The Proud Tower (45 page)

Bound volumes of the resolutions signed with a shaky “S.” indicated that Lord Salisbury was keeping track of public opinion. A deputation representing the International Crusade of Peace headed by the Earl of Aberdeen and the Bishop of London visited Mr. Balfour, who received them with a graceful speech taking “a sanguine view of the diminution, I will not say the extinction, but the diminution of war in the future” and looking forward to the coming conference as a “great landmark in the progress of mankind,” whether or not, he added, it produced any practical results. This was not altogether what Bülow had hoped for.

The epitome of the peace movement was the most ebullient and prolific journalist of an age rich in his kind, William T. Stead, founder and editor of the
Review of Reviews.
Stead was a human torrent of enthusiasm for good causes. His energy was limitless, his optimism unending, his egotism gigantic. As the self-estimated pope of journalism his registered telegraph address was “Vatican, London.” During the eighties he had edited the Liberal daily, the
Pall Mall Gazette
, in a series of explosions that made it required reading in public life. “You are too strenuous, too uniformly strenuous,” pronounced the Prince of Wales who read it regularly. Stead waded recklessly into crusades ranging from protection of prostitutes to a “Sane Imperialism.” They included campaigns against Bulgarian atrocities, Siberian convict life, the desertion of General Gordon at Khartoum, Congo slavery, the labour victims of “Bloody Sunday” in Trafalgar Square, and for baby adoption, village libraries, Esperanto, international scholars’ correspondence, and housing for the poor. His most notorious effort, published under the title “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” described his personal purchase of a thirteen-year-old girl for £5 as a means of dramatizing the procurement of child virgins for prostitution. The articles made a world sensation, and besides causing Stead’s trial and imprisonment on a charge of abduction, succeeded in forcing an amendment raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.

Stead visited Russia in 1889, where he interviewed Alexander III and became a champion of Anglo-Russian alliance and thus of everything Russian. He campaigned for a big navy at the instance of his friend Admiral Fisher; collaborated with General Booth on a book,
In Darkest England;
joined Cecil Rhodes in the cause of Imperial Federation and union of the English-speaking world. Deciding to reform Chicago after a visit there in 1893, he exposed its evils and laid out a scheme of regeneration in a book called
If Christ Came to Chicago
and organized a Civic Federation which included labour leaders and Mrs. Potter Palmer to put the scheme into action. During the visit he talked with Governor Altgeld and invited Fielden, one of the pardoned Anarchists, to share a speaker’s platform.

The connecting principle running through his causes was belief in man’s duty to amend society and extend the British sway. He liked to use the phrase “God’s Englishman” and conceived of this figure as a righter of wrongs; anything that added to his power was a benevolent influence. He turned up so often on opposite sides of the same question, as in the case of arms limitation and a big navy, that he was accused of insincerity, although in fact, as of any particular moment, his sincerity was genuine, if nimble.

In 1890 he founded his own journal, the monthly
Review of Reviews
, with the expressed object of making it read throughout the English-speaking world “as men used to read their Bibles … to discover the will of God and their duty to their fellow man.” Finding a monthly less satisfactory as a political organ, he yearned for a millionaire to back him in a daily of his own and once in Paris told a friend, “I went in to Notre Dame to have a talk with God about it.”

Detested by some, he was a friend of the great, including, besides Rhodes and Fisher, James Bryce, Cardinal Manning, Lord Esher, Lord Milner, Mrs. Annie Besant and Lady Warwick, who arranged a těte-à-těte lunch for him with the Prince of Wales. He interviewed sovereigns, cabinet ministers, archbishops and helped all “oppressed races, ill-treated animals, underpaid typists, misunderstood women, persecuted parsons, vilified public men, would-be suicides, hot-gospellers of every sort and childless parents.” His talk was a river and as a lecturer he “leaped over the face of the globe as though on a pogo-stick.” Besides writing, editing, traveling, interviewing and lecturing, he wrote or dictated some 80,000 letters in his twenty-two years on the
Review of Reviews
, an average of ten a day. He espoused spiritualism and considered himself a reincarnation of Charles II, who through him was making amends for his previous life on earth.

He was short in stature, with high color, bright blue eyes and a reddish beard, and in defiance of black broadcloth wore rough tweeds and a soft felt hat. Strong in good will, he was weak in judgment. If he had possessed that quality in proportion to his qualities of mind and character, said Lord Milner, he would have been “simply irresistible.” Seeing in him, in exaggerated form, all the attributes of the English people of his generation, an American journalist summed him up as “the perfect type of Nineteenth Century man.” Milner saw him as a cross between Don Quixote and P. T. Barnum, which may have been the same thing.

Naturally a passionate advocate of arbitration, Stead saw it leading to the establishment of an international court of justice and eventually to a United States of Europe. Anticipating the Czar, he had in 1894 suggested an international pledge by the powers not to increase their military budgets until the end of the century. When the Russian proposal burst upon the world, Stead saw the greatest opportunity of his career. He determined at once on a personal tour of the capitals as part of a great campaign to convince people everywhere that the Czar was sincere and to arouse a collective cry of support for the Conference. The tour was to culminate in an interview with the Czar from which he was not deterred by the Prince of Wales’s opinion, conveyed through Lady Warwick, that the young ruler, his wife’s nephew, was “weak as water,… has no character and would not be the slightest use to you.” On the way, Stead planned to interview the Pope, the Kaiser and the President of France, as well as King Leopold of the Belgians whom he would persuade to become spokesman of a league of small powers. To ward off possible official interference he called on Mr. Balfour at the Foreign Office, whom he found at first “nonchalant and ironical” but who quickly hardened in response to Stead’s rhapsodies. Balfour failed to understand, he said, how Stead could contemplate so lightheartedly “the increasing growth and power of Russia.” For their own time it did not matter, “but what of our children?… What kind of world will it be when Russia exercises a dominating influence over the whole of south-east Europe?” He did not, however, offer to put any obstacles in Stead’s path.

Within a month of the first news, Stead was on his way. In Paris he failed to see President Félix Faure, although he did see Clemenceau, who said “nothing would come of the Conference” and refused to alter his opinion. King Leopold, the Kaiser and Pope Leo XIII likewise avoided him, but Nicholas II, in compliance with a promise which his father had given to Stead ten years ago, granted him not only one audience but three. The Imperial graciousness dazzled Stead, who, being unused to courts, took it for the man’s character and did not realize it was the monarch’s trade. In any case he was determined to produce a hero. The Czar, he told his readers, was charming, sympathetic, alert, lucid, with a keen sense of humor, hearty frankness, admirable modesty, noble gravity, high resolve, remarkable memory, “exceptional rapidity of perception and wide grasp of an immense range of facts,” and all these were at the service of the cause of peace. Stead’s paeans to Russia’s intentions so far outdistanced her real aims that the Russian ministers complained to the British Government of being “much embarrassed.” His articles, however, were manna to the peace movement. Back in London he brought out a new weekly,
War Against War
, organized the International Peace Crusade and did his hyperactive best to strengthen public demand for a Conference that could not, must not fail.

Public opinion was not all of a piece. If the Liberals—and not all of them—shared Stead’s enthusiasm, the Conservatives did not. In all peoples there was much of what William Ernest Henley hymned as “the battle spirit shouting in my blood.” It was what made Romain Rolland, who was one day to become famous as a pacifist, cry joyously in 1898, “Give me combat!” The materialism of the time, the increasing ease, the power of money to substitute for muscle, produced in many a feeling of distaste or even a seeking for the strenuous, as when young Theodore Roosevelt headed for the Rockies. People felt a need for something nobler and saw it glimmer in the prospect of danger and physical combat, in sacrifice, even death, on the battlefield. The journalist Henry Nevinson felt a martial ardor when he drilled as an officer of the Volunteers and offended his Socialist friends by declaring that he “would not care to live in a world in which there was no war.” In later years it seemed to him the ardor had derived partly from ignorance of war and partly from the influence of Kipling and Henley.

Within narrow limits Henley was the Conservatives’ Stead, although lacking Stead’s elemental force and social conscience. No Teutonic homage to the master race could outshout his celebration of “England, My England,” whose “mailed hand” guides teeming destinies, whose “breed of mighty men” is unmatched, whose ships are “the fierce old sea’s delight,” who is:

Chosen daughter of the Lord
Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword.

There’s the menace of the Word
In the song on your bugles blown
England!
Out of Heaven on your bugles blown!

This was patriotism gone mad and represented a mood, not a people. In the same mood Americans listened to Albert Beveridge rant, “We are a conquering race … we must obey our blood.”

Such sentiments were among the indirect results of the most fateful voyage since Columbus—Charles Darwin’s aboard the
Beagle.
Darwin’s findings in
The Origin of Species
, when applied to human society, supplied the philosophical basis for the theory that war was both inherent in nature and ennobling. War was a conflict in which the stronger and superior race survived, thus advancing civilization. Germany’s thinkers, historians, political and military scientists, working upon the theory with the industry of moles and the tenacity of bulldogs, raised it to a level of national dogma. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law, supplied a racial justification in his
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
, published in German, which showed that Aryans, being superior in body and soul to other men, had a right to be masters of the earth. Treitschke explained that war, by purifying and unifying a great people, was the source of patriotism. By invigorating them it was a source of strength. Peace was stagnant and decadent and the hope of perpetual peace was not only “impossible but immoral as well.” War as ennobling became by extension, in the words of Generals von der Goltz and Bernhardi, a necessity. It was the right and duty of the nobler, stronger, superior race to extend its rule over inferior peoples, which, in the German view, meant over the world. To other nations it meant over colonies. Darwinism became the White Man’s Burden. Imperialism acquired a moral imperative.

Darwin’s indirect effects reached apotheosis in Captain Mahan. “Honest collision” between nations was “evidently a law of progress,” he wrote in one of a series of articles in 1897–99 in which he tried to instruct Americans in their destiny. This one was called “The Moral Aspect of War.” In another, “A Twentieth Century Outlook,” he wrote that nothing was “more ominous for the future of our race” than the current vociferous tendency “which refuses to recognize in the profession of arms—in war” the source of “heroic ideal.” In a private letter he wrote, “No greater misfortune could well happen than that civilized nations should abandon their preparations for war and take to arbitration.” His thesis was that power, force, and ultimately war were the factors that decide great issues in a nation’s fate and that to depend on anything else, such as arbitration, was an illusion. If arbitration were substituted for armies and navies, European civilization “might not survive, having lost its fighting energy.” Yet Mahan believed the Twentieth Century would reveal that man’s conscience was improving. He could not have preached power so positively if he had not believed equally in progress. His moral rectitude shines in a photograph taken with his wife and two adult daughters. Four pairs of forthright eyes gaze straight at the camera. Four keel-straight noses, four firm mouths, the ladies’ high-necked blouses fastened with bar pin at the throat, the hats perched stiffly on high-piled hair, all express the person “assured of certain certainties,” a species soon to be as extinct as Ribblesdale.

The necessity of struggle was voiced by many spokesmen in many guises: in Henri Bergson’s
élan vital
, in Shaw’s Life Force, in the strange magic jumble of Nietzsche which was then spreading its fascination over Europe. Nietzsche recognized the waning of religion as a primary force in people’s lives and flung his challenge in three words: “God is dead.” He would have substituted Superman, but ordinary people substituted patriotism. As faith in God retreated before the advance of science, love of country began to fill the empty spaces in the heart. Nationalism absorbed the strength once belonging to religion. Where people formerly fought for religion now they would presumably do no less for its successor. A sense of gathering conflict filled the air. Yeats, living in Paris in 1895, awoke one morning from a vision of apocalypse:

 … Unknown spears

Suddenly hurtle before my dream awakened eyes,
And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries
Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.