Pax Britannica (27 page)

Two politicians of very different stamp set the pace and style of the New Imperialism: Lord Salisbury, who was both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary; Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary. They were the two most striking members of the Conservative Unionist Government which had, in 1895, so overwhelmingly defeated the Liberals: but in many ways they were antipathetic to one another, and they sometimes seem like men from different ages, joggled out of sequence.

Lord Salisbury was almost the last of the hereditary Prime Ministers of England—Prime Ministers, that is to say, whose claim to leadership had been inherited from generations of landowning
forebears. He was also the last to sit in the House of Lords. He was a Cecil, the third Marquis, who had been Prime Minister twice before, and who stood supremely above convention, sham or even political intrigue. It did not seem to matter much to him whether he was Prime Minister or not. He was an astringently intellectual man, passionately interested in science and religion, fearfully shortsighted and intermittently depressed. He disliked sport, and lived superbly at Hatfield, the seat of the Cecils, where he entertained almost nobody, but worked in his private laboratory, tinkered with his electric lighting, and prayed in his private chapel each morning before breakfast. Salisbury was 67, and a disillusioned believer in the
status
quo
ante
—the privilege of rank, the rights of power. With his high domed head, his sad accusatory eyes, his great tangled beard and his shabby clothes, he stood uncompromisingly for the patrician superiority of Britain, defying the advance of democracy. He did not bother with discretion. He was intemperate, sarcastic, moody. Beneath his hand the great Empire itself seemed to lie like a family property, managed more shrewdly than you might suppose, and brooking no damned impertinence from neighbours.

There was nothing vulgar to Salisbury’s conception of imperialism. He was a European by taste—he wintered at his house in France—and Empire was not, to his mind, an end of itself. It was an instrument of national policy, to be exploited this way or that as British interests demanded. It was under his direction, in previous Conservative Governments, that Britain had dominated the partition of Africa, extending her possessions east and west, and establishing in effect a totally new Empire, different in kind from the old dominions. Salisbury did not see the process, though, as a land grab. He was thinking always of Britain’s traditional concerns—the security of her routes to the east, the balance of power in Europe. Flamboyant visions of universal power did not appeal to him—he described the Cape-to-Cairo railway as ‘a very curious idea lately popular’, and very willingly scotched it by allowing Germany to move into East Africa. ‘British policy’, he once said, ‘is to drift lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a boathook to avoid a collision.’ It was Salisbury who sanctioned the reconquest of the Sudan, the acquisition of Uganda, the seizure of upper Burma: but
glory
per
se
never egged him on, and they were cold and reasoned impulses that guided his policy.

He manipulated the bargains of Empire like a stockbroker: he swapped Heligoland for Zanzibar, swapped Bornu for parts of Algeria, recognized France in Madagascar in exchange for French recognition of a British Protectorate in Zanzibar. His transactions in West Africa formed a delicate web of diplomatic give-and-take, conducted always with larger purposes in mind. He defied the Monroe Doctrine when there was a dispute with Venezuela about the frontiers of British Guiana. He forced the Portuguese to recognize British suzerainty over Matabeleland. But all was done with a meticulous reserve—no flag-wagging, no tub-thumping, only an old professional skill, that touch of almost Renaissance finesse which was to give the British Foreign Office, for so many years to come, a reputation beyond its merits. Salisbury loathed sentimentality, cant, purple passages. No thrilling cadences of imperial romance emerged from his Parliamentary speeches. He lacked the gift of popular inspiration, if only because the public did not greatly interest him. But behind all the jingo of that time, somewhere behind all the calls to duty, the civilizing mission, the Flag, the Race and the White Man’s Burden, Salisbury’s fastidious mind controlled the energies of Empire, keeping it always within the limits of the possible, the rational and the peaceful. It was only a phase in the island history. England had neither lasting friends nor lasting enemies, nor even a providential destiny: only interests.
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Salisbury was a remote enigma to the British public. The front man of his Government was indisputably ‘Joe’ Chamberlain. In an administration of patricians, Chamberlain was a bourgeois—an ex-Mayor of Birmingham, who had made his fortune with a screw factory: but he had a gift of attracting attention, and he had made his own the dazzling cause of the New Imperialism. He had seen it for what it was, the most promising political vein of the day, and
when he was invited to join Salisbury’s Government, astutely chose for himself the Colonial Office. He was a Liberal-Unionist, who had parted company with Gladstone over the issue of Home Rule for Ireland—an obvious bridge to the haven of the New Imperialism. By now he was associated in everyone’s mind with Greater Britain, the Expansion of England and the other catch idioms of the movement. They called him ‘Minister for Empire’, and he had long since learnt, so he said, to ‘think imperially’. This was no politician’s pose. Chamberlain had once been a fervent anti-imperialist, but he had come to believe that the expansion of the Empire, and its consolidation into one immense Power, should be the first end of British policy, the one sure way of keeping Britain among the great Powers. ‘It seems to me that the tendency of the time is to throw all power into the hands of the greater empires, and the minor kingdoms—those which are non-progressive—seem to be destined to fall into a secondary and subordinate place. But if Greater Britain remains united, no empire in the world can surpass it in area, population, in wealth, or in the diversity of its resources.’

Chamberlain was not a product of the gentleman’s culture. He was not at Oxford, Cambridge, or one of the great public schools. He was a Unitarian by faith, a radical in domestic politics. He stood alone in that ultra-gentlemanly administration: as Arthur Balfour said of him, ‘Joe, though we all love him dearly, does not form a chemical combination with us.’ He was more like a colonial politician than a colleague of Lord Salisbury, and he held an irresistible appeal for the masses of the nineties, who loved flash. He kept the Colonial Office, once so dim and musty, blazing in the limelight—and even persuaded those chaste first-class clerks to welcome the change. He invested his own money in a 20,000-acre sisal estate in the Bahamas, and sent his son Neville to manage it. He concerned himself with colonial finance, colonial trade, tropical medicine, and the world’s hostility at the time of the Jameson Raid only strengthened his vision of a united Empire, ready to take on all comers. ‘Let us do all in our power by improving our communications, by developing our commercial relations, by co-operating in mutual defence, and none of us will ever feel isolated.’ It was Chamberlain who coined the phrase ‘trade follows the flag’, and so
passionately did he come to believe in the Empire as a whole that he once exclaimed: ‘England without an Empire! Can you conceive it? England in that case would not be the England we love.’ He stood for a Greater Britain ostentatious in its power. ‘I don’t know which of our many enemies we ought to defy,’ he wrote in 1896, ‘but let us defy someone.’
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In bizarre tandem this able man worked with Lord Salisbury in the aggrandizement of Empire. Beside Salisbury’s dishevelled melancholy, Chamberlain stood preternaturally elegant, an orchid in his buttonhole, a monocle in his eye, beautifully tailored and, in an era of ponderous whiskers, clean-shaven. Salisbury was magnificently nineteenth century, but Chamberlain would have looked, if remarkable, at least not blatantly out of period thirty years later. It is hard to believe they liked each other, and certainly Salisbury was often repelled by his Colonial Secretary’s strident kind of patriotism. He once complained that Chamberlain wanted to go to war with every Power in the world, and had ‘no thought but Imperialism’. The combination of the two men, nevertheless, was very effective. Salisbury’s calculated policies steered Great Britain carefully and quietly through some exceptionally treacherous waters, enabling her almost incidentally to seize a lion’s share of Africa without a European war. Chamberlain’s spectacular vision of grandeur convinced the electorate that this was the proudest moment of all British history, not merely a culmination, but a threshold of still immenser triumphs.

The men Kipling called ‘the doers’ were mostly unknown: the engineers and the prospectors, the merchant princes and the tropical doctors. Two of them only had achieved an international reputation—or notoriety: Cecil John Rhodes and his assistant and protégé, Leander Starr Jameson. In the summer of 1897 these two men were
both half-discredited by their parts in the Jameson Raid, but to many New Imperialists they were heroes still, and the Raid was seen only as an endearing excess of boyish dash. Rhodes and Jameson scarcely figured in the celebrations of the Jubilee, but they expressed for many Britons the grand fling of the Empire, roguery and all.

Jameson was as odd a doctor as ever took the oath. The son of a Scottish lawyer, the grandson of a Scottish general, an M.D. of University College, London, he would seem on paper cut out for a life of cautious convention—a sound Edinburgh family physician, perhaps, or the trusted confidant of lairds. Instead his life was one of rip-roaring excitement, catastrophic ups and downs. He broke away early. He was a successful young doctor in London when, at 28, he sailed to South Africa for his health, and set up a practice in the mining town of Kimberley. It was a risky decision, and proved characteristic. Jameson was a neat, witty, good-looking young man, with the gift of charm, but he was above all a gambler. He was more like an Irishman than a Scot. Legend says he once lost all his possessions in a poker game, but won them back later in the evening: and as he plunged into politics, and the work of Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, the headstrong bidding of his card-playing was applied to greater stakes. Jameson achieved all by his winning ways. He charmed the hard mining community of Kimberley into being his devoted patients—‘Dr Jim’, they called him. He charmed Rhodes into patronage. He charmed poor Lobengula into allowing Rhodes’s pioneers to cross his territory. He charmed the squabbling settlers of Salisbury out of successive attacks of dudgeon. He charmed half England when, at the commission of inquiry into the Jameson Raid, he observed with touching candour: ‘I know perfectly well that as I have not succeeded the natural thing has happened: but I also know that if I had succeeded I should have been forgiven.’ Jameson was always frank about his part in the Raid. He had launched it prematurely, and had hopelessly failed in what was really a squalid error of judgement. He was charged in England with an offence under the Foreign Enlistment Act, and spent some time in Holloway Prison, where he nearly died: but he had the born gambler’s resilience, and by the summer of 1897 he was past the worst of his ignominy, and at
44 was already planning a return to profit and politics in South Africa.
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He had something of Quixote to him, tilting away so endearingly at his windmills. Beside him Rhodes appears a powerful Sancho, so solid, so practical, so ready nevertheless to indulge in airy fancies and absurdities. There was something almost unreal to the scale of Rhodes. He was nicknamed the Colossus, of course, and of all the New Imperialists he most looked the part. He had a Roman face, big, prominent of eye, rather sneering—just such a face as a police reconstruction might compose, if fed the details of one who was both a diamond millionaire and a kind of emperor. There was a shifty look to Rhodes, but it was shiftiness in the grand manner, as though he dealt in millions always—millions of pounds, millions of square miles, millions of people. He was distrusted as often as he was admired, not least by British colonial officials. In 1891 Sir Harry Johnston, ‘Commissioner and Consul-General for the territories under British influence to the North of the Zambesi’, named a new British strongpoint in Rhodes’s honour: but it was noted that he chose one of the least important and most pestilential outposts in the whole of the slave country. (When, a few years later, it was taken within the territories of the South Africa Company, its name was hastily changed to Kalungwishi.)
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Rhodes was first of all a money-maker. A millionaire before he was 35, he took five years to get his pass degree at Oxford, because he spent so much time supervising his diamond interests in Kimberley. The fifth son of an English country parson, he first went to South Africa to help his brother grow cotton in Natal, where the climate was thought to be better for his asthma: it was only in the second half of his life that he conceived a vision of Empire in some ways more naïve, in some ways nobler, and in all ways more spacious than
anyone else’s. To Rhodes the British Empire was to be one of the revelations of human history, a new heaven and a new earth. In 1877, at 34, he made his first will, leaving his money for the formation of a secret society to extend British rule across the earth. He then foresaw the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific, the Malay archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan. The United States would be recovered, the whole Empire would be consolidated, everybody would be represented in one Imperial Parliament, and the whole structure would form ‘so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity’.

Rhodes’s achievements fell pitifully short of these Olympian prospects. He failed to build his Cape-to-Cairo Railway, or even to unite South Africa under the British flag. His one great political creation, Rhodesia, was presently to prove a perilous anachronism—a white State set defiantly in a black continent. In 1897 he was 44, and had fallen to a nadir in his affairs. He was seen by more restrained imperialists as a mere shady speculator, extending his unsavoury activities from diamond-mining to statesmanship, and masking all in high talk. His grand idea, though, survived it all. He really thought of the Empire as an instrument of universal peace. There was nothing niggling to his imperial sentiments: he got on well with Boers and with African chiefs—he had obvious affinities with both—and he even contributed funds to the Irish Home Rulers, the bitterest of all the Empire’s opponents. He hoped his name would be associated always with an idea ‘which ultimately led to the cessation of all wars and one language throughout the world’: and all the time, through all the fluctuations of his fortune, he was perfecting his scheme for the Rhodes Scholarships, which would take ‘the best men for the world’s fight’ from the English-speaking countries of the earth, send them to Oxford to be polished in England’s civilization, and distribute them through the Empire to fulfil his dreams. Of all the New Imperialists, Rhodes was the most genuinely inspired, and in the end most nearly justified his vision. William Blane, the South African poet, wrote truly of this misleading man: