Chapter XI: Part II: The Destiny of Imperial Britain (6)

The Crimean War marks a turning-point in the History of Europe only less significant than the Revolution of 1848. The isolating force of religion was annulled, and the slowly increasing influence of the East upon the West affected even the routine of diplomacy. The hopes of the Carlists and the Jesuits in Spain were frustrated, and Austria, deprived of the reward of her neutrality, could look no more to the Muscovite for aid in crushing Italian freedom, as she had crushed Hungary. From his deep chagrin at the treason of the Powers, Cavour seemed to gather new strength and a political wisdom which sets his name with those of the greatest constructive statesmen of all time. The defeat at Novara was avenged, the policy of Villafranca, and the designs of that singular saviour of society, Louis Napoleon, were checked. Venetia was recovered, and when in 1870 the lines around Metz and Sedan withdrew the French bayonets which hedged in Pio Nono, Victor Emmanuel entered Rome as King of Italy. Thirty years have passed since the 20th September, and the burdens of taxation and military sacrifices which Italy has borne, with the prisoner in the Vatican like a conspirator on her own hearth, can be compared only with the burdens which Prussia endured for the sake of glory and her kings before and after Rossbach. But instead of a Rossbach, Italy has had an Adowa; instead of justice, a corrupt official class and an army of judges who make justice a mockery, anarchism in her towns, a superstitious peasantry, an aristocracy dead to the future and to the memory of the past. This heroic patriotism, steadfast patience, and fortitude in disaster have their roots in the noblest hearts of Italy herself, but there is not one which in the trial hour has not felt its own strength made stronger, its own resolution made loftier, by the genius and example of a single man--Giuseppe Mazzini. To modern Republicanism, not only of Italy, but of Europe, Mazzini gave a higher faith and a watchword that is great as the watchwords of the world. Equal rights mean equal duties. The Rights of Man imply the Duties of Man. He taught the millions of workers in Italy that their life-purpose lay not in the extortion of privileges, but in making themselves worthy of those privileges; that it was not in conquering capitalists that the path of victory lay, but in all classes of Italians striving side by side towards a common end, the beauty and freedom of Italy, by establishing freedom and beauty in the soul.

The movement towards unity in Germany is old as the war of Liberation against Napoleon, old as Luther's appeal to the German Princes in 1520. The years following Leipsic were consumed by German Liberalism in efforts to invent a constitution like that of England. It was the happy period of the doctrinaire, of the pedant, and of the student of 1688 and the pupils of Sieyes. Heine's bitter address to Germany, "Dream on, thou son of Folly, dream on!" sprang from a chagrin which every sincere German, Prussian, Bavarian, Wuertemberger, or Rheinlander felt not less deeply. The Revolution of 1848, the blood spilt at the barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, did not end this; but it roused the better spirits amongst the opposition to deeper perception of the aspiration of all Germany. Which of the multifarious kingdoms and duchies could form the centre of a new union, federal or imperial? Austria, with her long line of Hapsburg monarchs, her tyranny, her obscurantism, her tenacious hold upon the past, had been the enemy or the oppressor of every State in turn. The Danubian principalities, Bohemia, Hungary, pointed out to Vienna a task in the future calculated to try her declining energy to the utmost. Prussia alone possessed the heroic past, the memory of Frederick, of Bluecher, of Stein, Scharnhorst, and Yorck; and, if politically despotic, she was essentially Protestant in religion, and Protestantism offered the hope of religious tolerance. After Austria's defeat in Italy, the issue north of the Alps was inevitable. The question was how and in what shape the end would realize itself. Montesquieu insists that, even without Caius Julius, the fall of the oligarchy and the establishment of the Roman Empire was fixed as by a law of fate. Yet, with data before us, it is hard to imagine the creation of the new German Empire without Bismarck. His downright Prussianism rises like a rock through the mists, amid the vaporous Liberalism of the pre-Revolutionary period. His unbroken resolution gave strength to the wavering purpose of Frederick William IV. His diplomacy led to Koeniggraetz, and the manipulated telegram from Ems turned, as Moltke said, a retreat into a call to battle. And in front of Metz his wisdom kept the Bavarian legions in the field. From his first definite entry into a State career in 1848 to the dismissal of 1887, his deep religion, wisdom, and simplicity of nature are as distinctly Prussian as the glancing ardour of Skobeleff is distinctly Russian. From the Hohenzollern he looked for no gratitude. His loyalty was loyalty to the kingship, not to the individual. He had early studied the career of Strafford, and knew the value of the word of a King. False or true to all men else, he was unwaveringly true to Prussia, which to Bismarck meant being true to himself, true to God. He could not bequeath his secret to those who came after him any more than Leonardo could bequeath his secret to Luini. But the Empire he built up has the elements of endurance. It possesses in the Middle Age common traditions, deep and penetrating, a common language, and the recent memory of a marvellous triumph. Protestantism and the Prussian temper ensure religious freedom to Bavaria. Even in 1870 the old principles of the Seven Years' War, Protestantism and the neo-Romanism of Pius IX, reappear in the opposing ranks at Gravelotte and Sedan. The new Empire, whether it be to Europe a warrant of peace or of war, is at least a bulwark against Ultramontanism.

The change in French political life finds its expression in the Russian alliance. Time has atoned for the disasters at the Alma and Inkermann. Would one discover the secret at the close of the century of the alliance of Russia and France, freedom's forlorn hope when the century began? It is contained in the speech of Skobeleff which once startled Europe: "The struggle between the Slav and the Teuton no human power can avert. Even now it is near, and the struggle will be long, terrible, and bloody; but this alone can liberate Russia and the whole Slavonic race from the tyranny of the intruder. No man's home is a home till the German has been expelled, and the rush to the East, the '_Drang nach Osten_' turned back for ever."

III

THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE

In modern Europe political revolutions have invariably been preceded or accompanied by revolutions in thought or religion. The nineteenth century, which has been convulsed by thirty-three revolutions, the overthrow of dynasties, and the assassination of kings, has also been characterized by the range and daring of its speculative inquiry. Every system of thought which has perplexed or enthralled the imagination of man, every faith that has exalted or debased his intelligence, has had in this age its adherents. The Papacy in each successive decade has gained by this tumult and mental disquietude. Thought is anguish to the masses of men, any drug is precious, and to escape from its misery the soul conspires against her own excellence and the perfection of Nature. Even in 1802 Napoleon in his Hamlet-like musings in the Tuileries despaired of Liberty as the safety of the world, and in his tragic course this despair adds a metaphysical touch to his doom. Five Popes have succeeded him who anointed Bonaparte, and the very era of Darwin and Strauss has been illustrated or derided by the bull, "_Ineffabilis Deus_," the Council of the Vatican, the thronged pilgrimages to Lourdes, and the neo-Romanism of French _litterateurs_. The Hellenism of Goethe was a protest against this movement, at once in its intellectual and its literary forms, the Romanticism of Tieck and Novalis, the cultured pietism of Lammenais and Chateaubriand. Yet in _Faust_ Goethe attempted a reconciliation of Hellas and the Middle Age, and the work is not only the supreme literary achievement of the century, but its greatest prophetic book. Then science became the ally of poetry and speculative thought in the war against Obscurantism, Ultramontanism, and Jesuitism in all its forms. Geology flung back the aeons of the past till they receded beyond imagination's wing. Astronomy peopled with a myriad suns the infinite solitudes of space. The theory of evolution stirred the common heart of Europe to a fury of debate upon questions confined till then to the studious calm of the few. The ardour to know all, to be all, to do all, here upon earth and now, which the nineteenth century had inherited from the Renaissance, quickened every inventive faculty of man, and surprise has followed surprise. The aspirations of the Revolutionary epoch towards some ideal of universal humanity, its sympathy with the ideals of all the past, Hellas, Islam, the Middle Age, received from the theories of science, and from increased facilities of communication and locomotion, a various and most living impulse. As man to the European imagination became isolated in space, and the earth a point lost in the sounding vastness of the atom-shower of the worlds, he also became conscious to himself as one. The bounds of the earth, his habitation, drew nearer as the stars receded, and surveying the past, his history seemed less a withdrawal from the Divine than an ever-deepening of the presence of the Divine within the soul.

That which in speculation pre-eminently distinguishes the Europe of the nineteenth century from preceding centuries--the gradually increasing dominion of Oriental thought, art, and action--has strengthened this impression. An age mystic in its religion, symbolic in its art, and in its politics apathetic or absolutist, succeeds an age of formal religion, conventional art, and Republican enthusiasm. Goethe in 1809, from the overthrow of dynasties and the crash of thrones, turned to the East and found peace. What were the armies of Napoleon and the ruin of Europe's dream to Hafiz and Sadi, and to the calm of the trackless centuries far behind? The mood of Goethe has become the characteristic of the art, the poetry, the speculation of the century's end. The _bizarre_ genius of Nietzsche, whose whole position is implicit in Goethe's _Divan_, popularized it in Germany. The youngest of literatures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as vividly as the oldest, Italy and France. It controls the meditative depth of Leopardi, the melancholy of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's dramas, and the cadenced prose of Flaubert. It informs the teaching of Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschaikowsky. Goethe, at the beginning of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in _Tristan_ and in _Parsifal_, has woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the _Upanishads_ into a rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.

What a vision of the new age thus opens before the gaze! The ideal of Liberty and all its hopes have turned to ashes; but out of the ruins Europe, tireless in the pursuit of the Ideal, ponders even now some profounder mystery, some mightier destiny. More than any race known to history the Teuton has the power of making other religions, other thoughts, other arts his own, and sealing them with the impress of his own spirit. The poetry of Shakespeare, of Goethe, the tone-dramas of Wagner attest this. Out of the thought and faith of Judaea and Hellas, of Egypt and Rome, the Teutonic imagination has carved the present. Their ideals have passed into his life imperishably. But the purple fringe of another dawn is on the horizon. Teutonic heroism and resolution in action, transformed by the centuries behind and the ideals of the elder races, confront now, creative, the East, its mighty calm, its resignation, its scorn of action and the familiar aims of men, its inward vision, its deep disdain of realized ends. What vistas arise before the mind which seeks to penetrate the future of this union! The eighteenth century at its close coincided with an accomplished hope clearly defined. The last sun of the dying century goes down upon a world brooding over an unsolved enigma, pursuing an ideal it but darkly discerns.

GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED, PRINTERS, LETCHWORTH.

Popular Edition, in Paper Covers, 1s. net.

TREITSCHKE BERNHARDI
EXPOUNDED EXPLAINED

GERMANY AND ENGLAND

By Professor Cramb.

With a Preface by A. C. Bradley and an Introduction by the Hon. Joseph Choate.

LORD ROBERTS said: "I hope that everyone who wishes to understand the present crisis will read this book. There are in it things which will cause surprise and pain, but nowhere else are the forces which led to the war so clearly set forth."

MR. CHOATE says: "Worthy to be placed among English Classics for its clearness of thought and expression, its restrained eloquence, and its broad historical knowledge ... it explains very lucidly, not the occasion, but the cause (the deep-seated cause) of the present war."

The _Times_ says: "A book of warning and enlightenment, written with all a man's strength and sincerity, for which we must be profoundly grateful."

The _Spectator_ says: "Let our readers buy this little book and see for themselves what the nature of the inspiration is at the back of the German Imperialism. They will learn in the smallest possible space what Germany is fighting for and what Britain is resisting."

Three Important Works

THE GERMAN WAR BOOK

Being "The Usages of War on Land" issued by the Great General Staff of the German Army.

Translated, with a Critical Introduction, by J. H. MORGAN, M.A.

Professor of Constitutional Law at University College, London; late Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford; Joint Author of "War; Its Conduct and its Legal Results."

_Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._

This official and amazingly cynical War Book of the Prussian General Staff lays down the rules to be followed by German officers in the conduct of War in the field, e.g., as to non-combatants, forced levies, neutrals, hostages. Its importance and interest cannot be exaggerated.

FRANCE IN DANGER

By PAUL VERGNET. Translated by BEATRICE BARSTOW.

_Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._

Monsieur Paul Vergnet in this book did for the French Public what Professor Cramb did for England. After a careful study of the Political Movements In Germany, and of German literature, he warned his countrymen that War was imminent. His aspect of the question has never been fully discussed in England, and the translation of this book ought to have a very special interest and value for all students of the Great War.

WAR, ITS CONDUCT AND ITS LEGAL RESULTS

Including a critical examination of the whole of the emergency legislation (with a chapter on Martial Law); a chapter on the Neutrality of Belgium; a survey of the Rules as to the Conduct of War on Land and Sea, and a complete study of the Effect of War on Commercial Relations.

By THOMAS BATY, LL.D., D.C.L., and Professor J. H. MORGAN.

_Crown 8vo._

IN WESTERN CANADA BEFORE THE WAR

A STUDY OF COMMUNITIES

By E. B. MITCHELL.

_With Map. Crown 8vo._

This is an attempt to describe truly the social and economic state of things in the Prairie Provinces of the Dominion in the years 1913-14, at the end of the great rush. The writer, who is neither a summer visitor nor a professional advertiser, nor a disappointed immigrant, had unusual opportunities for the study of life in a small prairie city and among the real prairie people on the farms; the picture drawn is neither all gloom nor all brightness. At the present time, when the War has made the whole Empire realize its unity anew, such a disinterested study of Western communities is specially useful and timely.

LONDON: JOHN MURRAY