Ordeal by Battle

f British interests. There was an unexpectedness about Lord Salisbury's words, coming as they did from the leader of a party which had hitherto lain under suspicion of jingoism, wh

we ourselves are the only possible disturbers of the peace, and that if we do not seek war, or provoke it, no other Power will dream of forcing war upon us. This unfortunately has rarely been the case; a

was essential, if a system of government, which aimed, not unsuccessfully, at giving justice and fostering well-being, was to maintain its power and prestige unshaken. The whole British race had nothing material to gain by war, but much to lose, much at any rate which would be put in jeopardy by war. In spite of all these

n a par with the rest of the world. The cloud of anxiety which for ten or more years has brooded over the great conscript nations, growing steadily darker, contain

of the moment. A sensational but unintended injury was not allowed to drive us {5} into war with Russia in 1904, and this precedent seemed of good augury. Moreover, when every statesman in Europe was fully alive to the electric condi

forelock and struck out forthwith. Among the causes which might bring about a surprise outbreak of war this was the most serious and probable. It was difficult to insure against it. But though perilous in the extreme while it lasts, panic is of

RS TO

ere among the cloudiest of abstractions—'political interests,' need of new markets, hunger for fresh territory to absorb the outflow of emigrants, and the like; on the other

bered that this accomplished fact, these staked-out claims of the British Empire, appeared to fall like a shadow across vi

l the moralists, and divines, and philosophers—even the poets themselves for the most part, though they come nearer to it at times than the rest—have struggled vainly to show us in their true proportions. The songs of a nation, its national anthems—if they be truly national and not merely some commissioned exercise—ar

NCE OF

inevitably follow upon such a struggle conducted upon the modern scale, of the stupendous loss of capital, destruction of credit, paralysis of industry, arrest of progress in things spiritual as well as temporal, the shock to civilisation, and the crippling for a generation, probably for several generations, possibly for ever, of the victorious country in its race with rivals w

le by logic. It must rise into a higher order of convictions than the intellectual before it can begin to operate upon human affairs. For it is matched against opinions which have been held and acted upon so long, that they have become unques

8

y oppressed. Two rival systems of civilisation, of morals, of religion, approach one another like thunder-clouds and come together in a clash. Where is the good at such times of casting up sums, and exhibiting profit-and-loss accounts to the public gaze? People will not listen, for in their view considerations of prosperity and the reverse are beside the question. Wealth, comfort, even life itself, are not regarded; nor are the possible sufferings of posterity allowed to count

altar to Jehovah, in order that his race {9} may not be shorn of its inheritance, in order that it may hold fast its own laws and institutions, and not pass under the yoke of the Gentiles. This habit of mind is unchanging throughout the ages. What moved men to give

IVES OF

oldiers of the Cross before them from the passes of the Pyrenees to the vineyards of Touraine, neither side would have listened with any patience to a dissertation upon the inconveniences resulting from a state of war and upon the economic advantages of peace. It was there one faith agains

peoples, in the resurgent empire of Japan, and in the great military nations—the French, the {10} Germans, and the Russians—but also in America and England. The last two pride themselves upon a higher civilisation, and in return are despised by the prophets of militaris

OF THE W

in their true proportions, but as they appeared at the moment of their occurrence to the eyes of harassed and suspicious officials. But even so, all the emptying of desks and pigeon-holes since the great American Civil War, has not been able to cover up the essential fact, that in this case a million lives were sacrificed by one of the most intelligent, humane, and practical nations upon earth, and for no other cause than that there was an irreconcilable difference amongst them, with regard to what St. Paul has called 'the substance of things ho

o security against war that British policy did not aim at any aggrandisement or seek for any territorial expansion. The essential questions were—had we possessions whic

with some kind of material currency. It will not stand out for very long against promises of prosperity and threats of dearth. But where, as at most crises, this spirit is not base, where its impulse is not less noble, but more noble than those which influence men day by day in the conduct of their worldly affairs, where the contrast which presents itself to their imaginati

by the British Government in the autumn of 1908, and led to the Imperial