OBSTINACY OR FIRMNESS?
WE have no sympathy with Russia under her present system of administration. That a great, and in many respects admirable, white people, professing and really reverencing the Christian faith, though in an ignorant and bigoted way, should live under the liability to be transported without trial, at the will of officials who are often corrupt, to toil for indefinite periods as slaves in the Arctic zone, seems to us a monstrous denial of justice. That the subordinates of a civilised Government should be allowed to condone, or even, if we may believe their enemies, to instigate, massacres like those of Blagovestchensk, Kisheneff, Baku, and St. Petersburg on January 22nd, and should escape all punishment, or be even repaid with honours, appears to us to justify, if anything canjustify, a condemnation as terrible as the one passed by Mr. Gladstone upon the rule of the later Bourbons in the Neapolitan kingdom. It is, as he said, " the negation of God erected into a system." Nevertheless, Englishmen are bound to be just even when they condemn, and there are points at which, in their natural indignation at monstrous evils, the English when treating of Russian affairs cease to be just. They hate, and perhaps also dread, her system of absorbing provinces, and forget too completely her permanent provocation. If England, like Russia, were shut out inexorably from the broad waters of the world, her people would fight for a hundred years ; and the rights of intervening populations would seem to them merely objections overridden by imperative necessities, and what their orators in prose and verse would describe as the March of Destiny, and believe to be somehow in accordance with Providential arrangements.
Had the English reigned in Russia, they would, if we understand their history and their impulses, have included Hammerfest and Constantinople within their dominion a hundred years ago. They wince, quite rightly, at the treatment of the Reservists who are driven into the trains to fight in Manchuria; for fifteen years at least they did not wince when all round our coasts every seafaring man—and the description had a wide definition—was liable to be seized, flung senseless into a boat, and sent to fight for years under a discipline then almost savage. " His Majesty's ships must have men," it was said, and in presence of that necessity the doings of the press- gangs must be condoned. We condemn the Czar for not " arresting slaughter " and for permitting repression, and nevertheless extol the heroic firmness of Pitt, who, rather than make a dangerous, and as he thought dishonourable, peace, heaped up taxes, suspended the Habeas Corpus Act, and bribed half Europe to fight by his side against Napoleon. We sympathise strongly with Japan in this war ; but we confess to an occasional feeling of reluctant admiration for the man who, sitting in a secluded palace, doubtful if there are not assassins even within it, with half his Ministers, and perhaps two-thirds of his people, opposed to the continuance of the war, with the torches of revolution blazing in his provinces, and he himself mis- trustful of his own adequacy to deal with so terrible a crisis, still refuses to yield, still trusts that Providence may relent, still believes that if he perseveres humiliation for himself, his dynasty, and his people may be avoided. He is told that he has lost the command of the waters in the Far East; and he replies by sending yet another fleet to the other side of the world, and, to the surprise of maritime mankind, it arrives there. He is warned that his army can- not, hope to defeat the Japanese ; and he answers by sending men, supplies, munitions, in endless sequence, though he is probably not only aware that they will not be sufficient, but knows that in sending them away he is begetting hope in every rebellious province. It is all obstinacy, people say, and that may be the truth ; but what would be the judgment of history if, per impossibile, Nicholas II. won ? Would he be condemned for stubbornness, or praised as
the man who was more resolute than his whole people,
and so far-sighted that he saw hope even amidst defeats which never ended ? One praises the Romans who sold the ground upon which a foreign victor stood; and why scorn the Russians ? The Czar has not, be it recollected, had one hour of victory to cheer his thoughts ; he has probably not even one clear source of confidence ; and yet he struggles on.
We hope, though our hope is not strong, that this war will help to drive out of the minds of statesmen as well as nations the superstition that in future wars will be short, and that peace, being always acceptable, can always be made. If ever there was a war which should have been short, it is this one. The objects of the war are not vital to the defeated side, which can wait for its road to free water as it has waited since in the tenth century Igor made his spring on Constantinople. Russia will be Russia still, even should the Mikado reign, whether directly or through his giant vassal, from the North Pacific to the Khingan Mountains. There have been no foreign compli- cations, nor has any Power made it a condition of its friendship that the war should go on. There have been no alternations of victory and defeat such as often protract war by perpetually reviving hope and fear. Above all, there has been no popular clamour on either side, or, if any, it has tended rather to bring the war to a close. Yet active operations are still going on after a campaign of fourteen months, and it is quite possible that, in a more languid way, the war may last for years. We fear that Moltke's opinion, that in future wars would be carried on till the nations grew pallid, is better founded than the more hopeful one. The consequences of defeat are now worse than they ever were for both rulers and nations. The latter are taxed for genera- tions to pay indemnities so large that their grandfathers would have pronounced them impossible, and the former lose their thrones, or the power which made those thrones valuable in their eyes. The demand for tribute— for that is what it comes to—makes Governments think that " more war " would, at any rate, be cheaper; while the old. attachment between Princes and people, which made it possible for the first Emperor of Austria to go back to Vienna a much-beaten yet popular man, has been undermined by modern ideas. Napoleon III. lost his throne at Sedan ; we doubt if even William H. could re-enter Berlin to reign as be does now after a great defeat ; and the Romanoffs know that autocracy and victory are for them inextricably linked together. Naturally the dynasties, or the Republican chiefs, think the prosperity of their nations bound up in their systems, and thus every motive, selfish and unselfish, combines to develop that dourness, that incapacity of yielding while there is a resource left, which is the real cause of the protraction of wars. Better, the dynasts and the populace think, be bled to fainting than be extinguished or ruined. by a " shameful" peace. It is easy to say, and quite true besides, that the adoption of the conscription, the immense cost of supplying such enormous armies in the field, and the endless waste of projectiles so increase the losses of modern war as to make peace the greatest of economic boons ; but it takes years for the losses in men to daunt a fighting nation, and while the lands yield their increase wars are not stopped by the impossibility of procuring either supplies or muni- tions. The statesman who goes to war to-day stakes his Government and the prosperity of his country upon the issue, and has need not only of courage, but of the firm- ness under a prospect of ruin which Nicholas IL is now displaying, and in all human probability displaying in vain. The wars of the next generation or two will not be campaigns, but will be fought to a finish ; and the man who engages in one, unless he is defending either the honour or the independence of his people, deserves no reputation either for vigour or for sense. His country may win, but it may also be bled almost to death, certainly into a fainting fit.
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