Pax Britannica (54 page)

‘
T
H
’
AT
cloud
in
the
west!
’
Here and there across the radiant horizons of the British Empire several such clouds were loosely forming, and gave to a few imaginative watchers a sensation of storms to come. It was as though that blaze of pride were too brilliant to last, like a preternaturally glittering summer day. Kipling caught this mood of presentiment in
Recessional.
Elgar would presently orchestrate it. Fisher felt it, as he watched the Germans building their battle fleets, and realized that all the glory of Empire could be shattered in one exchange of gunfire in the North Sea. Even the public showed a morbid interest in fantasies of foreign invasions and British defeats, calculated to chill the most Jingo spine: one horridly popular French publication,
Plus
d’Angleterre,
suggested that when their nemesis came at last the British would have to pay an indemnity of
£
560 million, and hand over Dover, the entire Royal Navy, most of the Empire and the Elgin Marbles to the French. For one Power to rule so much of the world seemed a challenge to fate—and every educated Englishman was aware of the fate of empires. The most frenetically imperialist of writers seldom failed to mention the fall of Rome, Ozymandias or the decline of Spain, if only to speculate what marvellous things the archaeologists would discover, when they dug through the debris of the Pax Britannica.

If precedents were anything to go by, the self-governing white colonies would be the first to break away from the Empire—probably not by armed rebellion, like the Americans, but perhaps by the exertion of independent tempers. A symbolically disconcerting proclamation was once made by the Australians at a place called
Thursday Island, in the remote tropical north of Queensland. This was the very top of Australia, separated only by the narrow Torres Strait from New Guinea, the East India archipelago and Asia proper, and it was one of the hardest places in the world for a big ship to get to: when the British India boats sailed there through the islands their captains often stayed on the bridge for four days and nights, worrying their vessels through the shallows. On Thursday Island, off the tip of Cape York, there was a little town and a naval station—1,500 souls in all, with some fifty whites and a shifting community of Malays, Polynesians, Chinese, a few Japanese pearl divers and a few aborigines. The flag of the Queensland Government flew above the Resident Magistrate’s house, and there was a little wooden prison, a post office, a storehouse for the Royal Navy’s Australian squadron, a couple of pubs, two or three shops and a courthouse. Immediately behind this clutch of buildings was the bush, and the Sound all about was littered with low sandy islands, baked in heat.

It was a dismal place, away beyond the never-never, but if the Australians ever stamped out of the Empire, Thursday Island might be remembered as their Concord, for it was here that they first showed the world their independence. For years the Queenslanders had been urging the Imperial Government to occupy the island of New Guinea across the water, to forestall the Germans or the French. The British, who had more than enough islands on their books, repeatedly declined: so on March 30, 1883, the day after the English mail-boat had left for London, leaving northern Queensland conveniently incommunicado, the Resident Magistrate at Thursday Island posted a proclamation in his official notice-board. It announced the annexation of all New Guinea, not by the Imperial Government at all, but by the Government of Queensland. A day or two later the Magistrate sailed across the Torres Strait, and ceremonially planted the Union Jack upon the soil of Papua. The British first annulled the annexation in a huff, then agreed to declare a protectorate over the south-eastern part of the island: and when, in 1884, the Germans took the north-eastern coast for themselves, the Queenslanders were understandably piqued.

White colonial defiance did not often go so far, but the Thursday Island proclamation was a warning, and less dramatic disagreements
smouldered on. Colonials intermittently complained that they were not permanently represented on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, their own supreme court of appeal, and it irritated them when the British, who controlled their foreign relations, high-handedly ignored their views. In Canada the historian Goldwin Smith
1
campaigned against everything imperialist, to the fury of loyal Anglo-Canadians. In Australia the
Bulletin
stridently derided the ‘colonial cringe’ and what it liked to call ‘The Hempire’. The British, for their part, often found the self-governing colonies an embarrassment. Their racial prejudices were awkward in a multiracial Empire: Australian laws keeping out Chinese immigrants, blessed with the Queen’s assent, were distinctly at variance with the Imperial Government’s Chinese treaties, securing British subjects in China every kind of privilege. The way colonials treated their African and aboriginal subjects was often distressing to the British. Both the Australians and the Canadians were in bad odour with the Japanese, a people to whom the British were increasingly drawn. The belligerence of the Australians and New Zealanders in the Pacific chafed against Salisbury’s sophisticated diplomacy, and Canada’s frontier fears repeatedly caused friction between London and Washington. Britain and France were habitually at loggerheads over Newfoundlanders’ fishing rights: when a fishing dispute between the Newfoundlanders and the Americans was adjudicated in favour of Washington, the Newfoundland Legislature refused to pay the damages, and the British Government voted with embarrassment to pay them itself—late one night towards the end of a Session, when nobody would much notice. All in all, if ever the British family of nations broke up, it was debatable whether the daughters would flounce out first, or the mother.
2

Would the barbarians one day take over? Not, it seemed to the experts again, by force of arms. There were very few British possessions where armed revolution seemed seriously possible, and there was virtually no communication between one subject people and another. The British agencies of security and intelligence were thorough and experienced, and since the Indian Mutiny they had taken no chances: the secret agents of
Kim
,
with their cloak-and-dagger habits and elaborate networks of information, were active all over British Asia. Von Hübner made the point that wherever the British lived there was sure to be a faithful servant, a trusty or Man Friday, to warn them of conspiracy: Lascar disaffection on British merchant ships was nearly always given away in advance.

In the black African colonies the last spirit of the Zulus and the Ashantis had been broken, and lesser tribes like the Matabele could not fight for long: even Adowa had not much shaken the military prestige of European armies and their Maxim guns. Kitchener was dealing with the Mahdi—or as Sir Walter Besant
1
put it in an article that summer, ‘inspiring with a wholesome dread of the British name the death-despising hordes of the Sudan’. The Egyptians were docile. The French Canadians were dormant. The great Sikh fighting confederacy, the last of Britain’s enemies within India, now provided some of the most trusted and admired soldiers of the Indian Army. The Burmese had been pacified, the Maoris were being anglicized, the Australian aborigines were far less trouble than the rabbits.

The two imperial communities which might conceivably rise in arms against the Crown were both white: the Boers of South Africa, the Irish of the Other Island. The formidable Boers, in their endless efforts to get away from the British, the Aborigines Protection Society and the smoke from the next man’s chimney, had seldom
failed to humiliate the imperial forces whenever they had clashed: their principles had such punch, their culture was so fanatic, their physiques were so stringy and spare, like the biltong that hung from their saddles, that they made their imperial opponents seem flabby by comparison. As for Ireland, there across St George’s Channel was the only real revolutionary situation of the British Empire. Nobody knew how many arms had reached the Irish nationalists, nor how prepared the Fenians were to try another rising: but it was a country, as everyone knew, that was only held by coercion, and twenty-three infantry battalions, with two regiments of cavalry and an army of police, stood on guard in case.

But it was the sea that counted. The sea insulated one possession from another, and gave the British, in effect, internal lines of communication. The British Army might not be very terrible to enemies in Europe, but it was expert in swift movement over vast distances, from one side of the Empire to another. If rebels within the Empire were to succeed, it would only be by scattered guerrilla tactics, tantalizing the heavy imperial forces and making them look foolish, without much hope of
driving them out altogether. Since the Kaiser’s friendly telegram to Kruger at the time of the Jameson Raid the Boers had convinced themselves that if ever it came to a showdown against Britain the Germans would send troops or at least arms to South Africa. The Irish, too, imagined armies arriving, singing Gaelic marching songs, in Fenian troopships from New York. These were pipe-dreams. The British controlled the seaways, knew all about colonial wars, and would always win them in the end.

No, if they were to lose their Empire by force, it would only be in conflict with some immense equal, engaging their armies in a kind of war they did not understand, and defeating them at the centre. They had no real friends or allies, their strength was half bluff, and the best Navy in the world could not save them against a determined team of European enemies. Then Miss Gonne might find her opportunity, and out of the wreckage some of the colonial peoples might snatch back their sovereignties, restoring their kingdoms, principalities, chieftaincies and sultanates to their former fissiparous consequence.

On Jubilee evening the Governor of Bombay gave a banquet in his palace at Poona, where the summer heat hung heavy over lake and grotto, and great ladies of the cantonment conversed stickily with Sassoons. Late that night two British officials, Mr Rand and Lieutenant Ayerst, were saluted into their carriage by the crimson-jacketed footmen at the door, and were driven away into the dark: they had hardly left the gate of the Government House compound when a volley of shots rang out from the shrubbery beside the road, and both men were killed.

A terrible plague was raging in the province of Bombay, and Rand and Ayerst were the plague officers trying to staunch it in Poona. Their methods had necessarily been forceful. They had called in troops to help, segregated people from infected areas into camps, pulled down contaminated properties. They had become dreaded figures among a populace that did not understand their purposes, and any dispossessed householder, half-crazed by anxiety, might have murdered them: but to the British in India their deaths meant far more. Fearful troubles beset India that summer, and the plagues and the famines were accompanied, for the first time since the Mutiny, by stirrings of nationalist feeling. For several days before the Jubilee leaflets had been circulating in Poona and Bombay, reviling the Queen and calling on Indians to boycott the festivities. Three hundred million Indians, they said, were living in slavery, diseased and half-starved. ‘Not even a demon would venture to celebrate his conquests in a time of famine plague and earthquake.’ The British newspapers did not give much prominence to the deaths of Ayerst and Rand, but the Anglo-Indians interpreted the tragedy as evidence of seditious conspiracy, and when a few weeks later the murderer was caught and hanged they felt that justice had only superficially been done.

In India an absolute despotism was supported by absolute freedom of speech, and a people with virtually no hope of governing itself was deliberately educated in the highest principles of English liberalism. At a time when only a handful of Indians had penetrated
the senior Civil Service, and the idea of an Indian Governor, let alone a Viceroy, was perfectly unthinkable, thousands of educated Indians were conversant with the views of Burke and Bagehot, and followed debates at Westminster with informed and often partisan interest. This was terribly frustrating. Militant religious revivals fanned the resultant discontent, and a multitude of half-Westernized graduates, denied the jobs they thought they merited, formed a perfect audience for demagoguery. There were, to use the noun classically applied to nationalists all over the Empire, agitators at large. ‘In every province of India with which I am acquainted’, Sir Charles Crosthwaite wrote, ‘there is scattered about a considerable element of this kind—the vultures waiting for the death of their prey.’

It was, though, more than mere lust for carrion. One response to the challenge of imperialism was inevitably the rise of patriotism in the subject peoples. Even in India, historically a welter of separate entities held together by alien force, a new sense of nation was emerging. Its leaders foresaw that the way to independence was not by any hope of another Mutiny, but by constant argument, agitation, Parliamentary pressure and appeals to the British conscience. ‘It may be,’ said the nationalist Gopal Krishna Gokhale, ‘that the history of the world does not furnish an instance where a subject race has risen by agitation. If so, we shall supply that example for the first time. The history of the world has not come to an end. There are more chapters to be added.’