Empire and Liberty
I
It is not easy to perceive what exactly was the object of the articles on Imperialism contributed to the first two numbers of this magazine by “Ossorian.” Vague glorification of an ideal British Empire which does not exist, based, so to speak, on a system of political metaphysics, is, at the very best, no better than vague glorification of the ideas of nationalism or separation, or any other idea which “Qssorian” may have set out to combat; whilst, practically considered, the upshot is equally nugatory. One can understand Home Rulers like Mr. John Redmond, together with out-and-out Unionists, subscribing to most of “Ossorian’s” generalities. What is meant, say, by telling us to take “a manlier, more intelligent and more consistent, view of things”? Is, for instance, one way of exhibiting our increased manliness to be the cessation of the demand for the elementary right to manage our own affairs? Or are we to acquiesce in base and ignoble wars against the liberty of small communities, wars which are condemned by the best minds within the British Empire, and by all the world outside? Are we to show our greater intelligence by applauding as magnificent what thinkers like Herbert Spencer, Alexander Bain, John Morley, Prof. Bryce, Goldwin Smith, William Watson and Olive Schreiner to name at random condemned as vile?
Again, what is meant by the phrase: “She [Ireland] will not, I think, work much longer through resistance and revolt?” Is it that we are to vote for perpetual Coercion Acts, and Over-taxation, to assent to the imprisonment of popular representatives, and to proclaim that we are not fit to govern ourselves, though we know in our hearts it is false? Of course, in supposing that these are the interpretations of “Ossorian’s” phrases, I may be doing him an injustice. But the truth is that the phrases themselves are so vague as to be either altogether meaningless, or are mere platitudes. One might as well assert that the English Free Traders, or Trade Unionists, or Anti-Vaccinationists work through “resistance and revolt,” as assert it of the Irish people. All parties and peoples seek to promote the measures they need and oppose measures that hurt them. How else do we act? How else should we act? To be consistent, “Ossorian” ought to advise the Free Traders, instead of “resisting” Mr. Chamberlain, to join his party; whilst, in turn, Mr. Chamberlain, instead of “revolting” against the doctrines of Cobden, should be advised to join the Cobden Club. Politics pursued on “Ossorian’s” lines would at least be interesting.
Behind, however, this vague talk of the spirit of resistance and revolt in the Irish people, there lies, in my judgment, a profound misreading of the Irish case, English Tories are in the habit of talking of the innate turbulence and discontent of Ireland. They are the type of people, I may remind “Ossorian,” whom Edmund Burke opposed on the question of the American War in his day, and who regarded the Boers as “obstinate” and “tricky” in our own day. Any people who do not delightedly welcome political slavery — when the brand is English — are in the view of this type morally inferior beings, with a double dose of original sin. But if the slavery be other than English—Turkish, or Russian, or Austrian — then the people who resist it are patriots and heroes. The Hungarians and the Bulgarians, the Italians and the Poles were and are noble peoples struggling to be free — but not the Boers, the Hindus, or the Irish. The type of Englishman in view — and he is in the majority — is merely the embodiment of ignorance and injustice, and is himself, without question, morally the inferior of most of the people he asperses. But for us in Ireland an important thing to note is that his view, which “Ossorian” seems to adopt, that we are a particularly turbulent, “revolting,” and “resisting” people is not true. I do not say that a spirit of revolt is a bad quality in itself. But, as a matter of fact, the mere pretence of goodwill on the part of the English Government — and it has seldom been more than a pretence — is enough to bring the Irish people half-way, and more than half-way. When, in 1886, Mr. Gladstone introduced his first Home Rule Bill, the mere prospect caused the Dublin workingmen to give such an enthusiastic welcome to Lord Aberdeen, the Gladstonian Viceroy, as made many Irish democrats wince. Time after time British statesmen had only to be moderately honest in translating their professions into practice to be hailed as deliverers. In view of such incidents and the facts of the case it is misleading to speak of the Irish people as gratuitously quarrelsome, or as resisting and revolting without just cause. And it is in the light of countless historic disappointments and disillusions that one fails to be impressed with the amiable gush of Lord Dudley about “national traditions” and “national character,” the platitudes of a Viceroy, who is a political nonentity, being a poor substitute for political justice.
That “Ossorian’s” general picture is not true to the facts, nor even consistent with itself, does not need very much demonstration. He tells us that the Englishman’s “contempt for thoughts and sentiments and ways that [are] not English has been a constant obstruction”-so that it would appear as though insular conceit were an excellent qualification for world-rule. “Ossorian” in one admission, indeed, gives his case away. England has been engaged in governing Ireland for centuries, and the policy of Irish government has been dictated by the “predominant partner” — the English. Yet “Ossorian” tells us that the “English in England . . . are beginning to understand” — the Irish case. Their progress is certainly promising; they will probably have arrived at full knowledge by the millenium. In the meantime, the Irish people, who do fairly understand their own case, are to suffer and struggle along whilst the amiable infant wisdom of England grows to maturity. The unvarnished truth is that no nation interferes from motives of philanthropy in the affairs of other nations, and the ideal of world-rule is itself fundamentally vicious, since the rule of communities by themselves is infinitely better in the long run than the most wise and benevolent outside despotism.
II
In the last paragraph of his second paper “Ossorian” writes: “Imperialism is not Anglicisation. It is the very reverse of Anglicisation. Anglicisation, in the sense of imposing English institutions, customs, standards, habits of thought, and so forth . . . would bring Imperialism to swift and unlamented ruin.” The language is not, perhaps, of the clearest. But, as a matter of fact, Imperialism in practice is Anglicisation or nothing, and it is tending to bring down the fabric in unlamented ruin. Within the last three years we have seen the British Empire in a frenzy of Imperialism, at the behest of mining capitalists, invade and break up two Republics in Africa, one of which (the Orange Free State), on the testimony of everyone, was an admirably governed community, and the other, on the testimony of impartial witnesses, was at least as well governed as England itself. And we have seen despatched to these territories officials from England, ignorant of the conditions and hostile to the people, and drawn doubtless from the class whose performances in Japan provoked “Ossorian’s” contempt. In a recent edition of his work New India, Sir Henry Cotton, in language not unlike Mr. George Lynch’s notes, “a greater friction between the governors and the governed, attributable especially to the arrogance in thought and language of the ruling race, which has been brought out into stronger relief by the extension of education and the growth of independence and patriotic feeling among the people.”
As I write, British forces, on pretexts that deceive no one, are engaged in the invasion of Tibet, as deliberate and wanton a crime as any burglar ever stood charged with. And we have all read the heroic exploits of this expedition in pursuing and shooting down practically unarmed Tibetans like sheep. But “Ossorian” seems to be singularly blind to such iniquities. He has an eye for the supposed inconsistency of Mr. Thomas O’Donnell, M.P. (which I confess not being able to recognise as gross), but he has no eye for the Jameson Raid, the Transvaal War, the age-long tragedy of India, prevented from developing along her own lines and taxed to famine point by English officialism, and the age-long tragedy of Ireland, kept in a state of perpetual smouldering civil war and bleeding to the point of extinction. These things might make the picture more sombre; but if the picture is to be a true one it must take these things in. And I confess I do not understand the object of a writer, obviously bent on serious discussion, leaving out the really serious facts in his way. If “Ossorian” had faced these questions out we might or might not have agreed with his conclusions; by ignoring them altogether the conclusions become almost worthless.
III
In order, then, to correct “Ossorian’s” picture and to clear the discussion, it is necessary to examine what exactly is the British Empire, not what it might or should be, but what it actually is. The name, “British Empire,” then, is used to cover a number of territories nominally under the British Crown, some of which like the Australian colonies are virtually self-governing republics, some of which, like Ireland, with a nominally-responsible government, are yet despotically governed against the consent of the people, and, lastly, states and territories, like India and the Transvaal, despotically governed without any pretence of consulting the wishes or interests of the people at all. That is the British Empire of fact. Now “Empire” in the historic meaning of the term is properly only to be applied to despotically-governed states. We may colloquially speak of New Zealand or Australia as portions of the British Empire, but their self-government is not due to any idea of Empire. We might as well speak of New Jersey or Massachussetts as portions of the American Empire, and no one will contend that their self-government is due to the Imperial ideal. If “Ossorian” insists that the Imperial ideal to him stands for self-government such as Australia and New Zealand enjoys, the whole discussion falls to the ground; for, in that case, the Irish people in demanding self-government are the true Im- perialists, as against the prose who are only at the beginning of wisdom.
As a matter of fact, however, we know that the people who appropriate the title of Imperialist in England, and claim to be the true exponents of the Imperial idea, are determinedly against the cause of self-government in Ireland, in India, in the Transvaal, and anywhere it can safely be withheld.
“Ossorian,” would seem to argue the opposite, And something might, indeed, be said for the British Empire if it were a political organisation sincerely aiming at its own extinction as an Empire; which is what it ought to do, if it were what its eulogists claim it to be. As M. Auguste Sabatier, the French Protestant, in his last book, in discussing authority, well says: “Like every good teacher authority should labour to render itself useless.” Does the British influence then, in the despotically-governed states, work in any conscious way to promote an ideal of liberty, or to educate and train them to the point of being able to take care of themselves? To pose the question at all in Ireland is almost ridiculous. We know, as a matter of fact, it does nothing of the kind.
Let us, for instance, take the Transvaal. England picked a quarrel with the South African Republic on the ground that some Englishmen there were not given votes quickly enough, though we were all aware that hundreds of thousands of Englishmen in England itself had no votes, Well, having begun the war on this pretext, England has ended by taking away votes from everybody, English and Dutch alike. England began by complaining that foreigners in the Transvaal were treated as “helots;” she has ended by importing Chinese by the thousand who will have no rights whatever.
IV
Beside such moral perversity it seems to me the charge sometimes made against Irish opinion that it unintelligently sympathises with England’s enemies is almost negligible. Certainly I agree that it behoves Ireland to regulate her international sympathies by permanent standards of right and wrong, and not by the accident of her relationship to England. And the business of those of us who wish to help Ireland, most assuredly is to scrutinise our sympathies, national and international alike. But who is it wishes Ireland to sympathise with the massacre of the Matabele or the Tibetans, the robbery of the Boer States, the ignoble and costly farce in Somaliland, or the never-ending “frontier expeditions” in India in which human beings are slaughtered in order to keep the Indian Army efficient in the art of man-slaying? Let me inquire of the people who charge Ireland with perverse feeling on these exploits, on what side is the impartial opinion of the outside world? Nay, on what side is the nobler opinion in England itself? It is significant, indeed, that the Englishman in Ireland, and a certain type of Irishman who follows his lead, when he eulogises England, is never thinking of the better and the finer England. It is never the England of Mill, or Cobden or Bright, or Morley, of Spencer or Matthew Arnold or Ruskin: this England never excites enthusiasm in the breast of your Imperialist, for this England, as a whole, scouts Imperialism and all its pomps as vigorously as the most turbulent Irishman of us all. It is the England of Disraeli and Arthur Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain, and Curzon and Milner, the England of Rudyard Kipling and the Music Halls - this is the England with which we are often benevolently called upon to ally ourselves. It is, as I have said, significant. By our intellectual and moral preferences we inevitably and unconsciously reveal our intellectual and moral stature. To ask us then to approve England’s wars of aggression on their merits, with their natural accompaniments of shoddy politics and intellectual decadence, is to ask us to pervert our natural moral feeling. To ask us to approve these wars as a matter of political tactic — so that by applauding the crime we ingratiate ourselves with the criminal — is a curious precept of intelligence and manliness. Happily the advice is as unintelligent as it is base, With men and nations, it is not those who abet them in their debauchery that they finally respect; rather do they despise such. And in any case, if the only way for Ireland to gain her liberty, or even “the sort of prosperity which the Englishman understands,” were for her to join England in trampling on the liberty of some other people, I trust the mass of Irishmen will never hesitate about their course. Liberty so gained would turn to tyranny in the hands that bought it, and so corrupt a political bargain would inevitably produce its harvest of moral corruption in the State.
V
The philosophic truth is that if humanity is ever to grow in political science and moral feeling, the ideal of Empire must more and more fade away and disappear; and just as the noblest men find their highest satisfaction in self-knowledge and self-discipline, so nations will come to find their true ideal in developing their own mental and moral wealth and in leaving other nations free from an interference which, always disastrous in practice, is generally motived by cupidity. As Edward Carpenter, an English poet who has to some extent inherited the gift of Whitman, wrote in scornful rebuke of his own nation’s Imperialism during the Boer War :—
And this thing cries for Empire.
This thing from all her smoky cities and slums, her idiot
clubs and drawing rooms, and her broker’s dens,
Cries out to give her blessings to the World!
And even while she cries
Stand Ireland and India at her doors
In rags and famine.
The poet with true instinct puts his finger on the moral hypocrisy of it all, the neglect of immediate obligations for the 'glory' of undertaking fresh ones. And with like force and truth Edward Carpenter, having prophesied the ruin of the Imperial ideal, sums up the new ideal in words with which this paper may fitly end :—
And better so perhaps; for what is good shall live,
The brotherhood of nations and of men
Comes on apace. New dreams of youth bestir
The ancient heart of earth—fair dreams of love
And equal freedom for all folk and races.
The day ts past for idle talk of Empire;
And who would glory in dominating others—
Be it man or nation—he already has writ
His condemnation clear to all men’s hearts,
‘Tis better he should die.
Originally Published in DANA, an Irish Magazine of Independent Thought, No. 4, 1904