A CENTURY OF EMPIRE
1815-1911
The British realms beyond the seas have little history before the
battle of Waterloo, a date at which the Englishman's historical
education has commonly come to an end; and if by chance it has gone any
further, it has probably been confined to purely domestic events or to
foreign episodes of such ephemeral interest as the Crimean War. It may
be well, therefore, to pass lightly over these matters in order to
sketch in brief outline the development of the empire and the problems
which it involves. European affairs, in fact, played a very subordinate
part in English history after 1815; so far as England was concerned, it
was a period of excursions and alarms rather than actual hostilities;
and the fortunes of English-speaking communities were not greatly
affected by the revolutions and wars which made and marred continental
nations, a circumstance which explains, if it does not excuse, the
almost total ignorance of European history displayed in British
colonies.
The interventions of Britain in continental politics were generally on
behalf of the principles of nationality and self-government. Under the
influence of Castlereagh and Canning the British government gradually
broke away from the Holy Alliance formed to suppress all protests
against the settlement reached after Napoleon's fall; and Britain
interposed with decisive effect at the battle of Navarino in 1827,
which secured the independence of Greece from Turkey. More diplomatic
intervention assisted the South American colonies to assert their
independence of the Spanish mother-country; and British volunteers
helped the Liberal cause in Spain and Portugal against reactionary
monarchs. Belgium was countenanced in its successful revolution against
the House of Orange, and Italian states in their revolts against native
and foreign despots; the expulsion of the Hapsburgs and Bourbons from
Italy, and its unification on a nationalist basis, owed something to
British diplomacy, which supported Cavour, and to British volunteers
who fought for Garibaldi. The attitude of Britain towards the Balkan
nationalities, which were endeavouring to throw off the Turkish yoke,
was more dubious; while Gladstone denounced Turkish atrocities,
Disraeli strengthened Turkey's hands. Yet England would have been as
enthusiastic for a liberated and united Balkan power as it had been for
a united Italy but for the claims of a rival liberator, Russia.
Russia was the bugbear of two generations of Englishmen; and classical
scholars, who interpreted modern politics by the light of ancient
Greece, saw in the absorption of Athens by Macedon a convincing
demonstration of the fate which the modern barbarian of the north was
to inflict upon the British heirs of Hellas. India was the real source
of this nervousness. British dominion, after further wars with the
Mahrattas, the Sikhs, and the Gurkhas, had extended up to the frontiers
of Afghanistan; but there was always the fear lest another sword should
take away dominion won by the British, and in British eyes it was an
offence that any other power should expand in Asia. The Russian and
British spheres of influence advanced till they met in Kabul; and for
fifty years the two powers contested, by more or less diplomatic
methods, the control of the Amir of Afghanistan. Turkey flanked the
overland route to India; and hence the protection of Turkey against
Russia became a cardinal point in British foreign policy. On behalf of
Turkey's integrity Great Britain fought, in alliance with France and
Sardinia, the futile Crimean War of 1854-1856, and nearly went to war
in 1877.
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 introduced a fresh complication.
Relations between England and France had since Waterloo been friendly,
on the whole; but France had traditional interests in Egypt, which were
strengthened by the fact that a French engineer had constructed the
Suez Canal, and by French colonies in the Far East, to which the canal
was the shortest route. Rivalry with England for the control of Egypt
followed. The Dual Control, which was established in 1876, was
terminated by the refusal of France to assist in the suppression of
Egyptian revolts in 1882; and Great Britain was left in sole but
informal possession of power in Egypt, with the responsibility for its
defence against the Mahdi (1884-1885) and for the re-conquest of the
Sudan (1896-1898), which is now under the joint Egyptian and British
flags.
Meanwhile, British expansion to the east of India, the Burmese wars,
and annexation of Burma (1885) brought the empire into a contact with
French influence in Siam similar to its contact with Russian in
Afghanistan. Community of interests in the Far East, as well as the
need of protection against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and
Italy produced the _entente cordiale_ between France and Russia in
1890. Fortunately, the dangerous questions between them and Great
Britain were settled by diplomacy, assisted by the alliance between
Great Britain and Japan. The British and Russian spheres of action on
the north-west, and the British and French spheres to the east, of
India were delimited; southern Persia, the Persian Gulf, and the Malay
Peninsula were left to British vigilance and penetration, northern
Persia to Russian, and eastern Siam to French. Freed from these causes
of friction, Great Britain, Russia, and France exert a restraining
influence on the predominant partner in the Triple Alliance.
The development of a vast dominion in India has created for the British
government problems, of which the great Indian mutiny of 1857 was
merely one illustration. No power has succeeded in permanently
governing subject races by despotic authority; in North and South
America the natives have so dwindled in numbers as to leave the
conquerors indisputably supreme; in Europe and elsewhere in former
times the subject races fitted themselves for self-government, and then
absorbed their conquerors. The racial and religious gulf forbids a
similar solution of the Indian question, while the abandonment of her
task by Great Britain would leave India a prey to anarchy. The
difficulties of despotic rule were mitigated in the past by the utter
absence of any common sentiments and ideas among the many races,
religions, and castes which constituted India; and a Machiavellian
perpetuation of these divisions might have eased the labours of its
governors. But a government suffers for its virtues, and the steady
efforts of Great Britain to civilize and educate its Eastern subjects
have tended to destroy the divisions which made common action, common
aspirations, public opinion and self-government impossible in India.
The missionary, the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer, and the political
reformer have all helped to remove the bars of caste and race by
converting Brahmans, Mohammedans, Parsees to a common Christianity or
by undermining their attachment to their particular distinctions. They
have built railways and canals, which made communications and contact
unavoidable; they have imposed common measures of health, common legal
principles, and a common education in English culture and methods of
administration. The result has been to foster a consciousness of
nationality, the growth of a public opinion, and a demand for a greater
share in the management of affairs. The more efficient a despotism, the
more certain is its supersession; and the problem for the Indian
government is how to adjust and adapt the political emancipation of the
natives of India to the slow growth of their education and sense of
moral responsibility. At present, caste and racial and religious
differences, especially between Mohammedans and Hindus, though
weakening, are powerful disintegrants; not one per cent of the
population can read or write; and the existence of hundreds of native
states impedes the progress of national agitation.
A somewhat similar problem confronts British administration in Egypt,
where the difficulty of dealing with the agitation for national self-
government is complicated by the fact that technically the British
agent and consul-general is merely the informal adviser of the khedive,
who is himself the viceroy of the Sultan of Turkey. Ultimately the same
sort of dilemma will have to be faced in other parts of Africa under
British rule--British East Africa and Uganda, the Nigerian
protectorates and neighbouring districts, Rhodesia and British Central
Africa--as well as in the Malay States, Hong Kong, and the West Indies.
There are great differences of opinion among the white citizens of the
empire with regard to the treatment of their coloured fellow-subjects.
Australia and some provinces of the South African Union would exclude
Indian immigrants altogether; and white minorities have an invincible
repugnance to allowing black majorities to exercise a vote, except
under stringent precautions against its effect. We have, indeed,
improved upon the Greeks, who regarded all other races as outside the
scope of Greek morality; but we do not yet extend to coloured races the
same consideration that we do to white men.
So far as the white population of the empire is concerned, the problem
of self-government was solved in the nineteenth century by procedure
common to all the great dominions of the crown, though the
emancipation, which had cost the mother-country centuries of conflict,
was secured by many colonies in less than fifty years. Three normal
stages marked their progress, and Canada led the way in each. The first
was the acquisition of representative government--that is to say, of a
legislature consisting generally of two Houses, one of which was
popularly elected but had little control over the executive; the second
was the acquisition of responsible government--that is to say, of an
executive responsible to the popular local legislature instead of to
the home Colonial Office; and the third was federation. Canada had
possessed the first degree of self-government ever since 1791 (see p.
169), and was rapidly outgrowing it. Australia, however, did not pass
out of the crown colony stage, in which affairs are controlled by a
governor, with or without the assistance of a nominated legislative
council, until 1842, when elected members were added to the council of
New South Wales, and it was given the power of the purse. This
development was due to the exodus of the surplus population, created by
the Industrial Revolution, from Great Britain, which began soon after
1820, and affected Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Various companies and associations were founded under the influence of
Lord Durham, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and others, for the purpose of
settling labourers in these lands. Between 1820 and 1830 several
settlements were established in Western Australia, in 1836 South
Australia was colonized, and gradually Victoria, Queensland, and
Tasmania were organized as independent colonies out of offshoots from
the parent New South Wales. Each in turn received a representative
assembly, and developed individual characteristics.
Cape Colony followed on similar lines, variegated by the presence of a
rival European race, the Dutch. Slowly, in the generation which
succeeded the British conquest, they accumulated grievances against
their rulers. English was made the sole official language; Dutch
magistrates were superseded by English commissioners; slavery was
abolished, with inadequate compensation to the owners; little support
was given them in their wars with the natives, which the home
government and the missionaries, more interested in the woes of negroes
in South Africa than in those of children in British mines and
factories, attributed to Dutch brutality; and a Hottentot police was
actually established. In 1837 the more determined of the Dutch
"trekked" north and east to found republics in Natal, the Orange River
Free State, and the Transvaal. Purged of these discontented elements,
the Cape was given representative government in 1853, and Natal, which
had been annexed in 1844, received a similar constitution in 1856.
Meanwhile, Canada had advanced through constitutional struggles and
open rebellion to the second stage. It had received its baptism of fire
during the war (1812-1814) between Great Britain and the United States,
when French and British Canadians fought side by side against a common
enemy. But both provinces soon experienced difficulties similar to
those between the Stuarts and their parliaments; their legislative
assemblies had no control over their executive governments, and in 1837
Papineau's rebellion broke out in Lower, and Mackenzie's in Upper,
Canada. Lord Durham was sent out to investigate the causes of
discontent, and his report marks an epoch in colonial history. The idea
that the American War of Independence had taught the mother-country the
necessity of granting complete self-government to her colonies is a
persistent misconception; and hitherto no British colony had received a
fuller measure of self-government than had been enjoyed by the American
colonies before their Declaration of Independence. The grant of this
responsible self-government was one of the two principal
recommendations of Lord Durham's report. The other was the union of the
two provinces, which, it was hoped, would give the British a majority
over the French. This recommendation, which ultimately proved
unworkable, was carried out at once; the other, which has been the
saving of the empire, was left for Lord Elgin to elaborate. He made it
a principle to choose as ministers only those politicians who possessed
the confidence of the popular assembly, and his example, followed by
his successors, crystallized into a fundamental maxim of British
colonial government. It was extended to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick
in 1848, and to Newfoundland (which had in 1832 received a legislative
assembly) in 1855.
To Lord John Russell, who was prime minister from 1846 to 1851, to his
colonial secretary, the third Earl Grey, and to Lords Aberdeen and
Palmerston, who succeeded as premiers in 1852 and 1855, belongs the
credit of having conferred full rights of self-government on most of
the empire's oversea dominions. Australia, where the discovery of gold
in 1851 added enormously to her population, soon followed in Canada's
wake, and by 1856 every Australian colony, with the exception of
Western Australia, had, with the consent of the Imperial parliament,
worked out a constitution for itself, comprising two legislative
chambers and a responsible cabinet. New Zealand, which had begun to be
sparsely settled between 1820 and 1840, and had been annexed in the
latter year, received in 1852 from the Imperial parliament a
Constitution Act, which left it to Sir George Grey, the Governor, to
work out in practice the responsibility of ministers to the
legislature. Other colonies were slower in their constitutional
development; Cape Colony was not granted a responsible administration
till 1872; Western Australia, which had continued to receive convicts
after their transportation to other Australian colonies had been
successfully resisted, did not receive complete self-government till
1890, and Natal not until 1893.
The latest British colonies to receive this livery of the empire were
the Transvaal and the Orange River colonies. A chequered existence had
been their fate since their founders had trekked north in 1837. The
Orange River Free State had been annexed by Britain in 1848, had
rebelled, and been granted independence again in 1854. The Transvaal
had been annexed in 1877, had rebelled, and had been granted almost
complete independence again after Majuba in 1881. The Orange Free
State, relieved of the diamond fields which belonged to it in the
neighbourhood of Kimberley in 1870, pursued the even tenor of its way;
but the gold mines discovered in the Transvaal were not so near its
borders, and gave rise to more prolonged dissensions. Crowds of
cosmopolitan adventurers, as lawless as those who disturbed the peace
in Victoria or California, flocked to the Rand. They were not of the
stuff of which Dutch burghers were made, and the franchise was denied
them by a government which did not hesitate to profit from their
labours. The Jameson Raid, a hasty attempt to use their wrongs to
overthrow President Kruger's government in 1895, "upset the apple-cart"
of Cecil Rhodes, the prime minister of the Cape, who had added Rhodesia
to the empire and was planning, with moderate Dutch support, to
federate South Africa. Kruger hardened his heart against the
Uitlanders, and armed himself to resist the arguments of the British
government on their behalf. Both sides underestimated the determination
and resources of the other. But Kruger was more ignorant, if not more
obstinate, than Mr. Chamberlain; and his ultimatum of October 1899
precipitated a war which lasted two years and a half, and cost the two
republics their independence. The Transvaal was given, and the Orange
River Colony was promised, representative government by the
Conservatives; but the Liberals, who came into power at the end of
1905, excused them this apprenticeship, and granted them full
responsible government in 1906-1907.
British colonies have tried a series of useful experiments with the
power thus allotted them of managing their own affairs, and have
contributed more to the science of politics than all the arm-chair
philosophers from Aristotle downwards; and an examination in their
results would be a valuable test for aspiring politicians and civil
servants. The Canadian provinces, with two exceptions, dispense with a
second chamber; elsewhere in the empire, second chambers are universal,
but nowhere outside the United Kingdom hereditary. Their members are
either nominated by the prime minister for life, as in the Dominion of
Canada, or for a term of years, which is fixed at seven in New Zealand;
or they are popularly elected, sometimes on a different property
qualification from the Lower House, sometimes for a different period,
sometimes by a different constituency. In the Commonwealth of Australia
they are chosen by each state voting as a whole, and this method, by
which a big majority in one locality outweighs several small majorities
in others, has sometimes resulted in making the Upper House more
radical and socialistic than the Lower; the system of nomination
occasionally has in Canada a result equally strange to English ideas,
for the present Conservative majority in the House of Commons is
confronted with a hostile Liberal majority in the Upper House, placed
there by Sir Wilfrid Laurier during his long tenure of office. The most
effective provision against deadlocks between the two Houses is one in
the constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, by which, if they
cannot agree, both are dissolved.
Other contrasts are more bewildering than instructive. In Canada the
movement for women's suffrage has made little headway, and even less in
South Africa; but at the Antipodes women share with men the privilege
of adult suffrage in New Zealand, in the Commonwealth of Australia, and
in every one of its component states; an advocate of the cause would
perhaps explain the contrast by the presence of unprogressive French in
Canada, and of unprogressive Dutch in South Africa. Certainly, the all-
British dominions have been more advanced in their political
experiments than those in which the flighty Anglo-Saxon has been
tempered by more stolid elements; and the pendulum swings little more
in French Canada than it does in Celtic Ireland. In New Zealand old age
pensions were in force long before they were introduced into the
mother-country; and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes,
payment of M.P.'s, and powers of local option and prohibition have been
for years in operation. Both the Dominion and the Commonwealth levy
taxes on land far exceeding those imposed by the British budget of
1909. Australia is, in addition, trying a socialistic labour ministry
and compulsory military training. It has also tried the more serious
experiment of developing a standard of comfort among its proletariate
before peopling the country; and is consequently forced to exclude by
legislation all sorts of cheap labour, which might develop its
industries but would certainly lower its level of wages. It believes in
high protection, but takes care by socialistic legislation that high
wages shall more than counterbalance high prices; protection is to it
merely the form of state socialism which primarily benefits the
employer. It has also nationalized its railways and denationalized all
churches and religious instruction in public schools. There is, indeed,
no state church in the empire outside Great Britain. But the most
significant, perhaps, of Antipodean notions is the doctrine, inculcated
in the Queensland elementary schools, of the sanctity of state
property.
Finally, the colonies have made momentous experiments in federation.
New Zealand's was the earliest and the briefest; after a few years'
experience of provincial governments between 1852 and 1870, it reduced
its provincial parliaments to the level of county councils, and adopted
a unitary constitution. In Canada, on the other hand, the union of the
Upper and Lower Provinces proved unworkable owing to racial
differences; and in 1867 the federation called the Dominion of Canada
was formed by agreement between Upper and Lower Canada (henceforth
called Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Prince
Edward Island and British Columbia joined soon afterwards; and fresh
provinces have since been created out of the Hudson Bay and North-west
Territories; Newfoundland alone has stood aloof. Considerable powers
are allotted to the provinces, including education; but the
distinguishing feature of this federation is that all powers not
definitely assigned by the Dominion Act to the provinces belong to the
Dominion. This is in sharp contrast to the United States, where each
individual state is the sovereign body, and the Federal government only
possesses such powers as the states have delegated to it by the
constitution.
In this respect the Australian federation called the Commonwealth,
which was formed in 1900, resembles the United States rather than
Canada. The circumstance that each Australian colony grew up round a
seaport, having little or no overland connexion with other Australian
colonies, kept them long apart; and the commercial interests centred in
these ports are still centrifugal rather than centripetal in sentiment.
Hence powers, not specifically assigned to the Federal government,
remain in the hands of the individual states; the Labour party,
however, inclines towards a centralizing policy, and the general trend
seems to be in that direction. It will probably be strengthened by the
construction of transcontinental railways and by a further growth of
the nationalist feeling of Australia, which is already marked.
The Union of South Africa, formed in 1909, soon after the Boer colonies
had received self-government, went almost as far towards unification as
New Zealand, and became a unitary state rather than a federation. The
greater expense of maintaining several local parliaments as well as a
central legislature, and the difficulty of apportioning their powers,
determined South African statesmen to sweep away the old legislatures
altogether, and to establish a united parliament which meets at Cape
Town, a single executive which has its offices at Pretoria, and a
judicature which is located at Bloemfontein. Thus almost every variety
of Union and Home Rule exists within the empire, and arguments from
analogy are provided for both the British political parties.
Two extremes have been, and must be, avoided. History has falsified the
impression prevalent in the middle of the nineteenth century that the
colonies would sooner or later follow the example of the United States,
and sever their connexion with the mother-country. It has no less
clearly demonstrated the impossibility of maintaining a centralized
government of the empire in Downing Street. The union or federation of
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa has strengthened the
claims of each of those imperial realms to be considered a nation, with
full rights and powers of self-government; and it remains to be seen
whether the federating process can be carried to a higher level, and
imperial sentiment crystallized in Imperial Federation. Imperial
Conferences have become regular, but we may not call them councils; no
majority in them has power to bind a minority, and no conference can
bind the mother-country or a single dominion of the crown. As an
educational body the Imperial Conference is excellent; but no one would
venture to give powers of taxation or of making war and peace to a
conclave in which Great Britain, with its forty-four millions of people
and the navy and army it supports, has no more votes than Newfoundland,
with its quarter of a million of inhabitants and immunity from imperial
burdens.
Education is, however, at the root of all political systems. Where the
mass of the people know nothing of politics, a despotism is essential;
where only the few are politically educated, there needs must be an
aristocracy. Great Britain lost its American colonies largely through
ignorance; and no imperial organization could arise among a group of
states ignorant of each other's needs, resources, and aspirations. The
Imperial Conference is not to be judged by its meagre tangible results;
if it has led British politicians to appreciate the varying character
and depth of national feeling in the Dominions, and politicians oversea
to appreciate the delicacies of the European diplomatic situation, the
dependence of every part of the empire upon sea-power, and the
complexities of an Imperial government which has also to consider the
interests of hundreds of millions of subjects in India, in tropical
Africa, in the West Indies, and in the Pacific, the Conference will
have helped to foster the intellectual conditions which must underlie
any attempt at an imperial superstructure.
For the halcyon days of peace, prosperity, and progress can hardly be
assumed as yet, and not even the most distant and self-contained
Dominions can afford to ignore the menace of blood and iron. No power,
indeed, is likely to find the thousand millions or so which it would
cost to conquer and hold Canada, Australia, or South Africa; but a
lucky raid on their commerce or some undefended port might cost many
millions by way of ransom. A slackening birth-rate is, moreover, a
reminder that empires in the past, like that of Rome, have civilized
themselves out of existence in the competition with races which bred
with primitive vigour, and had no costly standards of comfort. There
are such races to-day; the slumbering East has wakened, and the tide
which flowed for four centuries from West to East is on the turn. The
victory of Japan over Russia was an event beside which the great Boer
War sinks into insignificance. Asiatics, relieved by the _Pax
Britannica_ from mutual destruction, are eating the whites out of
the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and threatening South
Africa, Australia, and the western shores of America. No armaments and
no treaties of arbitration can ward off their economic competition; and
it is not certain that their myriads, armed with Western morality and
methods of warfare, will be always content to refrain from turning
against Europe the means of expansion which Europe has used with so
much success against them. The British Empire will need all the wisdom
it can command, if it is to hold its own in the parliament of reason or
the arbitrament of war.