Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  “The second danger is that you conceive of the native status as higher than it really is. This fault will be committed by the idealists among you, as the other will be the error of the practical man. And yet I have often found idealists and practical men alike doing homage to what I can only think is a false conception of native development. The native’s mind is sharp and quick, his memory is often prodigious, and he has histrionic and mimetic gifts which may mislead his teachers. But for all that he stands at a different end of the scale of development from the white man. He represents the first stage of humanity, and he has to travel a long way before he can reach that level which we roughly call our civilisation. You cannot annihilate ten strenuous centuries by assuming that they have not existed, and inviting the native to crowd the work of them into a year or two. Between his mind at its highest and ours at its lowest there is a great gulf fixed, which is not to be crossed by taking thought. It is less a difference in powers — for he has powers as remarkable often as our own — as in mental atmosphere, the conditions under which his mind works, and consequently the axioms of his thought. He will learn gladly what we have to teach him, and you will imagine that the lesson of civilisation has been learned, when suddenly you are pulled up by some piece of colossal childishness which shows that that mind whose docility you have admired has been moving all the time in a world a thousand years distant from your own. We must recognise this gulf and frame our education accordingly. At bottom, and for obvious reasons, the native mind is grossly materialistic. The higher virtues and what we call “spirituality” axe radically unintelligible to it, though it may learn to claim them and to talk their jargon. We must begin, therefore, with the first things, if we do not wish to get a dishonest parrot-like adherence to creeds which are not understood and have no power to influence life. I think there is more need for imagination and insight and foresight in a missionary among the black races than in most statesmen, for he has to study a mind and character most alien to our own and select from the vast storehouse of our civilisation the kind of nourishment suited to it.

  “Remember that education is a thing which must take its colour from the needs that it is provided to satisfy. Your business is to inculcate in the native mind the elements of citizenship and Christian morality. It can only be done by degrees, but for heaven’s sake begin with the truths that matter, and never mind the frillings for the moment. Get your foundations laid deep and solid. Preach the Atonement and the Fatherhood of God, and leave out your fancy dogmas. Teach the children to read and write, but do not aim at higher education, for that means black parsons and black schoolmasters, and for that class the market is overstocked, and they are outcasts from the society of those whom they would claim as intellectual equals. Above all things teach them trades and handicrafts and the simple laws of a decent life. It is not our business, as I keep telling my friends, to create a new heaven but to create a new earth. Get these strange, sullen, childish, dark-skinned people hammered into a peaceable and prosperous society, and you have laid the foundation of all the virtues. Teach them the elements of cleanliness and comfort and you will find them already grounded in honesty and loyalty; and you may soon get them to take their place in our complex system, — low down, of course, — but still indubitably within it. Don’t try and make out of them theologians or schoolmasters or bagmen or electioneering humbugs. Leave the scum of civilisation for civilisation to deal with. You have still, thank Heaven! a simple community: keep it simple so long as you can, for it is on simple lines alone that it can make true progress.

  “You may say that I offer you, merchants, planters, teachers, all of you, a gloomy programme. We are to civilise the land, you will say, by slow methods, and we shall be dead and buried long before the results come. Your complaint would be just if your only task were native administration. But it is not. You have the economic and political development of the land to think of, and you have your own future, for there is a white community growing up beside the black. And remember that the presence of the native races makes every man of you an administrator. If you face your duty, every white citizen will have the training of a proconsul, the same kind of problems to solve, the same qualities of character in demand. That is no small honour. What kind of race will your sons be if they grow up with the sense of civic duty alive in them, content to work slowly because hopefully and long-sightedly? I am one of the men who believe in the regeneration of the African continent. When the world has preached its lessons to her, she will also have something to say to the world. I do not think that the battles and the bloodshed, the young men who never came back, the lonely graves in the desert, the hopes crushed only to revive again — I do not think that these will have been in vain.

  Do you remember one of Pitt’s perorations when that austere statesman gave rein to his fancy and delivered a prophecy whose justification you and I still await? I commend its rhetoric to you as a watchword. ‘If we listen,’ he said, ‘to the voice of reason and duty, and pursue the line of conduct which they prescribe, some of us may live to see the reverse of that picture, from which we now turn our eyes with shame and regret. We may live to behold the nations of Africa engaged in the calm occupations of industry, in the pursuits of a just and legitimate commerce. We may behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking in upon this land, which at some happy period in still later times may blaze with full lustre, and, joining their influence to that of pure religion, may illuminate and invigorate the most distant extremities of that immense continent. Then may we hope that even Africa, though last of all the quarters of the globe, shall enjoy at length in the evening of her days those blessings which have descended so plentifully upon us in a much earlier period of the world. Then also will Europe, participating in her improvement and prosperity, receive an ample recompense for the tardy kindness — if kindness it can be called — of no longer hindering that continent from extricating herself out of the darkness, which in other more fortunate regions has been so much more speedily dispelled.

  ‘Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis,

  Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper!’”

  Late in the afternoon, as the yacht was once again slipping through violet waters, and tea was being served on deck, the Duchess found herself beside Mr Wakefield.

  “Francis is the oddest speaker of my acquaintance,” she said. “It is such a mixture of straightforward prose and ambiguous poetry. And yet there is an art in it. You saw how he impressed these people. My brother might have spoken like an angel for hours without anything like the effect that Francis had with a few abrupt sentences. It is the man that does it. His figure, with his hands in pockets, has such a power about it, and such a past behind it, that people listen not so much to what his voice says as to his presence.”

  Mr Wakefield looked back to where the forests and blue mountains of Entoro were growing faint in the evening haze. “On the second day of my visit,” he said slowly, “I objected to the ‘man of destiny.’ I withdraw that objection now. The thing may be undemocratic, illiberal, and reactionary — I do not care a penny whistle if it is. It is the only power which can plant civilisation in the wilds and turn savages into orderly citizens. Our democracy is excellent in its way, but it can’t do that sort of thing — you want the individual with his heart on fire to start the ball. You want faith and hope, and men have these things but not departments or nations. So much do I value the man of destiny now that I will describe him in the words of a writer I detest, — he is ‘the Cyclopean architect, the roadmaker of Humanity!’”

  CHAPTER VIII.

  AT dinner the following evening Carey announced that the subject for discussion that night was economic. A profound gloom fell on the company.

  “I hate the word,” said the Duchess. “When any one proposes some generous scheme the immediate answer is that it is uneconomic.’ I believe that the whole thing is a false science, invented by the trading classes to conceal their own rapacity. They identify their penny-wise cun
ning with the laws of nature and claim a divine sanction for their misdeeds. Besides, I am sick of the kind of argument we have heard so much of for the past two years. To my mind even the few economic laws which are certain may very properly be overridden for the sake of higher interests. You tell me that Protection is good or bad economics, and I don’t care a fig. I want to know if it is good or bad policy.”

  Lord Appin raised his eyebrows. “My dear Susan, do my ears deceive me? What you say is excellent Tory doctrine, which I have been industriously preaching for many years. Carey, living with you is turning all our heads. You have made Susan a Tory and Launceston a Dissenter.”

  “I am not going to ask you to talk Benthamite economics,” said Carey, “though there is a great deal to be said for them. All I want you to do is to look at the eternal problem which you find in all States — riches and poverty, the use and control of the one and the cure of the other. It is an immense subject, and if we once get among facts and figures we shall be in a hopeless morass. At the same time there are general principles here as elsewhere, and I think it is possible to disentangle a few of them. To show fully how he recognition of the possibilities of empire will affect capital and labour would take a man’s lifetime. But I think we can say roughly what the general line of the answer will be. I promise you, Susan, you shall not hear a word of orthodox jargon, for the excellent reason that none of us know any, except Lord Appin, and he doesn’t believe in it.”

  “My objection to the science is that it tends to approximate in its methods to theology. Its votaries are apt to make laws of Sinai out of deductions from the commerce of a single epoch, forgetting to distinguish between what is sufficiently axiomatic to constitute a general law and what is only true under special and terminable conditions. Indeed, my chief complaint against the science is that it is too loose rather than too formal. My other complaint is that it mistakes its vocation. It starts from highly abstract data and builds up on them a structure of ingenious puzzles. It erects into a real-philosophie what is purely formal, and, forgetting the abstraction of its starting-point, it imagines that it has provided a philosophy of life. A few elementary lessons in the art of definition would make the toil of economists of some use. As it is, they spend much of their time in the agreeable intellectual pastime of spinning cocoons. You may say, so does the metaphysician. But he is dealing with tremendous verities. And however fallacious, however over-subtle he may be, the magnitude of his task ennobles him. I cannot find the same elevation in tracking the vagaries of that quaint fiction the ‘economic man.’”

  As if to secure some cheerfulness for a dull discussion the party assembled after dinner in the Blue Drawing-room, which of all the rooms at Musuru was the most exquisite in its decorations. Its fluted white walls were set with panels of old turquoise-blue silk; the ceiling was modelled on that of a famous chamber at Versailles; the carpet was of rich white velvet pile; the furniture was all copied from a boudoir of Marie Antoinette. The books in the cabinets and on the tables were bound in vellum or blue morocco, and the few ornaments were of blue Sevres ware or old ivory. The one picture, which hung over the chimney, was a Watteau of blue-robed nymphs dancing under a great expanse of spring sky. The lamps had shades of ivory silk, and in the soft light the pure colours swam in a delicate harmony as of a summer noon. The scene was so strange and perfect that most of the guests gave an involuntary gasp of admiration. Even Mr. Wakefield snorted when he entered, and subjected the Watteau to the tribute of a long and critical stare.

  “We are told,” said Carey “that the Empire is the dream of capitalism, and like every falsehood the saying contains the... Imperialism involves such schemes; therefore Imperialism demands wealth and organisation. That is our simple syllogism. Imperialism is not capitalism, but it is akin to it in method. The capitalist makes his fortune by recognising the value of combination and the wisdom of earning profits over the largest area possible. Imperialism depends likewise upon a form of combination. Both believe that Providence is on the side of the bigger social battalions.

  “This, of course, is a truism. The difficulty arises when the imperialist State and the capitalist citizen come into conflict. Both have admittedly the same methods. Moreover, the great capitalist schemes must be semi-political, so the standpoint of pure individualism cannot be maintained. Our question therefore is, What is to be the relation of an imperial State to the rich citizen; and how far can the State imitate his activity on its own account? Or, to put it simply, admitting that combination and capital are necessary to any empire for imperial purposes, is the State in pursuit of such purposes to supervise or to supersede the individual?

  “We are on the brink, you see, of the tremendous question of Socialism or Individualism, and you will be relieved to hear that I shall not embark on that wintry sea. I am afraid I cannot take the opposition of the two terms seriously.

  Like Protection and Free Trade, they are methods, not ideals: curative measures, not forms of diet. To declare for one or the other is as if anglers were passionately to take sides in the question of dry-fly against wet-fly. To say whether the Empire in the future will be socialist or individualist requires the gift not of reasoning but of prophecy, for to dogmatise on the character of its development you must foretell the circumstances which may control it. My own view is that we shall see the State become increasingly more concerned with matters which our forefathers left to private enterprise. Partly it will be the result of that new view of the State as something intimately and organically related to the private life of its citizens: partly it will be the result simply of our greater geographical area. Things which were once well within the scope of the individual now require an organisation so vast and complex that only the State can provide it, or, if the individual can compass it, he becomes a public menace. I can face with equanimity the day when our great shipping lines, our railways, our cable systems, even our mines, will be State-owned, but before that day can come the State must have learned more in the way of administration than it knows at present.

  “At the same time, I cannot conceive that the day will ever dawn when the private capitalist can be wholly or even largely superseded. For many activities you will always want the quickening of the individual brain and will. Here I differ from my socialist friends, and I differ from them only because I am less of an idealist than they are. I do not think that men will ever spend themselves with the same fervour on behalf of a remote entity called the State as they will on their own private adventures. You may have the most admirable and conscientious officials, but they will be uninspired. They will administer, but rarely originate. In any case, any complete State-socialism is impossible to our Empire. I can picture it working well in a small neutralised State with no mysteries in her future. But what possible State organisation is capable of dealing with the whole life of a vast complex of States in all the latitudes of the globe?”

  “The socialist would answer,” said Hugh, “that if empire does not admit of his creed, then so much the worse for empire.”

  “He might,” said Carey, “but I do not think he will, if he is given to thinking seriously about the question. I have never found his class a reactionary one. But if he does, then I say in turn, so much the worse for socialism. For of the two creeds there can be no question which is the stronger. The one is a method, a particular theory of administration; the other is an ideal, a gospel of a fuller national life. Few people, I think, will be prepared on behalf of a speculation as to the best mode of government to give up the task of government altogether — which is what the demand would be.

  “However, I am not concerned to prophesy, and sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. I assume that the private capitalist will not be unknown in the future, that the State cannot wholly supersede him. Is it, then, to supervise him? Remember that the great fortunes of the future will not be made by old methods. Their makers will be no longer object-lessons in the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin’s maxims. The millionaire of the future will be a sta
tesman. He will administer affairs as complex and vast as the politics of a small nation. I am myself only a beginner, but politics in some form or other enter into every detail of my business. The great capitalist will have imagination and courage and foresight beyond most men.

  “Now, there is to my mind a very great danger in the appearance of a class of men of the first order in ability and force of character, and with immense power at their command, and the whole outside the State. It is a government within a government, private citizens who in effect have governing powers. I merely point out the danger, for I have no remedy prepared. We must recognise that empire will extend the sphere of the great capitalist, and take measures accordingly. If I were sketching out a Utopia, it would, of course, be easy to fix a limit beyond which private fortunes should not go. We should allow our capitalist his energy but not his profits. He would be a tame revenue-earning machine for the State, making millions and receiving a few thousands as pocket-money. But I confess I can see no scheme which, as the world stands, would prevent the danger and yet not put an end to the fact of capitalism, and, since I believe that fact to be desirable on public grounds, I am not prepared for any heroic remedy.