New York Times Current History: Vol 1, No. 1 | Page 7

of German conscripts. At first, in The Battle of
Dorking phase, the note was mainly defensive. But from the moment
when the Kaiser began to copy our Armada policy by building a big
fleet, the anti-German agitation became openly aggressive; and the cry
that the German fleet or ours must sink, and that a war between
England and Germany was bound to come some day, speedily ceased
to be merely a cry with our Militarists and became an axiom with them.
And what our Militarists said our Junkers echoed; and our Junker
diplomatists played for. The story of how they manoeuvred to hem
Germany and Austria in with an Anglo-Franco-Russian combination
will be found told with soldierly directness and with the proud candor
of a man who can see things from his own side only in the article by
Lord Roberts in the current number of The Hibbert Journal (October,
1914). There you shall see also, after the usual nonsense about
Nietzsche, the vision of "British administrators bearing the White
Man's Burden," of "young men, fresh from the public schools of Britain,
coming eagerly forward to carry on the high traditions of Imperial
Britain in each new dependency which comes under our care," of "our
fitness as an Imperial race," of "a great task committed to us by
Providence," of "the will to conquer that has never failed us," of our
task of "assuming control of one-fifth of the earth's surface and the care
of one in five of all the inhabitants of the world." Not a suggestion that
the inhabitants of the world are perhaps able to take care of themselves.
Not even a passing recollection when that White Man's Burden is in
question that the men outside the British Empire, and even inside the
German Empire, are by no means exclusively black. Only the sancta
simplicitas that glories in "the proud position of England," the
"sympathy, tolerance, prudence and benevolence of our rule" in the east
(as shown, the Kaiser is no doubt sarcastically remarking, in the Delhi
sedition trial), the chivalrous feeling that it is our highest duty to save
the world from the horrible misfortune of being governed by anybody
but those young men fresh from the public schools of Britain. Change
the words Britain and British to Germany and German, and the Kaiser
will sign the article with enthusiasm. His opinion, his attitude (subject
to that merely verbal change) word for word.

*Six of One: Half-a-Dozen of The Other.*
Now, please observe that I do not say that the agitation was
unreasonable. I myself steadily advocated the formation of a
formidable armament, and ridiculed the notion that, we, who are
wasting hundreds of millions annually on idlers and wasters, could not
easily afford double, treble, quadruple our military and naval
expenditure. I advocated the compulsion of every man to serve his
country, both in war and peace. The idlers and wasters perceiving
dimly that I meant the cost to come out of their pockets and meant to
use the admission that riches should not exempt a man from military
service as an illustration of how absurd it is to allow them to exempt
him from civil service, did not embrace my advocacy with enthusiasm;
so I must reaffirm it now lest it should be supposed that I am
condemning those whose proceedings I am describing. Though often
horribly wrong in principle, they were quite right in practice as far as
they went. But they must stand to their guns now that the guns are
going off. They must not pretend that they were harmless Radical
lovers of peace, and that the propaganda of Militarism and of inevitable
war between England and Germany is a Prussian infamy for which the
Kaiser must be severely punished. That is not fair, not true, not
gentlemanly. We began it; and if they met us half-way, as they
certainly did, it is not for us to reproach them. When the German
fire-eaters drank to The Day (of Armageddon) they were drinking to
the day of which our Navy League fire-eaters had first said "It's bound
to come." Therefore, let us have no more nonsense about the Prussian
Wolf and the British Lamb, the Prussian Machiavelli and the English
Evangelist. We cannot shout for years that we are boys of the bulldog
breed, and then suddenly pose as gazelles. No. When Europe and
America come to settle the treaty that will end this business (for
America is concerned in it as much as we are), they will not deal with
us as the lovable and innocent victims of a treacherous tyrant and a
savage soldiery. They will have to consider how these two incorrigibly
pugnacious and inveterately snobbish peoples, who have snarled at one
another for forty years with bristling hair and