centuries as being essentially, in its broadest aspects, a belated,
forced, and largely unconscious process of political adaptation to
changing conditions, of vast subconscious and unwilling trials and
experiments in new and greater political associations to replace that
formerly dominant Imperial idea, that I wish to put before the readers
of the _Empire Review_. It carries us on to the further realisation
that _since the process of change in communications is only now
approaching some sort of limiting completion, the new political systems
that have appeared cannot be considered as anything but preliminary
and transitory systems_. The United States of America, the Spanish,
Dutch and British colonial empires of the eighteenth century, the
Russian Asiatic Empire and the second British Empire of the nineteenth
century, the British Empire of the _Empire Review_ and of this present
discussion, must all from the angle of this conception be seen as
things experimental and transient, destined to the most extensive
coalescences, readjustments and modifications in a few score years. The
form to which these synthetic material forces, this constant abolition
of distance between State and State and man and man, are driving
us all, even in spite of ourselves, is a common Pax Mundi, a World
Commonweal, a federal suppression of armaments, a federal money system,
a federal postal system, a federal control of the production and
distribution of staple products, a federal direction of main-line sea
and land transport and of the movements of population. To these things
it seems to me human affairs trend now inexorably. The economic and
financial world net grows tighter and closer; war becomes so intimate
and inconclusive and destructive as to become impossible. The old ideas
may hold our race in a bloody and wasteful subjection for two or three
centuries yet; but the Pax Mundi waits at the end of the passage.
A man holding these opinions must necessarily judge the present
British Empire without any fanatical loyalty, critically as a possible
half-way house or a possible obstacle to a more comprehensive and
enduring synthesis. It is not really the same thing as the British
“Empire” of 1823, which was a string of trading posts and areas of
economic predominance about the world, _plus_ John Company’s fantastic
acquisition of the derelict rule of the Great Mogul. The bulk of
the present British “Empire” was created and held together by the
steamship. This rendered possible the transfer of considerable masses
of population to new territories and the importation of bulky staples,
of such things as wheat and cattle, across great stretches of ocean.
The Dominions were made by the steamship and the telegraphic cable,
and they constitute the freshest, most peculiar feature of the present
British Imperial system. Colonies the world has known before, but
neither the Greek and Phœnician colonies of the old world nor the
American colonies of the eighteenth century were linked closely and
abundantly enough to the mother country to prevent a final estrangement
and detachment. The British Dominions to-day are, on the contrary, kept
in touch, and more and more effectively kept in touch, with each other
and the mother country. Their mutual relationships are unprecedented.
Their unity may be enduring.
But when we turn to the relationship of Great Britain and these
Dominions on the one hand, to India on the other, we find something
entirely different, a new association also, but of absolutely
different structure and different capabilities, something accidental
and precarious and manifestly provisional. A London company running
a system of trading stations, acquired almost inadvertently amidst a
wild political welter in India, the heritage of the Great Mogul. Great
Britain has taken over this company’s possessions, enlarged them, given
India peace and a certain unity, educated her people, but not widely
nor sufficiently, developed her resources, but not very generously, and
manifestly has but the vaguest ideas of her future. The educational
and intellectual development of the British people has not kept pace
with this rapid expansion of British responsibilities. Our world
responsibilities have increased a hundredfold in the last century, but
our educated class, our supply of potential rulers, directors and the
like, our university organisations have not increased tenfold.
It is an open question whether on the whole we have most hampered or
benefited India. Or _vice versa_. But at any rate it must be clear
that the association of the Indian system with the Dominion system is
an accidental and transitory association. They both happen to be parts
of the British system, but there is no necessary connection. The two
move at different rates and in divergent directions. A man may be--I
know Australians who are--what I may call a Dominion-imperialist, but
not an Indian-imperialist. He may believe, as I do, in the need for a
sedulous preservation and intensification of the intellectual community
of the English-speaking peoples, and in an attentive care for every
possibility of understanding and sympathetic co-operation with the
United States of America, and at the same time he may be as convinced
as I am of our duty and obligation to educate and organise India
as speedily as possible for separation, for a friendly independent
existence within the world commonweal of peoples.
We British have not sufficient natural moral and intellectual
superiority to the Indian peoples, we have not a sufficiently organised
educational system nor a sufficient surplus of highly educated men,
to justify our continued usurpation of India’s right to think out
and work out its own rôle in the confederation of mankind. And we are
different from these dusky peoples; we do not work with them easily;
we hamper them and they hamper us intolerably. But released from our
entanglement with a population six or seven times as numerous as our
own, our entanglement with this great mix-up of temperamentally alien
peoples, the British and the associated English-speaking communities
scattered round the earth, extending their educational organisation and
developing their still crude intellectual and political possibilities,
may play a reasonable and yet leading part in the great synthesis
which will ultimately give the world enduring peace. “Disentangle from
India, draw near to America, come out of and keep out of ententes and
alliances upon the continent of Europe”; these are the broad lines upon
which I conceive the British system may best serve itself and mankind.
So far I have considered the British Empire only from the point of view
of the English-speaking Dominions and of India. I will leave Egypt and
Palestine, as they ought to be left, outside the discussion. They are,
I take it, relaxing protectorates. Nor will I say more than a word or
so about purely strategic possessions, Malta, Gibraltar and so forth;
they are part of our armament, and their destiny is dependent upon the
possibility of a world association sufficiently convincing to make
disarmament possible. But there still remain great areas that are
neither populated by kindred communities nor subject civilisations,
barbaric regions that have been taken over in order to exploit their
natural resources and prevent their being monopolised and closed
against us by some hostile power. The great overseas “Empire” of Spain
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was of this type. Such areas
of economic subjugation are a very ancient type of foreign possession.
In such a spirit Carthage once held Corsica, Sardinia and a large
part of Spain. In our own lives we have witnessed the sharing-out of
tropical Africa among competing European powers. Behind such division
and ownership lies the conception of bitterly competitive, monopolistic
trading States as the supreme form of human association. That again is
an obsolescent conception.
The Americans decided a century and a half ago that one necessary
condition of existence for a federal union of sovereign States was
universal free trade. All interference with the free movement of
another community’s trade, all tariff barriers and the like, are a mild
form of war. It must be plain to everyone that the present division of
Africa is extremely unstable, and that if the system of competitive
powers in Europe is to go on, it is only a question of how long it will
take France to feel secure enough against Germany to set about fighting
for the whole of raw-material Africa. The organised peace of the
world, the coming world civilisation, demands not only a cessation of
armaments, but a cessation of commercial discrimination and such-like
material injuries.
But these areas of undeveloped natural resources, of unexploited forests
and minerals and the like, sustaining only a sparse or undercivilised
population, must have administration and development from without.
If that is not to be the dangerous task and privilege of a single
exploiting State it must be the task of some as yet non-existent body
acting in the common interest. Until that federal body can be developed
and equipped with forces and resources of its own--it is the most
urgent of all necessary precautions against a future great war--there
is nothing for us to do but to go on holding these possessions
of the third order, without trading discrimination or settlement
discrimination, against any other race or people.
It is part of the fantastic nationalism that still plays so astonishing
a rôle in the political life of the world, to hold that every
definable region of the earth’s surface belongs, from sky to centre,
to the inhabitants it supports. But with ever increasing facilities
of movement this becomes constantly more impossible. It would, for
example, place the vast mineral wealth of Labrador at the disposal of
a few hundred wandering Red Indians. The conception of a federated
world system carries with it the idea that all the land and sea of
the world, all the natural resources of the world, animal, vegetable
or mineral, belong to all the people of the world, and that any
assignation, reservation, mandate or monopolisation of this or that
region is entirely a temporary arrangement to be superseded by that
inevitable world control. The British “Empire” in respect to this class
of possession is, therefore, in the position of a trustee for an unborn
but inevitable heir. Any Federation of Peoples or League of Nations or
whatnot that really undertakes the organisation of a world peace must,
as a necessary function, inherit all the overseas and alien possessions
that are not yet capable of an intelligent participation in world
government, whether they are now “owned” by Great Britain or by any
other State in the world.
In any world federation that may arise in the course of the next
century or so, the English-speaking communities, which already number
over two hundred million people, must necessarily play a leading
part. How far it will be the leading part, depends very much upon the
educational and general creative energy of these communities during
the years immediately before us and upon their power of casting aside
crippling prejudices and outworn ideas.
It needs no impossible effort to make the English language even now
the _lingua franca_ of India and China, and the creative imagination
embodied in English literature a fertilising power throughout the
earth. If I as a consistent republican find little joy in being
a subject of a King-Emperor, and if I find much of our British
Imperialism repulsively base, narrow, short-sighted and suicidal, that
is rather because I overestimate than underestimate the share that our
English language and civilisation and peoples may play in the future of
mankind.
IX
WINSTON
10.11.23
In this tragic and confused world it has been my undeserved lot to
lead an amused life. All sorts of bright and entertaining and likeable
things have been given me and paraded before me. And among others is my
friend, Mr. Winston Churchill: not the American Winston but the British
Winston. Our relations are relations of intermittent but I trust
affectionate controversy. We had a great slanging match some years ago
about Russia, and if I remember rightly Mr. Churchill took the count.
That is my pleasant impression of the affair. His may be different,
of course. Then, in a little book called _Men Like Gods_, one of the
characters got out of my control and began to speak and act in a way
so like Mr. Churchill’s that even I could see the resemblance. I was
shocked and alarmed. I had to stun that character and hustle it out of
the way, but not before it had made a long characteristic speech and
started a war....
Now Mr. Churchill has taken the opportunity afforded by an article
I wrote about the British Empire for the British _Empire Review_
to open up a fight again. My article, more or less abbreviated,
in some cases shorn of its chief arguments, and adorned with the
unsolicited crossheads so dear to editors of spirit, has been
extensively syndicated in America, and will no doubt be followed
round the earth by flying fragments of his reply. It is a spirited
and amusing reply. He calls me Citizen Hoopdriver, which is a fair
return for the misbehaviour of my fictitious character, and he laments
my discursiveness because I will not stick to my proper occupation
of imaginative fiction--which from a gentleman much younger than
myself who has danced in turn through Admiralty, War Office, Munitions
Ministry, Air Ministry, Colonies and Board of Trade, who has been
a brilliant cavalry officer and a still more brilliant newspaper
correspondent, who has written eight or nine large but entertaining
books and painted some excellent pictures, is pretty considerable
cheek. But let that pass.
My original article on the British Empire which appeared in the _Empire
Review_ pointed out things that are manifest to everyone but the most
besotted Imperialist; that the present British Empire is a thing of
yesterday, that it is excessively unstable, and that it is bound to
undergo great changes and reconstructions in the near future. An
Imperial Conference has been struggling in London with the most urgent
aspects of these pressing changes. And I should have thought that
anyone above the level of a patriotic schoolboy would have seen that
any rational constructive change must be in the direction of knitting
up the sprawling British system with its kindred civilisations, and
especially with the United States of America, in some form of mutual
support and co-operation. But Mr. Churchill, regardless of the article
he is pretending to criticise, and of all my attacks on the present
League of Nations, pretends that I want to put the British Empire
forthwith under a world federation upon which Belgians, Chinese,
Peruvians, Hottentots, and so forth are to be in a crushing majority.
“In this sublime conception,” he writes in his caustic way, “the
British inheritance accumulated by the thrift and effort of so many
centuries would be liquidated and generously shared with all nations.”
Now this is the poorest of platform nonsense. It is not only nonsense
about my proposals, but nonsense about the Empire. The sooner we clear
our minds of such cant about thrift and age-long development the
better. Putting it as gently as possible, the present British Empire
is not an inheritance but a series of--shall we say acquisitions?--and
mostly very recent acquisitions. What is the good of canting in the
face of facts? We didn’t save up India; Australia wasn’t the reward of
abstinence.
The British Empire of a hundred years ago was a mere set of scattered
trading-stations and a bit of the present Indian Empire. The present
British Empire has been assembled by means of the ocean-going steamship
and the railway in the last hundred years, and much of it in the last
fifty. Beside the Dutch colonial empire it is a thing of yesterday.
The steamship made it and maintains it. It is cemented by steamships.
If the steamship is presently superseded by the air-liner the British
Empire will become like a wall whose mortar has decayed. But Mr.
Churchill will hear nothing of new buttresses and sounder binding for
this adventitious band of States.
He goes on to a denunciation of my republicanism. Ignoring steamships,
banking, Imperial Preference, and a common language, he declares the
only sure link of the Empire is “the golden circle of an ancient
crown.” I would hate to say anything in detraction of a devoted and
indefatigable royal family, but I do not believe that there is any
effective imperial binding force in the cult of snobbery and sentiment,
of which its members are at once the divinities and the sacrificial
victims. The healthy natural man is a republican, and has a stiff
backbone. Nobody really loves or respects a courtier. One of the chief
troubles in the Irish settlement has been the excessive distaste of
many Irishmen for the forms of royalty. One of the chief barriers
between the British and closer co-operation with America is this
king-business. The true cement of our communities must be the sense of
equal brotherhood and common aims.
After that Mr. Churchill lapses into sheer naughtiness. There are
times when the evil spirit comes upon him and when I can think of
him only as a very intractable little boy, a mischievous, dangerous
little boy, a knee-worthy little boy. Only by thinking of him in that
way can one go on liking him. Suddenly he breaks out about Russia, and
I am reminded that he has been one of the chief afflictions of that
unfortunate country, that he was largely responsible for the waste
of scores of million pounds of British money, in arming first one
brigand chief and then another to attack and further devastate our
war-exhausted ally.
He is still unrepentant. He declares that I was a passionate and am now
a disappointed pro-Bolshevik, although I have always been an austere
critic and witness of Bolshevik incompetence and unpracticalness. But I
have also borne my witness to the fact that the Bolshevik leaders are
mainly honest men, fighting against stupendous difficulties and leading
hard lives, and that the Russian people would far rather have them as
its rulers than any of the vicious, plundering, pogromming White Hopes
and Czarist reactionaries patronised by Mr. Churchill. These Russians
have fought against tremendous difficulties against invading Japanese,
Poles, Esthonians, French-subsidised invaders and British-subsidised
invaders, and against famine and a pitiless blockade, and against their
own ignorance and the atrociously rough and cruel legacy of Czarism,
and it seems as if after all they will pull through and lay the
foundations of a renascent Russia.
And this is the handful of mud this English statesman hurls at the
struggling rulers of this great land with which we are at peace. “They
are just a selfish, plundering crew of tyrants and parasites who
descended upon an unhappy land and enslaved or slaughtered its people,
soiled its honour, ruined its prosperity, devoured its substance, and
enriched themselves and their female belongings.”
That about the “female belongings” isn’t at all the little gentleman.
It is not even honest abuse. He knows better. Indeed, we all know
better, and why Mr. Churchill keeps up this sort of thing defeats my
imagination. Russia is a strained and needy country to-day, but it is
bleakly moral; for a time there was no prostitution at all there, and
probably even to-day there is less prostitution in Russia than in any
other country in the world; the age when getting rich and “feminine
belongings” played a large part in its affairs ended with Rasputin and
the Czardom. But Mr. Churchill has assumed this attitude of vehement
hostility to the present Russian Government, and he persists in it with
puerile obstinacy, while that great country passes slowly out of the
shadows he helped to darken into the dawn of a new age.
X
THE OTHER SIDE IN FRANCE
17.11.23
In several recent articles I have been girding at France, at the
destructive egotism of France, at the relentless political cruelty of
France. Let me now look at France from another aspect.
Many of us, I suspect, are excessively bitter with France just now
because we love France. We are angry because we are jealous about her.
She has seen fit to embody herself in the dull, relentless Poincaré;
she has set her face like flint harshly and pitilessly against the
recovery and peace of Europe, and it is more than we can endure.
A few months ago I made a little tour in Europe, and outside the
boundaries of France everywhere I found the name of France the name
of division and mischief. The mark had not yet reached its final
degradation, but I went about in a very miserable Germany. Every
attempt that Germany made to get to her feet and breathe was met by
a thrust that sent her back into the black waters that are drowning
her. It was natural for Germany to be resentful. But in the farther
countries, also, resentment smouldered; they were carrying great
armies--the Czech Army is now greater than the British--they were
subjected to a propaganda of an intense and dangerous nationalism,
their future was dark with war possibilities, and it was all the work
of France. I came back to France through a Europe dying of entangled
nationalist policies, and my heart was very black against France.
I went about Paris for some days astonished to see that it did not look
consciously wicked. After all--much as I love my native London and
much as I delight in the tall vigour of New York--Paris is the Queen
of Cities, so gracious and so fine, so hospitably friendly and yet so
little meretricious in her quality. I met French friends and talked
with them abundantly. I went into Burgundy and into Touraine to meet
old friends and new ones, and gradually my nightmare conception of
France as an evil spider, stretching its poison claws all over Europe,
was mitigated.
That spider is there. It is the old spider of French foreign policy
that has lived on through revolutions and empires since the days of
the Grand Monarch, but within its limbs it holds so great a literary
man as Anatole France, so modern and bold an adventurer in statecraft
as Joseph Caillaux, so gentle and sincere a liberalism as that of the
gatherings of the Abbaye de Pontigny, and, indeed, a whole inarticulate
France of thought, doubt, and righteous intention. It is a France that
may at any time thrust Poincaré aside and break through to speech and
action and become _the_ France. It is an essential and leading part of
that world-wide republic of reasonable men which may yet save the world.
I wanted very much to look at and talk to M. Joseph Caillaux. He has
always interested me deeply. I had to make a four-hour automobile
journey to see him. I went past Chartres Cathedral, and the roads were
gay with blue flowers. He is living in his pleasant house and garden
in a little brown and white and green provincial town, and there he
is stifled and silenced. He may not go within a hundred kilometres of
Paris, nor may he go abroad. What he has got to say is not reported
in the Press. Only by way of the bookshop can he get anything through
to the public. Imagine our British Foreign Office sending my Lord
Rothermere into exile and original authorship at Llandrindod Wells or
Matlock on account of his interference with its policy! Imagine Mr.
Lloyd George or Lord Birkenhead restrained from excursions to America,
and deprived altogether of reverberation!
I lunched with M. and Madame Caillaux and some pleasant neighbours,
and we talked of books and flowers and such-like agreeable topics. We
exchanged telegraphic greetings with M. Anatole France, whom I had
hoped to meet there. M. Caillaux, I learnt incidentally, can take walks
and play tennis, but he may not go shooting. He is far too dangerous a
man, the French Government thinks, to be entrusted with a shot-gun.