The Crudest of Mistakes
Sir Bernard Pares warned that after the Great War, Western powers must not assume Germany’s role as supercilious bully.
1916
King George V 1910-1936
Sir Bernard Pares warned that after the Great War, Western powers must not assume Germany’s role as supercilious bully.
1916
King George V 1910-1936
In 1916, Sir Bernard Pares looked ahead cautiously to the end of the Great War, and to the prospect of an end to Germany’s high-handed economic domination over Russia. Knowing the Russian Emperor Nicholas’s goodwill towards England, Pares urged Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s government to set an example of restraint, liberty and understanding, and not simply to take the German Empire’s ignoble place.
abridged
ENGLISH influence, which is of a very different kind and very differently exercised,* is the wished-for substitute for German influence in Russia. England, without interference in the internal affairs of her ally and friend, will continue to be, as she has been in the past, a model for public effort, initiative, and progress in Russia, where she is as much the kinswoman of the truest conservative instincts as she is the pattern of the best Russian Liberalism. Germany did not understand Russia, and understands less than ever. We did not know Russia, but we are learning and we can understand her.
The gap left in the economic life of Russia by the withdrawal of so many Germans offers a unique opportunity to Englishmen. The pity is that we have made hardly any preparation for filling it, and that we are in danger of seeing an unregulated and confused crush of purely personal interests, directed by dubious middle-men and trampling their narrow path through this fine field of economic and political promise. If we take it that the Germans are to be excluded for our personal profit and that we are free to do as they have done, only with less knowledge and efficiency, we shall make the crudest of mistakes.
abridged
* See historian John Buchan on The Garden and the Machine.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.