Pax Britannica (56 page)

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:

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.’

W
HAT 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.

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 probably 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.’

But then ‘an Empire without religion’, Victoria had also written, ‘is like a house built upon sand’. There was certainly no shortage of religion as such. Upon the passive mass of Hindus, Muslims, animists, fetishists, sun-worshippers and pagans, corps of Christians were at work. Some 360 different missionary bodies maintained nearly 12,000 Christian missionaries in the field—rather more than the imperial garrison of Malta. They claimed to have converted more than 10 million people to Christianity, and the Bishop of Stepney once declared that the Imperial spirit in the State called for an Imperial spirit in the Church. Everywhere in the Queen’s dominions the dynamism of Christianity had left its mark. Pugin’s spire at Queenstown sent the emigrants westward into the Atlantic, the towers of the Basilica of St John the Baptist, high above St John’s harbour, welcomed them to the New World. The church of St James, within the Kashmir Gate at Delhi, was erected at the sole expense of Colonel James Skinner, of Skinner’s Horse, ‘in fulfilment of a vow made while lying wounded on the field of battle … in testimony of his sincere faith in the truth of the Christian religion’
1
. Sometimes the Archbishops of Canterbury and York swept into the Privy Council chambers to act as assessors in some ecclesiastical appeal from the distant Empire, and any Sunday morning, in any princely State of India, the locals might see the English of the neighbourhood, in their Sunday calico and polished tongas, trotting into town for morning service in the Residency drawing-room—a compulsive routine, it must have seemed, which gave cohesion to their exiled lives, and bound them together in godly purpose. Elsewhere in the Empire congregations were often assembled in order of seniority—highest officials in the front pews, a couple of rows of natives at the very back. There was an opulent Anglican Bishop’s Palace in Calcutta, opposite the Cathedral, which must have suggested to the Bengalis immense spiritual resources far away: in Bulawayo the Bishop was taking services among the pioneers with makeshift
fittings in the Empire Theatre, and was once seen to be announcing the next hymn,
The
Church’s
One
Foundation,
standing on a Black and White whiskey crate.

Buried away among it all was a conviction, common among imperialists of diverse kinds, that a spiritual destiny had called the British to their pre-eminence—that they were a chosen people, divinely different, endowed with special gifts, but entrusted with special duties, too. Admiral Fisher thought, only half in jest, that they were the Lost Tribes. Henley thought their country was the ‘chosen daughter of the Lord’—

Kipling thought God had hidden the frontier territories of the Empire ‘till He judged His people ready’. Providence, Destiny, Judgement—all these were basic to the vocabulary of the New Imperialism: when the Queen went to her Jubilee service at St Paul’s the
Daily
Mail
announced in a sacramental cross-head that the mother of the Empire had gone to do homage to the One Being

—as if to imply that she was merely reporting the state of the imperial garrison to her superior officer. War, empire and religion were inextricably related in the public mind. It was a fighting God, an Old Testament, fire-eating God, who seemed to be presiding over the imperial progress—‘Lord of our far-flung battle-line’.

If it sometimes looked brash or arrogant, sometimes this Christian certainty was beautiful to encounter. The most magical building in the British Empire stood at a bush settlement called Blantyre, in what was later to be Nyasaland. There, in 1888, a missionary called David Clement Ruffelle Scott decided to build a church. There was at that time no European town of Blantyre at all. Scott was the leader of a Scottish Church mission which had settled there, beside the slave route to the lakes of the interior, as disciples of Livingstone, spreading the Word and educating the natives. He and his colleagues had hacked out a clearing, all among the dripping
foliage, at the foot of the wooded valley which ran up to Zomba and the inner mysteries of Nyasa: and it was there that he decided to build his great church. He knew very little about architecture or construction, but he was genuinely inspired. He built in ecstasy. He made the bricks out of the clay of ant-hills, and he laid the foundations before he had drawn a plan. The building grew as he went along, its shape decreed by two unusual principles. First, it was to have no front, back or sides—each face was to be of equal importance. Secondly, it was to avoid symmetry wherever possible—‘Symmetry,’ Scott thought, ‘means poverty of ideas.’ While he worked at his building Scott was also compiling a monumental
Encyclopaedic
Dictionary
of
the
Mang’anja
Language
,
and the two great projects proceeded side by side, year by year, in that steamy and barbaric setting. By 1897 both were finished. The dictionary took its place among the standard works of African reference, and the church became one of the most moving in Christendom.

It was the strangest building. It was vaguely Byzantine, with African ornamentation—Zimbabwe Byzantine. It had a dome, and two towers, and flying buttresses, and innumerable odd projections, turrets, filletings and chisellings. Its bricks had never lost their sandy termite colour, and the church stood in a flat brown expanse of stringy grass, unmistakably a forest clearing still, and surrounded at a distance, like a king’s hut in its kraal, by the workshops and classrooms of the mission. On the Communion table stood a book-rest made from the tree under which Livingstone’s heart had been buried, upcountry in the Ilala territory. On a buttress of the south-west tower a brass plate commemorated the 365 lunar observations by which, in 1885, Lieutenant H. E. O’Neill of the Royal Engineers had determined the longitude of Blantyre:2 hours, 20 minutes, 13.56 seconds east of Greenwich.

Yet there was no rule to it. In heathen India there was an Established Anglican Church, supported by Indian revenue: in Christian New Zealand there was no official church at all. The Anglican Metropolitan of India came eighth in the Indian order of precedence, after the
Chief Justice of Bengal, but the Archbishop of Sydney had no official place, and in some of the Queen’s colonies the Roman Catholic Church was given State aid. No religion was proscribed in the British Empire, and none demanded. At a time—until 1871—when it was theoretically impossible to enter Oxford University without subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican faith, no religious affiliations were required of the men who ruled the Empire.

To the peoples at the receiving end, the faith of the Empire must have been exceedingly confusing. It was true, of course, that the kind sahib or bwana in the dog-collar was to be found everywhere, drinking gin with the officers in the big mess-tent or prostrate beneath the awning on the C.M.S. canoe: but he might represent any of a dozen different varieties of Christianity, he might be daggers drawn, theologically if not personally, with his brother-in-cloth down the river, he might honour his creed with gorgeous rituals of incense and cloth-of-gold, or self-abasing monologues. In Uganda there were actually religious wars, between tribes converted by Anglicans and tribes converted by Catholics. Perhaps a fifth of the Empire was Roman Catholic—there were 166 Catholic bishops, against 90 Anglican—and sometimes the Catholic cathedral in an imperial colony looked almost as official as the Anglican: in 1897 they had just completed the enormous new basilica of St Thomas at Mylapore outside Madras, the supposed burial-place of the martyred saint, and the site of a Catholic diocese since 1521. Jews and Masons were everywhere, too. The only synagogue in the world where the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic rites were jointly celebrated was in Kingston, Jamaica—in 1882 a great fire had destroyed the temples of both communities, so they polled funds to build one together. Even as they completed St Thomas’s basilica at Mylapore, they put the finishing touches to the Masonic Hall in Johannesburg opened that summer, too, and used by the Lodges of the Silver Thistle and Star of the Rand. (There was a synagogue in Johannesburg already, allegedly opened by President Kruger ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’, but the very first Jo’burg pastor was a Wesleyan, F. J. Briscoe, who took up residence in a wagon in Market Square in 1887.)

In the early days of British rule thousands of Ceylonese adopted the British faith because they thought it was a Government religion, compulsory for British subjects. They soon knew better. It took all sorts to make a British world, and what Raffles once called ‘the purest beams of reformed religion’ were not all-penetrating. Only the inspiration of individual Christians, and the evident material success of the faith, could really qualify Christianity as an ideology of the Pax Britannica. The gentlest of the imperialists hoped that the Christian example, if it did not actually convert the heathen, would at least stimulate their own religions towards a higher spirituality. Younghusband, for instance, thought that Hinduism had been cleansed by the Christian comparison, and said of the Queen’s Indian subjects: ‘We sought them merely for trade. We found them immersed in strife. If ever we leave them, may it be in that attitude most natural to them, with their arms stretched out to the Divine.’ Certainly some of the manners and motions of Christianity had their effect on other devotions. Semi-Christian sects of a thousand otiose varieties sprang up among the negroes of West Africa and the West Indies, fetish curiously mingled with catechism, Obeah with apostolic succession. On a temple bell at Moulmein in Burma a bell-founder who was surely of Evangelical education had scratched his own fundamentalist warning upon a Buddhist temple bell: