THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 1901. A CENTURY'S WARS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIV, Issue 2, 10 January 1901, Page 17

THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 1901. A CENTURY'S WARS.

j£j jj^T T seems as if the civilised nations of the world Jfe GP^ 1 are destined to be for ever class-ridden. At ;£\ by, one time the nobility were in the saddle. Ibey ?3jj a«. held the reins and plitd whip and spur so long Jsi? iA 1 that they became known in history as ' the •§ Wt ruling class.' But the Great Revolution altered f all that at one stroke in France ; and the industrial revolution by slower degrees in England. The invention of the spinning jenny by Hahgreaves in 1770, of the water-frame by Arkwrhjht in the following year, of the ' mule ' (which superseded both) by Crompton in 1770, and of the power-loom by Cartwright in 1785, broke up the old domestic system of manufactures and ushered in the era of the crowded' factory. The steam-engine completed the revolution. Deau Swift lived long enough to see the new order of things so far advanced that he could write : ' The power which used to follow land has gone over to money.' Defoe and Dr. Johnson made the amazing discovery that a man engaged in commerce — or at least his son or grandson — might be a gentleman. The capitalist manufacturer fast became a factor in the national life. He finally unseated tbe man of aot;es, and became himself the man on horseback. Towards the close of the eighteenth century — and long before the click-clack of the piston-rod replaced the hum and grind of the water-wheel — the capitalists were able to stand on equal terms with the land-owners as the ruling class of Great Britain. Pitt was the great statesman of the moneyed manufacturers. In their interests he committed his country to that policy of commercial wars which formed one of the most curious and melancholy features of the international relations of the century which has just

departed. Hitherto men had slit each others' throats on the battlefield for a sentiment or in the interests of a dynasty. Pitt made war for the more practical purpose of finding fresh markets for the iron pots, patent ovens, cotton goods, and crockeryware of Smith, Brown, Jones, and RoBiNiSON. The vanished century was conspicuously one of earth-hunger, of greed, of territorial expansion, and of brute force ; and to some extent it justifies the words applied by Washing ton Irving to history in general : that it is ' a Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man.' • • • The revolution wrought by the inventions of Haroreaves and Arkwright led — as Gibbins points out in his Industrial History of England — to Pitt's endeavor, in 1793, to strike down France, and thus secure for his conntry ' control of the world's markets.' The introduction of the steam-engine fixed the policy of expansion and commercial war, extended it, and made it permanent. This policy has guided successive Governments from the day of Waterloo to the outbreak of that curious combination of comedy, farce, and tragedy — of King Henry V., Falstaff, and Bombastea Furioso — which is still trying in vain to disentangle itself in South Africa. In the great war of 1793 to 1815 England had one signal advantage over Continental nations. While t hey, with Britain's effective aid, were carving each other up on their own soil — to the hopeless ruin of their manufacturing industries — she was the only European country in which war *vas not actually carried on. Throughout, her manufactures were undisturbed, and at the close of the struggle the ocean-carrying trade was left secure to her by her undisputed supremacy at sea. The long bull-dog struggle cost the nations engaged in it no less than 1,900,000 lives. It cost England £831,446,449. But its chief purpose was effected. In 1793 — tLe year in which the band began to play — her exports were officially valued at £17,000,000. In 1800 they had risen to £34,000,000 ; and in 1815, when Johnny came marching home after the battle of Waterloo, England's exports had an officially declared value of £58,000,000. • • • From the manufacturers' point of view the war had been a conspicuous success. It was regarded by those most interested in the war as a mere coincidence that all the profits went into the fobs of the capitalist manufacturers, and that the war tax fell with frightful severity on the poor, until rank starvation goaded the gaunt artisans and agricultural laborers into riot. But discontent, though not allayed, was driven beneath the surface by the Manchester Massacre of 1819. It was kept pinioned there by the tyrannous ' Six Acts' that followed. The celebrated statist Mr. GIFFBN tells us that so recently as 1830-31 'pauperism was nearly breaking down the country.' Ten years later, in 1841, there were no fewer than 1200 articles on the tariff, chiefly to meet the enormous annual charge on Great Britain's first big capitalist war. And for almost the first half of the nineteenth century English artisans and agricultural laborers toiled on in a state of degradation and misery of which no other time or country has ever produced a parallel. But human flesh was cheap. The steam flew through the thiottle-valves and the wheels whirled round only the faster. The commercial magnates rose and multiplied. They ruled the foreign policy of the country. Wealthy soap-men and kettle-founders and dish-makers mingled their plebeian red corpusculea with the ' blue blood ' of old titled families, and swelled the depleted purses of the scions of the needy aristocracy with coins wrung from the rugged hands of the under-fed, ill-paid, overwrought white slaves of England. • • • After the war which closed so dramatically at Waterloo (Jreafc Britain's trade expanded at an unexampled rate. Continental nations were crippled by the long-drawn struggle that had been fought out on their soil. Their manufactures were ruined, and they were thus precluded from serious competition with British capitalists till close on the middle of the century. Then the Crimean War broke out. The author of the Industrial History of Eng~ land says that it ' gave a great stimulus to our [British] agriculture, and had a similar affect upon our manufactures. The Indian Mutiny which followed it,' he continue!),

*did not much affect our trade, but it rendered necessary the deposition of the East India Company and the assumption of government by the Crown (1858), and thus eventually served to put our relations to that vast aud rich empire upon a much more satisfactory and profitable basis.' The three wars with China were undertaken for the purpose of forcing open a market for western manufactures in the Far East. The protection or expansion of trade was the root motive of the bombardment of Acre ; the chastisement of the Algerine pirates ; the occupation of Egypt ; the campaigns in the Soudan ; the subjugation of the Ghoorkas, Pindarees, Scindians, and, generally, of the pushing back of frontiers or spheres of influence in India and the Far East ; of the Kaffir, Ashantee, and Zulu wars ; and of the countless other petty straggles that are almost continually in progress in the back-blocks of the Empire. British merchants were keen to benefit by the quarrels of their Continental neighbors, and after the American Civil War promptly supplied the urgent demand for English products to replace the waste caused by that long and fiercelyfought conflict. The more that comes to light regarding the origin of the South African struggle, the more clear it becomes that it was also a mere incident of a policy of commercial wars which has never been lost sight of by British statesmen since the days of Pitt. The European Continental wars of the nineteenth century were undertaken chiefly for the sake of securing pet lines of frontier, or of preserving the equilibrium of that ticklish thing which is Known as the balance of power. But some of the Continental Great Powers — and especially Germany, France, and Russia — are now fairly launched upon the policy of petty wars with barbarians for the purpose of extending evermore the markets for their wares. The State conscience is fast becoming a mere cash register. • • • Without taking the cost of the present South African struggle into account, Great Britain spends annually 16s l-|d of every pound sterling of her taxes on war purposes^ — on army, navy, and interest on past wars. Long before the outbreak of the trouble in South Africa she had expended some £6,000,000,000 on or in connection with war during the nineteenth century. Mulhall states that the British wars from 1599 to 1856 involved the country in the enormous expenditure of £1,359,000,000,000. The ware of Europe and America from 1793 to 1877 are said by the same high authority to have involved a loss of 4,470,000 men and an expenditure of £3,047,000,000,000. The veins and the purse of the workers have paid most of this mighty butcher s bill. A fraction of this mountain of gold would suffice, if rightly expended, to kill off grinding poverty and to make the world as nearly a terrestrial paradise as money could well make it. And yet the worker huzzas the long knife called a sword that is sharpened to slit his carotid artery, and applauds the ringed finger that picks his pocket in order to purchase the weapon and to fee the man who wields it.