by Jan Morris
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Out of his time—in some ways too soon, in others too late. It was Kitchener, now Commander-in-Chief in India, who baulked Curzon of his Indian mission. In a historic quarrel—‘The Lord of the Realm versus the Lord of War’—they clashed over the degree to which the civil government should control the Indian Army. Kitchener won, obliging Curzon to resign in 1905, and never afterward did a Viceroy of such difficult originality grace the administration of India.
He left behind mixed feelings: gratitude for much of what he had done, contumely for his partitioning of Bengal, widespread resentment at his high-handedness and delusions of grandeur. He had mixed feelings himself. On the one hand he was a frank imperialist, working always ‘to rivet the British rule more firmly on to India and to postpone the longed-for day of emancipation’. On the other he was a man of civilized sympathies, and hoped that he had helped India towards ‘the position which is bound one day to be hers—namely that of the greatest partner in the Empire’.
His disdain was remembered by many, his fun by only a few. Though he later became Foreign Secretary, he never did get to 10 Downing Street, and he looked back on his years in India, for the rest of his life, with a nostalgic pride. Out of it all he distilled as memorable a philosophy of Empire, by his own proud standards, as was ever expressed: ‘Let it be your ideal’, he told his countrymen in India, ‘to remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of his ploughs, in whose furrow the nations of the future are germinating and taking shape, to drive the blade a little forward in your time, and to feel that somewhere among these millions you have left a little justice or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, or a stirring of duty where it did not exist before—that is enough. That is the Englishman’s justification in India.’
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Our second grandee of Empire stands, beside Curzon, like a searching torchlight beside a wind-flickered flare. If Curzon was quintessentially English, rooted for eight centuries in the same plot of Derbyshire countryside, Alfred Milner was hardly English at all. His philosophies owed nothing to the easy amateurism of the English tradition, his means of expression would not have found favour with the Souls, he lacked romance and he had little humour. He was an imperialist of a very different kind: much less flamboyant than Curzon, but much more implacable, dedicated less to ideals than to systems. He was a genuine imperial technocrat, a class of statesmen of which history had time to produce, fortunately for the allure of Empire, only one or two.
Milner was born in Germany, and had a German grandmother. His father, though British, had been born and brought up in Germany too, and Milner’s boyhood years there, his schooling at the gymnasium at Tübingen, marked his mind for life, and made him vulnerable always to English sneers and innuendoes. In 1870, during a walking tour in France, he saw the German Army in action during the Franco-Prussian War, and it is said that this experience further disposed him towards order, efficiency and political cohesion—not in those days the preoccupations of English gentlemen. At Oxford, where he was at Balliol a few years before Curzon, he won practically everything. He got a double first, of course. He won four of the great University scholarships. He was President of the Union. He was elected to a New College fellowship. He was a leading figure in a very different set from Curzon’s dashing and irreverent circle of Etonians. Milner’s group was earnest, socially-conscious, dutiful and exceedingly clever, and the friends he made in it lastingly influenced his view of public life and private duty. He was a formidable young man, and became a formidable old one.
He came to Empire obliquely, via journalism and politics, and his imperial career started as Under-Secretary to the Ministry of Finance in Egypt, under the grandiose pro-consulship of Lord Cromer. The task of imposing fiscal order upon that anthology of disorders, Egypt, was just Milner’s style. ‘In Egypt,’ he wrote, surveying the state of the toiling fellahin around him, ‘economic causes produce their theoretically correct results with a swiftness and exactitude not easily visible in other lands’: and this measurable distance between cause and effect, this self-evident translation of theory into practice, suited his sober gifts—‘in Egypt,’ he said, ‘there is no argument but “you must”.’
Milner was a black and white man, a man of figures, a prophet of ‘discipline, order, method, precision, punctuality’. ‘If Milner does not agree with you,’ Clemenceau was to write, ‘he closes his eyes like a lizard and you can do nothing with him.’ Intellectually, among the servants of the Empire in the early years of the new century, he stood almost alone: it was puzzling to some of his contemporaries that one of the cleverest men in England should devote his life to that essentially irrational enthusiasm, the Empire.
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But Milner was the born public servant—or alternatively, the born dictator. He was a bachelor until late in life, believing that he had to choose between public good and private happiness (‘What he needs’, Beatrice Webb the Socialist once remarked, ‘is God and a wife’). He lacked the hwyl to lead simple people or the artistry to inspire them, but he had a vocation to serve the State, and at the start of the twentieth century he believed that the most satisfying field of public service lay within the Empire. He was not much interested in the black African and Asian possessions, except as a source of wealth, but he was a consistent believer in white imperial unity—Greater Britain, a political amalgam of Britain and the self-governing Dominions. He recognized earlier than most of his contemporaries that Britain herself would presently be outclassed by the greater new Powers of Russia, Germany and the United States. Union with the Dominions, he thought, was the only way to maintain her status in the world—‘the British State’ (a word he was fond of, by the way) ‘must follow the race, must comprehend it….’
Look at his face, in the oval-framed photograph in Men of Empire, 1902! His mouth is set in a downward curve, not unkindly, not even unattractively, but implacably. His moustache, while not ostentatious, is emphatic and symmetrical. His eyes have a faintly bemused expression, as though he is forever astonished at the wayward nature of mankind. His forehead is high and fine, his ears are rather prominent, he sits in a posture half slouch, half admonition, like a schoolmaster lecturing a boy who, though undeniably a trouble-maker, does have recognizable talent. Only his tie, by a lifelong quirk, is slightly skew-whiff, and shows his collar-stud beneath.
Few women might be intoxicated by this severe cerebral figure.1It is easy to see, however, why Joseph Chamberlain, himself a forceful mixture of the impulsive and the hard-headed, surveying the growing confusion of South Africa immediately before the Boer War, invited Milner to go as High Commissioner to Cape Town. Milner called himself ‘a synoptic man’, a man who could make sense of things, and he hoped to fuse the two white races of South Africa into a harmonious whole under the Crown. He went there with a reasonably open mind, he learnt Afrikaans, he conscientiously met all the Boer leaders, but the synopsis did not work. After a year of hassle and impasse, logic convinced him that the only solution to the South African dilemma was war against the Boers. British and Boer independence, like the British and the Boer mentalities, were incompatible.
Milner never did cultivate the art of the possible. Another of his self-epithets was ‘a man for emergencies’, and he was bad at the slow slog or the compromise. Lloyd George, who should know, said he had ‘no political nostril’. He despised English constitutional methods—‘that mob at Westminster’, he called Parliament—resented the shifts and delays of democracy, and said, as he analysed the chances for peace and war in Africa, that he didn’t care twopence for the opinion of people 6,000 miles away in England.
Would you like to sin
with Elinor Glyn
on a tiger-skin?
Or would you prefer
to err with her
on some other fur?
In May, 1899, Milner declared his views in a much-quoted summary: ‘South Africa can pros
per under two, three or six governments, though the fewer the better, but not under two absolutely conflicting social and political systems.’ It was not a judgement of values, only of expediencies. Relentlessly he pressed it upon President Kruger, and the successive interviews between the two men are among the most suggestive in the Empire’s history: the Briton so cold, so implacable, so Balliol, the Boer so embedded in lore and faith, inherited emotions and tribal certainties—the one high-browed and formal in his winged collar and check cravat, the other whiskered and hideous with age, slumped in his drab frock-coat across the table. The talks were doomed: after a last harangue of Kruger which reduced the old patriarch to tears, Milner broke them off, and war was inevitable. It was all Milner’s fault, Lord Salisbury thought.‘We have to act upon a moral field prepared for us by him and his Jingo supporters … and all for people whom we despise, and for territory which will bring no power and no profit to England.’
If reason led Milner to war, the synoptic mind, when once the conflict was over, led him to new conclusions. He was still a fervent exponent of imperial unity, he recognized that true unity came best by consent, and the experience of the war perhaps convinced him that the stubbornness of the Boers could not be overcome by brute force. Instead, he thought, ‘stringent patient policy’ might do the trick. He imported from England a team of a dozen young Oxford bachelor intellectuals, nicknamed (naturally) Milner’s Kindergarten, to help with the task of reconstruction: they included a future Governor-General of South Africa, an editor of The Times and a British Ambassador to the United States. Their work was greatly admired, and the imperial propagandists hailed the Milner settlement as a model of foresight, enabling the two old enemies to live together in friendship at last.
But if Curzon the great romantic was always frank, Milner the logician could be devious. A policy hailed as liberal, in that it promised the defeated Boers equality with their victors, was really hardly more than a continuation of the war itself. Milner was out to create a South Africa in which, year by year, the British element would finally overcome the Boer. ‘My formula for South Africa’, he once told Winston Churchill, ‘is very simply: 2/5ths Boers and 3/5ths Britishers—Peace, Progress and Fusion. 3/5ths Boers and 2/5ths Britishers—Stagnation and Eternal Discord.’ He was not fond of the country—‘I have always been unfortunate’, he wrote, ‘in disliking my life and surroundings here’—but he saw it as his mission to bind South Africa permanently within the imperial unity, in the interests, one feels, not so much of human happiness or prosperity, as of applied theory.
In most parts of the Empire the British imposed their ways by sheer force of example: the western culture was so obviously superior, in economic and technical terms, that the subject peoples flocked in self-interest to its schools, its counting-houses and its drapers. In South Africa it was different: only in French Canada, Gaelic Ireland and Celtic Wales did the indigenes so uncompromisingly defend their heritage against the onslaught of Englishness. Milner’s methods were thorough and subtle. He brilliantly restored the ravaged country to normal life, resettling the landless families, building new schools and farms, evolving constitutions for the new Boer colonies. He imported Chinese labourers, under indenture, to bring the Rand mines back to full production. He started irrigation schemes and experimental farms, he founded municipalities in the hangdog Boer townships, he established a customs federation for all four colonies.
In short, he really did lay the foundations of a union, in which eventually the Boers would enjoy constitutional equality with the British. But it was to be a union inalienably, irrevocably of the Empire, giving the British permanent hegemony in South Africa, giving the Boers ‘a far higher plane of civilization than they had ever previously attained’. When Milner built new schools for Boers, he intended that the instruction should be in English. When he founded experimental farms, he hoped that British farmers would come and settle there. When he treated the Boer leaders with magnanimity, it was because he hoped they would be converted to the imperial plan. In 1910 the four colonies of South Africa, Boer and British, were joined in the self-governing Union of South Africa, and many people at home thought Milner had succeeded. ‘The grant of self-government’, declared a League of Empire publication that year, ‘has enabled two once hostile peoples to combine in a common ambition.’ ‘The Boers,’ said The British Empire in Pictures more ingenuously, ‘seem to be comfortable and contented under British Government.’
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They were not contented at all. Though some of their leaders really did embrace the imperial ideal, the most obdurate of the Boers were as calculating as Milner himself, and had no intention of allowing the British to swamp or pervert the Volk—just the opposite, in fact. Piece by piece the policy collapsed. British settlers never did achieve Milner’s algebraic serenity, while Boer national feeling only became more cohesive over the years, finding expression in political movements, secret societies, religion and an implacable cultural chauvinism.
Milner had returned to England for good in 1905, and blamed it all on too much haste—it takes time, to de-culturize a people. But he was blamed himself for disregarding the blacks of South Africa, who were denied all franchise in the new Union, but whose welfare had been, to many Englishmen, the only good reason for fighting the Boer War in the first place. ‘For the first time’, cried the Socialist Keir Hardie, ‘we are asked to write over the portals of the British Empire, “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.”’ Milner’s rash importation of Chinese labour for the Rand, something that seemed dangerously close to slavery, horrified liberal opinion hardly less, and in the end brought down the Conservative Government that had sent him to South Africa. Even Churchill, an old friend of Milner’s, could only say in a celebrated Parliamentary circumlocution that the indenture system could not be ‘classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude’.
Racialism, absolutism, illiberalism—all these were now seen as Milnerisms, and the radical Press fell upon him. ‘Is it any wonder when an essentially German mind drives English policy that the result is not exactly what the English public look for?’ demanded The Speaker. The Manchester Guardian said that what used to seem exciting in Milner’s character was now merely disgusting, while H. W. Massingham, who had been a war correspondent in South Africa, described Milner as ‘essentially un-English’—‘he had hardly any English characteristics, but was a pure bureaucrat and a pure ideologue.’
Milner never quite recovered from the taint, and ten years later a newspaper diarist could still say of him that ‘rightly or wrongly, few men in the country are more distrusted’. The Liberal leader Campbell-Bannerman called him ‘a most dangerous element in the national life’. He went on to be War Minister and Colonial Secretary, but his name would always be associated first with South Africa, and so with failure: for there the tribal spirit outstayed the synoptic skill, and made South Africa in the end a sad antithesis of the Empire’s good and glory.1
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Yet it would be wrong to leave Milner on a note of logic betrayed, for despite appearances he was far more than a mere intellectual. He had true gifts of friendship, his clever young disciples worshipped him, and behind that imperturbable façade, which made the Boers think of him as the Englishman incarnate, he burnt with lofty aspiration. He was, he said himself, ‘from head to foot one glowing mass of conviction’. With a vision less poetic but more furious than Curzon’s, he believed in the imperial mission almost as a revelation: he was one with the possessed expansionists of earlier times.
When Milner returned from Egypt, in 1892, he wrote a book, England in Egypt, in which he set out with his usual clarity the purposes of the British presence there. It was a plea for the acceptance of great responsibilities, and became one of the seminal texts of the New Imperialism. Churchill said it was ‘more than a book’, it was ‘a trumpet-call which rallies the soldiers after the parapets are stormed, and summons them to complete the victory’. Milner�
��s imperialism, when it came to the point, ran deeper, more religiously, than Curzon’s. It possessed a conspiratorial element, and in later years the members of his Kindergarten, reconstituting themselves in London as the ‘Round Table’, propagated the imperial faith like cultists, given to arcane images and confidential reports, and becoming the most persistent of all political pressure groups. Milner’s life was dominated, he said himself, by the dream of Empire: for years he spent every Empire Day, Queen Victoria’s birthday, talking about it to Rudyard Kipling. Though he claimed to see the Empire as a means of social reform—power equalled prosperity equalled a better life for all Britons—he really believed in it as an end in itself, to which any weapon might be directed: diligence, magnanimity, neo-slavery, cunning, logic, war.
Even treason: for years later, when the Protestant patriots of Ulster, in northern Ireland, proposed to defy the authority of the Crown in the interests of Empire, Lord Milner offered them all his help. It would not really be a rebellion at all, he reasoned, though the Royal Navy was preparing even then to put it down, it would be ‘an uprising of unshakeable principle and devoted patriotism—of loyalty to Empire and the Flag!’ Such was the lifelong fervour of this misleading man, who looked so grave, and thought so icily, but felt with such unexpected passion.1
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Two late grandees, each to end his life, in succession, as Chancellor of their old University, that last compensation of aged fame. There would never be imperialists like them again. No men of their calibre, in future generations, would see in Empire a proper arena for their talents, or satisfaction for their profoundest hopes. In the twentieth century the British Empire could no longer be the master of its own fate, still less dictate the course of world history, so that it lost its power to fascinate men of great ambition. Here, in farewell, are characteristic quotations from each of our imperialists, each illuminating a strand of Empire and a kind of man. This is Milner on his conception of imperial patriotism: ‘I am a British (indeed primarily an English) Nationalist. If I am also an Imperialist, it is because the destiny of the English race, owing to its insular position and its long supremacy at sea, has been to strike fresh roots in distant parts of the world. My patriotism knows no geographical but only racial limits. I am an Imperialist and not a Little Englander because I am a British race patriot. It is not the soil of England … which is essential to arouse my patriotism, but the speech, the traditions, the spiritual heritage, the principles, the aspirations, of the British race….’
