Chapter 14
Nationality possesses that demonic and incalculable quality from which almost anything may be expected in the way of marvel, just as certain spiky plants that have not varied winter or summer for years in their habitual unattractiveness will suddenly shoot up a ten-foot spire of radiant blossom abounding in honey. Partly by nationality has the human race been preserved from the dreariness of ant-like uniformity and has retained the power of variation which appears to be essential for the highest development of life. With what pleasure, during our travels, we discover the evidences of nationality even in such things as dress, ornaments, food, songs, and dancing; still more in thought, speech, proverbs, literature, music, and the higher arts! With what regret we see those characteristics swept away by the advancing tide of dominant monotony and Imperial dullness! The loss may seem trivial compared with the loss of personal or political freedom, but it is not trivial. It is a symptom of spiritual ruin. How deep a degradation of intellect and personality is shown by the introduction of English music-hall songs among a highly poetic people like the Irish, or by the vulgar corruption of India's superb manufactures and forms of art under the blight of British commerce! You know the Persian carpets, of what magical beauty they are in design and colour. When I was on the borders of Persia in 1907 the Persian carpet merchants were selling one kind of carpet with a huge red lion being shot by a sportsman in the middle of it to please the English, and another kind decorated with a Parisian lady in a motor to please the Russians. From those carpets one may realise what the English Government's acquiescence in the subjection of Persia really involves.
No subject race can entirely escape this degradation. No matter how good the government may be or how protective, all forms of subjection involve a certain loss of manhood. Under an alien Power the nature of the subject nationality becomes soft and dependent. Instead of working out its own salvation, it looks to the government for direction or assistance in every difficulty. Atrophy destroys its power of action. It loses the political sense and grows incapable of self-help or self-reliance. The stronger faculties, if not extinguished, become mutilated. In Ireland, even to-day, we see the result of domination in the continued belief that the British Government which has brought the country to ruin possesses the sole power of restoring it to prosperity. In India we see a people so enervated by alien and paternal government that they have hardly the courage or energy to take up such small responsibilities in local government as may be granted them. This is what a true Liberal statesman, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, meant by his wise saying that self-government is better than good government. And it might be further illustrated by the present condition of the largest subject race in the world--the race of women--to whom all the protective legislation and boasted chivalry and lap-dog petting, fondly supposed to be lavished upon them by men, are not to be compared in personal value with just the small right to a voice in the management of their own and national affairs.
Such mutilation of character is the penalty of subjection at its best. At its worst the subject race pays the penalty in tormenting rancour, undying hatred, and the savage indignation that tears the heart. It may be said that indignation is at all events better than loss of manhood, and again I agree. Where there is despotism it may well be that for this reason a cruel despotism is less harmful than a paternal despotism--less harmful, I mean, to the individual soul, which is the only thing that counts. But the soul that is choked by hatred and torn by indignation is not at its best. Its functions go wrong, its sight is distorted, its judgment perturbed, its sweetness poisoned, its laughter killed. The whole being suffers and is changed. For a time it may blaze with a fierce, a magnificent intensity. But we talk of a "consuming rage," and the phrase is terribly true. Rage is a consuming fire, always a glorious fire, a wild beacon in the night of darkness, but it consumes to ashes the nature that is its fuel.
Loss of manhood or perpetual rancour--those are the penalties imposed on the soul of a subject race. Nor does the dominant race escape scot free. Far from it. On the whole, it suffers a deeper degradation. A dominant race, like a domineering person, is always disagreeable and always a bore, and the nearer it is to the scene of domination the more disagreeable and wearisome it becomes, just as a tyrannical man is worst at home. I have known English people start as quiet, pleasing, modest, and amiable passengers in a P. & O. from Marseilles, but become less endurable every twenty-four hours of the fortnight to Bombay. There are noble and conspicuous exceptions alike in the army, the Indian Civil Service, and among the officials scattered over the Empire. But, as a rule, we may say that the worst characteristics not only of our own but of all dominant races, such as the French, Germans, and Russians, are displayed among their subject peoples. If, indeed, the subjects are on a level with spaniels that can be beaten or patted alternately and retain a constant affection and respect, the English son of squires thoroughly enjoys his position and does the beating and patting well. But it is always with a certain loss of humour and common humanity: it brings a kind of stiffness and pedantry such as Charles Lamb complained of in the old-fashioned type of schoolmaster. It exaggerates a sense of Heaven-born superiority which the English squire has no need to exaggerate.
I am not one of those who set out to "crab" their countrymen. We have lately had so much criticism and contempt poured upon us by more intelligent people like the Irish, the Germans, and an ex-President of the United States that sometimes I have been driven to wonder whether we may not somewhere possess some element worthy of respect. But, keeping the lash in our own discriminating hands, we should all perhaps confess that in regard to other people's feelings and ideas we are rather insensitive as a nation. This form of unimaginative obtuseness undoubtedly increased during the extension of our grip upon subject races between the overthrow of Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill and the end of the Boer War. Perhaps those fifteen years were the most entirely vulgar period of our history, and vulgarity springs from an insensitive condition of mind. It will be a terrible recompense if the price of our world-wide Empire is an Imperial vulgarity upon which the sun never sets.
There is another danger, not so subtle and pervading, but more likely to escape the notice of people who are not themselves acquainted with the frontiers of Empire. It is the production and encouragement of a set of scoundrels and wasters who trade upon our country's prestige to rob, harry, and even enslave the members of a subject race while they pose as pioneers of Empire and are held up by sentimental travellers, like Mr. Roosevelt, as examples of toughness and courage to the victims of monotonous toil who live at home at ease. There is no call either for Mr. Roosevelt's pity or admiration. I have known those wasters well, and have studied all their tricks for turning a dirty half-crown. They enjoy more pleasure and greater ease in a day than any London shop assistant or bank clerk in a month. They take up the white man's burden and find it light, because it is the black man who carries it. Of all the impostors that nestle under our flag, I have found none more contented with their lot or more harmful to our national repute than the "toughs" who devour our subject races and stand in photographic attitudes for Mr. Kipling to slobber over. These scoundrels and wasters are a far worse evil than most people think, for they erect a false ideal which easily corrupts youth with its attraction, and they furnish ready instruments for land-grabbers and company directors, as is too often seen in their onslaughts upon Zulus, Basutos, and other half-savage peoples whom they desire to exterminate or enslave. They are a singularly poisonous by-product of Empire, all the more poisonous for their brag; and though they belong to the class whom their relations gladly contribute to emigrate, they are far worse employed in debauching and plundering our so-called fellow-subjects in Africa than they would be in the public-houses, gambling-dens, pigeon-shooting enclosures, workhouses, and jails of their native land. Of course, it is very useful to have dumping-grounds for our wasters, and it is pleasant to reflect upon the seven thousand miles of sea between one's self and one's worthless nephew, but a dumping-ground for nepotism can scarcely be considered the noblest aim of conquest.
Why is it, then, that one nation desires to subjugate another at all? Sometimes the object has simply been space--the pressure of population upon the extent of ground. Pastoral and nomad hordes, like the "Barbarians" and Tartars, have had that object, but, as a rule, it has ended in their own absorption. The motives of the Roman Empire were strangely mixed. Plunder certainly came in; trade came in; in later times the slave-trade and the supply of corn to Rome were great incentives. The personal advantage and ambition of prominent statesmen like Sulla or Caesar were among the aims of many conquests. The extension of religion had little to do with it, for the Romans had the decency to keep their gods to themselves and never slaughtered in the name of Jove. But they were compelled to Empire by a peculiar conviction of destiny. They did not destroy or subdue other peoples so much for glory as from a sense of duty. It was their Heaven-sent mission to rule. Their poet advised other nations to occupy themselves with wisdom, learning, statuary, the arts, or what other trivialities they pleased; it was the Roman's task to hold the world in sway. To the Roman the object of Empire was Empire. It seemed to him the natural thing to conquer every other nation, making the world one Rome. That was, in fact, his true religion, and we can but congratulate him on the unshaken faith of his self-esteem. The Turk, on the other hand, who was the next Imperial race, boasted no city and no self-conscious superiority of laws or race. He subdued the nations only in the name of God, and to all who accepted God he nobly extended the vision of Paradise and a complete equality of earthly squalor. The motives of mediaeval and more recent conquests were the strangest of all. They were usually dynastic. They depended on the family claim of some family man to a title implying actual possession of another country and all its population. There was always one claimant contending against another claimant, this heir against that heir, as though the destinies of nationality could be settled by a strip of parchment or a love-affair with a princess. People grew so accustomed to this folly that even now we hardly realise its absurdity. Yet I suppose if the King of Spain left his kingdom by will to his well-beloved cousin George of England, not an English wherry would stir to take possession, and our newspapers would merely remark that there was always a strain of insanity in the Spanish branch of the Bourbons. Two hundred years ago such a will would have produced a prolonged and devastating war. Something is gained. We have eliminated royal dynasties from the motives of conquest.
In the extension and maintenance of our own Empire all previous motives have been combined. We have pleaded want of space; we have sought slaves either for export or for local labour; we have sought plunder and also trade or "markets"; we have sought dumping-grounds for our wasters, and careers for our public school-boys; like the Turks and Spaniards, we have sought to promote the knowledge of God by the slaughter and enslavement of His creatures; like the Romans, we have thought it our manifest duty to paint the world red and rule it. But within the last sixty or seventy years we have added the further motive most aptly expressed by the late King Leopold of Belgium in the document by which he obtained his rights over the Congo: I mean "the moral and material amelioration" of the subject peoples. That was a motive unknown to the ancients, though the Romans came near it when they granted equal citizenship to all provincials--a measure far in advance of any concession of ours. And it was unknown to the Middle Ages, though Turks and Spaniards came near it when they destroyed the infidels for their good and opened heaven to converted slaves and corpses. To subjugate a nationality for its own moral and material advantage is something almost new in history. It sounds the true modern note. That is not a pleasant note, but it is a sign of change, an evidence of hope. In the Boer War our real objects were to paint the country red on the maps and to exploit the gold-mines. But some people said we were fighting for equal rights; some said it was to insure good treatment for the natives; some thought we were Christianising the Boers; one man told me "the Boers wanted washing." Those excuses may have been false and hypocritical, but, at all events, they were tributes to virtue. They were a recognition that the old motives of Empire no longer sufficed. They exposed the hypocrites themselves to the retort of serious and innocent people: "Very well, then. If these were your motives, give equal rights, protect the natives, Christianise the Boers, wash them if you can." It is a retort against which hypocrisy cannot long stand out. It proves that a new standard of judgment is slowly forming in the world. But for this new standard, where would be the Congo agitation, or the movement against the Portuguese cocoa slavery, or such sympathy as exists with the Nationalists of India, Egypt, and Persia? When the doctrines of equal rights or even of moral and material amelioration are assumed, honesty will at last raise her protest and hypocrites be no longer allowed to reap the harvest of a quiet lie.
It is an advance. As history counts time it is a rapid advance. Now that Russia is reducing Finland to a state of entire subjection without even a pretext of right or the shadow of a pretence at improved civilisation, a general feeling of shame and loss pervades Europe. The governments do not move, but here and there the peoples raise a protest. Not even the most thorough-going champions of Imperialism, such as the _Times_, have ventured to defend the action. They have contented themselves with Cain's excuse that the murder was no affair of ours. A century and a half ago they would not have needed an excuse. No protest would have been raised, for it did not matter what nationality was enslaved. There is an advance, and we have now to extend it. In regard to races already subject, we have but to act up to the pleadings of our own hypocrisy; we have to maintain among them equal justice, equal rights and equal consideration as members of one great community, instead of depriving them of their manhood and kicking them out of their own railway carriages. We have to train them on the way to self-government, instead of clapping them into prison if they mention the subject.
And in regard to nationalities that still retain their freedom, we must bring our governments up into line with the leading thought of the day. We must show them that the destruction of a free people like Finland or Persia is not a local or distant disaster only, but affects the whole community of nations and spreads like a poison, blighting the growth of freedom in every land and encouraging all the black forces of tyranny, darkness, and suppression. Rapidly growing among us, there is already a certain solidarity between free States, and the problem of the immediate future is how to make their common action effective on the side of liberty. When I saw Tolstoy during the Russian revolution of 1905 he said to me:
"The present movement in Russia is not a riot; it is not even a revolution; it is the end of an age. The age that is ending is the age of Empires--the collection of smaller States under one large State. There is no true community of heart or thought between Russia, Finland, Poland, the Caucasus and all our other States and races. And what has Hungary, Bohemia, Syria, or the Tyrol to do with Austria? No more than Canada, Australia, India, or Ireland has to do with England. People are now beginning to see the absurdity of these things, and in the end people are reasonable. That is why the age of Empires is passing away."
It was a bold prophecy, but it contains the root of the whole matter. Only where there is community of heart and thought is national or personal life possible in any worthy sense. Unless that community exists between the various nationalities within an Empire, we may be sure the Empire is moribund. It is dying, as Napoleon said, of indigestion, and that other community of the world which is slowly taking shape among free and reasonable peoples will demand its dissolution. Our hope is that the other community will further proceed to demand that these disastrous experiments in the overthrow and subjection of free nationalities shall no longer be tolerated by the combined forces of liberty.
XXII
BLACK AND WHITE
One night Mr. Clarkson, of the Education Office, was rather late in leaving the Savile Club. He always makes a point of selecting the best articles in the _Nineteenth Century_, the _Fortnightly_, and the _Contemporary_ on the first Monday of every month, and, owing to a suspension of political activity in the House of Commons, he had lately spent more time than usual over the daily papers as well, since they could now afford greater space for subjects of interest. He noticed with some regret that it was half-past eleven as he came up Piccadilly and admired, as he never failed to admire, that urbane aspect of nature's charm presented by the Green Park.
It was late, but the evening was cool and dry. He wished to follow up a train of thought suggested by the question: "Should Aristotle be left out?" but, to preserve his mind from exclusiveness, he now and then considered it advantageous to plunge into what he called the full tide of humanity at Charing Cross. So that night, instead of making his way by the shortest route to his rooms in Westminster, he strolled, with a pleasurable sense of sympathetic abandonment, through the usual crowds that were hurrying home from theatres or supper-room.
But he soon perceived that all the crowds were not usual. Some were not hurrying; they were stationary. They were nearly all men, unrelieved by that subdued feminine radiance which Mr. Clarkson so much valued in the colour scheme of London. They were mainly silent. They appeared to be waiting for something.
"Is the King returning from the Opera?" he asked a policeman near King Charles's statue. But the policeman regarded him with a silent pity so profound that he suddenly remembered a King's recent death and the mourning in which the country was still partially immersed. No, it could not be royalty, and, feeling for the first time like a stranger in the centre of existence, Mr. Clarkson hurriedly crossed the road.
Between the top of Northumberland Avenue and Charing Cross Station he observed another crowd of the same character, but in thicker numbers still. Unwilling to eschew any emotion that thus stirred his fellow citizens, he approached the outskirts and waited, in hopes of gathering information without further inquiry. But the crowd was doggedly silent. Nearly all were reading the evening papers, and the few snatches of conversation that Mr. Clarkson caught appeared to be meaningless. At last he ventured to accost a harmless-looking, pale-faced youth in a straw hat, who was reading the latest _Star_, and asked him what he was waiting for.
The youth looked him up and down from head to foot, and then slowly uttered the words: "I don't think!"
"I'm so very sorry for that," said Mr. Clarkson, a little irritated, but, as he turned hastily away he reflected with a smile that, after all, one should be grateful to find imbecility so frankly acknowledged.
Next time he was more diplomatic. Standing quietly for a while beside a good-tempered-looking man, who was evidently an out-of-work cab-driver, he yawned two or three times, and said at last: "How long shall we have to wait, do you think?"
"Depends on cable," said the cab-driver. "Got a bit on?"
"Well, no; I haven't exactly got anything on," said Mr. Clarkson, uneasily; "but may I ask what cable you mean?"
"Don't be silly," said the cabman, and spat between his feet.
"Cheer up, long-face!" said another man, who had been listening. "He only means the cable from the States. Perhaps you've never heard of the White Man's Hope?"
Light at last broke upon Mr. Clarkson. "Of course," he said, "it's Independence Day! I've seen the American flag flying from several buildings. It has always appeared a most remarkable thing to me that we English people should thus ungrudgingly accept the celebration of our most disastrous national defeat. Such entire disappearance of racial animosity is, indeed, full of future promise. I suppose, if you liked, you might without exaggeration call it the White Man's Hope?"
"Stow it," said the cabman.
"No doubt the day is being marked in the United States by some special event," Mr. Clarkson continued, "and you are waiting for the account?"
No one answered. An American was reading aloud from a newspaper: "If the Imperturbable Colossus gets knocked out, a general assault upon all negroes throughout the States may be expected to ensue. The wail that goes up from Reno will be re-echoed from every land where the black problem sits like a nightmare on the chest. It is not too much to say that a new chapter in the world's history will open before our astonished eyes, so adequately is the gigantic struggle between the black and white races prefigured in the persons of their chosen champions."
All listened with attention.
"That's what I call thickened truth," said the American, looking solemnly round. "If that coloured gentleman with a yellow streak worries our battle-hardened veteran and undefeated hero of all time, the negro will grow scarce."
"They've been praying for Jeffries in all the American churches," said one, in the solemn pause that followed this announcement.
"So they have for Johnson in the negro churches," said another, "but he counts most on his mother's prayers. She lives in Chicago."
"It is peculiar in modern and Christianised countries," said Mr. Clarkson, anxious to show that he now fully understood the point at issue; "it is peculiar that the opposing parties in a war or other contest implore with equal confidence the assistance of the same deity."
"Millionaires is sleeping three in a bed at Reno. There's a thing!" said the man who was most anxious to impart information.
"The gate comes to £50,000, let alone the pictures," said another. "Each of them's going to get £500 a minute for the time they fight."
"Beats taxis," said the cabman.
"It's hardly fair to criticise the amount," Mr. Clarkson expostulated pleasantly; "the £500 represents prolonged training and practice in the art. As Whistler said, the payment is not for a day's work, but for a lifetime."
"Who are you calling the Whistler?" asked the cabman; "Jim Corbett, or John Sullivan?"
"Jeffries ate five lamb chops to his breakfast this morning," said the man of information, "and Johnson ate a chicken."
"Wish I'd eat both," said the cabman.
"What do you think of the upper-cut?" said the other, turning to Mr. Clarkson to escape the cabman's frivolity.