THE EASTERN MENACE.*
THE author of this book is an excellent representative of the Jingo school. He is an able man ; he is well read ; he is a vigorous writer ; and though he does not shrink from using strong language against his political opponents, he never in- dulges in personal abuse. Moreover, he never beats about the bush. He says straight out what lie means, and the result is a very plain and frank exposition of the policy which predominated in the counsels of Lord Beaconsfield's Government, though that Government had not the courage to give full effect to the aspirations of the more belligerent members of the Cabinet. If, however, the country had given a substantial majority to Lord Beaconsfield at the General Election, there can now be little doubt that the Jingo programme would have been carried out with tolerable completeness. In no other way can the late Government's change of front on the question of Afghanistan be explained. Their avowed object in that war was to make Afghanistan " strong, friendly, and independent ;" and neither before nor after the murder of Cavagnari did they breathe a hint of any intention to annex Candahar ; on the contrary, they favoured the belief that Candahar was to be abandoned. But no sooner did they find themselves in Opposition than they began to denounce the policy which they had in office proclaimed as their own. The evacuation of Candahar, which they had previously included in their own- programme, was now stigmatised by their chief as a policy of " scuttling out of Afghanistan," and a tame " surrender of the objects of the war " ; and Lord Beaconsfield plainly intimated, in his last speech in Parliament, that the independence or Afghanistan was no longer recognised in his policy. The real aim of his policy was revealed in the Secret Minute of Lord Lytton (published by Lord Hartiugton), which recommended not only the annexation of Candahar, but the practical annexa- tion of the whole of Afghanistan up to the Hindu Kush. Colonel Cory, with the natural frankness of a soldier, is indignant at the halting manner in which Lord Beaconsfield's Government carried out their own real, though unavowed policy. That policy is unveiled without disguise, in his own pages ; and we recommend everybody to read them who wishes- to know the serious peril from which the nation was saved by the expulsion from office of the most adventurous and at the same time the most incompetent Ministry of this century.
Colonel Cory's policy may well deserve the name of "thorough." He begins by arguing that the relation of the nations of the world towards each other must be one of chronic war, qualified by intervals of peace to enable the combatants to recruit their energies and replenish their resources for renewing the conflict. " Common-sense would serve to show that, par- ticularly at this juncture, the great object of a prudent nation should be rather to gain strength to wage war successfully than to seek to avoid the unavoidable." From this view of the matter the transition is easy to the propo- • The Eastern Menace. By Colonel Arthur Cory. London : Began Paul and Co.
sition that war is not an unmixed evil ; and the author does not shrink from that conclusion. " If war be thus inevitable," he says, " should we not suspect " a fallacy in the prevailing idea that it is an unmixed evil ?" The logic of this is not obvious, unless the author means that the inevitable can never he an unmixed evil. Cholera is the inevitable result of certain violations of sanitary laws ; but sane men have hitherto believed that it is not the part of wisdom to acquiesce in the periodical devastations of cholera, but rather to discover its causes, with a view to counteract them. No doubt, good sometimes follows in the wake of war, just as good may result from a conflagration, or even from the cholera. The conflagra- tion which destroys innocent lives may also destroy noxious weeds and dens of vice, and the cholera which desolates happy homes may call forth examples of heroic self-sacrifice. But the conflagration and the cholera are, nevertheless, nothing in them- selves but unmixed evils. It is not with the author's logic, however, that we are now concerned, but with his exposition of Jingo policy ; and that policy he candidly rests on " the good old rule, the simple plan," of appropriating your neighbours' property ad libitum, whenever it suits your convenience to do so. The huge wealth of Great Britain has been accumu- lated, " often by force, not nnseldom by fraud," and the author argues that the means which collected this wealth may be used legitimately in retaining or increasing it. Mankind is prone, says our author, and British mankind in particular, "to pursue and to slay." The Army, is therefore, " the noblest service in the world," and "rotund divines, sleek in broad-cloth, and easy in study arm-chairs," are sneered at for objecting to the "ruin of a thousand housemaids," through the contiguity of soldiers' barracks. The author, in short, regards the human race, civilised and uncivilised alike, as a vast collection of freebooters, scattered over the earth in hostile camps, and only restrained from preying on each other by the single motive of fear. The stronger nations prey upon the weaker, with as little compunc- tion as ravenous quadrupeds. "If any one nation be conspicuous for possessing in its single grasp as much wealth as that held by all the rest of the world put together, then its strength must be commensurate with its possessions, or there can be no escape from the conclusion that, whenever and wherever possible," there will be an attack made on that nation by the others. England is, according to our author, in this enviable, but perilous, con- dition; and the predatory Powers which are at present long- ing and preparing to devour it are America and Russia, each of which "is, advantageously for itself, based on our line of com- munication,—the one with India, the other with Canada. Both, moreover, have a direct and most tempting advantage held out, in the prospect of disaster to us, in the shape of an enormous increase of wealthy territory to itself."
The author regards India as the great, and apparently in- exhaustible, mine of British wealth ; and he thinks that the great Powers of Europe, and Russia in particular, are consumed with the desire of supplanting us in our Eastern El Dorado. We ought, therefore, to protect our coveted wealth with a force sufficient to repel any attack that either a single Power, or any combination of Powers, may chance to make upon us. Our wealth, he affirms, is equal to the task of providing for such a force ; and we have men in abundance, and also " the best arms in the world." We must, therefore, raise and maintain an Army whose permanent home will be in India, and this force ought to be " a local British force." That is the first measure of defence recommended by the author. " The other is to take possession of a line of communication with India, the shortest and most easily defensible." Considerations of morality, it will be observed, are simply passed by as irrelevant ; and quite consistently, from the author's point of view. He acknowledges no law in the mutual relations of nations but the law of physical force. Great Britain is to seize by the law of the strongest whatever territory it deems necessary or useful for resisting any kind of attack. The author accordingly sneers at " those imaginary lines of demarcation which men profess to trace out between nation and nation, state and state, and call frontiers, fencing them in with treaties more perishable in their obligations than the frail materials on which they are recorded."
We have no intention of discussing the morality of the policy which Colonel Cory recommends so vehemently ; but it is clear that he has never taken the trouble to count its cost. That question cannot be put aside cavalierly, by denouncing " the universal craze for economy ;" and the simple fact is that the Jingo policy, completely carried out, would be as ruinous as
a successful invasion of India. Sir G. Cornewall Lewis ex- plained this to Lord Palmerston, in a very able defence of the thesis that prevention was not, politically, always better than cure. The system of universal insurance, he showed, did not answer commercially. A merchant who had a fleet of ships found it cheaper to insure none than to insure all. And so, politically, a nation which had possessions all over the globe could not afford to insure at every point. It was safer to run some risk than to make a venture which would be financially ruinous and politically a failure. Colonel Cory confines his argument chiefly to insurance against danger to our Indian possessions. But if the Great Powers of Europe, as well as America, are waiting for an opportunity for robbing us of our. wealth, we should require to encase ourselves in an impenetrable panoply against our nearest neighbour, France. When closely examined, the policy is seen to be a portentous folly. Yet it was un- doubtedly the dominant policy in the Cabinet of Lord Beacons- field, and both Lord Beaconsfield himself and Lord Salisbury committed themselves to it on more than one occasion, though not in so naked and open a manner as Colonel Cory. Lord Salisbury declared on one occasion that England must continue to advance in a policy of annexation ; since not to advance was necessarily to decline. And in his famous Manchester speech he claimed as boldly as Colonel Cory the right to seize what- ever territory he deemed useful for safeguarding India. We are still unfortunately paying the legacy of expenditure be- queathed from the Jingo policy of the late Government ; but serious as that is, it is probably but a flea-bite in comparison with the obligations which six or more years of Jingo rule would have imposed upon us. And it is because Colonel Cory brings that fact vividly before us that we have thought his book deserving of some notice at our hands.
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