contented themselves with repudiating the right of parliament to tax
them, and proceeded to outrageous insults to the king's authority, and
the most open defiance of the trade regulations, indignation grew in
Britain. It seemed, to the average Englishman, that the colonists
proposed to leave every public burden, even the cost of judges'
salaries, on the shoulders of the mother-country, already loaded with a
debt which had been largely incurred in defence of the colonies; but to
disregard every obligation imposed upon themselves. A system whereunder
the colony has all rights and no enforcible duties, the mother-country
all duties and no enforcible rights, obviously could not work. That was
the system which, in the view of the gentlemen of England, the
colonists were bent upon establishing; and, taking this view, they
cannot be blamed for refusing to accept such a conclusion. There was no
one, either in Britain or in America, capable of grasping the
essentials of the problem, which were that, once established,
self-government inevitably strives after its own fulfilment; that these
British settlers, in whom the British tradition of self-government had
been strengthened by the freedom of a new land, would never be content
until they enjoyed a full share in the control of their own affairs;
and that although they seemed, even to themselves, to be fighting about
legal minutiae, about the difference between internal and external
duties, about the legality of writs of assistance, and so forth, the
real issue was the deeper one of the fulfilment of self-government.
Could fully responsible self-government be reconciled with imperial
unity? Could any means be devised whereby the units in a fellowship of
free states might retain full control over their own affairs, and at
the same time effectively combine for common purposes? That was and is
the ultimate problem of British imperial organisation, as it was and is
the ultimate problem of international relations. But the problem,
though it now presented itself in a comparatively simple form, was
never fairly faced on either side of the Atlantic. For the mother and
her daughters too quickly reached the point of arguing about their
legal rights against one another, and when friends begin to argue about
their legal rights, the breach of their friendship is at hand. So the
dreary argument, which lasted for eleven years (1764-75), led to the
still more dreary war, which lasted for seven years (1775-82); and the
only family of free self-governing communities existing in the world
was broken up in bitterness. This was indeed a tragedy. For if the
great partnership of freedom could have been reorganised on conditions
that would have enabled it to hold together, the cause of liberty in
the world would have been made infinitely more secure.
The Revolution gave to the Americans the glory of establishing the
first fully democratic system of government on a national scale that
had yet existed in the world, and of demonstrating that by the
machinery of self-government a number of distinct and jealous
communities could be united for common purposes. The new American
Commonwealth became an inspiration for eager Liberals in the old world
as well as in the new, and its successful establishment formed the
strongest of arguments for the democratic idea in all lands. Unhappily
the pride of this great achievement helped to persuade the Americans
that they were different from the rest of the world, and unaffected by
its fortunes. They were apt to think of themselves as the inventors and
monopolists of political liberty. Cut off by a vast stretch of ocean
from the Old World, and having lost that contact with its affairs which
the relation with Britain had hitherto maintained, they followed but
dimly, and without much comprehension, the obscure and complex
struggles wherein the spirit of liberty was working out a new Europe,
in the face of difficulties vastly greater than any with which the
Americans had ever had to contend. They had been alienated from
Britain, the one great free state of Europe, and had been persuaded by
their reading of their own experience that she was a tyrant-power; and
they thus found it hard to recognise her for what, with all her faults,
she genuinely was--the mother of free institutions in the modern world,
the founder and shaper of their own prized liberties. All these things
combined to persuade the great new republic that she not only might,
but ought to, stand aloof from the political problems of the rest of
the world, and take no interest in its concerns. This attitude, the
natural product of the conditions, was to last for more than a century,
and was to weaken greatly the cause of liberty in the world.
Although the most obvious features of the half-century following the
great British triumph of 1763 were the revolt of the American colonies
and the apparently universal collapse of the imperialist ambitions of
the European nations, a more deeply impressive feature of the period
was that, in spite of the tragedy and humiliation of the great
disruption, the imperial impetus continued to work potently in Britain,
alone among the European nations; and to such effect that at the end of
the period she found herself in control of a new empire more extensive
than that which she had lost, and far more various in its character.
Having failed to solve one great imperial problem, she promptly
addressed herself to a whole series of others even more difficult, and
for these she was to find more hopeful solutions.
When the American revolt began, the Canadian colonies to the north were
in an insecure and unorganised state. On the coast, in Nova Scotia and
Newfoundland, there was a small British population; but the riverine
colony of Canada proper, with its centre at Quebec, was still purely
French, and was ruled by martial law. Accustomed to a despotic system,
and not yet reconciled to the British supremacy, the French settlers
were obviously unready for self-government. But the Quebec Act of 1774,
by securing the maintenance of the Roman Catholic religion and of
French civil law, ensured the loyalty of the French; and this Act is
also noteworthy as the first formal expression of willingness to admit
or even welcome the existence, within the hospitable limits of the
Empire, of a variety of types of civilisation. In the new British
Empire there was to be no uniformity of Kultur.
The close of the American struggle, however, brought a new problem.
Many thousands of exiles from the revolting colonies, willing to
sacrifice everything in order to retain their British citizenship,
poured over the borders into the Canadian lands. They settled for the
first time the rich province of Ontario, greatly increased the
population of Nova Scotia, and started the settlement of New Brunswick.
To these exiles Britain felt that she owed much, and, despite her own
financial distress, expended large sums in providing them with the
means to make a good beginning in their new homes. But it was
impossible to deny these British settlers, and the emigrants from
Britain who soon began to join them, the rights of self-government, to
which they were accustomed. Their advent, however, in a hitherto French
province, raised the very difficult problem of racial relationship.
They might have been used as a means for Anglicising the earlier French
settlers and for forcing them into a British mould; it may fairly be
said that most European governments would have used them in this way,
and many of the settlers would willingly have fallen in with such a
programme. But that would have been out of accord with the genius of
the British system, which believes in freedom and variety. Accordingly,
by the Act of 1791, the purely French region of Quebec or Lower Canada
was separated from the British region of Ontario or Upper Canada, and
both districts, as well as the coastal settlements, were endowed with
self-governing institutions of the familiar pattern--an elected
assembly controlling legislation and taxation, a nominated governor and
council directing the executive. Thus within eighteen years of their
conquest the French colonists were introduced to self-government. And
within nine years of the loss of the American colonies, a new group of
self-governing American colonies had been organised. They were
sufficiently content with the system to resist with vigour and success
an American invasion in 1812. While the American controversy was
proceeding, one of the greatest of British navigators, Captain Cook,
was busy with his remarkable explorations. He was the first to survey
the archipelagoes of the Pacific; more important, he was the real
discoverer of Australia and New Zealand; for though the Dutch explorers
had found these lands more than a century earlier, they had never
troubled to complete their explorations. Thus a vast new field,
eminently suitable for European settlement, was placed at the disposal
of Britain. It was utilised with extraordinary promptitude. The loss of
the American colonies had deprived Britain of her chief dumping-ground
for convicts. In 1788, six years after the recognition of their
independence, she decided to use the new continent for this purpose,
and the penal settlement of Botany Bay began (under unfavourable
auspices) the colonisation of Australia.
But the most important, and the most amazing, achievement of Britain in
this period was the establishment and extension of her empire in India,
and the planting within it of the first great gift of Western
civilisation, the sovereignty of a just and impartial law. This was a
novel and a very difficult task, such as no European people had yet
undertaken; and it is not surprising that there should have been a
period of bewildered misgovernment before it was achieved. That it
should have been achieved at all is one of the greatest miracles of
European imperialism.
By 1763 the East India Company had established a controlling influence
over the Nawabs of two important regions, Bengal and the Carnatic, and
had shown, in a series of struggles, that its control was not to be
shaken off. But the company had not annexed any territory, or assumed
any responsibility for the government of these rich provinces. Its
agents in the East, who were too far from London to be effectively
controlled, enjoyed power without responsibility. They were privileged
traders, upon whom the native governments dared not impose
restrictions, and (as any body of average men would have done under
similar circumstances) they gravely abused their position to build up
huge fortunes for themselves. During the fifteen years following the
battle of Plassey (1757) there is no denying that the political power
of the British in India was a mere curse to the native population, and
led to the complete disorganisation of the already decrepit native
system of government in the provinces affected. It was vain for the
directors at home to scold their servants. There were only two ways out
of the difficulty. One was that the company should abandon India, which
was not to be expected. The other was that, possessing power, of which
it was now impossible to strip themselves, they should assume the
responsibility for its exercise, and create for their subjects a just
and efficient system of government. But the company would not see this.
They had never desired political power, but had drifted into the
possession of it in spite of themselves. They honestly disliked the
idea of establishing by force an alien domination over subject peoples,
and this feeling was yet more strongly held by the most influential
political circles in England. The company desired nothing but trade.
Their business was that of traders, and they wanted only to be left
free to mind their business. So the evils arising from power without
responsibility continued, and half-hearted attempts to amend them in
1765 and in 1769 only made the conditions worse. The events of the
years from 1757 to 1772 showed that when the superior organisation of
the West came in contact with the East, mere trading exploitation led
to even worse results than a forcibly imposed dominion; and the only
solution lay in the wise adaptation of western methods of government to
eastern conditions.
Thus Britain found herself faced with an imperial problem of apparently
insuperable difficulty, which reached its most acute stage just at the
time when the American trouble was at its height. The British
parliament and government intervened, and in 1773 for the first time
assumed some responsibility for the affairs of the East India Company.
But they did not understand the Indian problem--how, indeed, should
they?--and their first solution was a failure. By a happy fortune,
however, the East India Company had conferred the governorship of
Bengal (1772) upon the greatest Englishman of the eighteenth century,
Warren Hastings. Hastings pensioned off the Nawab, took over direct
responsibility for the government of Bengal, and organised a system of
justice which, though far from perfect, established for the first time
the Reign of Law in an Indian realm. His firm and straightforward
dealings with the other Indian powers still further strengthened the
position of the company; and when in the midst of the American war, at
a moment when no aid could be expected from Britain, a combination of
the most formidable Indian powers, backed by a French fleet, threatened
the downfall of the company's authority, Hastings' resourceful and
inspiring leadership was equal to every emergency. He not only brought
the company with heightened prestige out of the war, but throughout its
course no hostile army was ever allowed to cross the frontiers of
Bengal. In the midst of the unceasing and desolating wars of India, the
territories under direct British rule formed an island of secure peace
and of justice. That was Hastings' supreme contribution: it was the
foundation upon which arose the fabric of the Indian Empire. Hastings
was not a great conqueror or annexer of territory; the only important
acquisition made during his regime was effected, in defiance of his
protests, by the hostile majority which for a time overrode him in his
own council, and which condemned him for ambition. His work was to make
the British rule mean security and justice in place of tyranny; and it
was because it had come to mean this that it grew, after his time, with
extraordinary rapidity.
It was not by the desire of the directors or the home government that
it grew. They did everything in their power to check its growth, for
they shrank from any increase to their responsibilities. They even
prohibited by law all annexations, or the making of alliances with
Indian powers.[5] But fate was too strong for them. Even a governor
like Lord Cornwallis, a convinced supporter of the policy of
non-expansion and non-intervention, found himself forced into war, and
compelled to annex territories; because non-intervention was
interpreted by the Indian powers as a confession of weakness and an
invitation to attack. Non-intervention also gave openings to the
French, who, since the outbreak of the Revolution, had revived their
old Indian ambitions; and while Bonaparte was engaged in the conquest
of Egypt as a half-way house to India (1797), French agents were busy
building up a new combination of Indian powers against the company.
[5] India Act of 1784
This formidable coalition was about to come to a head when, in 1798,
there landed in India a second man of genius, sent by fate at the
critical moment. In five years, by an amazing series of swiftly
successful wars and brilliantly conceived treaties, the Marquess
Wellesley broke the power of every member of the hostile coalitions,
except two of the Mahratta princes. The area of British territory was
quadrupled; the most important of the Indian princes became vassals of
the company; and the Great Mogul of Delhi himself, powerless now, but
always a symbol of the over-lordship of India, passed under British
protection. When Wellesley left India in 1805, the East India Company
was already the paramount power in India south-east of the Sutlej and
the Indus. The Mahratta princes, indeed, still retained a restricted
independence, and for an interval the home authorities declined to
permit any interference with them, even though they were manifestly
giving protection to bands of armed raiders who terrorised and
devastated territories which were under British protection. But the
time came when the Mahrattas themselves broke the peace. Then their
power also was broken; and in 1818 Britain stood forth as the sovereign
ruler of India.
This was only sixty years after the battle of Plassey had established
British influence, though not British rule, in a single province of
India; only a little over thirty years after Warren Hastings returned
to England, leaving behind him an empire still almost limited to that
single province. There is nothing in history that can be compared with
the swiftness of this achievement, which is all the more remarkable
when we remember that almost every step in the advance was taken with
extreme unwillingness. But the most impressive thing about this
astounding fabric of power, which extended over an area equal to half
of Europe and inhabited by perhaps one-sixth of the human race, was not
the swiftness with which it was created, but the results which flowed
from it. It had begun in corruption and oppression, but it had grown
because it had come to stand for justice, order, and peace. In 1818 it
could already be claimed for the British rule in India that it had
brought to the numerous and conflicting races, religions, and castes of
that vast and ancient land, three boons of the highest value: political
unity such as they had never known before; security from the hitherto
unceasing ravages of internal turbulence and war; and, above all, the
supreme gift which the West had to offer to the East, the substitution
of an unvarying Reign of Law for the capricious wills of innumerable
and shifting despots. This is an achievement unexampled in history, and
it alone justified the imposition of the rule of the West over the
East, which had at first seemed to produce nothing but evil. It took
place during the age of Revolution, when the external empires of Europe
were on all sides falling into ruin; and it passed at the time almost
unregarded, because it was overshadowed by the drama of the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
The construction of the Indian Empire would of itself suffice to make
an age memorable, but it does not end the catalogue of the achievements
of British imperialism in this tremendous period. As a result of the
participation of Holland in the war on the side of France, the Dutch
colony at the Cape of Good Hope was occupied by Britain. It was first
occupied in 1798, restored for a brief period in 1801, reoccupied in
1806, and finally retained under the treaty settlement of 1815. The
Cape was, in fact, the most important acquisition secured to Britain by
that treaty; and it is worth noting that while the other great powers
who had joined in the final overthrow of Napoleon helped themselves
without hesitation to immense and valuable territories, Britain, which
had alone maintained the struggle from beginning to end without
flagging, actually paid the sum of 2,000,000 pounds to Holland as a
compensation for this thinly peopled settlement. She retained it mainly
because of its value as a calling-station on the way to India. But it
imposed upon her an imperial problem of a very difficult kind. As in
Canada, she had to deal here with an alien race of European origin and
proud traditions; but this racial problem was accentuated by the
further problem of dealing with a preponderant and growing negro
population. How were justice, peace, liberty, and equality of rights to
be established in such a field?
It was, then, an astonishing new empire which had grown up round
Britain during the period when the world was becoming convinced that
colonial empires were not worth acquiring, because they could not last.
It was an empire of continents or sub-continents--Canada, Australia,
India, South Africa--not to speak of innumerable scattered islands and
trading-posts dotted over all the seas of the world, which had either
survived from an earlier period, or been acquired in order that they
might serve as naval bases. It was spread round the whole globe; it
included almost every variety of soil, products, and climate; it was
inhabited by peoples of the most varying types; it presented an
infinite variety of political and racial problems. In 1825 this empire
was the only extra-European empire of importance still controlled by
any of the historic imperial powers of Western Europe. And at the
opening of the nineteenth century, when extra-European empires seemed
to have gone out of fashion, the greatest of all imperial questions was
the question whether the political capacity of the British peoples,
having failed to solve the comparatively simple problem of finding a
mode of organisation which could hold together communities so closely
akin as those of America and the parent islands, would be capable of
achieving any land of effective organisation for this new astounding
fabric, while at the same time securing to all its members that liberty
and variety of development which in the case of America had only been
fully secured at the cost of disruption.
V
EUROPE AND THE NON-EUROPEAN WORLD 1815-1878
When the European peoples settled down, in 1815, after the long wars of
the French Revolution, they found themselves faced by many problems,
but there were few Europeans who would have included among these
problems the extension of Western civilisation over the as yet
unsubjugated portions of the world. Men's hearts were set upon the
organisation of permanent peace: that seemed the greatest of all
questions, and, for a time, it appeared to have obtained a satisfactory
solution with the organisation of the great League of Peace of 1815.
But the peace was to be short-lived, because it was threatened by the
emergence of a number of other problems of great complexity. First
among these stood the problem of nationality: the increasingly
clamorous demand of divided or subject peoples for unity and freedom.
Alongside of this arose the sister-problem of liberalism: the demand
raised from all sides, among peoples who had never known political
liberty, for the institutions of self-government which had been proved
practicable by the British peoples, and turned into the object of a
fervent belief by the preachings of the French. These two causes were
to plunge Europe into many wars, and to vex and divide the peoples of
every European country, throughout the period 1815-78. And to add to
the complexity, there was growing in intensity during all these years
the problem of Industrialism--the transformation of the very bases of
life in all civilised communities, and the consequent development of
wholly new, and terribly difficult, social issues. Preoccupied with all
these questions, the statesmen and the peoples of most European states
had no attention to spare for the non-European world. They neglected it
all the more readily because the events of the preceding period seemed
to demonstrate that colonial empires were not worth the cost and labour
necessary for their attainment, since they seemed doomed to fall
asunder as soon as they began to be valuable.