The British people are already confronted with grave troubles in India
and Egypt and the Soudan. History has placed responsibilities on
their shoulders which they cannot shrug off with a careless gesture
of indifference or a splendid gesture of renunciation. That welter of
races and religions in India cannot be abandoned by people who have
ruled it, given it law, justice, internal peace, and protection from
old cruelties, tyrannies, famine and disease. If the British lost their
hold on India there would be a world of anarchy among all those races
and creeds between which there is no tolerance, so that they cannot eat
together, or mingle in a crowd, or touch without defilement. If the
British lost India other powers would fight to take it and the world
would be aflame again.
England will lose India if she grant self-government too quickly,
or too generously, to native rulers who cannot hold the scales of
justice, even as England has held them; who cannot control the native
princes by any such allegiance as they have given to a white emperor;
who could not keep Hindus and Moslems and other religious fanatics
from each other’s throats, nor administer justice with commonsense and
impartial judgment, as young magistrates from English public schools in
remote districts, where they were law-makers, judges, administrators,
in the midst of native populations obedient to their verdict and with
faith in their honesty. But the agitators in India, the “holy men” like
Ghandi, the students with Western education, are in revolt against this
benevolent despotism. They believe that India is able to govern itself.
They are refusing to buy British made goods. They use “Liberty” as
their watchword, and those who believe in national liberty, as I do,
can only answer their arguments by saying that India is not a nation
but a collection of races, and that Western ideas of parliamentary
government, “no taxation without representation” cannot be translated
into an Oriental country before centuries of education and preparation,
nor—failing that—without an anarchy in which a thousand horrors would
happen. To the fanatical Indian student from King’s College, London,
that answer is taken as an insult and as hypocrisy. And yet it is true.
So also in Egypt and the Soudan. The Egyptians ignore the benefits that
have come to them from British rule, British engineering, British
science, which dammed the Nile and fertilised their fields, gave a
better chance of life to the peasants, brought peace from the passions,
barbarities, slave-driving of the African races. They have a new sense
of power because they know England’s need of peace. They are prepared
to blot out all British benefits for the sake of that cry, “Egypt for
the Egyptians!” shouted from Cairo across the deserts. They demand the
Soudan as their province, although it was subdued by British troops,
and its barbarism was tamed by British rule after a history of human
cruelty in this black region hellish in its torture and diabolism, to
which, beyond any doubt, it will return if by weakness of man power,
hatred of war, or economic poverty, the British government releases its
control.
England is the leader of world peace. Poverty is creeping closer to
her. Her old Imperial spirit is deadened by war weariness and by new
ideals of liberal policy from which military force is eliminated. Yet
by their Imperial heritage the British people have responsibilities
towards the coloured races which cannot be supported without force of
arms, as military police for the order of the human race. If Great
Britain, for reasons of economy or lack of strength, retires from
these regions, as the Romans did from their own wide Empire, chaos and
upheavals in Africa, India and Asia will let loose a world of human
passion and revolt. Other powers will claim the succession, and another
world war, on a more terrible scale, will begin.