Chapter XV

At the close of the nineteenth century, the American people were opportunistic, optimistic, and prosperous; the Russian people were gradually sinking back from the status of a warlike, daring and adventurous nation into a state of sluggishly Oriental passivity and fatalism. In the one case, the power and resources of the West, exploited by the great Eastern financiers, had overwhelmed the last remnants of dying New England idealism, and had dragged the South, incapable of resistance, after it. In the other, the arbitrary will of the central government, backed by an army of corrupt bureaucrats, and by another army of illiterate peasants wearing the Czar’s uniform, had slowly radiated from Moscow through the veins of an immense country until it reached the far distant Pacific at Vladivostok and Port Arthur. Had Washington or Catherine the Great been permitted to revisit the scene of their labours again at the close of the century, they might well have been amazed at the work of their descendants. Both would have been astounded at the immense expansion of what had been originally a very simple idea. Washington in particular would have been hard put to discover his small, and almost poverty-stricken country, almost all English-speaking, with its scant three millions of inhabitants, and frontiers scarcely one hundred miles removed from the seaboard, in the vast congeries of races, ninety millions strong, industrialised up to the hilt and flaunting their wealth, that swarmed over America. But Catherine, too, though she would still have found herself at home among the superstitious mujiks, would have missed the intellectual brilliance of her court and have thought the state bureaucracy overcrowded. Though she might have admired Witte and his special creation of the Transsiberian railway, she would have shrunk back in horror from Tolstoy as from a monstrosity. And what Catherine would have thought of the special qualities of will and character manifested by her descendant, Nicholas II, had best perhaps be left to the imagination. In short, though nothing apparently had been changed, everything in reality was different. America was waxing, and Russia was waning rapidly, like two moons revolving in opposite directions.

The same phenomenon, with the same result, had happened long ago in the ancient world. We have referred before to Egypt and Babylonia as providing an instructive parallel to the two cases of America and Russia. It is necessary now again to recall them to memory, and to note that the period of Egypt’s greatest economic supremacy coincided precisely with the period of the supine Kassite rulers of Babylonia. That the Kassites were foreigners, is a fact perfectly well known, but it is also fair to point out that the Czar was in a very special sense a foreigner in his own realm. Catherine herself was purely East German; and the habit of marrying petty German princesses had persisted so long in the Romanov house that Nicholas II was himself the grandson of a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt and the husband of another. As in Babylonia, Russia was being bled white to support the supremacy of a foreign class. Meantime, America, holding for the most part to the dominant Republican party dynasty which had settled itself into power on the heels of the Civil War, had swept into its system of standardised ethics, mass-patriotism and business psychology, race after race from the old world. The situation was becoming not very different, after all, from that which confronted the Ancient World when Amenophis IV, later known as Akhnaton, mounted the throne of the Pharaohs. And the part that the Hittites had played in the drama of 1500 B.C. was to be played by Prussia; for this is the period of Prussia’s ultimate greatness on the world’s stage.

The drama began in America with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. The farmers of the South and West were already in revolt against the increasing cost of living which high protective tariffs had brought in their train. They were preparing to sweep the entire country under the leadership of Bryan. The industrial workers of the East had already threatened to follow them, in the great strike of 1893. If they had done so, the country would have split up in three sections, even less geographically definable than the boundaries of the North and South had proven at the time of the Civil War. The great industrialists of the East, and the millionaires of Wall Street with their hands on the pulse of the country, took fright. The election of 1896 proved the turning point. The nominee of the industrialist republicans was William McKinley, an affable, ingratiating, hard-working, but essentially spineless Ohioan; but the real power, the power of the campaign funds, lay in Wall Street, which lavishly poured out its treasure to aid the Republican Party to victory. The result was that the less-organised forces of Bryan failed; and McKinley became President. But the industrial outlook was none too rosy. In order to prevent a glut of manufactured products, and the repetition of such a crisis of unemployment as had already taken place in 1893-6, it was necessary not only to maintain domestic protection, but to find foreign markets. And foreign markets in America’s case meant inevitably foreign war. The pretext came when the battleship _Maine_ blew up in Havana harbour. At the price of a war with Spain, a war almost lost through America’s incapacity for military leadership, yet bound to be a victory in the end because of her opponent’s even greater helplessness, America acquired an overseas dominion in the Philippines, and practical certainty of headship in the Caribbean in the not remote future.

The results were momentous, socially and psychologically. America had proven once and for all that she could defeat a European power in the field. That the power chosen for this experiment was Spain, which was antiquated in equipment, weak in leadership, and inefficient in diplomacy, mattered not a jot. The fact that various European countries had half-heartedly shown the Spanish some sympathy was enough to set fire to the powder-magazine of American jingoism. A vast subterranean echo of England’s old Armada victory shook the Anglo-Saxon foundations of the country, trailed through the yellow press, and infected every woman and every schoolboy. This was truly the legendary age of American history, and its chosen hero became Theodore Roosevelt, the millionaire turned cowboy, the “trust-buster” with the big stick who defied equally Wall Street and the trade unions, who was ready apparently to ride and tame together the two wild horses of industry and agriculture, and to implant in every American breast the triumph of the average man. Under his leadership America jumped overnight in the eyes of the world from the status of a gawky, awkward, shambling frontiersman of the Lincoln type, to that of a big overgrown schoolboy with a book in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, equally ready to lecture and to bully the world. One need only be respectful to the “basis of prosperity” on which all American institutions rested at home, and ready to pounce upon any European nation that dared to interfere abroad, in order to be great.

2

Turn now from this picture to that of Russia during the close of the twentieth century. The construction of the Transsiberian railway, and the consequent industrial régime that Witte had fostered, led to a momentary return of prosperity. His creation of a gold standard backed by a gold reserve, together with the state monopoly that at this time was imposed on the manufacture and sale of vodka, happily combined with Alexander Third’s open policy of neutrality in Europe and of rapid penetration to the Far East. The outcome was a hectic period of urban development and factory construction. Meanwhile, the peasantry, especially in the overcrowded region of the Lower Volga, had to continue to suffer, despite their emancipation. Their zemstvos, or local councils, were given no power of legislation; and they were still paying in taxes for the costs of their own liberation back in 1861, and were to continue to pay up to 1910. A succession of bad crops on the Lower Volga in 1891 and 1893 did the rest, and famine drove them into the factories of the large towns, where they rapidly became transformed from illiterate and untrained agriculturalists, with all the earth-born superstitions of their class, to active revolters and plotters against Church and State, greedily swallowing Marx as their new gospel.

In the midst of this situation Alexander III died, to be succeeded by the helplessly fatalistic and spineless Nicholas II. He soon fell under the spell of the young wife who had been brought from Germany for him by his father, and who had first appeared before the Russian people in Alexander’s own funeral procession. This new accession, in 1894, simply meant that Alexander’s policy would continue to be followed blindly, but without the determination and efficiency that the Czar had shown in pursuing it. More and more the peasants were to be encouraged to emigrate; Siberia soon filled up with a new class of desperate adventurers, and those who did not take this path crowded into the factories of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where they were rapidly converted by the steady preaching of the fanatics of Marxism. Their motto was “Wait until the hour is ready when we may strike, and then throw down your tools.” Meanwhile the government proved blind to this new development, and contented itself with further driving the intelligentsia underground or into exile, and making half-hearted attempts to limit the hours of work, and the age at which the people were to be employed in the new factories.

The clash came finally in 1904. In that year, Japan, taking fright at the steady penetration of Russian influence and trade through Manchuria to Korea, China, and the Pacific, suddenly moved her armies, without the formality of a declaration of war, against Port Arthur. The result was to find Russia utterly unprepared. East of Lake Baikal, where the Transsiberian railway had a gap of one hundred miles which could be traversed in summer by steamers, but in winter had to be crossed on sledges, Russia had only eighty thousand field troops, with twenty-three thousand garrison, and thirty thousand railway frontier guards. Japan, on the other hand, could throw in one hundred and fifty thousand line troops at once, and held all the advantages of lines of communication. Russia was doomed to defeat from the outset; and this defeat, for the first time in her history, came not from the invading forces of Europe, but from her own invasion of Asia, which had been followed up to the point where she came into conflict with the one Asiatic nation which had westernised itself, and which was determined, thanks to its own population and trade problem, to keep a firm hold on the Pacific coast lands. But what made this defeat inevitable was the lack of enthusiasm that the Russian people themselves displayed towards the war. Since Nicholas, on his accession, had dismissed the appeal of the zemstvos for a parliamentary constitution as “senseless dreams,” the landowners themselves had become hostile; and the new urban proletariat was indifferent to the demands of any class but its own, and waiting for its opportunity.

The outcome was to prove to anyone but the vacillating and incapable Czar, whose head had been completely turned by the large doses of flattery administered to him by Emperor Wilhelm II (who for his part secretly cherished ambitions towards Europe similar to Russia’s Asiatic dreams) that the continuance of power in the hands of the Romanovs, which had been the sole means of holding the Russian Empire together since the days of Peter the Great, would cease, if once deprived of the support of the united Russian people. Despite the blessings of the Orthodox Church on the new crusade against the Japanese, despite desperate attempts to whip up patriotic sentiment, Russia was defeated not only in Manchuria, but on the home front. The Japanese War concluded not only with military defeat, but with a firm promise on the part of the Czar to open a Duma. This was wrung from him by the great strike of 1905, which paralysed the entire country, and by the passive but effectual resistance of the agrarian class themselves. The war with Japan was rapidly wound up by the intervention of Witte, who made the best bargain he could under the circumstances, in August, 1905; and the attention of the Russian government henceforward was directed towards dealing with the desperate situation at home.

Nicholas might in this crisis have abdicated and passed on the succession of the throne to someone equipped with more will-power and sense of the situation than himself, but for the fact that the Czarina had at last, on the outbreak of the war, presented him with a son. His one object henceforward was to transmit the patrimony of the Russian Empire as intact as possible to his heir; and in this aim his wife completely seconded him. The drift of his policy was to summon the Duma, make only such concessions as could be wrung from him, and if the situation proved too dangerous, to reassert his autocracy. It was a policy of desperation, which needed such a supreme Machiavellian as Catherine the Great to carry out successfully; and the conditions--not to speak of the ability involved--under which it was now undertaken were entirely different. In order to keep an eye on the insistent smouldering rebellion of the new factory class, Nicholas’ Government had adopted the policy of setting secret revolutionary agitators to work in industrial districts, in order that the expected uprising when it came might be known beforehand. The result had only been to completely paralyse the country in the strikes of 1905; and once the safety-valve of the Duma was constructed, it was not likely, despite the Czar’s secret hopes, to merely blow off in talk.

There followed ten years of fantastic nightmare for Russia. While in America, the country grew more and more consolidated in its power and prosperity, more and more ready for the date when it might emerge into the leadership of the world, under the successful compromise between “big business” and free competition discovered by Roosevelt; in Russia an outworn and scandalously patched together system tended more and more to break down under its own weight, as Napoleon long ago had accurately foreseen and predicted. The first Duma was suppressed, only to give way to one more radical. The elections were then purged so as to insure a conservative majority, but still the drift to revolution could only be temporarily stayed. What made matters still worse and finally transformed the most conservative landowning class into open opponents of the autocracy, were the scandals concerning the Czar’s own court and heir. The wretched child for whom Nicholas had staked everything, proved a congenital invalid, with no hope for cure from legitimate doctoring. In this resort, the thoughts of the monarch and of his consort turned to the apparatus of miracle which, they fondly believed, lay somewhere in the country itself. The result is well known to the world at large. From the day when the animally cunning and unholy Rasputin first left the trail of his dirty boots across the Czar’s carpet, Nicholas himself was doomed.

The watchword of the twentieth century for America was “uplift”; a determination to exploit the resources of the country up to the limit, and to preserve the Puritan outlook on life that had led to such important results, although the Puritan strain itself was steadily declining in numbers and ability. Abroad, America was determined to make her influence felt as at home; and the shadow of the dollar began to extend itself not only over the American continent, but in the remote regions of Europe and the Far East. The watchword for Russia during the same period was suppression of everything that stood in the way of the continuance of the Romanov dynasty, and suppression of the underground struggle for power by all other sections. The combined forces of Church and State would struggle on for a time longer, though deprived of every vestige of intelligent support. There was nothing to do but to wait on fate. When Crown and Church fell, they would fall together. Abroad, Russia had little influence; all she asked for from her new ally France was not a hand in policy, but capital to enable her to meet the expenses of the immense military establishment she was compelled to keep up in order to avert an explosion at home. Though facing the East, she was drawn into the orbit of European nationalist diplomacy by her economic needs. In America, on the other hand, no one need ask Europe for financial aid. But there had to be an increasing economic penetration of Europe to counterbalance industrial tension at home.

3

Meantime, while these tremendous events were preparing, the nations of the European continent pursued the path that had been left open to them by Napoleon’s collapse, the path of a final intensification of separate effort, backed by the combined forces of industrialism and parliamentarism. It is possible that never to the average individual had European life appeared on the surface so promising, so rich in its complexity, as during the first decade of the twentieth century. Despite the upheavals of 1848, despite the recrudescence of war that had broken out in the years 1866-1870, the continent that was the home of man’s ripest and maturest forms of civilisation had made an astonishing recovery. The old and the new had been skilfully combined. Except in France, the trappings of royalty persisted side by side with keen-witted Parliaments, whose members, inflamed by fiery patriotism and the carefully fostered sense of nationality, vied with each other in demanding more and more factories and better armaments. Thanks to the triumphs of science, the ever new discoveries that had been made in the realm of invention, the spread of electric light, telephones, railways, sanitation, medical skill, literacy, with the rapidly approaching advent of the motor car and the aeroplane in the offing--thanks to all these things, and the possession of the franchise, the future was held to be a rosy one. England in particular fêted the culmination of the Victorian age, and her last triumph over the Boers. France threw wide the doors of a great exhibition in Paris to celebrate a century of progress. Italy had reawakened as by magic from her decay, and was becoming a modern nation, without losing her ancient picturesqueness. In Austria, despite internal difficulties, the veteran Franz Joseph still firmly held together the various parts of his ramshackle Empire. Even backward Spain, newly defeated by America, might aspire to a new Empire in Morocco. As for the Far East, that too was giving way before the dominating force of the white man; in the Philippines, where America was proving herself the heir to England’s colonial ability; in China, where the Boxer rising had been quelled; in India, which England held firmly; and on the continent of Africa, parcelled out into colonies, and ruled by a dozen different nations. Yes, the future was full of hope, a great hope for the white man.

Such was the picture that Europe presented to the superficial observer at the close of the century. But underneath, things were very, very different, as a few lonely Europeans--men like Ibsen and Nietzsche--had learned to their cost. The aggressive nationalism that had gone on unchecked throughout the nineteenth century had proven the real enemy of progress. Every European nation had its own army, its own fleet; and these immense military establishments were not only expensive, but dangerous. Peace was outwardly maintained by means of a complex web of diplomacy and treaties. The Triple Alliance balanced the Triple Entente; but day by day this web became stretched to finer tension, nearer to the breaking point. What was still worse was that a generation of unchecked industrial competition, taking as its tacit watchword its own interpretation of Darwin’s law of “the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest,” had created immense city slums, huge industrial areas of unrelieved hideousness, festering plague-spots where drink, crime, misery, disease--varied only by strikes and discontent--stalked open and unabashed. The protests of a few idealists, a few æstheticians, such as Ruskin and William Morris, had passed unheeded. Religion itself could do nothing to mend matters, inasmuch as it was mostly State-religion, paying lip-service to the established powers. When it condemned, it did so mostly for wrong reasons, as in the case of Zola, whose only too honest and accurate social novels proved meat far too strong for ecclesiastical stomachs.

To the radical minority of impartial and intelligent observers, whether these called themselves socialists, anarchists, communists, or simply honest men, something in the cardboard edifice of European nationalistic prosperity was certain to give way; whether it was the perpetual military establishments, or the intensive industrial competition, or the futile and stupid madness of “patriotic” Parliaments, or the mob-spirit already manifesting itself as latent in democracy. But though the radicals saw the abyss yawning beneath their feet, they could not arrest the earth-tremor that was shortly to precipitate them and their respective nations into it. The régime of mechanical competition and of intensified nationalist effort had taken too firm a hold ever to be checked by words, however eloquent and far-seeing. As many intelligent men realised this fact, a sort of _fin de siècle_ weariness sprang up through the nineties, spread itself throughout Europe, and after taking the various forms of decadentism, symbolism, exoticism, finally immobilised itself in the cynical lightness of an Anatole France. Meanwhile, the web of diplomacy was re-spun, re-stretched, half ruptured at a touch and again tied together. Every year brought new threats of war, balanced by new projects of peace, until most people dreamed that war might never come. The sound of a revolver-shot in the sleepy town of Serajevo at last proved sufficient to shatter the fabric of a century of European diplomacy. A sort of convulsion passed over the face of the world, and the next moment, the nations that had maintained the fiction of armed peace ever since 1870 suddenly found themselves involved in the vast cataclysm of another European war.