The Crime Against Europe Part 5

Fleeing in hundreds and thousands from the rule of one who claimed to be their Sovereign, expelled in a mult.i.tude exceeding the Moors of Spain, whom a Spanish king shipped across the seas with equal pious intent, the fugitive Irish Nation found friendship, hope, and homes in the great Celtic Republic of the West. All that was denied to them in their own ancient land they found in a new Ireland growing up across the Atlantic.

The hate of England pursued them here and those who dared to give help and shelter. The United States were opening wide their arms to receive the stream of Irish fugitives and were saying very harsh things of England's infamous rule in Ireland. This could not be brooked. England in those days had not invented the Anglo-Saxon theory of mankind, and a united Germany had not then been born to vex the inept.i.tude of her statesmen or to profit from the shortcomings of her tradesmen.

So the greatest Ministers of Queen Victoria seriously contemplated war with America and naturally looked around for some one else to do the fighting. The Duke of Wellington hoped that France might be played on, just as in a later day a later Minister seeks to play France in a similar role against a later adversary.[3]

[Footnote 3: Sir Edward Grey and the _Entente Cordiale_.]

The Mexicans, too, might be induced to invade the Texan frontier.

But a greater infamy than this was seriously planned. Again it is an Irishman who tells the story and shows us how dearly the English loved their trans-Atlantic "kinsmen" when there was no German menace to threaten nearer home.

Writing from Carlsruhe, on January 26th, 1846, to his friend, Alexander Spencer, in Dublin, Charles Lever said: "As to the war the Duke[4] says he could smash the Yankees, and ought to do so while France in her present humour and Mexico opens the road to invasion from the South--not to speak of the terrible threat that Napier uttered, that with two regiments of infantry and a field battery he'd _raise the slave population in the United States_."

[Footnote 4: The Duke of Wellington: the report was brought to Lever by the Marquis of Douro, the Duke's heir.]

The infamy of this suggestion cannot be surpa.s.sed. The brilliant soldier who conceived it was the chivalrous Englishman who conquered Scinde, one of the chief glories of the Britannic hierarchy of soldier-saints.

The Government planning it was that of the late Queen Victoria with the Duke of Wellington's advice, and the people against whom the black-slave millions were to be loosed were the "kith and kin" of those meditating this atrocious form of ma.s.sacre. Truly, as an old Irish proverb, old even in the days of Henry VIII. put it, "the pride of France, the _treason of England_ and the warre of Ireland shall never have end."

As a latter day witness of that treason, one who had suffered it from birth to the prison cell, a dead Irishman speaks to us from the grave.

Michael Davitt in a letter to Morrison Davidson on August 2701, 1902, thus summed up in final words what every Irishman feels in his heart:

"The idea of being ruled by Englishmen is to me the chief agony of existence. They are a nation without faith, truth or conscience enveloped in a panoplied pharisaism and an incurable hypocrisy. Their moral appet.i.te is fed on falsehood. They profess Christianity and believe only in Mammon. They talk of liberty while ruling India and Ireland against the principles of a const.i.tution, professed as a political faith, but prost.i.tuted to the interests of cla.s.s and landlord rule."

Have Englishmen in less than two generations subst.i.tuted love for the hate that Napier, Wellington, and the Queen's Ministers felt and expressed in 1846 for the people of the United States? Is it love to-day for America or fear of someone else that impels to the "Arbitration Treaties" and the celebration of the "Hundred years of Peace?"

The Anglo-American "Peace Movement" was to be but the first stage in an "Anglo-Saxon Alliance," intended to limit and restrict all further world changes, outside of certain prescribed continental limits, to these two peoples alone on the basis of a new "Holy Alliance," whose motto should be _Beati possidentes_.

Since England and America, either in fact or by reservation enjoy almost all the desirable regions of the earth, why not bring about a universal agreement to keep everyone in his right place, to stay "just as we are," and to kindly refer all possible differences to an "International Tribunal?"

Once again the British Bible was thrown into the scale, and the unrighteousness of Germany, who did not see her way to join in the psalm singing, was exposed in a spirit of bitter resignation and castigated with an appropriate selection of texts. The Hague Tribunal would be so much nicer than a war of armaments! With no reckless rivalries and military expenditure there could be no question of the future of mankind.

An idyllic peace would settle down upon the nations, contentedly possessing each in its own share of the good things of life, and no questionable ambitions would be allowed to disturb the buying and selling of the smaller and weaker peoples. The sincerity of the wish for universal arbitration can be best shown by England, when she, or any of the Powers to whom she appeals, will consent to submit the claim of one of the minor peoples she or they hold in subjection to the Hague Tribunal. Let France submit Madagascar and Siam, or her latest victim, Morocco, to the franchise of the Court. Let Russia agree to Poland or Finland seeking the verdict of this bench of appeal. Let England plead her case before the same high moral tribunal and allow Ireland, Egypt, or India to have the law of her. Then, and not until then, the world of little States and beaten peoples may begin to believe that the Peace Crusade has some foundations in honour and honesty--but not till then.

Germany has had the straightforwardness and manliness to protest that she is still able to do her own shooting and that what she holds she will keep, by force if need be, and what she wants she will, in her own sure time, take, and by force too, if need be. Of the two cults the latter is the simpler, sincerer, and certainly the less dishonest.

Irish-American linked with German-American keen-sighted hostility did the rest. The rivalry of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft aided, and the effort (for the time at any rate) has been wrecked, thereby plunging England into a further paroxysm of religious despondency and grave concern for German morals. This mood eventuated in Lord Haldane's "week end" trip to Berlin. The voice was the voice of Jacob, in spite of the hand of Esau. Mr. Churchill at Glasgow, showed the real hand and the mess of pottage so amiably offered at Berlin bought no German birthright. The Kreuz Zeitung rightly summed up the situation by pointing out that "Mr. Churchill's testimony can now be advanced as showing that the will of England alone comes in question as the exponent of peace, and that England for many years past has consciously a.s.sumed the role of an absolute and perfectly arbitrary judge of war and peace. It seems to us all the more significant that Mr. Churchill proposes also in the future to control, with the help of the strong navies of the Dominions, the trade and naval movements of all the Powers on the face of the earth--that is to say, his aim is to secure a world monopoly for England." There has never been any other thought in the English mind. As I said in Part I. of this paper, "British interests are first the control of all the seas of all the world in full military and commercial control. If this be not challenged peace is permitted; to dispute it seriously means war."

Germany is driven by necessity to dispute it seriously and to overcome it. She cannot get out to play her part in world life, _nay, she cannot hope to ultimately maintain herself at home_ until that battle has been fought and won.

Arrangements with England, detentes, understandings, call them what you will, are merely parleys before the fight. The a.s.sault must be delivered, the fortress carried, or else Germany, and with her Europe, must resign the mission of the white races and hand over the government and future of the world to one chosen people.

Europe reproduces herself yearly at the present time at the rate of about five million souls. Some three-fifths of the number are to-day absorbed into the life of the Continent, the balance go abroad and princ.i.p.ally to North America, to swell the English-speaking world.

Germany controls about one-fifth of Europe's natural annual increase, and realising that emigration to-day means only to lose her people and build up her antagonist's strength, she has for years now striven to keep her people within German limits, and hitherto with successful results far in excess of any achieved by other European States. But the limit must be reached, and that before many years are past.

Where is Germany to find the suitable region, both on a scale and under conditions of climate, health and soil that a people of say 90,000,000 hemmed in a territory little larger than France, will find commensurate to their needs? No European people is in such plight.

Russia has the immense and healthy world of Siberia into which to overflow. France, far from needing outlets, increases not at all, and during 1911 showed an excess of close on 40,000 deaths over births.

For France the day of greatness is past. A French Empire, in any other sense than the Roman one of commercial and military exploitation of occupied territories and subjugated peoples is gone forever.

France has no blood to give except in war. French blood will not colonize even the Mediterranean littoral. Italy is faced with something of the same problem as Germany, but to a lesser extent. Her surplus population already finds a considerable outlet in Argentina and South Brazil, among peoples, inst.i.tutions, and language largely approximating to those left behind. While Italy has, indeed need of a world policy as well as Germany, her ability to sustain a great part abroad cannot be compared to that of the Teutonic people. Her claim is not so urgent; her need not so insistent, her might inadequate.

The honesty and integrity of the German mind, the strength of the German intellect, the skill of the German hand and brain, and justice and vigour of German law, the intensity of German culture, science, education and social development, these need a great and healthy field for their beneficial display, and the world needs these things more than it needs the British mastery of the seas. The world of European life needs to-day, as it needed in the days of a decadent Roman Empire, the coming of another Goth, the coming of the Teuton. The interposing island in the North Sea alone intervenes. How to surmount that obstacle, how to win the freedom of the "Seven Seas" for Europe must be the supreme issue for Germany.

If she falls she is doomed to sterility. The supreme test of German genius, of German daring, of German discipline and imagination lies there.

Where Louis XIV., the Directory, and Napoleon failed, will the heirs of Karl the Great see clearly?

And then, when that great hour has struck, will Germany, will Europe, produce the statesman soldier who shall see that the key to ocean freedom lies in that island beyond an island, whose very existence Europe has forgotten?

Till that key is out from the Pirate's girdle, Germany may win a hundred "Austerlitzes" on the Vistula, the Dnieper, the Loire, but until she restores that key to Europe, to paraphrase Pitt, she may "roll up that map of the world; it will not be wanted these fifty years."

Chapter V

THE PROBLEM OF THE NEAR WEST

The foregoing reflections and the arguments drawn from them were penned before the outbreak of the war between Turkey and the Balkan Allies.

That war is still undecided as I write (March 1913), but whatever its precise outcome may be, it is clear that the doom of Turkey as a great power is sealed, and that the complications of the Near East will, in future, a.s.sume an entirely fresh aspect. Hitherto, there was only the possibility that Germany might find at least a commercial and financial outlet in the Asiatic dominions of the Sultan. There was even the possibility, had Turkey held together, that England, to mitigate pressure elsewhere, would have conceded to an expanding and insistent Germany, a friendly interest and control in Asia Minor. It is true that the greatest possible development, and under the most favoured conditions of German interests in that region, could not have met the needs or satisfied the ever increasing necessities of Teutonic growth; but at least it would have offered a safety valve, and could have involved preoccupations likely to deflect the German vision, for a time, from the true path to greatness, the Western highways of the sea.

An occupation or colonisation of the Near East by the Germanic peoples could never have been a possible solution under any circ.u.mstances of the problem that faces German statemanship. As well talk of reviving the Frank Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The occupation by the fair-haired peoples of the Baltic and North Seas of the lands of Turk and Tartar, of Syrian and Jew, of Armenian and Mesopotamian, was never a practical suggestion or one to be seriously contemplated. "East is East and West is West," sings the poet of Empire, and Englishmen cannot complain if the greatest of Western peoples, adopting the singer, should apply the dogma to themselves.

Germany, indeed, might have looked for a considerable measure of commercial dominance in the Near East, possibly for a commercial protectorate such as France applies to Tunis and Algeria and hopes to apply to morocco, or such as England imposes on Egypt, and this commercial predominance could have conferred considerable profits on Rhenish industries and benefited Saxon industrialism, but it could never have done more than this. A colonisation of the realms of Bajazet and Saladin by the fair-skinned peoples of the North, or the planting of Teutonic inst.i.tutions in the valley of Damascus, even with the benevolent neutrality of England, is a far wider dream (and one surely no German statesman ever entertained) than a German challenge to the sea supremacy of England.

The trend of civilized man in all great movements since modern civilization began, has been from East to West, not from West to East.

The tide of the peoples moved by some mysterious impulse from the dawn of European expansion has been towards the setting sun. The few movements that have taken place in the contrary direction have but emphasized the universality of this rule, from the days of the overthrow of Rome, if we seek no earlier date. The Crusades furnished, doubtless, the cla.s.sic example. The later contrary instance, that of Russia towards Siberia, scarcely, if at all affects the argument, for there the Russian overthrow is filling up Northern rather than Eastern lands, and the movement involves to the Russian emigrant no change of climate, soil, law, language or environment while that emigrant himself belongs, perhaps, as much to Asia as to Europe.

But whatever value to German development the possible chances of expansion in the Near East may have offered before the present Balkan war, those chances to-day, as the result of that war, scarcely exist.

It is probably the perception of this outcome of the victory of the Slav States that has influenced and accelerated the characteristic change of English public opinion that has accompanied with shouts of derision the dying agonies of the Turk. "In matters of mind," as a recent English writer says in the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, "the national sporting instinct does not exist. The English public invariably backs the winner." And just as the English public invariably backs the winner, British policy invariably backs the anti-German, or supposedly anti-German side in all world issues. "What 1912 seems to have effected is a vast aggrandizement of the Slavonic races in their secular struggle against the Teutonic races. Even a local and temporary triumph of Austria over Servia cannot conceal the fact that henceforth the way south-east to the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea is barred to the Germans."[5]

[Footnote 5: Mr. Frederick Harrison in the _English Review_, Jan., 1913.]

That is the outstanding fact that British public opinion perceives with growing pleasure from the break up of Turkey.

No matter where the dispute or what the purpose of conflict may be, the supreme issue for England is "Where is Germany?"

Against that side the whole weight of Great Britain will, openly or covertly, be thrown. German expansion in the Near East has gone by the board, and in its place the development of Greek naval strength in the Mediterranean, to take its stand by the Triple Entente, comes to be jauntily considered, while the solid wedge of a Slav Empire or Federation, commanding in the near future 2,000,000 of armed men is agreeably seen to be driven across South-eastern Europe between Austro-German efforts and the fallow lands of Asia Minor. These latter can safely be left in Turkish hands yet a while longer, until the day comes for their part.i.tion into "spheres of influence," just as Persia and parts of China are to-day being apportioned between Russia and England. This happy consummation, moreover, has fallen from heaven, and Turkey is being cut up for the further extension of British interests clearly by the act of G.o.d.

The victory of the Balkan States becomes another triumph for the British Bible; it is the victory of righteousness over wrong-doing.

The true virtue of the Balkan "Christians" lies in the possibility of their being moulded into an anti-German factor of great weight in the European conflict, clearly impending, and in their offering a fresh obstacle, it is hoped, to German world policy.

Let us first inspect the moral argument on the lips of these professors. We are a.s.sured, by it, that the claim of the Balkan Allies to expel Turkey from Europe rests upon a just and historic basis.

Briefly stated it is that the Turk has held his European provinces by a right of conquest only. What the sword took, die sword may take away. When the sword was struck from the Ottoman's grasp his right to anything it had given him fell too. Thus Adrianople, a city he has held for over five hundred years, must be given up to a new conqueror who never owned it in the past and who certainly has far less moral claim to be there to-day than the descendants of Selim's soldiers.