Historians are sometimes ridiculed for indulging in conjectures about what would have followed in history if some one event had fallen out diflferently. " So gloriously unpractical ! " we exclaim. Now it is not for the sake of practice, but for the sake of theory, that such conjectures are hazarded, and I think historians should deal in them much more than they do. It is an illusion to suppose that great public events, because they are on a grander scale, have something more fatally necessary about them than ordinary private events ; and this illusion enslaves the judgment. To form any opinion or estimate of a great national policy is impossible so long as you refuse even to imagine any other policy pursued. This remark is especially applicable to an event so vast and complex as the Expansion of England. Think for a moment, if there had been no connection of England with the New World ! How utterly different would have been the whole course 190 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.
of English history since the reign of Queen Elizabeth ! No Spanish Armada would have come against us, and there would have been no Drake and Hawkins to withstand it. No great English navy would have grown up. Blake would not have fought with Van Tromp and De Ruyter. The wars of the Long Parliament and Charles II. with Holland, the war of CromweU with Spain, would never have taken place. The country would not have amassed the capital which enabled it to withstand and at last to humble Louis XIV. The great commercial corporations would not have arisen to balance the landed interest and transform the policy of the state. England would not have stood at the head of all nations in Queen Anne’s reign, and we should have had a wholly and entirely different eighteenth century. Every thing in short would be utterly unlike what it is; and you may be tempted to ridicule the whole speculation as unprofitable, because infinite.
But yet it is the most practical of all speculations, and for this reason. All this vast expansion, all these prodigious accretions which have gathered round the original England in three centuries, are yet not so completely incorporate with England that we cannot contemplate shaking ourselves free from them and becoming again the plain England of Queen Elizabeth. The growth of our Empire may indeed have been in a certain sense natural ; Greater Britain, compared to old England, may seem but the full- grown giant developed out of the sturdy boy; but there is this difference, that the grown man does not t• HISTOKY AND POLITICS 191 and cannot think of becoming a boy again, whereas England both can and does consider the expediency of emancipating her colonies and abandoning India. We do not, as a matter of fact, think of Canada as we think of Kent, nor of Nova Scotia as of Scotland, nor of New South Wales as of Wales, nor of India as of Ireland. We can most easily conceive them separated from us, and, if we chose, we could most easily bring about the separation. Nay more, many authorities actually recommend us to do so. We are forced then to pass some judgment on the expansion of England considered as a whole. Is it a transient development, like the expansion of Spain ? Was it even a mistake from the beginning, a product of mis directed energy ? Nations can and do make mistakes. They are guided often by blind passion or instinct, and there is no reason in the nature of things why their aberrations should not continue for ages and lead them infinitely far. And thus it is conceivable that England ought from the beginning to have resisted the temptations of the New World, that she ought to have remained the self-contained island she was in Shakspeare’s time—" in a great pool a swan’s nest " ; or at least that it would have been fortunate for her to have lost her Empire as France did, or when she lost her first colonial Empire not to have founded a new one.
But if this be so, or even if it may be so, what an enormous, intricate, and at the same time what a momentous problem is before us ! If we have thus wandered from the right path, or if only we ought 192 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
now to strike into a wholly new path, how prodigi ously important is the fact ! How much it siu-passes in importance all those questions of home politics which absorb our attention so much ! Many of us elude this consideration by a very confused argument. We say, “Let us mind our own affairs and not concern ourselves with remote countries, which are beyond our comprehension, and which it was a mis- fortune for us ever to become connected with.” But if this really was a misfortune, if our empire really is so much too large for us, then the question is infinitely more urgent and instant than if it were otherwise. For then we cannot too soon resolve to free ourselves from an encumbrance which will assuredly entail disaster upon us; then we ought to devote ourselves to the vast and delicate problem of destroying our Empire, until it is fairly achieved. And thus in any case we have here by far the largest of all political questions, for if our Empire is capable of further development, we have the problem of discovering what direction that development should take, and if it is a mischievous encumbrance, we have the still more anxious problem of getting rid of it, and in either case we deal with territories so vast and populations which grow so rapidly that their destinies are infinitely important.
I say, this is a political problem, but is it not also a historical problem? Yes, and the main reason why I have chosen this subject is that it illustrates better than any other subject my view of the con- nection between history and politics. The ultimate I HISTORY AND POLITICS 193 object of all my teaching here is to establish this fundamental connection, to show that politics and history are only different aspects of the same study. There is a vulgar view of politics which sinks them into a mere struggle of interests and parties, and there is a foppish kind of history which aims only at literary display, which produces delightful books hovering between poetry and prose. These perver sions, according to me, come from an unnatural divorce between two subjects which belong to each other. Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics. In order to show this clearly, it has seemed to me a good plan to select a topic which belongs most evidently to history and to politics at once. Such a topic pre-eminently is Greater Britain. What can be more plainly political than the questions What ought to be done with India ? What ought to be done with our Colonies 1 But they are questions which need the aid of history. We cannot delude ourselves here, as we do in home questions of fran- chise or taxation, so as to fancy that common sense or common morality will suffice to lead us to a true opinion. We cannot suppose ourselves able to form a judgment, for example, about Indian affairs without some special study^ because we cannot help seeing that the races of India are far removed from ourselves in all physical, intellectual, and moral conditions. Here then we see how politics merge into history. But I am even more anxious to show you by this o 194 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.
example how history merges into politics. The foundation of this Empire of ours is a comparatively modern event. If we leave out of account the colonies we have lost and think only of the Empire we still possess, we think of an Empire which was founded almost entirely in the reigns of George II. . and George III. Now this is the period which students avoid as being too modern for study ; this is the period which classic historians neglect, and which accordingly passes in the popular mind for an uneventful period of uniform prosperity and civilis- ation. I have complained that our historians all grow languid as they approach this period, that their descriptions of it are featureless, and that accordingly they lead their readers to think of English history as leading up to nothing, as a story without a moral, or as like the Heart of Midlothian, of which the whole last volume is dull and superfluous. You see then how I think this evil may be cured. I show you mighty events in the future, events of which, as future, we know as yet nothing but that they must come, and that they must be mighty. These events are some further development in the relation of England to her colonies and also in her relation to India. Some further development, I say, for evidently the present phase is not definitive ; but what the development will be we cannot yet know. Will there be a great disruption ? Will Canada and Australia become independent States? Shall we abandon India, and will some native Government at present almost inconceivable take the place of theI HISTOKY AND POLITICS 195 Viceroy and his Council ? Or will the opposite of all this happen 1 Will Greater Britain rise to a higher form of organisation 1 Will the English race, which is divided by so many oceans, making a full use of modern scientific inventions, devise some organisation like that of the United States, under which full liberty and solid union may be reconciled with unbounded territorial extension? And, secondly, shall we succeed in solving a still harder problem? Shall we discover some satisfactory way of governing India, some modus vivendi for two such extreme opposites as a ruling race of Englishmen in a country which they cannot colonise, and a vast population of Asiatics with immemorial Asiatic traditions and ways of life ? We do not know, I say, how these problems will be solved, but we may be certain that they will be solved somehow, and we may be certain from the nature of the problems that the solution of them will be infinitely momentous. This then is the goal towards which England is travelling. We are not then to think, as most historians seem to do, that all development has ceased in English history, and that we have arrived at a permanent condition of security and prosperity. Not at all ; the move- ment may be less perceptible because it is on a much larger scale; but the changes and the struggles when they come—and they will come—will be on a larger scale also. And when the crisis arrives, it will throw a wonderful light back upon our past history. All that amazing expansion which has taken place since the reign of George II., and which 196 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
we read of with a kind of bewildered astonishment, will begin then to impress us differently. At present when we look at the boundless extent of Canada and Australia given up to our race, we are astonished, but form no definite opinion. When we read of the conquest of India, two hundred millions of Asiatics conquered by an English trading company, we are astonished and admire, but we form no definite opinion. All seems so strange and anomalous that it almost ceases to be interesting. We do not know how to judge of it nor what to think of it. It will be otherwise then. Time will reveal what was really solid in all this success, and what was not so. Weshall know what to think of that great struggle of the eighteenth century for the possession of the NewWorld, when the event has shown, either that a great and solid World-State has been produced, or that an ephemeral trade-empire, like that of old Spain, rose to fall again; either that a solid union between the West and East, fruitful in the greatest and profoundest results, was effected in India, or that Clive and Hastings set on foot a monstrous enterprise which, after a century of apparent success, ended in failure.
This lesson time will teach to all alike. But history ought surely in some degree, if it is worth anything, to anticipate the lessons of time. Weshall all no doubt be wise after the event ; we study history that we may be wise before the event. Whyshould we not now form an opinion about the destiny of our colonies and of our Indian Empire? That I HISTOKY AND POLITICS 197 destiny, we may be sure, will not be decreed arbitrarily. It will be the result of the working of those laws which it is the object of political science to discover. When the event takes place, this will be visible enough ; all will see more or less clearly that what has happened could not but happen. But if so, the students of political science ought to be able to foresee, at least in outline, the event while it is still future.
Now, do not these considerations set the more recent history of England in a new light? I have shown you England in the latter part of the sixteenth century entering upon a wholly new path. I have traced the stages of its progress in this path through the seventeenth century and the prodigious results which followed in the eighteenth. I have pointed out that we are still in a state of things which is evidently provisional, of which some great modifica tion is evidently at hand. It follows from all this that the modern part of English history presents to us a great problem, one of the greatest problems, in political science. And thus I show you history merging in politics. I show you the reigns of George 11. and George III. not as a mere bygone period, whose quaint manners and fashions it is a delightful amusement to revive with the imagination, but as a storehouse of the materials by which we are to solve the greatest and most urgent of all political problems. In order to understand what is to become of our Empire we must study its nature, the causes which support it, the roots by which its Life is fed ; and to
198 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.
study its nature is to study its history, and especially the history of its beginning.
We have been told for a long time past by fashion- able writers that history has made itself too solemn and pompous, that it ought to deal in minute, familiar, vivid details ; in fact that it ought to be written just in the style of a novel. I will pause once more to tell you what I think of this view, which has been of late so prevalent. I do not deny the criticism on which it is founded. I fully admit that history should not be solemn and pompous, and I admit that for a long time it was both. But solemnity is one thing, and seriousness is quite another. This school argue that because history should not be solemn, therefore it should not be serious. They deny that history can establish any solid or important truths they have no conception that any great discoveries can ever come out of it. They can only see that it is exquisitely entertaining and delightful to call the past into life again, to see our ancestors in their costume as they lived, and to surprise them in the very act of doing their famous deeds. I find their theory stated with the most ingenuous frankness by Thackeray in the opening to his lecture on Steele, a passage which almost every one has read, and I fancy almost every one has thought very shrewd and true.
He says, " What do we look for in studying the history of a past agel Is it to learn the political transactions and characters of the leading public men 1 is it to make ourselves acquainted with the life and being of the time? If we set out with the t HISTORY AND POLITICS 199 former grave pui’pose, where is the truth, and who believes that he has it entire 1 " And then he goes on to declare that in his opinion the solemn statements which we find in books of history about public affairs are all nonsense, and would not bear any sceptical examination. He refers by way of example to Swift’s Conduct of the Allies and Coxe’s Life of Marllorough, and you see that it is from works of that extremely old-fashioned cast that he has formed his idea of what history is. But now, political history being all nonsense, what are we to substitute for it ‘( Thackeray tells us that we are " to make ourselves acquainted with the life and being of the time." What does this mean 1 He goes on to explain. " As we read in these dehghtful volumes of the Taller and Spectator, the past age returns, the England of our ancestors is revivified. The Maypole rises in the Strand again in London, the churches are thronged with daily worshippers ; the beaux are gathering in the cofifee-houses, the gentry are going to the drawing room, the ladies are thronging to the toy-shops, the chairmen are jostling in the streets, the footmen are running with links before the chariots or fighting round the theatre doors. I say the fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume which purports to be all true. Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life of the time ; of the manners, of the movement, the dress, the pleasures, the laughter, the ridicules of society—the old times live again and I travel in the old country 200 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.
of England. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?" That a great’ novelist should think thus is in itself almost a matter of course. The great engineer Brindley, being asked for what purpose he supposed rivers to have been created, answered without the least hesitation, To feed canals ! Thackeray, being asked why Queen Anne lived and the English under the Duke of Marlborough fought the French, answers candidly, It was that I might write my delightful novel of Esmond. Of course he thought so, but how could he, with his keen sense of humour, venture to say so ? You see, he appeals to our scepticism, He does not deny that history might be important if it were true, but he says it is not true. He does not believe a word of it.
Well! if so, Avhat should we do? Must we take the course he points out to us? Must we give up history as a serious study but keep it as a delightful amusement, turn away from European wars and watch the ladies thronging to the toy-shops, cease studying what sort of government our ancestors had and inquire rather what they had for dinner 1 I tell you there is another and a much better course, which leads in quite the opposite direction. If history for a long time has been, as it has been, untrue and un satisfactory, correct it, amend it. Make it true and trustworthy. There is no reason in the world why this should not be done, or rather it has been done already for the greater part of history, and only remains undone in those more recent periods which I HISTORY AND POLITICS 201 students have neglected. It seems not to be generally known how much the study of history has been transformed of late years. Those charges of untrust- worthiness, of pompous and hollow conventionality, which are vulgarly made against history, used to be well-grounded once, but are in the main groundless now. History has been in great part rewritten ; in great part it is now true, and lies before science as a mass of materials out of which a political doctrine may be deduced. It is not now pompous and solemn, but it is thoroughly serious, much more serious than ever. Here then is the alternative which lies before you. Instead of ceasing to regard history seriously, aa Thackeray advises you, regard it more seriously than before. Instead of holding that you cannot find the truth, and therefore may as well cease to seek it, consider that the truth is hard to find, and there- fore must be sought all the more diligently, all the more laboriously.
For observe that if once we grant that historic truth is attainable, and attainable it is, then there can be no further dispute about its supreme im portance. It deals with facts of the largest and most momentous kind, with the causes of the decay and growth of Empires, with war and peace, with the sufferings or happiness of millions. It is by this con sideration that I merge history in politics. I tell you that when you study English history you study not the past of England only, but her future. It is the welfare of your country, it is your whole interest as citizens, that is in question while you study 202 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.
history. How it is so I illustrate by putting before you this subject of the Expansion of England. I show you that there is a vast question ripening for decision, upon which almost the whole future of our country depends. In magnitude this question far sur- passes all other questions which you can ever have to discuss in political life. And yet it is altogether a historical question. The investigation of it requires not only some knowledge, but I may almost say a full knowledge of the modern history of England. For, as I have pointed out, England has been entirely engaged for the last three centuries in this expansion into Greater Britain. If therefore you would discern in outline the future of Greater Britain, you will have to master almost the whole history of England in the last three centuries. Only enter upon these inquiries, only undertake to make up your minds upon the colonial question and the Indian question ; you will find that you are led back from question to question and from one department of affairs to another, iintil you discover that these two questions bring the whole modern history of England in their train. And not only is this one way of grasping English history, but it is the best way. For in history everything depends upon turning narrative into problems. So long as you think of history as a mere chronological narrative, so long you are in the old literary groove which leads to no trustworthy knowledge, but only to that pompous conventional romancing of which all serious men are tired. Break the drowsy spell of narrative; ask yourself questions; set yourself T HISTORY AND POLITICS 203 problems ; your mind will at once take up a new attitude ; you will become an investigator ; you will cease to be solemn and begin to be serious. Now modern English history breaks up into two grand problems, the problem of the colonies and the problem of India.
Moreover, all those considerations which make the universal study of history imperative in all countries where there is popular government, operate in England far more strongly than in any other country. For this immense expansion of our race has the effect of making English politics most bewilderingly difficult. I take it that every other country—France, Germany, the United States, every country except perhaps Eussia—has a simple problem to solve compared with that which is set before England. Most of those states are compact and solid, scarcely less compact, though so much larger, than the city-states of antiquity. They can only be attacked at home, and therefore their armies are a kind of citizen soldiery. Now, distant dependencies destroy this compactness, and make the national interest hard to discern and hard to protect Because of our scattered colonies it is easy for an enemy to strike at us. If we were at war with the United States, we should feel it in Canada ; if with Russia, in Afghan istan. But this external difficulty is less serious than the internal difficulties which arise in a scattered empire. How to give a moral unity to vast countries separated from each other by half the globe, even when they are inhabited in the main by one nation ! 204 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lrct.
But even this is not the greatest of the anxieties of England. For besides the colonies, we have India. Here at least there is no community of race or of religion. Here that solid basis which is formed by immigration and colonisation is almost entirely wanting. Here you have another problem not less vast, not less difficult, and much less hopeful, than that of the colonies. Either problem by itself is as much as any nation ever took in hand before. It seems really too much that both should fall on the same nation at the same time.
Consider how distracting must be the effect upon the public mind of these two opposite questions. The colonies and India are in opposite extremes. What ever political maxims are most applicable to the one, are most inapplicable to the other. In the colonies everything is brand-new. There you have the most progressive race put in the circumstances most favour able to progress. There you have no past and an unbounded future. Government and institutions are all ultra-English. All is liberty, industry, in- vention, innovation, and as yet tranquillity. Now if this alone were Greater Britain, it would be homo geneous, all of a piece ; and, vast and boundless as the territory is, we might come to understand its affairs. But there is at the same time another Greater Britain, surpassing this in population though not in territory, and it is everything which this is not. India is all past and, I may almost say, has no future. What it will come to the wisest man is afraid’ to conjecture, but in the past it opens vistasr HISTORY AND POLITICS 205 into a fabulous antiquity. All the oldest religions, all the oldest customs, petrified as it were. No form of popular government as yet possible. Everything which Europe, and still more the New World, has outlived still flourishing in full vigour ; superstition, fatalism, polygamy, the most primitive priestcraft, the most primitive despotism; and threatening the northern frontier the vastAsiatic steppe with its Osbegs and Tur comans. Thus the same nation which reaches one hand towards the future of the globe and assumes the position of mediator between Europe and the New World, stretches the other hand towards the remotest past, becomes an Asiatic conqueror, and usurps the succession of the Great Mogul.
How can the same nation pursue two lines of policy so radically different without bewilderment, be despotic in Asia and democratic in Australia, be in the East at once the greatest Mussulman Power in the world and the guardian of the property of thousands of idol-temples, and at the same time in the West be the foremost champion of free thought and spiritual religion, stand out as a great military Imperialism to resist the march of Russia in Central Asia at the same time that it fills Queensland and Manitoba with free settlers? Never certainly did any nation, since the world began, assume anything like so much responsibility. Never did so many vast questions in all parts of the globe, questions calling for all sorts of special knowledge and special training, depend upon the decision of a single public. It must be confessed that this public bears its respon- 206 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect. i sibility lightly ! It does not even study colonial and Indian questions. It does not consider them in- teresting, except in those rare cases when they come to the foreground of politics. When the fate of a Ministry is concerned they are found intensely interesting, but the public does not consider them interesting so long as only the population of India, the destiny of a vast section of the planet, and the future of the English state itself, are concerned. As to India, Macaulay writes thus : " It might have been expected that every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history would be anxious to know how a handful of his countrymen, separated from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated in the course of a few years one of the greatest empires in the world. Yet unless we greatly err, this subject is to most readers not only insipid but positively distasteful." The acquisition of India by England, as part of that expansion which in the last two centimes has so profoundly modified our state, will be examined in the succeeding lectures.
LECTURE II