of democracy and the threat of Socialism. Cartoons in newspapers pictured John Bull looking over a fence at a bull called Labour. Most people were aware of problems without seriously imagining any major change in the present order of things, but a few were deeply disturbed. Young Arthur Ponsonby saw every night along the embankment from Westminster to Waterloo Bridge the “squalid throng of homeless, wretched outcasts sleeping on the benches,” and broke with the courtier tradition of his father and brother to become a Socialist. Lady Warwick tried to smother nagging doubts about a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure in “recurrent fits of philanthropy” which she indulged in from “an impelling desire to help put things right and a deep conviction that things as they were, were not right.” In 1895, on reading an attack by the Socialist editor Robert Blatchford in his paper the Clarion on a great ball given at Warwick Castle to celebrate her husband’s accession to the title, she rushed in anger to London, leaving a house full of guests, to confront the enemy. She explained to him how during a hard winter when many were out of work the Warwick celebrations provided employment. Mr. Blatchford explained to his beautiful caller the nature of productive labour and the principles of Socialist theory. She returned to Warwick in a daze of new ideas and thereafter devoted her energy, money arid influence to propagating them, to the acute discomfort of her circle.
Lady Warwick was a straw, not a trend. As a nation, Britain in 1895 had an air of careless supremacy which galled her neighbors. The attitude, called “splendid isolation,” was both a state of mind and a fact. Britain did not worry seriously about potential enemies, felt no need of allies and had no friends. In a world in which other national energies were bursting old limits, this happy condition gave no great promise of permanence. On July 20, when Salisbury’s Government was less than a month old, it was suddenly and surprisingly challenged from an unexpected quarter, the United States. The affair concerned a long-disputed frontier between British Guiana and Venezuela. Claiming that the British were expanding territorially at their expense in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, the Venezuelans had been goading the United States to open that famous umbrella and insist on arbitration. Although the American President, Grover Cleveland, was a man of ordinarily sound judgment and common sense, his countrymen were in a mood of swelling self-assertion and, as Rudyard Kipling pointed out, for purposes of venting chauvinist sentiments, France had Germany, Britain had Russia, and America had Britain, the only feasible country “for the American public speaker to trample upon.” On July 20, Cleveland’s Secretary of State, Richard Olney, delivered a Note to Great Britain stating that disregard of the Monroe Doctrine would be “deemed an act of unfriendliness toward the United States,” whom he described in terms of not very veiled belligerence as “master of the situation and practically invulnerable against any and all comers.”
This was truly astonishing language for diplomatic usage; but it was deliberately provocative on Olney’s part, because, as he said, “in English eyes the United States was then so completely a negligible quantity” that he felt “only words the equivalent of blows would be effective.” Upon Lord Salisbury who was acting as his own Foreign Secretary they failed of effect. He was no more disposed to respond to this kind of prodding than he would have been if his tailor had suddenly challenged him to a duel. Foreign policy had been his métier for twenty years. He had been at the Congress of Berlin with Disraeli in 1878 and had maneuvered through all the twists and turns of that perennial entanglement, the Eastern Question. His method was not that of Lord Palmerston, whom the Prince of Wales admired because he “knew his own mind
Lady Warwick was a straw, not a trend. As a nation, Britain in 1895 had an air of careless supremacy which galled her neighbors. The attitude, called “splendid isolation,” was both a state of mind and a fact. Britain did not worry seriously about potential enemies, felt no need of allies and had no friends. In a world in which other national energies were bursting old limits, this happy condition gave no great promise of permanence. On July 20, when Salisbury’s Government was less than a month old, it was suddenly and surprisingly challenged from an unexpected quarter, the United States. The affair concerned a long-disputed frontier between British Guiana and Venezuela. Claiming that the British were expanding territorially at their expense in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, the Venezuelans had been goading the United States to open that famous umbrella and insist on arbitration. Although the American President, Grover Cleveland, was a man of ordinarily sound judgment and common sense, his countrymen were in a mood of swelling self-assertion and, as Rudyard Kipling pointed out, for purposes of venting chauvinist sentiments, France had Germany, Britain had Russia, and America had Britain, the only feasible country “for the American public speaker to trample upon.” On July 20, Cleveland’s Secretary of State, Richard Olney, delivered a Note to Great Britain stating that disregard of the Monroe Doctrine would be “deemed an act of unfriendliness toward the United States,” whom he described in terms of not very veiled belligerence as “master of the situation and practically invulnerable against any and all comers.”
This was truly astonishing language for diplomatic usage; but it was deliberately provocative on Olney’s part, because, as he said, “in English eyes the United States was then so completely a negligible quantity” that he felt “only words the equivalent of blows would be effective.” Upon Lord Salisbury who was acting as his own Foreign Secretary they failed of effect. He was no more disposed to respond to this kind of prodding than he would have been if his tailor had suddenly challenged him to a duel. Foreign policy had been his métier for twenty years. He had been at the Congress of Berlin with Disraeli in 1878 and had maneuvered through all the twists and turns of that perennial entanglement, the Eastern Question. His method was not that of Lord Palmerston, whom the Prince of Wales admired because he “knew his own mind
Similar Books
