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are considered by leading anthropologists to be probably due to a crossing of the
fair whites with a darker race. It is to be observed that this distinction cuts across that which Comparative Philology would lead us to draw between Aryan or Indo-Germanic and Semitic nations; and this illustrates another uncertainty in which
the application of the notion of ‘race’ is involved, from the difficulty of separating, among the mental characteristics that distinguish average members of different
societies, what comes from physical heredity and what from social influence. In
consequence of this affinities of language are a very imperfect guide to affinities
of race. Hence, in speaking of the ‘Indo-Germanic family of nations,’ I must not
be understood to imply that the nations thus grouped together are all physically
derived from one stock; but only that they are connected with one ancient social
group by a continuous social life, evidenced by continuity of language and at least
partly due to continuity of race.
At the same time there are certain broad distinctions of physical race which
have remained nearly permanent during the range of history. As Mr. Tylor says, on
the wall-paintings at Thebes we can distinguish red-brown Egyptians, Ethiopians
like those of the present day, captives from Palestine with the well-known Semitic
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profile, thick-lipped negroes, and fair-skinned Libyans. And these examples may
remind us that civilisation is not a monopoly of the white race, in the widest sense of that term. ‘At the dawn of history, the leaders of culture were the brown Egyptians,
and the Babylonians,’ whose language is not connected with any known language
of white nations; while the yellow Mongoloid Chinese have been ‘for four thousand
years or more a civilised and literary nation.’ The civilisation that spread round
the Mediterranean was not originated by the dark whites – Phoenicians, Greeks,
Romans – but only carried on by them. Still we may perhaps say that higher
political civilisation, the capacity for developing constitutional government in a civilised state, belongs primarily to the white race; and mainly to branches of the white race which speak an Indo-Germanic language, and therefore show a partial
continuity of descent from one single original group. (DEP –)
Sidgwick goes on to address the importance of climate and geography
in shaping peoples, roughly following the line shared with Bryce. The
primary source of any racial pride that he is willing to record, in this highly
tentative and ambivalent way, thus concerns the European development
of liberal constitutionalism.
These distinctions between race, civilization, and political civilization
would seem to be of some importance for appreciating the particulars
of Sidgwick’s position. He had long been sharply critical of those who
pronounced in too-dogmatic fashion on just where civilization was to be
found. Of special note is an review of Lord Ormathwaite’s Astronomy
and Geology Compared – one of the tartest things Sidgwick ever wrote – in
which he complains of the “lucid and well-bred tediousness” of the “store
of platitudes” by which the author attempts to challenge Darwin. But the
“climax of complacent commonplace” is only reached when Ormathwaite
tries to show “how entirely progress and civilization have been confined
to the European branch of the human race.” According to him, Asiatic
nations “never seem to have been inspired by any of the loftier motives
which animate Europeans” – they cannot “recognize among them patri-
otism, or honour, or moral principle” and seem never to have “possessed
any body of works worthy to be termed a literature.” For such ignorance
Sidgwick can scarcely conceal his scorn: the problem with the book arises
“entirely from the matter.”
If only he had continued the thought.
As noted earlier, both Bryce and Dicey thought that many of Sidgwick’s
friends were slightly surprised by Development. Eleanor Sidgwick had
consulted both of them, and Leslie Stephen, on the publication of it, and
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they were enthusiastic in recommending it. In fact, Bryce went so far as to
write that in “the main principles or statements of fact there was nothing to
differ from,” and that he was especially impressed by Sidgwick’s treatment
of Rome – a subject on which, of course, Bryce had written extensively.
Perhaps enough has now been said to indicate the more worrisome pe-
culiarities of Sidgwick’s description of himself as a political “independent,
with Tory sympathies.” As the nineteenth century wore on, he was more
and more out of sync with political developments and more and more
worried about the direction of civilization, even as he was ever more en-
tangled with such matters. The great mystery is how he could have been
so alienated and so skeptical and yet remain so supremely confident in the
moral mission of English civilization, which in the end he prized mainly
for its political institutions and greater emphasis on science. Clearly, at
the least, he warmly entertained far too many possibilites when it came
to the future of race and rule, relations between “higher” and “lower”
civilizations, and a vigorous new aristocracy. His agnosticism did not lean
far enough in the right direction – did not, that is to say, push him far
enough toward a truly critical engagement with the concept of “Race.”
Vermicular skepticism might have served him and his students very well.
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Never, surely, was the English mind so confused, so wanting in fixed moral prin-
ciples, as at present.
Sir John Seeley, “Ethics and Religion,” paper delivered to the
Cambridge Ethical Society in
I share to the full the general disillusionment of political idealists, perhaps all the more fully that I am spending my time in trying to finish a book on the Theory
of Politics, with a growing conviction that the political results of the coming
generation will be determined by considerations very unlike those that come to
the pen of a theoretical person writing in his study.
Sidgwick to A. J. Patterson, December , (M )
The brutalism that was reviving in Europe was displayed most grimly in the
‘Congo Free State’ sanctioned by the Berlin Conference on Africa in , and
from then until a private empire of King Leopold of the Belgians. Here
could be seen priva
te enterprise at its worst, free from all public inquiry or
check, and the new plutocracy at its glossiest, with a royal manager. Its devi-
ous origins show how missionary zeal, like all Europe’s better impulses, could be
exploited by money-grubbers. A titular Archbishop of Carthage launched with
papal approval a campaign for stronger action against slave-trading; he invited
Christian soldiers to volunteer, and dreamed of a new order of knights-errant.
Leopold encouraged the idea, and when his ‘Free State’ was set up humanitarians
rejoiced.
His agent for the preliminary spadework or collection of ‘treaties’ was H. M.
Stanley, the Anglo-American explorer whose chief performance in Africa was
his expedition to find Livingstone in –. . . . In the Congo it was as easy as elsewhere to employ Africans of one tribe against another. Leopold assembled
a mercenary army with, by , officers from up and down Europe, and
, natives. Its business was to ensure quick profits in rubber, ivory, or palm-
oil collected as tribute or by forced labour. The consequences were of a sort and
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on a scale not seen again in the world until the Nazi epoch, when they were seen
in Europe itself.
V. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind
I. The Universal Heart of Darkness
Sidgwick’s abiding faith in the supreme value of Western civilization and
its expansion makes for very depressing reading. No doubt he was in
many ways innocent and ignorant of the brutal realities of the growth
of empire; certainly, he detested the militarism and barbarism of which
he was aware. But he was nonetheless horribly smug about his “grade”
of civilization. Someone so keenly aware that he was living in a Millian
age of transition, and possessing such an acute skeptical intellect, might
have done better, even if so many others certainly did worse. But then,
notions of “spiritual expansion” just did permeate the Oxbridge air, and
Sidgwick was in the business of educating the sentiments in the hope of
overcoming “strife,” at home and abroad, the strife that threatened to
increase as opportunities for colonization waned. Sidgwick’s major de-
pressive crisis in occurred in the very year of the birth of the Labour
Party.
In politics, in ethics, in philosophy, and in parapsychology – not to
mention in educational reform and sexual censorship – Sidgwick in the
s was very much continuous with his earlier self, even if he had grown
more politically depressed and eclectic. At the very end of his life, in fact, he
was again much animated by a political cause, opposition to the Boer War.
He felt keenly that Britain’s efforts in this case were ill conceived, acidly
remarking that it would be very convenient for future schoolchildren if
the British Empire were to fall in the easily remembered year of . As
his nephew Rayleigh recalled:
During the Boer War his attitude certainly verged on the anti-patriotic. He con-
sidered the action of this country indefensible, I think on the general ground that
the Boers had retreated to the Transvaal in order to get away from British rule,
and that if British subjects had followed them there they did so at their own risk,
and must put up with such legal and political status as the Boer government chose
to accord. I do not remember how he dealt with the rather technical questions
about British suzerainty which were involved. Mrs Sidgwick did not see eye to eye
with him on this subject, and when he discussed it she was sometimes perceptibly
irritated – a rare event indeed with her.
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Rayleigh also observed that
One of Sidgwick’s traits was a pronounced anti-militarist tendency. When after the
Omdurman campaign, Lord Kitchener came to Cambridge to receive an honorary
degree, some enthusiastic young woman said that he was her hero. When Mrs
Sidgwick mentioned this, Sidgwick remarked that he did not think it heroic to
mow down savages with machine guns – it might be necessary, but that was the
best that could be said of it. He was not tempted to think of himself as a man of
action.
The “Storm Along John” jingoism singing forth from every dance
hall in the late nineties only disgusted Sidgwick, who never showed any
great love of soldiers. But of course, this was characteristic of many of
his friends, notably Dakyns and Bryce, and was in no way inconsistent
with warm feelings about spreading civilization. To Bryce, in fact, he
confided:
As for the war, I do not mind telling you privately that no political event in
my lifetime has ever been so odious to me. It seems to me the worst business
England has been in since the war with the American Colonies, – and I cannot
help foreboding that it will end similarly, in an independent Dutch republic. But
I console myself by perceiving that I stand almost alone in this forecast. (CWC)
On Sidgwick’s analysis, if the war was due to any one person, it was Milner.
Revealingly, however, he held that the “war has manifested the force and
genuineness of the Imperial sentiment in the Colonies; that is the brightest
aspect of the whole matter.”
For all that, he could not bring himself to sign a petition, sent to him
by James Sully, calling for a halt to the war:
I should rather like to explain why, after thinking over your paper . . . I could not sign it. Perhaps it is partly my personal connection with the Government which
makes me think, in considering a question of this kind, ‘What should I do if
I were the Government?’ Now there is no doubt that if I were constituted the
Government now, and took up the matter at this state, I should not think it right to bring the war to an end except under conditions that gave adequate security
against its recurrence, provided for the equality of Dutch and English throughout
South Africa, and also for the payment of some part of the cost by the gold-bearing
districts. I should think this my duty, taking up the matter at this stage, in spite
of my strong condemnation of the diplomacy that brought the war about. This
being so, I have tried hard to think of any conditions that we could offer the Boers
such that a ‘brave people, jealous of their independence’ could be ‘expected’ to
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acquiesce in, which will also realise the ends above mention
ed, especially security
against the recurrence.
I think that the only terms England can offer, consistently with the attainment
of practically necessary ends, are such as the Boers cannot be expected to accept at present. . . . (M )
Indeed, Sidgwick would constantly lament the way in which, with jin-
goistic political rhetoric everywhere about him, “the old idea of national
independence as a priceless good for which a brave man may willingly
die had vanished into a dim and remote past.” He was, in a sense, right
about the meaning of the war. There is some consensus that the “Boer
War marked the end of a period of territorial expansion of the empire, and
led to a time of imperial rethinking and reorganization. The setbacks and
defeats of the first stage of the war, and the unexpectedly long drawn-out
closing stage poured cold water over imperial enthusiasm, but they did
not lead to any suggestion of imperial withdrawal.”
Yet this final phase of Sidgwick’s political and spiritual disillusionment
is again oddly revealing, for scarcely anywhere in his recorded opinions is
there any serious consideration of the issues posed by the war in connection
with the black populations of the contested territories. Ironically, most
of the blacks apparently favored the English over the Boers, who were
notoriously more racist. What, then, is to be made of this example of
Sidgwickian silence?
Once again, Bryce was the man with the details needed to fill in
Sidgwick’s colorless abstractions. When Bryce wrote about South Africa,
he well knew that there were more racial questions at issue than the rela-
tions of the Dutch and the English. Indeed, he envisioned South Africa’s
becoming like the southern United States, with “two races, separated by
the repulsion of physical differences,” having “no social relations, no mix-
ture of blood” and effectively forming two different nations – though with
“the nexus of industrial interest, for the white employer will need the labor
of the black.” Still, if “the whites realize, before the colored people have
begun to feel aggrieved, that they have got to live with the natives, and
that the true interests of both races are in the long run the same,” then the
difficulties faced will be less “formidable.” In fact,