The Anglo-German Tension and a Solution

Extract

An English writer in the Nineteenth Century and After, for April last, after naming twelve wars since 1850, great in political effect and, with two exceptions, great also in bloodshed, says:

If all these wars, and others which I have not stopped to name, were insufficient to convince our Radicals that their whole theory of international affairs was false, then the events that next followed might at last have brought the proof. In the South African war Britain had over two hundred and fifty thousand troops in the field, while the British Navy alone stood between our otherwise unguarded shores and a Europe burning to intervene — a feat which, in like circumstances, it is now no longer adequate to perform. Meantime, .in a silence inspired with a terrible energy, had proceeded the renaissance of the Japanese — a renaissance not of Jetters, but of arms, until, in 1904–5, by sea and by land she showed to mankind a new portent, the victory of an Asiatic race over one of the mightiest empires of the West. Later still than all this, even within the last few months, a vast upheaval, fraught with infinite meaning for the whole world, has occurred in China; while even at the present time a war is proceeding between Italy and Turkey, and rumours of possible co-operation with the former Power on the part of Russia are rife in the world.

As if all this were not enough evidence of the impermanence of all political conditions, Western mankind is also threatened with an earthquake from beneath in comparison with which the fury of the French Revolution itself might pale its ineffectual fires. The “Red Peril” already throws its lurid glare across the page of coming history, and intestine struggles on a scale unprecedented in human annals are already looming on the horizon of nearly all civilized peoples.