So much for the man. What of the Empire? Nicholas Jardine had witnessed, and assisted in, its collapse. He had witnessed the result of a "corner" in food stuffs, and discovered that Uncle Sam was not the man to miss his chance of making millions merely because in theory blood is thicker than water. He had witnessed, also, some of the effects of the great international confidence trick. The feature of the common swindle so described is that the trickster makes ingenuous professions. The dupe, not to be outdone in generous sentiments, places his watch or his bank-notes in the trickster's hands—just to show confidence. The trickster goes outside and does not come back again. So, in the matter of national armaments, Germany had avowed the friendliest disposition towards Great Britain. England, fatuously eager to believe in another entente cordiale, obligingly sapped her own resources. Germany, with her tongue in her cheek, went ahead, determined that England should not catch up to her. Thus had the way been paved for certain disastrous events: the cutting of the lion's claws, the clipping of his venerable tail, and the annexation of vast outlying domains in which the once unchallenged beast aforetime had held his own, monarch of all he surveyed. When Germany conceived that the fateful moment had arrived, Germany pounced. France was friendly, but not active, Russia active and not[Pg 7] friendly, Italy was busily occupied in Abyssinia, and nominally allied with Germany. Austria had her hands full in Macedonia, and was actually allied with Germany. Spain and Portugal did not count. Holland disappeared from the map, following the example of Denmark. The German cormorant swallowed them up, and German squadrons appropriated the harbours on the North Sea, as previously those on the Baltic. While these European changes were being effected with bewildering rapidity, our former allies, the Japanese, who had learnt naval warfare in the English school, played their own hand with notable promptitude and success. Japan had long had her eye on Australia. She wanted elbow room. She wanted to develop Asiatic power. Now was the time, when British warships were engaged in a stupendous struggle thousands of miles away. The little navy that the Australians had got together for purposes of self-defence crumpled up like paper boats under the big guns of the Yellow Fleet. Australia was lost. It made the heart ache to think of the changes wrought by the cruel hand of time—wrought in only a quarter of a century—in the pride of Britannia, in her power and her possessions.
India, that once bright and splendid jewel in the British Crown, the great possession that gave the title of Empress to Queen Victoria of illustrious memory—India, as a British possession, had been sliced to less than half its size by those same Japanese, allied with pampered Hindu millions; and it was problematical whether what was left could be held much longer. The memorable alliance with Japan, running its course for several years, had worn sharp and thin towards the end. It had not been renewed. Japan never had really contemplated pulling chestnuts out of the fire for the sole benefit of Great Britain. They saved us from Russia only to help themselves; and now that Great Britain was de[Pg 8]risively spoken of as Beggared Britain, the astute Jap, self-seeking, with limited ideas of gratitude, was England's enemy.
In South Africa, alas! England had lost not only a slice, but all. The men of words had overruled the men of deeds. What had been won in many a hard-fought battle, was surrendered in the House of Commons. Patriotism had been superseded by a policy of expediency. The great Boer War had furnished a hecatomb of twenty thousand British lives. A hundred thousand mourners bowed their heads in resignation for those who died or fought and bled for England. Millions had groaned under the burden of the war tax, and then, after years, we had enabled Brother Boer to secure, by means of a ballot box, what he had lost for the world's good in the stricken field. They had talked of a union of races—a fond thing vainly invented. Oil and water never mix.
Socialists, in alliance with sentimentalists in the swarming ranks of enfranchised women, had reduced the British Lion to the condition of a zoological specimen—a tame and clawless creature. The millennium was to be expedited so that the poor old Lion might learn to eat straw like the ox. If he could not get straw, let him eat dirt—dirt, in any form of humble pie, that other nations thought fit to set before the one-time King of Beasts.
In another part of the world, the link between England and Canada, another great dominion, as Linton Herrick well knew, had worn to the tenuity of thinnest thread. Canada, as yet, had not formally thrown off allegiance to the old country, but the thread might be snapped at any moment.
Linton, who had lived all his life in the Dominion, knew very well how things were tending. The English were no longer the dominant race in those vast tracts. They might have been, if a wise system of colonisation had been organised by British[Pg 9] Governments. But the rough material of the race had been allowed to stagnate and rot here in the crowded cities of England. Loafers, hooligans, and alien riff-raff had reached incredible numbers in the course of the last five-and-twenty years. Workhouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, and prisons could not be built fast enough to accommodate the unfit and the criminal. Meanwhile, the vast tracts of grain-growing Canada, where a reinvigorated race of Englishmen might have found unlimited elbow-room, had been largely annexed by astute speculators from the United States. The Canadians, unsupported, had found it impossible to hold their own. The State was too big for them. As far back as 1906, the remnant of the British Government garrison had said good-bye to Halifax; and the power and the glory had gone, too, with the once familiar uniform of Tommy Atkins.
At Quebec and Montreal, all the talk was of deals and dollars. The whole country had been steadily Americanised, and Sir Wilfred Laurier, when he went the ultimate way of all Premiers, was succeeded by office-holders who cared nothing for Imperial ties. For a time they were not keen about being absorbed by the United States, for that would mean loss of highly paid posts and political prestige. The march of events was too strong for them, and between the American and the British stools they were falling to the ground. It was bound to come, that final tumble. The force of things and the whirligig of time would bring in the assured revenges. The big fish swallows the little fish all the world over.
It was the programme of Socialism that had weakened the foundations of the British Empire and paved the way for the troublous times that followed. Cajoled by noisy agitators and the shallow arguments of Labour leaders and Socialists, the working man lost sight of the fact that his living[Pg 10] depended on working up raw material into manufactured goods, and thus earning a wage that enabled him to pay for food and shelter. The middle-class had proved not less supine. So long as Britannia ruled the waves, and the butcher and baker were in a position to supply the Briton's daily needs, all went well. But when a family could get only one loaf, instead of four; and two pounds of meat when it wanted five, it necessarily followed that a good many people grew hungry. Hungry people are apt to lose their tempers, their moral sense of right and wrong, and all those nice distinctions between meum et tuum on which the foundations of society so largely depend. Moral chaos becomes painfully accentuated when, as the result of a naval defeat and an incipient panic, the price of bread bounds up to eighteenpence per quartern loaf, with a near prospect of being unprocurable even for its weight in gold. All this had happened in these once favoured isles, because the masses, encouraged by self-seeking and parochially-minded leaders, had been more intent on making war upon the classes than on securing their subsistence through the agency of British shipping, protected by the British Navy at a height of power that could keep all other navies at a distance.
In olden time, when the earth was corrupt and filled with violence, the word came from on high: "Make thee an ark of gopher wood." And Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark, to the saving of his house. But while the ark was a-preparing, the people went about their business, marrying and giving in marriage, making small account of the shipbuilder and his craze. It had been pretty much the same in the twentieth century, when the British people were warned that another sort of flood was coming, and that they, too, would need an ark, of material considerably stronger than gopher wood. They refused to believe in the flood. But it came. It was bound to come.
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We fought, yes; when it came to the critical hour, we fought for dear life and liberty—fought hard, fought desperately, but under conditions that made comparative defeat inevitable. And the fight was for unequal stakes. To us it was an issue of life or death. To our foes it was an affair of wounds that would heal. The law of nations, the law of humanity, itself counted for nothing in that deadly and colossal struggle. Our merchant ships were sent to the bottom, crews and all. No advantage of strength or numbers served to inspire magnanimity. It was a fight, bloody, desperate, and remorseless for the sovereignty of the seas, a fight to the bitter end. And it was over, for all practical purposes, in a week. The British Government did not dare to maintain the struggle any longer. The Navy would have fought on till victory had been attained or every British warship had been sunk or disabled. The spirit of the service did credit to both officers and men, for much had been feared from disaffection. Socialism had crept into the fleet. Political cheapjacks with their leaflets and promises had sown discord between officers and men, and here and there had been clear indications of a mutinous spirit. But when it came to the pinch, one and all—officers, seamen, and stokers—had manfully done their duty. Where they were victorious, they were humane. When they were beaten, they faced the fortune of war, and death itself, with firmness and discipline. But all in vain as regards the general result. England's rulers for the time being, alarmed at the accumulating signs of a crumbling empire, daunted by the popular disturbances that broke out in London and the provinces, made all haste to negotiate such terms of peace, and agreed to such an indemnity that the dust of Nelson, and of Pitt, may well have shivered in their graves. Peace, peace at any price! was the cry. Peace now, lest a worse thing happen through a continuance of the struggle. Germany, however, would not have stayed her hand,[Pg 12] and England would have become a conscript province, but for the daring feat of a little band of Englishmen. Six of them, in the best equipped air-ship that money could buy, by means of bombs almost entirely destroyed the enormous works of Messrs. Krupp at Essen. By this means Germany's resources were so gravely prejudiced that it suited her to stay her hand for the time being. Out of this act of retaliation sprang the famous Air-Ship Convention, of which the outcome will appear presently.
During these dire events the women had votes, and many of them had seats in Parliament. Their sex was dominant. They heard the cry of the children. The men heard the lamentations of the women, and were unmanned.
Thus was Great Britain reduced to the level of a third-rate Power—a downfall not without precedent in the history of the world's great empires. But sadder even than the accomplished downfall was the fact that vast numbers of Britons had grown used to the situation, had so lost the patriotic spirit and fibre of their forefathers that the loss of race-dominance and of the mighty influence of good which Empire had sustained, seemed to them of little moment compared with their immediate individual advantage and petty personal interests.