Part 46

Great Britain, in a word, by ceaseless vigilance and at a great expense of energy, managed upon the whole to dominate one branch of the narrow seas, the channel. Upon the other branch, the North Sea, she felt nearly always secure. An exception to this security was found during the brief Dutch period in the seventeenth century and again, much more acutely, when the French were the masters of the Low Countries, and when Napoleon took control of the shipbuilding yards not only from Brest to Dunkirk, but from Dunkirk to the Bight of Heligoland.

This presence of the French power in Holland, Belgium, and Frisia, in particular the French control of Antwerp, was the true cause of violent anxiety, and the no less violent efforts in reply which Britain made during the Napoleonic wars. For twenty-three years she fought, with but two short intervals of repose, upon a dozen nominal pleas, but with one plain piece of statesmanship at the back of her mind--that no one should control the narrow seas against herself.

And especially that if she could not prevent the existence in normal times of a very powerful, dangerous French fleet, rendering her anxious for one-half of those seas, at least the other half should be free from such anxiety.

In the midst of such a secular determination, successfully maintained, Germany began to build her new great modern fleet.

The German Empire had a most unquestioned right thus to challenge the power of Great Britain. It was indeed the most effective challenge which a nation jealous of Britain's commerce could deliver, but it is none the less true that the plain policy of self-preservation compelled Britain to take up that challenge.

For the first time in three hundred years Britain found herself beginning to support French trades, in the general policy of the world.

The French, for reasons which had nothing to do with England and with which the mass of the English governing classes in no way sympathized, had maintained for more than thirty years a determination to restore their own power at the expense of Prussia. Because modern Germany was building her fleet, modern Britain, in order to check that movement, began thus in novel fashion and against all the old English traditions to support the French.

The thing was done at the bottom with reluctance. All Englishmen felt the common bond of religion which united their country with that which governs modern Germany. Many Englishmen believed that there was some vague bond of race between the two countries. Not a few worthy, ignorant men, and even one or two men of great ability, attempted to direct negotiations whereby a fixed ratio should exist between the two fleets; in other words, whereby the German Empire should pledge itself to a permanent inferiority at sea.

That empire would indeed have been more foolish even than cowardly had it listened to any such proposals. The position, therefore, was one of inevitable and increasing friction. It was a matter of life and death to England that no other great Western fleet should exist besides the French, and it was a matter of national existence to Germany once she had undertaken a policy not to give up that policy at the dictation of any other power--for, among other things, modern Germany lived on prestige; her whole internal structure depended upon it, and for Prussia to lose faith before Europe would be the end of the Germany that Prussia had made.

There are those who say that a Germany conducted by some Richelieu, or even by a surviving Bismarck, would never have attempted the building of a great fleet until accounts had been finally settled with France. There are those who say that the elements of statesmanship required the German Empire first to settle herself politically upon the shores of the Straits of Dover and the Netherlands, first to destroy the danger of a great war in the west on land, then and then only to begin building that fleet which must inevitably challenge Great Britain. It is no part of this criticism to consider the statesmanship of another nation, but at any rate once the policy of building the fleet was begun conflict with England was in sight.

2. The second cause of England's joining in this war is the effect of a number of internal arrangements, some of them of minor importance, but all leading in one direction and ultimately placing the Government of Great Britain in a position from which it was difficult to retire. In general terms these arrangements were based upon the idea of joining the group of powers, French and Russian, which formed the counterpoise to the Germanic group in Europe, the German Empire and Austria. At the same time there was running through these arrangements the idea of detaching Italy, whose Government was firmly attached to Germany, but whose population was very doubtful, from the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy, which had been the cardinal point in European affairs for a generation.

The various steps by which Great Britain approached this position are well known. In the first place, she came to an arrangement with France whereby she should have a free hand in Egypt and France should be supported by England in the occupation of Morocco. This was done behind the back of Germany to the manifest loss of Germany's colonial ambition and, what is more noticeable, England was openly paying a very high price for the new state of affairs she hoped to create, for she had pretty well a free hand in Egypt, already, while France's opportunity of going to Morocco and exploiting a very large area of valuable territory--something quite new and additional to her--depended upon England's withdrawing her opposition.

That opposition was withdrawn; and though the most violent effect was produced in Germany, though there were threats of war, pitiable quarrels within the French Cabinet and a moment of grave danger, the pact was accomplished, and Morocco, all save the strip opposite Gibraltar, became French, while all that Germany had to show for her share was an irregularly shaped and not valuable couple of slices cut out of tropical Africa in the Congo Basin from the vast French possessions there, and added to her own still insufficient share.

Another group of arrangements was that with Russia, and here again England willingly paid a heavy price, and again completely reversed her traditional policy. She gave all that is vital in Persia to Russian control. She forgot her old anxiety about the Indian frontier; she lost her old and hitherto unbroken policy of supporting Turkey in Europe. When the war came she was with the French in supporting the Balkan powers, "The Little Nations."

Finally, in the matter of Italy, she supported or permitted the Italian attack upon and annexation of Turkish territory in North Africa, and consistently, before and after that event, worked for the strengthening of Italy in the Triple Alliance and for securing the neutrality of that country, at least in case of a European war.

There were many other arrangements besides these three principal and typical ones, but all, small or great, were based upon the same idea, and pointed in the same direction. England was leaning upon the Russian side against Germany. The most important in the minor details in this new policy, the one which has had most effect perhaps in producing the war, was an understanding whereby the French fleet should virtually evacuate the Northern Seas and undertake for England the policing of the Mediterranean trade routes, and the guardianship of that source of food supply to Great Britain, thus leaving the whole weight of the British Navy free to guard the North Sea, and to face the new and growing German naval force.

Now, it must always be borne in mind that these arrangements, large and small, detailed and general, whereby Great Britain gradually involved herself in a network of French and Russian supports and reciprocal duties, never took the form of an alliance. The utmost pains were taken by English diplomatists and permanent officials at the English Foreign Office, experts and servants, to state that England remained free in spite of all to act as her conscience or her interest might dictate, whenever, or if, war should break out between the two groups of Continental powers. No one can read the conflict of evidence between the German Ambassador and Sir Edward Grey in the highly typical telephone incident which took place immediately before the recent declaration of war without seeing that liberty of action was maintained by the Government of Great Britain until the very last moment.

But one cannot do a number of things, each weighted with a similar tendency, without one's whole conduct and fate being determined in the direction to which those actions tend. To preserve one's legal or technical independence is not enough. In this specific case, for instance, the naval arrangement proved an exceedingly weighty thing. France could say:

"Relying on your explicit, though not expressed, support of myself and Russia, I guarded your trade routes in the Mediterranean and left my northern coasts undefended. Here is war about to break out with those northern coasts of mine bare against the overwhelming attack from the German fleet, and with nothing wherewith I can guard it; and that nakedness is entirely due to having trusted you. You may not have a legal obligation, but the moral one is not to be shirked."

At any rate, I insist upon the tendency of all these various diplomatic acts, because it has been they that might have dragged the most reluctant Government into this conflict, and it was they which, in combination with the cardinal policy of preventing maritime rivalry in the narrow seas, decided the present policy of this country.

3. But, as I have said, there was a third cause, much vaguer and, until war actually broke out, of little effect. Though there had existed for thirty years from 1880 until after the beginning of the new century such strong bonds of sympathy between Great Britain and North Germany--bonds riveted by Court influence and much more strengthened by the influence of the universities and of religious leaders--though some contempt for and alienation from the French had become of increasing note in English public utterances and literature, yet Great Britain retained upon the whole the Western doctrine of civilization and of its traditions.

The increasing German reaction against those traditions, particularly in morals, was not wholly sympathetic to the temper of the gentry, at least in England, and was sometimes exasperating.

All nations have cynically violated treaties at one time or another, but there is about a solemnly undertaken treaty by the great European powers and affecting the happiness of the smaller neutral States something particularly sacred. And though it must not for one moment be regarded as the principal cause of the war, it is true that the crudity of Prussia's neglect of treaties, the too simple fashion in which Prussia proposed a breach of international obligations in the matter of Belgium, did affect the conscience of not a few powerful men in England, and, what is perhaps more important, furnished a definite and concrete point on which the doubtful issue of peace or war could repose.

It must be remembered in this connection that Prussia had a novel tradition of her own in such matters. The phrase "The Frederickian tradition" is an accurate phrase. Frederick the Great did start the open and avowed doctrine that a breach of international convention and of international morals is always tolerable in the aggrandizement of one's country.

I think one is not telling the truth if one says that the proposed violation of Belgian territory for the invasion of France was of a nature to cause an explosion of anger in the very hardened minds of the professional politicians in any modern country. There is not one group of them that has not been guilty of something of the sort before. But I think one is telling the truth if one says that the over-simple and cold way in which Prussia took it for granted that the violation of a solemn and most important treaty was nothing just shocked opinion, even of the politicians, sufficiently to help to incline the balance against her.

There is much more. The Prussian estimate of Russian, of French, and even of English psychology was very erroneous. The Prussian way of getting France not to join is about as subtle as spitting in a man's face, and the elephantine gambols of the German diplomats in London during the fatal week preceding the war were a positive aid to the catastrophe that was about to take place. They blundered as hard and as heavily as it was possible to blunder; going to the wrong people; despising the subtly powerful; paying court to the more advertised and less controlling of the English public men, and in a word behaving themselves after that fashion for which we have coined the adjective "newspaper."

There was further the peculiar aggravation of the tone in which the Austrian note had been addressed to Servia. There was further the patent and almost puerile double dealing of Berlin in the attempted negotiations for peace between Russia and Austria--in which negotiations the British Cabinet was very prominent. But beyond all these other minor points, these three causes I have mentioned, by their convergence, seem to have determined England's participation in the war, with all the enormous but as yet unguessed consequences that will follow therefrom.

I repeat, I do not say that any one of those three causes would in itself have been sufficient. The three combining were just sufficient, and this account, if I am not mistaken, justly presents the picture that history should have of the manner in which Great Britain determined to conclude the long process of her recent diplomatic revolution and to engage with the Allies against the German Empire and the Hapsburg house, which the German Empire tows in its wake.