The First Decade 1900–09
As the twentieth century opened, wars were being fought on two continents: in Africa and in Asia. In South Africa, the Boer War was entering its eleventh week, the Boers, in their two independent republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, having taken on the might of the British Empire in neighbouring Cape Colony and Natal. The first battle of 1900 in South Africa took place on January 6, when Boer forces tried to drive the British from their positions inside the town of Ladysmith, where 20,000 British troops had defended the besieged town for more than two months. Within a month Ladysmith was relieved, 500 British cavalrymen breaking through the Boer ring and galloping through the main street shouting, 'We are here!'
Another besieged town, Mafeking, was relieved in May. The rejoicing in London when this news reached the capital was so vociferous and enthusiastic that the verb 'to Maffick'—to celebrate without inhibition—entered the language and remained there for several decades. A month later, Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal, was occupied. Britain had asserted its imperial power.
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In China, 'Boxer' rebels, their full name meaning 'Righteous harmonious fists', acting in defiance of the Chinese imperial Government, were attacking foreigners and Christian missions wherever they could. In May 1900 they marched towards Peking under the slogan, 'Death and destruction to the foreigner and all his works'. On the last day of that month an international force of 365 marines reached Peking, with troops from the United States, Britain, Russia, Italy, France and Japan. Two weeks later the Boxers entered the city, destroying most of the foreign-owned buildings that were not within the protective zone of the foreign Legations. The city's Roman Catholic Church was burnt to the ground and Chinese Christians living near it were massacred. Austrians at their Legation managed to rescue a Chinese Christian woman who was being burned to death near their Legation wall. After the Third Secretary of the Japanese Legation was set upon and murdered, Japan announced that she could have 'no more communication with China—except war'.
Foreigners who could reach the security of their respective Legations were protected by the marines, and an international naval force was on its way. On July 28 the German Kaiser, William II, was present at the North Sea port of Bremerhaven when 4,000 German soldiers set sail for China. Wishing them good fortune, he declared: 'When you meet the foe you will defeat him. No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken. Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as the Huns, a thousand years ago, under the leadership of Attila, gained a reputation in virtue in which they will live in historical tradition, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again even dare to look askance at a German.'
In the European Legations, under siege for three weeks, sixty-two Europeans were killed. Brought to China by sea, a combined force of 36,000 British, Russian, German, French and Japanese troops advanced on Peking. American troops also took part. On August 14, Russian and American troops attacked the central gates of Peking. British Indian troops were the first to reach the besieged Legations. Fighting continued around the Legations for another two days, when Japanese troops entered the Forbidden City. The siege of the Legations was over. In the subsequent savage battle for the nearby Roman Catholic Cathedral and the compound around it 400 Europeans were killed, 200 of them children from the orphanage inside the compound.
News of the scale of the killings in China took time to reach those who had despatched the expeditionary force. It was not until late in September that it was learned that at one Catholic mission far from Peking, four priests and seven nuns had been killed, and 1,000 Chinese Christians beheaded.
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The twentieth century opened with working men in all industrialized countries determined to improve their situation by direct participation in the political process. In London on February 27, representatives of all the British working-class organizations founded the Labour Representation Committee. Its aim was to bring about 'the independent representation of working people in Parliament'. A quarter of a century later, the secretary of the committee, Ramsay MacDonald, became Britain's first Labour Prime Minister. At the end of the century, a sixth Labour government was in power, and with a substantial parliamentary majority.
In Austria-Hungary in 1900, the internal divisions of the Habsburg Empire—with its mixture of Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Poles, Hungarians, Roumanians, Serbs, Croats and Italians—were much in evidence. During a meeting of the Austrian Parliament that summer the Czech opposition members disrupted the proceedings by blowing penny trumpets, beating cymbals, and producing an array of catcalls. After seven hours of disruption the Prime Minister closed the session. In December 1900, after a ten-year absence, the Italian deputies resumed their seats in the Austrian regional Parliament in the Tyrol, having boycotted the assembly on the grounds that they could always be outvoted by the German-speaking deputies. On their return they insisted that their speeches and interjections, which they would only make in Italian, should be translated into German, and read out in full.
Not only in his Austrian dominions, but also in his Hungarian kingdom—the twin pillars of his Dual Monarchy—the Emperor Franz-Josef faced disaffection. Speaking in the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest, the Hungarian Prime Minister said he was prepared to take the necessary measures 'to assert the rights of Hungary and its independence'. Until the time came to do so, he added, 'let us husband our strength and keep our powder dry'.
The Russian Empire also faced internal strife. On April 23 a secret meeting was held in the Empire's Georgian province to celebrate May Day, and with it the hopes of the workers for an end to autocracy. In the previous year's gathering, seventy workers had attended. In 1900 the number was 200. One of the speakers that day was Josef Dzhugashvili, a Georgian who had just been expelled from the Tiflis Theological Seminary, after five years studying to be a priest. He was in charge that year of Marxist propaganda among the Tiflis railway workers, and had indeed already made contact with them while at the seminary. Later he took the name Stalin—Man of Steel.
The leaders of the small, largely exiled, Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which had been founded in 1898, were convinced that the nineteenth-century Marxist analysis, whereby the collapse of the hated capitalist system could only come about through class conflict, made revolution inevitable in the highly industrialized States. The Party's leader, Vladimir Ulyanov, known by his underground name of Lenin, had left Russia in 1900 after three years in exile in Siberia. From his exile in Switzerland, he built a centralized Party structure, determined to see the day when the Tsarist Empire would be no more.
In July the Senate of Finland, a Russian province since 1808, rejected an imperial manifesto making Russian the official language of Finland, a country in which only 8,000 out of 2,700,000 people spoke Russian as their native tongue. Only two years had passed since the suppression of a measure of Finnish autonomy and the exile of many Finnish national leaders. Despite this rebuff by the Finnish Senate, the power of St Petersburg seemed unchallengeable.
The Ottoman Empire was likewise troubled by political agitation and civil war among its non-Turkish and non-Muslim nationalities. In the province of Macedonia, whose ethnic mix of peoples gave its name to the French salad Macédoine de fruits, more than a hundred ethnic Bulgarians were murdered by local Greeks during 1900. The small, landlocked province was home to Turks, Serbs, Bulgarian Christians, Bulgarian Muslims (known as Pomaks), Roumanians (known as Vlachs, some of them Greek Orthodox, others Muslim), Greeks, Albanians (Christian and Muslim), and Albanianized Serbs (known as Arnauts).
Within Turkish Macedonia, the Bulgarian Christians actively resorted to the forcible conversion of the Muslim Pomaks to Christianity. In the neighbouring Turkish province of Albania, a local Muslim chief ordered the murder of more than 200 Christians. A Christian village was set on fire and several Christians who had been taken hostage were murdered because no ransom was paid for them. In the distant eastern regions of the Ottoman Empire, Kurdish villagers attacked and murdered at least sixty Armenians, and possibly as many as 400, in 1900. Britain, one of its consular representatives in the region having been assaulted, protested vigorously. Nor was Britain itself untroubled by dissent. In September, Phoenix Park in Dublin saw a large Irish nationalist demonstration demanding Home Rule for Ireland, the abolition of 'landlordism' and the withdrawal of Irish political representation in the Westminster Parliament. But far more than political unrest, disease cursed the British Empire in 1900. In Hong Kong a hundred people a week were dying of bubonic plague that spring and summer. In India, during the course of a two-year famine, two million people died.
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The year 1900 saw national rivalries in the realms of both sport and invention. The first modern Olympic Games to be held outside Athens was held that year in Paris. The table of gold medal winners was headed by France with twenty-nine, the United States with twenty, and Britain with seventeen. Austria-Hungary won four, Germany three and Russia none.
Inventions could both inspire enthusiasm and foreshadow conflict. In Britain, William Crookes found the means of separating uranium. In the United States, the revolver was invented. In Germany, on the evening of July 2, the first airship, the creation of Count Zeppelin, made its trial flight, travelling a distance of thirty-five miles. Man had found a means of powered travel through the air.
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On 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died. She had reigned for sixty-one years. At her funeral procession in London, five sovereigns, nine crown princes or heirs apparent, and forty other princes and grand dukes rode on horseback to pay their respects. In southern Africa the British conquest of the two Boer republics was almost complete, but Boer guerrilla fighters continued to evade capture, fought on, and refused to surrender. In an attempt to force the guerrillas to give up, the British military authorities seized thousands of Boer women and children, whose menfolk were still fighting, and detained them in seventeen special camps, known as 'concentration camps'. Conditions in the camps were bad, with almost no medical facilities, and little food. A further thirty-five camps were set up for black Africans who worked on the farms of the absent fighters, so they too would be unable to plant or harvest crops, or look after livestock. The death toll in the camps was high, and was denounced in Britain by the Liberal Party leader, Henry Campbell-Bannerman. 'When is a war not a war?' he asked, and gave the answer: 'When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.' The government instituted improvements and the death rate fell, but 28,000 Boer women and children died in the camps, as did 50,000 Africans.
Britain clashed with Turkey in 1901, when the Turkish Sultan tried to extend his control to the small sheikhdom of Kuwait, in the Persian Gulf. When he tried to land a Turkish military force, the Sheikh of Kuwait, who had made a treaty with Britain two years earlier, appealed for help to his new ally. A British warship arrived in the Persian Gulf and announced it would open fire if the Turkish forces tried to land. This naval threat was effective; and the Sultan abandoned his claim to sovereignty over Kuwait. Ninety years later, Britain was among a coalition of powers which made war on Iraq for having overrun the small, and by then oil-rich, sheikhdom.
In Europe, the rivalries of the great Empires were still in embryo, as were some of the weapons of war. In 1901 Britain launched its first submarine: within ten years, fifty-six had been built. The motor car, also in its infancy, was likewise to transform war, with the evolution within fifteen years of the armoured car and the tank. Another development with significance for the whole century, both in peace and war, took place on 11 December 1901 when, in Newfoundland, the electronics engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi received by wireless telegraphy what he called 'faint but conclusive' signals from his transmission station in Cornwall. It was henceforth possible, The Times reported, to solve 'the problem of telegraphing across the Atlantic without wires'.
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On 6 September 1901 the President of the United States, William McKinley, who was visiting a Pan-American Exhibition at Buffalo, was shot by an anarchist with whom he was shaking hands. McKinley, who died eight days later, was a veteran of the American Civil War. Under his administration America had defeated Spain and acquired the Philippines. It was he who had agreed to the annexation of Hawaii by the United States, and the effective control of the United States over Cuba.
McKinley was succeeded as President by Theodore Roosevelt, his forty-three-year-old Vice-President, who three years earlier had raised and commanded a volunteer cavalry regiment of cowboys and college graduates, the Rough Riders, in the Spanish-American War. 'Great privileges and great powers are ours,' the new President declared on taking the oath of office, 'and heavy are the responsibilities that go with these privileges and these powers. According as we do well or ill, so shall mankind in the future be raised or cast down.'
In the Philippines, the United States was hunting down the leaders of the national movement which was fighting in the hills. On March 23 the rebel leader and his staff were captured, but fighting continued, forcing the Americans to maintain an army of 50,000 men in the Philippines. As in South Africa it was the tactics of guerrilla fighting that proved impossible for even the most disciplined army to master. The guerrilla forces could melt away into the undergrowth, forest and jungle as soon as they made their strike, and then regroup whenever they decided to strike again. During one such attack, three American officers and forty-eight of their men were killed.
On January 10, oil was discovered in Texas, a historic moment for the future wealth and power of the United States. That same year, also in the United States, the mass production of motor cars began. American industrial power was becoming as great as that of all the industrial nations combined. When the United States Steel Corporation was formed in 1901 it was popularly known as the Billion-Dollar Corporation. Its capital was in fact even larger: $1.3 billion. America's wide-ranging overseas possessions included the Philippines, the home of seven million Filipinos—almost ten per cent of the population of the continental United States. Puerto Rico, acquired from Spain in 1898, had almost a million inhabitants. But the great demographic change in the United States was taking place not through acquisition but through immigration. During one year, 1901, almost 500,000 immigrants arrived from Europe, a figure which was to be maintained year after year for the next decade. The largest single group that year were Italians, 135,996 in all. Russian Jews made up more than 80,000.
The Russia from which so many immigrants came was in constant turmoil. During a student protest in St Petersburg proclamations were distributed with revolutionary slogans, among them 'Down with the Tsar', and the red flag of revolution was flown on the steps of the cathedral. During riots in the Georgian capital, Tiflis, fourteen demonstrators were injured and fifty arrested. 'This day marks the beginning', wrote Lenin from his exile in Switzerland, 'of an open revolutionary movement in the Caucasus.' Among those who took part in this confrontation was Josef Stalin.
Count Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer and thinker, then aged seventy-three, was an active supporter of the student protests in Moscow. His sympathy with the demonstrators led to his excommunication by the Russian Orthodox Church. In an appeal to the Tsar to protect civil liberties in Russia, he wrote: 'Thousands of the best Russians, sincerely religious people, and therefore such as constitute the chief strength of every nation, have already been ruined, or are being ruined, in prison and in banishment.' Dissent should not be punished as a crime. It was quite wrong to believe that the salvation of Russia could only be found 'in a brutal and antiquated form of government'.
Neither the internal nor the imperial policies of Russia were to change. Throughout 1901 the Russification of Finland continued with vigour, and Finnish citizens were forced to serve against their will in Russian regiments. Local resistance to Russian policy was constant. In Helsinki, in 1902, of 857 men summoned to the army only fifty-six obeyed. When a vast crowd demonstrated against army service, the Tsar's Cossack troops used their knotted whips to disperse the demonstrators. Across the Gulf of Finland, other subjects of the Tsar, the people of Estonia, were also seeking some means of national expression. In 1901 a group of young Estonians started a newspaper aimed at raising national consciousness.
In the German province of Alsace-Lorraine, acquired by conquest from France thirty years earlier, there was discontent when a new German Secretary of State was appointed for the province. He had hitherto ruled the Danish majority in North Schleswig, another German imperial conquest of the nineteenth century, and had been hated for his hostility to the Danes under his control, where he had placed restrictions on the use of the Danish language on all those living in the province. The swift growth of the Polish population in those parts of East Prussia which at the end of the eighteenth century had been part of the Polish sovereign lands partitioned by Germany, Austria and Russia, was also a cause of internal dissent. In December 1901 twenty Polish schoolchildren who refused to say their prayers in German, a language they did not understand, were flogged. When the mother of one of the children was asked by the president of the court what language she supposed Christ to have spoken, she replied without hesitation, 'In Polish.' The German Government bought considerable tracts of land in the predominantly Polish region and settled Germans on it, further exacerbating Polish hostility.
The German Government was determined to suppress Polish national sentiment. The Polish language was not allowed to be taught in schools—though it could not be forbidden in homes—and Poles were excluded from the civil service, which included the teaching professions. During a raid on several Polish-language newspaper offices, documents were found which confirmed the desire of the Poles inside the German Empire for a national future for Poland. Several editors, and thirteen Polish students, were arrested and imprisoned. The crisis was exacerbated when the German Chancellor, Count von Bülow, characterized Germans as hares and Poles as rabbits, telling a journalist: 'If in this park I were to put ten hares and five rabbits, next year I should have fifteen hares and a hundred rabbits. It is against such a phenomenon that we mean to defend German national unity in the Polish provinces.'
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A peace agreement between the Great Powers and China was signed on 7 September 1901. In the first peace treaty of the new century the Chinese Government recognized the right of eleven foreign Powers to establish garrisons along the land and river communications between Peking and the sea. China also agreed to pay a cash indemnity for the loss of European life and property. In South Africa, despite overwhelming British numerical strength, the Boers refused to give up their struggle, and in a raid on Christmas Day 1901 attacked a British army camp, killing six officers and fifty men. The British army erected 8,000 blockhouses throughout the countryside, linked by 3,700 miles of barbed wire, to prevent the Boers from sending arms and reinforcements to their respective units. Slowly the Boer detachments were isolated and worn down. But the war created a backlash of strong anti-war feeling in Britain, which brought together anti-war representatives from many lands, and at a Universal Peace Conference in Glasgow the words 'pacifism' and 'pacifist' were officially adopted to describe the gathering and its participants.
Music saw the introduction of the gramophone record in 1901. Made of shellac, with a spiral groove, it was compact, accessible and relatively hardy. The first Nobel Prizes were also awarded that year, as the result of a benefaction left by the Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, who had died five years earlier. The first prizes were awarded for physics, chemistry and medicine. Ill-health and disease were to dominate the twentieth century. More than a quarter of a million Indians died of plague in 1901. In China drought and famine led that same year, in a single month, to an estimated two and a half million deaths.
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In February 1902 the last of the heavy guns in Boer hands were captured. A Boer delegation crossed the Atlantic to seek help in continuing their struggle, and was received by Theodore Roosevelt, but he told them, to their bitter disappointment, that the United States 'could not and would not interfere' in the struggle. The Boers had reached the end of their powers of resistance, and agreed to lay down their arms. When news of the end of the war reached London on the afternoon of June 1, rejoicing began in the streets and continued through the night. There was also mourning in many homes. More than 6,000 British soldiers had been killed in South Africa. A further 16,000 had died from fever.
That year the United States took direct action to assert its influence in the Western hemisphere when, after a revolutionary outbreak in Colombia, President Roosevelt ordered a battleship and a cruiser to the area, and a battalion of United States marines was landed. Only when the Colombian Government crushed the revolutionaries were the marines withdrawn.
Off the coast of Haiti it was not the United States, but Germany, that took action against revolutionary activity, when a German gunboat sank the flagship of the Haitian revolutionary leader. The resentment in the United States was not so much that Germany had taken this action, which was beneficial to the United States, but that it had been carried out in a way characterized by one American newspaper as 'unnecessarily brutal, wanton, and uncalled for'. Within the German Empire relations between the Germans and their Polish subjects remained tense. In March 1902 more than twenty Polish students who were studying in Berlin were accused of political agitation and expelled from Prussia. A month later the Prussian Government issued a decree limiting Polish immigration. Steps were also taken to prevent Germans, who had bought land cheaply from the Prussian authorities in an effort by the authorities to increase the German population in Polish areas, from selling that land to the Poles. Model German farms were established, to encourage German farmers to move to the predominantly Polish regions. To the distress of the Polish minority in Germany, the Kaiser declared that what he called 'Polish aggressiveness' was 'resolved to encroach upon Germanism'. The law forbidding the use of the Polish language at public meetings where Poles were gathered was strictly enforced.
Within Austria-Hungary labour unrest led to troop intervention in February 1902 in the Austrian port of Trieste. During a mass demonstration in support of an eight-hour working day, troops opened fire and twelve rioters were killed. In the Spanish city of Barcelona that month, several rioters demanding higher wages and better working conditions were shot dead and a state of siege declared for the second time within a year. In the Belgian city of Louvain eight workers were killed when troops opened fire on demonstrators demanding universal suffrage. In the United States a coal strike which threatened to create a winter coal famine was only called off by the personal intervention of President Roosevelt, who first threatened to send Federal troops to work the mines if the miners did not return to work, and then persuaded both mine owners and miners to accept the verdict of a commission of enquiry.
In Russia, revolutionaries were encouraged during 1902 by the reluctance of the Tsar's soldiers to open fire on demonstrators who refused to disperse when ordered to do so. One regiment was removed from Moscow when it was discovered that it could not be relied on to open fire on demonstrators when ordered by its officers to do so. In the city of Tula, less than a hundred miles to the south, a sergeant refused to order his men to open fire on strikers. When the officer in charge struck the sergeant with his sword, the soldiers mutinied.
The annual intake of soldiers into the Russian army was coming more and more from groups influenced by anti-Tsarist propaganda. Young university teachers, doctors and lawyers were likewise influenced by the anti-monarchical, anti-aristocratic and anti-capitalist emphasis of the revolutionaries. The Jewish Socialist Workers' Party, the Bund, created a year before the Social Democratic Labour Party, was particularly strong in western Russia and the Polish and Lithuanian provinces of the empire. It too favoured a revolutionary solution to redress the widespread peasant poverty and the harsh conditions in so many factories. A third Russian revolutionary party, founded in 1902, was the Socialist Revolutionary Party, whose 'fighting section' concentrated on the assassination of politicians, soldiers, policemen and police spies.
In April, the Russian Minister of the Interior was assassinated in St Petersburg by one of the students expelled the previous year from Kiev university after anti-government demonstrations. During a student uprising in Moscow university, 400 students, some armed, seized the main academic buildings, flew the red flag, and built barricades against the troops sent to evict them. They were all eventually captured and imprisoned. In an attempt to curb unrest in the Caucasus, the Tsarist police arrested a number of Social Democratic agitators, among them Josef Stalin. After eighteen months in jail he was sentenced to three years' exile in Siberia, from which he later escaped. The conditions under which he was exiled were far more lenient than those which he himself was to impose on so many others—numbering in their millions—within three decades.
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A Serb-Croat conflict erupted in 1902. That September, in Zagreb, capital of the Hungarian province of Croatia-Slavonia, groups of Serbs and Croats fought each other in the streets. The clashes began after a Serb-edited Belgrade journal, whose article was reproduced in the Zagreb Croat newspapers, denied that the Croats were a separate nationality; they were no more, it asserted, than 'a nation of lackeys'. The destiny of the Slavs of Croatia, the article insisted, was to be absorbed in Serbia; they spoke the same language as the Serbs, and differed only in their Catholicism from the Greek Orthodox Serbs; they were one people. The riots began when a large group of Croats, angered by Serb assertions, attacked a Serbian bank, newspaper offices, businesses and shops, most of which were wrecked. More than a hundred people were injured, some seriously. Violence only ended after martial law was declared, a curfew imposed, and Austro-Hungarian troops sent in to keep order.
In the Balkans, in the areas still under Ottoman rule, armed Bulgarians crossed the border into Macedonia, attacked Turkish army posts, and declared a provisional government. Serb and Greek villages that refused to provide the insurgents with arms and supplies were looted and burnt down. The Sultan ordered an immediate restoration of Ottoman authority. Several Christian villages were then destroyed by his troops, and some villagers massacred.
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Natural disasters worldwide were no respectors of imperial boundaries. In February 1902 an earthquake in the Caucasus, where a century of Russian rule continued to be resented, killed 2,000 people. Three months later, 30,000 people were killed when the town of St Pierre, on the French West Indian island of Martinique, was totally destroyed in May by the volcanic eruption of Mont Pelée. A further 2,000 were killed within twenty-four hours on the nearby British island of St Vincent, when the Soufrière volcano erupted. In Egypt, 20,000 people died of cholera; when the British authorities began to put disinfectants in the water supply, in the hope of curbing the disease, they were accused by the local population of poisoning the water.
In British India, more than half a million people died of plague in 1902. But the efforts of the Indian Medical Services to combat the diseases that periodically ravaged the sub-continent were persistent. That year, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to a British medical officer, Major Ronald Ross, who had served in India for eighteen years, for his discovery of the malaria parasite, and for his pioneering studies in combating the disease.
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War between the Powers was still, by most contemporary calculations, unthinkable in 1903, yet the prospect of such a war could grip the public mind: the most popular thriller published in Britain that year was Erskine Childers' Riddle of the Sands, a spy story about a German invasion. The means whereby war could be waged more effectively were continually being developed. In January 1903 the headquarters of the British First Army Corps, based at Aldershot, south-west of London, made successful contact by wireless telegraphy with the ships of the Channel Squadron, while the building of a new naval base at Rosyth, in Scotland, was in part designed to keep an eye on Russia's naval exit from the Baltic.
Inside Russia, heightened political unrest led the Tsar to issue a manifesto offering to improve the condition of village life. Two weeks later he abolished the system under which peasant communities were held collectively responsible for the taxes of their members. In the same manifesto, however, the local self-governing bodies were made even more subservient to officials appointed by St Petersburg. Both urban and rural workers in Russia were turning to violence. In March there was a strike of 500 workers in the State-run ironworks at Zlatoust, in the Ufa province; only a charge by sabre-wielding mounted troops was able to disperse the strikers. In May the Governor of Ufa was assassinated. In June, there were demonstrations by workers in the port cities of Batum on the Black Sea and at Baku on the Caspian. In Baku, 45,000 strikers took to the streets, troops were sent in, and several hundred workers were killed. In July and August disturbances spread to every industrial and manufacturing town in southern Russia. Men known to be police spies were assassinated in Pinsk and Nizhni-Novgorod.
Fifty-three of the leading figures in the Russian Social Democratic Party, most of them exiles, met in the summer of 1903, first in Brussels and then in London. There was a conflict between those who wanted a broadly-based Party with a large membership, and those who wanted a small, disciplined, professional centre. Lenin, who led the call for a small, tightly-knit central authority 'of people whose profession is that of revolutionist', lost by a narrow margin, twenty-eight votes to twenty-three. At the end of the meetings, however, his faction won by a majority of two the vote on who should control the Party newspaper. Because they were a majority on that occasion, albeit only just, Lenin's faction called themselves henceforth Bolsheviki—Majority-ites. But the rival faction, the Mensheviki, the Minority-ites, later won control of the newspaper. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks held together as a single party for another nine years; then they went their separate revolutionary ways.
Inside Russia the Social Democrat Party met secretly in November 1903, with delegates, including those from the Jewish Bund, calling for the abolition of autocracy and the establishment of a democratic republic. In Baku several thousand army recruits marched in procession through the town with a red flag inscribed 'Down with the autocracy! Long live the Republic!' Students in Kiev tore down the portrait of the Tsar, and replaced it with one of the man who had assassinated the Russian Minister of the Interior the previous year.
The Russian Government decided to introduce a traditional scapegoat: the Jews, of whom there were more than five million in Russia. On April 20, during a day of deliberately unchecked violence in Kishinev, forty-three Jews were killed and several hundred Jewish women were raped. When Jewish leaders went to St Petersburg to ask for justice, the Minister, Vyacheslav Plehve, told them that the existence of a Jewish revolutionary movement forced the government to take action. If the Jewish labour movement continued to grow, he warned, he would miss no opportunity 'of rendering the lives of the Jews intolerable'.
The pogrom at Kishinev was followed by another at Gomel, which was also officially condoned. Police and soldiers formed protective lines for the rioters, who once again looted, raped and murdered with impunity. When a group of Jews took up arms in an attempt to break through to some of those who were being attacked, they were fired on by the police. The killings in Kishinev and Gomel intensified the emigration of Russian Jews, many of whom made their way to the United States, Canada, Britain and, in small but steady numbers, to Turkish-ruled Palestine.
The Russian Empire, in turmoil within, continued to act as an imperial power overseas. At Port Arthur, in Manchuria, the building of thirty-five miles of coastal fortifications, docks and a new town on what had earlier been Chinese territory was continuous. By the end of 1903 the port could accommodate eight warships and a fleet of torpedo boats. Russia was becoming a Pacific naval power, only 600 miles from Japan. The Japanese public, incensed by Russia's forward moves in China and its occupation of the Chinese province of Manchuria, called for Japan to reassert control over the Korean peninsula. Russia responded by sending troop reinforcements to the Far East along the recently completed Trans-Siberian Railway. Britain and France called on both sides to negotiate rather than fight. The United States announced it would remain neutral in any conflict.
As war in the Far East was averted, for the time being at least, the focus of international attention turned to the Balkans. On the night of 10 April 1903, King Alexander and Queen Draga of Serbia were murdered in their palace in Belgrade, and their naked, mutilated bodies were thrown from the palace window. Also murdered that night were the Prime Minister and the Minister of War. The murdered King was twenty-six years old. A week earlier he had suspended Serbia's liberal constitution—which he himself had promulgated two years previously—revoked the law introducing secret ballots at the elections, and abolished freedom of the press. He had also excluded the Radical deputies from both the Senate and Council of State. After the murders it was reported from Belgrade that the capital wore a 'festive aspect' and that 'intense joy' prevailed. Soldiers, horses and guns were decorated with flowers. A tyrant had been overthrown, and a new King, Peter Karageorgevitch, then living in Geneva, was elected in his place by the parliament.
Contrasting events in Serbia with those of her eastern neighbour, Roumania, a British commentator noted that during 1903 Roumania was 'in the happy position of a country which has no history. The only noteworthy (and a very discreditable) incident in her home politics was an extensive emigration of Jews to America, in consequence of their being denied the rights of Roumanian subjects.' In Macedonia, the Turkish suppression of unrest among the Serb, Greek and Bulgar populations continued on its harsh course, with burnings and executions. Church leaders in Britain, France and the United States denounced Muslim 'savagery'. A mass meeting in London demanded an end to Turkish rule in Macedonia. The Emperor Franz-Joseph and Tsar Nicholas II, meeting at Mürzsteg, south-west of Vienna, agreed to put joint pressure on the Sultan to institute substantial reforms for the peoples of Macedonia. The British Government agreed to use its influence in Constantinople to put pressure on Turkey to comply. On 24 October 1903 Austria and Russia issued Instructions' to Turkey, known as the Mürzsteg Programme. Reforms in Macedonia were essential, the instructions read, and would be supervised by representatives of the Powers.
The Turkish Government hesitated to submit to the demands of two foreign powers. On December 16 Austria-Hungary issued a stern warning from Vienna: Turkey 'must change if she wished to live'. Three weeks after this warning Turkey agreed to carry out the Austro-Russian demands. An Italian officer was to reorganize the Macedonian police. Austrian and Russian civilian officials were to question the local inhabitants about their grievances. Race and religion were no longer to be a barrier to official employment. Administrative borders were to be redrawn to take account of ethnic groupings.
Although Austria-Hungary had been so keen on forcing the Turks to institute reforms in Macedonia, her own internal situation was far from reformist. Throughout the Hungarian province of Croatia there were protests in May 1903 by Croats at the unfair distribution of revenue raised by taxation, and at the exclusive use of Hungarian names and the Hungarian language on the local railways. The Hungarians, too, had cause for grievance: it was only after angry scenes in the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest that Franz-Josef allowed Hungary's national flag to be flown alongside the imperial flag on military establishments inside Hungary, and gave Hungarian officers the right to transfer to regiments within Hungary.
In the Austrian provinces of the Habsburg Empire, Czechs were demanding their own university and the adoption of the Czech language in all official proceedings relating to Bohemia in the Vienna parliament. In November 1903, Czech deputies put forward a programme of national demands, including special lessons in primary schools in the Austrian province of Silesia, where there was a Czech minority, 'to assist the development of the Czech national spirit'. The Czech demands were parallelled by demands from the Italian minority in the Tyrol, who wanted a university in Innsbruck. There followed a German protest demonstration against the Italian demands. These manifestations of national discontent within the Habsburg Empire caused many outside observers to wonder how long the Dual Monarchy could survive the tensions within it.
***
In foreign policy, the growing closeness of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and their association with Italy, raised the possibility of a strong new naval power in the Mediterranean. To counter this, Britain and France were drawing closer together, and in October 1903 they signed an agreement referring disputes between them to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, and in April 1904 signed the Entente Cordiale, whereby France recognized Britain's predominant position in Egypt, and Britain recognized France's predominant position in Morocco. In the Sudan, where five years earlier Britain and France had clashed over who was to control the upper regions of the Nile, a British force marched, with French approval, against a Muslim opponent of British rule, captured him and hanged him.
In northern Nigeria, British forces moved against the Muslim ruler who had defied the coming of British control over the region. Three hundred of his men were killed in the fighting. During the final battle of the campaign a European eyewitness wrote of how 'hordes of horsemen and footmen armed with spears, swords, old guns and bows and arrows appeared, charging the square over and over again, only to be mown down by machine-gun and carbine fire'. With that victory there was relief among the British administrators in West Africa that, as one contemporary wrote, 'the fear of a Mahomedan movement which would sweep the whites back into the Delta need no longer be entertained'.
The German colonial administrators in German South-West Africa faced local unrest when the Hottentot tribe rose in revolt. A punitive expedition was ordered by the Kaiser, to protect the 4,600 German residents in German South-West Africa and the 1,500 Boers who had emigrated there from South Africa. Thousands of the native Hottentots were killed.
***
President Roosevelt spoke in the summer of 1903 of the 'destiny' of the United States as a Pacific Power. A few weeks after his speech an 'All-American cable' was opened, linking San Francisco to the Philippines. An extension to Shanghai created telegraphic communication between the American and Asian continents. The new cable, linked with the existing Indo-European system, enabled Roosevelt, on July 4, American Independence Day, to send a message from Washington DC around the globe.
Unimpressed by the power of Washington, the Government of Colombia refused to allow the United States to build a canal across the Panama Isthmus at its narrowest point—the Colombian province of Panama. The people of Panama, despite being subjected to Colombian rule, were as keen as the United States to benefit from the wealth which would be created by building and working the canal. On November 3, in a bloodless revolution, the Panamanians declared independence from Colombia. An American gunboat watched over the scene, threatening to intervene if Colombian troops attacked the Panamanians. The Colombian troops withdrew and the Republic of Panama came into being, negotiating a treaty with the United States under which, in return for a guarantee by Washington to safeguard the independence of the new republic, Panama ceded in perpetuity a strip of land ten miles wide, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, on which the United States could not only build and control the canal, but maintain military garrisons, and exercise all the rights of sovereignty.
***
The year 1903 had its share of natural and unnatural disasters. In August, eighty-four Parisians were killed when fire broke out in the Paris metro. In December, during a theatre matinee in Chicago, fire killed more than 600 people, mainly women and children. In India the number of deaths from plague totalled 842,264. A policy of mass inoculation was embarked upon, but with local superstitions leading to resistance, the government had to promise to abstain from any attempt to carry out preventative measures by force. By the end of the year the total number of plague deaths during the previous three years reached 1,673,000.
Among the wealthier nations of the world, the search for a life of comfort, health and leisure was ever present. In 1903 the first 'garden city' was founded, at Letchworth in England, aimed at combining urban living with pastoral and even agricultural pursuits. That same year President Roosevelt established the first national wildlife refuge in the United States, Pelican Island, off the east coast of Florida. Nature was to be protected by Federal law and maintained by Federal money.
The welfare of human beings was enhanced in Germany, where the principle of sickness benefits for workers was confirmed and extended. In France, Pierre and Marie Curie discovered the properties of radium. That radium would have a dramatic influence in the treatment of cancer was not yet known, but the nature of its properties was clearly of medical significance. As The Times reported, 'radium emanations act powerfully upon the nerve substance, and cause the death of living things whose nerve centres do not lie deep enough to be shielded from their influence.'
Architecture and commerce combined in 1903 with the opening of the New York Chamber of Commerce and Stock Exchange. Also in New York, that year saw the opening night of the musical The Wizard of Oz, and one of the earliest feature films, The Great Train Robbery. The first motor taxicab was introduced to the streets of London that year, threatening the horse-drawn cab with extinction. Most dramatically for the future of the century, on 17 December 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two American brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, fitted a twelve horse-power petrol engine to one of their gliders. Thus powered it flew in the air for forty yards. This was the first successful aeroplane flight.
***
On 5 February 1904 negotiations being conducted between Russia and Japan over Russian claims for some influence in Korea, and Japanese claims for a similar influence in Manchuria, were broken off. Three nights later, Japanese torpedo boats attacked the Russian naval squadron at Port Arthur. Two Russian battleships and a cruiser were damaged. Russia and Japan were at war. Russian troops stationed in Manchuria marched into Korea. Two months later they were driven back, and Japanese forces entered Manchuria. At the same time Japanese troops, helped by gunboats and torpedo boats, besieged Port Arthur. This left Japan free to land an army in Korea without fear of Russian naval opposition.
Russia's position at sea was further weakened when, in April, the Russian flagship struck a Japanese mine off Port Arthur and sank; the Russian naval commander-in-chief, forty officers and 750 men were drowned. The Japanese fleet suffered no losses until May, when two Japanese cruisers rammed each other in dense fog off Port Arthur, with the loss of 235 lives, and a Japanese battleship struck two Russian mines and sank. Four hundred officers and men were drowned.
Eight months after the outbreak of the war, using the Trans-Siberian Railway, the strength of the Russian force in Manchuria reached 320,000, three times what it had been at the outset, but losses in battle were heavy. To augment the numbers, 7,000 convicts doing hard labour in the remote and desolate camps of Sakhalin island, nearly 3,000 of whom were convicted murderers, were offered a year off their sentences for every two months they were in action. An additional 15,000 ex-convicts, including 5,000 murderers who had served their sentences, but who had been forced after their release to live in settlements near the labour camps, were offered the right to return to Russia, if they agreed to fight. They were not, however, given the right to live in any provincial capital, or to own property.
In the main the convicts made poor soldiers, and the Russian army remained mostly on the defensive. Such clashes as did take place led to heavy Russian loss of life. In August the Russian fleet, bottled up in Port Arthur, decided to try to seek battle with the Japanese in the open water, and was defeated. To redress the balance the powerful Russian Baltic Fleet set sail for the Far East, a journey half way around the world. As it made its way eastward, 6,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in a failed attempt to break into Port Arthur.
***
Since May 1903 news of a reign of terror in the Belgian Congo had been reaching Europe as a result of the efforts of Edmund Morel, a shipping clerk in Liverpool, who published graphic accounts of atrocities which had come to his notice during the system of forced labour which was imposed by the Belgian authorities—under the direct rule of King Leopold—on the local inhabitants. Morel wrote of women chained to posts as hostages until their menfolk returned with rubber; and of Belgian punitive expeditions which, on their return to base, brought baskets of human hands as proof of their ruthlessness. Morel estimated that by such methods King Leopold, for whom the Congo was a personal domain, drew ￡360,000 annually from rubber alone.
In February 1904, nine months after Morel's first foray into print, Roger Casement, the British Consul in the Belgian Congo, sent a report of Leopold's activities to the Foreign Office in London. He had seen Congolese women and children chained in sheds as hostages, and men beaten up for failure to produce sufficient rubber at collection points. He reported that the Belgian authorities kept some 10,000 men under arms to police the Congo, and wrote of mass executions, and of terrible mutilations inflicted on the natives by white officials. Casement estimated that as many as three million native Congolese had died of disease, torture or shooting during the previous fifteen years.
As news of the Congolese atrocities spread there was widespread outcry at King Leopold's sanction of such hideous practices, and against the enormous financial profit he had made. Critics included President Roosevelt and King Edward VII among heads of State, and Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad among writers. But it was only after two years of international protests that the Belgian Parliament began to debate the situation in the Congo, and only after two more years that Leopold agreed to hand over his personal control to the Belgian Parliament. Roger Casement was knighted by the British King for his skill in exposing the Congo atrocities. Later he was active in the struggle to liberate Ireland from British rule. During the First World War he attempted to recruit Irish prisoners-of-war in Berlin to fight against Britain, was caught by the British after landing on the coast of Ireland, tried as a traitor, and shot.
The British Empire was continually exerting its strength. During 1904, a senior political officer of the Government of India, Colonel Younghusband, advanced into Tibet accompanied by 3,000 British and Indian soldiers, commanded by a senior British officer, General Macdonald. At the village of Guru, inside Tibet, the Tibetans blocked Macdonald's way. 'I did my level best to prevent fighting, and twice refused Macdonald's request to begin,' Younghusband wrote to a friend. 'But when the Tibetan general refused to carry out Macdonald's order to the Tibetans to lay down their weapons, began struggling with an Indian soldier, and loosed off his revolver, the fat was in the fire. I was miserable at the time, for of course it was a loathsome sight, and, however much I felt even then it would probably work out well in the end, I could not but be disgusted at the sight of those poor wretched peasants mowed down by our rifles and Maxims.'
In the fighting around Guru 600 Tibetans were killed. There were no British or Indian deaths. Younghusband and Macdonald pressed on toward the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. In subsequent skirmishes a further 2,100 Tibetans were killed, for the loss in action of thirty-seven British and Indian troops. Younghusband reached Lhasa, and the British flag was raised over the Himalayan kingdom. 'The Tibetans', he was surprised to find, 'were excellent people, quite polished and polite and genial and well-mannered, but absolutely impossible on business matters.' They accepted all Britain's demands, agreeing that their southern frontier would be the line defined by Britain fourteen years earlier. They would destroy all fortifications between Lhasa and the frontier. They would open markets in two towns in which traders from British India would be permitted to trade. They would also pay Britain the massive sum (for them) of ￡500,000, in seventy-five annual instalments. Until the Tibetan indemnity was paid, that is, until 1979, Britain would occupy the Chumbi Valley in southern Tibet.
General Macdonald's return journey was made more difficult by a sudden drop in temperature as he and his men made their way through steep ravines at 18,000 feet. Less than forty British and Indian soldiers had been killed in the fighting. More than 200 died of cold and exposure on their way home.
***
In Africa, as in Asia, the imperial powers continued to assert their authority. In Morocco the French Government began strenuous efforts to control the warring Muslim factions. In Angola, where Portugal had been the colonial power for more than 300 years, one of the native peoples, the Cuanhamas, had attacked an isolated column of Portuguese-officered troops, killing 254 of them. The Portuguese, who prided themselves on the enlightened nature of their administration, took punitive action. Five thousand soldiers set off to punish the Cuanhamas. The result was what a British report described as 'a massacre'.
In German South-West Africa the Herero people had risen in revolt, seizing German-owned houses and cattle, and surrounded several German garrisons. When a small German military detachment was attacked, and twenty-six German soldiers killed, a punitive expedition was despatched. Shortly after the expedition arrived the other large tribe in the colony, the Witbois, who had hitherto been armed by the Germans as allies in the struggle, joined the Hereros. In the months that followed, thousands of Hereros and Witbois were killed. When news of the severity of the punitive measures reached Europe, there was widespread indignation that destruction on such a scale had been inflicted by a colonial power on its subject peoples.
In the Dutch East Indies, following a rebellion against Dutch rule, a military force was sent against the rebels, and nearly a thousand women and children were killed. In the Dutch Parliament a member of the government's own Party declared that the Dutch soldiers had behaved like 'Huns and Tatars', massacring the women and children for the commercial ends of mining and oil exploration.
The conflicts of imperialism and nationalism were everywhere intertwined. Within the Russian Empire, the Governor-General of Finland was shot dead in June by the son of a Finnish senator. The next month the Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav Plehve, was killed by a bomb. In November, at a conference in St Petersburg, the usually docile presidents of the local provincial assemblies demanded the establishment of a constitution for Russia, and civil and religious liberties.
In Ireland, the desire for independence was inspired by other national struggles. In 1904 the Irish nationalist leader Arthur Griffith wrote of the achievement of the Hungarians in 1867 in obtaining their own parliament: 'Hungary won her independence by refusing to send members to the Imperial Parliament at Vienna or admit any right in that Parliament to legislate for her.' A year later Griffith founded Sinn Fein—Ourselves Alone—dedicated to an Ireland independent of the United Kingdom. Fourteen years later, as a Sinn Fein member of the British Parliament, he was to be one of the leaders of Sinn Fein's refusal to sit any longer in the Parliament in London, but to establish its own Irish Parliament in Dublin.
In India, where more than a million Indians died of plague in 1904, the Indian National Congress was searching for a means of challenging British rule. From South Africa, where his work on behalf of Indian rights had been tireless, Mahatma Gandhi advocated the method he was using there: non-co-operation. Peaceful but all-embracing protest was 'the only weapon', he wrote to a friend, 'that is suited to the genius of our people and our land, which is the nursery of the most ancient religions and has very little to learn from modern civilisation—a civilisation based on violence of the blackest type, largely a negation of the Divine in man, and which is rushing headlong to its own ruin.'
China was also on the verge of an internal transformation. A Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yat-sen, who had trained as a doctor in both Hawaii and Hong Kong, pressed for an end to the imperial dynasty and the 'regeneration' of China. In 1904 he and his followers published a document entitled 'Summary of the Revolution'. It was a far-ranging call, strongly influenced by Socialist doctrines: 'The Revolution having been inaugurated by the people, it shall be democratic, i.e., all citizens shall possess equal rights.' It was a revolutionary manifesto for a country where such ideals would have to be fought for in the streets and on the battlefields.
***
In 1904 the third modern Olympic Games was held in St Louis, Missouri. The United States won eighty gold medals—by far the largest number—with the next largest, five each, going to Germany and Cuba, and four to Canada. Several of the inventions of 1904 were to have a permanent place in the coming century. Among them were King C. Gillette's safety razor and Thomas Sullivan's tea bag. At the World Fair held in St Louis at the same time as the Olympics, German immigrants produced two items of food that, as a result of the Games, were popularized throughout the world: the ice cream cone and the hamburger.
***
In St Petersburg, tension had been building up as a result of the dismissal of four workers from the Putilov factory, the largest factory in the Russian capital. When the Putilov workers went on strike they were widely supported: on 7 January 1905 more than 80,000 people from enterprises across the city were on strike, closing down the capital's electricity. A mass demonstration was planned to demand increased wages and liberal reforms. On January 8 the demonstration's leader, Father Gapon, informed the Tsar that it would be peaceful, and that a petition would be presented which it was hoped the Tsar would receive in person, as the demonstrators had no faith in his ministers. But in another petition that day, peasant and working-class demonstrators warned the Tsar they had reached 'that terrible moment when death is to be preferred to the continuance of intolerable suffering'.
On Sunday January 9 Father Gapon—whom the Tsar described in his diary as 'some kind of priest-socialist'—led thousands of unarmed men, women and children towards the centre of the city, singing hymns and carrying crosses and religious banners. As they approached the Winter Palace, Cossack troops tried to drive them away with whips, but the crowd was too large and too determined to be whipped back. The Cossacks then used their rifles and swords. When several thousand striking workers reached the centre of the city, determined to help the crowd reach the Winter Palace, fighting ensued. When it ended 200 demonstrators lay dead.
On the following day strikes took place all over Russia. During mass demonstrations in Riga, troops charged and seventy demonstrators were killed. In Warsaw, on January 14, strikers marched through the streets looting and burning shops as they went. Russian troops opened fire and ninety-three marchers were killed. In prolonged fighting in Odessa, 2,000 demonstrators were killed. On February 17 the Tsar's uncle, Grand Duke Serge, who until a few weeks earlier had been Governor of Moscow, noted for his harshness towards any form of dissent, was assassinated.
Despite the revolutionary turmoil at home, and the military setback of the surrender of Port Arthur to the Japanese on January 1, Russian troops in Manchuria continued to fight, but in each confrontation their casualties were much higher than those of their enemy, and on March 9 they were forced to abandon Mukden, the principal town in southern Manchuria. During three weeks of fighting, 27,700 Russian soldiers had been killed.
The Russian Baltic Fleet had continued its long, slow voyage towards the Far East. On May 27 it reached the Tsushima Strait, the open waterway between Korea and Japan. The Japanese fleet was waiting. Battle ensued and within three-quarters of an hour all eight Russian battleships were out of action, as were seven of the twelve Russian cruisers and six of the nine destroyers. The Battle of Tsushima sealed the fate of the Russian war effort. On land the Japanese continued to advance, Japanese troops landing on Russian soil for the first time in the war, occupying the island of Sakhalin.
As Russia's humiliation intensified, President Roosevelt invited both Russia and Japan to accept a cease-fire, and to open negotiations in the United States. After less than three weeks of negotiations a treaty was signed. A war in which 58,000 Japanese and 120,000 Russian soldiers had been killed was over. Korea was recognized as a Japanese dependency, the first successful assertion of Japanese control on the mainland of Asia. Port Arthur was ceded to Japan. The southern half of Sakhalin island was annexed by Japan. Both belligerents agreed to evacuate Manchuria, which was returned to Chinese sovereignty.
In the final months of the Russian war against Japan, strikes, riots and violence had spread throughout Russia. In many rural areas, peasants murdered landlords, and looted houses, factories and sugar refineries. During April, in St Petersburg, a meeting of lawyers and professors from all over Russia called for a democratic constitution, based on universal suffrage and secret ballot. Their call was supported by the many unions that had sprung up, including those of medical personnel, engineers and technicians, agronomists, journalists, writers and school teachers. But, asserting its autocratic powers, the government forbade all public discussion of the lawyers' and professors' call.
The ability of the autocracy to stifle debate was under daily challenge. On May 8 a congress of fourteen unions, meeting in Moscow, advocated a general strike throughout Russia to end tyranny. In the Polish provinces of Russia, unarmed processions, mostly of working men, were attacked by Russian troops, and many marchers were killed. In Finland resolutions were passed demanding the abolition of the dictatorship and censorship, the restoration of Press freedom, and the removal of all Russian police forces. Municipal buildings in the Baltic provinces were attacked and portraits of the Tsar destroyed.
On August 19, realizing he could no longer resist the pressures of more than seven months' agitation and near-anarchy, the Tsar announced that 'while preserving the fundamental law regarding the autocratic power' he had decided 'to summon elected representatives from the whole of Russia to take a constant and active part in the elaboration of laws'. The new body would be called the State Council, in Russian, Gosudarstvennaia Duma—known simply as the Duma. It would be responsible 'for the preliminary study and discussion of legislative proposals'. These proposals, when decided upon, would be 'submitted to the supreme autocratic authority'.
The promise of an elected assembly was a massive concession for the Tsar, but a grave disappointment for those who wanted a democratic assembly with legislative powers, independent of the Tsar's authority. Not only the Duma's authority, but the franchise of the voters, was limited: owners of property could vote, as could proprietors of industrial establishments and also peasants. But working men and the professional classes, whose part in the demands for reform had been so strong, were both excluded. In St Petersburg, with a population of 1,500,000, there would only be 9,500 voters. In addition, the Tsar could dissolve the Duma when he chose. Nor were the public to be admitted to its sessions.
Unrest continued. In October there were strikes in both Moscow and St Petersburg, when troops again clashed with the strikers. On October 16, in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, Russian troops opened fire on a mass meeting of Estonians, killing 150. On October 26 a railway strike was declared throughout the empire, paralysing the ability of Russia to maintain trade or order. The constitutional reform parties believed only drastic action could force the Tsar to transform the Duma into a truly democratic constituency assembly. Decrees forbidding open-air public meetings without permission were ignored. In November people speculated that if the Tsar refused to accede to the demands of the Liberals for constitutional reform, he might be forced aside altogether by revolution.
On November 9 the sailors and artillerymen at the Kronstadt naval base, guarding the sea route to St Petersburg, mutinied. Troops sent to suppress the mutiny were only able to do so after severe fighting. An appeal on November 16 for workers to end the general strike was ignored. In Vladivostok, soldiers in the reserve mutinied, rampaging through the town, looting, and setting ships on fire. On November 25 there was a revolt of soldiers, sailors and workmen in the Crimean port of Sebastopol. Twenty thousand loyal troops had to be sent to crush it. The battleship Potemkin, under the control of its crew, flew the red flag of revolution, and bombarded government buildings in Odessa and other Black Sea ports with its powerful naval guns.
The Tsar had decided on his course. Harsh restrictions on press freedom were re-imposed, and new Governor-Generals appointed for the Baltic provinces and the Caucasus with authority to repress all agitation. Still the unrest continued. In Warsaw a demonstration by more than 400 Roman Catholic clergymen demanded autonomy for Poland, a separate Polish Parliament and the restoration of the Polish language in all local government business. There was a strike of postmen and telegraphists throughout the empire. The Tsar issued a new scale of heavy penalties for those who incited strike action. In response, the revolutionaries urged the public not to pay taxes, and called on soldiers to mutiny.
On December 21 revolution broke out in Moscow. The revolutionaries seized several railway stations and set up barricades. Councils of Workers' Deputies, many under Bolshevik control, were established throughout the city to direct the revolutionary effort. But government troops, remaining loyal to the Tsar, retained control of one of the railway stations, and of several fortified positions within the areas held by the revolutionaries, and were able to advance, bombarding revolutionary-held positions with artillery. The fighting continued for ten days. On December 28, 300 armed revolutionaries forced their way into the house of the Chief of the Secret Police and killed him. But the authorities were gaining the upper hand, and on the same day Tsarist police arrested all the members of the Social Revolutionary Committee in the city. A Bolshevik attack on the main police barracks was driven off. When the fighting in Moscow ended more than a thousand revolutionaries had been killed.
On December 26, while fighting was still intense in Moscow, the Tsar had issued a decree considerably widening the numbers who could vote for the Duma. Among the new voters would be house owners, tradesmen paying taxes, civil servants and railway employees. This concession calmed a considerable amount of Liberal unease in St Petersburg and Moscow. Elsewhere in the Empire, however, men and women were inspired by the revolution in Moscow to believe that the whole edifice of autocracy could be overthrown. There was fighting in several cities in the Polish provinces. In the Baltic provinces the revolutionaries fought, although in vain, to seize power, and in the Caucasus there were revolutionary outbreaks in several towns. On the Black Sea attempts were made to take over the main ports. In Odessa, after the declaration of martial law, Cossack troops cleared the whole centre of the city of strikers. In Estonia workers roamed the countryside looting and burning Russian-owned mansions until Russian troops hunted them down. Several hundred Estonian workers were killed by the troops. Five hundred more, arrested and court-martialled, were executed. Hundreds more were exiled to Siberia.
***
Other Empires faced other problems: in the British Parliament there was a call on May 9 for the 'gross disabilities' under which the Aborigines of Australia suffered to be removed for all time. On the following day the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the conditions under which the Aborigines had been put to work 'had many of the characteristics of slavery'. A week later, the conditions under which Chinese labourers were toiling in the mines in South Africa was cause for British parliamentary concern. These labourers had been brought from China under contracts which made their conditions of work harsh in the extreme.
In German South-West Africa the rebellion of the Herero and Witboi tribesmen continued. The German commander in the colony, General von Trotha, threatened the whole tribe with 'extermination' if it did not surrender. The Herero leader, Morenga, having offered in vain to open negotiations with the Germans, attacked one of the main German army camps and overran it. He then challenged the Germans to a full-scale battle. When this took place, forty German soldiers were killed. More German troops were sent from Germany. In the fighting that winter, the Witboi chiefs surrendered but the Hereros fought on. Against them the Germans instituted the policy the British had used against the Boers: concentration camps in which Herero women, children and old people were confined behind barbed wire, to try to force their menfolk to surrender. But the Hereros fought on, as the Boers had done.
In Austria-Hungary the Hungarian demand for universal suffrage culminated in a mass Socialist demonstration in Budapest. The Emperor was indignant, and prorogued parliament. Austrian Socialists then united with their brethren in Budapest, and on November 28 a demonstration of working men, marching with red banners, assembled in front of the parliament building in Vienna while parliament was in session. Inside, the Austrian Prime Minister agreed to introduce a franchise bill based on universal suffrage. The Hungarian Prime Minister did likewise in Budapest.
***
In British India, the plague that had taken so many lives each year since the beginning of the century took even more in 1905, when 1,125,652 plague deaths were reported. The death of more than a million people in one year was a terrifying testament to the power of disease, and the inability of even the most beneficent rulers to control it.
The growing prosperity of the industrial nations, and the desire of those who were making the wealth to live in greater comfort, was reflected in 1905 by the purchase, in the United States, south of Kansas City, of land on which to build an exclusive residential district. The era of the Country Club had begun. With the growth of wealth there came, for some, a sense of communal responsibility. The year 1905 saw the founding in the United States of the Rotary Club, whose members, businessmen and professionals, met regularly both for the pleasure of each other's company, and to do beneficial work in their local communities.
The instinct for the preservation of natural resources continued to be most noticeable in the United States, where in 1905 President Roosevelt established a Forest Service for the proper management and preservation of the country's vast woodland resources. The founding of the Audubon Society that year was an earnest of the recognition to protect birds in the wild. Parallel with this guarding of nature came the continued expansion of industry: that same year saw the creation in Pennsylvania of Bethlehem Steel, a giant of steel production. In Gary, Indiana, the rival steel company, the United States Steel Corporation, constructed a 'company town' which could house 200,000 workers in conditions of comparative comfort. In Britain, the continuing expansion of the motor car industry was seen in the founding of the Austin Motor Company, and of the Automobile Association. Cars were to be made accessible not only to the rich, but to the middle classes. And motor omnibuses—the 'bus' of today's cities worldwide—opened their first regular service in London in 1905. The internal combustion engine, which a decade earlier had been a curiosity, was becoming an integral part of the life, work and leisure of the twentieth century.
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On 10 January 1906 one of Britain's most popular newspapers, the Daily Mail, coined a new word, 'suffragette'. It referred to those women who, in search of the vote for women in national elections—one such election had just taken place, with an entirely male electorate—were adopting increasingly outspoken, even violent, tactics. In New Zealand, women, including Maori women, had received the vote more than a decade earlier. In Australia women had been entitled to vote in Federal elections since 1902; but unlike in New Zealand the Aborigines of Australia were denied the vote until 1967. In the United States, where an all-male franchise was still in place, there had for many years been a strong tradition of campaigning for votes for women. In the state of Wyoming, women got the vote as early as 1889, in Colorado in 1893 and in Indiana and Utah in 1896.
The question of the electoral franchise was momentarily overshadowed in the public mind on February 10, when King Edward VII launched a new battleship, the Dreadnought, the most powerful and fastest warship then in existence. This new class of battleship constituted a revolution in naval armaments, starting a race between the Great Powers that was to divert considerable financial resources from social policies.
In Russia, the turmoil of 1905 continued into the new year, despite hopes that the Duma, which was to be elected according to the wider franchise extracted from the Tsar, would be able to institute substantial reforms. The first election was to be held on April 4. Before then, in an attempt to curb political dissent, the government closed down eighty-eight newspapers and arrested more than fifty editors. Thousands of political agitators were sentenced to exile in Siberia or imprisoned. Thousands more fled the country for exile.
The first session of the Duma opened in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg on May 10. The Tsar's speech of welcome left the delegates puzzled that no reference was made to constitutional reform, or to the opportunities opened up by the very existence of an elected assembly. Instead the Tsar stressed his hope to bequeath to his son 'as his inheritance, a firmly established, well-ordered and enlightened State'. The deputies then transferred, through cheering crowds, to the Tauride Palace, where they were to hold all future meetings. In their first session there, that same day, they called for an amnesty for political prisoners—'those who have sacrificed their freedom for their country'—and the replacement of the autocracy by a constitutional monarchy. They then called for elections to be held by universal suffrage, free education, the distribution of some private land to the peasants and the abolition of privileges based on class, religion or race.
The Tsar took the view that an amnesty, the first of the Duma's requests, would encourage another revolution, and rejected it. When the Duma asked that the death penalty be not carried out on eight workmen who had been arrested during the riots in the Baltic provinces, its plea was ignored and the men were shot. When the Duma criticized the government for not having taken steps to prevent a massacre of Jews in the Russian-Polish town of Bialystok, the Tsar then announced that he was 'cruelly disappointed' that the representatives of the nation had 'strayed into spheres beyond their competence' and declared the session of the Duma closed.
A number of deputies, incensed at having been dissolved before they had been allowed to make any legislative progress, moved to the town of Vyborg, in Russian Finland. From there they issued a manifesto protesting against the dissolution and urging the population to give the government neither money nor soldiers. For its part the government sent a circular to all provincial governors, ordering that 'disturbances must be repressed, and revolutionary movements must be put down by all legal means'.
The provincial governors, the conduit throughout Russia for the Tsarist government's instructions, often lacked the authority to carry out those instructions. In Odessa, after a Jewish deputation told the city's governor that anti-Jewish riots were imminent, he replied that while he could certainly prevent government troops from joining in the attacks he would be unable to control either the Cossack troops, who had their own commanders, or armed gangs of anti-Semites—the 'Black Hundred'—or the public at large. Shortly afterwards, Cossacks and Black Hundreds joined a mob that rampaged through the Jewish districts, killing, maiming and plundering. The army stood aside.
That autumn many provincial governors and police chiefs were killed by revolutionaries. Field courts martial were established in many provinces at which the trial of someone accused of revolutionary activity was held in secret, and could take no longer than eighteen hours. The sentences had to be carried out within twenty-four hours. During September and October, 300 people were shot or hanged by order of these courts martial.
***
Japan, the victor of the Russo-Japanese War, was imposing its own imperial rule in Taiwan, a Japanese possession since 1895. Expeditions against the aboriginal population of the island had led by 1906 to the killing of tens of thousands. With the country apparently 'pacified' it was opened up to foreign investment. Gold production, the island's chief source of revenue for Japan, rose considerably. But 'pacified' proved to be a relative term for the Japanese in Taiwan, as it was for some of the European Powers in Africa. Within a year of the pacification having been declared complete, new outbreaks of revolt took place.
In South Africa the Zulu population in the British province of Natal rose in revolt in 1906. In an attempt to deter the rebels the Natal government sentenced to death twelve Zulus who had been convicted of murdering two police officers at the outbreak of the rebellion. The twelve men were executed, but the rebellion continued. Its suppression was conducted with severity, and more than 3,000 Zulus were killed. The Anglican Bishop of Zululand charged that the conduct of the troops was 'a deep disgrace to Englishmen'.
French efforts to assert authority over Morocco were challenged by Maclain, a Muslim leader described in the European press as 'a fanatical sorcerer from the Sahara', who incited the local population to attack Christians and Jews. At Marrakech he and his followers burst into the Jewish quarter, murdering and looting. At the port of Mogador only the arrival or a French gunboat protected the Jews of the town from another Berber chief.
A British expedition to find and punish rebels in Northern Nigeria was successful, British newspapers reporting that the rebel forces at one town had been 'almost exterminated'. In South-West Africa the German colonialists' war against the Herero, Hottentot and Witboi had continued with heavy casualties on both sides. The German public were shocked when they were told, in June 1906, that almost 2,000 German troops had been killed in the fighting. German military reinforcements were sent, and the last of the Witboi leaders surrendered. A month later the Hottentot chief gave himself up. A German military force then set out against the ever-defiant Hereros, but heavy casualties were inflicted on the Germans throughout the autumn.
In Berlin, a majority of the Reichstag deputies, including the Centre Party on which the government relied for support, demanded a reduction in the number of troops in German South-West Africa. The Chancellor was indignant at this attempt to curtail German imperial policy, and when a motion to increase the money allocated to South-West Africa was rejected by 178 votes to 168, he dissolved the Reichstag. Of the 80,000 Hereros in South-West Africa at the start of the century, only 15,000 were alive a decade later.
***
That year, in the United States, Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle exposed the terrible conditions, moral as well as sanitary, in the meat stock yards and packing houses of Chicago. In a letter to President Roosevelt, Sinclair urged an investigation. At first Roosevelt was reluctant to instigate one, but public pressure mounted, and when two undercover agents confirmed what Sinclair had written—that grave breaches of public health were involved in the slaughter and packing of meat—action was taken, and two pieces of binding legislation, the Meat Inspections Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, were passed through Congress. These acts imposed severe penalties on anyone whose canned meat was adulterated in any way, or did not clearly show the date of manufacture.
***
Natural disasters continued to take their toll. In Hong Kong, a typhoon killed 10,000 people. In Italy, 500 people were killed when Vesuvius erupted in the first week of April. On the morning of April 18 San Francisco was struck by an earthquake. There had been no warning, only an unexplained nervousness of dogs and horses on the previous evening. As fires spread, Federal troops were deployed throughout the burning city to stop looting. Four looters, caught in the act, were arrested and shot. When a large crowd of looters attacked the Mint, which was ablaze, fourteen of them were shot dead.
More than a thousand people were killed in the earthquake. The people of Japan subscribed $100,000 to earthquake relief. But President Roosevelt declined all foreign help, asserting that the United States was able to help its own homeless and destitute. The United States was not the only earthquake victim in 1906. On August 16 an earthquake struck Chile, killing 3,000 people.
***
President Roosevelt's determination to protect the natural and historic wealth of his country continued to lead to legislation. The Antiquities Act, 1906, gave the President authority to set aside Federal lands 'for the protection of objects of scientific, prehistoric, or historic interest', and the authority of the National Forests Commission, established a decade earlier, strengthened. In Britain the creation of rural suburbs as integral parts of a city was inaugurated in 1906 with the founding of Hampstead Garden Suburb, on the northern outskirts of London. That year, the Liberal government also instituted reforms in the conditions under which merchant seamen worked. Internationally, a convention was signed which forbade night-shift work for women.
In the realm of music 1906 saw the invention of the jukebox and the debut of the singer Maurice Chevalier. In the United States the W. K. Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake Company launched a new breakfast cereal, Kellogg's Corn Flakes. That same year the Coca-Cola Company replaced the cocaine in its popular drink with caffeine. Two technological advances, both of which were to have wide repercussions in the years ahead in the life of every nation, also took place in the United States in 1906: the opening in New York of a film studio, and the first radio broadcast, transmitted on December 24, when music, a poem and a short talk were heard not only in New York City but by ships' radio operators at sea.
***
In Russia, at the opening session of the second Duma in 1907, the Prime Minister, Peter Stolypin, created a sense of hope and expectation when he announced: 'Our country must be transformed into a constitutional State.' What constituted the essential parameters of a 'constitutional State' differed in the mind of the government and that of the members of the Duma. When the Duma voted to expropriate land from landowners for distribution to needy peasants, the government refused to agree. In June, Stolypin demanded the suspension of all the Social Democratic party members, sixteen of whom were at once arrested, and a further fifty-five of whom were charged with carrying on revolutionary propaganda in the army and navy, in the form of pamphlets, widely distributed, calling on all soldiers and sailors to disobey the orders of their officers. The Duma wanted a committee of deputies set up, before which the government could present its evidence against the Social Democratic deputies. But before the committee could meet, the Tsar dissolved the Duma, and fixed a date for new elections in three months' time.
Before the new elections could be held the Tsar changed the basis of voting. This was itself an unconstitutional act which violated a provision accepted when the Duma had been established in 1906, that the electoral law could not be changed without the Duma's consent. Under the new franchise more votes were to go to landlords and fewer to peasants, and two-thirds of the seats allocated to Poland and the Caucasus were taken away. Before the elections could take place, newspapers critical of the government were fined and confiscated, and more than a thousand people were exiled to Siberia. In Vilna, a Polish bishop who had been a member of the second Duma was removed from his bishopric for having supported the demands of the Poles in his diocese for equal treatment with the Russians.
Before the second Duma could assemble, there was a mutiny of the garrison at Vladivostok which took several days to suppress. In his opening address to the Duma, Stolypin stressed that revolutionary excesses could only be met by force. By the end of the year more than a hundred newspaper editors had been exiled to Siberia, and twenty-six left-wing members of the second Duma had been sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour. To avoid arrest, Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party, left Russia for exile in Europe: he was to remain in exile for ten years.
In France a 'crusade of beggars' served as a focal point for other discontents. During rioting in Narbonne, French troops were taunted by the crowd to use their bayonets, and did so; in Perpignan the town hall was burned down. In Italy, peasant farmers and unsuccessful immigrants returning from Central and South America demanded government help in regions where there was agrarian distress, disrupting railway services as part of their protest. At Bari an attempt to launch a general strike was crushed. Social unrest also flared in the rural areas of the Roumanian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia in the spring of 1907, when thousands of peasants who had witnessed the growing prosperity of Roumania through its grain exports without being the beneficiaries of that prosperity, rose in revolt. On a fierce rampage against those whom they accused of exploiting their labour, the peasants destroyed crops and burnt homes. In savage reprisals, the Roumanian government forces, 140,000 strong, killed more than 11,000 of the peasant rebels.
***
At an International Socialist Congress held in Germany in August, attended by the Socialist and labour party leaders from all over the world, delegates listened as the German Social Democratic Party leader, August Bebel, spoke of his conviction that wars came, not from conflict between the working classes, but from the desire of capitalist interests to provoke international conflicts. Bebel was strongly critical, however, of a French Socialist motion that in the event of war soldiers in all armies should desert, and even revolt. Another German Socialist then declared that love of humanity would never prevent his party from being 'good Germans', and he dismissed as 'foolishness' the idea of those delegates who believed that a European war could be brought to a halt by a working-class general strike.
The delegates were agreed that colonialism inevitably led to 'slavery, forced labour, the extermination of the natives, and the exhaustion of the natural riches of the countries colonized'. The cost of the colonies, the congress declared, should be born entirely by those who profited from their spoliation. It also agreed that Socialist members of all parliaments should vote against 'war budgets', and that Socialist workers should demonstrate whenever there was the 'slightest danger' of war.
In Vienna, during the first European elections held under universal male suffrage, the largest number of votes cast went to the mayor, Karl Lueger, head of the Christian Socialist party, whose platform was a mixture of Roman Catholicism, anti-Semitism and Socialism.
Every nationality of the Austrian Empire was represented in the parliament in Vienna, but in his address to the newly elected members Franz-Josef spoke of his confidence that 'a comprehensive widening of the juridical foundations of political life may go hand in hand with a concentration and increase of the State's political power'. This did not bode well for the national aspirations of the minorities. The principal national unrest in Austria-Hungary that year came from the most easterly peoples of the Empire, the Ruthenians, who, never having been independent, but always under the rule of some distant capital, resented the growing German influence in their main city, Lemberg. In the parliament in Vienna two Ruthenian deputies disrupted the proceedings by singing Ruthenian songs at the top of their voices, while another, who tried to make his speech in Russian, was forced to fall silent when informed that only the eight official languages of Austria could be used in the debates, and that Russian was not one of them.
***
In Prussia, the German authorities continued to press forward with the Germanization of the Polish areas. Polish-language newspapers were confiscated and their editors arrested, and a law was passed forbidding Polish peasants to build houses on their own land. The culmination of the anti-Polish measures came on November 26, when a bill was introduced into the Prussian Parliament for the compulsory expropriation of land owned by Poles. Money would be raised through local taxation to give cash compensation to those whose land was to be taken; thus the Poles would have to pay for their own eviction.
Slav discontent in Germany was small compared with that in Austria-Hungary. In the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which since 1878 had been under Austrian military occupation, the Serbs, who formed nearly half the population—the other half being Muslims—demanded complete autonomy, the election of a popular assembly on the basis of universal suffrage, and government of the province, not by Austrian military rulers, but by parliamentary majority. Austria rejected all these demands.
In the Hungarian portion of Austria-Hungary, the Croat minority was demanding a greater voice. The issue around which the agitation centred was language. When Croat members of the Hungarian Parliament insisted on speaking in Croat, the Hungarian deputies refused to listen to them. In anger the Croats walked out of the chamber. When the Governor of Croatia, appointed by the government in Budapest, supported Croat language demands, he was replaced by a governor known to support Magyar predominance in Croatia. One of the first of the new governor's ordinances made Magyar the official language on all Croatian railways. Croat travellers would have to discuss any surcharge of their train ticket in Hungarian, study the luncheon menu in Hungarian, and listen to all station announcements in Hungarian.
Similar language unrest affected the Slovak-speaking regions of northern Hungary. In one Slovak village a parish priest was imprisoned for two years for having insisted that the Slovak language be used in the schools and law courts. While the priest was in prison the villagers built a new church for him at their own expense, but refused to consecrate it until he was set free. The bishop, a Magyar, sent another priest, escorted by Hungarian troops, to consecrate the church. The villagers resisted and the troops opened fire. Eleven villagers were killed, among them five women and two children. When the Slovak deputies in the Hungarian Parliament protested, the Minister for Home Affairs replied that the villagers had committed 'an act of rebellion against the State'.
***
In Portugal's western Africa colonies, Guinea and Angola, native uprisings led to the despatch of troops from Lisbon and short but intense punitive expeditions. In German South-West Africa, the last of the Herero rebels were being hunted down. Reports reaching Europe suggested that, in the systematic sweeps being made against Herero villages, the whole tribe was being 'annihilated'. In German West Africa, and in nearby French West Africa, Muslim rebellions were crushed.
In the Far East, Japan was learning the problems of imperial rule. In Korea, an uprising against the Japanese presence led to bloodshed. A Korean regiment, refusing Japanese orders to disband, opened fire on the Japanese forces that eventually overcame it. More than 200 Japanese police and postal officials were murdered in the course of the uprising. Reprisals were severe.
***
No year was free from disasters which made headlines throughout the world. Accidents on the railways of the world were taking a steady toll. In Britain more than a thousand people lost their lives in 1907, and had done every year for the past decade. In 1907 an earthquake struck the central Asian region of Bukhara, a predominantly Muslim region over which Tsarist Russia had been sovereign for the previous forty years. In one town, 15,000 people were killed.
In India, the death toll from plague for the twelve months ending in September 1907 was 1,206,055, bringing the death toll for the previous seven years to more than five million. Drastic measures were recommended by the Government of India's medical experts, including the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of rat-infested houses, and the mass destruction of rats, even the possible inoculation of rats. Famine also struck Russia in 1907, when the widespread failure of the harvest led to the deaths of several million people.
Disasters in some parts of the world were parallelled by advances in the quality of life elsewhere: 1907 saw the manufacture in the United States of the first electric washing machine, and in Germany the invention of Persil detergent. The first synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was also invented that year, and on July 8 in New York, The Follies of 1907 music and dancing show had its opening night: the Ziegfeld Follies that were to entertain millions of people for another half century.
***
Within the Ottoman Empire there were those determined to turn their backs on sloth and corruption, and create a modern empire. In 1908 the Committee of Union and Progress, established in Salonika two years earlier by Turkish reformers, mostly young army officers, demanded the salvation of Turkey through constitutional reform. One catalyst for the Young Turk revolution was the growing anarchy in Macedonia, where the continuing fighting between Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs and Roumanians, the burning of each other's villages and the murder of civilians, threatened to bring Austrian and Russian troops into Macedonia to restore order, at Turkey's expense.
On July 23 the Young Turks in Macedonia declared the Ottoman constitution restored. Turkish troops based in Salonika then threatened to march on Constantinople if the Sultan did not accept their demands. On learning of the force that was about to descend on the capital, the Sultan agreed to restore the constitution that he had granted his subjects in 1876, which briefly instituted a parliamentary system, but had been 'suspended' fourteen months later. He also agreed to abolish censorship and release political prisoners. A Frenchman was appointed financial adviser to the new government, and an Englishman adviser on irrigation. But a request by the Young Turks for an alliance with Britain was rejected in London. Despite its revolution, Turkey was not regarded as on a par with the European Powers.
***
The Russian revolution had been crushed at the end of 1905, but discontent, terror and repression had returned. In the two years 1908 and 1909 more than 3,000 Russians were sentenced to death for political crimes, and more than 4,000 to hard labour. In July 1908 Leo Tolstoy published an appeal in which he declared that government repression was 'a hundredfold worse' than the criminal and terrorist violence in Russia because it was carried out in cold blood. On Tolstoy's eightieth birthday that September, the Russian newspapers were forbidden to make any mention of the anniversary.
The European Powers were searching for agreements that would help avert European conflict. In April, France and Germany agreed a common frontier between the German Cameroons and the French Congo. The border was delineated along rivers and streams so that accidental clashes between troops could be minimized. But the German navy continued to grow, becoming the largest naval force in the Baltic, and alarming both Russia and Britain. In the autumn of 1908 a retired German civil servant, Rudolf Martin, caused uproar in Britain when he advocated building a fleet of Zeppelin airships to be used for invasion, 'each to carry twenty soldiers, which should land and capture the sleeping Britons before they could realize what was taking place'. One result of Martin's outburst was to create interest in British government circles in the aeroplane as a weapon of war.
The French Army had just ordered fifty Wright aeroplanes to be built in France, and was experimenting with bombs containing inflammable liquid that might be dropped from these planes. The British Government asked Sir Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the Maxim gun, for advice. Maxim, who believed the aeroplane would become an effective weapon of war, spoke bluntly; 'If you were going to bombard a town, you might have a thousand of these machines, each one carrying a large shell, because it is the large shell that does the business. If a thousand tons of pure nitroglycerine were dropped on to London in one night, it would make London look like a last year's buzzard's nest.'
***
In Austria-Hungary, racial and national animosities were in no way diminished in 1908. When the Bohemian Diet met in Prague, the Germans, who constituted a majority, obstructed all legislation proposed by the Czech members, or in any way advantageous to the Czechs. In the southern province of Slovenia, German and Slovene citizens of the empire clashed in the streets. In Vienna, German and Italian students fought, the Italians demanding an Italian university in the Austrian port of Trieste, the majority of whose inhabitants were Italian. In the parliament in Vienna, the Czech Radical deputies sought to prevent the passage of the annual budget measures by drowning the voices of the debaters with whistles and penny trumpets.
In retrospect, the national tensions within Austria-Hungary were the prelude to that empire's territorial disintegration, but at the time it seemed that Austria-Hungary could only grow in strength and cohesiveness, even expanding its influence southward into the Balkans. Following the decision of the Young Turks in Constantinople to call a parliament—something hitherto unknown in the Ottoman Empire—Austria-Hungary feared that the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, under Austrian control since 1878 but still under nominal Turkish suzereinty, would seek representation in that parliament, and challenge the often harsh nature of Austrian rule. Austria-Hungary was determined to forestall this. Since 1878, Bulgaria, while autonomous, had been nominally a Turkish possession. It too feared that the Muslims in its midst would look to the new rulers in Constantinople for representation and redress.
Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria took co-ordinated action. On October 5 Bulgaria declared its independence from Turkey, and on the following day—a fateful day for European stability—Austria-Hungary announced the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The annexation alarmed Serbia, which found itself with the full panoply of Austrian sovereign power along its longest border, from the Danube to the Adriatic Sea. It also alarmed Russia, which feared that Austria-Hungary would move against Serbia, many of whose most vociferous nationalists lived within the annexed areas. When the Crown Prince of Serbia arrived in St Petersburg on October 28 he was met with enthusiastic Russian crowds denouncing Austria's acquisition of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But Germany, taking Austria-Hungary's side, was emphatic that no action should be taken against the annexation. Russia, following her defeat by Japan, was in no position to act as the protector of the South Slavs. Instead, she urged Serbia not to take any 'provocative steps' which might lead to hostilities with Austria and threaten a wider war.
The new Turkish Parliament was opened in Constantinople on 10 December 1908. In conformity with the mood of reform and toleration, a Greek was appointed Minister of Mines, Forests and Agriculture, and an Armenian became Minister of Commerce and Works. Of the 250 elected deputies, fifty were Arabs from Arabia; there were also eighteen Greeks, twelve Albanians, four Bulgarians, two Serbians and three Jews. These constitutional advances, which raised great hopes among the Turkish population, were parallelled by anger that the provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria had both been lost.
Far from Europe, the European Empires continued to face the anger of their subject peoples. In the Dutch East Indies, sporadic rebellions against Dutch rule on several islands were put down, the harshest measures being described as 'pacification'. British 'pacification' efforts were also in evidence in 1908. Along the north-west frontier of India, two Muslim tribes, the Mohmands and the Zakka Khels, whose rebellion more than a decade earlier had been crushed, rebelled again. A punitive expedition against the Zakka Khels was successful before the Mohmands could come to their assistance, despite the call by the Mohmand mullahs for their people to participate in Jihad, or Holy War. When 7,000 Mohmands crossed into British India they were driven back and a second punitive expedition sent against them. The Mohmands, their forts and watch towers having been destroyed, gave up the struggle.
Within India, the British rulers were confronted by increased nationalist agitation. In Bengal an attempt was made to blow up the train in which the Lieutenant-Governor was travelling. At Muzaffarpur two British women were killed when a bomb was thrown at their carriage by two Bengalis who mistook the carriage for that of a local magistrate. In a garden in Calcutta, police discovered a cache of arms, bombs and bomb-making instructions. In July the Bengali nationalist leader and newspaper editor, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, was convicted of sedition and sentenced to six years' transportation. In December the Indian Criminal Law was amended, denying the accused in any case of sedition, disturbance or murder, the right to be present at his own trial, or to be represented by his own defence lawyer, unless the magistrate specifically allowed it. If committed for trial, the accused would be sent before a panel of three judges. He would have no right to trial by jury.
***
In the German Empire, the question of the treatment of the Poles continued, year by year, to be the subject of harsh legislation and internal division. New measures were introduced in the Prussian Parliament on 26 February 1908 to expropriate land from the Poles and transfer it to Germans. A liberal German newspaper denounced the expropriations 'in the name of justice and humanity', but a majority of the members of the German Parliament supported their Prussian counterparts. The German Parliament also debated a Polish request to allow the use of the Polish language at public meetings. It was agreed that where more than sixty per cent of the local inhabitants spoke Polish, Polish could be the language of the meeting, provided three days' notice of the meeting was given to the police. So rigidly was the law upheld that where even as many as fifty-five per cent of the local population were Polish, they were not allowed to use their own language at public meetings. The Poles were tenacious in their national cause, holding 'mute' public meetings at which there were no speeches, but where the resolutions were written up in Polish on a large blackboard, and passed by a show of hands.
***
In South Africa, an attempt to expel Indians who were said to have entered the country without permission was met by widespread protest, and the organization of passive resistance to the government's registration laws. When Gandhi and several other leaders of the demonstrations were sentenced to two months' imprisonment with hard labour, Jan Christiaan Smuts, the South Africa Boer leader, denounced the sentences as too lenient. In answer to criticism from Britain of the severity of the punishments, Smuts replied that the Transvaal was 'a White man's country' and should be 'kept that way'.
Smuts agreed to open negotiations with Gandhi, but made it clear he hoped no more Indians would reach South Africa, and that in due course the Indian population would wither away. A new law sought to deprive the Indians already in the country of religious teachers, doctors and educationalists. When the act came into force Gandhi renewed his call for demonstrations, always stressing that no violence should be employed. He was convinced that morality would prevail over prejudice. It did not do so in South Africa.
***
In the United States, Theodore Roosevelt remained a firm believer in the importance of preserving his country's natural resources. Having set up the system of National Parks that would be protected from both urban and industrial exploitation, he called a conference of State Governors and prominent men which determined that the 'conservation of our natural resources is a subject of transcendent importance, which should engage unremittingly the attention of the nation'. The conference also called for laws to prevent waste in coal, oil and gas mining and extraction, 'with a view to their wise conservation for the use of the people'.
The ravages of nature continued to take human life. In June more than a thousand Chinese were killed when an earthquake created a fissure several miles long, swallowing up both homes and their occupants. The next month, in the Canadian province of British Columbia, fire destroyed the town of Fernie, killing a hundred people. In British India, plague deaths during the twelve months to September were calculated at 201,575. The worst natural disaster in Europe in 1908 came when an earthquake struck southern Italy. An estimated 200,000 Italians were killed.
***
The motor car made a significant advance in 1908, when Henry Ford announced that his Ford Motor Company would be making a Model T car, priced within the capacity of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people. To the benefit of millions more, that year saw the introduction in the United States of the electric iron and the paper cup. The cinema was becoming a popular vehicle for the spread of culture to the masses: among the films of 1908 was Tosca, starring Sara Bernhardt. The location of the main film studios in the United States was about to change from the East Coast to the West. When filming of The Count of Monte Cristo was completed that year in an open air studio near Los Angeles, a new venue, and a new word, entered the vocabulary of entertainment: Hollywood.
A story that might have come from Hollywood had its origins in 1908. On August 4 that year the Waterman's Fountain Pen Company of New York engraved the date of manufacture on one of its new gold-tipped fountain pens. The pen later became the property of Alexandre Villedieu, a Frenchman. He had it in his pocket in May 1915, while fighting on the Western Front. During the battle he was killed. His body, like that of tens of thousands of others, was never found, until, in the spring of 1996, a local farmer, ploughing the field, chanced upon it. Alongside Villedieu's body were his pipe, a pocket knife, his military belt—and the Waterman's fountain pen.
***
In 1909 a British writer, Norman Angell, argued in his book The Great Illusion that even a victorious warring Power would suffer economic and financial loss as a result of any future war. Angell stressed that the great industrial nations: Britain, the United States, Germany and France, were 'losing the psychological impulse to war' because of the interdependence and profits of trade and commerce. But the Chief of the German General Staff, General Schlieffen, had devised a plan for the rapid swing of German troops through neutral Belgium, in order to reach Paris and defeat France within six weeks—before the cumbersome Russian army could have time to make any significant advance against Germany in the east. With France having surrendered, Germany would then turn, under Schlieffen's plan, to attack Russia, and advance with superior forces. This was, of course, only a plan, not a policy. Indeed, the German policymakers made a major conciliatory gesture in 1909, when a Franco-German agreement was signed, whereby Germany agreed to pursue 'only economic interests' in Morocco, while recognizing the special interests of France in the 'consolidation of order and of internal peace'. Germany also agreed not to carry out, or encourage, any measure that might lead to the creation of German economic privilege in Morocco. Following this agreement the German Government prevented a German mining company from pursuing 600 mining claims which it had negotiated with the Sultan of Morocco, on the grounds that these claims, if upheld, would constitute a German monopoly, and thus a breach of the new agreement.
It was in the Balkans that the seeds of a European war were planted. Following the Serb protests against Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Austrians warned Serbia against any provocative action. There were demonstrations inside Russia in favour of Serbia. In protest against these demonstrations the German Government warned Russia that if she intervened militarily on behalf of Serbia, and attacked Austria-Hungary, then Germany would be bound by treaty to take the side of her Austro-Hungarian ally.
Faced by German pressure, the Russian Government advised Serbia to halt all anti-Austrian demonstrations and accept the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbia, far too weak to act alone against Austria, deferred to Russia's advice. Many Russians, with their sense of solidarity with Slavs everywhere, felt humiliated that German pressure had forced them to 'abandon' Serbia.
Inside Russia, the Duma continued to debate, but the powers of the autocracy were undiminished. Official figures released in St Petersburg in 1909 revealed that 782 political offenders had been executed in the previous year, an increase of more than a hundred from the year before that. The number in exile for political offences, mostly in Siberia, was an astonishing 180,000.
There was a growing call for greater Russification in Russia's Polish provinces, which had been a hotbed of revolt in 1905. Even among the liberal groups in the Duma, the idea of increased Russification found favour, with the result that the Polish deputies in the Duma lost half their representation. At the same time, the Polish Educational Society in Kiev, which catered for the large Polish minority living throughout western Ukraine, was closed down.
In Turkey, an attempt was made by forces still loyal to the autocratic powers of the Sultan to overthrow the Young Turks. On April 13 they seized power in Constantinople, but the troops in Salonika, the original base of Young Turk activity, remained loyal to the constitution, and Constantinople was recaptured eleven days later. The Turkish National Assembly, in an emergency session, voted unanimously to depose the Sultan, and he was sent into exile. He was succeeded by his brother.
Among the minorities inside Turkey who hoped the Young Turk revolution would bring them the political equality they had long been denied were the Armenians. There were as many as two million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, by far the largest Christian group, living mostly in eastern Anatolia. Their hopes of equality were dashed, however, when in 1909 several thousand Armenians were massacred in southern Turkey.
***
In British India—where plague was in its tenth year, the total number of victims for the year being officially noted, with the extraordinary precision of the clerks of empire, as 129,756—the Liberal government initiated reforms that would bring Indians into many levels of government. The first Indian to be appointed a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council took his place on the council in March. The appointment of an Indian had been strongly opposed by one member of the Viceroy's Council, who warned: 'An Indian colleague would be the admission of the thin end of the wedge which is to bring about the downfall of British administration.'
The British Liberal Government was in the final stages of negotiating an Act of Union with the Boer rulers in South Africa. There was distress in London when the Boers revealed their determination not to allow any form of equality for black Africans, Indians or people of mixed race, but would enforce a colour-bar as part of the constitutional legislation. A delegation of black Africans and Indians, Gandhi among them, went to Britain to put their case, and to have race equality made a part of the Union legislation. Many British Members of Parliament felt that the exclusion of non-whites from the right to vote was not only wrong in itself, but an abdication of imperial responsibilities. The white population of South Africa was determined, however, that their new parliament would be a parliament of whites, elected by whites, and that there should be no prospect of this franchise being extended in the future.
The British Government sought reconciliation with the Boers, the former enemies, and an attempt to satisfy Boer needs and prejudices overrode considerations of morality. Two Liberal principles were in conflict: that of equality and that of non-interference in colonial legislatures. With the passage of the Act of Union, the principle of equality with regard to skin colour in South Africa was ignored, and was to remain so for more than eight decades.
The British Empire was still expanding. On the Malayan Peninsula the Siamese Government transferred four Malay States to Britain, and agreed that British subjects throughout Siam would enjoy 'the rights and privileges' of Siamese citizens, but would be exempt from military service and all forced loans and military contributions. In Egypt, the British rulers promulgated a law placing under police supervision and village confinement anyone who agitated against British rule. Two months after the law was passed, the Egyptian National Congress met in Geneva, the Egyptian speakers stressing that they were competent to govern themselves, and that conditions under British administration were 'intolerable'. The British had no intention of leaving Egypt: control of the Suez Canal seemed an imperial necessity, guarding the sea route to India and the Far East. The actual Egyptian administration, like that of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to the south, was considered a model of colonial rectitude and advanced thinking. There was also the moral imperative, as seen by the Liberal Government in London, of suppressing the slave trade and the arms trade still being carried on in the more remote regions. The British civil servants were convinced they were better suited than the local population to advance the causes of health and welfare. These officials were proud of the fact that, as a result of a persistent British campaign against mosquitoes, an increase in infant mortality had been halted at Port Said. The Egyptian call for an end to British rule seemed, in British eyes, retrogressive and subversive, harmful not only to the fabric of empire but to the well-being of its native populations.
Every imperial power faced conflicts within its Empire. In Spanish Morocco, 6,000 Rif tribesmen attacked the 2,000-strong Spanish garrison, killing eleven Spanish soldiers before being driven off by artillery fire. Reinforcements were sent from Spain, but the Moors attacked again. In the ensuing battle, 300 Spanish soldiers were killed and more than a thousand Moors. Inside Spain there were anti-war demonstrations in those towns from which reservists had been called to the colours. On July 18 the demonstrations spread to Barcelona. That same day, in Morocco, Rif tribesmen launched an attack on Spanish supply lines. The news that reached Spain was inflamed by rumours that exaggerated the scale of the losses. Anti-war demonstrations in Barcelona and Madrid spread to railway stations in other cities from which conscripts were leaving for North Africa. In Barcelona, anarchists and socialists called a general strike for July 26. On the following day, in the Rif, more than 500 Spaniards were killed. Three days later troops were called out to put an end to the anti-war demonstrations in Barcelona. Artillery fire was effective in dispersing the demonstrators, almost 2,000 of whom were subsequently arrested, and five of whom were sentenced to death.
When the strength of Spain's military forces in Spanish Morocco reached 50,000, the Moors lost hope of driving the Spaniards out. Negotiations were opened on November 12, and three days later the tribesmen of the Rif surrendered. Militant Islam was once again suppressed.
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The first decade of the twentieth century was coming to an end. Its achievements were considerable. In Germany in 1909, women were admitted to the universities for the first time. In Britain the first Town Planning Act was passed, regulating the unchecked spread of urban sprawl. The first department store also opened in Britain that year—the creation of an American, H. Gordon Selfridge. In Palestine, under Turkish rule, the first Jewish collective farm, or kibbutz, was founded on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was the brainchild of Arthur Ruppin, a German Jew. Most of the farmers who practised its collective ethos were Jewish immigrants from Russia.
The year 1909 also marked a milestone in the history of the cinema. A permanent location, the nickelodeon, which had been introduced in the United States four years earlier, raised cinema attendance to more than twenty million a week. One of the very first feature films was issued that year, Vitagraph's The Life of Moses. In Italy, Milano Films produced Dante's Inferno.
The science of flight made a great leap forward in 1909. On July 25 a Frenchman, Louis Blériot, flew across the English Channel. He flew twenty-three miles, from a field near Calais to a meadow behind Dover Castle. The flight took him just under an hour and twenty minutes. In New York, Orville Wright made two flights around the Statue of Liberty, then hastened by transatlantic liner to Berlin, where, in another remarkable flying display, he took the German Crown Prince up with him to a height of a thousand feet.