Pax Britannica (58 page)

How powerful an abstraction it all was! This is Our Way, it seemed to say. It is the best. English rule was least popular in places, like Egypt or Ireland, where this conviction faltered, and Englishness masked uncertainties and weaknesses. Elsewhere the whole-hog archetypical Briton, reading his
Times
after his morning ride, may not have been much loved, but stood as a kind of signpost. Everybody knew him. He was not easily scared. His word was, rather more often than most, reliable in small things, if sometimes dubious in large. He seemed to stand fair and square, freshly shaven. The pound sterling in his pocket, the Royal Navy at his back, the rules the old school taught him: that was
his
ideology.

To many Britons this was not enough. They wished their Empire to offer some seminal example of social or political progress, to set a standard for the nations and be its own memorial. ‘We view the establishment of the English colonies on principles of liberty,’ Burke had said, ‘as that which is to render the kingdom venerable to future ages.’ ‘Wherever in the world a high aspiration was entertained or a noble blow was struck,’ said Gladstone, recalling the Liberal past, ‘it was to England that the eyes of the oppressed were always turned.’ ‘England has achieved,’ Disraeli claimed, ‘the union of those two qualities for which a Roman Emperor was deified: “Imperium et Libertas”.’ The one imperial achievement that gave satisfaction to everybody was the ending of the slave trade—a decision enforced impartially on all nations, and sustained by the Royal Navy ever since. This was right beyond all agitation: the more sensitive of the imperialists hoped it was for such enlightened actions that their Empire would be remembered in the end.

In the colonies many sorts of social and political experiments
had been tried, in advance of anything attempted in Europe. The very first true modern democracy was the Isle of Man, which gave the franchise to every man and woman in 1866: but New Zealand came a close second, even enfranchising Maori women by 1893. New Zealand was also one of the first countries with proper factory regulations, industrial arbitration, old age pensions, secular education and State life insurance, and it was the first to elect a Socialist Government—some of its members, according to Lord Onslow,
1
the Governor of the day, ‘labourers in actual receipt of daily wages’. Radicalism thrived in Australia, where the trade unions were already powerful. The only really exciting episode in Australian history, exploration apart, was the revolt at the Eureka Stockade in 1854—an armed rising of gold-miners at Ballarat, in Victoria, who felt that their rights were being suppressed by an unfeeling Government, and who had long since become martyrs of reform in the Australian public mind.
2
Sydney in the nineties was full of street orators, workers’ processions and venomous public attacks on the landed classes, launched with fiery Irish rhetoric, as often as not, beside the statue of the Prince of Wales in the public gardens. When von Hübner was in the city he was invited to dine with the Governor of New South Wales: but just as the guests were going in to dinner all the menservants went on strike, and ratings from a man-of-war in Sydney Harbour were hastily summoned as substitutes.

In many parts of the Empire State Socialism already existed, and almost nowhere was private enterprise regarded as sacrosanct. The imperial economy had its private and its public sectors, sometimes overlapping. The new Gibraltar dockyard, for instance, the home of the Atlantic Fleet, was being built by Topham, Jones and Railton,
but the tobacco business in Cyprus was a Government monopoly. Cook’s ran the official pilgrims’ office in Bombay, but the imperial railways were mostly built with a combination of State and private capital. England, still the supreme example of the uncontrolled economy, had deposited across the world communities whose economic methods were just the opposite. Free Trade found few adherents among the colonists, who raised their own protective tariffs the moment they were free to do so, and in a way the greatest Socialist State of all was British India, where the Government ran the schools and universities, supervised the medical services, managed most of the railways, all the salt and opium factories and a huge forest property, and in theory owned most of the land.

The self-governing colonies were the most genuinely egalitarian societies in the world. The United States had its own layers of social restriction, but the Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and English South Africans really were emancipated. Of course they still loved a duke, and respected the Oxford accent, but their equality of opportunity was almost absolute. Origin did not count. One of the most satisfying figures of the British Empire was the English working-man set free at last from the restraints of caste: released from village cage or urban prison, taken from smoky rain to sunshine, from cramped red brick to limitless space of prairie or outback, where no gentleman was going to patronize him, bailiff bully him, vicar exhort him to remember his place; where his sallow skin would bronze down the years, his stooped frame fill out and straighten, his hair bleach a little, his voice lose its deference; where his children would grow up a different kind of animal, bigger and stronger than ever he was, snubbed by no toffee-nosed prissy up at the Grammar, and ready to take on any of your ermined lordlings, any day, yes sirree.

(And his wife? Why, give her a generation or two, and she will rediscover her distant relationship with Lord Cape, for whom of course Cape Town was originally named; will realize that even in a modern democracy some people are, well, not quite the kind we older Australians care to meet; and presently resurrect out there in the sunshine all the social shibboleths she was so glad to leave behind in England.)

But if in some corners of the Empire the British were abolishing privilege, in others they were vastly enjoying it. One could not really claim it to be an egalitarian Empire, or a radical one, when the rulers of the African and Asian colonies themselves formed an
élite
privileged beyond the dreams of Etonians, and vast expanses of territory were actually ruled, under the Union Jack, by commercial companies. The theorists of Empire were tortured by the contradictions of it all, and their principal difficulty was the dual standard of the Empire: one standard for Britons, one for the rest. The glory of England lay in her free institutions, now extended so successfully to her white colonies: but the whole coloured Empire was governed as a benevolent despotism. This was an unsolved ambiguity. As Cromer, the most level-headed of Empire-builders, once wrote: ‘The Englishman as imperialist is always striving to attain two ideals which are apt to be mutually destructive—the ideal of good government, which connotes the continuance of his supremacy, and the ideal of self-government, which connotes the whole or partial abdication of his supreme position.’

The steady progress of the white colonies towards complete independence, though it made for tedious history, was a proper cause for pride. Whether or not they remained members of the Empire, they were complete nations created in the British image, honouring British standards. Elsewhere the British could flatter themselves that they were guiding a score of less-advanced nations towards democratic independence: here a nominated assembly, there half-elected, municipal constitutions in one country, regional legislatures in another. Surveying the Empire in the nineties, the imperial philanthropist might persuade himself that it was all an immense educational process, raising the subject peoples to equality one by one, and spreading the parliamentary doctrine across the world.

Realists knew that this was a meretricious picture. If that was the intention of Empire, its consummation was so far distant as to be meaningless. Not one Asian or black African colony was
anywhere on the way to self-government. Some were going backwards: blacks and whites had once enjoyed equal rights in Natal, but now there were 7,596 white voters, and only ten black (in a country of 400,000 Africans and 35,000 Europeans). Several possessions had given up their representative institutions, reverting to Crown Colony status, and after three centuries of British rule India was still utterly powerless. Indians might argue points of the law till daybreak, but they had no means whatever of altering it—they could say almost anything they liked in speech or in print, but they were ruled by a Parliament in London in which they were totally unrepresented. The British ruled against the wishes of the populace in Egypt and Ireland, and they ruled without consulting the bulk of the populace almost everywhere else. Their government was in nearly every case more just and more efficient than any conceivable substitute: but it was undeniably government by force—a situation repugnant to the deepest historical traditions of England, which no self-respecting Briton would ever tolerate for himself. To become thrall to a foreign nation, Elizabeth I had said, was ‘the greatest misery that can happen to a people’. The British bravely agreed: yet they held, that summer, 320 million foreign people in thrall to themselves.

This was the saving flaw of British imperialism, for this Empire did have an ideology after all: the High Victorian concept of fair play, which animated the petitioning sympathizers of the Eureka Stockade as it did the pukka sahibs of the Punjab, and appealed to agnostics as directly as to bishops. The British would not for long support an institution that was patently unfair, or betrayed the muffled decency of their national code. At our particular moment of history they were inflamed by the splendours of the imperial idea. They had been persuaded that it was noble and benevolent. They were excited by heady notions of racial superiority. They were flattered—who would not be?—by all that red on the map, all theirs, all pulsing with their energy, alive with their trade, courage and philanthropy. They believed they were awakening the torpid peoples
of the earth to the ennobling ideas of the West. ‘What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt’, Winston Churchill asked himself when he joined Kitchener in the Sudan, ‘is more noble and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations? To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain—what more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort?’

But such a mood would last only so long as it seemed
fair
: if ruthlessness were needed to keep this structure standing, the British would presently opt out. ‘Yet’, as Churchill added, ‘as the mind turns from the wonderful cloudland of aspiration to the ugly scaffolding of attempt and achievement, a succession of opposite ideas arise…. The inevitable gap between conquest and dominion becomes filled with the figures of the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier, and the lying speculator, who disquiet the minds of the conquered and excite the sordid appetites of the conquerors. And as the eye of thought rests on these sinister features, it hardly seems possible for us to believe that any fair prospect is approached by so foul a path.’ Lording it for lording’s sake was not the deeper British style. Nor was bullying, arrogance, drilling and flag-wagging. At the heart of the Diamond Jubilee there lay a doubt, or an irony: as though that great nation were play-acting through the summer dog-days, bluffing its wondering audience perhaps, but never quite convincing itself.

Q
UEEN VICTORIA went home happy on her Jubilee day. History had humoured her, as she deserved. The sun had shone all day—‘Queen’s weather’, the English called it—and there was nothing ironic to the affection her people had shown her. She had rolled through London intermittently weeping for pleasure, and studded her diary that evening with joyous adjectives: indescribable, deafening, truly marvellous, deeply touching.

To Victoria the fabric of her great Empire must have seemed almost indestructible. It had been created in her lifetime, and now in the last years of her reign it had reached its noonday. She would leave it as the most stupendous of heritages for her dear Albert and his innumerable successors. Today imperialism has long lost its power to move men’s hearts, and the idea of alien rule, however benevolent, is unacceptable to most civilized peoples. In those days it was different. Self-determination was not yet a creed, nor even often an aspiration, and colonial rule was not in itself degrading. Stripped of its emotional overtones, the British Empire did possess several tremendous merits. It was an association of like-minded States of British origin, whose friendship and kinship would prove a blessing to the world at large. It was an instrument of universal order: its scattered bases had enabled the Royal Navy to keep the world at peace for the best part of a century, and its strong arm had established the rule of law in many once-turbulent places. It was an agency of material progress: everywhere its technicians laid down the foundations of industry, and paved the way for change. It was a mighty stimulant: it injected new ideas into comatose societies, it shook up stagnant cultures, it prodded peoples withdrawn from the world into indignant protest, it pulled half Asia out of the Middle Ages, half Africa momentarily out of barbarism. And like it or not,
it kept Britain herself among the Great Powers for another half-century. It was the existence of the Empire that enabled the British, those champions of liberty, to play a part in the affairs of the nations far greater than their own meagre resources would allow, or their precarious prosperity justify.

So their pride was understandable, as they contemplated their possessions that summer. It was a world of their own that they commanded, stamped to their pattern and set in motion by their will. Their flag was, if not loved, at least respected everywhere. Their ships lay in every port, and majestically moved down every waterway. Their trains puffed to intricate time-tables across the plains of Asia. Their armies stood to their guns in gulleys of Chitral or barrack squares of Canada, their administrators ordered the affairs of strangers from Lagos to Hong Kong. Manors in Barbados, Grecian churches in Singapore, conservatories in Melbourne and towers of Madras owed their existence to the British: at their word dams arose in India and cables were thrown across oceans, roads arched towards Tibet or the Pacific, rupees chinked in the godowns of the east, the starter’s flag dropped on a thousand race tracks and troops of petty princelings obsequiously salaamed. In every continent the Queen’s judges decreed lives or deaths, the Queen’s warships swanked into harbour and the sounds of Empire echoed: hymn tunes, reveilles, halloos, sirens, rifle-chatter, ‘Play the game’ from the schoolmasters and ‘Boy!’ from the lounging planters. It was a stupendous surge of their own energy that the British were witnessing, and it stood beyond logic or even self-control: as when a man suddenly realizes his own strength, and expects life itself to obey him.

The New Imperialism quickly subsided. Two years later the Boer War broke out, and the confidence of Empire faltered. Four years later Victoria died, and an age ended. Twenty years later Fisher’s
dreadnoughts found their real enemy at last, not in any spiced tropical waters, where the white gunboats lay, but on a misty afternoon off the coast of Denmark: and Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, no longer monopolizing the Maxim gun, sent his English armies into far greater miseries and heroisms than they ever knew at Lucknow, Rorke’s Drift or the Khyber.

Seventy years later the grand illusion had collapsed, and England was a European island once more. The script was discredited, the props had disintegrated, and the British, looking back at that colossal performance, wondering at the scale, the effrontery, the vulgarity and the nobility of it all, could scarcely recognize themselves in the actors up there, or identify their smaller lives with that drama long ago.