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In China, the Boxers rebelled. Progressive Chinese and all Westerners regarded this anti-foreign movement as utterly wrongheaded. The Boxers were swept aside but by 1950 the Western world, appalled at a Communist China, would gladly have settled for the Boxers.
Whisky for a Widow. The world of 1900 was not so vast and diffuse as airborne 1950 imagines it to have been. 1900 had a focus—Britain, the banker, educator and policeman to the world. And the focus had a symbol, Victoria Regina. She stood for sureness, security, principle. After Prince Albert died in 1861 she had his evening clothes laid out every night as a memorial ritual of constancy. She had once rebuked a Minister who used the word expediency: "My lord, I have been taught to judge between what was right and what was wrong; 'expediency' is a word I neither wish to hear again nor to understand."
On the night of May 17, 1900, Victoria rejoiced. Her troops that day had relieved Mafeking, besieged seven months by the Boers. Though no great war, this had been the gravest challenge to Pax Britannica since Waterloo, four years before Victoria was born. On Mafeking night in the upper quadrangle of Windsor Castle, Eton boys sang patriotic songs for the old Queen. She sat by a window in the dusk, leaning out again & again to say "Thank you. Thank you from my heart." Many of the singing boys or their sons were to die in the two great wars to come; but that night at Windsor all seemed tranquil ahead for Britain and the Empire and the world. The Eton boys were astonished and delighted when an Indian servant handed the Queen a whisky & soda, which she drank, along with all Britain, on Mafeking night.
A few months later, on Jan. 22, 1901, Victoria died in the arms of her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm, whose devotion to her was widely advertised and believed. Few knew then that the Kaiser had recently tried to incite Russia against Victoria's Empire. In a secret message to the Czar, the Kaiser said: "Russia alone could paralyze the power of England and deal it, if need be, a mortal blow." If the Czar would order his armies against India, the Kaiser would guarantee that no European nation rose to Britain's defense.
The world of Windsor Castle was not as secure as it seemed on Mafeking night.
Mr. Morgan Takes the Elevated. The center of power was already passing, not to Berlin or Moscow, but to New York. There an imperious genius, J. Pierpont Morgan, dreamed imperial dreams. His crowning achievement was to create the U.S. Steel Corp., by far the biggest business then in the world. This is the story of Big Steel's genesis:
Andrew Carnegie wanted to sell out so that he could devote the rest of his life to giving away carefully the money he had carefully amassed. He knew that only Morgan could organize a combine big enough to swallow the Carnegie Steel Co.; he also knew that Morgan did not like him, and did not want to deal with him.