The Character of the British Empire

Ii

The creation of the British Empire has been simply a part (though, perhaps, the greatest part) of that outpouring of the European peoples which has, during the last four centuries, brought the whole world under the influence of western civilisation. That is a great achievement, and it has brought in sight the establishment of a real world-order. It is merely foolish to condemn the "lust of conquest" which has driven the European peoples to subdue the rest of the world, though, of course, we ought to condemn the cruelties and injustices by which it has sometimes been accompanied. But without it North and South America, Australia, and South Africa would have remained deserts, inhabited by scattered bands of savages. Without it India would have been sentenced to the eternal continuance of the sterile and fruitless wars between despotic conquerors which made up her history until the British power was established. Without it the backward peoples of the earth would have stagnated for ever in the barbarism in which they have remained since the beginning. The "imperialism" of the European nations has brought great results to the world. It has made possible that unification of the political and economic interests of the whole globe which we see beginning to-day. It is one of the fine aspects of this grim and horrible war that it affects the interests of the whole world, and that the whole world knows this.

The giant's part which has been played by Britain in the conquest of the world by Western civilisation, and the peculiar character of her work, have been due to two things--British institutions and the British Navy.

It ought never to be forgotten that down to the nineteenth century (that is, during all the earlier part of the process of European expansion) Britain was the only one of the greater European States which possessed self-governing institutions. She has been, in truth (this is not a boast, but a mere statement of indisputable historical fact), the inventor of political liberty on the scale of the great nation-state, as Greece was the inventor of political liberty on the scale of the little city-state. And wherever free institutions exist to-day, they have been derived from Britain, either by inheritance, as in America and the self-governing British colonies, or by imitation, as in all other cases.

When the outpouring of Europe into the rest of the world began, the British peoples alone had the habit and instinct of self-government in their very blood and bones. And the result was that, wherever they went, they carried self-government with them. Every colony of British settlers, from the very first, was endowed with self-governing institutions. No colony ever planted by any other nation ever obtained corresponding rights.[1] That is one of the outstanding features of British expansion. In the eighteenth century, and even in the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain herself and the young nations that had sprung from her loins were almost the only free States existing in the world. It was because they were free that they throve so greatly. They expanded on their own account, they threw out fresh settlements into the empty lands wherein they were planted, often against the wish of the Mother Country. And this spontaneous growth of vigorous free communities has been one of the principal causes of the immense extension of the British Empire.

Now one of the results of the universal existence of self-governing rights in British colonies was that the colonists were far more prompt to resent and resist any improper exercise of authority by the Mother Country than were the settlers in the colonies of other countries, which had no self-governing rights at all. It was this independent spirit, nurtured by self-government, which led to the revolt of the American colonies in 1775, and to the foundation of the United States as an independent nation. In that great controversy an immensely important question was raised, which was new to human history. It was the question whether unity could be combined with the highest degree of freedom; whether it was possible to create a sort of fellowship or brotherhood of free communities, in which each should be master of its own destinies, and yet all combine for common interests. But the question (being so new) was not understood on either side of the Atlantic. Naturally, Britain thought most of the need of maintaining unity; she thought it unfair that the whole burden of the common defence should fall upon her, and she committed many foolish blunders in trying to enforce her view. Equally naturally the colonists thought primarily of their own self-governing rights, which they very justly demanded should be increased rather than restricted. The result was the unhappy war, which broke up the only family of free peoples that had yet existed in the world, and caused a most unfortunate alienation between them, whereby the cause of liberty in the world was greatly weakened.[2]

Britain learned many valuable lessons from the American Revolution. In the new empire which she began to build up as soon as the old one was lost, it might have been expected that she would have fought shy of those principles of self-government which no other State had ever tried to apply in its over-sea dominions, and which seemed to have led (from the imperialistic point of view) to such disastrous results in America. But she did not do so; the habits of self-government were too deeply rooted in her sons to make it possible for her to deny them self-governing rights in their new homes. On the contrary, she learnt, during the nineteenth century, to welcome and facilitate every expansion of their freedom,[3] and she gradually felt her way towards a means of realising a partnership of free peoples whereby freedom should be combined with unity. Its success (although it must still undergo much development) has been strikingly shown in the Great War.

Thus British institutions--the institutions of national self-government, which are peculiarly British in origin--have played a main part both in determining the character of the British Empire and in bringing about its wonderful expansion. The more the British Empire has grown the more freedom has been established on the face of the earth.

The second great factor in the growth of the British Empire has been the power of the British Navy, which has been the greatest sea power of the world practically since the overthrow of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

It is a striking fact that in all her history Britain has never possessed a large army, until the necessities of this war suddenly forced her (as they are now forcing America) to perform the miracle of calling her whole manhood from the pursuits of peace to arms, of training them, and of equipping them, all within two years. In 1775 it was the fact that she possessed only a tiny armed force (some 40,000 men for the defence of all her dominions), which made it necessary for her, for example, to hire Hessian troops in a hurry for the purposes of the American War of Independence. Is not this an astounding paradox, that the power which has acquired dominion over one-quarter of the earth has done it without ever possessing a large army? And does it not suggest that the process by which this empire was acquired must have been very different from the ordinary processes of military conquest? This is a paradox which those who speak of the British Empire as if it were a mere military dominion must somehow explain.