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THE FOUNDATIONS 
 OF BRITISH POLICY 
 
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 J. A. SPENDER. 
 
 Reprinted from the WESTMINSTER GAZETTE. 
 
 WESTMINSTER GAZETTE Ltd., 12 SaHsbnry Square, London. 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 PAGB 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Introductory i 
 
 1902 — 1912, A Preliminary Explanation ; Questions Without 
 Answers; Good Hope of the Future. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The European Alliances and their Forces 7 
 
 Great Armies and their Limitations; From Isolation to 
 Complication; The British Ententes and their Origin. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The German Contention 14 
 
 (1) The British View of 1 
 (3) The Need of Candour. 
 
 |i) The British View of It; (2) The German View of It; 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Command of the Sea 20 
 
 (1) The British Doctrine of Sea Power; (2) The Foreign 
 Objection to It; (3) The British Answer; {4) Conscription, 
 Protection and Sea Power; (5) A Dangerous Heresy. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Compulsory Service and the Balance of Power ... 26 
 
 Conscript Army and Conscript Policy; Britain and the 
 Balance of Power. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Towards an Anglo-German Detente 31 
 
 German Indictments and British Retorts; Deeds, not 
 Words; Two Points of View and their Adjustment; Minor 
 Friction. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The Cement of Empire 38 
 
 The Great Centripetal Tendency; The Effect on the British 
 Empire; Logical Dilemmas and Practical Conclusions; 
 The Great Act of Faith. 
 
 S42343 
 
iv CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Balkan and Mediterranean Problems ... ... ... 45 
 
 A Decisive Intervention ; Annexation and Compensation ; 
 The Limits of British Power ; Mediterranean Interests ; 
 Italy and Tripoli ; To Restore the Concert of Europe. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Conclusion ... 52 
 
 Common Doctrine and Combined Defence ; The Three 
 Forces of the Empire; The Supreme British Interest. 
 
• o • • 
 
 THE FOUNDATIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 BRITISH POLICY. 
 
 I.— INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 1902-1912, A Preliminary Explanation ; Questions Without 
 Answers; Good Hope of the Future. 
 
 Towards the end of the Morocco negotiations a news- 
 paper correspondent predicted that the result would be a 
 peace, but a '* bad peace," which would lead after an in- 
 terval to further and more serious trouble in Europe. The 
 first part of this prediction has been fulfilled, and it is now 
 the business of all the nations concerned to prevent the 
 fulfilment of the second part. Great Britain is undoubtedly 
 one of the nations chiefly concerned, and during the last 
 six months her action and policy have been the subject of 
 an unceasing controversy in the German and Austrian press, 
 and to a lesser extent in the newspapers of other countries. 
 The solid fact that the negotiations resulted in a settlement 
 satisfactory to both parties, and the numerous indications 
 that the British Government, so far from inciting to a breach 
 of the peace, exerted a pacific and steadying influence 
 throughout this period of stress, will, we hope, prove 
 a more effective answer in the long run than any verbal 
 disclaimers; and in any case, a peaceful diplomacy 
 will desire to pass the sponge over all the details of 
 last year's transactions. But a study of German news- 
 papers at this time suggests the extreme desirability of 
 making the general lines of our policy a little clearer both 
 to ourselves and our neighbours. We are approaching a 
 time when international contentions will be less about actual 
 material things in dispute than about the motives, inten- 
 tions, designs, real or suspected, which are included in the 
 
2 CONTINIJITY AND CHANGE. 
 
 ■ ■''''■ , ' , ' ■'■' 
 
 word " policy.-' Neafly all' nations at this moment are 
 sailing uncharted seas in respect of what is called their 
 policy, and there are no rules of the road to prevent colli- 
 sions. But if only one nation out of many can clearly lay 
 down its course and keep to it, it will largely diminish the 
 danger to itself and probably help others to follow its 
 example. 
 
 1902—1912. 
 
 The chapters which follow deal briefly with certain of 
 the questions which go to the foundations of British policy. 
 There can be nothing new in such a discussion, and it must 
 travel over a great deal of familiar ground. But something 
 may be gained by bringing old and familiar things into 
 relation, and seeing how they have shaped themselves in 
 the recent years of Anglo-French-German contention. 
 We boast of continuity in foreign policy, and in any given 
 year the changes are so imperceptible that they seem to 
 count for nothing. But no one, I think, can look back 
 over a period of ten years and compare our position now 
 with our position at the end of the Boer War without be- 
 coming aware of a change which, whether it is due to our 
 own action or that of our neighbours, is of immense import- 
 ance. To the Powers of Europe we stand in a wholly 
 different relation from that in which we stood ten years 
 ago. From a position of almost complete isolation we have 
 passed to a position of active participation in the affairs of 
 Europe, and it is of the first importance to discover how we 
 got there and whither we were going. Only very careful 
 reflection on this subject will enable us to understand the 
 feelings which now prevail about us in Europe and the 
 forces with which we may have to reckon in the near future. 
 We have to consider what liabilities we are undertaking; 
 whether they are compatible with the needs of our oversea 
 Empire, or can be provided for without placing intolerable 
 burdens on the people of the United Kingdom. We have 
 also to ask what kind of naval and military policy will yield 
 the best results, given that we are both an Island and an 
 Empire, and involve us in the least conflict and competi- 
 
A NECESSARY ASSUMPTION. 3 
 
 tion with our neighbours; how far we can organise the 
 Empire for war or rely on its assistance in time of war; 
 what are the forces which tend to keep the Empire to- 
 gether; and what, if any, those which threaten its unity. 
 Volumes have been, and might be, written on all these 
 subjects, and all I can hope to accomplish, in a short review 
 of them, is to lead up to a few general propositions which 
 may serve as aids to reflection. 
 
 A Preliminary Explanation. 
 
 Since almost nothing can be written about foreign 
 affairs in these days which is not open to perversion 
 and misunderstanding, it is perhaps desirable to say at the 
 outset that the whole of what follows rests on the assump- 
 tion that Great Britain will be true to the letter and the 
 spirit of her existing Treaty obligations. The most 
 important of these at the present time is undoubtedly her 
 agreement with France, and there is no party in England 
 which desires to depart from that or to vary its terms. But 
 a good many people are asking to-day whether it is a neces- 
 sary consequence of the French entente that, after the 
 material questions which came within its scope have been 
 settled between France and Germany, we should be the 
 residuary legatee of their quarrel. It is only less in the 
 interests of France than of Great Britain that this question 
 should be answered, if it can be, in the negative. To have 
 as her next friend a nation which is perpetually involved in 
 quarrels with the most formidable of her neighbours is not 
 a desirable position for France, if it can be avoided. There 
 is no prospect, in the existing circumstances of Europe, that 
 a conflict between Germany and Great Britain could be a 
 duel in a ring formed by the other nations. In a greater or 
 less degree, it must affect the peace and interests of the 
 whole European family, and especially of France, whose 
 position would be gravely compromised if we were worsted 
 in such an encounter. A detente between Great Britain and 
 Germany would therefore be a relief to France as well as to 
 the two nations concerned, and a frank discussion of its 
 possibility can imply no suspicion of disloyalty to the 
 
4 UNNECESSARY RIDDLES. 
 
 French agreement. Years ago Prince Biilow laid down 
 the principle that the division of the Powers into groups for 
 particular purposes did not preclude the most cordial rela- 
 tions between Powers in the different groups. That is the 
 doctrine which, with rare exceptions, Germany has con- 
 sistently practised towards Russia, and the intimacy of the 
 two Courts and Governments has never been taken as a 
 reflection on Russia's adhesion to the Dual Alliance. The 
 question we may fairly ask is whether there is anything 
 inherent in the present situation which precludes at least the 
 same amount of civility and forbearance between Germany 
 and England. 
 
 Questions Without Answers. 
 
 An inquiry on these lines must be kept within a narrow 
 limit of time, if it is to be of the slightest practical value. 
 Nothing has tended more to embitter the politics of 
 Europe in recent years than the practice of asking questions 
 which no one can answer about the remote future. There 
 has never been a time when the prophets have not foreseen 
 an inevitable struggle for the mastery of the world, but each 
 generation of prophets has foreseen a different struggle, 
 and the protagonists in these visionary conflicts seldom 
 remain the same for ten years consecutively. It may be 
 that Germany will increase in population and wealth until 
 it is impossible for us to resist her designs on our sea- 
 power, and that the rest of Europe will acquiesce passively 
 in her hegemony by sea and by land. It may be that, 
 before this comes to pass, scientific invention will have 
 changed all the aspects of warfare in both elements, or, as 
 Mr. Norman Angell suggests, that the proved futility of 
 conquest from the economic point of view will have 
 rendered the test of battle obsolete and barbarous. There 
 are a dozen possibilities, any one of which may thwart all 
 predictions about the remote future, and reduce elaborate 
 policies founded on them to complete absurdity. The busi- 
 ness of the statesman is to keep the peace in his own time, 
 and to guard the interests of his country in such a way that 
 insurance against war does not become more burdensome 
 
THE EUROPEAN MIND. 5 
 
 than war itself. Some risks he must take, and others he 
 must ignore. A very little ingenuity will suggest conceiv- 
 able emergencies to which the strongest Governments would 
 be unequal. If anyone asks what would happen if Japan 
 and the United States attacked us in the Pacific, while a 
 coalition of France and Germany assailed us in the North 
 Sea and the Mediterranean, the answer must be frankly that 
 we haven't the slightest idea. But neither does Germany 
 know what would happen if Austria attacked her simul- 
 taneously with France and Russia. We can only deal 
 with probable cases in a future which is more or less within 
 our field of vision, and in the chapters which follow I pro- 
 pose to keep strictly within this limit. 
 
 Good Hope of the Future. 
 
 Nevertheless, we may have in the back of our minds 
 some speculation as to the remoter future. It is difficult 
 for any reasonable man to reconcile himself to the idea that 
 International relations will always be at the mercy of the 
 big battalions and the nations for ever condemned to the 
 present cut-throat competition in armaments. '' What a 
 scene, what a prospect," says Newman in his Apologia, 
 '* does the whole of Europe present at this day! and not 
 only Europe, but every Government and every civilisation 
 through the world which is under the influence of the 
 European mind." If the European mind is expressed in its 
 diplomacy, the same ejaculation is only too well justified 
 to-day. The ironic spirit has seldom manifested itself 
 more sardonically than in the preoccupation of European 
 statesmen with plans for mutual destruction at the 
 very moment when an immense number of the people 
 of Europe are protesting that the conditions of their 
 lives have become intolerable, and that their Govern- 
 ments have failed to solve the most urgent and 
 elementary of their problems at home. Yet recent ex- 
 perience also affords us some ground for hoping that there 
 are permanent forces at work which will tend to keep the 
 peace, if we can find our way through certain immediate 
 difficulties. Two or three times in the last few years we 
 
6 THE STREAM OF TENDENCY. 
 
 have seen European Governments walk up to the brink of- 
 the precipice and then withdraw after looking into the gulf. 
 The military men have worked out their military problem to 
 the last button, but they have omitted to consider the effect 
 of their plans on the non-combatant population, and it is 
 when the statesman begins to ask himself what would be 
 the effect of withdrawing four million young men from the 
 mines, the looms, and the factories, and how long the re- 
 maining fifty or fifty-five millions could be supported on 
 conditions which would perilously resemble those of a 
 general strike — it is then that he begins to pause and to 
 reflect that the answers to these questions are an incalculable 
 hazard for either the victor or the vanquished. Mr. Norman 
 Angell has laid himself open to criticism in his famous 
 pamphlet by the excessive stress that he lays on credit, 
 which, after all, can be suspended, without serious ultimate 
 loss of real values. But the extreme intricacy of the 
 modern system of life and the increasing dependence of the 
 nations on each other for their necessary supplies from day 
 to day are undoubtedly permanent factors which make for 
 peace, and which have gone far in recent years to counteract 
 the warlike tendencies that are expressed in compering 
 armaments. There are also, one fain would hope, moral 
 forces at work which will divert the minds and energies of 
 serious people from external rivalries and ambitions to the 
 solution of the social problem. In a brief consideration of 
 immediate international problems it is not possible to 
 enlarge on these permanent aspects of the question, and the 
 survey must necessarily in the main be limited to material 
 and physical forces. Nevertheless, at the start I would ask 
 the reader to accept provisionally the assumption that the 
 permanent tendencies in the modern world will in the long 
 run be towards peace, and that, if we can solve our imme- 
 diate problems, there is ground for good hope of the future. 
 
II.— THE EUROPEAN ALLIANCES AND 
 THEIR FORCES. 
 
 Great Armies and their Limitations; From Isolation to Compli- 
 cation; The British Ententes and their Origin. 
 
 Although we shall be travelling over ground which is 
 supposed to be familiar to all well-informed persons, it may 
 be well at this point to describe briefly the present grouping 
 of the European Powers. There is on the one side the 
 Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, 
 to which — a not unimportant addition — Roumania is sup- 
 posed to have acceded in 1906 ; and there is on the other the 
 Dual Alliance of France and Russia. The Triple Alliance 
 was evolved from an arrangement between Germany and 
 Austria, shortly after the Berlin Conference, with the object 
 of checking the supposed designs of Russia; and Italy 
 joined hands with these two Powers in 1882, influenced 
 probably by the suspicion that France was meditating a 
 restoration of the temporal power of the Pope. From this 
 time forward France, rather than Russia, seemed to be the 
 objective of this alliance, and it was for many years the 
 corner-stone of the Bismarckian policy to keep France aloof 
 from Russia and to cultivate good relations between Russia 
 and Germany. After Bismarck's retirement and death, 
 that aim became obscured in Germany, and Russia, more 
 and more suspicious of the aggrandisement of Germany, 
 drew closer to France, until in 1893 there was concluded 
 what was first of all described as a military convention, but 
 what afterwards came to be known as the Dual Alliance. 
 Apart from the external aims which the two groups had 
 respectively in common, there were seeds of weakness in 
 both combinations. An alliance between the French Re- 
 public and the Russian autocracy was freely stigmatised 
 as unnatural, and France had nothing to gain by operations 
 in the Balkans, which were the field of Russia's European 
 ambitions. On the other hand, Russia offered a promising 
 opportunity for French investment, and the cash nexus has 
 
8 POPULATION AND ARMIES. 
 
 combined with the fear which the Governments of both 
 countries feel of the increasing power of Germany, to keep 
 them together. In the other camp, Italy is obviously the 
 weak partner. She has long outgrow^n the fear of France, 
 which was her original motive for coming in, and her policy 
 in the Mediterranean may easily conflict with that of 
 Austria. Further, her position in Tripoli renders it im- 
 possible for her to contemplate without grave misgiving the 
 possibility of war with any stronger naval Power or group 
 of naval Powers. The Triple Alliance was renewed in 
 1891, in 1896, and again for ten years in 1902, but unless 
 rumour is more than usually at fault, considerable pressure 
 had on the last occasion to be applied to Italy. On the 
 other hand, Germany and Austria have come closer 
 together, and the services which Germany rendered ** in 
 shining armour *' to her ally after the annexation of Bosnia 
 and Herzegovina have undoubtedly consolidated the two 
 Powers, and proved to Austria-Hungary that the friendship 
 of Germany is an indispensable asset. 
 
 Great Armies and Their Limitations. 
 
 The forces controlled by these combinations run to 
 colossal figures. Germany can bring three and a half 
 million men into the field, Austria a million and a quarter, 
 Russia three and a half millions, France three millions. 
 These totals, however, tell us little. Transport and the 
 difficulty of handling vast masses of men impose on all 
 alike a limit beyond which numbers are of little avail. 
 Hence the nightmare from which France has suffered that 
 she must inevitably be extinguished by the greater popula- 
 tion of Germany is probably much exaggerated. No in- 
 crease in the population of Germany is likely to give her 
 anything like a proportionate advantage in the military 
 force which she could bring to bear upon France. France 
 is not at this moment so inferior in the numbers which 
 would be available in a struggle with Germany that a com- 
 mander of genius, if she produced one, might not at least 
 render her impregnable to attack. The cost of keeping in 
 
THE HAZARDS OF WAR. 9 
 
 the field the vast armies which would be mobilised would 
 probably end the struggle before the bigger population 
 could draw on its reserves. 
 
 The writer of these chapters has no pretensions to pose 
 as a military critic, but these few general propositions may 
 help us to realise how incalculable are the hazards, and how 
 difficult it is to predict the results, of a European war. If 
 war broke out between France and Germany, we cannot say 
 for certain how far, if at all, Austria and Russia would be 
 involved, or what part Italy would play. The obligation of 
 the allies to each other is, roughly speaking, that they shall 
 support each other when attacked, but the difficulty of 
 deciding in any given case which party is attacking and 
 which attacked may leave certain loopholes when the actual 
 emergency arises. In practice, we are accustomed to think 
 of Germany as dominating Europe, and as against any 
 other single Power there is no question of her supremacy. 
 Nation for nation, she is almost certainly the best organised 
 for war, and possesses the most powerful military engine. 
 But from the whole course of her diplomacy — her efforts to 
 keep Austria and Italy attached to her, her endeavour to 
 keep France and Russia apart, her frequently expressed 
 fear of isolation — we may judge that to herself her situation 
 appears to be one that calls for unceasing vigilance and 
 anxiety. If there are moments when the problems of the 
 British Empire seem beyond the solution of human brains, 
 we may comfort ourselves by the thought that there is no 
 nation in Europe which is not equally perplexed, which 
 cannot vex itself with questions to which there is no answer, 
 or imagine emergencies to which no force at its disposal 
 would be equal. 
 
 From Isolation to Complication. 
 
 Ten years ago it would have been assumed that these 
 estimates of Continental forces had little more than 
 academic interest for Englishmen. British' statesmen 
 prided themselves on their splendid isolation ; at times they 
 seemed to take a positive pleasure in the apparent hostility 
 to us of foreign Governments and the foreign Press. 
 
10 GREAT BRITAIN AND EUROPE. 
 
 '* They hate us because they fear us," said Mr. Chamber- 
 lain; *' they envy that which they do not possess," echoed 
 Mr. Jesse Collings. During the Boer War it was a moot 
 point whether Germany, France, Austria, or Russia was 
 the more unfriendly. To all these countries we seemed 
 a dangerous, incalculable, unassimilable factor, which 
 could not be harmonised with the European scheme ; which 
 would join no alliance, profess no fixed principles of 
 policy, respect none of the conventions and conveniences 
 of the Great Powers; which forced the pace when they 
 wished to go slow, raised awkward questions which they 
 desired should rest, and drove wedges between their com- 
 binations for its own advantage. Between 1880 and 1890 
 the opposition of France to our position in Egypt threw us 
 on the whole on to the side of Germany. Lord Salisbury, 
 when he came into office in 1886, *' recognised," says Lord 
 Edmund Fitzmaurice in his Life of Lord Granville, " the 
 necessity of an entente with Germany, and for many years 
 to come the position of Great Britain in Egypt had to 
 depend on the good-will of the Triple Alliance, and of 
 Germany in particular, which in that Alliance held the pre- 
 rogative vote."* Between 1890 and 1900 we had seemed 
 to oscillate violently between the two European groups. 
 Our statesmen had talked ominously of inevitable wars with 
 both France and Russia, and of fighting alliances with 
 Germany; and again they had flown into a passion with 
 Germany, and spoken of her as the author of all evil. Siam 
 and the Fashoda incident had brought us to the verge of a 
 rupture with France, the German Emperor's telegram to 
 President Kruger had mobilised a flying squadron of 
 British ships as a hint to Germany, the Committee of Im- 
 perial Defence was absorbed in plans for the defence of 
 India against a Russian invasion. The early months of 
 1900 were filled with rumours of a combined intervention of 
 all the Powers in the Boer War. Never did our isolation 
 seem so complete as at that moment. 
 
 •Lord Fitzmaurice's Life of Lord Granville. — XL, 453. The whole of this 
 volume may profitably be studied by those who wish to understand the history of 
 our recent relations with Germany. 
 
THE MOTIVES OF GREAT BRITAIN. 11 
 
 Then, in the characteristic British way, we slipped, 
 absent-mindedly, into the very heart and centre of the Euro- 
 pean complication. Historians will no doubt discover 
 great forces at work and long-laid plans coming to an issue 
 in the transactions which followed ; and nothing apparently 
 will ever convince the Germans that hostility to them was 
 not our guiding principle. That is, nevertheless, a com- 
 plete misapprehension. The motive of Mr. Balfour and 
 Lord Lansdowne in concluding the French entente was no 
 inore anti-German than that of their successors in continu- 
 ing it. Whether M. Delcass6 saw further and deeper into 
 the consequences is another question, which we will not 
 endeavour to answer, but if his vision extended to the pre- 
 sent situation, he must be credited with a foreknowledge of 
 great events that had yet to take place which was not shared 
 by any statesman in any other country. But though we 
 cannot presume to say what was in the minds of French 
 statesmen, we can say with absolute certainty what was in 
 the minds of our own statesmen. When they concluded the 
 Anglo-French entente in 1903 they were thinking, not of 
 European diplomacy, but of British Colonial and oversea 
 interests. All over the world we were entangled in contro- 
 versies with France, which, though none of them were of 
 first-class importance, yet in the aggregate made an uncom- 
 fortable and even a dangerous situation. We could make 
 no solid progress in Egypt and the Soudan in face of 
 French opposition ; we were constantly bickering about j 
 Newfoundland fisheries, the open door in Madagascar, and 
 boundaries in West Africa; we regarded each other with 
 sullen suspiciousness in Morocco and Siam. The Boer War 
 had exhausted our fighting energy ; the prospect of settling 
 all these questions by a business-like compact, and restor- 
 ing even and neighbourly relations with France came as an * 
 enormous relief to peaceably disposed people on both sides 
 of the Channel. When the agreement was made public 
 some Englishmen said that British interests had been 
 sacrificed to French, and some Frenchmen that France had 
 been too compliant to Great Britain, but no one imagined 
 
12 A SURVEY OF THE GROUND. 
 
 that an unfriendly act had been committed to Germany or 
 foresaw the contention with Germany which was to arise 
 out of it. 
 
 The subsequent developments of the entente must be 
 reserved for another chapter; but let me add a word here 
 about the other chief instruments of British policy, the 
 Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the understanding with 
 Russia^ about the Middle-East. We may look upon the 
 Japanese Alliance with unalloyed satisfaction, and not least 
 because Australia and New Zealand, at first somewhat 
 suspicious of the Imperial Government's dealings with 
 Japan, have heartily concurred in its renewal. The treaty 
 is now limited by frank acknowledgment of the fact made 
 known to all the world in our negotiations on President 
 Taft's Arbitration Treaty, that it will not be operative in a 
 war between Japan and the United States. Even though 
 the Arbitration Treaty is rejected by the American Senate 
 in its present form, no one has seriously supposed that we 
 should ever be found fighting with Japan against the United 
 States ; and the Japanese Government has certainly not been 
 deceived on that subject. But within this limit the 
 Japanese Alliance gives security to both parties and settles 
 the problem of the Pacific for as long a time as we can 
 usefully look ahead. The opening of the Panama Canal 
 will undoubtedly bring new problems which will need 
 careful study in advance by all the Governments, but 
 speculations on that subject lie beyond the scope of our 
 present inquiry. 
 
 The Russian entente^ like the French entente^ has 
 temporarily been entangled in the mesh of European 
 politics, and German newspapers have insisted on regard- 
 ing it as a part of our designs against their country. It is 
 in reality nothing of the kind, and it has not prevented 
 Germany from herself coming to an amicable agreement 
 with Russian about her Persian interests. But it is of great 
 service to us both because it prevents a collision of British 
 and Russian activities in Persia, and, still more, because 
 it has relieved us of the fear of a Russian invasion of India. 
 Its one point of difficulty is that it may seem to make us 
 
THE RUSSIAN ENTENTE. 13 
 
 parties to the Russian absorption of Northern Persia, or to 
 other proceedings on the part of the Russian Government 
 which we might not approve. There is no evidence thus 
 far that Persian nationalism has fared worse in existing 
 circumstances than it would have done if it had had to fight 
 for its own hand against the despotism of the ex-Shah. In 
 any case, those who criticise the agreement on this ground 
 should remember the solid advantages that it gives us, 
 among them being the fact that we are able to survey- 
 British policy without dwelling on a possible invasion of 
 India by Russia, or a possible conflict with Russia about 
 the destiny of Persia. 
 
14 
 
 III.— THE GERMAN CONTENTION. 
 
 (1) The British View of It. 
 
 (i) The British View of It ; (2) The German View of It ; (3) The 
 Need of Candour. 
 
 ^ We now come to the series of events which have led up 
 to the present contention with Germany. It is customary 
 to talk of them as if they were the legacy of generations of 
 strife and rivalry, but it is safe to say that twelve years ago 
 no Englishman and very few Germans had the least idea of 
 what was coming. The relations between the two countries 
 had, it is true, been subject to occasional outbursts of irrita- 
 tion on one side or the other, but hardly anyone spoke of a 
 German peril, and there was no material respect in which 
 the interests of the two countries appeared to conflict. It 
 was, therefore, with genuine surprise that Englishmen 
 from the beginning of 1905 onwards began to discern a 
 steady anti-British bias in German policy. The choice of 
 the Morocco question to apply pressure to France neces- 
 sarily brought us into the field on the side of France, and 
 gave the entente a European significance. It had been 
 announced to all the world that Morocco was one of the 
 subjects on which Great Britain and France would stand 
 together, and when the German Emperor paid his sudden 
 visit to Tangier in March, 1905, he cannot have miscalcu- 
 lated the certain results. Germany unquestionably was 
 acting within her rights, and if, as she alleged, she had not 
 been notified in the correct way from the French side of the 
 Anglo-French entente, she had formal ground of complaint 
 against M. Delcass^. But up to this moment it had not 
 occurred to anyone in England that Germany had any in- 
 terests or ambitions in Morocco which would cause her to 
 object to the Anglo-French agreement or any policy in that 
 part of the world which could bring her into collision with 
 France. The Emperor's visit to Tangier was followed by 
 a highly perilous passage of diplomacy, in which the Ger- 
 man Government appeared to be taking risks out of all 
 
GERMANY AND MOROCCO. 15 
 
 proportion to any interest they could have had in Morocco. 
 The French sacrificed their Foreign Minister in order to 
 keep the peace, but the Germans were not appeased, and 
 the pressure continued. It was the general belief at this 
 time that nothing but the support which the British Gov- 
 ernment gave to the French averted a catastrophe in the 
 early part of 1906, or induced the Germans to accept the 
 Alge^iras Conference as the way out of a dangerous 
 situation. 
 
 It is unnecessary to follow the windings of the Morocco 
 affair up to its recent, and, let us hope, its final phase. The 
 impression created in Europe was that Germany was less 
 concerned to assert herself about Morocco than to show her 
 displeasure at the Anglo-French, and, subsequently, the 
 Anglo-Russian ententes. It must be noted as an important 
 fact in these transactions, that Germany came upon the 
 scene just at the moment when Russia had suffered her 
 severest reverse in the Far East, and when she was unable 
 to offer any effective assistance to France. Englishmen 
 who had looked with apprehension at the power of Russia 
 in the East, learnt at this moment that a strong Russia was 
 an essential condition of equilibrium in the West. For six 
 years the whole of European diplomacy has been deflected, 
 and deflected to our disadvantage, by the Russo-Japanese 
 war and the revolution which followed in Russia ; whether 
 to Germany's advantage is another question. The effect of 
 German action in these years was to drive Britain into the 
 arms of France and Russia, and to turn the Anglo-French 
 entente, originally intended as a colonial and oversea 
 settlement, into an instrument of European diplomacy. 
 That, as I have pointed out, was not the intention of Great 
 Britain, but it became an honourable obligation, to which 
 her polic}^ was necessarily built up, and from which she 
 could not depart without a gross breach of faith. It was 
 impossible for her to stand by inactive while France was 
 apparently being subjected to penalties for the offence of 
 having entered into friendly relations with her. Neces- 
 sarily, in such circumstances we were obliged to maintain 
 out right to enter into relations with France and Russia as 
 
16 HOW IT LOOKS TO A GERMAN. 
 
 equally valid with the right of Germany to enter into rela- 
 tions with Austria and Italy. 
 
 (2) The German View of It. 
 
 Since this brief summary would probably be challenged 
 by a German as unfair or incomplete, let me try at the same 
 time to do justice to the German point of view. It is ex- 
 tremely difficult for an Englishman to realise the state of 
 feeling which prevails between France and Germany. To 
 both countries it is always potentially a feeling of danger. 
 . To ensure against the renewal of war with France, while 
 taking advantage of the French peril to keep the German 
 States united and firmly welded togelher in the Empire, 
 had from first to last been the main object of the whole 
 elaborate structure of Bismarckian diplomacy. This object 
 had been seriously compromised in German eyes by the 
 Franco-Russian alliance ; it was still further threatened by 
 any transactions, however legitimate, which brought Eng- 
 land and France and England and Russia together. To an 
 Englishman the situation of Germany looks impregnable. 
 She not only, as he thinks, is secure from attack in Europe, 
 but has a large surplus of energy for dangerous ambitions 
 and encroachments on fier neighbours. It is impossible to 
 say that what are called Pan-German am.bitions are not 
 entertained by a portion of the German people, but they are 
 commonly very much exaggerated outside Germany. 
 Difficult as it may be for Englishmen to believe it, the first 
 preoccupation of German statesmen is the defence of Ger- 
 many. When Germans protested during 1906 and 1907 
 that a conspiracy was on foot to construct a ** ring of iron ** 
 round the German Empire, Englishmen smiled at so fan- 
 tastic and hypocritical a pretence. They were wrong ; the 
 ** ring of iron '* was seriously feared in Germany ; and with 
 Austria cool, Italy doubtful, and France, Russia, and 
 Britain apparently organising themselves into a solid com- 
 bination, sober-minded Germans were seriously of opinion 
 that their position was growing dangerous. 
 
 It is the habit of Germans to weigh forces and not to 
 trouble about causes and explanations. Whatever might 
 
INNOCENCE AND CANDOUR. 17 
 
 be the cause of the Anglo-French entente, and be it as inno- 
 cent as Englishmen protested, all that Germany had to 
 reckon with was that France and Great Britain had come 
 together, and that the forces on which Germany had reck- 
 oned had thereby been disturbed. It was from the German 
 point of view a fact of the highest importance that the 
 British fleet might be enlisted on the side of France, and 
 that the British Army might be employed to neutralise the 
 excess of German troops over French. To test this new 
 combination by probing operations, to learn the worst that 
 there was to know about it, and to provide against it, 
 seemed the necessary course to the German Government. 
 These probing operations inevitably yielded bad results. 
 Shocks administered to France brought Britain into the 
 field. German diplomacy considered itself to have been 
 worsted by the British fleet. The moral was drawn that 
 Germany must have a fleet at leas't strong enough to make 
 it a formidable task for even the biggest Navy to engage it. 
 Great Britain was credited with the design of crushing the 
 German fleet while it was yet too feeble to resist. Ship- 
 building, therefore, must be pushed on quickly, so that 
 this danger-period might be passed. In the meantime it 
 must be intimated that if Great Britain attacked Germany 
 by sea, the return blow would be to France by land. So 
 the quarrel grew, fomented at each stage by an excited 
 Press which put the worst construction on fears and anxie- 
 ties honestly entertained on both sides, and interpreted 
 them as far-reaching hostile machinations. 
 
 The Need of Candour. 
 
 Only in so far as we understand this situation shall we 
 be in a position to limit its risks and liabilities. Railing is 
 useless; protestations of innocence avail nothing in Ger- 
 many's eyes against the plain fact that our power has been 
 formidably used on the side of France during the last six 
 years. The best hope lies in complete candour. For good 
 or evil we hold ourselves bound by our obligations to 
 France under the entente. We do not think they ought to 
 have been a cause of off"ence to Germany ; but, if they are. 
 
18 THE LIMITS OF BRITISH AMBITIONS. 
 
 we can do no other. Wherever a case arises in which we 
 are pledged to act with France, we shall be true to our 
 pledge, and if France is threatened with penalties because 
 of her friendly relations with us, we shall do our best to 
 support her against those who threaten her on that ground. 
 If we should be involved in war on this ground, we should, 
 of course, make war with all forces, naval and military, in 
 whatever way seemed most likely to us to lead to a success- 
 ful conclusion. But we cannot believe that any of these 
 consequences will or can follow from the part which we 
 have played. We have no design whatever to plunge into 
 the politics of Europe or to deprive Germany of any advan- 
 tage she may rightly enjoy by virtue of her power and 
 numbers. Naturally, we do not desire a coalition of Europe 
 against us such as might ensue if we were false to our 
 pledges, and it were concluded by all nations alike that we 
 were a perfidious friend and a dangerous enemy. But 
 neither do we desire to disturb the existing status quOy or to 
 encourage any friend of ours to play an aggressive part. 
 We have no army for any Continental adventure, and we are 
 aware that if we plunged into the military competition, it 
 would follow exactly the same course as the naval competi- 
 tion, and lead to the piling-up of new forces in other coun- 
 tries, without changing the relative balance of power. To 
 maintain our navy at its necessary strength, as well as the 
 expeditionary force that we need for oversea purposes, is 
 likely to tax all our resources, without the addition of a 
 larger army, which, if it were to have any decisive effect 
 upon European politics, would have to be maintained and 
 financed upon the European scale. Above all, we have 
 nothing to gain by any adventure in any part of the world ; 
 and our sole preoccupation is to keep and develop what we 
 have. If we aspired to play any part in Europe, it would be 
 solely that of a moderator. Our policy, however, is as far 
 as possible to limit our commitments in Europe and to re- 
 lease our energies for home affairs and for the organisation 
 of our Empire. 
 
 The question between the two countries is, first of all, 
 whether they can make an honest effort to appreciate each 
 
THE NEED OF CANDOUR. 19 
 
 other's necessary point of view. In this respect no finess- 
 ing diplomacy will help. There must be complete candour 
 and full acknowledgment of each other's obligations, and 
 of the dangers which either or both may honestly fear. An 
 argument on these lines cannot go far without bringing us 
 to the solid fact of British sea-power and the German atti- 
 tude towards it. With that I propose to deal in my next 
 chapter. 
 
IV.— THE COMMAND OF THE SEA. 
 
 (1) The British Doctrine of Sea-Power. 
 
 (i) The British Doctrine of Sea Power; (2) The Foreign Objec- 
 tion TO It; (3) The British Answer; (4) Conscription, 
 Protection, and Sea Power; (5) A Dangerous Heresy. 
 To all Englishmen it is fundamental that their country 
 should hold the command of the sea. If she fails to keep 
 open her communications with the Dominions and Depen- 
 dencies oversea, she ceases to be an Empire ; if she cannot 
 protect her commerce against hostile navies, she ceases 
 to be a great nation ; if she cannot secure her food supplies 
 she may cease to be a nation at all, and become a be- 
 leaguered fortress, which cannot be helped by any military 
 force, however gallant or numerous. This is not rhetoric, 
 but a simple statement of commonplace fact. 
 
 Until comparatively recent years the doctrine of sea- 
 power, though instinctively apprehended, was not explicitly 
 avowed even by Englishmen themselves. It has been 
 said that Admiral Mahan taught England her own secret; 
 but, if so, he taught it at the same time to other nations. 
 His volumes of inspired commonplace, brilliantly illus- 
 trated from history, are as much the gospel of the German 
 as of the British Navy League. To the German, as to the 
 Englishman, the decisive influence of sea-power on the fate 
 of nations, and the enormous national advantages which 
 belong to the Power that secures the command of the sea, 
 are now self-evident. The Mahan doctrine, moreover, has 
 been brought home to tHe Land Powers by a series of vivid 
 illustrations. Why, the nations asked themselves, were 
 they powerless to do anything during the Boer war? and 
 the answer was the British fleet. On what, again, did the 
 success of the Japanese army rest in its struggle with 
 Russia? Again the answer was on Japan's command of 
 the sea, without which her invasion of Korea and Man- 
 churia must have been foredoomed to failure. The escape 
 of one armed cruiser from Vladivostock held up all Japanese 
 
THE COMMAND OF THE SEA. 21 
 
 transports for three days until her whereabouts could 
 be ascertained. These simple and obvious examples came 
 in the nick of time to reinforce the maxims of the learned 
 historian and strategist, and no one from henceforth 
 doubted that sea-power was both the most vital necessity 
 and the most vulnerable point of the Island Empire, 
 whether in the West or in the Far-East. 
 
 (2) The Foreign Objection to It. 
 
 But how reconcile this with the reasonable rights and 
 claims of other nations? Here, if we will recognise it, is 
 one of the great central problems of British policy, and it 
 has been much complicated by the careless use of the 
 phrase '* command of the sea." Loosely used or misunder- 
 stood, that phrase gives the British Empire a domineering 
 and aggressive appearance to the rest of the world. It 
 seems like a claim to supremacy over the sea such as no 
 nation would venture to make over the land. And, indeed, 
 it is impossible to disguise from ourselves or others that 
 our sea force might, if we were so disposed, be used for 
 aggression and oppression as well as for defence and 
 liberty. That it is absolutely defensive is our conviction, 
 but, unfortunately, there is no way of proving it by argu- 
 ment, since the same fleet might equally well serve both pur- 
 poses. We can only say that even a successful war against 
 an inferior enemy might entail losses which would jeopar- 
 dise our supremacy, and, therefore, that we have every 
 reason to keep the peace, unless our vital interests are 
 assailed. But, however we argue, the foreign critic still 
 answers that our fleet gives us inordinate advantages in 
 time of peace. Not many months ago an Austrian-German 
 Radical Deputy* made a speech at Salzburg in which he 
 appealed for a union of the Mediterranean Powers — 
 Austria, France, and Italy — ''against a Power which has 
 its hands on all the affairs of the world, and wants to drive 
 back Germanic Germany (Germanische Deutschthum).** 
 ** When," he added, ** we establish unity among the Medi- 
 terranean Powers, the Power in question will be solidly 
 
 * Dr. Sylvester, see Times Vienna correspondent, August 3rd, 191 1. 
 
22 THE INDISCRETION OF A NOVICE. 
 
 opposed." It was explained afterwards that this gentle- 
 man, albeit that he is President of the newly elected Aus- 
 trian Reichstag, was a novice in foreign affairs, as indeed, 
 may be inferred from his speech. An old hand would at 
 least have been more adroit than to appeal to France in the 
 name of the Germanische Deutschthum. But the senti- 
 ment was enthusiastically cheered by his audience at Salz- 
 burg, and precisely because he was a novice, we may take 
 him as having blurted out an opinion, which is commonly 
 entertained, though not frequently expressed. Indeed, it 
 would be folly to deceive ourselves on this matter. A great 
 fleet has potentially a far greater range of action than any 
 army, however strong. It is free and mobile as no army 
 can be ; it carries its own transport ; is limited by no boun- 
 daries ; need follow no beaten track, and, even though con- 
 centrated in home waters, can make its existence felt and 
 acknowledged in all parts of the world. Hence the Conti- 
 nental complaint of the ubiquity of British interference, 
 and the latent resentment of a Power which, as the Aus- 
 trian Deputy says, " has its hands on all the affairs of the 
 world." We may answer that as a matter of fact this 
 Power seldom or never interferes with the affairs of her 
 neighbours, except in so far as they touch her own widely- 
 spread interests ; but the fact that she can interfere over a 
 vastly wider area and with much greater effect than any 
 other Power has far-reaching results on diplomacy, and, 
 since other nations are human, we must expect it to be a 
 source of friction. The German suffers from British fleet 
 scares just as we suffer from German invasion scares. It 
 has been seriously believed in Germany during the last 
 few years that we meditated sudden descents upon Kiel, 
 or new battles of Copenhagen. Hence the formula in the 
 preamble to the German Navy law that Germany must 
 have a fleet so formidable that even the strongest naval 
 Power could not attack it without risking its supremacy. 
 Equally to be reckoned with is the feeling that all oversea 
 enterprise by other Powers is, in a sense, on sufferance 
 from the strongest naval Power, to whom not only the 
 biggest fleet but all tfie coaling stations and all the strategi- 
 
GUARANTEES FOR THE PAX BRITANNICA. 23 
 
 cal points of vantage belong. This grows more urgent as 
 our neighbours require to import more food for their in- 
 creasing populations. They, too, though as yet in a lesser 
 degree, share our feeling that the safety of the ocean high- 
 road is for them all a matter of high, if not of supreme, 
 importance. 
 
 The British Answer. 
 
 An Englishman must be willing to part with his shirt 
 off his back before he loses his naval supremacy, and any 
 foreign nation which dreamt of challenging him would do 
 well to remember what is and must be at stake in the com- 
 petition. We may groan over forty million naval esti- 
 mates, but this total, huge as it is, would be by no means 
 the measure of our capacity in a life-and-death struggle. 
 At the end of the French War we had accumulated a debt 
 which, in relation to the population, the total of wealth, and 
 the value of the sovereign at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century, was roughly the equivalent of ;£'4, 000,000,000 for 
 our present population and wealth. There is hardly any 
 sacrifice which we should not make, if seriously challenged. 
 But expenditure on this vast scale is a great calamity for us 
 as for our neighbours, and we most sincerely desire to keep 
 it within bounds, if we can. In this respect nothing will 
 help us but a policy which the world in general believes to 
 be pacific and unaggressive. We cannot remove the theo- 
 retical objections to one Power exercising the command of 
 the sea, but we can do something to prevent its being a 
 practical grievahce. 
 
 But to make this definite, let us try to get closer to the 
 facts, as we may by asking a very simple question. What 
 would an intelligent Foreign Secretary say to an Ambassa- 
 dor who came frankly to him to put the foreigner's case 
 against the sea-power of Great Britain? Two things, I 
 think : 
 
 (i) That we have no army which could seriously menace 
 any foreign Power. None of them need fear invasion from 
 us as we should have to fear invasion from them if we lost 
 command of the sea. 
 
24 AN ARGUMENT WITH A TARIFF-REFORMER. 
 
 (2) That, as far as possible, we share the commercial ad- 
 vantages that our naval power gives us with all the world 
 through our policy of Free Trade and the Open Door. If 
 we break fresh territory in any part of the world, all our 
 neighbours can go in on the same terms as we do, save for 
 the small exception of the Colonial preferences. We do 
 this not from any quixotic motive, but because we believe 
 it to be in our own best interest. But we are entitled to get the 
 benefit of an enlightened selfishness which is of advantage 
 to our neighbours. 
 
 Conscription, Protection, and Sea-Power. 
 
 Now, I know that if I am addressing a Conscriptionist 
 or a Tariff Reformer, he will round on me at once, and ask 
 indignantly — would I allow the foreigner to dictate what 
 kind of army we shall have or what kind of trade policy we 
 shall have ? Fine rhetorical flourishes have been made on 
 platforms with that argument. My answer is simply that 
 I would not have the foreigner dictate, and that if I thought 
 either a conscript army or a tariff to be in the interests of 
 this country, I would have them, and tell the foreigner to 
 go hang. But at the same time, as a sensible man, I should 
 consider the consequences, and reckon among them the 
 extreme probability that either change would give a new 
 sharpness to the naval competition, and supply a fresh 
 motive for challenging our command of the sea. And this, 
 let us not disguise from ourselves, has been the effect of 
 both the Tariff and the militarist propagandas of recent 
 years. Many Germans have honestly persuaded them- 
 selves that we intend to change both our military and our 
 trade policy — to make an all-British Tariff combination 
 against the world, and to raise a compulsory army for opera- 
 tions in Europe. Again, I hear the Tariff Reformer indig- 
 nantly objecting — what right has the German to complain, 
 the German with his tariff and his monstrous army ? The 
 German, of course, let it be said at once, has no right to 
 complain, none whatever. But that, unfortunately, is not 
 the point. The point for an Englishman, and the only 
 point, is, how a change of policy in either respect would 
 
THE RETURN BLOW. 25 
 
 affect his interests and liabilities, and what would be the 
 consequences, if the greatest sea-Power were suspected by 
 the world at large either of formidable military designs, or 
 of an intention to establish a commercial monopoly in the 
 vast territories which it controls ? 
 
 A Dangerous Heresy. 
 
 The last question is necessarily a matter of speculation, 
 and I will leave it with a mere expression of opinion that 
 any considerable changes in fiscal policy must have a 
 profound reaction upon sea-power. Whether we gain or 
 lose more on the balance by such a change, it cannot be sup- 
 posed that other nations will as easily acquiesce in the 
 claim of a Protectionist as of a Free Trade Power to com- 
 mand the sea. The other question — the question relating 
 to military policy — has already, in my opinion, been tested 
 by experience, and we may take it as an established formula 
 of British policy that any considerable increase in our 
 power of acting with an army in Europe will require simul- 
 taneously a corresponding increase in our naval force. The 
 rule of the relativity of armaments applies to armies exactly 
 as it does to navies. Efforts on our part to increase the 
 total of our strength, military or naval, will be met by 
 corresponding efforts elsewhere, but the return blow will 
 not always be in kind, and it would almost certainly be 
 directed at our navy in the first instance. The European 
 competitors will seek to touch us on our most vulnerable 
 point, and at the same time to render it more difficult for us 
 to use an army in Continental operations. When it was 
 supposed that we were holding ** military conversations " ■ 
 with France, the answer of Germany was not to increase 
 her army, but to add to her shipbuilding under her naval 
 law. The idea, therefore, which used to be popular, that, 
 if we increased our army we could afford to spend less on 
 our fleet, is completely and dangerously chimerical. The 
 very contrary is the case. Indiscreet talk about military 
 operations in Europe leads straight to the increase of our 
 naval bill, and any sensational increase in our army would 
 have the certain result of requiring simultaneously a large 
 increase of our fleet. 
 
26 
 
 v.— COMPULSORY SERVICE AND THE 
 BALANCE OF POWER. 
 
 Conscript Army and Conscript Policy ; Britain and the Balance 
 OF Power. 
 
 The reader who has followed thus far will see that 
 the argument against compulsory military service is 
 founded not on anti-militarist grounds, but on general 
 political and financial considerations. The writer is 
 wholly in sympathy with the moral and physical side 
 of the case for military training, and he looks forward 
 to the day when the military and educational propagandists 
 will join hands to get the lads of this country into continua- 
 tion schools up to the age of seventeen, and agree upon a 
 fair apportionment of time to the military instructor with all 
 due safeguards for the conscientiously objecting parent. 
 That, in his opinion, is the way to solve the question of 
 feeding the Territorial army and at the same time to provide 
 a reservoir for military emergencies in the Empire. Unfor- 
 tunately, the actual military propaganda of the last few 
 years has not been on these useful and desirable lines, but 
 has been dominated by an idea of policy which, if it pre- 
 vailed, would scatter the resources of the Empire and divert 
 money and energy from its main source of power. 
 
 Conscript Army and Conscript Policy. 
 
 During last year there was a clearance of opinion on 
 this subject which enables us to speak positively about the 
 aims of the military propagandists. In the debate which 
 followed the publication of Sir Ian Hamilton's ** Com- 
 pulsory Service " it quickly became evident that no serious 
 military student held himself bound by the idea of a com- 
 pulsory defensive army confined to these shores in time of 
 war. Sir lan's analysis of this idea was fatal, and it was 
 quickly followed by disclaimers from all camps. A huge 
 defensive army, it was admitted, could do nothing to re- 
 trieve the situation or mitigate the state of siege which 
 
THE OBJECTS OF COMPULSORY SERVICE. 27 
 
 would be produced without invasion if the command of the 
 sea was lost. Thus when Lord Roberts's answer* appeared 
 in March, it was at once evident that the ideas of the 
 National Service League were in an extremely fluid con- 
 dition. The period of training originally stated as " from 
 four months to six months " was said to be a " detail " 
 which could be adjusted in " reducing theory to practice.'* 
 The whole argument implied that the compulsory army, 
 when raised, would be available for service against Con- 
 tinental Powers, and required that its training should be 
 approximately equal to that of Continental armies. 
 In the opinion of the writers who contribute to 
 this book, we are exposed to every kind of danger, 
 and there is no certainty either that the fleet can 
 save us from invasion or that we can escape being 
 involved in European military operations on the large 
 scale. After these admissions, the estimate of six 
 millions per annum, which was the original idea of the 
 National Service League, is not worth discussing. Not for 
 that, nor for double nor perhaps treble that sum could we 
 finance the kind of army that would be required for the pur- 
 poses in contemplation. Whatever the unknown cost 
 might be, it would be governed, like our naval expenditure, 
 not by what we wanted to do, but by what other Powers 
 were doing and by the training, equipment, and numbers 
 of the armies with which we might be at war. In fact, the 
 establishment of a conscript army would lead to exactly 
 the same results in England as in other countries, and 
 would require an expenditure on the same scale. 
 
 Into the technical questions raised in this debate I do not 
 propose to enter, except just to say that I have seen no 
 satisfactory answer to the careful argument by which 
 Sir Ian Hamilton established the presumption that the 
 existence of a universal compulsory army would be fatal or 
 at least very damaging to the voluntarily recruited ex- 
 peditionary force which is essential to the Empire. Subject 
 to this qualification, I will assume that there are no greater 
 
 * ** Facts and Fallacies." An answer to " Compulsory Service." By 
 Field Marshal Earl Roberts, V.C, K.G. 
 
28 BRITAIN AND THE BALANCE OF POWER. 
 
 difficulties here than elsewhere in raising a conscript army, 
 if the nation wills it and its policy requires. But then the 
 question arises whether any sound policy does require it, 
 and whether any nation could reasonably be expected to 
 bear such a drain upon its resources as the maintenance of a 
 conscript army, in addition to its other necessary expendi- 
 ture on arms and armaments, would impose on Great 
 Britain ? The writer of one of the sections in Lord 
 Roberts's book tells us that in *' a future by no means 
 remote " we may have to meet Naval Estimates of 
 ;^6o,ooo,ooo or ;^8o,ooo,ooo " even to maintain our present 
 relative position to our (naval) competitors," but this 
 prospect does not cause him the slightest doubt about the 
 wisdom of adding to our military expenditure. He wants 
 the conscript army in addition to the eighty-million navy, 
 and he is of opinion that the Empire must have both or 
 perish. To this gentleman, apparently, finance is a detail 
 to be arranged by Chancellors of the Exchequer on the 
 demand of military or naval experts. I have said and I 
 believe that there are no limits which can be placed to the 
 sacrifices which Englishmen would accept if they seriously 
 supposed their naval supremacy to be in danger, but the 
 same can by no means be said of military expenditure. 
 I Englishmen know by instinct and practical experience the 
 necessity of sea-power and the general idea of policy which 
 it serves. But they do not know, and no one, as yet, has 
 explained to them in any coherent way, what purpose is tc 
 be served by a conscript army; and, be it said with all 
 respect, the explanation, if it comes at all, must come 
 not from strategists, whether professional or amateur, but 
 from statesmen. An Army for use abroad must be the 
 instrument of a policy, and we must know what policy. 
 
 When that question is asked of military men the usual 
 answer is that we are committed to uphold the balance of 
 power in Europe. The legend is current that Sir Edward 
 Grey has in some public utterance committed us formally to 
 this obligation, but though the reference has again and 
 again been called for, it has never yet been forthcoming. 
 Sir Edward Grey is, of course, far too wise and careful to 
 
MILITARISM AND STATESMANSHIP. 29 
 
 pledge himself or the country to a formula which, if it had 
 any precise meaning, would commit us to engage in almost 
 any conceivable war that could take place in Europe. Truth 
 to tell, the " balance of power " is a legal fiction of the old 
 jurists which has little or no meaning in the modern world. 
 There never has been and is not now a balance of power 
 in Europe. The spectacle which history presents is almost 
 invariably that of some dominant Power which, neverthe- 
 less, finds itself severely limited in action, and courts 
 disaster when it endeavours to overstep these limits. As a 
 matter of fact and experience, the peace of Europe has been 
 best secured not by the delicate and wavering balance of 
 equal or approximately equal forces, but by a temperate 
 ascendency of one which cannot be easily challenged, and 
 which has more to lose than to gain by challenging others. 
 These conditions are not less but more cogent at the present 
 day than in former times, for the economic anarchy which 
 even a successful war must cause under modern conditions, 
 and the losses to which even the victorious party must be 
 exposed are more powerful deterrents than ever before in 
 the history of the world. 
 
 We have no concern, then, with keeping the balance of 
 power in Europe, if by that is meant a policy of weighting 
 the balance against the strongest Power and preventing it 
 from enjoying the advantages which belong to it by virtue 
 of its population and its wealth. We should be extremely 
 jealous if Germany declared it to be her mission in the 
 world to keep the balance of power on the sea against Great 
 Britain, and we need not suppose that Germany is at all 
 better pleased when Englishmen proclaim it their duty to 
 redress the balance of power on land against Germany. In 
 either case the use of a specious phrase barely conceals what 
 each party perceives to be a hostile intention, and if we wish 
 to avoid a chronic irritation we had better eschew both this 
 ancient terminology and the thoughts that it implies. When 
 these are cleared off the board, the problem at once becomes 
 simpler. For a vague formula committing us to everything 
 and nothing we substitute a clear principle and definite 
 obligations. The principle is so to order our policy that 
 
30 
 
 A CLEAR PRINCIPLE. 
 
 we may not have to fear a hostile combination against us 
 of greater strength than a reasonable expenditure on arma- 
 ments will enable us to meet; the obligations are, at the 
 present moment, chiefly those which we have contracted 
 towards France and Russia, and which are exactly defined 
 in our agreements with those two countries. It is not our 
 policy, however, to give these agreements large and vague 
 interpretations which would turn them into alliances for 
 European purposes, nor to construe them in such a sense 
 that they would be incompatible with friendly relations with 
 Germany. 
 
31 
 
 VI.— TOWARDS AN ANGLO-GERMAN 
 DETENTE. 
 
 German Indictments and British Retorts ; Deeds not Words ; 
 Two Points of View and Their Adjustment ; Minor Friction, 
 
 If we are to get permanently on to better terms with 
 Germany, we must clean forget some things and carefully 
 remember other things which have been a cause of con- 
 troversy during the last six years. We must cease to think 
 of ourselves as charged with a mission to redress the 
 balance of power in Europe. We must not talk at large as 
 if we were meditating Continental warfare on the large 
 scale, and organising ourselves to that end. Any war with 
 any Power would, of course, involve the consequence that 
 we should employ the whole of our force, naval and 
 military, in whatever way seemed best to conduce to 
 success ; and if, unhappily, we were at war with Germany, 
 we should naturally hold ourselves free to use army as well 
 as navy, if we thought it expedient to do so. But it is 
 most desirable for us to make clear to all our neighbours 
 fthat our value as friend or foe is mainly on the sea, that 
 what we can do for the one or against the other is deter- 
 mined in the main by our navy and not by our army, and 
 that the maintenance of our navy is an object from which 
 we shall not be diverted by any dream of military glory. 
 On these lines there may be rivalry, but there ought not to be 
 bitterness and hostility between us and any of the great mili- 
 tary Powers. We should be doing simply what all Europe 
 recognises that we must do, and our treaty obligations 
 would not conflict with Germany's line of action unless she 
 meditated acts of aggression, which she most vigorously 
 disclaims. Then always there remains the possibility of 
 agreements between England and Germany for mutual 
 relief in competitive shipbuilding. We cannot press these, 
 for, as experience has shown us, they are liable to grave 
 misunderstanding when proposed by the Power with the 
 strongest navy to the Power possessing an inferior navy. 
 But all that successive British Governments have said on 
 
32 THE ALLEGED BLOCKING POLICY. 
 
 this question still holds good, and the motive for checking 
 expenditure which does not alter the relative position of the 
 competing Powers is still a strong one, and may grow 
 stronger. 
 
 German Indictments and British Retorts. 
 
 A naval dStentey however, if it comes at all, will almost 
 certainly follow, and not precede, a political detente. 
 Shipbuilding is an expression of policy, and it will rise or 
 fall automatically according as our relations are good or 
 bad. The Englishman who desires a political detente must, 
 by some effort of imagination, put himself into the 
 German's shoes, and endeavour to understand the substance 
 of the charges which he brings against Great Britain and 
 British policy. We cannot dismiss as pure unreason a 
 sentiment which passes through the whole people, and, as 
 everyone knows who visits Germany or has German friends, 
 is shared by intelligent and quiet people who honestly wish 
 well to this country. Putting the Anglophobes and Pan- 
 German Jingoes out of account, what do these people say? 
 I Mainly, that Great Britain takes advantage of her sea- 
 power to pursue a blocking policy against every nation 
 whom she conceives to be a competitor or rival. She did 
 it, they will tell you, with Russia, blocking her from the 
 warm water in the Middle-East and Far-East, and endea- 
 vouring by all means to drive her back on to the steppes 
 and the frozen North. She did it with France, until she 
 suddenly and unaccountably reversed her policy in 1904. 
 She is doing it now with Germany, thwarting her in China, 
 vetoing the approach of the Bagdad Railway to the Persian 
 Gulf, interfering unwarrantably to prevent her from settling 
 witE France for a port in Morocco, and driving her to find 
 ** compensation " in arid and remote regions where her 
 emergence to the sea is thought to be convenient or not too 
 inconvenient to the British seemacht. Always in the long 
 run the complaint comes back to British sea-power, that 
 intangible, mysterious, far-reaching influence which 
 enables England to have her hand on everything, to keep 
 her neighbours from their place in the sun, to interfere 
 unwarrantably in affairs not her own. 
 
AGGRESSIVE AND DEFENSIVE ARMAMENTS. 33 
 
 Thus the tale runs, decked out with plausible and fre- 
 quently fictitious detail, that receives fresh accretions with 
 every diplomatic encounter in which Germany comes off, or 
 imagines herself to have come off, second-best. The 
 Englishman, of course, replies that the complaint itself is 
 the measure of Germany's restless ambitions, that she would 
 not think and feel like this if she did not really entertain 
 aggressive designs which it is the duty of this country to 
 hold in check. The German retorts that nothing is so 
 exasperating as the self-rtghteous injured innocence of the 
 Englishman. Recriminations, unfortunately, carry us no 
 further. Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of these 
 emotions, we have to deal with them as facts, and to miti- 
 gate them, if we can. Is there any way open to us of doing 
 that ? 
 
 Deeds Not Words. 
 
 Assurances and protestations of innocence are clearly 
 exhausted on both sides, and both in Germany and in 
 England, the demand is for deeds, and not words. Both 
 assure us that they are concerned with the existence of 
 certain forces, the use of which it is impossible to predict 
 with certainty. Governments come and Governments go; 
 the force which one Government intended to be defensive 
 may become aggressive in the hands of its successor. That 
 is what statesmen say when they are on their high horses ; 
 for practical purposes it makes an enormous difference 
 whether they are in friendly or hostile relations with each 
 other. The great army of Austria-Hungary might be used 
 against Germany, but German statesmen are content to 
 assume that it will be used for Germany. The naval and 
 military force of France might be used against Great 
 Britain, but British statesmen are content to assume that its 
 action will be benevolent. And, similarly, if Germany 
 could be convinced that British sea-power would not be 
 used against her, it would make an enormous difference to 
 the competitive naval budgets of the two Powers. That 
 conviction, however, can only be produced by the cessation 
 of diplomatic friction and by the gradual building-up of an 
 
34 A NEGATIVE OBJECT. 
 
 experience, through the mutual efforts of both Powers, 
 which will convince their publics that they are not en- 
 deavouring to trip each other up. ♦ 
 
 I am concerned here with British policy, and it is no 
 part of my business to enlarge upon what Germany should 
 do. But, briefly, the object for her, if she desires to make 
 an end of the Anglo-German contention, is to convince us 
 that she is not aiming at a European hegemony in which we 
 shall be the next victim after France is disposed of. I put 
 it thus baldly, not to accuse her of that design, but in order 
 to define accurately the suspicion which has been at the 
 back of all the diplomatic encounters of the last seven years. 
 Having stated it thus, and, I hope, given due weight to the 
 German counter-plea, in what follows I shall consider only 
 what we may do on our side to avoid giving cause or pre- 
 text to any honest apprehensions entertained in Germany 
 about our intentions. 
 
 Accepting for the purposes of argument the analogy 
 from Russia which I quoted just now from a German dis- 
 putant, we may lay it down broadly as an object to be 
 aimed at — not to get into the same position with Germany as 
 we formerly occupied with Russia. Nothing, in the light 
 of subsequent events, could have been more costly or futile 
 than the chronic irritation which was kept up between 
 Russia and ourselves for a period of forty years. For all 
 those years we became to Russia, and Russia became to 
 us, the villain of every piece, and at the end of it all our 
 own Prime Minister dismissed the whole policy as a *' back- 
 ing of the wrong horse." Let it be remembered that 
 Russia's complaint against us was exactly what is now 
 peard in Germany, that we blocked her from the sea and 
 parred her natural growth and expansion in all parts of 
 the world by the action of our fleet. The analogies, of 
 course, are not exact, but they are sufficiently near to 
 furnish an example and a warning. 
 
 Looking at it from a purely selfish point of view, we 
 may lay down one general proposition. It is more dan- 
 gerous to us in the long run that legitimate German am-- 
 bitions should be thwarted than that we should occasionally 
 
R 
 
 POLICY AND STRATEGY. 35 
 
 un the risk of seeing Germany gain a port or a strip of 
 I ( sea-board which might conceivably, though not probably, 
 |! harbour a German cruiser in time of war or serve as a 
 ' coaling-station for German warships. The command of 
 the sea would become intolerable to our neighbours, if it 
 became in practice a veto on their expansion, lest in con- 
 ceivable circumstances the British fleet should be em- 
 barrassed in war. One of the main causes of war, or at 
 least of competition in armaments, is the extreme anxiety 
 of strategists to secure their positions in case ipf war. 
 Modern diplomacy, it has been said, is a manoeuvring for 
 position in imaginary wars invented by Staff Colleges, and 
 in this process the political conditions which make for 
 peace are constantly disregarded. In the present case there 
 are two points of view to be kept steadily in mind : 
 
 (i) It is a political condition of peace that Germany 
 should have room for expansion without having to fight for 
 it — which means good Colonies or commercial spheres with 
 outlets to the sea. 
 
 (2) It is necessarily a strategical object with a Board of 
 Admiralty that Germany or any possible rival on the sea 
 should have as few deep-water harbours as possible capable 
 of being converted into naval bases whence cruisers might 
 emerge to prey upon commerce. The Admiralty will argue 
 with perfect propriety that, according to modern conditions, 
 it takes three cruisers to contain one, and, theVefore, that 
 every potential naval base threatens this country with a dis- 
 proportionately greater expenditure. 
 
 The business of the statesman is to find the balance 
 between these two views. The Admiralty view, if made thei 
 sole test, will clearly overreach itself by producing jealousy,! 
 friction, and unrest, which will be much more expensive 
 in the long run than the provision of a sufficient force to 
 obviate the danger. The political view, on the other hand, 
 must take account, for what it is worth, of the naval view 
 that expansion in this direction or that may complicate the 
 naval problem, and it must seek for arrangements which will 
 not have this consequence. 
 
 The working-out of these principles in a given case like 
 
36 A BUSINESS-LIKE DIPLOMACY. 
 
 that of the Baghdad Railway and its terminus is no easy 
 matter, and may lead to conclusions which will be displeas- 
 ing to the Chauvinists of both countries. In these affairs 
 we have always to remember the extremely business-like 
 nature of German diplomacy. It is no use to expect that 
 Germany will give to us what she regards as a German con- 
 cession, unless we have some equivalent to offer in ex- 
 change. But, on the other hand, just because Germany 
 has this unemotional do ut des characteristic, the situation 
 between her and other Powers is peculiarly well-defined. 
 If she does not serve God for nought, neither does she serve 
 Satan for nought. Ultimately she decides the question of 
 war or peace on a strict consideration of her own interests. 
 She will even, as we saw recently in the Morocco case, 
 half-draw the sword, and then declare herself ready for a 
 business-like bargain. On these lines, the expansion of 
 Germany may be attended with much hard-bargaining, but 
 it ought not to lead to war. 
 
 Minor Friction. 
 
 I am dealing only with the foundations of policy, and it 
 is no part of my object to furnish a finished design for the 
 structure. That, in any case, would be premature and 
 dangerous. The main point is that we should be prepared 
 for a policy of give-and-take, and that, by all means in our 
 power, and even occasionally at the sacrifice of purely 
 strategical considerations, we should avoid the imputation 
 of deliberately blocking Germany's expansion. Let us, in 
 particular, cease carping at Germany when she gains a 
 legitimate advantage, which in no wise threatens our 
 interests, as in Turkey. Another point of great importance 
 is that a serious effort should be made to get the minor 
 diplomacy of the two Powers on to a better footing. The 
 disposition of each Foreign Office is to see the hand of the 
 other in the most innocent transactions. The suspicion of » 
 England extends to every German Embassy and Consulate \ 
 all over the world; the suspicion of Germany to every 
 British Embassy and Consulate. All the junior members 
 of both services apparently imagine that they are pleasing 
 
DIPLOMATIC MISCHIEF-MAKING. 37 
 
 their superiors by adding their quotulum to the total of 
 irritation about trivial things. Hence a perpetual pin- 
 pricking on either side. Responsible people profess to 
 deplore it, but they do too little to stop it. It should be a 
 rule in diplomacy that, in proportion as you have serious 
 causes of contention with another Power, you should be 
 studiously polite to it in small things. You are in a far, 
 better position to negotiate the big things, when you are' 
 known to be reasonable and friendly about the little things. 
 It is impossible to over-rate the mischief which has beeri 
 done between England and Germany by the multiplication 
 of absurd little contentions which are of no consequence 
 in the long run to either Power. 
 
38 
 
 VII.— THE CEMENT OF EMPIRE. 
 
 The Great Centripetal Tendency; Its Effect on the British 
 Empire ; Logical Dilemmas and Practical Conclusions ; The 
 Great Act of Faith. 
 
 Those of us who are middle-aged will recall the gloomy 
 confidence with which our elders predicted the inevitable * 
 break-up of the existing empires of Europe. They had seen 
 the downfall of the French Empire, they gravely doubted 
 the stability of the new German Empire, they were quite 
 certain that the Austrian Empire must go to pieces, and 
 they looked forward to the separation of her Colonies from 
 Great Britain as either an inevitable evolution or a pre- 
 determined decline and fall. After forty years, none of 
 these prophecies have been fulfilled, and even the doomed 
 Turkish Empire continues to exist. This apparently 
 sudden change of centrifugal into centripetal forces is worth 
 examining, for, if we can in any way fathom it, we shall be 
 near one of the secrets of modern empires. 
 
 The Great Centripetal Tendency. i| 
 
 First, it is clear that all the separate systems are mutually 
 related. If one holds together, the chances are greatly 
 improved that the others will hold together. If the German 
 Empire had broken up instead of hardening into a solid 
 mass, other disintegrating forces would have been released, 
 or have revived in all parts of Europe. Bismarck, there is 
 reason for thinking, regarded the annexation of Alsace-Lor- 
 raine as not only a strategical, but a political necessity for i 
 the new Germany. France, he foresaw, would desire to | 
 recover the lost territory, and the fear of a war of revenge 
 would keep the German States armed and united under a 
 single War-Lord, until the national sentiment had time to 
 grow. But anger with Germany provided an equally strong 
 cement to the French people, and helped to preserve the ' 
 Republic from enemies and pretenders, and to commend it 
 to Frenchmen as the Government which divided them least. 
 Only less potent on either side of the frontier has been the 
 
THE PRESSURE FROM WITHOUT. 39 
 
 fear of Germany in Russia, and of Russia in Germany; 
 while to Austria-Hungary the conviction that only in the 
 big combination could safety be found against the bigger 
 combinations, has been the great preservative of national 
 unity. Similarly, in Italy, all looking backwards to the 
 grand duchies and petty kingdoms has been sternly for- 
 bidden by the presence of the great consolidated systems to 
 the north and east. All the nations, in short, tend to press 
 each other in from without, and to keep firmly in their place 
 any loosely connected portions of the different systems 
 which might otherwise become detached. This general 
 tendency is compatible, as we see in the cases of Germany 
 and Austria-Hungary, with much freedom and variety of 
 local institutions within the boundaries of the Empires. 
 The Imperial Governments, while centralising for the pur- 
 poses of defence, are able to leave the local governments a 
 wide scope, in reasonable confidence that a common motive 
 will keep them together. The big nation, like the big busi- 
 ness, has become the type of the modern world, and, though 
 a variety of smaller nations retain their independence, they 
 do so under the protection of the great Powers. 
 
 Its Effect on the British Empire. 
 
 Precisely the same considerations have operated in the 
 British Empire. In a world organised into small States it 
 would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, for 
 Great Britain alone to remain a great Empire. The states- 
 man of the early 'fifties dreamt of universal peace, and 
 thought of Europe as composed to a large extent of com- 
 paratively small nationalities, living unmolested by the side 
 of bigger neighbours, who had neither great armaments nor 
 large ambitions. Fortified with this ideal, he could look 
 forward with cheerful resignation to the time when the 
 Colonies would grow to manhood and claim the indepen- 
 dence of the grown-up estate. At all events, they would 
 come to no harm, and they could still remain in friendly and 
 sympathetic relations with their parents. The modern 
 statesman, looking round on the Great Powers, and seeing 
 their enormous armaments and formidable ambitions, is 
 
40 THE CONDITIONS OF UNITY. 
 
 obliged to ask where either parents or children might be^ 
 unless they held together. All this is obvious enough, yet 
 it is almost invariably ignored by the different schools of 
 politicians, who are searching about to find some new 
 cement, some political or fiscal specific, without which, as 
 they perpetually tell us, the Empire will irretrievably fall 
 asunder. These people speak as if we were living in the 
 world of the 'fifties — a partly fictitious world even then — 
 when any small community could hoist its own flag and be 
 welcomed with a " Bless you, my children '* by admiring 
 and disinterested spectators in other countries. For good or 
 evil that world has passed, if it ever existed, and it is scarcely 
 a paradox to say that in the world as we know it to-day, the 
 German fleet alone is worth a hundred times as much as 
 Imperial Preference or even an Imperial Council, as a 
 cement of the British Empire. 
 
 There is no cynicism in recognising this fact; rather let 
 us be thankful that there is something positive to show on 
 the credit side of the account for the enormous effort and 
 expenditure which the competition in armaments imposes 
 on us. Still less does the existence of a strong and 
 practical motive for cohesion banish the part which blood, 
 sentiment, tradition, and history play in keeping the Empire 
 together. If we could imagine the self-governing 
 Dominions to be devoid of British sentiment and impartial 
 between the great nations of the world, a variety of 
 suzerainties and protectorates would be open to them. One 
 might gravitate to Germany, another to the United States, 
 another to France. For every system we must postulate 
 some common attraction of sentiment and tradition strong 
 enough to defeat the pull of other systems. To the question 
 whether it prefers the British to any other possible con- 
 nection, the self-governing Dominion must return a decisive 
 positive answer on grounds that are, in the best meaning 
 of the word, sentimental. If that fails, the cause of unity is 
 in peril from the beginning, and no defensive organisation 
 will make it good. But if it does not fail, and the preference 
 for the British system over others is clear and positive, then 
 we may say with confidence that the motive for building up 
 
INEVITABLE RESERVATIONS. 41 
 
 the Empire into a united defensive system is stronger at 
 this moment than at any previous time in history. 
 
 Logical Dilemmas and Practical Conclusions. 
 
 As a matter of fact, this motive has been powerfully at 
 work for the last twenty years, and especially since the 
 Boer War. We have seen it in Imperial Conferences, 
 Defensive Conferences, Press Conferences. The idea of; 
 organising local defences and in one way or another of 
 helping the Mother-country to bear the burden of Imperial/ 
 defence is alive as it never was before. The public in the! 
 Dominions has only to be informed of the liabilities and 
 possibilities of war under modern conditions to wish to 
 help in some way or other. But here at once we get new 
 questions which afford the pessimists a fresh opportunity of 
 expressing doubts and fears. Military and naval considera- 
 tions come into conflict with political principles. The 
 Admiralty and the War Office desire, naturally enough,, 
 that the oversea forces shall be placed absolutely at their, 
 disposal. The Governments of the Dominions, not less 
 naturally from their point of view, desire that the self- 
 governing principle shall extend to naval and military ex- 
 penditure. South Africa and New Zealand are content to 
 contribute in money to the Imperial Navy; Australia and 
 Canada want their own navy and their own control. Voices 
 have been heard from Canada, South Africa, and 
 Australia suggesting that in conceivable circumstances 
 their Governments might remain neutral in a war in which 
 the Imperial Government was engaged. In both countries 
 the condition is attached that the local forces can only be 
 brought to the assistance of the Empire if their respective 
 Parliaments consent. 
 
 Heads have been shaken over these reservations, and 
 numerous long and learned dissertations written to show 
 the dangers which may result, if they are driven to their 
 ultimate logical conclusions. Yet the public may be 
 assured that the controversy on this subject is almost wholly 
 academic. None of the acute cases imagined by jurists 
 
42 EITHER— OR. 
 
 will arise if Britain holds the command of the sea ; we shall 
 be past arguing about any of them, if she does not. The 
 only condition on which a self-governing Dominion can 
 exercise an effective option in time of war is that Great 
 Britain can protect her in its exercise. If that fails, the 
 course which she must follow will not be decided by her 
 Parliament but dictated by the enemy. The only escape 
 from this dilemma would be by secession, which, if the 
 previous argument holds good, would exchange the 
 liabilities of partnership in the British Empire for a less 
 desirable alternative. To the Dominions, therefore, as to 
 the Mother-country, the maintenance of British sea-power 
 is the supreme defensive cause, and the task for both is to ^ 
 evolve an effective system of mutual aid and support that 
 shall not imperil the self-governing principle which is the 
 corner-stone of the Empire in its pohlical aspects. 
 
 The great thing for the moment is that the self-govern- 
 ing States are becoming thoroughly alive to the importance 
 of this question, and our business is to make it easy for 
 them to go forward. That we certainly shall not do, if we 
 present them with the cut-and-dried logical dilemmas which 
 are so much in favour with certain schools of strategists 
 and Imperialists. Either, say these people, you must come 
 under the control of the Admiralty or your navies will be 
 useless in time of war ; either your support must be uncon- 
 ditional or the Imperial Government must disregard it as a 
 factor in its defensive scheme ; either your must do more and 
 come closer, or you may as well do nothing for the real 
 purposes of war. If these logical martinets had their way, 
 there might be an Imperial fleet directed from Whitehall ; 
 but there would not long be a British Empire, for we 
 should be reviving just the very questions of taxation, re- 
 presentation, and the control of policy which lost us the 
 American Colonies. For good or evil we have to reckon 
 with the fact that the principal self-governing Colonies 
 will not part with the control of forces that are raised and 
 maintained by local taxation. The German General Staff 
 would, no doubt, say that this was fatal to their effective 
 use in time of war; the Englishman, accustomed to the 
 
THE DOMINIONS AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS. 43 
 
 British way, will perceive that it is the only condition on 
 which any assistance can be effectively rendered. 
 
 The Great Act of Faith. 
 
 For the loyal acceptance of the condition attached to it — 
 if the Parliaments of the Dominions consent — is the great 
 \ act of faith on which the whole British system depends. If 
 we do not believe that the Parliaments will consent to assist 
 the common cause in moments of stress and danger, or if we 
 think that the Parliaments are ripe for secession, then there 
 is no remedy, and mechanical efforts to bind unwilling 
 subjects will but make bad worse. But if we think that all 
 the signs of the times point to a spontaneous growth of 
 loyalty to the common cause, and a new recognition of the 
 guarantee which an effective unity offers for the liberty and 
 safety of the units, then we may be of good cheer about the 
 future. But the solution of the problem will be a gradual 
 growth, and not a sudden invention. Instead of our states- 
 men producing a plan and imposing it on the Empire, 
 successive statesmen at home and in the Dominions will 
 evolve a customary system, which will harmonise the 
 strategical and political points of view sufficiently for work- 
 ing purposes. That may or may not include a central 
 Council of Empire, but it must include a common doctrine 
 of Empire and an agreement as to its main lines of policy. 
 Hence the immense importance of the confidential com- 
 munications about Foreign affairs made for the first time at 
 this year's Imperial Conference, and the promise of the 
 Foreign Secretary to take the Dominions into his confidence 
 about affairs of moment to the Empire. Let that be 
 persisted in and made a regular part of the duties of the 
 Home Government, and the reservations of the Dominion 
 Governments will become unimportant for practical pur- 
 poses. The Imperial Government will know for what 
 enterprises it can and for what it cannot reckon on the 
 support of the Dominions, and it will direct its policy on to 
 the ground where support is secure. Such a policy must 
 necessarily, I think, be a peaceful policy. It would look 
 more to the world than to Europe, and it would endeavour 
 
44 THE FIRST ARTICLE OF THE CREED. 
 
 to avoid entanglement in mere diplomatic quarrels. It 
 would rest fundamentally on sea-power, and the importance 
 of maintaining the paramount fleet would be the first 
 article in its creed. 
 
45 
 
 VIII.— BALKAN AND MEDITERRANEAN 
 PROBLEMS. 
 
 A Decisive Intervention. 
 
 A Decisive Intervention ; Annexation and Compensation ; The 
 Limits of British Power; Mediterranean Interests; Italy 
 AND Tripoli; To Restore the Concert of Europe. 
 
 In the year 1909 there occurred one of those decisive 
 events which usually escape notice because they are not 
 attended v^ith immediately sensational consequences. This 
 was the diplomatic intervention of Germany, which com- 
 pelled Russia to withdraw her support from Servia and to 
 accept the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by 
 Austria-Hungary, without obtaining any " compensation *' 
 for herself. To understand the full meaning of this event, 
 we must go back a little and consider the sequence of events 
 from the autumn of 1908 onwards. 
 
 The annexation of the two provinces was the reply of 
 the dual monarchy to the " bloodless revolution '* which 
 had expelled Abdul Hamid and put the Young Turks in 
 power at Constantinople. It was in a sense a perfectly 
 natural move. Austria-Hungary had spent a great deal of 
 money and effort upon the development of Bosnia and 
 Herzegovina in the belief that the suzerainty of the Sultan 
 was a negligible factor. And so it was, while Abdul Hamid 
 remained on the throne. No one could have dreamt of the 
 Hamidian regime asserting its suzerainty over any 
 province administered by a great European Power. The 
 Young Turks, however, were an unknown quantity, and in 
 the spring of 1909 they looked extremely formidable. They 
 had apparently the sympathy of all Europe with them ; they 
 had rekindled the national sentiment of the Ottoman 
 Empire; they were loud in proclaiming their intention of 
 stopping the process of dismemberment which had gone on 
 continuously under the old regime. Austria-Hungary, 
 therefore, concluded that the only way of securing the 
 future against all hazards was to abolish the dormant claims 
 
46 THE ANNEXATION OF BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA. 
 
 of the Sultan and to make the two provinces legally as well 
 as actually a part of the Austrian Empire. 
 
 Annexation and Compensation, 
 
 Now, if this had been done with the consent of the 
 . Powers after negotiation with, and payment of some com- 
 pensation to, the Turks, nothing could have been said 
 against it. Done as it was, it was an open violation of^ 
 the Treaty of Berlin, a heavy blow to the Young Turks, 
 and an offence to the Powers who were not privy to it or 
 cognisant of it. There followed a period of confused pro- 
 test and diplomatic excitement. M. Isvolsky, on behalf 
 of Russia, proposed a Conference of the Powers to 
 regularise the annexation and, if possible, to obtain *' com- 
 pensation " for other Powers who held themselves to be 
 injured by the addition to Austrian territory. Prince 
 Ferdinand proclaimed himself Czar of Bulgaria; Servia 
 demonstrated wildly and foolishly. The Conference idea 
 fell flat. The Turks, who had a right to demand the inter- 
 vention of the Powers, suspected that the *' compensation *' 
 which Russia desired was the passage of the Black Sea 
 fleet through the Dardanelles — which would have made her 
 case so much the worse. In fact, a Conference seemed 
 likely to find ** compensation *' for everybody except the 
 Turks, who had suffered the original wrong. Sdrvia, 
 meanwhile, continued to demonstrate, and for several 
 weeks it was doubtful whether she would not precipitate a 
 conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Then the 
 German Emperor made preparations for mobilising an 
 army corps, and the German Ambassador at St. Petersburg 
 intimated to the Russian Government that any attack upon 
 Austria would bring her ally, Germany, on to the scene as 
 a belligerent. The effect was decisive, and with the aid 
 of Germany, Austria-Hungary won all along the line. 
 
 The Limits of British Power. 
 
 It was maintained at the time in the official German 
 / press that Germany had done nothing more than provide 
 
A RECENT CHAPTER OF HISTORY. 47 
 
 Russia with a convenient way of escape from a war which 
 she greatly desired to avoid. Germany, according to her 
 own account, had played the part of a friend to Russia. 
 This, however, did not prevent the Kaiser from claiming, 
 in a speech at Vienna the following year, that he had 
 appeared at the side of his ally Austria, in ** shining 
 armour,*' at the critical moment. Nor, we must add, did 
 this speech prevent the Czar from visiting the Kaiser a 
 few months later at Potsdam, and concluding what is 
 known as the Potsdam agreement in regard to Russian and 
 German relations with Persia. But the incident did show 
 decisively how the forces were ranged in the affairs of the 
 Balkans. Russia was plainly unequal to asserting herself 
 against the combined forces of Germany and Austria ; and 
 France, it must be assumed, had no mind to support Russia 
 in any Balkan adventure. The British Government has 
 been blamed for protesting against the annexation of 
 Bosnia and Herzegovina and for supporting the Russian 
 demand for a conference. As a signatory of the Treaty of 
 Berlin, it would have been extremely difficult for Great 
 Britain to keep silent, and she could do nothing better than 
 support the idea of a conference when proposed. The 
 Turks got something through British action, for, thanks to 
 the friendly offices of our Government, Austria consented 
 to pay two and a half millions for certain possessions of the 
 Sultan in the annexed provinces. But we must recognise 
 the fact that the limits of British power were defined in this 
 transaction. The situation at the critical moment was 
 dominated by the land forces of the great Powers. The 
 naval assistance which we could have given Russia would 
 not have aided her in the invasion of her western frontier 
 by the German Army. Certain English militarists have 
 asked us to observe how different the situation would have 
 been, if we had been in a position to guarantee Russia the 
 support of a conscript army capable of acting in Europe. 
 They are welcome to draw that inference, if they choose. 
 The sphere of our diplomacy might, no doubt, be 
 indefinitely extended, if we had unlimited power both on 
 land and on sea. Whether the interests of the British 
 
48 THE LIMITS OF BRITISH ACTION. 
 
 people or of Great Britain as a world-Power would be 
 served by the diversion of energy and capital to a vast 
 struggle in the Balkan Peninsula is a wholly different 
 question, and one which, in my view, must be answered 
 in the negative. But whichever view we take, it follows 
 that our diplomacy must not outrun our capacity to act. 
 It is useless for us to suppose that we can intervene effec- 
 tively in territorial disputes which may arise between 
 Russia on the one hand and the solid block of military 
 power' represented by the combination of Germany, 
 Austria-Hungary, Roumania, and Bulgaria. 
 
 Mediterranean Interests. 
 
 Are we, then, it may be asked, helpless in the diplomacy 
 of the Near-East? By no means. Great BriFain, France, 
 and Italy together, or the two former alone, represent by 
 far the preponderant naval force in the Mediterranean. 
 Turkey, exposed as she is to the sea, has at least as strong 
 motives for keeping on good terms with the principal naval 
 Powers as with the principal military Powers. She has 
 shown her practical sense of the situation by giving her 
 '^army to German and her navy to British instruction. We 
 hope it may never again be necessary to apply coercion to 
 the Turkish Empire, but a British Government has the 
 means of making itself respected, and a steady and 
 resourceful diplomacy has all the power it needs at its back. 
 But purely British interests in the Mediterranean' are not 
 now what in former days we supposed them to be. We no 
 longer trouble ourselves about Russia coming to Constanti- 
 nople ; if we fear encroachments upon Turkey, we fear them 
 from Germany and Austria, and not from Russia. Our 
 main interest is Egypt and the highway to India. 
 Alarmists tell us that Germany is encouraging the Turks to 
 build railways and prepare a great army, in order that they 
 may one day attack us in Egypt ; and, for this nightmare, 
 we are adjured to block Turkish railways and obstruct 
 German enterprise. We could be guilty of no greater 
 folly. A policy of pinpricks directed at German enterprise 
 — for it could be nothing more — would have no effect except 
 
A MORAL FROM TRIPOLI. 49 
 
 that of alienating the Turks and giving Germany a diplo- 
 matic handle to use against us. If there were really a 
 danger of Turkish hostility to our occupation of Egypt, this 
 would be the very way to precipitate it. Turkey needs rail- 
 ways, no country more. Without them there is no chance 
 of the internal development which alone can tranquilise the 
 Turkish Empire, and put its government on a secure foot- 
 ing. We may legitimately compete with Germany in pro- , 
 viding capital and pushing our commerce ; we may fairly • 
 look to it that our position in the Persian Gulf is not com- 
 promised by the establishment of naval bases for foreign ( 
 Powers; but we cannot block the development of Turkey 
 by German capital on the mere ground that we scent a 
 remote danger to ourselves in Egypt. Far the better 
 course would be to yield a frank and friendly acquiescence 
 in Germany's Anatolian enterprises, and to seek the 
 speediest possible settlement of the Bagdad Railway 
 question. 
 
 Italy and Tripoli. 
 
 The Italian swoop upon Tripoli was in the same line of 
 events as the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. 
 The situation in Tripoli is in process of working itself out, 
 and before it is over, it is likely to be rich in lessons for all 
 the spectators. On the one hand, we have it revealed to 
 us that a Power which has oversea possessions with no navy 
 to defend them, or at least to render attack on them a for- 
 midable operation, cannot rely on the forbearance of other 
 Powers or expect any of them to undertake the duty of 
 defence in its behalf. On the other hand, it is shown that 
 some desirable possessions, which look defenceless, have 
 means of resistance which cannot be ignored without peril 
 by those who attack them. By the mere act of seizing 
 Tripoli, Italy profoundly modified her relation to her Euro- 
 pean neighbours. Clearly, she is not in a position to engage 
 in a war with the Triple Alliance against the Dual Entente 
 without incurring the certain loss of her new possession and 
 of that portion of her army which is assigned to it. Italy 
 has not only placed herself out of action for this purpose, 
 
50 A EUROPEAN SCANDAL. 
 
 but her whole proceeding has proved embarrassing and 
 inconvenient to her partners in the Triple Alliance. The 
 carefully built up and well-deserved position which 
 Germany had won at Constantinople was jeopardised; 
 Austria-Hungary has been in a state of anxiety about pos- 
 sible reactions in the Balkan States ; the rivalry of Austria 
 and Italy in the Adriatic has been sharpened. These facts 
 are not mentioned in any spirit of hostility to the Triple 
 Alliance, but they are of obvious importance in any estimate 
 of the effective forces in Europe, and those who suffer from 
 the nightmare of German hegemony should be reassured by 
 the plain proof, which these events afford, that there are 
 different points of view within the German group, which 
 render it extremely improbable that it will ever become a 
 welded engine of tyranny capable of being used by one 
 power for the subjection of its neighbours. On the other 
 side, we may admit freely that the Italian adventure was full 
 ot embarrassment for ourselves. We cannot even now 
 measure fully what its reactions may be in the Mohammedan 
 world, and as the greatest of Mohammedan Powers, we / 
 have an uneasy sense that our liabilities are increased by it. 
 
 To Restore the Concert of Europe. 
 
 There is much to reflect upon in this survey of Balkan 
 and Mediterranean problems. It is a scandal to all the 
 Powers that the Balkan States should remain in a state of 
 turmoil and insecurity which would be discreditable to the 
 most backward of Southern American States. It is a 
 danger to all Europe that the Turkish Empire should be so 
 unstable as to be both a provocation and a temptation to its 
 neighbours in Europe. Nothing but the jealousies of thC; 
 Powers prevents the speedy solution of the quite measurable j 
 problems of Macedonia and Albania; nothing but their 
 rivalries renders the fear of another Turkish revolution for- 
 midable to Europe. But we have to deal with facts as they 
 are, and we are bound to recognise that the old diplomacy 
 which centred round the Treaty of Berlin has gone for ever. 
 Pressure cannot be applied to the Young Turks as it was 
 applied to Abdul Hamid. If Germany and Austria chose 
 
THE MEDITERRANEAN POSITION. 51 
 
 to say " Hands off ! " to the other Powers, Russia, it has 
 been made clear by the events of 1909, would not challenge 
 them, and the other Powers, ourselves included, have no 
 vital interest which would justify their Governments in 
 plunging into a remote conflict promising neither profit 
 nor glory. On the other hand, the position of Great Britain 
 in the Mediterranean is well secured, both by her own 
 efforts and by her understanding with France, and no com- 
 bination is in sight which need cause her alarm, even 
 though she has to maintain the present concentration in the 
 North Sea. It is an open secret that Italy, while nominally 
 adding to the forces of the Triple Alliance in her ship- 
 building, is, nevertheless, as much in competition with 
 Austria-Hungary as Great Britain is with Germany. If I 
 mention this, it is, once more, not to belittle the power of the 
 Triple Alliance, but simply to allay unfounded alarms about 
 the Austrian Dreadnoughts. With or without her new ships, 
 Austria will have no naval force which she can spare for 
 operations outside the Mediterranean, and the vital 
 interests of Italy would be threatened if naval 
 supremacy in the Mediterranean passed into the 
 hands of the Teutonic Powers. With Great 
 Britain, France, and Italy, united by ties of common^ 
 interest and yet friendly to German enterprise in Turkey,! 
 there should be no reason to fear for the peace in the Medi- 
 terranean. If we have a definite policy in the Medi- 
 terranean, it should be to restore the Concert of Europe, as] 
 the means of settling all questions which may threaten the ' 
 general peace. 
 
52 
 
 IX.— CONCLUSION. 
 
 Common Doctrine and Combined Defence. 
 
 Common Doctrine and Combined Defence ; Th!e Three Forces of 
 THE Empire; The Supreme British Interest. 
 
 If we could imagine the common doctrine of Empire 
 established roughly in some such way as I indicated in a 
 previous chapter, we might look forward to a much more 
 systematic organisation of willing service between the 
 mother-country and the Dominions than has yet been 
 arrived at. These chapters are directed to the Foundations 
 of Policy, and it does not come within their scope to enter 
 into details on this subject, but one can imagine an Imperial 
 General Staff working out a scheme under which, for 
 example, the forces of South Africa and Australasia would 
 be available for mutual aid or for the relief of the Indian 
 Army, or for the release of the regular army from garrison 
 duties. Or, again, looking still further ahead, one may 
 foresee a time when the Dominions which have navies of 
 their own might make the Pacific their sphere of action, and 
 so mitigate the results of the concentration in home waters 
 which has necessarily in recent years been the policy of 
 Whitehall. We need not suppose that these possibilities 
 are being neglected, either at the Admiralty or at the War 
 Office, but how little they enter into the thoughts of some 
 people who pride themselves on their Imperialism may be 
 judged from the inept comments which were made when 
 Lord Haldane added to the Mediterranean command the 
 highly important duties of Inspector-General of oversea 
 forces. That office, so far from being an ornamental ap- 
 pendage to the supervision of the Mediterranean garrisons, 
 may easily become one of the most important in the whole 
 defensive scheme, provided the holder of it is a military 
 statesman and not a mere martinet. The present Inspector- 
 General, happily, leaves nothing to be desired in this 
 respect, but the qualification is important, and it applies to 
 
THE VOLUNTARY BASIS. 53 
 
 everyone, from the Secretary of State downwards, who is 
 engaged in this work. We shall never get an army out of 
 the British Empire pledged unconditionally to go anywhere 
 and do anything that the General Staff may think desirable 
 on purely military grounds. In this respect all the 
 analogies from compulsory armies enlisted for home defence 
 or for service in the adjacent territories of an enemy are 
 misleading. Neither we nor any other country can take 
 men compulsorily and transport them across thousands of 
 miles of sea for service at our pleasure. That kind of 
 service is always conditional, and depends upon whether 
 the cause to which the statesman summons the soldier is 
 just and appeals to his imagination. Here, again, the 
 Imperial organiser is called upon for an act of faith. He 
 must believe that, if ever the Empire is summoned to a 
 supreme effort, it will be in a cause which will command its 
 allegiance, and fie must be prepared to work, in the mean- 
 time, not as one imposing his will on subjects who must 
 obey, but as an adviser who is helping communities of free 
 peoples to the method of action which is best for the 
 common cause and their own safety. A military or a naval 
 man, who regards the problem from a purely professional 
 point of view, will find this difficult doctrine. He wants 
 troops whom he can rely upon to be at a given spot at a 
 fixed moment; he wants ships which will be absolutely at 
 the disposal of the Admiralty from the moment of a declara- 
 tion of war. All others, he will tell you, must be written 
 off as useless or negligible for the purposes of real warfare. 
 But herein he is arguing from the analogies of European 
 warfare. Communities scattered over the globe cannot be 
 so treated. You can no more commandeer the citizen 
 armies of Canada or Australia for service on the Indian 
 frontier than you could the British Territorials. In each 
 j case, the service must be a volunteer service. The position 
 in this respect is no different in the British Empire from 
 what it is in France or Germany, except that the British 
 Empire commands by far the most formidable regular army 
 in existence for oversea service, whereas other nations have 
 to rely on volunteers ad hoc. But a volunteer service, to 
 
54 A POLICY OF CONFIDENCE. 
 
 relieve or reinforce a regular army, may be enormously 
 more efficient if there is in existence a skeleton organisation 
 into which it can be fitted, than if its role has to be impro- 
 vised at the last moment. The part of the military and 
 naval organiser is, therefore, to have an organisation ready, 
 in which the auxiliary forces, naval or military. Territorial 
 or Colonial, can be fitted, if they are forthcoming, and to 
 trust the statesmen to see that the policy is such that they 
 are forthcoming. In Europe the tendency is for policy to 
 follow strategy, but in the British Empire this order must/ 
 always be reversed. We can never deduce our policy from 
 a reckoning of forces which will be available for all enter- 
 prises ; we can only command the force if the policy is one 
 that commends itself to the Governments which dispose 
 of it. All our hopes, therefore, of practical co-operation in 
 the future depend on maintaining those regular communica- 
 tions between the Imperial Government and the Govern- 
 ments of the Dominions, by which alone they can be kept 
 of the same mind about the vital interests of the whole. In 
 this respect the problem has been greatly simplified in 
 recent years by the federation of the Australian States and 
 the Union of South Africa. The responsible Governments, 
 which now have to be consulted are comparatively few in 
 number, and the intervals between the Imperial Con- 
 ferences can be bridged by frequent communications. Even 
 if the problem of a representative Imperial Council proves 
 insoluble, here is machinery ready to our hands which can 
 and ought to be used in all affairs of first-class importance. 
 
 The Three Forces of the Empire. 
 
 In this survey we are looking into the future. For the 
 present we have to face the fact that the main burden of 
 defending the Empire will, for many years to come, rest with 
 the people of the British Isles. It is for them, inevitably, a 
 heavy burden, which a wise statesman will endeavour to 
 make as little onerous as possible. We cannot think of the 
 resources of any country as unlimited, or of its power of 
 action as equally formidable in both elements and in all 
 directions. Our position at sea is vital at once to ourselves 
 
THE MAXIMUM EFFORT. 55 
 
 and to the oversea communities; in our own interests, as 
 well as in theirs, we have to see that it is beyond challenge ; 
 even with their assistance we cannot hope that its cost 
 will decline, and in conceivable circumstances, we may have 
 to face the fact that it must increase. In addition to this, 
 we have to keep up a Regular Army for Imperial service, 
 which is unique of its kind, and, as I have just said, a more 
 formidable weapon for its purpose than any other country 
 possesses. A force available at an instant for service in 
 remote parts of the world must be voluntarily recruited, 
 highly equipped, and relatively well-paid ; and if it is to be 
 kept up to the requisite standard of efficiency, we cannot 
 look for any considerable economies in its maintenance. 
 Finally, we need a roughly-trained voluntary army for 
 Home Defence, to serve the purposes defined by the Com- 
 mittee of Imperial Defence, and to keep the public reassured 
 in case the Regular Army has to be taken out of the 
 country. The new organisation of the Veteran Reserve 
 will help materially to solve tlie problems of this force, by 
 providing a reservoir of trained men who will be available 
 for duty in times of emergency ; but, even so, we may, as 
 time goes on, have to spend more rather than less to keep 
 up the numbers and improve the training of the Territorials. 
 The wealth of this country is great, but recent struggles on 
 the question of finance warn us against supposing that 
 taxation can be indefinitely increased. The maintenance of 
 these three forces must, therefore, be considered the 
 maximum effort that can be imposed on the taxpayers, 
 without exciting a revolt in which rich as well as poor would 
 join. If, as the forward military party proposes, we had to 
 add a conscript army, available for service in Europe, we 
 should be putting on ourselves burdens which no nation in 
 the world's history has borne ; and we should not only be 
 no better off, but a great deal the worse off, for being an 
 island, since, in addition to the armies and relatively 
 inferior navies which the Continental nations maintain, we 
 should be bound, as an island, to maintain a supreme navy, 
 and, as an Empire, to provide an Imperial force for services 
 which no conscript army could undertake. 
 
56 THE SUPREME BRITISH INTEREST. 
 
 But, clearly, if the limit of our power is thus laid down, 
 our policy must not exceed it. We hold ourselves bound 
 by our treaty obligations to other Powers ; we have loyally 
 fulfilled these, and shall continue to do so. With the 
 force that we possess, we are useful friends and formidable 
 enemies. We have all the requisites for making ourselves 
 respected, provided we keep within the limits which Nature 
 and circumstances impose upon the power of every nation. 
 But to do this we must resist the interpretation of our treaty 
 obligations which would commit us to military operations 
 in Europe outside our interests and beyond our power of 
 effective action. In a previous chapter I defined the 
 supreme British interest in a sentence which I will venture 
 to repeat. It is to have a navy which will be equal to any 
 probable combination against us, and a policy which will 
 ' keep the probable combinations against us to what we can 
 meet without a gross inflation of expenditure on arma- 
 ments. Such a policy will necessarily be defensive and 
 pacific. It will not regard this country as having a Provi-'' 
 dential mission to redress the balance of power in Europe. 
 It will look to the world balance of power rather than to the 
 European balance of power; it will tend, as far as possible, 
 to avoid entanglement in European quarrels. It will seek 
 to make sea-power as acceptable as possible to other nations, 
 and, if it cannot remove their theoretical grievance, it will 
 seek to avoid causes of practical complaint. Such a policy 
 will endeavour to establish with Germany relations at least 
 as good as Russia, in spite of her alliance with France, 
 succeeds in maintaining with Germany. 
 
 In these chapters I have necessarily dwelt mainly on 
 questions of foreign and Imperial policy and armaments. 
 But it would be a profound mistake to suppose that these 
 alone constitute the strength of a nation, even in its external 
 relations. When we ask ourselves why Great Britain, 
 with her relatively small force, counted for so much in the 
 affairs of Europe during the fifty years succeeding the 
 Battle of Waterloo, one of the answers must be that she 
 succeeded in solving her internal problems, whereas her 
 neighbours, for a large part of that time, were living in 
 
 I 
 
THE GIFT OF NATURE. 57 
 
 fear, or actually in the midst, of social catastrophes. It 
 may be that a time is coming when for all countries alike 
 the internal economic problem will overshadow any ques- 
 tion of external policy. Or it may be that the incalculable 
 hazards of war, under modern conditions, will so impress 
 themselves on modern statesmen that diplomacy will sink 
 automatically and insensibly to a more peaceful plane. In 
 either case, the object of a nation like our own, which has 
 all the territory it can profitably employ, is to set itself free 
 to live its own life, and not to interfere with the lives of its 
 neighbours. The chief boon which Nature has given us is 
 that we can secure our sea-frontier with a relatively small 
 diversion of human energy from peaceful pursuits. That 
 gives us an advantage for the solution of our peace 
 problems of which, if we are wise, we shall permit no 
 Government to deprive us. 
 
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