The Imperial Idea

New Zealand Tablet, 6 October 1921, Page 9

The Imperial Idea

In a letter recently published, and attributed,. rightly or wrongly, to Sir Henry Wilson, there is a- point that has a certain interest, over and above the ordinary provincial bragging not unfamiliar in the queer, patch that calls itself "Ulster" (says the -New, Witness for July 1, editorially). A curious and almost innocent illusion, that a man can impress others by merely praising himself is a mark by which we all 'recognise .the-half-baked or -barbaric civilisation; we recognise it in Prussians, in certain Colonials, and in the stale Suburbia of Belfast. If there were nothing in the letter but the .usual Hheatrical stuff about "We Ulster boys," with a capacity to "teach" everybody everything, it would not be worth while to pause upon it he,re. What makes the letter interesting is a certain truth or half-truth contained in it. It is the fact that one of the things which the Ulster Boys have to teach is a thing called "the Imperial idea." And one of the ignorant and savage tribes, to whom it needs to'be taught, is the English nation. '" ' > '-••.•'. ./-'-■ ,

v Now this is in a sense true; a great deal truer than the man who wrote it was aware; x The Imperial idea, so far as it is an idea, is really much more at home in the culture of ; Belfast than in the culture of Birmingham; let alone the culture of Canterbury and Glastonbury and Strat-ford-on-Avon. The Imperial idea is in every way suited to the clear atmosphere of Belfast, to its high imaginative architecture, to its inspired creative art, to its mellow and stately school of manners.) And we insular English people, limited to the landscapes of Constable, seeing no more of the sky than was visible to Turner, forced'to find our heroes only in petty and parochial types like Nelson and Dr. Johnson, and having reached no further in the revelation of humanity than the production of Shakspere, must bear the scorn of Ulster as best we may.

But the thing, whatever we call it, which has been called Imperialism in England for the last forty years, the thing that has inspired Mr. Kipling and instituted Empire Day, that thing does exist, and that thing is exactly suited to what Sir Henry Wilson is said to have called "his own corner of Ireland." It 'is much' more at home there than it is in any corner of England, especially in any very English corner of England. •

Empire, both in the higher and the lower sense, is a thing for which the English are exceptionally unfitted. The higher needs a clarity,/and the lower a cruelty, that are not English at all. Sometimes the clarity and cruelty, may have been for a time combined; as is said to have been the case in some of Spanish conquests in South America. But*no two things could be more contrary, within the common culture of all Christendom, than the English and the Spanish spirit. What,the English really did, so long as they were really English, was something quite different. What they established in India, for instance, ; was not an empire; it was a trade truce. We never, made any serious attempt to give English ideas to the -.lndians as the Spanish did to give Spanish ideas to the Red Indians. We" never solemnly and solidly contemplated the picture of all those brown ] men* becoming Anglicans. , But j the Spaniards did solemnly and solidly contemplate the pictures of all those red men becoming Roman Catholics. We are not here discussing the. moral merits of the two things; there is 'much to: be said for both. T It is .essential, at so serious a crisis in our destiny, to gets rid of that detestable state of universal vain-glory, or claiming; all the virtues of everybody>; and realise 1 exactly what it :was.that we could do and did do, ; even if ; we have no other desire than to go on doing it. As Englishmen; and not merely as/Europeans, we had a very , genuine genius for gravel and for trade; the English good temper, the English ', sense of humor in inebngruous Circumstances, did make it easier to sail ; to the Cannibal Islands-, and^ to bargain with the King of

the Cannibal Islands. It did not make it „ easier to convert the King of the Cannibal Islands. On the other hand, as Europeans, and not merely as Englishmen, we naturally had a certain technical superiority to the cannibals, and a certain healthy distaste for cannibalism.. To that extent we ruled; but it was always, for good or evil, a very v negative sort of rule compared with the positive rule that has positively civilised barbarians, Clive did not make a new r India as Caesar made a new Gaul. Warren Hastings did not refound an Indian state as William the Conqueror .refounded a British state he simply played one Indian state against another, in the interests of the English mercantile adventure We may ( call this character, the liberty of our rule, or the limitation of our philosophy, or any other name bad or good; the practical essential is to seize the fact, for it explains both our success and our failure. In short, the two practical disadvantages of the imperial idea are, first that it is not imperial, and, second, that it is not an idea. The ordinary imperialist, such as he who wrote the letter, about the Ulster Boys, has no idea of what the idea is. Such people merely want to have their own way, shoot at the people they don’t like and shoot with the people they do, play at the games that amuse them and forget the problems thqy cannot solve, and then cover this very common and very human taste with a mass of meaningless abstractions about Law and’Union and Justice and Fair Play. But that is not an idea at all; as Catholicism or Calvinism or Socialism or even Prussianism are ideas. But precisely because it is so verbose and so empty, it attracts the sort of half-educated type that is ‘ common in colonies such t as the Orange Colony in Ireland. Such crude and cockney minds are quite content to make self-indulgence idealistic by the addition of self-praise. It is therefore a permanent possibility and a permanent peril, , that they may re-inforce what they call the imperial idea, , where the . real and relatively civilised English /would remain indifferent to it, through the possession of a sense of humor.

Now it is certain that this colonial, external and even alien element, much'more than the English element, is at this moment feeding the general hatred of England. Anybody who has been at any of our seats of military occupation has heard with his own ears complaints of some of the colonial soldiers of their insolence, their brutality and their anarchy. He has heard these complaints,, not from Irish peasants, not from Egyptian fellaheen, not from negroes or Chinamen, but from the Englisli officers of English regiments; from ordinary professional soldiers who are undoubtedly good patriots and who believe themselves to be good imperialists. A British officer may be an Imperialist; but he cannot enlarge his mind to take the fulness of the Imperial idea. The Imperial idea means looting shops and shooting non-combatants, and going on

in the simplest fashion of savages sacking a white settlement; nor do we doubt for a moment that the Orange colonists are capable of understanding and extending that idea. But it is not only a question of Orangemen, hut of almost any other kind of men whom the ignorance of our

victims may mistake for Englishmen; JeWs and Americans and Scotchmen, not to mention Welshmen.* We read lately,

in one of the Coalitionist papers, a list of those who were there described as the four or five Ministers most determined on resolute repression in Ireland. It did not contain a

single English name.

Clearly it is time that the English had something to

say in all this. The English .have vices of their own, the worst being the snobbish indifference to self-government which permits them to be thus misrepresented. But .their own original vices involved nothing resembling the fanatical ferocity of the Orangemen or the oriental megalo-

mania of the Jews. As this sort of Empire has suffered .this sort of expansion, the original Englishman in the centre of it has dwindled steadily irfe comparison and counted for less and less. Nothing has marked more un- ' mistakably the Imperialistic period than the complete oblivion of<the very existence of an English character. . Much is said of the Scottish .character when it is desirable to flatter it, and much of the Irish character ~ when it,is desirable ,\ to oppress it. But-even to speak of the English icharacter, as,distinct from the Scottish or Irish,•; has the

shock of something that is new because it ,is neglected, and neglected because; it is near. . u '. '

This point is strictly a part of national defence; and it ,is only in self-defence that it should so be stated. Nobody dreams of denying that these external elements have their merits also; that crowds of colonial soldiers died for a glorious historical memory, that numbers of colonies are democratic in a sense much more sincere than our own. We should never deny that Sir Henry Wilson was a loyal and valuable public servant, whether he was involved in the opinions quoted or no. We should no more think of generalising against all Ulster colonists, or other colonists, than of generalising against all Scotchmen. It is rather reluctantly that we realise the harm done to. our cause by our auxiliaries; but it is true, as things go at present, that we English shall hardly partake either of the crimes or the prizes of the partisans of the imperial idea. We shall partake only of their punishment.