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By Root 1132 0

Wales’s opinion, conveyed through Lady Warwick, that the young ruler, his wife’s nephew, was “weak as water,… has no character and would not be the slightest use to you.” On the way, Stead planned to interview the Pope, the Kaiser and the President of France, as well as King Leopold of the Belgians whom he would persuade to become spokesman of a league of small powers. To ward off possible official interference he called on Mr. Balfour at the Foreign Office, whom he found at first “nonchalant and ironical” but who quickly hardened in response to Stead’s rhapsodies. Balfour failed to understand, he said, how Stead could contemplate so lightheartedly “the increasing growth and power of Russia.” For their own time it did not matter, “but what of our children?… What kind of world will it be when Russia exercises a dominating influence over the whole of south-east Europe?” He did not, however, offer to put any obstacles in Stead’s path.

Within a month of the first news, Stead was on his way. In Paris he failed to see President Félix Faure, although he did see Clemenceau, who said “nothing would come of the Conference” and refused to alter his opinion. King Leopold, the Kaiser and Pope Leo XIII likewise avoided him, but Nicholas II, in compliance with a promise which his father had given to Stead ten years ago, granted him not only one audience but three. The Imperial graciousness dazzled Stead, who, being unused to courts, took it for the man’s character and did not realize it was the monarch’s trade. In any case he was determined to produce a hero. The Czar, he told his readers, was charming, sympathetic, alert, lucid, with a keen sense of humor, hearty frankness, admirable modesty, noble gravity, high resolve, remarkable memory, “exceptional rapidity of perception and wide grasp of an immense range of facts,” and all these were at the service of the cause of peace. Stead’s paeans to Russia’s intentions so far outdistanced her real aims that the Russian ministers complained to the British Government of being “much embarrassed.” His articles, however, were manna to the peace movement. Back in London he brought out a new weekly, War Against War, organized the International Peace Crusade and did his hyperactive best to strengthen public demand for a Conference that could not, must not fail.

Public opinion was not all of a piece. If the Liberals—and not all of them—shared Stead’s enthusiasm, the Conservatives did not. In all peoples there was much of what William Ernest Henley hymned as “the battle spirit shouting in my blood.” It was what made Romain Rolland, who was one day to become famous as a pacifist, cry joyously in 1898, “Give me combat!” The materialism of the time, the increasing ease, the power of money to substitute for muscle, produced in many a feeling of distaste or even a seeking for the strenuous, as when young Theodore Roosevelt headed for the Rockies. People felt a need for something nobler and saw it glimmer in the prospect of danger and physical combat, in sacrifice, even death, on the battlefield. The journalist Henry Nevinson felt a martial ardor when he drilled as an officer of the Volunteers and offended his Socialist friends by declaring that he “would not care to live in a world in which there was no war.” In later years it seemed to him the ardor had derived partly from ignorance of war and partly from the influence of Kipling and Henley.

Within narrow limits Henley was the Conservatives’ Stead, although lacking Stead’s elemental force and social conscience. No Teutonic homage to the master race could outshout his celebration of “England, My England,” whose “mailed hand” guides teeming destinies, whose “breed of mighty men” is unmatched, whose ships are “the fierce old sea’s delight,” who is:

Chosen daughter of the Lord

Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword.

There’s the menace of the Word

In the song on your bugles blown

England!

Out of Heaven on your bugles blown!

This was patriotism gone mad and represented a mood, not a people. In the same mood Americans listened to Albert Beveridge