X. WHAT IS THE BRITISH EMPIRE WORTH TO MANKIND? MEDITATIONS OF AN EMPIRE CITIZEN
The other day I was turning out the drawers of a bureau, and I came upon a little collection of printed cards and papers, the agenda and minutes of a dinner- discussion club of which I was a member far back in the days of good King Edward, when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was raising the banner of Tariff Reform. It was a small club of thirteen, and I was the least in it; never a government then or since that has not contained a member or so of it; and the aim of all our talks was to sharpen our ideas about the Empire to which we belonged and to come to some sort of agreement, if we could, about what we wanted to do with it and how we had to serve it. We never came to any agreement; Tariff Reform cleft us from the beginning, but I doubt if any one of us failed to give something or to learn much in these agreeable encounters.
I sat recalling these old discussions and linking them with writings of mine that preceded and followed them. I have been writing and thinking and talking about the Empire for thirty years. My ideas have changed and expanded; my knowledge has grown, I have moved with the times. Except that I have put more of it on record and so checked my steps more exactly, my thoughts and feelings about the Empire have probably been very like the thoughts and feelings of thousands of mediocre liberal Englishmen, It is interesting to recall some of the chief phases of the story.
I have had a phase of disillusionment about the Empire since 1919 so intense that I have come near to a complete antagonism to "Imperialism." But as I sit over these papers and think not merely of my own reactions, but of some of the "Empire builders" and Empire rulers I have known — Sir Harry Johnston, Sir Hugh Clifford, Lord Olivier, for example — I find myself still reluctant to turn against all the dreams of that liberal Imperialism of twenty years ago. For twenty years ago I was a firm believer in the great importance of the British Empire to mankind, and as hostile as I am to-day to the Nationalisms that set themselves up against it.
I am still — I am even more — anti-nationalist to-day. I see no good at all in people getting together into groups to exaggerate and overvalue their own peculiarities and run down, exclude, and injure the rest of mankind, I find nothing charming in the faked-up national costumes — ^which are all alike all over Europe, women in muslin caps and bits of red and black stuff, and men in pearl buttons — national arts — thumby bits of wood carving, pottery and lace that are even more the same thing everywhere — national dialects, national literatures, and national symbols, which pretend to discursiveness but really aim to pickle a dismal uniformity of petty localism, conceit, narrow-mindedness and customary tyranny, throughout the continent I am all for Cosmopolis and the high-road, and when I find nationalism rising to intricate interferences with trade and money, the free movement of men and goods about this none too large a planet, boastings, hostilities, armies, and the strangulation of the general welfare in the interests of the gangs exploiting patriotic instincts, my lack of enthusiasm deepens to positive hatred.
I think I was born cosmopolitan. I could never sympathise completely, though I realised the reality of their peculiar grievances, with the preference of the southern Irish to be lords upon their own dunghills rather than partners of the Ulstermen, the English, Scotch, and Welsh in the world adventure of the Empire, and, though I had qualms about the aims and methods of Cecil Rhodes and Dr. Jameson, I thought it was better to keep South Africa united and part of a great world system than to permit two illiberal republics to monopolise the Kaffir vitality and mineral wealth of a great region that should benefit all humanity. I have never found Nationalism even a plausible excuse for the sterilisation of some great area of potential wealth because a backward people happened to live upon it. The whole earth is for the whole race.
But even in those dinner club discussions of twenty years ago very marked divergencies of opinion and spirit became manifest. Our opening discussion was upon the possibility of an Imperial Zollverein, and that question, we found, went to the very root of our ideas. Did we want to unite the Empire, economically, financially, politically, militarily, against the rest of the world or not? Was it to be a closed fist in imitation of the Teutonic Zollverein, or an open hand to all the world?
I recall with satisfaction that it was I who appealed to geography and introduced the figure of the open hand. Our British fingers, I argued, spread over the whole keyboard of the world. We could never sound a uniform note. Canada, India, New Zealand, were incurably divergent, except in the idea of a common peace, and that uniformity in diversity was our asset. We had the confidence of foreign states in our tropical and other "raw product" possessions, because we stood — in those days — not for monopolisation, but the open door. The less assertive we were, the more possible it would be for other kindred powers to work with us and work out forms of co-operation with us in our task of coalescing and evolving into a world-wide civilisation.
That sort of idea about the empire was very prevalent in those days of twenty years ago. Kipling went about calling upon Americans and Germans, and indeed all Europe, to take up the "White Man’s Burthen" — and at the time of its first issue that memorable burden was intended to be something quite other than a mere bundle of loot. The Rhodes scholarships are another fossil good intention which remains to us from that age of potential incorporation. Americans and Germans at least were to be made like-minded with the British at Oxford! The idea of the eventual amalgamation of the Empire with other Powers in some comprehensive world control was, indeed, constantly cropping up. This involved no more thought of overcoming or conquering other competitors than did the big series of bank and industrial amalgamations that have occurred in Great Britain since the war. It was a pool we had in mind. The Empire was seen as the pacific precursor of a practical world State, Our "raw material" possessions were seen as part of the common estate of the human race, our share in a trusteeship; our Navy as a world police that might be at last as denationalised as the Knights Templars. These expansive possibilities were what attracted me to that club, and that, if I may name him, was what attracted Mr. Bertrand Russell, v/ho was also one of our thirteen.
But against us we found from the outset a group of Empire patriots, who were all for the Empire of the clenched fist. They were fierce fellows who believed that life was a violent struggle and that what one had in the world had to be held savagely against all comers. They did not want to unite the world, they wanted to subdue it to their conception of what was British. Whatever was British was right — things, Lords and Commons, our remarkable orthography, Ascot and the Derby, cricket and the Boat Race, the faithful Sikh and Simla, and the Navy. The outer world had to admire us, serve our purposes, and carry itself humbly towards us. They were, in fact, glorified Nationalists; their Imperialism was merely Nationalism distended, arrogant, intolerant of rivalry. Our fiercest member at every feast prepared our minds for war with Germany. He saw things quite simply: we had the best place in the world, and Germany wanted to take it, and we had to prepare for a fight. Education, efficiency of production, these Imperialists of the clenched fist saw only as necessary evils forced upon us by German competition. Their attitude to the Empire was what one might call the United Services attitude, a pose of unquestioning devotion. It is the exact parallel of the devotion that surrounded the German Kaiser in his glorious days. "The Empire right or wrong,” they said, "whatever it was, whatever it became, whatever it did.”
Naturally and logically they wanted a tariff wall and indeed every sort of wall about this divine reserve of earth, great armies and an overwhelming fleet, and outside it nations as poor, divided, and incapable of disturbing it as possible. That was the Nationalist-Imperialist idea as distinct from the Cosmopolitan-Imperialist idea that Russell and I embodied.
One evening when I was absent and the attendance was exceptionally low, there was a great dispute between Russell and four of the Nationalist-Imperialists. They were ready, they said, to die for the Empire, or commit any informality to serve it. Russell said there were quite a number of things on which he put a higher value than the Empire, and that if it came to a choice on these cases he would be against the Empire. This opinion I share. But that night the talk grew heated, and Russell, without waiting for the next meeting and reinforcements, resigned, and we saw him no more. Which was a pity, because one great charm of those discussions was the depth of the crevasses we found between us, and Russell was certainly the centre of the deepest crevasse system of all.
This incident, however, did pose for me quite plainly what is after all the essential question for all of us so far as our political lives go, whether the political system we live in is to be regarded as an end in itself, a divine unquestionable thing, or whether it is to be considered merely a transitory means to a greater end, to be judged on its merits, to be used, altered, and in the end gradually or completely replaced by something better. The Roman citizen was compelled to worship the Empire like a god, the Empire indivisible and eternal. Many people in Europe and America would impose the same uncritical abjection towards the American Constitution or the British Empire. You must salute, you must stand, stiff and stupid. Behind this personal abjection lurks moral corruption, a sort of collective scoundrelism. You must not trade fair and square, you must favour "Empire" goods. You must not publish scientific truth, but make whatever you discover an "Empire" secret. You may spy, you may lie for the "Empire’s" sake. Such "loyalty" I repudiate as an insult to humanity. I refuse my pinch of incense on that altar.
And I will go on to say that a British Empire which does not seem to me to be realising the wide and generous dreams of the liberal imperialism with which the century began is of no use to me, and I do not believe the Universe will suffer it to continue. For ten years I have seen the Empire going heavily and dully about its business; I have seen it made an excuse for much meanness and clumsy violence. It suffers in credit and direction by the hard "loyalty" of stupid adherents and stupid representatives who do not understand how gracious and mighty a civilising organisation it could be. They control it and they cripple it. It carries a vast crowd of parasites who snatch monopolies and profits in its name. It has lost moral prestige in Ireland, in India, in China, and before all the world. Enormously. Perhaps even fatally. To-day, what is it doing? Officially, I mean. Is it showing any intelligent sympathy for the efforts of the more progressive Chinese to found a modern State amid the ruins of the antiquated Manchu system, or is it just bullying and blustering in the confusion? Is it displaying the slightest generosity to the struggles of its fallen and shattered ally and helper, Russia, to reconstruct its economic life? Is it building up a free and friendly modern India? In the past it did great things for Japan, and it gave unity and freedom to and won the fellowship of Canada and South Africa, Is it doing anything to compare with these former feats to-day? Why is it engaging in a childish wrangle with the equally reprehensible Government of the United States about which is to have the biggest navy? For what on earth are these navies wanted now? It is improving its tanks, I gather; is it improving its educational machinery? What is it doing with its manhood? What chance has a boy of distinguished gifts born son of a miner under the shadow of the Duke of Northumberland?
How much of its tremendous resources is at the disposal of scientific research? In the measure of the available wealth and man-power, which is doing the most for scientific work to-day — Moscow or London? Has the British Empire made, indeed, one fine, great and ennobling gesture towards the future unity of mankind for the past ten years? Wembley! Rodeos and military tattoos! Immeasurable things could be done with the vast opportunity of the British Empire, but are they being even attempted?
I put these questions to myself, and I put them to the reader.
It would be all too easy to fly off into an attitude of anti-imperialism, and say with the Communists, "These Imperialisms are evil things; let us destroy them.” But they are not inherently evil things. To destroy Imperial systems with nothing to replace them is simply to leap backward because one is not going forward fast enough. The British Empire is not a thing to destroy; it is a thing to rescue. But the time for rescue is now — and the need is urgent. It has to be rescued from the arrogant flag-worshipping class and from the tariff monopoly adventurers who at present are in control. It has to be saved from its "patriots" and its "patriot" Government. We have seen the great civilised States of Central Europe humiliated and brought to disaster by just that same combination of exasperating militarism with industrial nationalism that now imperils Great Britain. Are we in our turn to tread that path? We want the Empire of the open hand. We want an Empire which is not an end but a means.
18 September, 1927