unqualified control of their own affairs, Britain necessarily left to
them the vexed problem of devising a just relation between the ruling
races and their subjects of backward or alien stocks; the problem which
had been the source of most of the difficulties of South Africa for a
century past, and which had long delayed the concession of full
self-government. Nowhere in the world does this problem assume a more
acute form than in South Africa, where there is not only a majority of
negroes, mostly of the vigorous Bantu stock, but also a large number of
immigrants mainly from India, who as subjects of the British crown
naturally claim special rights. South Africa has to find her own
solution for this complex problem; and she has not yet fully found it.
But in two ways her association with the British Empire has helped, and
will help, her to find her way towards it. If the earlier policy of the
British government, guided by the missionaries, laid too exclusive an
emphasis upon native rights, and in various ways hampered the
development of the colony by the way in which it interpreted these
rights, at least it had established a tradition hostile to that policy
of mere ruthless exploitation of which such an ugly illustration was
being given in German South-West Africa. An absolute parity of
treatment between white and black must be not only impracticable, but
harmful to both sides. But between the two extremes of a visionary
equality and a white ascendancy ruthlessly employed for exploitation, a
third term is possible--the just tutelage of the white man over the
black, with a reasonable freedom for native custom. 'A practice has
grown up in South Africa,' says the greatest of South African
statesmen,[8] 'of creating parallel institutions, giving the natives
their own separate institutions on parallel lines with institutions for
whites. It may be that on these lines we may yet be able to solve a
problem which may otherwise be insoluble.' It is a solution which owes
much to the British experiments of the previous period; and the
principle which inspires it was incorporated in the Act of Union. This
is one of the innumerable fruitful experiments in government in which
the British system is so prolific. Again, the problem of the
relationship between Indian immigrants and white colonists is an
acutely difficult one. It cannot be said to have been solved. But at
least the fact that the South African Union and the Indian Empire are
both partners in the same British commonwealth improves the chances of
a just solution. It helped to find at least a temporary adjustment in
1914; in the future also it may contribute, in this as in many other
ways, to ensure that a fair consideration is given to both sides of the
thorny question of inter-racial relationship.
[8] General Smuts, May 22, 1917.
The events which led up to, and still more the events which followed,
the South African War had thus brought a solution for the South African
problem, which had been a continuous vexation since the moment of the
British conquest. It was solved by the British panacea of
self-government and equal rights. Who could have anticipated, twenty
years or fifty years ago, the part which has been played by South
Africa in the Great War? Is there any parallel to these events, which
showed the gallant general of the Boer forces playing the part of prime
minister in a united South Africa, crushing with Boer forces a revolt
stirred up among the more ignorant Boers by German intrigue, and then
leading an army, half Boer and half British, to the conquest of German
South-West Africa?
The South African War had proved to be the severest test which the
modern British Empire had yet had to undergo. But it had emerged, not
broken, as in 1782, but rejuvenated, purged of the baser elements which
had alloyed its imperial spirit, and confirmed in its faith in the
principles on which it was built. More than that, on the first occasion
on which the essential principles or the power of the empire had been
challenged in war, all the self-governing colonies had voluntarily
borne their share. Apart from a small contingent sent from Australia to
the Soudan in 1885, British colonies had never before--indeed, no
European colony had ever before--sent men oversea to fight in a common
cause: and this not because their immediate interests were threatened,
but for the sake of an idea. For that reason the South African War
marks an epoch not merely in the history of the British Empire, but of
European imperialism as a whole.
The unity of sentiment and aim which was thus expressed had, however,
been steadily growing throughout the period of European rivalry; and
doubtless in the colonies, as in Britain, the new value attached to the
imperial tie was due in a large degree to the very fact of the
eagerness of the other European powers for extra-European possessions.
Imperialist sentiment began to become a factor in British politics just
about the beginning of this period: in 1878 the Imperial Federation
Society was founded, and about the same time Disraeli, who had once
spoken of the colonies as 'millstones around our necks,' was making
himself the mouthpiece of the new imperialist spirit. To this wave of
feeling a very notable contribution was made by Sir John Seeley's
brilliant book, "The Expansion of England." Slight as it was, and
containing no facts not already familiar, it gave a new perspective to
the events of the last four centuries of British history, and made the
growth of the Empire seem something not merely casual and incidental,
but a vital and most significant part of the British achievement. Its
defect was, perhaps, that it concentrated attention too exclusively
upon the external aspects of the wonderful story, and dwelt too little
upon its inner spirit, upon the force and influence of the instinct of
self-government which has been the most potent factor in British
history. The powerful impression which it created was deepened by other
books, like Froude's "Oceana" and Sir Charles Dilke's "Greater
Britain," the title of which alone was a proclamation and a prophecy.
It was strengthened also by the wonderful imperial pageants, like
nothing else ever witnessed in the world, which began with the two
Jubilee celebrations of 1887 and 1897, and were continued in the
funerals of Queen Victoria and Edward VII., the coronations of Edward
VII. and George V., and the superb Durbars of Delhi. The imaginative
appeal of such solemn representations of a world-scattered fellowship
of peoples and nations and tongues must not be underestimated. At first
there was perhaps a suggestion of blatancy, and of mere pride in
dominion, in the way in which these celebrations were received; the
graver note of Kipling's 'Recessional,' inspired by the Jubilee of
1897, was not unneeded. But after the strain and anxiety of the South
African War, a different temper visibly emerged.
More important than the pageants were the conferences of imperial
statesmen which arose out of them. The prime ministers of the great
colonies began to deliberate in common with the statesmen of Britain;
and the discussions, though at first quite informal and devoid of
authority, have become more intimate and vital as time has passed: a
beginning at least has been made in the common discussion of problems
affecting the Empire as a whole. And alongside of, and in consequence
of, all this, imperial questions have been treated with a new
seriousness in the British parliament, and the offices which deal with
them have ceased to be, as they once were, reserved for statesmen of
the second rank. The new attitude was pointedly expressed when in 1895
Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the most brilliant politician of his
generation, who could have had almost any office he desired,
deliberately chose the Colonial Office. His tenure of that office was
not, perhaps, memorable for any far-reaching change in colonial policy,
though he introduced some admirable improvements in the administration
of the tropical colonies; but it was most assuredly memorable for the
increased intensity of interest which he succeeded in arousing in
imperial questions, both at home and in the colonies. The campaign
which he initiated, after the South African War, for the institution of
an Imperial Zollverein or a system of Colonial Preference was a
failure, and indeed was probably a blunder, since it implied an attempt
to return to that material basis of imperial unity which had formed the
core of the old colonial system, and had led to the most unhappy
results in regard to the American colonies. But at least it was an
attempt to realise a fuller unity than had yet been achieved, and in
its first form included an inspiring appeal to the British people to
face sacrifices, should they be necessary, for that high end. Whether
these ideas contribute to the ultimate solution of the imperial problem
or not, it was at least a good thing that the question should be raised
and discussed.
One further feature among the many developments of this era must not be
left untouched. It is the rise of a definitely national spirit in the
greater members of the Empire. To this a great encouragement has been
given by the political unity which some of these communities have for
the first time attained during these years. National sentiment in the
Dominion of Canada was stimulated into existence by the Federation of
1867. The unification of Australia which was at length achieved in the
Federation of 1900 did not indeed create, but it greatly strengthened,
the rise of a similar spirit of Australian nationality. A national
spirit in South Africa, merging in itself the hostile racial sentiments
of Boer and Briton, may well prove to be the happiest result of the
Union of South Africa. In India also a national spirit is coming to
birth, bred among a deeply divided people by the political unity, the
peace, and the equal laws, which have been the greatest gifts of
British rule; its danger is that it may be too quick to imagine that
the unity which makes nationhood can be created merely by means of
resolutions declaring that it exists, but the desire to create it is an
altogether healthy desire. On the surface it might appear that the rise
of a national spirit in the great members of the Empire is a danger to
the ideal of imperial unity; but that need not be so, and if it were
so, the danger must be faced, since the national spirit is too valuable
a force to be restricted. The sense of nationhood is the inevitable
outcome of the freedom and co-operation which the British system
everywhere encourages; to attempt to repress it lest it should endanger
imperial unity would be as short-sighted as the old attempt to restrict
the natural growth of self-government because it also seemed a danger
to imperial unity. The essence of the British system is the free
development of natural tendencies, and the encouragement of variety of
types; and the future towards which the Empire seems to be tending is
not that of a highly centralised and unified state, but that of a
brotherhood of free nations, united by community of ideas and
institutions, co-operating for many common ends, and above all for the
common defence in case of need, but each freely following the natural
trend of its own development.
That is the conception of empire, unlike any other ever entertained by
men upon this planet, which was already shaping itself among the
British communities when the terrible ordeal of the Great War came to
test it, and to prove as not even the staunchest believer could have
anticipated, that it was capable of standing the severest trial which
men or institutions have ever had to undergo.
IX
THE GREAT CHALLENGE, 1900-1914
At the opening of the twentieth century the long process whereby the
whole globe has been brought under the influence of European
civilisation was practically completed; and there had emerged a group
of gigantic empires, which in size far surpassed the ancient Empire of
Rome; each resting upon, and drawing its strength from, a unified
nation-state. In the hands of these empires the political destinies of
the world seemed to rest, and the lesser nation-states appeared to be
altogether overshadowed by them. Among the vast questions which fate
was putting to humanity, there were none more momentous than these: On
what principles, and in what spirit, were these nation-empires going to
use the power which they had won over their vast and varied multitudes
of subjects? What were to be their relations with one another? Were
they to be relations of conflict, each striving to weaken or destroy
its rivals in the hope of attaining a final world-supremacy? Or were
they to be relations of co-operation in the development of
civilisation, extending to the whole world those tentative but far from
unsuccessful efforts after international co-operation which the
European states had long been endeavouring to work out among
themselves?[9] At first it seemed as if the second alternative might be
adopted, for these were the days of the Hague Conferences; but the
development of events during the first fourteen years of the century
showed with increasing clearness that one of the new world-states was
resolute to make a bid for world-supremacy, and the gradual maturing of
this challenge, culminating in the Great War, constitutes the supreme
interest of these years.
[9] See the Essay on Internationalism (Nationalism and
Internationalism, p. 124 ff.).
The oldest, and (by the rough tests of area, population, and natural
resources) by far the greatest of these new composite world-states, was
the British Empire, which included 12,000,000 square miles, or
one-quarter of the land-surface of the globe. It rested upon the
wealth, vigour, and skill of a population of 45,000,000 in the
homeland, to which might be added, but only by their own consent, the
resources of five young daughter-nations, whose population only
amounted to about 15,000,000. Thus it stood upon a rather narrow
foundation. And while it was the greatest, it was also beyond
comparison the most loosely organised of all these empires. It was
rather a partnership of a multitude of states in every grade of
civilisation than an organised and consolidated dominion. Five of its
chief members were completely self-governing, and shared in the common
burdens only by their own free will. All the remaining members were
organised as distinct units, though subject to the general control of
the home government. The resources of each unit were employed
exclusively for the development of its own welfare. They paid no
tribute; they were not required to provide any soldiers beyond the
minimum needed for their own defence and the maintenance of internal
order. This empire, in short, was not in any degree organised for
military purposes. It possessed no great land-army, and was, therefore,
incapable of threatening the existence of any of its rivals. It
depended for its defence firstly upon its own admirable strategic
distribution, since it was open to attack at singularly few points
otherwise than from the sea; it depended mainly, for that reason, upon
naval power, and secure command of the sea-roads by which its members
were linked was absolutely vital to its existence. Only by sea-power
(which is always weak in the offensive) could it threaten its
neighbours or rivals; and its sea-power, during four centuries, had
always, in war, been employed to resist the threatened domination of
any single power, and had never, in time of peace, been employed to
restrict the freedom of movement of any of the world's peoples. On the
contrary, the Freedom of the Seas had been established by its
victories, and dated from the date of its ascendancy. The life-blood of
this empire was trade; its supreme interest was manifestly peace. The
conception of the meaning of empire which had been developed by its
history was not a conception of dominion for dominion's sake, or of the
exploitation of subjects for the advantage of a master. On the
contrary, it had come to mean (especially during the nineteenth
century) a trust; a trust to be administered in the interests of the
subjects primarily, and secondarily in the interests of the whole
civilised world. That this is not the assertion of a theory or an
ideal, but of a fact and a practice, is sufficiently demonstrated by
two unquestionable facts: the first that the units which formed this
empire were not only free from all tribute in money or men, but were
not even required to make any contribution towards the upkeep of the
fleet, upon which the safety of all depended; the second that every
port and every market in this vast empire, so far as they were under
the control of the central government, were thrown open as freely to
the citizens of all other states as to its own. Finally, in this empire
there had never been any attempt to impose a uniformity of method or
even of laws upon the infinitely various societies which it included:
it not merely permitted, it cultivated and admired, varieties of type,
and to the maximum practicable degree believed in self-government.
Because these were the principles upon which it was administered, the
real strength of this empire was far greater than it appeared. But
beyond question it was ill-prepared and ill-organised for war; desiring
peace beyond all things, and having given internal peace to one-quarter
of the earth's population, it was apt to be over-sanguine about the
maintenance of peace. And if a great clash of empires should come, this
was likely to tell against it.
The second oldest--perhaps it ought to be described as the oldest--of
the world-empires, and the second largest in area, was the Russian
Empire, which covered 8,500,000 square miles of territory. Its strength
was that its vast domains formed a single continuous block, and that
its population was far more homogeneous than that of its rivals, three
out of four of its subjects being either of the Russian or of kindred
Slavonic stock. Its weaknesses were that it was almost land-locked,
nearly the whole of its immense coastline being either inaccessible, or
ice-bound during half of the year; and that it had not adopted modern
methods of government, being subject to a despotism, working through an
inefficient, tyrannical, and corrupt bureaucracy. In the event of a
European war it was further bound to suffer from the facts that its
means of communication and its capacity for the movement of great
armies were ill-developed; and that it was far behind all its rivals in
the control of industrial machinery and applied science, upon which
modern warfare depends, and without which the greatest wealth of
man-power is ineffective. At the opening of the twentieth century
Russia was still pursuing the policy of Eastward expansion at the
expense of China, which the other Western powers had been compelled to
abandon by the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Able to bring
pressure upon China from the landward side, she was not deterred by the
naval predominance which this alliance enjoyed, and she still hoped to
control Manchuria, and to dominate the policy of China. But these aims
brought her in conflict with Japan, who had been preparing for the
conflict ever since 1895. The outcome of the war (1904), which ended in
a disastrous Russian defeat, had the most profound influence upon the
politics of the world. It led to an internal revolution in Russia. It
showed that the feet of the colossus were of clay, and that her
bureaucratic government was grossly corrupt and incompetent. It forbade
Russia to take an effective part in the critical events of the
following years, and notably disabled her from checking the progress of
German and Austrian ascendancy in the Balkans. Above all it increased
the self-confidence of Germany, and inspired her rulers with the
dangerous conviction that the opposing forces with which they would
have to deal in the expected contest for the mastery of Europe could be
more easily overthrown than they had anticipated. To the Russian defeat
must be mainly attributed the blustering insolence of German policy
during the next ten years, and the boldness of the final challenge in
1914.
The third of the great empires was that of France, with 5,000,000
square miles of territory, mostly acquired in very recent years, but
having roots in the past. It rested upon a home population of only
39,000,000, but these belonged to the most enlightened, the most
inventive, and the most chivalrous stock in Christendom. As France had,
a hundred years before, raised the standard of human rights among the
European peoples, so she was now bringing law and justice and peace to
the backward peoples of Africa and the East; and was finding in the
pride of this achievement some consolation for the brutality with which
she had been hurled from the leadership of Europe.
The fourth of the great empires was America, with some 3,000,000 square
miles of territory, and a vague claim of suzerainty over the vast area
of Central and South America. Her difficult task of welding into a
nation masses of people of the most heterogeneous races had been made
yet more difficult by the enormous flood of immigrants, mainly from the
northern, eastern, and south-eastern parts of Europe, which had poured
into her cities during the last generation: they proved to be in many
ways more difficult to digest than their predecessors, and they tended,
in a dangerous way, to live apart and to organise themselves as
separate communities. The presence of these organised groups made it
sometimes hard for America to maintain a quite clear and distinctive
attitude in the discussions of the powers, most of which had, as it
were, definite bodies of advocates among her citizens; and it was
perhaps in part for this reason that she had tended to fall back again
to that attitude of aloofness towards the affairs of the non-American
world from which she seemed to have begun to depart in the later years
of the last century. Although she had herself taken a hand in the
imperialist activities of the 'nineties, the general attitude of her
citizens towards the imperial controversies of Europe was one of
contempt or undiscriminating condemnation. Her old tradition of
isolation from the affairs of Europe was still very strong--still the
dominating factor in her policy. She had not yet grasped (indeed, who,
in any country, had?) the political consequences of the new era of
world-economy into which we have passed. And therefore she could not
see that the titanic conflict of Empires which was looming ahead was of
an altogether different character from the old conflicts of the
European states, that it was fundamentally a conflict of principles, a
fight for existence between the ideal of self-government and the ideal
of dominion, and that it must therefore involve, for good or ill, the
fortunes of the whole globe. She watched the events which led up to the
great agony with impartial and deliberate interest. Even when the war
began she clung with obstinate faith to the belief that her tradition
of aloofness might still be maintained. It is not surprising, when we
consider how deep-rooted this tradition was, that it took two and a
half years of carnage and horror to convert her from it. But it was
inevitable that in the end her still more deeply rooted tradition of
liberty should draw her into the conflict, and lead her at last to play
her proper part in the attempt to shape a new world-order.
We cannot stop to analyse the minor world-states, Italy and Japan; both
of which might have stood aside from the conflict, but that both
realised its immense significance for themselves and for the world.