Before 1900

You are currently browsing the archive for the Before 1900 category.

Zeroth World Wars

31 August 2009 in 1900s, Before 1900, Blogging, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | 7 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A couple of interesting posts at The Russian Front suggest that the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 should be thought of as a World War Zero, or alternatively that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 should be. It’s often useful to play around with the names we give to historical events and phenomena, because it reminds us that they are just names. And this is an old game for historians (as Dave Stone notes) — the Seven Years’ War is sometimes considered to be the first world war (if not the First World War). But I’m not sure in what sense the Russo-Japanese and Russo-Turkish wars qualify as world wars. Shouldn’t the primary determinant of this be that they were fought on a world scale? Even the epic, doomed voyage of the Baltic fleet to Tsushima isn’t enough to make the Russo-Japanese War a world war, as all the actual fighting was localised to a relatively small region in Manchuria (if you set aside a few potshots at British trawlers).

But in his post, John Steinberg does give a list of reasons for his argument regarding the Russo-Japanese War (which comes out of research for a two-volume work he co-edited entitled The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero). It seems to me that most of them are not actually about geographical extent but rather other sorts of scale — of battles, of casualties, of finance, and so on. That is, in Steinberg’s formulation the Russo-Japanese War sounds something like an approach towards total war, not a world war. If that’s the case then I find this statement surprising:

As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.

I thought the Russo-Japanese War was well-known among western military historians (if not among contemporary western military staffs) for its bloodiness. Hew Strachan, for example, refers to it quite often (well, on 30 pages out of 1139) in volume I of The First World War. It’s also a common element in diplomatic histories of the war’s origins, for Russia’s defeat had a tremendous impact on the strategic calculations of all the other Great Powers. So it seems to me that western historians are quite comfortable in seeing the Russo-Japanese War as a step along the road to total war and/or to the First World War in several respects. I think I must be missing something here.

The first air bomb: Venice, 15 July 1849

22 August 2009 in Before 1900, Books, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

On 22 August 1849, the Republic of San Marco surrendered to Austria. The Republic was formed after a revolt in Venice against Austrian rule in March 1848. The Austrians eventually besieged Venice, leading to starvation and outbreaks of cholera in the city. During this siege, they launched the first air raids in history, by unmanned balloons which floated over Venice carrying bombs. The British press didn’t take any notice of this at the time, but the following account appeared in the Morning Chronicle a week after the surrender:

The Soldaten Freund publishes a letter from the artillery officer Uchatius, who first proposed to subdue Venice by ballooning. From this it appears that the operations were suspended for want of a proper vessel exclusively adapted for this mode of warfare, as it became evident, after a few experiments had been made, that, as the wind blows nine times out of ten from the sea, the balloon inflation must be conducted on board ship; and this was the case on July the 15th, the occasion alluded to in a former letter, when two balloons armed with shrapnels ascended from the deck of the Volcano war steamer, and attained a distance of 3,500 fathoms in the direction of Venice; and exactly at the moment calculated upon, i. e., at the expiration of twenty-three minutes, the explosion took place. The captain of the English brig Frolic, and other persons then at Venice, testify to the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants.

A stop was put to further exhibitions of this kind by the necessity of the Vulcan going into docks to undergo repairs, which the writer regrets the more, as the currents of wind were for a long time favourable to his schemes. One thing is established beyond all doubt (he adds), viz., that bombs and other projectiles can be thrown from balloons at a distance of 5,000 fathoms, always provided the wind be favourable. 1

Some comments. It’s hard to find reliable information on these attacks. The best account I’ve seen is by Lee Kennett and he’s not sure how many balloons were released, saying that the largest number he has seen is two hundred.2 This doesn’t fit well with the Morning Chronicle article, which seems to suggest that only two balloon bombs were ever launched. This is supposedly based on a letter written by the inventor of the balloon bombs, Franz von Uchatius, so if it’s accurate should be preferred over secondary sources.3

But whether the number was two or two hundred, it doesn’t seem like the balloon bombs had much effect on the course of the siege, which went on for another five weeks — despite the reference made in the Morning Chronicle to ‘the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants’. That was clearly what was intended, as the bombs were released (or maybe detonated) by a timer, and couldn’t possibly hit specified targets from a balloon drifting above the city.4 More importantly, the bombs used were filled with shrapnel, which isn’t much use for anything but killing and maiming people. So there were few qualms on the part of the Austrians about targeting and killing civilians. Which they went on to do with presumably much greater efficiency when they later bombarded the city with more conventional artillery, averaging a thousand shells a day.5

Finally, the air raids of 1849 seem to have had as little impact on the wider world (at least the English-speaking part of it) as they did on Venice. As noted above, there was very little notice taken in the British press, and I’ve come across only one meager reference to Venice in books published before 1914 (and that in a book translated from the German, written by the German military balloonist Hermann Moedebeck). So it doesn’t seem like they inspired anyone to find a better way to bomb cities from the air; that was an idea which had to be invented all over again. Which it was, of course, and Venice’s next air raid was on 24 May 1915.

  1. Morning Chronicle, 29 August 1849, 5.
  2. Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), 6.
  3. Kennett does state that two bombs were used in the first armed test, but that this was carried out on 12 July, with another ’series’ of tests on 15 July.
  4. Which is not to say they were just released at random; the balloon-bombardiers had to take windspeed into account when calculating how long to set the timer for, so that it would go off over Venice — though the wind could then change direction after launch, of course.
  5. Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 1815-1914 (London: Routledge, 2001), 47.

The first bombers

27 July 2009 in Art, Before 1900, Civil defence, Pictures by Brett Holman | 9 comments

The Battle of Copenhagen, 1801

The first bombers didn’t fly but sailed: they were warships known as bomb vessels, which mounted heavy mortars firing explosive shells. These could be used in naval battles, but weren’t very accurate and so were usually used to attack targets on land, including cities. The French navy used bomb vessels to bombard Genoa in 1684, which according to N. A. M. Rodger was ‘a demonstration of terrorism which had horrified Europe and gone far to isolate France’.1 The Royal Navy developed the idea further (putting the mortars on turntables to make them easier to aim, sometimes replacing the mortars with rocket launchers) and used them against Copenhagen in 1807.

Mats Fridlund is doing some very interesting work tying together the bombing of cities across the ages and the technologies used in their defence, from Copenhagen to 9/11 and after, water buckets gas masks, bomb shelters and bollards. He sees these as aspects of something he calls terrormindedness, the way that ‘terror becomes incorporated into citizens’ everyday lives’, precisely by way of those defensive technologies. There’s definitely something in that, though I would add that processes such as evacuation were also important.

Image: The Battle of Copenhagen, 2 April 1801 by Nicholas Pocock (Wikipedia) — the British only threatened to bombard that time, but I suspect it looked much the same in 1807.

  1. N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815 (London: Penguin, 2004), 155.

The phantom balloon scare of 1892

11 July 2009 in Before 1900, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Perhaps the first mass outbreak of mystery aircraft sightings took place in 1892 in Russian-occupied Poland, near the German border. The Manchester Guardian reported on 26 March that a ‘large balloon coming from the German frontier appeared about the fortress of Kovno‘. The Russian defenders fired at it, but it returned safely over the border.1 On 7 March, something similar had been seen near Dombrowa:

The balloon was coming from the south-west, and following a north-easterly direction along the Ivangorod-Dombrowa Railway, and this in spite of the fact that a north-east wind was blowing. The balloon disappeared behind the clouds, but reappeared about forty-five minutes later with a light burning (it was then half-past six in the evening), and following a course directly opposed to the former one. It is presumed that the balloon must have been provided with a highly perfected steering apparatus.2

A few days later came further reports: sightings ‘German balloons’ are now said to be ‘becoming frequent’. On 22 March a balloon was seen over a railway station at Pronshk[ol?], near Warsaw; the fortress of Novogeorgievsk; and the town of Kelets. The following day, people in Warsaw saw ‘a balloon over the city casting rays of light from an electric apparatus’. It stayed visible in the same place until 1am, when it moved to the west. A balloon ‘projecting powerful electric search lights over a large extent of country’ was seen in areas (presumably) near the Silesian border, towards evening or at night, apparently remaining motionless at a ‘great height for as long as forty minutes’.3

Clearly the Russians believed they were seeing German balloons. The Russian military fired upon one; and the New York Times reported that the Russian government intended to make a formal protest to Germany about the supposed overflights, citing ‘a breach of the military laws’.4 The Manchester Guardian suggested (on what basis, I don’t know) that ‘both the French and German military authorities are in possession of some sort of apparatus for steering balloons’.5 But we know now that this was not true. All anybody had were the usual static observation balloons, which were certainly not capable of the movement seen over Russian Poland.

So what was going on here? This was early on in the Russo-German antagonism. The Reinsurance Treaty between the two empires lapsed in 1890, and Russia was drawing closer to France. (The Franco-Russian treaty was drafted in August 1892.) Russian troops were pouring into Poland, whether for the annual exercises or some other reason was not clear. (Germans reportedly feared an attack; the Russian foreign minister had to assure the German ambassador that the mobilisation was only precautionary.) Russia itself was still suffering from a terrible famine after a crop failure in 1891, which had claimed the lives of several hundred thousand people over the winter.

So the situation in Russia was unsettled. The phantom balloons were thought to be piloted by German spies, and there is evidence that Russian authorities were worried about espionage, just as in Britain in 1909. For example, a Russian commander is reported to have to demanded permission to expel civilians from the border areas, 90% of whom were Jews, ‘who are regarded by the Russian authorities as certain to be friendly to an invading force, and as already acting as spies for the Germans’.6 This while Jews were being ejected from St Petersburg for the Pale of Settlement. Russians felt threatened by enemies within and without.

So in my usual way I’m suggesting that fears of war, of a technologically advanced enemy and a treacherous civilian minority combined to cause a phantom balloon panic, an early episode in the Scareship Age. Russians projected their fears onto the night sky. As for what actually triggered the sightings, Venus seems a likely candidate, as it was very bright and highly visible low in the western sky after sunset at this time. That can’t explain all the sightings (it had set long before 1am, for example), but it’s undoubtedly responsible for some of them.

  1. Manchester Guardian, 26 March 1892, p. 8.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid., 31 March 1892, p. 8.
  4. New York Times, 30 March 1892, p. 5. See also ibid., 26 March 1892, p. 3.
  5. Manchester Guardian, 26 March 1892, p. 8.
  6. Ibid., 31 March 1892, p. 8.

Thursday, 20 May 1909

20 May 2009 in 1900s, Before 1900, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Post-blogging the 1909 scareships, Quotes by Brett Holman | 6 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the scareship wave of May-June 1909. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

AIRSHIP MYSTERY. FLIGHT BY NIGHT OVER CARDIFF / Manchester Guardian, 20 May 1909, 7

The Globe has a slew of new reports from last night (p. 7), from Norwich, Wroxham, Sprowston, Catton and Tesburgh in East Anglia, Pontypool in Wales (by workers at a forge, an architect and two postal workers), and Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in Ireland. Some saw searchlights, some heard a ‘whizzing’ sound, some saw a cigar shape. But yesterday’s story of the airship seen at Cardiff, is today the main scareship story in both the Standard and the Manchester Guardian, as well as (again) the Globe. It’s clear that the mystery airships have moved from a minor curiosity to, if not big news, exactly, then at least middling news. The Globe has nearly a whole column on them, the Standard has another column, and the Manchester Guardian — which has mostly ignored the story up until now — has two full columns (see headlines above), a comment from its London correspondent and a leading article on ‘The mysterious airship’. The only holdout in my sample is the stuffy old Times.

The Cardiff docks story is the lead. The statement of the signalman Charles Westlake is repeated, and further supporting statements from the other dock workers given. The Manchester Guardian’s correspondent reports a rumour (p. 7) that residents of the Cathays district of Cardiff saw an airship on Tuesday night (i.e. the evening before the dock incident) but has not been able to verify this. It is also pointed out that locals are familiar with the appearance of airships, because one was built and flown nearby several years ago. This would be Willows No. 1; but it seems that Willows is not responsible for the mystery airship. At least, ‘a Cardiff man, who has made a study of aerial navigation for many years past, and whose son is at present in London exhibiting a dirigible airship’ is interviewed as well, without any connection being made between the two. But this must be Joseph Thompson Willows and his son Ernest Thompson Willows, who worked together on airships, though it is the son who is mostly remembered for this nowadays. In the opinion of Willows père, the airship at Cardiff was most likely launched from a ship in the Bristol Channel or off the south coast. He doesn’t say anything about who would be doing this, or why, but other locals seem to have their suspicions:

Naturally enough, tremendous interest has been manifested throughout the district, and in some quarters a feeling of unrest has been created, because it is generally recognised that in the event of invasion the Welsh coal ports would represent a vital spot of enormous strategical importance.

But there’s an even more sensational airship story from Cardiff. In fact, it is ‘of so strange a character as to be difficult of credence’, according to the Standard (p. 10). On the same night as the dockyard sighting, a travelling Punch-and-Judy salesman by the name of Lethbridge was walking back home from Senghenydd to Cardiff over Caerphilly Mountain. At about 11pm he saw an airship which had landed on the mountain, and its crew. At least, that seems to be the implication of the interview he gave to the Cardiff Evening Express yesterday.
Read the rest of this entry »

The canals of Mars, 1962

15 March 2009 in 1900s, 1920s, After 1950, Before 1900, Maps, Pictures, Space, Tools by Brett Holman | 10 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Mars map (1962)

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell’s maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi’s more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick’s brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I’ve seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor’s old observations to compile MEC-1. So it’s no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn’t live to witness Mariner 4’s flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.

Mowing devils, old hags, and phantom airships

18 June 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, Art, Before 1900, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Rumours by Brett Holman | 7 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Venus

Nick at Mercurius Politicus has an excellent post up on the The Mowing-devil, an English pamphlet from 1678 which is famous among forteans because it contains an illustration of something that looks a lot like a crop circle, three centuries before the term was coined. If it is an account of the mysterious appearance of a circle in a farmer’s field, then it is evidence that crop circles long preceded the activities of circlemakers Doug and Dave, and so are presumably a real, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon.

But Nick’s analysis suggests that the anonymous writer of the The Mowing-devil was not presenting an account of a strange but true event, but rather a cautionary tale about class relations in rural England. He concludes that

In short, The Mowing-Devil is probably not the representation of an early crop-circle that enthusiasts want it to be. In focusing on the woodcut, they’ve missed a much more interesting side to the text that tells us something about late seventeenth-century popular politics and religion.

Deleriad, a folklorist, made an interesting comment:

Although your analysis of the narrative is pretty reasonable I think it’s also worthwhile applying Hufford’s notion of the experiential source hypothesis. Put simply, it works on the basis that people explain anomalous experiences within the pre-existing worldview of a particular culture. So for example, encounters which might once have been explained in terms of fairies are nowadays explained in terms of aliens, lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs and so on.

Now, I’m aware of David Hufford’s work, though mainly by reputation: The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), a study of old hag folklore in Newfoundland, is a book I’ve heard much about. Hufford’s experiential source hypothesis (ESH) was put forward as an alternative to the prevailing cultural source hypothesis (CSH), which would explain supernatural claims almost entirely in terms of pre-existing beliefs, or else misperceptions, hoaxes or hallucinations.1 According to the CSH line of thinking, as I understand it, The Mowing-devil is probably best explained by something like Nick’s suggestion, or maybe there was an early modern Doug and Dave having a laugh, or something like that. The ESH, by contrast, would posit that that something odd happened in Hertfordshire — for example, a circle appearing overnight in a field of crops — and that the writer of The Mowing-devil described it in terms that he and his audience could understand — for example, a devil with a flaming scythe who appears after a farmer’s ill-tempered rejection of a workman’s offer to mow the field. To simplify grossly, a CSHer would say there’s no reason to believe that anything freaky is going on here, so let’s look for a mundane explanation; an ESHer would respond that this attitude risks throwing the extraordinary baby out with the ordinary bathwater.

So what should historians make of all this? I don’t think we can make much at all.
Read the rest of this entry »

  1. In other words, a sceptical viewpoint. David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centred Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 13-4.

The Russians are coming!

30 May 2008 in Australia, Before 1900, Books, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics by Brett Holman | 3 comments

On the night of 16 February 1873, the Russian ironclad Kaskowiski slipped into Waitemata Harbour, off Auckland, the largest city in the British colony of New Zealand. She found a British warship at anchor, and sent a ’submarine pinnace’ to disable its crew by means of a ‘mephitic water-gas’ so that their ship could be taken. Having done this, the guns of both ships were trained on the city. The Russian captain began to land his marines on shore, with orders to occupy the armoury and all telegraph stations within 40 miles, as well the banks at Grahamstown, which serviced the nearby goldfields. The Russians began rounding up prominent citizens and colonial officials, holding them at gunpoint in the Provincial Council Chamber. Vice-Admiral Herodskoff demanded from them a ransom of £250,000, or else he would give orders to burn Auckland to the ground. Eventually, a bit over half that sum was handed over. The Kaskowiski sailed away, leaving the provincial capital under the guns of the captured ship. The Daily Southern Cross, which reported this shocking news the morning after, was in despair: ‘WHERE IS THE BRITISH NAVY?’ But the British had problems of their own, for (unknown to the remote colony) war with Russia had already broken out over central Asia and Persia …

Of course, this never happened. It was a hoax, perpetrated by the editor of the Southern Cross, David Luckie. His aim was to draw attention to Auckland’s complete lack of defences, Battle of Dorking-style. But the effects were more War of the Worlds. Despite the clues (”Cask of whisky” and a supposed publication date three months in the future), some people prepared to flee the city, saddling horses and prying their gold from under the floorboards. Pupils skipped school (not that they needed much of an excuse, surely) to look out for the Kaskowisky, while others kept a suspicious eye on the British warship in the harbour. With crowds besieging his newspaper, he wrote a follow-up explaining what, in his opinion, needed to be done to guard against privateers and Russians: a chain of fortifications built to protect Auckland, armed with torpedoes, and a strong Royal Navy squadron for the Australian station.

The idea of a Russian attack on New Zealand wasn’t quite as silly as it might sound today. In 1865, a Confederate warship, Shenandoah, had visited Melbourne en route to plundering the American whalers off Alaska, so there was a precedent for privateering. The Great Game between Britain and Russia did indeed have the potential to turn into a Great War, and was causing concern in New Zealand as early as 1855. News of tension between the two empires led to war fever in early 1871, and in April that year, a Russian clipper called the Gaidamak had left Melbourne, and was last seen heading west for New Zealand … maybe it was scouting out sheltered harbours for use in wartime? (It wasn’t the first or the last Russian ship to visit Australia either.) The Australian colonies were starting to provide for their own defence — Victoria’s powerful monitor Cerberus arrived in the colony in 1871 — so why shouldn’t New Zealand do the same? It was so remote from mother England, after all, a long way for help to come.

But not much was accomplished. Some work was started on coastal defences in 1877; in 1885, there was another Russian scare, another hoax, and a number of forts were constructed. By 1909, the Russians had been replaced in the New Zealand imagination by Germans, and the commerce raiders were supplemented by airships. Finally, in the Second World War, some Germans and Japanese submarines did come to New Zealand, but didn’t actually do much. And there my knowledge of New Zealand’s defence panics ends, but I doubt there was anything else as curious as the Kaskowiski affair …

Sources: Glynn Barrett, Russophobia in New Zealand 1838-1908 (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1981), 48-53. Impressively, all of the Southern Cross has been scanned and is freely available online: the relevant articles would seem to be this, this, this, and this.

Who was Neon?

28 April 2008 in 1920s, 1930s, Before 1900, Books by Brett Holman | 12 comments

A comment from Melissa got me thinking about gender and the knock-out blow, which is admittedly not something I do very often. There are certainly a number of ways into this subject. The most obvious would be to look at the fact that airpower would bring war onto British soil for the first time since at least Culloden (ok, or since the Great War, if you want to be pedantic), thus threatening British women (and children) directly and on a large scale. Pointing this out was a powerful argument in favour of taking the threat of bombing seriously, and was widely deployed. So one could look at that construction. Or there’s the gendered language which was occasionally used to describe aerial warfare, such as Trenchard’s analogy of a football match, with victory going to the side which struck hardest and in their manly way made the defenders ’squeal’ first. Very playing-fields-of-Eton.

Another way would be the simple one of looking at what men and women wrote about the knock-out blow, and how it might have differed in style, content and reception. Certainly most of the writers on the subject were men, which is to be expected since only men had experience of air combat and so could plausibly present themselves as experts. But, particularly from the 1930s, a number of women writers did venture their opinions on the coming era of air war, generally from the pacifist viewpoint: H. M. Swanwick, Barbra Donington (with her husband, Robert), Sarah Campion, and of course Vera Brittain. (A notable non-pacifist, was the famous aviatrix Amy Johnson who wrote for the bellicose Daily Mail in the mid-1930s.) However, male writers could be dismissive of their arguments in highly gendered terms, when they bothered to note them at all. For example, W. Horsfall Carter wrote a pamphlet entitled Peace Through Police to rebut Swanwick’s works Frankenstein and his Monster: Aviation for World Service and New Wars for Old (both 1934). He thought that her attack on the idea of an international air force had ‘all the misdirected fervour of a militant suffragette’ and referred to her as a ’sentimentalist’.1

All honour to the pacifists whose consuming idealism and “conscience” impels them to denounce war and all its works. But when the heart is stronger than the head the result is a peace babel totally ineffective for the realistic business of peacemaking.2

Read: don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, let us hard-headed menfolk sort things out!

But there was one woman who was not so easily dismissed, for she wrote the most influential attack upon the very idea of the overwhelming superiority of the bomber to be written in the interwar period. The Great Delusion: A Study of Aircraft in Peace and War was published in 1927, inspired at least one book-length rebuttal (Murray F. Sueter’s Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great “Neon” Air Myth Exposed, 1928), and was still being cited as a prime example of airpower scepticism over a decade later. Its author was pseudonymous. Who was Neon?3
Read the rest of this entry »

  1. W. Horsfall Carter, Peace Through Police (London: New Commonwealth, 1934), 6.
  2. Ibid., 3.
  3. She also wrote at least one article: Neon, “The future of aerial transport”, Atlantic Monthly, January 1928, also in a sceptical vein.

A stern warning of things to come

15 March 2008 in 1930s, Before 1900, Periodicals, Quotes, Radio by Brett Holman | No comments

Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, speech to the Lord Mayor’s banquet, 9 November 1897:

Remember this — that the federation of Europe is the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilisation from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms are becoming larger and larger, the powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous and are improved with every year, and each nation is bound for its own safety’s sake to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilisation, the one hope we have is that the Powers may be gradually brought together to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world as a result of their great strength a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace.

Source: Lord Lytton, BBC Empire Service broadcast, 18 August 1938; quoted in Listener, 1 September 1938, 430. Emphasis added.

« Older entries