Democratic Ideals and Reality

$2.50

WHEN this book was first published in 1919it was a resounding failure so far as popular response in England and America was concerned. Now it has been given a second lease of life, and one hopes that American readers will take full advantage of this fact, For it clearly belongs in the limited category of books that write of the present in terms that are acceptable to the future. Some of its reflections actually seem more apposite, more timely at the present moment than they were when the book first appeared.

In prescient understanding of the political and social trends that are shaping the modern world this eminent British geographer ranks with Oswald Spengler and Ortega y Gasset, even though his little book lacks the ponderous, prolix scholarship of The Decline of the West and the salty paradoxical quality of The Revolt of the Masses. Sir Halford is obviously at home in history as well as in geography, equipped with the detailed specific knowledge which alone makes possible the intuitive long view. Most important of all, he possesses the indispensable quality of the true seer: ability to look into the future without being too much affected by the emotional impact of his immediate surroundings.

It is easy to see why the work attracted little attention in the victorious countries immediately after the First World War. People were tired, desperately tired, and eager to be assured that civilization had successfully survived its worst ordeal and now rested again on firm foundations. And here was a tiresome Jeremiah warning them that greater trials were in store in the future. In Germany, significantly, Mackinder was attentively read, and his ideas had a considerable influence on the thinking of Hitler’s geopolitical brain-truster, General Haushofer.

In his first two pages Mackinder characteristically throws out two challenging ideas. “The temptation of the moment,” he writes, “is to believe that unceasing peace will ensue merely because tired men are determined that there shall be no more war.”But, as he warns, “the grouping of lands and seas, and of fertility and natural pathways, is such as to lend itself to the growth of empires and, in the end, of a single world empire.”

And he develops the idea that the three continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa represent a world island.

In the midst of this world island is an area, including Eastern Europe and a large part of Western and Central Asia, inaccessible to the pressure of sea power, which he calls the heart-land. And his warning, driven home now with relentless force by the echoes of fighting from the ruins of Stalingrad to the sands of Egypt, is summarized in the following formula: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heart-land: Who rules the Heart-land commands the World Island: Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

It requires no special exercise of imagination to envisage the threat of Axis domination after Hitler’s conquests in Europe and Japan’s in Asia. Immediately after the defeat of Imperial Germany, it demanded exceptionally clear-sighted vision to recognize, as Mackinder did, that a new challenge of land power to sea power was highly probable; that, in his own words, “it is productive power which now counts, rather than dead wealth,” so that Germany would not be handicapped by financial collapse in its new race for world power. One hopes that Mackinder’s second hearing will be far wider than his first. Few books on world trends will better repay reading and rereading. W.H.C.