Part 4

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 rôle 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 Phœnician 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 who 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 rôle 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 rôle 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.

IX

WINSTON

10.11.23

In this tragic and confused world it has been my undeserved lot to lead an amused life. All sorts of bright and entertaining and likeable things have been given me and paraded before me. And among others is my friend, Mr. Winston Churchill: not the American Winston but the British Winston. Our relations are relations of intermittent but I trust affectionate controversy. We had a great slanging match some years ago about Russia, and if I remember rightly Mr. Churchill took the count. That is my pleasant impression of the affair. His may be different, of course. Then, in a little book called _Men Like Gods_, one of the characters got out of my control and began to speak and act in a way so like Mr. Churchill’s that even I could see the resemblance. I was shocked and alarmed. I had to stun that character and hustle it out of the way, but not before it had made a long characteristic speech and started a war....

Now Mr. Churchill has taken the opportunity afforded by an article I wrote about the British Empire for the British _Empire Review_ to open up a fight again. My article, more or less abbreviated, in some cases shorn of its chief arguments, and adorned with the unsolicited crossheads so dear to editors of spirit, has been extensively syndicated in America, and will no doubt be followed round the earth by flying fragments of his reply. It is a spirited and amusing reply. He calls me Citizen Hoopdriver, which is a fair return for the misbehaviour of my fictitious character, and he laments my discursiveness because I will not stick to my proper occupation of imaginative fiction--which from a gentleman much younger than myself who has danced in turn through Admiralty, War Office, Munitions Ministry, Air Ministry, Colonies and Board of Trade, who has been a brilliant cavalry officer and a still more brilliant newspaper correspondent, who has written eight or nine large but entertaining books and painted some excellent pictures, is pretty considerable cheek. But let that pass.

My original article on the British Empire which appeared in the _Empire Review_ pointed out things that are manifest to everyone but the most besotted Imperialist; that the present British Empire is a thing of yesterday, that it is excessively unstable, and that it is bound to undergo great changes and reconstructions in the near future. An Imperial Conference has been struggling in London with the most urgent aspects of these pressing changes. And I should have thought that anyone above the level of a patriotic schoolboy would have seen that any rational constructive change must be in the direction of knitting up the sprawling British system with its kindred civilisations, and especially with the United States of America, in some form of mutual support and co-operation. But Mr. Churchill, regardless of the article he is pretending to criticise, and of all my attacks on the present League of Nations, pretends that I want to put the British Empire forthwith under a world federation upon which Belgians, Chinese, Peruvians, Hottentots, and so forth are to be in a crushing majority. “In this sublime conception,” he writes in his caustic way, “the British inheritance accumulated by the thrift and effort of so many centuries would be liquidated and generously shared with all nations.”

Now this is the poorest of platform nonsense. It is not only nonsense about my proposals, but nonsense about the Empire. The sooner we clear our minds of such cant about thrift and age-long development the better. Putting it as gently as possible, the present British Empire is not an inheritance but a series of--shall we say acquisitions?--and mostly very recent acquisitions. What is the good of canting in the face of facts? We didn’t save up India; Australia wasn’t the reward of abstinence.

The British Empire of a hundred years ago was a mere set of scattered trading-stations and a bit of the present Indian Empire. The present British Empire has been assembled by means of the ocean-going steamship and the railway in the last hundred years, and much of it in the last fifty. Beside the Dutch colonial empire it is a thing of yesterday. The steamship made it and maintains it. It is cemented by steamships. If the steamship is presently superseded by the air-liner the British Empire will become like a wall whose mortar has decayed. But Mr. Churchill will hear nothing of new buttresses and sounder binding for this adventitious band of States.

He goes on to a denunciation of my republicanism. Ignoring steamships, banking, Imperial Preference, and a common language, he declares the only sure link of the Empire is “the golden circle of an ancient crown.” I would hate to say anything in detraction of a devoted and indefatigable royal family, but I do not believe that there is any effective imperial binding force in the cult of snobbery and sentiment, of which its members are at once the divinities and the sacrificial victims. The healthy natural man is a republican, and has a stiff backbone. Nobody really loves or respects a courtier. One of the chief troubles in the Irish settlement has been the excessive distaste of many Irishmen for the forms of royalty. One of the chief barriers between the British and closer co-operation with America is this king-business. The true cement of our communities must be the sense of equal brotherhood and common aims.

After that Mr. Churchill lapses into sheer naughtiness. There are times when the evil spirit comes upon him and when I can think of him only as a very intractable little boy, a mischievous, dangerous little boy, a knee-worthy little boy. Only by thinking of him in that way can one go on liking him. Suddenly he breaks out about Russia, and I am reminded that he has been one of the chief afflictions of that unfortunate country, that he was largely responsible for the waste of scores of million pounds of British money, in arming first one brigand chief and then another to attack and further devastate our war-exhausted ally.

He is still unrepentant. He declares that I was a passionate and am now a disappointed pro-Bolshevik, although I have always been an austere critic and witness of Bolshevik incompetence and unpracticalness. But I have also borne my witness to the fact that the Bolshevik leaders are mainly honest men, fighting against stupendous difficulties and leading hard lives, and that the Russian people would far rather have them as its rulers than any of the vicious, plundering, pogromming White Hopes and Czarist reactionaries patronised by Mr. Churchill. These Russians have fought against tremendous difficulties against invading Japanese, Poles, Esthonians, French-subsidised invaders and British-subsidised invaders, and against famine and a pitiless blockade, and against their own ignorance and the atrociously rough and cruel legacy of Czarism, and it seems as if after all they will pull through and lay the foundations of a renascent Russia.

And this is the handful of mud this English statesman hurls at the struggling rulers of this great land with which we are at peace. “They are just a selfish, plundering crew of tyrants and parasites who descended upon an unhappy land and enslaved or slaughtered its people, soiled its honour, ruined its prosperity, devoured its substance, and enriched themselves and their female belongings.”