by John Buchan
The chief features, then, of this half-way house of thought are that the world is classified with sharp distinctions between the classes, that the distinguishing principle — race, liberty, law, anything you please — is something given to the mind and not examined by the mind, and lastly, that such distinctions are considered and acted upon as final. It is emphatically the sphere of the practical man. It does not confuse the common issues of life with any of the uncertainties of speculation. Its guiding principle is the law of the Sufficient Reason; it explains everything by something else. The world it creates for itself is orderly, logical, and free from any atmospheric haze. Such is the true world of politics, for it is the Understanding which makes states rich and well governed, and their citizens prosperous and contented. I have said that it is a world of compromise, but remember that most of the people who live in it see no compromise about the matter. It is for them a world of final and unalterable truths. I need not labour the point, for Lady Amysfort on the second day of our visit gave us an admirable exposition of this half-way house of the Understanding on its political side, and Mr Wakefield, if I may say so, is a living instance of it.”
Mr Wakefield, hearing his name mentioned, awoke from a short nap, and prepared to give Lord Appin his critical and hostile attention.
“I shall not be accused of underestimating this most admirable attitude if I say that if it were universal the world would come to an end. Happily it is not universal, for there will always be many who, while insisting upon its merits, bring to it in practice a principle from another and a further stage of thought. Mr Wakefield, for example, would not be an Imperialist if he were content to dwell wholly in its confines. Its merits, let me repeat, are that it insists upon clear working distinctions, and that with its practical bias it looks always to facts, since its datum is Experience. Yes! But with Experience we admit at once one of the dynamic forces of revolution. I will not bring in any metaphysical doctrine of the Absolute Process of Thought. I will take this one recreating and reforming element in the sphere of the Understanding itself, that Experience which is its foundation. Sooner or later, as facts change, the change impresses itself even upon their formal interpretation. There will always be some who, living in the greater world of what, in contradistinction, we may call Reason, will be conscious from the start of the limitations of the Understanding; they will see its laws as compromises, its solutions as working hypotheses. Such men will be the midwives of change, and their maieutic skill will be aided by the slow compulsion of Experience. There is a name for this compelling force which has been in common use since Plato — Dialectic. It is the sceptical dissolvent, the inquiétude poussante, which acts upon the dogmatism of the Understanding. Hegel has an instance from theology which I daresay Lord Launceston remembers. But please keep in mind that, though I use this illustration, I am not giving you Hegelianism, but one of the accepted platitudes of philosophy. We first of all, Hegel says, conceive of God as a remote but beneficent force. We see seed-time and harvest return, children born and growing gently to maturity, and God following a laissez-faire policy, and suffering nature to run smoothly in compartments. Then suddenly comes in Dialectic in the thunderstorm which ruins the crops, the plague which devastates the family, in the awful terror of the Unseen, and the mystery of an inscrutable Fate. We are shaken out of our ease, and know that the Lord is a jealous God, and that nature is careless of our pigmy life. And then, at the last, comes the reconciliation in the domain of Reason, when we learn that God is made one with man. With this final stage of the infinite Reason we have no concern to-night. Politics is a mundane and a dusty game at best, and does not call for the highest function of thought. Sometimes, it is true, the humblest among us have seasons of revelation when a new dawn flushes our prosaic sky, and we have a glimpse of a City without foundations, and aspire for a moment to
‘the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun.’
A great seer or mystic will kindle a nation to pursue for a little an ideal, of which the Understanding knows nothing, and that patchwork, which we call our world, seems in very truth the garment of God. But these sublime imaginings are not for practical men such as Mr Wakefield and — magno intervallo — myself. In politics Dialectic acting upon the Understanding does not lead us, as Hegel’s illustration suggests, to the deeper unity of the Reason, but only to a reformed Understanding in harmony with changed conditions. The right mode of political thinking, I repeat, is this sphere, where the manifold world of experience is broken up into a clear system, where distinctions are regarded as final, and where the practical end is never lost to view. But for those who would lead their generation the Understanding must be tinged by Dialectic, compromises must be seen as such, and the coercive force of change which resides in experience must be aided and abetted. The result, as I have said, will be only another world of the Understanding, but the datum will have been revised. So in a roundabout way, and from a different side, we get back to the definition of Imperialism which we reached quite early in our stay here. We claim as our attitude this dialectical Understanding, or, in other words, while we needlessly destroy no one of the distinctions which compose our traditional creed, we desire to rethink them in the light of a new world.”
“It is an extraordinary thing,” said the Duchess, “how much wisdom there is in ordinary political labels. I should have said that Caroline and you, Bob, though you both call yourselves Conservatives, were at the opposite poles of opinion, and yet, when you come to a frank confession, you reach almost the same conclusion. I am not at all certain that I don’t agree with you. Only, what I feel about your definition of Imperialism is that it does not distinguish it from any other sound political creed. You define it by the attitude of mind which it implies — clearness, practicality, an adequate recognition of the conditions of policy. But the Liberal might say the same thing of his faith, and the Conservative, and the Socialist. There is no serious politician alive who would not subscribe to the formula.”
“Most true, Susan, but I have not nearly done with my definition. The attitude I have described belongs to all sane and practical creeds — creeds, that is to say, which incline neither to reaction nor to revolution. No faith which claims to be in tune with the spirit of its age would dare to disavow it. No; the difference is between those who hold the belief merely as a pious opinion and those who are prepared to act strenuously upon it. The difference, that is to say, lies in the rigour of our examination of our data. We Imperialists, whatever our political labels at home, are confronted with two alternatives. A huge empire has grown up around us, full of problems on which we can gain little light from our precedent history. We cannot deny the existence of that empire and those problems: so far we are all agreed. But we may regard it as an encumbrance, a menace to our older traditions; or we may see in it a hope of a richer and better public life, where greater responsibilities are counterbalanced by nobler rewards. To be an Imperialist demands two things — the eye to discern the new conditions and the will to accept them.”
“Do you argue, then,” said Hugh, “that the opposition we have to face is due not to intellectual blindness, but to moral lethargy?”
“Not to moral lethargy in the best cases, but to a quite honest and logical fidelity to a doctrine which I believe to be false. Our opponents may be divided into two classes. One class admits that these new conditions may be valuable, and that Imperialism is a beautiful dream; but they add that it is impossible. It is beyond the power of humanity, they argue, to construct such a state. Now, I am far from advocating impracticable ideals. It is a perfectly good answer to any proposal to say that it is impossible. But we must be careful how we admit the defence propter infirmitatem. If it were a question of building out of the void a Utopia where war should be unknown and property held in common, I should declare it impossible, because it would demand a revolution in human nature and human methods so complete as to be inconceivable. But when we are given the foundations to
build on and the materials are ready to our hand, and the only further requirements are intelligence and vitality in the builders, then to say that the work is too hard to attempt is a confession of moral lethargy. It is not political wisdom, but political cowardice.
“The other class have a more formidable defence. They altogether deny the value of the new conditions and the new ideal. They complain that a vast material extension has no organic relation to national well-being. Britain, they say, owns one-fourth of the territory of the globe, rules one-fourth of the population, and conducts one-third of the trade; but she is no greater on that account than if she possessed not a rood outside the British Islands. In a word, they deny that principle which I have always maintained to lie at the very root of Imperialism — the need of a quantitative basis for qualitative development.
“Let me try to state their case as fairly as I can. No state, they say, owes its greatness in any real sense to its material equipment. Russia may govern from the Baltic to the Behring Sea and yet be an inferior power to Germany. Themistocles will always defeat Xerxes, and rich Carthage must yield in the end to poverty-stricken Rome. The claim of Britain to a great place in the world is due to the liberties which she has evolved in her long history; to a constitution which has been a model for all free nations; to her propaganda on behalf of humanity and liberalism; to the vitality of her sons who have led the way in exploration and invention and adventure. It is true that great wealth and great possessions have been the result, but they are the accidents, not the springs, of her greatness. Her true magnificence is seen in the way in which she has built up nations overseas with no thought of her own advantage. Britain, confined to her islands, with every colony elevated into an independent state, is richer in all that constitutes national wealth than if she owned a quarter of the globe in fee-simple, and administered it as a tributary province. By remaining loyal to her faith in liberty she provides the conditions in which her people can grow to their full stature far more effectively than if she compelled the other nations of the world to become her servants to this end. So far I, for one, am ready to admit that the argument is indisputable.
“But, they continue, this modem talk of empire introduces another ideal, and a grossly material one. It brings in mere size as in itself of value. It seeks to extend the borders of Britain so that a quarter of the world shall be one state. The assumption on which it acts is that a complex organisation, which taxes all the powers of its organisers, is likely to produce a higher civic development than a simpler polity. The whole creed, they argue, is simply a shelving of the question. Granted that many things are ruinously wrong in our public life, surely the right way to remedy them is to get at the root of the mischief, to reform the heart, to transform the spirit, and not merely to say there is a big empire which will cure these ills if we allow it. They add — and I know I am repeating what has already been better said — that an immense material environment will cripple the soul. We shall think in continents instead of in truths. Our prosperity and its responsibilities will choke us till we become leaden-eyed galley-slaves killed by a too generous fortune.
“I can distinguish two separate points of attack. The first is that Imperialism tends to seek material cures for spiritual diseases. That is to say, our opponents deny that qualitative development can depend upon a quantitative basis. The second is that a vast material environment is not only no remedy for moral ills, but a direct menace to moral well-being. Let us take these arguments separately.
“The first, to my mind, is true up to a point. It adopts an illustration from biology, and holds that organic disease in a living body is not removed by growth in size or by any stimulants which promote such growth. Well, I am in entire agreement. But to adduce this illustration as an answer to my contention is to be guilty of a glaring ignoratio elenchi. I have used the word ‘development,’ not health. And my argument is that just as you cannot find the mind and spirit of a man in a body which has been starved and stunted till it is no better than an infant’s, so you cannot find true spiritual progress unless you provide adequate material conditions. But I do not care for this pictorial reasoning, so let us put the matter differently. What do we mean by spiritual development?
Surely, the broadening and deepening of the mind till it regards the world in its true perspective, and the strengthening of the character so that the will is a tempered and unerring weapon in the charge of a man’s soul. And this end is to be achieved only by the exercise of the mind upon the largest possible manifold of experience, and by the conflict of character with the alien forces of the world. I am talking, remember, not of the saint and recluse, but of the citizen. What is true of individual development is no less true of the state’s. A nation becomes great in the most sublimated sense of the word by its ability to present its citizens with a sphere of action wherein their civic responsibilities may be fulfilled. A microcosm, however perfect, will never be a true arena for civic virtue.
“But, it may be argued, no one denies that the state must have an ample sphere of action; the objection to your doctrine is that you declare that the sphere of action involves a spacial extension, whereas we say that it may be intensive. There is sufficient work for the citizen in settling his home problems without embarking on foreign adventures. My answer is that for a state such as ours the two things are synonymous. I do not for a moment deny that for a new colony intensive activity may be the path of wisdom. But in all old and highly developed lands there comes a time when, without spacial extension, all that is possible is a barren rearrangement, a shuffling of the cards. Just as we cannot describe a mere analysis and readjustment of a few dogmas as mental progress, so I call any preoccupation with what after all must be the formal aspect of our own affairs — their emendation without the introduction of fresh elements, — I call that national stagnation. And this brings me to my second answer to the first argument of our opponents. I am prepared to maintain that spacial extension may cure a disease, when that disease is itself the result of undue confinement. If a man is fainting from foul air, he will revive under the winds of heaven. A palm may be perishing in a flower-pot, when it would thrive in the forest. Mrs Deloraine has suggested that certain of the vices in our modem art are due to the narrowing of its borders. Take, again, our labour problem. You may talk about the reorganisation of industry, you may accept any socialist nostrum, you may abolish capitalism, and yet you will be no better off, if, as I believe, the radical fault is that we are over - industrialised. The cure for our economic ills, if cure there be, is to bring fresh capital into the business. One of the misfortunes of our age is that in one sense it is too ideal, too prone to neglect the material conditions without which no great end can be achieved in this world or any other. It is a flimsy idealism at the best, for the great idealists never forgot that, if it was well to trust in God, it was no less right to keep their powder dry.”
“We are too ideal,” continued Lord Appin, meeting the approving glance of Mr Wakefield, “and at the same time we are not ideal enough. If we were, we should not hear the second argument which our opponents use. Material greatness, they say, is an enemy to moral well-being. It debases our standards, inflames our pride, and stirs our passions. To this I have only one answer to make. If our national life be of so poor a quality that it is smothered by possessions, then the battle need never be joined at all. The ‘small nation’ fallacy is like the ‘sheltered life’ humbug in education. A people must keep itself clear from the world lest its garments be spotted, just as a boy should not be sent to a public school in case his moral sense be dimmed. If our soul is to be lost because we go down into the arena of life, then the odds are that it was not worth saving from the first. If we will escape the danger of decadence, we will also forego the hope of progress; and remember, the nation which stands still is doomed. If we do not go forward, we shall most certainly go back.
“But at the same time it is well that this objection should be stated, because it contains a warning against the sins
to which great empires are prone, — what the French call the disease of ‘grandeur.’ I believe most firmly that in the deepest sense Providence is on the side of the bigger battalions. I cannot see why size should not have its ideal as well as littleness. All the world inclines to reserve its affection for small things — a small country, a small people — because I assume there is a stronger sense of proprietorship attaching to what is limited in bulk. Yet I can conceive of as deep a patriotism in an empire as in a city, and a love of great mountains and plains as real as any affection for a garden. But size has its own disease, and we may easily fall into the vice of looking upon it as something worthy in itself, however alien it may remain to our culture. Whether we call the disease ‘Jingoism’ or ‘grandeur’ or ‘self-complacency,’ its root is the same. It means that we regard our empire as a mere possession, as the vulgar rich regard their bank accounts — a matter to boast of, and not an added duty. All the braggart glorification we sometimes hear means a shallow and frivolous understanding of what empire involves. No serious man dare boast of the millions of square miles which his people rule, when he remembers that each mile has its own problem, and that on him and his fellows lies the burden of solution.
“Jingoism, then, is not a crude Imperialism; it is Imperialism’s stark opposite. It belongs to the school of thought which thinks of the Empire as England, with a train of dependencies and colonies to enhance her insular prestige; but it has no kinship with the ideal of an empire moving with one impulse towards a richer destiny. The true Imperialist will be very little inclined to a cheap complacency. He is kindled at times to ardour by the magnitude of his inheritance, and he has always, if he keeps the faith, optimism and hope to cheer him. But he is equally weighed down with the burden of his duties and the complexity of the task before him, if he would translate his dream into fact. A dependency to him is not a possession but a trust. The glory of England is not the mileage of her territory but the state into which she is welding it.
