Historical and Political Essays

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Pericles and Aspasia._

[2] Jefferson's _Memoirs_, i. 80.

THE EMPIRE: ITS VALUE AND ITS GROWTH

I have been asked on the present occasion to deliver a short address
which might serve as an introduction to the course of lectures and
conferences on the history and resources of the different portions of
the Empire which are to take place in the Imperial Institute. In
attempting to discharge this task my first reflection is one which the
very existence of the Institute can hardly fail to suggest to anyone
with any knowledge of recent history. It is the great revolution of
opinion which has taken place in England within the last few years
about the real value to her both of her colonies and of her Indian
Empire. Not many years ago it was a popular doctrine among a large and
important class of politicians that these vast dominions were not
merely useless but detrimental to the mother-country, and that it
should be the end of a wise policy to prepare and facilitate their
disruption. Bentham, in a pamphlet called 'Emancipate your Colonies,'
advocated a speedy and complete separation. James Mill, who held a
high place among these politicians, wrote an article on Colonies for
the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' which clearly expresses their view.
Colonies, he contended, are very little calculated to yield any
advantage whatever to the countries that hold them, and their chief
influence is to produce and prolong bad government. Why, then, he
asks, do European nations maintain them? The answer is very
characteristic, both of the man and of his school. Something, he
charitably admits, is due to mere ignorance, to mistaken views of
utility; but the main cause is of another kind. He quotes the saying
of Sancho Panza, who desired to possess an island in order that he
might sell its inhabitants as slaves, and put the money in his pocket;
and he maintains that the chief cause of our Colonial Empire is the
selfish interest of the governing few who valued colonies because they
gave them places and enabled them to multiply wars. In more moderate
and decorous language, Goldwin Smith wrote a book, the object of which
was to show how desirable it was that this Empire should be gradually
but steadily reduced to the sweet simplicity of two islands. Similar
views prevailed very generally in the Manchester school. Cobden
frequently expressed them. The question of the colonies, he
maintained, was mainly a question of pounds, shillings, and pence; he
proved, as he imagined, by many figures that they were a very bad
bargain; and he expressed his confident hope that one of the results
of free trade would be 'gradually and imperceptibly to loosen the
bands which unite our colonies to us.' About our Indian Empire he
entertained much stronger opinions. He described it as a calamity and
a curse to the people of England. He looked on it, in his own words,
'with an eye of despair,' and declared that it was destroying and
demoralising the national character. It was the belief of his school
of politicians that all the nations of the world would speedily follow
the example of England and adopt a policy of perfect free trade; that
when all men were able to sell their industries with equal facility in
all countries, it would become a matter of little consequence to them
under what flag they lived, and that this complete commercial
assimilation would soon be followed by a general movement for
disarming, which would put an end to all fear of future war.

Many politicians who certainly cannot be classified with the
Manchester school held views tending in some degree in the same
direction. Even Sir Cornewall Lewis in his treatise on the 'Government
of Dependencies,' which was published in 1841, summed up the
advantages and disadvantages of a great empire in a manner that gives
the impression that in his own judgment the disadvantages on the whole
predominated. In the Autobiography of that great writer and excellent
public servant Sir Henry Taylor, who for many years exercised much
influence in the Colonial Office, we have a curious picture of the
opinions which were held on this subject about thirty years ago, both
by Sir Henry Taylor himself and by Sir Frederick Rogers, who was at
this time permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. They
both agreed that all our North American colonies were a kind of
_damnosa hereditas_, and that it was in a high degree desirable that
they should be amicably separated from Great Britain. Sir Henry Taylor
wrote his views on the subject with great frankness to the Duke of
Newcastle, who was then Secretary of State. 'When your Grace and the
Prince of Wales,' he said, 'were employing yourselves so successfully
in conciliating the colonists, I thought that you were drawing closer
ties which might better be slackened, if there were any chance of
their slipping away altogether. I think that a policy which has regard
to a not very far off future should prepare facilities and
propensities for separation.... In my estimation the worst consequence
of the late dispute with the United States has been that of involving
this country and its North American provinces in closer relations and
a common cause.'[3] 'I have always believed,' wrote Sir Frederick
Rogers in 1885--'and the belief has so confirmed and consolidated
itself, that I can hardly realise the possibility of anyone seriously
thinking the contrary--that the destiny of our colonies is
independence; and that in this point of view the function of the
Colonial Office is to secure that our connection while it lasts shall
be as profitable to both parties, and our separation when it comes as
amicable as possible.'

I do not believe that opinions of this kind, though they were held by
a large and powerful section of English politicians, ever penetrated
very deeply into the English nation. One of the causes of Mr. Cobden's
'despair' was his conviction that the English people would never be
persuaded to surrender India except at the close of a disastrous and
exhausting war, and in his day the policy of national surrender was
certainly not that of the statesmen who led either party in
Parliament. No one would attribute it to Mr. Disraeli, in whose long
political life the note of Imperialism was perhaps that which sounded
with the clearest ring, and it was quite as repugnant to Lord
Palmerston and Lord John Russell. In an admirable speech which was
delivered in the beginning of 1850, Lord John Russell disclaimed all
sympathy with it, and I can well remember the indignation with which
in his latter days he was accustomed to speak of the views on the
subject which were then frequently expressed. 'When I was young,' he
once said to me, 'it was thought the mark of a wise statesman that he
had turned a small kingdom into a great empire. In my old age it
appears to be thought the object of a statesman to turn a great
empire into a small kingdom.'

I do not think that anyone who has watched the current of English
opinion will doubt that the views of the Manchester school on this
subject have within the last few years steadily lost ground, and that
a far warmer and, in my opinion, nobler and more healthy feeling
towards India and the colonies has grown up. The change may be
attributed to many causes. In the first place, what Carlyle called
'The Calico Millennium' has not arrived. The nations have not adopted
free trade, but nearly all of them, including unfortunately many of
our own colonies, have raised tariff walls against our trade. The
Reign of Peace has not come. National antipathies and jealousies play
about as great a part in human affairs as they ever did, and there are
certainly not less than three and a half millions, there are probably
nearly four millions, of men under arms in what are called the peace
establishments of Europe. It is beginning to be clearly seen that,
with our vast, redundant, ever-growing population, with our enormous
manufactures, and our utterly insufficient supply of home-grown food,
it is a matter of life and death to the nation, and especially to its
working classes, that there should be secure and extending fields open
to our goods, and in the present condition of the world we must mainly
look for these fields within our own Empire. The gigantic dimensions
that Indian trade has assumed within the last few years, and the
extraordinary commercial development of some other parts of our
Empire, have pointed the moral, and it has been made still more
apparent by the eagerness with which other Powers, and especially
Germany, have flung themselves into the path of colonisation. In an
age, too, when all the paths of professional and industrial life in
our country are crowded to excess, the competitive system has combined
with our new acquisitions of territory to throw open noble fields of
employment, enterprise and ambition to poor and struggling talent, and
India is proving a school of inestimable value for maintaining some of
the best and most masculine qualities of our race. It is the great
seed-plot of our military strength; and the problems of Indian
administration are peculiarly fitted to form men of a kind that is
much needed among us--men of strong purpose and firm will, and high
ruling and organising powers, men accustomed to deal with facts rather
than with words, and to estimate measures by their intrinsic value,
and not merely by their party advantages, men skilful in judging human
character under its many types and aspects and disguises.

If again we turn to our great self-governing colonies, we have learnt
to feel how valuable it is, in an age in which international
jealousies are so rife, that there should be vast and rapidly growing
portions of the globe that are not only at peace with us, but at one
with us; how unspeakably important it is to the future of the world
that the English race, through the ages that are to come, should cling
as closely as possible together. As a distinguished statesman who
lately represented the United States in England[4] has admirably said,
'If it is not always true that trade follows flag, it is at least true
that "heart follows flag,"' and the feeling that our fellow-subjects
in distant parts of the Empire bear to us is very different from the
feeling even of the most friendly foreign nation. Our great colonies
have readily undertaken the responsibility of providing for their own
defence by land, and even in some degree by sea. If the protection of
their coasts in time of war might become a great strain upon our navy,
this disadvantage is largely balanced by the importance of distant
maritime possessions to every nation that desires to maintain an
efficient fleet; by the immense advantage to a great commercial Power
of secure harbours and coaling stations scattered over the world. It
is not difficult to conceive circumstances in which the destruction of
some of our main industries, occurring, perhaps, in the midst of a
great war, might make it utterly impossible for our present population
to live upon British soil, and when the possession of vast territories
under the British flag, and in the hands of the British race, might
become a matter of transcendent importance. Think for a moment of the
colossal, and indeed appalling, proportions which our great towns are
assuming! Think of all the vice and ignorance and disease, of all the
sordid abject misery, of all the lawless passions that are festering
within them! And then consider how precarious are many of the
conditions of our industrial prosperity, how grave and how numerous
are the dangers that threaten it both from within and from without.
Who can reflect seriously on these things without feeling that the day
may come--perhaps at no distant date--when the question of emigration
may overshadow all others? To many of us, indeed, it seems one of the
greatest errors of modern English statesmanship that when the great
exodus from Ireland took place after the famine, Government took no
step to aid it, or to direct it to quarters where it would have been
of real benefit to the Empire. Many good judges think that the
advantages of such interference in allaying bitter feelings,
softening a disastrous crisis, and permanently strengthening the
Empire, might have been well purchased even if they cost as much as
England has sometimes lost by one comparatively insignificant war or
by one disastrous strike. In dealing with this question of emigration
in the future, colonial assistance may be of supreme importance. And
those who have understood the significance of that memorable incident
in our recent history--the despatch of Australian troops to fight our
battles in the Soudan--may perceive that there is at least a
possibility of a still closer and more beneficent union between
England and her colonies--a union that would vastly increase the
strength of both, and by doing so become a great guarantee of peace in
the world.

It would be a calumny to suppose that the change of feeling I have
described was solely due to a calculation of interests. Patriotism
cannot be reduced to a mere question of money, and a nation which has
grown tired of the responsibilities of empire, and careless of the
acquisitions of its past and of its greatness in the future, would
indeed have entered into a period of inevitable decadence. Happily we
have not yet come to this. I believe the overwhelming majority of the
people of these islands are convinced that an England reduced to the
limits which the Manchester school would assign to it would be an
England shorn of the chief elements of its dignity in the world, and
that no greater disgrace could befall them than to have sacrificed
through indifference, or negligence, or faint-heartedness, an Empire
which has been built up by so much genius and so much heroism in the
past. Railways and telegraphs and newspapers have brought us into
closer touch with our distant possessions, have enabled us to realise
more vividly both their character and their greatness, and have thus
extended the horizon of our sympathies and interests. The figures of
illustrious colonial statesmen are becoming familiar to us. Men formed
in Indian and colonial spheres are becoming more numerous and
prominent in our own public life. The presence in England of a High
Commissioner from Canada, and of Agents-General from our other
colonies, constitutes a real though informal colonial representation,
and on more than one recent occasion our foreign policy has been
swayed by colonial pressure. These young democracies, with their vast
undeveloped resources, their unwearied energies, their great social
and industrial problems, are beginning to loom largely in the
imaginations of Europe. They feel, we believe, a just pride in being
members of a great and ancient Empire, and heirs to the glories of its
past. We, in our turn, feel a no less just pride in our union with
those coming nations which are still lit with the hues of sunrise and
rich in the promise of the future.

It has been suggested to me that I should on the present occasion say
something about the methods by which this great Empire was built up,
but it is obvious that in a short address like the present it is only
possible to touch on so large a subject in the most cursory manner.
Much is due to our insular position and our command of the sea, which
gave Englishmen, in the competition of nations, a peculiar power both
of conquering and holding distant dependencies. Being precluded,
perhaps quite as much by their position as by their desire, from
throwing themselves, like most continental nations, into a long course
of European aggression, they have largely employed their redundant
energies in exploring, conquering, civilising, and governing distant
and half-savage lands. They have found, like all other nations, that
an Empire planted amid the shifting sands of half-civilised and
anarchical races is compelled for its own security, and as a mere
matter of police, to extend its borders. The chapter of
accidents--which has played a larger part in most human affairs than
many very philosophical enquirers are inclined to admit--has counted
for something. But, in addition to these things, there are certain
general characteristics of English policy which have contributed very
largely to the success of the Empire.

It has been the habit of most nations to regulate colonial governments
in all their details according to the best metropolitan ideas, and to
surround them with a network of restrictions. England has in general
pursued a different course. Partly on system, but partly also, I
think, from neglect, she has always allowed an unusual latitude to
local knowledge and to local wishes. She has endeavoured to secure,
wherever her power extends, life and property, and contract and
personal freedom, and, in these latter days, religious liberty; but
for the rest she has meddled very little; she has allowed her
settlements to develop much as they please, and has given, in practice
if not in theory, the fullest powers to her governors. It is
astonishing, in the history of the British Empire, how large a part of
its greatness is due to the independent action of individual
adventurers, or groups of emigrants, or commercial companies, almost
wholly unassisted and uncontrolled by the Government at home. An
Empire formed by such methods is not likely to exhibit much symmetry
and unity of plan, but it is certain to be pervaded in an unusual
degree, in all its parts, by a spirit of enterprise and self-reliance;
it will probably be peculiarly fertile in men not only of energy but
of resource, capable of dealing with strange conditions and
unforeseen exigencies. England in the past periods of her history has,
on the whole, been singularly successful in adapting her different
administrations to widely different national circumstances and
characters, and governments of the most various types have arisen
under her rule. Nothing in the history of the world is more wonderful
than that under the flag of these two little islands there should have
grown up the greatest and most beneficent despotism in the world,
comprising nearly two hundred and thirty millions of inhabitants under
direct British rule, and more than fifty millions under British
protectorates; while at the same time British colonies and settlements
that are scattered throughout the globe number not less than fifty-six
distinct subordinate governments.

This system would have been less successful if it had not been for two
important facts. The original stuff of which our Colonial Empire was
formed was singularly good. Some of the most important of our colonies
were founded in the days of religious war, and the early settlers
consisted largely of religious refugees--a class who are usually
superior to the average of men in intellectual and industrial
qualities, and are nearly always greatly superior to them in strength
of conviction, and in those high moral qualities which play so great a
part in the well-being of nations. Besides this, in those distant
days, the difficulties of emigration were so great that they were
rarely voluntarily encountered except by men of much more than average
courage, enterprise and resource. These early adventurers were
certainly often of no saintly type, but they were largely endowed with
the robuster qualities that are most needed for grappling with new
circumstances and carving out the empires of the future.

The second fact is the high standard of patriotism and honour which we
may, I think, truly say has nearly always prevailed among English
public servants. It is not an easy thing to secure honest and faithful
administration in remote countries, far from the supervision and
practical control of the central government. I think we may boast with
truth that England has attained this end, not indeed perfectly, but at
least to a greater degree than most other nations. The history of
Indian and colonial governors has never been written as a whole, but
it is well worthy of study. In the appointment of these men party has
always counted for something, and family has counted for something;
but they have never been the only considerations, and, on the whole, I
believe it will be found, if we consider the three elements of
character, capacity and experience, that our Indian and colonial
governors represent a higher level of ruling qualities than has been
attained by any line of hereditary sovereigns, or by any line of
elected presidents. In the period of the foundation of our Indian
Empire much was done that was violent and rapacious, but the best
modern research seems to show that the picture which a few years ago
was generally accepted had been greatly overcharged. The history of
Warren Hastings and his companions has been recently studied with
great knowledge and ability, and with the result that the more serious
opinions on the subject have been considerably modified. Much
exaggeration undoubtedly grew up in the last century, partly through
ignorance of Oriental affairs, and partly also through the eloquence
of Burke. There is no figure in English political history for which I
at least entertain a greater reverence than Edmund Burke. I believe
him to have been a man of transparent honesty, as well as of
transcendent genius; but his politics were too apt to be steeped in
passion, and he was often carried away by the irresistible force of
his own imagination and feelings. Misrepresentations were greatly
consolidated by the Indian History of James Mill, which was for a long
time the main, and indeed almost the only, source from which
Englishmen obtained their knowledge of Indian history. It was written,
as might be expected, with the strongest bias of hostility to the
English in India, yet I suspect that many superficial readers imagined
that a history which was so unquestionably dull must be at least
impartial and philosophical. Unfortunately, Macaulay relied greatly on
it, and, without having made any serious independent studies on the
subject, he invested some of its misrepresentations with all the
splendour of his eloquence. I believe all competent authorities are
now agreed that his essay on Warren Hastings, though it is one of the
most brilliant of his writings, is also one of the most seriously
misleading.

I am not prepared to say that the reaction of opinion produced by the
new school of Indian historians has not been sometimes carried too
far, but these writers have certainly dispelled much exaggeration and
some positive falsehood. They have shown that, although under
circumstances of extreme difficulty and extraordinary temptation, some
very bad things were done by Englishmen in India, these things were
neither as numerous nor as grave as has been alleged.

On the whole, too, it may be truly said that English colonial policy
in its broad lines has to a remarkable degree avoided grave errors.
The chief exception is to be found in the series of mistakes which
produced the American Revolution, and ended in the loss of our chief
American colonies. Yet even in this instance it is, I believe, coming
to be perceived that there is much more to be said for the English
case than the historians of the last generation were apt to imagine.
In imposing commercial restrictions on the colonies and endeavouring
to secure for the mother-country the monopoly of their trade, we
merely acted upon ideas that were then almost universally received,
and our commercial code was on the whole less illiberal than that of
other nations. Both Spain and France imposed restrictions on their
colonies which were far more severe, and the English restrictions were
at least mitigated by frequent partial relaxations and exceptions, by
some important monopolies granted in favour of the colonies in the
English market and by bounties encouraging several branches of
colonial produce. It is at least certain that under the large measure
of political liberty granted by the English Government to the English
colonies their material prosperity, even in the worst period of
commercial restriction, steadily and rapidly advanced. This has been
clearly shown by more than one writer on our side of the Atlantic, but
the subject has never been treated with more exhaustive knowledge and
more perfect impartiality than by an American writer--Mr. George
Beer--whose work on the Commercial Policy of England has recently been
published by Columbia College, in New York. No one will now altogether
defend Grenville's policy of taxing America by the Imperial
Parliament, but it ought not to be forgotten that it was expressly
provided that every farthing of this taxation was to be expended in
America, and devoted to colonial defence. England had just terminated
a great war, which, by expelling the French from Canada, had been of
inestimable advantage to her colonies, but which had left the
mother-country almost crushed by debt. All that Grenville desired was,
that the American colonies should provide a portion of the cost of
their own defence, as our great colonies are doing at the present
time, and he only resorted to Imperial taxation because he despaired
of achieving this end by any other means. The step which he took was
no doubt a false one. As is so often the case in England, it was made
worse by party changes and by party recriminations, and many later
mistakes aggravated and embittered the original dispute; but I think
an impartial reader of this melancholy chapter of English history will
come to the conclusion that these mistakes were by no means all on one
side.

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