are only the
attempts of our diplomats to put a public spirited face on the
operations of private cupidity. This is not the first time nor the
second that I have had to urge that the greatest danger to us in the
sphere of foreign politics is the tendency of capital to run away from
civilization: the one running downhill to hell as naturally as the other
struggles uphill to the Celestial City. The Englishman is allowed to
produce the subsistence of himself and his family only on condition that
he produces the subsistence of the capitalist and his retainers as well;
and lo! he finds more and more that these retainers are not Englishmen,
but Russians, South Americans, Kaffirs, Persians, or yellow or black
barbarians armed for his destruction (not to mention Prussians and
Austrians), and that the treaties made by our diplomatists have less and
less to do with the security of the nation or the balance of power or
any other public business, and more and more with capitalist
opportunities of making big dividends out of slavish labour. For
instance, the Anglo-Russian agreement is not a national treaty: it is
the memorandum of a commercial agreement settling what parts of Persia
are to be exploited by the Russian and English capitalists respectively;
the capitalists, always against State interference for the benefit of
the people, being very strongly in favor of it for coercing strikers at
home and keeping foreign rivals off their grass abroad. And the absurd
part of it is that when the State has thus arranged for our capitalists
to exploit certain parts of Persia, and for their sakes to protect the
parliamentary liberties of the part left to Russia, they discovered
that, after all, the most profitable game was to lend Russia the money
to exploit with, and to facilitate the operation by allowing her to
destroy the Persian parliament in the face of our own exhortation to it
to keep the flag flying, which we accordingly did without a blush. The
French capitalists had dragged France into an alliance with Russia long
before this; but the French Republic had the excuse of the German peril
and the need for an anti-German ally. Her natural ally for that purpose
was England; but as there was no market in England for her money, her
plutocrats drove her into the alliance with Russia as well; and it is
that alliance and not the alliance with England that has terrified
Germany into flying at her throat and plunging Europe into a frightful
w