The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain Part 1

The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain.

by J. A. Cramb.

PREFACE

The following pages are a reprint of a course of lectures delivered in May, June, and July, 1900. Their immediate inspiration was the war in South Africa (two of the lectures deal directly with that war), but in these pages, written fifteen years ago, will be found foreshadowed the ideals and deeds of the present hour. When the book first appeared, Mr. Cramb wrote that he "had been induced to publish these reflections by the belief or the hope that at the present grave crisis they might not be without service to his country." In the same hope his lectures are now reprinted.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

John Adam Cramb was born at Denny, in Scotland, on the 4th of May, 1862. On leaving school he went to Glasgow University, where he graduated in 1885, taking 1st Cla.s.s Honours in Cla.s.sics. In the same year he was appointed to the Luke Fellowship in English Literature. He also studied at Bonn University. He subsequently travelled on the Continent, and in 1887 married the third daughter of the late Mr.

Edward W. Selby Lowndes of Winslow, and left one son. From 1888 to 1890 he was Lecturer in Modern History at Queen Margaret College, Glasgow. Settling in London in 1890 he contributed several articles to the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and also occasional reviews to periodicals. For many years he was an examiner for the Civil Service Commission. In 1892 he was appointed Lecturer and in 1893 Professor of Modern History at Queen's College, London, where he lectured until his death. He was also an occasional lecturer on military history at the Staff College, Camberley, and at York, Chatham, and other centres. In London he gave private courses on history, literature, and philosophy.

His last series of lectures was delivered in February and March, 1913, the subject being the relations between England and Germany. In response to many requests he was engaged in preparing these lectures for publication when, in October, 1913, he died.

PART I

THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST

REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

LECTURE I

WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?

[_Tuesday, May_ 8_th_, 1900]

The present age has rewritten the annals of the world, and set its own impress on the traditions of humanity. In no period has the burden of the past weighed so heavily upon the present, or the interpretation of its speculative import troubled the heart so profoundly, so intimately, so monotonously.

How remote we stand from the times when Raleigh could sit down in the Tower, and with less anxiety about his doc.u.ments, State records, or stone monuments than would now be imperative in compiling the history of a county, proceed to write the History of the World! And in speculation it is the Tale, the _fabula_, the procession of impressive incidents and personages, which enthralls him, and with perfect fitness he closes his work with the n.o.blest Invocation to Death that literature possesses. But beneath the variety or pathos of the Tale the present age ever apprehends a deeper meaning, or is oppressed by a sense of mystery, of wonder, or of sorrow unrevealed, which defies tears.

This revolution in our conception of History, this boundless industry which in Germany, France, England, Italy, has led to the printing of mountains of forgotten memoirs, correspondences, State papers, this endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above riches of the slight results slowly and patiently drawn, is neither accident, nor transient caprice, nor antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding impulse, the supreme instinct of this age--the ardour to know all, to experience all, to be all, to suffer all, in a word, to know the Truth of things--if haply there come with it immortal life, even if there come with it silence and utter death. The deepened significance of history springs thus from the deepened significance of life, and the pa.s.sion of our interest in the past from the pa.s.sion of our interest in the present. The half-effaced image on a coin, the illuminated margin of a mediaeval ma.n.u.script, the smile on a fading picture--if these have become, as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuating the Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, it is a power from the present that invests them with this magic. Life has become more self-conscious; not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper Self, the mystic Presence which works behind the veil.

World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden with eternal meanings, significances, intimations, swift gleams of the Timeless manifesting itself in Time. And the distinguishing function of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay bare, to crystallize the moments of all these manifestations, but to discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations, whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action.

Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry into the origin of the French Monarchy or the decline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not only the characters, incidents, policies immediately connected with the subject, but attempted an answer to the question--What is the place of these incidents in the universal scheme of things? so in the treatment of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial Britain, pursuing a similar plan, we have to consider not merely the relations of Imperial Britain to the England and Scotland of earlier times, but its relations to mediaeval Europe, and to determine so far as is possible its place amongst the world-empires of the past. I use the phrase "Imperial Britain," and not "British Empire," because from the latter territorial a.s.sociations are inseparable. It designates India, Canada, Egypt, and the like. But by "Imperial Britain" I wish to indicate the informing spirit, the unseen force from within the race itself, which in the past has shapen and in the present continues to shape this outward, this material frame of empire. With the rise of this spirit, this consciousness within the British race of its destiny as an imperial people, no event in recent history can fitly be compared. The unity of Germany under the Hohenzollern is an imposing, a far-reaching achievement. The aspirations of the period of the _Aufklarung_--Lessing, Schiller, Arndt, and Fichte--find in this edifice their political realization. But the incident is not unprecedented. Even the writings of Friedrich Gentz are not by it made obsolete. It has affected the European State-system as the sudden unity of Spain under Ferdinand or the completion of the French Monarchy under Louis XIV affected it. But in this un.o.bserved, this silent growth of Imperial Britain--so un.o.bserved that it presents itself even now as an unreal, a transient thing--a force intrudes into the State-systems of the world which, whether we view it in its effects upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance to the future, has few, if any, parallels in history.

-- I. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY

What is the nature of this Consciousness? What is its historical basis? Is it possible to trace the process by which it has emerged?

In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a State, or an individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire, purpose, or ideal pa.s.ses into the Conscious. Life's end is then manifest. The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly discerned, now becomes the fixed law of existence. Such moments inevitably are difficult to localize. Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger Robespierre--"He has so much of the future in his mind." But it is neither Toulon, nor Vendemiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Arcola, two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal Napoleon to himself. So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and to France. Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of Thrasymene and Cannae. It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall.

The prose of Osorius[1] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty line. Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the traces. But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the Unconscious to the Conscious. Similarly in the England of the seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation. This is the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Pet.i.tion of Right, to the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the "principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers. It is the unifying motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century. The eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing. An ideal from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the eighteenth century. But from the closing years of the century to the present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now impressing the whole earth by its majesty--the Ideal of Imperial Britain.

It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix precisely the first beginnings of great movements in history. Nevertheless it is often convenient to select for special study even arbitrarily some incident or character in which that movement first conspicuously displays itself. And if the question were asked--When does monarchical or const.i.tutional England first distinctively pa.s.s into Imperial Britain?

I should point to the close of the eighteenth century, to the heroic patience with which the twenty-two years' war against France was borne, hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss of an empire; and further, if you proceeded to search in speculative politics or actual speeches for a deliberate expression of this transition, I should select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of Warren Hastings. There this first awakening consciousness of an Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and p.r.o.nounced form indeed. Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow. His conception of history at its highest is but an antic.i.p.ation of the picturesque but pragmatic school of which Macaulay is coryphaeus. In religion he revered the traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time. His literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of Charles James Fox. In const.i.tutional politics he clung obstinately to the ideals of the past; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or indifferent. As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury that, in his const.i.tutional theories, Burke strictly belongs. But if his range was narrow, he is master there. "Within that circle none durst walk but he." No cause in world-history has inspired a n.o.bler rhetoric, a mightier language. And if he is a reactionary in const.i.tutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize--an empire resting not on violence, but on justice and freedom. This ideal influences the action, the policy, of statesmen earlier in the century; but in Chatham its precise character, that which differentiates the ideal of Britain from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than in Burke. And in the seventeenth century, unless in a latent _unconscious_ form, it can hardly be traced at all. In the speculative politics of that century we encounter it again and again; but in practical politics it has no part. I could not agree with Lord Rosebery when in an address he spoke of Cromwell as "a great Briton." Cromwell is a great Englishman, but neither in his actions nor in his policy, neither in his letters, nor in any recorded utterance, public or private, does he evince definite sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of Imperial Britain. His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work of Raleigh, of the elder Ess.e.x, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but not consciously, not deliberately.

In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape us. The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here definitely, there lost in receding vistas. On the battlefield or in the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work is slowly elaborating itself. And within the nation at large the ideal which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever clearer consciousness. Its influence throws a light upon the last speeches of the younger Pitt. If the Impeachment be Burke's _chef d'oeuvre_, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.[2] The ideal makes great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson, Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent. "The Cry of the Children" derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which, after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the Nile. The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder battle-cry of the "Rights of Man." Thus has this ideal, grown conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life. It removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that they by being free may bring freedom to others. In the great renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus. It imparts to modern politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility.

Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and const.i.tuted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken possession of all the avenues and pa.s.sages of the Empire's life, till at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift.

-- 2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM

Definitions are perilous, yet we must now attempt to define this ideal, to frame an answer to the question--What is the nature of this ideal which has thus arisen, of this Imperialism which is insensibly but surely taking the place of the narrower patriotism of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland? Imperialism, I should say, is patriotism transfigured by a light from the aspirations of universal humanity; it is the pa.s.sion of Marathon, of Flodden or Trafalgar, the ardour of a de Montfort or a Grenville, intensified to a serener flame by the ideals of a Condorcet, a Sh.e.l.ley, or a Fichte. This is the ideal, and in the resolution deliberate and conscious to realize this ideal throughout its dominions, from bound to bound, in the voluntary submission to this as to the primal law of its being, lies what may be named the destiny of Imperial Britain.

As the artist by the very law of his being is compelled to body forth his conceptions in colour, in words, or in marble, so the race dowered with the genius for empire is compelled to dare all, to suffer all, to sacrifice all for the fulfilment of its fate-appointed task. This is the distinction, this the characteristic of the empires, the imperial races of the past, of the remote, the shadowy empires of Media, of a.s.syria, of the nearer empires of Persia, Macedon, and Rome. To spread the name, and with the name the attributes, the civilizing power of h.e.l.las, throughout the world is the ideal of Macedon. Similarly of Rome: to subdue the world, to establish there her peace, governing all in justice, marks the Rome of Julius, of Vespasian, of Trajan. And in this measureless devotion to a cause, in this surplus energy, and the necessity of realizing its ideals in other races, in other peoples, lies the distinction of the Imperial State, whether city or nation.

The origin of these characteristics in British Imperialism we shall examine in a later lecture.

Let me now endeavour to set the distinctive ideal of Britain before you in a clearer light. Observe, first of all, that it is essentially British. It is not Roman, not h.e.l.lenic. The Roman ideal moulds every form of Imperialism in Europe, and even to a certain degree in the East, down to the eighteenth century. The theory of the mediaeval empire derives immediately from Rome. The Roman justice disguised as righteousness easily warrants persecution, papal or imperial. The Revocation of the Edict of Pa.s.sau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their origin without a break to that emperor to whom Dante a.s.signs so great a part in the _Paradiso_.[3] Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once ascribed the phrase _imperium ac libertas_ to a Roman historian. The voluntary or accidental error is nothing; but the conception of Roman Imperialism which it popularized is worth considering. It is false to the genius of Rome. It is not that the phrase nowhere occurs in a Roman historian; but no statesman, no Roman historian, not Sulla, not Caesar, nor Marcus, could ever have bracketed these words. _Imperium ac just.i.tia_ he might have said; but he could never have used together the conceptions of Empire and Freedom. The peoples subdued by Rome--Spain, Gaul, Africa--received from Rome justice, and for this gift blessed Rome's name, deifying her genius. But the ideal of Freedom, the freedom that allows or secures for every soul the power to move in the highest path of its being, this is no pre-occupation of a Roman statesman! Yet it is in this ideal of freedom that the distinction, or at least a distinction of Modern, as opposed to Roman or h.e.l.lenic, Europe consists; in the effort, that is to say, to spiritualize the conception of outward justice, of outward freedom, to rescue individual life from the incubus of the State, transfiguring the State itself by the larger freedom, the higher justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain throughout h.e.l.las, which Virgil in Rome can nowhere find. The common traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero of the _Aeneid_ and the triumvir Octavia.n.u.s, are not accident, but arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right of the ancient State. And it is in the Empire of Britain that this effort of Modern Europe is realized, not only in the highest, but in the most original and varied forms. The power of the Roman ideal, on the other hand, saps the preceding empires of Modern Europe down to the seventeenth century, the empire of the German Caesars, the Papacy itself, Venice, Spain, Bourbon France. Consider how completely the ideals of these States are enshrined in the _De Monarchia_, and how closely the _De Monarchia_ knits itself to Caesarian and to consular Rome!

The political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama, is tedious as a twice-told tale. Her art, her palaces, are her own eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her sky. But in politics Venice has not enriched the world with a single inspiring thought which Rome had not centuries earlier ill.u.s.trated more grandly, more simply, and with yet profounder meanings.

Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it "rejects the Faith proffered by the visiting angel"--a Protestant Spain is impossible--but because Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at large, that freedom which modern Europe had come to regard as dearer than life--freedom to worship G.o.d after the manner nearest to its heart.

But disaster taught Spain nothing--

[Ill.u.s.tration: Greek text]

Alas, for mortal history! In happy fortune A shadow might overturn its height; whilst of disaster A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson; And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe.

The embittered wisdom of Aeschylus finds in all history no more shining comment than the decline of Spain.[4]

The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand II, the internecine war of thirty years which he provokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying bequeaths to his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, Marengo, Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the empire devised ten centuries before by Leo III and Charlemagne.

And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull _Unigenitus_, the procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la Revolution:--"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."

From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain, first amongst modern empires, completely breaks. For it is a new empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire moulded by a new ideal.

Let me ill.u.s.trate this by a contrast--a contrast between two armies and what each brings to the vanquished.

Who that has read the historian of Alva can forget the march of his army through the summer months some three hundred and thirty years ago?

That army, the most perfect that any captain had led since the Roman legions left the world, defies from the gorges of Savoy, and division behind division advances through the pa.s.ses and across the plains of Burgundy and Lorraine. One simile leaps to the pen of every historian who narrates that march, the approach of some vast serpent, the glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through the June foliage, fateful, stealthy, casting upon its victim the torpor of its irresistible strength. And to the Netherlands what does that army bring? Death comes with it--death in the shape most calculated to break the resolution of the most dauntless--the rack, the solitary dungeon, the awful apparel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the _auto-da-fe_, and upon the evening air that odour of the burning flesh of men wherewith Philip of Spain hallowed his second bridals. These things accompany the march of Alva. And that army of ours which day by day advances not less irresistibly across the veldt of Africa, what does that army portend? That army brings with it not the rack, nor the dungeon, nor the dread _auto-da-fe_; it brings with it, and not to one people only but to the vast complexity of peoples within her bounds, the a.s.surance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion to that ideal which has exercised a conscious sway over the minds of three generations of her sons, and quickened in the blood of the unreckoned generations of the past--an ideal, shall I say, akin to that of the prophet of the French Revolution, Diderot, "_elargissez Dieu!_"--to liberate G.o.d within men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of itself and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony with the Divine. And it brings to the peoples of Africa, to whom the coming of this army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with consequences to the future ages of their race, some a.s.surance from the designs, the purposes which this island has in early or recent times pursued, that the same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still; whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon that army it offers some cause for gratulation or relief, that in this problem, whose vast issues, vista receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napoleon I.

and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that in this arena where conflicts await us beside which, in renunciation, triumph, or despair, this of to-day seems but a toy; that in this crisis, a crisis in which the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has intervened, definitely and for all time, which more than any other known to history represents humanity, and in its dealings with race distinctions and religious distinctions does more than any other represent the principle that "G.o.d has made of one blood all the nations of the earth."

-- 3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY