The Adjournment of the Great Game
With the lesson of the frightful cost of the Boer War fresh in mind, the English people and their Government had no desire to embark upon another conflict. Little by little it came to be felt, as the world filled up and distance was annihilated, that among States as among individuals the great must stand together to maintain their greatness against the floodtide of smaller ambitions. The principle was formulated, in diplomatic language, as "making friends with the neighbors of your neighbors" - that is, instead of being on any warmer than merely correct and inoffensive bowing terms with "next door," whose contiguity provides many opportunities of petty annoyances, you make friends of "next door but one," who will pretty certainly join you in putting pressure on "next door" to restrain those little exhibitions, known as "pinpricks" in diplomacy, which correspond to the crowing cocks, howling dogs and excessive and untimely playing of musical instruments on the other side of the domestic party wall.
Russia, in the days of the autocracy, initiated this policy by entering into an alliance with Republican France. To-day the world is girdled by a chain of understandings between those who live, geographically or historically, "next door but one," and so the peace of the world is preserved. In all these combinations, by the dawn of the 20th Century Russia was the pivot as she was a century earler when the field of action was almost entirely confined to Europe.
Russia made her choice at that critical time when England was deeply involved in the South African War. She was invited to draw the sword and take what the sword could offer. Russia refused, and not only kept up her own weapon, but forced less scrupulous swords to lie helpless in sheath. The policy was one that had been practised by the Emperor Alexander III, the "Peace-Keeper of the World." and was put forth boldly in the face of the world by his successor on the Russian Throne, Nicholas II, the apostle of arbitration at the Hague, and the reformer to-day of All the Russias. For the success of those reforms Russia must have peace - a guarantee for Russia's sincere devotion to the interests of peace to such as doubt the efficacy of the Hague Conference, to settle those matters which were formerly put to the last arbitrament of the sword.
It was thus perfectly natural that Russia should find herself strongly drawn towards the Anglo-Saxon world. On the one hand, Russia's interests nowhere clashed inevitably with those of any English-speaking country. On the other hand, no race that has ever done any of the fighting of the world is better known than the Anglo-Saxon race for its unwillingness to resort to the sword. If peace can be kept with honor. On both grounds Russia was openly at one with the Anglo-Saxon world.
By the Anglo-Russian agreement of August 31, 1907 (Parl. Papers, 1907, Cd. 3750), the British dominion in India is to all intents and purposes guaranteed, Thibet is effectively neutralised, Afghanistan is expressly recognised as lying within the British sphere of influence, and from a point in north-eastern Persia, covering Herat southward to the sea at Bander Abbas, a broad belt of the Persian borderland is included within the British sphere of influence, whilst the Russian sphere of influence is largely extended towards the Persian Gulf.
The advent of the Turkish constitution saw Germany thrown crop and heels out of his snug place at Turkey's capital, while that comfortable old suitor, Qreat Britain, which had been biting his fingernails on the doorstep, was welcomed smiling once more into the parlor. Great was the rejoicing in London when Abdul Hamid's "down and out" performance carried his trusted friend William along. The glee changed to grief when, within a year-so quickly does the appearance of the chessboard change in "the great game" - Great Britain was once more on the doorstep, and fickle Germany was snuggling close to Young Turkey on the divan in the dimly-lighted parlor.
By the early 1920s, England's general policy toward Russia seemed to favor dismemberment and the setting up and recognition of states carved out of former Russian territory, and to view with something like indifference even the disintegration of Russia through a prolongation of Bolshevist control. England, or at least a considerable proportion of her leading statesmen, was still obsessed with the Disraeli idea of the Russian threat to India, so potent an influence in the politics of the nineteenth century. But the real point of contact between Great Britain and Russia is neither the Pamirs nor Constantinople, but Persia, and a happy adjustment of possible conflicting interests there largely obviated danger of future conflict.
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