If beneath the alliances of the present war there is to grow up a system
of enduring understandings that will lead to the peace of the world,
there is needed as a basis for such understandings much greater facility
of intellectual intercourse than exists at present. Firstly, the world
needs a _lingua franca_; next, the Western peoples need to know more of
the Russian language and life than they do, and thirdly, the English
language needs to be made more easily accessible than it is at present.
The chief obstacle to a Frenchman or Englishman learning Russian is the
difficult and confusing alphabet; the chief obstacle to anyone learning
English is the irrational spelling. Are people likely to overcome these
very serious difficulties in the future, and, if so, how will they do
it? And what prospects are there of a _lingua franca_?
Wherever one looks closely into the causes and determining influences of
the great convulsions of this time, one is more and more impressed by
the apparent smallness of the ultimate directing influence. It seems to
me at least that it is a practically proven thing that this vast
aggression of Germany is to be traced back to a general tone of court
thinking and discussion in the Prussia of the eighteenth century, to
the theories of a few professors and the gathering trend of German
education in a certain direction. It seems to me that similarly the
language teachers of to-day and to-morrow may hold in their hands the
seeds of gigantic international developments in the future.
It is not a question of the skill or devotion of individual teachers so
much as of the possibility of organising them upon a grand scale. An
individual teacher must necessarily use the ordinary books and ordinary
spelling and type of the language in which he is giving instruction; he
may get a few elementary instruction books from a private publisher,
specially printed for teaching purposes, but very speedily he finds
himself obliged to go to the current printed matter. This, as I will
immediately show, bars the most rapid and fruitful method of teaching.
And in this as in most affairs, private enterprise, the individualistic
system, shows itself a failure. In England, for example, the choice of
Russian lesson books is poor and unsatisfactory, and there is either no
serviceable Russian-English, English-Russian school dictionary in
existence, or it is published so badly as to be beyond the range of my
inquiries. But a state, or a group of universities, or even a rich
private association such as far-seeing American, French and British
business men might be reasonably expected to form, could attack the
problem of teaching a language in an altogether different fashion.
The difficulty in teaching English lies in the inconsistency of the
spelling, and the consequent difficulties of pronunciation. If there
were available an ample series of text-books, reading books, and books
of general interest, done in a consistent phonetic type and spelling--in
which the value of the letters of the phonetic system followed as far as
possible the prevalent usage in Europe--the difficulty in teaching
English not merely to foreigners but, as the experiments in teaching
reading of the Simplified Spelling Society have proved up to the hilt,
to English children can be very greatly reduced. At first the difficulty
of the irrational spelling can be set on one side. The learner attacks
and masters the essential language. Then afterwards he can, if he likes,
go on to the orthodox spelling, which is then no harder for him to read
and master than it is for an Englishman of ordinary education to read
the facetious orthography of Artemus Ward or of the _Westminster
Gazette_ "orfis boy." The learner does one thing at a time instead of
attempting, as he would otherwise have to do, two things--and they are
both difficult and different and conflicting things--simultaneously.
Learning a language is one thing and memorising an illogical system of
visual images--for that is what reading ordinary English spelling comes
to--is quite another. A man can learn to play first chess and then
bridge in half the time that these two games would require if he began
by attempting simultaneous play, and exactly the same principle applies
to the language problem.
These considerations lead on to the idea of a special development or
sub-species of the English language for elementary teaching and foreign
consumption. It would be English, very slightly simplified and
regularised, and phonetically spelt. Let us call it Anglo-American. In
it the propagandist power, whatever that power might be, state,
university or association, would print not simply, instruction books but
a literature of cheap editions. Such a specialised simplified
Anglo-American variety of English would enormously stimulate the already
wide diffusion of the language, and go far to establish it as that
_lingua franca_ of which the world has need.
And in the same way, the phonetic alphabet adopted as the English medium
could be used as the medium for instruction in French, where, as in the
British Isles, Canada, North and Central Africa, and large regions of
the East, it is desirable to make an English-speaking community
bi-lingual. At present a book in French means nothing to an uninstructed
Englishman, an English book conveys no accurate sound images to an
uninstructed Frenchman. On the other hand, a French book printed on a
proper phonetic system could be immediately read aloud--though of course
it could not be understood--by an uninstructed Englishman. From the
first he would have no difficulties with the sounds. And vice versa.
Such a system of books would mean the destruction of what are, for great
masses of French and English people, insurmountable difficulties on the
way to bi-lingualism. Its production is a task all too colossal for any
private publishers or teachers, but it is a task altogether trivial in
comparison with the national value of its consequences. But whether it
will ever be carried out is just one of those riddles of the jumping cat
in the human brain that are most perplexing to the prophet.
The problem becomes at once graver, less hopeful, and more urgent when
we take up the case of Russian. I have looked closely into this business
of Russian teaching, and I am convinced that only a very, very small
number of French-and English-speaking people are going to master Russian
under the existing conditions of instruction. If we Westerns want to get
at Russia in good earnest we must take up this Russian language problem
with an imaginative courage and upon a scale of which at present I see
no signs. If we do not, then the Belgians, French, Americans and English
will be doing business in Russia after the war in the German
language--or through a friendly German interpreter. That, I am afraid,
is the probability of the case. But it need not be the case. Will and
intelligence could alter all that.
What has to be done is to have Russian taught at first in a Western
phonetic type. Then it becomes a language not very much more difficult
to acquire than, say, German by a Frenchman. When the learner can talk
with some freedom, has a fairly full vocabulary, a phraseology, knows
his verb and so on, then and then only should he take up the unfamiliar
and confusing set of visual images of Russian lettering--I speak from
the point of view of those who read the Latin alphabet. How confusing it
may be only those who have tried it can tell. Its familiarity to the eye
increases the difficulty; totally unfamiliar forms would be easier to
learn. The Frenchman or Englishman is confronted with
COP;
the sound of that is
SAR!
For those who learn languages, as so many people do nowadays, by visual
images, there will always be an undercurrent toward saying "COP." The
mind plunges hopelessly through that tangle to the elements of a speech
which is as yet unknown.
Nevertheless almost all the instruction in Russian of which I can get an
account begins with the alphabet, and must, I suppose, begin with the
alphabet until teachers have a suitably printed set of instruction books
to enable them to take the better line. One school teacher I know, in a
public school, devoted the entire first term, the third of a year, to
the alphabet. At the end he was still dissatisfied with the progress of
his pupils. He gave them Russian words, of course, words of which they
knew nothing--in Russian characters. It was too much for them to take
hold of at one and the same time. He did not even think of teaching them
to write French and English words in the strange lettering. He did not
attempt to write his Russian in Latin letters. He was apparently
ignorant of any system of transliteration, and he did nothing to
mitigate the impossible task before him. At the end of the term most of
his pupils gave up the hopeless effort. It is not too much to say that
for a great number of "visualising" people, the double effort at the
outset of Russian is entirely too much. It stops them altogether. But to
almost anyone it is possible to learn Russian if at first it is
presented in a lettering that gives no trouble.
If I found myself obliged to learn Russian urgently, I would get some
accepted system of transliteration, carefully transcribe every word of
Russian in my text-book into the Latin characters, and learn the
elements of the language from my manuscript. A year or so ago I made a
brief visit to Russia with a "Russian Self-Taught" in my pocket. Nothing
sticks, nothing ever did stick of that self-taught Russian except the
words that I learnt in Latin type. Those I remember as I remember all
words, as groups of Latin letters. I learnt to count, for example, up to
a hundred. The other day I failed to recognise the Russian word for
eleven in Russian characters until I had spelt it out. Then I said, "Oh,
of course!" But I knew it when I heard it.
I write of these things from the point of view of the keen learner. Some
Russian teachers will be found to agree with me; others will not. It is
a paradox in the psychology of the teacher that few teachers are willing
to adopt "slick" methods of teaching; they hate cutting corners far more
than they hate obstacles, because their interest is in the teaching and
not in the "getting there." But what we learners want is not an
exquisite, rare knowledge of particulars, we do not want to spend an
hour upon Russian needlessly; we want to get there as quickly and
effectively as possible. And for that, transliterated books are
essential.
Now these may seem small details in the learning of languages, mere
schoolmasters' gossip, but the consequences are on the continental
scale. The want of these national text-books and readers is a great gulf
between Russia and her Allies; _it is a greater gulf than the
profoundest political misunderstanding could be_. We cannot get at them
to talk plainly to them, and they cannot get at us to talk plainly to
us. A narrow bridge of interpreters is our only link with the Russian
mind. And many of those interpreters are of a race which is for very
good reasons hostile to Russia. An abundant cheap supply, firstly, of
English and French books, _in_ English and French, but in the Russian
character, by means of which Russians may rapidly learn French and
English--for it is quite a fable that these languages are known and used
in Russia below the level of the court and aristocracy--and, secondly,
of Russian books in the Latin (or some easy phonetic development of the
Latin) type, will do more to facilitate interchange and intercourse
between Russia and France, America and Britain, and so consolidate the
present alliance than almost any other single thing. But that supply
will not be a paying thing to provide; if it is left to publishers or
private language teachers or any form of private enterprise it will
never be provided. It is a necessary public undertaking.
But because a thing is necessary it does not follow that it will be
achieved. Bread may be necessary to a starving man, but there is always
the alternative that he will starve. France, which is most accessible to
creative ideas, is least interested in this particular matter. Great
Britain is still heavily conservative. It is idle to ignore the forces
still entrenched in the established church, in the universities and the
great schools, that stand for an irrational resistance to all new
things. American universities are comparatively youthful and sometimes
quite surprisingly innovating, and America is the country of the
adventurous millionaire. There has been evidence in several American
papers that have reached me recently of a disposition to get ahead with
Russia and cut out the Germans (and incidentally the British). Amidst
the cross-currents and overlappings of this extraordinary time, it seems
to me highly probable that America may lead in this vitally important
effort to promote international understanding.
XI. "THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN"
One of the most curious aspects of the British "Pacifist" is his
willingness to give over great blocks of the black and coloured races to
the Hohenzollerns to exploit and experiment upon. I myself being
something of a pacifist, and doing what I can, in my corner, to bring
about the Peace of the World, the Peace of the World triumphant and
armed against every disturber, could the more readily sympathise with
the passive school of Pacifists if its proposals involved the idea that
England should keep to England and Germany to Germany. My political
ideal is the United States of the World, a union of states whose state
boundaries are determined by what I have defined as the natural map of
mankind. I cannot understand those pacifists who talk about the German
right to "expansion," and babble about a return of her justly lost
colonies. That seems to me not pacificism but patriotic inversion. This
large disposition to hand over our fellow-creatures to a Teutonic
educational system, with "frightfulness" in reserve, to "efficiency" on
Wittenberg lines, leaves me--hot. The ghosts of the thirst-tormented
Hereros rise up in their thousands from the African dust, protesting.
This talk of "legitimate expansion" is indeed now only an exploiter's
cant. The age of "expansion," the age of European "empires" is near its
end. No one who can read the signs of the times in Japan, in India, in
China, can doubt it. It ended in America a hundred years ago; it is
ending now in Asia; it will end last in Africa, and even in Africa the
end draws near. Spain has but led the way which other "empires" must
follow. Look at her empire in the atlases of 1800. She fell down the
steps violently and painfully, it is true--but they are difficult to
descend. No sane man, German or anti-German, who has weighed the
prospects of the new age, will be desirous of a restoration of the now
vanished German colonial empire, vindictive, intriguing, and
unscrupulous, a mere series of centres of attack upon adjacent
territory, to complicate the immense disentanglements and readjustments
that lie already before the French and British and Italians.
Directly we discuss the problem of the absolutely necessary permanent
alliance that this war has forced upon at least France, Belgium,
Britain and Russia, this problem of the "empires" faces us. What are
these Allies going to do about their "subject races"? What is the world
going to do about the "subject races"? It is a matter in which the
"subject races" are likely to have an increasingly important voice of
their own. We Europeans may discuss their fate to-day among ourselves;
we shall be discussing it with them to-morrow. If we do not agree with
them then, they will take their fates in their own hands in spite of us.
Long before A.D. 2100 there will be no such thing as a "subject race" in
all the world.
Here again we find ourselves asking just that same difficult question of
more or less, that arises at every cardinal point of our review of the
probable future. How far is this thing going to be done finely; how far
is it going to be done cunningly and basely? How far will greatness of
mind, how far will imaginative generosity, prevail over the jealous and
pettifogging spirit that lurks in every human being? Are French and
British and Belgians and Italians, for example, going to help each other
in Africa, or are they going to work against and cheat each other? Is
the Russian seeking only a necessary outlet to the seas of the world,
or has he dreams of Delhi? Here again, as in all these questions,
personal idiosyncrasy comes in; I am strongly disposed to trust the good
in the Russian.
But apart from this uncertain question of generosity, there are in this
case two powerful forces that make against disputes, secret
disloyalties, and meanness. One is that Germany will certainly be still
dangerous at the end of the war, and the second is that the gap in
education, in efficiency, in national feeling and courage of outlook,
between the European and the great Asiatic and African communities, is
rapidly diminishing. If the Europeans squabble much more for world
ascendancy, there will be no world ascendancy for them to squabble for.
We have still no means of measuring the relative enfeeblement of Europe
in comparison with Asia already produced by this war. As it is, certain
things are so inevitable--the integration of a modernised Bengal, of
China, and of Egypt, for example--that the question before us is
practically reduced to whether this restoration of the subject peoples
will be done with the European's aid and goodwill, or whether it will be
done against him. That it will be done in some manner or other is
certain.
The days of suppression are over. They know it in every country where
white and brown and yellow mingle. If the Pledged Allies are not
disposed to let in light to their subject peoples and prepare for the
days of world equality that are coming, the Germans will. If the Germans
fail to be the most enslaving of people, they may become the most
liberating. They will set themselves, with their characteristic
thoroughness, to destroy that magic "prestige" which in Asia
particularly is the clue to the miracle of European ascendancy. In the
long run that may prove no ill service to mankind. The European must
prepare to make himself acceptable in Asia, to state his case to Asia
and be understood by Asia, or to leave Asia. That is the blunt reality
of the Asiatic situation.
It has already been pointed out in these chapters that if the alliance
of the Pledged Allies is indeed to be permanent, it implies something in
the nature of a Zollverein, a common policy towards the rest of the
world and an arrangement involving a common control over the
dependencies of all the Allies. It will be interesting, now that we have
sketched a possible map of Europe after the war, to look a little more
closely into the nature of the "empires" concerned, and to attempt a few
broad details of the probable map of the Eastern hemisphere outside
Europe in the years immediately to come.
Now there are, roughly speaking, three types of overseas "possessions."
They may be either (1) territory that was originally practically
unoccupied and that was settled by the imperial people, or (2) territory
with a barbaric population having no national idea, or (3) conquered
states. In the case of the British Empire all three are present; in the
case of the French only the second and third; in the case of the Russian
only the first and third. Each of these types must necessarily follow
its own system of developments. Take first those territories originally
but thinly occupied, or not occupied at all, of which all or at least
the dominant element of the population is akin to that of the "home
country." These used to be called by the British "colonies"--though the
"colonies" of Greece and Rome were really only garrison cities settled
in foreign lands--and they are now being rechristened "Dominions."
Australia, for instance, is a British Dominion, and Siberia and most of
Russia in Asia, a Russian Dominion. Their manifest destiny is for their
children to become equal citizens with the cousins and brothers they
have left at home.
There has been much discussion in England during the last decade upon
some modification of the British legislature that would admit
representatives from the Dominions to a proportional share in the
government of the Empire. The problem has been complicated by the
unsettled status of Ireland and the mischief-making Tories there, and by
the perplexities arising out of those British dependencies of
non-British race--the Indian states, for example, whose interests are
sometimes in conflict with those of the Dominions.
The attractiveness of the idea of an Imperial legislature is chiefly on
the surface, and I have very strong doubts of its realisability. These
Dominions seem rather to tend to become independent and distinct
sovereign states in close and affectionate alliance with Great Britain,
and having a common interest in the British Navy. In many ways the
interests of the Dominions are more divergent from those of Great
Britain than are Great Britain and Russia, or Great Britain and France.
Many of the interests of Canada are more closely bound to those of the
United States than they are to those of Australasia, in such a matter as
the maintenance of the Monroe Principle, for example. South Africa again
takes a line with regard to British Indian subjects which is highly
embarrassing to Great Britain. There is a tendency in all the British
colonies to read American books and periodicals rather than British, if
for no other reason than because their common life, life in a newish and
very democratic land, is much more American than British in character.
On the other hand, one must remember that Great Britain has European
interests--the integrity of Holland and Belgium is a case in
point--which are much closer to the interests of France than they are to
those of the younger Britains beyond the seas. A voice in an Alliance
that included France and the United States, and had its chief common
interest in the control of the seas, may in the future seem far more
desirable to these great and growing English-speaking Dominions than the
sending of representatives to an Imperial House of Lords at Westminster,
and the adornment of elderly colonial politicians with titles and
decorations at Buckingham Palace.
I think Great Britain and her Allies have all of them to prepare their
minds for a certain release of their grip upon their "possessions," if
they wish to build up a larger unity; I do not see that any secure
unanimity of purpose is possible without such releases and
readjustments.
Now the next class of foreign "possession" is that in which the French
and Belgians and Italians are most interested. Britain also has
possessions of this type in Central Africa and the less civilised
districts of India, but Russia has scarcely anything of the sort. In
this second class of possession the population is numerous, barbaric,
and incapable of any large or enduring political structure, and over its
destinies rule a small minority of European administrators.
The greatest of this series of possessions are those in black Africa.
The French imagination has taken a very strong hold of the idea of a
great French-speaking West and Central Africa, with which the ordinary
British citizen will only too gladly see the conquered German colonies
incorporated. The Italians have a parallel field of development in the
hinterland of Tripoli. Side by side, France, Belgium and Italy, no
longer troubled by hostile intrigues, may very well set themselves in
the future to the task of building up a congenial Latin civilisation out
of the tribal confusions of these vast regions. They will, I am
convinced, do far better than the English in this domain. The
English-speaking peoples have been perhaps the most successful
_settlers_ in the world; the United States and the Dominions are there
to prove it; only the Russians in Siberia can compare with them; but as
administrators the British are a race coldly aloof. They have nothing to
give a black people, and no disposition to give.
The Latin-speaking peoples, the Mediterranean nations, on the other
hand, have proved to be the most successful _assimilators_ of other
races that mankind has ever known. Alexandre Dumas is not the least of
the glories of France. In a hundred years' time black Africa, west of
Tripoli, from Oran to Rhodesia, will, I believe, talk French. And what
does not speak French will speak the closely related Italian. I do not
see why this Latin black culture should not extend across equatorial
Africa to meet the Indian influence at the coast, and reach out to join
hands with Madagascar. I do not see why the British flag should be any
impediment to the Latinisation of tropical Africa or to the natural
extension of the French and Italian languages through Egypt. I guess,
however, that it will be an Islamic and not a Christian cult that will
be talking Italian and French. For the French-speaking civilisation will
make roads not only for French, Belgians, and Italians, but for the
Arabs whose religion and culture already lie like a net over black
Africa. No other peoples and no other religion can so conveniently give
the negro what is needed to bring him into the comity of civilised
peoples....
A few words of digression upon the future of Islam may not be out of
place here. The idea of a militant Christendom has vanished from the
world. The last pretensions of Christian propaganda have been buried in
the Balkan trenches. A unification of Africa under Latin auspices
carries with it now no threat of missionary invasion. Africa will be a
fair field for all religions, and the religion to which the negro will
take will be the religion that best suits his needs. That religion, we
are told by nearly everyone who has a right to speak upon such
questions, is Islam, and its natural propagandist is the Arab. There is
no reason why he should not be a Frenchified Arab.
Both the French and the British have the strongest interest in the
revival of Arabic culture. Let the German learn Turkish if it pleases
him. Through all Africa and Western Asia there is a great to-morrow for
a renascent Islam under Arab auspices. Constantinople, that venal city
of the waterways, sitting like Asenath at the ford, has corrupted all
who came to her; she has been the paralysis of Islam. But the Islam of
the Turk is a different thing from the Islam of the Arab. That was one
of the great progressive impulses in the world of men. It is our custom
to underrate the Arab's contribution to civilisation quite absurdly in
comparison with our debt to the Hebrew and Greek. It is to the
initiatives of Islamic culture, for example, that we owe our numerals,
the bulk of modern mathematics, and the science of chemistry. The
British have already set themselves to the establishment of Islamic
university teaching in Egypt, but that is the mere first stroke of the
pick at the opening of the mine. English, French, Russian, Arabic,
Hindustani, Spanish, Italian; these are the great world languages that
most concern the future of civilisation from the point of view of the
Peace Alliance that impends. No country can afford to neglect any of
those languages, but as a matter of primary importance I would say, for
the British, Hindustani, for the Americans, Russian or Spanish, for the
French and Belgians and Italians, Arabic. These are the directions in
which the duty of understanding is most urgent for each of these
peoples, and the path of opportunity plainest.
The disposition to underrate temporarily depressed nations, races, and
cultures is a most irrational, prevalent, and mischievous form of
stupidity. It distorts our entire outlook towards the future. The
British reader can see its absurdity most easily when he reads the
ravings of some patriotic German upon the superiority of the "Teuton"
over the Italians and Greeks--to whom we owe most things of importance
in European civilisation. Equally silly stuff is still to be read in
British and American books about "Asiatics." And was there not some
fearful rubbish, not only in German but in English and French, about the
"decadence" of France? But we are learning--rapidly. When I was a
student in London thirty years ago we regarded Japan as a fantastic
joke; the comic opera, _The Mikado_, still preserves that foolish phase
for the admiration of posterity. And to-day there is a quite
unjustifiable tendency to ignore the quality of the Arab and of his
religion. Islam is an open-air religion, noble and simple in its broad
conceptions; it is none the less vital from Nigeria to China because it
has sickened in the closeness of Constantinople. The French, the
Italians, the British have to reckon with Islam and the Arab; where the
continental deserts are, there the Arabs are and there is Islam; their
culture will never be destroyed and replaced over these regions by
Europeanism. The Allies who prepare the Peace of the World have to make
their peace with that. And when I foreshadow this necessary liaison of
the French and Arabic cultures, I am thinking not only of the Arab that
is, but of the Arab that is to come. The whole trend of events in Asia
Minor, the breaking up and decapitation of the Ottoman Empire and the
Euphrates invasion, points to a great revival of Mesopotamia--at first
under European direction. The vast system of irrigation that was
destroyed by the Mongol armies of Hulugu in the thirteenth century will
be restored; the desert will again become populous. But the local type
will prevail. The new population of Mesopotamia will be neither European
nor Indian; it will be Arabic; and with its concentration Arabic will
lay hold of the printing press. A new intellectual movement in Islam, a
renascent Bagdad, is as inevitable as is 1950.
I have, however, gone a little beyond the discussion of the future of
the barbaric possessions in these anticipations of an Arabic
co-operation with the Latin peoples in the reconstruction of Western
Asia and the barbaric regions of north and central Africa. But regions
of administered barbarism occur not only in Africa. The point is that
they are administered, and that their economic development is very
largely in the hands, and will for many generations remain in the hands,
of the possessing country. Hitherto their administration has been in
the interests of the possessing nation alone. Their acquisition has been
a matter of bitter rivalries, their continued administration upon
exclusive lines is bound to lead to dangerous clashings. The common
sense of the situation points to a policy of give and take, in which
throughout the possessions of all the Pledged Allies, the citizens of
all will have more or less equal civil advantages. And this means some
consolidation of the general control of those Administered Territories.
I have already hinted at the possibility that the now exclusively
British navy may some day be a world-navy controlled by an Admiralty
representing a group of allies, Australasia, Canada, Britain and, it may
be, France and Russia and the United States. To those who know how
detached the British Admiralty is at the present time from the general
methods of British political life, there will be nothing strange in this
idea of its completer detachment. Its personnel does to a large extent
constitute a class apart. It takes its boys out of the general life very
often before they have got to their fourteenth birthday. It is not so
closely linked up with specific British social elements, with political
parties and the general educational system, as are the rest of the
national services.
There is nothing so very fantastic in this idea of a sort of
World-Admiralty; it is not even completely novel. Such bodies as the
Knights Templars transcended nationality in the Middle Ages. I do not
see how some such synthetic control of the seas is to be avoided in the
future. And now coming back to the "White Man's Burthen," is there not a
possibility that such a board of marine and international control as the
naval and international problems of the future may produce (or some
closely parallel body with a stronger Latin element), would also be
capable of dealing with these barbaric "Administered Territories"? A day
may come when Tripoli, Nigeria, the French and the Belgian Congo will be
all under one supreme control. We may be laying the foundations of such
a system to-day unawares. The unstable and fluctuating conferences of
the Allies to-day, their repeated experiences of the disadvantages of
evanescent and discontinuous co-ordinations, may press them almost
unconsciously toward this building up of things greater than they know.
We come now to the third and most difficult type of overseas
"possessions." These are the annexed or conquered regions with settled
populations already having a national tradition and culture of their
own. They are, to put it bluntly, the suppressed, the overlaid,
nations. Now I am a writer rather prejudiced against the idea of
nationality; my habit of thought is cosmopolitan; I hate and despise a
shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me
in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother
though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose.
But I have to recognise the facts of the case. In spite of all my large
liberality, I find it less irritating to be ruled by people of my own
language and race and tradition, and I perceive that for the mass of
people alien rule is intolerable.
Local difference, nationality, is a very obstinate thing. Every country
tends to revert to its natural type. Nationality will out. Once a people
has emerged above the barbaric stage to a national consciousness, that
consciousness will endure. There is practically always going to be an
Egypt, a Poland, an Armenia. There is no Indian nation, there never has
been, but there are manifestly a Bengal and a Rajputana, there is
manifestly a constellation of civilised nations in India. Several of
these have literatures and traditions that extend back before the days
when the Britons painted themselves with woad. Let us deal with this
question mainly with reference to India. What is said will apply
equally to Burmah or Egypt or Armenia or--to come back into
Europe--Poland.
Now I have talked, I suppose, with many scores of people about the
future of India, and I have never yet met anyone, Indian or British, who
thought it desirable that the British should evacuate India at once. And
I have never yet met anyone who did not think that ultimately the
British must let the Indian nations control their own destinies. There
are really not two opposite opinions about the destiny of India, but
only differences of opinion as to the length of time in which that
destiny is to be achieved. Many Indians think (and I agree with them)
that India might be a confederation of sovereign states in close
alliance with the British Empire and its allies within the space of
fifty years or so. The opposite extreme was expressed by an old weary
Indian administrator who told me, "Perhaps they may begin to be capable
of self-government in four or five hundred years." These are the extreme
Liberal and the extreme Tory positions in this question. It is a choice
between decades and centuries. There is no denial of the inevitability
of ultimate restoration. No one of any experience believes the British
administration in India is an eternal institution.
There is a great deal of cant in this matter in Great Britain. Genteel
English people with relations in the Indian Civil Service and habits of
self-delusion, believe that Indians are "grateful" for British rule. The
sort of "patriotic" self-flattery that prevailed in the Victorian age,
and which is so closely akin to contemporary German follies, fostered
and cultivated this sweet delusion. There are, no doubt, old ladies in
Germany to-day who believe that Belgium will presently be "grateful" for
the present German administration. Let us clear our minds of such cant.
As a matter of fact no Indians really like British rule or think of it
as anything better than a necessary, temporary evil. Let me put the
parallel case to an Englishman or a Frenchman. Through various political
ineptitudes our country has, we will suppose, fallen under the rule of
the Chinese. They administer it, we will further assume, with an
efficiency and honesty unparalleled in the bad old times of our lawyer
politicians. They do not admit us to the higher branches of the
administration; they go about our country wearing a strange costume,
professing a strange religion--which implies that ours is
wrong--speaking an unfamiliar tongue. They control our financial system
and our economic development--on Chinese lines of the highest merit.
They take the utmost care of our Gothic cathedrals for us. They put our
dearest racial possessions into museums and admire them very much
indeed. They teach our young men to fly kites and eat bird's nest soup.
They do all that a well-bred people can do to conceal their habit and
persuasion of a racial superiority. But they keep up their "prestige."
... You know, we shouldn't love them. It really isn't a question of
whether they rule well or ill, but that the position is against certain
fundamentals of human nature. The only possible footing upon which we
could meet them with comfortable minds would be the footing that we and
they were discussing the terms of the restoration of our country. Then
indeed we might almost feel friendly with them. That is the case with
all civilised "possessions." The only terms upon which educated British
and Indians can meet to-day with any comfort is precisely that. The
living intercourse of the British and Indian mind to-day is the
discussion of the restoration. Everything else is humbug on the one side
and self-deception on the other.
It is idle to speak of the British occupation of India as a conquest or
a robbery. It is a fashion of much "advanced" literature in Europe to
assume that the European rule of various Asiatic countries is the
result of deliberate conquest with a view to spoliation. But that is
only the ugly side of the facts. Cases of the deliberate invasion and
spoliation of one country by another have been very rare in the history
of the last three centuries. There has always been an excuse, and there
has always been a percentage of truth in the excuse. The history of
every country contains phases of political ineptitude in which that
country becomes so misgoverned as to be not only a nuisance to the
foreigner within its borders but a danger to its neighbours. Mexico is
in such a phase to-day. And most of the aggressions and annexations of
the modern period have arisen out of the inconveniences and reasonable
fears caused by such an inept phase. I am a persistent advocate for the
restoration of Poland, but at the same time it is very plain to me that
it is a mere travesty of the facts to say that Poland, was a white lamb
of a country torn to pieces by three wicked neighbours, Poland in the
eighteenth century was a dangerous political muddle, uncertain of her
monarchy, her policy, her affinities. She endangered her neighbours
because there was no guarantee that she might not fall under the
tutelage of one of them and become a weapon against the others.
The division of Poland was an outrage upon the Polish people, but it
was largely dictated by an entirely honest desire to settle a dangerous
possibility. It seemed less injurious than the possibility of a
vacillating, independent Poland playing off one neighbour against
another. That possibility will still be present in the minds of the
diplomatists who will determine the settlement after the war. Until the
Poles make up their minds, and either convince the Russians that they
are on the side of Russia and Bohemia against Germany for evermore, or
the Germans that they are willing to be Posenised, they will live
between two distrustful enemies.
The Poles need to think of the future more and the wrongs of Poland
less. They want less patriotic intrigue and more racial self-respect.
They are not only Poles but members of a greater brotherhood. My
impression is that Poland will "go Slav"--in spite of Cracow. But I am
not sure. I am haunted by the fear that Poland may still find her future
hampered by Poles who are, as people say, "too clever by half." An
incalculable Poland cannot be and will not be tolerated by the rest of
Europe.
And the overspreading of India by the British was in the same way very
clearly done under compulsion, first lest the Dutch or French should
exploit the vast resources of the peninsula against Britain, and then
for fear of a Russian exploitation. I am no apologist for British rule
in India; I think we have neglected vast opportunities there; it was our
business from the outset to build up a free and friendly Indian
confederation, and we have done not a tithe of what we might have done
to that end. But then we have not done a little of what we might have
done for our own country.
Nevertheless we have our case to plead, not only for going to India
but--with the Berlin papers still babbling of Bagdad and beyond[3]--of
sticking there very grimly. And so too the British have a fairly sound
excuse for grabbing Egypt in their fear lest in its phase of political
ineptitude it should be the means of strangling the British Empire as
the Turk in Constantinople has been used to strangle the Russian. None
of these justifications I admit are complete, but all deserve
consideration. It is no good arguing about the finer ethics of the
things that are; the business of sane men is to get things better. The
business of all sane men in all the countries of the Pledged Allies and
in America is manifestly to sink petty jealousies and a suicidal
competitiveness, and to organise co-operation with all the intellectual
forces they can find or develop in the subject countries, to convert
these inept national systems into politically efficient independent
organisations in a world peace alliance. If we fail to do that, then all
the inept states and all the subject states about the world will become
one great field for the sowing of tares by the enemy.
[Footnote 3: This was written late in February, 1916.]
So that with regard to the civilised just as with regard to the barbaric
regions of the "possessions" of the European-centred empires, we come to
the same conclusion. That on the whole the path of safety lies in the
direction of pooling them and of declaring a common policy of
progressive development leading to equality. The pattern of the United
States, in which the procedure is first the annexation of "territories"
and then their elevation to the rank of "States," must, with of course
far more difficulty and complication, be the pattern for the "empires"
of to-day--so far as they are regions of alien population. The path of
the Dominions, settled by emigrants akin to the home population,
Siberia, Canada, and so forth, to equal citizenship with the people of
the Mother Country is by comparison simple and plain.
And so the discussion of the future of the overseas "empires" brings us
again to the same realisation to which the discussion of nearly every
great issue arising out of this war has pointed, the realisation of the
imperative necessity of some great council or conference, some permanent
overriding body, call it what you will, that will deal with things more
broadly than any "nationalism" or "patriotic imperialism" can possibly
do. That body must come into human affairs. Upon the courage and
imagination of living statesmen it depends whether it will come simply
and directly into concrete reality or whether it will materialise slowly
through, it may be, centuries of blood and blundering from such phantom
anticipations as this, anticipations that now haunt the thoughts of all
politically-minded men.
XII. THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS