The War and Democracy Part 10

BOOKS

Unfortunately some of the indispensable books are in German or French, but the following list offers a very considerable choice:--

(A) AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

_Austria-Hungary and Poland_, by H.W. Steed, W. Alison Phillips, and D.

Hannay. (Britannica War Books.) 2s. 6d. net. Uncritical reprint of very valuable articles from the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.

LOUIS LEGER. _History of Austria-Hungary_. 1889 (from French) (out of print).

GEOFFREY DRAGE. _Austria-Hungary_. 21s. net. 1909. A mine of economic facts.

H.W. STEED. _The Habsburg Monarchy_. 1914. (3rd ed.) 7s. 6d. net. Far the best summary of tendencies, on the lines of Bodley's _France_ and Bryce's _American Commonwealth_.

R.W. SETON-WATSON (SCOTUS VIATOR). _Racial Problems in Hungary_. 1908. 16s.

net.

R.W. SETON-WATSON. _Corruption and Reform in Hungary_. 1911. 4s. 6d. net.

HON.C.N. KNATCHRULL-HUGESSON. _The Political Development of the Hungarian Nation_. 1910. 2 vols. 14s. net. A good exposition of the extreme Magyar Chauvinist point of view.

R. MAHAFFY. _The Emperor Francis Joseph_. 1910. 2s. 6d. A useful character-sketch.

C.E. MAURICE. _Bohemia_. (Story of the Nations.) 1896. 5s. An admirable text-book.

C.E. MAURICE. _The Revolutionary Movement of_ 1848-49. 1887. 16s. The best epitome in English.

COUNT FRANCIS LUTZOW. _Bohemia_. 1896. (Everyman Library.) 1s.

EMILY G. BALCH. _Our Slavic Fellow Citizens_. New York. 1910. The best book on emigration. 10s. 6d. net.

(B) SERBIA AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

W. MILLER. _The Balkans_. 1896. (Story of the Nations.) The best general text-book. 5s.

W. MILLER. _The Ottoman Empire, 1801-1913_. 1913. (Cambridge Historical Series.) An excellent book, with a misleading t.i.tle; it is really a history of the Balkan Christians, with special reference to the Greeks. Turkish history is only introduced incidentally. 7s. 6d. net.

EMILE DE LAVELEYE. _The Balkan Peninsula_. 1887. (Out of print,) By a distinguished Belgian professor, who was in his day recognised as an authority on Balkan questions.

LEOPOLD VON RANKE. _History of Servia_. 3s. 6d. (Bohn's Library.) This brilliant and sympathetic study by the greatest of German historians is of permanent value.

SIR ARTHUR J. EVANS. _Through Bosnia on Foot_. 1877. (Out of print.) The distinguished archaeologist took part, as a young man, in the Bosnian rising against the Turks.

R.W. SETON-WATSON. _The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy._ 1911. 12s. 0d. net. (Greatly modified and extended in a German edition published in 1913.)

R.W. SETON-WATSON. _Absolutism in Croatia_. 1912. 2s. net.

CEDO MIJATOVIC. _Servia of the Servians_. 1911. 16s. net.

ELODIE MIJATOVIC. _Serbian Folklore._. 1874.

(C) THREE OTHER BOOKS DEALING WITH THE BALKANS ARE STRONGLY RECOMMENDED

SIR CHARLES ELIOT (ODYSSEUS). _Turkey in Europe_. 2nd ed. 7s. 6d. net.

H.N. BRAILSFORD. _Macedonia_. 1906. 12s. 6d. net.

LUIGI VILLARI AND OTHERS. _The Balkan Question_. 1905. 10s. 6d. net.

CHAPTER V

RUSSIA

"G.o.d will save Russia as He has saved her many times. Salvation will come from the people, from their faith and their meekness. Fathers and teachers, watch over the people's faith, and this will not be a dream. I have been amazed all my life in our great people by their dignity, their true and seemly dignity. I have seen it myself, I can testify to it; I have seen it and marvelled at it; I have seen it in spite of the degraded sins and poverty-stricken appearance of our peasantry. They are not servile; and, even after two centuries of serfdom, they are free in manner and bearing,--yet without insolence, and not revengeful and not envious. 'You are rich and n.o.ble, you are clever and talented, well be so, G.o.d bless you.

I respect you, but I know that I too am a man. By the very fact that I respect you without envy I prove my dignity as a man....'

"G.o.d will save His people, for Russia is great in her humility. I dream of seeing, and seem to see clearly already, our future. It will come to pa.s.s that even the most corrupt of our rich will end by being ashamed of his riches before the poor; and the poor, seeing his humility, will understand and give way before him, will respond joyfully and kindly to his honourable shame. Believe me that it will end in that; things are moving to that.

Equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man, and that will only be understood among us. If we were brothers, there would be fraternity; but before that they will never agree about the division of wealth. We preserve the image of Christ, and it will shine forth like a precious diamond to the whole world. So be it, so be it!"--DOSTOIEFFSKY, _The Brothers Karamazov._

"The French are a decent civilised lot of people; but I wish we were not allies of Russia." This, or something very like it, is the spoken or unspoken thought of a very large number of persons, especially among the working-cla.s.ses in England at the present time. English suspicion of Russia is no new thing, though there is no doubt that the suppression of the revolution during the years 1906-1909 made it more general than ever before. It was responsible, for example, for the Crimean War, and the "crafty Russian" has become a catch-word almost as widely accepted in England as the phrase "perfidious Albion" is upon the Continent. I have seen Russia at her worst: I saw the revolution stamped out cruelly and relentlessly; I have lived three years in Finland, and know the weariness of spirit and aching bitterness of heart that comes to a fine and cultured race in its perpetual struggle for liberty against an alien Government to whom the word liberty means nothing but rebellion. And yet I am firmly persuaded of the innate soundness of the Russian people, and of the tremendous future which lies before it in the history of the world. I believe too that the English are suspicious of Russia, not because Russia is crafty or evil or barbaric, but because English people find it very difficult to understand a race which is so extraordinarily different from themselves. We fear the unknown; we suspect what is unlike ourselves; yet we shall do well, in the present crisis, whether we are thinking of our enemy Germany or our ally Russia, to remember the axiom laid down by Edmund Burke, the greatest of English political thinkers: "It is impossible to bring an indictment against a whole nation."

In any case, for good or ill, Russia is our ally, and if Germany is beaten, Russia seems likely to play as great a part in the settlement as she did in 1815. It therefore behoves us, in our own self-interest if for no higher motive, to try and understand the spirit and ideals of a great people, who, as they did a century ago at the time of Napoleon, are once again coming forward to a.s.sist Europe in ridding herself of a military despotism.

--1. _The Russian State._--Many of us do not realise the most obvious facts about Russia. For example, our atlases, which give us Europe on one page and Asia on another, prevent us from grasping the most elementary fact of all--her vastness. Mr. Kipling has told us that "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." But Russia confounds both Mr.

Kipling and the map-makers by stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.

For her there is not Europe and Asia but one continent, and she is the whole _inside_ of it. All Europe between the four inland seas, and all Asia north of lat. 50 (and a good deal south of it too)--that is Russia, a total area of 8-1/4 million square miles! This enormous country, which comprises one-sixth of the land-surface of the globe, is at present thinly populated; it has roughly 20 persons to the square mile as against 618 to the square mile in England and Wales. Yet for all that it contains the largest white population of any single state on earth, numbering in all 171 million souls. Moreover, this population is increasing rapidly; it has quadrupled itself during the last century, and with the advent of industrialism the increase is likely to be still more rapid. Many among us alive to-day may see Russia's population reach and perhaps pa.s.s that of teeming China. As yet, however, industrialism is only at its beginning in Russia; more than 85 per cent of the inhabitants live in the country, as tillers of the soil.

It will be at once evident that this fact gives her an immense advantage over industrial nations in time of war. She has, on the one hand, an almost inexhaustible supply of men to draw upon, while, on the other hand, her simple economic structure is hardly at all affected. A great European war may mean for a Western country dislocation of trade, hundreds of mills and pits standing idle, vast ma.s.ses of unemployed, leading to distress, poverty and in the end starvation; for Russia it means little more than that the peasants grow fat on the corn and food-stuffs which in normal times they would have exported to the West. Furthermore, her geographical and economic circ.u.mstances render Russia ultimately invincible from the military point of view, as Napoleon found to his cost in 1812. She has no vital parts, such as France has in Paris or Germany has in Silesia or Westphalia, upon which the life of the whole State organism depends; she is like some vast multi-cellular invertebrate animal which it is possible to wound but not to destroy. Russia has much to gain from a great European war and hardly anything to lose.

At first sight, therefore, there seems to be a great deal in favour of the theory, somewhat widely held at the moment, that to crush Germany and Austria will be to lay Europe at the feet of Russia, and that when Germany has been driven out of France and Belgium, the Allies in the West might have to patch up a peace with her in order to drive the Russians out of Germany. Behind this theory lies the a.s.sumption that Russia is an aggressive military state, inspired by the same ideals as have led Germany to deluge the world with blood. This is an a.s.sumption which is, I believe, absolutely unwarranted by anything in the history or character of the nation.

Historically speaking, the Russian Empire is an extension of the old Roman Empire; it is the direct heir of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had its capital at Constantinople, as the mediaeval "Holy Roman Empire," founded by Charlemagne in A.D. 800, was the heir of the Western Roman Empire, which had its capital at Rome itself. But the Eastern Empire survived its Western twin by a thousand years; the Goths deposed the last Roman emperor in 476, the Turks took Constantinople in 1453. The Russian Empire, therefore, which did not begin its political development until after the fall of Constantinople, entered the field some six and a half centuries later than the mediaeval empire of Charlemagne, which was indeed already falling to pieces in the end of the fifteenth century. Thus Russia presents the strange spectacle of a mediaeval State existing in the twentieth century, and she is still in some particulars what Western Europe was in the Middle Ages. She has, however, attained a unity, a strength and a centralisation which the Holy Roman Empire never succeeded in acquiring. There is nothing corresponding to the feudal system, with all the disruptive tendencies which that system carried with it, in modern Russia; partly owing to the constant danger of Mongolian invasion which threatened Russia for so many centuries, partly as a result of Ivan the Terrible's destruction of the _boyars_, who were a.n.a.logous to the mediaeval barons, and of Peter the Great's subst.i.tution of a n.o.bility of service for that of rank, Russia is politically more centralised than any mediaeval, and socially more democratic than any modern, country. Russia has also solved that other great problem which perpetually agitated the mediaeval world--the conflict between the secular and the spiritual power. She is the most religious nation in the world, but she has no Papacy; Peter the Great subordinated the Church to the State by placing the Holy Synod, which controls the former, under the authority of a layman, a minister appointed by the Tsar.

Yet, while she appears united and centralised when we think of her nebulous prototype, the Holy Roman Empire, we have only to compare her with her Western neighbours, and especially with that triumph of State-organisation, Germany, to see how amorphous, how inefficient, how loose, how mediaeval is the structure of this enormous State.

Peter the Great, who was more than any other man the creator of modern Russia, saw clearly that the only way of holding this inchoate State-ma.s.s together was to call into existence a huge administrative machine, and he saw equally clearly that, if such a machine was not itself to become a disruptive force through the personal ambition and self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of its members, it must be framed on democratic and not aristocratic principles. As Mr. Maurice Baring puts it, "Peter the Great introduced the democratic idea that service was everything, rank nothing. He had it proclaimed to the whole gentry that any gentleman, in any circ.u.mstances whatsoever and to whatever family he belonged, should salute and yield place to any officer. The gentleman served as a private soldier and became an officer, but a private soldier who did not belong to the n.o.bility, and who attained the rank of a commissioned officer, became, _ipso facto_, a member of the hereditary n.o.bility.... In the civil service he introduced the same democratic system. He divided it into three sections: military, civil, and court. Every section was divided into fourteen ranks, or _Chins_; the attainment of the eighth cla.s.s conferred the privilege of hereditary n.o.bility, even though those who received it might have been of the humblest origin. He hereby replaced the aristocratic hierarchy of pedigree by a democratic hierachy of service. Promotion was made solely according to service; lineage counted for nothing. There was no social difference, however wide, which could not be levelled by means of State service." This is partly what was meant when it was stated in the last paragraph that Russia was socially the most democratic of modern countries.

The system established by Peter the Great exists to-day. Russia is governed, not by a feudal n.o.bility like that which ground the faces of the poor in France before the revolution of 1789, nor by a number of capitalists who live by exploiting the workers; for neither feudal n.o.bility nor capitalism (as yet) has any real power in Russia. She is governed by a civil service, and by a civil service more democratic than our own, where the higher posts are as a rule only open to members of the upper and middle cla.s.ses, less exclusive than that of India, where the higher officials are nearly all recruited from the members of an alien race--a civil service, in short, whose only close parallel is the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine the Roman Church as a secular inst.i.tution, with a monarch at its head ruling by hereditary right instead of an elected president like the Pope, and you get a very fair idea of the Russian Government machine.

All that we a.s.sociate with the word aristocracy in the West, the hereditary principle, primo-geniture, the acc.u.mulation of the land and capital of the country in the hands of a small cla.s.s, the spirit of caste, the traditions of n.o.bility handed down with the t.i.tle-deeds from father to son, are either non-existent or of comparative unimportance in Russian society.