FROM EUROPEAN TOWARDS ATLANTIC ORDER,1913–22

 Generally speaking, the same mixture of mutual congratulationand national assertiveness found at the Paris Exhibition of 1900was in evidence at the London Congress of 1913. For example,responding on behalf of the foreign guests at a dinner given by theBritish government on 3 April, Professor Felix Liebermann,corresponding Fellow of the British Academy from Berlin, declaredin German that:the honour of thanking the British government for theircordial reception of the delegates had probably been con-ferred on him, and he had been allowed to express it in hismother tongue, on account of the kinship of civilizationwhich connected the host country with Germany moreintimately than with any nation not speaking the Anglo-Saxon tongue....Here was ample reinforcement for the Teutonic idea ofcivilisation so prevalent before the First World War. Furthersupport came from Commendatore Davidsohn who spoke inGerman at a concluding dinner on 7 April on behalf of thevisiting dele-gations as a whole, observing that they all leftEngland enriched by many intellectual and artistic inspirations,full, too, of a lively affection for a great, active and free people,who for centuries had gone forward at the head of theintellectual and political movement towards progress; for apeople to whom in the last resort was owing all that Europehad realised in the form of free institutions since the beginningof the French Revolution.But, of course, the German contribution to the Congressconsisted of far more than compliments: for example, apart fromErnst Bernheim, no less an authority than Karl Lamprecht alsospoke on intellectual trends. Meanwhile, the French participationwas smaller, and the appraisal lower, at least in the view of CharlesBernier of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts writing in the Revuehistorique. Though praising the zeal and courtesy of the hosts, alongwith a recreational programme so hospitable that it threatened tooverwhelm the cause of science, Bernier criticised the organisationof the Congress, especially its dispersal and lack of centre, and theearlier delay in sending out official invitations, the main reasonfor the paucity of French delegates. As a consequence of this delay,insufficient financial support could be found for greater attendancefrom across the Channel: ‘it seems that in this time of ententecordiale, and with England so close to us, France could have andshould have occupied a greater place at the Congress.’28Possibly, too, albeit unwittingly, Bernier was expressing mis-givings about the prevalence of the Teutonic idea, which tended toexclude the contribution of France to European civilisation.However, even American cousins, integral members of the Teutonicgrouping, were not totally happy with the arrangements made inthe mother country. Writing a report in The American HistoricalReview, J.F.Jameson perhaps let the organisation of the Congressdown lightly with the observation: ‘It is to be expected that Britishindividualism, which has had such brilliant results in history,should have its compensation in an organizing power, for suchoccasions, inferior to that of some other nations’, in particularGermany. Again, tempering criticism with indul-gence in a passageconcerning the importance of personal contact in a science such ashistory in which the human element plays so large a part, Jamesoncommented:More of that pleasure and profit might have been had ifthere had been easier means of finding members, inevitablyscattered through a great city, or if it had not been for theEnglish ‘custom’ of not introducing, but they were had ina very rewarding measure.On the sessions of the Congress, there was perhaps a furtherelement of damnation through faint praise in Jameson’s estimation:‘papers which by extraordinary originality and power weredestined to alter signally the maps of their respective fields werenot numerous—but the general level was high, and the totalcontribution to the science much more than respectable in quantity.’More explicitly, the American commentator noted that not onlydid more than half the programme, some forty papers, relate toBritish history, but another substantial part, about twenty papers,touched on it. And so:An American could not help thinking it to be a strangefact that, of more than a hundred papers presented byBritish subjects, only one was concerned wholly, andanother partially, with the history of the United States, acountry embracing nearly two-thirds of the English-speak-ing population of the globe.A paper by Jameson himself on ‘Typical Steps in AmericanExpansion’ helped to redress the balance somewhat, along withfurther contributions from his American colleagues who numberedabout twenty, compared with about 450 British out of a grand totalof 680. European representation included sixty-five from Germany,thirty from Russia (including some Poles), twenty-five fromAustria-Hungary, and only twenty-two from France, about thesame number from the Netherlands and Belgium together, andmore than twice as many as from Scandinavia. There were just afew delegates from other parts of Europe, from Latin America andJapan. Here, quantitatively, was a further reflection of the biasesevident in the proceedings of the Congress.29In one sense, the spirit of the Congress was that of Lord Acton,who had died in 1902. A.W.Ward talked there in ‘piousremembrance’ of Acton’s ‘characteristic breadth of knowledge anddepth of critical insight...ardour for the advancement of historicalstudies, unfailing candour of judgement and generosity ofsympathy’.30 Yet Acton might well have been surprised by some ofthe arguments advanced at the Congress by delegates from acountry which he had considered to be mostly inert in UniversalHistory—Russia. For example, A.S.Lappo-Danilevsky gave a well-received lecture in French— ‘L’idée de l’état et son évolution enRussie depuis les troubles du XVIIe siècle jusqu’aux réformes duXVIIIe’. More generally, delivering the presidential address to theLegal History Section in which Lappo-Danilevsky was to presenthis paper, the émigré Paul Vinogradoff sought to suggest ‘theconnecting links between the various researches in Roman andEnglish, German and Slavonic, Civil, Canon, and Common Law’.He went on to observe:The fundamental unity of our study may be realized fromtwo main points of view. They are provided by continuityon the one hand and by similarity on the other. There arestreams of doctrines and institutional facts which passthrough the ages and cross national boundaries from onehistorical formation to another. These constitute what maybe called the current of cultural tradition. Again, thesolutions of legal problems on different occasions fall intogroups according to similarities and contrasts, for whichthere is a common basis in the nature of the problemsthemselves. This gives rise to the application of thecomparative method. The continuity of culture andcomparative jurisprudence produce the atmosphere ofwhat might have been called International Law, had notthe term been appropriated to other uses.31(Needless to say, Vinogradoff made no reference in his paper tothe immediate problems of tsarism in his homeland, nor to the asyet obscure critic of his views—V.I.Lenin.)Going back in history beyond the formation of InternationalLaw, two entire sessions at the Congress were devoted to recentadvances and results of archaeological exploration in southernRussia. However, the Russian delegation’s sense of apartness wasreflected in the presentation of a formal protest about the exclusionof the Russian language from the proceedings of the Congress,especially significant in view of general agreement on St Petersburgas the venue of the next Congress.J.F.Jameson commented on this choice as he speculated aboutthe possibility of the Congress one day coming to the USA:Doubtless the journey would seem difficult to manyhistorians, and after going to St. Petersburg in 1918 it maybe natural to wish to assemble in 1923 in some capital morecentral to western Europe, and the summer climate ofWashington, or any other American city, would seem toohot to even the most philosophical of European his-torians
The years 1918 and 1923 would both come to bear a significancedifferent from that contemplated by J.F.Jameson in 1913. Recordinghis impressions of the Congress at the beginning of 1914 in Nauchnyiistoricheskii zhurnal, E.V.Tarle of St Petersburg regretted the fact thatthe attendance in general was poor, and that in particular therewas an almost complete absence of French colleagues. He was alsodisappointed that the English press was preoccupied by thealarming news from Europe, in particular the Balkan peninsula;the only exception was The Times, and even that newspaper for themost part published its reports on the Congress away from themain pages and in very small print. While he was pleased to notethat the atmosphere was one of serious interest rather than‘scientific ecstasy’, Tarle was sorry that general questions of thephilosophy of history were largely untouched. In this respect inparticular, he observed:The Congress expressed, on the one hand, the disorderand confusion in generalising thought characteristic of ourtime, and, on the other, the greatly increased exactitude. Itmay be deplored that there is no sign of any newfundamental formulations of methodological problems,new interesting generalisations capable of moving scienceforward. However, at the same time, it is impossible notto discern that fortunately in recent years that dilettantismhas ceased which (especially in Germany) not so very longago brought very facile and arbitrary solutions to the mostcomplicated historico-philosophical questions.33To some extent, in early 1914 Tarle was already mulling oversome of the ideas that he would put forward in 1922. He was alsoperhaps voicing Franco-Russian disquiet at exclusion from theAnglo-Saxon worldview. But, of course, his outlook would bemodified enormously by the First World War and the RussianRevolution. Events from August 1914 would have a shatteringimpact even for other delegates, not least for the Anglo-Saxons. In1902, in an influential work on Principles of Western Civilisation,Benjamin Kidd could write:The native Teutonic habit of mind, underlying the English,American, and German character, represents, of necessity,certain qualities—tenacity of purpose, determination in thepresence of opposition, love for action and hunger forpower, all tending to express themselves through the State—which were the necessary equipment of that militarytype which has won in the supreme stress of NaturalSelection its right of place as the only type able to hold thestage of the world in the long epoch during which thepresent is destined to pass under the control of the future.34From 1914 to 1918, natural selection exerted its supreme stress onone of the three Teutonic nations, Germany, while another, America,went from strength to strength.In England, where the First World War made an impact trau-matic enough, we find a variety of responses from the men whohad played leading parts in the Congress of 1913. Paul Vinogradoff,among many other major contributions to the peace, wrote of thenecessity to update the system first indicated by Montesquieu inThe Spirit of the Laws. For Lord Bryce, it had been ‘a war of Principlesfor Righteousness against Wickedness’. After the victory, it wasnecessary to consider how to prevent future wars and encouragethe spirit of freedom and democracy, in particular by means of theLeague of Nations. But Lord Morley indicated a different reactionin the Preface to his Recollections published in 1917. Although heexpressed a loyalty to reason and desire for wise policies, hedeclared that the war and his country’s action in it had led to hisretirement from public office. Moreover, in Morley’s estimation,‘The world is travelling under formidable omens into a new era,very unlike the times in which my lot was cast.’ Such a valedictoryattitude helped to form the view that ‘he was generally regarded,during his last years, as sharing with Mr. Hardy the position ofdoyen of English men of letters.’ And for Thomas Hardy himself,in one evaluation at least:The war had so barbarized taste, encouraged selfishness,and increased knowledge at the expense of wisdom thatanother Dark Age threatened, and the only hope for theworld seemed to be an alliance between religion andcomplete rationality ‘by means of the interfusing effect ofpoetry’.And yet, as Comte had said, progress was never in a straightline, and perhaps the regression was drawing back for a leapforward. He hoped, though forlornly, that it was so

 Farewell to old England was in part welcome to the new USA.Sadness in the hedged fields of Wessex was accompanied byexuberance in the unfenced lands of Wisconsin, and the centre ofthe English-speaking world was poised to move considerably tothe west of longitude 30 where Lord Acton had placed it in 1896.In the USA, Frederick Jackson Turner had recently observed thatwith the closure of the American frontier in 1890, the first periodof American history had closed four centuries from the discoveryof the continent, and after one hundred years of life under theconstitution. Then in that same year of 1896, he recommended‘the extension of American influence to outlying islands andadjoining countries’. Meanwhile, those outlying islands did notinclude those forming the United Kingdom, and there was stillmuch cultural deference before British and other Europeanmodels over the ocean. Yet, for example, a loud note ofindependence was struck in the first volume of the AmericanHistorical Review, published also in 1896. In an essay entitled‘History and Democracy’, W.M.Sloane observed: ‘It seems to bethe opinion of the keenest observers beyond the Atlantic that theold world today is weary of the past.’ While Europe yearned formodernity and futurity, the tendency ‘from experience towardstheory, from adaptation towards experiment, from progress ontraditional lines to advance on untried paths’ was still ‘in no sensecharacteristic of America’. But the easy circulation of ideasthroughout the world might introduce that tendency into theUSA, and Sloane warned: ‘if it comes or when it comes, and aconservative democracy guiding itself by the lights of history istransmuted into a radical ochlocracy moving by impulse orsteering by wreckers’ beacons, then, as it takes no prophetic giftto foretell, we shall have anarchy and ruin.’36Twenty years on, fears such as Sloane’s were beginning toseize the souls of many of his fellow-Americans as theyprepared for entry into the First World War. After the victoriousend to the war alarm rose to epidemic proportions as aconsequence of the Russian Revolution in the great ‘Red Scare’of 1919. However, at the same time, there was quiet satisfaction,even not so quiet celebration, at the thought that the torch ofcivilisation might be returning from ‘over there’. Even thenormally prosaic American Historical Review could break intoverse, quotingHave the elder races halted?Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over therebeyond the seas?We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson,Pioneers! O pioneers!Relative affluence should allow the American HistoricalAssociation to encourage ‘a wide variety of laudable enterprises,both those which will specially advance historical scholarship inAmerica and those which will be useful alike to us and thehistorians of burdened Europe’.37As often, the ‘spirit of the age’, or at least some elements in it,can best be caught through an examination of some episodes inthe career of a single individual, although in this case the examplechosen is far from typical. Having resigned from ColumbiaUniversity in 1917 in solidarity with two colleagues dis-missedfor opposing the war policies of the former President of PrincetonUniversity, Woodrow Wilson, Charles A.Beard set off in 1921 tosee for himself the predicament of Europe. On his return, he gavea series of lectures in 1922 at Dartmouth College, published inthe same year under the title Crosscurrents in Europe Today,38 anddescribed by the author himself as ‘a collection of notes’ whichhe hoped would be pertinent ‘to the great case of Mankind vs.Chaos’. Among Beard’s notes were several on the RussianRevolution. From the first, he observed, Lenin had never beendeceived by ‘the childish phantasy that paper decrees wouldestablish the new heaven and the new earth’ and haddemonstrated since the October Revolution ‘the doctrine of thepragmatist’. In 1922, it seemed to him ‘fairly safe to guess’ thatRussia would evolve into ‘a huge peasant democracy’ and that ‘aform of state capitalism’ would take ‘the place of communism’.Throughout Europe, socialists had ‘laid Marx on the shelf’, havingdiscovered that ‘party programs do not make plows’. As for thatother great force, nationalism, Beard hoped that statesmen wouldcome to see that its ethnic and geographical bases had nothing todo with prosperity, and that ‘some kind of a general economicconstitution’ would be adopted throughout the continent.Meanwhile, with or without nationalism, the ‘new America’would be forced by the ‘paralysis of Europe’ to look upon thePacific region as ‘the new theatre’