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free from the danger of a sudden catastrophe. But for the present we are driven
both by necessity and duty to a closer union. Already we should ourselves suffer
greatly from disruption, and the longer the union lasts the more important it will
become to us. Meanwhile the same is true in an infinitely greater degree of India
itself. The transformation we are making there may cause us some misgivings, but
though we may be led conceivably to wish that it had never been begun, nothing
could ever convince us that it ought to be broken off in the middle.
Thus, Seeley hopes that his meditations on the expansion of England
will impress upon the reader “that there is something fantastic in all those
notions of abandoning the colonies or abandoning India, which are so
freely broached among us.” After all, he inquires,
Have we really so much power over the march of events as we suppose? Can we
cancel the growth of centuries for a whim, or because, when we throw a hasty
glance at it, it does not suit our fancies? The lapse of time and the force of life,
‘which working strongly bind,’ limit our freedom more than we know, and even
when we are not conscious of it at all.
Indeed – and most importantly, by Seeley’s reckoning – the English do
not for the most part really have an empire at all, on the good old Roman
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model: “our Empire is not an Empire at all in the ordinary sense of the
word. It does not consist of a congeries of nations held together by force, but
in the main of one nation, as much as if it were no Empire but an ordinary
state.” That is, the union of “Greater Britain” – the true essence of which
is the white Dominions – is “of the more vital kind. It is united by blood
and religion and though circumstances may be imagined in which these
ties might snap, yet they are strong ties, and will only give way before some
violent dissolving force.” India might be a moral responsibility, but when
“we inquire then into the Greater Britain of the future we ought to think
much more of our Colonial than of our Indian Empire.” And behind
all of this pleading, there is a simple conviction: “We in Europe . . . are
pretty well agreed that the treasure of truth which forms the nucleus of
the civilization of the West is incomparably more sterling not only than
the Brahmanic mysticism with which it has to contend, but even than the
Roman enlightenment which the old Empire transmitted to the nations
of Europe.”
India, and Egypt, a convenient route to India that the British under
Gladstone had blunderingly continued to maintain after the breakup of
the Ottoman Empire and Disraeli’s purchase of the Suez Canal, might
well have appeared at this time to be quite resistant to any vital unity with
England. And with the British busily deploying their military to crush the
leaders of the Sepoy Mutiny, the insurrections of the Arabi Pasha and the
Mahdi, and Zulus whenever and wherever, the impartial observor ought to
have quickly realized that talk of spreading civilization scarcely did justice
to the flavor of imperial rule. The stirrings of colonial liberation were
already perfectly evident, and hardly incoherent, even if Queen Victoria
was the very proud Empress of India. Hence, Seeley’s fond outpourings
about the importance, for the future of the empire, of racial and religious
unity. He was, after all, the author of Ecce Homo.
And though he was no Rudyard Kipling, Seeley’s pleas for maintain-
ing the empire, cast in the tones of the academic, carried a great deal of
weight with those who were ever ready to feel the pangs of conscience
and moral responsibility. As George Woodcock has observed, Seeley, with
his stress on the white Dominions, really did introduce “a new element
into imperial thinking,” something not present in “open imperialists like
Disraeli and the crypto-imperialists like Gladstone.” Ensor has it that
after Disraeli’s death, “the single influence which did most to develop the
imperialist idea was the very powerful and popular book The Expansion of
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England. . . . Seeley, who was a specialist on the rise of Prussia and the career of Napoleon, was a believer in the beneficence of rule by the strong.”
Indeed, as Shannon puts it, he was seeking “an English equivalent of the
great reconstructor of the Prussian state, Stein, to fulfill the prophecies of
The Expansion of England.”
Maine’s arguments about the fate of India were somewhat different but
no more sympathetic to claims for Indian independence than Seeley’s.
Stocking has remarked that although some have seen Maine as “a progen-
itor of Cromer and Lugard and the later imperialism of ‘indirect rule,’”
he was actually “a strong advocate of active central government and leg-
islative reform,” and went far to break down in India “existing barriers
to individual personality and property rights.” In Maine’s view, it was
only the English who held back the “pent-up flood of barbarism” in this
country, where the inheritance of the past was of “nearly unmixed evil.”
The English, he urged, needed to rebuild India on English principles.
As Gauri Viswanathan has argued, in Masks of Conquest, Maine played
the harsh Dickensian utilitarian when it came to Indian education, par-
ticularly the study of literature. For this study “assumed a mind that was
capable of being driven by reason, an assumption that Maine felt was
entirely inappropriate in the Indian context.” Thus, Maine urged that
liberal, classical education only “gave Indians the illusion that they could
be better than they actually were and that they were being empowered
to change their personal destiny and affect the course of things.” He was
blunt: “We may teach our students to cultivate language, and we only
add strength to sophistry; we teach them to cultivate their imagination,
and it only gives grace and colour to delusion; we teach them to cultivate
their reasoning powers, and they find a thousand resources in allegory, in
analogy, and in mysticism, for evading and discrediting truth.”
Thus, the revitalized “aristocrat” was beginning to look quite white and
quite manly, less Millian and more Dorian. Did the work of Seeley and
Maine (and Balfour’s example) provide the case for the “Caesarism” that
Sidgwick so wondered and worried about?
Certainly it inspired, among other things, the formation of the Impe-
rial Federation League, in , which was eagerly supported by such
liberal imperialists as Lord Rosebery – not to mention Bryce and other<
br />
academic liberals – despite the lingering anti-imperialist sentiments of
Gladstonian liberalism. Enhanced federation, at least, was something to
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which Sidgwick looked forward, as a possible evolution of empire from
the colonial formation, and this was often very much an extension of the
imperial idea, with the “Concert of Europe” – the “civilized” states –
creating a more extensive framework of international law. He especially
looked forward “to the kind of federal union of civilized states that will
prevent war,” even if progress will be “slow.” As the Memoir records, he
put a great deal of faith in the potential of federation: the “federation of
the Australian Colonies interested Sidgwick greatly. He believed that in
federation there and elsewhere lay the best hopes of the peace and progress
of the world.” (M ) Indeed, his posthumous Development of European
Polity, the historical side of his political inquiries, would labor through
pages to the carefully hedged (albeit prescient) conclusion that
The future of constitutional monarchy I was unwilling to prophesy: but I feel
more disposed to predict a development of federality, partly from the operation of
the democratic tendency just noticed, partly from the tendency shown through-
out the history of civilisation to form continually larger political societies – as
Spencer would say, ‘integration’ – which seems to accompany the growth of
civilisation. . . . We have seen the same tendency in recent times in the formation of Germany and Italy: and we have in North America an impressive example of
a political society maintaining internal peace over a region larger than Western
Europe. I therefore think it not beyond the limits of sober forecast to conjecture
that some further integration may take place in the West European states: and if it
should take place, it seems probable that the example of America will be followed,
and that the new political aggregate will be formed on the basis of a federal polity.
When we turn our gaze from the past to the future, an extension of federalism
seems to me the most probable of the political prophecies relative to the form of
government. (DEP )
The “democratic tendency just noticed” concerned the “establishment
of secured local liberties, mainly under the influence of the sentiment of
nationality, in states that were previously of the unitary type.”
Mention might also be made, in this regard, of one of the more ambitious
forcasts of the Elements:
[I]f the boundaries of existing civilised states undergo no material change, the relative strength of the United States, as compared with any one of the West-European
States, will before the end of the next century so decidedly preponderate, that the
most powerful of the latter will keenly feel its inferiority in any conflict with the
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former. And even apart from this motive to union, it seems not impossible that
the economic burdens entailed by war, the preponderantly industrial character
of modern political societies, the increasing facilities and habits of communica-
tion among Europeans and the consequently intensified consciousness of their
common civilisation, may, before many generations have passed, bring about an
extensive federation of civilised states strong enough to put down wars among its
members.
He admits, however, that “this ideal is at present beyond the range of
practical politics.” (EP )
Now, the figures dealt with here are especially revealing of the most
powerful academic and political forces at work on Sidgwick, and of the
changing context in which he found himself, with the transition from
Millian academic Liberalism, half realized in Gladstone, to the ideology
of empire, influentially purveyed by colleagues he had personally praised
and supported. Apparently, his feelings for a new (genuine) aristocracy
infused with fire and strength shaded into some admiration for the twist
given such ideas in the new imperialism. This is much more than guilt
by association. Recall, too, how Sidgwick himself was instrumental in the
“maintenance and development of teaching for Indian Civil Servants”
and “served on the Board for Indian Civil Service Studies from May
to December , and from to himself provided £
a year towards the expense of the teaching required” (M ). In ,
he wrote to Dakyns that he has “been engaged in constructing a scheme
for the Competitive Examination by which a fair chance is to be given
to University Graduates; and a job it has been, as we had to adjust and
balance the relative claims of Classics, Mathematics, and Natural Science,
not to speak of other subjects, and at the same time balance the claims of
Oxford and the claims of Cambridge so that neither may feel postponed to
the other” (M ). But presumably Sidgwick thought it worth the effort;
he in all probability shared the view of his friend Trevelyan, whose family
was also much caught up in India, that “the Indian Civil Service was a
fine career, which held out splendid prospects to honourable ambition.
But better far than this, there was no career which so surely inspired men
with the desire to do something useful in their generation; to leave their
mark upon the world for good, and not for evil.”
Moreover, Sidgwick apparently had a warm regard for none other than
Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton (–), the first Earl Lytton, who
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became viceroy of India in . Lytton was a statesman, poet, and liter-
ary figure who sometimes published under the pen name Owen Meredith.
His works included Clytemnestra, The Earl’s Return and Other Poems,
The Wanderer, Chronicles and Characters, After Paradise, and King Poppy, among many others, and under his rule the controversial and problematic role of the British in India was growing ever more evident. Under
Lytton and the Beaconsfield government, the British were led to a series
of entanglements with Afghanistan, with such results as the massacre of
their delegation at Kabul; his exploits provided Gladstone with much of
the material needed for his anti-imperialist speech making during the
Midlothian campaign against Disraeli. Intolerant of the Indian press and
Eurocentric in the extreme, Lytton left India in , and in took
up the more congenial position of ambassador to France. His mother was
Lady Rosina Bulwer-Lytton, the novelist who caused a scandal with her
public (and quite sane) attacks on her husband and was eventually forcibly
committed to an asylum, with her care in later life largely falling to her son.
Lytton’s daughter married Eleanor’s brother Gerald, and Lytton himself
lived long enough to be recruited into the Society for Psychical Research.
Sidgwick found in Lytton the ideal reader for his Elements, and, as with
Bryce and Dicey, solicited his comments while preparing the book:
My dear Lord Lytton
I am exceedingly obliged to you for your very full and interesting letter; and
much gratified to find that you do not take more objections to my formulation
of international duty, and that your disagreements are only on minor points. I
was probably led to exaggerate our difference from the fact that, as you say, we
approached the matter from opposite [sic] – your object being to show that the
ordinary moralist had got considerably out of his proper place and function in his
dealings with international questions, and my object being rather to put him if possible in his proper place and keep him there!
I thought all you said in your address about the feminine personalities of nations
and the [sic] misleading effects opportune as well as entertaining. I quite feel that popular talk on this subject is rife with absurdities which are liable to become
worse than ridiculous in their practical effect. I have sometimes thought that the
uncertainty whether national identity depends on physical continuity of race or identity of land inhabited was perhaps the most striking cause of muddled sentiment on the subject. Do you remember how in Tennyson’s ‘Boädicea’ the queen
is consoled by loosely robed prophetesses depicting power and glory awaiting the
“isle” in the future? – when it would be inhabited by Angles who had managed to
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extirpate Boädicea’s kinsfolk, except from “Little Wales”! All the same I suppose
you would agree that as the notion of national identity is indispensable if we are to have any international morality, all this muddled sentiment does more good than