THE DAY OF THE SAXON.*
MR. HOMER LEA. has followed up his striking book The Valor of Ignorance with a detailed study of the present strategic position of the British, or as he calls it the Saxon, Empire, and the dangers which threaten its continuance. At the same time he discusses "the possibilities of bringing
about a militant renascence of the Saxon race before its day is done." He starts with certain assumptions which he states very candidly and fairly. He is no believer in the sanctity of democratic government. The masses in his view are prone to short and feverish views, and statesmanship consists rather in disregarding than in following their prejudices. Like Machiavelli, he considers that the law that governs international relations must always be the " law of the beasts," the use of tooth and claw in the struggle for survival. He thinks that the two worst of modern delusions are those of universal peace and the delimitation of national boundaries. "All national frontiers are subjeat to constant fluctuation, and must be for ever shrinking or expanding. They can no more remain delimited than the coast-line of oceans."
With such a philosophy as his basis he casts his eye over the nations and appraises their future. The book, like its pre- decessor, is brilliantly but irritatingly written. There is far too much pompous enunciation of principles, some of them truisms, many highly controversial. There is too much pseudo- scientific talk about "angles of convergence," &c., which is only to Tut the argument into a less intelligible form. Mr. Lea, we understand, acted as military adviser to Sun Yat-sen, so we can excuse.many imperfections when we consider the condi- tions of the writing. Chapters " finished upon a recent field of battle" may well be a little hurried. But no such excuse explains the terribly gnomic and apocalyptic manner of much of the book. An incisive passage is often marred by some por- tentous platitude delivered with desperate solemnity in a separate paragraph. Yet the book is very remarkable, when all deduction has been made. It is full of brilliant and aoute sentences. Here are a few :—
"To such a degree has the mobility of races advanced . . . that in all countries rich in natural resources but deficient in in- habitants the future population consists, not of the descendants of the first inhabitants, but of those nationalities whose source of supply is most abundant and whose mobility is greatest."
"Nations never advance to their doom. They retreat to it."
"Individual strife is the epitome of selfishness ; war a gigantic altruism."
" The sources of war are constant and immutable, differing only in the viewpoint of the observer, while the apparent and pre- cipitating causes are no more than ephemeral, coming and going from time to time, as is the fluttering of smoke over some crater- top. Yet it is upon this coming and going of the immaterial that the false doctrine of arbitration is based."
There is much fustian in Mr. Lea's style, but it is capable of great picturesqueness, and it has its moments of high anli rare
eloquence. He draws a gloomy picture of our condition, but
his good-will is obvious, and there is no question about the earnestness of his appeal. We have gone to sleep, he tells us, upon a peaceful earth, and are awaking upon a savage dawn to find it a place of strife:— "As we contemplate the Saxon armies of less than half a million men, scattered round the world on the never-ending circle under the pretence of guarding against twice ten million men, there is recalled to us a similar scene that one may look upon from the northern slopes of the Wu Tai mountains, where the old wall of China stretches like the British wall over dominions it can no longer defend. Over mountain chains, through deserts, across rivers, around principalities and states it goes on and on, until one would almost imagine that there was neither end nor beginning to it. Bat, alas ! the end of the wall is there ; there at every point upon which the eye rests. It is no longer a wall : it is a monument."
After having been supreme for more than a century the British Empire, in Mr. Lea's opinion, is face to face with four Powers, each better qualified to wrest the supremacy from us than we were qualified from the middle of the six- teenth to the end of the eighteenth century to wrest it from Portugal, Spain, Holland, and France. We cannot count the United States as other than a foreign Power, for with each decade they are drawing further away from their Saxon origin. At the same time they have a real interest in the preservation of the British Empire, in which their security lies rather than in any Monroe Doctrine. To Mr. Lea India is the true centre of gravity of
• The Day of the Saxon. By Homer Lea. London: Harper and Brothers. [7a. ed. net.]
the British Power. Its loss would mean a gap in the circle of our dominion so vast that the broken ends could never be joined again. The true frontier of India, he thinks, is Asia Minor in the west and the Malay Peninsula in the east, and the expansion to these natural frontiers is made necessary by mili- tary and economic reasons, by the increase of population, and by the territorial expansion of other Powers. This does not mean any definite annexations, but it means that with safety to India Russia cannot be allowed to pass the line Kabul- Teheran or Germany the line Port Said-Teheran. Turning to the Pacific, he finds that the security of Australasia rests alone upon the continuance of the Empire, and therefore that the first principle of Australasian defence is the defence of India. Her defence is naval, the strength of it being determined by the maximum naval capacity of the strongest Power capable of attack, i.e., Japan. This degree of naval strength is possible only to a unified British Empire. With regard to Russia, he thinks that the issue of the Japanese War was a danger of the first magnitude to our Empire. When Japan forced her back from the North Pacific she hurled her on India. His conclusion is that there are three nations which must sooner or later be forced into a coalition against the British Empire—Japan, Russia, and Germany. Our dismemberment would give Japan the predominance in the Pacific Ocean, Russia the Southern Asian continent, and Germany the supremacy in Southern and Western Europe, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
Mr. Lea proceeds to lay down what be considers the root principles of British defence. One is that " the security of an insular Empire is determined not by the defence of its own shores, but by the control of the coasts encom- passing the sea in which it is situated." A second is that sea-power is not to be measured by ships of war only, but by the ability to prevent the maritime supremacy of the adjacent continental Power, and that ability is rather military than naval. Thus, in a war between an insular and a continental Power, "a superior navy, plus a relative equality of land forces, constitutes the true proportion of the two arms." The only objective of war is to destroy the enemy's capacity to wage it, and this demands adequate military force. A naval defeat of an insular by a continental Power means the destruction of the insular Power, but the defeat of the continental Power only restores the status gun ante. This was seen in the Russo-Japanese War. Jape], could never have won merely by destroying the Russian navy. " The command of the sea means, not the sea, but the nations situated on its shores." A war with Russia or Germany waged only by sea would be a fight between a wolf and a shark. Even if we stopped, for example, Russia's oceanic trade, we would merely deprive ourselves of food-stuffs and raw ma,terial. Two-thirds of Russian imports and exports are by land frontiers. The insular character of our Empire instead of being a safeguard is its greatest danger. We can only insure safety by controlling two strategic spheres in Europe—the Mediterranean, and the northern sphere, which includes in case of war military control over Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium. If Britain is to prepare against the future, she must be awake to the real theatre of probable war, and she must be prepared at all costa to recognize the strategic significance of such neighbouring States as Persia and Afghanistan, Denmark and Holland. The Empire must be made politically cohesive and militarily one unit. We must have universal service throughout the Empire, and all our armies must be organized on the basis of expeditionary forces.
We have preferred to state Mr. Lea's argument rather than to criticise it. It bristles with contentious points. The pacifist will, of course, deny the value of the supremacy for which so much is to be sacrificed. The democrat will be scandalized by his apparent glorification of a military bureau- cracy. Some of the special prophecies must seem a little fantastic, and there will be considerable difference of opinion on many of the strategical views. But, when all is said, there is a great deal of sound sense and timely warning. The book demands serious attention for its good-will, its earnestness, and its many penetrating comments. We have been drifting of late into a false conception of the meaning of naval power, and, if for nothing else than this, Mr. Lea's analysis should be deeply pondered by those responsible for our imperial security.
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