T HE dreams of men of science are always interesting, especially
to Englishmen, who love dreams, but insist that they shall have some sort of apparent con- nection with facts. They will accept insufficient evidence, as they are now doing about the potentialities of radium, but they want a bit of that evidence to be tangible, visible, or audible. We do not know how many people will read Mr. Mackinder's lecture to the Geographical Society on "The Geographical Pivot of History," published in the Times of Tuesday, but of those who do read we doubt if any one will pronounce it dull. It involves results which are too great for that. Mr. Mackinder thinks that the pivotal area of the world is Northern Asia, or, as he calls it, Euro-Asia, stretching from the Urals to the North Pacific, and now in process of occupation by Russia, an Empire which, he believes, will not break up. It was from thence that half the barbarians came who subjugated and revivified the Roman world, and from thence that the Mongol hordes conquered China, India, and Russia. This region with its vast spaces will, he conceives, be shortly occupied by Russians, who will gain by the multiplication of railways those means of rapid locomotion which the earlier Mongols possessed in their unrivalled control of horse and camel power, through which they twice nearly conquered the world. They will replace the men of the steppe. It is true that this pivotal section of the world, with its strange seclusion owing to its want of gulfs and rivers, is surrounded with a periphery of great States, such as China, India, and Turkey—he might have added Arabia— supported or guided by an outer circle of States like Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, and Japan ; but the pivotal State would hold the inner side of the circle, and might press—as, indeed, it is doing—on every neigh- bour from Norway to Japan. This pressure, Mr. Mackinder evidently thinks, may in the end be successful. The resisting Powers would be maritime Powers; but in Mr. Mackinder's judgment, the cost of transport by sea and of transport by land tends to become equal, the shipper by sea having to pay certain charges which the shipper by land can avoid, and the pivotal State may become the central State for commerce. With the wealth thus accumulated vast fleets could be built, and then the pivotal State, assisted, Mr. Mackinder suggests, by Germany, might master the entire world, realise, that is, the secret dream of every conqueror, from Alexander to Napoleon. The pivotal State would be slow from its awful mass, but it would be irresistible.
It is an interesting dream, especially at a moment when we are witnessing a great effort on the part of Russia to possess herself of the remainder of Northern Asia, but it is, we think, a dream merely. To begin with, we doubt the commercial value of Northern Asia. To make that vast region, with its usually rigorous climate and great intervals of desert, really worth having as a new source of national strength, and not a, mere burden, such as Algeria is to France, it must be thickly populated with industrials; and where are they to come from ? If China, with her teeming millions of the most industrious folk in the world, and her terrible pressure from over-population, could not in a thou- sand years populate and cultivate Northern Asia, how should the Russians, with their much greater tendency to perish of hardship, be able to accomplish the task ? If they did, they would probably become, like the Chinese and the people of South Russia, a peaceful and comfort-loving population, very reluctant to serve as soldiers, and like the people of Odessa at this moment, disposed to con- sider first of all the cost of every great warlike enterprise. We say nothing of the question whether a great and wealthy pivotal State would be prepared to bear the per- petual strain involved in the effort to subjugate the vast periphery of States which, once the object was revealed, would exhaust themselves in the effort so to resist it that it would be abandoned in despair. But we do not believe in Mr. Mackinder's first datum, that a great and wealthy pivotal State can be formed in Northern Asia, the history of which is a record of successive abandonments by its inhabitants. No doubt when they abandoned it their movements were marches in arms, and they achieved over the weaker and more luxurious peoples of the East and South some great successes, while they taxed to the utmost the martial strength of the West; but they died or they settled ; at all events, they never went back again, thus breaking up the unity which Mr. Mackinder must, though he does not specially mention it, presuppose as continuous. Nor can we believe in their accumulating wealth as the carrier State. Water, which costs nothing, has always hitherto proved the cheapest method of carriage. Mr. Mackinder forgets that when long stretches have to be crossed no multiplication of railways can reduce the total distance, and -that if transit by land improves, so does transit by sea. If the great cargo boats can ever be driven at fifty miles an hour, which is, as Stephenson argued, entirely within the limits of the possible, the sea will be a vast railway, costing nothing to build. At present, at least, the great effort of Russia to spread Eastwards has added nothing to her strength, but much to her profitless expenditure; and there are great military experts who believe that if she wins the prospective conflict and seats herself on the North Pacific, the first consequence will be increased weakness, because she will, like Germany, have to defend herself on two frontiers at once, and will have roused as a permanent factor in the way of her pro- gress the jealousy of the United States. The resistance of America to Russian expansion Eastwards does not arise from any fad of Mr. Roosevelt's, but is the result of a thoughtful forecast among the ruling men of the Union, who perceive that an open market in China is essential to the development and the prosperity of all their States 'which border on the Pacific Ocean. Add the increased. hostility and wariness of every Asiatic neighbour, and we may fairly doubt whether the position of pivotal State will add very greatly to her strength. Pivots suffer from attrition.
We say these things because we know that many readers of Mr. Mackinder's paper will ask for an answer to his arguments; but in reality there is a better reply, which most of them probably have made instinctively for themselves. His view is one of many prophecies, and in no political prophecy is there much value. Some new factor always comes in to upset all calculations. Russia, for instance, no more expected to find in Japan a great resisting force to her onward march than to find one in Java or Samoa. It will take a century at least for the pivotal State to conquer and civilise and fill Northern Asia, and no one knows what by the end of that time will be the position of her alarmed and jealous neighbours. Japan, with her forty millions, may be as strong as Great Britain. China, with her four hundred, may be found to have been asleep, and not, as the Russian' poet Poushkine sang, "in dotage buried." Australia may have fifty millions of people, all devoted to the freedom of the North Pacific. India may be stronger far than even the "pivotal State." The English-speaking peoples may be two hundred millions of men all bound in close alliance, and too strong to be defied even by the rulers of all Asia. And finally, the ruling races of mankind' may have determined to avoid the slaughter, and the destruction, and, above all, the strain, caused by incessant wars; may have resolved, with the kind of resolve which is executive, that there shall be peace for a few generations, so that the human race may try whether its lot cannot by science and industry and wisdom be permanently amelio- rated. No one of these speculations may prove true; but they have all as much basis as Mr. Mackinder's, and no one of them involves a change half so wonderful as the rise of an Asiatic island-State to the present position of Japan.
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