the idealism of the great majority recalled the doctrinaire rigour of a Calvin, ready to sacrifice Servetus on an altar raised to the Moloch of Exegesis, or of a Robespierre sending to the knife political enemies condemned in the name of Liberty. He had no illusions as to the folly of the Foreign Offices of Europe in welcoming so effu- sively these sinister logicians, and on more than one occasion, in pub- lished utterances, expressed the opinion that they would wreck their country. He gave them three years in which to prove their incom- petence. The prophecy was fulfilled in four. 134 PROBLEMS OF POWER Sultan to accept financial control in Macedonia and a further increase of the gendarmerie. As one of the foreign officers has testified/ the Macedonian Turks and the " Young Turk " officers held the Sultan responsible for the humilia- tion which they felt as Ottomans, but, far from bearing any grudge against the European officers, they did their best to help these officers in their task. At all events Macedonia became the only part of the Ottoman Empire where the Turks developed sufficient national self-respect to perceive that reform alone could save their country ; but they could not tolerate the thought that Islamism was to owe its salvation to the foreigner. In intimate contact with European ideas, the Turkish civilian officials and officers in Macedonia resolved to dethrone the sovereign who was selling the Ottoman birthright to the Infidel Powers. The revolutionary " Committee of Union and Progress " was thus formed and developed, not merely against the Hamidian regime but against a meddlesome Europe. Turkey, it was held, must have a Constitution, providing guarantees of liberty and establishing her as an independent Power. Good government must begin in Macedonia. Only thus could the foreigner be evicted. When, in July 1908, the con- stitution of Midhat Pasha was revived, the "hero of the Revolution," Enver Bey, exclaimed, before ten thousand people assembled in Liberty Square at Salonica : " To-day Aribitrary Government has disappeared. We are all brothers. There are no longer in Turkey Bulgarians, Greeks, Servians, Rumanians, Mussulmans, Jews. Under the same blue sky we are all proud to be Ottomans." The European Consuls at Salonica were duped by this eloquence and their enthusi- asm duped their Governments. On July 30 the Journal de Salonique referred as follows to the scheme of a Balkan Confederation : "I have every confidence that the Turkish 1 Major Sarrou, in La Jeune Turquie et la Revolution, p. n. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 135 army . . . will bring about fraternity among the Balkan Peoples. Thus will finally be realized, for the happiness of all the nations of the Peninsula, that Oriental Confederation which has so long been the object of our hopes and dreams." Never, indeed, had there been such an opportunity. The Bulgarian, Servian, Rumanian and Greek Press applauded. It is probable that if, just at this moment, the Foreign Ministers of the Great Powers had not publicly acclaimed, in their several Parliaments, the work of the Committee, the Young Turks might have been checked on the headlong path of presumptuous nationalism which, four years later, was to precipitate them, together with the Empire for which they had become responsible, into one of the greatest dis- asters of history. Yet, for the time being, the Balkan States were ready to unite with the Young Turks in common hatred of the Tyrant. Unfortunately, the Young Turks were vain-glorious and inexperienced. Although fed on the crude pastry of revolutionary formulas, the leaders repudi- ated, at their very first success, the idealism which had con- ciliated the sympathy of the Balkan nationalities. On Monday, October 5, 1908, Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Bulgaria, proclaiming its independence, annexed Eastern Rumelia. The Committee might have seized this opportunity to place itself at the head of a Balkan League. 1 It preferred, instead, to take a futile revenge by boycotting Austrian and 1 Dr. Kleanthes Nicolaides, who played an interesting part in the negotiations resulting in the conclusion of the Balkan League, con- tributed in November 1912, three valuable articles to the Echo de Paris on " La Gen6se de 1'Union Balkanique." He showed notably that, throughout the preliminary discussions for the establishment of their Union, the Balkan States always expressed the wish that Turkey should form part of it. " It remained possible for Turkey to enter the League, hi fact, up to the beginning of August 1912. If Turkey had seized the opportunity thus offered her, she might be to-day at the head of the Union. . . She owes the present disaster solely to the lack of judgment and good- will of her rulers." 136 PROBLEMS OF POWER Bulgarian trade. A Young Turk Mission, sent to Western Europe, to arouse the sympathy and to secure the diplo- matic and financial support of France and England, re- turned to Salonica crest-fallen, and convinced that Europe was jealous of the Committee's success. In their exaspera- tion, the Revolution leaders decided to adopt a policy of militarism, while the Committee simultaneously prepared a scheme for submerging the Christian peoples of Macedonia under a flood of Mussulman immigrants. The chiefs of the Bulgarian, Greek, Servian and Al- banian Committees and Bands had hitherto honestly be- lieved in the protestations as to Ottoman fraternity. Even in March 1909, at the moment of the reactionary coup d'etat at Constantinople, the Macedonian Christians remained loyal to the Revolution. Race quarrels, domes- tic rivalries, disappeared, says Mr. Sam Levy x (perhaps the most competent authority on the spot), in presence of the danger incurred by the new regime. Even the Governments of the Balkan States still manifested their readiness to co-operate in the work of Macedonian reform. Thus seconded, the Committee of Union and Progress recovered its power, and deposed the Sultan. But its point of view had now completely changed. It had become the counterpart of the sinister Committee of Public Safety of the French Revolution. Forgetting its promises of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Justice, it pursued now a purely Islamic policy. Its aim henceforth was to crush out all the Christian Nationalities in the Empire, and notably in Macedonia. Yet, long-suffering still, the Balkan States remained almost quixotically friendly. Official declara- ations in Sofia and Belgrade left no doubt as to the sincerity of the desire of these two Balkan Powers to settle the pro- blems of Macedonia in co-operation with the New Turkey, and without a war. The Tsar Ferdinand went to Con- 1 Les Mifaits du Comite Union et Progr&s ; Sam Levy : Mecherou- tiette, October, 1912. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 137 stantinople on an official visit, and Pierre Karageorgewitch was welcomed officially at Salonica. What was the result of these advances to Turkey ? Turkish psychology is not as that of the Western nations. The attitude of the Christian peoples of the Balkans was interpreted as an indication of their inferiority. Bulgaria and Servia were believed to be afraid of the neo-Ottoman Power. The Committee of Union and Progress accordingly proceeded to persecute the Bulgarian clubs in Macedonia, and to promulgate the Associations Law (August 1909) l interdicting all nationalist or religious meetings. By 1910, in fact, Macedonia had once again become a pandemonium of fratricidal pas- sions. Anarchy was more rampant there than under the reign of Abdul Hamid. On January 23, 1910, the Salonica newspaper already quoted, printed in large type the following note : " We learn that serious pourparlers are now going on between the most influential members of the Greek and Bulgarian communities to arrive at a rapprochement. It would even appear that an under- standing is already under way." The Crown Prince of Servia arrived at Sofia on the same day. The Balkan League was in being. Young Turk presumption and incapacity had worked this miracle. The Committee of Union and Progress had opened, between the Balkan Nationalities and the Turkish Empire, the gulf, deeper than the Sea of Marmara, into which they were to be hurled headlong only two years later. The connexion of the episode of the Turkish Revolution 1 Clause four of this law was as follows : " The establishment of Political Associations on the basis, or under the denomination of nationality, is prohibited." This was a fatal blunder. It entailed the immediate dissolution of the various nationalist clubs in Mace- donia, which were, nevertheless, loyally devoted to the Young Turk Movement and to the Constitution. The immediate consequence was a revival of the old-time suspicion of the Turk throughout Macedonia, and a rapidly growing distrust of the " Committee of Union and Progress." 138 PROBLEMS OF POWER and of the Balkan war with the immediate theme is suffi- ciently obvious. The Berlin Treaty was a bungling artifice for stifling the cries of the youthful Balkan nations created by the Treaty of San Stefano. San Stefano had given the Balkan peoples the hope that they were about to enjoy a national existence. Three cynical surgeons, Bismarck, Bea- consfield and Andrassy, suddenly seized the infant Powers, gagged them, and without even bandaging their wounds- handed them over to the Turkish task-master. During nearly thirty years the Turk was suffered to brutalize his wards, with only occasional inspection or reproach on the part of the " interested " and " disinterested " Powers. Finally, in 1908, came the Revolution. After 1908 for a wonderful period of eighteen months the Turkish task-master seemed to have been transformed into a comrade. In this new role, however, the Turk made but a fleeting appearance. He van- ished into the wings and came forth in the garb of an exe- cutioner. But, in spite of the implication of the Treaty of Frankfort and of the Treaty of Berlin, the substance of human nature is not quite of the same malleable and senseless stuff as that of the elements composing a chemical compound. The vile Slav worm had become a chrysalis and was destined to break the cocoon so ingeniously and artificially elaborated at the Berlin Congress. If the Treaty of San Stefano had been suffered to remain the law of Europe, the world would have been spared the horrors of October and November 1912 ; but, at the same time, it would have been deprived of a singularly interesting object-lesson. It would not have had this fresh illustration of the short-sightedness of the Founder of the German Empire. Indeed, what were to become, after Bismarck's death, the vital Imperial interests of the New Germany, have all along been hampered in their evo- lution by the very influences that Germany herself set in motion when she forced upon the world the two arbitrary solutions of the Treaties of 1870 and 1878. The relations between the members of the Triple Entente A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 139 during the period just analysed, from 1904 to the formation of the Balkan League and to the famous coup d'Agadir, seem, however, to mark a partial and temporary success of German policy. Nothing is more curious than the way the harmonious working of the Triple Entente was for a long time endangered by the friction which the domestic problems of its several members generated. What M. Andre Tardieu accurately described in 1910 and 1911 as " Anglo-Franco- Russian ataxy " found therein one of its main causes. Of the three partners to this pact, France, in spite of the crises of rebellion among her civil servants, has perhaps of late suffered the least embarrassment. More than either Eng- land or Russia she has been at liberty to seek to adjust her own private interests to the vital common interests of the Triple Entente. Her friends were for some years less free than she to play their part according to the rules of the game. After the death of King Edward the very foundations of British Society and of England's Imperial greatness were jeopardized, and they remained in peril, as will be seen, 1 until the defeat of Canadian reciprocity with the United States. England's absorption in her own grave private matters resulted in the dangerous indifference and irresolution (as if she had eaten curare and all her motor nerves were paralysed) which, for many months prior to Agadir, caused her to withhold from France all but the most spasmodic assist- ance. And what the Temps said of the Entente Cordiale, that its members had " pratique parallelement, dans la solidarite des sentiments, et I'mcoherence des actes, la politique du laisser faire," might, with even greater force, have been applied to the relations between France and Russia, until M. Poincare, at the head of a really " national " ministry, decided to substitute for the policy of laisser oiler a policy of strenuous and concerted action. 2 Ever since the 1 See pp. 175-191. 8 The first executive act of M. Poincare, as President of the Re- public, was the appointment (Feb. 20, 1913) of M. Delcasse as Am- 140 PROBLEMS OF POWER Russo-Japanese War, Russia had, in fact, been trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. The new Russia, the Russia of the Duma, under the guidance of M. Stolypin, undertook to reconcile the dangerous ideas that have invaded it from the West and its own native traditions ; to create a Parliament on Russian soil without infringing the prero- gatives of the Autocrat of All-the-Russias ; but, above all, as M. Victor Berard has put it, to honour its signature as partner in the Triple Entente without breaking with its old friends and allies, the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs. In this duel between Constitutionalism and Nationalism, the wonder was that the Triple Entente should have survived even up to Potsdam. Frenchmen cherished for ten years and more the illusion that the Alliance with Russia was an earnest of the ultimate recovery of Alsace-Lorraine. As has been seen, it took that length of time for them to comprehend that the armies of the Dual Alliance were the armies of the Hague ; that neither the Tsar nor their own rulers had contemplated by the Alliance any other aim than that of defence ; that the sole positive good which the Alliance was intended to secure was the main- tenance of European equilibrium, and that they who had looked to it as a potential instrument of the revanche had been tragically duped. When France realized that the Russian Alliance meant not only that things must be as they had been, but that all hope of better days was gone, the plight of the nation was one that might have given rise to a certain sullen resentment. Such resentment did, in fact, exist to a certain degree among the generations that remembered the war of 1870. Upon the bassador at St. Petersburg. No diplomatic service in the world to- day can boast of such unity of views as is thus ensured in the Quai d'Orsay by the simultaneous presence of the two Cambons in London and Berlin respectively, of M. Barrere in Rome, and of M. Delcasse in St. Petersburg. Let the reader meditate on this remark in the light of pp. 52-58. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 141 younger generation, on the contrary, the consequence of their slow perception of the real significance, in its European bearings, of the pact with Russia was strangely different. Little by little the notion of revanche faded from the fore- ground of the French consciousness and gave way to a kind of supine satisfaction with the idea of security implied in the existence of the Alliance. If the Alliance was to be no longer interpreted as a means of realizing French dreams, it meant, at all events, the inexpressible boon of peace. The French soul tended to become relaxed. Humanitarianism, " paci- fism," anti-militarism, began to flourish. France had been cocardier up to 1890. The Russian Alliance gradually calmed her nerves, dissipated her fears, lulled her to sleep. A Dreyfus Case became possible. Strong in their faith in the loyalty of Russia to keep strict watch over the German dogs of war, in case they seemed to be preparing to leap across her eastern frontier, the Republicans fancied themselves at liberty to indulge in idealistic experiment, and free to respond, for instance, without loss of dignity, or dread of the consequences, to the cajoleries and flatteries of the German Kaiser. If he had continued to cajole instead of beginning to menace, humanitarianism might have gangrened the whole of France. One public man of eminence in France, and one public man alone, President Grevy, had a foreign policy which might have saved his country from some of the psycholo- gical consequences, and from the positive sequence, of the events that ensued. President Grevy never tired of preach- ing the gospel of isolation, the danger of entangling alliances. But he was over-ruled, and successive Ministers in France who extolled the Russian Alliance hoped not merely to assure European equilibrium, but to maintain European peace by holding Germany hi check. They were also aiming in- directly at the great century-old rival of their country, Great Britain. Notwithstanding Bismarck's efforts to thwart the inception of the Franco-Russian Alliance, the heirs of his 142 PROBLEMS OF POWER policy found in the Franco-Russian Alliance one of their most magnificent opportunities. What the Germans rapidly perceived was that in the Dual Alliance, by the nature of things, German hegemony was in being. By that Alliance the traditional bellicose France was paralysed. With a splendid and almost diabolic ingenuity Germany evolved a scheme for utilizing the Alliance in her own interest. She did all in her power to fan the embers of Anglo-French dis- cord by favouring French colonial expansion. She was aware that the first result would be to pit France against England under every clime and on every sea ; the second that young ambitious Italy would become the deadly foe of France ; and the third, that she herself would ultimately be able to dictate to a divided Europe the direction of European policy. For long years German foresight was confirmed to the letter. The daring plan for keeping down French resiliency was for a time completely successful. France and England came into dangerous collision everywhere. Italy and France glared at each other in Tunis and over the Dauphine passes, while the Triple Alliance was being slowly consoli- dated. Successive German Chancellors rubbed their hands in glee, and German hegemony assumed the aspect of a pillar of cloud by day and almost of fire by night. But the German plan succeeded too admirably. The Greeks, who were practical psychologists, noted that a Nemesis dogs the steps of a man or nation addicted to the unpardonable sin of pride. There came a time, amid the multiple shocks which harassed the nerves of British and French Foreign Ministers, as the lines of British and French Colonial expansion dovetailed throughout the world, when the chances of peace or war between France and England seemed to hang by a thread. Both Powers, after Fashoda, awoke to the idea that they had been playing the German game ; that while they had been irritating one another by constant pin-pricks, Germany had been looming more and more menacingly on the horizon. The scales A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 143 seemed to drop simultaneously from their eyes. They saw with the clearness presented by one of those superb comic situations staged by Fate that either they must go to war for the benefit of Germany or must come to an understanding with her, in their common interest, to the discomfiture of a common rival. Fashoda was the fork on their Damascus road. The revelation they received there flung into dazzling light the whole malicious-' ness of the German scheme, of which they had been for years the dupes. Such was the beautifully logical birth of that Entente Cordiale which shattered as by a thunderbolt a German policy that had lasted, and succeeded, for nearly twenty years. For some months Germany lay stunned and prone. The incredible had happened. There had been long years in the nineties when the Wilhelmstrasse must have known as well as the Quai d'Orsay, or any Parisian, that England was even more hated in France than the Power which had dismembered that country in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles. The possibility that England and France could ever come to terms was not taken in Germany as even a remote contingency. It was regarded as a political ab- surdity. Yet the incredible thing had happened. And, irony of ironies, it had occurred simply as a consequence of the overweening success of the Bismarckian plan. After the first discountenancing blow it was not surpris- ing that the German Chancery was a long time pulling itself together. Germany's uncouth movements and ges- tures in seeking to wreck the new combination of the Entente Cordiale ; her futile efforts in Spain, before the accession of the young Sovereign, to balk the Mediterranean policy of M. Delcasse, and to sweep that Power into the orbit of the Triple Alliance ; her invention of a Moroccan Question as a means of cleaving in two the Franco-British block which had only just been welded ; her nervous, vio- lently aggressive manner, so cousue de fil blanc, as the French 144 PROBLEMS OF POWER say all these are facts fresh in the memory not only of the professional politician but of the ordinary observer. And the more Germany wriggled, contrived, meddled and stormed, the more rooted became the Entente Cordiale in the hearts of Frenchmen and of Englishmen, the more natural seemed the miracle, the more real the joy of the two Chanceries and of the two peoples. Only a few keen-sighted observers in either country appeared to per- ceive, amid the strains of optimistic jubilation in which England and France welcomed the reconciliation and the now " definitive " establishment of European equili- brium, that Germany, by the Titanic blunder of her old Bismarckian non-colonial policy, had closed to herself politically almost every habitable corner of the globe ; yet that she had developed a great material civilization, with instincts of economic and commercial expansion which must find an outlet or burst. Only a few ap- peared to perceive that she was not likely to accept the new status quo created by the Triple Entente, and that every practical device which an astute Real Politik, unshackled by scruple, unpoisoned by the sophistications of a fanatical idealism, and inspired by patriotism, could suggest or invent, would be utilized for the destruction of that pact which seemed to have established the balance of power in Europe. If it had not been for the issue of the Russo-Japanese War a result utterly unforeseen by the Quai d'Orsay, and the perilous consequences of which, from the point of view of French interests, had never been taken into account in France the French nation might have continued, like the English, to remain, as a whole, blandly ignorant of strategic conditions and of international relations on the Continent of Europe. To be sure, the Algeciras Conference and the Casablanca incident were yet to intervene as object- lessons for the most indifferent ; but the defeat of the Rus- sian ally, Russian paralysis as a military power for some A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 145 years to come, was an event which, at the time, opened the eyes of even the least discerning of French observers. While it enabled them to divine, perhaps better than they other- wise might have done, the causes of the audacity of Ger- many in her Moroccan policy, it also enhanced for them the value of the Entente with England, and made them all the more vigilant as to the preservation of that Entente, according to the conception of its promoters. British poli- tics, both domestic and foreign, were bound to be watched by Frenchmen as jealously as they watched their own, and even more carefully and jealously than they watched those of Russia. England had partially taken the place of Russia in French affections. In the same breath in which Frenchmen repudiated, and sincerely repudiated, the notion that the Entente was dear to them because it meant a possible revanche, and insisted, and sincerely in- sisted, that they longed above all for European peace, they acknowledged that the Entente was possible only because it satisfied the common interest of France and England in thwarting the manoeuvres of a common foe. That foe was Germany, who was imperilling British sea-power after having torn great strips of flesh from the side of France. France has never desired war, but she has never wished for a peace which is a " peace at any price." During the past few years, for the first time, perhaps, in history since the Dukes of Normandy ceased to govern both at Caen and London, Frenchmen have honestly, even cordially, desired the well-being of England. Every event which can con- tribute to England's greatness has been a sincere joy to them. Every incident tending to diminish England's standing, alter her traditions, weaken her as a world-power, has been regarded in France with surprise and with some- thing like dismay. These words apply to the rank and file of the French nation. The pervasive genuine goodwill of Frenchmen towards England after 1905 has been, and is, a fact which stands for all it is worth, all it is possible to L 146 PROBLEMS OF POWER make out of it for diplomatic ends, even in face of minor differences between the two Governments. But the one thing that Frenchmen saw in 1910 and 1911, with an almost supernatural clearness, after the ominous events in Central Europe and the Middle East, was that for France to remain France, England must not cease to be England. When even a Lord Curzon expressed the hope of settling such a question as that of Muscat by an appeal to sentiment, the French wondered if the businesslike and level-headed Eng- land against which they had fought on a hundred battle- fields, the England with which they fancied they had come to terms, had suddenly vanished from the map. They saw in such a fact as this, as they saw in the rhythm of the humanitarian Sabbat to which in 1911 all England seemed to be dancing, the evidence of British insularity, the sign of England's ignorance as to the strategic condi- tions governing European politics, the apparently hope- less confirmation of the phrase which George Meredith often used to the present writer : " England's political intelligence runs to horns." And when the Secretary for War sought to drive Field-Marshal Lord Roberts into a corner, by his witty but futile assertion that Lord Roberts was insisting upon preparing for the " logically possible " instead of for the " reasonably probable," French- men asked themselves in what Teutonic world of mediaeval scholasticism that Minister had acquired his dialectics. 1 1 Some months later, in November 1912, Viscount Haldane, then Lord Chancellor, rebuked Lord Roberts for being ignorant of stra- tegy, accusing him of overlooking the fact that England's safety depended on command of the sea. This rebuke fell from the lips of the man who, some years before, had spoken of a " whole nation springing to arms on war being declared and nobly preparing to submit itself to six months' training in order to meet the invading foe." The date chosen by Lord Haldane for his rebuke was the eve of the day when Turkey agreed to begin negotiations for peace after a war that had lasted only six weeks, and had driven her troops under the walls of Constantinople. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 147 Adversity, in a word, has made the French of the Third Republic a more suspicious people than the nation which fell into the snare of the mendacious telegram of Ems- France has been bruised and buffeted by England, humili- ated and flouted by Germany. Even a race less eminently intelligent could not fail to learn something from so harsh an experience. When one has been the dupe of one's generous sentiments and of one's doctrinaire notions of right, only two refuges are left, sainthood or common sense. French foreign politics have begun to become prac- tical, after having been as sublimely and as dangerously disinterested as were those of the ideologue Gladstone. Europe still seems to find it difficult to understand that business methods and prudent self-interest can ever pre- vail at the Quai d'Orsay : it still thinks France amenable to blandishment and ready to follow the marsh-lights of idealism. Her friends and allies have at last learned that she realizes as keenly as Herr von Bethmann Hollweg that Europe is Europe, that Continental politics are not politics in a Ley den jar, and that the old saying still holds good : " The weak will be the prey of the strong " ; but in 1909, 1910 and 1911 they were still unaware of the change, and the sterility of the Triple Entente was then the main characteristic of that pact. The feeling in France in 1910 and 1911 was that the Triple Entente might not be an Alliance in the technical sense of the word, but that if it were not an Alliance, for all practical Purposes, it were better broken. No Frenchman was in- clined to quarrel over the choice of a word to describe the relations between France and England : modern politics are not a branch of semantics, and French experience of the connotation of the word " Alliance," as employed in description of the Franco-Russian pact, had not been calculated to arrest the growth of a salutary scepticism as to the utility of " alliances." But if the relations be- tween England and France, if the words " Entente Cordiale " 148 PROBLEMS OF POWER and " Triple Entente " mean anything, they mean at all events a common sense of the common interests uniting the three Powers, England, France and Russia ; and it was obvious even before Agadir that they ought to mean, above all (as even The Times and the Temps agreed in acknowledging), that these three Powers had one vital interest : the maintenance of the European equilibrium. What every Frenchman wanted to know was whether Englishmen had as keen a sense as they of the reality of this vital interest. In France, gratitude for the inestim- able services which England had rendered her whenever the Moroccan difficulty menaced the peace of Europe, was still, in June 1911, just before Agadir, a living sentiment. But if the French Parliament, if the French public, had drawn any lesson from that long-protracted and anxious period, it was that humanitarian aspirations were a dan- ous luxury ; and the Moroccan difficulty was not the only question that might lead to war. Of the two great blun- ders committed by the otherwise irreproachable statesman, M. Delcasse his blindness to the fact that, in allowing Russia to go to war with Japan, France suffered her ally to paralyse her efficiency in Europe, and his neglect to secure for France the army and the navy of his policy the French perceived that the latter mistake was incomparably the more unpardonable and the more heinous. M. Clemenceau, when Prime Minister, left the British Foreign Office no peace in his constant iteration of the fact that England seemed bent on repeating the blunder of M. Delcasse. One of M. Clemenceau's main objects was to convert the En- tente into a military treaty of defensive alliance. No one saw more clearly than he that in the Europe of to-day " splen- did isolation " was an impossible ideal for England. His views became those of his reflecting compatriots, as they observed that in proportion as German energy became more rampant, and the Balkan Problem more acute, England seemed to be curling her antennae inward, to be losing her European A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 149 sense and becoming more and more deeply self-absorbed. No one in France, in 1910 and 1911, was ashamed to own that France had need of England. But every one in France was astounded that Englishmen did not perceive that they had an even greater need of France. French respect for England's judgment received a blow when Englishmen were seen to be allowing domestic insular cares, and even the grave and beautiful interests inspired by the noble hieratic ceremony of the Coronation, to exclude from their thought all sense of their relative position in the world, and of their own Imperial contacts. The French wondered whether all England had not fallen a victim to the sleeping sickness. Above a supine people the all-but- isolated figure of Lord Roberts loomed gigantically for their vision. They had counted on England because England had taught them to dread and to admire her. Yet at certain moments England seemed to be selling her birthright of prac- tical sense and world-wide dominion for futile and destructive domestic measures, and humanitarian dreams that were the negation of an intelligent foreign policy. Even before Aga- dir the one condition of efficiency for the Entente, as well as of European peace, was seen in France to be that England should have the Army and Navy of -her traditional policy. Lord Curzon was applauded when he said that in England the Foreign Secretary was exactly in the position of Moses in the battle with the Amalekites : his two hands had to be held up by the Ministers for the Army and the Navy. From 1910 to 1911 France could not even at Constanti- nople fight the battles of the English alone. Yet Lord Haldane rejected the warnings of Lord Roberts and of the Military Correspondent of The Times l ; Sir Edward Grey called down on his head the crushing retort of the German Chancellor ; and when Mr. Jowett asked the Under- 1 " The preservation of France from an attack (by Germany before the weight of Russia begins to tell) is absolutely vital for our (Eng- land's) subsequent security." Times, April 7, 1911. 150 PROBLEMS OF POWER Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs " if, during his term of office, any undertaking, promise or understanding had been given to France, that in certain eventualities British troops would be sent to assist the operations of the French Army," the answer was " in the negative." The pretty little German pocket atlas for 1910, published by the great house of Justus Perthes, described the North Sea as the " Deutsche Meer," so that (as the French weekly newspaper L' Opinion recalled before Agadir) Great Britain se trouve done baignee par la mer allemande ! Yet there were little Englanders still. The abolition of the meridian of Paris, with the substitution for it of that of Greenwich, had its compensations. But,, in France, at all events, such events were not regarded as being in themselves a sufficient justi- fication of the raison d'etre of the Entente Cordiale during the eighteen months in which Germany after having, in collusion with Count Aehrenthal, shuffled all the Balkan cards and rearranged the map of Europe had been nego- tiating so effectively with Russia that a man like M. Hano- taux could write, however extravagantly : Les entretiens de Potsdam ont cree, de I'aveu de tous, une situation telle qu'on est bien oblige de se demander, maintenant, si la Russie a rompu le pacte de la Triple Entente. M. Pichon, before he fell from office, eloquently explained that Russia had done nothing of the kind, and that all was for the best in the best of all possible Triple Ententes. Sir Edward Grey echoed him in the same key of optimism, forgetting, like his colleague of the Quai d'Orsay, that although, from 1909- 1911, Constantinople was the diplomatic centre where the new European equilibrium must be delicately evolved, it was the place above all others where France and England seemed incapable of a common action. M. Pichon backed The Times, or The Times backed M. Pichon, on the question of Flushing ; but The Times was not the British Govern- ment, and as little was heard of M. Pichon's protests in defence of Belgian neutrality as of the fate of the British A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 151 ultimatum presented to the Persian Government and ridi- culously backed out of, to the astonishment of the Quai d'Orsay. But German Welt-politik was following then, as it .follows to-day, the line linking the two horns of a crescent which might well pass for the great type-dilemma : that of Koweit-Flushing. Every one beheld in 1911 how Russia had solved that dilemma, what Russia thought of the problem of the Baghdad Railway. She had gone to Potsdam and virtually left France and England to settle matters together or apart as best they could ; and pend- ing the settlement England was arming an expedition in the Persian Gulf to undo the anti-British work of anarchy and piracy complacently favoured by France at Muscat. When the French public noted facts of this nature, as they did note them ; when they beheld, as M. Tardieu, the foreign editor of the Temps, soberly enough put it at the time, that il semble admis que chacun doit aller de son cote sans concert, sans communication prealable, au petit bonheur, they concluded that chancellerie was an excellent name for the rocking-chairs in which, with discordant rhythm, the Foreign Ministers of the Triple Entente had been agitating, ever since the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the graver questions of European policy. In 1911, in fact, after four years of discordant action, in the summer months just preceding Agadir, Frenchmen were beginning to conclude, from their perception of the hollow- ness of certain optimistic official assurances as to the in- tegrity and efficiency of the Triple Entente, that they would perhaps do well to withdraw from a pact which had served its tune. Second thoughts reminded them, however, that it would be unfortunate for them, and unfor- tunate for England, if they should take to meditating too deeply on the idea that had ^recently been put to them by an ex-Foreign Minister, M. Hanotaux, in his sensational article, " // Faut Choisir." It was, after all, too late then to return to the principle of President Grevy. Germany 152 PROBLEMS OF POWER was not Germany when that statesman recommended to France a policy of absolute isolation ; but Germany was Germany in 1911. And, by the same token, England was England then, but England was not, in 1910 and 1911, the same England. That England should once more become England was felt on the Continent, everywhere save in Germany, to be the crying European need ; and it was the most genuine longing of France. In the summer of 1911, more than one disinterested observer felt like saying, ' England would be more than shortsighted, she would be ignoring her own interests, and the interests of European peace, if, draping herself in her Coronation robes, she were to allow France to cry over the Channel, into her indifferent ears, the words of Henry IV to Crillon : " We have conquered at Arques, but you were not there, my Crillon ! " Happily for the restoration of the old-time efficiency of the Triple Entente, Germany was at that very hour medi- tating the action which was to rouse England from her political lethargy, to make her contemplate from another angle the naif proposal of the American President for the signing of a treaty of unrestricted arbitration, and to cause her to rush, in her own interests, to the rescue of France, that the two Powers might stand shoulder to shoulder at Arques. Certain proposals of President Taft, relative to the settle- ment of " matters of national honour " by Courts of Arbitra- tion, had already begun to work havoc in England. They had been welcomed on March 13, 1911, by Sir Edward Grey as " bold and courageous words." England and the United States seemed to be wondering why the President of the French Republic and the Tsar of Russia were so long in tendering their congratulations. " It would seem as if France would be the next nation to come into line," ex- claimed one of the makers of opinion in the United States. Foreigners, however, overlooked, as usual, the positive conditions which, whether they liked it or not, were bound A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 153 to determine the attitude of present-day Frenchmen towards such demonstrations as those of the English-speaking com- munities with regard to treaties for the abolition of war. The foreigner easily falls a victim to optical illusions when he tries to penetrate the reaches of French idealism. What the English-speaking world chiefly knows of France is her ideologic bent : the date of 1789, the Contrat Social of Rousseau and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Revolution and the Walkyrie dash of the Republican armies over the toppling thrones of Europe, and the mystic words which "were the deeper undertone of the Marseillaise : Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. With that knowledge it couples the recollection of the doctrinaire policies of the Reveur Couronne of the Second Empire, the Emperor who was ever ready to rush to the succour of fallen nationalities and who professed to prolong thereby the democratic war- cry of the volunteers of the Revolution. And finally, the English-speaking world, face to face with forty years of the Third Republic, admires the altruism of her political philo- sophy of " solidarity " in reality, a dream of the Masonic inspirers of that Republic the magnificent ten years' battle between Individualism and the Raison d'Etat in the great drama of the Dreyfus Case, the constant urbanity of her attitude (" L' Adaptation des Alliances "), her diplo- matic intervention at moments of tension between the Powers (the " Dogger Bank "), and her undeviating loyalty to the ideal that maintains the Tribunal of the Hague. 1 1 At the very moment when Louis Napoleon, warned over and over again by his military attache in Berlin, Colonel Stoffel, and by the officer in command of the place of Strasbourg, General Ducrot, of the intentions of Prussia to attack France, undertook to reform the French army (1867), the Republican party proceeded to organize " pacifist " associations and leagues in favour of disarmament. The Imperial bill was attacked before the Corps Legislatif by Jules Simon, Magnier, Pelletan and Jules Favre. In the sitting of January 2, 1868, Marshall Niel, who defended the bill, was apostrophized as follows by Jules Favre : " Vous voulez done faire de la France une 154 PROBLEMS OF POWER This France which is only one, and not the whole France is the France visible from over the sea and from over the Channel ; but it is a France of mirage, a mirage that has often duped and lured the " Anglo-Saxon " or the Levan- tine vision, but has never deluded for long the sceptical scrutiny of the Powers of the Continent. There is quite another France, a much more real France, the France that has evolved not on some distant Atlantis, nor yet upon an island separated by an estranging sea from intimate Con- tinental contacts. There is the France that has all along formed an integral part of Continental European soil. That France, in order to keep up with the fashion of the hour, has more than once voted purely academic resolu- tions in favour of disarmament, calling on the Govern- ment " to exert every effort to place on the programme of caserne ? " and he replied in words that MM. d'Estournelles de Constant, Jaures and Bourgeois would appear to have forgotten : " Et vous, prenez garde d'en faire un cimetiere." Two years later came Sedan. (Cf. Chuquet : La Guerre, 1870-71.) M. Goyau cites in his admirable book, L'ldee de Patrie et Humanitarisme, p. 285, the pathetic words of Jules Ferry after the war. " Do you remem- ber," said Ferry, " that under the Empire we had little good to say of militarism ? Do you recall those vague aspirations towards general disarmament . . . that characterized the democracy of the time ? A number of us professed those ideas then. . . . But is there a single one, I ask you, who has not been converted by events ? This country has seen the war of 1870 ; it has turned its back forever on these dangerous and deceptive chimaeras." Few books of con- temporary history are more illuminating than the volume by M. Georges Goyau, from which the preceding passage is cited. It is, in a word, the record of the brave and naive efforts of the Sociability and Generosity of the French certain Frenchmen ! to inoculate Europe with the love of peace ; a history that never could have been written if the idealistic Republicans, who had coagulated into a fixed idea the revolutionary imaginations of the Jacobins, had not re- mained (until about ten years ago) criminally ignorant of geography and of European affairs. Even they, however, have finally learned that " 1'humanite a besoin, pour garder la France comme lumire, comme verbe et m6me comme parure, que la France ne cesse point d'etre la patrie fran9aise." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 155 work at the next Hague Conference, in agreement with the friendly and allied Powers, the question of the simultaneous limitation of armaments " (February 23, 1911). But the same France noted with singular satisfaction on April 30, 1911, the cautious and lukewarm terms in which the British Sovereign, addressing the Lord Mayor after the Guildhall Meeting held to consider the proposals of the President of the United States of America, perfunctorily affirmed his " gratification " at receiving " these records of opinions, unanimously expressed, upon a question of such supreme and far-reaching importance, by an assemblage so repre- sentative of the various lines of thought in our religious, political and social life." Late in the evening of May 9, 1911, the news reached Paris and Berlin that the Provincial Committee of the Reichsland, the Delegation of Alsace-Lorraine, had that afternoon been prorogued. The Imperial Cabinet order dissolving this Assembly was dated May 6, the first day of the Em- peror's visit to Alsace, and was issued from Strasbourg. Forty-eight hours later the Alsace-Lorraine Constitution and Finance Bills were rejected by the Committee of the Reichstag. Commenting on the confusion that reigned in the Committee previous to the rejection of these measures, the Berlin correspondent of The Times observed : " Now, as so often, one is tempted to believe that most people in Berlin and throughout the greater part of the German Empire know no more about Alsace-Lorraine than about the German colonies, if they indeed know as much." Paris, France in general, were fortunately better informed. There is a certain historical document which may have been forgotten in Berlin, which, no doubt, is little known in London and in Washington, but which, if it does not yet figure, as it ought to figure, on the walls of every French school, is still fresh in the memories of most French men. It is the unanimous Declaration of the Deputies of the French Departments of the Bas-Rhin, the Haut-Rhin, the 156 PROBLEMS OF POWER Moselle, the Meurthe, and the Vosges, protesting against the alienation of Alsace-Lorraine, and affirming the im- mutable determination of the population of these two Pro- vinces to remain Frenchmen. One hundred and seven members of the National Assembly among whom were M. Brisson, the late President of the French Chamber of Deputies, and M. Clemenceau, who avenged M. Delcasse at Casablanca voted against the preliminaries of peace ceding Alsace and a portion of Lorraine to Germany. They had assumed this sublime responsibility after perusal of such passages as follow and it would be a crime not to pre- serve the original language of the Declaration : " Europe ne peut permettre ni ratifier 1'abandon d' Alsace et de la Lorraine. Gardiennes des regies de la justice et du droit des gens, les nations civilisees ne sauraient rester plus longtemps insensibles au sort de leur voisine, sous peine d'etre a leur tour victimes des attentats qu'elles auraient toleres. L'Europe moderne ne peut laisser saisir un peuple comme un vil troupeau ; elle ne peut rester sourde aux protestations repetees des populations menacees ; elle doit a sa propre conservation d'interdire de pareils abus de force. Elle salt d'ailleurs que 1'unite de la France est aujourd'hui, comme dans le passe, une garantie de 1'ordre general du monde, une bar- riere centre 1'esprit de conquete et d'invasion. La paix faite au prix d'une cession de territoire ne serait qu'une treve ruineuse et non une paix definitive. Elle serait pour tous une cause d'agitations intestines, une provocation legitime et permanente a la guerre. " En resume, 1' Alsace et la Lorraine protestent hautement centre toute cession ; la France ne peut la consentir, 1'Europe ne peut la sanctionner. " En foi de quoi nous prenons nos concitoyens de France, les gouvernements et les peuples du monde entier, a temoins que nous tenons d'avance pour nuls et non avenus tous actes et traites, vote ou plebiscite, qui consentiraient abandon, en faveur de 1'etranger, de toute ou partie de nos provinces de 1' Alsace et de la Lorraine." This protest was drawn up by Gambetta at Bordeaux. That great patriot, who was to become the Tyrtaeus of la revanche had shown himself a seer : "La paix au prix d'une cession de territoire ne sera qu'une treve ruineuse et non une paix definitive. Elle serait pour tous une cause d'agita- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 157 tions intestines, une provocation 16gitime et permanente." Napoleon III was no less prophetic. In a letter, written to the Countess de Mercy- Argenteau just after the treaty of peace closing the Franco-German war, he said : " How can one not be discouraged in presence of the conditions of peace imposed upon France ? I admit we were the aggressors ; I admit we have been beaten, and that we were obliged therefore to pay the costs of the war or abandon a part of our territory. But to condemn us to both at once is very hard. ... In such conditions it is not a peace that the German Emperor is concluding, it is tan- tamount to killing us, and instead of re-establishing peace, it sows for the future hatred and distrust. Is this good policy, even for Germany ? I do not think so. The present state of European civilization causes the nations to be bound up one with another by a host of common interests so that the ruin of one reacts on all the rest. ... If the German Emperor and Bismarck had profoundly reflected on the state of Europe, they would have declared that while France remained deprived of a stable and consequently legitimate Government they regarded suspension of hostilities merely as a truce, giving them an opportunity to take measures to secure a military position more favourable if the struggle began again, but that once there was a Government based on right, and accepted by the nation, they would be more concerned as to peace for the future than as to the possession of certain discontented departments detached from a nation in dis- tress. That would have been la grande politique. The hatred of Germany would have disappeared as by enchantment, peace would have been assured for many years, confidence would have been restored, trade relations immediately resumed, and the German Emperor would have obtained greater glory than he will acquire by the possession of Metz and Strasbourg." Forty years of growing armaments are but the confirma- tion of this melancholy prophecy. In a proud and noble letter on " The Role of Bismarck " which Monsieur Emile Ollivier, author of L 'Empire Liberal and Minister of Napo- leon III, addressed to Professor Hans Delbriick, and which was published in the Figaro of May 14, 1908, the following passage occurs : " No one contests Bismarck's glorious place among the dominators of the world. But political facts are not to be judged by their immediate consequences. There are distant consequences which convert into calamities what had seemed to be good fortune, and which turn 158 PROBLEMS OF POWER into bitterness victories that had been received with rejoicing. Tht reflecting observer already perceives the sombre morrows of the policy which led, you Germans to success. Have you gained anything in conquering populations whom you torment, who hate you, curse you, and are merely waiting for a favourable circumstance to rise up against you ? Was not the fact that you have made it impossible to come to an understanding, without arriere pensee, with us, a heavy price to pay for the accession of territory which was not needed for your Unity ? Has your security been augmented by the fact of your having afflicted and buffetted a nation whose humiliations never last for more than a time, and who suddenly, on the morrow of a Soubise or a Bazaine, may behold the advent of a Turenne or a Pelissier ? A state of reciprocal distrust between France and Germany is a permanent cause of tumult in Europe." Frenchmen well knew why the dream of unrestricted Anglo-American arbitration must always plausibly appeal to Englishmen, and in 1911, above all, they under- stood why a dangerous proposal like that of Mr. Taft was so seductive to the eyes both of worried and tired statesmen and of a people familiar with Isaiah. French- men are little given to reading the Bible, but they have their own political sacred document, a Gallic Table of the Law, known as Les Droits de I'Homme ; and the imagina- tions of many of them, fed therein on an ideal of abstract Justice, have assimilated the phraseology of all the har- bingers of the Millennium, from a Quinet and a Michelet to a Jaures and a d'Estournelles de Constant. All French- men, furthermore, clearly enough perceive how special are the cases of England and the United States, and they saw in 1911 how ripe was the hour in England for the success of a meeting like that at Guildhall, where Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour (described by the Primate of England as " The Great Twin Brethren "), joined with the Archbishop of Can- terbury, and with all the prelates of all the Churches of Christian, and even of Rabbinical, England, in organizing a Crusade of Peace, to the cry of Dieu le veut the same cry, by the way, to which the Prussians marched down the Champs Elysees. Equally apparent to Frenchmen at the A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 159 time was the utility of such a Crusade as a diversion and a possible solution at a moment of Imperial crisis, when the Colonies were breaking away as " Dominions " from their island moorings. The positive advantages, for Eng- land, of an arrangement with the United States, which might do even more than diminish the possibilities of war, which might conceivably, in some distant future, lead up to a kind of " Anglo-Saxon " Amphictyonic Council, were carefully analysed in Paris. But what France also understood, and what America and England herself seemed less clearly to see, was that for her to follow in the wake of Mr. Taft, of Sir Edward Grey, of the Twin Parliamentary Brethren, and of the Prelates of the Guildhall meeting, would be to succumb to the form of folly known in the idiom of the Primate of England as " tempting Providence." Never has France been less suitably placed than to-day for signing a treaty automatically submitting to The Hague, or to any other tribunal, differences affecting her vital interests, independence, or honour. Nor can Germany adopt such a peace policy. Neither France nor Germany can. The reason why disarmament or any measure favouring it is impossible for France, is not that Germany would make war upon her. It is said that Germany re- quires twenty years of peace, and it is certain that the ex- cessive production in modern industrial Germany would cause any serious interruption of her commercial activity to provoke a formidable krach ; but France would go morally to pieces, she would be gangrened by humanitarianism, if, ignoring political conditions throughout the world, poli- tical things-as-they-are, she were to listen, as President Taft listened in 1910 and 1911, to the appeal of the elo- quent members of the Committee of the Association of International Conciliation. It has already been seen that one of the consequences of the Russian Alliance was to engender " pacifism " in France. 1 See pp. 30, 31, 140, 141. This is also the view of a remarkable 160 PROBLEMS OF POWER The more cocardier the spirit of France, the more remote becomes her hope of recovering Alsace-Lorraine save by war ; the more she is doomed to play into the hands of Ger- many, the more she retards the ideal of disarmament, and the more she prolongs the evil consequences of the crime of the framers of the Treaty of Frankfort. Yet, if she be not cocardier, if her rulers do not do all in their power to preserve the mainsprings of her national pride, if they do not seek to arrest the progress of humanitarianism, France loses her self-respect, sells her birthright, signs her death- warrant. No more tragic dilemma was ever presented to a nation. As long as the Alsace-Lorraine wound remains open, Europe, the world, cannot expect France to accept the idea of disarmament, or of arbitration on points of national honour. 1 diagnostician, M. Andr6 Cheradame. Ci.La Crise Franfaise.pp. 203, 204. Note as well a striking passage by M. Faguet, in his Introduc- tion to the Memoirs of M. Arthur Meyer, Ce que mes yeux ont vu : " The Russian Alliance was certainly a good thing in itself (says M. Faguet), although we have all along rendered Russia a good many more services than she has rendered us. Still, it was a good thing in itself. But, nevertheless, we must not overlook the facts that from a certain point of view it did us considerable harm ; I mean, moral harm. Until the Alliance, hope of reparation for the disasters of 1870 was a living sentiment in French hearts. After the Alliance, the terms of which were unknown, but which every one was aware to be merely defensive, it was more or less distinctly understood that the Alliance implied our acceptance of the diminution of France, not merely in presence of the Conqueror, but in the presence of a third party, and that that diminution was consecrated by a diplo- matic act of European importance, so that, in a way, the signature of Russia was affixed to the Treaty of Frankfort. ... I date from the Russian Alliance le flechissement, momentane, je Vespere, du patriotisme en France." 1 The attitude of Germany, at successive Peace Congresses, con- sistently opposing all " peaceful " proposals, has been a more effec- tive lesson to France than perhaps to the rest of the world. The late Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, who was sent to London to make a final assault on the Entente Cordiale, manoeuvred at the second Hague Conference against the policy of the British delegates favouring the principle of obligatory arbitration, in a way that A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 161 These are facts which the author of The Great Illusion does not seem to have adequately taken into account. Mr. Norman Angell has written in the interests of peace a volume of over three hundred pages, entitled The Great Illusion. He has blinded his eyes, like the legendary ostrich, to a whole series of facts, the existence of which radically disturbs the entire perspective, and compromises the practical value of his argument. It is quite true, as he says, 1 that there is a greater difference between the man of to-day and the man of only two or three generations ago than between the man of the last three centuries and the man of three thousand years before. But the normal con- sequences of that curious evolution, which Mr. Norman Angell neatly calls the " law of acceleration," have been retarded during our own time by the results of the short- sighted action which Germany, with the complicity of Europe, committed in the seizure of Alsace-Lorraine. France, at least, has not forgotten. As the Paris correspondent of The Times has written (Times, May n, 1912, he was then the special representative of that paper at The Hague) : " The most amazing thing was to witness the way in which Baron von Marschall, up till almost the very end of the Conference, retained the confidence of those, including the French delegates, who were striving to draw up a list of obligatory subjects of arbitration, while he himself was skilfully helping to reduce their list ad absurdum. As was remarked by an eminent delegate shortly before the final sitting of the Conference all that we have now agreed upon as the subject of obligatory arbitration reduces itself to the effects of de- ceased seamen. Among those who were at first, and indeed for a long time, most sanguine as to Baron von MarschalTs co-operation in the policy of obligatory arbitration was the late Mr. W. T. Stead, who, at The Hague, issued a daily journal in French giving an account of the proceedings of the Conference and estimates of the activities of the different delegates. His disappointment at the close of the Conference was so great that he published a very humorous cartoon representing the ' total eclipse ' of the chief German delegate, whom he had previously represented as the ' leading^star ' in the galaxy of diplomatists assembled at The Hague." 1 The present writer said it himself, some twenty years ago, in a book entitled Patriotism and Science, 162 PROBLEMS OF POWER That a thinker of Mr. Norman AngelTs probity should discuss the possibility of the abolition of modern armaments without dealing with the question of Alsace-Lorraine, is a curious oversight. Mr. Angell undertakes to prove that " the necessity of adopting defensive measures implies, on some one's part, grounds for aggression, and that this motive is due to the present universal belief in the economic advantages to be derived from a victorious war." Now this theory, which has a show of axiomatic clearness, is all too clear. It would seem so to have dazzled its inventor's eyes as to blind him to the immediate realities of contemporary history. It is true that no one will ever wish to fight his neighbour unless he has some good reason for doing so. But among all the English-speaking peoples economic motives have, perhaps, been the least persuasive motives that have driven great nations to war. The present condition of modern Europe, under the crushing system of armaments, is in itself the miserable consequence of a war waged for any and every other motive but that of economic advantage, a war which was at the time a mere incident in the vast national movement for the formation of a United Germany. Like- wise, most of the military activity of France within the last hundred years has been prompted by an idealism untinctured by economics. This, and other similar illustrations such as the Mobilization of the Balkan States, in October 1912 * might, it would be imagined, be merely supererogatory in replying to Mr. Norman Angell, who, in his less doctrinaire moments, is quite ready to acknowledge the potential share of other than merely economic factors among the causes of war. All that need be pointed out is the hopelessness of expecting to settle the problem of European armaments without first removing one of the primary causes of those 1 No one contests that economic motives help to explain the Balkan War (cf. pp. 250, 251, 287), but such motives are insignificant in comparison with the idealistic " national " aspirations that have found their sanction at Kirk-Kilisse. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 163 armaments, that obstacle in the path of " pacifism " known as Alsace-Lorraine. That question is an integral part of the whole question of European peace. And as Mr. Nor- man Angell's book has been translated into many languages, and has attracted wide attention, it is necessary to insist on the fact that it is the work of a clear and logical intelligence, somewhat surprisingly indifferent to certain of the more important among the positive factors with which a states- man has to deal. If Mr. Norman Angell had said : "If human nature were logical, and if nations were governed by reason, war would be almost impossible, because war is usually absurd ; and war is absurd because it rarely brings any lasting good, and because it is ridiculous to act on absurd motives," everybody would undoubtedly agree with him. But, unfortunately, nations are more frequently actuated by motives that are " absurd " than by motives that are rational ; and it is as irrational to expect to rationalize politics as it is to wish to rationalize religion. It was to lack foresight, and hence to be irrational, for Germany to take Alsace-Lorraine ; but it would be no less imprudent, and therefore irrational, for French leaders of opinion to cultivate in the mass of the nation the belief that, because what Mr. Norman Angell says is partially true, they ought to subordinate to that more remote ideal truth a certain set of French verities which are of the essence of their integrity as a nation. There are French truths and there are British truths, and there are truths that obtain on the slopes of the Atlas and there are abstract truths. Mr. Norman Angell's truth, in spite of its specious inductive stability, is an abstract truth. And, just because it ignores one whole set of facts those growing out of the terms of the Treaty of Frankfort, and as yet unmodified by the new conditions of modern progress it is a truth which, if it were accepted by the French, would reduce them to the state of the Greeks after the sack of Corinth. It would be necessary to insist on this fact since the French, as 164 PROBLEMS OF POWER every one knows, are a people peculiarly amenable to the seduction of clear thinking, peculiarly given to general ideas and to generous impulses, and peculiarly exposed to the ravages which such clear and generous ideas, when they are too clear, are bound to cause, if one could not confi- dently count on the action of an aggressive Germany to maintain a sane tonicity in the French character. It ought to be for the French a point of " national honour," in the in- terests of their peculiar form of civilization, to raise relent- lessly and even barbarically every form of dyke against the inroads of that tide of modern progress so magnificently symbolized by the industrial activity and the pervasive financial expansion of Germany. 1 It ought to be a point of " national honour " with them to refuse to allow German stocks to be quoted on the Paris Bourse, and to maintain their credit by methods which, as far as possible, will prevent them from feeling the impact of commercial crises in a word, to go back to the soil. 2 And finally, it ought to be a point of " national honour " with them to gaze steadily into the East, following the precept of Gambetta in his St. Quentin speech : "II faut constamment que la France soit penchee sur cette oeuvre de reparation. . . . Soyons tres reserves, ne prononsons jamais une parole temeraire. . . Soyons gardiens de notre dignite de vaincus, et ne parlons jamais de 1'etranger ; mais que Ton apprenne que nous y pensons tou jours." // faut constamment que la France soit penchee sur cette oeuvre de reparation. There have been long periods during the last twenty-five years when France seemed to have forgotten ; when, in heeding too literally the recommenda- 1 Cf. pp. 235-238. 2 Moral, political, sociological reasons ought to suffice as an in- centive to the French legislator for favouring agricultural interests and for arresting the exodus from the country into the towns. Rein- forced by the economic motives arising from the peculiar conditions of the French corn-market, these reasons become irrefutable. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 165 tion of Gambetta, " Ne parlons jamais de 1'etranger," she appeared positively to have ceased to follow the great tribune's other behest, " que Ton comprenne que nous y pensons toujours." In the making of her North African Empire, for instance, and indeed in the working out of her entire destiny as a Colonial power, she allowed to come into being an influential band of politicians, some of whom might perhaps have been induced in 1910 and 1911 to come to terms with Germany, even to sacrifice the Entente Cordiale, and to abandon the lost provinces to their fate, if they could thereby have made sure of obtaining from Germany the promise that, so far as that Power was concerned, Morocco should henceforth be terre fmngaise. 1 But at that very moment the mass of reflecting Frenchmen had their gaze rivetted on the Vosges. In the spring of 1911, only a few weeks before Agadir, M. Lavisse, the Academician, Professor of History at the Sorbonne, addressed the Alsace-Lorraine students as follows : " Mes amis, je ne veux pas dire autre chose que ce que je dis. Je n'ai pas d'arriere-pensee. Je ne suis pas venu apporter ici des paroles de haine ; il y a longtemps que j'ai ecrit : ' Puisque la haine est aveugle, ne la prenons pas pour guide.' Encore moins je me donnerai le ridicule de vous annoncer une guerre liberatrice. La France est pacifique ; elle ne f era la guerre que si elle y est contrainte. Mais considerez 1'etat de la politique europeenne et mondiale, les ligues, les contre-ligues ; la France est surveillee en tous ses mouve- ments par 1'Allemagne ; Allemagne et France sont deux armees en presence, et les trompettes et clairons des avant-gardes sont tenus a la hauteur des levres. Pour retrouver la liber te de ses mouvements, la France n'aurait qu'a dire un tout petit mot : ' J'oublie ! ' Ce tout petit mot, elle ne le dira pas." The Paris Review, Les Marches de I' Est, which is the organ of French writers " eager to protect the lucid genius of their race against the invasion of Germanism," has become in four years one of the indispensable reviews published in France. Alsace-Lorraine is now the theme of scores 1 Cf. pp. 242-246. 166 PROBLEMS OF POWER of volumes which go rapidly into numerous editions. Events in the lost provinces are followed by the Paris Press with an assiduity which would surprise the readers of that Press of ten years ago. Germany, moreover, seems to be exhausting her resources in furnishing French journalists with the most attractive matter for comment. When the Metz Courts are not engaged in prosecuting the members of a sporting club suspected of French sympathies and prosecut- ing them so blunderingly that the Deputy for Colmar, M. Blumenthal, in his interpellation to the Government at the Provincial Committee was able to say, " You need not feel surprise if the Germanization of this region has been re- tarded by ten years " an artist like Zislin is cast into prison for harmless if ruthless caricature, and the prosecuting magistrate, in his speech for the indictment, is obliged to acknowledge : " We are living in a frontier region where sympathies for France, after forty years of annexation, are still a living reality ; we are pass- ing through a period more agitated even than that of Boulangism ; an ardent nationalism is arising, and I do not refer to that nationalism summed up in the formula ' Alsace-Lorraine aux Alsaciens-Lor- rains.' No, I refer to that blue, white and red nationalism, which not only harks back to the past, but is cultivating among the people of Alsace-Lorraine the hope of a better future, to such a de- gree, in fact, that some of our Alsace-Lorraine youths regard the tricolour as their own flag." Prussia, in a word, as was clearly perceived in France even in 1910, can no longer, save by the most drastic measures, defend the German cause in the annexed territory. The claim of many excellent French observers, from M. Maurice Barres to M. Georges Ducrocq, would not seem to have been exaggerated : although separated from France, Alsace and Lorraine are more really united to her in feeling to-day than they were before the war. The Reichsland has become what M. Barres has called it, La Terre de la Resurrection. The new hypocritical solution offered by Germany for the terrible problem put by the Treaty of Frankfort, and kept A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 167 open by German incompetency and bungling, will be found to be utterly inadequate. The Constitution will solve nothing, and the action of the Emperor in dissolving the Provincial Committee will not have facilitated the task of altering the mystical status of Alsace-Lorraine as the Reichsland, " Imperial soil," which is the keystone of German Unity. The tension, in fact, has reached such a pitch that it is doubtful if a scheme of frank autonomy could now settle the question of Alsace-Lorraine. In his admirable pamphlet, Le Cauchemar de I'Europe, M. Albert Gobat, a Swiss Conseiller d'Etat, returning from a prolonged visit to Alsace in the autumn of 1910, argues eloquently that if the Imperial Government would only decide to place Alsace-Lorraine on the same footing as the Grand Duchy of Baden, or as the free towns of Hamburg and Lubeck (that is to say, grant them autonomy), such action, by lifting the annexed Provinces to the dignity of a nation, well above international complications, would guarantee the peace of Europe. The Constitution, at all events, will simply maintain the annexed Provinces in the relation of a fief to a sovereign lord. M. Gobat's proposal is the most obvious justice, but it is doubtful if those who know what the word Reichsland really implies, or if those who are best acquainted with the present state of Europe, will be as optimistic as he, in believing that even the inconceivable granting of autonomy to Alsace-Lorraine would usher in the era of European peace. An autonomous Alsace-Lorraine would add one more to the series of buffer States situated between France and Germany ; but the buffer quality of all these States, from Switzerland to Luxembourg and Belgium, is a mere diplomatic fiction which would vanish like a wisp of straw in the event of a European conflagration. At the present moment no international Treaty, no diplomatic instrument or convention is worth the paper on which it is written. They might as well have been formu- lated on paper made of wood-pulp. Three or four lunar 168 PROBLEMS OF POWER cycles, as every one knows, suffice to destroy most of the modern paper used for newspapers and books. But all the treaties in the world will be a dead-letter even before most of the modern productions of art and letters have turned to dust. The only treaties that stand a chance of a long life are those unwritten Agreements which are based on common interests. When, in order to prevent the construction of the Nicaragua Canal, and to save the honour of France, a great Frenchman, M. Bunau-Varilla, fomented a Revolution at Panama, and thus made it possible for Mr. Roosevelt to seize a zone in Columbian territory ; when Count d'Aehren- thal tore up the Treaty of Berlin on Bosnian soil, and the pieces were finally burned to ashes in bonfires lit by the Balkan League ; when the Germans, indifferent to the stipulations of the Act of Algeciras, and their agreement of desinteressement with France of 1909, sent a gun-boat to Agadir, the world beheld certain characteristic instances of that prehistoric principle, the spoils-policy, which the meditations of the international jurists have as yet done nothing to render obsolete. The principle dates from the Stone-Age. It seems new only because, owing to the changed social conditions, its application in the twentieth century, A.D., is an altogether different problem from the application in B.C. 20000, when there were few railways, telegraphs, steamboats, newspapers or crossed cheques. The prehistoric spoils-policy of the Cave-Dweller was realized by woodland craft, by bludgeon, or by a swift-speed- ing flint. ^The same object, the same principle, govern collective human nature to-day ; but, because in certain other respects to-day is different from yesterday, the old principle seems to be tending to make diplomacy a branch of physico-chemistry. It has been neatly defined, by M. Victor Berard, as Le Droit de Voisinage, which is French for " geographic gravitation." It is the human, the sociological, form of one of these aspects of the physical law of capillary attraction. The principle of " neighbourhood rights " the right which a Power assumes to annex or administer the States and Dependencies of a neighbour unable to defend itself, or to establish justice within its borders accounts for the shiftings in international relations, for the kaleidoscopic combinations that have taken place during the last ten years, from Morocco by way of Persia to Manchuria, and who knows ? perhaps round the world again to Mexico and Central America ; and if in the Far East Mr. Knox and President Taft met in 1910 with a comic rebuff, it was because they had not taken into adequate consideration the working of this positive and scientific basis of modern international politics. The successive treaties signed by the Powers have been merely a provisional record up-to- date of the stage reached in these chemico-political com- binations. One of the prettiest cases under this law is, of course, the process of " pacific penetration " of Morocco by France. But an even more elegant demonstration was the Anglo-Russian Agreement as to Persia, with its corollary that portion of the mysterious negotiations of Potsdam bear- ing on the Baghdad concession. Now the French, in their quick clear way, have been intelligent enough to apply this principle to the immediate future. This fact need surprise only those who still forget that France has had to evolve a national integrity in mid-Europe by slow and secular processes, which consisted in constructing for herself on every side a carapace impervious to outside influences. The French have had to fight their way to national unity against the inroads on their frontiers of the Anglo-Norman and the German. At no stage of their national history have they been without an Alsace-Lorraine problem in one form or another now in the South- West, now in the North, or now doubly, triply, in the East, where the line of the Vosges, of the Jura, and of the Savoy Alps has always marked the central axis of a border region never wholly theirs, nor yet ever wholly that of the " barba- rians." " National honour/ 5 in these conditions, is merely i?o PROBLEMS OF POWER the name for a set of unconscious reactions of self-pre- servation. It is not at all, in its essence, the hollow, but clarion-tongued, cocardier screech in praise of La Gloire which Englishmen and Germans fancy it to be, and which no doubt at times, for aesthetic ends, it can easily and provisionally become. From the point of view of the making of the nation, the evolution of French history has been an effort to moderate the action of the natural law of " neighbourhood rights " applied successfully and doggedly by England, and clumsily, though with a show of scientific, even philosophic, method by Germany. And the phrase " moderate the action," seems exact, because the natural and justifiable limits of French European expansion have never suffered any change in the Gallic mind since they were fixed by the Romans, who had worked with the geo- graphy of Strabo under their eyes. It has thus, as it were, become a second nature for France to possess a European sense ; and this European sense has never suffered her, for any protracted period, to be the dupe of even her most civilized aspiration, the dream of one day inhabiting a Europe based on Justice and Right. An almost singular respect for the written word in Treaties has been, no doubt, part of the Frenchman's noble Latin in- heritance, but his eyes have never been dimmed, to the presence, just over his buffer-State border, of a Holland which whatever the terms of the Treaty of London of 1839, guaranteeing Belgian independence and neutrality, and of the clauses of the Treaty of Vienna proclaiming the free navigation of the Escaut is destined one day to fall into the hands of Germany, unless its integrity be maintained by tfte common action of France and England. It did not need the Dutch proposal to fortify Flushing to justify, in the eyes of French statesmen, the vigilance with which they had been observing, since thejadvent of the Prince Consort, the extension of German influence in the Low Countries. They were well aware in 1911 that the Belgian and British appeals A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 171 to International Law^ to refute the parallel juridical argu- ments of Holland, were of merely academic interest save in so far as public discussion arrested Holland in her German policy, and gave her time to reflect on the international bearings of her proposed action. In 1910 and 1911 nothing more clearly showed the international authority of France than the facts that, unassisted by England, her Foreign Minister should ^.have declared openly in the Chamber of De- puties his readiness to causer with the signatories of the Treaty of 1839, an d that, although Germany retorted with tit-for-tat haste, that she had no intention of entering into any conversation on the subject, the Dutch Govern- ment after all prudently took the French hint, and began to tack away diplomatically from the shallows on which her heavy galleons seemed about to run aground. Yet the Flushing Fortification Bill came up again in 1912 before the Dutch Chamber, and this tune neither France nor England made the slightest sign that they had evolved a common policy for the defence of Belgian neutrality. 1 France, it should be repeated, cannot act alone. The Entente Cordiale must be converted into a close Dual Alliance, based on common interests, in order to forestall before the close of the next decade when Germany will have her full quota of " Dreadnoughts " in the North Sea the possibility of the principle of geographical gravitation being applied to Holland. Where are the " neighbourhood rights " of 1 The Belgian Army Bill laid before the Chamber on Dec. 5, 1912, proposing to raise the mobilizable total of that country's armed strength to 340,000 men, marks the determination of Belgium to guarantee, unaided, respect for her neutrality, in case of a war between France and Germany, or a war in which France and Germany .fare arrayed in opposite camps. These precautions do not, however, preclude the necessity for France and England to evolve a common policy for the maintenance of the validity of the treaties of 1839. In February, 1913, Baron de Broqueville, the Belgian Prime Minis- ter and Minister of War, stated to a Committee of the Belgian Cham- ber that the Minister for Foreign Affairs and he himself were " on a volcano." See note i, p. 208. 172 PROBLEMS OF POWER Germany more neatly applicable than to the regions about the Hague and Rotterdam ? Notwithstanding the imme- diate results of the victories of the Balkan League in 1912, every one who knows the state of Europe still recalls the pertinent question put by the author of Le Choix de Londres (Revue de Paris, April 15, 1911) : " When the Russians lay hands on, or take control of, Stamboul, when the Austrians follow suit at Salonica, and the Italians at Avlona, why should not the German Customs Officer or Admiral enter Rotterdam ? " At all events, reasons of this kind, vividly held before the French intelligence, kept France, in 1910 and 1911, from falling into the state of beatific apathy which at that period characterized England's attitude towards the problems of world-politics. The French felt, no doubt, as Bishop Butler said in his Sermons at the Rolls, that things will be as they will be ; but it never occurred to them that this fact was a reason for not maintaining constant vigilance, or for not making a strenuous effort to avoid becoming the dupe of "things." 1 VI On the first of July 1911 the First-Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris called on M. de Selves, the French Foreign Minister, to inform him of Germany's decision to send an armed vessel to the Moroccan port of Agadir. This mysterious coup d' Agadir, information of which was vouchsafed at the same moment to all the other European 1 " No people can maintain an effective peace policy without being always ready for war. A diminished France, a France exposed, by its own fault, to taunts or humiliations, would no longer be France. . . . Our words of peace and humanity will be all the more likely to be heeded, if we are known to be more determined and better armed." President Poincare"'s Message to the French Parliament, February 20, 1913. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 173 Governments, surprised and startled the world. A special and plausible justification of Germany's conduct, her not un- natural irritation at France's procrastination and apparent ill-will in the application of the Franco-German Agreement of 1909, was utterly unsuspected at the time, not only by the general public on the Continent and in England, but even by well-informed members of the French Parliament. The Agreement of 1909 had rejoiced Europe. It seemed to be an earnest of Germany's honest intention to cease using the Moroccan question as an instrument of political and diplomatic pressure on France. All that the public opinion of the world appeared clearly to perceive in this Agreement was that Germany had at last recognized the predominance in Morocco of French political rights. The fact that France, in another clause of the Agreement, had solemnly promised to share with Germany the golden apples of the Hesperides, was generally overlooked. Europe was ill prepared, there- fore, to divine that when Germany suddenly dispatched a gun-boat to an Atlantic port within reach of the Hesperi- dean Gardens it was because France for two years had been submitting her partner in the Agreement of 1909 to the tortures of Tantalus, by alternately offering, and juggling out of sight, that and other coveted fruit. These operations had gone on behind the scenes, and not a dozen men in Europe, outside of the official world of the Quai d'Orsay and the Wilhelmstrasse, were aware that the apparent bolt from the blue was an act for which a rational pretext could be adduced. 1 In deciding on so sensational a method for the solution of a strained diplomatic situation, Germany had miscal- culated the nature of the political forces, and of the inter- national factors, then existing in Europe. Relentlessly bent on the realization of her fixed idea, destruction of the Entente between France and England, she had counted on achieving that object surreptitiously during the working 1 See pp. 243-245. 174 PROBLEMS OF POWER out of the ingenious partnership concluded between herself and France by the Agreement of 1909. When that dream was blasted, she revived her other more familiar policy, the policy of intimidation. With the hammer of Thor she brought down a prodigious whack on the table at which she and her new French friends had been talking business for some eighteen months. Convinced that Great Britain was incurably pacific, and that France was hurtling to the dogs ; mistaking the obvious predicament of England, and the unrest in France, for positive signs of a disinte- gration that was bound to paralyse the common action of those two Powers, Germany concluded that the moment for aggressive action was at hand. Ignorant of the profound transformations of the French soul during the months follow- ing the fall of M. Delcasse and the Casablanca incident, and deceived by the " humanitarianism " of England's rulers, and the laisser-aller of her people, Germany took a hasty resultant of the international forces visible to the naked eye, and neglected all those subtler elements of her problem which less official, less responsible observers had detected and publicly noted. Moreover, she had not only to consider her relations with the powers of the Triple Entente ; but to maintain her hege- mony within the narrower limits of her own political system, the Triple Alliance. For the last three or four years it had seemed as if German leadership were being contested by Austria-Hungary. When Count Aehrenthal made up his mind to regularize the status of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Austro-Hungarian Minister had been less dazzled by the apparition at his side of his German ally in shining armour, than William II might have hoped. The " brilliant second " had shown himself a possible first if the allies should be called upon to run many more races together. It was true that the authority of the Triple Alliance had been enhanced in Europe by the failure of the Triple Entente to force Austria-Hungary to a Conference intended virtually as a A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 175 High Court to the bar of which Count d'Aehrenthal was to be summoned. But the watchful knew that Germany knew that Austria-Hungary knew that if the scheme of a High Court had failed it was owing less to Germany's support of her ally than to the lack of a common policy between France, England and Russia, and most of all to the Quai d'Orsay's natural hesitation to take any step that might alienate the sympathy of Austria-Hungary. That Power had beautifully backed France at Algeciras, and the growth of her authority, within reasonable limits, could not but be to the advantage of the French policy for the maintenance of a perfectly bal- anced Europe. In short, while what with Bosnia-Herze- govina, and Potsdam, and Anglo-Franco-Russian ataxy the Triple Alliance seemed to be steadily humiliating the Triple Entente, Germany's special diplomatic position, relatively to that of Austria-Hungary, was far less satis- factory than it appeared superficially to be. Some magni- ficent stroke of policy was really, as the French say, " indi- cated." Hot from the secret disappointment of her dis- cussions with France for the elaboration of a Moroccan condominium, Germany devised the Coup d'Agadir ; and in sending the Panther to an Atlantic port of Morocco, she counted on France's being frightened out of her wits and on England's refusal even to notice what she had done. She counted, perhaps, above all on England's blindness, and even on her incapacity to intervene. That Germany should have blundered so prodigiously implies, after all, that British things were in a perilous condition. And that was indeed the case ! England had reached a crisis due to a partial and startling breakdown in that very machinery of representative par- liamentary government which she herself had patented. It is a radical defect of parliamentary government that such government is committed to stop-gap initiatives, a process which is the negation of positive governmental effi- ciency. The foresight that is an essential characteristic 176 PROBLEMS OF POWER of a national policy the foresight which a Monarchy like that of Germany, where the Emperor and Chancellor are independent of the Reichstag, or a Consular Republic like that of the United States, where the President is largely responsible, can readily exercise such a foresight tends to become impossible in parliamentary regimes, like those of France and England, where virtually single Chambers, dependent on the [masses, readily sacrifice national to local interests, and intimidate the Government or Cabinet by the constant menace of withdrawing their support. Yet without prevision a State is doomed. Under a parliamentary regime national interests wait on the good pleasure of the average man (or on gelatinous coagulations of the average man), whose sole ambition to-day, as in the Roman epoch of " bread and circuses," is to satisfy immediate demagogic claims, and the limit of whose vision is, at the most, the horizon of his parish. Thus, England finds herself to-day confronted with a life-and-death problem of maintenance, not merely of her " prestige," but of her national security (though her prestige has been for several generations the chief guarantee of her security), owing largely to the fact that when the German Emperor declared that " Germany's future was on the water," the British Ministry were prevented by the parliamentary system of government from assuming certain responsibilities which, had they been untrammelled by humanitarian " little Englanders," they would have looked unhesitatingly in the face. Again, France has lost a vast portion of the Congo because a meddlesome Socialist opposition regularly scared her wisest statesmen into inacti- vity. Belated action is an inevitable characteristic of public policy under a parliamentary regime ; and it is rare that, given the nature and the speed of world-evolution in our time, belated action is not futile action. The coup d'epee dans Veau of the French proverb is the most accurate symbol of the eloquent, but aimless, gestures of Governments that have to give chronic account of their deeds to parlia- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 177 mentary assemblies. The tide that Shakespeare noted in the affairs of men cannot be taken at the flood when five hundred " citizens " are squabbling as to the boats to be selected for the voyage ; as to whether the crew is to be syndicalist or jaune, native-born or " sarrasin " ; or as to the reading of the sextant at the moment when the watch is taking an observation. What the five hundred will even- tually do is to force their officers to embark on a cranky craft without a sail, exposed to the mercy of the most accessi- ble current of the moment, in the puerile hope that all the winds will be favourable and that the current will after all set in the nick of time in the right direction. It is obvious that when, as to-day, States are busy with problems of social betterment, occupied, that is, in the practical realization of the modern ideal of social solidarity by the framing of demagogic measures partially inspired by the desire to secure votes, 1 a considerable proportion of the public fortune is sure to be diverted from the channels through which it might be made to fill a moat of defence about the entire nation and distributed into an inner network of canals for the alleged irrigation of the national soil. The budgets of modern States, in spite of the colossal expenditure for national defence, tend constantly to swell their items of social legislation, and such provisions as old-age pensions, working men's insurance, subsidies to labour organizations, the nationalization of railways, are becoming characteristic methods for the spending of public money, while at the same time they are inevitable obstacles to the construction of dreadnoughts, the equipping of air- fleets, and the formation of army corps. In other words, the clamour of the populace, or the tumult of the mob, armed by the humanitarianism of our special form of Chris- tian civilization, possesses, in the devices of universal suffrage and parliamentary government, sure instruments for the 1 The device is classic, for the surenchdre of the French deputy is only the modern form of the Roman panem et circenses. N 178 PROBLEMS OF POWER immediate and frequently selfish utilization of the wealth of the community, and for the satisfaction of party interests and class appetites in injudicious and often anti-national ways. England has been, for the last few years, a very beau- tiful instance of these truths. The accession to power of an humanitarian doctrinaire liberalism, with radicalistic roots and demagogic leanings, the surrender of England's destinies to a Cabinet dominated by public men mystically inflamed with a " holy " passion for the improvement of the masses, and either ignorant or unmindful both of the principles of State-craft and of the conditions of British pres- tige, provided an excellent object-lesson of the unadapta- bility to a self-respecting democratic society of the purely representative form of government. One of the colleagues of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith, Lord Morley, has perfectly described the faults of ardent spirits who take to politics in a stirring age: " Pierced by thoughts of the ills in the world around them, they are overwhelmed by a noble impatience to remove, to lessen, to abate. Before they have set sail they insist that they already see some new planet swimming into their ken, and touch the promised land. An abstract, & priori notion, formed independently of expe- rience, independently of evidence, is straightway clothed with all the sanctity of absolute principle. Generous aspiration, exalted enthusiasm, is made to do duty for reasoned scrutiny. They seize every fact or circumstance that makes their way, they are blind to every other. Inflexible preconceptions hold the helm. They exaggerate, their sense of proportion is bad." 1 British policy, under the direction of Mr. Lloyd George, tended to lack proportion ; it became a policy of parochial- ism. The Imperial Idea seemed to have vanished from the brains of British politicians. Englishmen had had forced upon them a prolonged constitutional crisis, which would have been worse than futile if it had not happily served the purpose of arousing the bewilderment and the 1 Address, June 28, 1912, as Chancellor of Manchester University. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 179 dismay of the Dominions, and thereby contributing (together with the episode summed up by the words Canadian Reci- procity, the meeting of the Imperial Conference, and later on, the Coup of Agadir) to save England from an insular grave. The debate on the Parliament Bill, which for months absorbed the entire attention of political parties, at a time when the Triple Alliance was strengthening its position in the Middle East from the Balkans to Baghdad, showed many things, and showed especially the weakness, the absurdity of party government based on the " rights of the majority " ; but above all showed that England's primordial interests were being neglected. That a system of party government based on the " rights of the majority " is by no means a satisfactory way of organiz- ing democracy, is being proved with reductio ad absurdum clearness by the experiments now making all over the world. It was already sufficiently indicated during the British crisis, which resulted in the Parliament Act the measure abolish- ing the right of veto of the Upper House while giving it a " suspensive veto " by the facility with which the Prime Minister became a " tyrant " in the provisional interests of his party. That crisis emphasized the necessity of an electoral reform ensuring the representation of minorities and it may be said, without insisting further, that it illustrated the truth that the French pre-Revolutionary conception of popular rights, the socio-political organization of the Old Regime, on which popular liberties had been organized in syndicates of interests known as " Etats," was a more practical and more really democratic system than the English invention of representative government. But it must be granted that no one who accepts the tradi- tional British view of " party government " had a right to criticize Mr. Asquith's action on the ground of its illogical character. Evidently the King, broad-basing his policy on the English democratic theory of the sovereignty of the i8o PROBLEMS OF POWER people, and accepting the British notion of party government founded on the majority system, regarded the General Elections that renewed the Liberal " Mandate " as possessing all the virtue of a referendum. By temporarily and con- stitutionally becoming a radical, and resisting the appeal of the irresponsible Conservative statesmen to cease to be a Constitutional Sovereign, the King showed himself more conservative than the Conservatives. He probably saved his country from Revolution. It was plausibly argued that the upshot of the long debate over the Parliament Bill namely, Mr. Asquith's letter (his " coup d'etat "), menacing the House of Lords with an arbitrary increase of the Liberal majority (by means of the device known as the " Prerogative of the Crown " for the creation of new peers), so that the existing dominant majority of Conservatives might be outvoted and the Upper House coerced into a line of action parallel with that of the House of Commons showed that Government in England to-day is Single-Chamber Government based on" the Party System. It was pointed out that, for the menace to have any reality, its efficacy should not be beyond doubt ; and that its effi- cacy would be doubted if there existed any known constitu- tional recourse against its realization. The fact that the Prime Minister used the menace for his party ends was every- where interpreted as a proof that he was the master of the King's Prerogative. But the conclusion was not, in logic, conclusive. The fact that the head of a disciplined majority in the Lower House should be in a position, by using the " Prerogative of the Crown," to carry out his will as to legislation in the Upper House implies, not one thing, but two things : that either the King is a coerced, or that he is a willing, accomplice of the Prime Minister's action. In the former case the King " rules " but does not " govern," which is, indeed, the British constitutional boast, and, for England, the definition of a " Constitutional Sovereign " ; in the latter case, the King's own responsibility is engaged, A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 181 but the theory of the " Constitutional Sovereign " annihi- lated. It was of the highest importance, therefore, to ascertain (and Mr. Balfour was intelligent enough to put the question) when, and in what conditions, the King was ready to use his Royal Prerogative ; for, if he promised the Prime Minister to create peers, provided the Prime Minis- ter should one day want them the method of the " blank cheque" ; that is to say, if he let the Prime Minister under- stand that he held himself to be constitutionally at the beck and call of the Prime Minister, irrespective of his own feelings or views he thereby acquiesced in the traditional British view of the Constitutional Sovereign, and illustrated, at the same time, the vast difference between the British Constitution and, say, the American, as regards the role of the head of the State. His action showed, once again, that in the English system there is no check, as far as the sovereign's role is concerned, to hasty or ill-considered legis- lation ; such action, in a word, tended to enhance the des- potism of the representative assembly. If, on the other hand, the King agreed to use his Prerogative only in response to the Prime Minister's specific appeal at a specific crisis, he was thereby acting not as a " Constitutional Sovereign" of the alleged British constitutional form, but as an inde- pendent organ of the machine of government, as, indeed, a Head-of-the-State, like the President of the United States, who possesses the power of veto and uses it in virtue of his normal constitutional role. The question put by Mr. Balfour as to the date of the guarantees given the Prime Minister by the Crown was there- fore not merely a matter of historical interest, or of curious inquiry. A clear answer to that question was required in order to comprehend the real nature of the political crisis in England, or indeed whether that crisis was in reality a constitutional crisis. It was imperative to know how and why the King's Prerogative was transferred to the Prime Minister, for use in connexion with the Parliament Bill, 182 PROBLEMS OF POWER before it was possible positively to conclude that govern- ment to-day in England is Single-Chamber government; that is to say, a reversion to the dangerous form of Assembly which grew up during the French Revolution, and is at the antipodes of the forms evolved, under the inspiration of more rational ideas, to surround the expression of the people's will with steadying checks. Even, however, if the King acted in the spirit of an independent chef d'etat lending his Pre- rogative for temporary application to a special situation, as an American president in the interests of the nation exercises his veto for particular ends such combined action on the part of Commons and King against the Lords could not but diminish the prestige of the Upper House, and show the need of a readjustment of its " constitutional " role while at the same time it exposed the institution of the Mon- archy, qua institution, to legitimate discussion as regards its role in the British Constitution. What was obvious was that Mr. Asquith's action did not at any moment clear up the confusion reigning in men's minds as to the reciprocal relations of the several parts of the British constitutional machine. It is more difficult to- day than ever to feel sure what is the role of the King ; what that of the Commons, what that of the Lords ; and these am- biguities show clearly for the first time what confusion exists in the British Constitution. They hint at the advis- ability of defining the diverse functions of the parts of the State by a paper constitution which shall both embalm old precedents and prepare the nation for new situations. In any case the creation of fresh peers that is, the sudden circumstantial packing of an Upper House with members friendly to the Government, in order to pass Government measures would always have to be regarded as a bungling method of representative government, even if it were not an arbitrary or possibly a revolutionary measure. A Prime Minister and, indeed, any statesman, will invariably be excused for adopting revolutionary methods if he can prove A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 183 that a Constitution is unworkable. But he will not be approved for upsetting a Constitution if all he can say is, " It doesn't work as I should like it to." Mr. Asquith argued that his action was justifiable because the country was behind him, with two General Elections to the good for the proof of his argument. But that was not proved, since only a precise referendum on a definite question can ever prove such a point as that. At all events, the episode served merely as an object- lesson showing the flimsiness and not-up-to-dateness of the so-called British Constitution. Mr. Asquith's action, revolu- tionary in its manner, was not so clearly ww-Constitutional as to be really Revolutionary ; and it will have served the end of hastening the necessary movement making for a reform that shall provide England with a real Constitution, in harmony not only with the social and economic evolution of the Three Kingdoms, but, above all, with the new require- ments of an Empire composed of five self-governing nations of equal status and common interests* Throughout the disastrous period of England's absorption in her constitutional crisis, Germany was engaged in difficult and secret negotiations with France, in pursuance of the common efforts of the two Powers to apply their Agreement of 1909. As her newspapers showed, Germany was fully aware of the germs making for the disintegration of England. The signs of national, as well as of constitutional, crises in England were indeed becoming so ominous and so abundant that they were attracting the attention of the entire world. One of the most startling of these signs was the negotiation between Canada and the United States over the question of Reciprocity. Owing to the failure of the British Govern- ment and Parliament to put into effect in good tune the Imperial policy defended by Mr. Chamberlain, the British Colonies had been rapidly moving towards a state of all but complete independence. For several years they had been 1 See pp. 266-271. 184 PROBLEMS OF POWER insisting on the right to be called " Dominions," and Canada, notably, had concluded commercial treatiesjwith other States, indifferent as to the possible consequences for British trade. The so-called British Empire was falling asunder. And when, in the latter half of 1910, the President of the United States proposed to the Prime Minister of Canada a reciprocity treaty " that," as he himself put it in a private letter to Mr. Roosevelt (January 10, 1911), " would make Canada only an adjunct of the United States," the British Government had so completely lost the reins of sovereignty that all they could devise to save Canada for the " Empire " was, in Lord Haldane's words, " sympathetically to watch " the astound- ing colloquy between Mr. Taft and Sir W. Laurier. With deliberate unconcern, the noble Viscount said : " We are going to leave the British merchant to flourish in the future as he has done in the past under Free Trade, and to leave the British Empire to hold together by bonds of sympathy " (House of Lords, May 18, 1911). The policy of the Cunctators and the Pilates, the policy of washing one's hands of all responsibility, is often con- venient, but is not always followed without risk. Canadian loyalty was later on to save Imperial honour, but the British Government did nothing to put themselves into a state of grace making England meet for such salvation ; they did nothing to prevent the sudden snapping of the ties linking Canada to the Empire. In general, at this juncture, the reticence of British island-opinion was a spectacle that seemed, in itself, to be less a proof of tactful and dignified discretion than a kind of stoic morituri salutamus addressed to Britain's offspring. Shakespeare seemed to have fore- seen this hour when he made Lear say : " Meantime we shall express our darker purpose, Give me the map there. Know that we have divided In three (five) our Kingdom : and 'tis our fast intent To shake all cares and business from our age ; Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburthened crawl towards death. . . ." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 185 To be sure, when Lear was quite spent with an intolerable despair, Kent saw where succour lay, and Cordelia came from France to bring her father's spirit peace : " But, true it is, from France there comes a power Into this scattered Kingdom. . . ." France was not Canada ; France could do nothing to arrest the fateful gravitation of the great North-American Dominion towards the pull of its mighty neighbour ; and France, moreover, was even at tjiat very hour unwittingly indulging in a dangerous experiment. She was fishing in the troubled waters of the negotiations consequent upon the 1909 Agreement with Germany, an Agreement which, if it had been really applicable, would have rendered the Entente Cordiale no more than a matter of past history. The statues which surround the memorial monument to the Great Queen in front of Buckingham Palace assumed in 1911 the aspect of Gonerils and Regans personifying the Daughter States ; and when the noble Coronation Procession disappeared through the Arch down the perspective of the Mall, it required no blending of fantasy with the imagination to perceive the Venerable Mother, as she looked on her wilful daughters in the dusk of evening, take on the semblance of a weeping Niobe. The tragic spectacle was the finest comedy for Eng- land's enemies, but it caused bewilderment in France. " It is her own soul that Canada risks to-day," telegraphed 1 England's Imperial poet, the man who had done most to render the soul of the average Englishman articulate. " Once that soul is pawned for any consideration, Canada must inevitably conform to the commercial, legal, financial, social and ethical standards which will be imposed upon her by the sheer admitted weight of the United States." " Not so," had said President Taft publicly, " all talk of 1 From Bateman's, Burwash, Sussex, on September 6, to the Montreal Star. 186 PROBLEMS OF POWER annexation is bosh " the same President who had privately solicited for his policy the approval of the founder of Ameri- can Imperialism, his predecessor Mr. Roosevelt, with the assurance that Reciprocity would " make Canada only an adjunct of the United States." A candidate for the Presi- dency, with jubilant indiscretion, had publicly declared that such was indeed the case. And England's best friends did not doubt it, nor did they doubt that Canada was irrevocably lost to the Crown. Even so perspicacious an observer as Rear- Admiral Mahan did not doubt it. Writing in the Century Magazine on " The Panama Canal and Sea Power in the Pacific," he pointed out that the military effect upon Sea Power of the Panama Canal would be the facility with which the navy of the United States and " that of the govern- ment controlling Canada " could pass from one side to the other, in support of either coast, as needed ; and he added that he had advisedly used the words " the government controlling Canada," for, while Canada was a part of the British Empire, it was " difficult, in view of current political discussions in Canada, especially those touching the question of support to the Empire, not to feel that the preponderant tone there did not in that respect reflect that of Australia, New Zealand, or even of South Africa." Rear- Admiral Mahan concluded with all the world, before the fall of Sir W. Laurier, in the year of Agadir, and while the United States and England were signing an Arbitration Treaty for the settlement even of questions of National Honour ! that there " did not appear to be between Canada and Great Britain that strong dependence of mutual interests of defence, of which the British Navy is the symbol and the instrument." He deeply regretted the fact, but the fact seemed incontes- table ; there was no gainsaying it. Indeed, viewed from the United States, in the late summer of 1911, England's plight seemed even more terrible than when it was contemplated from Paris in 1910 and before July i (Agadir), 1911. It was obvious that the effect of A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 187 Agadir on European politics would be all to the good, that the stupid coup would finally and definitively weld the Entente Cordiale, galvanize England, re-temper the French national soul, and establish for yet a few sure years the European balance of power. But " Reciprocity," and the doubtful issue of the Imperial Conference of British Premiers, had bared to the nations the misery and nakedness of Eng- land. Her old-time Imperial optimism appeared to have migrated to the North-American Atlantic States. From Montreal to Boston, from Boston to New York, from New York to Charleston and Atlanta, the magic word " Recipro- city " seemed to be a kind of mystic pass-word ushering in the new era, the century of the Panama Canal, and giving an opportunity for all the admittedly belated readjust- ments of the Monroe Doctrine. In general, and always, on the American Continent, the air of individual liberty, of reciprocal trust, of tolerant and untrammelled thought, that men breathe is lighter, more invigorating, than in Europe ; and, as the breasts of the self-reliant citizens of the^ Western communities expand, the well-being that pervades their organisms is one that the long-disciplined inhabitants of an older society have never known and find it difficult to understand. In 1911 the Americans, those to the north of the Great Lakes as well as those of the United States, seemed to be more than ever keenly aware of the difference between themselves and the Europeans. " Reciprocity " appeared to them quite the most natural thing in the world. The fighting on the Ameri- can Continent during the past three centuries, as ex-President Eliot of Harvard has pointed out, has not been of the sort which most imperils liberty. The French and English wars furnished a school of martial qualities at small cost to liberty ; and the War of Independence was, like the war of 1861, a " Civil War " ; the one was as much a Rebellion as the other. Both were waged in defence of the British tra- dition of Free Institutions, and both resulted in a reinforce- 188 PROBLEMS OF POWER ment of the ideal of individual freedom. Nothing is more characteristic of the temper of human nature on the North American Continent than the fact that in 1827 the same President who was to give his name to that proud American doubled-edged policy known as the Monroe Doctrine, signed a Convention with Great Britain by which England and the United States should maintain on the Great Lakes only a few insignificant vessels for the policing of those shores. No buffer state or bristling armament impeded the natural advance into England's Canadian territory of the spirit of individual American self-reliance ; and the new Reciprocity Treaty of 1910 and 1911 seemed to be but the natural, the inevitable, consequence of this pacific penetration of Americanism. It was the contagion of " American " ideas that engendered that peculiar Canadian form of the Monroe Doctrine to which Sir W. Laurier gave expression when he reiterated at the Imperial Conference the intention of Canada never to become embroiled in a British quarrel unless it suited her to do so ; and the anti-Imperialistic Anglo-Cana- dian Convention as to the relations between the British and Canadian navies was but the formal confirmation of this resolve, and the definite expression of the feeling behind such utterances. Sir Wilfred Laurier, returning from the Imperial Con- ference of May 23 to June 20, had sailed triumphantly up the river from Quebec amid cheering crowds on the wharves, and shipping decked with bunting. He was welcomed in Montreal as the champion of Canadian autonomy. He himself acquiesced, declaring that he had fought at the Conference " for the equality of the two races and the vindication of Canada's rights as an autonomous country." He added : " We were asked to endorse a proposal for the creation of an Imperial Council, which would decide military and naval policies and the taxation of the people. I opposed this, because it would have been an abrogation of our rights and opposed to the doctrine of respon- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 189 sible government." This proud affirmation of a policy avowedly in opposition to the " imperial jingoes," this appeal to Canadian national sentiment, was made by the states- man who had hurried home " to renew the fight for Recipro- city," an idea which he cherished, not because he loved the United States, but because he believed that by its realization he would all but definitively secure Canadian independence. He had neither Mr. Rudyard Kipling's nor Real-Admiral Mahan's sense of the risks. His speech was made on July 12. Just twelve days before, the European Governments had been informed by the German Chancellor that the Panther was to be sent to Agadir. Nine days later, at the Lord Mayor's banquet in London, Mr. Lloyd George made the speech which, rattling round the world, showed that at last England had awakened. The Chancellor of the Exchequer reminded Germany and he reminded the Dominions that the British Empire was still in existence ; and that national honour and the security of England's great international trade were not party questions ..." Reciprocity " was doomed ! Sir Wilfred Laurier had opposed a proposal for the creation of an Imperial Council which should decide military and naval policy and the taxation of the people. He had virtually repudiated the Empire and affirmed the detachment of Canada ; and Mr. Fisher, at the same Im- perial Conference, had seriously suggested that the Con- ference should be extended to include Foreign Powers fatuities that seemed to echo the incredible British ignorance of world-conditions, and be one with the sublimely stupid efforts to avert the risks of war by signing unrestricted Arbi- tration Treaties. Less than three weeks before Agadir, the Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Association had voted the following resolution : " This Committee expresses its satisfaction that the Colonial Con- ference has rejected a scheme for a Central Imperial Council which would have seriously hampered the freedom both of the United Kingdom and of the Colonial Governments, would have put India i 9 o PROBLEMS OF POWER at an even greater disadvantage than at present as compared with the rest of the Empire, and by emphasizing unnaturally the question of Imperial Defence would have been liable to increase the tendency to military and naval panics." Indeed, when the Imperial Conference rose, so unsatis- factory was the outlook notwithstanding the fact that the representatives of the Dominions had been " admitted into the interior of the Imperial household," had been shown the very " arcanae imperil, without any reservation or qualification " 1 that it really seemed as if England must make up her mind to the loss of her Dominions, to the loss of the Empire, and as if the only attitude left her, in face of the German hordes, was that of the Roman sena- tors when the barbarians appeared on their thresholds. A doctor in political science, investigating England's plight at this hour, would have prescribed as follows : She must learn to look facts in the face ; abandon her dilatory tac- tics; cultivate the habit of intellectual probity tear the scales from her eyes ; recognize that the old game is up ; that the Colonies are not Dependencies, but full-fledged Dominions ; that no cut-and-dried scheme of Union can ever bind these Daughters to the Mother-Country ; and, concen- trating all her energy on the preservation of India, Egypt, and the Islands of the Pacific, awake to the truth that Europe is Europe, and that as long as Germany is Germany, the Britons and the Gauls have a common interest and must hold together. The British Imperial Conference ended its deliberations on June 20. The date of Agadir is July i. Almost exactly one year later, July 10, 1912 Reciprocity having been buried, the Anglo-American Arbitration Treaty paralysed Mr. Borden, the new Prime Minister of an awakened Canada, stated in London, whither he had come to confer on the lessons which Agadir had finally revealed even to the 1 Speech of Mr. Asquith, final sitting. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 191 Anglo-Saxon world, that the sea defence of the Empire could best be secured by one navy ; and he added : " The Cana- dian ideal is one king, one flag, one Empire, one navy one navy powerful enough to vindicate the flag, and maintain the integrity of the Empire." The crisis was over ! England was to be saved by the Dominions ! As regards Canada herself, what had taken place was quite simple. The Canadians, who are firmly resolved at all costs to maintain their autonomy, fancied in 1910 and 1911 that Commercial Reciprocity with the United States was the shortest cut to national independence ; and the same people rejected Reciprocity because they suddenly became convinced that the only way, after all, to save their national soul was to lose it, not to the United States, but to the Empire. The ends sought by Sir Wilfred Laurier and Mr. Borden were identical. Their methods alone differed. In the Canadian case it has happened that second thoughts were best. Under the Stars and Stripes Canada would inevitably have been absorbed. Under the Union Jack she will perhaps become what her late Governor-General, Earl Grey, pro- phesied of her on July 10, 1912 : " The controlling part of the Empire." Among the results of the Coup d'Agadir none was more unexpected, and none obviously of more far- reaching consequence. England, moreover, was no longer "to shake all cares and business from her age," and, " un- burthened, crawl towards death." To-day the lines ad- dressed by Walt Whitman to " America " seem to have been meant for the older country : Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, All, all alike, endear'd, grown, ungrown, young and old, Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother Chair'd in the adamant of Time. BOOK III BOOK III THE foregoing attempt to analyse the political history and domestic crises of the European Powers, and of the two rival nations in North America, will have served, however imperfect it is, to justify certain remarks made in the earlier pages of this Essay. Not only will it have shown that " to chronicle the doings of any individual nation without writing at the same time the history of all other peoples is no longer possible," it will also have illustrated the more general truths formulated in the statements that " behind the facade of Government two occult powers Money and Public Opinion are now determining the des- tinies of the world," and that " national spirit is manifested only when nationality is menaced." It is not infrequently held that the time is approaching when the coalition of political passion and of social hatred and envy will completely dominate what still remains of national feeling or prejudice. It is, at all events, a fact that, as M. Rene Pinon says, 1 " A travers les frontieres tend a s'etablir rinternationalisme des partis." He goes so far afield as to recall that Philip of Macedon, Alexander, and later on the Romans when they undertook to subjugate Greece, where a refined civilization veiled the mortal vice of class war, and the inexorable antagonism of rich and poor were always able to count on the complicity, either of the plutocracy careful of its interests, or of the demagogue 1 La lutte pour le Pacifique, p. 185. 195 196 PROBLEMS OF POWER whose tyranny was menaced. Certain modern parallels, notably Germany's choice of methods in her efforts to sub- jugate France, might be more pertinent. In modern Europe, continues M. Ren6 Pinon, " money has been an element of universal corruption, it has upset the normal play of the governmental and administrative machinery, it has destroyed all idealism." The facts, as they have already been pre- sented in these pages, hardly seem to warrant so sweep- ing an indictment : idealism, at all events, seems still to hold its own in spite of the " corrupting " power of wealth. In agreement with the diagnosis herein attempted of the nature of contemporary unrest, Signor Guglielmo Ferrero notes l that the European peoples are beginning again to care for other things than their economic organi- zation and questions concerning the balance of trade. The interesting fact is that modern peoples seem to crave both ideal moral satisfactions and economic well-being : they want Reform as much as they want Money. It is probable that this apparently curious inconsistency is no inconsistency whatever. It is likely that the growing love of order, the general desire for reform, and the outburst of nationalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the recog- nition of the fact that money is to-day the chief instrument of rapid and successful action, are different aspects of the same state of mind. In any case, it is absurd to prejudge a question of this kind. No answer to it can be reasonably attempted before considering a characteristic collection of those concrete economic factors that are so fast tending to cosmopolitanize the still distinctly differentiated rival nations and peoples. II When, in 1847, at tne Congress of the Communist Union held in London, Karl Marx and Engels launched the cry: " Proletarians of all countries, unite your forces ! "; when in 1 " L'Ideal et la Richesse " : Le Figaro, September 10, 1912. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 197 1866, at Geneva, working-class delegates from all over Europe drew up the statutes of the " International Association of Working Men " ; when, finally, the revolu- tionary army organized by the General Confederations of Labour of the world, abandoned the Marseillaise for the sinister battle-song of the Internationale, 1 these bat- talions of the proletariat overlooked the fact that the growth of the very causes which had produced the illusion of a similarity of interests uniting the working-classes in all countries against the employer and the capitalist, was soon to shatter that illusion, through the action of a new factor. That new factor was the world-wide emigration of the working-man in search of better labour conditions and a higher wage. The socialists or the anarchists of the " Internationale," who repudiated so fiercely every form of patriotic or national feeling, who condemned gods, govern- ments and armies in their humanitarian anti-militarist 1 II n'est pas de sauveur supreme, Ni Dieu, ni Cesar, ni tribun. Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-memes ! Decretons le salut commun ! * * * * Les rois nous soiilaient de fumees, Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans ! Appliquons la greve aux armees, Crosse en 1'air et rompons les rangs ! S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales, A faire de nous des heros, Us sauront bientot que nos balles Sont pour nos propres g6neraux ! Refrain. Debout ! les damnes de la terre ! Debout ! les forgats de la faim ! La raison tonne en son cratere, C'est 1'eruption de la fin. Du passe faisons table rase, Foule esclave, debout, debout ! Le monde va changer de base : Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout ! I 9 8 PROBLEMS OF POWER frenzy, found themselves face to face with a set of facts which gave a surprisingly foolish look to their internation- alism. Thus the Italian labourer is over-running the globe, and becoming the rival of the American in New York, and of the Frenchman in Provence, in Lorraine and in the He de France. The German and the Swiss are colonizing Paris, the East of France, South America, London. The Pole is pullulating on both slopes of the Vosges. The Scandinavian, the Russian Jew, the Hungarian, are elbowing the native- born of every country. So overwhelming is the mounting tide of immigration in the United States and certain of the British Dominions that almost annually now for a quarter of a century those countries have felt called upon to raise higher and higher dykes against the influx of undesirables. In fact, to use the words of an excellent observer, M. Henri Joly, of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, " working men, when they gaze from afar across the boundaries of their several countries, look upon one another as allies, and even as brothers ; but when they are brought face to face they become rivals, and they then alter their policy." In every country to-day the labour syndicates the very organizations that had in- vented the notion of revolutionary " direct action," and the device of the general strike in order to manifest their impatience with the policy of legality followed by the so- cialist leaders and classic trade unionists these syndicates are calling on governments and parliaments to protect them against the alleged disloyal competition of transient foreign labour. Who has forgotten the action of the local carpenters' union after the destruction of San Francisco ? The annals of industry in every country in Europe are filled with the record of strikes, labour riots, murders even, consequent solely upon the international competition of the working classes. In fact, the whole theory of class war, with its corollary of the Internationale, would thus seem to have been a very hasty generalization. At all events A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 199 for the moment internationalism in the labour world ap- pears, in its curve of evolution, to have taken a direction parallel with that of internationalism in the political world. This is another example of the fact that nationalism is manifested only when national integrity is menaced. The growing claim of organized labour in the several nations to deal with the majestic phenomenon of migration, to demand, that is, state intervention, in the form of legislative measures, against the possibility of foreign competition, calls for even closer analysis. This peculiarly picturesque socio-economic movement has been brilliantly studied by the Italian writer, Signer Giuseppe Prato in his book: // Protezionismo Operaio (Turin 1910). 1 The legis- lative measures in question assume the double form, first of protection against the invasion, the real presence, of the foreign labourer, and secondly of customs protection against the cheap products of the foreign workman. Under the pretext of the " protection of national industries," the demand for " tariff reform " and the interdiction of " undesirables " occur everywhere simultaneously. Mr. Chamberlain, as far back as August 1904, declared that along this path lay England's safety. " Where would be the logic," he asked in the House of Commons, " if the foreigners to whom we wish to close British territory, could, by remaining in Hamburg or in Poland, manufacture products with which they could inundate our markets ? " And even the very peoples who, as exporters of labour, ought to foster every form of economic laisser-faire, the Italians and the Japanese for instance, keep step with the other rival nations and heed the demand of their proletariat for a " barbaric " exclusiveness. Quite recently the European Governments had to protest against a project of the Italian Government to interdict in Italy the presence of foreign insurance companies, 2 and Italian labour organizations 1 Translated into French by M.Georges Bourgin : Le Protection- nisme Ouvrier. J See pp. 303, 304. 200 PROBLEMS OF POWER have more than once demanded arbitrary measures of expul- sion against foreign employers established in Italy ; while the same Japanese workmen who protest against American restrictions on immigration, have called on their govern- ment to exclude Chinese labourers from Japan ! The spectacle has an ironic, even a fine comic quality ; but irony and absurdity seem to characterize most manifesta- tions of the human mob. At all events, the tendency to act absurdly is general ; and while such action is unjustifi- able from the point of view of pure economics, it is natural and inevitable in the light of what we know of human motives and of the psychology of crowds, above all those of the organic communities, welded together by common tradi- tions and common hopes, known as nations. The orthodox economist, the doctrinaire, " scientific " ideologues, may protest that the protectionist " nationalistic " movement in question is all wrong. Their anguish does not alter the fact of its existence. Even so impartial an inquirer as Signer Prato, the first to co-ordinate the immense mass of facts illustrating what he calls " working-class protectionism," refuses to dwell on any but the purely economic aspects of this world-wide phenomenon, and writes with the same imperturbable logic untempered by common sense that Mr. Norman Angell applies to the problem of international dis- armament. " The truth is," he says, " that it really matters little to humanity to know what area is to be reserved in the future to the expansion of the various races. What greatly interests it on the contrary is to have the assurance that none of the natural sources of wealth, the rational exploitation of which may bring about the greatest general well-being, is to be diverted from human uses by the monopolizing selfishness of little organized groups." 1 The " monopolizing selfishness of little organized groups " is " scientific " tautology for " national interest " ; and until Political Economy has done its worst and " Humanity " 1 Le Protectionnisme Ouvrier, p. 119. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 201 becomes a reality so long, that is, as the word Humanity remains only a metaphysic fiction it will matter much to the several " little organized groups " to the Italian na- tion, to the French nation, to the British nation, to the Servian nation, or even to the Chinese nation, as the Boxer riots showed whether they are suffered to expand or simply to exist in their own way, without the friction of alien elements tending to alter their national character and to destroy their cherished parochial prejudices. 1 Signor Prato admits that influences of climate, traditions, language, the milieu, family affections and patriotism, z may on occasion be obstacles in the way of that ideal mobility of human merchandise, that normal flow of immigration, which re- joices the hearts of the economists. But these sentiments he regards ( as baneful fictions with which science not only should, but can, do away ; for him they are barbaric pre- judices, retarding the progress of civilization. Yet it does not seem that the problems raised, for instance, by contemplation of the socio-economic, political conditions in the mining regions of the frontiers between Prussia, Alsace- Lorraine and Luxembourg can be completely illuminated by the application of so simplified a generalization. Thus, for it matters little where the observer takes his stand, more than eighty per cent, of the houses in the French portion of the valley of the Meuse are owned by their occupants. These proprietors are shrewd peasant farmers who do all that can reasonably be expected of any man to keep the birth-rate within decorous limits. In 1904 the excess of births over deaths was 143. The motives of the Meusian peasant are Malthusian ; they are the logical consequence of his desire 1 How resist recommending to Signor Prato's attention in this connexion the typical case of the closing down of the great steel mills at Gary, Indiana, in October 1912, owing to the sudden departure of some 2,750 workmen of the Slav races in order to rejoin the colours in the crusade of the Balkan States against the Turk ? 2 p. 250, work quoted. 202 PROBLEMS OF POWER not to continue dividing up an inheritance of fields which has already suffered painful partition. He adapts himself as best he can to the provisions of the Napoleonic code, and what is the result ? It is noted by Captain Vidal de la Blache in his monograph on The Lorraine Valley of the Meuse (Armand Colin, p. 139) : " les bras manqueraient a la terre sans 1'emploi des machines agricoles et sans la main d'ceuvre etr anger e (allemande, luxembourgeoise, beige)." The polyglot speech of the international nomad is, in fact, beginning to offend the traveller's ear all down the gentle valley of the Meuse, and it becomes tolerable although even then solely for aesthetic reasons only when heard be- neath the shadow of the gloomy, almost feudal, fortresses, veritable towers of Babel, the foundries and blast furnaces of the valley of the Chiers, at Longwy, or Mont-Saint Martin. But more prolonged immersion in this cacophony, here, even here, above all here, evokes thoughts of which the political economists have wisely washed their hands. And these thoughts are multiplied a thousand- fold by more intimate acquaintance with the serfs who swarm in and out of still other feudal fortresses, the monster iron foundries and the gigantic steel works, of which the gleam reddens the night sky of Luxembourg and Lorraine. The observer will learn there, to be sure, if he has never learned before, the impossibility, the futility, the absurdity even, of erecting Chinese walls be- tween the nations, with the object of preventing the recip- rocal exchange of products or of human merchandise. Un- questionably such walls are bound to be scaled by the nomad labourer. They are doomed to be undermined by the burrowing forces " pacific penetration " of international trade. The " patriotic " ideal of converting the several nations into water-tight compartments, within which each people may work out its salvation in sacred separation from its neighbours, obviously ignores the most characteristic material, and many of the moral, forces of the modern A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 203 world. Yet there is still left the main question as to what is really becoming of nationality under the action of these forces. In this connexion it is interesting to examine with some detail the single case of Luxembourg. Within the last twenty-five years, in that picturesque little Duchy which seemed predestined to remain one of the tranquil back-waters of civilization the discovery of a rich subsoil has internationalized industry and cosmo- politanized a rural population. All the economic and social conditions have been transformed. But what is the real nature of the transformation ? As one of the mem- bers of the Luxembourg Chamber said, during the debate of December 1911 on the proposed mining concessions : " When so many foreigners and so much capital come to our country they must inevitably form a State within the State, and this situation will certainly become more serious. We, the people of Luxembourg, must take our precautions, lest we be treated as foreigners in our own country. The danger lies in the fact, that we are being dispossessed of our country, and, so to speak, losing our nationality, owing to the intervention of a foreign industry." Any observer on the spot will understand these appre- hensions, and his briefest inquiry will show how firmly they are rooted in fact. He will discover that the members of the Luxembourg Chamber are besieged with applications from the youth of Luxembourg for places in the great metal- lurgic industries of the country, places which it is impossible to obtain because they are occupied by foreigners. At Differdange, out of a population of 15,000, there are 6,000 Germans ; yet, owing to the German mining law, many Luxembourgeois have been obliged to leave Alsace-Lorraine, where they had been employed as overseers by local mining companies. The obligation which the Luxembourg Govern- ment has imposed on the concessionaires of mines to con- sume the products of their mines in Luxembourg itself, by the building of forges and of iron and steel works, is not an effective remedy to this " evil." The Minister of the In- 204 PROBLEMS OF POWER tenor, M. Braun, calculates that sixty percent, of the men employed in the metallurgic industry in Luxembourg are foreigners. 1 The population of the Grand Duchy has in- creased in five years by 13,436 persons, but out of the total number of inhabitants in 1910 259,891 nearly 40,000 or 15 -28 per cent, were foreigners. Esch has grown with the mushroom speed of an American town. In one entire quarter the visitor hears only Italian spoken. And with the growth of industry the cost of living has immensely increased, while wages have risen fifty per cent, since 1894. From this startling movement of " prosperity " the inhabitants have no doubt reaped a certain benefit, but the chief beneficiaries have been the German iron-masters, and at this very hour the whole economic, not to say politi- cal, future of Luxembouig is in the balance, owing to the efforts of the famous German metallurgist, Herr Thyssen whose activity, by the way, has at the same time been suc- cessfully manifested in Normandy to obtain the concession of all the mines still at the disposal of the Luxembourg State. The European aspects and bearings of industrial energy of this admirable German kind are, one would suppose, too obvious to be overlooked. The Luxembourgeois them- selves are becoming alarmed. They dread their eventual absorption by German capital. The above quoted words of a member of the Grand Ducal Chamber were subse- quently echoed, in the same debate, by a colleague who exclaimed : " What would happen if our national interests were to find themselves in conflict with those of one of the immense German establishments ? Would there not be reason to fear that Berlin would exercise pressure on the country ? " It is likely that the Government of Luxem- bourg has not failed to learn the lesson of Tangiers and of Agadir. But it would be incredible, if, in face of the local anxiety aroused by the progress of Germany in Luxern- 1 See Luxembouig Memorial, Debate, December 20, 1911. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 205 bourg, the Quai d'Orsay did not see that a rapprochement with the Grand Duchy is now possible. England, whose interests are less immediate, has had the courage to favour her capitalists in their efforts to thwart the Germans in their systematic efforts to convert Luxembourg into a Prussian fief : the whole of the Grand Duchy is soon to be lighted by elec- tricity produced by turbines working in water captured from the Sure by the Science and Capital of Englishmen. It is a first blow dealt to the rapidly growing German domination of a neutral and independent State. France, on the other hand, notwithstanding the overtures of the Luxembourg Government, still delays to take the only step which can effectually restore her prestige in a region that she should prevent at all costs from becoming germanized : the con- struction in the valley of the Chiers of a canal which shall open Dunkirk, Antwerp and Rotterdam to the metallurgic industry of the Grand Duchy. France, which purchases annually from Germany some fifteen millions of tons of coke for use in the metallurgic works of Longwy and of Briey and which, for this reason, hesitates to exclude foreigners from participation in French mining concessions, lest the interdiction should be followed by reprisals France would manifestly recover more than the disbursement re- presented by her dependence on German coal should her Minister of Commerce revive a measure which would be as welcome to his own Eastern compatriots as to the Luxem- bourg Government. The present moment, moreover, is a critical one. It is interesting to recall that the successor of Kiderlen-Waechter, as Secretary of State for foreign affairs, is Herr Gottlieb von Jagow, who in 1908 was German Minister in Luxembourg. His four years subsequently passed in Rome will not have obliterated the impressions he gathered in his quiet post overlooking the French Eastern frontier. If France does not bestir herself she will awake within a few years to the fact that the Treaty of Vienna has been automatically revised, and that the Grand Duchy of 206 PROBLEMS OF POWER Luxembourg is no longer an independent Power. The German flag, now flying from the donjon of Hoh Koenigsburg, will then be hoisted on the ruined heights of Vianden, in full view of the windows of the house where Victor Hugo wrote L' Annie Terrible. Ill If ever the Powers, if ever France, were forced to tolerate such a fact as this, it would be because they had failed to fashion in their arsenals the only kind of weapon which, in the twentieth century, is a really effective instrument of combat. Trade, no doubt, follows the flag ; but more often the flag follows trade, and if the nations are awaken- ing to the fact that their autonomy is being menaced by German financial initiative and by German industrial enter- prise and it is not only the smaller Powers, Holland, Bel- gium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, but even France and England and Brazil which are face to face with the problem of stemming the German commercial tide the fault is their own ; they have hitherto neglected to employ suitable arms against their now insinuating, now brow-beating rival. There is thus a point of view, the detached scientific point of view, from which it is impossible not to acknowledge that Germany deserves all she has got, or all that she is ever likely to get. The old agrarian Germany has become a vast workshop, dependent on the foreigner for its food supplies. It imports cereals and other food-products for one-seventh of its population, nine millions of its inhabitants. So true is this that Herr von Gwinner, the Manager of the Deut- scher Bank, has, perhaps not extravagantly, said : "If Germany were to lose her commercial clientele, she would be obliged to become aggressive." At all events the Ger- mans are ceasing to emigrate. Germany annually summons from abroad some 750,000 agricultural labourers. She is bound, in her struggle for life, to insist on an open market A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 207 in order to make money enough to purchase the foodstuffs which she is unable to produce at home. This, no doubt, is the secret of the growth of her naval budget ; and there is no logical obligation for the other nations to regard her fleet as a predestined instrument of aggression. It is the great manufacturers, the " business interests," in Germany, who are most convinced of the need of a power- ful fleet. 1 In reply to the British First Lord of the Admiralty, they insist that such a fleet is not a " luxury," but a vital necessity. 2 It exists for the protection of German trade as the British fleet exists for the protection of England's trade. Whatever the added chances of inter- national collision created by its growth, the original motives of this expansion may fairly be ascribed to economic causes unmixed by bellicose intent. One can admit all this impartially, and yet find it the more difficult to account, on the basis of this so-called natural hypothesis, for Germany's refusal loyally to accept England's recent practical proposal for diminishing the naval rivalry between the two Powers. And the difficulty grows when the observer notes that, simultaneously with this refusal to adopt the British scheme for parallel and propor- tionate diminution of naval power, Germany votes, immedi- ately after the conclusion of the Moroccan arrangement with France, a sum of nearly 50,000,000 for the creation of two new army corps, 3 one of which is to be stationed at Sarrebourg, linking the forces at Metz and Strasbourg, exactly as though she meant to put in speedy practice the well-known plan of her general staff, which General von Bernhardi has thus bluntly justified : " Germany's object is to crush one of her foes before the other has dreamed of intervention. In such tactics as these lies Germany's sal- 1 Cf. the " Inquiry " opened by the Nord und Sud, July, 1912. 2 " The British navy is to us a necessity, and, from some points of view, the German navy is to them more in the nature of a luxury." Speech by Mr. Churchill before the Clyde Shipbuilders. Cf. p. 68. 208 PROBLEMS OF POWER vation." At the same time Germany is increasing the strate- gic railways which lead to the frontier States * ; she is plan- ning to widen the Kiel Canal, and is zealously seeking to reform the financial system which is, perhaps, the Achilles tendon of her power. All these acts, manifestations, ten- dencies, may be merely coincidental, and, in so far as they are the sign of a reflecting policy, the mere indication of a wish to render Germany impregnable against attack. But in presence of facts so numerous, so easily admitting of a contrary interpretation, it is logical for even other than British observers to conclude that Germany constitutes a danger to peace and that the danger lies, as Mr. Balfour said in the June issue of Nord und Sud : " in the co-existence of that marvellous instrument of warfare which is the German army and navy, with the assiduous, I had almost said the organized, advocacy of a policy, which it seems impossible to reconcile with the peace of the world or the rights of nations. For those who accept this policy, German development means German territorial expansion. All countries which hinder, though it be only in self-defence, the realization of this ideal are regarded as hos- tile, and war or the threat of war is deemed the natural and fitting method by which the ideal itself is to be accomplished." 2 1 The new Malmedy-Stavelot line is connected with the German military camp at Elsenborn, and with Cologne, Coblence and Treves. Another line parallel to the Belgian frontier runs south from Aix-la- Chapelle. See p. 171. 2 The origins of Anglo-German misunderstanding are more remote however, than Mr. Balfour has felt called upon to indicate. Edward Bernstein, the German Socialist, summarizes them in his pamphlet on " The English Danger and the German People." They started, he thinks, in 1879, when Germany inaugurated a protectionist tariff system, which injured British trade. England's distrust of Germany was increased when the latter began to develop a colonial policy. Some years later, the situation was aggravated by the famous Kruger telegram, followed by German Anglophobia during the Boer war. Thereupon Germany hastened the construction of her fleet. Why feel surprise, asks Herr Bernstein, if Edward VII immediately under- took what has been called the encerclement of Germany ? By pro- claiming herself the Protector of Islam, Germany continued to alarm the Mussulman powers, and the whole Moroccan business was calcu- lated, says this German authority, with extraordinary impartiality, to pit the powers against Germany. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 209 The impression, in a word, is inevitable that not only does the peace of Europe depend on Germany, but that the prosperity of Germany lies hi her own hands. If she possessed the force of character to abandon the aggressive policy of the last ten years ; if she could convince herself, and then convince the Powers, that the motives of her political action are peaceful, that she is not trying to domi- nate the universe ; if she were to repudiate the majestic dreams of Pangermanism, the theories of the General Bernhardis, she could quietly take the most brilliant and practical revenge for all the humiliating rebuffs of Tangiers and Agadir. By the employment of a method diametric- ally the opposite of the disquieting, aggressive attitude she has chosen, she could, if she liked, outstrip all the Powers in the accumulation of wealth and in world expansion. As long as Germany remains a menace to America, and to France and England, by showing that she fancies herself obliged to oust France and England from the points of the globe in which they have taken root, she imperils her economic and industrial interests. It is doubtful whether France has gained any added military strength by her de- claration of a Protectorate in Morocco. She is probably weakened in her Continental military power by taking possession of a region which for a generation will require at least one whole army corps to police it. The Colonial Powers that have won so much territory during the last twenty years at the apparent expense of German prestige night easily be undone by Germany, whose genius for a certain kind of Colonial expansion a very practical kind, and perhaps the only kind that tells is superior to theirs. It is perfectly true, as Mr. Norman Angell says, 1 that there are to-day more Germans in France than there are French- men in all the Colonies that France has acquired in the last half century ; and German trade with France outweighs 1 The Mirage of the Map. Bulletin of the American Association for International Conciliation, No. 53. P 210 PROBLEMS OF POWER enormously the trade of France with all the French Colonies. The late Prime Minister, M. Caillaux, argued, in his speech defending the Franco-German Agreement with regard to Morocco and the Congo, that the possession of Colonies was pure vain-glory in comparison with the advantages to be secured from the probable international commercial arrange- ments of the future. France is to-day a better Colony for the Germans than they could make of any exotic Colony which France owns. The distinguished German Socialist, Edward Bernstein, points out in his pamphlet, " The English Danger and the German People," that German im- ports into South Africa amount to 38,000,000, whereas British imports hardly reach 4,000,000. In Egypt, almost the entire trade is in German hands. In a word, German expansion is the wonder of the world. Germany's real Colonies are countries she has never owned. German colonizers are of the cuckoo-race. They prefer nests built by others. The pity of it is Germany does not know this/or that she is making up her mind that others suspect her of knowing it, and are taking their precautions accordingly. Germany is a parvenu Power, and full of Pangermans who want to " make history," and not merely to " make money." Germany deserves our sympathy. She lies in the centre of Europe, an enemy one of them mortal on each hand, the two Powers of the Dual Alliance ; and when she lifts her eyes from her eyry of Heligoland she beholds in the distance an island fortress manned by men whose one principle of international action has been to prevent any single power from dominating Europe, and who are closing their Dominion markets to her trade. She possesses for futile ends that have nothing to do with the vital problems of economy two jealous " allies " ; restive megalomaniac Italy, whose King is biding his time to declare himself the latest of the Roman Emperors, and an Aehrentalized Austria which has ceased to be satisfied with her role of a " brilliant second," and is in patriotic duty bound to avenge thehumi- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 211 liations entailed by the recent Balkan War. In interna- tional relations Germany is reduced to a day-by-day, almost a minute-by-minute policy of opportunism. Forced to defend, in Europe, a status quo based on the intolerable crime and egregious blunder of the Annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, when Italy makes war on Turkey, and upsets German prestige at Constantinople, Germany's one hope is to revive Crispianism, to pit France against Italy, and in general to evoke an Italian nationalism which will render her more necessary to her Austrian ally. Besides this, there are all the domestic ills, the simmering unrest, the doubtful social future overshadowed by the fundamental contra- diction between the Democratic constitution of the German Empire and the feudal character of the Prussian state. 1 Moreover, the leaders of Germany's foreign policy have for ten years raised rash hopes in the German people, and yet steadily showed themselves incapable of coping with the complex problems confronting them. Meanwhile, the youth- ful optimism of the plutocratic German oligarchy, nourish- ing, like the American, colossal fancies, dreams of improvis- ing, with the aid of a golden wand, a Titanic civilization superior to any that has preceded it. The Pan-German centaurs, in the spirit of the Valkyrie out-riders, are ready to plunge rough-shod, singing their mystic battle song of Commercial Imperialism, over the Gallo-Roman fields on which they gaze from the summits of the Vosges. Thence, traversing the Atlantic, they are braving the 1 See L' esprit Public en Allemagne, by Henri Moysset (Felix Alcan) and Les Embarras de I' Allemagne by Georges Blondel (Plon). A significant event occurred on January 30, 1913, in the debate in the Reichstag on the expropriation of Polish proprietors. That assembly passed a vote of censure on the Chancellor. He came forth, no doubt, constitutionally intact, because he depends not on the Reichstag, but on the Emperor, but the incident was a sign of the times. This is the first time the German Democracy has made use of its new liberty of voting, after an interpellation, on a Government measure. It will not be the last. 212 PROBLEMS OF POWER Monroism of the North Americans in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and in three great states of Southern Brazil. In the provinces of .Santa Catalina, Parana and Rio-Grande- do-Sul 350,000 Germans dominate a population that con- tains not more than ten per cent, of native born Brazilians. The Germans occupy there some 8,000 square miles. They are at last realizing the dreams of the rich bankers of Augs- burg, the Velzers, who, three centuries ago, purchased from Charles the Fifth a vast Venezuelan province. 1 And it is one of the ironies of history that, at the University of Harvard, on the sacred soil of old Massachusetts, one of the most mettlesome of these German centaurs, disguised as a professor of philosophy, should profit by the hospitality accorded to him to battle openly against the Monroe Doc- trine, urging the citizens of the United States to cease their vigilance as regards the invasion of the South American Continent by the European. The excellent German who is so diligently and patriotically engaged in spying out the American Canaan for the glory of the Deutschtum, has found perhaps unexpected allies among the more innocent com- patriots of Wendell Phillips and Emerson. The Atlantic Monthly contained recently a brilliant but specious article opposing the fundamental policy of the United States on the question of the Monroe Doctrine, and inspired by a fanatical hostility against the " present inhabitants of Latin America." " Let us have a new Pan-Germanism," ex- claimed the anonymous author of this article, pretentiously entitled " A Letter to Uncle Sam." " Let our race (sic) get together. ... If you, who owe so much to the German in this your own fair land, in the civilization they have brought here. ... If you still want to fight these splendid people who want to find expanding room as you once sought and found expanding room in order to bolster and uphold the wretched travesty of a tyrannous dictatorship masquerading as a paper repub- 1 See Les Democraties Latines de I'Amerique, by F. Garcia-Calderon, pp. 267-274. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 213 lie, sir, you have forfeited the world's respect ; you have not adjusted yourself to the new day ; you are an inadequate steward ; you are a relic of the nineteenth century, and you will richly deserve the thrashing you will surely receive." Because Germany complains that the British Empire and the Monroe Doctrine are blocking her expansion, does England, then, and do the United States, owe her the same kind of " compensations " which she claimed from France in the dark days of 1911 ? This eloquent pro-Teuton masquerading as a kind of German-American midwife for an Allemania groaning in birth-pangs, officina et vagina gentium proposes that the United States should say to Germany : " Welcome to South Brazil " ; that, at the same time Germany should say to Great Britain : " Sleep in peace. We have no further need of your possessions " ; that Germany and Great Britain should both say finally to the United States : " We guarantee your status quo and your paramount and indisputable interests on the American hemisphere from Canada to the Equator " ; that all should say to Brazil, and Brazil should say to all : but that he does not tell us ! It is obvious that this writer has not yet got at the root of the matter. He knows that the economic necessities of a nation determine its policy ; but it is no longer, as has already been made clear, because Germany needs, or even wants, to possess new territory, as an outlet for a surplus population, that she constitutes a danger. On the contrary, statistics show that her sons are ceasing to emigrate, that her birth- rate is steadily falling, and that she has even to import labourers from abroad. Count Posadowsky, Heir von Bethmann-Hollweg's predecessor in the office of Imperial Minister of the Interior, insisted on these facts, in November 1911, in an electioneering speech at Bielefeld. Germany, he argued, " had already an enormous territory to open up which would cost a lot of money just when they had made the imperial finances more or less balance." Antagonism on 214 PROBLEMS OF POWER the part of the Great Powers to territorial expansion by Germany in tolerable climates was as dangerous as blocking up the safety valve of a steam-engine. " It was, however, absolutely untrue that Germany was at present over-popu- lated and needed room for her surplus people. The truth on the contrary was that Germany had to import hundreds of thousands of foreigners to till German soil and work German mines." She wants an open market, and that is an ideal, no doubt, which British Imperial Preference would endanger. But more even than an open market in which to sell her goods, she wants an open market from which to buy other essential products, the possession of which is to-day a matter of life and death for her. She is scouring the world for iron. During the first ten years after the Franco-German War German industry advanced with magnificent strides, under the fostering influence of the Zollverein. 1 The French mil- liards of the war indemnity helped to swell the mounting tide of industrial and commercial expansion. When, in the period from 1880-1891, Bismarck introduced a protec- tionist system, and at the same time neglected to create a colonial empire capable of becoming the national receptacle of the over-production at home, he seemed wantonly to be trying to arrest the steady advance of the previous ten years. The neighbouring nations exercised reprisals. The number of foreign markets diminished. Yet the German population was rapidly increasing. An industrial crisis en- sued. Then it was that the German began to emigrate in droves. Afresh war might have helped to solve the situa- tion. Instead, Germany decided to alter her economic policy. Between 1891 and 1907, accordingly, she followed the system of signing commercial treaties with the different Powers. Prosperity seemed to return. German manufac- turers once again launched forth on what appeared to be the 1 See Blondel : L'Essor Economiquc du Peuple Allemand and L 'A llemagne aux abois, by Henry Gaston. Preface by General Bonnal. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 215 route of a magnificent future. Now, instead of exporting her citizens many of whom even returned from abroad she lavishly dumped her products " Made in Germany " upon all the world-markets. Nothing comparable with this moment of her national life had ever before been seen, save in the United States, where the phenomenon of the daring commercial " boom " took place in the same condi- tions. France, following a policy of recueillement and caution, both corresponding to her needs and characteristic of her prudent temperament, allowed herself to fall steadily be- hind in the race for the capture of the world-markets, while Germany, plunging recklessly on, evolved a system of financial and industrial credit which it is necessary to analyse in order to comprehend the existing facts affecting interna- tional relations. The [magnificent development of German industry has been rendered possible by a flexible but precarious banking system. In Germany the banks, even the savings banks which, in France, employ their deposits in the purchase of State bonds or in stable and well-guaranteed securities scatter their money broad-cast, lending to manu- facturers, discounting bills, or buying speculatively uncer- tain shares. In case of a " run " on a bank caused by a panic it is not always easy for the German savings bank to reimburse its clients. The Pan-Germanists discovered this in 1911, when they disseminated a war-scare. 1 At the same tune the great industrial banks felt the pinch, and their case illustrated the inconveniences of the German system. Germany is " rich," but it lives on bor- rowed money. The German Michael is kept in a semblance of health by chronic subcutaneous injections. French or American capital is the galvanizing drug. German home capital does not suffice to fill the coffers of the banks that are constantly being emptied by the German manufacturers' 1 Cf. Mermeix : Chronique de I' An ign, pp. 289-308, 6; also Les Grands Marches Financiers (Alcan, 1912). 216 PROBLEMS OF POWER and traders' demands for advances. The banks conse- quently have to procure money from abroad, and they bor- row where they can. Nowhere in the world is there a larger stock of available funds than in France. The French banks, therefore, are able to play a highly advantageous game with the German bankers. They lend their money at a good price ; and if, when the loan has expired, the German banker finds it inconvenient to pay, and wants to renew the loan, the French bank acquiesces and receives a fresh com- mission. This is normal and remunerative banking business, and it is in the common interest that nothing should ever occur to hamper it. But at a period of stress and strain, of economic or social unrest, and above all of war-rumour, France can no longer afford to lend. Ordinary prudence obliges the banks to hoard rather than disburse ; when the German asks for money, the Parisian banker retorts by claiming the settlement of his loan ; and the German banker is forced to pay his debts with real money instead of with promissory notes. The first and immediate consequence is that German industry is handicapped. If the tightening is prolonged, the great manufacturing and business enter- prises totter and fall like packs of cards. To prevent such a krach the German banker, the great French credit estab- lishments being closed to him, makes a desperate appeal for funds to the money-kings of the United States. In Septem- ber and October, 1911, Germany required 300,000,000 francs immediately. The American bankers saw their opportunity, and lent, at a rate of 6 per cent, and 7 per cent., money which in normal times Berlin could have got from Paris for 3 per cent, and 4 per cent. That was the price Germany had to pay for the luxury of flying her flag off Agadir. The object-lesson was one that any but Pan-German eyes could read. That the nation as a whole has probably learned it was proved by the speech of William II at the Kiel re- gattas in June 1912, when he reminded the people of the old A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 217 Hanseatic principality that it is one thing to hoist your ensign at the mast and another to haul it down with honour. Unfortunately, however, no experienced observer will have regarded as an amende honorable this diplomatic liquidation of the humiliating episode of Agadir. It was, no doubt, an adroit effort on the part of the Emperor to make what the Americans call " the best of a bad job," but it certainly marks on the part of the Prussian masters of Germany no diminution in the passion for world-dominion, no change in policy ; and it should be taken merely in connexion with recent warnings of Herr von Lumm, one of the members of the Board of Directors of the Reichsbank. He, at least, has drawn the inevitable and patriotic conclusion from the events of 1911 and 1912. In a series of articles in the Bank Archil) he reminded the German banks that, in scattering so recklessly the money deposited with them, and in failing to keep a stable stock in hand, they are doing their best to produce an explosion of financial and industrial panics. The figures cited by Herr von Lumm in respect to the speculations on shifting securities made at the Stock Ex- change through the intermediary of the great banks, have so alarmed this competent observer that he counsels greater prudence and less precipitation, if Germany does not wish to find her economic evolution hopelessly paralysed. 1 German industry, German trade, therefore, are constantly checked through a stoppage of fiduciary circulation, a kind of financial thrombosis, the temporary damming up of the canals of liquid money. Such are the possible disad- vantages of the German credit system. But German industry is exposed to even greater risks from outside. Whenever a world-market is closed to it, when tariff walls are raised against it, Germany exclaims : " We are being ' encircled/ hemmed in." It never seems to occur to her that other countries have the same " right " 1 Cf . the articles by M. Andre Sayous in the Information, notably one published on June 5, 1912. 2i8 PROBLEMS OF POWER to favour their own industries as she has to develop hers. " We claim our place in the sun," she continues, as if any of the Powers had the slightest wish to deprive her of any unoccupied region with a southern aspect which she has the capital and the initiative to colonize. Whenever Eng- land, the United States, France even, have recovered in the world-markets ground of which they had been temporarily deprived through the splendid campaign of the German travelling salesmen ; whenever these Powers establish trading stations in regions hitherto monopolized by the German manufacturer ; when Spain slowly wakes to the possibility of creating her own public works instead of appealing to German capitalists and German engineers ; when any other country that had formerly looked to Ger- many for aid learns to get on without her, the Germans begin to wonder if the whole world is not conspiring to throttle their national life. Such is the legend that has grown up in Germany, and England is uniformly regarded, and most unfairly regarded, as the instigator of this alleged con- spiracy. Lord Lansdowne, who, with M. Delcasse and the late King Edward, has been one of the chief agents of the " Time Spirit " in giving diplomatic shape to the present scheme of international relations, said in the House of Lords on February 14, 1912, that when England came to terms with France, in 1903 and 1904, the two countries had " am- ple materials for an all-round understanding," but that " there was no such array of acute and outstanding difficul- ties between England and Germany," for the excellent reason that during the twenty preceding years one British Government after another had been settling these questions as they arose. That is to say, Germany has no legitimate grievance of any kind. As a Times leading article had pointed out two and a half months before Lord Lansdowne, the Anglo-German Agreement of 1890, denning the British and German spheres of influence, not only in East Africa but in West and in South- West Africa, and ceding Heligoland A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 219 to Germany in return for the British protectorate over Zanzibar, was the very first of the series of agreements afterwards concluded on similar lines with other Powers. This treaty was a public British acknowledgment of Ger- many's status as a Colonial Power. It was followed up in 1898 by an understanding which rendered Anglo-German competition impossible in the event of the Portuguese colonies coming into the market. A year later England allowed Germany to hoist her flag on the two most important islands of the Samoan group. In China in 1897 and 1900 England continued to manifest her sense of Germany's Colo- nial needs and " rights." In short, up to the moment when England decided to compose her differences with France, as well as with the other Powers, by bartering her Moroccan " rights " off against the " rights " of France" in Egypt, Germany had never dreamed of propagating the legend of a world-cabal organized by England to thwart her progress. This legend is a fiction, but it is a fiction that has, in the German brain, to use the expressive word of a French philosopher, M. Fouillee, all the characteristics of an idee-force. This legendary belief has resulted in the German notion that the rest of the world owes her something, that she must be bribed to he down peaceably in her kennel ; and to-day no ordinary bone will satisfy her appetite for " compensations." Herr Hans Delbriick, a professor of history and one of the German mastiffs keepers, announced recently 1 that the latest arrangement with France was only tem- porary, and that Germany now feels justified in claiming the Congo Free State, the Portuguese Colonies in East Africa (she would like England to steal them for her), Zan- zibar, and what remains of French territory between the Cameroons and the mouth of the Congo. If England's arrangement with Russia with regard to Persia should result in a virtual partition of that country, Germany must put in 1 Preitssische Jahrbiicher, March 1912. 220 PROBLEMS OF POWER further claims for " compensations." " The world," says Heir Delbriick, " will have to get used to our applying throughout the world, wherever there is a change of fron- tiers, exactly the same policy that we employed in Morocco." This authority does not say whether he looks forward to this policy being employed with exactly the same result. If so, perhaps the Powers will not complain. The conduct, the attitude, the manner, and the manners, of the Pan-German are reminiscent of an ingenuous confession of one Mr. Good- fellow, a traveller in New Guinea, who writing to The Times on " Modern Men of the Stone Age," said : " The people we met in the unknown interior seemed to be extremely stupid. We used to strike matches in front of them, and do other things which we thought might interest them, but they would not look ; they turned their heads away. ' ' Germany of late years has been behaving like these artless explorers. She thinks it clever to treat other world-tribes as primitive peoples, and is constantly trying to frighten them with Tartarin roarings or childish boos ! She keeps on stupidly striking matches in front of them, but they are ceasing even to look. Though the world's increasing armaments sug- gest a return to savagery, some one may yet say to Germany what a North Queensland native said to the British Com- missioner, Walter Roth, who had been trying the match- striking trick. " Having," Mr. Roth says, " struck match after match before a crowd of natives who showed not the slightest signs of surprise, notwithstanding that a lucifer- box was an absolute novelty to them, I asked the interpreter to discover what those primitive children of nature thought of the performance. He informed me truly and tersely : ' He say " what for no gib (give) it he ^(him) ? " He say " you d fool, throw it away " ! ' " Meanwhile the legend of Germany's encerclement by Eng- land has been skilfully used by the German Government as a pretext for increasing its naval and military power, and whatever may be the pacific intentions of the Emperor, A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 221 there is hardly a speech of his during the last ten years but has sedulously watered the soil in which such rank legends grow. In July 1900, at the launching of the ironclad Wittelsbach, William II eloquently declared that the " Ocean was indispensable to German greatness," and he defined his thought as follows : " The ocean teaches us that on its waves and on its most distant shores no great decision can any longer be taken without Germany and without the German Emperor. I do not think that it was in order to allow themselves to be excluded from big foreign affairs that thirty years ago our people, led by their princes, conquered and shed their blood. Were the German people to let themselves be treated thus, it would be, and forever, the end of their world-power ; and I do not mean that that shall ever be the case. To employ, in order to prevent it, the suitable means, if need be extreme means, is my duty and my highest privilege." Suiting the acting to the word, William II landed at Tan- giers and began, in Morocco, a policy which has not only signally failed of its object, but has aroused against Germany the hostile distrust, the suspicious vigilance, of the entire world. Such a policy of meddlesome agressiveness a policy marked, as has previously been said, by inevitable contradic- tions trembles like a panic-struck compass when the needle is beset in turn by influences from all parts of the horizon. What is the most important of these influences ? Allu- sion has already been made to it. It is the imperious call of iron. The foregoing analysis of the international situation in Luxembourg will have given some idea of the nature of German unrest. It has been calculated that by the middle of the present century the German iron-mines will be ex- hausted. Within thirty years the same fate will have be- fallen those of Luxembourg. When the iron-famine comes, the vast foundries and steel industries of Westphalia, Silesia, the Rhenish Provinces and the valley of the Sarre will have to put out their fires. Twenty millions of Ger- many's population willj be driven to look elsewhere for a livelihood. Now, the iron-ore deposits which, in the 222 PROBLEMS OF POWER twentieth century, are as indispensable an asset as corn- fields for a civilized community, abound just over the Franco-German border, in the department of the Meurthe and Moselle. In the basin of Briey there is iron enough to last for 250 years ; and Briey is nearer than China, where there are still unplundered stores of coal. Germany thought she had included in the provisions of the Treaty of Frankfort all the iron-mines of Eastern France. The in- vention, in 1880, of the so-called Thomas process, which revolutionized the metallurgic industry, and the discovery shortly afterwards of the mines of Briey, revealed on French soil undreamed-of sources of wealth which became (as the author of L'Allemagne aux Abois puts it) a " veritable torture of Tantalus " to the Germans over the border. But while the iron in France is practically inexhaustible, coal is by no means as abundant. Most of the coal required for the iron-works of the Meurthe and Moselle is imported from Germany. Whenever the Essen Syndicate in Westphalia chooses to do so, it can starve out all the iron-masters of French Lorraine. The situation is singularly simple. Germany says to France : " Give us iron, and I will continue to give you coal." What more tempting and reasonable basis for a commercial Entente, leading up to a political understanding which would shatter the agreement between France and England, and, as Germany urges, surrender to France and herself the domination of the world ? Franco- German commercial, industrial and financial co-operation would settle all Germany's problems for a century. But, alas for German ambition, the question of Alsace-Lorraine still remains unsolved. The history of France makes it difficult for her sons to regard as glorious the fate which befell Greece when she was conquered by Rome. The Ger- man mentality, however, appears to be lacking in the deli- cacy to appreciate such susceptibilities as these. 1 Their 1 See, however, the Declarations of the German Ambassador in London, p. 258. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 223 Government untiringly, even insolently, goes on seeking to bribe France into financial and commercial arrangements which, if accepted, would place France in virtually the same position towards her as this or that Central American State occupies towards the great Northern Republic. It is easy to show in detail the curious results of the Agreement of 1909, followed by a succession of necessarily unsuccessful efforts to form unobjectionable Franco-German Companies for the exploitation of Morocco, the Congo and the Came- roons. 1 Fortunately, France is not altogether dependent on Germany for coal. She may buy it in England, and if worse comes to the worst, she can dig it out of the hitherto unworked mines in immediate reach of her own furnaces. A more enlightened and energetic policy on the part of her Ministry of Public Works would already have forced upon the Chamber of Deputies the construction not only of a Canal through the valley of the Chiers, opening up Dun- kirk, Antwerp and Rotterdam, but of the Canal du Nord- Est which is to link the Northern and Belgian coal-fields to the iron regions of Meurthe and Moselle. When France has done this, she will become for the first time com- mercially independent of Germany, but she may have in- creased intolerably her neighbour's exasperation. The old formula that " a nation requires the army and the fleet of its foreign policy " will meanwhile have to be altered to read : " A country requires the army and the navy of its economic policy." Germany requires not only French and American gold to keep her credit system in working order ; she requires also an army of foreign clients willing to buy her products, and she will shortly require French minerals to feed her hundreds of furnaces. " France seems destined, if all goes well, to become the most powerful nation of metallurgists in the world." 2 The invasion of Normandy by Herr Thyssen, who is even now building three hauts fourneaux 1 See pp. 242-246. 2 L'Allemagne aux Abois, p. 35. 224 PROBLEMS OF POWER adjoining the mines of which he has obtained the con- cession, and the establishment in Meurthe and Moselle of two or three other German mining magnates, show what might happen if Germany's foreign policy were not so blunderingly conducted. Unable to induce France to for- get ; exasperated by her inability to induce France to sign an alliance with her, she shows her teeth. She goes to Agadir. As the Paris correspondent of The Times has put it, she agrees to a friendly conversation, but on sitting down she lays a revolver on the table. Meanwhile, pending the moment when her armies may win for her the mines of Meurthe et Moselle, she is hunting for iron throughout the world. Writing on July 18, 1911, in the Daily Mail, Mr. Frederic William Wile, the Berlin correspondent of that paper, said : " The Ivlannesmanns' mining activities in Morocco are said to be inspired by the necessity of assuring the German steel and iron indus- try new sources of ore supply. There is alleged to be genuine concern over the diminishing supply in German mines. Great firms like the Krupps, of Essen, " King " August Thyssen and Matthias Stinnes, the uncrowned potentates of Rhineland-Westphalia, are associated with the Mannesmanns in the Moroccan ventures, and between them make up the 25 per cent, of German interest in the Union des Mines Marocaines which figures so conspicuously in the Moorish turmoil. The Krupps, Thyssens and Stinneses are also heavily interested in steel mills, iron mines, and transportation projects affecting their industry in Scandinavia and Russia, and have even established them- selves in French Normandy." l 1 For the details of the German metallurgists' dreams in Morocco see M. Andre Tardieu's " Le Mystere d' Agadir." A succinct statement of German operations in Normandy was given in The Times in October 1912 : " Negotiations between the French concern Etablissements Gail, and the Gewerschaft Deutscher Kaiser in Bochum have re- sulted in the formation of the Societe des Hauts Fourneaux et Acieries de Caen, with 30,000,000!, for the purpose of erecting and working a large plant, to include two blast furnaces having a yearly output of 200,000 tons of pig iron, and to be fitted with a complete gas-purifying plant. The scheme contemplates also the provision of rolling mills for the manufacture of sheets, sections, and merchant A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 225 There are, no doubt, many indications that the German rulers may eventually come to regard a war as the sole solution for the life and death economic problems with which they are confronted. France, England and the United States appear to Germany to be blocking her way. The nature of the sole solution that can maintain the peace of Europe has already been stated. Germany must find some means of convincing the Powers of the purity of her intentions. She must cease her bluff and her bluster ; she must become convinced that no nation in the world is capable of contemplating an attack on her ; she must seek some outlet for that furor teutonicus invoked by a former minister of war, General von Einen, in his Detmold speech, and she must cease to propagate at home the Nietzschean forms of mystical and metaphysical imperialism, that faith in the divine right of brute force which, inherited from Bismarck, inspires the ora- tory of her pan-German deputies, her press, and her ca- pricious diplomatic action. Sir Edward Grey excellently described the present situation when he declared that if German policy really aimed solely at rendering Germany powerful, and not aggressive, " within two or three years every chance of war would have disappeared." The German Emperor, who has in his veins a goodly proportion of French blood, should take to heart the lines of Corneille : Ne veuillez point vous perdre, et vous serez sauves ! J bars, and of coke ovens with apparatus for the recovery of by- products. The company have acquired a site extending over an area of 350 hectares situated in Herouville and Colonbelles (near Caen). The ore is to be obtained from the mines of Soumont and Perrieres, worked by the Societe des Mines de Soumont, and an electric railway 35 km. long will be constructed to convey it to the works. The works are to be connected with a site on the sea coast where important developments are contemplated, and it is expected that they will thus be situated favourably in regard to the exporta- tion of the finished products and the importation of fuel." There is as yet no mention of the establishment of a German coaling station. 1 The German Emperor counts, perhaps, on the economic " salva- 9 226 PROBLEMS OF POWER IV The foregoing analysis of the plight growing out of Ger- many's industrial situation and of her perilous banking sys- tem, is one which suggests as many arguments to the apostles of peace as to the most pessimistic of the prophets of war. The facts adduced might be used to illustrate the remarks of Mr. Norman Angell in his brilliant lecture read before the Institute of Bankers on January 17, 1912 : " With the freedom of communication in every sense that now exists in the world, it has become a material impossibility to prevent French money aiding German trade in one form or another " ; just as they could be made to point the moral of the utterance of M. Jaures, in the French Chamber of Deputies, on De- cember 20, 1911 : " The international action of the capital in the hands of the great bankers constitutes a formidable new power, which, if it is not con- trolled by opinion, if it is not controlled by Governments independent of it, if it is not controlled by enlightened and autonomous Demo- cracies, may prostitute pretexts of peace to miserable combinations, but which, if it is enlightened, controlled, supervised by great nations, independent and proud, may, at certain moments in the unstable equilibrium of the world, add to the chances of peace." Yet the same set of facts might, perhaps, with even greater force, be employed to controvert the whole main contention of these two seers. It is owing to the devices of banking, they argue, that two countries like France and Germany are able to divide their labour according to their characteristics, tion " of his country through the medium of the Diesel engine, destined to render the steam-engine archaic. The invention of the Augsburg engineer consumes not only crude oil but coal tar. It is claimed, therefore, that it will prove to be a means for the utilization of coal much more economical than hi the past : when coal is entirely con- verted into coke and coal-tar, the resulting economic progress will relegate the steam-engine to the Museums of Applied Arts. Thus Germany, abundantly provided with coal, need no longer dread the future. But, by the same token, England, whose coal-supplies are even richer than those of Germany, will be able to maintain a steady economic advance. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 227 one country being a maker, and the other a user, of capital : " The very stagnation of France, which set free this capital, is precisely the factor which makes it impossible for Ger- many to crush her." But the stagnation of France does not necessarily prevent Germany from trying to crush her. Such stagnation is no guarantee against the possibility that a peaceful German Government, however profoundly con- vinced of the economic soundness of a thesis like that of Mr. Norman Angell, may, at some moment of international fric- tion, be driven to make war in response to the clamours of a population grossly misinformed as to the hostile intentions of this or that foreign power or set of powers, or mortified beyond endurance by such a series of diplomatic rebuffs as the German people have had to endure of late, notably during the summer and autumn of 191 r. 1 For ten years, moreover, German amour-propre has been in a constant state of irritation. The dramatic resignation of the German Colonial Minister, Herr von Lindequist, after refusing to sign a treaty exchanging Germany's magnificent hopes of Moroccan mines and an Atlantic port for what he called " the marshy and malaria-haunted regions of the Congo," was almost a reflex action symbolizing the disgust of the German people with their rulers. At the signal, an immense wave of foaming chauvinism swept over the country. This patriotic movement, which forced the Government to increase the naval and military estimates, immensely reinforced the authority of the Pan-Germanist Association, of the Naval League and of the German Colonial Society. In other words, the German Government is pacific, but German opinion bellicose because the Government has been blundering for ten years. For a century and a half Europe has been endeavouring to deprive Kings and 1 Compare, moreover, the risks of war during November and Decem- ber, 1912, owing to the excited state of Austrian public opinion in connexion with Servian pretensions to annexing a strip of the Adriatic coast-line. 228 PROBLEMS OF POWER Governments of the right to make war and peace. Philo- sophers and historians have argued that it was owing to the ambitions of kings and the intrigues of courtiers that peace-loving nations had had to go to war against their will. This is the burden of the battle-song of the Inter- nationale ; and it has been thought that with the coming of an era in which war should depend on the people's will, peace would prevail throughout the world. But what answer is given by events ? If Turkey has lost Tripoli it is because the warlike enthusiasm of a new nationalistic Italy has forced the hand of her Government. It was the war- like temper of Bulgarian, Servian, Greek and Montenegrin public opinion, not the bellicose spirit of the Balkan Govern- ments, that mobilized the Balkan peoples against Turkey in the autumn of 1912. In Germany, not merely the Oppo- sition, but the Press have constantly reproached the Govern- ment for its pusillanimity. That public opinion upon which M. Jaures counts to " control," to temper, the action of the international bankers, cannot even " control " itself. The steadying influence of la haute finance, of finance in general, is certainly all that it is represented to be ; but such peaceful influence as it exerts is exercised, in our time, almost solely upon Governments. In presence of the rise of a sudden gust of chauvinistic passion, Govern- ments will be forced into line at the head of the self-mad- dened mob, and the philosophers in the van will have to advance with the rest. 1 1 No crescendo of conventional votes, leading up to an ultimatum in accordance with the rules of the game of war, as prepared by the Professors of International Law, warned the world that Japan in- tended to open hostilities against Russia, or that Italy intended to take Tripoli. None will temper the force of the shock when Germany decides to fall upon Nangy. As M. Rene Pinon says (Revue des Deux Mondes, June i, 1912, pp. 619, 620) : " The only premonitory indi- cation of war, in our Democratic epoch, is the temper of public opinion. When a nation's pulse beats at the fever cadence, when its blood is boiling and the whole organism shivers and trembles, the danger A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 229 V It is not only by the scrutiny of the mechanism of Ger- man industrial and financial organization that the hidden springs of European peace and war are laid bare. It has been pointed out that France, following a policy of re- cueillement and caution, both characteristic of her needs and characteristic of her prudent temperament, has allowed herself to fall steadily behind in the race for the capture of the world-markets. It is necessary to develop this remark in detail. A writer signing himself " Lysis," who has published two books, Centre I' Oligarchic Financier e en France and Les Capitalistes Franfais contre la France, has, for the last few years, conducted a courageous campaign with the object of enlightening Frenchmen as to the risks of their own admirable credit-system. He aims at a reform of the existing financial organization of France, and his under- taking has already borne fruit. It is significant that an ex-minister of Finance of the experience and authority of M. Caillaux who, whatever his occasionally misguided activity during the negotiations of 1910 with Germany, has proved his practical knowledge of the mechanism of French society to be that of a competent specialist should have ventured, however guardedly, to corroborate certain of the views of "Lysis" 1 : " Gentlemen," he said, " tell your representatives to consider the question of the organization of industrial and commercial credit, I mean of that credit which ought to be at the disposal of the small is near. At such psychological moments hi the life of a people, argu- ments based on Constitutional Law have no longer any hold, and Governments become powerless to arrest the impulses of the nation. The epoch of the old politique des Cabinets has gone by, and the best diplomatist to-day, is he who is able to penetrate the deep -lying intentions of the peoples and to divine their spontaneous impulses." If M. Pinon had written these words after the Balkan War of 1912- 1913 he would have been tempted to print them in italics. 1 In a speech delivered on January 9, 1911, at Lille. 230 PROBLEMS OF POWER shopkeepers and the small manufacturers, and which is at present doled out to them so parsimoniously. A good deal has been written of late on the economic and financial organization of France. There has been violent criticism of the system of exportation of French capital, without reflecting that a large portion of our economic and political force abroad is due to the fact that we are perhaps the biggest money-lenders in the whole world. 1 . . . These criticisms 1 M. Caillaux forgets, or neglects to mention, that while readiness and capacity to lend money to Foreign Powers increases the " poli- tical force " and the diplomatic prestige of a State during the period prior to the conclusion of a loan, the lending State, once the operation is concluded, becomes, to a large degree, the slave of the borrowing nation, and is placed in a position of dependency that hampers its future diplomatic action. Moreover, as Lysis says : " Foreign loans are not productive ; they do not serve to develop the wealth of the borrowing peoples, but to cover the costs of military preparations . . . Bad for the borrowers, the operation is full of risks for the lenders. Two thousand millions of francs of Rumanian, Bulgarian and Ser- vian securities are quoted on the Paris Bourse, the greater portion of which is in French hands. We have thus an immense amount of capital engaged in the most dangerous corner of Europe, exposed to the chances of war, of domestic strife, of political revolutions and of bad crops." This is a kind of fact that might no doubt be utilized by the Norman Angells and the Jaureses to support their argument as to the pacific influence of cosmopolitan capital, but it is, at the same time, obviously as legitimate ground for anxiety to those Frenchmen who, realizing that the counter-influences making for war are immensely preponderant, reflect with dismay what is to become of their exported savings when war breaks out, suddenly involving States, great or small, in which their capital is engaged. In the first week of the Balkan Scare of October 1912, an unwarran- table panic fell upon the Paris Bourse, whereas, in 191 1, when France was on the eve of war with Germany, the French money market remained calm. The depreciation of the securities quoted on the Paris Bourse ranged from five to twenty per cent., yet French and German financial interests as regards Balkan Questions were identical in kind. Writing in June 1907 in the Revue des Deux Mondes, M. Jacques Siegfried described the exodus of French capital as "a veritable new revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the domain of Economics," and called upon the Government to remedy " this dis- tressing fact." The question is discussed in all its bearings by M. Andre Cheradame, in his remarkable book La Crise Franfaise. In the Correspondant (Jan. 25, 1912) this writer, with reference to the futile efforts made by the Austro-Hungarian Government to negotiate A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 331 were dictated by the sentiment that in France the small shopkeepers and business men have inadequate facilities for obtaining long credit. In our country, if a manufacturer, who is at the head of a moderate business representing, for instance, 200,000 or 300,000 francs, wishes to develop it, while giving full guarantees as to business capacity, the only way of procuring the requisite capital is to appeal to private individuals. Save in exceptional cases no banking organization exists to provide him with capital, and the situation is worse still in the case of the small shopkeeper or the small manufacturer whose business represents a sum of 10,000, 20,000 or 50,000 francs. The in Paris a loan of 100,000,000 francs, to be quoted on the Paris Bourse, shows that if the attempt failed, it was because of the sound intuitions of French public opinion, as manifested in the Press, and not at all because of the prudent policy of the Government. M. Cheradame concludes that collusion between French finance and French diplomacy is indispensable. He suggests that before French financiers agree to lend money to a Foreign State they should first advise the Quai d'Orsay, in order to learn whether the principle of the contemplated operation is in harmony with French foreign policy. After a favourable reply, but only after such a reply, they may come to terms with the Foreign State. The necessity of some such permanent mechanism as this has now become generally recog- nized in France. The echo of this altered public opinion was heard in the last words of the ministerial declaration of the late French Government. M. Poincare said that the policy of his Government was to " reconcile, as twin and convergent forces , the financial power which was of such great assistance to France, with her military and naval power." In October [1912 he applied this principle in vir- tually prohibiting French bankers from lending money to Bulgaria, but later on, when Bulgaria was successful, it would appear that this prohibition was withdrawn. One of the ablest journals in Europe, L' Information the very existence of which, by the way, is a sign of the rapidly increasing interest taken by the French people in financial, economic and political questions has of late published many remarkable studies by such authorities as MM. Andre Sayous, Alfred Neymarck, Alexis Rostand, on themes which, ten years ago even, would have attracted no general attention : " French Savings and Financial Education," " The Reform of the Banking System with reference to the organization of credit for small industries and small shopkeepers," " The Admission of Foreign Securities to the Stock Exchange," etc. The commercial expansion of France is a fact with which, more and more, Germany and England will have to reckon. It is shown later on (pp. 235-238) that this revival will not, perhaps, turn out to be an unmixed good for the country. 232 PROBLEMS OF POWER conclusion to be drawn from these incontestable facts is not the necessity of altering existing conditions, but the necessity of creating some new supplementary institution. Besides the existing estab- lishments of credit, which should continue their present activity, there ought to exist organisms the sole object of which should be to assist small business men, small manufacturers. . . . Various types of local banks should be created, bolstering up a central bank." And M. Caillaux went on to extol the utility of the Japanese Industrial Bank, and to urge the adoption of a similar institution in France " in order to arouse the spirit of private initiative." 1 The question of private initiative and of individual re- sponsibility is, indeed, one of the most urgent of all questions for the Frenchmen of to-day. The authoritative character of the Napoleonic political, legal and social traditions, which have been codified by the French Constitution, French laws and French customs, is utterly unlike the undisciplined in- dividualism characterizing Anglo-Saxon institutions. Fur- thermore, the problems with which French civilization has to deal are almost exactly the opposite of those confronting civilization in the United States, or even in England and the Dominions. Individualism, which has made America, and is still running riot there, has little action in French affairs. But what, for the moment, is significant is that just as American financial institutions are the reflection of American individualism, so French financial institutions 1 Less than a year later (December 1912) M. Klotz, the Minister of Finance in the Poincare Cabinet, brought in a bill embodying all of M. Caillaux's proposals. In the Preamble M. Klotz pointed out that, notwithstanding certain advantages that had accrued to trade and industry from the exceptional banking concentration in France notably the maintenance of the rate of discount at a low level this concentration had unfortunately resulted in the disappearance of numerous local banks, and small merchants and manufacturers had thus been deprived of the financial support on which they had for- merly been able to count. The Klotz bill, which is open to serious criticism (see the article by M. Andre Sayous in L' Information of Feb. n, 1913) is now (March, 1913) before the French Parliament. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 233 are the product and the incentive of French conser- vatism, French bourgeois spirit, French dislike of responsi- bility. It is worth while considering the point somewhat curi- ously. It may safely be affirmed that the establishments of credit have immensely increased that tendency to thrift which characterizes the average Frenchman and which is partially due to the provisions of the French testamentary law. The Depopulation Commission of the Ministry of the Interior has, indeed, passed more than one resolution for a reform of the French Civil Code permitting French citizens to make wills which shall reconcile the two natural human ambitions, the desire to survive in one's property, and the desire to survive in one's posterity. In France, for more than a century, the law has forced French fathers to choose ; and, as Dr. Jacques Bertillon points out, they have uniformly made the choice which, from the purely economic stand- point, was most injurious to their country's interests. To preserve the property they have sacrificed the race. 1 M. Arsene Dumont, the author of Natalite et Civilisation, insists on the direct relation between the French system of not having more than two children and French love of economy. " Economy," he says, " is the cause of the limitation of the French population. . . . The wealth of France is merely economized money. But is a nation really rich if it hoards its pennies in coffers or in 1 The statistics are conclusive. The birth-rate has decreased in France since the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the last ten years the decrease has been accelerated. (It is during this period that the financial regime of France has become oligarchic.) It should be said, however, that the German birth-rate is almost as unfavourable. In 1911 the falling off in the growth of the popu- lation in Prussia and Bavaria together was more than 100,000. The Prussian Government has organized an inquiry. Voluntary restric- tions, artificial infecundity, are the real causes of the decline of the birth-rate in all countries. But the question is, what are the causes that favour the adoption of certain practices ? Is the ground par- ticularly favourable in France ? 234 PROBLEMS OF POWER woollen stockings ? Isn't it richer if it disposes of its money, if it uses it for some business or industrial enterprise ? The Frenchman is, of all peoples, known to me, not excepting the Spaniard, the one possessing the least spirit of enterprise. The French millionaire, as well as the French peasant and working man, has but one desire : to economize, and above all not to risk his money." Dr. Jacques Bertillon, who is of the same opinion, cites his authorities to show that the ideal of thrift and economy of the French bourgeoisie has become that formulated by one of its teachers, the Bible of the French school, La Fontaine : Un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu V auras. " The ideal of France was formerly incarnated by the knight, it is to-day personified by the functionary and the pensioner." Dr. Bertillon suggests that this evolution, may be due to the fact that the wars of the First Empire cut off the bravest and most adventuresome Frenchmen without leaving them the time to found a family, and thus left to the infirm the task of carrying on the race hence the relative rarity of ener- getic characters and the predominance, as a national characteristic, of an excessive prudence. But, apart from the fact that an observer like Balzac had excellent reasons for holding the view summed up in the phrase les coeurs furent alors (during the Napoleonic epopee) nomades comme les regiments, 1 France can adduce impressive facts the energy and initiative of her explorers, the enthusiasm and courage of her aviators, the moral and physical health of the present younger generation, the incomparable spectacle afforded by the Dreyfus Case and the resiliency of the nation in 1905, 1910, and 1913, under the pricking of the German goads * to show that the chivalrous, magnanimous, daring, adven- turous France of the crusaders, of the seventeenth century colonizers and of the soldiers of the Revolution and the Empire, is still more even than in being. It is to that France that allusion has already been made in the earlier pages of 1 La Paix du Menage. * Cf. La Renaissance de I'Orgueil Franfais, by Etienne Rey. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 235 this book. If for a long period there has been an enfeeble- ment of the spirit of enterprise, consequent on habits of excessive thrift, it is mainly, no doubt, to be accounted for by the fact that, after her defeat, France for a long period neces- sarily remained a stunned and bewildered nation, and that when she woke out of this condition of apathy it was to find herself called upon to lay the foundations of a new society before she could indulge in the luxury of cherishing her old dreams ; but it is also to be accounted for by the slow but fatal action of the French Civil Code in its stipulations concerning the disposition of property and regulation of marriage, and the enervating parallel influence of the great institutions of credit, which, after having canalized French savings into their vast central reservoir, have used those savings for the sole ends of cosmopolitan finance, instead of 'employing them to irrigate French soil and to encourage French industrial and economic initiative. After hav- ing succeeded in altering the French law of inheritance, the French Society known as L'Alliance Nationale pour 1'Accroissement de la Population which is only one of the admirable associations now endeavouring to solve the pro- blem of French race-suicide would do well to turn its attention not so much to the revision of the fiscal laws of France (the principle, for instance, of proportioning taxa- tion to the size of families) as to the furthering of the natural French expansiveness and spirit of initiative. Every ex- traneous influence tending to stifle that expansiveness and that initiative should be ruthlessly destroyed. Such an influence of repression would seem to be the peculiar activity of the French financial oligarchy, and Parliamentary inter- vention is required to determine the limits of that activity and to supplement the existing credit establishments by a financial system which will tend to develop, and not throttle, the spirit of energy and of responsibility. In pleading, however, for the direction of French activity towards the development of economic and indus- 236 PROBLEMS OF POWER trial interests ; in counselling a systematic effort to use French initiative for the cultivation of the natural re- sources of France, and for the fructification on French soil of the prodigious savings of the French people, the student of French Institutions should not be blind to the curiously interesting, almost paradoxical, fact that it is largely because France is so backward in economical and industrial development that she enjoys to-day a relative social and political tranquillity, whereas England, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Japan and the United States are racked by a spirit of revolutionary unrest. France is sadly behind the times ; her industry, her public works, her business and her commercial habits are not " up-to-date " ; and this back- wardness, no doubt, marks a serious economic inferiority compared with the industrial activity of her neighbours and rivals. Yet it is just this inferiority which, perhaps, accounts in a measure for her relatively greater social stability ; which explains why her people are to-day the most " con- servative " and the least revolutionary under the sun ; which finally and this chiefly concerns the subject in hand enables her, owing to her ready money, her immediately accessible reserves, to contemplate with comparative equanimity the possibility of having to wage war. This point is so important that it should be put more explicitly. The present critical condition of the modern State is so universal that more than one writer l has certainly been justified in comparing it with the no less universal unrest of 1848. Republics, Constitutional Monarchies, Empires, Despotisms, Parliamentary Regimes are one and all suffering from a kind of locomotor ataxy, and so deep-seated is the disorder that the political writers and the juris-consults who still discuss the questions once so beautifully dealt with by Montesquieu, are like a band of Sagrados who should under- 1 See Alexander D. Noyes, article " Politics and Prosperity," published in the Atlantic Monthly ; and Paul Louis, " La Crise de 1'Etat moderne," Mercure de France, April i, 1912. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 237 take to cure a victim of St. Vitus' dance by painting his face. This crisis of the modern State is, in its essence, an economic, not a political crisis. Questions of changing the form of government may arise in connexion with it and characterize its evolution, but such questions are of slight importance in comparison with the essential point, that of the organic economy of the community. The present crisis is of the nature of a struggle between the upper middle class, la bourgeoisie who possess, the beati possidentes, the aristo- cratic and privileged few in power, and the " people," the proletariat, who, to a large degree without property, are yet the producers of wealth, and who consequently regard themselves as les desherites. The democratic laic masses have ceased to " clamour in the desert " for equality of privi- lege, and are rapidly inventing the most ingenious engines of savage warfare against Established Things : humanitarian idealism, liberty, irreligion ; or instruments of assault from without : syndicalism, " direct action," sabotage. It is a duel to the death between the conservative Social Forms based on property and the Revolutionary Coalitions (syndicats] that are gradually disciplining the mass of pro- ducers. And behold the result in France ! France is the country which contains the largest number of property- owners ; it is the classic realm of thrift ; it is the corner of the globe where the land is most equally divided, where the bas-de-laine is always darned, where the pitcher of the Danaids is a constantly replenished jar of wine. Such in- dustrialism as has taken root on French soil has of course produced the same kind of friction as the clash between capital and labour has brought about in other parts of the world. But industrialism, business initiative, have been less characteristic of modern France than of the German Empire, of England and of the United States. The com- paratively greater diffusion of property in France, and the simpler economic and industrial organization, have kept her people " backward " ; but these very causes have, at the 238 PROBLEMS OF POWER same time, determined her conservatism, for they have counterbalanced the revolutionary spirit engendered, in France as elsewhere, by the tyranny of the privileged class in possession of authority and property. France, indeed, has invented, and become the propagator of, Syndicalism (as she always invents, because she thinks quickly, and because she has a gift for large clear ideas) ; but Syndicalism is less applicable, one might almost say less needed, in her case than in that of the other modern States. Yet, true as this is, it may be argued that Syndicalism is more needed in France than elsewhere, since at a time of social disintegra- tion (when religious scepticism, political and financial scandals, parliamentary frivolity and general irresponsi- bility are corroding the sentiment of respect) the tyrannical discipline of Syndicalism may be the one element capable of transforming French individualism into an instrument of altruistic action, pending the economic adjustments of the society of the future. The dictatorial demagogues who founded Syndicalism may all unwittingly have been render- ing a singular service to the ideal of Social order. l 1 Since the above was written a similar suggestion has been made by an astute realist, the late Minister of War in the Poincare Cabinet, M. Millerand. Interviewed by the Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse on the question of the abolition of standing armies in consequence of modern social evolution, M. Millerand expressed the view that any such result would be disastrous for the Republic. " Compulsory education in neutral schools, the unbridled liberty now rife, freedom of speech and of the press," he said, " have made us a people in constant intellectual ferment, who run the risk of having all the elementary rules of any established social order utterly obliterated in our souls. Amid this atmosphere of complete liberty, in this chaos of confused ideas, the army intervenes, giving our chil- dren the sense of discipline and sacrifice without which man is an incomplete being. . . . The slow work of organization now pro- ceeding will be greatly furthered by the development of Syndicalism." It is to be regretted that the French Minister of War did not develop this idea. If he had done so, it is likely that he would have ex- plained himself in language resembling that used recently by Mr. Norman Angell in a series of suggestive articles on " The Labour A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 239 VI The reader who has made his way through the somewhat obscure tangle of the foregoing exposition of two contrasted financial and economic organizations will perceive that he has now reached a clearing in the heart of the subject. It has been shown that, given the utterly dissimilar " states of mind " of Germany and of France, the diplomatic Unrest," published in the Daily Mail (May 30, 1912). He said : " The expression of these new tendencies is not likely to be revolu- tionary. . . . The revolutionary who has ' arrived ' is compelled to realize that society is an organism a thing which is alive and grows ; and even if his view is more mechanical than this and he regards its organization as a machine, it is a machine which has to be perpetually in motion. Now, a machine which has to be kept in motion cannot be altered radically by a rough blow here and there, and the alteration of one wheel alters others which there was no in- tention to touch. More and more, for instance, is it the case in any great strike that it is the working classes which pay the piper. In the British coal strike it was not the capitalist who suffered most. In the French railroad strike it was not the bourgeoisie who was most distressed, but the working men in other trades deprived of their work in a quarrel which did not directly concern them. A ' class war ' in which your own side in every battle suffers more than the enemy is one doomed to failure from the start. As has been said, the general strike is a very powerful weapon with which to commit suicide. " And the same forces which doom the general strike to failure doom to failure also the predatory schemes of forcible confiscation and dispossession of which we used to hear in connexion with plans of social reorganization a good deal more than we do now. Wealth in the modern world cannot be seized and transferred in this simple fashion ; it is not in the nature of a fixed or tangible quantity at all ; it is dependent upon the maintenance of certain functions ; stop them and the wealth disappears there is none to seize. And all these confiscatory schemes involve the stoppage of some vital func- tion. Those who have some knowledge of the work of the world its processes and necessary conditions know such schemes to be childishly impracticable. And every day makes them more so. ... The permanent element of Syndicalism, which means the drift of real power from a large general body possessing no special compe- tences, like Parliament, to bodies like trade unions organized for special industrial functions, will not necessarily be will almost certainly not be marked by revolutionary processes." 240 PROBLEMS OF POWER methods and machinery of the two Powers are bound to be correspondingly different. Cherishing different ideals, wanting different results, the two countries have a different mentality. It is not merely that mutual comprehension is necessarily hindered by the reciprocal distrust due to the dismemberment of France. Quite apart from their skele- ton in the closet there exists, between modern Germany and France, a lack of imaginative sympathy due to radical differences of temperament. Any successful diplomatic conversation between them presumes, on the part of both, a long preliminary effort to place themselves temporarily at a point of view for which no past experience has prepared them. While France is still, in the conventional civilized way, loyal to the appeal of great principles, respectful of accepted ideals of international law, and of recognized notions of justice, and correspondingly indifferent to the purely material aspects of any problem, to the concrete value of the elements in a diplomatic bargain, Germany, the great modern parvenu power, bereft of all deep-rooted historical traditions, unrestrained by precedent save that of the original sin of Alsace-Lorraine has been able to put her- self abreast of the time, and adopt the methods best fitted to a period dominated by economic interests. " What has a policy of partial understanding and of business profit to do with the Treaty .of Frankfort ? " said Herr von Kiderlen- Waechter, the German Foreign Minister, to a French journa- list, M. Georges Bourdon. 1 " Cannot France cherish her hopes in her heart, without refusing to participate in the general life of the time ; and, above all, when economic problems are paramount, are historical quarrels (sic) to domin- ate the necessary development of nations ? " Many Germans lack a sympathetic imagination, and it is owing to this lack that German diplomacy has become almost exclusively Figaro, August 6, 1912. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 241 a diplomacy of mercantile bargaining. 1 Emperor, Chan- cellor, Reichstag, have one and all been forced, no doubt, in spite of themselves, to become the spokesmen of German industrial and commercial interests. At the centenary of the firm of Krupp, at Essen, the Emperor William delivered one of his characteristic speeches. " The history of the firm," he said, " is a piece of Prussian and German history. . . . Krupp guns have been with the Prussian lines and have thundered on the battlefields which made ready the way to German unity, and won it at last. . . . Services rendered to the Fatherland in war and peace have won for this firm an especial position in my State, and for three generations brought its proprie- tors and their families into a relation of friendship and confidence with my ancestors and myself." Again, when in a disaster at the Bodium mines, scores of men are swept away by choke damp, the Emperor adds his tribute of mourning to the expression of German sympathy, and describes the miners as the German " coal army corps." The protection of industrial and commercial interests is the main motive of Germany's agitated activity, her capricious opportunism, her frequently unaccountable aggressiveness, her Shylockian insistence on the pound-of-flesh " compen- sation." England, for a time, notably in the strenuous days of the colonization of the Niger, seemed to be providing Germany with an excellent precedent for the employment of certain forms of national insolence. But the British principle that " business is business " has never, even in England, been allowed to become the sole principle of diplomatic action; whereas competence in international business has become for Germany the unique qualification of her foreign agents. Nothing is more characteristic of modern Germany than the career at Constantinople of a Marschall von Bieberstein, and the sole object of that ambassador's transfer to London was to "do business " 1 There are occasional exceptions. Cf. the utterances of Prince Lichnowsky cited on p. 258. 242 PROBLEMS OF POWER with a people whose business education, excellent as it is and superior as it has been to that of the French has never been systematically enough applied to diplomacy to justify the hope of success for British interests in any Anglo-German negotiation. France, at last, has learned the lesson of the spectacle of Germany's agitation : she has " found Germany out," although she has had to pay dear for the finding. When the French senator, M. Pierre Baudin, was called on to draw up the report of the Senatorial Com- mittee on the Franco-German Agreement of November 4 1911, he pointed the moral of the long tension between the two countries as follows : " The Germans," he said, " are accustomed to seeing their diplo- macy act the part of permanent agent of the national industry. This is the kind of aid they expect of their diplomacy. They look to it not only for the discovery of business opportunities, not only to begin negotiations, but also for such unflinching protection as shall exer- cise pressure on all rivals, and feel no hesitation at the idea of con- ferring a privilege. French traditions and ntoeurs are altogether different. They have, unfortunately, 1 removed us for too long a period from the great economic struggles that are nowTgoing on throughout the world." French traditions and moeurs are, no doubt, undergoing a change. They are harmonizing to-day with the general current of things. But M. Pierre Baudin would like to see French diplomatists less timid, less discreet, and, in a word, better informed, smarter business-men. The history of the relations between France and Germany during the last three years perfectly illustrates the truth so clearly enunciated by M. Pierre Baudin, and should be studied in detail by the public men of every country. That history, moreover, is an admirable instance of the fact that behind the fagade of Government financial considerations are determining, with increasing frequency and power, the policies of States. In January 1912 a Prime Minister of 1 This, as has been seen (pp. 235-238), is a debatable point, 243 France, M. Caillaux, was hunted out of office and exposed to obloquy, for more reasons than one ; but one of these reasons was that he had ventured to interpret to the letter the Agreement which a preceding minister, M. Pichon, had made in 1909 with Germany. By that Agreement, Germany for the first time acknowledged the preponderance of French political rights in Morocco ; but in the spirit of the do ut des the donnant, donnant, " business is business," principle of modern diplomatic bargaining she demanded an equiva- lent. France promised to co-operate with her in Morocco, frankly and consecutively, in purely economic matters. 1 Unfortunately, however, there are no such things in the modern world as " purely economic " matters. Economic preponderance, when long assured, inevitably takes the shape of political domination, and the French nego- tiators of the Franco-German Agreement of 1909 ignored this fact, and forged, thereby, the first link of a chain of consequences which was sure to bind them in the end to the car of German hegemony. The former Prime Minister of France, M. Raymond Poincare, who, as first reporter of the Senate Committee on the Franco-German Agree- ment of 1911, had had 'access before taking office to all the documents concerning the efforts of successive French Ministers to apply the Agreement of 1909, declared frankly in the Chamber of Deputies, on March 15, 1912, that " France in 1909, in 1910, and in 1911, honestly endeavoured to carry out the Agreement of 1909 " ; but, he went on, " elle s'est heurtee a des obstacles multiples . . . ei lorsqu'on a tente d'elargir V application de cette entente economique et de I'etendre au reste de I'Afrique, . . . on a rencontre tantdt des complications financieres imprevues, tantdt des oppo- sitions parlementaires inevitables." If the Agreement of 1909 had been loyally observed dur- 1 Textually, the two Governments declared " qu'ils chercheraient a associer leurs nationaux dans les affaires dont ceux-ci pourraient obtenir Venterprise." 244 PROBLEMS OF POWER ing a period of five years the Triple Entente would have been shattered, and shattered against the will of three nations. England would have been betrayed unintentionally by France, and isolated in Europe, while Germany would finally have realized her dream of achieving a predominance that should neutralize the results of French and English policy during the last ten years : the restoration of the balance of power in Europe. The method of solving the Moroccan difficulty adopted, in 1909, by the French Foreign Office, was a method involving political consequences which neither France nor England perceived at the time (see Speech of M. Pichon, February 8, 1912). The Agreement of 1909 had seemed an effective device for neutralizing German political hostility, and only a few perspicacious observers saw in it a first successful move on the part of Germany to fulfil, by a round-about, but effective, method, her fixed purpose of destroying the Entente between France and England, and the economic subjection of both peoples. England acquiesced without apparent apprehension in an Agreement which seemed to make solely for the peace of Europe, and France proceeded loyally to carry out that Agreement, to the letter, as well as in the spirit. The con- sequences of France's loyal action are full of suggestion. Franco-German economic co-operation became the chief preoccupation of the Quai d'Orsay, not merely in Morocco, but also in Central Africa and the Middle East. Inter- national trusts for the working of Moroccan mines, and for the building of public works in Morocco, were negotiated in conditions conforming with the spirit of the Agreement of 1909, but singularly disadvantageous to the interests of the Powers who were not partners to that Agreement. In the same blind spirit of good faith, successive French Ministers for Foreign Affairs proposed to extend the applica- tion of the new entente policy with Germany to regions beyond the limits of Morocco. In July 1909 M. Pichon, acting, as he believed, in the interests of European peace, A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 245 yet supposing himself to be still following the main lines of French foreign policy, suggested to the great French colonial company of Ngoko-Sangha the advisability of a consortium with the German Company of the Southern Cameroons for the common development of the frontier region. The French Company accepted, and negotiations were begun. They were formally concluded some eighteen months later in M. Pichon's private room at the Quai d'Orsay, in presence of the German Ambassador and of high officials of the French Colonial Office. About two months afterwards the Briand-Pichon Government fell without having submitted this project to Parliamentary ratification. The Government that succeeded, that of M. Monis, refused to adopt the plan of a consortium of French and German Companies ; and in response to the natural protests of the German Government, the French Prime Minister sought to tranquillize German susceptibilities by casting about for a fresh scheme of Franco-German co-operation. The " fresh scheme " was soon found. Early in the summer of 1910, French and German financiers, acting on behalf of French and Ger- man ministers, began the friendly discussion of a project for the construction of a railway traversing the territories of the German Cameroons and of the French Congo, and having its terminus on German soil. The scheme, as presented to the French Foreign Minister, M. Cruppi, by the French Min- ister of Finance and the French Minister of the Colonies, MM. Caillaux and Messimy, would inevitably have laid open to the political influence, and no doubt to the political pre- ponderance, of Germany, the basins of the Sangha, the Uban- gui and the Chan. A new Government, that of M. Caillaux, succeeded, and M. Cruppi remained Minister for Foreign Affairs. M. Cruppi rejected the project, and, at the same time, without asking the permission of Germany who, it must be borne in mind, had repudiated, by the Agreement of 1909, all claim to political rights on Moroccan territory 246 PROBLEMS OF POWER induced the Government of which he was a member to send an expedition to Fez. The German Government, which had thus witnessed the failure of each successive project for economic and commercial co-operation with France, concluded that such co-operation could be best secured by more active measures, and sent to Agadir the gunboat Panther. When France finally asked her what she meant by this act, she replied : Compensations ; and thereupon began the international tension of the summer of 1911, the tragic weeks when the dogs of war were heard baying in all the kennels of Europe. Out of this period of tension was to come the Franco-German Treaty of Novem- ber 4, 1911. France, by that diplomatic instrument, in return for a virtual protectorate of Morocco, ceded to Ger- many vast regions of the Congo, regions which, but for the consequences of the misguided arrangement of 1909, she need never have given up. In other words, M. Caillaux was hounded from office partially for reasons which those who approved of the agreement of 1909 were logically bound to repudiate. 1 The incident shows that the qualifications 1 See Le Mystere d' Agadir, by M. Andre Tardieu, pp. 72-73, etpassim. Every page of this remarkable book, by one of the sanest and most perspicacious students of politics and diplomacy of the present day, confirms the author's view that the Agreement of 1909 in facilita- ting the realization of German economic Imperialism to the detri- ment of the legitimate ambitions of the other signatories of the Act of Algeciras, and to the virtual nullification of the French claims to positive predominance in Morocco was an incredible blunder on the part of the Quai d'Orsay. When M. Jules Cambon and Baron de Schoen signed that Agreement, they signed at the same time the potential death-warrant of the Triple Entente ; they dug a mine and filled it with explosives under the sole diplomatic instrument the Act of Algeciras guaranteeing, at the time, French political supremacy in North- West Africa ; and not a day passed between 1909 and the arrival of the Panther at Agadir, without aggravating the consequences of the mistake of the French Foreign Office. In this connexion it is noteworthy that M. Andre Tardieu, whose in- fluence, as Foreign Editor of the Tetnps, was not foreign to the fall of M. Pichon, was one of the most efficient coadjutors of the policy A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 24? required of the modern diplomatist are no longer what they were even at the time of the Congress of Berlin. It shows that economic problems are coming to be the domin- ant themes in diplomatic conversations, and that the modern successors of Richelieu and Bismarck will probably learn more by studying the career of a Colbert and a Pier- pont Morgan than from perusal of Le Testament Politique, or even of the Busch Memoirs. VII There can be no doubt that social questions, economic questions, financial questions, are henceforth to occupy the attention of States to the gradual exclusion of political preoccupations. It is not merely German diplomacy which is becoming more and more what the French senator M. Pierre Baudin has called une diplomatic de negoce, and what Washington designates as " dollar diplomacy." It is not only in Germany that behind the Government, hemming it in, besieging it, there is an army of business men, of metal- lurgists, of mine owners, and that there are vast popula- explicitly formulated in the Agreement of 1909 ; but that to attack him, as he has been attacked, for loyally undertaking to facilitate the application of that Agreement, is an absurd injustice. He does not appear to have understood, in 1909, nor yet in 1910 any more than Downing Street or the Quai d'Orsay understood that Germany, in inducing France to sign the Agreement of 1909, had laid a trap for the Dual Entente, and that the logical consequences of the economic co-operation, reciprocally accepted by France and Germany, would be to thwart that very ideal of " European Equilibrium " which he himself has done more than any other French journalist to foster. It should be added that the services rendered to European peace during the last ten years by the untiring energy, the remark- able lucidity and the argumentative resource, with which this great journalist has daily forced his compatriots to face the realities of the European situation, are of incomparable value. During the period in question, not even any French statesman, with the single excep- tions of M. Delcasse and M. Poincare, has played so interesting, so intelligent, and so original, a part. 248 PROBLEMS OF POWER tions of working-men or farmers whose claims determine, to a large degree, the world-policy of this or that Power. The same evolution is taking place throughout the world, and a people which fails to recognize the growing importance of financial, commercial and industrial interests in international relations is fated to be left behind in the international race. The first obligation of the modern diplomatist is to acquaint himself with the economic facts, determining the political aspirations and the social organization of the country to which he is accredited. For the eloquent idioms and generalizing formulas of the old diplomacy is substituted today the precise language of the counting-room. A diplo- matic instrument is no longer read in its spirit, it is scru- tinized to the letter. Woe to the partner to an agreement who has forgotten to define, with legal definiteness, the possible points which the shifting course of events may raise in the interpretation of the Treaty ! Thus the numer- ous germs of conflict latent in the Franco-German Treaty of 1911 are due to the fact that French Foreign Office nego- tiators have not yet completely assimilated the business methods that prevail at the Wilhelmstrasse. They con- tinue to follow the French habit of securing the recognition by their opponents of the general principles that are re- garded as essential, and in neglecting the material and con- crete application of those principles. In the Treaty just mentioned, it would be possible to point out half a dozen instances of ambiguities or omissions calculated to en- danger the peace of Europe. But this Treaty has been cited solely as a typical modern case. From the point of view of the science of international relations, the Franco- German negotiations of 1911 are one with the Trans-Iran- ian projects of the Triple Entente, one with the still uncon- cluded negotiations respecting the construction of the Bagh- dad Railway, one with the Italian expedition to Tripoli, and one with the problem of a Servian outlet to the sea ; behind the fa9ade of Government, financial considerations, A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 249 with increasing frequency and force, are determining the policies of States. Signor Guglielmo Ferrero has pointed out that " if Turkey has lost Tripoli, it is because the bellicose enthusiasm of a new nationalistic Italy has forced the hand of the Govern- ment." The rapid rise and the effective activity of the young Italian nationalists is one of the most interesting socio-political phenomena of our time. But, behind this remarkable movement, a curious series of invisible financial causes prepared Italian public opinion for the conquest of the ancient Roman province of Libya. The story, as told by an excellent authority, M. Pinon, 1 shows how readily the flexible Italian soul, delighting in combinazioni, suc- ceeds in reconciling the most reciprocally contrary senti- ments when " interest " is paramount. " At the beginning of the reign of Leo XIII, the Banco di Roma was a financial house of relatively slight importance, established by private individuals. Its manager, Ernesto Pacelli, succeeded in winning the confidence of the Pope's entourage, and Leo XIII entrusted to him the funds of the Holy See. The addition of this new capital made it possible for the Banco di Roma to develop its business. But its relations with the Vatican prevented it from penetrating into the business world connected with the Quirinal, and notably to get its bills discounted by the Bank of Italy. Eager to force that door, the Banco di Roma sought advice in Government circles. The President of its Board of Directors was the President of the Chamber of Commerce, brother of the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Signor Tittoni. It was the period when the Italian Govern- ment was signing with M. Delcasse the Agreements declaring that France repudiated her interests in the Tripolitaine and that Italy repudiated hers in Morocco (1902). The Italian Government wished to secure in the Tripolitaine economic interests, which would permit it to develop Italian industry and commerce there, which would virtually amount to securing a mortgage on the province, and might, were the case ever to arise, provide an opportunity for armed inter- vention. The Banco di Roma secured the coveted business con- nexion with the Bank of Italy, promising in return to participate 1 See " L' Europe et la Guerre Italo-Turque," by Rene Pinon, the Revue des deux Mondes, June i, 1912. 250 PROBLEMS OF POWER in Italian enterprises in the Tripolitaine and in Cyrenaica. A whole series of undertakings and ventures were then founded in Tripoli and along the coast, with the capital, and under the direction of an agent of the Banco di Roma, Signer Bresciani, an ex-official in Erythrea : oil industries, soap manufactures, grain elevators, fisheries, the sponge trade, the purchase of land, electric works at Benghazi, a shipping line subventioned by the Government, and possessing at present four steamers. Missions were sent inland to enter into relations with the influential chiefs and marabouts. The Banco di Roma increased its capital to 80,000,000 francs, and recently augmented it still further. Notwithstanding these efforts trade remained stagnant ; business did not develop ; the capital ex- pended remained unproductive ; the financial obligations became more and more serious. The Ottoman officials put all kinds of obstacles in the way of the economic development of the province, seeking particularly to thwart the Italian ventures ; at Benghazi, for instance, the electric power works, for the lighting of the town, were not authorized. The Banco di Roma, having engaged a con- siderable capital in Africa, in the interest and almost at the sugges- tion of the Government, with the assurance that one day the Tri- politaine and Cyrenaica would pass under Italian domination, and that the expectations of the shareholders would eventually be recompensed, found itself, it is said, in difficulties. Last year, its manager informed the Government that he was on the point of being driven to a liquidation of his interests in the Tripolitaine, and that he was preparing to enter upon pourparlers with an English group and a German group. It would appear that this prospect greatly contributed to the determination of the Government to intervene, if necessary, by arms. Once hostilities begun, the Banco di Roma obtained the contract for the commisariat operations and the clothing of the troops of the expeditionary corps. It remains associated with the Government for the development of Italian interests in the Tripolitaine. Thus, the Bank which has the confidence of the Vatican happens, at the same time, to be the first and foremost promoter of Italian enterprises in the Tripolitaine : an elegant combinazione, uniting, for a work of Italian expansion and Christian propaganda, the two historic forces in Rome which officially ignore each other and mutually combat one another." An elegant combinazione, indeed ! And what more conclusive illustration of the modern craving for a happy mixture of idealism and of economic well-being ? Perhaps if any could be had it would be found in the case of Servia's long struggle for economic emancipation. 25* Up to 1905 this little nation of farmers and stock-breeders (in 1912, Servian exports amounted to about one hundred million francs, out of which 62 per cent, was represented by the products of the soil, and 20 per cent, by cattle and pork), remained in economic subjection to Austria. Austria's dream was to annex Servia to her great composite Empire. Whenever Servia displayed signs of political independence, Austria, who all but monopolized Servian exports, began the economic blackmailing of her emprisoned neighbour by closing her markets to Servian pork and beef. A Servian statesman, M. Paschitch, resolved to put an end to these humiliations. In 1906 he proposed a customs union between the three Slav states of the Balkans ; he thus took the first step for the formation of that Balkan Confederation which six years later was to astonish the world. Servian live-stock was partially diverted from the old Austrian routes, and transported by the Danube, the Ludwigs-Canal and the Main to German markets. A second outlet for Servian products was procured at Varna by means of concessions accorded on the Bulgarian railways. A favourable treaty of commerce was arranged with France. Little by little the old trade-current through Bosnia and to the Dalmatian coast was diminished and Servia was now selling her pork and cereals, without the Austrian middleman, through the channel of the Black Sea ports and Salonica, in all the Mediterranean ports, from Syria by way of Egypt to Italy. The need of direct communication between the Danube and the Adriatic became steadily more obvious, and Servian claims to economic autonomy, the only form of independence which in the modern world is the sign of political autonomy, became more and more legitimate. Austrian imports fell from 60 per cent, to 35 per cent. Then came the war of 1912. Within only a few days after the opening of hostilities, Austria beheld the Servian troops in possession of Uskub, of old Servia, of a large portion of the Sandjak of Novi-Bazar, and rapidly making for the Adriatic coast-line. A national 252 PROBLEMS OF POWER policy of more than thirty years was thereby suddenly stul- tified. Servia had burst her bounds, and was no longer the ward of the Dual Monarchy. In an adroit appeal addressed to English sympathy, through The Times (November 24, 1912), the Servian Prime Minister, M. Paschitch, explained that independence of trade and economic liberty were not only necessary for Servia' s development, and even for her existence, but also advantageous to the world ; an Adriatic outlet, he argued, would give Servia new neighbours, " since every maritime nation would then be Servia' s neigh- bour as much as Austria is to-day." Servia was particularly happy at the thought that she was thus to secure direct contact with England, and to live henceforth in close rela- tions with the nations of the West. It is obvious at last that the general desire for reform, and the outburst of nationalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the positive recognition of the fact that money is to-day the chief instrument of rapid and successful action, are merely different aspects of the same state of mind. BOOK IV BOOK IV THE precarious settlement of the seven years' Moroccan quarrel between France and Germany was an humilia- tion for the latter Power, and not merely because she failed to secure a naval basis on the Atlantic coast of Morocco and a free hand to delve in the mineral riches of that region. The episode, above all, revealed to the world Germany's inability to sunder England, France and Russia, and also the un- stable equilibrium of her own financial and economic re- sources. The existing lame solution of the Moroccan difficulty provisionally settled only one of the differences between France and Germany. The Great Misunderstanding re- mained more acute than ever. The German people at last clearly perceive the inconvenient consequences of the ill- advised foreign policy of their rulers : a resuscitated France, throbbing with optimism and potentially belligerent ; 1 a British Empire, which after a period in which the Colonies seemed to be breaking away from England, like so much Im- perial star-dust bent on parabolic careers of their own is now re-forming, in centripetal spiral movements, under the astonished eyes of the world ; 2 an Entente Cordiale between the new British Imperial System and the Dual Alliance ; 1 " II n'a pas dependu de nous de conserver la paix aux autres. Pour nous la conserver toujours a nous-memes, il faut garder en nous toute la patience, toute I'e'nergie, toute la fierte", d'un peuple qui ne veut pas la guerre et qui pourtant ne la craint pas." Speech of the French Prime Minister, M. Poincare, at Nantes, October 27, 1912. Cf. also Note, p. 172. 3 Even the native rulers of the Dependencies are feeling the thrill of Imperialism. In November, 1912, the Federated Malay 865 256 PROBLEMS OF POWER a Dual Alliance between France and Russia, closer knit than ever by definite engagements that are bound to upset the whole balance of power in the Baltic, the North Sea, and eventually in the Mediterranean ; and a Far East, which, owing to the Russo-Japanese precautions for the monopoly of vast tracts of China, is becoming more rapidly closed to German political expansion than ever Africa was closed to such expansion by the shortsightedness of Bismarck. These events and tendencies of which the list might have been much enlarged are the evident logical conse- quence of Germany's anti-German foreign policy during the last seven years, and some are the direct result of the latest of her blunders, the despatch of the Panther to Agadir. It was inconceivable that she should not have learned the lesson temporarily ; yet the German Emperor, sceptical as to the perspicacity of his people, recently reminded them that pan-Germanism is not a panacea for the revival of German prestige. The confession was a courageous act of political wisdom. But calculated, as it would have seemed, to point the full moral of a sequence of German blunders, William II evidently regarded it as utterly inadequate. Early in July, 1912, a few days only after the Russian Duma had voted grants for the construction of four " Dread- noughts " of 30,000 tons, four ironclad cruisers, eighteen torpedo boats, and twelve submarines, as " the necessary guarantee of the national dignity and security " (words of Mr. Kokovtzof, June 19) which had been endangered at States presented to the British Government a first-class armoured ship. On December 5, 1912, Canada offered three Dreadnoughts to the British Navy, and at one o'clock in the morning of February 14, 1913, amid scenes of great enthusiasm, the Borden Naval Bill, providing for the application of a sum of $35,000,000, " for the purpose of immediately increasing the effective naval forces of the Empire," was passed by 115 votes to 83. South Africa will shortly come into line with Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and contri- bute its quota of ships to the strength of the British Navy. A Defence Conference at Vancouver in 1913 will register results un- dreamed of before Agadir. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 257 Tsushima, the German Emperor met the Tsar at Port- Baltic, and when the two sovereigns parted the following authorised statement was given out : The political conversations, which extended to all questions of the day, strengthened on both sides the conviction that it still remains of the highest importance for the interests of the two neigh- bour Empires and of the general peace to maintain the mutual contact, based upon reciprocal confidence. There could be no question either of new agreements, because there was no particular occasion for them, or of producing alterations of any kind in the grouping of the European Powers, the value of which for the main- tenance of equilibrium and of peace has already been proved. Nicholas II thus became answerable before the world for the sincerity of William II's pacific intentions, but for this service he demanded a compensation. He forced William II to declare to the world, and to his own people, that the policy of the Triple Entente, which Germany had untiringly attacked, was a policy that had restored the balance of power in Europe and that made for peace. Germany's atti- tude at Port Baltic was either the mea culpa of a prodi- giously disinterested European patriotism or an ingenious device for gaining time, in order to begin again, at a more favourable moment, the old German policy of intimidation. In either case it was the direct result of forces actively at work during the previous years, of which Agadir may be taken as the supreme symbol. Port-Baltic was the reverse of the medal of Agadir. Germany's decision to be prudent, or, at all events to play a mystifyingly prudent game and to adopt a franker idiom to speak English and French instead of German x had been foreshadowed by the despatch to 1 " Odo gave some curious details of the interview between Bismarck and Thiers. The eventful one which terminated in the signature of the treaty lasted nearly eight hours. The old French- man's volubility began to wear the Chancellor's patience, and, after many hours, he said : ' You talk a language I cannot follow, and reply to, as you do. I will answer you in my own ' well knowing that Thiers did not understand '^German. Thereupon en- sued a Babylonia of jabber, Bismarck using very strong language in 3 258 PROBLEMS OF POWER London of one of her ablest statesmen, Baron Marschall von Bieberstein. The business methods of that distinguished negotiator had immensely advanced his country's interest at Constantinople. The issue of the Franco-German colloquy of 1911, and the events which Agadir precipitated in Europe, appreciably limited the potential range of his activity. What took place in Europe during 1912, and notably the declarations of his intelligent master at Hamburg and Port- Baltic, rendered the role of this German ambassador in London one which was bound to be rather that of a consular than of a diplomatic agent. While he was biding his time and laying his plans, Baron Marschall suddenly died (Sep- tember 24, 1912). Less than a month later, simultane- ously with the conclusion of peace between Turkey and Italy, and with the outbreak of war between Turkey and the Balkan States, Prince Charles Max Lichnowsky was appointed his successor. In the Deutsche Revue, three months before, when the Balkan Day of Judgment still seemed remote, Prince Lichnowsky had frankly declared his conviction, that " no diplomatic artifice could possibly destroy the friendship between France and England." He added : " We Germans must accept the new conditions of existence created in Europe by the alliances and ententes, alliances and ententes in which we have not participated, and which have constantly been formed, if not against us, at all events independently of us." The confession of Port- Baltic would seem to have been the echo of the prudent and reasonable declarations of the future German am- bassador in London. But, in spite of these declarations and even if the war in the Balkans had not exposed the stability of the Triple Entente to grave and unexpected risks the members of that group should keep well in mind his vernacular, which, in reply to Thiers' frantic inquiries : ' Qu'est ce qu'il dit ? ' was not translated literally by the bystanders." Anecdote from the private and unpublished papers of Hamilton Aide, in the possession of the author : " Notes of Evenings at Lady W. Russell's. Sunday, April 18, 1871." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 259 that the anomalous and unstable character of the German Imperial Constitution the particularism of the States composing an Empire provisionally welded into a kind of puzzle-nation solely by economic interest and by the in- genious creation of a Reichsland regarded as a sort of national Pan-German park constitutes a danger for Europe and for peace. A Confederation like the German Empire can hold together only as long as it is in the interest of the majority of its members to co-operate hamoniously. When such co-operation ceases to " pay " economically, or is not needed in order to repulse foreign aggression, dissolution inevitably sets in. It follows that a prolonged economic crisis or a lasting condition of European peace would tend to disin- tegrate the German Empire ; whereas steady economic well- being and a chronic state of military panic belong to the class of causes that favour the maintenance of German unity and the development of a German national spirit. Thus Im- perial Germany longs with the same passion for both peace and war. In the case of such a Power a consistent foreign policy is impossible. The tactics of its rulers, responsible for the defence of the essential Imperial interests that the Bismarckian policy bequeathed to them, are bound to gyrate between patient, methodical, and apparently peace- ful activity and hysterical and brutal intimidation and bluff ; and both attitudes are, from the German point of view, equally advisable and equally sincere. The corre- sponding attitude incumbent on Germany's neighbours is evident. When Germany is calm they should prepare for war ; when Germany blusters they should be calm. They should neither be the dupe of her friendly overtures nor the panic-struck victim of her facile bluff. And if ever the time comes when she oversteps the mark, her own Teutonic mark or any other ; if ever the necessity of preserving German national unity suggests to her princes the wisdom of preach- ing to the German people a new crusade for the salvation of the German soul, the French and the English need only 260 PROBLEMS OF POWER heed the words of the Damoysel de la Mer in Amadis de Gaule : " S'ils voyent seulement vos visages asseurez, je suis sur qu'ils ne les pourront souffrir : donnons dedans : car Dieu nous ayde." II The utility of the present grouping of the Powers is now generally acknowledged. No fears engendered by the Balkan Scare should obliterate from the consciousness of the Powers of the Triple Entente the knowledge, so labori- ously acquired, of the real conditions of international peace. Germany remains Germany in spite of the Balkan League. The fact of war in the Balkans made it all the more necessary for the Powers of the Triple Entente to entrench themselves in their positions and to prepare for contingencies. It was, indeed, characteristic of German methods that at the very outset of the Balkan war, when it was natural to anticipate the probable assembling of a European conference, for the purpose of vamping up the worn-out clauses of the Treaty of Berlin, Germany revived its old policy of blandishment of France. An inspired German press defended the thesis that in the Balkan Crisis the position of France and Germany was almost identical. The suggestion was that, since both desired European peace, they enjoyed the singular privilege of being able to co-operate for maintaining it. But such co-operation would have implied another experiment in rapprochement of the kind which proved so disastrous in 1909 and ended at Agadir. Henceforth partners to the Triple Entente must work together throughout the world, and not merely at this or that danger-spot, such as the North Sea, the Mediterranean, or the Caribbean. Common action, however, is impossible if the three Powers are distracted by their several domestic problems. A necessary preliminary of effective common action on the part of the pacific Triple Entente is that its members shall severally put their houses in order. When A STUDY OF^ INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 261 they shall have completed that urgent task, and when, furthermore, they shall have secured all the necessary subterranean or other ! channels of communication be- tween each other's domains, then, but only then, will they have the leisure to work out a common and elastic line of action, embracing all possible contingencies and aiming at and assuring the maintenance of peace in the world. Then, but only then, moreover, can they begin to do business (negotiations : neg-otium), collectively or individually, with Germany. The " European Concert," in the old sense of the word, is possible only at the price of war. The only form of " Concert " now possible is one organized for provi- sional ends between the two distinct groups of Powers ; each group of three acting as a single integral Power, after independently concerted arrangements between the several members of each group. This was the character of diplomatic action during the Balkan war. Through- out that episode the Triple Entente sought " to bring about a general understanding of all the Powers," and distinctly avoided " seeking to settle the difficulties of the moment by dwelling on any systematic opposition of the international groups." 1 But the diplomatic action of the Powers of the Triple Entente was common action, the nature of which was determined by protracted pre- liminary negotiations between them, negotiations in which the members of the Triple Alliance had played no part. The method thus practised and the efficacy of which was proved notably after Enver Bey's and Shevket Pasha's coup d'etat of January 24, 1913 bore no analogy with the classic method employed in the period prior to Bismarck's death, the method recalled with regret by the Wilhelmstrasse, and still apparently extolled by certain irresponsible French statesmen, among whom the most eminent is the ex-Foreign 1 Speech of the French Prime Minister, M. Poincare, in the Chamber of Deputies, December 21, 1912. a6a PROBLEMS OF POWER Minister, M. Hanotaux. To revert to this old method to-day would not be to reconstruct Europe ; it would be to shatter Europe. Destruction of either one of the present groups would instantly be followed by a general war. This is why the " European Concert," in the old sense of the word, is possible only at the price of war. The Triple Entente, if it has learned anything from the events of the last ten years, will certainly have learned to say : " United we stand, divided we fall." It must hence- forth act in one spirit and as one agent. When, having solved their own several domestic problems, its partners proceed to draw up a plan of common action, they can give Germany every assurance that Power may require of their willingness to see her obtain any reasonable place in the sun on which she may have set her heart. International business may be allowed to proceed unhampered by any other restrictions than those established by each self-re- specting nation in the defence of its own national integrity. Russia and Germany may work out, with no risk to the Entente, all the legitimate consequences of the arrangements of Potsdam. France and Germany may, to their common advantage, conclude the consortium of Ouenza, an arrange- ment of immense advantage to the great French colony of Algeria, and to the more than ever indispensable naval station of Bizerta. 1 And England may say to the successor of Baron Marschall von Bieberstein : " Since you and your government at last know where we stand, there is no longer any reason why we should not come to terms over certain little matters that still await solution." Fresh from inspection of the Krupp works at Essen, Sir Robert Hadfield, F.R.S., former President of the Iron and 1 The appointment of M. Jonnart, ex-Governor-General of Al- geria, to the post of Foreign Minister in the Briand Cabinet of Jan- uary, 1913, is an earnest of the rapid realization of the long-deferred Franco-German arrangement for the exploitation of the Ouenza mines, and of the construction of a railway system which will further the development of an extensive region of North Africa. . , A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 263 Steel Institute, was recently interviewed by the Berlin correspondent of the Daily Mail, to whom he revealed 1 the fact that Germany, the Doubting Thomas of the nations, had now reached a frame of mind in which mere protesta- tions of good will towards her were waste of breath ; that what she now wanted from England was a sign, a " tangible act like the cession of Walfisch Bay." Sir Robert Hadfield, convinced that the destiny and future progress of the world are largely in the hands of England, Germany and the United States, proposed a triple entente of those three Powers in China, with the object of .exploiting " the greatest stores of coal and iron in the world." He urged the appointment of an Anglo-German board of twenty members, all business men, " ten great Englishmen and ten great Germans, clothed with plenipotentiary powers by their respective governments, to discuss and seal what might be called a ' Treaty of Toleration.' ' Diplomatists, soldiers and sailors, added Sir Robert Hadfield, are too " professionally myopic " to be of any use on such a committee. What is certain is that France and Germany might indeed come rapidly to terms if their national affairs could but be treated as mere " business propositions " ; if, in a word, there were no such complications of their problem as have been set forth in this attempt to survey the world's history from the Treaty of Frankfort to the opening of the Panama Canal, and if theoretical economists might only be free to settle the question of international relations by leaving out all the factors that make their solution difficult. It would be possi- ble to adopt the principle of Sir Robert Hadfield's plan, provided the conditions just indicated have previously been laid down ; and, indeed, this principle is sure to be applied before long in a rational way ; but if ever England were com- placently to favour the diversion of German expansion from Asia towards Africa, not only would she undo the work of twenty years, and weaken her French ally, but she would be 1 " What Germany wants," Daily Mail, February 20, 1912. 264 PROBLEMS OF POWER preparing for herself a future complicated by fresh problems. She would be furthering German combinations for the estab- lishment of Atlantic coaling stations just at the critical mo- ment of the opening of the Panama Canal. England should afford Germany certain opportunities for working off her sur- plus energy, her surplus production in Asia, but should avoid any arrangement permitting her to become a greater rival than she already is along the Atlantic trade routes. Thus, in- stead of confirming the treaty of 1898 relative to the eventual dismemberment of the Portuguese Colonies, she should seek for a fresh arrangement undoing that dangerous, and incom- prehensible pact. Within the last fourteen years the con- ditions determining the balance of power in the world have been altogether altered : so that there are obviously some things that England can do, and some things she cannot do, whenever the time may come for " talking business." But she can do nothing, nor can either of her friends do any- thing, with safety, until they have one and all put their house in order. The question that presses is : In what does that operation consist ? Ill Both France and England are now facing the delicate and urgent obligation of an electoral and constitutional reform which shall either suppress or discipline those elements of anarchy already analysed. In Russia, not- withstanding the criticism evoked by the first experimental efforts to reconcile the absolutism of the Tsars with the interests and the claims of an awakened middle class and an awakening fourth estate, the national assembly of the Duma has continued to justify its existence. The constitutional regime has already taken root. The agrarian and edu- cational policy of the government and the Duma, the indus- trial and financial progress of the community, the reorganiza- tion of the military and naval power, in general the immense social and economic improvement, are results attesting A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 265 Russia's steady advance in her efforts to recover in Europe the place lost at Tsushima and at Mukden. Her domestic outlook is darkened by the grave problem of assimilating certain nationalities now constrained to call her master ; but in spite of the risks in a too rapid and rigorous Russi- fication of certain subject peoples, her future has never been brighter. While Prussia is still persecuting the Poles, 1 Russia would be well advised and more than ever since the rise of the Balkan Powers to evolve a Pan-Slav policy charac- terized at last by a more generous and prudent treatment of the Polish nation. As for France, in the summer of 1911 her crying needs were the revival of Authority, and the restoration of Constitu- tional order ; and it was quite clear at that date that these ends could be attained only by re-establishing the principle of the Separation of Powers. The policy of constructive nationalism, systematically applied by a ministry containing statesmen like M. Poincare, M. Delcasse, M. Briand and M. Bourgeois, has already made such progress that France, at this hour, is the most compactly self-conscious community in Europe. The project for the reform of the electoral law, a project consisting in the substitution of proportional representation and of the scrutin de liste for the former scrutin d'arrondissement, will, when it is adopted by the French Parliament, necessitate the formation of disciplined parties and reinforce the function of the head-of-the-state. It will give the President of the Republic the courage, and sanction his right, to make use of the prerogative of Disso- lution, already accorded him by the Constitution (in agree- ment with the Senate), but hitherto practically inoperative to the great detriment of French public life. 2 With the rein- 1 See note, p. 211. 2 Before M. Raymond Poincare became President of the Republic he formally stated, in an admirable little manual entitled Ce que demande la Citt (p. 54, Hachette), that dissolution was the natural guarantee of the Separation of Powers. " Elle ne merite pas," he said, ' 1'impopularite dont les evenements 1'ont enveloppee." 266 PROBLEMS OF POWER forcement of the Executive, and the revival of Ministerial responsibility, as a consequence of the reaffirmation of the principle of the Separation of Powers, France will be free to complete the task of reorganizing the national defence and of preparing her ports, her railways and her canals for the economic battles of the future. Foremost among her preoccupations should be the construction on her eastern frontier of a canal permitting Dunkirk to become a rival of Antwerp, the iron-masters of the Meurthe and Moselle to buy their coal in England instead of in Germany, and the whole French industrial world to break loose from the bonds now linking them to their German rivals. The industrial, financial, economic organization of France has, indeed, now taken a sportsmanlike start, and this movement synchronizes with the revival among the younger generation of a taste for adventure, a craving for responsible action, the re- awakening of a patriotic, genuinely national spirit, the growth of religious tolerance, and the recognition of the need of re-establishing the secular relations of France with the Vatican. The inconvenience, the absurdity even, of the suppression of the French Embassy at the Vatican, are rapidly becoming patent even to the most politically inexperienced of French Jacobin fanatics. Even they are now deploring the decay of the French protectorate of Eastern Christians, the ecclesiastico-political problems pre- sented by the declaration of a French protectorate over Morocco, and in general the advantage enjoyed by the rivals of France who possess an official representative through whom they may negotiate with the Vatican in defence of their national interests. There remains the case of England. Her Constitutional problem, which a year ago seemed almost insoluble, but the solution of which has now been rendered relatively easy owing to the consequences of the incident of Agadir, is, after all, no new question. It is twenty-five years since one of the most suggestive of English writers, the author of A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 267 Oceana, while pointing out the impossibility of there ever being a " British Empire," argued in the same breath that nothing was more feasible, if only politicians would cease to meddle, than a " Commonwealth " of the British nations, held together by common blood, common interest and a common pride in the great position which unity can secure. The " Commonwealth " dreamed of by Froude is on the point of hoisting on all the seas the flag of the five self- governing nations finally welded together, not only by common blood and a common pride, but by the sense of a common danger. Under the dissolvent of Free Trade the " British Empire " has been steadily disintegrating for more than a generation. The divergency of fiscal policies engendered a divergency of foreign policies. At one moment the Imperial Government would conclude a com- mercial treaty with Japan for the sole benefit of the United Kingdom, at another Canada signed similar treaties with France and Germany without regard to their effect upon British trade. Then Canada and Australia passed Naval Defence Acts, with the warning to the British Admiralty that the Imperial Government should be allowed to use their battleships only if they so decided. Five separate systems of commercial treaties, five separate systems of de- fence, and one-fifth of a foreign policy ! Such has been the agglomeration that for many years has been passed off as the British Empire, to a world astounded at the apathy and blindness, the procrastination and the parochial short- sightedness of England's statesmen and England's Parlia- ment. The Mother Island had taken it for granted that her Colonies were lost to her, and had not even gone into mourn- ing. Interest alone holds nations together, yet Mr. Chamber- lain proposed Imperial Preference to unheeding ears. Empires as well as nations must have a sense of unity in order to maintain their integrity, yet the dominant forces among the disjointed portions of the British Empire were centrifugal. 268 PROBLEMS OF POWER But nations and empires must have not only a sense of unity ; they must have also a symbol of unity. Viewed from the outposts of Empire in the seven seas, England would have been utterly invisible if it had not been for a certain shimmer on the far horizon which was identified as that of the splendour of the British Crown. Amid the ruins of her aristocratic traditions and Parliament, the institution of the Crown, the King, the growing part played by the sovereign, the increasing utility of his role, rapidly became apparent. It was seen that the King was the key- stone in the imperial dome, the foundations of which rested in the four quarters of the earth. It was discovered that it was the sovereign alone who had been holding the Empire together ; that to the Dominions the British Parliament, British statesmen, British liberties were nothing ; the Queen and the King all. The West has found it difficult to comprehend the feeling of the Japanese for the Mikado. The divinity of a Mikado, as the divinity of an Augustus, is a notion that no longer fits into the idioms and frames of thought of our radical democracies. But the positive reality and utility, the practical constitutional value of the conception, began to dawn upon the mind of the most un- reflecting citizen of England, as he watched the far-away Colonies moving out on their orbits, without need or thought of the island home, save when they beheld a chance gleam of sunlight on the British imperial crown. From having been a mere survival, from having dwindled to a fairly futile part of the constitutional machinery, a political fiction, a mere figure-head that " ruled " but did not govern, the sovereign turned out to be the sole really necessary portion of the constitutional edifice, the one hope of lasting union, the only interesting and essential British symbol visible over the top of the sea. Thus there has survived from the old constitution a symbol, the King, which will help to create the sense of unity ; and, happily for the idea that he represents, happily for England, happily for the incipient 26g Commonwealth of British Nations dreamed of by Froude, the sense of the importance of this symbol has been en- hanced, and, it is to be hoped, definitively affirmed, by the sense of common danger created by German imperialism and American commercial rivalry. King Edward died as King of England, Emperor of India. His son will reign as all that, but as more. Shortly, in a fresh and unexpected sense, he will be the British Imperial Sovereign. He alone, during the dark period of 1910 and 1911, when British institutions seemed crumbling, with the Dover Cliffs, into the sea, he alone, with a conscious and conscientious activity, was working for the preservation of the best of England's past, and for the adjustment of her present to her future. Grandson of the Queen who had maintained intact the traditions of the people that first gave practical efficiency to the idea of Freedom, son of the King whose sound sense and direct action were the most powerful factors in the restoration of the balance of power in Europe, King George, sailor, traveller, practical man-of-business, makes the tour of his island kingdom and of his imperial domains, gets him- self crowned at Delhi, crowns his boy in Wales, holds his Court in turn in the principal British possessions, and at the same time, keenly alive to practical things, seeks to inocu- late in a people " infected with a kind of restlessness exempli- fied in the week-end habit " l the antidote of an example 1 Fortnightly Review, August i, 1911 : "A Business-like King." Germany would seem to be aware of the disadvantages of the ' week-end habit ' in England. When she made up her mind to startle Europe by the ' Coup d'Agadir ' she chose the date of July 10 1911, which was a Saturday. In consequence of the deliberations of the French Government on Saturday afternoon it was decided to telegraph to London to the French Ambassador, M. Cambon, directing him to find out from the English Government whether they would send a war-ship to Agadir in case France decided to do so. M. Cambon replied late in the afternoon that Sir Edward Grey was out of town, and would not be back until Monday. He had had a talk, however, with the permanent Under-Secretary of State, Sir A. Nicholson, who, without engaging the responsibility of his chief, 270 PROBLEMS OF POWER based on his knowledge that the prosperity of the oversea dominions, as well as of Germany and of the United States, is due to the enterprise and the dogged industry of their sons. He took over the direction of the destinies of the new British Empire (knit together at present solely by the post and the telegraph) just at the moment when the problem of their union is taking the form of a magnificent joint-stock enter- prise which must be managed in the interests of the common shareholders. No sovereign ever had a greater opportunity. " The earnest object of my life," said George V. on his acces- sion, " will be to uphold the Constitutional government of these realms." How could he know at the time that this great ideal would so speedily have to be superseded by another, for the realization of which he, the author of the cry, " Wake up England," seems to have been predestined ? How could he divine that by the force of things, the force of German and American things, there would be added to the sense of a common blood and a common pride, cherished by Englishmen all over the world, the sense of a common declared that England would certainly adopt the policy of France. The French Cabinet thereupon deliberated on the question of the proper reply to be made to Germany but were unable to make up their minds. On the morrow, Monday, the French Foreign Minister left, with the President of the Republic, for Holland on a visit that could not be deferred. On Monday evening M. Cambon telegraphed to Paris that he had at last been able to find Sir Edward Grey at the Foreign Office, and that the minister, while assuring France of England's intention to support her in her Moroccan policy, seemed to doubt the advisability of making a naval demonstration, unless France insisted on doing so. At all events the matter could only be settled in Cabinet Council on Tuesday, the 4th. Meanwhile M. Caillaux, the Prime Minister of France, had decided not to send a ship to Agadir, and on Tuesday morning he telegraphed to M. Cambon bidding him inform the British Govermment of his decision. The telegram reached M. Cambon after the British Cabinet Council had come to the same decision as M. Caillaux, not to reply to the German challenge ! This Aesopian fable teaches that, while times and places often make timid men bold, on other occasions the same causes often make responsible men timid ; and it likewise teaches the risks of the British and now the American ' week-end habit.' A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 271 danger, and that this new situation would transform his task from that of " upholding the constitutional government of his realms " into that of assisting in the construction of a brand-new Imperial Constitution, and of determining the common functions of the United Kingdom, the auto- nomous Dominions and the Crown Colonies, all of them owing allegiance to but one king, one flag, one Empire ? IV The members of the Triple Entente must henceforth work together throughout the world, and the speedy settle- ment of their domestic problems is the necessary condition of effective common action. It remains to survey the wide sphere of their common action in the various seas and regions where their fleets are to fraternize. The Northern question may be dismissed with a brief allusion. Of the active discussion relative to the foreign policy of the Scandinavian States that has been going on in the three Northern countries ever since the separation of Norway and Sweden in 1905, only rare rumours reach the ears of Londoners and Parisians. But what is known shows that the policy of neutrality, strict and unalloyed neutrality, developed in the more recent speeches of both the Danish and the Swedish Foreign Ministers, is one warranting the belief that the pact signed by Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden in 1908 for the maintenance of the status quo in the countries around the North Sea and the Baltic is perhaps more likely to be re- spected than any other international declaration or treaty now under the sceptical scrutiny of the Powers. The ex- change of views in August and September, 1912, between the Foreign Ministers of the Powers of the Triple Entente in St. Petersburg, London and Paris, and the visits of Russian and British vessels to Scandinavian ports in Sep- tember, have consolidated the pact of 1898. The hardy voyages of the German " Zeppelins " above the North Sea 272 PROBLEMS OF POWER merely serve to remind the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the English, and the French that in an alert Triple Entente lies the one hope of peaceful existence in the waters bathing the sides of the triangle marked by Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Christiam'a. 1 The more immediate scenes of the action of the Triple Entente are mainly in other waters and in other countries. They may be classed under the general heads of the Medi- terranean, the Far East, and the American Mediterranean, the Caribbean Sea. In the Mediterranean and on its shores the policies of England and of France are for the first time in history easily assimilable. The lapsing of the Triple Alliance has happily synchronized with the settlement of the Macedonian question, and it was in the interest of the peace of the world that that alliance should be renewed without delay. Its fourth renewal early in December, 1912, has in nowise imperilled the naval position of the partners of the Entente Cordiale in the Mediterranean ; it has, on the contrary, rendered more stable than ever the balance of power in the Middle Sea. Italy, which has secured Tripoli through the collusion of England and France and to the regret, no doubt, of Austria, as well as to the certain embarrassment of Germany, 2 seems to be aware that by remaining in the Triple Alliance she can not only best harmonize her own antagonistic ends, 1 On Friday, November 29, 1912, it became known that an aerial navy bill was about to be proposed by the German War Office and Admiralty " for the creation of a fleet of twenty Zeppelin airships of about 920,000 cubic feet capacity, capable of travelling at fifty-one miles an hour, and remaining aloft for four days and four nights without an intermediate landing." 1 In the late summer of 1911, it was well known in Constantinople that if Italy did not go immediately to Tripoli, she would be fore- stalled by Germany, seeking, in the concession of a North African coaling station, a Mediterranean compensation for the loss of the Atlantic port of Agadir. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 273 but also preserve the balance of power in the Mediterranean and establish peace in Europe. This seems a paradox. The reason, however, is clear. When Italy adhered, in May, 1882, to the Austro-German treaty of 1879, and concluded the five years' pact which became known as the Triple Alliance, she assumed merely Continental responsibilities : nothing in the Alliance offered her any guarantee as to the inviolability of her coast- line. It suited Bismarck to foster Italian jealousy of French and British sea power, and, notwithstanding Italy's insistent request, he refused to extend the Alliance to the Mediterranean. This refusal placed the subtle Italian partner in one of those ambiguous positions he loves. The Italian is never happier than when a situation makes it natural to try to invent a combinazione. Before the first lapsing of the Alliance in consequence of meditations which have already been analysed Italy arranged a comple- mentary Mediterranean Agreement with France. When France and England concluded the Entente Cordiale in 1904, the Mediterranean clauses of their Arrangement were integrally bound up with the Anglo-Italian and Franco- Italian understandings with regard to the same waters. Once again, all the diplomatic roads led to Rome ; all save one, the Russian road, and even that highway was finally opened at Racconigi in 1909. Thus, during the period when German naval power was steadily growing, Germany's ally, Italy, was helping to close the great Middle Sea to German expansion. For the moment, however, Germany paid no heed. Even so recently as ten years ago Prince Billow proclaimed in the Reichstag that this state of things did not matter : such is Germany's veneration for the Iron Chancellor that even the most deplorable consequences of his greatest blunders are patri- otically ignored by the levites entrusted with the security of the ark of the Teutonic covenant. Bismarck had refused to extend the Triple Alliance to the Mediterranean ; Ger- 274 PROBLEMS OF POWER many reaped the consequences. Those consequences were too patent for her not to try to remedy the mischief done. When, in the winter of 1912, after Kirk-Kilisse, Germany beheld the sudden shattering of many of her plans for hegemony in the territory between Buda-Pest and Con- stantinople ; when she perceived that matters were moving so fast in the Balkans that if she did not intervene between her two allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy, those Powers would probably come to blows even before the stipulated date of June 28, 1913, fixed as the limit within which the Alliance could be renewed ; Germany acted in the in- terests of European peace in urging the instant renewal of that pact on whatever possible terms. For some months before the Balkan War the German newspapers had been insinuating that Italy would act wisely in confiding to the Triple Alliance the direction of her Mediterranean interests ! No Italian fish were caught by the tinsel of this fly-bait made in Berlin. Bismarck had failed to take the chance that Crispi offered him. It was too late, in 1912, for the Italians to agree to extend the Triple Alliance to the Mediterranean. To renew the Alliance in the old form, however, was an immediate guarantee of peace. So to revise it as wantonly to introduce German dreadnoughts into the Mediterranean, in consequence of an international pact, would have been to upset the whole balance of power in that sea, and multiply the chances of war. The Wilhelmstrasse, therefore, did not insist, and the Alliance was happily renewed on the old terms. This event was a positive victory for peace and a negative victory for the Triple Entente. And it should be said in this connexion that if, throughout all the negotiations connected with the peace settlement consequent on the Balkan war, Russia displayed so exemplary a prudence not even seeking the natural opportunity to take her re- venge for the humiliations of 1909 and to realize her dream of opening the Dardanelles her motives were, in general, a firm resolution to work sincerely in the interests of peace A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 275 and, in particular, to avoid any initiative which would warrant Germany's raising the question of the partition of the Greek islands in a form permitting that Power, for instance, to establish a naval base at Alexandretta, the terminus of one of the embranchments of the Baghdad Railway. Thus, unlike the Triple Entente, which is a pact between Powers united by a common interest and by a genuine reciprocal regard, the Triple Alliance is an arrangement, a self-denying ordinance, between three mortal enemies who have decided to grip each other as tightly as they can, lest if any one of them be given elbow-room he should fly at the others' throats. Again, when at Sinaia Count and Coun- tess Berchtold and King Charles and Queen Elizabeth drank one another's health in honour of the secret con- solidation of the pact between the Emperor Francis Joseph and the " hero of Plevna," for the maintenance of a Balkan status quo, whatever the issue of the war between Turkey and the Balkan League, these precautions were only demon- strations on a smaller scale of the same artfully jiu-jitsu diplomacy of which the secondary Powers had an excellent model in the Triple Alliance. 1 Count Aehrenthal revealed 1 In the present state of Europe the only prudent jiu-jitsu pre- cautions for Rumania are those that will link her destinies with those of Bulgaria and Servia against the encroachments of the Triple Alliance. After having haughtily claimed for many years and with reason not to be one of the Balkan States, she sought in January, 1913, during the armistice negotiations after the Balkan War, and even after the rupture of the negotiations on January 29, to exact territorial " compensations " of Bulgaria, for not having made war on the Allies while they were engaged in driving the Turk out of Macedonia ! She put forward the plea that the balance of power in the Balkans had been upset by the victory of the Allies ! King Charles's efforts to parody Pan-German policy would hardly have been possible but for the Austro-Rumanian under- standing. That arrangement must either be abolished or be limited by a frank convention with Bulgaria. A native " Latin " com- binazione would be more effective in the long run than Hohenzollern blufi. 276 PROBLEMS OF POWER to the world what Austria-Hungary thinks of Germany, and the retirement of the germanophile Archduke Eugene from the commandment of the Tyrol and Vorarlberg in favour of Baron Konrad von Hotzendorf, former head of the Austro- Hungarian General Staff, and the subsequent recall of General Konrad von Hotzendorf to his old post in the place of General von Schemua, show how Austria-Hungary feels about Italy. The Tyrol, in spite of the Triple Alliance, has become an arsenal of the national defence, a fortified camp dominating Italy. The latest Italian enterprise, the Tri- politan Expedition, has produced, among its most certain consequences, an aggravation of the Austro- Italian tension concerning the ultimate destination of the Albanian port of Valona, the hinterland of which is slowly being won over to Austrian sympathies by the steady propaganda of Fran- ciscan monks taking their orders from the Ball-Platz. In 1904 Signor Tittoni, Italian Foreign Minister, declared in the Chamber that Albania was not in itself of much importance, but that its shores and ports would ensure to their possessors " the uncontested military and naval supremacy of the Adriatic." 1 It is this statesman, now Italian ambassador in Paris, who has been notoriously the most assiduous com- panion of that Russian ambassador, M. Isvolski, whose dreams of offering an open Dardanelles to his sovereign were wrecked by the premature action of the members of the Triple Alliance in tearing up the Treaty of Berlin before Russia was ready. When the Tsar and Victor Emmanuel met at Racconigi, accompanied by their Ministers, the Sove- reigns laid the foundations of an entente cordiale the prin- ciple of which was their common hostility to the realization of German and Austro-Hungarian interests in the Balkans, 1 The Italians have never forgotten that the " Latin Sea," the Adriatic, was known, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as il golfo di Venezia. They dream of a railway from the Adriatic to the Danube (Scutari-Cladova) counterbalancing the line Vienna- Sal onica, and placing Italy in direct communication with Servia, Rumania and Russia. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 277 and a direct consequence of which was Montenegro's declara- tion of war in October, 1912, against Turkey. Italy has ceased to be the Cinderella of the Triple Alliance. Of the three members of that Alliance it is Germany, after all, that has reaped the least benefit from the pact during the last ten years. William II has done his best to keep his two partners in the humiliating posture of a " brilliant second " and a Sancho Panza third. But Count Aehrenthal's initiative in taking Bosnia-Herzegovina was followed by that of Signor Giolitti in seizing Tripoli and the Teuton leading- strings were snapped. The consequences of the Tripolitan expedition on the irridentist spirit were immediate. Europe too readily forgets that it is not France alone which has an Alsace-Lorraine problem to solve. When, on November 12, 1911, the Italian journalists at Tripoli offered a banquet to the correspondent of the Temps, M. Jean Carrere, the entire company greeted the intervention of Signor Scipio Sighele, one of the Nationalist leaders, with the cry : Vivent Trente et Trieste ! Italy has not yet achieved her ideal unity, and the " long hopes and the vast thoughts " which she has stifled for so many years are once again becoming articulate, now that her enthusiasm has been re-kindled by the Roman prowess of her troops in the antique Libya. The nationalist spirit which has of late inflamed Italy is no new thing ; it is only the resurgence of an old passion. In May, 1891, one of the most eminent political economists in Italy remarked * : " The idea that Italy supported Signor Crispi entirely against her will still prevails abroad, and it is entirely erroneous. The truth is Signor Crispi personified, in a perhaps exaggerated form, the megalo- maniac propensities of the majority of the governmental classes. He fell not because the country had had too much of his ' grand policy/ but solely because he had hurt certain local interests . . . and the same megalomania persists to-day, and his successor will have to heed these tendencies if he wishes to continue in office." This was in 1891. In 1912, after the bombardment of 1 Letter to the author by Signor Vilfredo Pareto. 278 PROBLEMS OF POWER Tripoli and the occupation of the /Egean, the Nationalist movement, born in Florence, was justified by its works ; irridentism took on a fresh vigour, it was fired by a new hope. But while the Turco- Italian War did not make for the peace of Europe, it made even less for the stability of the Triple Alliance. These considerations suggest once more how im- mensely it was in the interest of the peace of the world that that pact should be renewed above all, in anticipation of the fatal day when the Emperor Francis Joseph is to hand over the great composite world of Austria-Hungary to Heaven alone knows what destinies. J The Triple Entente has need of 1 Notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary, it seems probable that while the Emperor- King lives Austria-Hungary will do its best to keep the peace. What is known as the " Berchtold Proposition " was an ambiguous appeal made to Europe in August, 1912 (by the Power that in 1908 took from Turkey Bosnia-Herze- govina), to assist the Ottoman Government in applying a policy of progressive decentralization in favour of the Macedonian nationali- ties, and to urge upon the Balkan States a peace-policy. This pro- posal, made while the French Prime Minister, M. Poincare, was in Russia conferring with the Tsar's Government, aroused suspicion in Europe. It was generally regarded as an attempt to steal a march on Russia and to checkmate the policy of the Triple Entente. Yet the good faith of the Austro-Hungarian Government would seem to have been demonstrated by the subsequent course of events. Count Berchtold's initiative was certainly the efficient, it was not neces- sarily the final, cause of the Balkan Crusade. The Balkan States, crushed between the Young Turks and Austria-Hungary, fearing both the growth of Ottoman Imperialism and the descent of Austria to Salonica, had achieved their miraculous union under the hegemony of the Bulgarian tsar. Meanwhile the prolongation of the Turco- Italian war aroused their dormant ambition. The Ball Platz is nearer Belgrade and Sofia than are the Quai d'Orsay or Downing Street, or even St. Petersburg. Austria-Hungary is even more con- cerned for the maintenance of peace in the Balkans than France, England or Russia ; and Count Berchtold was no doubt better informed than the foreign ministers of the other Powers as to the danger of immediate war. He formulated his famous proposal calcu- lated to forestall and avert just such irreparable action on the part of the Balkan League as took place two months later when the four Balkan States declared war. At the same time he went to Sinaia to induce Rumania to refrain from war in case his efforts to mobilize 279 the Triple Alliance ; it needs the Alliance hi order to sim- plify its own problems. As long as the Alliance holds to- gether, so long are the prospects of peace between the great Powers of Central Europe approximately certain. And the existence of the Triple Alliance is no obstacle to the friendly ententes between two of its members and this or that member of the rival group. Thus hi Mediterranean waters the interests of France and England (even with certain reservations of Russia) are now identical. Their common aim is maintenance of an open sea : the one for the security of her Carthaginian naval base at Bizerta, and because of the need of an unen- cumbered highway for the transport of her army corps or even of her black troops in case of an European war ; the other because the Mediterranean, which is one of the great central portions of the maritime world, is also the highroad of the chief purveyors of England's food-supplies. The military correspondent of the Times has put a part of the case very neatly : "It is not in our interest that the trade of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles should suffer considerable interruption. It is not in our interest, nor in that of Russia, Rumania, or Turkey that the islands of the ^Egean, which have good harbours, and which can enable ships based upon them to control the trade issuing from the Dardanelles, should rest in the hands of a strong and unfriendly naval Power. Our interests and those of Russia in particular are identical in this respect, and if hereafter the Black Sea fleet of Russia were to be permitted by international agreement to steam into the Mediterranean, we should probably nowadays make no opposition. In a word, the situations that have already arisen, that are European diplomacy at the eleventh hour in favour of peace should prove unavailing. When Count Berchtold's fears were finally realized and war broke out, the Austro- Hungarian Minister for War took the natural precautions ; he asked for supplementary grants amounting to 250,000,000 crowns. To conclude, as certain Hungarian and French journalists (see article by M. Jacques Bardoux in the Opinion, Oct. 19, 1912) have concluded, that " the Ball Platz must have worked to precipitate the Balkan war " is a gratuitous inter- pretation. 280 PROBLEMS OF POWER arising, or that are bound to arise in consequence of the Turco- Italian War and of the Herculean efforts of the Balkan League to clean up the Augean stables of Macedonia, form an interesting illustration of the general drift of the time, the present phenomenon of nationalistic concentration in resistance to the disintegrating action of cosmopolitan economic forces ; while, viewed in the light of politics and diplomacy, they show that the present grouping of the Powers, in the interests of world peace and equilibrium, is rational, and that it is likely, for yet a considerable period, to remain what it is to-day. At all events, it is clear, since that is the immediate question in hand, that the members of the Triple Entente must hold together in the Mediter- ranean. Even the eventual opening of the Straits need not, and will not, be regarded as a matter that in any way con- cerns the principle of the maintenance of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. But it is impossible to treat it merely as a question of political economy, a problem with which national honour and national prestige have nothing to do, an operation that can be accomplished solely by inter- national finance and by commercial treaty. If it could be thus isolated, the Time Spirit would never have solved an historic problem more neatly nor offered an object-lesson more characteristic of the time. But it cannot thus be iso- lated. It has to be considered in connexion with the whole question of the balance of power in the Mediterranean, a question that includes, as has been seen, the ultimate par- tition of the " Greek " islands, and such immediate realities as the French protection of all the Eastern Christians. 1 1 In 1905, after M. Loubet's visit to Rome, when the relations between France and the Vatican were particularly strained, the Rouvier Ministry heedlessly displayed its friendship for Italy by granting the religious orders in the East the privilege of renouncing French protection for that of Italy. From 1905 to 1911 thirty -three Italian monastic establishments in the East substituted the Italian for the French flag. When the Turco-Italian war broke out, and the Italians were expelled from Turkey, the Italian monks who had re- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 281 Italy's cravings for possession of Rhodes, if satisfied by the Powers, in consequence of a European Conference, would im- ply compensations to those Powers commensurate with the importance of the concession. 1 Rhodes commands the route of the Dardanelles, Asia Minor, and the Suez Canal. It counterbalances Cyprus and menaces Malta and Bizerta. Even the presence of the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean could not suffice, in itself, to compensate the Triple Entente for the sudden shock given to the present relations of the fleets of the Entente Cordiale by the establishment of the House of Savoy in the citadel where the Knights of St. John repulsed the troops of Mahomet II. The settlement of the questions suddenly forced upon the attention of the mem- bers of the Triple Entente by the turn taken by the Turco- Italian War and by the success of the Balkan League will be the supreme test of the solidity of that pact and of the intelligence of French, British, and Russian statesmen. Even before the outbreak of the Balkan War, after six mained under French protection, as well as other Italian monks who had accepted the protection of Italy, appealed for protection to the French Consuls. Now that the war is over, the Italians are wondering whether France will try to keep under her protection the Italian monks who during the war rushed to the shelter of the tricolour. The Vatican still remains anti-French and pro-Italian. But French patriotism is no longer what it was in the days of M. Combes. M. Poincare is as well aware as was Gambetta that anti- clericalism ought not to figure on the list of French exports. On November 21, 1912, while the Turks and Bulgarians were still facing each other in the Tchataldja lines, he informed the Ottoman Govern- ment that France, " acting as the Protectress of the Eastern Christians, would be obliged to hold the Ottoman Government responsible for any violence exercised against them." The resolute courage of the French Prime Minister will have far-reaching consequences. 1 In the Preliminaries of Peace signed between Turkey and Italy at Ouchy (Oct. 16, 1912), Italy agreed to restore to Turkey the uEgean Islands already occupied by her. But for the realization of her promise she imposed certain conditions which necessitated the maintenance of her garrisons in the ^Egean not only during the war between Turkey and the Balkan League, but until the Powers should take in hand either by a Conference or by war the whole question of the revision of the Treaty of Berlin. 282 PROBLEMS OF POWER months of the Italo-Turkish War, when Italy had seized more than one-third of the islands of the Aegean, and Ger- many, her ally, had announced the intention of placing in the North Sea a fleet the equal of that of England, then at last there was belated talk in England of an alliance with France. Even Lord Haldane, whom a German foreign office communique in 1906 had described as "a very germanophile minister," x warned his compatriots that they were " getting slack " over questions of national de- fence, and he added : " In no distant time we ought to be the most powerful military and naval nation combined that the world has ever seen." The disinterested outsider who overhears such words as these can only reply : " There is no time to be lost." There is no time to be lost and not merely because Spain appears to be moving towards a dynastic revolution, and because the future of the incomparable Spanish coast- line concerns the Powers directly interested in the Mediter- ranean ; nor yet because the mystic and the superstitious believe in the Vaticinium Lehninense, the Prophecy of Mayence and the Predictions of Fiensberg, fixing for 1913 the end of the German Empire. 2 1 Deutsche Revue, September, 1906, article on " Germany and Foreign Policy." 2 In 1849, when William I, then Crown Prince of Prussia, was engaged hi repressing the revolution in Baden, he chanced to find himself one day in the little village of Fiensberg, where dwelt an old lady famous for her gift of prophecy. He sent for her and asked her to reveal to him his destiny. The pythoness wrote down the date 1849, and, in succession, under the nine, the figures i, 8, 4, 9. She added the whole, announcing that the result, 1871, would give the prince the date of his coronation. " What year shall I die ? " asked the prince. The old lady wrote down the number " 1871 " and, inscribing beneath the " one," according to the same method, the numbers i, 8, 7, i, added these figures, producing " 1888." " When will the German Empire be destroyed ? " continued the prince. The process already employed, when applied to 1888, gave the date of " 1913." On the famous " Prophecies of Hermann," which date from the Middle Ages, and are known all over Germany, there is A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 283 Kirk-Kilisse marks the end of an epoch, the Bismarckian, and the beginning of a new era, not merely of European, but of world history. Thirty-nine years before the dis- covery of America the Turks took Constantinople. Four hundred and fifty-nine years later Turkey ceased to be a European Power. She has been thrust back into Asia by a military coalition of the small Slav States. This is the first result of the Balkan War of 1912. What are the consequences of that result ? They are numerous and remarkable. The War has put an end to the dream of Catherine II : the road to Byzantium is closed to Russia. At the same time the enforced concentration of the Turks in Asia will oblige Russia to exercise special vigilance in the region be- tween the Black Sea and the Caspian, and particularly in her sphere of influence in Armenia. But while Russia has been arrested in her overland march to the Middle Sea, Austria has been arrested as well, and Germany also : a new Slav empire, the United States of Balkany, has taken the place left vacant by the Ottomans, closing the road to Salonica, and the Pan-German hopes of eventually making Trieste an integral part of the national patrimony of; Greater Germany have thus been dissipated. In other words, the rise of the Balkan States, provided they succeed in maintain- ing their union if they devise a workable Federation, which will lift them, as allied Powers, to the dignity of a Quadruple Entente capable of assuring their political and economic independence in face of the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance 1 will have effectually altered some of the most an abundant literature. The latest edition of the text, as well as of the text of the " Predictions of Mayence," may be found, with adequate comment, in an amusing publication, La Fin de I'Empire Allemand pour 1913, by J. H. Lavaur (Editions Pratiques et Docu- mentaires, Paris). 1 A quick and ingenious way for them to cement their union would be to insist on making Albania a kind of Balkan Reichsland, the keystone of their Federal Constitutiona territory belonging to all 284 PROBLEMS OF POWER important factors of world-politics. Certain constant quantities hitherto figuring in one entire series of problems have suddenly been eliminated. The statesmen most embarrassed by this alteration of the accustomed political formulas are those of the Triple Alliance. The perplexity of France, England and Russia is comparatively slight. These three countries have been able to settle down to the solution of the modified problems, without undue anxiety as to their ability to integrate the new factors. Germany and Austria, on the contrary, suddenly confronted by Kirk- Kilisse, are called on to deal with an unknown set of variables of uncertain bearing and value. All they really know to-day is that Bismarck blundered ; and that the Balkan factors in the problems of the modern world are, after all, turning out to be worth more than the prehistoric and legendary bones of the Pomeranian grenadier. As a result of the Balkan War, the German drang nach Osten has been checked, and Austria called back westward. It has already been shown that the Balkan ambitions of Austria were the result of her disasters. Napoleon drove her out of Italy and Germany, and offered her Istria and Dalmatia. Bismarck, continuing the work of Napoleon, took from her Venice, promised her Bosnia and Herzegovina, and, constructing a solid German bulwark at her back, launched her on her perilous voyage down the Danube. He gave her a free pass across Macedonia, and thereby lured her forth on her ambiguous destiny. Although Austria is a Power essentially German, Bismarck sought to make her Slav ; and she went on assimilating the territories of the Slavs until she became positively " saturated " with the Balkan States but monopolized by none, and nominally governed by rotatory delegates of the several members of the Balkan League. Austria alone would object to this solution for the Albanian Question ; Italy would not complain. The creation of a vaguely-defined Al- bania, overlapping the region of the recent Servian conquests, in order to appease Austria, would keep the Eastern Question still open. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 285 them. " Saturated " is, indeed, the very word employed by Comte d'Aehrenthal, the first of her public men to recoil before the consequences of pursuing a German, rather than a purely Austrian, policy. When Uskub and Ipek were cap- tured by the Servians six million men of their blood in Austria-Hungary applauded. Eleven million Germans and eight million Hungarians govern to-day in Austria-Hungary some twenty-five million Slavs. But for the Balkan War, Austria would have gone on thus absorbing, or trying to absorb, the Balkan Slavs, and she would soon have awaked to the fact that she had become a sort of pudding stone of peoples, a Plural Monarchy ripe for disintegration. To have played much longer the role of Prussian vassal would have been to substitute for the Eastern Question a much more complicated Austrian Question. The victories of the Balkan League have come at the " psychological moment." Austria must perforce alter her national policy. She is thrust back upon herself. She is given, for the first time since 1878 for the first time since Sadowa ! the oppor- tunity to meditate on her real interests, and evolve a self- respecting national policy, while eliminating the germs of anarchy, fast propagating in her loosely-knit composite empire. Kirk-Kilisse, which has stopped the German offensive in the Balkans, should be a blessing in disguise to Austria. On September 17, 1877, Crispi, who was then President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, and who had been sent by the Italian Government on a confidential mission to Berlin, was received by Bismarck, with whom he had a long and remarkable conversation, carefully reported in his Memoirs. During this conversation Bismarck said to the Italian statesman : "I cannot conceive of a case in which Austria would be our enemy." Crispi replied that Austria at the time evidently stood in need of German support, since she had to restore her financial situation and reconstruct her army ; but " Austria," he added, " cannot look favour- ably on the new German Empire." 286 PROBLEMS OF POWER " You say," continued Crispi, " that Germany has no interest in the Eastern Question. Yet you cannot forget that the Danube is to a large degree a German river ; it flows through Ratisbonne, and is the channel of German trade to the Black Sea. At all events, we Italians cannot, like you, ignore the Eastern Question. ... If the Great Powers were to agree to abstain from all conquest in the Balkan provinces, and decide that the territory taken from the Turks should be left to the native populations, we should have nothing to say. But it is said that Russia, in order to conciliate Austria, has offered the latter Bosnia and Herzegovina. Now, Italy could not permit Austria to occupy those territories. In 1866, as you know, the king- dom of Italy was left without frontiers in the Eastern Alps. If Austria were to obtain new provinces, strengthening her position in the Adriatic, our country would be caught in a vice, and exposed to invasion at the pleasure of the neighbouring empire. You ought to help us. We are loyal to treaties and demand nothing of any- body. You ought to dissuade Count Andrassy to-morrow from any wish to take over Ottoman territory." " Austria," replied Prince Bismarck, " is pursuing an excellent policy at present. Only one case could arise that would cause a rupture between Austria and Germany, namely a difference between the policies of the two Governments in Poland. . . . We cannot allow the establishment of a Catholic kingdom on our frontiers. It would be a France in the North. We already have one France. We should then have two, which would naturally be allied, and we should be between two enemies. . . . Austria knows we are loyal friends. She is following a good course, and has no reason to change. If she did change, and became the protectress of Catholicism, we should change too, and then we should be with Italy. . . . Don't try, by exciting her suspicions, to provide Austria with a pretext to change her policy. The Danube does not concern us. It is navigable only from Belgrade. At Ratisbonne there are only a few rafts. Bosnia, the whole Eastern Question, is of no interest to Germany. If it became a cause of quarrel between Austria and Italy, it would distress us to see two friends fighting whom we wish to see living in peace. Moreover, if Austria took Bosnia, Italy could take Albania, or some other territory on the Adriatic." It is more than thirty-five years since this conversation took place. Read in the light of the argument of the present book, there is not a sentence, there is scarcely a word, in it that is not rich in suggestion. " I cannot conceive of a case in which Austria would be our enemy," said Bis- marck to Crispi, and in the same breath the same Bismarck remarked : " We cannot allow the establishment of a Catho- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 287 lie kingdom on our frontiers." Yet Austria has now been turned back westward well up under the German bastions, and she is the Austria of the grandiose, politico- religious Eucharistic Congress of 1912. She has struggled for more than a generation, against her German birthright, to become Slav and Balkan ; she is constrained at last to renew her devotion to her ancestral German gods. The Hapsburgs are an older race than the Hohenzollerns ; they wore an Imperial crown 350 years before William of Prussia passed under the arch of the Place de 1'Etoile in Paris. " I cannot conceive of a case in which Austria would be our enemy ! " The potential " case " has arrived. If Austria has finally learned the whole lesson of the winter of 1912, her rulers who were dumbfounded (and who can wonder ? ) by the sudden shattering of the dreams of a generation will with statesmanlike calm readjust their policy to the new exigencies of the situation. They will understand that the victory of the Balkan States has at last made it possible for their country to assert, shoulder to shoulder with Germany, her equal moral rights and her national dignity ; they will frankly and loyally accept the new status quo. Austria, as the nearest neighbour of the new Slav federation, will learn to live in good international comity with States whose economic future is bound up with her own. 1 No consequence of the Balkan War is more interesting than this : the Austria that Germany seemed to have bewitched into pursuing the unending task of following 1 The economic consequences of the Balkan War are for Austria- Hungary far more serious than the political. Before the war its trade with Turkey exceeded its entire trade with all the Balkan Slates. Turkey was satisfied with an per cent, ad valorem tariff, whereas the duties imposed by Bulgaria and Servia on such articles as sugar, timber, leather, men's underwear, beer, etc., are most oner- ous for Austrian industry. The United States of Balkany may seek, by a Balkan zollverein, to close their markets to Austrian and German trade. Thus economic, quite as much as political, apprehensions accounted for Austria's attitude during the Balkan War, and will determine its policy after the war. 288 PROBLEMS OF POWER out the Bismarckian plan ; the blind blond pathetic giant, doomed to " toil at the mill with slaves " for the Wilhelm- strasse, is finally liberated. The Philistines have decided to do their work themselves. Austria had so long been used to taking orders from Berlin that when the task Berlin had set her was suddenly interrupted her very destiny seemed ended. She made a magnificent effort to survive ; in December, 1912, she converted the loosely-knit agglomer- ation of peoples ruled by Francis Joseph into a compact bristling camp, with the object of showing the world she was a nation. It is certain that the spectators most im- pressed were the Germans. Kirk-Kilisse" will have emanci- pated not merely the Balkans. It will have marked the rebirth of German Austria. But the mobilization of Austria, and its causes, did not merely constitute a lesson for Germany. They were also a warning for Italy. Italy, indeed, as has already been seen, had no need of such a warning. She has always had a perfectly clear idea of the peculiar nature of the armed neutrality and reciprocal distrust which are the very basis of the pact uniting her, in a defensive alliance, to her partners in the Triplice. " Italy could not permit Austria to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina," said Crispi to Bismarck in 1879, and Bismarck retorted jauntily : "Do what you like about the Eastern Question ; we have no interests in the Balkans ; if Austria takes Bosnia, Italy could take Albania or some other territory on the Adriatic." Crispi left Bismarck without having obtained satisfaction. A year later at the Congress of Berlin, moreover, Italy beheld closed against her all the Adriatic doors of the Balkans : the port of Antivari was given to Montenegro, and all the Montenegrin waters were shut to the war-vessels of the nations, yet the maritime police of the Montenegrin coast-line was handed over to Austria, and Austria, not Italy, was permitted to " accord her consular protection to the Montenegrin merchant flag." Italy, still preserving the memory of the old trade route, A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 289 the Via di Zenta, and of the still more ancient Roman way, the Via Egnatia the very one followed in the winter snows towards Durazzo by the Servians on their glorious march to the sea Italy came forth from the Berlin Congress with the sense that her interests had been sacrificed to those of Austria. Bismarck had in fact made it possible for Austria to organize the pacific penetration of a region that ought really to have been opened to Italy : " Montenegro must come to terms with Austria-Hungary as to the right of constructing and maintaining a route and a railway across the new Montenegrin territory " (Clause 29 of the Treaty of Berlin). Count Corti, the Italian plenipotentiary, took an amusing and futile revenge, during the very deliberations of the Congress, in daily allowing the more important results of the proceedings to leak out into the columns of The Times, through the intermediary of M. de Blowitz. But Crispi was already meditating a vengeance of a finer Italian quality. In spite of his appeal to Bismarck, Bosnia had been given to Austria for eventual occupation, and Albania had not been given to Italy, nor had she been offered any other territory on the Adriatic. Pending some satisfactory re- venge Italy took provisionally the only measure that could " give the time time." II tempo e galantuomo. As the best practical device for checking Austrian expansion in the Adriatic, she became a partner to the Alliance between Germany and Austria, and slowly laid her plans to extricate herself from the Germano-Austrian web. In 1890 Crispi wrote privately to Lord Salisbury : "If we had Tripoli, Bizerta would no longer be a menace for Italy nor for Great Britain." The British Prime Minister's reply was not unfavourable, but he conjured his Italian colleague to wait. Crispi, as a true Italian, could not ask for more ; but a year later (January i, 1891) he fell from office, and the occupation of Tripoli was adjourned for twenty years. This letter, however, was the origin of the Mediterranean arrangement with England scon to be 2go PROBLEMS OF POWER followed up by the Franco-Italian arrangements of 1892, which were to result in a Mediterranean Triple Alliance between England, France and Italy, an alliance which was to form an obstacle in the future to many a belated German scheme. Algeciras was the Nemesis of Germany. The Germans had fancied that the impetus given to their foreign policy by Bismarck required no watching. They had counted without the subtle diplomacy of the Consulta. The general result of that diplomacy had been to assure to Italy not in spite, but because, of her apparently con- flicting engagements to the members of the two recipro- cally hostile European groups a position of independence superior to that of any of the European Powers, not excepting England. She seemed to have allowed herself to be bound fast. Seen from afar she looked like a Laocoon in the coils of the two monstrous serpents. Yet she felt herself free in all her movements. She was less free than she fancied, as she discovered when, early in the Italo-Turkish War, she proceeded to bombard the Albanian coast, in order to bring Turkey to terms, and suddenly found herself warned off the precincts of Valona by her excellent neighbour and ally, Austria-Hungary. This veto rankled. Obviously the effects of the Bismarckian envoutement of Europe were not yet wholly spent. Italy decided to fight out her destiny in Africa, and meanwhile subtly contrived a still more effective vengeance for the Treaty of Berlin. When the King of Montenegro, father to the Queen of Italy, and himself a pensioner of that Tsar who at Racconigi signed with Victor Emmanuel a treaty concerning the Balkans, declared war against Turkey, Signor Giolitti must have poured libations to the manes of the great Crispi. Italy had managed to obtain a long-coveted strip of the North African coast-line, and she had moreover partially contributed to the creation of a situation in the neighbouring Balkans which would permit her, at last, to challenge her relentless rival, and " ally," Austria, in regions from which both Germany and Austria A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 291 had for thirty years done their best to exclude her. Face to face with a potential United States of Balkany, Italy* in her diplomatic disputes with Austria, now has a tangible object for which to fight. Austria, by the same token driven back westward, and confronted with a problem of constructive nationalism which can be solved only to the diminution of the prestige of Germany becomes a greater menace than ever to Italy. Never did a responsible sove- reign give a more certain proof of pacific intention than William II when he induced his allies of Rome and Vienna to renew, while the Balkan War was still in progress, and before the fate of the Eastern Adriatic was settled, the pact of the Triple Alliance. By what device Italy managed to maintain her independence, while still renewing this pact, and thus rendered a service not only to peace, but also to the Powers of the Triple Entente, has already been explained. Thus, among the numerous consequences of the Balkan War that have now been examined, one of the most signifi- cant is that Italy will be more than ever inclined to use to the utmost her Mediterranean Agreements with France and England, and less than ever ready to further the growth of the sea-power of her Triple Alliance partners in the Medi- terranean. Speaking at the Farnese Palace on New Year's Day, 1913, the French Ambassador, M. Barrere, said : " Nothing that has taken place in Africa has been able to alter the sentiments of mutual understanding and common interest that inspired the negotiation of the Franco-Italian Agreements of 1900 and 1902. These Agreements subsist with undiminished vigour; their object remains intact. They have given France and Italy twelve years of friendly relations, based on mutual recognition of their interests, and so firmly established that we can take it as certain that they will continue to develop for the prosperity and grandeur of both countries. Finally these Agreements have been a precious guarantee of European equilibrium. . . . During the past year France and Italy became, by a magnificent effort of national energy, neighbours in the Dark Continent, as they are in the Alps and in the Mediterranean. This fresh contract imposes upon the 292 PROBLEMS OF POWER two Latin nations an increase of confidence, friendly intercourse and mutual aid. For they are defending together the same ideal of civilization, and their moral interest in this great and noble task is identical." These are the words of one of the half-dozen makers of contemporary Europe. They were uttered after the renewal of the Triple Alliance. Italy's decision to acquiesce in the renewal of that Alliance on condition that its purely defensive character be not altered, and that it should not be extended to the Mediterranean is clear evidence of her conviction that her Mediterranean Agreements with France and England have been among the most effective guarantees of European peace. Her decision suggests also that now, face to face as she is with Islamism, and with a concentrat- ing Austria, she will seek to supplement these Agreements by further arrangements with England and France, tending to establish peace for a generation in the " Latin Sea," and on the North African coast-line. 1 " If we had Tripoli, Bizerta would no longer be a menace for Italy nor for Great Britain," said Crispi to Salisbury. But when Crispi wrote these words France and England were deadly enemies. In 1913 the problem of British sea-power has become a function of an even larger problem, that of the maintenance of the 1 In a remarkable speech (February 23, 1913) before the Italian Chamber, the Marquis di San Giuliano, Italian minister for Foreign Affairs, drew an elegant distinction between balance of power in the Adriatic and balance of power in the Mediterranean. The former problem, he said, was " going to be " solved by " the inti- mate collaboration of Italy and Austria-Hungary, the co-operation of Germany, and the broad and pacific spirit of equity of the other Great Powers." Some critics concluded that the phrase : " co- operation of Germany " implied Italian acquiescence in Germany's proposal to extend the Triple Alliance to the Mediterranean. The reference was obviously to Albania. As to the general balance of power in the Mediterranean the Italian minister insisted on the fact that that sea must be an open highway to all the nations, but he declared that the Mediterranean Agreements with France and England were still in existence, and he avoided any fresh reference to " German co-operation." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 293 British Empire. This is a situation which Italy's ambigu- ous position, as member of two reciprocally hostile groups of Powers, renders particularly acute. Kirk-Kilisse has tended to turn Italy more than ever towards the Powers of the Mediterranean ; but it has not detached her from the Triple Alliance. At present she is so placed as to be able to play a preponderant role in the counsels of Europe. It is significant that when, on the death of Kiderlen Waechter, William II had to choose a secretary of state for foreign affairs, his choice fell on the German Ambassador in Rome. And it should now at last be clear why the settlement of the questions suddenly forced upon the attention of the members of the Triple Entente, by the turn taken by the Turco- Italian War and by the success of the Balkan League, is to be the supreme test of the solidity of that pact. VI Meanwhile, the three Powers must act together in the Far East. This is the second theatre of the concerted activity of the Triple Entente. Three special arrangements already fix the conditions in which that Entente is to work out its programme in that vast region. There is the Anglo- Russian Entente, there is the Anglo- Japanese Alliance, and there is the latest Russo-Japanese Agreement. These three pacts were formed, have been occasionally modified, and will continue to be respected, with the object of main- taining peace in Persia, China, and Far Eastern waters. Eight years after the battles of Manchuria, Russia and Japan, with a practical sense that should make a Bismarck turn in his grave/are coming to terms for the common econo- mic domination of China, and it is within England's power to share this hegemony and eventually convert it into political predominance. France, the ally of Russia, and England, the ally of Japan, have their parts cut out for them : it is 394 PROBLEMS OF POWER nothing less than vigilantly to prevent the Russo-Japanese understanding from becoming an instrument for the de- struction of China. Gen. Homer Lea has pointed out (ch. vii, The Day of the Saxon) the vital necessity for Eng- land both to thwart the naval expansion of Japan in the Pacific, and to defend the integrity of China. The maintenance of the political and military equilibrium of the Pacific is, Indeed, one of England's first Imperial duties : hence the predominant part played by India in British Imperial strategy. The natural alliance was between England and China, not between England and Japan. But from the point of view of the balance of power in the Pacific, France, sovereign in Indo-China, has the same interests as England. The partners to the Dual Entente ought to co- operate, therefore, in the establishment of good government in China, and prevent any Russo-Japanese arrangement from hampering their common action. It should not, however, be a cause of regret to either Power if Russo- Japanese co-operation in Northern China diverts Japanese ambition from the Pacific towards the Continent, and Rus- sian expansion from India to North-Eastern China. As Gen. Lea has said : " Should Japan, to extend her sovereignty on the Asian continent, neglect to first gain control of the Pacific, then the duration of her national greatness will draw to an end." Russia and Japan, it will be remembered, celebrated the fourth of July (American Independence Day), 1910, by declaring that if the Manchurian status quo were menaced, " they would come to terms as to the measures they might deem necessary to take for the maintenance of the said status quo." This was an apt and timely retort to the sensational and ill-advised proposals of Mr. Taft's Government for the internationalizing of the Manchurian railways. It was an amusing instance of Monroism in Asiatic waters. Since then the sphere of Chinese territory over which the Russians and the Japanese have publicly extended their prohibitive sway has been made to include A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 295 Mongolia, 1 and the two Powers are already prospecting these new spheres for the construction of railways. England, who helped Japan to secure her foothold hi Corea, cannot be surprised at what has happened, and the United States has even less cause to wonder, even though Russo-Japanese co-operation in Asia probably implies the shattering of the Germano- American principle of the " open door." * Great Britain, in revising, in July, 1911, her treaty of Alliance with Japan, took the first step towards the realization of what should be her chief aim, the fusing of the British Empire ; but, in so doing, she virtually left Japan in the lurch. To please the President of the United States, to appease the Prime Ministers of the Dominions, and to avoid entangle- ments in connexion with the opening of the Panama Canal, she insisted on emasculating her agreement with Japan, and left her old ally to shift for herself in her home waters. 8 1 By the Russo-Mongolian Agreement of October 21, 1912, Russia is to " lend Mongolia support in the maintenance of the autonomous regime established by the latter." In return the Regent of Mongolia concedes to Russian subjects and to Russian trade the enjoyment of special rights and privileges. The Mongolian Government is not to conclude any agreement with China or any other Power " travers- ing or modifying the Treaty with Russia " without the assent of the Imperial Russian Government. We shall shortly, no doubt, learn the Japanese counterpart of this Treaty. 8 Yet both the Treaty of Portsmouth (September 5, 1906) and the second and third Anglo- Japanese Treaties of Alliance (August 12, 1905, and July 13, 1911) admitted the principle of the Open Door in Manchuria. Clause 4 of the Russo-Japanese Treaty agreed " not to oppose the general measures common to all the Powers which China might take for the development of the trade and industry of Manchuria " ; and the Anglo-Japanese treaties, going further, stated it to be the object of those agreements " to preserve the com- mon interests of all Powers in China by ensuring the independence and integrity of the Chinese Empire, and the principle of equal opportunities for the commerce and industry of all nations in China." It is in consequence of the action of just such protestations as these in favour of the " integrity of the Ottoman Empire," that Turkey has been crumbling and will continue to crumble. 3 That was the upshot on paper ! and probably the intention, of the revised treaty of July 13, 1911. England accepted the clause 296 PROBLEMS OF POWER Happily, the Russo-Japanese War was concluded without leaving behind it an Asiatic Alsace-Lorraine. One Treaty of Frankfort is enough for one century. The former enemies rushed into each other's arms. The consequence is simple but prodigious. The bugaboo of the Yellow Peril will be definitely laid by Russo-Japanese co-operation. No result could be either more desirable or more logical ; none could be more convenient for Great Britain and for France, nor, it should be added, for the United States, whose atten- tion for some time to come must be steadily concentrated north and south of Colon and Panama. The apprehensions of the Powers, lest with the " break-up " of China the whole race should be submerged by a muddy and mounting tide of obliging both Powers to come to each other's rescue should they be the object of an unprovoked attack, but it inserted in the new treaty a fresh clause providing that if " either Contracting Party concluded a treaty of general arbitration with a third Power, nothing in the Agreement should entail upon such Contracting Party an obligation to go to war with the Power with whom such treaty of arbitration was in force." This fresh clause was a concession to Canada, Australia, and the United States. But it is one of the ironies of history that the Taft project of unrestricted arbitration, signed by England and the United States, was not ratified by the American Senate. England, like the dog in the fable, sacrificed the bone for the shadow ; and the result was that Japan, herself on the point of being left in the lurch, turned towards Russia for moral and material support against the Powers aiming at the hegemony of the Pacific. By the failure of the Arbitration scheme, moreover, England slipped, as it were, between two stools. She lost Japanese goodwill, and she did not obtain that of the United States. England is now, in spite of the revision of the Japanese treaty, exactly where she was before its revision, as regards her obligations towards Japan in case of war. In a word, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, by their violent hostility to Mr. Taft's Arbitration Treaty, knocked the bottom out of the British plan to render a friendly service to the United States, while satisfying the insistent claims of the Dominion. As things are now, therefore, England would have to defend Japan by arms if Japan were attacked, say, by the United States. The pre- dicament of the Dominions would then be a peculiar one. Happily, the new Japanese arrangements with Russia are likely to render less probable an eventual shock between Japan and the United States in the Pacific. A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 297 yellow men, are being conjured away. China is not break- ing up ; China is being organized. The trade, the industry, and the finance of the world, American and German and British business enterprise, and American, French and British money, are shortly to render Chinamen so busy at home, under the surveillance of Japan and the Triple En- tente, that many of the now urgent problems of immigra- tion which are disturbing the nights of American, Canadian, Mexican, Chilian, and Australian statesmen will, temporarily at all events, be shelved. 1 And for the United States, above all, it is an event of the happiest omen that, just on the eve of the opening of the Panama Canal, Japan should seem to be turning her main attention to the problem of co-operation with Russia to do the world's work in those regions of the Pacific where her share of the white man's burden is and where her responsibilities seem to lie. She needs no naval base on the other side of the Pacific, at Mag- dalena Bay or elsewhere, to complete the marvellous epic of her rise to the rank of a Great Power by achievements as glorious as those that marked even the miraculous reign of Mitsu-Hito. For the moment she has enough to do at home. The new era of Taisho is to test her national char- acter as it was never tested even in the era of Meiji. Japan has had to pay dear for the luxury and honour of becoming a World-Power. Six months after the close of the war her public debt amounted to 1,850,000,000 yen, and her taxes were 5-27 yen per inhabitant. Five years later, March 31, 1911, the debt was 2,650,000,000, while the taxes were 6'2 yen per inhabitant. Thus the taxes, the majority of which are still the taxes imposed because of a great war, remain virtually unaltered and must be revised. The burden of taxation borne by the Japanese citizen is twice that weighing on the shoulders of Frenchmen or Englishmen. A policy of 1 The Japonization of China has been remarkably treated by M. Ren6 Pinon in La lutte pour le Pacifique, pp. 97-152. 298 PROBLEMS OF POWER retrenchment and reform is absolutely necessary. Already a Japanese minister of finance, Mr. Yamomoto, introducing into the State administration the principle of festina lente, has succeded in curtailing the ambitions of his colleagues of the departments of public works, of the army and of the navy, while promising the Japanese people to lighten their burdens in the next budget. The circumstances attending the resignation of the Japanese Cabinet early in December, 1912, owing to the deadlock between the civil and the military elements, and the Tokyo riots of February, 1913, showed the immense change that has come over Japan in the last ten years as regards the growth of a public opinion hostile to Imperialism and in favour of re- trenchment. This is a state of things that should not be overlooked in attempting to plot the curve of Japanese- American relations in the Pacific. Japan must remain busy at home or within the immediate precincts of her own home- waters. Five years at least of peace and a rigorously prudent financial and fiscal policy will be required to place her in a position permitting her to contemplate the future without dismay. Already she has had to borrow money abroad to pay the interest on loans previously contracted. An immense specie reserve of Japan's money is thus immobilized in Eng- land. Additional foreign loans will still be necessary. In general, it may be said that the first quarter of the twentieth century will probably be marked in world chron- icles as that in which the hinterland of the eastern shores of Asia was rapidly laid open to the play of economic and financial forces. In order that this evolution may proceed in peace, Russia and Japan must be suffered to police those waters with the military and financial co-operation of their friends and allies. This operation, which will be made immeasurably easier by the opening of the Panama Canal, will take place far more rapidly than is generally suspected, and before, from the Caspian across Siberia to the sea of Okhotsk, and from Teheran to the Yellow Sea, the colossal interior A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 299 of the Asiatic triangle, the apex of which is notched by the indentations of Cadiz, Brest, London and Marseilles, will be criss-crossed with railways built by Western capital, that will discipline in civilizing ways a population ready to take its part in the task of world organization. It seems hard to believe that certain Englishmen, deaf to the appeal of observers like Sir Valentine Chirol, are still hesitating to take into friendly consideration the proposal for the con- struction of a Trans-Persian railway : a railway that is certain to be built ; that, if built by Russia, France and England, will solidify the Triple Entente ; that will " help to restore the economic prosperity of Persia," " strengthen the central authority and pacify the turbulent regions through which it will pass " ; and, finally, will render India an accessibly tangible portion of the British Empire and insert a prosperous buffer-State between Russia and Eng- land. While these hesitations are being prolonged, the Russian Government has launched out on a vast scheme of public works that are to transform its Asiatic possessions. Russia is building, or is about to build, feelers to its great railway across Siberia ; another railway from the shores of the Caspian by way of Merv and Bokhara, along the fron- tier of Afghanistan to Samarkand ; still another linking the Volga to the Sea of Aral ; and another opening up Turkestan as far as Tashkent. These projects are but a few items in the vast programme which the solid co-operation of the Triple Entente with Japan may carry out in the interests of the economic improvement of Asia, and of the peace of the world during the next twenty years. The detached critic of world-movements may apply to this whole series of schemes the words applied by The Times to the project of the Trans- Iranian : " We only hope that when the moment comes for sifting them they will be judged with greater fore- sight than was shown by British Governments in the case of the Suez Canal ; for fortune may not again enable us to redeem the folly of narrow views." 300 PROBLEMS OF POWER VII But the era of " narrow views " is past. Mankind is living amid a contagion of adventure. The moment is at hand when the dream of Columbus, of ultimately reaching India if he sailed steadily into the West, is on the point of fulfilment. The nations are already rushing into the vortex of the Caribbean. The Panama Canal will be open in 1914. On the other side of the world, the Japanese, two years ahead of time, have already completed the trans-Corean railway linking the Russian station of Kharbine to the landing- stage at Fousan, and have signed a contract with the " French Sleeping Car Company " for the organization of a direct bi-weekly service between Paris and Tokyo. Even a " little Englander " will reflect before really trying to wreck the Trans-Iranian. The Powers are rushing into the Caribbean, and only Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker, who in August, 1912, altered the shore-line of the Dardanelles, and who has a revenge to take for Nicaragua, can now stem the tide. The Caribbean, it has been noted, is the third field of activity for the Triple Entente. In reality, in considering the Triple Entente, the common interests of France and England alone need be dealt with, with regard to the opening of the Panama Canal. Russia may be left out of account until she has realized her project of bridging Behring's Sea. But in the American Mediterranean, between Venezuela and the Gulf of Mexico, France and England are confronted with quite another set of conditions ; they are face to face with a new Power. Here they have to deal no longer with the members of the Triple Entente alone, but with a great State which had hitherto made it a point of honour to be able to get on alone, independently of an " effete Europe," and has ridiculed almost as roundly as England herself (it is in the blood) the possible advantages of " entangling alliances." There is evidence that the United States is not even yet A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 301 aware of the changes in store for it in consequence of the unconcerted, but common and glorious, achievement of M. Bunau-Varilla and Mr. Roosevelt : the Revolution of Panama and the completion of the Canal. It is probable that the Americans, absorbed, as Rear-Admiral Mahan puts it, in their " national ignorant self-sufficiency," preoccupied by the pressing problem of organizing demo- cracy on the vastest scale on which that operation has ever been attempted, engaged in the gigantic task of construc- tive nationalism to which they have been impelled by the energy and intelligence of Mr. Roosevelt, may not yet be alive to all the consequences of their Martian enterprise. But their national self-defence is a matter of constructive nationalism, and in view of the rapid march of time it is perhaps the main matter with which they have now to deal. During the ten years following on the Spanish-American War, the American Government pursued but half-con- sciously the policy of introducing her voice into the coun- sels of Europe and the world. The imperialism of her drift, though it escaped the notice of the average American citizen, was clearly perceived by the outside world, and it has already been shown that this fact, and this alone, gave Mr. Roosevelt his prestige in Europe. While holding some- what arrogantly to a vague and intangible principle known as the Monroe Doctrine, the United States meddled in matters which it might have been thought logical, but which it was practically impossible, for it to ignore. The United States had not intervened in the China- Japanese war of 1894-1895. In 1897, as is recalled by M. Ren Pinon in his Lutte pour le Pacifique, Mr. Sherman, the Secretary of State, declared to a French diplomatist that the United States " had not a cent's worth of trade with China, and would never send a soldier there." Yet in 1900 the United States took part in the Peking Expedition. What had happened was that a protective tariff had made the ex- 302 PROBLEMS OF POWER portation of cotton goods from Massachusetts into Manchuria a desirable object of American activity, and a sufficient pre- text for the American claim to the maintenance of an " Open Door " in Eastern Asia, at the very moment that the United States was establishing itself in the Philippines. Every day, in fact, revealed the fundamental antinomy between the principle of the Monroe Doctrine and, not merely certain of the moral and intellectual and economic forces of the modern world, but the consensus of opinion, philosophic and juristic, which the pressure of those forces was causing to be codified in international law. At the same time, there was revealed to the United States the necessity of possessing the fleet of its policy, the arm that could permit it the luxury of a Monroe Doctrine. It made frantic, character- istic, even sincere efforts, to stick to the logic of its Doctrine without a fleet. Whatever happened it would hold to its inexperienced American idealism. In 1902 it handed over the administration of Cuba to its own people. In 1909, after having governed the island for three years in order to stave off civil war, it shirked a second time the duty of facing plain political facts. A lack of intellectual probity is often characteristic of Anglo-Saxon statesmanship, and of late years, in America, Mr. Roosevelt alone would seem to have had an inkling of the profound practical truth of Spinoza's remark : " It matters little, as regards the security of the State, what the motives of rulers may be in the successful administration of affairs. Liberty or strength of soul are the virtue of private persons ; the virtue of the State is security." Yet the United States continued to hold the Philippines and Hawaii, and to insist on an Open Door in China. In spite of itself, it became a positive factor in the manoeuvres by which the Powers sought to parcel out the whole of Eastern Asia, until they were reminded that that region was a sphere of influence of Russia and Japan. At Algeciras, meanwhile, the United States again owing to the quick resolution and the diplomatic sense and know- A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 303 ledge of Mr. Roosevelt had shown that it was on occasion one of the essential factors of international peace. But all these instances of American co-operation in the international political work of the world have somewhat lacked continuity. At all events they have not possessed an adequate sanction. Their uncoordinated, of ten illogical character, will be revealed to the most indifferent once the Panama Canal is opened. The United States must hence- forth have a consistent world-policy supported on a fleet adequate to protect its interests in the Atlantic and the Pacific. It has summoned the world to its doors. It must henceforth not only defend the precincts of its house, but be able to justify its action with pretexts acceptable to its competitors and enemies. The preliminary efforts of the United States to attain this end have thus far neither been adequate nor sufficiently intelligible and explicit. This point requires explanation. American coast-wise trade is an American monopoly. Now, as, practically speaking, the Canal has become in Rear-Admiral Mahan's view, and as was held by President Hayes a part of the coast-line of the United States, it is argued that such trade may be allowed by the United States to use the Panama Canal under any terms that the Govern- ment may see fit to propose. Being a part of the American coast-line the Canal should be fortified, and for like reasons should be connected with the Cuban naval base of Guan- tanamo. The defence of the United States is what the mathematicians call " a function of the problem of control " of the Canal, and no parallel case exists in the world. Lord Lansdowne's queries with regard to the Dardanelles have, however, raised certain points or suggestions that may be cited as militating against this view. 1 Every one can see the peculiar advantage, for the United States, in case of war, of possessing, between the Atlantic and the Pacific, a safe open highway which it is at liberty to fortify as 1 See p. 7. 304 PROBLEMS OF POWER part of its coast-line. But once the currents of traffic have begun to flow through the Canal, it is possible, it is indeed probable, that the South American States of the Pacific, and even Australia, will be even more benefited than the United States by the use of the Canal ; and at such a moment, which will not be long deferred, the great States that are international carriers, England, Germany, France, even Japan, would find their interests seriously affected by the closing of the Canal. The question of the neutraliza- tion of the Canal might then conceivably be made the object of a common protest, and if the United States refused to heed such a protest, the Powers would have only the redress of the Hague Arbitration Tribunal (should the United States consent to bring the matter before such a Tribunal) or war. If a case of this kind were brought to-day before any Court of International Law, there can be little doubt as to the verdict of such a Court. In a " Consultation " made in the name of the protesting Powers, whose " na- tionals " (certain foreign life-insurance companies established in Italy) are threatened with confiscation by the Italian Government, which desires to establish a state monoply of life-insurance, Maitre Edward Clunet has martialled the argu- ments now universally adduced by international jurists to prove that the right of a State to legislate in sovereign independence is limited by the right of other States to see that the interests of their own " nationals " are not injured by such legislation. " By the very fact of their coexistence in multiple, homogeneous and independent groups, modern nations have become alive not only to their rights but to their obligations," writes Maitre Clunet ; and his views are corroborated by Professor von Bar for Germany, Professor Holland for Great Britain, Professor Lamsnarch for Austria, Professor Alberic Rolin for Belgium, Professor Lyon-Caen for France, Professors Anzelotti and Gabba for Italy, Councillor of State Asser for Holland, and Professor Roguin for Switzerland. " To avoid anarchy, or sterile, endless, sanguinary strife, modern nations have followed, in time of war as well as in time of peace, A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 305 certain customs and traditions. The continued conformity to these rules of conduct has resulted in the creation of a kind of common law, which presents the greater resistance to negative criticism because it is purely empiric. From the interpenetration of peoples by the communication of ideas, by the contact of individuals, by the dove- tailing of moral and material factors, there has resulted a formidable mingling of interests, sentiments and needs. From this common law of civilized nations, as now fixed by the experience and the com- mon consent of the most enlightened among them, it is possible to deduce the following principles : " States, in virtue of the right of sovereignty, are independent. This fact confers on them the faculty of legislating on their territory, according to their own views and needs. , " States, however, by definition, find solitary existence repugnant ; they are unable to live in isolation, even though that isolation be splendid. Whatever their condition, they form part of the civilized Community, of theMagna Civitas, of the maxima respublica gentium. This necessity is inherent in the nature of things ; it is impossible for States to avoid it, and the necessity engenders, and imposes on them, certain rights and duties. " The fact of their coexistence imposes on States certain limits, not to the enjoyment, but to the exercise, of their right of sovereignty. " This limit is fixed at the point where the right of the other States to a reasonable and equitable treatment, for themselves or their dependents, in international relations, begins to make itself felt. " Collective right, of which sovereignty is the expression, comports, like individual right, a jus utendi et abutendi ; but the jus abutendi stops normally when grave damage, damnum latum, is knowingly done to third parties in the exclusively personal interest and ad- vantage of the State which is the author of the injury. " If, from political or economic considerations of a domestic order, a State feels called on to infringe these principles, such an act gives rise to a demand for material reparation or a compensatory indemnity, according to the forms accepted by international cus- tom. " Thus, a State which, notably with regard to its trade, should adopt a system of complete isolation, would thereby renounce the enjoyment of the common law of nations." This clear and logical statement is not merely the verdict of a certain number of specialists in international law ; it represents as well the point of view of reflecting public opinion ; and there is no doubt that the ideal of inter- national relationship which it expresses tends more and more, notwithstanding such manifestations as the Coup d'Agadir, x 306 PROBLEMS OF POWER to become the aim of practical statesmen in the present day. It is because statesmen like Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, and specialists like Rear-Admiral Mahan, were so keenly alive not merely to the paramount importance of the Panama Canal for the National Defence of the United States, but also to the consensus of international juristic opinion as to the general principle of the subordination of the sovereign right of a State to the other ideal of human and international solidarity, that they so stubbornly con- tested in advance the wisdom of Mr. Taft's proposed un- restricted arbitration treaties, which would have rendered " justiciable " just such questions as the closing of the Canal in time of war to an enemy's war-ships, or as the right of the United States to eject from the coast-line ad- joining the Canal corporations purposing to acquire terri- tory for transfer to a Foreign Power, even under the appa- rently inoffensive forms of joint-stock companies. The opening of the Canal will not diminish, but aggravate that distrust of the United States which marks the rapidly grow- ing nationalism of the South American States. Pan-Ameri- canism will become more than ever a Utopia. And while the opening of the Canal may make it possible to apply the Monroe Doctrine, and in a more pronounced form, in Cen- tral America, in the Caribbean, and in the Pacific Coasts of Mexico, it will be a less and less applicable principle of South American action. These and other pretensions put forward by the United States Government may, therefore, conceivably, sooner or later, find themselves in opposition with the national in- terests of rival Governments plausibly justified by a more up-to-date interpretation of international law ; and in such a case the question could be decided only by the nation or nations possessing the greatest naval or military power. Hence the need for the United States, as a corollary to the fortifying of the Panama Canal, to build a powerful battle fleet rendering it predominant in the Caribbean, A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 307 and perhaps in the Pacific. If the Mahans, the Roosevelts, the Lodges are wrong ; if the Canal be not, as President Hayes argued that it was, part of the coast-line of the United States, but merely an international highway of as little direct interest to the Atlantic and Pacific States of the Union as the Suez Canal, then the United States can spare itself the expense of a fleet, and of naval bases at Guan- tanamo and in the Canal Zone. But if that view were to be taken in Washington, naval bases would quickly be built by World-Powers that have learned by hard experience never to defer the taking of defensive precautions. Fortunately or unfortunately, as it may be regarded the United States has no choice. By the mere fact of decid- ing to construct a Canal at Panama it crossed the Rubicon, took the step from which there is no going back, and de- finitively sealed the destiny opened for it in 1898, when it drove Spain out of Cuba. At any moment during the years succeeding the Spanish-American War, even after its grave decision virtually to annex the Philippines, at any moment previous to the glorious and fatal resolution to build the Panama Canal, it might have undone the conse- quences of its past, thwarted its destiny, and remained isolated from the European and Asiatic worlds, a self- sufficient mistress of half the North-American Continent, and Protector and Over-lord of Latin-America. The Panama Canal has changed all that. The United States is now out in the open. It is shortly to be swept into the centre of the world's currents and counter-currents, and it must learn to trim its sails to the winds against which the other Powers are tacking, and to lookout for the pirate fleets of its rivals. The Panama Canal, which is the gateway to the Eastern Pacific, will be the only highway between the three coasts of the United States, and, as Rear-Admiral Mahan has pointed out, it will impose upon America a great national obligation, that of securing her influence (not her supremacy) in the Pacific. A strong American Navy has 308 PROBLEMS OF POWER become a vital necessity for the security of the United States. America has courted a great responsibility, and she must rise to it, or pay the consequences by dismemberment. It is, furthermore, of grave significance that the United States is assuming these new responsibilities, that it is coming forth definitively from its magnificent isolation, just after the failure of its endeavours to bring about the Reciprocity Treaty with its Northern neighbour, England's great Dominion. The success of this scheme would probably have compassed the downfall of England. Its failure has saved the British Empire ; but at the same time it has flung the United States back on its own resources, and it now finds itself face to face with a Foreign Power as morally self-sufficient as itself, no less rich and enterprising than it, and as suddenly awakened to a sense of the practical realities of world-politics. The new situation thus pre- sented (mainly as one of the most significant corollaries of Germany's persistent aggressiveness) raises again for the United States a question it fancied it had settled seventy years ago by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. J Some fifteen years ago Mr. Chamberlain put it to her afresh : " Do the Great Lakes divide two enemies ? Is an Anglo-American Alliance useful ? " But the scope of the question is shortly to become wider. As the fatal day of the opening of the Canal approaches, Wash- ington will begin to ask itself another question : "Is an Anglo-American Entente imperative ? " Sir Edward Grey aimed at securing an American Alliance by means of an unlimited Arbitration Treaty, and failed. There are perils and special contingencies in the new responsibilities imposed on the United States as it finds itself at last in the thick of the warring interests of the world-powers England and her Dominions, Germany and Italy, South American Pan-Latinism, Japan and Russia ; and these 1 See " One Hundred Years of Peace," by Henry Cabot Lodge, The Outlook, January 4, 19131 A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 309 perils may make it more than a mere matter of convenience to come to an explicit political understanding with the British Empire. It is not merely that England, the United States and France have common commercial interests all along the Eastern Pacific, interests which they cannot share with Germany, who is already at so many points a triumphant competitor. It is, as Rear-Admiral Mahan has so conclusively shown, that the great effect of the Panama Canal will be the indefinite strengthening of Anglo-Saxon institutions along the North-East shores of the Pacific, from Alaska to Mexico, by multiplying the inhabitants of those regions and by a consequent augmentation of shipping and commerce. Moreover, the identity of f eeling between the North-American Pacific and Australia, both inheritors of the same political tradition, as to the question of Asiatic immigration, is certain to create political sympathies, and may draw into a common action the nations of which each forms a part. The question of Asiatic immigration is, in- deed, one on which Canada, the Western United States, Western South-America, Australia, and the rulers of the Islands of the Pacific are all at one. It is a question in which the Triple Entente agrees with the United States. It is a question on which the four countries will continue to agree for many years to come. It is a question on which the members of the Triple Entente disagree with Japan and China, and to a certain degree even with Germany. The Panama Canal will thus undoubtedly tend to Europeanize the North-Eastern and South-Western Pacific, while it leaves the Western Pacific Asiatic. But the important fact is that, just at the moment when the opening of the Panama Canal is linking the general interests of the new British Empire and of the United States in the Pacific America's need of English sympathy and friendliness is increased by the fact that the Cana- dian border will soon cease to be a colonial boundary and become really a British Imperial Frontier ; that a new 310 PROBLEMS OF POWER Canadian fleet, which is a British fleet, is constructing North of Colon, while an Australian fleet, and perhaps a New Zealand fleet, will shortly be sailing up out of the South- West and meeting the Canadian ships in the road- stead at Kingston. Just as for many years the fleets of the world have entered the Mediterranean under Eng- land's guns at Gibraltar, so henceforth the ironclads and merchant vessels of the Powers will pass from the Caribbean to the Pacific between the fortifications of the United States. But, magnificent vantage point as that of the Americans will be, let them cherish no illusions as to its meaning. The geographical centre of gravity will have been shifted from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, and national isolation, freedom from " entangling alliances," will no longer be possible for the United States. Established finally in the seat of customs, the Americans will hence- forth have to reason and act as political animals, in con- formity with the prejudices and customs of the world. No- thing is more obvious than that now at last the United States, having issued from its isolation, having become, sooner than it expected, perhaps sooner than it wished, a responsible, and no mere dilettante member of the concert of nations, will be called on by those nations, driven, that is, by the force of things, to conform its favourite principle of the Monroe Doctrine to the Law of Nations. No spasmodic, provisional, merely empirically opportunist readjustment of that Doctrine to this or that new need or situation, as they may arise, will any longer be tolerated. The attempt to defer the complete solution of this grave problem by arousing waves of enthusiasm in favour of Hague Con- ferences, unrestricted Arbitration Treaties, or any other desirable and elevated form of the humanitarian and Chris- tian ideal of Pacifism, will be regarded as hypocritical, and may even suggest the cuttle-fish policy of spurting forth an inky channel to cover its escape from its pursuers. Mean- while the most elementary attempt to preserve the essence A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 311 of its great national "Doctrine," while introducing it into the recognized corpus of International Law, will prove to the United States the wisdom of becoming as speedily as possible a strong naval and military Power. The same self-interest will suggest the parallel prudence of not doing anything to alienate the vast Imperial Community of men of its own flesh and blood, who, previously separated from it by an estranging sea, have now become its close neighbours, and even a possible menace to its insufficiently protected borders. If, from failure to divine the inevitable drift of the time, to distinguish clearly the character of the forces to which it must conform, the United States, repudiating its idealistic past, were to suffer serious friction to be set up along the new frontiers now uniting it to, instead of dividing it from, the British Empire ; if it were to let the problems created by the Panama Canal engender be- tween it and England, Canada and Australia, such ill- feeling as would prepare the diplomatic ground at Wash- ington for the signing of an entente between Berlin and Washington for their common defence against British and Russo-Japanese competition, both military and commercial should it drift into such a situation, it would have to bear the responsibility of an act which would upset the entire balance of power in Europe, and result in a war involving the interests of the entire population of our planet. The United States, alone among the strong nations, lived, up to the last ten years of the nineteenth century, under self-imposed limitations of two sorts one that had to do with geography, and another that had to do with public morality. As ex-President Harrison put it, only ten years ago, " We do not want, in any event, territorial possessions that have no direct relation to the body of our national domain, and we do not want any territory anywhere that is acquired by criminal aggression." 1 1 North American Review, " Musings upon Current Topics," February 15, 1901. 312 PROBLEMS OF POWER But now America has become a World Power. She is a new-comer among the World Powers, and she is an innocent 1 member of the international band of land-grabbers whose principle of action is reciprocal vigilance during their free- 1 Her " innocence " is really what the Germans would call " colos- sal." In November, 1911, the President of the United States pub- lished, in the Woman's Home Companion, an article on " The Dawn of World Peace," which was speedily reproduced in a special bulletin of the " American Association for International Conciliation." In that article President Taft said : " If the United States has a mission, besides developing the principles of the brotherhood of man into a living, palpable force, it seems to me that it is to blaze the way to universal arbitration among the nations. ... It is known to the world that we do not covet the territory of our neighbours, or seek the acquisition of lands on other continents. We are free of such foreign entanglements as frequently conduce to embarrassing com- plications. . . . The spirit of justice governs our relations with other countries, and therefore we are specially qualified to set a pace for the rest of the world." Not nine months later at a moment, moreover, when American marines were guarding the railway lines in Nicaragua a friendly European Government was making re- peated representations to the American Government against the alleged disloyalty of the United States in passing, relative to the Panama Canal, a law which the friendly Power in question holds to be an infringement of treaty obligations. It is evident that since, as President Taft says, the United States is " known to the world as a Power that does not covet the territory of its neighbours," and since " the spirit of justice governs the relations of the United States with other countries," he has himself beautifully " blazed the way " as he puts it to arbitration on the question raised by the protest of the British Government. Mr. Taft belatedly admitted this in an address on January 4, 1913, before the International Peace Forum. He promised, " if necessary," to submit the Panama Canal Tolls Dispute to arbitration. This decision was not taken, however, until after American public opinion had forced the hand, as it were, of his Administration ; and in the same breath he de- fended the treaties he had concluded with England and France for the settlement even of questions of national honour by arbitra- tion, declaring that the nations of the world look to the United States, and " properly look to the United States," as a leader in the matter of establishing peace, " because we are so fortunately placed between oceans and without troublesome neighbours [sic] that we can go on without fear of consequences [sic] to establish a condition in which we shall settle every question [sic] by reference to an arbitral tribunal." A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 313 booting raids, lest any one obtain a little more soil than his neighbour. The only influences in the world capable of putting an end to these predatory methods are the combined forces of the new British Empire, and a self-denying United States and France. Were the Americans of the United States, in the present state of the world, to succumb to the blandishments of Germany, and accept any exclusive arrange- ment with that Power, they would be selling their birth- right, sacrificing the essentials of what has made their history worth anything in the world's annals, and losing their " lives, their fortunes and their sacred honour." * It was a dream of Jefferson, at the end of his life, that Cuba and Canada should one day be incorporated in the United States. A part of this dream has been fulfilled : the United States now possesses its " South Coast Line," extending from Cuba to Colon and Panama, and it chances that that line is to be one of the new axes, perhaps the one new axis, of world-policy. The other part of the dream seems less likely to be realized ; the disintegration of the British Empire, which M. Garcia-Calderon in his Latin Democracies of America (p. 367) prophesied " would be the work of the Yankees," seems a contingency more remote than ever. Mexico, which Japan has already been trying to colonize, may before long become dependent on the United States, as the dummy State of Panama virtually is already, and as Central America will unquestionably be within a relatively brief time. But these embarrassingly ad- vantageous strategic additions to its territory will not give the United States a fleet ; they will not help it to compete with the commercial enterprise of the rival Powers in the ports of the Eastern Pacific ; they will not arrest the mag- nificent movement of the nations in their preparation for the 1 " England, and not the United States," says the author of The Day of the Saxon, " guarantees the independence of American nations ; and in the preservation of the British Empire rather than in the doctrine of Monroe is to be found the basis of their security." 314 PROBLEMS OF POWER economic (and perhaps military) struggle of which the Pacific Ocean is soon to be the scene. The Americans have been dredging their harbour at San- Juan in Porto Rico since 1908, and have already given it an average depth of twenty-eight feet. Galveston, where they are still hard at work, is rapidly becoming the third Atlantic Port of the United States. Key West has been bridged to the Continent, over 100 miles of sea, by a railway that is one of the marvels of modern engineering. At Santiago, in Cuba, and at Colon, the Americans are constructing feverishly and well. But meanwhile the Germans are prospecting the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico for coaling stations or ports of call, and, after having secured a coaling station at Haiti, have already settled on a point in the Danish West Indies, the island of Saint Thomas, which the United States tried to buy in 1902, yet which Danish nationalism seems now incompetent to hold. Out in the Pacific, west and south of Panama, Germany is linking up her possessions by wireless telegraphy. When the Canal is opened, France will have, a little to the south of the British Imperial " All-Red Route," an All-Blue Route belting the globe. The belt of French Colonies or Possessions reaches from Tahiti through the Canal, by Guadeloupe and Martinique to Dakar, thence to Bordeaux and Brest and, by the Rhone Valley, to Marseilles, where, once again taking to the sea, and skirting the North-African Coast from Algiers to Bizerta, it proceeds through the Suez Canal to Jibutil in the Persian Gulf, and to the Grand Co- mores, Madagascar and La Reunion in the Indian Ocean. It then turns northward, touching Asia at Saigon ; and, passing thence just to the north of Australia, finds in the New Hebrides and in New Caledonia (where Australia may one day procure the iron of which she stands in need) its last station before it is riveted again at Tahiti, in mid- Pacific. There an official mission is already investigating the problem of preserving for France commercial predomin- ance in the Polynesian Seas. It is unnecessary to await A STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 315 official confirmation to affirm that Tahiti, halfway between New Zealand and Panama, on one of the direct Austra- lasian routes, is destined to a great commercial future provided France constructs in that [island a modern port and coaling station. 1 If the French supplement their maritime route through the Panama and Suez Canals by an overland route ; if the Old World prolongs, from Brest to Vladivostok or Fousan, the great trunk railway lines of the United States and Canada, now linking San Fran- cisco and Vancouver to New York and Halifax, the world will wonder how a trifling matter like that of the Baghdad rail- way could ever have fired the imagination, and divided the diplomacy, of serious Powers. 2 Evidently no nation has ever had a more glorious opportunity than has France at this hour, of co-operating with the drift of the time and with the nature of things for the aggrandizement of her prestige as well as for the good of humanity. Franco- Latin co-operation in South America, Anglo-American colla- boration in the islands, and on the High Seas, of the Pacific ; a solemn Franco-Anglo-American pact for the peace of the world : such are the potential realities which may already be descried from the heights above Culebra. 1 For a more detailed treatment of the future of the relations of the United States and France in connexion with the Panama Canal see the author's lecture, delivered at the Theatre Michel, Paris, on February 12, 1913, and reproduced in a volume published by Alcan. 2 See " La France et le Monde de Demain," by M. Victor Be"rard, and the series of articles on "Les Ports Ame'ricains et le Canal," by M. Casimir P6rier, in the Figaro, April and May, 1912. INDEX Abarzuza, Sefior, 57 Abdul Hamid, 132, 133, 137 Adowa, 49, 68 Adriatic, The, 251, 276, 286, 288, 289 f gean Islands, The, 281, 282 Aehrenthal, Count, 4, 5, 9, 150, 168, 174, 175, 275, 277, 285 Afghanistan, 299 Africa, 23, 48, 54, 131, 243, 250, 263, 290, 291 South, 186, 210, 256 North, 262 East, 218, 219 West, 218 Central, 244 North-west, 246 Agadir, 46, 68, 73, 103, 131, 139, 148-151, 165, 168, 172, 175, 179, 186, 187, 189- 191, 204, 209, 216, 217, 224, 246, 256- 258, 260, 266, 269, 270, 272, 305 Aide, Hamilton, 258 Alaska, 308 Albania, 276, 286, 288, 289 Albin, Pierre, Le Coup d'Agadir, 54 Algeciras, 24, 175, 32 Conference of, 69, 103, 144, 290 Act of, 168, 246 Algeria, 262 Algiers, 88, 314 Archbishop of, 88 Alexander the Great, 8, 195 I, 46 II, Introduction vii, 45, 47 Ill, 49 Alexandretta, 275 Alsace-Lorraine, 5, 26, 43, 47, 50, 70, 140, I 55, 'S^, 160-163, 165-167, 169, 201- 203, 211, 222, 240, 277, 294 America, United States of, 2, 8-13, 15-19, 21-25, 31, 34-36, 39. 4, 42, 55, 65, 98, 106, 117, 118, 120, 123, 125, 128, I 39> I 5 2 i *59i *76, 183-189, 191, 198, 209, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 225, 232, 236, 237, 263, 270, 283, 294-296, 300- 303, 305-315 Colonies of, 4 South, 12, 315 Central, 169 Andover Hill, 19 Andrassy, 138, 286 Andr6, General, 83 Andrieux, M., no Angell, Norman, The Great Illusion, 161-163, 200 The Mirage of the Map, 209 226, 227, 230, 238, 239 Angers, 85 Antivari, 288 Antwerp, 8, 205, 223, 266 Anzelotti, Professor, 304 Aquitaine, 131 Ariovestus, 32 Armenia, 283 Arnold, Matthew, Essays in Criticism, 13, 18 Arques, 152 Asia, 48, 66, 104, 263, 264, 283, 294, 298, 299, 301, 302 Minor, 281 Asquith, Mr., 158, 178-180, 182, 183, 190 Asser, Councillor of State, 304 Atlantic Ocean, The, 103, 104, 211, 302, 303, 306 Augsburg, 212 Aulard, M., lot Aumale, Due d", 121 Australia, 256, 267, 295, 303, 309, 311, 314 Austria-Hungary, 3, 9, 44-46, 49-51, 132, 135, 174, 175, 210, 236, 251, 252, 272, 274, 276, 278, 283, 292, 304 Avlona, 172 B Baden, Grand Duchy of, 167, 282 Baghdad, 179 Baghdad Railway, 50, 151, 169, 248, 275, 315 Balfour, Arthur J., 55, 158, 181, 208 Balkan States, The, Introduction viii, 4, 9, 46, 50, 131, 132, 135, 136, 162, 179, 201, 228, 251, 258, 260, 274, 275, 278, 283-285, 287, 288, 290, 291 Baltic Sea, The, 256, 271 Balzac, 234 Bar, Professor von, 304 Bardoux, Jacques, 279 Bardo, Treaty of, 45 Barrere, M., 53, 140, 291 Bane's, Maurice, 99, 166 Bas-Rhin, 155 Baudin, Pierre, 242, 247 Bavaria, 233 Bazaine, 158 Beaconsfield, Lord, 138 Belgium, 167, 171, 206, 304 Belgrade, 136, 278, 286 Benghazi, 250 Beranger, Henri, 118 Be'rard, Victor, 53, 140 Le Droit de Voisinage, 168 La France et le Monde de Demain, 315 Berchtold, Count, 5, 58, 275, 278, 279 Berlin, Introduction viii, 24, 68, 132, 140, 153, 155, 204, 216, 274, 288, 311 Congress of, 44, 68, 138, 247, 288, 289 Treaty of, 46, 132, 138, 168, 260, 276, 281, 289, 290 Bemhardi, General von, 207, 209 Bernstein, Edward, 210 Bertillon, Dr. Jacques, 233 B6theny, 30 Bethmann-Hollweg, Heir von, 37, 147, 213 Bieberstein, Baron Marschall von, 160, 161, 241, 258, 262 Bielefeld, 213 Bismarck, Introduction vii, viii, 25, 30, 35, 41, 43-49, 63, 64, 68, 87, 129, 138, 141, 157, 214, 225, 247, 257, 261, 273, 274, 284-286, 288-290, 293 Bizerta, 262, 279, 281, 289, 492, 314 INDEX Blache, Captain Vidal de la, The Lorraine Valley of tht Meitse, aoa Black Sea, The, 7, 279, 383, 286 Blondel, Georges, Les Embarras cU fAUe- magne, 211, 214 Blowitz, M. de, 29, 45, 33,*54, 56, 88, 289 Blumenthal, M., 166 Bokhara, 299 Bonnal, General, 214 Bordeaux, 113, 156, 314 Borden, Mr., 190, 191 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 9,"5i f '**i3J, r ' 131," 174, 251, 277, 278, 284, 286, 388, 389 Bosphorus, 279 Bossuet, Introduction vii, 18 Boston, 19, 20, 187 Bourdon, Georges, 240 Bourgeois, M., 30, 154, 265 Bourges, Archbishop of, 91 Bourget, M., 99 Bourgin, Georges, Le Proteetionnisme Owner, 199 Braun, M., 204 Brazil, 206, 213 Bresciani, Signor, 250 Brest, 298, 314 Briand, M., 3, 83, 119, 125, 365 Briey, 205, 222 Brisson, M., 89, 156 Broqueville, Baron de, 171 Brunetiere, M., 96, 99 Buda-Pest, 274 Bulgaria, 3, 7, 50, 51, 135, 137, 231, 375, "287 Bulow, Prince, 68, 69, 273 Bunau-Varilla, Philippe, 168, 300 Butler, Bishop, 172 Butler, President Nicholas Murray, 61 Byzantium, 283 Cadiz, 298 Caen, 145, 224, 225 Cassar, Julius, 2, 37 M J Caillaux, 73, 210, 229, 230, 232, 243, 245, 246, 270 Calvin, 133 Cambon, Jules, 52, 53, 246, 269, 270 Cambrai, Mgr. de, Archbishop, 85 Cambridge, 19 Cameroons, The, 47, 219, 223, 245 Canada, 9, 13, 183-186, 188, 190, 191, 213, 256, 267, 295, 309, 311, 313 Canterbury, Archbishop of, 159 Carolina, North, 15 Carrere, Jean, 277 Caribbean Sea, The, 260, 272, 299, 300, 309, 313 Casablanca, 69, 144, 156, 174 Caspian Sea, The, 283, 298, 299 Catherine II, 283 Chamberlain, Joseph, n, 54, 55, 64, 183, 199, 267, 308 Chambord, Comte de, 8r Champagne, 102, 104, 116 Chari, Basin of, 245 Charles V, 212 Charles, King of Portugal, 5* Charleston, 187 Cheerier Andrf, 119 Chgradame Andr, 160 La Crist Franfaise, 2 30, "2 31 Chicago, 19 Chiers, 202 Valley of, 205, 223 China, 9, 24, 55, 68, 219, 323, 256, 263, 293- 296, 301, 302, 309 Chjrol, Sir Valentine, 298 Christiania, 34, 273 Churchill, Winston, 66, 68, oj Clam, Lt.-Col. du Paty de, 96 Cleznenceau, M., Introduction viii, Jt, 89, HI, 114, 120, 148, 156 La Melee Sociale, 112 Clunet, Maltre Edward, 304 Cochin, Denys, 28 Colbert, 247 Colmar, 166 Colon, 296, 309, 313 Colonbelles, 225 Colson, M., Organisme conomique ft Ditordrs Social, 117 Columbia University, 61 Combes, M., 78, 80, 92, 94, 106, 281 Compiegne, 30 Comte, 132 Conde, 8 Condorcet, 133 Congo, The, 2, 176, 210, 223, 227, 245, 346 Free State, 219 Connecticut, 20 Constant, MM. d'Estoumelles de, 154, 158 Constantinople, 7, 125, 132, 136, 146, 149, i 5*, 211, 241, 258, 274, 383 Copenhagen, 272 Corea, 294 Corinth, 163 Corneilles, 225 Corti, Count, 289 Costa Rica, 212 Coyer, Abbe, 33 Crewe, The Marquis of, 67 Crillon, 152 Crispi, 53, 285, 286, 288-290, 292 Croly, Mr., The Promise of Ameritun Life, 18, 130 Cruppi, M., 245 3 Cuba, 24, 31, 34, 302, 307,'3ii Culebra, 315 Curzon, Lord, 146, 149 Cyrenaica, 250 D Dabry, AbW Pierre, T^Les CaiholiquesZR&pttb- licains; Histoire et Souvenirs, Sj Dakar, 314 Dalmatia, 284 Danish West Indies, 314 Dante, 43 Danube, The, 104, 251, 276, 284, 286 Dardanelles, The, 6, 8, 274, 276, 279, 281, 300, 33 Dauphine, Passes of, 142 Delaisi, Francis, La Democratie et les Finan- ciers, 128 Delbruck, Professor Hans, 157, 219, 220 Delcasse, M., 52, 53, 56-58, 69, 70, 73,74,Ji39, 140, 143, 148, 156, 174, 218, 247, 249, ^ 265 Delhi, 269 Denmark, 271 Deroulede, M., 38, 39 Deschanel, Paul, 132 Dreyfus Affair, 51, 53, 55, jfi, 68, 74, 75, 80, 90, 91, 95, 96, 98-100, 117, 141, 153, 234 Captain, 96 Drumont, 118 Ducrocq, Georges, 166 Ducrot, General, 153 Duluth, 19 Dumont, Arsene, rtataliU et CiviKtaiion, 333, 234 Dunkirk, 205, 223, 266 Durazzo, 289 INDEX 319 E EdwardjVII/King of England, 55, 56, 69, 139, 218, 269 Einen, General von, 325 Eliot, Ex-President of Harvard, 187 Egypt, 53, 58, 190, 210, 219, 251 Emerson, R. W., 212 Engels, 196 England, 5, 7, 9, 25, 46, 48-50, 52-59, 62-66, 68, 69, 74, 98, 103, 106, 117, 128, 131, 132, 136, 139, 141, 143-152, 158, 159, 170-175, 178-191, 199, 205-207, 209, 213, 218-220, 223, 225, 226, 231, 232, 236, 237, 241, 244, 252, 255, 258, 262- 264, 266-273, 278, 279, 282, 284, 289- 296, 298-300, 303, 304, 307-309, 311, a", 313 Enver Bey, 134, 261 Erythrea, 250 Escaut, The, 170 Esch, 204 Eugene, Archduke, 376 Europe, 1-315 F Faguet, M., Le Culte de V Incompetence, et I'Horreur des ResponsabiliUs, 122, 130 125, 160 Fashoda, 49, 53, 55, 56, 68, 142, 143 Faure, F61ix, 55 Favre, Jules, 153 Ferdinand, Tsar, of Bulgaria, 137 Ferrero, Guglielmo, L' Ideal et la Richesse, 196 20, 249 Ferry, Jules, 73, 74, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 154 Fez, 246 Fichte, Introduction vii. Fiensberg, Predictions of, 282 Fisher, Mr., 189 Florence, 278 Flushing, 8, 150, 170, 171 FouiUee, M., 219 Fousan, 299, 314 France, 2-4, 8, 9, 12, 23-30, 33, 38-47, 49-60, 62, 65, 66-70, 74-132, 136, 139-176, 185, 196, 205-207, 209-211, 215, 216, 218, 219, 222-227, 229-240, 242-248, 255, 256, 258, 260, 262-266, 270-273, 278-281, 284, 286, 290-293, 296, 298, 300, 303, 304, 308, 312, 314, 315 Francis Joseph, Emperor, 275, 278, 288 Frankfort, Treaty of, 25, 27, 28, 44, 87, 138, 160, 163, 166, 222, 242, 263, 295, 296 Franklin, 24 Freeman, Professor, 62 Freppel, Mgr., Bishop of Angers, 85-87 Freycinet, 78 Friedrichshof, 69 Froude, 267, 269 Fullerton, W. Morton, Patriotism and Science, 81, 86, 117, 161 Fuzet, Mgr., Archbishop of Rouen, 79 Gabba, Professor, 304 Galata, 2 Galveston, 313 Gambetta, 28, 32, 70, 78, 82, 89, nr, 119, 124, 156, 164, 165, 281 Garcia-Calderon, F., Les Demoeratits Latines de I'Amerique, 212, 313 Garibaldi, 4, 23 Gary, Indiana, 201 Gascony, 104 Gaston. Henry, L'Essor Economigue du P tuple Attemand and L'Alltmagne aux dot's, 214 Gaul, a Gayraud, AbM, 94 Geneva, 133, 197 Genghiz Khan, 9 George V, King of England, 269, 370 George, Lloyd, 13, 178, 189 Germany, 5, 9, 12, 25, 30, 35, 37, 43-50, 52-55, E?57, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 73, 104, 117, 131, 132, 135, 138, 141-145, 147, 149-152, 1 156-176, 183, 185, 189, 190, 196, 204- 229, 231, 236, 237, 239-248, 255-257, 259-264, 269-277, 282-291, 303, 304, 308, 309, 314 Gibraltar, 309 Giolitti, Signer, 277, 290 Gladstone, William Ewart, 61, 64, 147 Glasgow, 64 Gobat, Albert, Le Cawhemar de I'Europt, 167 Goltz, Marshal von der, 133 Good fellow, Mr., 220 Goschen, Mr., 65 Gouthe-Soulard, Mgr., 86 Goyau, Georges, L'Idec de Paine ft Humani- tarisme, 154 Grand Comores, 314 Greece, 4, 7, 19, 20, 51, 195, 222 Greenwich, 150 Gr6vy, President, 141, 151 Grey, Earl, 191 Grey, Sir Edward, 66, 67, 69, 149, 150, 152, 159, 225, 269, 270, 308 Grundy, G. B., Thucydides and the History of His Age, 2 Guadeloupe, 314 Guantanamo, 303, 306 Guatemala, 16, 212 Gwinner, Herr von, 206 H Hadfield, Sir Robert, F.R.S., 262, 363 Hague, The, 24, 30, 140, 153, 155, 159-161, 172, 303, 310 Haiti, 314 Haldane, Viscount, 146, 149, 184, 282 HalSvy, Daniel, Luttes et Problem**, 52 Halifax, 315 Hamburg, 167, 199, 258 Hanotaux, Gabriel, 40, 48, 52-54, 15, 151. 26* Fashoda, 53 Hansen, Jules, Ambassade A Paris du Baron de Mohrenheim, 45, 74 Hardenberg, Introduction vii Harrison, Ex-President, 311 Harvard University, 187, 212 Haut-Rhin, 155 Hawaii, 50, 65, 302 Hay, Mr., 61 Hayes, President, 303, 306 Heligoland, 210, 218 Henri IV, King of France, 60, 63, 95, 15* Hermann, Prophecies of, 282 Herou.ville, 225 Holland, 98, 170, 171, 206, 270, 304 Holland, Professor, 304 Honduras, 16 Hotzendorf, Baron Konrad von, 276 Hugo, Victor, L' Annie Terrible, 206 I He de France, 198 Iowa, 118 Ipek, 285 India, 62/189, 190 Istria, 284 Isvolski, : M., 276 320 INDEX Italy, 4, 9, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 54, 142, 210, 211, 228, 249-251, 258, 272-274, 276, 277, 280-282, 284, 286, 288-292, 304, 308 Jagow, Gottlieb von, 205 Jameson Raid, The, 49 Japan, 5, 6, 12, 48, 148, 200, 228, 236, 267, 293-298, 302, 303, 308, 309, 313 Jaures, M., 3, 28, 118, 154, 158, 226, 228, 230 Jerrold, Laurence, The Real France, 74 126 Jibutil, 314 Joan of Arc, 70 Joly, Henri, 198 Jonnart, M., 262 Jowett, Mr., 149 Jura, 169 K Kahn, Maurice, Introduction viii Karageorgewich, Pierre, 137 Kharbine, 299 Kiderlen-Waechter, Herr, 205, 240, 292 Kiel Canal, 48, 63, 208 216 Kingston, 309 Kipling, Rudyard, 185, 189 Kirk-Kilisse, 46, 68, 162, 274, 283-285, 288, 292 Kitchener.fViscount, 49 Klotz, M., 232 Knox, Mr., 169] Koenigsburg, 206 Kokovtzof, Mr., 256 Kruger, President, 49 Krupp Company, The, 224, 241 Ladysmith, 55, 56 Lafayette, 121 Lamsnarch, Professor, 304 Lansdowne, Lord, 7, 55, 57, 58, 218, 303 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 184, 186, 188, 189, 191 Lavigerie, Cardinal, 88 Lavisse, M., 27, 165 Lavour, J. H., La Fin de FEmpire Allemand pour 1913, 283 Lea, General Homer, The Day of the Saxon, 63, 293, 294 Lebon, Dr. Gustave, 95, 116 Lemaitre, Jules, 99 Lenox, 20 Leo XIII, 8p, 82, 86-89, 91, 93, 249 Leroy-Beaulieu, M.A., 105 LeVy, Sam, Les Mefaits [du Comite Union et Progres, 136 Leyret, Henry, Le President de la Republique, 34 La Republique et les Politidens, 108 Les Tyrans Ridicules, 109, 124 Lichnowsky, Prince, 241, 258 Lille, 229 Lindequist, Herr von, 227 Lisbon, 54 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 296, 305, 306, 308 London, 13, 24, 96, 132, 133, 140, 145, 155, 189, 196, 222, 241, 258, 271, 298 Treaty of, 170 Long Island, 20 Longwy, 202, 205 Lorraine, 198, 202 Loubet, M., 93, 280 Louis XIV, King of France, 63, 98, 126 Louis Philippe, 121 Louis, Paul, 236 Louise, The Princess, Introduction vii Lubeck, 167 Lumm, Herr von, 217 Luxembourg, 167, 201-206, 221 Lyon-Caen, Professor, 304 Lyons, 14, 113 Congress of, 85 " Lysis," Contre FOligarchie Financiire en France and Capitalists Franfais contre la France, 229, 230 M Macedonia, 50, 51, 132-134, 136, 137, 275 280, 284 McClure, S. S., 129 McMahon, Marshall, 121 Madagascar, 314 Madrid, 24, 57 Magdalena Bay, 297 Magnier, 153 Mahan, Rear-Admiral, ir, 186, 189, 300, 303, 305-308 Malay States, 255, 256 Malta, 281 Manchester University, 178 Manchuria, 49, 50, 169, 293-295, 301 Manhattan Island, 14, 18 Manila, 50 Mannesmann Company, The, 224 Marchand, General, 49 Marcus Aurelius, 6r Marseilles, 298, 314 Martinique, 314 Marx, Karl, 196 Massachusetts, 301 Marmora, Sea of, 50, 137 Maurras, Charles, 99, 118, 119 - Kiel et Tanger, 54 L' Action Franyaise, 123 Mayence, Predictions of, 282, 283 Mediterranean Sea, The, 68, 104, 256, 260, 272-274, 278, 280-282, 291, 292, 309 Meline, irg Mercy- Argenteau, Countess de, 157 Meredith, George, 146 Merv, 299 Messimy, M., 245 Metz, 49, 157, 166, 207 Meurthe, Department of, 156, 222-224, 266 Meuse, Valley of, 201, 202 Mevil, Andre, De la paix de Francfort a la Conference d'Algesiras, 53 Mexico, 169, 307, 308, 313 Gulf of, 300, 313 Meyer, Arthur, Memoirs of, 160 Michelet, M., 99, 103, 104, 158 Midhat Pasha, 134 Mikhailowsky, Introduction viii Mill, John Stuart, A Few Words on Non- intervention, 63 MiUerand, M., 96, 238 Millevoye, 118 Mississippi State, 16 Mohonk, Conference of Lake, 61 Mohrenheim, Baron de, 74 Monastir, 133 Mongolia, 67, 294 Monis, M., T03, 245 Mont Saint Martin, 202 Montenegro, 50, 51, 277, 28S, 289 Montesquieu, 236 Montreal, 13, r87, 188 Morgan, J. Pierpont, 21, 247 Morley, Viscount, 44, 178 INDEX 321 Morocco, 53, 57, 58, 68, 95, 103, 132, 165, 169, 173. T 75> 2O 9> 2I , 22O > 22I > 22 3> **4> 243, 2 44, 2 46, 249, 255, 266 Morristown, 20 Moselle, Department of, 156, 222-224, 266 Moysset, Henri, L' Esprit Public en Allemagne, 211 Mukden, 49, 34, 265 Muertzsteg, Agreement of, 131 Monster, Count, 54 MQnsterberg, Prof. Hugo, 21 Muravieff, Count, 48 Muscat, 146, 151 N Nancy, 228 Napoleon, Introduction vii, viii, 61, 68, 79, 98, 284 Napoleon III, 29, 37, 59-6r, 63, 125, 157 Napoleon, Louis, 30, 59, 61, 153 Nantes, Edict of, 97, 99, 230 2 55l Necker, 29 New Caledonia, 314 New Guinea, 220 New Haven, 19 New Hebrides, 314 New Jersey, 17, 20 New York, 13, 14, 19, 20, 187, 198, 315 New Zealand, 186, 256, 309, 314 Newman, Cardinal, 61 Neymarck, Alfred, 3, 61, 231 Nicaragua Canal, 168 212, 300, 312 Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, 26, 27, 29-31, 48, 257, 2 76 Nicholson, Sir A., 269 Nicolaides, Dr. Kleanthes, 135 Niel, Marshall, 153 Nietzsche, 130 Niger, 241 Nile Valley, The, 18 The, ro4 Nimegue, Treaty of, 32 Normandy, 131, 204, 223, 224 North Sea, The, 104, 171, 256, 260, 271, 282 North Sunderland, 66 Norway, 271 Novi-Bazar, 251 Noyes, Alexander D., 236 O Odo, 257 Okhotsk, 298 Ollivier, Emile, V Empire Liberal, 157 Ouchy, 281 Ouenza, 262 Pacelli, Ernesto, 249 Pacific, The, 293-298, 302, 303, 306, 308, 309, 313-315 Pacific, Islands of, 95 Pagny, 46 Panama Canal, The, 8, n, 18, 74, 117, 186, 187, 263, 264, 295-300, 303, 303, 305- 309, 3"~3H Isthmus of, 35, 55, 168 State of, 313, 314 Paradol, PreVost, 109 Parana, 212 Pareto, Vilfredo, 277 Paris, 13, 14, 24, 25, 31, 38, 54, 74, 113, 132, 133, 15, 155. I59i 17*, *86, 198, 216, 271, 276, 287, 300 Paris, Comte de, 121 Paschitch, M., 251, 252 Pecci, Cardinal, 88 Peel, The Hon. George, The Future of Eng- land, 9 Peel, Sir Robert, 64 P6guy, Charles, 122, 124 Peking, 301 Pelissier, 158 Pelletan, 153 P6rier, Casimir, 315 Perrie'res, 225 Persia, 168, 219, 293, 298 Perthes, Justus, 150 Persian Gulf, The, 132, 151 Philip II, King of Spain, 63 Philip of Macedon, 195 Philippines, 301, 302, 307 Phillips, Wendell, 212 Pichon, M., 74, 15, 2 43~ 2 46 Pilant, Paul, Le Patriotisme en France ft rttranger, 32 Pindar, 19, 20 Pinon, Rene, France el Allemagne, 53 La Lutte pour le Pacifique, 195, 196, 296 301 228, 229, 249 Pisgah, 104 Pius IX, 80-82, 87 Pius X, 93-95 Poincar6, Raymond, 95, 109, no, 118, 120, 126, 139, 172, 231, 243, 247, 255, 2 6i, 265, 278, 281 Ce que demands la Citf, 265 Poitou, T3i Poland, 199, 286 Port Arthur, 49, 65, 68 Port Baltic, 257, 258 Porto Rico, 313 Portsmouth, 24 Treaty of, 295 Posadowsky, 213 Poseidon, 300 Potsdam, 140, 151, 169, 175. 2 6? Prato, Giuseppe, II Protexionismo Operaw, i 199-201 Proudhon, 116 Provence, 198 Prussia, King of, Introduction vii Prussia, Introduction vii, 27, 63, 153, 166, 2or, 233, 265, 282 Qua tref ages, 21 Quebec, 188 Quenet, M., 99, 158 R Racconigi, 273, 276, 290 Radziwill, Princess, Introduction vii Prince, 55 Rambaud, 82 Rampolla, Cardinal, 88 Ratisbonne, 286 Rawson, Admiral, 54 Renan, L'Avenir de la Science, 98 Rennes, 52 Rey, Etienne, La Renaissance de Franyais, 73 Rhine, The, 104 Rhodes, 281 Rhone, The, 14, 18, 20 Valley of, 314 Richelieu, Cardinal, 60, 98, 247 Richmond, 19 Rio-Grande-do-Sul, 212 Roche, Jules, 38, 39, 86 Roberts, Lord, 67, 146, 149 " Robespierre, 133 322 INDEX Roguin, Professor, 304 Rolin, Professor Alberic, 304 Rome, 53, 93, 104, 140, 205, 222, 280, 291 Roosevelt, Ex-President Theodore, 15, 23-25, 30-36, 38, 40-43, 128, 129, 168, 184, 1 86, 296, 300-302, 305, 306 Rosebery, Lord, 64 Rostand, Alexis, 231 Roth, Walter, 320 Rotterdam, 172, 205, 223 Roubaix, 112 Rouen, 79 Rousseau, J. J., Contrat Social, 153 Rouvier, 78 Rumania, 3, 7, 51, 275, 276, 278, 279 Rumelia, Eastern, 135 Russell, Lady William, 258 Russia, 6, 7, 25, 27, 28, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 54, 65, 69, 74, 95, 132, 139-141, 144, I 45, 148-151, 160, 175, 219, 224, 228, 255, 256, 262, 264, 265, 271, 274, 276, 278, 279, 283, 284, 286, 293-295, 297-300, 302, 308 Sadowa, Introduction viii, 45, 285 Saigon, 314 St. Petersburg, 140, 271 St. Quentin, 164 Saint SeVerin, 104 St. Sophia, 51 Saint Thomas, Island of, 314 Salisbury, Lord, Introduction viii, 53-55, 74, 292 Salonica, 51, 133, 134, 136, 137, 172, 251, 276, 278, 283 Samarkand, 299 Samoa, 47 San Domingo, 34, 35 San Francisco, 198, 315 San- Juan, 313 San Stefano, Treaty of, 138 Sangha, Basin of, 245 Saone, The, 14 Santa Catalina, 212 Santiago, 313 Sarre, Valley of, 221 Sarrebourg, 207 Sarrou, Major, La feune Turquie et la Revolu- tion, 134 Savonarola, 33 Savoy Alps, 169 Sayous, Andre 1 , 217, 231, 232 Scandinavia, 224 Scheldt, The, 8 Schemua, General von, 276 Schiller, Introduction vii Schleiermacher, Introduction vii Schleswig-Holstein, 43, 63 Schnoebele, 46 Schoen, Baron de, 246 Schopenhauer, 44 Seattle, 13 Selves, M. de, 173 Sedan, Introduction viii, 45, 60, 62, 154 Servia, 3, 50, 51, 137, 350-232, 375, 276, 287 Shakespeare, William, 177 King Lear, 184, 185 Sherman, Mr., 301 Shevket, Pasha, 261 Shimonoseke, Treaty of, 48 Siberia, 398, 399 Sicily, i Siegfried, Jacques, 230 Sighele, Scipio, 277 Silesia, 231 Simon, Jules, 153 Sinaia, 275, 278 Sofia, 136, 137, 278 Solon, i Soubise, 158 Soumount, 225 Smith, Prof. J. Allen, Spirit of American Government, 128 Smyrna, 132 Spain, 55, 57, 143, 318, 382, 307 Spinoza, 62, 302 Spuller, M., 89, 119 Stamboul, 172 Stead, W. T., 161 Steed, Wickham, 9 Stein, Introduction vii Stinnes, Mathias, 224 Stockholm, 19, 272 Stoflel, Colonel, 153 Stolypin, M., 140 Strabo, 170 Strasbourg, 46, 49, 153, 157, 207 Suez Canal, The, 7, 18, 282, 299, 306, 314 Sweden, 271 Switzerland, 167, 206, 304 Syria, 95, 251 Taft, Ex-President,'i2, 152, 158, 159, 169, 184, 185, 294, 296, 305, 311, 312 Tahiti, 314 TaiOandier, Georges Saint-Ren6, 107 Taine, 107, 109 Talleyrand, 46 Tangiers, 57, 68, 204, 209, 221 Tardieu, Andr6, 68, 139, 151 Le Mysore d'Agadir, 224, 246, 247 Tashkent, 299 Tchataldja, 281 Teheran, 298 Thiebaud, Georges, Les Secrets du Riant, 121 Thiers, M., 60, 76, 257, 258 Thrace, 50 Thyssen, August, 204, 223, 224 Tilsitt, Introduction vii Tirpitz, Admiral, 67 Tittoni, Signor, 249, 276 Tokyo, 297, 300 Tongking, 46 Transvaal War, 55 Trieste, 283 Tripoli, 53, 58, 228, 248-250, 272, 277, 278, 289, 292 Tshushima, 257, 265 Tunis, 45, 46, 142 Turenne, 158 Turkestan, 299 Turkey, European, Inroduction viii, 50 Turkey, 9, 50, 55, 132-137, 146, 211, 228, 249, 258, 275, 277-281, 283, 287, 290, 295 Tyrol, 376 U Ubangui, Basin of, 245 Uskub, 51, 257, 283 V van Dyke, Dr. Henry, Tht Spirit of Atntric*, 15, 21 Vancouver, 256, 315 Vandal, Albert, 28 Valenciennes, 8 Valona, 276, 290 Varna, 251 Vaugelas, 98 Venezuela, 58, 300 INDEX 3*3 Venice, 284 Vercingetorix, 70 Versailles, Introduction viii, 26, 97, lao Vianden, 206 Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, 93, 276, 290 Victoria, Queen of England, 53, 64 Vienna, Introduction vii Treaty of, 170, 203, 276, 291 Viollet, Paul, 76 Virgil, 43 Vitry, Fort of, 30 Vladivostok, 514 Volga, The, 299 Vorarlberg, 276 Vosges, The, 80, 156, 165, 169, 198, 211 Vrooman, Frank Buffington, 15 W Wales, 269 Waldeck, Rousseau, 78, 91, 92, 112, 114 Walfisch Bay, 263 v , Ward, Wilfred, 88 Washington, 12, n8,"i55, 247, 308, 311 Waterloo, Introduction viii Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 308 West Point, 19 Westphalia, 221, 223 Whitman, Walt, 191 Wile, Frederic William, 224 William I, Emperor of Germany, 38, 383, 087 William II, Emperor of Germany, 43, 47-49, 68, 69, 174, 2l6, 320, 331, 25, 341, 236, 257, 277, 291, 392 Wilson, Dr. Woodrow, g6 The State, 121, 137 Yamamoto, Mr., 297 Yellow Sea, The, 298 Yildiz Kiosque, 131 Zanzibar, 219 Zislin, 1 66 Zola, Emile, 52, 97 Printtd by BUTLMR * TAKNBR, Frmt and London.