by John Buchan
But Ireland had not found peace. The symbolists were still powerful, and their appeal was especially to uprooted and malcontent youth. In February 1932 Mr. Cosgrave was defeated in a general election in which his opponents offered no bribes except the chance of sacrifice and the certainty of conflict. Mr. de Valera had the mind of some great ecclesiastic of the Middle Ages, half mathematical, half mystical, and to him the symbol was dearer than the fact. He had never accepted the Treaty, and he set himself to whittle it away. He plunged his country into a tariff war with Britain over his refusal to pay the land purchase instalments, and pointedly disregarded all the formalities which membership of the Empire involved. Since Ireland could not repudiate the obligations of such membership and at the same time receive its benefits, she became in fact an alien to the Commonwealth. So the miserable position came about that Britain was forced to stand on legal points which had little bearing on the true case, and to do much to kill by her economic policy those elements in Irish life which made for stability and progress.
Many have wished that the Treaty and its heritage of debate could be blotted out and the cards dealt afresh, for the present situation does justice neither to Britain’s dignity nor to her generosity, and it inflicts futile suffering on Ireland. The obstacle to a fresh deal is not Britain’s pride, but Britain’s apathy about the whole business. Once Ireland meant something to us, and now she means little. We alternately scolded and petted her, which was a proof of interest, even if the interest was chiefly in a political counter; now there is no British election in which her name is mentioned. The horrors of 1921, of which we naturally heard more of one side than of the other, inspired wrath, which presently, after our fashion, changed to boredom. We had had enough of Ireland; let her stew in her own juice and permit us to attend to our own affairs. Yet this very popular apathy might make it easier for statesmanship to break the vicious circle, for the present situation offers no hope for the future. Grattan’s words of Ireland still remain true: “The Channel forbids union; the Ocean forbids separation.”
“Gentem innoxiam et nationi Anglorum semper amicissimam.” — Hist. Eccles., iv, 26.
II
The other imperial problems of those years concerned Egypt, and India, that empire within the Empire. In the War the former became perforce a British protectorate, and peace saw the rise of a violent nationalist agitation, encouraged by the ill-omened Allied doctrine of “self-determination.” Britain, busied with many tasks, postponed any settlement and deported Zaghlul, the nationalist leader; widespread rioting followed, until Lord Allenby restored a semblance of order. Then a little tardily the British Government sent out a mission under Lord Milner to report on the future government of the country. The mission, boycotted by the nationalists, advised that Egypt’s independence should be recognised, but it was not till nearly two years later that Britain finally declared Egypt a sovereign state, with certain reservations concerning defence, foreign affairs, imperial communications, and the Sudan. This by no means satisfied the extremists, rioting and assassinations were resumed, and an exasperated British Cabinet was forced to strong measures. Egyptian troops were withdrawn from the Sudan, the embryo parliamentary constitution was suspended, and presently the Sultan Fuad and his Ministers took over the government as a virtual autocracy. The situation was now much the same as under the Cromer regime, except that Egypt had not the benefit of a great Englishman and a band of competent and incorruptible British administrators. The ancient land of the Nile has not yet found a self to determine. More fortunate has been the fate of the two mandated states, Palestine and Iraq. The second, after twelve years within the Empire, during which it cost Britain much money and much diplomatic and military effort, has now attained to independent statehood and membership of the League of Nations. Palestine, where Britain in face of many difficulties has laboured to carry out her pledge to create a Jewish national home, is at the moment one of the few prosperous states in the world.
In India much history has been made since the King spoke at Delhi in 1911. The war served to hasten the growth of those national aspirations which had been whetted by the Minto reforms. In 1917 the Secretary of State for India, Mr. E. S. Montagu, made a momentous declaration in the House of Commons:
The policy of His Majesty’s Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.
These cautious but pregnant words were followed in 1919 by the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, which in the Provinces divided the functions of Government into two classes, some reserved exclusively for the Governor and his Council, and some entrusted to Ministers responsible to the new local Legislatures. A Central Legislature was also established, consisting of two Houses, with important legislative powers, but with the right left to the Viceroy to override its decisions. The plan was to be revised within ten years. It was formally inaugurated at Delhi, in February 1921, by the Duke of Connaught on behalf of the King-Emperor.
The new system had a disastrous birth. There was grave trouble on the Afghan frontier, and in India itself; it was boycotted by the National Congress, and Mr. Gandhi, the prophet of a kind of mystical reaction, preached a crusade of pacific non-co-operation. Yet the complex, hybrid system worked better than might have been supposed, and it was at any rate an education for many Indians in the rudiments of parliamentaryism. But revision was not only desirable but a statutory duty, and in 1927 a commission under Sir John Simon went out to India to study the problem. The Simon report, the ablest state paper of recent years, proposed full responsibility for the Provinces, but not for the Central Government, unless and until the Ruling Princes should enter the system, which might then be on a federal basis.
There followed a series of Round-Table conferences and peripatetic commissions to work out the details of the new constitution. The fact that the Princes were willing to come in met the Simon conditions, and it became possible to envisage a federal constitution with a large measure of responsibility at the Centre. The Government plan was embodied in a White Paper; this was submitted to an inter-parliamentary committee, which, after sitting for eighteen months, published its report in the late autumn of 1934. It accepted the main principles of the White Paper scheme, which indeed were not only the logical and inevitable conclusions of the Montagu declaration of 1917, but a rational deduction from the changed conditions of the East and the new temper of India and of the world.
Lord Minto, a plain country gentleman and no politician, was fond of saying that the objection to governing a country against the will of its inhabitants was not moral but physical; it was simply impossible; the wildest tyranny must be at least acquiesced in or it would not last a day. To govern 350 millions by force is not feasible, even if we wished it; some co-operation by the people is necessary since politics in India are fast spreading from the classes to the masses. Criticism of the details of the British policy is inevitable, for it is beyond question a long step forward into shadowy places. Yet there is general agreement on the need of some such stride and on its direction. The Empire was not won, and it has not been maintained, by standing stiffly in the old ways, but by repeated bold experiments. That instinct, which has guided us in the past, is to-day more vital than ever, since the events of the last twenty years have been like a compounding of chemicals in which no elements have been left unchanged. Every question requires a fresh analysis. Many principles, once held to be ultimate verities, have been revised, and the whole range of methods. In the realm of economics this is universally admitted, and it is not less necessary in the constitutional sphere.
Two further reflections may be added. It has been argued with truth that political systems do not appear out of the void, but have their roots deep in history, and depend for their success upon the nature of the society t
o which they are applied. Parliamentary democracy is not a thing which comes into being full grown; it has a slow genesis and requires long preparation; a form of government which has served well in the West cannot be indiscriminately applied to the East; western civilisation has behind it the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, and India has none of these things. The answer is that the British scheme differs organically from any western constitution. What is proposed is not a blind transference to alien conditions of a highly idiomatic kind of government, but an attempt to build upon the facts of modern India a special and appropriate type of polity.
Lastly, it is said with some truth that parliamentary democracy has lost caste in Europe. Why, it is asked, should we be ready to saddle India with a discredited type of government? The answer is that happily it is not discredited in Britain or in the British Empire. We are the honourable slaves of our own achievements. For a century we have been labouring to inspire India with our political philosophy, and we have largely succeeded. We have welcomed her as an organic part of an Empire which is based on that philosophy. We have helped to create in her habits of thought of which that philosophy is the natural outcome. We cannot exclude her from sharing in what we regard as our best.
III
Meanwhile the self-governing part of the Empire was engaged in working out in practical detail the new imperial doctrine which at the close of the War had won general acceptance. In former days the handling of foreign policy had been in the hands of the British Cabinet, and its decisions had bound the Dominions. Under its auspices treaties had been signed, and by its will war had been declared and peace concluded. But the new conception of an alliance of sovereign States made this procedure impossible. A Dominion could not pledge itself to war except with the consent of its own Parliament; it must have the right to make treaties in the name of the King; it must, if it so desired, have diplomatic representation in foreign capitals. The problem was how to combine these necessary functions with some unifying principle which would enable the Empire to have a continuous foreign policy, and in a crisis to speak to the world with a single voice.
When Mustapha Kemal’s troops advanced to the Dardanelles in the autumn of 1922 and for a moment Britain seemed to be on the verge of war, Mr. Lloyd George appealed to the Empire for aid. The response of the Dominions, half-hearted or resentful, was a warning that the old methods had gone for ever. The ensuing Treaty of Lausanne was formally accepted by Canada, but not any obligations arising from it, and at the Imperial Conference that year it was resolved that “no treaty should be negotiated by any Government of the Empire without due consideration of the possible effects in other parts of the Empire.” That year, too, Canada arranged a fishery treaty with the United States, the signature of which she insisted must be by the Canadian plenipotentiary under powers issued to him by the King. From 1924 onward various Dominions appointed their separate diplomatic representatives. In the Locarno treaties the Dominions and India were specially excluded from the British obligations arising thereunder, unless they specifically assumed them.
The Empire was drifting into a constitutional tangle which it was the business of the Imperial Conference in 1926 to unravel. A formula drafted by Lord Balfour, attempted a definition of the relations of Great Britain and the Dominions:
They are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
From this certain consequences followed, of which the chief was that the British Government, as Government, had no right of interference in Dominion affairs, and that a Governor-General must represent the King and the King alone, and be appointed on Dominion advice. A committee of lawyers and officials sat in 1929 to work out certain conclusions, and the result was the Statute of Westminster, which became law in 1931. This enactment removed, with a few small exceptions, every shackle from a Dominion’s sovereign power. It left the Crown as the sole legal link holding the alliance together, and it provided, therefore, that any law affecting the Crown should require the assent of every Parliament in the Empire.
If the scriptural Via, Veritas, Vita be taken as a motto for any great human undertaking, the two last words have been for the Empire interpreted and fulfilled. From the days of the Elizabethans it has had the Life. It has now by slow stages reached the Truth, a doctrine which permits free growth within a generous framework. It remains to find the Way, the machinery of an executive alliance, the means of giving expression to its unity of spirit. These means we are still in process of discovering in the various departments of economics, foreign affairs and defence. The conference at Ottawa in 1932 was such an attempt: so were the numerous trade arrangements negotiated in the last few years. The pressure of economic problems is forcing the component parts of the Empire into a closer collaboration, and correcting the fissiparous tendency which was inevitable after the dissolution of the older bonds.
A court of law, I think, would have some difficulty in interpreting the exact meaning of the Balfour Definition, or in pronouncing upon the full implications of the Statute of Westminster. Can a Dominion remain at peace if Britain is at war? In theory, perhaps, but scarcely in fact, for no imperial statute would prevent Britain’s opponent from bombarding the Dominion’s ports if it so desired. A Dominion may have the power to secede from the Empire, but what then becomes of its relation to the Crown? What is the right of the constituent provinces of a Dominion against a Dominion Government, rights of which Britain in some cases remains the trustee. What indeed is the true meaning of a Dominion? We have left unexplored certain arcana imperii in the hope that the need for exploration may never arise. That has always been the British way. When we start to write out a constitution we never make a complete job of it. We do not believe that the meaning of an Empire, which is in continuous growth, can be enshrined in any document. So instead of a definition we have been content with spacious generalities.
But one thing has emerged from the debate, the tremendous meaning of the Crown. It is the foundation of the new doctrine, the one principle which gives unity to a vast growth whose destiny is unpredictable. Without it no tie of sentiment or blood or tradition would bind for long. To the Empire it provides a centre for its long memories and a personality for its devotion. There can be no question but that it has acquired since the War a far deeper and more intimate meaning for the Britains overseas. The journeys of the Prince of Wales, and his power of charming every class, have brought the royal life into the kindliest contact with their own. When on Christmas Day in recent years the King has spoken to all his people, his wave-length has been subtly attuned to their hearts. He is not Sovereign or symbol, but the Head of the Family, who summons his household round the hearth, and commends it to “the Father of Whom every family in heaven or on earth is named.”
CHAPTER III. A HOUSE IN ORDER
I
Human nature loves to dignify the past and decry the present. The new is disturbing, or at the best drab; to look back to a golden age is one means of acquiring hope for the future, since what has once been may come again. The earliest Babylonian tablet is a lament for the decay of the age, and every epoch which seems brilliant to our retrospect had its prophets of doom. There were doleful critics in the time of the Antonines, and the peace of the Middle Ages seemed chaos to those who lived under it; the Elizabethans had their pessimists; Wordsworth thought the times degenerate during which Trafalgar was won and Napoleon conquered; and the rock-like serenity of the Victorians appeared to contemporaries a flimsy and febrile thing. The British people have always made a speciality of a kind of self-abasement which depreciates themselves and exalts their ancestors. In every decade we have had honest men and sincere thinkers, the burden of whose plaint has been Troja fuit.
After peace we had a full chorus of such croakers. In the first confusion of resett
lement the pre-War years, which had once appeared so comfortless, seemed an unbelievable paradise of ease. The heroism and discipline of the War were regarded as a supreme effort, in the making of which Britain had exhausted herself. We had to face unparalleled problems with wearied brains and slack sinews; the best of our youth lay dead on the battle-fields, and the elderly and the old had to bend their shoulders to tasks for which they were not fit. The decline of Britain seemed to many a foregone conclusion. But, as Adam Smith on his death-bed told a doubting friend, there is a good deal of ruin in a country. I question if the historian will find in Britain’s record a more honourable page than that which tells of the decade and a half after peace. Without the frosts of war to nerve her or the sun of prosperity to warm her, she trudged most gallantly along the muddy roads of the great thaw. With broken tools she built the rudiments of a new dwelling which, if the fates are kind, may be a worthier edifice than that which it has replaced.