Pax Britannica (55 page)

The British were most harassed by Indian nationalism in Bengal, a province of traditionally argumentative intellectuals, quick of thought, fluent of speech and supplied with all the latest liberal arguments by the University of Calcutta. The political prophet of Bengal in the 80s and 90s was an Englishman, Allan Octavian Hume, the son of a radical politician and a former member of the Indian Civil Service. Hume had been in most ways a model servant of the Raj. He had many of the qualities the service most admired in itself. He had distinguished himself in the Mutiny, first as an administrator, then as a courageous soldier. His chief fault was a popular one, disrespect for higher authority and an outspoken readiness to express opinions. He was a celebrated ornithologist in a service of
sportsmen—
Hume
and
Marshall
was the standard manual of Indian game birds. Hume retired in 1882 and went to live in Simla, where he cherished his theory that before long the new Indian nationalism would become a revolutionary movement, so that its energies ought to be channelled into constructive ends from the start. In 1883 he sent a circular letter to the graduates of Calcutta University, asking for fifty volunteers to ‘scorn personal ease and make a resolute struggle to secure greater freedom for themselves and their country, a more impartial administration, a larger share in the management of their own affairs’. The Indian Government approved of these innocuous aims, and when Hume formed the Indian National Congress he and his associates were at first exceedingly polite to the Raj, even inviting the Governor of Bombay to preside over their opening session.
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Times changed. Congress became a rallying-point of far fiercer spirit. Its propaganda grew more virulent with the years, its intentions more fundamental. ‘It is impossible,’ remarked Crosthwaite, ‘to take such a Congress seriously … their doings serve mainly to show the political immaturity of the present generation of educated Indians.’ He was wrong. Congress was another of those small clouds. Behind it generations of incoherent resentment were waiting to burst into the open. In Bombay the Hindu zealot Bal Gangadar Tilak, whom many Britons believed to be at the bottom of the Ayerst affair, was glorifying the splendours of an older India, where violence had been justifiable in a good end, and life had been governed by a Hindu morality far more powerful than the demolitions of Plague Commissioners. In both Bombay and Calcutta the Indian-owned Press was scurrilously critical of the Raj. Most educated Indian ‘agitators’ only wanted self-government within the Empire, like most patriotic Irishmen: but the longer they were denied it, the more moderate bodies like Congress were forced into extremism, and spell-binders like Tilak came into their own. British rule in India was about as efficient, about as fair, as any Government of the day could offer—‘not only the purest in intention,’
J. S. Mill had thought, ‘but one of the most beneficent in act ever known among mankind’. But it was not, by the nature of things, popular. Its very impartiality meant that it had few particular friends. To many Muslims it had a pro-Hindu bias, and vice versa, and its big, aloof, thick-skinned representatives, respected though they were, were not always easy to love. ‘It would be an error to suppose’, as Sir John Strachey wrote in the 1880s, ‘that the British Government is administered in a manner that altogether commends itself to the majority of the Indian population. This we cannot help.’

In Egypt almost nobody wanted the British to stay; when the pashas of the Cabinet cautiously suggested marking the Diamond Jubilee by a public holiday, the Khedive himself quashed the idea. In Burma the people somehow managed to stay apart from the Raj—‘an indisposition to serve us’, was how one official described the attitude, and the British had not succeeded in raising a Burmese soldiery. In Malta, which had joined the Empire of its own volition, and had always been run by its own officials, there were nationalist grievances of diverse kinds—about self-rule, about the economy, about the national language, about religion. In Jamaica, ruined by the collapse of its sugar market, there was a movement demanding accession to the United States. In the Cape the most clannish of the Boers, rankling at so many decades of British interference in their tribal ways, fantastically hoped that one day the whole of South Africa would be united under their own republican rule. In Canada the French Canadians hugged their humiliation to themselves, in Ceylon successive Buddhist revivals were tinged with sedition. Educated Africans of Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast resented the anglicization of the senior Civil Service, once run almost entirely by Africans, In the Parliamentary stand by Westminster Bridge a large gap in the seats showed how many of the Irish M.P.s refused to welcome the Queen’s Jubilee procession: the British profoundly agreed with Bismarck’s alleged suggestion that the Irish and the Dutch should change places—the Dutch would soon make Ireland
thrive, and the Irish would let the dikes rot and drown themselves. As Edmund Garrett
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once wrote, surveying the Irish and the Boer problems in parallel, ‘Providence in its infinite indulgence has spared us the task of reconciling any race which combines both the Dutch and the Irish gifts of recalcitrance.’

Everything was under control, though, and for the moment the British were less embarrassed by subversion in their Empire than by the complications that arose elsewhere in the world from their possession of an Empire at all. The idea of imperialism was by no means discredited abroad—it was reaching a climax everywhere—but the very size of the British Empire, and its application to so many races in so many parts of the world, was bound to make it enemies. Some of its foreign critics were merely jealous. Some thought the Empire evil. The Irish in particular had their champions everywhere, and especially in America, where hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants and their descendants were to embitter Anglo-American relations for a generation to come. When Americans attacked the concept of Empire they were thinking partly of that German Empire from which so many of them had escaped in 1848, but chiefly of the British in Ireland. Wherever two or three Kennedys or McCormicks gathered together the name of England was sure to be execrated, and Irish-American comment on the Jubilee was bitter. The English were honouring not the Queen, but themselves, said the New York
Sun
,
the chief organ of the Irish-Americans: they only kept the sovereign as a ‘theatrical accessory of traditional fetish’—the implication being that such a kingdom was necessarily hostile not merely to Irish rebels but to the Great Republic. In Australia, too, the Irish were a dangerous bore to the British (in 1868 a Fenian in Sydney had tried to murder Prince Alfred, the Queen’s second son, shooting him in the ribs when he was about to present a cheque to a charitable cause). As the Queen
said, ‘So different from the Scotch, who are so loyal’, and as the
Mashona
Herald
said in a headline reporting the Irish M.P.s’ boycott of the Jubilee procession, ‘Just Like Them’. To some imperialists the whole future of Britain as a Power depended upon her Irish policies—the real Home Rule issue, the
Edinburgh
Review
once wrote, was whether Imperial Britain was to continue a dominant nation in the world.

The occupation of Egypt involved Britain in countless European disputes, and the expansion of Empire elsewhere in Africa had, for all Salisbury’s
savoir-faire
,
at one time or another antagonized the French, the Germans, the Italians and the Portuguese. The French were suspicious of British intentions in Burma and Malaya, too, while a squabble with Venezuela about the British Guiana frontier embroiled Britain yet again with the Americans, it being implicit under the Monroe Doctrine that Guiana ought not to be British anyway. The possession of Gibraltar did not endear the British to the Spaniards, themselves then enduring the last melancholy pangs of lost supremacy. The possession of the Falkland Islands was already irritating the Argentinians and the Chileans, both good clients of the British, who nevertheless felt they had prior claims to the islands.

The biggest price of all was paid for India, for all its glory a diplomatic millstone round the British neck. The Tsar Nicholas II once observed that all he had to do to paralyse British policy was to send a telegram mobilizing his forces in Russian Turkestan. India was to Britain like a larger twin, whose hurts were felt in London as they were in Simla, and Britain’s foreign policies were twisted by Indian preoccupations. As the rival Powers of Europe built up their fleets and expanded their foundries, half the British energies were expended on securing the routes to India, safeguarding the frontiers of India, placating or overawing India’s neighbours. The Trans-Siberian Railway might not seem very relevant to British prosperity, but it was a possible threat to India, and so to Britain. So was the German plan for a railway to Baghdad, and the Hejaz Railway, which the Turks were building through Arabia, and the proposed Russian railway to the Persian Gulf—and every inexplicable border dispute in the marches of Afghanistan, every French misdemeanour
on the Indo-China frontier, the squabbles of sheikhs in south Arabia, the weakening of Chinese power in Tibet—all, because of India, the concern of the islanders off the north-west coast of Europe.

Was it all worth it? The most real threat to the future of the British Empire was not the danger of armed rebellion, nor the nuisance of political agitation, nor even just yet the prospect of a world war, but the possibility that the British themselves might lose the will to rule. Thirty years before Matthew Arnold had foreseen the terrible weight of Empire:

Arnold’s was a voice from another age, and his image of England was scarcely to be recognized in the glaring electric light of the nineties: but one day, nevertheless, the weary Titan might shrug that load off. It must have been so tempting to try the other way, and lead the quiet life in Little England. There were a few, a very few, precedents. Besides the United States, Tangier, the Ionian Islands, Sicily, Corsica and Java had all once flown the Union Jack. Only seven years before Heligoland, for seventy years a British outpost commanding the mouth of the Elbe, had been handed over to Germany in return for African concessions. Queen Victoria thought this a very bad precedent. ‘The next thing will be to propose to give up Gibraltar: and soon nothing will be secure, and all our Colonies will wish to be free.’ She accepted Salisbury’s reassurances dubiously. ‘I think you may find great difficulties in the future. Giving up what one has is always a bad thing.’

There were people in England, all the same, who felt it might be done more often. The most persuasive critics of Empire were to be found in Britain itself, and they had four main lines of argument. People like Fisher, though they certainly did not demand the dissolution of the Empire, felt that its emphasis was wrong, and that in their obsession with imperial adventure the British were neglecting far more pressing matters nearer home. People like Hobson believed that the glory was all an illusion, and that the Empire cost far more than it was worth. People like Wilfrid Blunt maintained that imperialism was immoral: it was a cheap aspiration for a great nation, and riddled with hypocrisy. And a few acute observers among the working classes, not quite bowled over by the
Daily
Mail
,
suspected the Empire to be fine for capitalists, but useless to employees—the first suggestion of a rift, between the rich and the poor, on the value of foreign investments.

All these sentiments, given voice by a handful of political stalwarts like Henry Labouchere
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and the surviving Gladstonian Liberals, sustained a sizeable anti-imperialist minority in Britain. There was never a moment when the British were unanimous about their Empire, and even after the collapse of the Liberal Party there were many in the land who despised, with Gladstone, those ‘false phantoms of glory’, and wondered as he did why the British public was shocked at the oppression of the Armenians, but indifferent to the bullying of the Irish.

But in that celebratory summer any weakening of the imperial will was imperceptible. Hobson could see no hope that imperialism would collapse at all, and most of those who detected Britain’s dimly discernible problems thought they could best be solved by strengthening the Empire, rather than giving it up. The fashionable New Imperialist theory was that the British Empire would only survive as a Great Power, able to match up to the new European and American giants, if it bound itself together into some more formal unity.

The most popular proposal was an Imperial Federation. This was Chamberlain’s dream. The Empire would be turned into a single economic unit protected by imperial tariffs—a sort of closed Free Trade area—and there would be a common defence organization, a common foreign policy and eventually an Imperial Parliament with members from all corners of the Empire. ‘Our chance is now,’ cried Sir Howard Vincent. ‘The fruit is ready to our hand. We grasp it, and leave for tomorrow an Empire in the homogeneous strength of which that of today shall pale and which, self-sustaining, self-supporting, shall eclipse all the world to be Mistress of the land as well as, as now, Mistress of the Sea.’ Chamberlain said of the white colonies at a dinner for their Premiers in London that June: ‘If they desire at any time to share with us the glories and the privileges of Empire—if they are willing to take on their shoulders their portion of the burden we have borne so long—they may rest assured that their decision will be joyfully received, their overtures will be cordially welcomed by the Motherland.’ Imperial Federation, said W. E. Forster, who had founded the Imperial Federation League, must be ‘such a union of the Mother Country and her Colonies as will keep the realm one State in relation to other States’. John Buchan speculated about the day when there would be ‘a continued coming-and-going between English and colonial society, till the rich man has his country house or shooting box as naturally in the Selkirks or on the East African plateau as in Scotland’.