ALL that can be done is to implore them, from Mr Buckle downwards,* to remember their responsibility, and to endeavour to make them see the lurid glare of the peasant’s burning homestead behind the glitter of their rhetorical incitations, and to hear the agonised wail of the homeless child as the echo of their bellicose rhetoric.
We in England are apt to forget, snugly ensconced in our coign of vantage behind the silver streak,* that others are more sensitive than ourselves, and that the small boy who halloos his comrades on to fight by alternate gibes and encouragement, while he stays out of harm’s way up a tree, is not exactly the exemplar who should be followed by those who essay to speak in the name of England for civilisation and for peace.*
George Earle Buckle (1854-1935), who in 1884 was appointed editor of the ‘Times’ when aged just twenty-nine. After resigning in 1911, he published a biography of Benjamin Disraeli and edited a collection of the letters of Queen Victoria.
The White Cliffs of Dover.
Stead was particularly enraged by the way that the British Government encouraged Russia to pursue the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire and then, on the eve of peaceful success, switched sides, plunging Russia and the Balkans into unnecessary war. It was such diplomatic sleight-of-hand and national self-interest that led Stead to lose faith in the British Empire as a global policeman.