The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎580r] (50/239)

AUTOCRACY AND WAR.
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is with us now ; and, whether this one ends soon or late, war will
be with us again. And it is the way of true wisdom for men and
States to take account of things as they are.
Civilisation has done its little best by our sensibilities for whose
growth it is responsible. It has managed to remove the sights and
sounds of battlefields away from our doorsteps. But it cannot be
expected to achieve the feat always and under every variety of cir
cumstance. Some day it must fail. Then we shall have a wealth of
appallingly unpleasant sensations brought home to us with painful
intimacy, while the apostles of war’s sanctity will crawl away
swiftly into the holes where they belong, somewhere in the yellow
basements of newspaper offices. It is not absurd to suppose that
whatever war comes to us next it will not be a distant war of
revanche waged by Russia either beyond the Amur or beyond the
Oxus.
The Japanese armies have laid that ghost for many a year.
They have laid it for ever, because the Russia of the future will
not, for the reasons explained above, be the Russia of to-day. It
will have not the same thoughts, resentments, or aims. It is even
a question whether it will preserve its gigantic frame unaltered
and unbroken. All speculation loses itself in the magnitude of the
events made possible by the defeat of an Autocracy whose only
shadow of a title to existence was the invincible power of military
conquest. That it will have a miserable end in harmony with its
base origin and inglorious life does not seem open to doubt. The
problem of the immediate future is posed not by the eventual
manner but by the approaching fact of its disappearance.
The Japanese armies, in laying the oppressive ghost, have not
only accomplished what will be recognised historically as an im
portant mission in the world’s struggle against all forms of evil,
they have also created a situation. They have created a situation
in the East which they are competent to manage by themselves;
and in doing this they have brought about a change in the con
dition of the West with which Europe is not well prepared to deal.
The common ground of concord, good faith and justice is not
sufficient to establish an action upon ; since the conscience of but
very few men amongst us, and that of no single Western nation
as yet, will brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the
fascination of a material advantage. And eagle-eyed wisdom alone
cannot take the lead of human action, which in its nature must for
ever remain short-sighted. The trouble of the civilised world is
the want of a common conservative principle abstract enough to
give the impulse, practical enough to form the rallying point of
international action tending towards the restraint of particular
ambitions. Peace tribunals instituted for the greater glory of war
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