The Former Canadian Governor General Who Dared to Advocate Peace Amid WWI

A portrait of Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, by Philip Alexius de László. Public Domain

Commentary

In the fevered atmosphere of wartime, those who call for peace are treated with disdain. And why not? Surely it is treasonous to want anything less than total victory for the righteous? Can peace not be secured only by crushing the enemy with overwhelming force? To call for peace in such times seems out of sync.

Such was the case with Lord Lansdowne in 1917. A British aristocrat, senior politician, and diplomat who was once Governor General of Canada, Lansdowne had been under-secretary for war from 1872–’74 and was originally a Liberal supporter of Prime Minister William E. Gladstone.

He later became a Conservative in Lord Salisbury’s cabinet as secretary of state for war from 1895–1900, foreign secretary from 1900–’05, and served in the first wartime coalition in 1915–’16. His second son was killed in action in October 1914 and buried at Ypres. After that, Lansdowne stood by the war policy for two more years.

By then, much more than Queen Victoria’s little wars, the scale and likely consequences of World War I horrified Lansdowne. In November 1916 he wrote a memorandum calling for a negotiated peace based on the status quo ante—the borders as they had stood in 1914.

“We are not going to lose this war,” he wrote, “but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilized world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it.” More controversially he added, “We do not desire the annihilation of Germany as a great power. … We have no desire to deny Germany her place among the great commercial communities of the world.”

But destroying Germany and Austria was exactly what France and the British Empire had in mind.

For a year Lansdowne showed his letter only to friends and colleagues to gauge reactions. But senior members of the government were war hawks, backing France to the hilt. Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the leading British newspaper, The Times, was appalled by the letter and refused to publish it. So Lansdowne offered the letter to The Daily Telegraph, which printed it on Nov. 29, 1917.

When America joined the war on the Allied side on December 7, the Allies’ arrogance increased. Crushing Germany and Austria became the inevitable desired end-state—a failure of vision that was disastrous for long-term peace prospects in the 1920s and 1930s.

Lansdowne could have saved himself much trouble. He was born and bred a country gentleman and could have devoted his life, after Eton and Oxford, to hunting and tending his gardens if he had chosen that path. But he was public-spirited and believed the upper class had a duty to serve.

And he did. Much of his record was one of promoting concord. He brokered the Anglo-Japanese treaty of 1902, a policy to contain Russia that held until 1923. He negotiated the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904, which ensured Anglo-French harmony on the world stage, and he worked on the Alaska boundary dispute to cement friendship with the United States. Lansdowne’s accomplishments were called a “diplomatic revolution.”

Lansdowne was Governor General of Canada from 1883 to 1888, one of the best. Here, too, he promoted peace, encouraging Prime Minister John A. Macdonald in 1883–’84 to make concessions to the Métis and give some political role to their leaders to defuse the mounting crisis in the West.

Lansdowne survived a Fenian assassination attempt in 1884 at Government House (Rideau Hall) in Ottawa. Actually he was quite a good target for the Fenians, bitter Irish nationalists based in the United States, because he owned land in Ireland and opposed the movement for a united, independent Ireland.

Thanks to a fairly effective spy network, Macdonald was well-informed about Fenian activities. “There is just a possibility,” he wrote to Lansdowne’s predecessor, Lord Lorne, “that, as shooting landlords is not a safe game in Ireland now, the Irish ruffians might try it on here.”

Indeed, one of them nearly pulled it off—hiding in the woods at Rideau Hall all day with a pistol. As luck would have it, Lansdowne never appeared. So the Fenian spent hours watching Lansdowne’s eldest son, 12 year-old Lord Kerry, skating on the Rideau Hall ice rink. The Fenian later boasted, “I could have shot the boy, but my heart failed me.”

It seems that security breaches of that type, with disaster narrowly avoided, are a perennial Canadian specialty.

In recent times one thinks of the bomb plot at the House of Commons in 1966 (when the bomber accidentally blew himself up in the bathroom), or the would-be assassin who broke into the prime minister’s residence at 24 Sussex Drive in 1995, or again, the Islamist gunman who ran right inside Parliament in 2014. Security was so bad that he could easily have shot the prime minister that day, if only he had known that the Conservative caucus was meeting in a committee room that he ran right past.

In 1917, Lansdowne’s Peace Letter was denounced in Parliament and the press as a “plea for surrender,” amidst much abuse. Later, in hindsight, he and his supporters were dismissed for their “high-minded defeatism,” and as “faint-hearts who got it wrong.”

In contrast, Aldous Huxley called Lansdowne the “last conservative statesman” in the 1946 edition of his dystopian novel, “Brave New World.” Huxley believed Lansdowne had foreseen an orderly, hierarchical, and prosperous free world about to be destroyed by ​​“nationalistic radicals” of both right and left—totalitarians enacting ideologies that still plague us today in different forms.

Lansdowne was quite right that it was unwise in the long run to crush Germany and dismember the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires. He dared to oppose those who would “go on fighting until the enemy was totally annihilated.” Thus, according to Huxley, Lansdowne spoke for true “conservatives, determined at all costs to keep their world intact.”

Would the world be a better place if the Allies had more limited war aims? Or had the fighting stopped before the United States got involved? Surely a compromise truce in 1917 would have been better than the “Carthaginian Peace” negotiated at Versailles in 1919, which almost guaranteed another war.

British historian Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller had similar views. The wise war policy in 1917–'18, he wrote, would have been to “prop up the tottering governments, to hold fast to the frontiers of 1913, to veto all territorial annexations, and to fight revolution by reinvigorating existing European governments.” The essence of conservatism!

Alas, overzealous British and French propaganda had demonized Germany with unhinged calls to “hang the Kaiser” and boil him in oil. It did not help that, with Germany under total blockade, the Kaiser tried to get Mexico to join his side—not the best move if it is in your interest to keep Americans neutral. All of that pushed the United States, led by Woodrow Wilson, to become a revisionist belligerent instead of an “arbiter of peace.”

A compromise truce—Lansdowne, the Habsburg emperor, and the Pope all suggested a way—would have been better than the Carthaginian Peace of 1919. At Versailles, as Fuller put it, “most of the Europe of a thousand years,” composed of empires that united and diverted rival nationalities in tolerable harmony, “was shattered and the balance between the nations destroyed.”

Instead, the so-called “peacemakers” of 1919 created a Frankenstein’s monster, sowing the seeds of ever more division, class hatred, race hatred, the Stalin-Hitler pact that launched World War II, and a plague of revolution and ethnic conflict down to the present day.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.