-- Mexico's revolution was regarded by the outside world as a comic nuisance.
It was, however, part of the deep stirring of "backward" peoples everywhere
which was to be characteristic of the century. Not the least poignant of the
era's surprises was the flowering of its greatest art movement in the soil of
the Mexican revolution; Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros were culturally about as
far as possible from Paris salons.
Crusades & Soup Kitchens. In Britain, the Liberal Party was the first
channel of those who sought State help against the rigors of capitalism. Sidney
and Beatrice Webb and their Fabians went further than the Liberals: they worked
for gradual change toward the socialist state. (The grade turned out to be
steeper than they thought.)
Churchill, as president of the Board of Trade (1908-10) and Home Secretary
(1910-11), was in the front ranks of the early Liberal drive for social
security. (In 1908 Churchill married Clementine Hozier "and," he reported,
"lived happily ever afterwards." Mrs. Webb noted that Churchill's bride had no
fortune, "which is to Winston's credit." Mrs. Webb had inherited money and,
like other similarly fortunate 20th Century characters (including Franklin
Roosevelt), she had a deep-seated prejudice against the accumulation of money
by any other means.) He fought for old-age pensions and a job-finding service
for the unemployed. But even in those Liberal salad days there were limits
beyond which Churchill would not go. Offered the Local Government Board (now
part of the Health Ministry), he recoiled: "I decline to be shut up in a soup
kitchen with Mrs. Sidney Webb!"
The Smoking Volcano. Like its successor, World War I came slowly, but more
stealthily. There was no Hitler screaming in the Sportpalast, no Mussolini
popping his eyeballs from a balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. International
affairs before World War I were in the hands of gentlemen, trained diplomatists
all. With great technical brilliance, they poulticed inflamed crises again
& again with the salve of compromise.
The root of the trouble went deep. Germany had come late to nationalism
and industrialization, late to the feast of trade and colonies--late but with a
hearty appetite. German steel production equaled Britain's by 1892, doubled it
by 1910. The Prussian power cult had thrived in a poor land, now enriched by
progress. Limitless expansion and conquest seemed to lie ahead. Germany's
threatening moves from 1900 to 1914 drove old rivals--Britain, France and
Russia--into one another's arms.
Churchill explained the Kaiser's restlessness: "All he wished was to feel
like Napoleon, and be like him without having had to fight his battles...If you
are the summit of a volcano, the least you can do is to smoke. So he smoked, a
pillar of cloud by day and the gleam of fire by night, to all who gazed from
afar; and slowly and surely these perturbed observers gathered and joined
themselves together for mutual protection." (Writing in 1930, Churchill was to
pay the Kaiser a compliment which was also a somber comment on the 20th
Century: "Time has brought him a surprising and paradoxical revenge upon his
conquerors...The greater part of Europe...would regard the Hohenzollern
restoration...as a comparatively hopeful event...This is not because his own
personal light burns the brighter...but because of the increasing darkness
around. The victorious democracies in driving out hereditary sovereigns
supposed they were moving on the path of progress. They have in fact gone
further and fared worse.")
