The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 7, Issue 1, Winter 2018 | Page 33

and how these circumstances parallel contemporary geopolitics. There is much
that WWI may have to inform modern scientific peace-modeling methods, and
Harrison may have possessed much insight on how to forecast war.
The Harrisonian Model
On St. Patrick’s Day—five years before the outbreak of WWI—German
leaders scrambled in response to the frantic display of “foul and disgusting
language” 9 issuing forth from the United Kingdom Parliament. The Irish
Nationalist Party Member, John Dillon, denounced such rhetoric as “the first
mutterings of a storm between two great nations” 10 —the British and German
Empires. Britain’s Parliament was distressing over a national naval estimate,
which predicted that the German Navy would outgrow Britain’s within a two-year
timeframe. Publicity of this estimate contributed to fears growing in the UK that
another nation would challenge the empire’s long-standing status as the world’s
“mistress of the ocean.” 11
This March 17, 1909 display of Parliamentary paranoia provoked
Harrison, a forty-year-long pacifist, to declare his need to “modify the anti-
militarist policy which [he had] consistently maintained” 12 for most of his adult
life and philosophical career. Not to be confused with Sir Frederic Harrison—
business mogul of the same era, bearing the same name and spelling—the
Positivist public figure wrote an alarmist letter to the editor of The Times, which
published it the next day. 13 His article featured a model that accurately predicted
some of the causal circumstances of the Great War that would transpire half a
decade later.
His paradigm consisted of three broad categories of antecedent variables
of an unprecedented, European-wide conflagration. These were German ambition,
German naval expansion, and an Anglo-German power conflict. All three
variables existed interdependently of each other so that removal of one could
theoretically have reduced or eliminated the likelihood of the impending Great
War.
German Ambition
Harrison’s letter also featured a profound disclaimer warning all readers
to preclude him from charges of any “anti-German” 14 motivations for his
“alarmist” 15 paradigm. He emphatically declared that his findings were irrelevant
to race, nationalism, or prejudice. Rather, he praised Germany as a cherished
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