ABSTRACT
During the eighty-two years of my life the world has changed as much as in any equal period of human history, if not more. It had, when I was young, an apparently stable pattern, which was not expected to alter fundamentally but only to undergo the sort of gradual evolution which had taken place in England. There were the Great Powers, which were European. (Most people forgot the United States, still recovering from the Civil War.) All the Great Powers except France were monarchies, and France only ceased to be a monarchy two years before I was born. When I first became politically conscious, Disraeli was Prime Minister and the country was indulging in a honeymoon of Imperialism. It was at this time that Queen Victoria became Empress of India, and that the Prime Minister boasted of having secured peace with honour. The “peace” consisted of not going to war with Russia; the “honour” consisted of the island of Cyprus which is now causing us first-rate embarrassment. It was in these years that the word Jingo was coined. The far-flung might of Britain was displayed in the Afghan War, the Zulu War, and the First Boer War. All these I was taught to disapprove of, and I was indoctrinated with the creed of the Little 38Englander. But this creed was never wholly sincere. Even the littlest of Little Englanders rejoiced in England’s prowess. The power and prestige of the aristocracy and the landed gentry were unimpaired. When my uncle married the daughter of a great industrial magnate, my grandmother was proud of her liberality in not objecting to his marrying into what she called “Trade”. Outside of Britain, the scene was dominated by the three great Eastern Empires of Germany, Austria and Russia. Nobody thought of them as transitory, although the German Empire had come into existence only a year before I was born and the Russian Empire (so Western liberals thought) would have to adopt a parliamentary constitution sooner or later.
