The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎600r] (90/239)

HOW IT STRUCK A CONTEMPORARY.
59
The warning which France had in the Austrian campaign of 1866
was duly given to Russia in the Japanese and Chinese war of 1895,
and went similarly unheeded. Historical experience seems, in
deed, to count for nothing in the business of international states
manship. Looking round the world at the present time, one can
but ask rather anxiously whether there is any other ferment going
on, any other statesman or nation working silently towards an
unexpected crisis which is similarly hidden from the eyes of
contemporaries.
That is too difficult a speculation to enter upon at the fag-end
of this article, but let me add, to prevent misunderstanding, that
the object of this analysis is not to encourage scepticism about the
part which statesmen and statesmanship play in the world. I can
imagine someone asking why, if the wisest of men are thus shown
to have walked in darkness about the most conspicuous affairs, we
should not close our Foreign Offices and let the inscrutable forces
which determine human destiny carry us whither they will. The
answer is twofold : first, that if some statesmen appear to be blind,
others are seen shaping events with indomitable will and courage,
and bringing great movements to their predetermined issue;
secondly, that though the errors of statesmen are conspicuously re
corded in history, they generally get less credit than is their due for
the avoidance of disasters which might have happened but for their
foresight and prudence. If historians recorded not only what
happened, but what might have happened but for the saving hand
at critical moments, some reputations, now rather low, would be
handsomely re-established. Lord Salisbury himself certainly
would not lose by this negative estimate. But when all is said,
the history of the last forty years does reveal repeated failures to
perceive what a subsequent judgment declares to have been the
obvious course of events. Some of these failures might, one would
suppose, have been averted by mere mechanical precautions, such
as the existence of efficient intelligence departments, and the habit
of diligently digesting their reports, but others, and the more im
portant, are failures in the judgment of human nature, failures to
appraise the value of moral causes, and of the hopes, ambitions,
and ideals which govern men of other races. We are, perhaps, in
rather special need of being reminded of this source of error at a
time when nations are peculiarly in the habit of weighing each
other according to the number of men they can put in the field
or the number of ships they can launch against a possible enemy.
J. A. Spender.