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Empire Review. October 1923

THE EMPIRE REVIEW has, I perceive, been born again and displays a constellation of gifted contributors writing about subjects of which their knowledge approaches saturation point. Commander Locker Lampson is alive to the need of variety, and for an incidental change he asks me to write upon a topic that he must feel is by no means my specialty. He wants my views about the British Empire. I more than suspect he counts upon my taking a Radical view of that great system. He selects me, an obscure supporter of the Labour Party, as a sample of what men are thinking on that side of the political arena. But I can write only as a man in that street. The official attitude of the party is to be found plainly and simply stated in the publications of the party headquarters.

Yielding to the Editor's persuasiveness, I will set down a few notes and a few generalities that occur to me. They may offend some of those peculiar people who are all out for the British Empire, any old British Empire whatever it is and whatever it does, but I think that they may be of interest to many—what shall I call them?—Imperialists, and I take it most of the readers of the Empire Review are such, who are prepared for the idea that support of the British Empire may be a conditional support and not a fanaticism.

Let me begin with something that is more than a mere verbal quibble. I wish that this political system could have some other name than Empire, because it is not properly an Empire at all. It is a complex association of at least three different types of territory, and the word "Empire" is endlessly misleading and mischievous in connection with it.

In the last few years, for purposes that need not now concern us, I have had to study a certain amount of history and a number of historians. Many men of commanding intelligence have been historians, and I offer no comparison between the intellectual quality of historians and that of scientific men as such. But trained as I was in the clear, subtle and beautiful disciplines of comparative anatomy, I found myself amazed at the easy carelessness of the average historian's habitual terminology, his slovenly parallelisms and reckless assumptions. A large part of his work is the study of human communities and political associations. Yet I found him without any intelligible classification of political combinations, any real sense of grades and structural differences between one community and another. He slops the word "Empire" over the whole face of history; Athenian Empire and Aztec Empire, Shang Empire and Sung Empire, Empire of Alexander and Roman Empire, Mongol Empire and Hittite Empire, British Empire and Brazilian Empire; it's all the same to him. "Cats is dogs," as the porter said, "rabbits is poultry, but a parrot is a passenger." As a consequence, the historian argues from the most atrocious analogies. And, though there is a considerable and pretentious literature of political science, there does not yet exist in all political and historical literature any attempt at a clear analysis of the differences and affInities of all these various human complexes. Yet to make such an analysis would be a most attractive and fruitful task. Historical and political science has still to find its Linnaeus. History, until that happens, remains a slough of terminological confusion, and the ideas of the ordinary educated man drown in that mud.

The word "Empire" came into the world with the expansion of the Roman Republic. The Roman Empire was a thing different in many fundamentals from the so-called "Empires" that preceded it, the "Shah-doms," if I may create a sort of temporary word, of Asia and the "Pharaoh-doms" of Egypt, for example. It differed from them at least as widely in its possibilities, structure and range as a species of Tertiary mammals differs from a species of Mesozoic reptiles. It was unprecedented in arising out of an aristocratic republic instead of a conquering monarchy, and in having a legal tradition of a strength and prestige unknown to any previous community. It was unprecedented in its disposition to extend its citizenship beyond its initial boundaries. Its expansion was concurrent with an increasing use of coined money and of credit based upon coined money; its economic and financial system had a quite novel facility and instability. The Empire was held together by a road- system that made the road-system of the Persians seem a mere preliminary experiment. Its extent was far greater than that of any preceding form of political administration. Reading and writing, already raised to new levels of simplicity and convenience by the Greeks and Hebrews, brought what we should think nowadays a small proportion, but which was in those days a quite unprecedented proportion, of the population into an intelligent participation in public affairs. Iron had become widespread for tools and implements as well as weapons, and the horse was now no longer a war-beast but, with its bastard child the mule, a universally available means of transport. All these things made the Roman Imperial System as new a thing in human experience as the United States of America or the present British "Empire," both of which, I hold, are new species, fresh beginnings without any true affinities in the past.

There is in all history only one rough parallel to the Roman Empire, and that is its contemporary Chinese Empire. But I will restrain my encyclopaedic impulse and leave that out of our present discussion.

Now as Gibbon's great history shows, the history of all Europe and Western Asia since that time is really the story of this unique thing, the Empire, the Roman Empire, and its struggle to exist, to remain one, and to restore itself, when broken, to complete existence. It was broken naturally by the Adriatic crack, running in towards that fatal wedge out of the great plains of the nomads, Hungary; it was broken by the general incapacity of the Italians for navigation, due perhaps to characteristics of the Italian coast; it was broken by the intellectual inadequacies of a plutocracy. But the Empires that sprang from it. West and East, were only the results of a fission that left the idea of reunion perpetually alive; the Holy Roman Empire, the Tzardom, the Imperialism of Napoleon, even the Austrian Empire and the Hohenzollern Empire, were all logically and legitimately the products of the original Empire, legitimately Empires in origin and intention, attempts to recover a universal sway; parts in a great dreary, futile European drama on which at last in these days the curtain falls.

There has indeed only been one real Empire in the world, this that centred upon Rome and the Mediterranean. Britain played a certain part in this Empire; Henry VIII, for example, was Imperial candidate against Charles V and the King of France; but the role of Britain therein has generally been a marginal one. The importance of England to mankind began only when it turned its face from the Empire and from thoughts of the Empire to the ocean. What we call to-day the British Empire is a new thing and a different thing from the Roman Empire, created by new and greater forces, and deserving an entirely distinctive name.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the opening phases of a great process of change in human conditions that has been going on until the present time. From the point of view of one who discusses political or economic agglomerations, the most important thing in that great revolution has been the development of new means of communication between man and man. That revolution began with the appearance of the ocean-going sailing ship and of printed paper; it reaches its climax nowadays in wireless telegraphy and the aeroplane. It is now a commonplace, though for many historians and scholars it is quite a recent discovery, that any change in communications involves new economic, strategic and political adjustments. For a score of centuries the horse, the horse-drawn vehicle, the hand-made high-road, the parchment document, the public speaker and vocal teacher and a feeble coastal shipping had been the limiting conditions of all statecraft. Under these conditions the idea of the Empire had been the highest political idea in men's minds. Now, however, in that age of Renascence, the ocean which had been an ultimate barrier became almost suddenly a highway; and the printed book, and, presently, the newspaper quickened masses in the community, hitherto politically ineffective, into informed activity. The politics and statecraft of Europe, obsessed—still to this day obsessed—by the doomed Imperial tradition, began nevertheless a clumsy slow adaptation to this process of material change, unable to ignore its pressures and compulsions, but evidently indisposed to recognise its nature.

I use this word "indisposed" deliberately. The political mind, like the legal mind to which it is so closely akin, looks backward habitually, prefers precedents to Utopias, clings to the old and is pushed along by the new. Europe clings still to the Imperial tradition four centuries after it became impracticable; its kindred peoples are divided and they destroy one another in the feuds of a dead issue. Frenchman and German waste Europe, as Asia Minor was wasted by Byzantine and Persian, in a futile search for a kind of supremacy that can never return to this world. They are like rivals who fight for a woman already dead and decayed.

Continental Europe is being desolated and destroyed by imaginative incapacity, by the failure to recognise the obsolescence of its political ideas and traditions. But Europe is not the world, nor will its decline and fall be the end of the human story. In the United States of America, in this so-called British Empire, and now in the United States of Russia, we must recognise a breaking away from tradition as complete as when the Roman Empire broke away from the forms and traditions of any previous political synthesis. These new systems arise not to inherit, but to supersede.

It is this conception of the history of the world during the last four centuries as being essentially, in its broadest aspects, a belated, forced, and largely unconscious process of political adaptation to changing conditions, of vast subconscious and unwilling trials and experiments in new and greater political associations to replace that formerly dominant Imperial idea, that I wish to put before the readers of the Empire Review. It carries us on to the further realisation that since the process of change in communications is only now approaching some sort of limiting completion, the new political systems that have appeared cannot be considered as anything but preliminary and transitory systems. The United States of America, the Spanish, Dutch and British colonial empires of the eighteenth century, the Russian Asiatic Empire and the second British Empire of the nineteenth century, the British Empire of the Empire Review and of this present discussion, must all from the angle of this conception be seen as things experimental and transient, destined to the most extensive coalescences, readjustments and modifications in a few score years. The form to which these synthetic material forces, this constant abolition of distance between State and State and man and man, are driving us all, even in spite of ourselves, is a common Pax Mundi, a World Commonweal, a federal suppression of armaments, a federal money system, a federal postal system, a federal control of the production and distribution of staple products, a federal direction of main-line sea and land transport and of the movements of population. To these things it seems to me human affairs trend now inexorably. The economic and financial world net grows tighter and closer; war becomes so intimate and inconclusive and destructive as to become impossible. The old ideas may hold our race in a bloody and wasteful subjection for two or three centuries yet; but the Pax Mundi waits at the end of the passage.

A man holding these opinions must necessarily judge the present British Empire without any fanatical loyalty, critically as a possible half-way house or a possible obstacle to a more comprehensive and enduring synthesis. It is not really the same thing as the British "Empire" of 1823, which was a string of trading posts and areas of economic predominance about the world, plus John Company's fantastic acquisition of the derelict rule of the Great Mogul. The bulk of the present British "Empire" was created and held together by the steamship. This rendered possible the transfer of considerable masses of population to new territories and the importation of bulky staples, of such things as wheat and cattle, across great stretches of ocean. The Dominions were made by the steamship and the telegraphic cable, and they constitute the freshest, most peculiar feature of the present British Imperial system. Colonies the world has known before, but neither the Greek and Phoenician colonies of the old world nor the American colonies of the eighteenth century were linked closely and abundantly enough to the mother country to prevent a final estrangement and detachment. The British Dominions to-day are, on the contrary, kept in touch, and more and more effectively kept in touch, with each other and the mother country. Their mutual relationships are unprecedented. Their unity may be enduring.

But when we turn to the relationship of Great Britain and these Dominions on the one hand, to India on the other, we find something entirely different, a new association also, but of absolutely different structure and different capabilities, something accidental and precarious and manifestly provisional. A London company running a system of trading stations, acquired almost inadvertently amidst a wild political welter in India, the heritage of the Great Mogul. Great Britain has taken over this company's possessions, enlarged them, given India peace and a certain unity, educated her people, but not widely nor sufficiently, developed her resources, but not very generously, and manifestly has but the vaguest ideas of her future. The educational and intellectual development of the British people has not kept pace with this rapid expansion of British responsibilities. Our world responsibilities have increased a hundredfold in the last century, but our educated class, our supply of potential rulers, directors and the like, our university organisations have not increased tenfold.

It is an open question whether on the whole we have most hampered or benefited India. Or vice versa. But at any rate it must be clear that the association of the Indian system with the Dominion system is an accidental and transitory association. They both happen to be parts of the British system, but there is no necessary connection. The two move at different rates and in divergent directions. A man may be—I know Australians w^ho are—what I may call a Dominion-imperialist, but not an Indian-imperialist. He may believe, as I do, in the need for a sedulous preservation and intensification of the intellectual community of the English-speaking peoples, and in an attentive care for every possibility of understanding and sympathetic co-operation with the United States of America, and at the same time he may be as convinced as I am of our duty and obligation to educate and organise India as speedily as possible for separation, for a friendly independent existence within the world commonweal of peoples.

We British have not sufficient natural moral and intellectual superiority to the Indian peoples, we have not a sufficiently organised educational system nor a sufficient surplus of highly educated men, to justify our continued usurpation of India's right to think out and work out its own role in the confederation of mankind. And we are different from these dusky peoples; we do not work with them easily; we hamper them and they hamper us intolerably. But released from our entanglement with a population six or seven times as numerous as our own, our entanglement with this great mix-up of temperamentally alien peoples, the British and the associated English-speaking communities scattered round the earth, extending their educational organisation and developing their still crude intellectual and political possibilities, may play a reasonable and yet leading part in the great synthesis which will ultimately give the world enduring peace. "Disentangle from India, draw near to America, come out of and keep out of ententes and alliances upon the continent of Europe;" these are the broad lines upon which I conceive the British system may best serve itself and mankind.

So far I have considered the British Empire only from the point of view of the English-speaking Dominions and of India. I will leave Egypt and Palestine, as they ought to be left, outside the discussion. They are, I take it, relaxing protectorates. Nor will I say more than a word or so about purely strategic possessions, Malta, Gibraltar and so forth; they are part of our armament, and their destiny is dependent upon the possibility of a world association sufficiently convincing to make disarmament possible. But there still remain great areas that are neither populated by kindred communities nor subject civilisations, barbaric regions that have been taken over in order to exploit their natural resources and prevent their being monopolised and closed against us by some hostile power. The great overseas "Empire" of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was of this type. Such areas of economic subjugation are a very ancient type of foreign possession. In such a spirit Carthage once held Corsica, Sardinia and a large part of Spain. In our own lives we have witnessed the sharing-out of tropical Africa among competing European powers. Behind such division and ownership lies the conception of bitterly competitive, monopolistic trading States as the supreme form of human association. That again is an obsolescent conception.

The Americans decided a century and a half ago that one necessary condition of existence for a federal union of sovereign States was universal free trade. All interference with the free movement of another community's trade, all tariff barriers and the like, are a mild form of war. It must be plain to everyone that the present division of Africa is extremely unstable, and that if the system of competitive powers in Europe is to go on, it is only a question of how long it will take France to feel secure enough against Germany to set about fighting for the whole of raw-material Africa. The organised peace of the world, the coming world civilisation, demands not only a cessation of armaments, but a cessation of commercial discrimination and such-like material injuries.

But these areas of undeveloped natural resources of unexploited forests and minerals and the like, sustaining only a sparse or undercivilised population, must have administration and development from without. If that is not to be the dangerous task and privilege of a single exploiting State it must be the task of some as yet non-existent body acting in the common interest. Until that federal body can be developed and equipped with forces and resources of its own—it is the most urgent of all necessary precautions against a future great war—there is nothing for us to do but to go on holding these possessions of the third order, without trading discrimination or settlement discrimination, against any other race or people.

It is part of the fantastic nationalism that still plays so astonishing a role in the political life of the world, to hold that every definable region of the earth's surface belongs, from sky to centre, to the inhabitants it supports. But with ever increasing facilities of movement this becomes constantly more impossible. It would, for example, place the vast mineral wealth of Labrador at the disposal of a few hundred wandering Red Indians. The conception of a federated world system carries with it the idea that all the land and sea of the world, all the natural resources of the world, animal, vegetable or mineral, belong to all the people of the world, and that any assignation, reservation, mandate or monopolisation of this or that region is entirely a temporary arrangement to be superseded by that inevitable world control. The British "Empire" in respect to this class of possession is, therefore, in the position of a trustee for an unborn but inevitable heir. Any Federation of Peoples or League of Nations or whatnot that really undertakes the organisation of a world peace must, as a necessary function, inherit all the overseas and alien possessions that are not yet capable of an intelligent participation in world government, whether they are now "owned" by Great Britain or by any other State in the world.

In any world federation that may arise in the course of the next century or so, the English-speaking communities, which already number over two hundred million people, must necessarily play a leading part. How far it will be the leading part, depends very much upon the educational and general creative energy of these communities during the years immediately before us and upon their power of casting aside crippling prejudices and outworn ideas.

It needs no impossible effort to make the English language even now the lingua franca of India and China, and the creative imagination embodied in English literature a fertilising power throughout the earth. If I as a consistent republican find little joy in being a subject of a King-Emperor, and if I find much of our British Imperialism repulsively base, narrow, short-sighted and suicidal, that is rather because I overestimate than underestimate the share that our English language and civilisation and peoples may play in the future of mankind.