Page:The Hero in History.djvu/92

92 of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, “members of one body and inheritors of one estate”; (4) the peaceful resolution of the incident at Sarajevo in 1914 by the open threat of the English-speaking Union to declare war against any power whose troops invaded a neighbouring country.

1. The military consequences to the North of a lost battle at Gettysburg would have included not a lost war but a prolonged one. The industrial equipment of the North, its much denser population, its command of the sea—not to mention the fall of Vicksburg and the control this gave of the Mississippi—spelled defeat in the end for the South. The capture of Washington and the threat to the Northern States would have unified sentiment in those regions and led to a more vigorous prosecution of the war. It might even have converted Lincoln into a Radical Republican. We agree with Churchill that “Once a great victory is won… all the chains of consequence clink out as if they never would stop.” But a victorious war for the South would not have been a link in the chain of consequences of a Northern military defeat. If great victories had been able to ensure final triumph in the Civil War, the South would have won easily, since it won most of the battles, as did the German Imperial forces in the First World War. If disastrous military defeats of the magnitude hypothetically suffered by the North were always a prelude to a lost war, there would to-day be no British Empire.

2. That Lee would have proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves after a Confederate victory at Gettysburg is a pretty conceit of a dramatic historian. There were plenty of victorious battles in whose wake he could have done this but did not. He did not because it would have disrupted the plantation economy in whose behalf the Southern States went to war. That England would have actively intervened on the side of the South in the event of a victory at Gettysburg is unlikely. So far as the working class population was concerned, its sympathies were actively for the North. To the extent that foreign policy in the hands of the ruling classes could proceed independently of this sentiment, the line of diplomatic strategy during the century was to play off one side against the other in order to weaken both—not only in the Civil War but in every war on the Continent.

3. To believe that in 1905 two mutually jealous sovereign states, the United States of the North and the Confederate States of the South, whose interests conflicted at many points, would