Salisbury: Last Words 

Salisbury: Last Words

I think I'm finished reading Lord Salisbury for a while. Time to return the books. I'm back reading the original Dune.

Salisbury criticizes the regime of Lord Palmerston as PM, and Lord Russell as Foreign Secretary, for being brave and resolute with very weak powers, and very vacillating and risk-averse with strong ones (such as Russia and Germany).

... when it is once discovered that a nation loves peace so profoundly that, rather than break it, it will put with indignities and accept humiliations that would goad any other people into war, its influence absolutely disappears. This is precisely what has happened to England during the past twelve months. She has eaten an amount of dirt at which the digestion of any other people would have revolted. Foreign Powers see that, in spite of this unsavoury meal, her Government is as happy, as meddling, and as pacific as ever, and quite ready for another plateful.


This is probably some of the language that caused his father--the previous Lord Salisbury--to say this is not the way a gentleman expresses himself.

As he describes how Russia, France and Germany all came to have contempt for Britain, first over Poland and then over the Danish Duchies, he gets another shot in at the Germans in particular:

"To be despised by the minor States of Germany is, perhaps, the lowest depth of degradation to which a great Power has ever sunk."

I hadn't realized the extent to which the Brits sleep-walked through the period when Germany built a new empire, with good open water ports that it simply seized from Denmark. This was in the 1860s; for a while it must have seemed that Britain, which operated all over the world thanks to its navy, would not necessarily be disturbed too much by Germany. Perhaps the slightly cynical, highly educated and in some ways sophisticated British leaders showed their limitations in the lead up to World War I.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Britain joined the Allies who defeated France. France has not been a similar threat every since. In the mid-19th century the German powers, which had played a pretty ignominious part in the Napoleonic wars, rose up. In the two world wars of the 20th century, Britain and Germany reduced each other to middling powers, and the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the only two superpowers.

In the 21st century, the United States is the only megapower. Does it have a kind of staying power that the old European powers didn't? Will its religion and Boy Scout optimism--in some ways very Victorian--help? The NY Times wrote recently that religion is growing in most areas of the world except Western Europe--not necessarily fundamentalism, but evangelical religion. (Search for "religion" on Althouse.com. My registration at NYT has stopped working.) Are the "red state" United States in some kind of alignment with much of the world already?

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