Chapter XIV

The history of the nineteenth century is the history of the decline and fall of Europe. The logical madness of Napoleon’s attempt to transform by the power of the sword and the brilliance of his individual genius, a group of mutually jealous and innately suspicious nationalities, differing in language, religion and local tradition, into a single unified power, failed as soon as Napoleon became old enough to lose grip on his peculiar gifts. In this defeat both America and Russia, as we have seen, had their share. Russia exhausted Napoleon’s armies, as England--the true parent of America, and of America’s achieved Teutonic-Celtic compromise between apparent political liberty and actual spiritual conformity--exhausted his ideas. During this very period England and America drew together again, and again came into closest spiritual contact, despite the prolonged agonies of the Revolution, the memory of which smouldered less in the hearts of its leaders, such as Washington and Jefferson, than in the depths of the raw new settlements on the Indian frontier. Indeed, had it not been for another characteristic piece of blundering diplomacy on the part of England, enshrined in what is known as Jay’s Treaty, the two countries which had opposed each other so long and desperately, might have come into firm alliance. The prevailing sentiment in England, after all her wars, successful and unsuccessful, has usually been to shake hands with her late foe; but this refusal on the part of the people to bear a grudge is not always shared by the brilliant diplomats and the aristocratically educated politicians of that paradoxical island. What is won by the simple courage of her yeomen, England throws away by the clever stupidity and superiority of her politicians, who are for the most part far too cynically sophisticated to place any reliance on human nature. This was again the case after the Napoleonic struggle: America and England had to remain politically isolated--though in fact, all their interests were shared in common--for the simple reason that the Englishman could only envisage empire in terms of trading posts separated by oceans, while the American saw his empire as new settlements spreading ever westward across unpopulated land-wastes.

On the other and eastern frontier of Europe, where the steppes of the Ukraine unchangeably roll up to the gates of Moscow, the armies of Napoleon had but recently passed, strewing with the evidences of the most disastrous defeat in history the snow-covered plains. The outcome of Napoleon’s titanic failure was soon to be apparent here not less in the spiritual than in the military sphere. Russia moved again, and still more sharply, away from Europe, as America had but recently and once again moved away from England. Czar Alexander I, who might now pride himself on the fact that his climate, if not his armies, had defeated Napoleon, was not in the least disposed to undervalue the historical importance of the appearance of that personage. To England, whether the England was that of the yokel or the poet, of Hodge or of Byron and Shelley, Napoleon was merely a temporary and absurd tyrant--a Corsican ogre feasting on the sufferings of slaves groaning beneath his whip-lash; one who had betrayed the spirit of liberty for a personal whim. To Alexander I and the whole Russian people, Napoleon was the French Revolution itself, _in propria persona_, the Promethean fire-bringer of liberty, the logical incarnation of a spirit opposed to historical continuity. The fact that he wore a military uniform and called himself Emperor, as did the Czar, did not matter. What mattered was that one of common birth, owning no power of descent save that conferred on him by his own ability, the representative of the dispossessed, the opponent of religion, and the overthrower everywhere of monarchy, should dare to measure swords with the consecrated Czar himself, whose will was sacred. This was sufficient to identify Napoleon as Antichrist in the eyes of Alexander and his meanest subjects alike. And the subsequent history shows that the Czar was prepared, by all the traditions of his breed and office, to act upon this hint up to the limit. In order to maintain his power intact, he had to see to it that Europe begot no more Napoleons. His one idea for the regeneration of the world was the establishment of a Holy Alliance, of absolute monarchs with the aim of upholding everywhere the sacrosanct traditions of religion and monarchy, and everywhere keeping down the incoherent but vital drive to liberty that Napoleon had striven to transform into a weapon of self-aggrandisement. Great was Alexander’s disillusionment when he discovered the chief opponent to this project was to be England itself, which had but recently fought Napoleon to the death; still greater was his despair when he learned through the formation of the Decembrist conspiracy, that his own intelligentsia would not follow him. With dramatic suddenness the vain, obstinate, fickle and shiftily brilliant creature who had saved Europe from republicanism, died; or, according to Russian legend, did not die, but walked out upon the road as a pilgrim under an assumed name, in expiation of the crime of parricide by which he had come to the throne. In any case, he left Russia to a more ruthless successor, determined alike to uphold his personal prestige and totally undisposed to play with the dangerously liberal notions of Europe.

Here we must again remind the reader that it is not the primary purpose of this study to provide a detailed and objective history of either Europe, America, or Russia as they manifested themselves throughout the nineteenth century. Rather our aim is to pierce everywhere through this tangled surface of objective facts to the more permanent realm of subjective results. The story of the nineteenth century in Europe is, as far as the European peoples are concerned, the story of the final emergence of an intense and peculiarly aggravated form of bourgeois nationalism. The French Revolution, Napoleon, and the industrial revolution, as political factors, alike conspired to intensify and make acute this mob-drift; romanticism and realism alike, in the field of the arts, fanned its fires. The nineteenth century proved that Europe no longer existed as a great political and spiritual possibility. In its place were only a group of mutually jealous and competitive units, whose local quarrels, to be healed only by exhaustion, would recur again and again. In compensation, the nineteenth century, if it could not produce a rebirth of Mediæval Europe, gave us for the first time since the Middle Ages, Europeans. Through Goethe and Heine, Stendhal and Flaubert, Ibsen and Nietzsche, Havelock Ellis and Verhaeren, Unamuno and Ferrero the line of the great Europeans has gone on, embracing all the European nations in the persons of certain representatives, in a mingled blend of love of country combined with love of mankind, cultivation of local traditions fused with total abhorrence of war. Perhaps the noblest task that America and Russia have accomplished in the world, has been that they have sometimes, albeit unconsciously, aided and abetted in the production of true Europeans. For without such, Europe at the present day would be what she has been for a century past, a desert.

2

The significance of the nineteenth century to America is that it precipitated and made acute the struggle between the commercial and industrial North, the agrarian and conservative South, and the vast mass of raw pioneers who, in the Middle West, actually held the balance of power. The North, in the outcome easily won, less on account of its numbers, and certainly not because of any intellectual brilliance, but because of the plain fact that the South and the Middle West could not even agree among themselves as regards essentials. The New England minority, men like the Transcendentalists, Fourierites, Abolitionists, regarded the perfect form of civilisation as a collection of industrial bourgeois city-states, strongly practical in aim, egalitarian in essence, dependent on absolute liberty of the citizen. To achieve this aim it was necessary for them to agitate for the abolition of negro slavery, which had existed in the South since the Colonial Period. The Southern minority, on the other hand, envisaged the perfect state as a collection of loosely-combined agrarian communities, maintained precisely by the development of slavery as an institution, and governed by an élite of aristocrats, whose activities, released from manual toil, could flow into intellectual channels. The balance of power between these two tendencies, which were incompatible from the outset, lay in the hands of the frontier squatter class of the Middle West and Far West. Their only concern was, which side could provide them most quickly with manufactured articles in return for their raw products. Garrison meant as little, spiritually, to them as Calhoun. America was their oyster, and all they cared for was the eating; in other words, they measured everything precisely by its value in dollars and cents to themselves. Since they were mostly poor men, dependent on their labor, and not economically tied to any particular section of the country (the whole history of the American frontier is a history of continual migration) they looked askance at slavery, which was decidedly the sort of game only a settled, rich man could play. Since New England idealism meant rather devotion to culture than to goods and chattels, they were equally indifferent to the most radical ideas of the New England reformers. They preferred to steer a middle course, and neither to accept slavery nor transcendentalism, realising that they had a continent to develop and their fortunes to make, and that the balance of power lay in their hands. From their emergence on the American stage in the person of President Andrew Jackson in 1829, we may date the typical shibboleths of “union” being held more precious than liberty, the constitution as impervious to logic, cheap money and big business as more important factors in life than either leisure or high thinking.

The situation in Russia differed in form, and in form only. In essentials it was precisely the same. Once again we have a majority of unintelligent peasants, a tiny minority of intelligent radicals, and between them the theoretically unlimited power of the Czar. The difficulty with the radicals was that they could not even agree among themselves. Some were absorbed by the materialistic socialism of the West, which was to be elevated to the rank of a dogma by the work of Karl Marx in this very epoch; still others were non-resistant idealists and anarchists; still a third group were mystic reactionaries, strongly tinged with the Oriental communism that lies at the heart of Christianity viewed in its most primitive aspect. The Czar was quite frequently ready to listen to them; in fact, the sole redeeming traits in the character of Nicholas I, who was Alexander’s successor, were his befriending of radical Russian authors (including Pushkin and Griboedev), his personal courage, and his determination to make decisions for himself. But the balance of the Czar’s power lay with the immense mass of uneducated, coarse and dirty peasantry; so long as their superstitions were not meddled with, so long as Russia could wage successful wars abroad, thus keeping up the price of foodstuffs, so long as the authority of the landowners and the burden of taxes lay not too heavy on their shoulders, all would be well. Nicholas’ system of maintaining, as far as possible, the internal _status quo_ while outwardly posing as the champion of Christianity and the upholder of the oppressed Slav race (which at this time was striving to get free from the yoke of Turkey) broke down badly in the ill-success of the Crimean War. The system of maintaining power by pressing upon Europe, and doing nothing within, could not go on. Czardom itself could not survive, so long as serfdom persisted as an institution. Under Nicholas’ successor, Alexander II, serfdom was abolished by a stroke of the pen, and thenceforward all Russians were theoretically free. To reach the same result, at the same moment, America had to go through the agony of four years’ civil war.

The outcome of this momentous decision was the same in both cases. In America, the Southern aristocracy was swept away, but with it went the last remnant of New England idealism. The “go-getter” type of American definitely appeared, and has dominated the scene ever since, despite every effort to uproot him. The seventies became for America the dawn of the “gilded age”; an orgy of land speculation, of feverish devil-may-care industrialism, of stock exchange gambling and political corruption swept the country. The South could not protest, being enslaved by the corrupt reconstruction government; the protest of the surviving New England idealists went unheeded. Culture was only important in so far as it represented an acquisitive value and the aim of all Americans became to acquire the essential wealth that could enable them to purchase culture, and so show themselves superior to their neighbours.

Meantime the country was filling up with impoverished but ambitious European immigrants, from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, the Balkans, who were ready to barter their share in European traditions for a hand in the melting-pot, which was to transform them all from disillusioned idealists into one hundred per cent wage-slaves. The nineteenth century in America thus proved a tragic triumph of the “divine average” which Whitman had so mistakenly hymned. It left America at the close of the nineties industrial in essence, ruthlessly efficient, contemptuous of Europe, and essentially vulgar. Out of the strivings of Virginia aristocrats and New England radicals had emerged a land of bumptious barbarians. The last heirs of the old intellectual tradition, men like Henry James, Whistler, Stephen Crane, even Mark Twain, began coming to Europe and staying there, in voluntary exile.

The outcome in Russia was equally disastrous to the spiritual health of the nation at large. The result of the alliance between Czar and mujik was but to strengthen the hostility to all ideas, especially to European ideas, and to drive the minority of the intelligentsia still further along the path that led to desperate nihilism. After a brief interlude of liberalism under Alexander II, Russia again took the path of repression, and the reign of his successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II, are noteworthy only for the complete suppression of all thought, the relentless persecution of every form of protest against the established trinity of orthodoxy, autocracy and Don Cossack brutality. Even Dostoevsky, who regarded himself as the special prophet of the old dispensation, was obliged in his famous Pushkin address, delivered at the close of his life, to utter a protest against the prevailing dirt, corruption, inefficiency and criminality, and to uphold the work of the revolutionaries, by speaking of Russia’s “pan-human mission,” and the ideals of the “Russian wanderer.” For the rest, persecuted, outlawed, butchered and oppressed, Russian thought scarcely dared lift up its head. Nicholas II succeeded, and nothing was changed. The end of the century found Russia sinking into a quagmire of corruption; and literature, which had maintained its protest since Pushkin, began to give up the struggle by taking on the colours of a defeated pessimism--the sensational pessimism of Andreiev, the neutral pessimism of Tchekhov, the immoralist Nietzschean pessimism of Artzybashev. The one outlet left to the Russian spirit was an illimitable despair.

The nineteenth century in America concluded with a great economic crisis followed by a foreign war, the first war in which America had been engaged since the Civil War had closed thirty years before. The nineteenth century in Russia closed also, a few years later, with a foreign war in the Far East, which coincided with an economic and political crisis at home. These two events were the logical outcome of the previous development we have already traced, and which had apparently fully settled the _status quo_ in both countries, without really settling anything. In both countries the unsolved questions of the relation between industrialism and agrarianism, monopoly and free ownership, foreign expansion and home reform, came almost simultaneously to a head. In 1898, following on the panic and great strike of 1893-4, America went to war with Spain; in 1904 the Russian government, which had steadily pursued, since the Crimean War, an ambitious advance through Siberia and Manchuria to the point where it was prepared, through possession of the spearhead of Port Arthur, to challenge Europe’s growing interest in China and Korea, found itself surprisingly halted by the outbreak of a struggle with Japan.

3

It is necessary here to go back a little, and to ask the question why these two movements which ushered in the twentieth century, did not coincide in date in both countries, inasmuch as they derived ultimately from the same tragic division of opinion between rulers and ruled, intelligentsia and peasants, though the intelligentsia in the one case were a handful of thinking radicals striving to break down the strangle-hold of the big business bosses and protectionist monopolies, and in the other an even more desperate handful of writers and publicists vainly protesting against the unholy alliance of Czardom, corrupt civil service, and secret police.

The answer to this question is to be found in the unequal incidence of the industrial era in point of time upon both countries. America had become industrial, except for the South, as early as 1840. After 1865 industrialism was everywhere paramount, and its sway was undisputed. But in Russia industrialism did not really begin until after 1892, when Sergius Witte became Minister of Finance and of Communications. As a direct result, the Transsiberian railway was built, thus giving Russia at last full opportunity for expansion in the only direction in which expansion was left open to her, namely, the Far East. Russia thereby followed the path of full industrialism, a path which had been open to the United States ever since the first transcontinental railway, the Union Pacific, had been opened in 1877. It is interesting to note that, once again, what was in the latter case the result of the steady influence of millions of new settlers upon a Federal government impotent to direct or interfere (for the Union Pacific was begun during the upheaval of the Civil War) became in the latter, the action of only one man, backed by the authority of the Czar.

In this delay of about a generation may be found the reason why Russia postponed the internal crisis that in her case, as in America’s, was to mark the slow transition from spiritual adolescence to dangerous maturity. Industrialism, in both cases, provided the lever that set in motion, once for all, the vast and ponderous machine that had been created. In the one case, it solidified, in the other it disrupted; and we need not invoke either Slav stupidity or Yankee smartness to explain the psychological causes of the crisis of 1904-5 or that of 1893-1898. In essence the two movements were similar, it was only in their results--as is practically always the case in American and Russian social life--that they could be thought of apart. In America the régime of free competition in industry supported by protective tariffs, and outward lip service to the Federal constitution as the sole God-given means of developing and fulfilling the destinies of the United States, had steadily built up the cities at the expense of the agrarian interest, until a succession of bad crops unconsciously restored the balance. The result was, first, trade depression; then reduction of wages; then a great strike at Chicago, which had, as the second American city, only just finished flamboyantly hailing the fourth centenary of Columbus’ discovery by means of a World’s Fair; lastly, blundering interference by the Federal Government which helped nobody and a smouldering agitation, freshly dividing the country into sections, arousing the discontented farmers for cheap money, and the discontented industrialists for an overseas empire, to absorb their surplus products. The result was that the inevitable demand for expansion of America beyond the ocean borders found its first moral pretext in the insurrection of 1895 in Cuba.

Turn from this to the situation in Russia, where to balance the American trinity of industrialist, agrarian and sentimental radical, we have the three already familiar elements of Czar, mujik, and intelligentsia nobility. Since 1861 the mujik had been nominally free, and their village zemstvos, or local assemblies, were growing inevitably in power and influence. The Czar owed the continuance of his power entirely to the support of this peasant class. But because of their continued increase in numbers, it was impossible to keep them contented without finding for them continually new lands whereon to settle; and such lands could only be opened in Siberia, Manchuria, Turkestan, the Far East. By building the Siberian railway and by concentrating on industrial development, Witte simply speeded up the outcome of this logical process. Thereby he split up the radical intelligentsia into three groups; those who, working through the zemstvos and the landed classes, were demanding free speech and a parliament; those who, working through the industrialists, were all for a physical force revolution and Marxian socialism to follow; and those who, working through the newly created and prospering middle classes, were all for protecting their rights by a conservative parliament on the English model. By deliberately driving Russia to take the path of industrialism and eastward expansion, in order to maintain the alliance between Czar and peasant, Witte proved himself not the least important servant of the Crown; but his service led directly to two results. It created an urban proletariat, of the utmost future danger as a hotbed of political radicalism, and inevitably forced on the Japanese-Russian War.

In either case, the policy followed was an attempt to resolve by an arbitrary act certain difficulties that could only be attacked from within. The average Middle-Western farmer took no interest in an economic protectorate over the Caribbean; the average Russian provincial noble had no quarrel with Japan. In the one case, it was only through the support of the great Eastern industrialists that the Union could be preserved in permanent form; in the other the central government was obliged to absorb a certain proportion of surplus peasant population, every year, either by creating an industrial class, or by promoting emigration to Siberia, in order to avoid civil war. The result of the movement of 1893-1898 was to make the industrial capitalist class the dictators of American policy, domestic and foreign; that of the parallel movement of 1893-1904 was to create a new industrial class, only awaiting a leader and an opportunity to take over the reins of government from the weak-kneed Czar and his advisers. That the one movement accomplished its ends largely by peaceable economic penetration, and that the other movement grew on account of its arbitrary and violent character matters little. Each violently wrenched a whole country out of its national orbit of development, and set it upon a path that inevitably brought it into conflict with other countries. In America’s case the conflict was to be with Europe, in Russia’s with Japan.

Thus both countries, for the space of about thirty years, had simultaneously explored the path of pacific expansion, and in both cases that means failed. That is the lesson we must keep in mind as once more we find America and Russia confronting each other across the space of Europe at the close of the nineteenth century. Since 1865 America’s entire policy had been maintenance of freedom of contract, protection of home markets, industrial expansion. The policy fell of its own weight because a glut of manufactured articles and the growing inability of the farmers to wring heavier crops from the soil, created a financial crisis of the type that recurs throughout American history. Since the disastrous Crimean War, and still more since the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 had robbed Russia of the fruits of her last victory over the Turks, the policy of the Czar and his advisers had been avoidance of all foreign ideas and radical notions combined with expansion of foreign markets and improvement of domestic communications in order to link up the most outlying parts of the Empire. This policy, too, fell of its own weight and came to nothing because in its zeal to foster commerce and industry it created an industrial urban class determined to take no orders even from the Czar, and because in its hurried race eastward, it finally dashed the trace-pole of the Russian troika against the immovable foundation stones of the Great Wall of China.