by John Buchan
“What about the imperial poetry you parodied this morning?”
“I recant, please, at once and for ever. The worst geographical verses are full of poetry, and I shall spend the rest of my life writing them. The ponies are rested, and we can have another gallop along the ridge.”
A couple of miles off was a small kopje crowned with a few trees. To this they raced, and the girl was an easy victor. For, coming suddenly upon a narrow rocky watercourse, she took it flying, while Hugh’s more sober pony insisted on scrambling down and up the banks. At the kopje the plateau was cut into by a long glen running up from the west, and they looked down from their eminence on steep bush-clad sides ending below in a dark evergreen forest. A soft purple haze hung over the depths, and from far down came the music of a waterfall.
For a little Lady Flora was silent with delight. She made a charming picture as she reined up her Arab on the edge of the slope, the sunlight in her hair, while with one hand she shaded her eyes and looked out to the horizon.
“I never realised before what space meant.
Of course I have been up mountains, and I once camped in the desert for a week, and I’ve been several times on the high seas, but I seemed always to carry my own atmosphere with me. But here everything indoors and commonplace and conventional is a million miles behind. I suppose I am the first woman who has ever been here, and I feel as if the place had been created for me and had been waiting for me since the beginning of time. What an egoist I am!”
On these uplands in mid-winter the dark comes swiftly, and already the sun was going down behind the far hills in a riot of crimson and amethyst. The heat had gone, and a chilly freshness was creeping into the air.
“We must be making for home,” said Hugh. “Let us canter back gently, for an East African twilight is not a thing to hurry through. So you are getting the sense of space into your blood! Well, that is Imperialism, you know, or at least the foundations of it. We all get stuffy sitting tight in our old creeds. We live, most of us, in gardens which are very pleasant and well-watered, but sleepy and not over-wholesome. And we grow old and stale before our time — the old age of decay, not the honest old age of being worn down with the friction of Ufe.”
“But how hard it is for a woman to avoid it! Men have such a wide world compared with ours. Our business is only to adapt ourselves to things as they are. Men can mould them as they please, and if they find the shades of the prison-house closing on them, they can put their packs on their shoulders and shake the dust of civilisation off their feet. How I envy you all!”
“That is one way, but not the best way. A man can always run off, but the best of them won’t. Their business is to try and shape things according to a better plan. Our lives are like a lot of separate circles scattered about in space. Sometimes they are cut by others and then we have friends, and talk of this man or woman ‘coming into our lives.’ I have heard you use that phrase at least a dozen times since I came here. Now and then one circle largely overlaps another, and then people are in love. Once in a blue moon, perhaps, two circles almost coincide. And then you have what is commonly known as a happy marriage. But the circles always remain the same size, so for restless souls love and marriage and even friendship are no solution, as you very wisely observed yesterday. And it is no remedy to remove the circle from London to Polynesia or the Klondyke, for you do not make it any bigger by changing its site. The only thing to do is to draw a larger circle with a wider radius. Only,” said Hugh sadly, “those who do that often fail to complete it, and leave only a broken arc to show how vast their design was.”
“I like that metaphor,” said the girl musingly. “Of course it is quite true that you do not get any nearer satisfaction by shifting your dwelling. But how hard it is for us to stretch the compasses and describe a wider circle.”
“It is getting easier every day. Our great-aunts had a code of rules laid down for them which nothing could break through. They left the schoolroom for a year or two of sentiment and gaiety, and then married and became good housewives; or perhaps they didn’t, and steered a precarious course on the high seas of scandal. Our grandfathers thought that the only choice lay between Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp. They had not discovered Diana Warwick.”
The sun had gone down, and a soft mulberry afterglow filled the western heavens. The ponies stepped sedately over the rough veld, till the woods rose black in the twilight, and they entered the long ride which led to the house.
“I think,” said Lady Flora, “that our circles are being widened for us. I know that in the last three days mine has expanded so far that London is only a little patch in a comer. I suppose you would say that we women are citizens now and not shepherdesses in porcelain.”
“Yes, that is a part of the truth. I was in Paris at Whitsuntide, and went to see Père Antoine. He is very old and blind, but he talks wonderfully, and his mind gets clearer with age. He said that the chief fact of the modern world is that humanity is drawing closer together. The State is taking the place of the old Church, and politics are acquiring a new meaning. Classes and ranks are being broken down, and men are beginning to find not only their duty but their happiness in community. They feel and think corporately, and not as atoms. It is something like this which the whole string of ‘isms from Comtism to Marxism has been trying to expound. A political creed was once a list of dogmas which meant nothing to the ordinary man or woman. Now every creed — ours as well as others — must spread its roots into all the interests and affections and aspirations of our life. Another saying of his impressed me a good deal. He declared that the worst modern vice was ‘spirituality,’ and that the most crying need was that the world should awake to the value of its great temporal heritage—’nôtre grand héritage temporel!’ That means much from a man who all his life has preached a mystical religion.”
The hall-door appeared before them with a glow of firelight shining into the chilly night. A groom led away the ponies, and soon the riders were warming cold hands at the hearth.
Lady Flora called Heaven to witness her enjoyment of the afternoon. “And how serious we grew! I suppose it was the twilight, which always makes me sad and sentimental. After tea let us go and find Colonel Alastair and Sir Edward, and play games on the billiard-table. I think we both want a bear-fight to bring us out of the clouds.”
The library at Musuru was a long room, panelled in some dark sweet-smelling wood, with the bookcases sunk in the walls. As with Gibbon’s Emperor Gordian, so with Carey: sixty-two thousand volumes attested the variety of his inclinations. It was a working-room, as the maps and papers piled on the desks bore witness, and its strenuous air was increased by the absence of any ornaments or pictures. But it was also a pleasant place for talk, for the shaded light gleamed cheerfully on vellum and morocco, and the low chairs round the great fireplace invited to comfort and conversation. The Duchess’s headache continued, and her niece had gone to sit with her. The rest of the party disposed themselves about the hearth in a circle, while their host stood as usual planted squarely on the hearthrug.
“Our conclusion last night,” Lord Appin began, “was that Imperialism cut across parties and demanded a revision of all traditional dogmas in face of a new body of fact. This, of course, does not mean any breach in our historical continuity. We have a vast deal to learn from all the traditional creeds; only they must be re-thought, as it were, and presented in a new system and a new language. This process, we also agreed, involved a change in our attitude of mind — indeed this change, if I remember aright, we defined as the essence of Imperialism. Instead of being negative, temporising, and unscientific, we must show ourselves positive and constructive. We have now to work out some of the details of our creed, so far as they are clear, and like philosophers we begin with the widest category. Our host commands us to - night to consider the question of the constitutional apparatus, the machinery of imperial union.”
Lord Appin, as if aware of the gravity of the undertaking, selected a large cigar f
rom his case and carefully lit it.
“First let us repeat all the platitudes,” he continued, “and get done with them. The pivot of the Empire is the Crown. In the last resort all our units, colonies and dependencies alike, submit to the sovereign executive power. We have also, roughly speaking, one law, for though I believe — Mr Wakefield will correct me if I am wrong — that at least five great legal systems and many smaller codes exist within the Empire, yet we have one ultimate tribunal of appeal, and therefore some continuity of interpretation. As I remember once hearing Mr Wakefield say, ‘To have the power of construing colonial laws and customs is to have the power to guide and restrain, to have, in effect, control of development.’ Now these two common possessions are a stupendous machinery of union, if properly directed. The trouble is the modes in which the sovereign authority is exercised. Its functions have been in practice delegated to the British Cabinet, and therefore, indirectly, to the British Parliament. Now clearly such Cabinet and Parliament must have two aspects — a national one, for the British Isles, and an imperial one, in which they control the Empire. But with the grant of self-government to so many colonies there can be no direct control, and so the doctrine of trusteeship has been brought into being. I think it historically correct, and it has the further merit of exactly covering the existing practice. A government rules England and the dependencies directly, but as regards the autonomous colonies it acts as a trustee for their welfare — that is to say, it provides for their defence, and reserves the right in the last resort to veto any of their legislative acts which it thinks dangerous to the Empire as a whole. This might be a perfectly satisfactory arrangement if our Cabinets or Parliaments were not human, and the magnitude and number of imperial questions were not beyond their power. A Parliament confronted with a great quantity of local problems can only give a perfunctory attention to most imperial matters, and in any case cannot hope to make itself sufficiently well informed on them to give its decisions much weight. Hence we get dissatisfaction on both sides. A Canadian who attends the debates in the House of Commons may wait for days before one imperial consideration emerges, and may see the Government which controls his destinies turned out of office on some business of English education. And the Englishman may justly complain that his own affairs are scamped because the men who were elected to look after them have to give their time to some Indian frontier question. The Home reformer and the Imperialist alike tend to grumble against a doctrine which seems to impose upon certain old-fashioned machinery a task too heavy for its performance. Have I stated the difficulty correctly, Mr Wakefield?”
The gentleman appealed to nodded his approval, and Lord Appin continued —
“We have to try and find some way out of the difficulty. I shall leave that to others who have made the subject their own. But I have one word of caution to give. Before dinner I looked into Bismarck’s Memoirs, and I was much struck by certain sayings of his which Busch reports. He had to face the problem of finding some constitutional machinery for the new German Empire. There were plenty of legalists around him to prepare formally perfect schemes. But Bismarck most wisely counselled patience. ‘Let us take,’ he said, ‘what we can get, what the States are freely willing to give us. As long as we have the impulse to unity in the soul of our people, almost any scheme will work. But if we once begin to squabble about details and impose a cast-iron constitution no scheme on earth will work. We cannot coerce the national life into narrow channels, but if we foster that life it will make in time the proper channels for itself!’ There, to my mind, spoke the true creative statesman.”
Lord Launceston acquiesced, and continued —
“I have had the ideal of federation before me ever since I began to be interested in politics, and I suppose I have read of or discussed almost every scheme that has been propounded. I own I am not very enthusiastic about any. They all begin with what Bismarck reprobated, asking too much. The chief — the scheme of legislative federation — need not detain us. Its principle is home rule for each unit and a central imperial legislature to govern and make laws for the Empire. It is an ideal fit enough for a small and compact empire, but to one so immense and scattered as ours, it is for the present, at any rate, wholly inapplicable. I do not dogmatise on what the future may bring forth. Distances have shrunk since our great-grandfathers’ time, and we are nearer to Toronto and Cape Town than they were to Rome, but the difficulties of space and time are as yet insurmountable. I have other objections to legislative federation besides its impracticability. I question if it is the most suitable ideal for an empire which contains on the one hand self-governing colonies, and on the other dependencies where autonomy is eternally impossible. The Tropics will always be a bar to a type of union which belongs essentially to white men and the Temperate zones. Again, it means the creation of a new representative body, and in face of the growing impotence of representative assemblies constructed on the old lines, I doubt if it would be wise to experiment with another. Besides, in all the units of a federation there must be a fairly uniform development. All must have attained to a certain height of self-conscious national life, so that they can enter the federation on equal terms. But can we maintain that such uniformity exists with Britain at one end of the scale and, shall we say, South Africa at the other? Lastly, unity must precede union. There must be imperial solidarity in fact before it receives formal recognition. The Empire is a living growth, and any forms we impose upon it must correspond to its living movement; otherwise, instead of chain-mail we shall have a strait - waistcoat. Any rigid scheme of federation applied prematurely will either be inoperative, and so bring the ideal into discredit, or it will curb and choke the life and produce monstrosity instead of growth.”
“For the time being,” continued Lord Launceston, “I do not see either the feasibility or the merits of federation in the common sense. Our conditions are not the conditions on which the ordinary federation is constructed. But,” he added cheerfully, “there is no reason why we should not develop a type of our own to meet our special requirements. There is no need to cumber ourselves with the irrelevant precedents of other empires. Let us make the most of the elements of consolidation we possess. Our primary merit is our elasticity. Our ideal is that of Virgil: —
‘Non ego, nec Teucris Italos parere jubebo,
Nee mihi regna peto: paribus se legibus ambae
Invictae gentes aeterna in foedera mittant.’
(Æneid, xii. 189-191. “I will not bid Italian serve Teucrian nor for myself seek I kingdoms. Let the two races, unconquered, and with equal rights, join in eternal friendship.”)
We have our free nations and our protected states, and in them all the one bond of union is the ultimate executive power. Any attempt at federation must proceed, therefore, on the executive side. The legislative side may be left cheerfully to the care of the ‘trustee’ doctrine, as Lord Appin has called it. But since we have services common to the whole Empire, expert knowledge is demanded, and we must have some machinery for calling to our assistance the practical wisdom of all our component States. We want, that is, a Council, and if you must have an epithet, I should prefer Imperial to Federal I have considered in my day many proposals for such a Council, and I cannot say that I have yet made up my mind on any one of them. That, however, is not important. We are not now drafting the Act to establish such a body. If we are agreed upon the principle, it does not pass the wit of man to devise the details. I have no doubt that Mr Wakefield is ready with some admirable device.”
Mr Wakefield was about to speak when he was forestalled by Lord Appin, who murmured dreamily—” What a conception! An Imperial Round Table to which colonial statesmen should flit like halcyons over the waters!”
These words did not please Mr Wakefield. “I fail to see the suggestion of comedy,” he said warmly.
“Comedy?” said Lord Appin soothingly. “I should not dare to hint at it. But you will have a considerable intellectual admixture. Our own Parliaments contain a confusion of
types, but we have never before ransacked the globe for variety.”
Mr Wakefield was only half appeased, and began in a slightly aggrieved voice —
“The chief fact we have to reckon with,” he said, “is colonial nationalism. All the self-governing colonies look upon themselves as nations — new national types with a specific national future. They began life under different conditions from England, and brought to their new lands only a light baggage of English traditions. Those new lands are themselves a great moulding force as regards national character. The boy who grows up in the backwoods and the boy who goes the conventional round of Eton and Oxford will become different men, though they may be the sons of the same father. A colony begins with a struggle for bare life, scarcely conscious of her own existence, only of her needs. And then success comes, and more success, and one morning she wakes to find that she has become a nation and can call the older people cousins. She has no standard of comparison, and begins by being extremely self-confident and bumptious. Take a young man and plant him with a wife in the wilds and tell him to make a home. So soon as he has done it he will begin to brag, and the harder the struggle the finer the fellow he will think himself. For, mind you, it is all his own — he owes little or nothing to borrowed capital, — so he writes ‘Alone I did it ‘ above his shanty, and looks down his nose at Creation. We call him a braggart, but we are wrong, for he is something subtler than that. He is a child, supremely ignorant, supremely courageous, crowing over his first triumph. And as it is with the individual, so with the people. As soon as they can straighten their backs and look around, and see a very good and entirely new earth, they pronounce the benediction of the Almighty in Eden, and swagger outrageously. Everything they have is the finest in the world, and they themselves are the last word in human perfection.
