Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  The occupation of Egypt involved Britain in countless European disputes, and the expansion of Empire elsewhere in Africa had, for all Salisbury’s savoir-faire, at one time or another antagonized the French, the Germans, the Italians and the Portuguese. The French were suspicious of British intentions in Burma and Malaya, too, while a squabble with Venezuela about the British Guiana frontier embroiled Britain yet again with the Americans, it being implicit under the Monroe Doctrine that Guiana ought not to be British anyway. The possession of Gibraltar did not endear the British to the Spaniards, themselves then enduring the last melancholy pangs of lost supremacy. The possession of the Falkland Islands was already irritating the Argentinians and the Chileans, both good clients of the British, who nevertheless felt they had prior claims to the islands.

  The biggest price of all was paid for India, for all its glory a diplomatic millstone round the British neck. The Tsar Nicholas II once observed that all he had to do to paralyse British policy was to send a telegram mobilizing his forces in Russian Turkestan. India was to Britain like a larger twin, whose hurts were felt in London as they were in Simla, and Britain’s foreign policies were twisted by Indian preoccupations. As the rival Powers of Europe built up their fleets and expanded their foundries, half the British energies were expended on securing the routes to India, safeguarding the frontiers of India, placating or overawing India’s neighbours. The Trans-Siberian Railway might not seem very relevant to British prosperity, but it was a possible threat to India, and so to Britain. So was the German plan for a railway to Baghdad, and the Hejaz Railway, which the Turks were building through Arabia, and the proposed Russian railway to the Persian Gulf—and every inexplicable border dispute in the marches of Afghanistan, every French misdemeanour on the Indo-China frontier, the squabbles of sheikhs in south Arabia, the weakening of Chinese power in Tibet—all, because of India, the concern of the islanders off the north-west coast of Europe.

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  Was it all worth it? The most real threat to the future of the British Empire was not the danger of armed rebellion, nor the nuisance of political agitation, nor even just yet the prospect of a world war, but the possibility that the British themselves might lose the will to rule. Thirty years before Matthew Arnold had foreseen the terrible weight of Empire:

  … she,

  The weary Titan, with deaf

  Ears, and labour-dimm’d eyes.

  Regarding neither to right

  Nor left, goes passively by,

  Staggering on to ber goal;

  Bearing on shoulders immense,

  Atlanten, the load,

  Well-nigh not to be borne,

  Of the too vast orb of her fate.

  Arnold’s was a voice from another age, and his image of England was scarcely to be recognized in the glaring electric light of the nineties: but one day, nevertheless, the weary Titan might shrug that load off. It must have been so tempting to try the other way, and lead the quiet life in Little England. There were a few, a very few, precedents. Besides the United States, Tangier, the Ionian Islands, Sicily, Corsica and Java had all once flown the Union Jack. Only seven years before Heligoland, for seventy years a British outpost commanding the mouth of the Elbe, had been handed over to Germany in return for African concessions. Queen Victoria thought this a very bad precedent. ‘The next thing will be to propose to give up Gibraltar: and soon nothing will be secure, and all our Colonies will wish to be free.’ She accepted Salisbury’s reassurances dubiously. ‘I think you may find great difficulties in the future. Giving up what one has is always a bad thing.’

  There were people in England, all the same, who felt it might be done more often. The most persuasive critics of Empire were to be found in Britain itself, and they had four main lines of argument. People like Fisher, though they certainly did not demand the dissolution of the Empire, felt that its emphasis was wrong, and that in their obsession with imperial adventure the British were neglecting far more pressing matters nearer home. People like Hobson believed that the glory was all an illusion, and that the Empire cost far more than it was worth. People like Wilfrid Blunt maintained that imperialism was immoral: it was a cheap aspiration for a great nation, and riddled with hypocrisy. And a few acute observers among the working classes, not quite bowled over by the Daily Mail, suspected the Empire to be fine for capitalists, but useless to employees—the first suggestion of a rift, between the rich and the poor, on the value of foreign investments.

  All these sentiments, given voice by a handful of political stalwarts like Henry Labouchere1 and the surviving Gladstonian Liberals, sustained a sizeable anti-imperialist minority in Britain. There was never a moment when the British were unanimous about their Empire, and even after the collapse of the Liberal Party there were many in the land who despised, with Gladstone, those ‘false phantoms of glory’, and wondered as he did why the British public was shocked at the oppression of the Armenians, but indifferent to the bullying of the Irish.

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  But in that celebratory summer any weakening of the imperial will was imperceptible. Hobson could see no hope that imperialism would collapse at all, and most of those who detected Britain’s dimly discernible problems thought they could best be solved by strengthening the Empire, rather than giving it up. The fashionable New Imperialist theory was that the British Empire would only survive as a Great Power, able to match up to the new European and American giants, if it bound itself together into some more formal unity.

  The most popular proposal was an Imperial Federation. This was Chamberlain’s dream. The Empire would be turned into a single economic unit protected by imperial tariffs—a sort of closed Free Trade area—and there would be a common defence organization, a common foreign policy and eventually an Imperial Parliament with members from all corners of the Empire. ‘Our chance is now,’ cried Sir Howard Vincent. ‘The fruit is ready to our hand. We grasp it, and leave for tomorrow an Empire in the homogeneous strength of which that of today shall pale and which, self-sustaining, self-supporting, shall eclipse all the world to be Mistress of the land as well as, as now, Mistress of the Sea.’ Chamberlain said of the white colonies at a dinner for their Premiers in London that June: ‘If they desire at any time to share with us the glories and the privileges of Empire—if they are willing to take on their shoulders their portion of the burden we have borne so long—they may rest assured that their decision will be joyfully received, their overtures will be cordially welcomed by the Motherland.’ Imperial Federation, said W. E. Forster, who had founded the Imperial Federation League, must be ‘such a union of the Mother Country and her Colonies as will keep the realm one State in relation to other States’. John Buchan speculated about the day when there would be ‘a continued coming-and-going between English and colonial society, till the rich man has his country house or shooting box as naturally in the Selkirks or on the East African plateau as in Scotland’.

  The details were generally left vague, but it was apparently postulated that the federation would be all white, with India and the rest held in common ward. The only self-governing colony to offer much positive response was Canada. In 1879 the Canadians, in one of their early acts as a Confederation, had imposed a customs duty on British imports, shattering the idea of a Free Trade Empire. Now, in the flush of the New Imperialism, these duties were cut by a quarter. The British for their part abrogated treaties, indirectly affecting imperial trade, which they had earlier concluded with Germany and Belgium. Colonial Preference became one of the watchwords of the New Imperialism, and the Canadian gesture was celebrated in a poem written by Rudyard Kipling and set to music by Walford Davies:

  A Nation spoke to a Nation,

  A Throne sent word to a Throne:

  ‘Daughter am I in my mother’s house,

  But mistress in my own.

  The gates are mine to open,

  As the gates are mine to close,

  And I abide in my Mother’s House?

  Said our Lady of the Snows.
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  It was not to be. Every year the rationalized Empire of the federalists became less convincing, as yet more African territories were added to the roster, and the shape of the thing became more unwieldy yet. The centrifugal forces of the Empire were too strong for unity. If the white colonies were prepared to think about commercial federation and imperial preferences, they were far less interested in common defence. They were very satisfied with the existing arrangements, under which they paid, between them all, rather less than I per cent of the annual cost of the Royal Navy. John Morley the radical said that any Imperial Federal Union would always fail on two issues—tariffs and natives: there was no such thing as an imperial native policy, and some of the Colonial Governments might certainly make awkward partners, if it came to a properly federal Empire, with the White Man’s Burden shared among all the white men. Lord Blachford, a former Permanent Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office, once remarked that to suppose that the Anglo-Saxons, ‘the great exterminators of aborigines in the temperate zones’, would when confederated set a new example of justice and humanity towards the coloured peoples seemed to him ‘a somewhat transcendental expectation’. Far from being ready for imperial federation, the colonies could scarcely unite their own territories. Newfoundland had refused to join the Canadian confederation. The Australian colonies were still unable to agree on terms for their own federation. New Zealand, though quite favourable in principle to the idea of imperial union, had in practice refused to join even an Australasian Customs Union. As for the British themselves, bravely though Chamberlain and his friends might talk of imperial preferences, as a nation they were still staunch Free Traders: man and boy they had profited by it, and what was good enough for their fathers was good enough for them.

  So the Federal Empire was still-born. Unity was bravely in the air throughout the Jubilee summer, and the problems of joint defence and policy were what the premiers mostly discussed at their conferences: but there were only two real and lasting bonds to keep the Pax Britannica in being. One was force, by which the British kept their dependent territories in hand. The other was sentiment: an indefinable, immeasurable bond which kept the British overseas, for all their grumbles, loyal at heart to Crown and Mother Country. The idea of the British Empire could move men to greater things than swagger and pageant music. The name of England, the presence of the Queen on her inviolate throne, could still send a chill down the colonial spine, and a favourite prayer of Jubilee year was Milton’s prayer for the Kingdom: ‘O Thou, who of Thy free grace didst build up this Britannick Empire to a glorious and enviable height, with all her daughter islands about her, stay us in this felicitie.’

  1 Eton and Christ Church, and formerly Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, this angry scholar established his anti-Empire reputation with his book The Empire in 1863, and kept it up until his death in 1910. The Dictionary of National Biography defines him as a ‘controversialist’.

  2 Except in the case of the New Zealanders, who depended entirely upon British markets, and never much wanted to be further emancipated. When, in 1926, the Statute of Westminster gave the white Dominions virtually complete sovereignty, the New Zealanders only signed to preserve the unanimity of the Empire, being perfectly happy as they were.

  1 Whose sister-in-law, Mrs Annie Besant, gave the British name a different sort of lustre by becoming, as an ardent anti-imperialist, President of the Indian National Congress in 1917. Sir Walter (1836–1901) was a benevolent littérateur who founded the Society of Authors.

  1 Hume, who was born in 1829, lived long enough to see the Morley-Minto reforms of 1907, the first positive step taken by the Imperial Government towards the emancipation of India. He died in 1912.

  1 At 32 editor of the Cape Times and one of the most powerful men in South Africa. A friend both of Rhodes and of Kruger, he had first gone to the Cape for his health, and he died in 1907, aged 42.

  1 A Radical socialite, founder of the magazine Truth, and for twenty-six years one of the wittiest members of the House of Commons. He died in 1912.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ‘The Song on Your Bugles Blown’

  The brave old land of deed and song.

  We ne’er shall do her memories wrong!

  For freedom here we’ll firmly stand,

  As stood our sires for Fatherland!

  Henry Parkes

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  WHAT this Empire stood for, whether it had a message for the world, how to define its principles—these were matters that the New Imperialists loved discussing, but never very neatly answered. The hazy nature of the structure emanated from its heart. The Liberal Party was humiliated, and the old Victorian faith in the omnipotence of freedom had faded rather, but the English remained an essentially libertarian people. Compulsion was not really to their taste. Their public policies swung from side to side with the swing of the political pendulum, and their private views, even in a period of deafening indoctrination, were varied and vehemently expressed: the Little Englanders argued on, every imperial gesture found its critics, and the Irish Nationalist M.P.s were in effect representatives at Westminster of imperial dissent. Twenty years of determined Government was all Lord Salisbury thought he needed to solve the Irish problem, but in a democracy like the English twenty years of consistent policy was hard to achieve. Nothing had time to settle. Even India had only been part of the Queen’s dominions for forty years, and the British, so inclined to compare their Empire with the Roman, often forgot that the Pax Britannica could scarcely be said to have existed for much more than a century.

  All this did not make for clear meanings. Enthusiasts hoped that when all the different intentions of Empire were synthesized—when the high-minded was diluted with the ignoble, the altruistic with the avaricious, the Crown purified by total immersion and Exeter Hall stiffened by Admiralty, out of it all would emerge some grand significance—an ideology of Empire, such as Napoleon might have devised. It was not so. There was a dialectic of Empire, but no manifesto. No particular dogma, aspiration, economic theory or social truth was expressed by the Pax Britannica. The British had never been good at formulating abstractions, and their attempts to elevate the Empire into ordered symbolism remained unconvincing.

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  Was it a Christian Empire? Most late Victorians would have been scandalized, if told that the British Empire was really an agnostic political structure. The missionary motive had been so elemental to its growth, pious talk of spreading the Word so infused its literature, it cropped up so often in prayers, sermons and commemorative services, that the average citizen assumed it to be as orthodox in faith as the Church of England itself, and bound to the Establishment by as many rubrics. Everywhere in the Empire the Anglican Church was identified with Authority—even in the self-governing colonies, where it had no official status at all. The British Army went to war with compulsory church parades, the Royal Navy mustered for divisions beneath its guns, ‘muscular Christianity’ summed up the ethos of the I.C.S. as well as anything could. Anglican dioceses sprang up wherever the Flag flew: when Bishop Hamlyn, the first Bishop of Accra, arrived at his mission on the Niger in 1896 he prefaced his diary with a glorious water-colour of his own arrival—flat on his back beneath a straw awning in the Church Missionary Society canoe, with eight stalwart converts paddling him, a bosun in a blue hat at the rudder, and at the masthead the flag of the C.M.S., a dove above an open bible. The most authentic imperial heroes—Livingstone, Gordon, Raffles—entered their adventures holding the Good Book as defiantly as ever a conquistador brandished his reliquary among the Aztecs.

  ‘Heaven’s Light Our Guide’ was the motto of the Indian Empire—the Prince Consort himself had devised it—and few doubted that it was the light of a Christian heaven. The idea of Christianity as primus inter pares had not yet commended itself to the British. They might not be actively devout themselves, but they had been brought up in a society that firmly believed the Christian way to be the only truth. Many would probab
ly have found it hard to believe that Queen Victoria had herself added, in her own hand, the following clause to the draft proclamation establishing Crown rule in India: ‘Firmly relying ourselves on the truth of Christianity, and acknowledging with gratitude the solace of religion, we disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions upon any of our subjects.’