The Imperialist

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

  “I expect it’s the next best thing,” he would say, “but it’s only the next best.”

  It was as if he felt charged to vindicate the race, the whole of Anglo-Saxondom, there in his supreme moment, his splendid position, on the top of an omnibus lumbering west out of Trafalgar Square.

  One introduction of his own he had. Mrs. Milburn had got it for him from the rector, Mr. Emmett, to his wife’s brother, Mr. Charles Chafe, who had interests in Chiswick and a house in Warwick Gardens. Lorne put off presenting the letter – did not know, indeed, quite how to present it, till his stay in London was half over. Finally he presented himself with it, as the quickest way, at the office of Mr. Chafe’s works at Chiswick. He was cordially received, both there and in Warwick Gardens, where he met Mr. Alfred Hesketh. Lorne went several times to the house in Warwick Gardens, and Hesketh – a nephew – was there on the very first occasion. It was an encounter interesting on both sides. He – Hesketh – was a young man with a good public school and a university behind him, where his very moderate degree, however, failed to represent the activity of his mind or the capacity of his energy. He had a little money of his own, and no present occupation; he belonged to the surplus. He was not content to belong to it; he cast about him a good deal for something to do. There was always the Bar, but only the best fellows get on there, and he was not quite one of the best fellows; he knew that. He had not money enough for politics or interest enough for the higher departments of the public service, nor had he those ready arts of expression that lead naturally into journalism. Anything involving further examinations he rejected on that account; and the future of glassware, in view of what they were doing in Germany, did not entice him to join his uncle in Chiswick. Still he was aware of enterprise, convinced that he had loafed long enough.

  Lorne Murchison had never met any one of Hesketh’s age in Hesketh’s condition before. Affluence and age he knew, in honourable retirement; poverty and youth he knew, em barked in the struggle; indolence and youth he also knew, as it cumbered the ground; but youth and a competence, equipped with education, industry, and vigour, searching vainly in fields empty of opportunity, was to him a new spectacle. He himself had intended to be a lawyer since he was fourteen. There never had been any impediment to his intention, any qualification to his desire. He was still under his father’s roof, but that was for the general happiness; any time within the last eighteen months, if he had chosen to hurry fate, he might have selected another. He was younger than Hesketh by a year, yet we may say that he had arrived, while Hesketh was still fidgeting at the starting-point.

  “Why don’t you farm?” he asked once.

  “Farming in England may pay in a quarter of a century, not before. I can’t wait for it. Besides, why should I farm? Why didn’t you?”

  “Well,” said Lorne, “in your case it seems about the only thing left. I? Oh, it doesn’t attract us over there. We’re getting away from it – leaving it to the new-comers from this side. Curious circle, that. I wonder, when our place gets overcrowded, where we shall go to plough?”

  Hesketh’s situation occupied them a good deal; but their great topic had a wider drift, embracing nothing less than the Empire, pausing nowhere short of the flag. The imperial idea was very much at the moment in the public mind; it hung heavily, like a banner, in every newspaper, it was filtering through the slow British consciousness, solidifying as it travelled. In the end it might be expected to arrive at a shape in which the British consciousness must either assimilate it or cast it forth. They were saying in the suburbs that they wanted it explained; at Hatfield they were saying, some of them, with folded arms, that it was self-evident; other members of the great house, swinging their arms, called it blackness of darkness and ruin, so had a prophet divided it against itself. Wallingham, still in the Cabinet, was going up and down the country trying not to explain too much. There was division in the Cabinet, sore travail among private members. The conception being ministerial, the Opposition applied itself to the task of abortion, fearing the worst if it should be presented to the country fully formed and featured, the smiling offspring of progress and imagination. Travellers to Greater Britain returned waving joyous torches in the insular fog; they shed a brilliance and an infectious enthusiasm, but there were not enough to do more than make the fog visible. Many persons found such torches irritating. They pointed out that as England had groped to her present greatness she might be trusted to feel her way further. “Free trade,” they said, “has made us what we are. Put out these lights!”

  Mr. Chafe was one of these. He was a cautious, heavy fellow, full of Burgundy and distrust. The basis of the imperial idea inspired him with suspicion and hostility. He could accept the American tariff on English manufactures; that was a plain position, simple damage, a blow full in the face, not to be dodged. But the offer of better business in the English colonies in exchange for a duty on the corn and meat of foreign countries – he could see too deep for that. The colonials might or might not be good customers: he knew how many decanters he sold in the United States, in spite of the tariff. He saw that the tax on food-stuffs was being commended to the working man with the argument of higher wages. Higher wages, with the competition of foreign labour, spelt only one word to English manufacturers, and that was ruin. The bugbear of higher wages, immediate, threatening, near, the terror of the last thirty years, closed the prospect for Charles Chafe; he could see nothing beyond. He did not say so, but to him the prosperity of the British manufacturer was bound up in the indigence of the operative. Thriving workmen, doing well, and looking to do better, rose before him in terms of menace, though their prosperity might be rooted in his own. “Give them cheap food and keep them poor,” was the sum of his advice. His opinions had the emphasis of the unexpected, the unnatural: he was one of the people whom Wallingham’s scheme in its legitimate development of a tariff on foreign manufactures might be expected to enrich. This fact, which he constantly insisted on, did give them weight; it made him look like a cunning fellow not to be caught with chaff. He and his business had survived free trade – though he would not say this either – and he preferred to go on surviving it rather than take the chances of any zollverein. The name of the thing was enough for him, a word made in Germany, thick and mucky, like their tumblers. As to the colonies – Mr. Chafe had been told of a certain spider who devoured her young ones. He reversed the figure, and it stood, in the imperial connection, for all the argument he wanted.

  Alfred Hesketh had lived always in the hearing of such doctrine; it had stood to him for political gospel by mere force of repetition. But he was young, with the curiosity and enterprise and impatience of dogma of youth; he belonged by temperament and situation to those plastic thousands in whom Wallingham hoped to find the leaven that should leaven the whole lump. His own blood stirred with the desire to accomplish, to carry further; and as the scope of the philanthropist did not attract him, he was vaguely conscious of having been born too late in England. The new political appeal of the colonies, clashing suddenly upon old insular harmonies, brought him a sense of wider fields and chances; his own case he freely translated into his country’s, and offered an open mind to politics that would help either of them. He looked at the new countries with interest, an interest evoked by their sudden dramatic leap into the forefront of public concern. He looked at them with what nature intended to be the eye of a practical business man. He looked at Lorne Murchison, too, and listened to him, with steady, critical attention. Lorne seemed in a way to sum it all up in his person, all the better opportunity a man had out there; and he handled large matters of the future with a confidence and a grip that quickened the circulation. Hesketh’s open mind gradually became filled with the imperial view as he had the capacity to take it; and we need not be surprised if Lorne Murchison, gazing in the same direction, supposed that they saw the same thing.

  Hesketh confessed, declared, that Murchison had brought him round; and Lorne surveyed this achievement with a thrill of the happies
t triumph. Hesketh stood, to him, a product of that best which he was so occupied in admiring and pursuing. Perhaps he more properly represented the second best; but we must allow something for the confusion of early impressions. Hesketh had lived always in the presence of ideals disengaged in England as nowhere else in the world; in Oxford, Lorne knew, they clustered thick. There is no doubt that his manners were good, and his ideas unimpeachable in the letter, the young Canadian read the rest into him and loved him for what he might have been.

  “As an Englishman,” said Hesketh one evening as they walked together back from the Chafes’ along Knightsbridge, talking of the policy urged by the Colonial representatives at the last Conference, “I could wish the idea were more our own – that we were pressing it on the colonies instead of the colonies pressing it on us.”

  “Doesn’t there come a time in the history of most families,” Lorne replied, “when the old folks look to the sons and daughters to keep them in touch with the times? Why shouldn’t a vigorous policy of Empire be conceived by its younger nations – who have the ultimate resources to carry it out? We’ve got them and we know it – the iron and the coal and the gold, and the wheat-bearing areas. I dare say it makes us seem cheeky, but I tell you the last argument lies in the soil and what you can get out of it. What has this country got in comparison? A market of forty million people, whom she can’t feed, and is less and less able to find work for. Do you call that a resource? I call it an impediment – a penalty. It’s something to exploit, for the immediate profit in it, something to bargain with; but even as a market it can’t preponderate always, and I can’t see why it should make such tremendous claims.”

  “England isn’t superannuated yet, Murchison.”

  “Not yet. Please God she never will be. But she isn’t as young as she was, and it does seem to me –”

  “What seems to you?”

  “Well, I’m no economist, and I don’t know how far to trust my impressions, and you needn’t tell me I’m a rank outsider, for I know that; but coming here as an outsider, it does seem to me that it’s from the outside that any sort of helpful change in the conditions of this country has got to come. England still has military initiative, though it’s hard to see how she’s going to keep that unless she does something to stop the degeneration of the class she draws her army from; but what other kind do we hear about? Company promoting, beekeeping, asparagus growing, poultry farming for ladies, the opening of a new Oriental Tea-Pot in Regent Street, with samisen-players between four and six, and Japanese attendants, who take the change on their hands and knees. London’s one great stomach – how many eating places have we passed in the last ten minutes? The place seems all taken up with inventing new ways of making rich people more comfortable and better amused – I’m fed up with the sight of shiny carriages with cockaded flunkeys on ’em, wooden smart, rolling about with an elderly woman and a parasol and a dog. England seems to have fallen back on itself, got content to spend the money there is in the country already; and about the only line of commercial activity the stranger sees is the onslaught on that accumulation. London isn’t the headquarters for big new developing enterprises any more. If you take out Westminster and Wallingham, London is a collection of traditions and great houses, and newspaper offices, and shops. That sort of thing can’t go on for ever. Already capital is drawing away to conditions it can find a profit in – steel works in Canada, woollen factories in Australia, jute mills in India. Do you know where the boots came from that shod the troops in South Africa? Cawnpore. The money will go, you know, and that’s a fact; the money will go, and the people will go, anyhow. It’s only a case of whether England sends them with blessing and profit and greater glory, or whether she lets them slip away in spite of her.”

  “I dare say it will,” replied Hesketh; “I’ve got precious little, but what there is I’d take out fast enough, if I saw a decent chance of investing it. I sometimes think of trying my luck in the States. Two or three fellows in my year went over there and aren’t making half a bad thing of it.”

  “Oh, come,” said Lorne, half swinging round upon the other, with his hands in his pockets, “it isn’t exactly the time, is it, to talk about chucking the Empire?”

  “Well, no, it isn’t,” Hesketh admitted. “One might do better to wait, I dare say. At all events, till we see what the country says to Wallingham.”

  They walked on for a moment or two in silence; then Lorne broke out again.

  “I suppose it’s unreasonable, but there’s nothing I hate so much as to hear Englishmen talk of settling in the United States.”

  “It’s risky, I admit. And I’ve never heard anybody yet say it was comfortable.”

  “In a few years, fifty maybe, it won’t matter. Things will have taken their direction by then; but now it’s a question of the lead. The Americans think they’ve got it, and unless we get imperial federation of course they have. It’s their plain intention to capture England commercially.”

  “We’re a long way from that,” said Hesketh.

  “Yes, but it’s in the line of fate. Industrial energy is deserting this country; and you have no large movement, no counter-advance, to make against the increasing forces that are driving this way from over there – nothing to oppose to assault. England is in a state of siege, and doesn’t seem to know it. She’s so great – Hesketh, it’s pathetic! – she offers an undefended shore to attack, and a stupid confidence, a kindly blindness, above all to Americans, whom she patronizes in the gate.”

  “I believe we do patronize them,” said Hesketh. “It’s rotten bad form.”

  “Oh, form! I may be mad, but one seems to see in politics over here a lack of definition and purpose, a tendency to cling to the abstract and to precedent – ‘the mainstay of the mandarin’ one of the papers calls it; that’s a good word – that give one the feeling that this kingdom is beginning to be aware of some influence stronger than its own. It lies, of course, in the great West, where the corn and the cattle grow; and between Winnipeg and Chicago choose quickly, England!”

  His companion laughed. “Oh, I’m with you,” he said, “but you take a pessimistic view of this country, Murchison.”

  “It depends on what you call pessimism,” Lorne rejoined. “I see England down the future the heart of the Empire, the conscience of the world, and the Mecca of the race.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The Cruickshank deputation returned across that North Atlantic which it was their desire to see so much more than ever the track of the flag, toward the middle of July. The shiny carriages were still rolling about in great numbers when they left; London’s air of luxury had thickened with the advancing season and hung heavily in the streets; people had begun to picnic in the Park on Sundays. They had been from the beginning a source of wonder and of depression to Lorne Murchison, the people in the Park, those, I mean, who walked and sat and stood there for the refreshment of their lives, for whom the place has a lyrical value as real as it is unconscious. He noted them ranged on formal benches, quiet, respectable, absorptive, or gathered heavily, shoulder to shoulder, docile under the tutelage of policemen, listening to any one who would lift a voice to speak to them. London, beating on all borders, hemmed them in; England outside seemed hardly to contain for them a wider space. Lorne, with his soul full of free airs and forest depths, never failed to respond to a note in the Park that left him heavy-hearted, longing for an automatic distributing system for the Empire. When he saw them bring their spirit-lamps and kettles and sit down in little companies on four square yards of turf, under the blackened branches, in the roar of the traffic, he went back to Bloomsbury to pack his trunk, glad that it was not his lot to live with that enduring spectacle.

  They were all glad, every one of them, to turn their faces to the West again. The unready conception of things, the political concentration upon parish affairs, the cumbrous social machinery, oppressed them with its dull anachronism in a marching world; the problems of sluggish over-population clouded their
eager outlook. These conditions might have been their inheritance. Perhaps Lorne Murchison was the only one who thanked Heaven consciously that it was not so; but there was no man among them whose pulse did not mark a heart rejoiced as he paced the deck of the Allan liner the first morning out of Liverpool, because he had leave to refuse them. None dreamed of staying, of “settling,” though such a course was practicable to any of them except Lorne. They were all rich enough to take the advantages that money brings in England, the comfort, the importance, the state; they had only to add their wealth to the sumptuous side of the dramatic contrast. I doubt whether the idea even presented itself. It is the American who takes up his appreciative residence in England. He comes as a foreigner, observant, amused, having disclaimed responsibility for a hundred years. His detachment is as complete as it would be in Italy, with the added pleasure of easy comprehension. But homecomers from Greater Britain have never been cut off, still feel their uneasy share in all that is, and draw a long breath of relief as they turn again to their life in the lands where they found wider scope and different opportunities, and that new quality in the blood which made them different men.