The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  His nonchalance and languid air covered an immense capacity for work. Besides leading the Government in the House of Commons he frequently doubled for his uncle at the Foreign Office. When in 1902 Salisbury retired, Lord Esher felt that his absence would be made up by “the supreme energy of Arthur.” To conserve energy Balfour transacted as much business as possible in bed and rarely rose before noon.

  He read incessantly: a book on science was propped open on the mantelpiece while he dressed, a detective story lay on his bedside table, the shelves of his private sitting room were stacked with volumes of philosophy and theology, the overflow was piled on the sofa, periodicals littered table and chairs and his sponge was used to support the reading of French novels in his bathtub. He never read the newspapers. Overnight guests found he did not even subscribe to them, a negligence for which he was scolded by Mr. Buckle, editor of The Times. Once the journalist, W. T. Stead, in conversation with the Prince of Wales, remarked that Balfour was a good man to have at one’s back in a fight but he was a little too indifferent. “Ah,” replied the Prince, nodding, “he never reads the papers, you know.”

  The Prince never cared for Balfour, who, he felt, condescended to him. Queen Victoria on the other hand admired him. On a visit to Balmoral, reported Sir Henry Ponsonby, Balfour discussed matters with the Queen, “showing where he differs from her in a way which makes her think it over.… I think the Queen likes him but is a little afraid of him.” The younger Ponsonby considered him a great success with the Queen, “although he never seemed to treat her seriously.” The Queen set down her own opinion in 1896 after a talk with Balfour on Crete, Turkish horrors, the Sudan and the Education Bill. She was “much struck by Mr. Balfour’s extreme fairness, impartiality and large-mindedness. He sees all sides of a question, is wonderfully generous in his feelings toward others and very gentle and sweet-tempered.”

  The supremacy and security of that time had not long to endure, and Balfour had weaknesses which, as the century turned over into less indulgent years, were to become apparent. Including the weaknesses, he was in character and attributes the final flower of the patrician and of him might have been said what Proust’s housekeeper, Celeste, said on the death of her employer, “When one has known M. Proust everyone else seems vulgar.”

  Not since Rome had imperial dominion been flung as wide as Britain’s now. It extended over a quarter of the land surface of the world, and on June 22, 1897, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, its living evidence marched in splendid ranks to the Thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s. The occasion being designed to celebrate the imperial family under the British Crown, none of the foreign kings who had assisted at the Golden Jubilee in 1887 were this time invited. In their place, carriages of state carried the eleven colonial premiers of Canada, New Zealand, the Cape Colony, Natal, Newfoundland and the six states of Australia. In the parade rode cavalry from every quarter of the globe: the Cape Mounted Rifles, the Canadian Hussars, the New South Wales Lancers, the Trinidad Light Horse, the magnificent turbaned and bearded Lancers of Khapurthala, Badnagar and other Indian states, the Zaptichs of Cyprus in tasseled fezzes on black-maned ponies. Dark-skinned infantry regiments, “terrible and beautiful to behold,” in the words of a rhapsodic press, swung down the streets in a fantasy of variegated uniforms: the Borneo Dyak Police, the Jamaica Artillery, the Royal Nigerian Constabulary, giant Sikhs from India, Houssas from the Gold Coast, Chinese from Hong Kong, Malays from Singapore, Negroes from the West Indies, British Guiana and Sierra Leone; company after company passed before a dazzled people, awestruck at the testimony of their own might. At the end of the procession in an open state landau drawn by eight cream horses came the day’s central figure, a tiny person in black with cream-colored feathers nodding from her bonnet. The sun shone, bright banners rippled in the breeze, lampposts were decked in flowers and along six miles of streets millions of happy people cheered and waved in an ecstasy of love and pride. “No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given me,” wrote the Queen in her Journal. “Every face seemed to be filled with real joy. I was much moved and gratified.”

  Already for some months there had been an aura of self-congratulation in the air, “a certain optimism,” said Rudyard Kipling, “that scared me.” It moved him to write, and on the morning after the parade the stern warning of “Recessional” appeared in The Times. Its impact was immense—“The greatest poem that has been written by any living man,” pronounced the distinguished jurist, Sir Edward Clarke. Yet however solemnly people took its admonition, how could they believe, as the ceremonies and salutes continued and top-hatted personages came and went to the Imperial Conference in Whitehall, that all this visible greatness was really “one with Nineveh and Tyre”?

  On October 11, 1899, a distant challenge, which had been growing stronger ever since the Jameson Raid, became explicit and the Boer War began. “Joe’s War,” Lord Salisbury called it in tribute to the aggressive role of the cuckoo in his nest, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary. Although he had started life as a Radical Liberal among men opposed on principle to imperialism, Mr. Chamberlain had since learned to “think imperially,” as he put it. It was a change of mind easily understood in a man with his keen sense of opportunity, for in the last twelve years alone, territories equal to twenty-four times the area of Great Britain had been added to the Empire. On joining the Government of 1895, Chamberlain had chosen the Colonial Office in the conviction that here was the key to empire and “manifest destiny,” a categorical imperative that was just then directing American eyes toward Cuba and Hawaii and stimulating Germans, Belgians, French, and even Italians, to join in the scramble for choice cuts of Africa.

  Chamberlain was a man of surpassing force, ability, and a consuming ambition which had never been satisfied. Not born to the landowning class, he had perfected an appearance of authority and poise that was distinctly his own. He had sharp, rather elegant features, eyes that revealed nothing and jet-black hair smoothly brushed. His face was a mask adorned by a monocle on a black ribbon; his tailoring was faultless, adorned by a daily orchid in his buttonhole. Having made sufficient fortune as a manufacturer of screws in Birmingham to retire from business at thirty-eight, he had become Mayor of his city, where his accomplishments in education and other social reforms had won national attention. Wasting no time, he had entered Parliament at forty as member for Birmingham, became a vehement spokesman of the Radicals, denouncing aristocrats and plutocrats as ardently as any Socialist, and quickly achieved Cabinet office as President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s Ministry of 1880. A hardhitting, cool and masterful character whose popularity in the Midlands swung many votes, he was a political factor to be reckoned with and saw himself as Gladstone’s successor. But the Grand Old Man was in no hurry to have one, and Chamberlain, too impatient to wait, found reason in the Home Rule issue to leave the party with a considerable following. In preparing for the election of 1895 the Conservatives were glad, if nervous, to attach him. He did not share the patrician’s indifference to public opinion, but in mannerisms and dress, played up to it, making himself a memorable personality. To the public he was “Pushful Joe” the “Minister for Empire” and the best-known figure in the new Government.

  Only Lord Salisbury remained unimpressed. “He has not persuaded himself that he has any convictions,” he had written to Balfour in 1886, “and therein lies Gladstone’s infinite superiority.” Balfour, characteristically, was kinder but plain. “Joe, though we all love him dearly,” he wrote to Lady Elcho, “somehow does not absolutely or completely mix, does not form a chemical combination with us.” This was not surprising. Chamberlain had not been to public school or the University (that is, Oxford or Cambridge), where, as Lord Esher remarked, “everyone with his capacity learns self-restraint,” and was not even a member of the Church of England. He nevertheless moved suavely among his new associates and was seen entertaining to tea on the terrace of the House of Commons a large party that included three duche
sses. He could certainly never be accused like Balfour of being too indifferent. Chamberlain was always in the grip of one passionate conviction or another which he would pursue, while he held it, with ruthless intensity. But he lacked a permanent, rooted point of view. Though only five years younger than Salisbury and twelve years older than Balfour, he represented the forces and methods of a new time to which Salisbury’s Government was essentially opposed. “The difference between Joe and me,” said Balfour, “is the difference between youth and age: I am age.” Balfour had behind him the long stability of belonging on top; Joe was the new tycoon in a hurry. The ways in which they did not “mix” were fundamental.

  For the present the collaboration between Chamberlain and his new colleagues was mutually loyal. When his hand was suspected behind the Jameson Raid and the Liberals made furious accusations, the Government closed ranks around him and a parliamentary committee of investigation found itself unable to trace anything definite back to the Colonial Office. Joe emerged with power undiminished and aggressiveness undimmed. “I don’t know which of our many enemies we ought to defy,” he wrote to Salisbury after the Kruger telegram, “but let us defy someone.” As the minister in charge of the increasingly inimical negotiations with the Boer Republic, his favorite method, reported Balfour to Salisbury, “is the free application of irritants.” While these were taking effect an old defeat was avenged: in 1898 Kitchener retook Khartoum and raised the British flag over the grave of General Gordon. Farther up the Nile, at Fashoda, a French military expedition penetrating the Sudan was confronted eye to eye by the British and, after a period of suspense during which the French recognized realities, withdrew without the firing of a shot. Britain’s unpopularity rose with her prestige.

  Then came the Boer War. The British Army, on which years of splendid isolation had conferred a certain rigidity, was revealed fully prepared for the Crimean War and it met a series of defeats. The Boers, it turned out, possessed cannon from Krupp’s and Creusot and their gunners were often German or French. President Kruger had used the reparations awarded for the Jameson Raid to buy artillery, Maxim guns and large stores of rifles and ammunition in preparation for the ultimate clash of arms. In one “Black Week” of December, 1899, Lord Methuen was defeated at Magersfontein, General Gatacre at Stormberg, and Sir Redvers Buller, the Commander-in-Chief, at Colenso with the loss of eleven guns, leaving Kimberley and Ladysmith invested. At home, people were stunned with unbelief. The Duke of Argyll, who was in his last illness, never rallied from the shock and died murmuring Tennyson’s line on the Duke of Wellington, “Who never lost an English gun.”

  With Black Week went the last time Britons felt themselves unquestionably masters of the earth. And the point was brought home when the Kaiser, a few months later, was able to insist successfully on a German commander for the expedition embarking to punish the Boxers at Peking. True, it was a largely German effort, the main British force being already on the spot, but Salisbury objected on principle. It was a British characteristic, even if unreasonable, he told the German Ambassador, “not to endure the command of a foreigner.” But he could not afford at that moment to court a conflict which might result in help for the Boers and was forced to acquiesce.

  In the new year, with new vigor, reinforcements and a new commander-in-chief to replace the disastrous Buller, the war gradually came under control. Mafeking was relieved in May, 1900—to the accompaniment of hysterics at home—Lord Roberts entered Pretoria in June and the annexation of the Transvaal was proclaimed on September 1 in the belief that only mopping-up was left. On a wave of renewed self-confidence and good spirits, the Conservatives called for a renewed mandate in what was known as the “Khaki” election in October. Using the slogan, “Every seat won by the Liberals is a seat won by the Boers,” they were comfortably returned to office. But though patriotic fervor was dominant, there was a current of antipathy to the war which came not only from “Little Englanders” of the orthodox Gladstone tradition but more particularly, this time, from an uneasy sense of ignoble motive, a glitter of the gold mines of the Rand, an aura of predatory capitalism, commercialism and profit. Opposition to the war provided a cause in which a young M.P., David Lloyd George, made himself known, although he did not go so far as to oppose annexation but only to propose negotiation to stop the war.

  There were many inside and outside the Government who awaited the approaching Twentieth Century with certain illusions lost which were never to be restored. Lady Salisbury, shortly before she died in November, 1899, said to a young relative, “The young generation may criticize us as they like; will they ever provide anything as good as what we have known?”

  The year 1900, rather than 1899, the Astronomer Royal had decided, after much weighing of the pros and cons, was the hundredth and last year of the Nineteenth Century. The moment of its passing was at hand; the end of the most hope-filled, change-filled, progressive, busiest and richest century the world had even known. Three weeks after it closed, on January 24, 1901, Queen Victoria died, redoubling the general sense of an era’s end. Lord Salisbury, tired of office, wanted to go too, but felt he could not until victory, still elusive in South Africa, was won. It came finally in June, 1902, and on July 14 Lord Salisbury stepped down. Again was felt the somber consciousness of something coming to an end: an Authority, a type, a tradition had departed. A French paper, Le Temps of Paris, still smarting from the humiliation of Fashoda, said, “What closes today with Lord Salisbury’s departure is a whole historic era. It is ironic that what he hands on is a democratized, imperialized, colonialized and vulgarized England—everything that is antithetic to the Toryism, the aristocratic tradition and the High Church that he stood for. It is the England of Mr. Chamberlain, not, despite his nominal leadership, of Mr. Balfour.”

  Queen Victoria, Lord Salisbury and the Nineteenth Century were gone. A year before she died, the Queen, returning on her yacht from a visit to Ireland, was disturbed by rough seas. After a particularly strong wave buffeted the ship, she summoned her doctor, who was in attendance, and said, in unconscious echo of a distant predecessor, “Go up at once, Sir James, and give the Admiral my compliments and tell him the thing must not occur again.”

  But the waves would not stand still.

  2

  The Idea and the Deed

  THE ANARCHISTS: 1890–1914

  2

  The Idea and the Deed

  SO ENCHANTING WAS the vision of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him, that six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914. They were President Carnot of France in 1894, Premier Canovas of Spain in 1897, Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, King Humbert of Italy in 1900, President McKinley of the United States in 1901, and another Premier of Spain, Canalejas, in 1912. Not one could qualify as a tyrant. Their deaths were the gestures of desperate or deluded men to call attention to the Anarchist idea.

  No single individual was the hero of the movement that swallowed up these lives. The Idea was its hero. It was, as a historian of revolt has called it, “a daydream of desperate romantics.” It had its theorists and thinkers, men of intellect, sincere and earnest, who loved humanity. It also had its tools, the little men whom misfortune or despair or the anger, degradation and hopelessness of poverty made susceptible to the Idea until they became possessed by it and were driven to act. These became the assassins. Between the two groups there was no contact. The thinkers in press and pamphlet constructed marvelous paper models of the Anarchist millennium; poured out tirades of hate and invective upon the ruling class and its despised ally, the bourgeoisie; issued trumpet calls for action, for a “propaganda of the deed” to accomplish the enemy’s overthrow. Whom were they calling? What deed were they asking for? They did not say precisely. Unknown to them, down in the lower depths of society lonely men were listening. They heard echoes of the tirade
s and the trumpets and caught a glimpse of the shining millennium that promised a life without hunger and without a boss. Suddenly one of them, with a sense of injury or a sense of mission, would rise up, go out and kill—and sacrifice his own life on the altar of the Idea.

  They came from the warrens of the poor, where hunger and dirt were king, where consumptives coughed and the air was thick with the smell of latrines, boiling cabbage and stale beer, where babies wailed and couples screamed in sudden quarrels, where roofs leaked and unmended windows let in the cold blasts of winter, where privacy was unimaginable, where men, women, grandparents and children lived together, eating, sleeping, fornicating, defecating, sickening and dying in one room, where a teakettle served as a wash boiler between meals, old boxes served as chairs, heaps of foul straw as beds, and boards propped across two crates as tables, where sometimes not all the children in a family could go out at one time because there were not enough clothes to go round, where decent families lived among drunkards, wife-beaters, thieves and prostitutes, where life was a seesaw of unemployment and endless toil, where a cigar-maker and his wife earning 13 cents an hour worked seventeen hours a day seven days a week to support themselves and three children, where death was the only exit and the only extravagance and the scraped savings of a lifetime would be squandered on a funeral coach with flowers and a parade of mourners to ensure against the anonymity and last ignominy of Potter’s Field.