I propose to offer for consideration some very general views upon the
effects and interaction of the ideas of Race and Religion upon the
political grouping of the population in various countries of Eastern
Europe and of Asia, with the object of showing how they unite and
divide mankind over a great portion of the earth. It will be
understood, I hope, that it is impossible in a brief discussion to go
far or thoroughly over such a wide field. I can only try to indicate
some salient points that may be worth attention.
If we look back upon the ancient world, as it was known to Greece and
to Rome, and as it can be dimly surveyed through the records of
classic antiquity, we find that before the Christian era the
populations were divided and subdivided into races or tribes, with
names signifying a common origin or descent; at any rate some kind of
tribal association. The designation of their country was usually
derived from the name of some dominant race, as Gallia from the Gauls
or Judea from the Jews; indeed I might say, as France from the Franks
or England from the Angles. Religious denominations of any large
community were, I venture to suggest, unknown, at any rate in ancient
Europe. The polytheism of these ages was too local and miscellaneous
to weld together any considerable groups on the basis of a common
worship or belief; for although three great religions then existed,
Buddhism, Hinduism, and the faith of Zoroaster (still represented by
the Parsees), these were confined to Central and Eastern Asia. And,
moreover, these religions had not the missionary spirit; I mean that
they made no vigorous open attempts to spread and gain proselytes,
still less did they use force to convert great multitudes. But after
the Christian era a change came over the face of the Western world.
The Roman empire--that greatest monument of human power, as Dean
Church has called it--began the fusion of races into one vast
political society; its dominion extended continuously from Britain on
the west to Asia Minor and the countries bordering on the Caspian Sea;
it settled the law and language of Southern Europe. The establishment
of the Roman empire is a cardinal epoch of the world's political
history. Then followed two events of immense political importance that
changed the whole aspect and condition of the religious world--the
rise and spread of two powerful missionary and militant religions.
First came Christianity to overspread the lands which the empire had
levelled politically. Islam followed in the seventh century, and the
conflict between these two rival faiths, each claiming universal
spiritual dominion, altered not only the spiritual but also the
temporal order of things in Europe and Western Asia. In Asia the
victorious creed of Mohammed imposed upon immense multitudes a
religious denomination; they became Mussulmans. In Western Europe the
dominion of the Roman empire had by this time fallen to pieces; it was
torn asunder by barbarian invaders; but upon the ruins of that empire
was built up the great Catholic Church of Rome, which gathered
together all races of the West under the common denomination of
Christianity. Beneath the canopies of these two great religions the
primitive grouping of the people survived; throughout Europe there
were no settled kingdoms or nations, but a jumble of races and tribes
contending for land and power. Now we know that in Western Europe this
strife and confusion of the Middle Ages at last ended in the
formation, on a large scale, of separate nationalities, and perhaps we
may take, roughly, the end of the fifteenth century as the period when
the great territorial kingdoms were definitely marked out, and when
the rulers were rounding off their possessions under designations that
may be called national. In these countries the subdivisions according
to race had now lost almost all political significance; but in the
sixteenth century another great disturbing element reappeared. The
great wars of religion again made a fresh division of the people into
two camps of Roman Catholics and Protestants. This ferment has
gradually subsided, and at the present time all minor groups of the
population in Western Europe have been absorbed under large national
designations; the nations are marked off within clearly cut frontiers,
and separated by the paramount distinction of languages. In Western
Europe you do not now define a man by his original race or by his
religion, you ask whose natural-born subject he is, in whose territory
he lives, and you class him accordingly as French, English, Spanish or
Italian.
Now it has been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West
into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to
the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the
earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of
mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My
present object is to lay stress on the importance of realising and
understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion
that this oversight, this neglect of ideas and facts that still have
great strength and vitality, may be connected with the influence, in
France and England, of a certain school of political philosophy that
arose in the eighteenth century, in France. The Encyclopedistes, as
they were called, because their leaders wrote the celebrated French
Encyclopaedia, treated in theory all notions of separate races,
religions, and frontiers as so many barriers against the spread of a
common civilisation, which was to unite all peoples on general
principles of reason, scientific knowledge, and emancipation from
local or national prejudices. As a theory this might not have had much
practical effect; but at the end of the eighteenth century came the
French Revolution, when these philosophical notions took a very
seriously practical shape; for the French Republican armies invaded
the kingdoms of Western Europe with the war-cry of universal
fraternity and equality. Revolutionary France ignored both race and
religion. It proclaimed, De Tocqueville says, above and instead of all
peculiar nationalities, an intellectual citizenship that was intended
to include the people of every country to which it extended,
superseding all distinctions of language, tradition, and national
character. Under Napoleon this fierce impulse of democratic levelling
was transformed into Imperialism: he aimed at restoring an Empire in
the West. But this aroused equally fierce resistance, and when
Napoleon had been beaten down, the national feeling emerged stronger
than ever. The doctrines of the French Encyclopedistes were inherited
by the English school of Utilitarians, led by Bentham and the two
Mills; and John Stuart Mill in particular, declared that one of the
chief obstacles to human improvement was the tendency to regard
difference of race as indelible. In fact, all this school, which had
considerable influence some forty years ago, treated religious and
social distinctions as inconvenient and decaying barriers against
rational progress, or as fictions invented by indolent thinkers to
save themselves the trouble of investigating the true causes that
modify human character.
There is undoubtedly a certain degree of truth underlying this view.
In the settled nationalities of the West these distinctions of race
and religion have a tendency to become unimportant and obsolete for
political purposes, although a glance across the water to Ireland will
remind us that they have by no means disappeared. What I wish to lay
stress upon is the very serious importance of race and religion,
politically, in other parts of the world, and particularly in some
Asiatic countries with which England is closely connected and
concerned. For, in the first place, there has been a notable revival
of the sentiment of race in Eastern Europe. And, secondly, the spread
of European dominion over Asia may be regarded as one of the most
prominent and powerful movements in the politics of the latter half of
the nineteenth century; one which may become the dominant feature of
politics in the twentieth century. It is this movement that is forcing
upon our serious attention the immense practical importance of race
and religion.
The plan which I shall attempt to follow in making a brief survey of
my subject, is to begin with a glance at the political condition of
Central Europe, and to travel rapidly Eastward. In the West, as I have
said, we have compact and permanently established States with national
governments. But as soon as we pass to Central Europe we find the
Austro-Hungarian empire distracted and threatened by internal feuds,
arising out of the contention for ascendency of two races, Germans and
Slavonians, and also out of the demands of the various provinces and
dependencies for political recognition of their separate identities,
founded on claims to represent internal sections or subdivisions of
the two chief races. The Slavonic populations in the north-west of the
empire are parted asunder from those in the south-east by the
Hungarians, who came in from the east, and are of a different stock,
and who have succeeded in establishing the federated kingdom of
Hungary. I will not trouble you with statistical or geographical
details. For my present purpose it is enough to mention that the
subjects of Austria, apart from Hungary, are classed in eight separate
sections, differentiated by separate languages, and that Poles,
Bohemians, Germans, and Italians, are all and each claiming a kind of
home rule within the empire, and show an increasing tendency to group
themselves by distinctions of race. In Bohemia the population is
nearly equally divided between Germans and Slavs, who speak different
languages, have separate schools, and contend violently for political
preponderance. In Moravia and Silesia, where the Slav element is
stronger, the same conflict goes on. In Galicia the contest is between
Poles and Ruthenians, between the Roman Catholic and the Greek
churches. In Hungary proper the Magyars have political predominance,
but the population of German descent and language is more numerous
than the Magyars: in Transylvania, further eastward, the Magyars are
politically overriding the Slav races; in Croatia to the southward a
similar struggle is going on. Throughout every province of the
Austro-Hungarian empire we see the same intermixture of races,
religions, and languages--the more numerous and better united sections
are striving for political ascendency: the weaker sections contend
against them by demanding autonomy. And, as all these various
antipathies and jealousies are represented in the Parliament of the
empire, the peaceful consolidation of the empire into a large national
State is interrupted by resistance under the watchword of separate
nationalities. Religious differences between Roman Catholicism,
Calvinism, and the Greek Church in the Eastern provinces, accentuate
the incoherence. Each separate group takes for its symbol, the
standard round which people rally, a language--German, Polish,
Tcheque, Ruthenian, and so on. They are all being energetically
maintained and jealously preserved in speech and writing in the
schools and the assemblies. Moreover, three different churches, at
least, are rallying their adherents and driving in the wedge of
religious dissension. All these groups go back to the early traditions
and history of the races, they sharpen up old grievances, and oppose
each other vigorously in the Imperial Chamber of Representatives. They
are, in fact, endeavouring to construct an earlier formation of civil
society, and to reverse the order of political amalgamation of small
States into large ones which has been operating for centuries in
Western Europe. In Western Europe the principle of nationalities has
been a method not of disintegration, but of concentration. It has led
within the last fifty years to the establishment of two States of
first-class magnitude, Germany and Italy; and Louis Napoleon, who had
proclaimed the idea of national unification, was ruined by his own
policy, for the Germans destroyed his dynasty, and Italy gave him no
help. But in Austro-Hungary, on the contrary, the movement is not
toward centralisation--it is centrifugal and separatist; and if it
continues to increase in force it may threaten with dissolution an
ancient and powerful empire.
You will observe that since we entered, in our survey, the Austrian
territories, we have found ourselves within the jurisdiction of an
empire in the true sense of that word, which I take to mean the
dominion of one superior sovereignty over many subordinate races,
tribes, or petty States that obey its authority. I may be permitted to
regard the German emperor as the military head of a constitutional
federation, which is a different thing. Now I think it may be said
that from Austria eastward across South-Eastern Europe and Asia, from
Vienna to Pekin, the general form of government is not national but
imperial. Every government is holding together a number of different
groups, all jealous of each other, all of whom would fall apart and
probably fight among themselves, if they were not kept under by one
ruler over them. It may be affirmed, broadly, that the structure of
modern Europe, as represented by the massing of the populations into
great homogeneous nations within fixed limits, has now been completely
left behind in the West, and that from the shores of the Adriatic Sea
right across Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the real subdivisions of the
people, the bonds that unite and separate them into different groups,
are denoted by Race and Religion, sometimes by one, sometimes by the
other, occasionally by both.
Our first step over the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire,
proceeding south-east beyond the Danube and the Carpathian mountains,
brings us into the various principalities and provinces that were once
under the dominion of the Ottoman empire, though almost all of them
are now independent of it. Nearly all of them lie in the region south
of the Danube, which is usually known as the Balkan Peninsula. Here
the complexities of race and religion are abundantly manifest, and
these archaic divisions of political society surround us everywhere.
This region has indeed been parcelled out, within our own time, into
territories of diverse States, but this is quite a modern formation,
and the idea of such political citizenship has been very recently
introduced.
If, now, it is asked why, in this corner of South-Eastern Europe, this
medley of internal distinctions, which was the prevailing
characteristic of the ancient world, has been so long preserved, the
answer is that all this country, the Balkan Peninsula, was under the
direct government of the Ottoman empire up to about seventy years ago,
and that most of the provinces were only liberated from the Turkish
yoke in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The effect of the
long dominion of the Turks over this country had been to perpetuate
the state of things which existed when they first conquered it. Their
policy, the policy of all Asiatic empires, was not to consolidate, or
to obliterate differences produced by race and religion, but to
maintain them in order to rule more securely. And here I may quote
from a book recently published under the title of _Turkey in Europe_,
which is unique of its kind, for in no other work can we find so
complete and particular a history of the Balkan lands, or so accurate
a description of the grouping of the people, taken from personal
knowledge and local investigation. The author, who calls himself
Odysseus, reminds us that the Ottoman Sultans acquired these
territories when they were in the confusion and dismemberment which
followed the decay and fall of the Byzantine empire; and he explains
that the Turks, who have been always inferior in number to the
aggregate of their Christian subjects, could hardly have kept up their
dominion if at any time the Christians had united against them. As the
Christians were not converted, religious unification, which in Asia
was the basis of Mohammedan power, was here impossible, so the Turks
divided that they might rule. 'The Turks have thoroughly learned,' he
says, 'and daily put into practice with admirable skill, the lesson
of _divide et impera_, and hence they have always done, and still do,
all in their power to prevent the obliteration of racial, linguistic,
and religious differences.' They have perpetuated and preserved, as if
in a museum, the strange medley that was existing when these lands
were first conquered by Turkish Sultans nearly five hundred years ago.
Their idea of government has always been simply to take tribute and
secure their paramount supremacy. The result has been that the
confusion, intermixture, and rivalry of race and religion is far more
intricate than even in the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the central
government has tried to reconcile and amalgamate. In Turkey, Odysseus
tells us, 'not only is there a medley of races, but the races inhabit,
not different districts, but the same district. Of three villages
within ten miles of one another, one will be Turkish, one Greek, one
Bulgarian--or perhaps one Albanian, one Bulgarian, and one Servian,
each with their own language, dress, and religion, and eight races and
languages may be found in one large town.'
What has been the upshot and consequence of this Turkish system? It
has been to make the Balkan Peninsula a battlefield, during the last
four centuries, of two great militant creeds, Christianity and Islam,
collecting the population into two religious camps; while inside these
two main religious divisions there are manifold subdivisions of race.
Men of the same creed are in different groups of race; nor are the
race-groups always of the same creed, for one section may have become
fanatic Mohammedans, while the rest have adhered to Christianity. The
intermixture is the more complicated because one cannot attempt to
distinguish a race by physical characteristics, by their personal
appearance or features as marking descent from one stock. The
practices of polygamy, slavery, of the purchase of women, and their
capture in the interminable wars, have produced incessant crossing of
breeds. It is not often understood or remembered that in former times
a tribe or band of foreign invaders, when they had to cross the sea or
to make long expeditions, very rarely brought women with them. So when
they settled on the conquered lands they must have intermarried,
forcibly or otherwise, with the subject race. If they massacred the
men, the women were part of their booty. Neither is the test of
language a sure one, though it is the best we have, and is becoming
more and more the criterion of race; for a kind of struggle for
existence goes on among the languages, they spread or contract under
various influences, mainly political. The folk may change their
language as they may change their creed; and, what is more remarkable,
they may even change their race. According to the book I have just
quoted, the Ottoman Government classes all its subject population into
religious communities. Whatever be a man's race or language, if he
professes Islam, he is called a Mohammedan; if he is of the orthodox
Greek Church at Constantinople, he is Greek or Rumi, for Stambul was
the capital of the Roman empire; or else he is Katholik, Armenian, or
Jew, according to his creed, not according to his birthplace or his
blood. So the official designations are religious, while the popular
usage is various, sometimes following race, sometimes creed, and it is
still constantly shifting, as I shall presently try to explain.
And here it may be interesting to mention a peculiarity of the growth
and constitution of the Eastern or Greek Church, in contrast with the
Western Church of Rome. The Roman Church has always claimed
universality--it has ignored and attempted to trample down all
political and national divisions; it demands of all Roman Catholics,
whoever they may be, submission to the supreme spiritual dictation of
the Roman pontiff, and those who accept any other authority are
outside the pale. From the beginning the Roman Catholic Church has
made incessant war upon every kind of heresy or dissent, transforming
the old rites and worships where they could not be exterminated. It
proclaims independence of the State, it has no local centres or
national branches. The Pope at Rome claims spiritual authority over
all Roman Catholics everywhere. But the historical fact that the
Eastern or Greek Church was always under the control of the Byzantine
empire at Constantinople, has kept this Church much more closely
allied to the temporal power; and the result has been that throughout
its development it has remained closely connected with the State. So
that wherever a fresh State has been formed, the Greek Church has
become national, and the spiritual authority, adapting itself to
political changes, has become a separate institution. The most signal
example of this is to be seen in Russia, where the Greek Church, being
cut off from Constantinople, had its own independent Patriarch up to
the time of Peter the Great; and very lately, when Bulgaria became a
State, it set up its own head of the Church, or Exarch. When Bosnia
and Herzegovina were ruled by the Turkish Sultan, the chief of the
Greek Church in that country was the Patriarch at Constantinople. Now
that these provinces have passed under the administration of Austria,
the ecclesiastical authority has also been transferred from the
Patriarch to local Metropolitans. Each new State shows a tendency to
establish what I may call spiritual Home Rule. We know that in Western
Europe the establishment of National Churches came in by one great
religious upheaval that is called the Reformation. In Eastern Europe
the movement has proceeded gradually, keeping pace with the rise and
recognition of separate governments, and the result has been the
multiplication of internal ecclesiastical divisions.
I have said that the Ottoman empire recognises only religious
denominations in the classification of the people. Apparently this was
the general usage in former times. A Greek meant a member of the
orthodox Greek Church, who might or might not be an inhabitant of
Greece, nor would he necessarily have spoken the Greek tongue. If a
Christian changed his religion, as a matter of course he changed his
name and his designation; he was placed in another group. But the
pressure of political independence has been latterly bringing into
prominence the idea of Race. Odysseus, from whose book I quote again,
gives us the very curious fact that even race is not immutable, it
changes like religion, with the political movement; it has become a
question of political expediency. When a separate State has been
organised, as in Bulgaria, or when a league for shaking off the
Turkish yoke is being organised, as in Macedonia, the plan of the
leaders is to induce the people to drop minor distinctions of origin
and to unite for the purposes of political combination, under some
larger national name, to call themselves Hellenes in Greece,
Bulgarians in Bulgaria, and Macedonians in the Turkish province of
Macedonia. Moreover, when a new State has been thus formed, like
Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, on the principle of Race, the patriotic
party begins to discover that many Greeks or Bulgarians are outside
the territory, and they set up a claim to enlarge their boundaries in
order to bring these people inside. So that the questions of races and
churches are used to keep up continual intrigues, dissensions, and a
lively agitation throughout these countries. For since religion is
always a powerful uniting force, there is a constant effort to bring
the people to congregate under the Established Church of their new
State, to renounce their obedience to any spiritual head outside its
limits. We have, therefore, the curious spectacle of a frequent
shifting of denominations of Race and Creed for the purpose of
political consolidation. In fact we are witnessing in the Balkan
Peninsula a struggle among the petty States to strengthen themselves
by capturing each other's population.
I think I may have said enough to prove, briefly and superficially,
the importance, in Central and South-Eastern Europe, of the ideas of
Race and Religion, the necessity of understanding their strength and
operation. So soon as we cross into Asia we find these ideas
universally paramount. It will perhaps be remembered that Henry Maine
pointed out long ago, in his book on Ancient Law, that during a large
part of what we call modern history no such conception was entertained
as that of territorial sovereignty, as indicated by such a title as
the King of France. 'Sovereignty,' he said, 'was not associated with
dominion over a portion or subdivision of the earth.' Now I do not
believe that a territorial title is assumed at this moment by any of
the great Asiatic sovereigns in Asia. Here in Europe we talk of the
Sultan of Turkey, the Shah of Persia, or the Emperor of China; but
these are not the styles or designations which are actually used by
these potentates; they are each known, on their coins, and in their
public proclamations, by a string of lofty titles, generally
religious, like our 'Defender of the Faith,' which make no reference
to their territories. Such were the titles of the Moghul emperors of
India, and I may here observe that the term Emperor of India, now
borne by the English king, is entirely of British manufacture. The
truth is that Asiatic kingdoms have no settled territorial
boundaries, they are always changing, just as our Indian frontiers are
constantly moving forward; and wherever in Asia there exists a
demarcated line of frontier, it has been fixed by the intervention of
European governments interested in maintaining order. In Mohammedan
lands the basis of a ruler's authority, in theory at least, is
religious, and all through Western Asia there is the closest
connection between the State and the dominant creed of Islam; for a
Mohammedan sovereign's authority is ecclesiastical, so to speak, as
well as civil; he is bound, in the words of our Litany, not only to
'execute justice,' but to 'maintain truth'; and the theory of two
separate jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal, is practically
unknown, though of course in dealing with religious questions the
ruler must be supported by the chief expounders of the law of Islam.
To borrow a phrase from Hobbes, 'the religion of the Mohammedans is a
part of their policy,' as it is also the fundamental bond of their
whole society.
We have seen that in South-Eastern Europe there is an intricate
intermixture of the distinctions of race and religion, with a tendency
of race to win the mastery. This is because the people of those
countries were conquered by Islam, but only partially converted, and
the Turkish Sultans, as I have already said, encouraged discord among
their Christian subjects. But in Western Asia the faith of Islam not
only conquered but converted much more completely; it almost
extirpated other faiths in Asia Minor and Persia, leaving in Asia
Minor only a few obscure sects, like the Nestorians, in a region that
had been wholly Christian, and leaving in Persia only some scattered
relics of the great Zoroastrian religion, still represented in two or
three towns by those whom we call Parsees. In these lands, therefore,
religion has generally mastered race, for the laws that regulate the
whole personal condition and property of the people are determined by
their religion, with a certain variety of local customs. Nevertheless,
beneath the overspreading religious denomination there are a large
number of tribal groups, all of whom are known by tribal names. Most
of these tribes are fanatic Islamites, but in the midst of them is one
group which is distinct by religion and probably by race--I mean the
Armenians. They do not form a majority of the population in Armenia,
they are scattered about Western Asia, and are divided into two
Christian sects, which under the Turkish empire are regarded as two
religious communities. Their recent terrible misfortunes afford a
signal and melancholy warning of the danger of interfering in Oriental
affairs without a full understanding of the complications arising out
of these very differences and antagonisms of race and religion that I
have been endeavouring to explain. And the whole story is a striking
example of the tremendous power of religion in Asiatic politics. In
1895 the European Powers interposed in the name of justice and
humanity to press upon the Turkish Government the reforms that had
been promised by treaty, and thus to better the condition of the
Armenians, by securing to them a certain share in the local and
municipal government. But the Armenians are a scattered and subject
people, different in race and religion and language from the ruling
Turks, and the demand for giving them some kind of independence
alarmed the Turkish Government and inflamed the fanaticism of the
Mohammedans. The only result of European intervention was a frightful
massacre of the Armenians, which the European Powers witnessed without
any serious attempt to stop. Such are the consequences of
misunderstanding the real political situation and the forces at work.
Probably many people in England had a very hazy notion of what the
Armenians were, or what their name signified. We have always to
remember that throughout Asia, and indeed over the greater part of the
non-Christian world, the various sections of the population very
rarely use for themselves, or indeed for the country that they dwell
in, the name that is used for them by Europeans. As our own system has
become territorial, as we call any natural-born inhabitant of France a
Frenchman, and so on, we are led by a false analogy to talk of Turkey
and the Turks, Persia and the Persians, India and the Indians, China
and the Chinese. But these broad designations denoting modern
nationalities are not used in Asia by the people themselves, to whom
such a conception is foreign. I know of no terms in the languages of
these countries that correspond to our words, Turkey, India, China, as
geographical expressions, and I think that the names used by Europeans
for outlying countries or peoples often come from some accident or
chance, or mistake, or by taking the name of a part of a country for
the name of the whole. In Asia the people still class themselves, in
their ordinary talk, by names designating religion or race. A curious
example of a religious designation still survives, by the way, among
Europeans in South Africa. When the first Portuguese explorers of the
African coast asked the Arab traders about the indigenous tribes,
they, being Mohammedans, said that the natives were all Kafirs, which
means Infidels. This was supposed to be the general name of a people,
and it has been handed down to us so that we still call the South
African natives Kaffirs. I doubt whether the tribes concerned have
ever used or recognised among themselves this unsavoury name. I may
note, by the way, that one of the most ancient tribal names in Asia is
that by which the Greeks, outside the Turkish empire, are often
known--Yunani, or Ionian--which must have been in use from the days
when the Greek colonies settled on the coast of Asia Minor, many
centuries before the Christian era.
We are pushing our survey eastward across Asia. The kingdom known to
Europe by the name of Persia is styled by its inhabitants _Iran_,
though I doubt whether a Persian subject belonging to a particular
tribe or sect would call himself _Irani_. The next independent
kingdom, beyond Persia, is Afghanistan; and here we have an example of
a designation originally implying race, gradually merging into one
that is territorial and political. Afghanistan originally meant, I
believe, the great central mass of mountains occupied by a tribe
called Afghans; it is now becoming a name that includes the whole
territory ruled by the Afghan Amir at Kabul. The causes that are
producing this change in the signification of the word are, first,
that the Amir of Kabul has subdued, more or less, all the tribes
inhabiting the country; and secondly, that the pressure of England and
Russia on two sides of that country has necessitated an accurate
demarcation of frontiers all round it, in order that the Amir's
territories, which are under our protection, may be precisely known.
The kingdom is thus acquiring a territorial designation. But this
kingdom of Afghanistan is really composed of a number of chiefships
and provinces very loosely knit together under the sway of the Amir,
which might fall asunder again if the rulership at Kabul became weak.
And the population is all parcelled out into various races and tribes,
usually dwelling in separate tracts under local chiefs; they are
always known among themselves by names, denoting race or tribe;
sometimes patriarchal, like the Children of Israel, or the clans of
our own Highlands; sometimes local, and in one case historical, for
the dominant tribe to which the Amir belongs has called itself Durani
or royal.
It is therefore the distinction of race or tribe, not of religion,
that governs the whole interior population throughout this vast region
of high mountains and valleys in the centre, with comparatively open
country on the north and south; the whole area has been peopled by a
conflux of tribes. Yet Afghanistan has some of the symptoms of
national growth--I mean that if it could hold together as one kingdom
it might grow into a nationality. In religion the Afghans are almost
all fanatical Mohammedans, for Afghanistan is the great bulwark and
citadel on the eastern frontier of Islam, and beyond it, in Eastern
Asia, there are no independent Mohammedan principalities. The kingdom
has a strictly defined territory, and a dynasty which has risen from
the chiefship of a powerful tribe to the heritable possession of that
territory. This dynasty, moreover, is identical in race and religion
with a large majority of its subjects, which is another peculiar
source of strength; for almost all the other first-class kingdoms of
Asia are ruled by dynasties of alien race, who sometimes profess a
religion different from that of many of their subjects. We are
frequently reminded of the important fact that in India the English
rulers are aliens in race and religion from the people; but we may
also remember that after all this is only a difference of degree, a
wider separation between the governors and the governed than elsewhere
in Asia. The principal kingdoms of Asia are ruled by foreign families
or dynasties that have come in by conquest. The Moghul dynasty that
preceded our own government in India was foreign; and it was a
Mohammedan rulership over an enormous Hindu population. The Ottoman
Turk was a foreign invader from Central Asia, who still governs a
variety of races and religions. In Persia the Shah's family is of a
Turkish tribe. And the Emperor of China is a Mandchoo Tartar, of a
race quite apart from that of the immense majority of the Chinese. Of
course the Russians are as much aliens in Central Asia as the English
in India; they govern from St. Petersburg as we do from London. I
doubt, therefore, whether there is any other kingdom in Asia that has
more of the element of national unity than Afghanistan, though
unfortunately its political condition is precarious, because there is
still much tribal disunion inside it.
Eastward again beyond Afghanistan we enter the Indian empire, a vast
dominion stretching south-eastward from the slopes of the outer Afghan
hills and the Persian border to the western frontiers of the Chinese
empire and of Siam, and controlling the whole seaboard of Southern
Asia, from Aden to Singapore. It is the possession of this wide
territory that has given to the English a direct and most important
interest in the problems of race and religion. For, in the first
place, in this empire we have to deal with three out of the four great
faiths of the world--Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism--and we have to
uphold for ourselves the fourth, Christianity. Secondly, we have also
within the borders of our empire a multiplicity of races and tribes;
and we have the peculiar Indian institution of Caste, which marks off
all Hindu society into innumerable groups, distinguished one from
another by the rules that forbid intermarriage and (in most cases) the
sharing of food. Now the word Hindu requires a special explanation,
because there is nothing exactly like it elsewhere in the world; it is
not exclusively a religious denomination; it denotes also a country
and a race. When we speak of a Christian, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist,
we mean a particular religious community without distinction of race
or country. When we talk of Persians or Chinese, we indicate country
or parentage without any necessary distinction of creed. But when a
man tells me he is a Hindu, I know that he means all three things
together--religion, race and country. I can be almost sure that he is
an inhabitant of India, quite sure that he is of Indian parentage; and
as to religion, the word Hindu undoubtedly locates him within one of
the manifold groups who follow the ordinances and worship the gods of
Hinduism. Next in importance to the Hindus, as a religious community,
come the Mohammedans, who number over sixty millions in India. The two
faiths, Hinduism and Islam--polytheism and monotheism--are in strong
opposition to each other; yet they are not quite clean cut apart, for
some Hindu tribes that have been converted to Islam retain in part
their primitive customs of worship and caste. And in Burmah, as in
Ceylon, the population is almost wholly Buddhist.
In a very able article that has recently appeared in an Indian
magazine, the writer, a Hindu, observes: 'The Hindus offer a curious
instance of a people without any feeling of nationality.' He finds an
explanation in 'the intensity of religiousness, which led to
sectarianism, and allying itself with caste, tended to preserve all
local and tribal differences.' Other causes, historical, political,
and geographical, might be mentioned, but I agree that the chief
separating influence has been religious. And, however this may be, it
may be affirmed that within our Indian empire at the present moment
the primary superior designation of a man is according to his
religion--he is either a Hindu, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist. But
inside these general religious denominations are very many
distinctions of caste, race, or tribe. The Sikhs are a sect of Hindus
who belong exclusively to the Punjab. The Marathas and Rajputs are
races who profess Hinduism and who always call themselves by their
racial names: and there are many aboriginal tribes, like the Bheels
and Gonds, who are being gradually absorbed into Hinduism. Race and
religion are, in fact, more profoundly intermixed in India than
perhaps in any other country of the world; and into such an intricate
subject I cannot now enter. My present point is that in India we are
governing an empire of the antique pattern, quite different from the
western nationalities, a country where complexities of race and creed
meet us at every turn in the course of our administration; an empire
which, as Mr. Bryce has pointed out in a recent essay that is full of
light and knowledge, has many striking resemblances with the dominion
of Imperial Rome.[57] There is the same miscellany of tribes and races
in diverse stages of civilisation, warlike and half-tamed on the
frontiers, softened and reconciled by peace, prosperity, and culture
in the older provinces of the empire, wild and barbarous in remote
interior tracts. There is just visible in India a similar though much
slighter tendency of the language of the ruling race to prevail among
the educated classes, because the English language, like the Latin,
has greater literary power, and conveys to the Indians the latest
ideas and scientific discoveries of the foremost nations of the world.
There is also a certain diffusion of European manners and even dress,
resembling in some degree what took place even in such a remote
province of the Roman empire as Britain, where, as we know from
Tacitus, it was made a reproach against the Romanising Britons that
they were abandoning their own costume for the Roman toga and adopting
the manners of their conquerors. All these tendencies are slightly
affecting distinctions of race and religion; though in India these
distinctions are far deeper than they were under the Roman empire, and
so far as one can judge they are ineffaceable.
In regard to religious differences, so long as the people were almost
universally polytheistic the Romans had little trouble on this score,
since every deity and every ritual was tolerated indifferently by
their government, provided that public order and decency were
observed; and this is the practice of our Government in India. But we
have one difficulty in governing India that did not trouble the Romans
at the time when they first founded their empire by conquest. I think
that religion had then very little influence on politics. It was the
advent of two great militant and propagating faiths, first
Christianity, next Islam, that first made religion a vital element in
politics, and afterwards made a common creed the bond of union for
great masses of mankind. It has now become in Asia a powerful
instrument of political association. Therefore when we proclaim for
our government in India the principle of religious neutrality we do
indeed avoid collision with other faiths, but we are without the
advantage that is possessed by a State which represents and is
supported by the religious enthusiasm of a great number of its
subjects. I take the separation of the State from religion to be a
principle that is quite modern in Europe; and outside our Indian
empire it is unknown in Asia. Everywhere else the ruler is the head of
some dominant church or creed. On the other hand our neutral attitude
enables us to arbitrate and keep the peace between the two formidable
rivals, Islam and Hinduism, which in a large measure balance and
restrain each other. And it is easier to govern a great empire full of
diverse castes and creeds when you only demand from them obedience to
the civil law, than when the Government takes one side on religious
questions. Nevertheless, though in India we proclaim and practise
religious neutrality, we must always remember that India is, of all
great countries in the world, that in which religious beliefs and
antagonisms affect the administration most profoundly, and subdivide
the population with the greatest complexity. For the empire contains a
wonderful variety of races and tribes, especially on its frontiers; it
has the fierce Afghan tribes under our protectorate on the north-west,
a cluster of utterly barbarous tribes in the north-east, and in the
Far East beyond Burmah we have undertaken the control of a border
tract, full of petty rival chiefships, where the language, manners and
origins are related to the neighbouring population of China.
In China we have the true type of Asiatic empire, by far the oldest in
the world, a sovereignty that, with various changes of dynasty, has
governed the Far East of Asia from time almost immemorial; an immense
conglomeration of different races under the rulership of a dynasty
that is foreign to the great majority of its subjects. Here again I
must remark on the absence of territorial or national designations.
The word China, as designating this empire, is not used by the people
themselves; the official name means, I believe, the Great Pure
Kingdom; and the emperor himself is known by various titles signifying
august, lofty, or sacred. I suppose that almost the whole population
belongs to the great Mongolian or Tartar family of mankind; but the
subdivisions of different tribes, races, and languages must be
numerous, as might be expected in such a vastly extended empire, and
the tribesmen are all known by their tribal names. In regard to
Religion the situation is peculiar, it is without parallel elsewhere
in Asia; for three great systems exist in China separately and
independently, each of them working in peace side by side with the
others: the religion founded by Confucius, which is a great system of
morals; Buddhism, which is a Church with a splendid ritual,
priesthood, and monastic orders; and Taoism, which is a kind of
naturalistic religion, the worship of stars, natural forces, spirits,
deified heroes and local gods. It is said to be a common thing for one
person to belong to all three religions, and the State superintends
them all impartially. One very remarkable and peculiar fact, which I
give on excellent authority, is that in China religious denominations
are never used to denote sections of the people, except by the
Mohammedans, who are not numerous and form a class apart. But any
attempt to describe the religion of China would lead me far beyond the
scope of this address. My present point is only to lay stress on the
enormous political importance, in China as elsewhere in Asia, of the
religious idea. For whereas powerful religious movements, affecting
the destinies of kingdoms and causing great wars, have ceased in
Western and Central Europe, in Asia all governments have constantly to
apprehend some fresh outburst of religious enthusiasm, the appearance
of some prophet or new spiritual teacher, who gathers a following,
like the Mahdi in the Soudan, and attacks the ruling power. The
Taeping rebellion, which devastated China some forty years ago, is a
case in point; it was begun by a fanatic leader who denounced the
established religions, and it soon became a dangerous revolt against
the Imperial dynasty. And the outbreak against the foreigners in China
last year is understood to have originated in religious fanaticism.
These events go to illustrate the enormous influence on politics which
Religion, whether you call it enthusiasm or superstition, exercises
everywhere in Asia.
But of all empires in Asia, the Russian empire is the greatest and the
most powerful. I have only space to say here that it is of the same
type with the others; it is a vast dominion over an infinite variety
of races, tribes, and creeds; it is a government which has come in by
foreign conquest; a Christian Power which has among its subjects a
great number of Mohammedans. It differs from our Indian empire in this
respect, that the Russian conquests were made gradually by land,
across Central Asia, or by slow immigration and extension, as in
Siberia, whereas the English reached India by a long sea-journey. So
that in the Asiatic empire of Russia the separation of race between
the rulers and their subjects is not so sharply defined as between
England and India. Nevertheless the problems that confront Russia in
Asia are similar in kind to those which face us in India; she has to
reconcile to her permanent dominion a miscellany of alien peoples,
whom it is almost impossible to fuse and consolidate into anything
like a nationality.
I have now endeavoured, very imperfectly, to show how Race and
Religion still powerfully affect society, and trouble politics,
throughout a great part of the world. How far they influence and
interact upon each other is a difficult problem; but one may say that
some religions seem to accord with the peculiar temperament and
intellectual disposition of certain races; that, for instance, the
active propagating spirit of Islam flourishes in Western Asia, while
in Eastern Asia a quiet and contemplative faith, with little
missionary impulse, no strong desire to make converts, has always
prevailed. But in the East everywhere Race and Religion still unite
and isolate the populations in groups--they are the great dividing and
disturbing forces that prevent or delay the consolidation of settled
nationalities; and so far as our experience goes, a fixed nationality
of the Western type is the most solid and permanent form of political
government and social aggregation. An empire is a different and looser
mode of binding people together, yet at certain stages of civilisation
and the world's progress it is a necessity; and an empire well
administered is the best available instrument for promoting
civilisation and good order among backward races. So managed it may
last long; and its dominion may be practically permanent, for commerce
and industry, literature and science, rapid and easy communication by
land and sea, spread far more quickly, and connect distant countries
far more closely, in modern times than in the ancient world. Yet there
is always an element of unrest and insecurity underlying the position
of imperial rulership over different and often discordant groups of
subjects; and this has been one main cause of the immemorial weakness
of Asiatic empires, and of the indifference of the people to a change
of masters, because no single dynasty represented the whole people. It
is just this weakness of the native rulers that has enabled the
European to make his conquests in Asia; and we have carefully to
remember that although our governments are superior in skill and
strength, we have inherited the old difficulties. For it is my belief
that in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia, the strength of
the racial and religious sentiments is rather increasing than
diminishing. This is indeed the view--the fact, if I am right--that I
especially desire to press home, because it is of the highest
importance at the present time, when all the European nations, and
England among the foremost, are extending their dominion over peoples
of races and creeds different from their own. Our governments are now
no longer confined to the continent which we inhabit; we are acquiring
immense possessions in Asia and Africa; we can survey the whole earth
with its confusion of tongues; its multitude of beliefs and customs,
its infinitely miscellaneous populations. We must recognise the
variety of the human species; we must acknowledge that we cannot
impose a uniform type of civilisation, just as we admit that a uniform
faith is beyond mere human efforts to impose, and that to attempt it
would be politically disastrous. This is the conclusion upon which I
venture to lay stress, because some such warning seems to me neither
untimely nor unimportant.
For there is still a dangerous tendency among the enterprising
commercial nations of the West to assume that the importation into
Asia of economical improvements, public instruction, regular
administration, and religious neutrality will conquer antipathies,
overcome irrational prejudices, and reconcile old-world folk to an
alien civilisation. Undoubtedly a foreign government that rules
wisely, justly, and very cautiously, acquires a strong hold on its
subjects, and may stand, like the Roman empire, for centuries. But
this can only be achieved by recognising, instead of ignoring, certain
ineffaceable characteristics in the origins and history of the people,
for whom the tradition and sentiment of race is often their bond of
union and the base of their society, as their religion is the
embodiment of their spiritual instincts and imaginations.