This awakening of a sense of duty to the State is leading to a more
thorough understanding of the particular State to which we happen to
belong—I mean of course the British Empire. This is another and a very
promising change in the national mind. During the last few months a new
vision has come to many of us of what the British Empire really is.
Speaking of Britons in general, I am afraid it must be confessed that
our knowledge of the Empire, our grasp of its significance, have been
inadequate to the immense human issues, and to the corresponding
responsibilities, which the Empire involves. We have been proud of this
vast heritage, we have complacently enjoyed the advantages which come to
all of us from its possession, we have talked vaguely and largely about
imperialism, but we have hardly taken our imperial duties to heart. Some
of us may have done so, but not the nation as a whole. To the majority
of the electorate the Empire has been a side issue, or a thing that
might be left to look after itself. It seemed too big and too broadly
based to be in danger of disturbance. Few of us gave much thought to it;
few of us allowed our imaginations to play round its meaning; still
fewer took the trouble to study its history. Had we done so we should
have realized, as I am afraid not many did realize, that a day would
dawn when our right to possess this Empire would be put to the proof,
when we should be challenged before the world to show that our
intelligence and our valour were equal to the vast imperial enterprise
on which we had engaged.
But let us not forget that the British Empire, in its present extent and
organization, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. In size, in wealth,
in the civilization of its component parts and their close relations
with one another, its characteristics are so different from what they
were a century ago that we can draw no parallel with the Napoleonic era.
And now, for the first time in its history, this Greater Britain is
being attacked—and attacked with unexampled vehemence and resolution. It
is a new experience, and like all new experiences it is compelling a
readjustment of thought.
This is a war of the Empire, by the Empire, for the Empire—and by the
Empire I mean all for which the Empire stands, its ideals as well as its
actualities. The Colonies and India are fighting for us and we are
fighting for them. Our fellow subjects in India are represented by a
great army of fine warriors, who have helped to check the would-be
invaders of our shores. Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Pathans have shed their
blood that London might be safe. Mohammedan, Hindu, and Christian have
fallen side by side in defence of the liberties of our race. This, I
say, is a new thing in our history. We feel a deepened intimacy with
these widely sundered races; the dominions over the seas seem no further
off than the next county. The Germans predicted that the outbreak of war
would split the Empire into fragments. It has given the Empire a
splendid solidarity such as it never before possessed. It has made us a
greater nation, not in the sense that it has added to our dominions, but
in the deeper sense that it has caused our political consciousness to
dilate to the imperial scale. The political organization of the Empire
is acquiring a corporate mind, just as the mother country after the
defeat of the Spanish Armada awoke to a new consciousness of her
national individuality and began to know herself for what she was.
The parallel is profoundly interesting. It took the English people many
centuries to discover their own country. The English in the reign of
Henry VIII had a vaguer notion of England than we have of Canada (very
few had seen a map of England); of Scotland than we have of Ceylon; of
Ireland than we have of Central Africa. But just as these vague
conceptions gave place in course of time to vision and realization and
patriotic love for England, so now we British are beginning to think of
the Empire as something more than a confused extension of our national
boundaries, or as a group of appendages to our national home. The Empire
is becoming _our country_, an inheritance of which we have to prove
ourselves worthy, and we are becoming its citizens in heart as well as
in name. Not that the change is already complete or even very far
advanced. But no close observer of present tendencies will doubt that
the movement of the national mind is in the direction of which I speak.
Our imperial soul is beginning to germinate. If the change continues its
ethical and spiritual consequences will be very great.
V
In connexion with this extension of our national consciousness one may
note at the present time some curious questionings among thoughtful men
as to the bearing of democratic theory on our imperial obligations. We
call ourselves a democracy; but there are moments, even in the course of
dealing with domestic problems, when we find it hard to reconcile the
facts with the theory. And the difficulty becomes greater in proportion
as we extend our thoughts to the imperial scale. According to the
democratic theory the people are to be consulted as to all that concerns
their interests. Well, there is nothing that concerns our interests
quite so deeply as the existence of the Empire. But when has the people
been consulted in the matter? Proud as the British may be of possessing
an empire on which the sun never sets, it is certain that the people as
a whole have never been asked whether they wished to possess such an
empire or not. They have never been asked how large they wished the
Empire to be; or whether they would or would not be content with
something less or greater. In an age when all things political are
supposed to be determined by voting it is a curious circumstance that
this, the greatest of political questions, has never been voted on at
all. Nay more. So far as I know, the British people have never said to
themselves, as the Germans have recently been saying, ‘Go to, now;
world-dominion shall be ours.’ It would tax the historian to fix the
period when the design for a world-wide empire became a definite
ambition of the British people. True, there have been statesmen like the
late Lord Beaconsfield, or Lord Chatham in an earlier age, who made
plans for increasing the dominions of the Crown. But the popular will
did not originate these designs, much as it may have applauded them when
they had been carried out—though even this has not always been the case.
Moreover, the control exercised even by statesmen over the process of
imperial expansion has been of a distinctly piecemeal character. As one
annexation followed another none of our ministers has foreseen where the
process would end. None of them has had a vision in advance of the
Empire as it exists to-day—in extent, in population, and in wealth. As
Seeley long ago pointed out, we have conquered half the world in a fit
of absence of mind. Indeed it would be extremely hard to fix
responsibility for the existence of the Empire, in its present
character, on any group or series of statesmen, or on any particular
generation of Britons—to say nothing of individual men. A province here,
a frontier there, an island somewhere else might be correctly set down
to an assignable wave of public opinion or to the diplomacy of a
particular minister. But the total growth seems to have escaped from
human control altogether. Certainly nothing would be more untrue than to
treat the existence of the Empire as though it corresponded to the
expressed will of the living generation. We have not _willed_ it into
being. We have found it there—like so many of the financial
obligations—e.g. the National Debt—which have been inherited from the
past, and have to be accepted whether we like them or not, in spite of
the maxim which is said to be the corner-stone of the constitution—‘No
taxation without representation’.
Our new vision of the Empire is teaching us another thing. We are
learning to understand more clearly the influence of the past on the
present. We begin to see that we inherit from the past something more
than the monuments of the mighty dead. We inherit the very form and
pressure of our national life; the range, significance and general
direction of our imperial duties. We inherit not our social problems
only; but the courage to attack them, and much of the wisdom which
guides us to their solution. These in all their essential features have
been determined not _by_ us but _for_ us by the action of forces which
did their work before we came into existence. We are therefore in no
mood to respond to the lines of the well-known hymn which bid us ‘give
the past unto the wind’. A past which has bequeathed to us our national
status and the broad outline of our imperial responsibilities, a past
which has given us our political idealism and our love of liberty,
cannot be ‘given to the wind’ without a degree of treachery of which the
fiercest anarchist in our midst is not capable. Without distinction we
feel ourselves bound to ‘carry on’; and what we are ‘carrying on’ is the
work of our fathers from the most distant ages to the present day. We
are learning the great truth of which Burke was the prophet—the
immortality of the State. The past is throbbing in our veins. The cause
we are fighting for is a thousand years old. Patriots and martyrs for
liberty are no longer mere names in the book of history; they are living
forces in our midst. The buried generations are with us. We are members
of a community which is continuous in time and has millions of members,
vast clouds of witnesses from every age, whose work is waiting for our
loyalty to make it complete.