We have now dwelt for a long time on that extra- ordinary expansion which has had the effect that, considered as a state, England has left Europe altogether behind it and become a world-state, while, considered purely as a nation—that is, as speaking a certain language—she has furnished out two world states, which vie with each other in vigour, influence, and rapidity of growth. We have inquired into the causes, traced the process, and considered some of the results of this expansion. It remains then in this closing lecture to gather up the impressions we have received into a general conclusion.
There are two schools of opinion among us with respect to our Empire, of which schools the one may be called the bombastic and the other the pessimistic. The one is lost in wonder and ecstasy at its immense dimensions, and at the energy and heroism which presumably have gone to the making of it; this school therefore advocates the maintenance of it as a LECT, vill KECAPITULATION 341 point of honour or sentiment. The other is in the opposite extreme, regards it as founded in aggression and rapacity, as useless and burdensome, a kind of excrescence upon England, as depriving us of the advantages of our insularity and exposing us to wars and quarrels in every part of the globe ; this school therefore advocates a policy which may lead at the earliest possible opportunity to the abandonment of it. Let us consider then how our studies, now that they are concluded, have led us to regard these two opposite opinions.
We have been led to take a much more sober view of the Empire than would satisfy the bombastic school. At the outset we are not much impressed with its vast extent, because we know no reason in the nature of things why a state should be any the better for being large, and because throughout the greater part of history very large states have usually been states of a low type. Nor again can we imagine why it should be our duty to maintain our Empire for an indefinite time simply out of respect for the heroism of those who won it for us, or because the abandonment of it might seem to betray a want of spirit. All political unions exist for the good of their members, and should be just as large, and no larger, as they can be without ceasing to be beneficial. It would seem to us insane that if the connection with the colonies or with India hampered both parties, if it did harm rather than good, England should resolve to maintain it to her own detriment and to that of her dependencies. We find too a confusion of ideas 342 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.
hidden under much of the bombastic language of this school, for they seem to conceive of the dependencies of England as of so much property belonging to her, as if the Queen were like some Sesostris or Solomon of the ancient world, to whom “Tarshish and the isles brought presents, Arabia and Sheba offered gifts " ; whereas the connection is really not of this kind at all, and England is not, directly at least, any the richer for it And further we have ventured to doubt that the vastness of this Empire necessarily proves some invincible heroism or supernatural genius for government in our nation. Undoubtedly some facts may be adduced to show natural aptitude for colonisation and a faculty of leadership in our race. A good number of Englishmen may be cited who have exerted an almost magical ascendency over the minds of the native races of India ; and in Canada again, where the English settlers have competed directly with the French, they have shown a marked superiority in enterprise and energy. But though there is much to admire in the history of Greater Britain, yet the pre-eminence of England in the NewWorld has certainly not been won by sheer natural superiority. In the heroic age of maritime discovery we did not greatly shine. We did not show the genius of the Portuguese, and we did not produce a Columbus or a Magelhaen. When I examined the causes which enabled us after two centuries to surpass other nations in colonisation, I found that we had a broader basis and a securer position at home than Portugal and Holland, and that we were less involved vm RECAPITULATION 343 in great European enterprises than France and Spain. In like manner Avhen I inquired how we could con quer, and that with little trouble, the vast country of India, I found that after all we did it by means mainly of Indian troops, to whom we imparted a skill which was not so much English as European, that the French showed us the way, and that the condition of the country was such as to render it peculiarly open to conquest.
Thus I admitted very much of what is urged by the pessimists against the bombastic school. I endeavoured to judge the Empire by its own intrinsic merits, and to see it as it is, not concealing the incon- veniences which may attend such a vast expansion, or the dangers to which it may expose us, nor finding any compensation for these in the notion that there is something intrinsically glorious in an Empire " upon which the sun never sets,” or, to use another equally brilliant expression, an Empire " whose morning drum-beat, following the sun and keeping company with the hours, encircles the globe with an unbroken chain of martial airs." But though there is little that is glorious in most of the great Empires mentioned in history, since they have usually been created by force and have remained at a low level of political life, we observed that Greater Britain is not in the ordinary sense an Empire at all. Looking at the colonial part of it alone, we see a natural growth, a mere normal extension of the English race into other lands, which for the most part were so thinly peopled that our settlers took possession of them without 344 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
conquest. If there is nothing highly glorious in such an expansion, there is at the same time nothing forced or unnatural about it. It creates not properly an Empire, but only a very large state. So far as the expansion itself is concerned, no one does or can regard it but with pleasiire. For a nation to have an outlet for its superfluous population is one of the greatest blessings. Population unfortunately does not adapt itself to space ; on the contrary, the larger it is the larger is its yearly increment. Now that Great Britain is already full it becomes fuller with increased speed ; it gains a million every three years. Probably emigration ought to proceed at a far greater rate than it does, and assuredly the greatest evils would arise if it were checked. But should there be an expansion of the State as well as of the nation 1 " No," say the pessimists, " or only till the colony is giown-up and ready for independence." When a metaphor comes to be regarded as an argument, what an irresistible argument it always seems ! I have suggested that in the modern world distance has very much lost its effect, and that there are signs of a time when states will be vaster than they have hitherto been. In ancient times emigrants from Greece to Sicily took up their independence at once, and in those parts there were almost as many states as cities.
In the eighteenth century Burke thought a federation quite impossible across the Atlantic Ocean. In such times the metaphor of the grown-up son might well harden into a convincing demonstration. But since Burke’s time the Atlantic Ocean has shrunk till itviii RECAPITULATION 345 seems scarcely broader than the sea between Greece and Sicily. Why then do we not drop the metaphor 1 I have urged that we are unconsciously influenced by a historic parallel which when examined turns out to be inapplicable. As indeed it is true generally that one urgent reason why politicians should study history is that they may guard themselves against the false historical analogies which continually mislead those who do not study history ! These views are founded on the American Revolution, and yet the American Revolution arose out of circumstances and out of a condition of the world which has long since passed away. England Avas then an agricultural country by no means thickly peopled ; America was full of religious refugees animated by ideas which in England had lately passed out of fashion ; there was scarcely any flux and reflux of population between the two countries, and the ocean divided them with a gulf which seemed as unbridgeable as that moral gulf which separates an Englishman from a Frenchman. Even then the separation was not eff"ected without a great wrench. It is true that both countries have prospered since, nevertheless they have had a second war and may have a third, and it is wholly an illusion to suppose that their prosperity has been caused or promoted by their separation. At any rate all the conditions of the world are altered now. The great causes of division, oceans and religious disabilities, have ceased to operate. Vast uniting forces have begun to work, trade and emigi-ation. Meanwhile the natural ties which unite Englishmen resume their 346 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
influence as soon as the counteracting pressure is removed—I mean tlie ties of nationality, language, and religion. The mother-country having once for all ceased to be a stepmother, and to make unjust claims and impose annoying restrictions, and since she wants her colonies as an outlet both for popula tion and trade, and since on the other hand the colonies must feel that there is risk, not to say also intellectual impoverishment, in independence,—since finally intercourse is ever increasing and no alienating force is at work to counteract it, but the discords created by the old system pass more and more into oblivion,—it seems possible that our colonial Empire so-called may more and more deserve to be called Greater Britain, and that the tie may become stronger and stronger. Then the seas which divide us might be forgotten, and that ancient preconception, which leads us always to think of ourselves as belonging to a single island, might be rooted out of our minds. If in this way we moved sensibly nearer in our thoughts and feelings to the colonies, and accustomed ourselves to think of emigrants as not in any way lost to England by settling in the colonies, the result might be, first that emigration on a vast scale might becomeour remedy for pauperism, and secondly that someorganisation might gradually be arrived at which might make the whole force of the Empire available in time of war.
In taking this view I have borne in mind the example of the United States. It is curious that the pessimists among ourselves should generally have VIII RECAPITULATION 347 been admirers of the United States, and yet there we have the most striking example of confident and successful expansion. Those colonies which, when they parted from us, did but fringe the Atlantic sea-board, and had but lately begun to push their settlements into the valley of the Ohio, how steadily, how boundlessly, and with what steadfast seK-reliance have they advanced since ! They have covered with their States or Territories, first the mighty Mississippi valley, next the Rocky Mountains, and lastly the Pacific coast. They have made no difiiculty of absorbing all this territory ; it has not shaken their political system. And yet they have never said, as among us even those who are not pessimists say of the colonies, that if they wish to secede, of course they can do so. On the contrary they have firmly denied this right, and to maintain the unity of their vast state have sacrificed blood and treasure in un- exampled profusion. They fii-mly refused to allow their Union to be broken up, or to listen to the argument that a state is none the better for being very large.
Perhaps we are hardly alive to the vast results which are flowing in politics from modern mechanism. Throughout the greater part of human history the process of state-building has been governed by strict conditions of space. For a long time no high organ isation was possible except in very small states. In antiquity the good states were usually cities, and Rome herself when she became an Empire was obliged to adopt a lower organisation. In medieval Europe, 348 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.
states sprang up which were on a larger scale than those of antiquity, but for a long time these too were lower organisms and looked up to Athens and Romewith reverence as to the homes of political greatness.
But through the invention of the representative system these states have risen to a higher level. Wenow see states with vivid political consciousness on territories of two hundred thousand square miles and in populations of thirty millions. A further advance is now being made. The federal system has been added to the representative system, and at the same time steam and electricity have been introduced.
From these improvements has resulted the possibility of highly organised states on a yet larger scale. Thus Eussia in Europe has already a population of near eighty millions on a territory of more than two millions of square miles, and the United States will have by the end of the century a population as large upon a territory of four millions of square miles. We cannot, it is true, yet speak of Russia as having a high type of organisation ; she has her trials and her transformation to come; but the Union has shownherself able to combine free institutions in the fullest degree with boundless expansion.
Now if it offends us to hear our Empire described in the language of Oriental bombast, we need not conclude that the Empire itself is in fault, for it is open to us to think that it has been wrongly classified. Instead of comparing it to that which it resembles in no degree, some Turkish or Persian congeries of nations forced together by a conquering horde, let us VIII RECAPITULATION 349 compare it to the United States, and we shall see at once that, so far from being of an obsolete type, it is precisely the sort of union which the conditions of the time most naturally call into existence.
Lastly, let us observe that the question, whether large states or small states are best, is not one which can be answered or ought to be discussed absolutely. We often hear abstract panegyrics upon the happiness of small states. But observe that a small state among small states is one thing, and a small state among large states quite another. Nothing is more delightful than to read of the bright days of Athens and Florence, but those bright days lasted only so long as the states with which Athens and Florence had to do were states on a similar scale of magnitude. Both states sank at once as soon as large country states of consolidated strength grew up in their neighbourhood. The lustre of Athens grew pale as soon as Macedonia rose, and Charles V. speedily brought to an end the great days of Florence. Now if it be true that a larger type of state than any hitherto known is springing up in the world, is not this a serious consideration for those states which rise only to the old level of magnitude? Russia already presses somewhat heavily on Central Europe ; what will she do when with her vast territory and population she equals Germany in intelligence and organisation, when all her railways are made, her people educated, and her government settled on a solid basis ?—and let us remember that if we allow her half a century to make so much progress her 350 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
population will at the end of that time be not eighty but nearly a hundred and sixty millions. At that time which many here present may live to see, Russia and the United States will surpass in power the states now called great as much as the great country-states of the sixteenth century surpassed Florence. Is not this a serious consideration, and is it not especially so for a state like England, which has at the present moment the choice in its hands between two courses of action, the one of which may set it in that future age on a level with the greatest of these great states of the future, while the other will reduce it to the level of a purely European Power looking back, as Spain does now, to the .great days when she pretended to be a world state.
But what I have been saying does not apply to India. If England and her colonies taken together make, properly speaking, not an Empire but only a very large state, this is because the population is English throughout and the institutions are of the same kind. In India the population is wholly foreign, and the institutions wholly unlike our own. India is reallj’^ an Empire and an Oriental Empire. It is in relation to India especially that the language of the bombastic school oflFends us, and that we are struck by the misconception which is betrayed in their high-flown imagery borrowed from the ancient world. And here we cannot, on looking more closely into the phenomenon, reconcile ourselves to it by dis- covering that, though it has not the romantic great- VIII RECAPITULATION 351 ness attributed to it, yet it has a solid value and utility to us which is of another kind altogether. Gradually and in recent times a great trade between India and England has sprung up, but even this, as I pointed out, was hardly contemplated by those who had the principal share in founding the Indian Empire. And it is diflScult to see what other great advantages we reap from it, so that we ask ourselves in some perplexity, what made us take the trouble of acquiring it. Historically the answer is, that in our great colonial struggle with France we were led into wars which left us in possession of territories in the neighbourhood of Calcutta and Madras, that we then proceeded to organise our government of them, that we successfully purged away the corruption which had sprung up in the first period of conquest, and created an administration that was pure and under the direct control of the Government at home ; but that afterwards there arose a line of Governors-General who on high grounds of statesmanship were favourable to annexa tion. The policy now adopted was not sordid, but it may have been ambitious and unscrupulous. If we are to think, as Mr. Torrens ^ imagines, that Pitt and Lord Wellesley in secret deliberation determined to replace the American colonies by an Eastern Empire, such an idea, according to the view taken in these lectures, belongs to an unsound and chimerical system of politics. But ostensibly the policy was fustified by arguments chiefly of a philanthropic kind, and 1 Tlie Marquis Wellesley, by W. M. Torrens, M.P., vol. i. p. 128, 352 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.
they were arguments of such strength that it wasdifficult to resist them. It was not to be denied that a most deplorable anarchy reigned in India. Here and there a tyranny arose which had somedegree of stability, though it was almost always a military government of the lowest type. But over the greater part of India there prevailed a system which it would be appropriate to call, not govern- ment of a low type, but robbery of a high type. Occasionally in Europe, as in some Highland clans or among the Western buccaneers, or those ancient pirates of the Mediterranean whom Pompey wascommissioned to suppress, robber-bands have hadalmost the magnitude and organisation of states, but they never have reached the scale of the robber-states of India. The Mahrattas levied their chout, a sort of blackmail, all over India, and at a later time the Pindarrees surpassed the Mahrattas in cruelty. Nowthis anarchy arose directly out of the decline of the authority of the Great Mogul. It was possible of course for the English to wash their hands of all this, to defend their own territories, and let the chaos welter as it would outside their frontier. But to Governors-General on the spot such a course mighteasily seem not just but simply cruel. Aggrandise ment might present itself in the light of a simple duty, when it seemed that by extending our Empirethe reign of robbery and murder might be brought to an end in a moment, and that of law commence.^ 1 " It is a proud phrase to use, but it is a true one, that we liave bestowed blessings upon millions . . . The ploughman is again in VIII RECAPITULATION 353 A.ccordingly Lord Wellesley laid it do^vn that there had always been a paramount Power in India, that such a paramount Power was necessary to the country, and that it became the duty of the Company, now that the power of the Mogul had come to an end, to save India by assuming his function. And thus we founded our Empire, partly it may be out of an empty ambition of conquest and partly out of a philanthropic desire to put an end to enormous evils. But, whatever our motives might be, we incurred vast responsibilities, which were compensated by no advantages. We have now acquired a great Indian trade, but even this we purchase at the expense of a perpetual dread of Russia, and of all movements in the Mussulman world, and of all changes in Egypt. Thus a review of the history of British India leaves on the mind an impression quite different from that which our Colonial Empire produces. The latter has grown up naturally, out of the operation of the plainest causes ; the former seems to have sprung from a romantic adventure ; it is highly interesting, striking, and curious, but difficult to understand or to form an opinion about. We may hope that it will lead to good, but hitherto we have not ourselves reaped directly much good from it.
I have shown you however that, though it may be called an Oriental Empire, it is much less dangerous every quarter turning up a soil which had for many seasons never been stirred except by the hoofs of predatory cavalry." Lord Hastings, February 1819. 2a 354 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.
to US than that description might seem to imply. It is not an Empire attached to England in the same way as the Roman Empire was attached to Rome ; it will not drag us down, or infect us at home with Oriental notions or methods of government. Nor is it an Empire which costs us money or hampers our finances. It is self-supporting, and is held at arm’s length in such a way that our destiny is not very closely entangled with its own.
Next I have led you to consider what may be the effect of our Indian Empire upon India itself. Weperhaps have not gained much from it; but has India gained ? On this question I have desired to speak with great diffidence. I have asserted con fidently only thus much, that no greater experiment has ever been tried on the globe, and that the efi"ects of it will be comparable to the efiect of the RomanEmpire upon the nations of Europe—nay, probably they will be much greater. This means no doubt that vast benefits will be done to India, but it does not necessarily mean that great mischiefs may not also be done. Nay, if you ask on which side the balance will incline, and whether, if we succeed in bringing India into the full current of European civilisation, we shaU not evidently be rendering her the greatest possible service, I should only answer, “I hope so; I trust so.” In the academic study of these vast questions Ave should take care to avoid the optimistic commonplaces of the newspaper. Our Western civilisation is perhaps not absolutely the glorious thing we like to imagine it. Those whoVIII RECAPITULATION 355 watch India most impartially see that a vast trans- formation goes on there, but sometimes it produces a painful impression upon them ; they see much destroyed, bad things and good things together sometimes they doubt whether they see many good things called into existence. But they see one enormous improvement, under which we may fairly hope that all other improvements are potentially included ; they see anarchy and plunder brought to an end and something like the immensa majestas Romanae pacis established among two hundred and fifty millions of human beings.
Another thing almost all observers see, and that is that the experiment must go forward, and that we cannot leave it unfinished if we would. For here too the great uniting forces of the age are at work England and India are drawn every year for good or for evil more closely together. Not indeed that dis- uniting forces might not easily spring up, not that our rule itself may not possibly be calling out forces which may ultimately tend to disruption, nor yet that the Empire is altogether free from the danger of a sudden catastrophe. But for the present we are driven both by necessity and duty to a closer union. Already we should ourselves suflfer greatly from dis- ruption, and the longer the union lasts the more important it will become to us. Meanwhile the same is true in an infinitely greater degree of India itself The transformation we are making there may cause us some misgivings, but though wc may be led con- ceivably to wish that it had never been begun, nothing 356 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LBOT.
could ever convince us that it ought to be broken off in the middle.
Altogether I hope that our long course of medita tion upon the expansion of England may have led you to feel that there is something fantastic in all those notions of abandoning the colonies or abandon ing India, which are so freely broached among us. Have we really so much power over the march of events as we suppose 1 Can we cancel the growth of centuries for a whim, or because, when we throw a hasty glance at it, it does not suit our fancies 1 The lapse of time and the force of life, " which working strongly binds," limit our freedom more than we know, and even when we are not conscious of it at all. It is true that we in England have never accustomed our imaginations to the thought of Greater Britain. Our politicians, our historians still think of England not of Greater Britain as their country ; they still think only that England has colonies, and they allow themselves to talk as if she could easily Avhistle them off, and become again with perfect comfort to herself the old solitary island of Queen Elizabeth’s time, " in a great pool a swan’s nest." But the fancy is but a chimera produced by inattention, one of those monsters—for such monsters there are—which are created not by imagination but by the want of imagination ! But though this is a conclusion to which I am led, it is not the conclusion which I wish to leave most strongly impressed on your minds. What I desire here is not so much to impart to you a just view of VIII RECAPITULATION 357 practical politics, as a just view of the object and method of historical study. My chief aim in these lectures has been to show in what light the more recent history of England ought to be regarded by the student. It seems to me that most of our historians, when they come to those modern periods, lose the clue, betray embarrassment in the choice of topics, and end by producing a story without a moral. I have argued in the first place that history is con- cerned, not mainly with the interesting things which may have been done by Englishmen or in England, but with England herself considered as a nation and a state. To make this more plain I have narrated nothing, told no thrilling stories, drawn no heroic portraits ; I have kept always before you England as a great whole. In her story there is little that is dramatic, for she can scarcely die, and in this period at least has not suffered or been in danger of suffer- ing much. What great changes has she undergone in this period? Considerable political changes no doubt, but none that have been so memorable as those she underwent in the seventeenth century. Then she made one of the greatest political dis- coveries, and taught all the world how liberty might be adapted to the conditions of a nation-state. On the other hand the modern political movement, that of Reform or Liberalism, began not in England but on the Continent, from whence we borrowed it. The peculiarly English movement, I have urged, in this period has been an unparalleled expansion. Grasp this fact, and you have the clue both to the eighteenth 358 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.
and the nineteenth centuries. The wars with France from Louis XIV. to Napoleon fall into an intelligible series. The American Revolution and the conquest of India cease to seem mere digressions and take their proper places in the main line of English history. The growth of wealth, commerce, and manufacture, the fall of the old colonial system and the gradual growth of a new one, are all easily included under the same formula. Lastly this formula binds to- gether the past of England and her future, and leaves us, when we close the history of our country, not with minds fatigued and bewildered as though from reading a story that has been too much spun out, but enlightened and more deeply interested than ever, because partly prepared for what is to come next.
I am often told by those who, like myself, study the question how history should be taught, Oh, you must before all things make it interesting ! I agree with them in a certain sense, but I give a different sense to the word interesting—a sense which after all is the original and proper one. By interesting they mean romantic, poetical, surprising ; I do not try to make history interesting in this sense, because I have found that it cannot be done without adulterating history and mixing it %vith falsehood. But the word interesting does not properly mean romantic. That is interesting in the proper sense which affects our interests, which closely concerns us and is deeply im- portant to us. I have tried to show you that the history of modern England from the beginning of the eighteenth centiu-y is interesting in this sense, .
viii • RECAPITULATION 359 because it is pregnant with great results which will affect the lives of ourselves and our children and the future greatness of our country. Make history inter- esting indeed ! I cannot make history more interest- ing than it is, except by falsifying it. And therefore when I meet a person who does not find history inter- esting, it does not occur to me to alter history,—I try to alter him.
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