The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  Nevertheless, even for the most ardent imperialists there were questions that had to be asked about the empire. How large should it become, given that it was inevitably costly to administer, and for how long should it be controlled from Westminster? Moreover, there were two very specific problems with the empire, and both were to do with self-government. One was Ireland; the second was emerging as India, where the first political movement dedicated to Indian self-rule–the Indian National Congress–had begun to meet as a party.

  By the late nineteenth century colonial self-government was an established fact in the case of peoples of European origin. Responsible self-government had been granted to Canada in 1840, Australia in 1856, Cape Colony in 1872 and Natal in 1892, with the British monarch’s representative the high commissioner reigning but not ruling. Excluded from this were the Irish, for reasons of security, and non-European peoples whose civilizations were believed not to measure up to European standards.

  Successive British governments balked at giving India self-rule. It had taken Britain long enough to give the franchise to those of her own nationals who were unpropertied and illiterate. The sense of caste made Indians seem careless of improving the education of the masses, an attitude which offended the theoretically more democratic British: a country with such widespread poverty and illiteracy was unready for democracy, for the western Parliamentary institutions which Britain believed offered the best method of ruling. As the keystone of the empire, Indian independence had to be very tightly controlled. Additional problems were created by the colour prejudice prevalent among the British population within India. In the 1880s Britons reacted with fury to the Liberal viceroy Lord Ripon’s plans for judicial reform which would allow Indian judges to try Europeans.

  In response the Indian Congress Party was founded in 1885, and had achieved national support by the beginning of the twentieth century. Though small measures of self-government for Indian nationals were granted during Liberal administrations by expanding the power of locally elected councils in 1892 and 1909, they were not enough. British investment and British engineers had given India 40,000 miles of canals and millions of acres of irrigation schemes. But Indian impatience with being treated like children grew. A protectionist policy against the importation of Indian textiles into Britain galvanized a Home Rule movement in 1916 under the leadership of the political activist and journalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the social reformer and Fabian Annie Besant.

  Like India, Ireland’s position within the empire was strategically too important for her to be given her freedom. While the Conservatives were in power they tried to ‘Kill Home Rule with Kindness’. The Congested District Board Act of 1891 improved Irish farming methods, while various land purchase acts of the 1890s allowed more tenant farmers to buy the land they farmed with a loan from the state. The Conservatives and Unionists believed they had safely got rid of Ireland’s nationalist aspirations.

  In the meantime the Irish nationalists were afflicted by a series of disasters to their cause. Their leader Parnell was cleared by a Parliamentary commission in 1888 of writing forged letters which approved of the Phoenix Park murders, published by The Times newspaper. But when Parnell was cited in the sensational divorce case of the wife of his fellow Irish nationalist MP Captain O’Shea a year later, it destroyed his reputation and the party he had led to prominence. For this was an era when Queen Victoria would not receive divorced persons at court, and the fiercely moral Nonconformists in the Liberal party refused to have anything to do with him. Parnell was forced to resign as head of the Irish Home Rulers. He insisted on starting up his own party, but the strain of the disgrace and the campaigning was too much for him. In 1891 he departed for England on business, having told his friends in Ireland that he would be back in a week. He was, but in his coffin, dead from pneumonia aged only forty-six.

  After Gladstone got his Home Rule Bill passed by the Commons but kicked out by the Lords in 1894, for a long time British politics were largely ignored by the Irish. They had lost faith in constitutional methods after the failure of two Home Rule Bills, and the Home Rulers had split into Parnellites and anti-Parnellites. Instead the ideas of Irish nationalism found their way into other areas of Irish life. An extraordinary renaissance of Irish culture took place. Scholars set out to rediscover the Irish language; schools teaching only Gaelic were opened, staffed by passionate nationalists like Padraic Pearse; Irish myths and legends inspired the poetry of William Butler Yeats, J. M. Synge and Sean O’Casey that became fuel for the fire of Irish patriotism. Paradoxically, by the early twentieth century the sense of Ireland as a separate culture and nation would build up such a head of steam that total severance from Britain proved unstoppable.

  It was not until 1900 that the Irish MP John Redmond was sufficiently authoritative to reunite the Irish nationalists at Westminster and approach Home Rule by constitutional means. But in 1907 Sinn Fein, a revolutionary party standing for total independence–its name means ‘ourselves alone’–was started up by the journalist Arthur Griffith and was soon attracting the support away from Home Rule. The argument had moved on a stage–Redmond had had the ground cut from beneath his feet.

  Presiding over these conflicts was the bearded, bearlike and imperturbable third Marquis of Salisbury, prime minister for most of the period until 1902, when ill-health removed him from office and his nephew Arthur Balfour took over. Salisbury’s bent was for foreign policy. With Europe in such a volatile state, he kept Britain out of foreign entanglements when continental states had abandoned the balance of power and were persistently forming antagonistic treaties against one another. Bismarck had tied Austria–Hungary and Russia into a complex web of alliances to protect Germany’s flanks against the retaliation he believed must one day come from France.

  Britain remained aloof. Salisbury believed in safety first. By refusing to make alliances with other powers Britain could not be dragged into a war that he constantly feared would break out, a war which the British people lacked both the army and the inclination to fight. It was a Canadian premier who in 1896 first used the phrase ‘splendid isolation’ to describe Britain under Salisbury: ‘whether splendidly isolated or dangerously isolated, I will not now debate; but for my part I think splendidly isolated, because now this isolation of England comes from her superiority’.

  Salisbury was splendidly isolated himself. Descended from Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s greatest servant, he was a superior aristocrat, a remote and inaccessible figure. He spent most of his time at his stately home Hatfield House, twelve miles north of London, under whose very oaks Queen Elizabeth I had received news of her accession. The possessor of a highly cerebral intelligence, Salisbury enjoyed carrying out chemical experiments for a hobby. But he had no aptitude for personal relations and it was said that he knew the names of none of his Cabinet.

  Moreover he seemed isolated from the very great social discontent of the 1880s and 1890s arising out of the worsening economic situation. In 1884 along with the Prince of Wales and Cardinal Manning Salisbury had been a member of the Royal Commission into the Housing of the Working Classes set up in response to a devastating description of life among the poor in London entitled ‘Bitter Cry of Outcast London’. But, despite all the evidence he heard on the committee, only modest social reforms took place in the next fifteen years of Conservative rule, none of which did anything to help those being thrown out of work. As a natural corollary to the 1884 broadening of the franchise, the Conservatives had set up elective county councils in 1888 which theoretically removed local government from the grandees of the shires, the magistrates in quarter sessions. But most ordinary people did not have time to give to the county council, so matters continued much as before. Having the vote didn’t seem to stop them living in slums, or dying of overwork, disease and simple poverty.

  But just because the Conservative government lost interest in social reform after the resignation in 1886 of the only Tory democrat in the Cabinet, Lord Randolph Churchill, it did not
mean that there were not plenty of people in Britain determined to effect change. Thanks to the education acts and the broadening of the franchise Britons were more politically aware and more militant. There were demonstrations by the unemployed in early 1886 which led to window-smashing in the West End. Trade unionism from being the preserve of middle-class unions like the engineers spread to unskilled industrial workers; the new unions were responsible for a series of mass strikes for higher pay and shorter hours of which the most famous was the dockers’ strike in 1889. These trade unions organized on an industry-wide basis were no longer happy with the Liberals, as the old unions had been. They felt they did not adequately represent the concerns of the working man.

  And progressive intellectuals were also discontented with the Liberal party after its split over Home Rule. It was becoming a party dominated by a Celtic programme of disestablishing the Welsh Church and Irish Home Rule. But because the reforming impulse was not adequately represented in party politics, it began to surface in all kinds of other places. At Oxford in the 1870s the philosopher T. H. Green, with his theory of active citizenship and the need of the classes to mingle, had a particularly strong effect on the best and the brightest spirits there. The noted university settlements in the East End of London which had begun in the 1880s–the best known is Toynbee Hall–attempted to put these ideas into practice. A law centre was set up to provide free legal advice, as it does to this day. Eager young graduates with feelings of social responsibility moved to the East End to impart their own learning to those less fortunate than themselves. From Toynbee Hall flowed the once celebrated Workers Education Association, designed to provide an adult education college and night classes for those in employment who had never had the benefit of a university education but wanted to stretch their minds.

  The Toynbee Hall settlements fed into a revival of the vigorous evangelicalism that had inspired Lord Shaftesbury in his pioneering reforms of the factory laws. Ninety homes were established for destitute children in the East End by Dr Thomas Barnardo in 1870; round the same time William Booth founded the Salvation Army to do social work and rescue the wretched, the impoverished, the drunken and the sinful in the East End at large revivalist meetings. The ‘Sally Army’ with its ‘soldiers’ in black uniforms accompanied by brass bands were a familiar sight in London until the late twentieth century.

  The miserable lives revealed by the strikes of industrial workers, the match girls and the dockers (who marched through London holding the fishheads which were all they could afford to eat), alarmed the social consciences of the middle class. There was a new purposefulness about the social reformers who set out to investigate the troubles of the poor. The use of scientific research and statistics to find out what was going wrong and arrive at a proper solution instead of piecemeal measures was pioneered by wealthy businessmen of conscience like the social reformer Charles Booth. Beatrice Potter, the daughter of a rich industrialist, collected the statistics for Booth’s landmark study of the poor, Life and Labour of the People in London; begun in 1886 it would not be finished until 1903, and became one of the most important influences on progressive thinking. It would lead to the revision of the Poor Laws and recognition of the need for old age pensions (see below).

  The catalogue of monstrous facts which these studies produced reinforced a general sense of the unfairness of the present system. To many it seemed that only some form of communal ownership of the means of production or socialism would prevent the shocking human casualties which were the by-products of capitalism. A number of socialist societies grew up in the 1880s, of which by far the most influential was the Fabian Society, founded by the reformer and researcher Sidney Webb, his future wife Beatrice Potter and the playwright George Bernard Shaw. The Society was named for the Roman general Quintus Fabius who never faced the superlative Carthaginian general Hannibal in battle but wore him down gradually over the duration. The Fabians intended to wear down Britain until their socialist ideas of a fairer society became accepted.

  Many of these societies were influenced by Chamberlain’s work in Birmingham. Such prototypes for state provision were admiringly christened ‘municipal socialism’ by the new socialist thinkers. But Chamberlain’s radicalism was imprisoned in the Tory party, kept there by Home Rule. Even so, the Fabian Society, with its slogan ‘evolution not revolution’, would be instrumental in the formation of what after 1900 was called the Labour party, which was intended to represent the working man. But, by the next general election in 1892, the political system was still eight years away from the meeting at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street on 27 February 1900 when representatives of the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation (created by a former stockbroker, H. M. Hyndman, in the 1880s) and half a million trade unionists set up the Labour Representation Committee to field candidates in the Parliamentary elections. Nevertheless the 1892 election produced some straws in the wind which suggested that the present system of parties was about to disintegrate.

  Two trade unionists and the Scots ex-miner Keir Hardie were elected to Parliament. They were the tentative first attempts to create other means of representing the working man’s interests than by relying on the Liberals. Their supporters had come to believe that only a political party for the trade unions would win legislation restricting the hours of manual labour. To the amazement of the silk-hatted MPs, Hardie turned up to the House of Commons wearing his working-class cloth cap as a badge of honour. Although Hardie in 1893 founded the small Independent Labour party at Bradford to fulfil such a role for the unions, when he failed to hold the seat in 1895 it proved that only a national organization could ensure continuous representation. It would take a further worsening of relations between the Conservative government and the working man as the strikes by the new unskilled trade unions became more ferocious and the legal reaction against them grew more severe to make the formation of a mass party imperative.

  In 1892 a new alliance with the Irish Home Rulers enabled the depleted Liberals to become the governing party again. The election was a protest vote against the lack of social reforms by the Tories. The eighty-three-year-old Gladstone took part in no fewer than eighty-five debates and at last got Home Rule for Ireland through the Commons, only for the House of Lords to reject it. When he resigned as leader in 1894, the immensely wealthy Lord Rosebery became premier for a year. Handsome and attractive, married to a Rothschild, Rosebery did not please the rank-and-file Liberals. He lacked both the common and the serious touch and made no attempt to acquire them–he was openly disapproved of by the still substantial Nonconformist element in the Liberal party for his frivolity in winning the Derby while prime minister not once but twice. By 1895 the Liberals were out of office again and the Conservatives and Lord Salisbury back in for another ten years on an increased wave of imperialist fervour. The Liberal administration had put through many radical changes–for one thing it had increased the democratization of local government by creating parish councils–but its programme was not exciting enough for a public thirsting for more martial triumphs. The succumbing of a section of the party under H. H. Asquith to imperialism further weakened the party’s appeal for old Radicals with their long history of pacifism. Some of them were drawn to the new socialist organizations, for an important strand of socialist thought was against war.

  Overall though the idea of a strong and conquering Britain was what won the public imagination and made them vote Conservative. When Salisbury returned as prime minister in 1895, imperial fever was at its height after the conquest of Lower and Upper Rhodesia. Imperialism was the dominant mood, and not just in Britain. The defeat that year of the decaying Chinese Empire by her tiny island neighbour Japan which had industrialized and modernized along western lines was the signal for Russia, Germany, France and Britain to demand spheres of influence in that empire for themselves. The Boxer Rebellion five years later resulted in the slaughter of the personnel in the European embassies’ compound at Peking (Beijing). Supposedly the work of
rebels, the rising was in fact aided by the Chinese government behind the scenes, but the European powers rapidly reasserted control. Even America, whose whole history had been a reaction against colonialism, succumbed to the spirit of the age and joined in carving up the undeveloped world. She declared war on Spain in 1898 and took the Spanish Empire, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba for her own. The only real success for the non-European world, which otherwise was uniformly defeated by the imperialist powers, was when the Ethiopians routed the Italians at Adowa in 1896.

  Even Rudyard Kipling occasionally viewed the expanding British Empire with the melancholy of historical perspective. He wrote the poem ‘Recessional’ at the height of the imperial frenzy in 1897 to warn of the suddenness with which ‘all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre’. But there was nothing melancholic about the ex-Liberal Joe Chamberlain, who regarded the empire’s economic potential with all the enthusiasm of the screw manufacturer he had once been. Chamberlain gave up as a bad job attempting to bring both halves of the Liberal party back together, asked Salisbury for the then unimportant job of colonial secretary and took firm hold of the imperial tiller. All he could think of was that the empire which had gained three and a half million square miles in twelve years must be the solution to Britain’s financial troubles. As the age of iron gave way to the age of steel, German advances in steel manufacture meant that by the mid-1890s Germany was overtaking Britain’s steel production. The empire was like an undeveloped estate. If it was better managed, it could be the making of Britain–after all, its combined population was 300 million people.

  Britain, Chamberlain believed, was a force for good, whose rule over the new territories of the British Empire could be justified only if she brought ‘security and peace and comparative prosperity to countries that never knew these blessings before’. Under Chamberlain the Colonial Office regularized the production of tropical crops like jute, cocoa, palm oil and coffee. In west Africa he made the government build ports and schools of medicine and sent troops to clear off marauding local tribes. He interfered in the economies of the West Indies by creating Royal Commissions to investigate the trade of the islands, some of which were facing bankruptcy since the decline of their share of the sugar industry owing to the cultivation of sugar beet in mainland Europe from the late nineteenth century. Indeed, Chamberlain let it be known that where he had once thought in terms of the nation he intended to think in terms of empire. The cautious Lord Salisbury himself even committed himself so far as to divide the world into ‘living and dying’ nations and emphasized ‘England’s…Imperial instincts’.