“Wars and Rumors of Wars”
By L. A. S.
The close of the year 1905 finds conditions prevailing in the political, industrial, social, and religious spheres of the world's life which plainly answer to the fulfilment of inspired prophecy regarding the time of the end. Just what those looking for Christ's return have said would come to pass in the world as signs that his coming is at hand, is now seen in events and conditions that are plain to all. No one can deny that things are in a general state of unrest and instability, leaving the minds of multitudes in uncertainty and anxiety. This is especially true of political conditions in the Old World. There is seen to-day the spectacle of one monarch holding in his hand the world's peace, while statesmen look on in anxiety, fearing and even predicting that a great war is about to be precipitated. Cable dispatches state that alarm for the peace of Europe is especially felt just now in England and France, in view of the belligerent attitude of the energetic and ambitious ruler of the German empire. A London dispatch says:— The close of the most eventful year in recent history finds European opinion inclined to regard the immediate political outlook with anxiety and apprehension. It is a pleasure to be able to sincerely disagree with the prevailing pessimism, and to record a firm belief that the scarcely disguised fears of a general war in the near future will prove unfounded. It is in England and France that political alarm is the greatest, and it finds a frank expression to-day in the usual reviews of the year in the chief journals. Thus the Times declares that the year closes “with the horizon overcast with anxiety.” The Spectator says: “It can not be pretended that the new year opens auspiciously,” and “grave apprehension as to the future is entertained in Paris, not merely by the man in the streets, but by persons of knowledge and responsibility.”
The sole cause of all this anxiety is the universal suspicion felt regarding the purposes of a single individual, whose name in England and France has become a synonym for danger to the peace of the world. And yet no man in Europe protests more insistently his love of peace than the German emperor. It is literally come to pass that Emperor William is suspected and feared most when he proclaims the loudest his peaceful purposes. The Spectator speaks the truth when it says that many well-informed Frenchmen believe the Germans have decided to attack them, and that they will be attacked with all the suddenness and overwhelming force that modern military organization renders possible. A Paris correspondent writing to-day [December 30], after consulting the French foreign office, says:— “France is not misled by the kaiser's private pacific utterances. Nothing has passed officially to confirm the newly developed peace views of the emperor.”
Despite the improvement in the relations of France and Germany occasioned by the submission of the Moroccan controversy to a conference, there is a distinct revival of war rumors, and a considerable element of the people and a number of journals are maintaining that war between France and Germany is inevitable. Some of these reports are taking an exaggerated form, but they all tend to stimulate the public apprehension. The Patrie publishes a report that the Bank of France has taken extraordinary precautions, similar to those adopted in 1870 before the Franco-Prussian War.
Dispatches from Belgium say the authorities there are adopting precautionary measures, anticipating that a conflict would reach Belgian soil. Specials from Switzerland report that the German reservists have been summoned, and other dispatches graphically describe the activity of French and German forces along the frontier, and their extensive works and defenses. These reports, it is said, are the outgrowth of the recent French yellow book showing the acuteness of the Franco-German issue over Morocco and the approach of the Moroccan conference, in which the issue will be renewed. These dispatches show the general state of uncertainty and apprehension that prevails in Europe at the opening of the new year, aside from the question whether the actual weight of evidence justifies the prediction of war.