TM3 ?)*>;-^'^ Political Prophecies AN ADDRESS to the EDINBURGH PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY Delivered Nov. 5 1918 BY The Right Hon. H. A. L. FISHER, MP. Price One Shilling net OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS HUMPHREY MILFORD 1919 XV/A ciT'.a <^o ciT'tO cv^o c^.o ciTb ciT'.^ cir ,o eir .0 ciT.D c5^D Political Prophecies AN ADDRESS to the EDINBURGH PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY DcHvoml Nov. 5, 1918 BY i he Kight Hon. H. A. L. FISHER, M.P. OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1919 F 53 :■■>-■ POLITICAL PEOPHECIES The great perturbation of liiiman affairs wliicli the world has experienced during the past four years has given rise in every region of society to a vague expecta- tion of change. In -syhatcver direction we turn, whether we listen to the voices of the crowd in our own streets or to the nnirmurs which float in upon us from India or Arabia, from the Siberian Plains, or the sunlit coasts of the Pacific, we hear the same multitudinous hum of vague expectancy. The great war will usher in a new era, create a new society, replace old ideals by new ideals, establish the human family on a new basis, draw the lines of states upon a plan dictated by reasoned foresight, and once and for all eliminate the poisons which infect the body j^olitic of Europe and those other parts of the habitable world which have fallen under European influence and control. Unless statesmanship and morality are alike bankrupt, the tragedy of such a war as this must not recur. Schemes are drawn up for a regenerate Europe, for a purified and pacified world. Belief in progress is too deep-rooted to admit of our seeing in this European cataclysm nothing but a great retrogression, only by long and painful struggles to be retrieved. The greater the obvious calamity, the more determined are we to read into it a presage of benefits commensurate with the unchallenged and palpable evil. Never have the prophets been more active. Never since the great age of Messianic expectation has the a2 4021^39 4 POLITICAL PROPHECIES human race lieen so much al>sorlied with the dark prospect of the future. The phantom host from Archangel who marched through Enghmd on its way to Belgium during the autumn of 191-4 reminds us of a fact, long known to the liistorians of religion, that beliefs are more often proportionate to desire than to evidence, and that if w^e only wish for a thing to happen with sufficient intensity, we may easily persuade ourselves that the object of our desire will be, or even has been, fulfilled. It follows that, if we wish to estimate the aptitude of the present age for framing a correct forecast of the future, allow- ance must be made for this soiu-ce of error. Sentiment obscures the judgement, passion clouds the vision. We refuse to admit that any prospect which seems to us to be odious and incompatible with a benignant scheme of the universe can in fact be possible. In the same gallant spirit of optimism, with hopes hardly more exuberant and measureless, Condorcet, the condemned prisoner of the Jacobin tyranny, composed his grand design for the future of a perfected humanity. The materials for exact political forecast have been vastly improved since the French Eevolution. We know more about the world in which we live, and are in a better position to gauge the forces which move it. Our statistics are more complete, our knowledge of the past is fuller ; we have acquired, through the influence of the public press and of democratic institutions, a more perfected and better schooled habit of political calculation. Certain vital factors affecting the growth and prosperity of nations, wdiich were hardly appreciated by statesmen and publicists a hundred years ago, are POLITICAL PK0PHEC1E8 5 now tilt; common property of political observation. Wo cjui clearly predict, with a tolerable degree of accuracy, the life of a mine, and in time our geological surveys should enable us to forocjist the development of all the mineral resources of a nation. We are, indeed, learning to estimate national power, not in terms of acres and square miles, but of iron ore and potash, of rubber and petroleum, of water-power and coal, of canals and textiles. We cast the horoscope of states, peoples, and races l)y a study of comparative l>irtli-rates, death-rates, emigration rates, and by such means essay to detect some of the larger features of the coming world; such as the growing urgency of the Yellow Kaccs, or the diminishing share of the Koman Catholic Church in the conduct of the world's affairs. But although our arms have gained in precision, the factors to be assessed have increased in numl)er and complexity. In place of the isolated rivalries of the jnist, we are now faced with struggles in which the whole habita1)le globe is cither directly or indirectly involved. The problems have become so vast, their solution depends upon a forecast of so many improbable and concurrent factors, upon so vast a complexus of doubtful contingencies, that statesmanship, which should be all prescience, has become three parts guess-work. What statesman in 1914 could have predicted that the European War would last four years, that it would lead to the capture of Jerusalem or Bagdad by British armies, bring about the collapse of the Russian Tsardoni, throw Finland into the arms of Germany, and cast the weight of the American Kepublic into the scale against the Central Powers ? For all our instruments of pre- 6 POLITICAL PEOPHECIES cision, our statistics, our historical and economic know- ledge, our trained and experienced statesmen, we did not foresee any one of these events. I do not say that these occurrences ought not and should not have been predicted. Good modern historians, had they brought their knowledge up to date, which they very seldom permit themselves to do, might have regarded each one of these occurrences in the light of a probability. The fact, however, remains that none of these things were predicted, and that the whole course of the military and political evolution of the world during the last few years has been full of surprise even for those who are paid to be prescient. To the mind of the ancients the experience of such great and unexpected changes in the disposition of the world, as those which are familiar to our own genera- tion, suggested the play of a capricious Fortune or Providence, of whom little else could be predicated save a deliglit in confounding the anticipations of mankind. In recounting the last agonies of the Macedonian Empire, Polybius reminds his readers that the fall of the Macedonians was foretold by Demetrius of Phalerum a hundred and fifty years before, in a prophecy so re- markable as to deserve the name of inspiration. It is clear, however, that there is nothing in this prediction which we should now regard as evidence of distinguished prescience. While recounting the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great, Demetrius was naturally moved to comment upon the sudden obliteration of a powerful empire by a people, only fifty years earlier, unimportant and obscure. Who would have predicted such a revolu- tion? It was clearly one of Fortune's favourite pai-a- POLITICAL PEOPHECIES 7 doxes, and not the last of them, for it was only to be expected that the same inscrutable Providence which had placed the Macedonians in the seat of pre-eminence would one day elect to withdraw its favours. In all this there is no profound philosophy. Demetrius does not attempt to iissign a cause for the future downfall of the Macedonians, but is content to argue from his knowledge of the habits of Fortune that their empire was no more designed for immortality than the famous Persian polity which the sword of the Macedonian conqueror had humbled to the dust. It is the more remarkable that Polybius should go out of his way to exalt this vague prediction, seeing tliat of all the historians of antiquity he is himself most noticeable for the true prophetic quality. Living in an age of astounding political revolutions, he has a keen eye for the large lines and decisive points of history. He sees the great fact of the rise of the Rommi Empire in its true signilicimce, assigns it to its true causes, and is prompt to realize that the Roman conquests have woven all the scattered threads of Mediterranean history into a single indissolul)le whole. The duel between Rome and Carthage is presented in its genuine linea- ments, at once as the collision between two incompatible types of polity and as the turning-point in the fate of the civilized world. The son of the Achaean Lycortas and the friend of 8cipio Aemilianus had no illusions as to the decadence of Greece and as to the enduring ascendancy of Rome. A long life consumed in war, politics, hunting, study, and travel had taught him the secret of the decline and fall of states. He notes the depopulation of the Chxck cities, iw a consequence of 8 POLITICAL PEOPHECIES self-indulgence and a cause of decay, comments on the way in which the Macedonian conquests contributed to the spread of luxurious tastes among the simple Romans, and argues that some day in the revolution of things conquest will bring its own nemesis, and that the l)rilliant world-state, the swift creation of which was the arresting fact of his own times, would be brought to the dust through the moral enervation of success. For many centuries these passages of solemn warning must have seemed to the Eoman readers of Polybius to be idle words. The Republic was succeeded by the Empu-e ; the Eagles of the Empire were planted on the Tees and the Tigris, and the decline of this imposing polity, which, next to its rise, is the greatest event in world-history, was spread over so long a space of time and accompanied by means so gradual and complex, that the real significance of the vast changes which produced the mediaeval out of the ancient world was never distinctly apprehended by contemporaries. Ammianus Marcellinus, the soldier historian of the fourth century, comes nearest to the truth in the spirited narrative recording the decadence of Roman society and the formidable pressure of the barbarian tribes upon the fabric of the Empire. But though dimly conscious of impending fate, Ammianus never nerves himself to look into its stern and pitiless eyes. The Roman Empire for him belongs to the eternal order of the Universe ; and the same spirit of fatalism, running through all the political speculation of the Middle Ages, prevented any just estimate of the measure and quality of the political transformations which were steadily breaking up the unity of the ancient world. POLITICAL PROPHECTES 9 Anollier grout historical event, the falling away of the American colonies from their allegiance to England, had l>een considered probable l>y many acute observers for a generation before it actually occurred. In France, wliero tlie wish was naturally father to tlie thought, Montesquieu gave it as his opinion as early as 1730 that England would bo the first nation to be abandoned l)y her colonics, and similar predictions were subse- quently made by D'Argenson, Turgot, and Vergennes, Montesquieu's argument was based upon the view that the colonist would not continue to tolerate the irksome fiscal restraints imposed by the mother country ; but another and even stronger argument was supplied by a reflection as to the probable consequences of a British conquest of French Canada. In 1748 the Swedish traveller Kahn was told, not only by native Americans but l)y English emigrants, that within thirty or fifty years the English colonies in America might constitute a separate Eepublic entirely independent of England, and was persuaded that the neighbourhood of the French colony was the chief power making for the maintenance of a union which had long ceased to be grounded on any foundation of friendly sentiment. And as the Seven Years' War proceeded it was an opinion com- mon in France, and not altogether unrepresented in England, that the loss of Canada to the French would usher in the defection of the American colonies from Great Britain. The French Revolution presents a case of an event confidently and frequently predicted, but ill-measured and ill-judged when it actually occurred. It is, how- ever, worthy of remark that the sense of impending a3 10 POLITICAL PROPHECIES revolution was more acute during the despotic anarchy of Louis XVs reign than in the years immediately pre- ceding the catastrophe. In the earlier period even a foreigner like Lord Chesterfield was impressed by the presence of all the symptoms of approaching change and revolution, and D'Argenson's Journals between 1740 and 1756 are full of the same apprehension ; but as the long uneasy reign of Louis XV came to a natural end, and the ancient monarchy of France was found to have safely survived its period of disorder and humilia- tion and to be refurnished with a stock of good inten- tions, the presentiment of impending evil died awa5\ Mr. Lecky points out that neither Franklin nor Frederick the Great, both of whom had special reasons or special opportunities for watching French affairs, had any glimpse of the approaching downfall of the monarchy, and it is a curious fact that in the vokuninous corre- spondence of Madame Roland, who from the very first played an energetic part in French revolutionary politics, there is not a single allusion to current or future politics before the storm burst in 1789. In general, the Revolution was judged in its initial stages with a light-hearted optimism, shared even by the gravest of German metaphysicians. The most pro- found diagnosis was supplied by Burke, whose warm and splendid imagination, upon this as upon other occasions, threw shafts of golden light into the obscurity of the future. Political philosophers are not famous for divination, seeing that even Aristotle, for all his opportunities at the court of Alexander, failed to detect the future of the Nation State, but Burke belongs to that small group of political thinkers among whom POLITICAL PROPHECIES U must be reckoned Poly1»iiis, De Tocqueville, Treitsclike, and Secley, whose minds are ([uickened to the hirge impending issues of the future. We do not renieml>er him so much for liis detailed predictions, though lie predicted the loss of the American coh»nies thnnigii the fiscal policy of the British Government, as from the fact that he was the first En.<>lislmian to envisage in its true promise and i)otency tiie growing polity of the North American States, the first to bring the peoples of India in a living shape to the minds of the distant mother nation who had drifted into the position of governing them, and the lirst to grasp the tremendous depth and devastating range of the French Revolution. Burke's estimate of the French Revolution is open to many criticisms, but in three respects he proved himself to be the best kind of political prophet, travelling to the right conclusions l»y a well-laid course of reasoning from the facts l)efore him. He was right in holding that a movement, springing not from a miscellany of opportunist calculations but from a coherent body of political doctrine having all the cjuality of religious faith, could not be confined to Franco alone, that it would spread tlirough Europe like a flame, and that all tile conservative elements in European society were concerned to resist it. He was right again in his view that the civil constitution of the clergy would constitute an irreparable breach l»etween the new society and the old, and that the destruction of the privileges and in- dependence of the Gallican Church would lead the way to a metre highly centralized State. Finally, he Avas right in predicting that all this tumult and turmoil would end in a military despotism. In all these respects 12 POLITICAL PROPHECIES Burke svas led to the right conclusion by the emplo)'- ment of a sound method, and when we consider that these declarations were made in the autumn of 1790, before the ftill of the monarchy, before the outbreak of war, and before the rise of the Jacoliins, they must be acknowledged to be among the most remarkable docu- ments of human prescience in the sphere of political speculation. Pitt's false prophecy that the end of the Papacy was in sight must be set off against the astonishing predic- tion (if indeed it be authentic) that Napoleon Avould meet with his ultimate check through a national rising in Spain. Napoleon's oracle, '■ Europe will be either Cossack or Republican ', has not yet been realized, but another vaticination was more successful : he divined that France would soon tire of the Bourbons, and that, in spite of Waterloo, there was still a chance for his dynasty. These are the predictions of statesmen. For the higher gifts of divination which depend upon an insight into the fundamental moral forces and aspects of the world, Wordsworth was superior to either Pitt or Napoleon. From the first he divined in the Spanish rising the presence of a fresh power in Europe, calcu- lated to frustrate the designs of French Imperialism. His picture of the degraded condition of the boy operative in a cotton-mill might have been cited without irrelevance in all the denunciations of the half-time system from the date of the publication of TJtc Exmrsion in 1814 until the abolition of the system ])y the passage of tlie Education Act in the present year. The evils of industrialism, the establishment of a national system POLITICAL rj^OPIIECIES 13 of compulsory uclucation, the daii^urs ol' the illustrated press, are all foretold in the books oH his prophetical statesmanship. On such matters he felt deeply, and therefore without extravagance, which is always shallow. Nobody with a decent mind desires to sec the scenery of liis home spoiled by the intrusion of railroads or fiictory chimneys, and Wordsworth in 1844 wrote a well-known sonnet against the jirojtcted Kendal and Windermere I'ailway — but that connnonplace objection was not the only word which Wordsworth had t(j say on railways. In an earlier sonnet, composed during a tour in the summer of 1833, he had foreseen that the spread of industrialism would not be fatal to poetry, but that poetry would absorb industrialism and turn it to its own spirituid. uses : Nor shall your presence, howso'er it mar The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar To the Mind's gaining that prophetic sense Of Future change, that point of vision, whence May be discovered what in soul ye are. lines equally premonitory of Turner's 'Rain, Steam, and Speed', and of Verhaeren's Vllles tcntaculaircs. The larger and more impressive tendencies of modern history have been too unmistakal)le to escape the notice of competent observers, though even the most sagacious have erred in their estimate as to the time at which or the mode in which a particular change was to be accom- plished. In so far as it is based upon an intellectual process at all, a political prediction is nothing more than an historical generalization, varying in exactitude with the knowledge and acumen of the prophet. From his insight into the nature and historical antecedents of the 14 POLITICAL PEOPHECIES German people Heine was well advised in warning the French in 1834 that they must not be deceived by mild-eyed philosophies, but that one fine day the old heathen gods of* Germany would rise from their graves, and Thor with his giant hammer set to work upon Gothic cathedrals. A feeling of national pride, stimu- lated by the stirring achievements of his race, led an Elizabethan poet to predict in the year 1602 the spread of the English language over the world : Who in time knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue? To what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall invent To enrich the unknowing nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident May come refined with accents that are ours? Yet Bacon thought that his Essays would survive rather in their Latin than in their English garb, and, long after Bacon and Daniel were laid in their graves, Gibbon, doubting the appeal of his own language, wrote an early work on the History of Switzerlandin French, as the tongue likely to secure for it the greatest circula- tion among polite readers. The incident is also memor- able as the occasion of a striking prediction. Hume, to whom the manuscript was submitted, recommended the author to use his native English in words which show a real intellectual grasp of the future. ' Let the French ', he wrote, ' triumph in the present diffusion of their tongue. Our solid and increasing establishments in America, where we need less dread the inmidation of Barbarians, promise a superior stability and duration to the English language.' Advice of uncommon POLITICAL PROPHECIES 15 sagacity which the recipient of the letter was wise enough to follow. In making predictions as to the future of his own country a prophet is helped by a great mass of in- stinctive, as well as of acquired, knowledge which is not available when he attempts to generalize as to the future course of foreign States. The knowledge pos- sessed by the inha])itants of any one country as to the social and political conditions of any otlier country is almost always so imperfect and supei-ficial that popular generalizations upon foreign peoples and foreign policies go, for the most part, wildly astray. In the later part of the eighteenth century it was the accepted view upon the continent of Europe that England was a decadent power, a sort of • insular Poland '—selfish, corrupt, torn by factions, without nerve or consistency, fast tottering to a bankrupt's grave. ' It is very easy ', wrote Rousseau in 1760, ' to see that twenty years hence England will be ruined, and furthermore will have lost her libei-ty', a view not confined to men of letters but \videly held in Courts and Cabinets. Thus Joseph II of Austria declared that England was fallen wholly and for ever, that she had become a second-class power like Sweden and Norway, and was proljably destined to fall under the sway of Russia ; and judgements equally unfavour- able were passed upon us by Catharine II of Russia and by Frederick II of Prussia. Indeed there was upon the Continent during the years preceding the w\ars of the Revolution and the Empire an undervaluation of British power and resources as serious and misleading as that which prevailed in Germany in the first decade of the twentieth century. In each case enormous 16 POLITICAL PEOPHECIES policies, affecting the whole future of the world, were based on insufficient knowledge and false estimates of the future. Of the governing tendencies of he modern world by far the most important is the spread of democracy, and the literature which has gro^vn up round democratic institutions is as voluminous as the importance of the subject demands. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that many leading features of modern democracy were wholly unforeseen by the men who first undertook to enlighten the world upon the subject. The political writers at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries wrote and thought of democracy in terms coloured, if not dictated, by memories of classical antiquity. Even the founders of the American constitution, who were not theorists but practical states- men, failed to foresee some of the most important features of American social life and constitutional development. They laboured under the delusion that because simplicity and equality had ])een the marks of the ancient Republic, and were certainly features of the social conditions then prevailing in the colonies, these qualities would permanently belong to the gigantic State which it was their office to create. They foresaw neither the large fortunes nor the huge and dominating Trusts which have given the ply to American institu- tions, and in general they were precluded, by reason of the fact that all previous experience of democracies had been confined to small States, from apprehending the way in which the problem of popular rule would ^vork itself out in the immense framework of the American Republic. The political boss, the Nominating POLITICAL PKOPllECJES 17 Convention, and all tlie nnsccn arts of management without which the new machine could not he ellectuaily worked, were quite beyond the apprehension of the members of the Phihixlelphia Convention, and if Alexander Hamilton could have lived to see the day when it could be truthfully said tliat 'the man who designates the delegates to the Nominating Convention is really the most powerful man in the United States, and that everybody l)ut a President in his second year is at his mercy ', he would have been the first to confess that the fabric of the Federal Constitution had undergone a profound change which no one of his contemporaries did in fact predict or could have been expected to infer I'rom the available evidence lief ore liim. Among the early observers of the democratic in- stitutions of the New World, De Tocqueville is fullest of the prophetic spirit. In 1833 he saw the main characteristics of democratic civilization with all the clairvoyance of tem})eramental dislike. Many of the defects which he noted as present in American society, and regarded to bo incidental to democratic civilization in general, have been mitigated by the sobering in- fluences of history, though it would be rash to say that tJiey are not still perceptible both in America and in other democratic countries. He may have overrated the extent to which subservience to public opinion, jealousy of personal eminence, blind acquiescence in vulgar standards, are to be counted as permanent equalities in democratic society, but that every such society is specially susceptible to these charges is pro- bably true. Mill, whose symi^athies were on the side of democrac}', thought that if Do Tocqueville hatl lived 18 POLITICAL PEOPHECIES to know what the New England States had become thirty years after, he would have acknowledged that much of the mifavourable part of his anticipations* had not been realized.^ However this may be, De Tocqueville certainly estimated aright the true proportions of the colour problem, and in effect predicted the American Civil War. It is also part of his claim to greatness to have explained to Europe that democracy was a form of civilization rather than a form of government, and that the world was entering on a democratic age. The full significance of the survival in Prussia of a mediaeval polity, based on the divine right of kings, served by a feudal aristocracy and capable of employing all the arts and sciences of modern life to serve its ends, had not dawned upon him. He was too wise, however, to claim oracular powers, and upon his own confession the history of his own country was full of unexpected dis- enchantments. ^I set myself, he wrote after the revolution of 1848, 'to retrace in my memory the history of the last sixty years, and I smiled bitterly as I thought of the illusions which accompanied each stage of this long revolution, the theories on which these illusions were nourished, the learned dreams of our historians, and all the ingenious and erroneous systems with the aid of which men had tried to explain a present which was not yet clearly seen and to predict a future Avliich was not seen at all.' Another error not confined to any one country or to any one school of political thought, has been the common assumption that democracy inevitably desires ' Cf. Currespondoicc, ii. 35. POLITICAL PROPHECIES 19 democratic legislation. Up till the Franchise Act of 1917, all the Eeform Bills in this country have been violently attacked and energetically advocated upon this erroneous assum])tion. Yet, though eighty-six years have passed since the first Keforni Act, there is still a great fund of conservative policy in the country. The House of Lords is in being, the Anglican Churcli holds its own, and the Tory party has enjoyed its fair share of office. Experience has shown that few speculations are so uncertain as those concerning the probable consequences of an extension of the franchise, nor was there any more remarkaljle feature of the francliisc debates of 1917 than the abandonment by tacit consent of this ancient field of contentious augury and gratuitous error. Nor has History Ijeen kind to those thinkers who, standing in the main line of the English liberal tradition, too hastily assumed that the world was passing out of a military into an industrial stage. The first apostles of Free Trade judged aright the economic consequences likely to flow from the adoption of their policy, but were disposed to exaggerate the influence of economic exchange as a factor making for peace. Closer intercourse, while it is a condition of friendship, is also a cause of friction, and the first result of the Com- mercial Treaty of 1860 between England and France was the outburst of a storm of indignation against this country in the forests and factories of our present Ally. It was reasonable to hope with Michel Chevalier that the development of the railway system in Europe would ' remove hcrcditaiy animosities and firmly cement nation to nation in a lasting peace'. But has this 20 POLITICAL PKOPHECIES prediction been fulfilled ? A few years after it Avas uttered Von Moltke and Roon were giving the world the first demonstration of the scientific use of railway power in modern war. The imion of the German States under the hegemony of Prussia had been foretold so often that many sagacious minds were doubtful whether, in fact, it could ever be realized. Lord Eobert Cecil, who, as Lord Salisbmy, was destined to rule in our Foreign Office for many years, contended in a Quarterly article on the Danish duchies, written in 1864, that Germany would never be united. Such a view was by no means foolish or fantastic. For centmies the most prominent fact in European politics had been the disunion of Germany and the rivalry of her warring States. One short-lived movement towards union had been crushed in 1815 ; another, more recent and more determined, had broken down in a calamitous failure in 1849. It was not, therefore, imreasonable to imagine that the obstacles, which had prevailed for several centuries, would be sufficiently strong to avert union even four years before union was, in fact, accomplished, and, indeed, it is probaljle that anything short of the very surprisingly rapid success of the Prussian army in the campaign against Austria would have involved the whole Prussian project in uncertainty. Posterity should not be too hard on statesmen if, in order to meet the urgent necessities of the moment, they consent to arrangements which, later on, under altered conditions, are found t(^ be prejudicial. All political decisions are taken under great pressure, and if a treaty serves its turn for ten or twenty years, the POLTTTCAf. PROPHECTES 21 wisdom of its franicrs is sufriciciitly conlirnied. Li viiw of the great period of rivaliy l)ct\vci'ii the British and (Jernian Empires wliidi lias opened out sinee 1890, it seems to argue a strange lack of foresight in British statesmen tliat tlioy shtadd have promoted the cession of Rhenish Provinces to Prussia in 1815 and of Heligoland in 1890. Yet each transaction is defensible in the light of the general system of foreign policy which this eomitry was pursuing at the time, the first when we reflect upon the danger which Europe had experienced from the aml)ition of Napoleon and upon the assumed necessity of erecting a powerful bulwark against the repetition of any French scheme of aggrandizement, and the second (thougli hero the defence is far weaker) when it is recalled that it was then the established }»olicy of Lord Salisbury's Government to maintain cordial relations Avitli the German Empire, that the growth of a powerful (Jerman Navy was not suspected, and that a set-off to the cession of Heligoland was supplied by the acquisition of Zanzibar, It is, however, remarkable how little the military strength of Prussia was appreciated at its true value in the decade preceding the Franco-Prussian War. * The Prussians', wrote Lord Palmerston in 1863, 'are 1>rave and make good soldiers, but all military men who have seen the Prussian Army at its annual reviews of late vears have uncquivocably declared tlieir oi)inioii that tlie French would walk over it andget without dithculty to Berlin.' A year later Disraeli, who was even more fundamentally misinformed, declared, 'Prussia is a country without any bottom, and in my opinion could not maintain a war for six weeks ". When, two years 22 POLITICAL PROPHECIES later, war did break out l)etween Prussia and Austria, it was the universal expectation, even in the l»est in- structed circles of Germany, that the war would be long and sanguinary. Mohl, the Wurtemberg jurist, expected it to last for a generation ; Hohenlohe, the Bavarian statesman, looked forward to protracted campaigns. Even the rapid victory of the needle gun in Bohemia did not unseal the eyes of Europe. When the war of 1870 l)roke out, Delane wrote to W. H. Eussell : ' Nothing shall ever persuade me except the event that tlie Prussians will withstand the French, and I would lay my last shilling upon Casquette against Pumper- nickel.' Such was the wisdom of the editor of the leading newspaper of the world. The acquisition of Alsace-Lorraine by Prussia in 1871 was at the time regarded by Bismarck with just mis- giving ; Init he allowed himself to be overborne by the soldiers. The consequences of this unprincipled act of spoliation vv^ere, however, foreseen, even in Germany, more particularly by Karl Marx, who predicted at the time that France would be thrown into the arms of Russia, and that the rol)bery would bring upon Germany a racial war against the united power of the Slavs and the Latins. Never has a prophecy been more exactly fuimied. That war is full of surprises is a maxim as old as Thucydides, and there has never been a war which has not l>rought confusion to the proj)hets. Many years ])efore the great storm broke, in August 1914, Europe had l)een uneasily conscious of gathering clouds, and a whole literature had grown up about the impending conflict. Yet the attitude which Great POLITICAL PROPHECTES 23 ]>ritain and Italy would adopt upon the outlnxak of hostilities l)etween the Gorman Powers and the Dual Alliance was ([uito uncertain, and few people before 1898 predicted that Turkey woidd he ranged on the side of tile Central Powers. Moreover, the entry of America into the War, hy far the most important occurrence of our ago, was, so far as I am aware, entirely unforeseen by any of those numerous thinkers who concerned themselves with speculations as to the im- mediate political future of the world. It was as unforeseen in America as it wjis in Europe, and this on many grounds of political tradition and racial mixture : but the unforeseen has come to pass. On the other iiand, some leading military and economic features of the W(.rld struggle were divined as early as 1898 by a sagacious Pohsh banker, who applied a trained economic intelligence to the task of interpreting such lessons as might be extracted from the latest improve- ments in the military art. The princijial data before Camille Bloch were the magazine rifle, the range-finder, smokeless powder, and the increased power and accuracy of the artillery arm. From a study of these data Bloch was led to conclude that a war waged upon a large scale ))etween such international coml)inations as the Triple and the Dual Alliance would lead to a stalemate. Owing to the destructiveness of modern warfare the next war would be a war of entrenchments, in which the spade would l)e as indispensal>le to the soldier as the rifle. ' Battles ', he said, ' will last for days, and at the end it is very doubtful whether any decisive victory would be gained.' The war of the future would be a long war, for there was no chance of armies rmming 24 POLTTTCAL PROPHEC^IES short of munitions. Of neeessit}' ' it would partake of the character of a siege operation, and would be brought to an end not l)y a militar}- decision, in the old sense of the term, but l^y famine '. ^ The future of war ', he declared, ' is not fighting but famine, not the slaying of men but the bankruptcy of nations.' Even the victorious power would be fatally injured by the destruction of resources and the break-up of society. On the assump- tion that the five continental countries, comprising respectively the Triple and Dual Alliance, were engaged, he calculated that two and a lialf million men would be fighting, and that the total cost distributed among the eoml)atant nations would be four million sovereigns .a day. All this furnishes an excellent example of the limits within which it is reasonable to hope that a carefid and dispassionate study of economic and technical data may enable accurate predictions to l^e made as to the course and character of future wars. Bloch had not all the technical data before him, with which we are all now familiar, nor had he the imagination to forecast them. He knew neither aeroplane nor machine gmi, neither tank nor sul)marine, neither gas nor gas-mask, but he had seen enough to realize that modern military science had created engines of destructiveness so greatly in excess of all previous records as to create a new problem, and he was entitled to argue that any future develop- ments of the military art would only aggravate the general tendency which he had set himself to explore. In the event his forecast of the future course of the present war was more correct than that of the C4erman Higher Command ; but it might easily have been other- POLITICAL PKOPHECIES 25 wise, and, as lui oxluuistivc stutonient of the j^ossibilitios of the case, his ingenious volumes are clearly defective in that they omit to consider the possiliility of a sudden col- lapse of one of the combatant nations either owintr to mili- tary mismanagement or to failure of the popular nerve. On the economic side, agam, Blocli failed to pay adequate regard to the stinudus whidi war imi)arts to industrial inventiveness, organization, and economy. In connuon with all other political reasoners, he failed to predict the part which women might be made to play in modern war and in the industries on which modern war is nourished, and in a hundred other particulars history has refused to substmitiate his predictions. Nevertheless, to him belongs the credit of pointing out for the first time a fact of surpassing importance, the significance of which we have only just begun to realize, that as the destructiveness of armaments increases, the rate of destruction diminishes until the cost of a slain enemy reaches a figure which is not only uneconomic but ruinous. In a gra})hic way he said that war was im- possible, by which he meant, not that war woidd not- be waged in future, but that the old-fashioned, chivalrous, swift, and decisive w^ar, the frisch-fruJdlchcr Kricg of the egregious Crown Prince, was henceforward an affair of the ancicn regime^ an historic curiosity. Nai-row the problem of war to one or other of its technical aspects, and the chances of an accurate pre- diction are increased. The forecast of the Blue- Water School that this island could not be successfully invaded from the sea is a triumpliant exemplification of accunxte reasoning within a limited sphere governed by considera- tions capable of accurate measurement. So, too, was 20 POLITICAL PEOPHECIES Admiral Sir Percy Scott's forecast of the part which the submarine was destined to play in naval warfare. As soon, however, as the question is extended beyond the possibilities contained in this or that application of military or naval power to a survey of the future of war in general, with all the moral and psychological im- ponderables, the possibilities of error become infinitely greater. In this sphere the imaginative historian is more likely to hit the mark than the encyclopaedic statistician. Travelling through the clouds, he may, nevertheless, find the goal. Eenan, writing in September 1870, under the shadow of a great military disaster, argued that in the next war, which would be a war of races and therefore of extermination, England would be found on the side of Franco. The reason which he advanced was a poet's reason. We were steadily becoming, like France, more Celtic and less Germanic in our general outlook upon life. ' France ', he writes, ' is one of the conditions of English prosperity. England is every day becoming more Celtic and less Germanic in virtue of that great law which ordains that the primitive race of a country eventually asserts its supre- macy over all tlie invasions. In the great struggle of races England is with us. The alliance of France and England is foimded for centuries. Whether we think of the United States, of Constantinople, or of India, England will sec that she has need of France and of a strong France.' These are remarkable words. Renan had a clear sense of tlie mediaeval character of Prussian militarism and of the danger which it opposed to the democratic countries of the West. At the same time he had been POLITICAL PROPHECIES 27 impressed by the quality of contemporaneous English literature, and more particularly by the Free Trade philo- sophy which had led to the commercial treaty between Eiit;land and France in ISGO. He felt instinctively that in all tliis tliere was something utterly alien to tlie Prus- sian spirit, and that the collision of ideals would lead one day to tlic clasli of arms. The opposition between English ways and Prussian, which was so present to the minds of Bismarck and Treitschke, seemed to Kenan, who knew so much less but divined so mucli more, to be one of the great fjicts which would dominate the future of Europe. So, while Moltke's guns were booming, he foretold the ultimate opposition of the British mid the German Empires, and at tlie same time, with the pre- science of genius, discerned the unsound quality of the new German Imperialism. I cannot deny myself the pleasure of a quotation from the Nonvellc Lettre a Strauss, written in 1871, with the exquisite measure and delicacy of which Kenan was a master : ' Excess of pati-iotism injures those works of universal significance which are grounded in the words of St. Paul : Non est ludaens neque Graecus. It is just because your great men eiglity years ago were not too patriotic that they opened out tliat large way wherein we are their disciples. I fear that your ultra-patriotic generation, repelling as it does everything which is not purely Germanic, is pre[)aring for itself a more restricted audience. Jesus and the founders of Christianity were not Germans. Your Goethe recognized that he owed something to that corrupt France of Voltaire and Diderot. Let us leave these narrow fanaticisms to the loAver regions of opinion. Permit me to say it, you have declined.' 402li39 28 POLITICAL PKOPHECIES Two forms of" oracle we shall always do well to exam i no with special care, those which proceed from the advocate and tlie pessimist. When has a measm-e been defended without confident asseveration of golden consequences which have never ensued, or attacked without predictions of evil Avhich experience has refused to endorse ? No one was more closely concerned with the inner history of working-class radicalism during the iirst decade of the nineteenth century than Francis Place, the Westminster tailor. Yet he prophesied that the repeal of the combination law of 1800 would j)ut an end to Trades Unions. Anxiety to secure support for the removal of an odious statute, coupled with a dislike of Trades Unions as obstacles to individual liberty, led him to express a belief calculated, indeed, to assuage the anxieties of his ojjponents, but destined to be completely overthrown by the realities of subsequent history. Nor are Education Ministers always infallible. W. E. Forster, the creator of our English Board Schools, prophesied that the education rate would never exceed Sd. What must his ghost be thinking, if it should ever take upon itself the curious fancy of visiting the debates of the local authority of West Ham when Mr. Will Thorne, in a voice of thunder, is expounding the educational finance of the area ? I will not pursue so painful a topic. In general it is wise for the fighting- politician, even if he be eminent in letters, to eschew predictions with respect to causes which he has at heart, imless he is careful to adopt language of the vaguest and most general description. Ten years ago it was confidently asserted by one of our most brilliant living Englishmen that Australians could never be reconciled POLITTCAL PROPirKOTKS 29 to paying for a war undertaken for the defence of Belgian neutrality/ At the time when the words were written the chances seemed a thousand to one against a disproof of such a proposition being afforded within a generation. Yet the very thing, which was cited in disparagement of Seeley's outlook on contemporary history, has, in fact, been brought to pass. If the verdicts of our best men are very fallible, even when they are dealing with the prospects of a civilization which they know, how much more fallible are our estimates of the mysterious East ? If we exclude the prescient anticipations of Brinkling and Oliphant, what western statesman or publicist can claim to have fore- told in the sixties the rise of Japan ? How few, even with the evidence supplied by the Chinese students who frequented the universities of America, predicted the establishment of a Eepublic in China? We judge the East by India, and we judge India by a series of maxims, the deposit of a long but narrow official ex- perience, which are fast becoming obsolete. Even in the Near East how often liave our prophecies lieen brouglit to naught from the days when Dr. Lloyd,'- ' the present most learned Bishop of Worcester, who has now for aliove twenty years been studying the Revela- tions with an amazing diligence and exactness ', predicted that the peace lietween the Turks and the Papal Christians was certainly to be made in the year 1698. The Turk, whose empire has been partitioned on paper more than a. hundred times, and whose expulsion from Christian territory has been constantly predicted, even • Morley, Critical Miscellanies, vol. iii. -' Burnet, Historij of Ms own Time, ii, p. '20i, 1G97, 30 POLITICAL PEOPHECIES by those who, like Wilfrid Blunt, had most sympathy for Islam, still remains in Constantinople, and when these lines were written was especially protected by a Power whose interest in Balkan problems was nowhere anticipated until the last decade of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the Government of the Ottoman Empire is in the hands of men who raised themselves to power by a revolution which no one foresaw and which every one misjudged. It is equally safe to distrust the pessimist. The prophet who foretells the degeneracy of his race may be doing a useful service in his day, but he is almost always convicted by the searchlight of to-morrov/. A Cambridge pedant once published a lament over the degeneracy of England, but the sheets were hardly dry from the press before the conquests of Wolfe and Clive laid the foundations of the British Empire. The jeremiads of Kobert Lowe and Thomas Carlyle are pretty reading, but after all we have 'shot Niagara' and are still a flourishing people, not altogether devoid of valour, faith, endurance, charity, and other estimable qualities of hand and heart : nor, so far as we can see, is the race of heroes entirely extinct upon this planet. Printed in England at the Oxford University Press UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY This book is DUE on the last date stamped below D 21 P.M. i MOV 2 t',\3^ SL R(IF Form I.-9 ".•jm-2, •18(5203) UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES 3 1158 00066 9613 UCSOUIH ■r.^r.p;,' f t^tllVt AA 000 794 130 5 '>.v^- y