A Twentieth-Century Outlook
May, 1897.
Finality, the close of a life, of a relationship, of an era, even though this be a purely artificial creation of human arrangement, in all cases appeals powerfully to the imagination, and especially to that of a generation self-conscious as ours, a generation which has coined for itself the phrase fin de siècle to express its belief, however superficial and mistaken, that it knows its own exponents and its own tendencies; that, amid the din of its own progress sounding in its ears, it knows not only whence it comes but whither it goes. The nineteenth century is about to die, only to rise again in the twentieth. Whence did it come? How far has it gone? Whither is it going?
A full reply to such queries would presume an abridged universal history of the expiring century such as a magazine article, or series of articles, could not contemplate for a moment. The scope proposed to himself by the present writer, itself almost unmanageable within the necessary limits, looks not to the internal conditions of states, to those economical and social tendencies which occupy so large a part of contemporary attention, seeming to many the sole subjects that deserve attention, and that from the most purely material and fleshly point of view. Important as these things are, it may be affirmed at least that they are not everything; and that, great as has been the material progress of the century, the changes in international relations and relative importance, not merely in states of the European family, but among the peoples of the world at large, have been no less striking. It is from this direction that the writer wishes to approach his subject, which, if applied to any particular country, might be said to be that of its external relations; but which, in the broader view that it will be sought to attain, regards rather the general future of the world as indicated by movements already begun and in progress, as well as by tendencies now dimly discernible, which, if not counteracted, are pregnant of further momentous shifting of the political balances, profoundly affecting the welfare of mankind.
It appears a convenient, though doubtless very rough, way of prefacing this subject to say that the huge colonizing movements of the eighteenth century were brought to a pause by the American Revolution, which deprived Great Britain of her richest colonies, succeeded, as that almost immediately was, by the French Revolution and the devastating wars of the republic and of Napoleon, which forced the attention of Europe to withdraw from external allurements and to concentrate upon its own internal affairs. The purchase of Louisiana by the United States at the opening of the current century emphasized this conclusion; for it practically eliminated the continent of North America from the catalogue of wild territories available for foreign settlement. Within a decade this was succeeded by the revolt of the Spanish colonies, followed later by the pronouncements of President Monroe and of Mr. Canning, which assured their independence by preventing European interference. The firmness with which the position of the former statesman has been maintained ever since by the great body of the people of the United States, and the developments his doctrine afterwards received, have removed the Spanish-American countries equally from all probable chance of further European colonization, in the political sense of the word.
Thus the century opened. Men’s energies still sought scope beyond the sea, doubtless; not, however, in the main, for the founding of new colonies, but for utilizing ground already in political occupation. Even this, however, was subsidiary. The great work of the nineteenth century, from nearly its beginning to nearly its close, has been in the recognition and study of the forces of nature, and the application of them to the purposes of mechanical and economical advance. The means thus placed in men’s hands, so startling when first invented, so familiar for the most part to us now, were devoted necessarily, first, to the development of the resources of each country. Everywhere there was a fresh field; for hitherto it had been nowhere possible to man fully to utilize the gifts of nature. Energies everywhere turned inward, for there, in every region, was more than enough to do. Naturally, therefore, such a period has been in the main one of peace. There have been great wars, certainly; but, nevertheless, external peace has been the general characteristic of that period of development, during which men have been occupied in revolutionizing the face of their own countries by means of the new powers at their disposal.
All such phases pass, however, as does every human thing. Increase of production—the idol of the economist—sought fresh markets, as might have been predicted. The increase of home consumption, through increased ease of living, increased wealth, increased population, did not keep up with the increase of forth-putting and the facility of distribution afforded by steam. In the middle of the century China and Japan were forced out of the seclusion of ages, and were compelled, for commercial purposes at least, to enter into relations with the European communities, to buy and to sell with them. Serious attempts, on any extensive scale, to acquire new political possessions abroad largely ceased. Commerce only sought new footholds, sure that, given the inch, she in the end would have the ell. Moreover, the growth of the United States in population and resources, and the development of the British Australian colonies, contributed to meet the demand, of which the opening of China and Japan was only a single indication. That opening, therefore, was rather an incident of the general industrial development which followed upon the improvement of mechanical processes and the multiplication of communications.
Thus the century passed its meridian, and began to decline towards its close. There were wars and there were rumors of wars in the countries of European civilization. Dynasties rose and fell, and nations shifted their places in the scale of political importance, as old-time boys in school went up and down; but, withal, the main characteristic abode, and has become more and more the dominant prepossession of the statesmen who reached their prime at or soon after the times when the century itself culminated. The maintenance of a status quo, for purely utilitarian reasons of an economical character, has gradually become an ideal—the quieta non movere of Sir Robert Walpole. The ideal is respectable, certainly; in view of the concert of the powers, in the interest of their own repose, to coerce Greece and the Cretans, we may perhaps refrain from calling it noble. The question remains, how long can it continue respectable in the sense of being practicable of realization,—a rational possibility, not an idle dream? Many are now found to say—and among them some of the most bitter of the advocates of universal peace, who are among the bitterest of modern disputants—that when the Czar Nicholas proposed to move the quiet things, half a century ago, and to reconstruct the political map of southeastern Europe in the interest of well-founded quiet, it was he that showed the idealism of rational statesmanship,—the only truly practical statesmanship,—while the defenders of the status quo evinced the crude instincts of the mere time-serving politician. That the latter did not insure quiet, even the quiet of desolation, in those unhappy regions, we have yearly evidence. How far is it now a practicable object, among the nations of the European family, to continue indefinitely the present realization of peace and plenty,—in themselves good things, but which are advocated largely on the ground that man lives by bread alone,—in view of the changed conditions of the world which the departing nineteenth century leaves with us as its bequest? Is the outlook such that our present civilization, with its benefits, is most likely to be insured by universal disarmament, the clamor for which rises ominously—the word is used advisedly—among our latter-day cries? None shares more heartily than the writer the aspiration for the day when nations shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; but is European civilization, including America, so situated that it can afford to relax into an artificial peace, resting not upon the working of national consciences, as questions arise, but upon a Permanent Tribunal,—an external, if self-imposed authority,—the realization in modern policy of the ideal of the mediæval Papacy?
The outlook—the signs of the times, what are they? It is not given to human vision, peering into the future, to see more than as through a glass, darkly; men as trees walking, one cannot say certainly whither. Yet signs may be noted even if they cannot be fully or precisely interpreted; and among them I should certainly say is to be observed the general outward impulse of all the civilized nations of the first order of greatness—except our own. Bound and swathed in the traditions of our own eighteenth century, when we were as truly external to the European world as we are now a part of it, we, under the specious plea of peace and plenty—fulness of bread—hug an ideal of isolation, and refuse to recognize the solidarity of interest with which the world of European civilization must not only look forward to, but go out to meet, the future that, whether near or remote, seems to await it. I say we do so; I should more surely express my thought by saying that the outward impulse already is in the majority of the nation, as shown when particular occasions arouse their attention, but that it is as yet retarded, and may be retarded perilously long, by those whose views of national policy are governed by maxims framed in the infancy of the Republic.
This outward impulse of the European nations, resumed on a large scale after nearly a century of intermission, is not a mere sudden appearance, sporadic, and unrelated to the past. The signs of its coming, though unnoted, were visible soon after the century reached its half-way stage, as was also its great correlative, equally unappreciated then, though obvious enough now, the stirring of the nations of Oriental civilization. It is a curious reminiscence of my own that when in Yokohama, Japan, in 1868, I was asked to translate a Spanish letter from Honolulu, relative to a ship-load of Japanese coolies to be imported into Hawaii. I knew the person engaged to go as physician to the ship, and, unless my memory greatly deceives me, he sailed in this employment while I was still in the port. Similarly, when my service on the station was ended, I went from Yokohama to Hong-kong, prior to returning home by way of Suez. Among my fellow-passengers was an ex-Confederate naval officer, whose business was to negotiate for an immigration of Chinese into, I think, the Southern States—in momentary despair, perhaps, of black labor—but certainly into the United States. We all know what has come in our own country of undertakings which then had attracted little attention.
It is odd to watch the unconscious, resistless movements of nations, and at the same time read the crushing characterization by our teachers of the press of those who, by personal characteristics or by accident, happen to be thrust into the position of leaders, when at the most they only guide to the least harm forces which can no more be resisted permanently than can gravitation. Such would have been the rôle of Nicholas, guiding to a timely end the irresistible course of events in the Balkans, which his opponents sought to withstand, but succeeded only in prolonging and aggravating. He is honored now by those who see folly in the imperial aspirations of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, and piracy in Mr. Cecil Rhodes; yet, after all, in his day, what right had he, by the code of strict constructionists of national legal rights, to put Turkey to death because she was sick? Was not Turkey in occupation? Had she not, by strict law, a right to her possessions, and to live; yea, and to administer what she considered justice to those who were legally her subjects? But men are too apt to forget that law is the servant of equity, and that while the world is in its present stage of development equity which cannot be had by law must be had by force, upon which ultimately law rests, not for its sanction, but for its efficacy.
We have been familiar latterly with the term “buffer states;” the pleasant function discharged by Siam between Great Britain and France. Though not strictly analogous, the term conveys an idea of the relations that have hitherto obtained between Eastern and Western civilizations. They have existed apart, each a world of itself; but they are approaching not only in geographical propinquity, a recognized source of danger, but, what is more important, in common ideas of material advantage, without a corresponding sympathy in spiritual ideas. It is not merely that the two are in different stages of development from a common source, as are Russia and Great Britain. They are running as yet on wholly different lines, springing from conceptions radically different. To bring them into correspondence in that, the most important realm of ideas, there is needed on the one side—or on the other—not growth, but conversion. However far it has wandered, and however short of its pattern it has come, the civilization of modern Europe grew up under the shadow of the Cross, and what is best in it still breathes the spirit of the Crucified. It is to be feared that Eastern thinkers consider it rather an advantage than a detriment that they are appropriating the material progress of Europe unfettered by Christian traditions,—as agnostic countries. But, for the present at least, agnosticism with Christian ages behind it is a very different thing from agnosticism which has never known Christianity.
What will be in the future the dominant spiritual ideas of those nations which hitherto have been known as Christian, is scarcely a question of the twentieth century. Whatever variations of faith, in direction or in degree, the close of that century may show, it is not probable that so short a period will reveal the full change of standards and of practice which necessarily must follow ultimately upon a radical change of belief. That the impress of Christianity will remain throughout the coming century is reasonably as certain as that it took centuries of nominal faith to lift Christian standards and practice even to the point they now have reached. Decline, as well as rise, must be gradual; and gradual likewise, granting the utmost possible spread of Christian beliefs among them, will be the approximation of the Eastern nations, as nations, to the principles which powerfully modify, though they cannot control wholly even now, the merely natural impulses of Western peoples. And if, as many now say, faith has departed from among ourselves, and still more will depart in the coming years; if we have no higher sanction to propose for self-restraint and righteousness than enlightened self-interest and the absurdity of war, war—violence—will be absurd just so long as the balance of interest is on that side, and no longer. Those who want will take, if they can, not merely from motives of high policy and as legal opportunity offers, but for the simple reasons that they have not, that they desire, and that they are able. The European world has known that stage already; it has escaped from it only partially by the gradual hallowing of public opinion and its growing weight in the political scale. The Eastern world knows not the same motives, but it is rapidly appreciating the material advantages and the political traditions which have united to confer power upon the West; and with the appreciation desire has arisen.
Coincident with the long pause which the French Revolution imposed upon the process of external colonial expansion which was so marked a feature of the eighteenth century, there occurred another singular manifestation of national energies, in the creation of the great standing armies of modern days, themselves the outcome of the levée en masse, and of the general conscription, which the Revolution bequeathed to us along with its expositions of the Rights of Man. Beginning with the birth of the century, perfected during its continuance, its close finds them in full maturity and power, with a development in numbers, in reserve force, in organization, and in material for war, over which the economist perpetually wails, whose existence he denounces, and whose abolition he demands. As freedom has grown and strengthened, so have they grown and strengthened. Is this singular product of a century whose gains for political liberty are undeniable, a mere gross perversion of human activities, as is so confidently claimed on many sides? or is there possibly in it also a sign of the times to come, to be studied in connection with other signs, some of which we have noted?
What has been the effect of these great armies? Manifold, doubtless. On the economical side there is the diminution of production, the tax upon men’s time and lives, the disadvantages or evils so dinned daily into our ears that there is no need of repeating them here. But is there nothing to the credit side of the account, even perhaps a balance in their favor? Is it nothing, in an age when authority is weakening and restraints are loosening, that the youth of a nation passes through a school in which order, obedience, and reverence are learned, where the body is systematically developed, where ideals of self-surrender, of courage, of manhood, are inculcated, necessarily, because fundamental conditions of military success? Is it nothing that masses of youths out of the fields and the streets are brought together, mingled with others of higher intellectual antecedents, taught to work and to act together, mind in contact with mind, and carrying back into civil life that respect for constituted authority which is urgently needed in these days when lawlessness is erected into a religion? It is a suggestive lesson to watch the expression and movements of a number of rustic conscripts undergoing their first drills, and to contrast them with the finished result as seen in the faces and bearing of the soldiers that throng the streets. A military training is not the worst preparation for an active life, any more than the years spent at college are time lost, as another school of utilitarians insists. Is it nothing that wars are less frequent, peace better secured, by the mutual respect of nations for each other’s strength; and that, when a convulsion does come, it passes rapidly, leaving the ordinary course of events to resume sooner, and therefore more easily? War now not only occurs more rarely, but has rather the character of an occasional excess, from which recovery is easy. A century or more ago it was a chronic disease. And withal, the military spirit, the preparedness—not merely the willingness, which is a different thing—to fight in a good cause, which is a distinct good, is more widely diffused and more thoroughly possessed than ever it was when the soldier was merely the paid man. It is the nations now that are in arms, and not simply the servants of the king.
In forecasting the future, then, it is upon these particular signs of the times that I dwell: the arrest of the forward impulse towards political colonization which coincided with the decade immediately preceding the French Revolution; the absorption of the European nations, for the following quarter of a century, with the universal wars, involving questions chiefly political and European; the beginning of the great era of coal and iron, of mechanical and industrial development, which succeeded the peace, and during which it was not aggressive colonization, but the development of colonies already held and of new commercial centres, notably in China and Japan, that was the most prominent feature; finally, we have, resumed at the end of the century, the forward movement of political colonization by the mother countries, powerfully incited thereto, doubtless, by the citizens of the old colonies in different parts of the world. The restlessness of Australia and the Cape Colony has doubtless counted for much in British advances in those regions. Contemporary with all these movements, from the first to the last, has been the development of great standing armies, or rather of armed nations, in Europe; and, lastly, the stirring of the East, its entrance into the field of Western interests, not merely as a passive something to be impinged upon, but with a vitality of its own, formless yet, but significant, inasmuch as where before there was torpor, if not death, now there is indisputable movement and life. Never again, probably, can there of it be said,
“It heard the legions thunder past,
Then plunged in thought again.”
Of this the astonishing development of Japan is the most obvious evidence; but in India, though there be no probability of the old mutinies reviving, there are signs enough of the awaking of political intelligence, restlessness under foreign subjection, however beneficent, desire for greater play for its own individualities; a movement which, because intellectual and appreciative of the advantages of Western material and political civilization, is less immediately threatening than the former revolt, but much more ominous of great future changes.
Of China we know less; but many observers testify to the immense latent force of the Chinese character. It has shown itself hitherto chiefly in the strength with which it has adhered to stereotyped tradition. But stereotyped traditions have been overthrown already more than once even in this unprogressive people, whose conservatism, due largely to ignorance of better conditions existing in other lands, is closely allied also to the unusual staying powers of the race, to the persistence of purpose, the endurance, and the vitality characteristic of its units. To ambition for individual material improvement they are not insensible. The collapse of the Chinese organization in all its branches during the late war with Japan, though greater than was expected, was not unforeseen. It has not altered the fact that the raw material so miserably utilized is, in point of strength, of the best; that it is abundant, racially homogeneous, and is multiplying rapidly. Nor, with the recent resuscitation of the Turkish army before men’s eyes, can it be thought unlikely that the Chinese may yet obtain the organization by which alone potential force receives adequate military development, the most easily conferred because the simplest in conception. The Japanese have shown great capacity, but they met little resistance; and it is easier by far to move and to control an island kingdom of forty millions than a vast continental territory containing near tenfold that number of inhabitants. Comparative slowness of evolution may be predicated, but that which for so long has kept China one, amid many diversities, may be counted upon in the future to insure a substantial unity of impulse which, combined with its mass, will give tremendous import to any movement common to the whole.
To assert that a few selected characteristics, such as the above, summarize the entire tendency of a century of teeming human life, and stand alone among the signs that are chiefly to be considered in looking to the future, would be to take an untenable position. It may be said safely, however, that these factors, because the future to which they point is more remote, are less regarded than others which are less important; and further, that those among them which mark our own day are also the factors whose very existence is specially resented, criticised, and condemned by that school of political thought which assumes for itself the title of economical, which attained its maturity, and still lives, amid the ideas of that stage of industrial progress coincident with the middle of the century, and which sees all things from the point of view of production and of internal development. Powerfully exerted throughout the world, nowhere is the influence of this school so unchecked and so injurious as in the United States, because, having no near neighbors to compete with us in point of power, military necessities have been to us not imminent, so that, like all distant dangers, they have received little regard; and also because, with our great resources only partially developed, the instinct to external activities has remained dormant. At the same period and from the same causes that the European world turned its eyes inward from the seaboard, instead of outward, the people of the United States were similarly diverted from the external activities in which at the beginning of the century they had their wealth. This tendency, emphasized on the political side by the civil war, was reinforced and has been prolonged by well-known natural conditions. A territory much larger, far less redeemed from its original wildness, and with perhaps even ampler proportionate resources than the continent of Europe, contained a much smaller number of inhabitants. Hence, despite an immense immigration, we have lagged far behind in the work of completing our internal development, and for that reason have not yet felt the outward impulse that now markedly characterizes the European peoples. That we stand far apart from the general movement of our race calls of itself for consideration.
For the reasons mentioned it has been an easy but a short-sighted policy, wherever it has been found among statesmen or among journalists, to fasten attention purely on internal and economical questions, and to reject, if not to resent, propositions looking towards the organization and maintenance of military force, or contemplating the extension of our national influence beyond our own borders, on the plea that we have enough to do at home,—forgetful that no nation, as no man, can live to itself or die to itself. It is a policy in which we are behind our predecessors of two generations ago, men who had not felt the deadening influence of merely economical ideas, because they reached manhood before these attained the preponderance they achieved under politicians of the Manchester school; a preponderance which they still retain because the youths of that time, who grew up under them, have not yet quite passed off the stage. It is the lot of each generation, salutary no doubt, to be ruled by men whose ideas are essentially those of a former day. Breaches of continuity in national action are thus moderated or avoided; but, on the other hand, the tendency of such a condition is to blind men to the spirit of the existing generation, because its rulers have the tone of their own past, and direct affairs in accordance with it. On the very day of this writing there appears in an American journal a slashing contrast between the action of Lord Salisbury in the Cretan business and the spirited letter of Mr. Gladstone upon the failure of the Concert. As a matter of fact, however, both those British statesmen, while belonging to parties traditionally opposed, are imbued above all with the ideas of the middle of the century, and, governed by them, consider the disturbance of quiet the greatest of all evils. It is difficult to believe that if Mr. Gladstone were now in his prime, and in power, any object would possess in his eyes an importance at all comparable to that of keeping the peace. He would feel for the Greeks, doubtless, as Lord Salisbury doubtless does; but he would maintain the Concert as long as he believed that alone would avoid war. When men in sympathy with the ideas now arising among Englishmen come on the stage, we shall see a change—not before.
The same spirit has dominated in our own country ever since the civil war—a far more real “revolution” in its consequences than the struggle of the thirteen colonies against Great Britain, which in our national speech has received the name—forced our people, both North and South, to withdraw their eyes from external problems, and to concentrate heart and mind with passionate fervor upon an internal strife, in which one party was animated by the inspiring hope of independence, while before the other was exalted the noble ideal of union. That war, however, was directed, on the civil side, by men who belonged to a generation even then passing away. The influence of their own youth reverted with the return of peace, and was to be seen in the ejection—by threat of force—of the third Napoleon from Mexico, in the acquisition of Alaska, and in the negotiations for the purchase of the Danish islands and of Samana Bay. Whatever may have been the wisdom of these latter attempts,—and the writer, while sympathizing with the spirit that suggested them, questions it from a military, or rather naval, stand-point,—they are particularly interesting as indicating the survival in elderly men of the traditions accepted in their youth, but foreign to the generation then rapidly coming into power, which rejected and frustrated them.
The latter in turn is now disappearing, and its successors, coming and to come, are crowding into its places. Is there any indication of the ideas these bring with them, in their own utterances, or in the spirit of the world at large, which they must needs reflect; or, more important perhaps still, is there any indication in the conditions of the outside world itself which they should heed, and the influence of which they should admit, in modifying and shaping their policies, before these have become hardened into fixed lines, directive for many years of the future welfare of their people?
To all these questions the writer, as one of the departing generation, would answer yes; but it is to the last that his attention, possibly by constitutional bias, is more naturally directed. It appears to him that in the ebb and flow of human affairs, under those mysterious impulses the origin of which is sought by some in a personal Providence, by some in laws not yet fully understood, we stand at the opening of a period when the question is to be settled decisively, though the issue may be long delayed, whether Eastern or Western civilization is to dominate throughout the earth and to control its future. The great task now before the world of civilized Christianity, its great mission, which it must fulfil or perish, is to receive into its own bosom and raise to its own ideals those ancient and different civilizations by which it is surrounded and outnumbered,—the civilizations at the head of which stand China, India, and Japan. This, to cite the most striking of the many forms in which it is presented to us, is surely the mission which Great Britain, sword ever at hand, has been discharging towards India; but that stands not alone. The history of the present century has been that of a constant increasing pressure of our own civilization upon these older ones, till now, as we cast our eyes in any direction, there is everywhere a stirring, a rousing from sleep, drowsy for the most part, but real, unorganized as yet, but conscious that that which rudely interrupts their dream of centuries possesses over them at least two advantages,—power and material prosperity,—the things which unspiritual humanity, the world over, most craves.
What the ultimate result will be it would be vain to prophesy,—the data for a guess even are not at hand; but it is not equally impossible to note present conditions, and to suggest present considerations, which may shape proximate action, and tend to favor the preponderance of that form of civilization which we cannot but deem the most promising for the future, not of our race only, but of the world at large. We are not living in a perfect world, and we may not expect to deal with imperfect conditions by methods ideally perfect. Time and staying power must be secured for ourselves by that rude and imperfect, but not ignoble, arbiter, force,—force potential and force organized,—which so far has won, and still secures, the greatest triumphs of good in the checkered history of mankind. Our material advantages, once noted, will be recognized readily and appropriated with avidity; while the spiritual ideas which dominate our thoughts, and are weighty in their influence over action, even with those among us who do not accept historic Christianity or the ordinary creeds of Christendom, will be rejected for long. The eternal law, first that which is natural, afterwards that which is spiritual, will obtain here, as in the individual, and in the long history of our own civilization. Between the two there is an interval, in which force must be ready to redress any threatened disturbance of an equal balance between those who stand on divergent planes of thought, without common standards.
And yet more is this true if, as is commonly said, faith is failing among ourselves, if the progress of our own civilization is towards the loss of those spiritual convictions upon which it was founded, and which in early days were mighty indeed towards the overthrowing of strongholds of evil. What, in such a case, shall play the tremendous part which the Church of the Middle Ages, with all its defects and with all the shortcomings of its ministers, played amid the ruin of the Roman Empire and the flood of the barbarians? If our own civilization is becoming material only, a thing limited in hope and love to this world, I know not what we have to offer to save ourselves or others; but in either event, whether to go down finally under a flood of outside invasion, or whether to succeed, by our own living faith, in converting to our ideal civilization those who shall thus press upon us,—in either event we need time, and time can be gained only by organized material force.
Nor is this view advanced in any spirit of unfriendliness to the other ancient civilizations, whose genius admittedly has been and is foreign to our own. One who believes that God has made of one blood all nations of men who dwell on the face of the whole earth cannot but check and repress, if he ever feels, any movement of aversion to mankind outside his own race. But it is not necessary to hate Carthage in order to admit that it was well for mankind that Rome triumphed; and we at this day, and men to all time, may be thankful that a few decades after the Punic Wars the genius of Cæsar so expanded the bounds of the dominions of Rome, so extended, settled, and solidified the outworks of her civilization and polity, that when the fated day came that her power in turn should reel under the shock of conquest, with which she had remodelled the world, and she should go down herself, the time of the final fall was protracted for centuries by these exterior defences. They who began the assault as barbarians entered upon the imperial heritage no longer aliens and foreigners, but impregnated already with the best of Roman ideas, converts to Roman law and to Christian faith.
“When the course of history,” says Mommsen, “turns from the miserable monotony of the political selfishness which fought its battles in the Senate House and in the streets of Rome, we may be allowed—on the threshold of an event the effects of which still at the present day influence the destinies of the world—to look round us for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be regarded in connection with the general history of the world.... The fact that the great Celtic people were ruined by the transalpine wars of Cæsar was not the most important result of that grand enterprise,—far more momentous than the negative was the positive result. It hardly admits of a doubt that if the rule of the Senate had prolonged its semblance of life for some generations longer, the migration of the peoples, as it is called, would have occurred four hundred years sooner than it did, and would have occurred at a time when the Italian civilization had not become naturalized either in Gaul or on the Danube or in Africa and Spain. Inasmuch as Cæsar with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the rival antagonists of the Romano-Greek world, inasmuch as with firm hand he established the new system of aggressive defence down even to its details, and taught men to protect the frontiers of the empire by rivers or artificial ramparts, to colonize the nearest barbarian tribes along the frontier with the view of warding off the more remote, and to recruit the Roman army by enlistment from the enemy’s country, he gained for the Hellenic-Italian culture the interval necessary to civilize the West, just as it had already civilized the East.... Centuries elapsed before men understood that Alexander had not merely erected an ephemeral kingdom in the East, but had carried Hellenism to Asia; centuries again elapsed before men understood that Cæsar had not merely conquered a new province for the Romans, but had laid the foundation for the Romanizing of the regions of the West. It was only a late posterity that perceived the meaning of those expeditions to England and Germany, so inconsiderate in a military point of view, and so barren of immediate result.... That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history; that western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar; that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa, attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden,—all this is the work of Cæsar.”
History at times reveals her foresight concrete in the action of a great individuality like Cæsar’s. More often her profounder movements proceed from impulses whose origin and motives cannot be traced, although a succession of steps may be discerned and their results stated. A few names, for instance, emerge amid the obscure movements of the peoples which precipitated the outer peoples upon the Roman Empire, but, with rare exceptions, they are simply exponents, pushed forward and upward by the torrent; at the utmost guides, not controllers, of those whom they represent but do not govern. It is much the same now. The peoples of European civilization, after a period of comparative repose, are again advancing all along the line, to occupy not only the desert places of the earth, but the debatable grounds, the buffer territories, which hitherto have separated them from those ancient nations, with whom they now soon must stand face to face and border to border. But who will say that this vast general movement represents the thought, even the unconscious thought, of any one man, as Cæsar, or of any few men? To whatever cause we may assign it, whether to the simple conception of a personal Divine Monarchy that shapes our ends, or to more complicated ultimate causes, the responsibility rests upon the shoulders of no individual men. Necessity is laid upon the peoples, and they move, like the lemmings of Scandinavia; but to man, being not without understanding like the beasts that perish, it is permitted to ask, “Whither?” and “What shall be the end hereof?” Does this tend to universal peace, general disarmament, and treaties of permanent arbitration? Is it the harbinger of ready mutual understanding, of quick acceptance of, and delight in, opposing traditions and habits of life and thought? Is such quick acceptance found now where Easterns and Westerns impinge? Does contact forebode the speedy disappearance of great armies and navies, and dictate the wisdom of dispensing with that form of organized force which at present is embodied in them?
What, then, will be the actual conditions when these civilizations, of diverse origin and radically distinct,—because the evolution of racial characteristics radically different,—confront each other without the interposition of any neutral belt, by the intervention of which the contrasts, being more remote, are less apparent, and within which distinctions shade one into the other?
There will be seen, on the one hand, a vast preponderance of numbers, and those numbers, however incoherent now in mass, composed of units which in their individual capacity have in no small degree the great elements of strength whereby man prevails over man and the fittest survives. Deficient, apparently, in aptitude for political and social organization, they have failed to evolve the aggregate power and intellectual scope of which as communities they are otherwise capable. This lesson too they may learn, as they already have learned from us much that they have failed themselves to originate; but to the lack of it is chiefly due the inferiority of material development under which, as compared to ourselves, they now labor. But men do not covet less the prosperity which they themselves cannot or do not create,—a trait wherein lies the strength of communism as an aggressive social force. Communities which want and cannot have, except by force, will take by force, unless they are restrained by force; nor will it be unprecedented in the history of the world that the flood of numbers should pour over and sweep away the barriers which intelligent foresight, like Cæsar’s, may have erected against them. Still more will this be so if the barriers have ceased to be manned—forsaken or neglected by men in whom the proud combative spirit of their ancestors has given way to the cry for the abandonment of military preparation and to the decay of warlike habits.
Nevertheless, even under such conditions,—which obtained increasingly during the decline of the Roman Empire,—positions suitably chosen, frontiers suitably advanced, will do much to retard and, by gaining time, to modify the disaster to the one party, and to convert the general issue to the benefit of the world. Hence the immense importance of discerning betimes what the real value of positions is, and where occupation should betimes begin. Here, in part at least, is the significance of the great outward movement of the European nations to-day. Consciously or unconsciously, they are advancing the outposts of our civilization, and accumulating the line of defences which will permit it to survive, or at the least will insure that it shall not go down till it has leavened the character of the world for a future brighter even than its past, just as the Roman civilization inspired and exalted its Teutonic conquerors, and continues to bless them to this day.
Such is the tendency of movement in that which we in common parlance call the Old World. As the nineteenth century closes, the tide has already turned and the current is flowing strongly. It is not too soon, for vast is the work before it. Contrasted to the outside world in extent and population, the civilization of the European group of families, to which our interests and anxieties, our hopes and fears, are so largely confined, has been as an oasis in a desert. The seat and scene of the loftiest culture, of the highest intellectual activities, it is not in them so much that it has exceeded the rest of the world as in the political development and material prosperity which it has owed to the virile energies of its sons, alike in commerce and in war. To these energies the mechanical and scientific acquirements of the past half-century or more have extended means whereby prosperity has increased manifold, as have the inequalities in material well-being existing between those within its borders and those without, who have not had the opportunity or the wit to use the same advantages. And along with this preeminence in wealth arises the cry to disarm, as though the race, not of Europe only, but of the world, were already run, and the goal of universal peace not only reached but secured. Yet are conditions such, even within our favored borders, that we are ready to disband the particular organized manifestation of physical force which we call the police?
Despite internal jealousies and friction on the continent of Europe, perhaps even because of them, the solidarity of the European family therein contained is shown in this great common movement, the ultimate beneficence of which is beyond all doubt, as evidenced by the British domination in India and Egypt, and to which the habit of arms not only contributes, but is essential. India and Egypt are at present the two most conspicuous, though they are not the sole, illustrations of benefits innumerable and lasting, which rest upon the power of the sword in the hands of enlightenment and justice. It is possible, of course, to confuse this conclusion, to obscure the real issue, by dwelling upon details of wrongs at times inflicted, of blunders often made. Any episode in the struggling progress of humanity may be thus perplexed; but looking at the broad result, it is indisputable that the vast gains to humanity made in the regions named not only once originated, but still rest, upon the exertion and continued maintenance of organized physical force.
The same general solidarity as against the outside world, which is unconsciously manifested in the general resumption of colonizing movements, receives particular conscious expression in the idea of imperial federation, which, amid the many buffets and reverses common to all successful movements, has gained such notable ground in the sentiment of the British people and of their colonists. That immense practical difficulties have to be overcome, in order to realize the ends towards which such sentiments point, is but a commonplace of human experience in all ages and countries. They give rise to the ready sneer of impossible, just as any project of extending the sphere of the United States, by annexation or otherwise, is met by the constitutional lion in the path, which the unwilling or the apprehensive is ever sure to find; yet, to use words of one who never lightly admitted impossibilities, “If a thing is necessary to be done, the more difficulties, the more necessary to try to remove them.” As sentiment strengthens, it undermines obstacles, and they crumble before it.
The same tendency is shown in the undeniable disposition of the British people and of British, statesmen to cultivate the good-will of the United States, and to draw closer the relations between the two countries. For the disposition underlying such a tendency Mr. Balfour has used an expression, “race patriotism,”—a phrase which finds its first approximation, doubtless, in the English-speaking family, but which may well extend its embrace, in a time yet distant, to all those who have drawn their present civilization from the same remote sources. The phrase is so pregnant of solution for the problems of the future, as conceived by the writer, that he hopes to see it obtain the currency due to the value of the idea which it formulates. That this disposition on the part of Great Britain, towards her colonies and towards the United States, shows sound policy as well as sentiment, may be granted readily; but why should sound policy, the seeking of one’s own advantage, if by open and honest means, be imputed as a crime? In democracies, however, policy cannot long dispute the sceptre with sentiment. That there is lukewarm response in the United States is due to that narrow conception which grew up with the middle of the century, whose analogue in Great Britain is the Little England party, and which in our own country would turn all eyes inward, and see no duty save to ourselves. How shall two walk together except they be agreed? How shall there be true sympathy between a nation whose political activities are world-wide, and one that eats out its heart in merely internal political strife? When we begin really to look abroad, and to busy ourselves with our duties to the world at large in our generation—and not before—we shall stretch out our hands to Great Britain, realizing that in unity of heart among the English-speaking races lies the best hope of humanity in the doubtful days ahead.
In the determination of the duties of nations, nearness is the most conspicuous and the most general indication. Considering the American states as members of the European family, as they are by traditions, institutions, and languages, it is in the Pacific, where the westward course of empire again meets the East, that their relations to the future of the world become most apparent. The Atlantic, bordered on either shore by the European family in the strongest and most advanced types of its political development, no longer severs, but binds together, by all the facilities and abundance of water communications, the once divided children of the same mother; the inheritors of Greece and Rome, and of the Teutonic conquerors of the latter. A limited express or a flying freight may carry a few passengers or a small bulk overland from the Atlantic to the Pacific more rapidly than modern steamers can cross the former ocean, but for the vast amounts in numbers or in quantity which are required for the full fruition of communication, it is the land that divides, and not the sea. On the Pacific coast, severed from their brethren by desert and mountain range, are found the outposts, the exposed pioneers of European civilization, whom it is one of the first duties of the European family to bind more closely to the main body, and to protect, by due foresight over the approaches to them on either side.
It is in this political fact, and not in the weighing of merely commercial advantages, that is to be found the great significance of the future canal across the Central American isthmus, as well as the importance of the Caribbean Sea; for the latter is inseparably intwined with all international consideration of the isthmus problem. Wherever situated, whether at Panama or at Nicaragua, the fundamental meaning of the canal will be that it advances by thousands of miles the frontiers of European civilization in general, and of the United States in particular; that it knits together the whole system of American states enjoying that civilization as in no other way they can be bound. In the Caribbean Archipelago—the very domain of sea power, if ever region could be called so—are the natural home and centre of those influences by which such a maritime highway as a canal must be controlled, even as the control of the Suez Canal rests in the Mediterranean. Hawaii, too, is an outpost of the canal, as surely as Aden or Malta is of Suez; or as Malta was of India in the days long before the canal, when Nelson proclaimed that in that point of view chiefly was it important to Great Britain. In the cluster of island fortresses of the Caribbean is one of the greatest of the nerve centres of the whole body of European civilization; and it is to be regretted that so serious a portion of them now is in hands which not only never have given, but to all appearances never can give, the development which is required by the general interest.
For what awaits us in the future, in common with the states of Europe, is not a mere question of advantage or disadvantage—of more or less. Issues of vital moment are involved. A present generation is trustee for its successors, and may be faithless to its charge quite as truly by inaction as by action, by omission as by commission. Failure to improve opportunity, where just occasion arises, may entail upon posterity problems and difficulties which, if overcome at all—it may then be too late—will be so at the cost of blood and tears that timely foresight might have spared. Such preventive measures, if taken, are in no true sense offensive but defensive. Decadent conditions, such as we observe in Turkey—and not in Turkey alone—cannot be indefinitely prolonged by opportunist counsels or timid procrastination. A time comes in human affairs, as in physical ailments, when heroic measures must be used to save the life of a patient or the welfare of a community; and if that time is allowed to pass, as many now think that it was at the time of the Crimean war, the last state is worse than the first,—an opinion which these passing days of the hesitancy of the Concert and the anguish of Greece, not to speak of the Armenian outrages, surely indorse. Europe, advancing in distant regions, still allows to exist in her own side, unexcised, a sore that may yet drain her life-blood; still leaves in recognized dominion, over fair regions of great future import, a system whose hopelessness of political and social improvement the lapse of time renders continually more certain,—an evil augury for the future, if a turning tide shall find it unchanged, an outpost of barbarism ready for alien occupation.
It is essential to our own good, it is yet more essential as part of our duty to the commonwealth of peoples to which we racially belong, that we look with clear, dispassionate, but resolute eyes upon the fact that civilizations on different planes of material prosperity and progress, with different spiritual ideals, and with very different political capacities, are fast closing together. It is a condition not unprecedented in the history of the world. When it befell a great united empire, enervated by long years of unwarlike habits among its chief citizens, it entailed ruin, but ruin deferred through centuries, thanks to the provision made beforehand by a great general and statesman. The Saracenic and Turkish invasions, on the contrary, after generations of advance, were first checked, and then rolled back; for they fell upon peoples, disunited indeed by internal discords and strife, like the nations of Europe to-day, but still nations of warriors, ready by training and habit to strike for their rights, and, if need were, to die for them. In the providence of God, along with the immense increase of prosperity, of physical and mental luxury, brought by this century, there has grown up also that counterpoise stigmatized as “militarism,” which has converted Europe into a great camp of soldiers prepared for war. The ill-timed cry for disarmament, heedless of the menacing possibilities of the future, breaks idly against a great fact, which finds its sufficient justification in present conditions, but which is, above all, an unconscious preparation for something as yet noted but by few.
On the side of the land, these great armies, and the blind outward impulse of the European peoples, are the assurance that generations must elapse ere the barriers can be overcome behind which rests the citadel of Christian civilization. On the side of the sea there is no state charged with weightier responsibilities than the United States. In the Caribbean, the sensitive resentment by our people of any supposed fresh encroachment by another state of the European family has been manifested too plainly and too recently to admit of dispute. Such an attitude of itself demands of us to be ready to support it by organized force, exactly as the mutual jealousy of states within the European Continent imposes upon them the maintenance of their great armies—destined, we believe, in the future, to fulfil a nobler mission. Where we thus exclude others, we accept for ourselves the responsibility for that which is due to the general family of our civilization; and the Caribbean Sea, with its isthmus, is the nexus where will meet the chords binding the East to the West, the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The Isthmus, with all that depends upon it,—its canal and its approaches on either hand,—will link the eastern side of the American continent to the western as no network of land communications ever can. In it the United States has asserted a special interest. In the present she can maintain her claim, and in the future perform her duty, only by the creation of that sea power upon which predominance in the Caribbean must ever depend. In short, as the internal jealousies of Europe, and the purely democratic institution of the levée en masse —the general enforcement of military training—have prepared the way for great national armies, whose mission seems yet obscure, so the gradual broadening and tightening hold upon the sentiment of American democracy of that conviction loosely characterized as the Monroe doctrine finds its logical and inevitable outcome in a great sea power, the correlative, in connection with that of Great Britain, of those armies which continue to flourish under the most popular institutions, despite the wails of economists and the lamentations of those who wish peace without paying the one price which alone has ever insured peace,—readiness for war.
Thus it was, while readiness for war lasted, that the Teuton was held back until he became civilized, humanized, after the standard of that age; till the root of the matter was in him, sure to bear fruit in due season. He was held back by organized armed force—by armies. Will it be said that that was in a past barbaric age? Barbarism, however, is not in more or less material prosperity, or even political development, but in the inner man, in the spiritual ideal; and the material, which comes first and has in itself no salt of life to save from corruption, must be controlled by other material forces, until the spiritual can find room and time to germinate. We need not fear but that that which appeals to the senses in our civilization will be appropriated, even though it be necessary to destroy us, if disarmed, in order to obtain it. Our own civilization less its spiritual element is barbarism; and barbarism will be the civilization of those who assimilate its material progress without imbibing the indwelling spirit.
Let us worship peace, indeed, as the goal at which humanity must hope to arrive; but let us not fancy that peace is to be had as a boy wrenches an unripe fruit from a tree. Nor will peace be reached by ignoring the conditions that confront us, or by exaggerating the charms of quiet, of prosperity, of ease, and by contrasting these exclusively with the alarms and horrors of war. Merely utilitarian arguments have never convinced nor converted mankind, and they never will; for mankind knows that there is something better. Its homage will never be commanded by peace, presented as the tutelary deity of the stock-market.
Nothing is more ominous for the future of our race than that tendency, vociferous at present, which refuses to recognize in the profession of arms, in war, that something which inspired Wordsworth’s “Happy Warrior,” which soothed the dying hours of Henry Lawrence, who framed the ideals of his career on the poet’s conception, and so nobly illustrated it in his self-sacrifice; that something which has made the soldier to all ages the type of heroism and of self-denial. When the religion of Christ, of Him who was led as a lamb to the slaughter, seeks to raise before its followers the image of self-control, and of resistance to evil, it is the soldier whom it presents. He Himself, if by office King of Peace, is, first of all, in the essence of His Being, King of Righteousness, without which true peace cannot be.
Conflict is the condition of all life, material and spiritual; and it is to the soldier’s experience that the spiritual life goes for its most vivid metaphors and its loftiest inspirations. Whatever else the twentieth century may bring us, it will not, from anything now current in the thought of the nineteenth, receive a nobler ideal.